Semple, "A Dispute Half a World Away Darkens a Movie House in Queens"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/nyregion/27bollywood.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

Access: May 27, 2009 (all emphasis mine)

May 27, 2009

A Dispute Half a World Away Darkens a Movie House in Queens 
By KIRK SEMPLE

A surge at the box office has made this spring a surprisingly happy one for the movie business. And as the big summer films arrive, Americans are expected to pile into theaters in even greater numbers.

Yet at one little cinema in Jackson Heights, Queens, the plot line is not so happy. The Eagle Theater is shut tight, its steel burglar gate pulled down and its marquee blank, battered and dark.

The cause of the theater’s untimely closing — like many things that happen in this bustling immigrant neighborhood — lies not in New York but clear on the other side of the planet.

In Mumbai, India, a seven-week-old strike by film producers has brought Bollywood, that country’s multibillion-dollar film industry, to a halt. The Eagle specializes in first-run Bollywood movies, and without a supply of new films, theaters like it around the world have had to screen old ones, dip into the pricier Hollywood and European film catalogs — or shut down. 

“You get more frustrated when you have no say in it,” said Mohammad Asif, a Pakistani businessman who helps to manage the 500-seat Eagle, nestled in the heart of a neighborhood thick with immigrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and shops selling products from South Asia. “We’re not part of their problem, but we’re affected.”

Bollywood producers began striking in early April, after the owners of India’s multiplexes rejected their demand for a larger share of the theaters’ profits. The Eagle, owned by a Pakistani business associate of Mr. Asif’s, closed soon afterward.

Mr. Asif said business had also been “pretty bad” at the movie house he owned, the Bombay Theater in Fresh Meadows, Queens. It remains open, though just barely, and is screening a recently released Punjabi film whose distribution was not affected by the dispute in Mumbai.

He and his business associate, Amjad Khawaja, bought their theaters 15 years ago, converting them from pornographic movie houses. And Mr. Asif said the Eagle would reopen as soon as the strike ended and new films were finished. 

In fact, the temporary ravages of the strike, he said, are minor compared with a longer-term scourge that threatens scores of small ethnic movie houses like his across the country: film piracy.

As illegal versions of new films — including those from the vibrant Bollywood and Latino film industries — have proliferated farther and faster around the world, especially through file-sharing Web sites, box office revenue has fallen at small theaters that build their programming around new releases, industry experts say. 

A year and a half ago, Mr. Asif said, the Eagle welcomed about 1,000 customers a week. By this spring, before the strike, that number had fallen to about 400.

“To be perfectly honest,” he said, “the last two years have been tough. A year ago was very tough. The last six months? Tough, tough and tough.”

“We can go dry for a month, six weeks, no big deal. But piracy. ...” His voice trailed off. “The slow, poisonous effect of piracy,” he muttered. 

Patrick Corcoran, a spokesman for the National Association of Theater Owners, a trade organization based in Washington, said that according to a study commissioned by the Motion Picture Association of America, pirated films cost American movie theaters about $700 million in lost revenue in 2005. Market experts believe that the annual losses have only mounted since then.

“If you talk to the studios, they’ll tell you that keeping a film off the Internet or off the streets for a week will mean tens of millions of dollars to them,” Mr. Corcoran said.

Theaters that specialize in films from developing countries can be hurt even more by slow distribution networks. The longer a new foreign film has been in release abroad, Mr. Corcoran said, the better the chances that it will be pirated and illegally distributed in the United States.

In the South Asian community of Jackson Heights, the Eagle’s closing has left some moviegoers feeling bereft. 

Seema Kapoor, 51, an Indian-American who lives in nearby Woodside and works as a saleswoman at a duty-free shop in La Guardia Airport, said she used to go to the Eagle at least once a month, with her sister, who visits frequently from Philadelphia, or a group of about 15 female co-workers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. 

“We’d say, ‘Let’s go to do some shopping in Jackson Heights,’ and we used to make a plan to go see a movie,” Ms. Kapoor said, adding that the theater’s proximity to her house — within walking distance — made the experience that much better. 

Employees at a video and music store next to the shuttered theater said their business had suffered since the Eagle closed because there was less foot traffic on the block. 

