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28 February, 2011 WSWS.org

The prime minister of Tunisia, Mohammed Ghannouchi, a holdover from the hated dictatorship of ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, announced his resignation Sunday in an address on national television. He stepped down after more than a week of mass demonstrations against his government, culminating in two days of rioting in which police killed five protesters.

A few hours later, the interim president, Fouad Mebazaa, named a former minister, Beji Caid-Essebsi, as the new prime minister, and the government reiterated a promise to hold elections to replace the caretaker regime by July 15.

Both the appointment and the election pledge were aimed at mollifying the Tunisian masses, who have correctly identified the government as a continuation of the Ben Ali regime without Ben Ali. Ghannouchi had been Ben Ali’s prime minister for 11 years before the Tunisian dictator fled the country on January 14, amid mass anti-government demonstrations.

Mebazaa was also a functionary of the regime, serving as the speaker of its rubber-stamp parliament. In order to find a successor to Ghannouchi without direct ties to Ben Ali, Mebazaa was forced to bring the elderly Caid-Essebsi out of retirement. The 84-year-old was a long-time functionary during the presidency of Habib Bourguiba, whom Ben Ali replaced in 1987.

In his television statement announcing his resignation, Ghannouchi cited the violence of the preceding days, which included an armed attack on the Interior Ministry building, and pitched battles between police and rock-throwing youth in downtown Tunis. “I am not ready to be the man of repression, and I will never be,” he said, although he showed no qualms about repression during more than a decade as Ben Ali’s chief administrator.

Popular opposition to the government has swelled over the past two weeks, as nothing has been done to provide the Tunisian masses with jobs or improvements in their living standards. Instead, the government has concentrated on reestablishing the security forces and negotiating with the representatives of various imperialist powers, particularly over security assistance, helping the Tunisian ruling elite rebuild its armed forces for use against the people.

On Sunday, February 20, more than 40,000 marched through Tunis demanding the ouster of the government. (See “New protests rock Tunisian government”) Groups of protesters then set up a tent camp in the central square of the capital city, modeled on the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt.

Friday, February 25 was designated as a “Day of Rage” throughout the Middle East and North Africa. In Tunis, an estimated 100,000 people marched down the main avenue of the capital city, shouting slogans against the government and demanding Ghannouchi’s ouster.

The march—an enormous turnout in a small country—went almost unreported in the international media, which has focused its attention entirely on the civil war developing in Libya next door.

Police fired in the air in an unsuccessful attempt to disperse the huge crowd, who chanted “Leave!”—the slogan of previous Tunisian protests against Ben Ali and the Egyptian movement against Mubarak—as well as “We don’t want the friends of Ben Ali!”

They denounced Ghannouchi and other cronies of Ben Ali for “usurping” and “confiscating” the Tunisian revolution.

Ghannouchi’s cabinet issued a statement seeking to appease the population, declaring that the government “has decided that consultations with different political parties should not exceed mid-March … Elections will be organized at the latest in mid-July 2011.” The statement also noted that the government has seized the assets of another 110 cronies of Ben Ali, following earlier action against 46 associates and family members.

This was combined with intensified repression. The Interior Minister banned further protests, threatening mass arrests, the first such decree since the ouster of Ben Ali. On Saturday, police and troops equipped with tanks used tear gas to disperse crowds of youth who sought to continue the protests. This provoked an armed attack on the ministry headquarters the following day. Over 200 people have been arrested in the capital since Friday.

After the speech announcing Ghannouchi’s resignation, cheering crowds gathered in the streets of the capital. One man, who identified himself to Reuters only as Ahmed, said, “We’re very happy, but it is not enough. We want to see nothing more of this government.”

The web site Stratfor Global Consulting, which has close ties to the US intelligence apparatus, cautioned, “The hope is that, with this concession, street protests will calm down and this will allow the government to get to the task of preparing elections. But the risk is that it will embolden the opposition forces to demand more concessions.”

Both the official state-run trade union organization UGTT and the Islamist group Ennahda hailed the resignation of Ghannouchi. The UGTT had initially agreed to serve in Ghannouchi’s cabinet, but was forced to pull out its three ministers in the face of mass hostility to a “new” regime led by the same faces as the old.

The nomination of a prime minister who is not directly implicated in the crimes of Ben Ali could serve as a pretext for both the unions and the Islamists to take their place in a government whose purpose is to guarantee the interests of the Tunisian bourgeois elite and the multinational corporations.

Last Monday, February 21, Ghannouchi met with two high-level US visitors, senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman. McCain, the Republican presidential candidate in 2008, declared, “The revolution in Tunisia has been very successful and it has become a model for the region,” adding, speaking for the Obama administration, “We stand ready to provide training to help Tunisia’s military to provide security.”

What McCain was hailing as a “model” was a “revolution” that left the existing prime minister in office and the entire state machinery intact, and merely sent the president packing. He was expressing the hope, on the part of US imperialism, that similar cosmetic shifts can be passed off as revolutions in the other US-dominated dictatorships and sheikdoms throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

Only six days later, however, McCain’s “model” has resigned—albeit to be replaced by another proven servant of the imperialist powers and enemy of the Tunisian working people.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

28 February, 2011 WSWS.org

With dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s control over the country ebbing, the United States and its European allies are stepping up their intervention into the Libyan crisis. Their aim is to ensure that any new regime will be equally subservient to their economic and geostrategic interests.

Behind the rhetoric about democracy and humanitarian concerns, Washington and the European powers are seeking to exploit the brutality of Gaddafi to condition public opinion to accept a colonial-style intervention and the reassertion of imperialist control over the country’s oil fields.

Over the weekend, Gaddafi’s hold on power was further eroded by the defection of additional political and military figures and the capture of more key cities by the opposition. Most significant was the fall to the rebels of Zawiyah, an oil port and refinery city thirty miles to the west of the capital, Tripoli. The capture of Zawiyah signified the spread of the rebellion, heretofore centered in the east of the country, to the west.

Although Gaddafi’s army has reportedly surrounded Zawiyah, as of early Monday it had not attempted to retake the town of 200,000 people. The areas remaining under the dictator’s control have reportedly been reduced to Tripoli and Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte.

