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By Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Yesterday Pakistan announced the launch of a military operation in Punjab, the country’s most populous province. Once again it has taken unprecedented carnage for the state to do something. It took the massacre of schoolchildren in December 2014 for the government to announce a formal counter-terrorism policy. This time, a Taliban-orchestrated suicide attack in a children’s park in Punjab’s capital Lahore has jolted the state into action.

Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a faction of the Pakistani Taliban which has also pledged allegiance to the so-called Islamic State, has claimed responsibility for the bombing. The group’s spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan told the media that Christians and Easter celebrations were the intended target of the attack, and that “it is a message to the Pakistani prime minister that we have arrived in Punjab.”

This is the second time in 13 months that Christians have been targeted in Lahore. In March last year twin bombings outside churches in Lahore killed at least 14 people in the city’s Youhanabad area – a Christian locality that falls within the constituency of the Punjab chief minister Shahbaz Sharif.

As chaos erupted in Lahore yesterday, thousands of protestors clashed with the police in the capital, Islamabad. The rioters are supporters of Mumtaz Qadri, a police commando recently hanged for killing former Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer for his opposition to Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, and his defence of Asia Bibi a Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy. The pro-Qadri rioters are still camped inside Islamabad’s “red zone, with a set of 10 demands, including official acknowledgement of Qadri as a “martyr”, immunity for those killing in the prophet Muhammad’s name and the execution of Asia Bibi.

Yesterday’s events have overlapped with Islamist parties uniting against the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N)-led government’s progressive policy-making. Since the turn of the year, the government has unblocked YouTube, initiated a bill to criminalise child marriages, punished Qadri and passed an act to protect women from violence and harassment.

In November, prime minister Nawaz Sharif became the first Pakistani head of government to attend a Diwali event, where he presented himself as “everyone’s prime minister” and vowed to eradicate religious discrimination in front of the local Hindu community. In December, Punjab police were asked to remove hate literature against the Ahmadiyya minority from Lahore’s largest technology market. Earlier this month, the government passed a resolution to announce holidays for religious festivals of the minorities, including Holi, Diwali and Easter.

It is clear that targeting Christian children on Easter is a ploy to test the ruling party’s resolve. While bombing a park is another attack on a soft target, signifying the weakness of jihadist groups in Pakistan, the targeting of a Christian festival on the ruling party’s own ground has thrown down the gauntlet to Sharif.

Christians, like other religious minorities in Pakistan, including progressive Muslims, have been at the mercy of mob violence, owing to the Islam-specific clauses of Pakistan’s blasphemy law, which upholds the religious sentiments of Muslims over those of citizens of other beliefs, and sanctions the death penalty for “insulting Islam”.

While the state has taken notable steps towards religious moderation, it is obvious that sustained tolerance cannot be achieved without reforming the blasphemy law. And Qadri’s supporters, Islamist political parties and jihadist groups will throw everything they’ve got at the government to prevent that from happening.

The Jamaat-ul-Ahrar’s declaration of war against the ruling party shows that Punjab, and its capital, are the battlefields where the jihadists will bid to strangle the PML-N’s stronghold. This makes Christians in Lahore – the city’s largest religious minority – the most vulnerable targets for radical Islamists.

While the military operation announced this week is vital in the battle against jihadists in Punjab, it is victory in the ideological war that will ensure a tolerant and progressive Pakistan in the long run. How the government reacts to the rioters in Islamabad, and its verdict over the Asia Bibi case, could help determine Pakistan’s long-term future.

The events this week highlighted two groups – Muslims who want to celebrate Easter with Christians, and radical Islamists who want to suppress Easter festivity through violence and intimidation. It is the government’s stance that will dictate which side the silent majority support. And if recent events are anything to go by, there’s more than an inkling of hope that Pakistan will opt to be on the right side of history.
29 March 2016

http://www.theguardian.com/

By Ryan Rodrick Beiler

Palestinians whose livelihoods are forcibly enmeshed in Israel’s economic system are often used as human shields against the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.

The frequent accusation made by critics is that boycotts of Israeli businesses, especially settlement businesses, will hurt the very Palestinians that BDS activists say they support.

At times, settlement advocates even deploy Palestinian spokespersons to speak positively about the higher wages they receive working for settlement businesses.

A new report released by UK-based Corporate Watch brings the voices of the Palestinian farmers and agricultural workers to the debate over how the BDS movement can best resist Israeli exploitation of their land and labor.

Corporate Watch’s report, titled, “Apartheid in the Fields: From Occupied Palestine to UK Supermarkets,” focuses on two of the most vulnerable segments of Palestinian society: residents of the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank’s Jordan Valley.

Farming under siege

Anyone entering Gaza through the Erez checkpoint on the northern boundary with present-day Israel, traverses a long, fenced corridor running through the so-called “buffer zone” enforced by the Israeli military.

This poorly defined area ranges from 300 to 500 meters along the inside perimeter of Gaza.

Since 2008, the report states, more than 50 Palestinians have been killed in this zone. Four Palestinian civilians have been killed and more than 60 injured so far this year.

According to the UN monitoring group OCHA, this zone also takes up 17 percent of Gaza’s total area, making up to one third of its farmland unsafe for cultivation. Areas that once held olive and citrus trees have now been bulldozed by Israeli forces.

Corporate Watch says that even though Palestinians are routinely shot at from distances greater than 300 meters, farmers whose land lies near the border have no choice but to cultivate these areas despite the danger.

Economic warfare

In addition to the lethal violence routinely inflicted on Gaza, Israeli authorities enforce what they have called “economic warfare” – a de facto boycott of almost all agriculture originating in Gaza.

Virtually no produce from the enclave is allowed into Israeli or West Bank markets, traditionally Gaza’s biggest customers.

From the time Israel imposed its blockade on Gaza in 2007 up until November 2014, a monthly average of 13.5 trucks left Gaza carrying exports – just one percent of the monthly average of goods shipped out just prior to the closure.

By contrast, already this year more than 22,000 trucks have entered Gaza, many carrying Israeli produce considered unsuitable for international export.

Dumping it on the captive market in Gaza further undermines local farmers.

The trickle of exports that Israel permits from Gaza go primarily to European markets, but this is only allowed through Israeli export companies that profit from the situation by taking commissions and selling Gaza products for far higher prices than they pay the producers.

“The Israelis export Palestinian produce and export it with an Israeli label,” Taghrid Jooma of the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees told Corporate Watch. “For example, they export roses from Gaza for nickels and dimes and sell them for a lot of money.”

