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MILITARY: Somali Pirates Provoke Indian Navy

Pirates imprisoned in Boosaaso's main jail, Somalia (photo by Jehad Nga)

The INS Tabar, a frigate in the Gulf of Aden, destroyed a "mothership" used by Somalia-based pirates to launch attacks by speedboat on merchant shipping in the area.  The New York Times reports that at least eight ships have been attacked by Somali pirates off the Horn of Africa in the last two weeks, the most notable of which is the Saudi-owned supertanker Sirius Star, with its $100 million cargo of crude.  The vessel was captured and is now being held for ransom off the coast of Somalia.

Danger Room notes that this is the Tabar's third engagement with pirates in little more than a week.  The Times of India reports that the Tabar answered distress calls from Saudi- and Mumbai-based ships.  Defending the Saudi vessel, the Tabar launched a Chetak helicopter with armed commandos, who fired on the pirate craft, forcing it to disengage.

India's naval presence in the region is new.  The International Maritime Bureau reports (cited in the NYTimes article) that this year, at least 92 ships have been attacked in and around the Gulf of Aden, more than triple the number in 2007.  India has joined British, American, Russian, and French naval vessels in the region, though there is no formal agreement, among the UN, NATO, or another body, on how best to coordinate the defense of merchant shipping and to reconcile security with the sovereignty of Somalia's territorial waters.

India's stake stems in part from its role in the centuries-old dhow trade, the small wooden cargo vessels that ply the Arabian Sea, the Gulf, and the Gulf of Aden, with cargo ranging from dates and grain to televisions, cooking oil, and contraband.  All the major ports in the region, including Dubai, Karachi, and Kuwait, are active in the dhow trade, with most of the sailors coming from India and Pakistan.  Mumbai and ports in Gujarat are home to India's dhow industry. 

Gujarati sailors aboard the MSV Shree Mahalaxmi, Sharjah, UAE, 2004 (photo by Preston Merchant)

An Indian dhow with 13 crew were seized on October 25 and later released.  Indian nationals also serve on the crews of vessels flagged in other countries, including the Japanese-owned chemical tanker MV Stolt Valor, which was captured by pirates in September and released on Nov. 16 after a ransom was paid.  The crew of 22 was comprised of 18 Indian nationals, including the captain. 

According to the Business Standard, Somalia has become the most important destination for dhow cargo since it receives no container traffic:

Today, most of the “high quality” trade happens with — take a breath — Somalia, through the ports of Berbera and Mogadishu. It might come a surprise but even the World Bank in its trade briefs notes that India is the lawless country’s biggest trade partner — supplying it with essential basic commodities such as rice, pulses, wheat, flour and sugar and helping transport the country’s only significant export — goats — to West Asia. And all the trade is courtesy the brave seamen who set out from the Kutch and, to a lesser extent, from Mumbai, Mangalore and Calicut.

“Earlier, we used to trade with Dubai but that has shrunk due to container availability. It is only a little profitable if you go there with over 1,000 tons. But places such as Yemen, Somalia, Eritrea and Kenya have no container traffic,” says Qasam Ali Mohammed Moulik, president of the Mandvi-Kutch Vahanvati Association. A ton shipped to Somalia will cost about Rs 1,300 at the current floating freight rate.

Somalia's lawlessness and poverty have given rise to piracy as a second career for fishermen and for Somalia's warring factions to extort money and supplies.  Jeffrey Gettleman explores this phenomenon in a long article in the New York Times, with haunting photographs by Jehad Nga.

Trade matters.  According to the BBC, "about a third of India's total fleet of 900 cargo ships deployed in international waters are at risk" in the Gulf of Aden, with its access to the Suez Canal, and the INS Tabar has already escorted some 35 ships, including non-Indian ones, along the route.

PAKISTAN: Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry to accept NYC Bar honor

On Monday, November 17, 2008, Pakistan's ousted Chief Justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, will be in New York to speak at the New York City Bar Association and to accept an Honorary Membership, which is one of the Association's highest honors. The invitation to receive the award was originally extended to Chaudhry in October 2007, following a unanimous recommendation by the Association's honors committee a month earlier, but Chaudhry was unable to come to New York to accept the award, since he was detained for several months under house arrest after General Pervez Musharraf's extraconstitutional suspension of the Pakistan Constitution in November 2007. The New York City Bar ultimately conferred the award in absentia in January 2008, breaking with the Association's longstanding policy requiring honorees to accept the recognition in person.

Chaudhry is the eighth individual to be conferred honorary membership by the New York City Bar. Prior recipients include former Chief Justice of the United States William Rehnquist, former Chief Justice of India P.N. Bhagwati, and Judge Thomas Buergenthal of the International Court of Justice. Last November, the Association held a rally protesting Musharraf's Emergency that attracted approximately 700 lawyers to the steps of the New York Supreme Court in lower Manhattan.

