Dorsey’s been scribbling furiously since the terrible violence in Port Said.

Marco Werman speaks with Dorsey about what’s behind the violence and perhaps the reaction or lack of it by Egyptian authorities.

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Marco Werman: The violence yesterday in Egypt involved rival groups of hardcore soccer fans known as Ultras. Supporters of the local Port Said team, Al-Masry, attacked the Ultra rooting for Cairo’s Al-Ahly. And police at the stadium reportedly stood by for the most part. That’s significant because the Cairo Ultras have a long history of clashing with police. They also played a key role in the protests against police and other security forces during Egypt’s revolution last year. James Dorsey writes about the intersection between soccer and politics. His blog is called The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.

James Dorsey: Soccer in Egypt as well as in the rest of the Middle East is from its inception political and has been political ever since. So, none of this violence is purely soccer related. Soccer in the Middle East is a battlefield, and that battle is often fought very bloody.

Werman: The Ultras have some political significance, partly because of the origins of their team, Al-Ahly, and partly because of the stand they took during Egypt’s revolution last year, pushing back against the forces of law and order in Tahrir Square. Is there a political backdrop to the Port Said team, Al-Masry?

Dorsey: Every team was politically founded. Those political origins really don’t mean much anymore. It means nothing, far likely to be anti-monarchists in a country where the monarchy no longer, hasn’t existed for 50 years. On top of that, in essence you have within every club three groups. You have the fans who by in large are anti-regime and clashed with the regime over a number of years prior to Mubarak’s departure. You have management, which was appointed by the regime. And you have the players who because the regime wanted to associate itself with soccer in a bid to shore up its own image, being able to distract attention and at times manipulate the motions, who became celebrities and they were showered with gifts, with attention by the regime. And so they stood on the sidelines during the revolt and that’s created tensions in the relations between the fans and the players.

Werman: So the Ultras, it’s a generic that doesn’t just apply to Al-Ahly.

Dorsey: That’s correct, Ultras first appeared in I think it was 1939 in Brazil, and then the next Ultra groups were in the 1950s in Italy. And there are differences between the groups, but fundamentally they are militant committed soccer fans who feel that they are the sole owners of the club and the only really true supporters. Management in many of the countries, as well as the players, are viewed as hired guns. When they get a better offer they move on. In Egypt, the management is not only a hired guy, but it’s an agent of the government.

Werman: And the Ultras who went to Tahrir Square to support the protestors last year, were they specifically Ultras in support of al-Ahly or various Ultras?

Dorsey: You have two major soccer groups in Cairo, Ahly is one, and it’s arch rival, Zamalek, which was the British club many, many years ago. And the Ultras for both of those groups were equally important and equally represented in the anti-Mubarak demonstrations. They are Ultras and they perceive themselves as such. They are extreme, so that’s why they’re called Ultras. They are ultra in the way they support their party.

Werman: James Dorsey is a researcher at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute. His blog is The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, which we’ll link to on our site, theworld.org. James Dorsey, thanks a lot.

Dorsey: My pleasure, take care.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read tweets about Egypt’s soccer violence

The man to beat is three-term incumbent president Abdoulaye Wade.

Among other candidates is Senegalese musician and political activist Youssou N’Dour.

He announced his candidacy Tuesday saying that he sees running for president as a “supreme patriotic duty.”

N’Dour’s candidacy is perfect fodder for John Street, who studies the intersection of music and politics.

Street is a professor at the University of East Anglia in the UK and author of the book “Music and Politics.”

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French-speaking Socialist Elio Di Rupo could be Belgium's next prime minister. (Photo: Michiel Hendryckx/Wiki Commons)

Belgium’s 18-month political impasse may be nearing an end. Parties from the Dutch-speaking North and the French-speaking South have finally agreed, in principle, to form a coalition government.

Still, economically speaking, Belgium remains divided between north and south.

There are bridges, though.

Take the food services company, Ter Beke. It doesn’t care if you’re from the Flemish North or the Walloon region in the South. If you’re Belgian, Ter Beke wants to be your go-to company when it’s time for dinner.

Ter Beke started as a family-run butcher shop in Flanders in the late 1940s. Over the years, it expanded and diversified into all sorts of processed meats and frozen foods. It does more than half a billion dollars worth of business a year, and it employs more than 1,500 people — in all regions of Belgium.

Luc De Bruyckere, chairman of Ter Beke, said the company lives in both worlds of Belgium.

“We are based in the Flemish region. We are a Flemish company, but we have three plants in Wallonia, employing 700 people in that part of Belgium,” De Bruyckere said.

Historically, Wallonia’s coal and steel industry made it the wealthier part of the country. But after World War II, the Flemish economy in the north took off, in part because of its seaside location and ports, like Antwerp.

Meanwhile, Wallonia’s heavy industry declined.

For years now, billions in tax money have flowed south from what is now the wealthier part, Flanders, to Wallonia.

It’s created what some see as a microcosm of Europe’s larger economic crisis — a split between North and South.

Johan Van Overtveldt, author of the book “The End of the Euro,” said the dividing line runs right through Belgium.

“The Flemish economy belongs in the hard currency Germany, Dutch-like economic system and thinking. The southern part of Belgium is more like Italy.”

He said the divide has been at the heart of the more than 500 days of political wrangling to form a Belgian government. And just like the Germans are demanding that the Greeks be held accountable for the bailout money they’ve been given, “The Flemish people are saying loud and clear, we still want to pay for the poor Walloon area, but we want to know how much and for how long,” Van Overtveldt said. “That’s where the parallel between what’s going on in Europe and what’s happening in Belgium really goes very far.”