Gaddafi’s dwindling domain has only accelerated the imperialist drive to intervene, including by military means. Over the weekend, the British military carried out two raids into the Libyan desert to transport British nationals out of the country. The first, carried out Saturday by SAS special forces using Hercules planes, rescued 150 people, mostly British oil workers, and flew them to Malta. The second, on Sunday, involved three Royal Air Force planes and picked up another 150 civilians.

On Sunday, the German military carried out its own raid. Two military planes landed on a private runway belonging to the Wintershall AG company, evacuating 22 Germans and 112 others and flying them to Crete.

These raids mark the first open use of military assets in the Libyan crisis, but they are likely to be followed by more aggressive actions. There are growing calls in the US and Europe for the imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya, to be policed to US warplanes, and other military measures to aid the anti-Gaddafi forces.

The main concern in Washington is the prospect of either a protracted civil war, which would further inflame world oil prices and destabilize other oil-producing dictatorships in North Africa and the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, or a political vacuum over which the US would exert little influence.

The New York Times published a front-page article Sunday under the headline “The Vacuum After Qaddafi.” The article noted that the US exerts far less control over the Libyan army and other institutions than it does in Egypt and Tunisia, and ended by suggesting the possibility of a military occupation under the cover of humanitarian needs.

“Some experts,” the Times wrote, “wonder if Libya might become the first experiment in the use of the ‘responsibility to protect’—the idea that a United Nations force would be deployed to prevent civilian deaths in the event of widespread violence…

“With the country now split badly between east and west, an outside protection force would lend time for Tripoli to reassert itself as the capital and establish control.”

A raft of measures have been taken over the past several days by the US and Europe to isolate Gaddafi and pave the way for a major military intervention. After announcing Friday the closure of the US embassy in Tripoli and the imposition of unilateral US sanctions, President Obama on Saturday for the first time called for Gaddafi to resign. The White House published an account of a telephone call to German Chancellor Angela Merkel in which Obama called for Gaddafi to “leave now.”

Obama is to meet Monday in Washington with United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to discuss further actions against the Libyan regime. Secretary Hillary Clinton is to speak in Geneva before the UN Human Rights Council, which over the weekend voted unanimously to suspend Libya’s membership.

The United Nations Security Council on Saturday unanimously passed a resolution imposing economic sanctions on Libya and referring Gaddafi and his key aides for prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO secretary general, held an emergency meeting of NATO ambassadors on Friday to discuss possible military assistance for evacuation efforts.

The British Guardian newspaper on Saturday cited unconfirmed reports that former Prime Minister Tony Blair had telephoned Gaddafi warning that NATO troops might be sent in. The claims were made by one of Gaddafi’s sons, Saadi, in a telephone interview from Tripoli.

The New York Times on Saturday quoted Tom Malinowski, the director of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch, as saying, “Even if people aren’t explicitly talking about no-fly zones, the fact that NATO met today suggests there is more on people’s minds than diplomacy… I sense military contingencies are on the table.” Malinowski has participated in White House meetings on the Libyan crisis.

The Financial Times on Saturday wrote that European officials have raised the possibility of armed rescues of the thousands of EU nationals still stranded in Libya. The newspaper quoted a “senior EU official” as saying: “It’s one of the possibilities we’re working on. We are in contact with EU member states to see whether their facilities, civilian and military, can be deployed for this.”

In taped interviews from Cairo broadcast on Sunday’s television talk shows, Republican Senator John McCain and Independent Senator Joseph Lieberman—who was the Democratic vice presidential candidate in 2000—attacked Obama for not going far enough in Libya. They called for a no-fly zone and military aid to the opposition.

The two noted that while the US had sent only a ferry to collect American civilians, Britain had sent a warship and Hercules aircraft.

Later on Sunday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested the administration was open to such moves, declaring that it was “reaching out” to opposition groups and was prepared to offer “any kind of assistance” to Libyans seeking to overthrow the regime.

The crocodile tears being shed by the US and its European allies over Gaddafi’s atrocities against protesters are utterly cynical. For days Obama and his European counterparts were silent over the massacres carried out by Gaddafi in Benghazi, Tripoli and other cities. Having established the closest relations with the regime over the past decade, which had allowed them free rein to once again exploit Libya’s oil resources, they hoped that Gaddafi would be able to quickly crush the uprising and restore order.

Only when it became clear that was not about to happen and the crisis began to seriously disrupt oil production and spark a panic rise in global market prices did they shift gears and denounce their former ally. Obama, Clinton, Sarkozy and company had all feted the dictator in recent months, following Tony Blair’s 2004 “deal in the sand” with Gaddafi and the Bush administration’s restoration of full diplomatic relations in 2008.

They had conveniently dropped the issue of Gaddafi’s role in the 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 innocent civilians, mainly Americans. Exposing the fraud of the “war on terror” and its function as a cover for the aggressive pursuit of US imperialist interests around the world, Washington converted the former “mad dog” and “rogue” into an ally in the anti-terror cause and force for stability in the region.

Only last November, the International Monetary Fund issued a glowing report on Libya, praising the regime for its aggressive pursuit of neoliberal, pro-market policies. The IMF praised Gaddafi’s “continued efforts to modernize and diversify the economy,” commending in particular “efforts to enhance the role of the private sector in the economy.” These very policies led to mounting economic hardship for the working class and rural poor, fueling the social anger that erupted earlier this month.

Gaddafi is a criminal who deserves to be brought to justice, but none of the imperialist leaders currently denouncing him have any standing to point the finger elsewhere. They are all complicit in wars of aggression and colonial-style occupations that have killed hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan and are implicated in all of the attendant crimes, including torture, rendition and indefinite detention.

The staggering hypocrisy of the US government is summed up by the fact that it supports bringing Gaddafi before the International Criminal Court, but refuses to sign on to the court and rejects its authority over Americans. It asserts the right of US officials to commit war crimes with impunity.

