On Shaha Ali Riza

To Whom It May Concern,

Shaha Ali Riza has worked as an advocate for women's rights and democracy in the Middle East for most of her career, but it's her personal life -- her relationship with World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz -- that's put her in the public eye. As the scandal over the compensation Wolfowitz arranged for her deepens, one longtime colleague, leading Palestinian peace activist and philosopher Sari Nusseibeh, wrote this open letter on her behalf.

I am very happy to have the chance to put in a good word for Shaha Ali Riza, especially in the midst of what seems to be an unfair and vicious campaign against her.

I have known Shaha for the past 15 years, starting when she was still working for the National Endowment for Democracy. Shaha, who had heard of my work as an academic and peace activist, was interested in sounding me out on ideas for projects in the West Bank to promote democracy, empower youths and build civil society organizations. At the time, she did something that I later came to recognize as her professional trademark: digging beneath the surface, questioning and double-checking existing practices in the field. Her uppermost concern was ensuring that there was no malpractice -- no financing that was going to the wrong people or organizations. We kept up our contacts as I became involved in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and helped work with World Bank officials to draw up plans for Palestine's economic development.

Shaha later moved to the World Bank. Because of the mutual trust that had already developed between us, she soon tried to get bank officials who worked on the Middle East to get to know me. She felt that they had to listen to a "fresh" voice, to the voice of someone who was not part of the existing system. She sought out other such voices and encouraged the bank to hold brainstorming workshops in the presence of nonofficial analysts and grass-roots activists. While at the State Department, she tried to start a program to help Palestinian students study law at American universities in hopes that, upon their return home, they would help develop workable legal institutions in a future Palestinian state.

When widespread violence erupted in 2000, she stepped in again after I started a grass-roots peace effort with an Israeli activist, Ami Ayalon. Shaha introduced me to James D. Wolfensohn, then the World Bank's president, in hopes of soliciting his help. She repeated her efforts as soon as Paul D. Wolfowitz was appointed as his successor, introducing him to Middle Easterners like myself in whom she found a genuine commitment to the betterment of their societies.

These are only some of the landmarks in our relationship, but they reflect an ongoing devotion to providing the best advice to the institutions for which she worked.

Very often, Shaha's perceptions and conclusions were not congruent with those of her colleagues. She knew that she sometimes upset coworkers because of her unconventional methods (notably her strong contacts in the region) and conclusions. Often, she would choose to be absent from a workshop in which we would be speaking with her colleagues -- often meetings that were the result of her own planning -- just so that her colleagues could listen to our voices without feeling "threatened."

Throughout, her guiding principle was this: Let's get the least tainted and least prejudiced advice about how her organization can make the best use of its resources.

I don't believe that the World Bank or the State Department could find a person more devoted to their work in this part of the world than Shaha. Nor, I believe, could underprivileged people from this region hope for a more sympathetic ear in Washington.

Yours truly,

Sari Nusseibeh

President, al-Quds University, Jerusalem

Bloggers on the World Bank scandal

Bloggers on the World Bank scandal. - By Blake Wilson - Slate Magazine:

Wolfowitz may soon be history, but what's next for the World Bank? Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly's Political Animal writes: 'Good news: it looks like Wolfowitz is toast. It couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Bad news: Can you imagine who Bush is going to nominate as a 'screw you' replacement? Doug Feith? Rick Santorum? Monica Goodling?'

Wolfowitz : Another country heard from

Wolfowitz critics point to his lack of ethics - MSNBC.com:

JAKARTA, Indonesia - The controversy surrounding World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz spotlights a lack of ethics that was apparent two decades ago when he was U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, say critics who recall how he failed to speak out against corruption and rights abuses.

Today, as head of the bank, Wolfowitz has been arguing that corruption is crippling the world’s poorest nations. But that was “the very thing he closed his eyes to” when he served as ambassador from 1986 to 1989 during the regime of the dictator Suharto, said pro-democracy activist Binny Buchori.

