Articles
The Kenyatta Affair
FOREIGN POLICY
March 20, 2013
By James Verini
For now, Uhuru Kenyatta is the president-elect of Kenya. On Saturday, March 9, after a week of suspense following voting, he bested his main rival and former boss, Prime Minister Raila Odinga, who’s challenging the results in court (and now claims, without furnishing much evidence, that he won). This is causing a lot of handwringing among allies of Kenya’s who make human rights a centerpiece of their foreign policies, because Kenyatta is facing trial in the International Criminal Court (ICC). In the violent wake of the last election, in 2007, ICC prosecutors allege, Kenyatta helped organize death squads. See Full Story
The Fall and Rise of Raila Odinga
FOREIGN POLICY
March 2, 2013
By James Verini
A third generation of leadership is emerging in post-colonial Africa, and with it a trend of sons being made to answer for their fathers. During Kenya’s first-ever presidential debate, held three weeks ago in Nairobi, the moderator accused the two leading candidates of subjecting Kenya to a family rivalry that their fathers started a half-century ago and that the country needs to get past. The leading candidates are Raila Odinga, the prime minister, and Uhuru Kenyatta, the deputy prime minister. Their fathers were Jomo Kenyatta, the first president, and Oginga Odinga, his aide de camp and vice president — before they came to detest one another. See Full Story
Vote M For Murder
FOREIGN POLICY
February 26, 2013
By James Verini
On Monday, March 4, Kenya will elect a new president, its first in a decade. The last time it held a presidential election, five years ago, the country tore itself apart with an atavistic ferocity that still shocks and embarrasses people here. When discussing the episode with outsiders, Kenyans, normally unafraid to meet a gaze, will look off to the side. “Other countries in Africa act like that,” one hears a lot. “Not us.” They don’t try to deflect blame (no one mentions the CIA), but they do disagree about the causes of the violence. Tribalism is a given. Landlordism, too, some insist. Or corruption. Or inequality, alcoholism, and idleness (the local euphemism for unemployment, which has hovered stubbornly near 40 percent for years; nearly half the country lives at or below the poverty line). See Full Story
Debate Night in Kenya
THE NEW YORKER
February 20, 2013
By James Verini
Next month, Kenya will elect a new President, only its fourth since it gained independence from the United Kingdom fifty years ago. And so, last week, the country held its first-ever Presidential debate. Kenyan candidates for office are usually referred to in the British manner, as aspirants, but they study American campaigns, so despite the inexperience it was a slick production. There was an hour’s worth of pre-game commentary, with cutaways to the candidates emerging from chauffeured cars at the auditorium in Nairobi. On the stage, they stood at specially designed curvy, metallic podiums, in front of ceiling-high images of the State House, Kenya’s equivalent of the White House. The moderator interrogated them through a wisp of a headset mic. The debate was broadcast on forty-two television and radio stations and livestreamed on the Internet. See Full Story
The Battle for South Kordofan
FOREIGN POLICY
January 22, 2013
By James Verini
NUBA MOUNTAINS, Sudan — When Gen. Jagod Mukwar joined the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), soon after it formed, in the mid 1980s, he was a young man, and Sudan’s civil war was already many years older than he was. Factions from the north and south of the country had been fighting since before Sudan won its independence, in 1956. Still, the SPLA’s cause — independence for the south — remained internationally obscure. Sudan had not yet become a pariah state, while a famine in Ethiopia and apartheid in South Africa used up the world’s limited bandwidth for African tragedy. Mukwar’s cause-within-a-cause — the plight of the people of the Nuba Mountains, his home, in Sudan’s South Kordofan province — was unheard of. Today, nearly 30 years after Mukwar took up arms, the bloodshed continues. See Full Story
The Last Stand of Somalia’s Jihad
FOREIGN POLICY
December 17, 2012
By James Verini
