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I am always amused when people talk about ‘US leadership’ in the world today, as I happen to live on earth and not in Hollywood. The last time the phrase was used I found myself looking at a photo of President Obama demonstrating what some people called ‘restrained masculinity’ (or some such nonsense) while watching a live video of Osama ben Laden being knocked out of action by US troops thousands of miles away. So much for postmodern definitions of masculinity, for if that is what we call restrained masculinity today then there must be a hell of a lot of macho guys watching Transformers 3 in the cinemas right now.

Anyway, all this talk of leadership has come to light again after the publication of the former US ambassador John Malott’s article entitled ‘Malaysia’s Political Awakening: A Call for US leadership’ (posted on the website of the East-West Centre EWC in Washington, re: http://www.eastwestcenter.org/ewc-in-washington/ewc-in-washington). The title of the article itself beggars belief: On the one hand there is a statement of fact (‘Malaysia’s political awakening’) and the other a moral/ethical prerogative (‘A call for US leadership’). But as Hume has noted, the leap from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ is a rather complex one, which brings into question other considerations including motive, intent and outcome/results.

Malott’s article takes a stab at being somewhat scientific by citing some index that states that Malaysians are ” the most submissive to authority of any people in the world”. Really? On what basis was this observation made? I am reminded of the Charles Humana Human rights index of the 1980s that claimed – apparently on the basis of reading the Constitution of the Philippines – that the Philippines then (in the 1980s) was one of the freest countries in the world. (Tell that to the journalists who fell foul of the Marcos regime.)

But what worries me the most about this article is that is is bound to be used to the max by the invested interests that oppose any reforms in/to Malaysia, and who are permanently on the look-out for ‘external/foreign threats and/or enemies’ to blame everything on. It is bad enough that Malaysia suffers under a mainstream vernacular press that has made all kinds of allegations about foreign funders and supporters being behind the local reform movement, (and which also suggest that Malaysians are such a passive lot that we need foreigners to reform us otherwise we will just be sitting on our arses.)

Malott’s article may do much more harm than good for it will be taken as a sign that some US policy-makers endorse and support the reform process in Malaysia, despite the fact that this process came from Malaysians themselves and from Civil Society movements in Malaysia that are home-grown and organic. Human rights NGOs in Malaysia do not need to heed the lessons of US policy makers when it comes to recognising human rights abuses in their own country, or in other countries for that matter- whether it is the detention of political opponents in Kamunting or the detention of foreigners in Guantanamo Bay.

From a slightly wider perspective I am equally concerned about what this says about how US policy makers see their role in the ASEAN region now and into the near future. After all since the 1990s almost all the American-backed dictatorships of ASEAN have collapsed. (Remember those darling dictators who were so strongly supported by the US government before, like Suharto and Marcos?) In a relatively short space of time we have seen the meteoric rise of China which is now asserting itself economically and diplomatically in the region. China’s massive investment into communicative transport infrastructure in Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar/Burma and Thailand means that it will soon have access to goods and resources in mainland Southeast Asia as never before. And China’s soft diplomacy in the region has also paid dividends: Thousands of scholarships are now being given to future technocrats from Southeast Asia to study in China, which will later serve as China’s diplomatic and economic bridge to mainland Southeast Asia too.

The US, on the other hand, is nursing an ailing economy that was rendered all the more feeble thanks to its adventurism abroad. It has its troops bogged down in Afghanistan, Iraq, parts of Central and South Asia, and suffers from over-reach and has over-stretched its resources. Faced with the problem of trying to spread finite manpower over long distances to maintain its former hegemonic role, it cannot deal with China’s growing assertiveness in areas such as the South China Sea.

In the long run, China has two factors on its side, and both are real: Firstly its massive reserves of US dollars which it is investing into areas like Central and Southeast Asia, and secondly its record as a no-nonsense serious diplomatic partner that talks about real things like investment and profit and does not lecture on human rights. (Because China knows it has no human rights record to speak of in the first place; but that makes it rather attractive to other dictatorships and military regimes too.)

Southeast Asia is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea (or caught between Mordor and Isengard if you are a Tolkien fan like me). My suspicion, however, is that in the long run realpolitik will prevail and despite all this alarmist talk of China’s rising, the governments of Southeast Asia (perhaps not civil society) will turn to China for they know that that is the side of their bread that is buttered. Yes, yes we know you Yankees will talk about universal values and all that – but its the Chinese who carry the big fat cheque book ok?

Yes, the Civil Societies of Southeast Asia need all the support they can get to further the cause of public political awareness and the deepening of our democratic institutions; but the long term threat to our fundamental liberties and human security comes from an unrestrained free market that regards all human beings as units of labour to be bought and sold like cattle; and the environment as a source of resources to plunder. America can help this process along, and stop supporting the dictators they have been keeping on their payroll for ages like Marcos, Suharto and the band of bandits currently running parts of the Arab world and Africa. But America also needs to learn that its not the only sheriff in town, and that the rise of China and India means that there are other players in the game too.

Dr Farish Ahmad-Noor (Badrol Hisham Ahmad-Noor) is Senior Fellow for the Research Cluster on Contemporary Islam in Southeast Asia; S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU).

Can Syria properly be understood as an example of a “pure” Arab popular revolution, an uprising of non-violent, liberal protest against tyranny that has been met only by repression? I believe this narrative to be a complete misreading, deliberately contrived to serve quite separate ambitions. The consequences of turning a blind eye to the reality of what is happening in Syria entails huge risk: the potential of sectarian conflict that would not be confined to Syria alone.

One of the problems with unfolding the Syria paradox is that there is indeed a genuine, domestic demand for change. A huge majority of Syrians want reform. They feel the claustrophobia of the state’s inert heavy-handedness and of the bureaucracy’s haughty indifference toward their daily trials and tribulations. Syrians resent the pervasive corruption, and the arbitrary tentacles of the security authorities intruding into most areas of daily life. But is the widespread demand for reform itself the explanation for the violence in Syria, as many claim?

There is this mass demand for reform. But paradoxically – and contrary to the “awakening” narrative – most Syrians also believe that President Bashar al-Assad shares their conviction for reform. The populations of Damascus, Aleppo, the middle class, the merchant class, and non-Sunni minorities (who amount to one quarter of the population), among others, including the leadership of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, fall into this category. They also believe there is no credible “other” that could bring reform.

What then is going on? Why has the conflict become so polarized and bitter, if there is indeed such broad consensus?

I believe the roots of the bitterness lie in Iraq, rather than in Syria, in two distinct ways. Firstly, they extend back into the thinking of the Sunni jihadi trend, as advanced by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which evolved in Iraq, surfaced violently in Lebanon, and was transposed into Syria with the return of many Syrian Salafist veterans at the “end” of the Iraq conflict.

Secondly, and separately, the bitterness in Syria is also linked to a profound sense of Sunni grievance felt by certain Arab states at Sunni political disempowerment following Prime Minister Nuri al-Malaki’s rise to power in Iraq, for which they hold Assad responsible.

In a precursor to present events in Syria, the Lebanese army too in 2007 battled with a group of Sunni militants of diverse nationalities who had all fought in Iraq. The group, Fateh al-Islam, had infiltrated Naher al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon from Syria, and had married into Palestinian families living there.

Although the core of foreign fighters was quite small in number, they were well-armed and experienced in urban combat. They attracted a certain amount of local Lebanese support too. That bloody conflict with Lebanon’s army endured for more than three months. At the end, Naher al-Bared was in ruins; and 168 of the Lebanese army lay dead.

That event was the culmination of a pattern of movements from Afghanistan and across the region into, and from, Iraq. Most of these radicalized Sunnis coming to fight the United States occupation had gravitated towards groups loosely associated with Zarqawi. Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda affiliation is not of particular significance to Syria today, but the Zarqawi “Syria” doctrine that evolved in Iraq, is crucial.

Zarqawi, like other Salafists, rejected the artificial frontiers and national divisions inherited from colonialism. Instead, he insisted on calling the aggregate of Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Jordan, and parts of Turkey and Iraq by its old name: “Bilad a-Sham”. Zarqawi and his followers were virulently anti-Shi’ite – much more so than early al-Qaeda – and asserted that a-Sham was a core Sunni patrimony that had been overtaken by the Shi’ites.

According to this narrative, the Sunni heartland, Syria, had been usurped for the last 40 years by the Shi’ite al-Assads (Alawites are an orientation within Shi’ism). The rise of Hezbollah, facilitated in part by Assad, further eroded Lebanon’s Sunni character, too. Likewise, they point to Assad’s alleged undercutting of former Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi as an act which had delivered Iraq to the Shi’ites, namely to Malaki.

From this deep grievance at Sunni disempowerment, Zarqawi allies developed a doctrine in which Syria and Lebanon were no longer platforms from which to launch jihad, but the sites for jihad (against the Shi’ites as much as others). The Syrian Salafists eventually were to return home, nursing this grievance. Many of them – Syrians and non-Syrians – settled in the rural villages lying adjacent to Lebanon and Turkey, and similarly to their confreres in Naher al-Barad, they married locally.

It is these elements – as in Lebanon in 2007 – who are the mainspring of armed violence against the Syrian security services. Unlike Egypt or Tunisia, Syria has experienced hundreds of dead and many hundreds of wounded members of the security forces and police. (Daraa is different: the armed element consists of Bedouin who migrate between Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria).

