My judo teacher Mr. Nishimoto, told every new class of his about how when he had emigrated after World War II, he had been a semi-professional boxer. He described how he followed the tradition of going out into the boxing ring and shaking hands with the other boxer. He would walk back out to his corner of the ring and then come out again and try to shake his opponent’s hand again, while he held his left hand clenched behind his back. If the other boxer started to shake hands again, Mr. Nishimoto would pound him with a hard left hook. This strategy could of course have a deadly effect the first time, but if he ever met the other boxer again, chances would be pretty big that the boxer would remember the left hook.

Judo is mainly a defensive martial art; one that uses the opponent’s advantages against himself. Height and weight are in motion when the aggressor is moving towards you. It is a similar situation with regards to human rights. You have a two ton gorilla moving at you at speed; what do you do bucko? Well, most of us would move out of the way. But there is more than one way to avoid getting trampled and still stand up for what you believe. Human rights work is not particularly glamorous and few activists end up as martyrs. The truth of the matter is that most human rights work can be a bit of a slog, just like any other job. Most of the work is information collecting, monitoring and documentation. Disseminating that information is where most people, if they are going to run into difficulties, will experience problems. That is one reason why freedom of expression is so important.

Most people have taken civil and human rights largely for granted at home. The same governments that would deplore the human rights record of those regimes they had placed in power in the first place, would be largely punctilious at home. 9/11 has left a lot of governments rushing like lemming to be the first to dive over the cliff, by initiating draconian measures to combat terrorism. Much to do has even been made about the advantages of special terrorism legislation to combat the Mob and other forms of organized crime. Britain even used their terrorism legislation in connection with the recent bankruptcies in Iceland. My point of reference has always been that criminals should stand trial and be prosecuted, regardless what the motivations have been for what they have done. The United States traveled a bridge too far, when they started using methods that wouldn’t have been out of place in a 1970’s Latin American dictatorship, but then again who was it that taught those methods at the “School of the Americas” in the first place?

What has been more surprising has been the response of European countries. Attempts have been made to make agreements with countries that have deplorable human rights records, to accept the return of their nationals, on the condition that they solemnly promise they won’t be tortured. Some returnees have been accused, but never tried, for offenses related to terrorism, while others are refugees that have claimed asylum, but have not been considered bona fides refugees. This, despite that many of the refugees have sought asylum from threats of torture from the authorities of the country they originated from. European countries have also been almost as uncritical with regards to restrictions on civil liberties and the implementation of extraordinary monitoring of the general population and the use of agents provocateur.

Increased militarization of civil society provides concomitant increased potential for violations of human rights. This combined with less transparency, justified by increased needs for security, means that the job of human rights organizations has become more difficult. There is more need now than ever for some human rights judo. Organizations should be a lot more active in training members as well as non-members to gather information, process it and disseminate that information. Instead, I see many organizations crawling into their shells and concentrating on funding efforts to keep the organization afloat. That isn’t the way to go. Inspiration needs to be gathered from those human rights organizations in the developing world that are one or two people slogging away at an insurmountable task, risking everything to protect and defend their human rights.

Isn’t it interesting? I thought the subject was, so I decided to look up the term “military intervention” in Wikipedia. Lo and behold, I was redirected to the term “peacekeeping“. This speaks volumes about relatively recent developments. There have always been attempts to find milder euphemisms for “military intervention”. Police mission is just one of them. However, new concepts were developed for how military forces could be used after the break up of the Soviet Union. One of the most persistent has been the use of military to preserve and protect the human rights of the civilian population in a conflict zone. Strategies and scenarios were developed, particularly in the Balkan conflicts, that were developed for “peacekeeping” and “peace enforcement”. One of these strategies was the use of small armored groups of soldiers, to take advantage of the landscape so that the surrounding area could be dominated by a small, well armed force, without necessarily having to use military might. Political and diplomatic considerations often needed to be addressed before a consensus could be agreed on that would place jets in the air and tanks and soldiers on the ground, often to the detriment of the civilian populations that were supposed to be protected.

Out of peacekeeping developed the strategy of “peace enforcement”. Peace enforcement is basically the same as a military intervention, but you want to call it something that sounds nicer because it is all supposed to be about protecting the civilian population. The difference in practice today is, that “peace enforcement” is still about using your own military, whereas “military intervention” is where the use of mercenaries and private “security” companies is considered as a viable option. It is also about this point where George W called in his allies – the lawyers. After all, that was how he became president in the first place. State sponsored kidnappings became “renditions”, torture became “stress positions” and irregular (guerrilla) forces became “illegal” combatants. It was also at about this point that companies like Blackwater came into the picture. Blackwater was responsible for much of the personnel at Abu Ghraib prison and for many of the random shootings of Iraqi civilians that took place.

Another problem that appears within the context of peace enforcement and military intervention is in connection with stated objectives. Some of these objectives include rebuilding infrastructure and humanitarian aid. Basically, a more advanced form of “winning hearts and minds”. The idea is to justify the legitimacy of the military operation to the civilian population by including a humanitarian element. This strategy blurs the distinction between civilian and military by either embedding humanitarian aid workers in military units, or by military personnel providing medical and other aid that is normally provided by humanitarian organizations. Embedding, whether of humanitarian aid workers or journalists, reduces the amount of independent observers that can comment on human rights violations.

