A post on Hartley’s blog this week includes a depressing reminder of what can happen outside the prison walls when tyrants take care to kill their victims discreetly: nothing much:

After speaking recently to a group of young South Korean soldiers about North Korea’s harsh labor camps, former prisoner Jung Gyoung Il — himself once a soldier in North Korea’s massive army — was stunned by the questions from the audience.

One soldier asked how many days of leave North Korean soldiers were given. Another asked if North Korean soldiers were allowed to visit their girlfriends.

No one showed any curiosity about the notorious network of gulags, a signature marker of the North’s brutality toward its own people.

In a rare acknowledgment, the South Korean government recently noted in a report that hundreds of thousands of North Koreans are languishing in the prison camps. But Seoul has made no public effort to exert pressure on Kim Jong Il’s regime over the issue. And many South Koreans, who hold deeply conflicted feelings toward their communist neighbor, are reluctant to even concede that the camps exist.

At universities, Jung said, many students sleep through his lectures about North Korea’s gulags. The indifference still shocks him, five years after he defected to South Korea following three long years in the Yodok gulag characterized by back-breaking labor, a sparse diet and long nights of forced study of former dictator Kim Il Sung’s philosophies.

But such apathy is typical in South Korea, where North Korea’s prison camps have rarely been discussed in public or in the political arena.

“South Koreans say, ‘So what? What’s the big deal about it?’” said Kang Cheol-hwan, a former gulag inmate who wrote about his 10-year imprisonment in ´The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag.”

“What’s more surprising for me,” added Kang, now the director of the North Korea Strategy Center, a human rights advocacy group, “was that South Koreans did not believe gulags ever existed in North Korea. They thought it was a lie.”

I am not sure now that Muslim terrorists carried out these attacks. There is evidence that the attacks were staged.

If they can make Avatar, they can make anything.

Meanwhile Hugo Chávez has accused the United States of America of using the recent earthquake in Haiti as an excuse to invade the latter country:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez claimed Wednesday that the United States is using the devastating quake that hit Haiti last week to occupy the Caribbean nation.

‘The United States government is using a humanitarian tragedy to militarily occupy Haiti. I read somewhere that they even occupied the government palace,’ Chavez complained as he launched a cable car system for poor neighbourhoods in Caracas.

The left-wing populist Venezuelan, an outspoken critic of US policies, said the United States should be sending more doctors and medicine than soldiers.

‘Cuba has more doctors in Haiti than the United States,’ he said.

Chávez is not alone. Other pseudo-Leftist representatives have made similar claims. Associated Press reports:

Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua — all three led by anti-US governments — claimed Washington was using the international relief operation in Haiti as cover for a military takeover.

Earlier this month I was asked to address an audience about what future there might be for the “decent left”. For those unfamiliar for the term this is the tendency on the left generally associated with backing the Iraq War (though some of the key advocates of this approach did not), opposition to alliances with extreme-right Islamism and the identification of a tendency towards anti-Semitism in some left-liberal discussion of Israel and the Middle East. The Euston Manifesto, published in 2006 expressed some of the thinking of The Decents.

On the key issue of the Iraq War, I was an agnostic. I hoped that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would lead to a new era of democracy, but suspected it would probably lead to fratricide, sectarianism and the break up of the country into Sunni, Shia and Kurdish enclaves. The reality has been more complicated than either scenario.

The inventive tactics of Iran’s opposition continue to deny the Tehran regime the uncontested power it seeks. The result is that the post-election political contest over the future of Iran is reaching a pivotal stage, says Nazenin Ansari.

there have been reports that Yahoo and Google mail have been blocked. There’s a submission at Reddit! with suggestions of ways you can help Iranians oppose and circumvent these new restrictions:

This is a long fight; true reform doesn’t happen over night & one more person who who gets to know what is going on, is another small victory. Reading stuff on internet might seem something mundane; but believe me, if it was so mundane, they wouldn’t be constantly blocking sites & arresting bloggers & admins.

R2P is certainly not—to judge by a careful reading of its history—a mere ploy by rich and powerful countries to poke their noses into the affairs of small nations. Its origins are somewhat more interesting.

One of the first international bodies to endorse the concept, or a version of it, was the African Union, which emerged from the discredited Organisation of African Unity. The AU’s Constitutive Act included a provision for “the right of the Union to intervene in a member state pursuant to a decision of the [AU] assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.” It cited a new principle of “non-indifference” to large-scale crimes.

One of R2P’s keenest sponsors was Kofi Annan, the Ghanaian who preceded Mr Ban as secretary-general. Mr Annan has agonised in public about the UN’s failure in Rwanda, when he was head of un peacekeeping, and has argued that his success as a peace-broker in Kenya last year owed something to the existence of R2P as a moral instrument.

Meanwhile, America, far from dreaming up R2P as a crafty way of justifying imperialist adventures, was initially rather sceptical. Under the Bush administration, both the Pentagon and the State Department were intensely wary of signing up to anything that might bind them to take draconian action in the name of humanity.

Indeed, R2P was a part of a much broader 2005 reform of the United Nations that George Bush first sought to weaken, then only reluctantly accepted. And to this day, there are voices on America’s political right that remain profoundly sceptical about the idea of costly pledges to wage wars in the name of protecting people from inhumanity.

