1. law, govt and politics
2. legal issues
3. human rights

February 27-March 1, 2015
The San Juan Daily Star
25
New York Times Editorials
On Sudan’s Rape of Darfur
by the government’s scorched-earth tactics.
Every once in a while, however, a sliver
of evidence emerges. In recent years, citizen
journalists and human rights defenders from
Darfur and the Nuba Mountains have smuggled out videos showing bombing raids and
burning villages. Images captured by our Satellite Sentinel Project confirmed the systematic
burning and barrel bombing of at least half a
dozen villages in Darfur’s eastern Jebel Marra
area last year.
To avoid scrutiny, the government has
spent millions of dollars provided by Qatar
to set up “model villages,” where it encourages Darfuris displaced by violence to settle.
Human Rights Watch recently documented a
chilling incident of mass rape at one of these
villages, Tabit.
After collecting more than 130 witness
and survivor testimonies over the phone, its
researchers concluded that at least 221 women
had been raped by soldiers of the Sudanese
Army over a 36-hour period last October. The
peacekeepers’ attempts to investigate this incident were obstructed by the government,
which allowed them into the town briefly for
interviews that were conducted in a climate of
intimidation. A leaked memo from the peacekeeping mission shows that Sudanese troops
listened in on and even recorded many of the
interviews. Since then, the people of Tabit have
had their freedom of movement severely curtailed.
The army had controlled the town since 2011, with a base on the outskirts, and was
not trying to drive the population from their
homes to gain territory. The sexual violence
has no military objective; rather, it is a tactic of
social control, ethnic domination and demographic change. Acting with impunity, government forces victimize the entire community.
Racial subordination is also an underlying
message, as non-Arab groups are singled out
for abuse.
Human rights courts around the world
have found that rapes by army officials or police officers can constitute torture. When issuing
its findings about crimes committed in a similar situation in Bosnia, the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia determined that
the rapes of women at two camps were acts of
torture since sexual violence was used as an
instrument of terror. The mass rapes in Tabit
follow the same pattern.
During our own visits to Darfur, the
Nuba Mountains and refugee camps in neighboring countries, we have heard story after
story like those from Tabit. These “torture rapes” are just one tool in Sudan’s criminal arsenal, which also includes aerial bombing of
hospitals and agricultural fields, burning of
villages and the denial of food aid.
Over time, international outrage has shifted away from Darfur. When change doesn’t
come fast enough, attention spans are short
— especially for places that appear to have
no strategic importance. In the last two years,
however, Darfur became important to the Sudanese government when major gold reserves
were discovered in North Darfur, the region
that includes Tabit.
When South Sudan won its independence in 2011, the part of Sudan left behind lost its
biggest source of foreign exchange earnings:
oil revenues. So gold has become the new oil
for Sudan.
According to the International Monetary
Fund, gold sales earned Sudan $1.17 billion last
year. Much of that gold is coming from Darfur
and other conflict zones. The government has
attempted to consolidate its control over the
country’s gold mines in part by violent ethnic
cleansing.
Unfortunately, the United Nations Security Council is too divided to respond with
action to the crimes being committed in Darfur
and other parts of Sudan. Russia and China,
which have commercial links to Khartoum
through arms sales and oil deals, are unwilling
to apply pressure that might alter the calculations of the Khartoum government. But that
doesn’t mean the international community is
without leverage.
Europe Won’t Give In to Doubt
countries where pluralism — of ideas, religion,
politics, ethnicity and language — is a fundamental part of national identity. This challenge
arises from the South and its extremist terror
groups.
The other challenge comes from the
East: President Vladimir Putin’s determination to change the rules of the international order established in Europe after the Cold War.
This order has been tested before, but today
in Ukraine it is genuinely under threat. Once
again, through the Russian assault on Ukraine,
a fundamental part of European identity is being attacked.
So how does Europe react? My colleague
Jochen Bittner, from the German newspaper
Die Zeit, wrote in this newspaper on Feb. 12
that we have been struck by an “autoimmune disease,” arguing that “two fundamental
virtues of the West, doubt and conscience, are
turning against their inventors.” Just compare John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address in
1961, he says, with today’s statements by the
European Union’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, to see how the West has sunk
into hollowness. (Mr. Bittner believes Ms.