What I have written above has most assuredly only scratched the surface. One issue that I haven’t covered yet is accountability. The behavior of military personnel is governed by military law, the Geneva Conventions and any mandate that comes from a United Nations resolution and the UN Charter chapters 6 & 7, but what rules govern mercenaries? I am participating in a symposium at the end of the month on this very topic, so it will be interesting to report back on this issue after the symposium.

I remember a story that I was told about a hapless American exchange student in Denmark. The wife of the family he was staying with had decided that his room needed to be cleaned up. She therefore suggested that his room needed “rearranging”. Translation: clean up your room, it looks like a pig sty. The poor student of course thought that the furniture wasn’t where it belonged and went about literally rearranging the furniture. The situation today is quit different. It appears that Danes have moved from the “Japanese model” to the “American model” when interacting with other people. It has almost become a national sport to insult and use scatological verbiage.

Family violence has become less accepted than it used to be in all sectors of the population. Slapping the wife or the kids around used to be relatively common, but due to changes in attitudes is now considered to be inappropriate and potentially criminal behavior. On the other hand, soccer fans used to be known in Denmark as “roligans” because they were “rolig” or calm and composed – relaxed. Many soccer fans in Denmark aren’t relaxed anymore. Hooliganism has arrived and soccer fans are finding themselves equated with hooliganism and the extreme right as in many other countries.

The greatest change has occured with regards to the treatment of minority groups. It used to be considered that the true test of a pluralist, democratic society was the extent to which the society included minorities and allowed them to participate and integrate. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. It is increasingly becoming almost a national sport to exclude, vilify and discriminate against individuals and groups that define themselves or are defined by others as a minority – based on race, gender, age, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, etc.

The majority of job opportunities in Denmark come through personal and professional contacts and not through job ads. That really blows when someone with international experience and fifteen years living abroad tries to find a new job. I tend to get slightly manic and try to analyze the job situation and develop new strategies for marketing my skills. I go through a stage where I revise my resumé and web sites. Then I try to draw on the networks of friends and contacts. Interestingly, this can quickly lead to embarrassment for all parties.

It is acceptable according to Danish social norms to be looking for employment. If however, you mention that you don’t have much of a network because you have been living abroad, or that you have been unemployed for a period of almost three years – despite unemployment in Denmark being at the lowest point for many years, embarrassment creeps in. Resumé forwarding not withstanding. In reality, the embarrassment couldn’t be more palpable if I had announced that I was starting my own harem and moving to a deserted island.

What is the cause of the embarrassment? People view their contacts as part of their own personal sphere. People need privacy, not because they are going to overthrow the government or plan a terrorist attack, but because they don’t want their wife to find out about their mistress, or they don’t want their employer to know about their gambling. We don’t like to reveal our foibles to just anyone. We also view our friends and contacts as assets that can support and help us, not someone else. Being unemployed, in a way, is like being socially dysfunctional or having the plague. Most people are afraid that it is somehow contagious.

By the way, I could still use those contacts…

I purchased my first Macintosh the first chance I got. That was a year or so later and the Mac had moved on to System 7. Despite my Mac (model IIsi) and my Apple licensed laser printer having cost a small fortune, I could do amazing things with it that wasn’t possible at the time on a desktop PC. I eventually purchased a laptop version of the Macintosh – a PowerBook. I was ready to become a road warrior. I was usually even able to keep my contacts, documents and various other files synced with my desktop Mac without much of a problem. Then came the so called “clone wars”. My desktop Mac had become a little long in the tooth, so I opted for a UMAX S900 running System 8. Steve Jobs had left Apple and founded NeXT Computers. Apple was foundering due to lost market share and tried to regain former glory by Apple licensing the MacOS operating system to other manufacturers such as UMAX and Motorola, in much the same way as Microsoft does. With the return of Steve Jobs after the firing of CEO Gil Amelio, a new operating system was rolled out (OS X) that only supported Apple made PReP or PowerPC Reference Platform based computers. This alienated many Mac users (including me) and is the root to Steve Job’s insistence that Apple maintains both full hardware and full software control over its products. This has been taken to a whole new level in the case of the iPhone.

The iPhone has up to this point only been for sale in some countries, the US, the UK, France and Germany among them. The phones have been tied or locked to one carrier in each country. Anyone that purchased an iPhone in one country and either worked or lived for a while in another country would be forced to unlock or “jail break” their phone, if they didn’t want to spend money on exorbitant roaming charges. Unfortunately, jail breaking an iPhone is like trying to perform voodoo on a moving target as firmware upgrades tend to render jail broken iPhones useless (known as “bricking”). After having received my iPhone,I have discovered that locking a phone to a carrier is common practice, but a practice that I have never experienced before. Anyone that travels a lot (either business or pleasure), which includes most people, should be able to use a local phone card to avoid exorbitant roaming fees.

