Beacon Broadside

Observation Post by Philip C. Winslow: The Murder of a Peacemaker

Today's post is the latest in a Beacon Broadside series: Observation Post by journalist and foreign correspondent Philip C. Winslow. Over a career that has spanned more than twenty-five years, Winslow has reported on world events for the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, Maclean's magazine, ABC radio news, CTV News, and CBC radio. He also served in two United Nations peacekeeping missions and worked for the UN in the West Bank for nearly three years. He is the author of Victory For Us Is to See You Suffer: In the West Bank with the Palestinians and the Israelis and Sowing the Dragon's Teeth: Land Mines and the Global Legacy of War.

Juliano Mer-Khamis was assassinated in the Jenin refugee camp on April 4, 2011.

The 52-year-old radical filmmaker, actor and director was shot five times by a masked gunman outside The Freedom Theatre, in the West Bank town once better known for its suicide bombers than for theater. In the refugee camp, Mer-Khamis's murder triggered two things: quiet outrage and just plain quiet. His drama productions and classes provide an oxygen-rich outlet for many children in the traumatized camp, but have badly upset conservative elements.

Mer-Khamis, who was half-Arab and half-Jewish by birth, was a provocateur and challenger, and knew the risks. Practically foretelling his own murder he once remarked that after all his work it would be a shame to die from a Palestinian bullet. He told Israel's Army Radio in 2009 that he was "one hundred percent Palestinian and one hundred percent Jewish". The comment reflected the tightrope nature of his bold cross-cultural ventures: To be one-hundred percent anything in Israel or occupied Palestine invites criticism or opprobrium; to boast a two-hundred percent identity is confrontational.

Yet confrontational, in the sense of demanding unfettered thought and expression, is what Mer-Khamis was all about. Plays such as Animal Farm and The Lieutenant of Inishmore may have opened young minds in Jenin but they also brought arson, broken windows, death threats and schedule postponements.

Juliano's mother, Arna Mer, laid the foundations. A Zionist who fought in the Palmach and later married a Palestinian Christian, Arna was as tough and colorful as Jerusalem stone, and devoted her later years to working for the rights of Palestinians under occupation. I wrote about Arna and her original drama group, and reactionary undercurrents in Jenin in April 2009.

The original theater was destroyed by Israeli forces in 2002, perhaps the most violent year of the second intifada. Juliano later made the documentary Arna's Children. You can read more about Arna and her life here.

Was Juliano too provocative? The answer can depend on the audience. Animal Farm, where children play the role of pigs, certainly was too much for some in a long-isolated town where drama and music schools are regarded as suspicious and subversive. Having children wear pig masks, and implying criticism of leaders – men, whose worldview is tightly bound with the concept of honor – is asking for trouble head-on.

What else? Adnan Hindi, the head of the camp's Popular Committee, has taken a hard line in the past about music performances. The Guardian reported Hindi's reaction to the murder and about a leaflet that circulated in the camp justifying it, as intolerant and backward-looking as the language was.

A couple days after the murder, Palestinian Authority (PA) police arrested a suspect. That news immediately degenerated into a Palestinian slanging match over whether the then-suspect was a member of Hamas (the ruling party in Gaza) or had connections to Fatah (the predominant party in the West Bank). The suspect apparently was later released.

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas (of Fatah) then took an unusual step to set things right and paper over the political chasm, by announcing that both Mer-Khamis and Vittorio Arrigoni, the Italian peace activist who was abducted and killed in Gaza by a Salafist group in mid-April, would be awarded the Medal of Jerusalem.

"The assassination of the two activists does not reflect the traditions, habits and morals of the Palestinian people and all humans," Abbas said. I won't quibble with the president over whether assassination is a human tradition: The award was a small step reflecting Abbas's opposition to violence and another attempt to heal the destructive Hamas-Fatah quarrel.

I asked some friends about Mer-Khamis, and about what the theater means for Jenin.

"I know we have some crazy people among us who do not think right," a longtime Palestinian friend in Jenin told me.

"What I am sure of is this [murder] did not happen in our name as Palestinians and did not happen in the name of Islam. What Juliano did for Jenin camp was great, what he did for the children was great, and when he was killed [it] was a sad day for everyone who knew him. . . . Whoever killed Juliano and the Italian should be punished, and anyone behind them should be stopped . . . they are not working to the benefit of Palestine; on the contrary they . . . help the Israeli occupation, to make our picture darker in front of the world."

