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By Jonathan Cook

It was another difficult week for Israel.

In Britain, 700 artists, including many household names, pledged a cultural boycott of Israel, and a leader of the Board of Deputies, the representative body of UK Jews, quit, saying he could no longer abide by its ban on criticising Israel.

Across the Atlantic, the student body of one of the most prestigious US universities, Stanford, voted to withdraw investments from companies implicated in Israel’s occupation, giving a significant boost to the growing international boycott (BDS) movement.

Meanwhile, a CNN poll found that two-thirds of Americans, and three-quarters of those under 50, believed the US foreign policy should be neutral between Israel and Palestine.

This drip-drip of bad news, as American and European popular opinion shifts against Israel, is gradually changing the west’s political culture and forcing Israel to rethink its historic alliances.

The deterioration in relations between Israel and the White House is now impossible to dismiss, as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama lock horns, this time over negotiations with Iran.

The US was reported last week to be refusing to share with Israel sensitive information on the talks, fearful it will be misused. A senior Israeli official described it as like being evicted from the “deluxe guest suite” in Washington. “Astonishing doesn’t begin to describe it,” he said.

The fall-out is spreading to the US Congress, where for the first time Israel is becoming a partisan issue. A growing number of Democrats have declared they will boycott Netanyahu’s address to the Congress next month, when he is expected to try to undermine the Iran talks.

Things are more precarious still in Europe. Several leading parliaments have called on their governments to recognise Palestinian statehood, and France rocked Israel by backing just such a resolution recently in the UN Security Council.

Europe has also begun punishing Israel for its intransigence towards the Palestinians. It is labelling settlement products and is expected to start demanding compensation for its projects in the occupied territories the Israeli army destroys.

This month 63 members of the European Parliament went further, urging the European Union to suspend its “association agreement”, which allows Israel unrestricted trade and access to special funding.

None of this has gone unnoticed in Israel. A classified report by the foreign ministry leaked last month paints a dark future. It concludes that western support for the Palestinians will increase, the threat of European sanctions will grow, and the US might even refuse to “protect Israel with its veto” at the UN.

Israel is particularly concerned about the economic impact, given that Europe is its largest trading partner. Serious sanctions could ravage the economy.

One might assume that, faced with these drastic calculations, Israel would reconsider its obstructive approach to peace negotiations and Palestinian statehood. Not a bit of it.

Netanyahu’s officials blame the crisis with Washington on Obama, implying that they will wait out his presidency for better times to return.

As for Europe, Netanyahu blames the shift there on what he calls “Islamisation”, suggesting that Europe’s growing Muslim population is holding the region’s politicians to ransom. On this view, the price paid for the recent terror attacks in Paris and Copenhagen is Europe’s support for Israel.

Instead, Netanyahu has begun looking elsewhere for economic – and ultimately political – patrons.

In doing so, he is returning to an early Israeli tradition. The state’s founders were inspired by the collectivist ideals of the Soviet Union, not US individualism. And in return for attacking Egypt in 1956, Israel was secretly helped by Britain and France to build nuclear weapons over stiff US opposition.

In response to recent developments, Netanyahu announced last month that he was courting trade with China, India and Japan – comprising nearly 40 per cent of the planet’s population.

Last year, for the first time, Israel did more trade with these Asian giants than with the US. Much of it focused on the burgeoning arms market, with Israel supplying nearly $4 billion worth of weapons in 2013. A region once implacably hostile to Israel is throwing open its doors.

India, plagued by border tensions with Pakistan and China, is now Israel’s largest arms purchaser – and such trade is expected to expand further following the election last year of Narendra Modi, known for his anti-Muslim views.

He has lifted the veil off India’s growing defence cooperation with Israel, one reason why Moshe Yaalon last week became the first Israeli defence minister to make an official visit.

Ties between Israel and China are deepening rapidly too. Beijing has become Israel’s third largest trading partner, while Israel is China’s second biggest supplier of military technology after Russia.

Last month the two signed a three-year cooperation plan, with China keen to exploit – in addition to Israel’s military hardware – its innovations on solar energy, irrigation and desalination.

Emmanuel Navon, an international relations expert at Tel Aviv University, claims that, despite its poor public image, Israel now enjoys a “global clout” unprecedented in its history.

Israel’s immediate goal is to future-proof itself economically against mounting popular pressure in Europe and the US to act in favour of the Palestinian cause.

But longer term Israel hopes to convert Chinese and Indian dependency on Israeli armaments – based on technology it tests and refines on a captive Palestinian population – into diplomatic cover. One day Israel may be relying on a Chinese veto at the UN, not a US one.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.
24 February, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By SUkant Chandan

Building towards a new wave of Global South decolonial anti-imperialist Resistance in Britain

Malcolm X is esteemed as a towering figure in the history of Resistance against the ‘Western’ capitalist-colonial order for in the main two reasons: he and those he worked with took inspiration, leadership and positive examples from actually existing global ‘Third World’ or Black Resistance against colonialism and neo-colonialism and applied that to the struggle of Black people against the system of oppression.

Malcolm X brought a no compromising approach to the Black Liberation Struggle in the USA at a time when the Black masses were intensifying their struggle against the equally intensifying white supremacist resistance that withheld and still withholds the rights and liberation of our peoples. He took the example of the growing victories of Asia and especially Africa and explained that Black people in the USA should be taking a lead from them in terms of ideologies and organisational forms of struggle, and at the same time Malcolm X advocated that the Third World or Global South liberation struggles and newly independent radical countries should come to support the struggle of the Black masses in the West against both sections common enemy.

It was for those reasons that Malcolm X; making serious headway in marrying the global and localised struggles that the powers that be killed him and made him a martyr. Therefore across the planet people recognise Malcolm X as one of the highest personifications of the potentiality of struggle in the West. It is no wonder that he remains a primary inspiring example informing our understanding and struggles today, and for these reasons amongst others, some of us are developing the Malcolm X Movement in Britain.

Inspired by the man himself The Malcolm X Movement is a Black and Asian decolonial and anti-imperialist initiative launching in August 2015, which is trying to develop unity between the peoples of the Global South. White comrades are involved in the MXM and work just as hard as any other members, but have no veto power in the structure of the MXM. The reason why we decided on this is that there is a dearth of radical Black and Asian organisations in Britain and a preponderance of white left and westernised left organisations who either are uninterested, hostile to or/and ignorant of the histories, legacies and on going challenges and advances of the peoples, countries, movements and governments of the Global South against neo-colonialism and all the oppressions of the ‘colonial matrix of power’ including amongst others white supremacy, misogyny, environmental destruction and the physical and mental genocide against those resisting and being oppressed by neo-colonialism.

The genesis of the MXM starts in June 2012. A network of around 30 activists mostly in their late 20s came together from a variety of different political backgrounds to plan launching the movement in 2015. The initiators of this process knew back then that 2015 was a big year as it is the 50th anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination.

Before the Malcolm X Movement (MXM) has even launched properly, we are delivering the first annual Malcolm X Film Festival in March-April and have conducted a one year long free course on white supremacy through the MXM initiative of the Assata-Tupac Liberation School, as well as our first public event. attended by nearly 200 overwhelmingly Black and Asian youth in June 2014 entitled Strike the Empire Back.

In late 2014 we began tentatively organising towards the first annual Malcolm X Film Festival as a three day event only in London, which has now turned into a series of seven events in at least six cities including in occupied Ireland (‘Northern Ireland’) in Belfast with other cities as other activists wanted to host events. The film festival is a truly historical political event for radical Black and Asian politics on this island for several reasons. It is the biggest initiative of decolonial Black and Brown led politics on this island for the last 25 years or so. Unfortunately not since the last years of the Radical Third World Bookfair has this country seen such.

The amount of support it has and is receiving is similarly unprecedented, with some 36 (and counting) organisations involved.

The event is being supported by some of the most inspiring political movements on the planet today fighting neo-colonialism such as the revolutionary Palestinian group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and their iconic leader Leila Khaled will be speaking at an event. The Libyan Popular National Movement are also an official supporting organisation despite one of their main spokespersons – Dr Moussa Ibrahim still being wanted by NATO! – speaking via video link he will be imparting how Malcolm X inspires the peoples of Libya to struggle against those who have lynched, raped and persecuted dark skinned, Black Africans and Libyans and those opposing NATO’s project there.

Also importantly we have the Black Panther veterans association, which gathers all the Black Panther veterans in the Black Panther Alumni supporting the film festival too. Members of Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic-Front) are also speaking from of one of the most effective decolonial Pan African and radical anti-imperialist states on the continent. And of course it is a real honour to have someone from the Shabazz family speaking via video link at the Malcolm X Film, sister Ilyasah Shabazz, an articulate and inspiring political activist and author in her own right and one of the daughters of Malcolm X. One cannot underemphasise how powerful it is to have the Shabazz family, the PFLP, ZANU-PF, the Black Panthers and Irish revolutionaries and many others supporting such an event.

The Film Festival will feature three panels with related themed speeches and interviews from Malcolm X, especially from the last few years of his life. The speakers and discussions will echo the themes being discussed in the three panels:

Civil Rights & Black Power
Global Unity & Internationalism
Legacy, Continuity and Challenges

The idea of the first annual Malcolm X Summer Festival came out of the simple recognition that there is no flag ship annual event in Britain focused towards celebrating and learning about Black and Asian struggles, our culture of Resistance and Humanity and on-going challenges. The Malcolm X Summer Festival seeks to celebrate through a diversity of workshops, panels, film showings, and other cultural and political activities engaging thousands across the country.

The Assata-Tupac Liberation School is the educational arm of the MXM which starts another annual course this May hosted in central London but accessible to people beyond who cannot physically attend via live streams, podcasts, youtube uploads and reading outlines and reading lists delivered by revolutionary experts and participants of struggles of the Global South. And its free! The Liberation School is where young people can develop themselves with the ideological tools for becoming revolutionaries, no other organised structure other than this liberation school exists in this country which delivers an on-going professionally constructed and free educational course in basically: Revolution.

Furthermore to all of the above, the MXM is launching grassroots campaigns at the Malcolm X Summer Festival, which will address some of the direct and immediate problems that our communities are facing and exposing how they impact us on a global level.

