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      The Real Scandal of Chinese Hacking

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      The image most people have of the world of espionage spans an intriguingly varied cast of contrasting personalities. It includes the colorful, the creepy, the beautiful but also the deceptively ordinary. It features a sexy Mata Hari and Christine Keeler. It stretches across history from Christopher Marlowe to the Cambridge Five, from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. And most people retain the image of the world-weary Cold War spies that have populated the novels of Graham Greene and John le Carré and the movies inspired by them.

      The advent of the internet has significantly transformed the landscape of spy-duggery. To be a spy used to require a solid education followed by intensive behavioral training and cross-cultural awareness. But in contrast with the past, the people identified as spies these days tend to be nerds: hackers, digital pirates and cyber-spies. Just as drone operators sitting in a remote location operating what resembles a video game console have increasingly replaced the soldier on the battlefield, the spies in today’s news are faceless operators. Their personalities are unknown and biographies singularly devoid of color and drama.

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      The picture becomes even more complex when we consider how the stories told about the cyber-spies emerge in the media. The source tends to be a government exposing them. But with so little substance to expose other than designating hidden lines of code, the public can’t even be sure that a newly-identified spy is real. And given that any clever coder motivated enough to rise to the challenge can hack the most secure target, the act that is identified as espionage may just be a feat of coding prowess by a teenager seeking to impress a few cyber-friends.

      We must not forget the need of some politicians in democratic nations to raise the alarm from time to time either to justify exceptional security measures they wish to impose, possibly for other reasons, or simply to prove to the electorate how vigilant they are in defending their vulnerable nation. In such circumstances, decoding the political intent behind incidents caused by coding becomes a major challenge. It is in such a context that, over the past week, the governments of the US and the UK have signaled at least two cases of spying by everyone’s favorite enemies in treachery: Russia and China.

      In the harvest of spy alerts from the past week, there was also what has become the obligatory mention of Russian meddling in Western elections (the Scottish independence referendum of 2014). But in the two contemporary cases that made the headlines, the goal turned out not to be the usual military, electoral or cultural goal (“sowing doubt” and “creating confusion”) but medical. The spies in question were seeking to hack research into the responses to COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

      According to The Guardian, the US Justice Department has indicted two Chinese hackers “for seeking to steal Covid-19 vaccine research” and other acts of industrial espionage. “Justice Department officials said Li [Xiaoyu] and Dong [Jiazhi] targeted biotech companies in California, Maryland, Massachusetts and elsewhere but did not appear to have actually compromised any Covid-19 research.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Compromise:

      Allow an idea, concept, process or object to escape from the hands of a person or institution that has been jealously hoarding the idea, concept, process or object with a view to reaping the maximum profit from it

      Contextual Note

      The message that nothing was compromised will reassure the public. But, as often in these cases, the motivation and the supposed agency of the Chinese government are implied rather than proven. With its typical lack of clarity, CNN clarifies: “While the indictment does not specify if the hackers had been working at the behest of the Chinese government as they targeted the coronavirus projects, senior national security officials have been warning of Chinese government attempts to steal coronavirus research from US institutions for months.”

      In other words, much like Russiagate, if “national security figures” warned that something might be initiated by an identified agent (the Chinese government) and then something (but not exactly the thing they feared) does seem to happen, the conclusion requires no further investigation. That is exactly how conspiracy theories are built and justified, but it is also how the best scoops in the media are constructed.

      Historical Note

      In the world of geo-diplomatic intelligence spawned by the Cold War and continued by all nations who can afford it ever since, spying, hacking and spreading disinformation have become a kind of operational norm. This means that whenever a political leader needs to create a scare, there will always be one available for immediate exploitation. Over the past 70 years, alarms about spying and foreign meddling only burst into the media at moments in which leaders judge it expedient to draw such incidents to the public’s attention. In the midst of an intractable pandemic that has caused severe political grief to the leaders of the US and the UK, this is one of those moments.

      Most of these cases produce mild diplomatic incidents that may have immediate pragmatic consequences but rarely alter the balance of power or degenerate into forms of durable conflict. In today’s case, pitting China against the US, after the closure of the Chinese Consulate in Houston, the consequences appear to be far from negligible. It is, after all, an election year in the US and Donald Trump’s chances of getting a new four-year lease on the White House are rapidly dwindling. This may be just the first act of a four-month drama or an alternative scenario — alongside the Israel-Iran conflict — for Trump to have the tail towag the dog.

      Embed from Getty Images

      With the ultimate prospect of an intercontinental war, no one in the media seems to notice what is special and different about the idea of hacking research on COVID-19 treatments, cures and vaccines. That is because both the media and politicians have failed to ask the basic question: Why would anyone want access to urgent medical research?

      In a rational world in which nearly 8 billion people find themselves assailed by fear of contamination, accompanied by the gutting of their economies and the violent transformation of their way of life, research on treatments and cures should logically take the form of a universal collaborative project spontaneously shared among all competent experts and researchers across the globe. Instead, we are passively witnessing a competition driven solely by the profit-motive of a few.

      The real question is: Why isn’t this research already being shared? Why must it be hacked? Everyone knows the answer to that question. It is too obvious, too much a part of the landscape to mention. That is why they dare not even ask the question or assess the consequences. The winner of the race expects to be handsomely rewarded, benefiting from a monopolistic position. And the nation that harbors the winner will be the first to exploit it, with the option of hoarding.

      That is how today’s world order works and everyone seems to accept it as normal, even in these far from normal times. It’s a unified ideological system that governs both geopolitics and the economy. Competition, profit and what Thomas Piketty has called the “sacralization of property,” including industrial property, are the pillars of our historical heritage from the industrial age. 

      Secrets permit monopolies. Monopolies guarantee excessive profit. The rule of the game is that researchers on one side of the world must be unaware of the progress of their colleagues elsewhere. May the best researcher win. Yet this not only slows down progress toward a satisfactory solution, but it also increases the risk that the winning solution may be flawed or incomplete.

      In today’s world, sharing means compromise. But that is deemed unacceptable for a simple reason: Compromise means being compromised. Totally unacceptable.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Click here to read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      London’s “Mega Mosque:” Islamophobia in the COVID-19 “New Normal”

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      During the lockdown, the US-based news service, Breitbart, ran a story about plans for a new “mega-mosque” in central London. Proposed for the historic Trocadero building near Piccadilly Circus in the heart of London’s entertainment and theater districts, Breitbart claimed that plans had been submitted to Westminster’s local authority to convert parts of the building into a mosque with a capacity to host around 1,000 worshippers.

