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Ecoterra Press Release 268 – The Somalia Chronicle June – December 2009, no 81b
Yemen and Somalia New Extremist Threats
By Gerald F. Seib (WSJ)
As U.S. Debates Afghan Strategy, the Two Nations Emerge as al Qaeda Breeding Grounds.
While Washington obsessed Monday over President Barack Obama’s plans in Afghanistan, as well as over a new burst of violence next door in Pakistan, some unsettling news arrived to remind everyone that the extremist threat isn’t limited to those troubled countries.
Reports from Yemen said government forces had killed 59 Shiite rebels in the country’s north.
The death toll is a sign of the intensity of the government’s current fight against a Shiite revolt that has forced tens of thousands of Yemenis out of their homes.
Combine that revolt in the north with separatist unrest in the south and a growing al Qaeda movement, all in the Arab world’s poorest country bordering Saudi Arabia, and you have a recipe for the kind of incubator for trouble that Afghanistan became before the 9/11 attacks. Lest we forget, barely a year has passed since al Qaeda forces struck the U.S. Embassy in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa.
Meanwhile, a second nation, this one in Africa, is moving much further down the track toward failed-state status and becoming a haven for Islamic extremists. It’s Somalia, where Islamist militias are not only battling a virtually powerless central government, but over the weekend threatened to advance across the border to hit targets in Kenya as well.
Somali President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed visited the U.S. in recent days and warned that “a foreign idea” is taking hold in his country; he didn’t mention foreign terrorists, but that’s what he meant. The State Department’s most recent terrorism report says that al Qaeda “elements” are benefiting “from safe haven in the regions of southern Somalia.”
Taken together, the reports from Yemen and Somalia present a vivid reminder that al Qaeda became a direct threat during the 1990s precisely because it was able to fill the power vacuum that Afghanistan had become. That could happen again in Afghanistan or Pakistan, of course—but not only there.
Happily, the other threats aren’t going wholly unnoticed. In Somalia, U.S. military commandos just last month launched a daring helicopter assault in which they took out the most-wanted al Qaeda operative in that land, a man named Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, along with his bodyguards. Mr. Nabhan, long on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s most-wanted list, was suspected of building the truck bomb that killed 15 people in a Kenya hotel in 2002, and of choreographing a failed missile launch at an Israeli airliner.
Meanwhile, Mr. Obama a few weeks ago sent a letter of support to Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, U.S. officials said. According to Yemen’s state news agency, the letter pledged help in “the fight against terrorism” and said the U.S. will “stand beside Yemen, its unity, security and stability.”
Those are signs that the national-security apparatus isn’t asleep at the switch as these problems grow. The question is whether the broader U.S. political system is too overloaded with the Afghanistan debate to act against dangers elsewhere. Fighting extremism, after all, is like squeezing a balloon; when flattened in one place, it tends to bulge somewhere else.
That’s particularly important to keep in mind because, despite the turmoil in Afghanistan and Pakistan, U.S. analysts think the fight against al Qaeda in those countries has diminished the terror group’s ability to operate. The most recent State Department report on terrorism says that, over the past year or so, al Qaeda and “associated networks continued to lose ground, both structurally and in the court of world public opinion.”
Yet like-minded Islamic extremists in places such as Yemen and Somalia can pick up the cause, with or without guidance from al Qaeda’s home office.
The danger is most acute in Somalia, where lawlessness is rampant. The central government controls little outside the capital of Mogadishu, and not all of that city, international reports indicate. Meanwhile, the Islamist movement al Shabaab is led by men affiliated with al Qaeda, some of whom fought with it in Afghanistan, the State Department reports. The only good news in Somalia is that the Islamists have spent some of their time and energy in recent weeks fighting among themselves.
In the long run, Yemen may be the more worrisome spot. It is, after all, the ancestral homeland of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and it has a close relationship with oil-rich Saudi Arabia, whose monarchy is a perpetual bin Laden target. Al Qaeda-affiliated groups already have claimed responsibility for a list of small-scale attacks in Yemen over the past two years; Yemenis’ broader role is underscored by the fact that 92 of the 221 remaining terror detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison are Yemenis.
The good news is that Mr. Saleh retains a good measure of control and wants help dealing with the threat, meaning it may be easier to help. Juan Zarate, a terrorism adviser to George W. Bush, says the best bet in Somalia may be a policy aimed at simply containing extremists there. But in Yemen, he says, hopes are brighter because of “a government that has some resources and some willingness to work with us,” as well as neighbors who are at least as concerned as is the U.S..
Criminalising Muslim Somalis counter-productive (ittefaq.com)
Recently, we have seen international media coverage of the alleged terror plot in Australia involving Australian citizens from Somalia and Lebanon. It was further stated that “the arrested men have links with a Somalia-based radical group called Al Shabaab.” According to the Australian-based newspaper the Herald Sun, “more than 1400 online reports have covered the arrests by 400 police officers and raids on 19 homes in Melbourne and county Victoria.” Some UK newspapers were quick to draw parallels with the UK using headlines such as “Somalis plot suicide blitz on UK target”; emanating reports that security chiefs fear British-based Somalis are now plotting terrorist activities in the UK. Some reports suggest that there is increasing concern about the number of young Somalis who have gone to fight in Somalia and now returned to life in the UK. We must address the problem.
The vast majority of Somalis in the UK do not support the actions of any terrorist group – the violent and criminal actions of these radicals divides communities and misrepresents our faith. Islam is built on values of peace and civic society. Here in the UK the young people that we work with are motivated and committed to making a positive contribution.
The UK has welcomed many Somalis and other immigrants during times of turmoil in our home nations. The search for safety is what brought our communities to the UK and we will do our best to sustain that at every level.
We are however, concerned about how the approach adopted by certain media outlets complicates and undermines the important work that organisations like the London Somali Youth Forum (LSYF) are undertaking in relation to community cohesion. It only serves to alienate people, something we would all seek to avoid. Muslim communities have been wrongly held accountable for the alleged actions of the four young men in Australia. Terrorism, or radical activity of any kind, is not a reflection of beliefs or values within communities – terrorism does not help communities, it hurts them. Suggesting otherwise gives more credence to terrorists than they deserve.
Undoubtedly, many Britons, and British Muslims in particular, have grievances with British foreign policy and UK involvement in addressing terrorism. However civic engagement is producing real change.
Engaging in civic society through practices such as voting, dialogue, debate and ‘change from within’ is encouraged under Islam. LSYF feel it is paramount that British Somalis and Muslims as individuals recognise the powerful role that they can play in shaping British society, and in influencing Government and civic structures to make a real difference. Some may use the recent events in Australia and employ scare-mongering tactics in order to undermine integration and multiculturalism, and attack UK immigration laws. It is imperative that we challenge Islamophobia and articulate responses to all mis-information on the ideologies of Islam.
Disadvantaged and marginalised young Somalis that are allegedly involved in radical activities have been the centre of attention recently. Violent extremists often prey on vulnerable young people in order to propagate their radical views; therefore it is in all of our interests to understand why these young people are disengaged. While it is important to discuss these factors, attention must be given to the fundamental question of what remains to be done, if those who are currently disenfranchised are to be truly integrated.
Practical issues such as education and employment must continue to be addressed; there are about 2 million Muslims in the UK today so it is imperative that our values are accurately represented.
Investigations into foreign correspondents’ deaths ‘essential’
Tony Loughran says it is never too late to investigate someone’s death.
A fresh investigation into the deaths of the Balibo Five has sparked questions as to why no investigation has been held into the murder of ABC cameraman Paul Moran, who died in a car-bomb attack in northern Iraq in 2003.
The Australian Federal Police announced on September 9 it would look into the deaths of Australian-based journalists Greg Shackleton and Malcolm Rennie, along with sound recordist Tony Stewart and cameramen Gary Cunningham and Brian Peters, who were killed during the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975.
Tony Loughran, the former head of international security at the BBC, has spent many years investigating the deaths of journalists, and has told Elizabeth Jackson on Correspondents Report that every investigation is vital.
He says he was stunned to hear there would be no investigation into Mr Moran’s death, when major investigations were held into the deaths of British media workers in Iraq around the same time.
“I was quite shocked because when I was coming over to Australia from the UK, I remember stopping off at Hawaii on a halfway kind of jaunt and hearing the actual bombs coming in on top of my contacts in the north at exactly the same time as Paul Moran’s death, or more or less the same time,” Mr Loughran said.
“There was a big investigation about that … Kate Preston as well, another journalist who was actually killed or executed – I would put my cards on the table about that, within Somalia, also had the right investigation.”
He says it is necessary to investigate all foreign correspondents’ deaths in order to learn from past mistakes and change protocols if necessary.
“In 1995, there was a correspondent, John Schofield, who was killed in Croatia, and we investigated his death then,” Mr Loughran said.
“We reinvestigated it in 2001, at the actual behest his wife Suzie, and we found some amazing things, which really helped us out as far as the training course was concerned for hostile environments.
“We looked at ambushes, we looked at vehicle check points, we looked at weapons that were being used, as we were able to put some reals good safety measures into the training courses.”
Mr Loughran says valuable lessons can always be learnt from such investigations.
“Normally with the BBC … managers and the individual specialists like myself were always involved in getting through to the facts and making sure at the end of the day that we actually learn from the facts, learn the lessons and make sure individuals themselves can’t go through that particular process again,” he said.
“For instance, if you look at one of the things that came out obviously with John Schofield’s death as well, was the misfitting of body armour.
“What we’re talking about now is the journalists themselves, so it came do individual pieces of equipment that we needed to look at as well – it would be exactly the same as with Paul’s death.
“But looking at the vehicle, looking at just exactly what was issues that day, looking at procedures, protocols, everything really, and training as well – what training did the actual individual have?”
‘Never too late’
Mr Loughran says it is not difficult to investigate someone’s death so long after the event.
“What tends to happen is that where it was very difficult before, because it was a war zone or because the local kind of political movement were actually in fear of their lives – were they going to be lynched or whatever – that tends to have subsided,” he said.
“Then an investigator like myself can come in and actually talk to people who may have closed up before, [who] may not have been able to give the information about what had gone on or whatever.”
Once on the ground, Mr Loughran says it is a matter of piecing things together.
“Once we’ve actually got the leads – whether they’re political, whether they’re military, whether they’re kind of humanitarian – if they’re on the ground, we then start to look at statements from individuals,” he said.
“That’s one of the things that I think that is missing in organisations failing to investigate, because they don’t take statements.
“You don’t get the true account of what went on, and as everyone knows, once you start taking statements from individuals, you can see it’s true or false – you can all of sudden start to see the big picture occurring in front of your eyes.”
‘Morally important’
Mr Loughran says it is a huge but worthwhile task for a news network to carry out an investigation into the death of one of its members.
“It sends the right message that when someone is injured or killed overseas, that somebody within the news networks, the management themselves, have taken the effort, taken the time, to look at the conclusions that could be drawn from the investigation,” he said.
“There’s a moral kind of commitment, that it’s saying to the individual’s family that when someone actually dies, we’re not just going to simply forget about them and say ‘well, you know, that’s the way it was – it was one of these heat of the moment things in war’.”
Mr Loughran says it is not only battle deaths which should be investigated.
“There are always some very interesting circumstances surrounding the deaths of individuals, and we’re not just talking about people dying in battle fields; the thing I talk about on our training courses is that a lot of the journalists die as the result of road traffic accidents overseas,” he said.
“Some of these in my particular role as the head of BBC’s security were very suspicious circumstances – wheels were loosened on vehicles, brake hoses were cut, a few other bits and pieces like that.
“These are the things that need to be investigated every single time – don’t leave anything to chance.”
Mr Loughran says if an investigation was carried out into Mr Moran’s death, there would be lessons the ABC would learn, which could potentially save lives in the future.
“The problem you’ve got is if at the end of the day, networks like the ABC, like the BBC or CNN or whomever, don’t actually go after the governments and say ‘Let’s hold you accountable for what’s gone on here’, then it will happen time and time and time again,” he said.
“Journalists will not be able to actually operate with any particular sense of security or safety.”
(*) Elizabeth Jackson spoke with Tony Loughran for Correspondents Report
Obama And Nobel Prize: When War Becomes Peace, Lies Become The Truth
Obama and the Nobel Prize: When War becomes Peace, When the Lie becomes the Truth by Michel Chossudovsky
When war becomes peace,
When concepts and realities are turned upside down,
When fiction becomes truth and truth becomes fiction.
When a global military agenda is heralded as a humanitarian endeavor,
When the killing of civilians is upheld as “collateral damage”,
When those who resist the US-NATO led invasion of their homeland are categorized as “insurgents” or “terrorists” .
When preemptive nuclear war is upheld as self defense.
When advanced torture and “interrogation” techniques are routinely used to “protect peacekeeping operations”,
When tactical nuclear weapons are heralded by the Pentagon as “harmless to the surrounding civilian population”
When three quarters of US personal federal income tax revenues are allocated to financing what is euphemistically referred to as “national defense”
When the Commander in Chief of the largest military force on planet earth is presented as a global peace-maker,
When the Lie becomes the Truth.
Obama’s “War Without Borders”
We are the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. The US in partnership with NATO and Israel has launched a global military adventure which, in a very real sense, threatens the future of humanity.
At this critical juncture in our history, the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to President and Commander in Chief Barack Obama constitutes an unmitigated tool of propaganda and distortion, which unreservedly supports the Pentagon’s “Long War”: “A War without Borders” in the true sense of the word, characterised by the Worlwide deployment of US military might.
Apart from the diplomatic rhetoric, there has been no meaningful reversal of US foreign policy in relation to the George W. Bush presidency, which might have remotely justified the granting of the Nobel Prize to Obama. In fact quite the opposite. The Obama military agenda has sought to extend the war into new frontiers. With a new team of military and foreign policy advisers, the Obama war agenda has been far more effective in fostering military escalation than that formulated by the NeoCons.
Since the very outset of the Obama presidency, this global military project has become increasingly pervasive, with the reinforcement of US military presence in all major regions of the World and the development of new advanced weapons systems on an unprecedented scale.
Granting the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama provides legitimacy to the illegal practices of war, to the military occupation of foreign lands, to the relentless killings of civilians in the name of “democracy”.
Both the Obama administration and NATO are directly threatening Russia, China and Iran. The US under Obama is developing “a First Strike Global Missile Shield System”:
“Along with space-based weapons, the Airborne Laser is the next defense frontier. … Never has Ronald Reagan’s dream of layered missile defenses – Star Wars, for short – been as….close, at least technologically, to becoming realized.”
Reacting to this consolidation, streamlining and upgrading of American global nuclear strike potential, on August 11 the Commander-in- Chief of the Russian Air Force, the same Alexander Zelin cited earlier on the threat of U.S. strikes from space on all of his nation, said that the “Russian Air Force is preparing to meet the threats resulting from the creation of the Global Strike Command in the U.S. Air Force” and that Russia is developing “appropriate systems to meet the threats that may arise.”
(Rick Rozoff, Showdown with Russia and China: U.S. Advances First Strike Global Missile Shield System, Global Research, August 19, 2009)
At no time since the Cuban missile crisis has the World been closer to the unthinkable: a World War III scenario, a global military conflict involving the use of nuclear weapons.
1. The so-called missile defense shield or Star Wars initiative involving the first strike use of nuclear weapons is now to be developed globally in different regions of the World. The missile shield is largely directed against Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
2. New US military bases have been set up with a view to establishing Us spheres of influence in every region of the World as well as surrounding and confronting Russia and China.
3. There has been an escalation in the Central Asian Middle East war. The “defense budget” under Obama has spiraled with increased allocations to both Afghanistan and Iraq.
4. Under orders of president Obama, acting as Commander in Chief, Pakistan is now the object of routine US aerial bombardments in violation of its territorial sovereignty, using the “Global War on Terrorism” as a justification.
5. The construction of new military bases is envisaged in Latin America including Colombia on the immediate border of Venezuela.
6. Military aid to Israel has increased. The Obama presidency has expressed its unbending support for Israel and the Israeli military. Obama has remained mum on the atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza. there has not even been a semblance of renewed Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
7. There has been a reinforcement of the new regional commands including AFRICOM and SOUTHCOM.
8. A new round of threats has been directed against Iran.
9. The US is intent upon fostering further divisions between Pakistan and India, which could lead to a regional war, as well as using India’s nuclear arsenal as an indirect means to threaten China.
The diabolical nature of this military project was outlined in the 2000 Project for a New American Century (PNAC). The PNAC’s declared objectives are:
- defend the American homeland;
- fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars;
- perform the “constabulary” duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions;
-transform U.S. forces to exploit the “revolution in military affairs;” (Project for a New American Century, Rebuilding Americas Defenses.pdf, September 2000)
The “Revolution in Military Affairs” refers to the development of new advanced weapons systems. These include inter alia the militarization of space, advanced chemical and biological weapons, sophisticated laser guided missiles, bunker buster bombs, not to mention the US Air Force’s climatic warfare program (HAARP) based in Alaska, are part of Obama’s “humanitarian arsenal”.
War against the Truth
This is a war against the truth. When war becomes peace, the world is turned upside down. Conceptualization is no longer possible. An inquisitorial social system emerges.
An understanding of fundamental social and political events is replaced by a World of sheer fantasy, where “evil folks” are lurking. The objective of the “Global War on Terrorism” which has been fully endorsed by Obama administration has been to galvanize public support for a Worldwide campaign against heresy.
In the eyes of public opinion, possessing a “just cause” for waging war is central. A war is said to be Just if it is waged on moral, religious or ethical grounds. The consensus is to wage war.
People can longer think for themselves. They accept the authority and wisdom of the established social order.
The Nobel Committee says that President Obama has given the world “hope for a better future.” The prize is awarded for Obama’s
“extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.”
…His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population. (Nobel Press Release, October 9, 2009).
The granting of the Nobel “peace prize” to president Barack Obama has become an integral part of the Pentagon’s propaganda machine. It provides a human face to the invaders, it upholds the demonization of those who oppose US military intervention.
The decision to grant Obama the Nobel Peace Prize was no doubt carefully negotiated with the Norwegian Committee at the highest levels of the US government. It has far reaching implications.
It unequivocally upholds the US led war as a “Just Cause”. It erases the war crimes committed both by the Bush and Obama administrations.
War Propaganda: Jus ad Bellum
The “Just war” theory serves to camouflage the nature of US foreign policy, while providing a human face to the invaders.
In both its classical and contemporary versions, the Just war theory upholds war as a “humanitarian operation”. It calls for military intervention on ethical and moral grounds against “insurgents” , “terrorists” , “failed” or “rogue states”.
The Just War has been heralded by the Nobel Committee as an instrument of Peace. Obama personifies the “Just War”.
Taught in US military academies, a modern-day version of the “Just War” theory has been embodied into US military doctrine. The “war on terrorism” and the notion of “preemption” are predicated on the right to “self defense.” They define “when it is permissible to wage war”: jus ad bellum.
Jus ad bellum has served to build a consensus within the Armed Forces command structures. It has also served to convince the troops that they are fighting for a “just cause”. More generally, the Just War theory in its modern day version is an integral part of war propaganda and media disinformation, applied to gain public support for a war agenda. Under Obama as Nobel Peace Laureate, the Just War becomes universally accepted, upheld by the so-called international community.
The ultimate objective is to subdue the citizens, totally depoliticize social life in America, prevent people from thinking and conceptualizing, from analyzing facts and challenging the legitimacy of the US NATO led war.
War becomes peace, a worthwhile “humanitarian undertaking” , Peaceful dissent becomes heresy.
Military Escalation with a Human Face. Nobel Committee grants the “Green Light”
More significantly, the Nobel peace prize grants legitimacy to an unprecedented “escalation” of US-NATO led military operations under the banner of peacemaking.
It contributes to falsifying the nature of the US-NATO military agenda.
Between 40,000 to 60,000 more US and allied troops are to be sent to Afghanistan under a peacemaking banner. On the 8th of October, a day prior to the Nobel Committee’s decision, the US congress granted Obama a 680-billion- dollar defense authorization bill, which is slated to finance the process of military escalation:
“Washington and its NATO allies are planning an unprecedented increase of troops for the war in Afghanistan, even in addition to the 17,000 new American and several thousand NATO forces that have been committed to the war so far this year”.
The number, based on as yet unsubstantiated reports of what U.S. and NATO commander Stanley McChrystal and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen have demanded of the White House, range from 10,000 to 45,000.
Fox News has cited figures as high as 45,000 more American soldiers and ABC News as many as 40,000. On September 15 the Christian Science Monitor wrote of “perhaps as many as 45,000.”
The similarity of the estimates indicate that a number has been agreed upon and America’s obedient media is preparing domestic audiences for the possibility of the largest escalation of foreign armed forces in Afghanistan’ s history. Only seven years ago the United States had 5,000 troops in the country, but was scheduled to have 68,000 by December even before the reports of new deployments surfaced. (Rick Rozoff, U.S., NATO Poised For Most Massive War In Afghanistan’ s History, Global Research, September 24, 2009)
Within hours of the decision of the Norwegian Nobel committee, Obama met with the War Council, or should we call it the “Peace Council”. This meeting had been carefully scheduled to coincide with that of the Norwegian Nobel committee.
This key meeting behind closed doors in the Situation Room of the White House included Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and key political and military advisers. General Stanley McChrystal participated in the meeting via video link from Kabul.
General Stanley McChrystal ias said to have offered the Commander in Chief “several alternative options” “including a maximum injection of 60,000 extra troops”. The 60,000 figure was quoted following a leak of the Wall Street Journal (AFP: After Nobel nod, Obama convenes Afghan war council, October 9, 2009)
“The president had a robust conversation about the security and political challenges in Afghanistan and the options for building a strategic approach going forward,” according to an administration official (quoted in AFP: After Nobel nod, Obama convenes Afghan war council October 9, 2009)
The Nobel committee had in a sense given Obama a green light. The October 9 meeting in the Situation Room was to set the groundwork for a further escalation of the conflict under the banner of counterinsurgency and democracy building.
Meanwhile, in the course of the last few months, US forces have stepped up their aerial bombardments of village communities in the northern tribal areas of Pakistan, under the banner of combating Al Qaeda.
Nobel Peace Prize Warrior
By Keith Pavlischek
Back in the Reagan era the slogan was “Peace through Strength.” In the military ranks this was modified, with typical military humor as decidedly unofficial, politically incorrect, slogans such as “Peace through Fire-Superiority” or “Peace through Marksmanship” or “Peace through Close Combat,” and the like.
Hold that thought.
Last month the New York Times reported “U.S. Kills Top Qaeda Leader in Southern Somalia.” The target was Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, who was killed by American commandos in a daring daylight raid in southern Somalia. Here’s how the Times summarized the operation.
On Monday, around 1 p.m., villagers near the town of Baraawe said four military helicopters suddenly materialized over the horizon and shot at two trucks rumbling through the desert. . . .
The helicopters, with commandos firing .50-caliber machine guns and other automatic weapons, quickly disabled the trucks, according to villagers in the area, and several of the Shabab fighters tried to fire back. Shabab leaders said that six foreign fighters, including Mr. Nabhan, were quickly killed, along with three Somali Shabab. The helicopters landed, and the commandos inspected the wreckage and carried away the bodies of Mr. Nabhan and the other fighters for identification, a senior American military official said.
You won’t find it in the Times story, but Fox News made it a point to report that ten days prior to the raid President Obama signed the Execute Order that gave the go-ahead to assassinate Nabhan. President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a month later.
So, who says President Obama hasn’t done anything to earn the award?
“Peace through Targeted-Assassinations” anyone?
West’s “Highways Of The Sea” Span Former Soviet Sphere
Baku to host TRACECA seminar “Marine highways of Black Sea and Caspian Sea”
[TRACECA: Transport Corridor Europe-Caucasus- Asia.]
-The “Motorways of the Sea for the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea” project will develop trade and transport in Europe-Black Sea region and the Caucasus-Central Asia region….The project covers Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Ukraine.
In mid-November 2009, Baku will host a seminar on “Marine Highways of the Sea (MoS) of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea” as part of the TRACECA transport corridor, said Akif Mustafayev, TRACECA National coordinator from Azerbaijan.
He said at present the construction of the Baku-Tbilisi- Kars railway is underway and so the Black and Caspian Seas are now of great importance in terms of the functioning of the entire TRACECA transport corridor.
At present, the transport corridor is implementing three projects, including “Marine highways of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea,” “Logistics Centers for Western CIS and Caucasus” and “TRACECA Civil aviation safety and security”.
The “Motorways of the Sea for the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea” project will develop trade and transport in Europe-Black Sea region and the Caucasus-Central Asia region through improving interaction of networks and multi-modal transport in the Black and Caspian Seas.
Egis BCEOM (France) is a consultant of the project. The project covers two years.
The project covers Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Ukraine.
The aim of the project is to promote and support effective intermodal freight transport in line with the concept of “Highways of the Sea” linking the neighboring countries of the Black and Caspian seas with the territory of the enlarged European Union.
NGOs Hold Arms Exporters to Account for Abuses
By Suzanne Hoeksema (IPS)
With 2,000 people dying daily in armed violence fuelled by irresponsible arms transfers, talks to create an international treaty regulating these weapons can no longer be delayed, says a coalition of NGOs in a new report “Dying for Action” published Wednesday.
While nuclear disarmament is high on the U.N. agenda these days, 90 percent of casualties in conflict areas are caused by small arms such as submachine guns, mortars and hand grenades, according to the Red Cross.
The main contributors to the report, Amnesty International and Oxfam argue that governments should be prevented from exporting arms to countries where there is a substantial risk that those arms will be used for serious human rights violations.
France, one of the main exporters of arms to Guinea, recently ceased all military trade with the West African country after the Guinean army broke up a civilian demonstration on Sep. 28 with extraordinary use of violence, including incidents of rape by soldiers.
A release by Amnesty Thursday said that Guinean police officers had been photographed in the capital Conakry on Oct. 1 carrying 56mm ‘Cougar’ tear gas grenade launchers, made in France, as well as kinetic impact grenades produced by the same French manufacturer.
France’s decision to suspend trade comes too late for the people who have died and suffered from violence, charged Brian Woods of the Military, Security and Police Team at Amnesty International.
Woods urged that the essence of an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), to be discussed by governments at the United Nations in New York this month, should be preventive rather than punitive in order to avert humanitarian crises.
The NGO report shows that around 2.1 million people have died directly or indirectly as a result of armed violence since 153 governments agreed in a 2006 vote on the need to control illegal and illicit small arms trafficking.
The largest producer, supplier and importer of small arms, the United States, voted against the proposal, while 24 countries abstained, including major arms exporters like China and Russia, and major importers like Pakistan and Egypt.
Armed conflicts, most notably in Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan and Sri Lanka, and the world’s deadliest war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), caused more than 700,000 deaths.
While the proliferation of small illicit arms is not a direct cause of war, the abundance of these weapons in fragile states seriously exacerbates armed conflicts and pushes up the number of casualties.
However, not only conflict or post-conflict states suffer from irresponsible arms trafficking.
In her address to the “Dying for Action” conference held at the U.N. headquarters on Wednesday, Novelle Grant, a senior official representing the Jamaica Police Force, said that since the 1960s, when guns became prevalent on the island, criminal violence has become far more deadly, with murder rates now among the highest in the world.
Another panelist, Frances Mutuku Nguli from PeaceNet Kenya, said that traditional conflicts over land between cattle herders and farmers have escalated and left many Kenyans dead and wounded, with the trafficking of arms proliferating beyond state control.
The uncontrolled arms trade also indirectly hinders development efforts and exacerbates poverty, said the ambassador of Norway to the U.N., Mona Juul. Jamaica, for example, has suffered an estimated cumulative loss of 57 percent of its GDP because of crime.