The reason the MXM has conducted a liberation school course, a well attended and successful public event, a film festival and a summer festival before we have even launched is that we have seen too many times when organisations seek to recruit and be active that they have actually done very little and have very little to offer. Rather, the MXM has sought to show people what we are capable of achieving, what we stand for, how we operate and who we are and what we strategically and tactically seek to do for the years ahead.

When the entire so-called ‘west’ is going deeper into crisis on all levels, as the west increasingly strikes, as its global positions of hegemony are slowly being whittled away by the growing capacity of the Global South, while the repression in the west in the forms of oppression of women and girls, of young people, white supremacy, housing and social problems all of which is a asymmetric mirror reflection, a microcosm of the neo-colonial and NATO covert and overt wars against the peoples of the world, it is imperative more than ever to build a base of Resistance to this order from right here in the UK, within the heart of whiteness. The MXM invites people to get involved, to contribute what we can in our modest way to the process of standing up against this system of oppression and standing with those who have and continue to effectively counter and destroy oppression and open up a new liberated future to Humanity.

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First Annual Malcolm X Film Festival
VIDEOS: #StrikeTheEmpireBack

Sukant Chandan is one of the coordinators of the Malcolm X Movement.

23 February, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Matt Peppe

Until the fall of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974, apartheid in South Africa was secure. There was no substantial resistance anywhere in southern Africa. Pretoria’s neighbors comprised a buffer zone that protected the racist regime: Namibia, their immediate neighbor which they had occupied for 60 years; white-ruled Rhodesia; and the Portuguese-ruled colonies of Angola and Mozambique. The rebels who fought against minority rule in each of these countries, operating without any safe haven to organize and train, were powerless to challenge the status quo. South Africa’s buffer would have remained intact for the foreseeable future, solidifying apartheid and preventing any significant opposition, but for one man: Fidel Castro.

In October of 1975, South Africa invaded Angola at the behest of the U.S. government to overthrow the left-wing Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in the soon-to-be independent country. Without Cuban assistance, the apartheid army would have easily cruised into Luanda, crushed the MPLA, and installed a puppet government friendly to the apartheid regime.

Cuba’s intervention in Angola managed to change the course of that country and reverberate throughout Africa. By ensuring independence from the white supremacists, Angola was able to preserve its own revolution and maintain its role as a base for armed resistance groups fighting for liberation in nearby countries.

In the American version of Cold War history, Cuba was carrying out aggression and acting as proxies of the Soviet Union. Were it not for one persistent and meticulous scholar, we might never have known that these are nothing more than dishonest fabrications. In his monumental books Conflicting Missions and Visions of Freedom, historian Piero Gleijeses uses thousands of documents from Cuban military archives, as well as U.S. and South African archives, to recount a dramatic, historical confrontation between tiny Cuba and Washington and its ally apartheid South Africa. Gleijeses is the only foreign scholar to have gained access to the closed Cuban archives. He obtained thousands of pages of documents, and made them available to the Wilson Center Digital Archive, which has posted the invaluable collection online.

Gleijeses’s research made possible a look behind the curtain at one of the most remarkable acts of internationalism of the century. “Internationalism – the duty to help others – was at the core of the Cuban revolution,” Gleijeses writes. “For Castro’s followers, and they were legion, this was not rhetoric… By 1975, approximately 1,000 Cuban aid workers had gone to a dozen African countries, South Yemen, and North Vietnam. In 1976-77, technical assistance was extended to Jamaica and Guyana in the Western Hemisphere; to Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia in Africa; and to Laos in Asia. The CIA noted: ‘The Cuban technicians are primarily involved in rural development and educational and public health projects – areas in which Cuba has accumulated expertise and has experienced success at home.’” [1]

The fight against apartheid, for the liberation of people who suffered for centuries under colonialism and racial subjugation, was truly a David versus Goliath conflict. In addition to having a strong military itself and being armed with nuclear weapons, South Africa enjoyed the diplomatic support of the United States, the world’s largest superpower. In this context, Cuba’s intervention – a poor Caribbean island under relentless attack from an unrivaled hegemon against a racist juggernaut backed by the world’s leading imperial powers – is even more remarkable.

Explaining how the significance of Cuba’s role in Angola is “without precedent,” Gleijeses writes: “No other Third World country has projected its military power beyond its immediate neighborhood.” He notes that while the Soviet Union later sent aid and weapons, they never would have become involved unless Castro had taken the lead (which he did in spite of Russian opposition). “The engine was Cuba. It was the Cubans who pushed the Soviets to help Angola. It was they who stood guard in Angola for many long years, thousands of miles from home, to prevent the South Africans from overthrowing the MPLA government.” [2]

White Elitism Has Suffered an Irreversible Blow

It had become clear that the left-wing People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the largest and most widely-supported of three warring groups, would prevail and gain control of the country. Afraid of having a government staunchly opposed to white domination so close to home, South Africa rushed to prevent self-determination for the Angolans. They were aided by U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who believed the threat of black liberation in Africa, which would lead to local control of their own resources at the expense of foreign investors, could still be contained.

South Africa launched an invasion to topple the MPLA and install the guerilla Jonas Savimbi, leader of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), the smallest and least popular of the three groups, as a puppet dictator in Angola. Savimbi, a collaborator with the Portuguese dictatorship before Angolan independence, was known for his ruthlessness, terrorism, and hunger for power. An avowed anti-communist who had already aligned with South Africa, Savimbi would have made the perfect Angolan facade for apartheid control.

Agostinho Neto, the President of Angola, appealed to Cuba to send troops to ward of the apartheid army’s invasion. On November 4, Castro agreed. Several days later the first Cuban special forces troops boarded planes for Angola, where they would launch Operation Carlota.

As the South African troops advanced inside Angola, they made remarkably easy gains through scarcely defended villages that put up little – if any – resistance. But by November 9, Cuban Special Forces had arrived and went immediately to the battlefield. In the Battle of Quifangondo, the Angolans, supported by Cuban troops, made a decisive stand. They turned back the apartheid army and prevented their easy march to Luanda, where that same day the Portuguese military left Angola and Neto declared independence.

Throughout November, the Cubans prevented further South African advances towards the Angolan capital. On November 25, the Cuban troops laid a trap for the racist army in the Battle of Ebo. As the South African Defence Force (SADF) tried to cross a bridge, Cubans hidden along the banks of the river attacked. They destroyed seven armored cars and killed upwards of 90 enemy soldiers.

Cuban troops kept pouring into Angola throughout the rest of the year. As many as 4,000 had arrived by the end of 1975, roughly the same number as South African invaders. Unable to penetrate deeper into Angolan territory, and facing a barrage of negative criticism after international media discovered SADF troops, rather than mercenaries, were behind the invasion, the South African advance ended.

The impact of the Cuban victory resonated far beyond the battlefield. More important than the strategic gain, the victory of black Cuban and Angolan troops against the whites of the South African racist army shattered the illusion of white invincibility.

A South African military analyst described the meaning of his country’s defeat: “The reality is that they have won, are winning, and are not White; and that psychological edge, that advantage the White man has enjoyed and exploited over 300 years of colonialism and empire, is slipping away. White elitism has suffered an irreversible blow in Angola, and Whites who have been there know it.” [3]

American officials claimed that the Soviets masterminded the operation with Cubans acting as their proxies. They couldn’t fathom Castro acting on its own, rather than as Moscow’s puppet. Such claims were repeated for years. American politicians went as far as falsely accusing Cuban troops of being mercenaries. But the record makes clear that these were in reality nothing more than slanderous lies.

The Americans were furious. “Kissinger’s response to Castro’s intervention was to throw mercenaries and weapons at the problem,” Gleijeses writes. [4] The Secretary of State was afraid that after their successful intervention in Angola, Cuba would put the rest of the racist regimes in the region in jeopardy. “We can’t say Rhodesia is not a danger because it is a bad case. If the Cubans are involved there, Namibia is next and after that South Africa, itself… If the Cubans move, I recommend we act vigorously. We can’t permit another move without suffering a great loss.” [5]

Support and Solidarity with Revolutionary Movements

Though South Africa had lost the battle, it by no means had surrendered the war. The apartheid regime still had designs on toppling the Angolan revolution and using it for its own ends. “It would be the centerpiece of the Constellation of Southern African States that they sought to create,” writes Gleijeses. “The concept had first emerged under Prime Minister Vorster, but it was PW Botha who had given it ‘a substance previously lacking.’ The constellation, the generals hoped, would stretch beyond South Africa, its Bantustans, Lesotho, Malawi, Botswana, and Swaziland, to embrace Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Zaire, and a nominally independent Namibia. The black members of the constellation would be anticommunist, tolerant of apartheid, and eager to persecute the ANC (the African National Congress in South Africa) and SWAPO (the South West Africa People’s Organization in Namibia).” [6]

Cuba was aware of this. “In Southern Africa Angola today, more so than a year ago, is the bastion of the fight against the racists and the unquestionable revolutionary vanguard. Imperialism knows this,” wrote Jorge Risquet, head of the Cuban Civilian Mission in Angola to President Neto. “Imperialism has to know what Angola does for Zimbabwe, what Angola does for Namibia, what Angola does for South Africa. Angola, bravely, lends real support to the movements of Namibia, Zimbabwe, South Africa. In concrete terms, nothing less than training in its territory 20,000 combatants from those three countries oppressed by the racists.” [7]

With the omnipresent threat against Angola, Cuba maintained a large contingent of around 30,000 troops at the behest of the MPLA to prevent another invasion. In a letter to the political bureau of the MPLA after Neto’s death, Fidel wrote of the sacrifice Cuba was willing to make.

“Cuba cannot keep indefinitely carrying out a military cooperation effort of the magnitude it currently is in Angola, which limits our possibilities of support and solidarity with the revolutionary movement in other parts of the world and defense of our own country,” Fidel wrote. But he made clear that Cuba had no plans to abandon Angola: “I want to assure you, above all, that in these bitter and difficult circumstances, Cuba will be unconditionally at your side.” [8]

Meanwhile, South African aggression was relentless. In 1983, the SADF bombed Angolan towns and pushed nearly 90 miles into Angolan territory. When the UN moved to condemn the invasion, the United States made sure the censure would not include sanctions, as they had done for more than a decade.

