ISIS Beheads Elderly Ex-Antiquities Chief in Syria's Palmyra

The Islamic State group beheaded the 82-year-old retired chief archaeologist of Palmyra after he refused to leave the ancient city, Syria’s antiquities chief said.

A UNESCO World Heritage site famed for well-preserved Greco-Roman ruins, Palmyra was seized from government forces in May, fueling fears the IS jihadists might destroy its priceless heritage as it had done in other parts of Syria and Iraq.

Syrian antiquities chief Maamoun Abdulkarim told AFP he had urged Khaled al-Assaad to leave Palmyra, but he had refused. Fears for Syria's Palmyra As ISIS Seizes Historic City

“He told us: ‘I am from Palmyra and I will stay here even if they kill me.’”

Abdulkarim said Assaad was murdered execution-style on Tuesday afternoon in Palmyra, in central Homs province.

“Daesh has executed one of Syria’s most important antiquities experts,” he said, using an Arabic acronym for IS.

Photos purporting to show Assaad’s body tied to a post in Palmyra were circulated online by IS supporters.

The killing is one of hundreds that have been carried out by IS in and around Palmyra since they took the city. The United States, France and UNESCO voiced outrage over Assaad’s death.

“He was the head of antiquities in Palmyra for 50 years and had been retired for 13 years,” Abdulkarim said.

He hailed Assaad as a leading expert on the ancient history of the city, which grew from a caravan oasis first mentioned in the second millennium BC.

“He spoke and read Palmyrene, and we would turn to him when we received stolen statues from the police and he would determine if they were real or fake.”

- ‘They’ll never silence history’ -

Abdulkarim said Assaad’s body had been hung in the city’s ancient ruins after being beheaded.

But the photo circulating online showed a body on a median strip of a main road, tied to what appeared to be a lamp post.

A sign attached to the body identified it as that of Assaad.

It accused him of being an apostate and a regime loyalist for representing Syria in conferences abroad with “infidels”, as well as being director of Palmyra’s “idols”.

It also claimed he had been in contact with regime officials.

Abdulkarim said Assaad had been detained by IS last month along with his son Walid, the current antiquities director for Palmyra, who was later released.

He said the jihadists were looking for “stores of gold” in the city.

“I deny wholeheartedly that these stores exist,” Abdulkarim said.

“The whole family is truly remarkable. (Assaad’s) other son Mohammed and his son-in-law Khalil actively participated in the rescue of 400 antiquities as the town was being taken over by the jihadists,” he said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor, also reported the death, saying Assaad had been killed in a “public square in Palmyra in front of dozens of people”.

UNESCO’S director general, Irina Bokova, said she was “both saddened and outraged to learn of the brutal murder,” adding that “they killed him because he would not betray his deep commitment to Palmyra”.

“His work will live on far beyond the reach of these extremists. They murdered a great man, but they will never silence history.”

The killing also prompted condemnation from French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who said Assaad had worked with numerous French archaeological missions over the years.

“This barbaric murder joins a long list of crimes committed over the past four years in Syria,” he said in a statement, calling for those responsible to be brought to justice.

In Washington, State Department spokesman John Kirby decried the “brutal, gruesome murder”.

IS captured Palmyra on May 21, prompting international concern about the fate of the city’s antiquities.

The IS group’s harsh vision of Islam considers statues and grave markers to be idolatrous, and the group has destroyed antiquities and heritage sites in other territory under its control in Syria and Iraq.

“These attempts to erase Syria’s rich history will ultimately fail,” Kirby said in Washington.

So far, Palmyra’s most famous sites have been left intact, though there are reports IS has mined them, and the group reportedly destroyed a famous statue of a lion outside the city’s museum in June.

Most of the pieces in the museum were evacuated by antiquities staff before IS arrived, though the group has blown up several historic Muslim graves.

IS has also executed hundreds of people in the city and surrounding area, many of them government employees.

The group also infamously used child members to shoot dead 25 Syrian government soldiers in Palmyra’s ancient amphitheatre.
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Reference:

Discovery News. 2015. “ISIS Beheads Elderly Ex-Antiquities Chief in Syria's Palmyra”. Discovery News. Posted: August 20, 2015. Available online: http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/isis-beheads-elderly-ex-antiquities-chief-in-syrias-palmyra-150820.htm

Mass Grave Reveals Ottoman Soldiers Fought To The Death In 16th Century Romania

On November 13, 1594, Michael the Brave summoned his subjects in the client state of Wallachia to rise up against the Ottoman Empire. As part of a series of land wars between the OttomanEmpire and various powers in Europe, Michael led his troops to conquer several castles along theDanube River and forts deep within Ottoman territory, turning back just miles from the Ottoman capital at Constantinople. But while Michael was away fighting, the men who lent him money to fund his bid to be prince were killed in the Wallachian capital of Bucharest (Romania).  Archaeologists believe they may have found these historic figures in a mass grave discovered in Bucharest’s University Square, and their bones reveal a very violent death.