Juliano's plan to stage a controversial German play about teenage sexuality may have been the last straw in a society where dancing, or even the appearance of girls and boys on the same stage, is likely to be condemned as prurient.

Reconciliation attempts sometimes forge unexpected alliances. Zakaria Zubeidi, a close friend of Mer-Khamis and co-founder of The Freedom Theatre, is a former member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and was long on Israel's most-wanted list. Depressingly, Zubeidi was quoted as saying that "there will be no forgiveness" for Juliano's killers. Despite Zubeidi's current peace credentials, "no forgiveness" sounds rather fatwa-like. Hopefully the pronouncement will not be part of the cycle of retribution. (In a sidebar to the murder of Arrigoni in Gaza, Hamas exacted punishment on the Italian's killers in distinctive fashion.)

An old friend who knows Jenin well and has more than twenty years experience as an observer in the Middle East said that Juliano could have been more accommodating to Jenin cultural and religious customs. "Children in the camp certainly benefited from the theater," he said. "But Jenin was slowly, slowly recovering from the total disaster of 2002, and Juliano had served in the IDF [the Israel Defense Forces], and was a Jew and an Israeli. As the wound [of the intifada] was slowly healing, it might not have been the best time and place to implement such extreme things. I can understand that it created a lot of tension in people's minds."

This friend, a skilled negotiator, is habitually cautious and patient about trying to shift people's positions. "[The traditional Muslim view] is the fact on the ground, and if you want to change things you have to get people's trust, and then when the time is right you can introduce Western thinking and modern ideas. And you have to earn the trust of the whole society – not just the children, but the parents and the elders".

Someone else remarked that it was a shame that Mer-Khamis, who was passionately of both communities, was never fully accepted by either. His mother, equally passionate for justice and freedom, would have understood. When Arna died in 1995, some Israelis vehemently opposed her burial in Israel, and she was at last laid to rest at the Ramot Menashe kibbutz. Some photos of her son's funeral, in the same kibbutz, are here, and there are numerous tributes on Facebook.

Finally, I asked an Israeli friend, a former army officer and a conciliation expert, to assess Juliano's work. "He was a very unusual bird – for us and [for] them. I believe he came up too early. But this is the only way changes can be done, and someone pays the bill [for all] of us."

What happens to the theater without Juliano? The theater coordinator, Rawand Arkavi, told the Guardian: "We were cautious before but now we don't care if they shoot all of us. We will keep the theatre going". My Palestinian friend echoed the determination: "The time of fear is gone".

Observation Post by Philip C. Winslow: Evictions in Sheikh Jarrah

Today's post is the latest in a Beacon Broadside series: Observation Post by journalist and foreign correspondent Philip C. Winslow. Over a career that has spanned more than twenty-five years, Winslow has reported on world events for the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, Maclean's magazine, ABC radio news, CTV News, and CBC radio. He also served in two United Nations peacekeeping missions and worked for the UN in the West Bank for nearly three years. He is the author of Victory For Us Is to See You Suffer: In the West Bank with the Palestinians and the Israelis and Sowing the Dragon's Teeth: Land Mines and the Global Legacy of War.

In occupied East Jerusalem just north of the Old City, the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah for years has been the crucible of the struggle by radical Jewish settlers to “Judaize” Jerusalem, as the common term goes. As a word, “Judaize” is slightly less cumbersome than “de-Palestinianize” (the latter is my term), but the intent and the effects are the same.

Although settlers’ organizations, facilitated in various ways by Israeli governments and protected by the security forces, routinely have taken over Palestinian property in other parts of East Jerusalem and in the West Bank, the symbolic heart of the struggle is here, for ownership or enforced control of the old stone homes on Sheikh Jarrah’s tree-lined streets.

On August 2, following an Israeli court decision, 53 Palestinian men, women and children were evicted from their homes in a nighttime raid. The Palestinians are classed as refugees who lost their homes in 1948. Shortly after the families and their furniture were on the street, security forces ushered Jewish settlers into the homes. A friend of mine and long-time Jerusalem resident said: “It was one of the worst things I witnessed in all my years here. It was bad enough kicking out women and children from their homes, but heavily armed police escorting settlers into the homes within half an hour in front of the distraught families, and obviously proud of their actions – that was really something.”

If you have a strong stomach, you can watch the evictions and the aftermath in this series of videos, after the jump.

