The Somalis have elected a new President, the guy who lead the Islamic Courts Union government. Ethiopia, with US backing, did their best to kill him and his forces and drive them out. Maybe the U.S. won't do that again. The ICU is not entirely compatible with custom Somali laws, which don't, for example, include cutting off of hands. However, they are anti-pirate, and I understand that when the ICU was in power before, things were somewhat more stable (lack of stability is the status quo in Somalia since 1991, the last time the country was unified under one government.)

     2054 is the 1000th anniversary of the official Catholic-Orthodox split in Christianity. It was a language issue, in any event not a debate about whether the Holy Spirit comes from the father, or the father and the son. The Russians have a new Patriarch today, and he has no plans to heal the rift.

     Gaddafi has been elected Chair of the African Union, a body which has been making some really bone-headed moves in the last year (e.g. initial reactions to Guinean and Mauritanian coups). His idea? To create a United States of Africa. Another, imho, bone-headed move. I'm much more inclined to have a United States of Arabia (Morocco to Syria to Saudi Arabia) and a state over all Bantu African states. However, since governments usually trump people, it might make even _more_ sense to have two great blocks, of Francophone and Anglophone Africa. That would be a bummer, but, there isn't a Standart Bantu language.

     Shoe hurled at Prime Minister of China during speech. Do any shoes come with pie attachments?

Am I Even Supposed to Believe This?

    The Sri Lankan government, having surrounded a 120 sq. mi. region in the northeast of that country, has had its President say that the LTTE, the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Elam, should *not* prevent the 250,000 civilians from fleeing the area.

     Just days earlier this SAME Sri Lankan government claimed there were only 1,000 LTTE fighters left.

     I think we all know that each LTTE fighter is not in charge of guarding 250 Sri Lankans and preventing them from leaving the region.

     Of course not.  The Sri Lankan government is Covering Its Globally Visible A** by saying this, so it can later say "We wouldn't have killed all those civilians if it the LTTE hadn't prevented them from leaving."

     What's even worse, in my humble opinion, than the words of the Sri Lankan President is that the NY Times-owned International Herald Tribune runs this AP story with the headline that re-inforces the governments claims.  Are the AP and NY Times secretly in the thralls of the power of Sri Lanka?  No, it is simply that they are against anyone, including the American Revolutionaries (see: Boston Tea Party, where uniforms were not worn), who would use violence to achieve a political end regardless of the merit of that end.

     In addition, the Sri Lankan military, PERFECT IN ITS ABILITY TO DISTINGUISH LTTE FROM TAMIL CIVILIANS, has decided not to declare any sort of ceasefire while encouraging the Tamil-speaking community to charge them and attempt to push through their battle lines (i.e. leave).

I have been sorely remiss, the LTTE

     The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam.  The world's most prolific suicide bombers (Hindus killing Buddhists).  This, like so much conflict today, has some roots in Colonialism.  The British wanted to weaken the Sinhala-speaking, Buddhist (~75%) majority, so they gave all the powerful positions to the Tamil minority, who were a tad bit more sophisticated before the Brits arrived.  After the Brits left, and Democracy was adopted, things went ever downward for the Tamil.  The Sinhala bastards even tried to effectively outlaw their language, which led to mass riots. 

     Now the Sri Lankan government, dominated by the Sinhala, is on a tear, blowing up women and children and men and militants, asserting that they might be on the verge of destroying a terrorist group by force for the first time in history.  Could someone talk to them?  They are making sure the media is not allowed to witness their actions, atrocity or liberation, but, per usual, if it were just liberation, what would they have to hide?

Clan or "Ethnic" Based Polities (UPDATE 1)

UPDATE 1: Add Ferraro paragraph at end

     In many countries in Africa and the Middle East which have many linguistic or tribal groups, the government is often from one group.  It is easy to imagine that qualified people outside the clan consider this unfair, unjust, possibly corrupt, or, at least, a bad recipe in the long run. 

     Already in American politics, family often trumps quality.  Let's face it, George Walker Bush was considered a real candidate not because he was a likable, upbeat idiot with a alcoholic, privileged asshole background, but because his father was President. 

