I recently attended a conference on Central American peace processes in Toledo, organised and sponsored by the Project on Justice in Times of Transition and hosted in Spain by the Centro International Toledo para La Paz. The conference brought together many of the key participants in the peace processes in Central America during the mid-80s to the early-90s. They included ex Presidents Vinicio Cerezo of Guatemala and Jose-Maria Figueres of Costa Rica, former military commander of the guerilla Frente Marti para Liberacion Nacional, Joaquim Villalobos, and former head of the Sandinista Army, General Joaquin Cuadra, former Head of the Guatemalan Army General Julio Balconi, and Sir Marrack Goulding who was Under-Secretary General for Political Affairs at the United Nations at the time, among others. The conference was both a retrospective exploration of the Central American peace processes as well as an effort to glean lessons for efforts at making peace in other places in the world.

The Central American peace processes of this period had a significant impact on how we conduct peace processes in the world today. Many developments that have become commonplace in peace processes around the world were refined, if not first tried, in Central America. They range from the widespread involvement of the United Nations on a regional basis, and the development of human rights monitoring, to the setting up of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and programs for Disarmament Demobilisation and Re-integration of former combatants. However, I want to emphasise another element of the Central American Peace Processes of this period – their contribution to attenuating, if not ending the Cold War.

While the Central American region shaped the context in which each country – whether Nicaragua, El Salvador, or Guatemala – tackled its civil conflict, the cold war shaped the context in which the region dealt with its problems. But Central American leaders searching for peace were not daunted by the global divide we then called the Cold War. They did not feel they had to wait for the Cold War to end to resolve the conflicts in their region, either individually or regionally. The process began under the leadership of President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica, who first convinced other leaders in the region that they all needed stability to progress economically, and then convinced the United States to give diplomacy and negotiation a chance. As Arias put it in an interview with El Pais (16 March 2006): “20 years ago Central Americans were killing each other. The superpowers provided the arms and we provided the dead. …After the defeat in Vietnam the US needed to win a war. They wanted to get rid of the Sandinistas from power in Nicaragua by military force. I told the US that is not the solution to differences, rather what is necessary is diplomacy and negotiation.”

So Central Americans managed to make peace in their own countries, if not contribute to the end of the Cold War, by demonstrating how particular conflicts seen as sites of political and ideological contestation on a global scale, could be recast as conflicts with their own dynamics that required a particular set of solutions.

Today we are being asked to choose sides in yet another great global divide – between the West and Islam. We are also told that Iraq, Israel-Palestine, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Indonesia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and even Europe, among many other places, are sites of great contestation between these two value systems. One approach is to view these as indeed sites of great contestation between Islam and the West, pick the side you are on, and proceed to fight it out with the other side in each particular place. Central America suggests a different approach. You do not have to deny the presence of such a “global divide” to tackle each problem separately. And tackling each problem separately may help resolve the global divide.

So Iraq then becomes less a place where the best of the West is contesting the worst of Islamic radicalism, but a country undergoing a triple transition – from Saddam Hussein’s Baath party dictatorship to multiparty democracy, from a Sunni dominated state to a multiethnic one, and from US occupation to self-government. And addressing each of these transitions has less to do with where we stand on the Islam-West divide, than with what techniques we can use to address them and lessons we have learned from other places that can help us do so.

Similarly, the Israeli-Palestinian problem becomes a challenge of ending the occupation of a people, and installing a functioning democracy to govern themselves, while developing a viable economy that will sustain their lives. It is not a place where an outpost of the West is facing Islamic hostility. Saudi Arabia can be viewed as the challenge of transitioning from a theocratic kingdom to a more plural state. And Afghanistan becomes the challenge of restoring basic institutions that can function in a country that has been ravaged by war and flattened by bombs for more than 25 years. Syria and Egypt are by contrast straightforward. They require a process for electing a representative government. The issue of Islam in Europe becomes how you include marginalized immigrant communities into the socio-economic and political mainstream of a number of countries who first came as guest workers, but now feel that they are neither guests nor workers.

All of these challenges are familiar to us, not because we have always been successful in addressing them, but because we have dealt with them before in other parts of the globe. By dealing with the parts (democratic transition, immigration, pluralism, building institutions) of the divide between Islam and the West, we need not deny that there may be a whole to it as well. We need only deny that it is clear how much greater the whole is to the sum of the parts. So we do not need to always address the whole in order to tackle each part. This is one important lesson we can learn from the Central American leaders of the 80s, whether government or rebel, who took on another global divide, part by part.

