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vol. xv no. 3

columbia political review

Removing the Stink Lebanon’s Garbage Crisis and the Sectarian Paradigm

PLUS INSIDE: New York’s Juvenile Offenders...p7 The Migrant Crisis in Europe........p18 1

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Editor’s Note

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Volume XV, no. 3

masthead: Editor-in-Chief Publisher Managing Editors

David Blackman Brian Chung Asha Banerjee Sophie Wilkowske

Web Editor

Mengzhou Jiang

Senior Editors

Nora Bailin Amanda Kam Yeye Kysar Omeed Maghzian Antonia Miller Andrew Pasquier Shambhavi Tiwari Amar Zaidi

Design Editor

Adam Resheff

Copy Chief

Sofi Sinozich

Assistant Copy Editors

Dominique Jones Peter Kalicki Becca Arbacher

n this, the Fall 2015 issue of the Columbia Political Review, we address a number of political issues that ought to be discussed as we return to campus. Our focus is thus necessarily diffuse, and these pages contain coverage on issues as local and personal as New York State’s failure to protect and rehabilitate juvenile offenders and as global and impersonal as the Chinese economic slowdown.

We begin with the stalwart Catalina Piccato’s analysis of Mexico’s anti-drug strategy from the lens of El Chapo’s escape from prison. Next, Tal Seigel explores how the partisanship of state politics has stymied much-needed reform in the way we treat juvenile offenders in New York State. In our other two features, Cody Wiles argues forcefully for treating sexual assault in the military as a national security issue, and Anamaria Lopez demonstrates that, since the United States is effectively responsible for Puerto Rico’s sovereign debt crisis, the United States has a moral obligation to work with the Commonwealth to repair Puerto Rico’s economy.

In addition to these engaging issues, it is our pleasure to be able to draw on the expertise of Professors Andrew Nathan and Carl Riskin to analyze the economic slowdown in China in our first briefing. In our second briefing, we take an in-depth look at Europe’s refugee crisis, with Matthew Zipf optimistically analyzing the German response, and Elif Coker elucidating the failures of the Turkish and broader European response to the needs of the Syrian refugees.

Last, but certainly not least, I must make mention of our cover story, Omar Abboud’s engrossing exposition of Lebanon’s sectarian paradigm through the lens of the You Stink protests. Omar eloquently draws on his own experiences and rigorously analyzes the political situation to produce a fascinating article that you, dear reader, would be remiss to pass over.

As always, thank you for your continued interest in CPR! CPRegards, David Blackman Editor-in-Chief

Artists: Lucy Jakub Daniel Salas David Blackman

(Cover) (p. 5) (p. 10, 26)

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed herein belong to their authors and do not necessarily

reflect those of the Columbia Political Review, of CIRCA, or of Columbia University.

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An affiliated publication of:

FALL.2015 table of contents Briefings 18 Fight and Flight The Syria Refugee Crisis

Comes to Europe

10 Some Yuan is Getting Me Down An Analysis of the Global

Impact of China’s Economic Slowdown

With Matthew Zipf and Elif Çoker

With Ankeet Ball, Prof. Andrew Nathan, and Prof. Carl Riskin

Cover Story: Lebanon 14

Removing the Stink Lebanon’s Garage Crisis and the Sectarian Paradigm

By Omar Abboud

Features 4 Shorty Keeps Running Away

El Chapo’s Escape and Solving

Mexico’s Cartel Problem

By Catalina Piccato

23 Security Under Assault Is Sexual Assault in the

Military a Women’s Issue?

7 Juvenile Injustice

New York’s Young Offenders

Do Upstate Time for Downtown Crime

By Tal Siegel

25 Puerto No Rico

Addressing the Commonwealth’s

Sovereign Debt Crisis

By Anamaria Lopez

By Cody Wiles

3

features

columbia political review :: fall 2015

Shorty Keeps Running Away El Chapo’s Escape and Solving Mexico’s Cartel Problem

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t 8:52 PM on July 11, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera – so called for his short stature – was pacing restlessly across his cell in Altiplano, Mexico’s only super-maximum-security prison. He proceeded to sit on his bed and change his shoes, just before walking to the shower area in the corner of his cell. Security camera footage showed him kneeling behind a waist-high concrete wall before disappearing into a blind spot. In a few seconds, he was gone.

The following day, Mexican authorities discovered a square opening cut into the floor of the shower which gave way to a 4,921-foot-long tunnel. The tunnel was fully ventilated and illuminated; it contained a makeshift vehicle constructed from a railcar rigged to the frame of a small motorcycle that drove from one end of the tunnel to another, probably used to transport the machinery and materials required for the construction of the tunnel. It ended beneath a small cinderblock house under construction in an open field. The Altiplano tunnel is, by any standards, an engineering marvel; according to an investigation by the New York Times, it likely cost over $1 million and took at least four people to complete, who were never detected or reported by the prison authorities. The escape was, by any standards, spectacular – a true disappearing act.

But El Chapo’s escape was also entirely unsurprising. His capture in February of 2014 had represented the greatest feat of the Mexican government’s security policy; his escape now represents its greatest defeat. It is the apotheosis of a failed security policy that the Mexican government has been implementing since the late 1990s, known as the kingpin strategy. Its basic premise is that by “decapitating” heads of crime families (“a figurative description for what has become a gruesomely literal 4

By Catalina Piccato narco tactic”, The Atlantic’s Keegan Hamilton aptly notes), the entire organization will be weakened. What has instead resulted from this misinformed strategy has been a proliferation of cartels, a diversification of the forms of violence they practice, and an overall increase in violence in the states where this policy has been most heavily implemented. In this sense, El Chapo’s escape represents both the metaphorical and literal failure of the kingpin strategy. Mexico’s drug war now requires a paradigmatic shift away from this strategy in order to truly effect justice.

At first glance it is all too easy to mythologize a character like El Chapo. Born and raised in rural poverty, the semi-illiterate grammar school dropout now heads a $3 billion drug trafficking empire that controls at least a quarter of all illegal drugs imported into the United States. He made “Forbes’ World’s Most Powerful People” and “Forbes World Billionaire” rankings, and his story has been the subject of dozens of narcocorridos, Mexican ballads that glorify traffickers. After the killing of Osama bin Laden, Guzmán became the world’s most wanted man at the callow age of 55. For perspective: according to the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), El Chapo sells more drugs today than notorious Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar did at the height of his career.

The trajectory of El Chapo’s career has followed that of the Mexican drug industry quite closely. For decades, Mexican smugglers had served only as logistical middlemen along the Caribbean route between Colombia and the United States. Beginning in the 1980s, a simultaneous boom in cocaine production and US drug-related law enforcement compelled Colombians to seek out an alternate route, which they discovered in Mexico. They began paying Mexican smugglers in cocaine, which gen-

erated enough capital for Mexicans to invest in their own drugs; by the 1980s, in the wake of the successful dismantling of Colombia’s drug cartels, Mexico had come to control the entire narcotics production and supply chain in the Americas. Deep ties between the two nations remain: according to a recent report from from Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, Sinaloa controls 35 percent of the cocaine exported from Colombia, which remains the largest producer of the drug in the world. Mexico’s proximity to the United States generated a higher market demand for drugs and increased their availability—leading to an explosion of the industry. The transformation of Mexico into the world’s biggest supplier of narcotics has been fueled, indeed, by what Hillary Clinton termed America’s “insatiable demand for illegal drugs,” or its position as the world’s biggest consumer of narcotics.

The Sinaloa cartel is a direct product of the narcotráfico power realignment of the 1980s. The mountainous and rugged state of Sinaloa had long been a center for contraband in Mexico, as well as a home to local marijuana and poppy cultivation. The first generation of major Mexican trafficking organizations of the late 1960s, pioneered by Pedro Avilés Pérez, had their origins there, from which they created and controlled routes to the United States.

The second generation of Sinaloan traffickers, which included Alvilés’ nephew El Chapo Guzmán Loera, quickly splintered off into various separate and warring factions. It now stands as Mexico’s most powerful drug organization, operating in 17 Mexican states, and in as many as 50 countries. It is rumored to have ties to the Mexican National Action Party (PAN) and other political and economic elites in Mexico. The Sinaloa cartel is also associated with the label “Golden Triangle,” referring to

columbia political review :: fall 2015 Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua, some of Mexico’s most dangerous states with the highest homicide rates in the country. El Chapo alone claims to have directly or indirectly murdered thousands of people.

It is critical to understand the historical context in order to better comprehend the security strategy developed to deal with the Sinaloa cartel and its counterparts throughout the country. Indeed, the example of Colombia and the influence of the United States were both critical in the development of the kingpin strategy. It was originally based on a similar strategy developed by the DEA in 1992 to target the heads of Colombia’s infamous Cali and Medellín cartels. Colombian cartel leaders at the time were directing their violence against the state, targeting high-profile federal officials for assassination. Thus, when the capos were taken out, the threats to the federal government were effectively reduced. The logic of the strategy was that it was all but futile to attack the cartel’s business activities, and that the common thread among all of the critical nodes of activity in the drug trafficking industry was the command-and-control elements that provided the leadership, authority, management and direction for those activities. In other words, the crimes that organizations like the Sinaloa cartel were perpetrating were too diffuse to ever be targeted effectively. Thus, the focus was placed on the people committing the crimes, like Escobar and El Chapo, and not on the crimes themselves.

The Colombian strategy was first adapted to Mexico by PAN President Vicente Fox upon his election in 2000; however, it was aggressively intensified under his successor, Felipe Calderón (2006 to 2012), who fully initiated the “War on Drugs” in the country and established the kingpin strategy as Mexico’s defining security policy to this day. The strategy was part of a governmental effort to arrest key drug cartel leadership figures in order to dismantle organizations and lessen the threat to national security. To do so, he dramatically increased military presence throughout the country and directed efforts that were uniquely targeted towards cartel leaders. The United

States became intimately involved in the intellectual development of the strategy, turning it into a “copy of the American antiterrorism strategy of high value targets,” in the words of Raúl Benítez Manaut, a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who specializes in security issues. Calderón’s efforts were bolstered by the generous security assistance, in the millions, provided by the United States. The United States also provides intelligence on drug leaders’ whereabouts and spends millions to strengthen the Mexican security forces who act on that intelligence. Through this bilateral cooperation, the strategy has been successful in “disrupting illicit networks” as it hoped to: Mexico’s government published a most wanted list with 37 cartel capos, 23 of whom were killed or arrested by

features government forces under Calderón’s administration.

These are misleading statistics.

Since the full-force implementation of the kingpin strategy, drug-related violence in Mexico has metamorphosed and worsened. The elimination of capos like El Chapo engenders a power vacuum, leading to the fracturing of the organization and an increase in homicide rates as rival groups battle for control. Under President Calderón’s administration, the country saw the appearance of sixty to eighty new trafficking gangs and homicide rates double that of the previous administration, spiking to over 120,000. While the large cartels are like monopolies involved in the production, transportation, distribution and sale of drugs, smaller groups often lack international reach to control the entirety of drug supply chain.

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features Instead, they have engaged in different forms of criminal enterprise such as kidnapping, extortion, and corruption – forms of violence that are arguably more dangerous for a larger section of Mexican society. On the other side, military troops have likely committed an unknown number of human rights violations, none of which they have been tried for. The power vacuum has also invited the formation of autodefensas groups or self-defense, vigilante groups made up mainly of farmers in rural areas.

These militias have become formidable forces against the cartels in

columbia political review :: fall 2015 fered a severe and profound crisis of legitimacy. However, the visibility and relative simplicity of the strategy, combined with strong financial pressure from United States, make it unlikely that President Peña Nieto will significantly alter the strategy anytime soon.

There are several reasons the kingpin strategy has not worked successfully in Mexico. For one, the success of the strategy in Colombia was achieved in very different conditions. The Colombian application of the strategy focused on the destruction of the cartels not for the purpose

both metaphorically and literally, escape the state.

More generally, the problem of the kingpin strategy is a conceptual one.

Solving Mexico’s drug war will require a paradigmatic shift in the way that we conceptualize cartels: They are not simple hierarchical institutions but rather vast and complicated networks that have infiltrated all parts of Mexican society. Cartel violence itself has changed since the implementation of the kingpin strategy.

