PERSPECTIVES 10 April 8, 2010 ● Mount Holyoke News On Sept. 28, 2001, when Irish journalist Martin O’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 to death. O’Hagan was 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 and Catholic nationalists. Communities of Protestant unionists in support of the British rule 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 political battle 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 peace agreement 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 factions apart. The religious opposition between the Catholics and the Protestants dates back to 400 AD. Over the years, Protestants have constituted a significant percentage of the overall island population, and a majority in what is now Northern 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 a threat 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 the Catholic and the Protestant forces are solved. “Real peace will be achieved one day,” as journalist Paul Williams said, “when we do not need a peace wall.” Revisiting Northern Ireland’s “Troubles” BY CHU WANG ’13 STAFF 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 Korean War in June 2010. While experts consider North Korea as a possible perpetrator of the attack, it is looking less and less 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 collision with a North Korean mine from the Korean War or an unknown object. No matter what re- ally caused the disaster, it surely poses questions about the South’s ability to prevent such a 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 out of 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 recent incident 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 disavowed the 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 a more complicated position in talks about its nuclear arms program. In December 2009, in an apparent move to combat inflation, its government decided to revalue its currency, the won, by requiring citizens 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 3500 wons per dollar on the black market, depreciated 96 percent against the dollar, according to 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 Korean news agency, reported that the North has executed Pak Nam-gi, Director of the Planning and Finance Department, the one seemingly responsible for the disastrous currency change. However, this does not solve the problem at hand. Food prices soared, plunging North 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 acquiring enough 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 probably have trouble finding the cause and an explanation behind the Cheonan catastrophe. The next Six-Party talk, with the possible participation of North Korea, which has historically focused 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 of war, North and South Korea face tensions BY THU NGUYEN ’12 ASST. PERSPECTIVES EDITOR B LACK WIDOWS ATTACK MOSCOW “You Russians only see the war on television and hear about it on the radio, and this is why you are quiet and 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 will come to your streets, and you will feel it in your lives and under your skin.” This was the grizzly message Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov conveyed two days after the suicide bombings in Moscow. One week ago, on March 29, two female suicide bombers detonated explosives in the Moscow metro system. The two attacks were carried out during the morning rush hour while 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 from Arab fundamentalists in 2000, along with the notion of a “global jihad.” The situation was believed to have relaxed after 2004, when attacks 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 not their 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 young women happened to be black widows. One of them, the 17- year-old Dzhanet Abdullayeva, had been married to an Islamist rebel leader who had died 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 Internet when Dzhanet was 16. The recruitment of young women is a common tactic in this move- ment because it is easy to lure them into Islamist thought. The girls meet their husbands on the Internet and get married at a young age because of the romantic ideal to marry a hero 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 bomb exploded 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 Putin in 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, who agreed with him that violence would only lead to more violence. Medvedev believes that first, 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 Moscow and with Doku Umarov’s threat of bringing the war into the cities, analysts fear that the old unrest might have reinflamed. BY MARION MESSMER ’13 STAFF WRITER Perspectives 4.8.10:Layout 1 4/15/10 7:41 PM Page 1