One of the biggest problems in controlling illegal arms trade is state complicity, said Brigadier-General Mujahid Alam, head of the Pretoria Office of the U.N. Mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC).
“It is not about so-called diversion of arms into the hands or armed groups which goes unseen. Most arms enter the country legally and are purposefully made illegal by complicity of national and regional authorities, with DRC as the most devastating example”, he said.
So what could a new treaty to control arms trade really achieve? Are states, and the arms companies that work within them, likely to stick to the ATT – and what happens when they do not?
Paul van den IJssel, the Dutch ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament, told IPS that some governments like that of the United States may fear that the ATT will interfere with sovereignty and national security, but that fear is unfounded since governments will keep their right to legally sell and buy weapons for the purpose of “national self-defence and law enforcement”.
Van den Ijssel and Debbie Hillier, a policy adviser with Oxfam, stressed that it is the responsibility of exporter states, in dialogue with arms companies, to follow a case-by-case risk assessment based on the foreseeable likelihood the weapons would be misused to harm civilians. However, it remains unclear what the consequences of non-compliance would be.
While there are examples of arms suppliers being brought justice û the most prominent being the Russian dealer Viktor Bout, who was arrested in 2008 and inspired the Hollywood film “Lord of War” û an international treaty would make it much harder “for any warlord to obtain new arms and ammunition”, said Jeremy Hobbs, head of Oxfam International.
While governments are often complicit in shady arms deals, the actual transactions are usually conducted by intermediaries which operate on the border of legality and illegality, such as Aerocom, a Moldovan air cargo firm; Henrich Thomet, a Swiss arms broker; and Bao Ping Ma/Poly Technologies, a Chinese arms manufacturing firm, some of which were allegedly involved in violating U.N. arms embargos on Angola, Liberia and DRC, as reported by Amnesty last month.
Hobbs said that “eight out of every 10 governments want to get an Arms Trade Treaty agreed and ordinary citizens are calling for one too. This month we need the majority of enlightened countries at the U.N. to make it happen. An intransigent few cannot be allowed to keep their foot on the brakes forever.”
Plot to bomb US buildings, disrupt World Cup
By Makhudu Sefara and Peter Fabricius
Tired of fighting, and largely losing, against the US in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia, a group of Somali terrorists devised a strategy to take on the superpower in South Africa.
The Sunday Tribune can reveal that the US’s closure of its offices in the country was because of intercepted cellphone communication detailing planned attacks on American interests here. It is unclear whether American interests necessarily include a possible visit by US President Barack Obama for the official opening of the World Cup.
Intelligence officers, according to two sources, intercepted a call made in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, to a group based in Somalia, and the conversation confirmed a plot to blow up American interests in South Africa last month.
A source said US intelligence agents, South Africa’s National Intelligence Agency and SAPS Crime Intelligence operatives launched a surveillance operation on the Cape-based group, gathering crucial information before the operation was thrown into disarray.
NIA spokeswoman Lorna Daniels refused to comment yesterday, threatening legal action.
As the embassies were closed just before Heritage Day, National Police Commissioner Bheki Cele went on TV to say the country’s intelligence structures were on top of the situation.
This, it was established, led to the group discarding the SIM cards and the phones they had used, to cover their tracks.
The source said: “What has been established is that the Cape guys are linked to al-Qaeda cells in Somalia, who are connected to the group in Afghanistan. We have established that most al-Qaeda operatives are relocating from Afghanistan to Pakistan, attracted by increased lawlessness in Pakistan.
“Our information is that there is a trail that links Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and, most interestingly, Mozambique, where Somalis have formed an anti-US cell already.
“The interception revealed that these people plan to move en masse from Mozambique to here (South Africa) in 2010 to attack American interests. Their point is that South Africa is not a target, but if South Africans are caught in the crossfire, then that would be unfortunate.”.
US embassy spokeswoman Sharon Hudson-Dean said: “We don’t comment on intelligence matters.”
An NIA official said yesterday: “This is classified information. If you publish it, this will jeopardise an operation already under way”.
The source said this was untrue because Cele had already said publicly that intelligence officers were on the trail of the extremists – which is why they changed phones and went underground without arrests.
“The US was right to take these people seriously because we now know that these people have links with shady characters who have access to old military hardware in Eastern Europe,” said the source.
Rich Mkhondo, the chief communications officer for the Fifa 2010 World Cup Organising Committee South Africa, said security for the event was provided by the state.
The Mozambican embassy could not be reached yesterday.
Hundreds of war crimes lawsuits filed against Israelis
By David Sapsted
Almost 1,000 lawsuits alleging war crimes by Israeli ministers and military personnel have now been filed around the world, Israel has admitted.
And the situation could become immeasurably worse for Israel’s politicians and soldiers as efforts continue to have the Goldstone report, which accuses Israel and Hamas of crimes against humanity during last winter’s Gaza Strip invasion, raised at the United Nations.
Last week, Moshe Yaalon, one of four deputies to Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, cancelled a planned fundraising trip to Britain because he feared arrest on war-crimes warrants issued by human rights and pro-Palestinian groups.
The week before, the defence minister, Ehud Barak, only avoided arrest on a visit to the British Labour Party conference in Brighton after a court ruled that he had diplomatic immunity.
Israelis travelling without such diplomatic protection now face the possibility of arrest in many countries across the globe, including Norway, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Holland and Canada.
Human rights lawyers are using the principle of universal jurisdiction in international law to file suits worldwide for war crimes, genocide, torture and crimes against humanity.
According to Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s foreign minister and a hardline nationalist, the estimated 964 international lawsuits now outstanding represent “a campaign to delegitimise Israel”.
But Sarit Michaeli, a spokesman for B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, describes the problem as one of Israel’s own making.
“Israel has only itself to blame for possible legal proceedings that might be taken against leading politicians and officers abroad because of its lack of internal investigations into wrongdoing by its security forces,” she said.
“The first line of defence against external prosecutions is independent, credible internal investigations conducted outside of the army.”
And that, according to the Goldstone report, is exactly what has not happened since the atrocities and civilian deaths in Gaza.
Although many of the existing warrants have been issued in countries that Israeli officials are scarcely likely to visit in the near future – Iran, for example – the situation has become serious enough for Mr Netanyahu to order his justice, defence and foreign ministers to hatch a plan to confront the problem.
There have even been attempts in the United States to bring lawsuits against senior Israeli officials and the future of such legal action now appears to rest on the outcome of a wholly unrelated case.
The US Supreme Court is to review a lower court’s ruling that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act does not apply to individuals but only to foreign states and their agencies. This review follows the go-ahead for a case to be brought against Mohamed Ali Samantar, the former prime minister and defence minister of Somalia, who is accused of overseeing a string of killings, tortures and rapes in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Marc Stern, acting co-executive director of the American Jewish Congress, wrote in a memo: “Given the effort to pursue legal action against Israel, its officials and soldiers in foreign courts in the wake of the Goldstone Report, Israel has much riding on the outcome of the case, though saying so means aligning oneself with a rather disreputable Somali official in this case, and many serial human rights violators in others.”
In fact, attempts to bring legal action against Israelis in foreign countries has been going on for more than 25 years, with a marked lack of success.
The first was launched in 1982 in Belgium against Ariel Sharon, then defence minister, for his role in the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon. A court dismissed the charges, which included crimes against humanity, and Belgium later changed the universal jurisdiction principle – after the United States threatened to move Nato headquarters out of Brussels – and will now pursue cases only where there is a distinct Belgian interest.
Spain’s legislature has recently followed suit, limiting international jurisdiction to cases where their own nationals are involved, and the United States and Israel are expected to put pressure on other European countries to do the same.
One upshot of the Spanish move has been the shelving this year of a long-running case alleging crimes against humanity by Israelis after the 2002 air raid in Gaza, which killed Salah Shehadeh, a Hamas leader, along with 14 civilians, nine of them children.
Other European countries, notably Britain and the Nordic nations, where human rights lawyers are particularly aggresive, steadfastly refuse to give up the principle of universal jurisdiction.
In 2005, Gen Doron Almog, a former head of Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip, refused to leave an El Al airliner when it landed in London after being tipped off by Israeli diplomats that British police were about to arrest him on war crimes charges.
According to pro-Palestinian sources in London, Mr Barak only avoided arrest on his recent visit to the Labour Party after the UK foreign office upgraded his visit from a private one to an official one to give him diplomatic immunity.
The cancellation of this month’s visit by Mr Yaalon to Britain was hailed by Palestinian groups as showing that Israeli ministers now have “a real fear” of travelling abroad.
Sarah Colborne, the director of campaigns and operations at the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in London, said this was a victory for the determination of campaigners seeking to bring suspected Israeli war criminals to justice.
“Israeli war criminals must not be allowed to come into Britain, walk freely and remain unpunished,” she said. “We are committed to bringing those responsible for war crimes against Palestinians to justice.”
But Gerald Steinberg, a professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, said he does not believe that successful prosecutions will result, however uncomfortable the lawsuits might make prominent Israelis travelling abroad.
“There have been at least a dozen such cases around the world involving Israelis. All of the cases were dismissed,” he told Jewish Week.
“The whole purpose of this is to present Israelis as war criminals. Nobody expects that Israelis will actually be brought to trial, but what they want is to have that label. The Goldstone report is just another aspect of this.”
Controversial DNA testing suspended by UK Border Agency
By Helen Young
In a move that was deliberately low-key the UK Border Agency has decided to halt the controversial and roundly denounced DNA testing system for identifying nationality.
The UKBA had been under considerable fire from academics and human rights groups following their announcement to implement the testing system which involved isotope analysis of hair and fingerprint DNA analysis.
The scheme, labelled the ‘Human Provenance Pilot’, was decried as both naive and scientifically flawed by the founder of fingerprint analysis Sir Alec Jeffreys. British authorities have announced that the scheme has been suspended with no indication of future plans, claiming simply that staff would be notified of the resumption at the time.
The hotly debated scheme was designed to test the validity of claims from asylum seekers from Africa who attempted to cite a war ravaged country as home in order to remain in the UK. The Home Office had argued that the technology was employed to stop fraudulent nationality swapping which they said was rife throughout Africa. The bloodshed in Somalia in particular has frequently been used as reasoning for seeking asylum.
The program has been condemned by almost every section of society. Opponents have labelled it useless, biased and fundamentally flawed. Scientists have pointed out that cross-border genetic mixing is commonplace and that DNA does not recognise borders.
Most criticism was reserved for the UK Border Agency’s lack of creditable sourcing for its information and exactly who had recommended they use such methods.
We do not send pictures with these reports, because of the volume, but picture this emetic scene with your inner eye:
A dying Somali child in the macerated arms of her mother besides their bombed shelter with Islamic graffiti looks at a fat trader, who discusses with a local militia chief and a UN representative at a harbour while USAID provided GM food from subsidised production is off-loaded by WFP into the hands of local “distributors” and dealers – and in the background a western warship and a foreign fishing trawler ply the waters of a once sovereign, prosper and proud nation, which was a role model for honesty and development in the Horn of Africa. (If you feel that this is overdrawn – come with us into Somalia and see the even more cruel reality yourself!) – and if you need lively stills or video material on Somalia, please do contact us.
There is no limit to what a person can do or how far one can go to help
- if one doesn’t mind who gets the credit !
ECOTERRA Intl. maintains a register for persons missing or abducted in the Somali seas (Foreign seafarers as well as Somalis). Inquiries by family member can be sent by e-mail to office[at]ecoterra-international.org
For families of presently captive seafarers – in order to advise and console their worries – ECOTERRA Intl. can establish contacts with professional seafarers, who had been abducted in Somalia, and their wives as well as of a Captain of a sea-jacked and released ship, who agreed to be addressed “with questions, and we will answer truthfully”.
ECOTERRA – ALERTS and pending issues:
PIRATE ATTACK GULF OF ADEN: Advice on Who to Contact and What to Do http://www.noonsite.com/Members/sue/R2008-09-08-2
NATURAL RESOURCES & ARMED FISH POACHERS: Foreign navies entering the 200nm EEZ of Somalia and foreign helicopters and troops must respect the fact that especially all wildlife is protected by Somali national as well as by international laws and that the protection of the marine resources of Somalia from illegally fishing foreign vessels should be an integral part of the anti-piracy operations. Likewise the navies must adhere to international standards and not pollute the coastal waters with oil, ballast water or waste from their own ships but help Somalia to fight against any dumping of any waste (incl. diluted, toxic or nuclear waste). So far and though the AU as well as the UN has called since long on other nations to respect the 200 nm EEZ, only now the two countries (Spain and France) to which the most notorious vessels and fleets are linked have come up with a declaration that they will respect the 200 nm EEZ of Somalia but so far not any of the navies operating in the area pledged to stand against illegal fishing. So far not a single illegal fishing vessel has been detained by the naval forces, though they had been even informed about several actual cases, where an intervention would have been possible. Illegally operating Tuna fishing vessels (many from South Korea, some from Greece and China) carry now armed personnel and force their way into the Somali fishing grounds – uncontrolled or even protected by the naval forces mandated to guard the Somali waters against any criminal activity, which included arms carried by foreign fishing vessels in Somali waters.
LLWs / NLWs: According to recently leaked information the anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden are also used as a cover-up for the live testing of recently developed arsenals of so called non-lethal as well as sub-lethal weapons systems. (Pls request details) Neither the Navies nor the UN has come up with any code of conduct in this respect, while the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program (JNLWP) is sponsoring several service-led acquisition programs, including the VLAD, Joint Integration Program, and Improved Flash Bang Grenade. Alredy in use in Somalia are so called Non-lethal optical distractors, which are visible laser devices that have reversible optical effects. These types of non-blinding laser devices use highly directional optical energy. Somalia is also a testing ground for the further developments of the Active Denial System (ADS) Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD). If new developments using millimeter wave sources that will help minimize the size, weight, and system cost of an effective Active Denial System which provides “ADS-ACTD-like” repel effects, are used has not yet been revealed. Obviously not only the US is developing and using these kind of weapons as the case of MV MARATHON showed, where a Spanish naval vessel was using optical lasers – the stand-off was then broken by the killing of one of the hostage seafarers. Local observers also claim that HEMI devices, producing Human Electro-Muscular Incapacitation (HEMI) Bioeffects, have been used in the Gulf of Aden against Somalis. Exposure to HEMI devices, which can be understood as a stun-gun shot at an individual over a larger distance, causes muscle contractions that temporarily disable an individual. Research efforts are under way to develop a longer-duration of this effect than is currently available. The live tests are apparently done without that science understands yet the effects of HEMI electrical waveforms on a human body.
WARBOTS, UAVs etc.: Peter Singer says: “By cutting the already tenuous link between the public and its nation’s foreign policy, pain-free war would pervert the whole idea of the democratic process and citizenship as they relate to war. When a citizenry has no sense of sacrifice or even the prospect of sacrifice, the decision to go to war becomes just like any other policy decision, weighed by the same calculus used to determine whether to raise bridge tolls. Instead of widespread engagement and debate over the most important decision a government can make, you get popular indifference. When technology turns war into something merely to be watched, and not weighed with great seriousness, the checks and balances that undergird democracy go by the wayside. This could well mean the end of any idea of democratic peace that supposedly sets our foreign-policy decision making apart. Such wars without costs could even undermine the morality of “good” wars. When a nation decides to go to war, it is not just deciding to break stuff in some foreign land. As one philosopher put it, the very decision is “a reflection of the moral character of the community who decides.” Without public debate and support and without risking troops, the decision to go to war becomes the act of a nation that doesn’t give a damn.”
ECOTERRA Intl., whose work does focus on nature- and human-rights-protection and – as the last international environmental organization still working in Somalia – had alerted ship-owners since 1992, many of whom were fishing illegally in the 200 nm Exclusive Economic Zone, to stay away from Somali waters. The non-governmental organization had requested the international community many times for help to protect the coastal waters of the war-torn state, but now lawlessness has seriously increased and gone out of hand.
ECOTERRA members with marine and maritime expertise, joined by it’s ECOP-marine group, are closely and continuously monitoring and advising on the Somali situation. (for previous information concerning the topics please google keywords ECOTERRA (and) SOMALIA)
The network of the SEAFARERS ASSISTANCE PROGRAMME helped significantly in most sea-jack cases. ECOTERRA Intl. is working in Somalia since 1986 on human-rights and nature protection, while ECOP-marine concentrates on illegal fishing and the protection of the marine ecosystems. Your support counts too.
Please consider to contribute to the work of SAP, ECOP-marine and ECOTERRA Intl. Please donate to the defence fund.
Contact us for details concerning project-sponsorship or donations via e-mail: ecotrust[at]ecoterra.net
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Ecoterra Press Release 300 – The Somalia Chronicle June – December 2009, no 113b
Enlarge ImageWhat Fate of Uganda’s Troops in Somalia Reveals About Our Politics
By Charles Onyango Obbo (Monitor)
A week ago a terrorist bomb exacted a heavy toll on the struggling Somalia government, when an explosion blasted a Mogadishu graduation ceremony, killing 19 civilians, including three ministers.
A few weeks earlier, there had been another deadly attack, this time on the African Union peacekeepers, where several members of the Ugandan contingent of the AMISOM force in Somalia were killed.
That attack forced AMISOM to reveal, for the first time, that it had lost 80 of its soldiers in explosions and clashes with Somali militants since the force deployed there in March 2007.
The 5,000 AU troops are mostly from Uganda and Burundi. Of the 80 soldiers killed, 37 of them are Ugandan.
The anniversary of the Somalia mission usually passes without comment, and Ugandan casualties there get one or two days in the media, and are then quickly forgotten.
One reason for this is that the public has grown cynical of UPDF missions abroad, and the interests the army serves at home. The defining experience was the nearly 10 years that the UPDF spent in the Democratic Republic of Congo, during which time it came to be viewed as nothing less than a bandit force used by rogue officers and NRM big wigs and their cronies in Kampala to plunder minerals, timber, coffee, and even wild game.
In Somalia, many reasoned that the UPDF role in the mission was part of a scheme by President Museveni to buy favour from the West, and shield him the pressure over his push to amend the Constitution in 2005, which opened the door for him to be president for life.
Even if that were true, on close scrutiny, the UPDF peacekeeping in Somalia is different from the disastrous one to the DRC in major ways. Unlike the DRC, the group of militants who eventually take power in Somalia can have far-reaching implications for East African security. Right now, the radical Islamist group Al-Shabaab that controls most of Somalia has governments in the region and the West running scared. They believe that an Al-Shabaab take over will be the equivalent of having Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda ruling Somalia.
My own view is that Somalis are among Africa’s most pragmatic people (which is why they succeed where they have been scattered by the crisis back home) and that the risk of an Al-Shabaab takeover is overstated, but it is understandable why others might be alarmed.
So unlike DRC, the UPDF in Somalia have nothing to loot. In fact, don’t expect them to return with local women in tow and chicken dangling from their backs, as happened with the troops in Congo.
That said, even if Museveni has his own private agenda, for once the UPDF mission in Somalia – its most dangerous and thankless such task — is part of something big.
If you look closely at the kind of officers in Somalia, you begin to see something else. Quite a few of them belong to the old National Resistance Army idealistic tradition, which believed that they would take over power and bring about a fair, law-abiding, corruption free political order in Uganda.
This school lost out years ago, and the power-hungry and blood-sucking wolves have taken over and are calling the shots. Indeed, they are growing stronger.
The UPDF in Somalia, therefore, is what the national army would have looked like if it hadn’t been turned into a fiefdom of a largely tribal officer corps, serving dishonourable interests of the NRM political elite – like stealing elections, tormenting the opposition, and serving as a palace guard. The contrast of the UPDF in Mogadishu with that at home, where it is has been deployed to guard land which influential people have bought out of the speculative calculation that they will make a killing from the oil in it, could not be more stark.
Compare again, the kind of officers who were deployed to hunt down the Lords Resistance Army and its leader Joseph Kony at their Sudan-DRC border bases earlier in the year. With the help of the US, the hopes were high that Kony would be killed, or at least captured. Therefore politically favoured, but inexperienced, officers who are part of the Museveni grand succession project were given the command, in the hope that their success against Kony would catapult them to national stardom. It didn’t happen.
By contrast, there will be national stardom for the Ugandan officers in Somalia, however successful they are, in part because they are part of a multinational effort. Secondly, success in Somalia will not come dramatically from a battlefield victory. In that sense, the UPDF mission is driven by old school but honourable values of service, not personal glory.
If you are a student of Ugandan, or more specifically NRM politics, pay attention to the mission in Mogadishu. Pay attention because it represents ideals that are dying in the army back home, and this might be the last time you will see them. The only thing the boys in Somalia have with those back home, is that they both have not been paid their salaries for some months now.
Shifta war refugees cry for justice
By Ali Abdi
Fearing for his life as the shifta war raged in the 1960s, Halake Maamo fled from his home in Isiolo to Somalia.
The shiftas, or guerrillas of Somali origin, waged a secessionist war against the Government in the harsh and dry plains of northern Kenya.
However, after Somalia’s dictator Siad Barre was overthrown and life became intolerable, Maamo returned to his homeland and settled in Garbatulla, Isiolo District.
But life has never been the same again for Maamo and thousands of other returnees. Most of them do not have Kenyan identity cards and lead poor lives, as they are yet to recover from the turmoil that disrupted their lives.
Although they are at peace unlike when they were in Somalia, their major concern is lack of national identity cards and government support to rebuild their lives.
While a few wealthy ones with political connections have obtained the crucial documents, many, especially those who stay in remote parts, are yet to be issued with IDs.
Maamo says he applied for the document on arrival in 1995 after a thorough vetting process. He is still waiting. Another vetting was done last year and he is now waiting for a response from the Government.
“The only thing new in my life is the peace otherwise I feel like a prisoner as my movement is restricted because I do not have a national identity card. I cannot travel to Isiolo town to see my relatives for fear of arrest by police who refer to me as that refugee from Somalia,’’ said Maamo in a recent interview.
Secession
Maamo, 78, left Merti in Isiolo North, one of the five epicentres of the war triggered by secessionists who wanted to cede Northern Frontier District (NFD) to Somalia, when his family was killed in 1967.
The previous year Maamo and his eldest son Dida, then only aged seven, had watched his father and relatives frog-matched from their huts and shot dead at a ‘concentration’ camp in Merti.
Today, he recalls that scores of other villagers labelled sympathisers of the rebel movement were killed.The secession campaign was spearheaded by the Northern Peoples’ Progressive Party (NPPP).
“The elders were brought from Sericho, Modogashe, Iresaboru, and here (Merti) and taken to Garbatulla. They were loaded onto two trucks to Isiolo. About five kilometres away, they were told to alight and run. But they shot them from the back,” says Maamo, a father of five.
Others who share Maamo’s story include Isiolo County Council chairman Adan Ali (Kinna ward) and his counterparts Mr Godana Tache (Garbatulla), Ali Adhi (Modogashe) and Mr Hassan Balla (Garfasa). They all lost their fathers in the incident.
Died Poor
‘‘My father Ali Wako was brought from Modogashe and was among those massacred in Garbatulla during the same incident. The elders viewed as anti-Kenyatta government were rounded up from villages across Isiolo South Constituency,” says Ali.
Ali is a grandson of the late Wako Happi, one of NPPP’s presidents who spearheaded the secessionist campaign in northern Kenya, then known as the Northern Frontier District.
Ali said his grandfather was detained in 1963 and released in 1969 after the movement was crushed.
“He fled to Somalia in 1972 and came back in October 1984. He died a poor man in Isiolo in 1996,” Ali said.
The co-ordinator of Friends of Nomads International, Mr Yusuf Dogo, says about 3,000 returnees are impoverished because they have no documents to show they are Kenyan.
They cannot get jobs or crucial government services, and many young people dare not step into the town for fear of arrest.
Most of those displaced by the Shifta war started the journey back home from Somalia refugee camps from 1984 following retired President Moi’s plea to leaders of Northern Frontier District (NFD) to come back home with their followers.
For more than 20 years now, they are still refugees in their own country.
Ali says unlike other pastoralists in the country, the returnees have experience in farming and should be helped by the Government to start and run irrigation projects.
Compensation
“The Government promised to help the returnees re-build their lives. They should be given IDs and helped start income generating projects,’’ said Ali.
The councillors want the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights and other rights bodies to help them sue the Government for compensation.
“If the internally displaced people of the post-election violence have been compensated why not us whose families were killed and property destroyed?’’ posed Tache, the Garbatulla councilor.
Isiolo District Registrar of Persons M Auma confirms that the returnees lack identity cards, with some waiting for more than a decade. He said his office in collaboration with local elders, the provincial administration and the National Security Intelligence Service have vetted hundreds of applications since 2004.
“When we took up the matter with the head office in Nairobi, we were informed that the case of the returnees would be dealt with by the Ministry of Immigration. We are still waiting,’’ says Auma.
Dogo says the returnees should be helped rebuild their lives through income generating projects. And Dogo suggests irrigation projects in areas such as Gafarsa, Muchuru, Malkadaka and Rapsu for those from Isiolo.
He also advises the Government to unconditionally issue them with identity cards, saying it is their constitutional right.
Dogo says the military employed the infamous scotch-earth tactics to round up and kill the livestock as one way to defeat the rebels.
Dogo attributes the widespread poverty in the region to the indiscriminate killing of livestock during the war.
Livestock rounded up indiscriminately from the residents were detained and slaughtered in a camp where Daawa Primary School and Orphanage stands today.
Africa’s Problems Success story of the West
By Regis Maburutse (BBD)
African Politics and economics is directly linked to its cultural diversity, from the north tip down to the south, Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, which for years cultural differences has traditionally been used as a measure of defining tribal superiority in the dispensation of national wealth and political leadership.
Political superiority in this continent is generally not defined by democratic principles rather by tribal lines. The value imposed by western Aid has vastly added to a further compounding and cementation of these old and outdated beliefs of who should be a leader of any African nation based on tribal grounds.
African problems are further compounded by the AIDS scourge as one could pick out any country in the world and talk about its problems and maybe as Africa has been so tragically ravaged by AIDS in the last 30 years or so it stands out on a world scale.
Africa is a large continent with many countries making up its bulk. They are many and varied from the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert to the Zulus of Kwazi Natal to the wandering nomads of the Sahara.
Geographically, the continent runs from this large expanse of desert of Botswana through to equatorial jungle in the Congo and down the rift valley of Ethiopia past the mountains of the moon the source of the mightiest river, the Nile, running through Sudan and Egypt perhaps Africa’s greatest tourist draw card apart from the safaris.
So although varied and vibrant a native of Mombasa is going to experience totally different problems to one of the Kalahari Desert. Piracy has been round for many years off the coast of Somalia and many of the eastern African countries are Muslim.
Now one of the real problems in Sudan is religion for it is fueling a war between Muslims and the rest of the country. Even one of Africa’s greatest tragedies the genocide in Rwanda was ignited by old religious conversions. So yes missionary work has added in part of Africa’s problems just as it has elsewhere around the world by imposing a state of western beliefs over traditional ones and in Africa these would be many and varied, Witchdoctors still hold power today. Also bad medicine like childhood Muti practices are problem from within.
But the problems from without began to arrive with the onset of colonialism and the fay the likes of Van Rens Burg set up the Cape Colony and David Livingstone trekked through what was then Rhodesia and a steady flow of foreigners came to the continent to seek their fortune.
De Beers is known all over the world for diamonds taken out of African soil. Of course this sort of exploitation is going to cause problems especially if the assumption is the black man is inferior and can work for peanuts. The advent of slavery where people were taken from the west coast to America did not help this prejudice.
