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Our writer was given exclusive access to the Assad Generals accused of war crimes as they seek to defeat the rebels in Aleppo

Mortars crashed into the middle-class streets around us and a T-72 tank baked in the heat under a road viaduct, but Bashar al-Assad’s most senior operational commander in Aleppo – a 53-year-old Major-General with 33 years in the military and two bullet wounds from last month’s battles in Damascus – claims he can “clean” the whole province of Aleppo from “terrorists” in 20 days. Now that is quite a boast, especially in the Saif el-Dowla suburb of the city, where sniper fire snapped down leafy streets. For the battle of Aleppo is far from over.

But this was a strange sensation, to sit in a private house, commandeered by the Syrian army – 19th-century prints still on the walls, the carpet immaculate – and talk to the Generals accused by Western leaders of being war criminals. I was, so to speak, in “the lair of the enemy”, but the immensely tall, balding General – his officers adding their own impressions whenever they were asked – had much to say about the war they are fighting and the contempt with which they regard their enemies. They were “mice”, the General said – he would not give his name. “They snipe at us and then they run and hide and in the sewers. Foreigners, Turks, Chechens, Afghans, Libyans, Sudanese.” And Syrians, I said. “Yes, Syrians too, but smugglers and criminals,” he said.

I asked about the rebels’ weapons and the clutch of conscripts staggered into the room under the weight of rockets, rifles, ammunition and explosives. “Take this,” the General said, grinning as he handed me a two-way radio, a Hongda-made HD668 taken two days ago off a dead Turkish fighter in Saif al-Dowla a few hundred metres from where we were sitting. “Mohamed, do you hear me?” the radio demanded. “Abul Hassan, did you hear?” The Syrian officers roared with laughter at the disembodied voice of their enemy, perhaps in the same block of buildings. We took this ID from the “terrorist”, the General said. “Citizen of the Turkish Republic” was printed on the card, above a photo of a man with a thin moustache. Born – Bingol (Turkey) 1 July 1974. Name: Remziye Idris Metin Ekince. Religion: Islam.

So, suddenly, we had a name for one of the mysterious “foreigners” who – at least in popular Baathist imagination – staff the “terrorist” army the Syrian military is fighting. And a lot of other names with far larger significance. As I prowled around the weapons – all captured within the past week, according to the Syrian officers – I found sticks of Swedish explosives in plastic covers, dated February 1999 and manufactured by Hammargrens, whose office address was printed as 434-24 Kingsbacka in Sweden; the words “made in USA” was also marked on each stick.

There was: a Belgian rifle, an FN from the town of Herstal, manufacturer’s code 1473224; a set of hand grenades of uncertain provenance numbered HG 85, SM8-03 1; a Russian sniper scope; a 9mm Spanish-made pistol – model 28 1A – manufactured by a Star Echeverria SA Eibar Espana; an ancient automatic rifle; a Soviet sub-machine-gun of 1948 vintage; a mass of Russian rocket-propelled grenades and launchers; and box after box of medical supplies.

“Every unit of the terrorists has a field ambulance,” an intelligence officer said. “They steal medicines from our pharmacies but bring other packets with them.” True, it seems. There were painkillers from Lebanon, bandages from Pakistan, much of the stuff was from Turkey. Interesting to know who the Spanish, Swedish and Belgian manufacturers originally sold their guns and explosives to. The haul went on and on, a newly out-of-date Visa card under the name of Ahed Akrama, a Syrian ID card in the name of Widad Othman – “kidnapped by the terrorists,” another officer muttered – and thousands of rounds of ammunition. The General agreed that weapons may have been taken from dead Syrian troops or soldiers who had been captured. Army defectors existed, he said, but they were “drop-outs, soldiers who had failed their basic tests who were motivated only by money”. This is what they say under interrogation, he said.

It wasn’t difficult to work out just how the fighting in Aleppo is developing. Walking the streets for more than an hour with a Syrian army patrol, individual snipers would shoot from houses and then disappear before government soldiers arrived. The army had shot dead one man with a sniper’s rifle who fired from the minaret of the El-Houda mosque. The Salaheddine district had been “liberated”, the Syrian officer said, and the Saif el-Dowla district was only two blocks from a similar “liberation”.

At least a dozen civilians emerged from their homes, retirees in their 70s, shopkeepers and local businessmen with their families and, unaware that a foreign journalist was watching, put their arms round Syrian troops. One told me he had stayed in his home as “foreign” fighters used his courtyard to fire on government soldiers. “I speak Turkish and most were speaking Turkish but some of the men had long beards and short trousers like the Saudis wear, and had strange Arab accents.”

So many Aleppo citizens talked to me, out of earshot of soldiers, about armed “foreigners” in their streets along with Syrians “from the countryside” that the presence of considerable numbers of non-Syrian gunmen appeared to be true. While much of the city continues its life under occasional mortar fire, tens of thousands of civilians displaced by the fighting between the Free Syrian Army and what the government always calls the “Syrian Arab Army” are now housed in vacant dormitories on the Aleppo University campus. And President Assad’s enemies are never far away.

Returning to the city centre yesterday afternoon, I discovered five Syrian soldiers – exhausted, with sharp, tense eyes – walking back to their barracks with a civilian called Badriedin. He had alerted the soldiers when he saw “10 terrorists” in Al-Hattaf street and the government troops had killed several of them – their bodies taken away on motor scooters, Badriedin said – and the rest escaped. The soldiers were high on their story, how they had been outnumbered but fought off their enemies. Even the operational commander of all Aleppo told me that a major battle was beginning in an area containing a mosque and a Christian school where his men had surrounded a large number of “terrorists”. “The Syrian army doesn’t kill civilians – we came here to protect them, at their request,” he said. “We tried to get civilians out of the area where we have to fight, with loudspeakers we give lots of warnings.”

I prefer the words emblazoned on the T-shirt of young man who said he was trying to reach his apartment in the snipers’ zone to see if it had survived. They read: “You see things and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were, and I say ‘Why not?’ – George Bernard Shaw.” Not a bad motto for Aleppo these days.

By Robert Fisk

21 August 2012

@ The Independent

On August 6, 2012, the neo-Nazi Wade Michael Page walked into the gurudwara (Sikh temple) of Wisconsin in Oak Creek and murdered 6 people including the temple president. He was killed by the police in the incident. While the Sikhs in the US had suffered from discrimination since they started coming to the United States in the early 20^th century: they were driven out of Bellingham, Washington, in 1907; and out of St. John, Oregon in 1910, this most recent Oak Creek killing sparked global outcries from Washington DC to New Delhi. In India, members of Sikh communities staged protest demonstrations in several cities including New Delhi and Jammu, Kashmir.

There are many ways to understand this abominable incident. Page’s personal history of his association with the far-right group and psychological profile would be one way. Bringing in the American history of violence with its reverence in the gun cultural economy, including the most recent killing at the screening of The Dark Knight Rises at a Denver cineplex on July 20, 2012 which claimed 12 lives, would be another. Situating this case in a larger context of growing hate-groups in the US would be yet another way.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there are now 1,018 hate groups which is a 69 per cent increase since the beginning of the twenty-first century. There is also a resurgence of the anti-government “Patriot” movement, some groups with their armed militias. It grew by 775% during the first three years of the Obama administration, from 149 in 2008 to 1,274 in 2011. In Wisconsin alone, there are 8 hate groups including the neo-Nazi “New Order” in Milwaukee, “Crusaders for Yahweh” in Eau Claire, and “Aryan Nations 88” in Green Lake, among others.

Situating the Wisconsin killing in the American context is certainly important, but I would argue that the case is much more dangerous if viewed in the global context of a heinous trend conducive to deadly religio-ethnic conflicts: that of violence against sacred spaces which includes killing worshippers in their houses of worship. This article attempts to show that there is indeed such a trend of violence against sacred spaces and that to cope with such phenomenon, it is important to understand why violence against sacred spaces is dangerous.

Violence against sacred spaces: a global trend?

In southern Thailand, there have been cases of violence against sacred spaces and religious personnel since the new round of violence re-exploded in 2004. But recently, two of the most significant cases include: the killing of 10 Malay Muslims, including the Imam, while they were praying in the Al-Furqan mosque in Narathiwat on June 8, 2009; and the bomb attack that killed two Buddhist monks from Suan Kaew temple while they were making their daily rounds of alms begging under military protection on a road in Yala on May 16, 2011, one day prior to the most important date in Buddhist calendar – the Visakha Puja day. Incidents such as these prompt me to ask if they are but isolated cases or symptomatic of a global trend.

