Column for July 30, 2006
One person’s root cause is another’s yesterday
They say the first casualty of war is truth. Context is usually a close second. In the bomb-blasted echo chamber that is the modern 24-hour news cycle, certain phrases bounce from politicians, to anchors, to pundits, to us, and then back round again, quickly assuming a truth of their own — a truth that is usually part truth, part propaganda and all hypocritical ringing in the ears.
Consider some of the latest favoured catch-phrases in terms of the Middle East imbroglio.
U.S. president George Bush has suggested Israel’s attack on Lebanon “helps clarify a root cause of instability in the Middle East — and that's Hezbollah… Therefore, in order to solve this problem, it’s really important for the world to address the root cause.”
The critical question though is whether Hezbollah is a root, or merely a recently budded branch. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the secretary general of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, probably got closer to the real root this week when he said we need to “root out the causes of tension provoked by Israeli occupation of Arab territories.”
Which takes us back to at least 1967. Which, for many Arabs — and some Israelis too — is still far too recent.
Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, echoing and reflecting the widely accepted view, has said any deal to end the fighting must include “implementation of UN Resolution 1559.” That security council resolution, passed unanimously in February 2004, called for dismantling all foreign militias, including Hezbollah.
The problem, of course, is that Resolution 1559 is just one among many UN Middle East resolutions, most of which have been ignored by whichever side didn’t like what it said.
Consider UN Resolution 242, also unanimously endorsed by the security council in 1967. It demanded Israel withdraw from the territories it then occupied… most of which it still occupies almost 40 years later. Israel, in fact, has rejected more than 65 UN resolutions, including Resolution 425, passed in 1978, which called on Israel to “withdraw its forces from Lebanon.” To be fair, Israel did eventually comply with that resolution… 22 years later. But its troops are now back again.
True enough, but Israel’s awesome assortment of weapons of mass destruction didn’t materialize from nowhere. For 30 plus years, Israel has been the largest recipient of U.S. military aid. Twenty per cent of Israel’s annual defence budget begins as American dollars. Since George W. Bush came to power, the U.S. has delivered $6.3 billion worth of military might to Israel, including more than 100 F-16 fighter jets currently being used to bomb Hezbollah, as well as Lebanon’s bridges, highways, power plants, neighbourhoods and UN observers.
Dropping multi-ton bombs on civilian neighbourhoods from aircraft that fly above the range of your enemy’s anti-aircraft weapons is brave?
True. But what about Israel? Hamas is the elected government of the Palestinian people, and Hezbollah is part of the elected Lebanese government. Israel calls them “terrorists” and refuses to have anything to do with them — except try to destroy them.
I happen to believe this is true but, just as Israel’s supporters trot out Arab statements calling for Israel’s destruction as justification for its own hostile actions, the Arab world sees an enemy that still dreams of creating “Eretz Israel,” or Greater Israel.
This promised land, mapped out by Jewish leaders before Israel actually existed, includes the southern part of Lebanon to the Litani River, the Syrian Golan Heights and the West and East banks of the Jordan River.
If you believe Eretz Israel is Israel’s ultimate if unspoken goal, as many Arabs do, then it all fits. As one recent poster to another pro-Arab website put it: “Dismantling of Iraq, incursion into Syria and Lebanon, eventual annihilation of the Palestinians, preparing to attack Iran, Somalia and Syria, then eventually Saudi Arabia and Sudan, all aid that objective of building Eretz Israel.”
Copyright 2006 Stephen Kimber
Africville Update, July 27, 2006
A dream deferred
Will former Africville residents finally get their church rebuilt? An apology would be nice too. Stephen Kimber reports.by Stephen Kimber
Irvine Carvery has reason to be cautious. And he is. But he could be cynical too. And he isn't.
Since 1976, when the birth of his first son taught him the "true meaning of Africville," Carvery has been on a seemingly doomed quest. He wants the City of Halifax to acknowledge it screwed up in the 1960s when it wiped from the map the poor black community where he was born and raised, and to do something now to rectify the damage it did to the 400 people who called it home at the time.
To many outsiders, Africville was a slum full of shacks without city water or sewers, surrounded by a dump, an infectious diseases hospital, an abattoir, sewage disposal pits. Many '60s do-gooders believed the answer was to raze the community and move its residents to modern public housing complexes.
