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The name printed in bold font on the back of his customised supporter’s shirt is usually “The Arch” when spotted at Newlands, Ellis Park or FNB Stadium (known as Soccer City during the World Cup), and one never fails to admire the gushing joy South Africa’s footballers, rugby players or cricketers feel when they spot him in the crowd.

“The Arch” is approaching his ninth decade, but never misses a moment to defy the sands of time, busting a lung blowing his “vuvuzela”, or singing “Shosholoza” in the crowd.

The colourful sports shirts are in dramatic contrast to the maroon robes we’ve been accustomed to seeing this man of the cloth in over the years.

Granted, there’s a sense of mad adventurousness about him whenever he speaks or sings in a crowd. There’s a lucid childlike cuteness in that squeaky voice, and a cuddly Yoda-esque wise teddy-bear in this old man when he appears on television. Flagging a warning signal, that we perhaps shouldn’t take this odd borderline-senile man seriously. No, because Bishop Desmond Tutu has always been like this, that’s part of his charisma.

But these are strange times…

When the head of the South African Zionist Federation, David Hersch, initiates an online petition against “The Arch”, demanding he be removed as patron of the Holocaust memorial centres in Cape Town and Johannesburg for his “anti-Israel behaviour” and labels his criticism of the policies, (yes, policies) of the state of Israel “morally repugnant” based on “horrific and grotesquely false accusation against the Jewish people”, it’s pertinent to provide a brief reminder to Hersch, and anyone who might be swayed, of the man’s credentials.

Tour de force

South Africa’s first black Anglican archbishop, Tutu was a tour de force against the Apartheid leviathan.

After years battling white supremacist foes, and gaining freedom, his was a voice of unity, refusing to allow post-Apartheid South Africa to fragment along racial lines.

He coined the term “Rainbow Nation” and actively worked to convince white South Africans that they had a role to play in the new era, while simultaneously launching himself fearlessly to address the monstrous socio-economic problems of poverty and HIV/AIDS in the country.

He headed the “Truth and Reconciliation Committee” which gave those guilty of the most heinous crimes, including mass murder, the chance to open up, say sorry and be forgiven to foster a national healing.

Not one to get onto the financial “gravy train” since 1994, Tutu has not accumulated massive wealth. He hasn’t glided into a blissful retirement, content with the activism of his youth, choosing instead, to hold a mirror up to the country, and his former comrades reminding them that they may be free now, but they’re far from flawless.

He has broken ranks and railed against government corruption. He was appalled with the soft diplomacy conducted with Zimbabwe over human rights abuses under the government of Robert Mugabe.

In 2009, when his friend, the Dalai Lama was denied a visa to South Africa because of Chinese pressure and alleged threats to end lucrative business with the rainbow nation, “The Arch” pushed a national soul-searching button by calling it “shameless” and “a total betrayal of our struggle history.”

Xenophobic violence committed by his fellow South Africans disturbed him so much that he wailed publicly, “Please, please stop, please stop!”

He is a founding member and chairperson of The Elders, which tries to put out fires around the world by flexing their aged intellectual and moral muscles. Membership includes Kofi Annan, Aung San Suu Kyi, Mary Robinson, Nelson Mandela and Jimmy Carter. Not bad company for an anti-Semite?

“The Arch” has spoken out in support of the people of Darfur; criticised rich nations at the G8 summit over the disconnect between what they say and do, what they promise and don’t give. He’s been outspoken over unilateralism in war (with Iraq as the prime example); campaigned for women’s rights; gay rights worldwide and within the church.

Israelis and Palestinians

Theoretically, he could have achieved all this, but still be an anti-Semite, right? Here’s an excerpt of an op-ed he’d penned in 2002, regarding Israel and The Palestinians:

“In our struggle against apartheid, the great supporters were Jewish people. They almost instinctively had to be on the side of the disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones, fighting injustice, oppression and evil.

“I have continued to feel strongly with the Jews. I am patron of a Holocaust centre in South Africa. I believe Israel has a right to secure borders. What is not so understandable, not justified, is what it did to another people to guarantee its existence. I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa.”

Tutu continued:

“Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice. We condemn the violence of suicide bombers, and we condemn the corruption of young minds taught hatred; but we also condemn the violence of military incursions in the occupied lands, and the inhumanity that won’t let ambulances reach the injured.”

The words of a raging anti-Semite? Or good wisdom for those politicians spinning on their own axis on that carousel called “The Peace Process” to listen to?

These are strange times. When thousands of birds fall mysteriously from the sky; Sarah Palin cries “blood libel” and one of the great moral sages of our time is called an anti-Semite, there probably isn’t any hope for the rest of us. Strange times indeed.

Wait, as I click the “publish” button, I’m reading that 2,141 people have signed a counter-petition to defend Tutu and his character. Hold on for a sec… make that 2,142. Maybe there’s a semblance of hope for us after-all.

By Imran Garda

As the new year begins, the price of wheat is setting an all-time high in the United Kingdom. Food riots are spreading across Algeria. Russia is importing grain to sustain its cattle herds until spring grazing begins. India is wrestling with an 18-percent annual food inflation rate, sparking protests. China is looking abroad for potentially massive quantities of wheat and corn. The Mexican government is buying corn futures to avoid unmanageable tortilla price rises. And on January 5, the U.N. Food and Agricultural organization announced that its food price index for December hit an all-time high.

But whereas in years past, it’s been weather that has caused a spike in commodities prices, now it’s trends on both sides of the food supply/demand equation that are driving up prices. On the demand side, the culprits are population growth, rising affluence, and the use of grain to fuel cars. On the supply side: soil erosion, aquifer depletion, the loss of cropland to nonfarm uses, the diversion of irrigation water to cities, the plateauing of crop yields in agriculturally advanced countries, and—due to climate change —crop-withering heat waves and melting mountain glaciers and ice sheets. These climate-related trends seem destined to take a far greater toll in the future.

There’s at least a glimmer of good news on the demand side: World population growth, which peaked at 2 percent per year around 1970, dropped below 1.2 percent per year in 2010. But because the world population has nearly doubled since 1970, we are still adding 80 million pe ople each year. Tonight, there will be 219,000 additional mouths to feed at the dinner table, and many of them will be greeted with empty plates. Another 219,000 will join us tomorrow night. At some point, this relentless growth begins to tax both the skills of farmers and the limits of the earth’s land and water resources.

Beyond population growth, there are now some 3 billion people moving up the food chain, eating greater quantities of grain-intensive livestock and poultry products. The rise in meat, milk, and egg consumption in fast-growing developing countries has no precedent. Total meat consumption in China today is already nearly double that in the United States.

The third major source of demand growth is the use of crops to produce fuel for cars. In the United States, which harvested 416 million tons of grain in 2009, 119 million tons went to ethanol distilleries to produce fuel for cars. That’s enough to feed 350 million people for a year. The massive U.S. investment in ethanol distilleries sets the stage for direct competition between cars and people for the world grain harvest. In Europe, where much of the auto fleet runs on diesel fuel, there is growing demand for plant-based diesel oil, principally from rapeseed and palm oil. This demand for oil-bearing crops is not only reducing the land available to produce food crops in Europe, it is also driving the clearing of rainforests in Indonesia and Malaysia for palm oil plantations.

The combined effect of these three growing demands is stunning: a doubling in the annual growth in world grain consumption from an average of 21 million tons per year in 1990-2005 to 41 million tons per year in 2005-2010. Most of this huge jump is attributable to the orgy of investment in ethanol distilleries in the United States in 2006-2008.

While the annual demand growth for grain was doubling, new constraints were emerging on the supply side, even as longstanding ones such as soil erosion intensified. An estimated one third of the world’s cropland is losing topsoil faster than new soil is forming through natural processes—and thus is losing its inherent productivity. Two huge dust bowls are forming, one across northwest China, western Mongolia, and central Asia; the other in central Africa. Each of these dwarfs the U.S. dust bowl of the 1930s.

Satellite images show a steady flow of dust storms leaving these regions, each one typically carrying millions of tons of precious topsoil. In North China, some 24,000 rural villages have been abandoned or partly depopulated as grasslands have been destroyed by overgrazing and as croplands have been inundated by migrating sand dunes.

In countries with severe soil erosion, such as Mongolia and Lesotho, grain harvests are shrinking as erosion lowers yields and eventually leads to cropland abandonment. The result is spreading hunger and growing dependence on imports. Haiti and North Korea, two countries with severely eroded soils, are chronically dependent on food aid from abroad.

Meanwhile aquifer depletion is fast shrinking the amount of irrigated area in many parts of the world; this relatively recent phenomenon is driven by the large-scale use of mechanical pumps to exploit underground water. Today, half the world’s people live in countries where water tables are falling as overpumping depletes aquifers. Once an aquifer is depleted, pumping is necessarily reduced to the rate of recharge unless it is a fossil (nonreplenishable) aquifer, in which case pumping ends altogether. But sooner or later, falling water tables translate into rising food prices.

Irrigated area is shrinking in the Middle East, notably in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, and possibly Yemen. In Saudi Arabia, which was totally dependent on a now-depleted fossil aq uifer for its wheat self-sufficiency, production is in a freefall. From 2007 to 2010, Saudi wheat production fell by more than two thirds. By 2012, wheat production will likely end entirely, leaving the country totally dependent on imported grain.

The Arab Middle East is the first geographic region where spreading water shortages are shrinking the grain harvest. But the really big water deficits are in India, where the World Bank numbers indicate that 175 million people are being fed with grain that is produced by overpumping. In China, overpumping provides food for some 130 million people. In the United States, the world’s other leading grain producer, irrigated area is shrinking in key agricultural states such as California and Texas.

The last decade has witnessed the emergence of yet another constraint on growth in global agricultural productivity: the shrinking backlog of untapped technologies. In some agriculturally advanced countries, farmers are using all available technologies to raise yields. In Japan, the first country to see a sustained rise in grain yield per acre, rice yields have been flat now for 14 years. Rice yields in South Korea and China are now approaching those in Japan. Assuming that farmers in these two countries will face the same constraints as those in Japan, more than a third of the world rice harvest will soon be produced in countries with little potential for further raising rice yields.

A similar situation is emerging with wheat yields in Europe. In France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, wheat yields are no longer rising at all. These three countries together account for roughly one-eighth of the world wheat harvest. Another trend slowing the growth in the world grain harvest is the conversion of cropland to nonfarm uses. Suburban sprawl, industrial construction, and the paving of land for roads, highways, and parking lots are claiming cropland in the Central Valley of California , the Nile River basin in Egypt, and in densely populated countries that are rapidly industrializing, such as China and India. In 2011, new car sales in China are projected to reach 20 million—a record for any country. The U.S. rule of thumb is that for every 5 million cars added to a country’s fleet, roughly 1 million acres must be paved to accommodate them. And cropland is often the loser.