      Having been widely shared on social media, the Breitbart story not only claimed that local residents were shocked by the size of the mega mosque, but so too was it alleged that some had voiced concerns about the increased risk of terrorism, that worshippers would try and enforce an alcohol ban in the surrounding area, and that there would be a conflict with those frequenting Soho, London’s gay quarter.

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      While some of those lodging complaints about the mosque will no doubt have had legitimate claims, the Breitbart article clearly acted as a catalyst for the radical right in Britain to jump on the opposition bandwagon. By using the term “mega-mosque,’ Breitbart reverted a tried and tested trope that has been successfully deployed in other parts of the country by various radical-right groups to derail plans for other new mosques. While this affords an opportunity to consider how the radical right have focused on size when it comes to opposing mosques, so too does it give us a timely insight into how the radical right’s campaigns of Islamophobia might change in the “new normal” of a post-COVID-19 world.

      The “Old Normal”

      Standing on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Piccadilly Circus, the Trocadero was built in 1896. Home to a restaurant until 1965, the building remained largely redundant until the early 1980s, when it was renovated and relaunched as an indoor entertainment complex, housing the UK’s first IMAX cinema and various other attractions, including the gaming arcade Segaworld. With every new initiative, however, came failure, and the building eventually became derelict in 2006. A year beforehand, Criterion Capital had purchased it along with another nearby building. Since then, the Trocadero has undergone significant changes: Today, for example, it houses a 740-bedroom hotel with a rooftop bar.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The man behind Criterion Capital is Asif Aziz. He also established the Aziz Foundation, an education charity for British Muslims that has its headquarters near Piccadilly Circus. The foundation was behind the plans submitted to the local authority to request permission to convert the basement and part of the ground floor into a prayer space and community center. With the intention of serving Muslims who live and work in the area, the plans state that it was likely that the prayer space would only attract near-capacity attendance for Friday prayers; on all other days, the plans claimed that no more than 100 worshippers would be in attendance. When the public consultation closed, nearly 9,000 comments had been filed about the plans. While the majority were supportive, a flood of comments opposing the mosque appeared once the mega mosque story was “broken” by Breitbart.

      Among these were a number of tropes that the radical right have been deploying about Muslims and the religion of Islam for some time: from changing the “character” of the area to the mosque being a potential “Islamist hotspot,” from Islam not being welcome in a “secular” society to the mosque being evidence of the further “Islamification” of Britain. Of course, the size of the mosque was also routinely cited as a problem.

      Under the “old normal,” the radical right have been scaremongering about the size of mosques for almost two decades. As the simple yet effective narrative goes, the bigger the mosque the bigger the threat posed. This was used to good effect in Dudley, a town on the outskirts of Birmingham in the West Midlands. While much was made of the size of the prayer hall, it was the height of the proposed minaret adjoining the “super-mosque” that garnered the most opposition.

      Alleged to be taller than the steeple of the town’s oldest church, opponents claimed Muslims were doing so in order to claim the supremacy of Islam over Christianity. Prompting more than a decade of radical-right protests, including some of the largest by the anti-Islam street protest movement, English Defence League, the plans for the mosque were withdrawn in 2018.

      Three years prior, a similar outcome met plans to build a 9,000-capacity “mega mosque” in Stratford, East London. There, more than a quarter of a million people signed a petition opposing the mosque following radical-right groups campaigns alleging that those behind the mosque had links with the 7/7 suicide bombers.

      The “New Normal”

      In the “new normal,” while various radical-right groups have jumped on the anti-mosque bandwagon, it has been by former anti-Islam political party and vigilante group, Britain First, that has led the way, at the time of writing acquiring near 125,002 signatures on its online petition to block the plans. Most interesting, however, are the reasons Britain First cites for opposing the new mosque.

      Alongside all of the old-normal reasons for doing so, it is the new attribution to the size of the mosque that is most insightful. As it states: “Local people have strongly objected to the application on the basis that the area was already heavily overcrowded even before the coronavirus pandemic introduced the need for social distancing – and that adding another 1,000 people, congregating in and around the mega mosque during prayer times would cause serious [problems].” As such, the new mosque should be opposed because it will increase the risk of spreading COVID-19 and thereby poses a threat to the health of local residents.

      While much has been made about the new normal that will ensue in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, what the Trocadero mosque shows is that some elements of the old normal will not only survive but will continue to thrive. As was the case in the old normal, mosques are problematic, the size even more so. Irrespective of any pandemic, little would appear to have changed.

      What does seem to have changed in the new normal, however, is how size is problematized. While the simple yet effective narrative technique used to be “the bigger the mosque, the bigger the threat posed” could, in the wake of 9/11,  always be understood as being either cultural or violent. As regards the former, this typically focused on the “takeover” of Britain, its values, way of life and so on. For the latter, this typically focused on terrorism and radicalization. Post-COVID-19, if Britain First is anything to go by, a more insidious dimension to that threat might now emerge. As the petition infers, the threat now posed by the mosque is also a biological one.

      Irrespective of whether such claims are true, one can see how effective and immediate this kind of claim could be among local people who are already fearful of the effects and impact of an invisible virus. Reshaping the narrative to “the bigger the mosque, the bigger the biological threat posed” may have the potential to be an even more effective means of mobilizing and opposing in the new normal than it was before. If Britain First is successful, expect others within the radical right to rapidly follow this new narrative technique in anti-mosque campaigns and other forms of Islamophobic mobilization throughout the UK.

      *[The Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right is a partner institution of Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The Travails of America’s Higher Education

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      American universities are among the best in the world. Harvard, Stanford, MIT and Yale, to name but a few, attract the best and the brightest of their generation, year after year. The competition is brutal. Most applicants are rejected. American universities, however, are not only among the best in the world — they are also among the most expensive. A non-resident student at one of the top public universities, such as UCLA, Berkeley or the University of Virginia, pays more than $ 150,000 for a four-year undergraduate degree. A professional master’s degree, such as business or law, costs you well over $100,000 a year. No wonder that higher education has become a multibillion-dollar quasi-corporation, with university presidents behaving — and being remunerated — like CEOs.

