July 4, 2007
Nouakchott Journal
In Mauritania, Seeking to End an Overfed Ideal

By SHARON LaFRANIERE
"NOUAKCHOTT, Mauritania — At the Olympic Sports Stadium here, a collection of dun-colored buildings rising mirage-like from the vast Sahara, about a dozen women clad in tennis shoes and sandals circled the grandstands one evening in late June, puffing with each step.

Between pants came brief explanations for their labors. “Because I am fat,” said one, a dark-eyed 34-year-old close to 200 pounds. Another, a 30-year-old in bright pink sneakers, said, “For myself, for my health and to be skinny.” It is a typically Western after-work scene. But this is the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, the mirror opposite of the West on questions of women’s weight. To men here, fat is sexy. And in this patriarchal region, many Mauritanian women do everything possible — and have everything possible done to them — to put on pounds.

Now Mauritania’s government is out to change that. In recent years, television commercials and official pronouncements have promoted a new message: being fat leads to diabetes, heart problems, high blood pressure and other woes. The joggers outside the Olympic stadium testify to their impact: Until lately, a Mauritanian woman in jogging shoes was roughly as common as a camel in stiletto heels.

But in other respects, the message faces an uphill run. A 2001 government survey of 68,000 women found that one in five between ages 15 and 49 had been deliberately overfed. And nearly 70 percent — and even more among teenagers — said they did not regret it.

“That is a bad sign, especially among the younger generation,” said Maye Mint Haidy, a government statistician who also runs a nongovernmental women’s organization.

Other cultures prize corpulent women. But Mauritania may be unique in the lengths it has gone to achieve its vision of female beauty. For decades, the Mauritanian version of a Western teenager’s crash diet was a crash feeding program, devised to create girls obese enough to display family wealth and epitomize the Mauritanian ideal. Centuries-old poems glorified women immobilized by fat, moving so slowly they seemed to stand still, unable to hoist themselves onto camels without the aid of men’s willing hands.

Girls as young as 5 and as old as 19 had to drink up to five gallons of fat-rich camel’s or cow’s milk daily, aiming for silvery stretch marks on their upper arms. If a girl refused or vomited, the village weight-gain specialist might squeeze her foot between sticks, pull her ear, pinch her inner thigh, bend her finger backward or force her to drink her own vomit. In extreme cases, girls died.

The practice was known as gavage, a French term for force-feeding geese to obtain foie gras. “There isn’t a woman close to my age who hasn’t gone through this, maybe not with the torture, but with the milk and other things,” said Yenserha Mint Mohamed Mahmoud, 47, a top government women’s affairs official.

Ms. Mahmoud insists that the use of torture has died out, though some say it lingers in remote areas. Still, Mauritania remains saddled with an alarming number of women weighing 220 to 330 pounds, according to the Ministry for the Promotion of Women, Family and Children.

The same 2001 survey that documented overfeeding estimated that two in five women were overweight — not high by American standards, where government surveys show nearly three in five women are overweight — but remarkable for sub-Saharan Africa. According to the International Obesity Task Force, a London-based research and advocacy group, Mauritania has the region’s fourth highest percentage of overweight women. Government officials blame a concerted effort by all but the poorest families to pump girls full of milk, cream, butter, couscous and other calorie-rich foods.

In 2003, the women’s ministry mounted a slim-down campaign, wielding messages that were anything but subtle. One television and radio skit depicted a husband carting his fat wife around in a wheelbarrow. Another featured houseguests raiding the refrigerator because their host was too obese to get up to feed them. Doctors were recruited to explain health risks.

But messages spread slowly in the desert. Nearly three-fourths of Mauritanian women do not watch television, and an even greater share do not listen to the radio, said Ms. Haidy, the statistician.

Nor is it easy, Ms. Mahmoud said, to change how the sexes view each other. “Men want women to be fat, and so they are fat,” she said. “Women want men to be skinny, and so they are skinny.” Indeed, according to Mauritanian stereotypes, porky men are womanish and lazy.

