Ya Bass

'Ice-pick that killed Trotsky' found in Mexico. Naturally the person who has the ice-pick wants some cash:

"I am looking for some financial benefit. I think something as historically important at this should be worth something, no?"

I think I must have been about 13 when I first read about the assassination of Leon Trotsky in one of my history books. Back then the whole ice-pick in the head of his enemy scenario not only helped sum up what a mad bastard Stalin could be but also helped turn my gaze towards some of the intrique inherent within "history". Before that I had considered it more in terms of trying to memorise the names of some old dead guys and a few dates - an inconvenience which got in the way of more important things like playing football or Sonic the Hedgehog.

Some good news for Iraqi football fans via Iraq the Model.
Football returns to Baghdad as the the Iraqi Premiere League begins.

Anne Applebaum on Amnesty's Amnesia in The Washington Post.

I don't know when Amnesty ceased to be politically neutral or at what point its leaders' views morphed into ordinary anti-Americanism. But surely Amnesty's recent misuse of the word "gulag" marks some kind of turning point. In the past few days, not only has Amnesty's secretary general, Irene Khan, called the U.S. prison for enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, "the gulag of our times," but Amnesty's U.S. director, William Schulz, has agreed that U.S. prisons for enemy combatants are "similar at least in character, if not in size, to what happened in the gulag."
. . .Thus Guantanamo is the gulag, President Bush is Generalissimo Stalin, and the United States, in Khan's words, is a "hyper-power" that "thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights" just like the Soviet Union. In part, I find this comparison infuriating because in the Soviet Union it would have been impossible for the Supreme Court to order the administration to change its policies in Guantanamo Bay, as it has done, or for the media to investigate Abu Ghraib, as they has done, or for Irene Khan to publish an independent report about anything at all.

Importantly, Applebaum does not seek to be an apologist for the Bush administration. She makes reasoned (and justified) critique of the practices at Guantanamo and elsewhere:

Like Khan and Schulz, I am appalled by this administration's detention practices and interrogation policies, by the lack of a legal mechanism to judge the guilt of alleged terrorists, and by the absence of any outside investigation into reports of prison abuse. But I loathe these things precisely because the United States is not the Soviet Union, because our detention centers are not intrinsic to our political system, and because they are therefore not "similar in character" to the gulag at all.

Good piece in the Guardian today: Young democracy guerrillas join forces.

Meanwhile in Iran:
Iranian women kick out against football ban.

In Syria the Vice-President Abdul Halim Khaddam stood down from his position in the Syrian government and the Baath Party today. It probably doesn't signal much however - while he was a hardliner and one of the architects of Syrian policy towards Lebanon over the last two decades his political influence has been fairly small in the last few years.

Things are looking much less promising in Zimbabwe: From the Sunday Times.

[Police] swept through the centre of Harare, rounding up the many thousands of traders who survive by selling everything from chewing gum to second-hand clothes and even the colourful women flower sellers who have operated in Africa Unity Square for decades. Flowers and wooden curios were thrown onto bonfires as their owners watched in disbelief.

It was the start of what has since become a nationwide scorched earth campaign. In cities from Mutare in the east to Bulawayo in the south, police have torched homes, demolished market stalls, detaining more than 20,000 traders, and bulldozed shanty towns.

Naturally, Zimbabwe hold a seat on the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.

A couple of weeks ago I was astonished to read Amnesty International describe the prison at Guantanamo Bay as the "gulag of our time". Undoubtedly there are abuses of power occurring in there but a reasoned critique of this should be made, not hysterical statements comparing it to a Gulag. Guantanamo has a few hundred prisoners, the Soviet Gulags held over 2 million following the purges in 1937 alone and cumulatively over 10 million throughout their existence. This is a low end estimate, many respected historians such as Anne Applebaum have put the figure at closer to 25 million. Over a million prisoners are documented to have died between 1934 to 1953 and the actual figures are most probably higher than this (in some camps the death rate was as high as 80% of prisoners in the first months of incarceration).

Guantanamo the Gulag of our times? I don't think so.

Nick Cohen mentions in the Observer today that he has:

an uneasy feeling that it [Amnesty International]is losing universal principles and treating the abuse of rights by the United States as worse than similar or more grotesque abuses by others.

About a month ago I read an interview with the head of Amnesty Internationl Irene Khan (I thought this interview was in the Guardian but I can't find it in their online archive and google hasn't helped me find the original either, so the following should be treated with some scepticism until I can find it) where she stated that Amnesty was intending to focus their resources on abuse in certain key countries - a corollary of which would be Amnesty not having such an universalist focus (even acounting for it's current selection bias where a disproportionate number of AI reports focus on relatively more democratic and open countries).

Links for comment on the report:

Cronaco

Socialism in an Age of Waiting

Shuggy's blogspot

Eric the Unread

Normblog