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Has the AU done too little, too late?

After months of deliberation, the African Union has recognised Libya’s new leadership – but many question its motives.

In a year when the world’s attention to global affairs has significantly focused on the African continent – from the Ivorian crisis, to the Arab Spring and the Horn of Africa’s drought – the African Union has played a less than dismal role.

In principle, the AU has a responsibility to protect, as Article 4(h) of the AU Constitutive act entrusts the organisation with a duty of care on humanitarian grounds, but in reality the AU has failed to act. After months of dithering, the AU officially recognised Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC) in New York at an AU peace and security meeting held alongside the UN General Assembly gathering.

It would have been a little more than embarrassing for the AU to insist on non-recognition, while Mahmoud Jibril addressed the UN as Libya’s de facto leader.

Though it’s unclear to what extent international pressure forced the AU’s hand, it’s possible this was a strategic attempt to return to the global community. At an assembly where African states are asking for two permanent seats in the Security Council – South Africa, Nigeria and Gabon are non-permanent members – the AU has finally realised it has to play ball, otherwise African requests for membership would be ignored.

It would also seem hypocritical for the AU to stubbornly cling to non-recognition, while the Security Council, representing its permanent and non-permanent members, maintains a friendly policy towards the NTC.

Other than international concerns, the AU had already begun to warm towards the NTC on its own accord. Headed by President Jacob Zuma of South Africa, the AU High Level Ad-Hoc Committee on Libya met in Pretoria on September 14 and called for the establishment of a broadly representative administration as the main condition for recognition.

Previously assured that Libya and the NTC’s “strategic commitment to the African continent” remained a priority; the AU delegation considered the possibility of the NTC taking up Libya’s seat in the AU Peace and Security Council (AU PSC), “based on the exceptional circumstances in and the uniqueness of the situation of Libya”. This was a crucial, but belated step towards acknowledgment, and it will be interesting to see how the new Libya gets along with Zimbabwe and Equatorial Guinea – as both are Gaddafi-friendly members of the AU PSC.

Given the splits between pro-NTC states such as Egypt, Nigeria and Tunisia and the undecided South Africa – which has implicitly aligned itself with influential Gaddafi sympathisers; Zimbabwe, Algeria and Angola – it is likely the AU will struggle to maintain a unified and positive position on Libya.

Different strategies, same aim

The news of Muammar Gaddafi’s family crossing into Algeria and the expulsion of the Libyan ambassador to Zimbabwe was an expected twist in events. It’s expected, because it’s natural that the colonel’s political allies would protect his family in Algiers and protest the hoisting of the new Libyan flag in Harare.

It’s also unsurprising that Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Jnr of Guinea-Bissau, an old friend of Gaddafi, would offer to “welcome him with open arms”. Sharing an anti-imperialist, iron-fisted ruler-for-life ideology, these acts also reflect the feelings of the majority of leaders in Africa who have expressed reservation towards the Libyan government in waiting.

Of fifty-five African countries, twenty states have recognised the NTC. In a surprise move, Nigeria acknowledged the rebels, days before the African Union was due to meet in Addis Ababa over Libya in August.

There are several reasons for this, including wanting to appear on the right side of democracy, secure West African relations with Libya’s new leaders, and to appear progressive in front of the international community – not least because the throne left by Gaddafi is open for the taking.

While President Goodluck Jonathan may not have pockets as deep as Gaddafi, nor the intent to extend his influence through money, Nigeria is aware of the new possibilities to assert its status as a regional superpower in a post-Gaddafi Africa.

Though Nigeria may have fallen in line with influential Arab states in Africa; Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, has carved a different path.

Nervous about the potential impact if Libya were to split into sparring tribes, Bouteflika, like the AU, demanded that a tribally representative transitional government be formed as a key condition for Algeria to recognise the NTC.

Although Algeria took in Gaddafi’s family, Bouteflika was quick to promise there was no room at the inn for the Brother Leader, saying, “never did we consider the idea that one day Mr Gaddafi could come knocking at our door”.

Realising there is a new political reality in a post-Ben Ali, post-Gaddafi, post-Mubarak Maghreb, Bouteflika has maintained cordial relations with the NTC – and the AU’s change of heart on Libya may now push Algeria into welcoming the new neighbouring government.

This may be a good move, but it means external pressure on the NTC to form an inclusive and stable transitional regime is significantly reduced, especially now that the rebels have indefinitely suspended all plans to form an administration.

Shifting sands

With Gaddafi gone, Algeria will have the chance to flex its muscle, particularly in the Sahel and Maghreb regions where it has historically wielded a lot of power. Like Jonathan, Bouteflika’s plans are not to create a Gaddafi-esque United States of Africa – positioning himself as King of Kings instead of Libya’s former leader, but he is likely to take advantage of his good standing with the AU and try to gain more support for Algeria’s foreign policy.

For example, a stronger AU backing in Algeria’s role in Western Sahara’s war against Morocco’s military occupation, or, acting in self-interest, a more dominant position on the continent, may be of use to Algeria in gaining support in the regional war against al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM). This was the aim of the Sahel region anti-terrorism conference convened in Algiers earlier this month.

As Algeria has considerably less influence with the Arab League, it would not be surprising to see Bouteflika jostling for Gaddafi’s crown, along with the new Libyan regime – which stands to inherit a sea of profitable and bankrupt investments across the continent.

As for the AU, the Libyan revolution has shown that there is a deep crisis in its crisis management.

Initially, the AU refused to recognise the NTC because it was an unelected government, but when an unelected megalomanic launched an attack, killing thousands of his own people; the AU buried its head deep in the Sahara’s sands unwilling to chastise Gaddafi.

Although the absence of Gaddafi’s political and financial contribution to African politics will be keenly felt, the AU sends a message to the world that the ethic of responsibility to protect is interpreted as protecting one’s own.

The oft-repeated slogan “African solutions to African problems”, increasingly sounds more like feel-good, empty rhetoric than concrete philosophy and strategy. For months, the AU hawked around its roadmap to peace for Libya, despite the fact that, from the outset, the NTC and the heckling protesters of Benghazi had expressly rejected the plan.

Up until early September, Zuma appeared confident of the AU’s mediation efforts, claiming had the AU peace plan been followed there would have been far fewer Libyan casualties. However, by recognising the rebels, the AU has now inadvertently conceded the failure of its proposed strategy.

Whichever course Libya’s future relationship with the AU takes, it’s clear that the organisation’s limited resources and questionable political allegiances will hang over it like a rain cloud. If the AU, in all its anti-imperialist glory, failed to balance its principles of African humanity, sovereignty and responsibility to protect in the Libyan question or to raise funds for the Horn’s famine, future crises requiring international intervention will be dealt with in the same way – with the AU hovering in the shadows enacting its do-little policy, while others act – rightly or wrongly.

By Tendai Marima

23 September 2011

Tendai Marima is a Zimbabwean blogger and doctoral student at Goldsmiths, University fo London whose research interests include African literature and global feminist theory.

This article is part 3 from Chapter 6 of Richard Heinberg’s new book ‘The End of Growth’, published by New Society Publishers. This chapter looks at ideas for post growth economics.

Get the book now – Amazon, New Society, Kindle, Nook Reader

Access previous posts here.

Chapter 6, Part 1

Chapter 6, Part 2

After World War II, the industrial nations of the world set out to rebuild their economies and needed a yardstick by which to measure their progress. The index soon settled upon was the Gross National Product, or GNP—defined as the market value of all goods and services produced in one year by the labor and property supplied by the residents of a given country. A similar measure, Gross Domestic Product, or GDP (which defines production based on its geographic location rather than its ownership) is more often used today; when considered globally, GDP and GNP are equivalent terms.

