VOL. 8/3 (ISSUE 36) - October, 2000

In this issue:

The October Revolution in Yugoslavia

To Our Serbian Friends by Adam Michnik

Milosevic is the curse of Serbia. This communist apparatchik seized power 13 years ago under the chauvinistic slogans of a Greater Serbia. He put in motion a process that broke up Yugoslavia, led to several wars, and sacrificed many thousands of lives. He condemned Serbia to isolation. He plunged it into poverty, corruption, and humiliation. To stay in power he instigated new conflicts, falsified elections, strangled public opinion, and plotted assassinations. At last, he lost the elections. His response was to falsify the results and then use naked force. This is how dictators, who do not understand that their time has past, defend themselves. That is how Romanian dictator Ceaucescu defended his power. Dear Serbian friends! We wish a future path for Serbia that recalls the Polish road and not the Romanian: a revolution without violence, and not a bloody conflict. Serbia deserves freedom and peace.

Reserved Optimism by Obrad Savic

The dramatic collapse of the Milosevic regime could happen in one day only because this anti-democratic regime had been crumbling for the past several years. But the radical change in the popular and civic mood has not been grounded in a desire for either political emancipation or moral renewal, but in the fear of economic catastrophe and a collapse of the system as a whole. The citizens of Serbia have come to the realization that without a change of the Milosevic regime, there could be no chance for a decent life in the near future. Many voted against Milosevic and for change, and not really for the political opposition presently in power. In my opinion, the democratic transformation and consolidation of the Yugoslav state and society cannot be achieved exclusively through economic changes, however important these may be. Real democratization of our society demands radical interventions in the political and legal system. A state of law requires not only personnel changes (Milosevic out, the opposition in) but, above all, a structural change of all state and social institutions. The political and moral renewal of the country cannot be achieved without re-examining institutional responsibility and not merely personal or collective responsibility. We must acknowledge our own contribution to what has happened in the decade-long "civil war" in former Yugoslavia. The painful issues of war crimes, nationalistic hatred, ethnic cleansing and the question of the future status of Kosovo and Montenegro, must not be swept away. If these questions are forgotten, the future of Serbia and Yugoslavia will be burdened with guilt.

It's Not Over by Ivo Banac

The worst is over, but it is not really over. There is a great deal that will be played out internally in Serbia as the story is pushed from page one to page seven, and then disappears. All sorts of things will be happening on the local level that will underscore the most important aspect of this October Revolution, namely, that Serbia is being brought back into the international system. The pace of the process is open to question but reintegration will happen. Milosevic will certainly try all sorts of moves, but I do not think he has any serious chance of prevailing. So, I think that we ought to be quite satisfied with the recent developments, but a great deal of debris has to be cleared before the story emerges in a somewhat more pristine form.

This is written with a heavy heart, given the current situation. It is easy to lay the blame on either side, and usually, this finger-pointing would follow established political rift lines. Yet, even if one feels - as I do - that Likud chairman Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount was ill-advised and certainly ill-timed, the ferocity of the Palestinian response forces one to reflect seriously on one aspect of the nature of Israeli-Arab relations. This is the issue not of peace-making, but of reconciliation.

For many years, most Israelis were ready to accommodate themselves to the cold nature of the peace with Egypt. "Better a cold peace than a hot war," was the conventional argument, and the internal logic was irrefutable. Of course, in an ideal world, things should have been different: but if, for 20 years, not one Israeli or Egyptian soldier was killed on the Israeli-Egyptian border, this was certainly preferable to the previous 20 years which had seen three wars and thousands of casualties on both sides. True, most Israelis were disturbed by the unwillingness of Egyptian society and its intellectual elite to open up to contacts with Israel. For over twenty years, there were hardly any academic or literary contacts, no exchanges of writers, or friendly soccer matches between youth groups. Professional Egyptian associations boycotted anything to do with Israel. The Israeli Academic Center, set up in Cairo in accordance with the peace treaty, remained isolated and virtually ostracized, and Egypt never set up its counterpart cultural center in Israel.