It is difficult to establish numbers, but perhaps 40,000-50,000 Syrians fought in Iraq. With their marriage into local communities, their support base is more extensive than actual numbers that travelled to Iraq. Their objective in Syria is similar to that in Iraq: to establish the conditions for jihad in Syria through exacerbating sectarian animosities – just as Zarqawi did in Iraq through his attacks on the Shi’ites and their shrines. Likewise, they seek a foothold in north-eastern Syria for a Salafist Islamic emirate, which would operate autonomously from the state’s authority.

This segment to the opposition is not interested in “reform” or democracy: They state clearly and publicly that if it costs two million lives to overthrow the “Shi’ite” Alawites the sacrifice will have been worth the loss. Drafting of legislation permitting new political parties or expanding press freedom are matters of complete indifference for them. The Zarqawi movement rejects Western politics outright.

These Salafi groups are the first side of the Syrian “box”: they do not conform to a single organization, but are generally locally-led and autonomous. Loosely inter-connected through a system of communications, they are well-financed and are externally linked.

The second side to the Syrian box are some exile groups: they too are well-financed by the US government and other foreign sources, and have external connections both in the region and the West. Some 2009 cables from the US Embassy in Damascus reveal how a number of these groups and TV stations linked to them have received tens of millions of dollars for their work from the State Department and US-based foundations, along with training and technical assistance. These exile movements believe they can successfully use the Salafist insurgents for their own ends.

The exiles hoped that a Salafist insurrection against the state – albeit confined initially to the periphery of Syria – would provoke such a backlash from the Syrian government that, in turn, a mass of people would be polarized into hostility to the state, and ultimately Western intervention in Syria would become inevitable – ideally following the Libyan model in Benghazi.

That has not happened, although Western leaders, such as French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, have done much to keep this prospect alive. It is the exiles, often secular and leftist, that are trying to “fix” the Syria narrative for the media. These expatriates have coached the Salafists in “color” revolution techniques in order to portray an unalloyed story of massive and unprovoked repression by a regime refusing reform, whilst the army disintegrates under the pressure of being compelled to kill its countrymen.

Al-Jazeera and al-Arabia have cooperated in advancing this narrative by broadcasting anonymous eyewitness accounts and video footage, without asking questions (see Ibrahim Al-Amine here, for instance).

Yet the Salafists understand that the exiles are using them to provoke incidents, and then to corroborate a media narrative of repression by the external opposition; this might actually serve Salafist interests, too.

These two components may be relatively small in numbers, but the emotional pull from the heightened voice of Sunni grievance – and its need for redress has a much wider and more significant constituency. It is easily fanned into action, both in Syria and in the region as a whole.

Saudi Arabia and Gulf states explicitly trade on fears of Shi’ite “expansionism” to justify Gulf Cooperation Council repression in Bahrain and intervention in Yemen, and the “voice” of assertive sectarianism is being megaphoned into Syria too.

Sunni clerical voices are touting the Arab “awakening” as the “Sunni revolution” in riposte to the Shi’ite revolution of Iran. In March, al-Jazeera broadcast a sermon by Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, which raised the banner of the restoration of Sunni ascendency in Syria. Qaradawi, who is based in Qatar, was joined by Saudi cleric Saleh Al-Luhaidan who urged, “Kill a third of Syrians so the other two-thirds may live.”

Clearly many of the protesters in traditional centers of Sunni irredentism, such as Homs and Hama in Syria, comprise of aggrieved Sunnis seeking the Alawites ouster, and a return to Sunni ascendency. These are not Salafists, but mainstream Syrians for whom the elements of Sunni ascendency, irredentism and reformism have conflated into a sole demand. This is a very frightening prospect for the quarter of the Syrians that form the non-Sunni minorities.

The marginalization of Sunnis in Iraq, Syria and more recently in Lebanon has aggrieved the Saudis and some Gulf states as much as it did the Salafists. The perception that Assad betrayed the Sunni interest in Iraq – although inaccurate – does help account for the vehemence of the Qatari-funded al-Jazeera’s pre-prepared information campaign against Assad.

The French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur has reported on one Stockholm media activist who paid an early secret visit to Doha, where al-Jazeera executives offered open access to the pan-Arab channel and coached the person in how to make his videos harder hitting: “Film women and children. Insist that that they use pacificist slogans.”

In contrast, Arabic press reports have been plain about the demands of Assad that Gulf states (the “Arabs of America”) and European envoys are insisting on, in return for their support. Ibrahim al-Amine, chief editor of the independent newspaper al-Akhbar, listed reform steps, which consist of disbanding the ruling party, initiating new legislation on political parties and the press, the dismissing certain officials, withdrawing the army from the streets, and beginning direct and intensive negotiations with Israel.

The envoys also suggested that such reforms might provide Assad with the pretext to break his alliance with Hezbollah and Hamas, in addition to severing the resistance aspect of Damascus’s relationship with Tehran.

Making these steps, diplomats have suggested, would facilitate improved relations with Arab states and international capitals and the prospect that oil-rich Arab states would offer Assad a $20 billion aid package, in order to smooth Assad’s path away from any economic dependency on Iran.

All of this underlines to the other dimension to events in Syria: its strategic position as the keystone of the arch spanning from southern Lebanon to Iran. It is this role that those in the US and Europe that concern themselves primarily with Israel’s security, have sought to displace. It is not so clear, however, whether Israel is as anxious as some Western officials to see Assad toppled Israeli officials profess respect for the president. And if Assad were to go, no one knows what may follow in Syria.

The US has a record of attempting to intervene in Syria that even predates the US Central Intelligence Agency’s and British intelligence’s 1953 coup in Iran against prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.

Between 1947 and 1949, American government officials intervened in Syria. Their aim was to liberate the Syrian people from a corrupt autocratic elite. What resulted was a disaster and led ultimately to the rise to power of the Assad family. Western powers may no longer remember this history, but as one BBC commentator recently noted, the Syrians surely do.

Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US effectively has been threatening the Syrian president with continuing ultimata to make peace with Israel – in a closely worked double act with Paris. Assad’s rejection of that 2003 threat has given rise to a ratcheting sequence of pressures and threats to the Syrian president, including action at the United Nations Security Council; the Special Tribunal on Lebanon over the killing of former premier Rafik al-Hariri and Israeli military action to damage Hezbollah and so to shift the balance of power in Lebanon to Assad’s disadvantage.

The US also began the liberal funding of Syrian opposition groups since at least 2005; and more recently the training of activists, including Syrian activists, on the means to avoid arrest and on secure communications techniques using unlicensed telephone networks and Internet software.

It is these techniques, plus the training of activists by Western non-governmental organizations and other media outlets, that also serve armed, militarized insurrection – as well as peaceful pro-democracy protest movements.

The US has also been active in funding directly or indirectly human-rights centers that have been so active in providing the unverified casualty figures and eyewitness accounts to the media activists. Some such as the Damascus Center for Human Rights states its partnership with the US National Endowment for Democracy and others receive funding from, for example, the Democracy Council and the International Republican Institute.

The Syrian government’s decision to ban foreign journalists has of course contributed to giving external activist sources of information the free hand by which to dominate the media narrative on Syria.

The missing side of the Syrian Pandora’s box, which has been omitted until now, is that of the Syrian army and its response to the protests. The largely Russian-trained army has no experience fighting in a complicated urban setting in which there are genuine protesters together with a small number of armed insurgents who do possess urban warfare and ambush experience from Iraq, and are intent on provoking confrontation with the security forces.

The Syrian army lacks experience in counter-insurgency; it was groomed in the Warsaw Pact school of grand maneuvers and heavy brigades, in which the word “nuance” forms no part of the vocabulary. Tanks and armored brigades are wholly unsuited for crowd control operations, especially in narrow, congested areas. It’s no surprise that such military movements killed unarmed protesters that were caught in the middle, inflaming tensions with genuine reformists and disconcerting the public.

Initially, army esteem was affected by the criticism. Though the stories of army mass desertion are disinformation, there was some erosion of military self-confidence at lower levels of command. And public confidence in the military wobbled, too, as casualties mounted. But it was a “wobble” that ended with the dramatic conflict around Jisr al-Shagour in mid-June, near the Turkish border. Just as the Lebanese nation rallied behind its army in the conflict of Naher al-Bared, so too the Syrians rallied behind their army in the face of the Salafist attack firstly on the police, and subsequently on the army and on state institutions in Jisr. And, as the details of the Jisr al-Shagour conflict unrolled before the public, sentiment turned bitter towards the insurrectionists, possibly decisively.

The images from Jisr, as well as other videos circulating of lynchings and attacks on the security forces will have shocked many Syrians, who will have perceived in them the same cruel “blood lust” that accompanied the images of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s hanging in 2006.

The Jisr events may prove to have been a pivotal moment. Army self-confidence and honor is on the rise, and the public majority now see in a way that was less evident earlier that Syria faces a serious threat unrelated to any reform agenda. Sentiment has tipped away from thinking in terms of immediate reform.

Public opinion is polarized and embittered towards the Salafists and their allies. Leftist, secular opposition circles are distancing themselves from the Salafist violence – the inherent contradiction of the divergent aspirations of the “exiles” and the Salafists, from the Syrian majority consensus, is now starkly manifest. This, essentially, is the last side to the paradoxical Syrian “box”.