During an excavation of the Saint Sava church cemetery, 688 graves dating to the 16th-19th centuries were uncovered.  Not far from the consecrated ground, though, archaeologists found three skeletons of people who had been tossed unceremoniously into the bottom of a circular pit. Animal bones, bricks, pottery fragments, and other debris had then been heaped on top of them to fill the pit. The inclusion of all this trash was fortuitous for the archaeologists, though, because the artifacts along with carbon dating of the bones allowed them to date the mass grave to the end of the 16th or early 17th century.

Mihai Constantinescu and colleagues carefully disentangled the jumbled remains and pored over the bones looking for clues about who they were and how they died.  Writing in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, they note that all three skeletons were male, and young to middle-age adults.  The men all had poor dental health as well as early evidence of osteoarthritis throughout their bodies. Based on muscle attachment sites on bone, they were also engaging in similar repetitive activities: lifting, throwing, moving heavy objects, walking long distances, and sitting in a crouched position.  It is highly likely these men shared an occupation that required them to perform the same activities over and over again.

But the injuries the archaeologists found—both those that had healed and those inflicted at death—are shockingly numerous and gruesome.  At some point in his life, Skeleton 1 fractured his collarbone, ribs, left wrist, kneecap, hip, lumbar spine, nose, and right middle toes.  Skeleton 2 appears to have taken an arrow to the back, with a penetrating fracture in his left shoulder blade, and had injured both knees.  Surprisingly, Skeleton 3 was unscathed, but possibly because he was a bit younger than the other two men.

Two dozen more injuries were found on the three bodies, but these were inflicted around the time of death. While Skeletons 1 and 3 had just a few injuries, Skeleton 2 suffered 18 wounds before he died. Most of the wounds were inflicted on these men’s heads by an attack from the front, and most injuries were caused by sharp objects like swords and arrows.

There was a musket ball lodged in the neck vertebrae of Skeleton 2, in addition to an arrowhead still stuck in a rib, a hacking wound that shattered the facial skeleton, and indication on the vertebrae that someone attempted to behead him.

Skeleton 3 also showed evidence of beheading with a blade wound—possibly from a broadsword—through a neck vertebra. Skeleton 1 suffered a massive cranial fracture, likely caused by a mace. Since soldiers at that time could only physically carry and use a musket, a bow, or a mace, and not a combination of those, this means that at least three different individuals set upon this group of men.

The exact names of these men are unknown, but Constantinescu and colleagues think they were either military commanders or janissaries (elite Ottoman infantry soldiers), quite possibly the very ones who had lent Michael the Brave money so that he could rule Wallachia.  If they were Romanians, “they would have been buried in a cemetery by the locals,” they write.  Based on the time period, the injuries inflicted, and the location of the burial, they conclude that “the tensions caused by the creditors on the princely court of Michael the Brave might have contributed to the excessive violence and to the lack of interest for their remains.”

Did Michael the Brave’s subjects violently attack the Ottomans in their midst while he was out fighting the Long Turkish War? It is impossible to answer this question definitively, but Constantinescu and colleagues’ work on this mystery grave demonstrates how putting together historical records, military paraphernalia, and human bones can lead us closer to a solution.
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Reference:

Killgrove, Kristina. 2015. “Mass Grave Reveals Ottoman Soldiers Fought To The Death In 16th Century Romania”. Forbes. Posted: July 5, 2015. Available online: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2015/07/05/mass-grave-reveals-ottoman-soldiers-fought-to-the-death-in-16th-century-romania/

Study ties conflict risk in sub-Saharan Africa to climate change, economics, geography

Researchers find elevated carcinogen markers for first time in car passengers

A massive new University of Colorado Boulder study indicates there is a statistical link between hotter temperatures generated by climate change and the risk of armed conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa.

CU-Boulder Professor John O'Loughlin led a research team that assessed more than 78,000 armed conflicts between 1980 and 2012 in the Sahel region of Africa - a semi-arid belt just south of the Saharan Desert that spans about 3,000 miles and more than a dozen countries from the Atlantic to the Indian oceans.

The team was looking for links between armed conflicts and temperature and rainfall anomalies, as well as assessing other causes of violence in the Sahel. "We found a clear signal that higher temperatures in the Sahel over time does increase the risk of conflict," O'Loughlin said.

While there are growing academic and public policy debates on the effect global climate change may be having on armed conflict in Africa, the link between climate and conflict in the Sahel does not hold true for the entire continent, said O'Loughlin, a professor of distinction in CU-Boulder's geography department. Even in the Sahel, political, economic and geographic factors were more of an influence on conflict than climate.