Mohamed el-Moktar Ould Salem, a 52-year-old procurement officer, blames the brightly colored, head-to-toe mulafas that hide all but the most voluptuous female curves for shaping the men’s preferences. A slender woman, he said, “just looks like a stick wrapped up.”

Fatma Mint Mohamed, 35, a mother of five living in a village south of Nouakchott, the capital, agrees. She carries nearly 200 pounds on her five-foot frame. Her weight makes her husband “very happy, of course,” she said, although her slimmer sister, 45 minutes away in the city, warns that it could kill her.

Mrs. Mohamed said she endured a comparatively mild form of gavage — “just enough so our family did not get criticized or be thought of as poor” — and was proud to emerge with a praiseworthy, roly-poly figure. Her 9-year-old daughter, Selma, with curly dark hair, wide-set eyes and what her mother considers a distressingly slim figure, has so far escaped the treatment, in hopes that she will gain weight on her own.

Selma’s sisters, now 20 and 14, were less fortunate. Mrs. Mohamed said she spared them the “old-fashioned” techniques that made girls she grew up with scream in pain. “But to tell the truth, I did take them to the cows and made them overdrink,” she acknowledged. “I did overfeed them, just a little bit, just so they could look like real Mauritanian girls. Forty days was enough to get them in the shape I wanted.”

Other Mauritanian women have replaced gavage with thoroughly modern prescription drug abuse. At the capital’s open-air market in late June last week, a male buyer easily secured a gold box of Indian-made dexamethasone tablets, a prescription steroid hormone that can cause sharp weight gain.

The black-turbaned seller, his wares displayed openly on a plastic sheet, warned that the drug was dangerous. But it would fatten up the man’s wife fast, he promised.

Nouredine François, a pharmacist, refuses to sell that drug. But he said he could not keep a particular prescription antihistamine on his shelves because women had heard it made them drowsy, thus less active and more likely to add pounds.

He considers himself one of the few Mauritanian men who understand obesity’s dangers. “Every day I see a woman come in here who has suffered from a stroke,” he said. He said he was trying to lose weight and did not push his wife to get fatter.

But his wife, an already-Rubenesque beauty-parlor worker, needs no pushing, he said. “She says, ‘Why don’t you bring me any pills? You give them to other women but you won’t give them to me.’ ”

“Women are very sensitive about their weight,” he said. “She just wants to keep up a good image.”

May 23: 2954

June 12 3195 11:45 p
June 13 3210 10:30p
June 14 3228 7:30p
June 15 3238
June 16 3249 11:45p
June 18 3274 8 a.m.
June 18 3288 10p.m
June 20 3350 11p.m
June 22 3371 8 a.m.
June 23 3381 10 a.m.
June 24 3408 10 p.m
June 26 3435 8 a,m.

June 27 3455 4p.m.
June 28 3465 9p.m.
June 29 3486 7p.m.
June 30 3501 11p.m.
July 1, 3547 11.p.m.
July 2 3585
JUly 3 3649 11 p.m.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/02/opinion/edkiss.php

A political program to exit Iraq
By Henry A. Kissinger
Tribune Media Services
Monday, July 2, 2007

The war in Iraq is approaching a kind of self-imposed climax. Public disenchantment is palpable. Congress will surely press for an accelerated, if not total, withdrawal of American forces. Demands for a political solution are likely to mount.

But precipitate withdrawal would produce a disaster. It would not end the war but shift it to other areas, like Lebanon or Jordan or Saudi Arabia. The war between the Iraqi factions would intensify. The demonstration of American impotence would embolden radical Islamism and further radicalize its disciples from Indonesia and India to the suburbs of European capitals.

We face a number of paradoxes. Military victory, in the sense of establishing a government capable of enforcing its writ throughout Iraq, is not possible in a time frame tolerated by the American political process. Yet no political solution is conceivable in isolation from the situation on the ground.

What America and the world need is not unilateral withdrawal but a vision by the administration of a sustainable political end to the conflict. Withdrawals must grow out of a political solution, not the other way around.