Still, Wallonia is trying to turn its economy around. Charleroi Airport, 60 miles south of Brussels, is growing by leaps and bounds. In Liege, a science park for high-tech start-ups is doing well. And Google has built a huge new data center in Mons.

Marcel Claes, CEO of the American Chamber of Commerce in Brussels, said it all points to a Wallonia renaissance.

“Of course, it’s still burdened a little bit with this strong industrial background of steel and coal industries,” Claes said. “But clearly Wallonia has made major efforts in the last ten years or so to position itself positively, and it’s attracted a lot of investment.”

Belgium, by the way, is home to some 2,000 different U.S. companies, employing around 140,000 people.

Marcel Claes said that finally having a federal government in Belgium will be important to the country’s image abroad.

Luc De Bruyckere of Ter Beke agrees, but warned that the real crisis is the bigger economic crisis in Europe.

“There is only one way to get out of the crisis, and that is working together. That means having more Europe, not only a monetary area, but also a budget area that is more integrated, and more unified.”

De Bruckyere said he’ll be watching next week’s European summit in Brussels very closely. His company has no plan B should the Euro fall apart. He said losing the Euro would be “unbearable, a disaster.”

It’s a sentiment that companies in both Flanders and Wallonia can agree on.

They have been a staple of Indian newspapers since before independence in 1947, and over the years, most cartoonists there have been left alone, and allowed to satirize or lampoon Indian politicians as they see fit.

But in recent weeks, two Indian political cartoonists have experienced pressure to censor their own work.

One of them is Satish Acharya whose cartoon depicting Indian politician Sharad Pawar pole dancing appeared in the Indian newspaper Mid day in early September.

A cartoon lampooning Indian politician Narendra Modi by Mussveer, the cartoonist for the Indian newspaper Prabhat Kiran, published on September 20, 2011.

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Marco Werman: Raji Sourani is director for the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. He lives in Gaza. Sourani says the Palestinian bid for UN membership has brought together the divided Palestinian factions of Hamas and Fatah.

Raji Sourani: I think the Israeli government, especially Netanyahu(sp?) government leaves no room for anybody not to be united. I think, you know, all our difference has been ruled and the possibly of reconciliation exists right now better than any time before and Palestinians, I think, right now have no difference in the the political level whatsoever between Hamas and Fatah. Both should be united and there is no reason or excuse to keep this split and the institutionalized weakness for the Palestinians.

Werman: So Mr Sourani, you’re saying you would like to see the split change for these two parties to be united…?

Sourani: I’m very optimistic for the foreseeable future.

Werman: You’re optimistic?

Sourani: Yep. Basically right now, Palestinian people, after sixty three years of the Nakba they’re talking about very basic, fundamental primitive human rights: right of life, right of movement, right of medical care, right of education and we are extremely far of achieving our right of self determination and independence.

Werman: And yet, Mr Sourani, in the past week Hamas has reiterated it’s resistance and Abbas has reiterated peaceful negotiations. It feels like a standoff, yet you’re saying it’s not a standoff.

Sourani: No, I think Palestinian people do have the right to resist, abide by international law and that’s not a shame, that’s not something we are, you know, ignoring. It’s our full right and I’m saying that, you know, as a Human Rights Activist.

Werman: Mr Sourani, you’ve said that you feel deceived by President Obama’s overtures of the Arab world and the Palestinians. Now there’s news from Congress that two hundred million dollars in development aid has been suspended for the Palestinians. Do you think the US is still a credible mediator for Middle East peace?

Sourani: Absolutely not. What we want from United States, don’t put Israel as holy body. Don’t provide legal political protection, to apply the rule of law in equal footsteps. We are entitled to freedom. We are entitled to self determination. We are entitled to state and we want to see United States supporting in one way ticket, that.

Werman: Mr Sourani, I’d like to ask you a personal question. You’ve been denied entrance to the United States for the past eleven years and you’re now here on a three month visa thanks on part to an intervention by former US President Jimmy Carter, among others. Why do you think the US has kept you out for so long and what do you think has changed?

Sourani: I think that’s the shame. For me, lawyer, director of Palestinian Center for Human Rights and I’m a recipient of the Kennedy Award. If all that, and I’m considered a suspected terrorist, who’s that?

Werman: Raji Sourani is a 1991 recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. He lives in the Gaza Strip. Mr. Sourani, thanks very much for coming in. Nice to meet you.

Sourani: It’s quite an honor and a pleasure. Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Like its politics, the country’s music scene is also split. Take a recent announcement by the Brussels Metro system. Officials announced that the piped-in playlist would no longer include French language music, because they had received complaints from Dutch-speaking riders, who complained that there were too many songs in French, and too few in Dutch.

That means huge, nationwide hits like “Alors on danse,” by Brussels-based hip-hop artist Stromae (an anagram for “maestro”). In fact, you cannot go many places in Belgium, or Europe for that matter, where that track does not get extensive airplay.

Instead, the Brussels Metro decided that from now on, only hit songs in Spanish, Italian and English will be played.
“Lady Gaga is all over the Metro, and that is suddenly not a problem,” joked Brussels author and blogger Marcel Sel. “To me, that’s the big problem. I mean, I don’t even like Lady Gaga.”

Sel noted that now, neither of Belgium’s two main musical languages will be celebrated in the capital’s Metro system. But he said, it is also more than just language that divides.

“Old fashioned pop that is produced in Flanders doesn’t really match the French taste, which is more or less la chanson francaise,” Sel said.

Jacques Brel, for one, did manage to be a musical hero for both Dutch and French speakers. And more recently, Sel said, a band called Clouseau has been popular nationwide.

Despite the name, Clouseau sings in Dutch, with a bit of French thrown in now and then. One popular track is called “Leve België,” or Long Live Belgium.