The smaller organizations that have been created as a result of the fractionalization of larger cartels operate

“Since the full-force implementation of the kingpin strategy, drugrelated violence in Mexico has metamorphosed and worsened.” certain states, but pose a dilemma for Mexican officials: though these groups are technically illegal and pose a threat to state security forces, they have also been more effective than the latter for protecting society in the short term from the cartels.

So, though kingpin decapitations, or strikes as they are often called, eliminate some of the most powerful players in the narcotics industry, they also result in unintended and extremely unfavorable consequences. Leadership removal might lead to short-term reductions in violence, but the longer-term effect is usually more bloodshed.

In efforts to make Mexico more attractive to foreign investors as part of his “Mexican Moment” plan, current President Enrique Peña Nieto toned down rhetoric and tried to veer away from the kingpin strategy, promising to reduce violence in more comprehensive ways than his predecessors. In line with the history of his party– the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI – he prefers to “look the other way” when it comes to drug-related crime, and does not want to let Mexico’s chronic violence and organized crime problems define his presidency. Ultimately, however, he has adopted much of the same approach as his immediate predecessor with an emphasis on using the military to hunt kingpins. The capture of El Chapo was mainly a publicity stunt for Peña Nieto’s administration, which in the past year had suf6

of stopping drug exports, but rather for the purpose of self-preservation, because the cartels were intent on destroying the government. The situation in Mexico, however, is not one of war between the government and the cartels, but rather conflict between the cartels at the expense of local communities. Additionally, the strategy resulted in very deleterious consequences in Colombia as well, as it arguably led to the formation of political alliances with paramilitary groups, and later on a more authoritarian system of government.

For it to succeed, the kingpin strategy would need to be combined with other rule-of-law reforms and other law enforcement and intelligence institution building efforts. This claim gets at the root causes of drug violence in Mexico, which have thus far been relatively ignored by recent administrations. One of the most significant causes is a weak capacity for state action. The Mexican state has traditionally been unable to address the basic social needs of the society and has lacked the security apparatus to address potential threats like cartels. In many cases, it even goes so far as to actively collude with traffickers. The lack of state capacity is attributable to the endemic bribery and corruption within the Mexican political system. These weak points were exploited by El Chapo in order to escape, and are what have enabled his success to this day. If they remain unaddressed, he will continue to,

differently and thus require a rethinking of the security strategy used against them. The new repertoire of crimes they commit, which includes kidnappings, extortions and corruption, has to be recognized by new strategy. Protection of human rights should be the cornerstone of an effective policy. American pressures must be tempered as they overly favor supply-side answers to the drug problem and in doing so, increase violence in Mexico. We should begin thinking of the crimes and not of the criminals, in order to reclaim victimhood for the thousands of affected peoples in the country. By shifting focus away from the capos and instead focusing on individual crimes that they have perpetrated, legal and criminal institutions may be better equipped to begin reducing violence in the country. The escape of El Chapo is just another demonstration of the fundamental problems of the state’s conceptualization of the cartel problem in Mexico. These are the problems which must be addressed to make any future capture of El Chapo worthwhile. • Catalina Piccato is a junior in Columbia College majoring in Economics-Political Science with concentration in Latin American Studies. She was born in Mexico City, Mexico, but has lived in New York City for most of her life. She can be reached at: cp2468@columbia.edu

columbia political review :: fall 2015

features

Juvenile Injustice

New York’s Young Offenders Do Upstate Time for Downstate Crime

By Tal Siegel

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n the 1980s, rapidly increasing crime rates all over the United States spurred widespread panic. By the ʼ90s, the myth of “super predator” teens—adolescents thought to be engaged in rampant, violent crime—had gripped the country, prompting nationwide legislation to lower the age of criminal responsibility. Known as Juvenile Court Exclusion laws, these laws barred many adolescents from juvenile courts, forcing them to be prosecuted and punished as adults. According to what was known as the “Public Safety Hypothesis,” the transfer to the more punitive adult courts would deter youth from criminal activity, thereby reducing crime across the country and improving public safety.

At the time, juvenile court—known as family court in New York State— was seen as too lenient for youth of-

tain crimes, and they do not offer as much access to rehabilitative “Alternative to Incarceration” programs as family courts do. Juvenile courts also differ in that they allow defendants to seal their records, meaning those offenders do not take on felony records that could jeopardize future job prospects, college financial aid, or welfare assistance.

Over time, empirical studies have revealed that there is no correlation between youth crime rates and the age at which adolescents are prosecuted in adult courts, invalidating the “Public Safety Hypothesis.” While the wave of punitive legislation continued until 1999, both juvenile arrest rates and violent crime rates had begun to decline as early as 1994. By 1997, homicide rates had returned to their 1986 levels—the year that these figures first began their sharp increase.

clusion laws of the 90s. In any prosecution, the culpability of the defendant and his or her competency to stand trial are essential concerns.

These neuropsychological studies determined that both of these factors are compromised among adolescents. While 16-year-olds may have the same intellectual ability to reason as adults, their judgment and decision-making abilities are lacking because the parts of the brain that enable us to regulate emotion and control impulses do not fully develop until the age of 25. Teens also exhibit compromised risk processing due to ongoing hormonal changes during their adolescent years. In addition, as teens are particularly susceptible to peer pressure, they’re often coerced into criminal activity that they wouldn’t otherwise engage in.

The fact that the adolescent brain

“Currently, New York and North Carolina are the only remaining states that allow minors aged 16 and up to be prosecuted in criminal court.” fenders on the verge of adulthood.

Whereas punitive criminal court focuses on the nature of the offense in question, family court tends to focus on the offender him or herself. This distinction is based on the idea that the state has an obligation to ensure the wellbeing of its youth, as well as the belief that juvenile delinquents are more likely to be successfully rehabilitated than adult criminals.

Family court uses what is called an “individualized justice” approach— one in which punishment or intervention is tailored to the individual circumstances, history, family, and life conditions of the defendant. This crucial difference between juvenile and criminal courts manifests itself in several procedures. Criminal courts administer longer sentences and enforce mandatory minimums for cer-

Research has repeatedly shown that transferring juveniles to criminal courts actually has an adverse impact on public safety because it engenders higher rates of recidivism. One recent study found that teens tried in adult court were 85 percent more likely to be rearrested for violent crimes, 44 percent more likely to be rearrested for felony property crime, and had re-incarceration rates 26 percent higher than those prosecuted in juvenile court. Sentencing length for convicted youth has not been known to have any correlation with the likelihood of re-offense, which means that administering harsher sentences does not succeed in deterring them from future crime.

There is also a body of neuropsychological research that challenges the legality of the Juvenile Court Ex-

is not fully developed can prove beneficial in a criminal justice setting because it means that teens are receptive to rehabilitation and much more likely to change their ways. The majority of teen delinquents are “adolescent-limited offenders.” In other words, their criminal behavior begins and ends in adolescence. Most teens outgrow their antisocial behaviors as their identity settles and never become “life-course-persistent offenders.” This plasticity of the young brain is why diagnosis of psychopathy is restricted before age 18.

The implications of these studies sparked a nationwide wave of legislation that sought to reverse the punitive Juvenile Court Exclusion laws, including the monumental Supreme Court decision that banned the death and life without parole sentences for 7

features

columbia political review :: fall 2015

“New York’s Republican state senators are wary of appearing ‘soft on crime’ for fear of losing the support of their constituents. Given the size of the prison economy, voters engaged in correctional work constitute a significant population” criminals under age 18. Today, 37 states and the District of Columbia designate 18 as the minimum age at which a defendant can be prosecuted in an adult criminal court, and 11 additional states set this minimum age at 17. Currently, New York and North Carolina are the only remaining states that allow minors aged 16 and up to be prosecuted in criminal court.

Even North Carolina is in the process of changing its laws, and in Congress a bipartisan bill called the REDEEM Act is in the works; if passed, the Act will provide federal funds for community policing to states that set the minimum criminal court age at 18.

At Rikers Island, a prison complex in New York City, defendants aged 16 and older are held while awaiting their trials and during court proceedings, before they have even been convicted of a crime. In 2014, the Department of Justice released a report on the facility that found that out of 489 adolescent inmates held there since 2012, nearly 44 percent had endured physical force at the hands of prison staff at least once. In the year 2013 alone, teen prisoners at Rikers Island sustained a total 1,057 injuries in 565 reported uses of force by correction officers. Undoubtedly the real figure is higher, as many incidents go unreported. The investigation found that inmates were instructed to “hold it down”—in other words, not to report the use of force—and that those who didn’t keep quiet suffered retaliation.

Moreover, the Department of Justice found that civilian staff members, including doctors and teachers, “also failed to report abuse and faced retaliation when they did.”

The 2014 Department of Justice report proved alarmingly similar to those conducted in other states in the past, confirming that adolescents face significant risks in adult prisons. In 1997, one such study found teens incarcerated in adult facilities three times more likely to be beaten by prison staff and five times as likely 8

to be sexually assaulted than those in juvenile prisons. Adolescent prisoners are often unable to protect themselves from other adult inmates, and the adult criminal justice system is simply not designed to protect them.

While juvenile facilities employ staff that is specifically trained to work with emotionally and physically vulnerable young inmates, adult prisons take no such precautions.

It is no surprise, then, that youth incarcerated in criminal prisons are also at a substantially greater risk of suicide. In fact, the suicide rate for teens in adult facilities is reportedly five times higher than the rate of the general adult inmate population, and eight times the rate of youth in juvenile facilities. In general, these adolescent inmates face significant mental health issues, and in particular, post-traumatic stress disorders. In addition, it has been shown that placing teens among hardened criminals can actually shape them into serious offenders; the adolescent years are critical to identity development, and young people are most susceptible to their environment during this period.

Between 2012-2015, there have been three legislative attempts to raise the age of adult criminal responsibility to 18 in New York State. In 2013, an additional proposal was made by New York’s Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman in the hopes of reaching a compromise between the two legislative houses. Lippman’s bill would have established a new court known as the “Youth Division of the Superior Court,” in which trials would be conducted under criminal procedure law, but would permit teenagers to seal their records, as in family court.

The Youth Division would take a rehabilitation rather than incarceration approach, offering a variety of “Alternative to Incarceration” programs.

Under this proposed bill, juvenile defendants charged with violent crime would still be prosecuted in criminal court. Though the New York State

Assembly held a few hearings regarding these reform bills—collectively known as “Raise the Age” bills—not one made it to the floor for a vote, and in the State Senate, no action was taken on any of the proposals.

In his January 2013 State of the State address, Governor Andrew Cuomo endorsed Raise the Age legislation, and later launched a special commission dedicated to the issue.

In 2015, Cuomo tried to bargain for Raise the Age reform for non-violent offenses as part of the State’s annual budget. It was approved by the State Assembly but blocked by Republicans in the State Senate. In addition, an separate comprehensive Raise the Age law was passed by the Assembly, but again, did not even reach the floor at the State Senate. At the same time, support for Raise the Age legislation has grown among law and order professionals such as judges, sheriffs, probation officers, and even district attorneys. Today, a coalition that advocates for Raise the Age legislation counts over 80 different nonprofits and interest groups as members.

In light of growing support for Raise the Age reform, and the considerable media attention garnered by the Rikers Island report, it is perplexing that none of these bills made it to the floor of either the Assembly or Senate for a vote. Why is it that New York, a relatively liberal state, lags behind traditionally conservative ones such as Texas and Missouri in addressing this issue? As it turns out, finding an answer to this question necessitates a closer look at New York State legislature and party leadership.

While New York is seen externally as a unified, Democratic state, internally, the state is incredibly divided and has been said to have the most partisan legislature in the entire country. New York’s partisan politics stems from a division between two geographic regions of the state: the rural upstate, which is majority Re-

columbia political review :: fall 2015 publican, and the urban downstate, which is primarily Democratic. The schism between the two regions reflects not only broad differences in partisan ideologies, but also disparities in the demographic and socioeconomic makeup of each region. Since 1974, control over the legislature has been consistently divided between the two parties, with Democrats leading the Assembly and Republicans commanding the Senate. Maintaining majority control has become critical, especially for the Republican Party, which has lost 50 percent of its voter registration in New York State since 1950. In an effort to hold on to these majorities, leaders in both parties have kept legislators under tight control. Party leadership often uses the distribution of campaign funds to influence legislators’ voting, and they regularly conduct closed-door conferences to determine their positions on issues before legislators have had a chance for open floor debate.

