TERROR-STATE ALIENS GOT U.S. AMNESTY , By: D'Agostino, Joseph A., Human Events, 00187194, 7/22/2002, Vol. 58, Issue 27
Contents
Somalis and Sudanese
The U.S. government has granted blanket temporary immigration amnesties to aliens from Sudan and Somalia, two countries known to have been havens for al Qaeda-terrorists.
On March 17, Gen. Tommy Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command conducting the war in Afghanistan, told the BBC that he had evidence of al Qaeda cells in Somalia. "We have known of links to al Qaeda in and through Somalia for a considerable period of time," he said. Osama bin Laden himself used to live in Sudan, and that country's regime is listed by the State Department as a sponsor of terrorism.
Somalis in the United States were first granted the special temporary amnesty on Sept. 16, 1991. Sudanese in the United States were first granted the amnesty on Nov. 4, 1997. Since then, the amnesties periodically have been extended, with little public notice or fanfare, even as U.S. administrations have changed.
Just before the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Bush Administration extended again these temporary amnesties to aliens from Sudan and Somalia. In the case of Somalia, it "re-designated" the country, which made many thousands of additional aliens eligible for amnesty.
As a result, Somali and Sudanese nationals who entered the United States illegally, or who overstayed the original terms of their temporary legal visas, are currently free to live and work in the United States.
The aliens were granted the temporary amnesty under a program called Temporary Protected Status (TPS).
Somalis and Sudanese
Somalis and Sudanese are far from the only aliens currently enjoying a TPS amnesty in the United States. The special status has also been extended to aliens from seven other countries, including El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Angola, Burundi, Sierra Leone, and Montserrat. The senior President Bush first listed Somalia for TPS status, and the younger President Bush first listed El Salvador for TPS last year. The rest were all first listed by President Clinton, then later renewed by the younger President Bush.
TPS was enacted as part of a 1990 immigration law that empowers the attorney general to grant temporary legal residence in the United States to aliens from a country suffering from a war, natural disaster, epidemic or other disturbance. Unlike asylum status, which is granted only to individuals who can demonstrate that they personally have a well-founded fear of persecution in their home country, TPS is automatically granted to all aliens from a listed country provided they were in the United States at the time of their country's listing and can pass a rudimentary background check.
In a website posting, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) says that aliens from TPS-designated countries who arrived in the United States in the fight time period are eligible to receive the amnesty unless they have been "convicted of any felony or two or more misdemeanors committed in the United States" or are "a persecutor, terrorist or otherwise subject to one of several security-related bars to asylum" or are "subject to one of several criminal-related grounds of inadmissibility for which a waiver is not available."
But there are questions about the effectiveness of the background check by which the INS determines whether an applicant falls into one of these categories. INS official Dan Kane told HUMAN EVENTS that after an alien applies for TPS, a background check is done that involves both the FBI and the CIA. But no effort is made to get information about the applicant's record from his native country. "It has nothing to do with the home governments," he said. "It's an FBI and a CIA background check. I can't say anything more about it."
Such a background check would have been unlikely, for example, to screen out the 19 September 11 hijackers had they been TPS applicants. None of them were known to have committed previous felonies in the United States, and the CIA had not warned the INS that any of them were terrorists.
Furthermore, many applicants can stay in the United States for extended periods of time before the background check is even conducted. Due to a large backlog for countries with large numbers of TPS beneficiaries, many applicants who have resided here for months or even years have yet to be screened.
Honduras and Nicaragua were granted TPS status in 1998. But of the approximately 150,000 Honduran and Nicaraguan applicants for a TPS amnesty, there were still 15,631 applicants awaiting final approval as of July 8. INS can't say if their background checks have been completed.
El Salvador was granted TPS status in March 2001. But out of 267,339 Salvadoran applicants, 166,472 were still waiting for final approval. Again, INS can't say if their background checks have been completed.
While the backgrounds of these TPS amnesty applicants are being conducted, the applicants are allowed to stay and work in the United States.
On March 2 of last year, when Bush announced that El Salvador would be given TPS status, the INS said, "It covers as many as 150,000 potential applicants." That estimate proved to be more than 100,000 lower than the actual number that applied.
TPS even immunizes illegal aliens who have been ordered deported by a federal immigration judge and are awaiting their deportation date.
TPS beneficiaries can travel freely within the United States. They also may travel outside the country and return provided they receive "advance parole" for this travel from the INS.
TPS also does not apply solely to actual citizens from the countries listed. It also applies to "aliens having no nationality who last habitually resided" in the listed country. Such people would qualify for a TPS amnesty as long as they passed the background check.
The Bush Justice Department extended the TPS amnesty for Sudanese citizens on Sept. 4, 2001, one week before September 11. "The extension of TPS is effective Nov. 2, 2001, and will remain in effect until Nov. 2, 2002," the INS said in a statement that day. "The extension of TPS will affect approximately 1,903 nationals of Sudan."
The justification for the amnesty, said the INS, was the long-running civil war in that country. "In the case of Sudan," said the statement, "there is an ongoing armed conflict and, due to such conflict, requiring nationals of Sudan to return home would pose a serious threat to their personal safety." Many Sudanese TPS beneficiaries are believed to be black Christians fleeing persecution by the Arab Muslim government. But the INS does not ask TPS applicants their religion and can provide no statistical breakdown of how many of the amnestied Sudanese are Christians and how many are Muslims.
