Mark MacKinnon's blog

Vladimir Putin wins 2011 Confucius Peace Prize

2011-11-15T19:06:00.004+04:00

Beijing: Vladimir Putin, man of peace?

Mr. Putin, the former and future President of Russia who is currently doing an internship as the country’s prime minister, has been called many things. Supporters have written pop songs about wanting “a man like Putin” in their lives, while his detractors think the precise opposite of the former KGB agent accused of demolishing Russian democracy and restoring parts of the old Soviet system.

One imagines that even Vladimir Vladimirovich himself would have been surprised by Tuesday’s news that he had been named this year’s winner of something called the Confucius Peace Prize. Mr. Putin is, after all, a man who shot to power by crushing the Chechen separatist movement with brute military force, famously vowing to hunt down the “terrorists” behind a series of mysterious Moscow bombings and to kill them “in the outhouse” if necessary.

Mr. Putin beat out a field that also included South African President Jacob Zuma, whom many see as tainted by allegations of rape and corruption, and Gyaltsen Norbu, the Tibetan whom Beijing controversially named the Panchen Lama after the 6-year-old boy identified by the Dalai Lama as the real 11th Panchen Lama disappeared in China in 1995. Other nominees reportedly included Bill Gates and Kofi Annan.

The inaugural Confucius Peace Prize was awarded last year in response to the somewhat more reputable Nobel Peace Prize being given to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who is currently sitting in jail for his role in drafting a pro-democracy manifesto known as Charter 08.

That first Confucius prize went to Lien Chan, a Taiwanese politician who said he’d never heard of the award, and who didn’t bother to pick it up. The prize – a glass statuette – was instead received at a Beijing ceremony by a baffled young girl (pictured) with no apparent connection to Mr. Lien.

“China is a symbol of peace…. With over one billion people, it should have a greater voice on the issue of world peace,” the prize committee explained on its website at the time.

Nobel Peace Prize host Norway, meanwhile, was dismissed as “only a small country with scarce land area and population” thereby unqualified “to represent the viewpoint of most people.”

This year’s prize will be again handed out on Dec. 9, one day before the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo.

The award has evidently embarrassed China’s Ministry of Culture, which once backed the Confucius Prize, but earlier this year disavowed it and set out to establish its own Confucius World Peace Prize. That trophy is also scheduled to be handed out on Dec. 9, though a winner has yet to be named.

The announcement of Mr. Putin’s award was only briefly available on Chinese news websites Tuesday before those webpages disappeared. The choice was considered a jaw-dropping one by those who saw the news before it was censored.

“This prize is insulting to Confucius,” was one commonly expressed sentiment on the popular sina.com web portal, where the news was briefly available.

“If it goes on for another two years, Ahmadinejad will be the next winner, and then will be [Hugo] Chavez and Kim II [Kim Jong-il]. What a pity that Gaddafi died too early, otherwise he would have had a turn too,” wrote another commentator.

Gaddafi may indeed have had a chance. One of the reasons the Hong Kong-based China International Peace Research Centre said it chose Mr. Putin was his push to prevent NATO from intervening in Libya’s civil war. Though Russia decided against using its United Nations Security Council veto to prevent military action – and Moscow later switched its support to the rebels when it became clear that Gaddafi’s regime was nearing an end – Mr. Putin’s efforts were deemed “outstanding in keeping world peace.”

Meanwhile, Liu Xiaobo remains in a prison in northeast China. He has another nine years to go on his sentence.

Democracy, managed (po-russki!)

2011-09-28T09:25:00.002+04:00

Мой анализ решение Путина вернуться в Кремль, которая была переведена на русский язык сайта "Открытая Уфа".

Democracy, managed

2011-09-25T19:05:00.005+04:00

(My article below is now online - with a vibrant comments section - at The Globe and Mail)

Saturday afternoon, at a political rally in Moscow's Luzhniki Sports Palace, Russia's two-decade experiment with democracy came to an end. A different, more authoritarian, system with only a mirage of choice, is now firmly in place.

Russia's new political model is often called Putinism, after the man who built it and who will soon return as its unequivocal head. Elections are still to be held, and Putinism is far freer in most aspects than the totalitarianism that Russians lived under for most of the Soviet era. But it is a one-man show, completely dominated by Vladimir Putin, the man who served as Russia's president from 2000 to 2008, and who is now primed to return to the Kremlin after a token four years as prime minister.

Dmitry Medvedev, a longtime Putin aide who was drafted into the presidency in 2008 (when Mr. Putin stepped aside in deference to an annoying clause in the post-Soviet constitution that limits presidents to a maximum of two consecutive terms) told a gathering of the dominant United Russia party on Saturday that Mr. Putin should be their nominee in the presidential election scheduled for next March.

"I think it would be correct for the congress to support the candidacy of the party chairman, Vladimir Putin, to the post of president of the country," a stoic Mr. Medvedev said. Mr. Putin quickly accepted, and said it would be "a great honour" to take his old job back.

The announcement brought an end to hopes that Mr. Medvedev, who had shown a slightly more liberal side than Mr. Putin and who had occasionally flashed a willingness to challenge his former boss, would stand against Mr. Putin next spring and give Russians a real choice. In recent months, Mr. Medvedev and Mr. Putin had both fed speculation about a head-to-head race by refusing to answer questions about which of them would run for the presidency.

Instead, Mr. Medvedev - at Mr. Putin's suggestion - agreed to lead United Russia into December's parliamentary election, putting him on track to switch jobs with Mr. Putin and become prime minister. Mr. Putin told the party congress that the decision had been made "a long time ago, several years back."

The game of musical chairs will only affirm what most Russians believed about Medvedev's time in the Kremlin: the real power remained with Mr. Putin throughout, even while in the nominal No. 2 job.

(A key part of Mr. Medvedev's legacy is a constitutional change extending presidential terms from four to six years, starting with the 2012 election. The change makes it possible for Mr. Putin, 58, to remain Russia's president until he's 70.)

Other parties will contest the Duma elections in December and the Kremlin will ensure that other candidates will be found to run against Mr. Putin in the spring. The appearance of choice is an important facet of Putinism, or "managed democracy," as the system's creators prefer to call it.

But those other parties and candidates will face a host of obstacles - ranging from the Kremlin's near-complete control of the media to physical intimidation and ballot-stuffing - that will make an electoral upset close to impossible. As the cases of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch now serving his seventh year in a Siberian prison, and Anna Politkovskaya, the Kremlin critic who was murdered for her investigative journalism in 2006, have made all too clear, there's no tolerance for genuine threats to the system.

Ten days ago, billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov - one of the last figures who could have made Russia's election season somewhat interesting - bowed out in disgust, withdrawing as a candidate for a Kremlin-backed opposition group (another unique feature of Putinism). "We have a puppeteer in the country, who long ago privatized the political system," Mr. Prokhorov said, in remarks taken to refer to Vladislav Surkov, a political strategist who remained a key figure in both the Putin and Medvedev presidencies.

Few Russians seem to mind. Aided by national media he hammered into submission after coming to office, Mr. Putin - who has been shown on state television fighting forest fires, tracking tigers and flying fighter jets - is easily the country's most popular politician, credited with stabilizing the country's economy (which remains heavily reliant on energy exports) and restoring its international prestige, in part via the 2008 war against neighbouring Georgia, a former vassal.

Western-style democracy, which the country briefly experienced in the 1990s, when Boris Yeltsin was president, is associated with corruption, lawlessness and economic collapse.

The man who oversaw the end of the Soviet Union has warned that Russia is headed for disaster if Mr. Putin and his coterie insisted on clinging to power.

"The unwillingness to start reform or the desire to have partial change is often explained by the fear of losing power and the desire to prevent a new collapse of Russia," Mikhail Gorbachev wrote in an article carried this week by two Russian newspapers. "But it is the very absence of change which threatens to provoke instability and put the future of the country in question."

The revolution shall be tweeted

2010-05-25T20:43:00.005+04:00

Bangkok - Once more, I'm in Bangkok, and once more The Globe and Mail has done me the favour of assembling a collection of some of what I posted before and during the Thai government's military crackdown on the Red Shirt protesters.

In case you missed them, here they are. As I mentioned in another article for The Globe, Twitter played an unprecedented role in the Thailand turmoil.

On the downside, it was a propaganda outlet for both sides and served to amplify the hatred and prejudice that exist in Thai society, arguably helping push the situation towards its bloody conclusion.

But it allowed hosted some top-notch reporting and, more importantly, allowed Bangkok residents to warn each other about what was happening in their neighbourhoods. In at least two occasions, one of which I was involved in inside the supposed sanctuary of the Wat Pathum temple, Twitter may have helped saved lives.

Here's how it went down (note these are not all my tweets from this period, but a selection chosen by editors at The Globe and Mail):

May 18, 2010

* 12:29 p.m. Thai media reporting govt has rejected Red ceasefire offer.

* 12:31 p.m. Bad news for peace fans - Thai government has extended "holiday" for rest of the week.

* 2:22 p.m. What blockade? Piles of fresh vegetables arrived today in Bangkok Red Shirt camp

* 3:06 p.m. Amnesty International slams Thailand's "reckless use of lethal force" against "unarmed people who posed no threat whatsoever".

* 4:29 p.m. Question of the Day: if Red uprising is about equality, why is there a VIP toilet? #thailand

* 6:41 p.m. East Bangkok, far from the Red Stage, supporters gather to watch latest speeches

* 11:39 p.m. Series of bangs heard from direction of Rama IV road, scene of much fighting in recent days. #thailand

* 11:41 p.m. Thai media reporting "strong rumours" of dawn crackdown in Bangkok standoff.

May 19, 2010

* 12:05 a.m. I should add to last tweet that if I had a baht for every crackdown rumour I've heard in recent weeks I could buy land in Rajprasong.

* 1:38 a.m. Thailand's tourism minister says number of arrivals at Bangkok airport has fallen from 30,000 to 20,000 a day because of crisis.

* 2:46 a.m. Another explosion in the distance. By now, I should have function key that types that sentence. #thailand

* 8:02 a.m. Breaking: Soldiers, armoured personnel carriers seen advancing towards main Red Shirt protest in Bangkok. Much gunfire.

* 9:07 a.m. New checkpoints sealing off military operation area. BBC's @aleithead says filmed Black Shirts firing back at soldiers.

* 9:30 a.m. "Thai troops open fire on protesters" - http://tinyurl.com/2953utq

* 9:59 a.m. Thai govt spokesman "we would like to reassure citizens of Bangkok... operations are designed to stabilize the area."

* 10:03 a.m. Thick smoke rising from Lumphini Park.

* 10:12 a.m. Thai govt spokesman says "operations designed to... provide security, safety to public at large." Will continue all day.

* 10:15 a.m. Thai Red Cross calling for urgent blood donations.

* 10:19 a.m. Thai media reporting military now controls Lumphini Park area. Red Cross calling for urgent blood donations.

* 10:43 a.m. Now at Chulalongkorn hospital. Heavy gunfire. Helicopters overhead

* 10:48 a.m. Thai troops advancing near Lumphini Park.

* 11:28 a.m. Closing in on Red stage at protest centre. As soldiers advance, Reds still defiantly sitting on ground, playing music. about 9 hours ago

* 11:29 a.m. Approaching Red stage. As army advances, Reds still defiantly sitting on ground, playing music. #thailand about 9 hours ago

* 11:34 a.m. Doctors and nurses prepare to receive casualties at Police Hospital in centre of Bangkok protest site.

* 11:48 a.m. At police hospital, 13 injured, six from gunshot wound. One dead, a foreign journalist killed at Sala Daeng.

* 11:55 a.m. Police Hospital adjacent to main protest stage says 13 injured so far, six from gunshot. One dead, a foreign journalist.

* 11:55 a.m. Hundreds of Red protesters gather at main stage as battle rages a few hundred metres south.

* 12:07 p.m. Praise my lovely wife who made me a medical kit with everything in. I just dressed a colleague's bullet wound. Shot in leg. All safe now.

* 12:08 p.m. Four dead, 50 injured across Bangkok in crackdown today, Thai media reporting.

* 12:27 p.m. Soldiers allowing Red Shirts to exit camp if they come forward with hands raised. Lt Col I talked to on way in said 10 surrendered to him.

* 12:33 p.m. Smoke rising from two locations north of main Red camp in central Bangkok. Din Daeng and one other area.

* 12:39 p.m. No Red leaders behind main stage when I visited. Reports some surrendering to police. Still thousands of protesters at main site.

* 12:58 p.m. Thai TV reporting that Red Shirts have occupied Bangkok's Century Park hotel. Years ago, in other Thailand, my cousin got married there...

* 1:25 p.m. Chidlom BTS station burning. Red shirts on tracks. Heavy explosions and gunfire.

* 1:31 p.m. Fire at Bangkok's Chidlom skytrain station. Heavy gunfire.

* 1:34 p.m. Al-Jazeera reporting Red Shirts stormed town hall in north Thailand. Could this spread?

* 1:52 p.m. Getting a bit dangerous now around Chidlom

* 1:56 p.m. Reuters reporting Canadian journalist injured in Bangkok clashes.

* 2:01 p.m. Massive fire now at Chidlom BTS. Something else burning besides tires.

* 2:33 p.m. As Red leaders surrender, hard-core elements reported to declare independence. Fighting coninues around Bangkok.

* 2:34 p.m. Canadian Embassy says avoid all travel to Bangkok, avoid non-essential travel to Thailand.

* 2:35 p.m. Thai military to impose curfew on Bangkok tonight.

* 2:36 p.m. Smoke rising from near Central World shopping mall in Bangkok. Reports that protesters tried to set it on fire.

* 3:05 p.m. Almost deserted. Rajprasong main Red stage. Now.

* 3:12 p.m. Rajprasong main red stage. Deserted. No sign of soldiers.
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* 3:43 p.m. In Wat Patum Wanaram, with hundreds of civilians. All just ran deeper into temple area because of nearby gunfire.

* 3:45 p.m. Hundreds of civilians begginf for UN to protect Buddhist temple in middle of site.

* 3:51 p.m. Smoke rises from fire behind Buddhist temple sanctuary for civilians caught in Bangkok fighting.

* 3:59 p.m. Thais in temple offering us water and a place to sit. "We're only kind to foreigners, not to each other," woman says.

* 4:00 p.m. Gunfire, explosions close to temple where unarmed Red Shirts have taken sanctuary.

* 4:01 p.m. Colleague say "Black Shirts" with rifles battling soldiers outside temple.

* 4:31 p.m. Ambulance attendees take cover in alley outside Wat Patum,

* 5:17 p.m. Red Shirts gather abandoned food in anticipation of long stay in Wat Patum temple.

* 5:19 p.m. Smoke rises from Bangkok's burning Central World shopping mall.

* 5:37 p.m. Thais in temple begging me to take them out. "You can go, right? Take me!" Also "Is the UN coming?"

* 5:50 p.m. Sustained gunfire outside temple serving as sanctuary in middle of Bangkok. People moving further away from entrance.

* 5:56 p.m. More shooting, explosions outside Wat Patum.

* 6:03 p.m. Inside Wat Patum as firefight rages outside.

* 6:06 p.m. Firefight outside temple escalating. Hundreds of people still sheltering inside.

* 6:08 p.m. Air smells of fire. Twenty buildings around city said to be in fire, including Central World.

* 6:10 p.m. At least one person inside temple has bullet wound. No idea what happened. Gunfire escalating.

* 6:27 p.m. Fighting rages all around temple. Tear gas in the air. At least three shot, either inside or just outside sanctuary.

* 7:44 p.m. At least five wounded around me at makeshift medical centre in park behind Wat Patum temple, one a friend and colleague.. gunfire continuesm

* 7:54 p.m. Somehow we're the only corros left in temple. People around us terified. Red Cross can't get ambulance in to injured because of gunfire.

* 8:27 p.m. Medics around me say 7 dead 10 injured inside Wat Patum temple, which was supposed to be sanctuary. I'd guess 1500 to 2000 terrified ppl

* 8:49 p.m. Please RT. People around me are dying because they can't get to hospital across the road because of fighting

* 8:51 p.m. More people will die inside Wat Patum unless we get ceasefire to get to hospital across the road.

* 10:15 p.m. Wounded in ambulance leaving Wat Patum. Ceasefire negotiated to let wounded leave.

One week in Bangkok

2010-04-25T17:00:00.006+04:00

Bangkok - In case you've missed it, I've been covering the ongoing political crisis in Thailand live from the streets of Bangkok for The Globe and Mail.

You can read my newspaper reports on the standoff between the government and the Red Shirt protesters on the website, but here's a snapshot of the minute-by-minute stuff I filed via my Twitter account (www.twitter.com/@markmackinnon).

(Note, this isn't a complete transcript of what I sent to Twitter, just a selection of "greatest tweets" compiled by the staff of globeandmail.com. They've posted more of my photos over there too.)

Timestamps reflect local time in Bangkok...

April 17

• 10:38 a.m: Three more Bangkok malls shut by Red Shirt protest. Hyatt Erawan closed too RT @RichardBarrow SIAM PARAGON/SIAM CENTER/SIAM DISCOVERY closed

• 10:39 a.m: Thumping rain in Bangkok this morning has sent many Red Shirts running for cover. Protest site emptiest its been in days.

• 12:24 p.m: Bangkok Post: Thailand future "precarious." Thaksin party a threat to "revered institution," civil war possible: http://tinyurl.com/y2ydxkq

• 7:23 p.m: The waiter in the Japanese restaurant I'm in just blamed the lack of tuna on the Red Shirts. Thaksin, what have you done??

April 18:

• 10:16 a.m: Red Shirt leaders claim part of army would defend Reds if new crackdown. "Tanks would fire at one another."

• 12:51 p.m: Thai Red Shirt protestors plan move to Silom banking district, military says will block them. Silom "out of bounds."

• 4:48 p.m: Thailand "Red Shirts" plan mass rally Tuesday, call on supporters to withdraw savings from "symbol of the aristocrats" Bangkok Bank.

• 5:56 p.m: Thailand: Pro-government "Yellow Shirts" give military one week to end Red Shirt protests or will act "to preserve the nation and monarchy"

• 5:59 p.m: Thai army vows to block Red Shirts if they try to move protest to Silom financial district: http://tinyurl.com/y7npxy6

April 19

• 10:16 a.m: Thailand: Red Shirt leaders back away from clash with military, cancel plans to expand protest to Silom Road financial district.

• 12:57 p.m: Shoppers, Yellow Shirts and soldiers in riot gear mingling on Silom Road. Bizarre. Half of Bangkok still acting like place not falling apart

• 1:01 p.m: Army Humvee parked where the food inspector's car should be in front of KFC on Silom Road.

• 2:04 p.m: Barbed wire, soldiers on Silom Road, Bangkok

• 2:33 p.m: Red Shirts, not police, control Chitlom BTS station over demo site

• 7:58 p.m: Uh-oh. Intercontinental Hotel in centre of Red Shirt protests in Bangkok closing its doors, citing troop movements.

• 10:05 p.m: Sigh. Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists. I moved out of the Middle East to escape the word, now everyone in Thailand is using it.

April 20

• 10:22 a.m: is being evicted from my second hotel this week. You'd think I was throwing TVs out the window.

• 10:32 a.m: Red Shirts have erected black tarp over main stage area in central Bangkok. Will obscure both the sun and the view of anyone spying above.

• 11:59 a.m: Death toll from Qinghai earthquake now over 2,000. Another 200 still missing.

• 4:27 p.m: Mood still tense, Red Shirts on motorbikes patrolling beyond usual protest camp borders, some carrying bamboo poles.

• 10:05 p.m: Amnesty International: "All sides in Thailand’s widening political conflict should immediately commit to ending human rights abuses."

• 10:05 p.m: Amnesty "urges [Thai government] to provide accountability for any violations by security forces as well as abuses by violent protesters."

April 21

• 10:21 a.m:Thailand's Red Shirts preparing for new army move, building tire barriers at all six entrances to their central Bangkok protest site.

• 5:22 p.m: As both sides talk war, there are scattered reports that negotiations are finally taking place... #thailand

• 7:23 p.m: Extremely tense now at Silom front line. Hundreds of Yellows chanting "get out!" at Reds from behind line of soldiers.

• 7:24 p.m: Tuk-tuk backfired near front line between army, Reds, and everyone ducked. #thailand

• 8:32 p.m: Red Shirts have expanded positions north of Lumphini Park. Checking IDs of drivers before allowing them to pass. #thailand

• 8:33 p.m: As army defends Silom financial district, Reds slowly taking over other parts of Bangkok beyond long-time camp.

• 8:58 p.m: Police have moved in to break up clashes between Red Shirts and local residents near Silom intersection. Tense. #thailand

• 11:23 p.m: Helicopters in sky over Bangkok. Several loud bangs heard. Fireworks or flares.

• 11:34 p.m: Orange flares all over the sky as helicopter buzzes over Bangkok Red Shirt protests.

April 22

• 3:12 a.m: Anyone thinking about upsides, downsides of Twitter shld check #thailand tag. Up-to-the-second updates blended with vitriolic hate speech.

• 11:54 a.m: Several thousand Red Shirts marching today to United Nations office in Bangkok to request presence of peacekeeping force.

• 12:25 p.m: How charged is the rhetoric in Thailand? Government says Red leader Thaksin akin to Hitler and Stalin. Reds say PM Abhisit like Pol Pot.

April 23

• 7:24 p.m: Scene at Sala Daeng intersection more relaxed than yesterday. Pro-govt crowd is bigger, but police doing better job of keeping sides apart.

• 7:27 p.m: Police have parked five large trucks across intersection, which should prevent easy restarting of last night's clashes. #thailand

• 7:34 p.m: Yep, real-live Yellow Shirts have joined the crowd on Silom Road. Mood more festive here than at Red rally, but of course Reds on Day 41...

• 7:35 p.m: Army deployed to Silom to keep district's businesses from suffering fate of Rajprasong. But stores shutting down here anyway...

• 8:22 p.m: Two explosions heard in Bangkok's business district; at least one person wounded, Reuters reporting.

• 8:23 p.m: Was there and heard blasts. Thought little of them. #toomuchtimeinwarzones

• 8:28 p.m: What I saw/heard were fireworks fired from Red side over police barricade. Not M79s, as some reporting.

• 9:19 p.m: Situation tense on Red side of barricade after mystery explosions. Reds leaving 40 metre gap behind wall of bamboo and tires. Plan to light?

• 10:30 p.m: Helicopters flying over Red Shirt protest site, Reds target them with jeers, fireworks.

• 10:31 p.m: Man beside me with club assuring me it's still safe to travel in his hometown. "No trouble! just relax! Welcome!"

• 10:38 p.m: pro-govt supporters now thowing rocks, bottles over barricade. Reds respond with firework into crowd. police caught in middle...

• 10:44 p.m: series of small blasts at Silom intersection. police still holding back

• 10:44 p.m: police now withdrawing with shields raised. leave field open for street fight between yellow, red

• 11:02 p.m: Police withdrawing further away from ongoing clash. Handful of pro-govt types tossing bottles and rocks over. Reds replying with firecracker

• 11:12 p.m: Two tourists pulling rolling suitcases just ran through centre of Bangkok street fight.

• 11:16 p.m: street fight escalating. police unit I'm with retreating a block.

• 11:20 p.m: Men in motorcycle helmets advance toward Red barricade hurl projectiles over. Amazingly no effort by police to intervene.

• 11:16 p.m: street fight escalating. police unit I'm with retreating a block.

• 11:20 p.m: Men in motorcycle helmets advance toward Red barricade hurl projectiles over. Amazingly no effort by police to intervene.

• 11:29 p.m:Thai police hiding under overpass (with me) as fighting escalates (pictured)

• 11:38 p.m: riot cops finally moving in between two sides.

• 11:39 p.m: Reds cheering (Bronx cheer?) as riot cops move in

• 11:42 p.m: Riot police moving down Silom driving back pro-govt rioters. Reds playing music and dancing. If this the end, a victory for them.

• 11:58 p.m: Thai police making arrests on Yellow side of clash. Red rally continues

• 12:08 a.m: If it was this easy to end the fighting, the question needs to be asked why it wasn't done hours ago...

• 12:14 a.m: Yellows on Twitter talking of arming themselves because of government "weakness" in facing Red Shirts.

• 12:16 a.m: Reds bamboo fortress unbreached despite clashes

• 12:44 a.m: Battle of Silom Road over for now.Question is what next? Helicopters in the air now, Reds appear to be targeting them with fireworks...

Google and China go to war

2010-01-18T09:24:00.004+03:00

The world’s most populous country and its best-known brand are in a new kind of war today, with the search engine formally opening hostilities after a series of incursions by the e-PLA.

Both sides have plenty to lose, with Google admitting it may have to withdraw from the potentially lucrative Chinese market – the world’s largest, with more than 300 million Internet users – and the Chinese government likely to lose international respectability over allegations that it participated in or tolerated the hacking of Gmail accounts belonging to Chinese human rights activists and others.

Another risk for the Communist Party is that it seems to be incurring the wrath of that same online community, which has already learned to live, grumpily, without sites such Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

The Chinese Internet is abuzz today with news that Google will stop censoring searches on google.cn – and may soon withdraw from China completely; raising the possibility of a Chinese Internet that increasingly exists as a separate entity from the rest of the World Wide Web.

Here’s a quick sampling of some of what is being said (note: Baidu, which cooperates with Chinese government censors, is the most popular search engine in the country, with more than 60 per cent of the market):

“Alas, a huge country of 1.3 billion people and 9.6million square meters land can't accept a website, sad” – a netizen named “Han” from Beijing who posted at the news.qq.com site.

“I knew this day was coming. (With a slogan like) “Don’t be evil” Google, you can’t stay long here.” – “Liyuan” from Wuhan, also at news.qq.com

“How sad this news is indeed! A world with only Baidu’s rules is not what I want to see!” – “Tianlu” from Wuhu City at the same site

Tianlu’s post drew a reply from a netizen who gave their name as “Xiangmatou”: “This is what the people in power would like to see the most. It is easier and more convenient for them to rule people’s views and the direction control of information.”

The discussion at the Chinese website of the Global Times newspaper was tamer, with some openly doubting whether Google would carry through on its threats:

“Isn’t it a hype? China is such a big market. How can Google be willing to give up such a big cake? But if it is true, it is a loss for us, because Google has more sources than Baidu. It’ll be a pity!” was one representative reader post.

(Interestingly, the state-run Xinhua news service took a similar line, suggesting that Google’s decision was not yet final and that the government was “seeking clarity” on the Internet giant’s intentions.

The U.S.-based China Digital Times, meanwhile, has been translating and compiling some of the reaction to the Google-China spat on Twitter (which can be accessed in China by those able to reach a Virtual Private Network. Some of the most interesting:

@hecaitou: After Google leaves China, the world’s top three websites on Alexa —Google, Facebook and Youtube are all blocked in China. This is not an issue of Google abandoning China, but one of China abandoning the world.

@mranti Withdrawal of Google means: 1 Scaling the wall is now an essential tool 2 Techies, you should immigrate

@lysosome On campus discussion forums Google tag has been removed

@Fenng Ten years online has turned me from an optimist into a pessimist

Speaking of Twitter, I’m regularly “tweeting” on this (and other topics) over at http://twitter.com/markmackinnon

A victory for Beijing in the New Great Game

2009-12-14T16:50:00.003+03:00

Beijing: A few hours ago, in a place called Samadepe on the rarely visited border between the Central Asian states of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the global balance of power tilted ever so slightly.

Flanked by the leaders of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, Chinese President Hu Jintao today turned a symbolic wheel as oil started flowing into a new 1,833-kilometre pipeline that snakes east from Turkmenistan and across Central Asia to Xinjiang in the far west of China, where it will connect with China’s own pipeline network.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has insisted that Russia is not bothered by the opening of the pipeline, but that’s difficult to believe. Mr. Putin’s nine years in power (the first eight as president) have been spent trying to reestablish Russia as a global force. Key to that effort has been its role as one of the world’s biggest producers of natural gas, a position that was strengthened by its effective monopoly over the pipelines coming out of the former Soviet states of Central Asia.

That monopoly has now been broken. The Turkmenistan-Xinjiang pipeline is the first that will transport gas from Turkmenistan, the world’s fourth-largest producer, to market without going through Russian territory. When it reaches full capacity in another three years, it will pump up to 40 billion cubic metres annually, feeding China’s rapidly-growing and energy-starved economy, meeting half of the country’s current demand.

