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By Afro-Middle East Centre

Rather than signalling any major, dramatic or radical change in direction, the new ‘charter’ (officially called ‘A Document of General Principles and Policies’) of the Palestinian group Hamas formalises what has existed in terms of the party’s policies and practices for more than a decade, superseding its old charter which has largely been outdated, irrelevant and an albatross around the organisation’s neck.

The new document, which took two years to debate and draft (but has been in the making since 2006), replaces the ‘Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement’, which was authored by a single individual in 1988, and adopted barely nine months after Hamas’s founding. Hamas has variously defended, been apologetic about and embarrassed by the 1988 charter, but, for mysterious reasons, has not been able to get rid of, or even amend, it. The group’s spokespersons have often said broad consultation was too difficult within its security constraints – even though it regularly holds leadership elections that encompass its members in various parts of the world. In 2006, in the run-up to elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), the first Palestinian Authority (PA) election that Hamas contested, the party issued an election platform that articulated changes in its positions from that contained in the original charter. But the platform was not comprehensive enough to be regarded as superseding the charter, and Hamas leaders themselves never referred to it in this way.

The platform did highlight the irrelevance and embarrassment of the old charter, and sparked a debate within the organisation on a range of issues – from the role of religion in the Palestinian struggle to the nature of a future Palestinian state. That debate culminated on 1 May 2017 with the launch of the new document. The process leading up to the launch was vigorous, and produced some issues of sharp disagreement within the movement. The 1 May document attempts to balance those debates within the Hamas constituency, and still provide a vision and strategies in a manner that will keep the organisation united, and allow all its members to feel satisfied.

Since the launch, much attention has been paid to the clause that accepts a Palestinian state along the 4 June 1967 border – essentially confining a future Palestinian state to the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza. The clause, however, does not actually go as far as ‘accepting’ the 1967 borders or a two-state solution, but notes that ‘Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967…to be a formula of national consensus.’ The clause was qualified with its ‘rejection of the Zionist entity’, support for the right of return of all Palestinian refugees – including to their homes in Israel, and rejection of ‘any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea’. It is debatable whether the 1967 border ‘formula’ ever was one of ‘national consensus’ among Palestinians. In the past few years, especially, after Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu repeatedly rejected any notion of a two-state solution, former US secretary of state John Kerry lamented its end, and US president Donald Trump refused to endorse the well-worn US support for such a solution, Palestinians have increasingly been arguing that a two-state solution is not possible, and the current reality is that there is already a single state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea that is governed by Israel. Despite the language in the document, however, after the launch Hamas leader Khaled Mesha’al, interpreted it as supporting a two-state solution. This contradiction between the charter’s insistence on Hamas’s ultimate goal being the ‘liberation’ of all of British Mandate Palestine, and the seeming acceptance of a two-state solution could prove to become a difficulty for the movement in the future, even though the notion of a two-state solution has already been articulated by Hamas spokespersons, including by its founder Shaykh Ahmed Yassin and by Mesha’al. The document’s position might be viewed as support for a two-state solution as the first phase towards a single state.

This is not the most significant aspect of the document, however. Perhaps most significant (and the most radical change) is the language and tone that describes Hamas as a nationalist Palestinian movement rather than as part of a global Islamist one. This begins with the description of Palestine as ‘the land of the Arab Palestinian people’, while the old charter regarded Palestine as ‘an Islamic Waqf [endowment] consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day’ – somewhat mirroring the Zionist conception of Israel as the land of all Jews. No longer. While Palestine is still ‘a land whose status has been elevated by Islam’, it belongs, according to Hamas to Palestinians, not to Muslims. Even in its characterisation of itself, Hamas now views itself as a ‘Palestinian Islamic national liberation and resistance movement’. The positioning of the words ‘Palestinian’ and ‘Islamic’ are not accidental. ‘Its goal is to liberate Palestine and confront the Zionist project. Its frame of reference is Islam,’ and there is no proclamation of ‘The universality of the Islamic Resistance Movement’ as in the old document. This new orientation is likely the reason that references to the Muslim Brotherhood (whose name and slogans peppered the earlier document) have been dropped. There is a glaring question that the document does not answer, however: if Palestine is ‘the land of Arab Palestinians’, what would be the place of Jews in a future Palestinian state.

Despite speculation that the document would attempt to placate Israel and western powers, it makes no serious attempt to do so. Even its strong emphasis that the ‘conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion’ and its accusation that it is Zionists who have co-opted Judaism and Jews in service of its ‘colonial project and illegal entity’ reflects a change in the way the movement views Jews and Zionism, and is guidance provided to its own constituency, rather than a placatory gesture to outsiders. Indeed, the three demands that the West (through the Middle East Quartet, comprising of the UN, USA, EU and Russia) have made of Hamas since 2007 have been emphatically rejected in the charter. The demands were that Hamas recognises Israel; renounces violence; and accepts all previous agreements made by the PLO and PA with Israel. Instead, the charter emphasises that ‘There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity’; insists that ‘At the heart of [means of resisting occupation] lies armed resistance’; and rejects the Oslo Accords ‘and all that flows from them’.

Of course, the rejection of the Oslo presents a contradiction. The charter affirms a role for the PA (a creature of Oslo) ‘to serve the Palestinian people and safeguard their security, their rights and their national project’. Further, the movement contested elections for the PLC (another Oslo creation), plays a role as part of the PA, and has expressed no intention to extract itself from the PA and refuse to contest future elections.

If we ignore the opportunity Hamas provides us to do interesting analyses of a new document, its release is a rather ‘ho hum’ moment. In itself, it says nothing new, and only documents what has already become a reality within the movement through decade-and-half shifts in thought and practice. At most, it will allow its spokespersons a sigh of relief that they no longer have to defend the old anti-Semitic and irrelevant document. The timing of its release does has some significance. While it will be seen as Mesha’al’s swan-song (he did not contest the recent leadership election, whose results will be announced later this month), it also happens when more militant leaders are rising, and they have expressed no criticism of the document. Yahya Sinwar, for example, a leader of Hamas’s armed wing, the ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, who spent twenty years in an Israeli prison, is now the group’s Gaza leader and the ‘prime minister’ in the territory. His embrace of the document indicates that the political and military wings of the movement are united in supporting it, and it is not an imposition by ‘moderates’ on the rest of the organisation.

If Hamas was unconcerned about how its critics in Israel and the West might view its new charter, it should be concerned about criticism from Palestinians, particularly the disappointment (and even anger) expressed by some at the seeming acceptance of the two-state solution. For many Palestinians who have become weary of the shenanigans of the PA, Fatah and the PLO, who oppose the PA’s ‘security coordination’ with Israel, and who support the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel had hoped that Hamas would not compromise its support for armed resistance, and would clearly express support for a one-state solution. For some in this group, the new document does not distinguish Hamas from Fatah in terms of its vision for the future (even though that’s not a correct reading of the relevant clauses).

4 May 2017

By Budour Youssef Hassan

Hunger strikes don’t get any easier with experience.

So says the family of Palestinian prisoner Majd Ziada, who has participated in multiple collective strikes since his arrest by Israeli occupation forces in 2002.

“It is as if you are carrying the weight of 15 years of imprisonment on your shoulders,” Hurriyah Ziada, Majd’s youngest sister, told The Electronic Intifada. “It is like running the last kilometers of a marathon: at the start you have a lot of energy but you eventually become drained.”

Majd, whose family hails from the village of al-Faluja northeast of Gaza City, ethnically cleansed by Zionist forces in 1948, was 19 when he was swept up during a wave of mass arrests at the height of the second intifada.

He spent 50 days in incommunicado detention, during which he was subjected to physical and psychological torture, his father and lawyer say. The abuse exacerbated preexisting ear inflammation, resulting in a complete loss of hearing in Majd’s right ear.

During a hearing in an Israeli military court the year of his arrest, Majd proclaimed that he did not recognize the court’s legitimacy and that it was Israeli soldiers who should be put on trial.

Majd was convicted of carrying out armed attacks and organizing a resistance cell, receiving a 30-year prison sentence.

Majd’s attorneys requested a retrial, arguing that his conviction was rife with grave procedural errors. An Israeli military court issued a rare commutation last month, reducing Majd’s sentence to 20 years.

Majd, who was arrested in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah, has most recently been held in Hadarim prison, in central Israel. The Fourth Geneva Convention forbids an occupying power such as Israel from transferring detainees from the territory it occupies, such as the West Bank, into its own territory. Majd’s imprisonment in Israel is thus a war crime.
Punishment

In her most recent visit to Hadarim, on 12 April, Hurriyah was told by Majd that he was planning to join the open-ended hunger strike set to begin five days later.

One of the main demands of the hunger strike is to end medical negligence of prisoners.

“[Majd] requires surgery to his ear and he is at risk of losing his hearing completely if it’s not performed,” Hurriyah said. “But the Israel Prison Service has refused to allow it and the only treatment he has received has come in the form of painkillers.”

Israel has punished hunger striking prisoners with a series of measures, including denying family visits and meetings with lawyers. All Hurriyah knows about her brother is that he was transferred from Hadarim and put in isolation. She does not know where he is currently being detained.

Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike are also protesting solitary confinement, night raids on prisoners’ cells, humiliating searches, the reduction of family visits, a ban on mobile phones, suspension of university education, restrictions on books and magazines, and widespread imprisonment without charge or trial, family members of striking prisoners and their lawyers told The Electronic Intifada.

“Through the battle of empty stomachs, prisoners are not only calling for their basic rights and demanding an improvement in prison conditions,” Abdel Nasser Ferwana, a writer who has done extensive research on the history of Palestinian hunger strikes, told The Electronic Intifada.

“They also seek to express their defiance, to reinvigorate public solidarity with the prisoners’ cause and to draw attention to their plight.”

A dangerous tactic of last resort, the first known hunger strike in the history of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement was in 1968, one year into Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Inmates at a prison in Nablus waged a three-day hunger strike protesting physical abuse and humiliating treatment by Israeli soldiers.

The first Palestinian prisoner to lose his life during a hunger strike was Abd al-Qader Abu al-Fahm, who died after being force-fed during a mass strike in Ashkelon prison in 1970.
History of struggle

Ferwana said that the current hunger strike is not an isolated event and is part of a long history of struggle.

“We need to remind people that Palestinian prisoners improved their conditions in jails and attained some of their rights thanks to their sacrifices, rather than Israeli generosity,” Ferwana said. “Some have lost their lives to secure those rights but this has been the most effective form of resisting and confronting the Israeli prison system.”

According to the Palestinian rights group Addameer, Israel currently holds 6,300 Palestinian political prisoners, 500 of whom are held without charge or trial under indefinitely renewable administrative detention orders issued by a military court.

Administrative detention has been the impetus for some of the more high-profile hunger strikes in recent years, such as those undertaken by Khader Adnan – a baker from the northern West Bank who has embarked on two lengthy strikes, becoming an icon of the prisoner movement – as well as journalist Muhammad al-Qiq, lawyer Muhammad Allan, and Bilal Kayed, who won his release after 15 years of imprisonment following a 71-day strike.