Oscar Arias, the then President of Costa Rica and Nobel Peace Prize winner, has just been re-elected President of Costa Rica after 20 years. He is promising a “Costa Rican Consensus” that will contribute to steps to end poverty and lead to military disarmament world wide. Given his contribution to peace in Central America and the end to the Cold War, I would like to add one more thing to his agenda – bringing an end the new global divide between Islam and the West, part by part.

An oft heard remark about Iraq today (at least where I hang out) is something along the lines of “Well, it may be bad over there, but at least they (the Iraqi people) are better off than they were under Saddam.” Such a response strikes me as simultaneously reasonable (it may be true) and false, insofar as it may be little more than the ‘last line of defense’ justification of many folks for what is increasingly seen as a losing proposition. Bush’s recent declaration that finishing the war will be effectively ‘someone else’s problem,’ seems only to strengthen the latter interpretation. But let’s take the claim of “at least they are better off than they were under Saddam” seriously for a moment. For if it is true, then one might hope that the future is not so bleak after all.

There seem to be (at least) two issues tied up in the statement that “they are better off than they were under Saddam.” First, that the ‘quality of life’ of the Iraqi people is, on average, better, with standard indicators such as per capita GDP, and the number of people receiving basic services such as electricity etc. moving in the right direction since the invasion. Second, that regardless of the quality of life, one’s actual life is better preserved today, despite the violence that seems ever present, than under the old regime. While seemingly appealing, the problem with both claims, I suggest, is that they tend to rest, at least implicitly, on calculations of ‘averages’. Unfortunately, focusing on such indicators and sampling for averages to make meaningful comparisons may hide more than it illuminates.

Take the first claim, that quality of life indicators are (on average) moving in the right direction. If one examines the available statistics then the picture presented seems to back up this claim. Regarding GDP growth, the US Department of State notes that a year before the invasion “Iraq’s per person income had dropped from $3,836 in 1980 (higher than Spain at the time) to $715 [in 2002] (lower than Angola),” which is pretty poor by any standard. In contrast, in 2005 the State Department reports that “Iraq’s GDP is projected at $29.3 billion…up from $18.4 billion in 2002.” Moreover, “the IMF projects Iraq’s economy to grow by 10.4% in 2006.” Regarding electrical power as another indicator of progress, the same Department of State report notes that “more than 2,000 megawatts (MW) of generation capacity have been added or rehabilitated. One hundred fifty planned and ongoing projects worth $800 million will add more than 600 MW of additional generation capacity and improve the distribution of power to more than 2.1 million people.”

These are indeed successes, but does it mean that Iraqi’s are better off, on average, since the invasion? If it is at least plausible that the sanctions placed on Iraq by the UN from 1991-1999 lowered GDP by as much as 75 percent, or some equally large amount, then the recovery to the current level of per capita GDP of $3,400 seems somewhat less impressive. Moreover, confusion abounds as to what the real figures for Iraqi GDP actually are. For example, the CIA estimates the per capita GDP of Iraq in 2001 at $2,500.00 and in 2003 at $1,600.00, which makes the 2002 figure of $715.00 used by the State Department seem rather deflated. Regardless, similar to the ‘miracle of Reaganomics’, if you throw yourself out of a building and break both your legs (in 1980-82), the ability to crawl away on your elbows (in 1984) could be considered a success -– on average.

Regarding electricity supply, the recent growth in Iraqi generation capacity has to be seen against, not just recurrent insurgent attacks, but against the decrepit state of Iraqi infrastructure at the time of the invasion (due in part to sanctions), and the orgy of looting that eviscerated what was left of that infrastructure in the first six weeks after the invasion. Seen in this light, what restored power there is may be far less than is needed, with some estimates arguing for 6 gigawatts of new capacity to meet current demand in the context of a projected current shortfall of 1.1 Gigawatts despite the new capacity noted above. On average then, electricity supply may be higher today than it has been since the mid 1990s – on average – but that’s not saying much.

Third, what is making Iraq better off are not its oil revenues, which are up but wholly insufficient to rebuild, or the export of dates (the export success of the past few years apparently), but massive foreign (US) aid. Given the falling popularity of the war in the US and the long run costs of the war being projected as being as high as two trillion dollars it is unlikely that this ‘development by aid’ can be supported in the long term. Given all this, even if the optimistic statistics and projections are correct, which they are unlikely to be (given the bogusness of most forecasting), then it is hard to unambiguously make the case that the Iraqi’s are materially better off, on average, than they were under Saddam. Specifically, since the current recovery is contingent upon unlimited foreign largess that can disappear rather quickly, thus skewing the average quite drastically, it is not clear that the average a year or two from now will be anything like the average today.

