How Wars End (2008)

“True Giant of U.S. Foreign Policy”

Reporter’s path twice crossed by Holbrooke

Richard Holbrooke’s book about Bosnia To End a War

Here’s an excerpt:

I remember packing up my microphone and recording equipment after an interview at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial. After talking about issues of memory and the horrors of directing a memorial site of such a horrific place, I packed up my equipment and I started walking out and I walked out of the memorial and directly into a neighborhood. I just remember walking around that neighborhood and seeing all of those manicured lawns, and sprinklers going and people walking their dogs; it just struck me, my goodness, for all the attention given to the prisoner barracks and to the actual concentration camp site, just outside the walls are homes where families used to live and families still do live. Right next to that site. And  just walking down the street wondering what the families in those houses used to think, day in and day out, just meters away from the concentration camp. You know, what was life really like? And a subject that really interests me, in connection with this piece,  what was it like for the bystanders, the Germans, the German families who lived so close to those sites, and lived every day lives?

Daniel Estrin’s stories for The World

A Rope and a Prayer: A Kidnapping from Two Sides (book)

Held by the Taliban (New York Times series)

Jeb Sharp interviews David Rohde about the Pakistan cables released by Wikileaks

Download MP3

In her new book The Trouble with the Congo Autesserre analyzes the failures of the international peacebuilding effort there. She argues diplomats and peacekeepers should pay more attention to local causes of violence.  Autesserre makes the case that a lot of violence in rural Congo is about basic matters of survival such as access to land and food. Those issues don’t go away just because leaders in a faraway city sign a peace deal.  Autesserre wants to see peacebuilders reapportion resources so that grassroots conflict resolution gets more attention. And she wants them to get over the idea that violence is somehow “normal”  in Congo.

What I heard a lot when I was doing the research were statements that are not obviously racist but that have an undertone that is really disturbing…I was in North Kivu in 2007, talking with a relatively high-level U.N. peacekeeper, a woman, very well-meaning, very nice. We were talking about the fact that there was massive violence and massive fighting picking up in rural areas and I asked her, “So what do you think it is?”  And she said, “Well I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the normal state of affairs for these provinces.”

Autesserre says that kind of rhetoric underscores for her a prevalent assumption among outsiders that a certain level of violence is normal for the Congo and much higher than what we would consider normal in Europe or America.   She traces the ideas back to a construct inherited from Belgian colonization. “Basically the Belgians in the 19th century constructed this image of the Congolese’s inherent savagery in order to facilitate colonization,”  Autesserre said. “The idea that the Congolese are inherently violent, they’re savages, so we the Belgians, the good guys, we’re going to go and civilize them.”  Autesserre says the idea was widespread in the 19th century and has persisted up until now.

In the public discourse,  in the media, there hasn’t been enough of challenging, of saying, “No, the Congo is not inherently violent; it’s not normal that people are fighting against one another.” And when you read media coverage of the Congo you still see a perpetuation of this discourse, you see a lot of references to Heart of Darkness; very often media analysis will use the word “barbarism.” They will focus on the really weird aspects of Mai-Mai militias, for example, the fact that they are fighting naked. All these things I think perpetuate this picture of the Congo as a place that is very different from our countries, from Europe and the United States, and that is so different that the violent things that happen there may be inherent to the place and we can’t judge the Congo by the standard that we judge other places. So one of the things  I try to do in the book is really to write against that and to deconstruct this image.  — Severine Autesserre

The podcast runs about 35 minutes. The music at the top is from the song Anata O from Congolese artist Lokua Kanza whom we featured in a Global Hit back in June.

Download MP3

Severine Autesserre’s homepage
The Trouble with the Congo webpage
Congo Coverage on The World

Slideshow of rediscovered Spanish Civil War negatives

I was astounded by what they were able to do, the courage that they showed, and with writing the book I wanted to bring some of their stories forward too,  so people could really hear them.  The purpose of the trial–one of the main purposes for me–is you’re really needing to re-weave the web of humanity that’s been broken, our community, our human community. It’s been broken so egregiously by horrible crimes. We want to stand with the victims, we don’t want to stand with the perpetrators. And they need to know that. They need to know that the people of the world recognize how seriously they’ve been harmed, and care about it.