GDP made the practical work of economists much simpler: If the number went up, then all was well, whereas a decline meant that something had gone wrong.

Within a couple of decades, however, questions began to be raised about GDP: perhaps it was too simple. Four of the main objections:

>> Increasing self-reliance means decreasing GDP. If you eat at home more, you are failing to do your part to grow the GDP; if you grow your own food, you’re doing so at the expense of GDP. Any advertising campaign that aims to curb consumption hurts GDP: for example, vigorous anti-smoking campaigns result in fewer people buying cigarettes, which decreases GDP.

>> GDP does not distinguish between waste, luxury, and a satisfaction of fundamental needs.

>> GDP does not guarantee the meaningfulness of what is being made, bought, and sold. Therefore GDP does not correlate well with quality of life measures.

>> GDP is “Gross Domestic Product”; there is no accounting for the distribution of costs and benefits. If 95 percent of people live in abject poverty while 5 percent live in extreme opulence, GDP does not reveal the fact.[1]

In 1972, economists William Nordhaus and James Tobin published a paper with the intriguing title, Is Growth Obsolete?, in which they introduced the Measure of Economic Welfare (MEW) as the first alternative index of economic progress.[2]

Herman Daly, John Cobb, and Clifford Cobb refined MEW in their Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW), introduced in 1989, which is roughly defined by the following formula:

ISEW = personal consumption

+ public non-defensive expenditures

– private defensive expenditures

+ capital formation

+ services from domestic labor

– costs of environmental degradation

– depreciation of natural capital

In 1995 the San Francisco-based nonprofit think tank Redefining Progress took MEW and ISEW even further with its Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI).[3] This index adjusts not only for environmental damage and depreciation, but also income distribution, housework, volunteering, crime, changes in leisure time, and the life-span of consumer durables and public infrastructures.[4] GPI managed to gain somewhat more traction than either MEW or ISEW, and came to be used by the scientific community and many governmental organizations globally. For example, the state of Maryland is now using GPI for planning and assessment.[5]

During the past few years, criticism of GDP has grown among mainstream economists and government leaders. In 2008, French president Nicholas Sarkozy convened “The Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress” (CMEPSP), chaired by acclaimed American economist Joseph Stiglitz. The commission’s explicit purpose was “to identify the limits of GDP as an indicator of economic performance and social progress.” The commission report noted:

“What we measure affects what we do; and if our measurements are flawed, decisions may be distorted. Choices between promoting GDP and protecting the environment may be false choices, once environmental degradation is appropriately included in our measurement of economic performance. So too, we often draw inferences about what are good policies by looking at what policies have promoted economic growth; but if our metrics of performance are flawed, so too may be the inferences that we draw.”[6]

In response to the Stiglitz Commission there have been increasing calls for a Green National Product that would indicate if economic activities benefit or harm the economy and human well-being, addressing both the sustainability and health of the planet and its inhabitants.[7]

One factor that is increasingly being cited as an important economic indicator is happiness. After all, what good is increased production and consumption if the result isn’t increased human satisfaction? Until fairly recently, the subject of happiness was mostly avoided by economists for lack of good ways to measure it; however, in recent years, “happiness economists” have found ways to combine subjective surveys with objective data (on lifespan, income, and education) to yield data with consistent patterns, making a national happiness index a practical reality.

In The Politics of Happiness, former Harvard University president Derek Bok traces the history of the relationship between economic growth and happiness in America.[8] During the past 35 years, per capita income has grown almost 60 percent, the average new home has become 50 percent larger, the number of cars has ballooned by 120 million, and the proportion of families owning personal computers has gone from zero to 80 percent. But the percentage of Americans describing themselves as either “very happy” or “pretty happy” has remained virtually constant, having peaked in the 1950s. The economic treadmill is continually speeding up due to growth and we have to push ourselves ever harder to keep up, yet we’re no happier as a result.

Ironically, perhaps, this realization dawned first not in America, but in the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. In 1972, shortly after ascending to the throne at the age of 16, Bhutan’s King Jigme Singye Wangchuck used the phrase “Gross National Happiness” to signal his commitment to building an economy that would serve his country’s Buddhist-influenced culture. Though this was a somewhat offhand remark, it was taken seriously and continues to reverberate. Soon the Centre for Bhutan Studies, under the leadership of Karma Ura, set out to develop a survey instrument to measure the Bhutanese people’s general sense of well-being.

Ura collaborated with Canadian health epidemiologist Michael Pennock to develop Gross National Happiness (GNH) measures across nine domains:

Time use

Living standards

Good governance

Psychological well-being

Community vitality

Culture

Health

Education

Ecology

Bhutan’s efforts to boost GNH have led to the banning of plastic bags and re-introduction of meditation into schools, as well as a “go-slow” approach toward the standard development path of big loans and costly infrastructure projects.

The country’s path-breaking effort to make growth humanly meaningful has drawn considerable attention elsewhere: Harvard Medical School has released a series of happiness studies, while British Prime Minister David Cameron has announced the UK’s intention to begin tracking well-being along with GDP.[9] Sustainable Seattle is launching a Happiness Initiative and intends to conduct a city-wide well-being survey.[10] And Thailand, following the military coup of 2006, instituted a happiness index and now releases monthly GNH data.[11]

Michael Pennock now uses what he calls a “de-Bhutanized” version of GNH in his work in Victoria, British Columbia. Meanwhile, Ura and Pennock have collaborated further to develop policy assessment tools to forecast the potential implications of projects or programs for national happiness.[12]

Britain’s New Economics Foundation publishes a “Happy Planet Index,” which “shows that it is possible for a nation to have high well-being with a low ecological footprint.”[13] And a new documentary film called “The Economics of Happiness” argues that GNH is best served by localizing economics, politics, and culture.[14]

No doubt, whatever index is generally settled upon to replace GDP, it will be more complicated. But simplicity isn’t always an advantage, and the additional effort required to track factors like collective psychological well-being, quality of governance, and environmental integrity would be well spent even if it succeeded only in shining a spotlight of public awareness and concern in these areas. But at this moment in history, as GDP growth becomes an unachievable goal, it is especially important that societies re-examine their aims and measures. If we aim for what is no longer possible, we will achieve only delusion and frustration. But if we aim for genuinely worthwhile goals that can be attained, then even if we have less energy at our command and fewer material goods available, we might nevertheless still increase our satisfaction in life.

Policy makers take note: Governments that choose to measure happiness and that aim to increase it in ways that don’t involve increased consumption can still show success, while those that stick to GDP growth as their primary measure of national well-being will be forced to find increasingly inventive ways to explain their failure to very unhappy voters.

References

1. For expanded discussion of these points, see discussion of GNP in Arne Naess, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 1989).

2. William D. Nordhaus and James Tobin, Is Growth Obsolete?, Cowles Foundation Discussion Paper 319 (New Haven: Yale University 1971).

3. Unfortunately, the organization Redefining Progress seems to have become a casualty of the economic crsis.

4. Harvard Medical School Office of Public Affairs, “Happiness is a Collective – Not Just Individual_Phenonmenon,” news alert.

5. Jamie Smith Hopkins, “Putting a Dollar Figure on Progress,” The Baltimore Sun, September, 2010.

6. Joseph Stiglitz, Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, Report on the CMEPSP (September, 2009), p.7.

7. The phrase “Green National Product” is from Clifford Cobb and John Cobb, The Green National Product: A Proposed Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (Minnesota University Press of America, 1994), pp.280-281.