Hunger strikes waged by individual prisoners have been more prevalent than mass hunger strikes in recent years.

Esmat Mansour, who was imprisoned by Israel between 1993 and 2013, said this is a direct result of the fragmentation of the prisoners’ movement – a spillover of the bitter impasse between the two main Palestinian political parties, Fatah and Hamas, that has prevailed over the past decade.

Mansour pointed to the August 2004 mass hunger strike – which lasted up to 19 days, depending on the prison, yielding little improvement in prisoners’ conditions – as a turning point.
Overcoming failure

Several factors contributed to the failure of that strike, according to Mansour: the harsh repression of the Israel Prison Service, then headed by Yaacov Ganot. Mansour described Ganot as a “fascist,” adding that he reintroduced the practice of strip-searching and ordered the separation of prisoners from their visiting family members with glass instead of a net that allowed for physical contact.

The second intifada was still going on and Ariel Sharon, Israel’s prime minister at the time, was not willing to compromise. This was the first hunger strike for many of the prisoners, and they lacked experience to deal with the inevitable Israeli retribution.

“The leadership of the strike was divided and the fragmentation of the prisoners made it easier for the [prison authorities] to quell it and break our spirits,” Mansour, who participated in that strike, told The Electronic Intifada.

“It took a long time and effort for the prisoners’ movement to recover from that setback and to restore confidence among prisoners and rebuild the movement.”

It wasn’t until 2012 that prisoners from all political factions organized another sustained mass hunger strike involving multiple prisons and political parties.

Preceded by a series of individual hunger strikes in protest of administrative detention, thousands of prisoners began an open-ended strike on 17 April 2012 – Palestinian Prisoners’ Day – and refused food for nearly one month.

The hunger strikers demanded an end to solitary confinement for all prisoners and a resumption of family visits to prisoners from the Gaza Strip. Such visits had been done away with following the capture of an Israeli soldier in Gaza in June 2006 and maintained even after the soldier’s release in a prisoner exchange deal in October 2011.

The 2012 hunger strike was accompanied by popular protests and escalated mobilization on the ground, not seen in Palestine since the early days of the second intifada more than a decade earlier. Even though the Fatah leadership did not participate in that hunger strike and was even accused by some prisoners of not showing enough solidarity, according to Esmat Mansour, the Fatah base in the prisons did join the strike.

The agreement reached between Palestinian detainees and the Israeli prison authorities in May 2012 was said to include limitations on administrative detention, the end of prolonged isolation and resumption of family visits to prisoners from Gaza.
“No other option”

Five years on, Palestinian prisoners are having to resort to their empty stomachs again to fight for their rights.

“Prisoners have been preparing for this hunger strike for almost two months and my husband confirmed to me on 4 April that he was taking part,” said Khalida Hamdan, whose husband, Muhammad Mesleh, is sentenced to nine life sentences plus 50 years for his involvement in the killing of nine Israelis.

“I initially questioned his decision but he explained to me how the increasing crackdown by Israeli prison authorities had left them with no other option,” Hamdan told The Electronic Intifada.

Mesleh, a leading figure in Fatah’s armed wing, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, was arrested by Israeli occupation forces on 17 February 2001, leaving Hamdan to raise their months-old child on her own. For almost a decade, Hamdan was banned from visiting her husband on security grounds. In 2012, she went on hunger strike for seven days in solidarity with her striking husband.

Mesleh is a close companion of Marwan Barghouti, the high-profile Fatah leader serving multiple life sentences after his arrest in 2002, and the face of the current hunger strike.

“He pleaded with me to not go on a solidarity hunger strike this time around but since 17 April, I have been unable to cook, unable to sleep properly or think about anything else,” Hamdan said.

“I only hear about him in the media. Is he in solitary confinement? How is he handling pain and fatigue? How is he surviving the revenge of the prison guards? You cannot exorcise those thoughts when a loved one is on hunger strike.”
Unity

The current hunger strike, estimated by Addameer to include 1,500 prisoners, is being led by Fatah, but prisoners from all the major Palestinian factions are participating.

Following his release from Israeli prison on 20 April, former Palestinian minister Wasfi Qabaha said that the hunger strike in Hadarim prison, the epicenter of the protest, involved prisoners from all factions and that parties from across the political spectrum were represented in the strike leadership.

He added that strike leaders such as Marwan Barghouti and Karim Younes, the longest-serving Palestinian political prisoner currently held by Israel, were transferred to Jalameh prison and put in isolation.

Nadim Younes, brother of Karim Younes, who has been imprisoned by Israel since 1983, told The Electronic Intifada that family and lawyers lost all contact with Karim since he began his hunger strike.

“Karim is now 58 and 35 years of imprisonment have definitely taken their toll on his ailing body,” Nadim said. “The importance of this strike lies in the fact that it has brought together prisoners from all factions and from all over Palestine: Gaza, West Bank, Jerusalem and Palestinians from the ’48 territories [present-day Israel].”

There are lingering doubts about whether this hunger strike will avoid the failure suffered in 2004. Former prisoner Esmat Mansour does not dismiss those concerns.

“It is true that Barghouti is the undisputed leader of this hunger strike. Some believe that he is trying to send a message to the Fatah Central Committee that he remains an influential leader,” Mansour said.

“But prisoners are not puppets: they would not join this strike if they didn’t have pressing demands. And Marwan’s leadership of this strike has definitely given it momentum and unprecedented media attention.”

The unity and resilience of the prisoners’ movement in the face of Israeli repression, intimidation and attempts to delegitimize the strike are being put to the test. Moreover, it is a test of the capacity of Palestinian society to mobilize in support of the prisoners, to build sustained pressure on Israel, and overcome their divisions to stand behind the prisoners.

If there is one cause that has managed to bring Palestinians together in recent years, it has proven to be the prisoners’ struggle.

Budour Youssef Hassan is a Palestinian writer based in Jerusalem. She blogs at budourhassan.wordpress.com.

26 April 2017

By The Peace People – TRANSCEND Media Service

1 May 2017 – Mairead Maguire, who visited the women’s peace movements of North and South Korea last year with 30 international women from around the world, made the following appeal to President Trump and the U.S. administration:

“The people of North and South Korea want peace and they want a peace treaty. They do not want their country to be bombed or their government to bomb others. Having visited both North and South Korea last year and walked with thousands and thousands of Korean women, North and South, I am convinced that peace is possible and what is needed is the political will of all parties to the conflict to dialogue and for negotiations to move from a Korean armistice to a Korean Peace Treaty.

“I therefore would like to appeal to President Trump and his administration not to carry out a military strike on North Korea, but to use the means of dialogue and diplomacy to reach a peace treaty for North Korea. Such peace leadership by President Trump will give hope to the people of Korea and all of humanity.

“The people of the world need to know that peace is possible between all the human family and that there are political leaders who have the courage to move from enmity to friendship and from war to peace.”

Mairead Corrigan Maguire, co-founder of Peace People, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment. She won the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her work for peace in Northern Ireland. Her book The Vision of Peace (edited by John Dear, with a foreword by Desmond Tutu and a preface by the Dalai Lama) is available from www.wipfandstock.com. She lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland. See: www.peacepeople.com.

The Peace People began in 1976 as a protest movement against the ongoing violence in Northern Ireland. Its three founders were Mairead Maguire, Betty Williams and Ciaran McKeown. Over 100,000 people were involved in the initial movement and two of the founders, Mairead and Betty, received the Nobel Peace Prize for that year. Since its inception, the organization has been committed to building a just, peaceful society through nonviolent means – a society based on respect for each individual, and that has at its core the highest standards of human and civil rights. www.peacepeople.com

1 May 2017

A new socio-political order – not aid – will alleviate the continent’s growing poverty and famine writes

By Firoz Osman

The spectre of famine haunts parts of Africa again, with more than 20 million people facing starvation across Somalia, Nigeria and South Sudan.

Only15% of the $4.4 billion that the UN appealed for has been delivered despite horrendous images of emaciated babies and forlorn men and women in flimsy tents made of rags emblazoned on our television screens.

How does such a scale of suffering occur on a continent of 1.2 billion people, so rich in mineral wealth and oil and so huge that it can hold almost every other continent in the world?

While famines frequently occur in different parts of the world, a closer examination of the recurrence of this misery in Africa suggests there is little natural about it.

From the 1950s African national liberation movements broke the yoke of colonialism and were granted independence but it turned out to be fraudulent and the continent continued to be invisibly looted under private auspices.

Former and current imperial and colonial powers such as France, Britain, the US and Israel, use the military-industrial-corporate complex, the IMF, World Bank, and the United Nations to exploit Africa’s resources.

African governments have been forced, through structural adjustments, to divert funds from agriculture, health and education, and into areas that benefits the West.

A major cause of the famines, however, is conflict and war. Strategically located Somalia has been at war since 1995 with numerous foreign interventions and famine has been a parallel occurrence. It now faces its third famine in 25 years, the last one in 2011 that claimed 250,000 lives.

South Sudan with half its population facing starvation is a country floating on oil. Emma Jane Drew, Oxfam’s Humanitarian programme manager, described the famine as “a man-made tragedy”. In 2014 the New York Times put the blame for the conflict on the US.

The third African country in dire need of humanitarian aid named by the UN is Nigeria. Independent journalist Thomas Mountain states that up to a third of Nigerian oil is stolen, secretly loaded onto oil tankers after bribes are paid to corrupt government officials.

Western oil companies loot some $140 billion a year of Nigeria’s black gold while nearly two-third of its people live on less than $2 a day. It boasts of the biggest economy on the continent but still in constant need for IMF bailouts.

Nigeria has the largest, best-equipped army in West Africa, benefitting mostly Western military industries. Instead of being wealthy and the envy of the world, its cities are filled with homeless children begging for bread.

Tom Burgis describes in his book The Looting Machine about a network of anonymous multinationals, corporate investors and bankers, who strike opaque deals with coup leaders and African elites to drain the continent’s resources.

This is illustrated by the colonial pact where 14 West African countries are obliged by France to put 85% of their foreign reserves into France’s national bank under the French minister of Finance control.

It is estimated that France now holds nearly $500 billion of the African countries’ money in its treasury. African leaders who object or resist are killed or become victims of coups. Those who obey are rewarded with security and a lavish lifestyle while their people endure extreme poverty.

Nearly 200 million people in Africa are malnourished. Malaria, dysentery, TB, HIV/AIDS, and pneumonia, ravage the continent. More than 5 million children under the age of five die annually and millions more face death by starvation, conflict and famine.

There is minimal primary health care, schooling, electricity, clean drinking water and sanitation. Many revolutionary leaders who freed their people from colonialism now rule through the same oppressive structures they overthrew.

Robert Lupton in Toxic Charity states that in the last 50 years, the continent has received $1 trillion in benevolent aid. Country by country, Africans are worse off today with more than half living on less than $1 a day. Life expectancy has stagnated, and adult literacy plummeted.

And yet charity has become a mammoth global industry worth $138.8 billion and employs 600,000 people, more than the most valuable industry, US Oil and Gas. In sub-Saharan Africa, it is worth an annual $55.8 billion, making it equal to the yearly output of Africa’s 20 poorest countries.

