In the late 1980s, the people of northern Somalia rebelled against the government of General Mohammed Siad Barre. After four years of fighting, they separated from the rest of the country, forming the Republic of Somaliland.

The cost of their de facto independence was heavy. Tens of thousands of people were killed during the conflict, many during bombardments by the Somali Air Force. Half a million more fled across the Ethiopian border, settling in refugee camps. A struggle for control of the breakaway republic followed in the mid-1990s.

Rebuilding has been slow. The last camp was dismantled just a few years ago.

Today, as Somaliland thrives in the shadow of its troubled neighbours, the scope of the war’s psychological toll has only begun to register. As many as two-thirds of people over the age of 25 have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder in some form. Abuse of khat, a plant-based amphetamine chewed all over the Horn of Africa, complicates this and other mental health issues.

There are no psychiatrists in Somaliland.

The patients at Hargeisa Mental Health Unit receive professional treatment for only one month per year, when a Somali-Canadian psychiatrist returns to the country on holiday. He provides free treatment and diagnosis.

What follows are portraits from Somaliland’s only mental health hospital.

See also Separation Anxiety: Caring for civil war survivors in Somaliland’s only mental health hospital in The Walrus.

Check out BA contributor Tyler Stiem’s awesome essay on Liberia, “Goodbye, Babylon King”, in the current issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review.

If social media tools are enabling the opposition protests in Iran, and helping us outside the country understand what’s transpiring, some credit for this is due to Hossein Derakhshan — Iran’s “Blogfather” and the author of a life that’s taken some very through-the-looking-glass turns of late. Derakhshan is currently being detained by the Iranian Intelligence Ministry.

In 2001, while living in Toronto, Derakhshan made available online a step-by-step guide to publishing a blog in Farsi (according to Wired, he had “figured out a way to combine Unicode and Blogger.com’s free tools to handle Persian characters”). Derakhshan’s instructions, along with his outspoken blogging, directly influenced thousands of Iranians to create their own web pages. The subject matter of these blogs varied widely—pop culture, sport, personal matters—but much of it was cyber samizdat and critical of the regime, establishing a space where Iranians could communicate openly to each other about living under a theocracy. The outbreak of self-publishing in Iran was so staggering, I gleaned one statistic that suggested Farsi was the internet’s fourth most blogged-in language—Farsi, with about 70-80 million native speakers, ranks as only the 22nd most spoken language in the world.

Hossein Derakhshan, Toronto Star

Derakhshan’s story has gooten strange and slippery since. He travelled to Israel in 2006 on his Canadian passport, and used his blog to challenge Iranian misconceptions about Israelis. After that trip, however, he began writing more favourably about Ahmadinejad, supported Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and was accused of making anti-Israeli comments; he decided to return to Tehran to live in 2008. Shortly after arriving in Iran last November he was arrested on the grounds of spying for Israel; a newspaper affiliated with the government reported that he had “confessed.” After being allowed a few phone calls upon his arrest he hasn’t been heard from. Canadian consular officials have been unable to get access to Derakhshan. His detention has garnered international media attention and a campaign for his release, but some of his former supporters, disturbed by the apparent about-turn in his views, are ambivalent. There are even conspiratorial internet whispers that Derakhshan is, in fact, an Iranian spy.

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Photo: The Guardian

As the regime steps up its efforts to control the information space (blocking websites, shutting down SMS systems, jamming satellite TV — email, it turns out, is the most reliable way to get word out), I found this snippet of history provided by a BBC diplomatic correspondent interesting:

In the old days of the Soviet Union, it was shortwave broadcasts the regime targeted.

But as computers and satellite dishes replaced shortwave radios, the Politburo faced a dilemma.

I remember Mikhail Gorbachov’s former ideology chief, a liberal reformer called Alexander Yakovlev once recalling how his bosses in the old Soviet Politburo ordered him to cost the business of jamming all satellite TV. This was the mid-1980s, in retrospect the last dying decade of the old USSR.

Mr Yakovlev said he looked into it, and reported back: radio jamming was expensive but just about doable. But when it came to TV jamming, it was just too expensive. The genie was effectively out of the bottle. The Politburo had to accept that the USSR could no longer practically enforce an isolated information space.