For years in the recorded history of Africa there had been tribal invasions running the entire length of the continent. In the history of Botswana it is recorded that the vultures flew constantly over the kalahari as the peaceful Bushmen were no match for the tribes from the north. So like any tribal nation as Australia was there were going to be tribal conflicts over land motivated by power and greed so these problems were her before colonization.
In Mozambique it is recorded that when the Belgians left they just up and went leaving reasonably sophisticated infra structure in the hands of the locals and the government crumbled.
South Africa is experiencing the same problems now since the hand over from President De Klek. The resignation recently of Thabo Mbeki and the controversy over the criminal background of the incumbent President Zuma show that in the wake of a colonial or foreign influence the locals are struggling.
It was reported in the early days of the handover from Mbeki to Kgalemani Motlanthe that the indigenous vineyard workers whom had now takeover the vineyards in such places as Stellenbosh in Cape province were actually wiring out workers pay cheques when there was no money in the bank.
The most publicized and tragic problem Africa has had to face is without doubt the AIDS virus and its democratic values. Speculation still exists as to how it came to be but if you believe the documentary showing how it came from the Belgian Congo then it is a direct result of western nations meddling.
It was reported that back in the 1950’s the medical researchers European were trying to find a polio vaccine that could be taken orally. Their research led them to Africa and of all places to the kidneys of a chimpanzee. They built a large compound in the Congo far up a river and housed many chimps and began experimenting.
They dissected the innards of the monkeys and used them in the manufacture of the new drugs. But one small oversight as in the kidneys lay dormant and unnoticed another virus AIDS. When they tried experimenting on the locals and it started to show deathly results the European researchers vanished. They know it to be valid as locals had been eating monkey and coming down with the same illness. So this huge problem was caused by outside interference.
Population growth without proper birth control education will be an internal problem for Africa for many years. It is very common to practice polygamy and if you are producing many children from many wives as the king of Swaziland then there will be more children to fed and treat medically.
All in all Africa’s problems were set in motion by foreign intervention and like any economic venture much of the continent was raped and not much put back for the African people. Look at the Shell Company’s involvement in Nigeria and the mess it has left with oil fires burning near villages.
As many counties are independent of foreign rule now the rest of the problems in Africa will fall on local shoulders and it is the hope of the whole world that for once in her history Africa can reach a stage of enlightenment in many countries and many areas but the war in Sudan must stop now to set the example for the rest of the country and problems of Zimbabwe must go too.
A Toilet in Somalia
By Charles G. Cogan
Intelligence professionals get it. But the general public does not. The image is out there of terrorists in djellabas negotiating fences in terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. This was in the good old days, before 9/11. Such, the pensée unique goes, is what would happen if the Taliban took over in Afghanistan again and brought al-Qaeda back.
Rolf Mowatt-Larssen was quoted in the New York Times on December 2 as saying, “There is no direct impact on stopping terrorists around the world because we are or are not in Afghanistan.” Rolf knows whereof he speaks: a graduate of West Point, a former CIA Chief in Moscow and lately chief of intelligence at the Department of Energy, he is now the reigning guru on nuclear terrorism. The article goes on to state that, “Mr. Mowatt-Larssen, now at Harvard, argued [...] that a safe haven can be moved to many different states, and the bigger threat exists in cells, including in Europe and the United States.” In other words, al-Qaeda and like-minded terrorists don’t need Afghanistan to carry out terrorist operations. These can be mounted from anywhere or anyplace, from Yemen to Somalia, to Hamburg or to … Detroit.
In carefully chosen but tortuous formulations, President Obama, almost subliminally, got across the notion that the Taliban are different from al-Qaeda, in his speech at West Point:
I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda…We must keep up the pressure on al Qaeda…Our overarching goal remains the same: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and to its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future.
We will support efforts by the Afghan government to open the door to those Taliban who abandon violence and respect the human rights of their fellow citizens.
In other words, al-Qaeda are the real bad guys, whereas there may be some good guys among the Taliban. Then, one may ask, since al-Qaeda’s terrorists, numbering in the hundreds, are now in a safe haven in Pakistan’s tribal areas, why are we sending thousands more combat troops into … Afghanistan!
In his speech at West Point, President Obama recognized the protean nature of the al Qaeda threat: “Where al Qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a foothold – whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere – they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships.”
Yet the President, in ordering 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan, in addition to the 21,000 he sent last spring, aligned himself not only with his pre-campaign rhetoric about a “necessary war,” but also with the sway that the military has established within American society. At least he did allow himself an out, which is quite unaligned with military doctrine: “After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.”
It was, indeed, a tortuous exercise for a tortured President.
(*) Dr. Charles Cogan Associate at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and was the chief of the Near East South Asia Division in the Directorate of Operations of the CIA from August 1979 to August 1984. It was from this Division that the covert action operation against the Soviets in Afghanistan were run. He is currently an Associate at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
Modern Slave Trade
Pinoy sailors send home record $2.5 billion in 9 months
The cash sent home by overseas Filipino sailors rose by $108 million or 4.51 percent to a new record of $2.501 billion in the nine months to September this year, from $2.393 billion over the same period in 2008, the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines reported Tuesday.
TUCP secretary-general and former Senator Ernesto Herrera attributed the nonstop rise in remittances from sea-based migrant Filipino workers to increased enlistment by shipowners in Europe and Asia.
“A growing number of European and Asian shipping firms are disbanding their multinational crews, and replacing them wholesale with all-Filipino personnel that are younger and more able,” said Herrera, former chairman of the Senate committee on labor, employment and human resources development.
“Foreign employers find Filipino sailors quick learners, and easier to train compared to other nationals. This may be due to their superior instruction here, apart from their ability to understand English,” Herrera said in a statement.
Herrera, meanwhile, renewed TUCP’s plea for the International Maritime Organization and shipowners to aggressively repel piracy and protect sailors. At least 71 Filipino sailors are still being held by pirates off Somalia.
According to the Department of Labor and Employment, some 229,000 Filipino sailors are on board merchant shipping vessels around the world at any given time.
>From January to September this year, remittances from Filipino sailors based in Norway soared by 110 percent to $229.551 million from $109.079 million over the same nine-month period in 2008.
Remittances from Filipino sailors based in Japan were also up 57 percent to $222.505 million from $141.886 million.
The other fast-growing sources of remittances from Filipino sailors were the United Kingdom, up 122 percent to $192.373; Germany, up 47 percent to $175.067 million; Singapore, up 60 percent to $107.945 million; Greece, up 67 percent to $93.446 million; Cyprus, up 23 percent to $46.390 million;
The Netherlands, up 114 percent to $41.281 million; Denmark, up 182 percent to $28.864 million; Oman, up 24 percent to $24.948 million; Hong Kong, up 33 percent to $24.870 million; and Sweden, up 126 percent to $24.223 million.
The double to triple-digit increases more than offset the 24 percent drop in remittances from Filipino sailors based in the U.S., to $1.216 billion from $1.595 billion.
The cash sent home by sailors accounted for 20 percent of the aggregate remittances from all migrant Filipino workers in the nine-month period.
Migrant Filipino workers wired home a total of $12.789 billion in the nine months to September this year, up $516.62 million or 4.21 percent from the $12.273 billion they remitted in the same period in 2008, according to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.
[N.B.: All the foreign hard currency sent as remittance home by worker from the Philippines is channelled through the system of the Philippine government first before given to the families in local currency. Therefore the labour abroad - if maid or mercenary - from the governmental perspective needs to be pushed as hard possible, which safeguards unscrupulous manning agencies from being prosecuted for their abusive practices and abused workers hardly find any assistance or help at their foreign missions. In Syria it is specifically bad, where Filipinas after running away from their employers, because they can not stand the working conditions "under their masters" any longer then are sued and even arrested until they pay a "disengagement fee" - often several thousand dollars. The benefit of foreign currency generation for the Philippine government is also the reason why the governmental orders to not let Filipinos sail into piracy-prone areas are neglected and were never enforced.]
WE SAY: Corruption is all about perception (IslandsBusiness)
‘So do people in the islands need to take note of these rankings? Is there anything they must do about it? We think not. From the foregoing discussion, it is clear that it is all about perceptions and it is hard to change those. The Cook Islands tried to grab the world’s attention by declaring itself a recession free zone earlier this year. While it was a brilliant marketing ploy, it didn’t change people’s perception. Indices like these, like many other “perception indices” are of little value and contribute nothing to the profiles of nations and only serve as a distraction’
Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index for 2009 was published last month. The index measures the perceived level of corruption in a nation’s public sector, which obviously includes government, its various departments and public enterprises. This year, New Zealand has bagged the numero uno spot. It has always been hovering at the top but this time it beat the reputedly squeaky clean Scandinavian countries like Denmark, Sweden and Finland (2nd, 3rd and 6th places respectively) and the exceptionally entrepreneurial Singapore.
New Zealand must feel lucky to have bagged the top spot this year. In fact, some people were even surprised that it did.
For, in the past couple of years, the country’s governments have been embarrassed by more than a smattering of corruption cases, not to mention the questionable financial dealings of several ministers while in office.
The most high profile one was of former Labour Party—and later independent—Member of Parliament Taito Phillip Field, who became the first New Zealand MP to be convicted on charges of corruption and awarded a six year jail sentence. Field, a long time citizen of New Zealand but of Samoan origin, was found guilty of 11 charges of bribery and corruption and 15 charges of attempting to obstruct or pervert the course of justice.
Also last year, an enquiry into the academic qualifications claim of the head of Immigration New Zealand and Deputy Secretary of Labour, Mary Anne Thompson, revealed that she did not hold a degree from the prestigious London School of Economics. She had used that claim, it was believed, to apply for a number of government positions. It was also brought to light that under her watch the performance of the Pacific Division had deteriorated and it was alleged that she helped relatives or friends from Kiribati gain residency in New Zealand.
Some commentators at the time sought to give these two high profile cases an “us and them” type of spin saying such incidents were inevitable as New Zealand’s population becomes culturally diverse and that as some immigrants rise to positions of power, whether administrative or political, they are bound to bring the social and cultural mores of their original countries along with them. Both the individuals in question having had Pacific roots, the invisible finger was pointed at Pacific islands culture.
But like love, sex, crime and politics, corruption too is a starkly human trait and cannot be blamed exclusively on culture or race by any stretch of logic. Just as these New Zealand commentators found out in the months after the Field and Thompson sagas.
Several ministers have been found to have used ingenious subterfuge to claim allowances and pecuniary gain for travel (in some cases palming off the costs of travel of partners to taxpayers), housing and other benefits, especially in an environment that was charged with public anger on the continuing fall out of not just the global financial meltdown but also of New Zealand’s own subprime crisis—the domino-like fall of dozens of finance companies gobbling up the life savings of thousands of mums and dads’ investors.
And most recently, an investigation has found that New Zealand lawyers have been fraudulently skimming off more than a hundred million dollars from tax payers annually through the legal aid system—yet another damning evidence of corruption going unchecked for years. All this in a country that the world perceives to be the most clean and green in the world.
Incidentally, the green image also has received a bit of a bruising recently with the country’s agriculture and farm sector contributing excessively to greenhouse gases when compared to its geographic size and that of its population and the more recent revelation that one in six New Zealanders may be drinking unsafe water.
In the case of the lawyers, it was not about an individual or two. It was a whole bunch of them that were rorting the system almost giving it the colour of the “institutionalised” corruption that is most commonly associated with governments in developing countries.
Clearly, therefore, as the Transparency International report calls itself, corruption is all about perception, notwithstanding the fact that there are dozens of statistical tools that are employed to compute the final rankings using the expertise of a number of professionals and researchers.
And people’s perceptions of nations are no different from their perception of brands. Some nations, like some brands, are always favoured in the public mind (no matter how many chain emails you receive about the amazing corrosive tooth dissolving and toilet cleaning powers of bottled fizzy drinks, no one really stops drinking them. In fact their sales grow every year).
The Pacific Islands score far worse than New Zealand and Australia (ranked eighth). While Fiji has not been ranked this year, Samoa leads the islands pack at 56, followed by Tonga at 99, the Solomon Islands and Kiribati sharing the number 111 spot and Papua New Guinea coming in last at 154 (the last in the list is Somalia at 180).
So do people in the islands need to take note of these rankings? Is there anything they must do about it? We think not. From the foregoing discussion, it is clear that it is all about perceptions and it is hard to change those. The Cook Islands tried to grab the world’s attention by declaring itself a recession free zone earlier this year. While that it was a brilliant marketing ploy, it didn’t change people’s perception. Indices like these, like many other “perception indices” are of little value and contribute nothing to the profiles of nations and only serve as a distraction and of course fodder for the news media.
On the other hand, indices that are based on hard research and verifiable data and not mere “perception”, which help the people of a nation to hold their governments accountable—such as those that measure human development and those that evaluate the ease of doing business in countries—are far more useful.
It will be interesting to see if, following the string of incidents of corruption that have come to light in New Zealand this past year, whether it still retains the top spot next year.
Haven’t They Always?
Nobel Committee Celebrates War As Peace
By Rick Rozoff
On Thursday December 10 U.S. President Barack Obama will receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced its selection for the prize on October 9 of this year, less than nine months after Obama assumed the mantle of the American presidency and less than a month after that announced the doubling of his nation’s troops for the world’s longest-running war in Afghanistan. The first contingent of new forces, consisting of 1,500 Marines, is to arrive next week, right before Christmas.
Ten days before the bestowal of the Nobel Peace Prize, the American president delivered a speech at the West Point Military Academy in which he pledged an additional 30,000 troops for a war now in its ninth year. His (and his predecessor George W. Bush’s) Defense Secretary Robert Gates hastened to add that 3,000 more support troops would be deployed, bringing the total to over 100,000, only 20,000 short of American soldiers in Iraq, and with as many as 50,000 more non-U.S. forces serving under the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force. In his West Point address Obama reminded his listeners that “When I took office, we had just over 32,000 Americans serving in Afghanistan….” He has ordered that number to be more than tripled.
A brief report on Obama’s peace prize appeared on the CBS News website on December 7 with the seemingly paradoxical title “A Peace Prize for a War President” by the news agency’s White House correspondent, Mark Knoller.
Neither the title nor the article it introduced was ironic. They reflected the straightforward truth.
The feature stated “There’ll be no effort by Barack Obama to disguise or obscure the fact that he’s a war president when he accepts the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Thursday.
“The ceremony takes place ten days after he announced plans to escalate the U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan by deploying another 30,000 American troops there.”
The selection of Obama evoked a prompt and aptly indignant response from Michel Chossudovsky at the Centre for Research on Globalization, who on October 11 published a piece called “Obama and the Nobel Prize: When War Becomes Peace, When the Lie becomes the Truth” [1] which stated inter alia that “When the Commander in Chief of the largest military force on planet earth is presented as a global peace-maker,” then “the Lie becomes the Truth.”
Although there are no firm, codified guidelines for nominating and agreeing upon a Peace Prize recipient, Alfred Nobel’s will states that it should be conferred upon a “person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
Those criteria have arguably never been honored or strictly abided by since the annual prize was first awarded in 1901. Several winners have been cited for helping to end wars – often by simply prevailing in them. One of the two American presidents previously awarded the prize, Woodrow Wilson, is such a one.
The other was Theodore Roosevelt, who as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1897 said “I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.”
Both Roosevelt in 1906 and Wilson in 1919 were standing presidents when they received the prize. The first had fought in Cuba during the Spanish-American War (the war he demanded a year before it began) and Wilson brought the United States into the First World War.
The Spanish-American War inaugurated the expansion of the U.S. from a hemispheric to an Asia Pacific power. And an empire. World War I placed the American army on the European continent for the first time and signaled its emergence as a international military power. Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901 when William McKinley, who launched the conflict with Spain and acquired Cuba, Guam, the Philippines and Puerto Rico as spoils of war, was assassinated; Wilson not only sent over one million soldiers to France but also deployed 13,000 troops to fight the new Russian government of Vladimir Lenin in 1918.
But neither Roosevelt nor Wilson were commanders-in-chief of a war when they were given the Nobel Prize. And they received it for, at least in theory, contributing to ending wars; the Russo-Japanese War and World War I, respectively. Granting the Nobel Peace Prize to a head of state escalating a war already in its ninth year half a world away from his own nation is a precedent that was reserved for this year.
Reuters quoted White House spokesman Robert Gibbs on December 7 stating “We’ll address directly the notion that many have wondered, which is the juxtaposition of the timing for the Nobel Peace Prize and – and his [Obama's] commitment to add more troops around – into Afghanistan.”
Juxtaposition, paradox, irony, contradiction and so forth are terms too weak and inaccurate to describe the timing of the announcement of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipient, coming as it did between two pledges of military reinforcements for the world’s largest-scale and longest-running war. Travesty is a better word.
Speculation was rife after October 9 regarding the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s rationale and motives for awarding Obama the prize, and press pundits were not amiss in offering explanations. But actions are more revealing than assumed or imaginary intentions and what the Nobel Committee has accomplished is to yet further tarnish its reputation and that of the prize it grants.
It is hard to think of any recipient, and surely any recent one, who personifies the qualities indicated by Alfred Nobel himself. Advocating and working for peace seem to have little if anything to do with being awarded the nominal Peace Prize. But twice in the last three years it has been conferred upon individuals far more deserving of indictment for violating the Principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal, especially that section of Principle VI, Crimes against peace, which is defined as “Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances.”
Two years ago the prize was shared by Al Gore, who as the vice president of the U.S.’s first post-Cold War administration helped preside over deadly street battles in Somalia and bombing – incessant bombing – attacks in Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sudan and Yugoslavia. And the launching of Plan Colombia in 1999, the latest fruit of which is the Pentagon’s acquisition of seven new military bases in the country and the resulting threat of armed conflict with its neighbors. Arranged by this year’s Peace Prize recipient. But, again, Gore received the prize years after leaving office and for work in an area unrelated to his former government posts.
Obama’s December 1 speech was larded with lines evocative of the worst rhetorical excesses of his predecessor combined with allusions to broadening the war reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s and Henry Kissinger’s expansion of what had previously been America’s longest war from Vietnam into Cambodia in 1970. “[S]hortly after taking office, I approved a long-standing request for more troops. After consultations with our allies, I then announced a strategy recognizing the fundamental connection between our war effort in Afghanistan, and the extremist safe-havens in Pakistan. I set a goal that was narrowly defined as disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al Qaeda and its extremist allies….”
The current administration has, in addition to plans to boost combined U.S. and NATO (“our allies”) military forces to 150,000 in Afghanistan, dramatically escalated drone missile attacks inside neighboring Pakistan and, as the above quote demonstrates, declared western and southern Pakistan part of the expanding war theater.
The president mentioned or alluded to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization several times in his address, in one instance with a degree of hyperbole that is as frightening as it is extravagant. “For what’s at stake is not simply a test of NATO’s credibility – what’s at stake is the security of our Allies, and the common security of the world.
“We are in Afghanistan to prevent a cancer from once again spreading through that country. But this same cancer has also taken root in the border region of Pakistan. That is why we need a strategy that works on both sides of the border.”
The entire world is threatened by a spreading cancer. This alarmist and crude phraseology was employed by a 21st century leader of the world’s superpower, a Harvard graduate, but could as well have been lifted from the lowest yellow journalism screed of the Cold War.
In attempting to deny the obvious – the inevitable – Obama continued by stating that “there are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. They argue that it cannot be stabilized, and we are better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. Yet this argument depends upon a false reading of history. Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations….”
Troops from America’s NATO and NATO partner vassals and tributaries in the war against barbarians – the terms are those of Zbigniew Brzezinski from his 1997 The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives – will not be limited to the war in Afghanistan, which in fact is a laboratory for a far broader global strategy, as “The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly, and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan….Where al Qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a foothold – whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere –
they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships.”
U.S. National Security Adviser James Jones said in October that “according to the maximum estimate, al Qaeda has fewer than 100 fighters operating in Afghanistan without any bases or ability to launch attacks on the West.” Government estimates for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan are in the neighborhood of 20,000.
This is the global cancer that requires 150,000 U.S. and NATO troops and an Afghan army of a quarter million or more troops. And a war that will continue well beyond the 2011 deadline mentioned in the West Point speech and be fought with intensified vigor and as far from Afghanistan as the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Southeast Asian archipelago.
With the deployment of “senior members of Mr. Obama’s war council,” as the New York Times characterized them, on the Sunday morning television news program circuit on December 7, the scope and the length of the already biggest and longest war in the world became undeniable.
The National Security Adviser, former Marine general and NATO top military commander James Jones, told CNN’s State of the Union: “We have strategic interests in South Asia that should not be measured in terms of finite times. We’re going to be in the region for a long time.”
He added that the influx of more American and NATO troops “will allow us to move our forces back towards the border regions, where really the most important struggle that we’re going to have is to make sure that on the Pakistani side of the border, that we eliminate the safe havens.”
Pentagon chief Robert Gates said on NBC’s Meet the Press that although there would still be over 100,000 American troops in Afghanistan in 2011, only “some handful, or some small number, or whatever the conditions permit, will begin to withdraw at that time.”
The Pentagon’s Central Command chief, General David Petraeus, appeared on Fox News Sunday and acknowledged that there were no plans for a “rush to the exits” and that there “could be tens of thousands of American troops in Afghanistan for several years.” [2]
Little noted with the expansion of the war is that its range is widening as its intensity is deepening.
The top U.S. Air Force commander in Europe and Eurasia, General Roger A. Brady, was in Georgia on December 7 and in the neighboring South Caucasus nation of Azerbaijan on the 8th to discuss both nations’ increased troop deployments to Afghanistan and solidifying strategic military relations.
The president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, has recently and once again threatened war against Nagorno Karabakh and by unavoidable implication Armenia, which is a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization with Russia. The latter is obligated to provide Armenia military assistance under terms of the treaty in the event of it becoming the victim of aggression. With the American commander listening attentively, defense minister of Azerbaijan Colonel-General Safar Abiyev said that ongoing negotiations over Nagorno Karabakh “were not fruitful and such a situation forced Azerbaijan to use other ways to liberate its lands from the occupation.” [3]
On December 4 the president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, who fought a five-day war with Russia in August of last year, spoke of his offering the U.S. and NATO 1,000 more troops for the Afghan war and ominously added: “This is a unique chance for our soldiers to receive a real combat baptism.
“We do not need the army only for showing it in military parades….While our allies – in this case the United States and Europe – are concentrating on other issues [Afghanistan and Iraq], our enemy is getting active. The sooner the Afghan situation is resolved and sooner the war is over in Iraq, [the sooner] Georgia will be more protected.” [4]
The enemy is Russia and the quid pro quo is U.S.-trained Georgian troops receiving a war zone “baptism” for a future conflict with their “numerous, dangerous and perfidious” adversary. The adjectives are also Saakashvili’s, as are these words: “We need an army that knows how to fight. And participation in the operation in Afghanistan is a unique chance to study this and receive experience….Our final aim is to free the occupied territories [Abkhazia and South Ossetia] and unite and integrate Georgia.” [5]
Other nations are obtaining combat experience in Afghanistan under NATO auspices for use in and on the borders of their homelands, including, like Azerbaijan and Georgia, nations bordering Russia – Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Mongolia, Norway, Poland and Ukraine – as well as future belligerents in conflicts elsewhere like Colombia, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates.
If the world’s sole superpower and its NATO entourage can employ the military necessity at will to advance their interests abroad, their “vassals” will be emboldened to do so nearer home and will receive the arms and training to execute their designs.
Far from promoting peace, even an enforced peace, a Pax Americana, the war in Afghanistan and U.S. foreign policy in general are igniting power kegs around the world.
If it can be argued that Obama inherited the war in South Asia from George W. Bush and is intent on “finishing the job,” his signing of the $106 billion Iraq and Afghanistan War Supplemental Appropriations in July and the $680 billion 2010 National Defense Authorization Act in late October belies any claim of objection to the enhanced use of the military in general and war in particular.
Next year’s Pentagon budget is the largest, in both current and real U.S. dollars, since 1945, the last year of World War II. Although it contains $130 billion for the war in Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq that previously would have been appropriated as separate supplemental funds, immediately after the signing of the Defense Department budget the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, stated “he expected the Pentagon to ask Congress in the next few months for emergency financing to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” [6] with the first request to be approximately $50 billion.
With the announcement on December 1 of another Afghan troop surge, the Pentagon’s requests for “emergency financing” can be expected to grow in both size and frequency. As with the claim of a troop withdrawal (or “drawdown”) by 2011, the alleged ending of war supplements is a public relations ploy and sleight of hand trick employed to beguile a gullible public.
Even in a world that over the last decade has been afflicted with such logical and moral affronts as humanitarian war and preemptive retaliation, awarding a peace prize to a war president represents a new nadir of cynical realpolitik and a flagrant endorsement of militarism, however well-disposed many may have been toward its most recent recipient.
Notes:
1) http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?aid=15622&context=va
2) New York Times, December 7, 2009
3) Azeri Press Agency, December 8, 2009
4) Civil Georgia, December 5, 2009
5) Rustavi2, December 4, 2009
6) Associated Press, November 1, 2009
International Counterterrorism Policy in the Obama Administration
By Daniel Benjamin (*)
If memory serves, when I spoke to you two years ago, my view was that the United States had developed great skills at what I called tactical counterterrorism–taking individual terrorists off the street, and disrupting cells and operations. On the strategic side, I thought we were losing ground. Now, I believe the administration is redressing that gap. In my roughly six months in office, my view of our tactical capabilities in the areas of intelligence, the military, and law enforcement have more than amply been confirmed. One of the great rewards of government service is the chance to work with colleagues in all of these areas, and I must say that their level of competence and professionalism is really extraordinary. When I consider how far we have come since my days at the NSC in the late 90s, I think it is quite remarkable.
And we are now working to match their proficiency by formulating the kind of policies that seek to shape the environment that terrorists operate in so that they find their efforts more constrained. We are rebuilding and reinvigorating old partnerships to combat terror and establishing new ones with others who have been on the sidelines. As we look at the problem of transnational terror, we are putting at the core of our actions a recognition of the phenomenon of radicalization—that is, we are asking ourselves time and again: Are our actions going to result in the removal of one terrorist and the creation of ten more? What can we do to attack the drivers of radicalization, so that al- Qaida and its affiliates have a shrinking pool of recruits? And finally– and vitally–are we hewing to our values in this struggle? Because as President Obama has said from the outset, there should be no tradeoff between our security and our values. Indeed, in light of what we know about radicalization, it is clear that navigating by our values is an essential part of a successful counterterrorism effort. Thus, we have moved to rectify the excesses of the past few years by working to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, forbidding enhanced interrogation techniques, and developing a more systematic method of dealing with detainees. We are also demonstrating our commitment to the rule of law by trying Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and other al-Qaida operatives in our court system.
Finally, we have a strategy for success in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The President has put forward a clear plan to constrain the Taliban and destroy the al-Qaida core, and the administration is putting up the resources necessary to achieve that goal. Moreover, we are working with Pakistan to establish the kind of relationship, based on trust and mutual interests, that will lead to the defeat of radicalism in that country, which has in recent months seen so much violence. We understand the trust deficit, built up over decades that created the current situation. We know that challenges in the region will not be overcome overnight. But we believe we are now firmly on the right track.
Before going any further, we need to consider the threat today: On any given day, al-Qaida remains the foremost security threat the nation faces. Yet having said that, it is clear that for al-Qaida, it has been a difficult period. The group is under severe pressure in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the U.S. and its allies have succeeded in severely degrading its operational leadership. The coming troop increase in Afghanistan will further reduce al-Qaida’s capabilities and those of other extremist organizations. The Pakistani military has been working to eliminate militant strongholds in its territory. As a result, al-Qaida is finding it tougher to raise money, train recruits, and plan attacks outside of the region.