KISMAYO, Somalia — Incredibly, this small port city, a study in ruin in a country that is a parable of ruin, boasts two airports. There is the new airport, as it’s known, laughably to all who touch down there, which lies 10 miles inland and consists of a couple of mostly tarmacked runways and the carcass of a terminal. Kismayo International Airport, in blue block letters, is just barely visible above the building’s sun-bleached cornice. Stencil-painted on the wall below that, and more legible, is the flag of the Islamist insurgent movement that until recently controlled Kismayo, Harakat al-Shabab al-Mujahideen, or al-Shabab — a black rectangle over white classical Somali script that reads “There Is No God But God.” See Full Story
The Tunnels of Gaza
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
December, 2012
By James Verini
For as long as they worked in the smuggling tunnels beneath the Gaza Strip, Samir and his brother Yussef suspected they might one day die in them. When Yussef did die, on a cold night in 2011, his end came much as they’d imagined it might, under a crushing hail of earth. It was about 9 p.m., and the brothers were on a night shift doing maintenance on the tunnel, which, like many of its kind—and there are hundreds stretching between Gaza and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula—was lethally shoddy in its construction. Nearly a hundred feet below Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, Samir was working close to the entrance, while Yussef and two co-workers, Kareem and Khamis, were near the middle of the tunnel. They were trying to wedge a piece of plywood into the wall to shore it up when it began collapsing. Kareem pulled Khamis out of the way, as Yussef leaped in the other direction. For a moment the surge of soil and rocks stopped, and seeing that his friends were safe, Yussef yelled out to them, “Alhamdulillah!—Thank Allah!” See Full Story
In Rebel Country
FOREIGN POLICY
November 27, 2012
By James Verini
GOMA, Democratic Republic of the Congo — After three days of sporadic fighting in and around Goma, the capital of North Kivu province in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the city fell to the M23 rebel movement last Monday night, November 19. The following Thursday morning, the military spokesman of the M23, Col. Vianney Kazarama, was standing at an intersection in central Goma, addressing a group of young men. Government troops were said to be in the hills planning a counteroffensive, and United Nations peacekeepers, who had attacked the M23 forces with helicopter gunships before fleeing, were nearby, awaiting new orders. Kazarama didn’t care, he said. He was thinking ahead. The M23 was going to create a better future not just for Goma but for all of Congo, he told the young men, and it needed their help. See Full Story
The Cult of Massoud
FOREIGN POLICY
November 23, 2012
By James Verini
KABUL — The first sign of officialdom you see when you drive from the Kabul airport parking lot is a government billboard looming above a traffic jam. It’s the size of a highway billboard in the United States, but closer to the ground, so that you can make out every nuance of the faces on it. Those faces belong to, on the right of the coat of arms of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai, and on the left, slain Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, dead some 11 years. With Karzai, you note those tired eyes and that child’s chin, unaided by a trimmed gray beard. Massoud comes off vastly more dashing. He appears to be in conference with the heavens: The eyes smolder from within, the strong chin and bushy goatee angle out like a divining rod. A pakol, the traditional hat of the Hindu Kush, sits like a column capital on his head. See Full Story
Prisoners Rule
FOREIGN POLICY
November, 2012
By James Verini
SAN PEDRO SULA, HONDURAS — A real estate broker might describe the state penitentiary here as centrally located. From the prison, it’s a quick ride to the barrios, where many of the inmates and guards live when they’re not inside its crumbling concrete walls — and also to the fortified residential compounds at the foot of the lush green hills that surround this city, the second largest in Honduras. When there’s a riot at the prison, the sirens can be heard in the mansions and the slums alike.