Which is the situation the Iranian government now finds itself in. It can physically prevent foreign journalists from reporting, but it can hardly keep pace with a growing movement of people, able to capture and transmit events in real-time, and becoming ever more adept at the tactics of digital evasion. The regime will try, and sometimes succeed, in holding back the torrent of images and tweets; but these are only temporary, jerry-rigged retaining walls, often learned from China, in an escalating game of info-tech cat and mouse.

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Photo: The Guardian

For all the talk of a possible behind-the-scenes struggle among country’s ruling clerics (Rafsanjani v. Khameini), an interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times argues that the “sham” elections and Ayatollah Khameini’s avowed preference for Ahmadinejad belies an altogether different dynamic — that Iran has, by stealth, evolved from “a theocratic state to military dictatorship.” Although technically the Ayatollah and his Guardian Council retain supreme authority, the authors point to the unprecedented prominence of former members of the  Revolutionary Guard (like Ahmadinejad) in central government and among the business elite; they also speculate that Khameini has “deliberately undercut his own clerical class” at times and thrown in his lot with Ahmadinejad, as a survival strategy:

Far from fretting about an impending attack from Israel or America, guard leaders have been warning the ayatollah that the most formidable threat to the Islamic Republic is a “soft regime change policy” involving the use of “orange revolutions” (as the hard-line Iranian newspaper Kayhan recently editorialized).

Encircled by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, besieged from within by disgruntled citizens, the supreme leader has turned to a bellicose strongman to preserve the system that elevated him. Indeed, Ayatollah Khamenei — who was scorned as a religious lightweight by many more established mullahs when he was chosen for the top post in 1989 — has repeatedly shown himself willing to undercut the “Islamic” in Islamic revolution. In doing so, he has painted himself into a corner — a permanent alliance with Mr. Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guards. And this fraudulent election will only push them closer together.

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Also of note:

“The Web v. The Republic of Iran”, Anne-Marie Corley, MIT Technology Review
“Iran’s Perpetual Revolution”, Steve Coll, New Yorker (Think Tank blog)

More from the China-Africa symposium at IU: The general outlook of most speakers is reservedly optimistic about the prospects of China’s engagements in Africa. If the last fifty years of Western-sponsored development on the continent have borne so little fruit—and in the case of France’s coddling of psychopathic tyrants, some very rotten fruit—why not grant the Chinese some goodwill as they expand Africa’s meek infrastructure and industrial capacity. Yes, China is presently helping shield and support genocidal leaders such as Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir. But these are early days yet. And no other power seems as willing or able to step up to the task as China is.

The comments echoed what I heard from many African activists at a conference on mining, environment and society in Accra last summer. They’d already witnessed enough of the bad from Western governments and corporations. China was Africa’s second opportunity. They were not blind to China’s abuses and put little stock in its rhetoric of developing nation brotherhood. But they liked some of what they heard so far about agreements China had signed with Zambia and Angola. China doesn’t impose conditionalities like the IMF. Meanwhile, it’s committing staggering amounts of money to build much needed roads and facilities. And there is also the sense that Africa can learn from China’s own economic take-off.

The success of these investments will depend on how well African governments do their job. How proactive they are at defending their own citizens’ interests, rather than their own bank accounts or China’s investments. They will need to demonstrate foresight, technocratic competence and savvy when negotiating deals. It’s questionable whether many governments on the continent have the capacity or honesty to do so.

On this, Howard French, the former New York Times bureau in both Africa and China, had an interesting proposal. He recounted a recent meeting with Robert Rubin, Secretary of the Treasury under Clinton and until January was a Director at Citigroup. Rubin, who is now “hiding out” at the Council on Foreign Relations, asked French what he thought was the most effective/least costly thing the U.S. could do for Africa.

French suggested initiatives to enhance civil society in Africa, such as university exchanges and training, anything that might equip its future leaders with the tools they need to challenge power. China tends to work government-to-government; strengthening the so called “Third Sector” in Africa is a means of creating accountability.