“He’s a hypocrite,” she said. “He should quit.”

And now we wait for Christopher Hitchens?

James Fallows on Wolfowitz and much more

James Fallows | Author and Journalist

I posted a piece by Christopher Hitchens sympathetic to Wolfowitz a few days back. Here is a more critical, and very thought-provoking, analysis by Jim Fallows [a Harvard classmate who does fabulous work]. See his full blog posting for some interesting byways and historical perspective, also relevant to Gonzales.

I was wrong to suggest that Paul Wolfowitz was like Robert McNamara. That is disrespectful to McNamara.

But in modern U.S. politics, I think the neocon/Bush comb is more “tribal” in its thinking than anyone else is. If you’re on the team, it’s very hard for you to do or say anything wrong. If not, the reverse. For instance: no organ of either the “mainstream” or the actually leftist press is as disciplined about propping up allies, no matter what, and shooting enemies on sight as are the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and most of what’s on Fox News. Democratic politicians are more disciplined than they used to be but still can’t help squabbling. By contrast there is evidently nothing Dick Cheney could do, say, exaggerate, or make up that would discredit him to his base....

This brings us back to Paul Wolfowitz. A natural extension of the in-group/tribal approach to life is the inability to ask or wonder: how would this look if the other side did it? How will it look to people who mistrust us or don’t automatically believe that everything we do is for a higher cause? This is a kind of political autism — an inability to sense or imagine other people’s reactions — and it runs the gamut. How would we feel about someone else “water boarding” our prisoners? How would we feel about the other political party intercepting our phone calls or emails? How would we like it if there were no right of habeus corpus? What would the world be like if everyone did what we are doing now?

The question Wolfowitz apparently failed to ask, is: given that I am basing my entire tenure at the World Bank on a crusade against corruption, how will it look if I extend special favors to a handful of political confidantes plus my girlfriend? Considering how many speeches I have given about those who use public office to do private favors, can I afford to dole out favors this way? Do the words “Caesar’s wife” ring any kind of bell?...

And that’s why cozy self-dealing is such a problem for Paul Wolfowitz. He has said he is sorry, which is more than Cheney, or Rove, or Rumsfeld, or Gonzales has managed to choke out. But — already in a complicated position at the Bank, because of what he calls “my previous job” — he has guaranteed that no subsequent speech on his central topic, the evil of self-dealing, will ever be taken seriously by anyone he hopes to convince. Say this for Robert McNamara: he has lived his post-Vietnam life with an awareness of what he can and cannot say or do. Paul Wolfowitz, you’re no Robert McNamara.

A contrarian view on Shaha Riza

Why Wolfowitz did nothing wrong. By Christopher Hitchens - From Slate Magazine:

Anyone in Washington who cares about democracy in the Muslim world is familiar with her work, at various institutions, in supporting civil-society activists in the Palestinian territories, in Iran, in the Gulf, and elsewhere. The relationship between the two of them is none of my damn business (or yours), but it has always been very discreet, even at times when Wolfowitz, regularly caricatured as a slave of the Israeli lobby, might perhaps have benefited from a strategic leak about his Arab and Muslim companion.

It is scarcely Riza's fault that she was working in a senior position at the World Bank when Wolfowitz was gazetted as its president. And quite frankly, if I were he, or indeed she, I would have challenged anyone to make anything of it. Of very few other people working there could it so obviously be said that she held her post as of right, and on merit....

Instead of settling the matter, this disclosure and plain offer on Wolfowitz's part has become the source of all his woes. It was decided by the board of the bank and the "ethics committee" that the board established, that for no reason except a private relationship, Riza had to leave her work at the bank. Feminists and opponents of the glass ceiling should begin paying attention here.

I am no fan of Paul Wolfowitz, and would shed no tears were he to leave the World Bank, or, for that matter, public life. I have no special insight into the particulars of any conflicts of interest (real or apparent) or failures of disclosure on his part at the Bank. But it does seem that Hitchens' argument deserves a hearing, and a serious response.