We all knew that it should have been otherwise; we also knew that school textbooks should have been modified, not to present the Israeli position, but at least to teach children and students a more balanced view of the origins and nature of the conflict. After all, this happened when France and Germany, or Germany and Poland, moved towards reconciliation after World War II or after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

We all knew this, yet realizing the constraints of Arab politics and Arab leaders who made peace with Israel, it was also considered politically correct not to press the issue too much. The same applied to Jordan and to the Palestinian Authority. All Israeli governments, of the Left or the Right, followed this line, despite occasional rhetoric brandished here and there.

It is precisely now that the problem comes back to haunt us. When attitudes are not changed on the social level, when students continue to be taught and indoctrinated that Israel is the enemy and an illegitimate entity, not just an adversary with whom a difficult peace is being achieved or negotiated, then when things go wrong, all prejudices and enmities come out of the closet.

Anyone following official Palestinian and Arab language in the last few days has been subjected to the depressing realization that we have returned to the l970s and l980s.

One may grant the Palestinians justified anger about certain Israeli moves in the last few days and weeks. But the vitriolic language coming from some of the more respectable Palestinian leaders - Legislative Council member Hanan Ashrawi and Economic Planning Minister Nabil Sha'at for example - suggests that Oslo has not really changed their basic view about Israel as a colonialist, imperialist, foreign and illegitimate entity.

All the pleasantries aimed occasionally at world public opinion or the Israeli Left have just disappeared - and what comes out is simple and frightening: hatred, pure hatred. And it is this inner truth which is truly frightening: because if this is the language of the leadership and the intellectual elite, one can imagine the venom that percolates down to the street level.

The same, of course, applies to the press in most Arab countries. This is not a criticism of Israeli policies: it is sheer, deep-rooted hatred. The language of peace, it so appears, has been merely a very thin veneer of respectability and political correctness.

When the pieces of the peace process will be put together again, as they surely will in one way or another, Israel will have to realize that security is guaranteed not only by physical arrangements on the ground, but that peace has also to be anchored in people's minds, hearts, and souls. Nobody should tell Arab writers or teachers what to write or teach; but you cannot have peace between diplomats and armies when this is not internalized by a country's writers, intellectuals, and poets.

This also means that at the next round of peace negotiations, it is not enough to have security experts and lawyers at the table (Internal Security Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami was virtually the only exception at Camp David). Peace is too serious a matter to be left only to generals and lawyers.

by Abdul Malik

The last time I saw Jafar was on June 24, his last day in New York before he left for Japan and then Medan, Indonesia. He had stopped by my apartment to pick up some literature on human rights in Islam, an issue he was invited to talk about before an NGO forum in Japan. After a cup of tea and a lengthy discussion, we bade farewell. Concerned about his visit to Indonesia, my wife specifically wished him luck and gravely cautioned him to be careful. He only smiled.

I went out to the balcony of my apartment to make sure he had followed my directions to the nearest subway station. I watched him go until he disappeared at the corner. The image is still vivid in my mind: a little man, carrying an oversized backpack with a big, beaming smile on his face. As I think of him now, this image was a fitting metaphor for his life. All his adult life, Jafar had been carrying a heavy burden, fighting for a just and peaceful society in Indonesia and particularly in Aceh. He believed in the cause so deeply that he dedicated everything he had to it, even his life.

I met Jafar about three years ago. He had just been released from hospital after a major surgery and looked very weak and fragile. This initial impression was shattered as soon as we started talking about Indonesia, especially Aceh. He was passionate and knowledgeable about the issue at hand, but never patronizing, intolerant or pompous. He was very humble.

Jafar forced me to learn more about Aceh and Indonesia. And in doing so, I also learned about him. Jafar was raised in a deeply religious Muslim family. He once told me that his parents wanted him to become a religious teacher or a cleric. They sent him to traditional Islamic institutions up until high school. He went to Medan, the capital of North Sumatra, for his college education. In 1991, he received two degrees, in Islamic Study and Law, from two different universities.

