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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.

By Ramzy Baroud

A foray of condemnations of the boycott of Israel seems to have fallen on deaf ears. Calls from Western governments, originating from the UK, the US, Canada and others, to criminalize the boycott of Israel have hardly slowed down the momentum of the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS). On the contrary, it has accelerated.

It is as if history is repeating itself. Western governments took on the pro-South African Anti-Apartheid Movement, fighting it at every corner and branding its leaders. Nelson Mandela and many of his comrades were called terrorists.

Once he passed away in 2013, top US politicians vied for the opportunity to list the late African leader’s great qualities in their many press conferences, speaking of his commitment to justice and human rights. However, Mandela’s name was not removed from the US terrorism watch list till 2008.

The Reagan administration called the African National Congress – the main platform for the anti-apartheid struggle – a terrorist group, as well. The ANC’s strategy against the Apartheid government was “calculated terror”, the administration said in 1986.

Many South Africans would tell you that the fight for equality is far from over, and that the struggle against institutional apartheid has been replaced by equally pressing matters. Corruption, neoliberal economics, and disproportionate allocation of wealth are only a few such challenges.

But aside from those who are still holding on to the repellent dream of racial superiority, the vast majority of humanity looks back at South Africa’s Apartheid era with revulsion.

The South Africa experience, which is still fresh in the memory of most people, is now serving as a frame of reference in the struggle against Israeli Apartheid in Palestine, where Jews have been designated as a privileged race, and Palestinian Muslims and Christians are poorly treated, oppressed and occupied.

While racism is, unfortunately, a part of life and is practiced, observed and reported on in many parts of the world, institutionalized racism through calculated governmental measures is only practiced – at least, openly – in a few countries around the world: Burma is one of them. However, no country is as adamant and open about its racially-motivated laws and apartheid rules as the Israeli government. Almost every measure taken by the Israeli Knesset that pertains to Arabs is influenced by this mindset: Palestinians must remain inferior, and Jews must ensure their superiority at any cost.

The outcome of Israel’s racist pipe dream has been a tremendous amount of violence, palpable inequality, massive walls, trenches, Jews-only roads, military occupation, and even laws that outlaw the very questioning of these practices.

Yet, the greater its failure to suppress Palestinian Resistance and to slow down the flow of solidarity from around the world with the oppressed people, the more Israel labors to ensure its dominance and invest in racial segregation.

“The whole world is against us,” is quite a common justification in Israel itself, of the international reaction to Israel’s Apartheid practices. With time, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and feeds on past notions that are no longer applicable. No matter how many companies divest from Israel – the latest being the world’s largest security corporation G4S – and, no matter how many universities and churches vote to boycott Israel, Israeli society remains entrenched behind the slogan and its disconcerting sense of victimization.

Many Israelis believe that their country is a ‘villa in a jungle’ – a notion that is constantly enforced by top Israeli leaders. Right-wing Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is purposely advancing the crippling fear in his own society. Unable to see the unmistakable crimes he has carried out against Palestinians for years, he continues to perpetuate the idea of the purity of Israel and the wickedness of everyone else.

In February, he spoke of the need to create yet more fences to keep his ‘villa in the jungle’ safe, and, to quote, “to defend ourselves against the wild beasts” in neighboring countries. The statement was made only a few weeks before the launch of the annual Israel Apartheid Week in numerous cities around the world. It is as if the Israeli leader wished to contribute to the global campaign which is successfully making a case against Israel as being an Apartheid state that ought to be boycotted.

Israel is, of course, no ‘villa in the jungle’. Since its inception over the ruins of destroyed and occupied Palestine, it has meted out tremendous violence, provoked wars and harshly responded to any resistance carried out by its victims. Similar to the US and the UK designation of Mandela as a ‘terrorist’, Palestinian Resistance and its leaders are also branded, shunned, and imprisoned. Israel’s so-called ‘targeted killings’ – the assassination of hundreds of Palestinians in recent years have often been applauded by the US and other Israeli allies as victories in their ‘war on terror.’

Comforted by the notion that the US and other western governments are on their side, most Israelis are not worried about exhibiting their racism and calling for more violence against Palestinians. According to a recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center and revealed on March 08, nearly half of Israel’s Jewish population want to expel Palestinians to outside of their historic homeland.

The study was conducted between October 2014 and May 2015 – months before the current Intifada began in October 2015 – and is described as a first-of-its-kind survey as it reached out to over 5,600 Israeli adults and touched on myriads of issues, including religion and politics. 48% of all Israeli Jews want to exile Arabs. However, the number is significantly higher – 71% – among those who define themselves as ‘religious’.