8. Derek Bok, The Politics of Happiness: What a Government Can Learn From the New Research on Well-Being (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

9. “David Cameron Aims to Make Happiness the New GDP,” The Guardian, November 14, 2010.

10. “Seattle Area Happiness Initiative”.

11. “ABAC Poll: Thai People Happiness Index Rose to 8 Out of 10 Points”, posted December 6, 2010.

12. “Coronation Address of His Majesty King Khesar, the 5th Druk Gyalpo of Bhutan,” November 7, 2008.

13. Cliff Kuang, “Infographic of the Day: Happiness Comes at a Price”, posted December 8, 2010.

14. Helena Norberg-Hodge, Steven Gorelick, and John Page, “The Economics of Happiness,” a documentary movie, International Society for Ecology and Culture, 2011.

By Richard Heinberg, 17 September 2011, Post Carbon Institute 

GOD OR GREED ? A  MUSLIM  VIEW

Summary of a Presentation at the Muslim-Christian Dialogue on Greed organised by the Lutheran World Federation and hosted by the Sabah Theological Seminary on 26^th of September 2011 in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah.

1. Greed is condemned in all religions.  Even in secular philosophies, greed is regarded  as a vice.
2. In the Qur’an, the embodiment of greed is Qarun (28:76-82; 29: 39) who was preoccupied with the accumulation of wealth and riches, and cared little for his fellow human beings or for God.

Greed is a vice in Islam because a) it is an act of stark selfishness; b) it distorts and perverts one’s character. It makes one vain and arrogant; c) it makes one overly materialistic ; d) it leads to the spread of corruption in society ; d) it is the antithesis of sharing and giving; and e) it undermines a person’s love for God and subverts values such as justice, fairness and compassion.

1. The repudiation of greed does not mean that one should renounce the life of this world.  Money is not an evil in itself. Islam allows for the ownership of property.  It prescribes rules for inheritance. Right through history Muslim societies have encouraged private enterprise and investment and recognised the legitimacy of reasonable profits.
2. But in the life of this world, there are limits that one should observe.  The concept and practice of limits is a fundamental principle in Islam.  Do not transgress the limits is an oft-repeated advice in the Qur’an.  It is linked to yet another principle, the principle of restraint.  Restraint helps to check and curb greed.  Restraint is the real meaning of the fast in the month of Ramadan.  Limits and restraint in turn lead to balance.  For it is only when everyone exercises restraint that there would be some equilibrium in society.  An equilibrium that guarantees each and every person his rightful place helps to establish the framework for justice.
3. When justice is central to society, greed will not find a foothold.  There are at least five injunctions and practices in Islam which underscore the significance of justice—- prohibition of interest (riba); the wealth tax ( zakat); the division of inheritance( faraid); the bequeathal  of personal wealth for the public good(waqf);  and charity ( sedaqah).  Underlying these injunctions and practices is a commitment to the equitable distribution of wealth and the reduction of social disparities.

It is significant that in the past this commitment did not in any way diminish the important role performed by the market in Muslim civilisation.  Huge markets flourished in some of the great centres of trade of antiquity, from Fez to Melaka.  But these were markets that were embedded in society, markets that by and large abided by the larger moral norms of Islam, including its prohibition on riba and on debt transaction.

1. This is why from the perspective of Islamic values and principles, what mars and mires the global economy and global finance today would be morally reprehensible. The ever widening wealth gap between the rich and the poor at the global level and within nation-states, the maximisation of profits as a credo, the transformation of money into a commodity for profit and the overwhelming power of speculative capital in financial transactions would contradict all that Islam stands for.  Most of all, it is the institutionalisation and the legitimisation of greed as never before in human history through a capitalist culture of acquisition, accumulation and conspicuous consumption that Islam would regard as the ultimate betrayal of God’s teachings.
2. How does one get out of the greed trap?  Perhaps one should begin with basics. Money should cease to be a commodity of profit. It should be a medium of exchange, nothing more; nothing less.  Its intrinsic value should be determined once again by the gold standard.  This will curb speculation and restore stability to the monetary system.  It will also eliminate debt transaction.   In such a system, there will be no need for interest or riba.  Private commercial banking will yield eventually to  public banks with mechanisms that ensure justice and fairness.  The Profit-and-Loss Sharing( Mudharabah) principle — and not the maximisation of profits— will guide these banks in their lending and investment policies.
3. Of course, reforms in the financial sector will have to be accompanied by far-reaching changes in the economy as a whole.  The public good rather than private gain will be the leitmotif of the economy.  Land, other natural resources, the supply of water and energy, highways, other forms of infrastructure, health care and education will all be part and parcel of the commons.  Cooperatives will play a major role in the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services.  Private business enterprises will be strongly regulated by ethical principles.
4. To sustain a transformed economy within an ethical framework, our underlying consciousness should also undergo a mammoth change. Justice, fairness, compassion, love, sharing, giving, restraint and balance will become central to the life of the individual and the community. For these universal, inclusive values to perpetuate themselves from generation to generation there has to be a psychological, emotional and intellectual anchor.  That anchor has to be a profound  consciousness of God.  It is God Consciousness that lays out the meaning and purpose of life, that determines the role and responsibility of the human being as vicegerent on earth, that affirms our collective commitment to all that is good and beautiful in this transient existence—- and therefore repudiates greed in all its manifestations.

10)   Islam and Christianity concur on this fundamental belief: that the human being cannot serve both God and greed at the same time.  If we choose God then we should declare war on those structures and attitudes that allow greed to breed in contemporary civilisation. As Muslims and Christians we should write, speak, organise and mobilise against greed.  In this monumental struggle we should work with people of other faiths and those who may not belong to a particular faith community.  The war against greed is putting into action God’s eternal message: Believe in God and do good.

Chandra Muzaffar

Kuala Lumpur

26 September 2011

THE Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial was to be dedicated on the National Mall on Sunday — exactly 56 years after the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi and 48 years after the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. (Because of Hurricane Irene, the ceremony has been postponed.)

These events constitute major milestones in the turbulent history of race and democracy in America, and the undeniable success of the civil rights movement — culminating in the election of Barack Obama in 2008 — warrants our attention and elation. Yet the prophetic words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel still haunt us: “The whole future of America depends on the impact and influence of Dr. King.”

Rabbi Heschel spoke those words during the last years of King’s life, when 72 percent of whites and 55 percent of blacks disapproved of King’s opposition to the Vietnam War and his efforts to eradicate poverty in America. King’s dream of a more democratic America had become, in his words, “a nightmare,” owing to the persistence of “racism, poverty, militarism and materialism.” He called America a “sick society.” On the Sunday after his assassination, in 1968, he was to have preached a sermon titled “Why America May Go to Hell.”

King did not think that America ought to go to hell, but rather that it might go to hell owing to its economic injustice, cultural decay and political paralysis. He was not an American Gibbon, chronicling the decline and fall of the American empire, but a courageous and visionary Christian blues man, fighting with style and love in the face of the four catastrophes he identified.

Militarism is an imperial catastrophe that has produced a military-industrial complex and national security state and warped the country’s priorities and stature (as with the immoral drones, dropping bombs on innocent civilians). Materialism is a spiritual catastrophe, promoted by a corporate media multiplex and a culture industry that have hardened the hearts of hard-core consumers and coarsened the consciences of would-be citizens. Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. Arbitrary uses of the law — in the name of the “war” on drugs — have produced, in the legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s apt phrase, a new Jim Crow of mass incarceration. And poverty is an economic catastrophe, inseparable from the power of greedy oligarchs and avaricious plutocrats indifferent to the misery of poor children, elderly citizens and working people.