      Until COVID-19, business was booming. The pandemic, however, has thrown a monkey wrench into the works, and university administrators are at a loss of how to respond to the crisis. The problem is that as higher education in the United States morphed into big business, it increasingly reached out beyond America’s borders, actively seeking to recruit international students. Last year, for instance, there were some 90,000 German students enrolled in American universities. Their numbers pale, however, in comparison to Chinese students, who in recent years amounted to over 350,000. Universities love foreign and non-resident students if only because more often than not they pay full tuition.

      Up in the Air

      The combination of COVID-19 and Trumpian nativism poses a serious threat to this arrangement. As the pandemic spread across the nation, universities were forced to close their doors and go online. And with the pandemic threatening to engulf the whole nation, largely thanks to the administration’s incompetence and utter lack of preparedness and empathy, the immediate future of higher education is completely up in the air. Foreign students are in the United States on a visa that requires them to pursue their degree at a (physical) university. As universities become virtual, switching to online teaching, this no longer applies, or so Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced in early July.

      This meant international would be required to leave the country or face deportation. Immigration suggested that international students whose university moved online consider transferring to another university that still offered in-person instruction – under the circumstances a rather ridiculous proposition. In any case, ICE announced that the Department of State would no longer “issue visas to students enrolled in schools and/or programs that are fully online for the fall semester” nor would immigration authorities “permit these students to enter the United States.”

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      In response, a number of major private and public universities filed a lawsuit against the federal government over the measure. In the days that followed the administration reversed course, admitting the “proposal” had been “poorly conceived and executed.” This, however, failed to smooth the waves of academic indignation. On July 14, the president of MIT, Dr. L. Rafael Reif, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, in which he claimed that America needed foreign students. Foreign students, he charged, were essential for American competitiveness and innovation. “As a nation,” he maintained, “when we turn our backs on talented foreign students, we not only lose all that they bring to our classrooms and laboratories, we also give up a strategic asset.”

      To illustrate the point he chose as an example Chinese PhD students — not particularly felicitous given the current anti-Chinese sentiments prevalent in America today. Most recent data showed, he wrote, “that 83 percent of Ph.D. students from China, the kind of highly trained scientists and engineers who drive American innovation, were still in the United States five years after completing their degrees.”

      The Resentment of the Privileged

      The New York Times allows its readers to comment on op-ed pieces. It is difficult to know if Reif was prepared for some of the responses he got from his readers. Quite a number of commentators questioned the MIT president’s motives behind his defense of foreign students, and particularly Chinese students. Others insisted that American students should get preference. Others charged that foreign students were “squeezing out” qualified American applicants for the simple reason that American top universities put them in a position to do so. Undoubtedly, resentment transcends class boundaries.

      There are, however, good grounds for this resentment. One of the most burning socioeconomic issues today is inequality. COVID-19 has once again drastically shown that inequality is a multidimensional phenomenon, related to a range of markers — gender, race, class and particularly education. Take, for instance, “assortative mating,” which refers to the tendency of people to choose a partner with a similar background, such as education level. Studies show not only that assortative mating has steadily increased over the past decades, but also that it has a non-negligible impact on socioeconomic inequality.

      It has also been shown that parents’ education level has a significant impact on their child’s educational attainment. Children from families where the parents are highly-educated are more likely to succeed in high school, more likely to attend and graduate from university and more likely to get a well-paying job. In this way, inequality is passed on to the next generation.

      A second reason for the resentment expressed by some of the comments in The New York Times is probably more mundane, more “human, all too human.” Top American universities are the incubator of America’s elite, similar to Oxbridge in the UK and the grandes écoles in France. With top universities seeking to attract foreign students, there are fewer spaces from the “native-born.” Given the profile of the average reader of The New York Times, the resulting resentment is quite understandable. Nativism is usually associated with “ordinary people” having to compete with migrants for scarce resources such as social welfare.

      This does not mean, however, that the privileged are immune to nativism. And the resentment of the privileged is bound to increase in the years to come. Until now, highly educated professionals in the West were largely protected against international competition. Studies suggest that COVID-19 is going to boost trade in services. The acceleration of trade in services, in turn, is likely to affect a range of professional services — finance, consulting, accounting, legal services, even medicine — hitherto shielded from international competition. Under the circumstances, the resentment of the highly educated is perfectly understandable. Foreign students from China and India at Harvard and MIT are the likely competitors of their offspring a few years ahead. And they are likely to win the race.

      Luxury Good

      It appears American higher education is in a pickle, some of its own making, some not. The reality is that higher education has become a luxury good in the US. For most Americans today, college education represents the second-largest expense after buying a home. Over the past three decades or so, tuition costs have more than doubled, in some cases significantly more. One of the reasons has been deep cuts by states for higher education, particularly in the wake of the Great Recession: Since 2008, tuition and fees in four-year public schools increased on average by more than 30%.

      At the same time, however, universities are also to blame. One of the main reasons for the spiraling costs of higher education is the dramatic expansion of university bureaucracy. In the years following the Great Depression, and state funding cuts notwithstanding, administration costs skyrocketed. According to Forbes, between 1980-81 and 2014-15 school years, administrative costs at private and public schools increased from $13 billion to $122.3 billion. During the same period, instruction costs increased from $20.7 billion to $148 billion. In the process, the number of administrators has steadily risen largely outpacing the hiring of full-time faculty. In fact, in today’s universities, a significant part of the teaching is done by part-time faculty more often than not paid a pittance — around $3,000 per three-credit course.

      As has been the case in so many other areas, COVID-19 has brutally exposed the complete lack of awareness of what is happening in the “real” world and of preparedness for contingencies on the part of those supposed to be in charge in higher education, namely its highly remunerated administrators. In a recent scathing critique in The Chronicle of Higher Education, a Johns Hopkins University professor has released all the pent-up anger that has accumulated over the years: “Even as they continue enriching themselves,” he charges, “university executives have revealed themselves ineffective in one of the most basic corporate responsibilities: managing financial risk. In a few short weeks, astonishingly wealthy institutions across the country were reduced to slash-and-burn strategies to maintain their solvency. Having consolidated power in their hands over the last generation, leaders of America’s wealthiest universities lacked financial reserves — while also squandering the reserves of their communities’ trust and goodwill.”

      The professor’s ire is understandable, given the heavy losses Johns Hopkins has projected it will incur as a result of the pandemic and its impact on its faculty. The university expects losses for the next fiscal year to amount to more than $350 million, partially to be met by cutbacks. In addition to restrictions on new hiring, the possibility of furloughs and even layoffs, the president of the university announced that JHU would suspend the university’s contributions to individual retirement accounts — for all practical purposes amounting to a pay cut.