What options are then left for Palestinians, who have been victimized and ethnically cleansed from their own historic homeland for 68 years, when they are described and treated as ‘beasts’, killed at will, and suffer under a massive system of apartheid and racial discrimination that has never ceased after all of these years?

BDS has, thus far, been the most successful strategy and tactic to support Palestinian Resistance and steadfastness while, at the same time, holding Israel accountable for its progressively worsening policies of apartheid. The main objective behind BDS, an entirely non-violent movement that is championed by civil society across the globe, is not to punish ordinary Israelis, but to raise awareness of the suffering of Palestinians and to create a moral threshold that must be achieved if a just peace is ever to be realized.

That moral threshold has already been delineated in the relationship between Palestinians and South Africans when Mandela himself said, “We know all too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

He was not trying to be cordial or diplomatic. He meant every word. And, finally, many around the world are making the same connection, and are wholeheartedly in agreement.

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.

17 March, 2016
Countercurrents.org

 

By Professor Francis A. Boyle

University of Illinois College of Law, Women’s Law Symposium, March 9, 2016

The author won two Orders from the International Court of Justice overwhelmingly in favor of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina against Yugoslavia to cease and desist from committing all acts of genocide in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention on April 8, 1993 and September 13, 1993. This was the first time ever that any Government or Lawyer had won two such Orders in one case since the World Court was founded in 1921. And on August 5, 1993, he also won an Article 74(4) Order from the World Court to the same effect. Under Article 74(4) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice, when the Full Court is not in Session, the President of the Court exercises the Full Powers of the Court and can issue an Order that is binding upon the states parties in a case. The story is told in his book The Bosnian People Charge Genocide! (Aletheia Press: 1996).

I want to express my gratitude to the Women’s Law Society for asking me to speak here today and especially in honor of International Women’s Day. The WLS organizers asked me to talk about a problem related to women and human rights. Over my career since coming here in 1978 — both practicing and teaching international human rights law — the most daunting problem I ever confronted was being the Lawyer for all the raped women of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I was the Attorney of Record for at least 20,000+ raped women of Bosnia before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the World Court of the United Nations System. All 20,000+ of these raped Bosnian women were my Clients. I had originally figured 20,000 was a gross underestimate since rape is always underreported — especially during war time. When the war and the genocide were over, the United Nations got into Bosnia in order to investigate. I have read that the current U.N. estimate is that about 40,000 Bosnian Muslim women were raped during that war and genocide.

The Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic appointed me their General Agent with Extraordinary and Penitentiary Powers to represent the Republic of Bosnia Herzegovina before the International Court of Justice. That meant I was their Attorney of Record and their Ambassador to the World Court with responsibility to argue their case for genocide and to stop the genocide against the Bosnians. This lawsuit was the most important international human rights case ever filed at the World Court since it was founded in 1921. All I am going to do here is discuss one critical element of the case when I argued to the World Court that the mass rape of the Bosnian women was genocide. I was given complete authority by President Izetbegovic to argue this case as I saw fit, and the mass rape of the Bosnian women was a decisive component of this genocide lawsuit as I saw it.

Even the Nazis during World War II did not engage in the mass and systematic rape of women as a technique of warfare, though the Japanese came very close to it against Chinese women during the Second World War. Bosnia was appalling! It seemed to me that what was going on there was not just rape – which in times of war is a war crime — but that what was going on there was genocide. Outright genocide! So I decided to argue that the mass rape of the Bosnian women was genocide to the World Court.

Now when I argued the case to the World Court I was operating on the basis of multiple and independent reputable human rights sources that what we were dealing with here was somewhere between 20,000 to 25,000 raped Bosnian Muslim women. If you look at the Genocide Convention, I was working with this definition in respect to arguing their case for genocide:

Article II. In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such…

(b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group…

Certainly rape causes both serious bodily and serious mental harm to members of the group. In this case, Yugoslavian and Bosnian Serb Christian men were raping Bosnian Muslim women.