Muhammad Zwaid of Gaza’s only export company, Palestine Crops, told Corporate Watch that part of the problem is that Palestine lacks its own bar code and so any produce exported through Israel carries an Israeli one.

“We have our own stickers,” said Zwaid, “but [Israeli export company] Arava has asked for them to be smaller and often Arava stickers are put on top of ours. Our produce is taken inside Israel by the Israeli company and then taken to a packing station where it is repackaged.”

Supporting BDS

Corporate Watch reports that while many of the farmers they interviewed support BDS, they also want the opportunity to export their produce and make a living.

This presents a quandary because a boycott of Israeli export companies like Arava will include Palestinian products as well.

Even so, the farmers interviewed maintained their support for BDS as a long-term strategy that outweighs the limited benefits of current export levels.

“What we need is people to stand with us against the occupation,” said one farmer from al-Zaytoun. “By supporting BDS you support the farmers, both directly and indirectly and this is a good thing for people here in Gaza.”

“Farmers all over the Gaza Strip were particularly keen on getting the right to label their produce as Palestinian, ideally with its own country code, even if they have to export through Israel,” the report states. “Country of origin labels for Gaza goods is something the solidarity movement could lobby for.”

Mohsen Abu Ramadan, from the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network, suggested to Corporate Watch that one strategy could be to engage farming unions around the world to urge them to endorse BDS in solidarity with Palestinian farmers.

Bulldozing the Jordan Valley

While Israel’s siege and deadly assaults have rightly focused international attention on Gaza, Israel’s actions in the Jordan Valley have generated far less outrage.

Yet well before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current extreme right-wing government made clear its opposition to a viable Palestinian state, he had pledged to never give up control of this agriculturally rich region under any two-state configuration.

Occupation authorities refuse virtually all Palestinian requests to build or improve infrastructure in the region. Residents face severe restrictions on access to electricity and water as well as other basic infrastructure.

Demolitions of Palestinian homes have increased in recent months, and in February, Israel carried out the largest demolition in a decade.

Routine violations

In the Jordan Valley, settlement agriculture often relies on Palestinian labor – including child labor – to do hazardous jobs for a fraction of what would be paid to Israeli citizens.

Though entitled to the Israeli minimum wage according to a high court ruling, many workers are routinely paid as little as half that.

Palestinians Zaid and Rashid are employed in Beqa’ot, a settlement built on land seized from Palestinians. They receive wages of $20 per day, about a quarter of which goes for daily transport.

They receive no paid holidays despite the fact that the Israeli government advises that workers are entitled to 14 days paid holiday and must receive a written contract and payslips from their employer.

Although they are members of a Palestinian trade union, their settler employers do not recognize any collective bargaining rights.

Workers are moreover frequently pressured into signing documents in Hebrew — which they cannot read — stating that they are being treated according to law. Workers fear being fired if they do not sign.

While Palestinians working in settlements are also required to obtain work permits from the military occupation authorities, several of those interviewed for the report had no such permits, leading to suspicions that employers may be attempting to further circumvent Israeli labor laws by using undocumented workers.

Both Zaid and Rashid told Corporate Watch they back the call for a boycott of Israeli agricultural companies.

“We support the boycott even if we lose our work,” Zaid said. “We might lose our jobs but we will get back our land. We will be able to work without being treated as slaves.”

Label games

Corporate Watch profiles the five main Israeli export companies: Arava, Mehadrin, Hadiklaim, Edom and the now defunct Carmel Agrexco.

A common practice by these companies is mislabeling goods as “Produce of Israel” even when they are grown and packed in West Bank settlements that are illegal under international law.

Corporate Watch also documents the varying degrees of success that BDS activists have had in targeting these companies.

Since 2009, following pressure from activists, the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs issued guidelines stating it is an “offense” to mislabel settlement goods as “Produce of Israel.”

Similar guidelines approved by the European Union late last year outraged Israeli politicians, despite the fact that the same practice has been United States policy since the mid-1990s.

Despite the guidelines, however, UK stores continue to stock Israeli products with misleading labels.

As recently as 2013, Corporate Watch found labels from the Israeli settlement of Tomer for the Morrisons store brand of Medjoul dates.

In another example, the Aldi chain was caught selling grapefruits from Carmel Agrexco labeled as products of Cyprus.

Beyond settlement boycotts

Of the supermarket chains targeted by BDS campaigns, only one, The Co-operative, has pledged to “no longer engage with any supplier of produce known to be sourcing from the Israeli settlements.”

This means that not only would the Co-op not stock settlement produce, but that it would not buy produce grown in present-day Israel from companies that also have settlement operations.

This made it the first major European chain to take such a step.

Corporate Watch points out that while not directly supporting the settlement economy, those Israeli companies without settlement operations still pay taxes to the Israeli government, which supports its ongoing occupation, colonization and oppression of Palestinians.

It notes that the Co-op took a much stronger stance regarding apartheid-era South Africa, when it boycotted all South African products.

In accordance with the 2005 BDS call from Palestinian civil society, Corporate Watch advocates a full boycott of all Israeli goods.

Ryan Rodrick Beiler is a freelance photojournalist and member of the ActiveStills collective.

30 March, 2016
Electronicintifada.net

By Fadumo Mohamed

While we mourn with the families of the terrible attacks in Brussels, let us ask ourselves: What is the source of our empathy? Are we troubled because of the bitter and heart-wrenching reality of the senseless theft of innocent lives? Or does our disturbance stem from elsewhere? Months ago the claims of “ Je suis Charlie“ flooded both the real and virtual world. Today, we are Brussels, but I ask: Who is Ankara? Who is Istanbul? Who is Somalia? Who is Gaza? Who is Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon, Kenya, Nigeria? Who is Tunisia, Jakarta, Ivory Coast and Mali? Who stands representative and in solidarity with all the other unwarranted victims of similar tragedies? Who truly stands up for unconditional empathy and mourning? These are questions we must ask ourselves in order to analyze the sincerity of our compassion, anger and empathy.

The disproportionality of the public outrage we see is the greatest testament to the underlying racism and hatred rooted in our global society. How could one champion the idea of humanity, all the while picking and choosing which lives are considered worthy of mourning and which are worthy of violence. I tell you, it is absolutely impossible. Quite frankly, the utter hypocrisy of this notion of selective outrage is vile and a slap in the face of thinking individuals.