But it was never that simple. There were no sewer and water services only because the city refused to provide them, despite residents' petitions and the reality it would have been cheaper to install them than relocate the people. The dump etc., only ended up in Africville because richer neighbourhoods didn't want them.
Perhaps most important—whatever outsiders thought—the residents considered Africville home and wanted to stay.
This weekend, during the 24th annual Africville Reunion on the shores of Bedford Basin near the container terminal in Seaview Park—where the community once stood—members of the Africville Genealogy Society will finally learn how much it will cost to rebuild Africville's former church and start and run an interpretive centre there.
Carvery will then go back to the bargaining table with federal, provincial and city officials, and try to make his dreams real. He's cautiously optimistic.
It's been a long time, I suggest.
"Sure has," Carvery laughs. But he remains an "eternal optimist."
In 1987, Carvery first appeared before council to demand it allow the former residents to return and rebuild Africville. That request "went to the basement or wherever those things go."
Undaunted, Carvery kept pushing and, in 1991, then-deputy premier Tom McInnis announced the province would contribute $200,000 for rebuilding Seaview Baptist Church, Africville's "vocal and spiritual heart." It's probably fair to say McInnis' announcement was as much about the then-Tory government's desperation to cling to power amid growing scandal as it was a genuine act of contrition.
But though the promise continued to be trot-ted out from time to time, nothing came of it.
To make matters worse, after the Genealogy Society, which Carvery heads, got so frustrated it filed a lawsuit seeking compensation from the city for their losses, city council retaliated by withdrawing its commitment to provide land for the church and refused to allow its negotiators to discuss the possibility of individual compensation.
In 2002, then-heritage minister Sheila Copps declared Africville a historic site, but even that didn't help re-start negotiations.
What did finally help, Carvery says, was a damning 2004 United Nations report that called on Ottawa to pay reparations to Chinese citizens who'd been forced to pay a head tax and to former Africville residents.
"That report was the watershed," he says.
With Ottawa finally taking an interest, everyone came back to the table and there's been "a very, very positive feeling ever since," not just among those doing the talking but their respective departments too.
So Irvine Carvery is hopeful this may finally be it, but there have been so many disappointments he says he won't celebrate "until the whole thing is done."
For Carvery, the "whole thing" includes more than rebuilding the church. Although the Genealogy Society has dropped its call for individual compensation, it wants its legal bills taken care of and, most important, it wants the city to turn over the adjacent Seaview Lookoff property for development as a senior citizen's home and affordable housing, and use the proceeds to create an endowment to not only fund the interpretive centre but also, hopefully, provide an educational fund for the descendants of Africville.
"Now that would be a legacy," he says. Optimistically.
Copyright 2006 Stephen Kimber
Column for July 23, 2006
Arab Holy War meets Israeli Apocalypse
On the evening of June 3, 1967, shortly before the beginning of that Arab-Israeli war, United States Secretary of State Dean Rusk sent an “eyes-only” cable to his Arab-based ambassadors describing a situation “as complex and as dangerous as any we have faced,” and asking them “to put your minds to possible solutions which can prevent war.”
They obviously didn’t come up with a solution that worked, then or now, but Rusk, in his message, identified what seems to me to be the daunting reality that — more than secure borders, two-state solutions, suicide bombers, collective punishment, the Jerusalem question, etc. — remains the single most significant impediment to lasting peace in the region.
“The ‘Holy War’ psychology of the Arab world,” Rusk wrote,”is matched by an apocalyptic psychology within Israel.”
It’s still true today.
The radical military wings of groups like Hezbollah and Hamas do see themselves as jihadists, whose righteous mission is to destroy Israel and who therefore refuse to be deterred by either superior Israeli force or the force of world opinion even if, as Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah puts it, “the whole universe comes (against us).”
On the other side of this unbridgeable divide are the Israelis, who see themselves as equally beleaguered by a hostile, unsympathetic world, and with no choice — remember the holocaust — but to counter any and all challenges with over-powering, overwhelming force.
