This blog isn’t dead. I haven’t been posting regularly because I’m going through some transitions (positive ones) in my personal and professional life. One of these transitions is directly attributable to my blogging  here over the past year.

So, stay tuned. Exciting announcements soon.

AREU just released a new report on the Shia Personal Status Law (previously known in the Western press as the Shia Family Law), and it is one hell of a report –fifty one pages long and illustrative of how the international community interacts with the Afghan government and Afghan civil society. I’m making my way through it now. When I’m done, I hope I’ll have time to post something on it. Until then, here’s a telling snippet:

The Afghan organisations interviewed reported being consistently told that this was an internal issue of the Afghan state and it was outside of the role of international institutions to interfere. UNAMA was singled out for particular criticism for their inaction. Civil society had higher expectations of UNAMA’s role in speaking out on human rights, gender and political development issues. One MP remarked on UNAMA’s cumbersome bureaucracy, slow reactions and the institution perceiving itself as always having its hands tied.

Representatives from UN agencies as well as western embassies were also reportedly present in the parliamentary gallery when the bill was being discussed and did not raise the issue as a concern with their own governments at that time, to the consternation of MPs alarmed at the bill’s contents and the lack of debate. During a meeting hosted by a UN agency between Afghan women activists, MPs, UNAMA and several embassies, one Afghan woman stated, “We understand if the embassies have to work behind the scenes. But they should be working, you know? And it is UNAMA’s job to be interfering, to speak up on human rights issues. That is why you are here.”

The picture below is my new blog icon.

Bistrik is an old, quiet neighborhood in Sarajevo full of kids playing soccer, tiny stone mosques and old guesthouses. I stayed in a creaky Bistrik guesthouse my first night in Sarajevo. The owner was a woman who spoke no English and fussed over me like I was her own child. I think back on her, and Bistrik, so fondly now.

I facepalmed when I read a recent Foreign Policy interview with  Mohammad Farid Hamidi, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission’s representative at the Working Group on Conflict-Related Detention.

Why did I facepalm? This:

Though he wasn’t consulted for either the Stone Review or Gen. McChrystal’s assessment, Mohammad Farid Hamidi, the Commission’s representative at the Working Group on Conflict-Related Detentions in Afghanistan, had some additional insights that U.S. reviews should have included.

Seriously? Really? The AIHRC was not consulted?

If we’re not going to listen to Afghans like Hamidi at this late hour…I just don’t know.

Stuff I’ve been reading:

Eurasianet:

Nearly 20 years after Georgia’s disastrous war against Abkhaz separatists, Georgian children whose families fled the breakaway region still study in segregated schools designed to keep the memory of Georgian-controlled Abkhazia alive. Now that the dream of reunification seems to be fading, critics fear that the schools’ existence will complicate efforts to integrate displaced families into mainstream Georgian society.

Sad. Postwar school segregation is an intractable problem in Bosnia and Kosovo also, only in those countries, segregation is by ethnicity and not IDP status.

Human Rights Watch:

In December 2002, Russian federal forces broke into the home of Salman Khadzhialiyev in the Chechen village of Samashki. They beat his two sons, Ramzan and Rizvan, and took them away. The brothers’ remains were found a few weeks later at a nearby farm; their bodies had been blown up by explosives.

UNHCR:

UNHCR takes to the air waves to warn people about the risks they face in trying to cross the perilous Gulf of Aden from the Horn of Africa to Yemen.

International Crisis Group:

Arabs and Kurds must urgently agree to a power-sharing deal, joint patrols in disputed areas and protection of minority groups to prevent escalating violence in Ninewa from endangering what remains highly fragile and uneven progress in Iraq. The Iraqi government and the Kurdistan regional government must take steps to resolve bilateral issues, including the status of disputed territories, the management and allocation of resources, and the division of power. Ninewa’s key political actors, al-Hadbaa and the Brotherhood List, should agree on an interim deal that gives the latter a fair share of power, while allowing the former to govern effectively.

Enough:

While we discuss the way forward in Afghanistan, a calamitous counterinsurgency operation is unfolding in the Democratic Republic of the Congo without the benefit of the same kind of thoughtful debate. In the forested terrain of Congo’s eastern provinces, the Congolese army and United Nations peacekeeping forces are waging a campaign that has little chance to succeed and has deepened what was already one of the world’s worst humanitarian emergencies. As in Afghanistan, the strategy in Congo demands a rethink.

Media Matters: Jackasses at the Washington Times use “Illegals” in a headline.

Glenn Greenwald:

As we debate the many scary enemies and exciting possibilities for new wars — escalation in Afghanistan, our very own “Cuban Missile Crisis” against the Persian Hitlers, the Socialist Menace in Venezuela — events can become very confusing.  Compounding that problem are the many complex, technical terms often used in media discussions of foreign affairs.  It’s therefore helpful to keep track of the relevant terms — ones just from the events of the last week alone — to maximize clarity as we debate our imperial responsibilities.

The glossary of terms that follows is awesome.

openDemocracy: Micro-states fascinate me. Take, for example, Andorra:

The principality of Andorra has long resisted the encroachments of the outside world. ‘We fought off the Arabs, we survived Napoleon, two world wars, and the Spanish civil war. Do not underestimate us,’ a local intellectual proudly tells me. The Andorrans – whose small land (470 square kilometres) perched on the southern slopes of the Pyrenees has an electorate of just 20,000 out of a population of 85,000 – indeed exhibit the feistiness and stolidity of mountain peoples the world over. The national anthem celebrates its historic independence in forthright terms: ‘Charlemagne the Great,’ it declares, ‘who delivered us from the Arabs. Alone I remain the only daughter of Charlemagne, Christian and free for eleven centuries. Christian and free I will remain, between my two valiant masters, my two protecting princes.’

Amnesty International:

Two Iranian refugees, who remain in detention in Turkey despite a European Court of Human Rights ruling on Tuesday, should be released, said Amnesty International. The court ruled that Mohsen Abdolkhani and Hamid Karimnia had been arbitrarily detained in Turkey without access to a lawyer or an asylum procedure, and other violations. The Court concluded that the two men, who were former members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization in Iran (PMOI), would face a real risk of death or ill-treatment if returned to Iran or Iraq.