He then started his career as a lawyer in Medan with the Legal Aid Institute, where he worked tirelessly and achieved a lot in a short span of time. In the four-year period 1992-1996, Jafar handled well over a hundred cases in North Sumatra, Riau, and Aceh. His legal advocacy did not know economic, political or religious boundaries. He worked with the same enthusiasm on behalf of the Christian Church Organization and his fellow Muslim Acehnese.

Shortly before he fled Indonesia, he was the Public Relations Officer and Head of the Land and Environment Division of the Legal Aid Institute, Medan. Besides handling cases and giving countless interviews to the domestic and foreign media, he also taught courses in Islamic Study and Law, wrote articles, and gave public speeches. He was a very active public figure and legal advocate, and this, in the corrupt and perverted world of Suharto's Indonesia, put him in serious danger. He left the country in 1997, but certainly not his people.

When he came to New York, he chose his job carefully so that he would find the time to continue working on the Aceh problem while earning to support himself. He took to driving a yellow cab on the weekends, so that he could continue to lobby and meet people during week. Jafar never complained about his job. On the contrary, he was happy to be able to find such a ''flexible'' job that allowed him to come and go as his activism required. His dedication to Aceh made such requirements seem very light.

In our frequent discussions at the New School we debated the Aceh problem from different perspectives. Although we agreed on the basic issue - that the suffering of the people of Aceh must be stopped - we often saw the problem differently. I saw Aceh through Indonesia, while Jafar did just the opposite: he saw Indonesia through Aceh. Despite our differences, however, we always had mutual respect. Our friendship grew and Jafar stopped by my office often, not just to talk about politics and human rights, but also about mundane issues of student life, his imminent surgery and yellow cab stories.

When Jafar was found dead, I asked a journalist friend in Jakarta what he knew about the murder. He volunteered this comment: ''The problem with Jafar was that he did not take sides.'' My journalist friend was wrong! Jafar was on the side of the people of Aceh, not that of the conflicting parties. He was first and foremost a human rights lawyer. Although he was deeply involved in politics, he was never a politician. He believed deeply in the sanctity of human life and that nothing could justify the oppression of one by another. On this matter he was an idealist, perhaps even religious. Any act or idea of compromising human rights in favor of political considerations or goals was, for Jafar, a betrayal to humanity itself. For him, human rights were not abstract concepts but concrete, existential issues.

Although he called for a political solution to the Aceh problem and was happy that the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement were holding talks in Switzerland, he also believed that the human rights violations in the region must be brought under the spotlight and eventually brought to justice. I knew he would not rest until this happened. This was the reason he went to Aceh last summer: to set up an office and start organizing the litigation process of the many human rights crimes that had taken place there.

We all knew we would never see him again. He was murdered savagely. It is ironic that a man who believed in the sacredness of human life had to lose his, defending this value!

When three students were shot dead on the streets of Jakarta last year, I wrote an article which I shared with Jafar. I could see that he liked a poem I quoted at the end of that article: ''Bury Me in A Free Land,'' by a 19th century black feminist abolitionist, Frances E.W. Harper. Now I can imagine him reciting it:

Make me a grave where'er you will,

In a lowly plain or a lofty hill;

Make it among earth's humblest graves,

But not in a land where men are slaves.

..................................................................

I would sleep, dear friends, where bloated

Might

Can rob no man of his dearest right;

My rest shall be calm in any grave

Where none can call his brother a slave.

I ask no monument, proud and high,

To arrest the gaze of the passers by;

All that my yearning spirit craves

Is - Bury me not in a land of slaves!

My friend, today you are not buried in a free land. There is nothing we can do about that. But I can assure you that your murderers were wrong if they assumed that by killing you, they have silenced your spirit. There are so many people making sure that your spirit and idealism will always shine. Then again, I do not think I need to tell you all this. Sometimes, I feel that you knew this all along. And I can see you, with your big, beaming smile, reminding me and everybody:

Call not those who are slain in the way of

God ''dead''

Nay, they are living, only ye perceive not.

Surely we are God's and to him we shall return

(Al-Quran)

by Sidney Jones

In your association with Jafar, what did you think of him as a person and as an activist?

