PERSPECTIVES10 April 8, 2010 � Mount Holyoke News

On Sept. 28, 2001, when Irish journalist MartinO’Hagan and his wife walked home from a bar on Lur-gan’s Market Street in Dublin, a car pulled over next to

them. Suddenly, a gunman opened fire from within the car, shooting O'Hagan todeath.O’Haganwas the first journalist murdered because of his investigative work on

the loyalist paramilitaries during Northern Ireland’s “The Troubles.” It was a pe-riod of ethno-political tensions and violence between the Protestant unionists andCatholic nationalists. Communities of Protestant unionists in support of the Britishrule are to this day in conflict with Catholic nationalists seeking a united Ireland.Today, terrorist acts between the two groups still occur, reinforced by the politicalbattle between the Unionists and nationalist.Starting in the late 1960s, “The Troubles” consisted of numerous violent cam-

paigns and terrorist attacks and took the lives of over 3,000 people. In 1998, a peaceagreement was signed between the two groups and a peace wall erected in Belfast,the capital of Northern Ireland, to keep the rival Protestant and Catholic factionsapart.The religious opposition between the Catholics and the Protestants dates back

to 400 AD. Over the years, Protestants have constituted a significant percentage ofthe overall island population, and amajority in what is nowNorthern Ireland. Sec-tarian troubles ranged from minor disagreements to appalling acts of violence.Until now, the Catholic extremists have carried out 26 incidences. Protestant ex-tremists, though less publicized, have also fought back fiercely.In the past few years, the British government has fought successfully against

terrorism, leading to an 87 percent decline of terrorist attacks in Northern Ireland.Recently the Irish government arrested Colleen LaRose and Jamie Paulin Ramirez,two American women, on the charges of having ties to the Northern Irish terror-ism. Both women were released soon after it was confirmed that they were not athreat to anyone’s safety. Yet their arrest showed that despite the decline in ter-rorist attacks, the fear of violent acts will be present until conflicts between theCatholic and the Protestant forces are solved. “Real peace will be achieved oneday,” as journalist Paul Williams said, “when we do not need a peace wall.”

Revisiting NorthernIreland’s “Troubles”BY CHU WANG ’13STAFF WRITER

On March 26, South Korean warship, Cheonan, ex-ploded near the Northern Limit Line with North Korea,complicating the political situation in the peninsula. This

disaster occurred just before the 60th anniversary of the KoreanWar in June 2010. Whileexperts consider North Korea as a possible perpetrator of the attack, it is looking less andless likely that the economically troubled country actually caused the disaster.Three currently suspected causes of the explosion on the warship include a torpedo

used by a North Korean submarine, defects within Cheonan itself and a possible collisionwith a North Koreanmine from the KoreanWar or an unknown object. Nomatter what re-ally caused the disaster, it surely poses questions about the South’s ability to prevent sucha large military loss, as Cheonan is known to have sailed this area multiple times before.The aftermath was too shocking for the South—Cheonan was split into two parts, and outof the 104 people on the warship, 46 are still missing.North and South Korea entered into an armistice, effectively halting violent activities

since 1953. However, complications have persisted between the two countries. The recentincident in March recalls the 1987 North Korean attack on a South Korean passenger air-plane that killed all 115 passengers. As of now, doubts remain about a possible North Ko-rean involvement in the Cheonan catastrophe, especially since North Korea disavowedthe armistice in May 2009.However, North Korea may, in fact, have more domestic issues to deal with rather

than preempting a costly attack that would likely place the country in amore complicatedposition in talks about its nuclear arms program. In December 2009, in an apparent moveto combat inflation, its government decided to revalue its currency, the won, by requiringcitizens to change 1000 won notes to ten won bills for a maximum of 100,000 old wons(equivalent of about $40 at the time). Immediately, the won, which already traded at 3500wons per dollar on the black market, depreciated 96 percent against the dollar, accordingto Bloomberg.Realizing its mistake, the North Korean government raised the limit to 150,000 wons

in cash and 500,000 wons in bank notes. In March 2010, Yonhap, a leading South Koreannews agency, reported that the North has executed Pak Nam-gi, Director of the Planningand Finance Department, the one seemingly responsible for the disastrous currencychange. However, this does not solve the problem at hand. Food prices soared, plungingNorth Korea into unprecedented economic hardship. Currently, for many North Koreans,the Los Angeles Times reported, an egg costs a full week's salary. The reason for this un-expected inflation is that traders and suppliers face insurmountable difficulty acquiringenough cash for their activities.As the North’s agenda requires more focus on domestic policy than ever (its leader

Kim Jong Il is to visit China possibly for economic assistance), South Korea will probablyhave trouble finding the cause and an explanation behind the Cheonan catastrophe. Thenext Six-Party talk, with the possible participation of North Korea, which has historicallyfocused on not only security and nuclear disarmament but also complex economic actions,will surely further complicate the situation in the Korean peninsula.