In this atmosphere, dramatic reform might well be viewed by the president’s supporters as signaling weakness, even appeasement to those responsible for killing so many police and army officers at Jisr. Not surprisingly, Assad chose to use last week’s speech to speak to his constituency: to state the difficulties and threats facing Syria, but also to lay out the road map towards an exit from danger and towards substantive reform.

Western comment overwhelmingly has described the speech as “disappointing” or “short on specifics”, but this misses the point. Whereas earlier, a dramatic reform shock, such as advocated by Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu might, at a certain point, have had a transformatory “shock” effect; it is doubtful that it would achieve that now.

On the contrary, any hint of concessions having being wrested from the government by the type of violence seen at Jisr would likely anger Assad’s own constituency; and yet improbably would never transcend the categorical rejection of the militant opposition seeking to exacerbate tensions to the point of making the West determined to intervene.

By carefully setting out of some very deliberate steps and processes ahead, Assad has correctly read the mood of the majority in Syria. Time will be the judge, but Assad seems set to emerge from a complicated parallel series of challenges directed towards him from movements and states which reflect a range of grievances, special interests, and motivations. The roots of all these are very far removed from issues of legislative and political reform in Syria.

It would hardly be surprising were Assad to see the aggregate of such measures against him effectively to constitute the mounting of a soft coup. He may query the extent of US President Barack Obama’s knowledge of what has been occurring in Syria. It seems unlikely that US officials were wholly ignorant or unaware of the matrix of threats converging to threaten Assad’s stability.

And if so, it will not be for the first time that Syrian officials have noted a “left” hand-“right” hand dysfunctionality in the Obama style of foreign policy, whereby contradictory policy approaches are pursued simultaneously by different US officials.

If, as seems likely, Assad does emerge from all the challenges, the tenor of his recent response to Arab and European envoys suggests that reform will be pursued, in part, to protect Syria’s resistance ethos from such challenges in the future. In 2007, Assad noted wryly, in an unscripted addition to his speech, that he had not had the time to pursue effective reform: “We did not even have time to discuss any idea related to the party law among others. At a certain stage, the economy was a priority, but we did not have time to tackle the economic situation. We have been engaged in a decisive battle [on the external front]; and we had to win. There was no other option …”

Now “reform” is the existential external front. But if the intent of all this was intended to shift the strategic balance in the Middle East, it has not worked. It is unlikely that Assad will emerge more pliable to Western challenges – any more than he has in the past. Alastair Crooke is founder and director of Conflicts Forum and is a former adviser to the former EU Foreign Policy Chief, Javier Solana, from 1997-2003. (Copyright 2011 Alastair Crooke.)

by Alastair Crooke

Since the AKP came to power in 2002, Turkey’s political landscape has changed significantly. Despite the AKP’s resounding victory in the 2011 election, they fell short of the two-thirds majority that would have enabled the AKP to unilaterally adopt a draft constitution. This article analyses the 2011 Turkish elections and the implications of the results.

The results of Turkey’s parliamentary elections, held on Sunday 12 June 2011, reflect a more accurate picture of the Turkish political scene than might have been assumed from some pre-election predictions. Indeed, the parliamentary representation of the four political parties that won seats is an indication of their real and solid support among the Turkish people.

The importance of these Turkish parliamentary elections was indisputable. Within Turkey the question on many people’s minds was whether the election results would give the prime minister, and president of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an adequate opportunity to stamp his mark on the content of a new draft constitution for Turkey. That a new constitution is necessary is agreed upon by most of Turkey’s political forces. Beyond Turkey’s borders, where the winds of Arab revolution rage, others were waiting to see whether the elections would result in the weakening or strengthening of Erdogan’s powers and his popular mandate.

The election result was a major victory for Erdogan and his party, but, for reasons that are easy to understand and had been predicted, the outcome cannot be viewed as an outright and conclusive AKP victory.

The elections

This was the third time that the AKP entered the Turkish electoral race since it was founded in 2001. The AKP participated in its first election a year after its founding, and then again in 2007. This 2011 election is the first to take place since the constitutional amendment that limited parliamentary terms to four years. About twenty parties participated in the election, with the most notable being the AKP, which has been in power since 2002; the Republican People’s Party (CHP), which is the main opposition party; the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) which is also an opposition radical nationalist party; and the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), whose candidates ran as independents but are expected to announce themselves as a parliamentary bloc once parliament convenes. However, reports suggest that thirty of the thirty-six elected members who would make up the BDP’s parliamentary representation are threatening to boycott parliament if six jailed deputies representing the same bloc are not freed. As had been expected, none of the smaller parties obtained the ten percent minimum requirement for parliamentary representation

A notable aspect of this election was that, since electioneering began, the AKP targeted the MHP with the aim of preventing the latter from reaching the ten percent threshold, and thereby ensuring over 367 seats for the ruling party. In Turkish politics, 367 is the magic number, as it is the number of seats required for a two-thirds majority. Such a majority would have enabled the AKP to adopt a draft constitution without having to resort to a popular referendum.

In terms of the overall atmosphere and the electoral procedures followed, these elections were the freest and most democratic that Turkey has witnessed since the transition to democracy over sixty years ago. Citizens were able to register to vote with nothing more than their official identity cards, enabling about fifty million Turkish citizens to cast their ballots. More than 7 600 candidates competed for the 550 parliamentary seats in the Grand National Assembly.

Unlike during previous parliamentary elections which the AKP participated in, there was a marked absence of debate on the issue of ‘secularism’ or, as it was then raised, ‘fear for the future of the republic and its values’. It has become clear to opposition parties that they cannot defeat the AKP with such rhetorical positions. Instead, the political debate raged around economic and developmental issues, unemployment, equitable distribution of wealth, and – above all – the expected new constitution. The three leaders of the main parties: Erdogan (AKP), Kemal Kilicdaroglu (CHP), and Devlet Bahceli (MHP), also played significant electioneering roles. While the AKP made a tremendous push to achieve gains in the western coastal regions of Anatolia, an area that has always been considered a CHP stronghold, it is believed that traditional CHP voters voted tactically by casting their vote for the MHP in an effort to boost the latter’s chances of returning to parliament, and thereby denying the AKP its desired two-thirds majority

The results

While the election did not fundamentally alter the relative standing of the Turkish parties, it is important to examine what has changed since the 2007 election.

Compared to 2007, the ruling AKP’s share of the popular vote increased by four points, reaching fifty percent of the popular vote. This means that the party has not only won three consecutive elections, but has also succeeded in steadily increasing its voter base. Such a result is unprecedented; even Adnan Menderes – who won three successive elections in the 1950s – did not achieve anything similar. In terms of the total number of the AKP’s parliamentary seats, these fell from 336 (in 2007) to 326. The drop was a result of the electoral commission’s changes to the electoral district boundaries, changes that were carried out with the support of the AKP government. Despite the new boundaries being considered more representative of the country’s changing demographic distribution, the redrawing of boundaries harmed the party’s prospects. Independent candidates, mostly supporters of the banned Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), achieved much better results than they did in the 2007 elections, gaining ten seats to make a total of thirty-six. The AKP also made major inroads by penetrating traditional strongholds of the CHP in the coastal cities, winning in Antalya, and taking second place in Izmir.

The CHP also increased its share of the popular vote by four points: from twenty-two to twenty-six percent. This is a modest increase considering that the party’s new leadership has almost entirely abandoned its traditional Kemalist discourse. The party also benefited from the change in the electoral district boundaries, raising the number of its parliamentary seats from 112 to 135. The CHP’s inability to challenge its AKP rivals, and the unprecedented decline in its performance in coastal cities have led to calls for an emergency party congress to replace party leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu.

Since the last election, the MHP’s support has declined by only one percent of the popular vote (from fourteen to thirteen percent). However, the MHP was the major loser in terms of parliamentary seats, dropping from seventy-one seats in 2007 to fifty-three seats. Despite the AKP’s targeted campaign against the MHP, the MHP remains in parliament. The MHP has also managed to survive a series of scandals that affected a number of its candidates. Arguably, the party’s maintaining its parliamentary presence is a success in itself and has been a factor in promoting some popular sympathy for the party, as well as bringing in some tactical votes from CHP supporters.

These results have enabled each of these three parties to claim victory: the AKP can celebrate passing the fifty percent mark, a major achievement in a political arena known for its fragmentation; the CHP can point to its modest increases in the percentage of the popular vote as well as parliamentary seats gained; and the MHP can claim success in withstanding the AKP’s targeted campaign against it, and of remaining in parliament. The incontrovertible success, however, is that of the Kurdish bloc, whose independent candidates won a significant number of parliamentary seats, confirming that they are a force to be reckoned with in Turkish politics. This is also an indication that the ‘Kurdish question’ will continue to trouble the Turkish state for some time.

Implications of the elections

The first implication of these results is that the AKP’s position in Turkish politics is still strong, and its rival parties remain too weak to pose a real challenge to its popularity, its control over parliament, and its ability to lead and govern the country. Instead of falling prey, as is often the case with democracies, to an accumulation of errors that comes with being in power for nearly a decade, the AKP has remained largely unscathed. Indeed, it seems that the party has steadily managed to attract and increase the support and confidence of the Turkish electorate.