I think Jafar was probably one of the most committed human rights activists I have met in the last several decades. I had known him since 1986, when he was a very young human rights lawyer. Even then, he was doing fairly dangerous work. He got involved in documenting human rights violations in Aceh in

1989, when major counterinsurgency operations began. He would take foreign correspondents up to Aceh from Medan and act as their guide and interpreter at a time when classic counterinsurgency techniques were being used by the Indonesian army. You would find mutilated bodies on the roadside and lots of people started disappearing.

Jafar was determined to get the story out. Over the last two years, he had been completely committed to raising the profile of the conflict in Aceh, so that it would come to the attention of the international community. He had been receiving threats but it did not stop him in the slightest. He was this very gentle and slight person who was actually extraordinarily brave.

He was also interested in continually improving himself intellectually and professionally. His breadth of interest went much further than the documentation of human rights violations in Indonesia. He got an internship from a Washington-based organization called the International Human Rights Internship Program to look at environmental law. He came to the U.S. in 1991 and spent time at the University of Colorado, worked as an intern for the Sierra Club and was, until recently, studying political science at the New School.

How do you respond to his killing and who do you hold responsible?

I think the reaction of all of Jafar's friends was that of grief, as well as anger that something like this could have happened to someone as dedicated as he to finding a peaceful resolution to the conflict. All of us believe that some unit of the military or police had to be responsible because it was clearly a political killing. There was, of course, a slight possibility that the armed guerrilla forces fighting for independence (known as the Free Aceh Movement or GAM), or some of their factions, could have been involved. But we have all discounted that because his murder followed a well-established pattern of military killings.

What is the conflict in Aceh about?

It is a nationalist conflict which is wrongly portrayed in many places as the struggle for an Islamic state. It is primarily a fight for the independence of Aceh as a separate nation with its own distinct national history and, as it happens, a culture that includes a very strong commitment to Islam (Aceh is known as the Gateway to Mecca). But the religious aspect is incidental to the nationalist conflict.

In the 1950s, after having supported the Indonesian revolution against the Dutch and having been very much a part of that, the leaders of Aceh felt that they had been given short shrift by the Indonesian republic, particularly when Sukarno wanted to combine the province of North Sumatra with Aceh. There was a separatist rebellion called Darul Islam that broke out in the 1950s, which was fundamentally a nationalist movement. That was pretty much resolved by the Indonesian government's recognizing that Aceh had a special status. It is not officially called a province but it is called the Special Region of Aceh. However, because this was merely a name change and did not mean anything in terms of greater autonomy, many of the grievances continued to fester. The Darul Islam movement has enormous resonance in Aceh today, and many of those who are leaders of GAM are people whose parents or grandparents were part of that movement.

The desire for clear independence, however, is relatively new. In the 1970s, when GAM first got started, it was not clear from some of their statements whether they were fighting for the independence of Aceh or for the island of Sumatra. The movement did gather strength with the successful struggle for separation in East Timor.

How does the Aceh conflict compare to the other conflicts in the region like that in East Timor?

The case for international intervention in Aceh is very weak, compared to East Timor, despite the fact that independence claims go back to 1832. From an international legal standpoint, Aceh is recognized as having been part of the Republic of Indonesia since Indonesian independence in 1949. In East Timor, there was a clear case of invasion by Indonesia in 1975, which was a violation of international law. There was no such hook for Aceh.

Secondly, Aceh did not have a significant number of expatriates to act as a political force, the way that the East Timorese in Australia or Portugal were critical to the independence movement.

Thirdly, you do not have any government championing the Acehnese cause, the way Portugal did for East Timor. Finally, you don't have the international church network that helped in the case of East Timor. The church acted as an enormously important force in East Timor, both because it was a worldwide network and also because it was the only institution independent of the Indonesian government.

What are the kinds of human rights violations reported in Aceh?

We have been documenting human rights violations in Aceh going back to the counter-insurgency operations in 1989, when the last major wave of military abuses began, but it has not let up.

The abuses, particularly in the period 1989-1994, involved major killings, rapes and arbitrary detentions. There were people who were taken to military camps and held for years without ever being charged, and a significant number of disappearances.

