Just International

A Letter To Ban Ki-moon

RE: Inspection and sealing of Freedom Flotilla II cargo

Dear Mr. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon,

We are writing to urge you to use your good offices in support of the humanitarian needs of the people of Gaza.

In our view, you can support the people of Gaza with two key actions. First, by appointing a representative to inspect and seal the cargo of the boats of the Freedom Flotilla II—thus assuring the Israeli government that the boats are carrying humanitarian supplies such as toys, medical supplies, cement and educational materials. Equally important, we strongly urge you to use your authority to call on all governments to support the safe passage of the Freedom Flotilla II. We are disappointed to learn of your recent efforts to persuade member governments from stopping the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza on the Freedom Flotilla II. We urge you to reconsider and instead encourage member states to lend support and ask Israel not to use force against legitimate humanitarian initiatives undertaken by civil society to help ease the suffering of the people of Gaza who are facing a humanitarian crisis of devastating scale.

The Freedom Flotilla II, organized by 14 national groups and international coalitions and carrying approximately 1500 ‘freedom riders,’ is set to sail to Gaza this month. Sailing in the spirit of promoting human rights, prosperity, and social responsibility, the aim of the Flotilla is to alleviate the humanitarian crisis faced by the citizens of Gaza.

The blockade in Gaza is clearly having a harmful impact on the people of Gaza, and indeed UNDP and other agencies report high levels of malnutrition and other disturbing health problems. According to a report by the World Food Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization, the level of “abject poverty” among the Palestinians of Gaza has tripled since the imposition of the blockade, with 61 % of households not having enough food. The blockade has crippled the Gaza economy and destroyed Palestinians’ livelihoods and homes.

We believe our requests to you are in keeping with UN Security Council Resolution 1860 of January 2009 as well as the 2010 UN Human Rights Council fact-finding mission on the attack on Freedom Flotilla I, which are calling for a lift of the blockade to allow humanitarian assistance. We urge you to do all you can to support this nonviolent international humanitarian effort, to provide UN representatives to inspect and seal the cargo, and to appeal to all governments to allow safe passage of the Freedom Flotilla II.

Thank you for your attention to this important matter. We look forward to your positive response.

Sincerely,

Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate 1976

Rigoberta Menchu Tum, Nobel Peace Laureate 1992

Jody Williams, Nobel Peace Laureate 1997

Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Laureate 2003

Who pollutes: The rich or the poor?

India’s prime minister is allowing India’s environment to be destroyed in order to cater to powerful foreign investors.

Indian farmers are being forcibly moved from their land to make way for rich foreign investors and their environmentally destructive plans [EPA]

On June 29, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met with editors of a few newspapers. When asked about whether he had been putting pressure on the Environment Ministry to approve environmentally destructive projects, he said “yes”, and justified that by quoting Indira Gandhi: “Poverty is the biggest polluter, we need to have a balance”.

Indira Gandhi said this in Stockholm, 1972 at the first Environmental Conference. She also read a quote from the Atharvaveda: “Whatever, I dig of you, O Earth, May that grow quickly upon you, O Pure One, may my thrust never pierce thy Vital points, thy heart”.

The Prime Minister has conveniently ignored the more significant quote.

The Prime Minister’s duty is to uphold the nation’s constitution and nation’s laws – including environmental laws – not to subvert them. By admitting that he has been putting pressure on the Environment Ministry, he has admitted that he is subverting the law.

Most commentators view the removal of Jairam Ramesh from the Environment Ministry during the July 12, 2011 cabinet-reshuffle as a further step towards environmental deregulation.

While quoting Indira Gandhi to justify his subversion of environmental law, the prime minister seems to have forgotten that Indira Gandhi created the country’s environmental governance structure during her tenure as prime minister. It was Indira Gandhi’s intervention that supported the call stop a hydro-electric project in Silent Valley, Kerala – saving an ecosystem rich in biodiversity.

It was Indira Gandhi’s concern that Mussorie, the queen of the hills, was being stripped naked by limestone mining that led the Environment Ministry to take action. We were invited to do the study of the environmental impact of limestone mining in Doon Valley in 1981 which eventually became the basis of a Supreme Court case.

In 1983, the Supreme Court shut down the mines.

