Sash's blog

A tale from the crypt

2011-04-22T11:58:00.001+07:00

This morning I unexpectedly witnessed a Malagasy exhumation here at the center. The center is building a new dormitory for the boys who live here, and while leveling the earth at the construction site, the workmen uncovered an old tomb still containing the bones of its occupant.

Tombs are very significant to Malagasies, many of whom still adhere to Madagascar's tradition of ancestor worship. Above-ground stone tombs are a common sight in the countryside here, often prettily decorated with painted carvings. The tombs are often associated with local fadys, or taboos. Fadys govern many aspects of life here. For example, in Ambohidratrimo, where I live, the locals believe that goats cause crop-destroying hail, and bringing a goat into the village is therefore fady. But since fadys are usually understood to be strictures laid down by ancestors who continue to watch over the living, there are many fadys associated with tombs.

The fadys are really just a part of the respect that Malagasies pay to the dead. As far as I understand, Malagasy animists believe that their ancestors watch carefully over the living, and are very much involved in day-to-day life. Another well-known custom here is the famadihiana, or turning of the bones. In order to help a dead relative join the ancestors, his or her bones are exhumed a few years after burial, to be wrapped in a new shroud and reburied in a more or less joyful ceremony.

So the discovery of an unknown tomb at the construction site here caused quite a stir. The center is technically owned by a powerful Malagasy Christian denomination, and most of the staff are either totally secular or more or less Christian. But even the Christians here generally observe traditional customs and beliefs to some extent. The tomb and its occupant had to be moved to the local cemetery, but it was done according to custom. Here are some pictures.

Excavating the tomb at the construction site.

The opening to the tomb. There are other tombs still standing nearby that were noted in a 1902 survey of the area, so we surmise that this tomb is about the same age.

A shot of the bones in the tomb. Nobody knows who this person was, and it will probably prove impossible to find out. He or she is now resting in a nearby communal cemetery.

Rum is an important part of Malagasy ceremonies involving the dead. Before exhuming the remains, Akany's maintenance man Jose poured a few capfuls of the rum into the grave as an offering.

The workers put what bones they could find into a new shroud to be wrapped for reburial. The only intact bones were a femur and some vertebrae; the others must have disintegrated over the last century or so.

The shroud, wrapped as is customary here. The older worker to the right has attended a number of famadiahana and knows the proper way to tie a shroud.

Jose pouring a capful of rum to splash on the tires of the 4x4 that took the bones to the reburial site. The newly wrapped bones are at his feet in a straw mat, next to the concrete and sand that will be used to build a new crypt.

Hiking in the highlands

2011-04-19T15:07:00.003+07:00

So far my posts about Madagascar have been fairly grim, but in fact this is a beautiful country with much to see and enjoy. Earlier today I had a chance to go on a hike in the countryside with my colleagues Caroline and Julie, to scout possible places to take some of the Akany children camping. Here are a few pictures.

A local village and its farmland. Rice cultivation is huge here.

Rice ripening in the field. It's not very nice fresh off the stalk—dry and starchy, a bit like a raw potato without the juice.

Some local farmers threshing rice by beating the stalks against old oil drums. They asked me to take a some photos of them and the scenery, which I'll print out and bring back to them in a few days.

Another vista.

The local basketball court. We went into the village to ask permission to camp on a local hillside, since there are often fadys, or taboos, associated with particular places. In many places, people are especially hostile to people camping near old tombs or other sites associated with their ancestors.

Enjoying some of the freshly threshed rice.

A farmer and his kids sharing a Checkers moment.

All for a cell phone

2011-04-08T17:45:00.008+07:00

This morning I had an unexpected opportunity to speak with a boy who was recently released from a center for juvenile delinquents.

This particular center has posed a difficult problem for me and my colleagues here. It has a fearsome reputation: stories abound of poor conditions, malnourishment, and physical/sexual abuse. Naturally, I'm putting much of my time and energy into researching the laws applicable to the delinquents' center, since that's where the worst abuses are taking place. The center's administration, however, makes it impossible for me to actually speak with the children there. It's not that I would actually be barred. In fact, I've already twice interviewed the center's director, who actually described some abuses without so much as blushing. Nevertheless, the administration fears scrutiny. I'm told that if I were to question the children about the conditions of their detention, they would likely be harshly punished en masse and interrogated about my work.

That's why coming across this boy was such a stroke of luck. Now that he's been released, he has nothing more to fear from the center's staff, and there will be no consequences for any of the current residents. Here's what he told me, through a Malagasy interpreter (no names or places, per my boss's request).

He was arrested in February, charged with the theft of his cousin's cell phone. Just before his two-hour trial, he was able to speak with a lawyer for about ten to fifteen minutes, during which she asked him nothing about the facts of his case, but managed to ascertain that his family would be unable to pay her $200 fee. She stood at the start of his trial to let the magistrate know that she was "representing" him, but never said a word. The magistrate (who, in a civil-law system like Madagascar's, decides matters both of fact and law) asked him only one question before convicting: did he do it?

He was taken straight from the court to the delinquents' center. As soon as the gendarmes left, the guards, along with five trusted children, started breaking him in. First, they made him kneel on the tiles with his arms behind his head, chanting "I stole it, I stole it." Then they made him "count" the tiles in the room by kneeling on each one in turn to determine how many pushups he would have to do—150 tiles, 150 pushups. When he was done doing pushups they forced him to pose as if seated for about half an hour. When he fell down from fatigue, they made him resume the position, and kicked him in the backs of the knees. Finally, they took him to his dormitory.

The dormitories are even worse. Every night, between 6:00 PM and 6:00 AM, the boys are locked into the dorms and left there with no supervision. Most nights, there is at least one fight: boys get black eyes, bruises, split lips, and in one or two cases, broken arms. Generally, the boy told me, the guards laugh when they see boys emerge in the morning with bruises. Occasionally, however, they respond to the fights by punishing the entire group. All of their punishments are cruel: the boys are forced to somersault, walk in pushup positions on their knuckles, or crawl, military style, back and forth across concrete. The boy I spoke to had scars on his knuckles and elbows.

Individual boys suffer even more. They are forced to clear sewage from the center's filthy squat toilets with their bare hands. They are bastinadoed: made to kneel on hands and feet with their feet on a chair, soles facing upwards, and are beaten on the soles of their feet with a rubber truncheon whip from a car tire. In some cases they remain unable to walk for up to a week afterwards. The guards administer the bastinado so cruelly that often the boys' feet are swollen on both sides, as each stroke causes the tops of their feet to hit the wooden chair hard enough to cause bruises.

The food at the delinquents' center is woefully inadequate. Plain rice gruel is served for breakfast and dinner. Lunch is half a bowl of rice with some dried fish. I asked the boy to show me, by pouring water into a bowl, how much gruel they are allowed for breakfast and dinner. Here's how much he poured:

For the record, it came to about 110 ml, or just shy of half a cup. More telling, perhaps, was the effect on the boy. He told me that between February 11 and April 7, his weight dropped from 65 kg (143 lbs) to 51 kg (112 lbs)—imagine a sixteen-year-old boy dropping thirty pounds in two months!

From a purely legal perspective, this is really a rule of law problem. Madagascar's laws are good on paper, but the reality is bleak, as in Oscar Wilde's epigram: "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means." The law says that the boy should have been assisted by counsel during his first police interrogation—but he wasn't. The law requires the trial magistrate to ask questions to determine a child defendant's capacity for criminal responsibility—but he didn't. The law forbids the centers' staff from abusing the children—but they do—and requires them to feed the children 3,000 calories a day—but they don't. Under the law, the boy I spoke with should have faced some form of judicial admonishment, or at worst, been required to attend a few reeducation classes (assuming that he could have been convicted at all under proper procedures). Instead, he was summarily condemned to a months-long nightmare of abuse and deprivation—and all for a cell phone.

There are bright spots in all of this. I've met, and heard of, juvenile judges here who are marvelously diligent and caring. And it's possible that we can change things at the delinquents' center. The boy I spoke to was convinced that the center's director has no idea what's going on, thanks to her attitude of not-so-benign neglect. Of course, she already told me about the fights in the dormitories herself, but she may be unaware of the worst of the adult abuses. And even if she does, it's conceivable that she doesn't know that her center is on the wrong side of the law. There's no guaranteeing it, but by approaching the center's director through the right channels, it's possible that we can improve things. One can only hope.

A peculiar institution

2011-04-05T13:18:00.004+07:00

In my last post I mentioned femmes de ménage. It's really just French for a housekeeper/cleaning lady, but in Madagascar the term has come to refer to children who work as domestic servants.

Most of what I've learned about these girls (and they're almost always girls, as the term indicates) comes from the staff at the various children's centers with which I'm working. So far as I know at the moment, femmes de ménage are the children of poor families, sent by their parents to work for wealthy Malagasies. They generally make some kind of wage, which I'm told tops out at about 60,000 AR or ariary ($30) per month. Not only is that less than the minimum wage of 77,000 AR ($36.50) per month, but the girls generally work long hours, sometimes up to twenty hours a day. Most of them live in abysmal conditions, sleeping on the floor in their employers' (or patrons') kitchens, and eating two meagre meals a day of either leftovers or plain rice. Although they usually make a nominal wage, they rarely collect it themselves; either their parents collect it directly, or they send it home themselves to support their families.

As bad as this practice is, it's hard not to sympathize with the plight of Madagascar's rural poor, who struggle simply to feed and house themselves. For them, sending their children to work can be a necessity. What's really infuriating about the femmes de ménage are their patrons, some of whom have succeeded in using the juvenile justice system to reduce their child servants to child slaves.

There's a pattern to these cases, according to my information: the patrons of a child femme de ménage brings the child to court on a petty charge, usually theft. The child is tried and sent to a children's center, like the ones with which I'm working. The femme de ménage, now branded a thief, is unable to collect wages. And there you have it: a child servant, by virtue of a petty conviction, is retroactively rendered little better than a slave. Meanwhile, the patron is free to find another servant. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The cycle can be even more maddening. In some cases, the patron will fabricate charges, and then blackmail the child's' parents into an informal agreement to reimbursement him for the alleged thefts. At the same time, the patron convinces the courts to craft a formal reimbursement order against the child. The patron avoids any obligation to pay even the meagre wages he owes his femme de ménage, and profits twice from a double reimbursement. As far as I've learned, however, the femmes de ménage are almost invariably convicted, while patrons are almost never prosecuted, despite the clear illegality of child labor under Malagasy law.

Under the circumstances, the fact that some of the girls are in fact guilty of theft is almost by the by. Most of their convictions pale into insignificance next to the crimes of their patrons: child labor at best, blackmail, fraud, and physical and sexual abuse at worst. And yet it's the children who land in court.

Even the worst child exploiters seem to go unpunished. A good example came up just this week at the children's court in a nearby town. A woman, who by all accounts was extremely rich, brought a nine-year-old boy to the family court, demanding that the judge relieve her of him. She described him as an unbearable burden, fit only to be a ward of the state. In fact, it emerged that she had adopted him as an infant and used him as a domestic slave ever since. Despite her wealth (she drove a Mercedes Benz to court, an incredible luxury in this country), the boy had slept in her kitchen and eaten two meals a day his entire life. He had lash marks on his back. The judge agreed to sever the boy's connection with the woman, and threatened to have her arrested if she ever approached the boy again, but she was not charged with anything. After nine years of exploitation, it was that easy for her to unburden herself of her child servant.

