The two men couldn’t keep from shouting at each other last week. Ahmed furiously blamed Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia for the shoot-outs that were erupting in Baghdad, Basra and other cities. “Who is Moqtada to make the situation good or bad when he wants to?” he demanded. “He only follows his emotions!” Abbas would have none of it. To him, Sadr will always be a hero, the leader of the fight to stop Sunni death squads from massacring Shiite civilians in 2006 and 2007. “He and all the Mahdi Army protected the Shia! Without them, the Wahhabis [Sunni hard-liners] would have killed all the Shia in Baghdad!” As Ahmed stormed out of the room, Abbas gave a final jab. “The money from your job is haram [unclean]!” he hissed. “The Hakim family is stealing money from the people!”
Their family argument stopped short of violence. But by the end of last week, at least 100 Iraqis had been killed in battles between the Mahdi Army and the Iraqi government’s security forces, which are dominated by Hakim loyalists. U.S. and Iraqi officials portrayed the fighting as a showdown between a lawful government and criminal gangs, but the feud dates back before the fall of Saddam Hussein. Sadr’s father, a venerated Shiite leader, remained in Iraq through the years of the dictatorship while many of the Hakims (a similarly prestigious line) took refuge in Iran. Ever since, each side has regarded the other as hopelessly compromised—with a touch of class hatred: Sadr has drawn many of his followers from the streets, while the Hakims’ organization has attracted more-educated Iraqis. And some Hakim loyalists have always blamed Sadr for the never-solved assassination of Ayatollah Mohamad Baqir al-Hakim in 2003, despite Sadr’s repeated protestations of innocence.
The Hakim-Sadr feud was temporarily eclipsed by the apocalyptic struggle between Iraq’s Shiite and Sunni hard-liners. But the country quieted down after Sadr declared a unilateral ceasefire last August. (His decision came after a clash with pro-Hakim forces in Karbala.) Since then, intra-Shiite tensions have simmered just below the surface. Now things have blown up, just as Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker prepared to testify before Congress on their progress in Iraq. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki (a former Sadr ally) sent reinforcements to begin taking control of Basra, which is dominated by several Shiite militia groups. The Mahdi Army, feeling itself targeted, fought back, and the violence immediately leaped to Baghdad and other Sadrist centers. The Coalition had to intervene repeatedly with airstrikes on militia positions.
While President George W. Bush called the battle a “bold decision” by Maliki, U.S. officials tell NEWSWEEK it was more improvised than planned. The idea was simply to employ tactics similar to the U.S. surge in Baghdad, pushing additional troops into neighborhood “strong points” in Basra and setting up observation posts and mini-bases as U.S. troops did in Baghdad. After signing off on the plan in mid-March, Maliki decided to travel south with his security cabinet to witness its implementation. But when the militias fought back, he rushed into a major offensive against militias with formidable firepower—some of it allegedly supplied by Iran. “It was impulsive,” says a senior U.S. adviser familiar with the operation. “The timing is unfortunate.”
It is worse than unfortunate. At the urging of U.S. officials, the Shiite-dominated central government recently passed a law to give provincial governors sweeping powers over security forces and public works. Provincial elections are slated for this year, and competition has already begun, with the Sadrists likely to gain seats. The prize is control of the oil-rich and fertile south. Sadr’s followers say Maliki’s Basra offensive was nothing but a pre-emptive move to steal the local election from them. U.S. and Iraqi officials deny any such thing. At the weekend, top Sadr aides said they still had not officially abandoned the ceasefire. But at home in Karbala, Abbas worries that the fighting will escalate. “The fighters have to obey the orders of Sayyid Moqtada al-Sadr,” he says. “If he says they fight, they have to fight.” He and his brother Ahmed can only pray that day won’t come.
title: “All In The Family” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-13” author: “Lashawn Odougherty”
These photographers prowl the edges of domestic scenes, on the lookout for the revealing gesture, the crack in the mask. Their timing is not %he timing of their subjects. When Tina Barney invades her sister’s disheveled pink bedroom with her camera, she’s not interested in any best-foot-forward stuff. Blood ties have given these artists unrivaled access, and more than once you wonder how the subjects feel about the intrusion. As novelist Ann Beattie says in her introduction to “Flesh & Blood,” “Are families simply fair game because they can’t easily run away? Would they wish, in effect, to wear Day-Glo orange vests on their autumnal walks through the living room to avoid being shot?” Most people are trusting when it’s a relative holding the camera. Looking at some shots in “Flesh & Blood’–Peter Martens’s picture of his mother being X-rayed after a stroke; his father’s bones in a crematory oven by Donald Dietz–it’s hard not to think that trust has been damaged.