A paper on the subject appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The study was co-authored by CU-Boulder postdoctoral researcher Andrew Linke and University of Alaska Anchorage Assistant Professor Frank Witmer, a former CU-Boulder graduate student who received his doctorate under O'Loughlin. The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the study.

The study also showed areas in the Sahel that were wetter or dryer than long-term averages were neither more nor less likely to experience violent conflict, he said. "This is an important finding because global climate change often results in environmental changes outside the realm of temperature increases," O'Loughlin said.

"Increasing frequency or greater severity of warmer temperatures could be problematic for the security of populations in regions where the link is statistically significant," said Linke. "But it's important to remember that our study shows that a number of other social forces have strong influences on political violence and conflict."

The new research follows a 2012 PNAS study led by O'Loughlin that indicated the risk of human conflict in East Africa from 1990 to 2009 increased somewhat with hotter temperatures and dropped a bit with higher precipitation. That study, which charted about 26,000 instances of conflict, also showed socioeconomic, political and geographic factors played a larger role in armed conflicts than climate change.

For the new study the research team divided the African continent into thousands of geographic grid cells, each about 6,214 square miles (10,000 square kilometers), examining them individually for both conflict and climate data, said O'Loughlin, also a faculty research associate at CU-Boulder's Institute of Behavioral Sciences.

O'Loughlin said the link between climate and violent conflict is strongest for "communal incidents" - violence between groups of civilians, rather than large-scale civil wars where rebel groups battle government armies.

The exhaustive database of violent events in the Sahel from 1980 to 2012 was assembled in part by CU-Boulder undergraduates, who combed online information sources like LexisNexis, a corporation that pioneered the electronic accessibility of legal and newspaper documents. The work by the students -- who put thousands of hours into the project -- was funded by the NSF's Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) and has generated several undergraduate honors theses, O'Loughlin said.

The CU-Boulder students coded each conflict event with very specific data, including geographic location coordinates, dates, people and descriptive classifications. The event information was then aggregated into months and into the grid cells that served as the units of analysis for quantitative modeling.

Each conflict grid also was coded by socioeconomic and political characteristics like distance to an international border, capital city, local population size, well-being as measured by infant mortality, the extent of political rights, presidential election activity, road network density, vegetation condition and ethnic community inclusion into the national government. The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder and the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, provided climate data for the study.

Data also came from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset (ACLED), directed by Clionadh Raleigh of Trinity College in Dublin. That database covers individual conflicts from 1997 to 2009 in Africa and parts of Asia and Haiti. There are more than 60,000 violent incidents in the database to date. Raleigh started the data collection while earning her doctorate at CU in 2007 under O'Loughlin.

As a next step, O'Loughlin has undertaken a new NSF-funded study with CU-Boulder anthropology Professor Terrence McCabe and political science Professor Jaroslav Tir to look at the mechanisms of conflict in Kenya. Researchers are interviewing Kenyans about their experiences regarding both violence and climate change, including the severity and frequency of drought. The study will include data on human migrations as well as the welfare of pastoralists and farmers as a result of climate change, he said.
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EurekAlert. 2014. “Study ties conflict risk in sub-Saharan Africa to climate change, economics, geography”. EurekAlert. Posted: November 10, 2014. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-11/uoca-stc111014.php

Collateral damage to cultural heritage of the past

Though it is not often the subject of front-page news on the Middle East, a largely unreported tragedy of literally monumental proportions is taking place there. While the world's attention has been quite naturally focused on the catastrophic human toll of the conflict in Syria and surrounding areas and the lives that have been destroyed by political instability in Egypt, economic privation, unrelenting civil war, and irresponsible governments have driven an unprecedented destruction of cultural heritage in those countries. Looted Dahshur, Abusir, Tarknan and the Malawi Museum in Egypt and devastated Aleppo, Apamea and Krak des Chevaliers in Syria provide bleak testimony to this calamity.

In a recent issue of the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies, six front-line heritage preservation activists come together for the first time to express theirs views and provide an update on what is happening today to Middle Eastern archaeological sites. These six articles are starkly illustrated by photographs -- a number of them taken by the authors and their informants on cell phones at risk of life and limb.

Joris Kila, a heritage specialist and reserve officer in the Royal Netherlands Army undertook cultural rescue missions to Iraq, Macedonia, Egypt, and Libya. Writing unsparingly about the irresponsibility of governments, the callous acts of individuals, and the inexplicable neglect of international organizations, he lements that, despite the number of conflict related heritage disasters that have occurred in the last few decades, "no lessons have been learned about prevention and practical solutions." Emma Cunliffe, who in 2012 brought the cultural costs of the Syrian uprising to the world's attention, cautions academics who steer clear of these issues that "an anti-war/pro-peace stance does not preclude acceptance of the fact that conflict still happens and must be dealt with."