In 2010, I conducted a study on the issue of violence against sacred spaces covering the period of 2009-2010 and found that there have been 104 incidents related to sacred spaces and religious personnel around the world, 49 took place in 2009 and it rose to 55 incidents in 2010. In 2010, the number of people killed in relation to sacred spaces increased 19.8% and those wounded increased 29.1%. These incidents combined have killed 1,730 people and wounded 3,671. Most of these incidents took place in Iraq and Pakistan which could be accounted for 77.2% of casualty in 2009 and 71.2% in 2010. If one considers the fact that Iraq is in a state of war and that Pakistan is not, it is important to point out that the number of people killed and wounded in Pakistan is 33.8% more than the number of casualties in Iraq in relation to sacred spaces and personnel. In addition, the year 2010 saw a dramatic increase of 147% in number of casualties in Pakistan resulted from violence against sacred spaces and personnel compared to 2009. (Peace & Policy 17 –forthcoming 2012)

In addition, a cursory glance at what has happened to sacred spaces in the first six months of 2012 yields the following results:

• January/People’s Republic of China: More than a thousand of Northwest Muslims fought against the Chinese police who demolished their mosque in the Ningxia region. (Bangkok Post, January 3, 2012)

• February/ Thailand: suspected insurgents threw two M 79 grenades into a Buddhist temple in Southern Thailand to avenge the earlier killings of four Malay Muslims by the Thai rangers. (Bangkok Post, February 2, 2012)

• March/Australia: the Nazi symbol “KKK” and “white power” were scrawled across a wall, and several headstones were vandalized at the Fingal Head Cemetery, a burial ground for the Aboriginal people in New South Wales. (Bangkok Post, March 9, 2012)

• April/Sri Lanka: Buddhist monks led an angry protest calling for the government to demolish or move a mosque in Dambala, North of Colombo. (Bangkok Post, April 24, 2012)

• May/Jerusalem: Vandals, believed to be ultra-orthodox Jews, armed with hammers caused serious damages to a 4^th century synagogue in the town of Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee. ( Bangkok Post, May 31, 2012)

• June/Iraq: Coordinated bombings and shootings took place during a major Shi’ite religious commemoration killing at least 59 people and wounding more than 200 in and near Baghdad. (Bangkok Post, June 14, 2012)

Though each case needs to be construed in the context of its own local conflict dynamic, taken together what these incidents mean is that: violence against sacred space could happen anywhere; the targets could belong to any religion/belief; the perpetrators could be organized or spontaneous; and violence that took place could be either provocative or reactive. Moreover, some of these cases engender deadlier violence. For example, recent explosions at three churches in Northern Kaduna, Nigeria, killed at least 16 people. Very soon this incident led furious Christians to retaliate against Muslims in a subsequent riot that killed at least 45 and wounded more than a hundred. (Bangkok Post, June 19, 2012)

The use of violence against sacred spaces that has occurred around the world was possible precisely because of the uncertainty of the cultural line separating the sacred from the profane spaces. Moreover, when these sacred spaces are attacked, it is their sanctity that generates cultural power producing collective identity, often times through moral outrage. Because of this complex conditionality, Muslims, Christians or Buddhists, among others, who witness their places of worship attacked, would react with outrage, and at times with vengeful violence. One of the reasons why attacking these targets endowed with religious symbolic meanings can be extremely dangerous with the curse of making conflicts deadlier is because they are not individuals but communal. The site that hurts is not the body or physical entity but the self – at times collective. Through anger of those communities of faith attacked, a kind of moral outrage as evident in Nigeria and elsewhere, violence against sacred spaces oftentimes engender conflicts deadlier and intractable. As a result, this kind of conflict becomes increasingly difficult to resolve.

Anticipating such incidents which seem to occur with increasing frequency, the TODA Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research, together with the Center for Global Nonkilling in Honolulu, Berghof Foundation, and Peace Information Center in Bangkok, organized an international conference on “Protecting Sacred Spaces and Peoples of Cloths: Academic Basis, Policy Promises” in Bangkok on May 28-29, 2011 to explore a specific class of ethno-religious conflict when perpetrators target sacred symbols and peoples, especially religious, which usually render existing conflicts deadlier and/or much more difficult to cope with. At the conclusion of the conference, international scholars and policy makers in attendance, including the eminent secretary general of ASEAN- Dr.Surin Pitsuwan who was there for the whole conference, seem to agree that this issue is indeed a dangerous global problem rarely touched by researchers, and that some appropriate regional and/or global policy needs to be formulated to prevent existing conflicts from sliding further into the realm of deadlier violence.

Perhaps the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century is the right time for a country such as Thailand or a region such as ASEAN to do something globally significant – initiating a cultural code of conducting conflicts that would render violence against sacred spaces internationally and formally unacceptable, for example. By overcoming its local or regional shortcomings, this country and/or ASEAN could help re-imagine a world where ethno-religious conflicts would be contained by locating sacred spaces and lives of religious personnel outside the curse of violence.

By Chaiwat Satha-Anand

Dr. Chaiwat Satha-Anand is the Chairperson, Strategic Nonviolence Commisssion, Thailand Research Fund

Senior Research Fellow, TODA Institute of Global Peace and Policy Research

It has been said that since wars begin in the minds of men and women, it is in the minds of men and women that the defences of peace must be constructed. Logically following from this has been the statement by Maria Montessori that ‘establishing a lasting peace is the work of education. All politics can do is keep us out of war’. Hence, the importance of Peace Education cannot be over-emphasized.

Peace education may be defined as the process of acquiring the values, the knowledge and developing the attitudes, skills, and behaviours to live in harmony with oneself, with others, and with the natural environment. In other words, peace education should be an integral part of a child’s life. Through a humanizing process of teaching and learning, peace educators facilitate human development. They strive to counteract the dehumanization of poverty, prejudice, discrimination, rape, violence, and war. Originally aimed at eliminating the possibility of global extinction through nuclear war, peace education currently addresses the broader objective of building a culture of peace. In this global effort, progressive educators worldwide are teaching the values, standards and principles articulated in fundamental human rights norms, principles and practices.

Peace and non violence are becoming priorities in education. Knowledge, and know-how, are both enriched when children are taught to know themselves. Decades of psychology and personal development, linked to the need for a more peaceful world, are naturally leading humankind into an era of interpersonal skills contributing to health and well being.

RATIONALE FOR PROVIDING PEACE EDUCATION IN SCHOOLS

It’s where young people, the future of the nation, spend most of their time. School helps shape a person’s character. Classrooms and school-yards are places where every child can be heard, where conflict can be resolved positively, where critical skills can be learned among friends. Teachers can teach peace by integrating the values, facts and methods of peace and global education into the curriculum.

Many teachers are already doing so, for instance, in elementary grades children learn to cooperate and share through games and role-playing. They recognize their responsibilities for making their classroom a peaceful place, and begin to handle positively their own conflicts.

In middle school teachers introduce global education and concepts of peace from other cultures. Students learn to work cooperatively, to research and analyze media, to track the political and social trends of a global economy in the light of some national objectives.

Secondary school students examine some realities of global interdependence, eg environment, economics, law. They critique national and global organizations and their own expectations for peace and development.

Peace education helps students to transform conflict in their own lives, understand and respect other cultures and ways of living, and treasure the Earth. Teachers of peace education encourage their students to cooperate with each other, think critically, solve problems constructively, take part in responsible decision-making, communicate clearly, share their feelings and commitments openly. These skills and values are essential for survival in an increasingly interdependent world, where violence has become an instrument of policy, yet still breeds more violence.

THE NEED FOR PEACE EDUCATION IN SRI LANKA

In a period of transition and accelerated change in Sri Lanka, which is presently emerging from the throes of a three decade conflict and grappling with the challenges that emerge in such a post-conflict setting, marked by the expression of intolerance, manifestations of racial and ethnic tension, intolerance towards those regarded as the ‘other’ and the growing disparities between the rich and the poor, action strategies become necessary both at ensuring fundamental freedoms, peace, human rights, and democracy and at promoting sustainable and equitable economic and social development all of which have an essential part to play in building a culture of peace between individuals and nationally.

BEST PRACTICES AND SUCCESS STORIES

Peace education is most effective when the skills of peace and conflict resolution are learned actively and are modeled by the school environment in which they are taught. In a number of countries, emphasis is placed on improving the school environment so that it becomes a microcosm of the more peaceful and just society that is the objective of peace education.

