But here's a Google search term that's also a reminder of how important the conversations about rape and confidentiality are.  Yesterday, some came to my blog by searching, "how to find out identity of a rape victim."

On a related note, I'm reading an interesting report by aids-free world on sexual violence during Zimbabwe's election crisis.  It's worth your perusal, but I wanted to ask what you think about the "anonymizing" tactic in their photos.

There are photos of women who have experience sexual violence.  I presume they are from Zimbabwe, though I don't recall the disclaimer (which narrates what I'm now explaining) saying so.  In any case, these women are <em>not</em> the women whose stories are quoted in the report.  And these women have been "disguised" by having colorful lines drawn over their face in significant places -- over the eyes and the nose, say.  The lines are also clearly a design element. Here's an example:

This is the best one; others in the report strike me as...a little too easy to unmask? You'd have to know the person...but of course that's entirely the point.

Also, what about the aesthetic here? It makes me uncomfortable; it feels a bit like the crime has literally sliced away the identity of the victim. I'm not sure that's the gestalt to go for. Thoughts?

Meanwhile, if the pictures are not of the same women telling stories in the report...is it important that we know they're sexual violence survivors? Is it weird that they are illustrations, public stunt doubles for the stories we know -- but they also have their own stories, that we don't? If so, would including pictures of women who hadn't been raped be any better? Is the solution not to address the issue at all, except to say in a disclaimer, "The women photographed are not the women whose stories are narrated in this report"?
nk
I'd love to hear thoughts on this, especially from those who found the Kristof stuff important. It seems to me that it's worth thinking about. The decision to obscure or anonymize is not the only one, obviously. There's an aesthetic, with implications, to this stuff too... But now I'm rambling. Curious to hear what you think.

Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi, cofounder and executive director, African Women’s Development Fund: "....She found a man standing over her daughter, in the process of raping her...She had a machete in her hand.  So she did what she had to do.  That’s the usual example given of the woman who decided she was not going to wait for the slow wheels of justice.  Now we are not going around advocating that women cut off the penises of the perpetrators--"

Voice from the crowd, loudly: "Why not?!"

In late January, A US immigration judge in Memphis, Tenn., recently granted asylum to a German couple that wants to home-school their kids. That's illegal in Germany, and after repeated warnings from the German government, police showed up at the Romeike home and tried to remove the children to social services.

I'm a little behind on this one -- late Jan and all -- but I just read about it in the CSM weekly magazine.  And then I Googled and learned:

According to TIME (which attributes this info to Hannelore Romeike, the mother of the kids), the asylum claim was the idea of a Virginia-based homeschool advocacy association, which the magazine says is trying to get more international. Why Germany? Well, the ban on homeschooling is a start, and surely this test case benefits from legal-ease.  German asylum seekers have something going for them that, say, Eritreans or Guineans or even Poles don't: Germans don't need visas to get here.

How to get asylum without really trying.

You can't, of course. Here's how it works, as I recall. First the requisite caveats: I'm not a lawyer of any type, nor an immigration or asylum expert. But I did learn a lot about asylum when I wrote my Best American Science Writing piece about doctors who treat torture survivors, and I've done a few things on asylum since.

There are (to my memory) three ways to get asylum: You can win it abroad, usually in a refugee camp. If that's your strategy, good luck; only 1 percent of refugees are resettled to third countries. In 2007, the U.S. took in just over 48,000 refugees. That's the most of any country in the world. On the other hand, there are 11.4 million refugees in the world. So I'm not sure that as a hypothetical future refugee, you want to put your eggs in that particular basket. (That's 2007 data because it's the newest UNHCR has at the moment.)  Then again, I'm not sure if, as a hypothetical refugee, you get eggs.