Still, on a recent afternoon, customers streamed in and out of the store, which specializes in South Asian films and music. An Indian customer at the counter asked for a film called “Gumnaam: The Mystery.” The clerk pulled the DVD from a shelf and handed it to him, but the man seemed unsatisfied. 

“Do you have the cheaper one?” the man asked, using code for a pirated version. The clerk demurred, yet the man asked again. The clerk, a college student from Pakistan, just shook his head. 

The customer turned to this reporter and smiled somewhat sheepishly. He said he lived in both Mumbai and New York and used to see movies at the Eagle frequently. “Every movie,” he said. “For years now.” 

Asked what he did for a living, the man paused. Suddenly the woman next to him whirled around and blurted: “He’s a movie producer! His nieces are the biggest stars in India.” She pointed at the DVD in his hand and exclaimed, “That’s his!” 

He was Shubir Mukerji, managing director of Filmalaya, a Bollywood film production company. The woman was his wife, Melissa. She said she had grown tired of watching him perform his undercover investigations to see whether his film, which was released in December, had already fallen into the stream of the American street piracy market. 

“He was acting,” she said. “Doing a bad job.” 

Mr. Mukerji explained that he was on an unplanned vacation in the United States because of the strike; he was supposed to have been shooting his next film in Frankfurt and London.

He was hopeful, he said, that the strike would end soon: The Bollywood producers were waiting for a reply to their latest settlement proposal. “We offered them a good deal,” he said. “We hope they’ll accept it.” 

With that, he paid $15 for an authentic DVD of “Gumnaam: The Mystery” and, with his wife and young daughter in tow, disappeared into the pedestrian bustle of Jackson Heights.

Majeed Babar contributed reporting.

My input: บทความนี้น่าสนใจตรงที่สิ่งที่เกิดขึ้นในอเมริกา (ที่โรงหนังต้องปิด) เป็นผลมาจากสิ่งที่เกิดขึ้นอีกฟากของโลกในอินเดีย (คนสร้างหนังประท้วงเรื่องส่วนแบ่งของการฉายหนังในโรงหนัง) และอีกอย่างตรงที่แม้ว่า piracy จะเป็นปัญหาสำหรับโรงหนังอเมริกัน แต่มันเป็นปัญหาที่ใหญ่กว่าของโรงหนังที่ฉายหนังจาก developing countries เพราะว่ากว่าหนังจะถูกนำมาฉายที่อเมริกา--ซึ่งใช้เวลานาน--หนังก็ถูก download online ไปเรียบร้อยแล้ว

Overland: American Colleges Raise the Flag in Vietnam

From: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i36/36a00101.htm

American Colleges Raise the Flag in Vietnam

Interest in partnerships with local institutions is high, but so are the bureaucratic hurdles

By MARTHA ANN OVERLAND

From the issue dated May 15, 2009

More than 30 years after the U.S. ambassador was airlifted from the embassy rooftop in Saigon with the flag tucked under his arm, a new American flag is going up in the city. This one won't be flying over the embassy. The Stars and Stripes, as well as the Texas state flag, are going up at the Saigon Institute of Technology, the only Vietnamese college to offer an American-accredited two-year degree.

"They've come a long way since 1975," says Gigi Do, director of international initiatives at Houston Community College, which offers six associate-degree programs in cooperation with the institute, in Ho Chi Minh City.

When her family fled Vietnam after the war, Ms. Do thought she would never see the country again: "And now it's 2009, and we are flying the Lone Star flag over their building."

Houston isn't the only American college to take note of the opportunities in Vietnam.

Hundreds of institutions, American and others, have signed memoranda of understanding with Vietnamese counterparts. Dozens offer jointor dual-degree programs. American colleges are helping the Vietnamese design curricula and teaching materials.

And interest is still growing. In Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), a recent conference sponsored by the U.S. government attracted 100 participants from American academic institutions interested in doing business in Vietnam.

"This was an eye-opener to me," says Michael W. Michalak, U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, referring to the large numbers of American partnerships in the country.

Despite the continuing worldwide economic slump, "there is no pullback in interest, that's for sure," says Mr. Michalak, who has championed efforts to overhaul Vietnam's education system.

