On the heavier side, a new war in Central Africa may break out.

On August 13, a group of Hutu rebels attacked a refugee camp in Burundi, killing 160 Banyamulenge refugees (Congolese of Rwandan and Burundi descent, most of whom have been identified as Tutsi) at the Gutamba Refugee Camp. It is believed that the rebels came from Democratic Republic of Congo.

The presence of Hutu rebels–genocidaires responsible for the 1994 Rwandan Genocide–and the support that they have received from Kinshasa for almost a decade has been a major concern for Rwanda and Burundi. The genocidaires continued to attack Tutsi in the two Kivu provinces and in Ituri, and they transmitted their racial hatred to other Congolese groups. (This report describes the regional connections between the Kivus, Rwanda and Burundi). Twice Rwanda and Burundi invaded Zaire/Congo in order to protect ethnic Tutsi.

There have been only brief intermissions in violence in eastern Congo since the ceasefire. Violence continued at the lower levels, below what the states considered the legitimate subjects for diplomacy. Nevertheless, they have been carried out by armed militia groups, some composed of demobilized soldiers. Stephan van Praet of Human Rights Watch says that the peace talks don't address the issue of justice at low levels, thus perpetuating the" cycle of impunity."

Diplomats from the two small Great Lakes nations have lost all their faith in the ongoing negotiations with Kinshasa.

"The process has broken down and we need to repair this break down," Azarius Ruberwa, the head of RCD and one of Congo's four vice presidents, told United Nations radio.

"We need to stop, re-read the (peace) agreement and the conclusions of the negotiations because it is incomprehensible that, during a peace process, genocide of Congolese people takes place abroad," he said.

Furthermore, politicians from both Rwanda and Burundi have suggested that they are thinking of another war:

"I have not ruled out an offensive against the DRC aimed at making them respect our country's borders," General Germain Niyoyankana told reporters.

Laurent Nkunda, a renegade Congolese commander, has also made threats:

"I am not attacking now ... I will be here in Goma mourning for a few days. By then hopefully the people of good faith will have taken the appropriate decisions ... This won't happen again."

The previous fighting was significant because it expanded to include states beyond those on the Great Lakes, most notably Angola and Zimbabwe, as the different states started to fight for mineral interests in the Kivus.

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On the lighter side, the last few episodes of Amazing Race 5 (taking place in Egypt and Tanzinia) have been touching. Most competitors scream at natives to do things for them--as if volume can overcome the language gap. Trying to win the show, they become ugly Americans--more than they might naturally be.



The married couple Chip and Kim (who grew up in South Central LA) have been moved being in Africa. They look around and think about the roots that they have in Africa. But more surprisingly, they actually stopped just to enjoy a moment of hospitality in a Tanzinian village.

I spent several days in California visiting my parents. They no longer live in Los Angeles, moving to one of the interior valleys about a decade ago. This was the first time I had been in California and did not visit LA–--it was no longer my home. And as Goa Xingjian says, it is impossible in a city for any place to belong exclusively to one person. Still, I was a tourist in the place of my birth.



The Temecula Valley, where they live now, has undergone immense change in a short time. It is high desert nestled between tall mountains. The climate is generally dry, and trees are precious. Initially, there were numerous orange groves; to the south there are avocado groves. There is also a small wine country with a dozen and a half vineyards. Every time I visit I am impressed by the progress made by the winemakers

The landscape is a piece of the Mexican desert pushing into California. In fact, there are a number of strong, long-standing Mexican-American communities. It is possible to see a long distance from almost anywhere within the valley. My Connecticut-born wife thinks it is picturesque, but not quite hospitable.

This area has come under pressure as new housing developments are raised and new people move in. A few orange groves have disappeared. Cookie-cutter houses obscure the original buildings that were appropriately weathered. The new residents commute to far off San Diego and Orange Country ... and to LA in some cases. They don’t understand the Mexican Americans who live in the area.

Being a tourist at home allowed me to do tourist things that I would not have done before. One thing I wanted to do was explore Spanish Colonial influence. Local myth in New England is intimately entwined with the founding history of America: people tend to see all American history originating from them. I was happy to show my wife the history and myths of old California with which I was raised.