This case raises a frustrating question: how can a person who has exploited a child from birth walk into a courtroom, essentially confess her crime to the judge, and walk out a free woman? As is often the case in poor countries, the question really has two parts. First, how are the procedures for charging someone with a crime supposed to work? And second, why don't they work? The first part of the question should be relatively easy to answer. Either the judge has the power to charge someone on his own initiative (or sua sponte, as we say), or he doesn't. The second, however, is more complicated. If judges here actually can bring charges sua sponte, why don't they? Are they corrupt? Are they scared of retribution? Are they resigned to the dysfunction that surrounds them? If judges actually can't bring charges, why doesn't someone else?

The asymmetry is galling: in Madagascar, as far as I can tell, if a child exploiter and a child servant walk into court together, the child will stay behind to be processed by the justice system, and the adult will walk out to repeat the cycle. Hopefully I'll learn to understand the problem better over the next couple of weeks, as I speak with local judges and lawyers.

The good, the bad, and the ugly

2011-03-30T17:40:00.001+07:00

It's been a full first two weeks in Madagascar. Now that I've been here for a while, I've had time to acquaint myself with the various children's centers I'm working with. The center where I'm living has a grant from the EU to put together a human rights education program for the children and staff at the various centers, all of which are closely tied to the family or criminal courts. The idea is to teach the children about their procedural rights in the courts (and, in some cases, prisons), and the laws governing their employment. The other part of the program will hopefully at least cut back a bit on some of the abuses that take place at some of the worse centers by making sure the staff know the law (and its attendant consequences) governing their conduct. I've had time to visit each of the centers at least once, and to meet the children and staff.

The first two centers are Akany Avoko, where I'm living, and Centre St. Jean. Both are well-run centers that take in children separated from their parents by the courts, because their parents have either abused them, abandoned them, or are themselves in prison. There are a few orphans as well, but they're exceptional.

Another center included in the EU grant is in Faravohitro, a neighborhood in Antananarivo. It was founded at around the same time as Akany Avoko and is considered a sister center, but the two are completely separate. Faravohitro houses about 30 girls, all of whom have been either accused or convicted of delinquency. The courts send the girls there either to await trial, or, if convicted, to serve out their sentences. Before coming to Faravohitro, most of the girls worked as domestic servants, or femmes de ménage, for wealthy Malagasies in Antananarivo. In reality, femmes de ménage are little better than slaves, sent to the city by their parents, who collect their wages. They often end up at Faravohitro on charges of petty theft, while their employers, or patrons, suffer no consequences at all for trafficking in child laborers. More about that in a later post.

By far the worst of the centers is Akany Fanabeazana, the center for boys. It houses about 80 boys, also accused or convicted of delinquency, or in a few cases of more serious crimes, including murder and rape. The fact that they are being held in a children's center rather than a jail is a step in the right direction, but I've quickly learned some disturbing things about the conditions there. The staff there use corporal punishment against the boys, and have been known to steal from them. Although some of the boys have committed violent crimes, they aren't supervised properly; there are cases of boys being badly beaten or even raped in the dorms by other boys, and, in at least one case, by a staff member. I'll post more about that as well.

My next task is to survey the children and staff at the various centers, to find out what they know about their legal rights. This is necessary because the teacher who will ultimately deliver this curriculum at the various centers will be paid by the EU, which won't give us any more money unless we show progress with measurable indicators. Beyond satisfying the EU (hopefully), the survey will give me a useful baseline measure of what people do or do not know. It will also give me a chance to ask the kids about their experiences in the courts, to find out which legal protections (like representation by a lawyer) are or are not actually enforced. I'll be doing that all next week.

Keeping in Touch, sort of

2011-03-11T22:40:00.005+07:00

While I was in Cambodia working at the Documentation Center, I tutored some high schoolers who also worked there. (I wrote about it a bit here.) The Director had asked me to help them improve their English writing. I recently received an email from a few of them, and you can judge for yourself how successful I was!

I got this one first:

dear! teacher!
We are very miss teacher so much, How are you!
I hope teacher will teach us again, at the end I wish teacher good luck gooog health and success in work, If teaher got my Email pleas reply to me soon ok,
from your best student Tina, Romas, Sarath,

And then a couple of days later, this one:

Dear Alex!
How are you nowadays? I hope that you are fine right? how about your study? Going well or not? I hope that you can do it to the good point.
For me, it always have the problem with my study because there has a lot of subject to study, so I must to challenge to try hard to study.
I and our team really miss you so much because we always think about your teaching us and I hope that we'll see you again.
OK! Take care.
Best wish!
Romas!

Their emails are obviously totally adorable, and I'm highly flattered that a year after the fact my students are keeping in touch, especially given what a rotten ESL teacher I was. There's no doubt in my mind that I learned much more from them about Cambodia than they learned from me about English grammar, but it was certainly a fun experience.

A party

2009-11-03T10:09:00.001+07:00

Last week Lou and I went to a party at our Khmer teacher Sokha's house. He and his wife were celebrating the first birthday of their son, Sothearos, a name from Sanskrit meaning "dew." It's also the name of a major boulevard in Phnom Penh, after some king or other. Sokha told us that it's very unusual for ordinary Cambodians to give a child such a grand name, as it's thought to be bad luck. He and his wife, however, decided to buck tradition. I'm not entirely sure of it, but I surmise that in Western terms, Sothearos falls somewhere between William and Charlemagne for grandeur and eccentricity. Not positively outlandish, but distinctly regal.

The party was a great chance to infiltrate a real, actual Khmer home---an opportunity that comes along with surprising rarity. Just traveling to Sokha's house demonstrated to us how much of Phnom Penh is hidden from us. Lou and I drove out to a spot near the airport, where Sokha met us on his motorbike. He led us along a series of unlit, rutted dirt alleys along the abandoned train tracks to his house, which seems to be part of the housing development that has exploded in the capital in recent years. Many of the houses seemed new or even half-built, although it was difficult to tell in the dark, especially as I was concentrating on negotiating protruding boulders, mud puddles, and hardened tire tracks with my extremely inadequate headlight (at low speeds it hardly works at all, but flares up when I rev the engine). The houses in this part of the city open onto undeveloped land that must have been a railway easement in the past. They say that Cambodia is restarting its rail lines, setting up an inevitable land conflict with these homeowners and merchants---but that's for another post.

Lou and I were the only Westerners at the party, and were given the red carpet treatment. That meant (1) sitting at a table groaning with grilled meat and pungent sauces, and (2) posing for photos with every single person at the party, whether or not we had had the chance to speak with them at all. The guests seemed to take it as a prestigious thing to have barangs (foreigners) at the birthday party, and wanted to commemorate the occasion. I've never really been a guest of honor, especially in such an unearned way, but I can't say I didn't enjoy playing the celebrity for an evening. Of course, I may have misinterpreted the whole thing. I was undeniably a bit of a physical standout at the party, towering over everyone there, so the shutterbugs may have simply been documenting an interesting specimen.

Here are some photos, as well as a very short video of Sokha's niece dancing. Her hand gestures are very typical. People dance the way she does in the video by the hour at weddings.

Wheels!

2009-10-13T15:08:00.001+07:00

This weekend I finally bought myself a motorbike! Here it is, my pride and joy---a Daelim Citi 100, a green hornet of uncertain vintage, with four gears, an unreliable electric starter, and an instrument panel that long ago stopped indicating speed, gear, or fuel quantity, purchased for the grand sum of $340 from the only obese Cambodian woman I have ever seen:

And here, for those who haven't experienced the joys of Phnom Penh's traffic, is a video I shot the other day by taping my camera to my handlebars, much to the amusement of other drivers. It starts in the parking lot of Legal Aid of Cambodia, and shows snippets of the very roundabout way I inadvertently took home. The shaking at the beginning is me jumping on the kick starter, thanks to the temperamental battery. My favorite part is at around 2:05, when you can see two dudes wheeling a rusty bicycle alongside their moto at high speed:

As you can see, the traffic in Phnom Penh is chaotic, to say the least. Of course I wear a helmet, but I consider myself an unusually safe driver here because I never drive into oncoming traffic. I also never transport more than one other person, though it's totally routine to see two adults and several small children on one moto. I also never administer intravenous medication on the moto:

Another road hazard here is the police, who routinely stop Westerners and demand on-the-spot "fines" for no good reason at all. So far I've managed to avoid being pulled over by veering into the middle lane whenever I see cops ahead, so that they can't easily flag me down.

For all the chaos, motoring around Phnom Penh is super fun. People seem to get a kick out of seeing a Westerner on an old beater like mine, instead of a more modern Honda, so I get lots of smiles and waves, especially from hack drivers (called motodop in Khmer) with the same kind of bike.

Trespassing on your own land

2009-10-05T09:34:00.001+07:00

Last week I went with the lawyers in the Land Law Program at Legal Aid to Siem Reap to visit two clients, husband and wife, who are in prison, accused of trespassing on their own land.

Their story is pretty typical: they're both former Khmer Rouge soldiers who settled on their farm after the fighting with the government stopped in the '90s. There was a government program, whereby you could take ownership of land by clearing it and removing any land mines in it---a sort of Homestead Act for Cambodia. The villagers did all that, established their farms, and started putting their lives back together.

Unbeknownst to our clients, however, the village chief illegally sold everybody's land to some politician quite early on, maybe ten years ago now. The politician in question (who is now a National Assembly member) bought the land as an investment---his intention was to sell the land for profit, not to farm it, so he left the villagers alone. Over the years the paper value of the land has skyrocketed, and it changed hands several times. Meanwhile, the villagers have continued farming the land, subsisting on their harvests as they've done since the war ended, totally unaware that influential people in the capital were speculating on its value.

That, to me, is one of the most revealing parts of the case. The villagers can continue farming the land, and the speculators can continue trading the land, coexisting in parallel universes, more or less blissfully ignorant of each other. It just so happens that the villagers are the legal owners of the land, but as long as their use of land---i.e., farming---doesn't conflict with the speculators' use of the land---i.e., profit---an equilibrium is maintained.

Our clients, however, decided to assert their legal claim to the land by seeking formal title to it. (Since the Khmer Rouge destroyed all records having to do with land ownership, it's very common for people to have a legal claim to their land without title, an actual piece of paper, recording that fact.) As soon as our clients sought formal ownership of the land, their interest collided with that of the speculators. The actual legal collision here is quite straightforward. The speculators think they own the land, but they don't, because they were defrauded in the first place; they have, in all fairness, been taken for a ride. They have a mess of their own to sort out, sorting out who owes what to whom over this rotten deal. But the villagers own the land---simple as that.

In Cambodia's courts, however, nothing is simple. The villagers may have the law on their side, but the speculators have money and influence. It's the easiest thing in the world for them to exert a little pull---and it really takes just a little---and steamroll the villagers. That's how our clients wound up in jail. The speculators bribed someone, or made a call, or both, and now our clients are looking at a year in prison for trespassing on their own land.

The really crazy part is that there's a whole system of special commissions, called Cadastral Commissions (from the French cadastre, for 'register of property'), charged with sorting out precisely this kind of all-too-common dispute. The only way to get definitive title to land is through that system. The speculators never went through that system, meaning that they have no legal support for their claim that they own the land. In essence, the speculators have succeeded in having two people locked up for trespassing on land that nobody legally owns.