But that is only the actus reus of the crime of genocide that I just quoted to you. I also had to prove the mens rea, and in the case of genocide, this was a specific intent offense. So I had to argue and prove that these women were being raped because of their Muslim religion or because of their Bosnian nationality or because of their Bosnian Muslim ethnicity. So how did I do that? I compiled all the victims’ statements we could get from United Nations Organs, the Council of Europe, reputable human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and put them all together and filed them with the World Court. And what type of evidence did I use to establish their genocidal specific intent by means of rape? Here, I am going to use some graphic language, but, hey, we are all adults here and we are lawyers. So that is just the way I had to argue the case:

I got numerous statements that, while these women were being raped, their rapists and the men surrounding them and oftentimes gang-raping them, said to them while they were in the process of raping and gang-raping them “Fuck Mohammad!” That proved that the rapists and gang-rapists were motivated because of the women’s religion. Or the rapists and gang-rapists would yell to their victims while raping them “Fuck your Turkish mother!” Bosnians are not Turks. They are South Slavic people, but because they are Muslims, Serbs derogatively refer to them as Turks. I put that in there to indicate these women were being raped on grounds of nationality and ethnicity. And: “Fuck you, you Balija whore!” Balija is a Serb derogatory term for Bosnian Muslims. Ditto. And: “Fuck Alija!” — in reference to my Client the President of the Republic of Bosnia Herzegovina Alija Izetbegovic, who was a Bosnian Muslim. Ditto. Etc

I compiled all these statements I possibly could obtain and put them into a package and filed them with the World Court. It was not enough just to prove that these women were being raped. It was not enough just to prove that these rapists and gang-rapists were war criminals and sadists. I had to prove that in the process of raping them these Christian Serbs raped the Bosnian Muslim women for religious reasons or national reasons or ethnical reasons as required by Article 2 of the Genocide Convention that says: “…committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such.” I argued to the World Court that Christian Serb men were raping Bosnian Muslim women for national and ethnical and religious reasons.

I also argued to the World Court Article 2, paragraph (d) of the Genocide Convention to establish that the mass rape of the Bosnian women was genocide for a second count of the actus reus for genocide: “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” And here, again, I used a multiplicity of victims’ statements from all reputable human rights sources and organizations, that while these women were being raped and gang-raped, their rapists and the men surrounding them and their gang-rapists, were saying to them “We’re going to give you a good little Serbian baby,” or “We’re going to give you a good little Serb baby.” This is because in this South Slavic culture the ethnicity is deemed to descend from the father. So, technically, if you have a child born of a Bosnian Muslim woman raped by a Christian Serb father, the baby is deemed to be Serb. Also, “We’re going to give you a good little chetnik baby!” Chetnik was a term for Serbian partisan resistance fighters during World War 2. Nothing wrong with resisting the Nazis. But here these Christian Serb men were invoking the Serb term Chetnik while they were raping these Bosnian Muslim women.

Next, Yugoslavia and the so-called Bosnia Serb Army, which was in fact an arm of the Yugoslav National Army, maintained rape camps for Bosnian Muslim women throughout the Bosnian territories that they occupied. There Bosnian Muslim women were confined and reduced to sexual slavery, repeatedly raped and gang-raped, traded around, sold, and trafficked. If they became pregnant in these rape camps, we had numerous victims’ statements that their captor-rapists told them: “We are going to make you stay here to give birth to a chetnik baby so that you do not get an abortion.” Yet another violation of Genocide Convention article 2(d) that I filed with and argued to the World Court.

Finally, we had large numbers of Bosnian refugees up in Canada. The Clinton administration – Clinton was such a phony and a hypocrite on Bosnia, I won’t go through it all here. But Canada was letting them in, while Clinton was not letting them into the United States on a large scale until after the Dayton Agreement. I called up to Canada and said “I need five courageous women, victims of rape, willing to give me their statements that I will file with the World Court and they must also be willing to testify at the World Court in front of the entire world what happened to them.” They got me the five courageous rape victims, we had their victim statements recorded, translated into English, and I filed them with the World Court.

At this beginning stage of the case I was simply trying to get what is called “an indication of provisional measures of protection.” That is the international equivalent of a temporary restraining order and injunction against all acts of genocide. So the proceedings on the merits and the trial itself would come later on down the line. At this stage, I was just trying to stop the genocide and the war and the rapes. I fully intended to call as witnesses before the World Court as many rape victims as I could fit into the schedule for the trial on the merits.

To make a long story short, I won a massive overwhelming Order from the World Court against Yugoslavia. Three measures of protection, the first that Yugoslavia itself should cease and desist from committing all acts of genocide against Bosnia and the Bosnians. I won that measure unanimously. The second, that Yugoslavia must do everything in their power to stop all these paramilitary, military, terrorist groups, and criminal gangs that they had launched upon the Bosnians, including for the purpose of the mass rape of the Bosnian women as techniques of ethnic cleansing and warfare. I won that measure with only the Russian Judge dissenting. And then third, which I had requested, that Yugoslavia do nothing more to further extend or aggravate this dispute over genocide. I won that unanimously too.