Following Governor Cuomo’s endorsement of Raise the Age legislation, Jeffrey Fagan, a Columbia Law School professor and expert on criminal justice policy, has predicted that “the biggest pushback will likely be from upstate New York politicians who will be leery of doing anything that seems soft on crime. The bread and butter of politicians is to be tough on crime. I think fear of crime will trump any rational arguments based on science.” New York State indeed has a long record of “tough on crime” legislation. In 1973, New York’s Governor Rockefeller was the first to declare a “War on Drugs,” and the Rockefeller Drug Laws enacted that same year were the toughest in the nation. For 17 years (from 1977 to 1995), the New York State legislature repeatedly attempted to reinstate the death penalty. In 1978, New York was the first state in the nation to enact the draconian Juvenile Offender Law, which sent 13- to 15-year-olds accused of certain designated felonies to adult courts.

“Cuomo’s language about New York’s prison industry doesn’t play well upstate,” said Republican Senator Betty Little in reaction to the Governor’s 2013 State of the State Address, “and I think we think differently about crime. We think that there should be punishment and penalties

for committing crimes and I’m not so sure that people in the New York City area or the metropolitan area think about that as much as we do.” Given that crime rates for New York City far surpass those of any other region in the state, Little’s last sentence is somewhat surprising. However, because prison work constitutes a large share of the upstate New York economy, her resistance to reform is also rather expected. Most of New York’s prisons are located upstate, and in some places, entire towns and economies have developed around these facilities.

And yet, increasing the age of criminal responsibility to 18 would have little to no effect on the prison economy or on the availability of jobs in correctional work. Juvenile prisoners constitute only about 2 percent of the incarcerated population in adult facilities. As Senator Little’s statement indicates, however, New York’s Republican State Senators are wary of appearing “soft on crime” for fear of losing the support of their constituents. Given the size of the prison economy, voters engaged in correctional work constitute a significant population. In addition, the Correctional Officer Association of New York State and other similar unions are listed as major campaign donors for much of the Republican Senate leadership—yet another reason why being perceived as “soft on crime” would pose a threat to Republican candidates. In the last two years, the prison industry has been suffering job losses stemming from Governor Cuomo’s success in reducing prison populations, which has resulted in the closure of several state prisons. In light of this, it has been a particularly inopportune moment for upstate Republican representatives to show support for Raise the Age policies that appear to threaten the prison economy in a similar manner.

As it stands today, Governor Cuomo plans to implement an executive order that would remove 16 and 17 year-olds from adult prisons. However, the order would not have an impact on the majority of juveniles incarcerated in adult facilities, as most are held in state jails rather than prisons. Nor would the order offer any help to the additional 40,000 minors who are prosecuted as adults in crim-

features inal courts on average each year, as it only applies to juveniles currently incarcerated in adult prison.

In the summer of 2015, one tragic example of the devastating impacts of Juvenile Court Exclusion made headlines in the media—the suicide of Kalief Browder. Kalief was arrested at age 16 for allegedly stealing a schoolmate’s backpack. He was held at Rikers Island for three years without a trial, and spent about two of those years in solitary confinement.

During his time at Rikers, Kalief was subject to violent abuse from both prison staff and other inmates. After he was finally released, Kalief sued the city and made appearances in the media to tell his story in the hopes of preventing others from a similar fate.

Kalief enrolled in college after being released from prison, but he suffered frequent panic attacks and was hospitalized twice in psychiatric wards.

He attempted suicide three separate times, both while in prison and after he was released. He died after his last attempt in June 2015, at the age of 22.

Some may try to pin Kalief’s ordeals on failures of the New York City Department of Corrections, but his story is representative of the trials faced by youths throughout the state when they are thrust into the adult criminal justice system. Should young people be held accountable for their infractions? Absolutely. However, prosecuting kids in adult courts is an unethical experiment that has gone on for far too long. We should know better by now. It is time to stop sacrificing adolescents on the altar of partisan politics, and time to change our laws for the sake of public safety and for the good of New York’s kids.•

Tal Siegel is a senior in Columbia’s school of General Studies, majoring in Political Science. Tal grew up in Israel where she worked as a counselor and teacher for juvenile delinquents in a special rehabilitative program, and ran a reentry program for formerly incarcerated women through the company she co-owned in St. Louis, MO. She plans to continue her graduate studies in Education Policy. Tal can be reached at: tss2133@columbia.edu 9

briefings

columbia political review :: fall 2015

Some Yuan Is Getting Me Down An Analysis of the Global Impact of China’s Economic Slowdown China on My Mind: What Might China’s Economic Slowdown Mean for the Global Economy?

C

hina is on my mind—and it seems to be on everybody else’s mind as well.

You’ve heard it all summer, and the headache is now continuing into autumn: China’s economy is slowing down drastically. Analysts have been predicting that China’s unprecedented 10 percent growth rate would eventually start to atrophy for the last three decades, and it seems that their conjectures are finally starting to be realized.

When one of the world’s economic titans starts to come to a halt, so too does the rest of the world, given the interconnectedness of the global economy. The economic state of China right now, especially if it continues to deteriorate, will have implications on the rest of the world for years to come.

By some economic measurements, you could claim that China is the largest economy in the world. The international economy is not unlike a spiderweb, with its strands comprised of economic relationships between nations; China, along with the United States, is at the dead center of the web. Human beings are notoriously inept at conceptualizing large numbers, and so the metrics alone belie how truly gigantic the Chinese economy is. The state-centric economic system initiated by Mao Zedong and pushed into overdrive by the policies of Deng Xiaoping accounts for an approximate 17 percent of all economic activity in the world.

It has a purchasing power parity GDP of 17.63 trillion USD, and employs nearly 788 million workers.

China has long since overtaken the United States as the primary man10

By Ankeet Ball ufacturing economy in the world; no nation exports more goods than China does, nor does any nation have as many trading relation-

ships. The world’s largest population combined with lofty ambitions has transformed China into a powerful regional leader in Asia, and a

columbia political review :: fall 2015 formidable global force in the trade and transaction of goods and services. When a traditionally strong central component of a spiderweb starts to go slack, the weight of its failure reverberates throughout the

of job security as firms slowly cut workers due to declining industrial demand. Wages aren’t coming to workers fast enough to counter the rate of inflation, and as a result, everything drops: consumer con-

briefings These pages add two academic voices to that chorus. Professor Andrew Nathan, Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science, will lend his expertise on Chinese markets and foreign policy to assess the cur-

“The world’s largest population combined with lofty ambitions has transformed China into a powerful regional leader in Asia, and a formidable global force in the trade and transaction of goods and services.” entire web, all the way to the very fringes of its architecture. Within the architecture of the global economy, when China’s strong foundation starts to weaken, the entire structure gets weaker as a result.

The slowdown in China began as industrial processes and firms started to halt production; demand failed to meet an abundance of supply. Customers and investments dried up in industrial cities as the

sumption, additional investment, imports, exports, and nearly every other economic indicator. This decline effect stemming from industrial capacity has combined with excess borrowing and fluctuations in the nation’s financial systems to form the main components of the Chinese economic slowdown.

The slackening of the Chinese components of the web are now being felt in reverberations all over

rent causes of the troubles in the Chinese stock market, and whether or not the entire Chinese market is heading for some sort of correction. We will also hear from Professor Carl Riskin, economics professor, who approaches the problem from a different angle, suggesting that the Chinese slowdown should be less of a cause for anxiety. While we cannot yet foresee with perfect clarity the broader implications

“If China enters into a recession, it would join a growing list of emerging economies entering recession, like Brazil and Russia, and would almost certainly drive the global economy into at best a recession, and at worse, an unprecedented financial crisis.” dangers of the intense growth of the Chinese economy began to catch up with the nation in the new decade.

This phenomenon has transformed once promising firms into skeletal remnants of past economic aspirations, taking form in empty factories and unused roads. Chinese consumption simply cannot keep up with previous Chinese investment, and the overabundance of its current investment infrastructure is halting technological improvements in the industrial sector, which accounts for a major part of the Chinese economy. Workers are stuck in menial labor roles in an effort to keep the Chinese national unemployment rate low. Though the rate hovers at 4 percent, insight into the daily life of Chinese workers—the majority of whom are from the peasant class—shows a lack

the world. Financial firms and economists are constantly analyzing market trends, searching for the faults that might burgeon into regional or global recessions. The Chinese growth rate is expected to hover around 6 percent next year, and the economic threshold for China’s yearly benchmark would be a bottom-line 2.5 percent growth rate. If China enters into a recession, it would join a growing list of emerging economies entering recession, like Brazil and Russia, and would almost certainly drive the global economy into at best a recession, and at worse, an unprecedented financial crisis.

All the usual suspects (and some unusual ones) are taking their shots on how to deal with the Chinese slowdown, from Barack Obama and Janet Yellen to Donald Trump.

of the Chinese nosedive from this summer, the following intellectual exploration will allow us some clarity for the world ahead. • Hailing from New Jersey, Ankeet Ball, a senior in Columbia College, is majoring in Economics-Political Science with a concentration in American Studies. He is an aspiring lawyer and wishes to eventually enter into a life of politics and public service. If you’re looking for Ankeet, he can be found on a stage, performing for a Columbia theatrical production, watching a Barclays Premier League Game, or crying in a fetal position because he can never physically meet Abraham Lincoln. It might be easier to reach him at: ab3755@columbia.edu 11

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CPR interviewed Professsors Carl Riskin and Andrew Nathan regarding the Chinese economic slowdown, and it is with pride and pleasure that we introduce them here.

Professor Riskin is a Senior Research Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, and a Distinguished Professor of Economics at Queens College. He is the author of China‘s Political Economy: The Quest for Development since 1949; co-author with A. R. Kahn of Inequality and Poverty in China in the Age of Globalization; and co-author with R. Zhao and S. Li of China’s Retreat from Equality, among others. His most recent research deals with income distribution and patterns of income inequality in China.

Professor Nathan is currently the Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, chair of the steering committee of the Center for the Study of Human Rights, co-chair of the board Human Rights in China, and a board member of Freedom House, among many other distinguished positions past and present. His publications are too numerous to recite here but his mosr recent book, co-authored with A. Scobell, is China’s Search for Security.

These distinguished experts’ responses are presented below.

CPR: What exactly led to the stock market crash in China this summer? I know there are probably lots of different causes and it’s hard to pinpoint any precise one, but could you give me an overview please of what happened?

Any stock market that goes up this far and this fast is going to come down at some point. What triggers it is some kind of mass psychology where everybody suddenly decides that this is the moment it’s going down, so they sell, so it goes down. It is widely thought that the signal that started this rush to the exists was the currency devaluation. But that was just the signal; the underlying cause was that many/most/all investors thought/knew that the market was overvalued.

C.R.

A.N.

I’m not a student of China’s stock markets and don’t follow them closely, so bear that in mind in what I say here. The market there is and has been from the beginning been a casino and its volatility is much greater than that of more mature markets. It has been a place where many people frustrated with very low government-controlled interest rates have gone to try to get higher returns. Everyone knows that it has been in bubble mode for some time, with ridiculously high price/earnings ratios.

CPR: Candidate Donald Trump used the Chinese stock market crash to justify his position that the United States should “decouple” from China. Setting aside whether or not his analysis is right, would it even be possible for the United States to “decouple” from China? Does what he’s advocating for make any sense?

It doesn’t make any sense. The US cannot decouple from China, we have too much trade with them, too much investment there, too much mutual dependence on global markets that both of us influence.

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C.R.