Also on Sept. 4, 2001, according to the Justice Department website, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft determined not only to extend TPS status for Somali nationals who had al ready been granted amnesty, but also to re-designate Somalia as a TPS country. That meant that all Somalis who entered the United States after the original 1991 designation and before the Sept. 4, 2001, re-designation would now be eligible for the amnesty. This encompassed a broad period in which al Qaeda was believed to be active in that country.
An INS press release officially announced Ashcroft's September 4 decision about the Somalis on September 12. "The Immigration and Naturalization Service announced today the extension and re-designation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for nationals of Somalia for an additional year," said the INS announcement. "The extension of TPS is effective Sep. 17, 2001, and will remain in effect until Sep. 17, 2002. The re-designation of TPS is effective immediately and will be in effect until Sep. 17, 2002."
Before Ashcroft's re-designation, 323 Somalis had been granted amnesty under the original 1991 TPS determination. Because of the re-designation, an additional 7,000 Somalis became eligible to apply for the amnesty.
Conservative Rep. George Gekas (R.-Pa.), chairman of the House subcommittee on immigration, does not want to abolish TPS but he does want to tighten its requirements. "We would like to convince the attorney general not to haphazardly grant and extend TPS to large classes of people," he said. "We don't want it to be blanket. We would force people to produce more evidence to show that it would be a hardship for them to go back to their home state rather than accepting a statement from them. We want to tighten up on all these immigration programs." Gekas is sponsoring a bill, the SAFER Act (HR 5013), that contains this tightening of TPS.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Somali woman tears a U.S. flag at a rally in Mogadishu in June 1993.
By Joseph A. D'Agostino
Source: Human Events, 7/22/2002, Vol. 58 Issue 27, p1, 2p
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Somalia's Desert Flower.
Source: Time Atlantic , 7/15/2002, Vol. 160 Issue 3, p58, 1p, 1c
Author(s): Gibson, Helen
Abstract: Profiles Waris Dirie, a supermodel and author who was born a desert nomad in Somalia. Biographical information for Dirie, including her escape from an arranged marriage and her circumcision while a young girl; Mention of her book, 'Desert Dawn'; Her documentation of the poverty in Somalia; Advocacy of Dirie against female circumcision. INSET: Q&A.
Supermodel turned best-selling author Waris Dirie wants to alert the world to the plight of her country--and of millions of young women
HER STORY IS THE STUFF of fiction: the daughter of Somali desert nomads, Waris ("desert flower" in Somali) Dirie fled her family when she was about 13 to escape marriage to a man old enough to be her grandfather. She landed in London as a servant to wealthy relatives and worked as a cleaner at McDonald's before becoming a supermodel, a James Bond girl, a U.N. special ambassador and a best-selling writer. Her second book, Desert Dawn, was published in Britain last week.
Hard to believe? Only until you meet Dirie. A warm but somehow elusive woman in her mid-30s--she doesn't know her age, nomads having little use for calendars and clocks--she radiates a luminous beauty with a whiff of the wild and free. Dirie is strikingly attractive, but her dramatic rags-to-riches journey was fueled not just by looks, but also by resilience. She calls it the power of the spirit. "I felt the power," she says when relating how she overcame some crisis or other in her life. "Believe in yourself, and nothing can stop you." That strength sustained her when she nearly died after being circumcised at the age of about five with a dirty razor blade. It saw her through her desert escape and the vagaries of a frenetic life on the international modeling circuit.
Dirie wrote about all this in Desert Flower, her 1998 autobiography, which topped the British, German (1.75 million copies) and Dutch best-seller lists. In Desert Dawn, which was written with Jeanne D'Haem and first published in Germany a few months ago, she tells of her horrific journey last year to find her mother, who lives in a village in her poverty-stricken homeland. Dirie found spiritual nourishment in her family's courage, faith and humor, but also much to distress her. She writes movingly of Somalia's dire poverty and of the problems caused by the entrenched attitudes of its tribal culture, which keep the country divided and so often in turmoil. Especially troubling to her is how these views ensure that women have few rights and remain subjugated by men.
Dirie has been speaking out about one aspect of this subjugation: female circumcision, practiced on 2 million girls a year, most of them in 28 African countries but also in immigrant communities in Europe and the U.S. The U.N. appointed her in 1997 as a special ambassador to seek an end to this practice, after she caused a furor by suddenly revealing her own experience to a reporter. Talking about such intimate personal details is excruciating for her, but she vows she won't stop.
Sustaining her now is not only the power of the spirit but also her five-year-old son, Aleeke, whom she calls "the light of my life." Now parted from his American jazz musician father, Dirie is currently living with Aleeke in Wales. She is vague about her future plans--excited about a proposal for a National Geographic documentary on Somalia but uncertain about staying in Britain. "I can enjoy anywhere, and I can leave it," she says. "Life is about moving on." She is, as she adds, a nomad after all.
By Helen Gibson
Q&A
"The power of the spirit...Believe in yourself, and nothing can stop you."
Q. Has any progress been made in stopping female circumcision? A. It's a subject that is increasingly talked about, and more women are campaigning against it all the time. But there is a long way to go, and things move slowly. You have to change attitudes. But apartheid was ended in South Africa--it can happen.
Q. How were you different from your siblings? A. I always wanted to know the reasons for things and didn't like when I was smacked for asking or pushed away or ignored. So I became my own person. I was considered different. Inside I felt I was right.