The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy. Instead of articulating a radical democratic vision and fighting for homeowners, workers and poor people in the form of mortgage relief, jobs and investment in education, infrastructure and housing, the administration gave us bailouts for banks, record profits for Wall Street and giant budget cuts on the backs of the vulnerable.

As the talk show host Tavis Smiley and I have said in our national tour against poverty, the recent budget deal is only the latest phase of a 30-year, top-down, one-sided war against the poor and working people in the name of a morally bankrupt policy of deregulating markets, lowering taxes and cutting spending for those already socially neglected and economically abandoned. Our two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative versions of oligarchic rule.

The absence of a King-worthy narrative to reinvigorate poor and working people has enabled right-wing populists to seize the moment with credible claims about government corruption and ridiculous claims about tax cuts’ stimulating growth. This right-wing threat is a catastrophic response to King’s four catastrophes; its agenda would lead to hellish conditions for most Americans.

King weeps from his grave. He never confused substance with symbolism. He never conflated a flesh and blood sacrifice with a stone and mortar edifice. We rightly celebrate his substance and sacrifice because he loved us all so deeply. Let us not remain satisfied with symbolism because we too often fear the challenge he embraced. Our greatest writer, Herman Melville, who spent his life in love with America even as he was our most fierce critic of the myth of American exceptionalism, noted, “Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial.”

King’s response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a re-evaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.

In concrete terms, this means support for progressive politicians like Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Mark Ridley-Thomas, a Los Angeles County supervisor; extensive community and media organizing; civil disobedience; and life and death confrontations with the powers that be. Like King, we need to put on our cemetery clothes and be coffin-ready for the next great democratic battle.

By CORNEL WEST

25 August 2011

@ The New York Times

Cornel West, a philosopher, is a professor at Princeton.

Does Conflict Empower Women?

“Necessity is the mother of Invention” is a well proven fact; similar has been the case with women of Kashmir. The armed conflict has imposed on them new alien roles, which they have readily accepted and are fulfilling the responsibilities of the same. During the initial phase of armed struggle, the women rubbed shoulders with men, and in many cases proved more effective than men, especially when the army or police would pick up the youth. The women of the locality would stage protests outside the army camps and pickets which would force the army to release the youth. The women would even resist the illegal detention of any youth, and would protest alongwith men against the atrocities of the State and army.

When the things turned ugly, and women found themselves in the line of fire, they retreated a bit from the active protests as the killings, rapes, abductions, torture and illegal detentions were threatening to disrupt the whole Social and Family life, which would have ultimately led to anarchy, but women took charge of their lives and responsibility of their families; they were overburdened by the challenges of extended responsibilities and roles but they didn’t panic and only due to their perseverance and steadfastness, a Social catastrophe was avoided. In the families whose lone bread earners were killed or disappeared, women began to shoulder the economic responsibilities, to educate their children and drive the cart of daily life.

Illiterate women, whose sons, spouses, brothers or fathers were serving jail sentences in different parts of Kashmir and India, began to follow their legal suits, contacted lawyers, got to learn about the draconian laws under which their beloved ones were imprisoned, got exposed to the legal clauses and knew which judges were hearing their cases. They began to visit various jails, torture and detention centers and traveled to alien places, which provided them diverse exposure, and they are well aware of the location of prisons, courts and cheap hotels to stay during which the trail was going on. Thus their personal tragedies made them emerge as empowered women, who control the lives of their kith and kin, despite the impediments of education, gender and birth.

Thousands of men have been killed in staged, fake encounters and in custody by the army and Police too. Then there are men, who have been picked by the army or police and since then none has heard about them, army and police claims they have run away from the custody, whereas their families allege that the disappeared souls are either in the custody of the agencies that picked them or have been killed who are occupying the unknown graves. According to the unofficial sources more than ten thousand persons are disappeared in Kashmir, and there are more than three thousand half widows(Half Widows are those women whose husbands have disappeared in the custody and there is no consensus among the scholars of different schools of thought about the stipulated time after which they can be pronounced as Widows and have the right to remarry). The disappearance is a brutal continuous source of agony for the family and those belonging to the victim as they always remain in a dilemma about the status of the victim, neither the law is able to declare him dead nor the dear ones are ready to accept him as dead, as the victim has vanished in thin air.

To follow the cases of these disappeared souls, mothers of the disappeared sons got together under the chairmanship of Parveena Ahangar, whose own son Javed Ahmad Ahangar is missing since 1990s from the army’s custody to form the Association of the Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) in 1994. Later on half widows too joined APDP. Since 1994 till date they have been fighting a continuous legal battle for Justice demanding the whereabouts of their beloved ones, which till now has yielded nothing, but Parveena a middle aged, illiterate, common woman has reiterated never to surrender or give up, and is inspiring others to follow her suit. On the 10th of every month, members of APDP stage a peaceful silent protest in the Pratap Park, located in the heart of Srinagar. Parveena is regularly invited to attend different seminars and conferences in different parts of the world, where she shares her agony and agony of thousands others.

The stalwarts of armed insurgency, most of whom either have been killed or have joined Pro-Freedom politics have been grossly negligent towards building institutions for the victims of conflict, instead the money which was contributed and channeled through them to take care of the victims of the conflict was siphoned and swindled off by the majority of them either for personal or political use, and the victims were left high and dry; and forced to fend for themselves which left them in pathetic conditions, where they are forced to be exploited in multi dimensional ways. It is one of the reasons where the common masses feel disgusted against the flag bearers of Aazadi, as they can’t relate their miseries and conditions to them. APDP with its little means tries to cater to the needs of the families of disappeared souls. Parveena holds that only mothers know the agony of losing a son, hence mothers have to be in the forefront in the struggle for Justice.

Armed insurgency which now has lost its momentum as a result of which women now are regaining their public space back once again, and are even on the forefront of the protests that have rocked Kashmir Valley for last three consecutive years since 2008. Women are also active in the Peace and Reconciliation efforts too, though these initiatives are still an elite venture.

Thus conflict made women of Kashmir to acquire new roles, and with it came its own set of problems and responsibilities and women have proved to be oceans of sacrifice and courage and with a smiling face they are delivering what these roles demand from them. But there is a flipside of the conflict which is having an adverse effect on women and has made them more vulnerable to various evils and their rights are violated with impunity.

The incidents of Domestic violence have gone up due to the impact of conflict, as the men folk are being daily humiliated by the army and police bruising their self esteem and crushing their self confidence, who in turn to want to regain and assert their authority, stature, status and manliness against women hence coerce them to submission. They avenge their humiliation from their womenfolk, which even in many cases has resulted in death.

The women related to militants and Pro-Freedom voices suffer from governmental and State apathy, hostility and hate at every step of their lives, and those related to renegades or counter insurgents from Social apathy, as they are declared as Social outcastes, and their women and children have to face a host of problems.

Families, whose bread earners have been killed, find women trying hard to keep the family together, often neglecting their own health. The financial constraints drive them from pillar to post and cultural impediments and social norms don’t even permit some of them to beg.

Previously it was the father, brother, husband or son who used to provide security to his daughter, sister, wife or mother but given the situation prevalent in Kashmir the roles have been reversed. The women shoulder their men when they are encountered with a calamity, though social norms inhibit women visiting Police Stations, army camps and torture centers, but the situation demands so and in the process they get a bad name label.

