1152. Cuban Music Icon Silvio Rodriguez Challenges State Censorship

By Marc Frank, Reuters, September 18, 2013

Rodriguez in a photo with Fidel Castro (no date)

The best known musician in Cuba and a staunch supporter of the island's communist revolution, Silvio Rodriguez, has challenged state censorship by inviting a recently sanctioned colleague to join him at two concerts this weekend on the Caribbean island.

Jazz musician Robertico Carcasses shocked authorities last week when he called for direct presidential elections, freedom of information and tolerance of dissent. He spoke out during a televised mega-concert to demand the return of four Cuban agents imprisoned in the United States 15 years ago.

The Ministry of Culture, which controls music venues and all recording, responded by banning Carcasses and his jazz-fusion group, Interactivo, from state venues until further notice, touching off a debate among artists and intellectuals on social media.

Rodriguez's invitation to Carcasses to perform represents perhaps the most serious challenge in decades to the state's control of culture and thought.

"I took the decision to do this precisely in the next two concerts, after learning that he had been sanctioned with an indefinite suspension from concerts and other public activities sponsored by the ministry," Rodriguez said in his blog, Segunda Cita (Second Meeting), on Tuesday.

"I do not agree with the excessive sanction of barring a musician from doing his work," Rodriguez said.

Soon after Rodriguez extended the invitation, the ministry met with Carcasses and his band. Rodriguez said on his blog on Wednesday that the ministry was expected to lift the sanction on Carcasses but there was no official word. The controversy has not been mentioned by state-run media.

Despite his gesture of support for Carcasses, Rodriguez was sharply critical of what he termed Carcasses' "stupidity."

"As a Cuban citizen Robertico has the right to say what he thinks," he wrote. "I would have preferred that he would do this in another concert, in a record, somewhere else, because the struggle for the freedom of the (agents) is sacred to the Cuban people."

Carcasses, in a statement issued after his suspension, stuck to his guns, repeating his words at the concert, but he apologized if he had caused further pain to the families of the agents and for not consulting fellow band members before speaking up.

"I want ... free access to information so I can have my own opinion. Elect the president by direct vote and not another way ... Neither militant nor dissident, all Cubans with the same rights," were some of the forbidden words uttered by Carcasses in improvised lyrics.

The Communist Party is the only legal party in Cuba and presidents are elected by a single chamber parliament.

The concert where Carcasses made his comments was staged in front of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana, culminating a day of support activities to bring the Cuban agents home.

The agents were sentenced to long prison terms in the United States for spying on violence-prone exiles and U.S. military bases in Florida.

Carcasses' protest and the state's response has touched off a controversy in Cuba reminiscent of that which followed the black power salute of Afro-American athletes during the 1968 Olympic Games.

Artists and intellectuals appear nearly unanimous in their criticism of Carcasses's choice of time and place to make his statement, while most also have expressed disagreement with his suspension. 

1151. The Syria Solidarity Movement: First Newsletter

By The Syria Solidarity Movement, September 15, 2013

This is the first newsletter of the Syria Solidarity Movement.  Many of you supported our work as part of the Free Palestine Movement, which sent delegations to two Gaza Flotillas and participated in several billboards and bus ads for Palestinian human rights.

More recently, you provided funds for one delegate (Paul Larudee) and part of the funds for another (Amir Massoumi) to participate in a peace delegation to Syria, led by Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire, and you received dispatches describing the visit and the findings of the delegation.

We pledged that any further Syria advocacy would be separate from the Free Palestine Movement, and the creation of the Syria Solidarity Movement is a fulfillment of that pledge.  We recognize that some of you may wish to be on only one of the two lists, and we will of course unsubscribe you if you wish.  However, both lists will be active only when there is something to report or some action that we ask you to take.