      COVID-19 marks a rude awakening for America’s premier universities, laying bare all the problems associated with the “corporatization” of the institution of the university and “the monetization of just about everything within the institution” that are at the root of their current predicament. Under the circumstances, the MIT president’s op-ed piece is understandable. It certainly won’t fix the system of higher education.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Opposing Repressive Regimes in the Middle East Is a Death Sentence

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      The ruling by Bahrain’s top judicial body, the court of cassation, on July 13 to uphold the death sentences of Mohammed Ramadhan and Husain Moosa has been decried by human rights organizations, condemned in the UK House of Lords and questioned in the British Parliament. Whether any of that will save the men from execution is debatable.

      The men were convicted and sentenced to death in 2014 for the killing of a policeman. That conviction was overturned when evidence emerged that they had been tortured into giving false confessions. Despite that decision, the death penalty was reinstated and subsequently confirmed by the court of cassation. An official in the public prosecutor’s office defended the court’s latest ruling while denying the accusations of torture, claiming that medical reports showed that the confessions were obtained “in full consciousness and voluntarily, without any physical or verbal coercion.”

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      That confounds the earlier court decision to throw out the convictions, which was based on an investigation undertaken by the Bahraini government’s own Special Investigation Unit that showed the men had been tortured. However, in the contorted reality of the kingdom’s politicized judicial system, the court of cassation decided that the convictions were not based on evidence extracted under torture but rather on other evidence.

      “Close and Important Relationship”

      Amnesty International denounced the latest verdict, saying: “The two men were taken to the Criminal Investigations Department where they were tortured during interrogation. Mohamed Ramadhan refused to sign a ‘confession’, though he was subjected to beating and electrocution. Hussain Ali Moosa said he was coerced to ‘confess’ and incriminate Mohamed Ramadhan after being suspended by the limbs and beaten for several days.”

      Moosa has said that, after his genitalia were repeatedly beaten, he was told that if he signed a confession implicating Ramadhan his sentence would be commuted to life: “They were kicking me on my reproductive organs, and would hit me repeatedly in the same place until I couldn’t speak from the pain. I decided to tell them what they wanted.” His repudiation of the confession was ignored by the courts.

      In UK Parliament, four days prior to the court of cassation ruling, the Conservative MP Sir Peter Bottomley had asked Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab for a statement on whether he would use what he called “the UK’s constructive dialogue” with Bahrain to publicly raise the cases of the men. In reply, the Minister for the Middle East and North Africa James Cleverly spoke of a “close and important relationship” with an “ongoing, open and genuine dialogue” with Bahrain. The minister averred that “this dynamic” enabled the UK to raise human rights concerns, adding “the cases of Mr Moosa and Mr Ramadhan had been, and would continue to be, raised in conversations with officials in Bahrain.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      Earlier this month, it was revealed that another heavily politicized judiciary, this time in Iran, had upheld the death sentences of three young Iranian protesters who had been arrested in November of last year during countrywide protests that saw hundreds killed by security forces. Though moving swiftly to convict the men and sentence them to death, the authorities have done virtually nothing about investigating the killings carried out by the state in suppressing the protests. Amongst media highlighting their case is the Saudi news site Al Arabiya. It noted that a hashtag trending in Iran, “#do not execute,” has had over 2 million tweets. On July 19, Iran halted the executions, according to one of the lawyers for the accused.

      In 2019, Saudi Arabia executed a record 184 people, including six women, many for drug-related offenses. Some were crucified after being beheaded. At least one was a minor. In April, the kingdom announced it would no longer execute juveniles; rather it would sentence them to a maximum of 10 years in a juvenile detention center. It is unclear if the decree will save the life of Ali al-Nimr, who was 17 when arrested and 19 when sentenced to death. His uncle Nimr al-Nimr, a prominent Shia Muslim cleric and critic of the ruling family, was beheaded in 2016.

      State-Sanctioned Arbitrary Killing

      In Egypt, more than 2,000 people have been sentenced to death since Abdel Fattah el-Sisi came to power in 2013, with nearly 200 executed. At least 10 children have been sentenced to hang. In the country’s prison system, there is another kind of death — by deliberate medical neglect, as was the case with the country’s first democratically elected president Mohammed Morsi. He was repeatedly denied medication for his diabetes and collapsed and died in a Cairo court on June 17, 2019.

      On November 8 last year, a panel of UN experts led by Agnes Callamard, the special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, concluded that Morsi’s death “after enduring those conditions could amount to a State-sanctioned arbitrary killing”. The case shed light on the horrific conditions in Egypt’s overcrowded and brutal prison system, a situation that has been severely exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

      On July 13, prominent Egyptian journalist Mohamed Monir died from COVID-19. He had been arrested and held in pre-trial detention for criticizing, on the Al Jazeera news network, the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis. The charge against him was broadcasting false news. The 65-year-old suffered from heart disease and diabetes, and was therefore at high risk of contracting the disease. After falling ill Monir was released to hospital a week before he died. An influential critical voice was silenced. Surely that was the intention — death, be it by medical malfeasance or by execution, is a powerful weapon in the hands of authoritarian regimes.

      *[This article was originally published by Arab Digest.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Under Pressure, Will Trump Wag the Dog?

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      As commentators in the US media continue to track and assess the accelerating decline of President Donald Trump’s prospects for reelection, some are wondering whether he will be tempted to organize a spectacular “October surprise” to magically overcome his ever-increasing gap in the polls. His behavior in recent days has appeared increasingly desperate, as demonstrated in this week’s shambolic Fox News interview with Chris Wallace.

      Some have speculated that Trump may now be feeling the need to assert leadership in foreign policy after singularly failing to do so on the real crisis at hand: the national response to the coronavirus pandemic. Alexis Dudden, an expert on Korea and Japan, evokes two hypotheses that concern North Korea: “If it strikes Trump’s fancy in the middle of the night to fly to Pyongyang and meet Kim in an effort to appear presidential, he will. If it strikes Trump’s fancy in the middle of the night to order a militarized attack on a North Korean nuclear facility in an effort to appear presidential, he will.”

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      The Intelligencer sees another scenario, one that is less speculative based on events that are already taking place. In an article with the title, “Could War With Iran Be an October Surprise?” the author, Jonah Shepp, reviews recent events concerning a series of mysterious explosions affecting Iran’s nuclear facilities. There is more than a strong suspicion that Israel is responsible for at least some of the unusual incidents. Shepp highlights the value escalation may have for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been under extreme pressure for more than a year through a series of inconclusive elections and is now desperate to find a way to escape the possible consequences of his trial for corruption.