Observation Post by Philip C. Winslow: Angola's Forgotten War, Squandered Peace

Today's post is the latest in a Beacon Broadside series: Observation Post by journalist and foreign correspondent Philip C. Winslow. Over a career that has spanned more than twenty-five years, Winslow has reported on world events for the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, Maclean's magazine, ABC radio news, CTV News, and CBC radio. He also served in two United Nations peacekeeping missions and worked for the UN in the West Bank for nearly three years. He is the author of Victory For Us Is to See You Suffer: In the West Bank with the Palestinians and the Israelis and Sowing the Dragon's Teeth: Land Mines and the Global Legacy of War.

Angola's decades-long terror often was called “the worst war in the world.” The civil war left as many as 1.5 million people dead and millions more maimed, orphaned and homeless. The description never seemed overstated.

Following a bloody struggle that ended with independence from Portugal in 1975, Angola plunged into a Cold War-fueled regional conflict that eclipsed all that had gone before. The Marxist government of the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) was backed by the Soviet Union, with Cuban fighters and others on the ground. Jonas Savimbi's UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) rebels were armed and supported by the United States and an aggressive, interventionist South Africa. Hopes for peace flickered for an instant before ill-timed elections in 1992; UNITA lost, and Savimbi re-started the war with intensified brutality. This chapter of the tragedy lasted for the next ten years.

Observation Post by Philip C. Winslow Ending Israel’s Settlements

Today's post is the latest in a Beacon Broadside series: Observation Post by journalist and foreign correspondent Philip C. Winslow. Over a career that has spanned more than twenty-five years, Winslow has reported on world events for the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, Maclean's magazine, ABC radio news, CTV News, and CBC radio. He also served in two United Nations peacekeeping missions and worked for the UN in the West Bank for nearly three years. He is the author of Victory For Us Is to See You Suffer: In the West Bank with the Palestinians and the Israelis and Sowing the Dragon's Teeth: Land Mines and the Global Legacy of War.

Ever since Barack Obama's inauguration in January, there's been talk of a looming policy confrontation with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who took office in March, over Israel's settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Headlines like "U.S., Israel square off over settlement expansion" boosted hopes or worries (depending on one's viewpoint) that the U.S. would use its considerable leverage to crack down on the continuing growth of the settlements, which are illegal under international law. At the first hint that Washington might do so, inflammatory posters popped up all over the West Bank (see this photo).

And after Obama's speech in Cairo on June 4, when he called for the settlements to stop, it seemed that the two leaders indeed were headed for a showdown over the most contentious issue in the Middle East.

Partly in response to Obama's address, a major policy speech by Netanyahu was promised. It came on June 14, struggled for lift and landed with a dull thud. "In my vision of peace, in this small land of ours, two peoples live freely, side-by-side, in amity and mutual respect," Netanyahu said. "Each will have its own flag, its own national anthem, its own government. Neither will threaten the security or survival of the other."

Some commentators made much of Netanyahu's use, for the first time ever, of the words "Palestinian state." The phrases the prime minister actually used were "armed Palestinian state" and "demilitarized Palestinian state," and pointed only to a future territory without an army, without control of its airspace, and one that provides "ironclad" security guarantees for Israel. The speech offered nothing new, and was breathtakingly ungracious to the Palestinians.

Observation Post by Philip C. Winslow Memorial Day Snapshots

Today's post is the latest in a Beacon Broadside series: Observation Post by journalist and foreign correspondent Philip C. Winslow. Over a career that has spanned more than twenty-five years, Winslow has reported on world events for the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, Maclean's magazine, ABC radio news, CTV News, and CBC radio. He also served in two United Nations peacekeeping missions and worked for the UN in the West Bank for nearly three years. He is the author of Victory For Us Is to See You Suffer: In the West Bank with the Palestinians and the Israelis and Sowing the Dragon's Teeth: Land Mines and the Global Legacy of War.

On a perfect Memorial Day morning, I bicycled out of Boston to a Veterans Affairs medical center in Jamaica Plain, to see if there might be a commemorative service for patients. It's no longer an inpatient facility, and was closed for the holiday. But as I rounded a corner not far from the hospital, I heard The Marines' Hymn ("From the Halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli...") and a medley of other armed forces songs booming off the walls of a highway overpass. At American Legion Post 76, small flags were stuck in the lawn, and spectators snapped pictures as a color guard formed up in the parking lot. A half dozen former soldiers, young and no longer young, stood at parade rest holding flags and old bolt-action carbines and exchanging a few wisecracks while the sound system was adjusted. There were short speeches, a prayer and a song with the refrain "God Bless the U.S.A," and several of the spectators sang along. The parade was short because the post is close to the highway and an intersection, and the color guard marched out of the driveway, around the building and back to the starting point.