With one million students graduating from high school every year, and places for fewer than 20 percent to go on to higher education, Vietnam is promising ground for education prospectors. And with China's education market considered saturated and India's barring foreign degree providers, Vietnam can look pretty enticing.

"People are trying to get a foothold here, just like Coca-Cola," says Bahr Weiss, an associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, which this fall will begin offering a doctoral program in clinical psychology in conjunction with Vietnam National University in Hanoi.

Vietnam, acknowledging that its education system is broken, has hung out the welcome sign, particularly for engineering and computer-science programs, which teach the skills most in demand here.

The education ministry actively encourages joint ventures. Visiting foreign professors encounter far less red tape than they did just five years ago. A pilot program even allows some local universities to hire American institutions to redesign their curricula and train their faculty members to teach the material.

Vietnam, it seems, is the next big thing. Or is it?

Whether from inertia, frustration, or both, plenty of those signed memoranda are gathering dust on administrators' shelves. Joint degree programs, begun with great fanfare, have closed and quietly gone away. After the handshakes and the tea drinking, sometimes the only thing to show for months or years of negotiations are the photographs of smiling officials standing next to a bust of the country's revered leader, the late Ho Chi Minh.

Vietnam may have embraced free-market reforms nearly two decades ago, but its education system remains hobbled by Soviet-style decision making. Despite talk of granting more autonomy, the central government is still involved in faculty hires and sets the curricula at most universities. The lumbering bureaucracy makes even the smallest changes difficult to put into effect. Widespread corruption, from nepotism to kickbacks, has only made it worse.

Eyes Wide Shut

"It takes a lot of patience to work here," says Dennis F. Berg, a sociology professor emeritus from California State University at Fullerton. An academic-program adviser in Vietnam since 1991, he now teaches on a U.S. government-financed fellowship at Hoa Sen University, in Ho Chi Minh City.

In many cases, he says, the signing of a cooperative agreement is followed by the "deafening sound of silence."

Around 80 percent of international initiatives, he estimates, do not offer tangible results. "Our campus has put a lot of money into Vietnam, but we have little to show for it," Mr. Berg says. "Programs start up, and you turn around and they're gone."

They can be sabotaged by something as petty as professional jealousies. Mr. Weiss, of Vanderbilt, spent nearly a decade setting up the clinical psychology program. Just as Mr. Berg did, he learned to speak Vietnamese along the way.

Supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, Mr. Weiss put his time in getting to know the right people, securing permission to officially raise the program as a possibility, and getting the final approvals. Still, after all that, the venture almost didn't come about.

"People in a different department tried to scuttle the program," says Mr. Weiss, referring to a rival group at the Vietnamese university. "The challenges are that this is a country with limited resources, and people tend to fight for what there is, and people will block other people's successes."

It is not enough to sign an agreement. Those who have successfully navigated Vietnam's education system say newcomers can trip up because they fail to monitor every single aspect of the relationship.

"Foreigners don't pay attention," says Mr. Weiss. "I've seen so many projects wasted."

Ms. Do, of Houston Community College, cannot count the times she has had to fly in and sort out misunderstandings. As a speaker of Vietnamese, she insists it is not a translation issue. Sometimes it's something as simple as the local partner's overselling the program to students' parents.

That may not sound like a big deal, says Ms. Do. But unless Houston maintains the quality of its Vietnam program, it risks losing its own accreditation. Consequently, the community college sends department heads to Ho Chi Minh City every semester to sit in on classes. The college holds frequent teaching workshops for the Vietnamese lecturers.

The efforts have paid off. Though the annual $1,500 tuition is more than 10 times as high as what Vietnam's state universities charge, in just five years the associate-degree program has grown from 400 to 3,000 students.

The Houston college itself benefits, too. Although Ms. Do won't divulge how much money it receives, she notes that the proceeds support faculty development and a scholarship program back home.

Academic Prospecting

Troy University, which offers programs in 11 countries, runs another joint program that is prospering in Vietnam. The curriculum for its master's program in business with Vietnam National University is the same as that offered in the United States. But about half of the professors are Vietnamese, a demographic that saves on costs.

Even though tuition is $4,800 a year — four times Vietnam's annual per capita income — the Alabama-based institution is able to fill the courses it offers.