So then my Order was transmitted to the United Nations Security Council for enforcement as required by the United Nations Charter. It was for the Security Council to enforce my Order that genocide and the raping be stopped because Yugoslavia did not stop the genocide and raping and indeed they continued it and escalated it. What did the Security Council do with my Order? Nothing! Clinton sabotaged its enforcement together with the British and the French and the Russians. So nothing was done.

Amazingly, instead of enforcing my World Court Order against Yugoslavia, these Great Powers then decided to punish Bosnia and the Bosnians by coming up with the so-called Owen-Stoltenberg Plan. This would have carved up the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina into three little chunks of land, destroyed our Statehood under international law, robbed us of our U.N. Membership, and subjected 1.5 to 2 million more Bosnians to ethnic cleansing. The Bosnian Apocalypse was staring me right in my face!

So I returned to the World Court asking for a second Order of provisional measures of protection to stop Owen-Stoltenberg. Then the very next day I flew to Geneva where I was the Lawyer for the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the Owen-Stoltenberg negotiations in order to stop them in situ. I sabotaged the whole damn thing right then and there. I made sure it never happened. And then I went back to the World Court and won that second Order – again — a massive overwhelming victory on behalf of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina against Yugoslavia to cease and desist from committing all acts of genocide against the Bosnians, both directly and indirectly by means of their genocidal surrogates. That was the end of the Owen-Stoltenberg Plan.

When the war was over, President Izetbegovic gave an interview in which he said “we almost lost our State in the Fall of 1993,” which was correct. I was there. Bosnia almost fell. All of Bosnia would have been turned into Srebrenica, and I later became the Attorney of Record for the Mothers of Srebrenica and Podrinja at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. 8,000+ Bosnian Muslim men and boys were just exterminated, and many women were raped. We would have had at least another 100,000+ more dead Bosnians and another 40,000+ more raped Bosnian Muslim women if Bosnia had fallen in the Fall of 1993.

But Clinton, Britain, France, and Russia refused to enforce my second World Court Order at the U.N. Security Council against Yugoslavia. Even most despicably, Clinton, Britain, France, and Russia sabotaged my strategy and our efforts to invoke the United Nation’s Uniting for Peace Resolution (1950) in order to have the United Nations General Assembly enforce my World Court Order against Yugoslavia. And in the Fall of 1993 Clinton finally came out of the closet and revealed his genocidal intention to carve-up and destroy the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Clinton hauled into the White House the Dutch Foreign Minister Kooijmans to serve as his stalking horse in order to do his genocidal dirty work for him. I had already briefed Kooijmans in his office at The Hague on these so-called Bosnian peace plans, saying they were all genocidal; that he should have nothing to do with them; and asked him to help us. Instead Clinton and Kooijmans came up with what they called the Contact Group Plan, which, again, would have done the same thing as Owen-Stoltenberg: Carve-up the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina into three pieces, destroy Bosnia’s Statehood under international law, and subject 1.5 to 2 million more Bosnians to ethnic cleansing.

So acting pursuant to my advice, President Izetbegovic gave me the authority to sue Britain at the World Court for aiding and abetting Yugoslavia’s genocide against the Bosnians and the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. We really couldn’t sue Clinton. Clinton was guilty as sin and deserved to be sued! But the only hope we had was that Clinton would change his mind. And among the other Permanent Members of the Security Council, the British were certainly the worst against us by far — though I had repeatedly offered to sue France and Russia at the World Court as well. Ditto for Croatia.

I set out to sue Britain to stop this latest Clinton/Kooijmans/Contact Group genocidal carve-up plan. I also set out to sue Britain at the World Court for aiding and abetting the Bosnian genocide, to stop the genocide, including the mass rape of the Bosnian women, and to break the genocidal arms embargo that the Security Council had illegally imposed upon the Bosnians in gross violation of their basic right to self-defense under U.N. Charter article 51. The Bosnians could not defend their women and their children. The Yugoslav National Army was one of the most powerful armies in Europe. After the Tito/Stalin split, Tito had armed, equipped, supplied and trained the JNA to repulse an invasion by the Soviet Union. By comparison, the Bosnians had no heavy weapons of their own. They were being slaughtered. I could watch it live on CNN.

In response, the British then threatened the Bosnians to the effect that if they let me argue this genocide case against them at the World Court, we will starve you to death. It was the middle of winter. All the food supplies for the Bosnians came in at Sarajevo airport that was under the control of the British and French troops. The British just threatened to cut off the supplies then and there. So under those circumstances of extreme duress, we had to withdraw that lawsuit against Britain for genocide from the World Court. The British also said: “And by the way, fire Boyle!” The British and everyone else involved knew full well that so long as I was Bosnia’s Lawyer at the World Court, I would use all the powers at my command and move heaven and earth to prevent their genocidal carve-up and destruction of my Client the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the further genocide of my Clients the Bosnians.