In the pre-trade liberalisation days, it was accepted that if commerce undermines ecosystems which support life, then that commercial activity must stop because life must carry on. Article 21 of the Constitution makes it the duty of the state to protect life – and since ecological processes support life, the state has a duty to protect ecology.

‘The poor live in the places polluted by the rich’

Under Prof. Manmohan Singh’s leadership since the 1990’s the idea of “growth fetishism” has been exposed; which is the idea that all ecological devastation is justified in the name of growth. Who is driving this ecological devastation and the pollution? The rich and powerful corporations? Or the poor and powerless women, farmers, tribals and displaced rural communities who are forced to become urban slum dwellers?

The poor live in the places polluted by the rich, they do not cause the pollution. And they live in polluted places because they are displaced from their homes in rural areas where they had lived sustainably for millennia. They are victims of pollution because they are victims of dispossession – this is environmental injustice. And it is an inevitable consequence of the outsourcing of pollution from rich countries in the disguise of foreign direct investment (FDI).

Coastal Orissa is a case in point.

In the Jagatsingpur district, where POSCO’s giant US $12 billion steel plant is planned as the highest FDI, farmers grow biodiversity – betel vines and paddy, coconut and cashew, fruits and fish. There is no pollution and no waste; that is a prosperity that GDP does not count.

This economy of sustenance is being uprooted by means of violence in order to enable POSCO to export our iron-ore and steel. Every law of the land including the Forest Rights Act and the Coastal Zone Regulation Act is being violated as committee after committee has recognised. And when the Ministry of Environment Committees affirms the violation of laws, it is the prime minister who puts pressure on the Environment Minister to give an approval to POSCO.

In June, it was the women and children of Govindpur, Dinkia and Nuagaon who laid down in front of the police in the scorching sun in an effort to stop the land grab. They were still forming a human barricade when I visited on June 23.

The prime minister is intervening against the country’s laws to promote this land and resource grab. POSCO gets our land and our resources – while all that we will inherit from the POSCO project is ecological destruction, pollution, displaced people and the destruction of our democracy.

Environmental destruction affects the poor first

In India, it is the corporations that are building giant coal-based power plants – which are major climate polluters. The automobile industry pushes more cars onto our roads which is leading to higher carbon dioxide emissions. Emissions from the use of fossil fuel are driven by the economically powerful, not the poor. But it is the poor who are most vulnerable to the floods, droughts and cyclones that climate change intensifies.

The same applies for toxic pollution.

More than 25 years since the Bhopal disaster, children are still born sick and disabled [GALLO/GETTY]

In 1996, a case was filed in the Supreme Court to stop the import of toxic waste from the US. This waste was generated by rich consumers in the US, not by the poor in India who put their lives at risk sorting out the toxic garbage. The Bhopal disaster and its continuing toxic pollution was not caused by the poor who died there by the thousands. It was caused by Union Carbide, now owned by Dow.

A major issue related to toxic waste is the pesticide ‘endosulfan’ which has been banned by the UN and most countries in the world. The Supreme Court in India has ordered an interim ban, following the disaster which killed 1000 people and crippled more than 9000 in Kasargod – where endosulfan was sprayed on cashew plantations for 20 years. These innocent victims did not cause the toxic pollution – it was caused by powerful corporations who have used their influence to block a ban on endosulfan, even as more people die and children are born disabled.

Toxic agrichemicals harm all life.

Synthetic fertilisers eventually run into rivers and oceans, creating “dead zones”. Nitrogen oxide released from nitrogen fertilisers accumulates in the atmosphere as a green house gas that is 300 times more damaging than carbon dioxide. These synthetic fertilisers are also used to make bombs as the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai and the Oklahoma city bombings in the US have shown.

We now have a new form of pollution in agriculture – genetic pollution from genetically engineered crops, which is destroying biodiversity and devastating farmers’ livelihoods.

The poor do not cause chemical and genetic pollution – giant chemical/biotechnology corporations do. And the chemical corporations are also the gene giants who now control seeds. Here too, instead of being the voice of poor and vulnerable farmers, the prime minister has become the voice of powerful global corporations by repeatedly referring to genetic engineering as the ‘second Green Revolution’.

Privatising profit and natural resources, socialising pollution

Whether it is atmospheric pollution, toxic pollution, genetic pollution or urban waste pollution, environmental pollution is an externality of a greed based economy which privatises profit and natural resources and socialises pollution. The rich accumulate the land, the biodiversity, the water, the air and the profits. The poor bear the burden of dispossession and accumulated pollution.

