Lens Blog: Photos of an Isolated Region in Tajikistan

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Along a nearly inaccessible road in Tajikistan, the Greek photographer Myrto Papadopoulos is pursuing a quiet story of growth and change in a small, isolated society.

Ms. Papadopoulos’s project, “The New Plastic Road,” follows Liu Xin Jun, a Chinese truck driver, and Davlat, a Tajik merchandiser, along a trade route in the Pamir Mountains. From the town of Khorog, the most developed in the region, east to Murghab, a former Russian military post at high altitude close to the Chinese border, she sought to explore socioeconomic and political development in an area known as Badakhshan. Basic necessities?— food, water and electricity — are lacking in the area, in part because it is so far from the capital of Tajikistan, Dushanbe.

Ms. Papadopoulos sought images of the road, and life on the road.

“What we wanted to see is how this road really affects the society,” Ms. Papadopoulos said. “And do people receive what they want now with this opening of trade.”

Myrto Papadopoulos A mother and her children pass in front of a gas station in Murghab, Tajikistan.

Tajikistan is a very poor former Soviet state. Its nearly inaccessible roads have hurt development. To reach Khorog, Ms. Padadopoulos endured a long and difficult drive through the mountains. “That’s how the region is,” she said. “There are very difficult places to reach.”

Virtually unreachable in the winter months, it is anything but a haven for tourism. Aside from a group of bikers and one or two mountaineers, Ms. Papadopoulos met few other travelers. “If something happens to you there,” she said, “it just happens.”

The road, which was reconstructed by China and opened in 2004, has also been a haven for drug-trafficking.

With China’s trade increase in central Asia, though, the situation has been changing. “All these things are suddenly moving,” Ms. Papadopoulos said.

Ms. Padadopoulos was featured on Lens in September 2011 (“In the Grecian Caves Where Time Slows Down,” Sept. 22). This was her first trip to central Asia. She plans to go to China and find the source of the trade, “where all these things are and where do they go.” The project will ultimately become a film about China’s investments in central Asia, which she is working on with her partner, Angelos Tsaousis.

The first trip was, for the most part, exploratory. “I tried to photograph what I saw,” Ms. Padadopoulos said.

In a way, she said, the environment — always very dark at night — felt peaceful. She especially felt that peace when photographing women.

“I really enjoyed sharing moments with the women. I felt very strong.”

And yet she felt a sense of melancholy, which comes out in the pictures — painterly, almost mystical. “I felt there was a sadness to them,” she said.

Myrto Papadopoulos Washing clothes in Khorog, Tajikistan, which has a shortage of drinking water.

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At War Blog: In Libya, Modified Weapon Becomes Less of a Threat

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An article in The New York Times last week discussed an American proposal to buy heat-seeking, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles from the many armed groups and people in Libya who are holding them. Even the older variants of these missiles, known in nonproliferation circles as Manpads, are a threat to civilian aviation; the American proposal is intended to take as many of the weapons as possible out of circulation, with hopes of trimming the number available on black markets.

All of the Manpads identified to date in Libya have been variants of the SA-7, an early Soviet-designed variant of a class of weapon that would eventually evolve to the American-made Stinger and other similarly frightening but lesser known models made in several nations. The story noted that the West’s working estimate for the number of missiles imported by the Libyan military during Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s long rule runs to 20,000. But that is a rough guess at the quantity imported — not the quantity on the loose after the war.

…the number now missing is a fraction of that. Precise estimates are impossible, officials say, because no one is sure how many the military still possessed at the outset of the uprising or later after months of fighting.

Some of the missiles were fired in training and in war. Others were disassembled by rebels, who used their tubes as makeshift launchers for other looted ordnance. Many of the missing missiles were looted, either by rebels or would-be profiteers. Many more were destroyed in bunkers that were hit in airstrikes.

One line in there — about rebels using tubes as makeshift launchers — provides the background you will need to interpret the short video below. In it, Kevin Dawes, an unusual battlefield wanderer from the United States, has made a record of the phenomenon of Manpads being repurposed for ground-to-ground war.

As an aside, it is worth noting that Mr. Dawes is a controversial figure and his behavior in Libya and elsewhere has been the subject of considerable online critique. Some of his wanderings with Manpads were the subject of a separate post on my own blog, here. This post will steer wide of the larger discussion about who Mr. Dawes is, and what he was doing in Libya, to examine some of the video record he has been posting from his travels. If nothing else, his video record provides a useful window on Libyan rebel behaviors, and in places is valuable for that alone.