The Indonesian Human Rights Commission has documented that 1700 people were killed in the period 1990-1998, when Aceh was declared a military operations zone. Military operations were carried out to remove any threat to Indonesian national security which, in this case, was the elimination of the guerrilla group, GAM.

Even after 1998, there have been significant new abuses but there has also been increased activity on the part of GAM. From the Indonesian government's point of view, there is no question that there is a serious security threat. But, as is usual in these cases, it is the civilians that get caught in the middle.

Does the armed guerrilla movement GAM have popular support? Has it also been responsible for civilian deaths?

GAM is often portrayed as being representative of all the Acehnese, which is not necessarily the case. A lot of people in Aceh want independence but do not sympathize with GAM. It is also the case that there are a fair number of people in Aceh who do not feel the desire for independence as intensively as people in four districts of the region where GAM is strong (which is indeed where the bulk of the population lives). But some of the people in the southern part of Aceh, and some ethnic groups, have not been particularly committed to the movement. It is actually a very complex situation.

We believe that abuses by GAM, like those of any other armed movement that commits violations of humanitarian law, have to be condemned just as abuses by governments have to be condemned. GAM has killed people that it suspects of being informers or collaborators with the Indonesian army and that is just as reprehensible as the Indonesian army killing suspected supporters of GAM. However, on the scale of things, the Indonesian government's abuses have been much higher.

Was Jafar a part of GAM?

That is a misunderstanding. He was not a part of GAM. If he had been an active supporter of an armed movement, he would have had less clout and less influence as a human rights activist. He was committed to bringing different parties in the conflict into dialogue with one another. I think he was, in his heart, a supporter of independence but he certainly did not belong to GAM.

Has the human rights situation in Indonesia improved after the fall of Suharto and the arrival of an elected government under Wahid?

The real change came with the fall of Suharto because, particularly in the period from May 1998 until the end of that year, there were huge expectations in Aceh that military perpetrators, responsible for some of the worst abuses that had taken place in the military period, would be brought to justice. At the same time, several members of GAM, who were outside the country, felt that it was safe to come back to Aceh. So you had a period of increased expectations for justice and increased activity from GAM. But nothing happened. The interim Habibie government did nothing to actually push for prosecutions and it would have made an enormous difference if some prosecutions had taken place during that window of opportunity.

There were a couple of major attacks attributed to GAM, that took place at the end of 1998, which led to a new wave of counterinsurgency operations by the Indonesian security forces. And at the same time, you had the influence of East Timor and the student-led movement for a referendum in Aceh. That movement was very much a civilian process and was not part of GAM. In fact, GAM did not support a referendum because it did not think it necessary to offer the Acehnese government a choice.

Since the Wahid government came to power, there has been total inattention to Aceh on the part of the central government in Jakarta. It looks as though some of the special army units are having a completely free hand without anybody exercising control from Jakarta. This is not to say that we are dealing with completely renegade units. There is still some command structure that has to be held responsible for what is going on, but the Wahid government is just not paying attention.

Is democratization a sham in Indonesia because the military still has significant control over the elected government?

It is not a sham. I think you cannot expect a country which has undergone thirty years of highly authoritarian government to change to a democracy overnight. There have been a lot of missed opportunities that the Wahid government could have acted on. It could, for instance, have put more skilled civilians in key cabinet posts and done a lot more to understand some of the root causes of conflict in places like Aceh. The Wahid government did agree to a humanitarian pause or cease-fire with the rebels, but it has not been particularly respected by either side. There have been 120 people killed since the humanitarian pause went into effect on June 2. However, the violations have also been by GAM. They are not entirely one-sided violations on the part of the government. However, the Wahid government has shown a willingness to negotiate, which we have not seen in any government before. It has to be given some credit for a willingness to find a peaceful resolution.

Are human rights groups, working in the region, under threat?

There is no question that human rights activists and those known to be supporting the referendum, or demands for independence, are under threat. On September 16, a university rector was shot dead, apparently because he allowed his university campus to be used as a forum for discussions in support of the referendum. He was assassinated and we think the police or the military was responsible. q

In July, the Przegorzaly castle in Cracow welcomed the participants of the ninth annual Democracy & Diversity Graduate Summer Institute. The Institute is one of the three principal components of a project organized by TCDS, entitled Transregional Learning Networks: New Sites for Research and Training (TLN).

