Winter 2010: Death

GLOBALIST The Yale

Winter 2010 / Vol. 11, Issue 2

DEATH:

A Double Take

Drones at War 6 * The Military at Yale 16 * The Evolution of Indian Dance 19

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

GLOBALIST The Yale

An Undergraduate Magazine of International Affairs Fall 2010 / Vol. 11, Issue 2 www.tyglobalist.org

This magazine is published by students of Yale College.

Yale University is not responsible for its contents.

Send comments, questions, and letters to the editor to jeffrey.kaiser@yale.edu.

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Academic Advisory Board Harvey Goldblatt, Professor of Medieval Slavic Literature, Master of Pierson College Donald Green, Director, Institution for Social and Policy Studies Charles Hill, Yale Diplomat-in-Residence Ian Shapiro, Director, MacMillan Center Ernesto Zedillo, Director, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization

DEAR

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GLOBALIST

READERS,

D

eath is an inevitable part of the human experience. Some of the greatest questions that we face deal with our mortality and the fleeting nature of our world. Death is not reserved for humans only. Plants and animals die. Whole species go extinct. Languages and islands disappear.

In the Focus section of this issue of the Globalist you’ll find articles that address both the morbid aspects of human death as well as death examined from non-traditional perspectives. Raphaella Friedman takes an in-depth look at the fiery debate over doctor-assisted suicide and euthanasia in the Canadian province of Quebec. Uzra Khan’s piece highlights the traditional death practice of the Zoroastrian community in India. Pieces by Jeffrey Dastin and Anne van Bruggen explore other forms of death: the disappearance and subsequent attempts to revive the Manx language on the Isle of Man, and the potential loss of a beautiful ancient city in Turkey, respectively.

Articles in the Yale in the World section take a look at two important on-campus debates.

First, Emily Foxhall examines the history of the relationship between Yale and the U.S. Military and the current culture of Yalies and service. Cathy Huang’s article looks at the benefits of a potential relationship between Yale and the National University of Singapore. In the Culture section, Sanjena Sathian investigates traditional forms of dance in the Indian Diaspora. Our Politics & Economy section takes you from Israeli human rights activism in the West Bank, to a referendum on independence for Southern Sudan, to an Indian politician’s rise to prominence.

Fitting with our theme of “Death,” we’re excited to present a miniature rebirth of Globalist design. The Production & Design Editors have worked hard to enhance the aesthetic to better reflect the sharpness and gravity of the content we publish. You’ll notice a new header, more use of contrast between black and white, an improved table of contents, and some design features that set the Focus section apart. We’d love to hear what you think about these changes.

In addition to the changes on these pages, we have significantly modified our website, tyglobalist.org. Online you’ll find exclusive content on two new blogs: The Globalist Notebook, featuring beat bloggers writing about a whole host of global issues, and The World at Yale, home to coverage of on-campus events and speakers. I hope you’ll check them out.

Best wishes,

Jeffrey Kaiser Editor-in-Chief, The Yale Globalist

Production & Design Editors Raisa Bruner, Eli Markham Managing Editor for Online Catherine Osborn

ON THE COVER:

Online Associates Helena Malchione, Rasesh Mohan

Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Kaiser Managing Editors Rae Ellen Bichell, Raphaella Friedman, Uzra Khan, Jessica Shor Associate Editors Monica Landy, Sibjeet Mahapatra, Charlotte Parker, Adele Roussow, Diego Salvatierra

A tree is dead after being struck by lightning on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia.

Copy Editor Alexander Krey

Executive Director Courtney Fukuda Publisher Tonia Sun Directors of Development Joe Bolognese, Joanna Cornell Events Coordinator & Director of External Relations Erin Biel

(Courtesy Garret Nuzzo-Jones/Flickr Creative Commons) Pictures from CreativeCommons used under Attribution Noncommercial license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

3

Editors Emeritus Jesse Marks, Rachel Wolf

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Submit entries to globalistcontestinfo@gmail.com.

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CONTENTS

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Winte r 201 0 / Vo l. 1 1 , Issue 2

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26

19

16

FOCUS: Death

26 | Debating the Right to Die

A commission in Quebec opens the debate about euthanasia. By Raphaella Friedman

24 | Dammed For years, Turkey’s ancient city of Hasankeyf has been flooded with problems. Soon, it will also by flooded with water. By Anne Van Bruggen

31 | Reviving Manx How the language indigenous to the Isle of Man disappeared—and came back to life. By Jeffrey Dastin

POLITICS & ECONOMY 6 | Predators in the Sky

The drone wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan intensify. By Luke Hawbaker

8 | An Indian Fairytale Chief Minister Mayawati is rising politically, despite her caste. By Abhimanyu Chandra

9 | Redefining Sudan Tension builds over a secession referendum in southern Sudan. By Sarah Juster

10 | A Modern Shield

33 | Dying to Live In South Korea, funerals staged for living participants provide a controversial path to better lives. By Jessica Shor

34 | Waiting for Vultures A drastic decline in Mumbai’s vulture population has left Zoroastrian funerary practices floundering. By Uzra Khan

36 | Collecting Fragments Post-dirty war, Colombian forensics teams match remains and families.

By Rae Ellen Bichell

science & TECHNOLOGY

12 | Jatropha: A Hard Nut to Crack The quest for a new biofuel stalls in India.

By Alexandra Friedman

YALE IN THE WORLD

14 | The Yale-NUS Collaboration Yale steps out into Singapore at a time of rapid Eastern growth. By Cathy Huang

16 | Fallen from the Front Lines The changing image of the military at Yale.

By Emily Foxhall

CULTURE

19 | Dancing in the Diaspora The tradition of classical Indian dance takes new shapes in the U.S. By Sanjena Sathian

PERSPECTIVES

37 | On Touring Poverty Are slum tours a meaningful way to connect with a community? By Jasmine Lau

38 | Closing Remarks: The 2010 World Expo Shanghai delivers on decadence, not ideas.

By Ben Schenkel

An Israeli human rights group uses cameras to deter West Bank violence. By Diana Saverin

The Yale Globalist is a member of Global21, a network of student-run international affairs magazines at premier universities around the world.

66 POLITICS & ECONOMY

the yale globalist: winter 2010

Predators in the Sky

As the drone war in Afghanistan and Pakistan intensifies, the political and strategic questions surrounding it become more and more vital to American policy.

By Luke Hawbaker

T

An artist’s rendition of a Predator Reaper drone like the ones used by the CIA over Afghanistan and Pakistan. (TaoTao Holmes/TYG)

he drone flew overhead, audible to those on the ground. Below it, members of the Taliban walked outside the safe house armed with rocket-propelled grenades. Stephen Farrell, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, and his Afghan colleague, Sultan Munadi, had been kidnapped by the Taliban in the Northern Afghanistan province of Kunduz. Over four days in September 2009, the men were moved between 15 or 16 houses, constantly aware of the drone high above them. Farrell hoped, correctly as it turned out, that it was looking for him and not simply hunting his captors.

Unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, are a critical part of the American counterterrorism arsenal. Their use to detect Farrell may not be controversial, but when used for targeted attacks against insurgents, drones highlight moral, political, and strategic concerns.

The question of efficacy is critical, and the balance of overall strategy with objective-specific tactics is difficult to achieve.

“You hope that [if] you remove insurgent commander X, insurgent group Y is less lethal in province Z,” said U.S. Army Captain Eric Robinson, who served in Khost Province in southern Afghanistan from

March 2008 to March 2009. “All the while,” he noted, “[you hope] the political consequences of that manner of response aren’t outweighing any benefit.” This cost-benefit calculation from a strategic standpoint is one that the both the Bush and Obama Administrations have faced when choosing whether or not to use drones.

The United States conducts drone operations under the purview of the Central Intelligence Agency. Technically the program does not exist. This lack of transparency is a chief concern of its critics, especially when assessing the casualties of drone strikes. The Long War Journal, one of the most respected compilers of drone strike data, estimates that since drone operations began in Pakistan in 2004, the United States has launched 198 drone strikes, all but ten since January 2008. Every week, the number continues to grow.

The data on casualties is incredibly varied and conflicting, though the Long War Journal estimates roughly 1,500 militant leaders and operatives have been killed—along with 104 civilians—since data collection began in 2006.

The difficulty in accurately calculating the deaths caused by drone strikes is clear: All sides of the conflict have incentives to misreport and distort the numbers.

Independent verification is hampered because the strikes often target difficult to access areas. The psychological horror that drones can inflict upon civilians living in the area of strikes is also difficult to assess. In October 2010, for example, the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail reported that use of sleeping pills and antidepressants was widespread among locals in areas where drone presence was heavy.

I

t is in northern Pakistan’s rugged, remote, and lawless Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA), legally inaccessible to American ground forces, where drones are most controversially— and, some would say, most necessarily— used. To understand why drones strike in Pakistan when the fighting ostensibly occurs in Afghanistan, one must understand how the ambiguous nature of the border area between the two countries defines the nature of this conflict.

“The only international or national organization in the world that pays attention to [the AfPak border] is NATO,” said Robinson. “Hamid Karzai, the governors I worked with in Afghanistan, they all referred to it as the Durand Line. Nobody recognizes [it]. None of the locals do. It’s a completely artificial construct.” A rem-

POLITICS & ECONOMY

www.tyglobalist.org nant of British colonial rule, the line draws its name from Henry Mortimer Durand, the Foreign Secretary of British India instrumental in creating the poorly demarcated and controversial border in 1893.

While NATO forces mostly respect and do not cross the border, the insurgents that they fight move freely between southern Afghanistan and their safe havens in Pakistan’s FATA. “The war will continue to deteriorate,” said Robinson, “if … these assembly areas for insurgent groups are allowed to go undisturbed. [Drone strikes are] an attempt to keep all of these negative actors off balance.”

The obvious alternative would be action by the Pakistani government. Unfortunately they have little authority in FATA and complex relationships with the groups it harbors. Pakistan is a critical ally of the United States, though not always a consistent one—understandable given its own national security threats. The government has launched offensives in the area and given tacit support to U.S. drone strikes with what Stuart Gottlieb, professor of counterterrorism and area studies at Yale University, calls a “wink and a nod.” But it still distinguishes certain Taliban, including the two groups most often targeted with drones, as “good Taliban” because they do not carry out attacks aimed at the state of Pakistan.

D

rones are viewed as effective weapons for disrupting the Taliban, but they do present some strategic disadvantages. The drone is “a very effective tactical military instrument and it has some good, positive strategic aspects to it, meaning it can weaken al-Qaeda or their affiliates,” said Gottlieb, “but it also has strategic costs. Internationally it’s unpopular, in the Arab and Muslim world in particular. It causes a lot of civilian casualties.

It’s a useful propaganda tool for al-Qaeda.”

This question of propaganda and public sentiment is perhaps the most hotly contested point in the debate over drones’ effectiveness. Just as it is difficult to accurately determine the results of drone strikes, so too is it difficult to gauge local opinion on the subject. Polls and speculations abound: The New America Foundation recently released a comprehensive poll of FATA, which determined that 48 percent of Pakistanis in the area believe the strikes kill mostly civilians, while only

7

American soldiers patrol in southern Khost province with Pakistan’s North Waziristan behind them.

(Courtesy Eric Robinson) 16 percent believe they accurately target militants. 33 percent believe they kill both.

Farrell originally went to the area where he was kidnapped to cover a controversial NATO bombing which may have killed many civilians. “We knew very well that if there indeed turned out to be a large number of civilians dead, it would anger many, many people in the area and would almost certainly be a recruitment tool for the Taliban,” he said. “I think exactly the same calculation would apply to a drone strike as to a bombing.” Deaths like these, aside from their capacity to fuel local anger, also reinforce the militant paradigm of the West versus the Islamic world. In his own experience, Farrell said his captors “appeared to be utterly convinced that Islam was under attack from the West.”

Such facts, coupled with the perception of high civilian casualties from drone strikes, bring into question claims of strategic effectiveness for drone strikes.

Drone warfare also provides militant groups with more evidence to underpin one of their chief narratives: one of fighting as the perennial underdog. According to Farrell, his captors viewed themselves as fighting the same fight as the mujahideen before them: the Afghans versus the Western aggressors—but this time against Americans instead of Soviets. The first words Farrell heard as he was forced into a Taliban four-by-four were “Are you Russian?” “[This] made me appreciate even more… that you were somewhat through the looking glass and in a place where logic wasn’t necessarily being applied to every conversation you were involved in,” Farrell

said.

As the withdrawal date of July 2011 approaches, the future of Afghanistan remains difficult to foresee. And the debate over pullout, like the debate over the effectiveness of drone strikes, is filled with optimism and pessimism, biases and bigotries, questions of strategy and questions of tactics. How many American troops will remain in Afghanistan? How will militants be targeted in Pakistan? Where will drones be used? How these questions and others are answered in the next year will shape the future of Afghanistan for better or worse.

Americans possess superior technology and overwhelming firepower, epitomized by the ceaseless drone presence above Afghanistan and Pakistan. Yet the Soviets were defeated in spite of their advantage, and the Taliban and others believe they will force America to suffer a similar fate.

American strategy must be created with this reality in mind, cognizant of the battle to win “hearts and minds” and the narratives militants employ. A drone can strike with surgical accuracy, yet the target itself may house a militant’s family. Through one set of eyes such a strike may symbolize a new pinnacle of military technology, through another, the newest symbol of Western hegemony. There are no easy answers to the questions drone strikes raise.

The only sure thing is their continued relevance and importance to American counterterrorism policy.

Luke Hawbaker ’13 is a History major in Ezra Stiles College. Contact him at luke.hawbaker@yale.edu.

88 POLITICS & ECONOMY

the yale globalist: winter 2010

An Indian Fairytale From poor and marginalized to Chief Minister and …

Prime Minister?

By Abhimanyu Chandra

C

haube Pandey, a taxi driver in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), was listening to political commentary on the radio when he remarked matter-of-factly, “Mayawati might become Prime Minister.

After all, the Dalits cast their vote in favor of the Elephant [the symbol of Mayawati’s party] without even thinking twice.” A majority of the people in UP agree. Mayawati, who because of her Dalit caste is permitted only one name by upper castes, is currently serving her fourth term as Chief Minister of UP and is the first Dalit to hold the office.

For centuries, Indian politics has been cursed by the country’s notorious caste system, which places Dalits, known sometimes as “untouchables,” at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Dalits were barred by the upper castes from education, healthcare, and other professions, and were considered suitable only for “impure” jobs like butchery and waste collection. The caste-system still thrives in parts of India, particularly rural areas, and caste identity remains a curse for many. Because of this, Mayawati’s position as Chief Minister of UP “has undeniably had repercussions across the Indian democratic system,” said Tariq Thachil, a political scientist at Yale who specializes in Indian politics. This is also because UP is India’s most politically influential state.