What's worse is that our clients have four children, who are now stranded on their farm with nobody to take care of them. Chheng Ourn, the director of LAC's Land Law Program, filed a motion with the court to dismiss the trespassing charges, so hopefully their parents will be out of prison soon, but there's really no saying. My task now is to try and find some NGO to take in the children, but even that might not happen---they're all overbooked and underfunded, so finding one to take in four more kids will take some doing. Right now, the village is inaccessible by road thanks to flooding from Typhoon Ketsana, so the kids are making do with the food that Legal Aid dropped off last week.

There was a World Bank project to help improve matters. They were resolving land conflicts and issuing titles to avoid precisely this kind of situation. But the day after we got back from Siem Reap, we learned that Cambodia's government has ended the program, which according to a local rights group, was "an abysmal failure."

Back in Cambodia

2009-09-23T11:27:00.003+07:00

So here I am, back in Cambodia. This time I'm working for a slightly more rag-tag organization, without the resources to handle my visas, so I had to shift for myself. As a result, I recently paid my very first bribe.

Let me hasten to say that this was a process utterly devoid of finesse. Do not for a second imagine me casting keen glances at stony faced interlocutors, engaging in any kind of savvy negotiations, or taking any audacious risks. Instead of conjuring "Sash in post-World War II Berlin traversing the treacherous zone borders using his wit and guile," think of "Sash learning an unfamiliar filing procedure at the DMV."

Here's how it went down. After disembarking from my plane, I shuffled through all the usual lines. I handed over my passport and paperwork, and made my way to the cashier as directed. But instead of shuffling along to await my visa, I paused at the counter for an awkward moment, trying to figure out to whom I ought to address my grease payment. You could hardly imagine a less debonair figure dabbling in the less-than-pristine waters of Cambodian officialdom. I even briefly entertained the notion of clearing my throat, as in: "Ahem. Can someone please tell me whom I should bribe?"

But, as I say, this game does not require a light touch. The paper shufflers behind the window, keen-nosed for lucre, spotted me straight away; the same people who had processed and returned my documents without deigning to notice me or return my greetings one minute suddenly showed uncharacteristic solicitude. Anyway, I imagined that I detected a certain heightened energy in the ranks, a straightening of backs and turning of heads, as I cast about for a sticky palm.

I eventually addressed the whole passel of officials, asking nonchalantly "Is it possible to get a six-month visa here?" Sure now what I was after, the immigration officials jockeyed openly for my business, talking over each other and trying to catch my eye.

Eventually, one of them won out. The bureaucrat started answering, "Yes, it is possible. You can---"---but before he could finish, a man in an olive-green military uniform emerged from an office behind the counter and stood behind my bureaucrat, who immediately said "You can talk to him." The uniformed man was the captain in charge of the immigration office at the airport. His inferiors all deferred to him as he led me to a different desk.

From there it was entirely straightforward: the captain very politely named his price, which was exactly the same price I had been offered on my first trip to Cambodia, and promised to deliver my passport and visa on such and such a day. I turned over my passport, and received it back in due course, exactly as promised, personally hand delivered by the captain.

As you can see, this particular area of Cambodian corruption is no cloak-and-dagger affair. No surreptitious swaps, no deft conman shuffles. No cynical, cigar-chomping camaraderie. No winking, no shit-eating grins, no talk of backs being scratched. No party lines, no inside connections, no circumlocutions. Nothing that resembled any of the bribes I've seen in the movies, or on shows like The Wire. Just a quick, public transaction with a uniformed officer who identified himself by name using an official document, charged me what appears to be a standard fee, and delivered the goods in a timely fashion.

In other words, this particular bribe was essentially indistinguishable from a legitimate fee. I asked at the immigration office how to get a visa, and an immigration officer handled it for me. In fact, I would point out that when I asked how to get a business visa, nobody mentioned what I happen to know is the actual procedure. Anyone who hadn't done the research wouldn't even realize he had paid a bribe, if he could overlook the suspiciously personalized service. It was predictable, efficient, and relatively transparent, just like a good bureaucratic procedure ought to be. It's just that the procedure that exists on paper and the procedure that happens in practice are totally different from each other---especially with regard to who keeps the fee.

Of course, maybe this is just a rationalization. Maybe I sullied myself with bad karma by participating in such a sordid business. If omens are any indication, I must have displeased some deity, because the airport lost both of my suitcases.

Back in the USA . . . for now

2009-08-19T04:17:00.003+07:00

As most of you know already, I am back in the US for about a month. I'm not yet reachable by phone, but I'll remedy that in the morning. Hardly worthwhile news to post at four in the morning, but I am currently suffering from serious jet lag as a consequence of a momentary, unaccustomed lapse into luxury and dissipation.

Ordinarily, I suffer only mild jet lag, especially when I arrive home late at night. On a long flight like the one from Hong Kong to New York, I usually get about two hours of sleep, by forcing myself unconscious through sheer force of will. Leg cramps, general irritation, and in-flight movies generally keep me awake the rest of the time, so that by the time I arrive home I'm capable of little more than a perfunctory greeting to the loving family before I collapse into bed.

But for some reason, I was bumped up into Business Class on my flight home this time. Not for me the grim, silent struggle for knee- and elbow-space, the incessant mewling and puking of babies, or the aching, unfulfillable urge to cross my legs. This time, sated with cognac and fine cheeses, lulled by the sound of glasses and porcelain chinking on amply laden carts, I slept the deep and refreshing sleep of one savoring unearned opulence.

The more fool me. I arrived in New York uncharacteristically perky, just in time for my sister and her fiance (who are putting me up for the night) to go to bed. That is why you find me posting to this nearly derelict blog at four in the morning. Serves me right, I suppose, for straying from the straight and narrow path of Economy Class.

Anyway, here are some pictures I took of the ruined temples at Angkor Wat.

Photo project

2009-07-26T12:45:00.007+07:00

I haven't posted for a while because with the end of the summer looming, I actually have to hand in a memo on my research topic. That's about all I've been up to, so I thought I'd write about a great project my friend Beth Rossi is working on for Legal Aid of Cambodia that has started to bear fruit.

Earlier this summer, Beth identified twenty-two Cambodian kids from Battambang who either have already had or are at risk of getting into trouble with the law. After a couple of introductory sessions, she gave them disposable cameras with which to take photos of their daily lives. Once the results came in, she held a writing workshop where the kids wrote captions for the photos and biographies of themselves, which were exhibited along with the photos in Battambang.

I've posted some of my favorites below. One hundred of the best photos are available here. Pictures of the exhibit going up and of the writing workshop are here.

The next step is to have the captions and biographies translated from Khmer into English. Then Beth can hang prints of the kids' photos at restaurants and retailers around Boston (where she attends law school), with the ultimate goal of helping out Legal Aid of Cambodia. If the project is successful enough, it may well be repeated---and as Beth has pointed out to me, it's a very promising way to build connections between at-risk children and sympathetic lawyers.

Donations are, of course, welcome. You can also buy prints of any photos that catch your eye, with the money going to an excellent cause. Beth's email address is elizabeth.a.rossi [at] gmail.com.

Here's Beth mounting the exhibit with a colleague:

And here are all the kids who took the photos:

Phnom Penh

2009-07-14T15:04:00.013+07:00

Two posts today: this one, which is hopefully pretty interesting; and another one probably only of interest to legal eagles. The second one is below, or you can access it here.

For the last few weeks, I've been working with some high school students who volunteer at DC-Cam, on top of my legal research. I'm supposed to be helping them with their writing; between communication difficulties and my lack of experience, I'm learning far more than they are.

My most precocious student is Romas, a Cham Cambodian girl who has essentially appointed herself student representative. Not only is her English better than the other students, but she is plain-spoken and confident where my other students are shy and deferential. It's a pleasure to work with all of them, but Romas's force of personality really sets her apart, especially among such a young group. She often translates for me, and negotiates on behalf of her peers over deadlines, meeting times, and so on.

Romas, along with a couple of other young volunteers, is learning radio production at DC-Cam. Last week, she brought me into the studio to play me a song about Phnom Penh. I got my hands on an mp3 version. Listen below, or here if the embedded player doesn't work.

A bit of background: the first thing the Khmer Rouge did when they took over was to force every last person to leave Phnom Penh. They claimed it was an "evacuation," and that the United States was planning to bomb the city (not altogether implausible, unfortunately), but it was really just another step in their plan to wind back the clocks into an agrarian golden age. The song Romas played me is about the period of exile from Phnom Penh:

Oh! Phnom Penh, during the three years we were apart, I missed you and my heart suffered each and every day, because the enemy cut off the affection between you and me.

When I was forced to leave you, anger burnt in my heart and compelled me to avenge [the sufferings you bore] to show my faithfulness to you.

R. Phnom Penh, our beloved city, in spite of the three years of hardship, you managed to preserve our [nation]'s bright history of courage and represent the soul of Kampuchea, which was once one of the world's glorious empire.

You prevented the disappearance of Cambodia, the descendant of the majestic Angkor empire.

Oh, the soul of the Khmer nation lives on and, oh, is inspired by the majestic Angkor empire.

Oh, Phnom Penh, now we are reunited and you are relieved from bereavement.

Oh, Phnom Penh, our nation's heart and soul.

Cathartic alchemy

2009-07-14T14:35:00.008+07:00

Here's a little thing I wrote for DC-Cam about my trip to the court yesterday:

Yesterday, Comrade Duch’s defense team brought the trial to a grinding halt, forcing the Trial Chamber to adjourn for the day before hearing any substantive testimony from former S-21 interrogator (and alleged torturer) Mam Nai. No sooner had Mam taken the stand than defense lawyer François Roux raised a question that brought the Chamber up short: had Mam had the opportunity to consult an attorney about the possibility that he himself will be subject to prosecution, either before the ECCC or another Cambodian court, if the Trial Chamber accepts the Co-Prosecutors’ motion to use the doctrine of Joint Criminal Enterprise?

Although Deputy Prosecutor William Smith responded that his office had promised not to prosecute Mam before the ECCC, he was, of course, in no position to speak for Cambodia’s domestic prosecutors. Mam informed the Court that he although he would like to consult an attorney, he cannot afford to pay one. Unable to get hold of an attorney for Mam on such short notice, Trial Chamber President Nil Nonn had little choice but to adjourn for the day or expose the court to allegations of disregarding Mam’s rights.

Derailing Mam’s testimony was just another volley in the ongoing fight over Joint Criminal Enterprise. Simply put, Joint Criminal Enterprise is a legal doctrine that spreads guilt from one person to another, as long as a few requirements are satisfied. Under the doctrine, people who are participating in a common enterprise are considered guilty of each other’s crimes committed to advance the goal of the enterprise. For example, two people who agree to rob a bank together can both be convicted of murder if one of them shoots a teller during the robbery. Legally, under Joint Criminal Enterprise, it is as though both robbers committed the murder, even though only one of them pulled the trigger---even if the other had no intention of creating any casualties. Needless to say, Joint Criminal Enterprise is a prosecutor’s dream. If convictions and years in prison are the coin of the realm, Joint Criminal Enterprise gives a prosecutor vastly more bang for her buck, one crime garnering as many convictions as there are plausible participants.

The ECCC Co-Prosecutors have asked the Trial Chamber to use Joint Criminal Enterprise in judging Comrade Duch. The benefit to the prosecution is easy to see. The doctrine would not only make it easier to convict Duch, but would put the Co-Prosecutors in a strong position to convict the tribunal’s other defendants, who were, after all, members of a tight-knit think tank. Moreover, if the Co-Prosecutors could establish that S-21 was a Joint Criminal Enterprise in which Duch and all of the prison’s guards and interrogators participated, they could bury Duch in an avalanche of guilt. The symbolism is, presumably, not lost on them: a broad application of Joint Criminal Enterprise would effectively allow the Co-Prosecutors to spin Tuol Sleng’s historical record into a monumental conviction, a beguiling, cathartic alchemy.