This, French said, is where China will likely bloody its nose eventually in Africa. When civil society in Africa challenges China to live up to its promises of development and rhetoric of brotherhood. “How will that encounter change the equation?” Will China just walk away if the engagement no longer serves its self-interest or is too troublesome? Will it play one neighbour against another for a better deal? Or will it affect an ethical component to its foreign policy?

French finished up with a potentially grim, dystopian scenario. It’s 2050. With 2 billion people, Africa’s population has doubled in 40 years and its mineral resource wealth is mostly depleted. Who knows what the impact of climate change will be then. What then if China’s efforts, this “second opportunity”, ultimately fail to help produce prosperous states?

(Photo: Chinese boss hollerin’ at his ditch diggers in Kabwe, Zambia)

Presently at Indiana University in Bloomington, attending an academic symposium on China’s rapidly expanding investments in Africa, and the implications it will have for the continent’s long-term development.

I am also buying buckets of fireworks. Or seriously considering it. Indiana has some of the laxest fireworks laws in America, which I suppose makes it an apt place to host a symposium about China (where fireworks were invented). In 2006, the state legalized the home use of exploding firecrackers and rockets with minimal restrictions. A local newspaper complains that the new law has “turned almost every summer night into Independence Day.” I didn’t know this in advance, but figured something was up when we crossed the Michigan-Indiana state line and were welcomed by a half-dozen fireworks warehouse emporiums, and the exuberantly-phrased roadside billboards advertising their never-ending array of celebratory combustibles.

Beyond the state-line fireworks stores, the other first impression Indiana makes is that it smells like poo. There are lots of farms, at least in the flatter north end of the state.

As for the symposium: the most revealing and entertaining presentation thus far has come from Wenren Jiang, a political science professor from the University of Alberta. What sets Jiang’s research apart is that he focuses not only on the official, state-level engagements between China and African governments (often involving Chinese state-owned enterprises), but also the mostly overlooked small and medium-sized Chinese entrepreneurs operating in Africa without state support.

Jiang’s presentation was based on research done in the Katanga region of southeastern Congo, paying particular attention to the sudden proliferation of copper smelters there 3-4 years ago, when copper was going for a handsome $9,000 US per tonne on world markets. The western media’s perception of China’s involvement in Africa, has mostly been a) skeptical, and b) focused on the state’s direct or indirect involvement. The story Jiang told was a “Wild West” scenario where independent Chinese investors went in, hastily threw together smelters, bought raw materials from freelancing locals (as opposed to establishing their own mines like Western companies in the area) and paid bribes to local bigwigs when necessary. Generally, they had little contact with Chinese officials in the country. The Chinese ambassador in Kinshasa told Jiang these dudes “only call when they’re in trouble.”

Relations between the entrepreneurs and local employees were strained. The smelters were frequently robbed, sometimes by their own staff. Safety and environmental regulations were either non-existent or unenforced. And the Chinese made little effort to understand the local culture or language. Not much after the would-be copper barons arrived, however, copper prices plummeted; first to $6,000 per tonne, and they’re now in the neighborhood of $3,000. Suffice it to say the Chinese are gone, and left little behind but unpaid wages, derelict smelter compounds, and a rising tide of crime. (But the region still has copper, plus cobalt, uranium, and diamonds—which is why some fear the resource wars currently happening in northeastern Congo, at the Ugandan frontier, could spread southward.)

Jiang’s point being that, contrary to the way we’ve framed our understanding of China’s involvement in Africa as  state managed, there’s a growing contingent of non-state, market-driven Chinese actors who are making their own deals, and in some cases, their own rules. For these players, diplomacy and south-south economic ties mean little. All that matters to them is the global market.

This article in the Asia Times by Jiang references his research around Lubumbashi, the capital of Katanga province.

My article on chieftaincy-related conflicts in Ghana appears today at the Globe and Mail online, coinciding with national elections there scheduled for tomorrow. The piece was assigned and written months ago, while I was in West Africa and the town of Bawku was still under a 6pm-6am curfew in the wake of some brutal attacks. The fighting there was over which tribe was entitled to the local chieftaincy and was unhelpfully fueled by national party politics.