What then for the other claim, that physical security is better now than under Saddam? Here the picture is equally complex. If we are to compare the threat to individual life today to that during the old regime, we must remember when Saddam et al., committed the majority of these murders rather than average over the life of the regime. Doing so would be to average out, for example, deaths in the Soviet Union over 70 years, and thus equally blame Stalin and Gorbachev. The problem is that ‘average’ deaths ‘now’ versus ‘then’ are a problematic indicator for comparison, (even if, unlike the USSR, Saddam was in power for the whole period).

Consider that the major ‘killing periods’ of Saddam’s regime were the ‘Anfal’ campaigns against the Kurds in the late 1980s where it is estimated 180,000 were killed, and the 1991 revolt where some 60,000 were killed. Add in the 500,000 Iraqis slaughtered during the Iran-Iraq war, plus the estimated 50,000 or so people murdered at other points, and you end up with about 790,000 people killed. [Photo shows Kurdish victims of the poison gas attack at Halabja.]

Compare this to the numbers given in The Lancet study of 2004 (or the UN study of 2005) where it was estimated that 100,000 had died as a result of the invasion (slate), or the (more documented and less estimated) study of Iraq Body Count of between 33,000 and 38,000 deaths since the invasion, and it seems quite simple to conclude that one’s safety today is greater than it was under the old regime. Indeed, one estimate places the old regime death rate at “between 70 and 125 civilian deaths per day for every one of Saddam’s 8,000-odd days in power.” (In contrast, see the Bode Miller problem I discussed last month). As such, things may, on average, be better today than the were in the 1980s or 1990s, but we should not expect anyone unfortunate enough to be living Iraq today to calculate their position relative to the average and be thankful for it.

Specifically, the data in Iraq, especially regarding political murders, is especially lumpy. Rather than their being an average number of murders per day by Saddam that people could expect, there were brief periods of intense violence punctuated by long periods of relative inactivity. In contrast, what we seem to have in Iraq since the occupation is constant and increasing levels of violence, even if the average rate is lower. Which situation then is harder to deal with? Reflecting on my wife’s family’s experience made me think about this question.

My wife was born and raised in East Germany, Stasi and all. Indeed, her uncle spent a few years in prison for going against the regime. However, the rest of her family did not. The reason was simple. Dictatorship or not, the East German regime had certain rules and norms that were obvious to all its citizens. If you obeyed these, you had a Stasi file like everyone else, but probabilistically, if you did not break the rules or violate the norms, you were left alone. There was little about the lived environment that was radically uncertain. Saddam’s regime may have been far more vicious than the former East German communists, but given the lumpiness of the data on who was killed and when, it may have been a reasonable assumption that if you were neither in the army in the 1980s, not a Kurd or a Southerner in revolt in the early 1990s, you had a reasonable chance of being left alone.

But what about the situation today? In a previous post I argued that social scientists’ predictions are under-determined by the facts and over-determined by our theories (old post). Something similar may affect normal people as well as social scientists. The world is an immensely complex place and we tend to assume it to be a far more stable place than it is. We do so because the stability that we take for granted is itself a social product, the result of intersubjective norms, institutions, rules etc. that we reproduce in our daily routines.

Iraq today may be far less bloody and far more wealthy – on average – than it was under Saddam, but it is also far more random. Given such a constant (as opposed to lumpy) level of random violence, old certainties no longer apply, old institutions no longer operate, and old norms are routinely violated. People (Iraqi or American) do not deal well with such environments and try to reduce this uncertainty by acting to protect themselves against it. In doing so they promulgate new norms (usually based on old scripts) such as re-imagining group membership on, for example, ethnic or religious lines, as seems to be happening in Iraq. Doing so may of course increase other agents’ uncertainty and thus ratchet up the violence, for every new ‘in-group’ there has to be a corresponding ‘out-group’, but it is a coping mechanism nonetheless.

Overall then, conditions in Iraq may be ostensibly better today than they were in the past, on average, but they may feel worse, and that’s what counts. Even though the body count is lower, even though there is more electricity, and even if there is more wealth in the country, such factors, and focusing on such factors, may be less important to understanding where Iraq is heading than we think. The Iraqi people “may be better off now then they were under Saddam”, but if it doesn’t feel any better to the people on the ground, we should not expect less bodies and more wealth –- on average –- to really make a difference.

An eighteen-year old girl drinks heavily at a bar. She leaves with three boys about her age. No one ever sees her again. Her body is never found. Such is the ordinary stuff of crime across the world: a victim and her suspects caught in a prosaic mixture of sex and violence.

Add to that a few elements I’ve left out of my description, however, and we have the stuff of media sensation and obsessive interest: A blond American girl goes to Aruba to celebrate her high school graduation. The night before she is to fly back, she drinks heavily at a local bar. She gets in a car with three locals. She is not at the airport the next morning. Her body is never found.