I was struck by the span of their ages and the conflicts in which they served. The post's last World War I soldier died a couple years ago, someone said. The World War II veterans moved with deliberation, and a couple of the Vietnam vets looked to be getting creaky knees, although Vietnam seems not that long ago.

One Navy man there was Eddie MacDonald, in his late eighties. MacDonald was an underwater demolition specialist and among the first to hit the shores of France clearing mines in advance of the D-Day landing. Another Navy man, in uniform and with a lot of stripes on one sleeve, was gently said to have "seen a lot of war service"; everyone shook his hand or patted him on the back.

Joe Ratta, aged 81, an Army tank driver in World War II, was there and so was his younger brother, Frank, an infantryman in Korea. Next to Paul DeCoste, a six-foot-plus Marine who served in Vietnam, were two young men – both named Mike – from our current Iraq and Afghanistan era. When the speeches were over and the service plaques had been handed out, the good-humored crowd ambled past the flags and headed for the bar.

"This goes on in every little town across the country on Memorial Day and Veterans Day," Joe Ratta told me later. He added that every civilian cemetery in the country is covered by a veterans' organization such as the Legion or Veterans of Foreign Wars. "Ever notice the small flags in the cemetery on Memorial Day?" Joe asked. "We put them there every year." This year the Jamaica Plain post placed 1,500 flags on veterans' graves in Forest Hills cemetery alone.

Observation Post by Philip C. Winslow Cluster Weapons: On the Way Out

Today's post is the latest in a Beacon Broadside series: Observation Post by journalist and foreign correspondent Philip C. Winslow. Over a career that has spanned more than twenty-five years, Winslow has reported on world events for the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, Maclean's magazine, ABC radio news, CTV News, and CBC radio. He also served in two United Nations peacekeeping missions and worked for the UN in the West Bank for nearly three years. He is the author of Victory For Us Is to See You Suffer: In the West Bank with the Palestinians and the Israelis and Sowing the Dragon's Teeth: Land Mines and the Global Legacy of War.

Ten years ago this spring an historic international treaty came into force banning antipersonnel land mines. Although the U.S. has not joined the 156 nations who ratified the treaty, American forces have not used antipersonnel mines since 1992, and have destroyed three million stockpiled mines; call it a reluctant phasing out of an indiscriminate weapon that U.S. forces have used since the Civil War.

Now a world movement to ban cluster weapons is gathering pace. It’s possible that this time around the U.S., which has not used cluster munitions since 2003 in Iraq, will join, helping make the weapons and their explosive sub-munitions a military artifact. So far 96 nations have signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) and seven have ratified it. The treaty will enter into force on the thirtieth ratification.

Civilian deaths and disabilities from antipersonnel mines have been well documented. The unnecessary suffering and a persistent international campaign brought about the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, also known as the Ottawa Treaty. Cluster munitions casualties are less well known, in part because the weapons have been used in fewer countries, about 30. But where they have been used, the terrible wounds and denial of land access have led arms control experts, doctors and civil society groups, under the umbrella of the Cluster Munition Coalition, to demand that this weapon be added to the list of prohibited weapons along with antipersonnel mines, dum-dum bullets, poison gas and blinding lasers.

Although antipersonnel mines and cluster munitions are in different military categories, they have one thing in common: catastrophic results for the civilians who come across them. America’s massive bombing of Laos from 1964 to 1973 still claims casualties today. One is Ta Douangchom. “I was living in a village called Ka Oy . . . in southern Laos. I was a farmer. One day, I was 28 years old at the time, I went out with my two sons to look for food and found a strange object. It looked green.” You can read the rest of Ta’s story here.

Observation Post: Cultural Cross-Currents in the West Bank

Today's post is the second in a Beacon Broadside series: Observation Post by journalist and foreign correspondent Philip C. Winslow. Over a career that has spanned more than twenty-five years, Winslow has reported on world events for the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, Maclean's magazine, ABC radio news, CTV News, and CBC radio. He also served in two United Nations peacekeeping missions and worked for the UN in the West Bank for nearly three years. He is the author of Victory For Us Is to See You Suffer: In the West Bank with the Palestinians and the Israelis and Sowing the Dragon's Teeth: Land Mines and the Global Legacy of War.

