Salon.com > Lawrence Weschler

Bahraini activist’s triumphant return

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 23:20:00 +0000

The remarkable Al-Khawaja family continue to bedevil the dictatorial royal regime of Bahrain in ever more confounding ways.

On Thursday I reported on a growing worldwide groundswell of support behind the notion of the entire family’s being considered for this coming year’s Nobel Peace Prize. I described, among other things, the 52-year-old father Abdulhadi’s longtime commitment to nonviolent resistance in support of democratic civil society and against the profoundly repressive regime of the Al Khalafa royal family (local allies, alas, of the United States, which stations its Fifth Fleet there in Bahrain). I described his brutal arrest following the suppression (largely by the neighboring Saudi army) of the short-lived Pearl Revolution in early 2011; the farcical trial that ensued with its apparently predetermined life sentence; the repudiation of that trial (and others like it) by the regime’s own hand-selected International Commission; the refusal of the regime to recognize its own commission’s recommendations in that regard; the 110-day hunger strike that Abdulhadi launched in early 2012 (Feb. 8 through May 29) in response to the regime’s failure to honor those recommendations; his eventual suspension of the hunger strike amid regime assertions that the their own judiciary would be embarking on a good-faith review of all those sentences; and the final court’s blithe verdict earlier this week, reconfirming Abdulhadi’s ridiculous life sentence, and those of all his colleagues in the civil society movement.

A worthy, necessary Nobel honoring the Arab Spring — and much more

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 01:00:00 +0000

Earlier this week, Bahrain’s highest court and final judicial authority upheld a series of ferocious sentences passed upon 13 nonviolent democracy activists, seven of them to life terms. In so doing it seemed to foreclose any possibility that the entrenched minority regime of the country’s Al Khalifa royal family might yet honor the pleas of human rights organizations and political leaders from throughout the world (ranging from U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and his high commissioner for human rights through virtually all European foreign ministers, and even significant voices in the Obama administration). It further flouted the explicit findings and recommendations of the international commission (headed by the renowned jurist Sharif Basyouni,) which it itself had empanelled less than two years ago, in a farcically short-lived feint at reconciliation.

Among those whose life sentence was upheld was the 52-year-old Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, whose 110-day hunger strike earlier this year momentarily drew world attention to the country’s ongoing travails. At the time he suspended that hunger strike, regime spokesmen lavished international reporters with assurances that his situation and that of his prisoner colleagues would be receiving full judicial review — the very review that has now come to naught, exactly as both he and numerous family members at the time predicted would prove to be the case.

America’s pervasive pay-off system

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 12:54:00 +0000

A bit over an hour into the five-hour drive across the ferrous red plateau, heading south toward Uganda’s capital Kampala, suddenly, there’s the Nile, a boiling, roiling cataract at this time of year, rain-swollen and ropy and rabid below the bridge that vaults over it. If Niagara Falls surged horizontally and a rickety bridge arced, shudderingly, over the torrent below, it might feel like the Nile at Karuma.

Naturally, I take out my iPhone and begin snapping pics.

On the other side of the bridge, three soldiers standing in wait in the middle of the road, rifles slung over their shoulders, direct my Kampalan driver Godfrey and me to pull over.

“You were photographing the bridge,” one of them announces, coming up to my open window. “We saw you.”

“Taking photos of the bridge is expressly forbidden,” the second offers by way of clarification, as the first reaches in and grabs the iPhone out of my hand. “National security. Terrorists could use such photos to help in planning to blow up the bridge.”

“Do I look like a terrorist to you?” I ask. “And anyway,” I shout as Soldiers One and Two walk off with their prize, oblivious, “I wasn’t photographing the bridge. I was photographing the rapids. The bridge was precisely the one thing I wasn’t photographing!”

Dark garland/Affirming flame

Tue, 25 Sep 2001 19:04:00 +0000

I have shored these fragments against my ruin ...

From Walker Percy's "Love in the Ruins"(1971)

Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last? [...]
Undoubtedly something is about to happen. Or is it that something has stopped happening? Is it that God has at last removed his blessing from the U.S.A. and what we feel now is just the clank of the old historical machinery, the sudden jerking ahead of the roller coaster cars as the chain catches hold and carries us back into history with its ordinary catastrophes, carries us out and up toward the brink from that felicitous and privileged siding where even unbelievers admitted that if it was not God who blessed the U.S.A., then at least some great good luck had befallen us, and that now the blessing or the luck is over, the machinery clanks, the chain catches hold, and the cars jerk forward?
- -- - - - - - - - - -
From Ernest Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms"

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The Htoo twins come in from the cold

Mon, 29 Jan 2001 09:00:00 +0000

The image itself (splayed across virtually every newspaper in the world) was uncanny, the caption more unsettling yet: Dec. 6, 1999, a pair of 12-year-old ethnic Karen twin brothers, the Htoos, Johnny on the left (that's a boy?) and Luther (Luther!?) on the right, leaders of a beleaguered Myanmar insurgent group known as God's Army, whose members credit them with mystical godlike powers that "render them invulnerable during battle."

In the photo, they look like Renaissance cherubs gone badly wrong (specifically like those two clichéd angels propped at the foot of Raphael's Dresden Sistine Madonna): toxic putti. Raphael's cherubs, that is, gone upriver, deep, way too deep into Conradland -- miniature Brandos bestriding their own demented cargo cult. Their aura is all the more unsettling in that, in this photo anyway, they actually look, if you'll pardon the expression, like Siamese twins. Johnny seems to grow right out of Luther's back, his tremulous innocence hitched helplessly to the latter's age-old, gimlet-eyed world-weariness: seen it all (toke), seen it all (toke), should never have seen any of it.