The results, however, also contain another message for the AKP and its leader Erdogan, whose growing confidence has been clearly manifest, of late. Despite the party’s stated goal of taking control of two-thirds of the parliamentary seats, the Turkish people decided not to cede this mandate to the party and its leader. Moreover, the party needed four more legislative votes to achieve the sixty percent that is necessary to bring the draft constitution to a popular referendum. Given these results, it is perhaps necessary for the party and Erdogan to express some humility.

These results also suggest that the drafting of the new constitution will not be an easy process. Erdogan will have to either broker a consensus on the matter, thereby sacrificing part of his ambition for fundamental change in the Turkish political system, or to win over four parliamentarians from outside of his party. In the latter scenario, the draft constitution would then go to a popular referendum, in which case Erdogan would also have to rely on popular support to endorse a constitution that subscribes to his and his party’s vision – regardless of the support or opposition of the other parliamentary blocs. Over the next year or two, the AKP leader will have to decide which of the two paths is better for his political career, and what he will want to do by the end of this parliamentary session, which is his last as head of government.

Another result of these elections is that the AKP has attained greater freedom in dealing with external affairs, and a greater sense of public support for its foreign policy. Undoubtedly, the coming months will see events in Syria occupying the highest priority; this amidst concerns of the Turkish government, as well as that of Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who has a parliamentary seat for the first time in his political career.

From another perspective, the election results offer a far more accurate picture of the Turkish political scene than what some had predicted. Changed electoral constituency boundaries and hotly debated election issues aside, the four political forces that won seats in the parliament reflect the real and solid presence of these currents within Turkish popular sentiment: the Kurdish bloc reflects a real popular political bloc, and its success confirms the importance and intractability of the Kurdish issue; the MHP represents the bloc of radical Turkish nationalist voters who subscribe neither to the position of the AKP – with its conservative neo-Ottoman discourse – nor to that of the CHP with its Kemalist pretensions. If the AKP represents the most coherent expression of Turkey’s reconciliation with its history, the different veins of its identity, and the world that surrounds them, then the CHP is the clearest expression of the continuity, whether real or perceived, of a Kemalist political consciousness that the AKP has been unable to absorb. It is likely that the picture of the Turkish political arena that is reflected in these election results will will not subjected to significant changes in the foreseeable future.

He is just a killer. Got it? No? Don’t you read the papers, watch the news, listen to the experts? Heck, don’t you see that Muslim organisations are so accustomed to being taken for granted that they jump in claiming that they did it. Ah, one more terrorist attack. But Norway? Why not? There are Muslims there and somewhere in Islam Norway too must have been mentioned. It did not work. This time someone was scoring points. That is what it is made out to be when a nice blond, clean-shaven guy in cop/military uniform, confesses.

He is not called a terrorist, no blanket judgement yet. Even as radical, he has his reasons – he is anti-Islam. He wreaked this terrorist attack to draw world attention to the end of multiculturalism. The New York Times had this precious nugget:

“Yet, some of the primary motivations cited by the suspect in Norway, Anders Behring Breivik, are now mainstream issues. Mrs. Merkel, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Prime Minister David Cameron in Britain all recently declared an end to multiculturalism. Multiculturalism “has failed, utterly failed,” Mrs. Merkel told fellow Christian Democrats last October, though stressing that immigrants were welcome in Germany.”

Is this not great? The bloke is now supposedly speaking or echoing the views of world leaders and the international media is going along with it?

The fact that he is seen to have acted alone puts him in the romanticised category of the lone ranger. He has himself said about how it was all “in the head”. They might just analyse it as mental trauma due to seeing so many immigrants around; maybe he suffered from claustrophobia; perhaps he was just playing some video games and decided to re-enact those scenes in real life. It would be attributed to madness. I would like to know why other sorts of such attacks are not. Because, they are not. They are planned and always have a purpose. There is, therefore, no reason to give him the benefit of doubt and to put him on a psychiatric couch only because he was alone. He has already displayed enough gall to declare that he wants to explain his stand. Explain the killing of a hundred people? He also wants to appear in uniform for the court hearings.

I am afraid but all this adds to the ‘heroism’. It won’t be stated in so many words, yet the subtext is clear. In a rather surprising statement quoted in the NYT piece, Joerg Forbrig, an analyst at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin who has studied far-rights issues, said, “I’m not surprised when things like the bombing in Norway happen, because you will always find people who feel more radical means are necessary. It literally is something that can happen in a number of places and there are broader problems behind it.”

Stunningly simplistic. “More radical means are necessary”? So says the Al Qaeda too, but they are not given this Prozac kind of treatment. “Broader problems behind it”? Sure. While radical Islamists train and prune everything, except their beards, they could have broader problems as well – like their countries being decimated by powers hat have no business to be on their land in the first place, and every person being considered a suspect if s/he is a Muslim, and their clothes and lifestyle being questioned.

Had this terrorist – yes, do use this term – been wearing a hijaab would it be seen as concern over multiculturalism? After all, when westerners go bang-bang and bomb-bomb in Iraq and Afghanistan, those places are superimposed by another culture and a fascist regime that seeks puppets to play with. Multiculturalism is not only about one nation deciding who the bad ones are, if they have granted them visas and they are working and in many ways contributing. If they are criminals, treat them as just that. Not as terror suspects. That does not happen. The chap at the pharmacy could well be a terrorist and if he takes an afternoon break for prayers, then he has had it. The teacher who wears a hijaab could be smuggling in Islamic literature for the bright kids who will soon turn into terrorists. Europe and America cannot take such risks.

We will forget the evangelists, the guys who burn the Quran, the people who say god told them to do it, the guys who move away if they see a person who does not look like them. Oh, they love chicken tikka and now vegetable jalfrezi. The curry kingdom was great till it lasted. Now it is time to just take the recipe and make it very clear who the boss is. As though it is not evident. As though it were any different when they ‘got Saddam’, they ‘got Osama’.

Breivik’s terrorism is as bad as any other is, so let us stop making excuses. The immigrant problem is there and must be dealt with by the relevant department. Neo-Nazi groups have been active long before 9/11. The new xenophobia has got a pedestal.

I also have problems with questions about how Muslims must integrate into societies they adopt as home. It brings the idea of globalisation down to a convenient ghetto. It is like Wall Street where you can get bullish and wager over funds the world over sitting at a desk. A closed group. You go to Muslim societies and Westerners work there and make no change in their lifestyle. They are immigrants in Middle-East countries that clearly call themselves Islamic and have never pretended otherwise. There is talk about how people cannot wear bikinis and I have maintained that a bikini is not a dress, not even casual smart. It is meant for the beach and beaches in those countries do permit people to wear what they want.

This is a digression because multiculturalism has different meanings. The West has always promoted itself as such a haven, a melting pot. It appears to be a simmering pot where discontent is now being given a more aggressive form. It is done slyly, as a protective garb.

Breivik’s “individual capacity” act is one such manoeuvre. This is what he had written before going on the killing spree about how he will be portrayal in the media after the act:

“However, since I manifest their worst nightmare (systematical and organized executions of multiculturalist traitors), they will probably just give me the full propaganda rape package and propagate the following accusations: pedophile, engaged in incest activities, homosexual, psycho, ADHD, thief, non-educated, inbred, maniac, insane, monster etc. I will be labeled as the biggest (Nazi-)monster ever witnessed since WW2.”

He gets points for getting the media down pat. It has stopped being a kangaroo court; it is now all about pop psychology.

Those people who died and their families do not know why this happened. Do they agree with him? I won’t be surprised if days later some adept media person will land up at their doorstep and get an ‘understanding’ version of the misguided soul who was disturbed by what the world was turning into because their jobs and lives were at stake. He was frightened, do you understand?

And you will see images of Islamic terror more than this act. There will be great editing. Shots of Norwegians weeping. Cut to some bombing by Islamist groups.

Who will this help? Both. The West in its endeavour to keep the ‘war on terror’ iron hot. And the radical Islamic groups who are so gung-ho about their role that the media attention will in fact help them by default. They did not do it, but they could. They always can.

Neither will realise that the world is not about them, but about people who are just living their lives.

By Farzana Versey

25 July, 2011

Countercurrents.org

President Obama has ripped up the US constitution for Nato’s ill-considered Libyan adventure. Congress must restore sense

This week, I am sponsoring legislation in the United States Congress that will end US military involvement in Libya for the following reasons:

First, the war is illegal under the United States constitution and our War Powers Act, because only the US Congress has the authority to declare war and the president has been unable to show that the US faced an imminent threat from Libya. The president even ignored his top legal advisers at the Pentagon and the department of justice who insisted he needed congressional approval before bombing Libya.

Second, the war has reached a stalemate and is unwinnable without the deployment of Nato ground troops, effectively an invasion of Libya. The whole operation was terribly ill-considered from the beginning. While Nato supports the Benghazi-based opposition (situated in the oil-rich north-east), there is little evidence that the opposition has support of the majority of Libyans. The leading opposition group, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (which had reportedly been backed by the CIA in the 1980s), should never have launched an armed civil war against the government if they had no chance absent a massive Nato air campaign and the introduction of Nato troops. Their reckless actions, encouraged by western political, military and intelligence interests, created the humanitarian crisis that was then used to justify the Nato war campaign.

Third, the United States cannot afford it. The US cost of the mission is projected to soon reach more than $1bn, and we are already engaged in massive cutbacks of civil services for our own people.