There are often riots at the prison. The most recent one, in May, started when a dispute broke out, allegedly over a woman who’d been smuggled into one of the cell blocks. That ended relatively peacefully, after the bishop of San Pedro Sula negotiated with the inmates to put away their weapons (which are as easy to smuggle into the prison as cell phones, pets, and women). Only one prisoner was killed. A riot in late March was bloodier. Thirteen people died, including a man who was decapitated before his head was tossed in front of the prison gates. According to local news reports, he was a former leader of a faction of prisoners who had become so unpopular they rose up against him. They also killed his dog. “The prisoners rule,” assistant prison director Carlos Polanco told the Associated Press in May. “We only handle external security.” See Full Story
How Virtual Pop Star Hatsune Miku Blew Up in Japan
WIRED
November, 2012
By James Verini
A Hatsune Miku concert begins humanly enough. If you’ve ever had the heart to accompany a daughter or niece to, say, a Justin Bieber or Miley Cyrus extravaganza, you know the drill: The young crowd rushes in, giggling, making yelplike noises that adult throats don’t make, repeating the titles of songs as if they were mantras. The band emerges, followed by more young-throat noises, followed by the diminutive but eerily poised headliner, who recalls one of those grown-up-looking babies in Renaissance art. Followed by pubescent rapture. See Full Story
Christopher Nolan’s Games
THE NEW YORKER
July 19, 2012
By James Verini
For over a decade now, Christopher Nolan, whose “The Dark Knight Rises” opens this Friday, has been awing and taunting us with his restless blockbusters. Nolan has directed “Inception,” “The Dark Knight,” “The Prestige,” “Batman Begins,” “Insomnia,” and the independent “Memento,” which established his reputation in the summer of 2000. That film delighted everyone from university faculty to teen-agers with customized bongs. Since “Memento,” however, Nolan, though more critically praised than many directors and more commercially successful than most (“The Dark Knight” is the twelfth-highest grossing film of all time, and its sequel promises to crack the top ten), has been dismissed by many cineastes as slick and quasi-intellectual. See Full Story
The Fast and the Ridiculous
FOREIGN POLICY
June 27, 2012
By James Verini
The majority members of the U.S. House Oversight Committee have been granted their fondest wish — their investigation into Operation Fast and Furious has caused the biggest proto-scandal in Washington, thanks to Attorney General Eric Holder’s refusal to hand over documents and a House panel’s vote last week to recommend the chamber cite him with contempt. No longer the private obsession of the right-wing media, Fast and Furious is on front pages and leading news broadcasts around the United States.
At issue now are two questions. First, what was the exact intent and oversight of the operation, run out of the Phoenix office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)? The agency says it was meant to track illicit guns going over the border into Mexico, as part of an effort to build cases against major smugglers. Where cross-border gunrunning is concerned, ATF is usually confined to interdicting low-level purchasers, thanks to crippling investigative limits put on it by Congress. See Full Story
Obama’s Deportation Two Step
WASHINGTON MONTHLY
June 27, 2012
By James Verini
In April, a man named Juan went to a courthouse in Inglewood, California, to turn himself in after learning a warrant had been issued for his arrest. He’d been driving on a suspended license, having racked up several traffic violations. Juan figured that he’d have to pay a fine, at worst do some community service. But the police arrested him. They told him he’d likely spend a few days in jail. So Juan called his boss at the drugstore where he worked to say he would be gone a few days. As it turned out, Juan would be gone much longer than that. See Full Story
The Talking Heads Song That Explains Talking Heads
THE NEW YORKER
June 14, 2012
By James Verini
In Jonathan Lethem’s new book, “Fear of Music,” a study of the Talking Heads album by the same name and a riff on his emotional history with the band, Lethem refers to an earlier essay of his on the subject: “At the peak, in 1980 or 81, my identification was so complete that I might have wished to wear the album Fear of Music in place of my head so as to be more clearly seen by those around me.” But no sooner has he quoted himself than Lethem applies the eraser of time, deciding “Like everything I’ve ever said about Talking Heads, or about any other thing I’ve loved with such dreadful longing—there’s only a few—this looks to me completely inadequate, even in the extremeness of its claims, or especially for the extremeness of its claims.” See Full Story
A Terrible Act of Reason
THE NEW YORKER
May 17, 2012
By James Verini
Suddenly, self-immolation is everywhere. Yesterday, in Oslo, a man set himself on fire outside the Anders Breivik trial. He follows at least forty Tibetans who have set themselves aflame to protest Chinese rule in the past year. There have also been a series of self-immolations in the Middle East and North Africa. In January, five young Moroccan men auto-cremated (the more accurate term; “self-immolation” technically means any form of self-destruction) following a fifty-two-year-old pensioner in Jordan and an elderly woman in Bahrain. The young men belonged to a group called Unemployed Graduates that had been occupying the Ministry of Higher Education building. They followed upon the action of Mohammed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor, whose self-immolation—inspired by the chronic poverty and corruption of his country—helped incite the Arab Spring. See Full Story
Bernard Hopkins and the Endless End of Boxing
GRANTLAND
January 25, 2012
By James Verini
Lately, boxers are in the habit of emerging for fights accompanied by deafening music from their homelands. In this respect American boxers have something of a cultural advantage — in hip-hop they have a brawler’s overture, entrance music that might have been created for the sport, what with its flow and flurries and self-aggrandizement. Bernard Hopkins has only recently pressed this advantage. He likes rap, but through much of his career he has preferred to appear for fights to “My Way.” The song, first recorded 44 years ago, is a personal anthem. He has it committed to memory. Asked during a segment of the HBO show Real Sports to answer accusations that he’s a paranoiac who’s betrayed trainers and managers and promoters over the years, Hopkins didn’t exactly deny the charge, but said, “I’ve done it the Old Blue Eyes way.” Flashing the interviewer with a feline proto-grin that almost seemed an invitation to join in, Hopkins then went into song: “I crossed the bridge … I took the blows … I’ve done it my way.” The grin had by this point turned, imperceptibly, into a glower. “Frank Sinatra,” he said. “It’s a bad piece.” See Full Story
Is There an “Obama Effect” on Crime?
