C.M. Sennott's Notebook:

A new Castro, but the same old Cuba

It's straight out of Orwell.

The Cuban government of Raul Castro has kept up the repression of the Cuban people through a Criminal Code known as “dangerousness.”

According to a new report released by Human Rights Watch today, this code allows authorities to imprison individuals before they have committed any crime, on the suspicion that they are likely to commit an offense in the future.

In other words, the “dangerousness” provision is defining as “dangerous” any behavior that contradicts Cuba’s socialist norms. Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith in 1984 would absolutely recognize such a law.

The 123-page report by Human Rights Watch, “New Castro, Same Cuba,” documents how scores of people in Cuba are being locked up for exercising their fundamental freedoms and how many more political prisoners arrested during Fidel Castro’s rule are being left to languish in detention.

Rather than dismantle Cuba’s repressive machinery, Raul Castro has kept it firmly in place and fully active, the report says. 

“In his three years in power, Raul Castro has been just as brutal as his brother," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “Cubans who dare to criticize the government live in perpetual fear, knowing they could wind up in prison for merely expressing their views.”  

Based on a fact-finding mission to Cuba and more than 60 in-depth interviews, Human Rights Watch’s Nik Steinberg led a team of researchers that have documented more than 40 cases in which the government has imprisoned individuals under the “dangerousness” provision for exercising their basic rights. 
 

In northern Iraq, O'Malley continues a tireless pursuit of reconciliation

Making peace is hard work. And there are few in the world who pursue it with the relentlessness and entrepreneurial spirit of Padraig O'Malley.

This time the professor and advocate for peace takes his energy to Kirkuk, Iraq, where he is pulling together the leaders from each of the three governmental bodies that lay claim to the coveted oil fields of Kirkuk.

Kirkuk is one of the great flashpoints for tension as the country prepares for the crucial election in January 2010, and this effort is intended to try to defuse the powderkeg that is Kirkuk.

O'Malley, an Irishman whose work on reconciliation efforts around the world is funded and supported by the University of Massachusetts and Tufts University, has for the first time brought together leaders from the Kirkuk Provisional Council, the Kurdistan Parliament, and the Iraqi Parliament.

At issue is how these groups can work together for the ethnically mixed city to govern itself and to determine whether Kirkuk province should become part of the autonomous Kurdistan region. It will also take up the thorny issue of property claims from people who were displaced during the reign of Saddam Hussein, and who will control and profit from the oil fields beneath the city.

O'Malley is the John Joseph Moakley Distinguished Professor of Peace and Reconciliation at the University of Massachusetts Boston¹s McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies. During the conference, Professor O'Malley and his team of negotiators from Northern Ireland and South Africa will use the Helsinki Agreement, a set of guidelines agreed upon last year by Iraq's national leaders as a result of a process facilitated by O'Malley and his team, to guide the discussions.

The hope is that the conferees will create an inter-parliamentary tier involving the three legislative bodies as the political vehicle to secure a peaceful future for the divided city.

The call from Oslo came way too early for Obama

The call came too early for President Obama on the Nobel Peace Prize.

In fact, it was precisely 6 a.m. when President Obama was awoken by his press secretary Robert Gibbs and informed that he was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

He hadn’t even had his morning coffee yet. And here was the young president winning the Nobel just nine months into his presidency.

As the news landed early Friday, the world has reacted with complete surprise. Even the handicappers of the Nobel in Oslo didn’t come close to calling Obama in the field of some 200 who were nominees.

GlobalPost has been on top of this story with an excellent piece on the handicappers that ran Thursday out of Norway by a new correspondent, Gwladys Fouche.

The world is surprised, but not too many have expressed disapproval beyond Hamas and the Taliban. And more than likely the far right in America.

But certainly it is fair to ask, why was he given this award when he is conducting two wars and pondering an escalation of 40,000 trooops in Afghanistan? The saber rattling against Iran is underway. The Israeli-Palestinian peace process has received scant attention by the president and is going nowhere even if his special envoy George Mitchell is working hard for a breakthrough.

It will be interesting to watch how Israel reacts to the news, particularly in the Likud and far right camp that has expressed deep mistrust of Obama.

An early glimpse comes from Likud Knesset member Danny Danon who responded to questions from reporters in Israel with this:

"Obama set himself a goal without even understanding the situation, and for that, he received the prize. [Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu will have to be very strong against the pressure that will now intensify as Obama will have to prove that he is worthy of the prize."

Obama’s speech four months ago in Cairo earned him many points around the world for his peace-making efforts, and essentially illustrated to the world that he was indeed going to reengage with international diplomacy in a new way. It is clearly one that stands in stark contrast to the unilateralism of President George W. Bush.

In his historic speech in Cairo in June, he said, “I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world," he said, "one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles - principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”

It seems the judges in Oslo have awarded him for having a good ear for listening to the world. And that’s not a bad thing, even if he does still have a lot to prove. The big question now is whether being recognized by the Nobel committee this early will help or hinder the administration in carrying out the president's great hopes for success in foreign challenges that include: reaching a settlement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, executing the U.S. draw down of troops in Iraq; continuing to build the institutions of democracy in Afghanistan; and containing the nuclear threat posed by Iran.

It’s a long list and there is a lot of work to do.  