In building the new pipeline, China can also claim victory in a race with both the United States and Europe. Both have sought for years to establish a route to bring Turkmen gas west without going through Russia, efforts that were repeatedly thwarted by interference from Moscow as well as Iran, which blocked efforts to build a pipeline underneath the Caspian Sea.

Though Mr. Hu was characteristically understated about the importance of the moment his new partners were effusive in welcoming Beijing to centre stage in Central Asia.

“This project not only has commercial or economic value. It is also political,” Turkmen Presidnet Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov told reporters. “China, through its wise and farsighted policy has become one of the key guarantors of global security.”

It’s a change that happened slowly. Russia has seen its already waning influence over its former backyard plummet since the onset of the global recession, which has hit the Kremlin’s coffers – and thus its ability to speak the language the Central Asia’s kleptocrats prefer – hard. The United States and Europe, meanwhile, have danced back and forth between courting the region’s leaders and condemning them, occasionally breaking ties completely, over human-rights abuses.

In the meantime, China, a late joiner to struggle for influence in Central Asia (dubbed “The Great Game” in the 19th Century as Russia and Britain jostled there), has quietly used its financial clout to make fast friends in the region, handing out massive loans and building the pipeline connecting Kazakhstan to Xinjiang. China’s Communist leaders, naturally, have no qualms about doing business with the unelected “presidents-for-life” who rule Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Last year, I was invited to the city of Almaty in Kazakhstan to address the Eurasian Media Forum on the theme of a “new Cold War” between Russia and the West, sitting on a panel alongside such combatants as former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and Kremlin spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky.

When the Americans and the Russians took a break from verbally attacking each other, an audience member asked a Chinese panelist where Beijing stood in the escalating dispute. His response came back to me today as I watched the television footage from Turkmenistan.

“We leave matters of war and peace to the Americans and the Russians,” he said, adding that China preferred to focus on building up economic relations with its neighbours.

The audience, made up of Central Asia’s business and political elite, gratefully applauded.

Face to face with Comrade Duch

2009-11-26T19:13:00.003+03:00

Phnom Penh: At first, I was going to rush outside with everyone else in the courtroom, to gulp some fresh air and a plastic cup of water after a morning of listening to prosecutor William Smith list off the crimes committed by Kaing Guek Eav, the murderous Khmer Rouge jailor better known as Comrade Duch.

But then I remembered that I had surreptitiously stuffed my Blackberry in my blazer pocket on the way in to the court (mobile phones aren't allowed in court but I had been reluctant to hand it over to an unknown fate with the security guards outside). I had snuck it through security once, but trying again might be pushing my luck. I decided to stretch my legs by wandering around the courtroom instead.

As the courtroom rapidly emptied. I realized there was someone else doing the same thing: Comrade Duch.

I couldn't help but stare. Here was the man who stands accused of - and has confessed to an indirect role in - the deaths of more than 12,000 people while he ran Phnom Penh's notorious S-21 torture and interrogation centre.

Just two days before, I had visited S-21 which, other than the gallows and the graves that stand in front of it, still looks from the outside like the high school it was before the Khmer Rouge arrived in 1975. It's a haunted place, filled with room after room of black-and-white photographs of those who spent their final days there.

Some stare at the camera with anger or defiance, others with fear plain on their faces. But most wear no expression at all, as if they've had all emotion beaten out of them. They look as though they no longer cared whether they lived or died.

Watching Duch pace around the courtroom - separated from the audience area where I stood by a pane of bulletproof glass to prevent revenge attacks - it was difficult to imagine this small, ordinary looking 67-year-old as the same man who oversaw a place where men were forced to eat human feces, women were raped and babies were bashed to death against trees.

Hands thrust deep in his pockets as he paced, perhaps thinking about the final statement and apology he would deliver to the court in a few minutes time, he looked like what he should have been: a retired mathematics teacher. Someone's grandfather. With nearly parted grey hair and a crisp white shirt, he looked exactly like a man I had seen outside Phnom Penh's disused train station earlier that morning.

As I pondered this, Duch turned and faced the almost-empty auditorium. His slightly watery eyes scanned the seats as if looking for someone. Eventually, they met mine.

A moment passed quietly as I uncomfortably returned his gaze. I don't know what he was searching for - a smile? a wave? - but I think I was hoping to catch a glimpse of the inner monster, the thing that separated him from the rest of us and made him capable of doing such horrible things. Or maybe a hint that he is, as he says, tormented by "excruciating" remorse over what he'd done.

In Duch's blank eyes, I saw neither. Just an old man in a cage looking out curiously at those looking in.

The courtroom started to fill back up again. Duch turned to consult with his lawyers.

A few minutes later, he stood and told the court again how sorry he was.

I had no idea whether to believe him.

Mr. Hu, tear down this firewall!

2009-10-27T08:45:00.007+03:00

Beijing: It was supposed to be a place to remember where you were and what it meant to you on Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell between East and West Germany, marking the beginning of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe.

But something very different – and fascinating – is happening instead at the Berlin Twitter Wall, a website that went online last week as part of the city of Berlin’s anniversary celebrations. Instead of reminiscences about life behind the old Iron Curtain, the site is being overloaded with complaints about a new barrier sealing people off from the outside world: China’s thick web of Internet censorship, referred to locally as the Great Firewall (or GFW, in character-saving Twitterspeak).

Most of the writers posted in Chinese, and claimed to be doing so from inside China, where Twitter and dozens of other popular websites have been blocked by the Communist government headed by President Hu Jintao. (Click here for an incomplete list of the banned sites.)

Blocked sites can be accessed from inside China via virtual private networks, provided you have both a private computer and the tech savvy to do so. The entire province of Xinjiang – home to 21 million people – has been almost completely without Internet service since deadly ethnic riots hit the city of Urumqi on July 5.

Here is a sampling of some of the postings the Berlin Twitter Wall has seen in the past couple of days. The tag #fotw refers to “fall of the wall”:

“All kinds of walls will have their day of collapse. #fotw” – posted Monday, Oct. 26 by “xtzc.”

“The collapse of the wall needs everyone’s help.” – posted Monday, Oct. 26 by xiaopohen,

“I have a dream: We will see the anniversary if the fall of the Great Fire Wall in near future.” – posted Monday, Oct. 26 by guoyumin

Here are a few others translated by the China Digital Times:

“#fotw We climb the Great Firewall because it has blocked out all of the dissent, and we do so to eventually get rid of the Wall.” – by miaofeng

“The wall built for others will eventually become a grave for the builders. #fotw” – by liujiang

“#fotw It has been twenty years, and we are still in the Wall.” – by gengmao

“#FOTW All Chinese on the electronic Berlin Wall, spectacular!” – by peterlue

“My apologies to German people a million times [for taking over this site]. But I think if Germans learn about our situation, they would feel sorry for us a million times.” – by ChrisicGong

Predictably, by Monday evening local time, the Berlin Twitter Wall was no longer accessible in Beijing.

Mr. Hu, please?

A police state without traffic police

2009-10-19T06:48:00.002+04:00

Beijing: “Qiguai. It means strange,” my Chinese teacher said, repeating the new word again so that I could grasp its rising-then-falling pronunciation.

“What did you find qiguai when you first arrived in Beijing?”

“The taxi drivers,” I responded, without hesitation. The teacher giggled as my classmate/wife tried to explain that Canada’s rules of the road are somewhat different than those in China, primarily because, well, there are rules and people follow them. Getting into a Beijing taxi is often akin to taking a seatbeltless ride on the Zipper, or one of those other rides that tour Canada’s exhibitions each summer.

The only thing more dangerous than being in a Beijing taxi is daring to cross the street in front of one. After 10 months of living here, I’ve concluded that the rules of the Beijing road are roughly as follows:

- Trucks and buses are supreme, and can pretty much drive any where and any way they choose. Bus drivers may be public servants in other countries, but in Beijing they’re threats to public safety.

- Cars come next, with bigger cars clearly having the right to force themselves into any lane they choose, even if occupied by a smaller vehicle. This may be a Communist state in name, but there’s a rigid caste system when it comes to travelling on paved surfaces.

- Bicycles and those old-fashioned enough to still ride them are expected to scatter out of the way of anything with a motor.

- Pedestrians are the bottom of the ladder, and enjoy the exact opposite of the right of way. Even if you’re already in the intersection, and the walk signal is green, you’re expected to dive out of the way of any car that happens to turn right through the crosswalk. If pedestrians really needed to get where they are going, they’d be in a car, preferably a large one.

It really is that bad. In his farewell to China blog entitled “How I survived China” James Fallows, the outgoing correspondent from The Atlantic magazine, writes about the advice he got from a Chinese doctor: “The most important ‘medical’ step you can take is to put on a seat belt in a car, wear a helmet on a bike, and run for your life in crosswalks,” the doctor told him.

Fallows goes on: “For the foreign diplomatic corps, the leading cause of death is traffic accidents. I worried every day about being mowed down by a bus, since they don’t stop at lights. My wife was run over in Beijing by a motor scooter that was going the opposite way down an eight-lane one-way road and was running a red light too. She’s fine now; the driver roared away, still against traffic, as soon as he climbed back on the bike.”

No one who lives in Beijing could have been surprised by that story (my parents are still recovering from the shock of a minor accident that occurred earlier this month when our car was struck by a driver backing down the wrong lane of a highway near the Great Wall). But sitting in our taxi this afternoon as it idled in thick Sunday traffic on the way home from our language lesson, it struck me that the drivers aren’t the problem – it’s the police who do so little to enforce the rules of the road that actually do exist.

It’s the oddest thing about living in this still-authoritarian state. The police are ubiquitous and absent at the same time. They stand on street corners (or nap in their cars) as cars recklessly run red lights right in front of them. It’s little surprise that – according to the official Xinhua news agency – China had the highest rate of road accident deaths in the world in 2007, at 5.1 per 100,000 cars.

Part of the problem is corruption. According to the Shanghai Oriental Morning Post, 47.2 per cent of all the new drivers they surveyed paid a bribe (the average price was 502 RMB, or about $75) to get their licenses rather than take the official drivers’ test. (Though could you pass the English-language version? Here it is.)

To my eyes, another factor seems to be that no one has told the policemen that they’re supposed to do police-y things like protect the public. During the National Day celebrations earlier this month, armed police were deployed on nearly every street corner to ensure the day passed smoothly and no one would do something outlandish like wave a Tibetan flag.

But that didn’t mean that any of them would lift an arm to help get snarled traffic moving again, or intervene to question a taxi driver who sped through a crowd of terrified pedestrians without so much as using a turn signal to warn anyone of his intention to do so.

The latter example is something that happens frequently, and right in front of the police who stroll about my east Beijing neighbourhood. (Nor do the same police ever intervene to break up the obvious drug-pushing and prostitution that takes place on the corners they patrol, but that’s another blog.)

But try walking through the streets with a T-shirt reading “One-party dictatorship is a disaster” (as lawyer Liu Shihui did recently in Guangzhou) and the police tend to move quickly and decisively.

Now I’ve never been entrusted with running a one-party police state, but as a pedestrian living in the capital of one, it’s all just a little qiguai.

Chinese democracy

2009-09-05T11:53:00.004+04:00

Beijing, Saturday, Aug. 29: Living and working in China can sometimes be difficult, especially for a foreign journalist. The ever-growing restrictions on the Internet and freedom of speech can be truly depressing for those of us who make a living saying what we think and trying to coax others to do the same.

Sometimes it feels like the government in Beijing can behave abysmally and get away with it simply because it is far too economically powerful and important to be challenged any more.

But a week in North Korea (you can see all the writing, photos and video Sean Gallagher and I produced from our trip here on The Globe and Mail website.) has given me some important perspective on where China is, and how far it has come in the 30 years since Deng Xiaoping renounced Mao's excesses and implemented his policies of reform and opening.

North Korea hasn't had its Deng Xiaoping or Mikhail Gorbachev yet. It's still trapped in an era many Chinese would recognize from the bad old days. The paranoia that ruled during the Cultural Revolution – the fear that you could be denounced, arrested or worse for the smallest indiscretion – is still thick on the streets of Pyongyang. Catastrophic economic decisions that recall Mao's Great Leap Forward still wreak havoc on North Korea's industry and agriculture.

Halfway through our week in North Korea, Sean and I confided half-jokingly to each other that we were starting to miss the relative freedom of China. By today, we were lusting for Beijing's smoggy air like a long-remembered lover.

Following one last scare at Pyongyang Airport that involved a border guard suspicious of my passport, we boarded our Air Koryo flight home after one of the most interesting and intense weeks either of us had ever experienced. As our Russian-made Ilyushin-62 lifted off, Sean and I looked at each other, smiled and exhaled deeply. When it touched down at Beijing Capital Airport at just after 10 a.m., we started laughing out loud.

Safely back on Chinese soil, we could talk freely for the first time in days. While in Pyongyang, we had been guarded in what we said even inside our shared hotel room, assuming it was listened to (a suspicion that was bolstered every time we opened our door and spotted a Workers' Party cadre lingering in the hall outside with seemingly very little to do).

In the presence of our minders, who stayed with us from dusk until dawn, we stuck to our cover stories. He was an English teacher, obsessed with correcting my Canadian pronunciation. I was the author of a book on recent Russian history (true enough), and fascinated by the Soviet-era friendship between Moscow and Pyongyang.

Repeating our lines was nearly as dull as it was difficult. Maybe it gave us some small insight into how careful North Koreans have to be in what they say every day of their lives.

For all modern China's flaws – and there are many – it is now a place where ordinary people, at least in Beijing and other big cities, can act and dress how they want. No one has to wear a Mao pin or join the Communist Party if they don't want to.

My earlier caveats aside (and they remain important), Chinese can also largely think and say what they want, provided they don't get too deeply into politics, or try and post those thoughts on the Internet.

Many Chinese are affluent now, and many more are no longer poor. Most of them are free to decide which way is the best for them to make money and feed their family. Those who have cash spend it how they choose, often travelling the world as they do so.

All of this progress gets too often forgotten by Western journalists such as myself who see a country in mid-journey and judge it by the distance it still has to go, rather than how far it has travelled.

Several large Chinese tour groups were in North Korea at the same time that Sean and I were there. Though our North Korean minders limited our interaction with them, I suspect the younger Chinese wanted to see what it looks like to live in a fanatically ideological country that has cut itself off from the world. The older ones came perhaps to remember what it was like to live in just such a place.

They can do that now. For them, it's the past, no matter how painful.

Sadly, for North Koreans it remains the here and now.

The pool hustlers of Pyongyang

2009-09-05T11:49:00.003+04:00

Pyongyang, Friday, Aug. 28: Finally, on the last day of our tour, Sean and I were given a few hours in the evening to unwind, a rare and badly needed break from a carefully packed itinerary that required us to be up and eating breakfast by 7 a.m. every day and that kept us busy until at least 9 p.m.

Today we started with the 2.5-hour drive south to the Demilitarized Zone (between North and South Korea), then returned to Pyongyang in time to tour the city's Soviet-style metro system. Fascinating, but exhausting.

Throughout the week here, our days have seemed designed to be so busy as to keep us from having any unscripted moments where we might meet and interact with real live North Koreans. At one point I suggested that we skip some of the formal sights and spend an afternoon in a park. Our guides just laughed, the same as they did when I inquired what Pyongyang nightlife was like.

So we were grateful to discover that the 47-floor Yanggakdo Hotel that we were confined to at night came equipped with bowling alleys, a casino and a billiards room in the basement. (The photo, in case you're wondering, is completely unrelated. It's from the Arirang Mass Games that we saw the previous night.)

Sean and I settled on pool as our leisure of choice, and he quickly demonstrated that he had spent far more time in the pool halls of London, England than I had in Stittsville, Ontario. I always struggle in games where there's no ice involved.

After three rapid, easy wins, Sean set off in search of what the British call the loo, leaving me to practice bank shots on my own. It didn't amuse me for long.

I went up to the empty bar and asked the long-haired young woman behind the counter for two more Taedonggang beers. She handed the drinks over, then smiled sweetly.

“Me, I play with you?”

I was momentarily confused about what she was suggesting, but followed her gaze to the ready pool table behind me.

“You play pool?” I asked.

“A little,” she replied, still smiling.

It proved to be quite an understatement. She gracefully potted a ball off the break and then proceeded to sink six more in a row without missing. Each time she made a particularly improbable shot, she would give me an apologetic look and say “sorry.”

In the corner, the nightly news played on a muted television. Looking over, I could see Kim Jong-il had visited some establishment and given advice to those working there, just as he seemed to every day. And yet, no one ever seems to have seen the Dear Leader in person.

Finally, it was my turn to shoot. Dazed, I knocked a ball uselessly down the table, missing the corner pocket by several inches. “Ooh, unlucky,” my tormentor said, covering her mouth to stifle a giggle prompted by my ineptitude. She swiftly put me out of my misery by dunking the eight-ball.

By this time, Sean had returned, and another waitress had emerged. She suggested that we play in teams – North Korea versus the United Nations, 1950s style.

I'm slightly embarrassed to report that despite Sean's best efforts, the North Koreans – dressed in matching blue uniforms that made them look like air hostesses from the 1970s – ran the Western imperialists out of the room, winning four of five games.

Though they spoke little English, my missed shots and bumbling attempts at speaking Korean gave everyone something to laugh about. Until a Workers' Party cadre wandered in and saw four people having fun that hadn't been government sanctioned.

He barked at the two women and ordered them back to work.

On the television set, images of life in this socialist paradise flickered silently.

Passport games - trying to stay out of Pyongyang Prison

2009-09-05T11:37:00.002+04:00

Pyongyang, Thursday, Aug. 27: For several days now, I have been inside North Korea with a secret. Jammed deep in my pocket, under my wallet, was a passport containing stamps that identified me as a Canadian journalist living in China.

It was not the passport I'd presented at the border. When we crossed from China, I had handed over an older document that was still valid but had nothing in it hinting at my profession. One of the North Koreans assigned to mind and monitor us had kept that document, saying it would be returned to me when I was leaving the country.

It was the second passport that occasionally made it difficult to sleep at night. Two U.S. television journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, were arrested earlier in the year for illegally crossing North Korea's border with China. They had been sentenced to 12 years hard labour, and served nearly five months before Bill Clinton flew to Pyongyang to rescue them.

I found myself wondering if Jean Chrétien would do the same for me.

Keeping the incriminating document in my pocket worked until this sunny morning, when our tour guides informed us that we would visit the mausoleum of Kim Il-sung to bow before the waxy remains of the “Great Leader” who is still so revered here.

As we pulled up in the parking lot, our guide turned around in her seat and struck fear into my heart with one politely uttered phrase. “You will have to empty your pockets in front of the security guards before you enter the mausoleum.”

Terror. My run of luck – I had gotten in and out of such journalist-unfriendly places as Zimbabwe, Syria, Belarus and Iraq in recent years without serious incident – was over. If I hid my passport on our government-provided minibus, there was no guarantee it wouldn't be uncovered while I was touring the mausoleum. Putting it in my backpack and handing it over at the coat check seemed equally foolhardy.

I had no other options that I could think of, so I did the only thing that came to mind. I let our minders exit the tour bus ahead of me, and waited until I was the last person on the bus. Then I took my passport out of my pocket and jammed it down the back of my pants.

Pleased with myself, I took a few confident steps towards the security guards who were supposed to frisk me. Almost immediately I had the unfamiliar and disconcerting sensation of a small blue booklet sliding slowly over my backside. It picked up speed as it headed south down my right leg.

Looking and feeling desperate for a bathroom break, I asked where the nearest toilet was and broke into a stiff-legged run as soon as I was pointed in the right direction. I got inside (it was mercifully empty) and slammed the door just in time to grab the passport as it landed on the top of my shoe.

I still hadn't gone through the pocket-emptying security check, so I had no choice but to try it again. This time, the passport went down the front of my pants. If the guards check there, I decided, we have problems no matter what they find.

Though I was drenched in sweat by this point, the trick worked and the guards spent only a few seconds at my wallet and the lint I retrieved from my pocket. I joined the long line of tourists and North Koreans who had come to pay their respects to the corpse of a megalomaniac dictator who died 15 years ago.

Some wept openly, apparently in sadness, at the sight of the man who instigated the pointless Korean War and oversaw one of the cruellest police states in modern history. Others stared at him expressionlessly.

Maybe it was the uncomfortable placement of my passport, but I found myself wanting to laugh at the absurdity of it all.

What to do with a stuffed Nicaraguan crocodile

2009-09-05T11:28:00.003+04:00

Pyongyang and Myohyangsan, North Korea - Wednesday, Aug. 26: Ever wondered what to do with that tacky gift you got for your birthday?

Kim Jong-il has come up with the perfect solution: build a palace in the mountains an appropriate distance away, and stick all the stuff that clashes with your kitchen cupboards up there.

Like the stuffed crocodile carrying a tray of drinks that Nicaragua's Sandinista rebels thought his father, Kim Il-sung, would just love. Or that stylish but out-of-date bulletproof limousine that good old Joseph Stalin gave his family back in the day.

The so-called International Friendship Exhibition, two buildings tucked high in the Myohyangsan mountain resort area north of Pyongyang, has to be one of the odder tourist sites in the world. The front room features a map of the world with three digital numbers on it – the first counting the number of gifts received by Kim Il-sung, the second the number given to Kim Jong-il. If you're wondering, father (who apparently continues to receive gifts from admirers even 15 years after his death) still leads son in this who-is-more-loved race. The third number, which glows at 180, keeps track of how many countries gifts have been received from.

While some gave fancy cars and stuffed crocs, others were more circumspect in their gifting. A serving tray with the word “Jamaica” painted on it looked like it had been swiped from a beach bar. A small blue pinny, again from Nicaragua, seemed like something you'd receive for taking part in, but not winning, a sporting competition.

Canada, you'll be pleased to know, was among the 180 countries that showed their admiration. A polar bear skin (head still on) was sent to Kim Il-sung's by an anonymous Canadian citizen and now hangs upside-down in a glass display case. The Communist Party of Canada apparently once saw fit to present the tyrants of Pyongyang with a Group of Seven coffee table book.

After a brief stop at a nearby Buddhist temple (where a token monk spoke to us in the company of a female soldier), we made the 21/2-half hour drive to Pyongyang and were taken to one of the sites I had been most anxious to see: the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum, which in another country might be called the Korean War Museum.

To visit the museum, in north-central Pyongyang, is to be told to forget everything you know about what happened in the 1950-1953 conflict. The official view put forth by the North Korean government has nothing to do with what's in Canadian history books.

In a succession of films, murals and moving battlefield mock-ups, visitors are pounded with a single message: that it was the United States that started the war on June 25, 1950 and that the Korean People's Army eventually handed the superpower an embarrassing defeat.

“Some of the Americans who come argue and say this isn't the case,” said our tour guide, a cheerful woman sporting a military uniform and an unreadable smile. “But history is history. You can't change it.”

Into the land of the Kims - a journey in North Korea

2009-09-05T11:21:00.003+04:00

Sinuiju, North Korea - Tuesday, Aug. 25: There was, of course, always the likelihood that the North Koreans wouldn't let in the country two foreigners with suspicious back stories (I entered on the premise that I was a Russian historian, Sean as an English teacher living in China). Or worse, that they'd let us in and keep us there until Bill Clinton's next trip to Pyongyang.

But the border and customs formalities went surprisingly smoothly, likely because we ran into a Chinese tour group that was crossing at the same time and cheerfully adopted the two crazy laowai (foreigners) as their own. By the time they got to the customs room, the guards were too busy going through bags stuffed with boil-in-bucket noodles (some of the Chinese were apparently worried they wouldn't be fed in North Korea) to give our documents more than a peremptory look.

(I presented a passport that had no markings identifying me as a reporter anywhere on it, and kept my other one – which has an incriminating Chinese journalist visa in it – jammed deep in my pocket. More on that later.) The weather was a warm and clear, and Sean and I were soon working on what we would come to call our Pyongyang tan.

Our first stop inside North Korea was a massive bronze statue on the main city square of the “Great Leader” Kim Il-sung, the founding leader of North Korea, shaking his fist like he's playing rock-paper-scissors.

In the official narrative here, the Great Leader didn't really go anywhere when he died and passed his tyrannical powers on to his son Kim Jong-il in 1994. Under the country's constitution, the elder Kim is North Korea's “eternal president,” though it's unclear what his day-to-day responsibilities are beyond appearing in old propaganda films. Red posters around the country tell citizens that Kim Il-sung will be with them forever.

“In our country, it is custom to bow before the statue of the Great Leader. Will you join us in this custom?” our tour guide said flatly. Sean and I had known this moment was coming. There was nothing to do but bow. When in Sinuiju…

After a quick tour of the Sinuiju Historical Museum, which was dedicated to the life stories of the two Kims (the elder apparently visited Sinuiju 217 times, the younger 186), as well as Kim Jong-suk, the mother of Kim Jong-il (only two visits to Sinuiju), we ate a lunch of beef, rice and kimchi and boarded the 2:10 p.m. train for the five-hour-20-minute hour journey to Pyongyang.

The wood-panelled train car looked like something out of the 1950s Soviet Union, with portraits of Kim Il-sung and a youthful Kim Jong-il hanging where Stalin and Lenin would once have been. The scene on the platform as we pulled away was similarly out of a Second World War movie: we could see weaponless soldiers milling around as martial music played over the loudspeakers. Merchants in grey Mao suits tried to shove their wares on the train as it began to roll away, and women waved farewell to men heading south to the capital city.

We were accompanied for the journey by a group of government-assigned tour guides who were assigned to watch us during our time in North Korea, as well as Workers' Party cadres who silently kept watch over all of us. They spent much of the ride to Pyongyang grilling us about our backgrounds. Why did you want to come to North Korea? How long were you in China? Where did you go to university? What was the theme of your book about Russia?

(Sometimes the conversations veered into the bizarre. Later in the trip, Sean, a Londoner, was asked what year the Tower of London was built. When he failed that test, our minders began to openly question his Britishness. He tried to brush it off by jokingly saying he was more into science than history, and wound up having to explain the concept of a vacuum as proof of that scientific bent.)

Out the window, a scene of abject poverty rolled by. Grey industrial with no sign of functioning factories and endless fields of rice and corn that were being worked by hand or by oxcart in the absence of farm equipment and fuel. There were few cars or even bicycles on the roads, and people could be seen walking tens of kilometres from anywhere.

“Long Live Kim Jong-il, a leader for the 21st Century!” proclaimed a red propaganda poster that we saw in almost every town we passed.

Our minders strictly warned us not to turn our cameras out the window, and it was easy to see why. This was not the image of a powerful country the Kim regime is trying so desperately to present to the world.

Through the looking glass: peeking at North Korea from across the Yalu

2009-09-05T11:15:00.005+04:00

Dandong, China - Monday, Aug. 24: Photographer Sean Gallagher and I landed today in the northeastern Chinese city of Dandong after a 90-minute flight on Air China from Beijing. We were met at the airport and taken straight to a hotel called the Pearl Island Golf Club.

There's a driving range here, but no golf course that we can find. Our room does offer a nice view across the Yalu River into North Korea, though.

It's our first glimpse into the Hermit Kingdom: a row of grey two- and three-storey buildings that appear to be uninhabited. Further east, there's a Ferris wheel that doesn't turn and an industrial zone where a single smokestack pumps black smoke into the air. The other factories, whatever they make or made, appear closed.

The contrast with the Chinese side is unmistakable. This side of the river is a construction site, with multi-storey apartment blocks and office buildings rising before your eyes. The locals stroll along a paved boardwalk and sit on the banks to stare at the Hermit Kingdom across the Yalu.

The North Korean side is deathly quiet in contrast. Even using the zoom lenses on our cameras, we only see a handful of residents, most of them walking or cycling. Not a single car drives by in the time we watch the other bank, though there is the occasional truck.

After an hour on our own, our tourist agent picks us up and takes us to the waterfront. Our first stop is the Broken Bridge, a broken metal span that was cut in half by a U.S. B-29 during the Korean War.

But that history is not what draws people here any more. Like the rest of the tourists, Sean and I walk right past the photographs explaining what happened here in 1953. It's at the end that we get our cameras out and resume photographing the south bank of the Yalu. The B-29's intent may have been to cut off a vital supply route for the North Korean army that was then pushing UN forces back south with the help of Chinese “volunteer” fighters, but 56 years later its lasting impact has been to create a tourist stop that allows voyeurs to get a few hundred metres closer to North Korea without the need for a visa.

