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Ed Webb

Poland Leads Wave of Communist-Era Reckoning in Europe - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-era-reckoning-in-europe.html

CEE Poland Hungary Romania communism history memory MENA authoritarianism transition

shared by Ed Webb on 22 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • “In order to defend ourselves in the future against other totalitarian regimes, we have to understand how they worked in the past, like a vaccine,” said Lukasz Kaminski, the president of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance.
  • Reconciling with the past is an issue that has hovered over post-Communist Europe for decades. But today that experience has broader global resonance, serving as a point of discussion across the Arab world where popular revolts have cast off long-serving dictators, raising similarly uncomfortable questions about individual complicity in autocratic regimes. Arab nations are forced to grapple with the same issues of guilt and responsibility that Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe are once again beginning to seriously mine. Time makes the past easier to confront, less threatening, but no less urgent to resolve. The experience here, however, suggests that it may be years, decades perhaps, before the Arab world can be expected to look inward.
  • The resurfacing a generation later of these issues is not entirely without controversy, often driven by hard-line governments and prompting accusations of score-settling and political opportunism.
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  • In most cases these revolutions were not complete overthrows, but moderated transitions of power. The Communist authorities stepped aside, but with conditions. In Poland the return of the post-Communists came even more quickly than in Hungary, with the Democratic Left Alliance winning in 1993, reinforcing cleavages in Polish society between those ready to move on and those who could not. “I expected some kind of Nuremberg for Communism,” said Tadeusz Pluzanski, whose father was tortured by the Communist secret police. “There was no revolution,” he said, “just this transformation process.”
  • “With dictatorship comes a dark heritage and after the dictatorship is gone; at first no one wants to deal with it,” said Antoni Dudek, a member of the board at the Institute of National Remembrance in Poland. “Usually it comes with the new generation that is ready to ask inconvenient questions.”
Ed Webb

Strongmen Die, but Authoritarianism Is Forever - Foreign Policy - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...ut-authoritarianism-is-forever

Turkey Poland Hungary authoritarianism institutions AKP Erdogan analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 30 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • Erdogan and his party have irrevocably altered Turkey; there is no going back.
  • Turkey’s political trajectory is an exemplary case of a country permanently rolling back democratizing reforms, but it’s not the only one. Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party in Poland are undermining the rule of law, democratic values, and human rights in the service of what they define as authenticity and security. These are developments that predate the migrant crisis that is buffeting Europe, though the large number of people from Africa and the Middle East seeking refuge in the European Union has made Orban’s and Kaczynski’s message more politically potent, and thus the undoing of democratic institutions and liberal values politically acceptable, for large numbers of Hungarians and Poles.
  • what’s important is how, in response to opposition, leaders in Turkey, Hungary, and Poland have established new institutions, manipulated existing ones, and hollowed out others to confront political challenges or to close off their possibility
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  • One of the best examples of institutional manipulation is the way in which Turkey’s AKP used its majority in the Grand National Assembly to whitewash a 2014 parliamentary investigation into corruption charges against four government ministers that threatened to ensnare Erdogan and his family. The process rendered the idea of parliamentary oversight essentially meaningless and gave the Turkish leader an opportunity to argue — credibly for his constituents — that the original allegations were an attempted coup. Since the corruption allegation, Erdogan has manipulated institutions to reverse the outcome of an election he did not like in 2015, tried his opponents in courts packed with his supporters, and debased Turkey’s electoral laws to ensure the passage of a referendum on constitutional amendments that would grant the presidency extraordinary powers
  • attacks on the press, along with the transformation of the state-owned broadcaster and state-run news service into an arm of the AKP, have crowded out independent newsgathering
  • the state-owned Anadolu Agency called the presidential election for Erdogan well before the Supreme Electoral Council — made up of AKP appointees — could count the vast majority of ballot boxes. This prompted Erdogan to appear on television graciously accepting another presidential term, making it impossible for the election board to contradict Anadolu’s projection and thus rendering the board a mere prop in AKP’s electoral theater
  • institutions tend to be sticky — they remain long after the moment when they are needed, often leveraged by a new cohort of politicians to advance their agendas. This does not imply that institutional change is impossible. It is just that revisions take place in the context of existing institutions and previous innovations
  • authoritarianism tends to build on itself. It may eventually give out, but short of a revolution that undermines a mutually reinforcing political and social order, institutions will have a lasting impact on society
Ed Webb