In addition to these operational setbacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, al-Qaida has not been successful in carrying out the attacks that would shake governments in the Arab world, which continues to be a primary long-term focus. It has failed to mobilize the masses–and this is a key point–which they have repeatedly said is their means of establishing Islamic emirates in the region.
Finally, there has been a decline of support for al-Qaida’s political program and there are several reasons for this: indiscriminate targeting of Muslim civilians in Iraq and Pakistan alienated many who were previously sympathetic to al-Qaida’s larger aspirations. The result has been both popular disaffection and a backlash from clerics in Muslim countries who have issued fatwas against the killing of other Muslims, notably in Iraq, although I note that this has yet to happen on a large scale in Afghanistan.
Second, al-Qaida’s ideological hard line has alienated more pragmatic organizations and individuals in the wider militant community. It has also created confusion over who carries the true banner of Islamic resistance to Western imperialism.
Third, denunciations of al-Qaida by extremist clerics have damaged the religious legitimacy of the group and raised questions about the proper use of violence in countries where there is no overt military action.
Fourth, al-Qaida and similar groups are becoming increasingly vague about who the primary enemy is, creating confusion in the militant community about the fundamentals of its strategic direction.
Yet despite these setbacks, al-Qaida has proven to be adaptable and resilient in two arenas. The first is in ungoverned or under-governed areas, often where there are tribal conflicts in which it can attach itself to the different parties. Thus in Yemen, al-Qaida operatives are marrying into the local tribes, and taking up their grievances against the government. In the sparsely populated Sahel, al-Qaida operatives, sometimes operating with individual local tribesmen and nomads, kidnap foreigners. In the FATA, operatives are marrying into local Pashtun tribes and are serving the larger interests of the Taliban insurgency by providing technical know-how and disseminating propaganda. And in Somalia, al-Qaida’s allies in al-Shabaab now control significant tracts of territory. These weakly-governed or entirely ungoverned areas are a major safe haven for al-Qaida and its allies and to dismiss their significance is to misunderstand their historical importance for training, recruitment, and operational planning. Quite frankly, the problem of un- and under-governed spaces is one of the toughest ones this and future administrations will face.
The second arena where Sunni radicals continue to succeed is in persuading religious extremists to adopt their cause, even in the United States. A bus driver, Najibullah Zazi, was trained in Pakistan and now faces charges in federal court for planning to set off a series of bombs in the United States. An indictment that was unsealed Monday in Chicago portrays an American citizen–David Headley–playing a pivotal role in last year’s attack in Mumbai, which killed more than 170 people and dramatically raised tensions in South Asia. So even if this radical movement is not mobilizing the masses, it is still galvanizing enough people to take to violence and poses a continuing, powerful threat. The importance of these two cases should not be glossed over–the conspiracies these men were engaged in had roots in the FATA, and eight years after 9/11, should give us all pause. The threat to the U.S. remains substantial and enduring despite the operational constraints on al-Qaida central.
It is also multifaceted as we have seen in the movement of young men, many of them motivated by a sense of ethnic duty, who have left their communities in Minnesota, been radicalized in Somalia, and fought and died for al-Shabaab.
As the example of David Headley indicates, al-Qaida is not the only group with global ambitions that we have to worry about. Lashkar e-Taiba has made it clear that it is willing to undertake bold, mass-casualty operations with a target set that would please al-Qaida planners. The group’s more recent thwarted conspiracy to attack the US embassy in Bangladesh should only deepen concern that it could evolve into a genuinely global terrorist threat. And let me say as an aside, very few things worry me as much as the strength and ambition of LeT, a truly malign presence in South Asia. We are working closely with allies in the region and elsewhere to reduce the threat from this very dangerous group.
As you know, I worked on terrorism in the White House when al-Qaida first surfaced in the late 1990s and I can tell you now, after having access to the intelligence again, that the threat has become far more complicated due to the proliferation of groups and the cross-pollination of networks. The global radical milieu has become thicker. There is so much more that we have to keep tabs on than there was in 1999.
So what are we doing to meet this challenge? Faced with this continuing and evolving threat, President Obama has articulated a clear policy – to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaida and its allies. That is our overriding objective, and to achieve it we are using all the tools at our disposal. In weakly-governed areas we are collaborating with the relevant local authorities to bolster their security forces to prevent al-Qaida safe havens. Moreover, our intelligence and law enforcement agencies and those of our allies continue to disrupt terrorist plots at home and abroad–as we have here in Denver and New York, in London, and in other countries around the world. We are working with the international financial community to deny resources to al-Qaida and its supporters. Now, as al-Qaida affiliates turn to kidnapping for ransom to raise funds, we are urging our partners around the world to adopt a no-concessions policy toward hostage-takers so we can diminish this alternative funding stream in regions like the Sahel, the FATA, and Yemen.
But this is not enough, as the continuing flow of recruits–and the lengthening roll call of conspiracies testifies. As President Obama succinctly put it, “A campaign against extremism will not succeed with bullets or bombs alone.” We need to look to look to what my colleague Deputy National Security John Brennan has called the upstream factors. We need to confront the political, social, and economic conditions that our enemies exploit to win over the new recruits…the funders…and those whose tacit support enables the militants to carry forward their plans.
The threat is global and our enemies latch on to grievances on behalf of the entire Muslim world, so we must work to resolve the long-standing problems that fuel those grievances. At the top of the list is the Arab-Israeli conflict, and, as you know, President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and Special Envoy George Mitchell are working very hard to resolve it.
Even with their efforts, peace in the Middle East will take time, and as we know, it will not eliminate all of the threats. But while the big policy challenges matter in radicalization, local drivers are critical as well. We are developing tailored-approaches to alter them. How do these different elements of our global counterterrorism strategy fit together?
To be sure, terrorism is a common challenge shared by nations across the globe—one that requires diplomacy—and one that the United States cannot solve alone. As Secretary Clinton has said, “Today’s security threats cannot be addressed in isolation. Smart power requires reaching out to both friends and adversaries, to bolster old alliances and to forge new ones.” The Obama administration has worked hard to reach out and, on the basis of mutual interests and mutual respect, to forge international coalitions. The administration has been working at reinvigorating alliances across the board and reengaging in the multilateral fora concerned with counterterrorism—fora that, in all honesty, were neglected for some time at the many UN entities, the G8, and the vast range of regional organizations that are eager to engage on counterterrorism issues.
Building the counterterrorism capacity of our partners at the national level is also a top priority. Consistent diplomatic engagement with counterparts and senior leaders helps build political will for common counterterrorism objectives. When the political will is there, we can address the nuts and bolts aspect of capacity building. We are working to make the counterterrorism training of police, prosecutors, border officials, and members of the judiciary more systematic, more innovative, and far-reaching, and we are doing this through such efforts as the Antiterrorism Assistance Program. In its more than 25-year old history, the ATA program has trained more than 66,000 professionals from 151 countries, providing programs tailored to the needs of each partner nation and to local conditions.
ATA is just one of many programs–on the civilian and the military sides of the house—that is increasing the ability of others to ensure their own security. With this kind of work, we are making real the President’s vision of shared security partnerships as an essential part of US foreign policy. This is both good counterterrorism and good statecraft. We are addressing the state insufficiencies that terrorism lives on, and we are helping invest our partners more effectively in confronting the threat–-rather than looking thousands of miles away for help or simply looking away altogether.
We are also addressing the local drivers of radicalization that still lead large numbers of people to adopt al-Qaida’s ideology, and as I said earlier, we understand the dangers of radicalization, and we are working both to undermine the al-Qaida narrative and to ameliorate the conditions that make it attractive. We know that violent extremism flourishes where there is marginalization, alienation, and perceived–-or real–-relative deprivation. In recognition of this, my first step has been to build a unit focusing on what we in the government call “Countering Violent Extremism” in my office to focus on local communities most prone to radicalization. There is a broad understanding across the government that we have not done nearly enough to address underlying conditions for at-risk populations–-and we have also not done enough to improve the ability of moderates to voice their views and strengthen opposition to violence.
Adopting a tailored-approach to countering violent extremism does not mean we can neglect broader structural problems. There is no denying that when children have no hope for an education, when young people have no hope for a job and feel disconnected from the modern world, when governments fail to provide for the basic needs of their people, when people despair and are aggrieved, they become more susceptible to extremist ideologies. But a tailored-approach to CVE requires identifying which of these problems are driving radicalization and are amenable to change with the help of local governments and leaders who understand the problems best.
Over time, the measures and the methods I have described above will reduce terrorists’ capacity to harm us and our partners. No element can be neglected if we are to succeed since they reinforce one another. Global engagement builds coalitions based on mutual interests and mutual respect. And these coalitions, in turn, help us partner with individual nations to enhance their capacity to counter extremism. This, finally, enables us to work with them to develop tailored-approaches to preventing extremists from becoming violent extremists.
I don’t want to leave you today with the impression that we have figured it all or that there won’t be real setbacks in the future. The contemporary terrorist threat was decades in the making and it will take many more years to unmake it. There is much we still need to learn, especially about how to prevent individuals from choosing the path of violence. But I believe we now have the right framework for our policies, and ultimately, I am confident, this will lead to the decisions and actions that will strengthen security for our nation and the global community.
(*) Daniel Benjamin, Coordinator, Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism – U.S. Government
We do not send pictures with these reports, because of the volume, but picture this emetic scene with your inner eye:
A dying Somali child in the macerated arms of her mother besides their bombed shelter with Islamic graffiti looks at a fat trader, who discusses with a local militia chief and a UN representative at a harbour while USAID provided GM food from subsidised production is off-loaded by WFP into the hands of local “distributors” and dealers – and in the background a western warship and a foreign fishing trawler ply the waters of a once sovereign, prosper and proud nation, which was a role model for honesty and development in the Horn of Africa. (If you feel that this is overdrawn – come with us into Somalia and see the even more cruel reality yourself!) – and if you need lively stills or video material on Somalia, please do contact us.
There is no limit to what a person can do or how far one can go to help
- if one doesn’t mind who gets the credit !
ECOTERRA Intl. maintains a register for persons missing or abducted in the Somali seas (Foreign seafarers as well as Somalis). Inquiries by family member can be sent by e-mail to office[at]ecoterra-international.org
For families of presently captive seafarers – in order to advise and console their worries – ECOTERRA Intl. can establish contacts with professional seafarers, who had been abducted in Somalia, and their wives as well as of a Captain of a sea-jacked and released ship, who agreed to be addressed “with questions, and we will answer truthfully”.
ECOTERRA – ALERTS and pending issues:
PIRATE ATTACK GULF OF ADEN: Advice on Who to Contact and What to Do http://www.noonsite.com/Members/sue/R2008-09-08-2
NATURAL RESOURCES & ARMED FISH POACHERS: Foreign navies entering the 200nm EEZ of Somalia and foreign helicopters and troops must respect the fact that especially all wildlife is protected by Somali national as well as by international laws and that the protection of the marine resources of Somalia from illegally fishing foreign vessels should be an integral part of the anti-piracy operations. Likewise the navies must adhere to international standards and not pollute the coastal waters with oil, ballast water or waste from their own ships but help Somalia to fight against any dumping of any waste (incl. diluted, toxic or nuclear waste). So far and though the AU as well as the UN has called since long on other nations to respect the 200 nm EEZ, only now the two countries (Spain and France) to which the most notorious vessels and fleets are linked have come up with a declaration that they will respect the 200 nm EEZ of Somalia but so far not any of the navies operating in the area pledged to stand against illegal fishing. So far not a single illegal fishing vessel has been detained by the naval forces, though they had been even informed about several actual cases, where an intervention would have been possible. Illegally operating Tuna fishing vessels (many from South Korea, some from Greece and China) carry now armed personnel and force their way into the Somali fishing grounds – uncontrolled or even protected by the naval forces mandated to guard the Somali waters against any criminal activity, which included arms carried by foreign fishing vessels in Somali waters.
LLWs / NLWs: According to recently leaked information the anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden are also used as a cover-up for the live testing of recently developed arsenals of so called non-lethal as well as sub-lethal weapons systems. (Pls request details) Neither the Navies nor the UN has come up with any code of conduct in this respect, while the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program (JNLWP) is sponsoring several service-led acquisition programs, including the VLAD, Joint Integration Program, and Improved Flash Bang Grenade. Alredy in use in Somalia are so called Non-lethal optical distractors, which are visible laser devices that have reversible optical effects. These types of non-blinding laser devices use highly directional optical energy. Somalia is also a testing ground for the further developments of the Active Denial System (ADS) Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD). If new developments using millimeter wave sources that will help minimize the size, weight, and system cost of an effective Active Denial System which provides “ADS-ACTD-like” repel effects, are used has not yet been revealed. Obviously not only the US is developing and using these kind of weapons as the case of MV MARATHON showed, where a Spanish naval vessel was using optical lasers – the stand-off was then broken by the killing of one of the hostage seafarers. Local observers also claim that HEMI devices, producing Human Electro-Muscular Incapacitation (HEMI) Bioeffects, have been used in the Gulf of Aden against Somalis. Exposure to HEMI devices, which can be understood as a stun-gun shot at an individual over a larger distance, causes muscle contractions that temporarily disable an individual. Research efforts are under way to develop a longer-duration of this effect than is currently available. The live tests are apparently done without that science understands yet the effects of HEMI electrical waveforms on a human body.
WARBOTS, UAVs etc.: Peter Singer says: “By cutting the already tenuous link between the public and its nation’s foreign policy, pain-free war would pervert the whole idea of the democratic process and citizenship as they relate to war. When a citizenry has no sense of sacrifice or even the prospect of sacrifice, the decision to go to war becomes just like any other policy decision, weighed by the same calculus used to determine whether to raise bridge tolls. Instead of widespread engagement and debate over the most important decision a government can make, you get popular indifference. When technology turns war into something merely to be watched, and not weighed with great seriousness, the checks and balances that undergird democracy go by the wayside. This could well mean the end of any idea of democratic peace that supposedly sets our foreign-policy decision making apart. Such wars without costs could even undermine the morality of “good” wars. When a nation decides to go to war, it is not just deciding to break stuff in some foreign land. As one philosopher put it, the very decision is “a reflection of the moral character of the community who decides.” Without public debate and support and without risking troops, the decision to go to war becomes the act of a nation that doesn’t give a damn.”
ECOTERRA Intl., whose work does focus on nature- and human-rights-protection and – as the last international environmental organization still working in Somalia – had alerted ship-owners since 1992, many of whom were fishing illegally in the since 1972 established 200 nm territorial waters of Somalia and today’s 200nm Exclusive Economic Zone (UNCLOS) of Somalia, to stay away from Somali waters. The non-governmental organization had requested the international community many times for help to protect the coastal waters of the war-torn state from all exploiters, but now lawlessness has seriously increased and gone out of hand – even with the navies.
ECOTERRA members with marine and maritime expertise, joined by it’s ECOP-marine group, are closely and continuously monitoring and advising on the Somali situation. (for previous information concerning the topics please google keywords ECOTERRA (and) SOMALIA)
The network of the SEAFARERS ASSISTANCE PROGRAMME and ECOTERRA Intl. helped significantly in most sea-jack cases. Basically the East African Seafarers Assistance Programme tackles all issues of seafarers welfare and ECOTERRA Intl. is working in Somalia since 1986 on human-rights and nature protection, while ECOP-marine concentrates on illegal fishing and the protection of the marine ecosystems. Your support counts too.
Please consider to contribute to the work of SAP, ECOP-marine and ECOTERRA Intl. Please donate to the defence fund.
Contact us for details concerning project-sponsorship or donations via e-mail: ecotrust[at]ecoterra.net
Kindly note that all the information above is distributed under and is subject to a license under the Creative Commons Attribution. ECOTERRA, however, reserves the right to editorial changes. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/uk/. The opinion of individual authors, whose writings are provided here for strictly educational and informational purposes, does not necessarily reflect the views held by ECOTERRA Intl. unless endorsed. With each issue of the SMCM ECOTERRA Intl. tries to paint a timely picture containing the actual facts and often differing opinions of people from all walks of live concerning issues, which do have an impact on the Somali people, Somalia as a nation, the region and in many cases even the world.
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Ecoterra Press Release 286 – The Somalia Chronicle June – December 2009, no 99b
Interview with Jan Knippers Black, the author of “The Politics of Human Rights Protection”
By Maria Lewytzkyj (SF Foreign Policy Examiner)
In a thought-provoking interview, Jan Black, the author of “The Politics of Human Rights Protection – Moving Intervention Upstream with Impact Assessment,” explores and makes interesting revelations about humanitarian intervention and human rights protection, the sentiments of our current era, the importance of impact assessments, differences in defining civilization with commentary about Iranian Nobel Laureate winner Shirin Ebadi’s thoughts on the topic, on the use of various ‘trump cards’ in political discourse, and most significantly, the use of denial as a shield.
My opportune discussion with the author provides readers with a comprehensive valuable addition to a very thorough book that fears little in its frank and bold exploration of the obstacles that human rights protectors face in being heard at the policy decision level and in forming a world where the motivation to protect human rights supersedes the motivation to walk away with a profit.
Envisioning a world that considers the idea of triage a good guiding practice when a conflict is being sorted out toward an improved situation, Jan Black offers great advice to human rights protectors on how to advocate that human rights become a top priority among other policy factors (trump cards as she calls them): economics, religion and security.
These trump cards have become the assumed priorities in assessing situations that lead to policy implementation around the globe, but they often overlook the consequences of policy choices. In her in-depth look at individual and collective rights, her candid inquiry questions what is found acceptable when it comes to living conditions and conflict conditions and makes a brilliant argument for pulling the whole business of preventing human rights abuses to the top of any action plan. She challenges people to re-engage actively in bringing to the foreground their observations and impact assessments of how policies and decisions affect the people before they ever become the established practice.
The book is a must-read and in the following interview, the author provides a sneak peek as well as applies her deep understanding to many current conflicts that are plaguing the globe. Few people have the type of determination Jan Black exerts, and few have taken the time to help us better understand the current situation we are all in. From the get-go, she challenges people to have the courage to understand and act to make the world a better place by no longer accepting failure or looking backwards to pick up the pieces, but by aiming to approach conflict resolution by taking the responsibility of becoming mindful well-informed concerned citizens who preserve the sanctity of human rights.
Tell me three top ways to move intervention upstream with impact assessment.
The three summed up would be: first is dream freely, second is think holistically, and the third is to act strategically. The first one I would say is about keeping your eyes on the prize, which is to say, don’t get bogged down in the details of trying to move incrementally beyond the most immediate crisis or problem. Remember that there is something much bigger than just getting past this little obstacle that you have in mind. Then also, to know where you are going, you have to know where you are coming from, so that means that you have to start by understanding:
where you are, where you’ve been, and why. Otherwise action without understanding is dangerous. So that understanding, I would say, comes from thinking holistically, which involves looking at the issue from a bottom-up perspective, which is very different from the way we look at most things. The framing for most issues comes down from those who command the floor, the people who have the power and the access to start with.
If you are promoting change, you’ve got to look at the perspective not of those who have the most to lose, but of those who have the most to fear. You also have to consider all the rights of all of the people. If you try to break them up and just choose one set of people and one set of the rights of theirs that are violated, you’re not going to understand what the big picture is about and then you can’t get very far.
The third is act strategically. I think that the most important aspect of acting strategically is to try to strip the cover of denial from people all the way up and down the system, not only the plausible deniability that presidents and other people at the top demand, but also the garden-variety denial that people use to protect themselves all the time. The main idea of mine is to lift the shield of denial from people at so many different levels in this process. I would say that is the ultimate objective. How you do that is something else. Coming up with the right kind of strategies of education and information and political advocacy.
I’ll back up a little to say that one of the reasons I think along these lines, like so many people who have been active in human rights for a long time, I just get tired of idea of counting bodies after the disaster has happened. Especially when it is so clear to us that it is going to happen. That to anyone who has been paying attention to the nature of the conflict in the region or to the consequences of this kind of policy, you can see for sure this disaster is going to happen. The problem is that the more important the decision, the less well-informed will be the decision-maker. If you look at the way that decisions about war and peace are made, the people who make those decisions for the most part really don’t know the region, the history that would need to be taken into consideration, even the history of the past wars of the country deciding to go to war. Such decisions are made by non-experts often for political reasons on intelligence that is pre-misinterpreted.
What I would like so much to be able to do, to inspire other people to do, is to try to get in ahead of those decisions and make sure that the people making the decisions from the top of the system understand that they will not be able to get away with plausible deniability any more. They will not be able to say, ‘but who could have predicted?’ We’re not going to let them say that. We did predict it – it’s on the record. But not just ‘we the activists’ or the experts could have predicted it. We want them to know that the public is going to know what we know about it. We are getting the word out, so forget your cover story. It’s not going to work. That’s the idea. One of the reasons that our leaders have been able to get away with plausible deniability for such a long time is that the public wants it too. That’s the most painful part and the most painful part to deal with too.
How do you break through that protective shield that allows people to avoid understanding what’s painful to understand? And it’s painful to understand, because you need to be able to believe in the reliability of your leaders or a power system, a social system. If you are able to understand what happens without your intervention there, then it imposes some kind of an obligation on members of the public at large. Understanding too much imposes obligations on anyone who does understand too much. Understanding is actually an act of courage in itself. It’s a step that is hard to get people to take.
It’s so easy to understand this when people have such huge obligations on their time. It’s a problem that keeps getting worse. If they don’t have three jobs just to get by, then they are doing a lot of volunteer work, or handling obligations for their own families that they didn’t have to handle before. That’s the evolution of the last several decades of our economic system; it has put a lot more pressure on every individual. So it’s easy to see how they feel like they can and must subconsciously avoid knowing these things. So it’s not enough that the information that it would take to know how to avoid disaster is not there, it’s just that you have to be able to force people to see it and understand it.
You have to make it hard for them not to know.
How you get there: there are a lot of different ways to get there. I became aware of this a long time ago when I worked on my dissertation, I wanted to look at how it happened that the U.S. became involved in the overthrow of a democratic government in Brazil in 1964, because I could see that a similar thing was about to happen in Uruguay and Chile. I wrote about it in the proposal to my dissertation. The evidence was that they were headed in the direction of a counter-revolutionary episode that Brazil had suffered and partly because of the way the U.S. was pushing it. I was amazed when I got to working on the dissertation that no one else had worked on this. At least in the U.S., you could not find even a suggestion that the U.S. had been involved in this kind of thing. In the first place, it was shocking to find out that something that was so obvious to me wasn’t out there. And I never believed for a minute that nobody else had an inkling of it, I just believed that nobody else was naïve enough to get into the kind of trouble it takes to tell the truth. The other thing that I learned in the process, in getting the information out there, is that the book that came out of it got some good publicity, but that was not enough. If people don’t want to learn what you have to tell them, then you need an organizational effort to get people informed.
It seems that one of the messages of your book is that human rights as an afterthought has become habitual in many cultures. It seems that the pain and suffering goes unnoticed and it isn’t until the system is fixed that wrongs are then righted. If there were a preventive approach to human rights in every sector, which ones would you suggest first? Also, there are already human rights commissioners in many governments with human rights abuses, why are they not meeting with success?
When you are starting from where we are now, from a fully developed kind of world empire – where there are a series of influences and hegemonies around and there are competitions for global hegemony – at least from our perspective in the U.S., we are in the belly of the beast of the empire that now assumes a right to control the ways of the world, and that’s to prevent so much of the kind of abuse that has become routine, you have to be willing to give up the idea of controlling the world. You can try influencing the world, you can try to lead by example, there are all kinds of ways we could try to have a positive influence on the world, but dropping bombs on them is not going to be one of those ways. And if we still think that whatever good we want to do for the world has to be done with the final idea that we have to control it, we’ve lost from the start.
We could approach human rights impact assessment in the same way that an environmental assessment has been approached, which is to try to get in ahead of the kinds of policies that affect the most people. Certainly you start with war, and there are basic approaches to foreign assistance, humanitarian assistance that if you study them carefully, and saw what had been done in the past and saw what has gone right and what has gone wrong, then you would have a much better idea than just starting with what is best practices from the perspective of how it works for the institution undertaking the practices. We don’t really look back after we’ve finished projects to try and figure out how the projects really worked for the people on the ground. It turns out to be how it worked for the World Bank, for the IMF, for the creditor institutions, for the aide agency.
It would be nice if you could have human rights impact assessment built into the system in the way that environmental impact assessment has been. I understand very well why that hasn’t really taken place and why it’s less likely to, because it’s a lot safer politically to hug a tree than a poor person.
People who think they have something to lose feel very threatened by the fact that there are a lot of people out there who have needs, and so security systems are really built to keep the have-nots from going after what the haves have. In fact, most of the systemic grand theft that happens is the rich stealing from the poor, not the other way around, because it is very easy for the rich to steal from the poor. It’s not easy for the poor to steal from the rich. But, there is so much that is systemic like that that you need to break through in some way. One of the reasons is that everyone wants to say that they are in favor of human rights. No one wants to be seen as being opposed to human rights. It’s gotten to be not only an accepted part of the discourse, but an obligatory part in a way. The way they get around actually being for human rights, is that they have trump cards that in the system are allowed to override it. One of them being security, of course. Once you play the security card, it overrides everything, including common sense. It means that decisions can be made very hurriedly without looking at any of the possible consequences. People are inclined to stop thinking themselves when somebody else plays that card, it’s a conversation stopper. It means that the argument stops here. To a lesser extent but also to devastating results, the economic card is played that way. You would think that in times of economic crisis, reasonable people would say, well, triage means you handle the greatest need first.
One of the worst things that happens with the myth of expertise about economics, the economists say that of course you have some starving people down there, but we can’t think about that right now, because the banking system is about to collapse. Wait a minute! The bankers are in trouble, so we are supposed to turn away from the starving people? I don’t think so.
If there are people who are in danger of starvation, if they are without shelter, if they are without the most basic health care needs, if they are disabled, if they need help for whatever reason, if they are old or young, in times of economic crisis, you direct whatever you have first of all to the greatest need. But actually, the opposite is the case. It’s never been seen more clearly than in the U.S. since September ‘08. What we have done is throw incredible amounts of money we don’t have to the financial institutions that got us into this mess in the first place. All over the country, budgets from local to state to federal budgets that were designed to help the people in the greatest need are the ones that are stripped. It’s not just us, that’s just not here and now, that’s the way the world has worked. That’s how the economy trump card is played. If the economy is in trouble that means that there has to be belt tightening. But guess whose belt gets tightened: the belts that are around the narrowest waists. That’s the way that works.
Also, when I talk about triage in the book, I counter-posed it against the broader issues. A lot of people will challenge pursuit of rights that are not well understood and abuses that are not necessarily understood as abuses, because, wait a minute, if you’re talking about human rights, you have to be dealing with genocides and execution and torture, and I say absolutely yes, we must maintain an idea of what has to be dealt with expeditiously and urgently, and of course we have to keep an eye on it! That doesn’t mean we can ignore the borderlines where the issues are not well understood or not agreed upon, because that is where most of conflict actually will be. Right there on the fuzzy border.
The rights of immigrants, legal or otherwise, right now that’s a huge issues. The U.S. has been imprisoning and abusing in all kinds of ways people rounded up of all ages. Immigrants, legal or otherwise – it takes them a long time to get things sorted out. In the meantime, they just abuse people right and left. It’s not just the U.S., we hear more about that all the time, but Europe is getting worse and worse on this all the time. It’s these borderline issues that call for policy and that cause conflict. We can’t ignore them, because there are even worst things going on.
If we are not expanding the boundaries of the rights that are understood as rights and must be protected, then we are losing ground. The more we lose, the more we stand to lose. This is a dynamic that is moving in one direction or another all the time. You can always say, well yes, there is an increasing number of homeless people on the streets, but we don’t have time to think about that, because we have bigger problem to deal with.