Second way to do it? Show up in the States and say "asylum!" at the airport. If that is your strategy, be strong; they will haul you straight to non-jail jail (they call it "detention").*

The third thing you can do is show your passport to the immigration guys, don't look too nervous, and then get admitted to the US. Then you have a certain amount of time (one year, as I recall, but this could have changed?) to go formally claim asylum. The difference between this and saying asylum at the airport is that you can spend that year living in an apartment, taking pictures of NYC and even working, if your claim takes more than 150 days to get processed (and unless there is divine intervention, it probably will) -- which is to say, living like a human being for the immense amount of time this claim will drag on.

The Romeikes got to skip straight to #3.  They didn't have to wait the 17 years that people in refugee camps do, on average. And they didn't have to wait God knows how long for a US embassy to approve their tourist visa to the US, so the could claim asylum while avoiding non-jail jail.  Like all Germans who want to come check out this wacky circus called America, they just had to get on a plane.

How to make sure you're persecuted at home in ways that (legally) count abroad

Next, the Romeikes (or their lawyers, I suppose) had to convince Judge Lawrence Burman that homeschoolers are a "particular social group," as the asylum law requires. That law says you don't get asylum no matter how many times the government hit you, unless you are a member of a "particular social group" with "a well-founded fear of persecution" based on said membership.

This little legal ditty has been the bane of asylum lawyers for a long time. It's meant that the majority of journalists who have the crap kicked out of them for doing their job get sent back home (file under, "What's a particular social group?  We don't know."). It's meant that Guinean women who've survived female genital mutilation and made it here and filled out their asylum paperwork get sent home, because, as a U.S. government lawyer put it (and the Associated Press paraphrased), "there was no evidence in the cases of the three women that the same individuals who harmed them would do so again" (file under, "You can only be circumcised once.  It's over; go home.").  It's meant that a Guatemalan woman whom an asylum judge recognized was tortured by her government was sent home because she couldn't prove she was tortured because of "race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a social group," as the law enumerates (file under, "WTF?  Yeah, that's what even the appeals judges said, too.").

There's been a lot of criticism of asylum rulings because of this incredibly variation, and there's been minor changes in policy to try an address it.**  Maybe calling journalists a "particular social group" is a move in the more sensible direction..but homeschoolers?   I'm befuddled.  A law school professor quoted in a Christian Science Monitor article  explained it this way:

"Homeschoolers are a movement of sorts...The immigration judge looking at this claim said there is a coherence to this gorup...and that denying the rights of this group [to homeschool] is persecution."

What's that coherence about?  Are homeschoolers any more coherent than journalists, what with their emailing and source-sharing and Committee to Protect Themselves?  The coherence in this case appears to be belief.  The Monitor hems and haws a bit about what USA Today puts much more bluntly: The Romeike's are evangelical Christians, giving their asylum claim an air of religious persecution, or at least religious group identification.

Sort of. The European Court for Human Rights has backed Germany's law in rulings against other families making similar claims.  (Note to asylum judges:  Are we usually in the business of bucking the European Court for Human Rights?  This isn't like the UN human rights body, that Bashir gets to chair while he's buying new gunships to "protect" Darfur.)

Meanwhile, you can't exactly call the man in charge here an asylum-crazy let-'em-in-lefty or a right-wing Jesus-judge. According to a Syracuse University project that tracks asylum decisions and turns them into handy statistics, Burman is slightly more willing than your average asylum judge to grant asylum: he denied (only) 50 percent of asylum claims before for him from 2004-2009, compared to what TRAC says it the national average tendency to send people home 57 percent of the time. (As for the Jesus part, I have no idea what Burman's beliefs or tendencies are, and unlike Lindsey Graham, in the absence of any real information I'll give a US judge the benefit of that doubt for keeping his personal beliefs off the bench.)

You can (almost) always win by saying the N-word

Naturally, Nazis come up in this sort of thing. There's a lot of jabber on the net that the ban on homeschool originates with Hitler, but the Monitor article pegs it to a 1919 law made under the pre-Hilterian Weimar Republic.  In fact, it's even older:  It's been around practically since Germany became a country (good old Prussia).  Variations of school laws were consolidated in 1890, at which point education was unarguably compulsory.  (h/t German Way Expat Blog, whose reference to Prussia I fact-checked with the charming Cyclopedia of Education, from MacMillian Press (thanks, Google Books) and written by Paul Monnroe, a professor at Teachers College at Columbia University -- and a PhD, a much less common degree back in 1919, when this book was published.  The book also confirms, btw, that Weimar thing.)