The goal of the TLN is to provide a unique educational environment for junior scholars from different parts of the world, and aims to strengthen transregional connections between them. Besides the Democracy & Diversity Institute in Cracow, the TLN includes a Democracy & Diversity Institute in Cape Town, and a follow-up program New Social Science Training at the Graduate Faculty in New York, a one-semester research and training program for selected alumni from the two Institutes.

The Democracy & Diversity Institute in Cracow, the oldest and most established component of TLN, brings together fifty graduate students from around the world, predominantly East and Central Europe, Central Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, the United States and Canada.

This year's graduate students came from 25 countries and specialized in different disciplines in the social sciences. During the course of the three weeks which we spent in Cracow, the differences between the participants became the subject of serious cultural and disciplinary ''blurring''. As one of the participants, a Polish anthropologist, remarked, ''My participation in the institute helped me to rethink my interests and encouraged me to adopt a more interdisciplinary approach to my studies. As a result of the Cracow experience, I have reached for readings from the field of political theory and sociology, which I had neglected earlier.''

This crossing of interests and experiences during the Institute was facilitated by its unique learning environment, conducive to intensive, multi-level interaction between the Institute's participants and faculty. The central elements of the program were four graduate seminars, which this year included: Democratic Culture (Prof. Jeffrey Goldfarb, Sociology Department, GF); Sustaining Democracy? (Prof. David Plotke, Political Science, GF); Theories of Gender in Culture (Prof. Ann Snitow, Committee on Gender Studies and Feminist Theory, GF); and Ethnos and Demos: Nation, Nationalism and the Politics of Ethnic Conflict (Prof. Elzbieta Matynia, Committee on Liberal Studies, GF and Prof. Ivo Banac, History Department, Yale University).

Unlike in most academic environments, where student-faculty interaction is limited to the classroom, the discussions generated in the classrooms in Cracow continued into informal settings - during meals, in accidental and arranged meetings in the hotel and during trips to the city.

Integrated evening and cultural programs further strengthened the interactive nature of the institute. This year, we had the pleasure of welcoming once again, our two annual distinguished guests - the Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz and the Editor-in-Chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, Adam Michnik. The two evenings drew many listeners from the Democracy & Diversity Institute, as well as from the outside.

On July 18, Krzysztof Czyzewski, director of the Borderlands Foundation, spoke about his project aimed at building a culturally and religiously rich community in the village of Sejny in the Suwalki region near the Polish-Lithuanian-Belarusian border. This year's rich evening program also included lectures by two economists. Prof. Harald Hagemann, of the University of Hohenheim in Germany, spoke in two evening sessions about the economic problems of European integration. We were also happy to greet our regional collaborator, Dr. Stephen Gelb, of the Development Bank of Southern Africa, who spoke about the current issues in the South African transition from apartheid to democracy.

In addition to formal lectures, many people attended extra-curricular screenings of classic political cinema from Central Europe, which included films by T. Kutz, W. Marczewski, W. Hass, A. Wajda, L. Wosiewicz, and others. The Institute was characterized by intensive intellectual debates and the formation of collaborative working relationships.

 Even the poor weather, which lasted through most of the Institute, could not dampen its warm, friendly atmosphere and creative spirit. Most importantly, after three weeks, we all returned to our homes in different parts of the world full of fresh ideas and energy for new projects, enriched and transformed by the transregional experience of studying and debating with colleagues at the Przegorzaly Castle.

The responses from participants speak for themselves:

''Coming to Poland redefined my dreams and what I want to do with my life. Ever since I came back to South Africa, so many things have happened in my life. Inspired by the lecture that Mr. Gelb presented in Cracow, I decided to start a library project. I was horrified at the education statistics in South Africa and when I returned, I came to realize that the socio-economic problems we have are not all going to be solved at the level of the government, but it will take individuals like me to make things happen.''