Dambisa Moyo, an Economist and author of Dead Aid, says that humanitarian aid is “the disease of which it pretends to be the cure”. It is not enough to treat the symptoms but not the cause.

Charity should not become a substitute for real justice merely to patch up the effects of fundamental injustices. An alternative socio-economic-political order must be developed where wealth is deployed to meet human needs.

(Dr Firoz Osman is with the Media Review Network of South Africa)

28 April 2017

By Rene Wadlow

The United Nations (UN) together with the governments of Sweden and Switzerland which have often led humanitarian issues in the UN system held a high-level pledging conference in Geneva on April 25, 2017 to again draw attention to the deepening humanitarian crisis in war-torn Yemen, currently the largest food security emergency in the world. Some 60% of the population are in a food-insecure situation.

More than 3.5 million people have been displaced in the cycle of escalating violence. “We are witnessing the starving and the crippling of an entire generation. We must act now, to save lives” said Secretary-General Antonio Guterres who presided over the conference. Realistically, he stressed that funding and humanitarian aid alone will not reverse the fortunes of the millions of people impacted. Diplomatically, he called for a cessation of hostilities and a political settlement with talks facilitated by the Special Envoy of the Secretary General, the Mauritanian diplomat Ismail Ould Chekh Ahmed.

UN officials and most diplomats are reluctant to call the armed conflict by its real name: “a war of aggression”. The aggression of the Saudi Arabia-led coalition (Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Qatar, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates) against Yemen began on March 24, 2015.

The Saudi-led coalition is helped with arms and “intelligence” by the USA and the UK which appreciate Saudi money for arms and do not want to antagonize a large segment of the Arab world when the conflicts of Syria-Iraq-Kurds-Turkey is still “on the table.”

However, the aggression of the Saudi coalition is what has turned an internal Yemen struggle for power between the current and the former President of Yemen into a war with regional implications, now drawing Iran into the picture.

Intellectually, the “political solution” is clear. There needs to be an end to the Saudi bombing and a withdrawal of its coalition troops. Then, the different factions in Yemen can try to develop some sort of inclusive government. The Swiss Foreign Minister, a co-host of the conference, hinted to the issue in suggesting very briefly that, if asked, Switzerland could provide expertise on forms of decentralization and con-federal government.

The effort to create a centralized Yemen government has failed. The future lies in a very decentralized government with great autonomy for the regions, taking into consideration the diverse tribal configuration of the country. With intelligence and patience – always in short supply – a single, highly decentralized State might be developed.

The most difficult first-step is ending Saudi-led aggression, after which an effective humanitarian aid and development program can be put into effect.

Prof. René Wadlow is President of the Association of World Citizens.

28 April 2017

By Andre Vltchek

Dr. Gus Abu-Sitta is the head of the Plastic Surgery Department at the AUB Medical Center in Lebanon. He specializes in: reconstructive surgery. What it means in this part of the world is clear: they bring you people from the war zones, torn to pieces, missing faces, burned beyond recognition, and you have to try to give them their life back.

Dr. Abu-Sitta is also a thinker. A Palestinian born in Kuwait, he studied and lived in the UK, and worked in various war zones of the Middle East, as well as in Asia, before accepting his present position at the AUB Medical Center in Beirut, Lebanon.

We were brought together by peculiar circumstances. Several months ago I burned my foot on red-hot sand, in Southeast Asia. It was healing slowly, but it was healing. Until I went to Afghanistan where at one of the checkpoints in Herat I had to take my shoes off, and the wound got badly infected. Passing through London, I visited a hospital there, and was treated by one of Abu-Sitta’sformer professors. When I said that among other places I work in Lebanon,he recommended that I visit one of his “best students who now works in Beirut”.

I did. During that time, a pan-Arab television channel, Al-Mayadeen, was broadcasting in English, with Arabic subtitles, a long two-part interview with me, about my latest political/revolutionary novel “Aurora”and about the state of the global south, and the upsurge of the Western imperialism. To my surprise, Dr. Abu-Sitta and his colleagues were following my work and political discourses. To these hardened surgeons, my foot ‘issue’ was just a tiny insignificant scratch. What mattered was the US attack against Syria, the Palestine, and the provocations against North Korea.

My ‘injury’ healed well, and Dr. Abu-Sitta and I became good friends. Unfortunately I have to leave Beirut for Southeast Asia, before a huge conference, which he and his colleagues are launching on the May 15, 2017, a conference on the “Ecology of War”.

I believe that the topic is thoroughly fascinating and essential for our humanity, even for its survival. It combines philosophy, medicine and science.

What happens to people in war zones? And what is a war zone, really? We arrived at some common conclusions, as both of us were working with the same topic but lookingat it from two different angles: “The misery is war. The destruction of the strong state leads to conflict. A great number of people on our Planet actually live in some conflict or war, without even realizing it: in slums, in refugee camps, in thoroughly collapsed states, or in refugee camps.”

We talked a lot: about fear, which is engulfing countries like the UK, about the new wave of individualism and selfishness, which has its roots in frustration. At one point he said: “In most parts of the world “freedom” is synonymous with the independence struggle for our countries. In such places as the UK, it mainly means more individualism, selfishness and personal liberties.”

We talked about imperialism, medicine and the suffering of the Middle East.

Then we decided to publish this dialogue, shedding some light on the “Ecology of War” – this essential new discipline in both philosophy and medicine.

ECOLOGY OF WAR

(The discussion took place in Beirut, Lebanon, in Cafe Younes, on April 25, 2017)

Broken Social Contract In The Arab World, Even In Europe

G.A-S: In the South, medicine and the provision of health were critical parts of the post-colonial state. And the post-colonial state built medical systems such as we had in Iraq, Egypt and in Syria as part of the social contract. They became an intrinsic part of the creation of those states. And it was a realization that the state has to exercise its power both coercively, (which we know the state is capable of exercising, by putting you in prison, and even exercising violence), but above all non-coercively: it needs to house you, educate you, and give you health, all of those things. And that non-coercive power that the states exercise is a critical part of the legitimizing process of the state. We saw it evolve in 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. So as a digression, if you want to look at how the state was dismantled: the aim of the sanctions against Iraq was not to weaken the Makhabarat or the army, the aim of the sanctions was to rob the Iraqi state of its non-coercive power; its ability to give life, to give education, and that’s why after 12 years, the state has totally collapsed internally – not because its coercive powers have weakened, but because it was robbed of all its non-coercive powers, of all its abilities to guarantee life to its citizens.

AV: So in a way the contract between the state and the people was broken.

G.A-S: Absolutely! And you had that contract existing in the majority of post-colonialist states. With the introduction of the IMF and World Bank-led policies that viewed health andthe provision of health as a business opportunity for the ruling elites and for corporations, and viewed free healthcare as a burden on the state, you began to have an erosion in certain countries like Egypt, like Jordan, of the non-coercive powers of the state, leading to the gradual weakening of its legitimacy. Once again, the aim of the IMF and World Bank was to turn health into a commodity, which could be sold back to people as a service; sold back to those who could afford it.

AV: So, the US model, but in much more brutal form, as the wages in most of those countries were incomparably lower.

G.A-S: Absolutely! And the way you do that in these countries: you create a two-tier system where the government tier is so under-funded, that people choose to go to the private sector. And then in the private sector you basically have the flourishing of all aspects of private healthcare: from health insurance to provision of health care, to pharmaceuticals.

AV: Paradoxically this scenario is also taking place in the UK right now.

G.A-S: We see it in the UK and we’ll see it in many other European countries. But it has already happened in this region, in the Arab world. Here, the provision of health was so critical to creation of the states. It was critical to the legitimacy of the state.

AV: The scenario has been extremely cynical: while the private health system was imposed on the Arab region and on many other parts of the world, in the West itself, except in the United States, medical care remainspublic and basically free. We are talking about state medical care in Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

G.A-S: Yes. In Europe as part of the welfare state that came out of the Second World War, the provision of healthcare was part of the social contract. As the welfare state with the advent of Thatcherism and Reagan-ism was being dismantled, it became important to undergo a similar process as elsewhere. The difference is that in the UK, and alsoin countries like Germany, it was politically very dangerous. It could lead to election losses. So the second plan was to erode the health system, by a thousand blows kill it gradually. What you ended up in the UK is the piece-by-piece privatization of the health sector. And the people don’t know, they don’t notice that the system is becoming private. Or in Germany where actually the government does not pay for healthcare – the government subsidizes the insurance companies that profit from the private provision of healthcare.

AV: Before we began recording this discussion, we were speaking about the philosophical dilemmas that are now besieging or at least should be besieging the medical profession. Even the social medical care in Europe: isn’t it to some extent a cynical arrangement? European countries are now all part of the imperialist block, together with the United States, and they are all plundering the rest of the world – the Middle East, Africa, parts of Asia – and they are actually subsidizing their social system from that plunder. That’s one thing. But also, the doctors and nurses working for instance in the UK or Germany are often ‘imported’ from much poorer countries, where they have often received free education. Instead of helping their own, needy people, they are actually now serving the ageing and by all international comparisons, unreasonably spoiled and demanding population in Europe, which often uses medical facilities as if they were some ‘social club’.

G.A-S: I think what has happened, particularly in Europe is that there is a gradual erosion of all aspects of the welfare state. Politically it was not yet possible to get rid of free healthcare. The problem that you can certainly see in the United Kingdom is that health is the final consequence of social and economic factors that people live in. So if you have chronic unemployment, second and third generation unemployment problem, these have health consequences. If you have the destruction of both pensions and the cushion of a social umbrella for the unemployed, that has consequences… Poor housing has health consequences. Mass unemployment has health consequences. Politically it was easy to get rid of all other aspects of the welfare state, but they were stuck with a healthcare problem. And so the losing battle that the health systems in the West are fighting is that they are being expected to cater to the poor consequences of the brutal capitalist system as a non-profit endeavor. But we know that once these lifestyle changes are affecting people’s health, it’s too late in terms of cure or prevention. And so what the European health systems do, they try to patch people and to get them out of the system and back on the street. So if you have children with chronic asthma, you treat the asthma but not the dump housing in which these children are living in. If you have violent assaults and trauma related to violence, you treat the trauma, the physical manifestation, and not the breakdown of youth unemployment, or racism that creates this. So in order to sustain this anomaly, as you said, you need an inflated health system, because you make people sick and then you try to fix them, rather than stopping them from being sick. Hence that brain drains that have basically happened, where you have more Ghanaian doctors in New York than you have in Ghana.

AV: And you have an entire army of Philippine nurses in the UK, while there is suddenly a shortage of qualified nurses in Manila.

G.A-S: Absolutely! This is the result of the fact that actually people’s health ‘happens’ outside the health system. Because you cannot get rid of the health system, you end up having a bloated health system, and try to fix the ailments that are coming through the door.

Collapse Of The Health Care In The Middle East

AV: You worked in this entire region. You worked in Iraq, and in Gaza… both you and I worked in Shifa Hospital in Gaza… You worked in Southern Lebanon during the war. How brutal is the healthcare situation in the Middle East? How badly has been, for instance, the Iraqi peoples’ suffering, compared to Western patients? How cruel is the situation in Gaza?