It’s easier to see the nature of ‘cause and effect’ if you look at things in the farming sector. We know that where you have farm labor involved and you are spraying pesticides, there is going to be tremendous damage to the people working there, but we keep doing it. When you are mining – mining gold and other such metals – there is going to be mercury released that will get into the water and it will be damaging to the health of children in the area. But we don’t do anything to prevent that sequence. We may check later, and find lots of kids in the Amazon who are suffering from mercury in the system. How could we have known? Of course we knew. There are many sectors like this. We know the downside. We don’t know how to stop the perpetrators from doing it.
The best example of them all is war, and the very idea that you send the bull in to set up the shelves in the china shop, never mind to clean up the mess that the bull made in the china shop. We talk as if we were so seriously concerned about the underprivileged, the disadvantaged, the discriminated against people in all these other parts of the world that we know so little about and, so what we are going to do about it is make war on them to straighten it out. How on earth can thinking people come to a conclusion like that? But imperial societies have always come to that conclusion. We have gotten to be an imperial society and we don’t face that.
That would be dealing with the problem of denial, if we could just get people to face the idea that our whole mindset is drawn from the business of having become an empire and that if we don’t deal with that, it’s not just that we’ll keep getting into wars, it’s that we are in a state of war. The system will require conflict all the time to keep itself going. That’s why you have to get out in front of it and recognize that this is empire, and if we don’t want the wars and we don’t want the cost of it, we have to start turning that around instead of going ahead down that path.
The more we build the military industry complex, the more there will be war. It’s a systemic thing. Once you have an empire, to keep the economy of the empire going, you also have to keep the wars going. The nature of demand is that you have to scare the people in order to keep the budgets coming out. We are building other aspects of this empire in the same way, like the prison industrial complex system. Our prisons are privatized and they are in it for profits. In order to continue to get the profits, you have to keep filling the prisons and having more demand for places to put the prisoners. So instead of thinking about whether it is really necessary to imprison people who have used a little bit of marijuana. Even if you’re sure you don’t want marijuana, there is surely a better way to deal with users of a substance than put them in jail. There is much about our prison system that is also quite insane. Not just immoral, but insane.
About human rights commissioners:
It’s one of those tools that is up for grabs always, it can be used to squelch criticism and curiosity about human rights if controlled by a government that doesn’t want to invite anybody into the discussion, but it can also be used to bring pressure on the government from the inside and the outside – like so many institutions and agencies it can be used for good or ill. The name of our game if we are promoting human rights, is that it works for the benefit of human rights instead of against it.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, I was working on some cases with Amnesty International, one of them being that of Annette Lew and other people who were fighting for organizing and trying to build a political base for respect for human rights and women’s rights and indigenous rights (or at least people’s rights). The Taiwanese felt like they were occupied more or less by mainland China and so they wanted their own government. And so I went over to see if I could get into the prison and be able to do a report for Amnesty on what was going on there. But also I knew that would not be easy, but perhaps making enough of a fuss, people would bring focus on the issue in the U.S. and around the world and bring pressure on what was then the government of the Republic of China. I was turned away from the prison of course by the human rights office of the government there.
Of course, if you anticipate that there are people who are going to come over looking into your human rights situation, then you set up a barricade, and the intelligent way to do that is to set up a human rights office to push these people back. That’s one thing. Human rights as a discourse, and the existence of human rights offices can be a tool and a tool can be used by anyone who picks it up. It can be used for good or ill. The language we use, is the same way.
When Jimmy Carter was in office in the U.S., we set up, for the first time, a human rights office in the State Department, to actually look into abuses in other parts of the world, including some that the U.S. had a great deal to do with (Latin America, but also along the fringes of what was then the Soviet sphere). And then when Carter was gone, and Reagan took over, the office came to be used for the opposite. I had an article that went to the New Republic on the situation of human rights in Chile – this would have been in the early 1980s. After they had published my article, the magazine got a really heated nasty message from Elliott Abrams, who was then head of the human rights office for the State Department. They were using that office the same way that the government of the Republic of China had been using it in Taiwan: to redefine human rights as they choose to and to push back those who were serious about it. That’s something we should understand about any kind of office, any kind of use of language, that it becomes a political football that can be used either way.
That said, I also have to say that a lot of good has been accomplished by many of those offices in parts of the world, particularly in Africa, because when the people who are trying to fight for human rights have so little clout behind them – when it’s so dangerous to do so – if you can get United Nations involvement in trying to set up and monitor such an office, even if the UN then is having to deal also with a repressive regime that is trying to control how that office is used, at least there is some push back FOR human rights. I’m not against countries having human rights offices, in fact I’m for it, but it’s something that people need to understand, like government or social institution itself: an operation that is called a human rights office can go either way.
Can you elaborate a little on your call to indiscipline?
I was thinking of it first in the sense of my advocacy of multidisciplinary studies, but in a way, I think I should go farther and say anti-disciplinary, because usually the whole idea of discipline is used to put up walls beyond which one set of people is not supposed to tread in search of an answer to a question, or a solution to a problem. I think that almost gives away the un-seriousness of the pursuit. If you look for example in the social science disciplines, political science all by itself, the study of politics by itself is entertainment, and economics by itself is religion. But, politics that is not based on an understanding on an intent to incorporate economics is just a popularity contest. Economics without politics has nothing to do with what is actually going to happen, so it’s a game. It’s chess that is less realistic than an actual chessboard. It goes beyond that. It’s a kind of discipline that is imposed by religions and the idea that you don’t dare question what I say god says. You get that also with any category of people that claims expertise and priority. That includes security systems and the economic systems at the top. The mess of expertise is one of the worst things that we have to contend with. The kind of expertise that says don’t question me, you’re not supposed to think about this, I have all the answers.
Can you tell me about a few world leaders who you think have moved away from that self-contradictory thinking that you mention in your book and are implementing indiscipline in their policymaking?
Yes, there is an awful discrepancy between the leaders who can accomplish that sort of thing and the once who are the decision makers. One of the biggest problems we have is that once people are in a position, elected or otherwise, to be seen as leaders, then they have something to lose, and then they are afraid to lead. Because leading means taking risks. Especially if you are trying to lead on behalf of the people, that is, as opposed to the elite. People like Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Ghandi, all kinds of people around the world have been willing to step up to do what it took to make a difference on behalf of the people as a whole. Not many people who are acknowledged people in public office or private power are willing to do that. Some are. I would say Soros has. George Soros has used his economic power to do some good. But that is kind of rare. There are international leaders. Right now for example, Lula from Brazil. He started a program “Fome Zero” (“No Hunger”) and it changed names and “Bolsa Familia” (“Family Safety Net”). It has cut back on poverty and kept a lot of students in school. Things can be done, even when it looks very difficult.
“To every solution there is a problem: any remedy devised to protect the interests of the less powerful will soon be turned by the powerful to their own advantage.” I quote from your book. I see your point. Everyone can play victim, is what I’ve heard. How do you suggest staying ahead of that game?
Anticipating it, and understanding that it will happen. Don’t be blindsided by it every time it happens, and understand that it is systemic. As soon as you implement an increase in minimum wage the folks who don’t want to pay their workers more will say that they have to downsize, because we can’t afford that. They’ll say it’s all your fault and you’re going to lose half those jobs instead. There may be some companies that are handicapped and some kinds of small companies that need some tax credits when such pay raises are implemented, but for the most part that’s just greed and hegemony. We have to expect that they will say that we know that they will downsize. We have to make it harder for them to downsize in response to an increase in minimum wage.
Same thing with laws that have come in to protect women or protect children, the first thing you know is that they are used to discriminate against women. We have to stay awake all the time and anticipate what they are going to do, and counter it and get back on track.
How do you suggest that the root causes of human rights violations be explored more in the public’s eye? For example, when you see a show or read an article or a study that talks about refugees in Sudan, or pirates in Somalia or other injustices in the news, what do you think that the media is doing wrong in telling the story?
One understands the nature of the news business and some of it is hard to get around. Of course, the focus will be on what is happening right now. It’s hard to get people just to give us a back-story and to give it in a way that makes what is happening now comprehensible, but they should try. I think also there is a tendency to focus primarily on the victims, without asking how did this happen and why did it happen without looking in the first place to the perpetrators and not to just the immediate abusers, but to the ones who enabled that abuse, and the ones who promoted the abuse, and the system that promotes it.
For example, sex trafficking. It’s such a big issue now. Of course, it’s horrifying. So the immediate attention is to the particular people who we can identify as having being trafficked and the particular immediate traffickers, but there are all kinds of systemic things that make that turn of events more likely. Look at the kind of economic collapse, meltdown, that means that public jobs will be lost. Well most of those jobs, that have been lost every time there is that kind of meltdown that destroys the public sector first, are women’s jobs, and they are left desperate. They have to be reaching for whatever looks like an opportunity for them. No wonder they are easily fooled in that kind of thing. Also you find more trafficking where there are swarms of workers that are immigrant workers, so we should make it less necessary for people to have to travel so far to do their work. That’s a systemic problem, that so much of the work force is on the move now and can’t settle down and make a real home for a real family.
Also, the warzones – that’s another part of the demand side of the human trafficking business. Where you have a lot of troops gathered, of course, there will be demand for sex services, so you will have people trafficked to meet that demand. There are systemic features on the supply side and the demand side that we never seem to look at or try to do anything about. That would be true with almost any kind of issue that you look at. And when you get right down to the bottom of it, rights abuse is always about inequality, because the bullies don’t go after people who are just as big as they are, the ones who can fight back.
Where you have vulnerability on the one hand and impunity on the other, of course you’re going to have rights violations.
Do you think that there have been any impact assessments on failed states that included that countries with poor governance would rely more on international organizations such as the UN and international aide? Do you think that that impacts whether or not other countries choose to improve their own governance or know that they can rely on these organizations and aide groups when domestic politics and internal strife as a fall-back plan?
I don’t really think it’s the governments, or the would-be leaders trying to put together a government for what are borderline failed states, that are so much the problem, as the countries that destroy these states. Like the way the U.S. goes into Iraq and smashes it up like a bull in a China shop and then says, yeah sure, the UN ought to come in and clean it up. I worry a lot about the U.S. having more impunity precisely, and other hegemonic states, that can act recklessly vis-à-vis another people or another state, and then turn around and say that it’s the role of the United Nations to pick up the pieces. I think that’s a problem.
I also think that whether or not we are talking about human involvement, part of the problem is that we so readily accept failure. We don’t go back. In the first place, if it worked for us, the ones who are supposed to be fixing it, it doesn’t seem to matter nearly enough that it might have been a failure for that bunch of folks we left behind. As long as it works for us, our budget, our careers, our media image, that’s what seems to be what matters too much. Not only do we too readily accept failure, we don’t even define it in a realistic way. But under any circumstances we seem to more readily accept failure than we accept an ongoing challenge. Or we can accept failure like the way we accept responsibility, which is without doing anything about it. That’s a big problem. Especially when it comes to what might be called nation-building, or post-conflict reconstruction or whatever has inspired the West to get involved somewhere, that it didn’t know enough about or care enough about, our model still has been the colonial system. We don’t admit that, we talk an awful lot about how important local buy-in and participation are and we don’t pay any attention to that on the ground, we just run it the way we always have, which is a colonial model.
We can’t stand to think that a project that we think is ours is getting out of control. It has to be out of control, unless we are going to stay on as colonial masters, but that’s a hard one to accept for the hegemonic.
How do those who feel vulnerable and recognize that injustice and feel that powerless get their impact assessment reports read by the proper decision makers who are going to make responsible policies?
Sometimes, it happens because they are determined enough to organize broadly enough to bring their demands into the streets, but lord knows it’s a really, really uphill game. Any group of really vulnerable has to gain allies who are not as vulnerable and build layers of coalitions around them. They also need to organize anybody they see as being in the same category of vulnerability, like indigenous people need to pull together across all the lines they can.
Amazingly enough, a lot of that is happening! There really are international organizations of indigenous peoples. You’d think that would be the last category of people who would be able to find common ground with people on the other side of the world. But there has been a lot of help from lots of international organizations and non-governmental organizations and it does make a difference, but then if the problem being addressed is one within one particular state, then you also need alliances and coalitions within that state too.
And it’s just a really, really major undertaking, because otherwise a government once in office is accessible to the powerful, to the big businesses, people with money to protect and to offer as campaign contributions and it’s very hard for other kinds of people to get access.
If Israel met Hamas on their terms, how would an impact assessment that overrides trumps (i.e. religious concerns, economic concerns, security concerns) look? For example, let’s say Hamas actually played politics as it should since being elected, rather than tactics it used prior to election.
In assessing the problem, everybody seems to forget now that what distinguishes terrorists from other kinds of contenders is that they are put off from the table. They have no way within the system to be heard. That’s not to say that there are not awful people. That’s not to say that harming innocent people is justifiable under any circumstances, but it is to say that there is an approach that should make a difference, which is to bring them to the table.
Maybe some of them you can’t deal with at all, maybe you have to lock them up for the safety of all of us, but if it is a whole movement of people it must be that they have a need that should be dealt with. And in the case of a group like Hamas, for heaven’s sakes, we said, play the game within the system, run for office, have elections the way the rest of us do. They did, they won, and we refuse to acknowledge it and pushed them out again. So we’re not playing the game. The rest of the world is not playing that game fairly with Hamas. It’s hard to see from standing where we are, anything that absolutely promises success, but it’s very clear that the way we are going about it is doomed to failure.
An episode called the peace process that really means a 50-year war is the best example I can see of accepting failure. I can see some good reasons why we wanted to call it the peace process early on as a ploy hoping that it would become one, but at least we have to notice that it didn’t and that we better do something different if we want it to become a peace process.
It seems that all sides are stuck in a big stand-off. It seems that an impact assessment like you promote would have to do away with the kind of terminology we’re talking about right now.
Actually, there have been in-depth studies, you might say impact assessment, the Goldstone Report is one, and it’s amazing how quickly people back off from something that tells an uncomfortable truth, some things that they don’t want to know. That unwillingness to understand is also part of the problem. It goes along with the fact that, as I say, there is no such thing as a system that doesn’t work, every system works for somebody, and this 50-year war is working for a lot of people, and we have to understand that and find ways to make people face that and cut across it.
How do you suggest?
The U.S. and Israel have actually persuaded even the UN Human Rights Council to avoid considering the Goldstone Report that just came out about the consequences of the invasion of Gaza a while back, and the entrapment of a million and a half people in this tiny territory where they are not able to get even the things that they need most. That’s just terrible! It would be wonderful if we could have an international movement that would have to call upon the resources of the media as well to generate an international discourse about this thing, and make people focus on it and understand it. It’s not enough that it is possible for people to understand a situation of abuse, the point is that everybody is under so much pressure in so many ways now, you have to make it impossible for them not to understand in order to get any action.
It’s an occupation that has turned at least part of the area into an open-air concentration camp. People just find it a whole lot easier not to face that.
In your book, you bring up conventions that protect human rights and the importance of their being written, but do you see them being employed in current events?
I think the thing is that those conventions are very valuable. They give us a lever, a handle to pick this up by, but unless there is a category of people, a group, a coalition, a mobilization of activists who are willing to do what it takes to focus international public attention on something, there will be no enforcement. In other words, having the conventions there is essential, but it still doesn’t do the job unless you have people who are willing and able to make it work.
You talk about collective rights in your book, can you share with me your perspective on civil rights laws and the chance they have in countries that have the worst human rights abuses?
I guess, one of the problems, is that even if we are able to get people around the world to understand that there has been a terrible wrong perpetrated against a particular category of people at a time and at a place, we don’t somehow get across to enough people what the background of all that is, how ‘cause and effect’ work to make peoples vulnerable and gives peoples impunity, so that they recognize when there’s another category of people collectivity whose rights are being abused who need to see those rights protected. Most people now understand about the Holocaust and what an awful kind of thing that was and some of the reasons for it, most people understand something about the civil rights movement and how it overcame the terrible level of discrimination and abuse against blacks in the U.S..
A lot of people in the West understand the nature of abuse of women in the Middle East. It’s easier to understand abuses and protections when it’s somebody else, when it’s in some other country. If you talked in Europe about the idea whether people live or die in this country depends on how much money they have, that they can’t get adequate healthcare unless they have adequate money, and that people accept that, they would say it’s shocking, when you think about it. Americans are immune to it, because the kind of a violation that becomes routine ceases to be seen as a violation. So you can apply this to so many kinds of things, for example, the way land has been taken from the people who tilled it, country by country all around the world.
When I first started studying Latin American affairs, it was so easy to attribute the kind of poverty and inequality to the Spanish conquerors and the great landlords of the 15th and 16th centuries, without noticing that the business of pushing people off of their land has been accelerated – it wasn’t getting better, it was getting worse. It continued to get worse all over the world. There are still pressures like that on the indigenous everywhere. I’ve been working on the case of the Mapuche in Chile and taking students down to see first-hand how that works. It’s no longer the great plantations – the old fashion kind, it’s not the sugar or cotton plantations of an earlier day – it’s plantations of pine and eucalyptus, and other commercial logging operations depriving the indigenous people of their land. So, I think that’s the kind of thing you were talking about, and how collective rights, as well individual rights, continue to be violated all over the radar, because people aren’t able to take what they understand about such violations at one time and in one place and transfer it.
So, what about writing more civil rights laws in those areas to protect their rights?
They need tighter laws, but that’s not the main problem in itself. The security trump card is available to be played all over the world, since the U.S. has introduced the war on terror and that there should be laws that are applicable in a case when terror violations have been alleged. They override other kinds of laws that might protect people. There were anti-terror laws that came in under Pinochet, but that kind of thing – the insistence that countries should have anti-terrorist laws – was pushed by the Bush administration all over the world after 9/11, so laws like that are being used to override other laws that were there to protect vulnerable people.
How do we reverse that?
I think somehow it has to start with education, but that also means organization and coalition building and popular movements. How do you get them going? They also have to be in conjunction with communication media campaigns to bring political pressures. And then whatever you can get going on the ground, you have to be able to funnel it to decision makers. To get that kind of chain going is also very difficult. There is nothing easy about this.
Rights are not bestowed, they have to be won and they have to be protected then or else they will lose them again otherwise.
What are your thoughts on Lubna Hussein, the Sudanese woman who wore trousers in public and therefore was convicted of indecency under Islamic law, and the trousers trial in terms of addressing human rights and Islamic law? She had a huge number of supporters.
There was an awful lot of support. I think the trick is if you can genuinely educate people, if you can get them to understand, to allow themselves to understand what is going on, then they really do support human rights. Most people believe that they support human rights, even if they don’t know anything about the particulars. But then they don’t want to know more about it, because it’s painful to know, because it puts an obligation on you to do something about it, to think about it.
Our problem is not that most people don’t care, they do care in principle, we have to get them to care enough to say something, to stand up. There was a poll, I think it was earlier this year or late last year, of 16 countries representing 2/3 of the world population that said that they thought women should have equal rights and that governments and international organizations should contribute to protecting those rights. So, it’s not that public opinion runs the other way, it’s that public opinion does not lead people to take stands that are strong enough or open enough to override the power of those who have too much to lose by acknowledging equal rights.
Individual heroism like Lubna exercised really does make a difference. It doesn’t always, but it does sometimes make a huge difference. I think the government hedged a bit after they saw that reaction and that answers the question that it does make a difference when people get out there and express themselves.
Writing on the topic of individual versus collective rights, you wrote “Perhaps a recombination of supposed first and third world positions would better serve to protect the rights of the majority worldwide.” Can you elaborate?
The discourse and the use of the idea of collective rights for the discourse has so often been dominated by the male leadership of countries where gender rights are so unequal, and then the discourse becomes cover for abusing women. They say, ‘We don’t believe in individual rights, we believe in collective rights, and that includes our right to abuse women,’ but what about the women’s rights. That’s a sham!
What I meant too was that the use of the idea of individual right in the West has become absurd to the point of giving priority to profit. Corporate personhood means that they can steal like swine in the name of corporations, because the corporations get away with pretending that they are individuals. In the meantime, the same country that allows that to happen does not allow individuals necessarily to speak their own languages in the workplace, or to smoke their pot at home or whatever. It is not really a priority given in the West to give individual rights; it’s a priority to the rights of the people who have the most money. They have all kinds of ways written into the law to protect that.
Can you give a current example?
We have a pharmaceutical industry that is able to pour so much money into the Congress that they were able to get a law that says that even though they can sell the drugs more cheaply to other countries, we cannot buy them back from other countries. They can make a law that makes it impossible for a government agency to make a deal with Canadian pharmaceutical importers and exporters to sell them back to us cheap. It’s absurd, the kinds of supposed rights that corporations get under that myth that we call individual rights.
In your book, you say, that “the real victor in the cold war thus was neither West over East nor North over South so much as the private sector over the public sector. That by no means ordained that the state was to fade away or that public budgets were to shrink. Rather it meant that the boundary between public and private domains was to be set by the private sector rather than the public one and that the power base of governments would shift more decisively from popular constituencies to corporate ones.” Do you think this might change given the current economic hardships that we are seeing?
Certainly, it should. You would expect so. That’s what happened when we had the Great Depression of the 1930s. There was a big turn around, because we could get the kind of government that assumed responsibility for it. It isn’t happening now. It certainly has not begun to happen. In a way, ‘we the people’ are begging the supposed healthcare insurers to let in us in the gate, to give the people something to say about their healthcare system. The whole approach is as if it was theirs to give us. There is no reason to have insurance companies involved in healthcare. What do they have to do with healthcare? But they own it, and we are not seriously challenging that. You’re right it should be turning around now, but it has a long way to go. We’re still going in the wrong direction right now.
In your book, you talk about incarceration and that it should be countercyclical, in that rates of serious crime rise in periods of economic decline, but in fact it responds above all now to political climate, particularly the generation of fear. Can you be specific about this observation?
I forget the exact figures, but it seems to me that incarceration, and I’m not certain whether we’re talking about the country as a whole or just in California, but I believe it has quadrupled over the last two or three decades at a time when actual rates of violent crime were dropping. So what does that say? It’s bizarre.
It is an economy that operates on its own now. It manages to build its own demand by scaring people and then just locking up more people for reasons that in the past we wouldn’t have taken seriously as a reason for locking them up. Small amounts of consumption of some drug that happens to be illegal, or perhaps is made illegal for frivolous reasons, like marijuana.
Even economic reasons. We don’t have a debtors’ prison, but we sure drive people to doing the kinds of things that can somehow be defined as illegal and then locking them up. We’ve hugely expanded the prison industry to lock up people who may be in the country illegally, instead of just deporting them. It was bad enough the way they were deported without any of the court procedures that are supposed to be carried out, that they are entitled to, but now we are neither deporting them nor giving them their day in court, we are just holding them in prisons, then sooner or later deporting them. [They’re being thrown in] just for being in the wrong country, and for trying to get a job. The point is that we are feeding the prison industry, which is now a private industry, like the military industry complex. It’s gone the same way as the medical industry, which used to be largely public or at least non-profit, and is now private.
What countries currently have the worst human rights violations?
It depends. There are so many different kinds of violations. China’s record with respect to capital punishment is just awful. The U.S. is one of the worst – one of the top 4, I guess – in capital punishment per capita, but China is by far the worst. The U.S., on the other hand, is the worst by far in the number of people incarcerated. If you are looking at abuses in terms of categories of people, like women, well, maybe Saudi Arabia. It’s hard to say. There are a number of countries that abuse women systematically and straightforwardly as a matter of law, as in Saudi Arabia, others where that kind of abuse may not be sanctioned by law, but it happens anyway. Even in a very modern and sophisticated, and in many ways a democratic country, like Turkey, abuses occur like honor killings of young women, because they are in the company of men they are not related to. There are terrible abuses like that in so many different places.
Do you think the super global powers like China, like the U.S., and countries like Saudi Arabia could find a shared interest among all of them in improving their human rights records, or is this just an exercise in our collective ability to recognize these violations, but our hands are tied?
I don’t think an initiative to find a collective interest will ever come from governments, I think it has to come from people. We have to force our governments to see it. I think it would not be a problem of getting the people to see that they have a collective interest in having governments that respect their rights, but systems operate as they do, because they serve the interests of some people. So that’s what you have to cut across somehow. That means governments won’t act in the public interest unless ‘we the people’ force them to do so.
I liked your suggestion that in the long term, peace means many things and should include “re-visioning of what civilization can and must be about.” And that for the time being, most of all, investing in peace must mean investing in the UN, the ICC, and other multilateral organizations and institutions. The way that civilization is defined depends on what book you read, there’s the Eurocentric view of civilization, the Arab-centric view of civilization and those who want to merge those views and not promote a clash of these civilizations. Can you elaborate?
In a way, we have ceased to aspire to the kinds of things that most people were agreed upon in the 1960s and 1970s in terms of the kind of society that we want, much less we accept. We have accepted the idea that profit motives outrank human rights. How can we ever have accepted something like that?
It could be argued that civilization was built on slavery, but I would say that modernization was built on slavery. It’s not the same thing as civilization. You’re right it depends on what one means by civilization. I like what is attributed to Gandhi, the idea that he was asked about what he thinks about western civilization and he said, ‘I think it would be a good idea.’ Most of us in the so-called Western civilization assume that we have a corner on civilization, the right to define it for ourselves. I don’t think that you find a lot of clash in values among the non-hegemonic. I think that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights represents probably the needs and feelings of most people.
But we have to understand that the hegemonic will try to define it in ways that work particularly for them and in some areas people will claim a right to collective or cultural rights that are not recognized by the universal declaration, meaning that half the population has the right to abuse the other half of the population. Whether it’s men wanting to abuse women, or the rich wanting to abuse the poor, if you start with the assumption that human rights means all people and all rights and that everybody should have a say about what those rights are, then it’s democracy with a small ‘d’. I think there is a global view of what civilization is, but most people don’t have enough to say about the way they see it.
Speaking of civilization, you’ve probably heard about Iranian Nobel Laureate winner Shirin Ebadi who took issue with the “clash of civilization” posture that has characterized West-Middle East relations over the past 30 years. She was Iran’s first female judge, supported the Islamic Revolution in 1978, suffered and then became a human rights attorney. She has said that Middle Eastern leaders use Islam as a shield. “They use Islam to hide behind and violate human rights. Like [Samuel] Huntington, they claim Islam is not compatible with democracy. But this is their interpretation. They interpret Islam in a way that grants them power and supports their power. Any objection to them is then an objection to Islam.” Your thoughts?
I’m very sad about the appearance of that book. Whether Samuel Huntington really thought that something like that was inevitable, or whether he thought it was a timely popular topic, is an open question maybe, but I think it played into what was to come and helped a lot of people come to a conclusion that differences inevitably lead to clash and the thing to do about it is to prepare for clash, instead of prepare for mutual understanding among cultures that are different.
He basically said that Islam is not compatible with democracy. So what, we are supposed to take that at face value?
In the first place, whose democracy? Ours is not compatible with democracy. Ours is run by money. Is that what democracy is supposed to be about? It is just too helpful to too many people to have the idea that violence is inevitable so preparing for it is the way to go. If you prepare for violence of course you’ll get it. If you prepare for peace, maybe that’s what you’ll get.
When I was talking about the trump cards, I really talked about a triad of trump cards, and the other one is religion, because if you credit that kind of religious thinking, I don’t mean from just the Islamic side, but from the so-called Christian side, there is a kind of mindlessness there that is also a conversation stopper that tells people that whoever can claim to speak for God has the last word and that people with better intentions and better sense are not supposed to weigh in. It has the same effect then as the security card and the economics card that just assume a right to override everything else.
