…but what about those who left him to it?

[This article is cross-posted here, here and here]

By Daniel Simpson

I never met Radovan Karadzic, though like many in the Balkans, I did once pretend to try and find him.

His trademark bouffant vanished long before I first set foot in Bosnia, a decade too late to see Serbs douse Sarajevo with anti-aircraft cannon, if not the “armed trees” of Dr Karadzic’s warped poetic prophecy.

A psychiatrist, his delusions started early. Born in a Montenegrin stable, as World War II spawned Socialist Yugoslavia, his role model wasn’t just his father Vuk, a Serbian militiaman who fought both the Nazis and the Partisan resistance. In time, he grew to see himself as heir to a far more celebrated Vuk Karadzic: the poet, folklorist and father of Serbian orthography.

By the outbreak of war in 1992, this linguist namesake’s spirit had long since possessed Dr Karadzic, who was lured into politics in the 1960s by an infamous nationalist writer. Visitors to his mountain redoubt were regaled with folk tales of Serbian suffering, as well as claims that Bosnia’s Muslims were slaughtering themselves, or fleeing their homes in gratitude to join ethnic kin elsewhere. Some were even treated to his singing. From a lopsided gawp, the Bosnian Serb leader would wail about his people’s historical woes, mawkish epics backed by a single-stringed lyre called a gusle, the traditional grating accompaniment to Balkan laments.

The peasants these anthems eulogised were all that remained when I arrived. And they weren’t about to betray their hero to prying outsiders, even for a $5 million bounty. For years, Dr Karadzic had roamed the wilds of Serb-run eastern Bosnia, unhindered by thousands of NATO soldiers who’d been sent to police the peace. He’d disguised himself as a priest, some said, shorn of his grey shock and sporting a beard. Others reported “sightings” worthy of Elvis: in cafés, at funerals, and even poetry readings. But if they’d phoned them in to NATO, the response had never been swift enough to threaten capture. Rewards seemed no match for the smuggled loot that bought Europe’s most notorious fugitive freedom to do as he pleased.

Or did it?

Death and the Baron

Death is a serious business at Reuters. One of its snappers just won a Pulitzer for shooting a dying cameraman. “A moment to be proud of,” boasted bosses.

Back at corporate headquarters, a book of the dead reminds visitors more sombrely of the prices people pay to bring them news.

The latest entry will honour a Gazan cameraman killed by an Israeli tank. Having already lost half a dozen reporters to American fire in Iraq, Reuters is demanding an investigation.

So far, so fair. But when Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger turned his hand to eulogy, he betrayed the memory of 23-year-old Fadel Shana.

“Our hearts obviously go out to his family,” Schlesinger told staff, though his head was clearly elsewhere. “It is, of course, striking,” his memo continued, “that this tragedy occurred on the last day for Reuters as it has been and the day before Thomson Reuters begins.”

Cue homilies to this “news and information power”, which makes most of its money selling trading systems to banks.

Blowhard Braggadocio

Sent to the New York Times last week

To the Editor:  

Roger Cohen (“Imagined Snipers, Real Challenges“, column, March 27) says “a seven-year dose” of “braggadocio from the White House” is quite enough.

Had they not already been killed by its policies, I suspect hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would agree.

So what was Mr Cohen’s response to the “bungled” war strategy when it was being devised, and might yet have been stopped (to say nothing of the lies that sold it)? A whisper of sotto voce braggadocio.

“To judge by the President’s plans,” he wrote to Times foreign staff on September 11, 2002, “the first half of next year may be busy.”

Without fear or favour indeed.

Daniel Simpson
London, March 27, 2008

The writer was a reporter for the Times in the Balkans during 2002 and 2003

Question Time for Democracy

Funnily enough, it isn’t

Dear Ms Halbach,

When more people have taken anti-depressants than voted for the current government, it’s time to ask questions about democracy.

If barely one in five voters elect the ruling party, and almost twice as many abstain, how should Question Time represent its audience when picking panellists? If most daily news is framed by officialdom and big business, and the three main parties share broadly similar platforms, where should viewers turn for incisive debate and analysis?

While its format remains sound, Question Time is stuck in a conceptual rut. What’s needed is an injection of critical thinking, and the courage to set its own agenda, instead of following other people’s. More shows should tackle themes, as on World Have Your Say. At least one guest should be a specialist authority and they ought to be framing the debate. Balance comes from judicious moderation, not pro-forma panel selection, and the aim should be to scrutinise the powerful, requiring input from beyond the Westminster bubble.

As the $1 billion race for the U.S. presidency unfolds, the story needs to be issues, not polls or personalities. So far, the biggest have been barely discussed: what does it all mean for America’s imperial role, and what happens next as that Empire declines? When Britain prepares to vote, the spotlight should return to electoral reform, and the Power Inquiry’s conclusion that: “The main political parties are widely held in contempt. They are seen as offering no real choice to citizens.”

The greatest challenges we face need urgent joined-up thinking, not sops to lobbies and faits accomplis. What use are biofuels, for example, if they don’t solve the energy or climate crises, while making food and water crises worse? How sustainable is economic growth without destroying the means to sustain ourselves? These questions demand intelligent discussion and the public has a right to expect it on TV.

Having worked as a foreign correspondent, I have an international perspective on global affairs and an outsider’s insight into Britain. Producing a daily world news bulletin, I’ve learned to prioritise context and analysis over soundbites and stand-ups.

As editor of Question Time, I’d host the national conversations that Parliament and the press shy away from, spicing up journalistic rigour with the dissent that’s the basis of democracy. I look forward to discussing my plans for the coming year.