A-S: If you look at places like Iraq: Iraq in the 80’s probably had one of the most advanced health systems in the region. Then you went through the first war against Iraq, followed by 12 years of sanctions in which that health system was totally dismantled; not just in terms of hospitals and medication and the forced exile of doctors and health professionals, but also in terms of other aspects of health, which are the sewage and water and electricity plants, all of those parts of the infrastructure that directly impact on people’s lives.

AV: Then came depleted uranium…

G.A-S: And then you add to the mix that 2003 War and then the complete destruction and dismantling of the state, and the migration of some 50% of Iraq’s doctors.

AV: Where did they migrate?

G.A-S: Everywhere: to the Gulf and to the West; to North America, Europe… So what you have in Iraq is a system that is not only broken, but that has lost the components that are required to rebuild it. You can’t train a new generation of doctors in Iraq, because your trainers have all left the country. You can’t create a health system in Iraq, because you have created a government infrastructure that is intrinsically unstable and based on a multi-polarity of the centers of power which all are fighting for control of the pie of the state… and so Iraqis sub-contract their health at hospital level to India and to Turkey and Lebanon, or Jordan, because they are in this vicious loop.

AV: But this is only for those who can afford it?

G.A-S: Yes for those who can, but even in those times when the government had cash it could not build the system, anymore. So it would sub-contract health provisions outside, because the system was so broken that money couldn’t fix it.

AV: Is it the same in other countries of the region?

G.A-S: The same is happening in Libya and the same is happening in Syria, with regards of the migration of their doctors. Syria will undergo something similar to Iraq at the end of the war, if the Syrian state is destroyed.

AV: But it is still standing.

G.A-S: It still stands and it is still providing healthcare to the overwhelming majority of the population even to those who live in the rebel-controlled areas. They are travelling to Damascus and other cities for their cardiac services or for their oncological services.

AV: So no questions asked; you are sick, you get treated?

G.A-S: Even from the ISIS-controlled areas people can travel and get treated, because this is part of the job of the state.

AV: The same thing is happening with the education there; Syria still provides all basic services in that area.

G.A-S: Absolutely! But in Libya, because the state has totally disappeared or has disintegrated, all this is gone.

AV: Libya is not even one country, anymore…

G.A-S: There is not a unified country and there is definitely no health system. In Gaza and the Palestine, the occupation and the siege, ensure that there is no normal development of the health system and in case of Gaza as the Israelis say “every few years you come and you mown the lawn”; you kill as many people in these brutal and intense wars, so you can ensure that the people for the next few years will be trying to survive the damage that you have caused.

AV: Is there any help from Israeli physicians?

G.A-S: Oh yes! Very few individuals, but there is…

But the Israeli medical establishment is actually an intrinsic part of the Israeli establishment, and the Israeli academic medical establishment is also part of the Israeli establishment. And the Israeli Medical Association refused to condemn the fact that Israeli doctors examine Palestinian political prisoners for what they call “fitness for interrogation”. Which is basically… you get seen by a doctor who decides how much torture you can take before you die.

AV: This actually reminds me of what I was told in 2015 in Pretoria, South Africa, where I was invited to participate as a speaker at the International Conference of the Psychologists for Peace. Several US psychologists reported that during the interrogation and torture of alleged terrorists, there were professional psychologists and even clinical psychiatrists standing by, often assisting the interrogators.

G.A-S: Yes, there are actually 2-3 well-known American psychologists who designed the CIA interrogation system – its process.

AV: What you have described that is happening in Palestine is apparently part of a very pervasive system. I was told in the Indian-controlled Kashmir that Israeli intelligence officers are sharing their methods of interrogation and torture with their Indian counterparts. And of course the US is involved there as well.

CONFLICT MEDICINE

Gus Abu-Sitta: War surgery grew out of the Napoleonic Wars. During these wars, two armies met; they usually met at the frontline. They attacked each other, shot at each other or stabbed each other. Most of injured were combatants, and they got treated in military hospitals. You had an evolution of war surgery. What we have in this region, we believe, is that the intensity and the prolonged nature of these wars or these conflicts are not temporal-like battles, they don’t start and finish. And they are sufficiently prolonged that they change the biological ecology, the ecology in which people live. They create the ecology of war. That ecology maintains itself well beyond of what we know is the shooting, because they alter the living environment of people. The wounds are physical, psychological and social wounds; the environment is altered as to become hostile; both to the able-bodied and more hostile to the wounded. And as in the cases of these multi-drug-resistant organisms, which are now a big issue in the world like the multi-drug-resistant bacteria, 85% of Iraqi war wounded have multi-drug-resistant bacteria, 70% of Syrian war wounded have it… So we say: this ecology, this bio-sphere that the conflicts create is even altered at the basic DNA of the bacteria. We have several theories about it; partly it’s the role of the heavy metals in modern ordnance, which can trigger mutation in these bacteria that makes them resistant to antibiotics. So your bio-sphere, your bubble, your ecological bubble in which you live in, is permanently changed. And it doesn’t disappear the day the bombs disappear. It has to be dismantled, and in order to dismantle it you have to understand the dynamics of the ecology of war. That’s why our program was setup at the university, which had basically been the major tertiary teaching center during the civil war and the 1982 Israeli invasion. And then as the war in Iraq and Syria developed, we started to get patients from these countries and treat them here. We found out that we have to understand the dynamics of conflict medicine and to understand the ecology of war; how the physical, biological, psychological and social manifestations of war wounding happen, and how this ecology of war is created; everything from bacteria to the way water and the water cycle changes, to the toxic reminisce of war, to how people’s body reacts… Many of my Iraqi patients that I see have multiple members of their families injured.

AV: Is the AUB Medical Center now the pioneer in this research: the ecology of war?

G.A.-S: Yes, because of the legacy of the civil war… of regional wars.

AV: Nothing less than a regional perpetual conflict…

G.A-S: Perpetual conflict, yes; first homegrown, and then regional. We are the referral center for the Iraqi Ministry of Health, referral center for the Iraqi Ministry of Interior, so we act as a regional center, and the aim of our program is to dedicate more time and space and energy to the understanding of how this ecology of war comes about.

AV: In my writing and in my films, I often draw the parallel between the war and extreme poverty. I have been working in some of the worst slums on Earth, those in Africa, Central America and Caribbean, South Asia, the Philippines and elsewhere. I concluded that many societies that are in theory living in peace are in reality living in prolonged or even perpetual wars. Extreme misery is a form of war, although there is no ‘declaration of war’, and there is no defined frontline. I covered both countless wars and countless places of extreme misery, and the parallel, especially the physical, psychological and social impact on human beings, appears to be striking. Would you agree, based on your research? Do you see extreme misery as a type of war?

G.A-S: Absolutely. Yes.At the core of it is the ‘dehumanization’ of people. Extreme poverty is a form of violence. The more extreme this poverty becomes, the closer it comes to the physical nature of violence. War is the accelerated degradation of people’s life to reaching that extreme poverty.But that extreme poverty can be reached by a more gradual process. War only gets them there faster.

AV: A perpetual state of extreme poverty is in a way similar to a perpetual state of conflict, of a war.

G.A-S: Definitely. And it is a war mainly against those who are forced to live in these circumstances. It’s the war against the poor and the South. It’s the war against the poor in the inner-cities of the West.

AV: When you are defining the ecology of war, are you also taking what we are now discussing into consideration? Are you researching the impact of extreme poverty on human bodies and human lives? In this region, extreme poverty can often be found in the enormous refugee camps, while in other parts of the world it dwells in countless slums.

G.A-S: This extreme poverty is part of the ecology that we are discussing. One of the constituents of the ecology is when you take a wounded body and you place it in a harsh physical environment and you see how this body is re-wounded and re-wounded again, and this harsh environment becomes a continuation of that battleground, because what you see is a process of re-wounding. Not because you are still in the frontline somewhere in Syria, but because your kids are now living in a tent with 8 other people and they are in danger of becoming the victims of the epidemic of child burns that we now have in the refugee camps, because of poor and unsafe housing.

Let’s look at it from a different angle: what constitutes a war wound, or a conflict-related injury? Your most basic conflict-related injury is a gunshot wound and a blast injury from shrapnel. But what happens when you take that wounded body and throw it into a tent? What are the complications for this wounded body living in a harsh environment; does this constitute a war-related injury? When you impoverish the population to the point that you have children suffering from the kind of injuries that we know are the results of poor and unsafe housing, is that a conflict-related injury? Or you have children now who have work-related injuries, because they have to go and become the main breadwinners for the home, working as car mechanics or porters or whatever. Or do you also consider a fact that if you come from a country where a given disease used to be treatable there, but due to the destruction of a health system, that ailment is not treatable anymore, because the hospitals are gone or because doctors had to leave, does that constitute a conflict-related injury? So, we have to look at the entire ecology: beyond a bullet and shrapnel – thingsthat get headlines in the first 20 seconds.

AV: Your research seems to be relevant to most parts of the world.

G.A-S: Absolutely. Because we know that these humanitarian crises only exist in the imagination of the media and the UN agencies. There are no crises.

AV: It is perpetual state, again.

G.A-S: Exactly, it is perpetual. It does not stop. It is there all the time. Therefore there is no concept of ‘temporality of crises’, one thing we are arguing against. There is no referee who blows the whistle at the end of the crises. When the cameras go off, the media and then the world, decides that the crises are over. But you know that people in Laos, for instance,still have one of the highest amputation rates in the world.

AV: I know. I worked there in the Plain of Jars, which is an enormous minefield even to this day.

G.A-S: Or Vietnam, with the greatest child facial deformities in the world as a result of Agent Orange.

AV: You worked in these countries.

G.A-S: Yes.

AV: Me too; and I used to live in Vietnam. That entire region is still suffering from what used to be known as the “Secret War”. In Laos, the poverty is so rampant that people are forced to sell unexploded US bombs for scrap. They periodically explode. In Cambodia, even between Seam Reap and the Thai border, there are villages where people are still dying or losing limbs.

G.A-S: Now many things depend on how we define them. It is often a game of words.

AV: India is a war zone, from Kashmir to the Northeast, Bihar and slums of Mumbai.

G.A-S: If you take the crudest way of measuring conflict, which is the number of people killed by weapons, Guatemala and Salvador have now more people slaughtered than they had during the war. But because the nature in which violence is exhibited changed, because it doesn’t carry a political tag now, it is not discussed. But actually, it is by the same people against the same people.

AV: I wrote about and filmed in Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, on several occasions. The extreme violence thereis a direct result of the conflict implanted, triggered by the West, particularly by the United States. The same could be said about such places like Jamaica, Dominican Republic and Haiti.It has led to almost absolute social collapse.

G.A-S: Yes, in Jamaica, the CIA played a great role in the 70’s.

AV: In that part of the world we are not talking just about poverty…

G.A-S: No, no. We are talking AK-47’s!

AV: Exactly. Once I filmed in San Salvador, in a gangland… A friend, a local liberation theology priest kindly drove me around. We made two loops. The first loop was fine. On the second one they opened fire at our Land Cruiser, with some heavy stuff. The side of our car was full of bullet holes, and they blew two tires. We got away just on our rims. In the villages, marassimply come and plunder and rape. They take what they want. It is a war.