This creates a consistency between the messages of the curriculum and the school setting, between the overt and the ‘hidden’ curriculum. Interventions on the level of the school environment tend to address how children’s rights are either upheld or denied in school, discipline methods, how the classroom and school day is organized, and how decisions are made. Training of teachers and

administrators is critical to enabling teachers to examine these issues from the perspective of peace education. The programme in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia contains elements of this approach. Peer mediation programmes have been set up in countries such as Liberia, where youth leaders are trained to be ‘conflict managers’.

A number of countries have developed peace education curricula, usually consisting of activities around themes such as communication, cooperation, and problem solving. Manuals have been produced to guide teachers in using these curricula with children in Burundi (1994), Croatia, and Liberia (1993). In the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, a series of workshops on peace education themes has been created for primary school children (1996). A series of readers has been developed in Rwanda for primary school children and adult literacy classes with stories and poems on peace themes. Sport and physical education have also been used in Rwandan schools as a vehicle for developing skills and attitudes of peace. Operation Lifeline Sudan has developed activity kits for schools that build cooperation and respect for differences through sports, art and science projects. Community service that is facilitated by the school is another feature of some programmes.

In a number of countries, efforts are under-way to upgrade the quality of pre service teacher education. Training may include a focus on such skills as the use of interactive and participatory teaching methods, organising cooperative group work, and facilitating group discussions. The use of these types of teaching methods is essential to quality basic education, and enables teachers to convey values of cooperation, respect for the opinions of the child, and appreciation of differences. Participatory teaching and learning strategies can be used throughout the curriculum, and are an essential component of efforts to promote peace through education. Examples of interactive approaches to pre-service teacher education come from Burundi and are a recurring theme in workshop reports from the ESAR region (1997).

In-service teacher education has been carried out in Burundi, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Tanzania. As is the case with pre-service teacher education, in-service teacher education may focus on participatory teaching and learning methods, as well as content areas such as children’s rights or conflict resolution skills.

CHALLENGES

The aims and objectives, the perspectives of the subject, the working methods and other theoretical and practical approaches are decisive variables. Furthermore, place, period, local environment and other internal variations are major affective components in deciding the kind of peace education, its scope, its nature and the values one would attach to it.

Owing to these factors, peace education necessarily varies from country to country, and even between regions within one country. However multifarious the approaches are, all educational programs and activities collected under peace education would seek to prepare the students for peace.

To put it in a nutshell, peace education sees to the construction of defences of peace and fences of justice in the minds of the younger generation, and to making the youth hold to peace individually in life, since peace is ultimately constructed in the minds of men and women in the same way that war once was.

THE BENEFITS OF PEACE EDUCATION IN SCHOOLS

· The school environments will begin to function as ‘zones of peace’, where children are safe from violent conflict

· Uphold children’s basic rights as outlined in the CRC

· Develop a climate that models peaceful and respectful behaver among all members of the learning community

· Demonstrate the principles of equality and non-discrimination in administrative policies and practices

· Draw on the knowledge of peace-building that exists in the community, including means of dealing with conflict that are effective, non-violent, and rooted in the local culture

· Handle conflicts in ways that respect the rights and dignity of all involved

· Integrate an understanding of peace, human rights, social justice and global issues throughout the curriculum whenever possible

· Provide a forum for the explicit discussion of values of peace and social justice

· Use teaching and learning methods that stress participation, cooperation, problem-solving and respect for differences

· Enable children to put peace-making into practice in the educational setting as well as in the wider community

Comments to salmayusuf@gmail.com

“I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion…

I want the full menu of human rights”

Desmond Tutu, Today, NBC, 9 January 1985.

The disproportionate focus on human rights from a negative perspective has sadly resulted in detraction from understanding the role that human rights can in fact play in post-war settings. The time is ripe for human rights to be approached positively, recognizing its value and ability to contribute to a process of national healing and reconciliation.

CREATING A SENSE OF BELONGING

One of the key advantages that civil and political rights offer is that, when properly implemented, enable citizens to feel involved with the state – and that the state, in some way, belongs to them. This is important in terms of nation-building and securing lasting peace, because if citizens have no connection to the state, then they also have no motivation to avoid conflict. The illustrations below demonstrate how specific rights can help to rebuild the nation and secure lasting peace.

I. THE RIGHT TO LIBERTY AND SECURITY OF PERSON

This right, combined with the right to life and freedom from torture, is important for ensuring that people do not have to fear for their safety whilst going about their daily lives. In terms of what this right can bring to the nation, it can help to maintain peace and security because if citizens are able to feel safe and secure in their environment, conflict is less likely to arise.

It is particularly important that this right is successfully protected because there is likely to be suspicion among citizens and other peoples that the rebuilding of the nation will result in the reinstatement of previous conditions of deprivation and discrimination: these suspicions need to be put to rest once and for all.

Additionally, ensuring that the security of person is protected can improve international relations: if the international community can see that rights such as these are being effectively protected, they are likely to be much more willing to engage with the state. In a globalised world, the ability to engage with other states is essential, both politically and economically.

II. THE RIGHT TO A FAIR TRIAL AND EQUALITY BEFORE THE LAW

It is important to ensure that all people, irrespective of ethnicity and religion, are treated fairly in legal proceedings within the country, largely because faith needs to be restored in the ability of the legal system to provide justice. As with the right to liberty and security of person, the implementation of the right to a fair trial and equality before the law is particularly important because it is necessary for those who have been unjustly treated in the past to see that the state is now able to protect them from future injustices: if they are unable to see this, then they are unlikely to be able to feel that they truly belong within the state.

The protection of these rights is also important more generally – a functioning and respected legal system is crucial in securing law and order, being essential if future civil unrest is to be avoided.

III. PUBLIC PARTICIPATION OF MINORITIES

Protection needs to be afforded not only to the majority of the citizens, but also to the minority and other disadvantaged groups within that society. If this cannot be achieved, then it is unlikely that peace will be maintained. For a political system to be truly democratic, it has to allow minorities a voice of their own, to articulate their distinct concerns and seek redress and lay the basis of democracy. Introducing ‘special measures’ for minorities does not place them in a position of privilege in society, but rather puts them on an equal footing with the majority. This allows minority groups to be able to influence public policy and therefore to prevent feeling detached from the nation.

Participation in public affairs by minorities is essential to creating a sense of national identity. It is crucial to feeling part of the state and the wider community. It is essential to the protection of their interests. Further, it will serve to inform decision-makers of the concerns of minorities, and leads to better decision-making and implementation. It is therefore clear that when minority rights are secured, there is a much greater likelihood that peace will be maintained. Practitioners should therefore aim to ensure that minority voices can be heard and feed into national processes.

What must be remembered, however, is that the requirements and needs of different minority groups in the country are different to each other and cannot be generalised, and practitioners too should not attempt to do so.

CREATING OPPORTUNITIES

The aim of protecting and promoting economic, social and cultural rights is to ensure that all people in the country are able to meet their basic human needs. The introduction of socio-economic rights should not be ruled out on the basis of monetary concerns. Instead, it has been seen that the fulfilment of economic, social and cultural rights in fact has the potential to improve the nation’s economy as a whole. The benefits offered by a number of specific economic, social and cultural rights are considered below.

I.THE RIGHT TO HEALTH

The physical and mental wellbeing of the nation can be particularly important for maintaining peace and security. A human rights framework that provides comprehensive protection for the human right to health should include provision of real access to healthcare – such access should include emergency and routine medical treatment, as well as immunization programmes. This will help to maintain lasting peace because, if our society as a whole – or a less affluent proportion of our society – is suffering from ill-health and disease, it is much more likely to be rife with discontent. Additionally, creating a healthy nation is likely to benefit the state’s economy – a sick nation is unable to work, and is therefore unable to generate wealth.

Concerns about the cost of providing human rights protection for the right to health should not be overstated. The right to health is a progressive human right, meaning that citizens should expect the state to provide for ‘the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.’ This standard depends on the wealth of the nation, so the standard that we could expect to enjoy in Sri Lanka, for example, is not the same as the standard that could be expected either in Germany or Guatemala.

What is important, however, is that access to healthcare is provided to all people equally. If this is not achieved, civil unrest is likely to return. Practitioners should therefore work to encourage the development of healthcare infrastructures that can be easily accessed by even the most marginalised groups in society.

