Another perspective on the unthinkable

The Arab media are giving prominent coverage to the horrific events at Virginia Tech yesterday. Al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya and Iraqi television have been reporting the story all morning, so that all the staff at lunch today knew that 32 people had been killed and nearly as many wounded in what everyone is now calling the worst shooting incident in American history.

Campus shootings always trigger emotional outpourings in the U.S. Columbine was a touchstone of the 1990s and, depending on what we learn in the next few days, Blacksburg may be one for this decade.

In Baghdad there's an obvious, if not totally apt, comparison. In January, Mustansiriya University, a historic, prominently Shiite school, was hit with a double suicide/car-bombing that killed 70 people and wounded 170 (pictured below). A few weeks later, a female suicide bomber struck, killing 40 and wounding 35. In the midst of so much sectarian killing, the massacres at a place of higher learning were still seen by many Iraqis as something singularly evil.

The difference, besides the body counts, is that most university students in America will show up to class today. Some students who on Tuesdays ordinarily sleep in -- or sleep one off -- might even show up too. The nation's classrooms will be a place for students and professors to work through their feelings about what happened at Virginia Tech. Students at USC or Texas can go to class safe in the knowledge that a suicide shooting spree isn't going to occur on their campuses, and that campus security will be under orders to pay a little more attention, at least for a little while.

In Baghdad, however, the suicide attacks on Mustansiriya were part of a much larger bloodbath. Since the start of the civil war, students have been kidnapped and held for ransom, outspoken professors have been assassinated by rival sects, and few people even risk showing up to class anymore. Many if not most students and teachers have left the country, leaving a generation of young people bereft of an education. The rest cower in fear. In January, attendance at Baghdad University was 6 percent. (While that may fly on some UC campuses, it's plain tragic.)

And it continues. Today, Iraqslogger reports:

On Monday, the same day as the Virginia Tech mass shooting, two separate shooting incidents struck Mosul University, one killing Dr. Talal Younis al-Jelili, the dean of the college of Political Science as he walked through the university gate, and another killing Dr. Jaafar Hassan Sadeq, a professor from the Faculty of Arts at the school, who was targeted in front of his home in the al-Kifaat area, according to Aswat al-Iraq.

I don't point any of this out to minimize what happened at VA Tech, which is unspeakable. It's just what people here are talking about.

One of our drivers, Hussein, a guy who speaks little English but is enraptured by all things American, asked me whether there was any information on the VA Tech killer. I said he was apparently an Asian student. Doesn't matter, Hussein said -- "All the Arabs will be sent home," and everyone laughed. I did too, but felt sad that he immediately made the war-on-terror connection.

I told everyone about the video that CNN showed a few thousand times last night, the video you've all seen by now, shot by a grad student on his cellphone. I said his name was Jamal Albarghouti -- and the whole table groaned. The name was Palestinian. "They're going to have a lot of questions for him," said Laith, a reporter. He kept everyone rolling as he briefly assumed the role of FBI interrogator. "How did you get such a good video? What else can you tell us?" I didn't know what was more cringe-worthy -- Laith's American accent, or the joke he was making.

Passport fever

If you're an American and you own a passport, you're in the minority among our countrymen. Recent estimates say that 21 percent of Americans hold passports - a fact that my snootier European friends tend to believe explains everything about my country. A few weeks ago two friends who left Nairobi for London last year returned on holiday with their 10-month-old son. I marveled at the baby's ability to make that long journey. That's nothing, the father said - they'd taken him to Australia over Christmas.

Yes, not even a year old, and he's got a passport with more stamps than most Americans get in their lifetimes.

This may be changing. The number of people applying for passports each year actually declined in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but now it's rising fast. The L.A. Times reports that the State Department will issue a record 17 million passports this year - up from 12 million last year and 10 million the year before. People are being forced to wait up to 10 weeks for new passports as the agency tries to cope with the demand; even the $60-extra expedited service, which I love, now takes four weeks or longer, the paper says.

No doubt part of the rush is due to new travel rules that require Americans to have passports to travel to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. But that law doesn't take effect until next year. The trendline of American passport-holders clearly points upward.

People like to find all kinds of symbols of American provincialism, from the diminishing coverage of foreign affairs in our newspapers and TV news programs to the blind way we went into Iraq. And wasn't 9/11 supposed to discourage Americans from traveling abroad?

So while it's mostly symbolic - and while I'm sure that the bulk of the new passports will be used to travel to a foreign country that's accessible by car - I think this passport surge is a hopeful development. Despite all the opposition worldwide to the United States right now, it tells the world, Hey, we're coming anyway.

Raining death and disinformation

The headline on the cover of Wednesday's Daily Nation

here in Nairobi was serious:

U.S. WARPLANE RAINS DEATH ON SOMALIA

Not exactly what you want to wake up to if you're a U.S. official in Kenya. The U.S. government has been trying to convince the people of Somalia, and of East Africa, that it isn't trying to bomb the crap out of Somali civilians, or take revenge for the 1993 "Black Hawk Down" battle in Mogadishu that left 18 U.S. servicemen dead, or set up a military base in Somalia from which it can rain death on unfriendly Gulf countries, or occupy Somalia to keep transnational terrorists from setting up shop. All these theories are espoused in Somalia, and none of them, say U.S. officials, is remotely true.

