Summer 2011: The New Frontiers

GLOBALIST The Yale

Summer 2011 / Vol. 11, Issue 4

THE NEW

FRONTIERS

Mass Weddings in Yemen 8 * Teaching Cambodia’s Genocide 12 * Pirates in Politics 16

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR 3

GLOBALIST The Yale

An Undergraduate Magazine of International Affairs Summer 2011 / Vol. 11, Issue 4 www.tyglobalist.org

This magazine is published by students of Yale College.

Yale University is not responsible for its contents.

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JOURNALISM A DVISORY B OARD Steven Brill, Yale Dept. of English Nayan Chanda, Director of Publications, MacMillan Center Daniel Kurtz-­‐Phelan, ơ Jef McAllister, Time Magazine Nathaniel Rich, The Paris Review Fred Strebeigh, Yale Dept. of English

ACADEMIC A DVISORY B OARD 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,

F

ew frontiers remain in the world as we know it today. Human history has been marked by never-‐ending exploration and discovery. One result of this drive to know the un-‐ known has been the creation of borders. As nations expanded, claiming ownership of frontier territory, boundaries were marked and borders were drawn. But borders and fron-‐ tiers can define more than just territory: Today, they are cultural, social, and political phe-‐ nomena as well.

In this issue of the Globalist, the final issue of the 2010 – 2011 academic year, our writers explore the concepts of frontiers and borders and the inevitable interactions between them.

In “Measuring Mountains,” Jonathan Kreiss-‐Tomkins delivers an intensely thoughtful and introspective narrative about his four-‐year journey climbing the mountains on the border between Argentina and Peru. Farther north, Emily Ullmann looks at a new plan to physically bridge the border between the United States and Mexico.

Other writers tackle the theme of frontiers and borders in less physical realms. Sarah Mich dives into the world of underwater archeology and the complex debate about modern day treasure hunters. In her piece on recent innovations in mapping, Cathy Huang explores the ways in which technology has crossed borders.

Outside of the Focus section, articles in this issue engage a host of complex political, cul-‐ tural, and economic issues. In “Swashbuckling, Tweeting Crusaders,” Sally Helm looks at the rise of the Pirate Party on the global political scene. Uriel Epshtein sits down with Iranian double agent Reza Khalili in a fascinating Q&A. Be sure to check out these stories and more inside the issue.

It has been an extraordinary year for the Globalist, and I am forever grateful to the writ-‐ ers, editors, production staff, and business team that made each issue of the magazine pos-‐ sible. We’ve put together an incredibly talented group that is sure to take the Globalist to new heights next year. Under the editorial leadership of Sanjena Sathian, I am excited to see what the future holds for this publication.

Many thanks for reading,

Jeffrey Kaiser Editor-‐in-‐Chief, The Yale Globalist

Production & Design Editors Raisa Bruner, Eli Markham Managing Editor for Online Catherine Osborn 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, Diego Salvatierra, Sanjena Sathian

Editors Emeritus Jesse Marks, Rachel Wolf

ON THE COVER:

Chandler Kemp crosses Portazuelo Negro in the Argentine Andes.

(Kreiss-Tomkins/TYG) Pictures from CreativeCommons used under Attribution Noncommercial license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

Executive Director Courtney Fukuda

Copy Editor Sophie Broach

Publisher Tonia Sun Directors of Development Joe Bolognese, Joanna Cornell Events Coordinator & Director of External Relations Margaret Zhang

Editors-at-Large Angela Ramirez, Emma Sokoloff-Rubin, Ali Weiner

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

The Yale Globalist thanks its sponsors: PLATINUM Thomas Barry James Awad GOLD Alpha Delta Pizza SILVER Larry Kaiser BRONZE Katherine Wolf

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CO N T EN T S

TABLE OF CONTENTS 5

Summer 201 1 / Vo l. 1 1 , Issue 4

12

20

36

8

FOCUS: Frontiers

20 | Measuring Mountains

32 | Bridging the Border

A journey into uncharted territory pushes personal and physical boundaries.

By Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins

26 | Bolivian Rhapsody An indigenous community revitalizes its culture — and its relationship with the earth. By Sanjena Sathian

How the United States and Mexico are trying to ease border crossing.

By Emily Ullmann

34 | Cholera’s Divisive Reappearance In the Dominican Republic and Haiti, history may prove harder to evade than an epidemic. By Deirdre Dlugoleski

36 | Exploring the Future of Undersea Excavation Underwater cultural heritage lies in wait for terrestrial answers.

By Sarah Mich

30 | The New Cartographers Novel mapping technologies are reshaping humanitarian and social movements. By Cathy Huang

CULTURE

6 | Art, Inc. A community of Chinese painters reproduces famous artwork en masse. By Joy Chen

7 | Corporate Networking, Indian Style Cricket leagues help Indian immigrants adjust to life in the United States. By Abhinav Gupta

Q&A

38 | Interview with Reza Khalili Questions for a double agent. By Uriel Epshtein

POLITICS & ECONOMY 8 | In Yemen, the More the Merrier?

Mass weddings may threaten the intimacy and tradition of marriage. By Erin Biel

10 | Waiting for a Revolution Why Cuba has more in common with China than Egypt. By Marissa Dearing

12 | In Search of Lost History Hope for genocide education in Cambodia?

By Nikita Lalwani

͝͠ ȁ Ƥ The introduction of new technologies has complicated the challenge of feeding Africa.

By Sophie Broach

16 | Swashbuckling, Tweeting Crusaders Newly formed but spreading fast, the Pirate Party fights for copyright reform and an end to censorship. By Sally Helm

66 CULTURE

THE YALE GLOBALIST: SUMMER 2011

Art, Inc. A community of Chinese painters reproduces famous artwork en masse.

By Joy Chen

F

amous for her enigmatic smile, Da Vinci’s inimitable masterpiece “Mona Lisa” has been valued at over $700 million. But in Dafen, China, “Mona Lisa” pulled in just over $40 in recent sales.

“Mona Lisa” is just one of millions of oil paintings replicated each year in this artis-‐ tic boomtown.

Dafen, an urbanized village in the major Chinese manufacturing city of Shenzhen, is home to about 8,000 artists who specialize in producing remarkably accurate copies of famous artwork. From Van Gogh’s sunflow-‐ ers to Lichtenstein’s comic book blow-‐ups, familiar masterpieces appear quite liter-‐ ally on every street corner, meeting the de-‐ mands of tourists, interior design suppliers, and hotel mass-‐market orders from around the world.

Originating in the 1980s, when Chinese economic liberalization policies encour-‐ aged the migration of the post-‐WWII Hong Kong painting trade to mainland China, the art hub now claims at least 700 art galler-‐ ies and produces an impressive 60 percent of the world’s oil paintings. The vast ma-‐ jority of Dafen’s artists work from their homes or rent studios, shops, and galleries on the first floors of brick buildings, where they paint for nine to ten hours a day. Af-‐

artists have been described as mere copy-‐ ists at best, and counterfeiters at worst.

Yet according to Winnie Wong, a junior fel-‐ low at Harvard who has spent four years researching and writing about Dafen, the claims are not based on verifiable fact or observation in China: “If you were to visit Dafen village once, you would see that the idea that it is made up of ‘copyists’ who have no creativity is not very true.” While some of the artists concentrate on produc-‐ ing over a hundred “Mona Lisas” over two years, other artists strive to create original artwork, including original commissions sourced from customer photographs sent by email. However, these originals amount to only about 5 percent of all the pieces sold.

Accusations of sweatshop labor from the media are often based on Dafen art-‐ ists’ almost mechanical productivity and relatively low wages. Mary Ann O’Donnell, a Shenzhen-‐based artist-‐ethnographer, ad-‐ mitted that levels of exploitation in Shen-‐ zhen are increasing. “Part of what has kept the boom going is this level of oppression.

In that sense, yes, some places are dirtier than others.”

On the other hand, Australian Bailey O’Malley, artist and owner of Dafen’s Pix-‐ 2oils gallery, questioned the comparison

The art hub now claims at least 700 art galleries and produces an impressive 60 percent of the world’s oil paintings. ter several years honing their skills in local art-‐specialty high schools, art academies, or through self-‐study, Dafen artists have no problem churning out copy after copy of idyllic landscapes, stark abstracts, and life-‐ like portraits.

With news headlines like, “China’s Art Factories: Van Gogh From the Sweatshop” and “Copying Mona Lisa: The Fake Art Industry in China,” international criticism has focused on Dafen’s mass-‐production of Western canonical masterpieces. Dafen

of Dafen factories to sweatshops: “ ‘Sweat-‐ shops’ is a story that will sell, but I have never met an artist who aspires to be a laborer or rice farmer.” He added that as skilled laborers, artists earn sufficient liv-‐ ing wages, and exceptional artists can make above-‐average incomes. According to Wong, an average painter in Dafen can make about 3,000 renminbi (RMB) per month, about $500 and just enough to get by in China. The best earn more than three times that amount.

Hand-painted replicas of Western masterpieces fuel the art market in Dafen, China. (Flickr Creative Commons/mandiberg) Some artists, however, disagree with O’Malley’s assertion of job satisfaction: “I don’t think I will do this job forever,” re-‐ marked Alice Liu of Shenzhen Yayuan Art Company. Others, like Tony Liu, an artist at Dafen’s Spring of Art Oil Painting Studio, reflected that “it is hard to earn enough money to feed oneself, and fierce competi-‐ tion means luck is important sometimes.”

Nonetheless, he remained optimistic about the liberties his job affords: “It is a very free career; nobody will supervise the artist.

Artists can explore new areas of visual art.”

This mix of intense work ethic and contested work conditions seems to find a niche in the profitable Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen, often dubbed the “work-‐ shop of the world.” At the same time, cre-‐ ative exploration is budding as the pros-‐ pering nouveau riche in China demand more luxuries and the international market widens. In this context, Dafen’s art boom will surely flourish, fueling original author-‐ ship along with it. This convergence of an Eastern market with Western art in Dafen speaks to the power of globalization and the experience of artists and their art in con-‐ temporary society. The masterpiece and the mass-‐market are together at last.

JOY CHEN ‘13 is in Silliman College. Contact her at joy.chen@yale.edu.

CULTURE 7

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Corporate Networking, Indian Style Cricket leagues help Indian immigrants adjust to life in the United States.

By Abhinav Gupta

‘I

t came right down to the end, right round. Leagues have emerged across the Valley engineer remarked, “It took a long to the last over,” reminisced Shailen-‐ United States, especially in areas with large time for me to adjust to the States. Even dra Singh, a software engineer at Indian populations like New York and San now, it’s hard to fit in; however, cricket helps me feel part of a community.” The sport has EMC Corporation. “But, of course, we made Francisco.

Though informal, these leagues draw facilitated the creation of pockets of Indian sure that we won.” On a crisp mid-‐October Sunday afternoon, Singh and 21 Indian im-‐ players with true talent. “Sure, some play culture in America. “We’ve formed a circle migrants received small trophies under a casually,” said Singh. “But, for us, we want that’s into cricket,” said Singhal. “When you’ve moved past wives meeting, blue tent on a baseball field in cen-‐ to males playing together each tral Massachusetts. Singh’s team, weekend consistently, you’ve got a the ECC Hoickers, had just defeated community,” he said, laughing.

TechPro to win the inaugural 2010 While Indians may not grasp Cornell’s Cup. But, though they the four down system of American stood on a diamond, it was not base-‐ football or the office March Mad-‐ ball that they had been playing for ness pool, they can readily appre-‐ the last three hours. Rather, as Singh ciate the differences between the put it, “we played the only sport that off-‐cutter, the leg cutter, and the re-‐ brought us together, cricket.” verse swing: the nuances of cricket.

Though foreign to most Ameri-‐ At EMC and other organizations cans, cricket is the second most that employ large numbers of Indi-‐ popular sport in the world. In India, ans, recent conversation has been cricket transcends sport: It is reli-‐ dominated by the ICC World Cup gion. In every park, alleyway, and that occurred in March. “It’s been parking lot, youngsters can be seen the status quo, at lunch, in meet-‐ smacking tennis balls with make-‐ ings, anywhere. It’s been all we’ve shift wooden bats. Team India play-‐ talked about,” said Singh. “It’s the ers like Sachin Tendulkar and M.S. most common topic; it really breaks Dhoni star in shampoo commer-‐ the ice.” Singh’s teammates and co-‐ cials, light up roadside billboards, workers awoke at 4:30 a.m. to cheer and decorate the walls in the rooms on the Indian national team in the of Indian children. “It’s a fact. If Cricket in the United States is rising in popularity as Indians imWorld Cup Final, as did countless you’re Indian, of course you know migrate. (Flickr Creative Commons/Michelle Tribe) other Indians in living rooms, bars, cricket,” said Singh.

As Indians have emigrated from India, to improve. Cricket is our passion.” In fact, universities, and theaters across the world.

Just like chicken tikka masala or “Slum-‐ they have brought their national pastime many of the players played cricket at the with them. In the United States many collegiate level in India. In America, these dog Millionaire,” Indian cricket has been cricket leagues are composed of company-‐ recreational leagues scout players, form se-‐ exported globally. As the Indian team lifted sponsored teams that draw the many edu-‐ lection committees, and employ formal um-‐ the Cricket World Cup, Sunil Gavaskar, the Indian commentator, exclaimed, “All Indian cated Indian professionals working in the pires to foster healthy competition.

That said, cricket is more than an im-‐ fans will be rejoicing, not just here, but corporate world. In the ten-‐team New Eng-‐ land Cricket Association, teams from EMC, ported hobby: It is a way for immigrants to wherever they are in the world.” Through MathWorks, and eClinicalWorks, among stay connected to the life they left behind. leagues, television, and passing office con-‐ other companies, compete in a round-‐robin “We played all the time as kids,” said D.V. versation, cricket culture unites Indians, three month summer season. Similarly, the Nagraj, an IT specialist who plays with his shaping a collective national pride that Michigan Cricket Association fields teams colleagues from the University of Massa-‐ crosses oceans. from Ford, DaimlerChrysler, and General chusetts Medical School. “It allows us to re-‐ ABHINAV GUPTA ’13 is a Biology and Motors, which compete in a Detroit-‐based live the memories of India.”

Political Science double major in Daven-‐ Cricket not only connects immigrants summer tournament. At the Microsoft port College. Contact him at headquarters in Redmond, WA, seven dif-‐ to their pasts but also helps them adjust in abhinav.gupta@yale.edu. ferent intra-‐company teams compete year-‐ their new homes. Ashish Singhal, a Silicon

88 POLITICS & ECONOMY

THE YALE GLOBALIST: SUMMER 2011

In Yemen, the More the Merrier?

Though they aim to make marriage easier for impoverished grooms, mass weddings may threaten the intimacy and tradition of marriage.

By Erin Biel

I

t is 10 a.m. and the sports stadium in Sana’a, Yemen is packed. Hun-‐ dreds of young men swathed in white robes and black and gold headscarves begin to congregate, their long, curved golden swords held at the ready. Local celebrities have turned out for the event; the Yemeni President’s son, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, and representatives from 70 other coun-‐ tries are among the spectators. This is no conventional sporting event. In fact, it is not a sporting event at all. It is a mass wedding.

Mass weddings are meant to ease the financial burden that Yemeni grooms incur in paying the conventional, rather exorbitant wedding expenses. In a tradi-‐ tional wedding, the groom presents the bride’s family with a dowry of $5,000 or more in money and valuables, such as gold jewelry. During the ceremony itself, which lasts two to three days, the groom must rent a tent, furnish it with cushions and decorative lighting, and hire a tradi-‐ tional Yemeni band for nights of endless dancing. He must purchase enough lamb, bread, and rice to fill the stomachs of the entire community, and enough qat, a leaf

chewed for its stimulant effect, for all in attendance.

It’s quite a fanfare, and the cost of these time-‐honored extravaganzas weighs heavily upon a country in which half the population lives on less than $2 a day. Mass weddings initially evolved as a response to this conundrum. Lately, how-‐ ever, the innovative practice has taken on a new meaning, as people far removed from the bride and groom have co-‐opted these mass weddings to serve their own interests.

O

n October 21, 2010, the largest mass wedding on record was held by the Orphans’ Develop-‐ ment Foundation (ODF). Sixteen hun-‐ dred grooms, all orphans, took part in the ceremony, the third to be held thus far by ODF. “The mass weddings are in-‐ tended to help these young people marry by facilitating weddings and reducing costs,” said Bashir Radman, the director of management relations and marketing at ODF. The service is especially benefi-‐ cial for the grooms, who do not have fami-‐ lies to help pay the staggering wedding expenses. Radman continued, detailing

After the ceremony, the groomsmen celebrate and dance to the tune of the sitar and tambourine. (MTN Yemen)

the social purposes that mass weddings purportedly serve: “Mass weddings are a means of disseminating chastity among young people,” he said. This is an impor-‐ tant value in a country where the concept of “girlfriend and boyfriend” is culturally taboo and where people fear that if men are not married off soon enough, they will resort to prostitution.