Although Ghana is generally talked up as one of the most stable and democratic countries in Africa, there are a worrying number of disputes that happen at the nexus of chiefly and partisan political power. Bawku is but the most dramatic recent example.

The elections here and in the U.S. resulted in the piece getting bumped and bumped and bumped. Now that it is running it’s been bumped from the pages of the newspaper to the internet only. Something about a political/constitutional crisis in this country and declining page counts thanks to the economic downturn. Which is fair enough. But I can’t also help feeling that it reflects, once again, Africa’s low priority in our media—unless, of course, something particularly awful and newsworthy happens. Reporting on Ghana’s election has been sparse overall, BBC Online being the rare exception. If violence does occur post-election, and it threatens the region’s stability, it will make news then. But any analytic reporting that attempts to anticipate what might happen in advance too often doesn’t make it through the noise.

I updated the article in the past couple weeks and according to most reports pre-election violence in Ghana has abated. The picture at head is of Bawku’s almost deserted main intersection only minutes before the daily, army-enforced curfew was to take effect. The intersection is also the dividing line between rival Kusasi and Mamprusi neighborhoods. This is a snap of the current Bawku Naba (chief), Asigri Abugrago Azoka II of the Kusasi tribe, whose legitimacy has been challenged by Maprusis—a decades-old dispute that has frequently spilled over into bloodshed.

Violence in Bawku this past July resulted in the firebombing of several shops. Motorcycle taxis on the Mamprusi side of town complain that they can’t work certain parts of Bawku for fear of violent attacks and thefts.

And this is an entirely gratuitous shot of a Bawku man preparing goat for dinner.

More scribblings from recent trip to New York City, in part for book-related research. & in part to confirm that what happened on November 4 actually did happen. (Pics from Lisa K.)

November 10, 2008
Paying sporadic attention to the news one item stands out: Gun and ammo sales are booming surging (insert your own punning headline here). It would appear some folks are afraid that the new socialist president is intent on stripping the citizenry of their armaments, so they’re stock-piling. A store in Houston reported that sales on the Saturday preceding election day were seven times higher than for a typically healthy one.

We hit a few more galleries and the trip’s art highlight ends up being the exhibition DOWN by Kehinde Wiley at Deitch Projects. Seven monumentally-scaled paintings that riff on historical images of fallen religious and warrior icons by situating urban black men in heroic poses—sacrificial, ecstatic, sanctified while often tricked out in bling and hip hop gear. The colours vibrate and the scenes are startling for being both so modern graphic and yet classical; epochal mashups enhanced by the floating latticework of textile patterning (patterns based on the kind of designs once found on African-produced textiles for the European market). They’re subversive but seem to have a sense of humour about themselves. And their scale is overwhelming; the largest painting is 24 feet across.

We also check out shows by Andreas Gursky, Phillipe Parreno, Zak Smith and Bill Jacobson.

Which has me wondering: how goeth the art market? Not well I discover by perusing the previous day’s New York Times.

“Works by a wide range of artists failed to sell at a Christie’s auction in New York [on November 5], and items that did go fetched disappointing prices… The contagion has infected the art world. Collections from the estates of two New York philanthropists were expected to generate at least $104 million in sales; they brought in $47 million.”

Tuesday, November 11
President George Bush is in town for Veteran’s Day.

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It’s estimated that New York has already lost 45,000 finance-related jobs. Those terminated can console themselves at one of the now hot & happening Pink Slip Parties, which function as both networking events and drunken gripe-fests. Beer comes cheap at only $2 for a Bud. Former hedge-fund manager Mike Grimm said farewell to a $500,000 annual salary only a couple weeks ago. Mike tells the New York Post: “No one is an investor anymore. Everyone’s a speculator.”