Child marriage is becoming rampant in the heavily militarized areas, so as to escape rape and molestation by the army. The drop out rate of girls from schools is also on rise, in order to escape the routine taunts and harassment by the army enroute to school. Some girls have been even forced to marry certain people of influence through coercion by Police and counterinsurgents and in case of resistance; either the girl has been raped or killed. There has been no survey about the exact number of rapes committed against the Kashmiri women but in a survey conducted by Medicans San Frontiers(Doctors Without Borders) an International NGO in 2006 on “Kashmir: Violence and Health”, 11.6 percent of interviewees said they had been victims of sexual violence since 1989. Almost two thirds of the people interviewed (63.9 percent) by MSF had heard about cases of rape during the same period. The study revealed that Kashmiri women were among the worst sufferers of sexual violence in the world. The figure is much higher than that of Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Chechnya and Ingushetia. Many teenage girls are now going for counseling in order to cope the rising psychological impact of the atrocities on women perpetuated by army and police. The suicide rate among women of Kashmir is on rise and the ramifications of conflict have contributed to its steep increase among women.

The women of Kashmir have been dragged to flesh trade, and they are exploited in this process as they are offered money sometimes but most of times denied. The lower rung Special Police Officers(SPO)s are even a part of this vicious circle, who would marry a girl, then sell her to others or make her to visit their higher officers for sexual favors. These women forced in the flesh trade are even used as mukhbirs(spies) or even coerced to drag other girls in their net, thus the vicious circle continued and the girls had no escape from the same. Luring the poor girls for jobs and then sexually exploiting them, came to the forefront on a large scale in the form of VIP Sex Scandal 2006 in which high rank police officials, top bureaucrats and politicians were involved in sexploitation of the young local girls, all of whom were educated, some even with bachelors and masters degree, though most of then were not poor, but they needed jobs for attaining social status. In Kashmir it now has become difficult for young unemployed girls to find a suitable groom, as the marriage market demands the girl to be employed, and more the high paying job, more are the chances of having a similarly high status groom, this trend is making the girls run helter skelter for jobs and in the process fall in the trap of sex exploiters, who in this case happened to be men of Power.

The sexploitation of women in Kashmir still continues unabated, and now there are many clear signals that Kashmiri girls are even trafficked to other states for prostitution, and sooner or later this brutal fact will too dawn on the people of Kashmir.

The recent population census of 2011 has brought to fore various shocking facts about women of Kashmir, of which the drastic decline in the female sex ratio will have serious ramifications in the future, though some leaders have even advised the men to turn gay, but we must try to find the real roots of this decline, as the Sex ratio has dropped from 906 per thousand males in 2001 to 883 in 2011, as the decadal census proved. One of the reasons for this drastic fall is the vulnerability of women via the presence of army in Kashmir who ravage their chastity with impunity, hence numerous incidents of rape and molestations by the army and zero percent persecution of the culprits has reinforced the belief of parents that they can’t afford the liability of a girl child. Other reasons like Dowry, patriarchal hostility towards girl child, unemployment and a host of other issues too contribute to the brutal female feticide, which is continuing unabated, despite dire warnings in the Quran against such inhuman, uncivilized, brutish, nasty and savage practice. Also many girls have been left unclaimed in hospitals by their parents, giving rise to another issue of catering to these infants, which mostly are adopted and if not the orphanages, special homes have no arrangement for the same. The Social & Child rights workers encounter serious challenges while addressing this new problem.

Women of Kashmir even in 21st century suffer from scores of problems and issues in this corner of the world, where women still have numerous inhibitions and are far from empowered. Women of Kashmir have adopted and acquired new roles that conflict imposed and demanded from them, but the perpetual denial of Justice, failure to bestow equal rights on them, structural prejudices prevalent in society against them, absence of institutions which will cater to their needs, marginalization of their dissent, suppression of their voices and turning a blind eye towards their sacrifices and contribution has obviously led to their souls being bruised, vision blurred, physique burdened, courage undermined, voices chocked but despite all these hurdles they play a significant part in holding the family and society together. They have always proven to be an inspiration for men to continue their struggle against occupation and atrocities. Every conflict brings in its wake new roles for women, and in most cases women comply with the same, same has happened in Kashmir too, but these roles have both Positive as well negative implications depending on the manner, means and degree of exposure to the conflict and its impact on the lives of women.

What more new roles or disastrous implications conflict will have on women of Kashmir in future, only time will tell!!

By Mushtaq Ul haq Ahmad Sikander

4 September 2011

Mushtaq Ul Haq Ahmad Sikander is Writer-Activist based in Srinagar, Kashmir and can be reached at sikandarmushtaq@gmail.com

Disappointment At The United Nations: The Palmer Report On The Flotilla Incident Of 31 May 2010

When the UN Secretary General announced on 2 August 2010 that a Panel of Inquiry had been established to investigate the Israeli attacks of 31 May on the Mavi Marmara and five other ships carrying humanitarian aid to the beleaguered people of Gaza there was widespread hope that international law would be vindicated and the Israelis would finally be held accountable. With the release of the report this past week these hopes have been largely dashed as the report failed to address the central international law issues in a credible and satisfactory manner. Turkey, not surprisingly, responded strongly that it was not prepared to live with the central finding of the 105 page report to the effect that the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip is lawful and could be enforced by Israel against a humanitarian mission even in international waters.

Perhaps this outcome should not be surprising. The Panel as appointed was woefully ill-equipped to render an authoritative result. Geoffrey Palmer, the Chair of the Panel, although respected as the former Prime Minister of New Zealand and as an environmental law professor, was not particularly knowledgeable about either the international law of the sea or the law of war. And incredibly, the only other independent member of the Panel was Alvaro Uribe, the former President of Colombia, with no professional credentials relevant to the issues under consideration, and notorious both for his horrible human rights record while holding office and forging intimate ties with Israel by way of arms purchases and diplomatic cooperation that was acknowledged by ‘The Light Unto The Nations’ award given by the American Jewish Committee that should have been sufficient by itself to cast doubt on his suitability for this appointment. His presence on the panel compromised the integrity of the process, and made one wonder how could such an appointment can be explained, let alone justified. The remaining two members were designated by the governments of Israel and Turkey, and not surprisingly appended partisan dissents to those portions of the report that criticized the position taken by their respective governments. Another limitation of the report was that the Panel was constrained by its terms of reference that prohibited reliance on any materials other than presented in the two national reports submitted by the contending governments. With these considerations in mind, we can only wonder why the Secretary General would have established a framework so ill-equipped to reach findings that would put the controversy to rest, which it has certainly not done.

Even this ill-conceived panel did not altogether endorse Israeli behavior on 31 May. They found that Israel used excessive force and seemed responsible for the deaths of the nine passengers on the Mavi Marmara, instructing Israel to pay compensation and issue a statement of regret. In other words the Palmer Report seems to fault seriously the manner by which the Israeli enforced the blockade, but unfortunately upheld the underlying legality of both the blockade and the right of enforcement, and that is the rub. Such a conclusion contradicted the earlier finding of a more expert panel established by the Human Rights Council, as well as rejected the overwhelming consensus that had been expressed by qualified international law specialists on these core issues.