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As for Donald Trump, I wouldn’t waste time parsing his comments. The US-China relationship has been a distorted one, in some ways, in that it has helped enable China’s past strategy of depending on expanding exports to drive growth of GDP and employment, which was a flawed strategy that they are now trying to move away from. It also enabled the US to run big trade deficits and to lose manufacturing jobs faster than we otherwise would have. If China rebalances its economy to rely more on domestic consumption and less on investment and exports – all of which it is trying to do – and the US were to rebalance our own economy by ending the dysfunctional circus in Congress, adopting a tax code that promotes a less lopsided distribution of income and a budget that restores and expands our badly eroded infrastructure, improves education and promotes innovation, then the two countries could enjoy a less unbalanced kind of trade relationship, which would be good for us both. I’m not holding my breath.

CPR: The Economist at the end of August argued that the “crash” in the Chinese stock market was no more serious than a daily fluctuation in a relatively new stock market, even if it was a “three sigma” event. Would you agree with that?

Conversely, Forbes at the end of September warned that another big dip is coming in the Chinese stock market. Colombo argues that a wedge patterning has been forming in the SSEC, similar to one that formed in the days leading up to the crash happening over the summer. Is it possible to predict it this accurately? Is it likely that another similar crash in the Chinese stock market is approaching imminently?

Right, I don’t think it should be called a crash. A similar decline here would be called a correction. It would be a crash if it continued for a much longer time, went lower, and did not recover.

Of course nobody can predict the timing or magnitude of market moves. We can predict the market will go up and down but not when and how much. However, for what it’s worth, I do not consider it “likely” that the Chinese stock market will undergo another major correction until some future time when it has again gone up a great deal. Here my reasoning is partly political - the government won’t let that happen (and the fact that it won’t, encourages investors to stay in and prevents the market from falling). My second reason is, I suppose, economic or political-economic. That is to say that the Chinese stock market has a lot of flaws - information is not transparent, a lot of investors are short term gamblers, there is probably still too much leverage — AND the Chinese economy is certainly slowing down and has structural problems of its own, BUT all that said, that economy remains very strong whether its growth rate is the announced 7 percent or a more modest 5 percent. There is a lot of money there. Savings rates are low. People are going to continue to invest in stocks.

C.R.

A.N.

Both the Shanghai and the Shenzhen markets more than doubled in value from the middle of 2014 to the middle of this year. Even after the sharp fall in August the market remains over-priced and so, yes, at some point it will correct. But the stock market is not the economy and one shouldn’t use those terms interchangeably. China’s economic growth rate has been falling for long-term reasons, especially the gradual exhaustion of their previously huge pool of surplus labor, as well as the narrowing of the technological gap between China and the most advanced countries. Although there is debate about how fast China is actually growing at present, my reading of those who are most in touch with the situation leads me to believe that their growth rate is not much lower than the 7% claimed. Wages, jobs, disposable income and consumption spending all continue to rise. Nor is the stock market an important source of capital for Chinese industry, which gets most of its capital from retained earnings and bank loans.

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columbia political review :: fall 2015

Removing the Stink

Lebanon’s Garbage Crisis and the Sectarian Paradigm

I

t was a busy night at Mezyan, a new pub on Hamra Street in downtown Beirut on a Friday this past August. It had recently gained a reputation among locals for being a hangout spot for Syrian activists currently in exile. A friend of mine involved in student government at the American University of Beirut was waiting for me, eager to discuss the changes that were taking place in the country. Beirut was embroiled in a crisis over garbage collection, a service in the hands of a private corporation whose contract with the municipal government expired without renewal. The garbage that had piled up on the sides of roads became so intolerable that a movement assembled to demand the resignation of the government. Protests organized by the movement have been taking place in downtown Beirut’s Riad al-Solh Square for nearly two months.

According to the movement’s early Facebook campaign, the “You

By Omar Abboud pressure subsequently mounted on You Stink to become an organized platform for exposing other forms of Lebanese dysfunction. Suddenly, there arose the pragmatic yet also existential need for the movement to organize its demands politically.

Leaders of the initial movement, who were primarily students and other young people, faced a formidable challenge: addressing the wider systemic issues in municipal and national governance while avoiding an inevitable partition that would render their goals niche, obsolete, and sectarian.

Political mobilization in Lebanon and its inherent complexities pervade every realm of society from the military to education, access to public services, foreign relations, and employment. Its sectarian system of organization is what has left Lebanon without, or perhaps robbed of, a unique national identity clear of political grout. The balance of power in the country,

“The “stink” was initially pointed at the government’s ineptitude in this particular disaster, but the group has since evolved as notable grievances like political corruption and lack of infrastructure were brought to the table.”

Stink” protests started “as a response to the government’s inability to solve the crisis.” The “stink” was initially pointed at the government’s ineptitude in this particular disaster, but the group has since evolved as notable grievances like political corruption and lack of infrastructure were brought to the table. Images circulated of protestors assaulted by the police during the larger demonstrations of August 6 and August 23 that took place in Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square, and 14

mandated by sectarian allotments for Muslims and Christians as two broad categories encompassing many more, has made the country prone to major foreign, economic, and humanitarian destabilization that is both exigent and longstanding.

What I have found most interesting during my more recent trips to Lebanon is how our student generation witnesses and reacts to these events. Coffee shops, pubs, and restaurants cast a shadow over

these harsh realities while simultaneously challenging them; pubs like Mezyan are incubators of a different form of political yet intellectual mobilization, one reminiscent of the meetings of intellectuals at Hamra Street cafés in the 1960s, now somewhat a thing of folklore.

And the politics that pervade these social establishments have shifted along with the country: In 2005, it was the people celebrating Lebanese sovereignty after the expulsion of the Syrian army from its 29year occupation; in 2007 and 2008, it was the lingering consequences of Israel’s bloody war with Lebanon during the summer of 2006; in 2011, it was the Arab Spring; in 2014, it was and continues to be ISIS. So of course, the soupe du jour that night at Mezyan was fleshing out the garbage crisis. For many, the recent protests have provided a promising sign that it is possible to break the gridlock when basic services like garbage, water, and electricity are threatened. Although this uprising should not be mistaken for political unity in the country, evidence suggests that these protests can and will become a major turning point for the country and thus for the region altogether. But placing Lebanon in the context of the Arab Spring, examining the current demographics of the country, and considering its unique humanitarian and infrastructural constraints show us that this turning point likely isn’t a positive one.

Conflict & Representation So how do the Lebanese conceptualize the origin of conflict? As simple as it is, it is a question that has defined the political edges of every representation of Lebanon in recent history from news media to foreign scholarship, artistic expres-

columbia political review :: fall 2015 sions, and political rhetoric. Many start their analysis of Lebanon with the eruption of the civil war in 1975. Some mark the beginning of a Lebanon distinct from Syria with the formation of Israel in 1948. Yet most commentaries of Lebanon’s current and past conflicts note that the country’s independence from France in 1943 was the most politically significant paradigm shift, allowing the country to establish a kind of national character while also instituting the National Pact of 1943, an unwritten agreement that institutionalized Lebanon’s configuration as a secular and multi-confessional state.

From this starting point stemmed a number of important developments, namely the use of a demographic census from 11 years

The ensuing tensions resulted in a civil war in 1975 with unique international stakes, involving major Israeli and American interventions, and an extended Syrian occupation that lasted until 2005. Perhaps most significantly, the militarization of sectarian groups became well commercialized and tied to foreign interventions to the extent that contemporary political parties and actors in Lebanon, particularly Hezbollah, are direct successors of the wartime militias, both in terms of the leadership that directed them, and the strategic alliances that they held on to as the post-war period progressed.

The issue of originating conflict in this fashion, at least from an epistemological standpoint, is that it subsumes continuation. The co-

cover story paralyzed by both a tinted frame of political origination and wartime trauma, placing each into its own subjectivity, never to come to terms with or even understand another.

Beirut’s Party Scene The end of Lebanon’s civil war in 1990 did little to suppress the sectarian political fabric, but putting an end to the violence that had resulted in the deaths of over 100,000 people over the preceding 15 years was a necessary goal.

The most significant changes to Lebanon’s political configuration included a re-proportioning of the parliament to one that was exactly 50-50 Christian-Muslim, and exactly 50-50 Sunni-Shiite within the Muslim half. The other major

“Each contemporary party has been paralyzed by both a tinted frame of political origination and wartime trauma, placing each into its own subjectivity, never to come to terms with or even understand another.” prior to determine the representative proportions of Lebanon’s 18 recognized religious confessions (denominations) in a parliament of 128 seats. This unique configuration would never be sustainable, of course: as the country’s sects shifted in size, each one’s desire to hold or gain power increased, leading to political instability while simultaneously promoting sectarian identification. The National Pact’s stipulation that the president of the country always had to be a Maronite Christian and that the prime minister had to be Sunni Muslim also bestowed certain privileges on both groups that would propel inequality in income and social access for Shiites, Druzes, and other minorities. The mass migration of Palestinian refugees to the country upon the creation of Israel in 1948 further strained the country’s economic resources while creating further political segmentation; the entrance of these primarily Sunni Muslim refugees was politicized into a force throwing the sectarian order out of balance.

lonial period in Lebanon is politically significant and has various “lingering effects,” as is described

by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism. Our understanding of Lebanon has been so deeply affected by the colonial paradigm that it seems to have begged the question: is every analysis of Lebanon necessarily skewed due to Lebanon’s political realities, or is there no “real” Lebanon and only a system of such representations? This relates closely with our understanding of democracy in the Lebanese context; in a system such as this one that promotes close sectarian identification, no one voice can claim to represent or speak for all. Our understanding of the sectarian divide is complicated by and implicated in the atmospheric problematization of representing the conflict and its players. Each sect’s pursuit of more power in the country has thus become synonymous with a blurred religious, patriotic, even linguistic decrial of the country’s perceived modus operandi, and it follows that each contemporary party has been

development that accompanied the ratification of the Ta’if Agreement and the ending of the war was the disarming of all Lebanese militias that participated in the civil war, with the express intention of restoring political stability and normalcy while empowering a renewed secular Lebanese army and restoring Lebanese national character.

The large exception to this rule was Hezbollah, which was permitted to keep its arms as a signatory of the agreement with the stipulation that its arms would be used for resistive purposes only; Hezbollah was heavily involved in fighting Israel in the south of the country during the preceding period, particularly after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and several of its predecessor-component militias also fought Israel during its previous violations of Lebanese territory (Lebanese army records show that there were one or two such violations every single day between 1968 and 1974).

The significance of Hezbollah’s presence as a paramilitary force with a sectarian character in Leba15

cover story non cannot be understated. On the one hand, their ability to counteract the army as a backbone of stability in the state is one of special status amongst Lebanon’s other sectarian parties. From another perspective, an armed group has the ability to inculcate a power dynamic amongst other parties that is physically and politically dominating. Finally, the strategic significance of this combination of military and sectarianism makes Hezbollah an important strategic asset for Iran and Syria.

And as recent history has demonstrated, their resulting participation as an armed group fighting in the Syrian Civil War has made Lebanon a target for many of the conflict’s rebel groups and weakened national boundaries, allowing rebels and ISIS fighters to enter and exit Syria easily from Lebanon.

As the Shiite confession began establishing a character centered at least partially around Hezbollah at the conclusion of the Civil War, Sunni political representation took on a much different form. Rafiq Hariri, a business tycoon that made his fortune in Saudi Arabia in the preceding years, entered politics with the support of the Saudi Arabian regime that convened the Ta’if Accords, and served as prime minister for the majority of the period between 1991 and 2005. His administration was characterized by his plan to rejuvenate Beirut as a cosmopolitan commercial and cultural hub, signified by the development of a new downtown district by a private company called Solidere. The foreign investment that Hariri hoped to stimulate with the downtown project was successful, despite the problematic and controversial appraisal, payout, and confiscation of land that would eventually become part of the development. Hariri was assassinated in a car bombing in 2005, and the long and politically messy tribunal that has been tasked with the investigation currently suggests that Syria, which at that time was still occupying Lebanon on the basis of maintaining stability, ordered or at least sanctioned his assassination.

Over 1 million people took to the streets in the weeks after his killing, calling for the expulsion of the Syri16

columbia political review :: fall 2015 an military. The final withdrawal of Syria’s army in April 2005 marked the success of what was then known as the Cedar Revolution.