It is not surprising that a majority of Republicans, Democrats and independents alike think the US should not be involved in Libya.

This war is misguided. An invasion would be a disaster. Nato already is out of control, using a UN mandate allowing for protection of civilians as the flimsy pretext for an unauthorised mission of regime change through massive violence. In a just world, the Nato commander would be held responsible for any violations of international law. As a means of continuing the civil war, Nato member France and coalition ally Qatar have both admitted shipping weapons to Libya, in open violation of the United Nations arms embargo.

In the end, the biggest casualty of this game of nations will be the legitimacy of the UN, its resolutions and mandates, and international rule of law. This condition must be reversed. The ban on arms supplies to Libya must be enforced, not subverted by Nato countries. The US must cease its illegal and counterproductive support for a military resolution now.

The US Congress must act to cut off funds for the war because there is no military solution in Libya. Serious negotiations for a political solution must begin to end the violence and create an environment for peace negotiations to fulfil the legitimate, democratic aspirations of the people. A political solution will become viable when the opposition understands that regime change is the privilege of the Libyan people, not of Nato.

By Dennis Kucinich

Dennis Kucinich is US Congressman from Ohio and a former presidential candidate in the United States.

© 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited

Let’s be absolutely clear, it wasn’t experts speculating, it was guessers guessing – and they were terrible

I went to bed in a terrible world and awoke inside a worse one. At the time of writing, details of the Norwegian atrocity are still emerging, although the identity of the perpetrator has now been confirmed and his motivation seems increasingly clear: a far-right anti-Muslim extremist who despised the ruling party.

Presumably he wanted to make a name for himself, which is why I won’t identify him. His name deserves to be forgotten. Discarded. Deleted. Labels like “madman”, “monster”, or “maniac” won’t do, either. There’s a perverse glorification in terms like that. If the media’s going to call him anything, it should call him pathetic; a nothing.

On Friday night’s news, they were calling him something else. He was a suspected terror cell with probable links to al-Qaida. Countless security experts queued up to tell me so. This has all the hallmarks of an al-Qaida attack, they said. Watching at home, my gut feeling was that that didn’t add up. Why Norway? And why was it aimed so specifically at one political party? But hey, they’re the experts. They’re sitting there behind a caption with the word “EXPERT” on it. Every few minutes the anchor would ask, “What kind of picture is emerging?” or “What sense are you getting of who might be responsible?” and every few minutes they explained this was “almost certainly” the work of a highly-organised Islamist cell.

In the aftermath of the initial bombing, they proceeded to wrestle with the one key question: why do Muslims hate Norway? Luckily, the experts were on hand to expertly share their expert solutions to plug this apparent plot hole in the ongoing news narrative.

Why do Muslims hate Norway? There had to be a reason.

Norway was targeted because of its role in Afghanistan. Norway was targeted because Norwegian authorities had recently charged an extremist Muslim cleric. Norway was targeted because one of its newspapers had reprinted the controversial Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

Norway was targeted because, compared to the US and UK, it is a “soft target” – in other words, they targeted it because no one expected them to.

Then it became apparent that a shooting was under way on Utoya island, the security experts upgraded their appraisal. This was no longer a Bali-style al-Qaida bombing, but a Mumbai-style al-Qaida massacre. On and on went the conjecture, on television, and in online newspapers, including this one. Meanwhile, on Twitter, word was quickly spreading that, according to eyewitnesses, the shooter on the island was a blond man who spoke Norwegian. At this point I decided my initial gut reservations about al-Qaida had probably been well founded. But who was I to contradict the security experts? A blond Norwegian gunman doesn’t fit the traditional profile, they said, so maybe we’ll need to reassess . . . but let’s not forget that al-Qaida have been making efforts to actively recruit “native” extremists: white folk who don’t arouse suspicion. So it’s probably still the Muslims.

Soon, the front page of Saturday’s Sun was rolling off the presses. “Al-Qaeda” Massacre: NORWAY’S 9/11 – the weasel quotes around the phrase “Al Qaeda” deemed sufficient to protect the paper from charges of jumping to conclusions.

By the time I went to bed, it had become clear to anyone within glancing distance of the internet that this had more in common with the 1995 Oklahoma bombing or the 1999 London nail-bombing campaign than the more recent horrors of al-Qaida.

While I slept, the bodycount continued to rise, reaching catastrophic proportions by the morning. The next morning I switched on the news and the al-Qaida talk had been largely dispensed with, and the pundits were now experts on far-right extremism, as though they’d been on a course and qualified for a diploma overnight.

Some remained scarily defiant in the face of the new unfolding reality. On Saturday morning I saw a Fox News anchor tell former US diplomat John Bolton that Norwegian police were saying this appeared to be an Oklahoma-style attack, then ask him how that squared with his earlier assessment that al-Qaida were involved. He was sceptical. It was still too early to leap to conclusions, he said. We should wait for all the facts before rushing to judgment. In other words: assume it’s the Muslims until it starts to look like it isn’t – at which point, continue to assume it’s them anyway.

If anyone reading this runs a news channel, please, don’t clog the airwaves with fact-free conjecture unless you’re going to replace the word “expert” with “guesser” and the word “speculate” with “guess”, so it’ll be absolutely clear that when the anchor asks the expert to speculate, they’re actually just asking a guesser to guess. Also, choose better guessers. Your guessers were terrible, like toddlers hypothesising how a helicopter works. I don’t know anything about international terrorism, but even I outguessed them.

As more information regarding the identity of the terrorist responsible for the massacre comes to light, articles attempting to explain his motives are starting to appear online. And beneath them are comments from readers, largely expressing outrage and horror. But there are a disturbing number that start, “What this lunatic did was awful, but . . .”

These “but” commenters then go on to discuss immigration, often with reference to a shaky Muslim-baiting story they’ve half-remembered from the press. So despite this being a story about an anti-Muslim extremist killing Norwegians who weren’t Muslim, they’ve managed to find a way to keep the finger of blame pointing at the Muslims, thereby following a narrative lead they’ve been fed for years, from the overall depiction of terrorism as an almost exclusively Islamic pursuit, outlined by “security experts” quick to see al-Qaida tentacles everywhere, to the fabricated tabloid fairytales about “Muslim-only loos” or local councils “banning Christmas”.

We’re in a frightening place. Guesswork won’t lead us to safety.

By Charlie Brooker

24 July 2011

@guardian.co.uk

Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up.

Studs Terkel

The situation in Syria seems to have reached a critical turning point. There is a possibility that popular protests continue as they have since mid-March and that they continue to be met by military and police violence in violation of the spirit and letter of humanitarian international law. The Syrian army and militias have responded to unarmed nonviolent demonstrations with disproportionate force. Humanitarian international law has as its base the Martens Clause named after the legal advisor of the Russian Czar at the time of the Hague Peace Conferences. The clause is included in the Preamble to the 1899 Hague Convention. It is taken up again in Article 3, common to the four Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949. The Martens Clause states that “the means that can be used to injure an enemy are not unlimited” but must meet the test of ‘proportionality’ meaning that every resort to armed force be limited to what is necessary for meeting military objectives. The shooting of unarmed demonstrators does not meet the test of proportionality.

For several months, the Syrian people have been sending a clear message to President Bashar al-Assad: The time has come for him to step aside.

However, there seems to be a real possibility of negotiations between the government led by President Bashar al-Assad and members of different opposition groups. President Assad, after two months of silence during which time demonstrations spread and repression increased on June 20 has called for a “national dialog” that could usher in changes. However, there were few specifics as to what topics such a national dialog would cover.

Many opposition leaders consider the proposal as a bid for more time during which arrests continue and over 1,000 persons have been killed in response to non-violent demonstrations. Moreover, it is not clear that the leaders of the longstanding but divided leadership of opposition groups are in control of the demonstrators. As in Tunisia and Egypt, Syrian demonstrators are young, come from an increasingly educated middle class and are influenced by the spirit of the ‘Arab Spring’ rather than by the ideology of the historic opposition groups.

As a sign that the proposal for a national dialog was real, the government allowed a meeting on June 27 in Damascus of some opposition figures. Those who met stressed that they did not claim to speak for all the demonstrators, and not all open opposition figures attended. In addition there are opposition figures in exile, and those in hiding fearful of arrest. There are also, no doubt, those who are waiting to see which way the wind blows. President Assad has spoken of starting the national dialog on July 12, but it is not clear who will attend and how representative they will be.

The savagery of the Damascus regime in suppressing dissent knows no boundaries. President Assad will resort even to heavy military force to silence his own people.

Civil society participation — religious, education, labor, women, cultural and media — is crucial to build public support for a real national dialog and to broaden constituencies for peace. A national dialog is merely the beginning of a deep reordering of the political and economic structures and relationships among elements of the society. There is a need for continual adjustments to adapt to new developments. There also needs to be quick post-agreement benefits to give people a stake in the readjustment process and to reduce the capacity of spoilers.

In some conflict situations, external mediators from the United Nations, national governments or nongovernmental organizations have played a useful role. Currently, the situation seems to have reached a stalemate when neither the government nor the protesters can resolve the crisis on their own terms. There are few signs that the government is open to external mediators, but with refugees from Syria going to Turkey, there is a real danger that the conflict will take on trans-frontier dimensions. A real national dialog could set out a framework for reforms which have been promised in the past but which never came to birth. As a result, sentiments have hardened, and trust has been lost. As external but concerned parties, we should encourage a broadly-based national dialog as a first important step on the road to reform.