Q. Do you regret giving up modeling? A. No, life is about changes, and I had better things to do. It was fun, but it was meaningless. It's sad how many girls in the West make modeling their dream and goal. They should keep a focus on something else at the same time.
Q. And the movie Elton John was going to make of your life? A. That has faded out.
Q. What next? A. I have started the Desert Dawn Foundation to raise money for schools and clinics in Somalia. What I saw there broke my heart. These people have nothing, really nothing.
Source: Time Atlantic, 7/15/2002, Vol. 160 Issue 3, p58, 1p
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Fire and rain.
Source: Ecologist , Jun2002, Vol. 32 Issue 5, p16, 4p
Author(s): Smith, Jeremy
Abstract: Presents an interview with Somali environmental activist Fatima Jibrell about her country, its problems and why she has no faith in the United Nations. Brief information on Jibrell; Main production of Somalia; Drought in the country.
Contents
Somalia's Black Gold
SOMALIA
Old glories
Fatal cycles
The answer: build hundreds of dams
It's known as 'The Hungriest Country on Earth'. Life expectancy is only 47 years; one in four children dies before the age of five; and three quarters of the population have no access to clean water Now Somalia is facing another drought, predicted to be worse than the one that killed more than 200,000 people 10 years ago. Jeremy Smith spoke to Somali environmental activist Fatima Jibrell about her country, its problems, and why she has no faith in the UN.
Considering the endless cycle of televised appeals, the global conferences to alleviate hunger and the ubiquitous twentysomethings standing on street corners asking us to fill out direct debit forms, one might assume that the more that rich countries give to the Third World, the better things would be there.
So when the United Nations Development Project (UNDP) said recently that it was planning to return with 'interventionist strategies', everyone must have breathed a sigh of relief. Help was on its way at last. In the hotel where we meet I ask Fatima Jibrell what she thinks of the news.
'I don't think the UNDP -- or any UN agency, for that matter -- will make any difference if it comes back to Somalia,' she tells me. 'And if it doesn't come, it won't be missed. If the UN comes, it just stays and rents a big house and drives its cars around and then leaves. I don't seen any improvement. You tell me where it is working?'.
To understand her answer, and to understand why so many other Somalis have such a mistrust of outside aid, one needs to know something of Jibrell's. and Somalia's, history.
54-year-old Fatima Jibrell first awoke to the severity of Somalia's plight when she returned to the country after attending university in the US. As a student she had campaigned for the world to do something to stop the fighting in her country, to stop arming the warring factions, so that Somalia might be given a chance to find peace. Returning home she saw thousands starving as millions of dollars were spent on a useless war, and watched as the baby goats she had played with as a child were unable to find enough food to eat, because all the acacia trees whose leaves formed the staple of their diet were being felled to fuel the country's most economically profitable, if environmentally destructive industry -- the production of charcoal.
But rather than give up, or leave the country, Jibrell committed herself to working to bring about the changes that might help her country recover. To this end she has set up and worked with numerous different groups. Though they may work in disparate fields, all these groups are driven by the same ethos. As Jibrell insists: Somalia's future can only be built from inside Somalia, by the Somali people using their own indigenous knowledge and resources.
The list of these groups is impressive. Jibrell was instrumental in creating the Women's Coalition for Peace, set up to counter political crisis in the Puntland region of north-east Somalia. She is coordinator of the Resource Management Somalia Network, which unites environmental groups across the Horn of Africa. And she has joined with several villages in the region of eastern Sanaag to form the Buran Rural Institute. Last May the institute organised a camel caravan: young people loaded tents and equipment onto camels and spent three weeks walking through nomadic areas. The volunteers educated people about how to use and protect their fragile resources, healthcare and livestock, and how to live peacefully with one another.
But her most notable success is her work with Horn of Africa Relief and Development Organisation, which she founded and still runs. This year, that work has been awarded with a Goldman Prize -- environmentalism's equivalent of a Nobel. And Jibrell is en route for the US to receive her award when I meet her.
Somalia's Black Gold
Traditionally Somalia only produced charcoal for its own local market, employing a small number of people. However, ever since the collapse of the country's central government in 1991 and the ensuing civil war, the lack of central control has led to widespread, environmentally destructive logging, accompanied by inter-clan warring over control of the trade. Following the livestock export ban imposed by the Gulf States in 2000, charcoal replaced beef as the number one export, earning it the sobriquet Somalia's Black Gold. However, like oil, this black gold comes with a heavy price for the environment.
At the height of the trade, hundreds of square kilometres of trees were being cleared a month. Once the trees have been burned, the scarred land that remains cannot support life.
Most of the trees felled are acacia, important in Somalia, not least because the leaves provide food and shelter for the livestock that forms the basis of Somalis' traditional diet. Full-grown trees, which are aged between 50 and 500 years, were being turned into charcoal and exported at the staggering rate of 30,000 tonnes a month.
In addition, many other bushes and plants in the logging areas are used as kindling to help burn the larger trees. This is a dangerous process that can cause runaway forest fires which wipes out hundreds of kilometers of much needed bush and forest at a time.
Finally, the trucks that carry the charcoal leave rutted tracks in their wake. These tracks end up as eroded gullies when the rains came,
Working with her group, Jibrell trained a team of young people to organise awareness campaigns telling people about the irreversible damage the charcoal trade caused. This culminated in a peace march through Puntland's main town, calling for an end to the 'charcoal wars' being fought by the different clans over control of the trade.