Wednesday, November 12
Several interviews today, but the one most pertinent to current events is with William Easterly, an economist at New York University who specializes in development and foreign aid. In his book The White Man’s Burden he gamely takes on the many failings of not only traditional development models and big-letter aid agencies, but also the overly ambitious and technology-centred solutions proposed by Jeffrey Sachs and the Millennium Development Goals. He’s not saying the Goals are themselves are unworthy, only that the methods we keep employing to get there don’t work. Easterly pushes for a more modest, flexible, bottom-up, trial-and-error approach that considers what works in one political, cultural and economic context may not necessarily work in another.

But Easterly doesn’t restrict his criticism to well-meaning NGOs and international development agencies. He’s pointing out all the ways in which our interventions have gone awry in the developing world, which includes the sorts of policies forced upon countries by the IMF and World Bank, through Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) and the like. Which brings us to the current moment—the IMF had been struggling to overcome its bad reputation and make itself relevant again when the financial crisis landed its lap. Now it’s suddenly an active lender again, to Iceland, Pakistan, Hungary, Ukraine, and others. I asked Easterly what he thought about the return of the IMF.

“I’m afraid they’re going to go back to the old models—the course of conditionalities. The anti-globalization types who talk about neo-liberal economic policies as such a bad thing, I sympathize with them a lot but disagree at the same time. On one hand I believe that a lot of neo-liberal economics is common sense, time-tested stuff that works in the long-run to promote prosperity… But it’s not some kind of ideological dogma that you rigidly apply, and it’s certainly not something to be coercively imposed by outsiders. Because the moment something goes wrong, and things always go wrong along the way, you get a wave of xenophobic populists come to power who say it’s all the fault of evil foreigners and their ideas. You’ve just set back the cause of trying to find sensible ideas for economic management. Instead you get this pendulum of extremes.”

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Afterward, I make the move from hotel to home, relocating myself and travelling things to a friend’s place on the Upper West Side. But there is bad news: Her husband was laid off today from the company where he had worked for ten years. The economy in general, and slumping sales in particular, were cited as the reasons why. Over dinner he’s distracted and not very hungry; he keeps migrating to his laptop as he’s sent out some messages to friends and family, and, I suppose, is seeking some comfort or counsel in their replies. As he’s a foreign national, there is also the matter of his soon-to-be cancelled work visa. And they have a one-year-old baby.

Thursday, November 13
George Bush is still in New York. As if to say: you won’t be rid of me so easily! He’s making a speech to a forum hosted by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, which I’m watching simulcast on a local television station. It takes a vigorous bout of arm pinching for me to again re-affirm the utter meltdown of the past couple months. And there’s Bush delivering his dispatch from bizarro world: on the one hand he’s justifying his administration’s de facto nationalization of many major U.S. banks while advising against any new substantive measures to regulate global financial markets.

He insists that the crisis “was not a failure of the free market system,” but, presumably, some greedy, loose nuts operating inside of it. Which sounds something like the argument that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” while neglecting to mention the regulatory conditions and business culture that enabled/encouraged the reckless behaviour.

Scribblings from recent trip to New York City, in part for book-related research. & in part to confirm that what happened on November 4 actually did happen. balloon alley image by Lisa K.

Thursday, November 6
Two days after Obama’s election and there remains a palpable cloud of euphoria that glides above Manhattan streets like a giant happy soap bubble, delivering a sloppy kiss to every citizen it bumps into. The president-elect’s face on banners, T-shirts, stenciled graffiti, buttons, his name even dotted out in red light bulbs against the face of an apartment building facing the Williamsburg Bridge, each bulb occupying the window slot of a different unit (talk about unanimity).

Wall Street, and the fresh troubles it has sired, feels temporarily walled or moated off from the rest of Manhattan. Until it’s quitting time and all those glum, anxious faces take to the subway for parts uptown and suburbia.

A weird, bi-polar moment.

Friday, November 7
The image above is but one of the many signs here that Americans can, for this passing moment, attach any and all hopes or aspirations to the Obama image. What’s your wish? Personally, I’m pulling for more banjo, smoked meat and that the outdoor ice rinks stay open longer this year.