Born in 1956 to poor and near-illiterate parents, Mayawati acquired a public university education and became a teacher.

She was inspired to enter politics by Kanshi Ram, a Dalit leader and founder of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Mayawati’s current party. Unlike the only two other women with comparable stature in India’s political history, former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the current head of the ruling party Sonia Gandhi, Mayawati did not reach power through political lineage, wealth, or connections, but through her own struggle and effort.

Mayawati has instituted several policies to empower the lower castes. The Ambedkar Village Scheme has enhanced develop-

ment by increasing access to electricity, better roads, and more housing for the lower castes. Her enactment of the Atrocities Against Scheduled Castes Act has improved the day-to-day lives of Dalits who may now seek refuge in the law when wronged by the upper castes. Anshuman Goyal, an Indian resident of New York, believes that when Mayawati is in power in UP, there is a better maintenance of law and order. Such results and successes have led analysts to wonder whether she could become Prime Minister, an ambition she openly acknowledges.

Several critics, though, have questioned the extent of her service. Anand Teltumbde, a writer for the Indian-based Economic and Political Weekly, argued that Mayawati has intoxicated the lower castes through empty assertions of identity. He points to the rupee garlands, literal garlands made of enormous amounts of cash, she has received from fellow party members, and her Rs. 10 million (about $225,000) per month income increase. Such assertions of her success, argued Teltumbde, are less meaningful than provisions for real economic development.

Similarly, Rajdeep Sardesai, another prominent Indian journalist, complained that she has draped the state with hundreds of billion-rupee statues of Dalit leaders, including of herself. He questioned their benefit to the poor and believes that “hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.”

It is likely that if Mayawati does not succeed at the national level, it will be because she and the BSP have not made significant inroads into any state other than UP. Although it is a national party, the BSP lacks nationwide appeal. According to Christophe Jaffrelot of the Center for International Studies and Research, the BSP is even showing signs of disintegration, with many of its former leaders abandoning the party to form their own. Challenging the country’s older, more established parties seems a distant prospect for the BSP. Nevertheless, India’s historical ruling

Mayawati, at a ceremony after winning the 2007 Uttar Pradesh state elections (Courtesy Shailendra Pandey/Tehelka) parties, the Congress Party and the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), have problems of their own. Since 1947, the Congress Party has been led by the family of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and has been internally undemocratic. The BJP is a Hindu party that has abetted some of India’s worst religion-based violence. Mayawati’s BSP, in comparison, has been internally democratic, meritocratic, and secular. It has deepened India’s democracy, the largest in the world, by providing political power to the lowest caste. Its rise may take time, but Mayawati, at fifty-four, is young in comparison to the typically gray Indian politicians.

If she succeeds in ensuring economic improvement in UP and abandons the temptations of populism, Mayawati could begin to broaden her appeal and may reach the unprecedented height of becoming the first Dalit Prime Minister of India.

Abhimanyu Chandra ’13 is in Branford College. Contact him at abhimanyu.chandra@yale.edu.

POLITICS & ECONOMY

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Redefining Sudan A referendum on secession for Southern Sudan promises to increase tension in an already unstable region.

By Sarah Juster

“S

ecession is like a divorce. It is not a sweet idea,” said Professor Amal Fadlalla, who researches Sudanese issues at the University of Michigan.

Though she may be correct, secession is a strong possibility for Southern Sudan. On January 9th, Sudan’s semi-autonomous South will vote in a referendum on whether to secede from the North. The referendum is part of a five-year Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), signed in 2005 after 39 years of civil war between the predominantly Muslim Arab North and Christian African South.

“The last five years under the CPA have been a political nightmare,” said Fadlalla.

In addition to the referendum, the CPA called for national elections, which were held in April, several months behind schedule. Most Sudanese believe that they were rigged. “The ballots were stuffed with the wrong votes. There’s even a video on YouTube showing this,” said Yahia Hassan, a Yale freshman and the grandson of two chairmen of separate factions within the leading Northern UMMA opposition party.

“What wasn’t expected was Northern control over elections.” Along with failed collaboration between Northern and Southern opposition parties, these questionable elections led to an easy victory for current dictator Omar Al-Bashir and set the stage for conflict over the upcoming referendum.

The Southern coalition for secession is strong. Benjamin Machar, a “Lost Boy” who fled Southern Sudan as a young boy during the war and eventually relocated to the United States, said that for his family and others in the South, emotions are running high. “After a half century of war, many Southerners are now 50 to 60 years old. They were raised during the war and brought up their children during war. They are tired of war. They want to actually start living like other Africans.” Although Hassan would prefer an alternative to Southern secession, he said that if he were a Southern voter, he would opt “to secede after everything they

have been through. I would not want to be part of a country whose president is wanted internationally for crimes, especially when they have the resources and capability to do what they want.”

Northerners, too, see secession in a negative light. Southerners living in the North—estimates put the number between one and three million—do not want to be cut off from family or business ties. Fadlalla noted that especially in Northern cities, “many people are out of touch with disparities and think that the North and South can just unite. They also feel they will lose the ruling Southern People’s Liberation Movement as an ally.”

Considering that Bashir’s government has hardly begun preparations for the referendum, it is unlikely that a Southern vote for independence will lead to a clean split from the North. At worst, the referendum will spark a full-blown civil war. Oil, borders, and political leadership are all at stake in the dispute between the north and south.

Sudan’s oil is primarily drilled in the South, yet most of it is controlled and exported by the North for huge revenues. The issue of border demarcation is also pivotal, especially in the oil rich area of Abyei on the NorthSouth border, where residents will choose to join either the North or the South in the referendum.

There is also potential for conflict within the South between the various political parties. Machar believes that the government will work to “divide and rule by stirring conflict between these groups, because the North maintains power when it is at war.”

To mitigate the violence that could come of this approach, the president of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement, Salva Kiir, has been reaching out to other Southern leaders to try to solidify a coalition before the referendum. According to Hassan, Kiir’s coalition “is a smart move, because if Southern parties get together to form a coalition, this would remove the threat of a lot of tribal conflict.” Yet only with the referendum will the success —(or failure—) of this move become clear.

When Hillary Clinton labeled the referendum “a ticking time bomb” in her speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in September, she was correct. The potential for conflict is too great under a government that, as Hassan said, “does not seem to care if violence breaks out.” For now, only one thing is sure: This year will be a determinate one in Sudan’s complicated and wartorn history.

Sarah Juster ’14 is in Ezra Stiles College.

Contact her at sarah.juster@yale.edu.

Southern Sudanese police recruits at a meeting on referendum security. (Courtesy FlIckr Creative Commons)

10 10 POLITICS & ECONOMY

the yale globalist: winter 2010

A Modern Shield An Israeli human rights group uses cameras to deter and document violence in the West Bank.

By Diana Saverin

Palestinian children learning how to use the B’Tselem cameras in the West Bank. (Courtesy B’Tselem)

T

he video begins with a fuzzy image of three men speaking on a hill. Seconds later, the camera starts bouncing as the Palestinian holding the camera runs away from the escalating scene. When he refocuses the lens, a man in a white shirt is firing an M-16 as Palestinian men, women, and children flee and scream around him.

Several Palestinians are shot. The video cuts out at the sight of a woman covering her mouth and crying as she turns away from a man clutching his bleeding stomach.

This video was taken in Hebron, a city within the West Bank. The camera was distributed by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which has given more than 120 video cameras to Palestinians living in high conflict zones near Israeli settlements and army bases in the West Bank.

The growing number of Israeli settlements in the West Bank makes the brokering of a two-state solution increasingly complex. In a final negotiated agreement, the West Bank and Gaza would likely become the Palestinian state. The fact that the

West Bank is peppered with Israeli settlers, many of whom vehemently refuse to move or accept Palestinian statehood, makes the option less viable. The Oslo Accords of 1993 established a series of interim steps meant to deconstruct the messy business of evacuating settlers and transferring political and civilian control.

In accordance with Oslo, the West Bank is divided into three areas, A, B, and C, with area A under full Palestinian control, area B under shared Israeli and Palestinian control, and area C under full Israeli control.

The settlements are in area C, and it is estimated that Israeli infrastructure composes 40 percent of the West Bank. Settlements vary in size and scope; some house tens of thousands of Israelis in Jerusalem suburbs beyond the green lines, the lines defining the borders of Israel after the 1948 ArabIsraeli War, while others are home to a few “extreme” settlers, who are at the center of violent conflict. It is on the latter group that B’Tselem’s cameras have focused.

The organization uses the videos to educate Israeli and international audiences about the violence in the West Bank. They are also a tool to file complaints with police and present evidence in court cases—in some instances, the cameras even prevent violence in the first place. “People ask to get cameras, even if they’re broken,” said Jesse Rothman, an intern for the project this past summer. “Just holding up a camera is a major deterrent for settlers and the IDF to abuse Palestinians.”

ground with screaming in the background, as settlers from the Ma’on settlement chase a Palestinian family and throw stones at them in their village in the South Hebron Hills. Yet another captures a soldier shooting rubber bullets at a blindfolded and handcuffed Palestinian. These videos have prompted debate and awareness within both Israel and the West Bank.

Diala Shamas, a Palestinian who worked for the B’Tselem camera distribution project during its first year, described the reaction among Palestinians. “The footage I was getting back was of huge interest to Palestinians… I think that shows how much separation we have from our own story.”

As Rothman put it, “the graphic quality of video is a powerful tool. You can empathize with a person you see more than [if you read] a 300-page human rights report.”

H

undreds of human rights organizations have set up camp in Israel, and all strive to bring factual truth to a conflict where objectivity is elusive.

Each, including B’Tselem, has its own set of followers and critics.

According to John, an Israeli lawyer, “B’Tselem is a thoroughly reviled organization in this country. Certainly it has its supporters, but they are few and self-referencing.” He does not view the organization as legitimate or respectful. “Think of the church that sends protesters to the funerals of American servicemen and servicewomen, to protest homosexuality in America,”

It’s a very cynical project because it takes for granted that we can’t fix the system.

—Diala Shamas, former B’Tselem contributor The images are shocking. One wellknown video reveals an Israeli settler in Hebron hitting the camera while calling a Palestinian woman a sharmouta—a whore.

Another features blurry footage of moving

he said.

Some settlers feel an even greater animosity towards the project. “Once, I was walking in Hebron with a video camera, and the settlers thought that I was taking

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A single frame from a video shot by a 15-year-old participant in the camera distribution project shows settlers throwing stones at children from the village of a-Tuba in the southern Hebron Hills.

(Courtesy Muhammad Jundiyeh) videos for B’Tselem. They started shouting at me, ‘B’Tselem bitch,’” said Dana Golan, executive director of Breaking the Silence, a group of Israeli veterans that speak about their experiences in the West Bank and Gaza.

Rebecca, an Israeli woman who lives in a settlement north of Jerusalem, believes that the project is inherently biased. “If you were to distribute cameras to residents of Yishuvim [an Israeli settlement], you would see homes that were robbed, people who were attacked, people who were killed,” she said. “Where were the cameras during the most recent terror attack on two young couples in a car near Hebron?”

There is no doubt that violence exists on both sides. However, Elik Elhanan, a former IDF soldier and co-founder of the organization Combatants for Peace, finds any comparison of abuses laughable. “Israel is a state which has an army, police force, health care, nuclear weapons, satellites, submarines,” he said incredulously. “B’Tselem is protecting people who have no state, no means of protection. Every street in Israel has a video camera on it… the Palestinians don’t have that, so they get shitty old cameras.”

But Elhanan does not completely endorse B’Tselem’s approach. “I don’t believe in emotionally blackmailing people into political action,” he said. For Elhanan, the question of getting an emotional response will not solve the political problem of Palestinian occupation.

’Tselem’s project is representative of a new wave of civilian journalists who are using technology to raise awareness about human rights violations around the world. As Hamodie Abonadda, an ArabIsraeli living in Jerusalem put it, “an image is stronger than a thousand words, and nowhere is this truer than in the occupied West Bank.”

The organization aims not only to encourage awareness and public debate within Israel about the extent of law breaking and unethical behavior that goes unpunished, but also to promote accountability.

As Sarit Michaeli, B’Tselem’s spokesperson, explained, “our critique is not directed at settlers, but at the security forces in the government that do not do enough to enforce the law on settlers. This project is a way to force them to do their jobs.”

For some, the B’Tselem videos represent one dimension of the conflict without context. Accusations of bias and sensationalism are inextricably tied to this decentralized model of civilian reporting. Leora Kahn, a Yale professor and executive director of Proof, an organization that aims to use media for social justice, believes that “all media is a tool for change depending on how you use it… [but] videos and photography can be destructive. It is easy to get an emotional response from people with photography.” Kahn cited the example of the flotilla incident from late May, in which the same video was used by various groups with different captions to push opposing agendas.

Elhanan echoed this sentiment: “Information won’t go in the media unless it’s

really shocking… concentrating on the pornography of the colonization of Palestine does not do justice to the exploitation of Palestine.”

Rebecca does not see the project as productive towards peace or a two state solution. “I do believe that Palestinians should have their own state for a number of reasons. But I don’t think the way to work towards establishing such a state is through this project of photographing victimization,” she said. Shamas also recognized this: “It’s a very cynical project because it takes for granted that we can’t fix the system.”

A

mid peace negotiations and nearconstant coverage of the conflict in the news, words such as “settler” and “occupation” can seem distant from the reality on the ground. B’Tselem’s videos bring an element of truth to the complex language and myriad narratives that muddy any conclusions about the conflict. They by no means represent the only truth—the events caught on film occur within the scope of a truly multi-faceted clash—but these indisputable depictions of grave abuses do raise serious questions. Hopefully they will prompt bilateral action to work toward building a respectful society, or at the very least, one free of habitual harassment and violence. *Some names have been changed to protect the identities of the sources.

Diana Saverin ’13 is in Berkeley College.

Contact her at diana.saverin@yale.edu.

Palestinians at a B’Tselem training program in the West Bank. (Courtesy B’Tselem)

12 12 SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

the yale globalist: winter 2010

Jatropha: A Hard Nut to Crack The quest for a new biofuel has stalled.

“I

t is a complete failure,” sighed Jenn Baka from her hotel room in Tamil Nadu, India.

After months of studying a unique plant on a Fulbright Scholarship, Baka has deemed it—the jatropha curcas—a flop. Just a few years ago, it was hailed as the crown jewel of Indian sustainable energy. The renewable energy industry began to explore the biofuel potential of jatropha, a plant that produces toxic, non-edible nuts. With a readily extractable 45 percent oil content and the ability to run in any diesel machine after processing, jatropha caught the attention of governments, private companies and NGOs alike.