Dear selective mourners:

You are not outraged at the death of innocent civilians, you are in fact bothered and angered at the death of only those you deem worthy of life. Those who you feel you have some sort of allegiance to or can more readily relate to. You do not truly care. Your regard for human life is classified in whom you depict as human. This frighteningly fascist, neo-Nazi idealism of selective outrage and mourning is toxic and detrimental to our communities and the greater global society. It challenges the idea of equality in the value of human life, and attempts to shape it to ever-changing standards. It promotes segregation over unity, general disregard over compassion and hate over love. It challenges fundamental values of humanity. Selective outrage is born from the ideas of segregation and the delusions of superiority. The “us vs them’ narrative oozes from its very foundation. We need to be careful not to tread its path lest we become depraved and lose the ability of our hearts to recognize and resonate with the vict
ims of suffering and oppression worldwide. More importantly, so we do not lose the capability to stand up for injustice unconditionally.

Since the attacks in Brussels, we have once again come to see the presidential candidates, one after another, deliberately insistent in their manipulation of public tragedies for political gain. Here’s what Cruz, Clinton and Trump had to say:

Cue the strategic incite of fear mongering tactics by manipulative politicians:

Ted Cruz:

“We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.”

Hillary Clinton:

“When I was secretary of State we often had some difficulty with our European friends because they were reluctant to impose the kinds of strict standards we were looking for. That, after Paris, has changed.”

and finally Donald Trump:

“I’ve been talking about this for a long time, and look at Brussels.”

“You look at what just took place in Brussels, and that’s peanuts compared to what’s going to happen”

This rhetoric — as history has so proved — is a deliberate fuel fed to racists and xenophobes who will undoubtedly clash back with more violence. It plays to the inherent and irrational fears that are already prolific throughout the Western world in regards to Islam and the intentions of Muslims. I am terrified for the Muslims and “Muslim passing individuals” who will more than likely be the secondary victims of these attacks. I am petrified for this repeat in history. I am in firm and unwavering solidarity with those who refuse to buckle under the overwhelming pressure of the looming demand for public condemnation of such tragedies — tragedies they are in no way a part of. The Muslim community refuses to stand idly by and allow our religion to become the scapegoat of these terrorist attacks. We should not have to apologize for actions we have not committed and we will certainly not sit back and bear the responsibility of injustices falsely claimed in the name our religion. The world at large needs to come to
gether in moments like these instead of actively placing partitions between one another. We are saddened and outraged by the attacks made against humanity, those that we come to know of by way of mainstream media and those that are too often silenced by the very same people. Our hearts cry out for injustice; wherever it may be.

The validation of one’s humanity does truly lie in universal and unconditional empathy, solidarity and compassion. Our prayers are with the families of victims.

Fadumo Mohamed is a 21 year old writer and social justice advocate. She is a full time student who enjoys photography in her spare time and a young woman who stands proudly behind her Muslim, Somali and Hokage identity.

23 March 2016

By sputniknews

Thanks to modern technologies one can easily reconstruct the story of Washington’s conspiracy aimed at destabilizing Syria by exploiting the country’s ethnic and religious divisions.

In his recent Op-Ed for Russia Today Neil Clark, a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger, writes that former US Secretary of State Clinton’s emails as well as secret labels and reports provided by Wikileaks and American conservative educational foundation Judicial Watch show that Washington was by no means an innocent bystander, but went out of its way to destabilize Syria and exploit its ethnic and religious divisions.

What previously seemed to be just a set of circumstances have turned out to be elements of a highly thought-out and well-orchestrated project.

Nothing hinted at any trouble back in 2006, when US Ambassador to Syria William Roebuck sent a cable to the White House describing “potential vulnerabilities” of the Assad government and the “possible means to exploit them.”

For instance, Roebuck proposed to play on Sunni fears of Iranian influence.

“Though often exaggerated, such fears reflect an element of the Sunni community in Syria that is increasingly upset by and focused on the spread of Iranian influence in their country through activities ranging from mosque construction to business. Both the local Egyptian and Saudi missions here, (as well as prominent Syrian Sunni religious leaders), are giving increasing attention to the matter and we should coordinate more closely with their governments on ways to better publicize and focus regional attention on the issue,” the Ambassador wrote.

The cunning politician also suggested using rumors of corruption in the inner circle of the Assad government; airing “the SARG’s dirty laundry” through the Gulf monarchies’ media sources; and encouraging gossip and signals of some sinister external plotting to increase the possibility of the government’s “self-defeating over-reaction.”

Interestingly enough, Riyadh and Cairo were supposed to play an important role in the Washington-led conspiracy against Bashar al-Assad.

According to Pulitzer-prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, following the US invasion of Iraq Saudi Arabia persuaded Washington to crackdown on Iran and its allies in the region (the Shiite crescent), most notably Assad’s Syria.

“The Saudis have considerable financial means, and have deep relations with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis — Sunni extremists who view Shiites as apostates,” Hersh wrote in his article for The New Yorker in 2007, citing Vali Nasr, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and expert in Middle Eastern affairs.

Then the Silicon Valley’s ingenious planners stepped in. In 2010 Jared Cohen, the President of Jigsaw (‘Google Ideas’) and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, made a trip to Syria with Alec Ross, technology policy expert who was Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Summing up the results of their “business trip” to the Syrian Arab Republic, Ross wrote: “When Jared and I went to Syria, it was because we knew that Syrian society was growing increasingly young (population will double in 17 years) and digital and that this was going to create disruptions in society that we could potential harness for our purposes.”

Clark turns the spotlight on the fact that “those ‘purposes’ were of course ‘regime change’ and to break Syria’s alliance with Iran.”

In summer 2012, when the Syrian conflict spun out of control political aide Sidney Blumenthal wrote to Hillary Clinton:

“The fall of the House of Assad could well ignite a sectarian war between the Shiites and the majority Sunnis of the region drawing in Iran, which, in the view of Israeli commanders would not be a bad thing for Israel and its Western allies.”

Nearly simultaneously president of ‘Google Ideas’ Jared Cohen offered the State Department a new digital tool aimed at bolstering defections from the Syrian government, Clark notes.

“Our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities, nobody is visually representing and mapping the defections, which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition,” Cohen wrote.

Interestingly enough, in August 2012 the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) shed some light on who exactly was behind the Syrian uprising: Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda in Iraq.

“Internally, events are taking a clear sectarian direction. The Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria… AQI supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning, both ideologically and through the media” the DIA report read.

However, it did not prevent the Obama administration from continuing their operation. They were fully aware of what forces they were playing with.

In 2015, in an interview with Al-Jazeera Michael Flynn, former head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), confirmed that that it was a “willful decision” of the Obama administration to team up with Salafists, al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria back in 2012.

“I don’t know that they turned a blind eye, I think it was a decision. I think it was a willful decision,” Flynn said.