II. THE RIGHT TO EDUCATION

Education provides citizens with opportunities to develop new skills. This, in turn, provides the opportunity to generate a higher income. As citizens are able to earn more, it is clear that the nation’s economy will improve as a whole and the likelihood of satisfaction and prevention of frustration can considerably contribute to building a connection with the post-war state. This is happening at the moment, where India is moving ahead of the Western world in relation to science and technology. It is clear that a world-class system of universities cannot be developed overnight. However, if investment is made in our education system, then the state’s economic outlook can improve in the long-term. Moreover, such investment will prevent unrest in the short to medium-term because if every citizen can see progress being made and are given the opportunity to improve their own standard and quality of life, they are far less likely to agitate and return to conflict.

III. THE RIGHT TO WORK

The right to work carries with it the potential to improve the prosperity of the nation. This is because it is important to have an active workforce in order to grow the nation’s economy: if people are given the ability to work, then they are able to go out and earn more money, some of which can then be created as revenue. Such protection will in turn reduce unrest and improve the economy.

RESTORING DIGNITY

Possibly the most important contribution human rights can make towards reconciliation and securing lasting peace is the protection they can bring to minorities. Practitioners are therefore well advised to work closely with minority groups in order to determine how their needs can be best met. It should be borne in mind, however, that an overly minority-focused approach could arouse the suspicions of the majority. Ultimately, balance and discretion need to be used, ensuring that the social fabric woven leaves no place for discrimination, discontent or misgiving.

By Salma Yusuf

The writer can be contacted at: salmayusuf@gmail.com

For the Iranian people, the 2012 Olympic Games in London which wrapped up earlier on August 12 was thoroughly different from the previous editions of the summer Olympics. This year’s games came on the heels of a set of biting sanctions by the United States and European Union against Iran’s banking, insurance, transportation and oil sector which have dramatically crippled Iran’s economy and severely affected the innocent civilians.

While Israel, Iran’s traditional arch foe, has been intensively lobbying to convince the U.S. Congress to adopt more backbreaking economic sanctions on Iran and further isolate it over its nuclear program, the successful and unprecedented performance of Iranian athletes in London effectively appeased the country’s innumerable excruciating wounds.

Iranian delegation to the 2012 Olympics snatched 12 medals, including 4 golds, in weightlifting, wrestling, taekwondo and athletics and came 17th in the medal table among some 204 participating nations, recording Iran’s best all-time performance in the Olympic Games.

For Iranians, every medal in such an important and defining event like Olympics means a hoisting of the country’s flag before the eyes of millions of international viewers and most importantly, every gold medal means that the people around the world will respectfully listen to your national anthem. In the time that the Western diplomats avoid hosting their Iranian counterparts and shun them in different meetings and spare no efforts to make sure that Iran is an isolated nation, they’re the athletes who bear the burden of promoting the name of their country and making their people proud and cheerful.

Zahra Kazemi Aliabad, a postgraduate student of English literature and a freelance journalist believes that the Iranian athletes performed in the 2012 Olympics brilliantly and brought glory and credit to the country: “I’m really proud that I’m an Iranian citizen. The Iranian sportsmen showed a fantastic performance. If you look at the Olympics medal table, you will find out that we stand above many prosperous and economically progressive nations such as Spain, Brazil, South Africa, Denmark, Turkey, Switzerland and Canada.”

“The U.S. and Israeli politicians are going through fire and water to convince the world leaders to boycott the upcoming Non-Aligned Movement summit in Tehran. They already succeeded in dissuading Ban Ki Moon from attending. Their sole objective is to bring Iran to isolation. If they had the choice, they would even bar the Iranian athletes from international sports events, but Iranians’ glorious success in Olympics really disappointed them,” she added.

The 22-year-old blogger Mohammad Hossein Nikzad wrote a post on his weblog Aghalliyat (the minority) before the games started and called Olympics a precious opportunity for “cultural diplomacy.”

“Olympic is a platform and a free tribune for introducing Iranian culture [to the world]. More than 10 thousand athletes from different countries take part and the whole world is paying attention to the event. The country that performs in the games better can surely promote its culture more effectively and gain international prestige and credibility,” he wrote.

“Our responsibility is to categorically support our athletes and promote and talk about their successes in the mass media… of course we can not surpass a country like China which is a sports stronghold, but we can at least outperform weaker countries which usually grab numerous medals in the Olympic Games and make their people feel honored,” he added.

Following the conclusion of the games and once the Iranian delegation returned from London, the society was tremendously filled with joy and a communal feeling of delight. The mass media gave extensive coverage to the 12 medalists and invited them for interviews on different radio, TV stations and newspapers. The vivacious Persian blogsphere was also happy with the news that Iranian caravan finished 17th among the 204 participating nations, especially given the huge economic, political pressures which the country has been withstanding for a long time.

Hamid Sourian, Iran’s 55-kg Greco-roman wrestler and five-time world champion who clutched the first gold medal in the games for Iran updated his newly-established blog from London on July 6, expressing his satisfaction with the victory which ended his disappointing Olympics medal drought.

In his blog post titled “semi-declaration,” which received 1165 comments from the visitors, Sourian wrote, “I was flooded by your invaluable kindness. Had it not been your prayers and good wishes, it would have not been possible for me to make the achievement. I should make sure that this medal would not make me arrogant so that I might forget the Almighty God and the people who always stand shoulder by shoulder with me.”

The world wrestling giant wrote that he personally moderates all the comments he receives and even though he cannot personally reply to all of them, he reads them one by one and is always “thankful to the committed people for the compassion they show to him.”

Abolghasem Bayyenat, an Iranian political commentator and Ph.D candidate of political science at Maxwell School of Syracuse University also believes that the 2012 Olympics was an auspicious event for the Iranians: “The recent Olympic games fostered national cohesion in Iran in two important ways. First, international sports events in general have the function of raising national consciousness. The broader the contexts in which individuals find themselves the broader the scope of their in-group identification would be.”

“Sub-national group identifications, such as ethnic, sectarian and partisan identities, become less salient in an international context while national identities gain increased salience. It is in this line that during the recent Olympic Games Iranians, more than any other time in recent months or years, identified themselves along national lines rather than sub-national ones. The people of Iran thought of themselves more as Iranians rather than as Azeris, Kurds, Persians, Turkmans, Baluchs or other ethnicities,” he added.

“Second, people tend to identify more with groups which provide them with higher levels of honor and relative worth, if they have a choice. Iranian athletes performed far better in the recent Olympics games than any other neighboring country which share the same ethnicity with Iranian ethnic groups,” he wrote. “Being Iranian served as a source of pride for the nationals of Iran as, in overall terms, the Iranian team outperformed all Iran’s neighboring countries as well as many developed countries by a wide margin in the recent Olympic games. Thus, regardless of their political, ethnic and sectarian affiliations, Iranians felt proud to be Iranian as their national identity provided them with more honor than their sub-national identities.”

All in all, the 2012 Olympics was a dramatic event for the Iranian people to regain their sense of dignity and honor in view of the increasing pressure on their country over its nuclear program. While the country’s politicians face a daunting job in resisting the mounting economic and political pressures, the Iranian athletes performed fantastically, proving that it’s not too easy to take Iran off the international equations.

By Kourosh Ziabari

21 August, 2012

@ Countercurrents.org

Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian journalist

Over the past year, the British government have bombed rebels into power in Libya – and are desperately hoping to do the same in Syria –whilst simultaneously aiding and abetting the crushing of rebel forces in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Some commentators have called this hypocritical. In fact, there is no contradiction: the British government is engaged in a vicious, region-wide attack on all independent, anti-colonial forces in the region, be they states or opposition movements. Client regimes – in many cases monarchies originally imposed by the British Empire – have been propped up, and states outside the orbit of Western control have been targeted for destruction. The policy, in other words, has been entirely consistent: a drive towards the total capitulation of the Arab world; and more specifically the destruction of any potential organised resistance to an attack on Iran. What is more, it has been planned for a long time.

The Arab spring did not come out of the blue; it was both predictable and predicted. All demographic, economic and political trends pointed in the direction of a period of instability and civil unrest across the region, and especially in Egypt. The combination of growing and youthful populations, rising unemployment, corruption and unrepresentative government made some kind of mass manifestation of frustration a virtual certainty – as was recognised by a far-reaching speech by MI6-turned-BP operative Mark Allen in February 2009. In August 2010, Barack Obama issued Presidential Study Directive Number 11, which noted “evidence of growing citizen discontent with the region’s regimes” and warned that “the region is entering a critical period of transition.” Four months later, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia, sparking off the unrest that led to the downfall of President Ben-Ali.