Radman also praised mass weddings for reviving the principle of social solidar-‐ ity. ODF’s mass weddings have certainly become a social event over the years.

When ODF conducted its first mass wed-‐ ding in 2008, only 250 grooms took part, but in the three years since, the number of groomsmen and the ceremonial extrav-‐ agances have swelled dramatically.

T

he marked increase in the number of grooms who participate in mass weddings is far from coincidental; it is likely the result of politics. Saudi Arabia, the primary source of funding for Islamic organizations in Yemen, has tak-‐ en a particular interest in Yemeni mass weddings. Saudi King Abdullah’s brother, Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, has served as the principal donor to these weddings each year. Many view these seemingly charitable gestures as part of the Saudi kingdom’s efforts to exert its influence in the Middle East. As Oliver Holmes, a contributor to TIME maga-‐ zine with extensive experience in Yemen, noted, “Saudi Arabia tries to do a lot of PR… They have quite a few oil interests in Yemen.”

Majid al-‐Kibsi, a journalist for the Yemen Observer, an English-‐language newspaper published in Yemen, also ap-‐ peared skeptical of the Prince’s ostensi-‐ bly altruistic motives. “It is considered one of the shapes of charity to help a man get settled and get married, but the idea of charity is to keep the donor unidenti-‐ fied,” al-‐Kibsi said. “The way they pro-‐

POLITICS & ECONOMY 9

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In October, 1,600 groomsmen and dignitaries from over 70 countries crowded into a sports stadium to partake in the largest mass wedding on record. (MTN Yemen) mote the name of the sponsor is more like a political agenda.”

This sense of Saudi self-‐promotion is hard to overlook at ODF’s mass weddings.

The Crown Prince and other Saudi digni-‐ taries address the grooms from a tall po-‐ dium throughout the ceremony, and signs plastered around the stadium’s walls her-‐ ald the Crown Prince’s contributions to the event. Perhaps the most notable con-‐ tribution is the 200,000 Yemeni Rials, or $900, that the Crown Prince contributes to each groom’s dowry, nearly one-‐fifth of the expected dowry amount. Such appar-‐ ent benevolence on the part of the Crown Prince is hardly scrutinized by the Yeme-‐ ni orphan grooms, who otherwise receive little assistance.

M

ass weddings have also caught the attention of the corporate realm. Businesses have started to hold mass weddings for their male employees as a way of fostering loyalty within the company. In contrast to the humanitarian nature of the ODF mass weddings, corporate weddings are more a form of “corporate social responsibility to raise morale…[similar to] a big office party,” said Holmes, who attended both the recent ODF mass wedding and a cor-‐ porate mass wedding hosted by MTN, a multinational telecommunications com-‐ pany that operates in Yemen.

In November 2010, MTN hosted a mass wedding for 30 of its male employees. The ceremony was not all that different from ODF’s: Men donned the traditional white robes, chewed qat, listened to instrumen-‐ tal music, and sat on cushions—albeit not stadium chairs—while MTN executives

gave ingratiating speeches. MTN post-‐ ers decorated the room, reminding the groomsmen that the company had made the event possible. Televisions that dot-‐ ted the walls would suddenly come to life, only to reveal the face of Raid Ahmed, the CEO of MTN in Yemen, who congratu-‐ lated the grooms as valuable employees of the company. The role of MTN at the wedding seemed “very like Big Brother,” Holmes recounted.

One of the employees who participated in the wedding was Rami Bamashmous, an organizational development special-‐ ist in the human resources division. “I really feel [like] MTN is family to me, not just a company I’m working in,” he said. “As grooms in the mass wedding, we share the same memories which are unforgettable, and words can’t describe them.” But the wedding seemed to hold little significance for many of the grooms in attendance. Better off financially than ODF’s orphan grooms, a number of the MTN employees were also planning to hold their own, more intimate weddings.

Essentially, the grooms just came for the free party. “Usually the grooms will hold another traditional wedding ceremony after the mass wedding, so he can invite and celebrate with all [of] his friends and family,” al-‐Kibsi affirmed.

M

ass weddings, originally a prag-‐ matic answer for a country riddled with poverty, may be responsible for the end of private, inti-‐ mate marriages. The increasing popu-‐ larity of mass weddings has even made local religious leaders reconsider the traditional concept of a wedding. As mass

weddings infiltrate the corporate sector, tribal sheikhs have begun to fear losing their important religious role in wedding ceremonies. In turn, they have attempted to reassert their authority by also con-‐ ducting mass weddings in their villages.

While in the past two brothers would sometimes get married simultaneously, sheikhs are now all too willing to marry 50 men from a single community at once.

“In Yemen you must know that Yemeni Sheikhs don’t like to be left behind in any new trend,” al-‐Kibsi articulated. Yemeni groomsmen want the economic advantag-‐ es of a mass wedding, and if the sheikhs don’t keep up with the trend, they could find themselves out of a job.

This shift to mass weddings is fairly new, and many Yemeni wedding cus-‐ toms remain resilient to change, for now.

Back at the stadium where the 1,600 ODF orphans are getting married, all of the grooms suddenly jump to their feet and burst onto the central dance floor. Mov-‐ ing to the rhythm of the tambourine and Arab sitar, they unsheathe their tradi-‐ tional swords and spin them around their heads. The men are ecstatic, and the air is jubilant. One can only wonder what will happen to this tradition if or when the mass weddings grow any larger. Space on the dance floor could become stifling and, with that, these marked wedding tradi-‐ tions could be stifled as well. Perhaps the Saudi Crown Prince should next invest in the construction of a larger stadium for Yemen.

ERIN BIEL ’13 is a Global Affairs major in Ezra Stiles College. Contact her at erin.biel@yale.edu.

10 10 POLITICS & ECONOMY

THE YALE GLOBALIST: SUMMER 2011

Despite the decay, urban street artist José Fuster takes pride in his country. (Isaac Wasserman)

Waiting for a Revolution Why Cuba has more in common with China than Egypt.

By Marissa Dearing

I

n July 2011, a fiber-‐optic cable from Cuba to Venezuela will become operational, offering Cuba Inter-‐ net speeds up to 3,000 times faster than what is currently available.

In a country where travel is severely restricted, open telecommunication is nearly nonexistent, and human rights are suppressed, discontent has long festered under the boot of the Castro regime. In this new era of “Facebook revolutions,” will Internet access finally mobilize the discontented, as it has across the Middle East and North Africa, and threaten the Castro brothers’ regime?

Unfortunately, many veteran observ-‐ ers of Cuban affairs believe the cable will have no beneficial impact on civilian use of the Internet. Carlos Eire, professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale Uni-‐ versity and a Cuban exile, sees no change on the horizon for the Cuban people. “The only impact the cable will have on the is-‐ land will be on the tourists and the ruling elites,” he said, calling the cable “empty glitz and mere window dressing.”

The Cuban government itself has ad-‐

mitted to the state-‐sponsored newspaper Granma that, although the cable will im-‐ prove information technology and com-‐ munications and further cooperation among the region’s Latin American coun-‐ tries, it will not assure greater Internet access for the Cuban people. The regime claims widespread access would require a large infrastructure investment that will not be feasible in the near term. “The Cuban government has its own agenda for this cable,” said Damian Fernandez, former director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International Univer-‐ sity.

That agenda includes attracting pri-‐ vate investments, and the stakes are high for the Castro government. As Tomas Bil-‐ bao, executive director of the Cuba Study Group, pointed out, “there’s a need to re-‐ solve the deep economic crisis or, frankly, they may not have a country to rule.” The government seems to have judged that greater governmental access, increased communication with the Latin American region, stronger ties between Cuba and Venezuela, and possible economic ben-‐

efits offset the political risk of bringing greater Internet speeds to the island.

The Cuban government’s hopes for the cable also include improved internal op-‐ erations and tightened national security.

According to Andy Gomez, senior fellow at the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-‐American Studies, greater bandwidth means greater power, and the government intends to use the cable to counter outside information, dis-‐ seminate propaganda, and more effec-‐ tively police the people. Far from liberal-‐ izing or opening up the island, the Cuban government is looking to the cable to ad-‐ vance its own interests.

The Cuban government has been re-‐ markably successful in controlling Inter-‐ net access up to this point. Only about 3 percent of Cubans have a web connection, and many of those who do are government workers with access only to an intranet that does not allow free access to the wider Internet. Social media are almost nonexistent, as are free printed media.

According to Javier Corrales, professor of Political Science at Amherst College and

POLITICS & ECONOMY 11

WWW.TYGLOBALIST.ORG co-‐author of “Democracy and the Inter-‐ net,” in Cuba there are a “select few who are wired and the vast majority who… face government-‐imposed barriers.” This makes Cuba “much more draconian” than other authoritarian regimes, like China, which restrict only Internet content.

Beyond simply blocking access to the Internet, the Cuban government vigor-‐ ously attempts to counter any informa-‐ tion Cubans do find with its own online messaging. The government has taken a preemptive strategy of dispatching its own employees to post pro-‐government comments on blogs and media sites. They comment on Cuba-‐related stories, write their own blog posts, and put a spin on every story that appears about Cuba, ensuring that all information is, in some form, manipulated. This complicates the commonly held belief that technological advances inevitably serve as stepping-‐ stones for greater democracy and free-‐ dom of speech. Bilbao explained that al-‐ though technological advances “can be a weapon for greater liberalization,” as the government recognizes and fears, they can also “be used for greater repression” by the government.

Such repression may well prevent uprisings like those recently witnessed across the Middle East. The Cuban se-‐ curity apparatus acts the moment they hear about any sort of gathering: “They will let you talk, but they will not let you form conversation communities,” Cor-‐ rales explained. Every block has a Com-‐ mittee for the Defense of the Revolution watching with whom people meet, and Corrales emphasized that freedom of as-‐ sociation is “the freedom that has been most systematically repressed” in Cuba.

Because freedom of speech does not nec-‐ essarily lead to political action, the opin-‐ ions of a few isolated online rebels may not amount to much until the Cuban gov-‐ ernment allows for groups of like-‐minded people to gather.

Eire sees Cuban society, like that of Or-‐ well’s “1984,” as dominated by the govern-‐ ment’s masterful spinning of information and controlling of language, and infused with citizens’ paranoia and desire for self-‐preservation, both of which suppress political action. In response to the unrest in the Middle East, the government has intensified these efforts, often throwing dissidents in jail for a few days. “If you

decide to stick your neck out, chances are you’re going to be the only one…or there’s going to be so few others that you’re all going to pay a very heavy price,” ex-‐ plained Eire. “It’s very difficult for people to get out there and start shouting ‘down with this, let’s have change.’”

Mariolys Goenaga, an exile from the province of Pinar del Rio who still has family on the island, claimed that Cuban people are beaten down by an omnipres-‐ ent security organization that is aided by many citizen informants. Told by the gov-‐ ernment what to think, Cubans live with the little information provided because there is no alternative. According to Goe-‐ naga, Cubans “have a bandage over their eyes.” The government has “taught [the Cuban citizen] to be quiet, and if he talks, he talks softly.”

Still, some expect the new cable to bring limited benefits, thanks to the inge-‐ nuity of the Cuban people. In a telephone interview—over a bad connection and through half a dozen dropped calls—Yo-‐ ani Sánchez, famed Cuban blogger and critic of the Cuban government, shared her conviction that the ruling elites in-‐ tend the new submarine cable to benefit the Cuban government, not the Cuban public. Nevertheless, Sanchez pointed out that there has been black market ac-‐ cess to the Internet for years and that the Cuban people will not pass up the op-‐ portunity to take advantage of increased bandwidth. “We have found ways to have ourselves heard, even when access is rationed and controlled,” Sanchez ex-‐ plained. “We have the creativity and tal-‐ ent to make it happen.”

According to Bilbao, government em-‐ ployees already spend up to 90 percent of their Internet time on Facebook, mak-‐ ing it clear that the Cuban people want to connect with the world and that they will take advantage of any opportunity to do so. He applauded improved Inter-‐ net access for academics, universities, and researchers in the government since “there is quite a bit of diversity of thought within those centers.” As academics en-‐ gage in increased public dialogue, their access could help break down the walls that keep the average Cuban citizen from information.

For the time being, though, Cuban creativity and determination may not be enough. “There is a technological chasm between Egypt and Cuba,” explained Sanchez, and those organizational tech-‐ nologies that aided Egypt’s Revolution are still inaccessible to most Cubans.

“Change,” she continued, “will happen very slowly in Cuba.”

This cable is the infrastructure that in the future will fulfill Cubans’ hopes for connections and communication with the outside world. But that future will have to wait until the old guard fades away, until death or disability drags the Castro brothers from power, until cracks form in the iron control of the authoritarian elite.

Then, on the Internet and in the public square, the bandage will finally fall from Cubans’ eyes, and the Cuban citizen will speak again. Loudly.

MARISSA DEARING ’14 is in Berkeley College.

Contact her at marissa.dearing@yale.edu.

A Cuban flag blows in the wind. The Castros still rule this beautiful island. (Isaac Wasserman)

12 12 POLITICS & ECONOMY

THE YALE GLOBALIST: SUMMER 2011

In Search of Lost History Is there hope for genocide education in Cambodia?

By Nikita Lalwani

Pictures of Khmer Rouge victims line the walls at Security Prison 21, where nearly 17,000 people were imprisoned between 1975 and 1979. (Lalwani/TYG)

S

ocheat showed me a picture he had drawn of Angkor Wat, Cam-‐ bodia’s historic temple complex, and told me of his day at school.

But standing at his orphanage in Siem Reap, I wasn’t thinking about his country’s rich culture. A question had been lingering on my mind.

“Socheat,” I said, “Do you learn about the Khmer Rouge in school?”

He looked at me for a moment before I saw a glimmer of recognition in his eyes.

“Yes, the Khmer Rouge,” he answered. “It was a great sickness in Cambodia.”

Encouraged, I asked if he knew how many people had been killed by the geno-‐ cidal regime. He replied that he did not know anyone had been killed. Nor did he recognize the name Pol Pot. “It was a great sickness” was all he could tell me.

Yet he did better than his friend, 16-‐year-‐ old Sopphat, who had never even heard the term “Khmer Rouge.”

Socheat and Sopphat’s discouraging

responses represent a general trend of ignorance and misinformation in Cam-‐ bodia’s classrooms about the genocide that between 1975 and 1979 killed 2 mil-‐ lion Khmer, more than one-‐quarter of the country’s population, and whose lasting effects have hindered societal growth ever since.

D

etails about who was a victim and who a perpetrator in this genocide are controversial and ill-‐defined, complicating the problem of disseminat-‐ ing accurate information. In a village 50

prisoners from the prison to the Choeung Ek killing fields to be murdered. He spoke calmly from the wooden floor of his stilt-‐ ed house, as a fan hummed in the back-‐ ground over the sound of livestock below.

“I was a victim of the Khmer Rouge,” he claimed, explaining that he had been forced to leave his village as a teenager to work for the regime. He knew that if he did not perform his duties, he would be killed along with the prisoners he sent away.

In 2009, when Huy was profiled by The New York Times, he said, “I did not volun-‐ teer to work at S-‐21. We were all prison-‐ ers, those who killed and those who were killed.” He continued, “And in fact, for a lot of the staff there, the day came when they were killed, too. In the daytime we’d be eating together, and in the evening some were arrested and killed.”

I asked Huy if he had taught his chil-‐ dren about the Khmer Rouge or about his role in the regime. He looked straight at me but evaded the question, saying only that he tells his story willingly to visi-‐ tors like me. If Huy has not informed his children of the genocide, he is among thousands of other parents and teach-‐ ers across the country who remain silent about the Khmer Rouge, either because they wish to put a painful past behind them or because they are ashamed of the role they played 30 years ago.

Socheata Poeuv, who traveled to Cam-‐ bodia to create a documentary titled “New Year Baby” about her family’s expe-‐ riences during the genocide, was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and raised in

I had a better idea of what happened in the Holocaust than what happened to them.

—Socheata Poeuv, commenting on her parents who survived the Cambodian genocide miles south of Phnom Penh, I met with Him Huy, a former Tuol Sleng prison (S-‐ 21) guard responsible for transferring

Texas. Now a student at the Yale School of Management, she said she grew up rela-‐ tively unaware of her country’s dark past.

POLITICS & ECONOMY 13

WWW.TYGLOBALIST.ORG Her parents, like many Cambodians, were hesitant to tell her and her siblings about what they had been through.

“When I was growing up, my parents barely talked about their past, so I grew up not understanding what happened to them at all,” she said. “I had a better idea of what happened in the Holocaust than what happened to them.”

When they finally opened up to her, she said she felt alienated from them. She was forced to confront the fact that her parents had a secret life before she was born, one that she could never fully un-‐ derstand.