There is, however, a notable difference between people that demanded that Lebanon’s sovereignty be upheld by attending Cedar Revolution demonstrations, and people that reacted to the Cedar Revolution by mobilizing politically; notably, the latter resulted in the formation of new coalitions known as the March 8 and March 14 alliances, which together comprised the parliament of 2005. The March 8 Alliance, a big tent coalition, was comprised primarily of the Maronite Free Patriotic Movement, and the Shiite Hezbollah and Amal Movement. The anti-Syrian March 14 Alliance, by contrast, was comprised almost entirely of the Sunni Future Movement, with the Maronite Lebanese Forces party and Kataeb as secondary participants.

The emergence of these coalitions partially broke hard party lines while complicating divisions between the sects; while Sunnis and Shiites aligned themselves squarely within the March 14 and March 8 alliances respectively, Maronites and particularly Druzes, Lebanon’s fifth largest sect by parliamentary representation, continue to run on both March 8 and March 14 ballots in Lebanese elections. In fact, the current government is controlled partially by a new bloc separate from the post-2005 alliances comprised primarily of Druze, Maronite, and Armenian parties and politicians. Most importantly, the idea that Syria’s presence and exit was significant enough to question the status quo — only to simply reconfigure it — reveals an important insight on today’s garbage protests: that people’s demands, as related as they are to secular and even anti-sectarian causes, are prone to cooptation by political parties simply due to the dominating force of sectarianism.

You Stink As my friend and I continued discussing the prospect of these current protests avoiding this kind of political cooptation at Mezyan that

night, a table nearby was embroiled in a debate about a different topic: the Syrian refugee crisis, which has brought over 1 million refugees to Lebanon. 25 percent of the country is Syrian, and Lebanon’s capability to assist refugees is abysmal compared to those of Turkey and Jordan, where the UNHCR has set up refugee camps and border registration services that account for most of the refugees that cross. The abject poverty that these Syrians have been living in is a humanitarian crisis of tragic proportions, and to further complicate matters, the forced integration of Syrians into Lebanese society has turned into a highly politicized issue. Syrians are not only seen as foreign invaders that are usurping resources by a population already exasperated by political and economic instability, but responsibility for their care is also relegated disproportionately on a confessional basis, because Syrians have settled in the majority Muslim area of Hamra in Beirut and certain areas of the Béqaa Valley near the border. Similarly to and in tandem with the Palestinian refugee crisis, which still persists in Lebanon, the emergence of these Syrian refugees has inspired ugly forms in jingoism in the media and national political rhetoric.

As our conversations eventually collided and the topic of ISIS violently perched at the border for the past year came up, I was struck

by Lebanon’s simultaneous gravity and absurdity; and through the confusion that accompanies that paradox, I also became reminded of the deep divide I saw within people I knew on the state of the country.

For a long time people have been resigned to be indifferent towards what might be called “the political situation,” a construct that transcends the instability, corruption, and other truths of daily life in Lebanon. The threat of conquest

by ISIS has launched this situation into a stratosphere of “everything is so bad that it’s ironic.” Interestingly one category of people has responded by disengaging completely not only from the anxiety that pervades Lebanon’s irony, but also from a will to change what may be within their grasp. Why this persists is a

columbia political review :: fall 2015 critical issue, but some plausible explanations have emerged: people feel helpless in face of such insurmountable challenges, people

On the contrary, what is happening in Lebanon has never been more different than Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and even Syria. A popular joke

cover story Lebanon’s political dimensions, those of us that came to the square to declare that the government indeed stinks still see this movement

“Throughout the Arab Spring, people have been demanding the removal of their presidents. In Lebanon, the people have been demanding a president” see the consequences of taking up political causes, and people see no need to engage unless their lives are immediately at risk, suggesting a mass epidemic of insouciance. Yet a second category has emerged, one of great, unremitting anger, and it’s the category I argue has been most inspired by the current garbage crisis and has been almost perfectly captured by the slogan of “You Stink.”

Conversations in Beirut today center not around whether the garbage crisis has highlighted some form of systemic failure or even corruption in the government; this much has become clear. From my most recent discussions with other Lebanese as well as organizers of You Stink, it seems that growing cynicism and that indifference towards participation are the movement’s greatest enemies. Most importantly, the legacy of cooptation is still very much fresh and many are incredulous towards the notion of political action escaping the power gridlock. In this fashion, we are already beginning to see that these suspicions may be very much correct: major politicians from across the political spectrum have tweeted, uploaded videos, and published statements in support of the You Stink movement. Many accept this cooptation, unknowingly participating in the empowerment of these crucial counterparts in state corruption.

And this, in a way, is part of what makes Lebanon’s upcoming role in the Middle East particularly significant, and certainly more significant than as the next domino in the oft-described play-by-play of corrupt Arab regimes being brought down by the power of the people.

making the rounds recently nails it quite pithily: throughout the Arab Spring, people have been demanding the removal of their presidents.

In Lebanon, the people have been demanding a president (that’s right: Lebanon’s gridlock has kept the country without a head of state for over 15 months).

Having taken their syncretism for granted, Lebanese have also seen the emergence of what Dr. Jamil Mouawad chronicles in The Guardian as a parallel state, one controlled by private corporations enabled by a systematically weakened regime. High expenses, lack of expertise and weak infrastructure in the post-war period led the government to place provision of water and electricity and the collection of garbage in the hands of private corporations. Officially, garbage is handled and budgeted by each municipality, but Beirut has been contracting a company to collect the garbage since 1994 and has allotted the spending budget to paying contracting fees. Public electricity only runs for 12-14 hours, and those corporations contracted to provide the rest charge exorbitant fees for limited and non-guaranteed service. What has resulted is a particularly unnerving symbiosis: a public state whose interests only protect few, and a private state whose controlling benefactors are the individuals that preside over the public state. It is a deadly cycle that the garbage crisis has exposed, and one that people have finally come to question on the most fundamental level.

I attended the You Stink protests during that trip to the city of my childhood. Despite our inability to ever fully understand or represent

as a culmination, although of what we are not yet sure. What we held in common was that we saw this call as necessary for Lebanon’s survival, in the face of ISIS, in the face of humanitarian tragedy, in the face of threat of more civil war at any moment: essentially, in the face of overwhelming odds.

Critics of the movement call out their low numbers, citing that protests have been attended by only fifty to a hundred thousand people.

The entire million that demanded Syria’s removal in 2005 cannot possibly have become disillusioned or cynical, but what many claim is that a significant proportion of that million didn’t see the removal of Syria as mutually exclusive with a domestic sectarian agenda. Breaking the cycle of reconfiguration and enacting a paradigm shift in Lebanon’s most base sectarian tendencies is a necessity that protesters have put their lives on the line for.

And, in defiance of Lebanon’s great irony, this necessity poses the biggest worry of all: that the You Stink movement, at its most deep level, calls for an end to the sectarian — the only Lebanon that we have ever known — and that Lebanese people just aren’t ready to let go. •

Omar Osama Abboud is a senior at Columbia Engineering majoring in Operations Research and minoring in Middle Eastern Studies (MESAAS). He grew up in Toronto, Canada and is originally from Beirut, Lebanon. He was previously the President of CU Turath, Columbia’s Arab Students Association. He can be reached at: ooa2121@columbia.edu.

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briefing

Fight and Flight The Syrian Refugee Crisis Comes to Europe

According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), there are more refugees or displaced persons in the world today than at any point before in human history. The majority of them are children.

This summer witnessed the explosion of the Syrian refugee crisis into the Western sphere as desperate Syrians pushed westward to reach some measure of both physical and economic security—there are now more refugees in Europe than at any point since World War Two. This issue is neither a short-term nor temporary one. While it is contingent upon the situation in Syria (which is embroiled in a civil war with no end in sight), the refugee crisis will nevertheless most likely be a long-term, intergenerational issue. Yet, no meaningful efforts have been made to attempt to deal with the crisis. The European Union has been paralyzed in a state of inaction, with individual countries having vastly differing approaches to the issue. Germany has taken the most welcoming stance, using an “open-door” policy to accept its refugees. However, the resultant stream of thousands of refugees has overwhelmed the German state. Other states, such as Hungary and the UK, have taken much more conservative stances to the crisis.

It is clear there is much to be done to ensure the safety and welfare of the refugees, as well as to deal with the political crisis in Syria. In an effort to contribute meaningfully to that discussion, CPR now presents two voices discussing various aspects of the crisis.

Elif Naz Coker has written an article examining the (failed) policies of various affected countries, focusing in particular on Turkey. She analyzes the actions of the Turkish government in contributing to and exacerbating the crisis, and possible remedial policies for the future.

Matthew Zipf has written an article that attempts to understand and explain why it is Germany that has risen to the challenge of the crisis. He explains what it is about Germany’s particular history with refugees that has led to both the German people and government welcoming refugees, and the implications that this influx of people will have on the German identity and nation.

-CPR

Germany and the Migrant Crisis

“T

he problem is not a European problem,” said Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary, of the many hundred thousand asylum-seekers pouring into the continent.“The problem is a German problem. Nobody would like to stay in Hungary.”

I hazard that many people would have liked to stay in Hungary, or at least would have preferred it to living in a war zone. But that opportunity—Europe’s opportunity—to provide collective respite, to prove the EU offers more than moral rhetoric, is lost.

In September, Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, outlined a plan to resettle 18

By Matthew Zipf 160,000 refugees across Europe. Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany, presented a plan for five times that, in her country alone. Germany is not Europe, but for the refugees, it may as well be.

With the migrant influx, German history has once again subsumed German politics. The parliament today speaks of the 11 million refugees resettled after World War II, of the guest-worker program in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and of reunification in 1990.

Merkel, with her open-door asylum policy for Syrian refugees, is not coming out of left-field. She sees the pragmatic possibilities—an expanded national identity, new moral authori-

ty, and a restored labor force—but is ultimately building on the country’s history of large-scale migration.

In the aftermath of World War II, occupied Germany received over 11 million expellees and refugees, the majority of whom were migrants emigrating from former German territories to accommodate the new, postwar borders. These migrants were of German descent; they may have lived abroad, but they could relate ethnically. Though tensions in the cities arose between long-time residents and the recent arrivals, by the end of the 1940s, the Wirtschaftswunder had kicked in, and economic growth quelled social tension.

columbia political review :: fall 2015 As unemployment plummeted from 12 percent in 1950 to 1 percent a decade later, the West German government signed Gastarbeiter (guest worker) treaties with Italy, Spain, Turkey, and other lesser-developed economies, allowing foreign workers to enter Germany under the expectation that they eventually return home.

The influx of migrants pushed native West Germans into higher-paying positions, all the while providing German factories with much-needed unskilled workers for the assembly-lines.

Despite its economic success, the Gastarbeiter program proved a blemish on Germany’s post-war record.

Many Turks, who constituted the largest national group in the program, never fully integrated, nor did they return home, as the program initially expected. Instead, they formed ethnic enclaves in Germany’s cities, separate from the mainstream social fabric.

Children of the Gastarbeiter—Turkish or otherwise—gained the right to reside in Germany, but not citizenship.

Integration proceeded slowly, and at times, never occurred. “We should learn from the experiences of the ‘60s,” Merkel said in a recent speech to her parliament, “when we asked Gastarbeiter to come to us, and make integration the top priority from the start.”

In 1990, the Germans began yet a larger migration: reunification. West Germans paid a Solidaritätszuschlag—a solidarity surcharge—to fund integration with the economically-depressed East. “The Germans were in the mood to make this enormous sacrifice,” Dr. Volker Berghahn, professor emeritus of History at Columbia University told CPR, “because it was for the greater cause of reuniting Germany. But whether they will dip into their pockets again and accept a sort of refugee tax, I don’t know.”

Fifteen years after reunification, the German parliament formally designated Germany an “immigrant nation.” It has since been de jura multicultural and accepting. But more pressing, according to Berghahn, is the de facto question of integration: “Can a society like Germany, who said they’ll accept 800,000 migrants, actually cope with that?”