Fast-growing cities are also competing with farmers for irrigation water. In areas where all water is being spoken for, such as most countries in the Middle East, northern China, the southwestern United States, and most of India, diverting water to cities means less irrigation water available for food production. California has lost perhaps a million acres of irrigated land in recent years as farmers have sold huge amounts of water to the thirsty millions in Los Angeles and San Diego.

The rising temperature is also making it more difficult to expand the world grain harvest fast enough to keep up with the record pace of demand. Crop ecologists have their own rule of thumb: For each 1 degree Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum during the growing season, we can expect a 10 percent decline in grain yields. This temperature effect on yields was all too visible in western Russia during the summer of 2010 as the harvest was decimated when temperatures soared far above the norm.

Another emerging trend that threatens food security is the melting of mountain glaciers. This is of particular concern in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau, where the ice melt from glaciers helps sustain not only the major rivers of Asia during the dry season, such as the Indus, Ganges, Mekong, Yangtze, and Yellow rivers, but also the irrigation systems dependent on these rivers. Without this ice melt, the grain harvest would drop precipitously and prices would rise accordingly.

And finally, over the longer term, melting ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica, combined with thermal expansion of the oceans, threaten to raise the sea level by up to six feet during this century. Even a three-foot rise would inundate half of the riceland in Bangladesh. It would also put under water much of the Mekong Delta that produces half the rice in Vietnam, the world’s number two rice exporter. Altogether there are some 19 other rice-growing river deltas in Asia where harvests would be substantially reduced by a rising sea level.

The current surge in world grain and soybean prices, and in food prices more broadly, is not a temporary phenomenon. We can no longer expect that things will soon return to normal, because in a world with a rapidly changing climate system there is no norm to return to.

The unrest of these past few weeks is just the beginning. It is no longer conflict between heavily armed superpowers, but rather spreading food shortages and rising food prices—and the political turmoil this would lead to—that threatens our global future. Unless governments quickly redefine security and shift expenditures from military uses to investing in climate change mitigation, water efficiency, soil conservation, and population stabilization, the world will in all likelihood be facing a future with both more climate instability and food price volatility. If business as usual continues, food prices will only trend upward.

By Lester R. Brown

15 January, 2011

Earth-policy.org

Lester Brown is President of the Earth Policy Institute and author of World on the Edge: How to Prevent an Environmental and Economic Collapse (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011) available online at www.earth-policy.org/books/wote.

NOTE: This piece originally appeared in Foreign Policy on Tuesday, January 10, 2011.

On December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a young Tunisian man of 26 years old, heads towards the municipality of Sidi Bouzid, a Tunisian provincial city. He walks calmly towards the entrance of the building with the intention of protesting. Bouazizi, who was unemployed despite holding a university degree as an IT engineer, was gaining his daily bread as a street vegetable-seller before the police confiscated his stall. Now he was determined to let his voice be heard and to protest this injustice along with the corruption it reflects and the lack of opportunities he is facing despite his application to study and manifest willingness to accept any possible job, including selling vegetables in the street. When the young man set fire to himself in front of City Hall, he marked a day after which Tunisia and possibly the whole Arab world will never be the same.

Immediately after the people of Sidi Bouzid heard about the act of the young man, thousands of people took to the streets in indignation, protesting peacefully against the corruption, injustice, and lack of job opportunities. They chanted slogans like “You gang of thieves, employment is a right” — the gang of thieves they refer to being the “Trabelsies” — as they are known to the whole Tunisian people — that is the family of Leila Ben Ali, wife of the Tunisian dictator Zinelabidine Ben Ali who has been in power since 1987, after a bloodless coup against his mentor, Lahbib Bourguiba.

Since then Tunisia has become one of the most harshly governed of the Arab countries run by an iron fist, where all opposition has been eliminated or tamed. The Trabelsies and their lacqueys grew to become a controlling elite monopolizing most of the country’s resources. The situation is so extreme that it is said that one hundred people control the whole of Tunisia today and dictate its policies in pursuit of their personal gain. Tunisia has become the byword of what is meant by speaking of a Kleptocracy.

In a country that despite everything has a high level of education, with wide internet use and a highly critical population, it was sooner or later going to lead to a confrontation between government and people. That the protest started from the southern parts of the country, generally the more marginalised and oppressed, is also no surprise.

The reprisal was swift and harsh: already on the first day there were reports of deaths and wounded. Other people soon followed Bouazizi’s example and either set themselves on fire or attempted suicide in other ways. The message is clear: the people are desperate, and they feel they have nothing to lose any more.

In another era we might not have even heard of this clash, but with cellular phone cameras and Facebook, the official and western media blackout was breached. Images of the protest, videos, firsthand testimonies, articles drafted by the protesters themselves have gone all over the place in cyberspace. The regime has always had a dodgy relationship with Facebook and the internet and tried now to control the flow of information. But through proxy-servers the story was still being told. Al Jazeera was the only news channel that made headlines of the protests, earning itself the wrath of the regime that has described its coverage as conspiratorial.

This particular conspiracy theory has not been limited to the media. The regime maintains that it embraces the whole protest movement, all thugs steered by a foreign agenda and aiming at destabilising the country and undermining its fabulous and unique success story. Amongst the protesters it is feared as a result that the regime will resort to bombings attributed to Al Qaida to validate these claims. Similar tactics were used in the 1990s when, as Jennifer Noyon chronicles in “Tunisia’s ‘Managed Democracy’,” “by carefully emphasizing the alleged terrorist character of An-Nahda, the regime was able to undermine the movement’s legitimacy in the eyes of the people and to jail and repress its members.”

Ben Ali, best friend of the European Union and especially France in his strong support for a type of militant secularism, has hardly an enemy to his name but his own people, so to speak about foreign aggressors is rather surreal. Despite the fact that his corrupt and oppressive style of governance is well known to the EU, Europe remains a fan of the dictator and structurally finances projects that are controlled by what, Wikileaks has revealed, the American administration regards as little other than a mafia. This is no surprise to most Arabs, because we are used to the west supporting our dictators. Democracy would involve some kind of implementation of a people’s agenda that is not sufficiently pro-Western for Europe or the USA to live with.

Emboldened by European support, and after the death of Bouazizi who succumbed to his burns on January 4, the regime went berserk, opening fire at demonstrators and killing fifty people in three nights. As videos circulated on Facebook showed shocking images of youth shot dead in the head or in the heart, this has galvanized larger crowds onto the streets. What started as a spontaneous uprising now looks more like a revolt, the geographical spread of the protests reaching Tunis, the capital, where today artists protesting against the severity of the repression were beaten and humiliated by the police. But, above all, major protests were reported in three populous and notorious neighbourhoods of Tunis, Al Tadamon, Al Tahrir, and Al Intilaka. Protest has even reached the North West for the first time and there is some talk of casualties in the city of Beja. It seems that the momentum is still building after twenty-five days.

Could this be a popular revolution to topple the regime? This scenario cannot be excluded. There are already signs of dissent among some army units following the sacking of army commander Ben Amar for allegedly refusing to shoot at the protestors. Neither can the possibility of a military putsch to substitute one dictator for another. One thing is sure: there is a political awareness being created now among the Tunisian people and especially among the youth — a sense of historic possibility that what was deemed impossible may actually be within reach.

The effect of this is even being felt on the streets of Algeria where thousands of youth, who were copying the demands of “the Tunisian Intifada” as people are calling it now, clashed with police. Across the Arab world, peoples are experiencing hope, and the regimes are afraid: all the Arab people and all the Arab regimes

The most famous of Tunisian poets, Abolkacim Ashabi, once wrote a famous poem that we all learned in school across the Arab world. Its best-known verse reads: “If the people one day decide to live, fate must answer and the chains must break.” Bouazizi’s martyrdom may have triggered a popular revival, many now believe, which will ensure that it is only a matter of time before Ashabi’s prophecy is fulfilled.

By Dyab Abou Jahjah

15 January, 2011

OpenDemocracy

Dyab Abou Jahjah is founder and former president of the Arab European League

This article is published by Dyab Abou Jahjah, and openDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it without needing further permission, with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. These rules apply to one-off or infrequent use. For all re-print, syndication and educational use please see read our republishing guidelines or contact us.

A John Pilger investigation and interview with Julian Assange

The attacks on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, are a response to an information revolution that threatens old power orders, in politics and journalism. The incitement to murder trumpeted by public figures in the United States, together with attempts by the Obama administration to corrupt the law and send Assange to a hell hole prison for the rest of his life, are the reactions of a rapacious system exposed as never before.

In recent weeks, the US Justice Department has established a secret grand jury just across the river from Washington in the eastern district of the state of Virginia. The object is to indict Julian Assange under a discredited espionage act used to arrest peace activists during the first world war, or one of the “war on terror” conspiracy statutes that have degraded American justice. Judicial experts describe the jury as a “deliberate set up”, pointing out that this corner of Virginia is home to the employees and families of the Pentagon, CIA, Department of Homeland Security and other pillars of American power.

“This is not good news,” Assange told me when we spoke this past week, his voice dark and concerned. He says he can have “bad days – but I recover”. When we met in London last year, I said, “You are making some very serious enemies, not least of all the most powerful government engaged in two wars. How do you deal with that sense of danger?” His reply was characteristically analytical. “It’s not that fear is absent. But courage is really the intellectual mastery over fear – by an understanding of what the risks are, and how to navigate a path through them.”

Regardless of the threats to his freedom and safety, he says the US is not WikiLeaks’ main “technological enemy”. “China is the worst offender. China has aggressive, sophisticated interception technology that places itself between every reader inside China and every information source outside China. We’ve been fighting a running battle to make sure we can get information through, and there are now all sorts of ways Chinese readers can get on to our site.”

It was in this spirit of “getting information through” that WikiLeaks was founded in 2006, but with a moral dimension. “The goal is justice,” wrote Assange on the homepage, “the method is transparency.” Contrary to a current media mantra, WikiLeaks material is not “dumped”. Less than one per cent of the 251,000 US embassy cables have been released. As Assange points out, the task of interpreting material and editing that which might harm innocent individuals demands “standards [befitting] higher levels of information and primary sources”. To secretive power, this is journalism at its most dangerous.

On 18 March 2008, a war on WikiLeaks was foretold in a secret Pentagon document prepared by the “Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch”. US intelligence, it said, intended to destroy the feeling of “trust” which is WikiLeaks’ “centre of gravity”. It planned to do this with threats of “exposure [and] criminal prosecution”. Silencing and criminalising this rare source of independent journalism was the aim, smear the method. Hell hath no fury like imperial mafiosi scorned.