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Lisa K. and I take in the large Elizabeth Peyton show at the New Museum (the new building for which is amazing—minimal white boxes tiered haphazardly atop one another). Peyton is an American portraitist whose paintings typically feature her hipster friends, romantic historical figures or pop celebrities as her subjects. Her style, most conspicuously influenced by David Hockney, is quite fetching—sensual, borderline androgynous figures done in colourful, heavy oils, showing the deft hand of a fashion illustrator. But the uncritical nature of her practice, with its seeming adoration for fancy pop cutey boys, feels very one-note and betrays a certain shallowness that wears after a while. Too much of it is the familiar youth, celebrity and beauty stuff: Live Fast, Die Young & Leave a Beautiful Corpse Whatnot. Having said that, the show is hugely entertaining and the pictures themselves are beautiful and often intimately tiny.

Most promising, her recent paintings do show in an interest in age beyond the beautiful corpse, including one of septauganarian poet John Giorno and another of a weary-looking Matthew Barney perhaps doing his best Van Gogh impersonation (above). And a new one added to the show only yesterday: a portrait of Michelle Obama with her daughters.

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Walking past Grand Central late at night, we encounter an angry white male, youth category, bedecked in the hip-hop stylee exclaiming “Obama! Obama!” with more aggression than glee.

Saturday, November 8
Much of the day is spent gallery-hopping in Chelsea. Most notable: Julian Faulhaber’s exhibition Lowdensitypolyethylene at Hasted Hunt (image above). At first glance his hyper-real, supersaturated depictions of austere, geometric, unpeopled modern environments seem like fabrications or reconstructions—but they are actual images of recently completed spaces, yet to be fully turned over to human usage, lit only with available ambient/artificial light. There has been no post-production work on the photos. The images are abstractly gorgeous, luminous, unearthly and more than a little creepy. Like sets for a Kubrick movie imagined, but never made.

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Today, I learn belatedly that Frank ‘Lefty’ Rosenthal has died. You will know Rosenthal best as the inspiration for Martin Scorsese’s Casino, in which Robert DeNiro starred as Las Vegas casino mogul Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein. Rosenthal was a low-level East Coast hoodlum before bringing his chutzpah to Vegas and the gambling scene. He eventually ran four major casinos simultaneously, hosted his own television variety show, wrote newspaper columns, and, most importantly, revolutionized the gambling industry’s business model by demonstrating just how much money could be from sports betting.

He was also one of America’s luckiest men: Casino’s final scene, in which Rothstein/Rosenthal survives a car bombing, is true to the facts. He walked away only lightly charred thanks to a metal plate installed beneath the driver’s seat for reasons that had nothing to do with his own protection, and the fact he hadn’t fully closed his door before keying the ignition.

Rosenthal’s passing seems apropos now, as we endure the long denouement of that elaborate shell game known as the Credit Economy Death Cycle. He was famous for ensuring the customers of the casinos he ran were surrounded in decadent luxury and treated to a good show—even as they lost their shirts. And he knew his maths: Sports Illustrated called him the “greatest living expert on sports handicapping.” On his own website (which you must check out, it’s so American! of a certain vintage), he unabashedly described himself as both a “Game Theorist” and a “Las Vegas gangster”… Shall I resist making a crack about how appealing his C.V. would have looked on pre-bailout Wall Street?

Sunday, November 9
Window shopping & day dreaming. In Soho we pop into the Moss design store where I encounter, for the first time, the Buildings of Disaster series by Constantin and Laurene Boym—architectural miniatures of landmarks famous for the tragic or catastrophic events that occurred therein. The Watergate Hotel, the Dakota in front of which John Lennon was assassinated, Three Mile Island, Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, Chornobyl, the Ford Theatre, the Paris underpass where Princess Diana’s speeding limo crashed…

From the Boyms’s website: “Some of these buildings may have been prized architectural landmarks, others – non-descript anonymous structures. But disaster changes everything. The images of burning or exploded buildings make a different, populist history of architecture, one based on emotional involvement rather than on scholarly appreciation. In our media-saturated time, the world disasters stand as people’s measure of history, and the sites of tragic events become involuntary tourist destinations.”

Which doesn’t sound entirely implausible or pomo-stupid. Except some of the pieces have now been re-issued in limited gold-plated editions that retail for thousands of dollars apiece. And that seems to me more purposefully tacky than subversive, a cynical rather than playful critique of event collectibles. Especially as the retailer brags of the many celebrities who possess items from the collection.