“WikiLeaks confirms that — as was the case in Libya and Iraq — almost everything about the official “western establishment” version of the war in Syria was false,” Clark underscores.

“Far from being an innocent bystander, the US went out of its way to destabilize the country and exploit ethnic and religious divisions,” he stresses.

25 March 2016

http://sputniknews.com/

By Ramzy Baroud

The apparent sudden Russian military withdrawal from Syria, starting on March 15 left political commentators puzzled.

Few of the analyses offered should be taken seriously. There is little solid information as of why the Russian leader decided to end his country’s military push in Syria. The intervention, which began last September, was enough to change the direction of the war on many fronts.

However, one thing is for sure: the Russian withdrawal is reversible, as indicated by Vladimir Putin himself. “If necessary, literally within a few hours, Russia can build up its contingent in the region to a size proportionate to the situation developing there and use the entire arsenal of capabilities at our disposal,” he said at the Kremlin on March 17.

In fact, all parties involved are taking such a threat seriously, for the abrupt withdrawal has not renewed the appetite for war and does not present an opportunity for any major party in the conflict to pull out of the Geneva peace talks.

It is safe to say that after five years of war in Syria, the conflict is entering into a new phase. No, not a political resolution, but a grand political game that could divide the country into several entities, according to sectarian lines.

If that takes place, it will bode badly, not only for Syria alone, but the whole region. Division would then become the buzzword according to which all current conflicts would be expected to be settled.

While Russia’s motives behind the withdrawal are yet to be clarified, the intrinsic link between it and the current talks, in which dividing Syria into a federations have been placed on the agenda, is unmistakable.

“UN mediator, Staffan de Mistura, should be ashamed to have put ‘federalism’ on the agenda of this week’s talks on ending the Syrian war and fashioning a ‘new’ Syria,” wrote Michael Jensen in the Jordan Times. “Moscow, plus some Western powers, should also be sharply criticized for thinking of such a possibility.”

Indeed, the model is not entirely Russian. The latter managed to rebalance the conflict in favor of the government of Bashar Al-Assad, but various other parties, western and Arab, in addition to Turkey and Iran, have also managed to steer the conflict to a virtual deadlock.

With no goodwill involved, and little trust among the conflicting parties, dividing the country morphed from a far-fetched possibility to an actual one.

Therefore, it came as no surprise that, while the Russian withdrawal was still taking place, and shortly after the resumption of talks in Geneva, the Kurdish-controlled areas in Syria declared itself a federal region in the north. Of, course, the move is unconstitutional, but Syria’s violent bedlam has become the perfect opportunity for various groups to take matters into their own hands. After all, the very violent Daesh had carved a state for itself and fashioned an economy, created ministries and written new text books.

But the move by the Syrian Kurdish PYD is, in fact, more consequential. Daesh is a pariah group that is not recognized by any party in the conflict. PYD, which is considered an offshoot of the Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), on the other hand, has much sympathy and support, from both the US and Russia.

The group was credited for intrepidly fighting Daesh, and expected political dividends for that role. However, the PYD was not invited to join the talks in Geneva.

Although their decision was seen as a retribution for being excluded from the talks, it is unlikely that the PYD made the decision without covert support from its main benefactors who have been floating the idea of federation for months.

For example, the idea was articulated by Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institute in a Reuter’s op-ed last October. He called for the US to find a ‘common purpose with Russia’, while keeping in mind the ‘Bosnia model.’

More recently, during a testimony before a US Senate committee to discuss the Syria ceasefire, Secretary of State, John Kerry revealed that his country is preparing a ‘Plan B” should the ceasefire fail. It may be “too late to keep Syria as a whole, if we wait much longer,” he said.

The Russian partaking of the war may have altered the landscape of the conflict on the ground, but it also further cemented the division model.

Recent comments by Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Sergei Ryabkov, that a federal model for Syria “will work to serve the task of preserving (it) as a united, secular, independent and sovereign nation,” was the Russian spin on Kerry’s remarks.

Considering the current balances of power in Syria itself and the region as a whole, it might eventually become the only feasible solution for a country torn by war and fatigued by endless deaths.

Qatar and other Gulf countries have already rejected the federalism idea, although considering the Syrian government’s latest territorial gains, their rejection might not be a pivotal factor. The Turks also find federalism problematic for it will empower its arch enemies, the Kurds, who, according to the model, will be granted their own autonomous region. The PYD announcement was a trial balloon at best, or a first step towards the division of the whole of Syria.

Considering how grisly the Syrian war has been in those past years, federalism might not strike many as a dreadful possibility, but it is. Arab countries are historically an outcome of western and foreign meddling that divided the region in accordance to strategic convenience. That ‘divide and rule’ mindset has never been vanquished, but rather strengthened under the American occupation of Iraq.

“‘Federalism’ in the context of this region is another word for division and partition. It is a curse word and a curse concept for countries in this region where sectarian and ethnic communities have been planted for centuries in the bodies of states, like raisins in a Christmas fruitcake,” Jensen elaborated.

The Arab region was divided in 1916 to resolve outstanding conflicts between Britain, France and, to a lesser extent, Russia. The proposed division in Syria follows the same logic.

But if this Pandora’s Box is to open, it is likely to find itself on the agenda of future peace talks, where Libyans and Yemenis might find themselves contending with the same possibility. Both of these countries were, at one point in the past, also divided so it is not entirely an implausible notion.

It is important that dividing the Arabs does not become the modus operandi in managing conflict, the region and its resources. Federalism does not just undermine the identity of the Syrian nation, but it also plants the seed for further conflicts between warring sects, not in Syria alone, but in the Middle East at large.

Only a united Syria can offer hope for the future. Nothing else does.

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. His books include ‘Searching Jenin’, ‘The Second Palestinian Intifada’ and his latest ‘My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story’. His website is: www.ramzybaroud.net.

24 March, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Stéphane Hugues & Alex Lantier

The day after the mass bombings in Brussels that killed 34 people and wounded another 230, it emerged that Belgian authorities had specific forewarnings of the attack and had already last year identified the men who carried out the assault as Islamist terrorists.

The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported Wednesday that Zavantem Airport and the Maelbeek metro station were known to be targets for planned terror attacks. It wrote, “The Belgian security services, as well as other Western intelligence agencies, had advance and precise intelligence warnings regarding the terrorist attacks in Belgium on Tuesday, Ha’aretz has learned. The security services knew, with a high degree of certainty, that attacks were planned in the very near future for the airport and, apparently, for the subway as well.”