The Indian government championed jatropha from the start, largely due to the energy needs of its burgeoning population and its dependency on foreign fuel as the fourth largest consumer of oil in the world.

By Alexandra Friedman With over one billion people and nearly all of its fertile land allocated to food crops, India’s land shortages render most biofuel cultivation impossible.

Still, the Indian Ministry of New and Renewable Energy pledged to achieve 20 percent biodiesel consumption by 2017 and to provide the entire Indian population with a source of renewable energy by 2015. For a while, jatropha seemed like the answer, launching to the top of the national Indian energy agenda due to its purported ability to grow anywhere.

In 2003 the Indian government began to set aside officially designated “wasteland” as jatropha test sites, where a combination of public and private investment enabled the planting of jatropha plantations. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005, which guarantees rural Indian households 100 days of employ-

Jatropha seeds enter the process of oil extraction. (Courtesy R.K. Henning/Wikimedia Creative Commons)

ment on manual labor projects, provided the necessary workforce to plant jatropha.

“It was promoted as a crop that can survive in marginal environments under rain-fed conditions, meaning no fertilizer or extra water required, so farmers took up the crop.

Surprise, surprise—it doesn’t grow well in marginal conditions,” explained Baka.

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t first glance an almost messianic plant, jatropha promised to bolster employment levels and turn wastelands into producers of clean, renewable energy. Researchers had estimated that one acre would yield between 200 and 400 gallons of oil, significantly more than current biofuels like soy and canola oil. But after years of trying to harvest the nut’s potential, researchers and farmers have begun to accept failure. “Jatropha is a pandemic like H1N1. It is not going to solve the energy crisis of the world, but rather take away land where large populations are growing,” said Dr. K.K. Tripathi of the Indian Department of Biotechnology, who has conducted multiple government and private studies revealing poor yields of jatropha.

Dr. Robert Bailis of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, who is currently researching the lifecycle of jatropha as a biofuel, agreed: “Unfortunately, the plant was really over-hyped if you go back four, five years. It was pitched as this miracle crop that can grow in really poor conditions and give great yields with very little input and very little attention from the farmer,” he said, “and none of that is true.”

This trend is especially apparent in the private sector, where companies are steadily decreasing investment in jatropha projects. In 2009 British Petroleum sold its rights in an estimated $12.1 million jatropha project joint venture with D1 Oils for a mere $818,900, making a timely departure before D1 Oils fell into financial woes.

Megha Rathee, chief operating officer at green consultancy firm Earth 100, commented on dwindling governmental investment: “The expected yield of jatropha never came into being, so the government

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www.tyglobalist.org lost interest.” The haphazard implementation of projects like these causes skepticism among researchers like Bailis, who questions the motives of corporations and the Indian government behind the push for jatropha. “People don’t act ethically when it comes to business,” he insisted.

Unfortunately, farmers have suffered much more than private investors. A lack of buyers and refineries means that many of these farmers cannot sell their product, even with the government’s push for jatropha. On top of that, many farmers have reported poor yields and insist that in the three-year-plus period it takes to grow, process, and sell jatropha, they could turn a higher profit by planting crops like sorghum or sugarcane.

Over a third of the 700 farmers Baka interviewed were promised loans from agricultural banks to replace their normal food crops with jatropha, many more receiving encouragement from the local government.

Few have received compensation for their efforts.

An open jatropha nut bearing its seeds will eventually be processed to produce oil.

(Courtesy Wikimedia Creative Commons) be put to more productive use with effort.”

In many instances, “there is this whole other energy economy situated there that’s

It was pitched as this miracle crop that can grow in really poor conditions and give great yields with very little input and very little attention from the farmer, and none of that is true.

—Robert Bailis, Assistant Professor at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies

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atropha’s final redeeming quality—that it grows in fallow and otherwise unused land—also falls short. Proponents of the plant argue that regardless of yield, jatropha does not compete for valuable food crop space, especially when planted in “wasteland” areas. But Baka found discrepancies in the government terminology of “wasteland.” Baka noted that one village leader she met while doing survey work in Tamil Nadu told her that “the local state government body had forced him to plant jatropha in his village even though he said he didn’t have land. The government was trying to promote it so heavily and do these propagation schemes that they even forced him [to find land] to plant it.”

Because of this external pressure, villages that grow jatropha are often forced to cultivate it in common land areas, normally used as public space for gathering fuel wood or grazing animals. The Indian government definition of wastelands is “lands that can

not mentioned in any of the government assessments of wastelands,” said Baka. These wastelands are often home to trees used for fuel wood, charcoal production, electricity production and tire retreading.

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n some locales, jatropha has achieved success: A handful of private companies promoting the plant have implemented an effective system of jatropha production, refinement and exportation. Gold Star Biofuels, a private jatropha oil manufacturer, is one such company. Through its unique humanitarian focus on its farmers, Gold Star, “helps the economy of the country by providing jobs to unemployed farmers, keeps the families together on the farms, pays all of our farmers U.N. wages on levels projected for 2015 and pays national insurance,” explained Jack Holden, the company’s executive director.

Earth 100, part of Goldman Sachs Group’s efforts to reduce its carbon foot-

print in India, has similarly achieved success as a buyer in the jatropha oil manufacturing industry. They provide companies with ‘green fleets’ of cars that are powered solely by nonedible biofuels like jatropha.

Most of Earth 100’s jatropha comes from wild sources, picked and collected by villagers in an alternative, organic manner of cultivation.

Aside from the social benefits, jatropha seedcakes produced as a byproduct of oil extraction can help replenish the soil. “The technology needed for avoiding chemical fertilizer is very important and significant in reducing the carbon footprint as well as energy use and improving the scenario towards sustainability [of jatropha],” said Dr. Alok Adholeya of the Energy and Resources Institute.

Despite these small-scale successes, the overriding failure of jatropha has left many projects abandoned. The true sustainability of the plant is yet to be determined: Factors influencing the yield, the carbon balance of jatropha, and the amount of energy used to manufacture the oil and the seedcake must still be researched.

The enigma of jatropha remains unsolved. As Rathee explained, “Jatropha is not the ideal solution, but it’s the only one that we have right now.”

Alexandra Friedman ’14 is in Pierson College. Contact her at alexandra.friedman@yale.edu.

14 14 YALE IN THE WORLD

the yale globalist: winter 2010

The Yale-NUS Collaboration: A TwoWay Street of Learning Yale is finally stepping outside of its North American presence at a time of rapid globalization and Eastern growth.

By Cathy Huang

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Soon, dorms like this one on the National University of Singapore Kent Ridge campus will model the residential college system at Yale University. (Courtesy Michelle Du)

my Soh is a freshman enrolled in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the National University of Singapore.

Born and raised in Shenton Way, Singapore, Amy held life-long ambitions to attend NUS to become an international lawyer. Raised in a family of doctors, Amy knows her dreams will demand the utmost focus on her studies. At the mention of Yale University, Amy’s eyes noticeably lit up.

“What a fantastic university! Yale is well known across the world… I’m so excited to hear that Yale is coming to us!”

She was referring to plans to build a liberal arts college based on Yale’s model at the National University of Singapore. Amy is one of the students who will be on campus to see the Yale-NUS collaboration bear fruit in 2014.

With its ambitious motto of “towards

a global knowledge enterprise,” the National University of Singapore has, since its founding in 1905, served as a leader in post-secondary education in Asia. Times Higher Education ranked NUS as the 4th best university in Asia and 34th best university in the world. Currently, NUS confers degrees to its 24,000 undergraduates through 13 different faculties, or individual schools that resemble pre-professional programs. But according to Lily Kong, vice president of University Global Relations at NUS and director of the Yale-NUS program, Yale and NUS are now collaborating “to build an educational model that will set the standard for other liberal arts education programs in Asia in the future.”

NUS President Tan Chorh Chuan corroborated this optimism in an address to the university, stating that the liberal arts college is part of NUS’s plans for a “bold and highly-strategic investment in education

for the future.”

The Yale-NUS College will be an independent entity on the NUS Kent Ridge campus funded entirely by NUS. Yale University President Richard Levin hopes to open the doors to a class of roughly 250 students in the fall of 2014. These students will be taught by 60-70 core faculty members drawn from both universities. As for the curriculum, Haun Saussy, professor of Comparative Literature at Yale and acting member of the Curriculum Committee for the Yale-NUS project, described it as a “global Directed Studies,” referring to the popular freshman program at Yale that stresses multi-disciplinary study.

“The program involves intensive reading of works from different disciplines but not just the European canon,” Saussy explained. Humanities-focused classes are far less common in Southeast Asian education models, but Yale-NUS students will

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www.tyglobalist.org study texts from both the Asian and European traditions, while developing and challenging their own ideas.

It remains to be seen how students will respond to a new liberal arts approach to higher education. Kong points out that in Singapore, a greater emphasis is placed on the major as preparation for a career, whereas Yale encourages greater breadth and discourages a pre-professional focus.

Also, the majority of students at NUS only live on campus for a year, and Yale hopes to forge closer-knit communities through the introduction of its popular residential college system. While there are no guarantees that NUS will adapt immediately, those involved with the project are excit-

academic freedoms. Etkin Tekin, a Yale junior who spent 10 months studying and working at NUS and who hopes to one day work in Singapore, believes these concerns are unwarranted.

“People see three or four facts about Singapore and immediately dismiss it,” said Tekin. “Maybe their laws wouldn’t work here, because we’ve grown accustomed to our own constitution, but they work there and the people are very happy. I remember when we were studying Machiavelli, my professor cracked a joke about the Singaporean government. People were comfortable laughing although it might have been a dissention from what the government ideally wants from

Singapore cannot afford to block any academic discourse because if it “[misunderstands] reality, reality doesn’t suffer, Singapore suffers.” ­— Kishore Mahbubani, Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at NUS ed for change. Casey Nagy, associate secretary to the Vice President at Yale, who has worked on the project since its conceptualization, acknowledged that “whenever one contemplates a partnership with entities that have different traditions and exist in different environments, accommodations will be necessary.” Nagy, who organizes feedback regarding the project from Yale and NUS faculty and alumni, has seen an “overwhelmingly positive” response. In the coming months, Yale hopes to release data to confirm this voiced approval from its faculty and alumni.

The collaboration, however, has not been received without concern. Some fear that Yale stands to lose valuable faculty and resources in this venture. But, while a few Yale professors might teach at NUS for a semester or two while serving as guides, the Yale-NUS faculty will consist mainly of new hires, young PhDs who will have the opportunity to find tenure-track jobs in a stagnant job market. The Hiring Committee at Yale is on a “global search” to find talented teachers. Kong looks forward to welcoming Yale professors but stressed that NUS does not plan on “keeping them.”

Other concerns have focused on the problems the autocratic nature of the Singaporean government might pose for

its people. Most of my professors at NUS spoke whatever they felt. It’s a pretty liberal and comfortable classroom setting.”

Kishore Mahbuhani, former Singaporean diplomat at the UN and current dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at NUS, also lamented the misconceptions of his home country. He pointed out that, as a small island country with fewer than five million people, Singapore cannot afford to block any academic discourse because if it “[misunderstands] reality, reality doesn’t suffer, Singapore suffers.”

Mahbubani has written several books on the topic of global power shift between the Eastern and Western hemispheres and sees the Yale-NUS project as a valuable opportunity for Yale to establish a “twoway street of learning” with increasingly competitive Asian nations. “With the end of Western domination, we have to step outside Western mental box and see how other cultures think,” he said. “Through this project, we get a combination of the best of the East and the West to create a more stable 21st century.”

The Yale-NUS project undoubtedly fulfills Yale’s quest to obtain a more global reach. Both universities are members of the International Alliance of Research Universities, a group of 10 of the world’s leading research-intensive universities.

And while the two already collaborate on research ventures such as natural resource management and biodiversity conservation, this project would allow for an unprecedented yet classic exchange of academic ideas. The hope is that, upon the project’s success in Singapore, academic ingenuity will spread naturally into the surrounding region.

“The goal is for only a small proportion of the students in the college to be Singaporeans. The idea is that they’re going to be drawn from China, India, Malaysia, Hong Kong, the whole area … then, they can circulate back out to their home societies, taking our model with them,” said Saussy. NUS’s long involvement in regionally-organized activities—which include educational collaborations, student mobility programs, and cultural exchanges—makes it the ideal hub for pioneering education in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. And now, Yale has the opportunity to become a pioneer in the region as well. As a powerhouse of Western intellectualism, Yale is finally stepping outside of this role at an ideal time of rapid globalization and Eastern growth.

But the benefits of the partnership will not be projected immediately in rankings or statistics. It is a partnership rooted in ideas and collaborative influence, and the clearest proof of its success will lie with the first graduating class of the Yale-NUS College. Mahbubani encouraged Yale to maintain enthusiasm. “This is a 100-year, not a one-year or two-year project,” he said.

The Yale-NUS project is still in its nascent stages. In the coming months, the curriculum will be finalized and the faculty solidified. While some Singaporeans and members of the Yale community question the project’s purpose, Saussy stressed that “in a good exchange, both participants are changed by it. That change is the unknown, but it’s also the reward.” The Yale-NUS project has the highly sought-after power of changing post-secondary education. The extent of this power is still unknown, but through its use, new roads in education will undoubtedly be paved.

Cathy Huang ’14 is in Morse College.

Contact her at cathy.huang@yale.edu.

16 16 YALE IN THE WORLD

the yale globalist: winter 2010

Fallen from the front lines:

The Military at Yale

By Emily Foxhall

I

n Woolsey Hall around noon on any weekday, lunch-goers bound for Commons Dining Hall are bombarded by representatives of various student groups. Stationed at cardboard tables and armed with sign-up sheets, they advocate for their group’s causes: Complete a survey and contribute to the university’s understanding of psychology, buy a piece of artwork and help the economy of a third world country, or pin on a purple ribbon and spread awareness about sexual violence.

At the backdrop of this scene, largely unnoticed, stands a war memorial.

Dedicated on November 21, 1920, the first eight marble tablets on the wall included the names of 225 Yale men who died in World War I. During the dedication ceremony, former Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, a member of the Yale Class of 1888, justified these deaths with his commentary: “So long as it is the function of a university to produce leaders for service in the Commonwealth … will men look to the test of war—the test of willingness to die for a cause.”

Roughly 40 years later, many Yale men looked away when this war became Vietnam. The Reserve Officers’ Training

Corps (ROTC) left campus; consequently, recruiters for military service are no longer allotted a space at career fairs. More broadly, Yale students’ conception of how to use their education in service to America has expanded to include careers in politics, journalism, and even art. But the military remains the goal of a determined few.

American military and intelligence services were bad and moral people should have nothing to do with them.”