So sure, like their predecessors, the Nazis did it. By the way, so do we: In 2008, a California court ruled that parents without state certification can't homeschool their kids.

The Monitor article says that other German families who want to homeschool their kids are in touch about this asylum ruling. I therefore predict a spike in German asylum applications. Meanwhile, I'll prepare a policy memo that suggests we skip the whole asylum thing and treat this more like Wife Swap: You can homeschool your kid in New York and live in my apartment, if I can crash in your Berlin pad and avail myself of that grand German tradition in which women get 14 weeks paid maternity leave and both parents get Elternzeit, which protects them from being fired for three years after Das Baby has arrived.

Or maybe Germany will just give me economic asylum? Bitte sehr?

--
*As of Jan 4, this is supposed to change. Watch (wait?) and see.

**Which is to say, for every case of FGM that lost an asylum petition, another could have gotten it.  It depends, literally completely, on the judge.  (So by all means share what you know about asylum cases, but try to avoid lashing out at me in comments because you heard about the woman from Togo who <em>did</em> get asylum for FGM...I know, I know...)

His name is John Kiriakou, and that interview he gave ABC opened the floodgates for "torture works" arguments. There are a lot of good reasons that whether torture works or not is beside the point, but I'm skipping that for the moment.

Because it turns out, Kirakou may have kind of, unintentionally, fibbed.  (Begin chorus of, "I've been used!")

This from Foreign Policy:

Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up.

"What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts," he writes. "I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence."

But never mind, he says now.

"I wasn't there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I'd heard and read inside the agency at the time."

That's from Kiriakou's new book, The Reluctant Spy.  Or rather, from the very end. He says his interview is "a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own." The CIA told FP, "He apparently didn't know as much as he thought he did. That's a very different matter" than deception.

FP points out that the NY Times actually reported last year that Kiriakou wasn't in any of the places he talked about on ABC and that he learned anything he knew from reading field reports at his Virginia desk.

ABC, for its part, is apparently too stunned and shamed to share the tape any more.  When the "torture memos" came out and revealed the guy Kiriakou was talking about had been waterboarded not once, but 83 times, ABC didn't retract the story.  It didn't correct the story.  It "updated" the print story.  And the video?  Today, you won't find the Kiriakou interview at all.

"UPDATE: U.S. Government documents released in April 2009 indicate that Kiriakou's account that Abu Zubaydah broke after only one water boarding session was incorrect. According to a footnote in newly released, previously classified "Top Secret" memos, the CIA used the water board "at least 83 times during August 2002 in the interrogation of Zubaydah.

"Following the release of the documents, Kiriakou said: "When I spoke to ABC News in December 2007 I was aware of Abu Zubaydah being water boarded on one occasion. It was after this one occasion that he revealed information related to a planned terrorist attack. As I said in the original interview, my information was second-hand. I never participated in the use of enhanced techniques on Abu Zubaydah or on any other prisoner, nor did I witness the use of such techniques."

In the old days, this would call for a good rewrite. Then again, ABC just canned half its national staff. It probably doesn't have time to retract or rewrite a story that shaped a nation's debate on torture.  Not when you can just pop a little update on the end of your web copy and be done!  Ta-da!

Small groups of armed Californians have been turning up at cafes and coffee shops with handguns holstered to their belts to raise awareness about gun rights and what they call unfair limits on concealed weapon permits.

Sure, they may look scary, but they're (by law) unloaded. And you're not allowed to attach the ammunition you carry to the gun. I'm not sure how that makes me feel, but there you go.