The suspected attackers were well known to police authorities. Two of the suicide bombers, Khalid El Bakraoui, who attacked the metro station, and his brother Ibrahim El Bakraoui, who exploded a bomb at the airport, had been convicted of armed robbery and were known to have connections to the November 13 attacks in Paris carried out by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Both were identified post-mortem by their fingerprints.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Ibrahim El Bakraoui had been detained in Turkey and identified as an Islamist fighter, then deported to the Netherlands last year.

“One of the perpetrators of the Brussels attack is a person whom we detained in June 2015 in [the southeastern province of] Gaziantep and deported… We informed the Brussels Embassy of the deportation process of the attacker with a note on July 14, 2015. However, the Belgians released the attacker despite his deportation,” Erdoğan said.

Erdoğan added that Belgian authorities were unable to establish any ties between El Bakraoui and terrorist activity despite the Turkish warnings, which were “ignored.”

Another bomber who blew himself up at the airport has still to be identified, and the third airport attacker, identified as Najim Laachraoui, remains on the run. Belgian authorities said they were looking for a man of Turkish origin, 22 years old, driving an old, dark Audi A4 car.

These reports raise the most serious questions as to how and why Belgian and allied intelligence agencies allowed the Brussels bombings to occur. In the fifteenth year of the “war on terror” declared by Washington and its European allies after the September 11, 2001 bombings, intelligence agencies have at their disposal sophisticated spying techniques capable of tracking virtually all cell phone and Internet activity. Claims that the attack occurred because Belgian and allied intelligence agencies somehow failed to “connect the dots” are simply not believable.

Belgium has been on high alert. Large numbers of soldiers and police were deployed in Brussels when the city was placed on lockdown following the November 13 attacks in Paris, and again after last week’s capture of November 13 attacker Salah Abdeslam. Belgian forces had advance notice of the targets of an attack and the identity of the attackers. Nonetheless, the ISIS team was able to amass a large stock of bomb-making equipment undisturbed and plan, prepare and execute devastating and coordinated terror bombings.

During the first lockdown, in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, 16 people were arrested and 22 searches were made, which produced nothing. All the while, Abdeslam was living a few kilometers from his parents’ home.

Abdeslam’s capture in last week’s police raid apparently pushed the ISIS terrorists to put their plans into action. Ibrahim El Bakraoui’s laptop was found in a dustbin in the street. On it police found a recording of Bakraoui saying he was “acting in a rush” and “did not [know] what to do anymore,” as he was being “searched for everywhere and was no longer safe.” If “he stuck around” he was likely “to end up in a prison cell.”

Police located El Bakraoui’s apartment by speaking to the taxi driver who dropped off the attackers at Zavantem airport. He told police he picked them up from 4 rue Max Roos in the Schaerbeek area of Brussels. Police searched the apartment and found 15 kilos of explosives, 150 litres of acetone, 30 litres of hydrogen peroxide, detonators, a case full of nails and screws and other bomb-making materials.

There are as yet no calls for mass sackings in Belgian and European intelligence circles after this stunning breakdown of security. The reason is that powerful factions within the ruling elite and the state, far from being genuinely revolted by these attacks, view them as a political godsend, allowing them to press for policies on which there is broad agreement in ruling circles: stepped-up military intervention in the Middle East, police-state surveillance measures in Europe and incitement of anti-Muslim racism.

New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman and Roger Cohen published articles yesterday that in virtually identical terms argued for an escalation of the war in Syria, ostensibly to fight ISIS. Cohen declared that “the West’s ponderous wait-them-out approach to the murderous fanatics of the caliphate looks like capitulation,” while Friedman asked whether “Obama hasn’t gotten so obsessed with defending his hands-off approach to Syria that he underestimates both the dangers of his passivity and the opportunity for US power to tilt the region our way.”

European officials are holding a conference today to coordinate a broad expansion of police operations across Europe, while Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s neo-fascist National Front, is calling for large-scale raids against Muslim neighborhoods in France. “We must immediately launch a vast police operation to invest all these districts that are outside our Republic,” she declared.

Under these conditions, it is increasingly clear that ISIS serves US and European imperialism not only as a proxy force fighting for regime-change in Syria, but also as an instrument to press for anti-democratic and unpopular policies at home.

The ISIS attacks in Paris last January and again in November, and in Brussels this week, were all carried out by the same terror network. This network is well known to French intelligence and to its US and European counterparts. All of these forces are linked to the original Al Qaeda network that emerged from the collaboration between the CIA and Saudi and Pakistani intelligence to mobilize Islamist fighters against the USSR and the Soviet-backed Afghan regime in the 1980s.

Khalid El Bakraoui rented, under an assumed identity, an apartment in the Belgian town of Charleroi for the authors of the November 13 attacks as a stop-over on their way to Paris. He also rented the apartment in the Forest area of Brussels, where on March 15 police first encountered Salah Abdeslam, and where Mohamed Belkaïd was killed in a gun battle that allowed Abdeslam to escape the initial police raid.

The French news site Médiapart reported that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the organizer of the November 13 attacks, and Chérif Kouachi, one of the Charlie Hebdo attackers, both knew Farid Melouk, a top figure in French Islamist circles. Melouk was a leading member of the Algerian Islamic Armed Group (GIA), a terror organization linked to Al Qaeda that fought the military junta during the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s.

Chérif Kouachi’s meeting with Melouk on April 11, 2010 was photographed, using telephoto lenses, by investigators of the French Anti-Terrorism Sub-Division (SDAT).

Arrested with other Al Qaida members in Belgium in 1998 for attempted murder, possession of arms and explosives and falsifying government documents, Melouk was in prison until 2004, when he was extradited to serve a second term in France until 2009. When released, he stayed in France, quietly establishing closer ties to ISIS. He managed to flee to Syria the day after the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

Speaking to the Investigative Commission on Jihadist Networks of the French National Assembly last year, anti-terrorist investigating Judge Marc Trévidic declared, “The older ones are returning to activity. Farid Melouk, of whose presence in Syria I have now learned… I met him in 2000 when I was dealing with the first ‘Afghan’ network. He was at the head of a very big network that provided passage for jihadists… These older ones have a phenomenal number of contacts in Belgium and France.”

Such reports underscore that, over the course of decades, the jihadist networks have been investigated and mapped out in the greatest of detail by the European secret services, judiciary and police agencies.

24 March, 2016
WSWS.org

By Mirza Arif Beg

Europe is under attack again and the world stands in solidarity with Brussels as it did with Paris back in the November of 2015. Days after the arrest of main suspect in the Paris attacks, Salah Abdelsalam, the capital of Belgium and European Union was a witness to horrific attacks at Brussels Airport and in a subway station early Tuesday morning. The Islamic state has claimed responsibility for the attacks hinting toward an impending international crisis that these attacks might well stimulate.

