Magic Statistics

A few days ago, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf was outraged at the suggestion that his country's military intelligence agents were giving aid to Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.  Now, he's not so sure.

Retired Pakistani intelligence officers could be running the Taliban insurgency against coalition forces in Afghanistan, Pakistan's president, Gen Pervez Musharraf, has said.

He made the admission to an American television channel at the weekend — the first time he had broken from his usual policy of denying any Pakistani hand in the rebellion against American, British and other forces.

Asked on NBC television if his Inter Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) was involved in helping Taliban fighters, he said that retired rogue officers might be involved.

"I have some reports that some dissidents, some people, retired people who were in the forefront in ISI during the period of 1979 to 89, may be assisting with their links somewhere here and there.

"We are keeping a very tight watch and we'll get a hold of them if that happens."

You’ll get a hold of them . . . and then what?  Let ‘em go?

Previous related posts:

• Pakistan takes pressure off the Taliban
• India says Pakistan behind Mumbai bombings

A brutal police assault on peaceful demonstrators in Harare, Zimbabwe, three weeks ago has been widely condemned. Robert Mugabe’s forthright approbation of the police action has only intensified outrage, both at home and abroad.

Ordinary Zimbabweans are angry with President Robert Mugabe for what many are describing as unforgivable and irresponsible statements he has been making following the bone-breaking assault last month by his security forces on national trades union chief Wellington Chibebe and other top union leaders.

Addressing a rented crowd bussed to Harare Airport, on his recent return from addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Mugabe said he would continue to sanction the beating of labour leaders who disregard police orders.

Rejecting widespread international condemnation of the assaults on the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, ZCTU, leadership, Mugabe said his government has no apologies to make. "There are some [foreign countries and human rights groups] who think we are not independent, who think they can organise demonstrations and look for pot-bellied people like Chibebe to demonstrate."

Other ZCTU leaders injured in the assault included President Lovemore Matombo and First Vice President Lucia Matibenga.  The American trade union organisation AFL-CIO has launched a campaign to publicise deteriorating conditions in Zimbabwe.

On Sept. 13, some 1,500 ZCTU activists were peacefully protesting the nation’s abysmal economic conditions. Witnesses say police attacked the crowd and brutally beat many of the union members and arrested 265. Matombo and Matibenga were among those arrested, as was ZCTU General Secretary Wellington Chibebe, winner of the AFL-CIO’s 2003 George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award.

A reporter with Institute for War and Peace Reporting spoke to ZCTU first vice president Matibenga, now in a Johannesburg hospital.  Mrs Matibenga, the only woman in the group, suffered a broken arm and internal injuries.

IWPR: Mrs Matibenga you were one of fifteen ZCTU leaders arrested during nationwide demonstrations against the policies of the ZANU PF government on September 13. Press reports said you were severely beaten by the police. Can you take us through the events leading to your arrest?

MATIBENGA: We had barely marched 100 metres from our offices in Harare as planned when police stopped us. They told us to sit on the tarmac - which we did - then they crammed the fifteen of us into a police vehicle and took us to Matapi police station. There they took our cell phones and handcuffed us in pairs.

Each pair would be force-marched into an empty room at the station, and then six police officers would use truncheons to beat them. Sometimes they used clenched fists and their police boots.

The fifteen were not taken to hospital until the following day and only after their lawyer was permitted to intervene.

Recently released estimates of life expectancy show that conditions in Zimbabwe are increasingly desperate.

Zimbabwean women now have the shortest lifespan in the world, according to the World Health Organisation. Largely as a result of HIV/AIDS, Zimbabwean women now have a life expectancy of 34 years and men of 37, said WHO in its annual report for 2006. According to the United Nations Children's Fund, three babies in Zimbabwe become infected with HIV every hour.

h/t for AFL-CIO blog: normblog.  Thanks, Binky.

Previous related posts:

• Zimbabwe effectively under martial law
• Mugabe to Annan: Get lost
• Zimbabwe hospital Hell
• Zimbabwe impoverished by hyper-inflation

Didymus Mutasa, Zimbabwe’s minister of national security and head of the state police, is one of the country’s most powerful and feared officials.  Robert Mugabe’s right-hand man, he has a reputation for ruthlessness, callousness, and brutality.

One of his first projects after being appointed chief of the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO)  early in 2005 was the infamous Operation Murambatsvina [Operation Drive Out the Filth], which sent soldiers to destroy the homes of over 700,000 people.

Mutasa presented Murambatsvina as a regeneration and renewal scheme to "clean up" urban areas. But most people who lost their homes were opposition supporters, and nearly a year-and-a-half later virtually nothing has been done to provide new homes for the estimated 700,000 to a million people who watched their houses being bulldozed, sledgehammered and set ablaze.

Anna Tibaijuka, the special envoy of United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, lambasted Mutasa's operation as inhuman and a breach of national and international human rights laws.
. . .
Quietly, in recent weeks, Mutasa has relaunched Operation Murambatsvina, with yet more humble homes being torn down in urban suburbs by powerful organs of state.

Many observers wonder if this is the same Didymus Mutasa who was active in the movement that ended white minority rule in Rhodesia, as it was then known, in 1979.

Fifty years ago he was a deeply Christian young man and black nationalist working round-the-clock on a multi-racial farm that was famous in liberation circles, and beyond, and hated by Rhodesia's white minority government.

He became a living legend among liberal Christians by helping to make Cold Comfort Farm into a first class agricultural training ground and a psychological liberation centre that was an early staging post on the long march from colonial oppression in Rhodesia to majority rule in Zimbabwe.