Syrian archaeologists Salam Al Quntar and Ali Cheilmous describe the very human dimensions of damage to heritage. "Not only impressive ancient buildings have values for Syrians," Al Quntar writes, "but the entire setting of the ancient urban landscape, historical and religious buildings, suqs or bazaars, cafes and restaurants, and even the narrow warm streets." Cheikmous concludes, "No political solution to the Syrian conflict can be imagined at the moment…As a result, the nation's heritage is hostage to both sides of the conflict."

Salima Ikram and Monica Hanna, Egyptian archaeologists, discuss the stepped up looting activity and illegal land appropriation that has accompanied Egypt's volatile political situation. Hanna decries the fact that "There is not a single site in Egypt that has not suffered the attack of the land mafia and looters." Ikram, similarly, sees these events, concluding with the dire prediction that "Now, until the rule of law has been re-established, Egypt's heritage will continue to be lost. This is tragic for the whole world, but most of all for Egyptians."
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References:

Science Daily. 2014. “Collateral damage to cultural heritage of the past”. Science Daily. Posted: August 7, 2014. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140807104705.htm

Fantastic Photos of Chechen Culture From a Young Phenom

See the photos at: http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2014/02/diana-markosian/

If young photographers want to succeed, they would do well to heed this word of advice from acclaimed photographer Diana Markosian: Get as far away from the photo herd as possible. Go your own way.

“Part of what helps is not being in New York,” says Markosian, 24. “When you surround yourself with people doing the same thing as you, you’ll get trapped in the headspace of gossip, of being competitive, and of cliques. It’s kind of like high school, and I’m not interested in any of that.”

This epiphany came to her while working for a wire service covering the aftermath of a January, 2011, terrorist bombing in Moscow. Surrounded by seasoned wire photographers with the latest gear, she knew she couldn’t compete. She worked out that hard news wasn’t her thing. “I realized I sucked at news photography,” Markosian says with a laugh. “I needed to do what I was good at. I went to Chechnya two weeks later.”

The move paid off. When the name of the bombing suspect, Magomed Yevloyev, came to light, Russian authorities closed his village to outsiders and journalists. Markosian was undeterred, even after a photographer was arrested attempting to photograph the bomber’s family. At 6 a.m. one morning, as security guards prayed at the mosque, she slipped in, located the bomber’s mother Roza Yevloyev, made a portrait that became a Reuters photo of the year, and slipped away.

“The portrait got some recognition but more than that I realized this is what I had to do,” says Markosian. “I couldn’t be where everyone else was. I can’t be where everyone else is.”

She soon began her project Goodbye, My Chechnya about Muslim girls coming of age in Chechnya. It established her reputation.

Markosian’s work of emotional and political significance appears in news outlets across the globe. For all her talk of being an outsider, her resumé reads like that of someone annointed by the phototocracy. She’s picked up a Burn 2013 Emerging Photographer Grant, attended in the prestigious invite-only World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass, and recently got a nod at the Aftermath Project Grant.

She’s traveled to Armenia, followed the ancient Silk Road, and trekked overland into northeastern Afghanistan. In recent months, in her adopted home Burma, she has been making portraits of the energetic and diverse youth shaping the future of a nation in the early throes of democracy. Editors she once begged to take her calls now root for her success. She cites James Estrin of The New York Times as particularly supportive.

“They want to see you grow. They’re taking there time to look at your work and they want you to succeed,” says Markosian, who appreciates the straight feedback photo editors deliver. Estrin once told her he could publish a series of 10 photos that would work for him, but not for her. In other words, it wasn’t her best. So she returned to the field to flesh out the project, making it stronger. Another editor’s intervention brought her out of a post-break-up depression and inspired her to confront her most difficult assignment: Finding her estranged father. At the age of seven, Markosian’s mother brought her and her older brother to the United States from Armenia, an effort to end the pain caused by her absent husband.

Markosian flew with her older brother David to Yerevan, Armenia. When they knocked on her father’s door Markosian’s grandfather opened it. His son wasn’t home. They spent the longest hour of their lives sitting on the couch. When he finally returned, they spent another half hour convincing him they actually are his children. Once convinced, Markosian’s father, a writer, asked why they had not come sooner. That was in January, 2012. By June, Markosian moved to Armenia to rebuild her relationship. It was two months before she picked up her camera. Not just because she was sorting out her own head but because she was negotiating her mother and father’s feelings too.

“I didn’t want my father to feel I had betrayed him, but he saw how difficult it was for me. The first thing he said to me was, ‘I want you to feel comfortable doing what you feel comfortable doing. Do not worry about what I or your mother is going to think,’” says Markosian. “That allowed me to create from the heart.”