While the attacks in Brussels that led to the killings of 30 people and wounded many more were covered internationally in contrast to Ankara, a city that has come under attacks repeatedly in the past five months. The International New York Times’ website had at least 5 stories dealing with Belgian capital and reporting on every event that transpired. The case was similar with The Guardian and The Washington Post as they sidelined the US’ President Barack Obama’s historic visit to Cuba, first by any US President in the past 88 years.

The terror attack that struck Ankara last Sunday evening forms part of a spate of violence that Turkey has suffered from in the past 5 months. This was the fourth occasion post deadly attacks at one of the rallies in Ankara in the month of October last year that took the lives of more than 100 people. While two people believed to have declared their allegiance with the ISIS carried out the attacks in October, the Turkish officials believed that the bombers linked to the banned Kurdish Workers party (PKK) perpetrated violence on Sunday. However, a breakaway faction of the PKK took responsibility for those attacks.

The day Ankara burnt in flames of terror, the world media paid little to no heed on the events and the number of deaths in the city. US Media kept itself aloof from these attacks and engrossed themselves into primaries as the second Super Tuesday approached. However, attacks in Brussels not only compelled them to empathise with the victims but also keep Obama’s visit to Cuba on the back burner.

Another country that doesn’t grab international media’s attention that frequently also came under assault last Sunday as the Al-qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) percolated deep into Western Africa resulting in the deaths of 16 people. Ivory Coast, a country that is more famous for the heroics of its former football captain and Chelsea player Didier Drogba was the latest to suffer with violence after the same group besieged a hotel in Mali and pulled off similar events in Burkina Faso recently.

This was not the first time when renowned media organizations and the world had turned a blind eye towards these deadly attacks. These events once again not only reflect western media’s bias towards certain terror attacks but also give us reasons to analyze as to why attacks in Brussels and Paris or a siege in Sydney invites far more outcry as compared to attacks in West Asia and Africa.

On the morning of 14th November 2015, I woke up to the news of deadly attacks on the French capital, Paris and these attacks literally sent shock waves across the world. These attacks at five different places brought the world to a standstill and the leaders along with millions stood in solidarity with Paris. Facebook initiated a solidarity campaign by helping its users change their profile images with a French flag in the foreground.

While close to 140 people lost their lives in Paris on that tragic evening of 13th November and many more had wounded, just a day before similar attacks had taken place in the Lebanese Capital of Beirut taking the lives of 41 people. What was significant to notice is that the world empathized with Paris on the one hand with alacrity but allowed the fatalities of Beirut go into oblivion.

A variety of factors play a part in not only the way certain events are covered but also the frequency of such incidents determines the coverage of certain areas. Emile Brunue, a cognitive neuroscientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an interview with Thinkprogress.org in the immediate aftermath of Paris attacks threw light on the psychological impact an event causes that triggers a response from the world. It also depends to a great extent whether your in-group or out-group has come under attack.

While there is a possibility that an attack on the in-group i.e. people who have any sort of similarity in terms of culture, religion, region and ideology will spark an immediate empathy as was witnessed in the aftermath of Paris attacks the distinction on the same lines may not trigger response on the same parameters.

Another significant factor to be considered in this discourse is the reaction of world leaders including the US president Barack Obama. Obama held a press conference instantly after Paris came under attack and declared that his country stands in solidarity with France at this moment of crisis. He was seen invoking his exhortations that it was not only an attack on a country or a city but an attack on the entire humanity. However, the incongruity even in the response to the attacks in Paris and Ivory Coast is visible as only a statement of condemnation was released by US Department of State spokesman John Kirby. The Washington is yet to respond to the attacks in Ankara.

In the immediate aftermath of Brussels attacks, the mayor of Paris tweeted that the Eiffel Tower will remain illuminated in the colors of Belgian Flag and Downing Street in UK has already raised the Belgian flag. However, these events were nowhere to be traced when Ankara endured horrendous attacks not once but on five different occasions.

Frequency of these events as mentioned above also determines the reaction and the amount of coverage that an incident or a place that comes under attack garners. The attacks in Paris were second in the same year after the office of a cartoon magazine Charlie Hebdo was attacked in January last year that led to the deaths of 17 journalists. This attack easily shrouded the killings of more than 2000 people in the northern town of Baga in Nigeria. Attack on Charlie Hebdo brought in notice the latest threat to Free speech and expression and millions participated in the Paris peace march.

While the larger West Asia has remained under serious attack in the past five years or so, Turkey had primarily remained at peace prior to attack in Ankara last year. Unfortunately, neither media nor this world ran any social media campaign to declare its solidarity with Turkey.

A barrage of images, editorials, and opinion pieces was unleashed upon us as it is usually done when a western country comes under attack. Attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the brutal massacre of Parisians is nowhere to be downplayed and in fact shouldn’t be at any cost. Paris attacks had kept the first pages of leading newspapers occupied for at least three initial days and we could expect the same again with regard to Brussels attacks. However, leading news organizations such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian are yet to publish their first editorial dedicated to the attacks in Ankara and Grand Bassam.

Mirza Arif Beg is Doing his Masters in Convergent Journalism at AJK Mass Communication Research center, Jamia Millia Islamia. He takes keen interest in International Affairs. He tweets @arifmirza22

23 March, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ludwig Watzal

Every year, it’s the same beat-up story. The pro-Israel Zionist lobby AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) invites to its annual convention and all the top knobs in Washington show up. This year, President Obama had more important things to do and made a historical visit to Cuba. Eighty-eight years ago, the last sitting US President, Calvin Coolidge, paid a visit to this island nation that is still embargoed by the US because it didn’t give way to US pressure.

This year, it was the turn of the American presidential candidates to go on the AIPAC pilgrimage, except for Bernie Sanders. Trump, Clinton, Cruz and Kasich were all thrilled to bits about Israel. They outbid each other in their subservience to Israel. Sanders, the only Jew in the race, did not show up and scathingly criticized the Israeli government for its occupation and its “disproportionate responses to being attacked”. He criticized the bombing of hospitals, schools and refugee camps in the 2014 war with Hamas and demanded an end of the blockade on Gaza. He, at least, was honest and did not pay rhetorical lip service to an occupation regime that apparently shares the same values as the US.

