Norway forced to deal with gruesome genies

I’ve just watched the Breivik Video Manifesto, an odious, misogynist and ridiculous grab-bag of far right anti-Muslim ideas with a childish appeal to crusader and templar nonsense. I won’t be linking to it, go search it out yourself if you want to see it. No doubt my viewing it along with countless others is exactly what the mass murderer wanted to happen. American journalist Kevin Slaughter found more ravings in the aftermath of Anders Behring Breivik's slaughter in which a quiet, dangerous lunacy shines through. The hint of menace is there throughout, though the capacity to carry such ideas to their illogical conclusion still defies reason.

Breivik’s actions puts him in a different category to Martin Bryant, Michael Ryan, Thomas Hamilton, Cho Seung-Hui or countless other madmen who destroyed multiple lives randomly in mundane settings. Breivik’s aim was to wipe out an entire political class, both the current generation at the Oslo offices of the Prime Minister and the next generation at the youth camp in Utoya, leaving almost 100 dead people in his grisly wake. The first hand account of Prableen Kaur on Utoya is more chilling than anything Hollywood could dream up by way of terror. Nor was it the end of the matter. Unlike most of the other mass murderers, Breivik did not do the decent thing and turn the gun on himself. Instead he gave himself up and spoke freely of his actions in the start of the second act of his deadly charade.

Breivik’s careful planning of his actions took into account the aftermath. In setting up his recent Twitter and Facebook accounts, he knew the media would trawl all over his digital footprint in the wake of the atrocity. He was relying on mass media to get his message out beyond the lunatic fringe. This was why it was so important the judge closed the court when Breivik appeared this week. He desperately wanted an open court and be seen wearing a uniform. Some painted it as a press freedom issue, but the question needs to be asked “press freedom to do what?”

Judge Kim Heger agreed with police there was nothing to gain from giving him a soapbox. Heger did the right thing by kicking the media out and placing Breivik in solitary confinement for four weeks. Despite the need for transparency in the law, the media could simply not be trusted in the matter. On Saturday, many established journals were led astray by the feverish demands of the media machine, and blamed Islamic extremism for the events without a shred of evidence. Nature and the media abhor a vacuum and the information gap was filled with “fact free conjecture” as Charlie Brooker put it.

Afterwards there was the inevitable mad scramble to find out as much as possible about the life and motivations of the killer. Most picked up the crumbs of evidence he deliberately left behind. Others rushed into the arrant nonsense that the shootings somehow “destroyed Norway’s innocence.” Nor was Norway “suddenly exposed to the banality of evil.” This clichéd rot says nothing other than express a maudlin faux-sympathy for those who suffered a terrible loss. Many people have lost relatives or friends but that is no reason to infantilise the tragedy. Norway is a complex first world country not an eight-year-old child.

Immigration is on the rise in Norway as it is across Europe. Many are uneasy with the changing demographic though few would be prepared to be violent about it. Islam is the country’s second largest religion and there has been a corresponding rise in support for the anti-immigration Progress Party, now the second-largest party in Parliament. Lilit Gevorgyan, Europe analyst at the IHS Global Insight think-tank, sees the killings as a chance to be a catalyst for an honest discussion of the issue in the political centre. "If the twin attacks fail to trigger an honest discussion of the issue, exposing often scare-mongering arguments used by the extreme right, this may marginalise the radical groups and worsen the situation, which in turn could bring more similar attacks in the future," Gevorgyan said. "This is not just an issue in Norway. Across Scandinavia and also in Western and Eastern Europe, you have a lot of people who are very frustrated by the lack of open debate.” Maybe this is giving in to Breivik, but he has released the genie and it will be impossible to put it back in the bottle.