The myth, of course, is that of Catholic missions and Father Junipero Serra: a Franciscan who was sent to establish a firm Spanish presence in Alta California against the encroachment of British and Russian traders and to Catholicize the natives. The mission were outposts whereat Europeans and natives coexisted. They were the basis for the settlement of California. The pastoral image of monks and natives living together in harmony persists today. The reality was that the mission system, while growing, was fragile, and the religious goals of the missionaries conflicted with the goals of the crown, which wanted to turn natives into Spanish citizens. To this end, the state founded towns: there were parallel policies that led to the settlement (in the European sense) of California.

We drove out to two missions, San Juan Capistrano and San Luis Rey (a beautiful drive over the mountains). Each mission left me with a different impression. San Juan Capistrano completely fit its romantic image. The mission is right in the middle of the city, surrounded by streets that run parallel to the walls. Large parts of the structure have been not been rebuilt, giving that classic look of a ruin. The large church has been left completely open to the elements, its roof having collapsed in an earthquake. The gardens are filled with colorful plants; there are running fountains. Numerous artists paint the famed bells. Parts of the mission dedicated to artisanship are open and thoroughly explained. There is even a little display showing the piano whereat “When the swallows return to Capistrano” was composed. So close to the street, the mission is more of a park than an historical site–a respite from urban life among romantic surroundings.

San Luis Rey has been restored. The damage that it experienced has been repaired, and it appears to be more functional. The mission is painted in a stark white, and stunning site as it is some distance from its city. One of the last missions that was built, it was meant to look more like a baroque Spanish church. Details that would normally have been created with wood carving, stained glass and marbled stone were painted in. Imported statues of religious figures were evocative and emotional. The museum was well organized, showing the articles of daily and religious life. Most of these came from Spain, although some were produced in Mexico and (in rare cases) locally.



Despite its restoration, San Luis Rey probably did more to recreate the impression of a mission against the Southern California landscape: a stark white edifice against high mountains, surrounded by land affected by drought. I was transfixed by two photographs that showed the conditions of both mission in the mid-nineteenth century. Not only were they in need of repair, but the landscape was desolate. Time has given richer flora to both San Juan Capistrano and San Luis Rey (thanks to the likes of William Mulholland). However, the former looks like a piece of paradise in a hectic world. The former reveals more of the imposing presence of the Church when it was first built, something that could have been alien and unfamiliar. Furthermore, San Juan Capistrano gave the impression that the missions were self-sufficient because of the centrality of displays of artisanship, a notion betrayed by San Luis Rey.

Often I cringe whenever politicians try to draw lessons from history. More often than not they prove they are bad historians (or people with bad memories). Such was the case with California Governor Schwarzenegger's speech at the RNC last night:

When I was a boy, the Soviets occupied part of Austria. I saw their tanks in the streets. I saw communism with my own eyes. I remember the fear we had when we had to cross into the Soviet sector. Growing up, we were told,"Don't look the soldiers in the eye. Look straight ahead." It was a common belief that Soviet soldiers could take a man out of his own car and ship him off to the Soviet Union as slave labor.

Matt Yglesias has already written quite a job dissecting the governor's speech (some criticism I agree with, some I do not). However, Schwarzenegger should have thought his speech through more carefully, especially with respect to the issue of the Red Army.

The occupation was a frightening time for Austrians. As a people they were complicit in Germany's war. Indeed, they showed more enthusiasm for some of the worst crimes of the Nazi regime than other Reichsdeutschtum. When the Red Army advanced on Eastern and Central Europe, Austrians (like other Germans) developed an irrational hatred of Russians. They developed fantasies about the persistence of the Russian mob and the crimes they would commit against Germans. The Mühlviertler Hasenjagd reveals the depths that the hatred of Austrians could reach: a village slaughtered a group of Russian POWs who escaped from Mauthausen. Austrians did not dread Russians in the same manner that Americans had; their emotions had monstrous roots.

There is no benign occupation, no foreign army whose presence does not elicit feelings of powerlessness and shame. There were places where the Red Army committed crimes of war. However, the fear that the governor spoke of was, in part, a carryover of the war that Austrians helped to fight. Governor Schwarzenegger was young: he grew up in a generation who described themselves as the “first victims of Nazism.” The truth is more sinister, and it has been difficult to accept.

Geitner Simmons of Regions of Mind notes an interesting question about how and why the American West was settled.