For the world’s imperial powers, wracked by their own economic crises – Britain, France and the US – it was clear that this unrest would present both a danger and an opportunity. Whilst it threatened to disrupt the Gulf monarchies imposed by Britain during the colonial period (Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait et al), it could also create the ideal cover for the launching of long-planned proxy wars against old enemies.

Both Libya and Syria have long been considered thorns in the side of Western world domination. It is not only their policies – from Gaddafi’s consistent opposition to US and British military bases in Africa to Assad’s support for Palestinian liberation groups – which riles Western policy makers, but the mere fact that they have independent governments which are able to formulate and implement such policies. In the eyes of the world’s unelected and undeclared ruling elites, for a government of the global South to be either strong or independent might be just about tolerable – but not both.

Secret Anglo-American plans for the overthrow of the Syrian government – using proxy forces directed by Western intelligence, and carried out under the cover of ‘internal disturbances’ – have been in place since at least 1957 . More recently, the US has embarked on a policy of funding sectarian Salafi militias to wage war against the region’s Shi’ites in order to undermine Iran, destroy the Syrian state and cut off Hezbollah’s supply lines. This policy was a direct response to the two major setbacks of the previous year – the massive wave of attacks on Western forces by Sunni militants in Iraq and Israel’s defeat in its war with Hezbollah. In a prophetic piece in 2007, Seymour Hersh shows how the US, Israel and the Saudis hatched a plan to ‘redirect’ Sunni militias away from their fight against the US and towards Syria. As one US government consultant put it, “it’s not that we don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs; it’s who they throw them at—Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians, if they continue to work with Hezbollah and Iran.”

The coming of the ‘Arab spring’ provided the perfect cover for the throwing of these bombs – and for the British and US government plans to be put into effect. They acted quickly; armed attacks began in both countries within days of the ‘protest movement’ erupting, carried out by insurgents with longstanding links to British intelligence and increasingly trained and directed by the SAS and MI6 .

Acting under the cover of the Arab spring also proved a winning formula for Western governments to mobilise support for ‘humanitarian intervention’ – the twenty-first century white man’s burden. Bush and Blair had given Western warmongering in the Middle East a bad name, but by implementing proxy wars – and aerial blitzkrieg – under the guise of ‘support for popular uprisings’, it was possible to ensure that liberals and ‘socialists’ by and large fell in line (albeit with some tactical differences on occasion). Frustrated Western radicals, desperate to vicariously experience the ‘revolution’ they know they would never – and let’s face it, would never want to – actually be involved in, lapped up the imagery of the ‘people versus the dictator’. These ‘useful idiots’ all helpfully provided a veneer of credibility to the new wars that was clearly lacking in the case of Iraq.

The method of ‘proxy war’ – using militias recruited from the local population to fight for imperial interests – has long been the favoured policy of British policy planners – in contrast to the more ‘gung-ho’ boots on the ground methods of the US.

The war against Libya gave the ‘Arabists’ who dominate the British Foreign Office (the FCO) a chance to show the Americans how it is done. They have always preferred to cultivate local allies on the ground to do the fighting and dying – it’s cheaper, less unpopular at home, and so much more subtle than the blunt, blundering and cretinous approach of the Bushblair posse. Indeed, the FCO opposed the Iraq war for precisely this reason – there was no moral, nor even strategic, disagreement – but a tactical one. The perceived failure and cost (in both blood and treasure) of Iraq thus allowed the ‘Arabists’ to gain the upper hand for the next round of colonial war that is now unfolding.

Meanwhile, client regimes – those monarchies established by Britain in the dying days of Ottoman control of the region – were given all the help they needed to drown their own uprisings in blood. Britain sold Saudi Arabia no less than £1.75 billion worth of arms last year – arms that are now being used against protesters in both Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, where the Saudis invaded last autumn to crush the growing democratic revolt, as well as to arm the militias fighting in Syria. Qatar under the absolute rule of the Al-Thani family – chosen by Britain to run the country in the mid-nineteenth century – has also been crucial in fomenting the new imperial wars. The Al- Jazeera TV channel, which plays such an important role in the colonisers’ propaganda war – is run from Qatar and essentially took over the role of the BBC Arabic service when it closed operations in 1996. Qatar has also been at the forefront of the co-ordination, training and arming of the paramilitary proxy forces in Libya and Syria.

To ascertain the British government’s attitude towards an uprising in a state in the Middle East, one simply has to ask: is this a state created by Britain, or one built on an independent support base? Countries in the latter category get attacked, whilst those in the former are aided in consolidating their power and crushing the opposition.

Egypt, however, does not fit so neatly into either category. Egypt under Mubarak was neither a total stooge regime nor fully independent; neither a Libya nor a Qatar. Although the country had freed itself from its’ British-imposed king in 1952, since the Israeli peace accord of 1979, it had been widely viewed as a client state of the US and a key ally of Israel. Mubarak’s standing in the Arab world reached a nadir during the Israeli onslaught against Gaza in 2008-9, which even became known as the ‘Mubarak massacre’ for his refusal to open the border to fleeing Palestinians. Nevertheless, imposing regime change on Libya was going to be difficult for the West with Mubarak in charge next door. He had developed a friendly relationship with Gaddafi over the years, and seemed to be moving closer to Iran . A UN report in 2006 even accused him of training the Islamic Courts Union – the Somali government which the US were working so hard to destroy – and he, along with Gaddafi, had opposed the expansion of AFRICOM – the US military’s ‘Africa Command’ – on the continent. A client who thinks he can conduct his own foreign policy is clearly missing the point. Removing Mubarak whilst keeping intact rule of his country by a military in hoc to the US may have come to be seen as the preferred option in London and Washington – especially if this option were to divide the revolutionary movement and take the wind out of its sails. Recent events in Egypt – such as the Egyptian airforce strike on ‘Islamic militants’ in the Sinai, and the closure of the tunnels to Gaza – a lifeline for Palestinians to which Mubarak had to some extent turned a blind eye – suggest that the new government in Egypt is more than happy to do the bidding of the neo-colonisers.

By Dan Glazebrook

21 August, 2012

@ Countercurrents.org

Dan Glazebrook is a political writer and journalist. He writes regularly on international relations and the use of state violence in British domestic and foreign policy.. He can be reached at danglazebrook2000@yahoo.co.uk

“Iran’s leaders should know that I do not have a policy of containment…. I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon…. I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.”

— Barack Obama at an AIPAK meeting in Washington D.C., March 2012

Iran since the Islamic Revolution (1979) is another unbeatable adversary for America. Nevertheless, America and its allies have not abandoned their regime-change efforts in Iran. After the failure of the “mass movement” for democracy in the wake of the so-called rigged parliamentary elections in mid-2009 in Iran, America was back to square one. It simply under-estimated the “raw power of nationalism” in Iran, that is, the average Iranian was not willing to accept America as a friend. Since then America has been vigorously projecting Iran as an imminent nuclear threat to Israel and other countries in the region. In March 2012, Obama told Netanyahu to wait and see if “crippling sanctions” against Iran worked. In March 2012, Obama also threatened Iran at an AIPAK meeting in Washington: “Iran’s leaders should know that I do not have a policy of containment…. I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon…. I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests”. While Israel had been publicly threatening to bomb Iran’s “nuclear facilities” in early 2012, Obama offered to give Israel advanced weaponry — including bunker-busting bombs and refueling planes — in exchange for Israel’s agreement not to attack Iran “until 2013, after US elections”. Meanwhile, Israel is allegedly fabricating a “smoking gun” to justify its attack on Iran; and its spies disguised as Iranian soldiers, have already been working inside Iran. Several incidents of Iranian nuclear scientists being assassinated by unknown assailants for several years may be mentioned in this regard. Iranian and foreign experts are pointing fingers at Israel for these assassinations.

As we know, Western nations – directly or indirectly – controlled Iran up to the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Although the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company by the Government in 1951 signaled the end of British hegemony in Iran, the short-lived freedom of Iran was over with the CIA-sponsored military coup in 1953 that toppled the elected nationalist government of Prime Minister Mossadegh. Interestingly, Iran’s Shiite clerics under the leadership of Ayatollah Kashani (CIA is said to have bribed the Ayatollah) actively supported the anti- Mossadegh coup. The coup was followed by a period of twenty-five years of tyranny under the Shah, while American and British oil companies owned eighty per cent of the oil revenue. Afterwards Iran was practically an American protectorate up to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Since then – thanks to Iran’s avowedly anti-American and anti-Israeli stand – we have hardly heard anything positive about the country. George W. Bush in 2002 abruptly named Iran, together with Iraq and North Korea, among his “Axis of Evil”. Iranians least expected this from America while relations between the two countries had remarkably improved in the previous five years. In 1998, President Khatami extended an olive branch to America stressing the need for “dialogue among civilizations”. Former senior policy makers like Brzezinski and Scowcroft also favored a rapprochement with Iran.