HRW uncovers LRA massacre in Congo

A new Human Rights Watch report has given details of a large scale massacre of civilians in north-eastern Congo by the Ugandan rebel group the Lords Resistance Army in December last year. In a well-planned operation, the LRA killed more than 321 civilians and abducted more than 250 others, including at least 80 children in northeastern DRC near the border with Sudan. The attack was one of the largest single massacres in the LRA’s 23-year history and witnesses said for days afterwards the remote area was filled with the “stench of death.” (photo © 2009 Reuters)

The horrific nature of the attack is outlined in HRW 67-page report “Trail of Death: LRA atrocities in Northeastern Congo” (pdf version).It was one of a series of assaults in the Haut-Uele and Makombo regions of DRC late last year during a vicious four-day operation to abduct child soldiers for their operations. In each town they arrived in, the LRA pretended to be Congolese and Ugandan army soldiers on patrol, and spoke in broken Lingala (the common language of northern Congo) to reassure locals. Then they tied them up with ropes or metal wire at the waist, often in human chains of five to 15 people and dragged them away. The victims included many children aged 10 to 15 years old who were made to carry pillaged goods. Anyone who refused, or who walked too slowly, or who tried to escape was killed. Hundreds were hacked to death with machetes or had their skulls crushed with axes and heavy wooden sticks.

Both the Congolese and Ugandan governments had previously claimed the LRA was no longer a threat to the DRC. HRW says embarrassment over these claims contributed to the lack of news of the massacre reaching the outside world. A DRC army investigation unit arrived in the area a week later and concluded the LRA had carried out the attacks but no further action was taken. Ugandan soldiers attempted to pursue the assailants but without success.

It wasn’t until the end of December that news filtered through to MONUC, the UN peacekeeping mission in Congo. Though it regarded the LRA as the enemy, MONUC did not have the resources to investigate. Its priorities were to defend the district capital Dungu from LRA attack, and attend to the long-running crisis in Kivu. However after a HRW briefing in March, MONUC sent a team of human-rights specialists to the area to investigate.

The attack was coordinated by General Dominic Ongwen, commander of LRA forces in northeastern Congo. Ongwen is wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes committed in Uganda and he divvied up the abductees among the LRA commanders and separated into multiple smaller groups, each heading in a different direction. HRW has now called on the ICC and the DRC to investigate Ongwen and his two most senior commanders for their role in the massacre.

It will be a task easier to ask than answer. Originally restricted to Uganda, the LRA has now evolved into a regional power causing deadly mayhem in Uganda, southern Sudan, CAR, and Congo. They were pushed out of Uganda in 2005 and now operate in the remote border areas between southern Sudan, Congo and CAR. Despite continual attacks from multiple directions, including the 2008 US-logistics backed Operation Lightning Thunder, the LRA has proven remarkably resilient and able to regroup to continue their attacks against and abductions of civilians. In retaliation for Operation Lightning Thunder the LRA attacked numerous Congolese villages around the end of 2008 killing almost a thousand civilians and abducting hundreds more.

HRW says one hope of defeating the LRA comes from the US government. On 24 February, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Senate told the Foreign Relations Committee “I have been following the Lord’s Resistance Army for more than 15 years. I just don’t understand why we cannot end this scourge. And we [the US government] are going to do everything we can to provide support we believe will enable us to do that.” Three weeks ago the Senate unanimously passed the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act. The bill is now before the US House of Representatives and if enacted into law requires the Obama administration to develop a regional strategy to stop LRA attacks, LRA, work to apprehend their leadership, and support economic recovery for northern Uganda.

HRW says the people of northeastern Congo and other LRA-affected areas across the central African region have suffered for far too long. “They are waiting for strong, effective action to end the LRA’s atrocities,” said the report. “[And also] to see the safe return of their children and other loved ones who remain with the LRA, and to let them know they are not forgotten.”

Massacre in Central Nigeria

Human rights groups have called on Nigeria’s interim president to launch an immediate investigation into the tit-for-tat murder of over 400 villagers in the centre of the country two days ago. The killings of men, women and children in Nigeria's Plateau State took place on Sunday morning, when an armed group arrived in the mainly Christian villages of Dogo Nahawa, Zot, and Ratsat, 10 kilometers south of provincial capital Jos. The group shot into the air to draw people out of their homes before cutting them down with machetes. (photo by Reuters)

The strong stench of decomposing human bodies filled the air before they were removed to three mass burial sites. A state official who headed the Rescue and Recovery Committee said about 380 were buried at Dogon Na Hauwa while about 36 corpses would be buried in the two other graves. A small number of the bereaved families made their own burial arrangements. Plateau State Police Command said 96 people were arrested with four of the fleeing killers shot dead by security forces.

