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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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For too long, Western governments have believed they could earn a cheap victory by using air power alone. But experience shows this is not enough

Air strikes are becoming the main Western means of controlling the Middle East and South Asia without putting soldiers on the ground where they might suffer politically damaging casualties. Britain, France and the US have used only airpower to wage war in Libya over the last four months. The US is also stepping up its air offensive in Yemen, where the CIA is to start operating Predator drones alongside the US military, and is continuing its drone attacks in north-west Pakistan. Even in Iraq, where the US is supposedly ending its military commitment, it stunned people near the southern city of Amarah last week by unexpectedly launching bombing raids.

The use of air forces as colonial policemen in the region has a long and bloody history, but has often proved ineffective in the long term. A Nato pilot who bombed Ain Zara south of Tripoli earlier this month almost certainly did not know that his attack came almost exactly 100 years after the very same target had been hit by two small bombs dropped by an Italian plane in 1911.

The Italian air raid was the first in history, carried out soon after Italy had invaded what later became Libya during one of the many carve-ups of the Ottoman Empire. The first ever military reconnaissance flight took a route near Benghazi in October, and on 1 November Sub-Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti became the first pilot to drop bombs. He swooped down on a Turkish camp at Ain Zara and dropped four 4.5lb grenades from a leather bag in his cockpit. The Turks protested that Gavotti’s bombs had hit a hospital and injuring several civilians.

The pros and cons should have become swiftly apparent. It is not that air strikes are wholly futile. I was in Baghdad during the US bombing in 1991 and again during Desert Fox in 1998. Crouched on the floor of my hotel room, watching columns of fire erupt around the city and the pathetic dribbles of anti-aircraft fire in return, was a testing experience. On the other hand, being shelled in West Beirut during the civil wars was in some ways worse because it went on for longer and was completely haphazard. In Baghdad I hoped that the Americans were taking care about what they targeted, if only for reasons of PR, although my confidence was severely dented when they killed some 400 civilians in the Amariya shelter.

Frightening though it is being bombed, air forces often exaggerate what they can do. They are always less accurate than they claim; their effectiveness depends on good tactical intelligence. Bombing works best as a blunt instrument against civilians as a generalised punishment. Against well-prepared soldiers, such as Hezbollah’s guerrillas, it is far less effective. Israel’s disastrous venture in Lebanon probably rated as history’s most ill-thought out air war until this year when France and Britain decided to ally themselves to an enthusiastic but ill-trained militia to overthrow Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

It did not start like this. When Nato planes first attacked, it was with the aim of preventing Gaddafi’s tanks advancing up the road from Ajdabiya to rebel-held Benghazi. The strikes were effective, but the objective swiftly changed to become an open-ended campaign to overthrow Gaddafi in which Nato provided air support for the rebel militia. Very similar to French imperial forays in West Africa, it is extraordinary that this open-ended foreign intervention has been so little criticised in Britain.

The rebels have always been weaker than their Nato sponsors pretended. It is all very well to recognise them as the legitimate government of Libya, but evidently not all Libyans agree. The highly informed International Crisis Group says that a key component “in Gaddafi’s ability to hold on to much of the west [of Libya] has been the limited defections to date among the main tribes that traditionally have been allied with the regime”. In reality, a divided Nato has joined one side in a civil war in Libya, just as it did earlier in Afghanistan, and the US and Britain had done in Iraq.

In air wars, the first week is usually the best. By the end of it, the easiest targets will have been destroyed and the enemy will have learnt how to hide, disperse its forces and avoid presenting a target. In the case of Libya, the pro-Gaddafi troops started to use the same beat-up pick-ups with a heavy machine gun in the back as the rebels. Several times Nato struck at their allies with devastating results.

So far in Libya there has not been a mass killing of a large number of civilians in an air strike. When this happened with the Amariya shelter in Baghdad in 1991, the selection of targets in the city had to be confirmed by the chief of staff, Colin Powell, and air strikes on the capital largely ceased. Air force generals point to the wonderful accuracy of their smart weapons, singling out tiny targets, but they seldom explain that this depends on correct intelligence.

Such intelligence is often very shaky. I was in Herat in western Afghanistan in 2009 when US aircraft killed some 147 people in three villages to the south. Bombs had smashed the mud-brick houses and bodies of the dead had been torn to shreds by the blast. What had happened in these villages, which were deep in Taliban territory, was that some US and Afghan vehicles had been successfully ambushed. Frightened and bewildered soldiers had called for air support. Shouting “Death to America” and “Death to the Government”, enraged survivors drove a tractor pulling a trailer piled high with body parts to the governor’s office in Farah City.