The facts of the crime remain the same. The temper of the response alters dramatically.

Almost a year later, Natalee Holloway still commands our attention. Small developments in the case are breaking news. The characters are all well known: the grieving and irate mother; the coddled major suspect; the various local authorities. Several have given long interviews on national television; all have lawyers, perhaps one or two have secured agents. As with the runaway bride and Hurricane Katrina, the story itself has become a story, an occasion for the media to examine the way in which it packages and serves up the news. Why do we care about one girl’s disappearance when so much of graver consequence happens all the time? Why Natalee Holloway? 

One answer to this question has been the much-discussed “missing white girl syndrome.” A blond and attractive teenager disappears and all sorts of conscious and unconscious associations are made. Natalee Holloway swiftly turns from a particular individual, with thoughts and desires and experiences of her own, to an iconic vision of American girlhood: blond, young, pretty, and almost certainly dead. Like many things, our icons are easier to see in their twilight. Natalee is somehow blonder in repose. And so the story isn’t really about one person’s disappearance. It is about everything that is conventionally American thrown into horrible distress, apple pie tossed to the wolves.

Lurking below the interest in iconic American girlhood is something darker and less easy to talk about, at least on prime time cable. Natalee may or may not have been raped. She may or may not have had consensual sex with one, two, or three boys. One of them licked Jello shots off her stomach earlier in the evening. This much is known. She left a tourist bar named “Carlos ‘n Charlie’s” at around 1:30 am on May 30th, 2005. Her last recorded act was to get into a car with the three suspects. After that, we are left to our bleakest imaginations. In other words, the Natalee story lingers in part because of its strong undercurrent of sex and mayhem.

Natalee’s blondness and our penchant for erotic mayhem are not so separate. They are two sides of the media frenzy that has become the Natalee Holloway story. We turn girls into icons and then like to think of them in the most degraded of circumstances. Even a casual observer of trends in recent pornography knows this all too well. Prurience and voyeurism are intrinsic to this case and central to its apparently unending allure. Our white girl has not simply gone missing. She is now at the dimmer reaches of what we can speak about and what we can imagine. The combination is toxic and intoxicating. 

To these associations, I would add one more element that is essential to the Natalee phenomenon. The crime remains without a body, some of the most basic facts available only through conjecture and inference. This way it is both a perfect and flawed crime story. The same public that watches Greta Van Susteren incessantly dissect the case on On the Record tunes in regularly to CSI, where virtuoso experts discover incriminating evidence on or about the corpses of victims. But Natalee’s body is still out of reach of criminology and forensic science. Nothing is resolved or certain. Natalie did or did not have sex, was or was not raped, died by accident or met foul play. According to the latest version of events, she may have expired from an overdose of alcohol and drugs. Without a body, there is no way to know for sure.

Natalee still holds her secrets. Irresolution and uncertainty allow for the infinite variety of crime-narratives to play themselves out—among talking heads, in our imaginations. Yet irresolution and uncertainty also frustrate an audience that expects closure. We have grown used to bodies that talk to the police and doctors and scientists. The Natalee Holloway story places her body at the center of events—she was or was not inebriated, did or did not have sex, met or did not meet with violence—yet renders it disturbingly mute.

We may never hear Natalie speak. What we know is this. An eighteen-year old girl drank heavily at a bar. She left with three boys about her age. No one saw her again. Her body has yet to be found. 

Scott Esposito, author of the excellent literary web log Conversational Reading, has spread the word that the next volume of William T. Vollmann’s Seven Dreams series of novels might take on the subject of Chief Joseph:

Vollmann fans will be giddy to hear…that he’s shortly to begin work on the next dream in the Seven Dreams series. He said it will center around the life of Chief Joseph and that he’ll be playing with the chronology, perhaps telling the story backwards. He remarked that this may mean that the story will have a happy ending, something Vollmann stories typically don’t have.

Giddy, indeed. I hope nobody will object to a few notes giving some historical background, which I happen to be interested in at the moment because of a projected essay on a parallel subject I have been developing with a friend. To be clear: I know nothing about the upcoming novel whatsoever, other than that, if the report is accurate, I look forward to reading it. Since the larger meta-narrative of the Seven Dreams series involves the history of the clashes between Native Americans and their white colonizers since the settlement of the New World, it does seem logical that Joseph could become a central figure. His tragic heroism in attempting to save his Nez Perce people from ethnic cleansing in the 1870s is a story American schoolchildren may remember. Evicted from their homeland in the Wallowa valley of what is now Oregon, they attempted to flee to Canada to avoid being forced on to a reservation. Pursued by a much larger force of U.S. Army regulars under the command of the one-armed general Oliver O. Howard, Joseph managed to elude capture for around 1,000 miles through extremely shrewd tactics and maneuvers.