“I feel a bit dirty,” Sean confesses in his London accent after we finish the 20 yuan (about $3.50) tour. It does indeed feel wrong to stare and point at the people across the river as though they are zoo animals.

But peering into Stalinism's last redoubt is a lucrative industry here in Dandong. After our walk to the end of the Broken Bridge, we board a tour boat crammed with more than 70 Chinese tourists. The boat crosses the middle of the river – presumably into North Korea waters – as cameras snap away and tourists pose against a backdrop of patrolling soldiers and bare-chested men wading waist-deep into the water to fish with nets. Another packed boat leaves every 30 minutes.

Our boat captain has chosen The Carpenters as the soundtrack for the 30-minute excursion. Every sha-la-la-la. Every whoah-oh-oh. At first it seems wildly inappropriate, but later it occurs to me that Yesterday Once More (the song's title) might be exactly how many Chinese feel as they peer at a country still living through the disastrous leadership China itself experienced decades ago during the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward.

Dinner that night is an alcohol-soaked affair at a North Korean restaurant in Dandong. Beef, rice, kimchi and a fruit alcohol that our guide mixes into our Taedonggang beers.

The patrons are in a great mood, singing and clapping along with a lively stage show. It's just a guess, but it feels like they're delighted to be among the very few allowed to leave the paranoid and impoverished place across the river.

The bum's rush out of Kashgar

2009-07-11T14:43:00.002+04:00

Kashgar, China - I was in deep sleep when I heard someone ringing the doorbell of my room at the Tian Yuan Hotel. I looked at the clock, saw it was only 8 a.m. and rolled over to go back to sleep. Whoever it was could come back later. There was a “do not disturb” sign hanging in the door.

The bell rang again, then a third time. If it was housekeeping, they obviously thought some sort of emergency cleaning needed to be done.

Groggily, I put my glasses on and opened the door a crack. A short man in a red shirt peered back earnestly. He told me he was from the local government, and that I had to leave the city on an 11 a.m. flight. There were four other men in the hall, two of them in blue police uniforms.

“I'm sorry, but the security situation is not good,” the man in red told me. “You must leave the city for your own safety.”

I told him that I had a flight back to Urumqi the following morning. (I had been in the city for less than 24 hours, reporting on the local government's plan to demolish most of Kashgar's historic Old City.) The man in red seemed to know this already.

“No, you must leave today,” he said firmly, shaking his head.

Arrangements had been made for me to be on the 11 a.m. flight out.

After awkwardly gobbling down my breakfast under the supervision of two police officers, I was taken to the lobby where Elizabeth Dalziel, a photographer with the Associated Press, was already waiting with her own security entourage. Together we were driven to the airport and instructed to book flights back to Urumqi.

That's when it descended into farce. Elizabeth and I sat down and waited for the security men who were escorting us to buy us tickets and put us on a plane. That's how it goes in the movies after all.

But the security guys did nothing for the sort. They stood at the other end of the ticket counter from us, expectantly us to buy our own way back to the provincial capital, Urumqi. (Why they thought we'd be “safer” in Urumqi – where 156 people died in riots this week – than Kashgar was never explained. The best answer I got was from the man in red, who said that while Kashgar appeared safe, that “it could change at any second.”) The 11 a.m. flight took off without us, and the standoff dragged on.

The police instructed Elizabeth and I to buy tickets for the next flight out, just after 2 p.m. We called the Department of Foreign Affairs in Beijing, as well as the government media office in Urumqi, looking for clarification of our situation.

Were we under arrest? If not, could we return to the city? Why hadn't we been put on a plane, as the man in red said we would be?

Revealingly, the answers were different depending on which government department we called. Officials in Beijing had no idea we had been detained or why. The propaganda officials in Urumqi – who had made a show of being accommodating to the media this week, a clean break from a year ago when foreign journalists were completely barred from Tibet in the wake of riots there – told us that the officers in Kashgar had made a mistake and that we were free to go.

We passed that on to the officers guarding us, who retorted that they had been ordered to take us to the airport, and that those orders hadn't changed. An official from the local government promised to come out and mediate the situation, but never showed up.

“It's not possible to arrange interviews today,” she said. “You should leave.”

Even if we wanted to, we couldn't have. After the 11 a.m. flight, commercial air traffic in and out of Kashgar was stopped, apparently so that a succession of military planes could land and offload more troops.

Though Xinjiang is Chinese soil, both Urumqi and Kashgar have the feel of occupied cities this week.

Elizabeth got frustrated and – noticing that our guards had long since stopped paying attention us – made a daring run into the city to photograph afternoon prayers at one of the city's many mosques.

She was eventually found by police and brought back to the airport. Our fates were sealed, so rather than spend the night in Kashgar Airport, we gave up and bought tickets to the next flight out to Urumqi.

What happened in Kashgar today that they didn't want the foreign media to see?

To the best of my knowledge, nothing major. But with foreign journalists kicked out of the city, the Internet switched off and international calls blocked, we may never know for sure.

Climate change and Japan: Lost in perspiration

2009-07-11T14:40:00.000+04:00

Tokyo, Monday, July 6, 2009 - As I sat facing the Foreign Minister of Japan in a boardroom adjacent to his downtown Tokyo office last week, I felt a bead of sweat form on my forehead. Trying to look as calm and sophisticated as possible, I reached up and dabbed at it with a tissue, but it was soon replaced by others.

The more I thought about it – more specifically, the more I thought about trying not to sweat – the damper I got. Soon, my body was a rain forest.

Was I nervous? Perhaps, though the interview could hardly be called highly charged, given that I'd been requested to submit the questions I would ask weeks ahead of time. Foreign Minister Hirofumi Nakasone wasn't so much responding to my queries as he was reciting answers off a sheet that had been prepared for him by aides.

It could have been the three-piece suit I was wearing. If I was ever waterboarded in Guantanamo Bay, my interrogators would quickly find out that one of the reasons I became a foreign correspondent was to avoid having to wear a suit and tie every day. My wife swears that my mood changes for the worse – and I start to sweat – as soon as I have that extra piece of cloth around my neck.

But the biggest reason I was sweating is that it was 28 degrees inside the central Tokyo building that hosts Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Four years ago, as Japan (like nearly every other industrialized country) lagged behind the greenhouse gas emission reduction targets set out for it in the 1997 Kyoto Treaty, Environment Minister Yuriko Koike made a decision that lands somewhere between the visionary and the sadistic: Tokyo would slash energy use by decreeing that thermostats in government departments could never be set lower than 28 C.

Businesses were urged to set the same standard and many did. By the end of the year the government had a genuine success in the fight against global warming to crow about. In 2005, the Cool Biz campaign, as it became known, was estimated to have resulted in a 460,000-tonne reduction in emissions of carbon dioxide, a number equivalent to that emitted by one million households in one month. The next year was even better: a 1.14 million-tonne reduction in carbon dioxides, equivalent to 2.5 million households for one month.

Cool Biz also set off a sartorial revolution in Japan (one that no one bothered to inform your correspondent about) as instinctively formal businessmen and government officials were forced to ditch their jackets and ties or sweat to death. That said, at least two government officials I met last week had ties that they sheepishly pulled out of their pockets whenever the occasion demanded.

All of which makes Japan's recent dithering over climate change a bit hard to fathom. Prime Minister Taro Aso enraged environmentalists last month by setting a new emissions-reduction target that many felt falls short of what Japan is capable of. The way Japan presented the new number – a 15 per cent cut over the next 11 years – sounded impressive enough, but put up against the Kyoto Treaty baseline of 1990 emission levels, it translates into only an 8 per cent cut from that point, or barely beyond the 6 per cent reduction that Japan and many other countries have already committed to back in 1997.

When I asked Hirofumi Nakasone, the Foreign Minister, about the international reaction to his government's new targets, he politely retorted that Japan was still a leader in the climate-change fight and that what the world needed post-Kyoto was a new climate change pact that bound rapidly developing countries such as China and India (who got a pass in 1997) to make reductions as well. He mercifully avoided reminding me that Canada was recently named the country that has done the least to reduce emissions of any in the G-8 (Japan came fifth).

Still, coming from the government that hosted Kyoto, Nakasone's point-the-finger-at-others defence had me wondering how serious Japan really is in 2009 about curbing carbon emissions.

I'd hate to think I got all hot and sweaty for nothing.

The ‘Anonymous Netizen’ declares war on Beijing

2009-07-11T14:34:00.002+04:00

Beijing, Thursday, June 25, 2009 - It has, until now, been a one-sided fight. For years, the censors employed by the Chinese government have launched wave after wave of attacks against China’s vibrant online community, blocking access to websites, shutting down discussions and sending police to deal in person with those who get too chirpy online for Beijing’s liking.

The war on what are known as China’s “netizens” has escalated in recent months. First, it announced a sweeping crackdown on Internet pornography that also had the side benefit of shutting down websites better known for hosting dissident bloggers and lively political discussions. Popular sites such as YouTube, Blogspot and Wordpress were among the sites barred.

Earlier this month, the Chinese government moved to block Twitter, and all its edgy Tweeting about the 20th anniversary of the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

The net result is infuriating. Often, I find myself swearing at the computer screen as attempts to do simple research are blocked by the net nannies. Even blogs about my beloved Edmonton Oilers often fall on the wrong side of the Great Firewall of China. Instead of gossip about this weekend’s NHL draft, all I get is the familiar notice: “The network link was interrupted while negotiating a connection. Please try again.”

Like many Internet-savvy Chinese, I can get around the blocks using a virtual private network. But many of China’s 298 million Internet users are believed to lack the know-how, or the funds, to circumnavigate the Great Firewall.

Pressing its case – and perhaps seeking to close the VPN loophole – Beijing recently announced that all personal computers sold in the country after July 1 would include a creepily named software package known as Green Dam Youth Escort that would spare the censors some work by blocking a lot of websites itself. Beijing has since backed down somewhat, but you get the sense that the relative freedoms many Chinese enjoy online is something the government will continue to craft ways to restrict.

This morning, the Chinese version of Google, google.cn, was blocked, again as part of the stated effort to crack down on Internet pornography. Google responded meekly by saying it would do what it could to comply with China’s new demands, which include that it prevent Chinese surfers from accessing foreign-based websites.

Others were not so willing to take the latest assault lying down. Within hours of the Google block, an angry cry dubbed the “2009 Declaration of the Anonymous Netizens” began circulating on the Chinese Internet.

Here it is, in a translation provided by www.shanghaiist.com . It you want to see the original page in Chinese, click here.

2009 Declaration of the Anonymous Netizens

To the Internet censors of China,

We are the Anonymous Netizens. We have seen your moves on the Internet. You have deprived your netizens of the freedom of speech. You have come to see technology as your mortal enemy. You have clouded and distorted the truth in collaboration with Party mouthpieces. You have hired commentators to create the "public opinion" you wanted to see. All these are etched into our collective memory. More recently, you forced the installation of Green Dam on the entire population and smothered Google with vicious slander. It is now clear as day: what you want is the complete control and censorship of the Internet. We hereby declare that we, the Anonymous Netizens, are going to launch our attack worldwide on your censorship system starting on July 1st, 2009.

For the freedom of the Internet, for the advancement of Internetization, and for our rights, we are going to acquaint your censorship machine with systematic sabotage and show you just how weak the claws of your censorship really are. We are going to mark you as the First Enemy of the Internet. This is not a single battle; it is but the beginning of a war. Play with your artificial public opinion to your heart's content, for you will soon be submerged in the sea of warring netizens. Your archaic means of propaganda, your epithets borrowed straight from the Cultural Revolution era, your utter ignorance of the Internet itself - these are the tolls of your death bell. You cannot evade us, for we are everywhere. Violence of the state cannot save you - for every one of us that falls, another ten rises. We are familiar with your intrigues. You label some of us as the "vicious few" and dismiss the rest of us as unknowing accomplices; that way you can divide and rule. Go ahead and do that. In fact, we encourage you to do that; the more accustomed you are to viewing your netizens this way, the deeper your self-deception.

You are trying in vain to halt the wheels of history. Even with your technocratic reinforcements, you will not understand the Internet in the foreseeable future. We congratulate you on your adherence to your Cultural-Revolution style conspiracy theories in your dealings with dissent; for we too get nostalgic at times. We toast to your attempts to erect a Great Wall among your netizens, for such epic folly adds spice to any historical narrative. Still, there's something we feel obliged to tell you.

NOBODY wants to topple your regime. We take no interest whatsoever in your archaic view of state power and your stale ideological teachings. You do not understand how your grand narrative dissipated in the face of Internetization. You do not understand why appealing to statism and nationalism no longer works. You cannot break free from your own ignorance of the Internet. Your regime is not our enemy. We are not affiliated in any way with any country or organization, and we are not waging this war on any country or organization, not even on you. YOU are waging this war on yourself. YOU are digging your own grave through corruption and antagonization. We are not interested in you, destined for the sewage of history. You cannot stop the Internetization of the human race. In fact, we won't bat an eyelid even if you decide to sever the transpacific information cables in order to obtain the total control you wanted. The harder you try to roll back history, the more you strain the already taut strings, and the more destructive their final release. You are accelerating your own fall. The sun of tomorrow does not shine on those who are fearing tomorrow itself.

We are the Anonymous Netizens. We are the sum of the world's entire online population. We are coordinated. We are dominant. We are innumerable. For every one of us that falls, another ten joins. We are omnipresent. We are omnipotent. We are unstoppable. We have no weaknesses. We utilize every weakness. We are the humanity under every mask. We are the mirrors of conscience. We are created equal. We are born free. We are an army. We do not forgive. We do not forget.

LIBERTY LEADS THE INTERNET.

WE'RE COMING.

TWEET! China blocks Twitter

2009-06-03T08:34:00.003+04:00

BEIJING – One minute, I was marveling at all the free-flowing chatter on Twitter about the looming anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989. There were links being posted to information about that day that has never been shown in China’s state-controlled media. A campaign encouraging Chinese to wear white, a colour of mourning, on Thursday was spreading tweet by tweet.

I found myself wondering how long it would be allowed to continue.

Then I hit the refresh button and a far-too-familiar message appeared on my computer screen: “The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading. The network link was interrupted while negotiating a connection. Please try again.”

The Great Firewall of China has grown again. Forty-eight hours ahead of the most sensitive date on the Chinese calendar, a host of popular websites, including photo-sharing site Flickr.com, search engines Livesearch.com and Bing.com (Microsoft’s answer to Google), as well as Hotmail, are all suddenly inaccessible, in addition to Twitter.com.

Video-sharing site YouTube and blogger portals Wordpress and Blogspot have already been blocked for weeks.

No one needed to tell Chinese Twitterers why the crackdown on free expression happened at the start of June.

“Isn’t it rather obvious why? Because of certain events that transpired just shy of 20 years ago,” wrote Kaiser Kuo, a well-known Beijing-based Twitterer who identifies himself as a guitarist, writer and a father of two. “Hopefully this will pass after the [expletive] sensitive date.”

“I believe that this website is closed because of two days of later -- June 4,” chimed in Zuola, a popular Chinese blogger whose own page also falls on the wrong side of the Great Firewall, but who had still been managing to reach a wide audience through Twitter.

Earlier this year, China announced that it now had 298 million Internet users, more than any other country. An estimated 70 million Chinese have personal blogs, forcing a government used to having complete control over the flow of information to adopt new tactics. But China’s Internet community has been learning and adapting just as fast.

Many of the Chinese on Twitter were quickly back to tweeting as normal within minutes of the new block, logging on through virtual private networks to go around the censors. However, less web-savvy Chinese (and those unable to afford the cost of a VPN) will no longer be able to read what they write. Nor will they be able to see pictures posted on Flickr, or use their Hotmail accounts.

The move appears part of a wider effort to censor media ahead of Thursday’s anniversary. The hard copy of the South China Morning Post that I get delivered from Hong Kong has stopped arriving in recent days, although the International Herald Tribune that gets delivered by the same company keeps coming through.

BBC World television goes off the air each time one of their anchors tries to introduce a piece about the anniversary. They’re getting slow on the trigger finger though, I actually caught a brief glimpse of Tank Man the famous unknown rebel who stood alone in front of a row of tanks in 1989, on BBC today before the screen went blank.

The government also seems to have moved to silence well-known dissidents ahead of the anniversary. Bao Tong, a former top Communist Party official whom I recently interviewed for The Globe and Mail was taken from his home today by security agents and reportedly driven to his home village in southern Zhejiang province. Ding Zilin, head of the Tiananmen Mothers organization (I also interviewed her for my piece this weekend about today’s generation of Chinese students), was also told to leave the city, and phones at her apartment rang busy all day.

All this over an anniversary that many loudly insist is a non-event. "The party and the government long ago reached a conclusion about the political incident that took place at the end of the 1980s and related issues," Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a news conference today.

No question there. The party and the government are decided.

But today they don’t seem quite so certain about the people.

Addendum: An interesting little moment developing that may say something about the futility of trying to censor the Internet in 2009.

"China blocks Twitter" is now the No. 3 topic on Twitter, behind only "Air France" and "goodsex."

Number 8 is the conversation this was meant to squelch: "Tiananmen." (http://twitpic.com/6gqvl)

Change, all of a sudden, in Mongolia

2009-06-03T08:28:00.004+04:00

Beijing - Amid all the alarming news about North Korea’s recent nuclear test and the reflections on the Tiananmen Square massacre of 20 years ago this week, a little piece of promising news from this region got far less attention than it deserved.

Last Sunday, June 24, some 1.1 million Mongolians, or nearly three-quarters of all eligible voters, went to the polling stations. It was the country’s sixth presidential election since the country left the Soviet Union’s orbit and embraced multi-party politics in 1990 and this time around, another milestone was reached: a candidate other than the leader of the Mongolian Peoples’ Revolutionary Party won.

Following a hard-fought campaign, Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj of the opposition Democratic Party won 51 per cent of the vote, ousting incumbent Nambariin Enkhbayar of the MPRP. And while the MPRP’s narrow victory in parliamentary elections a year ago had sparked deadly riots amid accusations of electoral fraud, there was no violence this time around or allegations of improprieties this time around.

Mr. Enkhbayar, whose party has dominated Mongolia politics for nearly 90 years, gracefully conceded defeat even before the final results were officially announced. The street parties began soon afterwards.

The vote was hailed as “free and peaceful” by the U.S. State Department. “This election is a clear demonstration of Mongolia’s continued commitment to democratic reform and represents a real achievement for such a young democracy,” spokesman Ian Kelly said in a statement. Even more remarkable was the fact that Mongolia’s democratic evolution has happened despite the fact the country is wedged between Russia and China, two giants somewhat less concerned with the will of the people.

Those who observed the process up close were just as impressed. “The riots last year had everyone a little worried. Here was the one country in the region that was seemingly doing very well in terms of building democracy and institutions – compared with everything else going on in Asia – and suddenly maybe that wasn’t the case. This election really reassured everyone,” said Julian Dierkes, an assistant professor at the Institute of Asia Research at the University of British Columbia who was on the ground in Mongolia as a monitor last week.

There is, unsurprisingly, a whiff of big-power politics in all this. Though Mongolia was never formally part of the old USSR, its political scene is very similar to that in former republics like Ukraine, Georgia and parts of Central Asia, with one party (in Mongolia’s case, the MPRP) seen as aligned with Russia and the other (Elbegdorj’s Democratic Party) closer to the United States. The early analysis is that the Mongolia’s new president will try and decrease the country’s reliance on Moscow by upping ties with the U.S., Europe and Canada. (China is also increasingly a player in Mongolia’s business scene, but until now has played only a background role in the political struggle.) All that aside, no one but the Mongolians cast their vote last week, and they now appear to have chosen a Democratic Party president who will have veto power over an MPRP-controlled parliament. Now all they have to do is work together to deliver on voters’ hopes that they can lead the country out of endemic poverty.

Despite opening its mining sector and signing lucrative deals with international firms, one-third of Mongolians live below the poverty line.

p.s. Speaking of Tiananmen Square, I’m watching BBC World in The Globe and Mail’s Beijing office as I type this. Each hour, when the anchor tries to introduce the piece BBC has done for the 20th anniversary of June 4, 1989, the screen here goes blank. I assume the piece they don’t want people to see is this one.

6+4 20

2009-06-03T08:23:00.002+04:00

Beijing, May 20, 2009 – In today’s China, it’s often difficult to gauge how ordinary people feel about the Tiananmen Square massacre of 20 years ago. As the anniversary approaches, are the gory details of that day – and the fact the government still suppresses them – relevant in a country that looks nothing like the China of 1989?

Pro-democracy activists, all but a very brave few of them speaking from outside the country, insist that June 4, 1989 remains the blackest day in recent Chinese history. To them, the wound Chinese society suffered then won’t be anywhere near healed until the events of 1989 are brought before the public eye and those responsible for the bloodshed are made accountable.

When I recently interviewed Bao Tong – the top aide to the ousted Communist Party secretary Zhao Ziyang, and the only senior Communist official jailed for his role in 1989 (for standing with the students) – he certainly shared that point of view. He told me that Deng Xiaoping’s decision to use force to disperse the student protestors who had occupied Beijing’s central square to back their demands for change “caused all the [political] stagnation and backwardness in China over the past 20 years.” You can read the whole article here.

Similarly, Ding Zilin of the Tiananmen Mothers committee has been waging a long and lonely fight to force the government to investigate what happened on June 4, the day that her 17-year-old son Jiang Jielian was shot in the back and killed near Tiananmen Square. Her group has meticulously collected a list of 195 names of those killed during the crackdown, and she believes many more than that actually died that day.

But many other, often louder, voices say that Tiananmen Square no longer matters. They argue China’s astonishing economic progress in the past 20 years proves that Deng Xiaoping made the right decision in cracking down and preventing China from falling into the type of chaos that hit Eastern Europe and the former USSR after the collapse of Communism there. To them, it’s only Westerners with an “anti-Chinese” agenda who keep the Tiananmen issue alive.

(The government’s own changing view is nicely documented by Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch The most recent assessment given by a government spokesperson is “the government has already reached the verdict on 'June Fourth,' and the stability of the country was the foremost priority.”)

Rarely are ordinary Chinese voices heard on this topic. In large part, that’s because the government has made the topic taboo. It’s never mentioned in the state-controlled media, and Tiananmen-related websites on the Internet are routinely blocked by censors. People like Mr. Bao Tong and Ms. Ding are kept under heavy surveillance, with their phones monitored and their interaction with other Chinese strictly controlled. The events of that day are never discussed in polite conversation - it's almost as if they never happened.

Which is why I was fascinated by a little phenomenon that the Chinese edition of Google, google.cn, (otherwise best known for happily helping build the Great Firewall of China) inadvertently recorded. Take a look at this link. It’s a snapshot, sent my way by a Chinese Twitter pal of the top 10 most-searched items on google.cn for Tuesday, May 19, 2009.

The No. 2 most-searched term, and recent holder of the No. 1 spot, is the apocryphal string “6+4 20.” It looks like bad arithmetic, but it's in fact a reference to the sixth month, fourth day, and the 20th anniversary of June 4, 1989.

The Net Nannies would have to be at the top of their game to spot that one. Plug it into google.cn, and Google returns a load of sites that are normally blocked inside China, including (at the time I’m writing this, anyway) the Chinese-language Wikipedia entry on the massacre, which contains the famous photo of a man staring down a row of tanks and repeats assertions that thousands of people died on and around the square that day.

Apparently, a whole lot of ordinary Chinese aren’t quite convinced that Tiananmen Square no longer matters.

Thailand's stress-relieving street battle

2009-04-15T23:32:00.003+04:00

Bangkok: There were just two of us on the empty street. Me, and the guy with the gun.

We were in the centre of the Thai capital, in broad daylight, but it couldn't have been more deserted. All the shops on Nakhon Sawan Road had their metal shutters pulled down after 24 hours of violent protests in the city. The road behind me was blocked by a burned-out bus that red-shirted protesters had positioned to keep the army out of their encampment.

There was nowhere for me to run. My assailant trained his weapon on me and let loose a jet of water straight into my chest.

He then collapsed into giggles like the six-year-old he was.

After days of escalating tension in Bangkok as the army faced off with supporters of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a hint of normalcy returned to the usually jovial Thai capital yesterday.

The state of emergency imposed by Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva is still in effect, and there are still soldiers on the streets, but most of Thais moved on to the important business of celebrating Songkran, the lunar new year.

That means heading out into the sweltering hot streets (it was 33 C today) with a water gun and an attitude. Buddha images are “bathed,” and so is anyone who walks into splashing range.

Many Thais appear to believe that extra karmic points are awarded to those who douse foreigners who walk around lost in thought, or women of any nationality foolish enough to wear white. Motorcyclists are another favourite target.

The clashes on Monday between the Red Shirts and the army (which left at least two people dead and more than 100 injured) led some to dub this holiday the “Black Songkran.” But Thais are a resilient people, having endured a staggering 18 coups in the past eight decades, as well as countless popular protests.

Even at the height of the violence this week, much of Bangkok carried on as if nothing abnormal was taking place. In the famous backpacking district around Khao San Road, it was as though this troubled place called “Thailand” that the newspapers were writing about was somewhere far, far away from the merry stretch of bars and restaurants.

Nonetheless, the city emitted a collective sigh of relief when the leaders of the Red Shirts called off their protest on Tuesday, putting at least a temporary end to the crisis. Maybe, just maybe, it will be a happy new year after all.

Me, I'm taking my cue from the kid and going shopping for a Super-Soaker.

Or at least a rain slicker.

What colour for Chisinau?

2009-04-10T15:31:00.001+04:00

Tbilisi: As I write this, students have just been evicted from the parliament building in the former Soviet republic of Moldova, a day after storming it to show their despair at the idea of four more years of Communist rule there.

I’ve seen a few such popular revolts in my time (Georgia, Ukraine, Lebanon), and happen to have spent last week hopping through the post-revolutionary capitals of Kiev and Tbilisi on vacation.

The simple conclusion: these uprisings, even when they’re successful, rarely mark a wholesale change from the past.

In Ukraine, tents still occupy part of the Maidan (otherwise known as Independence Square), just as they have almost continuously since the Orange Revolution in late 2004. But the politicians the world fell in love with back then – the brave Viktor Yushchenko, with his face bearing the scars of a poisoning attack, and the glamorous Yulia Tymoshenko, with her golden Princess Leia-like braids – quickly turned on each other after the people put them in power, and politics quickly returned to the dirty old status quo in Kiev.

What looked like a popular revolution back then (albeit one with plenty of outside support) turned out to be more about one clan of oligarchs ousting the other.

My closest Ukrainian friends, who five years ago were heavily politicized and energized by what had happened on the streets of Kiev, were disheartened and interested in talking about anything but Ukrainian politics when we had dinner last week. On the Maidan, you can still buy KGB T-shirts and Lenin paraphernalia, but not one vendor bothers to sell anything orange anymore. There’s just no interest, not even from tourists.

Other than a single column in front of the main post office – which has been encased in plexiglass to protect the revolutionary graffiti painted there five years ago – it’s as if the Orange Revolution never happened.

Georgia, despite last year’s disheartening war with Russia, provides more reason for optimism. Tbilisi in 2009 is a completely different place than the city I first visited back in the fall of 2002.

Collapsing buildings in the historic Old Town have been replaced by sidewalk cafés and jazz bars. The old Intourist hotel – which for more than a decade had been overflowing with refugees from the early 1990s war in Abkhazia – is now an almost-complete five-star Radisson. (The refugees were given compensation to move elsewhere in town.)

But, like Moldova, the country is held back because large chunks of Georgian territory are de facto Russian protectorates. Last summer’s war over South Ossetia proved a disastrous miscalculation by President Mikhail Saakashvili (that's him looking alternately frazzled and amorous in the posters I saw in downtown Tbilisi), and now tens of thousands of Georgians are back on the streets demanding that he step down, just as he forced Eduard Shevardnadze aside back in 2003. (Check out reporting from the scene by my longtime friend Michael Mainville of Dowling, Ont. – now the Caucasus bureau chief for Agence France-Presse.)

Neither the Rose Revolution in Georgia nor the Orange Revolution in Ukraine brought the people on the streets the change they were seeking. The change in governments only began a whole new cycle of instability and overt Russian intervention in both countries.

That’s something the angry students in Chisinau should probably keep in mind.

Moscow redux

2009-04-07T19:56:00.003+04:00

Moscow: The first thing that strikes me upon returning to Moscow is the new sense of order in the Russian capital.