“On the one hand, Cambodians don’t want to talk about their experience be-‐ cause it is very painful to recount and they don’t see the immediate point of do-‐ ing so,” Poeuv continued. “On the other hand, they don’t want to be forgotten. I think they want their children and grand-‐ children to know who they are and know their story.”

I

n the public sphere as well, there are those fighting to spread awareness.

Yuok Chhang, director of the Docu-‐ mentation Center of Cambodia, the re-‐ search institute responsible for collecting evidence for the tribunals and creating textbooks about the genocide, said he has worked to make genocide education man-‐ datory in 1,700 high schools across the country. Yet too often teachers and par-‐ ents who were victims or perhaps even members of the Khmer Rouge regime re-‐ fuse to include the material in class.

“Genocide education is important be-‐ cause it is a new way to look into a form of truth and reconciliation,” Chhang ex-‐ plained. “I tell students that genocide is no joke: You sit, you read the textbook, and there will be an exam at the end of the school year.”

Educating the public about Cambodia’s genocide is one way for victims to get back what they lost during the Khmer Rouge regime: access to education. Indeed, ac-‐ cording to the Cambodian Poverty Assess-‐ ment, all educational achievements prior to the Khmer Rouge were eradicated by the regime, which destroyed schools, equipment, and books. Additionally, an estimated 75 percent of all teachers and secondary school students were killed or went missing during that time. Accord-‐ ing to Chhang, studying the genocide is a

statement that what transpired will never be forgotten.

Yet as a result of opposition from teachers, as well as strong governmental disapproval from those complicit in the genocide, it took the Center nine years to write their 98 page textbook, “A History of Democratic Kampuchea,” about Pol Pot’s regime. Before this text was published in 2007, virtually nothing was taught about the Khmer Rouge. For example, in 2000, a ninth-‐grade textbook included only a short section about the genocide: “From April 25 to April 27, 1975, the Khmer Rouge leaders held an extraor-‐ dinary Congress in order to form a new Constitution, and renamed the country ‘Democratic Kampuchea.’ A new govern-‐ ment of the DK, led by Pol Pot, came into existence after which Cambodian people were massacred.”

There was no mention of Tuol Sleng, the prison where more than 17,000 Khmer were tortured and held captive. There was

R

eady or not, the creation of the Ex-‐ traordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia has brought Cambodi-‐ ans face to face with their past. Although many Cambodians are still unaware of the Khmer Rouge genocide, these tribunals set up to try the top five Khmer Rouge officials have brought much needed pub-‐ licity to the event. Duch, the head of the Tuol Sleng prison who was recently tried, admitted to his role in the genocide and received a 19-‐year sentence for his crimes.

In the process, hundreds of victims were reminded of the horrors they once faced.

Chhang told me that he hopes the tri-‐ bunals will help those victims move past the genocide and become more open to genocide education. “In the big picture, the court is extremely important for Cam-‐ bodia to move on, as people, almost 86 percent, support it,” he said. “But in the smaller picture, there are technical is-‐ sues, as there are so many egos involved in the tribunal, and in many cases they reach unethical conclusions.”

Egos and questionable conclusions

I did not volunteer to work at S-21. We were all prisoners, those who killed and those who were killed.

—Him Huy, former Tuol Sleng prison (S-21) guard no mention of the killing fields, where men, women, and even children were tak-‐ en to be executed, sometimes for some-‐ thing as harmless as knowing French or wearing glasses. And there was no his-‐ tory of Pol Pot, Duch, or any of the lead-‐ ing Khmer Rouge officials, whose plan to revert Cambodia to its original agrarian state resulted in one of the most deadly social engineering experiments the world has experienced.

But it may be unfair to expect Cambo-‐ dian schools to teach about the Khmer Rouge regime when the education sys-‐ tem as a whole is broken, admitted Po-‐ euv. Cambodian teachers are often poorly trained and even more poorly compen-‐ sated, leaving many unready to offer com-‐ prehensive genocide education to their students.

aside, though, many see genocide tribu-‐ nals and education as the first steps to-‐ wards healing for Cambodia. As the world proclaims “never again” after each geno-‐ cide that occurs, education will be funda-‐ mentally important if future killings are to be prevented.

Back at the orphanage, I told Socheat and Sopphat what I knew about the Khmer Rouge. They killed nearly 2 mil-‐ lion Khmer, I said, and their rule lasted for four long years. They killed people ar-‐ bitrarily, sometimes simply for appearing intelligent.

“Two million people. That’s bad,” said Socheat. “I will ask my teacher about that.”

NIKITA LALWANI ’13 is an English and Humani-‐ ties double major in Morse College. This spring, she co-‐led a group of 14 Yale students to Cambodia to study the genocide.

Contact her at nikita.lalwani@yale.edu.

14 14 POLITICS & ECONOMY

THE YALE GLOBALIST: SUMMER 2011

Ƥ New technologies have complicated the challenge of feeding Africa.

By Sophie Broach

I

n Umudike, Nigeria, the rows of leafy green cassava plants growing at a confined field trial site are the result of millions of dollars in funding, years of research, and a collaboration that spans continents. For some, these geneti-‐ cally modified (GM) plants promise an ag-‐ ricultural revolution that could eliminate hunger and malnutrition in sub-‐Saharan Africa. For others, they pose a grave threat to environmental integrity, human health, and traditional farming techniques.

“Cassava is the most important food crop in sub-‐Saharan Africa,” declared Dr. Claude Fauquet of the Danforth Plant Science Cen-‐ ter in St. Louis, Missouri. Where other crops fail, this sweet potato-‐like vegetable thrives.

It resists drought, grows in poor soil, repels herbivores with its cyanide-‐laden leaves, and requires minimal labor to plant. Cas-‐ sava can be left in the ground for up to three years and removed whenever needed. Not surprisingly, at least 100 countries world-‐ wide count on cassava as a staple food.

However, the 250 million people in sub-‐ Saharan Africa who rely on the plant as their major source of calories are prone to malnutrition. The starchy vegetable has the lowest protein-‐to-‐energy ratio of any staple crop and lacks adequate levels of vitamins A and E, iron, and zinc. Some varieties do contain in abundance compounds that can cause cyanide poisoning when eaten. Cas-‐ sava’s susceptibility to devastating viral dis-‐ eases also jeopardizes its status as a food security crop. Recently, the cassava mosaic virus and brown streak disease have rav-‐ aged harvests in East and Central Africa, reducing yields by as much as 50 million tons each year.

T

wo teams at the Danforth Center have set out to fix the flaws in this exceptionally important staple crop by genetically engineering the perfect cas-‐ sava. One group, Biocassava Plus, or BC Plus, aims to raise cassava’s levels of iron, protein, and vitamin A to provide the com-‐ plete minimum daily dietary requirements

for these nutrients in a cassava-‐based diet.

Martin Fregene, the director of BC Plus, ex-‐ plained that this can only be accomplished through genetic engineering: “You don’t have a natural genetic variability for iron or protein in cassava. You don’t have it there.

You’re stuck.” BC Plus draws the genes for this purpose from various plants, algae, and microbes.

The second team, Virus Resistant Cassa-‐ va for Africa, or VIRCA, has the urgent task of developing cassava plants resistant to cassava mosaic virus and brown streak dis-‐ ease by using genes from the viruses them-‐ selves. Fauquet, Danforth’s VIRCA director,

national’s agricultural campaign. “Once one of these crops is out of the bag, it’s hard to put it back in the bag, so to speak.”

“When new [GM] varieties are intro-‐ duced, they tend to be planted in mass,” Jones said. Indeed, VIRCA has developed two cassava cultivars for each country and hopes that soon these types will be as widely adopted as possible. Although, as Fauquet pointed out, “Cassava is not a single plant or a single variety for all of Af-‐ rica… you have hundreds of different ethnic groups that prefer different plants because they have different habits.” Fauquet does not worry about this wealth of biodiversity

GM tech is here to stay… We cannot feed tomorrow’s population with the technology of yesterday.

—Martin Fregene, Biocassava Plus scientific director predicted terrible instability for Nigeria’s population of 155 million should brown streak disease spread to this very cassava-‐ dependent area, but he hopes the virus re-‐ sistant cassava developed by VIRCA could mitigate the effects of such a disaster.

M

any groups oppose the introduc-‐ tion of these seemingly miracu-‐ lous types of GM cassava. When asked about the health consequences of consuming GM foods, Gareth Jones of Bio-‐ safety Africa, explained simply, “Nobody re-‐ ally knows! This is the problem… No long term studies have been done.”

Critics also worry about the enduring consequences of introducing genetically engineered plants into natural ecosystems, fearing they could eliminate biodiversity in areas beyond their intended use by out-‐ numbering and surviving over their dis-‐ ease-‐prone counterparts. “The deliberate release of GM into the environment… can lead to irreversible damage to ecosystems,” explained Glen Tyler of Greenpeace Inter-‐

being wiped out but, instead, frets over how to persuade African farmers to adopt the GM cassava on a large scale.

The close relationships between devel-‐ opment organizations and biotech com-‐ panies have been another cause for criti-‐ cism by anti-‐GM groups. Monsanto, the agricultural biotechnology corporation responsible for the majority of the world’s GM seeds, provided a $50 million gift to its neighbor in St. Louis, the Danforth Center, when it was founded and later donated $7.5 million to VIRCA. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which employs multiple staff members who previously worked at biotech companies, gave $12 million to BC Plus and recently pledged an additional $8.3 million grant to support later stages of the project.

The sources of funding for VIRCA and BC Plus have caused some to re-‐examine their underlying purposes. Are these os-‐ tensibly charitable development projects actually attempts by corporate First World interests to take over African agricultural systems? Fauquet rebutted that his work is

POLITICS & ECONOMY 15

WWW.TYGLOBALIST.ORG “for pure humanitarian purposes.” He as-‐ serted that Monsanto “is only really helping us financially and providing technologies or information, but they… are not driving our plans.”

Even if no opportunities for abuse seem immediately apparent, however, some wor-‐ ry they may emerge in the long run. Jones explained, “Most of the farmers in Africa use and re-‐use their own seed. With GM seeds you have the issue of patent protec-‐ tion. The biotech companies say they will give their seeds out royalty free, but for how long? Once all other seeds in a region have been replaced with GM varieties, what will be the farmers’ choice?”

Tyler posited the idea that although uptake of GM cassava in African countries might never directly enrich biotech compa-‐ nies, gaining acceptance for GM goods as a humanitarian technology may make the climate around selling such products less controversial worldwide. Fears about the environmental and health risks of GM foods prevail in many countries, severely limiting markets for biotech companies. Some Euro-‐ pean countries, including France, have even banned imports of Monsanto’s GM maize.

When questioned about environmental opposition to the VIRCA program, Fauquet laughed: “I think [they] are looking at the wrong problem. We have huge problems on this planet,” like malnutrition, which con-‐ tributes to the deaths of roughly 5 million children each year.

O

pponents of VIRCA and BC Plus have argued that pouring millions of dollars into complicated bio-‐ tech projects diverts money and energy from simpler development methods that have been proven to work. Tyler pointed to genetic engineering programs with underwhelming track records such as the Rockefeller Foundation’s Golden Rice Project, which strives to save millions from death and blindness with GM biofor-‐ tified rice, but so far has little to show for its 20 years in development and over $100 million in funding.

Meanwhile, a number of programs that are simpler and less expensive have had greater success than their high-‐tech coun-‐ terparts. Unleashing the Power of Cassava in Africa, for example, has succeeded in doubling cassava yields in the Ido commu-‐ nity in Nigeria by simply educating farm-‐ ers about proper land preparation, weed-‐ ing, stem handling and transportation, and use of fertilizer, while disseminating improved, non-‐GM cassava varieties. “All we need is to educate the farmers more and let them receive… new materials that are in the system that they have not had access to,” explained Richardson Oke-‐ chukwu, the organization’s deputy project manager in Nigeria.

Critics like Tyler argue that we can eliminate world hunger with existing tech-‐ nology. He sees this problem as rooted in

a lack of support for small-‐scale farmers and poor policy and distribution rather than inadequate supply. Jones likewise as-‐ serted, “The removal of massive farming subsidies in the U.S. and Europe and the altering of the global trade system would arguably do far more to alleviate human suffering in the Global South than any sin-‐ gle technological ‘silver bullet.’ ” Despite all the controversy surround-‐ ing the genetic engineering of the cassava plant, Fregene and Fauquet remain confi-‐ dent that these technologies will soon be the key to feeding a rapidly growing plan-‐ et. Fregene predicted ominously, “Even if you plowed all the game parks in East Africa, plowed all the forests in northern Europe… you would still run out of land to feed an ever growing human population.”

“GM tech is here to stay… We cannot feed tomorrow’s population with the technol-‐ ogy of yesterday,” he said. Fauquet put it less bleakly “I am absolutely convinced we can feed 10 billion people. This is not a problem. The question is: Are we going to do what is necessary to do that?” Both development organizations and environ-‐ mental groups agree that we must do what is necessary to solve Africa’s food crisis and foster independence from foreign aid—they just disagree on how.

SOPHIE BROACH ’13 is a History major in Pier-‐ son College. Contact her at sophie.broach@yale.edu.

Two BC Plus cassava roots fortified with beta carotene (left) next to a wild type of cassava lacking in beta carotene. (Courtesy Danforth Plant Science Center)

16 16 POLITICS & ECONOMY

THE YALE GLOBALIST: SUMMER 2011

Swashbuckling, Tweeting Crusaders ǡ Ƥ and an end to censorship.

By Sally Helm

I

n Sweden, they stand on street corners handing out free books stamped with their logo and call it “culture bombing.” In the Nether-‐ lands, they have protested the use of textbooks and favor moving to a wiki-‐ based learning system. Most recently, in Tunisia, their work to topple government censors landed some of them in prison.

They call themselves the Pirate Party, and their influence is growing. Proclaim-‐ ing that ideas should be available to who-‐ ever wants them and that the Internet can democratize information flow, their platform aligns with recent events like the free-‐speech driven revolution in Tu-‐ nisia and the WikiLeaks break. “The en-‐ tire focus is on intellectual politics,” said recently elected party co-‐chairman Samir Allioui. “We’re living in an ever more information-‐focused society, and the laws need to be adapted to that.”

Allioui chairs Pirate Parties Interna-‐ tional (PPI), the umbrella organization that serves to facilitate communication

Australia to Croatia. Tech-‐savvy members take advantage of a broad range of Inter-‐ net collaboration tools to stay in touch, including a program called “Pirate Pads,” which allows many people to edit the same document, much like Google Docs, as well as Skype accounts and mumble servers, another voice chatting application. “Our office is the Internet,” Allioui said.

Though somewhat informal and de-‐ centralized, the party has serious aspi-‐ rations, and they have already reached many of their goals. Two Pirates, Amelia Andersdotter and Christian Engstroem, both of Sweden, are members of the Eu-‐ ropean Parliament. Pirates hold city coun-‐ cil seats in the German cities of Münster and Aachen, and the party won numer-‐ ous seats in other local elections in late March. Most significantly, January saw Slim Amamou, a member of the Tunisian pirate party, become Tunisia’s Minister of Youth and Sport.

Amamou’s rise is emblematic of the Pi-‐ rates’ fight to overcome censorship. In the

There is no difference between downloading a piece of journalism and downloading an MP3. If you can eliminate the option for people to download an MP3, you can also eliminate the option for them to download a piece of journalism.

—Samir Allioui, Co-Chairman of Pirate Parties International among the various in-‐country branches of the party. Swedish businessman Rickard Falkvinge founded the first Pirate Party in his home country in 2006 to support ac-‐ tivists interested in copyright reform, and the international arm of the party was officially founded at a 2010 conference in Brussels. By that time, Pirates were al-‐ ready active in dozens of countries from

weeks and months leading up to the Tuni-‐ sian revolution, the 33-‐year-‐old had been actively resisting the oppressive govern-‐ ment regime, disseminating information on how to access blocked sites, and up-‐ dating his Twitter account to keep young revolutionaries in touch with the news.

When he and fellow Tunisian Pirate Azyz Ammami both disappeared from their

homes on January 6—kidnapped for gov-‐ ernment questioning—the Pirate Party of Tunisia issued an appeal for action on its Facebook account and through other me-‐ dia channels. After enduring psychologi-‐ cal and physical torture, both men were released on January 13, just before Presi-‐ dent Ben Ali fled the country.

The hastily constituted interim gov-‐ ernment offered Amamou a ministerial position because of his prominent role in the revolution and his popular appeal.

His appointment to the cabinet signaled a radical shift in Tunisia’s approach to cen-‐ sorship and free speech. Once governed by one of the most restrictive regimes in the world, the country is moving towards a more open position, spurred in part by the work of the Pirate Party.