Clinton grows a spine

Fri, 05 Jan 2001 09:00:00 +0000

Back in the early summer of 1998, delegates from over 160 nations gathered in Rome were wrapping up work on a treaty to establish an International Criminal Court. The court would have the power, for the first time in history, to try and convict individual perpetrators for particularly heinous violations of the laws of war, for crimes against humanity and for genocide -- it would be not an ad hoc Nuremberg or Yugoslav/Rwanda-type tribunal, but rather a permanent court with generalized and ongoing worldwide jurisdiction, a court whose existence the U.S. had been advocating for years, but whose birth the U.S. delegation now suddenly seemed just as hellbent on forestalling.

I remember there was a lot of talk there in the halls about the League of Nations. "If the U.S. walks out on this court," the Syrian delegate assured me, his eyes twinkling with grim satisfaction (he was all for it; he couldn't wait), "it will be like the League of Nations." Perhaps, I remember thinking at the time, but in that case ought President Clinton be cast in the role of Woodrow Wilson, the League's strongest advocate, or that of Henry Cabot Lodge, its most ferocious opponent?

Dan Quayle redux

Sat, 16 Dec 2000 22:51:00 +0000

At the time of his sudden ascension to prominence, back in 1988, when the entire world seemed to be stammering, as if in one voice, "Him? Why him?" Dan Quayle, we were assured, had struck a resonant chord in the patrician sponsor who had selected him to serve as his vice presidential running mate. George Bush saw something in the boyish young (though actually not that young) man; indeed we were told, he recognized in him something of a son.

Little did we know.

There were countless other fresh young politicians from whom to choose that strange summer morn, some of them quite competent, but Bush père chose that one. Just as this time around, bent on revenge for their defeat four years later, the Bush clan could have rallied behind the competent son but instead chose to marshal its forces around (behind, in front of, above, beneath) its hapless dauphin.

A fluke? A crisis? No, the future

Sun, 12 Nov 2000 22:28:00 +0000

Amid the flood tide of punditry spewing forth in the wake of last Tuesday's bizarre electoral result, two rhetorical gambits, in particular, seem to keep recurring.

First, that this "crisis" is unprecedented, unique, impossible to have predicted or to ever again replicate, a macro-historical fluke. (Indeed, it's all so uncanny that it's almost as if we should feel privileged to be taking part in it.) Second, that it represents the triumph of deliciously, deliriously messy reality over any social-scientific ambitions to model or channel it (as evinced by the marvelous scandal of the networks' miscalling Florida with absolute statistical certainty, absolutely inaccurately, not once but twice in a single evening).

It seems to me, however, that both of these claims run counter to an even more remarkable reality.

How “The West Wing” gets the vote out

Tue, 17 Oct 2000 19:42:00 +0000

"In a telephone interview today from St. Louis, where the final debate will take place on Tuesday night, Mr. [Jim] Lehrer said his critics were missing the point. His role, he said, is to foster give-and-take, and not become a star attraction. 'If somebody wants to be entertained, they ought to go to the circus,' Mr. Lehrer said. 'They ought to go to the movies. Or they ought to go to the ballgame. I didn't sign on to entertain people for 90 minutes three times. These have been tremendous exercises for democracy.' -- from 'Critics Accuse Moderator of Letting Debate Wander,' by Richard L. Berke.

"[Thomas] Schlamme ['West Wing' director] ... put it another way. 'If you do a show about politics, people have to represent a certain political allegiance,' he said. 'If you do a show about cops, they have to shoot a gun; or a show about doctors, they have to save lives. You've got to be specific here. If you play it safe, there's not a chance the show would be successful.' -- from "'The West Wing': Leader of the Free World (Free TV, That Is)," by Bernard Weinraub."

The ABCs of Balkan nationalism

Thu, 05 Oct 2000 22:32:00 +0000

Several years ago, while reporting in Belgrade, I happened to have a conversation with a Serb oppositionist journalist, of whom there were still dismayingly few, and she recalled for me her own experience of the late 1980s and early 1990s in Yugoslavia. For some reason, she said -- and she couldn't really explain why -- she hadn't at the time succumbed to the ex-communist leader Slobodan Milosevic's raging propaganda campaign to recast himself as the leader of an urgent Serbian nationalist revival.

(At the time, her bewilderment reminded me of that of an old Danish woman with whom I also once happened to have a conversation -- a veteran, years earlier during the Nazi times, of her country's famously successful effort to rescue its Jews. When I asked her why little Denmark, couched there amid such hotbeds of anti-Semitism as Germany and Poland, had itself never seemed to succumb, she at first gazed upon me authentically baffled and noncomprehending. "What kind of question is that?" she finally responded, "Why did we never succumb? I mean, isn't the only valid question why Germany and Poland ever did?" In so saying, of course, she'd answered my original question perfectly.)

Relying on God

Wed, 16 Aug 2000 22:41:00 +0000

Much was made of the fact, last week, that, as Maureen Dowd pointed out in her New York Times column the next day, Sen. Joseph Lieberman managed to mention "God 13 times in 90 seconds" in his Nashville debut as Al Gore's vice presidential pick. To wit, according to the official transcript:

Dear friends, I am so full of gratitude at this moment. I ask you to allow me to let the spirit move me, as it does, to remember the words from Chronicles, which are to give thanks to God, to give thanks to God and declare his name and make his acts known to the people; to be glad of spirit; to sing to God and make music to God, and most of all, to give glory and gratitude to God from whom all blessings truly do flow.

Dear Lord, maker of all miracles, I thank you for bringing me to this extraordinary moment in my life.

And Al Gore, I thank you for making this miracle possible for me and breaking this barrier for the rest of America forever. God bless you and thank you ...