The definitive history of the subject is The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest, written by Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., back in 1965 (Mariner Books reissued the complete and unabridged book in 1997 as a paperback). One of the more remarkable episodes in Josephy’s book involves a photograph taken by William H. Jackson before the 1877 war of a “half-blood with blue eyes and light hair,” who the Nez Perce claimed was the son of William Clark (of Lewis & Clark, the idea being that Clark fathered a son on his travels through the area). Later, when Joseph and the other “non-treaty” remnants who had refused the destruction of their homeland were finally captured in Montana some forty miles away from the Canadian border, by troops under Nelson Miles, they found a old man who was probably the same light-haired person in Jackson’s picture. The story of the photograph, which now resides in my hometown at the Iconographic Collection of the Wisconsin Historical Society, neatly encapsulates the drift down into the abyss of unnecessary and largely unprovoked violence that took place when white settlers replaced more friendly explorers in the Nez Perce homeland. The great tragedy of the Nez Perce was that they, among all the tribes of the West, were the most consistently friendly and accommodating allies of the whites.

Another remarkable dimension of the story is the role of the villain of the piece, General Howard, the man tasked with hunting Joseph down. (Because the Nez Perce had women and children with them, Howard today would be called, properly, a war criminal.) Howard might prove to be an ideal vehicle for Vollmann’s continual exploration of the bad conscience of white mythology. An abolitionist Civil War general who had atrocious luck in battle – losing his arm at in the accidental battle of Fair Oaks, routed by Jackson’s surprise attack at Chancellorsville, and given the worst troops in the worst field position on the first day of Gettysburg – Howard was reliable enough to rise to be one of Sherman’s key subordinates during the March to the Sea. He was one of few Northern military men to write about the suffering inflicted on the civilians of Atlanta, particularly the women (this in an article in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War). After the war, he helped found Howard University for African-Americans, before being posted to the West. Howard, in fact, seemed to have a paradoxical streak in his character whereby he tried to negotiate for the Nez Perce to stay in their homeland at first, but had nothing but contempt for what he saw as the satanic dimensions of Native American religion. What is so terrible about him is that he seemed to have every appearance of being an upright man, even a sympathetic man in some ways during the war.

In his memoir Nez Perce Joseph, Howard tried to justify his actions in a way that followed the commonly-held and relentless logic of dispossession:

There are few Indians in America superior to the Nez Perces. Among them the contrast between heathen and Christian teaching is most marked. Even a little unselfish work, both by Catholic and Protestant teachers, has produced wonderful fruit, illustrated by those who remained on the reservation during the war, and kept the peace; while the unhappy effects of superstition and ignorance appear among the renegades and “non-treaties.” The results to these have been murder, loss of country, and almost extermination. (Brig. Gen. O. O. Howard, “Preface,” Nez Perce Joseph.)

The connection between this fascinating (and awfully frank) statement and the general drift of how Native Americans were loved to death by the Catholic missionaries in Vollmann’s novel Fathers and Crows (the Second of the Seven Dreams) should be pretty clear. How Vollmann handles the story will be doubtless unexpected, unpredictable, and brilliant, as usual. If I had to hazard a single speculative remark (never wise, so advance apologies), I would probably guess that the story won’t be that Howard found ways to fail to capture Joseph. It would diminish Joseph’s military accomplishments to put that idea forward, for one thing. In fact, Howard did fail – mainly because with heavy equipment and logistical problems he couldn’t really keep up in the terrain – and in the end Sherman dispatched Miles’ troops to catch Joseph before he slipped across the border into Canada. Joseph hoped, possibly mistakenly, that Canada would have offered him and his people asylum. After being captured, Joseph made the speech for which he is known to history: “I will fight no more forever…”

The generally-rentable and pretty solid PBS series The West (Episode Six), directed by Stephen Ives and produced by Ken Burns, and written by the perennial Burns collaborator and scholar Geoffrey C. Ward, contains a lot of interesting documentary material on the story.

Justin E. H. Smith

[For an extensive archive of Justin E. H. Smith’s writing, visit www.jehsmith.com]

In recent years, one of the sights that never fails to drive home to me the fact that I am back in Eastern Europe is that of hordes of travellers rushing to the grand machines in airport departure areas that, for a price, will wrap one’s luggage in multiple layers of clear, environmentally unfriendly plastic.  This is meant to serve as protection, though it must be hell to remove. 