T

hough such resistance is one arm of the Pirate platform, many of the party’s actions focus more spe-‐ cifically on the reform of copyright and patent laws. Its basic argument is that “intellectual property” is an inherently flawed concept. Many members join the political movement because of their be-‐ lief in net neutrality. Josef Collentine, a university-‐aged member of the Swedish party currently studying public relations and marketing at Högskolan i Jönköping University in Sweden, said that it was the Pirates’ stance on copyright reform that first drew him into the movement two years ago. “In my opinion, information should be as free as possible. Right now, the middleman is still holding on to that information,” he said.

The party supports an end to non-‐ commercial copyright protections and a scaling back of commercial ones. Though former co-‐chair Gregory Engels noted in a January 2011 interview with Vibe maga-‐ zine that the party does not officially sup-‐ port illegal downloading of music, he be-‐ lieves the laws themselves are flawed and

POLITICS & ECONOMY 17

WWW.TYGLOBALIST.ORG should be changed to make music down-‐ loads legal. Allioui echoed that view: “The problem is that there is no difference be-‐ tween downloading a piece of journalism and downloading an MP3. If you can elimi-‐ nate the option for people to download an MP3, you can also eliminate the option for them to download a piece of journalism.”

P

PI discussed ways to reform such laws at their most recent gathering in Friedrichshafen, Germany on March 12 and 13. Titled “Sailing in the Open Sea—Pirate Design for Tomorrow,” the confer-‐ ence allowed pirate support-‐ ers from around the world to gather, share ideas, and make connections. The meeting inspired Collen-‐ tine to start an interna-‐ tional newsletter to keep the domestic and local wings better informed about what their coun-‐ terparts are doing in other parts of the world.

Specific agenda items dis-‐ cussed at the March gathering included issuing a statement of support for WikiLeaks contributor Bradley Manning and determining how best to combat the regulations of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which re-‐ cently approved the “.xxx” domain name.

Pirates object to the title because it is the first domain name that judges the content it describes, Allioui explained.

They also discussed extending their reach into education initiatives, an area in which the party has been active in the past. Allioui, who served as the head of the Dutch Pirate Party before being elect-‐ ed an international co-‐chair in Friedrich-‐ shafen, supported a project in the Neth-‐ erlands to eliminate textbooks and move to a wiki-‐based learning system. Instead of learning from static sources, he said, children would move their education to the Internet, learning from what are es-‐ sentially higher quality Wikipedia pages.

Anyone, including students, could add to and update the Wikis, though the teachers or curriculum coordinators would have ultimate control. The resources would be free for taxpayers, and schools would be able to stay constantly up-‐to-‐date with

changing facts. Allioui said that he hopes the move might actually improve quality control by keeping information fresh.

Naturally, publishing companies op-‐ pose such a change. Allioui said their role would, and should, shrink under such a plan. “It’s competition. Times change.

When we got the Euro in Europe, all the currency exchange officers started to com-‐ plain as well. So did the train con-‐ ductors when we first expanded

t r a n sp o r t at i o n over water,” Allioui argued. “When times change, you adapt your business or die.”

The plan is a radical one, as many Pi-‐ rate projects are, and creates practical and logistical concerns. Teachers used to a textbook system might object to aban-‐ doning traditional methods, and though Allioui contends that the Wikis would remain high-‐quality, such a new system would be less vetted and likely more prone to mistakes, at least in its early stages. Pi-‐ rates respond to such critiques with the contention that there are always hurdles when a new ideology takes root; we would do best, they argue, to look beyond initial objections and strive to adapt to chang-‐ ing times. Yet to be truly effective, radical ideas must eventually be combined with practical implementation.

T

hat is easier said than done. The pirate agenda has repeatedly been stymied by corrupt and tradition-‐ bound political systems, Allioui said; yet

the party’s ultimate goal is to change the system from within. The party sees transparency and accountability as core political values and seeks to extend gov-‐ ernment representation to further their agenda. Their adoption of the name “Pi-‐ rate Party,” which was originally applied as a slur in Sweden, reflects their drive to turn an outsider group into one that oper-‐ ates within the system.

That will not happen overnight. Col-‐ lentine said that he believes the party’s youth contributes to its status as a fringe movement. “All parties are radical at the beginning, because they have a view that is very different from what is established,” he said. “In a few years, our ideas will be more main-‐ stream.”

Allioui agreed: “We’re a young organization, and most of the organi-‐ zation is still under con-‐ struction. But being infor-‐ mal doesn’t mean you’re not serious.”

The party’s day-‐to-‐day op-‐ erations reflect that casual out-‐ look; for example, former co-‐chair Gregory Engels used a Facebook sta-‐ tus update beginning “Ahoy pirates” to call his far-‐flung followers to Friedrich-‐ shafen. Yet Allioui stressed that although their methods may be untraditional, their message is substantial. “We’re politicians and activists at the same time,” he said.

In expressing this sentiment, Allioui highlighted a tension that Amamou en-‐ countered when he announced that he had accepted a position in the Tunisian government. Many of his online followers expressed fear that he might abandon his revolutionary views and become a sell-‐ out. As more and more Pirates attempt to gain national office, they will have to rec-‐ oncile their party’s ideals with the limita-‐ tions of the system, as all politicians must.

But Collentine and Allioui both asserted that politics and “piraticism” don’t have to be at odds. Mainstream political scenes around the world might even benefit from a bit of their radical flavor.

SALLY HELM ’14 is in Berkeley College. Contact her at sarah.helm@yale.edu.

FOCUS: THE NEW FRONTIERS Illustration by Kat Oshman

20 20 FOCUS: FRONTIERS

Measuring

THE YALE GLOBALIST: SUMMER 2011

MOUNTAINS

by Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins

FOCUS: FRONTIERS 21

WWW.TYGLOBALIST.ORG

I

have always been fasci-‐ nated by the superlative.

Fastest. Hardest. Longest.

Highest. The –est has al-‐ ways captured my imagi-‐ nation and, in some way or another, often guided my actions. On the morning of January 2, it landed me on the side of a road in the Puna de Atacama, the mountainous frontier of the northern Chil-‐ ean-‐Argentine Andes.

My climbing companion Chandler Kemp and I were here to climb a mountain—a superlative mountain—by the name of Ojos del Salado. Among the Puna’s many high peaks, Ojos del Salado rises above the rest. In fact, at approximately 22,600 feet, it stands second in South America only to Aconcagua, and by only a few dozen me-‐ ters. And as a volcano, it stands second to none: Ojos is the tallest volcano in the world.

Ojos is a mountain of topographic coin-‐ cidence. From its massif, two distinct sum-‐ mits of approximately equal altitude rise up, their peaks within a meter of each other.

Complicating matters, while both summits technically straddle the Argentine-‐Chilean border, climbers ascend each one from dif-‐ ferent countries. The ruta argentina leads to the de facto Argentine summit, and the ruta chilena leads to the de facto Chilean summit. Since Ojos was first ascended in 1937, no one has known which of its two summits is the taller, “true” summit. That’s what we set out to discover.

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he Puna de Atacama is one of the few places in the world where hitch-‐ hiking is a reliable mode of trans-‐ port. Encompassing the northern Chilean-‐ Argentine Andes and just south of the parched Atacama Desert of Bolivia, the Puna is dry, barren, windy, unpopulated, and rarely visited.

After waiting a little over an hour by the side of the road, a metallic glint flickered on the horizon through the shimmers of heat rising off the solitary asphalt road. We were in luck: a ride.

Sixty-‐five kilometers later, 25 kilometers short of the official Chilean border, we ar-‐ rived at the small outpost of civilization that was Argentina’s border post. I hopped off the overstuffed bed of the pick-‐up and walked towards the cluster of Spartan mil-‐ itary-‐hut architecture that we would call home for the next week. This youth hostel

13,000 feet in the Andes was built by the Province of Catamarca about a decade ago in a burst of entrepreneurial vigor meant to attract mountaineers. The province’s tour-‐ ism enterprise has been a qualified suc-‐ cess. Climbing in this region of the Andes has been on the uptick owing to both effec-‐ tive marketing of its extraordinarily high mountains and also the accommodations, minimalist as they might be, that make it accessible.

A handful of scraggly, sunburned climb-‐ ers mingled in the shade of the huts. It felt vaguely like we were outsiders sauntering into an Old West frontier town, the locals peering out their saloon doors, sizing up the newcomers. But climbers are characteristi-‐ cally friendly people, and as we approached the squinted eyes warmed to smiles and outstretched hands. Looking over our new acquaintances, one tall, lithe climber in his mid-‐thirties immediately captured my at-‐ tention. Of all places, a familiar face.

Alex Garate was the first climber I met when I first came to these mountains four years ago. I was 18 years old, drunk on am-‐ bition, and awash in romanticism for ad-‐ venture, but Alex patiently counseled me as best anyone could before we went our separate ways into the hills. His first words of our reunion told how well he had come to know me: “A four-‐year journey for you, Jonathan?”

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he frontier implies something be-‐ yond what we know or what we are capable of. On many levels, the Puna had become my frontier these last four years, my place to engage the superlative.

Once accounting for most of the world,

frontiers have been systematically win-‐ nowed by civilization’s inexorable advance, restricted to a few far-‐flung regions. Terra incognita—the manifestation of a fron-‐ tier—is now a concept as obsolete as the expression is archaic: The distant icy poles of the Arctic and Antarctic have been con-‐ quered, the forbidding summit of Everest achieved, the source of the Nile discovered.

Present-‐day discoveries are a bit like the reunion tour of an over-‐the-‐hill, once-‐ great band: As exciting as they might be, you can’t help but think of what the golden age must have been like. Landsat Island is a perfect example. A frozen, unremarkable speck off the coast of Labrador about a fifth the size of a football field, it was found in 1973 when a Canadian scientist noticed it in a Landsat satellite image. The discovery ranks as one of the most significant in de-‐ cades. Contemporary terra incognita is the mere technicality or happenstance of the unknown.

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handler and I had ventured to the Puna de Atacama because it is a frontier, one of the last of its kind.

We were out to find a Landsat Island of sorts, and we knew it was out there.

We had teamed up with Frederick Blume, a geophysicist from a consortium-‐ chartered geodesy laboratory in Boulder, Colorado called UNAVCO. Blume was part of the 1997 and 1998 National Geographic expeditions to Mount Everest that deter-‐ mined its now-‐accepted altitude, and he knows all there is to know about measur-‐ ing mountains. Trimble, a company that designs and manufactures GPS equipment, our means of measurement, signed on to

OPPOSITE: The 18,000-foot volcanic plateau that encircles the base of Ojos del Salado. BELOW: Relatives of the llama, four vicuñas graze the altiplano grasses. (Kreiss-Tomkins/TYG)

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THE YALE GLOBALIST: SUMMER 2011 generously provide the $30,000 of technical gear required for the expedition. And from my previous sorties to the Puna, I had built up an informal network of Argentine climb-‐ ers, government officials, and scientists to assist with logistics. All the pieces were in place; we just needed to climb the darn thing.

Climbing a mountain like Ojos, however, begins with preparing the body. Altitude has a formidable effect and demands pro-‐ found respect.

More than once I encountered a favorite hypothetical anecdote of South American climbers, the science of which I later cor-‐ roborated with Dr. Peter Hackett, Director of the Institute for Altitude Medicine in Telluride, Colorado. Imagine someone liv-‐ ing at sea level who contracts a helicopter to land him on the summit of Aconcagua or Ojos, an ascent of about 23,000 feet. No matter how delicately he might conserve his energy or how valiantly he might try to steady his breathing, the thin air will render him unconscious within hours and on the verge of death; such is the hypoxic shock of altitude. Were he to go all the way to 26,000 feet, the height of the tallest peaks of the Himalayas, he would be dead in 30 minutes. The moral is obvious: Ascend too fast, allow ambition to “helicopter” you up a mountain, and risk everything.

In my mind, altitude was a frontier of its own, a physiological frontier, and almost certainly the most dangerous we would encounter. We approached cautiously. We acclimatized.

Altitude is hard to describe, but it’s sort of like trying to breathe with your head stuck out the window of a car going 70 miles per hour; it’s hard to get what feels like a proper breath of air. But as the week progressed, our bodies adapted. We no lon-‐ ger felt a hypoxic pinch in our lungs after a long yawn. Breathing through the nose be-‐ came more comfortable. Climbing became easier and faster.

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even days later we were on the trail.

After a final 20 kilometers of road, actually rutted, rocky 4x4 track, in a rusty, red pick-‐up truck, we set off on foot, circumnavigating the flanks of Incahuasi, a massive volcano, the first of many to come.

After a little more than an hour, we ap-‐ proached a lonely, peculiar-‐looking tripodal sign amid the sand and rocks. In the glib cursive of a nightclub’s neon sign, it read “Chile.” We kept walking, turning around to glance behind us. The metal placard now read “Argentina.” Just 30 years ago, passing that point would have been an ill-‐ advised provocation to Chilean sovereignty.

Frontiers and borders have a propen-‐ sity to mingle, sometimes with dramatic results. Ecuador and Peru, for instance, skirmished for nearly two centuries over a swath of Amazonian jungle so remote that soldiers often did not know which side of the putative border they were on. At the polar extremes, disputes of sovereignty promise to unfold in the frozen expanse of Antarctica and underneath the icy crust of the Arctic Ocean as technology enables the extraction of resources previously con-‐ signed to penguins and polar bears.

Chile and Argentina have their own his-‐ tory of border conflict. In the early ‘70s, au-‐ tocratic military juntas governed both na-‐ tions. To distract from domestic troubles, both governments resorted to jingoistic posturing, focusing their energies and emo-‐ tions on the small, unsettled islands of Pic-‐ ton, Lennox, and Nueva in Chile’s far south.

Argentina claimed the islands as its own and nearly mounted a full-‐scale invasion of Chile in 1982 on the basis of the Picton, Len-‐ nox, and Nueva dispute. Pope John Paul II intervened at the last minute and tensions eased, but the episode affected the entire Chilean-‐Argentine border, and, indirectly, the expedition Chandler and I were at-‐ tempting.

On expedition eve at the hostel, Chan-‐ dler and I were shoveling forkfuls of pasta and Parmesan into our mouths while hov-‐ ering over our map, reviewing the route for the days to come. “Make sure you watch out for the land mines,” warned a voice be-‐ hind us. We turned around, incredulous. It was Cristian Rodrigo Mur, Alex’s climbing partner. At first we thought he was joking, but it was hard to tell from his always part serious, part mischievous face. We further conferred with Alex and the Argentine Fed-‐ eral Police at the neighboring border post.

It turned out he was serious.

Chile has not publically disclosed where

FROM TOP: Chandler Kemp crossing into Chile; a bedraggled Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins boiling water for dinner on the last day of the trip; inside the sleeping quarters of the Quonset hut “mountaineering hostel” at the Argentine border post. (Kreiss-Tomkins/TYG)

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WWW.TYGLOBALIST.ORG its minefields lie, just that there are 181 of them, containing a total of 122,909 mines.

The best Cristian could do was vaguely wave his hand at a general area of the map indicating the zone of danger. No one, af-‐ ter all, really knows where the minefield’s boundaries are. We resolved not to get any-‐ where close to it.

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he same nationalism responsible for the thousands of mines buried along the border has also accounted for the dispute over Ojos’ altitude that we sought to put to rest. Most maps and sources list Ojos del Salado at 6,983 meters (22,608 feet), but it has hardly always been that way.

Aconcagua lies entirely within Argenti-‐ na’s borders, so the country doesn’t need to share the national pride and celebrity, and also tourism revenue, of its geographic su-‐ perlative. To Chile, this has always seemed an affront; Argentina has historically over-‐ shadowed its Andean neighbor, in econom-‐ ic strength, natural resources, even soccer.

As Paul Simons, former U.S. ambassador to Chile, put it, Chileans have had to be “more creative and more scrappy” with less to work with, like the overlooked younger sib-‐ ling of a successful older brother.

Scrappiness goes far. Chile now boasts the highest Human Development Indicator

A desiccated mule carcass at 15,000 feet. According to local gauchos, the mule succumbed to altitude sickness over four years ago, in December 2006. (Kreiss-Tomkins/TYG) vestigate” its altitude. Upon return, their exaggerated data raised eyebrows and, in-‐ cidentally, the ostensible altitude of Ojos by a considerable margin.

Estimates ranged as high as 7,100 me-‐ ters (23,300 feet), leapfrogging Aconcagua with many meters to spare and establish-‐ ing Ojos as the new roof of the Americas.

Nonpartisan mountaineers were skeptical, of course, and as bilateral relations be-‐ tween the two countries have thawed since the late ‘80s, most data, Argentine, Chilean, or otherwise, center on an altitude in the vicinity of 6,900 meters. But for Chandler and me, the aura of international intrigue was further motivation to assign another datum, hopefully of incontrovertible preci-‐ sion, to the mountain’s height.

The frontier implies something beyond what we know or what we are capable of. On many levels, the Puna had become my frontier these last four years, my place to engage the superlative. on the continent and the status of an estab-‐ lished middle power. Their soccer team, albeit coached by an Argentine, even ad-‐ vanced to the Round of 16 at the last World Cup. But Chileans are still sensitive about their national stature. In Simons’ view, Chileans have “a national pride thing, and [they] get all spun up about it.”