      Mitch Prothero, writing for Business Insider, suggests a direct connection between Netanyahu’s dilemma and Trump’s quandary in an article with the title, “Israel keeps blowing up military targets in Iran, hoping to force a confrontation before Trump can be voted out in November.” Trump may also be hoping that if Israel takes the lead, he will be justified in following through, with the hope that the nation would fall in line behind a wartime president.

      Both Shepp and Prothero focus on the sense of urgency felt in Israel to profit from what may be the last few months of Trump’s presidency before he becomes a lame duck, as now seems nearly certain. Prothero explains that, for the moment, Israel’s decision has been “to follow the Trump administration’s lead of exerting ‘maximum pressure’ on the Iranians.” Prothero quotes an EU intelligence official: “The attacks appear to be part of a campaign of “maximum pressure, minimal strategy.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Maximum pressure:

      In 21st-century diplomacy, political sadism directed against civilian populations to persuade them to respect interests and values that may be foreign to their culture 

      Contextual note

      Shepp calls Israel’s attacks “short-of-war actions.” He predicts that an administration led by Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, “would probably not continue Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ approach to Iran and would not be as solicitous of Israel’s covert operations.”

      The EU official quoted above believes that “the Israeli plan here is to provoke an Iranian response that can turn into a military escalation while Trump remains in office.” The Israelis would thus aim at drawing the US deeper into a struggle that includes a very real potential of turning into a war. Trump is likely to play along if he believes it will make him look like a wartime president in the weeks before the November election.

      The situation is risky for numerous reasons. None of the parties would welcome war itself, but the ratcheting up of tensions to the point at which the fear of hostilities becomes palpable might be seen as the last-minute trick that allows both Netanyahu and Trump to hold onto the reins of power that appear to be slipping from their respective hands.    

      Historical note

      Following the disastrous experience of George W. Bush’s never-ending wars in the Middle East in what might be called more than maximum pressure on nations that fail to follow the American game plan, the past two US administrations have tended to turn to economic sanctions as the principal means of “persuading” governments to obey their dictates. Donald Trump has turned the policy into a reflex in his foreign policy. He routinely directs sanctions not only against recalcitrant nations but even against individuals, such as the members of the International Criminal Court who have dared to threaten an investigation of American or Israeli war crimes.

      In an article on Al Jazeera, Eva Nanopoulos reminds readers that it was US President Woodrow Wilson who first launched the idea of economic sanctions. Once the trauma of World War I had passed, Wilson got to work looking for ways of imposing order while avoiding the messiness of war. His promotion of the League of Nations was a crucial element. The key to making the League of Nations work could only be economic sanctions, which Wilson described in this way: “Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly [and] terrible remedy. It does not cost a life outside the nation boycotted but it brings a pressure upon the nation which, in my judgment, no modern nation could resist.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      President Wilson invented the logic of maximum pressure that has become the most used and abused tool in the foreign policy toolbox under the Trump administration. “There always was a degree of irony in Wilson’s juxtaposition of peace and death,” Nanopoulos writes. 

      Paradox might be a more appropriate word than irony to describe a policy that is both “peaceful” and “deadly.” There can be no greater moral failure and manifestation of hypocrisy than the deliberate inversion of a widely understood moral concept. Because people spontaneously think of war as a form of organized killing, they can be persuaded to think that so long as a state of war doesn’t exist, economic sanctions, which indirectly but just as surely cause death and suffering, may no longer be considered killing. After all, if there is no smoking gun, no crime has been committed.

      Nanopoulos describes the result: “All served the same cause: to advance imperial ambitions without assuming the risks and responsibilities of war. With the establishment of the League of Nations, multilateral sanctions became part of an international arsenal used to effectively preserve the colonial status quo.”

      It has become customary to invoke the famous “rule of law” that we use to characterize the world order after 1945. The aftermath of World War II saw the creation of the United Nations and a global financial system given a stable structure at Bretton Woods. It didn’t eliminate war, but it kept wars local while developing global trade. Nations and the UN began deploying the threat and the application of economic sanctions. Still, we should not lose from sight the links to European colonialism and emerging American imperialism that Wilson built into the notion of sanctions when he described them as being both peaceful and deadly.

      Maximizing sanctions avoids war. But going to war can still have its merits, mainly in terms of electoral advantage for insecure and contested leaders. Margaret Thatcher demonstrated the principle in the Falkland Islands in 1982. This is traditionally called the tail wagging the dog. Whether it is done through war or simply through Wilson’s and Trump’s maximum deadly pressure, Shakespeare’s Macbeth probably had it right when — allowing for an appropriate adjustment in the spelling — he called it “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Click here to read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Political Behavior and Basketball Correctness

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      Like an elementary school, the United States has a permanent problem defining and enforcing the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. It has reached a point at which every issue becomes focused not on general interest but on individual behavior, largely because the notion of social behavior appears to have been definitively lost.

      Recent weeks have seen an acceleration of the trends associated with what is often called the “culture wars.” Politics itself has been increasingly reduced to accepting or denouncing someone else’s rules to live, work and breathe by. Ironically, in some cases, breathing itself has become the issue.

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      In a context in which the deprivation of one man’s breath has spawned massive and ongoing protests, the National Basketball Association (NBA), a sports league comprised of a majority of black players, announced that it would allow its players to display on their jerseys a message of solidarity in response to the questions raised by the killing of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis policeman.

      US Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri — a populist Republican in a state that not only has no NBA team but has, in recent years, been rocked by racist violence — audaciously stepped in to deviate the discussion toward themes he considers more legitimate. In the face of recent attacks against the tradition of slavery, Hawley has embraced the sacred cause of defending the memory of the Confederacy and its heroes. He accuses his enemies, the Democrats, of using the pretext of anti-racism to dismantle the police, neuter the military and erase the history of the Confederacy. In his mind, none of those three entities can be suspected of racism, not even the Confederacy, which was just about brave white people defending their traditions.

      Embed from Getty Images

      As a senator, Hawley has no authority over a sports league. But he does have access to public platforms, which he uses to promote his political agenda. He complained that the NBA “is limiting its social messages on jerseys.” Hawley wants the NBA to include in its list of authorized messages his own preferred political mantra, “Free Hong Kong,” which of course has nothing to do with the Floyd drama or with the players’ lives, or, for that matter, the US Senate.

