Jenin broken down...
As we watch the wasteland images unfold from the Jenin refugee camp, Rita Giacaman and Penny Johnson, two academics from Birzeit university, have produced a statistical profile of the community. It makes essential reading.
Israeli officials persist in a rhetoric that brands Jenin refugee camp as a terrorist camp, they say in the study of 14 April. But, they ask, who actually lives there?
Using data from the PCBS 1997 national census, UNRWA information and a 1999 community-based household survey by the Institute of Womens Studies at Birzeit University, in co-operation with the Institute of Community and Public Health, Giacaman and Johnson throw some much needed light on the area.
They tell us that the 1997 national census discovered a camp of 9,104 people living in 1,614 households (UNRWA has the figure as 13,055 people). The camp is roughly a square kilometre in size. Women, children and older people (over sixty-fives) make up 67% of the crowded population. 42.3% of the population is under fifteen years of age, and 4.3% over sixty-five. 33.4% of the women are illiterate, compared to 20.9% of males. The second intifada has brought a 48% drop in median household income.
For the full report, with more statistics (such as: 52% of women bake bread on a daily basis), click here. See also a full page of openDemocracys Middle East Web Resources.
and the rest hotting up
Meanwhile, the fall-out from the conflict goes on.
In the Ukraine, eight people are being questioned about an attack on Saturday on Kievs main synagogue. As evening prayers ended, stone-throwing football fans went on the rampage, smashing twenty windows, injuring worshippers and hospitalizing the Rabbi. The BBC reports that the police took twenty minutes to arrive on the scene. Ukraines Chief Rabbi, Moshe Azman said that the attackers were chanting anti-Semitic slogans. The police said it was just an act of hooliganism.
Chancellor Schroeder of Germany has been exerting massive pressure this week on the Tunisian authorities, as German federal agents assist in efforts to investigate the explosion of a truck at the Ghriba synagogue in the Tunisian resort island of Djerba. Sixteen people were killed: ten Germans, five Tunisians, and a Frenchman. A number of German tourists are reported to be in a critical condition in a Berlin hospital.
On Tuesday, two London-based Arabic newspapers, Al Hayat and Al Quds, said that they had received information from a group calling itself the Islamic Army for the Liberation of the Holy Sites, a sub-set of al-Qaida, claiming responsibility for the bombing. In what is deemed to have been a suicide mission, the newspapers quoted the statement as saying, The martyrdom operation is a response to Israeli crimes against the sons of the Palestinian people.
And the marches, rallies and demonstrations continue. This week saw a virtually unreported pro-Palestinian march in London, a pro-Israeli march in Rome, and a major solidarity with Israel march in Washington, boasting speakers like Binyamin Netanyahu, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Gephardt and Rudolph Giuliani. Haaretz reported Wolfowitz as saying innocent Palestinians are suffering and dying as well. It is critical that we recognize and acknowledge that fact. He words were greeted with boos and chants of no more Arafat.
Cold feet
The war on terrorism continues unabashed in that hotbed of subversion, San Francisco. A man was briefly detained at the airport there last week, after diligent security bods spotted wires and batteries in his shoes. The man was stripped of his footwear, and the police blew them up.
However, the suspicious shoes did not contain any explosives (a fact already ascertained by the police before they detonated them). Rather, the wires and batteries were designed to heat up the shoes and allow their wearer to keep his feet warm. Unfortunately, the man was part of a tour group arriving from Shanghai and his English didnt stretch to Im not a terrorist, I just have bad circulation. He could offer no explanation about his hi-tech feet-heaters before they were blown to smithereens.
The presidency for the poet warrior
The worlds newest country will soon be born, and this week it got its President. On 20 May, East Timor will become the first new nation of the millennium as it officially gains its independence, following twenty-four years of Indonesian occupation and the control of a UN Transitional Administration since 1999. The referendum of that year paved the way for self-government and this weeks election.