Others, also scorned, have lately played a supporting part, intentionally or not, in the hounding of Assange, some for reasons of petty jealousy. Sordid and shabby describe their behaviour, which serves only to highlight the injustice against a man who has courageously revealed what we have a right to know.

As the US Justice Department, in its hunt for Assange, subpoenas the Twitter and email accounts, banking and credit card records of people around the world – as if we are all subjects of the United States – much of the “free” media on both sides of the Atlantic direct their indignation at the hunted.

“So, Julian, why won’t you go back to Sweden now?” demanded the headline over Catherine Bennett’s Observer column on 19 December, which questioned Assange’s response to allegations of sexual misconduct with two women in Stockholm last August. “To keep delaying the moment of truth, for this champion of fearless disclosure and total openness,” wrote Bennett, “could soon begin to look pretty dishonest, as well as inconsistent.” Not a word in Bennett’s vitriol considered the looming threats to Assange’s basic human rights and his physical safety, as described by Geoffrey Robertson QC, in the extradition hearing in London on 11 January.

In response to Bennett, the editor of the online Nordic News Network in Sweden, Al Burke, wrote to the Observer explaining that “plausible answers to Catherine Bennett’s tendentious question” were both critically important and freely available. Assange had remained in Sweden for more than five weeks after the rape allegation was made — and subsequently dismissed by the chief prosecutor in Stockholm – and that repeated attempts by him and his Swedish lawyer to meet a second prosecutor, who re-opened the case following the intervention of a government politician, had failed. And yet, as Burke pointed out, this prosecutor had granted him permission to fly to London where “he also offered to be interviewed – a normal practice in such cases”. So it seems odd, at the very least, that the prosecutor then issued a European Arrest Warrant. The Observer did not publish Burke’s letter.

This record-straightening is crucial because it describes the perfidious behaviour of the Swedish authorities – a bizarre sequence confirmed to me by other journalists in Stockholm and by Assange’s Swedish lawyer, Bjorn Hurtig. Not only that; Burke catalogued the unforeseen danger Assange faces should he be extradited to Sweden. “Documents released by Wikileaks since Assange moved to England,” he wrote, “clearly indicate that Sweden has consistently submitted to pressure from the United States in matters relating to civil rights. There is ample reason for concern that if Assange were to be taken into custody by Swedish authorities, he could be turned over to the United States without due consideration of his legal rights.”

These documents have been virtually ignored in Britain. They show that the Swedish political class has moved far from the perceived neutrality of a generation ago and that the country’s military and intelligence apparatus is all but absorbed into Washington’s matrix around NATO. In a 2007 cable, the US embassy in Stockholm lauds the Swedish government dominated by the conservative Moderate Party of prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt as coming “from a new political generation and not bound by [anti-US] traditions [and] in practice a pragmatic and strong partner with NATO, having troops under NATO command in Kosovo and Afghanistan”.

The cable reveals how foreign policy is largely controlled by Carl Bildt, the current foreign minister, whose career has been based on a loyalty to the United States that goes back to the Vietnam war when he attacked Swedish public television for broadcasting evidence that the US was bombing civilian targets. Bildt played a leading role in the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a lobby group with close ties to the White House of George W. Bush, the CIA and the far right of the Republican Party.

“The significance of all this for the Assange case,” notes Burke in a recent study, “is that it will be Carl Bildt and perhaps other members of the Reinfeldt government who will decide – openly or, more likely, furtively behind a façade of legal formality – on whether or not to approve the anticipated US request for extradition. Everything in their past clearly indicates that such a request will be granted.”

For example, in December 2001, with the “war on terror” under way, the Swedish government abruptly revoked the political refugee status of two Egyptians, Ahmed Agiza and Mohammed al-Zari. They were handed to a CIA kidnap squad at Stockholm airport and “rendered” to Egypt, where they were tortured. When the Swedish Ombudsman for Justice investigated and found that their human rights had been “seriously violated”, it was too late.

The implications for the Assange case are clear. Both men were removed without due process of law and before their lawyers could file appeals to the European Human Rights Court, and in response to a US threat to impose a trade embargo on Sweden. Last year, Assange applied for residency in Sweden, hoping to base Wikileaks there. It is widely believed that Washington warned Sweden through mutual intelligence contacts of the potential consequences. In December, Prosecutor Marianne Ny, who re-activated the Assange case, discussed the possibility of Assange’s extradition to the US on her website.

Almost six months after the sex allegations were first made public, Julian Assange has been charged with no crime, but his right to a presumption of innocence has been wilfully denied. The unfolding events in Sweden have been farcical, at best. The Australian barrister James Catlin, who acted for Assange in October, describes the Swedish justice system as “a laughing stock… There is no precedent for it. The Swedes are making it up as they go along”. He says that Assange, apart from noting contradictions in the case, has not publicly criticised the women who made the allegations against him. It was the police who tipped off the Swedish equivalent of the Sun, Expressen, with defamatory material about them, initiating a trial by media across the world.

In Britain, this trial has welcomed yet more eager prosecutors, with the BBC to the fore. There was no presumption of innocence in Kirsty Wark’s Newsnight court in December. “Why don’t you just apologise to the women?” she demanded of Assange, followed by: “Do we have your word of honour that you won’t abscond?” On Radio 4’s Today programme, John Humphrys, the partner of Catherine Bennett, told Assange that he was obliged to go back to Sweden “because the law says you must”. The hectoring Humphrys, however, had more pressing interests. “Are you a sexual predator?” he asked. Assange replied that the suggestion was ridiculous, to which Humphrys demanded to know how many women he had slept with.

“Would even Fox News have descended to that level?” wondered the American historian William Blum. “I wish Assange had been raised in the streets of Brooklyn, as I was. He then would have known precisely how to reply to such a question: ‘You mean including your mother?’”

What is most striking about these “interviews” is not so much their arrogance and lack of intellectual and moral humility; it is their indifference to fundamental issues of justice and freedom and their imposition of narrow, prurient terms of reference. Fixing these boundaries allows the interviewer to diminish the journalistic credibility of Assange and WikliLeaks, whose remarkable achievements stand in vivid contrast to their own. It is like watching the old and stale, guardians of the status quo, struggling to prevent the emergence of the new.

In this media trial, there is a tragic dimension, obviously for Assange, but also for the best of mainstream journalism. Having published a slew of professionally brilliant editions with the WikiLeaks disclosures, feted all over the world, the Guardian recovered its establishment propriety on 17 December by turning on its besieged source. A major article by the paper’s senior correspondent Nick Davies claimed that he had been given the “complete” Swedish police file with its “new” and “revealing” salacious morsels.

Assange’s Swedish lawyer Bjorn Hurtig says that crucial evidence is missing from the file given to Davies, including “the fact that the women were re-interviewed and given an opportunity to change their stories” and the tweets and SMS messages between them, which are “critical to bringing justice in this case”. Vital exculpatory evidence is also omitted, such as the statement by the original prosecutor, Eva Finne, that “Julian Assange is not suspected of rape”.

Having reviewed the Davies article, Assange’s former barrister James Catlin wrote to me: “The complete absence of due process is the story and Davies ignores it. Why does due process matter? Because the massive powers of two arms of government are being brought to bear against the individual whose liberty and reputation are at stake.” I would add: so is his life.

The Guardian has profited hugely from the Wikileaks disclosures, in many ways. On the other hand, WikiLeaks, which survives on mostly small donations and can no longer receive funds through many banks and credit companies thanks to the bullying of Washington, has received nothing from the paper. In February, Random House will publish a Guardian book that is sure to be a lucrative best-seller, which Amazon is advertising as The End of Secrecy: the Rise and Fall of WikiLeaks. When I asked David Leigh, the Guardian executive in charge of the book, what was meant by “fall”, he replied that Amazon was wrong and that the working title had been The Rise (and Fall?) of WikiLeaks. “Note parenthesis and query,” he wrote, “Not meant for publication anyway.” (The book is now described on the Guardian website as WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy). Still, with all that duly noted, the sense is that “real” journalists are back in the saddle. Too bad about the new boy, who never really belonged.

On 11 January, Assange’s first extradition hearing was held at Belmarsh Magistrates Court, an infamous address because it is here that people were, before the advent of control orders, consigned to Britain’s own Guantanamo, Belmarsh prison. The change from ordinary Westminster magistrates’ court was due to a lack of press facilities, according to the authorities. That they announced this on the day US Vice President Joe Biden declared Assange a “high tech terrorist” was no doubt coincidental, though the message was not.

For his part, Julian Assange is just as worried about what will happen to Bradley Manning, the alleged whistleblower, being held in horrific conditions which the US National Commission on Prisons calls “tortuous”. At 23, Private Manning is the world’s pre-eminent prisoner of conscience, having remained true to the Nuremberg Principle that every soldier has the right to “a moral choice”. His suffering mocks the notion of the land of the free.

“Government whistleblowers”, said Barack Obama, running for president in 2008, “are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal.” Obama has since pursued and prosecuted more whistleblowers than any other president in American history.

“Cracking Bradley Manning is the first step,” Assange told me. “The aim clearly is to break him and force a confession that he somehow conspired with me to harm the national security of the United States. In fact, I’d never heard his name before it was published in the press. WikiLeaks technology was designed from the very beginning to make sure that we never knew the identities or names of people submitting material. We are as untraceable as we are uncensorable. That’s the only way to assure sources they are protected.”

He adds: “I think what’s emerging in the mainstream media is the awareness that if I can be indicted, other journalists can, too. Even the New York Times is worried. This used not to be the case. If a whistleblower was prosecuted, publishers and reporters were protected by the First Amendment that journalists took for granted. That’s being lost. The release of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, with their evidence of the killing of civilians, hasn’t caused this – it’s the exposure and embarrassment of the political class: the truth of what governments say in secret, how they lie in public; how wars are started. They don’t want the public to know these things and scapegoats must be found.”

What about the allusions to the “fall” of Wikileaks? “There is no fall,” he said. “We have never published as much as we are now. WikiLeaks is now mirrored on more than 2,000 websites. I can’t keep track of the of the spin-off sites: those who are doing their own WikiLeaks… If something happens to me or to WikiLeaks, ‘insurance’ files will be released. They speak more of the same truth to power, including the media. There are 504 US embassy cables on one broadcasting organisation and there are cables on Murdoch and Newscorp.”