And so began a year of learning and self-examination that would result in My Father, the Stranger.

“I didn’t go in there thinking I’d do a project, I went in there to find my father,” she says. “I noticed myself slow down. Not shooting images every day. Not even caring about shooting. I’d lost my father and didn’t know anything about him. It was a gift to be next to him. There’s no image for that.”

Through her lens, Markosian came to terms with her loss; a loss that welled deep. The project resonated far and wide. Fathers wrote to Markosian describing their relationships with their daughters. Her father cried upon seeing the final edit. The photo industry responded as well, with the New York Times and Photo District News picking up the work. Markosian says it’s changed the way she operated.

“I don’t care about producing as quick; it could take a year or two to make something that matters to me.”

A willingness to embrace the unknown persists. Relocating to Burma was, at first glance, a strange choice — Markosian couldn’t relate to the people around her, couldn’t speak their language and didn’t relate to their history. It took a friendly English speaker her own age to ease her into the culture and drag her out of depression and self-doubt. Her new friend introduced her subjects ranging from political prisoners to the Lady Gaga of Burma.

“I’m meeting people my age who are actually doing things to change their country,” she smiles. “I care a lot more about people than I do about my images. I look at my images from Chechnya and they don’t even reflect how much joy that went into the work.”

Markosian’s short career has been one of stalking a subject and then ceding some control. She’s lucky that natural beginnings and ends for each of her projects have presented themselves. She’s allowing her life to dictate the images, rather than images dictate her life. As a youngster Markosian was a talented ballet dancer but a serious injury forced her out of the art. After that she decided she wouldn’t let one thing define her. Hedging her bets, she writes and teaches too.

“I don’t have the calling that I must just be a photographer,” she says. “I understand that this is what I’m interested in right now and that could change in five years and I’d be fine with that. Maybe I’m sounding like I have my shit together. Maybe I don’t? Maybe these portraits in Burma are no good? I’m actually excited about what’s happening. There’s so much opportunity to define photography. You do it first for yourself and then for a broader audience. Honestly, I don’t care where the industry is going. I care much more about where I am going.”
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References:

Brook, Pete. 2014. “Fantastic Photos of Chechen Culture From a Young Phenom”. Wired. Posted: February 17, 2014. Available online: http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2014/02/diana-markosian/

(Ab)use of World Heritage Site causes rifts in Bosnia and Herzegovina

What happens when a theatre of war is elevated to a World Heritage Site while the wounds are still raw? In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the World Heritage Sites have become podiums from which various groups proclaim wrongs done to them in the war. This is shown in a thesis by ethnologist Dragan Nikolić at Lund University, Sweden.

Dragan Nikolić has studied how sites that are included on UNESCO's list of World Heritage Sites – the old bridge in Mostar, the bridge over the Drina in Višegrad, and the nomination of the old town in Jajce – have gained a partly different meaning for the local people than that intended by national politicians and the international community.

World Heritage Sites have mainly been seen as a valuable asset for people's identity and a method to market locations. The thesis, Three Towns, Two Bridges and a Museum. Memory, Politics and World Heritage in Bosnia and Herzegovina, poses the question of what happens to World Heritage Sites where culturicide has been committed. Dragan Nikolić shows how the sites have been used strategically in political contexts and how they have been used and abused tactically in day-to-day life at transnational, national, local and individual level. The studies illustrate how the official memory of the World Heritage Sites often collides with the individual memories of members of the population.

"Instead of becoming symbols of reconciliation and pride, the bridges in Mostar and Višegrad, for example, became trouble spots. They were used to reinforce the memory of past injustices and to uphold a victims' perspective in the collective memory. They became a symbol for the role of victim. The people fight over who has suffered most", says Dragan Nikolić.

However, the thesis also gives examples of positive aspects of the involvement of civil society, such as in the case of the AVNOJ museum in Jajce, where many representatives and organisations came together to reinterpret the past.

The thesis follows both the intentions of the authorities and the frustration of the local population when symbolic actions have come before practical engagement, as well as how memorials have become weapons in a conflict that has been resolved only on the surface.

"My research shows that we cannot trivialise either cultural heritage monuments or people's memories; rather, we must strive to understand the interplay between them. Strategies and policies for World Heritage Sites must be changed and the authorities must follow up what happens after a place is designated a World Heritage Site, i.e. spend more time on the use and the practices that develop around this type of monument", says Dragan Nikolić.

Dragan Nikolić grew up in Bosnia Herzegovina and came to Sweden as a refugee in 1993 at the age of 17. This has given him a unique insider and outsider perspective in the work on his thesis. He defended his thesis in ethnology on 25 May at Lund University. The title of the thesis is Three Towns, Two Bridges and a Museum. Memory, Politics and World Heritage in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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References:

EurekAlert. 2012. "(Ab)use of World Heritage Site causes rifts in Bosnia and Herzegovina". EurekAlert. Posted: June 7, 2012. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-06/lu-ow060712.php

Ultimate Weapon: Knowing a War Zone’s Culture

The U.S. military is paying more attention to the culture of the places where it fights, putting a new weapon in its arsenal, according to both soldiers and academics.

