Christmas Lives On

By Garrison Keillor, The Washington Post

24 December 16

t is hard to believe that the Creator of our universe with its billions of galaxies could have sent Himself to this little blue blip not so long ago in the form of an infant born to a virgin, to be first worshiped by illiterate shepherds where He lay in a feed trough, livestock peering down at Him, Eastern potentates following a star to the site. But here we are again, singing those songs, so we shall see.

My mother loved Christmas with her whole heart. With six children and no credit cards and my father ever watchful for unnecessary expense, Christmas was a mountain for Grace to climb, requiring endurance, planning, stealth and skill, but she brought it off to perfection every year, until she was in her 90s and then she coasted on her memories.

Her mother died when my mother was 7, and Mother had no memory of her, which troubled her deeply. She looked at photos of her mother, tall, haggard, from the early 1920s, and tried to dredge up some recollection, anything at all, the sound of her voice, what she cooked, what her hand felt like. Grace was third from the end of 11 children, the 12th having died with the mother, of scarlet fever, and Grace was raised by her older sisters, Marian and Ruby and Margaret. Complaint was not encouraged in that family, and mental health was not a topic for discussion, but clearly Christmas was a shining moment of gaiety in a family of modest means and strict decorum.

When I was 19, my older brother asked me to look after his house over Christmas so he and his young family could drive out to New York for a week. His house was in the woods, and I, intoxicated by Thoreau at the time, was more dramatic than necessary and announced that I would spend Christmas alone out there “to figure things out.” A poem of mine got in the college literary magazine, with the lines:

Will take me out and away from you and all of this.

Which was about skating, but a girl I knew thought it was suicidal and she came out to the woods to visit me and bring me dinner from her mother — turkey, candied yams, cranberry, in tinfoil. We lit candles and sat and meditated on the mystery of life, and it was pleasant to have someone be so concerned about my well-being. At the time, I thought of suicide as poetic, an artistic choice stemming from great emotional depths. Two months later, her boyfriend Leeds was killed when a drunk driver pulled out of a parking lot and into his mother’s car coming back home from a play at the Guthrie Theater. Twenty-some years later, sunk in depression, my friend filled her pockets with rocks and paddled a canoe out to the middle of a lake and capsized it and drowned.

Life is good. On a winter night, looking into a fire, our dead are around us, testifying to that. The books on the shelves, the young people around the table, the carols on the radio in the kitchen, the shining snow on the hill that looks out at the Mississippi River.

As you get old, you gain a stripped-down life, minus the clutter and hullabaloo, the excess food and alcohol, the meaningless gifts, and it is quite satisfying to sit with your true love in candlelight, a plate of cookies on the table, and let memories come and go. My mother is there. It’s 6 a.m., still dark out, and I’ve come down the stairs in my pajamas to the darkened tree, a note from Santa, the crumbs of the gingersnap I left for him, and I hear the padding of bare feet on the stair, and suddenly the tree bursts into light, and my mother is standing there in a raggedy robe. She missed her dead mother and found her every year in making Christmas for us.

Even after she moved to Florida, she flew back for a proper Minnesota Christmas with frost on the windows and wind in the chimney. What you do for children is never wasted: This Christmas will live on and nourish them long after you have faded away.

Aleppo's "Evacuation" Is a Crime Against Humanity

By Ben Taub, The New Yorker

24 December 16

ast Thursday, as forces loyal to the Syrian government advanced through eastern Aleppo and despondent civilians there wondered whether they would be massacred, Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, stood in a sunlit courtyard in Damascus, dressed in a crisp blue suit, and compared his victory to the births of Jesus Christ and the prophet Muhammad. Just as our calendars count the years before and after those events, he explained, “I believe that we will talk about history—and not just the history of Syria but of the entire world—as before and after the liberation of Aleppo.” He rocked back and forth on his heels, waving his arms and raising his eyebrows, unable to conceal his excitement.

So, characteristically, an autocrat inflates his place in history. But, in this case, it’s worth acknowledging that Assad has a point: the significance of Aleppo’s collapse is far greater than its physical territory, its ancient history, and its former splendor. For more than four years, Western governments and the United Nations stood by, watching, as Assad and his backers ostentatiously ignored the laws of war, and residents of eastern Aleppo live-streamed their own extermination. Now, along with tens of thousands of civilians, the credibility of the powerful countries and institutions that could have helped them, but didn’t, lies in Aleppo’s rubble and blood.

Consider Abdulkafi Alhamdo, a Syrian teacher and activist, who had taken Western politicians at their word and believed that documenting human-rights abuses mattered to the international community. He stayed in Aleppo under bombardment and siege, and broadcast his thoughts on Twitter, because he thought that if the world witnessed civilians suffering in Aleppo, it would come to their aid. Last Tuesday, Alhamdo filmed what he expected to be his final message, a warning to activists living in other repressive parts of the world. “Don’t believe anymore in the United Nations,” he said. “Don’t believe anymore in the international community. Don’t think they are not satisfied with what’s going on.” He sighed, and checked his surroundings. Pro-Assad militias were closing in. “This world does not like freedom, it seems. Don’t believe that you are free people in your countries anymore. No.” There was the sound of gunfire in the background. “I hope you can remember us.”