Bob Driege, who runs the Vynilla record shop in Dutch-speaking Ghent, said bands that sing in Dutch, like Clouseau, generally do not do so well in French-speaking Wallonia.

“It’s strange; it’s like another country. It’s language, and it’s historical, I think. It’s also the bookers, the people who book the bands into clubs. The Flemish bookers work in Flanders and the Wallonian bookers work in their territory.”

Driege said he has tried to sell French-language bands in his shop over the years, with only limited success.

Etienne Bours, who is based just outside of French-speaking Liege, has tried to feature Flemish artists on his radio music program.

“There’s a very good young singer called Milow that I played on my show recently,” Bours said. “He’s important right now in Belgium because he sings what many people don’t even dare to say.”

In one of Milow’s tracks, called “The Kingdom,” he sings: “Where I’m from we are divided between the north and the south.” In another part of the song, Milow says: “Where I’m from there’s a lack of heroes, both in politics and in song.”

Not surprisingly, he has taken some heat from some of his more separatist Flemish fans for tracks like “The Kingdom.”

Ironically, said author Marcel Sel, Milow’s song at least has a shot at getting played on the Metro in Brussels, because it’s in English.

“The politicians are quarreling about myths and symbols,” he said.

“If instead they were promoting both languages in the Metro, and saying, ‘This week will be promoting this Dutch song, or this French song,’ then I think that would be interesting. That’s the kind of investment we should do, especially in Brussels.”

Sel said he suggests starting such a project with Arno, who is known as the Belgian Tom Waits.

After all, Arno is from Flanders, sings songs in French, and lives in Brussels, which makes him, well, really Belgian.

A street in Kathmandu, Nepal (Photo: Mary Kay Magistad)

The process of writing a new constitution started in 2008, with the election of a Constituent Assembly – the latest step in a peace process that ended the Maoist insurgency’s decade-long civil war that killed more than 16,000 people.

Since then, the Maoists have come in from the jungle, participated in and won the most votes in elections, served for nine months as the leading party in the government and argued amongst themselves about the best way forward.

Nepal’s Maoists have now tried both – and they are internally conflicted about what they like better.

“Some of the traditional thinkers in our movement think this peace process is not benefitting to the people. It is not benefitting to the Party,” said Khim Lal Devkota, a smartly dressed lawyer on the Maoist Politburo. “So they say we have to retreat back to a People’s War and people’s revolt. But my personal opinion is peace and constitution is the mandate of the people. This is the realistic line of our party within this time, I hope.”

Such internal divisions within the Maoists are holding up progress. One faction, led by former Maoist forestry minister Matrika Prasad Yadav, has even broken away and formed its own party. And Prachanda, the former Maoist guerilla leader, who briefly served as prime minister in 2008-09, is said to sway between the hard-line faction that wants to go back to fighting, and the pragmatists, who want to work within the system.

Maoist Politburo member Khim Lal Devkota (Photo: Mary Kay Magistad)

As the countdown to the deadline for a new constitution has progressed, Nepalis have taken to the streets, urging their politicians to think beyond their own interests and get beyond their deadlock. The government, a coalition of the Union of Marxist-Leninists and the Maoists, is seeking another year’s extension, on top of the one-year extension when the deadline wasn’t met last year. Some fed-up Nepalis are asking why their tax dollars should keep paying for 600 people on the Constiuent Assembly to sit around and not write a constitution.

“All these politics people are bad people,” said a young taxi driver named Ram, as we idled on a crowded, dusty street in his beaten-up hatchback. “They all say when they’re running for office that they’re going to do good things. But once they’re elected, they do nothing. Even the Maoists. They’re only thinking of themselves, and not helping the people.”

Ram said he was thinking about how he is going to get enough gasoline each day to drive his taxi, and earn enough money to take care of his wife and four-year-old daughter. Gas has been in short supply, thanks to the Nepal Oil Corporation not paying its bills, so most drivers have had to wait hours at the pumps, and even then, can only get a couple of gallons of gas at a time. Ram seethes as he describes how the rich and politically connected can cut to the front of the line, and take as much gas as they like. Nepal’s politicians ignore such frustrations at their peril.

Most Nepalese live beneath the poverty line (Photo: Mary Kay Magistad)

“The spark can catch fire and become a forest fire, because everything is so tinder dry, in terms of joblessness, economic frustration, inflation – all the gamut of reasons which is why North Africa is flaring up. The same reasons exist here, as well,” said Kunda Dixit, publisher of the Nepali Times newspaper. “Unless you give jobs to people, unless there is hope for the future, demagogues can use those objective conditions to foment violence in the future.”

Most Nepalese are illiterate, and live beneath the poverty line. Millions work overseas, because there are no jobs at home. As many as one-third of Nepal’s 47 million people are dependent on the remittances those workers send home – remittances that account for 23 percent of Nepal’s total GDP.

War and instability haven’t helped. They put on hold earlier plans to harness some of Nepal’s 43,000 megawatts of potential hydropower – creating electricity that could end the brownouts, draw in new foreign investment and businesses, and still have plenty left over to sell for profit to energy-hungry India and China.

“Because of that instability and the power struggle at the top, development is paralyzed, economic activity is not taking place,” Dixit said. “It is encouraging lawlessness and impunity, which means investors are not investing. That means jobs aren’t being created. And that then becomes a whole vicious cycle.”

Dixit said some former Maoists themselves, those in the faction that wants to go back to fighting, are running road blocks, doing banditry and engaging in black market activities. Most of the 19,000 Maoist soldiers are in the barracks, being paid a small salary to sit idle. The Maoist party takes a generous cut of that salary.

That may be one reason why the Maoists have been slow to move toward letting their army be disbanded – or, as they prefer to say, integrated and rehabilitated. But even here, there are disputes among parties.