We are not the voice of the Syrian people, but we are the voice of people throughout the world – and especially those who are in countries whose governments are part of the problem – who listen to the Syrian people.  Syrians do not speak with a unanimous voice, but our solidarity is based upon principles that many of them have articulated, and which accord with international law and standards, as follows:

1. Above all else, we respect Syrian solutions to Syrian problems.
2. We oppose all military intervention in Syria, including the provision of any arms, military training, intelligence, personnel or equipment except for the purpose of national self defense.
3. We advocate a reduction of arms and a ceasefire by all combatants.
4. We advocate massive provision of humanitarian aid for all displaced Syrians, wherever they may be, including Syrian territory.  This aid should be administered under the supervision of the United Nations or similar international agencies.
5. We advocate a Syrian national dialogue under international auspices, in a location and with protections and guarantees that permit all parties to feel safe, and without the exclusion of any parties.

Some argue that we should include other principles, such as advocacy of a secular society and a government based on nondiscrimination and human rights.  Although we understand and respect such arguments, we believe that it is not our place to make such declarations, but rather to support Syrian declarations of their principles.

We will shortly be reporting to you about some of our ongoing activities, including actions to prevent U.S. military intervention in Syria, a North American tour by Mother Agnes-Mariam of Mussallaha ("Reconciliation"), the peace organization in Syria that invited the international peace delegation in May, 2013, the gathering of deterrence volunteers in Syria to defy military intervention, and other activities.

We welcome your participation and your inquiries.

The Syria Solidarity Movement

http://www.syriasolidaritymovement.org/

To make a U.S. tax-exempt donation, go to http://www.syriasolidaritymovement.org/donate-2/

1150.Cuba: A New Media Model?

By Fernando Ravsberg, Havana Times, July 25, 2013

The school in is the media, knowing what to do, not
waiting for another signal,” said Antonio Molto the new president of the Cuban
Journalists Association. Photo: Raquel Perez  

“We can’t lay the blame entirely on journalists or entirely on the media. We must lay the blame on the Party, in the first place, and we have to begin to criticize ourselves for what we have failed to do in order to develop our press,” said Cuban Vice-President Miguel Diaz Canel.

He declared this at the close of the 9th Congress of the Cuban Journalists Association (UPEC). It is the first time anyone in the leadership of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) acknowledges the Party’s responsibility for the shortcomings and distortions characteristic of the Cuban press.

The call for self-criticism was accompanied by the election of a new UPEC leadership, made up of eager journalists of proven professionalism, who are versed in the use of new information technologies – something which ought to make them more conscious of the pressing need for changes.

Raul Garces, UPEC’s recently-elected vice-chair, stressed that the Cuban press is going through a critical moment. “There are two paths we can take: either we fix the problem together once and for all, or the credibility and persuasive power of the Cuban media will simply collapse.”

In his address to the journalist’s Congress, he acknowledged that “we have gradually adopted a model which portrays reality by contrasting the alleged “hell abroad” with Cuba’s supposed “domestic paradise”. We have often substituted reasoned argument with propaganda.”

The new UPEC chair, Antonio Molto, sent out a clear message to Cuban journalists, stating that “all you have to learn is that the media, knowing what they have to do, should not wait for any sign from above, that the go-ahead is already there.”

According to Molto, however, no few pitfalls are to be found down this path, for “we’ve had a lot of claptrap and rubbish. Learning to communicate with the public, getting to understand a democracy that isn’t only top-down, where diversity has a place and is respected, will be a long process.”

The new model for the media “hasn’t been put into writing yet. There are notes, suggestions, and theses. The model, however, has by no means been worked out,” Molto affirmed.

The school in is the media, knowing what to do, not waiting for another signal,” said Antonio Molto the new president of the Cuban Journalists Association. Photo: Raquel Perez

The fragments of the UPEC Congress sessions broadcast on Cuban television showed a serious debate, where participants questioned many aspects of the country’s media and proposed old and new ideas to transform the press into something that society demands and needs.

The Congress questioned the current relationship between the Communist Party and the press, the salaries of journalists, the lack of equipment, the refusal of government officials to share public information, the absence of journalistic legislation, the “thin skin” of some politicians and the lack of authority of media managers show when faced with pressure from these politicians.