We expect the prime minister to uphold India’s Constitution and environmental laws – not subvert them while he supports and promotes the polluters.

We expect our prime minister to recognise that the poor are victims of pollution and environmental degradation – not its cause.

We expect the prime minister to remember that he holds our precious natural heritage and natural capital in trust for future generations – not to be given away to greedy corporations and destroyed for short term profits.

We expect our prime minister to grow beyond his “growth fetishism” and recognise that we are all part of Mother Earth, and that pollution is violence against the Earth and people.

Dr Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecofeminist, philosopher, activist, and author of more than 20 books and 500 papers. She is the founder of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, and has campaigned for biodiversity, conservation and farmers’ rights – winning the Right Livelihood Award (Alternative Novel Prize) in 1993.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

By Vandana Shiva

26 July 2011

Al Jazeera

‘War on terror’ set to surpass cost of Second World War

The total cost to America of its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the related military operations in Pakistan, is set to exceed $4 trillion – more than three times the sum so far authorised by Congress in the decade since the 9/11 attacks.

This staggering sum emerges from a new study by academics at the Ivy-league Brown University that reveals the $1.3 trillion officially appropriated on Capitol Hill is the tip of a spending iceberg. If other Pentagon outlays, interest payments on money borrowed to finance the wars, and the $400bn estimated to have been spent on the domestic “war on terror”, the total cost is already somewhere between $2.3 and $2.7 trillion.

And even though the wars are now winding down, add in future military spending and above all the cost of looking after veterans, disabled and otherwise and the total bill will be somewhere between $3.7 trillion and $4.4 trillion.

The report by Brown’s Watson Institute for International Studies is not the first time such astronomical figures have been cited; a 2008 study co-authored by the Harvard economist Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz, a former Nobel economics laureate, reckoned the wars would end up costing over $3 trillion. The difference is that America’s financial position has worsened considerably in the meantime, with a brutal recession and a federal budget deficit running at some $1.5 trillion annually, while healthcare and social security spending is set to soar as the population ages and the baby boomer generation enters retirement.

Unlike most of America’s previous conflicts moreover, Iraq and Afghanistan have been financed almost entirely by borrowed money that sooner or later must be repaid.

The human misery is commensurate. The report concludes that in all, between 225,000 and 258,000 people have died as a result of the wars. Of that total, US soldiers killed on the battlefield represent a small fraction, some 6,100. The civilian death toll in Iraq is put at 125,000 (rather less than some other estimates) and at up to 14,000 in Afghanistan. For Pakistan, no reliable calculation can be made.

Even these figures however only scratch the surface of the suffering, in terms of people injured and maimed, or those who have died from malnutrition or lack of treatment. “When the fighting stops, the indirect dying continues,” Neta Crawford, a co-director of the Brown study, said. Not least, the wars may have created some 7.8 million refugees, roughly equal to the population of Scotland and Wales.

What America achieved by such outlays is also more than questionable. Two brutal regimes, those of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, have been overturned while al-Qa’ida, the terrorist group that carried out 9/11, by all accounts has been largely destroyed – but in neither Iraq nor Afghanistan is democracy exactly flourishing, while the biggest winner from the Iraq war has been America’s arch-foe Iran.

Osama bin Laden and his henchmen probably spent the pittance of just $500,000 on organising the September 2001 attacks, which killed 3,000 people and directly cost the US economy an estimated $50bn to $100bn. In 2003, President George W Bush proclaimed that the Iraq war would cost $50bn to $60bn. Governments that go to war invariably underestimate the cost – but rarely on such an epic scale.

If the Brown study is correct, the wars that flowed from 9/11 will not only have been the longest in US history. At $4 trillion and counting, their combined cost is approaching that of the Second World War, put at some $4.1 trillion in today’s prices by the Congressional Budget Office

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington

Thursday, 30 June 2011

Walker’s World: It looks like 1914 again

PARIS, July 18 (UPI) — This is how it must have felt in late July 1914 as Europe careened blindly into a war that would shatter its wealth and its culture and nobody knew how to stop it.

The world we have known since the end World War II, of ever-broadening economic prosperity, is poised for implosion. The global economy has proved over the past three years to be a resilient beast but even it cannot survive the simultaneous collapse of Europe and the United States, its two dominant components.