“They want to integrate (with Nepal’s national army) on their own terms,” said Ram Sharan Mahat, leader of the Congress Party. “They want to keep their units together, so they can maintain control over them.” He said they also want their cadre to go in at the same rank they held as guerillas, whether they meet the Nepali army’s standards for that rank or not.

Durbar Square in Kathmandu,Nepal (Photo: Mary Kay Magistad)

However the Maoist army integrates, Mahat said it has to happen soon, or there’ll be no new constitution. He hints that the Congress Party wouldn’t consider that the end of the world – after all, the idea of pushing for a new constitution, one that enshrined more autonomy for ethnic groups and more rights for the poor – was part of the Maoist platform, not the Congress Party’s. He said even when a new constitution is written, his party won’t help ratify it, until the Maoists stop hanging on to their separate army.

“The problem is, the Maoists haven’t given up their goal of People’s Republic.” Mahat said. “As a long-term goal, that’s fine. If you go to people and get a popular mandate, that’s one thing. But you must give up violence. You must give up arms. And you cannot capture power with the help of force.”

Maoist Politburo member Devkota said his party will give up its separate army in good time, but not before a constitution is written that the Maoists feel was worth their struggle.

“If anyone is trying to conspire against peace and constitution, we have to launch some other kind of protest movement,” he said. But it will be helpful to peace and constitution.”

It is hard to argue that one party in a negotiation maintaining a separate army just in case, is a constructive strategy toward peace. Political analyst Prashant Jha, also of the Nepali Times, said the real problem is that the Maoists feel on the defense. He said once the Maoists lost their coalition majority in 2009, despite having won the most votes in the election, most of the other parties worked to shut them out of government.

“There was an effort to isolate and pressure them to give up their army. But I think that boomeranged,” Jha said. “You can’t push someone to the wall and then say, ‘ok, give me your source of strength.’ I think the way to do it is to keep engaging them in the process, keep giving them a share of the power structure, and then forcing them to and extracting concessions from them.”

Jha said the Maoists’ own record in power was disappointing to many people who voted for them – they expected faster progress. But some voted for the Maoists, not because they believe in socialism, but because they wanted to get the Maoists out of the jungle and into the system. They are now, and Jha believes that is where they’ll now stay.

“I do not see the possibility of the Maoists coming and capturing the state and imposing their own style of totalitarian Marxist system,” he said. “I think the Maoists realize they have to coexist with other forces. This will be a democracy of some sort. A flawed democracy, a dysfunctional political system, perhaps, a noisy and messy one, but the Maoists will have to live within that system.”

Some Maoists even talk about European-style social democratic aspirations.

“A capitalistic kind of revolution is the aspiration of my party, too,” said Maoist Politburo member Devkota. “Without a capitalistic revolution, we cannot jump into socialism. Germany, after unification, introduced a social market economy. That could also be one of the models for the Nepalese context.”

The Maoists’ detractors are skeptical, and with the clock ticking down on coming up with a constitution, each side accuses the other of operating in bad faith.

Rikshaw driver Dumar Rana with other locals (Photo: Mary Kay Magistad)

But others see the Maoists as the closest thing they have to a champion in a system stacked against them. At dusk in Kathmandu’s Square, with rose light playing on exquisite former royal dwellings, rickshaw driver Dumar Rana said the Maoists still have his support.

“They did an excellent job when they ran the government,” he said. “They had a program of helping rickshaw drivers get loans to buy their rickshaws. They really wanted to work hard for laborers. Some political parties didn’t really want to develop the nation, but the Maoists did.”

What’s more, he said, the Maoists have given people like him their dignity.

“I’m speaking here because of the Maoist party,” he said. “Under the monarchy, we laborers didn’t have the right to speak. It’s the Maoists who gave us the chance to speak and get involved in politics.”

What Dumar Rana would like politicians, including the Maoists, to hear now, is to get on with it, get a constitution written, and start helping the people they were elected to help.

Some foreign media organizations have made the comparisons (for example, here and here). Also implicitly making the connection was Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who has called the quake and its aftermath Japan’s worst crisis since World War Two. A further sign of the historical significance of the moment, and of the country’s plight: Japanese Emperor Akihito made the first television address of his reign.

That said, there are significant differences between the 1945 bombings and the earthquake. The most obvious is that the 1945 events were military attacks (though the vast majority of victims were civilians). The destruction of two cities and the radiation released was fully intended by Japan’s wartime enemy, the United States. Also, radiation levels today are nowhere near as high as in the aftermath of the bombings. Nor, so far, is the loss of life, as shockingly high as it is.

In the podcast I put together for the 65th anniversary of the dropping of the Atomic bombs, there are two takes on self-censorship. A child survivor of Hiroshima explains why she kept quiet about her experiences for so long, through the pain and guilt of survival. She was seven when the the bomb fell, killing her parents and siblings but inexplicably sparing her. Late in life, Sueko Hada tells her story, in the presence of her daughter and granddaughters. They’ve heard some of it before, but she includes many new details this time. I snapped the picture above of the family on the day I interviewed Mrs Hada in 2005. My report originally aired on The World as part of a series on the mental health of A-bomb survivors, known in Japan as hibakusha.

Before I met Mrs Hada, I don’t think I fully understood why people with painful pasts remain silent, essentially censoring their own histories. But if you grew up in post-war Japan, surrounded by people who believed that radiation sickness was contagious and hereditary, you too might keep quiet about your past.

The legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is hard to gauge. Japanese children still visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum (left). But these days, Tokyo Disneyland is a far more popular destination for school groups.