In the UN Security Council resolution against Libya passed Saturday, the US insisted on a clause declaring that people from countries not signed up to the International Criminal Court could not be punished by it for crimes in the Libyan attacks. American officials insisted on the paragraph to prevent setting a precedent for prosecution by the ICC of American soldiers and officials.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

27 February, 2011 Countercurrents.org

The escalating critical water problem in Gaza can give rise to a major outbreak of waterborne diseases such as cholera which would inevitably spread to the surrounding areas, the Mediterranean coasts and straight into Europe.

All environmental indicators are pointing to this troubling possibility at a catastrophic magnitude, if the current non functioning sewage system in Gaza is not resolved urgently.

Cyprus, Greece, Turkey and other European countries can be affected by a major outbreak and experts are saying that the epidemic is imminent if the possibility came true.

Approximately 80 percent of Gaza’s 1.5 million population lives in refugee camps, some of the most densely populated areas on earth where adequate infrastructure is rare and the conditions for waterborne diseases are rife, thus increasing the chances of an outbreak in Gaza and the surrounding areas.

As it is now, water related diseases among the Gaza population, including the potentially fatal blue baby syndrome, are severe. The environment is choked with untreated sewage, threatening Palestinians health and life. Other equally lethal waterborne diseases include typhoid and hepatitis A.

A recent World Bank Report says : The impact on the environment is dramatic. Wadi Gaza is choked with sewage. Along the Gaza Strip, 16 sewage outfalls go direct to the sea, releasing about as much as 80,000 cubic meters of waste water (more than 50 percent of total waste water) untreated into the sea daily.

“Faecal coliform” bacteria cluster around the outfalls. Fish are infected, and the coastline is contaminated, impacting the quality of life of Gazan citizens and the livelihoods of those who depend on marine sources for their income”

The quality of water in Gaza is deteriorating rapidly, and until another source of water is found, the population in Gaza remains at risk as there is little that can be done as long as the Israel policy of closure continues.

Ninety percent of the water available in Gaza coming from the coastal aquifer is undrinkable, with nitrate and chloride levels between 6 to 7 times above the level set by the World Health Organisation.

One of Gaza’s current waste water treatment facilities were constructed with an operational capacity of 32,000 cubic meters of waste a day. With an annual growth that is one of the world’s highest – an estimated 3.6 percent annually – Gaza’s surging population has overwhelmed the capacity of the waste treatment facilities, and the facilities are receiving an estimate of 65,000 cubic meters of waste daily. Unable to handle more than half of its intake, much of the waste is dumped into the Mediterranean Sea, polluting the biodiversity of at least three different nations.

The treatment of Gaza’s waste water cannot progress as long as Israel restricts basic building materials and adequate levels of fuel and electricity, and, with a rising population over-burdening the capacity of the current facilities.

Now it looks like the closure will imperil Israel as the bacteria infested untreated waste water dumped into the sea off Gaza will inevitably flow to Israeli beaches and further up north and beyond.

The Perdana Global Peace Foundation (PGPF), formerly Perdana Global Peace Organisation (PGPO), a first but resolute step in the arduous journey towards global peace, moves towards the single goal of putting an end to war. Its founder, YABhg Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, envisages “a serious, active and sustained struggle against war and for peace”. Sharing and supporting this agenda are world-prominent professionals, intellectuals, authors, statesmen – all passionate advocates of international peace. Together, they have signed the Kuala Lumpur Initiative that defines the Kuala Lumpur Initiative to Criminalise War.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

28 February, 2011 TruthDig.com

I have watched mothers and fathers keening in grief over the frail corpses of their children in hospitals in Gaza and rural villages in El Salvador, Bosnia and Kosovo. The faces of these dead children, their bodies ripped apart by iron fragments or bullets tumbling end over end through their small, delicate frames, appear to me almost daily like faint and sadly familiar ghosts. The frailty and innocence of my own children make these images difficult to bear.

A child a day dies in war-related violence in Afghanistan. Children die in roadside explosions. They die in airstrikes. They die after militants lure them to carry suicide bombs, usually without their knowledge. They die in firefights. They are executed by the Taliban after being accused, sometimes correctly, of spying for the Afghan National Army. They are tiny pawns in a futile and endless war. They are robbed of their childhood. They live in fear and surrounded by the terror of indiscriminate violence. The United Nations, whose most recent report on children in Afghanistan covered a two-year period from Sept. 1, 2008, to Aug. 30, 2010, estimates that in the first half of last year at least 176 children were killed and 389 more wounded. But the real number is probably much, much higher. There are big parts of the country where research can no longer be carried out.

We will not stop the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, we will not end this slaughter of innocents, unless we are willing to rise up as have state workers in Wisconsin and citizens on the streets of Arab capitals. Repeated and sustained acts of civil disobedience are the only weapons that remain to us. Our political system is as broken and dysfunctional as that once presided over in Egypt by Hosni Mubarak. We must be willing to accept personal discomfort, to put our bodies in the way of the machine, if we hope to expose the lies of war and blunt the abuse by corporate profiteers. To do nothing, to refuse to act, to be passive, is to be an agent of injustice and to be complicit in murder. The U.N. report estimates that during the two-year period it studied almost 1,800 children were killed or injured in conflict-related violence, but numbers can never transmit the reality of such suffering.

On March 19, the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, I will join a coalition of U.S. military veterans from Iraq Veterans Against the War, March Forward!, Vietnam Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Peace who will gather in Lafayette Park across from the White House. The veteran-led action will result in numerous arrests, as did a Dec. 16 protest organized by Veterans for Peace. It will seek, because it is all we have left, to use our bodies to challenge the crimes of the state.

It does not matter if this protest or any other does not work. It does not matter if we are 500, as we were in December, or 50. It does not matter if the event is covered in the press or ignored. It matters only that those of us who believe in the rule of law, who find the organized sadism of war and militarism repugnant and who seek to protect the sanctity of life rise up. If we do not defend these virtues they will be extinguished. No one in power will defend them for us. Protests are rending the fabric of the U.S.-backed dictatorships in Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt and Libya. They are flickering to life in the U.S. in states like Wisconsin. And they are beginning to convulse Iraq. Iraqis, for whom eight years of war and occupation have brought nothing but misery and death, are surrounding government buildings to denounce their puppet government. They are rising up to demand jobs, basic services including electricity, a reining in of our mercenary killers, some of whom have been used to quell restless crowds, and a right to determine their own future. These protesters are our true allies, not the hired thugs we pay to repress them.