Pictured above from the gold-edition BoD collection, clockwise from top left: World Trade Center, Neverland Ranch, Watergate Hotel, OJ Simpson Car Chase, The Pentagon, Oklahoma City Federal Building, Waco, Unabomber Shack.

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I head off on a long stroll, trawling eastward along East 4th to Alphabet City. The closer you get to Avenue D, the more Puerto Rican and Dominican becomes the neighborhood. Colourful murals dedicated to deceased young people adorn several walls. There are some lovely and wild community parks and gardens, mostly tended by volunteers. It’s a relief to discover there are still some scrappy Manhattan neighborhoods such as this, as the rest of the island is reupholstered into a high-priced theme park or mall.

The word ‘kleptocracy’ has been historically applied to a substrata of not-quite-failed states (Nigeria today, Indonesia under Suharto, Fujimori’s Peru) where rulers and elites have enriched themselves at the expense of raising people’s living standards. As more of the backstory around the current financial crisis comes to light, the United States is coming dubiously close to earning the moniker it once used to justify military interventions elsewhere (Philippines, Panama).

As yesterday’s New York Times reported, the F.B.I. is struggling against chronic staff and resource shortages to properly investigate the deluge of financial fraud cases that have been shaken out of the now emptied federal piggy bank. The situation is largely the result of decisions to reallocate resources toward counter-terrorism and national security in the wake of 9-11. But even four years ago, F.B.I. officials pleaded with the Bush administration for more agents to deal with white collar crime. From the article:

“Since 2004, F.B.I. officials have warned that mortgage fraud posed a looming threat, and the bureau has repeatedly asked the Bush administration for more money to replenish the ranks of agents handling nonterrorism investigations, according to records and interviews. But each year, the requests have been denied, with no new agents approved for financial crimes, as policy makers focused on counterterrorism.

“According to previously undisclosed internal F.B.I. data, the cutbacks have been particularly severe in staffing for investigations into white-collar crimes like mortgage fraud, with a loss of 625 agents, or 36 percent of its 2001 levels.

“Over all, the number of criminal cases that the F.B.I. has brought to federal prosecutors — including a wide range of crimes like drug trafficking and violent crime — dropped 26 percent in the last seven years, going from 11,029 cases to 8,187, Justice Department data showed.”

Which is kinda crazy when you consider the many high profile corporate malfeasance cases (Enron, WorldCom) during that same period. The unwillingness to embrace any meaningful government oversight is illustrated in another recent Times article that details a meeting between senior economic officials in the Bush administration in February 2002. At the meeting, a seemingly out-of-character Alan Greenspan is reported to have said, “There’s been too much gaming of the system. Capitalism is not working! There’s been a corrupting of the system of capitalism.” Along with then Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, he argued for urgent action against reckless executives and fraudulent accounting practices.

O’Neill and Greenspan lost the argument. Just like the F.B.I. lost the argument for more resources devoted to criminal investigations. From 2001 to 2007, the agency requested 1,100 new agents for non-counterterrorism cases; instead, it lost 132. Yesterday’s Times article suggests this neglect was not simply post-9/11 mania, but a willful attitude of the administration.

“After the collapse of Enron in 2002, the Justice Department moved aggressively against corporate fraud — too aggressively, in the view of some people within the administration. It set up a national task force to tackle the problem, garnered hundreds of convictions at companies like WorldCom, Adelphia and Enron, and forced the closure of Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm, for its role in the Enron collapse.

“But several former law enforcement officials said in interviews that senior administration officials, particularly at the White House and the Treasury Department, had made clear to them that they were concerned the Justice Department and the F.B.I. were taking an antibusiness attitude that could chill corporate risk taking.”

In October 1980, Salih Sezgin was an illiterate seventeen-year-old when he was incarcerated in Diyarbakir prison, Turkey’s most notoriously brutal penitentiary. The military high command had just staged a coup dissolving the government. Many Turks welcomed the army’s intervention due the rising tide of political violence (committed by leftists & rightists) and economic instability that had been plaguing the country for almost a decade.