With this image still vivid from a recent voyage, I was amused to read of Milosevic’s posthumous return to Belgrade that “[t]he coffin, wrapped in clear plastic and packing tape, was removed from the jet after the rest of the passengers’ baggage on a small yellow vehicle with a conveyor belt” (New York Times, “Milosevic’s Body Returned to Homeland for Burial,” March 15, 2006).  Finding this gem just before the funeral, I thought to myself: Replace the staid black suit and tie with a shiny track outfit for the ceremonial display, and pipe in some noxious turbofolk to pump up, with the help of a cheap techno beat, the narcissism of minor differences, and there will be no doubt but that in death the ex-Yugoslav dictator has been honored, if not with a state funeral, at least with all the decorations of the post-communist culture of tacky thuggery that Milosevic and his family so shiningly embody.

In 1998, I asked Warren Zimmerman, the recently discharged U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, whether the seemingly endless series of violent episodes involving Serbia and its neighbors could be attributed to “deep-seated, historical enmities.”  He rightly said no, and that indeed much of the Clinton administration’s fence-sitting was regrettably motivated by just such an idea.  Slobodan Milosevic often invoked the battle of Kosovo Pole against the Turks in 1389 to justify ongoing slaughter.  Clinton, in turn, emboldened by Robert D. Kaplan’s influential 1993 book, Balkan Ghosts, was happy to invoke similarly distant and semi-mythical events to justify the U.S. position that there’s no point in trying to stop those bloodthirsty Yugoslavs from having it out.

In the late 1990s, I got it into my head to go to Belgrade to interview Milosevic.  It never happened, and this past month I have definitively put my hope of following through to rest.  Back then, I was listening in preparation to instructional casettes of what used to be called “Serbo-Croatian.”  They highlighted the names of foods, and for some reason lay particular emphasis on the fruits.  I learned for example that in Serbia a mango is called a “mango.”  Great. 

I quickly realized that this would not help me to formulate probing questions about who stood to benefit from the privatization of previously state-controlled industries, about the chain of command between Belgrade and Bosnian Serb commandos, etc.  I doubled up my efforts and began to sit in on intensive language courses at Columbia. In the end, the Yugoslav embassy in D.C. held onto my passport far too long.  By the time I got it back, having in the end been declined a visa, I was fairly proficient in Serbo-Croatian –I could now buy a mango while haltingly discussing geopolitics– and the NATO bombing campaign had, at long last, begun. 

This campaign divided those of us who hate war, but also hate the suffering wrought by nasty, opportunistic men propelled into power, whose “sovereignty” is then for some reason thought worthy of respect. To the present day the NATO campaign in Yugoslavia seems to occupy a position halfway between the case of Rwanda, where staying out was a clear abrogation of international responsibility to protect the helpless; and that of Iraq, where humanitarian intervention between a tyrant and his subjects was neither a significant part of the justification for invasion nor, evidently, among the concerns of the invasion’s planners.

The Serbian media have for the most part been at least as reserved in their expression of affection for the deceased former leader as has the New York Times.  Vreme, Serbia’s own journal of record, assesses Milosevic’s reign as one of incalculable tragedy. Curiously, it seems that Milosevic has received a warmer send-off from the Russian establishment press, but even there his legacy is presented in that dialogical form that often passes for objectivity: “Some say he was the butcher of the Balkans, but some say he was a Serbian national hero.”  We may speculate that this “balance” has something to do with Putin’s increasingly tight control of the media, and his concern for his own legacy as an increasingly iron-fisted ruler.  Russia has given amnesty to Milosevic’s wife and their cretinous son Marko, the one-time patron of Belgrade’s Madona discotheque, whose principle concern in life seems to be collecting sports cars and firearms, and who once announced to Yugoslavia’s Vatican ambassador that he would like to have plastic surgery on his ears, since, as he explained, “I can’t drive an expensive car, dress well, and be floppy-eared like cattle at the same time” (for a hilarious transcript of bugged conversations among the Milosevic clan, see: http://harpers.org/AllInTheFamily.html).

Those who believe that Milosevic could do no wrong appear to include young Marko, wife Mira, a few scattered seniors in Serbia and Russia whose pensions have been cut off, and Ramsey Clark.  All considered, the average age is quite high.  Notwithstanding the depiction widely circulated in the Russian press, of the former ruler as St. Slobodan in the style of an Orthodox icon, and notwithstanding the 50,000 nostalgic gawkers who turned out for the public funeral, it is not likely that the affectionate memory of him will survive for more than the few years most of his supporters have left.