The video is short. Watch it.

Note the start. By the tenth second, what you see, notwithstanding Mr. Dawes’ description of an Igla, is an anti-Qaddafi fighter heading toward a firefight with an SA-7 tube. But at a glance you might notice that this is not an ordinary SA-7 tube, at least not an ordinary SA-7 tube that is ready to fire an SA-7. It is missing its battery unit, and it has no gripstock.

Moreover, someone has outfitted the tube with a wooden dowel as a foregrip, and what looks to be a wooden shoulder rest, too. If you look more closely, you’ll also see something — but not an SA-7 missile — protruding from its aft end. The activities of the many other rebels in the video should provide a hint at what is happening in the video. This fighter is obviously not preparing to fire at an aircraft. He is heading toward a group of cornered Qaddafi fighters — not a tactical situation that demands heat-seeking, ground-to-air fire.

What you are seeing is yet another improvised launcher for the 57-millimeter air-to-ground rockets. Libya’s rebels proved adept at working with what they could scrounge to carry on their war. In this case, by removing the heat-seeking missile from the SA-7 tube and replacing it with a captured 57-millimeter rocket, the rebel had become equipped with a lightweight launcher for firing a single high-explosive rocket at a ground target.

We’ve covered at some length the early Mad Max-style 57-millimeter rocket launchers that rebels put together by taking rocket pods designed for aircraft and fitting them to pickup trucks. The weapons were dangerous, and often used badly. Libya’s rebels may have seen in them a sign of their uprising’s resolve and grit. But they had little means of employing their truck-mounted systems discriminately or accurately. Rather, the way the rebels often fired them served to undermine their standing, showing that their battlefield conduct could resemble that of the Qaddafi forces they loathed.

The system on the video, documented by Mr. Dawes, was the man-portable version of the same rocket, and it summons a somewhat different reaction. The nature of shoulder-fired arms stands to make them potentially more discriminate. And in this case, though the weapon may be dangerous to the man who fires it and to his colleagues standing nearby, this particular makeshift weapon contains, in its own odd way, a good sign.

Libyans and the officials and contractors now trying to assess the risks of the former Qaddafi Manpad stocks have noted that some of the SA-7s were disassembled for this kind of use. Every SA-7 that has been dismantled for conversion to a makeshift 57-millimeter rocket launcher is an SA-7 that will never be fired at a Boeing, a Tupolev or an Airbus.

And so Mr. Dawes has given us a curious little record of the Libyan war. You won’t find many people who would endorse this kind of weapon. But you will find, here and there, a few nonproliferation heads nodding with grudging approval. Why? Because this is one heat-seeking missile that need not be tracked down, bought and destroyed. In the annals of makeshift arms, this is the law of unintended consequences, turned kind.

Follow C.J. Chivers on Facebook, on Twitter at @cjchivers or on his personal blog, cjchivers.com, where many posts from At War are supplemented with more photographs and further information.

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Global Update: New H.I.V. Cases and AIDS Deaths Plummet in British Columbia

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New H.I.V. cases and AIDS deaths are both going steadily down in British Columbia, according to data released last week.

“We’re particularly pleased to see that our treatment-as-prevention strategy has taken off big-time,” said Dr. Julio S. G. Montaner, director of the British Columbia Center for Excellence in H.I.V./AIDS. His center was a pioneer in the strategy, which involves searching aggressively for people at risk of H.I.V. infection, talking them into being tested and putting those who are infected on antiretroviral drugs immediately, which lowers by 96 percent the chances that they will infect others.

In Vancouver, where he works, AIDS is concentrated in two largely separate groups: gay men and drug addicts. To reach the addicts, the city opened a center where they can inject under a nurse’s supervision without fear of arrest; the nurses also offer medical care, including tests.

Testing is increasing, and syphilis rates are holding steady, Dr. Montaner said, so the drop in new cases is not a result of fewer tests or greater condom use.

AIDS cases remain steady in Canada’s other provinces, except for those in the Prairies region, where they tripled, mostly among Indian addicts in Saskatchewan, which has no safe-injection center.