“A man of high integrity and Christian character,” said Guy Clutton-Brock, the Welsh-born champion of black freedom who became Zimbabwe’s first and only official white hero when President Robert Mugabe buried his ashes at Harare's Heroes Acre in 1996.

“He never feared to speak his mind and he was always a sensitive leader, a man of vision, an optimist with a profound belief in his fellow man regardless of race, colour, creed.”

He was regarded as a trustworthy and honest parliamentarian through the 1980s and 1990s.  In 2000, however, things began to change.  He was appointed anti-corruption minister around the time that Robert Mugabe unleashed his supporters to seize farms and dispossess their white owners.  Three years later, Zimbabwe’s economy was in a free-fall from which it has yet to recover.  Mutasa was ensconced on an eastern Zimbabwe farm, and he and other Mugabe cronies had enriched themselves by selling stolen farm machinery.

In 2004, he repeatedly kicked opposition MP Roy Bennett on the floor of parliament, a crime for which he received no punishment.  At Mugabe’s insistence, however, Bennett was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment.

Didymus Mutasa, once extolled as an honourable and self-sacrificing Christian, has become a corrupt and shameless sycophant for Robert Mugabe.

Mugabe seems to have a talent for co-opting Christian leaders, including Bishop Nolbert Kunonga and Archbishop Bernard Malango, both Anglicans, and Bishop Peter Nemapare of the African Methodist Church.  Fortunately, there are still some who have not bowed the knee to Baal, such as Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo Pius Ncube.

Previous related posts:

• Housing shortage in Zimbabwe? Believe it!
• Housing shortage in Zimbabwe? Don’t believe it!
• Zimbabwe effectively under martial law

Statistics Canada yesterday released a report on violence against women that consists mostly of previously released data from various sources.  It also includes some new data on women living in the three northern territories.

The GSS [General Social Survey] showed that women in the territories report higher rates of spousal violence than those living in the provinces. Police statistics also indicate that women in the territories also experience higher levels of sexual assault and homicide.

According to the GSS, spousal violence in the territories came to the attention of the police more often than violence occurring in other parts of Canada. In addition, the use of shelters in the territories is the highest in the country.

Overall, 12% of adult residents of the three territories who had been married at some point in their life, or who had lived in a common-law relationship, had experienced violence by a spousal partner in the five years prior to the survey. This compares with 7% in the provinces.

Police data show that rates of homicide in the territories are the highest in the country and that rates of sexual assault are also higher than in the provinces, although rates of sexual assault have declined in all three territories in recent years.

The report combines victimisation data gathered via social surveys and data on crimes reported to the police.

Since this study has been covered in various Canadian news sources (see, e.g., CBC and Globe and Mail), the rest of this post is devoted to a very serious shortcoming in the analysis.

The report fails to distinguish women who are living with a husband to whom they are legally married, women who are in a common-law relationship, and women who are separated from a spouse.  Studies in many different countries and localities show that women in these different situations face widely varying levels of risk of violence from their spouse/partner.  Statistics Canada, however, provided almost no related statistical analysis in a 97-page document devoted to analysis of violence against Canadian women.

I find this, frankly, baffling.  My bewilderment is compounded by Statistics Canada's disclosure in this same report that women who are separated or living common-law are indeed at significantly greater risk of spousal violence.  From the section of the Executive Summary headed "Risk factors", p. 14 of the full study (pdf):

Risk Factors

• Young women experience the highest rates of violence.
• Women experience higher rates than men of sexual assault, stalking, serious spousal assaults and spousal homicide.
• Partners' use of psychological or emotional abuse, and frequent heavy drinking by partners, raise the risk of violence against women in spousal relationships.
• Women in common-law relationships and those who are separated report rates of spousal violence and homicide that are disproportionate to their representation in the population.
• Stalking by ex-partners raises the risk of ex-partner violence.

Nowhere in the statistical tables and charts that make up the bulk of the report is the bolded statement corroborated.  And here I thought the purpose of an executive summary was to summarise findings documented in the full report.  Not this time, apparently.

The report does contain analysis of spousal homicide victims by detailed accused-victim relationship (Fig. 25, p. 38), but the statement in the Executive Summary refers more broadly to spousal violence.

Finally, there's this sentence in the conclusion of the report:

Women living in common-law unions are at higher risk of assault and homicide by their partners than married women.

The report substantiates the conclusion with respect to homicide, but not assault—a much more prevalent form of violence.

Clearly, Statistics Canada has spousal-violence data of sufficient quantity and quality to differentiate married women from those separated or living common-law, else the statement in the Executive Summary could not be made.  Why, then, does the report itself not provide statistical documentation for its own executive summary?  Why did Statistics Canada not publish relevant and important analysis that it clearly has the capability and opportunity to undertake—indeed, in this case, that it implicitly admits having already done?

Sources:

Statistics Canada, 2006. Measuring Violence Against Women: Statistical Trends, 2006. Statistics Canada catalogue no. 85-570-XIE.http://www.statcan.ca/english/research/85-570-XIE/85-570-XIE2006001.pdf (accessed 2 October 2006)

Statistics Canada, 2006.  "Violence Against Women: Statistical Trends." The Daily, 2 October.  Statistics Canada catalogue no. 11-001-XIE.
http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/061002/d061002a.htm (accessed 2 October 2006).

Previous related post: A primer on crime statistics