The Disappeared Children of Israel - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-yemenite-children-affair.html

Israel Jews families culture history sephardim children

shared by Ed Webb on 11 Mar 19 - Cached
  • a community of Israelis of Yemenite descent who for decades have been seeking answers about their lost kin.
  • Known as the “Yemenite Children Affair,” there are over 1,000 official reported cases of missing babies and toddlers, but some estimates from advocates are as high as 4,500. Their families believe the babies were abducted by the Israeli authorities in the 1950s, and were illegally put up for adoption to childless Ashkenazi families, Jews of European descent. The children who disappeared were mostly from the Yemenite and other “Mizrahi” communities, an umbrella term for Jews from North Africa and the Middle East. While the Israeli government is trying to be more transparent about the disappearances, to this day, it denies that there were systematic abductions.
  • Following the nation’s founding in 1948, new immigrants to Israel were placed in transit camps, in harsh conditions, which were tent cities operated by the state because of housing shortages. Hundreds of testimonies from families living in the camps were eerily similar: Women who gave birth in overburdened hospitals or who took their infants to the doctor were told that their children had suddenly died. Some families’ testimonies stated that they were instructed to leave their children at nurseries, and when their parents returned to pick them up, they were told their children had been taken to the hospital, never to be seen again. The families were never shown a body or a grave. Many never received death certificates.
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  • Naama Katiee, 42, remembers hearing about Rabbi Meshulam as a teenager. She asked her Yemenite father about what happened, but he said he didn’t want to discuss it. She met Shlomi Hatuka, 40, on Facebook through Mizrahi activist groups and together they founded AMRAM, a nonprofit organization that has cataloged over 800 testimonies of families on its website.
  • a movement among the younger generation of Israelis of Yemenite descent — and activists from the broader Mizrahi community — who are building public pressure in demanding explanations for the disappearances and acknowledgment of systematic abductions.
  • “They really thought they had to raise a new generation, which was separate from the old ‘primitive’ community,” Ms. Katiee said about the early state of Israel. During the years soon after the country’s founding, Jews in Israel emigrated from over 80 countries and from several ethnic groups, part of a national project focused on forging a common new Israeli identity. Recently arrived Yemenite and other Mizrahi Jews tended to be poor, more religious and less formally educated than the Ashkenazi establishment in Israel, who looked down on them and wanted them to conform to their idea of a modern Israel.
  • For years, families were told they were wrong to accuse the Israeli government of such malice. Mr. Hatuka said that many of the mothers interviewed by AMRAM, including his own grandmother who lost a child, were often conflicted about whom to hold responsible. “They love this country,” he said. “My grandmother knew that something was wrong, but at the same time she couldn’t believe that someone who is Jewish would do this to her.”
  • The issue continues to resurface because of sporadic cases of family members, who were said to have died as infants, being reunited through DNA testing, as well as a number of testimonies from nurses working at the time who corroborated that babies were taken.
  • deep mistrust between the state and the families.
  • In 1949, Mrs. Ronen arrived in Israel from Iran while 8 months pregnant with twin girls. After she gave birth, the hospital released her, advising that she rest in the transit camp for a few days before taking the girls home. When she called the hospital to tell them she was coming for her babies, she recalled that the staff informed her: “One died in the morning and one before noon. There is nothing for you to come for anymore.”
  • Gil Grunbaum, 62, became aware of his adoption at age 38, when a family friend told his wife, Ilana, that he was adopted. Mr. Grunbaum tracked down his biological mother, an immigrant from Tunisia, who was told her son died during her sedated birth in 1956. Mr. Grunbaum’s adoptive parents were Holocaust survivors from Poland. He didn’t want to add more trauma to their lives, so he kept the discovery to himself.
  • Ms. Aharoni said that she then went to consult her father, a respected rabbi in the community, who dismissed her suspicions. “You are not allowed to think that about Israel; they wouldn’t take a daughter from you,”
  • “Jews doing this to other Jews? I don’t know,”
Ed Webb