Much of the appeal of Troy to Vietnamese undergraduates is that it caters to those who failed to get into a Vietnamese university. The program is a second choice for most, says Vu Manh Tuan, one of its students. That is because the competition for the relatively few seats at the inexpensive public universities is cutthroat. Yet students are surprised how hard they have to work at the American curriculum in order to graduate.

"It's easy to get in, but it's not easy to get out," says Mr. Tuan, which is the reverse of what happens in a Vietnamese university.

Most of the partnerships, however, are not moneymakers. For all the talk of Vietnam being Asia's next economic tiger, it remains a poor country. A small upper-middle class has emerged that can afford to send its children to the more expensive joint programs, or even abroad, for a degree. But plenty of other students struggle to come up with the average $130 annual tuition that the public universities charge.

Of course, foreign institutions understand that such ventures offer benefits like international exposure, which helps faculty members and students remain competitive. But colleges looking to make big bucks right away may be disappointed.

Gil Latz, vice provost for international affairs at Portland State University, which is helping Vietnam's education ministry develop a computer-science curriculum at the University of Science, in Ho Chi Minh City, says not all of the benefits can be measured in dollars. Portland's work in Vietnam is considered worthwhile even though "we do not seek to recoup our investment in time and money," he wrote in an e-mail message to The Chronicle. "That would be virtually impossible."

Quality Control

Most American universities looking to set up degree programs here are well established, accredited institutions that understand that going into business in a new country takes a major investment of time and money. Yet American academics both in Vietnam and back home are increasingly concerned that not all foreign ventures are on the up-and-up. Because of lax rules governing partnerships with foreign universities, unaccredited institutions are finding Vietnam easy pickings.

Mark A. Ashwill, director of the Institute of International Education's office in Vietnam, has watched the number of dubious distance-learning courses steadily rise over the past several years. These "rogue providers," he says, prey upon uninformed students who are desperate for an American degree.

"It's easy to set up shop and recruit students from overseas," says Mr. Ashwill. "For some it's their primary and most lucrative market. They are called rogue providers for a reason."

No moves have yet been made to regulate or toss out unaccredited providers in Vietnam, say several academic insiders. (The Ministry of Education and Training did not respond to repeated interview requests.) Mr. Ashwill can only warn Vietnamese officials who seek his advice to steer away from forming partnerships with certain disreputable institutions. The problem is that students who want to transfer to the United States or use their degree to get a job may find that their qualifications are worthless.

The State of Oregon's Office of Degree Authorization, for example, has declined to recognize the degrees issued in Vietnam by Northcentral University, an online enterprise based in Prescott Valley, Ariz., that offers an M.B.A. program in cooperation with the Hanoi University of Technology.

Alan L. Contreras, administrator of the state agency, says that until the qualifications of the faculty members in Vietnam and the quality of the program are ascertained, the degrees will not be recognized in Oregon.

John A. Taylor, vice president of the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, Northcentral's American accreditor, says the university "does not have commission approval to offer any on-ground degree programs in the U.S. or abroad. To our knowledge, all of its programs are delivered online."

Le Hong Hai, the Hanoi university's deputy director for international cooperation, says as far as he knows, Northcentral is accredited to offer programs in Vietnam, and that is good enough. His university does not really consider a potential partner's reputation when making an international deal, he adds. Northcentral was chosen, he says, because of "its low cost, the academic requirements are not too high, and it is accredited."

Oversight of international academic programs has been a continuing challenge, says Mr. Contreras.

"We have been concerned for some time that U.S. institutions that operate overseas often have insufficient ability to determine what is really happening at the foreign site," he wrote in an e-mail message. "It is very hard to figure out what Northcentral actually does in Vietnam."

Overhauling a broken system is not easy, nor can it be done overnight, says Le Quang Minh, vice president of Vietnam National University in Ho Chi Minh City, who is an outspoken proponent of international partnerships.

"We are trying to be selective," he says "but in higher-education reform we have so many things to do."

Whatever bumps there are along the way, Mr. Minh has no doubt that working with and learning from foreign institutions, including America's, is the path Vietnam must follow. "The international programs have been part of the stimulus for change," he says. Change must reach not only the classrooms, he goes on, but also the leaders of Vietnam's system of education.