But to the defense team, all that glitters is not gold. Their task will become vastly more burdensome if the Trial Chamber decides that it can hold Duch guilty of crimes that, in the view of the defense, he did not commit, was not aware of, and could not control. To them, and to academic critics of the doctrine, Joint Criminal Enterprise amounts to little more than guilt by association---good enough for moralists, perhaps, but not good law. Further, the doctrine is said by some to favor quantity over quality of convictions.

Duch’s lawyers are evidently resisting the use of the doctrine tooth and nail. Roux ‘s question---whether Mam had been able to consult with a lawyer about his exposure under Joint Criminal Enterprise---evinced more than his concern for Mam’s welfare. It highlighted an unresolved tension between Joint Criminal Enterprise and the right of a witness to refuse to incriminate himself. If simply working at S-21 exposes Mam to liability for the crimes of his fellow guards, who are free to incriminate themselves, he cannot safely testify about anything of value. Put another way, Joint Criminal Enterprise could put one witness’s right against self-incrimination into the hands of another witness, reducing witness protection to a nullity.

An important question that went unasked yesterday was whether the Joint Criminal Enterprise doctrine even exists in Cambodian domestic law. If the answer is no, then Mam quite simply cannot be prosecuted in the Cambodian courts (assuming, of course, that he avoids incriminating himself directly). Even if the ECCC Trial Chamber does accept Joint Criminal Enterprise, its decision has no effect on Cambodian law. As long as the Co-Prosecutors honor their promise not to bring Mam before the ECCC, he should be safe, Joint Criminal Enterprise or no Joint Criminal Enterprise.

But that, of course, was not the point. Roux put the Trial Chamber and the Co-Prosecutors on notice that his team will do its best to raise the cost of implementing Joint Criminal Enterprise, in terms of amnesties, legal aid, further delays, and the risk of appeal. He also put Mam on notice---whether with or without genuine grounds---that his testimony could come back to bite him.

The Luminous Bastard

2009-07-10T11:08:00.016+07:00

One of the biggest characters on the international criminal law scene is the lawyer Jacques Vergès, who is defending Khieu Samphan, Democratic Kampuchea's head of state, in the ECCC. At least among lawyers, he has come to embody radical, postcolonial opposition to anything that smells of Western imperialism---including just about all of the international criminal tribunals. He has defended Algerian cafe bomber Djamila Bouhired; Carlos the Jackal, who shot up an OPEC meeting; Gestapo-member Klaus Barbie, aka the Butcher of Lyon; Slobodan Milošević; and Suddham Hussein; among others.

He is notorious for his courtroom tactics. During his defense of Djamila Bouhired (whom he later married), he baited the mob of racist Pieds-Noirs in the gallery, informing the court that "while their people were subsisting on acorns in the forest, my people were building palaces," waving the flag of the Algerian National Liberation Front, and generally raising a media ruckus that eventually resulted in Bouhired's release. His tactics are anything but lawyerly, but they've succeeded again and again, and made Vergès famous. What one can glean of his political philosophy seems caustic, if not nihilistic, but his tactics undoubtedly wreak havoc on hypocrisy.

Adding to his air of hard-core radical glamour, Vergès disappeared for about eight years in the nineteen-seventies, without telling Djamila or any of his friends where he went. They presumed that he was dead. Rumor has it that he was here in Cambodia, working to bring about the Khmer Rouge revolution; the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders deny it, but Vergès himself keeps mum.

On top of all that, Vergès is an extraordinarily eloquent man, and has (ironically) patterned himself as an old-school French intellectual, in the tradition of Diderot and Montaigne. He is also something of a bon vivant: impeccable clothes, swell apartments, big cigars, fine wines, and so forth. He entitled his autobiography Le Salaud Lumineux, or The Brilliant Bastard, in which he wrote "My moral is to be against every moral, because it seeks to lash down life."

His latest escapade, of course, is at the ECCC. His defendant isn't being tried yet, but Vergès has made some waves already in the Pre-Trial Chamber. During a routine hearing on some procedural matter, Vergès adopted his usual tactics, and went straight for the Court's weakest point: the atmosphere of corruption that has plagued the proceedings. After some heated colloquy, the judges insisted that Vergès restrict his arguments to the motion before the Chamber. Before moving on, he produced this gem:

"Firstly, I shall be silent because it is not for me to be more concerned about your honor than you yourselves are. If you consider that corruption should not be discussed, I am not going to force the discussion on you. I shall be silent because I understand your caution in this regard and I think that the presumption of innocence that you sometimes deny the accused may be of some benefit to you. And I shall be silent because the Head of the State which hosts you has stated publicly that he wishes you to leave, making of you, in a moral sense, squatters. I shall be silent also because a member of the Government of the country that hosts you stated that you were obsessed only by money, thus confirming the charge---be it grounded or not---of corruption, which blights the tribunal. Lastly---you see, I'll be brief---because it is not seemly to fire on ambulances and victims and the wounded; nor is it seemly to fire on hearses and those who are about to die."

In response, the Pre-Trial Chamber issued a "Warning" to Vergès to the effect that if he continues to obstruct the proceedings, they will sanction him; they sent a copy of the warning to the French Bar Association. A feeble rejoinder, in my opinion, to Vergès broadside. Whatever you think of him and his tactics, this exchange gives a sense of the force of his personality and intellect, and how difficult it is for a court to emerge from a tangle with him with its dignity intact. Vergès always plays his part to the hilt, making almost any response seem trivial by comparison.

This post is already too long, but I'll end by saying that while Vergès is something of a fringe figure, his critiques of international criminal justice are not unfounded. The other defense lawyers I've met here are principled people, who object to the strong element of theater that characterizes a tribunal like this one. Their most basic criticism---and it's a difficult one to counter---is that a court operating under such great political and historical pressure simply cannot realistically acquit its first few defendants. The first cases go forward on a presumption of guilt, not innocence, but are vigorously contested anyway, simply to present the appearance of neutral justice. This tribunal, like many others, is charged with restoring respect for the rule of law, a goal that doesn’t comport well with a show trial, however “just” the outcome. It’s just a shame that Vergès is such a toxic standard bearer for international criminal defense, which does critically important work and brings intellectual rigor to these kinds of courts.

There’s a documentary about Vergès called Terror’s Advocate; it’s very long, with a lot of talking heads and interviews with superannuated terrorists, but there are a lot of interviews with Vergès himself, which make for fascinating watching. There’s also a great interview available here.

More random photos

2009-07-06T11:12:00.011+07:00

Some photos I've taken recently, in no particular order.

Here's the outside of a rural temple I visited briefly this weekend:

And here is a shrine inside the temple. The temple itself is a beautiful, ancient stone structure in the jungle, surrounded by the ruins of older, smaller temples. It's at the top of some very picturesque stairs; you can hear the monks chanting inside as you climb up to the main entrance. Once you get inside you see this:

This photo doesn't really do the shrine justice. From outside, the interior of the temple is completely dark---all you can see is the christmas lights on the shrine flashing in different patterns, like a misplaced slot machine.

A stupa in the nearby village, containing the bones of a mass grave left over from the Khmer Rouge days. In the local version of Buddhism, people's bones must be cremated, but only by their relatives. Since these bones are unidentified, nobody's allowed to burn them. There are stupas like this one all over the country. Some have proposed holding a national cremation of remains like these, but it's been delayed while the trials are going on, in case the bones are needed for evidence.

Some pickled ants we had for lunch the other day. Surprisingly, quite delicious---the eggs go pop in your mouth!

A guardian statue outside the National Museum:

Louise at the beach:

A monk jumping from one building to another. The cloths are monks' robes drying in the sun.

A woman plowing her rice field in the countryside:

A moto driver sleeping near my house:

A survivor and a perpetrator

2009-07-02T16:51:00.004+07:00

This week I saw a survivor of Tuol Sleng prison (aka S-21) testify, and met the prison's second-in-command in person.

The survivor was Vann Nath, one of only twelve people who survived S-21, out of the fourteen thousand who were killed there. Since only four are still alive, Vann Nath's testimony drew a big crowd---the Court's viewing gallery was thronged with Westerners and Cambodians.

Vann Nath only survived Tuol Sleng because of his training as a painter---the Khmer Rouge forced him to paint portraits of its top leaders. Except for his miraculous survival, Vann Nath's story was fairly typical. He was forcibly "evacuated" from the city, and deposited in a rural commune. After working for two and a half years in the rice fields near Phnom Penh, he was arrested out of the blue on suspicion of subverting the revolution, most likely because he had a university education. After his arrest, he was tortured briefly at a Buddhist pagoda used as a prison, until he was transferred to Tuol Sleng. He spent a month there before he was pressed into service as a portraitist until the Khmer Rouge fell in 1979.

After he was freed, Vann Nath painted a series of pictures of the atrocities committed at Tuol Sleng, which are now permanently exhibited there. I could only find a few samples online (sorry for the poor image quality).

The paintings were a major part of Vann Nath's testimony. This one shows one prisoner being publicly tortured while an unconscious prisoner is dunked in water to revive him for more abuse. The layout of the prison as shown in the painting is very accurate. The wooden structure---which was originally used as a jungle gym for students---still stands there. The Prosecutors used the painting to show the view that Duch must have had of the tortures committed at Tuol Sleng as he traversed the yard, in order to establish his awareness of and responsibility for the crimes that took place.

I've included this one, of a prisoner being waterboarded, purely out of interest.

As I mentioned, I also met Tuol Sleng's second-in-command, Him Huoy, the officer responsible for arresting all of the prison's victims. He also personally killed a number of inmates by beating their heads in with an iron bar, the method of choice for dispatching victims who survived the interrogations.

These days, however, Huoy lives a quiet life as a farmer, a few hours from Phnom Penh. He doesn't know the city very well, so when he's in town, he tells people to meet him at DC-Cam. He was at the office briefly, so Youk, the head of DC-Cam, introduced him to the interns. It was, to say the least, a surreal moment---Youk just brought him into our office unannounced and said "This is Comrade Huoy. He killed some people during the Khmer Rouge," in very much the same way that you might say "This is Comrade Houy. He'll be working in accounting."

Everyone here is completely comfortable working with perpetrators by now, and indeed it's seen as an important part of the Center's work. But for us interns, it's difficult to know how to react. Many, many Khmer Rouge cadres were trapped in their roles, and lived just as fearfully as other Cambodians. But Huoy was an important enough figure that he barely escaped prosecution; if the Court's agenda were just a shade broader, he could very well be in the dock.

As it is, he's cooperating with the other prosecutions, and appears to be a fairly significant figure in people's understanding of reconciliation. And people have little choice but to reconcile: a lot of former cadres live alongside their victims, growing rice like everyone else.

The Court, finally

2009-06-16T15:04:00.010+07:00

I finally went to the Court yesterday, for the first time since I've been here.

A bit of background: right now the Court is trying Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Comrade Duch. He was in charge of an interrogation center in Phnom Penh called S-21, or Tuol Sleng Prison, where some 15,000 people whose loyalty to the Khmer Rouge was in doubt were tortured and killed. I'll skip the grisly details on my blog, but there's plenty of information on the New York Times website and in Wikipedia. Duch has admitted responsibility for the crimes that took place at S-21, but since the Court rules have no mechanism for dealing with a guilty plea, the trial is going on regardless.