I think that she’s right that a great many readers over there use Islam as a shield just in the way that many leaders, including supposedly religious leaders in the U.S., use family values as a shield. I think that people who are serious about human rights just have to keep trying to protect even our words and our dialogue. The whole discourse gets pulled into another direction, if we are not careful.
Ebadi mocked the idea floated by the same leaders that, instead of abiding by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they would write their own “Islamic Declaration of Human Rights.” “How many declarations do we need?” said Ebadi. “If Muslims are allowed to draft their own, we will have a Christian Declaration and a Hindu Declaration… We will have as many declarations as there are faiths. It would be impossible.” How do you react to this?
That’s the problem – it’s not so universal. The pretence at least is that most of the world has had a say in these major documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and if it is just a matter of one group’s dogma versus another group’s dogma, there is no end to that.
What age are we in now? Do you think that we are in a more selfish era than previously? For example, there was the age of enlightenment during the Industrial Revolution, the age of reason, the age of discovery or exploration, the great awakening…
I would say we are in the age of denial. It’s certainly not the age of reason, is it? In some ways, it’s an age of greed. I think most people go along with it, the idea that greed can override, but I don’t think most people are greedy. Most people accept empire, but I don’t think most people are hegemonic. But most people will settle for denial. Trying to survive however they can and to not notice, because they don’t feel empowered to challenge what they see.
That’s really what this book is all about, trying to get past that.
Do you think that it is a matter of time that those who implement the politics of human rights protection will not be vilified or seen as missing the importance of industry and economics, and seen as too sensitive?
I never seem to remember who said what, but I think it was Solomon who said a prophet is not without honour saving his own country. We don’t mind being reminded that somebody else way far away is being abused or abusing other people, we just don’t want to know that it is right here, because we don’t know what to do about it and we don’t want to feel responsible for it.
How do we stop the vilification?
There are ways. We need more ways of protecting and recognizing the kind of work that needs to be done when we see it. Instead of backing off and disassociating from people who have the nerve to tell the truth, we should protect them, we should do them honors. We don’t. We have laws that are supposed to protect whistle-blowers, but they don’t, because most people understand that it’s dangerous to be a whistle-blower and it can be dangerous to be associated with whistle-blowers. We just have that upside down and backwards. We bestow more honours on military leaders who bomb villages than we do the people who might have tried to point out ahead of time that if you drop that bomb you are going to destroy the village.
If you can get people to listen and think about it, maybe you can help them understand, that caring about what your country is doing is patriotic and taking responsibility is perhaps even more patriotic. We’re not led to think that way. We’re led that blindly following people right off a cliff is the way to go. The kind of twist that we need to our way of thinking is so huge.
(*) Jan Knippers Black is a Professor in the Graduate School of International Policy Studies of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. THE POLITICS OF HUMAN RIGHTS PROTECTION: Moving Intervention Upstream with Impact Assessment by Jan Knippers Black / Rowman & Littlefield
Blackwater Prepared Bribes After 2007 Nisoor Massacre (DemocracyNow)
Former executives at the private military firm Blackwater have revealed the company authorized around $1 million to bribe Iraqi officials in the aftermath of the September 2007 killings of seventeen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square. The New York Times reports the payments were approved after the Iraqi government called for Blackwater’s expulsion from Iraq, threatening the company’s lucrative annual contract. It’s unclear if any Iraqi officials ultimately received the payments, which would violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act banning bribes to foreign governments. Despite the Iraqi government’s initial calls for ousting Blackwater, it only revoked the firm’s main operating license earlier this year. Speaking to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Democracy Now! correspondent and independent journalist Jeremy Scahill said the revelations could lead to criminal charges against Blackwater.
Jeremy Scahill: “Let’s remember here that we are talking about the single worst massacre committed by a private force in Iraq of that war, committed by Blackwater, the Nisoor Square massacre. It was the biggest diplomatic crisis between Washington and Baghdad at the time. You had the Iraqi government saying that Blackwater was banned from the country and then suddenly doing an about face, and Blackwater remains in Iraq to this day. So on the issue of criminality here, when you have the FBI going over to conduct a criminal investigation, if you had Blackwater officials attempting to bribe Iraqis, that’s tantamount to tampering with a federal investigation. There is a grand jury sitting right now in North Carolina that has reportedly been informed of these allegations by Blackwater officials, very serious.”
Blackwater continues to work in Iraq under an aviation contract with the US State Department. As XE Services LLC it tries to get a foothold in Somalia, Kenya and surrounding seas.
Italy Convicts CIA Agents of Kidnapping (AP)
2003 case is first to challenge practice of extraordinary rendition
An Italian judge today convicted 23 Americans of the 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric on a Milan street, in a landmark case involving the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program in the war on terrorism. Judge Oscar Magi acquitted three other Americans, citing diplomatic immunity. Former Milan CIA station chief Robert Seldon Lady received the stiffest sentence, eight years in prison. The other 22 each received a five-year sentence. All were tried in absentia.
All but one of the Americans were identified by prosecutors as CIA agents. Their lawyers entered innocent pleas on their behalf, and they are considered fugitives from Italian justice. They were convicted of kidnapping Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr and transferring him to US bases in Italy and Germany. He was then moved to Egypt, where he says he was tortured. Nasr was released after four years in prison without being charged.
U.S. (In-)Justice Dept. Subpoenaed Indymedia Site for Web Visitors
The U.S. American Justice Department is coming under criticism for demanding information on visitors to the independent progressive news website Indymedia. A US attorney in Indiana reportedly subpoenaed the records from Indymedia earlier this year and then ordered the site to keep silent about the request. The Electronic Frontier Foundation says the subpoena demanded the individual internet protocol addresses of every single Indymedia visitor. The group says the subpoena was ultimately dropped.
We do not send pictures with these reports, because of the volume, but picture this emetic scene with your inner eye:
A dying Somali child in the macerated arms of her mother besides their bombed shelter with Islamic graffiti looks at a fat trader, who discusses with a local militia chief and a UN representative at a harbour while USAID provided GM food from subsidised production is off-loaded by WFP into the hands of local “distributors” and dealers – and in the background a western warship and a foreign fishing trawler ply the waters of a once sovereign, prosper and proud nation, which was a role model for honesty and development in the Horn of Africa. (If you feel that this is overdrawn – come with us into Somalia and see the even more cruel reality yourself!) – and if you need lively stills or video material on Somalia, please do contact us.
There is no limit to what a person can do or how far one can go to help
- if one doesn’t mind who gets the credit !
ECOTERRA Intl. maintains a register for persons missing or abducted in the Somali seas (Foreign seafarers as well as Somalis). Inquiries by family member can be sent by e-mail to office[at]ecoterra-international.org
For families of presently captive seafarers – in order to advise and console their worries – ECOTERRA Intl. can establish contacts with professional seafarers, who had been abducted in Somalia, and their wives as well as of a Captain of a sea-jacked and released ship, who agreed to be addressed “with questions, and we will answer truthfully”.
ECOTERRA – ALERTS and pending issues:
PIRATE ATTACK GULF OF ADEN: Advice on Who to Contact and What to Do http://www.noonsite.com/Members/sue/R2008-09-08-2
NATURAL RESOURCES & ARMED FISH POACHERS: Foreign navies entering the 200nm EEZ of Somalia and foreign helicopters and troops must respect the fact that especially all wildlife is protected by Somali national as well as by international laws and that the protection of the marine resources of Somalia from illegally fishing foreign vessels should be an integral part of the anti-piracy operations. Likewise the navies must adhere to international standards and not pollute the coastal waters with oil, ballast water or waste from their own ships but help Somalia to fight against any dumping of any waste (incl. diluted, toxic or nuclear waste). So far and though the AU as well as the UN has called since long on other nations to respect the 200 nm EEZ, only now the two countries (Spain and France) to which the most notorious vessels and fleets are linked have come up with a declaration that they will respect the 200 nm EEZ of Somalia but so far not any of the navies operating in the area pledged to stand against illegal fishing. So far not a single illegal fishing vessel has been detained by the naval forces, though they had been even informed about several actual cases, where an intervention would have been possible. Illegally operating Tuna fishing vessels (many from South Korea, some from Greece and China) carry now armed personnel and force their way into the Somali fishing grounds – uncontrolled or even protected by the naval forces mandated to guard the Somali waters against any criminal activity, which included arms carried by foreign fishing vessels in Somali waters.
LLWs / NLWs: According to recently leaked information the anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden are also used as a cover-up for the live testing of recently developed arsenals of so called non-lethal as well as sub-lethal weapons systems. (Pls request details) Neither the Navies nor the UN has come up with any code of conduct in this respect, while the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program (JNLWP) is sponsoring several service-led acquisition programs, including the VLAD, Joint Integration Program, and Improved Flash Bang Grenade. Alredy in use in Somalia are so called Non-lethal optical distractors, which are visible laser devices that have reversible optical effects. These types of non-blinding laser devices use highly directional optical energy. Somalia is also a testing ground for the further developments of the Active Denial System (ADS) Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD). If new developments using millimeter wave sources that will help minimize the size, weight, and system cost of an effective Active Denial System which provides “ADS-ACTD-like” repel effects, are used has not yet been revealed. Obviously not only the US is developing and using these kind of weapons as the case of MV MARATHON showed, where a Spanish naval vessel was using optical lasers – the stand-off was then broken by the killing of one of the hostage seafarers. Local observers also claim that HEMI devices, producing Human Electro-Muscular Incapacitation (HEMI) Bioeffects, have been used in the Gulf of Aden against Somalis. Exposure to HEMI devices, which can be understood as a stun-gun shot at an individual over a larger distance, causes muscle contractions that temporarily disable an individual. Research efforts are under way to develop a longer-duration of this effect than is currently available. The live tests are apparently done without that science understands yet the effects of HEMI electrical waveforms on a human body.
WARBOTS, UAVs etc.: Peter Singer says: “By cutting the already tenuous link between the public and its nation’s foreign policy, pain-free war would pervert the whole idea of the democratic process and citizenship as they relate to war. When a citizenry has no sense of sacrifice or even the prospect of sacrifice, the decision to go to war becomes just like any other policy decision, weighed by the same calculus used to determine whether to raise bridge tolls. Instead of widespread engagement and debate over the most important decision a government can make, you get popular indifference. When technology turns war into something merely to be watched, and not weighed with great seriousness, the checks and balances that undergird democracy go by the wayside. This could well mean the end of any idea of democratic peace that supposedly sets our foreign-policy decision making apart. Such wars without costs could even undermine the morality of “good” wars. When a nation decides to go to war, it is not just deciding to break stuff in some foreign land. As one philosopher put it, the very decision is “a reflection of the moral character of the community who decides.” Without public debate and support and without risking troops, the decision to go to war becomes the act of a nation that doesn’t give a damn.”
ECOTERRA Intl., whose work does focus on nature- and human-rights-protection and – as the last international environmental organization still working in Somalia – had alerted ship-owners since 1992, many of whom were fishing illegally in the since 1972 established 200 nm territorial waters of Somalia and today’s 200nm Exclusive Economic Zone (UNCLOS) of Somalia, to stay away from Somali waters. The non-governmental organization had requested the international community many times for help to protect the coastal waters of the war-torn state from all exploiters, but now lawlessness has seriously increased and gone out of hand – even with the navies.
ECOTERRA members with marine and maritime expertise, joined by it’s ECOP-marine group, are closely and continuously monitoring and advising on the Somali situation. (for previous information concerning the topics please google keywords ECOTERRA (and) SOMALIA)
The network of the SEAFARERS ASSISTANCE PROGRAMME helped significantly in most sea-jack cases. ECOTERRA Intl. is working in Somalia since 1986 on human-rights and nature protection, while ECOP-marine concentrates on illegal fishing and the protection of the marine ecosystems. Your support counts too.
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Ecoterra Press Release 300 – The Somalia Chronicle June – December 2009, no 113b
Enlarge ImageWhat Fate of Uganda’s Troops in Somalia Reveals About Our Politics
By Charles Onyango Obbo (Monitor)
A week ago a terrorist bomb exacted a heavy toll on the struggling Somalia government, when an explosion blasted a Mogadishu graduation ceremony, killing 19 civilians, including three ministers.
A few weeks earlier, there had been another deadly attack, this time on the African Union peacekeepers, where several members of the Ugandan contingent of the AMISOM force in Somalia were killed.
That attack forced AMISOM to reveal, for the first time, that it had lost 80 of its soldiers in explosions and clashes with Somali militants since the force deployed there in March 2007.
The 5,000 AU troops are mostly from Uganda and Burundi. Of the 80 soldiers killed, 37 of them are Ugandan.
The anniversary of the Somalia mission usually passes without comment, and Ugandan casualties there get one or two days in the media, and are then quickly forgotten.
One reason for this is that the public has grown cynical of UPDF missions abroad, and the interests the army serves at home. The defining experience was the nearly 10 years that the UPDF spent in the Democratic Republic of Congo, during which time it came to be viewed as nothing less than a bandit force used by rogue officers and NRM big wigs and their cronies in Kampala to plunder minerals, timber, coffee, and even wild game.
In Somalia, many reasoned that the UPDF role in the mission was part of a scheme by President Museveni to buy favour from the West, and shield him the pressure over his push to amend the Constitution in 2005, which opened the door for him to be president for life.
Even if that were true, on close scrutiny, the UPDF peacekeeping in Somalia is different from the disastrous one to the DRC in major ways. Unlike the DRC, the group of militants who eventually take power in Somalia can have far-reaching implications for East African security. Right now, the radical Islamist group Al-Shabaab that controls most of Somalia has governments in the region and the West running scared. They believe that an Al-Shabaab take over will be the equivalent of having Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda ruling Somalia.
My own view is that Somalis are among Africa’s most pragmatic people (which is why they succeed where they have been scattered by the crisis back home) and that the risk of an Al-Shabaab takeover is overstated, but it is understandable why others might be alarmed.
So unlike DRC, the UPDF in Somalia have nothing to loot. In fact, don’t expect them to return with local women in tow and chicken dangling from their backs, as happened with the troops in Congo.
That said, even if Museveni has his own private agenda, for once the UPDF mission in Somalia – its most dangerous and thankless such task — is part of something big.
If you look closely at the kind of officers in Somalia, you begin to see something else. Quite a few of them belong to the old National Resistance Army idealistic tradition, which believed that they would take over power and bring about a fair, law-abiding, corruption free political order in Uganda.
This school lost out years ago, and the power-hungry and blood-sucking wolves have taken over and are calling the shots. Indeed, they are growing stronger.
The UPDF in Somalia, therefore, is what the national army would have looked like if it hadn’t been turned into a fiefdom of a largely tribal officer corps, serving dishonourable interests of the NRM political elite – like stealing elections, tormenting the opposition, and serving as a palace guard. The contrast of the UPDF in Mogadishu with that at home, where it is has been deployed to guard land which influential people have bought out of the speculative calculation that they will make a killing from the oil in it, could not be more stark.
Compare again, the kind of officers who were deployed to hunt down the Lords Resistance Army and its leader Joseph Kony at their Sudan-DRC border bases earlier in the year. With the help of the US, the hopes were high that Kony would be killed, or at least captured. Therefore politically favoured, but inexperienced, officers who are part of the Museveni grand succession project were given the command, in the hope that their success against Kony would catapult them to national stardom. It didn’t happen.
By contrast, there will be national stardom for the Ugandan officers in Somalia, however successful they are, in part because they are part of a multinational effort. Secondly, success in Somalia will not come dramatically from a battlefield victory. In that sense, the UPDF mission is driven by old school but honourable values of service, not personal glory.
If you are a student of Ugandan, or more specifically NRM politics, pay attention to the mission in Mogadishu. Pay attention because it represents ideals that are dying in the army back home, and this might be the last time you will see them. The only thing the boys in Somalia have with those back home, is that they both have not been paid their salaries for some months now.
Shifta war refugees cry for justice
By Ali Abdi
Fearing for his life as the shifta war raged in the 1960s, Halake Maamo fled from his home in Isiolo to Somalia.
The shiftas, or guerrillas of Somali origin, waged a secessionist war against the Government in the harsh and dry plains of northern Kenya.
However, after Somalia’s dictator Siad Barre was overthrown and life became intolerable, Maamo returned to his homeland and settled in Garbatulla, Isiolo District.
But life has never been the same again for Maamo and thousands of other returnees. Most of them do not have Kenyan identity cards and lead poor lives, as they are yet to recover from the turmoil that disrupted their lives.
Although they are at peace unlike when they were in Somalia, their major concern is lack of national identity cards and government support to rebuild their lives.
While a few wealthy ones with political connections have obtained the crucial documents, many, especially those who stay in remote parts, are yet to be issued with IDs.
Maamo says he applied for the document on arrival in 1995 after a thorough vetting process. He is still waiting. Another vetting was done last year and he is now waiting for a response from the Government.
“The only thing new in my life is the peace otherwise I feel like a prisoner as my movement is restricted because I do not have a national identity card. I cannot travel to Isiolo town to see my relatives for fear of arrest by police who refer to me as that refugee from Somalia,’’ said Maamo in a recent interview.
Secession
Maamo, 78, left Merti in Isiolo North, one of the five epicentres of the war triggered by secessionists who wanted to cede Northern Frontier District (NFD) to Somalia, when his family was killed in 1967.
The previous year Maamo and his eldest son Dida, then only aged seven, had watched his father and relatives frog-matched from their huts and shot dead at a ‘concentration’ camp in Merti.
Today, he recalls that scores of other villagers labelled sympathisers of the rebel movement were killed.The secession campaign was spearheaded by the Northern Peoples’ Progressive Party (NPPP).
“The elders were brought from Sericho, Modogashe, Iresaboru, and here (Merti) and taken to Garbatulla. They were loaded onto two trucks to Isiolo. About five kilometres away, they were told to alight and run. But they shot them from the back,” says Maamo, a father of five.
Others who share Maamo’s story include Isiolo County Council chairman Adan Ali (Kinna ward) and his counterparts Mr Godana Tache (Garbatulla), Ali Adhi (Modogashe) and Mr Hassan Balla (Garfasa). They all lost their fathers in the incident.
Died Poor
‘‘My father Ali Wako was brought from Modogashe and was among those massacred in Garbatulla during the same incident. The elders viewed as anti-Kenyatta government were rounded up from villages across Isiolo South Constituency,” says Ali.
Ali is a grandson of the late Wako Happi, one of NPPP’s presidents who spearheaded the secessionist campaign in northern Kenya, then known as the Northern Frontier District.
Ali said his grandfather was detained in 1963 and released in 1969 after the movement was crushed.
“He fled to Somalia in 1972 and came back in October 1984. He died a poor man in Isiolo in 1996,” Ali said.
The co-ordinator of Friends of Nomads International, Mr Yusuf Dogo, says about 3,000 returnees are impoverished because they have no documents to show they are Kenyan.
They cannot get jobs or crucial government services, and many young people dare not step into the town for fear of arrest.
Most of those displaced by the Shifta war started the journey back home from Somalia refugee camps from 1984 following retired President Moi’s plea to leaders of Northern Frontier District (NFD) to come back home with their followers.
For more than 20 years now, they are still refugees in their own country.
Ali says unlike other pastoralists in the country, the returnees have experience in farming and should be helped by the Government to start and run irrigation projects.
Compensation
“The Government promised to help the returnees re-build their lives. They should be given IDs and helped start income generating projects,’’ said Ali.
The councillors want the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights and other rights bodies to help them sue the Government for compensation.
“If the internally displaced people of the post-election violence have been compensated why not us whose families were killed and property destroyed?’’ posed Tache, the Garbatulla councilor.
Isiolo District Registrar of Persons M Auma confirms that the returnees lack identity cards, with some waiting for more than a decade. He said his office in collaboration with local elders, the provincial administration and the National Security Intelligence Service have vetted hundreds of applications since 2004.
“When we took up the matter with the head office in Nairobi, we were informed that the case of the returnees would be dealt with by the Ministry of Immigration. We are still waiting,’’ says Auma.
Dogo says the returnees should be helped rebuild their lives through income generating projects. And Dogo suggests irrigation projects in areas such as Gafarsa, Muchuru, Malkadaka and Rapsu for those from Isiolo.
He also advises the Government to unconditionally issue them with identity cards, saying it is their constitutional right.
Dogo says the military employed the infamous scotch-earth tactics to round up and kill the livestock as one way to defeat the rebels.
Dogo attributes the widespread poverty in the region to the indiscriminate killing of livestock during the war.
Livestock rounded up indiscriminately from the residents were detained and slaughtered in a camp where Daawa Primary School and Orphanage stands today.
Africa’s Problems Success story of the West
By Regis Maburutse (BBD)
African Politics and economics is directly linked to its cultural diversity, from the north tip down to the south, Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, which for years cultural differences has traditionally been used as a measure of defining tribal superiority in the dispensation of national wealth and political leadership.
Political superiority in this continent is generally not defined by democratic principles rather by tribal lines. The value imposed by western Aid has vastly added to a further compounding and cementation of these old and outdated beliefs of who should be a leader of any African nation based on tribal grounds.
African problems are further compounded by the AIDS scourge as one could pick out any country in the world and talk about its problems and maybe as Africa has been so tragically ravaged by AIDS in the last 30 years or so it stands out on a world scale.
Africa is a large continent with many countries making up its bulk. They are many and varied from the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert to the Zulus of Kwazi Natal to the wandering nomads of the Sahara.
Geographically, the continent runs from this large expanse of desert of Botswana through to equatorial jungle in the Congo and down the rift valley of Ethiopia past the mountains of the moon the source of the mightiest river, the Nile, running through Sudan and Egypt perhaps Africa’s greatest tourist draw card apart from the safaris.
So although varied and vibrant a native of Mombasa is going to experience totally different problems to one of the Kalahari Desert. Piracy has been round for many years off the coast of Somalia and many of the eastern African countries are Muslim.
Now one of the real problems in Sudan is religion for it is fueling a war between Muslims and the rest of the country. Even one of Africa’s greatest tragedies the genocide in Rwanda was ignited by old religious conversions. So yes missionary work has added in part of Africa’s problems just as it has elsewhere around the world by imposing a state of western beliefs over traditional ones and in Africa these would be many and varied, Witchdoctors still hold power today. Also bad medicine like childhood Muti practices are problem from within.
But the problems from without began to arrive with the onset of colonialism and the fay the likes of Van Rens Burg set up the Cape Colony and David Livingstone trekked through what was then Rhodesia and a steady flow of foreigners came to the continent to seek their fortune.
De Beers is known all over the world for diamonds taken out of African soil. Of course this sort of exploitation is going to cause problems especially if the assumption is the black man is inferior and can work for peanuts. The advent of slavery where people were taken from the west coast to America did not help this prejudice.
For years in the recorded history of Africa there had been tribal invasions running the entire length of the continent. In the history of Botswana it is recorded that the vultures flew constantly over the kalahari as the peaceful Bushmen were no match for the tribes from the north. So like any tribal nation as Australia was there were going to be tribal conflicts over land motivated by power and greed so these problems were her before colonization.
In Mozambique it is recorded that when the Belgians left they just up and went leaving reasonably sophisticated infra structure in the hands of the locals and the government crumbled.
South Africa is experiencing the same problems now since the hand over from President De Klek. The resignation recently of Thabo Mbeki and the controversy over the criminal background of the incumbent President Zuma show that in the wake of a colonial or foreign influence the locals are struggling.
It was reported in the early days of the handover from Mbeki to Kgalemani Motlanthe that the indigenous vineyard workers whom had now takeover the vineyards in such places as Stellenbosh in Cape province were actually wiring out workers pay cheques when there was no money in the bank.
The most publicized and tragic problem Africa has had to face is without doubt the AIDS virus and its democratic values. Speculation still exists as to how it came to be but if you believe the documentary showing how it came from the Belgian Congo then it is a direct result of western nations meddling.
It was reported that back in the 1950’s the medical researchers European were trying to find a polio vaccine that could be taken orally. Their research led them to Africa and of all places to the kidneys of a chimpanzee. They built a large compound in the Congo far up a river and housed many chimps and began experimenting.
They dissected the innards of the monkeys and used them in the manufacture of the new drugs. But one small oversight as in the kidneys lay dormant and unnoticed another virus AIDS. When they tried experimenting on the locals and it started to show deathly results the European researchers vanished. They know it to be valid as locals had been eating monkey and coming down with the same illness. So this huge problem was caused by outside interference.
Population growth without proper birth control education will be an internal problem for Africa for many years. It is very common to practice polygamy and if you are producing many children from many wives as the king of Swaziland then there will be more children to fed and treat medically.
All in all Africa’s problems were set in motion by foreign intervention and like any economic venture much of the continent was raped and not much put back for the African people. Look at the Shell Company’s involvement in Nigeria and the mess it has left with oil fires burning near villages.
As many counties are independent of foreign rule now the rest of the problems in Africa will fall on local shoulders and it is the hope of the whole world that for once in her history Africa can reach a stage of enlightenment in many countries and many areas but the war in Sudan must stop now to set the example for the rest of the country and problems of Zimbabwe must go too.
A Toilet in Somalia
By Charles G. Cogan
Intelligence professionals get it. But the general public does not. The image is out there of terrorists in djellabas negotiating fences in terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. This was in the good old days, before 9/11. Such, the pensée unique goes, is what would happen if the Taliban took over in Afghanistan again and brought al-Qaeda back.
Rolf Mowatt-Larssen was quoted in the New York Times on December 2 as saying, “There is no direct impact on stopping terrorists around the world because we are or are not in Afghanistan.” Rolf knows whereof he speaks: a graduate of West Point, a former CIA Chief in Moscow and lately chief of intelligence at the Department of Energy, he is now the reigning guru on nuclear terrorism. The article goes on to state that, “Mr. Mowatt-Larssen, now at Harvard, argued [...] that a safe haven can be moved to many different states, and the bigger threat exists in cells, including in Europe and the United States.” In other words, al-Qaeda and like-minded terrorists don’t need Afghanistan to carry out terrorist operations. These can be mounted from anywhere or anyplace, from Yemen to Somalia, to Hamburg or to … Detroit.
In carefully chosen but tortuous formulations, President Obama, almost subliminally, got across the notion that the Taliban are different from al-Qaeda, in his speech at West Point:
I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda…We must keep up the pressure on al Qaeda…Our overarching goal remains the same: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and to its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future.
We will support efforts by the Afghan government to open the door to those Taliban who abandon violence and respect the human rights of their fellow citizens.
In other words, al-Qaeda are the real bad guys, whereas there may be some good guys among the Taliban. Then, one may ask, since al-Qaeda’s terrorists, numbering in the hundreds, are now in a safe haven in Pakistan’s tribal areas, why are we sending thousands more combat troops into … Afghanistan!
In his speech at West Point, President Obama recognized the protean nature of the al Qaeda threat: “Where al Qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a foothold – whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere – they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships.”
Yet the President, in ordering 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan, in addition to the 21,000 he sent last spring, aligned himself not only with his pre-campaign rhetoric about a “necessary war,” but also with the sway that the military has established within American society. At least he did allow himself an out, which is quite unaligned with military doctrine: “After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.”
It was, indeed, a tortuous exercise for a tortured President.
(*) Dr. Charles Cogan Associate at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and was the chief of the Near East South Asia Division in the Directorate of Operations of the CIA from August 1979 to August 1984. It was from this Division that the covert action operation against the Soviets in Afghanistan were run. He is currently an Associate at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
Modern Slave Trade
Pinoy sailors send home record $2.5 billion in 9 months
The cash sent home by overseas Filipino sailors rose by $108 million or 4.51 percent to a new record of $2.501 billion in the nine months to September this year, from $2.393 billion over the same period in 2008, the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines reported Tuesday.