None of Iraq's neighbors, not even Iran, is in a position to dominate the situation against the opposition of all the other interested parties. Is it possible to build a sustainable outcome on such considerations?

The answer must be sought on three levels: the internal, the regional and the international.

The internal parties - the Shiites, the Sunnis and the Kurds - have been subjected to insistent American appeals to achieve national reconciliation. But groups that have been conducting blood feuds with one another for centuries are, not surprisingly, struggling in their efforts to compose their differences by constitutional means. They need the buttress of a diplomatic process that could provide international support for carrying out any internal agreements reached or to contain their conflict if the internal parties cannot agree and Iraq breaks up.

The American goal should be an international agreement regarding the international status of Iraq. It would test whether the neighbors of Iraq as well as some more distant countries are prepared to translate general concepts into converging policies. It would provide a legal and political framework to resist violations. These are the meaningful benchmarks against which to test American withdrawals.

The reason why such a diplomacy may prove feasible is that the continuation of Iraq's current crisis presents all of Iraq's neighbors with mounting problems. The longer the war in Iraq rages, the more likely will be the breakup of the country into sectarian units.

Turkey has repeatedly emphasized that it would resist such a breakup by force because of the radicalizing impact that a Kurdish state could have on Turkey's large Kurdish population. But this would bring Turkey into unwanted conflict with the United States and open a Pandora's box of other interventions.

Saudi Arabia and Jordan dread Shiite domination of Iraq, especially if the Baghdad regime threatens to become a satellite of Iran. The various Gulf sheikhdoms, the largest of which is Kuwait, find themselves in an even more threatened position. Syria's attitudes are likely to be more ambivalent. Its ties to Iran represent both a claim to status and a looming vulnerability.

Given a wise and determined American diplomacy, even Iran may be brought to conclude that the risks of continued turmoil outweigh the temptations before it.

To be sure, Iranian leaders may believe that the wind is at their backs, that the moment is uniquely favorable to realize millennial visions of a reincarnated Persian empire or a reversal of the Shiite-Sunni split under Shiite domination. On the other hand, if prudent leaders exist - which remains to be determined - they might come to the conclusion that they had better treat these advantages as a bargaining chip in a negotiation rather than risk them in a contest over domination of the region.

No American president will, in the end, acquiesce once the full consequences of Iranian domination of the region become apparent. Russia will have its own reasons, principally the fear of the radicalization of its own Islamic minority, to begin resisting Iranian and radical Islamist domination of the Gulf. Combined with the international controversy over its nuclear weapons program, Iran's challenge could come to be perceived by its leaders to pose excessive risks.

Whether or whenever Iran reaches these conclusions, two conditions will have to be met: First, no serious diplomacy can be based on the premise that the United States is the supplicant. America and its allies must demonstrate a determination to vindicate their vital interests that Iran will find credible. Second, the United States will need to put forward a diplomatic position that acknowledges the legitimate security interests of Iran.

Such a negotiation must be initiated within a genuinely multilateral forum. A dramatic bilateral Iranian-U.S. negotiation would magnify all the region's insecurities. For if Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait - which have entrusted their security primarily to the United States - become convinced that an Iranian-U.S. condominium is looming, a race for Tehran's favor may bring about the disintegration of all resolve.

Within a multilateral framework, the United States will be able to conduct individual conversations with the key participants, as has happened in the six-party forum on North Korea.

A forum for such an effort already exists in the foreign ministers' conference that met recently at Sharm el-Sheikh. It is in the United States' interest to turn the conference into a working enterprise under strong, if discreet, American leadership.

The purpose of such a forum should be to define the international status of the emerging Iraqi political structure into a series of reciprocal obligations. Iraq would continue to evolve as a sovereign state but agree to place itself under some international restraint in return for specific guarantees.

In such a scheme, the United States-led multinational force would be gradually transformed into an agent of that arrangement, along the lines of the Bosnian settlement in the Balkans.