Donald Trump, the front-runner of the Republican Party, welcomed without any marked enthusiasm by 18 000 Israel fans, turned to upstage Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, not to speak of John Kasich. Trump got standing ovations even when he castigated Hillary Clinton “as a total disaster, by the way”. The audience was thrilled by Trump when he called US President Barack Obama “the worst thing that ever happened to Israel”. Obama and Clinton “treated Israel very badly”. Trump also wants to cancel the Iran deal. Although Trump’s appearance lasted only 25 minutes, he won the audience over by his simple pro-Israel rhetoric. The following statement opened the hearts of the crowd; “I speak to you today as a lifelong supporter and true friend of Israel. I’m a newcomer to politics but not to backing the Jewish state.” Suddenly, all his racist and xenophobic ramblings seemed forgotten, although the leadership of AIPAC had a sore head about Trump’s appearance.

Hillary Clinton spoke before Trump and she did everything to outdo him by not only lambasting him but also by calling to elevate the US-Israel alliance to “the next level”. That she wants to see Benyamin Netanyahu right away after becoming President does not speak in her favor. She supports a memorandum that would boost military aid to Israel. She reiterated her tough stance on Iran, calling for sanctioning any Iranian violation of the nuclear deal not excluding military force. Years ago, Clinton threatened Iran with total annihilation if the country would attack Israel. No Iranian leader has ever called for an attack on Israel. She appealed to the emotions by mentioning the wave of stabbings by Palestinians and blamed the Palestinian leadership for inciting violence, celebrating terrorists and rewarding the families of murderers. She denounced again the BDS campaign.

Ted Cruz and John Kasich tried even to outdo Hillary Clinton. Cruz wants to rip-up the Iran deal and block federal funding to BDS supporters. Cruz announced not to be “neutral” but stand “unapologetically with Israel”. He wasn’t even ashamed of drawing an analogy between the nuclear agreement with Iran and the Munich Agreement of 1938. Before him, Netanyahu has also drawn such an absurd analogy.

Ohio’s governor, John Kasich, promised to defend Israel from an imagined Iranian nuclear threat, and said the US should suspend the deal. He also called for the US to recognize Jerusalem as the “eternal capital of Israel”.

From this adulation of the State of Israel, one might get the impression that the candidates are competing for the highest office in Israel and not in the US. It seems as if the presidential candidates do not care about their own country and the American people.

Dr. Ludwig Watzal works as a journalist and editor in Bonn, Germany. Her runs the bilingual blog “between the lines” http://between-the-lines-ludwig-watzal.blogspot.de

23 March, 2016
Countercurrents.org

 

By Joshua Holland

More than anything, the terrorist group’s outward expressions of religious fervor serve its secular objectives of controlling resources and territory.

Despite the existence of a good deal of research about terrorism, there’s a gap between the common understanding of what leads terrorists to kill and what many experts believe to be true.

Terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda are widely seen as being motivated by their radical theology. But according to Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, this view is too simplistic. Pape knows his subject; he and his colleagues have studied every suicide attack in the world since 1980, evaluating over 4,600 in all.

He says that religious fervor is not a motive unto itself. Rather, it serves as a tool for recruitment and a potent means of getting people to overcome their fear of death and natural aversion to killing innocents. “Very often, suicide attackers realize they have instincts for self-preservation that they have to overcome,” and religious beliefs are often part of that process, said Pape in an appearance on my radio show, Politics and Reality Radio, last week. But, Pape adds, there have been “many hundreds of secular suicide attackers,” which suggests that radical theology alone doesn’t explain terrorist attacks. From 1980 until about 2003, the “world leader” in suicide attacks was the Tamil Tigers, a secular Marxist group of Hindu nationalists in Sri Lanka.

According to Pape’s research, underlying the outward expressions of religious fervor, ISIS’s goals, like those of most terrorist groups, are distinctly earthly:

What 95 percent of all suicide attacks have in common, since 1980, is not religion, but a specific strategic motivation to respond to a military intervention, often specifically a military occupation, of territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly. From Lebanon and the West Bank in the 80s and 90s, to Iraq and Afghanistan, and up through the Paris suicide attacks we’ve just experienced in the last days, military intervention—and specifically when the military intervention is occupying territory—that’s what prompts suicide terrorism more than anything else.

ISIS emerged from the insurgency against the US occupation of Iraq just as the Al Qaeda network traces its origins to the Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

This view differs from that of Hillary Clinton and others who believe that ISIS “has nothing whatsoever to do” with Islam, as well as the more common belief, articulated by Graeme Wood in The Atlantic, that ISIS can be reduced to “a religious group with carefully considered beliefs.” It’s a group whose outward expressions of religious fervor serve its secular objectives of controlling resources and territory. Virtually all of the group’s leaders were once high-ranking officers in Iraq’s secular military.

Pape’s analysis is consistent with what Lydia Wilson found when she interviewed captured ISIS fighters in Iraq. “They are woefully ignorant about Islam and have difficulty answering questions about Sharia law, militant jihad, and the caliphate,” she recently wrote in The Nation. “But a detailed, or even superficial, knowledge of Islam isn’t necessarily relevant to the ideal of fighting for an Islamic State, as we have seen from the Amazon order of Islam for Dummies by one British fighter bound for ISIS.”

But how does the notion that terrorists are intent on getting powers to withdraw from their territory square with the view that the group’s shift to terrorist attacks in the West is designed to draw France and its allies into a ground war in Syria? Writing at the Harvard Business Review, Northeastern University political scientist Max Abrahms argues that these analyses are contradictory. But Pape says that it’s important to distinguish between ISIS’s long-term goals and its shorter-term strategies to achieve them:

It’s about the timing. How are you going to get the United States, France and other major powers to truly abandon and withdraw from the Persian Gulf when they have such a large interest in oil? A single attack isn’t going to do it. Bin Laden did 9/11 hoping that it would suck a large American ground army into Afghanistan, which would help recruit a large number of suicide attackers to punish America for intervening. We didn’t do that – we used very limited military force in Afghanistan. But what Bin Laden didn’t count on was that we would send a large ground army into Iraq to knock Saddam out. And that turned out to be the most potent recruiting ground for anti-American terrorists that ever was, more so than Bin Laden had ever hoped for in his wildest dreams.

So if your goal is to create military costs on these states and get them to withdraw, you’ve got to figure out a way to really up the ante. And the way that you really up the ante is to get them to overreact. You try to get them to send a large ground army in so that you can truly drive up the costs. That’s what ISIS is trying to sucker us into doing.

Another theory holds that ISIS—and Al Qaeda—set their sights on France in order to polarize mainstream French society against its Muslim community. As University of Michigan historian Juan Cole put it after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, “The problem for a terrorist group like Al Qaeda is that its recruitment pool is Muslims, but most Muslims are not interested in terrorism. Most Muslims are not even interested in politics, much less political Islam.” In Cole’s formulation, if violent Islamic fundamentalists “can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.”