The response of the US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, to all this was to claim that the Taliban had run through the villages hurling grenades. Lies like this were very much designed for US consumption, but they enraged Afghans who could see the deep bomb craters on their televisions. Will the Libyan air campaign end in a similar disaster? Political tolerance in the UK and the US for the war in Libya is shallow and it would be fatally undermined by any accidental mass killing of civilians.

From the moment, 100 years ago, when Sub-Lieutenant Gavotti threw his grenades over the side of his cockpit, Western governments have been attracted by the idea that they can win wars by air power alone. Victory will be cheap without committing ground troops. Only late in the day does it become clear, as we are now seeing in Libya, that air power by itself hardly ever wins wars.

By Patrick Cockburn

24 July 2011

©independent.co.uk

Oslo Massacre Exposes The Nexus of Islamophobia And Right-Wing Extremism

More details have emerged on the Norwegian terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik and now we have enough details to piece together what’s behind Friday’s massacre which saw car bombings in Oslo and a mass shooting attack on the island of Utoya that caused the deaths of more than 90 people.

Hours before his terrorist acts, Anders Behring Breivik left a 1550-page manifesto on internet. Its title is 2083: A European Declaration of Independence. Apparently, the title is rooted in a demogrpahic claim that Muslims will become a majority in Europe.

The manifesto draws on “Eurabia” and “Muslim Tide” writers such as Bruce Bawer, Melanie Phillips, Mark Steyn, Geert Wilders, Theodore Dalrymple, and Robert Spencer, as well as many figures from the extreme right, to create an argument that Muslims, immigrants, multiculturalists, European Union backers and social democrats are part of a plot to undermine Europe’s Christian civilization. It then draws on the extreme right, the ideas of al Qaeda and other terrorist groups (which he admires) to describe and rationalize a plot which almost exactly matches his activities on July 22, 2011.

While Breivik is relatively dismissive of the larger anti-immigration parties’ prospects for meaningful change, he lauds more fringe groups such as the Stop Islamization of America and Stop Islamization of Europe, websites including JihadWatch and Gates of Vienna, and the True Finns, some of whose members were sent the manifesto shortly before his killing spree started.

Breivik also brags of his links to and friendship with members of the UK’s English Defense League. However, he chides the EDL for being “dangerously naive” in pursuing a democratic path, and advises it to instead attack a nuclear plant to “cripple the British economy, contributing to creating an optimal climate for significant political change.”

According to his lawyer Geir Lippestad, Breivik spent years writing the 1,500-page manifesto that police were examining. It was signed as “Andrew Berwick.” The date was referred to later in the document as the year (2083) that coups d’etat would engulf Europe and overthrow the elite he maligns.

“He wanted a change in society and, from his perspective, he needed to force through a revolution,” Geir Lippestad told public broadcaster NRK. “He wished to attack society and the structure of society.”

The manifesto vowed revenge on those who it accused of betraying Europe. “We, the free indigenous peoples of Europe, hereby declare a pre-emptive war on all cultural Marxist/multiculturalist elites of Western Europe. … We know who you are, where you live and we are coming for you,” the document said. “We are in the process of flagging every single multiculturalist traitor in Western Europe. You will be punished for your treasonous acts against Europe and Europeans.”

The Knights Templar Video

In the manifesto, Breivik referred to the Knights Templar group. According to the Associated Press, the use of an anglicized pseudonym could be explained by a passage in the manifesto describing the founding, in April 2002 in London, of a group he calls a new Knights Templar. The Knights Templar was a medieval order founded to protect Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land after the First Crusade.

A 12-minute video clip posted on YouTube with the same title as the manifesto featured symbolic imagery of the Knights Templar and crusader kings as well as slides suggesting Europe is being overrun by Muslims. Police could not confirm that Breivik had posted the video, which also featured photographs of him dressed in a formal military uniform and in a wet suit pointing an assault rifle.

The video was a series of slides that accused the left in Europe of allowing Muslims to overrun the continent: One image showed the BBC’s logo with the “C” changed into an Islamic crescent. Another declared that the end result of the left’s actions would be an “EUSSR.”

More quotes from the Manifesto

For me it is very hypocritical to treat Muslims, Nazis and Marxists differ. They are all supporters of hate-ideologies…(page 2-3)

What is globalization and modernity to do with mass Muslim immigration?

And you may not have heard and Japan and South Korea? These are successful and modern regimes even if they rejected multiculturalism in the 70′s. Are Japanese and South Koreans goblins?

Can you name ONE country where multiculturalism is successful where Islam is involved? The only historical example is the society without a welfare state with only non-Muslim minorities (U.S.)…(page 7)

We have selected the Vienna School of Thought as the ideological basis. This implies opposition to multiculturalism and Islamization (on cultural grounds). All ideological arguments based on anti-racism. This has proven to be very successful which explains why the modern cultural conservative movement / parties that use the Vienna School of Thought is so successful: the Progress Party,Geert Wilders, document and many others…(page 13)

I consider the future consolidation of the cultural conservative forces on all seven fronts as the most important in Norway and in all Western European countries. It is essential that we work to ensure that all these 7 fronts using the Vienna school of thought, or at least parts of the grunlag for 20-70 year-struggle that lies in front of us.