By René Wadlow

René Wadlow is Senior Vice President and Chief Representative to the United Nations Office at Geneva of the Association of World Citizens.

Industrial civilisation has changed everything. At the dawn of the petrochemical age in 1750, atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide were estimated to be 280 parts per million (ppm). In 1960, they were around 360 ppm. In May 2011 levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide had reached over 394 ppm.

The oceans of the earth are presently becoming more acidic at ten times the rate that preceded the last mass extinction event at the end of the Cenozoic era tens of millions of years ago.

And while Arctic sea ice cover has been steadily declining in recent years, NASA scientists have confirmed that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at a rapidly accelerating rate.

There are many who have read the warning signs. Half a century ago, Rachel Carson alerted us to the damaging consequences of industrial methods of agriculture on ecosystems everywhere. Soon after, Fritz Schumacher urged us to rethink economics in view of the rapacious influence of corporate globalisation. And both Rosalie Bertell and Helen Caldicott have long warned of the silent, slow and spectrous death emanating from the nuclear industry.

The UN Climate Conferences at Copenhagen in 2009 and Mexico City in 2010 were effectively neutered by the influence of mining and energy companies acting through Western governments, notably the US and Canada. Closer to home, both Liberal and Labour parties are desperately outreaching each other in promised tax cuts while arguing about how best to lower carbon emissions by a sad 5% by 2020.

Meanwhile, 250 million tons of coal – over 10 tons for every man, woman and child living in this country – and 10,000 tons of yellow cake – uranium oxide – continue to be shipped out of Australia each year as part of a non-negotiable assault on the earth, felicitously described as a “mining boom”, that has replaced the sheep’s back on which the Australian economy was once carried.

Those who have understood the magnitude of the environmental situation that presently confronts us are faced with a two-fold task. The first is to clearly identify the nature of those forces that have brought us to where we are. The second is to envision the changes needed – both in our thinking and in our actions – that might reverse the dangerous situation within which we find ourselves, or at the least, prepare future generations for living on the earth in a very different manner.

One of the most articulate and visionary allies in this task is the late Thomas Berry, theologian, mystic and cultural historian. Berry combines prophetic clarity with a penetrative erudition grounded in the intellectual and spiritual traditions of both West and East.

His vision was slowly formed through many decades of studying the wisdom traditions and through observing the effects of industrial civilisation on the earth’s ecosystems during the twentieth century. Thomas Berry offers a truly heroic vision to counter the pathologies of distraction and trivialisation borne of the post-modern enthralment with transience and distaste for grand narratives.

The Turning Wheel

The grandness of Berry ‘s scope was first given impetus through his early immersion in the Scienza Nuova of Giambattista Vico which was published in 1725. Berry ‘s doctoral thesis in the 1940s was based on Vico’s work. It introduced him to a way of thinking about history that was mythic in its dimensions.

Vico’s study was in part a response to the declaration of Descartes a century earlier that the world and the creatures within it were as clock-work mechanisms that could be manipulated and controlled by the rational intellect. Like William Blake, Giambattista Vico baulked at the constriction of such a view and sought to restore the centrality of poetic wisdom and creative imagination to human purpose and experience.

Vico was of the view that there is a cohesiveness within history, that history is not a random and contingent cascade of events and circumstances, but rather carries an inherent pattern and order that can be discerned through careful examination and reflection. This view mirrored the intuition of many indigenous cultures and the central understandings of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, all of which hold a cyclical rather than a linear view of history. Vico developed his insight into a formal structure, describing the history of humanity as a repeating cycle of ages.

He called the first of these periods The Age of the Gods . Such periods are characterised by theocratic systems of government maintained by clearly articulated and widely accepted mythologies and belief systems. The second age or epoch he named The Age of the Heroes . Such times are characterised by the rule of hereditary monarchies and their associated aristocracies and are usually marked by the presence of defined social classes, including a slave caste. The third phase described by Vico is The Age of Men which is characterised by a preference for more democratic forms of government and a valuing of rationality and human freedom. Implicit in this third phase is a tendency to increasing decadence and the consequent rise of a barbarism that brings about the progressive dissolution of all the social and institutional structures that had enabled its development. According to Vico’s understanding, the collapse of this third age is once again followed by a return of the prototypical Age of the Gods . And thus the wheel of time and human history rolls on.

Following Vico , Berry elaborated his own system which incorporated much of the new knowledge that had emerged since Vico’s time. Berry describes the prototypical age as Tribal-Shamanic , wherein the world is experienced as a field of living potencies and fluid energies. This is followed by the Traditional-Civilisational epoch, where human life is shaped by well-defined cultural patterns and directed by hierarchical institutions. Berry identifies the third age as the Scientific-Technological , the time within which we presently find ourselves.

During this Scientific-Technological phase, all previously established cultural forms, rituals and practices are subordinated to the norms of an allegedly “enlightened” rationality. All earlier ways of knowing are usurped by “scientific” epistemologies that have become the sole arbiters determining whole new sets of beliefs, practices and technologies. Like Vico, Thomas Berry views this third age as carrying the seeds of its own demise. But rather than being followed by a return to another prototypical Tribal-Shamanic age, Berry suggests that we are now poised to transition to a fourth age, an age he calls The Ecozoic Era .

On the Ecozoic Era

According to Thomas Berry, we are presently hovering on the edge of an immense cultural and existential abyss. He is of the view that only a change of epic dimensions will enable us to successfully navigate our way through the accumulated detritus of a dying industrial civilisation. He proposes that this can only be accomplished by consciously envisioning the task ahead, a task which he refers to as The Great Work . The changes to be made are not so much in our methods, but in our minds and more particularly, in our relationship with the earth’s living systems. The rest will then follow.

Thomas Berry believes that we are at a crucial point in the history of humanity. The activities of industrial civilisation have irreversibly altered the character of life on earth. This has occurred at every level from forest to prairie ecosystems, inland lakes and waterways to intercontinental oceans, and animal and human habitats everywhere. He reflects :

“We are changing not simply the human. We are changing the chemistry of the planet. Even the geological structure and functioning of the planet. We are disturbing the atmosphere, the hydrosphere and the geosphere all in a manner that is undoing the work of nature over some hundreds of millions, even billions of years. The genetic strains we have extinguished will never return.”

Such profound disturbances herald a progressive collapse both of the physical and institutional structures that are associated with the Scientific-Technical age and the fixed mindset that has blinded us to the unanticipated consequences of industrial civilisation.

Rather than preparing for a return to primitive conditions that such a collapse might suggest, Berry suggests that we harness our new-found understanding of how the phenomenal world was formed and is maintained and direct that understanding towards living with the Earth in a mutually enhancing manner. Such co-operative participation with the natural world represents, for Berry , the quintessential change that will bring about the Ecozoic Era.

The Ecozoic era therefore represents a potency within the human imagination that can heal the divided consciousness that has overseen the destruction of numerous ecosystems and caused great damage to delicate systems of dynamic interdependence that have emerged over periods of hundreds of millions of years. Berry is not proposing that we beaver away with recycling systems, energy efficiency and pollution controls, important though these may be. He reminds us that the primary change needs to occur in our minds, in our relationships with each other and the world, in our sensitivity to and awareness of the fragility of natural systems, and in our recovery of a sense of awe and wonder for the created world. The rest will then follow.

Tributaries

Berry ‘s intellectual and spiritual development were strongly shaped by his long-standing study of both Asian thought and indigenous cultures. After serving as a US Army Chaplain in Germany from 1951 to 1954, he spent the next three decades teaching in a number of American universities. During that time, he established programs in Asian religions at Seton Hall, St. John’s University , Fordham University , Columbia University , and the University of San Diego . His programs encompassed Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism.

Thomas Berry was also strongly influenced by the ideas of anthropologist and fellow priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Berry served as president of the American Teilhard Association over a 12 year period from 1975 to 1987. He shared Teilhard’s view that consciousness is an attribute of the evolutionary process itself, and not merely a peculiar physiological epiphenomenon associated with the activity of neurotransmitters. For both Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Berry, the world was charged with energy as alive as any creature within it.

Thomas Berry holds that each of us has the capacity to enter into deep communion with rivers, with clouds, with forests and with mountains, but that most of us have lost that capacity in the present time. This alienation from the natural world has contributed to the objectification of its living and non-living components and a myopic disregard of the effects of our actions on the earth and its living systems.

Berry believes that the roots of our present attitude are to be found in the anthropocentrism of the biblical and the Greek humanist traditions. Both found meaning and purpose in the human community and dismissed or neglected the “primary sacred community”, the phenomenal world itself.

This separation from nature was intensified by the influence of the sixteenth century English proto-scientist Francis Bacon who was among the first to formally objectify and commodify the world. Bacon’s radical revisioning of the scope of human agency was furthered by the proclamations of Rene Descartes on the nature of mind and matter and the subsequent adoption of his views and methods by an emerging scientific community. The phenomenal world and the living things within it were increasingly viewed as objects to be explored and exploited in whatever way was deemed useful for human purposes.