The problem, of course, is that such unilateral, out-of-all-proportion responses inevitably increase Israel’s isolation from all but its staunchest and most self-interested allies (like the United States, which would like nothing better than for Israel to do its dirty work in Syria and Iran). But, worse, such apocalyptic reflex reaction inevitably drives moderate Arabs who — like their Israeli counterparts — want only to be left alone to live in peace, into accepting the militants as the only legitimate deterrent to Israeli aggression.
That only incubates more violence, burying even deeper any hopes for peace.
Which brings us to the current conflict in which, as Samir Franjieh, a Christian member of Lebanon’s parliament, put it: “Hezbollah took two Israeli prisoners, and the result now is that 3.5 million Lebanese are being held hostage.”
The captured soldiers — two taken by Hezbollah in Lebanon and one by Hamas on the Gaza strip — have become beside the point, the excuse, if you like, for Israel to, once and for all, finally and forever decimate Hezbollah and Hamas. That very well may inevitably lead Israel into a direct confrontation with Iran and Syria, who arm and bankroll the militants.
The truth is that the Israelis do not really want peace — not yet, and not on any but terms they dictate. How else to explain Israel’s refusal to negotiate with “terrorists” even though the so-called terrorists are the identified enemy they are fighting, and even though one of those groups is now the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people? How else to explain, too, Israel’s insistence on holding the Lebanese government and the Palestinian Authority responsible for the actions of its militants and demanding they rein them in, while, at the same time, Israel is doing everything in its power to ensure that those governments don’t ever have the military might to control those militants or, more importantly, defend themselves against Israel?
Even if Israel “wins” a bomb-the-bejesus war with its Arab neighbours — and it would — that will not guarantee peace, or even security. Such a “victory,” in fact, will only encourage more Arab resistance, spawn new insurgents and spark more — and ever more uncontrollable — violence.
The situation in the Middle East today is no less complex or dangerous than it was when Dean Rusk wrote his memo 40 years ago, and we are certainly no closer to a solution “which can prevent war.”
My guess is that we won’t find that solution until we find a way to convince both the Arabs and Israelis to step back from their different but shared apocalyptic view of this conflict. And that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.
Copyright 2006 Stephen Kimber
Column for July 16, 2006
Health department’s proposed bylaws
make bad situation worse
It is hard to imagine at first blush, but the department of health’s belated, half-hearted attempt to head off future embarrassments like the still-ongoing Gabrielle Horne affair may only end up making the situation worse.
Horne, of course, is the cardiac research specialist whose promising career was derailed four years ago when officials at the Capital District Health Authority took the unusual step of varying her medical privileges on an “emergency basis,” effectively ending what had been described as a globally pioneering research program.
Although the initial reasons cited for this drastic measure had to do with patient safety and research ethics, those excuses were exposed for what they were within days of the initial edict. Instead, it appears — as should have been clear from the outset — that the case against her revolves around professional jealousy and personality conflicts.
Many things went horribly wrong in the Horne case, including, most obviously, the disciplinary process the hospital used to try and resolve it. That process has still not settled the dispute, nor accomplished anything of significance beyond significantly running up the health authority’s legal bills. (The latest on the Horne case itself is that the most recent attempt to reach a settlement between the parties has failed, and the health authority board has — finally — scheduled a full-fledged hearing on the case for early September. Given the “volumes and volumes” of material accumulated over the past four years, including a recent 500-page report from the privileges review committee, Horne says it will be “a daunting task to try and fit the case within the three days” set aside for the hearing.)
Although no one will admit it, Horne’s case — and another similar one involving oncologist Michael Goodyear, also still unresolved — prompted the health department to review its medical staff (disciplinary) bylaws last year. In May, it circulated its proposed amendments for review.
What is surprising — stunning, really — is that those proposals, in the words of a recent letter from the Canadian Association of University Teachers to the Minister of Health, “would exacerbate problems, not resolve them.”
One of the biggest flaws in the handling of the Horne case, for example, had to do with timelines. The existing bylaws include strict deadlines for various review committees to deal with allegations against a doctor, but those provisions were largely ignored in the Horne case. The result is that a process that should have been completed within a month is still festering almost four years later.
The department of health’s proposal to deal with this issue? “The chair of any committee,” its draft bylaw reads, “has in their sole discretion the absolute authority to vary such timelines as he or she sees fit.”