The Congress, in a last analysis, saw more criticism than laments, more serious analysis than tantrums, and more proposals than conformism. And the best part, to quote Molto, is that the new model “hasn’t been put into writing yet. There are notes, suggestions, and theories. The model, however, has by no means been worked out.”

This opens up the possibility of collective action, through which common journalists can become something more than salaried workers forced to adhere to pre-established norms, as is the case nearly everywhere around the world, through which they can take part in the creation of the norms themselves.

Cuban journalists have all of the professional passion, talent and knowledge needed to take on this challenge. The two presentations at the Congress were a demonstration of the knowledge that journalists have in the area of communications.

Some insist that countries are shaped by their enemies and that this applies particularly to Cuba, forced to conceal nearly every one of its steps from the watchful gaze of its northern neighbor, who is always waiting to use the slightest slip against it.

Caught between foreign aggression and those at home who affirm that criticisms give “weapons to the enemy”, the Cuban press is today what it was forced to be. To blame everyday journalists for this would be a bit trivial, superficial and unjust.

At this precise moment, however, it seems as though the entire nation is conspiring to bring about a new, improved journalism in Cuba. There are still risks involved, but to let such an opportunity pass without at least trying to achieve this would be unforgivable.

1149. Top Ten things Americans need to Know about Syria if they’re going to Threaten to Bomb It

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment, September 12, 2013

Juan Cole

Ambrose Bierce is said to be the author of the saying “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” Despite the vigorous national debate about intervening in Syria, there is some reason to think that most Americans could not find it on a map. Here are some key points about Syria that this blog has been trying to underline.

1. Syria is a country in the eastern Mediterranean; northern Syria is due east of Sicily and southeast of Athens. Syria’s population is about 22 million, making it the 54th most populous country in the world, smaller than Ghana, Taiwan and Nepal. The population of a country helps to determine how big its military can be. Syria by this criterion is not very important militarily. Syria does have stockpiles of toxic gas, but these cannot be easily delivered any significant distance and are not effective weapons except against a massed military formation. it is not clear that Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles are bigger than those of Russia, the US, Israel, and North Korea.

2. Syria is a largely Arabic-speaking country. Arabic is a Semitic language related to Hebrew. But about 10 percent of the population is Kurdish, which speaks an Indo-European language ultimately related to English.

3. Before the revolution that began in 2011, The Syrian economy was diverse. About a quarter of the economy was industry and mining. Retail sales were another quarter. A little over a fifth was agriculture. And tourism accounted for about 12 percent. Syrian industry has been nearly brought to a standstill by the civil war. Millions of Syrians have been displaced from their homes, either fleeing to other cities inside the country or being forced abroad to Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. Even before the troubles, Syria was a relatively poor country with an annual gross domestic product in nominal terms ($64 bn) that is 65th in the world behind Angola, Cuba and Ecuador.

4. The Syrian revolution and civil war did not begin as primarily sectarian. It is to some extent a class struggle High population growth rates and economic stagnation made the state unable to provide jobs to a burgeoning youth population. Droughts and the bad effects of global warming also created a water crisis that harmed farmers and pushed youth off the farms into city slums where, after the 2008 world crash, there were no jobs. The big protests in 2011 originated in the slums around the cities in the center of the country, where young men who had moved there for work from the countryside found themselves locked into long-term unemployment. The governmental and business elite in Damascus benefits from the regime and has mostly remained loyal or neutral, whether they are Sunnis or Alawites. About half of the large northern city of Aleppo is still with the regime, as well. Because the upper ranks of the ruling Baath Party are disproportionately dominated by the Alawite minority, and because so many discontented youth in the cities of the center are Sunni, the conflict took on a sectarian tinge. But its underpinnings are economic.