To sums up the Vienna school of thought: Cultural Conservatism (anti-multiculturalism); Against Islamization; Anti-racist; Anti-authoritarian (resistance to all authoritarian ideologies of hate); Pro-Israel/against non-Muslim minorities in Muslim countries; Defender of the cultural aspects of Christianity; To reveal the Eurabia project and the Frankfurt School (ny-marxisme/kulturmarxisme/multikulturalisme)

Breivik’s right-wing pro-Israel line, combined with his antipathy to Muslims, is just one example of the European far-right’s ideology, exemplified by groups such as the English Defense League (EDL). The EDL, a group Breivik praises, along with the anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders, share with Breivik an admiration for Israel.

Anti-Muslim activists and right-wing Zionists share a political narrative that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a “clash of civilizations,” one in which Judeo-Christian culture is under attack by Islam. Israel, in this narrative, is the West’s bulwark against the threat that Islam is posing to Europe and the United States.

Daniel Pipes

Mondoweiss wesbsite pointed out that Breivik’s admiration for the likes of Daniel Pipes is also telling, and should serve as a warning that, while it would be extremely unfair and wrong to link Pipes in any way to the massacre in Norway, Breivik’s views are not so far off from some establishment neoconservative voices in the U.S. For instance, both Pipes and Breivik share a concern with Muslim demographics in Europe. In 1990, Pipes wrote in the National Review that “Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene…All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.”

Pipes was appointed by the Bush administration to the U.S. Institute of Peace, and sits on the same board than none other than the Obama administration’s point man on the Middle East, Dennis Ross.

Pipes’ and Breivik’s concern about Muslim and Arab demographics also recall the remarks of Harvard Fellow Martin Kramer, who infamously told the Herzliya Conference in Israel last year that the West should “stop providing pro-natal subsidies for Palestinians with refugee status…Israel’s present sanctions on Gaza have a political aim, undermine the Hamas regime, but they also break Gaza’s runaway population growth and there is some evidence that they have.”

Adding to the Israel/Palestine angle here is the fact that the day before the attack on the island of Utoya, a Palestine solidarity event was held there.

Mondoweiss says it remains unclear why Breivik, and his accomplices if he had any, would attack young Norwegians. But it probably had something to do with Breivik’s belief that European governments, and the Norwegian government, were run by “Marxists” allied with Islamist extremists who were bent on destroying Europe through “multiculturalism.”

The treatise ends with a detailed description of the plot, ending with a note dated 12:51 p.m. on July 22: “I believe this will be my last entry.”

The nexus of Islamophobia and right-wing extremism

Tellingly, reports reveal Breivik’s admiration for bigoted groups such as the English Defense League and Stop the Islamization of Europe, which campaign against Muslims and the building of mosques. Similarly, Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party in Holland appears to win Breivik’s approval because it seeks to protect Western culture from a growing threat of so-called “Islamization”.

Mondoweiss website argues that an examination of Breivik’s views, and his support for far-right European political movements, makes it clear that only by interrogating the nexus of Islamophobia and right-wing Zionism can one understand the political beliefs behind the terrorist attack.

Breivik is apparently an avid fan of U.S.-based anti-Muslim activists such as Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and Daniel Pipes, and has repeatedly professed his ardent support for Israel.

The nexus of Islamophobia and right-wing extremism was clearly on display during last summer’s “Ground Zero mosque” hysteria, which culminated in a rally where Geller and Wilders addressed a crowd that included members of the EDL waving Israeli flags.

According to Mondoweiss website, this comment by Breivik is one example of the twisted way in which Islamophobia and a militant pro-Israel ideology fit together: Cultural conservatives disagree when they believe the conflict is based on Islamic imperialism, that Islam is a political ideology and not a race.

While much remains to be learned about the attacks in Norway, it has exposed the dangerous nexus of Islamophobia, neoconservatism and right-wing Zionism, and what could happen when the wrong person subscribes to those toxic beliefs, Mondoweiss concludes.

Norway massacre reminiscent of Oklahoma bombing

Norway massacre seems a reminiscent of the 1995 Oklahoma bombing by the right-wing extremist, Timothy McVeigh, that claimed 168 lives, including 19 children under the age of 6, and injured more than 680 people. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a sixteen-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings.

Like the Oklahoma bombing, immediately after the news of the bombing of government buildings in Norway’s capital Oslo, the media was buzzed with speculations about who might have done it and why. Most speculation focused on so-called Islamist militancy and Muslims.