My input: Shifting focus from China and India to Vietnam?

Singer: A life to save: direct action on poverty

A life to save: direct action on poverty
Peter Singer

People with more than enough have an immediate and personal obligation to help those living in extreme poverty, says Peter Singer.
11 - 05 - 2009 [date of publication]

Imagine you come across a small child who has fallen into a pond and is in danger of drowning. You know that you can easily and safely rescue him, but you are wearing an expensive pair of shoes that will be ruined if you do. We all think it would be seriously wrong to walk on past the pond, leaving the child to drown, because you don't want to have to buy a new pair of shoes - in fact, most people think that would be monstrous. You can't compare a child's life with a pair of shoes!

Yet while we all say that it would be wrong to walk past the child - and probably nearly all of us really would save the child in the pond - there are other children whose lives we could save just as easily, and yet we are letting them die. The United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) estimates that nearly 10 million children under 5 years old die each year from causes related to poverty. That's 27,000 a day - a sports-stadium full of young children; and the number is exceeded by thousands of older children and adults who die from poverty every day as well. Some children die because they don't have enough to eat or clean water to drink. More die from measles, malaria, diarrhoea and pneumonia - diseases that don't exist in developed nations, or if they do, are easily cured and rarely fatal. 

One man described a case in Ghana to a researcher from the World Bank: "Take the death of this small boy this morning, for example. The boy died of measles. We all know he could have been cured at the hospital. But the parents had no money and so the boy died a slow and painful death, not of measles but out of poverty." 

Unicef, Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), and many other organisations are working to reduce poverty and provide clean water and basic healthcare, and those efforts are reducing the toll. If the groups had more money, they could do more, and more lives would be saved. Most people living in affluent nations - including amid the current "hard times" - have money to spare, money that they spend on luxuries like clothes they don't need, vacations in exotic places, even bottled water when the water that comes out of the tap is safe to drink. Instead of spending money on these things, we could give the money to an organisation that would use it to reduce poverty, and quite possibly to save a child's life. 

It's not hard 

True, the situation in which you can rescue the child in the pond is not exactly the same as that in which you can donate to an aid organisation to save a child's life. There is only one child in the pond, and once we have saved him, we have solved the problem and need not think more about it. But there are millions of children in poverty, and saving one of them does not solve the problem. Often this feeling - that whatever we do will be merely "drops in the ocean" - makes us feel that trying to do anything at all is futile. But that is a mistake. Saving one child is not less important because there are other children we cannot save. We have still saved a life, and saved the child's parents from the grief that the parents of that boy in Ghana had to suffer. 

Emotionally, we are more likely to help a child we see in front of us, and less likely to save one very far from us, especially if we cannot even put a face or a name to that child. We have evolved in small face-to-face communities, and our compassion is rarely evoked by statistics and words without images. But today we live in a different world, and we are able to help people thousands of kilometres from us. The facts about human psychology do not justify us in ignoring the plight of those who are far from us. 

It is also true that saving a child drowning in a shallow pond is a simple thing to do, whereas reducing global poverty is complex. But some aspects of saving human life are not so complex. We know that providing clean water and sanitation saves lives, and often saves women hours each day that they previously spent fetching water, and then boiling it. We know that providing bed-nets reduces malaria, and immunising children stops them getting measles. We know that educating girls helps them to control their fertility, and leads them to have fewer children. 

We can at least help people to have these things. Beyond that, we can try a variety of bold and enterprising ideas for reducing poverty, from microcredit to higher-yielding seeds to a basic-income grant. We need to experiment, and to assess the results of the experiments, so that we learn what can work, and what does not work. In that way, even though not every aid project will be a success, each one will contribute to greater knowledge about how to create the successful aid projects of the future. 

People with more than enough have a moral obligation to help those who, through no fault of their own, are living in extreme poverty. It's not hard to do.

Peter Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University, and laureate professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE), University of Melbourne. His website is here.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/a-life-to-save-direct-action-on-poverty

___________________________________________________________________________

My input: "But today we live in a different world, and we are able to help people thousands of kilometres from us."

Singer is a professor of bioethics! An interdisciplinary approach to global poverty...