What had once been Yale’s indisputable duty and commitment became a stigma, as demonstrated by students who established a chapter of a group called Students for a Democratic Society in 1962. In 1967,

Many students have navy blue banners in their rooms displaying the phrase “For God, For Country, And For Yale,” but the patriotism associated with the middle two words no longer connotes a devotion to the military, let alone a military job.

T

he Army ROTC program was founded at Yale in 1917, but the initial enthusiasm did not last. “[The cultural change] started with the Vietnam War, but it was larger than that,” said Charles Hill, professor of International Studies and Yale’s diplomat-in-residence, referring to the other social revolutions characteristic of the ’60s: women’s rights, civil rights, the arrival of the New Left. “Underneath it all was a sense that America was bad and the

they staged their first anti-ROTC protest, appropriately held in Woolsey Hall.

Though small in numbers, the members of SDS vocalized an opinion that was becoming more and more common among Yalies.

History professor Donald Kagan theorized that, because Yale students felt guilty with regard to their ability to avoid the draft, they found solace by convincing themselves and declaring to the public that the war was evil. “Otherwise they

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would simply be cowards and shirkers and not patriotic,” he said. For them, fighting in wars became something for other, less moralistic people to do. Accordingly, over subsequent years, ROTC courses shifted from academic to extracurricular status.

By 1971, the organization had left campus altogether.

S

till, despite the stigma brought on by the Vietnam War, not all Yalies abandoned the idea of joining the military.

Since September 11th in particular, many have noted that the Yale community’s attitude has become noticeably more supportive than during the Vietnam days—or, at least, more open.

Megan Leitch ’02, who did ROTC and now flies with the Air Force, said that the main issue among Yale students was ignorance as to how entering the U.S. military works. “I can’t count the number of times I had to explain there are four military branches and the difference between an officer and enlisted person,” she wrote in an e-mail. Many Yalies are unable to distinguish the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force, each of which has its own duties and standards of selection. Furthermore, while any citizen can enlist, becoming an officer requires training and demonstration of intelligence and leadership.

For many students, the decision to pursue a military career is rooted in family values and pre-existing military ties. Both Matthew Hammerle ’06, who enrolled in ROTC and now flies for the Air Force, and Leitch had families associated with the military. Benjamin Klay ’03 grew up wanting to be a diplomat as his grandfather had been but felt he would be better qualified having served in the military first. Kagan,

too, noted this trend and said of a past student who chose to join the Marines: “His family had brought him up to have certain values, certain ideas of what is good and what is right. They had stuck with him. I suspect that’s what allowed him to continue to be what he was before he came.”

Despite it being a path from which it might be easier to stray, these students still chose Yale over a military academy as their stepping stone toward serving in the armed forces. Hammerle said he chose Yale simply because he wanted to have the college experience away from the strict rules associated with the military. He also noted that, as advertised by the Yale admissions office, the university is a place where people of a wide range of backgrounds and values are able to interact.

While Hammerle was one of the few to notice the memorial when walking through Woolsey to lunch—he said the shrinking list of names made him feel sad because it reflected a lack of commitment to the military—to him the diversity of opinion was worth the added battle of defending the military.

While students today are by no means openly encouraged to join the military, they do have options for pursuing a military career. Depending on the military branch they wish to pursue, students can enroll in the ROTC course at the University of Connecticut or University of New Haven, which requires weekly classes, drills and leadership training, or, alternatively, apply for the Officer Candidate School (OCS), which usually requires time spent over the summer followed by training upon graduation. Still, they are a far cry from serving as an average enlisted member; both mean entry with an officer’s

commission.

On campus today, there are signs of support and discussion of these students.

A Navy SEALs flag now hangs above the porch of the home belonging to the fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon, headlines in the Yale Daily News feature the ongoing ROTC debate, and even General Stanley McChrystal can be spotted walking up Prospect Street as he heads to teach his class. The Yale College Council recently sent a poll “measuring student opinion and interest with regard to ROTC and military service at Yale.”

Hill said he believes comments that may have passed without criticism during the ’60s and ’70s are considered much less appropriate in today’s social environment.

Leitch described all of her Yale peers as “respectful” of her decision to join the military. Tom Stipanov, a Yale senior who plans to enter the Marine Corps upon graduation, could name no instance of negative reaction from peers. Hammerle cited just one. When he set up a table to talk about ROTC at the Bulldog Days club fair, the LGBTQ group placed its tri-fold board right next to his in order to dissuade students from joining.

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ublic sentiment aside, there is an underlying demand for a justification of the decision to join the military. Klay wrote his senior essay on the subject, giving it the title “The End of ROTC at Yale.”

In the introduction of his essay, Klay said his friends often joked about how crazy he was for wanting to join the Marines. Many asked why he would waste his education on the military.

Kagan finds that a pointless question: “I think the number of things that your

18 18 YALE IN THE WORLD education very specifically prepared you for as opposed to anything else are damn few,” he said. This is especially true in a liberal arts setting.

Yet one attribute remains constant among Yale students: talent. Both Hill and Kagan noted that, especially now, the military needs intelligent people. “In the military you’ve got to think about everything and you have to see how things are interrelated to each other,” Hill said. “And often what you’re doing is something that affects the lives of a lot of people … A Yale education prepares you to have [this] wide range of reference across many categories of activity.”

But not everyone buys into the universal application of the Yale education. Last year, in a speech to students at West Point, former Yale professor William Deresiewicz challenged the idea that all Yalies are taught to be leaders.

“What I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve,” he said. “That is exactly what places like Yale mean when they talk about training leaders … People who make it to the top.”

To Hammerle, the Yale mentality of needing to prove oneself as the best conflicts with the concept of working as a team so instrumental to military culture.

Yalies don’t want to be one of many, he

the yale globalist: winter 2010 said, they want to be special immediately after graduating. Although his ROTC schedule restricted him from taking any classes that met on Thursdays, he felt the reasons Yalies hesitate to join the military went far beyond issues of scheduling: “I don’t think the military has got the glam.”

But Stipanov felt differently. “I’m not sure what the mission of Yale is,” he said, adding that he didn’t think it was to train you for your immediate post-college experience. “I don’t think any civilian job right out of college gives you the level of leadership experience that you get as an officer.”

Stipanov spent the summer after his sophomore year completing the first stage of the Marine Corps OCS program. Often working on four hours of sleep, he said he found the military a greater challenge than Yale. “I’ve found the military very, very intellectually engaging,” he said. “At least from my experience, there are a lot of similarities between Yalies and Marines.

Both organizations tend to attract ‘Type A’ personalities. Both tend to attract hardworking people with a mind for the service of others.”

Even upon entering the military world, Yale students are often put on the defensive. Klay recalled others in the Marines OCS program questioning why, as a Yale student, he was there. He said he was trying to figure that out himself. Grappling with questions such as “what am I study-

ing for?” and “what is Yale all about?”

Klay nonetheless ultimately found in OCS the sense of fulfillment he had desired. Or, as he described, “that feeling you get before you fall asleep at night where you feel like you did something good.”

U

pon graduation, five Yalies have gone on to serve as President.

More played roles as Supreme Court justices, Foreign Service officers, Secretaries of State. Maya Lin ’81 designed the Vietnam War Memorial. James Dao ’79 covers military affairs for The New York Times. Political Science professor Susan Hyde helped monitor elections in Afghanistan.

So what happened to all of Yale’s military men?

Many students have navy blue banners in their rooms displaying the phrase “For God, For Country, And For Yale,” but the patriotism associated with the middle two words no longer connotes a devotion to the military, let alone a military job.

When most Yalies today think of careers “for country,” they first think non-profit or politic.

To Hammerle, the answer to the question of which people are giving back to their country lies not in the question of who is in the military but why people have chosen the careers they have. “I do think it’s important for everyone to give back to this country. I think our country is amazing in all the opportunities it provides,” he said. “It’s not necessarily what you’re doing, but that you’re doing it for the right reason, and that’s that you’re making this country better.” Still, he concluded that there will always be a need for the military.

At the 1920 Woolsey Hall dedication, Stimson left a small wish for Yale students today. The names on the wall were engraved so “that future generations of Yale may be aroused to an emulation of their spirit and their endeavor,” he said. “Keep ye the faith with them: faith in our country; faith in our country’s men; faith in the mission of America to a shattered world.”

How that faith manifests itself into a career has proved open to interpretation.

Emily Foxhall ’13 is an English major in Silliman College. Contact her at emily.foxhall@yale.edu.

Every year Yale holds a ceremony in front of the Beinecke Memorial in observance of Veterans Day. (Kaiser/TYG)

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Dancing in the Diaspora Classical dancers in India and the United States experience a thousand-year-old tradition in very different ways.

By Sanjena Sathian

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ne winter, when I visited family in the bustling city of Chennai, India, I hopped on the back of my cousin’s bicycle to tag along to her dance class, where she learned Bharatanatyam, an ancient Indian classical dance form that tells the stories of Hindu mythology and folklore. Every afternoon, she made her way through the loud, dusty streets on her bike to get to her teacher’s flat, weaving in and out of motorcycles and cars along the streets where traffic laws are meant to be broken. She rehearsed for hours each day, her teacher drilling all the students relentlessly until their technique and steps were perfect.

Back home, on Saturday mornings, I used to wake up at eight so my mother could drive our Volvo station wagon through my Atlanta subdivision, past the rows of stucco and brick houses, past the swim-tennis complex, past the Publix and the Domino’s pizza, to my dance teacher’s house, where, for an hour each week I learned Bharatanatyam. Together with a group of five or six fellow pre-teen girls, we abandoned concerns about our braces and our crushes on boys to step into the bodies of temple dancers and to carry on telling the stories that our mothers and grandmothers told before us.

Worlds apart, in cool suburban basements and on humid cement terraces, Indian girls and Indian-American girls alike are taught this dance form from a young age. But instead of remaining a vessel for the same traditions, the form is rapidly evolving and modernizing in America, as the Indian-American diaspora dances from the traditional to the modern.

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lassical dance teachers in India are strict. Students come to their teachers’ homes several days a week for hours at a time. Teachers are revered with a respect foreign to most Americans. On Hin-

du holidays, students bring plates of fruit to their teachers before touching their feet and asking for blessings. The teachers are the final authority and the ultimate word.

Tradition is passed along from teacher to student, and the students are vessels, ready to absorb whatever comes their way.

Sanhita Basu Ghose has been trained in six different classical styles. Her local students attend class at least eight times a month as a rule. But when students come to her from abroad, she intensifies their training. And after several months of dance boot camp, her students disperse across the world, back to Japan, Argentina, Germany, Russia, and the United States.

Teachers in India like Ghose are becoming increasingly connected to the rest of the world. Many travel to the U.S. to teach workshops to American students or perform on college campuses. When they return home, they do so with a sharpened awareness of the difference between their students and the American students they’ve just met.

“In India of course I tell the child about what she is doing, the meaning of the song and everything, but … more or less everything which is Bharatanatyam is part of their every day life,” said Revathi Ramachandran, a teacher based in Chennai who has also taught extensively in America. “But in the U.S., I have to explain to them what everything is about. The children have grown up in a different environment.”

Indian-American girls are dependent on their parents to learn the dance, Ramachandran observed. But this also helps American students pursue the dance to higher levels, she said, because in the intensely competitive academic environment of India, girls begin dropping out as exams and preparation for university approaches.

Quitting in the United States is harder— it means quitting on a motherland that’s already been left behind.

Sanhita Basu Ghose’s classical dance students come from all around India and the world to learn from her. (Courtesy Sanhita Basu Ghose)

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group of nine girls aged six or seven, dressed in the telltale leggings and sweaters of a Connecticut winter, are pounding their feet against the floor, their eyes fixed on their teacher in front of them. They are preparing for a performance at the upcoming Diwali (the Hindu holiday of lights) festival in Norwalk, Connecticut. The girls are being watched from the sidelines, where mothers, younger siblings, and the occasional father sit in folding chairs, watching their daughters attempting to tell the story of a naughty Hindu de-

20 20 CULTURE ity, Krishna. The teacher dances in front of them, reminding them: “Walk like a dancer!”

“Don’t forget to smile!”

“Hold your heads!”

The girls follow her movements closely.

Most of them do not understand the words of the song they are dancing to. The teacher translates something every few lines, explaining to the baffled six year olds that they are portraying the story of a Hindu god. This is where the girls’ parents have brought them, and until they are old enough to understand why they are dancing, they will keep following in the footsteps of tradition. It’s what they’ve been told to do.

At Vani Natyalayam dance school in Monroe, Connecticut, this is a typical class for beginner dancers. The girls dance on a blue and yellow floor and at one end of the room hangs an American flag next to a Korean flag and a banner that proclaims in red letters “HOUSE OF DISCIPLINE.” Vani Nidadavolu, the owner and teacher at the school, rents this tae-kwon-doe studio in a small strip mall on the weekends to hold her classes. Nidadavolu, who emigrated from the state of Andhra Pradesh when she got married, began teaching dance when her now college-aged daughter was born. And for the mothers now watching their daughters, the motivation for starting Bharatanatyam classes so young is the same.

“I think for all these people—mostly the

the yale globalist: winter 2010 attraction is that they learned the rules, they learned the tradition,” said Nidadavolu. “It’s all parents’ interest. Later on the kid will develop interest, but initially [parents] don’t want to lose the cultural connection.”

Teaching a dance style that tells stories of a culture most Indian-Americans don’t know by heart in a language many students don’t speak or understand has its challenges for teachers. So teaching dance becomes as much about learning bits of the language—songs are in Tamil, usually, but sometimes in Telugu or Kannada—the history, and Hindu mythology as about the art itself. Indira Rajasekhar, a Bharatanatyam teacher in Rockland County, New York, also started her dance school as a way to convey the homeland she had left behind to her children.

“It was a big help with raising my kids in a different land,” she said. “It’s not just learning a dance, it’s not an after school activity. It’s beyond that—it is our culture you’re learning, your tradition. You’re learning your values through dance.”

A

fter the beginners, three high school girls come in for their class, where they are practicing a Jattiswaram, a dance that focuses on the rigor of steps more than a story. Two of the girls have only learned for three years, but Chitra, Nidadavolu’s daughter, has been learning for nine years and is now in training for her graduation ceremony, or Arangetram.

One of the dancers, Priya Gupta, said her parents expected her to take on Indian dancing in addition to the other styles of Western dances she had learned before.

“My mom couldn’t let me not do it,” she

laughed. “I guess she liked the idea of me being Indian in some ways.”

Chitra comes from a line of Nidadavolu women known to fall in love with the art.

Though she and her sister began dancing Bharatanatyam because their mother expected them to do it, Chitra realized she loved it after seeing her sister’s passion.

“It was this one moment where it clicked—this is what I was born to do,” she said, recalling watching her sister. “She’s a role model for me.”