The latest propaganda about the “damage” caused by WikiLeaks is a warning by the US State Department to “hundreds of human rights activists, foreign government officials and business people identified in leaked diplomatic cables of possible threats to their safety”. This was how the New York Times dutifully relayed it on 8 January, and it is bogus. In a letter to Congress, Secretary of Defence Robert Gates has admitted that no sensitive intelligence sources have been compromised. On 28 November, McClatchy Newspapers reported that “US officials conceded they have no evidence to date that the [prior] release of documents led to anyone’s death.” NATO in Kabul told CNN it could not find a single person who needed protecting.

The great American playwright Arthur Miller wrote: “The thought that the state… is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.” What WikiLeaks has given us is truth, including rare and precious insight into how and why so many innocent people have suffered in reigns of terror disguised as wars, and executed in our name; and how the United States has secretly and wantonly intervened in democratic governments from Latin America to its most loyal ally in Britain.

Javier Moreno, the editor of El Pais, which published the WikiLeaks logs in Spain, wrote, “I believe that the global interest sparked by the WikiLeaks papers is mainly due to the simple fact that they conclusively reveal the extent to which politicians in the West have been lying to their citizens.”

Crushing individuals like Julian Assange and Bradley Manning is not difficult for a great power, however craven. The point is, we should not allow it to happen, which means those of us meant to keep the record straight should not collaborate in any way. Transparency and information, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, are the “currency” of democratic freedom. “Every news organisation,” a leading American constitutional lawyer told me, “should recognise that Julian Assange is one of them, and that his prosecution will have a huge and chilling effect on journalism”.

My favourite secret document — leaked by WikiLeaks, of course – is from the Ministry of Defence in London. It describes journalists who serve the public without fear or favour as “subversive” and “threats”. Such a badge of honour.

A John Pilger investigation and interview with Julian Assange

The attacks on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, are a response to an information revolution that threatens old power orders, in politics and journalism. The incitement to murder trumpeted by public figures in the United States, together with attempts by the Obama administration to corrupt the law and send Assange to a hell hole prison for the rest of his life, are the reactions of a rapacious system exposed as never before.

In recent weeks, the US Justice Department has established a secret grand jury just across the river from Washington in the eastern district of the state of Virginia. The object is to indict Julian Assange under a discredited espionage act used to arrest peace activists during the first world war, or one of the “war on terror” conspiracy statutes that have degraded American justice. Judicial experts describe the jury as a “deliberate set up”, pointing out that this corner of Virginia is home to the employees and families of the Pentagon, CIA, Department of Homeland Security and other pillars of American power.

“This is not good news,” Assange told me when we spoke this past week, his voice dark and concerned. He says he can have “bad days – but I recover”. When we met in London last year, I said, “You are making some very serious enemies, not least of all the most powerful government engaged in two wars. How do you deal with that sense of danger?” His reply was characteristically analytical. “It’s not that fear is absent. But courage is really the intellectual mastery over fear – by an understanding of what the risks are, and how to navigate a path through them.”

Regardless of the threats to his freedom and safety, he says the US is not WikiLeaks’ main “technological enemy”. “China is the worst offender. China has aggressive, sophisticated interception technology that places itself between every reader inside China and every information source outside China. We’ve been fighting a running battle to make sure we can get information through, and there are now all sorts of ways Chinese readers can get on to our site.”

It was in this spirit of “getting information through” that WikiLeaks was founded in 2006, but with a moral dimension. “The goal is justice,” wrote Assange on the homepage, “the method is transparency.” Contrary to a current media mantra, WikiLeaks material is not “dumped”. Less than one per cent of the 251,000 US embassy cables have been released. As Assange points out, the task of interpreting material and editing that which might harm innocent individuals demands “standards [befitting] higher levels of information and primary sources”. To secretive power, this is journalism at its most dangerous.

On 18 March 2008, a war on WikiLeaks was foretold in a secret Pentagon document prepared by the “Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch”. US intelligence, it said, intended to destroy the feeling of “trust” which is WikiLeaks’ “centre of gravity”. It planned to do this with threats of “exposure [and] criminal prosecution”. Silencing and criminalising this rare source of independent journalism was the aim, smear the method. Hell hath no fury like imperial mafiosi scorned.

Others, also scorned, have lately played a supporting part, intentionally or not, in the hounding of Assange, some for reasons of petty jealousy. Sordid and shabby describe their behaviour, which serves only to highlight the injustice against a man who has courageously revealed what we have a right to know.

As the US Justice Department, in its hunt for Assange, subpoenas the Twitter and email accounts, banking and credit card records of people around the world – as if we are all subjects of the United States – much of the “free” media on both sides of the Atlantic direct their indignation at the hunted.

“So, Julian, why won’t you go back to Sweden now?” demanded the headline over Catherine Bennett’s Observer column on 19 December, which questioned Assange’s response to allegations of sexual misconduct with two women in Stockholm last August. “To keep delaying the moment of truth, for this champion of fearless disclosure and total openness,” wrote Bennett, “could soon begin to look pretty dishonest, as well as inconsistent.” Not a word in Bennett’s vitriol considered the looming threats to Assange’s basic human rights and his physical safety, as described by Geoffrey Robertson QC, in the extradition hearing in London on 11 January.

In response to Bennett, the editor of the online Nordic News Network in Sweden, Al Burke, wrote to the Observer explaining that “plausible answers to Catherine Bennett’s tendentious question” were both critically important and freely available. Assange had remained in Sweden for more than five weeks after the rape allegation was made — and subsequently dismissed by the chief prosecutor in Stockholm – and that repeated attempts by him and his Swedish lawyer to meet a second prosecutor, who re-opened the case following the intervention of a government politician, had failed. And yet, as Burke pointed out, this prosecutor had granted him permission to fly to London where “he also offered to be interviewed – a normal practice in such cases”. So it seems odd, at the very least, that the prosecutor then issued a European Arrest Warrant. The Observer did not publish Burke’s letter.

This record-straightening is crucial because it describes the perfidious behaviour of the Swedish authorities – a bizarre sequence confirmed to me by other journalists in Stockholm and by Assange’s Swedish lawyer, Bjorn Hurtig. Not only that; Burke catalogued the unforeseen danger Assange faces should he be extradited to Sweden. “Documents released by Wikileaks since Assange moved to England,” he wrote, “clearly indicate that Sweden has consistently submitted to pressure from the United States in matters relating to civil rights. There is ample reason for concern that if Assange were to be taken into custody by Swedish authorities, he could be turned over to the United States without due consideration of his legal rights.”

These documents have been virtually ignored in Britain. They show that the Swedish political class has moved far from the perceived neutrality of a generation ago and that the country’s military and intelligence apparatus is all but absorbed into Washington’s matrix around NATO. In a 2007 cable, the US embassy in Stockholm lauds the Swedish government dominated by the conservative Moderate Party of prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt as coming “from a new political generation and not bound by [anti-US] traditions [and] in practice a pragmatic and strong partner with NATO, having troops under NATO command in Kosovo and Afghanistan”.

The cable reveals how foreign policy is largely controlled by Carl Bildt, the current foreign minister, whose career has been based on a loyalty to the United States that goes back to the Vietnam war when he attacked Swedish public television for broadcasting evidence that the US was bombing civilian targets. Bildt played a leading role in the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a lobby group with close ties to the White House of George W. Bush, the CIA and the far right of the Republican Party.

“The significance of all this for the Assange case,” notes Burke in a recent study, “is that it will be Carl Bildt and perhaps other members of the Reinfeldt government who will decide – openly or, more likely, furtively behind a façade of legal formality – on whether or not to approve the anticipated US request for extradition. Everything in their past clearly indicates that such a request will be granted.”

For example, in December 2001, with the “war on terror” under way, the Swedish government abruptly revoked the political refugee status of two Egyptians, Ahmed Agiza and Mohammed al-Zari. They were handed to a CIA kidnap squad at Stockholm airport and “rendered” to Egypt, where they were tortured. When the Swedish Ombudsman for Justice investigated and found that their human rights had been “seriously violated”, it was too late.

The implications for the Assange case are clear. Both men were removed without due process of law and before their lawyers could file appeals to the European Human Rights Court, and in response to a US threat to impose a trade embargo on Sweden. Last year, Assange applied for residency in Sweden, hoping to base Wikileaks there. It is widely believed that Washington warned Sweden through mutual intelligence contacts of the potential consequences. In December, Prosecutor Marianne Ny, who re-activated the Assange case, discussed the possibility of Assange’s extradition to the US on her website.

Almost six months after the sex allegations were first made public, Julian Assange has been charged with no crime, but his right to a presumption of innocence has been wilfully denied. The unfolding events in Sweden have been farcical, at best. The Australian barrister James Catlin, who acted for Assange in October, describes the Swedish justice system as “a laughing stock… There is no precedent for it. The Swedes are making it up as they go along”. He says that Assange, apart from noting contradictions in the case, has not publicly criticised the women who made the allegations against him. It was the police who tipped off the Swedish equivalent of the Sun, Expressen, with defamatory material about them, initiating a trial by media across the world.

In Britain, this trial has welcomed yet more eager prosecutors, with the BBC to the fore. There was no presumption of innocence in Kirsty Wark’s Newsnight court in December. “Why don’t you just apologise to the women?” she demanded of Assange, followed by: “Do we have your word of honour that you won’t abscond?” On Radio 4’s Today programme, John Humphrys, the partner of Catherine Bennett, told Assange that he was obliged to go back to Sweden “because the law says you must”. The hectoring Humphrys, however, had more pressing interests. “Are you a sexual predator?” he asked. Assange replied that the suggestion was ridiculous, to which Humphrys demanded to know how many women he had slept with.

“Would even Fox News have descended to that level?” wondered the American historian William Blum. “I wish Assange had been raised in the streets of Brooklyn, as I was. He then would have known precisely how to reply to such a question: ‘You mean including your mother?’”

What is most striking about these “interviews” is not so much their arrogance and lack of intellectual and moral humility; it is their indifference to fundamental issues of justice and freedom and their imposition of narrow, prurient terms of reference. Fixing these boundaries allows the interviewer to diminish the journalistic credibility of Assange and WikliLeaks, whose remarkable achievements stand in vivid contrast to their own. It is like watching the old and stale, guardians of the status quo, struggling to prevent the emergence of the new.

In this media trial, there is a tragic dimension, obviously for Assange, but also for the best of mainstream journalism. Having published a slew of professionally brilliant editions with the WikiLeaks disclosures, feted all over the world, the Guardian recovered its establishment propriety on 17 December by turning on its besieged source. A major article by the paper’s senior correspondent Nick Davies claimed that he had been given the “complete” Swedish police file with its “new” and “revealing” salacious morsels.

Assange’s Swedish lawyer Bjorn Hurtig says that crucial evidence is missing from the file given to Davies, including “the fact that the women were re-interviewed and given an opportunity to change their stories” and the tweets and SMS messages between them, which are “critical to bringing justice in this case”. Vital exculpatory evidence is also omitted, such as the statement by the original prosecutor, Eva Finne, that “Julian Assange is not suspected of rape”.