The series of Western misadventures and support for external aggressors like Saddam Hussein (who invaded Iran in 1980 and got tacit Western support till the end of the Iraq-Iran War in 1988) and internal dissidents like the “Marxist-Islamist” Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MeK) have failed to overthrow the ayatollahs. Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has documented evidences of American troops training Iranian terrorist MeK guerrillas in Nevada desert (during 2005 and 2008). Interestingly, America is backing the MeK, which it formally declared as a terrorist group in 1997. Soon after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, MeK fighters stormed the US Embassy in Tehran and took diplomats and staff hostage for 444 days. MeK fighters had fought for Saddam Hussein and were captured by US troops in 2003. In 2004, considering them “protected persons” not POWs, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld decided to release them. In 2007, President Bush set aside part of the $400 million, allocated for overthrowing the Iranian regime, for the MeK.

In the above backdrop, it is evident that US hawks and neocons are adamant to fight the Islamic regime of Iran, which they portray as a “fundamentalist autocracy” and a “totalitarian one-party state” modeled on fascism and communism. “By 2002-2003, the joke making the rounds in Washington was: ‘Everybody wants to go to Baghdad; real men want to go to Tehran’.” As Samir Amin points out, America and Israel, “under the pretext of its [Iran’s] nuclear development”, would like to destroy the country as it “does constitute an obstacle to the deployment of the US military control over the region. This country must, therefore, be destroyed”. Although it is time that Americans realize Iranians hate America more intensely than they hate the ayatollahs, we notice American analysts and policymakers debating what would be the best time to attack Iran. Rejecting skeptics of military action against Iran, hawkish American analysts and policy makers believe that a military strike to destroy “Iran’s nuclear program” could only spare the world from a nuclear-armed Iran. Some even consider Obama foolish for not considering “tiny Iran” a serious threat to America.

However, it is least likely that America will attack Iran in the near future. Israeli human rights activist Uri Avnery believes that: “The United States will not attack [Iran]. Not this year, nor in years to come. For a reason far more important than electoral considerations or military limitations. The United States will not attack, because an attack would spell a national disaster for itself and a sweeping disaster for the whole world.” Avnery believes that Israel is also not likely to attack Iran as the latter’s closing down the Strait of Hormuz in the wake of an attack would spell disaster for the entire world. To close the discussion on American and Israeli hawks’ “Iran Obsession”, we may argue that Iran is not a threat to anybody in the region, let alone America or any NATO power in the foreseeable future. We have reasons to believe that Iran has no reason to build nuclear weapons (unless it is forced to do so). We may agree with Robert Fisk that Iran has already “won almost all its recent wars without firing a shot” as America and NATO destroyed “Iran’s nemesis in Iraq” by defeating Saddam Hussein and killing thousands of Sunni militants. Fisk believes that arming Arab states in the Gulf is counterproductive as armies in these countries “could scarcely operate soup kitchens” let alone fight Iran. Last but not least, unlike Iraq, Iran would not be another cakewalk for America. There are people in the Pentagon who believe that Iran could “spell disaster for the United States and its military” in the Persian Gulf. However, some Americans’ “Iran Obsession” is so intense that some influential American plaintiffs ten years after 9/11 implicated the Iranian government and its top leaders, along with Bin Laden and the Taliban regime of Afghanistan, in the attacks on September 11, 2011.

Meanwhile, in April 2012, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain decided to form a union called the Arabian Gulf Union, in opposition to the Iranian efforts to form a union with Iraq. Meanwhile, America has been arming conservative Gulf monarchies, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE, Kuwait and Qatar. America’s double standard in missile proliferation in the Gulf is noteworthy. A State Department official said in early 2012 that the US was “working hard to prevent missile proliferation [in the Gulf].” Vijay Prashad has aptly inferred, “such hypocrisy could be disheartening” as it essentially means that “the Good Guys (the monarchs) can have missiles, but the Bad Guys (the Iranians) cannot”. One may agree with Kenneth Waltz that in view of Israel’s nuclear capability, a nuclear-armed Iran would bring stability in the entire region.

One is not sure if US policymakers pay heed to the Russian interests in Iran and the entire South Caucasus region; and what Russia is likely to do in the event of an US-Israeli invasion of Iran. Iran is vital for controlling (what Brzezinski wrote in his 1998 book, The Grand Chessboard) “about three-quarters of the known energy resources in the world”. Russia is least likely to allow any foreign power control Iran and the oil and gas fields in the region. Russian troops and a missile division have already been stationed in and around Iran, including Armenia and the Caspian Sea. Russian aircraft carrier Kuznetsov frequently visits the Syrian port Tartous following the conflict in that country in late 2011. It is noteworthy that in April 2012 General Leonid Ivashov, President of the Academy of Geopolitical Science wrote that “a war against Iran would be a war against Russia” and he also sought closer ties with China and India for stable Iran and Syria. American use of Azarbaijan airfields against Iran could provoke Russia to interfere, signaling a major war in Southern Caucasus and beyond. Meanwhile, Russia is quite apprehensive of NATO’s missile defense facilities in Eastern Europe. While the then President Medvedev warned the NATO in 2011 that Russia would retaliate militarily if Russia and America could not come to an agreement on the missile defense system, the Russian Chief of Chief of General Staff Nikolai Makarov went even further. On 3rd May 2012 he told senior US and NATO officials at an international conference that Russia would not hesitate using “destructive force preemptively” against NATO if the situation worsens further.

As Russia considers both Syria and Iran vital for its strategic interests in the Middle East, any US-NATO and / or Israeli attack on these countries could drag Russia into the conflict zones. Some analysts believe that America “is more seriously preparing for military action against Iran than is widely realized”. After the failure of the third round of talks between Iran and the P5+1 Group (Five UN Security Council Members plus Germany) in June 2012 over Iran’s nuclear program, America seems to be preparing for an attack on Iran in early 2013. It does not want Israel to do the job as US hawks believe “it is much better that the US ‘does the job properly’ than lets Israel, with its much smaller forces, take the lead”. The Pentagon has already earmarked what types of aircraft, bombs and missiles it should use, and from which bases – Fairford in Gloucestershire, England, and Diego Garcia to be precise – in the invasion of Iran. The US would like to use B-2s (“Stealth Bombers”) and F-22s, F-15E and F-16 strike aircraft and air-to-surface standoff missiles (JASSMS). However, as Paul Rogers observes, “nothing has been learnt [by America] from the experience of two long and bloody wars, and that is the real cause for worry”.

As discussed earlier, America needs a major war every ten years or so for reasons known to those who understand the dynamics of the American Military-Industrial Complex. We also know that a US retired General Wesley Clark has also re-iterated this by revealing the Pentagon’s confidential list of seven Muslim-majority countries that the US had been planning to invade since September 2001. The list includes Iraq, Syria and Iran. American politicians, media and think tanks have been untiringly demonizing Iran since the Islamic Revolution to justify the invasion. Meanwhile, the US administration wholeheartedly supported Saddam Hussein’s eight-year-long war against Iran (1980-1988) to bleed and weaken both the belligerents for its long-term strategic interests in the entire region. Of late we notice an alarming growth in the anti-Iranian campaigns in prestigious American dailies, magazines and think tank reports (along with the vitriol of politicians). Quoting the Associated Press the Washington Post and many other print and electronic media in America in late June and early July 2012 circulated a story about Iran’s alleged terror plan (said to have been unearthed by Kenyan officials who had arrested two Iranian “agents”) to attack the US, Britain, Israel or Saudi Arabian interests in Kenya. We even find the prestigious Time magazine and Foreign Policy publishing sensational items on Iran’s testing long-range missiles, capable of hitting Israel (with no mention of Israel’s capability to nuke countries in the region, including Iran). It is least likely that a country like Iran, which is under constant threat of attacks by Israel and/or America for its alleged nuclear program, would sponsor terrorist attacks on America or Israel to provoke retaliatory attacks by them.

By Taj Hashmi

21 August, 2012

@ Countercurrents.org

Taj Hashmi teaches at the Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, Tennessee

The Syrian crisis has been dragging on for over 18 months now with no imminently favorable results for the rebels.

There were early sparse peaceful protests here and there in cities but all vestiges of such protests are gone altogether. Instead, we see cities pass from hand to hand and people killed as part of ‘collateral damage’. ‘Collateral damage’ is not my favorite phrase. On the contrary, I find it odious. But who is really to blame for the human loss in Syria?