Case in point: the highest mountain on the continent. Increasing the actual height of Ojos to exceed Aconcagua was hardly a plausible engineering endeavor, so the Chilean government essentially willed the ostensible height of the mountain higher.

The Chilean government, beginning in the 1950s and continuing through the ‘70s, en-‐ gaged in exercises of scientific nationalism by sponsoring expeditions to Ojos to “in-‐

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rom the Argentine-‐Chilean border, Chandler and I pushed on. Now in the lee of Incahuasi, we entered a shallow crease between the volcano and a ridge, each of our footprints preserved in the sandy terrain as if it were a first snow.

The landscape was timeless and still. We felt tired, even just a few hours in. Our backpacks, each about 65 pounds, felt ev-‐ ery bit as much, and each breath of air was subtly unsatisfying. But we were making progress; Chandler and I had assimilated into the silence around us, but I felt an un-‐ spoken confidence between us. We could do this.

A few kilometers farther we were re-‐ warded with an expansive vista. Ojos and its volcanic brethren crowded the horizon

tens of kilometers ahead, and a yawning desert plain extended in between. We set off across it, hugging the base of an adja-‐ cent volcano, El Fraile, for on our other side was the vague region where Cristian had waved his hand—the minefield.

By dusk we had crossed the plain and entered the foothills buffering Ojos. We hadn’t seen evidence of another human all day: no footprints, no trash, no wind walls of campsites past, no airplanes, and, merci-‐ fully, no land mines. The tentacles of civi-‐ lization’s inexorable advance had not yet reached this far.

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handler and I had chosen an uncon-‐ ventional approach to Ojos. As op-‐ posed to the well-‐known ruta argen-‐ tina or ruta chilena, we were improvising a ruta argentina-‐chilena, weaving illegally back and forth and back again over the bor-‐ der all the way to Ojos and its high camp.

A mixture of motivations, most strategic and logistical, inspired the route. But one was very much aesthetic. This was very re-‐ mote territory, even for the Puna, and we wanted the real frontier, a road never trav-‐ eled.

Our camp that night rewarded those aspirations. We had chosen a spot nestled between two volcanoes. On one side rose El Fraile, its mammoth, rocky profile loom-‐ ing large above camp, catching the evening alpenglow like a giant textured canvas.

As if to ward off ambitious climbers from its summit, Fraile wore a crown of treach-‐ erous-‐looking lava, and while I waited for cooking water to boil, I tried to pick out a route to the peak that managed to avoid its hazards.

On the other side of camp, however, was something even more alluring: El Muertito, “The Little Death,” a never-‐before-‐climbed volcano.

Its ominous name conjures menacing imagery, but El Muertito is essentially an

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THE YALE GLOBALIST: SUMMER 2011 ultra altiplano above 18,000 feet, was an-‐ other kind of frontier:

The unusual color of the red crater lake of El Muertito is mediated by unknown processes. (Kreiss-Tomkins/TYG) incongruous lump of decaying volcanic rock, a decidedly non-‐technical climb and an ugly duckling to the pleasingly sym-‐ metrical, imposing image of its neighbor, El Fraile.

Were it not for the absence of snow, the eroding volcano could have been mistaken for a New England ski hill. But as we paced ourselves on El Muertito’s rocky scree, it wasn’t so much the mountain that was cause for our simmering excitement as it was what the mountain stood for. This was the notion of frontier distilled in a pithy, one-‐mountain manifestation. That it took the form of a New England ski hill was no obstacle to our sense of exploration.

The summit itself, an unassuming jum-‐ ble of rocks, was nothing special. But as John Biggar, author of “The Andes,” the canonical guidebook for the cordillera, later informed us, we were standing on top of the highest unclimbed mountain in the Western Hemisphere. It felt great, as sum-‐ mits always do, and this one just a little bit more so.

The view was breathtaking. From our 5,985-‐meter perch, Ojos still dominated the south, but with our lofty spirits, it now began to look manageable. From our topo-‐ graphic map, Chandler and I could tell a crater resided inside El Muertito. At the summit, our suspicion was confirmed. And as it happened, at the center of the crater was a lake. A blood-‐red lake.

There are two theories behind its other-‐ worldly beet red color. The first is that the color comes from purely mineral process-‐ es, namely iron cycling. The second theory is that microbes mediate oxidation in the acidic pool. According to Cara Santelli, a research geologist at the Smithsonian In-‐ stitution, “If there is microbial life, it would be a great analog to studying life on other planets.”

We knew as soon as we saw the lake that this was a tremendously exciting dis-‐ covery, if not scientifically, then personally.

Several months after the fact, just thinking about it continues to give me a thrill.

This concept of discovery is fundamen-‐ tally selfish. Anything that comes into the irreversible possession of one is forever denied to the rest; such is the cruel, ines-‐ capable paradox of frontiers. In a way, dis-‐ covery is as much an elegy, for the thing discovered can never be discovered again.

Others have made this observation be-‐ fore. Upon the announcement of George Mallory’s inaugural expedition to Everest, the last great frontier of its era, London’s Evening News editorialized, “Some of the last mystery in the world will pass when the last secret place in it, the naked peak of Everest, shall be trodden by those tres-‐ passers.”

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wo days later, the excitement of El Muertito and its mysterious lake had subsided, replaced instead by gnawing anxiety. Chandler and I were now at the Ojos high camp, our tent pitched in the shadow of a large boulder of lava, the mountain out of sight but very much in mind. This was a scheduled day of rest, “the most relaxing in years” for Chandler.

For me, although I didn’t express it at the time, it was somewhat the opposite.

The foreign landscape impressed a feeling of just how out of place we were.

This was my undoing four years ago as an 18-‐year-‐old. Alone, not far from where we were, with 11 days worth of food, set on summiting Ojos, I had instead abruptly turned around in retreat. Nine days of rela-‐ tively uninterrupted solitude—consum-‐ mate, consuming solitude, as I had never before known it—had deeply unsettled me.

As I then wrote in my journal, this area, the

…there is a jarring absence of other life.

There are no vicuñas or guanacos [llama-‐ like animals that live as high as 15,000 feet]; no birds in the sky, even if just migrating; no vermin; no shrubs, lichens, or mosses; no insects, not even ones blown astray by the terrain-‐scouring winds; not even the wee little ice worms eke out a humbled exis-‐ tence here. Everything is dead, and the zone of deadness expands for kilometer upon profound kilometer. This is obviously not intended habitat for humans, physically or psychologically…

Our relationship with other forms of life is only realized when we are without it. Watching the flora and fauna disap-‐ pear species by species with each rung of altitude was unsettling. Few places cre-‐ ate such a biological vacuum: the coldest wastelands, the driest deserts, the highest mountains. These frontiers of ultimate soli-‐ tude seldom receive the lonesome visitor.

Now, four years later, in Chandler I count-‐ ed the best antidote to ultimate solitude I could imagine.

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ummit morning, 3:30 a.m., we woke. It was cold. The beams of our flashlights jerked around the tent as we fumbled to put on our down parkas, mittens, and other insulation. We scarfed down a warm breakfast and set off into the inky black-‐ ness towards an invisible mountain.

The sun peered over the horizon five hours later, bringing earnestly appreciated

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WWW.TYGLOBALIST.ORG light and warmth. When we turned around to inspect our progress, the landscape of the Puna ran away from us, its solemn vol-‐ canic reds and blacks interrupted occasion-‐ ally by the cheerful piebald white of snow-‐ fields. But progress itself was too little, too slow.

I was the problem. Chandler and I both run competitively and enjoy enterprises of endurance; we normally make good time on mountains. But something serious was amiss.

The culprit, as my urine revealed, was dehydration. Dehydration is bad; extreme exertion while severely dehydrated at el-‐ evations above 18,000 feet is disastrous.

By then, six hours in, my fatigue was ex-‐ pressing itself as a compelling desire to fall asleep right there on the mountain. The once-‐unthinkable notion of turning around before the summit began to snake its way through my synapses, gaining plausibility as it went. We paused for a two-‐hour break, to salvage a rapidly deteriorating situa-‐ tion. With Chandler fetching water from a nearby crater lake, reputed to be the high-‐ est standing body of water in the world, I rehydrated through two and a half liters of sips. As the fluids percolated through my system a faint but explicit sensation of strength returned.

Progress ensued, but our pace soon again slowed. Dehydration had fully drained my reservoir of energy. During our overwhelmingly frequent rest breaks, I would close my eyes, thoughts skittering about helter skelter, as if on ball bearings and free of cognitive friction. In a frontier of ultimate solitude, my condition might

BY THE NUMBERS JONATHAN’S JOURNEY 100 Kilometers traveled 600K Number of steps taken by Chandler and Jonathan $30K Cost of GPS equipment used 2 cm Margin of error for final GPS data 43% Air density at summit of Ojos relative to sea level 1 Number of red crater lakes discovered have been cause for concern, but with the resolute friendship and companionship of Chandler, I pressed on.

We passed a decades-‐old wreck of a high-‐altitude helicopter and rounded on to the Argentine summit of Ojos. That was it.

A four-‐year personal journey, culminated. I lay down and closed my eyes.

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handler took care of most of the rest, venturing across the rarely attempt-‐ ed and very exposed traverse to the Chilean summit. Over an hour later, he re-‐ turned, we packed the GPS devices up, and began the return journey to camp. I was in a fatigued trance. Gray clouds swirled as we descended, enveloping where we once were, and a light snow began to fall. As dusk approached, finally, the garish orange of our tent appeared ahead. For me, it was food and sleep, deep and dreamless.

Chandler later told me he stayed awake for hours that night, worried my extreme fa-‐

tigue might have been the initial symptoms of cerebral edema, a sometimes fatal con-‐ dition brought on by altitude. Fortunately, it was not, and we hiked out the following days without incident. But that day, sum-‐ mit day on Ojos, the culmination of our trip and my four-‐year journey, was the hardest thing I’d ever put myself through, a state-‐ ment not without competing precedent.

I had found my frontier, and it had kicked my butt.

On April 15, 2011, I received from UNAV-‐ CO final data from our GPS measurements.

With a margin of error of two centimeters, about the width of two fingernails, the east-‐ ern or “de facto Argentine” summit is 31 centimeters taller than the western or “de facto Chilean” summit.

JONATHAN KREISS-‐TOMKINS ’12 is a Politi-‐ cal Science major in Branford College.

Contact him at jonathan.kreiss-‐tomkins@yale.edu.

Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins catching a gust of wind on the crater rim of El Muertito. (Kreiss-Tomkins/TYG)

26 26 FOCUS: FRONTIERS

THE YALE GLOBALIST: SUMMER 2011

Bolivian Rhapsody An indigenous community revitalizes its culture – and its relationship with the earth

By Sanjena Sathian

Tiwanaku can be seen in the distance from one of the archeological sites nearby. (Sathian/TYG)

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irst time to Bolivia?”

My plane was on its final de-‐ scent into La Paz, and the man next to me had stopped staring at me long enough to start interrogations.

I responded yes, in Spanish.

“So you’re going to party for Carnaval, right?” he continued in English. “All the tourists are so drunk.”

I replied that I would only be in La Paz, the coun-‐ try’s capital, for a day before heading on to Tiwa-‐ naku, a small town about two hours away, where I would spend 11 days living with indigenous Aymara families and learning their agricultural practices.

“Tiwanaku?” he looked puzzled. “I didn’t think anybody still lived there.” Once a regal, thriving city at the center of a powerful Aymara civilization, the city of Tiwanaku today looks markedly different.

I soon left behind the world of my La Paz hostel, clogged with scruffy Australian and Irish tourists who seemed to spend all day watching soccer in the hotel

bar for a radical shift in scenery. As I pulled into Ti-‐ wanaku, knocking around in an ancient white van that had made me carsick on the way, the first sight I saw was an enormous beige sign hanging from a vacant building, advertising lodging in the Hotel Akapana.

Across the street from the hotel, two or three restau-‐ rants lined abandoned train tracks, which ended by a coral pink museum and a blue archway labeled “Ar-‐ cheological Site at Tiwanaku.”

The city seemed to be waiting for me, like a ghost town with its arms open. The quiet, dusty streets were lined with restaurants, hostels, hotels, conve-‐ nience stores, and stand after stand hawking artisan gifts: alpaca hats, stone carved pendants, and posters of Tiwanaku. But as far as I could see, my travel com-‐ panions and I were the only ones who might buy their wares. Tiwanaku, like many of the rural areas across Bolivia, is caught in a limbo; as its residents flee to big cities, vacating the countryside and leaving gaping ag-‐ ricultural holes behind them, Tiwanaku sits patiently,

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waiting and hoping for a few visitors to find their way here from La Paz or neighboring Peru.

Only 15 years ago tourists were almost unheard of in Tiwanaku, but today commu-‐ nity members report that they receive about 50,000 visitors every year. Visitors to Tiwa-‐ naku sweep in in a flash to see the archaeo-‐ logical site and perhaps stop into the small museum right next door, before returning to their treks through the Andes or quests for the best club in Latin America. My travel companions and I were the first foreigners to be hosted by families in the small urban center of the Tiwanaku pueblo and the first tourists to ever enter the homes of the fami-‐ lies in the rural nearby campo. We were their guinea pigs, and they hope more trav-‐ elers like us can help them create a future for tourism in their community.

or indigenous communities like Tiwa-‐ naku, life should be getting better. Par-‐ ticularly since the election of Aymaran Evo Morales as Bolivia’s first indigenous president in 2006, conditions for indigenous groups in Bolivia have changed radically.

Speaking the Aymara language, once ille-‐ gal, is today encouraged by the government and even required for some government of-‐ ficials so that they can communicate with all members of society. As I walked through Tiwanaku to the market one Sunday, one of our hosts excitedly pointed out the schools and soccer stadium we passed along the way.

“That’s thanks to Evo,” he explained.

“Not everyone likes him, but we have things he built for us right here in Tiwanaku.”

It is almost impossible to drive through a stretch of rural Bolivia without seeing “Evo” or “Más Evo,” meaning “more Evo,” graffitied on a brick wall. Under Morales, in-‐ digenous communities have received more attention and rights and have been freed from the discrimination they faced in the past.

But despite better conditions for the Ay-‐ mara people, Tiwanaku, like many other ag-‐ riculturally dominated parts of the country-‐ side, faces still another dilemma. The town is conspicuously empty. A glance around the market on a Sunday afternoon in the center of town, or a meander through one of the 23 farming communities surrounding the town, reveals very few young men.

“Where are all the men?” I asked my host mother Rosemarí in Spanish one after-‐ noon as we walked down a dirt road to milk the cows. Since I had arrived in Tiwanaku, I found myself perpetually surrounded by women, interacting with the men only a few times over meals. “There don’t seem to be very many.”

“They’re leaving,” she responded. “Many to La Paz.” Rosemarí’s brother drives a taxi in La Paz, returning to Tiwanaku every few weeks to see his family or to participate in festivals. It is not just the men leaving Tiwa-‐ naku, though. A new generation of young people, excited to lead more cosmopolitan lives with greater financial payoff, are head-‐ ing to the cities or to work in the coca fields, leaving behind a life of subsistence farming in Tiwanaku’s potato fields. They follow the money, and it leads them straight out of Ti-‐ wanaku.

As Rosemarí spoke about the exodus of able-‐bodied men, her forehead creased with worry. The problem, she told me, is dual: As young men leave for the modern world of the cosmopolitan city life, the modern world is entering Tiwanaku, threatening to erase the memory of what it means to be Aymara.

Gesturing to her clothing, she told me that the Aymara used to only wear clothing made out of llama fur, but that today she does not follow the tradition so strictly. She has a cell phone. Their house has a televi-‐ sion. Her sister has an e-‐mail address. The world in the campo is changing, certainly, but they must not forget too much, she said.

“We believe—we really do—in pacham-‐ ama,” she told me, emphasizing that the community has not forgotten this funda-‐ mental Aymara notion of “Mother Earth.”

Yet despite Rosemarí’s assertion, the Ayma-‐ rans, especially members of the farming communities, are acutely aware of some-‐ thing sinister happening to pachamama.

As the climate changes and rains come at unpredictable times, the allure of staying in the campo shrinks, and something has to be done. The members of the younger genera-‐ tion that flee to more lucrative areas may be forgetting an ethic that the Aymara hold as fundamental: that respect for pachamama is paramount and that she must be cared for.

Rosemarí once told me as we herded sheep up the mountains that there is a dif-‐ ference even between the farming Aymara living in the agricultural communities around Tiwanaku and the artisans who live in the pueblo. The artisans, she said, are for-‐ getting, but in the campo, they have to build their lives around pachamama.

“We believe in pachamama, and we can feel her changing,” she said, her jaw fixed and her eyes growing wider. “But some peo-‐ ple…they are forgetting.”