5. Some 10 to 14 percent of Syrians are Christians. They speak Arabic and are primarily Eastern Orthodox (like Greece and Russia) or Uniate Catholics, belonging to Eastern churches that at some point recognized the Pope and came into communion with Rome. A few Christian villages still speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Syrian Christians tend either to be politically neutral or to tilt toward the ruling regime, being afraid of the more radical Sunni fundamentalists who have come to the fore on the battlefronts of the north, one of which has declared itself an affiliate of al-Qaeda. The clerical hierarchies of the Syrian Christians and their Lebanese coreligionists have strongly come out against a US missile strike on Damascus. Another 10 to 14 percent of Syrians are Alawites, members of a branch of Shiite Islam that is considered unorthodox by other Shiites. They don’t have Friday prayers, and some of their beliefs are New Age-ish. The Alawites predominate in the upper echelons of the ruling Baath Party and the officer corps.

6. If the US were to intervene in Syria, it certainly would not be about oil. Syria was not a significant oil exporter. By 2009 it was producing less than 400,000 barrels a day. The world produces on the order of 90 million barrels of oil a day, and some countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia by themselves produce in the neighborhood of 10 million barrels a day. Nor is Syria necessary to pipelines in the region. Iraq’s northern fields feed into Turkish pipelines, and Turkey is anyway so far much more stable than Syria. Syria’s production has been more than halved by the war, but the loss to the world markets is minor. Libya’s production has fallen by nearly a million barrels a day in the past year because of oil worker strikes and autonomist, Eastern claims on resources, and this shortfall has barely produced any comment in the American press.

7. Some 60% of Syrians are Sunni Arabs, i.e., adherents of the Sunni branch of Islam who speak Arabic as their mother tongue. Sunni Arabs also predominate in Jordan and Egypt. Large numbers of Syrian Sunnis are secularists, either nationalists or leftists, and not very observant. Many Syrian Sunnis still follow the tolerant, mystical Sufi form of Islam. Others have come under Saudi influence and are known as Salafis, but this is just a euphemism for Wahhabis, members of the intolerant and rigid form of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia. A very small number of Sunnis have affiliated with al-Qaeda, but they have had the important battlefield victories in the north.

8. Contemporary Westerners imagine they are the pinnacle of civilization, but they are newcomers to the phenomenon by Syrian standards. Syria is the site of the ancient civilization of Ebla, between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago. It was later ruled by Assyria, the Pharaohs of Egypt, Babylon, Persia/ Iran, Macedonia, and Rome/ the Byzantines. Along with Palestine, after the death of Jesus around 33 AD/ CE, Syria was a site of the spread of Christianity. St. Paul had his conversion on the road to Damascus, and I was once shown a building he was said to have stayed in in what is now a Christian quarter of the city. Between the time of Jesus and around 600, it gradually became mostly Christian. Beneath Damascus are the catacombs where early Christians hid from persecution. It was conquered by the Arab Muslims in 634-640. Over many centuries thereafter, the people of Syria gradually began speaking Arabic instead of Aramaic, and gradually converted to Islam from Christianity and Judaism. There is no evidence that violent coercion was at the root of this conversion, though there were tax advantages and it was a way to move up socially. Arab Muslim rule of Syria was challenged in the medieval period by the Crusaders and the Mongols, both of which were fought off. Medieval Syria may have been 50% Shiite, but the dynasty founded by Saladin imposed Sunni orthodoxy after he conquered it in 1175-1185.

9. In 1516 Syria fell to the Ottomans based in Istanbul in what is now Turkey, and was ruled by the Sunni Muslim Ottoman empire until World War I. In 1916 Britain and France secretly concluded the Sykes-Picot agreement, which awarded Syria to France if the allies defeated the Ottomans (who sided with the Germans and Austrians in WW I). The British allied with the Arabs of the Hijaz and Jordan to push the Ottomans out of Syria toward the end of the war, a story told in the classic David Lean film, “Lawrence of Arabia” (1963). But the French were outraged that the British had connived to foster an Arab state in Syria in 1918-1920, and in 1920 they invaded and asserted their claim under Sykes-Picot. The some 20 years of French rule in Syria was the worst example of colonial administration in French history, and few French historians have bothered to write about it. In 1944 Syria was recognized by the allies as an independent country (France having been colonized by Germany was in no position to continue to colonize Syria).