Having reviewed the Davies article, Assange’s former barrister James Catlin wrote to me: “The complete absence of due process is the story and Davies ignores it. Why does due process matter? Because the massive powers of two arms of government are being brought to bear against the individual whose liberty and reputation are at stake.” I would add: so is his life.

The Guardian has profited hugely from the Wikileaks disclosures, in many ways. On the other hand, WikiLeaks, which survives on mostly small donations and can no longer receive funds through many banks and credit companies thanks to the bullying of Washington, has received nothing from the paper. In February, Random House will publish a Guardian book that is sure to be a lucrative best-seller, which Amazon is advertising as The End of Secrecy: the Rise and Fall of WikiLeaks. When I asked David Leigh, the Guardian executive in charge of the book, what was meant by “fall”, he replied that Amazon was wrong and that the working title had been The Rise (and Fall?) of WikiLeaks. “Note parenthesis and query,” he wrote, “Not meant for publication anyway.” (The book is now described on the Guardian website as WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy). Still, with all that duly noted, the sense is that “real” journalists are back in the saddle. Too bad about the new boy, who never really belonged.

On 11 January, Assange’s first extradition hearing was held at Belmarsh Magistrates Court, an infamous address because it is here that people were, before the advent of control orders, consigned to Britain’s own Guantanamo, Belmarsh prison. The change from ordinary Westminster magistrates’ court was due to a lack of press facilities, according to the authorities. That they announced this on the day US Vice President Joe Biden declared Assange a “high tech terrorist” was no doubt coincidental, though the message was not.

For his part, Julian Assange is just as worried about what will happen to Bradley Manning, the alleged whistleblower, being held in horrific conditions which the US National Commission on Prisons calls “tortuous”. At 23, Private Manning is the world’s pre-eminent prisoner of conscience, having remained true to the Nuremberg Principle that every soldier has the right to “a moral choice”. His suffering mocks the notion of the land of the free.

“Government whistleblowers”, said Barack Obama, running for president in 2008, “are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal.” Obama has since pursued and prosecuted more whistleblowers than any other president in American history.

“Cracking Bradley Manning is the first step,” Assange told me. “The aim clearly is to break him and force a confession that he somehow conspired with me to harm the national security of the United States. In fact, I’d never heard his name before it was published in the press. WikiLeaks technology was designed from the very beginning to make sure that we never knew the identities or names of people submitting material. We are as untraceable as we are uncensorable. That’s the only way to assure sources they are protected.”

He adds: “I think what’s emerging in the mainstream media is the awareness that if I can be indicted, other journalists can, too. Even the New York Times is worried. This used not to be the case. If a whistleblower was prosecuted, publishers and reporters were protected by the First Amendment that journalists took for granted. That’s being lost. The release of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, with their evidence of the killing of civilians, hasn’t caused this – it’s the exposure and embarrassment of the political class: the truth of what governments say in secret, how they lie in public; how wars are started. They don’t want the public to know these things and scapegoats must be found.”

What about the allusions to the “fall” of Wikileaks? “There is no fall,” he said. “We have never published as much as we are now. WikiLeaks is now mirrored on more than 2,000 websites. I can’t keep track of the of the spin-off sites: those who are doing their own WikiLeaks… If something happens to me or to WikiLeaks, ‘insurance’ files will be released. They speak more of the same truth to power, including the media. There are 504 US embassy cables on one broadcasting organisation and there are cables on Murdoch and Newscorp.”

The latest propaganda about the “damage” caused by WikiLeaks is a warning by the US State Department to “hundreds of human rights activists, foreign government officials and business people identified in leaked diplomatic cables of possible threats to their safety”. This was how the New York Times dutifully relayed it on 8 January, and it is bogus. In a letter to Congress, Secretary of Defence Robert Gates has admitted that no sensitive intelligence sources have been compromised. On 28 November, McClatchy Newspapers reported that “US officials conceded they have no evidence to date that the [prior] release of documents led to anyone’s death.” NATO in Kabul told CNN it could not find a single person who needed protecting.

The great American playwright Arthur Miller wrote: “The thought that the state… is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.” What WikiLeaks has given us is truth, including rare and precious insight into how and why so many innocent people have suffered in reigns of terror disguised as wars, and executed in our name; and how the United States has secretly and wantonly intervened in democratic governments from Latin America to its most loyal ally in Britain.

Javier Moreno, the editor of El Pais, which published the WikiLeaks logs in Spain, wrote, “I believe that the global interest sparked by the WikiLeaks papers is mainly due to the simple fact that they conclusively reveal the extent to which politicians in the West have been lying to their citizens.”

Crushing individuals like Julian Assange and Bradley Manning is not difficult for a great power, however craven. The point is, we should not allow it to happen, which means those of us meant to keep the record straight should not collaborate in any way. Transparency and information, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, are the “currency” of democratic freedom. “Every news organisation,” a leading American constitutional lawyer told me, “should recognise that Julian Assange is one of them, and that his prosecution will have a huge and chilling effect on journalism”.

My favourite secret document — leaked by WikiLeaks, of course – is from the Ministry of Defence in London. It describes journalists who serve the public without fear or favour as “subversive” and “threats”. Such a badge of honour.

The world’s four main emerging economic powers, known by the acronym BRIC — standing for Brazil, Russia, India and China — now refer to themselves as BRICS.

The capital “S” in BRICS stands for South Africa, which formally joined the four on Dec. 24, bringing Africa into this important organization of rising global powers from Asia, Latin America and Europe. President Jacob Zuma is expected to attend the BRICS April meeting in Beijing as a full member.

This is a development of geopolitical significance, and it has doubtless intensified frustrations in Washington. The U.S. has been concerned about the growing economic and political strength of the BRIC countries for several years. In 2008, for instance, the National Intelligence Council produced a document titled “Global Trends 2025” that predicted:

“The whole international system — as constructed following WW II — will be revolutionized. Not only will new players — Brazil, Russia, India and China — have a seat at the international high table, they will bring new stakes and rules of the game.”

More recently, the U.S. edition of the conservative British weekly The Economist noted in its Jan. 1 issue that “America’s influence has dwindled everywhere with the financial crisis and the rise of emerging powers.”

The U.S. is still the dominating global hegemon, but a swiftly changing world situation is taking place as Washington’s economic and political influence is declining, even as it remains the unmatched military superpower.

America suffers from low growth, extreme indebtedness, imperial overreach, and virtual political paralysis at home while spending a trillion dollars a year on wars of choice, maintaining the Pentagon military machine, and on various other “national security” projects.

The BRICS countries, by their very existence, their rapid economic growth and degree of independence from Washington, are contributing to the transformation of today’s unipolar world order — still led exclusively by the United States — into a multipolar system where several countries and blocs will share global leadership. This is a major aim of BRICS, which recognizes it’s a rocky, long road ahead because those who cling to empire are very difficult to dislodge before they swiftly disintegrate.

Looking down that road the next few decades, it is imperative to contemplate two potentially game-changing events that will heavily impact global politics, and the future of world leadership.

1. The rate of petroleum extraction will soon reach the beginning of terminal decline, known as peak oil. This means more than half the world’s petroleum reserves will have been depleted, leading inevitably to much higher oil prices and severe shortages. Under prevailing global conditions, this will greatly exacerbate tensions between major oil consuming countries leading to wars for energy resources

One resource war already has taken place — the Bush Administration’s bungled invasion of Iraq, which possesses the world’s fourth largest reserves of petroleum and tenth largest of natural gas. Since the U.S. with less than 5% of world population absorbs nearly 30% of the planet’s crude oil, who’s Washington’s next target — Iran? Behind the U.S.-Israeli smokescreen of alleged Iranian aggression and supposed nefarious nuclear ambitions, reposes the world’s third-largest proven oil reserves and second-largest natural gas reserves.

In 2009, the U.S. with a population of 300 million consumed 18.7 million barrels of oil day, the world’s highest percentage. The second highest — the European Union with a population of 500 million — consumed 13.7 barrels a day. China with a population of 1.4 billion people was third, consuming 8.2 million barrels. BRICS, incidentally, includes the country with the world’s first largest natural gas reserves, Russia (which is also eighth in petroleum reserves).

2. Equally dangerous, and perhaps much more so, is the probability of disastrous climate change in the next few decades, the initial effects of which have already arrived and are causing havoc with weather patterns. This situation will get much worse since the industrialized world, following slothful U.S. leadership, has done hardly anything to reduce its use of coal, oil and natural gas fossil fuels that are mainly responsible for climate change.

Another climate question is whether the capitalist system itself is capable of taking the steps necessary to dramatically reduce dependence on greenhouse gas emissions, as the socialists maintain. Eventually, under far better global leadership, some serious action must be taken, but the damage done until that point may not be rectified for centuries, if not longer. The question of better global leadership depends to a large degree on the outcome of the unipolar-multipolar debate.

Returning to the immediate problem, Washington not only opposes BRICS’ preference for multipolarity, but is disgruntled by some of its political views. For instance, the group does not share America’s antagonism toward Iran — President Barack Obama’s whipping boy of the moment. BRICS also lacks enthusiasm for America’s wars in Central Asia and the Middle East and maintains friendly relations with the oppressed Palestinians. The five nation emerging group further leans toward replacing the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency with a basket of currencies not preferential to any one country, as is the present system toward the U.S., or perhaps even a non-national global reserve legal tender.

For a small group —though it is symbolic of a large trend in world affairs — BRICS will have considerable clout this year as members of the UN Security Council occupying five of 15 seats — temporarily for Brazil (until the end of 2011), India and South Africa (ending after 2012), and permanently of course for China and Russia.

BRICS as an organization had a most unusual birthing. The group was brought into the world, so to speak, without the knowledge of its members. The event took place in 2001 when an economist with the investment powerhouse Goldman Sachs created the BRIC acronym and identified the four countries together as a lucrative investment opportunity for the company’s clients based on the enormity of their combined Gross Domestic Products and the probability of increasing growth.

Neither Brazil, Russia, India nor China played a role in this process, but they took note of their enhanced status as the BRICs and recognized that they shared many similarities in outlook as well as significant differences in their types of government and economic specialties.

The main similarity was that they were emerging societies with growing economies and influence, and they viewed Washington’s unilateral world leadership as a temporary condition brought about by accident two decades earlier due to the implosion of the Soviet Union and most of the socialist world. They all seek a broader, more equitable world leadership arrangement within which they and others will play a role.