Well, alright, I was doing this case free of charge and pro bono publico. I wasn’t paid a dime by the Bosnian government, whether for expenses or for fees. Indeed, I was eating my own expenses. It cost me $30,000 in out of pocket expenses to win those two World Court Orders that I took out of my own bank account and put on my American Express Gold Card. That money was paid back to me by a Bosnian woman living in Canada who took out a second mortgage on her home. So the Bosnian government brought in their own Bosnian lawyer to take my place, Mr. Softic. And then what happened? Here we get directly into feminist legal studies and international human rights law.

When I was flying back from the World Court to here in Champaign the day after winning my first Order, on that long airplane flight home I contemplated to myself: “Ok. I won this Order but now I’m going to have to prove it at the trial. And here, there’s 25,000 raped women. I did win the temporary restraining Order but proving it in Court on the merits is another matter. I want this to be done in a way that would set a precedent for the future of all women. So I am really going to need an expert on both feminist legal theory and international human rights law to conceptualize this entire matter for me on setting up, proving, and winning that the mass rape of the Bosnian women was genocide.” So I called up my friend Professor Kathleen Mahoney, who teaches at the University of Calgary Law School in Canada and I asked her to handle all this for me and in particular to conceptualize how we are going to argue and win that the mass rape of the Bosnian women was genocide from a feminist legal studies perspective. She readily agreed to do it, free of charge and pro bono publico, eating her own expenses, and immediately set up a team of women lawyers there in Calgary and went to work on it for me.

What happened? After I was moved off the case, Bosnia’s lawyers dismissed Professor Mahoney and her team and dropped the entire issue that the mass rape of the Bosnian women was genocide from the World Court lawsuit. They dropped it all completely from the proceedings. After I had deliberately put it right in there smack dab in the heart of the lawsuit as one of the critical elements of this genocide case right from the very get-go.

And then, when it came to the trial on the merits at the World Court, I was not there, but here. I did follow it from here and as far as I could tell, Bosnia’s Lawyers did not have even one Bosnian woman victim of rape testify. I stand subject to correction by someone who actually attended the World Court trial in The Hague, but you had 20,000+ raped women, and Bosnia’s lawyers did not call even one rape victim to testify as a witness? And this despite the fact that at the very beginning of these proceedings I had told the World Court that I had at least 5 rape victims and I was going to call them all to testify at the trial about what happened to them?

So of course in its Judgment on the merits, the World Court basically said “Well Bosnia made the charge at the beginning of the lawsuit, but they didn’t put on any evidence in the Memorial or in the trial to support it.” So it was summarily dismissed, and that was that. These 40,000 raped women of Bosnia were abandoned and betrayed by their own government! Likewise, the Mothers of Srebrenica and Podrinja were abandoned and betrayed by their own government! Ditto for the Women of Srebrenica!

Where do we stand now? My argument that the rape of women can constitute genocide was ratified by International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in the Akayesu case decided in 1998. Akayesu is the leading source of international legal authority that we have today that the rape of women can constitute genocide. As for Professor Mahoney, she and her team took all of their outstanding work and filed it with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia where it was used in the Foca Rape Camp case. The Serbs established and maintained rape camps. These Bosnian Muslim women were kept in these rape camps, they were repeatedly raped and gang-raped, they were traded around and sold and trafficked. Professor Mahoney and her team successfully argued to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia that their sexual slavery was a crime against humanity.

Now, that is a major advance for women in the development of international human rights law and of international criminal law. Up until that ruling, sexual slavery in war time had never been considered anything more serious than a series of war crimes. Thanks to Professor Mahoney and her team, sexual slavery is now a crime against humanity. More serious than a war crime, and just short of genocide.

For example I have tried to help the Sex Slaves in Korea that the male chauvinist pig militarists in Japan still call their “comfort women” that were designated for their own personal sexual “comfort.” Well clearly this is a crime against humanity — what the Japanese did to the Korean women and also to the Chinese women, the Sex Slaves over in China too, during World War II. And Japan still denies it as of today. In both cases, nothing meaningful has really been done to rectify these grave injustices, these crimes against humanity against the Korean women and the Chinese women by Japan. Most of these women have gone to their graves in silence and unvindicated. These Korean women and these Chinese women too have been abandoned and betrayed by their own governments.