We are wasting $700 million a day to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while our teachers, firefighters and police lose their jobs, while we slash basic assistance programs for the poor, children and the elderly, while we turn our backs on the some 3 million people being pushed from their homes by foreclosures and bank repossessions and while we do nothing to help the one in six American workers who cannot find work. These wars have taken hundreds of thousands of lives. They have pushed millions into refugee or displacement camps. They have left young men and women severely crippled and maimed. They have turned our nation into an isolated pariah, fueling the very terrorism we seek to defeat. And they cannot be won. The sooner we leave Iraq and Afghanistan the sooner we will save others and finally save ourselves.

There will be veterans in the park who carry with them physical and emotional wounds of great magnitude, who remain crippled by the dead hand of war, who never sleep well, who struggle in the black pit of depression and with post-traumatic stress disorder, and who will bear the cross that war inflicted upon them until the end of their days. They will have surmounted tremendous psychic and physical pain to make it to Lafayette Park, to defy what they know must be defied. And if they can walk their trail of tears to the White House so can you. They are our wounded healers, our disregarded prophets.

Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot who while flying saw the killings of unarmed Vietnamese civilians in what later became known as the My Lai massacre, landed in the village during the slaughter. He spotted a group of about 10 civilians, including children, running toward a homemade bomb shelter. Soldiers from the 2nd Platoon, C Company, were chasing the civilians. Thompson, dismounting from the cockpit, put himself between the civilians and the soldiers. He ordered his gunner to open fire on the Americans if they began to shoot the villagers or him. Later, Thompson, who crusaded for justice after then-Maj. Colin Powell led the official whitewash of My Lai, received death threats. Mutilated animals were tossed on his doorstep. He was unsung for decades and forgotten until shortly before his death in 2006. He exhibited real courage, moral courage, the kind of courage the state detests, the kind of courage for which they do not mint medals.

Bradley Manning, who allegedly downloaded thousands of documents and videos that confirmed war crimes by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and passed them on to WikiLeaks, is being held in a military brig in Quantico, Va. He has been kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day and denied exercise, a pillow or sheets for the last nine months. His prolonged isolation is designed to break him physically and psychologically. There will be a protest outside Quantico on March 20 in support of Manning, another soldier from another war whom Thompson would have understood.

The documents published by WikiLeaks detailed for the world the widespread use of torture by Iraqi and Afghan security forces and the silent complicity of Washington. They confirmed that civilians, including children, are routinely murdered by occupation forces and that the killings are not investigated. The documents lifted the veil on our undeclared, black war in Pakistan, including drone strikes that have killed more than 900 civilians in Pakistan since Barack Obama took office. They shed light on the gross corruption, drug trafficking and crimes committed by the Afghan president as well as the reign of terror carried out by the Afghan National Army. These documents confirm that huge numbers of Iraqi civilians have been killed by U.S. troops at checkpoints, and that since the invasion tens of thousands of civilians have died as a result of the war. These documents illustrate in page after page that our government makes no effort to protect liberty, democracy or human rights, but instead prefers crude and brutal mechanisms of power.

The Obama administration, which has proved as efficient in serving the war machine and the corporate state as the Bush administration did, is attempting to destroy not only Manning but WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The state seeks to silence anyone who practices moral courage. It does not want the truth heard. It does not want the reality seen. If these forces of war and greed triumph, and we do not, there will be darkness. But if on March 19 there is at least one person willing to defy the state, to demand justice at the cost of his or her freedom, there will be a flame held to light the way for us all.

Copyright © 2011 Truthdig, L.L.C.

Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. His newest book is “Death of the Liberal Class.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

28 February, 2011 Countercurrents.org

The United States government cannot get enough of war. With Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s regime falling to a rebelling population, CNN reports that a Pentagon spokesman said that the U.S. is looking at all options from the military side.

Allegedly, the Pentagon, which is responsible for one million dead Iraqis and an unknown number of dead Afghans and Pakistanis, is concerned about the deaths of 1,000 Libyan protesters.

While the Pentagon tries to figure out how to get involved in the Libyan revolt, the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific is developing new battle plans to take on China in her home territory. Four-star Admiral Robert Willard thinks the U.S. should be able to whip China in its own coastal waters.

The admiral thinks one way to do this is to add U.S. Marines to his force structure so that the U.S. can eject Chinese forces from disputed islands in the East and South China seas.

It is not the U.S. who is disputing the islands, but if there is a chance for war anywhere, the admiral wants to make sure we are not left out.

The admiral also hopes to develop military ties with India and add that country to his clout. India, the admiral says, “is a natural partner of the United States” and “is crucial to America’s 21st-century strategy of balancing China.” The U.S. is going to seduce the Indians by selling them advanced aircraft.

If the plan works out, we will have India in NATO helping us to occupy Pakistan and presenting China with the possibility of a two-front war.

The Pentagon needs some more wars so there can be some more “reconstruction.” Reconstruction is very lucrative, especially as Washington has privatized so many of the projects, thus turning over to well-placed friends many opportunities to loot. Considering all the money that has been spent, one searches hard to find completed projects. The just released report from the Commission on Wartime Contracting can’t say exactly how much of the $200 billion in Afghan “reconstruction” disappeared in criminal behavior and blatant corruption, but $12 billion alone was lost to “overt fraud.”

War makes money for the politically connected. While the flag-waving population remains proud of the service of their sons, brothers, husbands, fathers, cousins, wives, mothers and daughters, the smart boys who got the fireworks started are rolling in the mega-millions.

As General Smedley Butler told the jingoistic American population, to no avail, “war is a racket.” As long as the American population remains proud that their relatives serve as cannon fodder for the military/security complex, war will remain a racket.