SLATE
October 5, 2011
By James Verini
Ever since crime started declining in American cities in the 1990s, researchers have been hunting for the reasons why. After more than a decade of research, many argued that smarter policing, more incarceration, the waning of the crack epidemic, improved home security, and legislation such as the Brady Bill had a role in cutting crime. More speculatively, some posit that an aging population, legal abortion (an argument first advanced in the Quarterly Journal of Economics Steven Levitt and later popularized in his book Freakonomics), the rise of mood-improving drugs, and, a theory that’s attracted much attention lately, laws banning lead in paint, may have contributed to the decline. See Full Story
U.N.convenient Truth
FOREIGN POLICY
September 22, 2011
By James Verini
In 1988, Abba Eban, perhaps the finest diplomat and one of the sharpest minds Israel has ever produced, got up before a distinguished crowd in London to give an address with the predictable and yet absurd title, “Prospects for Peace in the Middle East.” Predictable not just in itself, but because Eban and other Israeli leaders had delivered countless such addresses in the 40 unpeaceful years since the country’s creation; absurd because his remarks, which concerned Palestine, came a year into the First Intifada. See Full Story
Mexican Roulette
FOREIGN POLICY
August 30, 2011
By James Verini
Until this year, the worst episode in the history of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives came in 1993, when the ATF raided cult leader David Koresh’s Branch Davidian compound. That raid led to a 50-day standoff that ended with the deaths of 83 Davidians and provided endless fodder for anti-government types (Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh among them), the gun lobby, and Republican lawmakers, who overtook Congress the next year on a wave of anti-Washington resentment. Although it was the FBI that oversaw the final siege of the compound, and although four of its agents were killed in the shootout, the ATF took most of the blame. See Full Story
The Unquiet Life of Franz Gayl
WASHINGTON MONTHLY
July, 2011
By James Verini
As he had every morning for years, on October 4, 2010, Franz Gayl woke up at five, fed his two Rhodesian Ridgebacks, and then walked down the street from his modest home at the end of a cul-de-sac in northern Virginia to wait for the bus to the Pentagon. Once there, Gayl swiped his badge, thanked the security guards, and proceeded down the vast corridors to an office of the B Ring and the Marine Corps’ Department of Plans, Policies and Operations. At almost exactly seven thirty, Gayl, a science adviser to the Marines, walked into his Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, a secured office in which military employees with high-level security clearances spend their days, and sat down at his desk, eager to get to work. See Full Story
The Good Bad Son
NEW YORK MAGAZINE
May 22, 2011
By James Verini
The last time Benjamin Barber saw Saif Qaddafi, in early December, they spent a cheerless evening together in London. Barber, a political scientist and board member of Saif’s Qaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation, was in town for a board meeting that was supposed to have taken place in Tripoli but, a week before, had been moved to England. Over an Italian dinner in Mayfair, he asked Saif why.
“I don’t feel comfortable in Tripoli,” the 38-year-old son of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi said. “I have too many enemies there right now.” See Full Story
The Curious Case of Joseph and Nicholas Brooks
NEW YORK MAGAZINE
February 7, 2011
By James Verini
When they met one night last June, Nicholas Brooks and Sylvie Cachay should not, their friends say, have been attracted to each other. Sylvie was an ambitious designer, once divorced, who sought out serious relationships with similarly driven men. Nick had recently dropped out of college, had never held a job for more than a few months, and had dated many women.