The apartheid regime used Washington’s diplomatic shield to keep its dreams of a Constellation of Southern African States alive. The International Court of Justice had decisively rejected the continued presence of South Africa in Namibia in a 1971 Advisory Opinion as “illegal.” The court declared that “South Africa is under obligation to withdraw its administration from Namibia immediately and thus put an end to its occupation of the territory.” Seven years later, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 435 reiterating its objective of “the withdrawal of South Africa’s illegal administration from Namibia and the transfer of power to the people of Namibia.”

Washington’s support enabled South Africa to ignore the ICJ and UN Security Council. The apartheid government, understanding that free elections would mean a SWAPO victory, refused to comply. “The South Africans took advantage of U.S. goodwill to further their foreign policy aims,” Gleijeses writes. [9]

In 1978, a South African massacre against a refugee camp in Cassinga killed more than 600 Namibians. The U.S. opposed sanctions in the Security Council. President Carter took the excuses of the apartheid regime at face value: “They’ve claimed to have withdrawn and have not left any South African troops in Angola. So we hope it’s just a transient strike in retaliation, and we hope it’s all over.” Even after Angolans foiled an attack by South African commandos against Gulf Oil pipelines inside Angola in 1985, which would have killed U.S. citizens, the U.S. government continued protecting their racist allies.

The Whole World is Against Apartheid

As international opinion turned, Castro sensed that apartheid in South Africa would not be able to last much longer. Despite the growing cost to Cuba of maintaining about 30,000 troops in Angola, Castro was confident that he would be able to wait out the inevitable downfall of the racist regime.

“Today they are totally on the defensive in the political arena, in the international arena, they have a very serious economic crisis,” Castro said in a conversation with Angolan President José Eduardo Dos Santos in 1985. “I can’t say how this is going to end, what the end result of it all will be; but in my opinion, South Africa won’t recover from this crisis.” Castro said that the situation facing South Africa did not occur by chance, but that it was a result of the collective action of the people in many parts of Southern Africa fighting for their independence. “All these factors, common struggles, common sacrifices, have contributed to create this crisis for apartheid, that wasn’t created in one day, it was created over many years,” Castro said. [10]

“I believe that apartheid – I sincerely believe it – is mortally wounded,” Castro said.[11]

Nevertheless, the apartheid government kept up its relentless fight for survival. Throughout the 1980s, Angola was subjected to various incursions and invasions by South Africa. At the same time, the Angolan Armed Forces (FAPLA) fought against former Portuguese collaborator Jonas Savimbi and his UNITA army, who was backed by South Africa and the United States. Savimbi sought to roll back MPLA rule and form an alliance with the apartheid regime.

The confrontations climaxed in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in late 1987. After a forward offensive to attack UNITA stalled, Angolan and Cuban troops managed to defend the town. They then turned to the Southwest where they attempted to drive the SADF out of the country once and for all. As the Cubans asserted supremacy with their air force, they were able to take the lead on the battlefield.

With the military confrontation raging, talks started between Angola, Cuba and South Africa, with the United States moderating, in London in early 1988. In instructions to the Cuban delegation, Castro reflected on the South Africans and American mindset.

“The fact they have accepted this meeting in London at such a high level shows that they are looking for a way out because they have seen our advance and are saying, ‘How is it that Cuba has converted itself into the liquidator of Apartheid and the liberator of Africa?’ That’s what is worrying the Americans, they’re going to say: ‘They’re going to defeat South Africa!” Castro said. [12]

Castro also told his delegation that the goal was not to pursue a war or military victory, but to achieve negotiations over SADF from Angola and implementation of Resolution 435, which would grant independence to Namibia. “They should know that we are not playing games, that our position is serious and that our objective is peace,” he said. [13]

The Cuban Commander-in-Chief’s instructions to his negotiating team show that he fully understood that Cuba stood firmly on the right side of history.

“All of Africa is in favor, all of the non-aligned movement, all the United Nations, the whole world is against Apartheid,” Castro said. “This is the most beautiful cause.” [14]

The negotiations would continue throughout the year and lead to the New York agreements in December 1988, which Gleijeses says “led to the independence of Namibia and the withdrawal of the Cuban troops from Angola.” [15]

This was the beginning of the end of apartheid.

“By the time Namibia became independent, in March 1990, apartheid was in its death throes,” Gleijeses writes. “A month earlier, Frederick de Klerk, who had replaced the ailing PW Botha as South Africa’s president, legalized the ANC and the South African Communist Party, and he freed Nelson Mandela. The apartheid government engaged in protracted and difficult negotiations that led in April 1994 to the first elections in the country’s history based on universal franchise.” [16]

The Contribution of the Cuban Internationalists

No one was more grateful for Cuba’s role in the defeat of apartheid and the liberation of blacks in Africa than Nelson Mandela. In July 1991, during a visit to Cuba to mark the 38th anniversary of the Cuban revolution, Mandela spoke of his gratitude for the Cuban role in Southern Africa.

“The Cuban people hold a special place in the hearts of the people of Africa. The Cuban internationalists have made a contribution to African independence, freedom and justice, unparalleled for its principled and selfless character,” Mandela said. “We in Africa are used to being victims of countries wanting to carve up our territory or subvert our sovereignty. It is unparalleled in African history to have another people rise to the defence of one of us.”

Many years later, after the passing of Nelson Mandela, Castro would wonder why after so many years the enablers of apartheid still could not admit the truth.

“Why try to hide the fact that the apartheid regime, which made the people of Africa suffer so much and incensed the vast majority of all the nations in the world,”Castro wrote, “was the fruit of European colonialism and was converted into a nuclear power by the United States and Israel, which Cuba, a country who supported the Portuguese colonies in Africa that fought for their independence, condemned openly?”

Since the success of the Cuban revolution of 1959, American policy has always been reflexive opposition to anything Cuba did. Shortly after Mandela’s funeral, Gleijeses wrote an open letter to President Obama that described the actual course of events in Africa during the Cold War: “While Cubans were fighting for the liberation of the people of South Africa, successive American governments did everything they could to stop them.”

Gleijeses wrote that Obama must have noticed the reception of Cuban President Raúl Castro in South Africa, and implored him to reconsider the disconnect between the two countries. “Perhaps, Mr. President, what you saw in South Africa may inspire you to bridge the chasm and understand that in the quarrel between Cuba and the United States the United States is not the victim,” he wrote.

But Obama has not been able to learn this lesson. On December 17, when he announced a change in the U.S.’s Cuban policy, Obama claimed that the current policy “has been rooted in the best of intentions.” This is a gross misrepresentation that suppresses the policy of unrelenting economic war, which has caused unimaginable pain and suffering to millions of Cubans; a covert terrorist campaign against the island carried out first directly by the U.S. government then later sanctioned and outsourced to reactionary terrorists provided safe haven in the United States; and collaboration with the apartheid regime to punish Cuba for helping fight for the liberation of black Africa.

American officials would, no doubt, prefer that Cuba’s heroic role in defeating apartheid and the U.S.’s shameful role in enabling it be relegated to the ash heap of history. But the historical and documentary record speaks for itself, despite Washington’s attempts to bury it. Like Castro, one has to wonder: why keep hiding the truth?

Matt Peppe writes about politics, U.S. foreign policy and Latin America on his blog. You can follow him on twitter.

Works Cited

[1] Gleijeses, Piero. Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991. The University of North Carolina Press, 2013. http://www.amazon.com/Visions-Freedom-Washington-Pretoria-1976-1991-ebook/dp/B00GJQHOJ4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420320673&sr=8-1&keywords=visions+of+freedom

[2] Ibid.

[3] as cited in Gleijeses, 2013

[4] Gleijeses, Piero. Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 (Envisioning Cuba). The University of North Carolina Press, 2002.http://www.amazon.com/Conflicting-Missions-Washington-1959-1976-Envisioning-ebook/dp/B004P1JTGG/ref=sr_1_1_twi_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1423430995&sr=8-1&keywords=conflicting+missions

[5] “NSC Meeting, 4/7/1976” of the National Security Adviser’s NSC Meeting File at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library. (pg. 21)http://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/document/0312/1552402.pdf

[6] Gleijeses, 2013

[7] Jorge Risquet to Agostinho Neto,” February, 1978, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Archives of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party. Obtained and contributed to CWIHP by Piero Gleijeses and included in CWIHP e-Dossier No. 44. http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/117933 (pg. 8-9)

[8] “Fidel Castro to Political Bureau of the MPLA,” September 15, 1979, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Archive of the Cuban Armed Forces. Obtained and contributed to CWIHP by Piero Gleijeses and included in CWIHP e-Dossier No. 44. http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/117946 (pg. 2-3)

[9] Gleijeses, 2013

[10] Memorandum of Conversation between Fidel Castro and José Eduardo dos Santos,” October 25, 1985, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Archives of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party. Obtained and contributed to CWIHP by Piero Gleijeses and included in CWIHP e-Dossier No. 44. http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/118021 (pg. 31-33)

[11] Ibid. (pg. 32)

[12] Instructions to the Cuban Delegation for the London Meeting, ‘Indicaciones concretas del Comandante en Jefe que guiarán la actuación de la delegación cubana a las conversaciones de Luanda y las negociaciones de Londres (22-4-88)’
http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/118133.pdf (pg. 11)

[13] Ibid. (pg. 13)

[14] Instructions to the Cuban Delegation for the London Meeting, ‘Indicaciones concretas del Comandante en Jefe que guiarán la actuación de la delegación cubana a las conversaciones de Luanda y las negociaciones de Londres (23-4-88)’,” April 23, 1988, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, Archive of the Cuban Armed Forces. Obtained and contributed to CWIHP by Piero Gleijeses and included in CWIHP e-Dossier No. 44. http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/118134 (pg. 5)