All this suggests a three-tiered international effort: an intensified negotiation among the Iraqi parties; a regional forum like the Sharm el-Sheikh conference to elaborate an international transition status for Iraq; and a broader conference to establish the peacekeeping and verification dimensions. The rest of the world cannot indefinitely pretend to be bystanders to a process that could engulf them through their default.

Neither the international system nor American public opinion will accept as a permanent arrangement an American enclave maintained exclusively by American military power in so volatile a region. The concept outlined here seeks to establish a new international framework for Iraq. It is an outcome emerging from a political and military situation on the ground and not from artificial deadlines.

Henry A. Kissinger heads the consulting firm Kissinger & Associates. This article was distributed by Tribune Media Services.

Peace Through PayPal?
Kiva Allows Americans to Lend Money to Needy Entrepreneurs Around the World

By BETSY STARK, LARA SETRAKIAN and TERI WHITCRAFT
June 5, 2007 —

In Kirkuk, a city in northern Iraq that wavers between war and unsteady peace, a woman named Khadeja runs a beauty shop in the poorest section of town. She needs $1,200 to keep her business going -- a business that supports her parents and disabled brother.

In Los Gatos, Calif., a real estate broker named Debby Bright is giving her a loan.

Separated by roughly 7,000 miles, Bright and Khadeja connected through Kiva, an online lending network which recently added Iraqis to its list of entrepreneurs in poor countries who are looking to build up a business.

On Kiva.org Bright and others like her log on, browse the pictures and profiles of small business owners and make micro loans -- usually $25 to $50 each -- with the click of a mouse.

Once the full value of the loan is collected, it's wired to a Kiva field partner in that country, who then delivers cash to the entrepreneur.

Khadeja gets her loan, and Bright gets to feel she made a difference.

"She's an entrepreneur and I'm an entrepreneur, and I know how important it is to have one's own business," Bright told ABC News. "I feel we as a nation owe something to these people."

Rebuilding Iraq -- One Loan at a Time

The first Iraq entrepreneurs to join this lending service went up on the Kiva Web site just two weeks ago. Photographs of their faces were blurred to protect their identities, and the requests were accompanied by this disclaimer: "This entrepreneur is from a volatile region where the security situation remains unsettled. Lenders to this business should be aware that this loan may represent a higher risk and accept this additional risk in making their loan."

Nevertheless, the Iraq postings sparked what seemed like a feeding frenzy online. Within a few hours all the loans were fully funded -- from the hair salon to a request for a new sewing machine and a request to rebuild a computer shop that had been burned to the ground in a terrorist attack.

"A lot of people had the same reaction I did, which was, 'This is my chance!'" said Christian Conti of Washington, D.C., who loaned $25 to a mobile phone shop owner in Kirkuk. "As someone who watches the news play out day to day & and all you hear is the negative news & you say, 'Man, I wish I could do something.'"

"Traditionally a business on Kiva gets funded in about a day and a half," CEO and co-founder Matt Flannery told ABC News. He noted that women business owners in Africa usually go the quickest, while Eastern European men take the longest time to get funded.

"Right now the Iraqis are going to quickest. I think they all got funded in half a day, which is the fastest sector on our site right now," Flannery added.

Some of the Americans who responded told ABC news the loans were their way of helping with Iraq's reconstruction, lifting an economy left in tatters by the U.S. invasion.

"I'm not able to save Iraq & but I am able to give $25 to support a woman and her tailoring business," said Glenda Denniston of Madison, Wis., who loaned money to both the computer store owner and the seamstress in Kirkuk.

The 'Two Martini Loan'

Many of the Kiva lenders say they are "addicted" to the Web site, checking it daily if not hourly to see what new countries and entrepreneurs have been posted.

Conti has loaned $25 to three dozen different entrepreneurs from Togo to Tanzania, Afghanistan to Iraq. He calls it his "two-martini loan."

"That's what it costs in D.C. for two martinis and instead someone in Tajikistan has two cows, is able to feed their family & that's an easy decision for me," said Conti.