We are two weeks away from an American default on the world’s greatest, most liquid and essentially most stable source of the debt and credit that fuel the economy of the whole planet. And yet the prospect of default has gone from unthinkable to unlikely to possible and is now teetering on the brink of the probable.

We may be a week away from a collapse of the eurozone and the chaos then unleashed would leave the European Union in shreds. The world’s two largest economies would crumple together, like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Moriarty plunging together in a death grip over the Reichenbach Falls. At least Arthur Conan Doyle had the good sense to bring Sherlock Holmes back to life. The world of the euro and dollar wouldn’t find reincarnation to be so easy.

As in 1914, there is nothing inevitable about this gruesome double stagger to disaster. Economic conditions have not brought us to this pass. This is a political crisis, brought on by obstinacy, ignorance and dogma.

The ignorance defies belief. We all saw what happened when Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008. A U.S. default would be like that, only a hundred times worse, triggering cascades of defaults and bankruptcies as the credit default markets unwound. Interest rates would soar worldwide. A new Great Depression would follow.

And recall that in this world of tight supply chains for our supermarkets, modern societies are perhaps six meals away from blood on the streets.

The dogma is extraordinary. Those Republican congressmen and their Tea Party chorus who say that a U.S. default is needed to tame the beast of Big Government are terrifyingly sure of themselves, even though their leaders know the risks.

“I don’t think anybody in the world really believes that the United States is going to default on our debt,” Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, said on Fox News last week. “But given what is going up in Europe, something could spook the market, missing Aug. 2 could spook the market and you could have a real catastrophe.”

There is no shortage of reasonable solutions. The “grand bargain” that Boehner and U.S. President Barack Obama have discussed, which would secure $4 trillion in cuts over the coming decade, is one. The proposal of the Debt Commission, led by former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., and Erskine Bowles, White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, is another.

As Bowles told the National Governors’ Association last week:

“We can’t grow our way out of this. We could have decades of double-digit growth and not grow our way out of this enormous debt problem. We can’t tax our way out. The reality is we’ve got to do exactly what you all do every day as governors. We’ve got to cut spending or increase revenues or do some combination of that.”

The obstinacy on display defies belief. Politics is about compromise and building consensus but the current U.S. Congress spurns such qualities as weakness.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the same obstinacy and ignorance are on display, although there is a little less dogma. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has had repeated opportunities to craft a deal that would recapitalize the banks and secure the debt of Greece, Portugal and Ireland. Their total debt is easily manageable, totaling around 7 percent of European gross domestic product.

The mechanisms of a solution aren’t complicated. A true euro-bond, in which all eurozone countries become jointly and severally responsible for the debt, would have resolved the crisis overnight had it been applied two weeks ago.

But that was before the markets got spooked by Merkel’s antics and her refusal to tell German voters the truth: that their country’s $200 billion a year trade surplus, itself an underlying cause of the euro crisis, can only be sustained if Germany uses its financial strength to hold the eurozone together.

So now Italy, with its $2 trillion in sovereign debt, is itself on the line. The result is that in government treasuries and top banks and investment houses, contingency plans are being drafted for a euro collapse.

There is increasing speculation of the eurozone splitting between a solvent Teutonic north (Germany, Holland, Finland, Austria) and an instant devaluation of an insolvent south (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece). Nobody knows into which camp France might fall.

The good news is that unlike July 1914 armies and battle fleets aren’t being mobilized. The bad news is that if the double collapse of dollar and euro takes place, the armies would be needed to maintain some kind of order at home. But that would only work if the governments can continue to pay and feed the troops.

By MARTIN WALKER

18 July 2011

Martin Walker is the Editor Emeritus of UPI

© 2011 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 

‘US Leadership and the Local Drivers of Foreign Policy’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Dr Farish Ahmad-Noor (Badrol Hisham Ahmad-Noor)


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

Unfolding the Syrian paradox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Alastair Crooke

 

Turkish elections: An inconclusive victory for the Justice and Development Party

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.

 

They Don’t Have Terrorists in Norway?

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

 

 

The US Must End Its Illegal War In Libya Now

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

06 July, 2011

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

© 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited

The news coverage of the Norway mass-killings was fact-free conjecture

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