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Wednesday, December 31, 2003
2003
Alright
Guy Bourdin and Art Deco at the V&A. Middlesex filter beds: a grass snake, woodpeckers, warblers, grey herons, kingfisher. My lovely family of coots on the River Lea - good luck! Abney Cemetary. Renata Adler. 1st english translations of With the Flow (Huysmans) and Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers (Pierre Guyotat). Turner and Whistler at Tate Britain. Healthy Gower swimming in July and August. New York in March (giant prawns, Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Central Station, Ghostbusters). Garbo in A Woman of No Importance at the NFT. Mario Bava, Dario Argento. Exiles. The hot weather. Sophie Dahl in the flesh. Attending a garden party hosted by an exiled Yemenese royal family. Darren Campbell and Carolina Kluft at the World Athletics. Ennio Morricone (reissue Mondo Morricone CDs), Goblin, Italodisco, Sandy Denny, Bix Beiderbecke, the London FM dial. More books: Modern Jihad - Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks Loretta Napoleoni (best this year), No End to War Walter Laqueur, Regime Change Christopher Hitchens, London Orbital Iain Sinclair (pbk), John F Kennedy - An Unfinished Life Robert Dallek. Vanessa Feltz (London Live 3-5). Berlusconi's big mouth. Roland Cartier shoes that glide! November 5th. Immolation of the Ba'ath regime. Milosevic in the dock. Learning to fence.
Awful
End of the affair. Mysterious weight loss. Dull and muddled translation of Deleuze on Francis Bacon, minus the plates. EU ban on Gower cockles. Berlusconi. Bombing of Al-jazeera. Iraq aftermath. Aceh. Liberia. Congo. North Korea. Chechnya. Kyoto. Water. Fires. No money, more problems.
Citta 03
Q: What did Saddam Hussein say when he came out of his hole?
A: "Did I beat David Blaine?"
1:34 PM
Sunday, December 28, 2003
Druqz
Heroin, opium and morphine production dominates the Afghan economy. It is controlled by Northern Alliance warlords, military commanders and drug cartels, with political connections that extend to the hierarchy of central government. Farmers extract opium from abundant poppy fields largely located in the East; it is processed into heroin at illegal production facilities. In July 2000 the Taliban outlawed the cultivation of poppy plants and closed down the laboratories used to produce heroin. That same year, they cashed in their last opium reserves for huge profit, flooding Europe and North America with vast quantities of unusually pure heroin (a disaster for San Francisco). With the fall of the Taliban in 2001, the Northern Alliance took control of the drug trade, along with criminal cartels ready to exploit the new war economy. Warlords and gangsters retained control of a booming industry, with a cut of the profits taken by provincial administrators, military commanders and terrorists. Farmers became reliant on the drug trade to maintain a decent standard of living (consequently, any attempt to return to a purely agrarian economy would be doomed to failure without overt (or covert) force).
Afghanistan is the world's largest producer of opium and exports 90% of Europe's heroin. According to The Economist, the huge revenues extracted from this trade will help military commanders buy influence in the forthcoming summer elections, as well as large caches of arms and equipment for Northern Alliance warlords. Afghanistan will become the world's premier narco-state.
Afghanistan's mature heroin industry has its roots in the murkiest of Cold War realpolitik escapades: the war between the Soviets and Islamisc jihadists (the Mujahedin) between 1979-89. The Carter administration saw the Soviets' reluctant entry into war in Afghanistan as a potential Cold War equaliser: an opportunity to create the USSR's own Vietnam. Covert support for the Mujahedin was irresistible: a way to divert, weaken and humble Soviet will and military power on the World stage. The Reagan administration inherited this plan and implemented it with a vengeance. It was a delicate operation: America would not directly arm the Mujahedin fighters so the Pakistani Secret Service (ISI) was engaged as a willing intermediary. The ISI was powerful; an Islamist force, virtually independent and easily able to influence the Pakistani government. Arms, ammunition and money were channeled from the CIA via the ISI across the Pakistan/Afghan border to the Mujahedin fighters. The CIA purchased hardware from countries friendly to the US, most of whom exploited the opportunity to offload obsolete weaponry. CIA funds flowed into accounts controlled by the ISI to meet the endless costs of purchasing and transporting equipment, building and maintaining storage facilities, paying the salaries of Islamist party commanders and Mujahedin fighters and releasing them from jail. The ISI ran up a bill of about $5 billion a year.