TUCP secretary-general and former Senator Ernesto Herrera attributed the nonstop rise in remittances from sea-based migrant Filipino workers to increased enlistment by shipowners in Europe and Asia.
“A growing number of European and Asian shipping firms are disbanding their multinational crews, and replacing them wholesale with all-Filipino personnel that are younger and more able,” said Herrera, former chairman of the Senate committee on labor, employment and human resources development.
“Foreign employers find Filipino sailors quick learners, and easier to train compared to other nationals. This may be due to their superior instruction here, apart from their ability to understand English,” Herrera said in a statement.
Herrera, meanwhile, renewed TUCP’s plea for the International Maritime Organization and shipowners to aggressively repel piracy and protect sailors. At least 71 Filipino sailors are still being held by pirates off Somalia.
According to the Department of Labor and Employment, some 229,000 Filipino sailors are on board merchant shipping vessels around the world at any given time.
>From January to September this year, remittances from Filipino sailors based in Norway soared by 110 percent to $229.551 million from $109.079 million over the same nine-month period in 2008.
Remittances from Filipino sailors based in Japan were also up 57 percent to $222.505 million from $141.886 million.
The other fast-growing sources of remittances from Filipino sailors were the United Kingdom, up 122 percent to $192.373; Germany, up 47 percent to $175.067 million; Singapore, up 60 percent to $107.945 million; Greece, up 67 percent to $93.446 million; Cyprus, up 23 percent to $46.390 million;
The Netherlands, up 114 percent to $41.281 million; Denmark, up 182 percent to $28.864 million; Oman, up 24 percent to $24.948 million; Hong Kong, up 33 percent to $24.870 million; and Sweden, up 126 percent to $24.223 million.
The double to triple-digit increases more than offset the 24 percent drop in remittances from Filipino sailors based in the U.S., to $1.216 billion from $1.595 billion.
The cash sent home by sailors accounted for 20 percent of the aggregate remittances from all migrant Filipino workers in the nine-month period.
Migrant Filipino workers wired home a total of $12.789 billion in the nine months to September this year, up $516.62 million or 4.21 percent from the $12.273 billion they remitted in the same period in 2008, according to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.
[N.B.: All the foreign hard currency sent as remittance home by worker from the Philippines is channelled through the system of the Philippine government first before given to the families in local currency. Therefore the labour abroad - if maid or mercenary - from the governmental perspective needs to be pushed as hard possible, which safeguards unscrupulous manning agencies from being prosecuted for their abusive practices and abused workers hardly find any assistance or help at their foreign missions. In Syria it is specifically bad, where Filipinas after running away from their employers, because they can not stand the working conditions "under their masters" any longer then are sued and even arrested until they pay a "disengagement fee" - often several thousand dollars. The benefit of foreign currency generation for the Philippine government is also the reason why the governmental orders to not let Filipinos sail into piracy-prone areas are neglected and were never enforced.]
WE SAY: Corruption is all about perception (IslandsBusiness)
‘So do people in the islands need to take note of these rankings? Is there anything they must do about it? We think not. From the foregoing discussion, it is clear that it is all about perceptions and it is hard to change those. The Cook Islands tried to grab the world’s attention by declaring itself a recession free zone earlier this year. While it was a brilliant marketing ploy, it didn’t change people’s perception. Indices like these, like many other “perception indices” are of little value and contribute nothing to the profiles of nations and only serve as a distraction’
Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index for 2009 was published last month. The index measures the perceived level of corruption in a nation’s public sector, which obviously includes government, its various departments and public enterprises. This year, New Zealand has bagged the numero uno spot. It has always been hovering at the top but this time it beat the reputedly squeaky clean Scandinavian countries like Denmark, Sweden and Finland (2nd, 3rd and 6th places respectively) and the exceptionally entrepreneurial Singapore.
New Zealand must feel lucky to have bagged the top spot this year. In fact, some people were even surprised that it did.
For, in the past couple of years, the country’s governments have been embarrassed by more than a smattering of corruption cases, not to mention the questionable financial dealings of several ministers while in office.
The most high profile one was of former Labour Party—and later independent—Member of Parliament Taito Phillip Field, who became the first New Zealand MP to be convicted on charges of corruption and awarded a six year jail sentence. Field, a long time citizen of New Zealand but of Samoan origin, was found guilty of 11 charges of bribery and corruption and 15 charges of attempting to obstruct or pervert the course of justice.
Also last year, an enquiry into the academic qualifications claim of the head of Immigration New Zealand and Deputy Secretary of Labour, Mary Anne Thompson, revealed that she did not hold a degree from the prestigious London School of Economics. She had used that claim, it was believed, to apply for a number of government positions. It was also brought to light that under her watch the performance of the Pacific Division had deteriorated and it was alleged that she helped relatives or friends from Kiribati gain residency in New Zealand.
Some commentators at the time sought to give these two high profile cases an “us and them” type of spin saying such incidents were inevitable as New Zealand’s population becomes culturally diverse and that as some immigrants rise to positions of power, whether administrative or political, they are bound to bring the social and cultural mores of their original countries along with them. Both the individuals in question having had Pacific roots, the invisible finger was pointed at Pacific islands culture.
But like love, sex, crime and politics, corruption too is a starkly human trait and cannot be blamed exclusively on culture or race by any stretch of logic. Just as these New Zealand commentators found out in the months after the Field and Thompson sagas.
Several ministers have been found to have used ingenious subterfuge to claim allowances and pecuniary gain for travel (in some cases palming off the costs of travel of partners to taxpayers), housing and other benefits, especially in an environment that was charged with public anger on the continuing fall out of not just the global financial meltdown but also of New Zealand’s own subprime crisis—the domino-like fall of dozens of finance companies gobbling up the life savings of thousands of mums and dads’ investors.
And most recently, an investigation has found that New Zealand lawyers have been fraudulently skimming off more than a hundred million dollars from tax payers annually through the legal aid system—yet another damning evidence of corruption going unchecked for years. All this in a country that the world perceives to be the most clean and green in the world.
Incidentally, the green image also has received a bit of a bruising recently with the country’s agriculture and farm sector contributing excessively to greenhouse gases when compared to its geographic size and that of its population and the more recent revelation that one in six New Zealanders may be drinking unsafe water.
In the case of the lawyers, it was not about an individual or two. It was a whole bunch of them that were rorting the system almost giving it the colour of the “institutionalised” corruption that is most commonly associated with governments in developing countries.
Clearly, therefore, as the Transparency International report calls itself, corruption is all about perception, notwithstanding the fact that there are dozens of statistical tools that are employed to compute the final rankings using the expertise of a number of professionals and researchers.
And people’s perceptions of nations are no different from their perception of brands. Some nations, like some brands, are always favoured in the public mind (no matter how many chain emails you receive about the amazing corrosive tooth dissolving and toilet cleaning powers of bottled fizzy drinks, no one really stops drinking them. In fact their sales grow every year).
The Pacific Islands score far worse than New Zealand and Australia (ranked eighth). While Fiji has not been ranked this year, Samoa leads the islands pack at 56, followed by Tonga at 99, the Solomon Islands and Kiribati sharing the number 111 spot and Papua New Guinea coming in last at 154 (the last in the list is Somalia at 180).
So do people in the islands need to take note of these rankings? Is there anything they must do about it? We think not. From the foregoing discussion, it is clear that it is all about perceptions and it is hard to change those. The Cook Islands tried to grab the world’s attention by declaring itself a recession free zone earlier this year. While that it was a brilliant marketing ploy, it didn’t change people’s perception. Indices like these, like many other “perception indices” are of little value and contribute nothing to the profiles of nations and only serve as a distraction and of course fodder for the news media.
On the other hand, indices that are based on hard research and verifiable data and not mere “perception”, which help the people of a nation to hold their governments accountable—such as those that measure human development and those that evaluate the ease of doing business in countries—are far more useful.
It will be interesting to see if, following the string of incidents of corruption that have come to light in New Zealand this past year, whether it still retains the top spot next year.
Haven’t They Always?
Nobel Committee Celebrates War As Peace
By Rick Rozoff
On Thursday December 10 U.S. President Barack Obama will receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced its selection for the prize on October 9 of this year, less than nine months after Obama assumed the mantle of the American presidency and less than a month after that announced the doubling of his nation’s troops for the world’s longest-running war in Afghanistan. The first contingent of new forces, consisting of 1,500 Marines, is to arrive next week, right before Christmas.
Ten days before the bestowal of the Nobel Peace Prize, the American president delivered a speech at the West Point Military Academy in which he pledged an additional 30,000 troops for a war now in its ninth year. His (and his predecessor George W. Bush’s) Defense Secretary Robert Gates hastened to add that 3,000 more support troops would be deployed, bringing the total to over 100,000, only 20,000 short of American soldiers in Iraq, and with as many as 50,000 more non-U.S. forces serving under the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force. In his West Point address Obama reminded his listeners that “When I took office, we had just over 32,000 Americans serving in Afghanistan….” He has ordered that number to be more than tripled.
A brief report on Obama’s peace prize appeared on the CBS News website on December 7 with the seemingly paradoxical title “A Peace Prize for a War President” by the news agency’s White House correspondent, Mark Knoller.
Neither the title nor the article it introduced was ironic. They reflected the straightforward truth.
The feature stated “There’ll be no effort by Barack Obama to disguise or obscure the fact that he’s a war president when he accepts the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Thursday.
“The ceremony takes place ten days after he announced plans to escalate the U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan by deploying another 30,000 American troops there.”
The selection of Obama evoked a prompt and aptly indignant response from Michel Chossudovsky at the Centre for Research on Globalization, who on October 11 published a piece called “Obama and the Nobel Prize: When War Becomes Peace, When the Lie becomes the Truth” [1] which stated inter alia that “When the Commander in Chief of the largest military force on planet earth is presented as a global peace-maker,” then “the Lie becomes the Truth.”
Although there are no firm, codified guidelines for nominating and agreeing upon a Peace Prize recipient, Alfred Nobel’s will states that it should be conferred upon a “person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
Those criteria have arguably never been honored or strictly abided by since the annual prize was first awarded in 1901. Several winners have been cited for helping to end wars – often by simply prevailing in them. One of the two American presidents previously awarded the prize, Woodrow Wilson, is such a one.
The other was Theodore Roosevelt, who as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1897 said “I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.”
Both Roosevelt in 1906 and Wilson in 1919 were standing presidents when they received the prize. The first had fought in Cuba during the Spanish-American War (the war he demanded a year before it began) and Wilson brought the United States into the First World War.
The Spanish-American War inaugurated the expansion of the U.S. from a hemispheric to an Asia Pacific power. And an empire. World War I placed the American army on the European continent for the first time and signaled its emergence as a international military power. Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901 when William McKinley, who launched the conflict with Spain and acquired Cuba, Guam, the Philippines and Puerto Rico as spoils of war, was assassinated; Wilson not only sent over one million soldiers to France but also deployed 13,000 troops to fight the new Russian government of Vladimir Lenin in 1918.
But neither Roosevelt nor Wilson were commanders-in-chief of a war when they were given the Nobel Prize. And they received it for, at least in theory, contributing to ending wars; the Russo-Japanese War and World War I, respectively. Granting the Nobel Peace Prize to a head of state escalating a war already in its ninth year half a world away from his own nation is a precedent that was reserved for this year.
Reuters quoted White House spokesman Robert Gibbs on December 7 stating “We’ll address directly the notion that many have wondered, which is the juxtaposition of the timing for the Nobel Peace Prize and – and his [Obama's] commitment to add more troops around – into Afghanistan.”
Juxtaposition, paradox, irony, contradiction and so forth are terms too weak and inaccurate to describe the timing of the announcement of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipient, coming as it did between two pledges of military reinforcements for the world’s largest-scale and longest-running war. Travesty is a better word.
Speculation was rife after October 9 regarding the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s rationale and motives for awarding Obama the prize, and press pundits were not amiss in offering explanations. But actions are more revealing than assumed or imaginary intentions and what the Nobel Committee has accomplished is to yet further tarnish its reputation and that of the prize it grants.
It is hard to think of any recipient, and surely any recent one, who personifies the qualities indicated by Alfred Nobel himself. Advocating and working for peace seem to have little if anything to do with being awarded the nominal Peace Prize. But twice in the last three years it has been conferred upon individuals far more deserving of indictment for violating the Principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal, especially that section of Principle VI, Crimes against peace, which is defined as “Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances.”
Two years ago the prize was shared by Al Gore, who as the vice president of the U.S.’s first post-Cold War administration helped preside over deadly street battles in Somalia and bombing – incessant bombing – attacks in Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sudan and Yugoslavia. And the launching of Plan Colombia in 1999, the latest fruit of which is the Pentagon’s acquisition of seven new military bases in the country and the resulting threat of armed conflict with its neighbors. Arranged by this year’s Peace Prize recipient. But, again, Gore received the prize years after leaving office and for work in an area unrelated to his former government posts.
Obama’s December 1 speech was larded with lines evocative of the worst rhetorical excesses of his predecessor combined with allusions to broadening the war reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s and Henry Kissinger’s expansion of what had previously been America’s longest war from Vietnam into Cambodia in 1970. “[S]hortly after taking office, I approved a long-standing request for more troops. After consultations with our allies, I then announced a strategy recognizing the fundamental connection between our war effort in Afghanistan, and the extremist safe-havens in Pakistan. I set a goal that was narrowly defined as disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al Qaeda and its extremist allies….”
The current administration has, in addition to plans to boost combined U.S. and NATO (“our allies”) military forces to 150,000 in Afghanistan, dramatically escalated drone missile attacks inside neighboring Pakistan and, as the above quote demonstrates, declared western and southern Pakistan part of the expanding war theater.
The president mentioned or alluded to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization several times in his address, in one instance with a degree of hyperbole that is as frightening as it is extravagant. “For what’s at stake is not simply a test of NATO’s credibility – what’s at stake is the security of our Allies, and the common security of the world.
“We are in Afghanistan to prevent a cancer from once again spreading through that country. But this same cancer has also taken root in the border region of Pakistan. That is why we need a strategy that works on both sides of the border.”
The entire world is threatened by a spreading cancer. This alarmist and crude phraseology was employed by a 21st century leader of the world’s superpower, a Harvard graduate, but could as well have been lifted from the lowest yellow journalism screed of the Cold War.
In attempting to deny the obvious – the inevitable – Obama continued by stating that “there are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. They argue that it cannot be stabilized, and we are better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. Yet this argument depends upon a false reading of history. Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations….”
Troops from America’s NATO and NATO partner vassals and tributaries in the war against barbarians – the terms are those of Zbigniew Brzezinski from his 1997 The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives – will not be limited to the war in Afghanistan, which in fact is a laboratory for a far broader global strategy, as “The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly, and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan….Where al Qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a foothold – whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere –
they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships.”
U.S. National Security Adviser James Jones said in October that “according to the maximum estimate, al Qaeda has fewer than 100 fighters operating in Afghanistan without any bases or ability to launch attacks on the West.” Government estimates for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan are in the neighborhood of 20,000.
This is the global cancer that requires 150,000 U.S. and NATO troops and an Afghan army of a quarter million or more troops. And a war that will continue well beyond the 2011 deadline mentioned in the West Point speech and be fought with intensified vigor and as far from Afghanistan as the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Southeast Asian archipelago.
With the deployment of “senior members of Mr. Obama’s war council,” as the New York Times characterized them, on the Sunday morning television news program circuit on December 7, the scope and the length of the already biggest and longest war in the world became undeniable.
The National Security Adviser, former Marine general and NATO top military commander James Jones, told CNN’s State of the Union: “We have strategic interests in South Asia that should not be measured in terms of finite times. We’re going to be in the region for a long time.”
He added that the influx of more American and NATO troops “will allow us to move our forces back towards the border regions, where really the most important struggle that we’re going to have is to make sure that on the Pakistani side of the border, that we eliminate the safe havens.”
Pentagon chief Robert Gates said on NBC’s Meet the Press that although there would still be over 100,000 American troops in Afghanistan in 2011, only “some handful, or some small number, or whatever the conditions permit, will begin to withdraw at that time.”
The Pentagon’s Central Command chief, General David Petraeus, appeared on Fox News Sunday and acknowledged that there were no plans for a “rush to the exits” and that there “could be tens of thousands of American troops in Afghanistan for several years.” [2]
Little noted with the expansion of the war is that its range is widening as its intensity is deepening.
The top U.S. Air Force commander in Europe and Eurasia, General Roger A. Brady, was in Georgia on December 7 and in the neighboring South Caucasus nation of Azerbaijan on the 8th to discuss both nations’ increased troop deployments to Afghanistan and solidifying strategic military relations.
The president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, has recently and once again threatened war against Nagorno Karabakh and by unavoidable implication Armenia, which is a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization with Russia. The latter is obligated to provide Armenia military assistance under terms of the treaty in the event of it becoming the victim of aggression. With the American commander listening attentively, defense minister of Azerbaijan Colonel-General Safar Abiyev said that ongoing negotiations over Nagorno Karabakh “were not fruitful and such a situation forced Azerbaijan to use other ways to liberate its lands from the occupation.” [3]
On December 4 the president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, who fought a five-day war with Russia in August of last year, spoke of his offering the U.S. and NATO 1,000 more troops for the Afghan war and ominously added: “This is a unique chance for our soldiers to receive a real combat baptism.
“We do not need the army only for showing it in military parades….While our allies – in this case the United States and Europe – are concentrating on other issues [Afghanistan and Iraq], our enemy is getting active. The sooner the Afghan situation is resolved and sooner the war is over in Iraq, [the sooner] Georgia will be more protected.” [4]
The enemy is Russia and the quid pro quo is U.S.-trained Georgian troops receiving a war zone “baptism” for a future conflict with their “numerous, dangerous and perfidious” adversary. The adjectives are also Saakashvili’s, as are these words: “We need an army that knows how to fight. And participation in the operation in Afghanistan is a unique chance to study this and receive experience….Our final aim is to free the occupied territories [Abkhazia and South Ossetia] and unite and integrate Georgia.” [5]
Other nations are obtaining combat experience in Afghanistan under NATO auspices for use in and on the borders of their homelands, including, like Azerbaijan and Georgia, nations bordering Russia – Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Mongolia, Norway, Poland and Ukraine – as well as future belligerents in conflicts elsewhere like Colombia, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates.
If the world’s sole superpower and its NATO entourage can employ the military necessity at will to advance their interests abroad, their “vassals” will be emboldened to do so nearer home and will receive the arms and training to execute their designs.
Far from promoting peace, even an enforced peace, a Pax Americana, the war in Afghanistan and U.S. foreign policy in general are igniting power kegs around the world.
If it can be argued that Obama inherited the war in South Asia from George W. Bush and is intent on “finishing the job,” his signing of the $106 billion Iraq and Afghanistan War Supplemental Appropriations in July and the $680 billion 2010 National Defense Authorization Act in late October belies any claim of objection to the enhanced use of the military in general and war in particular.
Next year’s Pentagon budget is the largest, in both current and real U.S. dollars, since 1945, the last year of World War II. Although it contains $130 billion for the war in Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq that previously would have been appropriated as separate supplemental funds, immediately after the signing of the Defense Department budget the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, stated “he expected the Pentagon to ask Congress in the next few months for emergency financing to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” [6] with the first request to be approximately $50 billion.
With the announcement on December 1 of another Afghan troop surge, the Pentagon’s requests for “emergency financing” can be expected to grow in both size and frequency. As with the claim of a troop withdrawal (or “drawdown”) by 2011, the alleged ending of war supplements is a public relations ploy and sleight of hand trick employed to beguile a gullible public.
Even in a world that over the last decade has been afflicted with such logical and moral affronts as humanitarian war and preemptive retaliation, awarding a peace prize to a war president represents a new nadir of cynical realpolitik and a flagrant endorsement of militarism, however well-disposed many may have been toward its most recent recipient.
Notes:
1) http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?aid=15622&context=va
2) New York Times, December 7, 2009
3) Azeri Press Agency, December 8, 2009
4) Civil Georgia, December 5, 2009
5) Rustavi2, December 4, 2009
6) Associated Press, November 1, 2009
International Counterterrorism Policy in the Obama Administration
By Daniel Benjamin (*)
If memory serves, when I spoke to you two years ago, my view was that the United States had developed great skills at what I called tactical counterterrorism–taking individual terrorists off the street, and disrupting cells and operations. On the strategic side, I thought we were losing ground. Now, I believe the administration is redressing that gap. In my roughly six months in office, my view of our tactical capabilities in the areas of intelligence, the military, and law enforcement have more than amply been confirmed. One of the great rewards of government service is the chance to work with colleagues in all of these areas, and I must say that their level of competence and professionalism is really extraordinary. When I consider how far we have come since my days at the NSC in the late 90s, I think it is quite remarkable.
And we are now working to match their proficiency by formulating the kind of policies that seek to shape the environment that terrorists operate in so that they find their efforts more constrained. We are rebuilding and reinvigorating old partnerships to combat terror and establishing new ones with others who have been on the sidelines. As we look at the problem of transnational terror, we are putting at the core of our actions a recognition of the phenomenon of radicalization—that is, we are asking ourselves time and again: Are our actions going to result in the removal of one terrorist and the creation of ten more? What can we do to attack the drivers of radicalization, so that al- Qaida and its affiliates have a shrinking pool of recruits? And finally– and vitally–are we hewing to our values in this struggle? Because as President Obama has said from the outset, there should be no tradeoff between our security and our values. Indeed, in light of what we know about radicalization, it is clear that navigating by our values is an essential part of a successful counterterrorism effort. Thus, we have moved to rectify the excesses of the past few years by working to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, forbidding enhanced interrogation techniques, and developing a more systematic method of dealing with detainees. We are also demonstrating our commitment to the rule of law by trying Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and other al-Qaida operatives in our court system.
Finally, we have a strategy for success in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The President has put forward a clear plan to constrain the Taliban and destroy the al-Qaida core, and the administration is putting up the resources necessary to achieve that goal. Moreover, we are working with Pakistan to establish the kind of relationship, based on trust and mutual interests, that will lead to the defeat of radicalism in that country, which has in recent months seen so much violence. We understand the trust deficit, built up over decades that created the current situation. We know that challenges in the region will not be overcome overnight. But we believe we are now firmly on the right track.
Before going any further, we need to consider the threat today: On any given day, al-Qaida remains the foremost security threat the nation faces. Yet having said that, it is clear that for al-Qaida, it has been a difficult period. The group is under severe pressure in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the U.S. and its allies have succeeded in severely degrading its operational leadership. The coming troop increase in Afghanistan will further reduce al-Qaida’s capabilities and those of other extremist organizations. The Pakistani military has been working to eliminate militant strongholds in its territory. As a result, al-Qaida is finding it tougher to raise money, train recruits, and plan attacks outside of the region.
In addition to these operational setbacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, al-Qaida has not been successful in carrying out the attacks that would shake governments in the Arab world, which continues to be a primary long-term focus. It has failed to mobilize the masses–and this is a key point–which they have repeatedly said is their means of establishing Islamic emirates in the region.
Finally, there has been a decline of support for al-Qaida’s political program and there are several reasons for this: indiscriminate targeting of Muslim civilians in Iraq and Pakistan alienated many who were previously sympathetic to al-Qaida’s larger aspirations. The result has been both popular disaffection and a backlash from clerics in Muslim countries who have issued fatwas against the killing of other Muslims, notably in Iraq, although I note that this has yet to happen on a large scale in Afghanistan.
Second, al-Qaida’s ideological hard line has alienated more pragmatic organizations and individuals in the wider militant community. It has also created confusion over who carries the true banner of Islamic resistance to Western imperialism.
Third, denunciations of al-Qaida by extremist clerics have damaged the religious legitimacy of the group and raised questions about the proper use of violence in countries where there is no overt military action.
Fourth, al-Qaida and similar groups are becoming increasingly vague about who the primary enemy is, creating confusion in the militant community about the fundamentals of its strategic direction.
Yet despite these setbacks, al-Qaida has proven to be adaptable and resilient in two arenas. The first is in ungoverned or under-governed areas, often where there are tribal conflicts in which it can attach itself to the different parties. Thus in Yemen, al-Qaida operatives are marrying into the local tribes, and taking up their grievances against the government. In the sparsely populated Sahel, al-Qaida operatives, sometimes operating with individual local tribesmen and nomads, kidnap foreigners. In the FATA, operatives are marrying into local Pashtun tribes and are serving the larger interests of the Taliban insurgency by providing technical know-how and disseminating propaganda. And in Somalia, al-Qaida’s allies in al-Shabaab now control significant tracts of territory. These weakly-governed or entirely ungoverned areas are a major safe haven for al-Qaida and its allies and to dismiss their significance is to misunderstand their historical importance for training, recruitment, and operational planning. Quite frankly, the problem of un- and under-governed spaces is one of the toughest ones this and future administrations will face.
The second arena where Sunni radicals continue to succeed is in persuading religious extremists to adopt their cause, even in the United States. A bus driver, Najibullah Zazi, was trained in Pakistan and now faces charges in federal court for planning to set off a series of bombs in the United States. An indictment that was unsealed Monday in Chicago portrays an American citizen–David Headley–playing a pivotal role in last year’s attack in Mumbai, which killed more than 170 people and dramatically raised tensions in South Asia. So even if this radical movement is not mobilizing the masses, it is still galvanizing enough people to take to violence and poses a continuing, powerful threat. The importance of these two cases should not be glossed over–the conspiracies these men were engaged in had roots in the FATA, and eight years after 9/11, should give us all pause. The threat to the U.S. remains substantial and enduring despite the operational constraints on al-Qaida central.
It is also multifaceted as we have seen in the movement of young men, many of them motivated by a sense of ethnic duty, who have left their communities in Minnesota, been radicalized in Somalia, and fought and died for al-Shabaab.
As the example of David Headley indicates, al-Qaida is not the only group with global ambitions that we have to worry about. Lashkar e-Taiba has made it clear that it is willing to undertake bold, mass-casualty operations with a target set that would please al-Qaida planners. The group’s more recent thwarted conspiracy to attack the US embassy in Bangladesh should only deepen concern that it could evolve into a genuinely global terrorist threat. And let me say as an aside, very few things worry me as much as the strength and ambition of LeT, a truly malign presence in South Asia. We are working closely with allies in the region and elsewhere to reduce the threat from this very dangerous group.
As you know, I worked on terrorism in the White House when al-Qaida first surfaced in the late 1990s and I can tell you now, after having access to the intelligence again, that the threat has become far more complicated due to the proliferation of groups and the cross-pollination of networks. The global radical milieu has become thicker. There is so much more that we have to keep tabs on than there was in 1999.
So what are we doing to meet this challenge? Faced with this continuing and evolving threat, President Obama has articulated a clear policy – to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaida and its allies. That is our overriding objective, and to achieve it we are using all the tools at our disposal. In weakly-governed areas we are collaborating with the relevant local authorities to bolster their security forces to prevent al-Qaida safe havens. Moreover, our intelligence and law enforcement agencies and those of our allies continue to disrupt terrorist plots at home and abroad–as we have here in Denver and New York, in London, and in other countries around the world. We are working with the international financial community to deny resources to al-Qaida and its supporters. Now, as al-Qaida affiliates turn to kidnapping for ransom to raise funds, we are urging our partners around the world to adopt a no-concessions policy toward hostage-takers so we can diminish this alternative funding stream in regions like the Sahel, the FATA, and Yemen.
But this is not enough, as the continuing flow of recruits–and the lengthening roll call of conspiracies testifies. As President Obama succinctly put it, “A campaign against extremism will not succeed with bullets or bombs alone.” We need to look to look to what my colleague Deputy National Security John Brennan has called the upstream factors. We need to confront the political, social, and economic conditions that our enemies exploit to win over the new recruits…the funders…and those whose tacit support enables the militants to carry forward their plans.