 

 

 

27 February, 2011 The Independent

No one saw the uprisings coming, but their deeper cause isn’t hard to fathom

Revolution is breaking out all over. As Gaddafi marshals his thugs and mercenaries for a last-ditch fight in Tripoli, several died as protests grew more serious in Iraq. Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah tried to bribe his people into docility by splashing out $35bn on housing, social services and education. Across the water in Bahrain the release of political prisoners failed to staunch the uprising. In Iran, President Ahmadinejad crowed about chaos in the Arab world, but said nothing about the seething anger in his own backyard; in Yemen, the opposition gathers strength daily.

And it’s not just the Middle East. This is an African crisis: Tunisia, where it started, is an African country, and last week in Senegal, a desperate army veteran died after setting fire to himself in front of the presidential palace, emulating Mohamed Bouazizi, the market trader whose self-immolation sparked the revolution in Tunisia. Meanwhile, the spirit of revolt has already leapt like a forest fire to half a dozen other ill-governed African nations, with serious disturbances reported in Mauritania, Gabon, Cameroon and Zimbabwe.

Nowhere is immune: dozens of activists in China are in detention or under other forms of surveillance, and the LinkedIn network was shut down as authorities seek to stamp out Middle East-style protests there. In what is arguably the most repressive state on the planet, North Korea, the army was called out and five died in the northern city of Sinuiju after violent protests erupted there and in two other cities. The generals who rule Burma under a trashy façade of constitutional government were keeping a close eye on the Middle East, ready to lock up Aung San Suu Kyi again at the first sign of copycat disturbances.

Nowhere is immune to this wave of rebellion because globalisation is a fact; all the world’s markets are intricately interlinked, and woe in one place quickly translates into fury in another. Twenty years ago, things were more manageable. When grain production collapsed in the Soviet Union during the 1980s and what had been one of the world’s greatest grain exporters became a net importer, the resulting surges of anger brought down the whole Communist system within a couple of years – but stopped there. Today there are no such firebreaks, and thanks to digital communications, events happen much faster.

Why are all these revolutions happening now? Plenty of answers have been offered: the emergence of huge urban populations with college degrees but no prospect of work; the accumulation of decades of resentment at rulers who are “authoritarian familial kleptocracies delivering little to their people”, as Peter Bergen of the New America Foundation put it; the subversive role of Facebook and Twitter, fatally undermining the state’s systems of thought control.

Absent from this list – to the combined bewilderment and relief of the US and Europe – are the factors that were universally supposed to be driving populist politics in the Middle East: Islamic fundamentalism coupled with anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism. As one Egyptian pointed out after the fall of Mubarak, at no point during weeks of passionate revolt did either the Israeli or the US embassies become a target of the crowd’s fury, even though both are within easy reach of Tahrir Square. “Not so much as a Coke can was thrown over the wall,” he said.

Of course, that does not mean that allies of al-Qa’ida will not seek to exploit the growing chaos in Libya in particular, striving to turn it into a new Somalia-sur-Med. Nor does it guarantee that any of the other revolts will produce stable democracies. Because the real cause of these revolutions, beyond all the chatter about social networks, is a problem that is liable to get worse in coming years rather than better, and that is largely beyond the power of anyone to contain or control.

The first warnings of what was to come appeared in the form of a briefing paper on the website of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization in December. “Recent bouts of extreme price volatility in global agricultural markets,” it said, “portend rising and more frequent threats to world food security. There is emerging consensus that the global food system is becoming more vulnerable and susceptible to episodes of extreme price volatility. As markets are increasingly integrated in the world economy, shocks in the international arena can now transpire and propagate to domestic markets much quicker than before.”

The “shocks” all occurred a long way from Cairo and Tunis. They included fires in Russia last autumn which wiped out hundreds of thousands of acres of grain; heavy rains in Canada, destroying the wheat crop there; hot, dry weather in Argentina which destroyed the soybean crop; the Australian floods which ruined the wheat harvest. The Middle East accounts for one-third of worldwide wheat imports. The combined effect of these far-flung agricultural problems was to bump up the food price index by 32 per cent in the second half of 2010.

The FAO likens “extreme price volatility” to great natural disasters – major earthquakes, tsunamis, catastrophic cyclones. “Historically, bouts of such extreme volatility… have been rare,” they say. “To draw the analogy with natural disasters, they typically have a low possibility of occurrence but bring with them extremely high risks and potential costs to society.”

A similar chain of unconnected farming catastrophes in early 2008 led to a similar outbreak of “extreme price volatility” around the world which provoked food riots in more than 40 countries, from Haiti to Bangladesh, including Mexico, Uzbekistan and Eritrea but also involving several countries caught up in the present round of uprisings, including Egypt, Yemen, Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal and Zimbabwe. All were among the 80 countries around the world that combine low incomes with food deficits – the need to import food, bringing exposure to wildly fluctuating world market prices. In these poor countries, food purchases can consume 70 per cent of income. The result, when prices of flour and grains shoot up by 30 per cent, is extreme distress – the sort of distress that sends people out into the streets in fury.

Abdolreza Abbassian, FAO’s chief economist saw – in his dry, cautious, academic manner – the present turmoil coming. “It’s getting a little bit uncomfortable,” he said back in December. “A lot of countries, especially the poorer ones, have to rely so much on world markets. They have to import food at much higher prices. Whether or not this will lead to domestic problems, turmoil, demonstrations, riots, the kind of things we saw in 2008, it is not possible to predict.”

For the poor of the Middle East, the price shocks at the start of this year were like experiencing a second killer earthquake in three years – but unlike with an earthquake, there was someone you could blame. So angry were the food price protesters in Tunisia that, after Mohamed Bouazizi set fire to himself, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali declared a state of emergency and promised to reduce the price of food. But it was too little, too late: by mid-January he was gone.

Tunisia’s turmoil, warned The Washington Post as the toppled president flew off into exile, “has economists worried that we may be seeing the beginning of a second wave of global food riots”. As we know now, it turned out somewhat differently. Food riots in 2008, revolutions in 2011 – what, where, who is next?

 

 

Deputy Chief of Staff Yair Naveh said the events currently shaking the Arab world ‘were ordained from above’ by a guiding hand.