At the initiative of Russia’s then-President Vladimir Putin in 2006, BRIC began what became regular meetings at the ministerial level that evolved a couple of years later into what is in effect a political organization. There are some differences and rivalries within its ranks that have been kept within bounds, such as between China and India (which is also close to the U.S.), and to a lesser extent between Russia and China. Brazil and South Africa are everyone’s friends.

All five BRICS states — three of whom possess nuclear arsenals — maintain essentially cordial relations with the U.S. and try to avoid antagonizing the world superpower.

Dispite productive working relations between the U.S. and Russia, Moscow justly perceives Washington to be an implicit threat that seeks to neutralize — if it cannot dominate — it’s now reviving former Cold War opponent. The Russian leadership seems to view the U.S. as a strategically declining imperialist power, perhaps all the more dangerous for its predicament.

The Chinese government, while standing up for its rights when challenged by the U.S., is especially cautious because America’s military power at this point is overwhelmingly superior to its own in all respects. It’s trying to catch up in terms of defense, but it will take many years.

The Chinese Communist Party and government are primarily focused, as they have been for decades, on the creation of a modern, advanced, educated and 70% urban society of some 1.4 billion people. The national plan is to achieve this goal by 2030, based on economic growth (China is now the world’s second largest economy, heading toward first within 15-35 years), political stability at home (which will soon require substantial social reforms to facilitate), and a foreign policy of nonintervention and friendship between nations.

The Beijing leadership is evidently uncertain whether the U.S. decline is temporary or long term and does not officially comment on such matters in line with its foreign policy perspective.

Just before the start of 3-day talks in Beijing regarding U.S.-China military relations, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the New York Times Jan. 8 that the Obama Administration was so concerned about Beijing’s “military buildup in the Pacific” that the Pentagon was now increasing spending on such weapons as an advanced “long range nuclear-capable bomber aircraft,” among other measures.

Responding to Gates’ comment two days later at a joint press conference, Chinese Defense Minister Gen. Liang Guanglie said the U.S. “was overreacting” to an effort to modernize. “We can by no means call ourselves an advanced military force,” Liang said. “The gap between us and that of advanced countries is at least two to three decades.” This cannot be honestly disputed

The newspaper also paraphrased Gates as saying during his visit that “if Chinese leaders considered the United States a declining power… they were wrong.” He was then directly quoted: “My general line for those both at home and around the world who think the U.S. is in decline is that history’s dustbins are filled with countries that underestimated the resilience of the United States.” Last August, it should be noted, two-thirds of the America people queried told an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll they think the U.S. is in a state of decline.

While Gates dwells upon Beijing’s “buildup,” the U.S. virtually encircles China with military bases, submarines, fleets at sea, spy satellites, long-range nuclear and conventional missiles, offensive weapons many years in advance of Chinese defenses, overwhelming airpower, plus alliances with Japan and South Korea in Beijing’s vulnerable northeast, Taiwan, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and India. The U.S. spends over 10 times more on the military than China. It operates up to 1,000 large and small military bases around the world, while China has no foreign bases.

The Obama Administration is presently fishing in the troubled waters of the South China Sea, intervening in territorial disputes between China and neighboring countries, including Vietnam, much to Beijing’s chagrin.

It is precisely this kind of “leadership” that BRICS and a number of emerging nations want to change.

The addition of South Africa was a deft political move that further enhances BRICS’ power and status. The new member possesses Africa’s largest economy, but as number 31 in global GDP economies it is far behind its new partners, nearly by 20-1 in China’s case. It’s also behind such other emerging countries as Turkey, Mexico, and South Korea, for example — but African credentials are important geopolitically, giving BRICS a four-continent breadth, influence and trade opportunities. China is South Africa’s largest trading partner, and India wants to increase commercial ties to Africa.

Johannesburg sought BRIC membership over the last year, and as early as August the process of admission was underway, but now as a member it must take serious steps to substantially hasten its economic development to keep pace with other BRICS members. This will not be easy, but it is assumed the partners will help out.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson declared: “We believe that South Africa’s accession will promote the development of BRICS and enhance cooperation between emerging economies.” Russia’s Foreign Ministry statement said South Africa “will not only increase the total economic weight of our association but also will help build up opportunities for mutually beneficial practical cooperation within BRICS.”

Brazil’s Foreign Ministry, in addition to the conventional welcoming, interjected a sharp political note into this economic club by suggesting that “on the international level” BRICS would work “to reform the financial system and increase democratization of global governance.” The reference was to Washington’s dominant authority over global finance and its unipolar leadership. This is bound to further irritate Washington.

India, like South Africa a former British colony and now a swiftly developing country, cannot conceivably oppose Johannesburg’s admission for obvious reasons, but has so far remained publicly silent since the Dec. 24 announcement. India’s unexpected quietude is of interest because last August Indian High Commissioner Virendra Gupta commented that “India of course remains extremely supportive of South Africa joining BRIC.” The Indian foreign office is too sophisticated to have forgotten the expected routine welcoming.

Maintaining good ties with Washington, which is disturbed by South Africa’s membership, is one of New Delhi’s main considerations. The United States has been courting India for some time, offering various rewards — from help with its nuclear program (and silence about its violation of the nonproliferation treaty) to supporting India’s quest for a future Security Council seat (which China opposes and Russia supports). The purpose is to attract India more deeply into Washington’s orbit, undercutting Beijing’s increasing global influence, and perhaps setting the two against each other.

Global Trends 2025 even envisioned possible “great power rivalries and increasing energy insecurity” between India and China that may lead to a serious confrontation “though great power war is averted.” In the process, “United States power is greatly enhanced. “

Regardless of BRICS and other emerging economies, President Obama’s principal foreign policy objective since assuming office has been to reassert American global leadership after the Bush Administration’s neoconservative imperialist wars and unilateralism weakened Washington’s alliances and compromised its hegemony. This is what Obama was elected to do — not, by rank-and-file Democrats cocooned in “change we can believe in,” but by the representatives of great wealth, great corporations and great financial power.

The Obama Administration’s first National Security Strategy report, released in May 2010, makes it clear that “Our national security strategy is… focused on renewing American leadership so that we can more effectively advance our interests in the 21st century.” In discussing world economies, which correlate to global leadership in Washington’s view, President Obama declared in his State of the Union Speech last year that “I do not accept second place for the United States of America.”

As part of this policy the U.S. seeks to forestall the development of a genuine multipolar system by making limited concessions to the emerging nations that will that leave Washington in charge for many years.

Washington’s latest scheme, introduced a year and a half ago by Secretary of State Clinton, is the so-called, “multi-partner,” not “multipolar,” world — suggesting the Obama Administration’s intention is to serve as “senior” partner of a global leadership “coalition of the willing,” as it were, that will in effect strengthen Washington’s singular role.

“We will lead,” Clinton told the Council on Foreign Relations, “by inducing greater cooperation among a greater number of actors and reducing competition, tilting the balance away from a multipolar world and toward a multi-partner world. Now, we know this approach is not a panacea. We will remain clear-eyed about our purpose. Not everybody in the world wishes us well or shares our values and interests. And some will actively seek to undermine our efforts. In those cases, our partnerships can become power coalitions to constrain or deter those negative actions.”

The U.S. also gives verbal support to an eventual expansion of the Security Council, and has cooperated in extending the powers of emerging countries within the Group of 20 leading industrialized economies, in the World Bank and IMF. In addition the State Department seeks one-to-one arrangements advantageous to certain countries to keep them well within the U.S. sphere of influence.

Washington intends to function as the principal world power for as long as it can. After all it is still an enormously wealthy, militarized state with powerful and obedient industrialized allies including the European Union countries (and NATO), the UK-Australia-Canada-New Zealand nexus, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and others.

However, the ongoing global diversification of economic and political resources toward the emerging countries appears to be leading inevitably to multipolarity. To quote “Global Trends 2025” once again:

The time of decision about the architecture of future world leadership draws nearer. At some point in 10 or 20 years a reluctant Washington may have to settle for a prominent position in a multipolar world construct.

But of course there remains another possibility.

Given the volatile global situation — peak oil, climate change, continued U.S. imperial wars, grave poverty that will increase as world population grows from 6.8 billion today to over 9 billion in 2050, and many emerging countries seeking a rightful share of world leadership — the Unites States may resort in time to global military aggression to sustain its dominant status, possibly even World War III.

Considering the U.S. political system’s decades-long move toward the right, the enormity of the Pentagon’s arsenal, the militarism in our society, and the ability of Washington and the corporate mass media to collaborate in “selling” wars to a misinformed public, this cannot be ruled out.

It is impossible to predict how all this will turn out. What is known is that the American people still have the power to make their own history. This not so much a question of voting — for whom, in this case? — but of taking action to galvanize the masses of people to oppose the political structure’s penchant for wars and global domination, for inexcusable foot-dragging on climate change and indifference to gross economic inequality.

By Jack A. Smith

The author is editor of the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter and is former editor of the (U.S.) Guardian Newsweekly. He may be reached at jacdon@earthlink.net or http://activistnewsletter.blogspot.com/

Over the last few days we have seen some of the bravest people facing down some of the worst.

Armed with nothing more than a revolutionary heart and hopes of a better future they gathered and protested as government forces aimed their weapons and fired live rounds in to the crowds.

But the ammunition and the underlying threats of arrest and torture meant absolutely nothing to the masses – for they had simply lost their fear.

It was the final testament to the brutality of a dictator who has had the support of European leaders and various presidents of the United States.

And that the Tunisian President Zine El-Abedine Ben Ali fled from his country like a rat up a drainpipe after 23 brutal years spoke volumes about the character of the man himself.

If he had one ounce of the courage his own people displayed, he too would have stayed but most of these tyrants are gutless with the moral fiber of a dung beetle.

The demise of Ben Ali came when police prevented an unemployed 26-year-old graduate from selling fruit without a license. Mohammad Bouazizi turned himself in to a human torch on December 17 and died of the horrific burns in Sidi Bouzid, in central Tunisia.

It was the final straw, a defining moment which ignited rallies, marches and demonstrations across Tunisia.

And revelations from Wikileaks cables exposing the corrupt and extravagant lifestyle of Ben Ali and his grasping wife fanned the flames of unbridled anger from a people who were also in the grip of poverty.

I knew it was coming. I saw the burning desire for freedom in the eyes of the courageous people of Ghafsa when the Viva Palestina Convoy entered the country in February 2009 on its way to Gaza.

Our convoy witnessed the menacing secret police intimidate the crowds to stop them from gathering to cheer us on.

This vast army of spies, thugs and enforcers even tried to stop us from praying in a local mosque

That they stood their ground to cheer us on prompted me to leave my vehicle and hug all the women who had turned out. We exchanged cards and small gifts and then, to my horror, I discovered 24 hours later that every woman I had embraced in the streets of Gafsa had been taken away and questioned.