Although Duch's testimony yesterday was largely fairly technical and uninteresting, there were a couple of memorable moments in the day. At one point, Judge Lavergne was interrogating Duch about conditions at S-21. Duch was evidently impatient with the technical nature of the questioning; he eventually pointed out that the prison existed only as a way-station on the way to the killing fields, and said, memorably, that the prisoners "lived like animals and ate like animals. We thought of them as already dead, only waiting to be smashed."

At another point, the Co-Prosecutor showed a clip of video from the case file, which included footage of Vietnamese detainees at S-21. One of the victims, a woman sitting in the front row of the spectators' gallery, suddenly started sobbing. I often become very focused on the wonky procedural details of my research project, even in the middle of trial, but a lot of people are overwhelmed by seeing Duch and seeing relics of what happened to them.

We met some of the Court's VIPs yesterday as well: Chea Leang, the Cambodian Co-Prosecutor; and Dame Silvia Cartwright, one of the Trial Chamber judges, who has been a justice on New Zealand's highest court and New Zealand's Governor-General (seen here Eskimo-kissing the Queen). We were able to ask them questions about our research projects, which was enlightening, to say the least.

More wonkery about the trial

As I've noted before, the trial is creeping forward at a snail's pace, to the consternation of almost everybody involved. The delay---and the frustration---is partly attributable to the fact that different chambers in the Court have been repeating each other's work.

I was thinking about it in terms of Law & Order the other day. For those who don't watch the show, it always begins with a portentous voice saying the same thing: "In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate, but equally important groups: the police who investigate crime, and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders." Every episode starts with a police investigation, and ends with a courtroom prosecution, which is pretty representative of what actually happens in a common law system: police do all the investigating; attorneys do all the lawyering; judges umpire at both stages.

In the ECCC, the judges are the ones responsible for investigating crime. They do use a Judicial Police Force, but the judges still run the show. They also run the show at trial: instead of acting as as umpire, as they would in the States, the judges ask most of the questions.

What's worse, the judges at every stage can re-open the investigation. Even the Supreme Court Chamber judges, who in most systems would stick to deciding fairly narrow questions on appeal, can conduct new investigations, question new witnesses, or call back witnesses already questioned in the Trial Chamber. Of course, nobody knows how---or if---they'll use that power, since no appeals have been lodged yet.

Then there are the Co-Prosecutors, and the defense team. Individuals who want in for their own claims are allowed to participate as Civil Parties, and are represented in groups by lawyers who are allowed to question witnesses during the trial. So if Law & Order did an ECCC spin-off, the portentous voice would have to say "In the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the people are represented by lots of important groups: the judges who investigate crime; the judges who prosecute the offenders; the prosecutors who prosecute the offenders; more judges who prosecute the offenders; some more judges who might investigate crime if they want to; ninety-eight civil parties, who are sometimes allowed to prosecute the offenders; and maybe more judges maybe investigating more crime. Maybe."

So in Duch's case, the Co-Investigating Judges have already investigated his alleged crimes, interrogated him, and interrogated witnesses. They've amassed an enormous case file, containing thousands of documents, transcripts, and so on. But now the Trial Chamber, instead of simply issuing a ruling based on the information in the case file, is once again questioning witnesses, and Duch himself, at great length.

The trial phase has already gone on far longer than anyone anticipated. Some people thought the trial would last about a month: they expected the Trial Chamber to spend most of its time looking at the case file, examining a few witnesses just to clarify points of confusion.

In fact, the trial is likely to take as long as a year. The Court was only supposed to exist for three years. That time will run out in July, and the Court won't even be anywhere near done trying the first of five defendants. If the Court's funding dries up before its work is done, it could turn into a real fiasco.

Of course, it's still early days: this is, after all, the Court's very first trial. And it's important to remember that the system is very new. The Cambodian judges, including Nil Nonn, the President of the Trial Chamber, are relatively inexperienced. Before this, the longest trial that Judge Nonn oversaw lasted four days.

Judge Cartwright also gave a convincing rationale for erring on the side of length. All of the Court's investigations are completely confidential, so what's heard in open Court is all that the public gets to know for the time being. Given the importance of these trials for Cambodians, it makes sense to prioritize building a public record. Anyway, it's far too early to tell how things will go here.

Miscellany

2009-06-08T17:20:00.015+07:00

Some more miscellaneous photos today.

Lou and I went to the market this weekend to stock up our apartment. People buy almost everything here in these huge, filthy, chaotic marketplaces. Our local market is in a huge shed-like building which is, I suppose, the market proper, but people sell things for blocks in every direction. There seems to be no organizing principle of any kind, so the place is essentially unnavigable: it's a labyrinth of narrow, poorly-lit concrete aisles, sometimes transected by ditches full of watery grime and garbage, which sometimes have a plank across by way of a footbridge. The fruits and vegetables are great, but the meat is a little scary---huge sides of pork next to mounds of unidentifiable offal leaching puddles of juice. The flies love it. Here's a sample:

Presumably people eat the meat from the markets without any major complications, but I'm too squeamish to try. Luckily, you can get anything and everything at the markets: clothes from major Western brands (Gap, Abercrombie, Birkenstock, etc.), taken straight from the factories and sold at a fraction of the retail price, fake antique statuary, spare motorcycle parts, farming equipment, books, very professionally pirated DVDs from Malaysia, kitchen equipment, religious items (shrines, incense, candles, etc.), silk, paintings, construction materials, watches, jewelry, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's a lot of fun shopping in all the confusion. People are very friendly, and open to bargaining; I've learned my numbers in Khmer so that I can haggle a little bit.

Here's Louise shopping for fruit. The only ones I can identify so far are rambutan, in the lower-left corner (it's lot like lychee), and dragon fruit immediately to the right of that (has a nice, mild, white flesh).

We also went to a performance by a troupe of drummers at Sovanna Phum. Very beautiful traditional drumming, with dancers acting out a battle between giants, and then monkeys trashing the stage. I got a not-so-good picture in the low light.

I also made another not-so-good recording with my camera's rinky-dink microphone. Listen below, or here if the embedded player doesn't work.

Bullets, electricity, lightning, tiger bites, and snake strikes, Oh My!

2009-06-04T16:47:00.007+07:00

Here is the procedure for swearing in witnesses, according to the Cambodian Code of Criminal Procedure---the equivalent of "Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God." This version is somewhat more compelling, I'd say.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Legal procedure of swearing the oath

The swearing of the oath shall be led by a Greffier, and shall be done in the presence of a sacred object at the court.

Before beginning the oath, the person taking the oath shall light a candle and incense sticks in worship of the sacred object upon which that oath is to be taken. Next, the Greffier shall clearly read aloud the Introductory Statement for the person taking the oath, and then read The Oath for the person taking the oath to repeat.

After administering the oath, the Greffier shall establish a written record, confirming that it was properly administered and that the oath in verbatim was recorded.

Introductory Statement

May all the guardian angels, forest guardians, and powerful sacred spirits of Preah Àng Dâng Kae, Preah Àng Krâpum Chouk, Preah Àng Svēt Chhăt, Preah Àng Chēk, Preah Àng Châm, Năkta Khlăng Moeung, Năkta Khrâhâmkâ, Lôkta Dâmbâng Dèk, Lôkta Dâmbâng Krâ Nhoung, Lôk Yeay Tēp, Preah Àng Vihea Suor, Preah Àng Preah Chiviwăt Baray and Preah Àng Wăt Phnom Khlèng come forward to preside over this swearing ceremony, since the parties to this matter are in dispute and have alleged that witnesses personally know, have seen, have heard, and have recalled, and the law requires bringing these people to serve as witnesses and to give truthful and accurate testimony.

Should anyone answer untruthfully about what they know, have seen, have heard, and remember, may all the guardian angels, forest guardians, Yeay Tēp and powerful sacred spirits utterly and without mercy destroy them, and bestow upon them a miserable and violent death by means of bullets, electricity, lightning, tiger bites, and snake strikes, and in their future reincarnation separate them from their parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren, impoverish them, and subject them to miseries for 500 reincarnations.

Anyone testifying truthfully without evasion, without lying, without bias because of bloodline, without collusion arising from fear, hatred, material greed, or having taken bribes, may all the guardian angels, forest guardians, Yeay Tēp and powerful sacred spirits in the world assist them in long life, good health, an abundance of material possessions and having respectful and loving families until future reincarnation, encountering only good deeds, progress, prosperity and flourish, in accordance with their aspirations.

The Oath

I will answer only the truth, in accordance with what I have personally seen, heard, know, and remember.

If I answer falsely on any issue, may all the guardian angels, forest guardians and powerful sacred spirits destroy me, may my material possessions be destroyed, and may I die a miserable and violent death. But, if I answer truthfully, may the sacred spirits assist me in having abundant material possessions and living in peace and happiness along with my family and relatives forever, in all my reincarnations.

Appellate review---not boring, honest!

2009-06-01T15:22:00.011+07:00

So I started work at DC-Cam about a week ago. I spent the first few days picking a topic to research for the summer, given to me by my boss, Anne, and have now been plugging away for a few days. Brace yourself.

My topic is the standard of review in the Supreme Court Chamber of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), the highest chamber in the Khmer Rouge tribunals. I know it sounds dry, but it's actually quite interesting when you dig into it.

The real problem, crudely stated, is that the ECCC is totally sui generis, and therefore totally unpredictable. The basic structure of the tribunal is laid out in some detail on paper, in its founding statute and internal rules. But the tribunal is so new that the Supreme Court Chamber still hasn't issued any decisions, so there's no telling how it will use its powers.

One example is the Supreme Court Chamber's power to conduct investigations. The ECCC is structured so that a pair of judges, called the Co-Investigating Judges, are supposed to manage the initial investigation into a suspect. They're supposed to put everything they discover into a case file, which they forward to the Trial Chamber. The Trial Chamber should acquit or convict/sentence a defendant, largely on the basis of the case file. The Supreme Court Chamber should hear appeals on very specific issues, and reverse, affirm, or remand Trial Chamber judgments. In the opinion of the prosecutors, all of this should happen fairly quickly.

But the Trial Chamber and the Supreme Court Chamber are both allowed to introduce new evidence into the case file, and even initiate new investigations. The Trial Chamber, instead of ruling fairly quickly on the evidence in the case file, has used its powers to call many of the same witnesses interrogated by the Co-Investigating Judges. As a result, the current trial---of Comrade Duch---has dragged on for months, and shows every sign of continuing to drag on. All of the suspects who are to be tried by the ECCC are aging and in questionable health---many people are afraid that they'll die before the Extraordinary Chambers get a chance to try them, losing the last chance to make Khmer Rouge leaders accountable in court.

The question for me is whether the Supreme Court Chamber will use its powers to run yet another set of witness interrogations and investigations, or whether it can be convinced to limit its role to more traditional appellate questions. So far, I'm proceeding by looking at some of the other international criminal tribunals: the International Criminal Court (ICC), International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL). They use similar rules of procedure and evidence, and have issued a number of decisions on how they hear appeals. The problem, of course, is that the ECCC is under no obligation to follow any other court's decisions. While I can argue that the ICTY's approach works pretty well, I can't claim that the ECCC is bound to use it.