      One of the most respected commentators on the NBA, Adrian Wojnarowski, reacted on Twitter with a simple but deliberately impolite message: “F–k you!” What he meant was: You may be a senator but you have no stake in this; you don’t have the faintest idea of what it is about or what it means to the players, and, moreover, this has nothing to do with China or any other demagogic message you probably want to broadcast to your electoral base.

      That might have been too long for a tweet. The two words he used conveyed the message much more succinctly.

      Alas, for Woj (as the commentator is familiarly known), once Hawley expressed his shock at the crudity of the response, his employer, the sports network ESPN, suspended the seasoned reporter after making this statement on July 13: “This is completely unacceptable behavior and we do not condone it. It is inexcusable for anyone working for ESPN to respond in the way Adrian did to Senator Hawley. We are addressing it directly with Adrian and specifics of those conversations will remain internal.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Unacceptable behavior:

      The expression of justified emotion toward an impertinent figure of authority by someone employed by an organization professionally dedicated to containing expression within a rigidly controlled framework that must avoid offending its audience

      Contextual Note

      Senator Hawley framed his message in populist terms, complaining that by refusing to mention Hong Kong, the NBA was stifling the players’ freedom of expression out of fear of upsetting the Chinese government and losing the lucrative Chinese market. In his letter to the NBA’s commissioner, Adam Silver, Hawley claimed “that the league’s policy on social injustice messages ‘appears to stop at the edge of your corporate sponsors’ sensibilities.’”

      Hawley remembers that the NBA’s delicate attitude toward China had briefly become a hot-button issue in 2019. It resonated with the populist anti-China sentiment pushed by the Trump administration. But that issue has since been eclipsed by something far more dramatic that directly impinges on the lives of players and their families.

      As a senator and supposedly responsible citizen, Hawley should be aware that the NBA’s intention was not to turn players’ jerseys into a new open social media platform for the expression of random political opinions, but rather as an opportunity to express solidarity on an issue that affects their lives.

      Hawley, the politician, sees it as an occasion to score a political point that has nothing to do with the question of racial justice. It would even have the effect of undermining its importance. Race is not a serious issue for Hawley, certainly not as urgent as protecting the political rights of the Hong Kong Chinese. He seems less concerned by the plight of the Saudis, who are far more oppressed.

      As a response to such twisted reasoning, Woj found the best two words to use in the English language.

      Historical Note

      In a speech on June 11 from the floor of the Senate, Josh Hawley invoked Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address and even called one of the most violent battles of the American Civil War a “shared struggle.” He seems to have retained the idea that when two groups of brave people spent four years massacring each other, they were engaged in an act of sharing.

      In a fundamentally hyperreal way, Hawley has a point. Intolerance and even murderously violent behavior in the US have come to exist as a form of sharing to the extent that everyone willingly and often eagerly participates. His message about the Civil War seems to be that white people disagreed only to end up agreeing in the end, which allowed them to emancipate the slaves for the betterment of the nation.

      This view of history implies that once that was done, the problem ceased to exist. That may be why Hawley feels that what the NBA should be focusing not on saving its season interrupted in March by the COVID-19 pandemic, nor on allowing its players to grapple with their racial identity in US society, but addressing the issue he considers vital for his constituents in Missouri: humiliating the Chinese government, if only to comfort President Donald Trump’s and other Republicans’ chances of being reelected.

      In defending the tradition of the South’s role in the war, Hawley claims that his aim is “not to embrace the cause of the Confederacy, but to embrace the cause of union, our union shared together as Americans.” This is particularly ironic coming from a senator from Missouri, since the status of Missouri played a key role in provoking the Civil War. But, as Hawley notes, once the bloodshed and the sacrifice of more than 600,000 American lives was over, the nation came together.

      As author David Rothkopf notes in an article in Haaretz, Trump “has embraced a defense of the losers in the American Civil War as a central theme of his campaign.” Hawley has stepped up to support both of those causes: defending the memory of slave-holders and reelecting Trump. “Let us work together … to build on the history and the responsibility that we share as Americans,” Hawley said. He never stops insisting that it’s all about “sharing.”

      On July 16, Hawley asked for an investigation of a prosecutor focused on the needs of the black community. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, an African American, “has sought to reduce incarceration and low-level marijuana cases and has angered the St. Louis police union with her reform efforts.” Most objective observers agree that Gardner’s efforts correspond to the most basic reforms aimed at reducing the patent inequality of a system designed to disproportionately imprison members of the black community. Gardner described Hawley’s demand as “a dog whistle of racist rhetoric and cronyism politics.”

      Some of the new “enlightened” populists on the right, such as the otherwise open-minded and anti-racist Saagar Enjeti, see Hawley as a hero, a defender of a working class that includes oppressed minorities. Adrian Wojnarowski begs to differ. A generation of descendants from former slaves probably feels the same way.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Click here to read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      What Will Future Generations Say About Us?

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      This week, 216 years ago, one founding father killed another in a duel in Weehawken, New Jersey. On that early July morning, the vice president of the United States squared off against the former secretary of the treasury. As virtually everyone in America now knows, thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda, Alexander Hamilton didn’t survive the shootout with Aaron Burr.

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      At the beginning of this month, Disney released the film version of Miranda’s blockbuster musical, “Hamilton.” So, I could finally see this extraordinary synthesis of history, biography, music and dance. As a musical, it’s riveting. As political commentary, however, it’s surprisingly dated.

      America’s Musical

      “Hamilton” debuted five years ago, in the middle of Barack Obama’s second term as president. Just as Obama was daily reimagining the American presidency, “Hamilton” reimagined the American Revolution and the creation of the United States.

      By casting people of color as the Founding Fathers — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison —  the musical speaks to the universality of that 18th-century struggle and visually links the oppression of Americans at the hands of British colonialism to the oppression of people everywhere. It’s both a projection backward of Obama’s breakthrough and a lyrical version of an Obama speech.

      “Hamilton” is radical in form: the casting, the incorporation of rap. The content, however, is quite mainstream. Aside from a couple of references to slavery and the interests of wealthy bankers, it celebrates the spirit of 1776 in a way that Americans of all political persuasions can embrace.

      And have embraced. On November 18, 2016, only a week after that gut punch of an election, Mike Pence attended a show, which prompted the actor portraying Burr to say at the close, “We, sir — we — are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights. We truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.” It was a message from one rogue vice president to another.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Pence “appeared to enjoy the show and applauded liberally,” NPR reported. And for the next three years, he ignored the remonstration. Pence and Donald Trump, too, portrayed themselves as revolutionary underdogs — rather than the reactionary overlords they really were — who wanted to be in “the room where it happens.” They, too, were not going to throw away their shot.

