The prisoners of Kish Island

Kish Island, Iran - Sunday, Oct. 12

It turns out that, besides me, the only other obvious foreigners on Kish Island are some 1,000 Filipinos. I’m the only one pretending to holiday. The frustrated Filipinos have been trapped here for weeks on end by a change in visa rules in the United Arab Emirates, where they work.

The UAE’s impressive economic boom has been fuelled by a very dark side, the abuse and exploitation of foreign labourers, most of them from the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. Many of the foreign workers never get official status in the UAE, but choose to stay illegally, knowing that the money they can earn in Dubai and Abu Dhabi – whatever the atrocious conditions – is far better than what they can earn back home. Most visitors to the UAE are given two-month tourist visas on landing, which theoretically prohibit work, but which can be simply renewed by leaving the UAE for a day.

Because of its visa-free status, and because it’s relatively cheap compared to the rest of the Persian Gulf, Kish was a favoured destination for employers looking to send workers on one-day “visa runs.” And when the UAE’s visa rules changed this summer – requiring one-month gaps between entries for travelers of certain nationalities – news didn’t trickle down until hundreds of Filipinos were already in Kish, suddenly prevented from returning to their jobs in the UAE.

They’re a bedraggled lot, lining up each day at the Kish Airlines office, begging for a rare seat on one of the 26-seat Fokker F-50s that jet between Dubai and Kish several times a day. Some tell wild stories about needing to pick up corpses in Dubai that will decompose if they don’t get embalmed within 24 hours. Others just plead with the ticket saleswoman, telling her they’re about to lose their livelihoods if they can’t get back to the UAE soon.

“I just need to get off this godforsaken island!” a nearly crying man with a Pakistani accent shouted before storming out of the office, ticketless.

For the record, the UAE is far from alone in the Arab world in its treatment of foreign workers. Human Rights Watch recently did a very thorough report on the conditions some labourers live in, naming and shaming Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Morocco alongside the UAE as the worst abusers.

Ali Reza

Kish Island, Iran - Saturday, Oct. 18

At dinner tonight, I found myself thanking the higher power, my foreign editor, that been allowed to study Arabic long enough to at least be able to sound out the Persian-only menu in the hotel restaurant. Arabic and Persian use the same right-to-left script and, even more mercifully, a kebab is still spelled “kebab” in Farsi. A "Beebsee," or Pepsi, was as exciting beverage as I could find to wash it down with (there is no letter P in traditional Arabic script).

I’d been warned beforehand that many Iranians consider it odd to see someone dining alone, so I was only mildly surprised when a balding middle-aged man soon took one of the empty chairs at my underutilized table for four. In halting English that he’d learned two decades ago while working at a tourist hotel in his home city of Esfahan, he asked me where I came from, and then solemnly introduced himself as Ali Reza, a 50-year-old civil engineer. He was unmarried, and had no children. He liked to ride his bicycle and didn’t smoke. I didn’t ask him about any of this, he just told me one personal fact after another as if he wanted to use every English word he knew right there and then before he forgot any of them.

Ali is one of the estimated one million Iranian tourists who visit Kish each year, looking for sun and sand and a rare break from the strict Islamic laws in the rest of the country. It’s hardly Sodom or Gomorrah, but Kish is a place where Iranians can breathe a little easier without the religious police monitoring their every action. After dark, young couples cuddle together on the beach in contravention of the mullahs’ restrictions on socializing between unmarried couples. Headscarves are worn often only loosely, and it at least one case I saw, not at all.

Later, as Ali and I strolled around the hotel gardens past the empty swimming pool, Ali told me that he thought George W. Bush was “a good man” while “our president” (he didn’t name Mr. Ahmedinejad) “is crazy.”

When I prodded him to explain why, he switched the topic. We were coming to the end of the small path we’d been following and were about to join the much busier boardwalk along the gulf coast. “The weather is very good here,” Ali said loudly and to no one in particular. “No rain.”

Not without my dateline

Kish Island, Iran - Saturday, Oct. 11

After seven years of covering the Middle East and the ever-expanding “war on terror,” I finally set foot in Iran today. Yes, that place. The one with the crazed nuke-hungry mullahs and the crowds wishing death to America. The geographical centre of George W. Bush’s infamous “Axis of Evil.”