In certain ways, the question really boils down to which legal tradition the tribunal should draw from: the civil law tradition, where courts are heavily involved in determining the facts of a case; or the common law tradition, where courts only participate in fact-finding to the extent that they apply rules of evidence at trial. It may seem like counting angels on a pin, but the distinction is actually highly charged.

The Cambodian judges in the ECCC have been accused of incompetence, corruption, and political manipulation. Any effort to reduce their influence may be received as a vote of no confidence, further dividing the international and Cambodian factions in the tribunal.

Besides, many powerful people here stand to benefit from a slow, ineffective process. Hun Sen, the former low-ranked Khmer Rouge official who has been Prime Minister since 1985, has opposed prosecuting anyone other than the five suspects already in custody. Other Khmer Rouge leaders are still living openly in Phnom Penh, and still have considerable wealth and influence.

To complicate matters yet further, any attempt to introduce a common-law approach may be received as an attempt to impose American legal standards on an internationalized court. That can draw knee-jerk accusations of imperialism.

An important backdrop to my work is the Plenary Session coming up this fall. Plenaries are where everyone who is anyone at the ECCC---all of the judges and the heads of the various units---have the opportunity to amend the Internal Rules. The prosecutor with whom I've spoken hopes to persuade the judges in the Supreme Court Chamber to adopt his view of things, and find some way of ensuring that appeals will be heard speedily, with very limited admissibility for new evidence.

Appellate review may not be the sexiest question, but it's an excellent framework for understanding the bigger picture. In the absence of any serious jurisprudence on the nature of the trials, the ECCC is operating more or less on the fly; everyone seems to be making it up as they go. It looks as though my work may actually help move things in one direction or the other, which is very exciting.

Court isn't in session this week, but I'm hoping to attend early next week. After that I'll post something about how things actually look at trial.

Monks and more

2009-05-28T13:30:00.005+07:00

Just a few photos today, since I'm on my lunch break at work. Here is the line of Buddhas sitting on my desk in the office:

The temple whose monks I recorded chanting is around the corner from my office, so the neighborhood is full of monks traveling to and fro. Sovi, the owner of Top Banana, tells me that young men often become monks for just a few months at a time, to get a bit of education and to live a relatively stable, if meager, lifestyle. Here's a monk bus that I saw loading up in front of the Wat:

You often see monks taking the motos (motorcycle taxis) to and from the Wat as well:

On my way to work this morning, I saw these monks giving a blessing. The man ran out of the photocopy shop where he works and tucked some money into their bags, in exchange for which they chanted for a couple of minutes while he prayed. (For the record, I asked permission to take the picture.)

Top Banana

2009-05-25T05:30:00.018+07:00

I'm housebound this afternoon by inundations of rain and homework, so I thought I would pause from grading write-on submissions long enough to post something to the blog.

Top Banana, the guesthouse where I'm staying, appears to be a popular spot for the NGO/expat crowd: the residents at the moment include three journalists (two Belgian, one American), a UNESCO staffer, a conservationist, a director of nature documentaries reconnoitering for his next film, and no fewer than six American law students.

Us law students are all gathered on the terrace, hard at work on various onerous assignments lingering over from last semester. There's a backpacker picking his guitar in the corner and grinning at us mockingly from time to time. The Khmers who work or hang out here are taking potshots with a pellet gun at a cigarette lighter suspended from the ceiling on a length of string; every once in a while they take potshots at the tuk-tuk (motorcycle rickshaw) drivers who congregate outside. Here's a photo of Mali with his gun:

Here's one of the view from my bedroom window:

You can see the topmost tower of Wat Lanka, the nearby Buddhist monastery, in the upper left corner of the picture. Early this morning the monks were chanting while an extremely melodious bird sang outside my window. I made a not-very-good recording, which you can listen to below (or click here if the embedded player doesn't work).

So far so good. I start work at DC-Cam tomorrow.

Some tourism

2008-07-23T07:08:00.003+07:00

I'm reading "African Laughter," by Doris Lessing, an account by Lessing of a series of visits back to her homeland between '85 and '92 -- a very engaging read in these times, sometimes very sad in its early naivety about Mugabe, sometimes disturbingly accurate in its predictions, all of it uncannily recognizable in Zimbabwe 2008. Especially disturbing are the white Zimbabweans one meets, still nostalgic for colonial rule in the same way as Lessing's contemporaries.

I crawled inside a hollow baobab tree in the countryside the other day. I didn't notice any creepy crawlies inside the baobab tree -- just dust, dust, dust, dust, dust, inches thick. The pictures from inside the tree are generally long exposures, because the flash just bounced off of particles of dust -- I can show you when I get home. I have a great picture of Louise's 82-year-old grandmother crawling into the tree through all the dust, with admirable intrepidity. And yes, the baobab trees are from Le Petit Prince. I picked up a baobab fruit (a source of cream of tartar) as a souvenir -- it's oblong, as hard as a coconut, but with soft green velvet all over the outside. There was a rock ledge near the big baobab, where baboons use rocks to smash open the hard fruits and eat the seeds inside. We did find some hyena dung nearby, though -- white, dry, and full of hair like an owl pellet, because they eat bones and hair and greedily digest the rest.

At Kariba Dam there's a statue of a river god: when the dam was built and that portion of the valley flooded, the Tonga tribe (fishermen) were forcibly relocated to miserable, unfarmable areas where they were told to abandon their ways and learn to farm. With, as one would expect, terrible results. The holding wall built to contain the river while the main dam was built was tall enough to contain a 1000-year flood (the largest flood predicted for a 1000-year period, given the probabilities), but shortly after came a 1 million-year flood, overwhelming the holding wall and ruining the construction. The Tonga concluded that Nyami Nyami was angry at the attempt to contain him, and that the project was doomed -- but it went ahead, as these things do, and they remain displaced.

An anxiety dream

2008-07-03T20:11:00.002+07:00

Now that the elections are over things seem a bit quieter here. There are still reprisals going on in the countryside, but the feeling of tension has begun to subside. The week of the elections I had a series of anxiety nightmares. That Thursday, I dreamt that I was on my way home from a ZANU-PF rally that I was forced to attend, but the streets were full of eerie, distended soldiers, ten feet tall and as thin as poles, blocks and blocks of them without faces marching in impeccable formation. I kept my ZANU-PF hat on and my recruitment literature prominently displayed, thus avoiding trouble until I got to the car I was driving. But after a few blocks of driving, a cataclysmic storm engulfed me, washing away the roads and trees, and cracking buildings right in half. I got out of the car to walk home, but the asphalt was floating away on whitewater rapids, tipping like sheets of ice as I jumped from floe to floe. Somehow I managed to get to the shopping center near Louise's house, but it had blown away, leaving just the iron framing.

So it was a pretty tense week, but now it's all over -- and not over. I don't feel anything like the same anxiety, but I know that reprisals are starting in the countryside, and there's still no political resolution in sight.

But I'm in a very good mood, generally, especially looking forward to this next week. Louise's cousin is getting married, and the wedding is at her house. Then we're all going on a family picnic to Lake Kariba on the Zambian border (did you hear? their president just died, repercussions for Zim yet to be seen), to stay on a house boat, camp in a game park, drink gins and tonics, and generally lead the high life. Also, on Saturday I'm going to the annual Fourth of July picnic at the American embassy (invitation only), where I hope to meet all sorts of eccentric expats, about whom I will send a full report. Dzimbabwe and David (two guys in the office) were very eager to come, because (and I quote) "The beer will be flowing, and there will be white chicks," so I've managed to get them on the list to get in. Should be much fun.

One day until the elections

2008-06-26T07:12:00.001+07:00

One day until the elections and then -- who knows? Anything could happen now.

Yesterday Lou and I followed a truck full of riot police -- a huge, military green truck with a double-sided bench running down the middle, although only ten or so police in their blue helmets with batons and shields. We followed them to the South African embassy, where several hundred people whose rural homes had been burned by ZANU PF were protesting. As soon as the riot police showed up, though, the embassy opened its gates and let everyone in. That was how things stood for a while, so we went home, but this morning there were police roadblocks all along the road to the embassy, stopping and searching cars. We were waved through, and saw that the people were still sitting in the embassy parking lot in a standoff with the police. Who knows what will come of them? If the embassy kicks them out, the riot police will beat them and torture them; but they're all Zimbabwean citizens, so it's a bit tricky for the embassy to keep them indefinitely. Interesting times, as Tafadzwa is always saying.

I met Arnold Tsunga -- the founder of ZLHR -- yesterday. It was a big surprise to find him in the office, as he's been in exile in Zurich for years. Apparently he sneaks into Zimbabwe occasionally when big things are happening. I told him I hadn't expected to meet him; he asked if I was keeping my head down and staying off the radar; I said It's hard to tell with radar, but I hope I'm not on it -- I'd be more worried about myself if I were you; he laughed and said Personally, I'd be more worried about you, my friend. Then he gave me some chocolate from Switzerland.

Tongai got back from his week off last night. He said it was terrible -- that every night militias came to his house and forced him to go to ZANU PF rallies. Same story as always: they make speeches, chant slogans, publicly beat MDC supporters. They keep a list of who attends each night, and beat up anyone who misses. They also stop people and demand to know last night's slogan, things like "Total Independence, Total Control;" or "Robert Gabriel in the office, Tsvangirai at the gate;" or "Total Empowerment." Everyone in the countryside wears ZANU PF bandannas and t-shirts or carries ZANU PF flags or puts ZANU PF stickers on their cars (if they have them).

I had a conversation with one of our lawyers yesterday after work -- his father, who must be at least sixty or seventy years old was beaten up for the second time on Friday for supporting MDC. Now he's in hiding with his son, unable to go the hospital for fear of being arrested again.

Reassurances

2008-06-25T07:13:00.000+07:00

I received an email from a friend worried about safety in Zim. Here's the story.

While I'm not technically working with the opposition, I am working with Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, an extremely disfavored group of people at the moment. Some high profile human rights lawyers have been profiled, and it's been impossible for some time for less well-known lawyers to practice -- going to prisons to represent clients or to court houses to serve papers is too dangerous these days. But I feel pretty safe, because Harare remains a bubble of peace in the midst of the rural violence. The violence in the cities is targeted at leading, vocal critics of the government and at MDC leadership. In the townships and villages the story is different.

As for where I'm staying, it's quite secure. First of all because it's in a well-off low-density suburb with a lot of whites in it, and second of all because my girlfriend's parents, like most "middle class" people here, have walled off their land, topped the wall with an electric fence, and installed an electric gate.

The building where I work is a generic office building, and while ZLHR's address is well known (it has to be for them to practice law), there's no reason for anyone seeing me walk in to assume that that's where I'm headed. Also, I know one of the partners at a private law firm one floor up from me, who has kindly let me work from their library whenever I feel nervous. If it comes to it, he's offered to cover for me by saying that I'm interning for his firm over the summer -- which is what I tell just about everyone I meet.

So I feel pretty safe, but tense just about all the time. This is a tense time for everyone -- me least of all, in fact -- as the run off approaches on Friday, but with MDC out of the picture I think the worst is over for now. What happens after the election is impossible to know, but there's nothing to be done but wait and see, and make choices accordingly.

A question of doctrine

2008-06-24T07:14:00.000+07:00

David just came in with Connie and another woman whose name I don't know. They all lined up in front of me, giggling fit to bust, and David said "Alex, we have a problem which we cannot settle amongst us alone, so we put it to you. This woman here is claiming that although she has lost her virginity, she has regained through the power of God her 'secondary virginity,' whatever that may be. What do you think of this?" I was rather stumped, so I said that I didn't think it was so unreasonable, and that what she'd gotten back was her chastity although technically not her virginity. Then I pointed out that there's an operation to restore the hymen for those who care enough. But she said she'd gotten that back too, at which point I said that I would have to take her word for it.