We have built up then destroyed cities, cut deep into mountains and hauled out coal and metals, cut down rainforests and created new wastelands, dammed great rivers and ruined wetland ecosystems, drilled dry deserts and contracted armies to protect pipelines, mindlessly disgorged our accumulated wastes into the air, the earth and the sea without regard for anything but our own benefit.

We have had no philosophical or ethical system in place that would urge sensitivity, caution or restraint in such matters. Neither religion nor humanistic ethics warned us of the folly and the danger of continuing this relentless assault upon the earth. Berry reflects:

“We have a moral sense of suicide, homicide and genocide, but no moral sense of biocide, the killing of the life systems themselves and even the killing of the earth”

The Tragic Climax

The activities of industrial civilisation have seriously undermined the earth’s capacity to maintain the delicately balanced regulatory systems that were slowly perfected over symphonic time periods. These systems have enabled life to expand and flourish in all its profusion through the 65 million years of the Cenozoic Era, an era that, according to Berry , now approaches its tragic climax.

Thomas Berry likens the present situation to only two other events in the history of the earth. The first was the termination of the Palaeozoic Era 220 million years ago when 90% of all living species were extinguished. The second was the termination of the Mesozoic Era 65 million years ago when a second mass extinction of species occurred. The changes we are presently witnessing are not fortuitous. They are a direct consequence of the activities of industrial civilisation.

Industrial civilisation has largely been fuelled by the energy locked in the massive deposits of fossil fuels that have been extracted, fractionated and burned up in a short century and a half. Carbon is the basis for all life as we know it. The earth has miraculously maintained atmospheric carbon at a steady level by storing it in the great forests of the earth, within the oceans of the world, and in the underground coal, oil and gas deposits that have locked solar energy into the ubiquitous benzene ring fashioned within the cells of ancient trees.

The great forests of the Europe have been felled and those of the new world are rapidly disappearing. The carbon they held, and that released by the burning of fossil fuels in coal-fired power stations and internal combustion engines now thickens the earth’s atmosphere and increases the acidity of the oceans of the world. Berry reflects:

“Our present system, based on the plundering of the Earth’s resources, is certainly coming to an end. It cannot continue.”

Yet politicians, industrialists, bankers and consumers are searching for ways to stave off the inevitable. We will find ways of sequestering carbon. We will build hydrogen-fuelled cars. We will make lots of money through carbon trading schemes. We will recycle our bottles. We will recycle our water. We will remove the salt from sea water when our rivers and reservoirs dry up. We will create wind farms and solar arrays. We may even decide to close down our coal-fired power stations and replace them with new generations of nuclear reactors.

But the damage has already been done and we remain perversely fixed in our ways. For many political leaders, our way of life, predicated as it is on a highly productive industrial system and a global economy, is simply not negotiable. Most discussions centre on ways that will enable us to “grow the economy” while continuing on our present trajectory.

Although the increase of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere is a major factor in creating climate change, it is but one of the many constellations of deleterious influence created by industrial civilisation. Background radiation levels have been progressively rising since Hiroshima and Nagasaki . The methods of industrial-scale broad acre farming have destroyed the arable top-soils in most nations. The widespread use of agricultural chemicals has vitiated insect life and encumbered both human and animal metabolisms. Groundwater has everywhere been depleted or poisoned. The fish stocks of the oceans continue to fall. The point was made and has been reiterated many times since Rachel Carson lamented the coming of a Silent Spring in 1962. Thomas Berry calls it as it is :

“The earth cannot sustain such an industrial system or its devastating technologies. In the future, the industrial system will have its moments of apparent recovery, but these will be minor and momentary. The impact of our present technology is beyond what the earth can endure.”

Towards the Future

So where does this leave us? Where are we to find solutions? Are there, in fact, any solutions? Clearly, we have no choice but to prepare ourselves and our children for what lies ahead. At another level, we need to prepare the ground for another way of being on the earth, a way that acknowledges not only our potential for mastery, but one that accords with our essential dependence on the forces that drive and sustain the natural world. This will require a fundamental change in our consciousness. That change will not be generated by diving deeper into the furious flow of information and sensation that drives the technosphere, but rather by a sensitive consideration of our circumstances and an active seeking out of the sources of wisdom that are both ever-present and ever-elusive.

Berry ‘s Ecozoic Era is predicated on a reacquisition of those sensitivities and sensibilities that will enable participatory continuity within our human communities and the ecosystems within which we are situated. We will need to develop a deeper understanding of our relationship with the natural world. We will need to make more intelligent choices in the way that we live individually that is reflected in the way that we live collectively so that the immense disparities that presently divide humanity will be avoided in the future. We will need to conform our actions to the limits of fairness and respect for the needs of our fellow creatures – both human and non-human – and of the earth itself. We will need to learn to do things differently. Berry reminds us that:

“The earth is primary and humans are derivative. The present distorted view is that humans are primary and the earth and its integral functioning only a secondary consideration. The Earth must become the primary concern of every human institution, profession, program, and activity, including economics.”

Despite the prognostications of aerospace engineers and our starry-eyed space cadets, we will neither be mining the asteroids nor peopling other planets in the foreseeable future. Our collective energies will be needed to cope with increasingly uncertain weather patterns, food production and distribution, resource availability, economic stability, and social, political and personal freedoms.

In the meantime, our politicians will continue to baulk and bicker, mining and energy companies will continue to squeeze every last drop from what little is left, global corporations will continue to manipulate governments and bleed consumers, investment bankers will continue to chase easy money.

Let us not fall into the folly of expecting change from above – politically or metaphorically. Let us change what can be changed in our own lives, draw strength and inspiration from those striving to bring about a more sustainable future, and work in whatever ways we can to prepare our children for life in a very different world.

By Vincent Di Stefano

Vincent Di Stefano is a retired osteopath and author of ” Holism and Complementary Medicine. History and Principles ” published by Allen and Unwin in 2006. He lives in Australia and can be contacted at www.thehealingproject.net.au

Soaring Food Prices, Wild Weather, Upheaval, and a Planetful of Trouble

What can a humble loaf of bread tell us about the world?

The answer is: far more than you might imagine. For one thing, that loaf can be “read” as if it were a core sample extracted from the heart of a grim global economy. Looked at another way, it reveals some of the crucial fault lines of world politics, including the origins of the Arab spring that has now become a summer of discontent.

Consider this: between June 2010 and June 2011, world grain prices almost doubled. In many places on this planet, that proved an unmitigated catastrophe. In those same months, several governments fell, rioting broke out in cities from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, to Nairobi, Kenya, and most disturbingly three new wars began in Libya, Yemen, and Syria. Even on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Bedouin tribes are now in revolt against the country’s interim government and manning their own armed roadblocks.

And in each of these situations, the initial trouble was traceable, at least in part, to the price of that loaf of bread. If these upheavals were not “resource conflicts” in the formal sense of the term, think of them at least as bread-triggered upheavals.

Growing Climate Change in a Wheat Field

Bread has classically been known as the staff of life. In much of the world, you can’t get more basic, since that daily loaf often stands between the mass of humanity and starvation. Still, to read present world politics from a loaf of bread, you first have to ask: of what exactly is that loaf made? Water, salt, and yeast, of course, but mainly wheat, which means when wheat prices increase globally, so does the price of that loaf — and so does trouble.

To imagine that there’s nothing else in bread, however, is to misunderstand modern global agriculture. Another key ingredient in our loaf — call it a “factor of production” — is petroleum. Yes, crude oil, which appears in our bread as fertilizer and tractor fuel. Without it, wheat wouldn’t be produced, processed, or moved across continents and oceans.

And don’t forget labor. It’s an ingredient in our loaf, too, but not perhaps in the way you might imagine. After all, mechanization has largely displaced workers from the field to the factory. Instead of untold thousands of peasants planting and harvesting wheat by hand, industrial workers now make tractors and threshers, produce fuel, chemical pesticides, and nitrogen fertilizer, all rendered from petroleum and all crucial to modern wheat growing. If the labor power of those workers is transferred to the wheat field, it happens in the form of technology. Today, a single person driving a huge $400,000 combine, burning 200 gallons of fuel daily, guided by computers and GPS satellite navigation, can cover 20 acres an hour, and harvest 8,000 to 10,000 bushels of wheat in a single day.

Next, without financial capital — money — our loaf of bread wouldn’t exist. It’s necessary to purchase the oil, the fertilizer, that combine, and so on. But financial capital may indirectly affect the price of our loaf even more powerfully. When there is too much liquid capital moving through the global financial system, speculators start to bid-up the price of various assets, including all the ingredients in bread. This sort of speculation naturally contributes to rising fuel and grain prices.

The final ingredients come from nature: sunlight, oxygen, water, and nutritious soil, all in just the correct amounts and at just the right time. And there’s one more input that can’t be ignored, a different kind of contribution from nature: climate change, just now really kicking in, and increasingly the key destabilizing element in bringing that loaf of bread disastrously to market.

Marketing Disaster

When these ingredients mix in a way that sends the price of bread soaring, politics enters the picture. Consider this, for instance: the upheavals in Egypt lay at the heart of the Arab Spring. Egypt is also the world’s single largest wheat importer, followed closely by Algeria and Morocco. Keep in mind as well that the Arab Spring started in Tunisia when rising food prices, high unemployment, and a widening gap between rich and poor triggered deadly riots and finally the flight of the country’s autocratic ruler Zine Ben Ali. His last act was a vow to reduce the price of sugar, milk, and bread — and it was too little too late.