A professor posed an interesting query to the H-West listserv last week:

I lectured Tuesday about westward expansion in the post-Civil War era. I read a quote from Horace Greeley urging New York's poor to take a farm in the West and" crowd nobody, starve nobody." Then I opened it up for questions.

A student pointed out that at many times in history, ruling elites have used frontiers or distant edges of the empire as a convenient dumping ground for unwanted minorities or disagreeable elements of society.

Her question: can we see the Homestead Act of 1862 and its promotion in the post-Civil War period as an effort by Northeastern elites to offload what they saw as unwanted human rubbish onto the West? In other words, as a cynical political move rather than solely as government acting to fulfill the Free Labor dream? Can it be flipped on its head to be seen as an effort in negative social engineering (remove the awful) rather than positive social engineering (accentuate the good)?

The equation of frontier settlers and the unwanted seems to hold up quite well in comparative history. In European history, the question of who left to populate new continents is familiar. In the eighteenth century Britain transported unwanted and undesirable elements (especially criminals) to the American colonies and, when that option was closed by American Independence, to Australia. The missionaries of eighteenth-century California were likely a mix of untalented, restless and troubled monks who inflicted their frustrations on natives. In the nineteenth century France turned its colonies into a repository of criminals who might return to the metropole one day.

There are a few problems with this theory. Mr. Simmons points out that while this argument has some strengths, people who populated the American West required some means to do so. They were not simply the “dregs of society”–the poor and landless could not always migrate at will:

Those who migrated to the Plains, California, and the Pacific Northwest in the mid-nineteenth century were not urban poor, but primarily middling farmers who were struggling to support their families on midwestern farms.

Those living on the most marginal farms, or who were working as laborers on farms or in cities did not have sufficient capital to move their families hundreds or thousands of miles to start over on far western frontiers, even if they were offered free land.

Still, we must admit that migration attracted some people who were down on their luck.

But I also think that this question must be asked: did governments really want to deposit the unwanted on their frontiers and peripheries?

I am very skeptical of a positive answer. Frontiers and peripheries are not empty space–indeed, they could have native populations. They are also places where the reach of government is weak, and where challenges to authority over the frontier abound.

I see two basic problems. First, administering far off territories is laborious. States cannot police them and they cannot provide services without difficulty. States tend to fear that frontiers will turn into ‘badlands’–like the Wild West or China’s Muslim provinces. Second, frontiers border other nations who are themselves trying to secure their territory and who might have a claim on the frontier as well. Again, China’s frontier is being drawn into the politics of the “stans”–the Muslims republics that splintered off from the Soviet Union.

Why would states want to encourage people they consider unreliable to migrate to places that were difficult to control? The threat to the state is that the settler population will become unstable, drawing the state into an international conflict that might result in territorial loss. The federal government believed that its hold on the Louisiana territory was threatened by Louisiana’s complex racial mixture and the liberties of free blacks. Furthermore, there was concern that Spain would try to use ethnic tensions to destabilize Louisiana, thus gaining control over it. Currently, I am writing about German political exiles who wanted to settle in Alsace in the 1920s. The French government feared that these exiles would incite ethnic conflict that would give Germany a claim on the eastern départements.

Policies on settlement had to take into account strategic concerns. Consequently, states wanted stable, reliable populations that consisted of loyal, upright citizens. Governors tried to prevent former slaves and refugees (especially those from the Carribean) from coming to Louisiana. When Bismarck annexed territories in Africa and the Pacific as German colonies, he dreamed that entrepreneurs would lead the way to settlement.

All these go to questions of how states control territory. At some point states cannot continue to use force in order maintain their integrity. They rely on citizens to maintain the legitimacy of the state’s presence and to maintain security. If the state must rescue its citizens, it must do so with overwhelming force. The old situation cannot be restored: the needs of the settlers must be met fully. Such was the case with Bacon’s Rebellion and the Herero War. Ariel Sharon has been pondering these issues as well: whether or not the Israeli settlement in Gaza and the West Bank are legitimate, they can be maintained only at great cost to Israel. Defending the settlements may be too expensive.

Ultimately, peripheries and frontiers are not impoverished places that vacuum up the destitute. Indeed, cities on the periphery can be quite prosperous. They are ports of entry for goods and ideas into the nation. They are also places where people can benefit from cross-border relationships. If states fear that far off territories will become ‘badlands’, they also struggle with peripheries that become independent through their affluence.