Human rights organizations have constantly condemned and exposed the brutality of the Ben Ali regime but that has not led America and European leaders to intervene or put pressure on the regime to stop the brutality.

Sadly, it serves western interests to have a people brutalized and subjugated.

Now Tunisia is minus one dictator but it is still in a state of emergency. The next few days and weeks are going to be crucial for the Tunisian people who deserve freedom and liberty. My God, they’ve paid for it with their own blood and we must always remember their martyrs.

None of the politicians, secret police or other odious government forces will emerge from this period with any honor and quite a few are already cowering in the shadows.

But perhaps the biggest show of cowardice in this whole sorry episode has come from The White House.

Not one word of condemnation, not one word of criticism, not one word urging restraint came from Barak Obama or Hillary Clinton as live ammunition was fired into crowds of unarmed men, women and children in recent weeks.

And news of the corrupt, mafia-like regime would not have come as a surprise to either of them. We know this thanks to the Wikileaks cables written by US Ambassador Robert Godec who revealed in one memo: “Corruption in the inner circle is growing.”

But, as the injustices and atrocities continued there was not one squeak from the most powerful nation on earth … until America’s dear friend, Ben Ali had scuttled from the country.

The reality is the US Administration likes dealing with tyrants and even encourages despotic behavior. Egypt is one of the biggest testaments to this with its prisons full of political opposition leaders. Hosni Mubarak is Uncle Sam’s enforcer and biggest recipient of aid next to the Zionist State.

Pakistan’s treatment of its own people is little better. Remember when US Ambassador Anne Patterson in Islamabad wrote in one Wikileaks cable about the human rights abuses carried out by the Pakistan military? Patterson then went on to advise Washington to avoid comment on these incidents.

But now the US has made a comment on the situation in Tunisia … but only when Ben Ali was 30,000 feet in the air did White House spokesman Mike Hammer issue a statement which read: “We condemn the ongoing violence against civilians in Tunisia, and call on the Tunisian authorities to fulfill the important commitments … including respect for basic human rights and a process of much-needed political reform.”

Unbelievable. Too little, too late, Mr President. Actually that statement could have been uttered any time during the last US presidencies since Ronald Reagan.

But as I say, America couldn’t give a stuff about the human rights of the people of the Maghreb, Pakistan, Egypt and Palestine to name but a few.

When US condemnation finally came through the tyrant had fled leaving behind more than 60 civilian martyrs and countless more injured.

Tomorrow I will go to the Tunisian Embassy in London as I have done previously and stand shoulder to shoulder with my Tunisian brothers and sisters and their supporters. We will remember the dead, we will pay tribute to the brave and courageous many who are still in the process of seizing back their country and we will pray that no tyrant will sleep easy in his bed from this moment on.

Tonight we are all Tunisians.

By Yvonne Ridley

15 January, 2011

Foreignpolicyjournal.com

British journalist Yvonne Ridley is the European President of the International Muslim Women’s Union as well as being a patron of Cageprisoners. Read more articles by Yvonne Ridley. http://yvonneridley.org/

Washington, DC – There has been a democratic revolution in Tunisia over the past four weeks. This is a new and exciting era in Tunisian history, and an example for other countries of the Arab world.

Unfortunately, however, it all started when a 26-year-old university graduate set himself on fire on 17 December in a public town square in Sidi-Bouzid, in the south of Tunisia. He died a few days later.

Daily demonstrations and clashes with the police ensued and quickly spread to other cities. The demands initially focused on economic issues, such as employment and poverty alleviations, but quickly became political: denouncing corruption and demanding accountability, freedom of expression and a representative government.

The overwhelming majority of the demonstrations have been peaceful, ranging in size from a few hundred to over 40,000 people. The government, the opposition and experts on Tunisia were caught off-guard by the magnitude and the strength of these spontaneous demonstrations, and by the veracity of their political demands.

Tunisia has often been cited as a “good student” of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It has enjoyed sustained economic growth in the past 20 years – extraordinary by Arab standards – posting an average of five per cent annual growth. However, the “spoils” of development have not been shared equally between all sectors or regions of the country.

Corruption is rampant, with a few families and individuals controlling an increasing proportion of the economy. Tunisians speak daily about how the “Trabelsi clan” – the family of the president’s wife – is above the law and forcibly stealing private and public lands and properties.

Officially, unemployment is at 14 per cent, however, among recent university graduates (85,000 students graduate every year), it is estimated to be between 34 per cent and 36 per cent.

A restive youth decided to take matters into its own hand. The half of the Tunisian population under 25 years of age declared “enough is enough” and took to the streets to demand immediate changes.

Promises by Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of creating 300,000 jobs over the next two years and guaranteeing a job for every graduate within two years of entering the job market did not appear to satisfy popular thirst for major reforms, especially at the political level. On 12 January, Ben Ali indefinitely closed all schools and universities, called in the army, announced the release of all prisoners and an investigation looking into charges of corruption. But it was too little too late. On 14 January Ben Ali stepped down.

The opposition has now been galvanised and united like never before. In the past, the government played on the divisions between Islamic and secular forces to keep the opposition weak and divided, but Tunisians abhor violence and extremism, and do not want a theocratic government. What they do want and deserve is a democratic system of government that is based on their Islamic values and identity.

It appears that opposition leaders have finally overcome their fears of the regime, and mistrust of each other, and are willing to work together for political and economic reforms. Tunisians, across the board, realise that prosperity for the majority of people or economic development that benefits everyone will not be possible without political reforms, a major clampdown on corruption, and a representative and accountable government that listens to the people, and protects their rights and interests.

The rules of the game are changing. The interim government, or any future government, must pay close attention to public opinion and sentiments. They promise to legalise all political parties, and organise free and fair elections with international observers within six months. They also promise to reform the political system to allow greater transparency and accountability. Government officials have been reminded that they are public servants. Let’s see if they can act the part.

Having seen the success of people’s power in Tunisia, it is probable that other Arab populations will demand similar rights and reforms in the coming months and years. Already there are reports of self-immolation by people in Algeria, Egypt and Mauritania, hoping to be heard and to set their countries upon the same path as Tunisia. Arab leaders must reform or face their people.

The genie of democratic change is out of the bottle.

by Radwan Masmoudi

21 January 2011

* Radwan A. Masmoudi is President of the Washington, DC-based Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).

Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 18 January 2011, www.commongroundnews.org

Copyright permission is granted for publication.

Jerusalem – Jerusalem, home to Christianity, Judaism and Islam – and highly significant to Palestinians and Israelis alike – continues to be a crucial focal point in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Holy Basin in Jerusalem is home to some of the most sacred sites to all three religions, including the Western Wall, a remnant from the Second Temple and the holiest place in Judaism, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam. Sovereignty, freedom of movement and the symbolism of the city are therefore very important to Palestinians and Israelis, both of whom see Jerusalem as their nation’s capital.

There have always been religious motives for the conflict over Jerusalem, but in recent years the religious-historical justifications are trumping political ones, and Jewish and Muslim extremists are using Jerusalem as a rallying point.

Since Israel annexed East Jerusalem following the Six-Day War in 1967, it has been building and expanding Jewish neighbourhoods beyond the Green Line and as of the 1990s it has been settling Jews in the middle of densely populated Palestinian neighbourhoods.

Organisations such as Ateret Cohanim and Elad promote the Jewish purchase of property in Palestinian neighborhoods, portraying it as redemption of Israel’s land. Ateret Cohanim is a religious seminary that acquires property in the Old City’s Muslim quarter. They use the religious significance of this area for political gains, presenting it as a mitzvah (religious deed) to displace Palestinians from their homes.

Elad, founded in 1987, runs the City of David archaeological tourist site in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan. Tourists who visit there are excited about seeing where King David supposedly once roamed, but are unaware of the fact that not only are the region’s archaeological findings questionable, but Palestinian homes were expropriated inside the City of David to “resettle” Jews.

The Jewish religious settlement project has generated similarly one-sided responses by Muslims. To some Muslims these groups represent a new “crusade” against Islam itself. One of the leading groups countering the “Judaisation of Jerusalem” is the Islamic Movement in the North of Israel, which has been making strong inroads in Jerusalem. Like Hamas, the Islamic Movement fills the vacuum created by the absence of Israeli government services in East Jerusalem and the prohibition on the Palestinian Authority to take action. It has gained strong support from the Arab community by launching the “Al-Aqsa in Danger” campaign, which highlights the importance of the mosque as a unifying symbol.

Such groups capitalise on the fear of the local residents confronted with growing settlement and security activities in the city and the municipality’s neglect of Palestinian residents. They have positioned themselves as the defenders of Islam and Jerusalem and have quickly won local support by providing charity and infrastructure.

Both Muslim and Jewish groups have been denying each other religious and historical heritage in Jerusalem. A recent study by the Palestinian Authority (PA) claimed that Jews have no historical or religious heritage in Jerusalem. However, the PA leadership was quick to dismiss the study and its findings, a move which constitutes a shift away from previous trends of claiming exclusive rights to Jerusalem.

The change in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a political conflict over identity, nationality and land to a conflict being led by extreme religious groups for political gains is a dangerous shift that should be worrying, especially for mainstream religious leaders. The more people see this conflict in starkly religious terms, the less likely they will be to accept compromise.

Jerusalem has the potential to be a city of peace and coexistence as mentioned in the holy books. This has been exemplified by efforts of non-violent protest and education, such as the Wadi Hilweh Information Center in Silwan, comprised of residents of Wadi Hilweh who seek to effectively communicate information about their struggle to retain their land, and the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity movement, which has been bringing Palestinians and Israelis together to protest the settlements in East Jerusalem every week for the last year.

Such groups must be strengthened so that Jerusalem’s potential to bring Christians, Jews and Muslims together in peace can be realised.

by Aziz Abu Sarah and Mairav Zonszein

21 January 2011

* Mairav Zonszein (972mag.com) is an American Israeli journalist, blogger and activist based in Jerusalem. Aziz Abu Sarah (azizabusarah.wordpress.com), a Palestinian from Jerusalem, is Director of Middle East projects at the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, and winner of the Eliav-Sartawi Award for Common Ground journalism. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).

Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 18 January 2011, www.commongroundnews.org

South Beirut — Informed Congressional sources in Washington DC today  are confirming that the White House has informed Congressional Committee  Chairpersons and American allies that the Special Tribunal for Lebanon  (STL) will indict Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Wali al  Faqui (jurisconsult or Supreme Religious Leader) for issuing the order to  assassinate Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The US and Israel believe  Iran’s motive was that PM Hariri was considered a serious threat to Tehran  and Damascus because their intelligence agencies established that Hariri was  conspiratorially linked to Saudi Arabia, France and the United States–and  by extension, Israel.