Witnesses interviewed by US-based Human Rights Watch said the attacks were committed by Muslim men speaking Hausa and Fulani against Christians, mostly of the Berom ethnicity."This kind of terrible violence has left thousands dead in Plateau State in the past decade, but no one has been held accountable," said Corinne Dufka, senior West Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. "It's time to draw a line in the sand. The authorities need to protect these communities, bring the perpetrators to book, and address the root causes of violence."

Civil society leaders in Jos said that the attacks were retaliation for previous attacks against Muslim communities in the area and the theft of cattle from Fulani herdsmen. On January 19, more than 150 Muslim residents were killed in an attack on the nearby town of Kuru Karama. In that attack scores of the residents were hacked to death and their bodies stuffed into wells. State agencies went missing in that attack and also in the revenge attacked that followed this week.

Religious and land-related clashes in the state have claimed more than 2,000 lives since 2001. The ruling state and national party the People's Democratic Party is supported by Christians while Muslim mainly back the opposition All Nigeria People's Party. And because the Hausa-speaking Muslims are often referred to as settlers, they are barred from taking official positions, gibing further rise to hatred.

Nigeria’s racial problems have been exacerbated by a constitutional crisis triggered by a long illness to President Umaru Yar’Adua. Yar’Adua spent three months in Saudi Arabia clinic before returning to Nigeria last month. However he has yet to resume any duties and four Saudi heart specialists arrived in Nigeria on the weekend as his health deteriorated. His exact health status is shrouded in secrecy as Acting President Goodluck Jonathan and other ruling party members have still not been granted access to see him in his Intensive Care Unit within the state house.

The Acting President is a Christian unlike the Muslim Yar’Adua as part of an unwritten agreement to take turns sharing the presidency between north and south. Jonathan comes from the oil-rich Delta region, an area with a sense of resentment that northerners stolen its wealth. The stand-off between the northern and southern factions has paralysed the administration of the country since Yar’Adua fell ill. Everyone is now waiting to see how the armed forces respond to the crisis. As Jonathan Clayton said in The Times “few people would like to see a return to military rule, but an unstable Nigeria is a nightmare prospect for both African and Western leaders.”

CPJ report condemns Russia’s treatment of journalists

A damning new report from a US-based watchdog says Russia’s treatment of journalists is worse now than it was during the Communist era. 17 journalists have been murdered there since 2000 and in only one case have the killers been caught and punished. Only Iraq and Algeria are more dangerous for members of the press. According to the report from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) this represents “a sorry record for a great and powerful nation that embarked on democratisation after more than 70 years of brutal repression”. (photo credit: Argenberg)

The mixed messages on Russia appear in CPJ's report “Anatomy of Justice: The Unsolved Killings in Russia” released last week. It shows secrecy, corruption, lack of accountability, and conflicts of interest routinely thwart justice in the murders of journalists in Russia. As well as expressing outrage, the report offers guidelines and evidence for restarting investigations into unsolved murders. “When journalists are threatened, democracy itself is threatened,” it warned.

The report laments the apathy of the Russian people who seem unconcerned by the murders. CPJ says this is because the vast majority get only government-filtered news, so outrage has been muted. The 17 journalists who died were uncovering the truth in a wide range of topics: organized crime, corporate corruption, bribe-taking among public officials, and unrest in the Northern Caucasus republics. In each case authorities pretended there was another motive involved such as robbery or a personal grudge so as not to investigate the political element of the killings.

Take the case of Aleksei Sidorov, editor of Tolyattinskoye Obozreniye who was killed in the Volga region city of Tolyatti. Sidorov had exposed organised crime and government corruption in the car-manufacturing city (“Russia’s Detroit”) as did the editor who preceeded him, Valery Ivanov. Assailants shot dead Ivanov and 18 months later stabbed Sidorov repeatedly with an ice pick. The official version was Sidorov was killed in a random street brawl after he refused a stranger’s appeals for vodka. As in many similar cases, investigators made no efforts to check out his records, interview witnesses, or visit his news organisation.

The Novaya Gazeta newspaper has suffered more than most for its courage in exploring Russia’s underbelly. Three of its best reporters - Igor Domnikov, Yuri Shchekochikhin, and Anna Politkovskaya – have been murdered. In February, three defendants in the Politkovskaya trial were found not guilty after the evidence presented against was skimpy. Though the case is now being retried, no one expects justice to emerge. “Once again, the state had given the masterminds an easy pass,” said the CPJ. “Only the small fry were in the dock.”