10. Independent Syria suffered from a series of military coups. The March, 1949 coup of Husni al-Za`im may have been encouraged behind the scenes by the Truman administration because his predecessor had objected to an oil pipeline that was to go through Syrian territory. In 1958-1961, Syria was joined with Egypt in the United Arab Republic. In 1963 officers of the Arab nationalist Baath (Resurrection) Party, which claimed to be socialist, made a coup. The Baath is still in power in Syria. In 1970 Air Force general Hafez al-Assad, an Alawite, made an internal coup, and in 2000 he was succeeded by his second son Bashar, an opthalmologist trained in England. The Baath is a brutal one-party state characterized by a secret police that intensively spies on the population and punishes dissent with arbitrary arrest and torture. It raised standards of living and brought the country from being overwhelmingly rural farmers to having a slight urban majority.

1148. The Rich Get Richer Through the "Recovery"

By Annie Lowery, The New York Times, September 10, 2013

The "recovery"

The top 10 percent of earners took more than half of the country’s total income in 2012, the highest level recorded since the government began collecting the relevant data a century ago, according to an updated study by the prominent economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty.

The top 1 percent took more than one-fifth of the income earned by Americans, one of the highest levels on record since 1913, when the government instituted an income tax.

The figures underscore that even after the recession the country remains in a new Gilded Age, with income as concentrated as it was in the years that preceded the Depression of the 1930s, if not more so.

High stock prices, rising home values and surging corporate profits have buoyed the recovery-era incomes of the most affluent Americans, with the incomes of the rest still weighed down by high unemployment and stagnant wages for many blue- and white-collar workers.

“These results suggest the Great Recession has only depressed top income shares temporarily and will not undo any of the dramatic increase in top income shares that has taken place since the 1970s,” Mr. Saez, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in his analysis of the data.

The income share of the top 1 percent of earners in 2012 returned to the same level as before both the Great Recession and the Great Depression: just above 20 percent, jumping to about 22.5 percent in 2012 from 19.7 percent in 2011.

That increase is probably in part due to one-time factors. Congress made a last-minute deal to avoid the expiration of all of the Bush-era tax cuts in January. That deal included a number of tax increases on wealthy Americans, including bumping up levies on investment income. Seeing the tax changes coming, many companies gave large dividends and investors cashed out.

But the economists noted that the trends looked the same for income figures including and excluding realized capital gains — implying that the temporary tax moves were not the only reason the top 1 percent did so well relative to everyone else in 2012.

More generally, richer households have disproportionately benefited from the boom in the stock market during the recovery, with the Dow Jones industrial average more than doubling in value since it bottomed out early in 2009. About half of households hold stock, directly or through vehicles like pension accounts. But the richest 10 percent of households own about 90 percent of the stock, expanding both their net worth and their incomes when they cash out or receive dividends.

The economy remains depressed for most wage-earning families. With sustained, relatively high rates of unemployment, businesses are under no pressure to raise their employees’ incomes because both workers and employers know that many people without jobs would be willing to work for less. The share of Americans working or looking for work is at its lowest in 35 years.

There is a glimmer of good news for the 99 percent in the report, though. Mr. Piketty and Mr. Saez show that the incomes of that group stagnated between 2009 and 2011. In 2012, they started growing again — if only by about 1 percent. But the total income of the top 1 percent surged nearly 20 percent that year. The incomes of the very richest, the 0.01 percent, shot up more than 32 percent.

The new data shows that the top 1 percent of earners experienced a sharp drop in income during the recession, of about 36 percent, and a nearly equal rebound during the recovery of roughly 31 percent. The incomes of the other 99 percent plunged nearly 12 percent in the recession and have barely grown — a 0.4 percent uptick — since then. Thus, the 1 percent has captured about 95 percent of the income gains since the recession ended.

Mr. Saez and Mr. Piketty have argued that the concentration of income among top earners is unlikely to reverse without stark changes in the economy or in tax policy. Increases that Congress negotiated in January are not likely to have a major effect, Mr. Saez wrote, saying they “are not negligible, but they are modest.”