There continues to be much speculation about the timing of the Special Tribunal indictments and what they will mean on the street. Bookies at the Casino de Liban near Jounieh have odds that those indicted will be named publicly on next month’s valentine’s day, the 6th anniversary of the Hariri murder. Others are holding their bets arguing that using that date would make the STL prosecutor’s office appear too politicized, a charge Prosecutor Daniel Bellemare has been chafing under for more than a year. The STL has said that the names of those indicted will be kept sealed when prosecutor Bellemare sends them to Pre-Trial Judge Daniel Fransen. The public will likely learn the names of those indicted when arrest warrants are issued by the Court.

More likely would be Israel undertaking a White House green-lighted  invasion of Lebanon to degrade Hezbollah and Syria as a base toward the weakening of Iran from ground level. Congressional sources report that the Pentagon disagrees with Israel and intend to attack not from the base but from above the top of the Resistance pyramid, which is Iran. The US will hit Iran hard thus hopefully opening up another attempt to peel away Syria and forced them to accept a peace deal with Israel. The scheme would return the Golan heights to the Assad regime minus the 100 meters strip along Syria’s Lake Tiberius. This sliver of lake front is where former Syrian President Hafez Assad told President Bill Clinton in 2000, he used to swim as a kid. He also told Clinton that Syria’s demand for its full return was non-negotiable, the same position adamantly held today by the Syrian government.

In Beirut, discussing the likelihood of street violence, a March 14th Hariri supporter attending Professor Norman Finkelstein’s public lecture at AUB last night told this observer that Lebanon needs stability and justice. “Let all the dead from Lebanon’s black civil war period rest in peace. It’s time to move on and rebuild our fractured country. I say all those who have been killed in Lebanon are equal.”

Well almost.

The enthusiastic young man did not believe his counsel should apply to the case of his personal idol, former P.M. Rafik Hariri, who while not the first PM to be killed in office, is the first one to be killed with such powerful friends insisting on “justice.”

LEBANON IS in crisis. And what is new?

Since the founding of the state, 90 years ago, the word “crisis” has been inseparably linked with its name.

From the Israeli perspective, this crisis has a double significance.

First, it endangers the quiet on the Northern border. Every internal crisis in Lebanon can easily lead to a conflagration. Somebody in Lebanon may trigger a confrontation in order to divert attention from internal matters. Somebody in Israel may decide that that this is a good opportunity for advancing some Israeli scheme.

Lebanon War III, if it breaks out – God forbid! – threatens untold destruction on both sides. Lebanon War II will look, in comparison, like a picnic. This time, all Israeli towns and villages will be within range of Hezbollah’s rockets. During the big Carmel fire, a few weeks ago, it became clear that nothing has been prepared for the defense of the rear, besides an impressive arsenal of speeches and declarations.

But this Lebanese crisis is also significant on quite another level. It holds an important lesson concerning the existential question facing us now: Israel in its 1967 borders or a Greater Israel that will rule over all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan.

The Lebanese crisis calls out to us: Look, you have been warned!

THE LEBANESE malaise started with a crucial decision made on the very day the state was set up.

In Arab eyes, Lebanon is a part of Syria. Greater Syria – al-Sham in Arabic – includes the present state of Syria as well as Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan and Sinai. This is a basic tenet of modern Arab nationalism.

During the hundreds of years of Ottoman rule in the region, there were no real borders between these provinces. The administrative divisions changed from time to time, but were unimportant. One could travel from Haifa to Damascus or from Jerusalem to Beirut without encountering any problem.

Lebanon is a country of high mountain ranges, one of the most beautiful countries in the world. This topographical reality encouraged persecuted minorities from all over the region to look for refuge there. They established themselves between the mountains, organized for all-round defense, fiercely resolved to hold on to their special character. The very tolerant Ottoman rule gave each community far-reaching autonomy (the “millet” system).

Thus the Druze established themselves in the Chouf mountains, the Christian Maronite sect in the Central Mountains and the Shiites in the South. Next to them there were other Christian communities (mainly Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholics) and the Sunni Muslims. These last were concentrated mainly in the coastal towns – Tripoli, Beirut and Sidon – and not by accident. The (Sunni) Ottomans put them there as guardians of their empire in face of all these diverse communities.

THE HISTORIC change in the annals of Lebanon occurred in 1860. Until then, the two main communities – the Maronites and the Druze – lived in strained co-existence. There were many clashes between them, and for some time, Druze princes established something resembling a mini-state in the region, but the relations between them were tolerable.

In 1860 the local conflicts escalated disastrously, and the Druze massacred the Christians. The Jews, too, were in danger, and the British Jew, Moses Montefiore, rushed to their aid in his coach. The world was shocked – that was a time when the world was still shocked by massacres – and the situation was exploited by the French, who had always cast covetous eyes on the “Levant”. The Istanbul government was compelled to recognize them as protector of the Christians in Lebanon. In order to defend the Christians, the Lebanese mountains were given an autonomous status within the Ottoman Empire, under French protection.

With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, the region was divided between the two victorious powers – Great Britain and France. In a cynical betrayal of their declared aim (“national self-determination”) the French took hold of Syria (including Lebanon), while the British took possession of Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq. The Arabs were not consulted. When Emir Faisal (the brother of Abdallah) set up a Syrian kingdom in Damascus, he was brutally thrown out by the French. A later national Arab revolt against the French, led curiously enough by the Druze, was put down with great cruelty.

The Muslims, who constituted the overwhelming majority in united Syria, hated the French conquerors and continued to hate them until the last day of their rule in Syria, when the British evicted them in the course of World War II (with the help of the “illegal” Jewish forces in Palestine. It was in this campaign that Moshe Dayan lost his eye and gained his trademark eye patch.)

THE MAIN aim of French rule from its first day was to turn the Lebanon mountains into a solid French dominion, based on the Christian population. They decided to cut Lebanon off from Syria and turn it into a separate state. This separation aroused a huge storm among the Muslims, but without effect.

Then there arose the crucial question that casts its shadow over Lebanon to this very day: should the Christians be satisfied with a small state, in which they would constitute a decisive majority, or should they prefer a large state and annex extensive Muslim territories. This was called in French “le Grand Liban” – Greater Lebanon.

Every Israeli can easily recognize this dilemma.

There is a Jewish legend in which Pharaoh was told that a newborn baby called Moses was destined to become a king. In order to test him, Pharaoh offered the baby, side by side, a golden crown and a heap of burning coals. The baby extended its hand towards the crown, but God sent an angel who pushed the hand towards the coals. Pharaoh was satisfied and Moses was saved.

When the Christians in Lebanon were offered this choice, they chose the crown.

Acceding to their demands, the French included in Lebanon the Muslim towns of Tripoli, Beirut, Sidon and Tyre, the Bekaa valley and the entire Shiite South. All the inhabitants of these “disputed territories”, as they were to be called, including the Shiites, opposed this violently, but to no avail. All opposition was brutally crushed by the French.

EVEN AT the founding of Greater Lebanon, the Maronites constituted a minority of the population. All the Christians together, including all the various communities, made up a bare majority. It was clear that the Muslims, with their higher birthrate, would become the majority in the Christian state before too long.

This, of course, happened soon enough. The Muslims did give up their dream of turning the wheel back and returning the “disputed territories” to their Syrian homeland, but they started to struggle against the total domination of Lebanon by the Christians.  In the course of time, the Christians were forced to surrender some of their privileges to the other communities. An iron-clad communal division was put in place: the president (with extensive executive powers) was always a Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim, and so forth, down the line. But within a short time, this division ceased to reflect the demographic realities.

To use Israeli terms: Lebanon claimed to be a “Christian and democratic state”. But as a matter of fact, it never was a democratic state, and gradually it ceased to be a Christian state as well.

The short history of Lebanon consists entirely of a struggle between the communities which were joined together against their will, like cats in a sack. One can learn a lot about this from the excellent book recently released by Patrick Seale, “The Struggle for Arab Independence”.

The struggle reached one of its peaks in the great civil war that started in 1975. The Syrians invaded the country in order to defend (how ironic!) the Christians against the Muslims, who were reinforced by the PLO which had established a kind of mini-state in the south, after being expelled from Jordan.

Into this mess blundered the leaders of Israel, without having the slightest idea about the complexities of the situation. Sharon invaded Lebanon in 1982 in order to annihilate the PLO and drive the Syrians – their enemies – out. The IDF struck a deal with the Maronites without realizing that they were much better at committing indiscriminate massacres (Sabra and Shatila) than real fighting. 18 years and hundreds of dead soldiers were needed to extricate the Israeli army from this trap.

The Israeli intervention had only one lasting effect, and a totally unexpected one. The Shiites in the South of Lebanon, the most downtrodden community in the country, held in utter contempt by both the Christians and the Sunnis, suddenly woke up. In their prolonged guerrilla war against the Israeli army, they became an important political and military, and finally a decisive national force in Lebanon. If Hezbollah indeed takes over the whole country, it would owe Ariel Sharon a statue in the central square of Beirut.

THE PRESENT crisis is a continuation of all the former crises. But during the 90 years of Lebanon’s existence as a state, profound changes have taken place. The Christians are now a secondary force, the Sunni Muslims have also seen their political importance diminished. Only the Shiites have gained ground.

The present crisis started with the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri, the Sunni Prime Minister, whose place was filled by his son, Saad al-Din Rafiq al-Hariri. (The word assassination, by the way, is derived from the medieval Shiite sect of Hashishi’in.) An international investigation was set in motion, mainly in order to damage Syria, the enemy of the US, but the traces led in the direction of Hezbollah. To forestall the report, Hezbollah and its allies (including an important Christian general) this week brought down the coalition government, of which they were a part. Saudi Arabia and Syria, recently mortal enemies, joined forces in an effort to avert a catastrophe that could easily spread throughout the region. They offered a compromise – but the US instructed its client, Hariri, to reject it.

The Americans resemble – and even upstage – the Israelis in their arrogance and ignorance, which border on fatal irresponsibility. Their intervention this week, emanating from a frivolous contempt for the incredible complexity that is called Lebanon, may bring about a civil war and/or a conflagration that may involve Israel.

All this would have been prevented, and 90 years of suffering might have been avoided, if the Christians had been satisfied with their part of the country. When they chose the option of “Greater Lebanon” – a clear parallel to “Greater Israel” – they condemned themselves and their country to 90 years of struggle and pain, without an end in sight.

At the decisive moment, no angel diverted their hand from the golden crown to the burning coals. Now we Israelis face a very similar choice.

Uri Avnery

January 15, 11