Finally, overall, it has just been announced that on March 24, 2016, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia will issue its Verdict on Radovan Karadzic. Karadzic had been indicted for every crime in the ICTY Statute including two counts of genocide – one count for Bosnia in general and the second count for Srebrenica in particular. During the summer of 1993. I stopped Karadzic, Milosevic, Tudjman, Boban, Owen, Stoltenberg, the United Nations and the European Union from carving up and destroying the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina with the most catastrophic consequences for the Bosnians. We were all in Geneva together! And they had the backing of Clinton and Christopher working behind the scenes in Washington, D.C. in support of their efforts to destroy us. It will certainly be nice to see Karadzic finally get his just desserts after all these years!

Similarly, working on behalf of my Clients the Mothers of Srebrenica and Podrinja. I got the ICTY Prosecutor to likewise indict Slobodan Milosevic for every crime in the ICTY Statute book including two counts of genocide — one count for Bosnia in general and the second count for Srebrenica in particular. He died while on trial in The Hague taking all his secrets with him. How convenient for Clinton, Britain, France, Russia, the United Nations, and the European Union. Dead men tell no tales! I will have to study the Karadzic Verdict and figure out what more – if anything – can now be done on behalf of the 40,000 raped women of Bosnia, the Mothers of Srebrenica and Podrinja, the Women of Srebrenica, and the Bosnians. Thank you.

17 March, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By William Blum

The prospect of a Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump general election is nightmarish for Americans who see Clinton as a warmonger and Trump as a demagogue, but William Blum sees Trump as the lesser danger.

If the American presidential election winds up with Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump, and my passport is confiscated, and I’m somehow FORCED to choose one or the other, or I’m PAID to do so, paid well … I would vote for Trump.

My main concern is foreign policy. American foreign policy is the greatest threat to world peace, prosperity, and the environment. And when it comes to foreign policy, Hillary Clinton is an unholy disaster. From Iraq and Syria to Libya and Honduras the world is a much worse place because of her; so much so that I’d call her a war criminal who should be prosecuted.

And not much better can be expected on domestic issues from this woman who was paid $675,000 by Goldman Sachs – one of the most reactionary, anti-social corporations in this sad world – for three speeches and even more than that in political donations in recent years. Add to that Hillary’s willingness to serve for six years on the board of Walmart while her husband was governor of Arkansas. Can we expect to change corporate behavior by taking their money?

The Los Angeles Times ran an editorial the day after the multiple primary elections of March 1 which began: “Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States,” and then declared: “The reality is that Trump has no experience whatsoever in government.”

When I need to have my car fixed I look for a mechanic with experience with my type of auto. When I have a medical problem I prefer a doctor who specializes in the part of my body that’s ill. But when it comes to politicians, experience means nothing. The only thing that counts is the person’s ideology.

Who would you sooner vote for, a person with 30 years in Congress who doesn’t share your political and social views at all, is even hostile to them, or someone who has never held public office before but is an ideological comrade on every important issue? Clinton’s 12 years in high government positions carries no weight with me.

The Times continued about Trump: “He has shamefully little knowledge of the issues facing the country and the world.”

Again, knowledge is trumped (no pun intended) by ideology. As Secretary of State (January 2009-February 2013), with great access to knowledge, Clinton played a key role in the 2011 destruction of Libya’s modern and secular welfare state, sending it crashing in utter chaos into a failed state, leading to the widespread dispersal throughout North African and Middle East hotspots of the gigantic arsenal of weaponry that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had accumulated. Libya is now a haven for terrorists, from al Qaeda to ISIS, whereas Gaddafi had been a leading foe of terrorists.

What good did Secretary of State Clinton’s knowledge do? It was enough for her to know that Gaddafi’s Libya, for several reasons, would never be a properly obedient client state of Washington. Thus it was that the United States, along with NATO, bombed the people of Libya almost daily for more than six months, giving as an excuse that Gaddafi was about to invade Benghazi, the Libyan center of his opponents, and so the United States was thus saving the people of that city from a massacre.

The American people and the American media of course swallowed this story, though no convincing evidence of the alleged impending massacre has ever been presented. (The nearest thing to an official U.S. government account of the matter – a Congressional Research Service report on events in Libya for the period – makes no mention at all of the threatened massacre.) [“Libya: Transition and U.S. Policy”, updated March 4, 2016]

The Western intervention in Libya was one that the New York Times said Clinton had “championed”, convincing Obama in “what was arguably her moment of greatest influence as secretary of state.”

All the knowledge she was privy to did not keep her from this disastrous mistake in Libya. And the same can be said about her support of placing regime change in Syria ahead of supporting the Syrian government in its struggle against ISIS and other terrorist groups. Even more disastrous was the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq which she as a senator supported. Both policies were of course clear violations of international law and the UN Charter.