For many Americans, the use of the bomb remains a hugely sensitive issue. Views both pro and con seem entrenched, dialogue virtually impossible. The debate — such as it is — hasn’t progressed much since the 1995 controversy over The Smithsonian’s Enola Gay exhibition. But there has been new research about some of the earliest news reporting of the bombs. That began in 2005, when several dispatches written by Chicago Daily News reporter George Weller were published first time by the Tokyo newspaper Mainichi Shimbun. That was followed by publication in English of those and other reports in First into Nagasaki, a book put together by Weller’s son, Anthony.

Weller blamed U.S. military censorship for the previous non-publication of his reports. But Japanese freelance reporter Atsuko Shigesawa disputes that in a new book. (Japanese links here and here.) At the Library of Congress, she came across a statement from Gilbert Harrison, who was a sergeant in the US Army Air Forces and went to Nagasaki with Weller. Harrison went on to become editor of the New Republic. In his statement, he describes how he delivered Weller’s reports to a Chicago Daily News employee in Tokyo. As far as he knows, he says, the reports were filed there and then and were not subject to military vetting. He says he “doesn’t know why” the New York Times and the Arizona Republic reported in 2005 that “our reports were censored and not printed for 60 years.”

Atsuko Shigesawa believes that the true acts of censorship in reporting on the A-bombs were self-imposed, sometimes by reporters, sometimes by their editors. In Weller’s case, she believes his editors at the Chicago Daily News killed many of his stories. And when it came to other reporters filing stories from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Shigesawa found that newspapers routinely cut the segments dealing with radiation sickness and other after-effects of the bombs on the human body. (The photo to the right was taken at a hospital in Tokyo. The original caption reads: “The patient’s skin is burned in a pattern corresponding to the dark portions of a kimono worn at the time of the explosion.”) In addition to these editorial cuts, at least one correspondent chose not to report on his hospital visits, believing that they were part of a plot to hoodwink him. William Lawrence of the New York Times wrote that American reporters were being subjected to “a Japanese propaganda campaign calculated to shame Americans for using such a devastating weapon of war”. He continued: “I am convinced that, horrible as the bomb undoubtedly is, the Japanese are exaggerating its effects in an effort to win sympathy for themselves in an attempt to make the American people forget the long record of cold-blooded Japanese bestiality.” For those reasons, Lawrence did not write about his hospital visits and the cases of radiation sickness he witnessed until 1972, in his memoir.

We don’t — and probably never will — have the full story of what influenced those initial reports of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But there’s enough to suggest that self-censorship played a prominent role.

For another take on the meaning of Hiroshima and memory, check out Rahna Reiko Rizzuto’s memoir Hiroshima in the Morning. It is a 2010 finalist in the autobiography category of the National Book Critics’ Circle Award.

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The father of political Islam in Turkey has died. Former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan was 84. During his career, Erbakan fought to bring Islamic political parties to power in Turkey. The leaders of Turkey’s current Islamic governing party all learned politics at his knee.

Necmettin Erbakan was a mechanical engineer by training. But as a political figure, he challenged Turkey’s secular state for more than 40 years. Judging by the size of the crowds at his funeral in Istanbul on Tuesday, he made a deep impression.

Ali Erdem, a civil servant who came out for the funeral, said that Erbakan was really a man of the people.

“He did great things for Turkey’s Muslims. He has also helped Muslims all over the world who are oppressed and tired of being pushed around. He gave them a voice,” Erdem said.

Part of what Erbakan did was combine Turkish nationalism, anti-western sentiments and Islam. And he kept to that message, said Dr. Sakir Guce, who was also at the funeral.

“What made him different was that he said the same thing three days before he died, that he did when he started 40 years ago. He always stayed true to himself,” Guce said.

When Mustafa Kemal “Ataturk” abolished the Ottoman sultanate in 1923 and created a modern republic, Islamic groups languished in the margins. Erbakan was the first to win power for an Islamic party — through the ballot box.

Sebnem Gumuscu Orhan, a political scientist at Sabanci University, said that Turkey’s governing AK party wouldn’t be in power today had it not been for Erbakan.

“I wouldn’t say the political agenda is inspired by him but they learned a lot about politics from him,” Orhan said.

In 1996, Erbakan became the first devout Muslim to serve as prime minister in modern turkey. The following year, Turkey’s secular military forced him from power, and his Islamic party was subsequently banned.

But Turkey is a very different place today. While the governing Islamist party is led by former Erbakan disciples, their politics are very different. They are pro-European Union and pro-US and they’re enthusiastic about free markets.

And now Turkey is being talked about as a democratic model for political Islam in other countries in the Middle East.

There is a comfort to thinking of the year of your country as the father or mother of the nation. And it’s not just countries with dictators that name their leaders in this way. Britain’s Margaret Thatcher was the Iron Lady (soon to be a biopic of the same name starring Meryl Streep). Finland’s President Tarja Halonen is often referred to as Moominmamma– partly ironically, but also out of pride. (The Moomins are a cartoon strip and set of children’s fantasy stories that are as big as Disney in Finland).

In Mubarak’s case, the pharaoh moniker is an insult. It’s shorthand for absolutism, state violence and destruction.

“If we go back four thousand years pharaohs were kings that ruled for life and built grand monuments to themselves,” says Joshua Stacher of Kent State University. “It’s not a good term.”

It wasn’t always that way. A few decades ago, the pharaohs were remembered proudly as demi-gods who “ensured the provision of water to the Egyptian peasants in the Nile Delta and upper Egypt,” says Tarek Osman, author of Egypt on the Brink. That is “an extremely positive role in the deep Egyptian psyche.” Maybe that sense of the pharaohs will return, now that Mubarak is gone.

Check out this post on Language Log for Chinese signs held by protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Were these people protesting Mubarak, or sending a message to China’s Communist rulers?