 

The events currently shaking the Arab world “were ordained from above” by a guiding hand, Israel Defense Forces Deputy Chief of Staff Yair Naveh said on Sunday. Naveh added that the Israeli army needed faith in God now more than its supply of planes and tanks.

Naveh made the statements while accompanying Israel’s two chief rabbis, Rabbi Yona Metzger and Rabbi Shlomo Amar, on their visit to the chief military rabbi’s office at the Tzrifin base.

In remarks during the visit captured by the pro-settler news outlet Arutz 7, Naveh called Israel an island of calm in the storm of the Middle East, turmoil that had not been foreseen by intelligence officials despite their good work.

“But it was ordained from above,” he said, “and we don’t know where it will lead, but it’s clear to us that there is a hand from above.”

Naveh said supposedly democratic forces in the Middle East have always been supplanted by negative extremist and religious forces. Addressing the chief rabbis, Naveh called the IDF a Jewish army, an army of believers and an army that from the beginning always “knew how to create the right balance among communities represented in it, all the religions represented in it, but always leading with the power of faith and adherence to mitzvot [religious commandments].”

He said in recent years, the army had become more welcoming to religious soldiers.

 

 Last Modified: 24 Feb 2011 20:01 GMT

Export led economic growth, based on cheap labour, has created vast inequalities .

In early March, China’s National People’s Congress will approve its 12th Five-Year Plan. This plan is likely to go down in history as one of China’s boldest strategic initiatives.

In essence, it will change the character of China’s economic model – moving from the export- and investment-led structure of the past 30 years toward a pattern of growth that is driven increasingly by Chinese consumers. This shift will have profound implications for China, the rest of Asia, and the broader global economy.

Like the Fifth Five-Year Plan, which set the stage for the “reforms and opening up” of the late 1970s, and the Ninth Five-Year Plan, which triggered the marketisation of state-owned enterprises in the mid-1990’s, the upcoming Plan will force China to rethink the core value propositions of its economy.

Premier Wen Jiabao laid the groundwork four years ago, when he first articulated the paradox of the “Four ‘Uns” – an economy whose strength on the surface masked a structure that was increasingly “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and ultimately unsustainable”.

Re-balancing

The Great Recession of 2008-2009 suggests that China can no longer afford to treat the Four Uns as theoretical conjecture. The post-crisis era is likely to be characterized by lasting aftershocks in the developed world – undermining the external demand upon which China has long relied. That leaves China’s government with little choice other than to turn to internal demand and tackle the Four Uns head on.

The 12th Five-Year Plan will do precisely that, focusing on three major pro-consumption initiatives. First, China will begin to wean itself from the manufacturing model that has underpinned export- and investment-led growth. While the manufacturing approach served China well for 30 years, its dependence on capital-intensive, labor-saving productivity enhancement makes it incapable of absorbing the country’s massive labor surplus.

Instead, under the new Plan, China will adopt a more labor-intensive services model. It will, one hopes, provide a detailed blueprint for the development of large-scale transactions-intensive industries such as wholesale and retail trade, domestic transport and supply-chain logistics, health care, and leisure and hospitality.

Such a transition would provide China with much greater job-creating potential. With the employment content of a unit of Chinese output more than 35 per cent higher in services than in manufacturing and construction, China could actually hit its employment target with slower GDP growth. Moreover, services are far less resource-intensive than manufacturing – offering China the added benefits of a lighter, cleaner, and greener growth model.

The new Plan’s second pro-consumption initiative will seek to boost wages. The main focus will be the lagging wages of rural workers, whose per capita incomes are currently only 30 per cent of those in urban areas – precisely the opposite of China’s aspirations for a more “harmonious society”.

Among the reforms will be tax policies aimed at boosting rural purchasing power, measures to broaden rural land ownership, and technology-led programs to raise agricultural productivity.

Urban-rural divide

But the greatest leverage will undoubtedly come from policies that foster ongoing and rapid migration from the countryside to the cities. Since 2000, annual rural-to-urban migration has been running consistently at 15-20 million people.

For migration to continue at this pace, China will have to relax the long-entrenched strictures of its hukou, or household registration system, which limits labor-market flexibility by tethering workers and their benefits to their birthplace.

Boosting employment via services, and lifting wages through enhanced support for rural workers, will go a long way toward raising Chinese personal income, now running at just 42 per cent of GDP – half that of the United States. But more than higher growth in income from labor will be needed to boost Chinese private consumption. Major efforts to shift from saving toward spending are also required.

That issue frames the third major component of the new Plan’s pro-consumption agenda – the need to build a social safety net in order to reduce fear-driven precautionary saving. Specifically, that means social security, private pensions, and medical and unemployment insurance – plans that exist on paper but are woefully underfunded.

For example, in 2009, China’s retirement-system assets – national social security, local government retirement benefit plans, and private sector pensions – totaled just RMB2.4 trillion ($364bn). That boils down to only about $470 of lifetime retirement benefits for the average Chinese worker. Little wonder that families save out of fear of the future. China’s new Plan must rectify this shortfall immediately.

New industries

There will be far more to the 12th Five-Year Plan than these three pillars of pro-consumption policy. The Plan’s focus on accelerated development of several strategic emerging industries – from biotech and alternative energy to new materials and next-generation information technology – is also noteworthy.

But the emphasis on the Chinese consumer is likely to be the new Plan’s defining feature – sufficient, in my opinion, to boost private consumption as a share of Chinese GDP from its current rock-bottom reading of around 36 per cent to somewhere in the 42-45 per cent range by 2015. While still low by international standards, such an increase would nonetheless represent a critical step for China on the road to rebalancing.

It would also be a huge boost for China’s major trading partners – not just those in East Asia, but also growth-constrained European and US economies. Indeed, the 12th Five-Year Plan is likely to spark the greatest consumption story in modern history. Today’s post-crisis world could hardly ask for more.

But there is a catch: in shifting to a more consumption-led dynamic, China will reduce its surplus saving and have less left over to fund the ongoing saving deficits of countries like the US. The possibility of such an asymmetrical global rebalancing – with China taking the lead and the developed world dragging its feet – could be the key unintended consequence of China’s 12th Five-Year Plan.