It worked. In 2000 the Puntland regional government banned the export of charcoal. The ban has remained in place ever since, and has resulted in an 80 per cent reduction in charcoal exports.
But Jibrell was aware that it was not enough just to stop the trade. She had to offer sustainable alternatives. So, at the same time as she was explaining to people why they must stop making and using charcoal, she promoted the use of simple solar cookers -- so breaking the domestic dependence on charcoal, replacing it with a clean, and cheaper alternative.
SOMALIA
Old glories
She may have won an 'Environmental Nobel' for her efforts, but Jibrell would rather emphasise that she was just part of a team and is reticent about any discussion of the prize itself. She seems utterly unimpressed by the trappings of so-called Western progress. She has good reason.
'Somalia was not always like this,' she says, adding that, in order to learn how her country can survive, she spends much of her time speaking with and listening to the many nomadic peoples that make up nearly 80 per cent of her country's population. It is their indigenous knowledge, she insists, passed on from generation to generation of pastoralists who have lived and survived in Somalia's difficult conditions, that holds the key to her country's future.
'In the past,' she continues, 'before the arrival of the colonialists, these nomads had their own way of protecting against the cycle of drought. When the weathers were good, they would take their cattle far away from the watering holes and leave the land nearest the water, which is, of course, the most fertile, untouched. When the droughts did come they could return to these fields that they had saved, which now would be the only ones still rich with water.'
All this changed with the arrival of first the British and then the Italians in the 19th century. For the Somalis, surviving for themselves was no longer enough. Now they had to compete for a share in the markets for which the Europeans compelled them to work. Inevitably greed got the better of some, who rejected all that their old wisdom had taught, and began to farm the land near the water holes in the search for quick profits. Fighting broke out over who controlled these profitable lands. And then, when the inevitable droughts returned, there were no fertile pastures to return to.
So began Somalia's collapse, a century of division and drought where tribes fought one another relentlessly, while the people starved in their thousands.
In 1992, with the country torn apart by civil war and facing the worst drought in a decade, the international community finally acted. (Actually it had been acting all along behind the scenes, supplying arms and influence, with the US alone providing Somalia with military aid worth $390 million between 1980 and 1989).
In December of that year, 28,000 US Navy Seals and Marines charged up Mogadishu beach to the delight of the attendant crowd of camera crews and reporters, all of whom had been briefed by the Defense Department in advance of the landing. What followed was one of the most painful episodes in recent US and Somali history, jingoistically recast last year in the US' favour by Ridley Scott's film, 'Black Hawk Down'. The tragically misnamed Operation Restore Hope was a cruel and unmitigated disaster, in which 10,000 Somalis died, mostly women and children. Former US ambassador to Somalia T Frank Crigler accused the US and UN of 'turning triumph into tragedy, applying brute military force to a situation that calls for quiet diplomacy, patient mediation, steadiness and understanding'. As if to emphasise the total lack of all the above qualities, certain US leaflets distributed to civilians during the campaign had mis-translated 'United Nations' when turning it into Somali. Instead it read 'Slave Nation'.
Fatal cycles
It is now 10 years later. Somalia is once again facing a devastating drought, which local people say could be the worst for 50 years. Up to 800,000 people are at risk of death.
I want to know what Jibrell thinks her country needs. She doesn't have any time for the UN, or for its development arm the UNDP, yet her organisation is called Horn of Africa Relief and Development. Does she think, then, that there is still a place for development in her country's future?
'Development is not about doctorates and PhDs,' shel replies. 'It's about us developing our natural resources holistically on our own terms. By which I mean that we will use our indigenous knowledge, and then choose to use what outside help we believe can support us.'
This is a long way from the open-market mantra of globalisation which puts all knowledge up for grabs to the highest bidder. As Jibrell sees it, those pushing development on her country now are little better than the colonists of the 19th century. She once wrote: 'Slavery was also about profit for the then developing [Western] world. It provided free human resources. Profit makers of today do not claim ownership of individuals, but they are busy making fast profits by exploiting and destroying the natural and human resources in a very cruel and greedy manner.'(n1)
Nothing Jibrell has seen since has changed her mind.
'Don't you see what the fishing fleets are doing to the reefs?' She asks the question in such a way as to make me feel directly responsible for the damage. 'The reefs took millions of years to grow. Now they are using nets that are destroying them in seconds. Do we have another two million years to wait for them to grow back? The acacia tree that took between 50 to 500 years to grow is gone. Do we have time to wait for that to come back?
'And don't listen when they blame the corruption of our ministers. In Somalia now we are not saying that we wish we had received the IMF loans that the presidents and ministers were putting in their pockets and calling aid. We don't miss them. We're happy not to get them.'
The evidence supports her. In a 1995 article, Somalia expert and former editor of Somalia News Update Bernhard Helander wrote: 'Militia strength and the ability of factional leaders to hijack Somalia's future are functions of the levels of influx of dollars and aid. The more funds that come in, the more likely it is that the artificial factions will be able to cling on to aspirations of power.' On the other hand, he added,'In areas which have received minimal levels of aid and political involvement, quite different processes have emerged... Since then, clans of the area have been engaged in an impressive series of conferences engaging continuously widening spheres of clan elders, professionals, intellectuals and politicians.'(n2)
The trouble is, explains Jibrell, the nature of globalisation is such that even when Somalia isn't being crippled by debt-related aid European fishing fleets are dumping illegal waste off its shores, and DDT is still being exported to the country despite its being banned in America and Europe.