Like Chitra, the small girls dancing in Nidadavolu’s earlier class may grow up to find something meaningful in the stories they have been telling and the traditions that have inadvertently slipped into their everyday lives. Though many of these daughters stumble blindly into the art at first, the dance unfolds itself after each passing year of weekly classes and sparsely attended performances in community cultural centers or temples. And the daughters find their way to the heritage of their mothers.

Shemoni Parekh, another of these daughters, is a dancer and the artistic director of Kruti Dance Academy in Atlanta.

Parekh was one of the performers featured on America’s Got Talent this summer.

Parekh’s mother, Dina Seth, founded the school, and through her childhood and college years she danced at Kruti, watching it blossom from a class held in the basement of her house to arguably the biggest studio for all types of Indian dance in the southeast. Now, Seth and Parekh together run the school.

Kruti is a mega-dance corporation. Sporting a dazzling website, it advertises classes ranging from Bollywood to folk styles to

Left: Some of Sanhita Basu Ghose’s classical dance students pose in classical forms (Courtesy Sanhita Basu Ghose). Above: From left to right, Chitra Nidadavolu, Shemona Singh and Priya Gupta, three of Vani Nidadavolu’s students, pose after their class in Monroe, CT. (Sathian/TYG)

CULTURE 21 21

www.tyglobalist.org the traditional classical Bharatanatyam.

Parekh emphasized that though members of the academy performed fusion pieces that mixed Indian classical and folk styles on America’s Got Talent, all the dancers in question were first classically trained in Bharatanatyam. The classical dance is a necessary language through which to interpret other dance styles, Parekh said.

“There’s a lot of beauty in the regional Indian dancing that America doesn’t get to see. We wanted to show things that mainstream America would not necessarily be aware of,” she said, explaining that after movies like Slumdog Millionaire, America had already seen Bollywood dance. “Our country thrives on culture because we don’t have necessarily one identified ‘everybody.’

America is ready to see a fusion of Eastern styles.”

D

ancers around the country have adopted similar philosophies to Kruti’s, and many college campuses are now seeing the rise of “fusion” dance teams that mix elements of classical, Bollywood, and folk styles with each other or with Western jazz, hip-hop, modern, and ballet styles. These teams come from their campuses at the College of New Jersey, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Georgia, and more to meet at national competitions. One such team, Northwestern University’s Deeva, is comprised of fifteen members, nine of whom are of Indian origin and six of whom are not. The team mixes both Western and Eastern styles, and they dance to Western music.

Bharatanatyam dances tell the stories of Hindu mythology and folklore. (Courtesy Sanhita Basu Ghose) erating way for some young dancers to reinterpret the tradition in a cultural context that is more familiar.

Deepa Ramadurai, a junior at Northwestern University on Deeva, learned Bharatanatyam from the age of five. She took classes in the Chicago suburbs whereher great-aunt was her teacher. “It was completely my parents,” she explained of how she got started dancing. “But as I got

As I got older I really appreciated the cultural context it provided me because I wouldn’t understand half of my history and the Hindu mythology behind it.

—Deepa Ramadurai, Bharatanatyam dancer For the purist onlookers in India, this new style can be jarring. Deepak Mazumdar, a dance teacher in Bombay, said that he sees no value in mixing styles.

“It is total confusion. The road leads to a dead end. I am totally against this new venture which ultimately leads to fatigue and has no direction. It is total waste of time and energy.”

But the new wave of fusion can be a lib-

older I really appreciated the cultural context it provided me because I wouldn’t understand half of my history and the Hindu mythology behind it.”

When she arrived at college, she chose to pursue fusion dance instead of the classical form. The team she dances with uses some Bharatanatyam inspired moves as well as a healthy mix of jazz and modern Western dance. The members have trained

in a wide variety of dance forms, from Chinese dancing to ballet, and everyone learns one another’s styles. The group’s unique integration of Bharatanatyam as part of the fusion won them second place at the Manhattan Project, a national fusion competition, last spring.

Ramadurai is just one of many members of the first generation, the daughters of immigrants who have learned the histories of their motherland and are playing with them in new ways. As the dance evolves, so does the tradition, and a wholly new tradition fusing East and West seems to have been born. Dancers of Ramadurai’s—and my— generation grew up dancing to the steady ta-takita beat of our mothers’ land. We listened to our teachers when they told us what stories we were supposed to be telling and when they translated the songs so we could understand. We followed our parents when they told us to dance and to hold onto their culture.

And now we are the first generation of a new tradition. This is the birth of a new culture.

Sanjena Sathian ’13 is an English and Ethnicity, Race & Migration double major in Morse College. Contact her at sanjena.sathian@yale.edu.

Wilton/TYG

232 known languages have died out. Annually 265,000,000 acres of land are deforested while over 5,000 aniIn the course of human history,

mal species are listed as endangered. Already this year,

55,271,022 people have died worldwide. Meanwhile, 1 star in our galaxy collapsed upon itself; in around 5,000,000,000 years, our sun will do the same. About 6,000,000 bacteria are exterminated every time you wash your hands with antibacterial soap. In the past minute, you lost

2 of your brain cells.

But death is not just a statistic.

FOCUS: DEATH

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the yale globalist: winter 2010

Dammed

For years, Turkey’s ancient city of Hasankeyf has been flooded with problems. Soon, it may also be flooded with water.

By Anne Van Bruggen

O

n a regular day, the streets of Hasankeyf would be bustling. An ancient city on the banks of the Tigris River in southeastern Turkey, Hasankeyf usually brims with tourists enjoying its fish restaurants and myriad of archaeological wonders. But on June 20, stones fell down the cliff of a third-century Byzantine castle, one of the main tourist attractions, and killed a local man, prompting the Turkish government to shut down the site. Now, the restaurants are empty. A handful of tourists loaf about the main street, which is cordoned off by a fence. Turkish police deny access to the famous castle.

The site’s closing is only one of many problems besieging Hasankeyf. In 2006, the Turkish government began construction on the Ilisu Hydroelectric Dam, a U.S. $1.7 billion project which, if completed as planned by 2013, would submerge Hasankeyf under 200 feet of the Tigris’s waters.

The dam would generate 3.8 gigawatt hours of electricity per year, enough to provide for over a million and a half Turkish people each year. The reservoir created would keep water, a precious resource in the region, inside Turkey’s borders and out of neighboring Iraq and Syria. The

newly available water would also support the population of the Hasankeyf region, who are mainly of Kurdish minority and earn their living from agriculture. According to Mehmet Acikgoze, the regional coordinator of the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP), the dam would enhance the employment capacity of the rural sector and thereby raise income and standards of living.

The people of Hasankeyf and local NGOs, however, have expressed skepticism towards the government’s assertions, pointing to more sinister reasons for the dam’s construction. Idris Kartal, a resident of Hasankeyf and the city’s main tourist guide, said that the government hopes to stop movement of Working Party of Kurdistan (PKK) rebels who cross the border from Iraq and find support among the marginalized people of Hasankeyf.

“But these reasons are more speculative,” he admitted.

According to a 2005 study conducted

by Irish National University, the Ilisu Dam Project would displace between 25,000 and 78,000 people. Hasankeyf has grown poor since the government banned investment and construction of new houses when the dam plans were first presented in 1977.

Volkan Pirinççi, who worked for the na-

tional Turkish Nature Association, Doga Dernegi, added that “even if you want to register for a new electricity or water line, they won’t give it to you.”

The government has instead begun construction on new houses further up the hills surrounding Hasankeyf intended for future displaced people. But in these settlements, “agriculture will be impossible,” Pirinççi said. Hasankeyf’s residents have been migrating to bigger cities like Batman and Diyarbakir for years, but Kartal explained that now that tourism, another main source of income, has been cut off, it is even more common for people to search for jobs elsewhere.

Kartal speculates that by shepherding the people out of their caves and impoverished houses and into a planned urban area, the government can better control the people. Furthermore, it hopes to attract support away from the Kurdish rebels by providing the people new wealth, industries and farms. “We in Hasankeyf believe that the dam is part of a plan to obliterate Kurdish culture,” Kartal stated emphatically.

Conspiracy theories abound about reasons for the dam’s construction. One revolves around a professor at the University of Batman, Abdüsselam Uluçam,

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www.tyglobalist.org

A view of the Tigris as it flows through Hasankeyf.

(Courtesy Flickr Creative Commons) who happens to be the chief archaeologist at the Hasankeyf site. According to Pirinççi, Uluçam has publicly voiced his opinion that Hasankeyf’s inhabitants should move even if the dam construction stops because they are ignorant of the archaeological sites they live on and destroy them.

According to Pirinççi, Uluçam has said that “Hasankeyf’s destiny cannot be left to the Hasankeyf people.” Kartal also raised the possibility that the authorities will move the people without building the dam so that the archaeologist can have his way.

As for how an archaeologist could have such sway in forcing migration in the area: “Uluçam is good friends with the Turkish president,” said Kartal. Pirinççi confirmed they had a background together as classmates.

Distrust between the government and the residents of Hasankeyf runs deep.

Restaurant owner Nurullah Sevinc even questioned the falling rock incident. “The authorities threw that stone down on purpose, so that they have a good excuse to close the restaurants, drive us out of business and force us all to move,” he said.

Sevinc’s reaction is not uncommon. Selin Unluonen, a Yale freshman from Istanbul, echoed the theory: “I wouldn’t be surprised; such things do happen in Turkey.”

The Ilisu dam would not only displace the people of Hasankeyf but also destroy the monuments that have made the city famous. The site has been home to nine different civilizations. Doga Dernegi’s report, “Outstanding Universal Value of Hasankeyf and The Tigris Valley,” presents the most important arguments for its importance: “Hasankeyf is a masterpiece of human creative genius, an outstanding example of certain architecture, and the habitat for threatened species of outstanding universal value for science.” In 1978, the Turkish government even declared Hasankeyf an important and inviolable historical site, which temporarily halted the Ilisu plans. Last July, the European Court of Human Rights voiced the same concerns, pushing the project’s German, Austrian, and Swiss financial backers to withdraw their support. Recently, the plans moved forward again after two Turkish banks, Akbank and Garanti, promised their financial support.

“The best way to save the people and historical value of Hasankeyf,” Pirinççi explained, “is to include it on the UNESCO World Heritage list.” However, UNESCO membership has to be requested by the Turkish prime minister, who has yet to do so.

Instead, the government has promised to save Hasankeyf by transferring the monuments to a new site. A big billboard in Hasankeyf presents an image of a beautiful new town, reigning over a lake where tourists ride jet skis and swim. But according to Caglayan Ayhan, a spokeswoman for the Initiative to Keep Hasankeyf Alive, that vision is “ridiculous and impossible, because the monuments are made of soft stone which will crumble when moved.

Even with scuba diving gear, nobody will be able to see its marbles.”

Other efforts to save Hasankeyf are NGO-based and are aimed at raising awareness of the city and its potential destruction. Doga Dernegi’s newest project is a petition asking the Turkish Prime minister and the presidents of Akbank and Garanti to stop the Dam project and propose Hasankeyf as a UNESCO World Heritage site. According to Pirinççi, some

Sunset from the fish restaurants besides the river Tigris. During the day children swim in the river and women and men picnic. At night local and foreign tourists enjoy a meal. (Van Bruggen/TYG)

2,000 people have signed to date, including a handful of Turkish celebrities. The same group has also made a map showing all the other treasures of Hasankeyf besides the closed castle in order to encourage tourists to continue visiting.

Despite the controversy, the people of Hasankeyf have remained strangely silent.

The locals “have lost all hopes and are fed up with this issue which has been going on for many years,” said Pirinççi. “They don’t believe anything can be done, instead they are looking for a new life start.”

Kartal explained that only fear of the government keeps the people from protesting. The many active NGOs, however, are still fighting to stop the destruction of Hasankeyf in favor of a dam, which will last a short 50 years before becoming nonfunctional. For the people of Hasankeyf, who have faced the threat for 33 years, nothing remains to be said. Hasankeyf has been under siege throughout history: first from the crusaders and Ottomans, to the battle of Kurdish rebels, and now the looming construction of the Ilisu Dam. Even though it is uncertain if the dam will ever be built, the slowing of tourism is, for many, the last straw. People are finding themselves with no plans for the future and only one alternative: “to move,” explained a gloomy Kartal.

Anne van Bruggen ’13 is in Saybrook College. Contact her at anne.vanbruggen@yale.edu.

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the yale globalist: winter 2010

debating the right to die

By Raphaella Friedman

A government commission in Quebec opens the conversation about euthanasia and what it means to die well.

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www.tyglobalist.org

T

he ability to determine the time and manner of one’s own death was once thought of as supernatural, a power reserved for the fates, not the government. But advances in medicine and technology that allow physicians to extend life almost indefinitely are changing perceptions of mortality. People are living longer, and as religiosity gives way to more secular societies, public policy options like euthanasia and assisted suicide are becoming more attractive to those suffering from terminal illness.

While touted as the most humane approaches to death by their advocates, euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide challenge many deeply engrained notions about the sanctity of life, the obligations of the state, and the patient-physician relationship. Some of these policies have taken hold in more secular societies, but they are not without controversy.

For Quebec, a province that has long been linguistically and culturally distinct from the rest of Canada, the adoption of a progressive approach to end of life care may prove to be yet another factor that sets it apart from the rest of the country. And if the current trend holds, Quebec may be the first province in Canada to grant citizens the right to die.

Q

uebec is not the first place to grapple with the debate over the legalization of euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide. Such practices are legal in four places around the world, though each has its own approach. Oregon has legalized doctor-assisted suicide, in which a physician prescribes a pill or tells the patient which button to press to end his or her life. Switzerland too allows assisted suicide, but does not require a physician’s presence. The Netherlands and Belgium have both adopted euthanasia as an end-of-life option, allowing doctors to inject medications or press a button themselves, actively ending their patients’ lives. This form of assisted suicide is most controversial, as it gives power to the physician. For some, it amounts to little more than consensual murder.

Those who fear paternalism and the marginalization of minority groups look no further than the Netherlands when defending their argument. Involuntary euthanasia rates are uncomfortably high in the Netherlands, prompting concerns about lax restrictions

and vulnerable populations. Out of the 9,700 annual requests for euthanasia or assisted suicide, 3,700 are granted, only 300 of which are assisted suicides. Of those euthanized, approximately 1,000 were involuntary: The patient did not or could not consent to the procedure. If a similar system makes its way to Quebec, “we’re in serious danger of losing our respect for human life and human dignity,” said Margaret Somerville, ethicist and founding director of the McGill University Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law. Despite the controversies surrounding end-of-life care in other countries and a reluctance to address the issue in Canada as a whole, a special provincial governmental commission in Quebec entitled Mourir dans la Dignité, or Dying with Dignity, has begun to tackle end of life issues ranging from palliative care to euthanasia. It has been accepting presentations and written statements from experts since 2009, and now the commission is conducting public hearings in 11 cities on the subject of death. They plan to file a formal report sometime in 2011.