In my book The New Cold War: Revolutions, Rigged Elections and Pipeline Politics in the Former Soviet Union, I wrote about my concerns that Vladimir Putin's obsession with stability and the "power vertical" (stabilnost and vertikalny vlast) were populist code for eliminating such annoyances as free elections and independent media.

That's proven to be true, but it must be remembered that a wide majority of Russians continue to back Putin's policies (and those of his chosen successor as president, Dmitriy Medvedev, who in many ways still remains his mentor's underling). With the benefit of some time away, it's easier to see some of the reasons why. Simply put, Moscow is a safer and more prosperous place to live in 2009 than it was when Vladimir Vladimirovich succeeded Boris Yeltsin nine years ago.

A few little things that struck me:

* There is now an official taxi stand at the still-dilapidated Sherevmetyevo-2 airport that charges you a pre-set rate for trips to the city centre (i.e., no more arguing with bandits who will wait all day for a foreigner rich and stupid enough to pay their price).

* I wasn't stopped once, during more than a week in Moscow and St. Petersburg, by police demanding to see our dokumenti and looking to extract bribes for invented problems with said documents, something that used to happen on a regular basis. Perhaps I look less like a Chechen like I used to. Or perhaps the crackdown on corruption has reached the police force. The only time we were stopped was when our cab driver was actually caught on a radar gun going over the speed limit. Yes, police in Moscow now use radar guns and care how fast you drive.

* The touts who used to harass tourists lining up to see the Kremlin and the Hermitage museum have all disappeared. (Though St. Petersburg is still an easy place to get your pocket picked. My wife and I witnessed a woman lose her camera on the Nevskiy Prospekt).

* An overall sense that Moscow, in particular, is a less chaotic place than it used to be, certainly than it was when we first arrived in late 2001.

* This Putin lookalike on Red Square thought I would pay 1,000 rubles (about $33) to have my picture taken with him. This one cost nothing.

That said, Russia is also one of the countries that has been worst hit by the economic crisis thus far (GDP shrank 7 per cent in the first quarter of 2009 ), and Moscow remains one of the most expensive cities in the world.

As in China, many in Russia have been willing to accept some restrictions on personal freedoms so long as the economy kept growing and their lives continued to improve. If that deal is broken, will the popularity of President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin also take a hit?

The past few days have seen some of the largest anti-government rallies in recent years (such as the Communist Party gathering yesterday in Nizhny Novgorod) and heavy-handed government responses (such as a recent decision to dispatch Interior Ministry troops from Moscow to break up anti-government protests in the Pacific Ocean port of Vladivostok) -- the latter being a sure sign of government nervousness.

A test of where things are heading could come in the unexpected form of the mayoral elections for the city of Sochi, which is scheduled to host the 2014 Winter Olympics. Some 26 people threw their hats into the ring, including leading opposition figure Boris Nemtsov (briefly deputy prime minister during the Yeltsin years), celebrity ballerina Anastasia Volochkova (famously canned by the Bolshoi Theatre for being overweight), billionaire businessman Alexander Lebedev and acting mayor Anatoly Pakhomov, who has the all-important backing of Putin's United Russia party.

Nemtsov has already had ammonia thrown at him by unknown assailants dressed in women's clothing and Volochkova has apparently now been disqualified for leaving her birthday off one of the documents she submitted with her registration papers. A porn star and a prominent freemason have also joined the race. It's enough to make a former Moscow correspondent tear up with nostalgia.

Despite the ludicrous start to the campaign, there is a serious side: whoever emerges from the crowded field on April 26 will get a chance to promote their version of Russia on the world stage in five years time. Given the way elections are run these days in Russia, the safe money is always on the Kremlin's man.

2009-03-30T17:54:00.002+04:00

Beijing: The man in the bathtub is Lai Changxing. He's reading a newspaper that says “Canada Real Estate News” and “Job Service Centre.” This is how China's Southern Weekly newspaper – and many ordinary Chinese – envision life in Canada for China's most wanted man, someone accused by Beijing of heading a $10-billion smuggling empire before fleeing to Canada in 1999.

With press like this, it's hard to believe sometimes, but there was a time – barely a decade ago – when this country's leaders referred to Canada as China's “best friend in the world.”

That statement, made by then-Premier Zhu Rongji during one of those ballyhooed “Team Canada” business promotion trips of the Jean Chrétien era, was perhaps an overstatement made by a very polite host, but there was a bit of substance to it at the time. Canadian-Chinese friendship dates back to the fabled Norman Bethune's battlefield medical work during the Sino-Japanese war and has accelerated since 1970 when Canada recognized the People's Republic, two years before Richard Nixon dared travel to China. The Globe and Mail even played a role, opening the first Western newspaper office here in 1959, back when it was still called Peking. Most importantly, there are 1.4 million Canadians of Chinese descent.

The Chrétien era was arguably the warmest stretch to date, in part because Canada's 20th prime minister was personal friends with former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin. In 2005, someone named Paul Martin took it a step further by signing a “strategic partnership” agreement with visiting Chinese President Hu Jintao and promising to double trade within 10 years.

It took less than four years for all that warmth to almost completely disappear. The Stephen Harper era has been catastrophic in terms of Ottawa-Beijing ties, to the point that Canada has become almost irrelevant here. (Charles Burton, who once served as a Canadian diplomat in China, wrote a devastating critique of what's wrong that's well worth a read. Or check out Colin Freeze's report that appeared in The Globe and Mail.)

In a sentence that summarized much of what Mr. Burton laid out over 25 pages, the Canada-China Business council recently warned that “Canada, despite its historic ties to China, is not seizing all of the opportunities China affords to investors and businesses.”

The two biggest irritants were Canada's decision to award honourary citizenship to the Dalai Lama (which was a good idea) and Mr. Harper's decision to skip last year's Summer Olympics in Beijing (which wasn't).

When asked why he takes stands that fly in the face of Canada's business interests in the world's largest market, Mr. Harper claimed that he doesn't want to sacrifice “important Canadian values” to the “almighty dollar.” Fine. And if Mr. Harper was going around the world defending human rights anywhere they were in danger, his hard-line China policy might make sense. But given his government's unquestioning support of Israel during its recent assault on the Gaza Strip (to pick one example that I have some familiarity with), it's clear that he's not going to win a Nobel Peace Prize any time soon.

The problem Mr. Harper and his coterie have is they see the world as divided up into “good” countries (like the United States, Taiwan and Israel) and “bad ones” including China and much of the Muslim world. We take tough stands about Tiananmen Square and Tibet, but don't bat an eyelash at Guantanamo Bay or Gaza. If we had a consistent, moral foreign policy based on “Canadian principles,” the tough stand vis-à-vis Beijing would make sense. But we don't, and it doesn't.

The fact is that only the pro-Israel lobby spends more time and money on lobbying Canadian parliamentarians than pro-Taiwan groups. (Taiwan was the top destination for freebie trips by MPs in 2007, and second to Israel last year), and so here we are. And Canada's relationship with the world's next superpower is in tatters.

The truth is that we're in serious danger becoming a “bad” country in China's eyes as well. Our Prime Minister boycotted their coming-out party last summer, when even George W. Bush and Nicholas Sarkozy found ways to attend either the opening or closing ceremonies of the Olympics. We grant refuge to their most wanted man (albeit because the aforementioned Mr. Zhu repeatedly declared that Mr. Lai deserved to be executed, which is pretty much a death sentence in a country where courts usually do as their told). And we harangue them about domestic issues from across the ocean, rather than in quiet face-to-face talks where Mr. Harper speaking his mind might actually have some impact.

The good news is that there are some inside the Canadian government that get it. We're in the process of opening six new trade missions in China, which should finally give us a diplomatic and commercial presence here worthy of the world's third-biggest – and fastest-growing – economy. And, for better or for worse, Trade Minister Stockwell Day is planning a visit here next month.

That's all well and good. But the word I'm getting from various sources is that the “face”-conscious Chinese leadership is going to hold a grudge until Mr. Harper repents and makes a full-on official visit to Beijing. Mr. Harper has suggested that such a trip is on the horizon.

I hate to agree with the Toronto Star, but for the sake of Canada's interests, and reputation, in China, the sooner he gets here, the better.

The case of the Impeccable underwear

2009-03-30T17:49:00.002+04:00

Beijing: It was one of the most bizarre new stories in recent weeks, a quasi-clash between the American and Chinese navies in the South China Sea.

The incident, according to the various accounts, ranged at times between the very dangerous and the farcical, with five Chinese boats coming so close to the USNS Impeccable – waving Chinese flags and demanding that the American ship leave the area – that the Impeccable resorted to using fire hoses to force their pursuers back. Undaunted, the Chinese sailors stripped to their underwear and kept up their dangerous game of chicken.

American officials have condemned the Chinese actions and portrayed the incident as an example of growing Chinese aggressiveness, and many news organizations used the story as an opportunity to discuss China's plans to eventually build its first aircraft carrier.

But looking at a map of where the incident occurred (BBC has a nice one), I find myself wondering how the U.S. navy would respond to a Chinese spy ship floating so close to its territorial waters. (The Impeccable is an unarmed surveillance craft that specializes in tracking submarines. As noted on the Danwei website, the Impeccable also looks “like something in which a James Bond villain would plan world domination.”)

The South China Sea is a mess of duelling claims, with China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam all declaring sovereignty over parts of it. It's also one of the most strategically important bodies of water anywhere, with some 10 million barrels of oil passing through every day aboard tankers. Underneath lies even greater treasure – somewhere 7.7 billion barrels and 28 billion barrels of crude oil. Hence the competing claims and the U.S. navy's interest in patrolling the region.

The area that the Impeccable was operating in was actually just outside of China's territorial waters, but within what is known under international law as its exclusive economic zone. So the American ship had a right to be there, though the law (to me) seems vaguer on whether foreign nations can park active military vessels in another country's economic zone.

Most Chinese are cheering on their navy's new willingness to give even the shirts off their backs for their country. “Let's send some ships to the American exclusive economic zone a few times to see the reaction of the U.S.,” a Shandong resident posted on the popular sina.com web portal. “We must control the deteriorating situation in the South China Sea by force,” chimed in blogger Wangfengchuizhou.

This may not go away soon. While Obama and Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi met last week in Washington to defuse tension over the Impeccable incident, the brouhaha escalated again shortly thereafter, when the Filipino parliament passed a law claiming sovereignty over parts of the Spratly Island chain that are also claimed by China. China responded by announcing it was sending its biggest and fastest patrol boat to the area, while the Impeccable is still floating around, now accompanied by a destroyer.

Random notes

2009-03-20T03:58:00.001+03:00

* I spent last week in Tokyo, but where I really wanted to be was Osaka, where they were dredging up old statues of Colonel Sanders. Apparently, this means the Hanshin Tigers have a chance at baseball glory this year. They haven't won the national championship since elated fans tossed the Colonel and his secret recipe into the Dotonburi River in 1985, following the Tigers' last title win. Call it the Extra Crispy Curse.

* While the U.S. and China were playing strip tag in the South China Sea, Japan was sending off two of its own destroyers to join the international anti-piracy mission off the coast of Somalia. China has already done the same, but Japan's deployment is yet another stretch of its famously pacifist post-World War Two constitution. (On a related note, I dropped by Canada's own pirate hunters last fall. You can still read the article here.)

* Is there a ban on importing cheese into China? James Fallows of The Atlantic investigates over at his superb blog.

* I was saddened, but not surprised, to see that He Weifang, an outspoken law professor at Peking University, has been reassigned to the Western province of Xinjiang, an effective demotion that also takes Prof. He out of the media spotlight in Beijing. Prof. He knew that he was courting trouble when he signed Charter 08, a document that calls for democratic reform in China. When I last contacted Prof. He, he agreed to an interview, and then backed away a few days later. He explained that he was “reluctant to talk about the Charter at this moment.”

* Check out Stephanie Nolen's new blog, Subcontinental, among her latest writings from, er, the subcontinent, is a post from the Tibetan capital in exile, Dharamsala.

Free Liam Gallagher!

2009-03-03T16:42:00.003+03:00

Beijing: Sigh.

So the powers-that-be here have decided that British rock band Oasis can't play their first-ever gigs in mainland China because Liam Gallagher (the Gallagher brother with the nicer voice and even less of a grasp on things like politics than his sibling) played at a “Free Tibet” concert on Randalls Island in New York in 1997.

That's the reason being given by the band, anyway. Oasis were scheduled to play a pair of shows in Shanghai and Beijing in early April and said in a statement that they were “bewildered” by the decision, which came just three weeks after the shows were announced.

“According to the show's promoters, officials within the Chinese Ministry of Culture only recently discovered that Noel Gallagher appeared at a Free Tibet Benefit Concert on Randall's Island in New York in 1997, and have now deemed that the band are consequently unsuitable to perform to their fans in the Chinese Republic … during its 60th anniversary year,” the statement reads.

Leaving aside the question of just exactly what or where the “Chinese Republic” is, the government-ordered cancellation is bad news for Chinese music fans, even those who aren't particularly keen on “Wonderwall” and everything that followed.

Here's an incomplete list of some of other musicians who played that day at Randalls Island: U2, R.E.M., Eddie Vedder, the Beastie Boys, Alanis Morissette, the Foo Fighters, Sonic Youth, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, a Tribe Called Quest and Ben Harper. So the ban on Oasis might mean no shows by Bono, Pearl Jam or Alanis in the Middle Kingdom either, although Sonic Youth did play Beijing last year without any problems.

The Chinese government is hypersensitive regarding foreign artists performing here, particularly since last March, when Bjork – another singer who was on the stage that day in 1997 – finished a concert in Shanghai with her song “Declare Independence” and shouted “Tibet! Tibet! Raise your flag!” over the final bars. There was some chatter among Chinese music fans about what the notoriously unpredictable Gallagher brothers might do on stage.

(It's not just the Tibet issue that gets the censors back in their 1970s frame of mind. All major foreign acts need to submit a setlist to the authorities before performing; the Rolling Stones were famously made to drop several songs with “suggestive” lyrics before they were allowed to make their 2006 debut in China. “Brown Sugar,” “Honky Tonk Woman” or “Beast of Burden” all got excised for fear of what hearing such songs live might do to the locals.)

In my books, if the Chinese authorities were going to ban Oasis for a perceived offence to the people of China, they should have targeted the other Gallagher, Noel (the one with the unibrow who writes most of the better tunes), who made a far bigger error when he referred to Shanghai – maybe you've heard of it, population 18.9 million – as “the middle of nowhere” in an interview with That's Shanghai magazine.

The good news is that an April 7 Oasis show in Hong Kong is apparently still going ahead. “One country, two systems,” the formula under which Hong Kong was absorbed back into China in 1997, apparently means one concert for 1.3 billion people.

Questions for Grandpa Wen

2009-03-02T13:50:00.004+03:00

Beijing: He cooks for the poor, he dodges shoes, and now Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao can claim to be the first Chinese premier to ever chat with the proletariat over the Internet.

The widely popular premier spent two hours online Saturday afternoon answering a selection of questions from among 90,000 that were sent in via the websites of the central government and the state-run Xinhua news agency. Wen admitted he was nervous to be taking questions online for the first time, but said he would follow his mother's advice and “be honest and use (his) heart to talk.”

Over the course of the lengthy exchange, the 66-year-old warned netizens that the global economic crisis had not yet hit the bottom, and sympathized with the plight of China's 20 million-plus jobless migrant labourers. Wen also acknowledged that China needed to make a “major move” against official corruption, and explained a planned overhaul to the country's health care system that aims to provide universal health care to all 1.3 billion Chinese citizens by 2011.

He also answered a more light-hearted question about his reputation as a cook (earned after he cooked a New Year's meal of sautéed pork and peppers for earthquake survivors in Sichuan province), and briefly tackled last month's incident during which he had a shoe thrown his way by a protestor during a speech he gave at Cambridge University.

“I acted very calmly. What I thought first was the national dignity, people's dignity and to maintain the friendship between China and Britain,” he said, explaining his stony response to the flying footwear. “Even if something dangerous was hurled at me, I will not move at all”

(You can read Xinhua's account of Wen's entire chat here.)

The online appearance comes just days before Wen is to deliver a report to the National People's Congress, China's rubber-stamp parliament, and highlighted the growing power of netizens in China, which now is the world's largest online community, with more than 300 million people now connected to the World Wide Web. Though many websites – particularly those related to sensitive topics such as the so-called “three Ts” (Tibet, Taiwan and Tiananmen Square) – are routinely censored here, the Internet has nonetheless become a powerful force for change, with netizens in one recent case forcing an investigation into the suspicious death of a prisoner in police custody in Yunnan province. Online public opinion polls have also helped push official corruption, an issue the country's leadership would likely prefer to avoid discussing, to the top of the agenda ahead of this week's annual meeting of the NPC.

“I always think that people has the right to know what the government is thinking and doing, and voice their criticism of government policy,” Wen said during the online question-and-answer session, adding that he spends half an hour to an hour online every day.

Wen's earthy style has made him an extremely rare phenomenon in Chinese politics – someone who rose up through the thickly bureaucratic ranks of the Communist Party who can actually claim genuine popularity. When I was in Sichuan last week talking to survivors of last year's catastrophic earthquake, the people I met expressed genuine affection for the man who played a front-line role in the relief efforts last spring and has made a total of seven trips to the region since the May 12 disaster. There was a noticeable difference in how people referred to Wen, and how they spoke of Chinese President Hu Jintao (who has also visited the earthquake zone, and did a web chat of his own last year). “Grandpa Wen,” as many Chinese call him, was someone they felt they knew. Hu was someone they had seen once.

Wen has long walked a very careful line between populism and his position in the Party. One question that wasn't asked in the online discussion – and one that would have been extremely timely given the looming 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre – is what Wen was doing in the photograph above. That's him, just to the right of Zhao Ziyang, then the general-secretary of the Communist Party, as Zhao addresses the students on Tiananmen Square in May 1989, days before the protests were forcefully quashed. Zhao, who was sympathetic to the students' calls for reform, was purged after the crackdown and placed under house arrest until his death in 2005. Wen somehow survived and kept rising through the official ranks.

Given that Wen's webchat was conducted via official websites, it's unsurprising that no one asked him about the events of May and June 1989 (or at least that no such questions were allowed through).

But since Wen told his virtual questioners that he spends time every day surfing the web, I'll pose my own questions here, in case his clicking ever takes him over to Points East.

Dear Mr. Premier,

- What was going through your mind that day as you accompanied Zhao Ziyang to address the students?

- What do you think, 20 years later, of the Tiananmen Mothers call for the Chinese government to “break the taboo” around Tiananmen and finally name all those killed and to punish those responsible?

- How will you mark the 20th anniversary on June 4th of this year?

Mr. Wen, I respectfully welcome you to leave your responses in the comments section below. Or e-mail me, if that's more your style.

Take your mother's advice about this. As you said yourself, the people - and I mean those in China, not necessarily readers here - have the right to know what their government is thinking and doing.

The Rolex People's Liberation Monument

2009-03-02T13:46:00.002+03:00

Chongqing, Feb. 19, 2009: This heaving city in southwestern China is a place of many contrasts. It is at once a city that is almost unheard of outside eastern Asia, and by some measures the world's largest metropolis (if you include the admittedly expansive municipal area, some 80,000 square kilometres, a staggering 32 million people live here). And while it's hardly news anymore that modern China is a place of massive disparity between rich and poor, those two worlds don't often rub shoulders in Beijing, which six months after the spectacle of the Summer Olympics still has on its best clothes for the outside world. The poverty that afflicts so many of this country's 1.3 billion people is hidden away nicely from the hordes of foreigners that troop through the capital city.

In Chongqing, meanwhile, gleaming towers crammed full of high-end stores and restaurants stand directly beside squalid apartment blocks and long-uncollected garbage. Young professionals in stylish Western clothes share the sidewalks with husky bang-bang men who carry other people's goods up the steep slopes of this mountainous port city on bamboo poles slung over their shoulders.

Chongqing was also the city that served as the capital of China (and the headquarters of Korea's government-in-exile) during the brutal Japanese occupation of Beijing and the Pacific coast during the Second World War. It was here that Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-Shek met after Japans surrender to the Allies for 42 days of peace talks that quickly dissolved back into civil war between Mao's Communists and Chiang's Kuomintang.

In the centre of this chaotic city stands the eight-sided Peoples Liberation Monument. Originally made of wood, it was first erected to commemorate the death of Sun Yatsen, the leader of the 1911 revolt that brought down the Qing Dynasty. In 1947, it was rededicated by the Kuomintang government to mark the victory over Japan. Three years later the new Communist regime gave the tower its current name in celebration of the first anniversary of the People's Republic of China.

In other words, 27.5-metre high tower — now a concrete pillar decorated with gold writing — has a habit of getting a new name and a makeover each time there's a change of power in China.

Some revolutions are quieter than others, however. A few years ago - the locals I spoke to said they couldn't recall precisely when - four ornate gold clocks were added to the top of the People's Liberation Monument, each bearing a very prominent "Rolex" label. More than one visitor has dubbed the remodelled monument the Rolex Tower. It still stands on Chongqing's central square, surrounded by a Starbucks, a McDonalds and a KFC.

As one blogger from the Muslim region of Xinjiang noted after their own visit to the People's Liberation Monument "they're SO BAD at communism in China."

Not a shot was fired, but the only thing China's latest revolution lacks is a name.

Liar, liar, underpants on fire

2009-03-02T13:37:00.003+03:00

Beijing, Feb. 11, 2009: It was, quite literally, an unmissable event. A giant inferno that engulfed a 30-storey building in east Beijing, drawing a crowd of hundreds of onlookers.

Even those Beijingers who didn't see the fire itself on Monday night were affected by it the next morning as the firefighting operation shut down a major highway – the capital's Third Ring Road – for much of the day, causing traffic chaos throughout the city. The fire also contributed to Tuesday being one of the worst air-quality days in Beijing in recent months.

The blaze destroyed the nearly finished Mandarin Oriental hotel, which had been due to open this spring but is now an empty blackened tower. One firefighter died from smoke inhalation and seven others are in intensive care.

Making the fire even more obvious was its location, inside the complex that contains the iconic new headquarters of Central China Television, or CCTV. Dubbed the dakucha (the big underpants), by locals, the futuristic CCTV headquarters is one of the most striking new buildings on the Beijing skyline. In fact, CCTV owned the adjacent Mandarin Oriental building that was destroyed in the fire, and hosted the fireworks party that was found responsible for starting the blaze.

And yet, the news staff at the state-run CCTV were apparently the only people in Beijing who didn't notice the tower of flames directly in front of them. That night's newscast began not with live footage of the fire inside their complex, but with news of the fatal bush fires in faraway Australia.

As Han Han, one of China's best-read bloggers, sarcastically noted: “If CCTV's premium evening news program started airing at that time, the cameramen could move their lens toward the window after news anchors introduced what was happening with the fire — they would get the images of the fire and produce the first unedited news story in CCTV's history.”

In comments that were themselves censored before being reposted by other Chinese bloggers as well as websites outside China, Han Han compared the Mandarin Oriental to “the thing underneath the big underpants” and said that by burning it, CCTV had committed a symbolic act.

“Such self-castration just perfectly fits the image of CCTV being the world's number one eunuch media,” he wrote. “For sure, the present CCTV does not deserve to have one.”

Han Han is not alone in his disdain. Last month, a group of 22 prominent Chinese intellectuals called for a boycott of CCTV, saying the network churned out only “low-grade propaganda.”

(For a taste of why many Chinese people might be fed up with CCTV, check out this YouTube clip of how the network covered Barrack Obama's inaugural address. The live feed is muted and the presenter awkwardly cuts in just as Obama mentions that “earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions.”)

CCTV eventually acknowledged that it was responsible for the fire, and that it didn't have the required permit to use fireworks that the deputy chief of Beijing's fire control bureau said were identical to those used during the opening ceremonies of last summer's Olympic Games.

It has yet to apologize for its shoddy coverage of an event that couldn't have been any easier to report.

Two thrown shoes, one "despicable act"

2009-03-02T13:32:00.003+03:00

Beijing, Feb. 4, 2009: After trying for 24 hours to pretend that nothing happened, the Chinese government is now declaring its belated outrage over an incident that saw a protester throw a shoe at Premier Wen Jiabao during his speech at Cambridge University.

The incident occurred Monday as Mr. Wen was giving a speech entitled “See China in the light of her development” to a crowd of some 500 of the university's students and staff. As Mr. Wen was speaking, he was interrupted by an audience member who blew on a whistle and yelled that it was a scandal that Mr. Wen had been invited to speak at Cambridge. “How can the university prostitute itself with this dictator?” the unnamed protester shouted as others in the crowd yelled for him to stop.

He capped off his diatribe Iraqi-style, tugging off his shoe and hurling it towards the podium, where it landed about a metre away from the Chinese premier. Mr. Wen briefly paused to size up the situation and to examine the grey sneaker that now lay to his right.

Then, after the protester was hustled out of the room by British police to face charges of disturbing the public order, he calmly resumed his speech. (You can watch a video of the incident here. The link may not work if you're inside China.)

At first, Beijing tried to act as though nothing had happened. The live broadcast of Mr. Wen's speech on state television was halted immediately after the incident, and no mention of the footwear-hurling was made in yesterday's newspapers.

Today, however, the government changed tact and went on the offensive, labeling the incident to be “despicable behaviour.”

“The Chinese side has expressed its strong feelings against the occurrence of the incident,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said in a statement, part of which appeared on the front page of today's China Daily.

The Chinese blogosphere also erupted. A clip of the incident that was eventually posted on the popular sina.com web portal drew more than 8,000 responses, most of which condemned the protester and praised Mr. Wen for his restrained response. Even my Chinese teacher was upset. “Did you see what happened to Premier Wen Jiabao? This is very disappointing,” she told me between lessons on proper sentence structure. “Everybody wants to know who would do this.”

One thing that detracted from China's cries of insult: the same Foreign Ministry that complained of despicable behavior had seen fit to make light of a similar episode last month in Baghdad when Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi tossed his size-10s at former U.S. President George W. Bush.

When asked about the Bush incident at a press conference in Beijing soon after that incident, Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao earned a few chuckles with his response.

“Next time I should watch out for not only [those] who are raising their hands, but also [those] who are untying their shoelaces,” he said.

Wise advice for Mr. Wen and all world leaders these days. But it appears the Chinese government found such things funnier when the shoe was on the other foot.

The day the music died in Macau

2009-03-02T13:26:00.003+03:00

Macau, Jan. 30, 2009: When times were better in this former Portuguese colony, hordes of tourists from mainland China came not only to gamble, but to shop and spend and even experience a little bit of Italy.

The Venetian Macau, which opened its doors in August, 2007, boasts of being the world's largest casino. But it's not the 340 slot machines and 800 gaming tables that grab your attention. It's the spectacle that surrounds them.

Between trips to the baccarat and blackjack tables, you can stroll out into the miniature "Venice" that American billionaire Sheldon Adelson built in this corner of southeast China.

Inside the Venetian are addresses like Marco Polo Street, St. Mark's Square and the Grand Canal. The latter is one of three canals that run through the mall, giving gamblers and their families the opportunity to take rides on tradition Venetian rowboats that come equipped with gondoliers sporting the same striped shirts, wide-brimmed hats and red waist sashes that they do in the Italian version. The big-voiced gondoliers serenade their customers with English and Italian songs as they navigate along the shallow waterways, passing by high-end clothing stores whose facades have been designed to look like Venetian houses, complete with tiny overhanging balconies.

The only thing missing from this Venice is a decent pizza joint.

(It's not even the most bizarre casino idea in town. The Greek Mythology Casino has a large statue of Zeus in the lobby but slipped up on a few other historical details. The entrance is guarded by oversized Roman centurions.)

But even the painted blue skies on the ceiling over the Grand Canal can't distract from the reality that this Venice, or at least part of it, is sinking.

As the global economic crisis sweeps through Asia, fewer and fewer mainland Chinese -- who account for the vast majority of all visitors to Macau -- come to gamble.

Though the Venetian is still the busiest place in town, it has proven to be far from immune to the effects. Many shops along the Grand Canal this week were advertising going-out-of-business sales.

The line-ups for the gondola rides have shrunk too, and last month half the gondoliers got the same bad news so many people around the world have received since the economic crisis began last year: they were out of a job.

The Ox's thunderous, and occasionally terrifying, arrival

2009-03-02T13:23:00.003+03:00

Beijing, Jan. 30, 2009: Bang. Bang. Bangbangbangbang.