Fathi: Iran Releases Journalist Convicted of Spying for U.S.

May 12, 2009
Iran Releases Journalist Convicted of Spying for U.S. 
By NAZILA FATHI

TEHRAN— An Iranian-American journalist who was sentenced to eight years of jail on charges of spying for Washington was released Monday after an appeals court reduced the sentence, her lawyer said.

Saleh Nikbakht, one of the two lawyers who defended Roxana Saberi in an appeal hearing on Sunday, said the court turned down the original jail term and issued a two-year suspended prison term in its place. 

“The verdict was given to me in person today,” Mr. Nikbakht said. “The appeals court has accepted our defense.” 

Ms. Saberi had been held in Evin prison since January. The court ruling meant that she can leave the country immediately if she decides to, Mr. Nikbakht said as he awaited her release with Ms. Saberi’s parents, who live in Fargo, North Dakota, another lawyer for Ms. Saberi, and a crowd of journalists and photographers. 

Mr. Nikbakht gave no further details about her release or her plans. But her father, Reza Saberi, told The Associated Press: “In the next few days, we will make travel plans to return home.”

Her whereabouts after her release were not immediately known.

Ms. Saberi, 32, has lived in Iran since 2003 and worked as a freelance journalist for National Public Radio and the BBC. She was arrested in late January for buying a bottle of wine, which is illegal in Iran. But the charges against her escalated to working without a press card and then spying for Washington. Her press card had been revoked in 2006.

The sentencing had threatened to complicate political maneuvering between Iranian and American leaders over Iran’s nuclear program, an issue that kept relations icy during much of the Bush administration. President Obama recently made overtures to Tehran about starting a dialogue over the nuclear program, and Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, responded positively. 

Ms. Saberi was found guilty in April in a trial her father said lasted less than an hour. The State Department called the charges against Ms. Saberi baseless and asked for her release.

Soon after her sentencing, Mr. Ahmadinejad urged the chief prosecutor to re-examine the case. 

In the appeal, Mr. Nikbakht argued that the espionage charge should be lifted because the foreign ministry and the judiciary had previously said that there was “no hostility between Iran and the United States.” The judges accepted the defense, he said.

The Paris-based press freedom group, Reporters Without Borders, welcomed the appeal court’s decision in a statement on its Web site.

Sharon Otterman contributed reporting from New York.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/world/middleeast/12iran.html?ref=global-home&pagewanted=print

___________________________________________________________________________

My Input: What interests me about this news article is that the report doesn't really dig deep into the "issue"--espionage. So the charge was really "baseless"? I'm not suggesting that it was or it was not. Instead I wish the issue was discussed more in the article. Perhaps information is kept private for the sake of Saberi's safety?

McEvers: In Anti-Piracy Fight, Yemen May Be Part of Problem

In Anti-Piracy Fight, Yemen May Be Part Of Problem

by Kelly McEvers

Sixth in a series

Khaled Fazaa

Yemeni forces escort Somali pirates upon arrival at the southern port of Mukalla on the Gulf of Aden on April 27. The previous day, the pirates had seized an oil tanker off Yemen's coast. Yemeni special forces stormed the tanker, killing three hijackers, capturing 11 and regaining command of the ship.

Morning Edition, May 8, 2009 · Yemeni special forces stormed an oil tanker that had been seized by Somali pirates last week, killing three pirates and capturing 11 more.

The government of Yemen, which is just across the Gulf of Aden from Somalia, is trying to portray itself as part of the solution to piracy in the region. But others say that Yemen — which is itself a failing state where sympathy for the Somali pirates runs deep — might be part of the problem.

The pirates had seized the Yemeni-owned tanker just 10 miles off Yemen's coast, after it left the port city Mukalla. The next day, the Yemeni coast guard retook the ship and brought the alleged pirates back to port. The men were paraded in front of reporters while the Yemeni national anthem blared from a coast guard boat.

Some of the accused pirates wore nothing more than their underwear. One was hopping on one leg.

Mohammad Hajri, a Yemeni coast guard captain, said the pirates would be detained and interrogated, then brought to trial.