Mr. Saez and Mr. Piketty, of the Paris School of Economics, plan to update their data again in January, after more complete statistics become available.

1147. A Climate Change Alarm, Too Muted for Some

By Justin Gillis, The New York Times, September 9, 2013

This month, the world will get a new report from a United Nations panel about the science of climate change. Scientists will soon meet in Stockholm to put the finishing touches on the document, and behind the scenes, two big fights are brewing.

In one case, we have a lot of mainstream science that says if human society keeps burning fossil fuels with abandon, considerable land ice could melt and the ocean could rise as much as three feet by the year 2100. We have some outlier science that says the problem could be quite a bit worse than that, with a maximum rise exceeding five feet.

The drafters of the report went with the lower numbers, choosing to treat the outlier science as not very credible.

In the second case, we have mainstream science that says if the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubles, which is well on its way to happening, the long-term rise in the temperature of the earth will be at least 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, but more likely above 5 degrees. We have outlier science that says the rise could come in well below 3 degrees.

In this case, the drafters of the report lowered the bottom end in a range of temperatures for how much the earth could warm, treating the outlier science as credible.

Climate change skeptics often disparage these periodic reports from the United Nations, claiming that the panel writing them routinely stretches the boundaries of scientific evidence to make the problem look as dire as possible. So it is interesting to see that in these two important cases, the panel seems to be bending over backward to be scientifically conservative.

Is it right to throw out bleeding-edge science in the one case while keeping it in the other? That is hard to judge for anybody who is not a working climate scientist. After all, we pay them for their expertise, just as we pay doctors to advise us if we are diagnosed with cancer. And we are talking about two distinct issues here, each with its own specialized body of research.

The group making these decisions is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a worldwide committee of several hundred scientists knowledgeable in the complex field of climatology. It won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, along with Al Gore, for helping to alert the public to the risks that are being run with the unchecked combustion of fossil fuels.

The group’s decisions will not be final until the official report is released on Sept. 27. We know about them only because a secret draft was leaked ahead of the final editing session coming up in Stockholm. Scientists from a few countries have raised objections to the preliminary decisions on sea level and temperature, and they could well change in the final report.

Perhaps they should; there are climate scientists not serving on the committee this year who think so. Their fear is that the intergovernmental panel might be pulling punches.

It turns out that the Nobel Prize, welcome as it might have been back in 2007, served the same function it has for many other scientists who have won it over the years: it painted a fat target on the committee’s back. The group has been subjected to attack in recent years by climate skeptics. The intimidation tactics have included abusive language on blogs, comparisons to the Unabomber, e-mail hacking and even occasional death threats.

Who could blame the panel if it wound up erring on the side of scientific conservatism? Yet most citizens surely want something else from the group: an unvarnished analysis of the risks they face.

To be clear, even if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ends up sticking with the lowball numbers in these two instances, they are worrisome enough. As best scientists can tell, the question with sea level is not whether it is going to get to three feet and then five feet of increase, but merely whether it will happen in this century or the next.

Likewise, with temperature, the panel is saying only that the lowball numbers are possible, not that they are likely. In fact, the metric used in the scientific literature, the temperature effect of doubled carbon dioxide, is merely a convenient way of comparing studies. Many people make the mistake of thinking that is how much of a global temperature increase will actually occur.

At the pace we are going, there is no reason to think that we will stop burning fossil fuels when carbon dioxide doubles. We could be on our way to tripling or quadrupling the amount of that heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere. In that case, experts believe, even an earth that turns out to be somewhat insensitive to carbon dioxide will undergo drastic changes.

Obviously, the high estimates are even scarier. So it would be nice to hear an explanation from the drafters of this coming report as to why they made decisions that effectively play up the low-end possibilities. But with the report still officially under wraps, they are not speaking publicly. We are thus left wondering whether it is a matter of pure professional judgment — or whether they have been cowed by the attacks of recent years.

