Rebuilding Mosul: The daunting mission to bring the demolished city back from the dead
July 20, 2017 by admin
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The nine-month U.S.-backed offensive to expel Islamic State militants from Mosul was a relentless and savage fight. Now that that it has been won, another daunting battle has begun: to bring Iraq’s second-largest city back from the dead.
Thousands of buildings have been reduced to rubble, more than 120 miles of roadways have been damaged, and the city’s airport, railway station and at least one university are wrecked.
As the militants retreated after 2½ years of occupation, they intentionally targeted infrastructure, demolishing vital bridges, attacking the water and sewage systems and tearing down electricity lines. They also laced neighborhoods with booby traps and homemade bombs.
“The destruction is massive,” said Saroj Kumar Jha, who oversees Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon for the World Bank. “It will be a very big reconstruction effort.”
He said Iraqi authorities and Mosul residents would have the opportunity to replan the city and improve the quality of life there.
East Mosul, which was recaptured in January, is on the mend. But in the recently reclaimed west of the city, “the picture is very different,” said Lise Grande, the United Nations Development Program’s resident representative for Iraq.
Of western Mosul’s 54 residential districts, the U.N. characterizes 15 as “heavily damaged,” meaning the majority of the buildings are uninhabitable. Some 32,000 houses have been destroyed in those areas.
“If you were to go into those 15 districts, what you would see is very alarming,” Grande said over Skype from the Iraqi capital Baghdad. “They look like they’re flattened.”
Additionally, 23 districts are “moderately damaged,” meaning possibly up to half of the buildings have been destroyed or are structurally unsound, and 16 districts are “lightly damaged,” Grande said. Some 16,000 homes have been destroyed in these areas.
The U.N. estimates that repairing Mosul’s basic infrastructure will cost more than $1 billion.
So where to begin?
The first step is stabilization, Grande said.
“We start at the bottom of the grid in reestablishing temporary services so that people can start to rebuild their lives.”
A so-called “command cell,” consisting of community members, tribal leaders and representatives of the security forces, set the priorities, Grande said. Then the U.N., humanitarian groups and other international partners help the government meet its goals.
Humanitarian groups have started trucking water into the city while “stabilization teams” work to repair pumping facilities and substations, Grande said.
Massive mobile electrical generators will also be moved in and mounted on concrete slabs and hooked up to individuals homes in neighborhoods lacking power.
The World Bank has an ongoing project to help the Iraqi government design and reconstruct several bridges “on a fast-track basis,” said Jha, the World Bank official.
“Mosul depends on various supplies coming from different parts of Iraq,” he said. “Without access, nothing will happen.”
Experts said that restoring the city’s pharmaceutical factories and once-thriving industries such as furniture-making is paramount to reviving Mosul.
Bringing people home
So is restoring the population.
Some 940,0000 people fled the city of 2 million after the fighting started last October, according to the U.N. About 240,000 have returned, while 320,000 have found refuge in emergency camps and the rest shelter with family and friends or in mosques and public buildings, Grande said.
Their return to their homes could take months as unexploded ordnance is identified and cleared and Iraqi forces shore up security.
The government’s national operations centers will tell the public when neighborhoods are safe for return, Grande said.
Under a U.N.-supported program, communities would be brought together to decide which houses get repaired, and contractors would hire local residents to rebuild the homes.
“The reason that process is so important is that there is a consensus among everybody about which houses get rebuilt and which don’t, and that’s critical,” Grande said. “That helps to mitigate social tension at the neighborhood level.”
Rebuilding trust
But rebuilding and reviving Mosul will require more than physical reconstruction, experts said.
“Obviously there’s a cosmetic issue, but underpinning that is governance, “ said Eric Bordenkircher, a researcher at the Center for Middle East Development at UCLA’s International Institute. “You can build all these houses, but people may not want to return if they don’t trust the Iraqi government.”
Such confidence is lacking between the Shiite-led Iraqi government and predominantly Sunni communities such as Mosul. Experts say the Shia monopoly on power has caused Sunnis to feel alienated from the state and the political process.
“The government will need to be more inclusive,” Bordenkircher said. “Sewage, running water, electricity are a little more immediate, but the issue of trust, accountability, inclusiveness — those are time-intensive and are going to take not days, not weeks, not months, but years to merge.”
Jha of the World Bank, said creating a mechanism “for people to be at the center of the rebuilding process” was critical.
“Reconstruction is an opportunity for reconciliation,” he said.
Lingering concerns
Hovering over the recovery effort are the threats of corruption and mismanagement.
“In the real world, you can state all kinds of good intentions, but the real question is going to be, very early on, have you appointed people who are willing to work together, who are competent and reasonably honest,” said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. “There’s a tendency to assume that reconstruction and recovery are enough. A lot depends fundamentally on what people actually do on the ground.”
And then there is Islamic State. Experts believe the militant group will continue to undermine security efforts. And Iraqi government forces will need to adopt counterinsurgency strategies.
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Is parole the next chapter in the never-ending, and ever-fascinating, saga of OJ Simpson?