Just as often, though, the photographers display affection for their subjects, and in the work of some, like Laurence Salzmann, there’s a sense of downright giddiness. Yet “Flesh & Blood” is a spiky, modern corrective to Edward Steichen’s famous ‘5Os anthology, “The Family of Man.” It’s less about common ground than the disparate combinations that now make up the politically loaded idea of “family.”
While many of the photographers in “Flesh & Blood” seem disaffected and befuddled by kinship, Sally Mann shows us her family with uncommon clarity. At first, her beautiful black-and-white photographs appear realistic. Her children are doing what kids do-pretending at being adults, showing off cuts and scrapes, running around the house buck naked. But on closer inspection, most of the pictures seem contrived. The children are not “caught” in the midst of childhood rituals; they are acting them out for the camera. The pictures are not so much of children as they are about childhood–and the presiding, ironic intelligence is that of an adult.
In one image, a smiling little girl in a tutu leans against the back of a pickup; from the tailgate dangles a dead deer, its throat cut. This is tough stuff, meant to make us question our soft-headed notions about innocence. It’s the same in the many pictures where the children are nude. They are disturbing images, and they are meant to be. With their waif-white skin against chiaroscuro shadows, the children look Victorian-but their eyes say something else. They know, and they know we know, that they’re sexual creatures.
People upset over these pictures have accused Mann of exploiting her own children. But in the photographs, it is clear the children aren’t puppets; Mann captures their gumption and independence. Whatever contrivance is behind the images, her meticulous chronicle so enhances our appreciation of the mysteries of childhood that it is an accomplishment beyond caveat.
title: “All In The Family” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-10” author: “Stephen Anderson”
title: “All In The Family” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-11” author: “Brian Reamer”
Things didn’t look funny last week for Serbia’s strongman. Nearly three weeks of daily demonstrations have humiliated Milosevic; for the first time he really seemed in trouble. Washington, which had embraced him as its partner in implementing the Dayton peace plan, now pronounced him “not indispensable” and threatened to reimpose sanctions if he uses force to suppress the protests. The government-controlled press railed against the demonstrators as “terrorists” on a “pro-fascist rampage.” In fact, they hardly did anything more violent than pelt government buildings with eggs–which are so costly in inflation-ridden Serbia that their prices immediately soared. What really seemed to scare the regime was that the marchers began to demand not just the restoration of opposition victories but Milosevic’s resignation.
So far Milosevic has dragged his country into an unwinnable war, turned it into a pariah nation and wrecked its economy so severely that the lifting of international sanctions has scarcely improved life for most people. Along the way, he’s had more than a little help from Mira. A man without a childhood–both of his parents committed suicide–Milosevic relies on Mira so much that many observers see her as his mother figure, and a domineering one at that. After the affair two years ago, the couple reconciled–and soon after, many of Slobo’s most able supporters and ministers were cashiered for not meeting Mira’s test of political correctness (a hard test to meet, since the socialists had renounced the communism Mira holds so dear).
Mira, whose mother was executed by fellow communists as a snitch, is a figure of many passions, most of them strange. In one column for Duga, she asked why Belgrade housewives are not better housekeepers; in another she dismissed AIDS as a disease of “prominent homosexuals and Hollywood stars.” Turning to political scolding, Mira went on to build her reconstructed far-leftist alliance–with support from Slobo’s ruling party. When diplomats visited Milosevic during the crisis, they found a man surrounded by sycophants who don’t dare tell him the truth. “Milosevic doesn’t have any idea how bad things really are,” said a Western diplomat.
Unsavory lot: The opposition does, and it has happily ridden the wave of public indignation. Unfortunately, Serbia’s opposition figures are largely an unsavory lot. The best known of them, Vuk Draskovic, once led a rightist paramilitary band. Democratic Party leader Zoran Djindjic, who would have been mayor of Belgrade if the election results had stood, has been praised for keeping the protests peaceful–but has disreputable friends among Serb fanatics in Bosnia. Dismayed by the bickering opposition parties, which have splintered even since the elections, university students have organized separate protests, and some workers demonstrated, too. “We’ve had enough of this; for five years we’ve been told things will get better,” said Stojan Dordjevic, a 50-year-old rubber-industry worker. “Milosevic has driven the country to economic disaster, ruined the future of my children, and now he’s stolen our votes.” His factory closed, Dordjevic scrapes by selling potatoes on the street–when he’s not out marching.