And now, the Kicker of the Day, same article:

“If all you see are guns in the media used in a violent manner, that’s your perception of guns,” [an open-carry promoter] says. “When we’re out in public with them, we’re interacting with the public in a very nice manner. We’re showing that these are tools that are used for self defense.”

I'm not a development specialist or an economist, so there's a lot of this that goes over my head, including "we used the Pinkovskiy and Sala-i-Martin methodology."  Would love if someone could explain what that is and why it's significant to me.  And since I don't know, I have to wonder:  Is this the only methodology that, when applied to these data sets, would illustrate a reduction?  Is there some other, more common methodology that says poverty is rising?

Let's not rain on the parade too soon.  The authors find a that poverty has dropped -- 10 percentage points -- since 1995.  As it's done that, GDP has gone up.  Seems simple enough.  (But I'm sure it's not.  It never is.)

I won't have a chance to digest it in whole soon, but if anyone wants to check it out and leave me a comment, that would rule.

Meanwhile, there's a conversation about the poverty-deflating value of tourism over at Roving Bandit.  He hears from Britain's Overseas Development Institute that spending by tourists is two-to-three times higher than aid dollars or remittances to most developing countries.  I haven't bought the new book being launched later this week to check into the data, but hey, there it is.  (If you're interested in "poverty tourism," and I have to wonder how much of a slice of what ODI is talking about this is, you might like my article about a private tour company that takes visitors to a Millennium Village in Rwanda.)

Colum Lynch (whose hire as a blogger was FP's smartest move in awhile) broke this delightful bit of WTFedness on his UN blog, Turtle Bay. Not only did the Guinean army hire Crane's consulting firm for advice, said firm conducted a review of the Army. Grade? A! Nice work, boys! Now if you can avoid nasty media reports about "alleged" human rights abuses during your next city siege, maybe you'll get an A+.

But Crane et al also gave the Guinean military a slideshow that could be called How Not to Be (Perceived As) a War Criminal. I recommend all 16 frames of it, because of all the pictures of white soldiers taking what we're to assume is very responsible aim NOT at civilians, and because you will never again see a project credited to a crew of such stature with this many exclamation points. Enjoy.

You'll probably like most of what's in the "special report on human rights," but Adam Hochschild's article on the DRC -- "Blood and Treasure: Why one of the world's richest countries is also one of the poorest" -- stands out in the magazine.  Hell, it stands out next to most American journalism on Africa. (You should also buy the magazine because Marcus Bleasdale's photos are mind-blowing, and you'll want to know about his book coming out.)

Hochschild's is the first big story I've seen about minerals in Congo not to be all gimmicky (sorry, 60 Minutes, and by the way, do better next time).  He doesn't follow around a well-coiffed white ambassador-to-horror, nor does he talk about your cell phone or lap top in a doomsday tone.  In fact, he points out, in a luscious little sidebar, that a boycott of DRC minerals won't do much but take wages away from already impoverished and underpaid artisanal miners.  (It's worth noting that the people working on some kind of mineral-certification process are concerned about that too and trying to plan around it.  It's also worth noting that mineral-certifying, a la the Kimberley process, is a bit of a mixed bag.  But that's another issue.)

Hochschild's article is so damn good in part because it isn't ahistorical.  The author of "King Leopold's Ghost" starts with what he knows best, the country's history of colonial exploitation.  He follows that path straight up to today.  "Of the women I see now in long, brightly colored dresses eking out a living selling bananas spread on a piece of cloth at the roadside, how many, I wonder, are the granddaughters or great-granddaughters of those who were marched to the mines in chains?"

He literally follows the relics, showing us old abandoned mining towns -- there's a detail nothing short of absurd, about an Olympic-sized swimming pool near Ituri, rusting metal diving board and ladder still in tact -- and introducing us to the people you meet in a miner's Congo: police who want bribes to pass on the road, the young shopkeeper weighing metal middlemen's wears, the prospectors (and, in a passing reference, the American man who stands to make a fortune on new gold pits). Here's one scene:

It’s only about 10 in the morning, but the tropical sun is already broiling. Farther down the trail we
stop to talk to a young miner with a gentle smile and intelligent eyes, walking back uphill to [the town of] Pili-Pili. His name is Alex, and he is 22. He says he had to drop out of high school two years ago for lack of money, and has been mining ever since. “There is no work in Congo. We suffer a lot.”