[15] Gleijeses, 2013

[16] Gleijeses, 2013

23 February, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Eric Zuesse

.Both before and after Crimea left Ukraine and joined Russia in a public referendum on 16 March 2014, the Gallup Organization polled Crimeans on behalf of the U.S. Government, and found them to be extremely pro-Russian and anti-American, and also anti-Ukrainian. (Neither poll was subsequently publicized, because the results of each were the opposite of what the sponsor had wished.) Both polls were done on behalf of the U.S. Government, in order to find Crimeans’ attitudes toward the United States and toward Russia, and also toward Ukraine, not only before but also after the planned U.S. coup in Ukraine, which occurred in February 2014 but was actually kicked off on 20 November 2013, the day before Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych publicly announced that Ukraine had received a better economic offer from Russia’s Eurasian Economic Community than from America’s European Union. (The EEC subsequently became the Eurasian Economic Union, now that it was clear that Ukraine was going with the EU.) That decision by Yanukovych in favor of the EEC was mistakenly thought by him to be merely an economic one, and he didn’t know the extent to which the U.S. Government had set up an operation to overthrow him if he didn’t go along with the EU’s offer. (If some of these basic historical facts don’t come through from merely the wikipedia articles alone, that’s because the CIA is among the organizations that edit wikipedia articles, and so wikipedia is unwittingly a political propaganda vehicle. It is especially used for propaganda by the CIA and FBI.)
More recently, a poll of Crimeans was issued on 4 February 2015, by the polling organization GfK, and paid for this time by the pro-American-Government Canadian Government, via its Canada Fund for Local Initiatives, and via Free Crimea, which is itself funded by the latter organization. However, the Canadian Government got no better news than the U.S. Government had gotten: 82% of Crimeans “Fully endorse” Crimea’s having become part of Russia (of which it had been part between 1783 and 1954, and which the public there had never wanted to leave); 11% “Mostly endorse” it; 2% “Mostly disapprove”; 3% “Don’t know”; and only 2% “Fully disapprove.” Or, to put it simply: 93% approve; 3% don’t know, and 4% disapprove. This poll was publicly issued only in the polling organization’s own report, which was made available only in Russian (the Ukrainian Government’s main language for international business) and therefore not comprehensible to English-speakers. It was titled, “?????????-???????????? ?????????? ??????? ????? ???????????? ??????????? GfK Ukraine ?? ?????? ????????” or “SOCIO-POLITICAL SENTIMENTS IN CRIMEA: Research conducted by GfK Ukraine on the order of the company.” On February 10th, an English-language article reported and summarized the poll’s findings.

During the 16 March 2014 public referendum in Crimea, 96% voted to rejoin Russia. One question on the post-referendum, April 2014, U.S.-sponsored Gallup poll in Crimea, was headlined, “Perceived Legitimacy of March 16 Crimean Referendum” (on page 28 of the poll-report), and 82.8% of Crimeans agreed with the statement, “The results of the referendum on Crimea’s status likely reflect the views of most people here.” 6.7% disagreed. According to the newer poll (4 February 2015), 96% were for annexation to Russia, and 4% were opposed, which happens to be exactly what the 16 March 2014 referendum had actually found to be the case. But, continuing now with the description of the April 2014 Gallup poll: its “Views of Foreign Parties’ Role in the Crisis — Crimea” (p. 25), showed 76.2% of Crimeans saying that the role of the U.S. was “Mostly negative,” and 2.8% saying the U.S. role was “Mostly positive”; while Crimeans’ attitudes towards Russia were the exact opposite: 71.3% said Russia’s role was “Mostly positive,” and 4.0% said it was “Mostly negative.”

An accurate reflection of the reason why Crimeans, during the lead-up to the referendum, were appalled by America’s extremely violent and bloody takeover of the Ukrainian Government (as the EU itself had confirmed), was given on Crimean television shortly before the referendum, when a former criminal prosecutor in the Ukrainian Government, who lived and worked in Kiev and saw with her own eyes much of the violence but was not personally involved in the events, quit her office, and got in her car and drove back to her childhood home in Crimea, now unemployed, because she was so revulsed at what had happened to her country. On this call-in show, which was watched by many Ukrainians, she explained why she could no longer, as a lawyer and a supporter of the Ukrainian Constitution, support the Ukrainain Government — that it was now an illegal Government. She closed her opening statement, just before taking the calls from people over the phone, by saying, “Despite that our ‘great politicians’ who seized power by bloodshed, are now claiming that we don’t have the right to decide our own future — citizens of Crimea, you have every right in the world. Nobody is allowed to ururp power.” She subsequently became a criminal prosecutor in the new Crimean government, enforcing now the Russian Constitution, in Crimea.

However, anyone who says that Russia “seized Crimea,” is clearly lying or else is fooled by people who are.

Here, then, are highlights from a typical Western ‘news’ report about Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, in the issue of TIME magazine (December 10th online, December 22nd issue on newsstands), headlining “Vladimir Putin, The Imperialist,” in which Putin was a “runner-up” as the “Person of the Year” — a year when, actually, Obama overthrew Ukraine’s Government and replaced it with one run by racist-fascist (or nazi) haters of Russia, who were setting up to yank the remaining years on Russia’s lease of its crucial Black Sea Naval Base in Crimea, and the Crimeans were imminently fearing a Ukrainian invasion (the author was Simon Shuster):

His decision in March to invade and then annex the region of Crimea from Ukraine marked the first growth of Russia’s dominions since the fall of the Soviet Union. …

With the conquest of Crimea, a derelict peninsula about the size of Massachusetts, Putin at last restored a scrap of Russia’s honor, says Gorbachev, by “acting on his own,” unbound by the constraints of U.S. supremacy and the table manners of international law. …

That name [Crimea], redolent with the history of Europe’s 19th century wars, has become a byword in Russia for national revival, a taste of the imperial glory that a generation of Russians have long hungered for. …

Already expelled from the G-8 club of wealthy nations in March after the annexation of Crimea, Putin was further ostracized at the G-20 summit. …

So, was Putin’s taste of empire worth the cost to Russian prosperity? For those who carry the grudges of Russian history, it was. …

Russia now seeks to position itself as an alternative to the Western model of liberal democracy—and it’s had some success. Right-wing politicians in France and the U.K., not to mention Central and Eastern Europe, are not shy about declaring their admiration for Putin. The ultraconservative government of Hungary, a member of NATO and the European Union, has announced its intention to develop as an “illiberal state” modeled on Russia, cracking down harshly on civil society. …

Putin will face challenges of his own as the West begins to rally against his aggressiveness. …

Make no mistake, though: Russians also remember that their country once dominated a sixth of the earth’s landmass and stood as a global player second to none. That is the role Putin seeks to regain. …
Nothing was said about the Black Sea fleet, nor about any strategic issue. Nothing was provided in order to help readers understand what was happening. Readers’ Cold-War buttons were being pushed; that is all. America’s aristocracy despises its public, whom they merely manipulate and control.

Here is an article about (and linking to) U.S. President Barack Obama’s “National Security Strategy 2015,” in which Obama uses the term “aggression” 18 times, 17 of them referring to Russia. Obama never once cites a reason for appying that term; for example, unlike Simon Shuster, he doesn’t even so much as mention “Crimea.”

And, here is the best video that has yet been issued on Obama’s February 2014 coup, the coup that installed the Ukrainian regime that has been carrying out the ethnic cleansing operation, which Ukraine calls their ‘Anti Terrorist Operation,’ in the Donbass region, though it’s really the anti-resident operation there.

That fate of ethnic cleansing or local genocide — the fate which befell the residents of Ukraine’s Donbass region, the region that’s shown in dark purple in this election-map for the man whom Obama overthrew in February 2014 and which is the area that voted 90% for him — is the fate that Crimeans were protected from when they rejoined Russia.

Russia’s using its troops, who were permanently stationed in Crimea already and didn’t need to ‘invade’ anything in order to protect the residents in Crimea so that they could hold their referendum in peace, is what blocked the seizure of Crimea by the newly installed Ukrainian regime.

The invader was the United States, in its typically sneaky post-1950 way: a coup d’etat. What Dwight Eisenhower’s, Allen Dulles’s, and Kermit Roosevelt’s CIA operation had done to Iran in 1953, Barack Obama’s and Victoria Nuland’s operation did to Ukraine in 2014: a violent coup installing a far-right government — in Obama’s case, even a nazi government (and see this and this and this).

That — and the firebombings and other horrors that Washington’s Brookings Institution think tank want U.S. taxpayers to finance yet more of in Donbass — is what Russia protected Crimeans from.

The aggressor here is not Vladimir Putin; it is Barack Obama. All honest news media (such as here and here and here and here and here and here and here) are reporting that. For economic analysis and reporting on these and other events, here is an excellent general news source. (It autotranslates if viewed in google’s chrome browser.) As for dishonest ‘news’ media, such as TIME and Fox ‘News,’ they serve a different purpose than truth; so, none of them will be listed here, where the only interest is truth.

PS: For further insights into the lying that is prevalent in the West regarding Crimea, Ukraine, and Russia, see this remarkably honest testimimony to the U.K. House of Lords’ 20 February 2015 Committee report, “The EU and Russia: before and beyond the crisis in Ukraine,” linked there on p. 108 as “RUS0012” and titled “Irina Kirillova MBE – Written evidence,” in which that Cambridge university professor describes the profound disappointment of ordinary people she had encountered in Russia, as they saw the misrepresentations in the West regarding the situations in Russia, Ukraine and Crimea. Outside of the English-speaking world, and especially in the regions that are not controlled by the U.S., the fakery of ‘journalism’ in the English-speaking world is becoming shockingly more evident than it formerly was. As usual, however, the House of Lords’ final report ignored these realities; and, throughout, it starts with the assumption that Russia is aggressive and that the West is merely responding to that. This professor’s written testimony was thus ignored. Most of the other individuals in the “Appendix 2: List of Witnesses” were the Anglo-aristocracy’s usual Russia-haters, such as Ian Bond, Director of Foreign Policy, Center for European Reform, saying that, “The most important thing is that the EU, as a rules-based organisation, should follow a rules-based approach to Russia,” as if that would be something alien to Russians. This type of bigoted condescenscion was rife throughout the report. If those people are as blind to evidence and science as they put themselves forth as being, they are dangerous in any governmental role; and to call the U.K. a ‘democracy’ is questionable, at best. Britain is an aristocracy, not a democracy. And the U.S. is at least as bad. In regards to the relationships between Russia, Ukraine, and Crimea, the West might be as bad as Ukraine, and should just quit the entire matter and try to start over from scratch, which means to let the nazis whom Obama placed into power there sink, not provide them with more weapons. Or, if more weapons are provided to them, then the rest of the West should issue sanctions against any nation that does that. Under liars and fools the West is drifting towards a totally unwarranted nuclear conflict with Russia.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

21 February, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

The White House held a three-day anti-terrorism summit dubbed as “Countering Violent Extremism Summit,” from Tuesday to Thursday (Feb. 17-19).