CPJ says the failure to achieve justice reflects shortcomings at every level: political, investigative, prosecutorial, and judicial. The poor record of solving journalism-related killings stands in sharp contrast to Russia’s stated record in solving murders among the general population. One of the country’s top law enforcement officials, Aleksandr Bastrykin, has said the vast majority of murders have been solved in recent years. Bastrykin, however, has publicly acknowledged discovering who ordered the Politkovskaya murder would be much harder.

The Kremlin must take a large slice of the responsibility for the problem. It has marginalised critical journalists by barring them from state-controlled national television and obstructing their work through regulations and bureaucratic harassment. Murder investigations are secretive affairs, marred by conflicts of interest and frequently influenced by external political forces. Investigators have failed to follow up on journalism-related leads or question professional contacts while police have concealed important evidence without explanation. It is hardly surprising to find many of those murdered were among the harshest critics of the Kremlin.

CPJ have recommended the Prosecutor General order a thorough re-examination of all 17 cases. It should pursue unchecked leads, track down wanted suspects, and examine professional motives. Where there are conflicts of interest, cases should be reassigned. Investigators and prosecutors should also communicate clearly and regularly with victims’ families. Until this is overturned, the Russia media system will continue to be based on self-censorship leaving many important areas under-investigated or completely uncovered. CPJ said the international community had a role in holding Russian leaders accountable for their record. Key institutions such as the OSCE and the Council of Europe need to resist Russian attacks that claim they should not concern themselves with human rights. The murdered 17 deserve nothing less. Also, it is in their own vested interests to do so. "An undemocratic Russia is a threat to international stability," CPJ said.

Mafia acquitted of killing God's Banker

A court in Rome has acquitted five people accused of murdering Italian financier Roberto Calvi due to insufficient evidence. Calvi was known as “God’s Banker” due to his work on behalf of the Vatican’s bank. The decision comes almost 25 years to the day of his death. In 1982 his body was found hanging from London’s Blackfriars Bridge with rocks and $15,000 in cash stuffed into his suit. London police initially ruled it suicide but Italian prosecutors eventually brought murder charges in 2003 after pressure from Calvi’s family. The five cleared this week are Giuseppe "Pippo" Calo, a mafia money launderer, businessmen Ernesto Diotallevi and Flavio Carboni, Calvi's driver and bodyguard Silvano Vittor, and Carboni's Austrian ex-girlfriend Manuela Kleinszig.

While the acquittal of Kleinszig was not unexpected (the prosecution had asked for her charges to be dropped due to insufficient evidence), the release of the four others after a 20 month trial was a shock. Prosecutors had asked for life sentences for all four. One of the detectives involved in the case, Geoff Katz, said he was surprised by the verdict. "It'll be a tremendous disappointment for the families and also the Italian magistrates who have spent so much time on this case," he said. But one of Calo's lawyers, Massimo Amoroso, said the evidence was weak. The judges have yet to release their reasoning for the verdict.

The acquittals leave a sense of continuing uncertainty over how Calvi met his death. Roberto Calvi was 62 years old when he was found hanging from a rope attached to scaffolding under the bridge. He had come to the UK on bail after having been convicted of corruption in Italy. During the trial, prosecutors alleged Calvi was taken to the bridge by boat and was probably still alive but unconscious when a noose was placed around his neck.

The Milan-born Calvi was chairman of Banco Ambrosiano which collapsed shortly before he died. The bank was founded in 1896 as a Catholic bank and named for St Ambrose, the fourth century archbishop of Milan. The bank’s purpose was to act as a counter-balance to Italy’s secular banks. Calvi joined Ambrosiano in 1947 and worked his way up to become chairman by 1975. Calvi created a number of off-shore companies in the Bahamas and South America and also bought Italy’s premier newspaper Corriere della Sera.