While the Panel delayed the report several times to give diplomacy a chance to resolve the contested issues, Israel and Turkey could never quite reach closure. There were intriguing reports along the way that unpublicized discussions between representatives of the two governments had reached a compromise agreement on the basis of Israel’s readiness to offer Turkey a formal apology and to compensate the families of those killed as well as those wounded during the attack, but when the time for announcing such a resolution of this conflict, Israel backed away. In particular, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, seemed unwilling to take the last step, claiming that it would demoralize the citizenry of Israel and signal weakness to Israel’s enemies in the region. More cynical observers believed that the Israeli refusal to resolve the conflict was a reflection of domestic politics, especially Netanyahu’s rivalry with the extremist Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who was forever accusing Netanyahu of being a wimpy leader and made no secret of his own ambition to be the next Israeli head of state. Whatever the true mix of reasons, the diplomatic track failed, despite cheerleading from Washington that made no secret of its view that resolving this conflict had become a high priority for American foreign policy. And so the Palmer Report assumed a greater role than might have been anticipated. After the feverish diplomatic efforts failed, the Palmer panel seemed to offer the last chance for the parties to reach a mutually satisfactory resolution based on the application of the international law and resulting recommendations that would delimit what must be done to overcome any violations that had taken place during the attack on the flotilla.

But to be satisfactory, the report had to interpret the legal issues in a reasonable and responsible manner. This meant, above all else, that the underlying blockade imposed more than four years ago on the 1.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza was unlawful, and should be immediately lifted. On this basis, the enforcement by way of the 31 May attacks were unlawful, an offense aggravated by being the gross interference with freedom of navigation on the high seas, and further aggravated by producing nine deaths among the humanitarian workers and peace activists on the Mavi Marmara and by Israeli harassing and abusive behavior toward the rest of the passengers. Such conclusions should have been ‘no brainers’ for the panel, so obvious were these determinations from the perspective of international law as to leave little room for reasonable doubt. But this was not to be, and the report as written is a step backward from the fundamental effort of international law to limit permissible uses of international force to situations of established defensive necessity, and even then, to ensure that the scale of force employed, was proportional and respectful of civilian innocence. It is a further step back to the extent that it purports to allow a state to enforce on the high seas a blockade, condemned around the world for its cruelty and damaging impact on civilian mental and physical health, a blockade that has deliberately deprived the people of Gaza of the necessities of life as well as locked them into a crowded and impoverished space that has been mercilessly attacked with modern weaponry from time to time.

Given these stark realities it is little wonder that the Turkish Government reacted with anger and disclosed their resolve to proceed in a manner that expresses not only its sense of law and justice, but also reflects Turkish efforts in recent years to base regional relations on principles of fairness and mutual respect. The Turkish Foreign Minister, realizing that the results reached by the Palmer Panel were unacceptable, formulated his own Plan B. This consisted of responses not only to the report, but to the failure of Israel to act benignly on its own by offering a formal apology and setting up adequate compensation arrangements. Israel had more than a year to meet these minimal Turkish demands, and showed its unwillingness to do so. As Mr. Davutoglu made clear this Turkish response was not intended to produce an encounter with Israel, but to put the relations between the countries back on ‘the right track.’ I believe that this is the correct approach under the circumstances as it takes international law seriously, and rests policy on issues of principle and prudence rather than opts for geopolitical opportunism. As Davutoglu said plainly, “The time has come for Israel to pay a price for its illegal action. The price, first of all, is being deprived of Turkey’s friendship.”

And it this withdrawal of friendship is not just symbolic. Turkey has downgraded diplomatic representation, expelling the Israeli ambassador and maintaining relations at the measly level of second secretary. Beyond this all forms of military cooperation are suspended, and Turkey indicated that it will strengthen its naval presence in the Eastern Mediterranean. As well, Turkey has indicated its intention to initiate action within the General Assembly to seek an Advisory Opinion from the International Court of Justice as to the legality of the blockade. What is sadly evident is that Israeli internal politics have become so belligerent and militarist that the political leaders in the country are hamstrung, unable to take a foreign policy initiative that is manifestly in their national interest. For Israel to lose Turkey’s friendship is second only to losing America’s support, and coupled with the more democratic-driven policies of the Arab Spring, this alienation of Ankara is a major setback for Israel’s future in the region.

What is more, the Turkish refusal to swallow the findings of the Palmer Report is an admirable posture that is bound to be popular throughout the Middle East and beyond. At a time when some of Turkey’s earlier diplomatic initiatives have run into difficulties, most evidently in Syria, this stand on behalf of the victimized population of Gaza represents a rare display of placing values above interests. The people of Gaza are weak, abused, and vulnerable. In contrast, Israel is a military powerhouse, prospering, a valuable trading partner for Turkey, and in the background the United States is ready to pay a pretty penny if it could induce a rapprochement, thereby avoiding the awkwardness of dealing with this breakdown between its two most significant strategic partners in the Middle East. We should also keep in mind that the passengers on these flotilla ships were mainly idealists, seeking nonviolently to overcome a humanitarian ordeal that the UN and the interplay of national governments had been unable and unwilling to address for several years. This initiative by civil society activists deserved the support and solidarity of the world, not a slap on the wrist by being chastened by the Palmer report’s view that their action were irresponsible and provocative.

Israel has managed up to now to avoid paying the price for defying international law. For decades it has been building unlawful settlements in occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. It has used excessive violence and relied on state terror on numerous occasions in dealing with Palestinian resistance, and has subjected the people of Gaza to sustained and extreme forms of collective punishment. It attacked villages and neighborhood of Beirut mercilessly in 2006, launched its massive campaign from land, sea, and air for three weeks at the end of 2008 against a defenseless Gaza, and then shocked world opinion with its violence against the Mavi Marmara in its nighttime attack in 2010. It should have been made to pay the price long ago for this pattern of defying international law, above all by the United Nations. If Turkey sustains its position it will finally send a message to Tel Aviv that the wellbeing and security of Israel in the future will depend on a change of course in its relation to both the Palestinians and its regional neighbors. The days of flaunting international law and fundamental human rights are no longer policy options for Israel without a downside. Turkey is dramatically demonstrating that there can be a decided downside to Israeli flagrant lawlessness.

By Prof. Richard Falk

10 September 2011

@ Middleeastmonitor.org.uk

The author is the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

Dealing with Israel under a hegemonic crisis

The global hegemonic order is being challenged at a time of crisis and turmoil in several regions.

A crisis of hegemony in contemporary international politics is an astonishing development. This situation ironically presents us with serious risks in global terms, while offering opportunities at various levels simultaneously.

The diminishing power of the US in world politics has been subject to many interpretations in this period. One shared perspective is that the US overstretch in post-September 11 period tested the limits of the US power. The US is now back at home and dealing with its own problems with lesser interest to international issues. The Obama administration offered “hope” in this regards exclusively to its domestic constituency. The promise of Obama’s was a restoration of trust and confidence at home, while attempting to repair the US image abroad.

The gradual decline of the US hegemonic influence in the Middle East created a stronger impact in this geography in comparison to other regions. The region was stuck with the static order predicated on the three interrelated pillars of ensuring Israel’s security, serving oil interests and maintaining the so-called stability. The US administration was happy with the Mubarak regime, since it was satisfying these requirements. The weakening US role opened room for the regional actors to progressively forge a sense of self-confidence to act on their own. Arab Spring demonstrated that no international power, including the US and other major powers, is able to control the developments. Ironically, the so-called ‘spring’ came to the Arab world at a time of global turmoil.

“Israel operates in a new Middle East”

Recently, the US-Israeli relations have been transformed under the imperatives of the declining hegemony. In this relationship, Israel used to be viewed as a vital ally backed strongly by the US in an atmosphere of hegemonic stability in the Middle East. Israel is still a vital ally and continues to enjoy strong support. However, Israel operates in a new Middle East, with weakening US control. The US also has lost its direct control over Israel and it is also unable to shape political environment in the region in which Israel operates. Granted, the Israeli administration still benefits from the US support, while not being accountable to it.