Not surprisingly, The American Enterprise Institute, now home to John Bolton, Lynne Cheney,and Newt Gingrich, got their talking points into the Washington Post within hours.

The New York Times originally reported: A terror group, Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami, or the Helpers of the Global Jihad, issued a statement claiming responsibility for the attack, according to Will McCants, a terrorism analyst at C.N.A., a research institute that studies terrorism. In later editions, the story was revised to read: Initial reports focused on the possibility of Islamic militants, in particular Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami, or Helpers of the Global Jihad, cited by some analysts as claiming responsibility for the attacks. American officials said the group was previously unknown and might not even exist.

According to Turkish newspaper Zaman, shortly after the bomb exploded in Oslo on Saturday, almost all European TV stations began making mention of a new wave of Islamic terror. The culprits they suggested included a wide range of “Islamist” terrorist groups, including but not limited to al-Qaeda and Ansar al Islam. As the night advanced, TV and media outlets slowly replaced the Islamist terror thesis with a new one that is probably more disturbing to Europeans (that the terrorist is a rightist extremist).

Similarly, within hours of the Oklahoma bombing on April 19, 1995, most network news reports featured comments from experts on Middle Eastern terrorism who said the blast was similar to the World Trade Center explosion two years earlier.

Ibrahim Ahmad, a Jordanian American, had been traveling from his Oklahoma City home to Jordan on April 19, the day the 4,800-pound bomb ripped through the Federal building. Scooped up in the FBI’s initial dragnet, he was questioned in Chicago, and then again in London, where British authorities grilled him for six hours. “When they said, ‘You are under arrest in connection with the bombing,’ I thought that was the end of the world for me,” he told reporters.

However, after about 36 hours it became clear that domestic right-wing extremists were the prime suspects in the case but the media jump too quickly to speculate that the bombing was the work of Middle Eastern ‘terrorists’ while the so-called terrorist experts extended their had just like in the case of Oslo massacres to justify the media speculation.

Interestingly, when it transpired that it was a right-wing anti-Muslim Christian, the response was ‘it is unbelievable that a Norwegian would do such a thing.’

Nationalists pose bigger threat than al-Qaeda

Dr Robert Lambert, Co-Director of the European Muslim Research Centre at the University of Exeter and Lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrews, argues that while we must await the outcome of police investigations and court proceedings before reaching any firm conclusions about Breivik’s motivation, it will nevertheless be instructive to begin an analysis of a violent extremist nationalist milieu in Europe and the US, and its dramatic shift towards anti-Muslim and Islamophobic thought since 9/11. To be sure, this will certainly be more relevant than an analysis of al-Qaeda terrorism.

Here is an excerpt from Dr Robert Lambert’s article titled, Nationalists pose bigger threat than al-Qaeda:

“Breivik can claim to have followed a long tradition of terrorism target selection that is intended to send a strong message to politicians in an attempt to persuade them to change policy. As leading terrorism scholar Alex Schmid reminds us, terrorism is a form of communication that “cannot be understood only in terms of violence”. Rather, he suggests, “it has to be understood primarily in terms of propaganda” in order to penetrate the terrorist’s strategic purpose.

“Breivik appears to understand Schmid’s analysis that terrorism is a combination of violence and propaganda. “By using violence against one victim,” a terrorist “seeks to coerce and persuade others”, Schmid explains. “The immediate victim is merely instrumental, the skin on a drum beaten to achieve a calculated impact on a wider audience.” This is certainly the kind of rationalisation that perpetrators of political violence have adopted in many contexts in pursuit of diverse political causes for decades.

“Many extremist nationalists in Norway, the rest of Europe, and North America will be appalled by Breivik’s resort to terrorism and in particular his target selection. However, Breivik is likely to argue that he has sent a powerful and coercive message to all politicians in the West that will help put the campaign against the “Islamification of Europe” at the top of their agenda.

“Breivik may hope that others will take inspiration from his act and seek to emulate him. Terrorism may be repulsive to many who share Breivik’s bigoted anti-Muslim views, but it is a tactic that only requires a small number of adherents to achieve its purpose, whatever the cause. So if even only a handful follow his route, Breivik will count that as a success.

“Finally, it is only necessary to recall the circumstances of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 to be reminded of extremist nationalists’ bomb-making capacity and target selection. Timothy McVeigh was able to utilise skills and contacts he acquired in his US military service to build and detonate a bomb that killed 168 victims, injured 680 others, destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a sixteen-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, shattered glass in an additional 258 nearby buildings, and caused at least $652m worth of damage.

“With minimal help, McVeigh was able to inflict more harm and damage with one bomb than four suicide bombers in London operating under an al-Qaeda flag in London ten years later,” Dr Robert Lambert concludes.

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

25 July 2011

Countercurrents.org

Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Executive Editor of the online magazine American Muslim Perspective