It's Day 5 of the Chinese New Year, the Year of the Ox, and the celebrations continue. All day and every night, the Chinese are still celebrating, setting off enough ordnance to make most armies blush -– and send to Odessa the Travelling Cat scrambling for furniture to hide under.

As someone who spent the last four years living in the Middle East, I have to admit that the occasionally spectacular fireworks have made me jump more than once too. The explosives may be intended to scare away evil spirits and bring in good luck, but the first days of the Year of the Ox have made Beijing sound a little too much like Baghdad or Beirut. An unbroken night's sleep is out of the question.

On Sunday night, on the eve of the Chinese New Year, a firework sailed into a café near Beijing's Houhai Lake that my wife and I had been sitting in not an hour before. The café was set ablaze, one of 75 fires in the city that night that were caused by the celebrations.

To prevent such kinds of incidents, fireworks were actually banned inside Beijing and most urban areas of China from 1993 until 2005. But while the government frequently said the restriction reduced injuries and property loss, the ban was wildly unpopular -- and largely ignored. For the past three years, the government has bent to reality and lifted the ban for the Spring Festival period.

This year, the government is not only allowing the show to go on, it's helping to make sure no one in this city of 17.5 million (and that's a low-end estimate) runs out of explosives until they're fully done celebrating the Ox's arrival. The Beijing Municipal Office of Fireworks said that a stockpile of half a million boxes of fireworks -- some of them miniature versions of the ones used during the opening of the 2008 Olympic Games -- was available for the 15-day period between the Lunar New Year and the Lantern Festival on Feb. 9. The value of the fireworks that will go up in smoke over that time has been estimated at more than $15-million.

In many ways, it's an astonishing decision by a government that otherwise exerts so much control over people's lives. Want to buy a copy of Ma Jian's latest book Beijing Coma or surf the website of Amnesty International? The government has banned the former from Chinese bookstores and blocks access to the latter.

Want to whistle a firework a few metres above your neighbour's head in the middle of the afternoon? Go ahead. There's no better way to say happy New Year. I even saw policemen surreptitiously set off a few rounds when they thought no one was watching them. According to the Xinhua news agency, 46 people were injured on the first night of the celebrations. The latter number, though, was portrayed as good news since it was barely half the number who were hurt during the celebrations 12 months ago to welcome the first day of the Year of the Rat.

So what is a recently arrived Canadian -- brought up to think that fireworks displays are something that only the National Capital Commission can properly handle -- to do amid all this unhinged revelry? How does one respond after nearly being burned to a crisp in a coffee shop?

The only thing I could think of to do was join in. Later that same night, we headed down to the public square that stretches between Beijing's historic Drum and Bell towers with a plastic bag full of explosives that you'd need a license to buy in Ontario. With hundreds of other revelers, we welcomed the Ox in the noisiest, most reckless way we could.

Call it self-defence.

Please look after this bear

2009-01-22T18:09:00.004+03:00

An article I wrote about the Russia-Georgia war and what it could mean for Ukraine appeared in this month's issue of This magazine.

Here's a snippet:

While these conflicts aren’t completely about oil, the media shouldn’t buy the simplistic democracy-versus-authoritarianism line the State Department is flogging either. It’s a clash of empires, one falling from the height of its power, the other rising from the rubble of defeat. In this increasingly overt battle, national prestige and natural resources trump the will of Georgian and Ukrainian voters.

This isn’t a call for appeasement. If Russia interferes in Ukraine’s elections, it needs to be confronted with tough diplomacy or even sanctions. But the same rules should apply to Western governments, who in 2004 not only unequivocally backed President Viktor Yushchenko, but also poured money (as they did during Georgia’s revolt a year earlier) into youth groups that led street protests against the pro-Russian regime. Unlike in 2004, we shouldn’t seek to vanquish Russia and its allies in the country. Instead, Ukraine’s leaders should be coaxed toward a power-sharing arrangement that reflects the truly divided nature of the country.

You can buy This on Canadian newsstands for $6.

Or, sigh, read the whole piece for free here.

Let me know what you think.

Free Hossein Derakhshan!

2008-12-12T07:07:00.000+03:00

Terrible news. It's been confirmed that Hossein Derakhshan, the prolific and controversial Iranian-Canadian blogger who is known as the "Blogfather" of the Persian blogosphere has been arrested in Iran.

Making this even creepier (for me) is the news that Hossein's last public act was to join the "Road to Jerusalem" group that was following this blog via Facebook.

Most disturbing are the reports that Hossein was accused of spying for Israel. In Iran, that charge can often be a death sentence.

I met Hossein once, and yes it was in Jerusalem. But he walked the streets proudly wearing an "I Love Tehran" T-shirt (probably the first one ever worn in Israel) in an over-the-top effort to challenge stereotypes and tackle the misconceptions that exist in both Tel Aviv and Tehran.

Yes, he was a critic of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. Yes, he openly admired the Israel and the West. But he was also fiercely proud of his Iranian heritage, and called Iran the freest country in the Middle East after Israel. Though himself an atheist, he expressed admiration for Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

This man is no spy. If Iran wants to be anything close to the marvellous place Hossein Derakhshan always claimed it was, the government must release the Blogfather immediately.

To Jerusalem, by bullet-proof bus

2008-11-09T20:47:00.004+03:00

By bus, Tapuach, West Bank to Jerusalem - Friday, Nov. 7

I arrived in Jerusalem today, 30 days after I left it. Fittingly, the final leg of my road was through the most complicated part of the Middle East, and among the Jewish settlers who make it so by insisting on their God-given right to live on land that most of the world recognizes as belonging to the Palestinians.

I rode Egged bus 148 from the heart of the West Bank home to Jerusalem. It's a bus specifically for settlers, and is outfitted with double-paned bulletproof windows to protect it from attack as it rolls through the Palestinian Territories. It doesn't stop in any of the Arab towns along the way.

My fellow passengers, however, were far from stereotypes. While there were indeed religious fundamentalists on the bus, racing to beat the sun - and the beginning of Jewish Sabbath - to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, I spent most of the ride chatting with a young couple who themselves reflected the current divide within Israel.

Both were named Adi, and were students at the college in the West Bank settlement of Ariel. She, Adi Saidoff, is a 22-year-old believer in the idea that the West Bank is part of Greater Israel. A resident of a moshav outside Jerusalem, she said she was proud to go to school in Ariel because it meant she was contributing to the settlement project.

Her 25-year-old boyfriend, Adi Fardouq, was less sure. The son of a prominent member of Israel's left-wing Labour Party, he said he wasn't sure Jews should remain in places like Ariel.

"If we take from them, they will take from us," the deeply tanned engineering student explained before his equally tanned girlfriend, an economics major who hid her eyes behind over-sized sunglasses, interrupted.

"They're sitting on our land," she said, speaking of the Palestinians without mentioning them. "The places where the settlements are need to belong to us."

"I don't think so," he retorted as our bus rolled through the yellow gate of the sprawling Ofra settlement, with its red-roofed homes on a hilltop overlooking Ramallah. "Every time we take land from them, we open this conflict further."

While both were agnostic about the looming Israeli election - a vote that could decide which Adi sees their vision fulfilled - they were both worried by this week's victory by Barrack Obama in the U.S. presidential election.

Falsehoods such as that Obama is a Muslim are commonly repeated here, and Israelis are deeply concerned that he will reverse America's historic support for Israel and instead sympathize with the Palestinians.

Several passengers on the bus said that Israel's very existence - or at least its presence in the West Bank -would be threatened without U.S. backing.

"We can say that Israel exists because of America. They're the ones who liberated the concentration camps, and until now they give us large amounts of money," said Binyamin Lumbre, an 85-year-old who left his native France three years ago - citing rising violence in the suburbs of Paris where he lived - to take up residence in the West Bank settlement of Eli.

"If America doesn't support Israel in the future, if it doesn't give us the money, we'll be in great difficulty."

Which, of course, is exactly the outcome the vast majority of the Muslim and Arab world is hoping for.

West Bank traveller's index

2008-11-09T20:47:00.003+03:00

By bus from Nablus to Jerusalem -Friday, Nov. 7

Number of our Egged bus: 148

Number of Israeli Jews on the bus: 37

Number of Arabs: 0

Number of Jewish settlements the 148 passes through: 10 (including Jewish neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem)

Number of Palestinian towns the 148 stops in: 0

Number of military checkpoints we pass through: 4

Time our bus spent waiting at said checkpoints: none (Egged buses aren't searched by Israeli soldiers)

Number of panes of bulletproof glass the bus windows are made of: 2

Height of the concrete wall we passed through separating the Israeli settlement of Pisgaat Zeev from the outskirts of the Palestinian capital of Ramallah: eight metres

Signs of the times

2008-11-09T20:47:00.001+03:00

Tapuach Junction, West Bank - Friday, Nov. 8

I'm now out of Nablus, having crossed the massive Huwwara checkpoint on the city's southern edge. I'm waiting at a bus stop with Jewish settlers to take me the final leg to Jerusalem.

The mood here can be summed up by the black-and-white poster glued to the metal side of the bus stop, which is defended by cement blocks for passengers to duck behind in the case of attack:

"Struggle for the Land of Israel," the sign reads.

"No to a Palestinian state!"

"They are S-C-A-R-Y!!!"

Yes, with hyphenated letters and three exclamation points.

A 15 minute drive north, in the Old City of Nablus, the walls are plastered with photos of Palestinian "martyrs" - members of Hamas and the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades - who died in the last intifada. The ancient stones are also covered spray-painted swastikas.

The middle ground is unrepresented anywhere in these parts

The prisoners of Nablus

2008-11-09T20:46:00.001+03:00

Nablus, West Bank - Thursday, Nov. 6

When I first met Adly Yaish nearly three years ago, he was full of excitement. Just elected the mayor of the West Bank city of Nablus with a whopping 74 per cent of the vote (besting four other candidates), the businessman-turned-politician was a believer in the future, in democracy, even in Israeli-Palestinian co-existence.

Today, he slumps at his desk as he describes the 15 months he spent in Israeli prison without ever being charged with anything (though Yaish says he is not a member of Hamas, he ran for election on their list during 2005 municipal elections) since his election. His release was ordered nine separate times during that span by Israeli judges. Nine times, the prosecutors found ways to keep him in prison (the tactic is known as "administrative detention") while they futilely tried to build a case. Nearly half his term in office was wasted behind bars

But Yaish gets truly depressed when he describes what has happened to his beloved Nablus, a 2,000-year-old city set deep in a valley in the northern West Bank. Rather than restoring a sense of normalcy to the city through planned upgrades to its sewage system and electricity grid, the 56-year-old Liverpool University mechanical engineering graduate has seen the city's cultural and economic life crumble during his time in office.

“Nablus used to be the commercial capital of the Palestinians, now it's the capital of poverty. It used to be the biggest city in the West Bank, now it's the biggest village,” he told me as we drank zaatar-infused tea at his office this evening. “The situation has gotten so much worse in the past three years. The really bad news is that people are starting to lose hope.”

Nablus's ailment is easy to identify. The city and its 180,000 residents are surrounded by six Israeli checkpoints, 14 Jewish settlements and 26 settlement outposts, the latter of which are illegal even under Israeli law. Getting in and out of the city is a chore for anyone and impossible for many. Commercial interaction with the rest of the West Bank – never mind the rest of the world – has been almost completely choked off.

Some residents haven't left the city since the last intifada began in the fall of 2000. Thousands of children have never seen the world beyond the checkpoints.

Once a hotbed of militant activity, Nablus and the nearby Balata refugee camp are largely quiet these days. Large numbers of gunmen who once fought Israel have handed in their weapons to the Palestinian Authority, and PA policemen now control the streets. The Israeli army, however, still enters at will and makes arrests, as it did today when a group of undercover officers apprehended Hamas member Mohammed Kharraz from the convenience store his family owns in the city.

Yaish says that Israel's refusal to lift the checkpoints or stop the military incursions into his city means that the current calm cannot last.

“When I was in prison, I told the man interrogating me: ‘Look, I'm the mayor of Nablus. Seventy-four per cent of the people voted for me. I never did anything wrong, I never harmed anybody. When you put me in prison, what do you think will happen? Do you think the people of Nablus will become more peaceful?' I told him, ‘You are hurting the Israeli cause. You are not hurting mine.'”

Hitchhiking to the "Capital of Terror"

2008-11-09T20:45:00.004+03:00

Hitchhiking from Hamra checkpoint to Nablus, West Bank – Thursday, Nov. 6

Finally, after prolonged negotiations – and several phone calls to the public relations staff of the Israeli military in Tel Aviv – I'm allowed to pass through Hamra checkpoint (pictured, with Israeli soldiers checking documents), along with my translator, Nuha Musleh.

(Apparently, Nuha was part of the problem. Although she identifies herself as Palestinian – and lives on the wrong side of the wall Israel is building in the West Bank – she holds East Jerusalem residency, which comes with an Israeli ID card. Israelis aren't allowed into Nablus, which is surrounded by imposing checkpoints built during the violence of the recent Palestinian uprising, or intifada.)

Our minibus has left us long ago, so we're left to stand on the side of the road, trying to thumb a ride the rest of the way to the city the Israeli military calls the West Bank's “Capital of Terror” in its press releases. During the intifada, the city is a stronghold of both Hamas and the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, and the Israeli army still conducts regular arrest raids here, including one earlier today.

After a few minutes of standing with our arms out, Ahmed and Khaireddin, two Palestinian farm labourers, pull over and offer to give us a lift to the next town, Toubas. Nuha and I climb into the back of their white Mercedes pick-up truck, and make room for ourselves amidst their water canisters and welding masks.
Ahmed and Khaireddin are coming back from a day working at a kibbutz inside Israel where they make 120 shekels (about $35) in a day. They don't care about the politics of that, as long as it puts food on their families' table.

“There's nothing in Palestine,” Ahmed explains, rubbing two dirty fingers together to emphasize his point.

They drop us at the entrance to Toubas, where a kindly old man offers Nuha and I some tea while we wait for a taxi to come along. It doesn't take long before a car offers to drive us to Nablus for 10 shekels. It's taken us more than three hours to reach the city, which is just 40 kilometres north of our starting point, Jericho.
“Life is difficult here,” Mustafa, our driver, says after listening to a recounting of our journey. “Nablus died when the checkpoints were built.”

As he drives we listen to the latest news on BBC Arabic radio. The new U.S. president-elect, Barrack Obama, apparently has hired Rahm Emmanuel to be his chief of staff. Everyone in the cab notes with a sigh that Emmanuel is Jewish, and therefore likely to side with Israel in the decades-old conflict that has made life in Nablus so miserable.

Mustafa turns to me, taking his eyes off the chaotic Nablus traffic that seems to be coming at us from all directions. “This Obama, do you think he can help us?” he asks.

I give him the standard Palestinian answer to a such a direct, difficult-to-answer, question: “Insha'allah.”
God willing.

Absurdistan

2008-11-09T20:45:00.003+03:00

By minibus from Jericho to Hamra checkpoint, West Bank - Thursday, Nov. 6

Travelling within the Israeli-occupied West Bank is always a journey through the absurd.

After the Jericho "rest stop," I board a yellow minibus heading north to the city of Nablus. Or at least, it eventually heads north. To avoid having to pass through the checkpoints that surround Jericho and protect the nearby Jewish settlements, we first head south, and then east before finally turning north up through the Jordan Valley. In all, our driver says, we're adding 35 kilometres to what should be a straight 40-km run.

There are nine of us, including a young family of four from Nablus, on the journey. As we pass through the scenic Jordan Valley, my fellow passengers emit a series of sighs.

After passing through another Israeli military checkpoint, we drive along the Dead Sea, with its unique and healing mineral-rich waters. Israelis and foreigners can lounge at the four-star resorts that line its eastern bank, but not Palestinians. "I went for the first time from the Jordanian side," laughs Aladdin Nasser, a tailor and father of two from Nablus. There's no mirth in his chuckle.

"The situation is bad, but we are used to it," his wife Filisteen told me, cradling her 1 1/2 year-old son in her lap. Round-faced and wearing a flowered tightly wrapped head scarf, she told me that Israeli soldiers often gave her trouble at checkpoints because of her name, which is Arabic for "Palestine."

"It makes some of them laugh and makes some of them angry. They say, 'Why are you named Filisteen?'"

We drive north past a string of Jewish settlements and Israeli-owned greenhouses and fruit plantations. Under the peace proposal favoured by the Israeli government, they would retain the strategic and fertile Jordan Valley

"I can't even stop for gas here," our driver," 30-year-old Muayyad Awad explains. That's an improvement, however. A year ago, no Palestinians were allowed to drive this road, Highway 90.

After just over an hour of driving, we reach Hamra, an Israeli checkpoint on the road to Nablus. The soldiers take our passports and express surprise at seeing a Canadian journalist aboard Palestinian public transportation.

"I don't think I can let you pass," a young soldier with a British accent and an American M-16 tells me.

Not wanting to hold up the other passngers, I get off the bus. For 45 minutes now, I've been standing by the side of the road in the middle of the West Bank. My passport confiscated, I can go neither forwards nor backwards until the Israeli soldiers give me permission to do so.

"Now you're a real Palestinian," a young man with a stubbly face - stuck in the same situation as I me - laughs. This time, there's real mirth

West Bank blues

2008-11-09T20:45:00.001+03:00

Jericho, West Bank - Thursday, Nov. 6

"Smell the jasmine and taste the olives," my mobile phone tells me. "Welcome to Palestine."

Not yet.

The Istiraha, or "rest station" in Jericho is anything but restful. Our bus from the border heads into an Israeli closed military zone where inside our passports are taken from us by Palestinian security guards. Meanwhile we 48 travellers sit on the idling bus, waiting while our passports are checked for the third time in a matter of a few kilometres.

The Istiraha is nominally under the control of the Palestinian Authority, but there little question who's in control here. The PA guards have nice camouflage uniforms, but no weapons. The Israeli soldiers who control the perimetre are equipped with American-made M-16 assault rifles and armoured jeeps.

It's one of the most damaging criticisms of the Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas: that in seeking peace with Israel while simultaneously waging a quiet war against the Islamist Hamas movement, its security forces have become little more than part of the occupation.

Into Palestine

2008-11-09T20:44:00.001+03:00

By taxi and bus from Amman, Jordan to Jericho, West Bank Thursday, Nov. 6

Entering the Palestinian Territories from other parts of the Arab world is always a sombre experience. You're going to a place many Arabs - particularly the millions of Palestinian refugees scattered around the region since the 1948 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars - dream of seeing, but will likely never visit in their lifetimes.

This morning I was driven from downtown Amman to the King Hussein border crossing (known as the Allenby Bridge to Israelis, after the British general who built it in 1918) by Tariq Hassan, a 48-year-old Jordanian of Palestinian descent who had only seen his hometown of Ramallah once, when his father took him there as a 13-year-old boy.

"I still remember it," Tariq told me as we descended towards the Dead Sea, with the Palestinian city of Jericho coming into sight. "But I don't know if I'll ever go back. They will never give me a visa, I don't think."

The Jordanian side of the border crossing is a surreal experience where foreigners are whisked through with as little hassle as necessary (I drank coffee and watched al-Jazeera while my passport was processed) while hundreds of Palestinians queue for hours in a separate terminal.

But it's on the other side, once you've passed the last photographs of King Abdullah II and his father King Hussein and see the Star of David for the first time, that the disparity becomes plainest.

Israeli security services are notoriously intrusive and impolite (I've been left shaking with anger by airport security who often go so far as to ask to see e-mails between me and my editors in Toronto as proof that I'm being sent somewhere on assignment) but today it's relatively painless for a Canadian guy named Mark.

"What's you family name?" the unsmiling young female guard asks me when I get to the front of the long passport line inside the Israeli side of the border terminal.

"MacKinnon." Just like it says in my passport. I pronounce it in as an unthreatening a manner as those three syllables can be uttered.

"Your father's name?"

"Wayne."

"Your grandfather's name?"

"Gerard."

We both know the drill. If I answer "Mohammed" or something similar to any of the questions, it's off to the little interrogation room for me. Wayne and Gerard sounds sufficiently un-al-Qaeda, so I'm allowed through quickly. Welcome to Israel.

The Ahmeds and the Fatimas stand in line behind me, some seated off to the side awaiting their confrontation with the Shin Bet internal security service. Many of these people were born and live in the West Bank, but they could never dream of such rapid passage to their own home.

(I've had friends - with Canadian passports - delayed for four or five hours because their last name was Ibrahim or because their grandfather's name sounded suspicious to the Israeli ear.)

After passport control, I board an air conditioned 48-seat passenger bus whcih for 16 shekels (about $4) will take me and 47 Palestinians to the mandatory next stop for those who can't afford the exorbitant taxi fares onwards - the main bus station in Jericho. You can't be in a rush to get there. The bus doesn't leave until every seat is full.

President Obama: the Middle East press responds

2008-11-09T20:42:00.000+03:00

Here's a quick look at how the press in the Middle East — arguably the region likely to be most affected by yesterday's U.S. election — interpreted the news that Barrack Obama is on his way to the White House:

“No declaration of support and no promising statements can diminish the fear many Israelis' have of U.S president-elect Barak Obama … . [Some Israelis] identify Obama, black and bearing Hussein as a middle name, as a supporter of the oppressed in Third World countries, and fear that he will automatically side with the Palestinians.” — Aluf Benn, columnist in Israel's Haaretz newspaper.

“Exit polls: 78 per cent of Jews voted for Obama” — headline in the Jerusalem Post.

“[President-elect Obama's] political charisma, eloquence, and sharp intuitive intelligence would not have been the sole factors that led to his victory, and to him becoming the leader of the world's strongest power — in fact, the leader of the entire world. In fact, his victory will have been the outcome of the crushing defeat the Arabs and Muslims have inflicted on the former U.S. administration, stirring hatred against it from its own citizens first, but from the entire world as well” — Abdelbari Atwan, writing in the pan-Arab al-Quds al-Arabi.

“Black Kennedy to White House” — headline in Lebanon's al-Akhbar newspaper, which is considered pro-Hezbollah

“Public opinion in Iran and the Middle East believes that Obama and McCain are two faces of the same coin. The victory of either won't have the least impact on the situation of these countries. In other words a yellow dog is a jackal's brother [Iranian proverb meaning cut from the same cloth].” — editorial in Iran's hardline Hezbollah newspaper

“Why did the Obama wave explode? Because he represents what is ‘new.' Because he captures the ‘spirit of the times.' Because he provides hope for ‘change.' Because he captures the imagination of ‘youth.' Because he can be trusted as a leader. We hope that Barack Obama will make history in the White House, and will not disappoint our hopes for change and ‘revolution.'” — Hasan Cemal, writing in Turkey's centrist Milliyet newspaper.

“No matter who wins US vote, hope remains for peace” — headline in the Jordan Times.

“Everyone knows that the period of U.S. foolishness is over” — headline in Syria's state-run Tishreen newspaper.

Middle East Electoral College: final results

2008-11-09T20:39:00.000+03:00

Amman, Jordan – Wednesday, Nov. 5

“Mabruk!” the purple-uniformed bellboy shouted at me across the lobby of the Hyatt hotel. “Congratulations!”

To tell him that I wasn't American, and therefore not responsible in any way for electing Barrack Obama yesterday, would have ruined the moment. All day today, Jordanians from all walks of life, as well as some of the Iraqi and Palestinian refugees who now live here, expressed their delight that the United States had chosen – as they see it – to end eight years of confrontation between the West and the Muslim world and to elect someone who appears to be the complete opposite of George W. Bush.

Despite warm ties between Bush and Jordan's King Abdullah II, the last eight years have been unkind to this desert kingdom, which had long been an oasis of calm and stability in a turbulent region. Bush's decision to launch the 2003 invasion of neighbouring Iraq – quietly supported by the Jordanian government – has since driven some 750,000 Iraqis into refuge in Jordan.

The violence tearing Iraq apart spilled over the border in November 2005 when suicide bombers dispatched by the Jordanian-born head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, attacked three hotels on the same night, killing 60 people and targeting the country's vital tourism industry. (The Hyatt hotel was one of those attacked that night. Staying here remains a bit eerie despite the completely refurbished lobby.)

And all that is in addition to the estimated 1.7 million Palestinian refugees (a low-ball estimate) who have lived here for decades. King Abdullah publicly backed both President Bush's failed “road map” to Middle East peace (which was supposed to deliver a Palestinian state by 2005) and the stalled Annapolis peace process that was launched last year. No progress has been made, and the Palestinian refugee population in Jordan continues to grow.

So it's little surprise that Jordanians are as happy to see the end of the Bush era as anyone else in the Middle East. Here's a sampling of what I heard today as I toured Amman, as well as a nearby Palestinian refugee camp and al-Zarqawi's hometown of Zarqa. Only one woman told me that she had hoped to see McCain win, and she said that was because she hated America and “wanted the worst for them.”

“In the Middle East, everybody is happy today. They wanted to see someone different for from Bush and people saw Senator McCain as an extension of Bush. It's not so much for Obama as against an extension for Bush.”

-Adnan Abu Odeh, former head of the royal court under King Abdullah II's father, King Hussein.

“Obama will bring change, God willing.”

– Jawat Barghouti, a Texan-Palestinian-Jordanian who said he voted for the new president-elect.

“I'm very happy. God willing he will be good for us, for the Palestinian cause. Bush ruined all the world.”

- Mohammed al-Ayyan, 62-year-old tailor in the Hitteen Palestinian refugee camp near Zarqa.

“We have problems no matter who is president. God willing (Obama) will be better if he follows what he say.”

- Umm Karam, 60-year-old grandmother in Hitteen refugee camp.

“We don't need Obama or McCain. We just need America to leave us alone.”

– Mohammed, taxi driver in Amman.

So give Jordan and the final 34 seats to Obama, giving him an even more convincing win in our little Middle East Electoral College than he achieved in the real one in the United States.

Barack Obama (Dem.) — 475 votes
John McCain (Rep.) — 65 votes

Why such a wide margin? Well, outside of Israel (where people are worried that a President Obama will be less supportive of the Jewish state and pressure it into accepting a peace deal that includes giving up most of the occupied West Bank) and Iraqi Kurdistan (where Kurds are worried that a hasty withdrawal from Iraq will plunge the country into a civil war that they will not be able to stay out of), Middle Easterners are simply tired of the war and tumult that have marked the Bush years.

Syrians and Iranians are hoping that a President Obama will deliver on his promises to use dialogue instead of force and to meet with those that the Bush Administration ostracized as enemies. Turks want to see an end to the chaos that has spilled over Iraq's borders into their own.

Palestinians and other Arabs are hoping – just as Israel fears – that Obama will be a more neutral arbiter than the openly pro-Israeli President Bush. I repeatedly heard that “war on terror” can't be won unless the U.S. president, whoever that happens to be, first brings an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which a wide majority of Middle Easterners see as the chief cause of Muslim radicalism.

In other words, the expectations in this battered region could scarcely be any higher, or more difficult to fulfill. But if and when the new president-elect heads down his own “Road to Jerusalem,” he'll begin his journey with all the goodwill he needs.

Middle East Electoral College: Syria results

2008-11-09T19:39:00.000+03:00

Damascus, Syria – Tuesday, Nov. 4

The polls have just open across the United States, but they're vote has long been decided in Syria, where Barrack Obama has unsurprisingly won another clear victory in our unscientific little survey of how Middle East voters feel.

Asking Syrians their opinion about politics is like walking around the Vatican asking who's gay. Most people just blush and walk away when you bring up the topic.

That said, a few Syrians did open up and share their opinions, usually when they were in situations where they could be certain that no one was listening. All who did talk frankly with me said they either supported Obama or none of the above. Not one wanted to see a McCain victory, for the same reason I've heard elsewhere in the Arab world — he's seen as more likely to continue the reviled policies of George W. Bush.

Here's a sampling of what I heard:

"I think Obama is better, but America's policy to Syria will not change no matter who is president."

— Rami, 35, bartender working at a resort in the coastal town of Lattakia.

“People here believe Obama has an inclination to use diplomacy instead of military force. He likes to talk rather than flex his muscles, and I think we need to talk rather than fight.”

— Marwan Kabalan, political scientist at the University of Damascus.

"We support whichever person will help us get back Golan"

— Georges Salim Attoun, gold seller in the old city of Damascus, referring to the strategic Golan Heights area that Israel has occupied since a 1967 war.