Stephen S. Roach, a member of the faculty of Yale University, is Non-Executive Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and author of The Next Asia.

This article was first published by Project Syndicate.

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

 

 Middle East Correspondent

Monday, 7 March 2011

Desperate to avoid US military involvement in Libya in the event of a prolonged struggle between the Gaddafi regime and its opponents, the Americans have asked Saudi Arabia if it can supply weapons to the rebels in Benghazi. The Saudi Kingdom, already facing a “day of rage” from its 10 per cent Shia Muslim community on Friday, with a ban on all demonstrations, has so far failed to respond to Washington’s highly classified request, although King Abdullah personally loathes the Libyan leader, who tried to assassinate him just over a year ago.

Washington’s request is in line with other US military co-operation with the Saudis. The royal family in Jeddah, which was deeply involved in the Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, gave immediate support to American efforts to arm guerrillas fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan in 1980 and later – to America’s chagrin – also funded and armed the Taliban.

But the Saudis remain the only US Arab ally strategically placed and capable of furnishing weapons to the guerrillas of Libya. Their assistance would allow Washington to disclaim any military involvement in the supply chain – even though the arms would be American and paid for by the Saudis.

The Saudis have been told that opponents of Gaddafi need anti-tank rockets and mortars as a first priority to hold off attacks by Gaddafi’s armour, and ground-to-air missiles to shoot down his fighter-bombers.

Supplies could reach Benghazi within 48 hours but they would need to be delivered to air bases in Libya or to Benghazi airport. If the guerrillas can then go on to the offensive and assault Gaddafi’s strongholds in western Libya, the political pressure on America and Nato – not least from Republican members of Congress – to establish a no-fly zone would be reduced.

US military planners have already made it clear that a zone of this kind would necessitate US air attacks on Libya’s functioning, if seriously depleted, anti-aircraft missile bases, thus bringing Washington directly into the war on the side of Gaddafi’s opponents.

For several days now, US Awacs surveillance aircraft have been flying around Libya, making constant contact with Malta air traffic control and requesting details of Libyan flight patterns, including journeys made in the past 48 hours by Gaddafi’s private jet which flew to Jordan and back to Libya just before the weekend.

Officially, Nato will only describe the presence of American Awacs planes as part of its post-9/11 Operation Active Endeavour, which has broad reach to undertake aerial counter-terrorism measures in the Middle East region.

The data from the Awacs is streamed to all Nato countries under the mission’s existing mandate. Now that Gaddafi has been reinstated as a super-terrorist in the West’s lexicon, however, the Nato mission can easily be used to search for targets of opportunity in Libya if active military operations are undertaken.

Al Jazeera English television channel last night broadcast recordings made by American aircraft to Maltese air traffic control, requesting information about Libyan flights, especially that of Gaddafi’s jet.

An American Awacs aircraft, tail number LX-N90442 could be heard contacting the Malta control tower on Saturday for information about a Libyan Dassault-Falcon 900 jet 5A-DCN on its way from Amman to Mitiga, Gaddafi’s own VIP airport.

Nato Awacs 07 is heard to say: “Do you have information on an aircraft with the Squawk 2017 position about 85 miles east of our [sic]?”

Malta air traffic control replies: “Seven, that sounds to be Falcon 900- at flight level 340, with a destination Mitiga, according to flight plan.”

But Saudi Arabia is already facing dangers from a co-ordinated day of protest by its own Shia Muslim citizens who, emboldened by the Shia uprising in the neighbouring island of Bahrain, have called for street protests against the ruling family of al-Saud on Friday.

After pouring troops and security police into the province of Qatif last week, the Saudis announced a nationwide ban on all public demonstrations.

Shia organisers claim that up to 20,000 protesters plan to demonstrate with women in the front rows to prevent the Saudi army from opening fire.

If the Saudi government accedes to America’s request to send guns and missiles to Libyan rebels, however, it would be almost impossible for President Barack Obama to condemn the kingdom for any violence against the Shias of the north-east provinces.

Thus has the Arab awakening, the demand for democracy in North Africa, the Shia revolt and the rising against Gaddafi become entangled in the space of just a few hours with US military priorities in the region.

 

 

In contrast with what is happening in Egypt and Tunisia, Libya occupies the first spot on the Human Development Index for Africa and it has the highest life expectancy on the continent.  Education and health receive special attention from the State.  The cultural level of its population is without a doubt the highest.  Its problems are of a different sort.  The population wasn’t lacking food and essential social services.  The country needed an abundant foreign labour force to carry out ambitious plans for production and social development.

For that reason, it provided jobs for hundreds of thousands of workers from Egypt, Tunisia, China and other countries.  It had enormous incomes and reserves in convertible currencies deposited in the banks of the wealthy countries from which they acquired consumer goods and even sophisticated weapons that were supplied exactly by the same countries that today want to invade it in the name of human rights.

The colossal campaign of lies, unleashed by the mass media, resulted in great confusion in world public opinion.  Some time will go by before we can reconstruct what has really happened in Libya, and we can separate the true facts from the false ones that have been spread.

Serious and prestigious broadcasting companies such as Telesur, saw themselves with the obligation to send reporters and cameramen to the activities of one group and those on the opposing side, so that they could inform about what was really happening.

Communications were blocked, honest diplomatic officials were risking their lives going through neighbourhoods and observing activities, day and night, in order to inform about what was going on.  The empire and its main allies used the most sophisticated media to divulge information about the events, among which one had to deduce the shreds of the truth.

Without any doubt, the faces of the young people who were protesting in Benghazi, men, and women wearing the veil or without the veil, were expressing genuine indignation.

One is able to see the influence that the tribal component still exercises on that Arab country, despite the Muslim faith that 95% of its population sincerely shares.

Imperialism and NATO – seriously concerned by the revolutionary wave unleashed in the Arab world, where a large part of the oil is generated that sustains the consumer economy of the developed and rich countries – could not help but take advantage of the internal conflict arising in Libya so that they could promote military intervention.  The statements made by the United States administration right from the first instant were categorical in that sense.