Last week, Science magazine named the treatment-as-prevention strategy, with the clinical trial of 1,763 couples on four continents that proved it worked, as its 2011 “Breakthrough of the Year.”

Dr. Montaner said he is frustrated that rich countries will not donate enough money to roll out the strategy in poor countries with huge H.I.V. epidemics.

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The Lede Blog: Video Shows Monitors at Syrian Protests

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Video posted online by Syrian activists on Friday is said to show Arab League monitors in the middle of a large protest in the city of Idlib.

As my colleagues Kareem Fahim and Hwaida Saad report, activists said that the Syrian security forces opened fire on several demonstrations on Friday, killing or injuring protesters in Hama and the Damascus suburb of Douma, despite the presence of Arab League monitors in the country.

Undeterred by the threat of violence, tens of thousands of people appeared to take to the streets across the country intent on showing the monitors the central role played by peaceful protest in the uprising. Video posted online by activists showed monitors in yellow jackets surrounded by vast crowds in the northern city of Idlib.

According to an activist who writes on Twitter as Alexander Page, two brief clips posted on YouTube by a video blogger named Eliasecis showed protesters gathering on Friday outside Hamdan hospital in Douma after an Arab League vehicle was spotted there.

In April, Al Jazeera reported that three doctors, including the private hospital’s director, Dr. Hosam Hamdan, were arrested “because they had disobeyed orders from the secret police to refuse treatment to protesters.”

In a third clip from the same blogger, protesters could be seen surrounding the Arab League monitors as they left the hospital.

Protesters continued to call for Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, to step down. But, as Reuters reports, one of the Arab League monitors was caught on live video broadcast by Al Jazeera telling protesters at a mosque in Douma: “Our goal is to observe… it is not to remove the president, our aim is to return Syria to peace and security.”

Ahmed Al Omran, a Saudi journalist with NPR who sifts through Syrian protest video on his Twitter feed, notes that this graphic clip is said to show the bloody face of a young man activists said was shot in Douma on Friday.

The same journalist pointed to this video, said to have been recorded in Douma on Friday as the activist behind the camera was shot by the security forces.

On Thursday, Mr. Omran reported on the death of another video activist, Basil Al-Sayed, who was reportedly killed in the city of Homs on Wednesday while filming an assault by the security forces.

Video posted online by an activist in Homs on Friday showed residents sharing their accounts of the security crackdown with one of the monitors.

In another encounter with monitors, said to have been recorded on Friday in the devastated neighborhood of Baba Amr in Homs, Mr. Omran points out that protesters could be heard chanting: “No dialogue with Bashar!”

Another activist uploaded this clip of a boisterous, antigovernment demonstration in Homs, which has been one of the most active centers of dissent since the uprising began.

Borzou Daragahi, a Financial Times correspondent, observed that some of the protesters “were shown dressed in long white shrouds, symbolizing their readiness for martyrdom, and waving Islamic flags.”

The activist Sham News Network channel on YouTube featured video of what looked to be an even larger demonstration in the Deir Baalba neighborhood of Homs on Friday.

According to Mr. Daragahi, protesters in Deir Baalba mocked a statement by the Sudanese head of the observer mission, Lt. Gen. Mohamed al-Dabi, who called conditions in the city “reassuring.” Mr. Daragahi reported that the protesters in turn reminded the world that General Dabi was the chief of a military intelligence branch in Sudan that has been accused of atrocities, displaying a sign that read: “Homs is fine? And Darfur is fine as well?”

Activists also documented protests and confrontations across Syria on Friday. This video of a clash between protesters and the security forces was said to have been filmed in Dara’a, the southern city where the uprising began in March.

According to Mr. Omran, in this video clip, one of the Arab League observers in Dara’a explained that he had seen government snipers in the city and called on the authorities to remove them.

Protesters also reportedly took to the streets of the city of Hama, where an uprising in 1982 was brutally crushed by Hafez al-Assad, the current president’s father. Near the end of this video of a rally in Hama, one of the protesters waves a sign that compared the health risks of living under the rule of Mr. Assad to the danger posed by smoking.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 30, 2011

An earlier version of this post misstated the name of a New York Times reporter writing about the protests in Syria. He is Kareem Fahim.