He and the friend who is with him, he explains, are cascadeurs—a word that normally,
as French film buffs know, means movie stuntman, but here it means someone working odd corners, who does not belong to one of the teams. Alex shows us a small plastic bag of sand, with tiny flecks of gold
in it, which, he estimates, the two of them can sell in Pili-Pili for the equivalent of $1. That’s their usual take for an entire day, and they are delighted to have found this much so early. They bid us a warm goodbye and
continue up the trail."

Here's some analysis:

"A failed state fails its people in many ways, and one of them is that, in a world of powerful corporate players, a weak and corrupt government has no bargaining power."

And here's the brilliant conflict nut graf, that thing that so many journalists get wrong -- sensationalize, one-dimensionalize, or otherwise miss the boat in the oft-dsicsused "rape + lions" kind of way -- and that Hochschild makes look so deceptively simple:

Since Mobutu’s overthrow and death in 1997, Congo has been in the grips of a fiendishly complex and brutal war whose exact toll no one knows. It may well be in the millions if you count those who died because fleeing their homes or living in packed, disease-ridden refugee camps cut them off from adequate food and medical care. Women and girls by at least the tens of thousands have been gang-raped by government soldiers and rebel militias, who have found this a chillingly effective method of terrorizing the civilian population of areas they occupy.

That's probably the limits of fair use at this point, and the article isn't online yet.

One thing I always appreciate about his writing, and that these three excerpts illustrate yet again, is the humility in both his observation and analysis. You're not gonna see Hochschild pulling that Gettleman stuff. He listens, pays attention, and knows it's always more complicated than it seems. And he manages, so deftly and in so few words, to write so much. This is an article about far more than just "conflict minerals," and yet it tells that story better than most journalists have thus far, too.

Buy the magazine. And then send a note to the editors that says you want to see more of this kind of writing (and photography!). (They seem to register tweets to @motherjones as well.)

Land, of course!

The African continent is freaking huge. Most of its inhabitants subsistence farm that land. Meanwhile, as oil bubbles up on the western coast and foreign-owned agro-farms crop up in the east and south, every acre may be getting more valuable. But it's trapped value, in a way, because there's confusion about who owns what. Thanks, colonialism!

I wrote about this situation last month in the Christian Science Monitor's cover story "The African Divide."  Apparently it's so interesting that I'm going to be talking about it on C-SPAN's Washington Journal tomorrow at 9:15 am, when pretty much only my mother will be awake.

I chose a very narrow angle on a very big issue, and even that angle is big enough to have supported dozens of dissertations. Since then, I've heard from lots of people, many of them sharing resources on different angles of the issue.   One of them?  Forests. "The era of the hinterland is ending," says the Rights and Resources Initiative. Damn straight, I think, Liberia in mind: Liberia is making major forest concessions to foreign companies (even while it won't allow land sales between citizens, citing confusion over customary and statutory land systems). Here's what RRI says:

"Forest lands are booming in value for the production of food, fuel, fiber and now carbon. New global satellite and communications technology allow the world to peer into, assess the value of, and potentially control forests from anywhere in the world. More than ever, forests are bargaining chips in global climate negotiations and markets. This unprecedented exposure and pressure, and risk to local people and their forests, is being met by unprecedented levels of local organization and political influence, providing nations and the world at large tremendous opportunity to right historic wrongs, advance rural development and save forests."

Another place to dig around a bit if you're into this land thing is the website of The Millennium Challenge Corporation, which has a portfolio of land projects across Africa. You can get a quick list of them on the second page of this short document, and you can dig around on their site for a look at what's going on in those countries. My quick, randomly-chosen-three-places look for M&E didn't reveal much, but hey, at least you know where stuff's happening.