     Let's not hand the Senate Seat in New York to Caroline Kennedy.  She is not an expert on our wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, she is not an expert in terrorism, she is not an expert in Russia (still the #2 nuclear missile power), China, India or trade issues, she is not an expert on the economy, she is not an expert on Health Care, she is not an expert on taxes, she is not an expert on the justice system.

     Instead of any qualifications, Caroline Kennedy has a very, very large rolodex.  She has this because of the connections of her clan, the Kennedys. 

     If she had even one of these expertises, I could consider supporting her.  Instead I am embarassed for America and her increasingly clannish ways.

     It turns out Geraldine Ferraro wants Caroline Kennedy also not get the post, pointing out the same thing, and wrote to Governor Patterson should nominate one of the six, sitting female members of New York's Congressional delegation.  Excuse me, Geraldine?  You were abysmal during the Democratic primaries, and you are abysmal here.  We should pick people solely on the basis of which reproductive organs they have?  That is often a top priority for dating, but totally irrelevant in politics.  Could we review the list of experiences (I forgot Global Climate Change! Another expertise Caroline Kennedy doesn't have) I presented?

Language & Conflict: A Report from Afghanistan

     Many thanks to WIIIAI, for this link to a discussion of the language issue (Dari (vs Farsi) vs Pashto) in Afghanistan.  Student conflicts have resulted in 100s of injuries.  The Culture Minister is accused of being against all Iranian influence as foreign, and un-Afghan, but the same guy supports the use of English.  One person says that people re using the language issue to divide Afghans, as part of a plot.  If I have done that, I apologize.  My main interest is justice, specifically administrative/legal justice, a requirement for good governance, which requires that the judge, jury, lawyers, witnesses, police and prison guards can all communicate reasonably effectively with the accused.

Language And Conflict: New Categorization of Problem Types

     Noam Chomsky, to try to point out the error of my ways, pointed to the 1994 Rwandan genocide as an example of a deadly conflict within one language community.  Of course I'd known about this event, and consider it only one among many major events in the last couple decades, but more recent e-mail conversations about Rwanda with Chomsky have led me to an insight I hadn't previously had.

     Some of the problems, and certainly the class Chomsky was thinking about, concern when groups speaking different languages share one country, or government, and fight over power, land or access to resources.  I like to point to the examples of Switzerland and India as possible ways to handle this.

     A different set of problems emerge when you take one (large-enough) language community and divide it up with internationally recognized (sacrosanct) lines.  Examples include, but are not limited to

• Kinyarwanda-Rundi, although small, the part in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been particularly influential.  I made that graphic specifically to show Chomsky what I was talking about, and it was key to helping me get to the understanding I am trying to relay in this post.
• The Taleban, or, more exactly, the Pashtana tribesmen of the Hindu Kush and Koh-e-Sulaiman mountains (Pashtan is singular, Pashtun is the Indian corruption of the word).
• The Sudan (Deby, President of Chad, comes from a tribe which is half in Sudanese Darfur.
• The Kurds
• The Somalis (still without a government, 17 years running).
• Even Ossetia. Divided between Russia and Chechnya

Again, as if you needed any reminding, all of these borders were drawn up by Europeans, who, generally speaking, organized things for their own interests (if you look at the Pashtana map, it looks as if "divide and rule" was their interest).

     Somali, Rwandan, Kurdish, Pashtana and Zaghawa speakers have all, definitely hosted rebel groups on one side of the border to attack and destabilize the government on the other.  In fact, all of them are doing it today.

     Peace out.

Themed Post 2: On Categorization of Languages

     The point is that mutual intelligibility is equality, but that there is also a "linguistic distance" between languages, which might be measured by the time it would take an average person speaking the first language to learn the second. All sufficiently alien languages, I would say, are equally distant. The distance between French and Italian, on the other hand, is relatively small. It might be possibly to plot these distances.  It might be possible, given that linguists tend to come up with terms for features in a language like verb-subject-object order, that language distance roughly corresponds to the number of language feature differences.