The situation remains volatile in the Middle East, given the weakening of hegemonic control and weakening ability of regional actors to deal with the situation in the region. Though there is an increasing room to manoeuvre and the regional powers enjoy a sense of freedom of action, they are not sure about where the regional order is heading. Although none of the regional powers, i.e., Israel, Iran, and Turkey, is able to dominate others, each experiences emancipation from the limiting influence of the hegemonic order. Israel’s choice in this situation is to oppress Palestinians, block any hope for peace, de-legitimize the UN system and international law. Israel also consolidates the US double standard image, marginalises the regional countries and peoples, and turns a blind eye to radical change and transformation in the region.

The Israeli administration’s understanding of the global and regional environments are very problematic. From their perspective, there is a suitable environment for their policies and they will not be responsible for the consequences of their actions at all. The US is not in a position to influence them, and they may even meddle into the US politics. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s defiance against the Obama administration exemplifies this mentality. This false consciousness made foreign policy concerns in Israel disappear and only Israeli domestic issues matter. It may lead to an Israeli ego-centric illusion at the administrative level with far worse consequences.

Dealing with Israel is becoming more difficult under a crisis of hegemony. The strategic blindness prevents the Israeli governemnt from drawing lessons from the deteriorating relations, among others, with Turkey as well as post-revolution Egypt. Unfortunately, the Israeli illusion seems likely to continue at the detriment of the other regional actors, its allies and its own people.

By Bulent Aras Last

21 September 2011

Professor Bulent Aras is head of the Center for Strategic Research, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Turkey.

Dag Hammarskjold: Was his death a crash or a conspiracy?

Exactly 50 years ago, UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold died in a plane crash on a mission to prevent civil war in newly independent Congo. Suspicions that the plane was shot down, never fully laid to rest, are now again on the rise.

After his death, Mr Hammarskjold was described by US President John F Kennedy as the “greatest statesman of our century”. He was a man with a vision of the UN as a “dynamic instrument” organising the world community, a protector of small nations, independent of the major powers, acting only in the interests of peace.

Dag Hammarskjold

Born in 1905 into an aristocratic Swedish family

Full name, Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjold

Helped lay foundations of Swedish welfare state

Swedish state secretary for foreign affairs (1947-1951)

The UN’s second secretary general (1953-1961), proposed by Britain and France

Nobel Peace Prize winner 1961

The only person to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize after his death, he established the first armed UN peacekeeping mission following the crisis in Suez.

Just after midnight on 18 September 1961, he was heading to negotiate a ceasefire in a mineral-rich breakaway region of Congo, where another of his peacekeeping missions was getting bogged down in the complex politics of decolonisation and Cold War rivalry.

But his DC6 aircraft crashed in darkness shortly before landing, in a forest near Ndola in Northern Rhodesia – now Zambia.

Knut Hammarskjold, his nephew, visited the crash site days later.

“It was just scattered all over the place, the pieces of the aircraft,” he says. “I did not see any bodies, they had been removed earlier, I think.”

He remembers the reaction at home in Sweden, where his uncle was a national hero.

“Everybody was so shocked. I can say the whole of Sweden was affected by this. All the shops had his picture in the window, and he had a state funeral which was very unusual for a foreign office person.”

Iron will

Eight years earlier, when the members of the Security Council appointed the unassuming Swede secretary general, they could not have predicted the zeal he would bring to the job.

“He was a very spiritual, intellectual, cultured man, and that was all part of his mystical approach to life,” says Dame Margaret Anstee, the first female under-secretary at the UN, who was starting out on a 40-year career at the organisation. “He had a certain reserve, and a certain unique kind of dignity.”

But he soon gained a reputation for independence and daring, and instead of staying in his New York office, a hands-on approach became his trademark. He personally negotiated the release of 15 American airmen who had been imprisoned in China at a time when the People’s Republic was not represented at the UN.

“He had the skills of mediation and persuasion, combined with this almost iron single-minded will of where he wanted to go,” says Margaret Anstee.

“But of course by that very token it brought him into conflict with people who wanted to use the UN for their own ends.”

In Congo, one issue was who should control the southern province of Katanga, rich in copper, uranium and tin. Belgium, the ex-colonial power, backed a secessionist movement led by Moise Tshombe, as did the UK and US who had mining interests in the region.

But Mr Hammarskjold from the start backed Congo’s elected central authorities – the Soviet-backed government of prime minister Patrice Lumumba, and later, after Mr Lumumba was deposed and murdered, Prime Minister Cyrille Adoula.

Mr Hammarskjold wanted to pursue a negotiated solution between Mr Tshombe and the central government, a goal that became even more urgent after UN peacekeepers found themselves outgunned during an aggressive operation to drive foreign mercenaries from Katanga.

Mr Tshombe was waiting to talk to him in Ndola on the night he died.

Airbrushed photos

The crash of his aircraft has never been fully explained. Two investigations held in the British-run Central African Federation, which included Northern Rhodesia, were followed by an official UN inquiry, which concluded that foul play could not be ruled out. So people have never stopped coming forward with new explanations, and asking new questions.

Some 30 years after the crash, in 1992, two men who had served as UN representatives in Katanga just before and just after Hammarskjold’s death – Conor Cruise O’Brien and George Ivan Smith – wrote a letter to the Guardian claiming to have evidence that the plane was shot down accidentally, by mercenaries. In their view, a warning shot intended to divert the plane to alternative talks with industrialists in Katanga, in fact hit the plane and caused it to crash.

In 1998 South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, led by Desmond Tutu, published eight letters that suggested CIA, MI5 and South African intelligence were involved in sabotage of the aircraft. British officials responded that these were likely to be Soviet forgeries.

In 2005, the head of UN military information in Congo in 1961, Bjorn Egge, told the Aftenposten newspaper he had noticed a round hole in Hammarskjold’s forehead when he saw the body in the mortuary. It could have been a bullet hole, he said, and it had been mysteriously airbrushed out of official photographs.

Over the past four years, Swedish aid worker Goran Bjorkdahl has carried out extensive research and British academic Susan Williams published a book on Thursday – Who Killed Hammarskjold? Both conclude that it is likely the plane was brought down.

Mr Bjorkdahl began his study after inheriting from his father, who had worked in Zambia in the 1970s, a piece of the plane fuselage containing unexplained small holes. He tracked down 12 witnesses, in whose accounts of the night three points appeared repeatedly:

The DC6 circled in the air two or three times before it crashed

A smaller plane flew above it

A bright light flashed in the sky above the large plane before it went down

Six witnesses also recall seeing uniformed personnel near the crash site that morning, even though

official reports claim it was not located until after 15:00 that day 

The official inquiries held at the time also contain witness testimony referring to a second plane in the sky.

One of the key questions Ms Williams asks in her book is why this and other inconvenient observations were discounted, or in some cases doctored during the official Rhodesian investigations. She says it is clear to her that there was a cover-up.

She places particular emphasis on three of her discoveries:

The photographs of Hammarskjold after his death are either taken in such a way as to conceal the

area around his right eye, or, where the eye is visible, they show evidence of having been touched

up, possibly to hide a wound

The sole survivor of the crash, Harold Julien, said there was an explosion before the plane fell from

the sky – his evidence was discounted in the original inquiry on the grounds that he was ill and

sedated, but Ms Williams has found a doctor’s statement insisting that he was lucid at the time (he

died of his injuries within days)

A US intelligence officer at a listening station in Cyprus says he heard a cockpit recording from Ndola,

in which a pilot talks of closing in on the DC6 – guns are heard firing, and then the words “I’ve hit it”

“There is no smoking gun, but there is a mass of evidence that points in the direction that the plane was shot down by a second plane,” she told the BBC. “That is a far more convincing and supported explanation than any other.”