Furthermore, American money was siphoned by endless layers of bribery and corruption. The ISI would steel arms and skim funds, Pakistani border control demanded bribes for delivering weapons, and so on. By the time American aid reached the Mujahedin fighters a substantial amount of the initial cache had disappeared. Islamist fighters in Afghanistan found themselves hungry and short of arms despite massive US assistance. To match this deficit the CIA had to reach into the "the black budget": secret funds retained by the Pentagon for the finance of covert operations, for example the Contras in Nicaragua.
To fulfill mounting costs, adequately arm the anti-Soviet fighters and perpetuate the Soviet quagmire, the ISI and the CIA turned towards illicit trade, most prominently contraband and drugs. The localised drug industry was expanded by the ISI with the tacit agreement of the CIA. Most of the heroin extracted from this blooming trade ended up in North America: in effect, the CIA fed America's voracious drug appetite. Poppy planting was encouraged by taxes imposed on farmers by the advancing Mujahedin. Expansive poppy fields were planted in new regions. The ISI increased heroin production and smuggled the drugs through routes in Pakistan with the aid of the Pakistani army and the leading Muslim bank (the BCCI) who funded the operation. Narcotics took over the agrarian infrastructure as Afghanistan became the main source of heroin for Europe and America.
Now, with production back in the hands of the Northern Alliance, ISI and BCCI-sponsored smuggling routes through Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and the Balkans (the Islamist lines) have been largely abandoned. The Northern Alliance favor an alternative route through Central Asia into Russia. Tajikistan-based traffickers act as a conduit between the Northern Alliance and Russian border guards. The Tajikistan route generates huge profits for an enriched Russian Mafia, making inroads into the American market via links with Columbian and Mexican drug cartels, and increasing government corruption and gang violence.
In Afghanistan, allied forces turn a blind eye to poppy growth and heroin production; the problem is too complex, entangled and explosive. To challenge the unholy alliance of warlords, criminals, and military officials would constitute an undeclared act of war that would multiply problems within an already fractious and lethal war economy.
1:13 PM
Tuesday, December 23, 2003
This Christmas I attended Vespers, witnessed the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin and followed The Procession of Our Lady, which transformed the Brompton Oratory into a Spanish carnival. On Charing Cross Road we had a conversation about Marxist Priests in Latin America and Marxist mayors in Wales. It was Winter Solstice.
11:04 AM
Monday, December 22, 2003
This will be worth tuning into on the wracked tundra. Brrr. Bitter wind, ice sheets, gulags!
7:34 PM
Friday, December 19, 2003
Magic potion, puns, and village-based resistance
1:37 PM
Wednesday, December 17, 2003
Hunger
Marylebone farmers' market, on Sunday, between 10am and 2pm, in a car park off Cramer street. Bright day: glassy sky, air nips flushed skin. Picking through boxes of dusty vegetables, sprout stalks, pumpkins and crusty loaves. There's a stall that sells pheasant, partridge, wood pigeon, wild rabbit and venison. Game shrink-wrapped, all odd hues: deep blood red and sunset yellow. Other stalls specialise in dairy products: untreated milk, quail and duck eggs, brandy butter, rich rice pudding in foil containers. There are racks of apples, and a wicker basket full of hares in plastic. And there are fishmongers: one sells cockles, brown shrimp, mussels, Blakeney Point oysters, live crabs and lobsters in the back of a van; another has a striped apron and sells skate, sea bass, mackeral, dover sole and cod fillet on ice. A man makes lovely pies (pheasant and mushroom, mixed game, duck and orange, rabbit) and sells Aylesbury ducks. A look in my eye reveals hunger and dull, mild poverty ("sorry, I'm just looking"). There are big Christmas trees for sale and a nostalgic scent in the air. The lavender stall, though, is a bit much.
In Harrods food hall I discovered that the dairy counter sells empty Ostrich eggs (£25 each). Two scottish women stood behind me, one said, "that's ridiculous! Empty Ostrich eggs!" and the other said, "well, I guess you wouldn't want an Ostrich to hatch in your house," and the other said, "no, I suppose not."