Yours sincerely,

Daniel Simpson

Wet Dreams?

Solving The Global Water Crisis

By Daniel Simpson

“Water is the earth’s eye, looking into which
the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”
– Henry David Thoreau

“When the well runs dry, we know the worth of water.”
– Benjamin Franklin

LONDON, 13 February 2008 - Of all the clichés du jour, few resonate quite like the one about water. According to the effusive chief executive of Dow Chemical, and countless others before him and since, it’s “the oil of the 21st century.” Only it isn’t, except in terms of the scramble for access.

Our dependence on water is involuntary, it can’t be substituted or offset, and there won’t be a rush before the droughts. This isn’t to suggest that no one gets rich, but our fixation on getting richer is part of the problem, perhaps even more so than demographics, diet and climate change. The poor will bear the brunt of future turmoil, but hardship is likely to hit most people, whether in the stomach or the pocket. As with energy, the price of food keeps rising, and in some places staples are already scarce. That’s partly down to water shortages, and technology can’t just conjure up unlimited cheap supplies. We have to use less, in the farming that guzzles most of it, in the industries that ship its hidden costs around the world, and in our homes and lifestyle choices. Without radical changes over the next couple of decades, it won’t just be Africans brandishing machetes over a water pump.

And yet, with better stewardship, there’s probably enough to go around. Unfiltered by human interference, the hydrological cycle yields the ultimate renewable resource. Even today, as sprawling cities and irrigation pipes suck river beds and aquifers dry, a combination of cutbacks, recycling and more integrated planning could still stave off the Biblical devastation envisaged by the United Nations. Barely three percent of the earth’s water is fit for human consumption (and most of that’s ice), perhaps parching or poisoning up to three billion people by 2025. But if the richest countries in particular consume less, and invest in membranes to make sewage thirst-quenching, they could reuse more of what they have, while promoting wetland conservation. Captured rainfall could replenish groundwater as part of plans to keep rivers hydrated. And if, as seems inevitable (but costly), we also strip salt from the sea, people might even stop misquoting the Ancient Mariner, and instead find plenty more drops to drink.

“Water has been taken for granted,” laments Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary General. While some countries toy with austerity, others build desalinated oases, complete with golf courses and a hardcore fossil fuel habit. “The notion of water sustainability in a broad sense has not been seriously examined,” Ban told a roomful of executives and policymakers at last month’s World Economic Forum in Davos. “No one really owns the problem. Therefore, no one really owns the solution.” That’s led to comparisons with global warming, many of which are spurious, given the geographical variations in water scarcity compared to the atmospheric commons. There are nonetheless common policy responses, particularly when it comes to pricing in environmental cost. For the past couple of decades, international organisations have promoted local action, tailored to individual river basins. This is now being supplemented by a focus on quantifying and curbing worldwide wastage, perhaps using tradable footprint permits to encourage more holistic thinking about water embedded in supply chains.

The most logical sequence of policies is to start by slashing demand, most simply by jacking up prices. But this raises the question of water rights, a term with complex implications when referring to exploitation licenses, especially in the United States, where there’s booming speculative trade. More broadly, the right of humans to a fundamental necessity is only flimsily established, and even more weakly enforced. That will have to change, even if there’s little hope of delivering on UN promises to halve the number of people lacking access to safe drinking water by 2015. Tiered tariffs are an obvious compromise, and more nations are likely to emulate South Africa’s provision of a free (or nominal fee) subsistence minimum, defined by the World Health Organisation as 20 litres per person per day. If that sounds substantial, try filling a bath with it, then consider that we “eat” around 5,000 litres daily, depending on how much goes into producing our favourite foods – or their feed. More than half that volume is needed to make a simple cotton T-shirt, and even greater quantities to wring a single litre of ethanol from maize. So much for the biofuel revolution: it’s not only pushing up grain prices, and eating up arable land; it’s drinking the very water we need to grow crops.

“We are making a big mistake,” Nestle’s chief executive, Peter Brabeck, told peers at Davos: “trying to solve the energy problem by making the nutrition problem worse.” Even oil eats water, he stresses. Some 2.5 litres go into processing a litre of petrol, and dozens of times that much gets pumped into tar sands as steam to extract each litre of oily goo. Neville Isdell, Brabeck’s counterpart at Coca Cola, agrees that joined-up thinking is vital. The water industry is projected to suck up a third more electricity within two decades, while worldwide energy consumption doubles – if the resources still exist to keep pace with it. What’s more, the U.S. already uses 40 percent of its ever scarcer water to generate power. “Unless we raise the issue as being a holistic issue, we’re going to get simple solutions,” Isdell warns. The consequences couldn’t be starker, particularly if we keep heating up the planet by burning carbon. “Unless we put limits on that at much lower levels than today’s,” says Fred Krupp, of the lobbying group Environmental Defense, “then we are walking into hell for water shortages.”

Just how bad might it get? Assuming the global population keeps growing as forecast, with ever more urban residents on rising incomes, demand for food will roughly double by the middle of the century, while water use might even triple. A generation before that, half the people on earth could be living on arid land, struggling to cultivate it and scavenging for drinking water, as one in five have to today. Conflict seems as inevitable as it has been for millennia. From Darfur to Damascus and beyond, water (or the lack of it) bubbles under hotspots like magma, erupting into wars that could engulf dozens of contested regions within decades. The crisis is multidimensional, from its ecological roots to the implications for democracy and human rights, depending on who profits and who pays.