Also in the podcast, fears for the future of Cantonese, once the lingua franca of many Chinatowns around the world.

Beijing is stepping up its efforts to establish Mandarin as the official tongue of China. As a result, Cantonese is spoken by fewer people — and in fewer situations outside the home — even in Cantonese-speaking parts of China. There have been protests in the cities of Guangzhou and Hong Kong about proposals to expand the use of Mandarin on TV and in other public settings.

In the rest of the world, students of the Chinese language and their teachers see the writing on the wall: they are choosing to learn Mandarin rather than Cantonese.

These days in New York’s Chinatown, a mix of dialects is spoken. That means people often fall back on the common dialect Mandarin. But not Kim Mui. She teaches a Cantonese class. It’s going to take many people like her to ensure that Cantonese survives in the long term.

Finally, British cultural revolutionaries Gang of Four talk about their name, which derives from a group of notorious Chinese cultural revolutionaries. The bandmembers also talk about their new CD, and about phrases that include the word farm.

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More than 30,000 Belgians took to the streets of the capital on Sunday to send a simple message to politicians: form a government.

By Clark Boyd

225 days.

That’s how long Belgium has now gone without a national government. For months, political parties from the Dutch-speaking north and French-speaking south have been trying to form some kind of coalition.

But no luck, so far — and it seems some Belgians have had enough.

This weekend, more than 30,000 Belgians marched through Brussels with a simple message for politicians — “Shame: No government, Great country.”

Julie Marlier and her boyfriend, Philippe Mathot, said they are tired of paying taxes to politicians who aren’t working.

“That’s our money that they’re spending every day,” Marlier said, “and without any results. That’s not normal.”

Mathot added, “They’re like children playing in a playground.”

The Shame rally started online as a Facebook page. In fact, the web has become the platform for Belgians to voice their political displeasure. Dutch-speaking radio journalist Kris Janssens recently posted a video to YouTube.

In it, he joked, “I don’t usually say much about Belgian politics, because I know it’s a sure way to kill the mood at any family gathering. But I just don’t get it anymore,” he continued. “Do these politicians have no shame?”

The video has garnered tens of thousands of views and comments.

Belgian actor Benoit Poelvoorde also got a lot of attention for a plea he recently made on television. “Don’t be surprised by this weird thing on my face,” he said, caressing his stubble. “A Hairy Belgium! Let’s keep our beards until Belgium gets back on its feet!”

A “Hairy Belgium” website quickly went up. More than 650 people have signed on to grow their beards until Belgium forms a government.

There is now a second beard-related website, called “A Beard for Belgium.”

Another site, called “Camping 16,” allows you to pitch a virtual tent in protest outside of the Prime Minister’s office in Brussels — located at “16″ Rue de la Loi.

Dorian van Bever, one of more than a dozen Belgians who worked on the Camping 16 website, said these websites crystallize feelings in real life, and permit people to say they’ve had enough.

“What do you do if you’ve paid for something that doesn’t work?” the site asks. “You get your money back,” it reads.

The intent is humorous, said van Bever, because humor cuts across the linguistic and cultural divides in Belgium. “We choose humor because we don’t want the streets to be on fire.”

Perhaps the funniest online effort, though, is a site called “le record du monde,” or the world record. On the site, you can watch the seconds tick down until Belgium surpasses Iraq’s record of 289 days without a government.

Graphic designer Sven Grothe, who helped put the site together, said he’s not making a political statement. “It’s more of joke,” he said. “It draws attention to the ridiculousness of the situation.”

If it all sounds surreal, well, that’s because it kind of is surreal.

Belgium’s strong local governments ensure that trash still gets picked up, police are still on the streets, and pensions are still paid. But the dysfunction at the national level has led some commentators to consider if Belgium might be “The World’s Most Successful Failed State.”

Marcel Sel, an author and columnist, pointed out that when you say “failed state” and then add “successful,” it’s a nice portrait of Belgium.

“It sounds surrealistic, but we Belgians like to think of ourselves as being surrealistic people.” He said it’s a clever way to put things, though he added that Belgium is not a failed country — “not yet,” he laughed.

Websites and real world rallies aside, no one expects an end to the political stalemate anytime soon. Sel said he would not be surprised if Belgium beats Iraq’s world record by a wide margin, and, he jokes that if the “grow a beard for Belgium” campaign catches on, Brussels may soon more like Kandahar.

Read More
• Belgians Press Politicians to Form Government
• Watch Belgium beat Iraq for the world record of days without a government
• Pitch a virtual tent outside the Belgian Prime Minister’s office
• Video: Kris Janssens
• A Hairy Belgian

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David Horowitz: The way this material is being presented is kind of an upside down context.  It’s being presented as though the Palestinians have agreed to extraordinary concessions and the Israelis government have missed opportunities.

Marco Werman: That’s David Horowitz, editor of the Jerusalem Post.

Horowitz: These are not Wikileaks American diplomatic cable; these are materials that have come out from the Palestinian side.  There is some suggestion that they may not be entirely accurate.  They’re certainly not the sort of neutral mediators’ take on any of these discussions.

Werman: But it is kind of Israel’s mideast own little micro Wikileaks.