    

Language & Conflict: Status of Forces Disagreement Between U.S. and Iraq

Roads to Iraq says Iraqi PM Allawi says there are translation problems with the agreement.  The NY Times has a story on the general fall apart of the non-agreement.

Language & Conflict In the News: South Ossetia Peace Deal in French

Bad French Prolongs Russia-Georgia Conflict, from the Telegraph, UK. 

Bernard Kouchner told a meeting of EU foreign ministers at the weekend that the ceasefire agreement was written in French before being translated into English and then Russian. Asked what problems surrounded the buffer zones, Mr Kouchner replied: "The translation, as always."

Language And Conflict In the News: Georgian and South Ossetian

This is a NY Times story by Ellen Barry discussing the linguistic issues in Georgia and South Ossetia mostly from the perspective of individuals.  It includes language bias preventing people from learning the language of the "other."

A war between the two groups in the early 1990s divided them almost surgically. Young Georgians stopped learning Russian, the lingua franca for the entire region in Soviet days; young Ossetians did not learn Georgian. Older people, who spoke both, pretended not to.

Magdalena Frichova, who monitored the conflict in South Ossetia for 10 years for the crisis group, recalled watching local officials wait, poker-faced, for a translator even when it was obvious that they understood. Over time, people began to struggle with languages they once spoke fluently.

Ellen Barry seems ignorant of early Soviet history, which encouraged society in the local language, and even redivided the Tsar's Russia into 15 Soviet Republics, each with their own language (although Belarus and Ukrainian are almost completely mutually intelligible with Russian).

Persephone (UPDATE 1)

UPDATE: Colored Ilam province (in Luri and Bakhtiari) in red, see comments
     A map of the Persephone world.  Dari, I know, is Persian, while Tajik, I think, is very close.  It looks like the colors are very good choices.


Image from Wikipedia, I found it looking up the Pashto Language.

Language and Conflict: South Ossetia

When Georgia was actually in charge of South Ossetia, they tried?forced? South Ossetians to switch away from the Ossetian language.

Georgia has no policy for linguistic/ethnic minority representation in the unicameral Georgian parliament. There are six Azeri MPs, and, "[a]s not all these MPs understand Georgian, it is unclear how they participate in the parliamentary work."

Language and Conflict: The coup in Mauritania

Is it ever good to have a coup?  I don't know how corrupt Abdallahi was, or how meaningful his anti-secular moves were.  This one made me think about the 1999 coup in Guinea-Bissau, which also started after the President fired the chief of the Army, who then turned around and started a coup.  In Guinea-Bissau, new elections were held within a year, and, other than the fact that the new President's forces hunted down and killed the coup leader, the former Army chief, it all went pretty smoothly.

The coup in Mauritania happened two days ago.  It was mostly bloodless.  According to the Associated Press:

Police reportedly fired tear gas at about 50 people who had gathered near the main market of Nouakchott [the capital]. Otherwise, the city remained calm.

Wikipedia's coverage of the Mauritanian coup is very comprehensive (like their coverage of South Ossetia).

Pretty much everyone in Mauritania speaks Arabic, so there are no meaningful internal language considerations.  Wikipedia's reports that although most of the rest of the world is acting outraged, the Arab League and the Arab Maghreb Union are both sending delegations to investigate.  My theory says that if the Arab language governments are OK with this, we should tend to give them the benefit of the doubt. 

General Aziz has promised elections quickly. 

Since Aziz has been in power before, and has been around for a long time, there is no reason to think this will have any impact on the decades long conflict between Mauritania and Morocco over Western Sahara.

No Overlap At All: Russian Tanks Enter Georgian Ossetia

In my language and conlict website, I write about South Ossetia a little, as part of a larger discussion of post-Soviet conflicts.