By 2060, according to Germany’s Federal Statistics Office, the German population will shrink to between 68

and 73 million people. At the same time, the percentage of working-age residents will fall by ten percentage points, so that of every eight Germans, one will be 80 or older. “We need people,” German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere announced, at a state event in early September. “We need young people. We need immigrants.

All of you know that, because we have too few children.”

Germany’s social security program depends on young workers, and, like in the United States, the proportion of net contributors to net recipients

briefing And then there’s the street life of Germany’s cities: Berliners now delight as much in their Turkish restaurants as in their Currywurst. Why not let Munich have falafel and schawarma?

If you understand Harlem’s reaction to gentrification, then you understand conservative Germans’ reaction to the migrants. They fear displacement and cultural loss. They fear they will no longer recognize the towns and cities they grew up in. And in Germany more so than in America, there is a dialogue over these fears, and over how the culture should proceed.

“If you understand Harlem’s reaction to gentrification, then you understand conservative Germans’ reaction to the migrants.” has declined in the past two decades.

But the migrants could change this. As Michael Clemens and Justin Sandefur of the Center for Global Development note in Foreign Affairs, Germany will reap “tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lifetime added-value from each Syrian that is successfully integrated into its labor force.” Resettlement, on average, will cost $14,000 per person.

The effect on wages, meanwhile, will be minimal. The Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development (KNOMAD), a World Bank research agency, estimates that a 1 percent increase in a population—exactly the projected growth of Germany after the influx of asylum-seekers—on average depresses wages by only .1 percent. Moreover, asylum-seekers are typically more productive than other classes of migrants: In 2004, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that refugees in the United States earn up to 20 percent more than non-refugee migrants.

But Germany will benefit from more than just the demographic and economic boost. There are international ties to be formed and cultural diversity to be gained. The Syrian refugees, many of whom are well-educated, from Syria’s middle class, could help expand the Middle Eastern market for Germany’s export-dependent companies, and could further integrate Arab states into the international order.

In 2000, Friedrich Merz, then leader of the center-right Christian-Democratic Union, wrote in Die Welt of the need for Leitkultur, or leading culture, by which immigrants would assimilate to certain guiding national norms. Immigrants to Germany, Merz argued, had a duty to adopt and respect Germany’s values.

Ten years after Merz, the prominent Islamophobe and former Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin added to the debate on Leitkultur, offering the prognosis that the waves of post– World War II Islamic immigration have caused Germany to become, on average, less intelligent. Sarrazin’s message resonated with some, but the rebuke was much stronger. Germany—unlike neighboring Austria, Switzerland, and Denmark—has no major far-right party, and thus no real, mainstream home for reactionaries like Sarrazin.

But Berghahn, professor of History, suggests that Sarrazin reflects how race remains a part of the debate over assimilation. “This is where the ordinary German majority still has problems: to see themselves as a multicultural, multiethnic society,” he told me. “For centuries, since the rise of German nationalism at least, they saw themselves as ethnically homogeneous.”

“So it will be very interesting,” Berghahn added, “to see whether German society takes this opportunity to show that we have really changed, and are 19

briefings no longer as our grandfathers were in the 1930s, when they rounded up Jews and murdered them.”

What is Germanness, and who is it for? If it is only for whites and Christians and those of native birth, then Germany is no different from Hungary. But German politicians’ sensitivity to history separates them from their Hungarian counterparts. They understand that though the desire to preserve their Germanness may be benign, parts of the German identity have historically been toxic, and must be countered.

Functional societies have shared values; healthy societies regulate what those values are. Germanness may derive from Das Land der Dichter

columbia political review :: fall 2015 und Denker—The Land of Poets and Thinkers—but it cannot derive from race or religion. The success of this migration rests on the ability of everyday Germans to regulate their national identity, to understand that being German must have nothing to do with blood or birth. But as much as the Germans must accept the migrants, they must also be honest about which parts of their identity they are not willing to sacrifice. Full assimilation cannot be the policy anymore than full multiculturalism can.

These migrants did not simply appear in Germany. They crossed the Mediterranean on crowded dinghies and paid smugglers and hiked along highways and rode in stuffed trains

and suffered. Germany is their paradise, Merkel their guiding light—that much we saw at Budapest’s Keleti Station, as hundreds of migrants chanted her country’s name. If Germanness can be for all those who love Germany, for all those who cannot think of a better home, then the migrants might just fit. • Matthew Zipf is a first-year at Columbia College with prospective majors in Computer Science and Political Science. As a dual citizen of Switzerland and the United States, he participates in both European and American politics. He can be reached at: mfz2105@columbia.edu.

Humanity Washed Ashore: The Failures of Turkey and the European Union

O

n September 2, 2015, the lifeless body of a three-year-old Syrian refugee from Kobane washed up on the shores of a resort town in Turkey. He was with his family on an inflatable boat that would be capsized with 12 people on board.

The boat was one of the many trying to make it to the Greek island of Kos, and Kurdi was one of the many infants who lost his life on the journey. It took the devastating photos of the threeyear old being displayed on media outlets and the Internet to finally spur some European leaders to react.

On the morning of September 30, 2015, a refugee camp in the Franco-Italian border town Ventimiglia was raided by the Italian police. The refugees were forcibly drawn away from their shelters, and were promised to be taken to the Red Cross facilities nearby. When the students of French university Sciences Po’s Menton campus (located on the French side of that border) tried to bring basic supplies like food, water, and blankets for shelter, they were refused access to refugees by the police forces and the material they brought was piled up in a corner instead of being distributed.

For the first time in years, a Schengen zone border was policed again, and passport and residence permit checks resumed.

Had anything changed in these 28 days besides the release of countless statements expressing remorse and 20

vague calls for action? Had any concrete improvements been made in handling the refugee crisis that now affects a region stretching from Iraq to the United Kingdom? The answer is a resounding no. The world is failing to respond to the Syrian refugee crisis; Europe seems unable or unwilling to ensure the refugees’ safety, to provide them the asylum they demand, to establish a consensus within public opinion regarding governmental policies, or, in short, to preserve humanity. The grave failure is caused by a significant delay in the global recognition of and response to the crisis.

This paper will attempt to analyze a few of the many causes of that delay: the false prediction of the length and scope of the Syrian conflict, a collective and insinuated refusal to accept and integrate the refugees, and a lack of a decisive stance against the clashing parties in Syria.

The Western media has only recently started to cover the details of the Syrian refugee crisis proliferating over these past few months. However, the country has been mired in a constant state of civil war since 2009, and the refugee crisis began back in 2011.

According to current United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) data, in the past four years, a total of 4,052,703 Syrians have been affected by the conflict and were forced to move. Of those, 1,938,999 refugees have been registered in Tur-

By Elif Çoker key, and accounting for unregistered individuals, the total number of refugees in Turkey is believed to push 2.5 million. Turkey serves not only as a host, but also as a transit hub for many of the refugees, and its policies are directly affecting the scope of the crisis in Europe. The open-door policy Turkey has adopted since 2011 has allowed the aforementioned millions to enter the country—but that is not the end of the story.

Previously, existing mechanisms issued temporary ID cards to wouldbe asylum seekers while they were in the process of registering with the UNHCR and obtaining refugee status. As the crisis escalated,Turkey’s Law on Foreigners and International Protection, allowing large number of fleeing refugees to legally stay in Turkey, was passed, and a new migration management agency was created to monitor the influx of Syrians and provided them a status of “temporary protection” which had an undefined time limit. The mechanism soon proved inefficient as UNHCR failed to respond to the refugees’ demands and began scheduling appointments for applicants for as late as the year 2020.

The UNHCR currently has very limited working capacity in Turkey and very few Turkish NGOs are partners with UNHCR. According to former spokesman for UNHCR and current president of the Research Center on Asylum and Migration (IGAM), Me-

columbia political review :: fall 2015 tin Çorabatir, the Turkish government drastically reduced its level of collaboration with the agency and started establishing its own refugee camps along the border, creating a bureaucratic duality. The agency is understaffed, underfunded, cannot offer educational or vocational services, and provides only temporary shelter at the camps, giving no aid with respect to integrating into Turkish society. The government takes pride in its wellequipped border camps, but neglects to mention that two thirds of the refugees in Turkey actually live outside of these camps and in various cities like Istanbul, Gaziantep, and Hatay.

Moreover, while the government does provide access to healthcare for the refugees, it does not facilitate their search for shelter, and rent prices skyrocket wherever refugees tend to concentrate in the country. The real estate market takes advantage of the vulnerability with clear price discrimination against Syrians, forcing refugees to pay higher rents, down payments, and security deposits, and sometimes requiring a Turkish guarantor to sign the lease. In terms of education and opportunity, while some Syrian high school diploma holders can get into Turkish universities, there is as yet no system designed to let younger children into the primary schools, let alone any opportunity to educate them in their native Arabic.

Clearly, Turkey’s open door policy remains flawed. While the country still accepts the Syrian citizens flowing in at the borders, it needs to do more to assist and integrate them. When first initiated, the open door policy was an attack against Bashar Al-Assad, after the incredibly close friendship between him and then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ended very bitterly. The welcoming of the refugees was initially motivated in part by a desire to create a pro-Turkish lobby within Syria for the hoped-for postwar period. However, neither Turkish government officials nor the refugees themselves had predicted the length and intensity of the conflict. The measures that were designed to be temporary, like camps and asylum seeker ID cards that do not allow travel outside of the city they are assigned to, did not correspond with the long-term needs of the refugees, like vocational training, access to education for young

children, or housing aid, and created discontentment and need for mobilization. Thus began the illegal and dangerous journey of families such as that of Aylan Kurdi, who were denied exit visas, towards Greece and further into Europe.

One of the reasons why the Syrian refugee crisis only recently started to become a focal point in Western media and politics is because the influx into these countries significantly increased in the second half of 2015. As UN refugee chief Antonio Guterres put it to Reuters at the end of September, “Unfortunately only when the poor enter the halls of the rich, do the rich notice that the poor exist.” When the refugee crisis was contained within the borders of Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq (the four countries with the largest population of Syrian refugees), it was a Middle Eastern conflict and not of primary concern for the West. But once the Greek islands, the Franco-Italian border, and Balkan countries saw the mass arrival of refugees, then the problem began to be recognized.

The EU countries were, and still are, afraid of the massive influx. With the exception of Sweden that has an open door policy for those applying for refugee status, European nations are against the idea of accepting the refugees, granting them appropriate status, and initiating an integration process. In a New York Times report from September 30, 2015, German senior official Volker Stanzel explains the reluctance of governments in responding to the demands of the refugees: “We’re in a process that is ugly, that some people call ‘refugee poker,’ with everyone horse trading and fighting for their own skin, but doing so in the framework of existing European mechanisms.” Indeed, these past months have witnessed government brutality towards incoming refugees in Hungary, with Prime Minister Viktor Orban claiming that the “men from the Arab world who look like warriors” tried to enter his country, and that this was “forced upon” Hungary, according to the Associated Press. Another group of refugees were being sent back and forth in trains at the Franco-Italian border for months as neither country wanted to accept them. These European countries are missing the point that the first country

briefings of asylum that a refugee enters does not necessarily have to be their new homeland. Çorabatir insists that while the refugees’ rights of choosing which country to seek asylum in is not unlimited, their decisions and preferences need to be respected and accounted for, stressing that Greece and Eastern European countries have been acting in an “egotistical manner” in the handling of the crisis.

Given the scope of the current crisis, even the well-intended governmental attempts to offer solutions remain too naïve and inefficient. On September 9, 2015, the International Peace Institute published the Salzburg Declaration on the Refugee Crisis, drafted by the likes of Amr Moussa, Ghassan Salame, Lloyd Axworthy and Rita Hauser. Some of the bullet points from that declaration include: Create humane, properly resourced and equipped reception centers in key hubs in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe where refugees are congregating; ensure that these centers provide for the basic needs of those seeking protection, and assist them in the process of resettlement; devise criteria for indicative quotas against which Member States throughout the world should be asked to accept refugees; treat all nationals fleeing violence from Syria as eligible for temporary protection status.