An absence of popular protests renders it rather far-fetched to relate the crisis to the manifestations of an uprising. For example, there has not been even one instance of self-immolation to reflect the acme of social despair and economic frustration in the country as in Cyprus, Egypt, Israel and elsewhere. This of course does not rule out the idea that there are certainly reforms to be made in Syria as in all parts of the world.

Despite an incredibly massive disinformation campaign waged by western media outlets to depict Bashar Assad as the ‘Bad Guy’ and the effluvium of money to the insurgents from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the USA and the UK to mention only a few, President Bashar Assad does not seem to be willing to step down from power and abandon it to the care of the Saudis or the Americans so they may install a West-friendly puppet regime to cater to a wide range of demands and tastes including those of the Zionists, the West and other Arab puppet regimes as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and Jordan.

There are reports that indicate the regime of Qatar has allocated USD 300 million as political incentives for Syrian officials to defect. Defection is indeed a very significant move and can gravely tarnish the image of any government and question the very legitimacy of it. So, the enemies of Syria are capitalizing on this effective ruse. Qatar’s envoy in Mauritania reportedly offered his Syrian counterpart an advance payment of one million US dollars and a monthly salary of $20,000 over 20 years in a bid to convince him to defect and publicly blast ‘the atrocities of Syrian government’. According to a report carried by Lebanese-based Al-Manar TV, Syrian envoy in Mauritania Hamad Seed Albni was also offered a permanent residence in Doha, but he declined the offer.

From a political point of view, the defectors can be shrewdly used to deal a lethal blow to a government by twisting the realities on the ground to the benefit of those who finance and support them and to the loss of the government from which they have defected. Syria’s former Prime Minister Riyad Farid Hijab, who fled to Jordan (a safe haven for defectors) last week, is typical of such a case. He made a public appearance on Tuesday for the first time since his defection and branded the Syrian regime as the ‘enemy of God’. He further said that the government of President Bashar Assad was “crumbling internally under the pressure of relentless fighting against rebels, and from betrayals by loyalists who want only to flee” (The New York Times, August 14, 2012). It is not yet known if he has defected out of his strongly internalized personal beliefs or if he has been lured into Jordan by Qatar-promised generous offers. Syrian rebels have been mobilizing Prime Minister Riyad Hijab and some ministers for the last four months, an opposition official told the Global Times after Hijab fled the country.

In addition to Hijab, some top officials have so far defected including Syrian representatives in the United Arab Emirates and Iraq, Abdel Latif al-Dabbagh and Nawaf al-Fares.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has recently made a visit to Turkey and discussed with Turkish officials how to support the rebels in Syria in order to “end the violence and begin the transition to a free, democratic Syria without Assad”.

“We are continuing to increase pressure from the outside. Our number-one goal is to hasten the end of the bloodshed and the Assad regime,” she said.

It goes without saying that the only goal the US is seeking to achieve is to put an end once and for all to a government antagonistic to Washington’s interests in the region.

Hillary Clinton said the United States and Turkey are considering imposing no-fly zones and other steps on Syria to help rebel forces.

“It is one thing to talk about all kinds of potential actions, but you cannot make reasoned decisions without doing intense analysis and operational planning,” Clinton said. “Our intelligence services, our military have very important responsibilities and roles to play so we are going to be setting up a working group to do exactly that.”

In fact, Lady Bountiful is making herculean efforts to tailor a western suit to fit the Zionists and the Wahhabis alike.

The naked truth is that any time the US steps in to force changes in a country, it certainly seeks to serves its own long-term interests. Look at Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The interests are not necessarily financial. They might be of intelligence and military interests only to be used later for expanding their colonialist pursuits.

By Ismail Salami

16 August, 2012

@ Countercurrents.org

Dr. Ismail Salami is an Iranian writer, Middle East expert, Iranologist and lexicographer. He writes extensively on the US and Middle East issues and his articles have been translated into a number of languages.

US efforts to bring down the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria focus on collusion with Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Turkey is the only regional power that could successfully front a proxy war with Syria, behind which Washington could call the shots. The AKP is also viewed as the best political force to head a Sunni-based regional alliance movement incorporating Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The US has worked to coordinate the military operation in Syria through the Syrian National Council (SNC) and the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which is controlled by Ankara and made up of most of the forces the US would seek to impose as a post-Assad client regime. This includes not just its own long-time assets, drawn from ex-members of the Baathist regime and its nominally liberal bourgeois opponents, but above all the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Brotherhood has already formed regimes that the Obama administration is working with in Tunisia and Egypt to secure US regional interests in the aftermath of the fall of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak.

Along with these layers, the US also relies on Al Qaeda elements from Iraq, Libya and elsewhere to act as shock troops, funded and armed by the Saudi and Qatari governments.

The FSA, no less than the Al Qaeda-linked groups, operates as a Sunni sectarian force. But a command structure based in Turkey and the presence of a few trusted “liberal” figures in its ranks has been used by Washington in a concerted propaganda effort to conceal the sectarian character of the opposition and its ties to Al Qaeda elements.

However, the growing role of Salafist forces has proven politically embarrassing to the US. Thus, for weeks, US officials have been placing reports in the media stressing that it has CIA operatives working to control the supply of arms to the insurgency—which the New York Times described as being “funnelled mostly across the Turkish border by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood and paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.…”

US secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s visit to Istanbul on Saturday aimed to strengthen US/Turkey cooperation and reinforce US operational control of the insurgency. Clinton made her most significant statement when she raised the possibility of establishing a no-fly zone, but her remarks also referenced “very intensive operational planning” by military and intelligence officials that aims to “get into the real details.”

Washington’s broader regional ambitions were underscored that weekend by coordinated announcements by the Treasury and State Department, accusing Iran and Hezbollah of training Syrian army forces. A Treasury statement cited Hezbollah’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, as personally overseeing the operation.

Turkey has made repeated indications that it is ready to mount a military incursion into Syria, citing the threat posed by the control established by Kurdish groups over border areas. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has warned, “We have three brigades along the border currently conducting manoeuvres there…. It is out of question for us to tolerate a structure of the terrorist organisation in the north of Syria….”

On August 7, Erdogan made an incendiary attack on Assad, asking, “Can we even say that he is a Muslim?”

Citing the danger of a Kurdish insurrection is not just a device for justifying a military assault on Syria. Erdogan indeed faces the threat of mounting unrest among Turkey’s 20 million Kurds and the prospect of a separatist movement emerging in Syria’s northeastern border area.

Syrian border regions are under the de-facto control of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the Kurdish National Council (KNC). The PYD is the more substantial force and is affiliated with Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

Erdogan has attempted to counter the PKK’s influence by seeking an accommodation with Massoud Barzani, the president of Iraqi Kurdistan. These efforts have been far from successful, with Barzani lending his support for the effort at establishing a Syrian Kurdish enclave. Moreover, the attempt to cultivate Barzani has angered the Sunni-dominated central government in Iraq, particularly a deal to set up a pipeline to carry oil and gas from Kirkuk to Ceyhan and developing trade worth billions of dollars.

Kirkuk is a disputed city that the Kurds want to incorporate into their region. Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, this month made a provocative visit to Kurdistan that included a visit to Kirkuk.

Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki said in a statement Saturday that Turkey is “dealing with the [Kurdistan] region as an independent state, and this is rejected by us.”

Total of France has also been told it will be required to sell its minority stake in the Halfaya oilfield in Iraq unless it cancels a deal acquiring licences controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government.

Writing in Middle East Online, James M. Dorsey notes that the potential fallout from the proxy war in Syria “ranges from the exodus of many of its 2.1 million Christians from what they fear will be a Sunni-dominated post-Assad Syria, to the emergence of Kurdish areas in Syria as a new flashpoint in Turkey’s intermittent war against Kurdish insurgents. It also risks a greater assertiveness of Turkey’s Alevis, a Shiite sect akin to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s Alawites that account for 20 percent of its population.”

For this reason, Erdogan’s Syrian policy has aroused significant opposition within Turkey. In Milliyet, for example, Metin Munir denounced the government for “seeking to gain points through its pro-Sunni and anti-Jewish policies…. Syria is being divided, which poses an extreme threat to Turkey.”

Erdogan has described Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the main opposition Republican People’s Party as being “just like” the Baath Party in Syria.