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Relatives of 9/11 Victims, Suspecting Hacking, Await Answers

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Some heard mysterious clicking sounds on their home and mobile phones. The fiancée of one man who died at the World Trade Center remembers listening to snippets of someone else’s conversation on her line. A husband of another victim recalls hearing somebody remotely accessing his home answering machine, which still held the final, reassuring message left by his wife shortly before the crash of Flight 93. Others say they are baffled as to how details about their loved ones appeared in British tabloids within days of the attacks.

Ten years later, their long-held suspicions aroused by The News of the World phone-hacking scandal in London, dozens of relatives of victims contacted the Justice Department. On Aug. 24, eight of them met with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and asked him to determine whether their privacy had been violated. As a first step, they asked him to see whether Scotland Yard had a record of their names or phone numbers among the material seized from a private investigator who hacked cellphone messages for the tabloid.

Four months later, they are still waiting to hear back and are frustrated by the Justice Department’s silence.

“It’s not that hard to find out — it’s quite a simple thing, really, isn’t it?” said Patricia Bingley, a British citizen whose son, Kevin Dennis, a 43-year-old trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, worked on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center’s north tower.

Ms. Bingley said she was stunned to see, in the Sept. 18, 2001, issue of The Sun, a photograph of her son reading a bedtime story to his two sons, which she did not give to the paper. The story also contained details about her son that she said no one from her family had provided to The Sun. “It never made sense to me,” she said, adding that she suspects hacking or worse by the paper. “I’d like very much for the government to tell us whether this happened or not. Celebrities seem to have no trouble finding out.”

In July, as revelations about widespread phone hacking by the tabloid were spilling out, another British newspaper, The Daily Mirror, reported that a private investigator said that News of the World reporters had offered to pay him to retrieve phone records of Sept. 11 victims. After the report, which was not confirmed by other news organizations, the Justice Department opened an investigation. To date, no evidence has emerged publicly that Sept. 11 victims were hacking targets.

Jodi Westbrook Flowers, a lawyer at a South Carolina firm that represents more than 6,700 relatives of Sept. 11 victims, said she and her colleagues had scoured the British tabloids and found scores of details about the victims. Relatives were not certain how the tabloids found out so much so quickly after the attacks.

One of the relatives, whom she declined to identify, said that five days after Sept. 11, The Sun published the words from a voice mail message left on his cellphone by his son, who was aboard one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center. (British authorities are also investigating whether hacking occurred at The Sun, which, like The News of the World, is owned by News Corporation.)

In late September, Ms. Flowers, of the Motley Rice law firm, sent Mr. Holder phone numbers of two dozen relatives of victims and asked that Scotland Yard run them through the 12,000 pages of documents seized from the home of Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator responsible for most of the hacking by the now-shuttered News of the World. She said at least 100 of her clients, in both the United States and Britain, now want similar information.

On Nov. 3, Vida G. Bottom, chief of the Justice Department’s public corruption unit, wrote to the lawyers, saying, “The F.B.I. has undertaken a preliminary review to assess the veracity of those allegations.”

Ms. Flowers said she was disappointed by the vagueness of the response. “We asked a simple threshold question, and we basically received a nonanswer,” she said.

Ms. Flowers added, “If there was no hacking, it is wildly coincidental that so many people describe similar experiences.”

Even so, two Justice Department officials with knowledge of the inquiry said they did not expect much to come of the investigation. The officials, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss a continuing criminal inquiry, said the investigation remained open in case Scotland Yard discovered evidence confirming the suspicions of the Sept. 11 relatives. They both said they were doubtful such evidence would emerge.

Tracy Schmaler, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said only, “It’s an ongoing investigation.”

Charlie Savage contributed reporting.

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India Ink: Quick Action in Kashmir After Shooting

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The government of Jammu and Kashmir took swift action after security forces killed an 18-year-old male Monday, arresting five men in connection with the shooting.

Altaf Ahmad Sood was killed when Central Industrial Security Forces fired on a group that was protesting electricity shortages outside the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation in the border town of Boniyar, Kashmir. State Chief Minister Omar Abdullah visited the family of the deceased youth on Tuesday, and then used Twitter to denounce the death, calling the circumstances “tragic, shocking and inexcusable.” The youth was shot twice in the chest, Mr. Abdullah said in a statement.

Local people were protesting power cuts in front of the company that runs the local hydroelectric power project. It is not clear whether the victim was part of the group of protesters.