When U.S. soldiers first went into Afghanistan and Iraq a decade ago, the military gave little thought to how an understanding of regional language, values, and norms could ease the interaction between troops and the locals they encountered.

“There was this early period there when we invaded Iraq, in particular, where we just thought that this was a military endeavor,” said Rochelle Davis, an assistant professor of anthropology at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center. “If you go back and look at how we talked about it and the things we did, culture just wasn’t even considered.”

The military’s attitude has changed considerably since then, as culture and language training have shifted from the purview of a few specialists to a central tool in any service member’s arsenal. Maj. Gen. David Hogg, head of the Adviser Forces in Afghanistan, has even suggested the military more broadly think of “culture as a weapon system.”

A new report from the Government Accountability Office suggests that the Army and Marines still need to do a better job of tracking and assessing exactly who receives cultural training, assigning them where their training will be most useful, and following up so their newly acquired language skills don’t go stale. Nonetheless, the military is doing a much better job today, Davis says, than it did 10 years ago in applying insights from anthropology (without, that is, the problematic pursuit of bringing anthropologists on board in battle zones).

The military’s evolving approach to culture may be one of the legacies of the post-Sept. 11 era. After the early days in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army and Marine Corps established cultural training centers in 2005, the Air Force in 2006, and the Navy in 2007. Some of the signposts since then: The GAO report found that the military had spent about $12 million sending 800 soldiers through 16 weeks of Afghan language training between 2010 and the summer of 2011. Hundreds of thousands of other troops who’ve cycled through those war zones have been given “smart cards” detailing topics like the five pillars of Islam, local religious celebrations, and cultural customs.

“When General Hogg says we need to think of culture as a weapon system, that’s in some ways appealing to people who say, ‘Culture is touchy-feely; we want to be able to accomplish the mission with guns and might,’” Davis said. “He’s trying to say, ‘No, we need to think of culture as another weapon system just as guns and other things are – it can be part of us winning these wars.’”

Davis, whose area of expertise focuses on the Arab world, has conducted interviews with soldiers who’ve returned from Iraq about their cultural training and interaction with locals.

“When I ask a lot about their interactions with Iraqis, they basically talk about ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys,’ they don’t really talk so much about ‘Iraqis,’” she said. “They don’t say ‘al-Qaeda,’ or ‘Saddam Hussein’s cronies.’ They say ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys,’ because the bad guys have shifted over time.”

And the same thing has happened in Afghanistan. Davis suspects that the confusion soldiers feel in this shifting landscape underscores the importance to the military of cultural knowledge. When enemies aren’t readily identifiable, cultural clues can help in navigating local communities.

Still, the military hasn’t exactly produced the material that a team of regionally expert Ph.D.s might come up with. Davis says the Iraq smart cards offer some useful information (as well as striking parallels to the advice the military gave soldiers posted to Iraq during World War II). But other information, she says, has been factually inaccurate or potentially harmful.

One panel on the Iraq smart card, for example, explains the long-running conflict between the country’s sectarian groups.

“It’s all about who hates who, who is oppressed by who, who fights who,” Davis said. “When you’ve read that, the takeaway is that these people will never get along, they’ll always hate each other.”

And this is probably a counterproductive bias for soldiers who’ve been asked to help build a unified Iraqi democracy. The newer smart cards for Afghanistan don’t repeat this mistake, Davis said, and she points to that example as one of the ways in which the military has grown more sophisticated not just in its understanding of cultural differences, but of the concept of culture itself.

“To codify it in these kinds of ways — Afghans are this way, Iraqis are this way, Kurds are this way — and to say ‘this is how you should behave,’ as if it’s a military system,” Davis said, “completely divorces culture form the dynamism that is culture.”

Military researchers, however, have begun to suggest that soldiers need to learn “cross-cultural competence” skills that can be applied in any setting, rather than specific cultural trivia about individual communities that can fit on a flip card and grow outdated with time. This, too, represents an evolution in thinking from an institution that not long ago thought little about this topic.

Davis accepts that there will be some missteps along the way. She often presents images of the Iraqi smart cards to audiences deeply familiar with the local culture. One panel, explaining the significance of different-colored headdresses, doesn’t quite get things right. “I can make people laugh,” Davis said, “just by showing them that card.”

But, she adds, “I would rather they at least try. Nobody’s going to do anything perfect the first time.”