Weird.

Caving?

2008-06-23T07:16:00.000+07:00

Some notes on the atrocities going on in the countryside. It seems strange, but I haven't felt any real threat from that kind of violence -- for years, Mugabe has been careful about where he places violence and whom he targets. All of the people who are suffering at the moment are either opposition leaders, or poor blacks from rural areas. There's been some violence in the cities, but that's concentrated in the townships (what they call the ghettos, which are miles from the center of town), or at opposition rallies (court orders allowing the rallies notwithstanding).

As for the MDC pulling out of the run-off, it's still too early to tell how that will play out -- we only just heard about it last night. But I'm very hopeful that it will mean some reduction in violence. I'm convinced that it's a good move -- even if Mugabe doesn't call off his dogs straight away, pulling out of the run-off has concentrated international attention on Zim in a whole new way, and seems to have dealt the coup de grace to Mugabe's credibility. Maybe more importantly, it's shifted huge pressure onto Thabo Mbeki to actually mediate some sort of solution instead of pursuing the "wait and see" approach. At least that's the common wisdom at this point, who knows what it's worth. But without any need to intimidate the electorate, and with the whole world suddenly watching, and arguably having won his way, I see little reason for Mugabe to keep waging de facto war. Hell, I could even see this turning into an exciting time, if they manage to come to some sort of power-sharing agreement. And if all that happens is a restoration of the status quo, so be it.

Adjusting

2008-06-19T07:19:00.000+07:00

From an email to a friend:

First of all, the bad news. The rural areas here have degraded into total lawlessness -- genocide is no longer much of an exaggeration, according to the reports that trickle out. As Dzimbabwe (the international litigator here with whom I'm working) pointed out, Mugabe has never been known to bluff, so when he says that he won't give up power, he means it. The regime is desperate and has very little to lose -- they refuse to believe that MDC will actually offer them immunity from prosecution in exchange for a peaceful transition of power.

But there's good news, too. Harare is still a bubble, and MUST remain a bubble as long as the UN envoy and SADC election monitors are in town. Although the police have been shutting down the offices of various political groups, there haven't been any arrests that I know of (with the exception of a couple of very high-profile lawyers). I'm doing all that I can to keep myself safe -- I never drive here, as traffic stops can sometimes result in arbitrary arrests. I know one of the partners at a private law firm upstairs, so when things get hot I go up there and work from their library. I'm a few doors down from the back stairs in case of an emergency. Most importantly, I'm a white American -- the police are not inclined to make serious trouble for whites who don't pose a major threat, and even less inclined to make trouble for Americans. I know they gave the Ambassador trouble a while back, but he has been going out of his way to expose the people in power, and he has the clout to really do it. Unless the police actually come to our office, which is extremely unlikely, there's really no way at all that they would discover me. I'm only seen for a few seconds as I leave Louise's car every morning to come into the building, where I claim to be working for my friend at the private firm -- he'll vouch for me if it's necessary.

Also, it's important for you to know that I'm NOT participating in the crisis work that's going on here. I'm working on a law suit being filed in the African Commission for Human and Peoples' Rights on a ZANU-PF initiative from a few years back. I'm not going to courtrooms or prisons -- in fact, ZLHR, has pretty much stopped representing people itself as it's too dangerous, instead recruiting private attorneys who aren't known.

As for my own threshold, I have honestly lost track of it. I exceeded what I thought was my threshold about two months ago: first I thought that if the elections didn't go smoothly I wouldn't come; then that if there was a crisis I wouldn't come; then that if there was violence I wouldn't come; then that if political groups were targeted I wouldn't come. All that happened (and worse), but here I am. At this point, I feel totally at sea. The other night I had lunch with a couple who work with torture victims throughout the country, who have returned from forced exile despite the danger, and who continue to publish rigorous, damning reports about torture under the auspices of an officially banned organization. I had a long talk with the directors of Doctors for Human Rights, who document the injuries of victims of political violence, despite the fact that the police periodically purge the hospitals of MDC supporters. Two of my bosses have been arrested and beaten in years past, but they keep doing their thing. Hell, my fellow intern from the University of Zimbabwe got a visit from the Central Intelligence Organization the other day telling him to shut down his Catholic Peace and Justice Commission and that they'll be keeping a close eye on him, but he's holding another meeting tonight, with God only knows what results. So you see, if I'm looking for guidance as to when I should think about pulling out, I won't really find it here. Nobody will judge me or think less of me at all if I turn tail, but nobody's going to do it before me either, so I'm sort of on my own.

Now, these people really suffer. Not like the people who are being beaten and tortured in the countryside, but still -- it's very evident that they're struggling just to keep their heads above water, always just about to be overwhelmed with the things that they see. But when I see them at dinners and parties, it's also evident that they have a real capacity for joy. That's really where I begin to gain some sense of perspective on what's happening here. When I read about the courts or the police, which have become political weapons, I find myself unable to wrap my head around the fact that people continue arguing cases and filing motions and all that. But it seems to me that it's just another way of trying to turn things right-side up in this country. The fact is that the police here do absolutely anything they want, utterly unencumbered by any consequences. But maybe the constant pressure on them to act lawfully highlights their lawlessness. Anyway, life goes on.

It's easy enough to rationalize my being here. Seeing as how bad things can happen anytime -- car accidents, muggings, diseases, etc. -- there's no sense being timid. If I were a short story writer (and I hope sincerely that God is not one), I would have myself come home from Zimbabwe for fear of things to awful to contemplate, only to get run over by some stock-broker's Beamer while crossing Palmer Square to get to the ice-cream store.

Already I feel like I've been here forever, even though it's only been three and a half weeks. Frankly, I keep expecting someone to look up and ask me why I'm still here and what on earth I think I'm doing. But nobody is doing it -- they long ago lost any sense of cognitive dissonance, arguing cases in courts that have been hopelessly corrupted, or living the life of a middle class professional under the sword of Damocles. I guess everyone who could be scared away already has been, and the only people left are people with a bottomless capacity for coping. And people who have no choice but to cope, people without money or education or connections enough to run away.

The ZLHR lawyers have developed an incredibly dry sense of gallows humor. Tafadzwa is like the Dread Pirate Roberts -- every night when he goes home, he says "Good night everyone. I hope to find you all here when I come back. If I come back." Dzimbabwe was bragging that he's just one arrest away from landing a cushy job teaching human rights at a Western university. He's been antagonizing the Commissioner of Police -- an extremely dangerous thing to do -- to get back some papers they confiscated at the airport several weeks ago, and the letter he got back was the subject of much mirth in the office. David (the student leader being monitored by the CIO) spends all day cracking jokes about "Our dear Bob."

Hm. This email is neither short nor reassuring. I keep doing that -- starting a brief note to a friend and looking up 1,000 words later without having related much more than musings. I really will write later with some more day-to-day news -- honest!

They can go to hell

2008-06-19T07:17:00.000+07:00

I'm at work. There was a big blackout yesterday, so I couldn't get onto the internets. They have load shedding here, so at designated hours the electricity goes out in different neighborhoods (although it's usually far longer than it's supposed to be), but yesterday the whole city was out.

Wow. Some people just have NO idea what's going on here -- a woman just called from the Harare Interflora office to say that the Dutch office of Amnesty International had put in an order for flowers to be sent to one Jenni Williams (the director of a women's rights group here) at Chikurubi Maximum Security Jail. She knew that the flowers would never arrive if she just sent them on, so could we please help?

Chikurubi is one of the most notorious prisons here, which must make it one of the most miserable prisons on earth. Inmates are starved, overworked, overcrowded, diseased, beaten, and generally forgotten. I gave the message to Dzimbabwe: he just laughed and said they should go to hell.

Closed for raids

2008-06-14T07:23:00.000+07:00

Another email:

Home from work today, as I don't know if ZLHR is open or closed. Nobody's picking up the phone, and the Internet is down. Once again, a strange life -- I'm writing on the shady veranda looking at the flowers waving under the jacaranda tree watching the gardeners going about their business and Louise's grandmother tending to her nursery. But God only knows where the ZLHR lawyers are. I don't know if they went home yesterday to hide away or if they went to Harare Central Police Station to try and bail out all the human rights activists they arrested yesterday. I hope they didn't go to Harare Central -- it's a genuine house of horrors, that place, and by now they know the ZLHR lawyers well. If they went to the station, it's entirely likely that they were all rounded up and are in some concrete cell. Meanwhile, I'm safe and sound in the compound under a blue sky.

More and more stories are starting to trickle out of the countryside. Mbuya's brother Edward was telling us yesterday that every night his son is rounded up by ZANU-PF militiamen to attend nightly "re-education" rallies where they hold bonfires and make vicious lying speeches all night long. They register everyone in a book (a genuine Doomsday Book), and retaliate brutally against anyone who misses a night.

Hopefully monitors will start coming into the country over the next couple of weeks, so things should quiet down a little bit, at least in the townships (which is what they call the slum areas of the major cities). The rural areas are totally sealed off from foreigners, though, so they'll keep doing whatever they like out there.

Sorry for all the politics -- it's all anyone talks about these days. There's just no end of horror stories -- people who have spent a night or two in jail, "domestics" whose relatives are suffering in the countryside, news reports from exile newspapers, speculation about coalition talks, NGO news, so on, are all our conversations. What will actually happen after the election nobody thinks about.

Anyway, my life is very pleasant. I'm going to a dinner party tonight with some guy from Amnesty International, then to a party with Golden Boy. Might play squash this afternoon. Going to a play tomorrow night, then a lunch party on Sunday. Colonial life continues apace, crisis or no crisis. It's a nice tune we fiddle while Harare burns.

Raids and stuff

2008-06-13T07:21:00.006+07:00

The police raided two other human rights group earlier today, so our office shut down in a hurry and forgot to tell the interns! David and I were working away on our respective projects until we noticed the eery silence. We left the room to find that all the offices were locked and most everyone had gone home except receptionists and one or two staffers, and there was a sign outside saying "Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights is CLOSED until further notice." Luckily, I have a connection through Louise's parents with a partner at a law firm in the same building, so I just nipped up the stairs and am writing from their rather elegant, if small, library. I expect I'll work from home tomorrow. It's a bit much, I think, shutting down the office for fear of raids by the ZRP's Law & Order division (notorious torturers) and simply forgetting to inform the interns. Anyway, I'm safe and sound.

I met some Lefto revolutionaries who work with torture victims. And the heads of Doctors for Human Rights. All on the verge of nervous breakdowns, as you would imagine -- terrible, terrible reports from the countryside. Amputations, burnings. A friend of Louise's mother was arrested on a routine traffic stop and held in a cell for a little while, for no reason at all. While she was in the cell, police kept coming in and raping two girls held on shop-lifting. They're absolutely lawless right now, killing and raping just because they can. Truly, dogs of war.

The parties here are pretty fun. Liquor is hard to come by, so they're not especially well lubricated. The party yesterday was full of NGO types. UN, WHO, UNICEF, ZADH, ZLHR, Amani Trust, Amnesty, IWSHF -- it's hard to keep track of the alphabet soup. Ranging from a rather bewildered German undergrad doing his internship at the worst possible time to die hard revolutionaries who have been in and out of exile and are compiling lists of people to destroy in the event of government change.