If you get Russia Today(RT), the 24 hour English language news station from the Russian perspective, you definitely need to compare it to the story you might get from CNN.  There was no overlap in the facts of the case at all.  CNN has an exclusive interview with Saakashvili, and MSNBC and FOX are not covering the story at all.  The President of Georgia, definitely a U.S. rather than Russian ally, says they did nothing to provoke the Russian invasion, and they bravely have shot down two planes.  The Russian perspective, only available on Russia Today, says the Georgians fired artillery into North Ossetia (on the Russian side of the border), deny all reports of downed planes, and claim they are doing what they can to stabilize the situation.  CNN calls it an invasion, RT calls it Georgian provocation. 

Georgia, in this case, lacks a U.S. presence in the cable media, so outlets like CNN will have to do. 

Just as a reminder, Georgia has plenty of problems with Russia already.  Russia backs the de facto independent Georgian province of Abkhazia.

I made this map by eliminating lots of data from a CIA map.  The "R"s represent Russian population centers.

Ignoring the political perspective for a minute, only RT has footage of what is going on and discussions of what towns have been impacted and how.

Language and Conflict: Review of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation

An eloquent and useful work for German Supremacists and neo-Nazis.

Fichte wrote "Addresses..." during the period when Napoleon controlled Germany.  Fichte gave these lectures in an attempt to rally the locals to rise up and get rid of the Corsican upstart.  Most of his plan to get them psyched up?  Pandering. 

He starts with a lot of talk about education, and near the end of this section he actually says that poverty and crime will pretty much dissapear with his proposed education system. Virtually no details are provided, but he says the kids will love it and he also says during it each will becom accustomed "to bear every effort and hardship."  Sounds like something the kids will love!

His discussion of education might be retarded, but it isn't the offensive part.  For this, Fichte makes up a ludicrous and factually incorrect linguistic argument to buttress his claims that the Germans are the only true people on Earth.  It's really silly, but the gist is that if ever your ancestors are conquered, and forced to learn a new language, they will be cut off from all further intellectual progress.  Fichte claims, clearly and repeatedly, that only Germans are capable true thought, or original philosophy.  That non-Germans can never truly learn the German language, because it is too much for them.  Non-Germans, who think they've thought of something?  It's like a faerie on the grass, no impact at all. 

I read this book because some academics and others pointed to Fichte as an important herald in the field I've been developing, language and conflict.  It turns out that, other than his crackpot theory of the role of language in the ability of people to think, he mentions language, or German, very little.  He fears, in one section, that Germans will be forced to adopt French (some already had) and this will make them permanently subject people. He says that even should German survive as a literary language, German men of letters would be powerless to perform what he sees as the "noblest privilege and sacred function" of an intellectual, to address a people's most important affairs.  Fichte ends this portion, as far as language is concerned, by saying "Germany was split up into several separate States. and was held together as a common whole almost solely by the instrumentality of the man of letters, by speech and writing."

It is obvious now why the German Romantics liked him, at least at first. They were, themselves, literary men who took an interest in affairs of State.  Soon after actually meeting Fichte, however, they stopped hanging out.  He didn't last long as the first Chair of Philosophy of the new Berlin University (1810), either.

After that, there is only this quote, which I like and which is poetic.  It is from the very last Address before the conclusion, which makes it odd how he starts...

To begin with and before all things: the first, original and truly natural boundaries of States are beyond doubt their internal boundaries.  Those who speak the same language are joined to each other by a multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself, long before any human art begins; they understand each other and have the power of continuing to make themselves understood more and more clearly; they belong together and are by nature one and an inseparable whole.  Such a whole, if it wishes to absorb and mingle with itself any other people of different descent and language, cannot do so without itself becoming confused, in the beginning at any rate, and violently disturbing the even progress of its culture.  From this internal boundary, which is drawn by the spirital nature of man himself, the marking of the external boundary by dwelling-plae results as a consequence; and in the natural view of things it is not because men dwell between certain mountains and rivers that they are a people, but, on the contrary, men dwell together -- and, if their luck has so arranged it, are protected by rivers and mountains -- because they are a people already by a law of nature which is so much higher.

So, other than one part of one sentence (highlighted in orange) which rings true and isn't absurd, Fichte doesn't address languages and nations at all.