Pakistan's lawyers' movement has insisted that Chaudhry remains Pakistan's legitimate and constitutional Chief Justice, and continues to demand his reinstatement to that office. However, the Pakistan People's Party-led government that came to power in the spring has refused to reinstate Chaudhry, claiming that the individual installed as Chief Justice by Musharraf upon suspending the constitution in November 2007 is Pakistan's "rightful" chief justice and that Musharraf's extraconstitutional actions cannot be undone.

The New York City Bar website has more details about the event, which is free and open to the public, and the award. Journalists may direct inquiries to the New York City Bar's Eric Friedman, at efriedman[at]nycbar[dot]org or +1 212 382-6754.  Tell 'em SAJAforum sent you.

During his visit to the United States, Chaudhry also will speak at Fordham University Law School (details) and Harvard University, which awarded Chaudhry its Medal of Freedom in November 2007.

Last week on SAJAforum: "Musharraf's 'Emergency' - One Year Later"

WEBCAST: US and Global Economy in Turmoil #4

[SUPPORT SAJA: Help us meet our new $15,000 challenge grant: http://saja.org/articles/saja-group-receives-prestigious-challenge-grant ]

Listen to a discussion, jargon-free, about the continuing meltdown around the world; what the prognosis is for ordinary people as well as big business; and much, much more. Have a suggestion for the NEXT webcast? Let us know! saja[at]columbia.edu

Our speakers include, from left:

• James T. Areddy, China correspondent, The Wall Street Journal (Shanghai)
• Krishna Guha, US economics editor, Financial Times (Washington, DC)
• Sarah Khan, vice president, international equity sales, BMA Capital Management, a leading Pakistani investment company (Karachi)
• Tejinder Singh, editor-in-chief, New Europe, the European Weekly (Brussels)
  Moderator, Sree Sreenivasan, SAJA co-founder and Columbia Journalism School professor
  

Monday, Oct. 27, 10-11 p.m. New York/Washington time
(that's Tuesday, Oct. 28, 8-9 am Karachi time; 10-11 am Shanghai time and 3-4 am Brussels time)
See your local time here: http://snurl.com/4nvr2

Listen live or to a recording:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/saja/2008/10/28/economy
(you can go to that link now and set an e-mail reminder for yourself)
or call +1-347-324-5991 to listen live

SEND IN YOUR QUESTIONS in the comments section below or  via e-mail to saja@columbia.edu
Post your comments below.

Listen to our previous webcasts on this topic:

Webcast #3: http://www.sajaforum.org/2008/10/webcast-us-glob.html

• Mustafa Chowdhury, head of US Rates Strategy, Deutsche Bank
  
• Nik Deogun, international editor, The Wall Street Journal
• Raju Narisetti, editor, Mint, a New Delhi business daily (former managing editor, Wall Street Journal Europe).
  

Webcast #2: http://www.sajaforum.org/2008/10/webcast-saja-br.html

• Ali Velshi, CNN's senior business correspondent
• Shibani Joshi, Fox Business News correspondent
• Hitha Prabhakar, a retail analyst and fashion editor (and former Bear Stearns analyst)

Webcast #1: http://www.sajaforum.org/2008/09/webcast-the-us.html

• Vikas Bajaj, business reporter, The New York Times (former SAJA vice president); read bio and archive of NYT articles
• Anirvan Banerji, co-founder and director of research at the Economic Cycle Research Institute; co-author of "Beating the Business Cycle: How to Predict and Profit from Turning Points in the Economy"
• John Laxmi, co-founder of a New York-based private equity firm with $4 billion under management (and SAJA treasurer); read bio
• Sudeep Reddy, economics reporter and "Real Time Economics" blogger, The Wall Street Journal (former SAJA Board member)

As always, you are welcome to quote from anything said during the FREE, WORLDWIDE webcasts (25+) at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/saja

PREZ RACE: Rekha Basu on John McCain's Meeting with the Des Moines Register's Editorial Board

[SAJAforum's posts, sources, resources about the 2008 presidential race]

Last Tuesday, Sen. John McCain met with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register in a bid to once again obtain the paper's endorsement. (In December, shortly before the Iowa caucuses, the Register endorsed McCain and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to be the nominees of their respective parties.) As news outlets widely reported, and as you can see for yourself in the video to the right, the interview at times became somewhat contentious.

On Friday, SAJAer Rekha Basu, who is a columnist for the paper and attended the meeting, shared some of her reactions in a column for the Register:

John McCain is angry.