A half decade of war created a class of high-rolling war profiteers and jet-setters who dominate Belgrade’s social scene, and entrenched a class of corrupt party apparatchiks. In a city where the average income is about $100 a month, it’s not unusual to see Maseratis driven around by self-professed war criminals. First Son Marko Milosevic, whose only apparent means of support is a rural discotheque he owns, is an outspoken proponent of the sort of style Serbs call the “Four P’s”: pager, pistol, plavusa (blondes) and Pajero (a type of car), although he prefers a yellow Ferrari. “I can’t sit in a car alone without music and a gun,” Marko told an interviewer from Vreme last summer. “I have to have a girl and music and a car and gun.” A bad combination: by his own count the 22-year-old presidential son has totaled 15 cars in 19 accidents. The police don’t dare arrest him; a photographer who took his picture recently was brutally beaten.
Marko’s sister, Marija, 31, is the editor in chief of a Belgrade radio station that plays Serbian pop music–and wasn’t jammed like its feistier brethren last week. She’s had a series of boyfriends, who tend to be elevated to ambassadorships. The decadence of the Milosevic inner circle grates in a land where wages go unpaid and pensions shrink monthly. In the Milosevic hometown of Pozarevac, Slavka Ilic, 58, is selling her grandchildren’s clothing at a street stall: “They have two big houses, and I haven’t had my pension in two months.”
“We’re not going to take it anymore” was one of many of the protesters’ chants last week. After 17 straight days on the streets, turning out in force despite bitter cold and even snow, protesters were making that point stick. Milosevic’s government floated offers of compromise, announcing the resignations of the information minister, Aleksander Tijanic, and the fraudulently installed mayor of Nis, the second largest city where opposition parties had their wins invalidated. Two radio stations were reopened–the government lamely blamed the closure of the popular Radio B-92 on the flooding of its transmitter.
That’s probably not enough. Unless Milosevic either hands back Belgrade or resorts to force in the streets, it seems unlikely the protesters will go home soon. Either course could break Milosevic’s grip on power. An opposition victory now will buoy it toward an even stronger challenge in next year’s federal elections; a crackdown could provoke widespread international condemnation. But the status quo may prove even worse, given the protesters’ apparent staying power: “The longer this goes on, the weaker he gets,” says a diplomat in Belgrade.
It has often been said that Slobodan Milosevic believes in only one thing: power. Nobody thinks he will go easily. Once a Communist Party stalwart, he remade himself a nationalist in a bid to keep power–and wrecked Yugoslavia in the process. Then he became the peacemaker whose cooperation made the Dayton peace plan possible–and betrayed his protEgEs among the Bosnian Serbs. But democrat does not seem to be in the Milosevic repertoire. A democrat must be willing to lose.
title: “All In The Family” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-19” author: “Lauri Edwards”
Yet the Bushes are only one of the GOP clans with deep roots in public service. A family might come to politics, like the McCains, from a long military tradition. Or with politics in its blood like the Tafts, a bedrock Ohio clan that produced a president early in the last century. Two traditions came together when Howard Baker married Nancy Kassebaum. The revolutionaries named Reagan will also live on, if only in the sentimental memory of the party the Gipper built. Politics may seem out of fashion or derided as a cyncial game. But to these people–these families–public service is a noble enterprise and a life they are proud to live.
title: “All In The Family” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-09” author: “Hazel Beavers”
Of the three Chadians and one Frenchman in the party, Djimdoumalbaye, 31, was the acknowledged master of fossil spotting. “You have to be curious, and touch everything that lies on the ground,” he told NEWSWEEK. “If there’s a crust, it’s possible there’s a bone inside.” The normal routine is to use a broom of twigs to sweep sand into shovels and sift it through mesh. But this morning he didn’t need the broom. “I saw a crust with two rows of teeth,” he says. “It was all black, and at first sight I thought it was a pig’s jaw. Then I turned it over, and I saw the eye sockets, and I thought, ‘That’s what we’re looking for’.”
And more. What the fossil hunters, who were working under the eccentric paleontologist Michel Brunet of the University of Poitiers, found was a skull that has not only made history, but thrust history back a couple of million years. What at first looked like a pig’s jaw is now known as Sahelanthropus tchadensis, nicknamed “Toumai”: “hope of life” in the Goran language.