'There are certain insects in hot countries that live off and decompose the animal droppings before they get too hard and dry,' she tells me. 'But DDT has wiped them out. So now, the manure just hardens in the sun, the soil does not get fertilised, the trees don't grow and there are no leaves for the baby goats to eat and turn back into manure.' It is a fatal cycle, and the only amount of foreign interference that will solve it is none.
'How are we going to survive?' she asks. 'We don't want to leave, we love our hot country. But if there is nothing left in our land and we have to, then the survivors will come to your shores. The rest will die. So which is better? For your countries in Europe and the US to get rich for a little while from our resources, or for those resources to sustain whoever lives in Somalia?'
The answer: build hundreds of dams
Although she urges the outside world to pressure its companies and governments not to abuse the Third World, Jibrell does not believe the solutions to her country's problems will be ones that are externally introduced, financed and controlled. For her, the answers are simpler, smaller, cheaper and indigenous. If only we would leave Somalia alone.
'Imagine there is a seven-year-old boy working as a herder for baby goats,' she says -- and the changes in her face show that, while she is deeply angered by the injustices inflicted upon her country and the world, she is also an optimist.
'Instead of this child just sitting around all day idly, what we have him and his friends doing now is studying the land that they know so well, and seeking out the traces of the rivers. Whenever they find a trace they follow the line to its weakest point, which is just where the bends start. There he puts some stones, one on top of the other -- say eight or nine, to form a small rock dam. Then he continues downstream to the next bend. He builds another dam, and another, until the end of the day.
'Then when everyone comes home they will sit around the fires and talk and share their experiences. "How many dams did you build today?" It becomes a game, with everyone involved -- the mother, father and all the children.
'You do not want the water to stop,' she adds, picking up a little chocolate wrapped in the logo of the hotel we are talking in and turning it on its side on the table. 'It will create a gully. You want it to slow down, so you have to position the stones so.' She lies the chocolate down flat, mimicking the dam building.
'You want it to slow down so that the water will deposit soil and manure and seed. Then, after seven or so days something may grow up from the soil -- maybe some grass, or an acacia bush, or a tree. And if it grows, then later the baby goats can come up and munch at its leaves.' She accompanies her last sentence with little munching sounds, her fingers and thumb snapping together like a shadow puppet.
'Suppose one tree lives. It will grow and become bushy. It will become cover for the land, and this will stop soil erosion and the leaves will provide food for the goats and the sheep and the cattle. And we repeat the process all across Somalia.
'Slowly but surely, over 20 years or more our country will recover. It is not a difficult solution. It's not quick, but nor is it expensive. And, most importantly, it does not involve the UN.'
Jeremy Smith is assistant editor of The Ecologist
Source: The Ecologist, Jun2002, Vol. 32 Issue 5, p16, 4p
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The media's role.
Source: Quill , Jun2002, Vol. 90 Issue 5, p62, 2p
Author(s): Floreancig, Lisa
Abstract: Presents several studies on the role of news media in a country. 'Amidst Torture and Terror: Reporting in Somalia'; 'Gag order: Media in a Closed Society,' in Saudi Arabia; 'To Speak or Not to Speak: Life As an Iraqi Journalist.'
Contents
SOMALIA. Amidst torture and terror: Reporting in Somalia
SAUDI ARABIA. Gag order: Media in a closed society
IRAQ. To speak or not to speak: Life as an Iraqi journalist
NORTHERN IRELAND. Northern Ireland: The Extremists, Propaganda, and the Media
It's a journalist's job to report the news, but politics and culture bring potentially dangerous challenges to journalists from other countries.
Last Spring, seniors and graduate students at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis studied the roles of news media in several different countries. Their work resulted in papers that examined each of these countries. We have condensed those papers into the following four "snapshots" that illustrate the state of the media in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Northern Ireland.
SOMALIA
Amidst torture and terror: Reporting in Somalia
A Somali journalist's work does not involve glitz or glamour. Often the struggle to perform the job becomes a fight for survival. The journalists are the unfortunate victims of curses, harassment, abductions, torture, and murder.
Despite the fear Somali journalists confront each day, they are unwilling to give in to the power that often plans to destroy them.
"I am called a foreign-manipulated reporter, an evil teller," said Somali journalist Ali Musa Abdi on the 1996 program "BBC Focus on Africa."
According to Abdi, many Somali citizens are armed with weapons, and they are not afraid to use them. "They try to censor the work of the journalists. Any writing that doesn't coincide with their interests is considered offensive, and they are not slow in telling you so." Abdi has received more than 175 threats and 22 death threats.
Despite the dangers of his work, Abdi is determined to get his stories out for the world to read. "I wear patience against the curse," he said in a BBC interview. "As for the threats, I try to keep them from my mind."
Unfortunately, Abdi is only one of hundreds of Somali journalists who have encountered such obstacles in performing their jobs. In January 2000, a newsman was brutally murdered while on assignment. Ahmed Kafi Awale, a commentator for Radio of the Somali People, was covering Mogadishu's Bakara Market when thieves shot him to death.
Today, the future of the Somali press is unclear. Without the presence of a political infrastructure, civil fighting and distress continue to hinder development of a free press within the country.
"Journalism in the Third World is not fun at all," said Abdi. "In countries where there is relative stability, journalists worry about being arrested if they offend a powerful politician. Here in Somalia we worry about how and when we will be killed."
SAUDI ARABIA
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Gag order: Media in a closed society
Saudi Arabia remains tucked away, ruled by a government that is mainly interested in protecting itself. Much of this protection is through media and information censorship.