Assuming these decisions withstand final review, it will be fascinating to hear the detailed explanations in Stockholm.

1146. Proposal to Protect Antarctic Waters Is Scaled Back

By David Jolly, The New York Times, September 10, 2013

PARIS — A proposal by the United States and New Zealand to create a huge ocean reserve in Antarctic waters has been sharply reduced in scale after opposition from Russia and other nations with large fishing industries. Environmentalists warned that the ambitious project was being badly undermined.

The Ross Sea marine protected area that the two governments proposed last year was to have set aside about 875,000 square miles of the Southern Ocean where commercial fishing would be sharply limited. The area’s relatively pristine ecosystem is crucial to the survival of thousands of species, including whales, seals and penguins, as well as the small fish and crustaceans on which they depend.

On Friday, though, New Zealand announced that the overall size of the proposed reserve was being reduced by 40 percent to gain the support of member nations on the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, the international body that sets conservation policy for the Southern Ocean, of which the Ross Sea is a part. Commission delegates are scheduled to meet next month in Hobart, Australia, to consider the proposal.

It was clear in July that the American-New Zealand proposal was on shaky ground after a commission meeting in Bremerhaven, Germany, broke up without agreement. Supporters of the proposal expected delegates there to work on ironing out details, and were stunned when Russia and Ukraine raised legal and procedural questions that halted the discussion, and questioned the commission’s authority to create such reserves. Norway, China and Japan led other fishing nations in calling for smaller reserves, and for “sunset clause” provisions that would allow for the possibility of eventual commercial exploitation of the areas.

Most of the fishing activity in the Ross Sea now is directed at the slow-maturing Patagonian toothfish, often marketed as Chilean sea bass. But there is growing interest in harvesting krill, the tiny creatures that are a pillar of the Southern Ocean ecosystem, and many fishing nations do not want to seal off any future possibilities as fish stocks elsewhere in the world are depleted.

Nongovernmental organizations have accused Washington and Wellington of caving in without a fight. The Antarctic Ocean Alliance, a coalition of 30 environmental groups, said on Monday that the scaled-down version of the proposal was a “tactical mistake and a significant retreat for Southern Ocean protection.”

Andrea Kavanagh, a spokeswoman for the Pew Charitable Trusts on Antarctic issues called it “baffling.” The decision to make such a large concession before the Hobart meeting has even begun, she said, means that by the time a deal is reached, the reserve might be only half its original size.

“What is so disturbing is that this is the new starting line,” she said, “and the permanence of it is now up for negotiation.”

Evan T. Bloom, the head of the American delegation to the Antarctic conservation commission, said that the most important parts of the initiative remained intact and that the reserve would still be the world’s largest.

“I know there are a number of stakeholders who are particularly concerned about the changes we’ve made,” Mr. Bloom said, “but we think it’s necessary to take into account the views of members of the commission and the scientific committee.”

A concurrent proposal, championed by Australia, France and the European Union, for a network of seven protected areas in the eastern Antarctic region is also being revised for the Hobart meeting, though the changes that have been made so far relate to how they will be established, not their sizes.

Nongovernmental groups have accused the Russians of negotiating in bad faith. They point out that many of the nations that are now balking at creating marine reserves had pledged in 2010 at a United Nations conference in Nagoya, Japan, to set aside 10 percent of the world’s oceans for conservation by 2020. Currently, less than 1 percent is protected, and the goal is almost certain to go unmet.

Dmitry Kremenyuk, the head of the Russian delegation to the conservation commission, said accusations that Russia had blocked progress “would not be correct.” He acknowledged that his country had raised scientific and legal questions about the basis for the reserves, but he said other countries had also expressed misgivings. The objections raised in Bremerhaven were part of “a standard way of negotiating,” he said.

Mr. Kremenyuk suggested that the revised Ross Sea proposal might meet with a better reception in Hobart, and that the European-Australian proposal for the eastern Antarctic would also have to be revised.

“They’ll have to rearrange their priorities, and then it might work,” he said. “Cast away the zones that are less significant, and retain the top priority ones.”