A couple of worrisome stories out of Jenin in the northern West Bank recently. Not deadly clashes between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers this time, but internal events that threaten progress in a more indirect way.

Jenin, from a hill above the town and the camp. From Philip C. Winslow: Jenin Photos

A bit of background. Jenin-- the town and its gritty, sprawling refugee camp, where from a hilltop you can look across the Green Line at the fields of Israel-- has been a hot spot since the Arab revolt of 1936 - 1939. During this decade's second intifada many Palestinian suicide bombers came from Jenin, and in April 2002 ferocious battles raged in the refugee camp, and the Israeli army flattened part of the camp's center. Israeli military incursions and arrest raids continue, although with less frequency. Nearly 16,000 refugees, more than 42 percent of them under the age of 15, live in concrete-block buildings in the camp's winding narrow streets and alleys.

Since the constant reciprocal violence of seven years ago, Jenin has pulled itself up by its bootstraps, with help and encouragement from outside, and has become a vibrant and energetic city. Palestinian police are back on the streets, the anarchic armed militias have been curtailed, some trade with Israel has resumed, and signs of normal life are popping up like tulips. As a friend reminded me, "Jenin is not the Wild West anymore."

But some deep-rooted and distinctly anti-modern undercurrents run through Jenin camp and other conservative Palestinian towns, as in much of the Arab world. The first of the recent troubling stories was the torching of a non-profit West Bank music-teaching center for children, Al Kamandjati (it means 'the violinist' in Arabic), which burned up about $20,000 worth of musical instruments. No one was injured, and no one has admitted responsibility for the arson.

The second incident was a bad-tempered controversy over a concert given by a Jenin camp youth orchestra, the Strings of Freedom, for a group of Holocaust survivors in Holon, Israel. The event was part of an event called Good Deeds Day, sponsored by a wealthy Israeli woman. The Palestinian musicians, aged between 11 and 18, were meticulously trained in Jenin by an Israeli Arab woman, Wafa Younis, who lives in northern Israel.

Observation Post: War Crimes on Trial in Sierra Leone

Today's post is the first in a new Beacon Broadside series: Observation Post by journalist and foreign correspondent Philip C. Winslow. Over a career that has spanned more than twenty-five years, Winslow has reported on world events for the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, Maclean's magazine, ABC radio news, CTV News, and CBC radio. He also served in two United Nations peacekeeping missions and worked for the UN in the West Bank for nearly three years. He is the author of Victory For Us Is to See You Suffer: In the West Bank with the Palestinians and the Israelis and Sowing the Dragon's Teeth: Land Mines and the Global Legacy of War.

Rebels with a stolen Nigerian anti-aircraft truck circling a tent where UN negotiators were talking with rebel commanders. From Philip C. Winslow: Sierra Leone photos

The last time I talked with Sierra Leone's war criminals in the terrorized West African country some years ago, they were swaggering, threatening, drunk or confused, and sometimes a mixture of those.

This week in a sterile, glass-enclosed courtroom in Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, the swagger had gone out of three of them as they were sentenced to long prison terms for multiple war crimes and crimes against humanity. The sentences were welcomed by veteran human rights activists. "The deadly cycle of impunity is slowly being broken in Sierra Leone and West Africa," Corinne Dufka, the senior researcher for Human Rights Watch in West Africa, told me from Dakar, Senegal.

During Sierra Leone's civil war from 1991 until 2002, armed groups such as the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) perpetrated a countrywide reign of brutal terror. The commanders of the RUF and various factions -- Foday Sankoh, Johnny Paul Koroma, Sam Hinga Norman, Sam "Mosquito" Bockarie -- planned and instigated serial atrocities in a nation already flat on its back. Their tools of terror included the mass rape of girls and women, forced marriage, child slavery, and mass amputations, all against a non-hostile people, their own people. The leaders fancied themselves rebels and revolutionaries, but in reality they were criminal mercenaries linked by diamond wealth to Liberia's president Charles Taylor across the eastern border.

Sankoh and his rivals in the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), the Civil Defense Forces (CDF), and the West Side Boys had no recognizable political ideology, and no moral restraints. Lesser figures down the terror chain became victims themselves, such as the child soldiers who were forced to kill their families and were bound to their captors with cocaine, amphetamines and more violence. At the hands of these gangs, tens of thousands of Sierra Leoneans were killed, more than two million were displaced, and many thousands more survived with appalling physical and mental wounds.