Mogherini’s appeal to Moscow to use its “considerable influence” over separatists in Ukraine was “shot through with self-doubt.”)
I disagree. Today’s world is much more
complex than the bipolar world of the Cold
War. Comparing the European Union’s foreign
policy chief, with all her structural constraints,
to the then-leader of the free world is rather
unfair. There was no Federica Mogherini in
1961, because the European Community was
in its infancy, with only six member states.
Today, with 28 member states, the European
Union is much more complicated to run, but
also more powerful: Just ask Russian officials
how they feel about European and American
sanctions. The Ukrainian people who stood
and fought on the Maidan in Kiev to defend
their right to an association agreement, waving
the European flag, are also a testimony to the
European Union’s power of attraction.
By GEORGE CLOONEY,
JOHN PRENDERGAST
and AKSHAYA KUMARFEB.
I
n the early 2000s, a brutal conflict in western Sudan between the government and
rebels led to the deaths of hundreds of
thousands of Darfuris, with millions displaced
as refugees. In 2004, the United States declared
Sudan’s actions a genocide.
After that spike in attention and concern,
the world has largely forgotten about Darfur.
Unfortunately, the government of Sudan has
not.
Because Sudan’s government routinely
blocks journalists from going into the Darfur
region and severely restricts access for humanitarian workers, any window into life there
is limited. The government has hammered
the joint peacekeeping mission of the United
Nations and African Union into silence about
human rights concerns by shutting down the
United Nations human rights office in the capital, Khartoum, hampering investigators of
alleged human rights abuses and pressuring
the peacekeeping force to withdraw.
Just last week, the regime reportedly convinced the peacekeeping mission to pull out of
areas it says are stable, hoping no one takes a
closer look. As a result, mass atrocities continue
to occur in Darfur with no external witness.
This is also the case in Blue Nile and the Nuba
Mountains, two southern regions devastated
By Sylvie Kauffmann
F
or some time now, thanks to my name
which sounds Jewish, although I was
raised in a Catholic family, I have been
blessed with all sorts of emails from Israel —
Tel Aviv real-estate agents, good travel deals,
support-the-troops messages — which I usually delete without a second thought.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, I found
a new invitation in my inbox: “Prepare your
Aliyah.” Aliyah (ascent) is the Hebrew word
used for Jews scattered around the world who
decide to move to Israel. This email — sent, I
suppose, to tens of thousands of other French
Jewish names — was an ad for Hebrew classes specially designed for French Jews who,
scared by the recent terrorist attacks, might be
tempted to leave.
Following the Copenhagen shootings, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of
Israel again called for “mass immigration” of
Jews from Europe to Israel. But how can one
make the argument for Jews to flee their country, be it Denmark or France? Europe without
Jews: This is what the Nazis tried to achieve. It
would also be granting an immediate victory
to the terrorists who have been targeting them.
As the reaction in France and Denmark shows,
standing up to the threat means staying, not
fleeing.
Europe faces two fundamental challenges. One is posed by radical Islamists who kill
cartoonists, Jews and members of the security
forces, preferably those of diverse ethnic background. Their attacks target two hallmarks
of Western societies: freedom of speech and
diversity. The assaults have been carried out in
26
February 27-March 1, 2015
The San Juan Daily Star
New York Times Editorials
Holding Homeland Security Hostage
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
R
epublicans in the Senate took a step on Wednesday to
avert a national crisis by passing a law to fund the Department of Homeland Security before its budget expires at the end of the week. Republicans in the House, however, intent on thwarting President Obama’s executive action
on immigration, have been unwilling to back away from the
dangerous impasse on this issue in their party.
If a budget for the department isn’t approved by the
end of the week, there’s only one agency in the gargantuan
bureaucracy where business would largely continue to operate as usual. It happens to be the United States Citizenship
and Immigration Services, which processes visa, work permit
and green card applications and is the very agency responsible for accepting petitions for deferred action from deportation that the Obama administration has offered to certain
unauthorized immigrants.
Unlike other parts of the department, the citizenship
and immigration services agency is financed almost entirely
by applicant fees, rather than taxpayer dollars, making it immune to government shutdowns.
What Greece Needs
By ARISTOS DOXIADIS
T
he depression ravaging Greece is always framed as an
issue of macroeconomics: fiscal policy was tightened too
quickly; government debt is too high; the tools of currency devaluation and monetary expansion are not available inside the eurozone. But this is overly simplistic; local politics and
microeconomic factors are just as important in explaining the
depth of the crisis.