Reading the placards held up by the elderly demonstrators outside the US embassy in Moscow a few weeks ago, one detected an odd persecution complex, as though Western nations have arbitrarily picked out the South and Eastern Slavic peoples for harrassment.  This complex is particularly sharp among some Serbs, who sincerely believe that they are the last line of defense for Christian Europe against the invading Muslim hordes.  As I seem to recall one Serbian warlord saying in the mid-1990s, if it weren’t for the vigilant work of death squads like his, camels would be drinking from the banks of the Seine in no time.

The problem of course is that the Ottoman Empire no longer exists, and in  any case the Kosovo Albanians and the Bosnian Muslims are not foreign invaders.  They are, to use the old, optimistic and all-inclusive language preferred by Marshall Tito, indigenous Yugoslavs, and from the point of view of, say, a Norwegian, they are at least as European as Arkan the warrior and Ceca his turbofolk-singing muse.  Though there is an enduring “Muslim question” in Europe, the landscape has changed somewhat since the original battle of Kosovo Pole, and Milosevic was indulging in nothing but an anachronistic medieval fantasy to make Yugoslav Muslims out as Turkish infidels.

But are the complaints of anti-Serbian bias justified?  To be sure, there is a prevailing sense in the Western media that Serbians are to be collectively punished for the crimes of the warlords and thugs Milosevic oversaw.  Thus in a blurb on the New York Times homepage we read that “The ex-Yugoslav leader’s supporters planned a Belgrade funeral that raised fears of Serbs using the ceremony to try to regain power.”  Serbians regaining  power in Serbia?  The very gall.  In the full article, “Serbs” is lengthened to “nationalist Serbs,” but the slip is telling.  Serbia continues to be vilified as a whole, and probably will be until more serious atonement is made by the Serbian political establishment, and until the deniers of the ethnic-cleansing campaigns are pushed even further to the fringe, where they may congregate harmlessly and irrelevantly, like the friends of David Irving.  It is a good thing that Milosevic was not honored with a state funeral, and if he and his family had been refused the right to return to Serbia now, the ceremonies would likely have only taken place in Russia and stoked the rancid rhetoric there about some pan-Slavic mystical  “brotherhood” which nonetheless excludes the Croats and Slovenes since they abandoned Orthodoxy, or the Cyrillic alphabet, or something.

The irony is that the appeals to ancient blood ties that provide nationalist movements with their fuel are but a flipside of the Clinton-style invocation of intractable ancient blood feuds in the aim of rationalizing staying the isolationist course.  Among national groups, there simply are no natural enemies or natural friends.  Serbs and Kosovo Albanians are not like cats and dogs.  The myth that they are, or that they became so in some  transformative event on a 14th-century battlefield, and are forever condemned to live out the fates that were there secured, has tremendous propaganda value in rallying the troops for current purposes, and this is something that Milosevic well understood.

And this brings us to Iraq, where, in the transition from “terrorist insurrection” to “civil war,” the Americans are increasingly feeling not besieged, but exclued from the action.  Whatever the arguments for withdrawal, and there are many excellent ones, let us not lapse into the Orientalist and vaguely racist fantasy that, whereas we in the enlightened world work out our differences through rational communication, in those parts there’s nothing to be done but to let the Shiites and Sunnis fight it out amongst themselves.  Such reasoning always mistakes the local and short-term for the eternal and fixed.  It’s not in their blood.  It’s in their predicament.

By Dr. Shiban Ganju

Shiban is the chairman of a biotechnology company in India and a practicing gastroenterologist in the USA. He travels between these two spaces frequently but lives in them simultaneously. He has been a passionate theater worker, reluctant army officer, ambitious entrepreneur, successful CEO and an active NGO volunteer. Still, he is does not know what he wants to be when he grows up; but he wants his epitaph to be “He tried.”

A diminutive microbe, Helicobacter Pylori (HP) emerged from obscurity over twenty years ago and squirmed itself into fame and stardom! Since its stomach damaging felony was discovered, it has been accused of causing injury to other precious organs like heart and colon. The scientist sleuths are collecting evidence to indict it; the verdict is not yet in but it is likely that HP will be found guilty on some counts and exonerated of others.

This miniscule, (3 micrometers long), corkscrew like microbe eluded the scientists with diversionary tactics worthy of a hardened felon. HP created the trail of hyper acidity as the cause of ulcer disease and scientists spent decades to unravel the mystery of acid production.

The dogma in ulcer disease stated: stress increases Hydrochloric acid production which in turn erodes the duodenal or gastric (stomach) lining causing an ulcer crater.

Investigators found excessive acid and pepsin production in the stomach of patients with ulcer disease. Other associated culprits — cigarettes, anti inflammatory drugs like aspirin and ibuprofen — shared the blame.