Horowitz: Oh, absolutely.  The only point that I’m trying to make here is unlike the Wikileaks, which are official State Department cables, you know, it’s not entirely clear how accurate these documents are or maybe some are more accurate than others.  I would just be a little bit cautious on that. But that’s not the main point that I’m trying to make here.  I would imagine that for all sides if you’re conducting very, very sensitive negotiations, it is problematic if your discussions become public before they’ve reached a conclusion.  I think from what I’ve seen from the Israeli point of view, that’s very literal in these documents, that’s being said privately that wasn’t made clearly publicly. In other words, the conversations that are Tzipi Livni had with Abu Ala, what she said publicly since reflected the position that she took in those discussions.  It seems to be that there is more daylight between what the Palestinians were saying in the negotiating sessions than what they said publicly. And that’s incredibly unfortunate because that goes against the Israeli concern about the Palestinians, that the leadership has not prepared the public for compromise, that the leadership on the Palestinian side has not impressed upon the Palestinian public that the Jews have historic sovereign rights in this part of the world as well. And I think that disconnect is becoming manifest in the response to the leaks; that the Palestinian negotiators are having to say what is not exactly true or they’re being criticized for going further in private.  And the indicated a resonance to go in public.  And that’s because of the, if you like, groundwork that’s been done by the Palestinian leadership in preparing the Palestinians for the need to compromise. Unfortunately, the Jews and the Palestinians, the Arabs and the Jews in this part of the world, there was meant to be a two state solution from the start in 1948.  The Jewish leadership accepted it.  Those who spoke for the Arab residents did not.  And the concern in Israel is that the Arab leadership, the Palestinian leadership, has yet publicly to prepare the Palestinian citizens, the Palestinian public for the necessary compromises.

Werman: Who do you think would’ve leaked these documents?

Horowitz: Well, first of all, obviously, I don’t know.  It is being speculated that people who believe that Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority President, has been too flexible and too ready for compromise with Israel, and may have an interest; that could be people from Hamas, that could be people from within Fatah, his own Fatah party.  But it may well be that we find out the sort of leak eventually, but we don’t know at the moment.

Werman: You know, people have been writing the obituary for the peace process for years, but the revelations in these documents and the gulf that is characterized in them really feels like the end.  Does it to you?

Horowitz: Look, it’s been very, very depressing watching negotiations unfold in recent years, and seeing overtures — and again, I speak to you as an Israeli newspaper editor, so from an Israeli point of view — seeing Ehud Barak going to Camp David in 2000, seeing Ehud Olmert in the offer that’s an account of which has already appeared in newspapers.  Again, Israel has gone from Gaza.  It was offering to relinquish almost all the West Bank.  Olmert was ready to divide Jerusalem.  There’s been talk that Olmert was almost prepared to put the old city, the western wall, the Temple Mount, the holiest place in Judaism, in the hands of a non-sovereign international authority of some kind. These were positions that from again, a Israeli consensual point of view, if the Palestinians wanted viable terms, should have wanted a leak on those kinds of offers.  And that didn’t happen. It reflects a sense on the Israeli side that the Palestinians have not been ready to compromise.  And the fact that it’s been greeted on the Palestinian side as proof that their leadership was too moderate would seem to undermine how wide the gaps really are. These are conversations when you read these papers that are being carried out in a good atmosphere between people who have evidently tried to move toward some kind of common ground.  And reading them, you know, in the context of everything that has unfolded here, certainly does not create a sense of optimism that the two sides are within bridging distance of what each sees as its essential needs.

Werman: David Horowitz, editor of the Jerusalem Post.  Thanks so much for your time.

Horowitz: Thank you.

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That’s followed by a conversation about the merits of the King James Bible, which turns 400 in 2011. In secular Britain, those merits aren’t strictly religious. In fact, people like former UK poet laureate Andrew Motion view the King James Bible as a literary giant, second only perhaps to Shakespeare. He argues that we are fast forgetting how it has shaped English-language poetry, fiction and rhetoric.

Then, the main event: the R word. Or perhaps the R-rated word: rationing. For manyAmericans, the idea of rationing is, well, unAmerican. In Britain though, rationing is part of the national psyche: it got the country through two world wars, and its collectivist values are at the core of Britain’s government-run health service. Now though, the emergence of expensive, new end-of-life drugs are challenging Brits’ belief in rationing.

During World War II and for nine years after, the British government rationed most food items: meat, flour, eggs, sugar. The government also strictly controlled the supply of gasoline, soap, stockings—even the number of buttons on jackets.

Although there was wartime rationing elsewhere, including in the United States, it generally applied to fewer items over fewer years and was quickly forgotten. In Britain, however, rationing became a part of the national identity.

Many older Britons speak of rationing as a great legacy of those wartime and post-war years, when people sacrificed their own interests for the greater good.

After World War II, the British government extended this societal approach to health care. It created the National Health Service, the NHS.

Today, 95 percent of Britons get their care through the government-run program. In order to provide care to everyone, the government says it must place limits on the care it provides. It must ration.

Limits to Care

“We have a limited budget for health care, voted by Parliament every year, and we have to live within our means,” said Michael Rawlins, chairman of a government agency called the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).

NICE decides which drugs and other treatments can be prescribed by NHS doctors.

NICE was created in 1999 to clarify the reasons why certain drugs are approved and others are rejected. “In the old days it used to be done in secret, behind closed doors, in smoke-filled rooms,” Rawlins said. “Now it’s explicit. Everybody knows what the rules are.”

NICE’s rationing decisions start with a basic premise: The government should spend its limited resources on treatments that do the most good for the money. NICE calculates cost-effectiveness with a widely used measure called a quality-adjusted life year (QALY).

In essence, NICE asks these questions: How much does a drug or procedure cost? How much does the treatment extend the average patient’s life? And what is the quality of that life gained?

The calculations are complicated, but imagine that a cancer treatment costs $100,000 and that it extends the life of the average patient by four years. That means the cost of the treatment per year gained is $25,000.

Now imagine that for part of those four years the patient will be in pain and bedridden. NICE might figure the quality of that life at 50 percent of perfect health. Under NICE’s formula, that would make the drug half as cost-effective. In other words, the result would be $50,000 per quality-adjusted year gained.