Greece has fared much worse than other eurozone countries that faced a sudden drop in foreign financing, and then
enacted similar austerity programs. It lost 26 percent of its
G.D.P. from the pre-crisis peak, while Portugal, Ireland and
Spain lost no more than 7 percent each. Much of this difference
is due to foreign trade.
In all four countries, when capital from abroad stopped
flowing in, increasing exports became an urgent goal. The
other three countries achieved this quickly. Greece did not. If
it had boosted exports, its recession would have been much
shallower; by one estimate, a 25 percent increase in exports
could have limited the drop of gross domestic product to just
3 percent.
Why did Greece fail to adjust like other southern European countries? Wages have dropped far more in Greece since
2010 than in any other country, and the cost of labor is no longer a barrier to exports. Businesses have not taken advantage
of this for three reasons: regulations, fear and size.
Regulatory barriers to starting or expanding a business
in Greece used to be the worst in Europe, and they are still
formidable. Since 2010 there has been some reform, demanded
by the “troika” (the European Commission, European Central
Republicans had warned that they would pass a bill to
finance the Department of Homeland Security only if it included a provision blocking Mr. Obama’s initiatives, which
would allow certain longtime immigrants to remain in this
country and work lawfully but would not provide a pathway toward citizenship. The Senate majority leader, Mitch
McConnell of Kentucky, agreed to untangle the two issues
by putting forward a straight budget bill and vowing to introduce separate legislation that would stop the president’s
program. Republicans in the House have not agreed to pass
a similar bill.
Mr. Obama has rightly threatened to veto a bill that
would stop his immigration plan, arguing that the steps the
White House intends to take are the best alternative to comprehensive immigration reform, which Congress has failed to
pass for decades.
If the department is not financed, 30,000 people would
be furloughed. Most of the department’s employees would
be considered “essential” and asked to show up to work
even though they wouldn’t be getting paid. The collateral
damage of the stalemate are tens of thousands of families
who depend on the biweekly paychecks of these front-line
Bank, and the International Monetary Fund), but progress is
slow. Hundreds of thousands of pages of small print need to
be canceled, thousands of officials must lose their authority to
block business decisions, and protected professions must be
opened to competition from new business models. Politicians
have not expended much political capital to push through these changes.
Fear also held back the economy. In other countries most
parties reached a broad consensus over structural change. In
Greece no political party had the courage to take ownership of
any reforms, any cuts in expenditure or any new taxes, even
though it was very clear that some such combination was inevitable. When in government, politicians blamed all measures on
the troika; when in opposition, they declared all measures unnecessary and wrong and branded the government as traitors.
This polarization brought violence and threats. Tourism
was hit for three years by pictures of arson and beatings in
Athens, as well as by port blockades and taxi strikes. Foreign
investors were put off by threats from the surging Syriza
opposition that they would reverse all sales of state assets, and
would restore a centralized wage system that enforces pay raises every year, regardless of productivity. Deposits flowed out
of banks due to fear of a “Grexit” or on rumors of nationalization, leaving no funds to lend to export-oriented businesses.
Finally, the size of companies in Greece is a fundamental structural issue. Industrial capitalism was never strong in
Greece, which is a society of small owners and of microbusinesses. Land and homes belong mostly to their occupants,
free of mortgage, more so than in any Western country. Selfemployment and companies of fewer than 10 employees are
much more prevalent than in any other European nation. Only
5 percent of employment in the whole economy occurs in companies with more than 250 employees. Even the main export
industry, tourism, consists mostly of medium and small businesses.
workers, including border patrol agents and airport security
screeners.
“There are serious consequences for the working men
and women of our department if they are required to come
to work and try to make ends meet without a paycheck,” the
homeland security secretary, Jeh Johnson, said earlier this
week. “For themselves and their families.”
While critical functions, such as law enforcement operations, would continue, officials say the halt in financing
would compromise their ability to respond effectively to a
natural disaster and could make the country more vulnerable
to organized crime and even acts of terrorism.
At the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, there is one program that would have to be suspended:
E-Verify, the online service that allows employers to check the
employment eligibility of workers.
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The San Juan Daily Star
February 27-March 1, 2015
27