I have only contempt for the freshly exposed behaviour of a large minority of MPs (and for their subsequent excuse-making); the manipulation of candidate lists and the appointment of unelected insiders to Cabinet posts disgusts me. But, behind what appeared to be yet more establishment fixing, there was another story to tell: Kinnock’s maiden speech in the House of Lords addressed the Responsibility To Protect (“R2P”). She questioned the widely-held idea that R2P was solely about questions of military intervention in the affairs of sovereign states and emphasised that it should be about responsible international co-operation to protect threatened populations. I think there is truth in this, even if history suggests such a view is optimistic. Sadly (according to Google News at least), no one is interested in discussing global matters of life and death when there’s a bit of parochial political gossip to cover. Thanks to the shoddy parliament.uk Website — there’s a link to an “advanced search”, but it’s not clickable in Firefox — it’s difficult to find the speech, if it is even available to read. If I track it down, I will post it here.

The question of whether or not the election results were fixed — which has shaded into the question of whether or not the protests were primarily, or continue to be, about vote-rigging — had fascinated many outside observers. It seems that it has turned out to be an academic one, but it’s been interesting to see the various ways professional and amateur statisticians examined it, and how their investigations were viewed by “Kremlinologists” of the regime.

Many outside believed that Ahmadinejad’s perennial popularity in the provinces and the results of pre-election polls suggested that the published results weren’t completely implausible. Some of those also believed that the results were indeed fixed, but only to a limited degree and not to an extent that changed the final result. Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco, Ph.D. candidates in political science at Columbia University, looked at the suspicious last digits of the official election counts.

The US polling site, FiveThirtyEight, that did a fine job of analyzing and predicting polling and voting in the most recent US Presidential elections has a good summary and one of its contributors, Nate Silver, gives vent to his newly-justified skepticism:

For all the complex series of statistics that have been run on Iran’s election, it’s the simplest that might prove to be the regime’s downfall. More people “voted” than were eligible to vote — in a lot of places. The interior ministry admits to 50 such instances out of the 300+ jurisdictions in which Iran tallied results. That is widespread, prime facie and admitted-to evidence of fraud, and I don’t see how the Guardian Council expects people to buy the argument that whatever caused the tub to overflow in those 50 cities was not also tainting the results throughout the rest of the country. The Chatham House report we linked to earlier today found that there were more “votes” than voters in two entire provinces

The Interior Ministry will presumably next try to argue that these were irregularities owing to the mere overzealousness of the Iranian people. Perhaps, as happens with some regularity in the United States, people who thought they were eligible to vote but weren’t nevertheless tried to and weren’t screened properly by elections officials. But this explanation doesn’t hold water — voter eligibility is not a tricky matter in Iran. The Statistical Center of Iran reports that, as of the last census, there were some 47.7 million people aged 18 or older in Iran, which is the voting age in that country. By contrast, the widely-cited figure is that there were some 46.2 million eligible voters. Virtually all people aged 18 or older, evidently, are eligible to vote in Iran, which has very few non-citizens (only about 1.6 million according to official estimates).

This leaves only two possibilities: that there was widespread ballot-stuffing or that the results in some or all areas don’t reflect any physical count of the ballots but were fabricated whole hog on a spreadsheet.

[bold emphases mine]

The improved situation in Iraq will allow the new administration to shift its focus to Iran, where the clock is ticking on a dangerous and destabilizing nuclear program. Obama should offer direct official engagement with the Iranian government, without preconditions, along with other incentives in an attempt to turn Tehran away from developing the capacity to rapidly produce substantial amounts of nuclear-weapons-grade fuel. At the same time, he should lay the groundwork for an international effort to impose harsher sanctions on Iran if it proves unwilling to change course.

… Iran’s challenge has led other actors in the region to begin to work together and look to the United States for help. Egypt and Saudi Arabia have grown deeply disillusioned with U.S. leadership but would welcome an effective U.S. role. Even Syria, Iran’s ally, has launched peace negotiations with Israel partly to improve its relations with Washington and partly to avoid being stuck on the Shiite side of the emerging Sunni-Shiite divide. If the Obama administration could show that there are real payoffs for moderation, reconciliation, negotiation, and political and economic reform, it would recoup considerable U.S. influence throughout the region.

Obama will have to decide what to do about the conundrum posed by Hamas, which won the Palestinian elections in January 2006 and then took control of Gaza through a military putsch in June 2007. Hamas rejects both Israel’s right to exist and the agreements the Palestinians have already entered into with Israel. It also advocates and practices violence and terrorism (which it calls “resistance”) against Israel. Nonetheless, given Hamas’ control of Gaza and its support among at least one-third of Palestinians, a peace process that excludes it could well fail.

The way out of this dilemma is to make it clear that Hamas, and not the United States, is responsible for the Gazans’ fate.

I link to the essay, not because I agree with everything in it — parts of it strike me as over-optimistic — but because it is interesting and timely and it collects a useful list of problems facing the new “leader of the free world” in a region that is more important to World opinion than it is to humanity’s well-being. Indeed, I feel that the Middle East (especially Israel and the Palestinian Territories) generates discussion out of proportion with the number of human beings living there and the economic significance of their activities. Others go even further.