Pirates Just 'Ordinary' People

It was the fourth group of alleged pirates from Somalia to be placed in Yemeni custody. In February, 10 men were captured by a Russian navy boat and handed over to the Yemeni coast guard. Officials say that group of Somalis was caught with Kalashnikovs, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, ammunition and a small, fast boat. The group now awaits trial.

Yemeni reporter Mohammad al-Qadhi met the accused Somalis in the library of the central jail in the port city of Aden. He says the men told him they started out as fishermen, then grew angry when they saw large international ships overfishing Somali waters and dumping waste there, too. So they decided to rob a ship.

The men were ordinary people, Qadhi says. "They were not some people who are strange — just young people."

They told Qadhi that if there were stability in Somalia — education, employment — they would not be pirates.

"One of them told me, 'If there is stability in Somalia, we are ready to give up and be members of the army and protect our state,' " Qadhi says.

Sympathy For Pirates, Not Western Countries

This kind of sympathy for pirates is shared by many people — officials and civilians alike — in Yemen, despite the coast guard's crackdown. An American Navy commander recently alleged that private citizens in Yemen are selling weapons, fuel and supplies to Somali pirates. And maritime experts worry that pirates are increasingly able to find refuge along Yemen's vast coast.

The sympathy runs so deep in the country that some Yemeni officials suggest the extensive international attention to piracy is just a pretext for big powers like the U.S. to gain control of the Gulf of Aden, a waterway through which millions of barrels of oil pass every day.

Ahmed al-Asbahi, a member of the Yemeni parliament, suggests that Western powers are allowing piracy to continue as a way to serve their own interests.

"What the international community should do is help bring a real and lasting peace to Somalia. If they do this, then there won't be any piracy. They can do this without bringing their military forces to our waters," Asbahi says.

Yemen May Face Its Own Piracy Problem

But that kind of peace takes time, says Yemeni political science professor Abdullah al-Faqih. Until that happens, he says, "Yemen is part of the problem."

That's because Yemen itself is a failing state, Faqih says. It has a growing separatist movement in the south, an insurgency in the north, a re-emergence of al-Qaida and, on top of all this, a collapsing economy.

"Yemen is dependent [on] oil revenues. Now with the financial crisis, the oil price is going down. … Basically, the country lost most of its credit and financial resources," he says.

What's more, the oil itself is running out. And the government has failed to diversify the economy. Faqih says a total economic meltdown could come very soon. The government already has cut the state budget in half.

He says he thinks that within three to five months, the government won't be able to pay its salaries.

If the state fails, Faqih says Yemen would expand the belt of lawlessness in the region to both sides of the Gulf of Aden and become yet another place where pirates, smugglers and militants could thrive.

Instead of worrying about how to fix the problems in Somalia, he says, Yemen should worry about whether it will become the next Somalia.

Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103904390

Archibugi: Which Jails for Somali Pirates

Which jails for Somali pirates?
Daniele Archibugi

The Gulf of Aden is becoming increasingly crowded. Due to the several million paid in ransom over the last twenty four months, and to the persisting chronic poverty in Somalia, the number of individuals who have turned to piracy has increased, and they seem to be more desperate and less experienced than the previous ones. In the first quarter of 2009, the number of attacks on ships has in fact doubled, according to the International Maritime Bureau ( see IMB, Piracy attacks almost doubled in 2009 first quarter, 21 April 2009).

7 - 05 - 2009 [date of publication of this article] 

But pirates have today, to deal with an increased presence of military ships; the United States leads a multilateral military force of some twenty states, and the European Union has created for this purpose its first joint military force. Their numbers are augmented by the presence of the military ships from several Eastern states. Moreover, the UN Security Council has authorized military ships in the area to pursue suspect vessels inside the Somali territorial waters and even onto the mainland in order to capture the pirates. If both the number of pirates and of military ships in the area increase, we can be almost certain that the two will clash more frequently. This is precisely what has happened in the last weeks.

But once arrested, what becomes of the pirates? The International Law of the Sea does not give rise to problems of interpretation: since the Seventeenth century pirates are considered hostis humani generi and piracy is one of the few crimes, indeed the first crime, for which there exists universal jurisdiction (for a fascinating account of piracy in the Seventeenth and Eighteen Centuries, see Peter T. Leeson The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, Princeton University Press, 2009). This means that any state that captures a pirate ship is entitled to try the pirate crew in its tribunals. But the norm is so old and international piracy in the high seas had become so uncommon that states find themselves unprepared. More particularly, several countries do not know how to incorporate this international norm in their domestic jurisdiction.