The head of the commission, Member of the National Assembly of Quebec Geoffrey Kelley, said that the commission’s facilitation of complex discussion of life and death boils down to a single question: “We’re asking, if you’re in pain and suffering at the end of life, can government do something about it, yes or no?”

I

t is not a question that other provinces are comfortable with addressing. Dr. Yves Robert, the secretary of the Quebec College of Physicians, acknowledges that Quebec stands alone from the rest of Canada in promoting this conversation: “We are in some ways a distinct society, being mostly French, with values which are probably closer to Western Europe, where there are already some countries legalizing euthanasia.”

In fact, while the College of Physicians has actively endorsed a conversation about euthanasia and the right to die, the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) has closed the topic. Official policy is made explicit by the CMA’s 2007 statement: “Canadian physicians should not participate in euthanasia or assisted suicide.”

“In Quebec, they have been most willing to challenge public policy,” explained Susan Eng, advocacy chair for the Canadian Association of Retired Persons (CARP) and board member of the Canadian Civil Liberties Asso-

28 28 28 FOCUS: DEATH 28 ciation (CCLA). “They have the most willingness to challenge the idea that there should be only public pay medicine. They are actually prepared to deal with the issue of private paid medicine.” And now they’re taking on end-of-life care.

In Quebec, what was once an intensely religious society has slowly evolved into one of the most secular in the world.

The Catholic character of Quebec began to erode in the 1960s, when the province transferred the responsibilities of health care and education from the Roman Catholic Church to the new government and created a welfare state. As religion waned, a sense of Quebec nationalism grew.

In 1991 a separatist political party, the Bloc Québécois, was founded. It is this party, which continues to advocate for an independent Quebec, that has raised the issue of euthanasia, one which politicians in other provinces have shied away from.

In April 2010, Bloc Québécois MP Francine Lalonde introduced Bill C-384 in the Canadian House of Commons, which called for the legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia for those experiencing extreme physical or mental suffering. Despite Lalonde’s concerted efforts, the bill was soundly defeated 228-59. Bill C-384 falls in line with the Bloc’s history of taking controversial stances on issues, promoting Quebec’s unique values, needs, and interests. While euthanasia is certainly not grounds for a separatist movement and the Bloc does not purport it to be the party’s main issue, there is no doubt that the acceptance of euthanasia would further distinguish Quebec from the rest of Canada.

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he last time Canada broached the topic of end-of-life care was in 1993, when a woman named Sue Rodriguez brought a case before Canada’s Supreme Court. Rodriguez suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease and was told she had three years to live. In 1993, well into the later stages of her illness, she begged the Supreme Court to grant her what no other court would: the right to die.

Rodriguez’s lawyers made the case that prohibiting someone to help Rodriguez end her own life when she was no longer physically capable of doing so herself deprived her of her right to personal liberty and security. They also posited that it constituted cruel and inhumane treatment,

the yale globalist: winter 2010 also forbidden under Canadian Civil Code.

Her appeal was denied. The Supreme Court ruled that the state’s obligation to preserve the sanctity of life conflicted with her request. Canada has maintained this position ever since; current law bans assisted suicide, and accessories to an assisted suicide face up to 14 years in prison.

In 1994, Rodriguez took her life with the help of an anonymous physician. Her case is not an isolated one.

‘H

e asked me to come around on a Sunday; he said he wanted to die at 2:00 in the afternoon,” said Dr. Phillip Nitschke, an Australian physician and pro-euthanasia activist who administered the world’s first legal, lethal injection in 1996. “He wanted the drug to be injected. It was very hard. I built a machine where I could press the button on my little laptop computer that would deliver the drugs, which took me out of that immediate space. He was able to hold his wife and he died in her arms … It was quite difficult. Obviously I’d fought hard to get the law in”—Nitschke had actively fought to have a legal euthanasia law passed in Australia’s Northern Territory—“but then the time came when it had to be used.”

Nitschke has hardly looked back since.

By the time that the Northern Territory repealed its decision to legalize euthanasia in 1997, Nitschke had already administered lethal doses to four patients, earning him the less-than-affectionate nickname “Dr. Death.”

That same year he founded Exit International, an organization devoted to presenting and promoting end-of-life options, including assisted suicide and euthanasia. The organization holds workshops in Canada, as well as in Britain, the United States and Australia. In these workshops, Nitschke teaches his audiences about specific methods that will ensure a peaceful, painless death should their health or physical condition deteriorate irreparably. Where the government refuses to bend the rules of end-of-life medical care, Nitschke believes he provides a valuable

Dr. Philip Nitschke designed this “death machine” to deliver a lethal injection to patients after they answered a series of questions on the laptop. The device, which was eventually banned, was used by four terminally ill Australians.

(Courtesy Flickr Creative Commons/Mads Boedker)

service in teaching a medical approach to painless suicide.

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n elderly man with dark circles under his eyes sits on a bed. He talks about the choices he’s made in his life, from what car he drives to the woman he chose to marry. He then stares at the camera intently: “What I didn’t choose was to be terminally ill. I didn’t choose to starve to death because eating is like swallowing razor blades. And I certainly didn’t choose to have to watch my family go through this with me.” He concludes pleadingly, as the camera zooms in, “I’ve made my final choice, I just need the government to listen.” Exit International’s logo flashes at the end.

The ad has been banned from Canadian airways, but thanks to Youtube it has been viewed more than 43,000 times. The Television Bureau of Canada refused to air the ad, not because of the potentially disturbing subject matter, but rather because of the Exit International logo: It cannot direct traffic to an organization or website that promotes suicide by teaching suicide techniques. While the ad itself does not undermine societal values protected under the Civil Code and, in fact, represents a balanced account of the dilemma of a

29 29 FOCUS: DEATH 29 29

www.tyglobalist.org terminally ill patient, apparently the organization does. Lose the logo, make some other minor changes, and it’s back on the air, the Bureau said.

Nitschke found their logic absurd. “People are very surprised that these ads attracted any censure whatsoever. It’s very soft, very mild, and one would hardly find that it’s a confronting ad,” he said dismissively. “And to try and argue that it might somehow or other convince people to go off and commit suicide—which is really why it’s restricted, the fear that it might encourage suicide—is bizarre.”

In light of Canada’s strict legal repercussions for accessories to assisted suicide, Nitschke’s goal is to make sure that family and friends don’t have to go to jail just because their loved one didn’t prepare an exit strategy while still physically able to do so. But his personal views on euthanasia and assisted suicide go beyond the constraints of the law. “[Assisted suicide] is not an option that should just be reserved for people who satisfy strict criteria. I believe that any adult who has a considered and rational perspective should have access to the best ways and means of carrying it out,” said Nitschke. “Now, that is a view which upsets some people in the movement be-

cause they say it will upset politicians and make it harder to bring about legislative change.”

However extreme Nitschke’s views, this question of self-determination and individual liberty is at the heart of the legal debate.

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eyond public policy, the moral consideration of whether one citizen should be allowed to take another’s life proves to be thorny. By making suicide easy and accessible to nearly all who seek it, Nitschke’s organization departs from other pro-euthanasia groups. Most

people who are simply tired of life, despite being physically healthy. This is individual liberty at its most extreme.

“Do you really have no moral problem with a doctor killing patients?” asked Somerville. Like Nitschke, Somerville is an Australian. She too has joined the argument over euthanasia in Canada, and the two have debated each other in the past.

In her written submission to the Quebec Commission on Dying with Dignity, Somerville argued, “We need to explore not only the practical realities, such as the possibilities for abuse, that allowing euthanasia would open up, but also, the

[Assisted suicide] is not an option that should just be reserved for people who satisfy strict criteria. I believe that any adult who has a considered and rational perspective should have access to the best ways and means of carrying it out.

—Dr. Phillip Nitschke countries have rejected the view outright.

However, in Belgium, assisted suicide and euthanasia are available to those with unbearable mental conditions, as well as to

effect that doing so would have on important values and symbols that make up the intangible fabric that constitutes our society.”

Somerville argued that the physicianpatient relationship would be severely damaged by allowing doctors to kill patients. Physicians are denoted as healers, and also have more opportunities than the average citizen to kill, claimed Somerville.

She refuses to use the words euthanasia or assisted suicide. “The danger of euphemism is that it blocks out moral intuitions about what is right and what is wrong. It makes us feel differently,” she said. “If we describe doctors as warm and fuzzy you have one reaction; you have a different reaction when you talk about doctors killing people.”

While the Quebec College of Physicians does not endorse euthanasia, it does not rule it out entirely either. It simply wants law to more accurately reflect the realities in the field. “In our criminal code it’s a black-and-white issue. There is no other way to interpret it in the criminal code other than it being a murder. But there may be exceptions,” said Robert. He points to the problem of technology extending life past its expiration date.

“Is this the best way to handle care for a

30 30 30 FOCUS: DEATH 30 person?” he asked. “We may have to change the usual way of thinking that medicine has to prolong life as long as possible.”

Eng agreed, pointing to the problem of the high cost of extreme end-of-life care.

“That kind of medical intervention is extremely expensive, and the cost-benefit of it needs to be re-examined, especially as that intervention is painful,” she said.

In the absence of assisted suicide, there is the alternative of simply ending treatment, in which case “the person is allowed to starve and dehydrate to death, which takes several days of agony. What the hell is that about?” said Eng, her otherwise professional tone abandoned in a burst of unexpected emotion. Moral questions evaporate at the bedside; dignity is the only thing clearly in focus. “You can’t blame the doctor for not wanting to take on the liability.

And so, what do you do in the meantime?

You’re standing at the hospital bed, what are you supposed to do?”

There is agreement on at least one thing: the importance of both the physician and patient’s role in decision-making. By presenting euthanasia as the inalienable right of the autonomous patient, the Bloc’s bill “reduced the role of the physician,” according to Robert. “It does not promote the best decision-making process. The will of the patient has to be considered, without a doubt, but professional opinion has to be considered too.”

Nitschke disagreed: “I don’t think that profession itself should stand in the way of something that the broader public clearly wants. I don’t think any profession should stand in the way of decisions people want to make about their own death.”

Somerville believes that even opening the debate about whether one human can kill another is a grave mistake in which individualism takes precedence over important societal values. When forming a position on the issue, she tells people to ask themselves the following two questions: ‘How would I not like my great-greatgrandchildren to die?’ And ‘What values do I want to pass on to the world of the future?’

D

espite deep-seated disagreements, official proceedings in Canada have remained surprisingly civil for a debate that entails life and death. Little fanfare or protest have accompanied the public hearings thus far.

Doctors, academics, organizations and

the yale globalist: winter 2010 private citizens have come out on all sides of the issue. “What’s refreshing about this debate is that it’s not a partisan debate,” Kelley pointed out. “There’s not a liberal side, not a conservative side. People are

with it everyday, and often privately and without much community support.”

In a CARP poll in September 2010, 71 percent of the 3,000 members who responded, all above the age of 65, supported

We are in some ways a distinct society, being mostly French, with values which are probably closer to Western Europe where there are already some countries legalizing euthanasia.

—Dr. Yves Robert, Quebec College of Physicians pleased that their parliamentarians are grappling with an issue that has a very direct impact on their lives.”

The discussion is holistic. A current governmental online questionnaire looks at a variety of end-of-life care options, like palliative care and the state of nursing homes, in addition to euthanasia. However, some consider the inclusion of euthanasia distracting. “I think that the debate on these issues in some ways is premature,” said Abby Lippman, a fellow at McGill’s Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future. “We should provide people with the care that they need at the end of their life before we go into issues of how do we make that [end of life] happen faster,” she said.

“Until that basic stuff is done, I consider this discussion dyslexic.”

In written statements, the Canadian Medical Association has also recommended enhanced palliative care services, better suicide prevention programs, and a Canadian study of medical decision making before considering such a “fundamental reconsideration of medical ethics.”

Others have called for special attention to how a euthanasia policy could affect vulnerable groups, like the elderly and mentally disabled. Kelley acknowledges that some of these concerns would have to be addressed in any sort of legislation. “The message you could send to seniors, that somehow their lives are no longer useful, and the notion of being a burden on one’s family, is very disturbing.” It is one that he believes the commission and Quebec’s government will ensure does not result.

The CARP, on the other hand, has urged greater public discourse on end of life options. “There are issues that people don’t like to talk about,” said Eng. “But the reality is, our people, our membership, deal

assisted suicide or euthanasia. Eng places great weight on that number: “It wasn’t 50/50. That’s a serious amount of people.”

She added, “I don’t read that as a clamor for suicide, I read it as a fear of bad death.”

Kelley also described the discussion of euthanasia as unavoidable. Many Canadians have watched loved ones become slaves to the machines that keep them alive and are struck by fear of a bad death in a sterile hospital. “There is a nostalgia for a peaceful country death, as death has become so medicalized,” explained Kelley.

C

hoosing the time and manner of one’s death is, at the end of the day, a very personal issue. Putting aside the policy making, there remains the inevitable and individual struggle with mortality that every human must face. It is these encounters with death that have brought euthanasia to the forefront of the political agenda. Kelley is heading up this commission a few years after watching a hospice assist both of his parents in dying; MP Francine Lalonde’s effort to legalize euthanasia has run parallel to another struggle: her own against cancer. In September she tearfully announced at a press conference that she would not be running for reelection because of a recurrence of bone cancer.

Whether Quebec will become euthanasia’s beachhead to Canada and North America remains to be seen. While some might say that Quebec has opened a Pandora’s box, the question of dying well and what that entails is universal. As Eng put it, “This is the kind of thing society has to grapple with.”

Raphaella Friedman ’12 is a Political Science major in Trumbull College. Contact her at raphaella.friedman@yale.edu.

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www.tyglobalist.org

Reviving Manx How the language indigenous to the Isle of Man disappeared and came back to life

By Jeffrey Dastin

N

ick Merrill walked the streets of Douglas with a tape recorder and an archaic instruction manual.

He passed British stores where salesmen welcomed customers in Gaelic. He passed Anglican churches where Gaelic translations accompanied English bibles and signs. Douglas, the capital of the Isle of Man, a self-governed British Crown Dependency in the Irish Sea, conveyed a mixed cultural heritage.

Entering Mad Dog’s pub, Merrill, then 17, referred to his manual and greeted locals in Manx Gaelic, the dead, indigenous language of the Isle of Man: “Fastyr mie.”

Recording and taking lessons from the few speakers across the island, Merrill learned to speak Manx within three weeks. A year later, he wrote The Voice of Man, a book documenting his cultural experience. Merrill had taken part in a modern resurrection: the revival of Manx.