NICE has set a maximum that it will spend on a treatment: about $47,000 per quality-adjusted year gained.

NICE tends to assume, without always performing calculations, that most common treatments are cost effective—including insulin for diabetes, cholesterol-lowering drugs for heart disease, and kidney transplants.

Instead, NICE analyzes only selected therapies, such as expensive new drugs that may extend life at the end of life. It has calculated that some of the more expensive drugs meant to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s Disease and some cancers fall below the cost-effectiveness threshold. In such cases, NICE says, the NHS shouldn’t pay for the drugs.

NICE chairman Michael Rawlins acknowledged that his agency’s decisions deprive some patients of drugs that may extend their lives by several months or more.

“We do recognize that the end of life is a very special time,” Rawlins said. “[It] allows people to attend weddings, see a grandchild born, seek forgivenesses.”

But he argued that if Britain spends a lot of money at the end of life, “we’re going to have to deprive other people of cost-effective care.” Rawlins said that might mean spending less money at the beginning of life—and might result in a higher infant mortality rate.

A Cancer Patient Fights Back

“Imagine how I feel when I hear people saying that if they give me the drugs I need to stay alive, babies are dying,” said David Cook, one of a growing number of British cancer patients speaking out against NICE and its rationing formula.

While sipping strong English tea in his village farmhouse kitchen, Cook argued that NICE’s logic breaks down when you go from the abstract formula to specific patients—like him.

A senior government manager in his fifties, Cook was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2004. Two years later his prognosis was bad.

Cook’s doctor said he would die within months unless he got a drug to slow the growth of his tumors. But the cost of the drug was high—too high for NICE in light of the advanced stage of Cook’s cancer—and the NHS refused to pay for it.

Cook fought back. He contended that NICE’s rationing formula calculates cost-effectiveness based on the average patient, but individual patients might do better on a given treatment, which would make the drug more cost effective than NICE suggests. Cook’s doctor believed that was true for him, so Cook pleaded his case before a panel of experts.

“I had to persuade a total of six people that were in the room” he said. “I had to talk for my life.” Cook won his appeal—he got the drug—but he resented that he had to fight for it, that he was treated as an exception.

Cook has other complaints about NICE.

He says the agency treats patients inequitably; it is more likely to reject drugs for rarer cancers like his because the treatments are more expensive than those, say, for breast cancer or lung cancer. “We’re being penalized for having…the ‘wrong’ type of cancer,” he said.

Cook contends that NICE overreaches by measuring the quality of a patient’s life. He said it should not be up to bureaucrats to decide that the life of a bedridden patient, for instance, is worth a quarter or a half that of someone in perfect health.

Cook further argues that NICE neglects an important fact—that by helping a patient live longer, a drug may improve not only that patient’s life but also the lives of loved ones. For his part, Cook remains active and working and has helped care for his wife, who has been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Public Backlash

Stories like David Cook’s—about the government restricting access to life-saving drugs—have become common in the British media.

Part of the reason is that many new cancer drugs have become available in the last few years, and some of these drugs are extremely expensive.

NICE’s rejection of such drugs has fueled a growing backlash against the agency. Patient groups and drug companies have called it heartless and indiscriminate.

NICE’s future now hangs in the balance.

In May 2010, Britain’s ruling Labour Party, which founded the agency, lost a general election. The new Conservative-led government has said it will establish a cancer fund, totaling more than $300 million a year, to pay for some cancer drugs turned down by NICE.

This comes at a time of economic crisis in Britain. The government is making large cuts in just about every other public service.

Health economist Alan Maynard of the University of York said it may seem compassionate to set up a cancer fund, but it undermines NICE at a time when the country needs to be reminded of the value of rationing.

These days in Britain, few speak favorably about an agency that was set up to ensure that the government could provide the best care to the most people.

“NICE is not very popular,” said writer Lionel Shriver. “I may be the only fan of NICE in the country. After all, it’s the organization that says ‘no.’”

Shriver is an American who lives in London. Her latest novel, So Much for That, is about the U.S. health care system and how, in her view, it failed a woman who was dying of cancer. Shriver said her novel would have turned out “drastically differently” if she’d been writing about the British health care system.

The novel follows a character who has mesothelioma, a rare but deadly disease that is usually caused by exposure to asbestos. The character is partially based on a close friend of Shriver’s who lived 15 months after being diagnosed with mesothelioma. Shriver says her friend’s treatment cost $2 million.

“If she had been in the UK, that character would have been given palliative care alone,” said Shriver. “They would have tried to keep her comfortable and out of pain, but they would have skipped the major surgery. They would have skipped all that excruciating chemotherapy.”

“I think that my character and indeed my friend would have been better off in the United Kingdom,” Shriver said.

A Model for Other Countries?

Britain’s medical rationing has been noticed around the world. A steady stream of health officials from countries like Brazil, China, and Poland have visited NICE to see if setting up a rationing agency along similar lines makes sense for them.

Some American health care experts wanted to establish an agency like NICE as part of reforming the U.S. health care system. But after Sarah Palin cited Britain as the inspiration for what she claimed was an Obama Administration plan for “death panels,” that idea was dropped.

In fact, in this year’s health care reform law, Congress specifically prohibited British-style rationing. Medicare, for example, cannot apply quality-of-life tests in determining the cost-effectiveness of treatments.

Lionel Shiver is not pleased with that outcome. She said Americans still don’t seem ready to focus on some key end-of-life questions. “At least in the UK we’re having the conversation. How much is a life worth? And what kind of quality of life is that?”

But as other countries look to Britain as a model, it’s far from clear that the model itself will survive.

And that begs the question: Can explicit health care rationing work anywhere if it’s in trouble in the very country that may be best equipped to take it on?

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