Government ownership of Saudi television and radio stations ensures that news items report only official views and refrain from reporting on political and religious issues. The media are also banned from reporting on subjects such as the royal family and the military.
The Saudi government also tightly controls coverage of women. Often, stories are spun to portray women as gaining in stature. But in February 2002, USA Today reported that with the fall of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia now has the "dubious distinction of affording its women the worst treatment in the world."
As'ad Abukhalil, a former Saudi journalist based in the United States, knows well the censorship that is enforced by the government -- particularly its policy toward women.
When asked by his editor in Saudi Arabia to write an article on the country's history, Abukhalil said he would accept the assignment only if he was allowed to include a story about the treatment of Saudi women.
"Suddenly the editor became very unnice," said Abukhalil. "He thanked me and hurried off the phone. I was fired a week later."
The same laws affecting Saudi women apply to those women who join the journalism profession. Stringent clothing requirements are enforced when female journalists are in the company of their male counterparts or in public. The newsrooms are divided to keep female journalists separate from the male journalists. Face-to-face interviews with men are forbidden and telephone interviews are frowned upon, forcing many female journalists to use e-mail and fax to do their jobs. Covering government speeches is almost impossible. Female journalists must either sit in a side room or watch on a television monitor, and they are not permitted to ask questions.
But there may be signs of change in Saudi Arabia. Many Saudis have become consumers of international news because, according to Abukhalil, the news they receive at home is uninformative and useless. The government is quickly losing control as more outside information becomes available through satellite or Internet access.
For journalists who go against the authoritarian rule, government reprisal can extend far beyond simply being dismissed from a job. Human Rights Watch reports that journalists can be detained and face corporal or capital punishment, depending on the offense. A movement toward a free press now depends largely on the determination of the Saudi people to make a change.
IRAQ
To speak or not to speak: Life as an Iraqi journalist
For the rogue journalist, life in Iraq is a life on the run. Monetary fines, imprisonment, torture, and even death await journalists who report news and events that the government does not approve.
In July 1998, Iraqi government officials arrested Dawoud al-Farhan in Baghdad because of articles he had written about government corruption and embezzlement. A journalist at the Cairo-based Middle East News Agency, al-Farhan has not been seen since.
Last year, 89-year old journalist Muhammad Jamil Rozhbayni was found dead in his home. The author of several articles on the ethnic purification of the Kurdish regions, Rozhbayni was found mutilated, and his notes for his memoirs were missing.
According to the Iraq Press, 50 journalists have left the country because of restrictive limits on their reporting and editorial pressure. Recently, Iraq's only investigative reporter Hashem Hassan escaped from prison, where he served two years for refusing to pen an apology letter to Saddam Hussein for writing articles that repeatedly criticized the Hussein regime.
The past 10 years have seen fewer journalists in the crosshairs of the Iraqi government, because journalists here have learned the dangers of criticizing the government. Hussein's son, Uday, controls the Iraqi Journalist Syndicate. With its 50 radio stations and 13 television stations, broadcasts are used primarily for political reasons.
While there are newspapers not owned by the younger Hussein, they are still heavily censored, and many have been forced to lower print count because of financial difficulties.
"Because of the Iran-Iraq war and the Gulf War, the Iraqi media is totally controlled by the government," said Kai Hafez, author of Mass Media, Politics, and Society in the Middle East. "All foreign publications are banned. The Iraq News Agency is virtually the only source of news for the media. Most of these services are mobilized for propaganda supporting the Iraqi political leadership."
Charles Duelfer, visiting resident scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., understands Iraqi journalists' apprehension about speaking out against the authoritarian nature of the press.
"They are not inclined to discuss such matters with strangers or in any way that could get back to Iraq," said Duelfer. "One very good journalist I know left Iraq recently and is trying to make a living teaching English in Europe. He is very cautious because, like many others, he still has relatives in Iraq who could pay the price."
NORTHERN IRELAND
Northern Ireland: The Extremists, Propaganda, and the Media
For journalists in Northern Ireland, the complexities of the country's ongoing peace movement have produced dilemmas in the coverage of extremist groups.
"What the extremists do is patently obvious. If a journalist wants to talk to one of these groups, they have little difficulty as most of these groups are keen to have what [Margaret] Thatcher called 'the oxygen of publicity'," explained Jude Collins, columnist for The Irish News and education professor at the University of Ulster.
Journalists are put in the role of deciphering what is news and what is propaganda.
"Journalists in Northern Ireland have a pretty high professional reputation and have been accustomed over the years to sorting out what is news and what is spin," said Conor O'Clery, a correspondent at the New York Bureau of the Irish Times. "There are fringe newspapers on both sides that could be called propaganda sheets, but mainstream newspapers separate news and opinion pretty well."
But, according to Karlin Lillington, an Ireland-based journalist with the Irish Times, some journalists don't distinguish between the two.
"Because the newspapers tend to speak from a community, they tend to editorialize sometimes in ways that fan the conflict," she said. "One could argue that the parties in the North always place a certain spin on issues designed to enhance their position, and journalists, of course, report that stance. Often the stance is designed to rattle sabers and placate the more hard-line parts. Is that propaganda or news?"
As Northern Ireland's local media grapple with objectivity, bias, and fairness, the international media struggle with the same issues.
"In the U.S., there's too much focus on the religious angle, a convenient shorthand for a much more complex conflict," said Lillington.