G.A.-S: ICRC, they train surgeons in these countries. So the ICRC introduced war surgery into the medical curriculum of the medical schools in Colombia and Honduras. Because effectively, these countries are in a war, so you have to train surgeons, so they know what to do when they receive 4-5 patients every day, with gunshot wounds.

AV: Let me tell you what I witnessed in Haiti, just to illustrate your point. Years ago I was working in Cité Soleil, Port-au-Prince, Haiti. They say it is the most dangerous ‘neighborhood’ or slum on Earth. The local wisdom goes: “you can enter, but you will never leave alive”. I went there with a truck, with two armed guards, but they were so scared that they just abandoned me there, with my big cameras and everything, standing in the middle of the road. I continued working; I had no choice. At one point I saw a long line in front of some walled compound. I went in. What I was suddenly facing was thoroughly shocking: several local people on some wooden tables, blood everywhere, and numerous US military medics and doctors performing surgeries under the open sky. It was hot, flies and dirt everywhere… A man told me his wife had a huge tumor. Without even checking what it was, the medics put her on a table, gave her “local” and began removing the stuff. After the surgery was over, a husband and wife walked slowly to a bus stop and went home. A couple of kilometers from there I founda well-equipped and clean US medical facility, but only for US troops and staff. I asked the doctors what they were really doing in Haiti and they were quiet open about it; they replied: “we are training for combat scenario… This is as close to a war that we can get.” They were experimenting on human beings, of course; learning how to operate during the combat…

G.A-S: So, the distinction is only in definitions.

AV: As a surgeon who has worked all over the Middle East but also in many other parts of the world, how would you compare the conflict here to the conflicts in Asia, the Great Lakes of Africa and elsewhere?

G.A-S: In the Middle East, you still have people remembering when they had hospitals. Iraqis who come to my clinic remember the 80’s. They know that life was different and could have been different. And they are health-literate. The other issue is that in 2014 alone, some 30,000 Iraqis were injured. The numbers are astounding. We don’t have a grasp of the numbers in Libya, the amount of ethnic cleansing and killing that is happening in Libya. In terms of numbers, they are profound, but in terms of the effect, we are at the beginning of the phase of de-medicalization. So it wasn’t that these medical systems did not develop. They are being de-developed. They are going backwards.

AV: Are you blaming Western imperialism for the situation?

G.A-S: If you look at the sanctions and what they did to their health system, of course! If you look at Libya, of course! The idea that these states disintegrated is a falsehood. We know what the dynamics of the sanctions were in Iraq, and what happened in Iraq after 2003. We know what happened in Libya.

AV: Or in Afghanistan…

G.A-S: The first thing that the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan or the Nicaraguan Contras were told to do was to attack the clinics. The Americans have always understood that you destroy the state by preventing it from providing these non-coercive powers that I spoke about.

AV: Do you see this part of the world as the most effected, most damaged?

G.A-S: At this moment and time certainly. And the statistics show it. I think around 60% of those dying from wars are killed in this region…

AV: And how do you define this region geographically?

G.A-S: From Afghanistan to Mauritania. And that includes the Algerian-Mali border. The Libyan border… The catastrophe of the division of Sudan, what’s happening in South Sudan, what’s happening in Somalia, Libya, Egypt, the Sinai Desert, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, even Pakistan including people who are killed there by drones…

AV: But then we also have around 10 million people who have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo, since the 1995 Rwandan invasion…

G.A-S: Now that is a little bit different. That is the ‘more advanced phase’: when you’ve completely taken away the state… In the Arab world Libya is the closest to that scenario. There the oil companies have taken over the country. The mining companies are occupying DRC. And they run the wars directly, rather than through the Western armies. You erode the state, completely, until it disappears and then the corporations, directly, as they did in the colonialist phase during the East Indian Company, and the Dutch companies, become the main players again.

AV: What is the goal of your research, the enormous project called the “Ecology of War”?

G.A-S: One of the things that we insist on is this holistic approach. The compartmentalization is part of the censorship process. “You are a microbiologist then only look what is happening with the bacteria… You are an orthopedic surgeon, so you only have to look at the blast injuries, bombs, landmine injuries…” So that compartmentalization prevents bringing together people who are able to see the whole picture. Therefore we are insisting that this program also has social scientists, political scientists, anthropologists, microbiologists, surgeons… Otherwise we’d just see the small science. We are trying to put the sciences together to see the bigger picture. We try to put the pieces of puzzle together, and to see the bigger picture.

AV: And now you have a big conference. On the 15th of May…

G.A-S: Now we have a big conference; basically the first congress that will look at all these aspects of conflict and health; from the surgical, to the reconstruction of damaged bodies, to the issues of medical resistance of bacteria, infectious diseases, to some absolutely basic issues. Like, before the war there were 30,000 kidney-failure patients in Yemen. Most dialysis patients are 2 weeks away from dying if they don’t get dialysis. So, there is a session looking at how you provide dialysis in the middle of these conflicts? What do you do, because dialysis services are so centralized? The movement of patients is not easy, and the sanctions… One topic will be ‘cancer and war’… So this conference will be as holistic as possible, of the relationship between the conflict and health.

We expect over 300 delegates, and we will have speakers from India, Yemen, Palestine, Syria, from the UK, we have people coming from the humanitarian sector, from ICRC, people who worked in Africa and the Middle East, we have people who worked in previous wars and are now working in current wars, so we have a mix of people from different fields.

AV: What is the ultimate goal of the program?

G.A-S: We have to imagine the health of the region beyond the state. On the conceptual level, we need to try to figure out what is happening? We can already see certain patterns. One of them is the regionalization of healthcare. The fact that Libyans get treated in Tunisia, Iraqis and Syrians get treated in Beirut, Yemenis get treated in Jordan. So you already have the disintegration of these states and the migration of people to the regional centers. The state is no longer a major player, because the state was basically destroyed. We feel that this is a disease of the near future, medium future and long-term future. Therefore we have to understand it, in order to better treat it, we have to put mechanisms in place that this knowledge transfers into the medical education system, which will produce medical professionals who are better equipped to deal with this health system. We have to make sure that people are aware of many nuances of the conflict, beyond the shrapnel and beyond the bullet. The more research we put into this area of the conflict and health, the more transferable technologies we develop –the better healthcare we’d be allowed to deliver in these situations, the better training our students and graduates would receive,and better work they willperform in this region for the next 10 or 15 years.

AV: And hopefully more lives would be saved…

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are revolutionary novel “Aurora” and two bestselling works of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and  “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”.View his other books here. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Al-Mayadeen. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo. After having lived in Latin America, Africa and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.

28 April 2017

By Kathy Kelly

On April 26th, 2017, in Yemen’s port city of Hodeidah, the Saudi-led coalition which has been waging war in Yemen for the past two years dropped leaflets informing Hodeidah’s residents of an impending attack.  One leaflet read:

“Our forces of legitimacy are heading to liberate Hodeidah and end the suffering of our gracious Yemeni people. Join your legitimate government in favor of the free and happy Yemen.”

And another: “The control of the Hodeidah port by the terrorist Houthi militia will increase famine and hinder the delivery of international relief aid to our gracious Yemeni people.”

Certainly the leaflets represent one aspect of a confusing and highly complicated set of battles raging in Yemen. Given alarming reports about near famine conditions in Yemen, it seems the only ethical “side” for outsiders to choose would be that of children and families afflicted by hunger and disease.

Yet the U.S. has decidedly taken the side of the Saudi-led coalition. Consider a Reuters report, on April 19, 2017, after U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis met with senior Saudi officials. According to the report, U.S. officials said “U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition was discussed including what more assistance the United States could provide, including potential intelligence support…”  The Reuters report notes that Mattis believes “Iran’s destabilizing influence in the Middle East would have to be overcome to end the conflict in Yemen, as the United States weighs increasing support to the Saudi-led coalition fighting there.”

Iran may be providing some weapons to the Houthi rebels, but it’s important to clarify what support the U.S. has given to the Saudi-led coalition.  As of March 21, 2016, Human Rights Watch reported the following weapon sales, in 2015 to the Saudi government:

– July 2015, the US Defense Department approved a number of weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, including a US $5.4 billion deal for 600 Patriot Missiles and a $500 million deal for more than a million rounds of ammunition, hand grenades, and other items, for the Saudi army.

– According to the US Congressional review, between May and September, the US sold $7.8 billion worth of weapons to the Saudis.

– In October, the US government approved the sale to Saudi Arabia of up to four Lockheed Littoral Combat Ships for $11.25 billion.
· In November, the US signed an arms deal with Saudi Arabia worth $1.29 billion for more than 10,000 advanced air-to-surface munitions including laser-guided bombs, “bunker buster” bombs, and MK84 general purpose bombs; the Saudis have used all three in Yemen.

Reporting about the role of the United Kingdom in selling weapons to the Saudis, Peace News notes that “Since the bombing began in March 2015, the UK has licensed over £3.3bn worth of arms to the regime, including:

– £2.2 bn worth of ML10 licences (aircraft, helicopters, drones)

– £1.1 bn worth of ML4 licences (grenades, bombs, missiles, countermeasures)

– £430,000 worth of ML6 licences (armoured vehicles, tanks)

What has the Saudi-led coalition done with all of this weaponry?  A United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights panel of experts found that:
“At least 3,200 civilians have been killed and 5,700 wounded since coalition military operations began, 60 percent of them in coalition airstrikes.”

A Human Rights Watch report, referring to the UN panel’s findings, notes that the panel documented attacks on camps for internally displaced persons and refugees; civilian gatherings, including weddings; civilian vehicles, including buses; civilian residential areas; medical facilities; schools; mosques; markets, factories and food storage warehouses; and other essential civilian infrastructure, such as the airport in Sana’a, the port in Hodeidah and domestic transit routes.”

Five cranes in Hodeidah which were formerly used to offload goods from ships arriving in the port city were destroyed by Saudi airstrikes.  70% of Yemen’s food comes through the port city.

Saudi coalition airstrikes have hit at least four hospitals supported by Doctors Without Borders.

In light of these findings, the leaflets fluttering down from Saudi jets on the beleaguered city of Hodeidah, encouraging residents to side with the Saudis “in favor of the free and happy Yemen” seem exceptionally bizarre.

UN agencies have clamored for humanitarian relief. Yet the role the UN Security Council has played in calling for negotiations seems entirely lopsided.  On April 14, 2016, UN Security Council Resolution 2216 demanded “that all parties in the embattled country, in particular the Houthis, immediately and unconditionally end violence and refrain from further unilateral actions that threatened the political transition.” At no point is Saudi Arabia mentioned in the Resolution.

Speaking on December 19, 2016, Sheila Carpico, Professor of Political Science at the University of Richmond and a leading Yemen specialist called the UN Security Council sponsored negotiations a cruel joke.