There were a range of people, including white Rhodesians and the Belgian and British mining companies in Katanga, “with a sense of being at war with the UN and with African nationalism”, she says – and with a motive for preventing Mr Hammarskjold and Mr Tshombe reaching a negotiated settlement.

Model diplomat

Mr Hammarskjold’s main adviser at the time, Brian Urquhart, says it is “so wrong” to think that “at night without ground control you could shoot down a plane or even locate it”. But Ms Williams says experts have told her that the DC6, on its way in to land at Ndola airport on a moonlit night, was a “sitting duck”.

Ms Williams argues that the time has come for a new inquiry, and Mr Hammarskjold’s nephew Knut is reported to have called for one himself, after hearing of Ms Williams’ new evidence.

Fifty years later, his uncle is still a model for people working at the UN, says Knut Hammarskjold.

“Many, I’ve been told, still have his photo on their desks, and [former Secretary General] Kofi Annan says he always asks when there is a problem: ‘What will Dag have done in this situation?'”

Dame Margaret Anstee says he had the courage to stand up for his principles and to the strong member states, which his successors have lacked.

“There was a tacit agreement never to have such a single-minded secretary general again,” she says. “I think we can say they haven’t.”

Additional reporting by Stephen Mulvey

Susan Williams’ book, Who Killed Hammarskjold?, is published by Hurst and Company.

BBC World Service’s Witness programme on Monday reports on Dag Hammarskjold’s life and death, featuring contributions from Knut Hammarskjold and Dame Margaret Anstee.

By Stephanie Hegarty

17 September 2011

@ BBC World Service

Sigmund Freud once mentioned the defense offered by a man who was accused by his neighbor of having returned a kettle in a damaged condition. In the first place, he had returned the kettle undamaged; in the second place it already had holes in it when he borrowed it; and in the third place, he had never borrowed it at all.

That man’s name?

Dick Cheney.

On “Morning Joe” on MSNBC [4] on Thursday, the former Vice President claimed that the intelligence used to invade Iraq had been sound and accurate; the faulty intelligence was all Bill Clinton’s fault; the invasion didn’t do any damage but rather it was the Iraqis who damaged Iraq; and any invasion causes horrific things to happen, that just comes with the territory.

This incoherence was interspersed with gossip about Cheney’s marriage and his friends and his whole lovable social self. That lie may have overshadowed the more serious ones. When in the hell did Cheney become respectable, much less lovable? But that’s a distraction. Cheney’s crimes have long been catalogued [5].

Joe Scarborough began his Cheney interview by asking, not why did you commit so many crimes and abuses, but how did you, dear Dick, suffer from having the image of Darth Vader imposed on you? Cheney replies that he had fun wearing a Darth Vader mask. But listen carefully for the Freudian slip: he says he wore it in the President’s office, not the VICE President’s office.

Cheney claims he didn’t transform into Darth Vader, and of course he didn’t. Cheney was an immoral power-mad neocon for decades who consistently favored presidential prerogatives and aggressive militarism. But Cheney claims that what changed was that a terrorist act became an act of war rather than a crime. Did it do that all on its own?

Cheney slips in his usual baseless defense of torture and related abuses as having served some useful purpose. Scarborough does not follow up on that claim. Instead, he asks about Colin Powell’s comments on Cheney’s book. Nice and gossipy. But Lawrence Wilkerson’s more serious comments on the same topic, including his expression of willingness to testify against Cheney in court, go unmentioned.

Cheney then claims the Iraq lies were well-intended mistakes and basically accurate at the same time. Content with this, Scarborough focuses in on DC social scene changes over the decades. That’s journalism!

Mike Barnicle, a SERIOUS journalist, then asks Cheney if he regrets the death of a U.S. soldier in a humvee that was operating in Iraq without proper armor. This is a question along the lines of “Why did the military waste $60 billion in Iraq?” These talking heads are not 60 seconds from the topic of the lies that launched an illegal and immoral war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, almost none of them Americans, and Barnicle wants to know why the humvees weren’t better armored. Wednesday’s news [6] of U.S. troops having murdered Iraqi children gets no mention. This is breakfast table reporting for goodness sake! And yet, even with the softball question about the humvee armor, Cheney makes excuses and points out that things like that just happen in wars.

Well, exactly. But why do the wars happen?

Finally Scarborough asks Cheney why the U.S. military invaded Iraq, and Cheney says it was the right thing to do. He paints it as defensive. We attacked an unarmed impoverished nation halfway around the globe IN DEFENSE. Cheney even regurgitates a long-debunked claim about Mohamed Atta meeting with Iraqi officials. Next, Mika Brzezinski asks Cheney about the war lies, and Cheney blames Clinton. Now, I’m no fan of Clinton, and he told plenty of his own lies and engaged in plenty of power abuses tied to wars and military actions, but the fixing of the facts around the policy on Iraq was a major operation created after Clinton was gone. On this, Scarborough and Brzezinski had no follow up questions.

Instead, Barnicle helpfully turned to the topic of moving troops early out of Afghanistan and into preparation for war in Iraq. Cheney dishonestly suggested that no troops were moved to Iraq until a year and a half later. Then Cheney claims the Iraqis are the ones who did all the damage in Iraq. And on that note, Scarborough insists on chattering about Cheney’s marriage, while Brzezinski insists on hearing about Cheney’s sedated dreams of Italian villas.

Cheney admitted in this interview that his vice presidential role was unique. But that’s not actually an argument for buying his book. It’s an argument for amending our Constitution to include a ban on vice presidents exercising executive, as opposed to legislative, power.

The trouble is that there’s little point in amending our laws until we start enforcing them. Dick Cheney is a human advertisement for the absence of the rule of law in the United States. Wilkerson thinks Cheney is bluffing because he is scared of being prosecuted. I think Cheney knows that could only happen abroad. He is safe here because the Justice Department answers to Obama, and Obama is protecting Cheney because Obama is continuing similar crimes and abuses.

If Obama were to allow Attorney General Eric Holder to enforce our laws against Dick Cheney, Obama might very well save his own electoral prospects. But he would put himself at risk of future prosecution. The question of whether we will have the rule of law becomes the question of whether Obama wants to trade four years of power for decades in prison. That’s not how it is supposed to work.

By David Swanson

1 September 2011.

@ Democrats.com

Britain’s exposure to eurozone debt

The market focus at the moment is on the exposure of French banks to Greece. But be in no doubt how exposed British banks are to eurozone sovereigns and corporations.

I’ve written about the figures before.

But this chart (courtesy of a report by the Ernst and Young ITEM club) tells the story visually.

Germany gets gold, France silver. And then it’s us. The report estimates that the overall exposure of British banks to the economies of Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain is around $430bn, or 19 per cent of our GDP. If the eurozone unravels and those debts fall dramatically in value (or even go into default), the fact that we’re not members of the single currency will not protect us.

Incidentally, you might wonder what British banks were doing buying up all that eurozone debt in the first place. The Vickers commission, implicitly, wondered the same thing. That’s why it recommended that only British retail and corporate lending should be inside its ring fence. If bankers want to speculate by buying eurozone securities, they should surely do it without an implicit UK government backstop.

By Ben Chu, 14 September 2011 @ The Independent