And yet all we heard from the U.S. government for three days this week, since it was first reported Tuesday that a U.S. military helicopter had bombed a group of suspected al-Qaida affiliates in remote southern Somalia, was a loud silence. On Tuesday and Wednesday, residents reported new airstrikes, and thousands of people fled their villages. Meanwhile, Somali government officials and civil society groups were describing civilian casualties in the dozens, and angry rebukes were coming in from the U.N. Secretary-General, the Arab League, the Italian Foreign Ministry and elsewhere over the "indiscriminate" U.S. bombing. News stories for three days reflected these dramatic accounts.

As it turned out, the reports were very likely wrong, or at least exaggerated. Yesterday the U.S. government launched a PR offensive to counter the reports. The ambassador in Kenya told the BBC Somali-language service that there had been only one U.S. airstrike, on Monday, and that no civilians were killed, although he didn't say how he knew that. A top official in Kenya later briefed a group of journalists on background and confirmed that, but also refused to offer details. Some officials in Washington and Nairobi speculated that further airstrikes could have been conducted by U.S. ally Ethiopia. Then suddenly a Somali government spokesman who had said Wednesday that U.S. raids were ongoing, changed his story and said there had been only one U.S. strike.

Who knows what the real story is. There's a lot of misinformation and disinformation out there, but in a place like Somalia - lawless, chaotic and mostly inaccessible to outsiders - anyone who steps up to the mic is going to be heard. As we tried to report Tuesday and Wednesday on what was happening, my colleagues from rival news organizations and I tried to insert the appropriate caveats. "It was unclear whether..." "Unconfirmed reports said..." "According to residents' accounts, which could not be independently verified..." The last refuges of journalists working in the fog of war. (Or whatever this was.)

We probably didn't win any journalism prizes this week. But the U.S. government didn't help matters by staying silent for so long. Forty-eight hours is an eternity these days, and the U.S. should have put its version of events out there sooner. It might not have averted the firestorm, but it would have helped calm some Somali fears.

As the U.S. official who briefed us privately yesterday acknowledged, things still move slowly in the bureaucracy of the State Dept. and the Pentagon, and the delayed response reflected some confusion and buck-passing. But I believe it showed more than that.

It showed how low Africa still ranks on the U.S. priority list. Had this been Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan, you would expect a swifter public-diplomacy operation. Yet even though this was a covert counterterrorism operation against al-Qaida targets that had suddenly become public and produced an outcry in a Muslim nation, it was still in Africa, and therefore less deserving of attention. Or so it seemed. Every U.S. official who comes through this region insists that they are trying to do good in Somalia. This is a place where the U.S. has a bad history, including Black Hawk Down in 1993. And since 9/11 they've warned that it could be a place where terrorists take root.

You can't blame the government entirely. Somalia has been a big story for three weeks now, since the Islamists who ruled the country were driven out by Ethiopian troops starting around Christmas. For a couple of days there, Africa was a front-page story in the United States for several days in a row. If you looked at a major U.S. paper that week, you'd see Somalia stories with bizarre datelines like London, Zanzibar and, in my case, a tagline saying that I "reported from the United States" (I was at my parents' house in California). That was the sign of journalists' vacations getting screwed up to cover this. It was a priority for news organizations. And yet most people I spoke to in the U.S. that week had no idea there was anything happening in Somalia, or where Somalia was. One person asked me if I meant "Sudan."

So we've all got a long way to go in figuring out this most maddening of African countries. If it's as important to U.S. interests as the Bush administration keeps telling us, and it probably is, we ought to all pay a bit closer attention. The good news is that this is a time of major change in Somalia and after the events of the past few weeks it's probably going to register on the journalistic radar a little better.

Vote today

I hope everyone reading this in the U.S. is able to go out and vote today. I've covered a couple of elections this year in a couple of desperately poor countries, Uganda and Congo. In both countries, turnout easily topped 50 percent. In Congo last month, some people walked miles barefoot in the rain to vote, babies strapped to their backs, having not eaten a decent meal in days or weeks. Maybe you can't compare. But Americans really have no excuse.

 

I say this, and yet I must admit - I didn't vote in this election. I kind of have an excuse, but basically I didn't get my act together in time and by the time I started hunting around online to get an absentee ballot mailed here, it was too late. I don't take much consolation in the fact that my Congressional district is "safe" (how many of them really aren't?). But I'm signing up now for 2008 - not gonna miss that one.

 

Dan Rather is apparently lending his election night wit and wisdom to Jon Stewart on Comedy Central - which is a great bit of casting and sounds like the most entertaining and informative way possible to ring in the new Congress.