Following repeated efforts to secure a visa to travel to Tehran – and repeatedly rejections on the basis of both my nationality and my profession – I finally discovered a way into the Islamic Republic, or at least a corner of it, while flipping through an old copy of a Lonely Planet guide to the Middle East that has sat, to my wife’s chagrin, in the bathroom for most of the past three years. It was on page 228 that I had my revelation. That’s where I learned of the existence of Kish Island.

Kish Island, the well-thumbed book told me, was the only part of Iran that foreigners – even Canadian journalists – can enter without a visa. Then came the even more tantalizing part: once in Kish “head down to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs where they can grant you a full tourist visa within 48 hours.”

So here I am. On Kish Island, a place that at once poses as both the Hawaii and the Hong Kong of the Islamic Republic, staying in a grey concrete block that looks more like a military bunker than the four-star hotel it alleges to be (that's the interior of my hotel room, top left). In the name of finally getting a visa to Iran, I’m pretending to be that rare breed of Western tourist who prefers destinations where alcohol is illegal and men and women must swim and sunbathe at separate, fenced-off beaches.

The swimming pool at the Shayan Hotel is as dry as the minibar, having been emptied many years ago to make sure no one swam where the opposite sex might catch an illicit glimpse of flesh.

Nonetheless, a green card in the room promises “Happy Day’s (sic) For You.” Inside the card are a set of nine rules. Rule No. 1: “Ladies are requested to respect Islamic covering.” Rule No. 2: “Gentlemen are requested not to wear knee breaches.”

I promise not to leave this island, dear reader, until I find out what a knee breach is.

The Road to Jerusalem

OK. So until now this was a Russia blog. But for the next three weeks it's going to dramatically change in character and become - wait for it - a travel blog.

That's right, I'm travelling across the Middle East for The Globe and Mail, which will be running my Road to Jerusalem blog on its website as well.

After spending much of the past seven years reporting from the region (I first landed here on Sept. 12, 2001) and covering not only the fall of Baghdad and the real war that followed, but the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the rise of Hamas, the various failed peace processes and the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah - not to mention living in Jerusalem for the past 3 1/2 years and Beirut before that - I'm driving across the region to take stock of how people here were affected by the George W. Bush era and how they view an Obama or McCain presidency.

I'm starting in the southern corner of Iran, and will head from there via Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian West Bank to Jerusalem, the city that's arguably at the centre of it all.

I hope you enjoy this change of pace. Let me know what you think as I go along. And please check out my first newspaper report of the journey, which appeared yesterday.

Russia and Georgia at war: how we got here

Just a quick post to highlight an article of mine on the war (and especially Mikhail Saakashvili's bizarre decision to attack South Ossetia) that was published today in The Globe and Mail. There's also an audio slideshow.

As fighting raged all over his tiny former Soviet country this week, a CNN anchor asked Georgia's brash and unpredictable President Mikhail Saakashvili whether he had believed his country could actually win a military showdown with Russia. "I'm not crazy," the President answered in his American-inflected English.

Others weren't so sure. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev charged that Mr. Saakashvili had acted like a "lunatic" in provoking the conflict and said he needed to be removed from office. A French diplomat suggested Mr. Saakashvili had been mad to take on Russia, and American officials wondered how he could have so badly misread their signals calling for restraint in his efforts to reclaim the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Many of his own people are shaking their heads at how "Misha," as he is affectionately known, could have backed their country into such a dangerous corner.

It was on Monday afternoon in the tree-lined city of Gori that Mr. Saakashvili came face to face with the scale of the error he made in attacking South Ossetia and triggering war with Russia, Georgia's giant neighbour to the north.

Sporting a green camouflage flak jacket, he was preparing to address the international media when Russian jets suddenly roared overhead. Someone in his entourage shouted, "Air! Air!" and Mr. Saakashvili looked at the sky, then broke into a sprint. Eventually he dove for cover, his bodyguards piling on top, hoping to shield their President from shrapnel.

Many bombs fell in and around Gori — the geographic heart of this strikingly beautiful country on the southeastern edge of Europe — and none came close to hurting him.

But the video of him ducking and running may prove to be the bookend to a tumultuous political career that began five years ago with another famous image: Mr. Saakashvili striding into Georgia's Soviet-era parliament building clutching a rose, at the vanguard of a democratic revolution that was supposed to remake not only his own tiny country but the entire former USSR.