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t the heart of the twin problems of keeping youth in Tiwanaku and bringing more tourists to the city lie questions about the future of indigenous communities. As the indigenous peoples of Bolivia are afforded more rights, will they use their integration into the nation as a chance to abandon their seemingly archaic pasts, or will they be called to remember their culture? Bringing back a slipping cul-‐ ture means both having a population that cares about breathing new life into it, and, in this day, having enough tourist onlookers

28 28 FOCUS: FRONTIERS to watch it all happen.

Just outside the sparse pueblo, Tiwan-‐ aku’s “urban center,” and just before the sprawling yellow farmland of the campo meets the soft grey mountains, the Unidad Academica Campesina de Tiwanaku (UAC) sits nestled between town and country. The first day I found myself on the university’s campus, it was as though I’d found Tiwan-‐ aku’s missing generation. The university, the first of several indigenous agricultural institutes scattered across the Bolivian countryside, is one element of the indig-‐ enous renaissance blooming all over the country, and it might be Tiwanaku’s key to its twin troubles of keeping the young gen-‐ eration around and attracting tourism.

“Since I was a child I’ve always seen these customs and practices, and now I’ve seen them disappearing,” Magda Hortencia Patty Quispe, a student in animal husband-‐ ry at UAC, told me. “Young people are leav-‐ ing to go to the cities, and we realize that’s not good. So we want to go back to remem-‐ ber…and to see the cultures of our grand-‐ fathers. Showing young people that you can reappropriate our roots is important; it shows you that you can stay and change the hurting environment.”

The university, founded in 1998, was part of the governmental push to help members of indigenous communities thrive. The hope for universities like UAC at Tiwanaku is that they might inspire young people to stay in their indigenous farming communities by giving them the tools and skills to turn their traditions into careers for the modern age.

THE YALE GLOBALIST: SUMMER 2011 UAC’s 175 indigenous students, who come from both Tiwanaku and other neighboring communities, can choose from three cours-‐ es of study: agriculture, animal husbandry, and rural tourism.

“The main project here is to revive these ancient agricultural practices and to reinte-‐ grate them into our communities, and part

lighting up and his hands clenching and unclenching with nervous energy. “There are things that science doesn’t explain, like why offerings to pachamama work. So here we are doing a combination of science and technology, and we want to take that to the community and help them develop it.”

The sentiment expressed by Lopes is one

As young men leave for the modern world of the cosmopolitan city life, the modern world is entering Tiwanaku, threatening to erase the memory of what it means to be Aymara. of this is proving with the help of science that these practices do work,” explained Flavio Merlo Maydana, director of the pro-‐ gram in animal husbandry.

UAC at Tiwanaku was founded, he said, with the goal of attracting some young Aymarans to stay behind and revitalize the methods that their grandfathers used for years before them. Maydana is one of the 20 Aymara faculty members at UAC engaged in this project. I followed him from the din-‐ ing hall to his office, passing a greenhouse and a large field, where an alpaca stood chewing grass lazily and watching a group of students having class outside studying the anatomy of llama skeletons.

“We want to reach back to what we were without forgetting the world outside of us,” said Francisco Flores Lopes, a professor of anatomy and physiology at UAC, his eyes

An Aymara woman picks potatoes from her fields for carnaval festivities. (Sathian/TYG)

that pervades the entire university. As stu-‐ dents of animal husbandry and agriculture learn old practices and remake them in a modern light, students of tourism study im-‐ mense amounts of cultural history, in addi-‐ tion to practical skills about marketing and business. UAC is tackling the double-‐sided dilemma of both keeping people to stay in the campo and bringing in new eyes to visit and learn and study.

“Today, [the university] is a revaloriza-‐ tion of our culture,” Maydana said. “We have people who haven’t studied in the uni-‐ versities but who listen to voices they hear in the land and the trees, and they know what pachamama wants people to do or not…and we have a form of revitalizing the earth that we can take from them.”

Maydana can remember when the Aymarans were discriminated against and not allowed to study even in elementary schools, let alone universities. Though peo-‐ ple with indigenous heritage make up al-‐ most 66 percent of the Bolivian population, it was not until Evo Morales, he said, that the quality of life for indigenous peoples began to improve. But during the time that being Aymara had been a taboo, an entire generation lost a sense of what it meant to be Aymara.

“There’s definitely a revitalization of Aymaran cultural identity going on,” said Alan Kolata, archaeologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, who has been studying the Aymara commu-‐ nity in Tiwanaku since 1978. “It’s been accel-‐ erated under Evo, but it predates Evo, back to 1952 or ’53. The Aymara were becoming increasingly more self-‐assertive about their culture.”

UAC is in the business of saving a cul-‐

FOCUS: FRONTIERS 29

WWW.TYGLOBALIST.ORG ture. At the university, Maydana said stu-‐ dents speak not only Spanish and Aymara, but also Quechua, another indigenous lan-‐ guage. Lopes said a major part of the uni-‐ versity’s goal of revalorizing the culture is encouraging students to speak indigenous languages. Some students at UAC are even writing their senior theses in Aymara, a radical shift from years before when young children might have been slapped by their grandparents for speaking the language.

But saving pachamama is an integral part of saving Aymaran culture. Making old agricultural practices work in new times can be a challenge, Maydana said. Some of it involves abandoning technologies that have failed, like pesticides, to return to more nat-‐ ural solutions for things. As we sat in his of-‐ fice, occasionally interrupted by a cacopho-‐ ny of animal noises outside or in a lab a few buildings over, Maydana remembered his days a child, when he did not know about veterinarians. But animals never got sick then, either.

“Today, there are parasites and pesti-‐ cides, and we have to use science and tech-‐ nology to go back to some ancient ways,” he said. “We used pesticides to kill parasites, and now we have forgotten in the meantime the natural ways to kill parasites.”

Reviving the old ways is especially im-‐ portant in the world of dairy farming. Most families in the campo have cows, which they milk twice a day, providing their families with milk and cheese, but many don’t have the materials to make cheeses that could be sold in a market or in La Paz. In one of the labs at UAC, students are working on an an-‐ swer; they spend hours each morning heat-‐ ing up milk, adding enzymes to it, and turn-‐ ing it into cheese on an industrial scale that many families in the campo cannot emulate.

Dairy likely holds the most potential for rural residents to modernize, Kolata said. But some agricultural practices, like that of using raised fields to farm, though once efficient, are no longer sustainable as the amount of production in rural areas shrinks. But producing things like yogurt and cheese—if universities like UAC can get the technology they need to produce dairy hygienically on a large scale—hold the po-‐ tential to be a fruitful method of production.

Agricultural modernization may help the community hold onto some of its ancient traditions, but it may not be enough to hold together a culture that some are forgetting.

A woman walks home from the Tiwanaku town center after shopping at the Sunday market. (Sathian/TYG)

T

he Aymara in Tiwanaku had been forgetting for years before they be-‐ gan remembering. And many of the residents attribute the sudden jolt in mem-‐ ory to an unexpected interest on the part of North American academics like Kolata in studying Tiwanaku. After the academ-‐ ics came a few tourists, and now they want more. Tourism is the other stimulus that might breathe new life into Tiwanaku’s economy and, as a result, Aymaran culture.

“Tourism complements the resurgence of Aymara culture, and it’s important for Tiwanaku,” Kolata said. “External interest stimulates their understanding that [Tiwa-‐ naku] is an important place.”

The alumni of the rural tourism depart-‐ ment at UAC are scattered all around Tiwa-‐ naku. Graduates of the university with de-‐ grees in tourism and some members of the older generation have been designing ways to pull visitors from La Paz or even from neighboring South American countries by mixing archaeological tourism and ecotour-‐ ism, or even arranging host family stays like what I experienced.

I was entering parts of Tiwanaku as a pioneer among tourists. As I milked cows in the fields and celebrated carnaval in the potato fields with Rosemarí, I got more than a few confused looks from passing villag-‐ ers. The ground I treaded in Tiwanaku was fresh, and my footprint may stay imprinted in the soil for some time. As more and more tourists come to Tiwanaku, that effect will

be diluted, but in these early years, tourism may change the way Tiwanaku operates.

“Tourism here can be developed as an element of interaction across cultural back-‐ grounds,” said Angela Callisaya Yujra, a 2008 graduate of UAC who is now working at the Centro Integral de Tiwanaku, the growing tourism bureau in the pueblo. “It’s a key way to revalorize the situation with the environment. [Tourists] will change their points of view once they see different ways of treating the earth.”

The future of Tiwanaku, and of other in-‐ digenous communities across Bolivia and South America, rests at this crucial junction between the ancient and the modern. But as I watched Tiwanaku retreat into dusty roads and far-‐off blue tinged mountains on the drive back to La Paz, I saw my presence as not so distanced from the struggles of the campo. Whether or not Tiwanaku contin-‐ ues to modernize effectively and profitably lies in their hands. But our outside eyes, if gentle and curious, are a part of their cul-‐ tural revalorization, and as tourists, our witness matters. *Note: reporting for this article was con-‐ ducting mostly in Spanish, and quotes have been translated.

SANJENA SATHIAN ’13 is an English major in Morse College. Contact her at sanjena.sathian@yale.edu.

30 30 FOCUS: FRONTIERS

THE YALE GLOBALIST: SUMMER 2011

The New Cartographers Novel mapping technologies are reshaping humanitarian and social movements.

By Cathy Huang

I

t was half past midnight at Tufts University, but de-‐ spite the late hour, the base-‐ ment computer lab pulsed with energy. The several dozen volunteers from the greater Boston area who were present had just one goal for the night: to map Port-‐Au-‐Prince, the collapsed capital of Haiti, on their computer screens thousands of miles away. The anxi-‐ ety was palpable. A television in the corner played live footage of the earthquake’s de-‐ struction, but the volunteers—a motley group of professors, businessmen, and students—remained fixated on their com-‐ puter and cell phone screens. As a French-‐ speaking volunteer translated a Skype S.O.S. message about a family trapped un-‐ der rubble, the man next to him guided his cursor to the location indicated and tagged the spot: “urgent help requested.”

Though none of the volunteers was able to witness the on-‐ground humanitar-‐ ian crews, they carried on vigilantly. Forty-‐ eight hours later, the team completed the most comprehensive map of Port-‐au-‐Prince ever rendered, allowing aid groups to in-‐ stantly identify addresses of victims who required water, medical attention, and sup-‐ plies. In the process, they had revealed to the world the life-‐saving potential of “wiki” technologies, as they are used to shape a new, web-‐based phenomenon called “neog-‐ raphy.”

Kate Chapman, a self-‐taught “neo-‐ge-‐ ographer,” explained that, “in a disaster cycle, everyone has a piece of the picture.

The more people are able to share infor-‐ mation data across ecosystems, the more effective… disaster response [will be].”

This information sharing takes place on-‐ line through familiar platforms like Google Maps and Open Street Map, the cartogra-‐ pher’s equivalent of Wikipedia, ensuring that the technology remains accessible to anyone.

The team at Tufts mapping post-‐earth-‐

quake Haiti worked for a project called Ushahidi. Founded in the wake of the vio-‐ lent 2007 elections in Kenya, Ushahidi uses crowdsourcing for its “activist mapping.”

People all over the world now use this free and open source software platform for map-‐ ping data during elections, natural disas-‐ ters, and violent conflicts.

P

atrick Meier, who directs crisis map-‐ ping for Ushahidi, also founded a young group called the International Network of Crisis Mappers (INCM). Crisis Mappers relies on some 1,500 volunteers, all unpaid, worldwide who interact through the organization’s website in forums, webi-‐ nars, and maps. To join the Crisis Mapper network, one only needs Internet access, browsing experience, and an interest in on-‐ line maps or news. Even Meier is a volun-‐ teer at the end of the day. The virtual map platforms allow people to work on projects as they have time, much like writers and ed-‐

itors for Wikipedia. Meier’s co-‐founder, Jen-‐ nifer Ziemke, is piloting the first university course about crisis mapping at John Car-‐ roll University; when she is not teaching, Ziemke runs INCM projects and organizes conferences.

“Openness is essential,” she said. “Neog-‐ raphy is one big collection of people’s in-‐ sights, calculations, and observations from around the world. We don’t actually make anything new, but open platforms allow us to stitch together what’s already there and connect groups of people who other-‐ wise wouldn’t be able to find one another.”

Ziemke believes that accessibility will pro-‐ mote enthusiasm.

“A lot of my students are excited. They pick up GIS [Geographical Information Sys-‐ tems] software easily and feel empowered.

In fact, students anywhere can get involved by joining the Google group,” Ziemke said. The online group trains a Standby Task Force consisting of media monitors,

Screenshot of a real-time student protest map in London. (Samuel Carlisle)

FOCUS: FRONTIERS 31

WWW.TYGLOBALIST.ORG translators, software engineers, and data specialists who take turns logging on and transforming on-‐ground information into mapped coordinates indicating areas of need, danger, or destruction.

Though INCM is the largest online group of crisis mappers, other, smaller net-‐ works exist around the world. MapAction, based in the United Kingdom, dispatched a team to Bolivia to map regions affected by severe flooding as part of a plan to better prepare the Bolivian government for simi-‐ lar crises down the road. The floods didn’t garner much international press attention, but the quieter struggles of flood victims were addressed by community mapping ef-‐ forts. In 1995, the Borneo Project held Ma-‐ laysian Borneo’s first community mapping workshop. Since then, community mapping has become incredibly popular among in-‐ digenous communities fighting for land rights. The Philippine Association for Inter-‐ Cultural Development uses Participatory 3D modeling GPS and GIS applications to allow indigenous communities in the Phil-‐ ippines to claim their rights over ancestral domains. Ziemke hopes to put community maps to domestic use, too; She is planning to study and mitigate issues of homeless-‐ ness and hunger in Cleveland, Ohio where she teaches.

A

fter capturing international atten-‐ tion and praise for their successful mapping of Haiti, Crisis Mappers ex-‐ panded their volunteer base and launched Ushahidi platforms for Chile, Egypt, and, most recently, Libya. Despite its aim of streamlining humanitarian aid, however, Crisis Mappers does not always operate without opposition. A new United Nations-‐ requested project to map the ongoing civil war in Libya has entered uncharted terri-‐ tory. “How do you map live military conflict on the web for the use of aid organizations, foreign governments, and expatriates while avoiding sensitive intelligence leaks or endangering the lives of sources?” Meier asked.

To address this problem, volunteers working on the Libya crisis maps send in their updates, but media monitors don’t publish the data until a day later in order to prevent the map from being mined for intel-‐ ligence in the midst of civil war.

“Haiti provided a permissive environ-‐ ment, politically and geographically.” Meier said, sighing and adjusting his glasses.

“Libya couldn’t be more different.” After all, autocratic regimes tend to favor censor-‐ ship, and the openness of online maps can be threatening.

As web-‐based movements are apt to do, community mapping has fallen into the hands of young people. Sam Carlisle, a 23-‐year-‐old electronics engineer in the United Kingdom, combines his interests in programming and social activism by using Google Maps and Google Earth. After his girlfriend was trampled by police horses during a London university student protest,

to emergency rooms.” In that vein, just as medical personnel need the proper technol-‐ ogy before they can diagnose and treat pa-‐ tients, crisis mappers require reliable inter-‐ net connections. In areas where mobile and Internet access have been severed by either the government or by natural disasters, pro-‐ testers and those needing help must impro-‐ vise. Protestors and humanitarian workers in Egypt, for example, use dial-‐up connec-‐ tions and new “speak to tweet” technology, which converts voicemail recordings into Twitter messages.

How do you map live military conflict on the web for the use of aid organizations, foreign governments, and expatriates while avoiding sensitive intelligence leaks or endangering the lives of sources?

—Patrick Meier, Founder International Network of Crisis Mappers Carlisle sought an outlet for his frustrations with the government’s broken promises and abuse of police power.

“I didn’t want to sit by and watch my friends get brutalized by the police any-‐ more. It just didn’t make sense to me,” Carlisle explained. He teamed up with 22-‐year-‐old Sam Gaus, a student at Uni-‐ versity College London, to create Sukey, a Smartphone web application that allows us-‐ ers to update maps of protest routes in real time. The maps show the locations of police-‐ men, blocked streets, and potential spots of violence. Although Gaus and Carlisle often participate in student protests, both main-‐ tain that their app is not some instrument for inciting or promoting riots. Rather, it is designed to protect students from police violence, a frequent product of attempts to quell the protests. Before every gather-‐ ing, Carlisle sends the same text message to Sukey users: “Stay sensible, stay safe.”

Looking ahead, Gaus and Carlisle said that they hope to expand internationally and help students demonstrate peacefully worldwide.