And the small sums add up. In 20 months the San Francisco-based nonprofit has helped put more than $6 million into the hands of small business owners in 30 countries.

Kiva, which means "agreement" in Swahili, operates based on what's called social lending or person-to-person financing. The power of that method, according to Kiva CEO and co-founder Matt Flannery, lies in the personal connectivity felt on both sides of the transaction.

"I think the secret of Kiva's success is that it's a people-focused experience. People in America get to see where their dollars are going," said Flannery.

Sending a Message

In every country, Kiva has a field partner that deals directly with the entrepreneurs -- reviewing loan applications and delivering the cash. In Iraq, that partner is the Al-Aman Finance Center in Kirkuk, which is funded by a grant from USAID. Al-Aman chairman Waria Salhi says that the Kiva loans send a clear and powerful message to borrowers in Iraq.

"The message is 'Americans are not only the soldiers whom you see on Iraqi streets chasing bad guys. They are also good and hardworking people thousands of miles away and voluntarily willing to help you with their hard earned money,'" Salhi told ABC News in an e-mail.

"Lenders are not lending because they think of how the person is going to pay me back & they're lending because they think this person is the most in need," said Flannery.

The Payback

So far, Kiva has an excellent track record for the repayment of loans.

Only one out of 9,000 borrowers has defaulted on a Kiva loan; all others have paid back or started to pay back their lenders. While the individual lenders on Kiva don't collect interest on their loan, the borrowers do pay interest to Kiva's field partners at a rate of roughly 13 percent to help cover their operating expenses. That's usually far less than the interest charged by banks or other institutions that are available to make loans.

Aside from the default rate, experts find there can be other risks with this operating model for loans. In particular, there is a risk that loan recipients are not honest or realistic about their plans for the money they receive.

"It's very hard to vet projects on the ground & and make sure they're capable of doing what they say they'll do with the money," said Ethan Zuckerman, a research fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

"Kiva's done quite well with this so far, leveraging contacts on the ground. But it gets harder to do the larger you get," he said.

The Next Step

As Kiva looks to raise more money for an expanding group of small businesses around the world, there will likely be changes to its operating model.

To date Kiva's overhead expenses have been covered by donations and grants, but sometime this year the nonprofit will introduce a fee of 2 percent to local partners to sustain and scale up its work.

There are also plans to build out the Web infrastructure on Kiva.org to add rich content including more photos and soon, video of Kiva loan applicants in remote reaches of the world.

But for now, entrepreneurs like Khadeja in Kirkuk, are just happy that they received a loan. She is looking forward to hiring some extra workers and getting new equipment for her beauty shop with her thousand dollars from Kiva.

"I tell my donor thank you," Khadeja told ABC News through a translator. "It will change my life."

Copyright © 2007 ABC News Internet Ventures

"Attempts Seen As Model for New Attacks On U.S. Soil
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 3, 2007; A01

The next terrorist assault on the United States is likely to come through relatively unsophisticated, near-simultaneous attacks -- similar to those attempted in Britain over the weekend -- designed more to provoke widespread fear and panic than to cause major losses of life, U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials believe.

Such attacks require minimal expertise and training and are difficult to prevent. Although British investigators have not claimed al-Qaeda involvement in the latest incidents, officials here said they may constitute a "hybrid" phenomenon, in which al-Qaeda inspires and guides local groups from afar but establishes no visible operational or logistical links.

The connection, several officials said, is made through a growing network of al-Qaeda intermediaries and affiliates who are far removed from the organization's leadership.

"What is a direct link?" asked one counterterrorism official. "Is it couriers? Messengers?" U.S. officials "from very senior folks" on down, he said, are watching as the British work to reconstruct the attacks and trace their origin.

In an internal memo titled "Staying on Target," CIA Director Michael V. Hayden told agency employees yesterday that "events in Great Britain since last Friday serve as a reminder -- if we ever needed one -- that this remains a dangerous world and that our work in defending America is as important as ever."