Tunisia's Truth-Telling Renews a Revolution's Promise, Painfully - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...lutions-promise-painfully.html

Tunisia authoritarianism torture prison policing police memory history politics transition

shared by Ed Webb on 23 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • In eight hearings over five months, the commission has opened a Pandora’s box of emotions for Tunisians. After long averting their gaze from past horrors, Tunisians are now digging deep into the dirt. Even former President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali has been watching the proceedings from exile in Saudi Arabia, according to his lawyer.
  • The commission’s effort to confront past horrors and bring some perpetrators to justice, even while pushing reconciliation, has been painful in more ways than one. Opponents have been vociferous and have undermined public confidence in the process.Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands remain transfixed by the hearings, and the victims’ humanity is winning through, quelling some of the loudest critics. And there are the first signs that the truth-telling is changing attitudes and opening a path to reconciliation. If nothing else it has opened a national debate.
  • victims have continued to talk long into the night, describing a litany of killings, forced disappearances, torture and oppression from the nearly 60 years of authoritarian rule. Their testimony has shredded long-accepted official narratives and has exposed abuse, a topic that was taboo until the country’s 2010-11 revolution ousted Mr. Ben Ali.
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  • he did not expect the wider ripples, such as when a police official stood up at a conference and apologized to him for the harm done. And the process has healed a decades-long rift in his family, who were driven apart under the strain of the oppression and opposed his testifying in public
  • Mr. Brahim says if they tell the truth he is prepared to forgive them. “I am not denouncing people but the system,” he said. “I want them to unveil the truth and unveil this system of torturers.”
  • the commission can also pass cases for prosecution to special chambers for transitional justice, and may do so for about 100 of the most egregious or symbolic cases of the 65,000 lodged.
  • Drawing on the experiences of transitional justice processes in South Africa, Latin America, Poland and other places, the commission decided against bringing victims face to face with their former torturers, since it can make them relive their trauma.
  • exposing the mechanics of authoritarianism
  • President Béji Caïd Essebsi, who served in prominent positions under both dictatorships, and his government’s officials have declined to attend the hearings.
  • Officials who worked for the previous governments complain that the hearings are one-sided and have given voice only to the victims. “That gives the idea of injustice and lack of transparency,” said Mohamed Ghariani, who was the head of the R.C.D. ruling party under President Ben Ali and who spent 28 months in prison after the revolution.
  • many former officials still feel threatened by the process and continue to intimidate their victims, commissioners say. Victims remain scared to come forward, said Leyla Rabbi, president of the commission’s regional office in the marginalized northwestern town of Kasserine. No perpetrators there had come forward, either.
  • “There is a kind of shivering, an explosion within society.”
  • In March, she was invited to a mainstream television talk show — unheard-of just a few months ago for a veiled Islamist activist — and found a new television audience, mainly young viewers, writing to her.The biggest change was when she went to renew her identity papers at her local police station several weeks ago. The chief recognized her and invited her to his office. She feared a reprimand after her accusations about torture.Instead, he only wanted to assure her of his readiness to assist.“That was a surprise,” Ms. Ajengui said, flashing the smile that has endeared her to many across the country. “I thought he was going to be angry.”
  • Ed Webb on 23 Apr 17
     
    Noteworthy that, as with the constitution-drafting process, Tunisians have carefully studied other countries' experience in deciding how to address this very sensitive part of the transition process.
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