Pape says this analysis is also consistent with his research:

If ISIS is going to end the military intervention by France, one attack is not likely to do it. In the statement that ISIS released, they say that they want a storm of similar attacks against Paris and other French targets because their goal is to knock France out of the military coalition. To do that, to achieve that goal, they’re going to need to recruit many more attackers to do suicide attacks like the ones that occurred in Paris. In the short-term it makes perfect sense to want an environment that stirs up hostility towards Muslims in France, because that will make them much easier to recruit for their longer-term object of kicking France of the coalition.

Pape also argues that ISIS’ shift in strategy to attacks overseas is a sign not of its strength, but of its weakness on the ground in Syria and Iraq. He points out that over the past year, the amount of territory ISIS controls has shrunk by 10 percent:

The U.S. strategy against ISIS is working and it’s putting enormous pressure on ISIS. It’s a strategy of air and ground power, with the ground power coming from local allies—the Kurds and the Shia in the region, and even some Sunnis who are opposed to ISIS. They’re increasingly working with us on the ground while we’re fighting from the air. The problem here is not that we don’t have enough ground forces.

It’s because the strategy is working that ISIS is now desperate, and is shifting its pattern of behavior. In October, ISIS launched only eight suicide attacks in Iraq and Syria, when they normally do 30 to 35 per month, and that’s the same month that they shifted to suicide attacks in Ankara, Turkey, on October 10. Then they downed the Russian plane on October 31st, and now the Paris attacks on November 13th. As ISIS’ territory has shrunk in Iraq and Syria, it is now clearly shifting its suicide attack resources out of Iraq and Syria, and into Turkey, into killing Russian civilians, and now also into Paris.

In Pape’s view, most of the conventional wisdom about what terrorists want to achieve is wrong, and that disconnect has limited the effectiveness of the West’s response to terrorism.

Robert Pape’s responses have been condensed and edited for clarity. You can listen to the entire 18-minute interview below.

http://politicsandrealityradio.podbean.com/e/robert-pape-on-politics-and-reality-radio/?token=eee75153ec66d94fc360e8ed4db303bd

Joshua Holland is a contributor to The Nation and a fellow with The Nation Institute. He’s also the host of Politics and Reality Radio.

2 December 2015

By Chandra Muzaffar

Past UMNO presidents had joined forces with the political Opposition. UMNO’s founding president for instance, Dato Onn Jaafar, after his resignation from the party leadership in 1951 established first Parti Kemerdekaan Malaya and then Parti Negara (PN). As PN president, he collaborated with PAS in the 1959 General Election. It was through this collaboration that PN won 4 state seats in Terengganu and Onn secured the Kuala Terengganu Selatan parliamentary seat.

UMNO’s second president, Tunku Abdul Rahman, Prime Minister of Malaya and then Malaysia from 1957 to 1970, also left UMNO in 1988 when UMNO Baru was formed by Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad following the deregistration of the original UMNO by a Court of law. He campaigned actively for the opposition Semangat 46 in the 1990 General Election, and since Semangat 46 was an ally of the DAP, the Tunku also spoke on a few occasions from the DAP’s platform. Incidentally, UMNO’s fourth president, Tun Hussein Onn, also stayed out of UMNO Baru.

In a sense, the third president of UMNO, Tun Abdul Razak, also reached out to the Opposition in order to expand the ruling coalition and form the Barisan Nasional (BN). It was he who brought in the opposition Sarawak United People’s Party (SUPP), followed by the opposition Gerakan Rakyat Malaysia ( Gerakan), the opposition People’s Progressive Party (PPP) and the opposition PAS into Government. It was through collaboration with a number of opposition parties that the BN was created.
Moves of this sort are not uncommon in the realm of party politics. Parties and groups associate with one another for a variety of reasons. This is what freedom of association is all about in a parliamentary democracy.

Against this backdrop, the demands made by the Citizens’ Declaration initiated by Dr. Mahathir on the 4th of March 2016 are part and parcel of democratic politics everywhere. Asking for the removal of a Prime Minister through peaceful means in accordance with prevailing laws; or calling for the abrogation of laws and agreements which violate those human rights embodied in the Federal Constitution; or pleading for the restoration of the integrity of institutions such as the police, the SPRM, Bank Negara and the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) are in no way antithetical to the norms and principles of governance that Malaysia as a nation has adopted since Merdeka.

10 days after the Citizens’ Declaration was announced to the public, its impact appears to be modest on the basis of the signatures it has garnered. The demonization of the Declaration by the powers-that-be — it is described in some of the government-linked media as the Mahathir- Kit Siang Declaration — is partly responsible for this. But it is also because a number of the leading lights associated with the Declaration have a parlous record when it comes to upholding integrity or protecting the institutions of governance. Besides, some of them seem to be pursuing different agendas which are at variance with the essence of the Declaration. For a Declaration of this sort to harness massive support it should have a single clear focus articulated by all its main actors.

Nonetheless, the leaders of the Declaration will go all out to mobilize support. Najib Razak loyalists are bound to respond. The confrontation between the two sides will be the cynosure of all eyes. Politics and power will take center stage. The fundamental issue of integrity and accountability will be sidelined. Concerned Malaysian citizens should not allow this to happen.

This is why it is so important for the nation at this stage to focus upon what may well be the most critical evaluation of the IMDB saga. This is the report that the PAC will present to Parliament in a short while. The report which would have drawn upon the submission of the Auditor-General to the PAC, apart from its own investigations, may provide a lot of the answers that Malaysians and outsiders are waiting for. The PAC, let us remind ourselves, cannot conceal or camouflage the truth because it has a number of Opposition Members of Parliament in it and its Deputy Chairman is a respected Opposition stalwart. Besides, one can expect the Auditor-General given his commitment to integrity to have done an honest job in unravelling the whole truth about this saga.

One hopes that the lines of action recommended by the PAC will be endorsed by Parliament and implemented by the Executive without delay. If these recommendations serve to strengthen the sinews of integrity in Malaysian society, the people should speak up to ensure that justice is not sacrificed at the altar of political expediency. The Conference of Rulers which in October 2015 requested the Executive to uncover the truth about 1MDB should once again play its rightful role as a guardian of good governance and advise Parliament and the Executive to remain faithful to its supreme duty — which is to protect the rights of the people in accordance with the principles of the Constitution.

Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is a Malaysian political scientist.

Kuala Lumpur.
14 March 2016.