Two police officers had been found murdered in Diyarbakir; Sezgin was rounded up as part of a crackdown on leftists and Kurdish activists. On scant evidence he was convicted of one of the murders and sentenced to death. (Later, through the intervention of E.U. politicians, his sentence was commuted to twenty years.)

Upon arriving at the prison, Sezgin was asked by the guards “do you want a room with television and shower or a regular room?” He didn’t fall for the ruse, but many of his fellow convicts did. A shower meant a hole in the cell’s ceiling that allowed circulating sewage from the toilets above to constantly pour into the room. To amuse themselves, guards would sometimes order the prisoners to roll around in the shit; if there wasn’t enough excrement on them, they were told to roll around some more. Prisoners would willingly smear more shit on one another to avoid a beating. Evidently, this was the “television” part, albeit for the benefit of guards.

Sezgin introduced himself to me in late October, during one of his rare strolls outside the newspaper office in Istanbul where he now works. I was sitting with his publisher at a sidewalk tea shop. This was in the week following the PKK ambush which killed 12 Turkish soldiers on October 21. Due to the fervour on the streets and the recent spate of violence against Kurdish politicians, journalists, merchants and civilians, he hadn’t been home in five days. He preferred to sleep in the relative security of the office. From his window on the fourth floor it was easier to see who was coming and going.

At the time of his arrest, Sezgin was a Marxist, which was then common among Kurdish activists. In prison he sustained regular beatings, psychological torture and the prospect of being hung. He witnessed many of his friends die from hangings, hunger strikes, suicides, or fatal injuries due to torture. One day he was ordered to clean an area of the prison where guards had stashed a friend’s dead body in the garbage for him to find. But he said he never broke. “The sense of belonging to your people gave me an aim that I wanted to live. In prison they forced us to march to Turkish songs, put pictures of Atatürk in our cells—they try to make you a Turk. But you remain a Kurd. If anything that makes you stronger.”

In prison he taught himself how to read and write. He began work on Hanging Nights, a memoir of his prison life.

Sezgin was released in 1999, thirty-seven-years old. When he had arrived at Diyarbakir prison it was surrounded by open fields; now it was enclosed by a suburb of apartment blocks that had swelled with Kurdish migrants, refugees of the war between the PKK and the Turkish army. And times had changed dramatically. The Cold War was long gone. Now everything was “globalization.”

“At the time we went to jail we were socialists, Marxists. And so when the Soviet Union fell we were sad, because it was something we were fighting for. But it took time to realize that this was better—for everything to be open, for there to be no borders. It should make it easier to talk about everything. The communist countries put severe pressure on their people. Within such a society it would have been no better for the Kurds.”

While the Turkish mainstream is ambivalent about the changes it must make to join the European Union, and increasingly unhappy with its strategic alliance with the U.S. and NATO, the Kurds I spoke with enthusiastically embraced what they call “globalism.” For them it meant the ability to communicate with and receive support from the large Kurdish diaspora in Europe, to envisage a day when freedom of mobility and more permeable borders will make it easier to connect with relatives in northern Iraq, Syria or Iran, it invited the scrutiny of the European Union into human rights abuses, and support for their rights as a minority. In 1999, a former Prime Minister of Turkey, Mesut Yilmaz, conceded that “Turkey’s road to the European Union goes through Diyarbakir.”

When Hanging Nights was published it turned Sezgin into something of a cause célèbre. He was interviewed by Turkish media and featured as the subject of a French documentary. He gets mail every day from current inmates. But in the hysteria that prevailed on the streets in October, Sezgin worried that things were moving backward for the Kurds. During a visit to his newspaper’s offices, I was told that one of his colleagues had been sentenced that day to a year in prison for an article he wrote about Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned founder of the PKK. While the young colleague was somewhat relaxed about the prospect of jail, and even joked about it, Sezgin was not so sanguine. “I don’t wish anyone to go through what I did. I don’t want to see Jalal go to prison. Anyone who is sentenced, I tell them to leave the country.”