Addressing the summit on Wednesday, President Barack Obama said the United States is not at war with Islam. He told the summit that he wants to discredit the belief that Americans and Westerners in general are at odds with Muslims. He said this narrative helps extremists radicalize and recruit young Americans and others.

He also said that the world is at war with those who have “perverted Islam,” and stressed the importance of reaching out to young people most at risk of being recruited by radical groups. “No religion is responsible for terrorism, people are responsible for violence and terrorism,” Obama said.

Speaking at the anti-terrorism summit on Thursday, President Obama reiterated that any contention by terrorist groups that Western nations are fighting a war against Islam is an “ugly lie.” “The notion that the West is at war with Islam is an ugly lie,” he said. “And all of us, regardless of our faith, have a responsibility to reject it.”

Obama urged summit delegates to “confront the warped ideology” espoused by terror groups, particularly efforts to use Islam to justify violence. “These terrorists are desperate for legitimacy and all us have a responsibility to refute the notion that groups like ISIL somehow represent Islam, because that is a falsehood that embraces the terrorist narrative,” Obama said.

According to a White House statement, the purpose of the summit is to “highlight domestic and international efforts to prevent violent extremists and their supporters from radicalizing, recruiting, or inspiring individuals or groups in the United States and abroad to commit acts of violence, efforts made even more imperative in light of recent, tragic attacks in Ottawa, Sydney, and Paris.”

This summit will build on the strategy the White House released in August of 2011, Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States, the first national strategy to prevent violent extremism domestically.

Keith Ellison: Speaking at the summit on Wednesday, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) denounced the United States’ targeting of Muslim populations and argued that by failing to prosecute hate crimes against Muslim communities the U.S. government is only furthering extremists’ cause.

Recalling the shooting of three young Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on Feb 10, and official reluctance to question the shooter’s motive, Ellison told the assembly, “It’s important that law enforcement prosecute hate crimes against Muslims….It’s important that we at least admit that what happened in Chapel Hill probably was not only about a parking space.” He added, “This defies our sense of logic and common sense.”

Ellison, who is the first Muslim elected to Congress, said that the incident is emblematic of how the United States’ targeting and prosecution of Muslims only reinforces extremist behavior. “This actually helps to support the false narrative of violent extremism; [extremists] want to make the case that America hates you, is against you, join us,” he said.

“Razan, Yusor and Deah—the three student victims—were living, walking, breathing examples of countering violent extremism until their lives were taken away,” added the congressman. “Let us not slip into a mistaken idea that terrorism is somehow a Muslim idea.”

Ellison also criticized recent moves by U.S. banks to stop all money transfers between the U.S. and Somalia. “On February 6, our financial services system stopped working with Somali money-wiring services to send money to Somalia,” said Ellison, whose home state has the largest Somali-American population in the country. “This is important because in the region, the violent extremist wants to be able to say ‘See, they won’t even let your relatives send you money.’ They want to be able to say that and we have got to be able to stop them from saying that.” “The violent extremist makes the case that America is at war with Islam and Muslims, and we have to assert that this is not true; not just in word, but in deed,” he said.

Joe Biden: Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday opened the three-day White House summit by pointing to the U.S. experience with assimilating immigrants as a factor in helping it prevent the terrorist attacks that have hit Europe. Biden took part in a round-table discussion with local leaders from Boston, Los Angeles and Minneapolis. The three cities have programs to counter extremism that the White House wants to promote as examples. Officials say they hope to replicate those programs in other places around the countries with populations that could be prone to radicalization.

Biden, in his remarks, held up Boston, Los Angeles and Minneapolis as examples of communities moving ahead with programs to counter extremism locally. He said the goal was to bring together broad coalitions of community leaders so that all Americans — and particularly Muslims — would feel like “we see them.” “We haven’t always gotten it right,” Biden said. “But we have a lot of experience integrating communities into the American system, the American dream.”

American Muslim reaction

The CVE summit has drawn criticism from civil rights organizations, who say the government risks alienating Muslim communities by partnering with religious and cultural organizations to identify potential extremists. “From conceptualization to implementation, the CVE strategy raises significant constitutional and privacy concerns. It is not based on empirical evidence of effectiveness. It threatens to do more harm than good,” Hina Shamsi, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Security Project, was quoted by CNN as saying.

American Muslim leaders have also warned that the White House conference to ‘counter violent extremism’ is well intentioned but risks stigmatizing and endangering Muslims in America. They say whatever the summit’s intentions, it will reinforce a message that American Muslims are to be hated and feared, a spark in what they consider to be a powder-keg of Islamophobia in the media and online.

A number of national faith groups have questioned the framing of the summit. In an open letter to President Obama, the Interfaith Alliance protested White House press secretary Josh Earnest’s statement formally announcing the event, which the group said “mentions only acts of violence perpetrated by individuals who self-identify as Muslims, and it holds up as examples of prevention only CVE pilot programs directed at American Muslims.”

The letter signed by 18 organizations notes that: ” As you know, studies by the FBI and the Southern Poverty Law Center have shown that the overwhelming majority of terrorist incidents in the United States were committed by non-Muslims.”

Rabbi Jack Moline, executive director of Interfaith Alliance, said, The White House must make sure not to unfairly single out American Muslims as it seeks to confront violent extremism perpetrated in the name of any faith or ideology.”

While Muslim Advocates has been critical of the summit, it was also invited to attend. It sent legal director, Glenn Katon, to share the group’s viewpoint. “They seem to focus primarily on Muslim communities, which account for only a small fraction of terrorist activities carried out in the United States,” Farhana Khera, executive director of the group Muslim Advocates, said in an interview with Washington Post. She added that any faith community — including Christians and Jews, “would be horrified to learn that their religious leaders were asked by law enforcement to monitor their congregants’ religious views and opinions and report back to them.”

The killing of Deah Barakat, 23, his wife Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21, and her sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, “really underscores how dangerous it is for the US government, including the White House, to focus its countering violent extremism initiatives primarily on American Muslims”, said Farhana Khera.

The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), a coalition of several leading national and local Muslim organizations, gathered around fifty U.S. Muslim leaders at a full-day forum on countering violent extremism (CVE) in Washington, D.C. on February 10, 2015. The forum adopted the following points on CVE:

(a) The USCMO endorsed an ACLU-led letter addressing the current countering violent extremism initiative that was sent to the Obama administration. We are disappointed that the administration has not responded to the fair concerns raised in the letter.

(b) Based on the shared experience of summit attendees and recent media revelations, the USCMO is very concerned that law enforcement outreach and CVE programs may be accompanied by intelligence gathering activities or other abusive law enforcement practices. The concern is particularly acute in relation to the FBI.

(c) The USCMO is concerned that the Muslim community has been singled out by the administration for CVE. This singling out is Constitutionally-questionable and morally problematic.

While the first two days of the three-day summit primarily focused on domestic extremism while the final day, Thursday saw full participation of more than 60 countries including several ministers. According to the White House Fact Sheet the “Summit offers an opportunity to approach CVE in a comprehensive way and build upon the framework of the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, which encourages the UN and other multilateral bodies to intensify efforts to identify and address the local drivers of violent extremism. ”

Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Chief Editor of the Journal of America (www.journalofamerica.net) Email: asghazali2011 (@) gmail.com

20 February, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Dan Glazebrook

Western states are trumpeting ISIS as the latest threat to civilisation, claiming total commitment to their defeat, and using the group’s conquests in Syria and Iraq as a pretext for deepening their own military involvement in the Middle East. Yet as Libya seems to be following the same path as Syria – of ‘moderate’ anti-government militias backed by the West paving the way for ISIS takeover – Britain and the US seem reluctant to confront them there, immediately pouring cold water on Egyptian President Sisi’s request for an international coalition to halt their advances. By making the suggestion – and having it, predictably, spurned – Sisi is making clear Western duplicity over ISIS and the true nature of NATO policy in Libya.

On 29th August 2011, two months before the last vestiges of the Libyan state were destroyed and its leader executed, I was interviewed on Russia Today about the country’s future. I told the station: “There’s been a lot of talk about what will happen [in Libya after the ouster of Gaddafi] – will there be sharia law, will there be a liberal democracy? What we have to understand is that what will replace the Libyan state won’t be any of those things, what will replace the Libyan state will be the same as what has replaced the state in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is a dysfunctional government, complete lack of security, gang warfare and civil war. And this is not a mistake from NATO. They would prefer to see failed states than states that are powerful and independent and able to challenge their hegemony. And people who are fighting for the TNC, fighting for NATO, really need to understand that this is NATO’s vision for their country.” Friends at the time told me I was being overly pessimistic and cynical. I said I hoped to God they were right. But my experiences over a decade following the results of my own country (Britain)’s wars of aggression in places like Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq long after the mainstream media had lost interest, led me to believe otherwise.

Of course, it was not only me who was making such warnings. On March 6th 2011, several weeks before NATO began seven months of bombing, Gaddafi gave a prophetic interview with French newspaper Le Monde du Dimanche, in which he stated: “I want to make myself understood: if one threatens [Libya], if one seeks to destabilize [Libya], there will be chaos, Bin Laden, armed factions. That is what will happen. You will have immigration, thousands of people will invade Europe from Libya. And there will no longer be anyone to stop them. Bin Laden will base himself in North Africa and will leave Mullah Omar in Afghanistan and Pakistan. You will have Bin Laden at your door step.”

He specifically warned that Derna, a town that had already provided large numbers of suicide bombers to Iraq, would become an “Islamist emirate” on the Mediterranean. Gaddafi’s warnings were mocked in the Western media (although many intelligence experts, in under-reported comments, backed his assertions), and few in Europe had ever heard of Derna. Until November 2014, that is – when ISIS announced their takeover of the city, the first of three in Libya now under their control. Their most recent conquest, Sirte, Gaddafi’s hometown, was heralded by the posting onto youtube of the beheading of 21 Coptic Christians they had captured there last December. They are widely believed to have been immigrant workers from one of the poorest parts of Egypt.