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Manx died when it was no longer spoken as a primary language, coinciding with the death of native speaker Ned Maddrell in 1974. While some islanders learned Manx before Maddrell’s death, the language’s endangerment was clear. Yet cultural and economic changes on the Isle of Man facilitated a popular movement to revive Manx. In 1982, the island’s parliament, Tynwald, created the Manx Heritage Foundation to promote Manx culture.

Among other things, the foundation offers language classes and hosts the Cooish, a weeklong festival of Manx language and music. The revitalization raises important questions: Why revive a language when the dominance of a few languages fosters global communication? What causes a language to die in the first place?

Manx Gaelic is one of six Celtic languages, dating back to the fifteenth century. At the end of the 1700s, the British

government established a presence on the Isle of Man to counteract merchants smuggling British goods through the island.

Manx did not fit the new British order, and officials disparaged Manx as the language of farmers and fishermen. Soon, Tynwald conducted deliberations in English, education became based on the English model, and the Anglican Church showed hostility to the Catholic natives.

It was the ethnically Manx, however, who did most harm to the language. Many emigrated to Britain in search of work.

Those who remained wished to study English because it was the language of business and government—the language of social mobility. “Up until thirty years ago, [the Manx language] was a mark of disgrace,” said Brian Stowell, a 74-year-old citizen of the Isle of Man. “The people were proud of being Manx [ethnically]… proud that the Isle of Man has got its own government, that it’s not in the United Kingdom.”

But the language was antiquated. Public disdain for Manx suggested that a language lost value when it no longer served everyday needs. Increasingly, the needs of the Manx people shifted away from agricultural traditions and toward business conducted in an English-speaking world.

As Merrill would do decades later, a teenage Stowell helped the community record Ned Maddrell and other native speakers before they passed away. In the process, Stowell learned Manx. Stowell left the Isle of Man to pursue a career in physics, but he returned in 1991 to become the first Manx Language Officer of Tynwald’s Education Department. Working with other officials, he developed a program to teach Manx to children age seven and up. “The number of children with the approval of parents overwhelmed us,” said Stowell. Despite the stigma that Manx had carried on the Isle of Man, Stowell felt that “the loss of the language made a terrific psychological impact on the people here.”

An excerpt from the Manx graphic novel “Yn Chelg.”

Translation below.

“What’s going on?” c’red ta taghyrt?

“I’m not sure but there’s something funny about this.” cha s’aym, agh ta red ennagh quaaght bentyn rish shoh.

“YOU!”

uss!

“Diarmaid Ó Duibhne. I’m placing you under obligation to take me away out of here.” y yeermad o divney! ta mee cur fo guess oo mish y chur lhiat ass y voayl shoh!

“Excuse me, dear lady, but I don’t think I know you.” gow my leshtal, y ven seyr... agh cha nel enneyaym ort, vel?

“You’ll know me very well from now on. I am the Princess Gráinne, daughter of the High King of Ireland.” bee enney feer vie ayd orrym maghey shoh. mish grainney, inneen yn ard-ree.

“Now… through that sunroom, quickly.” nish...trooid y ghrianane shen hoal dy çhelleeragh!

“In the name of… What is she saying?” ayns ennym yee! c’red t’ee gra?

The decline of the language had drawn little attention, but its extinction felt like the end of a culture. Youth in particular were affected because they grew up during the island’s economic evolution.

In the 1980s, the Isle of Man became a tax haven for British companies, causing

32 32 32 FOCUS: DEATH 32 the island’s economy to boom. For locals, the change was noteworthy. New opportunities for advancement made searching for work outside the Isle of Man unnecessary. While English remained the language of business, prosperity was widespread enough that locals could learn Manx as a hobby. The government could afford to sponsor cultural festivals and language classes, and the people could afford to attend. Unlike previous generations of Manx, the new generation viewed the language as part of its heritage rather than a social impediment. Even foreigners liked the revival of Manx as “partly a romantic idea,” said Stowell.

Although money and public support were necessary, language revival was achieved through teaching. The culmination of efforts like Stowell’s was the founding of the Bunscoill Ghaelgagh in 2001, the first primary school conducted entirely in Manx. Students begin at the age of four and learn Manx for the first two years of school. Afterward, the Bunscoill follows the standard curriculum of the Isle of Man, but instruction in subjects such as geography, history, and math is in Manx. When necessary, a council within the Bunscoill invents Manx vocabulary to match the specialized terminology of the sciences. English is studied once a week.

“Most countries already have the language being spoken in the home and in the community, and they then have the schools,” said Julie Matthews, the head

the yale globalist: winter 2010 teacher of the Bunscoill, “whereas we are trying to promote the language through the children.” Whether this is an effective strategy is still unclear: The oldest graduates of the Bunscoill are only in middle school.

Harry, Matthews’s ten-year-old nephew and a student at the Bunscoill, said he enjoys learning in Manx because it connects him to the island’s history. His classmate Toshiki felt differently. Toshiki does not plan to speak Manx after graduating and claimed that among friends, “most of the time we speak English, sometimes Manx.”

While Toshiki’s lack of interest seems like a simple unwillingness to do work, it raises the question whether children can bear the burden of language preservation.

Instruction in Manx is available to adults as well. In 2004, Adrian Cain became the Manx Language Development Officer for the Manx Heritage Foundation. In addition to increasing the language’s profile through the press, Cain teaches language classes everyday. One problem Cain faces is that parents commit their children to learning Manx but do not commit themselves. “Passive support is all well and good, of which there’s a lot, but making the move to learning the language is a difficult one,” said Cain.

The dissemination of the language in modern culture also is important. Working to create a new body of Manx literature, Stowell translated Alice in Wonderland into Manx and wrote a full-length Manx novel, Dunveryssyn yn Tooder-Folley, or The

Language Development Officer Adrian Cain, center, instructs the class to touch their heads as he teaches the Manx imperative mood. (Courtesy Adrian Cain)

Vampire Murders. He is currently writing his memoirs in Manx. Every Sunday, Stowell discusses Manx history and current affairs on Manx Radio. Among other radio programs offered in Manx are weather reports and music broadcasts. Manx even has an outlet in television; British cartoons are dubbed in Manx and then sold on DVD. “I think the DVDs are going to sell horribly,” said Merrill. “That’s not the point. The point is just to produce media that is Manx … and lessen the complete monopoly that British culture has over the island.”

The loss of the language made a terrific psychological impact on the people here.

—Brian Stowell, Citizen of the Isle of Man As Merrill watched the modern resurrection unfold, he asked, “Why would you want to save a language? It’s a really interesting question because there are a lot of benefits to everybody speaking the same language: more communication, more peace. But I think that people embed a lot of culture in language and language embeds a whole way of thinking about the world.”

For example, the concept of private property is difficult to express in Manx because it did not exist in Celtic culture. Merrill notes that one cannot ask, “Do you have a boat?” in Manx. Possession translates to, “Is there a boat at you?” To many, a way of viewing the world is itself worth preserving. This is no surprise considering the pride that the Manx take in their obscure culture.

Cain argues that learning Manx is important because it creates “a modern identity for the twenty-first century, which is inclusive.” He believes the language can serve as a “cultural reference point” for the population of the Isle of Man, even though 60 percent are not ethnically Manx. The language gives the Isle of Man significance apart from its tax-haven status, and appreciating Manx heritage connects people as much as a common language like English can. “For Manx, there is life after death,” said Cain. In this increasingly globalized world, few languages will have such fortune.

Jeffrey Dastin ’14 is in Saybrook College.

Contact him at jeffrey.dastin@yale.edu.

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Dying to Live In South Korea, funerals staged for living participants provide a controversial path to better lives.

By Jessica Shor

W

ith a final strike of the hammer, the coffin lid is sealed. Shrouded in a traditional white funeral robe and surrounded by darkness and silence, the body lies in peace. Yet after ten minutes, the undertaker returns and opens the coffin. The deceased, suddenly bathed in light, climbs out of his final resting place, ready to begin life again.

In South Korea funerals like this one, staged for living participants, have become a centerpiece of the well-dying movement, a popular yet controversial effort to help Koreans find meaning in their lives.

At each well-dying seminar, participants begin by listening to a speech about the importance of finding meaning in one’s life. Then they analyze their own lives, including writing final messages to their families and friends and creating a last will and testament. With an often-teary good-bye, participants climb into their coffins, where they remain enclosed for up to fifteen minutes, left alone with their thoughts.

Korea Life Consulting, a company that pioneered the m ove -

ment, has provided simulated funerals for more than 50,000 Koreans, according to the company’s founder, Ko-min Su. Entrepreneurs around the country have since started offering their own well-dying seminars, seeking to capitalize on a growing trend. Some major companies, including Samsung, Hyundai, and Kyobo Life Insurance, have even gone as far as to require many of their employees to take part in simulated funerals.

While the seminars are for-profit enterprises—price per person ranges from $50 to $350—the leaders of this movement emphasize the psychological benefits their service provides. “These funerals affect people very strongly emotionally,” said Su. “People realize what they need to change in their lives, and that is very important.

Participants can live better after this experience.” Dr. E. James Lieberman, an American psychiatrist who focuses on the psychology of mortality, agreed, calling the well-dying movement “constructive.”

According to Lieberman, “In Korea they’re saying that death isn’t untouchable, that it happens to all of us, so let’s deal with it. Do you want to wait until someone puts your body in a coffin, or do you want to do it yourself?

It shows a good spirit.”

Despite the apparent oddity of the well-dying movement, it may not be a coincidence that the trend emerged in South Korea. The country holds the unfortunate record of having the highest suicide rate in the world. Suicides have doubled in the last 10 years, skyrocketing to 31 deaths per 100,000 people. By comparison, Japan has the world’s second highest suicide rate, at 24 per 100,000.

Korea’s rising suicide rate is often attributed to recent societal changes. According

Illustration by TaoTao Homes/TYG

to Kyoo-soeb Ha, the president of the Suicide Prevention Association of Korea, urbanization, economic modernization, and a liberalizing social climate have all contributed to weakened family ties, which Koreans traditionally relied on for social and psychological support.

The well-dying movement’s relationship with Korea’s high suicide rate is a point of contention. Many, like Lieberman, see simulated funerals as a positive step to combating the problem. “Awareness of death, and being mature about it, is an important step,” explained Lieberman. “If this movement helps people understand their own mortality and improve their lives, that’s healthy.”

Others, though, think that participating in one’s own funeral is at best unhelpful, and at worst a possible push towards suicide. A former senior manager at Samsung Korea, speaking on condition of anonymity, criticized his company’s practice of requiring employees to stage their own funerals: “These rituals turn suicide into a personal matter,” he said. “There have to be more societal changes, and people need to look into what aspects of society cause suicides. We can’t just require people to take part in these seminars but not look at how the stressful work environment at Samsung may contribute to suicide.”

Suicide remains a taboo topic in Korean culture, and Koreans have limited access to psychological treatment. In this context, the well-dying movement offers Koreans a rare chance to deal directly with the problems they face. While the debate continues over the effects of simulated funerals, more and more people are turning to the movement for help, before the lids close on their coffins for good.

Jessica Shor ’13 is an Anthropology major in Ezra Stiles College. Contact her at jessica.shor@yale.edu.

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the yale globalist: winter 2010

Waiting for Vultures A drastic decline in Mumbai’s vulture population has left Zoroastrian funerary practices floundering.

By Uzra Khan

(Courtesy Tom Thai/Flickr Creative Commons)

I

n 2006, some gruesome photos surfaced in Mumbai that shocked all who saw them. Taken by a woman named Dhan Baria, the photos revealed rotting dead bodies piled on top of each other. Some had been left to decompose for years and had eyes that had been gouged out by crows.

Baria is a Parsi, part of the Zoroastrian tradition that emigrated from Greater Iran to South Asia over a thousand ago.

Today the Parsi community in India is small: some 65,000 remain and have integrated themselves into society. Believers in cosmic dualism, Parsis maintain a strict division between forces of good and evil; nothing related to sadness or suffering can come into contact with the pure natural elements of fire and earth. A deceased human body, infested with the hostile demon of putrefaction, cannot be burned or buried. Instead, it is to be left in the Parsi “Towers of Silence,” giant open-roofed

mausoleums, to be devoured by vultures.

When Baria’s mother died in 2005 her body was left here. When Baria found out that it could take nearly a year for her mother’s body to decompose, she went to investigate.

While the system worked for many years in Mumbai, Baria’s photos exposed the current state inside the Towers of Silence—a horrifying lack of decomposition.

No one but a handful of corpse bearers had witnessed the problem until Baria man-

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www.tyglobalist.org aged to get inside the Towers after doling out a generous bribe. So why weren’t the bodies decomposing?

O

ver the years, the number of vultures in India has fallen drastically. “When I was first married, the trees bordering the Doongerwadi land [the location of the Towers] could be seen from my house,” said Kulsum Dubash, who lives close to the Towers of Silence in Mumbai, “and used to be full of vultures. But for many years now there have been none.”

The culprit is Diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug used with humans to treat pain and swelling caused by arthritis, as well as with livestock. Diclofenac has been shown to kill vultures that eat the flesh of these humans and animals. By 2003, the vulture population on the Indian subcontinent had declined by 93 percent, and 99 percent by 2008. “Parsis speak of a time when vultures would be waiting for bod-

also practical concerns, like the stench of rotting flesh that arises from the Towers.

Cremation and burial are other options that some Parsis are turning to. “In a theological sense, it shouldn’t matter to a Parsi if his body lies in the Towers, for his soul has escaped. But it is, of course, an issue of emotion,” said Vevaina.

T

he Bombay Parsi Panchayat (BPP), a mostly conservative group of trustees who oversee the affairs of the Parsi community in Mumbai, opposes changes in death rituals. A vocal trustee of the BPP, Khojeste Mistree, said that “over 97 percent of Parsis living in Mumbai prefer to take the Tower of Silence route versus cremation, despite the reformists and media mischievously seeking to sensationalize and mislead the reader.”

Taking an active stance against reform, the BPP even banned from the Towers two priests who have been performing ceremo-

I live near the Towers of Silence, and I can smell the stench of bodies from there. Vultures were the best, eco-friendly method, but we are running out of options now.

—Khusroo Madan, Parsi priest ies at the Towers of Silence. Today, there are none,” said Yuhan Vevaina, lecturer of Zoroastrian Studies at Harvard University.

The governments of India and Pakistan have banned Diclofenac, but workarounds to the ban are commonplace. “The same chemicals are being sold for veterinary use in different brand names. In effect, it is Diclofenac being sold under different names,” said Rishad Naoroji, an expert on birds of prey in India. In any case, the damage was done years ago.