A brief comparison between these points and what Europe has been doing so far demonstrates a clear contrast. While the declaration suggests establishment of reception centers in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, the EU has agreed on pledging to give one million euros in funds to UNHCR projects in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. The EU is still refusing to confront the fact that there is a very significant refugee presence in its territories and is desperately trying to contain the crisis in the Middle East instead of responding to imminent needs of people suffering in their trains, at their borders, and on their streets. French President François Hollande’s statement to France 24 that “It is close to the scene of the tragedy that the refugees must be kept, welcomed, supported” reflects the collective denial of the European leaders that the crisis is far too intense and spread out to limit it to the imminent periphery of Syria.

21

briefling The third point in the declaration calls for indicative quotas that are supposed to ensure some sort of equal distribution of refugees. While close to 4 million refugees are currently living in Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan, the 28 countries of the EU recently made a pledge to redistribute only 120,000 refugees in Europe, though the UN-

columbia political review :: fall 2015 came evident as the number of refugees increased and their needs were not met. Turkey’s rushed policies, fueled more by anger and hatred towards Bashar al-Assad than humanitarian concerns, proved that opening borders to two million refugees in order to construct the image of an omnipotent, charitable regional power

“Unfortunately only when the poor enter the halls of the rich, do the rich notice that the poor exist.”

HCR estimates a total of 477,000 refugees are actually already present on the continent. Not only are European countries not attempting to accept quotas that accurately correspond to the refugees’ demand and the countries’ own capacities, they are clearly not “treating all fleeing violence from Syria as eligible for temporary protection” either. On the contrary, one of the few measures that the union has agreed on includes asking Greece and Italy to reinforce their border controls against the influx of refugees, with European Commission President JeanClaude Juncker stressing the need for “fully operational European border and coast guard” and the commission and other member states censuring and pressuring the two countries for allowing too many refugees to move north without being identified and thereby making it easier for them to successfully seek asylum in northern Europe. The European Union is not treating the refugee influx into its borders as a humanitarian crisis that needs to be alleviated through collaboration and sacrifice, but as a threat to its society and economy that needs to be averted.

The second half of 2015 has observed the Syrian refugee crisis take on a whole new dimension, spreading out to dozens of countries and affecting millions of people, not only the dislocated Syrians but also the residents of the countries to which they have immigrated. The crisis has also demonstrated many structural flaws in the European and international political systems, which have impeded a successful response. The lack of funding and operational strength within UNHCR and refugee relief NGOs be22

counterbalancing the tyranny of the Syrian Baath regime without having the sufficient infrastructure, humanitarian aid resources, and long-term integration plans would sooner or later cause discontent on the part of both the refugees and Turkish citizens, and trigger a second wave of massive movement.

Indeed, Fulya Ozerkan of Agence France Presse claims that “Turkey’s refusal to give [Syrian immigrants] refugee status is among the factors driving the current exodus to Europe.”

Suffering from the repercussions of economic crises and in a state of anxiety, European societies started to lose faith in their ruling parties and favor more extreme political movements, especially those in the right wing. The January 2015 attack to Charlie Hebdo offices in France created a xenophobic backlash against Muslims and Middle Eastern immigrants and residents, further enforcing the support for Marine Le Pen’s Front National and other extreme right parties by some groups. European governments, worried about the effect on welfare programs, anxious about changes in the dynamics of the labor market, still facing issues of integration and equality with the existing body of immigrants, and facing reactionary pressures from their voters, are showing an understandable but clear lack of willingness to grant asylum to Syrian refugees, who in turn must resort to setting up camp at the borders or using illegal forms of transportation, which can result in great physical harm and, all too often, death. Yet now that the refugee crisis is getting the media attention it deserves, and the personal stories of survivors are making the news

and being shared on social media, the pressure on Turkey and the EU countries to respond more effectively may increase.

As long as strong and collective political action, including possible direct military intervention in Syria itself, is not taken to resolve the conflict in Syria, no measures to help the refugees will be enough. The disagreement between European leaders about whose side, if any, to take in the Syrian conflict delays urgently needed concrete action. While Chancellor Angela Merkel calls for an “inclusive peace process,” President Hollande says that political transition can only happen with the final departure of Assad; as air strikes are being launched by France, Turkey, Canada and the United States, the lack of a corresponding political intervention to support them is making the efforts lose impact. Unilateral agendas are taking precedence over collective interests, as we see with Turkey attacking the Kurds on the pretense of fighting ISIS. While violence is on the rise in the region, there can be no expectation of refugees going back home. On the contrary, the number of Syrian citizens having to leave their homeland will only increase. Will Turkey and the EU finally recognize the long-term nature of the crisis and decide to sacrifice immediate political benefits for extended humanitarian aid and integration measures? Or will the world community continue to witness more infant deaths and ruined refugee camps surrounded by police at what once used to be symbolic and uncontrolled borders? •

Elif Naz Çoker is a junior at the Columbia School of General Studies as part of its Dual BA Program with French social sciences university SciencesPo. Having majored in Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies in France, Elif has now shifted her focus to Neuroscience and Sociology. Born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey, and currently the Middle East and North Africa representative of the CIRCA Academics board, Elif is emotionally attached to and academically interested in the political and social issues of the region. She can be reached at: elif.coker@columbia.edu

summer columbia political review :: fall 20152015

Security Under Assault

features cover story

Is Sexual Assault in the Military a Women’s Issue?

By Cody Wiles

R

ussia’s aggressive posture and nuclear arsenal pose “an existential threat to the United States,” according to General Joseph Dunford, now the newest Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the top military leader in the country. The comments, which came during a Senate confirmation hearing for the next chairman, ignited the defense community and revealed a lot about our current military priorities. While many pundits have focused on General Dunford’s grim assessment of Russian intent or his strategy for defeating ISIS, however, another observation has seemingly slipped through the cracks: when it comes to the issue of sexual assault in the military, congressional interest is divided, not along partisan lines, but gendered ones.

Interspersed between questions on China, Russia, and even the origin of the Gen. Dunford’s “Fighting Joe” nickname, four out of seven women on the Senate Armed Services Committee made time to ask about the epidemic of sexual assault in the military. While Senators Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Kelly Ayotte (RNH), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), and Mazie Hirono (D-HI) saw fit to mention the issue, not a single one of the committee’s nineteen men spoke up.

This, quite frankly, is unacceptable.

By now, the statistics surrounding sexual assault in the military have been widely distributed. Last year 20,000 service members were the victims of either sexual assault or unwanted sexual contact, translating to more than 52 cases a day. Of those, only one fourth of the survivors were willing to report their assault, and for good reason: 62 percent of those who did received retaliation from their command or their peers.

To some, the idea that female senators are disproportionately invested in the problem of sexual assault might not sound so alarming. They are, after all, just looking out for the

female demographic that elected them to office. But this argument ignores the reality that more than half of the victims of sexual assault in the military are men. Besides, even if this were not true, are we really comfortable defining sexual assault as a women’s issue? Do the men and women of Congress not share an equal stake in ending this problem?

So far, the debate in the Senate has been driven by two familiar, if sometimes divergent voices. Sen. McCaskill succeeded in passing the Victims Protection Act last year, which implemented a number of helpful changes in the ways that commanders handle alleged sexual assaults.

Sen. Gillibrand, meanwhile, has had less success with her own, further reaching Military Justice Improvement Act, which narrowly failed to pass in June as an amendment to the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Had it become law, Sen. Gillibrand’s legislation would have shifted the authority to prosecute military sexual assaults

heads over the best way to fix the military justice system and end the environment of retaliation that it has encouraged. While they may not agree on the specifics of a solution, however, their activism has shrouded the debate in a distinctly feminine voice. While many of the men in Congress have been willing to speak in favor of or vote for legislation addressing sexual assault in the military, their silence during Gen. Dunford’s confirmation hearing only reaffirms the perception that it is, in the end, a fringe issue, relegated to the purview of women while the old boys handle the defense questions that “really matter.”

The result of Congress’s lackluster response to military sexual assault is a predictable one: the US Department of Defense, while paying lip service to the issue, has repeatedly failed to reduce sexual assaults, end workplace retaliation, or engender confidence in the military justice system. While the reporting of sexual assault by survivors has experienced

“When it comes to the issue of sexual assault in the military, congressional interest is divided, not along partisan lines, but gendered ones.” away from the unit commander to an independent military prosecutor outside of the victim’s chain of command. In doing so, supporters of the amendment had hoped to reduce the high rate of retaliation against service members reporting assaults and remove the decision to prosecute from commanders who may have a personal relationship with the accused.

It is true that Senators McCaskill and Gillibrand have often butted

a modest improvement over the past few years, the military’s willingness to prosecute alleged offenders and protect victims remains stagnant.

The victims of this congressional indifference and military inaction are many, and thanks to films such as The Invisible War and organizations like My Duty to Speak, their stories are finally being told. What they provide is a grim view of the treatment and experiences of sexual assault survivors both past and pres23

columbia political review :: summer 2015 features ent.

One story to emerge is that of former Marine 2nd Lt. Elle Helmer who, following a St. Patrick’s Day pub crawl with peers from the Marine Barracks Washington, was reportedly called into the office and raped by a superior officer. She remembered struggling against her assailant before falling and slamming her head on his desk, and her superior officer was later found passed out in the room, naked from the waist down. Despite this, she was discouraged from seeking medical help or forensic examination and her accusation was largely dismissed by other officers on account of her

columbia political review :: fall 2015 cover story

to his accusations.

These cases are far from anomalies, and as a May 2015 Human Rights Watch report confirms, the problems of dismissal and retaliation are not going away, even after the Department of Defense’s most recent efforts at reform. Central to this failure is an idea among lawmakers and DOD officials alike that the military has more important issues to tackle, and that any major change to the military justice system will come to the detriment of the armed forces’ primary mission of fighting wars and protecting national security.

This mentality has to change. Con-

in reducing sexual assault and maintaining good order and discipline generally. That role, however, need not extend to the relatively narrow and thoroughly legal arena of criminal prosecution.” In other words, responsibility for prosecuting cases of sexual assault need not remain in the hands of commanding officers, especially when their friends and peers are among the accused. The adoption of such structural changes, in line with Sen. Gillibrand’s attempted legislation, may indeed have a tremendous impact on the prosecution of military sexual assailants and the protection of survivors. However, a truly effec-

“Congress, the Department of Defense, and the American people cannot keep treating the issue of military sexual assault as one divorced from our defense priorities or the integrity of our armed forces.” drinking. Eventually, in an act of retaliation that has become all too common, an investigation was opened against 2nd Lt. Helmer and she was discharged for “public intoxication” and “conduct unbecoming an officer.”

Her assailant, meanwhile, remained unpunished and continued to serve.

The risk of military sexual assault and the difficulties faced in pursuing justice pose a very real problem for men as well. In another case, a former Navy sailor identified as Heath Phillips by the organization Protect Our Defenders was sexually assaulted shortly after reporting to his first duty station at Naval Weapons Station Earle in New Jersey. His assailants insisted that he was just being hazed as an initiation into the group.

His superiors insisted that he was lying. Eventually, after his unit failed to respond to his complaints or protect him from repeated sexual assaults by his peers, Phillips returned home at his family’s request and was soon charged for being AWOL, or absent without leave. Due to the “other than honorable” discharge that he received, Phillips was subsequently denied treatment for his PTSD by the Veterans Affairs hospital, and while some of his assailants would eventually be caught assaulting other sailors, no charges were filed in response 24

gress, the Department of Defense, and the American people cannot keep treating the issue of military sexual assault as one divorced from our defense priorities or the integrity of our armed forces. As a veteran of the Marine Corps myself, I can speak to the importance of a positive command climate that encourages troop unity and trust in leadership. All of this is degraded by an environment of fear and retaliation, which can poison a command structure and delay military readiness.

To combat this, Human Rights Watch has made a number of recommendations to Congress, including that they expand “protection to prohibit retaliatory investigations,” “procedural protections for complainants,” and “streamline the process for whistleblowers to get relief.” While such reforms are easy enough in theory, however, recent failings have shown that their implementation may require a significant look at the structure of the military justice system and the role of commanding officers in handling sexual assaults.

In 2013, 35 law school professors and military JAG (Judge Advocate General) officers issued a statement conceding that: “Commanders play a decisive role in military operations and must likewise play a central role

tive solution may need to account for the pervasive culture of sexism and exclusion that exists in many units throughout the military, and which discourages service members from coming forward and disrupting the illusion of order and discipline when they are assaulted.