A tasty directory of produce (for my own reference).
6:57 PM
I expect you are trying to find the movie "Red Dawn" at the moment, it used to be on Channel Five all the time, written by John "Big Wednesday" Millius. Good film, Patrick Swayze leads a teenage American mudjaheddin to victory against the Soviets/Cubans in hometown USA. Are the American military a) fucking scary with a souped up Reaganite view of world politics? or b) labelling their missions according to the entertainingly ridiculous 80's videos they brought with them to Iraq? Have there been missions to capture/destroy high ranking members of the Ba'athist party called "Operation Three O' Clock High" and "Mission: Killer Klowns from Outer Space"?. I think the world needs to know.
Gavin Watkins
12:20 PM
Monday, December 15, 2003
On TV they show Saddam leaning back on a chair, smoking a big cigar - younger, handsome, power-glutted, "indefatigable" (George Galloway) - as a brutal purge of the Ba'ath hierarchy gets under way. The woman on the TV introduces this "chilling" footage and, at first, I don't know what she is talking about - then I realise that while Saddam is sitting there, generals and politicians are led from the room by Ba'ath security officers to be tried (briefly) and then slaughtered. Yes, well, I'm chilled: that's the (hard)line of power, power stripped to brute Stalinist essentials, "raw power" (Iggy Pop).
What happened on 18 July 1979 is recorded on video. Saddam personally ordered the filming of the proceedings of a meeting of the Regional Command Council and other top party officials of the Ba'ath, four hundred in all, in a conference hall which looked like a cinema that he had had built for international meetings. The film shows Saddam running the meeting by himself. He is on stage, sitting behind a large table with four microphones in front of him and a large cigar in his hand. Occupying the first row are his loyalists: Izzat Douri, his second-in-command in the Iraqi Ba'ath party and deputy secutary of the RCC; Taha Yassin Ramadan, his vice president; foreign minister Tariq Aziz; and others including his cousin, brother-in-law and Chief of Staff, General Adnan Khairallah.
Saddam stood up and walked slowly, as if with a heavy heart, to a lecturn with two microphones on it. He spoke to the gathered leadership in the manner of a relaxed lecturer addressing a group of supplicants. He not only announced the existence of a plot, but gestured with a wide sweep of his arm and told his followers that they would have a chance to determine the veracity of his statement. Mashhadi was summoned from behind the curtain and took Saddam's place at the lecturn while the latter went back and sat behind the table, still puffing on his huge cigar.
For two hours Mashhadi regaled the listeners with details of the conspiracy, dates, places of meetings and names of participants. It was obvious that his presentation was rehearsed. He referred to the so-called conspiraters as traitors, and as he mentioned each name plain-clothed security officers were filmed escorting the person mentioned out of the hall. When one of them tried to speak to the gathering, Saddam shouted , 'Itla, itla', or 'Get out, get out!'. Heads bowed, every single one walked out with his grim-looking escorts, never to be seen again. No one said anything while the camera panned across the faces of Douri, Aziz, and Khairallah.
What was happening, one of the most hideous recorded examples of the working of a dictatorship, finally became clear to the rest. Some of them stood up and started to cheer Saddam. He responded with a broad smile, twice thanked people who stood up to praise him and offer their fealty. Encouraged, others stood up to speak of Saddam leading them on a march to liberate Palestine, and the camera showed a happy Saddam content with what he was hearing.
Saddam reserved for himself the right to make the closing statement. Tearfully, he mentioned how the conspirators had tried to drive a wedge between him and Bakr (General Ahmend Hassan Al, his political mentor) and 'weaken the glorious Ba'ath Arab Socialist party'. When he repeated the names of the accused who had been close to him, he appeared to wipe tears from his eyes. The audience followed suit; Douri led the way and suddenly everyone had a handkerchief in his hand and was wiping away tears. Towards the end Saddam was in good spirits and laughed, and the whole audience laughed with him.
From Saddam Hussein - The Politics of Revenge by Said K. Aburish.
They pick him out of his hole, check his head for lice, shave off that scrappy Moses beard, then go out in front of the world - imagine a million eyes jammed into a tube as thick as wire -
"Let's go and break the news, boys..."