Even if he remains in office after this crisis, the era of hope, democracy and pro-Western reform that Mr. Saakashvili — still boyish-looking at 40 — was supposed to herald has ended. The moment he ordered his troops to attack the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali a week ago, Georgia once more became a failed state, a place where wars, coups and instability are the norm and one that Western investors would be wise to avoid.

Georgia's loss is Russia's gain. Moscow is once again emerging as the regional hegemon, on the verge of pushing the U.S. back out of the former Soviet Union, an area Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin calls "the near abroad." The leaders of Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, all former Soviet republics, rushed to stand with Mr. Saakashvili in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi this week in what was as much a demonstration of fear as it was of solidarity. They were joined by the President of Poland, another country that remembers when the Red Army regularly ranged far beyond its borders and thus fears Russia's resurgence.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko is probably the most concerned member of the quintet. While Poland and the Baltic states are under the protective umbrella of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Ukraine is not. Along with Georgia's, its application to join NATO was shelved back in April for fear of offending Russia, which considers both states to be properly part of its "sphere of influence."

It all makes Mr. Saakashvili's decision to attack last Friday — while the world was distracted by the opening of the Beijing Olympic Games — extremely difficult to understand. In the name of "reuniting" Georgia, which has never been united since it gained independence in 1991, hundreds of people are dead (each side accuses the other of ethnic cleansing) and Georgia's sovereignty is under renewed threat.

As the sound of gunfire recedes, questions about Mr. Saakashvili's judgment — and his ability to continue governing — are growing louder.

Read the whole article here, and let me know what you think.

Misha's terrible gamble

I know Mikhail Saakashvili a little bit. I've met him a few times in Tbilisi, and have come to admire his raw idealism (rare in politicians these days) as well as his daring and determination. Those qualities made him the perfect leader five years ago when he led from the front as street protests against a flawed election turned into the Rose Revolution that propelled him to power. Then, in his first 12 months as president, he bowled over the naysayers by tackling endemic corruption in the police and public service and bringing the renegade province of Adjaria back under Tbilisi's control.

On subsequent visits, I couldn't help but be impressed. Life in Georgia was demonstrably better after the Rose Revolution than it had been beforehand. Saakashvili had his detractors, but even they couldn't deny that he was transforming the country and the region. The West (and Western investors) loved him, and Georgia's successes inspired copycat uprisings in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.

But Misha's idealism and daring always had a dangerous side. His early victories led him to believe that it was only a matter of time before Georgia's other breakaway regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, would also succumb to Mishamania. Ignoring the one thing he could never change about his country - the fact that Russia, no matter how hard he pushed it away and tried to resist its influence, would always be Georgia's giant neighbour and most important trading partner - he insisted on flicking the Russian bear in the nose, almost to see how far and how long he could get away with it. His neocon allies in the United States (notably including Senator John McCain) cheered him every step of the way in his fight against what they saw as renewed Russian imperialism.

Misha spited the Kremlin until Russia blocked imports of Georgian wines and the country's famous Borjomi mineral water, two of the tiny country's most lucrative exports. A Canadian leader who instigated such a trade war against our giant and powerful neighbour to the south wouldn't last through the next elections, but Misha did, though only after shedding his democrat's cloak to oversee a violent crackdown on opposition demonstrators in Tbilisi last fall.

His effort to get Georgia (along with Ukraine) into NATO was also foolhardy. He must have (or at least should have) known that the bid would fail since countries like Germany and France had signalled long beforehand that they weren't interested in admitting a country that had an outstanding territorial dispute with Russia. The only thing the bid accomplished was to further convince Moscow that Saakashvili was an enemy.

Misha's twin obsessions - battling Moscow and reestablishing control over Abkhazia ad South Ossetia - were bound to cause trouble at some point. But even those who know Saakashvili couldn't have predicted that he'd take it as far as to launch Friday's surprise attack on South Ossetia.

Even for a man of his well-chronicled volatility, it was an amazing gamble. And a very poorly thought out one. Hundreds of people are now dead, most of them civilians. Russian planes are striking all over Georgia and its troops and tanks have crossed from South Ossetia and Abkhazia into Georgia proper. The Kremlin has made it clear that its end goal, one way or another, is to oust Saakashvili from power.