The role of the media in political communication continues to be important to Northern Ireland. In a society that holds many traditional divisions in education, housing, and employment, the media have been the tool for communications across those divisions.
Compiled by Lisa Floreancig, a graduate journalism student at Indiana University.
Copyright of Quill is the property of Society of Professional Journalists.
Source: Quill, Jun2002, Vol. 90 Issue 5, p62, 2p
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KALASHNIKOVS AND COOLBOXES
Economist, 00130613, 4/20/2002, Vol. 363, Issue 8269
The war against polio is almost won. But the virus still lingers
Dateline: BAIDOA
AT ONE of Somalia's countless roadblocks, militiamen with Kalashnikovs stop passing vehicles and search for children. A truck approaches, laden with timber and passengers, among them several mothers with infants. The militiamen order them to dismount; and they refuse to let the truck proceed until all the children have been vaccinated.
In the struggle against polio, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has forged some strange alliances. The disease paralyses children and sometimes kills them, by causing their lungs to seize up. In 1988 it infected an estimated 350,000 people. Since then, 2 billion children have been immunised under the auspices of the WHO's Global Polio Eradication Initiative. On April 16th, the WHO announced that only 537 cases had been reported in 2001, and the true figure is thought to be no more than double that.
Like smallpox, polio could be completely eradicated. The wild polio virus cannot survive long outside its human host, so if enough people are vaccinated, it has nowhere left to hide. The WHO hopes to achieve this by 2005, having failed to fulfil a previous vow to do it by 2000.
Polio persists in ten countries, all of them poor. In places such as India, Egypt and Nigeria, many children are not vaccinated because local health services are cash-strapped and ineffectual. In others, such as Afghanistan, Angola and Sudan, this problem has been aggravated by war.
Somalia is a particularly tough spot. It has been shredded by civil war since 1991. There is no state, unless you count a "transitional national government" that controls a few streets in the capital, Mogadishu. The rest of the country is controlled by warlords who, as the Americans discovered in 1993, are difficult to deal with. Yet somehow the anti-polio campaigners have managed it.
In each area, they seek the local warlord's permission before carrying out hut-to-hut vaccinations. They are careful to hire members of all the big local clans to help, and to rent the cars they need--but no more--from whomever the local warlord nominates. The cars come with drivers and Kalashnikov-toting guards, but cannot be used to transport vaccines over long distances. If driven to a rival clan's territory, they are liable to be hijacked.
In Somalia, the men with guns make the rules. The WHO has to adapt to this, just as the locals do. Somali women make money by building stick-and-plastic shacks at roadblocks and selling tea to waiting travellers. The WHO has followed suit, placing a vaccinator with a coolbox at every possible roadblock to catch peripatetic children. In their own bossy way, the men with guns thus help.
Around Baidoa, a town in the south of the country, inoculators squeezed droplets of vaccine into babies' mouths for three days last week with barely a hitch. Baidoa is in a relatively stable part of Somalia: it changed hands three times between 1991 and 1999, but has been peaceful for three years, apart from the daily cacophony of bored young men firing their submachineguns into the air for fun.
Some parents refuse to vaccinate their children. Rumours proliferate, including the idea that the vaccine is un-Islamic, or that it gives you AIDS. But the WHO persuades the reluctant by getting people from their own clans to talk to them, and driving trucks around broadcasting pro-vaccine messages over loudhailers.
To reach more dangerous areas, the vaccinators wait for a gap in the fighting, and then pounce. There is a polio officer in every district. Some sleep in a different house each night to avoid kidnap, for people with foreign employers are assumed to be rich. Whenever it looks safe enough to fly in the coolboxes, they shout. With luck, their task is nearly done: no new infections have been reported in Somalia this year.
Somalia is only a small battlefield in the campaign against polio. India and Nigeria, with their vastly greater populations, harbour many more polio cases. But if inoculators can succeed where even the American marines could not cope, there is hope that polio will soon exist only in special cultures in laboratories. The campaign needs another $275m, but once the virus is gone, all the money now spent on polio can be used for other things.
Source: The Economist, 4/20/2002, Vol. 363 Issue 8269, p79, 1p.
Mercy USA.
September, 2001
Immunizing Children in Somalia
From January to April 2001, Mercy-USA for Aid and Development mobile vaccination teams, with the support of UNICEF, inoculated 1,022 children under one and 1,601 pregnant women in the Jilib District of southern Somalia. They were inoculated against measles, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, polio and tuberculosis. During 2000, M-USA vaccinated 3,700 children in Jilib against measles.
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A M-USA mobile vaccination team member immunizing a baby against polio in Jilib District, Somalia.
From March to April 2001, Mercy-USA participated in a WHO-supported polio eradication campaign in the same region that immunized almost 26,000 children. Over 10,000 children also received vitamin A. Vitamin A helps prevent severe visual impairment and blindness, and decreases the risk of severe illness, and even death, from such common childhood infections as diarrheal disease and measles.
M-USA carried out similar polio eradication programs in 1998, 1999 and 2000; over 100,000 children were immunized in these activities.
Since 1990, Somalia has not had a widely recognized or strong central government, and has been ravaged by intermittent civil war, famine and a continuing severe drought. The country's health care infrastructure, like its entire public infrastructure, has collapsed during this period. Non-governmental organizations, like Mercy-USA, have been filling the gap left by the absence of government institutions. M-USA is responsible for health services in the Jilib District.