You can feel it in the clenched muscles in his throat, the narrowing of his eyes, the controlled tone with which he handles a question he doesn't like, as if struggling to contain something that might spill out. We've seen that body language on TV. But around a Des Moines Register table Tuesday, the anger and tension were palpable. And unsettling.

McCain's volatility has been written and whispered about by staff and Senate colleagues: the mercurial temper, the quixotic outbursts of reproach, then jocularity. But those alleged episodes were behind the scenes. The combative, prickly McCain we saw was seeking the Register's endorsement. He already got it in the caucuses.

He took frequent offense at questions, characterizing them as personal viewpoints of the questioners rather than legitimate topics. True, he was asked some tough, pointed questions about his running mate and his honesty. But America is having those discussions, and you'd expect he'd be ready, not defensive. It takes a thick skin to be president. [link]

The entire column is available here, and video of the entire interview (which runs just under an hour) is available here. Basu answered three quick questions about the McCain interview:

SAJAforum: Compared to what you describe in your column, what was McCain's temperament like during his meeting with the Register's editorial board last fall, in advance of the caucuses?

PREZ RACE: Temple grad student on "gotcha journalism" and his exchange with Sarah Palin over Pakistan

[See SAJAforum posts, sources, resources on the 2008 presidential race]

A couple of weekends ago, Gov. Sarah Palin made headlines for her informal exchange, while ordering cheesesteaks in Philadelphia at Tony Luke's, with a Temple University graduate student about Pakistan:

"How about the Pakistan situation?," asked [Michael] Rovito, who said he was not a Palin supporter. "What's your thoughts about that?"

"In Pakistan?," she asked, looking surprised.

"What's going on over there, like Waziristan?"

"It's working with [Pakistani president] Zardari to make sure that we're all working together to stop the guys from coming in over the border," she told him. "And we'll go from there."

Rovito wasn't finished. "Waziristan is blowing up!," he said.

"Yeah it is," Palin said, "and the economy there is blowing up too."

"So we do cross border, like from Afghanistan to Pakistan you think?," Rovito asked.

"If that's what we have to do stop the terrorists from coming any further in, absolutely, we should," Palin responded, before moving on to greet other voters. [link]

The comment was interpreted by many to be closer to the position of Sen. Barack Obama than to that of Palin's own running mate, Sen. John McCain, who just the previous evening had criticized Obama's position on Pakistan during the first presidential debate. The next day, the McCain campaign retracted Palin's comments, and in a joint interview of McCain and Palin by CBS's Katie Couric the following Monday, McCain blamed the entire episode on what he referred to as "gotcha journalism."

Today, the Temple graduate student in question, Michael Rovito, has published an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer about his exchange with Palin and the subject of "gotcha journalism":

No one was engaging the Alaska governor beyond small talk. Most of the people in the crowd appeared starstruck, including some Obama supporters we had spotted earlier.

I felt compelled to ask the governor about the U.S. incursions into Pakistan that had been in the news recently. My parents urged me not to, but I thought she might respond in this informal setting....

PREZ DEBATE: McCain and Obama Debate Afghanistan and Pakistan

The South Asian subcontinent continued to feature prominently in the presidential race this week, as Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama clashed over U.S. policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan during their debate on Friday night. In the New York Times, David Sanger characterizes the exchange as a "role reversal," with Obama seeming "more aligned" than McCain "with President Bush’s current policy of authorizing American special forces to cross the Afghan-Pakistan border into Pakistan’s tribal areas that Al Qaeda and the Taliban have used as a sanctuary."

Video of the exchange to the right. Other reactions to the debate, along with excerpts from the debate transcript, after the jump.

POLITICS: On the sidelines of the UN General Assembly

Yesterday, Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari and India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met on the sidelines of the 63rd UN General Assembly session in New York:

[The leaders] agreed to kickstart an embattled peace dialogue between the two nuclear-armed rivals, with new talks to be scheduled by year's end....

Singh and Zardari also decided to launch trading between the divided zones of the disputed Kashmir region from October 21....

The leaders agreed that a special meeting of a joint anti-terror mechanism be held next month to address "mutual concerns," including the bombing of the embassy, the statement said....

Singh and Zardari appeared satisfied as they emerged from the meeting.

In brief remarks, Singh praised Zardari's vision for a progressive South Asia, saying they decided that issues be resolved through "peaceful" means.

Zardari called Singh the "architect of modern India," saying, "I hope to learn from him."

The meeting helped eased tensions, officials from both sides said.

"The leaders met for well over an hour, spent most of their time without aides and had a comprehensive discussion of the entire realm of issues in our relationship," Indian Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon told reporters....