"You can see from their faces which one is better. Obama has a better smile, a better personality."

— Sarah, 23, waitress and model based in Damascus.

"Obama or McCain? Bashar Assad!"

— nearly everyone else I asked.

So we colour Syria blue and award Obama 98 more seats in the electoral college, adding to his already wide margin of victory over McCain.

Barack Obama (Dem.) — 441 votes
John McCain (Rep.) — 65 votes

Jordan, which has 34 seats in our electoral college, will be the last to vote. Look for the final results here tomorrow, as well as perhaps a little analysis of what I've heard across this region about Bush, Obama and McCain since my journey began back on Oct. 8.

Syrian visa roulette

2008-11-09T19:28:00.000+03:00

By car from Damascus, Syria to Amman, Jordan - Tuesday, Nov. 4

Technically, I'm banned from reporting in Syria.

I found this out last year while working on a series tracing the plight of Iraq's millions of refugees.

I asked for a visa to visit Syria — the country that had absorbed the largest number of Iraqis since 2003 — and was told I was no longer welcome.

The official reason given was that the Syrian regime had discovered that I lived in Jerusalem, and Syria denies visas to all those who have visited what it refers to as Occupied Palestine. But I knew from experience that Syria turns a blind eye to where most journalists are based so long as their coverage is perceived as fair to Bashar Assad and his buddies.

The real problem, a contact of mine in Damascus explained, was that the Ministry of Information had examined my work and found a) that I regularly referred to Bashar Assad as a dictator (Gasp! How dare I?) and b) reported on the alleged connection that United Nations investigators had found between Syria and the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.

Guilty on both counts, though the latter simply reporting the UN investigator's findings, not any conclusions of my own. Surely, I protested, other journalists had done the same without getting banned. My contact dug deeper and found the real reason was a favourable portrait I had written back in 2006 of Michel Kilo, the jailed writer who is one of the leaders of Syria's democratic opposition. Apparently the regime saw red when I compared Kilo to the likes of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Vaclav Havel, dissident writers who were also persecuted, but eventually helped bring down authoritarian regimes in their countries.

Here's the story. Read it again if only because Bashar Assad doesn't want you to.

Despite the ban, I was able — to my own surprise — to enter enter Syria twice in the past week despite the fact that I had no visa, tourist, journalist or otherwise.

When I crossed into Syria last week from Turkey, I was given a three-day pass only after a short interrogation by the border guards. They asked me my profession and whether I'd ever been to Israel. I lied on both counts and they waved me across. Though they had computers, I could see they weren't connected to anything but each other, so there was little risk of being caught. (The Syrian regime is paranoid about the Internet, having banned such sites as Facebook and Hotmail out of fear they could be used to foment dissent. In the information age, such an attitude can damn an entire country, or at least its rulers, to obsolescence.)

Yesterday, I crossed from Lebanon with even less hassle. An uninterested border guard stamped me in for 15 days without making me fill out the standard form. Perhaps he thought I was part of the group of Iraqis driving ahead of me in a white Oldsmobile with red Baghdad license plates who had overtly bribed the customs officials with a bottle of Lebanese arak not to look in their car.

I was quite pleased with myself last night as I wandered the old city of Damascus, chatting with the locals for the story about Syrian attitudes toward the U.S. election that appeared in today's newspaper. I had outsmarted Syria's vaunted intelligence services.

Or at least I thought I had until I arrived today at the Syria-Jordan border. When the guard asked me my profession I told him I was a teacher, the cover story I usually use when entering journalist-unfriendly places like Syria, Belarus and Zimbabwe.

"No you're not," he replied in English before switching to Arabic.

"Inta sahafi," he said accusingly, knowing I'd understand. You're a journalist.

"No," I stammered, leaning forward to try and catch a glimpse of what it said on his computer screen.

He spared me the effort. "Mark MacKinnon, The Globe and Mail, Canadian newspaper," he read.

Busted. Terrifying images of what the inside of a Syrian jail might look like floated through my head.

"Yes, but I'm leaving now," was the only reply I could formulate.

The guard dropped a blue exit stamp into my passport. "That's good for you," he said with a smile.

Quote of the week

2008-11-09T19:18:00.001+03:00

Damascus, Syria - Monday, Nov. 3

"I think if Syrians had a vote it would be 99 per cent in favour of Obama. In other words, a proper Syrian election."

— Joshua Landis, Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma.

Checkpoint etiquette

2008-11-09T19:17:00.002+03:00

Zahlé, Lebanon - Monday, Nov. 3, 2008

A snippet of conversation from a military checkpoint that my car was stopped at:

Lebanese soldier: Documents, please. (He has a black M-16 assault rifle slung around his shoulder. With him standing and me sitting, the business end of the gun is pointed right at my face. I hand over my passport.)

Me: Can I ask a question?

LS: Go ahead.

Me: I've heard that in the Arab world it's very impolite to point the sole of your foot at someone. Is this true? (Arabs do indeed hate this. The bottom of your foot is considered unclean. Hence all the slapping of Saddam Hussein's fallen statues with sandals back in 2003.)

LS: Yes. It's very bad. (He smiles, and seems pleased by my interest in the local culture.)

Me: I understand. In Canada we consider it very rude to point your rifle at someone.

(The soldier understands and swings his rifle behind his back. He returns my passport with a sharp salute. Perhaps a small victory for civility has been won this fine day in Lebanon.)

Middle East Electoral College: Lebanon results

2008-11-09T19:13:00.001+03:00

Zahlé, Lebanon – Sunday, Nov. 2, 2008

Barrack Obama's sweep of the real battleground states continues.

In Lebanon, as in Turkey, George W. Bush achieved the rare feat of unifying the country's quarrelling political factions around their disdain for him and his policies of the past eight years.

The militant Shia Hezbollah movement and its allies hate Bush for his open and unblinking support of Israel, particularly during the 2006 war during which the Israeli military laid waste to much of South Lebanon. When the war was over, Hezbollah supporters hung "Made in the USA" banners over destroyed apartment blocks and mocked claims by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the war had been part of process to bring about a "new Middle East."

That Hassan Nasrallah's followers aren't fans of the Bush Administration is hardly surprising. Far more damning is the hurt disappointment of the country's pro-Western groups, who feel the U.S. abandoned them during and after the war, even though the White House had initially held up the 2005 Cedar Revolution here as proof that "freedom" was indeed spreading in the region.

Here's a sampling of what I heard during my journeys from Tripoli to Byblos to Beirut to Baalbek:

"Obama hates war. Bush wants war against the Muslims and the Arabs and I think McCain will be like Bush."

– Bilal Ramadan, 21-year-old science student. An Allawite Shiite, he lives in the northern city of Tripoli.

"I don't think Obama will be racist in his policies. Black people are not biased towards Israel."

– Khodor Kamaleddin, taxi driver. Works outside the Commodore Hotel in Hamra, a Sunni Muslim neighbourhood of Beirut.

"I like the black one. I like what he is saying. The other one is like Bush, his policies are very bad."

– Wafa Darwish, a 40-year-old schoolteacher from the northern town of Qalmoun.

"Obama is better because he will sympathize with the Arab people and our causes. We hope that this is not just advertising."

– Bilal Bayan, 36-year-old shopkeeper in the Hezbollah-dominated tourist city of Baalbek.

"I am disappointed in both candidates. They are avoiding the big issue, which is the question of Palestine."

– Ahmed Fatfat, MP and former cabinet minister in the pro-Western Future Party.

Out of nearly two dozen Lebanese that I asked about the U.S. elections, only two said they favoured John McCain. So Obama sweeps Lebanon and its 21 electors, widening his already impressive lead in the race:

Barack Obama (Dem.) – 343 votes

John McCain (Rep.) – 65 votes

Obama already clinched the Middle East Electoral College back when he won Turkey, but Jordan and Syria still haven't had their say. Results from both countries should be in by the time polls close in the United States on Tuesday, so stay tuned.

From Hamra to Hezbollahland

2008-11-09T19:12:00.000+03:00

By taxi from Beirut to Baalbek, Lebanon - Sunday, Nov. 2

Heading east from the Lebanese capital of Beirut, perched on the Mediterranean Sea, to the Bekaa Valley near the Syrian border is not only a great way to this physically striking country, but also to get a sense of why Lebanon, a great idea in theory, has never worked in practice.

Some days it feels like the most open and tolerant place on earth, with Christian women wearing giant crosses that dangle in their out-there cleavage sharing the sidewalks with Shia women sporting headscarves so tight that not a single hair is visible. Lebanon, as the Lebanese are so fond of saying, sometimes feels like the answer to the so-called "clash of civilizations." (The nightlife is also superb – Beirutis are famous for partying even as the bombs fall. These days, with the country experiencing a rare stretch of relative peace and stability, it's entry by-reservation-only at most of the city's top clubs.)

But Beirut also wears the gruesome scars of all those times that the tolerance faded away and Christian fought Muslim and Sunni fought Shiite. Many buildings in the city centre remain uninhabitable shells of their former selves, torn to shreds by human anger expressed through lead.

I left my hotel in Beirut's Hamra neighbourhood today and headed east with my friend Jamal Jarbouh, a Palestinian refugee (his family is from Haifa) I'd met by chance in a gas lineup during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. Our white 1991 Mitsubishi whined as we rose up into the tree-covered Mount Lebanon range and drove through a line of alternatingly Christian and Druze towns, scenic rest spots today that were regularly turned to battlefields during the 1975-1990 civil war. They nearly were again this May as tensions spiked during and after the Shia Hezbollah militia turned its guns inside Lebanon for the first time and carried out a lightning military seizure of West Beirut.

As we follow the winding road through Mount Lebanon, Muslim villages are followed Christian ones less than a kilometre away. Unless you're Lebanese, you can only be sure of which you're in by looking at the political posters taped to telephone poles and the insides of shop windows. Christian towns are lined with billboards advertising the rival factions loyal to Christian leaders Michel Aoun, Samir Geagea and Amin Gemayel. Druze villages are dominated by the red flags of Walid Jumblatt's Progressive Socialist Party. All are leaders from the civil war era who are still revered by their followers today.

We're stopped in the Christian town of Zahle by an intelligence officer who takes issue with Jamal's Palestinian ID papers (Lebanon's Christians and Palestinian groups were worst of enemies during the civil war year and suspicions still linger). We're allowed to pass only when I explain to the officer in French that I'm Canadian and Jamal is with me.

Eventually, our car descends out of the mountains and we pass through a series of Lebanese army checkpoint on the edge of the Bekaa Valley.

The army checkpoints are the last sign we see of the Lebanese state for some time. Around Baalbek, the ancient Phonecian city that more recently was the birthplace of Hezbollah, the militant Shia movement's yellow banner here takes precedence over the red-and-white Lebanese flag. Giant photographs of the Hezbollah "martyrs" who died fighting Israel hang from nearly every post. There's Samir Qantar, the murderer who was just released from Israeli prison after 29 years as part of a macabre prisoners-for-body parts swap between Hezbollah and Israel. Imad Mugniyeh, the Hezbollah military commander killed this year in a mysterious explosion in Damascus that was blamed on Israel, is the most honoured of the dead.

Though just 85 kilometres away from Beirut and the bright lights of Hamra Street, Baalbek feels like a different country altogether, and in many ways it is. Here the power cuts on and off through the night (our Mitsubishi's headlights even got into the act, leaving us driving in complete darkness for a long stretch) and the mosques, not the nightclubs, are the centres of social activity. This is Hezbollahland.

Jamal and I spend part of the evening drinking tea with the locals at a coffeehouse not far from the Roman ruins that draw the steady stream of tourists that are the city's main source of income. The tea-drinkers are poor and middle class Shiites who speak of Beirut - and the government led by Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, a Sunni - as something far away that is the source of all their problems. Few are willing to bet that the peace that currently prevails in the country will last through next year's elections.

The trip from Beirut to Zahle to Baalbek makes me think of my travels in Iraq, where Sunni, Shiite and Kurd unwillingly live together for the arbitrary reason that British colonialists thought it was a good idea to draw the borders where they are today. Lebanon feels like a similarly false construct, two or more countries pressed together into one by their former French rulers who paid little attention to the demographic makeup of the state they were creating. As in Iraq, the errors of that time resonate still.

Guns and Buns

2008-11-09T19:08:00.000+03:00

Beirut - Sunday, Nov. 2, 2008

Tragically, the Guns and Buns restaurant in Beirut's Dahiyeh area was closed today when I went to go have lunch. I'd been thrilled by reports of a restaurant in the heart of the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital that served such delicacies as a “Magnum Pistol” (grilled chicken sandwich) or the “M-16 Carbine” (lamb on a toasted bun) both of which can be served with a side of “Grenades” (otherwise known as potato wedges).

The signature weapon of the Hezbollah fighter, the “AK-47 Kalashnikov,” is apparently beefsteak sandwich served in long baguette-style bread. No wonder the restaurant's advertising slogan is “a sandwich can kill you.”

“When you live by the beach, people make cafes that reflect that beach atmosphere,” owner Yousef Ibrahim once explained to a reporter. “So when you live in a war zone, I think you should make the most of that too.”

The restaurant, which opened this summer, isn't directly affiliated with Hezbollah, but the Shiite militia controls everything that happens in the Dahiyeh and gave Guns and Buns its seal of approval by running a story about it on the movement's al-Manar television network.

Pity the restaurant doesn't open on Sundays. I was left to peer forlornly through the window from its sandbag-protected patio, denied my chance to sample such delicacies as the “Tactical Meal” and the “Terrorist Meal.”

No word on whether there are toys for the kids with those.

The truth

2008-11-09T19:04:00.000+03:00

Beirut – Saturday, Nov. 1

The digital sign looming over the entrance to Beirut's Hamra neighbourhood is persistent, forlorn and accusing. Day 1,357 it says – three years, eight months and 17 days since the massive truck bomb blast that killed Lebanon's popular former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, and 21 others.

It was Feb. 14, 2005, a day that sent Lebanon on a long, downward spiral. Underneath the day counter is a simple plea written in Arabic: "al-haqiqa," it asks. "The truth."

I remember the bombing well. My wife and I were living in Beirut at the time, studying Arabic at the Lebanese American University. We on our lunch break between classes when the explosion shook the walls and windows of our apartment in Hamra. We ran out onto the balcony to see a thick, black pillar of smoke rising into the sky. We soon discovered that our Valentine's Day plans were among the casualties – the blast destroyed the restaurant where we had reserved a table for dinner that evening.

Until that moment, Hariri had been Mr. Lebanon, the man most responsible for bringing an end to the 1975-1990 civil war. He hosted the peace conference that produced the 1989 Taif Accords and rebuilt the country's shattered capital city (Hariri controlled the Solidere company that reconstructed, at great profit, the central district of Beirut that had been the front line during the civil war years).

The Valentine's Day bombing set Lebanon sliding back into the morass of violence and instability that Hariri had almost managed to pull the country out of before his death. His death was blamed by many Lebanese on neighbouring Syria, and the murder sparked the "Cedar Revolution" uprising that eventually forced Syria to withdraw its troops from Lebanon after a 29-year stay.

But the feel-good people-power moment wasn't meant to last. The militant Shia movement Hezbollah never signed on to the pro-Western Cedar Revolution (in fact, it organized its own counter demonstrations that were similar in size) and maintained its close links with both Damascus and Tehran. A year after the Cedar Revolution, Hezbollah staged a cross-border attack on an Israeli patrol that prompted a 34-day war that left an estimated 1,200 Lebanese dead and brought the bad old days back to Lebanon for good.

The country, already deeply divided over the Hariri murder and its fallout, was even further split by the war, with the pro-Western "Cedar" camp on one side, and Hezbollah and it allies on the other. The political standoff escalated later that year into Hezbollah-led street protests against the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and then exploded into open warfare on the streets of Beirut this May when Hezbollah seized the western half of the capital to back its demands for a larger say in government.

The streets of Beirut are calm again now – Rafik Hariri's son Saad recently met with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in an effort to resolve some of their many differences – but the murder still hangs over Lebanon's future. Canadian prosecutor Daniel Bellemare, appointed last year by the United Nations to investigate and prosecute the Hariri killing as well as a succession of political assassinations that followed, is due to deliver his final report and prosecutions are expected to follow.

Bellemare's findings – and the potential of high-profile and highly politicized trials at The Hague – will rock the political system here one more time if, as expected, he moves to indict senior figures in Lebanon's former Syrian-friendly government and perhaps in Damascus itself. That could lead to more instability and even more fighting. But it needs to happen nonetheless. This country won't be healed until the Lebanese know who killed Rafik Hariri, and why.

To Beirut, with a changing cast of characters

2008-11-01T20:37:00.001+03:00

By shared taxis from Tripoli, Lebanon to Beirut - Friday, Oct. 30

The best, and cheapest, way to travel around Lebanon is by what the locals call a servees, taxi cabs that fill up gradually with people heading (roughly) in the same direction. A few thousand Lebanese pounds buys you a seat in an overcrowded car (there were six people crammed in our beaten, brown Mercedes) and off you go.

I caught one today at sundown in the northern city of Tripoli that was heading in my direction, the Lebanese capital of Beirut. Passengers jumped in and out of our car — which was older than I was and sounded like a Cessna when it maxed out at 80 kilometres an hour — as we headed south down the coastal road that traces Lebanon's long border with the Mediterranean Sea.

Since I'm here — and Lebanon finally has Blackberry service — let me introduce you to some of the changing cast of characters sharing the car with me:

- Yehia Darwish, 28. The chatty driver of our whinging Mercedes and a resident of the troubled city of Tripoli. Thin and dark-featured, he chain-smokes Winston cigarettes and leaves the radio off as we drive. Biggest concern: rising costs on basic goods (though gasoline is falling in price) and an economic crisis that makes people stingy about taxi fares.

- Wafa Darwish, 40 (no direct relation to Yehia). Schoolteacher in the Sunni Muslim town of Qalmoun in north Lebanon. Short and animated, she covers her head with a flowered scarf. Biggest concern: the end of the era of George W. Bush — whom she blames for many of Lebanon's internal problems — can't come soon enough.

- Ramieh al-Hindi, 23-year-old Palestinian refugee and stay-at-home mother of two. Petite and outgoing, she wears tight jeans and stylish Western clothes despite her conservative surroundings. Biggest concern: more than a year after the Lebanese army's siege of the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp, she and her family still have no house to go home to.

- Milad Abed, 39, waiter at a fish restaurant in the ancient Christian city of Byblos. Round-faced and sleepy-looking, it appears he may have sampled the table wine this afternoon. Biggest concern: the political fighting inside Lebanon's large Christian community, which many worry could eventually spill over into street violence.

The conversation ebbs and flows as we head towards Beirut, eventually collapsing into silence after a raucous it's-my-turn-to-talk-to-the-foreigner start.

Night falls during our drive and Lebanon buzzes by in the dark. Caught between the Mediterranean Sea and the mountains, and more fatally between Syria and Israel, the scenery and the free-wheeling conversation remind me that Lebanon remains at once the best and worst corner of the Middle East.

Peace, for now

2008-11-01T20:35:00.001+03:00

Tripoli, Lebanon - Friday, Oct. 31

War never feels very far away in this bustling coastal city in north Lebanon. The sun-whitened office buildings and apartment blocks are scarred by bullet holes, reminders of the last civil war in this deeply divided country. The streets are thick with soldiers and armoured personnel carriers, trying to prevent the next one.

Lebanon very nearly slid back into internecine conflict six months ago, when fighters from the Shia Hezbollah militia, locked in a political dispute with the country's pro-Western government, briefly seized control of predominantly Sunni West Beirut. The civil war many have been predicting for some time might have begun then and there had there been another armed group capable of challenging Hezbollah.

Since then, Lebanon's myriad factions have come to a political accord that has taken the fighters off the streets, at least until crucial elections next year that will go a long way to deciding whether this country tilts west to Washington and Paris, or east to Damascus and Tehran.

An uneasy peace reigns for the moment, and nowhere is it more uncertain than in deeply religious Tripoli, where clashes between the city's Sunni majority and its Allawite minority remain a near-daily occurrence.

"(The Sunnis), they throw grenades here and the Lebanese army tells us not to retaliate. We are preparing ourselves for a bigger attack," said Daniel Dayeh, a 25-year-old Allawite living in the tense Jebel Mohsen neighbourhood of Tripoli. He was sitting with a dozen other Allawite men, all unemployed, outside a coffee shop plastered with photographs of Syrian leader Bashar Assad, who is also Allawite.

Downhill from Jebel Mohsen, Mustafa Alloush splits his time between tending to his duties as chief surgeon at the city's Nini hospital and heading up the local branch of the predominantly Sunni Future Movement. Future fighters were routed by Hezbollah in Beirut back in May, and some in Tripoli sought revenge against the Syrian-backed Allawis in this city.

"It's stable for now. The problem is that people do not believe it will stay as such," Alloush told me between patients at the Nini hospital. "People are waiting for something to happen."

High times in the Axis of Evil

2008-11-01T20:32:00.000+03:00

By car from Lattakia, Syria to Tripoli, Lebanon – Thursday, Oct. 30

After three weeks of wandering through Iran, Iraq and Syria, may I humbly present you a brief backpackers' guide to the three of the least-understood countries on the planet:

Syria:

DO

* Spend a day or more wandering the Old City of Damascus. It's simply one of the most magical places on the planet.
* Pop by the Krak des Chevaliers near the port city of Tartus. I was there today and could have easily spent several more hours than I did wandering what is easily the best-kept Crusader castle in the region. Almost untouched by time, it looks like something out of a fairy tale (see the photo).
* Pack some going-out clothes. Syria may be an honorary Axis of Evil member (I think John Bolton described them as being in a subgroup with Libya and Cuba, sort of like the minor leagues of evil), but that doesn't mean the people don't like to have a good time. Damascus has one of the best nightlife scenes in the Middle East.

DON'T

* Giggle at all the portraits of President Bashar Assad, even if such enforced adulation is silly in the extreme. I counted 12 of them in one room at the Lebanon-Syria border today, many with slogans like “we're all with you” and “we love you” printed underneath the pictures of the smiling dictator.
* Try and ask Syrians about politics. Nine times out of 10, you'll run into a stone wall. People who say what they think here can easily end up in jail.

Iraq

DO

* Spend an hour or more touring the ancient citadel overlooking the city of Irbil.
* Go for a stroll in the laid-back Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah. It's probably the only major city in Iraq where it's safe for a foreigner to walk around on their own, even after dark.
* Pop by the Christian town of Ainkawa, outside of Irbil. The German restaurant there is a pretty good send-up of a Munich beer house. There's a not-too-bad Chinese restaurant (think Manchu Wok) in Sulaymaniyah too.

DON'T

* Believe everything that you read. The “surge” is indeed working (along with, a more important decision by various Iraqi groups to hold their fire for now) and has reduced the level of violence from the insane heights of the bloodletting in 2006 and 2007 to the merely nutty levels of today, but this is still very much a war zone. Outside of the Kurdish north, it's only safe for a foreigner if you've got trustworthy Iraqi friends and a bulletproof vest. (For a daily tally of the latest violence, check out the Iraq Today website.)
* Leave home without Ciprofloxacin or some other wide-spectrum antibiotic in your kit. I've been to Iraq seven times and have gotten I'd-better-sit-down-and-start-writing-my-will sick on each occasion.

Iran (well, OK, Kish Island, the only part I was allowed to visit):

DO

* Do pull out an English newspaper or book if you're sitting by yourself at dinner. Iranians love showing off their mastery (or bare competency) of foreign languages. You'll be chatting with the locals in no time.
* Book yourself onto one of the dinner-boat cruises that circle this island after dark. It's the best way to see Iranians, in Iran, kicking back and relaxing as much as they're allowed to in the Islamic Republic.
* Check out the Dariush Grand Hotel, which somewhat garishly recalls the grandeur of ancient Persia.

DON'T

* Show up on Kish Island, hoping to talk your way into a full-fledged Iranian visa. Especially if you only have a Canadian passport.
* Hum the bars to John McCain's new hit song, “Bomb Iran.”

When I set out on this journey, some friends and family back home expressed concerns that I was taking my life into my hands (Iran, Iraq and Syria! Oh my!). And while it's certainly not a route for the faint-hearted, you don't need to be a journalist (actually it's probably better if you aren't, at least in Iran and Syria) to get a lot from such a trip. And while the bus services aren't great in some parts of Iraq and Syria, they're a great way to meet the ordinary people who live in these places and never make the news.

So, economic crisis be damned, call your travel agent now and tell them you want to see the Axis of Evil today. Get there before the American army does.

The sorry state of Syria's army

2008-11-01T20:30:00.000+03:00

Lattakia, Syria -Thursday, Oct. 29

The army of the Syrian Arab Republic often appears as the bad guy in Western media narratives.

They were the brutish soldiers who oppressed Lebanon throughout their 29-year-stay in that country. They're the jihadi-friendly outfit that looks the other way as suicide bombers to be cross Syria on their way to Iraq. Israelis still shudder at the mention of 1973, when the combined forces of Syria and Egypt staged a surprise attack one October morning.

Up close, they hardly live up to their nefarious reputation. Poorly paid and badly equipped, they're most often seen walking along the side of the road in their fading camouflage gear, trying to thumb rides.

Today, I met Abdo, a 29-year-old tour guide in Lattakia who recently finished his three-year stint as a conscript. He said he earned 300 Syrian pounds per month (about $6) while stationed near the Lebanese border. "I live with my mother, but I still need 5,000 or 6,000 pounds a month," he said. Which is why Syrian soldiers are notoriously corrupt. They live on bribes.

My first encounter with the feared Syrian army on this trip was a trio of soldiers manning a checkpoint near the Turkish border. Ostensibly, they were there to examine travellers' documents, but taking shelter from the rain in a roadside shack, they were much more interested in bumming cigarettes.

"Are those good to smoke?" a somewhat portly middle-aged soldier said, spotting a pack of Dunhill cigarettes lying in the front seat of my longtime friend Raed's car.

Raed, a Jordanian and a skilled negotiator of Middle Eastern checkpoints, flipped him the whole pack. We didn't want to be held up and scutinized. (More on that later.)

Seeing our apparent generosity, two other soldiers surged forward, leaving their Kalashnikov rifles leaning against their chairs. "Hey, there are three of us," one says. Raed handed over a second pack.

The first soldier asked Raed where "the foreigner," me, was from. "Canada," Raed said.

The soldier raised his eyebrows. "He looks like one of us," he offered with a shrug before waving us on. His curiosity had been bought off by the Dunhills.

It was easy to imagine the notorious foreign fighters of Iraq sliding through the same checkpoint with even more ease.

The U.S. brazenly bombed eastern Syria this week, claiming Damacus wasn't doing enough to clamp down on the flow of jihadis into Iraq. The truth is that even if Bashar Assad's regime were to make helping the U.S. priority No. 1 (something that's unlikely given the angry, if orchestrated, demonstrations at the U.S. Embassy in Damascus today) this underfunded, unmotivated force simply doesn't look nearly up to the task.

Myths and maps

2008-11-01T20:28:00.000+03:00

By taxi from Antakya, Turkey to Lattakia, Syria — Wednesday, Oct. 29

A snippet of the conversation I had today as I talked my way through Turkey's border with Syria:

Syrian soldier in ill-fitting uniform: Have you ever been to Occupied Palestine?

Me: Nope. No sirree. Never heard of it.

SS: Do you intend to visit Occupied Palestine after you leave Syria?

Me: No. Why would I want to visit such a place. I can tell it's heinous just by the way you spit its name out. (I'm paraphrasing here. I actually don't know the Arabic word for "heinous.")

Crossing borders in the Middle East is always a game. If your job requires you to live in Jerusalem (ie. the headquarters of the Zionist Entity/Occupied Palestine) and cover the rest of the Middle East (ie. the angry Arabs who just refuse to peacefully coexist with darling, expansionist little Israel) it's a game of bluff.

Having lived in Jerusalem for the past three-and-a-half years, I've perfected the art. The Syrians and the Lebanese want you to swear that you've never been to Israel, even if a quick Google search of my name would prove otherwise.

The Israelis, on the other hand, want you to gripe and complain about having to visit these awful countries that surround them.

"Where are you going?" I was asked by a security guard once at Israel's Ben Gurion airport as I checked in for a flight to the Jordanian capital, Amman.

"Amman, then Beirut," I told him truthfully, just to see his reaction. Most Israelis envision Lebanon as one of Dante's lower levels of hell.

"Why?" the agent asked with concern.