These negotiations are based on UN Security Council resolutions 2201 and 2216. Resolution 2216 of 14 April 2015, reads as if Saudi Arabia is an impartial arbitrator rather than a party to an escalating conflict, and as if the GCC “transition plan” offers a “peaceful, inclusive, orderly and Yemeni-led political transition process that meets the legitimate demands and aspirations of the Yemeni people, including women.”

Although scarcely three weeks into the Saudi-led intervention the UN’s deputy secretary-general for human rights said that the majority of the 600 people already killed were civilian victims of Saudi and Coalition airstrikes, UNSC 2216 called only on “Yemeni parties” to end the use of violence. There was no mention of the Saudi-led intervention. There was similarly no call for a humanitarian pause or corridor.

The UN Security Council resolution seems as bizarre as the leaflets delivered by the Saudi jets.

The U.S. Congress could put an end to U.S. complicity in the crimes against humanity being committed by military forces in Yemen.  Congress could insist that the U.S. stop supplying the Saudi led coalition with weapons, stop helping Saudi jets to refuel, end diplomatic cover for Saudi Arabia, and stop providing the Saudis with intelligence support. And perhaps the U.S. Congress would move in this direction if elected representatives believed that their constituents care deeply about these issues. In today’s political climate, public pressure has become vital.

Historian Howard Zinn famously said, in 1993, “There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people for a purpose which is unattainable. If the purpose is to stop terrorism, even the supporters of the bombing say it won’t work; if the purpose is to gain respect for the United States, the result is the opposite…”  And if the purpose is to raise the profits of major military contractors and weapon peddlers?

Kathy Kelly (Kathy@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org)

28 April 2017

By Dr Gideon Polya

On Australia’s Anzac Day,  Muslim, feminist  social advocate and  humanitarian  journalist  Yassmin Abdel-Magied (who works for the ABC, Australia’s equivalent of the UK BBC) posted on her Facebook page: “Lest we forget (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine)”. Savaged by public outcry, Ms Abdel-Magied rapidly deleted the post and apologized. The post was correct and her silencing by rabid jingoists is a stain on Australia and an attack on free speech.

One can succinctly amplify Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s truthful combination of seven (7) words that so offended the rabid jingoists of imperial lackey Australia as follows. Australia’s Anzac Day (“the one day of the year”) commemorates the invasion of Turkey on 25 April 1915 by the Australian  and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) and Anglo-French forces. The invasion was unsuccessful and the Allied forces withdrew in 1916.  Anzac Day commemorates  Australia’s  war dead totalling about 100,000 over the last century in the service of the British Empire or, after Pearl Harbor,  the American Empire. Australia and the Australian War Memorial ignore the 100,000  Indigenous Australians who died defending Australia from genocidal invaders (the British) while massively – and indeed most appropriately – commemorating 100,000 courageous Australians who died overseas in foreign lands in British and/or American wars.

As a UK lackey or US lackeys Australia has invaded 85 out of 203 present-day countries (195 UN-recognized nations and 8 non-UN-recognized self-governing countries) as compared to the British 193, the French 80,  the US 72 (52 after WW2), Germany 39, Japan 30, Russia 25, Canada 25,  Apartheid Israel 12 and China 2. Australia has been involved in all post-1950 US Asian wars, atrocities associated with 40 million Asian deaths from violence or war-imposed deprivation. Australia is an enthusiastic participant in the US War on Muslims (aka the US War on Terror) that has been associated with 32 million Muslims deaths from violence, 5 million, or deprivation, 27 million, in 20 countries invaded by the  US Alliance since the US Government’s 9-11 false flag atrocity that killed 3,000 people, overwhelmingly  Americans. There are presently 65 million refugees in the World  with about half being Muslim refugees from genocidal wars conducted by the US and its allies, notably the UK, Australia, Canada, France  and US-, UK-, Australia- , Canada- and France-backed Apartheid Israel. The refugee breakdown is circa  7 million (Palestine),  5-6 million (Iraq), 11 million (Syria), 2 million (Somalia), 1 million (Libya), 3 million (Afghanistan), 2 million (Pakistan), 0.5 million (Yemen). US lackey Australia is complicit in an ongoing Muslim Holocaust and Muslim Genocide. In addition to various involvements in Libya, Syira, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, Australia is  targeting  US drone strikes in starving Somalia and starving Yemen (Gideon Polya, “Paris Atrocity Context: 27 Million Muslim Avoidable  Deaths From Imposed Deprivation In 20 Countries Violated By US Alliance Since 9-11”, Countercurrents, 22 November, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya221115.htm ;  “Experts: US did 9-11”: https://sites.google.com/site/expertsusdid911/; “Muslim Holocaust Muslim Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/muslimholocaustmuslimgenocide/ ; “Stop state terrorism”: https://sites.google.com/site/stopstateterrorism/ ).

Back to Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s “Lest we forget (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine)” –  “Lest we forget” is absolutely correct. Silence is complicity and silencing truth-tellers like Yassmin Abdel-Magied is worse than mere complicity. Australia has a policy of highly abusively and indefinitely  imprisoning  refugees (mostly Muslims) without charge or trial in remote concentration camps on the Island Nation of Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. Australia is presently involved in its Third Syrian War in a century (it previously invaded Syria in WW1 and WW2). In the present US-backed Syrian Civil War 0.5 million Syrians  have  died violently, a similar number have died from war-imposed deprivation and 11 million refugees have been generated . ANZAC forces commenced the Palestinian Genocide and Bedouin Genocide with the WW1 conquest of Palestine that led to a famine that killed 100,000 Palestinians, and with the December 1918 Surafend Massacre of Palestinians, including Bedouin. ANZAC forces helped to brutally suppress pro-democracy Egyptians  in 1919.

Duncan Fine (a lawyer and Director and Special Counsel for The National Justice Project) has come to Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s defence and offered this fine opinion: “Last month Attorney-General George Brandis called for changes to the “offend, insult and humiliate” clause in Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, saying that they stifled freedom of speech and that was “one of the key things the Anzacs fought for”. With perfect timing, yesterday, on Anzac Day, we got to see whether he was right. Because Yassmin Abdel-Magied, the young social advocate, part-time ABC presenter and writer posted on her Facebook page: “Lest we forget (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine)”. She deleted the post within hours and wrote a brief ­apology… To paraphrase George Brandis, the ability to bravely say what you think, no matter how unpopular, is exactly why the Anzacs fought at Gallipoli. Accordingly, we should celebrate Abdel-Magied, not attack her” (Duncan Fine , “We should celebrate Yassmin Abdel-Magied , not attack her”, Sydney Morning Herald , 26 April 2017: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/we-should-celebrate-yassmin-abdelmagied-not-attack-her-20170426-gvsp1k.html ).

I wrote a letter of support for Yassmin Abdel-Magied  to her fellow  ABC journalists (however the Silence has been Deafening):

LETTER:

“Dear ABC journalist,

This is a letter of support for a courageous and humane  ABC journalist, Ms Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who was absolutely correct to say in effect: “Lest we forget all the victims of war” but has been savaged on that account by  the Yellow Press of the Dirty Digger [media mogul Rupert Murdoch] and by a vomit of Coalition politicians.

ANZAC forces commenced the Palestinian Genocide and Bedouin Genocide with the WW1 conquest of Palestine that led to a famine that killed 100,000 Palestinians and with the December 1918 Surafend Massacre of Palestinians, including Bedouin. 25 April is Anzac Day for Australians and New Zealanders, a day on which they quite rightly remember their courageous veterans and courageous military war dead at cenotaph memorial  services and veteran parades  in cities and in country towns. The key phrase associated with Anzac Day is “lest we forget” – lest we forget the courageous and loyal men and women who served or  died in the service of their country in war,  whether or not the war was just or lawful. However “lest we forget” unfortunately does not extend to the victims of rape in war or the millions of “collateral” civilian deaths.  Nor does “lest we forget” extend to the war criminal politicians, lobbyists, media and corporations primarily responsible for these war crimes. 25 April is Anzac Day commemorating the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) invasion of Turkey at Gallipoli in 1915, the day after the commencement of the Turkish Armenian Genocide (1.5 million Armenians killed) that was precipitated by the prior prolonged Allied naval bombardment. On Anzac Day Australians utterly ignore Australia’s complicity in horrendous UK and US war crimes. Australia has a secret genocide history that is resolutely ignored by White Australians.

For details of 40 deadly atrocities in which Australia has been complicit see  Gideon Polya, “On Anzac Day Australia ignores its complicity in horrendous war crimes & climate crimes”, Countercurrents, 24 April 2017: http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/04/24/on-anzac-day-australia-ignores-its-complicity-in-horrendous-war-crimes-climate-crimes/ .

My detailed and documented analysis was published on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day (Armenian Genocide Memorial Day) (24 April)  for a world-wide audience and concludes: “On Anzac Day Australians rightly remember the sacrifice of their courageous veterans and  courageous war dead. However,  on such solemn memorial occasions Australians, all members of the US Alliance and indeed all of Humanity must also  publicly remember the horrendous civilian deaths from violence or war-imposed deprivation and other atrocities, notably rape and other violent and traumatic subjugation, associated with war.  Lest we forget. As Albert Einstein famously observed: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”. Sustained Mainstream media fake news through lying by omission means that a poorly-informed Humanity is badly running out of time to save the planet. Examine the above catalogue of war criminal,  climate criminal or sociopathic Australian complicities and determine the complicity of your country in egregious inhumanity or egregious threats to Humanity.  Please tell everyone you can.”

Yours sincerely, Dr, Gideon Polya, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia”

Since the terror hysteria occasioned by the US Government’s 9-11 false flag atrocity that killed 3,000 people, mostly Americans, there has been a huge increase in anti-Arab anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, warmongering and jingoism within the US Alliance, including  Australia.  Each year  Australian Mainstream  media, politicians and academic presstitutes join in an outpouring of fervent jingoism on the occasion of Anzac Day.  Alex Bainbridge commented thus in the Green left Weekly on this most recent Anzac Day (2017): “Today — ANZAC Day — is the climax of the orgy of nationalism and militarism we’ve been subjected to in recent times, ostensibly to remember the ordinary people who responded to the lies of the government by fighting and dying in an unjust war. Of course progressive people have sympathy for the soldiers who died as well as the soldiers who didn’t die but nevertheless witnessed or experienced terrible things. But it is also fair to point out the hypocrisy of the official propaganda machine” (Alex Bainbridge, “Justice and hypocrisy on Anzac Day), Green Left Weekly, 25 April 2017: https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/justice-and-hypocrisy-anzac-day ).