Meanwhile the bank’s major shareholder was now the Institute for Religious Works (IOR), the official name of the Vatican bank. In 1971 Pope Paul VI appointed Chicago-born Archbishop Paul Marcinkus chairman of the IOR. The burly Marcinkus was a papal bodyguard known as “the Pope’s gorilla”. He saved the pontiff’s life after he knocked a knife out of the hands of a deranged Bolivian painter who lunged at the Pope in the Philippines. The bank job was his reward. Marcinkus was a practical man when it came to financial affairs and his dictum was “you can’t run the church on Hail Marys”. He knew the unworldly Vatican needed a commercial banking partner and in 1974 he chose Banco Ambrosiano.

Calvi was a compulsive operator and used a complex network of overseas banks and finance companies to move money out of Italy, inflate share prices, and secure massive unsecured loans. By 1978 the bank was in deep trouble. The bank of Italy issued a report that found Banco Ambrosiano had made illegal exports of several billion lire. In 1981 Calvi was put on trial and given a four year suspended sentence and a $20 million fine for taking $26.4 million out of the country in violation of Italian currency laws. Incredibly Calvi kept his job at the bank.

While investigating Calvi, police uncovered a link to financier Licio Gelli. Both men were freemasons and Gelli was the leader of a covert Masonic lodge called Propaganda Due (P2). This lodge was extremely powerful and its members were journalists, parliamentarians, industrialists, and military leaders and the heads of the three Italian intelligence services. When police searched Gelli’s house they found a document called the Democratic Rebirth Plan which was a plan to steer Italy towards a more autocratic government. Its existence scandalised Italy. Gelli fled the country, but the affair brought down the government of Arnaldo Forlani.

A year later Banco Ambrosiano was on the verge of collapse with debts of $1.4 billion. It was revealed that Calvi had given the money in questionable loans to three of Banco Ambrosiano’s Latin American subsidiaries. The bank was accused of money laundering for P2 and the mafia. Archbishop Marcinkus and the Vatican bank were implicated. The IOR owned ten of the overseas dummy companies in the Bahamas and South America to which Ambrosiano lent the money.

Calvi was devastated by the discovery of the loans. On 5 June 1982, he wrote a letter to Pope John Paul II in which he pleaded for help. The letter started: “I have thought a lot, Holiness, and have concluded that you are my last hope.” Calvi went on to warn the pope that the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano would “provoke a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions in which the Church will suffer the gravest damage”. He also claimed the IOR were hiding the facts about the Vatican’s financial irregularities from the pope.

Five days later Calvi left Rome, presumably without an answer from the pontiff. He obtained a false passport and flew to London. The prosecution in the court case alleged he was lured to London so he could be killed for embezzling Mafia funds as well as stop him from revealing what he knew about the Vatican Bank and P2. After being missing for seven days, he was officially sacked from the bank. On the morning after a mail-room clerk of the Daily Express, walking to his job on Fleet Street, found Calvi swinging from Blackfriars bridge in London’s financial district.

An initial autopsy judged the death as suicide. But a second autopsy a year later gave an open verdict. In 1984 the Vatican Bank agreed to pay US$224 million to the 120 creditors of the failed Banco Ambrosiano as a “recognition of moral involvement” in the bank's collapse. In 1987 Milan judges investigating the Ambrosiano affair issued a warrant for Archbishop Marcinkus’s arrest for being accessories to the fraudulent bankruptcy of the bank. But because the Vatican enjoyed protected borders under the 1929 Lateran Treaty, the Italian police could not arrest him. The Pope accused the Italians of a “brutal cover-up” and refused to extradite him. Marcinkus was quietly retired to Phoenix, Arizona.

Calvi's family continually maintained that his death had been a murder. His body was exhumed in 1998 and a forensic report four years later concluded he had been murdered. The case was re-opened in 2003. The ringleader of the five people charged was Pippo Calo, a Mafia gangster already serving a long prison sentence. Prosecutors said they believed Calvi was murdered by the Sicilian Mafia and mainland Italian mobsters, the Camorra, as punishment for pocketing money they had asked him to launder. The prosecution presented forensic evidence that he was strangled and his suicide staged in a manner suggesting Mafia or Masonic ritual.

But after this week’s verdict, his family are in anguish again. Calvi's son Carlo who now lives in Canada never believed that his father's death was a suicide. He said he was disappointed but not surprised. "I never thought this was going to end today," he said. "But these are the individuals I consider responsible for organizing his journey to London and his murder on the behalf of others."