The circumstances could not be more propitious.  In the November elections, the Republican right-wing struck a resounding blow on President Obama, an expert in rhetoric.

The fascist “mission accomplished” group, now backed ideologically by the extremists of the Tea Party, reduced the possibilities of the current president to a merely decorative role in which even his health program and the dubious economic recovery were in danger as a result of the budget deficit and the uncontrollable growth of the public debt which were breaking all historical records.

In spite of the flood of lies and the confusion that was created, the US could not drag China and the Russian Federation to the approval by the Security Council for a military intervention in Libya, even though it managed to obtain  however, in the Human Rights Council, approval of the objectives it was seeking at that moment.  In regards to a military intervention, the Secretary of State stated in words that admit not the slightest doubt: “no option is being ruled out”.

The real fact is that Libya is now wrapped up in a civil war, as we had foreseen, and the United Nations could do nothing to avoid it, other than its own Secretary General sprinkling the fire with a goodly dose of fuel.

The problem that perhaps the actors were not imagining is that the very leaders of the rebellion were bursting into the complicated matter declaring that they were rejecting all foreign military intervention.

Various news agencies informed that Abdelhafiz Ghoga, spokesperson for the Committee of the Revolution stated on Monday the 28th that “‘The rest of Libya shall be liberated by the Libyan people’”.

“We are counting on the army to liberate Tripoli’ assured Ghoga during the announcement of the formation of a ‘National Council’ to represent the cities of the country in the hands of the insurrection.”

“‘What we want is intelligence information, but in no case that our sovereignty is affected in the air, on land or on the seas’, he added during an encounter with journalists in this city located 1000 kilometres to the east of Tripoli.”

“The intransigence of the people responsible for the opposition on national sovereignty was reflecting the opinion being spontaneously manifested by many Libyan citizens to the international press in Benghazi”, informed a dispatch of the AFP agency this past Monday.

That same day, a political sciences professor at the University of Benghazi, Abeir Imneina, stated:

“There is very strong national feeling in Libya.”

“‘Furthermore, the example of Iraq strikes fear in the Arab world as a whole’, she underlined, in reference to the American invasion of 2003 that was supposed to bring democracy to that country and then, by contagion, to the region as a whole, a hypothesis totally belied by the facts.”

The professor goes on:

“‘We know what happened in Iraq, it’s that it is fully unstable and we really don’t want to follow the same path.  We don’t want the Americans to come to have to go crying to Gaddafi’, this expert continued.”

“But according to Abeir Imneina, ‘there also exists the feeling that this is our revolution, and that it is we who have to make it’.”

A few hours after this dispatch was printed, two of the main press bodies of the United States, The New York Times and The Washington Post, hastened to offer new versions on the subject; the DPA agency informs on this on the following day, March the first: “The Libyan opposition could request that the West bomb from the air strategic positions of the forces loyal to President Muamar al Gaddafi, the US press informed today.”

“The subject is being discussed inside the Libyan Revolutionary Council, ‘The New York Times’ and ‘The Washington Post’ specified in their online versions.”

“‘The New York Times’ notes that these discussions reveal the growing frustration of the rebel leaders in the face of the possibility that Gaddafi should retake power”.

“In the event that air actions are carried out within the United Nations framework, these would not imply international intervention, explained the council’s spokesperson, quoted by The New York Times”.

“The council is made up of lawyers, academics, judges and prominent members of Libyan society.”

The dispatch states:

“‘The Washington Post’ quoted rebels acknowledging that, without Western backing, combat with the forces loyal to Gaddafi could last a long time and cost many human lives.”

It is noteworthy that in that regard, not one single worker, peasant or builder is mentioned, not anyone related to material production or any young student or combatant among those who take part in the demonstrations.  Why the effort to present the rebels as prominent members of society demanding bombing by the US and NATO in order to kill Libyans?

Some day we shall know the truth, through persons such as the political sciences professor from the University of Benghazi who, with such eloquence, tells of the terrible experience that killed, destroyed homes, left millions of persons in Iraq without jobs or forced them to emigrate.

Today on Wednesday, the second of March, the EFE Agency presents the well-known rebel spokesperson making statements that, in my opinion, affirm and at the same time contradict those made on Monday: “Benghazi (Libya), March 2.  The rebel Libyan leadership today asked the UN Security Council to launch an air attack ‘against the mercenaries’ of the Muamar el Gaddafi regime.”

“‘Our Army cannot launch attacks against the mercenaries, due to their defensive role’, stated the spokesperson for the rebels, Abdelhafiz Ghoga, at a press conference in Benghazi.”

“‘A strategic air attack is different from a foreign intervention which we reject’, emphasized the spokesperson for the opposition forces which at all times have shown themselves to be against a foreign military intervention in the Libyan conflict”.

Which one of the many imperialist wars would this look like?

The one in Spain in 1936? Mussolini’s against Ethiopia in 1935? George W. Bush’s against Iraq in the year 2003 or any other of the dozens of wars promoted by the United States against the peoples of the Americas, from the invasion of Mexico in 1846 to the invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982?

Without excluding, of course, the mercenary invasion of the Bay of Pigs, the dirty war and the blockade of our Homeland throughout 50 years, that will have another anniversary next April 16th.

In all those wars, like that of Vietnam which cost millions of lives, the most cynical justifications and measures prevailed.

For anyone harbouring any doubts, about the inevitable military intervention that shall occur in Libya, the AP news agency, which I consider to be well-informed, headlined a cable printed today which stated: “The NATO countries are drawing up a contingency plan taking as its model the flight exclusion zones established over the Balkans in the 1990s, in the event that the international community decides to impose an air embargo over Libya, diplomats said”.

Further on it concludes: “Officials, who were not able to give their names due to the delicate nature of the matter, indicated that the opinions being observed start with the flight exclusion zone that the western military alliance imposed over Bosnia in 1993 that had the mandate of the Security Council, and with the NATO bombing in Kosovo in 1999, THAT DID NOT HAVE IT”.

To be continued tomorrow.

Fidel Castro Ruz

March 2, 2011

8:19 p.m.