The fog lifts in Pittsburgh, and the G20 leaders are already scrambling for position

PITTSBURGH — A fog is lifting over the city of three rivers as world leaders begin to arrive here for the Group of 20 summit.

And before they even arrive in their limousines snarling traffic for all the locals, presidents and prime ministers are positioning their policies for the summit which will focus on how to keep the slow, but steady recovery of the global economy going forward.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who faces an election on Sunday, was eager to get on the map. And she spoke directly to a strong sentiment in Europe that the U.S. needs to focus more on what it sees as an urgent need for market regulation, particularly in the United States. GlobalPost columnist Cindy Skyrzycki, an expert on regulation who happens to live here in Pittsburgh, is right on the money in her analysis of this debate over regulation as the cutting edge of this summit.

Coming off the U.N. General Assembly, the leaders of the G20 are also taking positions on other key issues, particularly China, which has already thrown cold water on the resolution that emerged out of the Security Council Wednesday to impose further sanctions on Iran if it does not halt its nuclear program.

All week, GlobalPost has been weighing in on a wild few days of foreign policy.

Led by GlobalPost managing editor Thomas Mucha, GlobalPost has provided an outstanding body of work on the global economy in recent weeks. That coverage culminates over these next two days here in Pittsburgh at the G20. 

We have been working in partnership with one of our newspaper syndication partners, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, one of America’s great city newspapers, which has done an excellent job covering the events. Their online team has built a very cool web page for the paper’s coverage and a running blog, “The Big Story.”

The Post-Gazette has also featured our  interactive graphic, “The World Comes to Pittsburgh: A G20 Survival Guide,” which was edited by Mucha and created by our ace web developer Luke Parlin out of our offices in Boston. The graphic features 20 reports from 20 correspondents on the G20 countries and is a survival guide to the events here, providing you with the players and the positions they hold.

I arrived in Pittsburgh and immediately starting writing about this gritty and welcoming city and how it was bracing for the world to arrive on its doorstep. The city was chosen to host the G20 summit because of its stunning renaissance from a dying steel mill town to a vibrant, modern city that has reinvented itself as a center for medicine, academia and technology.

There’s heavy security here with 900 Pittsburgh police and 1,000 additional police sworn in from forces around the country who are on hand to protect the city from a small army of protesters, activists and anarchists who are threatening to disrupt the gathering of world leaders as they did so effectively at past summits in San Francisco and Genoa, Italy. Wednesday, Greenpeace successfully carried out an operation by climbing a bridge with repelling ropes and unfurling a huge banner that read: “DANGER: Climate Destruction Ahead. Reduce CO2 Emissions Now.”

It’s a big week for those who follow the issues that affects us all — the struggles against terrorism, climate change, nuclear proliferation, the global economy and the Obama administration’s still emerging foreign policy — and GlobalPost has a lot of groundtruth for you to check out. Let us know what you think by posting comments here or on my blog, GroundTruth.

Pittsburgh braces to welcome the world

PITTSBURGH — Just landed in this gritty town of rivers and steel and a no-nonsense people who work hard and play hard.

The city is bracing for the Group of 20 summit on the global economy that will shut down roads and disrupt life and generally mess with the local economy. But the folks here are pretty welcoming, sort of in the way you welcome your in-laws who'll be spending a few days.

To be polite, they seem to be watching international affairs a bit more closely than usual. But from what I can tell they're not too impressed.

"Is this guy serious?" asked Greg Smalenskas, a chef at a downtown restaurant, as he watched Libyan leader Col. Muammar Gadaffi live on CNN deliver his insane, 90-minute rant at the U.N. General Assembly.

"Is he coming here?" asked a woman sitting at the bar, as he went from calling for an investigation of the JFK assasination to referring to Obama as "my son" and banging the podium as he called for the U.N. to move out of New York.

The woman looked worried. No, I assured her, Libya is not in the G-20 and thankfully will not be pitching up in Pittsburgh. But clearly Gadaffi got up on the wrong side of the tent after his attempt to create a Bedouin encampment on land owned by Donald Trump in Bedford, NY and another parcel in New Jersey was disrupted in the middle of the night. (I'm not making this up.)  

Before the surreal interlude of Gadaffi and the fireworks of protesters challenging Iranian leader Ahmadenijad, President Obama opened the session with a speech that was well-reasoned and warmly welcomed. Obama stressed the need for countries to work together to confront global issues. Highlights of it in the newscast got a few polite nods of the head in agreement from most of the people in the Tap Room bar at the William Penn Hotel, but very quickly eyes shifted back to the larger screens which were carrying ESPN. 

Out on the rain-soaked streets, Tiona Jackson, 25, a nursing assistant, was waiting for a bus to get to the nursing home where she works the late shift. And she has no idea how she'll get home when they begin shutting down the streets for the summit later tonight.

"All I know is I can't get home from work tonight and have no idea how I'll get in tomorrow," she said. "Tell you the truth, I'll be glad when they're gone."

David Henderson, a computer programer with a Pittsburgh Steelers' T-shirt, said he was surprised by the hundreds of police who are out in force to counter a small insurgency of protesters who lurk around the city.

"The police are in riot gear and scaring the daylights out of everybody," he said and "all these black limos are everhwere" in town escorting the delegations. 

"As long as they are all out of here by the time the Steelers' game starts, I guess we can put up with all this," he said.

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