According to the official electoral commission, Xanana Gusmao, the hugely popular run-away favourite for the Presidential job ever since the referendum, registered eighty-three per cent of the vote. As a guerilla leader, Gusmao fought an armed rebellion against the Indonesian occupation for two decades before he was captured in 1992 and held in a Jakarta jail for seven years. From prison he acted as a de facto poet laureate for his people, and became known as the poet warrior.
Now, he is crowned the reluctant leader of a hopeful nation. Gusmao has often said that he would rather be a pumpkin farmer or photographer than President (a claim similar to the ones made by the guy in the White House). But as an instinctive man of the people, he was not about to let them down, and after a quarter of a century of hell, the people have finally got their man.
The expectations are high, the anxieties and necessities are enormous, Gusmao said at a news conference, following his victory. In a sign of changes to come, the President-elect made one of his first telephone calls to Indonesias Minister of Foreign Affairs. The reports were of a friendly and congratulatory exchange. Gusmao has made reconciliation one of the cornerstones of his campaign, and has said that he favours an amnesty for those accused of the post-independence bloodshed.
Post trade-war?
The aid agency Oxfam International released a report this week entitled Rigged Rules and Double Standards Those who noticed it have sensed a shift.
The report attacks the worlds rich countries for erecting and maintaining high barriers in international trade, especially when it comes to products made in developing countries. It identifies the US and the EU as the main culprits in unfairly shifting the rules of the global trading system to their own advantage. Politics as usual, you may say.
Well, not according to some, who see Oxfams report as a clear endorsement of free trade, and an important break with many of its anti-globalisation allies. According to Paul Blustein in the Washington Post, the report praises international trade as a potentially enormous boon to the worlds poor, shows uncharacteristic support for free-market economics and is aimed both at shaming the governments of rich countries and rallying the anti-globalization movement behind a more nuanced stance than the hard-line opposition to trade espoused by many activists.
The report states that developing countries face tariff barriers four times higher than richer countries, when exporting goods to wealthy nations. The problem is not that international trade is inherently opposed to the needs and interests of the poor, but that the rules that govern it are rigged in favour of the rich, it says.
The extreme element of the anti-globalization movement is wrong, the Washington Post quotes report-author Kevin Watkins as saying. Trade can deliver much more for poor countries than aid or debt relief.
The report criticizes the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and multinational corporations for hampering the opportunities of the poorer nations to share in the wealth. It is particularly scathing about the protection given to farmers in Europe and the US. However, its tone and central message offer a clarification of many of the key points of contention in the protest movement. No doubt some will hate it. Whatever, its core argument is a timely contribution to the globalisation debate. As Amartya Sen says in the foreword, Global integration, rather than insulated isolation, has been the basis of economic progress in the world.
To read more or voice your thoughts on this issue go to openDemocracy's Globalisation debate. Also see our major dialogue between Professors Hirst and Held, 'Globalisation: the argument of our time'.
Quotes of the week
This is a political decision.
José Bové, Roquefort-farmer and anti-globalisation activist, after being sentenced to jail-time by the Montpellier appeals court for demolishing a McDonalds outlet in 1999. Bové will be jailed after 5 May, when the second and final round of the French presidential election.
He was democratically elected. Legitimacy is something that is conferred not just by a majority of the voters, however.
A Whitehouse spokesman (Ari Fleischer?) on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who returned to power on Sunday after a two day coup (quoted in the New York Times).
The international community fell short in offering sufficient protection to the people in the so-called safe area.
Prime Minister Wim Kok of the Netherlands, announcing the resignation of his government to the Dutch parliament. The decision followed a damning report by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation on the role of Dutch peacekeeping troops in Srebrenica in 1995, when eight thousand Muslims were murdered by Bosnian Serbs.
"Sharon is responsible for making everyone - even the children of five and ten, who no longer felt directly involved - for making them all 100 percent involved."
Asma Khader, a human rights lawyer in Amman, telling the New York Times how the young refugees in Jordan have been getting a 'reinvigorated history lesson'.
Contact the Diary editor: dominic.hilton@opendemocracy.net