Up till now, the United States and France are the only two states to have brought pirates home to try them. The United States have brought to New York Abduhl Wal-i-Musi, the teen-ager involved in the hijacking of Maersk Alabama and its Captain Richard Phillips whose age and even name are still uncertain. This will be the first trial held in the United States for piracy for more than a century. The course of the trial promises to be all but predictable: the strategy of the defence is likely to be centred around the age of the defendant, but also on the fact that his arrest took place while he was onboard the American vessel to negotiate the release of the Captain. The fact that he was arrested during a truce in high sea might invalidate the arrest.

The number of pirates detained in France is greater: following two expeditions of the French special squads there are currently twelve prisoners. The first group of six pirates was captured in April 2008 after the kidnapped, payment of a ransom and release of the 30 members of the crew (22 of which were of French nationality) of the yacht "Le Ponant". The second group of six pirates was captured in September 2008 (while a seventh pirate was killed), after they hijacked the yacht of the French couple Delanne. In both cases, the blitzes of the commandos were properly filmed and broadcasted by the French Navy.

These cases have one legal point in common: those who performed the arrest are the same nationality as the hostages. But they have also similarities in terms of political image: Nicolas Sarkozy and Barack Obama have both been directly involved in the process and are portrayed as the decision-makers of last resort who acted to protect their fellow citizens abroad as well as to ensure the guilty parties were punished.

How do the other navies behave, in particular in those cases when hostages of different nationality are involved? The Indian navy has shown more propensity to sink suspect ships rather then arresting pirates. The Dutch and Danish navies, who have captured ships carrying war weapons, have kept the crews onboard their vessels for a few hours but have then chosen to release them. The Dutch, who were operating under a joint NATO mission, have provoked the wrath of the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. But the fact remains, NATO has an agreement to patrol the Gulf of Aden, but it does not have a common policy in relation to making arrests, as frankly acknowledged by NATO Lieutenant Commander Alexandre Fernandes.

It is certainly surprising that there are so many Navy ships patrolling the Gulf of Aden and the outcome is so often that arrested pirates are released. So far, the Navies have had a more preventive than a repressive role. There are not more than one hundred pirates waiting for trial, of which 64 in Kenya, 12 in France and 1 in the United States, but at least double the number of suspected pirates have been captured and then released.

Great Britain has extricated itself from this embarrassing situation by reaching an agreement with Kenya, delegating to the Nairobi tribunals the responsibility to see justice done. The United States and the European Union swiftly followed suit through an "Exchange of Letters between the EU and the Government of Kenya" (pdf). It is an ingenious solution, albeit a contradictory one: states with a proven democratic tradition have surrendered jurisdiction to a country whose justice and detention system they have themselves often denounced as corrupt, inefficient, very slow and infamous because of regular violations of human rights. Surrendering the pirates to a state incapable of guaranteeing a just trial risks becoming a new form of "extraordinary rendition". Moreover, even in Kenya there is a mounting dissatisfaction with these legal arrangements, often not ratified by the Parliament and that may expose the country to reprisals by armed groups in neighbouring countries.

But what alternatives are there? The first is to charge the states which captured the pirates also with the responsibility of carrying out the trial and detention (as the United States are doing). This may prove risky for the countries that arrest pirates. The United States and France, for example, may be asked to justify in front of their own Courts the use of force employed. Were better options available to the killing of the three other pirates involved in the kidnap of Captain Phillips? Was France legally authorized to intervene militarily in Somali territory? All these issues are likely to make the trials controversial and to make the offences of the pirates as minor ones.

The second is the institution of an ad hoc International Tribunal, but this solution is costly and judicially cumbersome.

The third, and possibly best, solution is to give jurisdiction to a state whose judiciary system guarantees that the defendants will not be abused, in other words, not Kenya.

We can be certain of one thing: the pirates' adventures have not only disrupted maritime governance, they are also showing up the faults of the international criminal jurisdiction.

Source: http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/email/which-jails-for-somali-pirates