With that, protests began in Egypt and the Algerian government ordered increased wheat imports to stave off growing unrest over food prices. As global wheat prices surged by 70% between June and December 2010, bread consumption in Egypt started to decline under what economists termed “price rationing.” And that price kept rising all through the spring of 2011. By June, wheat cost 83% more than it had a year before. During the same time frame, corn prices surged by a staggering 91%. Egypt is the world’s fourth largest corn importer. When not used to make bread, corn is often employed as a food additive and to feed poultry and livestock. Algeria, Syria, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia are among the top 15 corn importers. As those wheat and corn prices surged, it was not just the standard of living of the Egyptian poor that was threatened, but their very lives as climate-change driven food prices triggered political violence.

In Egypt, food is a volatile political issue. After all, one in five Egyptians live on less than $1 a day and the government provides subsidized bread to 14.2 million people in a population of 83 million. Last year, overall food-price inflation in Egypt was running at more than 20%. This had an instant and devastating impact on Egyptian families, who spend on average 40% of their often exceedingly meager monthly incomes simply feeding themselves.

Against this backdrop, World Bank President Robert Zoellick fretted that the global food system was “one shock away from a full-fledged crisis.” And if you want to trace that near full-fledged crisis back to its environmental roots, the place to look is climate change, the increasingly extreme and devastating weather being experienced across this planet.

When it comes to bread, it went like this: In the summer of 2010, Russia, one of the world’s leading wheat exporters, suffered its worst drought in 100 years. Known as the Black Sea Drought, this extreme weather triggered fires that burnt down vast swathes of Russian forests, bleached farmlands, and damaged the country’s breadbasket wheat crop so badly that its leaders (urged on by western grain speculators) imposed a year-long ban on wheat exports. As Russia is among the top four wheat exporters in any year, this caused prices to surge upward.

At the same time, massive flooding occurred in Australia, another significant wheat exporter, while excessive rains in the American Midwest and Canada damaged corn production. Freakishly massive flooding in Pakistan, which put some 20% of that country under water, also spooked markets and spurred on the speculators.

And that’s when those climate-driven prices began to soar in Egypt. The ensuing crisis, triggered in part by that rise in the price of our loaf of bread, led to upheaval and finally the fall of the country’s reigning autocrat Hosni Mubarak. Tunisia and Egypt helped trigger a crisis that led to an incipient civil war and then western intervention in neighboring Libya, which meant most of that country’s production of 1.4 million barrels of oil a day went off-line. That, in turn, caused the price of crude oil to surge, at its height hitting $125 a barrel, which set off yet more speculation in food markets, further driving up grain prices.

And recent months haven’t brought much relief. Once again, significant, in some cases record, flooding has damaged crops in Canada, the United States, and Australia. Meanwhile, an unexpected spring drought in northern Europe has hurt grain crops as well. The global food system is visibly straining, if not snapping, under the intense pressure of rising demand, rising energy prices, growing water shortages, and most of all the onset of climate chaos.

And this, the experts tell us, is only the beginning. The price of our loaf of bread is forecast to increase by up to 90% over the next 20 years. That will mean yet more upheavals, more protest, greater desperation, heightened conflicts over water, increased migration, roiling ethnic and religious violence, banditry, civil war, and (if past history is any judge) possibly a raft of new interventions by imperial and possibly regional powers.

And how are we responding to this gathering crisis? Has there been a broad new international initiative focused on ensuring food security for the global poor — that is to say, a stable, affordable price for our loaf of bread? You already know the sad answer to that question.

Instead, massive corporations like Glencore, the world’s largest commodity trading company, and the privately held and secretive Cargill, the world’s biggest trader of agricultural commodities, are moving to further consolidate their control of world grain markets and vertically integrate their global supply chains in a new form of food imperialism designed to profit off global misery. While bread triggered war and revolution in the Middle East, Glencore made windfall profits on the surge in grain prices. And the more expensive our loaf of bread becomes the more money firms like Glencore and Cargill stand to make. Consider that just about the worst possible form of “adaptation” to the climate crisis.

So what text should flash through our brains when reading our loaf of bread? A warning, obviously. But so far, it seems, a warning ignored.

By Christian Parenti

Christian Parenti, author of the just-published Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (Nation Books), is a contributing editor at the Nation magazine, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute, and a visiting scholar at the City University of New York. His articles have appeared in Fortune, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Mother Jones, among other places. He can be reached at Christian_parenti@yahoo.com. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Parenti discusses the origins of his latest book and how climate change contributes to global violence, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

Copyright 2012 Christian Parenti

There is a new, powerful divide that confronts 1Malaysia. It is a political divide that separates the Barisan Nasional, and its supporters, on the one hand, from the Pakatan Rakyat, and its followers, on the other.

There are other divides in Malaysian society: economic, social, cultural, religious, geographical and territorial. A divide by itself is not a threat to a nation’s unity or solidarity. It is when a divide causes serious polarisation that it becomes a matter of deep concern.

The BN-PR political divide is polarising society. It has gone way beyond the usual loyalties associated with competing political parties in a democratic system. Among its obvious consequences are the following:-

1. A blind, almost fanatical attachment to the interests and views of one party or coalition which disregards or dismisses completely the position of the other party or coalition.
2. A total inability to see the wrongs committed by one’s own side and a complete unwillingness to appreciate the positives on the other side.
3. A rapidly declining engagement in rational, balanced discourse on national issues on both sides of the divide.
4. The visible shrinking of the middle ground in national politics as rigid dogmatic partisan positions are adopted by individuals and groups in both camps.
5. A dramatic increase in vile, vulgar epithets and foul, filthy language on online newspapers, websites and blogs associated directly or indirectly with one side or the other which are employed against individuals who are perceived to be on the other side of the divide.

There are those who argue that the political polarisation that is happening, however adverse its consequences, is not a big problem because it does not have communal overtones. This is true but only to an extent.

The undercurrents in this BN-PR polarisation are communal. Though the BN is an established inter-ethnic coalition, it has been portrayed as an UMNO dominant entity that has marginalised the non-Malay parties and communities. This crude portrayal of the BN and its predecessor, the Alliance, actually began in 1964 and was spearheaded by Lee Kuan Yew, then Secretary-General of the People’s Action Party (PAP), the forerunner of the DAP. It has now reached a peak point which is one of the many reasons why parties like the MCA, Gerakan, MIC and PPP lost considerable support in the 2008 General Election. It also explains to a degree the current consolidation of the Chinese position on ethnic issues around the DAP.

While the BN is perceived in some Chinese circles as Malay, there is a growing sentiment within a segment of the Malay community that PR, though drawn from different communities, is actually controlled by the DAP, the party with the most number of parliamentary seats within the PR. How PAS has yielded to the DAP on the question of an “Islamic State”, its defining ideology,  and related issues, and how PKR has tailored its politics to enhance its appeal among the Chinese electorate are offered as evidence of this alleged subservience. There is thus an ethnic dimension to popular perceptions of both the BN and PR which makes political polarisation a graver challenge than it already is.

What are the causes of this political polarisation?  The intensification of the struggle for power at the federal level is undoubtedly the main factor. Because of its creditable performance in the 12^th General Election in 2008, and its victories in 8 out of the 16 by-elections since then, the PR parties, each with its own agenda and goal, are convinced that they will capture Putrajaya in the 13^th General Election. The BN is, of course, determined to remain in Putrajaya, hoping  to regain its two-third majority in the Federal Parliament, and re-take some of the states it lost to the Opposition in the last election.

Political polarisation arising from this intense, often aggressive contest has been exacerbated by the cyber media. With the advent of a variety of channels of expression from the website and blog to facebook and the tweet, millions of citizens are not only articulating their opinions on a whole range of social and political concerns — which is a laudable development —- but are also ventilating their communal biases, their religious prejudices and their personal frustrations as never before. Since cyber communication allows anonymity, quite a few are slanderous and vicious in their comments. When freedom is exercised in such an irresponsible manner, it is inevitable that political polarisation will increase.

In this regard, elements within the mainstream print and electronic media are also culpable. There have been occasions when their stark or subtle biases have reinforced polarising tendencies in the larger society. The authorities have not checked these tendencies.

The expanding NGO community which utilises the media to the hilt has also contributed to polarisation. Most politically oriented NGOs are aligned to one side or the other. Sometimes they adopt stances on political issues that are more communal than political parties. Even some professional bodies tend to incline towards this or that political party on certain controversies.

It does not help that a number of intellectuals have also become blatantly partisan in outlook. Instead of fostering a balanced discourse through their writings some of them are rabidly biased to a point that they refuse to acknowledge the positive elements on the other side.  They have tarnished their own intellectual credentials by presenting complex political challenges in stark black and white terms, often camouflaging their communal inclinations, and thus aggravating political polarisation.

Can we overcome, or at least reduce, political polarisation? It is unlikely that appeals to both sides to dialogue and to reconcile will have any impact. It is perhaps the 13^th General Election that will resolve the polarisation— if it produces a decisive winner.

By Chandra Muzaffar

Petaling Jaya.

25 July 2011.

Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Yayasan 1Malaysia and Professor of Global Studies at Universiti Sains Malaysia.