Download MP3

Judith Armatta’s Home Page

Jeb Sharp’s November 11, 2003 radio report on the Milosevic Trial

ICTY – International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

Thinking of the time when no witnesses will be left to remember and actually we’ll only have the archives and their images, I thought it’s important if not urgent to try to conceive the complexity of these images, the layers of reality that are concealed behind the simplistic way we are used to seeing this extremely important footage and I think that it also creates for us a perspective which we can use in our own contemporary viewing when being mediated by the media and news programs it’s always about our limitations as viewers and when we realize these limitations we know to seek for more than what we are actually seeing and I think this is maybe one of the most ethical tasks we have in front of us as viewers.

The emotional trigger maybe was the death of my grandmother one year before I started to make this film. Until then I was sure that at least during the decades the survivors were still a mass of people it was much more important to listen to them, or even to listen to their silence, because their silence was also a form of testimony, to understand something of what had happened. But now when they’re slowly dying, I think that the images are much more important to understand than anything else, because it is the chemistry of reality in a way. And to understand what it contains is to try and seek for truth. –Yael Hersonski

Jeb Sharp’s radio interview with Yael Hersonski, August 18, 2010

That’s the million dollar question right. I think as a commander and having seen the human sacrifice, you know I love my guys and I think that’s the ultimate question you know is what I saw my friends endure, the kind of horrific things that I saw, the people who were caught in between, you know, I don’t know. I think that’s why it still bothers me so much. I think that loss is often the most powerful emotion because it’s something that you always have to deal with. Time never completely closes that wound, because there’s nothing to go back to. I hope, I hope that the legacy we leave behind, that we’ve been a force for good, you know and I tell my guys all the time, what you guys did, hunting high value targets, taking down some of these car bomb networks, with what we had control over, we did good.

Strategically, that’s not my question. I’m obviously very invested in it but not of my own doing or that of my guys. I think a large reason why Americans support soldiers nowadays days is because they recognize we’re public servants. We swore to the constitution and we go where we’re ordered to go and then carry ourselves with the morality our country expects of us so that we acquit ourselves with honor. I can say we did that. Can I say it was worth it? You know, no, I certainly have, I certainly have strong feelings. We’ll see, and ultimately it’s up to time to tell whether or not the impact that we had in Iraq was in the national interest of the United States and was worth the sacrifice of the men and women and some of the Iraqis that were caught in the middle that helped us. But I can’t answer that question.

www.jessicasternbooks.com
Jeb Sharp’s radio interview with Jessica Stern
The Chronicle of Higher Education
New York Times review
Washington Post Op-Ed

Soccer spread so quickly. A lot of sports spread along the sinews of empire, you can think of cricket or rugby or even baseball in the U.S. case. What happened with soccer is it did spread via English–it was created and codifed in England and it spread with English people who crossed into other countries but very quickly it took root in those other countries. France is one case among many where in the early 20th-century English communities brought it there and then very quickly it became just part of the social fabric of every day life and very quickly it became an extremely important pastime for many many people.  – Laurent Dubois

Dubois explores the roots — in Empire — of the diversity of the French national team, long celebrated but also maligned for its preponderance of players of African and Caribbean descent.  And he profiles two players in particular, Lilian Thuram and Zinedine Zidane, in his tale of how soccer and French identity are intertwined. Download MP3

Other links:

Laurent Dubois’s Soccer Politics blog

The World’s 2010 World Cup page

NPR Interview on the history of soccer in Africa

TNR’s soccer blog GoalPost

Photos

BBC Kosovo Coverage

BBC Air Strikes Coverage

Winning Ugly

Waging Modern Wars

• Subscribe to the How We Got Here Podcast via iTunes
• Subscribe to the How We Got Here Podcast via RSS