Learning Pashto Progress

Today I went to a website written in the Pashto language and I recognized three words: Taleban, Afghan, and American.  Hardly a large vocabulary, but it was kinda exciting for me, especially since they were all in a row and the first words on the page I read.  Oh, you say, they are all basically words that are transliterated from English.  I speak English!  That's sorta the point!

Massive Translation Program

Daniel Pipes apparently translates every one of his articles into

Arabic	Chinese (S)	Danish	Dutch	French
German	Hebrew	Hindi	Italian	Portuguese
Russian	Slovak	Spanish	Swedish

You can see a sample of his deep and abiding ignorance.

Language and Conflict: In the Whitehouse

Hu Jintao has been very open in many ways about his concerns and the pressures he feels, as have I. And I feel comfortable. And by the way, that's not easy when there is a language barrier. And yet, I can report to you that we do have cordial, relaxed conversations -- in spite of the fact that we both have interpreters. It's much easier when you are dealing with a person that speaks your own language. Since the only one I speak is English, it's important to have English speakers. -- President George Walker in the Roosevelt Room, July 31st, 2008

Many thanks to WIIIAI, who reads Bush speech transcripts, and sent this in.

Zimbabwe Addenda: Kenya and internal Languages

Anglophone Kenya has a stake in the outcome in Zimbabwe.  Like America in 2000, we will never know who won in Kenya's 2007 election.  The US and EU quickly moved in and started pushing the Kenyans around, insisting on some sort of compromise (just like America welcomed international calls for a Bush-Gore unity government in 2000, and would welcome such calls again).  What they did was create the post of Prime Minister, and gave it to the person who appeared to have been cheated.  A U.S. Republican Party backed group, the IRI, was one voice that used exit polls to denounce the original election.  Kenya, by the way, has three of Africa's four major language groups, and the voting division was along linguistic regional lines.

Kenya's agreement, in part foisted on them from the outside, becomes an especially bitter pill if Zimbabwe suffers no such meddling (would you sit idly by if foreigners encouraged us to change our Constitution because of a close, allegedly fraud-ridden election?).

Enough of Kenya, what about Zimbabwe's internal language situation.

The majority group in Zimbabwe is, like the Shia in Iraq, about 60-65% of the total population.  Unlike Iraq, however, the smaller groups are much smaller: one at 10%, three around 5%, another four around 3%.  The Shona people have run Zimbabwe from the beginning.  Zimbabwe became independent only in 1980, the white government having become independent from the British during the days when Britain was spinning off her colonial empire.  Quite soon after independence, there was violence between the Shona and the second largest group, the Ndebele speakers. 

Language and Conflict in the News: Zimbabwe (UPDATE 1)

Update: Added final paragraph on possible motives

Robert Mugabe is a dictator, but it is only the Anglophone world that cares.  The current anti-Mugabe campaign is centered in London, with support from many Commonwealth countries (roughly over fifty former British colonies, and therefore Anglophone) and America.  Zimbabwe used to be a member of the Commonwealth but pulled out after the last round of criticism.

Hard to prove, sitting here, that official interest in this case is from Anglophone governments, I'll try.

This article from Bloombberg some country's official reactions to Zimbabwe's election. The UK, US, Canada and Kenya (former British colony) are the only sources of criticism.  South Africa (Anglophone) and Djibouti(Francphone) are voices supporting the status quo (minus all the criticism).  By the way, Gordon Brown looks like a fool in the article, saying African countries are no longer willing to support Mugabe (where are South Africa and Djibouti?).

This article is about Chinese opposition to U.S. proposals for sanctions, and also mentions Russia is against sanctions.

Although the G8 has issued statement calling Zimbabwean elections a sham, it includes Russia, whom we have already seen do not support doing anything about it.

What do you know about the MDC, anyway, other than that they want to protect English landowners?  Could this be part of the reason the UK has been so unwavering in their opposition to Mugabe over the last few years?  Do you think the Tsvangirai doesn't have his own militias, and his own propensity to resolve things via violence?