(Phiwe Mankayi, South Africa)

''The readings and heated discussions in 'Ethnos and Demos' and 'Democratic Culture' destroyed many of my preconceived notions about politics and society. The diversity in class, too, broadened my perspective. In contrast to the passive acquisition of knowledge which is still common in the institutions which I have attended, the Institute's teaching methods involve students and value an interdisciplinary approach.''

(Michal Witkowski, Poland)

''I really appreciated the way professor Matynia and professor Banac combined theories of nationalism with concrete examples. It was very interesting for me to see how participants from different countries - mostly East-Central Europe - reacted to the professors' arguments.''

(Tomas Strazay, Slovakia )

''Apart from the classes, I was really astonished by the number of activities that we had during our stay. This has been the most eventful summer of my life. To meet so many interesting people within such a short time span - Polish-American Nobel Prize poet, Borderlands activist, South Africa expert... All these people shared one feature with our professors - they were really enthusiastic about what they were doing. And that is the most important thing.''

(Oleh Kaptar, Ukraine)

With the onset of the academic year, we warmly welcome into our midst a new group of TCDS Fellows, joining our activities in New York as part of TCDS's three-year New Social Science Training project. The project is a semester-long follow-up initiative offering training in research and teaching to select alumni of TCDS's Democracy & Diversity Institutes in Cracow and Cape Town.

Conducted every Fall at the Graduate Faculty (GF), the program is intended for the cultivation of a new kind of research and a new type of researcher, engaged in both the academia and civil society and addressing the question of the public sphere. Aimed at transcending the boundaries of professional associations, political geography, and academia itself, the individual research projects accepted for the program are organized around four areas of democratic institutional design: Public Sphere and Political Culture; Nationality-Ethnicity-Gender; Civil Society and Social Change; Democratization, Political Justice, and Economic Equity.

Of the twelve junior scholars invited to join the NSST program each year, six come from TCDS's target regions: East & Central Europe, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa. They are teamed with six competitively selected graduate students from the GF. The latter also include Democracy & Diversity Institute alumni and constitute a similarly diverse group representing the same regions.

In the course of the program, the TCDS Fellows will take advantage of opportunities for team research, along with possibilities to craft and test a common language that can benefit from the local intellectual traditions. They will also explore novel approaches to the preparation and teaching of new curricular units, designed in close collaboration between two Fellows from different regions and under the supervision of a senior faculty advisor from the GF. The pedagogical objective of the program is to synthesize the methodology and content of academic instruction in an increasingly global world.

The TCDS Fellows will work closely with a GF faculty advisor on their own projects, developed further within small research teams of four Fellows each. These peer working groups meet weekly, with an invited faculty advisor regularly in attendance. While each working group represents three or four different target regions, its members are united by a shared focus on one of the four TCDS Fellowship themes. The members of each group also jointly attend department seminars that reflect the shared focus of the group, and relate to one of the four program themes. By the end of the program, six teams of two Fellows each will design a course based on their research projects and reflecting the most recent literature from their regions.

The Fellows will also discuss their ongoing work in the presence of a broader university audience at the TCDS Work-in-Progress Workshops. Final versions of their research papers will be presented at a concluding conference (this year on December 15) and published as part of the TCDS Working Paper Series.

We wish a productive and enjoyable semester at the New School University to our new friends and colleagues participating in the 2000 TCDS Fellowship program: Emmanuel Remi Aiyede, Gibson Boloka, Hana Cervinkova, Allison Clarkin, Tamara Enhuber, Jüri Lipping, Johannes Sakkie Mpanyane, Veronica Perera, Lotar Rasinski, Sergio Tavolaro, Marcel Tomasek, and Arturas Valionis.

Timo Lyyra is Program Coordinator of the TCDS.