"For vacation. It's beautiful there. A lot like Tel Aviv."

The agent strongly doubted that. It's easier, I suppose, to envision the enemy as being fundamentally different than you.

Obama wins Turkey, clinches Middle East Electoral College

2008-11-01T20:18:00.000+03:00

After eight years of being caught in the backdraft of U.S. President George W. Bush's policies, the people of Turkey are angry. Religious Turks are angry about the Iraq war, which Turkey opposed from the start, and about the ever-expanding "war on terrorism," which many here view as a war on Islam.

Despite those perceptions, the Bush Administration was actually a staunch backer of Prime Minster Recep Tayyep Erdogan and his mildly Islamist AK Party, lending support to the government a constitutional crisis in Turkey this year and backing its bid to join the European Union. That disappointed secular Turks, who hoped that the hawkish U.S. administration would understand their fears of the creeping Islamicization of life in Turkey.

And while Kurds in Iraq love Bush (and his father) for bringing down Saddam Hussein and letting loose the genie of Kurdish autonomy, Turkey's Kurds see only a double-standard. The Bush Administration deployed its troops alongside Kurdish militias during the war in Iraq, and has been supporting Iranian Kurdish groups seeking to undermine the regime Tehran. But the PKK, the group fighting for the independence of Turkey's Kurds, was labeled a "terrorist" organization for the first time by the Bush Administration.

In short, Bush managed to offend Turks of all political stripes during his eight years in the White House. As a result, if Turks could cast ballots in the looming U.S. election, they'd vote almost unanimously for change in Washington. And unfortunately for John McCain, they don't buy his maverick schtick. Change, to Turks, means Barrack Obama in the White House.

It was a landslide. Other than a few people who professed to have no opinion about U.S. politics, every single one of the 20-some Turks I asked said that they'd vote for Obama if they could. Not one Turk I spoke to picked McCain.

By and large, Turks think fondly of the Bill Clinton era, and hope that the return of a Democrat to the White House might mean a return to the less confrontational U.S. foreign policy of that era.

Here's a sampling of what I heard:

"[Obama] is an intellectual, and he has new ideas. McCain comes from the same party as Bush – and we don't need to see any more wars."

– Baris Kuyucu, 33, Gaziantep resident and sports anchor on the CNN Turk television channel.

"When you ask people about George Bush, the first thing they think of is the Iraq war, and the second thing is his relationship with the [Turkish] government and his putting the PKK on the terrorist list."

– Angel Ugar, 23-year-old translator and mother of one.

"Kurds in Turkey have the same problems as black people in the U.S. Because of this, we hope that Obama will understand our situation."

– Abdullah Demirbash, 42-year-old Kurdish politician and the former mayor of the old city of Diyarbakir.

"Black people have suffered a lot in their past. God brought this black person to the biggest country in the world so that maybe he can bring justice to the world."

– Sait Sanli, 64, the "Peace Father" of Diyarbakir. Has eight children of his own

"Obama knows about Muslims, and he has a nice smile."

– Abdul Kerim, a 32-year-old barber and father of three living in the city of Sanliurfa.

So, after mixed results up to now, Obama cleanly sweeps Turkey and the 175 votes I awarded the country in our makeshift electoral college. That means that even though Syria, Lebanon and Jordan have yet to be polled, the Democratic candidate has already passed the magic number of 270 needed to clinch victory in our little "election."

Barack Obama (Dem.) – 322 votes

John McCain (Rep.) – 65 votes

Undaunted, we'll press on, just to make sure Syrians, Lebanese and Jordanians have their say too. But I think I can already guess what many of them will say.

As Timur Schindel, the Turkish-American who owns the fantastic Anadolu Evleri hotel in historic Gaziantep, told me, "Everybody accepts now that the past eight years have been a disaster."

In the Republic of Hatay

2008-11-01T20:11:00.000+03:00

Antakya, Turkey - Wednesday, Oct. 29

My head snapped around to look when I heard the familiar sound of Arabic being spoken. "Keefak, ya doktor?" the waiter at the restaurant shouted to an acquaintance. "How are you, doctor?"

Arabic, the language that (along with Hebrew) has surrounded me for the 3 1/2 years I've lived in Jerusalem, has been rare on this trip. And since I was still in Turkey, I didn't expect to start hearing it hear either.

But national borders in the Middle East are a poor way of judging who lives where. In fact many of the region's most persistent troubles can be traced back to the half-mad way the lines were drawn in this part of the world back in the colonial era.

Many Iraqis, for instance, curse the day in 1920 that the British united the predominantly Sunni province of Baghdad with the Shia province of Basra and the largely Kurdish Mosul area to form what is now Iraq. Similarly, though less explosively, the line that divides Saudi Arabia from Jordan cuts right through the ancient territories of several tribes who are now split by the border. And that's without discussing (for now) Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

Antakya, known during the Roman era as Antioch, is another one of those places. Historically part of Syria, it was arbitrarily made a separate territory (the sanjak of Alexandretta) during French colonial rule.

In 1938, under Turkish pressure, this tiny patch of land declared independence from France and became known as the Republic of Hatay, a country with its own flag and parliament (best known as the fictional setting for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which unfortunately for the local tourism industry, was actually filmed in Petra, Jordan.)

A year later, a referendum was held — during which Turkey is alleged to have moved in busloads of Turkish "residents" — and Hatay voted to join the Turkish Republic. France, anxious to keep Turkey neutral in World War Two, meekly acquiesced.

Flash forward seven decades, and it still doesn't make much more sense than it did in 1938. The street signs are in Turkish and the red-and-white Turkish flag hangs from every shop in an over-the-top display of nationalism. But on the streets, this is still an Arab town that ended up in Turkey through a string of events almost to strange to be depicted in film.

"Ninety per cent of the people here speak Arabic better than they speak Turkish," my cab driver, Fouad, told me as we left Antakya and headed south towards the Syrian border.

In this region, where history is never forgotten, such anomalies have a nasty habit of flaring into bigger problems. But with Turkey rapidly modernizing and flirting with the possibility of European Union membership, no one is agitating for reunion with isolated Syria just now.

"Life is good here in Turkey, thank God," Fouad said. "We are Arabs, but we don't want the troubles the have in Syria and Lebanon.

Travellers' Index

2008-10-28T22:22:00.001+03:00

By bus from Gaziantep to Antakya, Turkey - Tuesday, Oct. 28

Number of seats on the ancient white minibus I'm travelling in today across southwestern Turkey: 16

Number of passengers on said bus: 20

Number of people seated on plastic stools in the aisle: 3

Number standing: one tall man bent in half but still hitting his head on the roof from time to time

Number of over-sized bags of cotton in the aisle: 1

Number of smelly canisters that earlier today contained either milk or yogurt: 3

Distance between starting point, Gaziantep, and destination, Antakya: 200 kilometres

Time journey is expected to take: four hours

Cost of trip: 12 Turkish lira (about $7)

Number of women on the bus: 9

Number of headscarves: 7

Number of people typing on their Blackberry right now: 1 (Hi Mom!)

Number of people staring at said Blackberry user as though he were from Pluto: 19

Three Turkeys

2008-10-28T22:19:00.001+03:00

By bus from Diyarbakir to Gaziantep, Turkey — Monday, Oct. 27

Sebnem Duyar, 30-something Istanbul native, manager of the four-star Class Hotel in Diyarbakir

Sebnem Duyar would probably stand out anywhere. With her giant mane of frizzy auburn hair, her easy, crooked smile and forearms coloured by Asian tattoos, she's never been one to blend easily into crowds.

But of late, the attention she gets on the streets has made her increasingly uncomfortable.

"My grandparents used to say that Diyarbakir is the Paris of Turkey," she said of the ancient walled city to that she has been relentlessly fighting to see added to the country's flourishing tourist trail. "But unfortunately, the situation is getting worse here in the southeast of Turkey."

Especially for liberal, working women like her. While the city is very safe, the growth of political Islam in the country has increased the pressure on women like Sebnem to conform to conservative social norms. Staunchly secular, she won't wear the Islamic headscarf. Which means she either braves the stares or go straight from the hotel to home. Saturday night, she sat alone in the lobby bar of her own hotel, chatting with staff and guests long after it was necessary for her to be there.

"I can go anywhere in Istanbul, not here. Most women in Diyarbakir are housewives, so people here look at me like I'm an alien. If I want to go some place with (male) friends who are not my boyfriend, that's not a very good idea."

Like many secular Turks in this deeply divided state, she lays the blame on the ruling Justice and Development, or AK, party. "They will never represent me," she said.

Abdullah Demirbas, 41, Kurdish leader and ousted mayor of the old city of Diyarbakir

In another country, it would have been an innocent enough gesture. But Abdullah Demirbas knew he was courting trouble when he sent New Year's greeting cards to his constituents that were written in Turkish, English and Kurdish.

The Kurdish language is banned from official use in Turkey, and Demirbas was unsurprised when he ended up before a judge to defend his actions. He says he has 20 outstanding cases against him - most of them for linguistic offenses he incurred by trying to offer services in Kurdish while he was mayor - that could put him behind bars for as long as 60 years.

Demirbas says that when he appeared in court, the judge focused on his illicit use of the letter 'w' in the Kurdish new year's greeting of "sersala we piroz be." Turkish is the only official state language, Demirbas was sternly reminded, and there is no 'w' in the Turkish alphabet.

Absurdly, it didn't seem to bother the court that there was also a 'w' in "Happy New Year" - the English greeting that was printed on the same cards.

"The judge said we could use it in English, but we could not use a Kurdish 'w'," the ex-schoolteacher told me with a rueful smile when I visited him at the office of his Democratic Society Party (known by it Turkish acronym, DTP) in the old city of Diyarbakir. The DTP is the political wing of the outlawed PKK militia that has fought the Turkish army for 24 years, demanding independence for the country's estimated 12 million Kurds.

Six months after he sent the trilingual New Year's greetings - and after further offending the higher authorities by polling Diyarbakir residents on which language they'd prefer to be served in (72 per cent said Kurdish) - Demirbas was removed from office.

The fight for Kurdish rights in Turkey, however, is far from over. Nearly every day in the past week has seen fresh demonstrations in Diyarbakir and other cities, organized by the DTP to protest the alleged mistreatment of jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.

Demirbas, who is investigating the legalities of running again in municipal elections next year, says Turkey's heavy handed attempts to suppress Kurdish nationalism will never succeed.

"Turkish public policy, since 1923, is one people, one society, one language, one flag and one religion," he told me as a heavy rain pounded the stone roof of his office. "This policy is not suitable to the realities of the Turkish republic."

Bayran, 42, part-time labourer and resident of the guest house attached to the Halilur Rahman mosque in Sanliurfa

Bayran doesn't have a very sophisticated understanding of why the Turkish economy is in crisis these days. What he does know is some rich people in Istanbul and Ankara made mistakes, and now the amount of work available for an occasional labourer like him has dried up to perhaps one job a week.

Bayran lives in the deeply conservative city of Sanliurfa, near the Syrian border. Most nights he sleeps in the spartan guesthouse attached to the giant mosque that marks the birthplace of the Prophet Abraham.

(Abraham's stay here was apparently eventful. The story goes that a nefarious King Nimrod tried to have our Abraham immolated on a funeral pyre, but God cleverly intervened, turning the fire into water and the burning coals into fish. A thick school of bread crumb-craving fish inhabits the Lake of Abraham in Sanliurfa today.)

Bayran wears tattered clothes, but a wide smile, as he leads a foreign visitor through the mosque complex. He empties his pocket to show he has only three Turkish lira - the cost of a bed for the nigh at the mosque guesthouse - but steadfastly refuses offered money at the end of his guided tour.

This is his Turkey: poor, devout and conservative. The political concerns of Sebnem Duyar and Abdullah Demirbas have no connection to his reality.

He's a staunch supporter of Prime Minister Tayyep Recep Erdogan and the AK Party. "Not just because they are religious, but because they are honest," he tells me earnestly. "They are on the path of righteousness."

The Middle East Electoral College: Iraq results

2008-10-28T22:15:00.000+03:00

So colour Iraq neither red nor blue. Or rather, colour it either, depending on what part of the country you're talking about.

During the course the week I spent in Northern Iraq, I asked more than two dozen Iraqis whether they'd prefer to see John McCain or Barrack Obama win the White House on Nov. 4.

The results were split almost perfectly down the middle. Most Kurds preferred McCain, seeing him as more likely to support their dream of independence and less likely to withdraw American troops from the country. Kurds, who actually speak with affection of George W. Bush, fear that a U.S. withdrawal would plunge the country into a new civil war that they could not stay out of.

The Arabs I met, however, were more likely to support Obama, believing that he is more likely to adopt different policies than Bush, the man they blame for destroying this country.

Here's a taste of what some of the Iraqis I spoke to had to say on this question:

“We cannot ask the U.S. troops to leave because that will lead to civil war… . Obama's policy is a rapid withdrawal of American troops. This will not benefit the Iraqi people in general.”

– Rahman Gharib, 42, a journalist affiliated with the Communist Party of Kurdistan.

“I prefer the black one. He will pay more attention to the situation in Iraq.”

– Walid Chiad, 42, an Arab refugee from Baghdad currently living in Kirkuk.

“I think America needs some change. People get sick and tired of a style, a face or a colour.”

– Father Sabri al-Maqdessy, priest at St. Joseph's Church in Ainkawa.

A third opinion which was shared by Arabs and Kurds alike is that it won't make much difference who wins and that Iraq will suffer under either man's leadership.

“Bush destroyed Iraq. He took our oil and gave us nothing in return,” said Ayyad Manfi, the mukhtar, or leader, of a refugee camp near Sulaymaniyah for former Baghdad residents. “We don't believe in this election. Whatever they say, they will change their promises later.”

So, how to award Iraq's 146 electors? My poll was obviously skewed by the fact I was in the Kurdish north of the country. The Arab refugees I spoke to were also uniformly Sunni, meaning this already unscientific poll takes almost no account of the feelings of the country's largest community, the Shiites.

The good news is that not every U.S. state is winner-take-all – and you could argue that Iraq is hardly one country anymore – so I'm doling out the electors based on the most obvious line: McCain has won Iraqi Kurdistan, Obama takes Sunni and Shia Iraq (the latter judgment based on the fact Shia leaders have been nearly unanimous in calling for a speedy U.S. withdrawal from the country, which is closest to Obama's policy). Kurds make up roughly 20 per cent of Iraq's population, so McCain gets 20 per cent of the votes, or 29 electors. Obama gets the remaining 117.

Arbitrary? Perhaps. But I'm the one battling to hold my insides in after eating at an Iraqi roadside diner and spending sleepless nights at the Simpan Hotel, so I get to make the call. You're at home surfing the Internet during a commercial break in Hockey Night in Canada, so you just get to complain about it in the comments section below.

Our running total now shows Obama surging from behind to take the lead:

Barack Obama (Dem.) – 147 votes
John McCain (Rep.) – 65 votes

Next up, Turkey, which has a dominant 175 votes in the 538-seat electoral college.

If Obama wins it, he'll shoot past the 270 mark needed to secure victory, meaning my little polling project could effectively be over long before election day. If McCain wins it, we've got a race to the wire, with Syria, Lebanon and Jordan deciding who takes the prize.

Follow the race at The Globe and Mail website.

Spot the open society

2008-10-28T22:13:00.000+03:00

Websites banned in the Islamic Republic of Iran (aka. wacky Muslim theocracy, charter Axis of Evil member):

www.globeandmail.com (though you could sneak in the back door through www.globeandmail.ca if you're in Iran and craving your latest Road to Jerusalem fix…)

BBC's Farsi language news service

http://blogsbyiranians.com/

www.youtube.com

www.flickr.com

www.amazon.com

www.blognews.com

Most pornography websites (I hear)

Websites banned in the Turkish Republic (aka. plucky Muslim democracy, trusted NATO member):

www.youtube.com (too many videos mocking Mustafa Kemal Ataturk)

www.blogger.com

www.richarddawkins.net (the creationist upset some local imams)

www.megaupload.com

www.ateizm.org

www.geocities.com

www.imdb.com (actually, they tried to block the famous movie information site, but a typo has meant that www.imbd.com got blocked instead)

Most pornography (again, word on the street)

Borderlines

2008-10-28T22:10:00.000+03:00

Diyarbakir, Turkey — Saturday, Oct. 25

When you travel across the Middle East, you cross cultural lines as well as geographical ones. One of the most obvious barometres of where you are in the region is how much fun you're allowed to have on a night out.

So far this journey has taken me from the tip of Iran, where the country's cowed (but monied) liberal elites tried to have as much fun as they could, heading offshore to have listen to live music and chastely shimmy in their seats. Couples were welcome, so long as they were already married, but alcohol was strictly off limits, as everywhere in the Islamic Republic.

The next stop was the Kurdish north of Iraq, where the Johnny Walker and Heineken flow relatively freely inside the hotels and restaurants of cities like Sulaymaniyah and Irbil. But the drink-ups were strictly same-sex affairs. Female foreign aid workers might occasionally be seen in these dens of little repute, but never an Iraqi woman. The men drink and smoke and watch channels like "Sexy Sat," but their wives and sisters aren't allowed in the door.

Tonight I reached the southeastern corner of Turkey, also arguably the southeastern corner of what could loosely be termed the West. This is, after all, a NATO country, and what are all those guns and bombs for it not to spread "our values?"

Exhausted after the long drive from Zakho, I nonetheless accepted an invitation to head out on the town with Yilmaz Akinci, the local correspondent for the al-Jazeera satellite television channel. He took me to Major, a live music club in the centre of Diyarbakir, where for the first time in two weeks I watched men and women dance, drink, sing, laugh and generally behave as they wished.

If this is indeed a clash of civilizations that the world is in the middle of, it's my job as a journalist to try and understand all perspectives, and not to take sides. But between you and me, tonight at the Major, I couldn't help but smile.

One war zone to another

2008-10-28T22:09:00.000+03:00

By taxi through southeastern Anatolia - Saturday, Oct. 25

The most surprising thing about crossing from northern Iraq into southeastern Turkey, which in the Kurdish narrative are two parts of Greater Kurdistan, is that you still feel as though you're in occupied land. In fact, the Turkish military presence here is more obvious than the combined presence of the United States, the Iraqi army and the Kurdish militias in on the other side of the border.

As we drove towards the city of Diyarbakir and into a gathering thunderstorm, Kemal and I were pulled over at a succession of checkpoints and twice made to get out of the car so my bags could be hand-searched. At each base, a makeshift machine-gun post had been constructed underneath Turkey's red-and-white crescent-moon flag. Armoured personnel carriers patrolled the highways.

To an extent, the security measures are understandable. While it was quiet today, southeastern Turkey has effectively been a war zone for much of the past 30 years, a place where hostilities between the army and the Kurdistan Workers' Party can flare up at any time.

The locals in this heavily rural part of Turkey are clearly resentful of the heavy handed military presence in their towns and villages. The residents are Kurds, many of them sympathetic to the PKK, while the soldiers are ethnic Turks.

"Turkey. Problem," Kemal explained to me with a disgusted shrug after a soldier had given my dirty laundry a thorough examination. Kemal was stretching the limits of his early-career-Schwarzenegger English, but I got the point.

Turkey most definitely does have a problem here.

I am a Middle Eastern cigarette smuggler

2008-10-28T22:04:00.002+03:00

At the Iraq-Turkey border - Saturday, Oct. 25

I left Iraq this morning, crossing into Turkey via the busy Ibrahim Khalil crossing that is landlocked Iraqi Kurdistan's main lifeline to the outside world (see lineup of trucks at left).

I left Zakho, a dusty border town, and ascended into the jagged mountains of southeastern Anatolia in a Turkish taxi, a white Ford Focus driven by a gruff man named Kemal. It would cost me $150, he said, for the four-plus hour drive between the predominantly from Zakho to Diyarbakir in Turkey.

With his bald skull, and shiny black shirt tucked into shiny grey slacks, Kemal looked like an extra on some Turkish version of the Sopranos. Not Paulie or Silvio, mind you, but one of those anonymous thugs they sent out to rough up the guys who inadvertently picked up the trash on one of Tony's routes.

That's just me stereotyping of course. Or at least it was until Kemal pulled me aside at the border crossing and showed me a black garbage bag stuffed with several cartons of Gauloises cigarettes.

"For you," he told me with a please-understand-this-or-we're-both-in-trouble look in his eyes. "Not for driver."

I got the message. If anyone asked, I smoke six packs a day (despite my asthma) and came to Iraq for the cut-rate ciggies. Got it.

Thankfully, the question never came up, and Kemal, the Gauloises and I glided through to the land of Ataturk. A Kurdish guard on the Iraqi side, however, did have some queries about my passport.

"Kanada?" he said, eyebrows raised.

"Canada."

"America?"

"No, Canada."

"Like Montana?" (For some reason, it's the U.S. state best known in these parts.)

"No, different country."

"Like Kurdistan and Iraq?" (This gave me pause. Perhaps we are indeed only semi-autonomous in the Stephen Harper era. But my patriotism was by now in full roar.)

"No, like Jordan and Iraq."

The guard furrowed his brow. Canada being an entirely separate entity didn't quite sound right to him, but he obviously he didn't want to insult me either. He offered a compromise.

"Maybe like Kuwait?" he said, referring to the tiny Gulf state that Saddam Hussein always claimed was a renegade Iraqi province.

I took the offered olive branch. After all, the world had driven Saddam out of Kuwait when he invaded back in 1991. Not a bad precedent to establish for that inevitable day the Americans come seeking revenge for the War of 1812 and Celine Dion.

"Like Kuwait," I agreed.

Travel advisory

2008-10-28T22:03:00.000+03:00

Zakho, Iraq - Saturday, Oct. 25

Travel advisory/Public service announcement: If you ever have the odd fortune to need to spend a night in the town of Zakho, Iraq, do avoid my residence of last night, the Sipan Hotel.

The toilets don't work, every drain is clogged with human hair and the walls are covered with bug carcasses. The only thing missing was the chalk outlines of dead bodies on the floor. But that's probably just sloppy Iraqi police work.

Iraq blackout

2008-10-28T22:01:00.000+03:00

Zakho, Iraq - Friday, Oct. 24

In a fitting end to my latest spin through Iraq, the power has been out for the past half hour here in Zakho. Sitting in the dark is part of life in the new Iraq. (Thank Ataturk that I'm now close enough to the Turkish border to get Blackberry service...)

While the security situation in the country deservedly gets most of the attention, the lack of basic services here is an under-reported crisis. Power outages are a regular occurrence in Baghdad, as well as here in the relatively stable north of the country.

The electricity in Zakho comes on only after 5 p.m. each day. It's supposed to stay on until 9 a.m., but there have already been two cuts in the first six hours of that stretch.

It's not just the electricity. Tap water remains undrinkable across Iraq and, judging by the state of my stomach, the recent cholera outbreak in the country may be more widespread than has been reported so far.

Back in 2003, shortly after a wild-bearded Saddam Hussein was discovered in his spider-hole north of Baghdad, I went to a power plant in the capital to ask why electricty was in such short supply. The manager was short on answers, and embarassed to admit that despite the UN sanctions back then, the situation was better in Saddam's time. He blamed insurgent attacks on the infrastructure.

I wonder what he'd say now. Because no matter how many U.S. soldiers leave or stay in Iraq, this oil-rich country won't be able to move on in the dark.

Quote of the week

2008-10-28T21:59:00.001+03:00

"George Bush is our friend now. He is adopting Communist solutions to the financial crisis."

- Rahman Gharib, journalist with the Communist Party of Kurdistan.

In this car, we drink Coke, listen to Nancy and despair for the future

2008-10-28T21:50:00.002+03:00

By car from Irbil to Zakho, Iraq – Friday, Oct. 24

Perhaps the greatest debate gripping the Middle East has nothing to do with either the future of Iraq or the Israel-Palestine peace process. What really gets the locals agitated is a discussion of the comparative merits of the two pop vixens of the Arab world. Think Britney versus Christina, without the K-Fed subplot and the public breakdowns.

Nancy Ajram (the one on the left in the pic) is a 25-year-old pouty-lipped Lebanese singer who has won acclaim as the Madonna of the Arab world after a string of hit singles dating back seven years as well as racy (for this region) music videos. Her climb to fame accelerated a few years back when she became the Middle Eastern face of Coca-Cola. She sings and shimmies in almost every Coke ad broadcast on television in this region, and her face appears on every can.

Nancy's nemesis is Haifa Wehbe, also from Lebanon, who became a sensation by out-sexing her rival on satellite music channels, triggering a series scandals in the Arab that have been exacerbated by the fact Haifa is Shia Muslim (unlike Nancy, who is Maronite Christian). In one notorious clip, Haifa appeared in a wet red bathing suit that clung revealingly to her curvaceous form. The 32-year-old's saucy image provoked the Islamist-dominated parliament of Bahrain to pass a motion earlier this year calling for her concert in the country to be cancelled.

Her rivalry with Nancy is such that Haifa has been made the aluminum face of Pepsi, meaning the two stars stare lustily at each other inside convenience store refrigerators around the region.

"Nancy can sing, Haifa's just a body," Sherzad, my cheerful translator offered when I asked which side of the great divide he fell on. There's some truth to that – Nancy shot to fame after singing in and winning a televised talent show. Haifa's big break was being named runner up in the Miss Lebanon contest and then being selected by People Magazine as one of the world's 50 most beautiful people.

To be fair, Sherzad isn't really Haifa's type. She's made it clear she's not into nice guys like him, having made headlines in recent years by performing with rapper 50 Cent and endorsing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah following the 2006 war with Israel.

Nancy, meanwhile, stands on the other side of the great Lebanese divide (one that reflects the split across the entire Middle East) having written a song mourning the 2005 murder of the country's popular former prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, and endorsing Lebanon's pro-Western "Cedar Revolution." Much more Sherzad's type, frankly.

So we listened to Nancy Ajram as we plunged westward through Iraqi Kurdistan, heading for the Turkish border. But my impending departure was making Sherzad morose, despite the upbeat pop coming from the car stereo.

“You're lucky. You get to leave tomorrow. We have to stay here,” he moaned. “Maybe God will punish me when I die for not having done anything with my life.”

I told him that I hoped to come back in five years time and to see him happy, perhaps in an independent Kurdistan.

“That needs to happen,” he said. “Either we separate from Baghdad, or there will be civil war with the Kurds fighting the Sunnis and Shiites.”

I had no retort. We drove in silence for the next while, listening as Nancy cheerfully sing of love and hope.

Pricetags

2008-10-28T21:49:00.001+03:00

By car from Irbil to Zakho, Iraq – Friday, Oct. 24

The question came naturally as our car approached a fork in the road during the drive today from Irbil to Zakho. If we took the left turn, we would be in Mosul, arguably the most violent city in Iraq. Happily, we veered to the right.

"How much do you guys think I'm worth?" I asked as our blue Chevy Neon crossed the Great Zab River, a tributary of the Tigris. Kidnappings are common in Mosul, and a Western journalist would presumably be a lucrative target.

My companions, Miran, the car's driver, and Sherzad, a translator I'd hired to accompany me on my trip through Northern Iraq, laughed uproariously. "I say $200,000," offered Sherzad. Though he doesn't have a mean bone in his body, the speed of his response suggested he'd previously turned the question over in his head.

I was insulted. A paltry $200,000 seemed like nothing compared to the rumoured sums other kidnappees had fetched. Especially with the way the dollar has fallen lately. You can barely buy a foreclosed house in Detroit these days with 200 grand.

"Don't worry Mark, I think you're worth a lot more," Miran said with a laugh that was probably meant to be reassuring.

Iraq's only tourist

2008-10-28T21:37:00.000+03:00

Irbil, Iraq - Thursday, Oct. 23

I spent today wandering around the semi-restored remains of the Irbil citadel, a UNESCO world heritage site that overlooks the modern city from atop a hill in the centre of town.

Obviously once majestic – parts of it are believed to date back to the 6th Century B.C., making Irbil one of the oldest human settlements in the world – the vast citadel is unsurprisingly in desperate need of work. While the Kurdish Textiles Museum at its heart is worth a visit, there's little to see in large swathes of the ancient fortress beside graffiti-covered stones. The building that should be the citadel's centerpiece, the former Ottoman pasha's palace, looks like a hurricane blew through it, leaving behind only trash and a few walls for local teenagers to scrawl their names on.