Schroeder and Chirac send their warm congratulations fast; Russia is too sour and choked to even fake pleasure. Probably all aware that their (former) moral opposition can be exposed as compromised (fatally) if Saddam decides to reveal a secret history of cosy deals and snug arrangements, or is drugged into it, or whatever.
Meanwhile, now: the illusion of scattered Ba'ath military operations - or Saddam's control over Iraqi resistance - disintegrates like Uday's palace in a welter of Tomahawk missiles. The bombs and shooting raids remain and the messy nexus of radical opposition - nationalist, religious, as well as Ba'ath loyalists and civilians amped on bloodshed, adventure, outlaw status - reveals a chaotic, lethal aspect. Or, until it breaks up like crude oil in stormy water. Once a loose alliance weakens, the tenacious Islamists remain - with their obscure fiscal channels, hard and software supplies, and resevoir of manpower.
We're on a scavenger hunt for terror.
George W. Bush
11:12 PM
Friday, December 12, 2003
Ivory Coast.
State television has shown pictures of four bodies, some wearing magic charms...The director of Ivorian Television, RTI, Jean-Paul Dahily said the assailants wore black clothes bearing the name "Nindja" - a reference to one of the militias which has sprung up since the 2002 uprising in support of President Laurent Gbagbo.
3:56 PM
Uruguay turns left.
On Dec 7, 60% of Uruguayans voted to reimpose the State monopoly on oil supplies, a demand for renationalisation counter to the global drift towards free-market neoliberalism, and more frustration for the IMF in Latin America.
3:24 PM
This is, I assume, not just "punishment" for the Iraq stance, but a response to Russia's increasingly obvious Soviet leanings: a new willingness to invoke Soviet heroes and the industrial achievments of the Communist era, the opening of a hydroelectric dam in the East (an old Soviet project abandoned in '89, but reactivated in the late 90s), the markedly undemocratic electoral win for United Russia that exposed Putin's determined grip on power, the incarceration of Mikhael Khodorkovsky (Russia's richest man, critic of and potential political rival to Putin) on charges of fraud, and a certain institutional resistance to private enterprise and free markets within the Kremlin etc.
One of the main reasons Russia opposed America's war was because of some precious trade agreements struck with Ba'ath Iraq. Russia is, ostensibly, an American ally in the War on Terror, but also, potentially, an enemy: Russia was one of the designated targets in the '01 Nuclear Posture Review presented by Rumsfeld, and that was simply because of the size of its nuclear arsenal.
1:13 PM
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
and related
12:43 PM
Saturday, December 06, 2003
Shining Path screwed.
3:32 PM
Mr Rumsfeld flew over the Iraqi capital in what the French news agency AFP described as a swarm of Black Hawk helicopters before landing at a military base.
Stylish!
1:41 PM
Friday, December 05, 2003
Swiss bank accounts!
12:39 PM
The tropical disease of US trade policy
Mr Bush, who is about to enter an election year, is risking a political backlash in steel-producing states but faced the prospect of worse among other states where voters could have been affected in a tit-for-tat trade war.
He was also facing pressure from American manufacturers which are heavy users of steel and had argued that the higher prices were hurting their businesses and costing jobs.
11:53 AM
Aceh Again
JAKARTA (AP)--Achenese rebels celebrated the 27th anniversary of their
independence struggle Thursday with the sporadic raising of flags and a rare
battlefield success, killing four soldiers and injuring two in clashes
across the
restive province.
The Indonesian military, which launched a fresh offensive against the Free
Aceh Movement in May, had warned that anyone celebrating the anniversary
would
be punished severely. They threatened to shoot anyone caught raising a rebel
flag and said offenders would be charged with treason.
The threats and increased military patrols in the oil- and gas-rich province
appeared to work, with witnesses seeing only a smattering of rebel flags -
black and red with a star - flying across the province on the northern tip of
Sumatra.
...
Thursday's killings marked one of the few days that the Indonesian army lost
more men than rebels and comes after months of military dominance on the
battlefield. Since the May offensive began, the military claims it has
killed more
than 1,000 rebels but lost only 47 soldiers and 16 police officers.
A rebel spokesman couldn't be reached for comment.
11:19 AM
Thursday, December 04, 2003
Good.
10:31 AM
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