On 60th anniversary ofwar, North and SouthKorea face tensionsBY THU NGUYEN ’12ASST. PERSPECTIVES EDITOR

BLACK WIDOWS ATTACK MOSCOW“You Russians only see the war on television and

hear about it on the radio, and this is why you are quietand do not react to the atrocities that your bandit

groups under Putin’s command carry out in the Caucasus. I promise you that the war willcome to your streets, and you will feel it in your lives and under your skin.” This was thegrizzly message Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov conveyed two days after the suicidebombings in Moscow.One week ago, onMarch 29, two female suicide bombers detonated explosives in the

Moscow metro system. The two attacks were carried out during the morning rush hourwhile the trains pulled into populated stations and the doors were just opened. 40 peo-ple were killed and many others were severely injured.Suicide attacks are not a new phenomenon in mainland Russia. The separatist ter-

rorist movement in Chechnya copied them fromArab fundamentalists in 2000, alongwiththe notion of a “global jihad.” The situation was believed to have relaxed after 2004, whenattacks remained in the southern provinces bordering on Chechnya and were concen-trated on the Russian police there.The concept of female suicide bombers is not new either. Since the early 2000s, many

young women from the Caucasus region have become suicide bombers. Whether or nottheir motivation was religious is doubtful, though. Known as “black widows,” they de-cided to carry out the attacks because their husbands had been killed by Russian secu-rity forces.In this case, the two youngwomen happened to be black widows. One of them, the 17-

year-old Dzhanet Abdullayeva, had been married to an Islamist rebel leader who haddied on New Year’s Eve during a shootout between separatists and the Russian police.Novoye Delo, a newspaper in Dagestan, reported that the couple met on the Internetwhen Dzhanet was 16. The recruitment of youngwomen is a common tactic in this move-ment because it is easy to lure them into Islamist thought. The girls meet their husbandson the Internet and get married at a young age because of the romantic ideal to marry ahero who fights for a cause. If their husbands die, they either marry another rebel or be-come black widows.The recent attacks seem to have been a statement against Prime Minister Vladimir

Putin and his hard-line approach of dealing with the separatist movement. One bombexploded in the Lubyanka subway station, next to the headquarters of the Federal Secu-rity Service (F.S.B.), the successor agency to the Soviet-era K.G.B. that was led by Putinin the late 1990s.President Dmitry Medvedev’s approach to the social unrest in southern Russia has

been a softer one. He appointed a new leader in Ingushetia, another Muslim region, whoagreed with him that violence would only lead to more violence. Medvedev believes thatfirst, and foremost, the root issues for terrorism in those regions—poverty, unemploy-ment and low education levels—need to be resolved.

Experts fear, however, that if there will be further attacks in mainland Russia, Russ-ian citizens will demand a rougher course of action, more aligned with Putin’s old poli-tics. With at least two further bombings in southern Russia after the attacks in Moscowand with Doku Umarov’s threat of bringing the war into the cities, analysts fear that theold unrest might have reinflamed.

BY MARION MESSMER ’13STAFF WRITER

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PERSPECTIVES 11April 8, 2010 � Mount Holyoke News

Now that Congress passed the universal health carebill, immigration, some might think, will be the next re-form on President Barack Obama’s checklist. Well, not sofast.Opposed to popular expectations, the U.S. immigra-

tion system has remained a marginalized issue in theObama administration. It was barely mentioned in thePresident’s January 2010 State of the Union Address, aphenomenon that led to negative reactions by the U.S. eth-nic press. Though Obama has many times called for acomprehensive immigration reform, he hasn’t yet dis-cussed the topic extensively, a sign that his administra-tion now has a different set of priorities—education andhealth care, for instance. But with the passing of theHealth Care and Education Reconciliation Act, will thepriorities on Obama’s checklist change?“Now that the health care bill has passed, the ad-

ministration’s priorities will be the economy and job cre-ation,” said Donna Van Handle, Dean of InternationalStudents.When Obama finally addresses the immigra-tion issue, Van Handle expects to see an opportunityfor the estimated 12 million illegal aliens in the U.S. toapply for citizenship. She hopes to see the path to per-manent residency streamlined with a shorter wait pe-riod for both legal and illegal aliens.These seem to be the questions the Obama ad-

ministration wants to address as well. According tothe White House, Obama is in support of strongerborder control, facilitating the legal immigrationprocess and enforcing a law against employment ofillegal immigrants. As he said in a March 18 state-ment, he is committed to “fix our broken immigra-tion system.”But many are skeptical to Obama’s approach

in tackling the U.S. immigration reform. Republi-can representatives Lamar Smith, Gary Miller and

Sue Myrick blame the Obama administration forfailing to enforce effective immigration laws. Theyformed a Reclaim American Jobs Caucus thatseeks to make the connection between unemploy-ment rates and illegal immigration apparent. “Thenumbers are simple,” said Miller in a 2010 video re-leased by NumbersUSA, a nonpartisan organizationfighting to reduce immigration numbers. “At last es-timate, there weremore than eight million illegal im-migrants in the U.S. labor force,” he added. “Andthere aremore than 15million unemployed Americancitizens and legal immigrants.”“I’m genuinely tickled at the idea that undocu-

mented people somehow have control over the unem-ployment rate,” said Daniela Pila ’12, who organizedMount Holyoke international students in a spring breaktrip to Boston to explore U.S. immigration issues. Pilabelieves that the unemployment rate in America ismostly related to the recent crash of the financial andreal estate markets than to undocumented migrantworkers. If Obama manages to address the immigrationreform by the end of the year, Pila expects to see changesin border control and tourist and student visas.Yet the chances are that the Obama administration

won’t get to tackle immigration issues in the near future.Tensions around the recent health care bill, Pila noted,will prevent the President from focusing on the much an-ticipated immigration reform. “Since future bills will de-pend on how the healthcare bill will play out, it’s tough tosay that Obama will address immigration reform by theend of 2010, and to an extent, the end of his term,” she said.Unity remains one of the fastest ways for Congress to

march toward an effective immigration reform. As VanHandle said, both political parties need to work togetherto tackle this issue. “If such a bill is to be passed,” she said,“it will take a truly bipartisan effort.”

Is immigration next on Obama’s checklist?BY MAGDALENA GEORGIEVA ’10PERSPECTIVES EDITOR

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