The effect that the decline in vultures has had on the Parsi mortuary practices is grimly obvious. The bodies can no longer be disposed of effectively. “Bodies were supposed to be totally consumed within hours whereas they now decompose gradually over nine months to a year,” said Homi Khusrokhan, a Parsi who advocates thinking practically and changing these rituals to adapt to changing times. Bodies piling up in the Towers not only raise questions about dignity of the deceased and the emotions of the bereaved, but

nies at Parsi cremations and burials. There is currently a case in the Bombay High Court against the BPP, stating that the ability to exclude priests exceeds their jurisdiction as a body of trustees. “They say that undergoing a cremation defiles the holy fire. Well, I ask them, do they eat tandoori chicken? By roasting it, they defile fire too.

Their logic is completely irrational,” said Khusroo Madon, one of the two excluded priests. “I live near the Towers of Silence, and I can smell the stench of bodies from there. Vultures were the best, eco-friendly method, but we are running out of options now.” There is no stigma attached to cremations done for non-Indian Parsis, which has also brought the logic of the BPP into question. Some believe that a large part of the BPP’s resistance to cremation stems from a fear of losing the valuable property of Doongerwadi to the government or to developers, if the Towers become unnecessary.

Complaints about putrid smells around the Towers of Silence were lodged by near-

by residents, and as the situation continues to deteriorate, some solutions have been proposed. Solar reflecting panels have now been placed inside the Towers, and these help to dehydrate the corpses once they are there, reducing the role of vultures in the mortuary process. However, these are ineffective in the monsoon months from June to September and have been criticized as being a means of ‘backdoor cremation,’ supported by the BPP, which so strongly condemns outright cremation.

Despite the ineffectiveness of the solar panels, there has been a gradual reduction in the smell around the Towers of Silence. This sparked rumors about whether the khandias, the corpse bearers who are the only people with access into the area where the corpses lie, were using special chemicals on the bodies. No one is quite sure.

Another potential solution would be to breed vultures in captivity: “The majority of the community want the BPP trustees to bring back the vultures in Mumbai and house them in a giant aviary over two of the three functional Towers of Silence,” said Mistree, who also claimed that the proposed solution would cater to ecological conservation. For many reasons, though, this solution has been deemed unrealistic.

The ongoing use of Diclofenac, the lack of a forest environment amidst Mumbai’s high rises, and high levels of noise pollution would make the project difficult.

T

he debate goes further than ecological concern: Differences in opinion on solutions to the problem of body disposal represent a deep rift between the traditionalists and the progressives in the Parsi community today. The vulture conundrum only exacerbates an ever-expanding clash of opinions that is “dividing our community,” according to Madon.

With an aging population and strict rules governing marriage and lineage, the Parsi community faces extinction. At the same time, an end to the controversy about how to handle the death ritual is nowhere in sight. Unless deeper rifts are resolved, bodies will continue to accumulate in the Towers of Silence, until one day there are no more Parsis to die in Mumbai.

Uzra Khan ’12 is a Psychology major in Trumbull College. Contact her at uzra.khan@yale.edu.

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the yale globalist: winter 2010

Collecting Fragments

Post-dirty war, Colombian forensics teams match remains and families.

By Rae Ellen Bichell

After intense mapping and surveying, anthropologists with EQUITAS uncovered a grave with the bodies of three victims of Dirty War violence. (Courtesy EQUITAS 2006)

I

t all started in the 1960s.

Death squads of right-wing paramilitaries started to abduct civilians from the countryside, killing them or sending them to torture centers to weaken the agrarian Marxist rebels. The bodies, mostly those of the peasant farmers that make up the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), were quickly disposed of in nearby rivers, ditches, and hastily dug mass graves. Colombia’s dirty war has killed an untold number of people, more than the dirty wars in Chile, Peru, and El Salvador. Even now, people continue to disappear. “We will never have all the information,” said Drisha Fernandes, a member of the Colombian Interdisciplinary Team for Forensic Work and Psychosocial Assistance (EQUITAS). Still, groups like EQUITAS are trying to piece together the country’s murky history of violence and human rights abuses, starting with the most basic material: DNA. It was only in 2005 that Colombia’s Congress approved a law aimed at demobilizing the 20,000 paramilitary fighters still responsible for kidnappings, murders, and trafficking cocaine. Seeking truth and reconciliation, families are finally reporting the disappearances of their loved ones after years of mourning in secrecy.

In the past eight years, 50,000 missingpersons cases have been reported, the result of years of forensics and humanitarian efforts to convince victims’ families to come forward—a notable feat in a region where people are still afraid that doing so will prompt paramilitaries to try to silence

them with violence.

This increased openness on the part of families of the missing has enabled Colombian forensics teams to uncover 3,269 bodies in unofficial graves across the country since 2006. Armed with a flurry of sensors, magnetometers, and ground-penetrating radar, they locate the clandestine graves, most of them overgrown with dense forest cover, sometimes intentionally obscured where shovels concealed a mutilated body.

Charged with the daunting task of identifying the dead, these teams send anything they can find—bits of hair, bone, or tissue—to labs in Bogotá for DNA identification. The ultimate goal: to identify every body they find.

For many on the forensic teams, that goal is personal. “The people that are doing the work are close to the history,” said Douglas Ubelaker, who leads workshops across the globe on forensic identification.

“There’s the well-meaning mindset that ‘these awful things happened to my community and I’m going to make it right.’”

Despite the challenges forensics teams overcome to recover bodies, the process of DNA identification has come under scrutiny by NGOs like EQUITAS and Physicians Without Borders. “People think genetics is a magic wand. A little bone, a little blood, and magic is there. Boom!” said Fernandes, who works with families to reconstruct the conditions surrounding the death of a relative.

But DNA identification only tells part of the story. “The government really likes that idea, but it leaves out a lot of information,” said Fernandes. “You need to figure

out the context of the death,” namely, the human rights abuses surrounding it, like torture and rape, which largely go undocumented and are often sidelined because they are difficult to prove. The fact that such crimes were so ubiquitous, however, makes it all the more important to investigate. Unfortunately, that may not be realistic. For one, said Fernandes, “We have very low standards in crime scene investigation. It’s crappy.”

The fact that the conflict was so recent presents another host of issues. “For the analysis to be on target you need to have some distance, at least in an intellectual sense,” said Ubelaker. “They’re pursuing truth and justice, so there is a closer relationship between the investigation and the analysis.” Sometimes this connection can propel an investigation toward an answer more haphazardly than if proper procedures were followed.

Remains are continually being uncovered: EQUITAS even has a do-it-yourself online tutorial on how to find a missing person. But recovery teams may be biting off more than they can chew. The recovered remains are scattered across the country, prepared and analyzed by a wide range of labs. The Justice and Peace Unit of the State Prosecutor’s Office reported that only 12 percent of the mortal remains recovered since 2006 have been identified.

The rest lie in labeled piles on sterile metal shelves, silent and anonymous.

Rae Ellen Bichell ’12 is an Anthropology major in Davenport College. Contact her at raeellen.bichell@yale.edu.

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On Touring Poverty

By Jasmine Lau

T

While the trip did not strike me as voyeuristic, the poverty felt cheapened when the guides pointed it out in attempt to evoke in us a sense of pathos.

he guide walked us through the maze of Kampung Pulo, an informal settlement in Jakarta, Indonesia. The tenements, a hodgepodge of concrete, corrugated metal sheets, and wooden planks, lacked doors or locks, leaving the 147 poor families that live there with little privacy. As we slowly made our way through the sewage-strewn alleyways, a woman wrapped in a towel gave us a nonchalant glance while doing her laundry.

Half-naked men dozed on the ground amidst buzzing flies. Children played tag barefoot in the gutter.

Slum tours come in many different forms, but they have always been controversial. The first favela tours in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil sprung up more than 15 years ago, offering guided visits of neighborhoods notorious for violence and drug trafficking. While operators and advocates claimed that these tours could raise awareness about poverty and stimulate the local economy, people shuddered at the idea of foreign tourists gawking at miserable conditions and snapping photographs of the squalor. Critics called these tours voyeuristic for trivializing poverty into entertainment and even argued that they violate the basic rights of residents who never give their consent to participate.

Despite the criticism, offshoots of the favela tours are now found all over the world, from township tours in South Africa to slum tours in India. As a traveler, I understood the instinctive allure of venturing off the charted territory of sterile, traditional tourist sights to see the lifestyle of ordinary people. My curiosity piqued, I signed up for a tour of the “hidden side” of Jakarta.

The tour took three hours, a sweaty trek through two different slums in Jakarta. I came back with dusty jeans, a memory card full of photos, and a considerably lighter wallet but little mental enlightenment or emotional growth. The living conditions at the kampungs were appalling, but I had expected it. I lacked any sense of true shock. While the trip did not strike me as voyeuristic, the poverty felt cheapened when the guides pointed it out in attempt to evoke in us a sense of pathos. It bothered me that I had been made to feel sorry

for the residents.

I was also troubled by Ronny Poulan, the founder of Jakarta Hidden Tours. In his forties and a former film producer, Poulan was kindhearted and socially conscious but patronizing and clueless with regards to the ethics of tourism as well as the protocols of successful charity. “Photos are for a good purpose, and the people do not refuse,” he told me when I expressed my concern about photography being disrespectful. He called us “angels” for reaching out to the locals, a label that made me uneasy; I harbored no delusions about the self-beneficial nature of the tour. Half of the profits from the trip goes to an NGO that Poulan founded which reinvests in the community. But from one of its “projects” I saw on the tour, a one-room community center where Poulan’s daughter was the only regular volunteer teacher, I was not convinced that the trip had any real charitable impact or that Poulan was even driven to do good.

While friends have told me about other tours that were more sensitive and focused on culture and history rather than simple poverty, I was still unsure. Even if reasonable ground rules are set that ensure that the trip is respectful and less intrusive, what makes it this experience “better,” more authentic or more powerful, than watching a documentary?

Do we really need to a three-hour tour to understand the lives of the more unfortunate?

What are we going to do with this information and this experience afterwards? Personally, I do not have a satisfactory answer, which is why I will not be taking another trip.

The president of Brazil just unveiled a grand plan to bring tourists at the 2016 Olympics on a new wave of favela tours. I shudder to think what this entails: Slum tours incorporated into a mass tourism formula sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Jasmine Lau ’12 is an Economics and International Studies double major in Silliman College. Contact her at jasmine.lau@yale.edu.

38 38 38 PERSPECTIVES 38

the yale globalist: winter 2010

Closing Remarks: The 2010 World Expo Shanghai delivers on decadence, not ideas.

By Ben Schenkel

O

This Expo, the first to be hosted in a developing country, was less a kaleidoscope of futuristic ambitions than a shrine to questionable points of national pride.

ver my four months in Shanghai—living, toiling, and touring inside the 2010 World Expo—I acquired quite the stockpile of trinkets from its pavilions. With an armband from Angola, chocolate Smurfs from Belgium, and propaganda booklets from North Korea, I was pleased with my souvenir collection until the last week. That’s when I realized the traditional keepsake of any Expo was missing from my haul: an Expo passport. Coveted by the visitors for resale potential as well as nostalgia, their telltale stamps correspond to every pavilion, nearly 400 in all. Without those colorful imprimaturs, I feared I would leave the Expo with no proof of the factoids and friendships I had obtained.

To call Expo 2010 a self-enclosed, miniature world would do a disservice to its colossal scope. The fairground straddled a riverbank and outstripped the acreage of several participating countries. Despite my on-site lodgings in the Expo Village, I had to allow a full hour for each commute to the USA Pavilion. I was too busy volunteering there as a bilingual Student Ambassador to venture forth to the neighboring pavilions, not even for an in-and-out stamping.

As I eventually overcame my Expo agoraphobia, though, I began to branch out and learn more about the other pavilions. For my part, I had known since my training that the USA Pavilion was wholly dependent on private sponsorship. But sensitive as I was to the logos littering the USA Pavilion, I was still taken aback by the pervasiveness of branding throughout all of the Expo, a quarter of whose pavilions belonged to non-governmental entities.

Dashing through the national pavilions on my quest for stamps, I grew disenchanted by the salesmanship on display—as if the purpose of Expo were not transmitting knowledge, but pandering to would-be consumers. Apart from the rare pavilions that thoughtfully engaged with the official theme of “Better City, Better Life,” layering it with a country-specific value like Denmark’s on cycling and Israel’s on solar power, I trudged through dozens that amounted to little more than playgrounds or bazaars.

Pavilions dissatisfied me for several reasons.

There were those with a kitchen-sink approach and the attendant clutter, like Pakistan, which devoted an entire corridor to Mao’s supposed love of their homegrown mangoes. Others advocated an irrelevant message: Bolivia’s essentially pleaded to le-

galize the coca plant. Still more were built around flashy centerpieces and little else: Latvia, for example, boasted a wind tunnel. This Expo, the first to be hosted in a developing country, was less a kaleidoscope of futuristic ambitions than a shrine to questionable points of national pride.

Whereas I was disappointed by the scarcity of coherent signs and impressive inventions—after all, the 1904 and 1939 World’s Fairs gave us the ice cream cone and television, respectively—the visitors to Expo were more concerned with navigation, hydration, and self-preservation. As Expo 2010 wore on, attendance surged along with the unbearable temperatures: With 73 million visitors overall, predominantly from the Chinese hinterland, it has earned posthumous hype as the biggest peaceful event in human history. Although this superlative excludes combat zones, the Expo certainly felt like one. I had to be on constant guard against line-jumping, parasol-poking, and vicious elbowing. Picnics broke out in the middle of exhibits, listless burnouts napped atop benches, and loudspeakers clamored about missing children. The popular pavilions, like Japan and Saudi Arabia, had waits averaging six hours. Incivility ran rampant.

Even so, I am reluctant to agree with the frequent condemnation of the Expo as a $50-billion publicity stunt, for it did bring its share of benefits.

Contrasted with the Expo’s six-month lifespan, the revitalization it wrought on Shanghai’s infrastructure will be long lasting, whether through the retouched riverfront or the six-fold multiplication of subway lines. And unlike the pavilions, Shanghai’s resurgence as an international city isn’t at risk of being dismantled.

Still, the visitors I greeted at the USA Pavilion seemed too preoccupied—with mementos like the passports, with gimmicks like “4-D” special effects, and with merely getting through the door—to engage with the newly sparkling city, let alone with other worldviews. For many visitors, the Expo passports they took home commemorated little more than a trip to pure spectacle. Which is a shame, given the Expo’s potential to showcase the world to a populace that can rarely afford to use their real passports.

Ben Schenkel ’12 is an Ethics, Politics, and Economics and International Studies double major in Ezra Stiles College. Contact him at benjamin.schenkel@yale.edu.

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