Then there are a lot of local people of our generation, some of whom are also NGO types, but some of whom are just floating. Sabibi is typical -- one week he's smuggling fuel across the border, the next week he's trying to sell hot tubs to businessmen. Has no idea what he'll do or how he'll do it, but has vague plans in place to leave the country. Everyone seems bound for Australia or the UK with no firm plans once they get there.

Disconnected

2008-06-12T07:27:00.001+07:00

I think the lawyers at the office quite consciously keep me out of the loop. There's a palpable sense of crisis pretty much all the time, people rushing in and out, clients crowding the waiting room, phones ringing off the hook. Most conversations are conducted in Shona, so I usually have no idea what's happening. I know that at least some of the lawyers have started to bunker down in the office, putting off serving any papers or making any arguments in court until after the run-off, two weeks from Friday. It's an awful situation for them -- there are about ten human rights lawyers left in the country according to my boss, and hundreds of atrocities going on every day in the rural areas. But trying to bring suit at the moment is too dangerous to contemplate, so the lawyers busy themselves with documenting what they can and doing their best to protect colleagues who've garnered unwelcome attention from the government. Or, at least, that's my sense of what's going on, which is, again, sketchy.

It's hard to describe how strange everything feels right now. All day long I research government atrocities, continually discovering that some of them have been directed at my colleagues (rather a presumptuous word, I guess, but anyway people who work a few yards from me) -- harassment, beatings, death threats, you name it. And then I come back to the compound to eat family dinners, watch movies, and so on. It's like some bizarre parody of middle class working life. I guess a lot of things are bizarre parodies here. Louise and I had a rather heated discussion with her dad about the ins and outs of armed robbery here. It's hard to maintain any framework for judging crime here when the government is stealing land as fast as it can and torturing its own citizens, the police are corrupted beyond recognition, people are beginning to starve, prison conditions are unthinkable, and some miniscule portion of the population lives in compounds surrounded by electric fences.

The ZLHR office is just as strange. The other day I was having a funny, bantering conversation with David, the other intern (a student at the U of Zim) about Michael Jackson's merits and demerits, when Alec Muchadehama (the high-profile lawyer with the death threats) came sweeping in with some of our attorneys, who had clearly been up all night. They tossed David a set of car keys, told him to remove all the papers from a purple car on the corner and shred them, and then swept back out again.

My own work is very much unrelated to any of this, though. It's amazing to me how disconnected I feel from the things that I'm researching, even though they seem to be happening all around me. I guess that's just the nature of things here for the time being, as the government does its best to preserve a sense of normalcy in Harare while basically waging war in the countryside. Anyway, things should apparently quiet down shortly as observers start to trickle in from various treaty organizations in the region.

Hm, I seem to have made this sound like a war zone. Rest assured, it's not -- actually, it's eerily routine. I quietly read and write all day, joke around with people in the office (who admittedly have developed a powerful sense of gallows humor), see beautiful sights, meet people -- all that stuff. But at the same time, we all know that there's a crisis washing right past us, hitting everyone poor and black or vocal in dissent. It really is hard to describe.

Soldiers

2008-06-11T07:28:00.000+07:00

No end of soldiers in the streets yesterday -- they're everywhere! You see them walking around in their fatigues or dress uniforms on every block, sometimes groups of two or three. A lot of people think that the military is basically already in control, and I must admit it looks that way. Enormous trucks carrying more soldiers roll by every once in a while, too. Some of them seem to be patrolling, but some of them seem to be headed somewhere carrying backpacks. God knows what's going to happen after the run-off, but hopefully someone will send monitors in and things will stay relatively quiet.

Plenty of police, too, many of them looking barely older than teenagers. They've put up roadblocks in a lot of areas, although they seem to wave most people through.

Random notes

2008-06-09T07:29:00.000+07:00

The other day a group of policemen crossed the street in front of our cars. I was idly watching them go by, and I guess they didn't like it -- one of them glared at me and pulled a mock salute, and they all laughed.

The women here wear really old fashioned clothes, and like to coordinate their colors. Just now I saw three women go by in long skirts and blouses: one with a dark blue skirt and a light blue blouse, one with a dark green skirt and a light green blouse, and one with a dark peach skirt and a light peach blouse. Sometimes they wear little sweater vests, in which case skirt vest shirt are all coordinated that way. They look like walking swatches.

People here sell everything. You see groups of men walking right in traffic along busy roads, displaying their goods to stopped cars. Yesterday three men came up to our car at a stop light, selling mops and brooms, potted plants, potatoes, and framed samples of African fabric.

Also, everywhere I go shady looking men try to get me to change money at terrible, terrible rates -- US$1 to Z$100 million, even though the actual rate is approaching US$1 to Z$1 billion. When they want to change money, they hiss through their teeth and rub their fingers together as you walk by, or else they say things like "Excuse me! Excuse! I want to call you sir! I buy you some dollars!" Sometimes people spot me from a block away and come running through traffic to try and sell me random things, like watch batteries or toothpaste.

Just had a weird conversation with David in the office. He claims that he wants a white girlfriend, because he wants someone who can "point me in the direction of the ideal." He had to run to a meeting, so I didn't get to ask him about this at length, but as far as I can gather he wants a white girlfriend because Tony Blaire and Bill Clinton both stepped down when their terms finished without waging civil war.

I overhear some disturbing conversations here in the office. A small sample: just now some guy came in to talk to Dzimbabwe. As often happens, they were talking mostly in Shona, with a few English phrases tossed in here and there. So I hear "chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter and now it is heard that the man is in political exile." Then, laughter all around.

First impressions

2008-06-04T07:31:00.000+07:00

So here I am, safe and sound.

Louise -- my girlfriend's -- garden is straight out of the Old Testament. I don't recognize most of the plants in it, but there are giant ferns, climbing flowering vines, banana trees, palm trees, guava trees, avocado trees, and what is apparently the biggest jacaranda tree in all Harare. The fauna is just as impressive: yellow spiders five inches across that are harmless, tiny jumping spiders the size of a pinhead whose bite causes creeping necrosis (which they cut out without any anaesthetic, to avoid infecting the blood), African doves that hoot like owls. I've also seen the requisite giraffes and crocodiles and gazelles (no elephants so far).

Life here feels decidedly colonial. Louise assures me that she is solidly middle class in Zimbabwe, but it's not a middle class life that I recognize. We live on a plot of land big enough to hold the Garden of Eden, a two greenhouses, three brick patios, a veranda, four or five cars, a vegetable patch, and enough lawn to hold a soccer tournament. Not to mention the, uh, domestics' quarters. That is to say, where the, ahem, "domestics" live. To wit, a maid, a couple of gardeners, and their kids. All of which is enclosed by a high concrete wall with an electric gate.

I realize that it sounds like life as a British Viceroy, but it is not in fact an extraordinarily luxurious life so far. Or at least, comparatively speaking. You can drive for miles and miles around Harare and see nothing but the walled-in compounds of the "middle classes." A significant portion of the urban population really seems to live this way. And as far as having a lot of land goes, it's not just a luxury -- we really live on the vegetables from the vegetable patch and the eggs from the chickens. Then again, on the days when we sit on the veranda eating fresh passion fruit and drinking port, it's hard not to think of the "clubs" for empire-building whites in another era. Or what I had thought was another era. Still more reminiscent of those days was the restaurant I went to with Louise a few days ago, where a predominantly white crowd ate lunch on an expansive lawn behind a gate guarded by a man in khaki and a pith helmet.

It's important to remember, though, that Zimbabwean whites these days are difficult to pigeon-hole. There's no denying the colonial legacies, but Mugabe drove the vast majority of the whites away by authorizing his cronies to seize their land, killing, plundering, and raping in the process. The whites who remain -- about 25,000 of them out of some 300,000 -- are largely born and raised in Zimbabwe. Many of them work for aid organizations or schools. It's a very interesting setting.

Still, the shortages we here about in the states are not very much in evidence for people with some money. A couple of US dollars -- about Z$1.5 billion as of a week ago, so considerably more by now -- buys enough vegetables for a few days, and they're not hard to find. Some things are impossible to get, like wheat flour, cooking oil, and so on.

The money situation is insane. When I arrived, the exchange rate was six hundred million Zimbabwe dollars to one US. Someone in Louise's office exchanges money on the black market, so I gave her $30 to change -- she came back with a stack of bills six inches high, each one worth Z$50 million. We calculated that a single sheet of toilet paper costs at least Z$100,000, but that was a week ago, so the price has probably gone up considerably. The latest innovation is the "Agrobond," some sort of bearer's check in denominations of billions allegedly meant to make things easier for farmers. In reality, word is that the people in charge didn't want news of a billion dollar bill hitting the streets. People hand over huge piles of ten million dollar bills to get rid of them like spare change.

I've only been at work for a couple of days, but so far it's going well. They have me working on several papers at once, all transitional justice projects for various people. Of course, given the current state of affairs it looks like there will be neither transition nor justice in Zimbabwe in the foreseeable future, but it's interesting, educational work. I may have a chance to work on a report to the UN, which would be right up my alley, so I'm trying to sweet talk the right people. Part of my research will come from interviews we'll conduct, so at the moment I'm working on a set of interview questions for police who have been involved in violence or torture -- imagine a telephone survey with questions like "Have you ever raped anyone in custody?" It is, to say the least, surreal. But apparently they've got hold of a few officers willing to interview anonymously, so maybe it'll produce something valuable. Just to reassure you, I won't be conducting the police interviews myself -- not only am I working illegally, but most of them don't speak English. So don't worry about that.

So in short, the word for the week is "disorienting." I don't know where anything is, or what anything is, or who anyone is, or what to think of anything. But it's hugely fun so far, and very exciting.

On the flight over, we stopped in Dakar to refuel and pick up more passengers: tall, thin, black men in white robes and brimless hats; and a group of fat, red-faced, Afrikaans farmers with triple chins and beady eyes. Louise's father came to pick me up from the airport, where I arrived pretty late at night. He shushed me when I commented upon the five portraits of Robert Mugabe I saw on the way from the gate to the luggage carousel. The ride from the airport to Louise's house went through the industrial district of Harare. The street lights were out because of power cuts, but I could see groups of men sitting by the highway, or walking along with bundles on their heads. Andy said the area was known for smash and grabs, so he ran every red light and swerved around the huge potholes in the road like a maniac. The house is in a compound behind a high wall with an electric gate.

Went to the market today, my first trip outside the compound. The suburbs look almost rural, with trees everywhere and all the houses hidden behind concrete walls, but everywhere there are people along the road, or sitting selling miserably tiny piles of vegetables -- one man was sitting next to a stall with two tomatoes. We went to a fairly well stocked vegetable market, where a woman with an orange head wrap and an infant stared at me fixedly the whole time. Our pile of vegetables and squashes came to 1.4 billion Zimbabwe dollars, or about two American dollars. I can't keep track of the money -- people just say "three" or "four" and you don't know if they mean three hundred million or three billion. The banks won't let you withdraw more than five billion each day, which is woefully inadequate for most things. Louise and I had planned to go out to lunch, but her three billion wasn't enough to cover it, and the man at her office who trades currency on the black market can't get any until tomorrow.

We went looking at possible places to live, which meant going to a couple of different compounds. One, across the road, was owned by a man of eighty or ninety who took about fifteen minutes because he is "racked with arthritis." He told us that was about to go away to visit "a lady friend, a family lady friend of forty years standing, so don't snigger."