      Now, in perhaps the supreme designation of mainstream status, Disney has made “Hamilton” available to the masses. How times have changed.

      In 2020, thanks to the coronavirus, live theater seems impossibly risky (why are the performers touching each other? How can the audience sit so close together?). And, with protesters on the street challenging Washington and Jefferson over their slave ownership, the musical suddenly seems behind the times, though not nearly as backward as Aunt Jemima and the soon to be former Washington Redskins.

      As A.O. Scott recently pointed out in The New York Times, “There’s been a bit of a backlash from the left against what’s perceived as an insufficiently critical perspective on slavery (and also on Hamilton’s role in the birth of American capitalism). At the same time, the extent to which Miranda celebrates America’s political traditions has been taken up as a cudgel against the supposed illiberalism of the statue-topplers and their allies.” Miranda himself has acknowledged the criticisms from the left. History doesn’t stand still for anyone, not Jefferson, not Hamilton, not Lin-Manuel Miranda.

      The Great and the Not-So-Great

      What’s remarkable, of course, is the speed with which the political temperament has changed. In a few short months, statues have fallen throughout the United States, and not just those dedicated to the Confederate cause.

      Also torn down or relocated are statues honoring figures associated with the genocide of indigenous people (Christopher Columbus), with slave-owning (Hamilton’s father-in-law, Philip Schuyler) and with racist policing (former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo). Statues connected to colonialism have fallen in the UK, Belgium and elsewhere. Everything, it seems, is up for debate, even monuments to the heroes of the American Revolution.

      We fully expect books and plays written in the 1950s to seem dated. Ditto those produced in the 1970s or even the 1990s. But 2015? The critiques of American failings — slavery, colonialism, racist policing — are not new. What’s changed is that the powerful have been forced to listen.

      Perhaps “Hamilton,” despite its slighting of slavery and reverence for the Founding Fathers, even played a role in preparing the powerful for this shift. But let’s be real: The destruction of images — literally, iconoclasm — is a lighter lift than the transformation of structures. It’s one thing to take down Confederate statues, but quite another to remove racism’s grip on housing, education and employment. Likewise, it’s more politically palatable to recast a play about the Founding Fathers than to grapple with the ugly truths that accompanied the founding of this nation.

      At a deeper level, the musical and the statues share a common veneration of the great person. History, we are constantly reminded in art and monuments, is the product of founding fathers, great conquerors, kings, presidents and prime ministers. Campaigns are launched to diversify those numbers to include women, people of color, perhaps even an activist or two like Martin Luther King Jr. But the focus remains on the individual, not the countless people who turned the gears of history, planted the fields of history, occupied the streets of history and, ultimately, changed the course of history.

      As “Hamilton” acknowledges, great persons are always a product of their time and place, and they’re always flawed in some way or another. Sometimes, those flaws are of an individual nature, like Alexander Hamilton’s adultery (or, more recently, the sexual harassment charges against Park Won Soon, the progressive activist and former mayor of Seoul who committed suicide last week).

      More often, the famous personages are as blind to their faults as most everyone else in their society. Transforming society requires a collective effort to shine a light on these blind spots, as the Black Lives Matter movement has done, at home and abroad, around police violence, racist iconography and the legacy of colonialism.

      Iconoclasts of the Future, Unite!

      So, perhaps it’s time to conduct a thought experiment. We’ve seen how quickly culture has moved on and left the blind spots of “Hamilton” more readily visible. How will future generations condemn us for our blind spots as they tear down today’s statues tomorrow?

      I can almost hear our children gathering in the street to pull down the statues of the famous as they chant, “Carbon hog!” For will not contribution to the destruction of the planet ultimately be seen in the same light as colonialism, as the plunder and robbery of future generations?

      The emancipation of slaves was a radical act in 18th-century America. The Polish revolutionary Tadeusz Kosciuszko berated Jefferson — his friend — at length to free his slaves, and Jefferson ignored him because, just as Pence shrugged off Burr, he could. Jefferson certainly had mixed feelings about slavery, but he was able to maintain the contradiction in his life of slave ownership and sentiments like “all men are created equal” because popular opinion, as opposed to Kosciuszko’s opinion, allowed him to do so.

      Future generations may feel the same way about our simultaneous recognition of the perils of climate change and our car ownership, air travel and use of air conditioning. Greta Thunberg, our generation’s Kosciuszko, similarly berates world leaders and with as little immediate impact.

      Future generations may also look askance at our nationalism. Why do we believe that we owe debts of obligation to strangers who live within certain borders and not strangers who live outside those borders? How could we countenance the return of desperate migrants and refugees to, in many cases, their certain death?

      And what about all the statues raised to military leaders? It seems rather ridiculous to honor men who oversaw the slaughter of others just because they were on the winning side. Future generations may well look at all the celebrated generals as so many mass murderers.

      Speaking of mass murder, how will future generations feel about the millions of animals that we kill every day for our own consumption? Or even the millions that we own as pets? The list of potential blind spots is long indeed, and there are plenty of motes in my own eye. History is constantly evolving. There is no timeless art; there are no timeless values.

      Everything reflects the moment of its production, from the American Constitution to the latest iteration of “Hamilton.” We are engaged in a long, collective conversation enlivened by a soundtrack of insightful speeches, catchy tunes and the rising roar of street protest. As for those future statues, I dearly hope that they are pulled down, defaced, disgraced. Because that would mean, in a future of superstorms and nuclear threats and periodic pandemics, that at least there are still people around to take them down.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Albania’s Ancient Blood Feuds Trap Entire Generations

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      Basmir Gjeloshaj, a young man from the north of Albania, has been confined to his home for most of his life, as described by Vincenzo Mattei for Al Jazeera. Walking outside could be deadly, not because of the novel coronavirus, but because his father’s murder has pulled him into a gjakmarrja (pronounced Jyak-MARR-Ya) — an Albanian blood feud. In recent months, the COVID-19 pandemic has swiftly halted daily life around the world and forced millions into isolation in their homes. The same fate has befallen hundreds of Albanians trapped inside, some for years on end, as a result of the region’s tradition of revenge killing.  