Natural consequence was a multi million dollar business of acid neutralizing and suppressing drugs. Shelf loads of antacids and histamine-2 receptor blockers like Cimetidine (Tagamet) became the standard therapy. Later, the proton pump inhibitors like Omeprazole (Prilosec) and its variants entered the fray to abolish gastric acid.

When medical therapy failed, surgeons wielded their knives, especially for those patients with complications of bleeding, obstructed stomach outlets and indolent ulcers. Surgery involved cutting part of the ulcerated stomach or duodenum and reconnecting the stomach to the jejunum. Prominent surgeon Billroth attained immortality by naming one such procedure after him, only to announce a newer and improved version later that he named Billroth II.

Other surgeons innovated the cutting of the vagus nerve to abolish the stimulus to acid production. But it led to decreased motility of the stomach and stagnation of food, so other surgeons offered a solution by enlarging the gastric outlet opening into the duodenum (pyloroplasty).

So the dogma went on. Books, papers, seminars were devoted to discuss the virtues of one procedure and vices of the other. Newer acid suppressants proliferated and a few generations of gastric surgeons thrived. Meanwhile, some patients improved while others suffered more.

The beginning of the end of this mindset came with the discovery in 1983 by Barry Marshal and Robin Warren from Perth, Australia that the cause of gastritis and duodenal ulcer is this cork screw shaped bacterium Helicobacter Pylori. (Campylobacter pyloridis initially) Though this bacterium was found in the stomach lining by many investigators from 1875, it was Marshall and Warren who cultured these bacteria and found them in over 90 percent of duodenal ulcers. Marshall further nailed the etiology by satisfying Koch’s postulates. Koch, a renowned scientist, had suggested earlier that in order to validate an infectious etiology of a disease the following criteria had to be met:

1. The organism is always associated with disease.
2. The organism will cause disease in a healthy subject.
3. Eradication of the organism will cure the disease.
4. Re-challenge with the organism will cause the disease again.

Barry Marshall swallowed a Petri dish culture of H. Pylori and suffered severe gastritis; he recovered when the bacteria were eradicated and he did not re-challenge.

He satisfied three of the four postulates. After initial skepticism, as befits a dogma, other workers from all over the world replicated these findings. Suddenly ulcers of the stomach and duodenum were cured by simple antibiotic therapy for two weeks. Drs. Marshall and Warren won the Nobel Prize in 1995.

HP turns to be more interesting than a mere ulcer causing nuisance. It has four to six flagella at one end with which it penetrates the mucous layer and approach the gastric wall. The bacterium produces many enzymes including urease which breaks down urea into ammonia and bicarbonate which neutralize the surrounding acid creating a neutral pH cocoon around the bacterium. With glue like surface adhesins, HP clings to the gastric cells. Its secreted enzymes provoke the gastric G cells and D cells which enhance the Hydrochloric acid and pepsin production. An inflammatory response ensues and the lining succumbs to the onslaught of abrasive acid and inflammation. The surface breaks down and forms an ulcer. (Remember how research had shown increased acid production in ulcer patients: the cause was the bug and not stress!)

Investigators have shown that HP is present six times more often with gastric cancer and mucous associated lymphoid tumors (MALT) than in normal stomachs. Eradication of the infection with antibiotics clears the lymphoid tumors. (Here is a stunning example of antibiotics curing cancer!)

HP lives preferentially in the lower part of the stomach and passes in the faeces.The interpersonal transmission, therefore, is presumed to be fecal-oral. Over 50 percent of adults in the developed world carry this bug; the prevalence is higher in the developing countries. The prevalence increases with age.

The microbe is transmitted with in the family and travels with the family; this attribute has been used to study recent migration of human populations. The following example illustrates the point: the Ladakh region occupies northern tip of India and borders Tibet on the east and Kashmir on the west. The population of this region descends from Tibetan and Indo-Iranian stock. While genetically the two populations do not differ, the genomics of H pylori in their stomachs betray their migrations from their respective ancestral lands of Tibet and northwest India.

HP has reminded us again: 1. Microbes rule. 2. “Scientific” dogma can stupefy the mind 3.The dogma may even harm the very patients that are supposed to benefit from such knowledge.

What is the future of this bacterium? All bad things must come to an end! A mathematical model from Stanford suggests that H pylori will be extinct in one hundred years, at least in the USA. Its fifteen minutes of fame will be over.

Helicobacter Pylori, the diminutive flagellate, dispeller of dogma, generator of insight into cancer, tracer of human dislocations gives me “ulcers”, when, as a physician, I encounter patients with surgically mutilated stomachs from a bygone era. I shudder to think that the current “state of the art” in medical practice will be found similarly inadequate in future.

I pray we do no harm in the meantime.