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Mercy-USA.
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A Mercy-USA doctor examines a child suffering from tuberculosis at our TB center in Mogadishu, Somalia.
Successful TB Control Program in Somalia Expanded during 1999
In July 1999, Mercy-USA for Aid and Development expanded its very successful tuberculosis (TB) control program to Jilib. The new program, MUSA's third in Somalia, is located in our Mother/Child Health Clinic (MCH) in that town. This Jilib program is now treating 200 TB patients annually, in addition to the 1,200 TB patients treated per year in our Mogadishu (800) and Bosasso (400) centers.
These three centers, which also educate their local communities in methods to prevent the spread of TB, utilize the most effective TB treatment strategy, Directly Observed Treatment Short-course (DOTS). The Mogadishu and Bosasso centers have cure rates of over 90%, compared with the average international cure rate of about 80% for DOTS.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is providing Mercy-USA with all TB medicines free-of-charge. In addition, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), is providing us with basic food items to supply to patients and their families in Bosasso and Jilib.
MUSA's TB control program began in 1994 with the opening of the treatment center in Mogadishu, the first to open in the country since the outbreak of civil war in 1990. The program was expanded the following year to include a treatment center in Bosasso.
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Nucletron
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WHO TB Control
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Immunize a child and save a young life.
30, 000 children under 5 years old die every day in the developing world.
This gift will immunize one child in a developing country against six major causes of death and disability - diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, polio, tetanus and tuberculosis.
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A LANGUAGE LEARNED A CULTURE PRESERVED
By: Goad, Meredith, Humanities, 00187526, Jan/Feb2002, Vol. 23, Issue 1
A room full of squirming schoolchildren have a special treat at the Riverton School in Portland, Maine--a bilingual story time.
After reading the story of "The Lion and the Mouse" in English, Joy Ahrens turns the floor over to a Somali woman sitting next to her.
"Alia's not going to read it, she's going to tell it," Ahrens tells the kids. "She has it in her head. A lot of times when you hear a story it gets inside you."
Alia Mohamed begins speaking in her native language and gesturing with her hands, telling the story of the lion who did a favor for a mouse by not eating him. The mouse later returned the favor by chewing the lion out of a net. When the story is over, Mohamad says "Dhamaad"--The End.
This unusual story hour features other readings in English and Somali from The Night You Were Born, Cherished One and A Somali Alphabet, two new children's books just published by the African Women's Literacy Project.
Through the literacy project, run by Portland Adult Education, Somali immigrant women with young children and no access to day care are tutored in English in their homes.
Ahrens, a teacher for the program, convinced eight of the Somali women she worked with this year to record their favorite stories in both English and Somali in the new books.
Ahrens sees the books, which were published with funding from the Maine Humanities Council, as a valuable tool both for teaching the women English and for preserving the Somali culture for their children, who are now immersed in the American way of life.
"Somali language was not written down until 1972, so it's a very oral culture," Ahrens says. "The traditions of storytelling are very strong, but they are passed down orally from generation to generation. It's hard to know in future generations how many of their children or grandchildren will actually be speaking Somali in their home, so we wanted to preserve some of these stories in print."
Included in the book of folk tales is a beautiful lullaby that Ahrens has actually heard some of her students sing as they tried to quiet a fussy child during a lesson:
"Hobeeya, hobeeya, hoobaala The night you were born, cherished one, My enemies fled, my enemies fled The earth shone on me, the earth shone on me Brightness, may you live long, May your mother never cry."
The book also contains a couple of tales that read as if they could have been written by the Brothers Grimm. One features a woman named Arrawelo who castrates men, makes people wait in the hot sun all day for water, and asks permission to kill her grandson.
Ahrens said she learned that the tale is one of the best known stories in Somali tradition. "Why sanitize it and take it out?" she asks. "You really change the texture of the story."
Rahmo Mohamud's contribution to the book is "The Story of the Lazy Man," which features a hyena that eats a man who does not want to work but expects to be rich.
In Somali stories, hyenas are very smart creatures who teach people lessons. Mohamud says the story of the lazy man was told to her by her mother, and she hopes to pass it on to her two children.
"Do we have hyenas here in Maine?" Ahrens asks the children at Riverton before reading the story in English. "No. So that's probably why there aren't as many stories here from our culture with hyenas in them. But in Somalia there are a lot of hyenas."
Abdirahman Abdulle, ten, raises his hand and gives his own theory on the dearth of hyenas in America.
"In America people don't laugh that much, but in Somalia people laugh that much," he says, "and hyenas, they like to be laughing."
Later, Ahrens and Nadifo Ayanle read from the alphabet book. Ahrens holds up the first page, which features a large B and a drawing of a babaay, or a papaya.
"Papaya is a fruit," reads the text. "We eat it after lunch. It's sweet and juicy. The outside is green and the inside is yellow."
"The Somali alphabet begins with B," Ahrens tells the children. "And look at the next page." She holds up a page with a large T and the word timo, which means hair. The Somali alphabet follows the Arabic order, and the letters p, v, and z do not exist. "When we were getting to print this," Ahrens says, "somebody in my office said 'Oh no, they mixed up all the pages!'"
PHOTO (COLOR): NADIFO AYANLE READ'S IN SOMALI TO HER DAUGHTER DEEQA AT PORTLAND'S RIVERTON SCHOOL.
By Meredith Goad
Source: Humanities, Jan/Feb2002, Vol. 23 Issue 1, p46, 1p
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