War of words

‘Leaders of India and Pakistan trade insults in London’ sighed the DAILY TELEGRAPH. But the GUARDIAN could glean hope from Advani’s soundbites. It attached significance to ‘‘the most hawkish member of the Indian government’’ telling the paper that any proposal — ‘‘whatever it is’’ — could be considered. And that ‘‘… if a settlement has to come about then it can only be in the form of some compromise in which both sides have to give and take in relation to their present positions’’. According to the paper, Advani now appears to ‘‘accept that the facts of history are not immutable… he has acknowledged that Kashmir’s history looks very different ‘from General Musharraf’s point of view’’’.

Incidentally, while the GUARDIAN saw Advani only as ‘‘a possible future Indian prime minister’’, the DAILY TELEGRAPH said he is ‘‘widely viewed as likely to succeed Atal Behari Vajpayee, the Prime Minister, in elections due to be held in 2004.’’ Hmm.

Operation Enduring

In the western media, the growing realisation that the war goes on in Iraq, after the war. NEW YORK TIMES columnist Thomas Friedman insisted that ‘‘it’s too soon to tell’’. In a ‘‘fluid situation’’ like Iraq, where there are 10 things happening every day, he put the score at ‘‘about 5 to 5’’. But elsewhere, a growing alarm over continuing attacks against the US military by an increasingly bold guerrilla resistance force.

Writing from Baghdad this week, ten weeks to the day after Saddam’s regime was finally toppled, GUARDIAN’s Rory McCarthy described a city ‘‘torn apart by killings, misunderstanding and the startling failures of America’s military occupation’’. He spoke of demonstrations by Iraq’s unemployed soldiers who have not received their payouts after Iraq’s military was formally dissolved last month. ‘‘In the eyes of the US military, the crowd of frustrated former soldiers was a threat and they eventually opened fire. The Iraqi soldiers see themselves very differently — as husbands and fathers, struggling to make a living, gripping with defeated pride and disappointment’’.

The CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR described a new edict by Paul Bremer, Washington’s man in Iraq. According to the Coalition Provisional Authority’s Order Number 14, media are prohibited from broadcasting or publishing material that incites violence against any individual or group ‘‘including racial, ethnic, religious groups and women’’; encourages civil disorder; or ‘‘incites violence against coalition forces’’. In a front page editorial in Iraq’s widely read broadsheet AS-SAAH, the paper’s senior editor let readers know just what he thought of the new restrictions: ‘‘Bremer is a Baathist’’, the headline read.

Echoes from afar

This week in the GUARDIAN, John Aglionby found common themes in south east Asia’s two main news stories over the last month. Burma, where pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been detained. And Aceh, where military operations were started to crush the separatist Free Aceh Movement.

Aglionby noted that global condemnation of the Rangoon generals’ actions has been strong but is unlikely to resonate among the junta because India, and more especially China, are silent. Meanwhile, the Indonesian armed forces, from whom much of the Burmese army’s structural organisation is copied, are getting away with much more. Reports speak of the systematic execution of Acehnese, forcible relocation of whole villages to ill-equipped camps, detention and disappearance of students and activists, intimidation of the media.

The strongest comparison between Burma and Aceh, said Aglionby, was their hopelessness: ‘‘no long-term political solution appears to be anywhere on the horizon’’. In both countries, suppression of dissenting opinion looks like the governments’ only modus operandi. In both, this looks like it will continue.

United by pain

A Heartwarming image from the middle of another hopeless conflict. This week, TIME offered a peek inside Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital. Where ‘‘Jews save Arabs and Arabs save Jews, even in the angriest of hours’’. As politicians unrelentingly fail to find a peace that stays, Hadassah’s mixed staff ‘‘manages to make coexistence work’’. Chief nurse Fatma Hussein explained: ‘‘In this community of the sick, everyone understands what pain is. Nobody has patience for anybody who would inflict pain on others’’.

Dowry theory

THE ECONOMIST took a look at dowry in India in the fading light of Nisha Sharma’s fame. An interesting question remains, it suggested, even after the heroine has exited the stage: Why are dowries so high, and getting higher? Despite economic growth and modernisation and the law?

According to the magazine, a new study by Siwan Anderson, an economist at the university of Tilburg in the Netherlands, provides the answer. The continuing importance of caste fuels dowry inflation. Economic wealth has made average wealth rise, but it has also increased the range of inequality of income. Women are still competing for the limited pool of men in castes above their own. So, ‘‘an increasing income spread makes it possible for the price of a scarce resource, in this case a high caste husband, to be bid up much higher than it would if incomes were more uniform’’.