Sirte had been a pro-government stronghold during NATO’s onslaught in 2011, and one of the last cities to fall – the result of its ferocious resistance and zero support for the ‘rebels’. It was subjected to a massive siege and became the scene of some of the worst war crimes of the war, both by NATO and their allies on the ground. Now that the people of Sirte have been forced to live – and die – under the latest incarnation of NATO’s ‘heroic freedom fighters’ – it is becoming ever clearer why they fought so hard to keep them out in the first place. Yet even this massacre is eclipsed by the almost 600 Libyan National Army soldiers killed by ISIS and their allies in their battle to take Benghazi over the last three years.

This is the state of affairs NATO bequeathed to Libya, reversing the country’s trajectory as a stable, prosperous pan-African state that was a leading player in the African Union and a thorn in the side of US and British attempts to re-establish military domination. And it is not only Libya that has suffered; the power vacuum resulting from NATO’s wholesale destruction of the Libyan state apparatus has dragged the whole region into the vortex. As Brendan O Neill has shown in detail, the daily horrors being perpetrated in Mali, Nigeria and now Cameroon are all a direct result of NATO’s bloodletting, as death squads from across the entire Sahel-Sahara region have been given free reign to set up training camps and loot weapons across the giant zone of lawlessness which NATO have sculpted out of Libya.

The result? African states that in 2010 were forging ahead economically, greatly benefitting from Chinese infrastructure and manufacturing investment, moving away from centuries of colonial and neo-colonial dependence on extortionate Western financial institutions, have been confronted with massive new terror threats from groups such as Boko Haram, flush with new weaponry and facilities courtesy of NATO’s humanitarianism. Algeria and Egypt, too, still governed by the same independent-minded movements which overthrew European colonialism, have seen their borders destabilised, setting the stage for ongoing debilitating attacks planned and executed from NATO’s new Libyan militocracy. This is the context in which Egypt is launching the regional fightback against NATO’s destabilisation strategy.

Over the past year in particular, Egyptians have witnessed their Western neighbour rapidly descending down the same path of ISIS takeover as Syria. In Syria, a civil war between a Western-sponsored insurgency and an elected secular government has seen the anti-government forces rapidly fall under the sway of ISIS, as the West’s supposed ‘moderates’ in the Free Syrian Army either join forces with ISIS (impressed by their military prowess, hi-tech weaponry, and massive funding) or find themselves overrun by them. In Libya, the same pattern is quickly developing. The latest phase in the Libyan disaster began last June when the militias who dominated the previous parliament (calling themselves the ‘Libya Dawn’ coalition) lost the election and refused to accept the results, torching the country’s airport and oil storage facilities as opening salvos in an ongoing civil war between them and the newly elected parliament. Both parliaments have the allegiance of various armed factions, and have set up their own rival governments, each controlling different parts of the country. But, starting in Derna last November, areas taken by the Libya Dawn faction have begun falling to ISIS. Last weekend’s capture of Sirte was the third major town to be taken by them, and there is no sign that it will be the last. This is the role that has consistently been played by the West’s proxies across the region – paving the way and laying the ground for ISIS takeover. Egyptian President Sisi’s intervention – airstrikes against ISIS targets in Libya – aims to reverse this trajectory before it reaches Iraqi-Syrian proportions.

The internationally-recognised Libyan government based in Tobruk – the one appointed by the House of Representatives that won the election last summer – has welcomed the Egyptian intervention. Not only, they hope, will it help prevent ISIS takeover, but will also cement Egyptian support for their side in the ongoing civil war with ‘Libya Dawn’. Indeed, Egypt could, with some justification, claim that winning the war against ISIS requires a unified Libyan government committed to this goal, and that the Dawn’s refusal to recognise the elected parliament , not to mention their ‘ambiguous’ attitude towards ISIS, is the major obstacle to achieving such an outcome.

Does this mean that the Egyptian intervention will scupper the UN’s ‘Libya dialogue’ peace talks initiative? Not necessarily; in fact if could have the opposite effect. The first two rounds of the talks were boycotted by the General National Congress (the Libya Dawn parliament), safe in the knowledge that they would continue to receive weapons and financing from NATO partners Qatar and Turkey whilst the internationally-recognised Tobruk government remained under an international arms embargo. As the UK’s envoy to the Libya Dialogue, Jonathan Powell, noted this week, the “sine qua non for a [peace] settlement” is a “mutually hurting stalemate”. By balancing up the scales in the civil war, Egyptian support military support for the Tobruk government may show the GNC that taking the talks seriously will be more in their interests than continuation of the fight.

Sisi’s call for the military support of the West in his intervention has effectively been rejected, as he very likely expected it to be. A joint statement by the US and Britain and their allies on Tuesday poured cold water on the idea, and no wonder – they did not go to all the bother of turning Libya into the centre of their regional destabilisation strategy only to then try to stabilise it just when it is starting to bear fruit. However, by forcing them to come out with such a statement, Sisi has called the West’s bluff. The US and Britain claim to be committed to the destruction of ISIS, a formation which is the product of the insurgency they have sponsored in Syria for the past four years, and Sisi is asking them to put their money where their mouth is. They have refused to do so. In the end, the Egyptian resolution to the UN Security Council on Wednesday made no mention of calling for military intervention by other powers, and limited itself to calling for an end to the one-sided international arms embargo which prevents the arming of the elected government but does not seem to deter NATO’s regional partners from openly equipping the ‘Libya Dawn’ militias. Sisi has effectively forced the West to show its hand: their rejection of his proposal to support the intervention makes it clear to the world the two-faced nature of their supposed commitment to the destruction of ISIS.

There are, however, deep divisions on this issue in Europe. France is deepening its military presence in the Sahel-Sahara region, with 3000 troops based in Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali and a massive new base opened on the Libyan border in Niger last October, and would likely welcome a pretext to extend its operations to its historic protectorate in Southern Libya. Italy, likewise, is getting cold feet about the destabilisation it helped to unleash, having not only damaged a valuable trading partner, but increasingly being faced with hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the horror and destitution that NATO has gifted the region. But neither are likely to do anything without UNSC approval, which is likely to continue to be blocked by the US and Britain, who are more than happy to see countries like Russian-allied Egypt and Chinese-funded Nigeria weakened and their development retarded by terror bombings. Sisi’s actions will, it is hoped, not only make abundantly clear the West’s acquiescence in the horrors it has created – but also pave the way for an effective fightback against them.

Dan Glazebrook is a political analyst and author of “Divide and Ruin: The West’s Imperial Strategy in an Age of Crisis”

This article originally appeared on RT.com

20 February, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Dr. Ludwig Watzal

Should there not be a prisoner swap?

The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has afflicted severe damage to U. S. democracy. The incarceration of “terror” suspects for the last 13 years without trial will be a Cain’s mark for years to come. Not to speak of the “black sites” and dungeons in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Out of 799 detainees who have been held at Guantanamo Bay since September 11, 2001 attacks, so far, two alleged terrorists have been convicted by a Kangaroo court. One judgment had to be rescinded. A great success for the American legal system!

Shaker Aamer, a Saudi-born British citizen, has been incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay with no trial or charge for the last 13 years. He has never been accused of any wrongdoing. He has been tortured and mistreated like all of the detainees. Anyone who believes in the rule of law should be appalled by the fact how the U. S. trample on human rights and Habeas Corpus. Concerning the prison camp, there exists a state of total secrecy. On Sky news, Roger Waters called this case a national disgrace. [1] It appears that Aamer’s only “crime” is his wrong sounding name, being at the wrong time in the wrong place. Aamer has always been committed to the fate of other prisoners. According to Joseph Hackman, a former Guard in Guantanamo, the conditions of the detainees are beyond the pale. For example, Guantanamo is swamped with rats, which run in and out of the cages in which the prisoners are held like animals.

In 2007, the Bush administration cleared Aamer for release to Saudi Arabia, so did the Obama administration in 2009. Although the British government has been demanding his immediate release for years, Aamer remains in custody and that, though Britain was the first country to has participated in the attack on Iraq. The so-called special relationship between the imperial power and its client state does not seem to be so special.

Shortly after his inauguration, President Obama promised to close Guantanamo within a year. Until today, the prison camp is still open and functioning well. There are strong forces in the U. S. Congress who want to keep the camp open. Senator Kelly Ayotte from New Hampshire and others, amongst them the notorious Senators John McCain from Arizona and Lindsey Graham from South Carolina, proposed legislation, called “Detaining Terrorists to Protect America Act of 2015”, that is designed to keep Guantanamo open, and to stop any prisoners from being released for the next two years, until after the end of the Obama presidency. It’s an outrageous imposition, given that 54 of the remaining 122 prisoners have been approved for release by a thorough review process. The remaining prisoners, not yet cleared for release, need the chance to show that they are not a threat.

The British government has the obligation and should do everything in its power to bring Shaker Aamer back to his family in London. His place is not in a Saudi dungeon but in Great Britain.

Dr. Ludwig Watzal works as a journalist and editor in Bonn, Germany.

20 February, 2015
Countercurrents.org

By Kathy Kelly

After a week here in FMC Lexington Satellite camp, a federal prison in Kentucky, I started catching up on national and international news via back issues of USA Today available in the prison library, and an “In Brief” item, on p. 2A of the Jan. 30 weekend edition, caught my eye. It briefly described a protest in Washington, D.C., in which members of the antiwar group “Code Pink” interrupted a U.S. Senate Armed Services budget hearing chaired by Senator John McCain. The protesters approached a witness table where Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright and George Schulz were seated. One of their signs called Henry Kissinger a war criminal. “McCain,” the article continued, “blurted out, ‘Get out of here, you low-life scum.'”

At mail call, a week ago, I received Richard Clarke’s novel, The Sting of the Drone, (May 2014, St. Martin’s Press), about characters involved in developing and launching drone attacks. I’m in prison for protesting drone warfare, so a kind friend ordered it for me. The author, a former “National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism,” worked for 30 years inside the U.S. government but seems to have greater respect than some within government for concerned people outside of it. He seems also to feel some respect for people outside our borders.

He develops, I think, a fair-minded approach toward evaluating drone warfare given his acceptance that wars and assassinations are sometimes necessary. (I don’t share that premise). Several characters in the novel, including members of a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, criticize drone warfare, noting that in spite of high level, expensive reconnaissance, drone attacks still kill civilians, alienating people the U.S. ostensibly wants to turn away from terrorism.