Another foreign-policy “success” of Mrs. Clinton, which her swooning followers will ignore, the few that even know about it, is the coup ousting the moderately progressive Manuel Zelaya of Honduras in June, 2009. A tale told many times in Latin America.

The downtrodden masses finally put into power a leader committed to reversing the status quo, determined to try to put an end to up to two centuries of oppression … and before long the military overthrows the democratically-elected government, while the United States – if not the mastermind behind the coup – does nothing to prevent it or to punish the coup regime, as only the United States can punish; meanwhile Washington officials pretend to be very upset over this “affront to democracy”. (See Mark Weisbrot’s “Top Ten Ways You Can Tell Which Side The United States Government is On With Regard to the Military Coup in Honduras”.)

In her 2014 memoir, Hard Choices, Clinton reveals just how unconcerned she was about restoring Zelaya to his rightful office: “In the subsequent days [after the coup] I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere … We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot.”

The question of Zelaya was anything but moot. Latin American leaders, the United Nations General Assembly, and other international bodies vehemently demanded his immediate return to office. Washington, however, quickly resumed normal diplomatic relations with the new right-wing police state, and Honduras has since become a major impetus for the child migrants currently pouring into the United States.

The headline from Time magazine’s report on Honduras at the close of that year (December 3, 2009) summed it up as follows: “Obama’s Latin America Policy Looks Like Bush’s”.

And Hillary Clinton looks like a conservative. And has for many years; going back to at least the 1980s, while the wife of the Arkansas governor, when she strongly supported the death-squad torturers known as the Contras, who were the empire’s proxy army in Nicaragua. [See Roger Morris, former member of the National Security Council, Partners in Power (1996), p.415. For a comprehensive look at Hillary Clinton, see the new book by Diane Johnstone, Queen of Chaos.]

Then, during the 2007 presidential primary, America’s venerable conservative magazine, William Buckley’s National Review, ran an editorial by Bruce Bartlett. Bartlett was a policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan, a treasury official under President George H.W. Bush, and a fellow at two of the leading conservative think-tanks, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute – You get the picture?

Bartlett tells his readers that it’s almost certain that the Democrats will win the White House in 2008. So what to do? Support the most conservative Democrat. He writes: “To right-wingers willing to look beneath what probably sounds to them like the same identical views of the Democratic candidates, it is pretty clear that Hillary Clinton is the most conservative.”

During the same primary we also heard from America’s leading magazine for the corporate wealthy, Fortune, with a cover featuring a picture of Mrs. Clinton and the headline: “Business Loves Hillary”.

And what do we have in 2016? Fully 116 members of the Republican Party’s national security community, many of them veterans of Bush administrations, have signed an open letter threatening that, if Trump is nominated, they will all desert, and some will defect – to Hillary Clinton!

“Hillary is the lesser evil, by a large margin,” says Eliot Cohen of the Bush II State Department. Cohen helped line up neocons to sign the “Dump-Trump” manifesto. Another signer, foreign-policy ultra-conservative author Robert Kagan, declared: “The only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton.”

The only choice? What’s wrong with Bernie Sanders or Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate? … Oh, I see, not conservative enough.

And Mr. Trump? Much more a critic of U.S. foreign policy than Hillary or Bernie. He speaks of Russia and Vladimir Putin as positive forces and allies, and would be much less likely to go to war against Moscow than Clinton would. He declares that he would be “evenhanded” when it comes to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (as opposed to Clinton’s boundless support of Israel). He’s opposed to calling Senator John McCain a “hero”, because he was captured. (What other politician would dare say a thing like that?)

He calls Iraq “a complete disaster”, condemning not only George W. Bush but the neocons who surrounded him. “They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction and there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.” He even questions the idea that “Bush kept us safe”, and adds that “Whether you like Saddam or not, he used to kill terrorists.”

Yes, he’s personally obnoxious. I’d have a very hard time being his friend. Who cares?

William Blum is an author, historian, and renowned critic of U.S. foreign policy. He is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II and Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, among others. [This article originally appeared at the Anti-Empire Report, http://williamblum.org/ .]

11 March 2016

By Nick Beams

The International Monetary Fund warned this week of a further weakening of the global economy following the release of figures showing a significant decline in Chinese and global trade.

In a major speech to the National Association for Business Economics in Washington on Tuesday, the first deputy managing director of the IMF, David Lipton, said that it was “most disconcerting” that the rise in “risk aversion” was leading to a “sharp retrenchment in global capital and trade flows.”