Apple has been indecisive with regards to initial policy on third party application development. Apple originally took the stance that only programs created by Apple or its partners (such as Yahoo and Google) would be able to be used on the iPhone. Apple has since reversed this stance after hackers started developing programs and installing them with “installer.app”. Apple now has a developer kit that will allow third party developers to create programs for the iPhone, apparently through the iTunes store.

Apple’s recent policies on hardware and software has driven one of my colleagues to exclaim in frustration that Apple has become the Big Brother that they warned against in their famous “1984” Macintosh advertisement. While I understand that Apple doesn’t want to end up with a buggy operating system like Microsoft Vista, I tend to agree with my colleague. After all, I have as of yet been unable to use my carrier*s EDGE with my jail broken iPhone.

One of my favorite stories on this topic comes from my brother in law. He told me about a small Danish turnkey dairy company that was very successful in Europe, but wanted to expand their horizons. The head of the company went down to the local copy shop (!) where the company got their folders and brochures printed. He asked the owner of the copy shop if he couldn’t drum up some sort of English language campaign for the company. “Yes, yes, English is my best” says the owner of the copy shop and the rest is history, as they say. The copy shop owner made a fundamental linguistic mistake. He mistook the use of “construct” and “erect” in the English language. The title on the campaign brochures should have been “construction all over the world”, but instead was “erections all over the world”. While this was an obvious mistake, it none the less attracted much attention, for obvious reasons, and helped garner a steep increase in business for the company.

The story never fails to be an ice breaker in the right company. It is a reminder of what we all have in common as people, regardless of race, culture or religion.

Sunshine and relatively warm weather have finally hit Denmark. People have started to relax a little bit. Taking some time to smell the roses, as it were. That doesn’t mean that Danes as such become more friendly to people that they don’t know. You can always spot the people that feel at home in Denmark, but have been living abroad for some years. It takes a year or two after having returned to Denmark, to perfect the art of blank stares on the buses and trains. Returnees having yet to adapt to the local mindset are almost always the ones that talk to the cashier in the checkout line, comment on things to their fellow train or bus passengers, smile as they are walking down the high street, etc.

People from the so called “western world” consider themselves in general to be hospitable and in some cases we are. A vacation a generation ago was to exotic places like Spain and Italy. Today we travel further – to Africa, Latin America and Asia. We expect the locals to be “hospitable” as we are spending money to visit them. The connection that develops between money and hospitality can be a slippery slope. The local population becomes dependent on tourism and we get used to the idea that we can pay for hospitality. The reality is that hospitality comes from the culture and the ethical basis of the culture and not from the wallet.

Refugees and immigrants to Denmark often find that they are expected to be thankful for living here. This, regardless of their background. Imagine a young American immigrant to Denmark being told as part of his “career counseling” that he should be thankful for the honor of living in Denmark. No mention that Danes should be thankful for the Marshal Aid that they received after WW II from the US. A Greek friend of mine has both a Greek university degree, an MA degree from a Danish university, a BA degree from a Swiss university and another BA from a British university. The only job he can get in Denmark is sorting the mail at a postal distribution center. Many refugees and immigrants have skills that could enrich Danish society both culturally and commercially, if they were valued and utilized.

Topless bathing has been a longtime sport at the local beaches; now it is allowed in public swimming halls in the Copenhagen area and a burgeoning export is taking place to many new countries where Danes vacation. Despite having been a fan of the female form since I was very young, I find it to be weird bordering on bizarre that wearing religious symbols in public should be more controversial for some politicians and opinion makers than bare breasted women, as this last week’s newspaper headlines can corroborate .

While globalization and multiculturalism need not necessarily be goals in and of themselves, intercultural and interfaith cooperation and understanding is much preferable to cultural (and religious) arrogance, smugness and inhospitality.

I don’t claim that I have any inside information on the issue, but I have noticed how some of the travel books have had extremely dated information at best. One of the problems with the travel book genre is that economic and political crises, as well as natural disasters and terrorism can have a quick and long lasting influence on where tourists decide to vacation. If the demand for a certain travel guide decreases, the publisher is forced to make the decision whether to reprint an existing travel guide, publish a new edition or drop the country from the list. The East Asian Financial Crisis made a large impact on the local Asian economies. Businesses that were thriving the one day were closed the next. Political leaders were toppled. The Bali and Jakarta Marriott bombings only added to the jitteriness of tourists and added uncertainty to the entire tourism industry in Southeast Asia. While all of this is understandable, it is no excuse for travel guides with useless information.

My experience has taught me that travel guides in their third or fourth edition can often be susceptible to “inaccuracies”. Ever come to a new city and find out that none of the two or three star hotels exist anymore? How about mid range restaurants? This can often be due to the fact that some of the information has been revised, but not all. Keeping track of two to five star restaurants and hotels, etc. can prove to be an enormous task, particularly in a city like Jakarta where it is possible to have the same street number in three or more locations at different points on the same street. A travel writer has either to rely on an army of taxi drivers just to keep the locations of establishments up to date, or the writer has to update the information in bits.

Sure there can be perks for a travel writer, not all of them surviving the harsh light of scrutiny, but I am sure that there is also a lot of exhausting work involved.