Emmanuel Remi Aiyede, Development Policy Centre, Ibadan, Nigeria; "From Subjects to Citizens: The Dynamics of Civil Society and The Democratization Process in Nigeria"

Juri Lipping, University of Tartu, Estonia; "Kant and the Two Principles of Publicity"

Lotar Rasinski, University of Wroclaw, Poland; "Discursive Theory of Power"

• Civil Society and Social Change

Gibson Boloka, University of the North, South Africa; "Black Economic Empowerment and the Struggle for Transformation in South African Media Industry"

Veronica Perera, New School University; "Globalization and Gender: Reflections on the Political Economy of the Feminization of Paid Workforce in Argentina"

Sergio Tavolaro, New School University; "Civil Society and Modernity in Brazil: An Inquiry into Political Culture and the Opportunities for Democratization"

• Politics and Democracy

Tamara Enhuber, New School University; "A Third Way of Doing Contentious Politics in India? The Bonded Labor Liberation Movement between Tradition and Modernity"

Johannes Sakaria Mpanyane, New School University; "Internal Party Democracy and Consolidation of Democracy: The Case of the ANC in South Africa"

Piki Ish-Shalom, Hebrew University, Israel; "Binding Together the Theories of Democracy and International Relations: The Case of Morgenthau's Elitism and Realism"

• Instituting Democracy

Allison J. Clarkin, New School University; "Moralizing Moments: The Saliency of Ubuntu in Post-Apartheid South Africa"

Hana Cervinkova, New School University; "The Good Soldier Svejk Comes to NATO: Some Magical Aspects of Czech International Politics"

Arturas Valionis, Graduate School for Social Research, Poland; "After the National Movement: "Soft" Problems of Democratic Consolidation"

Marcel Tomasek, Graduate School for Social Research, Poland; "Premature Consolidation Tendencies in the Context of the Czech Republic's Accession to the European Union"

Lectures

• Tues., October 10: A roundtable discussion, Human Rights and Democracy in Aceh, Indonesia, featured seven experts from Indonesia, including Saifuddin Bantasyam, executive director of the Forum for Human Rights Concern; Ahmad Farhan Hamid, Member of Parliament; and Musdah Mulia, an expert on Anti-Discriminatory and Minority Protection for the State Ministry for Human Rights.

• Wed., October 11: Ivo Banac, Durfee Professor of History at the Council of European Studies at Yale University, gave a talk entitled After Elections in Former Yugoslavia.

• Thurs., November 2 to Sat., November 4: The symposium, Civil Society Revisited, will feature a keynote address by Adam Michnik and daily presentations and discussions on the following topics: Civil Society Reinvented - Concepts and Case Studies; Civil Society and the Meanings of 1989; and Civil Society and the Post Cold War World - Advocates and Critics. The speakers will be: Shlomo Avineri, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Radim Marada, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic; Maria Markus, University of New South Wales, Australia; Nadezda Cacinovic, University of Zagreb, Croatia; Vladimir Tismaneanu, University of Maryland; Jean L. Cohen, Columbia University; Irena Grudzinka Gross, The Ford Foundation; and Graduate Faculty professors Andrew Arato, Jose Casanova, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Agnes Heller, Elzbieta Matynia, David Plotke, and Charles Taylor.

• Wed., November 29: Andrzej Paczkowski, from the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, will give a lecture on The Controversies around "The Black Book of Communism."

• Thur, November 30: Leszek Koczanowic, Department of Psychology University of Opole, Poland, will speak on, The Memory of Politics - The Politics of Memory.

• Mon., December 4: Renata Salecl, of the University of Ljubljana and the London School of Economics and currently Visiting Professor of Human Sciences at George Washington University, will give a guest lecture, Are We Truly Living in an Age of Anxiety?

• Fri., December 15: The TCDS Fellowship Program Concluding Conference, at which this semester's 12 TCDS Fellows will present their work, will take place all day in the Wolff Conference Room.

• Weekly until November 21: The TCDS Fellows will be presenting their work in the Work-in-Progress Series every Tuesday at 10:30 in the morning in the Machinist conference room.

Summer 2000

This past summer, TCDS conducted a Fulbright American studies institute on the United States named Reading America. The program focused on American nonfiction literature as a vehicle for the study of U.S. society, culture, and institutions, and immersed its participants in an intensive study of the processes affecting contemporary American social, political, and cultural life, as examined in seminars, on-site study sessions, and reading workshops held in New York City, New Mexico, and Washington, D.C. We send our best regards to our 18 new friends from an equal number of countries around the world who attended and successfully completed this program. We will keep in touch!

January 2001