      These blood feuds are part of an ancient Albanian code of justice that obliges murder to be repaid with murder. Many of those involved in the feuds, including children or teenagers born into feuding families, are only safe from retaliation killings inside their homes. To step outside is to risk your life.

      A Question of Honor

      “I’m well, I’m isolating at home,” Nikollë Shullani said by phone from Shkodër, 100 kilometers (62 miles) north of the capital Tirana. He was referring to the government orders to self-isolate amid the spread of COVID-19 that has even reached his remote city. “Ngujim në shtëpi,” he said, using the same word for coronavirus-related isolation that is used for those locked inside because of a gjakmarrja. Shullani heads an organization called Missionaries of Peace and Reconciliation of Bloodshed, whose aim is to mediate the conflicts between feuding families.

      The goal is pajtimi, or reconciliation, which is achieved through a negotiation process between families. Traditionally the elderly, who are highly respected in Albanian culture, play a central role in these negotiations. Often, negotiations only begin years after the start of the conflict. Shullani has been successful in resolving 12 feuds, but he says that there are still at least 400 currently ongoing in northern Albania.

      These numbers are difficult to verify. In 2016, the chairman of the Committee of Nationwide Reconciliation (CNR) estimated that some 12,000 people have died in Albania’s blood feuds since 1991. The authorities recorded just three revenge killings in 2018, and Operazione Colomba, a volunteer organization, counted six murders “with blood feud elements” in 2016, two in 2015, four in 2014 and seven in 2013, according to a UK government report. But according to the CNR, as many as 1,000 families have been affected by the problem in 2018, with some 300 families living in fear for their lives.

      Blood feuds can begin from theft, threats or even insults — any action that questions one’s honor, which is of extreme importance in rural Albanian society. When such a dispute escalates to murder, the family of the victim is expected to obtain justice by killing the murderer or another male in his family. Then, the burden falls on that family to seek vengeance. This cycle can continue for generations, pulling in descendants who had nothing to do with the original conflict.

      The feuds are rooted in a code of laws known as the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini, which dates as far back as 5th century B.C., according to some scholars. It is named for the 15th-century Albanian nobleman Lekë Dukagjini, who codified the rules of the Kanun, which consists of 12 books and 1,291 articles. These laws are still well known among the northern malisors, or mountain people, and cover all aspects of life, from family and marriage to personal property and justice. They also lay down strict social rules, including that women cannot be targeted in blood feuds and that those who owe blood may not be targeted while inside their homes.

      This is why the men of families involved in gjak (blood) are often confined to their homes at risk of being killed, relying on the women in the family to bring home food and supplies. Even young boys can be targeted according to the Kanun, and lose their chance at an education unless their school sends a teacher to instruct them at home. Some children who were born into feuding families have been trapped indoors for most of their lives. 

      Many are paying for crimes they did not commit. In his article, Mattei recounts the plight of Gjion Mhilli, who “will forever remember the date of September 19, 1992, as the day his brother shot and killed a neighbour in a dispute over land. On the few occasions that Gjion has ventured outside since, he has been threatened or chased, often having to hide in the store rooms of sympathetic shopkeepers.”

      After centuries of practice, the Kanun was outlawed during the second half of the 20th century by Enver Hoxha, Albania’s communist dictator who ruled with an iron fist. Under his authoritarian regime, the practice completely halted. However, it saw a resurgence in rural Albania after the country’s turbulent transition to democracy in the 1990s, which left behind a frail and corruption-ridden government. The Kanun is still applied in the northern and central parts of Albania, and research from the British Embassy in Tirana concluded that these blood feuds are “largely restricted to remote pockets in the mountain north of the country.”  

      The Other Path

      Judges in Albania can often be bribed to dramatically reduce prison sentences, even in cases of murder, and Shullani explains that this weakness in Albania’s justice system is why the Kanun has reemerged in recent times. “The first best thing is the rule of law,” he said. “But when the law fails, the Kanun is the other path.” 

      Shullani recalled one feud that left a particularly strong impression on him — the story of a widow in a village near Shkodër. Her husband’s murderer was released from prison after only two years, which added insult to the pain of her loss. Her four sons lived abroad in Italy, and preferred to forgive the blood rather than initiate a feud, but the widow refused to pardon the murderer. She could not live with the dishonor that this would bring on her relatives and ancestors.

      Those who do not avenge a murdered relative face intense stigma in the region. “In some areas, the tradition of ‘coffee under the knee’ still exists, [whereby] on feast or wedding days coffee is not served at the table but at the level of the feet for those who did not avenge their killed relative,” writes Mattei. 

      Shullani has visited this widow 16 times, even with the village’s kryeplaku, or wise man, and other local elders in an effort to make peace. Her sons have begged her to forgive the murder, saying, “Mother, we want to forgive the blood of our father because we want to live,” Shullani related. “That is not a problem for me,” she replied. “I have four sons; one should give his life in the name of his father.” This widow took it upon herself to seek vengeance, even though feuds are usually fought among men in Albania’s patriarchal society. Her husband’s murderer is still in hiding out of fear that she will kill him, Shullani says.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Despite the barbaric nature of this ancient system, Shullani points out that the strict rules and established process for peacemaking set the blood feuds apart from the random, merciless crime that happens elsewhere. However, some have observed that the rules of the Kanun have begun to erode in recent years. The BBC quotes Liljana Luani, a teacher of children “involved in blood,” as saying: “Nowadays neither the Kanun nor the laws of the state are being followed. It has happened that there have been women killed and children killed” — a violation of the ancient Kanun. “I think the state law enforcement authorities should do more and that they are not working properly.”

      The Albanian Penal Code carries a 30-year sentence for blood feud murders and recent years have seen renewed efforts by police to squash the problem. Still, a report by Cedoca, the Documentation and Research Department of the Office of the Commissioner General for Refugees and Stateless Persons of Belgium, cited meeting with “two experts who expressed strong doubt that the police is capable of controlling, monitoring, preventing and prosecuting the contemporary blood feud phenomenon,” stating that suspects are often released again after an initial arrest.

      Nonetheless, the British Embassy report quoted a local representative of the national ombudsman as saying “the presence of the law has very much advanced nowadays. In the last 5-6 years the law and order were reestablished. Closed cases have been re-opened and potential blood feud cases are treated with particular attention, even in the remote areas. If something happens, the police will intervene nowadays.”

      Shullani and Luani have both dedicated their life’s work to the victims of these feuds. They both agree that the blood feuds will not end until Albania’s government revitalizes its justice system once and for all.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More