July 20, 2017 by admin
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It was justice. It was a legal abomination. It was reality television before reality television was even really a thing. It was before social media and yet was probably the most viral story of the last half-century.
And it’s all front and center again this week.
O.J. Simpson will go before the Nevada Board of Parole on Thursday morning in hopes of being released from a medium-security prison about two hours northeast of Carson City.
Brooke Keast, spokeswoman for the Nevada Department of Corrections, said 19 networks and 120 reporters are expected to encamp outside Lovelock Correctional Center, where he is serving time for robbery and kidnapping convictions in 2008.
Droves of media will also descend on Carson City, about 100 miles southwest of the prison, where the parole board will decide Simpson’s fate. If he is granted parole, he could be out of jail as soon as October.
What life is like behind bars for O.J. Simpson, Prisoner 1027820? »
But why do people still care about Simpson, whose televised Ford Bronco chase and criminal trial in the slayings of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson resulted in his controversial acquittal more than 20 years ago?
Because it was about race relations in America. Because it was about the public’s insatiable appetite for celebrity crime. Because Americans live still with the offspring of that trial — television shows like “Keeping up with the Kardashians” and the Academy Award-winning documentary “O.J.: Made in America.”
Laurie Levenson, a Loyola Law School professor who became a fixture as an analyst for CBS during the trial, said that among water-cooler moments, it was a rare phenomenon: Everyone had an opinion on O.J., and the case became a cultural touchstone. Almost anyone could say where they were when the cops chased the Bronco on June 17, 1994, or when the verdict was read on Oct. 3, 1995.
“He really does define the combination of modern pop culture with the modern justice system,” Levinson said. “He was the origin of reality TV. You followed the Bronco. You followed the trial. You followed the everything after. It’s like the Bronco chase continues.”
Simpson’s life tracks through some of the nation’s most tumultuous periods even as he seemed to glide through much of it.
While he was winning the Heisman Trophy in 1968, he was more muted compared with some African Americans who took strong stands for civil rights — like Muhammad Ali did by defying his draft orders. Or like Tommie Smith and John Carlos did at the Mexico City Olympics by raising their black-gloved fists in a black power salute to highlight the struggle for racial equality.
But he also broke barriers. He was the first black man to be a national pitchman for Chevy. Hertz built a hugely successful ad campaign around him. He was cast in big-budget Hollywood films despite little acting experience, including turns in “The Towering Inferno” and “The Naked Gun.”
His murder trial came on the heels of the acquittal of four white Los Angeles Police Department officers in Rodney King’s beating and the subsequent riots that tore up the city and contributed to Chief Daryl F. Gates losing his job and a series of reforms within the force.
The documentary “O.J.: Made in America” tied race relations and Simpson’s life into a tightly wound dissertation on why blacks and whites reacted so differently when Simpson was found not guilty of the slayings and how he became an unlikely face for injustices blacks saw in the American legal system.
When the documentary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last year, the director, Ezra Edelman, told The Times that the Simpson story simply couldn’t get away from the overarching themes of race relations in Los Angeles and the nation.
“O.J. is a sad, depressing American story, and a tragedy,” he said. “But the tragedy is not that this beautiful, charismatic person ended up where he is today. It’s that the people who invested in him had so little hope that this was something so important to celebrate.”
His acquittal soon was followed by his losing a civil trial in Santa Monica filed by the Goldman and Brown families; a jury awarded them $33 million.
Simpson’s Brentwood Estate was eventually bulldozed and he was forced to sell off some of his prized possessions. His two children with Nicole Brown Simpson managed to stay mostly out of the public eye, but Simpson still seemed to attract the spotlight after moving to Florida.
Notable players in the Simpson trial also were tracked by a public still curious about the courtroom theater that had gripped the nation. Prosecutor Marcia Clark had a television show. Defense attorney Johnnie Cochran died in 2005. Judge Lance Ito retired. Famed defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey filed for bankruptcy. Robert Kardashian, Simpson’s close friend, died in 2003.
Simpson was criticized after saying he’d spend his time looking for the real killers of Brown and Goldman but instead seemed to play a lot of golf and lead a party lifestyle in Florida.
Then came the arrest in Las Vegas in 2007 after a bizarre robbery at the Palace Station Casino, where Simpson and some armed accomplices ostensibly came to reclaim memorabilia the former football star said belonged to him.
He was convicted and sentenced to 9 to 33 years in prison on the charges — a move some have suggested served as justice for his murder acquittals.
Simpson was first eligible for parole in 2013 and testified via videoconference from the prison.
“I’m sorry for what has happened. I have spoken at length to both of the victims. They’ve apologized. I’ve apologized,” Simpson said. “I know their families. They know my families. I just wish I’d never gone to that room. I wish I didn’t. I wish I’d said, ‘Keep it and not worry about it.’ Other than that, I’m just sorry all this had to happen.”
Simpson, who turned 70 this week, has been incarcerated 9 years — the minimum amount of his sentence. Keast, the prison spokeswoman, said his cell is about 90 square feet and, like most every inmate, Simpson has a job. He started as a porter, but has mostly worked in gym maintenance.