He noted that emerging markets experienced a capital outflow of $200 billion last year compared to a net inflow of $125 billion in 2014. “Trade flows meanwhile are being dragged down by weak export and import growth in large emerging markets such as China, as well as Russia and Brazil, which have been under considerable stress,” he said.

Lipton made his remarks following the release of data showing that Chinese exports experienced their biggest contraction since 2009. It was another sign that, far from the world economy being on the road to “recovery,” global demand is continuing to fall.

Chinese exports in February were down by 25.4 percent in dollar terms from a year earlier, after falling by 11.2 percent in January, while imports declined by 13.8 percent, after dropping by 18.8 percent in January. While the figures may have been somewhat distorted because of issues related to the lunar New Year holiday, the combined January and February falls add up to a marked decline over the previous year, and no one is expecting the March data to show any improvement.

The Chinese results are the latest in a series of reports showing a decline in world trade, especially over the past two years, as a result of intensifying recessionary trends. In the years before the financial meltdown, world trade grew at about twice the rate of growth for the world economy. Since 2011, it has been in line with or even below that figure.

Last year, the value of global trade fell by 13.8 percent in dollar terms, the first contraction since 2009. Figures released last week for the US, the world’s largest economy, show the same trend as the second largest economy, China. US exports fell by 2.1 percent, while imports were down by 1.3 percent. The value of goods exports from the US was the lowest since February 2011.

Lipton concluded his speech by repeating the official mantra that “global economic recovery continues.” However, everything that came before showed the opposite to be the case.

“The IMF’s latest reading of the global economy shows once again a weakening baseline,” he said. “Moreover, risks have increased further, with volatile financial markets and low commodity prices creating fresh concerns about the health of the global economy.”

These concerns were being fed by the “perception that in many economies policymakers have run out of ammunition or lost the resolve to deploy it.” Repeating the call issued by the IMF prior to the recent G20 meeting in Shanghai, he said it was “imperative that advanced and developing countries dispel this dangerous notion by reviving the bold spirit of action and cooperation that characterized the early years of the recovery effort.”

He claimed the G20 meeting had recognized that the global economy remained too weak and had provided “some reassurance that countries stand ready to act if necessary.” In fact, such are the divisions within the G20 that proposals for cooperation did not even make it onto the agenda of the meeting. As a number of media reports noted, the gathering was characterised by the efforts of every country to blame every other country for the worsening situation.

Lipton pointed both to what he called “unresolved legacies” and the “emergence of new risks.” In many parts of Europe, government and private debt remained high, as well as banks’ non-performing loans. In the US, unfilled infrastructure needs “diminish economic prospects,” while in Japan, “deflation is putting the recovery at risk.”

On top of these “legacies,” new risks had developed. “The global economic slowdown is hurting bank balance sheets and financing conditions have tightened considerably,” he warned. “In emerging markets, excess capacity is being unwound through sharp declines in capital spending, while rising private debt, often denominated in foreign currency, is increasing risks to banks and sovereign [government] balance sheets.”

Lipton pointed out that the decline in stock market indices for this year implied a loss of market capitalization of more than $6 trillion, equivalent to about half the total losses incurred in the most acute phase of the 2008 financial crisis. While the decline on a global scale was 6 percent, some markets had experienced losses of 20 percent.

He warned that protracted low global demand coupled with financial turbulence created the risk of “negative feedback loops” between the real economy and markets, generating deflation and “secular stagnation”—a situation where the level of savings permanently outstrips the demand for investment funds.

In other words, low global demand, in large measure the result of low investment, leads to financial volatility, which in turn leads to reductions in investment, further lowering demand.

Lipton said commodity exporters had to recognise that commodity prices “may well be permanently lower.” This assessment has also been made by Goldman Sachs, one of the largest banks operating in commodity markets. In a series of reports issued this week, it said the recent spike in prices was likely to be temporary, and the 20-month decline had further to run before supply was cut and markets rebalanced.

Lipton repeated the now obligatory statement from the world’s major economic institutions that the lessons of history had to be learned and zero-sum policies, in which one country attempts to alleviate its position at the expense of others, had to be eschewed, because in the long run, they made all countries worse off.

One of the chief mechanisms of such zero-sum games is competitive currency devaluation. But such measures are being intensified, not reduced. While all central banks insist that their quantitative easing programs, through which they pump money into the financial system, together with negative interest rates are not aimed at lowering the value of their currency, this is their effect.

Following the decision by the Bank of Japan to introduce negative interest rates at the end of January, a further step in this direction is expected today when the European Central Bank governing council meets. It is widely forecast to extend its quantitative easing program and take interest rates further into negative territory, exacerbating the tensions in financial markets.

10 March, 2016
WSWS.org