Mission & Justice

Nasser Arrabyee; 10/9/08

The reconstruction efforts in Sa’ada cannot continue unless Al Houthi rebels relinquish their positions in the mountains, Yemeni Deputy Prime Minister for Defence and Security Affairs, Rashad Al Alimi said. He accused the rebels of intending to continue the war, which has wreaked havoc in the Sa’ada area and cost the government over $50 million (Dh183.5 million) for reconstruction. “Despite the fact that the government troops have withdrawn nearly all positions, the Al Houthi groups are still building fortifications and taking over new positions,” he said.

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22/8/08, Tony Smith; holds a PhD in political science. He has taught at several universities, most recently at the University of Sydney.

Commemorations in 2006 to mark the 40th anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan should have helped the rehabilitation of Australia’s Vietnam veterans. No one doubts the courage of these mostly young men or the trauma they have experienced since their return. No one should deny that they have been treated badly. One indication is that only now, 36 years after Australia’s withdrawal from Vietnam, and coinciding with the 42nd anniversary of Long Tan, a study is to be held into the health outcomes of service for veterans and their families. Several official ceremonies have honoured Vietnam veterans, including a Welcome Home Parade and the dedication of a memorial in Canberra.

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Frank Walker; 10/8/08

Vietnam veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange are much more likely to get prostate cancer, a new study has found. It is the first time the toxic defoliant sprayed during the Vietnam War has been linked to the most common cancer in men and second-biggest cancer killer. The eight-year study of 13,000 veterans by the University of California’s Davis Centre found twice as many men exposed to Agent Orange developed prostate cancer as veterans who were not exposed. They were also diagnosed at a younger age and their cancer was nearly four times more likely to spread.

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David Armitage; 19/7/08

My handy digital Bush countdown clock tells me there are 185 days left until George Bush leaves the White House. We will all have our memories of his eight years in office, but one that sticks in the mind is the moment in May 2003 when he stood on the deck of an American aircraft-carrier and announced the end of large-scale combat operations in Iraq. The notorious banner behind him read “Mission Accomplished”. “Mission: Impossible” might have been more like it. There is a better reason than Bush’s hubris to remember that moment. It marked the end of the last war fought between two sovereign states. In this case, the enemies were the United States and Saddam Hussein’s Republic of Iraq. Not long after, the new Iraqi Government regained its sovereignty and began to carry on military operations in alliance with coalition forces. Bush’s announcement was clearly not the end of the war in Iraq. But it did end formal interstate warfare, at least for the present.

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John Bartlett 10/7/08

According to Jim, an attendant at the the National Gallery of Victoria, feelings ran high last Anzac Day against the exhibition of 51 drawings and etchings by Otto Dix, a German artist/soldier. ‘In Adelaide,’ he says, ‘there were even some attempts to damage the prints.’ This is an exhibition that indeed provokes strong reactions from observers with its often grotesque and always confronting depictions of the realities of war on the Western Front during WWI. Dix said that ‘there was a dimension of reality that had not been dealt with in art: the dimension of ugliness’. In this exhibition there is an excess of ugliness. Mealtime in the Trenches depicts a soldier gulping down a hasty meal apparently indifferent to the human skeleton trapped in the frozen landscape beside him.

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Jeremy Pearcel 7/7/08

Arthur William Galston; Agent Orange Researcher; 1920 — 15-6-2008

Arthur Galston, a Yale plant biologist who did early research that helped lead to the herbicide Agent Orange, and who then helped raise awareness of the US military’s use of it in Vietnam in the 1960s and its devastating effects on river ecosystems, has died of heart failure in Hamden, Connecticut. He was 88. In letters, academic papers, broadcasts and seminars, Galston described the environmental damage wrought by Agent Orange and travelled to South Vietnam to monitor its impact. From 1962 to 1970, US troops released about 76 million litres of the chemical defoliant to destroy crops and expose Vietcong positions and routes of movement. Galston asserted that harm to trees and plant species could continue perhaps for decades. He pointed out that spraying Agent Orange on riverbank mangroves in Vietnam was eliminating “one of the most important ecological niches for the completion of the life cycle of certain shellfish and migratory fish”.

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Emily Wilson; 5/7/08; Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her most recent book is The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint (Harvard University Press).

The Roman Triumph; Mary Beard; Harvard University Press
Everybody above the age of four knows how important it is not to be a sore loser, and how difficult. When you lose your whole fortune to your sister at Monopoly, you are not supposed to burst into tears, accuse her of cheating, hit her, tear up the paper dollars or run screaming from the room. You are supposed to be gracious in defeat: congratulate the winner, allow her to enjoy her victory, stifle your sorrow and pretend not to mind too much.It is perhaps unfair that the moral and emotional burden of the situation should fall on tie one who has suffered defeat, but the same rules apply beyond the playroom. Even in war, when winning and losing is a matter of life or death, we still hang on to the unrealistic hope that the losing nation will do the decent thing, that it will accept defeat with good grace rather than fighting back with terrorism or breaking up into civil war.

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Sian Powell; 5/7/08

The girl in Sierra Leone’s Freetown spends all her time caring for her baby, a child born of violent rape. The adolescent in southern Afghanistan has finally begun to learn to read, but she is terrified because her school has been bombed. The young woman from Darfur, in Sudan, sexually assaulted by four men, disdained by her father and left to weep in a tent, is psychologically scarred beyond imagining. The girl living in a tent camp near East Timor’s Dili airport mourns her child, born in the hills and dead of untended medical complications. Like more than 200 million others, all these girls and young women live in war zones or troubled post-war zones. All have been traumatised beyond the ordinary vicissitudes of conflict simply because they were female. Apart from the standard stream of war stories, little publicity has been given to their plight, which not only entails common horrors of war, such as the physical danger, the hunger, the fear, but also those disasters peculiar to females: rape as a war crime, early marriages of convenience, giving birth without access to child care. If girls and women endure discrimination during times of peace, it is doubled in times of war.

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Emily Wilson; 5/7/08; Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her most recent book is The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint (Harvard University Press).

The Roman Triumph; Mary Beard; Harvard University Press
Everybody above the age of four knows how important it is not to be a sore loser, and how difficult. When you lose your whole fortune to your sister at Monopoly, you are not supposed to burst into tears, accuse her of cheating, hit her, tear up the paper dollars or run screaming from the room. You are supposed to be gracious in defeat: congratulate the winner, allow her to enjoy her victory, stifle your sorrow and pretend not to mind too much.It is perhaps unfair that the moral and emotional burden of the situation should fall on tie one who has suffered defeat, but the same rules apply beyond the playroom. Even in war, when winning and losing is a matter of life or death, we still hang on to the unrealistic hope that the losing nation will do the decent thing, that it will accept defeat with good grace rather than fighting back with terrorism or breaking up into civil war.

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Dewi Cooke; 28/6/08

Women and girls are often caught in the crossfire of conflict, violated by men who have the power to do so. A new report argues  legal changes to protect them are crucial in the fight against poverty. Young women occupy a strange space in most cultures. As mothers, sisters and daughters, their strength and resilience help hold their communities together. But in times of war they are often the first and most vulnerable targets. That is how it was for Bintu and Rumenia. Bintu is from Liberia, where she was captured by rebels during the civil war. Rumenia is from East Timor and lost her 20-year-old older brother in the 2006 uprising when he was shot outside her family home.

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