Revealed last week in the journal Nature, Toumai’s wonders, as well as its mysteries, begin with its age: approximately 7 million years old, it’s the oldest fossil of a hominid, or human ancestor, by more than a million years. (The nearest skull is a relative ingenue at 2.5 million years old.) But what has paleontologists agog is this googol-granddaddy’s precocious attributes: most notably the relative flatness of its face, which is more modern-looking than skulls half its age. “This is the most spectacular discovery in 70 years,” says Harvard paleontologist Daniel Lieberman. “It’s probably as close to the common ancestor of chimps and humans as we’ll ever see.”
Or maybe it’s not our ancestor at all, but some star-crossed evolutionary line that was far ahead of its time. While paleontologists agree that chimps and Homo sapiens share a common ancestor, there’s debate on just how straight the path was from that ancestor to humans. Instead of the transformation illustrated in 1950s textbooks, with a neat progression of chimp to stoop-shouldered caveman to Tony Curtis, many paleontologists believe prehumans emerged in a number of different lines, with all but ours dying out. By this view the way to chart human evolution is not by a tree but a complex bush. “Maybe [Toumai] is an indication that there were lots of different species of hominid that were reproductively isolated,” says Don Johanson, a “bushy” theorist who discovered the 3 million-year-old “Lucy” bones in 1974. “They all went in their own directions.”
By this theory, previous celebrated finds like Lucy (who walked upright but had a chimplike snout) or the 2 million-year-old Homo habilis (strong brow ridges and a flat face) can’t ever be placed in a serial progression, but were all candidates in the ultimate game of “Survivor.” Not everybody buys into this bushy theory. “It’s ‘X-Files’ paleontology” with no supporting evidence, says fossil hunter Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley.
In any case, Brunet’s amazing find gives us plenty to consider. The skull is nearly complete–itself something of a miracle. Although Toumai’s brain was about the size of a modern-day chimpanzee’s, its face is quite flat, a classically human trait. Unlike chimps, it sports a large brow and small canines. And even though Brunet’s team found no signs of a skeleton, the way the spine connects to the skull leads scientists to think that Toumai may have walked on two feet.
There is one question the Toumai skull does settle. You can stick a fork in the theory that human ancestors loitered in eastern Africa until the last couple million years or so. This “East Side Story” held that prehumans arose after tectonic forces formed the Rift Valley 8 million years ago. While chimps on the western side were fat and happy in their lush forests, their hapless brethren were subjected to an increasingly harsh, dry climate, forcing them to evolve. Toumai shows that the Rift Valley had little to do with how and why hominids evolved. It also means that scientists have to roll back their estimate of when chimps and humans diverged by at least a million years.
For more than 20 years, the 61-year-old Brunet has defied conventional wisdom in seeking hominid fossils in all the supposedly wrong places. After false starts in Pakistan and Cameroon, he settled on Chad. Though now as flat as a dot-com’s revenues, millions of years ago the Djourab desert was a huge basin surrounding a freshwater lake teeming with now extinct fish and amphibious mammals. Nearby, creatures vaguely resembling today’s giraffes and pigs grazed on grasses and leaves. Just the kind of place prehumans would have loved–if any ever lived there. Brunet believed fervently that they did. “East Side Story said savannah made man,” Brunet told NEWSWEEK. “But the oldest are associated with forest fauna.”
When Brunet arrived on the scene in 1994, he encountered sand dunes drifting across a hard desert floor, with fossils inlaid like some kind of prehistoric floor tile. One of the richest was TM266, which he explored in 1997–and figured that four years later, the shifting sands might uncover more. Talk about hitting paydirt. “Brunet’s work is like looking for a needle in a hundred haystacks,” says Jacques Corgin, the French ambassador to Chad. “To find what they found, you need la baraka [luck].”
Oddly, it was not until September, two months after his team uncovered the skull, that Brunet himself first laid eyes on Toumai. After his team had unearthed the skull, they wrapped it carefully in toilet paper and headed home. After three days they reached Chad’s capital, N’Djamena, and phoned Brunet. The find quickly became the talk of N’Djamena, and the French press caught wind of it. The leak so infuriated the control-freak Brunet that he stayed away for weeks. Ultimately, of course, he had to venture to Chad to take plaster casts (Toumai itself will remain in his native country), and begin to address the controversy that a 7 million-year-old hunk of bone generates. But Brunet, with characteristic confidence, claims “no doubt” that his discovery is one of humanity’s ancestors, “the oldest human known to now.” To confirm this–and resolve some of the increasing mysteries that the residue of a 7 million-year-old creature has stirred–will indeed require la baraka.