I have issues with the human terrain systems that the US military uses. However, I want to present articles that present different points of view.
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References:

Badger, Emily. 2011. "Ultimate Weapon: Knowing a War Zone’s Culture". Miller-McCune. Posted: November 4, 2011. Available online: http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture/ultimate-weapon-knowing-a-war-zones-culture-37602/

Should Social Scientists Help the U.S. Fight Terror?

This subject is huge, particularly in the Anthropology community. I've addressed it before, but it needs to be addressed again. The first article in 2008 discussed ethics of the practice according to the American Anthropologist Association. The second article, published in 2009 talks more about the use of Anthropologists in Human Terrain Systems.



Among the military brass giving testimony about global terrorism at a Senate hearing yesterday was a single academic: Scott Atran, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Why invite an academic to speak to the Senate Armed Services Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee?

Because while the U.S. government has spent hundreds of millions on terrorism research, including the creation of terrorism research institutions at the University of Maryland and elsewhere, the U.S. strategy against terrorism “is focused on technology, not understanding who violent extremists are and where the are coming from,” Atran told ScienceInsider by e-mail. In fact, he said, the only reason they invited him to the hearing is “because they were spooked by the [attempted] Christmas bombing and aware that their over-reliance on widgets isn't doing the job. ... They know I'm one of the only people around who works in the field with jihadis and wannabes and want to find out what makes them tick.”

Atran leveled criticism at the U.S. military’s Human Terrain System, a program that has embedded social scientists in military units in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It is the infantry units themselves that should be trained before they go in theater to be culturally sensitive,” Atran told the senators. “Such efforts as these, small as they are, are potentially quite counterproductive. ... The military and cultural reality of the terrain may favor having embedded social scientists be uniformed and armed, ... but the possibility that social scientists themselves would have to fire their weapons and perhaps kill local people ... is guaranteed to engender academia's deep hostility.”

While giving his testimony, Atran called on the U.S. government to engage social scientists more directly in open, peer-reviewed studies of terrorism, rather than relying on clandestine intelligence and antiterrorism technology. “Involve social scientists but not in [the military] theater,” Atran said.

But persuading more anthropologists to collaborate with the U.S. military “is not going to be easy, and it’s not going to happen today,” says Karaleah Reichart, an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She notes that the ethics code of the American Anthropological Association prohibits researchers from doing clandestine work for any government as well as any research that leads to the harm of their subjects. “How can the military convince us of that?”

Reichart says that the distrust between academic anthropologists and the U.S. military is a recent phenomenon. “Historically, anthropologists have worked closely with the government, and many were in the armed services,” she says, for example, studying the culture and ideology of the Germans and Japanese during World War II. “It’s the ‘know your enemy’ strategy.” But sentiment among academics about the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has turned sour, she says, especially in the wake of scandals involving social scientists' role in government-sanctioned torture.

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References:

Bohannon, John. 2010. "Should Social Scientists Help the U.S. Fight Terror?" Science Insider. Posted: March 11, 2010. Available online: http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/03/should-social-scientists-help-th.html

Human Terrain Systems, Anthropologists and the War in Afghanistan

While political science was the academic discipline which the wars of the twentieth century drew upon, the asymmetrical wars of the twenty-first century now look toward anthropology with hopes of finding models of culture, or data on specific cultures to be conquered or to be used in counterinsurgency operations. But anthropology is not political science, and anthropologists have different commitments to those who share their lives and vulnerabilities with them. Source.

I've talked a bit about this before. The article raises the question of ethics in anthropology, particularly as it arises in times of war. This article looks at the work of Montgomery McFate who is the public spokeswoman for the Human Terrain Systems (HTS) and anthropology. The ethical dilemma is great.

As Price notes; "Today, in Iraq and Afghanistan, anthropologists are being told that they’re needed to make bad situations better. But no matter how anthropological contributions ease and make gentle this conquest and occupation, it will not change the larger neocolonial nature of the larger mission; and most anthropologists are troubled to see their discipline embrace such a politically corrupt cause."

At this time HTS is under the auspices of the US military. A document at Wikileaks outlines the military's handbook for HTS personnel. The American Anthropological Association has bluntly declared HTS as unethical. To that end there are difficulties in recruiting experienced anthropologists into the program. It was this reason that the military took over from private enterprise. David Price also points out that the government and intelligence agencies have other less obviously ethically challenged jobs for anthropologists.

Read the article.

About the Author:

David Price is a member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologist. He is the author of Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War, published by Duke University Press, and a contributor to the Network of Concerned Anthropologists’ new book Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual published last month by Prickly Paradigm Press. He can be reached at dprice@stmartin.edu
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References:

Price, David. 2009. "Human Terrain Systems, Anthropologists and the War in Afghanistan". CounterPunch. Posted: December 1, 2009. Available online: http://www.counterpunch.org/price12012009.html

Navajo Code Talker Veterans Break Silence

The Navajo Code Talkers saved countless American lives by developing a code so complex even fellow Navajo Marines couldn't decipher it.