Honest and forthright Australian journalist Guy Rundle writing in the independent Australian web magazine Crikey on the centenary of the futile and bloody 1915 ANZAC and Allied invasion of Turkey (2015): “As Anzac Day approaches, the World War I wars have started up again! About ten years ago, WWI ceased to be a futile struggle and became a struggle against German militarism. The reason was obvious: as the Iraq War bogged down, the usual historical argument for war — the failure of “appeasing” Hitler — stopped working. We needed the example of a meaningful quagmire, and so WWI was it, the revision starting almost to the day that the last living witnesses of the conflict died. But Turkey has always been a problem in this — there was nothing to pin on the rather torpid empire, which was attacked purely as a way to cut through to central Europe and open a second front (and then carve up its provinces into colonies). That problem has become especially acute now that we are attempting to turn Gallipoli into something other than meaningless slaughter… Meanwhile, there’s probably at least one truth and reconciliation commission that Australians should be more interested in, and that’s to do with a war closer to home — the frontier massacres of Aborigines, which continued right up to and beyond WWI, and which shaped the attitudes of many of the country kids who became the Diggers. There’s a link there, too. The larrikin image of the Anzacs that we celebrate may have come from an irreverence to authority in the face of British disdain, but much of that disdain came from the fact that some, perhaps many, Australian troops were far more willing to kill Arab civilians than British soldiers were, and Australian troops were notorious for it. Why? Because they’d already become comfortable and relaxed about killing brown people at home, and Arabs were just a different shade” (Guy Rundle, “Rundle: the Right really do not want to open the Anzac can of worms”, Crikey, 16 April 2015: https://www.crikey.com.au/2015/04/16/rundle-the-right-really-do-not-want-to-open-the-anzac-can-of-worms/ )

Guy Rundle is correct about the (ongoing) Australian Aboriginal Genocide.  Australia (like Apartheid Israel that Zionist-subverted, US lackey Australia backs with a fervency second only to that of the Zionist-subverted US), arose through racist European colonization and ongoing genocide of the Indigenous population. Thus the Indigenous Australian population dropped from about 1 million in 1788 to about 0.1 million a century after invasion  due to violence,   dispossession, disease and deprivation. The Aboriginal Genocide continues with about 4,000 Indigenous Australians dying avoidably each year. Indeed about 2 million Aborigines have died untimely deaths from violence, 0.1 million, or deprivation and disease, 1.9 million, since 1788. There were up to 750 unique Aboriginal groups and associated languages and dialects in 1788 but only 150 remain with all but 20 endangered. Aboriginal Ethnocide (Aboriginal Cultural Genocide) continues through deprivation,  removal of bilingual education and continued removal of Indigenous children from their mothers at a record rate. About 0.1 million Indigenous Australian died violently in the “frontier wars”,  with violent extermination of Indigenous Australians (Aboriginal, Aborigines) only ceasing after the Coniston Massacre in 1928 in Central Australia (Gideon Polya, “Australian PM Turnbull backs genocidal Apartheid Israel with falsehood and exceptionalism”, Countercurrents, 24 February 2017: http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/02/24/australia-pm-turnbull-backs-genocidal-apartheid-israel-with-falsehood-and-exceptionalism/ ; “Aboriginal Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/aboriginalgenocide/ .)

Crikey published my following comments on Guy Rundle’s truth-telling: “Congratulations to Guy Rundle for his powerful, truth-telling antidote to 100 years of Australian warmongering propaganda and mythologizing. History ignored yields history repeated and Australia is now engaged in its Seventh Iraq War, this year marking not just the centenary of Australia’s disaster at Gallipoli (8,000 Australians killed, about 700 from disease) and the Armenian Genocide (1.5 million Armenians killed) but also the start of Australia’s First Iraq War (see Gideon Polya, “Australia’s First Iraq War” , MWC News, 28 February 2015 : http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/50028-australias-seventh-iraq-war.html ). However some corrections and amplifications below: 1. After months of Allied shelling in the Dardanelles, the Turkish Armenian Genocide began on 24 April 2015, the eve of the Anzac landing, with the round-up of Armenian community leaders – indeed 24 April is commemorated as Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day (see Gideon Polya, ‘Australian ANZAC Day, Armenian Genocide Day Of Remembrance And Australia’s Secret Genocide History”, Countercurrents, 24 March, 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya240413.htm ). 2. Australia was complicit in the WW2 Bengali Holocaust (the 1942-1945 Bengal Famine; 6-7 million Indians deliberately starved to death by the British ) by withholding food from starving India from its huge wartime wheat stores (see “Bengali Holocaust (WW2 Bengal Famine” writings of Dr Gideon Polya”: https://sites.google.com/site/drgideonpolya/bengali-holocaust and Gideon Polya (2011), “Australia And Britain Killed 6-7 Million Indians In WW2 Bengal Famine”, Countercurrents, 29 September, 2011: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya290911.htm ). 3. Turkey is but 1 out of 85 countries that Australia has invaded as a UK lackey or a US lackey with variously disastrous short-term and long-term consequences (see Gideon Polya, “As UK Lackeys Or US Lackeys Australians Have Invaded 85 Countries (British 193, French 80, US 70)”, Countercurrents, 9 February, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya090215.htm and Gideon Polya (2013), “Review: “The Cambridge History Of Australia” Ignores Australian Involvement In 30 Genocides”, Countercurrents, 14 October, 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya141013.htm ).”

Back in 2015, Scott McIntyre, a courageous young sports journalist with Australia’s substantially taxpayer-funded,  multicultural  Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), was sacked after he tweeted a succession of truthful anti-war comments on Anzac Day (25 April and Australia’s more important of 2 major  war dead remembrance days, the other being  the WW1-end Remembrance Day on 11 November, also the date in 1975  on which progressive Australian PM Gough Whitlam was sacked in a US CIA-backed Coup). Only a few decent Australians –  most notably Guy Rundle,  John Pilger (outstanding expatriate Australian journalist), Greg Barnes (a barrister and a spokesman for the Australian Lawyers Alliance.), the NSW Council for Civil Liberties  and myself – came to his defence, and the rest was silence or strong condemnation of McIntyre from politicians , journalists and commentators . Free speech was trashed in jingoistic, pro-war , US lackey, endlessly war mongering and human rights-abusing  Australia (Gideon Polya, “Australia trashes free speech – SBS sacks journalist Scott McIntyre over anti-war tweets.”, Countercurrents, 4 April 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya040515.htm ).

Indeed Guy Rundle commented thus on Anzac Day and Scott McIntyre (2015): “The [1916 Dublin, Ireland] Easter Rising was worth becoming a martyr for, but Anzac Day collapses under the weight of its own meaninglessness. That we were defeated at Gallipoli was unquestionably the best thing, a demonstration to the world that the Europeans could be stopped from turning the whole world into their empire. The meaning of the deaths of Anzacs, as an event, can only come from defeat. It was necessary to a good result that we be thrown back into the sea. The private and particular meanings we make of the invasion is a way of avoiding that melancholy truth.… Scott McIntyre’s tweets were a related example — he was just the first person in the mainstream meeja to crack. The fact that the Minister of Communications [the oh-so-charming, all-smiles, ostensible liberal but US lackey Rightist and lipstick-on-a-pig Malcolm Turmbull – now PM of Australia] felt the need to step in on four tweets shows how brittle the whole thing has become” (Guy Rundle, “Rundle – on Anzac Day in Dublin and a cause worth dying for”, Crikey, 27 April 2015: https://www.crikey.com.au/2015/04/27/rundle-on-anzac-day-in-dublin-and-a-cause-worth-dying-for/ ).

The jingoists, warmongers, and war-glorifiers falsely praise themselves for upholding  national security  – however the opposite is true at a very fundamental level. The jingoists and warmongers endanger Humanity by falsehood and censorship. Fundamentally , rational risk management that is crucial for societal safety, successively involves (a) accurate  reportage, (b)  scientific analysis (this involving the critical testing of potentially falsifiable  hypotheses) and (c) informed systemic change to minimize risk. Unfortunately this is  turned on its  head by jingoist warmongers through (a) lying, censorship and intimidation, (b) anti-science spin-based analysis (this involving the selective use of asserted facts to support a partisan position) and (c) counterproductive, reportage-threatening blame and shame, with the ultimate obscenities being violence and war.

Thus warmongering lunacy must be opposed by decent, sane people everywhere. The Korean War resulted in the deaths of up to 28% of the North Korean population  by US saturation  bombing and turned North Korea into a one-party state and military fortress that has now acquired several nuclear bombs. US lackey Australia has joined threatening Trump jingoism over North Korea which has responded in kind with this appalling, horrifying and chilling threat: “If Australia persists in following the US’ moves to isolate and stifle North Korea … this will be a suicidal act of coming within the range of the nuclear strike of the strategic force of North Korea”. Of course one notes that Australia is complicit in US nuclear terrorism  via electronic tracking facilities such as that at Pine Gap in Central Australia and through hosting  US ship-borne nuclear weapons – Australia thus helps the US  threaten all nations on earth with nuclear annihilation. ANU Professor Leszek Buszynski has commented: “This is a [North Korean] regime that fears the United States may launch a pre-emptive strike. I think in North Korea they take this very seriously indeed, because they’ve seen what the Trump administration has done in Syria … and they would fear that the US would do the same to them” (Andrew Green, “North Korea threatened nuclear strike against Australia if it doesn’t  stop “blindly toeing US line””, ABC News, 23 April, 217: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-22/north-korea-accuses-australia-of-blindly-following-the-us/8464252 ).

Australia and the World would be better served if Australia sought to encourage a pragmatic, China-mediated and China-guaranteed North Korea –South Korea rapprochement that would obviate North Korea’s present perception that it needs nuclear weapons. And then the World could turn its attention to US-, UK- and Australia-backed nuclear terrorist, genocidally racist, racist Zionist-run, democracy-by –genocide Apartheid Israel that reportedly has 400 nuclear bombs, that (unlike Iran) refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), that (unlike North Korea) refuses to ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which has invaded a dozen countries and routinely bombs other countries when it chooses to (Korea and Iran have not invaded any other country for centuries) (see “Nuclear weapons ban , end poverty & reverse climate change”: https://sites.google.com/site/300orgsite/nuclear-weapons-ban ).

Former Australian PM, the late  Malcolm Fraser, warned against US lackey Australian jingoism after WikiLeaks revealed that PM Kevin Rudd had suggested the possibility of a US war with China (the  biggest destination for Australian exports) if it didn’t play ball and that the Australian Ambassador to Washington, Kim Beazley, indicated to the Americans  that Australian troops would be involved in such an eventuality . Malcolm Fraser was horrified and recalled that when the US was threatening war against China in the1950s, the then PM,  conservative Robert Menzies, declared that Australian forces would not be involved in such a war (Malcolm Fraser “Slavish devotion to the US a foreign policy folly for Australia”, The Age On-line, National Times, 14 December 2010: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/slavish-devotion-to-the-us-a-foreign-policy-folly-for-australia-20101213-18vec.html  ).

All praise to truth-telling Australian journalist Yassmin Abdel-Magied. By deleting her truthful post she has lived to fight another day in serial war criminal, jingoistic, US lackey, politically  correct  racist (PC racist)  Australia. And her truthful post lives on: “Lest we forget (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine)”.  Lest we forget all the victims of war, all the victims of  the ongoing US War on Muslims,  and in particular the people of a famine-wracked swathe of countries from Nigeria to Yemen in which 20 million are presently facing famine and mass starvation. Australia is presently complicit in the US bombing of starving Somalia and starving Yemen, countries with populations (50% children) of 11.2 million and 27.9 million, respectively ( “Famine “largest humanitarian crisis the history of the UN””, Al Jazeera, 11 March 2017: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/03/famine-united-nations-170310234132946.html ).