“They had nothing in common,” a friend of Sylvie’s says.
“Sylvie wasn’t typical for him,” a friend of Nick’s says. See Full Story
The Great Cyberheist
NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
November 14, 2010
By James Verini
One night in July 2003, a little before midnight, a plainclothes N.Y.P.D. detective, investigating a series of car thefts in upper Manhattan, followed a suspicious-looking young man with long, stringy hair and a nose ring into the A.T.M. lobby of a bank. Pretending to use one of the machines, the detective watched as the man pulled a debit card from his pocket and withdrew hundreds of dollars in cash. Then he pulled out another card and did the same thing. Then another, and another. The guy wasn’t stealing cars, but the detective figured he was stealing something.
Indeed, the young man was in the act of “cashing out,” as he would later admit. He had programmed a stack of blank debit cards with stolen card numbers and was withdrawing as much cash as he could from each account. He was doing this just before 12 a.m., because that’s when daily withdrawal limits end, and a “casher” can double his take with another withdrawal a few minutes later. To throw off anyone who might later look at surveillance footage, the young man was wearing a woman’s wig and a costume-jewelry nose ring. See Full Story
Obama=Bush?
THE BOSTON GLOBE
November 14, 2010
By James Verini
Months before Election Day, the name of Jimmy Carter had assumed an incantatory power among observers of politics. President Obama’s supporters began to fret that his presidency was declining as Carter’s did, while his opponents salivated at the prospect, as though the more the 39th president was mentioned, the worse the chances of the 44th. In addition to columnists and bloggers, historians Walter Russell Mead and Sean Wilentz have written on the comparison, while Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, has worried over it. Carter himself recently discussed it with Larry King.
Is Obama the next Carter? Leaving aside for the moment the facility and myopia of this analogy — we’ve had 17 one-term presidents — its details are off. Obama and Carter are both Democrats, true, both are intellectuals who came into office on a wave of discontent, and both promised new approaches to government and the world. What candidates don’t? Obama seems to like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even less than Carter liked Menachim Begin, and Carter faced a crisis in Iran, a new eruption of terrorist threats, and economic woes, though all of very different sorts than those facing Obama. See Full Story
The Last Nazi-Hunters
WWII QUARTERLY
November, 2010
By James Verini
Crowded in front of the television in Eli Rosenbaum’s office, his staff was taken with a giddy anticipation not often found in employees of the United States Department of Justice. The mood was doubly odd because the footage they watched was pretty dull: a Gulfstream jet idled on a runway at Cleveland International Airport. Rosenbaum’s eyes were glued to the screen too, but he wasn’t giddy. He wore a skeptical frown. The coverage was broadcasting live on CNN, on May 11 of 2009, and yet Rosenbaum didn’t believe the plane on the screen would lift off. The director and chief prosecutor of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations—the “Nazi-hunters” in local parlance—he had been waiting for most of his adult life to watch this particular flight and its 90-year-old passenger, John Demjanjuk, depart the United States for good. After a morbid odyssey of hearings and appeals, injunctions and stays, exonerations and recriminations, however, no disappointment would surprise him. See Full Story
Show Him the Money
WASHINGTON MONTHLY
July 2010
By James Verini
Thomas J. Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has a well-developed talent for self-promotion. He makes a point of being the last person on any stage, and he leaves no detail to chance. The Chamber’s event staff is famously fastidious: one of Donohue’s parties involved corralling a Clydesdale horse into the Chamber’s lobby. Such grandiosity is of a piece with how Donohue treats his station. He travels in a chauffeured Lincoln and a leased jet, and his salary, $3.7 million last year, makes him the sixth highest paid lobbyist in the country. This requires funding, which Donohue secures with exceptional skill. Among his office decorations is a desk plaque that reads, “SHOW ME THE MONEY.” “He used to pound his fist on the desk and say, ‘Show me the money!’” a former Chamber lobbyist recalls. “He got his rocks off on it.” See Full Story