An inspector and four constables of the C.I.S.F., a central government paramilitary unit, were arrested over the shooting. Mr. Abdullah’s quick response may be an attempt to avoid a repeat of the summer of 2010, when 120 protesting boys were killed by police over a span of several months. Protests over individual shootings would often lead to more violence and shootings. The summer of 2011 passed peacefully.

The government handled “much tougher situations last summer without a single casualty,” Mr. Abdullah told NDTV, an independent news channel.

Monday’s incident immediately provoked sharp reactions from political figures in the state. “People were demanding basic amenities of life, like power, and you give them bullets,” said Mahbooba Mufti, the main opposition leader.

The shooting “is an attack on the democratic rights of citizens to protest peacefully,” said Mohammad Yousuf Tarigami, a communist party legislator in the state.

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France’s Treasury Chief Works to Guard Credit Rating

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Mr. Fernandez, the head of the Treasury within the Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry, has already been through a similar crisis-management exercise. That came in early August, when Standard & Poor’s cut the top credit rating of the United States government while most of the French elite was on vacation.

Within hours on a summer Saturday morning, Mr. Fernandez helped organize a series of emergency calls with his boss, Finance Minister Fran?ois Baroin, and others in Paris’s circle of policy makers, to prevent the American crisis from sending a financial tsunami across the Atlantic.

Later that day, Mr. Baroin appeared on French television to question the validity of the United States downgrade. President Sarkozy interrupted his vacation in a show of engagement. But behind the scenes, Mr. Fernandez did much of the heavy lifting.

It was not the first time in the two-year-long European crisis that Mr. Fernandez has quietly kept things moving. And it probably will not be the last.

As France and Germany take the lead in trying to hold the euro currency union together, Mr. Fernandez has emerged as one of Paris’s top power brokers — whether in promoting the French position on the banking sector’s participation in a Greek bailout, or the creation of a rescue fund for troubled countries, or the recent deal by most European Union governments to shore up the foundations of the euro zone.

So much confidence has been placed in Mr. Fernandez that the French news media have started calling him the “guardian of the triple-A.”

But Mr. Fernandez, at 44 a youthful technocrat whose soft blue eyes belie an inner sang-froid, chuckles about the moniker with an almost embarrassed air.

“I’m a civil servant,” he said demurely. “I do what I have to do.”

What he must do now could prove crucial to how well France weathers the country’s seemingly inevitable debt downgrade. Because the demotion has been widely telegraphed by the three major credit rating agencies, Mr. Fernandez and other officials do not expect the impact to be devastating.

Still, a lower credit rating will probably make it more expensive for France to service its debt, and more difficult for the Europewide rescue fund — of which France is a major backer — to operate. That, in turn, could renew tensions between France and Germany over how to manage the euro crisis.

For every photo op in which Mr. Sarkozy and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany trumpet a new step forward, Mr. Fernandez has spent countless hours behind the scenes with an influential man in the presidential cabinet, Xavier Musca, Mr. Sarkozy’s powerful chief of staff, and Berlin’s point man, J?rg Asmussen, to smooth and soothe the sometimes testy French-German relationship.

Mr. Fernandez also exchanges e-mails frequently with officials at the Treasury Department to keep up on developments across the Atlantic. And his ability to parse mind-numbing financial issues better than nearly any other French civil servant helped French leaders look smart during the Group of 20 meetings to which France played host in 2011.

Doing all this largely below the public radar is apparently the way Mr. Fernandez prefers to work. In a country where discretion is a highly prized commodity, his effectiveness comes from operating in the shadows.

“Ramon is the right man in the right place,” said Christine Lagarde, who worked with Mr. Fernandez until last summer, when she resigned as France’s finance minister to become the managing director of the International Monetary Fund.

“He is smart, experienced, a good negotiator, but also a critical part of a close-knit network of advisers to the leading political figures,” Ms. Lagarde said.

For Mr. Fernandez’s efforts, he was made a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in December, in a ceremony under the gilded ceilings of the élysée Palace. Mr. Sarkozy cited Mr. Fernandez as a pillar in the management of France’s future.

Yet such moments are rare. Mr. Fernandez generally eschews the elitist trappings embraced by most other government dignitaries.

He rides a motor scooter to work, for example. The idea of being chauffeured around “gives me a headache,” he said. On the scooter, “you take some fresh air, and you are forced to focus on just one thing.”

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