History ignored yields history repeated.  Holocaust  ignored yields holocaust repeated. Genocide ignored yields genocide repeated. Indeed genocide ignoring and holocaust ignoring are far, far worse than repugnant genocide denial and holocaust denial because at least the latter permit  refutation and public debate ( Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”, that includes a succinct history  of every country and is now available for free perusal on the web: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/  and Gideon Polya, “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial and the crisis in biological sustainability”, G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2008 edition that is now available for free perusal on the web: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ ).

Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. No more war – please tell everyone you can.

28 April 2017

By Dr Binoy Kampmark

Any doubts that Turkey’s involvement in the conflict against Islamic State is purely symbolic were dispelled by a latest round of air strikes against Kurdish positions in northeast Syria and Iraq’s Sinjar region, killing at least 20 fighters.  (The number from Ankara is a more inflated 70).  Iraqi government officials were flawed by the action, infuriated by its audacity; the US State Department was troubled and confused.

“We are very concerned, deeply concerned,” claimed spokesman Mark Toner, “that Turkey conducted air strikes earlier today in northern Syria as well as northern Iraq without proper coordination with the United States or the broader global coalition to defeat IS.”[1]  Toner also explained that such strikes “were not approved by the coalition and led to the unfortunate loss of life of our partner forces in the fight against” Islamic State.

The Pentagon seemed less troubled, concerned more with logistical error and plain bungling among coalition members.  “We don’t want our partners hitting other partners,” came a statement from a senior US defence official.  “We’ve got to figure out exactly who got hit.  We don’t know yet. We do know where the strikes were, but we don’t know exactly who is dead.”[2]

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is very much on top of the world – his world, at least. On the home front, he continues a savage campaign against alleged coup plotters through mass detentions. He is beaming from the referendum results held this month that granted him new constitutional powers.

Refuting the suggestion that this latest round of belligerence was an act of introspective, isolated adventurism, he explained that, “We shared this with the US and Russia and we are sharing it with Iraq as well.  It is an operation that (Iraqi Kurdistan President Massoud) Barzani has been informed about.”  Such an interpretation stretches the meaning of sharing, to say the least.

A statement from the Turkish military justified the strikes on a long grounded and orthodox basis: that the groups in question had links with the Kurdish Workers’ Party, or PKK, deemed by both Washington and Ankara as a terrorist group. The fighters in question had become targets as a preventative measure against the smuggling of weapons and munitions into Turkey that might end up being used by the PKK against the Turkish state. The agenda for liberation has no borders:

“To destroy these terror hubs which threaten the security, unity and integrity of our country and our nation and as part of our rights based on international law, air strikes have been carried out… and terrorist targets have been struck with success.”

The PKK presence in Sinjar was yet another consequence of violence and its bitter fruit, a response to the murderous efforts of Islamic State militants against the local Yazidi population that saw genocide and enslavement practiced against thousands.  Erdoğan is less sentimental about the reaction to IS exploits, concerned that the PKK presence risks creating a “new Qandil” reminiscent of the organisation’s base bordering Turkey, Iraq and Iran.

The bloody melange looks all the more complicated for having the US-backed Popular Protection Units (YPG), being targeted by a NATO and US ally, a point that underscores Turkey’s ambivalent role in fighting various fundamentalist groups in the conflict.  Turkey is keeping its enemies traditional.

The YPG was in little doubt what the actions had done, expressing its anger in a Twitter post.  “By this attack, Turkey is trying to undermine [the] Raqqa operation, give (IS) time to reorganize and put in danger live of thousands of” displaced persons.

For some months now, Ankara has been insisting that Washington adopt a different approach to their YPG allies, one of studied disentanglement from the Kurdish temptation.  Preference, at least from the Turkish side of things, is given to closer cooperation with Syrian units, notably in efforts to remove Islamic State forces from Raqqa.

An even more stern tone has been directed at Baghdad, accused of dragging its feet on the issue of dealing with the Kurdish problem.  A statement by spokesman Saad al-Hadithi ventured a condemnation, claiming that the raids were “a violation of international law and of Iraqi sovereignty.”  Much of this will fall on deaf ears, given the porous, contingent nature of the current Iraqi and Syrian borders.  Large powers trample and stomp, and the governments in question seem mere caretakers for the next hostile engagement.

The Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs in the Kurdish north had little time to lavish legitimacy on the Turkish assault, but it had a concession to make: “PKK has been problematic for the people of the Kurdistan region and, despite broad calls to withdraw, refuses to leave Sinjar.”[3]

Accordingly, the “PKK must stop destabilising and escalating tensions in the area to allow life to return to the people of the area.”  A frightful mess and one that Erdoğan has every intention of complicating.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-39708909

[2] http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/turkey-bombs-kurdish-forces-northeast-syria-179841213

[3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/washington-protests-as-turkish-strikes-target-u-s-backed-fighters-1493158100

28 April 2017

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

Israel has resorted to three main strategies to suppress Palestinian calls for justice and human rights, including the Right of Return for refugees.

One is dedicated to rewriting history; another attempts to distract from present realities altogether and a third aims at reclaiming the Palestinian narrative as essentially an Israeli one.

The rewriting of history happened much earlier than some historians would assume. The Israeli hasbara machine went into motion almost simultaneously with Plan Dalet (Plan D), which saw the military conquest of Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of its inhabitants.

But the actual discourse regarding the ‘Nakba’ – or the ‘Catastrophe’ – that has befallen Palestinian people in 1947-48 was constituted in the 1950s and 60s.

In an article entitled: “Catastrophic Thinking: Did Ben-Gurion Try to Rewrite History?” Shay Hazkani revealed the fascinating process of how Israel’s first Prime Minister, Ben Gurion, worked closely with a group of Israeli Jewish scholars to develop a version of events to describe what had taken place in 1947-48: the founding of Israel and the destruction of Palestine.

Ben-Gurion wanted to propagate a version of history that was consistent with Israel’s political position. He needed ‘evidence’, to support that position.

The ‘evidence’ eventually became ‘history’, and no other narrative was allowed to challenge Israel’s take on the ‘Nakba’.

“Ben-Gurion probably never heard the word ‘Nakba,’ but early on, at the end of the 1950s, Israel’s first Prime Minister grasped the importance of the historical narrative,” Hazkani wrote.

The Israeli leader assigned scholars in the Civil Service to the task of fashioning an alternative history that continues to permeate Israeli thinking to this day.

Distracting from history – or the current reality of the horrific Occupation of Palestine – has been in motion for nearly 70 years.

From the early myths of Palestine being a ‘land with no people for a people with no land’ to today’s claim that Israel is an icon of civilization, technology and democracy surrounded by Arab and Muslim savages, Israel’s official distortions are relentless.

So while Palestinians are gearing up to commemorate the war of June 5, 1967, which led to the, thus-far, 50-year military occupation, Israel is throwing a big party, a major ‘celebration’ of its military occupation of Palestinians.

The absurdity is not escaping all Israelis, of course.

“A state that celebrates 50 years of occupation is a state whose sense of direction has been lost, its ability to distinguish good from evil, impaired,” wrote Israeli commentator Gideon Levy in the ‘Haaretz’.

“What exactly is there to celebrate, Israelis? Fifty years of bloodshed, abuse, disinheritance and sadism? Only societies that have no conscience celebrate such anniversaries.”

Levy argues that Israel has won the war of 1967 but has “lost nearly everything else.”

Since then, Israel’s arrogance, detestation of international law, “ongoing contempt for the world, the bragging and bullying” have all reached unprecedented heights.

Levy’s article is entitled: ‘Our Nakba’.

Levy is not attempting to reclaim the Palestinian narrative, but is succinctly registering that Israel’s military triumphs was anaffliction, especially as it was not followed by any sense of national reflection or attempt at correcting the injustices of the past and the present.

However, the process of claiming the term ‘Nakba’ has been pursued cunningly by Israeli writers for many years.

For those scholars, ‘the Jewish Nakba’ refers to the Arab Jews who arrived in the newly independent Israel, largely based on the urgings of Zionist leaders for Jews worldwide to ‘return’ to the biblical homeland.

A ‘Jerusalem Post’ editorial complained that “Palestinian propaganda juggernaut has persuaded world public opinion that the term ‘refugee’ is synonymous with the term ‘Palestinian.’”

By doing so, Israelis attempting to hijack the Palestinian narrative hope to create an equilibrium in the discourse, one that is, of course, inconsistent with reality.

The editorial puts the number of ‘Jewish refugees’ of the ‘Jewish Nakba’ at 850,000, slightly above the number of Palestinian refugees who were expelled by Zionist militias upon the founding of Israel.

Luckily, such disingenuous claims are increasingly challenged by Jewish voices, as well.

A few – but significant – voices among Israeli and Jewish intellectuals around the world are daring to re-examine Israel’s past.

They are rightly confronting a version of history that has been accepted in Israel and the West as the uncontested truth behind Israel’s birth in 1948, the military occupation of what remained of Palestine in 1967, and other historical junctures.

These intellectuals are leaving a mark on the Palestine-Israel discourse wherever they go. Their voices are particularly significant in challenging official Israeli truisms and historical myths.

Writing in the ‘Forward’, Donna Nevel refuses to accept that the discussion of the conflict in Palestine starts in the war and occupation of 1967.

Nevel is critical of the so-called ‘progressive Zionists’ who insist on positioning the conversation only on the question of occupation, thus limiting any possibility of resolution to the ‘two-state solution.’

Not only is such a ‘solution’ defunct and practically not possible, but the very discussion precludes the ‘Nakba’, or the Catastrophe, of 1948.

The “Nakba doesn’t enter these conversations because it is the legacy and clearest manifestation of Zionism”, Nevel wrote.

“Those who ignore the ‘Nakba’- which Zionist and Israeli institutions have consistently done – are refusing to acknowledge Zionism as illegitimate from the beginning of its implementation.”

This is precisely why the Israeli police have recently blocked the ‘March of Return’, conducted annually by Palestinians in Israel.

For years, Israel has been wary that a growing movement among Palestinians, Israelis and others around the world have been pushing for a paradigm shift in order to understand the roots of the conflict in Palestine.

This new thinking has been a rational outcome of the end of the ‘peace process’ and the demise of the ‘two-state’ solution.

Incapable of sustaining its founding myths, yet unable to offer an alternative, the Israeli government is now using coercive measures to respond to the budding movement: punishing those who insist on commemorating the ‘Nakba’, fining organizations that participate in such events and even perceiving as traitors any Jewish individuals and groups that deviate from its official thinking.

In these cases, coercion hardly works.

“The March (of Return) has rapidly grown in size over the past few years, in defiance of increasingly repressive measures from the Israeli authorities,” wrote Jonathan Cook in ‘Al-Jazeera’.

It seems that 70 years after the founding of Israel, the past is still looming large.

Fortunately, the Palestinian voices that have fought against the official Israeli narrative are now joined by a growing number of Jewish voices.

It is through a new common narrative that a true understanding of the past can be attained, all with the hope that the peaceful vision for the future can replace the current one – one which can only be sustained through military domination, inequality and sheer propaganda.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com.

28 April 2017