Huh? Instead of ensuring a speedy resolution of disputes, such an amendment would effectively, arbitrarily and unilaterally allow the hospital to drag out the process forever.
Perhaps not surprisingly, members of the district medical staff association rejected that proposal, endorsing — by a vote of a 148 to 7 — their own alternative, which requires mutual consent to change the timelines, with the proviso that if the hospital or individual making the allegations can’t meet the required timelines, “the physician should be reinstated pending the ultimate outcome.”
There were other problems with the Horne process too, including the fact that the health authority claimed its own CEO didn’t have the authority to sign off on a “full and final” settlement with Horne after he had done so in the presence of an arbitrator and the board’s own lawyers, and the lack of adequate medical staff representation on the oversight committees dealing with such clearly professional issues.
The health department’s proposed bylaws don’t address those concerns either.
“The big question,” suggests Dr. Kenneth West, the Secretary-Treasurer of the District Medical Staff Association, is why the department came up with “such a problematic document.”
A good question. As is the question of why the Horne case still hasn’t finally been resolved.
Too bad there aren’t better answers.
Copyright 2006 Stephen Kimber
Column for July 9, 2006
Do we need a little more MAD?
Mutual Assured Destruction. MAD. The idea is simple. If you have a nuclear bomb and I have a nuclear bomb, you’d better not try to use yours on me or I’ll fire mine at you, and we’ll both be dead. World ends. Game over.
For a good chunk of the last half of the last century, mutual assured destruction was the Cold War nuclear-deterrence strategy of choice. For at least a generation, it rocket-fueled an ever escalating arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, and kept the rest of us endlessly teetering on the brink of — but never quite falling into — nuclear Armageddon. If you listen to some old soldiers, MAD is one of the reasons we are still around to debate the issue in the 21st century.
When I was younger and smarter, I thought the theory of mutual assured destruction was as mad as its acronym, just another lame excuse for the boys with guns on both sides to gobble up bigger and bigger shares of their country’s budgets in order to buy newer and fancier toys to one-up whatever even newer, fancier, shinier stuff the other side had. I still believe that’s true, but I’m no longer convinced that the theory behind mutual assured destruction isn’t...well, mad in a practical way.
Consider. We now live in a single superpower world. Do you feel any safer?
Even if George W. wasn’t the one sitting in the White House with Dick Cheney’s notoriously itchy trigger finger twitching on the nuclear button — Just two more years, praise God, Allah and the 22nd Amendment — we would still have to face the fact the collapse of the Soviet empire changed the nature of geopolitical warfare.
On the one hand, the Americans have the fire power to bomb Afghanistan back into the stone age and the military might to invade and occupy Iraq. There is no countervailing country, bloc or moral authority — we saw how effective the UN and world opinion was in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion — to make Bush et al think twice before they go marching as to war. With their endless supply of satellite-guided smart bombs that they can drop from jets so high in the sky conventional anti-aircraft from most of the nations they threaten can’t touch them — there is probably no conventional war the Americans cannot win.
On the other hand, there is no such thing as conventional warfare anymore.
And so long as the Americans persist in unilaterally employing their military superiority, they will only invite the al Qaedas of this world to respond, not in kind but with the kind of moving-target guerilla attack the most powerful nation on earth can never fully anticipate or defend against. In other words, in this new world order, the United States may win the conventional war but it will never keep the peace for long.
The United States is not the only country trapped in this conundrum.
These days the need for a little more MAD is nowhere more evident than in the Middle East where the militarily superior Israeli government has used the kidnapping of one of its soldiers by Palestinian militiamen as an excuse to punish an entire population.
The Israelis can dispatch F-16 fighter jets, Apache attack helicopters, navy gunboats, Merkava tanks, thousands of troops and more bulldozers into Gaza to blow up bridges, disable power plants, level government buildings, destroy orchards, arrest elected officials and, incidentally, kill innocent civilians because... well, because they can.
Who’s going to stop them? Certainly not the pitiably ill-armed Palestinians, whose response weapons-of-necessity consist of little more than a few pathetic, homemade, unguided Qassam missiles. No wonder they resort to suicide bombers and soldier kidnapping. But in the end, no army in the world, no matter how powerful, can finally defeat an enemy that believes they have nothing to lose.