The famed Navajo Code Talkers, the elite Marine unit whose unbreakable code stymied the Japanese in World War II, fear their legacy will die with them.

Only about 50 of the 400 Code Talkers are believed to be still alive, most living in the Navajo Nation reservation that spans Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. Many are frail or ill, with little time left to tell the world about their wartime contribution.

But on Tuesday, 13 of the Code Talkers, some using canes, a few in wheelchairs, arrived in New York City to participate for the first time in the nation's largest Veterans Day parade, set for Wednesday.

The young Navajo Marines, using secret Navajo language-encrypted military terms, helped the U.S. prevail at Iwo Jima and other World War II Pacific battles, serving in every Marine assault in the South Pacific between 1942 and 1945. Military commanders said the code, transmitted verbally by radio, helped save countless American lives and bring a speedier end to the war in the Pacific theater.

They were sworn to secrecy about their code, so complex that even other Navajo Marines couldn't decipher it. Used to transmit secret tactical messages via radio or telephone, the code remained unbroken and classified for decades because of its potential postwar use.

"We were never told that our code was never decoded" or given identities of the original 29 Navajos who created it, said Keith Little, 85, who joined the Marines at 17 and remembers crouching in a bomb crater amid heavy fire on Iwo Jima.

"It was all covered by secrecy. We were constantly told not to talk about it," Little said. The Code Talkers felt compelled to honor their secrecy orders, even after the code was declassified in 1968.

The oldest of the 13 living Code Talkers is 92, and the group includes one of the original 29. Many Code Talkers who served in the war were young farmers and sheepherders who had never been away from home.

"The code did a lot of damage to the enemy," said Samuel Tom Holiday, 85, of Kayenta, Ariz., who also is joining the parade. He was a 20-year-old Code Talker when he and two other Marines went behind enemy lines on Iwo Jima to locate a Japanese artillery unit advancing on American forces.

Once the unit was located, Holiday transmitted a coded message to Marine artillery, which fired a big shell at the Japanese. After the Marine rifleman proclaimed it "right on target," Holiday messaged "Right on Target" to a Navajo Code Talker in Marine artillery.

Though the Code Talkers transmitted information on tactics and troop movements, orders and other vital battlefield communications, they did not know at the time how those messages figured in the greater battle strategy.

Today "there's a certain elation about" knowing how much their work affected the outcome of the war, said Little, who runs a family ranch in Crystal, N.M., on the Navajo Nation.

Before the code, the Japanese intercepted and sabotaged U.S. military communications at an alarming rate because they had expert English translators. American forces then devised ever more complicated codes, but that increased the time -- sometimes hours -- for sending and decoding them.

The code, based on the ancient Navajo language, changed that. In the first 48 hours of the battle of Iwo Jima, six Code Talkers worked nonstop, transmitting and receiving more than 800 messages about troop movement and enemy fire -- none deciphered by the Japanese. What confounded the enemy most was that Code Talkers could use distinctly different words for exactly the same message.

Recognition from the U.S. government and awareness of the Code Talkers -- even within the Navajo community -- has been slow to come. It wasn't until 2000 that the Congressional Gold Medal was bestowed on the survivors of the original 29 Code Talkers and silver medals on the rest.

The 2002 film "Windtalkers," starring Nicolas Cage and Christian Slater as two Marines assigned to protect Code Talkers in Saipan, helped shed further light on the group.

At least five of the Code Talkers died just this year, creating an urgency for the Navajo Code Talkers Foundation to create a museum in their honor in New Mexico, near the Navajo capital of Window Rock, Ariz. It is slated to open sometime in 2012.

Yvonne Murphy, a foundation board member and daughter of Code Talker Raymond R. Smith Sr., who died seven years ago, did not hear of the Code Talkers until she was 16.

"I saw this outfit lying on the bed ... a Marine gold-colored shirt," she said, the uniform of the Code Talkers, laid out with some Navajo jewelry. But it wasn't until she was in her 30s "that I was able to grasp the whole concept," added Murphy, 45.

The Code Talkers in New York this week hope to highlight their efforts and financial needs for the museum.

On Tuesday, they attended a ceremony aboard the USS Intrepid, a World War II warship, to commemorate the 234th anniversary of the Marine Corps. They planned to visit ground zero later in the day.

"Our language was used to help win the war," Holiday said.

"After we're all gone, there will be no one to tell the story."

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References:

Ilnytsky, Ula. 2009. "Navajo Code Talker Vererans Break Silence". Discovery. Posted: November 11, 2009. Available online: http://news.discovery.com/history/navajo-code-talkers-veterans.html