The PKK calculates that it will succeed in establishing an autonomous or independent region in Syria and can strike its own deal with the US and other imperialist powers. The August 13 edition of Rudaw, produced in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, interviews a prominent former member of the PKK leadership council, Nizamaddin Taj.

He states that a “Syrian Kurdistan” can be created, just as “the Kurds of Iraq benefited from the American invasion of Iraq,” providing only that Barzani does not compete with the PKK “due to pressure from Turkey or a goal of seizing power quickly in Syrian Kurdistan.”

“The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria is the only party that can seize power after the collapse of Assad, but Israel, the US and Europe are very worried about the Muslim Brotherhood of Syria and believe that they are different than the Muslim Brotherhood groups of Egypt and Tunisia,” he surmises. “The world needs a player in Syria that could rival the Sunnis in Syria. The Alawites cannot play this role. Therefore, the Kurds in Syria will become an important partner in the new Syrian state.”

Under such incendiary conditions, Erdogan’s operations on Syria’s border can become not only the occasion for a direct assault on Damascus and Aleppo, in alliance with Washington, but for a conflict that would also be waged on the soil of Iraq and Turkey itself.

By Chris Marsden

16 August, 2012

@ WSWS.org

A leaked memo that surfaced Wednesday provides a detailed blueprint for an unprovoked Israeli war against Iran. The publication of the memo coincides with multiple Israeli media reports indicating that such an attack may be imminent.

The memo was first published by US blogger and journalist Richard Silverstein and was subsequently picked up by the BBC and other media. Silverstein said that the document had been passed by a member of the Israel Defense Forces to a politician, and then on to him. He said it had been prepared for the eight-member Israeli Security Council as part of a bid by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak to convince other members of the government to support an early and unilateral Israeli strike.

The memo posted on Silverstein’s blog, Tikun Olam, states: “The Israeli attack will open with a coordinated strike, including an unprecedented cyber-attack which will totally paralyze the Iranian regime.” The aim is to shut down all communications between the Iranian government and military, leaving the country’s leadership in the dark about what is happening at key installations and bases. Carbon fiber munitions would be employed to shut down the country’s electrical grid.

Meanwhile, “A barrage of tens of ballistic missiles would be launched from Israel toward Iran,” the memo states. These would be fired by Israeli submarines from the Persian Gulf region against Iranian nuclear facilities at Arak, Isfahan, Fordo and elsewhere. They would be supplemented by “a barrage of hundreds of cruise missiles” aimed at destroying the regime’s command and control capacity and decapitating Iran’s nuclear and missile development program, targeting the “residences of senior personnel.”

These attacks would be followed up by Israeli Air Force warplanes carrying out air strikes against “targets which require further assault.”

Clearly, such an assault would inflict massive civilian casualties while plunging the entire region into chaos.

The memo is only the latest in a number of reports over the past week indicating that Netanyahu and Barak are making a concerted push for war, having publicly declared that the stalemated international negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program are a failure and that economic sanctions have not swayed Tehran to abandon the program. The Iranian government insists that its nuclear activities are for peaceful purposes.

Matan Vilnai, who is leaving his post as Israel’s “home front” defense minister to become the Zionist state’s ambassador to China, gave an interview published in the Israeli daily Maariv Wednesday in which he spelled out the government’s projections for the domestic impact of a war on Iran.

Vilnai told Maariv that “the home front is ready as never before” for a war with Iran. “There is no room for hysteria” he said, estimating that approximately 500 people within Israel would probably be killed in retaliatory strikes. “There might be fewer dead, or more, perhaps… but this is the scenario for which we are preparing, in accordance with the best expert advice.”

Israelis had no choice but to accept such a death toll, Vilnai suggested. “Just as the citizens of Japan have to realize they can have earthquakes, so the citizens of Israel have to realize that if they live here, they have to be prepared to expect missiles on the home front. It’s not pleasant for the home front, but decisions have to be made and we have to be ready.” Recent polls have indicated continued strong public opposition to a war with Iran.

The war, Vilnai said, “will last 30 days on several fronts,” according to the government’s assessments. The implication is that Israel would be involved in hostilities not only with Iran, but also with the Lebanese Shia movement Hezbollah as well Palestinian fighters in the Gaza Strip.

Vilnai is being replaced in his “home front” post by Avi Dichter, the former director of Israel’s internal security agency, Shin Bet, Netanyahu announced on Tuesday. The appointment of Dichter, who resigned from the opposition Kadima party to take the post, was widely seen as part of the war preparations as well as a move to bolster support for an attack within the government.

As director of Israel’s General Security Service (GSS) from 2000 to 2005, Dichter was responsible for choosing the targets of Israel’s so-called “targeted assassinations,” the Zionist regime’s response to the second Palestinian intifada. These extra-judicial executions claimed some 724 lives, including those of at least 228 civilian bystanders, of whom 77 were children.

New civil defense measures are being taken in preparation for war, including the rolling out of a text message system for warning the population against incoming missiles, the distribution of more gas masks, and the organization of air raid drills at schools in the north of Israel when they open next month

An indication of the seriousness with which the war threats are being taken internationally is their impact on Israel’s economy. Fears of an Israeli attack have sent the shekel to its lowest level in nearly 15 months, while the Tel Aviv stock market hit a three-week low on August 13. Meanwhile, the cost of insuring Israeli debt has risen steadily—what traders are calling a “saber-rattling” premium.

There have been multiple reports indicating that the stepped-up threats of war against Iran are driven not so much by new intelligence about the Iranian nuclear program as by the US election calendar. Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s largest circulation daily, published a report by two of its senior journalists last Friday stating, “Insofar as it depends on Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, an Israeli military strike on the nuclear facilities in Iran will take place in these coming autumn months, before the US elections in November.”

On Tuesday, the daily Ma’ariv reported that Netanyahu and Barak have set a September 25 deadline for US President Barack Obama to make a commitment that the US will take military action against Iran. The date coincides with the opening of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, which Netanyahu is scheduled to attend.

Israel’s Channel 10 News reported Tuesday that US and Israeli officials are seeking to set up a meeting between Netanyahu and Obama around that date. At that time, the sources said, Obama will supposedly commit to using military force against Iran by June 2013 if Tehran has not submitted by then to Western demands that it scrap its nuclear program.

Netanyahu’s calculation appears to be that launching a war before the November election in the US would force the Obama administration to join Israel in attacking Iran out of fear of being out-flanked on the right by Republican nominee Mitt Romney, who recently visited Israel and declared that the US should support the Israeli regime if it launches a unilateral war.

According to military analysts, Israel does not have the military capacity to wipe out Iran’s nuclear program, but could set it back at least two years through air strikes. Drawing the US into an attack holds the prospect of inflicting far more extensive damage as well as the potential for an all-out war for regime-change.

Much has been made in the Israeli media of opposition from within the top ranks of Israel’s military and its intelligence apparatus to launching a unilateral attack. A number of former military and spy chiefs have spoken publicly in opposition to Tel Aviv carrying out an imminent war. These divisions, however, are of a tactical character, involving different calculations as to how best to prepare a war that would bring in the US military.

Speaking at a Pentagon press conference Tuesday, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta voiced the view that the Israeli regime had yet to make a decision as to “whether or not they will go in and attack Iran at this time.” He stressed that Israel is an “independent… sovereign country” and would act “based on what they think is in their national security interest.”

Panetta went on to make his own provocative attack on Iran in relation to the unfolding civil war in Syria. Presenting no evidence, he claimed that Iran was “trying to train a militia within Syria to be able to fight on behalf of the regime.” The defense secretary said that Iran’s role was “dangerous” and was “adding to the killing that’s going on.” He added, “The Syrian people ought to determine their future, not Iran.”

These remarks reek of hypocrisy. The reality is that it is Israel, not Iran, that is armed with hundreds of nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, in Syria, the US and its allies, particularly the reactionary monarchies in Saudi Arabia and Qatar as well as the government in Turkey, are deeply involved in organizing, arming and training the sectarian militias that are waging a terror campaign to topple the Assad regime. The unsubstantiated charge against Iran that it is assisting its ally Syria with the training of a pro-government militia is yet another threat against Tehran and one more indication that the intervention in Syria is directed at preparing a far more dangerous war against Iran itself.

Under conditions in which the US military has deployed a massive force in the Persian Gulf, including two aircraft carrier battle groups and extensive air power, bolstered by a squadron of the most advanced F-22 fighter planes, the threats and provocations from both Washington and Tel Aviv have ratcheted up tensions to a level in which the outbreak of a full-scale war is on a hair trigger.

By Bill Van Auken

16 August, 2012

@ WSWS.org