T

hough Libyan and British officials don’t seem eager to partner with on-‐ line mappers any time soon, such re-‐ lationships could complement most govern-‐ ments. According to Meier, “crisis mapping platforms are to crisis zones what MRIs are

Such technologies could have saved lives after an 8.9 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami hit Japan on March 11, 2011. Tao Guo, a geospatial software re-‐ searcher based in Tokyo, is a standby Crisis Mappers volunteer. In the weeks after the tsunami, he has found his vocation to be a blessing, albeit a haunting one. Every day, he relays and charts information on the whereabouts of hundreds of disaster vic-‐ tims, any one of whom might be a colleague or childhood friend. “[We must] collect, analyze and distrib-‐ ute the correct information to people,” Guo said. “But information without proper as-‐ sessment might turn into rumors very fast.

People rush to buy food in Tokyo, foreigners rush to escape from Japan ... much of that can cause messes and disturb relief efforts.”

Guo believes the precision and authority of mapping technologies can be a real con-‐ tribution. How the map will look upon com-‐ pletion is still a mystery, but its prospective benefits for his people keep him working.

To practice their art, ancient cartographers needed keen observation skills, a quill, and enough parchment. Guo and his fellow cri-‐ sis mappers need their laptops, cell phones, and, perhaps most importantly, each other and all of us.

CATHY HUANG ’14 is in Morse College. Con-‐ tact her at cathy.huang@yale.edu.

32 FOCUS: FRONTIERS

THE YALE GLOBALIST: SUMMER 2011

Cars wait in hours of traffic to enter Mexico at Tijuana’s only crossing point. (Ullmann/TYG)

Bridging the Border A new project on the border between the U.S. and Mexico aims to ease crossing and improve local and national relations.

By Emily Ullmann

I

n 2013, a bridge in south-‐ ern California will reach across the armed fences of the border that the United States has tried so hard to keep impregnable. This cross-‐border facil-‐ ity will connect airfields in San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, which are less than a mile apart, allowing travelers easier access across the border and linking bi-‐national firms. In the midst of heated immigration debates, legally and safely transcending this border is of great importance.

This project is revolutionary, according to Miguel Aliaga, director of public rela-‐ tions for Grupo Aeroportuario del Paci-‐ fico, the company that owns the Tijuana airport, While bi-‐national metropolitan regions exist all along the border between cities like El Paso-‐Ciudad Juárez and Lar-‐ edo-‐Nuevo Laredo, there are currently no cross-‐border airport terminals. In fact, Ali-‐ aga believes this project will be the first of its kind in North America and only the sec-‐ ond in the world. The only other is a ter-‐ minal at the Geneva Airport that straddles

the France-‐Switzerland border.

Efforts to make border crossings easier may seem surprising given news reports that portray Tijuana as a “violence-‐racked city,” marred by “massacres” and other instances of “spectacularly gruesome violence.” Articles often vividly describe brutal decapitations and execution-‐style shootings, creating the image of near total anarchy. Yet these images fail to empha-‐ size that the vast majority of the violence is among the warring drug cartels and does not affect the general population. As the U.S. and Mexican governments have already approved the project, the real struggle will be overcoming the image of violent, chaotic Mexican border cities that has been created by the American media.

Many Americans associate business across the San Diego-‐Tijuana border with the drug trade or the smuggling of illegal immigrants. This common media depic-‐ tion, coupled with the U.S. State Depart-‐ ment’s warning that Tijuana’s “security situation poses serious risks for U.S. citi-‐ zens,” has left most people unaware of the

importance and continued growth of le-‐ gitimate cross-‐border economic relations.

The new facility officially aims to reduce congestion at border crossings, but its im-‐ plications extend far beyond traffic. If the project succeeds, it could also help reduce tensions between Mexico and the United States, paving the way for improved rela-‐ tions.

Currently, Tijuana’s International Air-‐ port offers better options for international flights than the San Diego airport, so many San Diegans forgo the proximity of their own airport and cross the border to trav-‐ el. The limited number of international flights also means that most travelers from abroad must fly into either Los Angeles Airport, which is over 120 miles north of San Diego, or into Tijuana and then spend several hours waiting in line to cross the border into the United States. The inconve-‐ nience of these options can easily dissuade corporations from creating factories and offices in the region. Aliaga, along with regional firms, hopes added convenience will bolster tourism. In particular, accord-‐

FOCUS: FRONTIERS 33

WWW.TYGLOBALIST.ORG

ing to Kenn Morris, president and CEO of Crossborder Group, Inc., a bi-‐national consulting firm that facilitates business relations across the border, many in the re-‐ gion anticipate that this will boost China’s budding interest in the San Diego-‐Tijuana area and strengthen the Japanese and Ko-‐ rean corporations that already have exten-‐ sive investment in the region.

The San Diego city government has been searching for a way to expand the San Diego Airport site for decades. Planes whiz directly above high rises in the city, sometimes swooping frighteningly close to the buildings, and turn sharply off the runway to avoid driving into the water that borders the airstrip. The airport’s size, lo-‐ cation, and short runway have restricted its growth and made it nearly impossible for large, international flights to use the

discussed in the mid-‐1990s. The idea, how-‐ ever, faced strong opposition from several San Diego city councilmen, who believed that a border crossing would cause prob-‐ lems with security, traffic, and pollution in the region. The project was abandoned for almost a decade before current plans be-‐ gan to take shape.

As a traveler, though, the need for a new means of crossing becomes clear im-‐ mediately upon reaching the border. A long fence stretches in both directions as far as the eye can see. On the U.S. side, a large sign with one word, “Mexico,” hangs down, tantalizing drivers who sometimes sit in traffic for several hours. Pedestri-‐ ans going into Mexico, mostly residents of Mexico who commute across the border on a daily basis, simply pass through turn-‐ stiles on their way home. Crossing into the United States, however, is like trying to speed through total gridlock during rush hour—except the long lines and honking horns are made even more intolerable by the Customs and Border Protection offi-‐ cers and trunk searches.

In the fall of 2010, Crossborder con-‐ ducted surveys among visitors from San Diego in Tijuana. Of the several hundred people polled, 75 percent agreed that the Baja California region of Mexico is more secure than the U.S. media depicts with its descriptions of graphic violence against civilians and a lack of police protection.

Even among visitors who travel to Baja infrequently, fewer than 25 percent cited violence as the primary reason for their avoidance of the region. Morris believes that the statistics speak for themselves.

“The U.S. media tends to paint Mexico

The U.S. media tends to paint Mexico with a certain image [and has] generally overblown the risks of visitors to Tijuana —Kenn Morris, President and CEO of Crossborder Group, Inc. airport. The cross-‐border facility will in-‐ crease runway access by connecting a small terminal directly to Tijuana’s major airport.

“San Diego’s airport capacity is and will be constrained. This [cross border fa-‐ cility] takes advantage of San Diego and Tijuana’s unique geographic location and relationship,” said Morris. His firm has been advocating for the cross-‐border fa-‐ cility project since the idea was originally

with a certain image [and has] generally overblown the risks of visitors to Tijuana,” he explained. Morris thinks that visitors crossing the border would be safe regard-‐ less of the presence of the cross-‐border facility, but the bridge will allow travelers to feel secure as they cross into Tijuana without stepping a foot outside the airport walls.

In the future, a ticketed passenger ar-‐ riving in Mexico will step off a plane and

walk down a corridor with signs and shops, just like one in any airport around the world. At the end of the hallway, a gov-‐ ernment official will stamp the traveler’s passport and check their ticket. In a matter of minutes, the traveler will walk through security and into the United States.

In spite of a travel warning issued by the U.S. Department of State, people in-‐ volved on both sides of the border are en-‐ thusiastic about the facility’s implications in the area.

Morris and his Crossborder Group, Inc. clients look forward to the effects, both direct and indirect, of the cross border fa-‐ cility. Morris believes the expected direct effects will be some of the economic and business relationships that form among companies and investors. Beyond these concrete results, he hopes that the ter-‐ minal will strengthen the relationship between Mexico and the United States.

Both nations, “tend to think of themselves as operating independently [and] think of problems and opportunities in a paro-‐ chial sense,” explained Morris. “Instead of as two separate cities, we need to think of [the San Diego-‐Tijuana area] as a pool of 3.2 million people. That combined pool of individuals can have a better quality of life and better competition among busi-‐ nesses.”

With the United States and Mexico in each other’s top three biggest trading partners, metropolitan areas across the border could be transformed by the im-‐ proved cooperation and bi-‐national men-‐ tality that the cross border facility has the potential to create. Although the San Diego-‐Tijuana terminal is still in its devel-‐ opmental stages, the success or failure of the project could have a serious impact on other regions. Morris thinks the project, if it works well, could inspire investors to “rethink what other opportunities might exist along the U.S.-‐Mexico border” and strengthen both economic and political re-‐ lationships across the border. With people easily passing through the facility every day, the bridge will be more than a physical link. It has the potential to totally reinvent the area, allowing a border known now for hostility and security concerns to become a bridge to cooperation and friendship.

EMILY ULLMANN ’14 is in Timothy Dwight College. Contact her at emily.ullman@yale.edu.

34 34 FOCUS: FRONTIERS

THE YALE GLOBALIST: SUMMER 2011

Cholera’s Divisive Reappearance In the Dominican Republic and Haiti, history may prove harder to evade than an epidemic.

By Deirdre Dlugoleski

‘T

he relationship be-‐ tween Haiti and the Dominican Republic is a complicated, very strange relationship,” reflected Robert Lamothe. A teacher of Creole, Lamothe left Haiti for the United States with his family at age 13 but re-‐ members the widespread discrimination well. “I have to tell you that I was shocked that the Dominicans had sent helicopters, first aid, and rescuers to Haiti,” he added, frowning and folding his hands.

Despite this complicated relationship, the Dominican response to the devastat-‐ ing earthquake that hit Haiti last Janu-‐ ary was decidedly straightforward. Haiti’s neighbor sent food, water, mobile clinics, and teams of rescue workers across the border, providing one of the earliest and largest aid contributions to Haiti. Domini-‐ can hospitals took in Haitian victims and provided emergency care, and the Domin-‐ ican government announced that it would halt deportations of illegal immigrants in the aftermath of the disaster. From a small country with a high poverty rate, the aid was a strong sign of solidarity with Haiti.

This generosity is even more remarkable in light of traditional Dominican relations with its neighbor, which have never been smooth. The window for improved rela-‐ tions, however, may be closing with the ap-‐ pearance of cholera on Hispaniola, the is-‐ land the two countries share, nine months after the disaster.

Since the 19th century, Dominicans have developed an explicitly anti-‐Haitian national identity. The Dominican Repub-‐ lic celebrates its 1844 independence from Haiti rather than Spain, its other colonial occupier. The worst manifestation of ten-‐ sions came in dictator Rafael Trujillo’s 1937 massacres of Haitians along the border, considered by many as an act of genocide. Subsequent political leaders have used the “Haitian problem” to draw attention away from domestic issues. In the Dominican Republic today, the dark

skin associated with Haitians is often a stigma, and Haitians still hold mostly low wage jobs. Given the island’s social histo-‐ ry, Lamothe was certainly not alone in his astonishment at the Dominican outreach after the quake.

The appearance of cholera in central Haiti’s Artibonite Valley last October was the country’s first outbreak in over a cen-‐ tury. It has since claimed over 4,600 lives.

Upon hearing of a few cases of cholera in the Dominican Republic in November, many Dominicans feared a similar out-‐ break. “In reality, it is a very contagious disease,” observed Francisco Franjul, a taxi driver and former bank manager in the Dominican Republic. “In some cases, it can’t be avoided despite taking the ap-‐ propriate measures.”

Though access to health centers is not a problem, adequate treatment is not guaranteed. “In all the provinces there are hospitals, and for almost every six kilome-‐ ters there is a center for primary health,” said Jorge Amarante, a doctor in the Do-‐ minican Republic. “The problem is in the quality of the medical services given.”

While almost every town has a clinic, few are equipped to handle an outbreak of the disease on the scale Haiti has seen. The

tially a water-‐borne disease; somebody has to get it from water and then pass it on to other people,” explained Ian Raw-‐ son, Director of Hopital Albert Schweizer, the first hospital in Haiti to receive chol-‐ era patients. “The reality is that the vast majority of people who got sick and who are getting sick got sick from the water that they drank.” But even water is easily treated. “A couple of grains of chlorine in a bucket of water will pretty much take care of it,” said Rawson.

Though cholera poses little danger to ordinary Dominicans, the same cannot be said for the country’s tourists. In January, over 100 guests, mostly wealthy Venezu-‐ elan businessmen, contracted cholera at a high-‐profile wedding in Casa del Campo, a Dominican resort. But the Dominican gov-‐ ernment only admitted to the presence of cholera on the island after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez publicly spoke of the event.

Since that public relations debacle, the Dominican government has taken ex-‐ traordinary measures to publicize their efforts against cholera. “They’ve been do-‐ ing everything in their power to control the spread of the disease, but controlling the disease itself doesn’t prevent against

I was shocked that the Dominicans had sent helicopters, first aid, and rescuers to Haiti.

— Robert Lamothe, Haitian Creole teacher Dominican Ministry of Health has under-‐ taken an immense public education cam-‐ paign in Spanish and Creole, including posters and mass text messages reading “¿Qué es el cólera?” and “Kisa kolera li ye?”—“What is cholera?”

But Dominicans face relatively little chance of death by cholera. Treatment is easy, often requiring only oral re-‐hydra-‐ tion for a recovery within three to four days. Cholera also does not move easily from human to human. “Cholera is essen-‐

the backlash of how potential tourists per-‐ ceive the threat from abroad,” explained Gerald McElroy, a local program coordi-‐ nator for the NGO Yspaniola who works mostly in the border region. The imple-‐ mentation of these measures, however, betrays the underlying issue behind the cholera panic: illegal immigration.

“The Dominican-‐Haitian border is very vulnerable to being crossed without con-‐ trol,” observed Amarante. An estimated 600,000 Haitians lived illegally in the Do-‐

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Any individual with a Haitianlike appearance could be stopped and asked for papers… If they don’t have their documents on them, which oftentimes are expensive or difficult to obtain for Dominicans of Haitian descent, they will be sent to Haiti.

—Gerald McElroy, Progam Coordinator for Yspinola minican Republic before the earthquake, a figure that has climbed to one million in its aftermath. Around 80 percent of agricul-‐ tural workers in the Dominican Republic are Haitian or of Haitian descent.

“It’s becoming an uncontrollable situa-‐ tion,” Franjul said. “They don’t maintain a low profile in the country, causing more inconveniences than cholera, like robber-‐ ies, homicides, and beggars in the streets, asking for money and using children for this business.” With no legal status, it is also impossible to monitor their health.

“Illegal Haitian migration to our territory is worrisome,” explained Franjul, “They don’t apply a hygienic conduct to be able to control this disease that they bring to the country.”

The government seems to agree. De-‐ spite the rarity of human-‐to-‐human trans-‐ mission, the Dominican Republic has undertaken anti-‐Haitian initiatives to pre-‐ vent the spread of the disease. Mass depor-‐ tations, suspended after the earthquake, have recently resumed. “Any individual with a Haitian-‐like appearance could be stopped and asked for papers,” said McEl-‐ roy. “If they don’t have their documents on them, which oftentimes are expensive or difficult to obtain for Dominicans of Hai-‐ tian descent, they will be sent to Haiti.”

Authorities have also segregated border markets, like the once-‐thriving Dajabón, where both Haitians and Do-‐ minicans would go to sell goods in a civil exchange. “They’ve built this completely separate complex far away from where

A sign in front of a public health building on the Haitian side of the border. (Dr. Robert Chase) the market used to take place,” said McEl-‐ roy. “Now, there’s a check point. They’ve built a completely new border crossing, a new bridge, so now there’s two, and as you cross the second bridge you’re pushed into this fenced in area with this wooden build-‐ ing and all sorts of venders and stalls…

They want to have all the Haitian vendors in one area separate from the Dominican vendors.”

Despite this active segregation in cities and border markets, the government has turned a blind eye to mixed communities on the border. High numbers of Haitian migrant workers live in crowded, make-‐ shift villages called bateyes with little or no access to electricity, sanitation, health care, or running water. They are neither immobile nor sequestered from contact with Dominicans. They can commute be-‐ tween Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and some bateyes have a high proportion of Dominican residents. These communi-‐ ties are especially at risk for diseases like cholera, but government-‐ordered deporta-‐ tions, which traditionally have occurred around electoral campaign seasons, have thus far avoided the bateyes, focusing in-‐ stead on the cities. With elections sched-‐ uled for May, this may change; bateyes have been subject to routine sweeps in the past.

Few medical specialists have concerned themselves with how the disease reap-‐ peared in the country. “I don’t think that the origin is relevant except in discourses that serve to provide a rationale for dis-‐

crimination,” said Ana Lara, a second year Ph.D. student from the Dominican Republic. “For me,” McElroy said, “one of the really upsetting pieces of the past two months has been how the conservatives in the Dominican Republic have used the epidemic as a political tool. Illegal immi-‐ gration has always been an issue here, so when you can empower these conserva-‐ tive politicians to have some sort of legiti-‐ mate reason to start deporting Haitians, it’s a disaster.”