Elsewhere in the plot, U.S. citizens face acute questions after they themselves witness remote control attacks on colleagues. Standing outside a Las Vegas home engulfed in flames, and frustrated by his inability to protect or save a colleague and his family, one main character ruefully identifies with people experiencing the same rage and grief, in faraway lands like Afghanistan and Pakistan, when they are struck by Predator drones that he operates every day. U.S. characters courageously grapple with more nuanced answers to questions such as, “Who are the terrorists?” and “Who are the murderers?” As the plot accelerates toward a potential terrorist attack against railway systems in U.S. cities, with growing suspicion that the attacks are planned for Christmas Day, Clarke builds awareness that those who launch cyber-attacks and drone attacks, no matter which side claims their loyalty, passionately believe their attacks will protect people on their own side.

When U.S. media and U.S. government officials ask, “who are the murderers,” the default answer is enemy soldiers. I’m reminded of Senator McCain’s own response to a 2012 prisoner exchange of five Afghan militants, where he was alleged to have exclaimed, “They’re the five biggest murderers in world history! They killed Americans!”

It brings home a core fact about drones: that you can’t surrender to a drone. Enemy soldiers, and people merely suspected of being, or intending to become, enemy soldiers, are killed at home gardening, or eating dinner with their families. At the military base where I was arrested, soldiers drive home every evening from piloting drones in lethal sorties over Afghanistan, Iraq, and presumably a sizable list of other countries less well known to the U.S. public. With no overwhelming zeal to kill civilians, they assist the U.S. in killing many more civilians each year than Al Quaeda and ISIS can collectively dream of doing, in the course of advancing U.S. interests over a whole world region U.S. drones render into one large battlefield. No thinking person would wish that same logic to be visited on these soldiers returning home from daily battle, although Clarke’s novel chillingly imagines the U.S.’ own technology and rules of engagement turned against it. It’s a warning we’re too prone to ignore.

In Clarke’s novel, the U.S. drone operators and intelligence officials are smart, efficient, generally honest, caring and often funny. Romance and occasional flings color their lives. The two masterminds of the enemy plot in contrast, are more mysterious. Readers learn almost nothing about their personal lives, although it’s clear that they don’t expect to live much longer. They, too show remarkable expertise exploring high-tech ways to achieve goals. They, too, are clever and terrifyingly competent; personal loss and deeply felt grievances motivate them; like their counterparts, they’ve moved into high positions with increasing wealth and perks. But, unlike the U.S. characters, they express no remorse or second thoughts about killing their targets and strategizing for a major attack.

The fact remains that if we didn’t see enemy soldiers as “murdering terrorists” lacking the human emotions and rights of our own troops, and enemy civilians as “collateral damage” whose deaths are automatically the fault of all who resist us, then there couldn’t be a drone program. There wouldn’t be a technology for eliminating human threats and human obstacles conveniently, cheaply, and instantly from the skies. We would no longer be killing militants and suspected militants unquestioned, too often at the first hint that they might pose a risk to us.

The “means-ends” question intensifies as both sides demonstrate increasingly high-tech ways to thwart and attack each other. One intelligence officer asks how his superior manages to draw the line between what is acceptable and what would be out of bounds when he issues orders that will “take out” presumed enemies.

“It used to be the ‘Front Page Rule,'” the higher official responds. “Assume it will be on the front page of the Post someday and only do it if you could stand that level of exposure. But it’s amazing what has been on the front page without any real consequences: torture, illegal wiretaps, black sites. No one goes to jail. No one gets fired. So I don’t know anymore.”

When Clarke invokes the “Front Page Rule, it seems to be his acknowledgement that peace protesters like those of Code Pink play a valuable role informing public opinion. Believing that the means you use determines the end you get, they hold out for alternatives to war and killing. Far from being low-life scum, they have distinguished themselves in fields of diplomacy, research, journalism, law and education. More than this, they are distinguishing themselves in service to the victims of war.

I hope that someday Senator McCain will gain the insight to repent of insulting them, just as one of the witnesses that day, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, may now regret having exalted the “indispensable” U.S. nation’s right to lead in using force, having since admitted, “We have been talking about our exceptionalism during the recent eight years. Now, an average American wants to stay at home – they do not need any overseas adventures. We do not need new enemies.”

Militarists trust in weapon strength. Still, though perennially disregarded, another option is readily available, offering much greater safety and letting us insist without self-deception on the respect for life that we invoke in defense of our nation’s drone strategy and its war on terror. It’s the option of treating other people fairly and justly, of trying to share resources equitably, even that precious resource of safety; of trying to see the humanity of our so-called enemies and of seeing ourselves as we’re seen by them.

Clarke’s story moves toward a suspenseful conclusion at the height of the Christmas season, ironically moving toward a day traditionally set aside to herald a newborn as the Prince of Peace.

As drone warfare proliferates, as the stings of the drone become more lethal and terrifying, the peace activists hold a newsworthy message. I’m glad Code Pink members continually interrupt high level hearings. I hope their essential questioning will plant seeds that germinate, take root and gather underground strength.

This article first appeared on Telesur.

Kathy Kelly, co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence (info@vcnv.org), is in federal prison for participation in an anti-drone protest. She can receive mail at: KATHY KELLY 04971-045; FMC LEXINGTON; FEDERAL MEDICAL CENTER; SATELLITE CAMP; P.O. BOX 14525; LEXINGTON, KY 40512.
20 February, 2015
Telesurtv.net

By Jon V Kofas

Does Greece with just 2% of EU GDP have the ability to destabilize the EU simply by refusing the IMF-EU imposed austerity program, or does Germany have such power because it has been trying to impose its economic hegemony over the rest of Europe?

On 19 February 2015, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble rejected a Greek compromise proposal for a Greek “bridge loan” that would essentially buy six-month time for the new SYRIZA government in Athens to restructure the fiscal system and stabilize the government’s finances while meeting domestic needs.

Rejecting the proposal from Athens, a proposal that most of the EU members are willing to support, Germany demanded that the new SYRIZA (center-left) government of Greece continue with IMF-EU austerity as previous (neo-liberal oriented) governments had agreed in the past five years. Of course, austerity has resulted in a drop in GDP of 25%, drop in one-third of incomes (wages, benefits and social security) for about two-thirds of the population, unemployment of 26% and a mass exodus for college educated people, while leaving the public health care system in shambles because money was transferred from health care to paying interest on debt. At the same time, debt-to-GDP ratio rose from 110% before austerity to 175% in 2015. The strongest argument against austerity is that every single promise the IMFand Germany made about its results – economic development, lower unemployment, lower debt-to-GDP ratio, healthier government revenues – turned out to be entirely false.

For its part, Germany insists that Greece is trying to negotiate an extension of euro zone funding with no strings attached and it must abide by all neo-liberal policies previous governments agreed to implement, regardless of the cost to the middle class and workers, to health care and education, as long as the defense sector stays untouched because Germany exports weapons, submarines, etc to Greece. Meanwhile, Athens promises to meet its debt obligations as long as it has better terms and no interference in domestic policies. This means no interference in the country’s institutions impacting everything from health care and education to the fiscal system and privatization of public assets that Germany wants sold for pennies on the euro to billionaires waiting for the fire sale. Ruling out any compromise, Schaeuble argued that: “Our room for maneuver is limited. We must keep in mind that we have a huge responsibility to keep Europe stable.”

The German finance minister clearly presents his government as the guarantor of EU stability and Greece as the catalyst for instability. The EU’s largest creditor nation, Germany is the victim of the EU’s largest debtor nation, Greece, so Berlin must protect the integrity of the EU as far as Schaeuble is concerned. The question is whether this is the case, or is the German finance minister demonizing the weak debtor nation, buying time and forcing it to make even more compromises so that the failed IMF-German-imposed program prevails in Greece. This would then send a message to all of the EU that Germany is hegemonic and its austerity and neo-liberal policies will prevail over the periphery members in the EU that Germany has reduced into quasi-colonies, as the Greek prime minister implied in a recent speech before Parliament.

Germany has a long history of trying to impose its hegemony over Europe, going to war when Prussia led the unification of the Germanic states in 1870. Germany went to war again in1914 in a blatant attempt to secure more colonies, semi-colonies and spheres of influence, and global markets. In 1939, Hitler, following the long-standing German tradition of hegemony went to war against the rest of Europe, putting an end to the strategy of war as a way of securing the goal of hegemony. In the second half of the 20th century, Germany turned to the concept of European economic integration to accomplish the goal of hegemony where war had failed in 1914 and 1939.

One of Germany’s best historians of the 20th century, Fritz Fischer, argued in his works dealing with the German Empire that the goal of Prussian (Junker aristocracy)-led regime from 1870 to 1914 was to be a world power, otherwise the alternative was decline. (See Fischer’s Weltmacht oder Niedergang: Deutschland im ersten Weltkrieg, 1965)

The concept of global power status is deeply ingrained in German culture and today it manifests itself in the patron-client integration model that Angela Merkel has been pursuing in order to achieve the goal, while at the same time enjoying the support of German banks and corporations, many of which the government is itself a stockholder. In other words, German contemporary foreign financial and economic policy as practiced through the mechanisms of the European Union have a historical basis, and reflect the “Fischer Thesis” of World Power or Decline!
One could argue that just because Germany was founded as a nation by going to war against neighboring France in 1870, that does not mean Germany in early 21st century is militaristic like old Prussia. The same argument could then made about Germany’s quest for hegemony in 1914, and again in 1939. In this case, let us wipe out the memory of the holocaust, Jews, gypsies, Communists, among other war crimes, including those that the Third Reich committed throughout the Balkans, including Greece. Let us simply accept that Germany in the early 21st century is not militarist and it is not pursuing political hegemony at the expense of its neighbors, having learned bitter lessons from history. Can we possibly make the same argument about German economic hegemony ambitions?

The obstacle for Germany is not Greece and the periphery nations in the EU that are powerless to determine what happens to the monetary bloc. After all, Greece like all of the periphery EU members have always been dependencies of the core countries. From its creation as an independent nation in 1832 until the present Greece was always a debtor nation and always a dependency of Great Britain from 1832 until the Truman Doctrine, and then on the US from 1947 until the 1970s when it took a turn toward much greater European integration and depndence.