According to the statement, crossborder trade will commence on the road between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad, capitals respectively of Indian and Pakistani zones of Kashmir, as well as the road from Poonch, in southern Indian Kashmir, to Rawalakot in Pakistani Kashmir. [link]

The text of their joint statement is available here.

The Singh-Zardari meeting, however, was overshadowed in the U.S. media by coverage of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's courtesy calls with visiting world leaders during her own trip to New York. South Asian leaders featured prominently in Palin's schedule. While media access to Palin's meetings was strictly limited, journalists were able to get some access to Palin's initial exchanges of pleasantries with the visiting heads of state.

ROUNDUP: Islamabad Marriott on U.S. front pages

On Saturday, Sept. 20, 2008, the Marriott Hotel in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad was bombed, killing more than 50 people. In addition to covering the breaking news [see the SAJAforum coverage], we have collected some front pages that show how some U.S. dailies played the bombing story. These are taken from the Newseum.org's Today's Front Pages gallery (a must-visit site).

Thanks to the story of the $700-billion Wall Street bailout story and the intensifying political season, the bombing didn't appear on as many front pages as it might have at another point in the year. One interesting note: As you will see below, the Miami Herald only carried a small pointer to an inside story, while its Spanish-language sister publication, El Nuevo Herald, had a big photo, a major story and a smaller photo. Scroll down to see "Un Infierno En Pakistan."

If you have any thoughts about how the story was played, please post them in the comments sections below.

MEDIA: A Mumbai language controversy ropes in the Bachchans and Shah Rukh

Language politics are, as a general rule, messy. When Jawaharlal Nehru became the Prime Minister of newly independent India, one of the crises he weathered was rioting that forced his government to redraw the map of some southern Indian states along linguistic lines. Although it is largely forgotten today, the decision to change the boundaries was one that Nehru deeply regretted because he thought it elevated regional differences at the expense of the unity of the Indian nation.

Nehru’s concerns about the capacity inherent in language for dividing people still ring true. In a roundabout way, an account of divisive language politics in Mumbai recently made it into the Western media.

Mumbai, whose very name embodies the politicization of language (it was known as Bombay until 1995), is a place where Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi and English are all spoken. There is, however, simmering tension as right-wing political parties exploit perceived slights against Marathi speakers to advance their program of asserting the cultural superiority of Hindu, Marathi-speaking Maharashtrians. (Mumbai is the capital of Maharashtra state.)

Over the past year, there has been street violence in Mumbai as cadres of the right-wing Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) party have been trashing shops owned by people originally from northern states like Uttar Pradesh. But now these thugs have a pretext for their campaign of intimidation: store signboards in languages other than Marathi.

BOOKS: Five Questions for Rinku Sen, Author of "The Accidental American"

This month, SAJA member Rinku Sen launches a new book, "The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization." In the book, Sen, along with Fekkak Mamdouh, narrates the story of the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York, an organization that supports and organizes workers in New York's restaurant industry. ROC-NY was initially founded by Mamdouh and fellow organizer Saru Jayaraman to support workers, like Mamdouh himself, who were displaced from their jobs at Windows on the World, the restaurant that was at the top of the World Trade Center's North Tower. In the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attack, which claimed the lives of 72 individuals who worked at Windows, ROC-NY helped the surviving Windows workers launch a cooperatively-owned restaurant, Colors. Since then, the organization has expanded its work to organize and advocate for improved working conditions for restaurant workers throughout New York City, and has explored the prospects for expanding its work nationally.

Sen and Mamdouh tell the story of ROC-NY's founding and the ups and downs of its subsequent campaigns on behalf of New York's restaurant workers, critically assessing the challenges faced by advocates for immigrants' rights and drawing lessons from the local story about ROC-NY for the broader, national debates over immigration reform and globalization. Sen previously wrote about ROC-NY in a 2007 article, and she and Mamdouh discuss the themes of the book in a short video prepared in connection with the book's release. They launch a national book tour in New York on September 3, 2008 (details are available here). Journalists with interview requests and other inquiries about "The Accidental American" for Rinku Sen and Fekkak Mamdouh may email their publicist, Ina Howard-Parker, at ina [at] representinc.com. Tell 'em SAJAforum sent you.

Sen is currently president and executive director of the Applied Research Center and publisher of ColorLines, ARC's magazine on race and politics. She began her career as an organizer in 1988 with the Center for Third World Organizing and was named one of Ms. Magazine's "21 Feminists to Watch in the 21st Century" back in 1996. Her previous book, "Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing and Advocacy," offers advice for activists and social change organizations based on her own experiences as an organizer and other case studies. She recently answered a few questions from SAJAforum about her new book, the role of journalism in her work as a community organizer, and her views on the current debate over immigration reform:

SAJAforum: When and why did you decide to write this book, and why did you decide to call it “The Accidental American”?