In addition to banned munitions, Syrian and Russian aircraft spent the past few months dropping leaflets over eastern Aleppo, warning that anyone who didn’t leave the area would be “annihilated.” But there was nowhere to go, except into government-held districts, where many residents feared that they would be detained, tortured, and killed. The leaflets continued to rain down on them. “You know that everyone has given up on you,” the leaflets said. “They left you alone to face your doom.”

Now is the time to stop talking about violations of human rights in Syria, and, instead, to describe atrocities in the proper terms: war crimes and crimes against humanity, as defined, unambiguously, in the Rome Statute, the founding document of the International Criminal Court. A campaign of “extermination,” for example, is a crime against humanity characterized by “the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population.” The U.N. spent the past five months asking the Syrian government for permission to deliver food and medical supplies to eastern Aleppo, but the request was never granted. And so the people of Aleppo starved, and shivered, because, in order not to be kicked out of Syria entirely, the U.N. only delivers aid where and when the Assad regime allows it to. Last June, when Syrians were starving to death under siege in Madaya, near Damascus, the U.N. told the Syrian government that if aid convoys were not allowed to enter the neighborhood by road, it would begin dropping aid from the air. The regime didn’t acquiesce. Still, the airdrops never happened.

Assad’s campaign in eastern Aleppo was distinguished by the near-constant commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity, in plain view. (Many rebel groups in Syria have also violated the laws of war, but on a vastly smaller scale.) Total war against a civilian population and infrastructure is as effective as it is illegal, and last week it prompted what has become widely known as the “evacuation” of eastern Aleppo. Even the U.N. Security Council used that term, as if the choice between death and displacement is any choice at all. In the preceding days, the U.N. had reported that pro-Assad militias were going house to house, and had executed scores of civilians, including women and children.

The legal definition for what is happening in Aleppo is forced displacement—a term that has been carefully avoided by the Security Council, which, ignoring the reality on the ground, issued a resolution this week stressing the importance of “voluntary, safe, and dignified passage of all civilians.” This crime is well established under international law. “If civilians are being told that they should leave or risk being deliberately targeted by military forces, that amounts to forcible transfer,” Alex Whiting, a former prosecutions coördinator at the I.C.C., who now teaches at Harvard Law School, told me. “The ‘force’ in forcible transfer is not limited to physical force,” he added. “It also includes threats of force or coercion, or fear of violence or duress.” On Thursday, as locals crammed into buses—even crowding into the luggage compartments—Majd Khalaf, a member of the White Helmets civilian-rescue organization, posted on Twitter, “Today, Assad and his militias won their war against civilians of #Aleppo they forced them to leave their homes in front of the whole world.”

To discredit allegations of war crimes, Syria and its ally Russia have instigated a forceful campaign of disinformation and punditry. Russian state television insinuated that activists filming in Aleppo were not actually civilians. Vitaly Churkin, the Russian Ambassador to the United Nations, appropriated the ongoing hysteria over “fake news” to apply the term to Western coverage of Syria. Meanwhile, Bashar Ja’afari, the Syrian Ambassador to the United Nations, recently held up a large printed photograph before the Security Council, depicting a soldier on his hands and knees, offering his back as a footstool for an elderly woman climbing out of a truck bed. “Here you see a picture of a Syrian soldier providing help and support to a woman,” Ja’afari said. “This is what the Syrian Army is doing in Aleppo.” The photo, however, had been cropped to hide an Iraqi flag. It was taken at least six months ago, likely near Fallujah.

As I have previously written, the volume and quality of court-ready evidence against high-level officials in the Syrian government is greater than has ever previously been collected in an active conflict. Still, the International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction over Syria, because Russia, voting no alongside China, obstructed the conflict’s referral at the U.N. Security Council, in 2014. A single country’s veto power shields all of Syria’s war criminals from justice—not just Assad and his deputies but also various rebels, including members of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The credibility of worthy institutions is at stake when they are totally incapable of adhering to their founding principles. Under the present system, to some war criminals with powerful allies, the laws of war, drafted during the bloodiest century in human history, can be brushed aside as little more than a suggestion, to be ignored, shamelessly, with impunity.

International criminal law takes into account the fact that the highest-level perpetrators are rarely present at the scene of the crime. For this reason, one of its modes of liability, known as “command responsibility,” is an assessment of whether the individual on trial knew or should have known that his subordinates were committing war crimes, and, in turn, whether he failed to prevent or punish those crimes. That will be one measure of Assad’s guilt, should he ever be brought to court. Our collective shame, having watched this horror unfold, is another matter still.