When you see what the Israelis — who also, it is worth noting, possess nuclear weapons — have done to the Palestinians in Gaza in the past few weeks, you begin to understand why the Iranians might want a nuclear weapon or two of their own. Or why the North Koreans, already singled out by the belligerents in the Bush administration as part of the axis of evil, might not be so keen to abandon their own nuclear program just because the rest of us want them to.
Perhaps MAD is not quite so mad after all.
Copyright 2006 Stephen Kimber
Column for July 2, 2006
MacDonald makes bad law worse
To tell the truth, and I sometimes do, I could care less whether I am allowed to shop ’til I drop on Sundays. I have no vested, or even unvested, interest in the outcome of this tiresome debate.
I don’t, thank God, work in the retail business. If there is indeed a God I should be thanking, however, He (or should that be She, or It?) still hasn’t convinced me it is my sacred duty to oppose shopping, dancing, card-playing, movie-going, or Internet surfing on the Christian Sabbath (or, for that matter, on the Jewish, Muslim or anyone’s else’s preferred day of rest).
If the ban on Sunday shopping was lifted totally tomorrow, I would probably go to the malls about as often as I do now. Which is to say as little as possible, especially before Christmas, during holidays, or at any other time when there are likely to be crowds present. Especially Sundays.
In the last provincial plebiscite on the issue in 2004, I was among the 45 per cent of Nova Scotians who voted for Sunday shopping, but I was not heartbroken when my side lost.
All of that said, I find our government’s latest response to this issue puzzling, contradictory and ludicrous. Or, to give our premier the benefit of the doubt, perhaps Rodney MacDonald is just simply incredibly inept.
The current laws on Sunday shopping are so badly conceived you could drive an 18-wheeler full of exotic fruits and vegetables through them and still be legal. Just ask Pete Luckett. More on Pete later.
Although the law has its roots in Christian dogma (once known as the Lord’s Day Act, it now carries the more boringly God-neutral title of the Retail Business Uniform Closing Day Act),there are lots of interest groups — from workers’ rights advocates to family values’ politicians to convenience store owners and tourist operators — who have done their best to bend the law to their own self-interested purposes.
Which means the law is so full of loopholes and exemptions as to be meaningless. While you cannot wander a mall or shop in a supermarket on a Sunday, you can browse the grocery shelves at your neighbourhood mega-pharmacy, pick up a twofer at the cold beer store, buy a bestseller at a big-box Chapters, play the slots at the casino, even paw the fruits and vegetables at Pete’s Frootique.
Pete, as you may recall, challenged the law that kept larger stores closed on Sundays by ingeniously subdividing his operation into a bunch of legally separate but conveniently all under one roof and otherwise indistinguishable specialty shops. The province took him to court and lost.
Finally, just before last month’s provincial election, the province’s two largest grocery chains decided they had no choice but to follow Pete, effectively making even more of a mockery of the law.
In response, Rodney MacDonald’s government brought down the hammer. Sort of. Late last week, it introduced new regulations to amend the Closing Day Act.
It is worth noting that almost a full page of the three pages of regulations are taken up with “exemptions” to the rules, which include confectionary storess, Laundromats, even… wait for it… “a prefabricated or modular home sales office.” Huh?
But the key clause is the one that prohibits a grocery store whose retail sales space is ever more than 4,000 square feet from opening on Sundays. Take that, malls and supermarkets.
What about Pete’s Frootique? Good question. The last sentence in the new regulations reads: “Subsection (2) does not apply to a store if that store was regularly open to the public on Sunday before June 1, 2006.”
Which is to say Pete’s Frootique. Why the exception for Pete’s? Better question. I confess I don’t know — could it be because Pete has already won his lawsuit, and the government thinks Sobeys and Superstores should run up their own legal bills? — but MacDonald’s selective shutdown has not only managed to make me feel some unexpected sympathy for the big supermarket chains but also finally made me care about the Sunday shopping debate.
Having made an already poorly drafted and unfair law even more discriminatory, it’s time to do the right thing and ditch the law altogether.
Copyright 2006 Stephen Kimber
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and seven non-fiction books.
Buy his books at Amazon.