Which raises the question, does the citadel need to be restored in order for tourists to consider coming to Irbil (let's pretend Iraq's security situation isn't an issue here – it's relatively calm in the Kurdish north), or is it a sad fact that no on will rebuild it until they see the first trickle of tourists and the colour of their money?

As I wandered the deserted remains, I bumped into a lonely guard. He confessed that other than the occasional group of Kurdish schoolchildren, there wasn't much for him to do most days.

"Sometimes the Americans come here on their day off. But sometimes there's nobody, or just one person," he said, giving me a sympathetic look.

For dinner, I travelled to the nearby Christian town of Ainkawa where a German restaurant – Der Deutscher Haus – does booming business serving premium Bavarian beers and authentic goulash and schnitzels.

Who says there's nothing for tourists in Iraq?

The plight, and flight, of Iraq's Christians

2008-10-24T09:34:00.002+04:00

Ainkawa, Iraq Thursday, Oct. 23

Father Sabri al-Maqdessy is a man with a lot on his mind. A priest at St. Joseph's Chaldean Church in this Christian town in the north of Iraq, he's struggling to keep track of two equally disturbing trends: an influx of new families into his parrish and an outflow of longtime residents.

Neither is a new phenomenon. Since the U.S. invasion in 2003, Christian families have been fleeing to Ainkawa, chased from their homes in Baghdad and elsewhere by Sunni and Shia militants who bombed churches and demanded that Christian women adopt strict Islamic dress. The prewar population of this attractive little town doubled during the first four years of the war as 1,500 families arrived here looking for refuge.

Just as the situation seemed to be stabilizing, a spate of murders in recent weeks targeting the Christian community of the nearby city of Mosul has sparked a new exodus. Another 1,500 families have fled Mosul in the past month, with many of those arriving at St. Josephs, looking for shelter and food.

"Christians have always been targeted by different groups in the Middle East because we are the only people without a tribal system to protect us or the political power to give us security," the bald, soft-spoken priest said as we chatted inside the stone-walled compound of St. Joseph's, which from the street looks as much like a castle than a place of worship. "The church is weak. The Vatican does not have tanks."

Just as worrying for Father Sabri are those who are leaving Ainkawa. Theyre not returning to their homes, but headed for new lives in the West, leaving Iraq behind. As much as half of Iraqs prewar Christian population of 800,000 is believed to have emigrated since 2003.

"Everyone is leaving. If the situation continues the way it is for another 10 years, 20 at most, you won't see any Christians left here."

Landscapes

2008-10-23T13:29:00.000+04:00

By bus from Sulaymaniyah to Irbil, Iraq – Wednesday, Oct. 22

A few things I spotted as I stared out the dirty window of our Reagan-era Toyota bus as we winded our way from Sulaymaniyah to Kirkuk to Irbil:

- Iraq turns from green to brown as you leave the Kurdish north and head in the direction of Baghdad. As we left Sulaymaniyah, the forested mountains that surround that city were replaced by rocky brown hills which soon melted into the familiar desert of central Iraq.
- While the peshmerga fighters who man checkpoints under the control of the Kurdistan Regional Government carefully checked the identification of anyone entering or leaving their autonomous area, the regular Iraqi army soldiers who patrol Kirkuk barely peer in the windows as they wave us on.
- Kirkuk still looks like the war zone it is – two bombs went off here as recently as Saturday – with some roads torn up by the tracks of tanks (likely American ones) and other streets barricaded to keep Arab and Kurd apart.
- Three things in a row along the highway northwest from Kirkuk to Irbil: first was the rubble of a stone fortress that served as a base for Saddam Hussein’s army before it was destroyed by American air power back in 2003. Next came a (presumably empty) discarded oil tanker with the word “Allah” scrawled on the side in Arabic. After that was an unfinished home with the blue letters “USA” written on the outside.

A short sojourn in Kirkuk

2008-10-23T13:28:00.002+04:00

Kirkuk, Iraq – Wednesday, Oct. 22

I briefly ended up in the violent city of Kirkuk today, completely by accident.

When I arrived in Sulaymaniyah this week, I casually asked Miran, The Globe and Mail’s genial longtime driver/fixer in Northern Iraq, whether it would be possible to visit the city that has become the frontline in the struggle between Kurdish and Iraqi nationalists. No, he chuckled, “there are still kidnappings and murders all the time there.” It was the same answer he had given me on my last two visits to the country.

Even as a relative calm has returned to other parts of Iraq, Kirkuk has gotten worse as simmering, decades-old tensions over whether the city is Kurdish, Turkoman or Arab (Saddam Hussein forcibly tried to make it the latter during his reign) bubble towards a full boil.

So the journey today was supposed to be along the safe route. My translator and I boarded the bus to Irbil thinking that it would take the northern road, avoiding the potential trouble on the southern one. Straight out of the station, it went south to Kirkuk, a city I hadn’t visited since the summer of 2003.

Despite some nervousness among the other passengers about having to travel with a trouble-magnet foreigner (there was a long conversation between the driver and passengers before it was agreed that I could come along for the drive), nothing happened. The city I saw was one that divided and scarred by years of fighting – an oil-rich place where electricity is still a luxury that most homes experience for only a few hours a day – but one that was functioning, at least on the Kurdish side that we drove through.

The roads were packed with cars and the shops were open, including a few Christian-owned stores in the city centre that openly advertised the Turkish and German beers they carried in stock (liquor stores have long since disappeared in Baghdad and the Shia south, chased away by the militants).

As we drove through his hometown, Abbas Khorsheed, a 33-year-old dentist with neatly combed-back hair and dark, intense eyes, told me that, economically, the post-Saddam era has been good to Kirkuk. Where he was once paid a state salary of 3,000 Iraqi dinars – a paltry $1.50 (U.S.) – a month as a dentist, he said he now makes upwards of $12,000 a year.

He’s taken some of that money and is studying on the side to become an orthodontist. He advised me that braces would straighten my crooked bottom teeth.

But while most Kurds are big fans of the United States and President George W. Bush for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein, Mr. Khorsheed is less sure the sacrifices have been worth it. A pessimist, he sees either unending war, or unending American occupation in Iraq’s future. Kirkuk will remain a dangerous frontline city in whatever happens next, he predicted.

“There is no agreement between the different groups, Arabs, Kurds, Turkomans, Christians. The situation has been like this for centuries. It will not get better,” he said, his quiet voice barely audible over the bus’s squealing engine. And while he’s thinking of leaving the city, he’s convinced the Americans will stay, no matter who wins next month’s U.S. presidential election.

“Iraq will become like Japan. The Americans will stay forever, I think.”

2008-10-22T23:17:00.002+04:00

By bus from Sulaymaniyah to Irbil, Iraq – Wednesday, Oct. 22

When I lived in Canada, a road trip meant piling with friends into my green Ford Escort, the windows down and the radio loud as we set off from my hometown of Ottawa to Montreal or Toronto for the weekend. During the years I lived in Russia, a “road trip” usually meant taking the train, speeding between Moscow and St. Petersburg or rolling slowly across the awe-inspiring distances to the east.

In the Middle East, a road trip means military checkpoints. Whether you’re driving between the holy cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, heading to the scenic south of Lebanon, or doing what I did today – cutting across the north of war-torn Iraq by bus – hitting the road means spending a large chunk of your journey having your documents and belongings checked by nervous soldiers.

For the three-plus hours the 17 other passengers and I sat crammed into a decades-old Toyota bus, we hit six checkpoints. Two of them were manned by Iraqi army soldiers, the other four by the pershmerga (ready-to-die) militia that is the de facto army of the autonomous Kurdish region in the north of Iraq. By the last of them – when I was asked to get out of the vehicle so that I could be more closely examined by a swarthy soldier with kebab breath – I was even thinking fondly of the Ontario Provincial Police and their nefarious speed traps. Yes, the checkpoints were that aggravating.

The bumpy, 205-kilometre drive from Sulaymaniyah to Irbil was nonetheless as exhilarating in its own way as those weekend rips to Montreal. For the past five years, reporters like me have had to skulk around this country, fearing car bombs and kidnappings. The last time I was in Baghdad (back in March), a colleague and I used four cars between us, hoping that switching vehicles often enough would keep the anonymous bad guys from tracking our movements too closely. Other journalists travel with their own security detachments.

But today my translator and I simply headed down to the main Sulaymaniyah bus station, found a driver who was hollering out “Hawler! Hawler!” (the Kurdish name for Irbil) and hopped aboard. I grabbed a seat between a gregarious 22-year-old peshmerga fighter heading home to Kirkuk and an intense 26-year-old economics graduate going to Irbil. We sat back and chatted the afternoon away as though we were travelling through a completely normal country somewhere else on this planet.

But this wasn’t that other country, as the jolts to our spine that we experienced each time the bus bounced off a pothole reminded us. Saifeddin Shamseddin, the recent economics grad, was bordering on depressed. His degree, he said, meant nothing in a country where there was no work of any kind for young people like him. He had been in Sulaymaniyah filling out the necessary documentation to go to police college – another Iraqi intellectual forced to pick up a gun because there’s nothing else to do.

“No one is happy here. There are thousands of young students who have just graduated and are now sitting at home jobless” he said, his long legs curled up almost to his chin because the bus seats were so close together.

Mohammed Amin, the young peshmerga fighter, nodded in agreement. He confessed that he was saving up money to pay a smuggler to take him, along with his wife and infant daughter, out of Iraq, to London if they could manage it. “It will continue to get worse here day after day,” he predicted. “I’ve lived here 22 years and I have yet to see one happy day in Iraq."

Forty-eight hours in Iraq

2008-10-22T00:11:00.000+04:00

Sulaymaniyah, Iraq – Tuesday, October 21

Iraq, unquestionably, is a safer place now than it was a year or 18 months ago, when the worst of the inter-communal fighting was raging. But what does “safer” mean in the Iraqi context?

To give you an idea, I thought I’d resurrect a feature from the blog I did during my last visit to Iraq, and treat you to a short summary of the violence around the country in the 48 hours since I’ve arrived in this comparatively calm corner of it.

While most of the shootings and explosion are considered to minor for the media to report on anymore, the overall picture is far from pretty. Even though the main Sunni and Shia militias are largely holding their fire for now, this is still arguably the most dangerous country on earth, with the northern city of Mosul (which has a mixed Sunni Arab and Kurdish population) now rivaling Baghdad as the centre of the chaos.

(The incidents were not confirmed by me. The reports are courtesy of the folks at Iraq Today and McClatchy newspapers)

Today (as of 6 p.m. local):

- Three electricity workers and an Iraqi army soldier were wounded when an improvised explosive device (IED) went off in eastern Baghdad.
- A bomb targeting a police patrol exploded in eastern Baghdad, wounding two civilians, Iraqi police said.
- Fifteen people were killed and 40 others were injured in fierce clashes that erupted overnight and continued sporadically till noon in an area southwest of Iraq. The deadly clashes occurred when people from the city of Ramadi, capital of western Anbar province, attacked people from Babel province near the Jurf al-Sakhar area, some 60 km southwest of Baghdad. The battle erupted due to a dispute between the two sides over the ownership of farmland.
- Gunmen blew up a drinking water station east of the district of al-Dalouiya, near the Tigris River.
- Clashes broke out between armed gunmen and Iraqi army soldiers in the al-Siddiq neighborhood in the east of Mosul.

Yesterday:

- A roadside bomb struck a double-decker bus in eastern Baghdad, killing two people and injuring seven. Iraqi police and hospital officials said the bus was carrying employees of Iraq's Housing Ministry through the Shiite-dominated neighborhood of Mashtal when the blast occurred.
- Nine decomposed bodies were found in Latifiya, 40 km south of Baghdad, police said. The victims had been buried for more than a year.
- The Iraqi army killed two militants and arrested 51 others on Sunday in different areas across Iraq, the Defence Ministry said in a statement.
- A roadside bomb planted near a school for girls in central Baghdad.
- A bomb placed under a taxi exploded at Maysaloun Square in east Baghdad, police said. Police and health officials said two people were killed and two injured.
- A roadside bomb detonated on Palestine Street (east Baghdad) targeting a police patrol. Four people were injured, including a policeman.
- In two separate incidents, individual dead bodies were discovered in eastern Baghdad.
- Three insurgent gunmen were killed near the city of Baquba when an improvised explosive device they were planting exploded.
- Police accidentally shot and killed a civilian during a raid on the town of Muqdadiyah, north east of Baquba.
- Police shot and killed three gunmen during clashes in the town of Mandli, east of Baquba.
- A civilian was killed by a roadside bomb that exploded near his home in the town of Khanaqeen.
- One man was killed and another injured by a roadside bomb that exploded in the northern city Mosul.
- Gunmen assassinated a member of the Kurdistan Democratic party (KDP) in Mosul.
- A sniper shot and killed a policeman in Borsa neighborhood in Mosul.
- Six people, all members of one family, were injured when a roadside bomb exploded near there car in Mosul.

Barrack Obama wants to start withdrawing U.S. soldiers from this country, something those Iraqis I’ve spoken to in the past two days believe will lead to even more violence. But at least that’s a new policy. John McCain thinks America is “winning” something here.

Dreams, and nightmares, of Baghdad

2008-10-21T01:55:00.001+04:00

Sulaymaniyah, Iraq – Monday, Oct. 20

The situation in Iraq is getting better, the statistics say (though the daily blow-by-blow is still mind-numbing to read). By most accounts, Baghdad, an all-out war zone for most of the past five years, is becoming almost livable again.

But don't try telling that to the 300-plus people - almost all of them former Baghdad residents - living in miserable conditions in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Sulaymaniyah. Such rosy talk is nonsense, they say. Returning to their old homes in Baghdad, for them, remains an impossibility.

The stories they tell paint a very different picture than the one emerging of late in the Western media. They don't see an Iraq that's beginning to heal, but instead one where the divisions have become irreparable.

All of the refugees here are Sunni Arabs (Sulaymaniyah is in the Kurdish autonomous region, the majority Kurds are Sunnis) and most of them were driven from their homes by Shia militias during the worst of the sectarian fighting in 2006 and 2007.

It's safe to go back to Baghdad, they say, if it is in a Sunni neighbourhood. If your old home was in a Shia area, there's still no going back.

“I will never go back to Baghdad, It’s impossible for me,” said, Layla Shalan, a widowed 48-year-old mother of six. Wrapped in a head-to-toe black abaya, she told me how she remained in the mixed Dora neighbourhood of Baghdad even after her husband disappeared in 2004, leaving for work one morning and never coming home. She finally fled Dora with her children after Shia gunmen came to her door shortly afterwards and kidnapped her one-year-old daughter Nora, saying they'd return her only when Ms. Shalan and her family vacated their house.

There are dozens of stories like hers in this ramshackle collection of tents in the eastern corner of the Kurdish Autonomous Region. This is a place where optimism is even scarcer than decent food or shelter. Despite the steady stream of good news coming from Baghdad in recent months, the tent city remains home to more than 60 families – making it slightly larger than it was when I last visited here in early 2007.

“If they gave me all of Baghdad, I wouldn’t return. People who say it is getting better are media liars,” Iyad Manfi, the camp's leader, or mukhtar. He moved into one of the shoddy tarps-and-wooden-pole tents here in 2006 after his house near the infamous Abu Ghraib prison was hit by a mysterious explosion. He says he returned to Baghdad once already, believing the security situation had improved, but returned here shortly afterwards after receiving more threats.

Mr. Manfi, whose tense face makes him far older than his 32 years, says returning was a mistake he won’t make again. “When I leave this camp, it will not be to go home. It will be to leave this country.”

That sentiment is common across this battered country. Unsurprising new statistics released by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees today show that while the number of Iraqis seeking asylum in the West has dropped by more than 10 per cent since the same time last year, Iraqis still lodge far more asylum applications than any other nationality.

My own Iraq war

2008-10-20T19:53:00.001+04:00

Sulaymaniyah, Iraq - Monday, Oct. 20

This morning, after five years of covering the war here in Iraq – and managing to largely stay clear of the fighting – I finally became a participant in the violence. Upon arriving in my hotel room here in Sulaymaniyah, exhausted after a journey from Kish Island that included two flights and a long drive, I was confronted by a real live terrorist. A cockroach almost the size of my closed fist. The Osama bin Laden of the insect world.

I won’t drive you off the website with all the gory details, but suffice it to say that this was a real this-room-isn’t-big-enough-for-both-of-us battle that lasted upwards of half an hour. The fall of Baghdad didn’t take this long.

The plastic slipper I found in the bathroom did nothing but tickle this behemoth of a bug. I swear he was giggling as I slapped him with it repeatedly. Next up, I tried a shock-and-awe campaign using the sole of my shoe that at least managed to irritate my many-legged nemesis. Finally, borrowing from the U.S. Army’s overkill playbook (think air strikes and wedding parties), I lifted up the minibar fridge and dropped it on the offending roach, ending his one-bug intifada against my occupation of room 207.

Surely there’s some metaphor for the entire “war on terror” somewhere in that story.

The Battle of Room 207 was a bloody end to an exhausting journey from Kish Island in southern Iran to the eastern corner of northern Iraq. The plan had been to get from there to here overland across the Islamic Republic, but after the mullahs decided I wasn’t worthy of even a transit visa across their country, I had to abandon that plan and travel to Sulaymaniyah – the next stop on my itinerary – the long way (answering the question posed by Dion Nissenbaum over at McClatchey newspapers). Two flights and a three-hour drive later, I was face-to-face with Osama the Cockroach.

More geopolitically relevant than my discovery of new uses for a minibar was the reception I got upon landing in Northern Iraq. Walking into the pre-fabricated airport at Irbil, the effective capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, is always a reminder of how detached from the rest of Iraq this place has become.

The fact that I had no Iraqi visa didn’t matter to the blue-uniformed guard who marked page 17 of my passport with a red-and-blue “Kurdistan Regional Government” stamp. There was no sign of the Iraqi flag anywhere inside the terminal – in fact, Arabs from the rest of Iraq were the only people on my flight who received serious scrutiny when they landed in Irbil.

The growing independence of Iraqi Kurdistan is fraught with problems. The Kurds aren’t content with the three northern provinces they currently control, and a conflict with Baghdad is looming over the future of oil-rich Kirkuk, a city Iraqi Kurds refer to as their “Jerusalem.” An independent Kurdistan of any size is also anathema to neighbouring Iran and Turkey, who each have their own large and restive Kurdish populations. Fighting between the Turkish army and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, has escalated along the Turkish-Iraqi border again in recent days, and Iran has also taken to shelling Northern Iraq, targeting Iranian Kurdish groups who use Iraqi Kurdistan as a rear base.

But being here and seeing the determination with which the Kurds have gone about building their own mini-state over the past five years, it’s clear that a point of no return has been passed somewhere along the way. The Kurds will never accept the return of Baghdad’s authority over this land they’ve fought so long to call their own.

The Middle East Electoral College

2008-10-19T20:09:00.000+04:00

Among the questions I’ll be asking people – Iranians, Iraqis, Turks, Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians, Israelis and Palestinians – as I travel overland across this region over the next three weeks is how they feel about the upcoming presidential election in the United States.

Outside of the U.S. itself, it’s safe to say that the Middle East is the region most affected by this faraway vote that they have absolutely no control over. The George W. Bush era brought them the (failed) Road Map to Israeli-Palestinian peace, the invasion of Iraq, the rise of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in Iran, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the election (and international rejection) of Hamas in the Palestinian Territories, the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah and the now-stalled Annapolis peace process. All were considerably affected by the man who sat thousands of kilometres away in the White House.

So what next? Would a President Obama keep his promise to negotiate with Iran, and rapidly reduce the number of American soldiers in Iraq? Would he be a better mediator in the Middle East peace process? Or perhaps a President McCain would be a better pick for Israelis, who fear being pressured into a peace agreement with the Palestinians, or those pro-Western Lebanese who want U.S. support in facing down Hezbollah? Who do Turks, polarized into camps of secularists and Islamists, with the Iraq war lapping at the country’s southeastern fringe, want to see win the election?

To keep track of this project, I’ve come up with a system based on the U.S. Electoral College and its 538 members. I’ve distributed those 538 votes among the eight countries that I’m going to visit, according to their populations. The winner of this completely unscientific exercise will be known by election morning, Tuesday, Nov. 4.

Here’s the breakdown:

Kish Island, Iran – 8 electors
Iraq – 146 electors
Turkey – 175 electors
Syria – 98 electors
Lebanon – 21 electors
Jordan – 34 electors
Israel – 36 electors
Palestinian Authority – 20 electors

A few footnotes: I based Kish’s population on the one million Iranian tourists who visit Kish each year rather than the 16,500 who actually live on the island. I also allocated Turkey only half the electors its population of 70 million should receive, mostly just to keep the election from being decided solely by the Turkish vote.

Some early results are already in. Barack Obama had the support of 100 per cent of the Iranians I met during my week on Kish Island giving him all 12 Electoral College votes from there.

I won’t arrive in Israel or the Palestinian Territories until after the Nov. 4 election, but after living in Jerusalem for the past three-and-a-half years, I feel comfortable awarding the 36 Israeli votes to Senator John McCain. While polls of Israeli opinion on the election have returned mixed results, even the left-wing Haaretz newspaper has concluded that McCain will be better for Israel’s interests than that other guy with the Muslim-sounding middle name.

Similarly, the Palestinian Authority’s 20 Electoral College votes go to Obama for almost the complete opposite reasons. In fact, some Palestinians have gone so far as to run phone banks for Obama, dialing up unsuspecting voters in the U.S. to ask them to vote for Barack.

So, with 16 days to go – and five countries to travel through – before Election Day, the Middle East Electoral College looks like this:

John McCain (Rep.) – 36 votes
Barack Obama (Dem.) – 28 votes

Colour Iran and the Palestinian territories blue, and Israel red.

Next stop, Iraq. Stay tuned.

Next year in Tehran?

2008-10-19T18:54:00.000+04:00

Kish Island, Iran - Thursday, Oct. 16

Over the years, I have been turned down on three separate occasions when I applied for a visa to visit Iran. The first two attempts were via the Iranian Embassy in my old home of Moscow, and once I was even approved for a journalist visa by the Foreign Ministry in Tehran only to have it revoked when I went to pick it up at the Tsarist-era building that housed the embassy on Moscow’s tree-lined Pokrovsky Boulevard.

With over-the-top ceremony and politeness, the ambassador treated me to half-a-dozen cups of tea and a plate of cookies as he rolled out a lengthy explanation of why I wouldn’t be allowed to board my flight to Tehran the next morning. “Iran loves Canada,” he told me earnestly. “But Canada does not love Iran.” I had no retort. After that much tea, all I could think of was my bladder and what level of diplomatic faux-pas it would be to relieve myself in the snowbank outside the embassy.
The ambassador didn’t say it out loud, but he didn’t need to. The visa had been revoked because of the diplomatic brouhaha over Zahra Kazemi, the Iranian-Canadian photojournalist who was raped, tortured and beaten to death in 2003 inside Evin Prison, in northern Tehran. No Canadian journalist, the Iranian authorities correctly surmised, could travel to the country without making an effort to investigate what had happened to Ms. Kazemi.

During the nearly four years I lived in Jerusalem, an Iranian visa was an effective impossibility. In fact, you're forbidden from travelling to the Islamic Republic if you've even set foot inside Israel/the Zionist Entity. Though there were a few intrepid correspondents who did the occasional Jerusalem-Tehran commute, they were generally old Iran hands who had contacts inside the regime in Tehran who could be trusted to look the other way when their visa applications arrived. So when I finally convinced my editor to let me drive across the Middle East to mark the end of the Bush era, I knew that the biggest hurdle would actually be in reaching the starting point of my journey.

There were two routes I could try. First I sent in an application for a tourist visa via an online service that promised Iranian visas “in 7 easy steps.” I was so enticed that I didn’t notice the chart on the same webpage which suggested Canadians are more likely to be turned down for Iranian visas than any other nationality, including Americans. I gamely sent in the 72-euro application fee, only to get the predictably negative reply a few weeks later.

So Kish Island represented a last, desperate chance to see Iran before I ended my tour of duty in the Middle East. And today, I was told – again – that I was not welcome in the Islamic Republic. “There is a problem with your visa,” the shy desk clerk at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs office told me. The office is one of the few places on the island where photographs of Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor Ayatollah Ali Khameini are displayed.

After a week of battling with the bureaucrats and being repeatedly promised a visa, I was as grumpy as the two ayatollahs looked in their official portraits. I demanded to know what the "problem" with my visa was. I got a one word answer: "Politics."

In Canada, we call these places “gay hangouts”

2008-10-19T18:53:00.001+04:00

Kish Island, Iran - Wednesday, Oct. 15

I can’t believe I’m still on Kish Island. I’d hoped to have a visa to head onwards to mainland Iran by now, but that’s starting to seem an increasingly distant prospect. When I went to the Foreign Affairs office today, I was told only that there was “a problem” with my application. This doesn’t look good. I’m terrified that the only corner of Iran I’ll be allowed to see is this bizarre Disneyland of the Persian Gulf.

I’ve already visited the local Dolphinarium, toured the 92-square-kilometre island by bicycle and had dinner aboard a catamaran. Those are all the activities the guide book lists for Kish. This scenic place is starting to feel like my own personal Alcatraz, although I suspect it’s easier to find a drink, and some decent television, inside the actual prison.

I spent the afternoon today at the island’s men-only beach, a place that’s fenced off from the rest of Kish so that nobody in a chador gets lustful at sight of my unsculpted furry chest.

The beach is white sand and the water is wonderfully warm, and clear enough that you can see the marine life swimming around you. But somehow the absence of women and children makes even this stunning place feel like a failed house party, where lots of invitations went out, lots of preparations were made, but no one showed up.

A quartet of young guys from Tehran jump and dive after a volleyball, but no one watches or cheers their feats of athleticism. Men swim alone or in pairs, but no one splashes the water at anyone else or plays tag or even laughs too loudly. It’s serene, it’s beautiful, but it’s no fun at all.

Jihadenfreude

2008-10-19T18:51:00.001+04:00

Kish Island, Iran - Tuesday, Oct. 14

I can’t claim credit for the title of this entry. Used to describe the Muslim world’s delight at seeing the financial meltdown in the West, it first appeared in a New York Times blog written by my friend and colleague Stephen Farrell, that paper’s Baghdad correspondent.

Nonetheless, I thought I’d chip in with a few examples from The Tehran Times, the turgid government-run newspaper that is the only English reading I’ve come across on this island.

“The U.S. is slowly but surely being ravaged by demons of its own design,” correspondent Randeep Ramesh reported in a recent edition. “The U.S. has been gobbling up the world's resources – be it labor, capital or minerals – so that Americans can live beyond their means. That these might run out has never bothered U.S. leaders.”

In today’s edition, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini chipped in with a few thoughts of his own. “Liberal democracy, with all its political, economic and military power has been knocked to the ground before the eyes of all the world,” the Times quoted him as saying. “Today, the false bubble of money has popped in the Western world… and they themselves say that the era of U.S. hegemony has come to an end.”

Ayatollah Khameini would have you all know that “the ideology of Islamic thought” will gain from democracy’s downfall.

Counting ayatollahs

2008-10-19T18:43:00.001+04:00

Kish Island, Iran - Monday, Oct. 13

As of today, I am an Iranian multimillionaire.

At dusk – nearly everything closes during the afternoon because of the 40C heat – I plunged into the thick and sweaty crowd at a currency exchange office inside one of Kish’s myriad duty-free shopping malls (which sell mostly cheap Chinese-made electronics and what appear to be knock-offs of Western-brand clothing) and emerged with an armful of Iranian rials.

Three hundred US dollars bought me nearly three million Iranian rials, most of them in crisp orange 50,000-rial notes. For those of you who like to view things from a geopolitical standpoint, it seems three Benjamin Franklins are worth a giant pile of Ayatollah Khomeinis.

After years of travelling through the Middle East with almost exclusively US currency in my wallet, I finally found a place that wouldn’t accept the greenback when I went to go pay the fee for my mainland Iranian visa today. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Islamic Republic of Iran, it seems, is unwilling to accept the Great Satan’s money, a currency even Saddam Hussein and Robert Mugabe had no trouble filling their coffers with.

An apologetic teller at the bank informed me that the payment could only be made in Euros or Iranian rials. Dropping his voice, he then proceeded to warn me that even though America was in financial crisis, I shouldn’t change too much of my dollars into Iranian money. “When you get to Tehran, people on the streets will take dollars, no problem,” he said conspiratorially. “Thank God for the US dollar.”