The incidents in England and Scotland, counterterrorism officials said, coincide with recent U.S. intelligence indicating stepped-up movement of money and people from al-Qaeda camps in the ungoverned tribal areas of Pakistan, near the Afghan border. Several senior U.S. military officials were sharply critical yesterday of what they saw as the Pakistani government's unwillingness to move forcefully against the camps and the U.S. administration's failure to press Pakistan harder to curtail what one called a terrorist "growth industry."

Al-Qaeda's "presence in the tribal areas has not been this secure since before 9/11," one senior U.S. military intelligence official wrote in an e-mail.

Hayden's memo appeared designed to rally his troops in the face of the morale-deadening criticism directed at the intelligence community in recent years. Accused of incompetence for failing to warn of the September 2001 attacks and for providing faulty intelligence on Iraq, it is also charged with overzealous anti-terrorism efforts that see al-Qaeda operatives under every bed.

"Even as we deal with the current threat," Hayden's memo said, "it is hard not to notice the growing debates on both sides of the Atlantic about certain aspects of the war on terrorism: Guantanamo, habeas corpus, detentions, renditions, electronic surveillance, etc. For us, though, the choices are pretty clear: We will use all of our lawful authorities to defend America and her friends.

"Some say elements of the current debate reflect the thinking of a pre-9/11 world," the short memo concluded. "Don't worry about that. Keep your eye on our objective. For all of us at CIA, today's date is clear: It's always September 12th."

After the events in Britain, U.S. officials have tried to strike a balance between insisting that "we do not currently have any specific threat information that is credible about a particular attack in the United States," as Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said yesterday, and asking Americans to keep a careful watch on their surroundings.

Although the Department of Homeland Security did not raise the threat level, Chertoff and other officials said that security and surveillance have been increased in several ways, including the placement of more U.S. marshals on flights to Britain and other European destinations.

Officials said the weekend's events had only heightened existing concerns. "It's not just what happened in England and Scotland that has us watching," another counterterrorism official said. "We have had some concerns for some time."

On Jan. 22, the Holland Tunnel in New York was evacuated for several hours after a suspicious package was spotted after an accident. Hazardous-materials teams were brought in, and the package was blown up by a robot before the tunnel was reopened.

In Georgetown on Saturday night, some restaurants and nightclubs were evacuated after firefighters spotted an abandoned backpack on a sidewalk. And on Sunday afternoon, police set up checkpoints on the access route into Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, stopping some cars and trucks for inspection.

A senior administration official acknowledged that recent arrests of groups charged with plotting terrorist attacks in Miami and at Fort Dix, N.J., and John F. Kennedy International Airport, as well as the arrest of a man charged with planning to detonate an explosive device in an Illinois shopping mall, have "come under a great deal of criticism for not being serious."

But the official saw some vindication for U.S. law enforcement in the British plots. "Remember that the FBI and the law enforcement community have done important work in nipping these cells in the bud so that we don't get to the stage of cars pouring into an airport terminal," the official said.

Saying that the British incidents "certainly appeared to be al-Qaeda-inspired," the official said they were more of a "reminder" of an ongoing threat in this country than an indication that similar attacks are imminent here.

Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert at Georgetown University, said he considered al-Qaeda involvement likely in the British incidents and disagreed with those who labeled the attacks amateurish. "They didn't work, but I think of all the al-Qaeda plots we've seen, their sophistication is in their simplicity. They used available materials. Where they tripped up is in the detonation of the devices. That's a trickier business."

The alleged perpetrators under arrest in Britain -- two of them physicians -- pose a challenge for both British and U.S. intelligence officials. The doctors' names did not appear on any U.S. list of people with suspected terrorist ties, U.S. officials said.

Al-Qaeda has made a "strategic investment" in Britain in recent years, Hoffman said, creating ties to an infrastructure of individuals and groups that are difficult to fit into an intelligence profile.

By drawing from a large reservoir of potential operatives, Hoffman said, al-Qaeda is attempting to "break any attempt at profiles, and also to demonstrate the diversity of their movement."

Staff writers Thomas E. Ricks and John Solomon contributed to this report."