Perhaps most importantly, if military sexual assault is ever to be dealt with properly, representatives and senators on both sides of the political and gender divide need to stop treating it as a fringe discussion that remains outside the scope of national security. It is time that all members of Congress recognize that ending the epidemic of sexual assault in the military is both a moral imperative and a strategic one. Until they do, we will continue to fail our men and women in uniform and endanger the effectiveness of our military force. • Cody Wiles is a senior at the School of General Studies majoring in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. Before coming to Columbia, he served in the U.S. Marine Corps as an artilleryman with the 11th Marine Regiment and has remained active in both veteran and defense communities. He can be reached at: caw2174@columbia.edu.

summer columbia political review :: fall 20152015

cover story features

Puerto No Rico

Addressing the Commonwealth’s Sovereign Debt Crisis

By Anamaria Lopez

W

hen the average American hears of Puerto Rico, several images are likely to enter their mind: white sand, turquoise oceans, and the cast of West Side Story. But behind the façade of picturesque beaches, salsa music, stately Spanish architecture, and seaside resorts lies a far bleaker reality. Puerto Rico is currently suffering from what onlookers in journalism and politics are referring to as an economic “death spiral.” The island’s government has just declared the first of many expected defaults on payments to debtors, the consequence of years of virtually unchecked borrowing, primarily from Wall Street firms. To free up money for debt payments, the government is beginning to enact austerity measures, such as cuts on social programs and attempts

population lives below the poverty line, a figure that will only grow as taxes rise, services are cut, and businesses are closing their doors.

In response to this dismal economic state Puerto Ricans are leaving their homeland by the thousands, and emigration continues to accelerate at an alarming rate.

It is obvious that action needs to be taken to ensure that Puerto Rico’s financial crisis does not spell disaster for the island’s future, but the government is simply no longer capable of solving this problem alone. At this point, some degree of federal intervention seems inevitable; US corporations are too heavily invested in Puerto Rico to allow the island’s economy to be destroyed beyond repair. But while there are strong economic incentives for aiding Puerto Rico, such as the con-

which has been almost entirely immobilized by corruption, a lack of sufficient revenue, and a grossly oversized bureaucracy. Despite the “anti-corruption” platform of nearly every political campaign since the inception of self-governance in 1948, corruption not only persists, but thrives. In 2008, then-governor Anibal Acevedo Vila was officially charged with 19 counts of corruption. Just this year, a petition to remove the current governor, Alejandro García Padilla, from office on grounds of his alleged mismanagement of public funds garnered over 100,000 signatures. The rampant corruption in government has created an institution that is poorly organized and unequipped to efficiently solve the issues facing its constituency. Most notably, tax evasion is going largely unchecked,

“America has played a leading role in the breakdown of Puerto Rico’s economy. Now, it is morally obligated to help them rebuild.” to lower the minimum wage. While Puerto Ricans do not pay federal income tax, they are experiencing skyrocketing sales and gas taxes as the government attempts raise revenue. Infrastructure is becoming increasingly privatized as the government seeks any and all possible methods of raising funds, which means any future revenue from airports, toll roads, or ports is being sacrificed in order to obtain instant cash. The Puerto Rican government is clearly prioritizing quick revenue over the future economic stability of the island, and the consequences are already beginning to make themselves known. Nearly half the

sequences Puerto Rico’s economic collapse would have on American industry, the most compelling argument for intervention is a moral one. Assigning all of the blame to the United States for Puerto Rico’s current state would be a gross oversimplification of the matter, but the primary issues facing the island today are rooted in centuries of colonialism and exploitation by the federal government. America has played a leading role in the breakdown of Puerto Rico’s economy.

Now, it is morally obligated to help them rebuild.

Admittedly, much of the fault lies with the Puerto Rican government,

a serious issue given the revenue crisis the government is facing.

Economists estimate Puerto Rico is receiving only about half of the tax revenue it should, but a lack of funding and well-trained personnel to better enforce tax laws leaves the government with no clear solution.

The informal economy in Puerto Rico is also massive, currently estimated to make up about 30 percent of the island’s GNP. This includes income from federal transfers, such as Social Security and food stamps, as well as the thriving underground drug economy. This income is obviously untaxed, further exacerbating the issue of insufficient tax revenue.

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columbia political review :: fall 2015 cover story

columbia features political review :: summer 2015

OS CL RE FO ED

With a labor participation rate of only about 50 percent, widespread tax evasion, and an enormous informal economy that operates entirely without taxes, it is unsurprising that the Puerto Rican government is grasping at straws to support its population. Recent natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy and an ongoing drought have placed even more strain on already depleted government coffers, and politicians have struggled tremendously with balancing the necessary disaster relief with debt payments. As the debt grows and revenue falls, funds intended to aid citizens and improve crumbling infrastructure shrink.

The government is also disproportionately large relative to the population of the island. Reliance on the bloated public sector for employment has resulted in an underdeveloped private sector and a dependence on American corporations to fill this gap, a phenomenon with significant economic consequences for Puerto Rico. Most educated young people either take a job in government or leave home for employment opportunities in the continental United States, resulting in a shrinking middle class.

Furthermore, the half of the population that lives below the poverty line overwhelmingly rely on government benefits, not as a temporary means until employment can be found, but as a permanent 26

source of income. It is difficult to imagine that a state with such close ties to the United States could be in such a dismal economic state. How, then, did Puerto Rico’s economy spiral so wildly out of control?

Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States might initially seem like it should preclude the commonwealth from such dire financial woes; the United States is undeniably one of the wealthiest countries on earth, and even poverty as it’s defined in America is far less severe than is the case in other countries. The reality, though, is that this relationship with the United States is exactly how Puerto Rico’s financial crisis came about.

The fundamental issue of the United States-Puerto Rico relationship is simple: Puerto Rico, regardless of its official designation as a commonwealth, is essentially a colony of America. As stated in the 1901 Supreme Court decision Downes v. Bidwell, Puerto Rico belongs to the United States, but is not an officially incorporated part of it—a statement that defines the political status of Puerto Ricans (residing on the island) as inherently inferior to that of those who live on the mainland. Moreover, Downes effectively granted Congress ultimate authority over Puerto Rico, despite the fact that Puerto Ricans have no voting representatives in Congress. Puerto Rico’s muddled territorial status

grants it absolutely no influence in the legislative branch, and because the voices of Puerto Ricans are not being heard, federal policies that are destroying the island’s economy remain in place.

The Jones Act is perhaps the most obvious example of the marked detrimental effect Puerto Rico’s ill-defined territorial status has had on its economic development. Intended as a measure to protect American shipping companies, the Jones Act prohibits any international parties from transporting goods between Puerto Rico and the United States. This mandate, which applies exclusively to Puerto Rico, has resulted in shipping costs at least twice as high as those of neighboring islands. Higher shipping costs leads to a higher cost of living, driving further emigration from the island. American shipping interests are being prioritized over the Puerto Rico’s future prospects, largely because shipping companies have a degree of influence in Congress that Puerto Rico has never enjoyed.

Protectionist policies like the Jones Act have prevented Puerto Rico from expanding trade extensively past America’s borders, and as a result, Puerto Rico has been forced to shape fiscal policy in order to appeal to American corporations and investments. For example, Puerto Rico’s governments bonds are triple tax exempt, which has allowed for huge borrowing from Wall Street firms at cripplingly high interest rates—a set of circumstances which has been a major factor in the current debt crisis. Various tax exemptions and subsidies have also been established to attract American industry to develop on the island, most notably Section 936 of the United States Internal Revenue Code (26 U.S.C. §936). Section 936 granted tax exemptions to income originating on US territories, drawing thousands of corporations to Puerto Rico and substantially accelerating its economic growth. When Section 936 eventually came under criticism for essentially allowing large companies to avoid paying taxes, it was phased out—and with the disappearance of the tax ex-

columbia political review :: summer 2015 columbia political review :: fall 2015 emptions came the disappearance of industry in Puerto Rico. Corporations that no longer had any incentive to operate on a fairly distant island with high property costs relocated to the continental United States. Since 2006, when Section 936’s tax breaks were substantially eliminated, Puerto Rico’s economy has contracted significantly every year. The decision to enact these tax breaks had ensured that Puerto Rico’s economy would become dependent on the continued existence of them, and the decision to abolish it was made by Congress, not the Puerto Rican government.

Protectionist policies and tax regulations are several manifestations of a larger trend that has revealed itself over the course of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico’s existence: Puerto Ricans’ interests are consistently put second to the interests of American industry

island to restructure its debts and take the first steps towards paying them off. Simply paying off debts, however, is not a solution to the crisis, only the necessary first step.

Congress needs to work alongside the Puerto Rican government to abolish protectionist policies, expand international trade, and halt the island’s pernicious dependency on American industry. Finally, both the federal government and the people of Puerto Rico need to seriously consider the relationship they share, and evaluate whether the current commonwealth system is truly what’s best for both parties.

Specifically, the question of Puerto Rico’s lack of representation in Congress must be addressed. The Puerto Rican government deserves to have a say in deciding issues that directly affect the island – otherwise Puerto Rico will remain under what is, at its core, colonial rule.

cover features story sociated with statehood that must be more thoroughly explored, such as the effect Puerto Rico’s economy would have on the American economy as a whole and the potential degradation of Puerto Rico’s distinct culture that could occur were it to become a state. It is difficult to say whether statehood is a feasible option, but unless the United States seriously invests in Puerto Rico at this critical moment, the possibility of attaining statehood in the future could be jeopardized.

The economic repercussions of Puerto Rico’s crisis constitute a convincing argument for federal intervention on their own, as the adverse effects on Wall Street corporations and American trade could be potentially disastrous if the island continues to default on its debts. But the most compelling reason that the government must take action is the responsibility the

“The Puerto Rican government deserves to have a say in deciding issues that directly affect the island—otherwise Puerto Rico will remain under what is, at its core, colonial rule.” or the federal government. A lack of Puerto Rican representation in Congress allows these policies to remain in place indefinitely, prompting the question: what will it take to abolish these policies? Will Puerto Rico’s imminent collapse finally constitute a significant enough impetus for Congress to take action?

If so, what form should federal intervention take?

Those opposed to intervention are quick to label the concept of aiding Puerto Rico as a “bailout”, but a mere bailout would simply palliate Puerto Rico’s current issues without solving the long-term problem. What Puerto Rico needs is not a bailout; Puerto Rico needs extensive, long-lasting reform.

Firstly, Congress needs to grant the Puerto Rican government the right to file for bankruptcy under Chapter 9 (11 U.S.C. §900 et seq.), from which it is currently inexplicably prohibited from doing. Filing for bankruptcy will allow the

The debate whether to annex Puerto Rico as a state or establish it as an independent country has existed for decades, and both alternatives have advantages and disadvantages. It’s unlikely any momentous decisions will be made in the foreseeable future, at least until Puerto Rico’s economy has stabilized somewhat, but recent years have seen a shift in public opinion in favor of statehood. The 2012 referendum on statehood indicated that a majority of those who voted were in favor of it, but a majority of Puerto Ricans intentionally did not vote, evidence of the complex and multifaceted nature of the issue. Statehood could grant Puerto Ricans the representation and equal treatment that they deserve, and supply the island with the resources needed to rekindle economic development and address the myriad problems plaguing the government, but the answer is not so simple. There are limitations and consequences as-

United States has for Puerto Rico’s situation. American colonialism has left deep scars on what is known as the Island of Enchantment, and at perhaps no other time in its history have they been so apparent. Only when the United States recognizes its own culpability in Puerto Rico’s crisis and takes action to save the island from total collapse can these scars begin to heal. • Anamaria Lopez is a freshman in Columbia College hoping to major in Economics and Political Science. Hailing from the San Francisco Bay Area, she was part of the first generation of her family to be raised outside Puerto Rico. She is passionate about equal educational opportunity, especially for students of color, and economic development of postcolonial nations in Latin America and the Caribbean.

She can be reached at: al3509@columbia.edu.

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