Germany’s problem today is actually the core EU members, especially the UK that wishes to redefine its relationship with the EU, and the US that wants a balance of power in Europe with a modicum of containment imposed on Germany through the EU and NATO. At the same time, there is the reliance of Germany on Russian energy that makes it vulnerable and the global competition from China that is investing hundreds of billions in Europe, thus investing in market share at Germany’s expense. Greece is small, symbolic, and a political issue that reflects Germany’s larger problems in its quest for global status.

The issue for Germany is to inject sufficient fear into the rest of Europeans about any nation deviating from German policy dictates so that they follow faithfully as they have in the past. Greece is only the example Germany is using to accomplish its goal, because Greece has only “negative political and economic leverage” while Germany has positive leverage. In short, Greece, like all debtor nations in our modern times can threaten suspension of payments thus causing instability among private and public bondholders who would rather secure a deal securing some return on investment than no return.

The massive transfer of wealth from Greece to Germany in the last five years of austerity has resulted in several billion euro profits for German banks. True, German taxpayers have provided loans to Greece used to repay German and other EU creditors, but the money never goes to Athens, but directly to the banks including European Central Bank that has also made huge profits from Greek bonds. In other words, in the short term European taxpayers are making loans to Greece to pay the EU banks, while Greece will be saddled with debt for the next 80 years. This kind of negative leverage actually destabilizes markets because large institutional investors fear not making as much money as they hoped. Of course, there is one other type of negative leverage Greece enjoys that really angers Germans, even if they do not support their government’s tough policy. The left-center SYRIZA government has repeatdly asked Berlin to open negotiations for war crimes and several billion – anywhere from 30 to 150 billion euro – that Germany owes Greece. Berlin insists it will not discuss war crimes and damages owed to Greece.

On the other hand, there is the positive leverage that Germany exercises as the hegemonic creditor nation. In order to secure austerity that keeps the currency strong at the expense of debtor nations whose economies are weak and become even more dependent on the creditors, Germany and by extension the EU is refusing liquidity to the debtor nation. The threat of Germany immediately throws off the bond and stock markets, because it means that the absence of agreement with the debtor will mean financial and economic turmoil.

Germany’s positive leverage stems from its massive economic power within the EU and clearly as the dominant country it has the ability to stabilize or destabilize as it wishes. At the same time, Germany feels the pressure from the US and China, pressure it resents as we have seen over the disagreements on the Russia-Ukraine crisis. In its quest for global power status, Germany wants a freer hand in the EU that it considers its back yard, just like the US considers the Caribbean and Central America its back yard. With France politically and economically weak, the major obstacle to Germany is the persistence of anti-EU sentiment coming out of the UK. It is possible that the UK will have an even larger economy than Germany at some point before 2024, and this is something that Germans take into account when they position themselves for hegemony today. In short, the German-UK power struggle is important today, though hardly fierce enough for these two economic rivals to go to war as they did in 1914.

German power means the power to stabilize or destabilize the entire euro zone. Greek weakness means that it must use every other power from China and Russia to the US in order to counterbalance Germany’s pressures. Berlin resents that the UK and US, as well as China and Russia want a European balance of power with a Germany that is weaker than it is. Not too long ago, a US government official noted that the German trade surplus is a destabilizing factor in the EU and it comes at the expense of the other members. This kind of thinking prevails among the other great powers in the world, and it is something that Germany is trying to surpass when it adopts a harsh negotiating posture toward Greece. Unlike many analysts who insist that the issue is a culture clash, a difference between a northern European vs. a southern European country, I believe that those are marginal issues and at the core rests German strategy for hegemony and Greek insistence at preserving a modicum of national integrity and sovereingty.

Jon V Kofas is a novelist. He blogs at http://www.jonkofas.blogspot.in/

20 February, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Alex Lantier

Reports of the fighting in the strategic east Ukrainian city of Debaltseve make clear that the US-backed Kiev regime sustained a humiliating defeat this week.

Late Wednesday, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko claimed that six soldiers had been killed and 100 wounded in a hurried evacuation of Debaltseve. He justified the evacuation by claiming that 2,475 soldiers and 200 military vehicles had been pulled out in time from the encirclement maneuver launched by Russian-backed forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR).

Yesterday, Poroshenko revised the casualty count upwards to 13 killed, 157 wounded, 90 captured, and “at least” 82 missing. However, according to the New York Times, “the number of dead would likely grow considerably higher.”

With estimates of the number of Ukrainian soldiers trapped in the Debaltseve area ranging from 5,000 to 8,000, it appears the Kiev regime’s losses are to be counted in the thousands. Yesterday, DPR leader Alexander Zakharchenko declared, “We have completed an operation to clear Debaltseve. Unfortunately, Ukrainian authorities have failed to listen to reason and lay down arms … The losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the [Debaltseve] pocket are estimated at around 3,000 to 3,500.”

Zakharchenko said that DPR authorities were negotiating with the Kiev regime for the return of the bodies of the fallen and the release of Ukrainian prisoners of war.

“The amount of equipment Ukrainian units have lost here is beyond description. We have taken loads of ammunition both in Debaltseve and Uglegorsk,” said Zakharchenko. He added that the Kiev regime had “lost its best units and a large amount of hardware and ammunition in the Debaltseve trap.” He said many fighters from the Ukrainian 128th mountain rifle brigade, the 8th special force regiment, and the far-right Ukrainian National Guard had been killed.

DPR officials claimed yesterday that they were ending major combat operations. DPR Defense Ministry spokesman Eduard Basurin said, “On the whole, the situation along the contact line is gradually stabilizing. Units of the DPR’s armed forces strictly abide by a ceasefire and don’t fall for sporadic provocations by Ukrainian troops.”

Basurin reported, however, that fighting was still ongoing to crush isolated groups of Kiev regime fighters on the outskirts of Debaltseve.

Interviews of Ukrainian troops by Western journalists sympathetic to the Kiev regime painted a picture of total collapse. Ukrainian supply lines to Debaltseve were cut off for a week by DPR forces prior to the final assault, the Guardian reported, calling the Kiev regime’s situation in east Ukraine “catastrophic.”

“We knew that if we stayed there, it would definitely either be captivity or death,” Ukrainian Lieutenant Yuriy Prekharia told the Guardian .

Ukrainian troops refused a DPR offer to let them to retreat unharmed if they abandoned their arms, and they repeatedly came under artillery and small arms fire as they fled. Medic Albert Sardarian said that after his column of armored vehicles carrying 1,000 men came under artillery fire, survivors had to flee on foot, leaving their dead and wounded behind.

As Ukrainian soldiers fleeing from Debaltseve arrived in Artemivsk, New York Times journalists reported, “Many soldiers were in a demoralized and drunken state. Shellshocked soldiers from the battle in Debaltseve wandered the streets through the day Wednesday, before beginning to drink heavily…At Biblios, an upscale restaurant in Artemivsk, soldiers staggered about in the dining room, ordering brandy for which they had no money to pay, and then firing shots into the ceiling as other guests quietly fled the premises.”

The debacle suffered by the Kiev regime exposes the utterly reckless and frankly stupid character of the policy pursued by Washington and its EU allies in Ukraine.

One year ago, Washington, Berlin and the other NATO powers backed a putsch led by pro-Nazi forces of the Right Sector, exploiting the right-wing, pro-EU Maidan protests to topple President Viktor Yanukovych. The putsch had no popular support, and the Maidan protests rarely gathered more than a few thousand people bused in from western Ukraine. The regime that emerged, led by right-wing forces, including the fascist, anti-Russian Svoboda Party, deeply alienated the population in the more pro-Russian industrial heartland of east Ukraine.

The initial attempts of the Kiev regime and its CIA backers to subjugate east Ukraine by sheer military terror, relying on fascist militias and select units of the Ukraine army that it considered to be reliable, have failed. Popular opposition and covert Kremlin support for east Ukrainian forces has sufficed to defeat those units that Kiev could throw against the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Nevertheless, Washington is pressing Kiev to prepare for a renewed offensive and is still discussing directly arming the Ukrainian army against Russia with US weapons. While Washington pursues a strategy that could trigger a direct conflict between NATO and Russia, a nuclear-armed power, its proxy regime in Kiev is disintegrating.

In west Ukraine, the population is evading or resisting draft orders to obtain more cannon fodder for the east Ukraine war. At the same time, Ukraine’s economy, cut off from its main industrial base in east Ukraine and its export markets in Russia, is collapsing.

“The country is at war that they cannot afford to fight. There is no economy any longer. When you look at where the industrial base of Ukraine is, and the conflict going on in the east, there is absolutely no doubt as to why it is happening,” Gerald Celente of Trends Journal told Russia Today. “That $160 billion loss of trade with Russia has destroyed the economy, when it was already in a severe recession. It went from very bad to worse than depression levels.”

Ukraine’s Gross Domestic Product has shrunk 6.5 percent. Workers’ purchasing power is collapsing, with inflation expected to reach 27 percent this year and the hryvnia, the Ukrainian currency, losing roughly half its value against the dollar. In the meantime, Kiev is slashing wages, industrial subsidies, and social spending, throwing large sections of the working class out of work.

The Kiev regime’s reverses do not, however, signify an end to the conflict in Ukraine, which is driven above all by NATO’s drive to tear Ukraine out of Russia’s geostrategic orbit, to humiliate Russia and prepare to reduce it to the status of a semi-colonial dependency of the NATO powers. The only force that can stop this offensive is the international working class, mobilizing itself in struggle against NATO’s war plans.

Without such an intervention, NATO’s Ukrainian proxies will simply regroup and launch a renewed assault—as they did in the aftermath of the previous ceasefire negotiated in Minsk last September.

Poroshenko reacted to the defeat in Debaltseve by calling for what would be a new, major escalation of the conflict: deploying European Union (EU) troops as peacekeepers to east Ukraine to confront Russian-backed forces. He claimed this deployment would aim to enforce the terms of the second Minsk cease-fire agreement announced last week, which both sides in Ukraine have ignored.

“The best format for us is a policing mission from the European Union. We are convinced that this will be the most effective and optimal solution in a situation when promises of peace have not been kept,” Poroshenko declared. He said Kiev would “launch official consultations with our foreign partners” to this effect.

Oleksandr Turchynov, the head of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, called for EU troops to also deploy to Ukraine’s border with Russia—an utterly reckless move that would position EU troops for a direct attack on the centers of European Russia.

20 February, 2015
WSWS.org