Ironically, the Dominican Republic may be stirring itself into a frenzy over a threat that has largely passed. After a successful public health campaign and aid from many NGOs, the disease has abated in Haiti and remains relatively under control. Most international medical organizations have already departed, though a handful re-‐ mains to run cholera treatment centers.

The Dominican Republic’s own preven-‐ tion campaign has seen so much success that serious outbreaks of cholera have not even appeared in the bateyes.

For both Haitians and Dominicans, it seems that history has proven more in-‐ tractable than the disease. It is the rela-‐ tionship between the two neighbors that needs treatment more urgently than the water supply.

DEIRDRE DLUGOLESKI ’13 is a History major in Ezra Stiles College. Contact her at deirdre.dlugoleski@yale.edu.

36 36 FOCUS: FRONTIERS

THE YALE GLOBALIST: SUMMER 2011

Exploring the Future of Undersea Excavation Underwater cultural heritage lies in wait for terrestrial answers.

By Sarah Mich

H

alfway around the world from the beaches of Califor-‐ nia, a ship that carried the secret to an ancient trade route rests quietly on the ocean floor. The vessel is an Arab dhow, not more than 20 meters long, crafted from planks tied together with pieces of stout twine. When it sank off the coast of Indone-‐ sia 12 centuries ago, its hull filled with Chi-‐ nese ceramics, it was bound for modern-‐day Iraq.

But in March of this year, the dhow be-‐ gan making waves once more, this time in international headlines. More than a de-‐ cade after the ship’s discovery, the Smith-‐ sonian Institution made plans to host an exhibit of artifacts from the sunken vessel, entitled “Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds,” to open in 2012. As the exhibition nears its start date, though, several curators and archaeologists at the Smithsonian have turned a critical eye to the artifacts and the methods used to pro-‐ cure them. Their skepticism arose from the fact that commercial salvagers, the mod-‐

ern, industrial version of treasure hunters, had recovered the ship.

The dhow’s discovery in 1998 reverberat-‐ ed through the archaeological world for its historical significance. The location of the wreck in the Java Sea proved, for the first time, the existence of a maritime Silk Road as early as the 9th century. But its discovery also thrust a spotlight on unsettled differ-‐ ences between archaeological and salvage communities. Paul Johnston, a Smithson-‐ ian curator, expressed doubt that the ship’s 60,000 artifacts could have been procured by proper scientific means in less than two years. Many archaeologists and museum curators share the concern that in the case of this dhow, and similar underwater exca-‐ vations, commercial motives have begun to overpower traditional archaeological meth-‐ ods of exploration, to the detriment of the historical and cultural value of the artifacts.

M

odern commercial salvage companies face far more regulation than treasure hunters of the past.

Their image, however, is invariably tied to

Archaeological divers face competition these days from salvage companies. (NOAA Photo Library/Flickr)

the thrill, riches, and recklessness that Blackbeard and his cohorts popularized in public imagination. “People think we’re out here to plunder gold,” said Sharon Wiley, director of media relations at Mel Fisher’s Treasures, a Florida-‐based salvage company that began excavating a Spanish galleon, Nuestra Señora de Atocha, in 1985.

Twenty-‐five years later, the Atocha is a $500 million enterprise, and the company has hired employees, like Wiley, who groom its brand and maintain that the financial and emotional thrill of the hunt is only a sliver of the story.

Salvage companies also emphasize that their focus on historical value governs op-‐ erational practices. Tilman Walterfang, the German explorer who discovered the Arab dhow and subsequently formed Seabed Ex-‐ plorations, a New Zealand-‐based salvage company, has upheld the merits of respon-‐ sible salvage while condemning treasure-‐ hunters who “destroy the valuable cultural information of a wreck before anyone can collect it in a database for posterity.” At the outset of the dhow excavation, Walterfang hired Australian archaeologist Michael Flecker to ensure that the work was thor-‐ ough: “We recovered artifacts, conserved all of them, researched for six years, and invited scholars from all over the world.

We did all that we could do.” Seabed’s re-‐ search produced two treatises totaling 950 pages that catalogue the artifacts’ history and preservation. Walterfang sold the re-‐ search and 53,000 pieces of the collection to the Singaporean government in 2005 for $32 million dollars.

So why are commercial salvage com-‐ panies frequently on the defensive? Wiley commented that archaeologists have not acknowledged the rigor of salvage opera-‐ tions. “Right now there is a big disjoint be-‐ tween what we do and what they think we do,” she said. “We use utmost integrity on the wreck sites. If they would see how we run the operation, we might be able to col-‐ laborate.” But for years archaeologists have refused the company’s invitations to view

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Ceramic jars, an ornate metal ewer, and a priceless Tang gold cup were discovered on the shipwreck of the dhow. (Creative Commons/Singapore Art Science Museum) salvage operations.

Yet it seems indisputable that commer-‐ cial salvage companies are primarily effi-‐ ciency-‐minded and profit-‐driven. Gold and jewels adorn the homepage of the Mel Fish-‐ er’s Treasures website, and Fisher himself is pictured in a white linen suit standing in ankle-‐deep water and dangling a gold chain between outstretched hands. A code of ex-‐ cavation ethics, however, is notably absent from the site.

F

or the Australian National Maritime Museum, now in its twentieth year, Walterfang’s discovery would have been a noteworthy show. “We were offered that exhibit, and we turned it down,” said curator Kieran Hofty. “The Singapore col-‐ lection is not intact, and when you break up a collection, you lose information.”

The goal of preserving information, in whatever form it may take, distinguishes the archaeological profession from its com-‐ mercial counterpart. While commercial salvage companies will always excavate a given site after receiving proper authoriza-‐ tion, archaeologists take a more nuanced approach. Only in some cases will archae-‐ ologists elect to excavate a site. If a wooden shipwreck has been exposed through a layer of silt, scientists will conserve the ma-‐ terial on land to prevent the organic mate-‐ rial from decomposing within months. But they will often opt to leave a less vulnerable site undisturbed to preserve its contextual integrity.

Financial constraints in the field have also led archaeologists to adopt more con-‐ servative practices than their commercial counterparts. Before an excavation can take place, archaeologists spend months or years on grant proposals to obtain fund-‐ ing from the National Science Foundation, institutions, and private entities. The often self-‐financed ventures of private salvage companies can proceed with excavations as soon as their permits are approved. Dr.

Silvano Jung, an underwater archaeologist who studies sunken aircraft in Australia, cautioned against this expediency: “under-‐ water sites are the ultimate non-‐renewable resource.” Nothing, he said, should be rushed.

F

or much of the past century, a jumble of national and international laws reg-‐ ulated underwater archaeology, and implementation was even more arbitrary.

But in a 2001 meeting, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Orga-‐ nization (UNESCO) developed a set of pro-‐ visions to protect underwater cultural heri-‐ tage sites from the threats posed by a lack of international standards.

The UNESCO Convention, adopted in 2009 and so far ratified or accepted by 37 countries, pledges to preserve sites of cultural heritage, protect them from com-‐ mercial exploitation, and keep sites in situ whenever possible.

Even among countries that have rati-‐ fied the Convention, however, compliance is far from guaranteed. Governments issue permits, police their territorial waters, and have the power to buy or receive a share of the artifacts following an excavation. Faced with this conflict of interest, governments may seek to promote tourism, favor devel-‐ opment over archaeology, and take treasure profits. Many countries in Southeast Asia are notorious for hasty and unregulated ex-‐ cavations.

V

iewed contextually, the wholesale condemnation of commercial sal-‐ vage seems too simple a route. In-‐ deed, while archaeologists plug away at excavations and new discoveries, some historical treasures may remain forever uncovered without the intervention of com-‐ mercial interests. And sometimes, time is of the essence: Dr. John Hale, an archaeologist at the University of Louisville, predicts that the Titanic will collapse on itself within de-‐

cades, consumed by iron-‐eating bacteria.

Commercial interests operate with a lev-‐ el of profit-‐driven urgency—and funding— that allow incredible discoveries to be made.

Neither are commercial companies uninter-‐ ested in cooperation with their academic colleagues. “With sensitive management and good strategies, there are more ways to approach this than black and white, purist and mercenary,” Walterfang said. “Recent controversies and legal developments have triggered some discussion, though when it will lead to dialogue, I do not know.”

I

n the midst of thousands of silver coins and the world’s best-‐cut emeralds, the crew excavating the Atocha discovered something else: The ship did not have to sink. The nails used to hold the ship togeth-‐ er were too short and its ribs too thin. In short, the king’s contractors “supplied sub-‐ standard parts,” Hale said. “The Spanish Empire foundered and went under because it couldn’t get the treasure home effectively, in part because of its own contractors and builders. It’s the mentality of personal prof-‐ it first, with communal effort far down the list.”

With thousands of artifacts awaiting their Smithsonian debut, the museum held a conference on underwater archaeology in late April, the results of which may help govern future excavations. But the history of the Atocha should not be lost on the Arab dhow. In this community of underwater explorers, the challenge of fostering dia-‐ logue and amicable cooperation between all stake-‐holding parties persists. It will take a concerted effort between archaeologists and commercial salvagers to ensure that history might not be lost in a sea of conflict-‐ ing interests.

SARAH MICH ‘12 is an American Studies major in Saybrook College. Contact her at sarah.mich@yale.edu.

38 38 Q&A

Q

& A

THE YALE GLOBALIST: SUMMER 2011

A Conversation with Reza Kahlili

On March 30th, Reza Kahlili came to Yale to speak about his experiences as a former Iranian Revolutionary Guardsman and double agent for the CIA. Kahlili has a unique and inside perspective on a country mired in controversy. U RIEL E PSHTEIN spoke to him about his experiences and the future of Iran.

Q: Could you please talk a bit about your background?

A: I was born in Tehran but was sent to

the U.S. to study at the University of South-‐ ern California. After my return, in 1979, my friend in the Revolutionary Guard con-‐ vinced me that my education in computer science and my background in communica-‐ tions would make me a perfect candidate to join them. Inspired by the values of the revolution and hoping to serve my country, I didn’t hesitate, but a few months down the road I became disillusioned. I saw the regime commit terrible atrocities. Women were forced to wear the hijab, men and women couldn’t be seen together, many who voiced the slightest bit of political dissent were taken to Evin Prison, and there they were tortured, the women were raped, and many were eventually executed. I saw my childhood friend be executed…This, of course, isn’t even to mention that political parties were banned and the U.S. embassy was taken hostage…

Soon, I had seen enough and by the fall of 1981 sought to return to the U.S. under the pretense of having to take care of an ailing relative. My friend in the Revolution-‐ ary Guard helped me with my papers, and I was able to make the trip. In the U.S., I first got in touch with the FBI—the CIA wasn’t listed in the Yellow pages—and they, in turn, forwarded me to Langley. The CIA agent who I’d gotten in touch with proposed that I return to Iran as a spy for the U.S. He said I could oppose the atrocities of the regime by providing information about the Revolution-‐ ary Guard. I agreed, was trained in Europe, and shortly became a CIA double agent in the ranks of the Revolutionary Guard.

Epshtein/TYG

Due to security concerns, Khalili conceals his face behind sunglasses, a hat, and a mask. The name “Reza Khalili” is a pseudonym that he uses to protect the identities of his family and friends. (Courtesy Reza Khalili)

“The CIA agent who I’d gotten in touch with proposed that I return to Iran as a spy for the U.S. He said I could oppose the atrocities of the regime by providing information about the Revolutionary Guard.”

Q: What years were you involved with the CIA?

late ‘80s through early ‘90s in Europe, mid ‘90s in America.

A: Early ‘80s through late ‘80s in Iran,

Q: What did you think of your

Q&A 39

WWW.TYGLOBALIST.ORG involvement with the CIA?

A: Despite what many movies will

tell you, they were great. They were concerned with my safety, told me that I wouldn’t have to do anything that made me uncomfortable, trained me well, and then listened to my concerns throughout the process. When, after many years, I wanted to get out, they didn’t resist and even helped with transportation to the U.S.

Q: Do you believe that the Iranian Regime Q: Were the people of Iran who came out in cares for its self-‐preservation?

A: No, their mentality does not allow them A: No, they’ve never had a chance for a to. This may seem crazy to many, but they have a different lens through which they see the world. They see martyrdom as the highest calling. Mutually assured destruction wouldn’t give them pause. At best, even if they did care about their own preservation, then the nuclear bomb would give them much more freedom to support terrorism around the world.

Q: What did you hope to achieve?

A: I was hoping that they would under-‐ Q: Taking into account China’s and Rus-‐

stand that this regime would have to go, and I hoped to provide the right analysis to the U.S. administration so that they would help the Iranian people. This, unfor-‐ tunately, didn’t happen.

Q:

Do you think Iran is trying to get a nuclear weapon?

A:

Absolutely. I have no doubt that a nuclear device is their end-‐goal and, un-‐ fortunately, I think they’ll be able to get it because we haven’t taken enough actions to stop them.

Q:

Some people will argue that even if Iran gets a nuclear weapon it will never use it. Do you think that’s true?

A:

Absolutely not. The Iranian leaders who are ruling the country right now are truly messianic, and they believe that it is mandated that they destroy Israel to bring about the End of Times and the return of the last Imam. It is essential for the West to realize this. Nukes in the hands of the radicals in Iran would at the very least destabilize the world, affect the economy by raising the price of oil, and expand terrorist activities [by removing terrorists’ fear] about a reaction from the U.S. Once they have a nuke, they can take the world hostage.

I think that mutually assured destruc-‐ tion does not apply to the Iranian regime and that they will seek to destroy Israel and create the circumstances necessary to fulfill the centuries-‐old Hadith that states that once chaos takes over the world and one-‐third of the world population dies, Imam Mahdi will return.

2009 supporters of Mousavi?

sia’s recalcitrance in supporting crippling sanctions against Iran, what do you think the United States can realistically do in the next few months or years to ensure that Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon? Is there any-‐ thing we can do?

A:

Russia and China aren’t abiding by the current sanctions in place. Many Chinese companies, with permission from the U.S., are still working in Iran, and many other cor-‐ porations are secretly doing business in Iran.

A Chinese ship was recently confiscated

by Malaysian police in Malaysia en route to Iran; the ship was holding nuclear material.

India, Germany, Venezuela, and others work with Iran. The U.S. had the best opportunity in the summer of 2009 when Iranians came out en masse to oppose the regime. The U.S. didn’t support the protesters and so now we’re left with only two options: First, mini-‐ mize diplomatic connections with Iran; kick out most Iranian diplomats from Europe and let the Iranian people know that the West supports their aspirations to freedom and democracy and that we will help them over-‐ come the regime. Otherwise, we’ll eventually have to go to war. In this scenario, we would have to fight the Revolutionary Guard and tell the Iranian people they have Western support. If they know this, they’ll do the rest.

Q: So you believe that the Iranian people, as a whole, oppose the regime?

A: Yes. Q: Do you believe that they will come out again as they did in the summer of 2009?

A:

Only if they have assurances that the West will support them.

free election so they took this opportunity to come out and show their resentment towards the regime. They weren’t coming out to support Mousavi, but rather to oppose the regime.

Q: What should the West do to demon-‐ strate support for the people of Iran who oppose the regime?

A:

They should provide support to pros-‐ ecute the Iranian leaders through legal chan-‐ nels for crimes against humanity: for rape, for torturing and murdering Iranian citizens, for genocide against religious minorities, for involvement in international terrorism, and for killing American soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. should help estab-‐ lish direct channels of communication with the Iranian people to provide information to the masses and to promote freedom. [It can also] ask our allies within the European Union to cut diplomatic ties to a minimum and to refuse airspace to Iran Air and ports to ships to and from Iran.

Q: Yale Professor Hillary Leverett argues that the United States should engage more with Iran and seek a realignment similar to the one Nixon sought with China. What do you think of this proposal?

A:

Frankly, that’s ridiculous. For over 30 years, U.S. administrations have gone through back channels with serious negotia-‐ tions and serious sanctions to come to better relations, and nothing has worked. This proposal is destructive because the regime has shown utter contempt for its own people, the U.S., and the world. Not understanding this ideology and the philosophy is exactly why every approach has failed. Until we do understand them, we will fail in future ap-‐ proaches…. No matter how many incentives we offer, the Iranian regime will not change their behavior.

Khalili chronicled his experiences in the 2010 book, “A Time to Betray.” Visit www.atimetobetray.com for more information.

URIEL EPSHTEIN ’14 is in Trumbull College.

Contact him at uriel.epshtein@yale.edu.

ANNUAL

9th

The Yale Globalist’s

INTERNATIONAL PHOTO CONTEST

Submissions start September 26.

E-‐mail globalistcontestinfo@gmail.com for instructions.

New category!

Global Health in Action sponsored by the

Yale Global Health Leadership Institute

“Immunization Card” (Gabe Forrey)