I'm not writing all this to defend Russia's actions. The idea of Russian troops in Gori - or Tbilisi - is abhorrent to me. But I can't for the life of me figure out what Misha (that's him in the photo, second from the right, taking cover during a Russian air raid on Gori) was thinking.

He must have known that attacking South Ossetia would provoke a massive, and disproportionate, Russian response. He should have realized that his government might not survive such a confrontation. And anyone who occasionally glances at the news could discern that his friends in America are far too concerned with places like Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan to even consider aiding him militarily against the Russian army.

The West can kick and scream and call Vladimir Putin a monster, but there's little Washington and Brussels can do. Post-Iraq, the moral high ground has been ceded and there's no longer the necessary force to back it up anyway. And Saakashvili muddied the waters for many by launching the Friday assault on South Ossetia that left 10 Russian "peacekeepers" dead. One also wonders how Washington would react if Serbian troops launched a snap assault on Kosovo (another breakaway province under foreign protection that claims independence), killing 10 NATO troops in the process.

So why did Misha do it? Why were pride and South Ossetia worth risking his government and his country's sovereignty - not to mention the hundreds of people dead - for?

As day breaks in Tbilisi on the fifth day of this unnecessary war, I know I'm not the only one asking.

P.S. - For those of you in Canada, I'll be discussing all this tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. EST on Canada AM. I'll do it again on CTV Newsnet at 7 p.m.

Off-topic: me in Zimbabwe

Just a quick post to highlight a recent undercover trip I took to Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe that partially explains why this blog has been so quiet lately...

UNDERCOVER IN ZIMBABWE

Surreptitiously 'committing journalism' amid fear, terror and economic ruin

MARK MacKINNON, Harare

Crouching low over the steering wheel, Chamu sneered and shook his head slowly as we drove past a building plastered with several dozen posters calling for Zimbabweans to support Robert Mugabe's drive to install himself for another six years as president.

"We did it in 1980, let's do it again!" the green-and-yellow election advertisements shouted. It was a reference to the role Mr. Mugabe and his ZANU-PF movement played 28 years ago in bringing about the end of white supremacist rule in this country.

Do what again, you had to wonder. Chamu kept shaking his head as we drove down nearly empty streets and past the deserted stores of his hometown in northern Zimbabwe. Gasoline cost too much for people to drive their cars. The store shelves were empty of all but a few expensive, imported products that the average Zimbabwean could not afford.

"There's nothing in Zimbabwe. As long as Mugabe rules, we will suffer," the 25-year-old tour guide scoffed. "And if we protest, they will squash us like mosquitoes. Like cockroaches. Human life means nothing to them."

Chamu was the first Zimbabwean I met, but it was an opinion I'd hear repeated over and over again during the week I spent reporting in Zimbabwe undercover.

Chamu isn't the tour guide's real name. Most of the names in this story have been changed. Publishing real names might earn those concerned a potentially fatal visit from the Central Intelligence Organization. Such are the stakes in Mr. Mugabe's Zimbabwe. Even identifying the town Chamu and I were driving through might endanger the few other foreign journalists still in the country - I left yesterday - since it would reveal the route some of us used to get in and report on last week's one-man "election."

My journey through the disaster that is modern Zimbabwe began as soon as I crossed into the country. Posing as a tourist - camera, binoculars and Indiana Jones hat at the ready - I entered overland and headed straight for one of the country's spectacular national parks.

I spent the first two days trying to do nothing an ordinary tourist wouldn't do, hiking through parks and photographing the carefree monkeys, baboons and hippos that were sometimes the only other creatures there. With most sensible tourists giving Zimbabwe a wide berth these days, I had some of the world's natural wonders almost completely to myself. At night, I'd retire to my room and surreptitiously e-mail what I could of the day's events using my BlackBerry.

Even while hiking deep in the parks, I couldn't escape the sensation that I was drifting through the wreckage of something potentially wonderful that had been destroyed by spectacular mismanagement and crude tyranny.

You can read the rest of the story here at The Globe and Mail website.

Radio Canada International interviewed me yesterday about the trip and why and how I did it. You can listen to the conversation my conversation with journalist Levon Sevunts here.