The threat is global and our enemies latch on to grievances on behalf of the entire Muslim world, so we must work to resolve the long-standing problems that fuel those grievances. At the top of the list is the Arab-Israeli conflict, and, as you know, President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and Special Envoy George Mitchell are working very hard to resolve it.
Even with their efforts, peace in the Middle East will take time, and as we know, it will not eliminate all of the threats. But while the big policy challenges matter in radicalization, local drivers are critical as well. We are developing tailored-approaches to alter them. How do these different elements of our global counterterrorism strategy fit together?
To be sure, terrorism is a common challenge shared by nations across the globe—one that requires diplomacy—and one that the United States cannot solve alone. As Secretary Clinton has said, “Today’s security threats cannot be addressed in isolation. Smart power requires reaching out to both friends and adversaries, to bolster old alliances and to forge new ones.” The Obama administration has worked hard to reach out and, on the basis of mutual interests and mutual respect, to forge international coalitions. The administration has been working at reinvigorating alliances across the board and reengaging in the multilateral fora concerned with counterterrorism—fora that, in all honesty, were neglected for some time at the many UN entities, the G8, and the vast range of regional organizations that are eager to engage on counterterrorism issues.
Building the counterterrorism capacity of our partners at the national level is also a top priority. Consistent diplomatic engagement with counterparts and senior leaders helps build political will for common counterterrorism objectives. When the political will is there, we can address the nuts and bolts aspect of capacity building. We are working to make the counterterrorism training of police, prosecutors, border officials, and members of the judiciary more systematic, more innovative, and far-reaching, and we are doing this through such efforts as the Antiterrorism Assistance Program. In its more than 25-year old history, the ATA program has trained more than 66,000 professionals from 151 countries, providing programs tailored to the needs of each partner nation and to local conditions.
ATA is just one of many programs–on the civilian and the military sides of the house—that is increasing the ability of others to ensure their own security. With this kind of work, we are making real the President’s vision of shared security partnerships as an essential part of US foreign policy. This is both good counterterrorism and good statecraft. We are addressing the state insufficiencies that terrorism lives on, and we are helping invest our partners more effectively in confronting the threat–-rather than looking thousands of miles away for help or simply looking away altogether.
We are also addressing the local drivers of radicalization that still lead large numbers of people to adopt al-Qaida’s ideology, and as I said earlier, we understand the dangers of radicalization, and we are working both to undermine the al-Qaida narrative and to ameliorate the conditions that make it attractive. We know that violent extremism flourishes where there is marginalization, alienation, and perceived–-or real–-relative deprivation. In recognition of this, my first step has been to build a unit focusing on what we in the government call “Countering Violent Extremism” in my office to focus on local communities most prone to radicalization. There is a broad understanding across the government that we have not done nearly enough to address underlying conditions for at-risk populations–-and we have also not done enough to improve the ability of moderates to voice their views and strengthen opposition to violence.
Adopting a tailored-approach to countering violent extremism does not mean we can neglect broader structural problems. There is no denying that when children have no hope for an education, when young people have no hope for a job and feel disconnected from the modern world, when governments fail to provide for the basic needs of their people, when people despair and are aggrieved, they become more susceptible to extremist ideologies. But a tailored-approach to CVE requires identifying which of these problems are driving radicalization and are amenable to change with the help of local governments and leaders who understand the problems best.
Over time, the measures and the methods I have described above will reduce terrorists’ capacity to harm us and our partners. No element can be neglected if we are to succeed since they reinforce one another. Global engagement builds coalitions based on mutual interests and mutual respect. And these coalitions, in turn, help us partner with individual nations to enhance their capacity to counter extremism. This, finally, enables us to work with them to develop tailored-approaches to preventing extremists from becoming violent extremists.
I don’t want to leave you today with the impression that we have figured it all or that there won’t be real setbacks in the future. The contemporary terrorist threat was decades in the making and it will take many more years to unmake it. There is much we still need to learn, especially about how to prevent individuals from choosing the path of violence. But I believe we now have the right framework for our policies, and ultimately, I am confident, this will lead to the decisions and actions that will strengthen security for our nation and the global community.
(*) Daniel Benjamin, Coordinator, Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism – U.S. Government
We do not send pictures with these reports, because of the volume, but picture this emetic scene with your inner eye:
A dying Somali child in the macerated arms of her mother besides their bombed shelter with Islamic graffiti looks at a fat trader, who discusses with a local militia chief and a UN representative at a harbour while USAID provided GM food from subsidised production is off-loaded by WFP into the hands of local “distributors” and dealers – and in the background a western warship and a foreign fishing trawler ply the waters of a once sovereign, prosper and proud nation, which was a role model for honesty and development in the Horn of Africa. (If you feel that this is overdrawn – come with us into Somalia and see the even more cruel reality yourself!) – and if you need lively stills or video material on Somalia, please do contact us.
There is no limit to what a person can do or how far one can go to help
- if one doesn’t mind who gets the credit !
ECOTERRA Intl. maintains a register for persons missing or abducted in the Somali seas (Foreign seafarers as well as Somalis). Inquiries by family member can be sent by e-mail to office[at]ecoterra-international.org
For families of presently captive seafarers – in order to advise and console their worries – ECOTERRA Intl. can establish contacts with professional seafarers, who had been abducted in Somalia, and their wives as well as of a Captain of a sea-jacked and released ship, who agreed to be addressed “with questions, and we will answer truthfully”.
ECOTERRA – ALERTS and pending issues:
PIRATE ATTACK GULF OF ADEN: Advice on Who to Contact and What to Do http://www.noonsite.com/Members/sue/R2008-09-08-2
NATURAL RESOURCES & ARMED FISH POACHERS: Foreign navies entering the 200nm EEZ of Somalia and foreign helicopters and troops must respect the fact that especially all wildlife is protected by Somali national as well as by international laws and that the protection of the marine resources of Somalia from illegally fishing foreign vessels should be an integral part of the anti-piracy operations. Likewise the navies must adhere to international standards and not pollute the coastal waters with oil, ballast water or waste from their own ships but help Somalia to fight against any dumping of any waste (incl. diluted, toxic or nuclear waste). So far and though the AU as well as the UN has called since long on other nations to respect the 200 nm EEZ, only now the two countries (Spain and France) to which the most notorious vessels and fleets are linked have come up with a declaration that they will respect the 200 nm EEZ of Somalia but so far not any of the navies operating in the area pledged to stand against illegal fishing. So far not a single illegal fishing vessel has been detained by the naval forces, though they had been even informed about several actual cases, where an intervention would have been possible. Illegally operating Tuna fishing vessels (many from South Korea, some from Greece and China) carry now armed personnel and force their way into the Somali fishing grounds – uncontrolled or even protected by the naval forces mandated to guard the Somali waters against any criminal activity, which included arms carried by foreign fishing vessels in Somali waters.
LLWs / NLWs: According to recently leaked information the anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden are also used as a cover-up for the live testing of recently developed arsenals of so called non-lethal as well as sub-lethal weapons systems. (Pls request details) Neither the Navies nor the UN has come up with any code of conduct in this respect, while the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program (JNLWP) is sponsoring several service-led acquisition programs, including the VLAD, Joint Integration Program, and Improved Flash Bang Grenade. Alredy in use in Somalia are so called Non-lethal optical distractors, which are visible laser devices that have reversible optical effects. These types of non-blinding laser devices use highly directional optical energy. Somalia is also a testing ground for the further developments of the Active Denial System (ADS) Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD). If new developments using millimeter wave sources that will help minimize the size, weight, and system cost of an effective Active Denial System which provides “ADS-ACTD-like” repel effects, are used has not yet been revealed. Obviously not only the US is developing and using these kind of weapons as the case of MV MARATHON showed, where a Spanish naval vessel was using optical lasers – the stand-off was then broken by the killing of one of the hostage seafarers. Local observers also claim that HEMI devices, producing Human Electro-Muscular Incapacitation (HEMI) Bioeffects, have been used in the Gulf of Aden against Somalis. Exposure to HEMI devices, which can be understood as a stun-gun shot at an individual over a larger distance, causes muscle contractions that temporarily disable an individual. Research efforts are under way to develop a longer-duration of this effect than is currently available. The live tests are apparently done without that science understands yet the effects of HEMI electrical waveforms on a human body.
WARBOTS, UAVs etc.: Peter Singer says: “By cutting the already tenuous link between the public and its nation’s foreign policy, pain-free war would pervert the whole idea of the democratic process and citizenship as they relate to war. When a citizenry has no sense of sacrifice or even the prospect of sacrifice, the decision to go to war becomes just like any other policy decision, weighed by the same calculus used to determine whether to raise bridge tolls. Instead of widespread engagement and debate over the most important decision a government can make, you get popular indifference. When technology turns war into something merely to be watched, and not weighed with great seriousness, the checks and balances that undergird democracy go by the wayside. This could well mean the end of any idea of democratic peace that supposedly sets our foreign-policy decision making apart. Such wars without costs could even undermine the morality of “good” wars. When a nation decides to go to war, it is not just deciding to break stuff in some foreign land. As one philosopher put it, the very decision is “a reflection of the moral character of the community who decides.” Without public debate and support and without risking troops, the decision to go to war becomes the act of a nation that doesn’t give a damn.”
ECOTERRA Intl., whose work does focus on nature- and human-rights-protection and – as the last international environmental organization still working in Somalia – had alerted ship-owners since 1992, many of whom were fishing illegally in the since 1972 established 200 nm territorial waters of Somalia and today’s 200nm Exclusive Economic Zone (UNCLOS) of Somalia, to stay away from Somali waters. The non-governmental organization had requested the international community many times for help to protect the coastal waters of the war-torn state from all exploiters, but now lawlessness has seriously increased and gone out of hand – even with the navies.
ECOTERRA members with marine and maritime expertise, joined by it’s ECOP-marine group, are closely and continuously monitoring and advising on the Somali situation. (for previous information concerning the topics please google keywords ECOTERRA (and) SOMALIA)
The network of the SEAFARERS ASSISTANCE PROGRAMME and ECOTERRA Intl. helped significantly in most sea-jack cases. Basically the East African Seafarers Assistance Programme tackles all issues of seafarers welfare and ECOTERRA Intl. is working in Somalia since 1986 on human-rights and nature protection, while ECOP-marine concentrates on illegal fishing and the protection of the marine ecosystems. Your support counts too.
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Ecoterra Press Release 300 – The Somalia Chronicle June – December 2009, no 113b
Enlarge ImageWhat Fate of Uganda’s Troops in Somalia Reveals About Our Politics
By Charles Onyango Obbo (Monitor)
A week ago a terrorist bomb exacted a heavy toll on the struggling Somalia government, when an explosion blasted a Mogadishu graduation ceremony, killing 19 civilians, including three ministers.
A few weeks earlier, there had been another deadly attack, this time on the African Union peacekeepers, where several members of the Ugandan contingent of the AMISOM force in Somalia were killed.
That attack forced AMISOM to reveal, for the first time, that it had lost 80 of its soldiers in explosions and clashes with Somali militants since the force deployed there in March 2007.
The 5,000 AU troops are mostly from Uganda and Burundi. Of the 80 soldiers killed, 37 of them are Ugandan.
The anniversary of the Somalia mission usually passes without comment, and Ugandan casualties there get one or two days in the media, and are then quickly forgotten.
One reason for this is that the public has grown cynical of UPDF missions abroad, and the interests the army serves at home. The defining experience was the nearly 10 years that the UPDF spent in the Democratic Republic of Congo, during which time it came to be viewed as nothing less than a bandit force used by rogue officers and NRM big wigs and their cronies in Kampala to plunder minerals, timber, coffee, and even wild game.
In Somalia, many reasoned that the UPDF role in the mission was part of a scheme by President Museveni to buy favour from the West, and shield him the pressure over his push to amend the Constitution in 2005, which opened the door for him to be president for life.
Even if that were true, on close scrutiny, the UPDF peacekeeping in Somalia is different from the disastrous one to the DRC in major ways. Unlike the DRC, the group of militants who eventually take power in Somalia can have far-reaching implications for East African security. Right now, the radical Islamist group Al-Shabaab that controls most of Somalia has governments in the region and the West running scared. They believe that an Al-Shabaab take over will be the equivalent of having Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda ruling Somalia.
My own view is that Somalis are among Africa’s most pragmatic people (which is why they succeed where they have been scattered by the crisis back home) and that the risk of an Al-Shabaab takeover is overstated, but it is understandable why others might be alarmed.
So unlike DRC, the UPDF in Somalia have nothing to loot. In fact, don’t expect them to return with local women in tow and chicken dangling from their backs, as happened with the troops in Congo.
That said, even if Museveni has his own private agenda, for once the UPDF mission in Somalia – its most dangerous and thankless such task — is part of something big.
If you look closely at the kind of officers in Somalia, you begin to see something else. Quite a few of them belong to the old National Resistance Army idealistic tradition, which believed that they would take over power and bring about a fair, law-abiding, corruption free political order in Uganda.
This school lost out years ago, and the power-hungry and blood-sucking wolves have taken over and are calling the shots. Indeed, they are growing stronger.
The UPDF in Somalia, therefore, is what the national army would have looked like if it hadn’t been turned into a fiefdom of a largely tribal officer corps, serving dishonourable interests of the NRM political elite – like stealing elections, tormenting the opposition, and serving as a palace guard. The contrast of the UPDF in Mogadishu with that at home, where it is has been deployed to guard land which influential people have bought out of the speculative calculation that they will make a killing from the oil in it, could not be more stark.
Compare again, the kind of officers who were deployed to hunt down the Lords Resistance Army and its leader Joseph Kony at their Sudan-DRC border bases earlier in the year. With the help of the US, the hopes were high that Kony would be killed, or at least captured. Therefore politically favoured, but inexperienced, officers who are part of the Museveni grand succession project were given the command, in the hope that their success against Kony would catapult them to national stardom. It didn’t happen.
By contrast, there will be national stardom for the Ugandan officers in Somalia, however successful they are, in part because they are part of a multinational effort. Secondly, success in Somalia will not come dramatically from a battlefield victory. In that sense, the UPDF mission is driven by old school but honourable values of service, not personal glory.
If you are a student of Ugandan, or more specifically NRM politics, pay attention to the mission in Mogadishu. Pay attention because it represents ideals that are dying in the army back home, and this might be the last time you will see them. The only thing the boys in Somalia have with those back home, is that they both have not been paid their salaries for some months now.
Shifta war refugees cry for justice
By Ali Abdi
Fearing for his life as the shifta war raged in the 1960s, Halake Maamo fled from his home in Isiolo to Somalia.
The shiftas, or guerrillas of Somali origin, waged a secessionist war against the Government in the harsh and dry plains of northern Kenya.
However, after Somalia’s dictator Siad Barre was overthrown and life became intolerable, Maamo returned to his homeland and settled in Garbatulla, Isiolo District.
But life has never been the same again for Maamo and thousands of other returnees. Most of them do not have Kenyan identity cards and lead poor lives, as they are yet to recover from the turmoil that disrupted their lives.
Although they are at peace unlike when they were in Somalia, their major concern is lack of national identity cards and government support to rebuild their lives.
While a few wealthy ones with political connections have obtained the crucial documents, many, especially those who stay in remote parts, are yet to be issued with IDs.
Maamo says he applied for the document on arrival in 1995 after a thorough vetting process. He is still waiting. Another vetting was done last year and he is now waiting for a response from the Government.
“The only thing new in my life is the peace otherwise I feel like a prisoner as my movement is restricted because I do not have a national identity card. I cannot travel to Isiolo town to see my relatives for fear of arrest by police who refer to me as that refugee from Somalia,’’ said Maamo in a recent interview.
Secession
Maamo, 78, left Merti in Isiolo North, one of the five epicentres of the war triggered by secessionists who wanted to cede Northern Frontier District (NFD) to Somalia, when his family was killed in 1967.
The previous year Maamo and his eldest son Dida, then only aged seven, had watched his father and relatives frog-matched from their huts and shot dead at a ‘concentration’ camp in Merti.
Today, he recalls that scores of other villagers labelled sympathisers of the rebel movement were killed.The secession campaign was spearheaded by the Northern Peoples’ Progressive Party (NPPP).
“The elders were brought from Sericho, Modogashe, Iresaboru, and here (Merti) and taken to Garbatulla. They were loaded onto two trucks to Isiolo. About five kilometres away, they were told to alight and run. But they shot them from the back,” says Maamo, a father of five.
Others who share Maamo’s story include Isiolo County Council chairman Adan Ali (Kinna ward) and his counterparts Mr Godana Tache (Garbatulla), Ali Adhi (Modogashe) and Mr Hassan Balla (Garfasa). They all lost their fathers in the incident.
Died Poor
‘‘My father Ali Wako was brought from Modogashe and was among those massacred in Garbatulla during the same incident. The elders viewed as anti-Kenyatta government were rounded up from villages across Isiolo South Constituency,” says Ali.
Ali is a grandson of the late Wako Happi, one of NPPP’s presidents who spearheaded the secessionist campaign in northern Kenya, then known as the Northern Frontier District.
Ali said his grandfather was detained in 1963 and released in 1969 after the movement was crushed.
“He fled to Somalia in 1972 and came back in October 1984. He died a poor man in Isiolo in 1996,” Ali said.
The co-ordinator of Friends of Nomads International, Mr Yusuf Dogo, says about 3,000 returnees are impoverished because they have no documents to show they are Kenyan.
They cannot get jobs or crucial government services, and many young people dare not step into the town for fear of arrest.
Most of those displaced by the Shifta war started the journey back home from Somalia refugee camps from 1984 following retired President Moi’s plea to leaders of Northern Frontier District (NFD) to come back home with their followers.
For more than 20 years now, they are still refugees in their own country.
Ali says unlike other pastoralists in the country, the returnees have experience in farming and should be helped by the Government to start and run irrigation projects.
Compensation
“The Government promised to help the returnees re-build their lives. They should be given IDs and helped start income generating projects,’’ said Ali.
The councillors want the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights and other rights bodies to help them sue the Government for compensation.
“If the internally displaced people of the post-election violence have been compensated why not us whose families were killed and property destroyed?’’ posed Tache, the Garbatulla councilor.
Isiolo District Registrar of Persons M Auma confirms that the returnees lack identity cards, with some waiting for more than a decade. He said his office in collaboration with local elders, the provincial administration and the National Security Intelligence Service have vetted hundreds of applications since 2004.
“When we took up the matter with the head office in Nairobi, we were informed that the case of the returnees would be dealt with by the Ministry of Immigration. We are still waiting,’’ says Auma.
Dogo says the returnees should be helped rebuild their lives through income generating projects. And Dogo suggests irrigation projects in areas such as Gafarsa, Muchuru, Malkadaka and Rapsu for those from Isiolo.
He also advises the Government to unconditionally issue them with identity cards, saying it is their constitutional right.
Dogo says the military employed the infamous scotch-earth tactics to round up and kill the livestock as one way to defeat the rebels.
Dogo attributes the widespread poverty in the region to the indiscriminate killing of livestock during the war.
Livestock rounded up indiscriminately from the residents were detained and slaughtered in a camp where Daawa Primary School and Orphanage stands today.
Africa’s Problems Success story of the West
By Regis Maburutse (BBD)
African Politics and economics is directly linked to its cultural diversity, from the north tip down to the south, Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, which for years cultural differences has traditionally been used as a measure of defining tribal superiority in the dispensation of national wealth and political leadership.
Political superiority in this continent is generally not defined by democratic principles rather by tribal lines. The value imposed by western Aid has vastly added to a further compounding and cementation of these old and outdated beliefs of who should be a leader of any African nation based on tribal grounds.
African problems are further compounded by the AIDS scourge as one could pick out any country in the world and talk about its problems and maybe as Africa has been so tragically ravaged by AIDS in the last 30 years or so it stands out on a world scale.
Africa is a large continent with many countries making up its bulk. They are many and varied from the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert to the Zulus of Kwazi Natal to the wandering nomads of the Sahara.
Geographically, the continent runs from this large expanse of desert of Botswana through to equatorial jungle in the Congo and down the rift valley of Ethiopia past the mountains of the moon the source of the mightiest river, the Nile, running through Sudan and Egypt perhaps Africa’s greatest tourist draw card apart from the safaris.
So although varied and vibrant a native of Mombasa is going to experience totally different problems to one of the Kalahari Desert. Piracy has been round for many years off the coast of Somalia and many of the eastern African countries are Muslim.
Now one of the real problems in Sudan is religion for it is fueling a war between Muslims and the rest of the country. Even one of Africa’s greatest tragedies the genocide in Rwanda was ignited by old religious conversions. So yes missionary work has added in part of Africa’s problems just as it has elsewhere around the world by imposing a state of western beliefs over traditional ones and in Africa these would be many and varied, Witchdoctors still hold power today. Also bad medicine like childhood Muti practices are problem from within.
But the problems from without began to arrive with the onset of colonialism and the fay the likes of Van Rens Burg set up the Cape Colony and David Livingstone trekked through what was then Rhodesia and a steady flow of foreigners came to the continent to seek their fortune.
De Beers is known all over the world for diamonds taken out of African soil. Of course this sort of exploitation is going to cause problems especially if the assumption is the black man is inferior and can work for peanuts. The advent of slavery where people were taken from the west coast to America did not help this prejudice.
For years in the recorded history of Africa there had been tribal invasions running the entire length of the continent. In the history of Botswana it is recorded that the vultures flew constantly over the kalahari as the peaceful Bushmen were no match for the tribes from the north. So like any tribal nation as Australia was there were going to be tribal conflicts over land motivated by power and greed so these problems were her before colonization.
In Mozambique it is recorded that when the Belgians left they just up and went leaving reasonably sophisticated infra structure in the hands of the locals and the government crumbled.
South Africa is experiencing the same problems now since the hand over from President De Klek. The resignation recently of Thabo Mbeki and the controversy over the criminal background of the incumbent President Zuma show that in the wake of a colonial or foreign influence the locals are struggling.
It was reported in the early days of the handover from Mbeki to Kgalemani Motlanthe that the indigenous vineyard workers whom had now takeover the vineyards in such places as Stellenbosh in Cape province were actually wiring out workers pay cheques when there was no money in the bank.
The most publicized and tragic problem Africa has had to face is without doubt the AIDS virus and its democratic values. Speculation still exists as to how it came to be but if you believe the documentary showing how it came from the Belgian Congo then it is a direct result of western nations meddling.
It was reported that back in the 1950’s the medical researchers European were trying to find a polio vaccine that could be taken orally. Their research led them to Africa and of all places to the kidneys of a chimpanzee. They built a large compound in the Congo far up a river and housed many chimps and began experimenting.
They dissected the innards of the monkeys and used them in the manufacture of the new drugs. But one small oversight as in the kidneys lay dormant and unnoticed another virus AIDS. When they tried experimenting on the locals and it started to show deathly results the European researchers vanished. They know it to be valid as locals had been eating monkey and coming down with the same illness. So this huge problem was caused by outside interference.
Population growth without proper birth control education will be an internal problem for Africa for many years. It is very common to practice polygamy and if you are producing many children from many wives as the king of Swaziland then there will be more children to fed and treat medically.
All in all Africa’s problems were set in motion by foreign intervention and like any economic venture much of the continent was raped and not much put back for the African people. Look at the Shell Company’s involvement in Nigeria and the mess it has left with oil fires burning near villages.
As many counties are independent of foreign rule now the rest of the problems in Africa will fall on local shoulders and it is the hope of the whole world that for once in her history Africa can reach a stage of enlightenment in many countries and many areas but the war in Sudan must stop now to set the example for the rest of the country and problems of Zimbabwe must go too.
A Toilet in Somalia
By Charles G. Cogan
Intelligence professionals get it. But the general public does not. The image is out there of terrorists in djellabas negotiating fences in terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. This was in the good old days, before 9/11. Such, the pensée unique goes, is what would happen if the Taliban took over in Afghanistan again and brought al-Qaeda back.
Rolf Mowatt-Larssen was quoted in the New York Times on December 2 as saying, “There is no direct impact on stopping terrorists around the world because we are or are not in Afghanistan.” Rolf knows whereof he speaks: a graduate of West Point, a former CIA Chief in Moscow and lately chief of intelligence at the Department of Energy, he is now the reigning guru on nuclear terrorism. The article goes on to state that, “Mr. Mowatt-Larssen, now at Harvard, argued [...] that a safe haven can be moved to many different states, and the bigger threat exists in cells, including in Europe and the United States.” In other words, al-Qaeda and like-minded terrorists don’t need Afghanistan to carry out terrorist operations. These can be mounted from anywhere or anyplace, from Yemen to Somalia, to Hamburg or to … Detroit.
In carefully chosen but tortuous formulations, President Obama, almost subliminally, got across the notion that the Taliban are different from al-Qaeda, in his speech at West Point:
I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda…We must keep up the pressure on al Qaeda…Our overarching goal remains the same: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and to its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future.
We will support efforts by the Afghan government to open the door to those Taliban who abandon violence and respect the human rights of their fellow citizens.
In other words, al-Qaeda are the real bad guys, whereas there may be some good guys among the Taliban. Then, one may ask, since al-Qaeda’s terrorists, numbering in the hundreds, are now in a safe haven in Pakistan’s tribal areas, why are we sending thousands more combat troops into … Afghanistan!
In his speech at West Point, President Obama recognized the protean nature of the al Qaeda threat: “Where al Qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a foothold – whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere – they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships.”
Yet the President, in ordering 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan, in addition to the 21,000 he sent last spring, aligned himself not only with his pre-campaign rhetoric about a “necessary war,” but also with the sway that the military has established within American society. At least he did allow himself an out, which is quite unaligned with military doctrine: “After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.”
It was, indeed, a tortuous exercise for a tortured President.
(*) Dr. Charles Cogan Associate at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and was the chief of the Near East South Asia Division in the Directorate of Operations of the CIA from August 1979 to August 1984. It was from this Division that the covert action operation against the Soviets in Afghanistan were run. He is currently an Associate at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
Modern Slave Trade
Pinoy sailors send home record $2.5 billion in 9 months
The cash sent home by overseas Filipino sailors rose by $108 million or 4.51 percent to a new record of $2.501 billion in the nine months to September this year, from $2.393 billion over the same period in 2008, the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines reported Tuesday.
TUCP secretary-general and former Senator Ernesto Herrera attributed the nonstop rise in remittances from sea-based migrant Filipino workers to increased enlistment by shipowners in Europe and Asia.
“A growing number of European and Asian shipping firms are disbanding their multinational crews, and replacing them wholesale with all-Filipino personnel that are younger and more able,” said Herrera, former chairman of the Senate committee on labor, employment and human resources development.
“Foreign employers find Filipino sailors quick learners, and easier to train compared to other nationals. This may be due to their superior instruction here, apart from their ability to understand English,” Herrera said in a statement.
Herrera, meanwhile, renewed TUCP’s plea for the International Maritime Organization and shipowners to aggressively repel piracy and protect sailors. At least 71 Filipino sailors are still being held by pirates off Somalia.
According to the Department of Labor and Employment, some 229,000 Filipino sailors are on board merchant shipping vessels around the world at any given time.
>From January to September this year, remittances from Filipino sailors based in Norway soared by 110 percent to $229.551 million from $109.079 million over the same nine-month period in 2008.
Remittances from Filipino sailors based in Japan were also up 57 percent to $222.505 million from $141.886 million.
The other fast-growing sources of remittances from Filipino sailors were the United Kingdom, up 122 percent to $192.373; Germany, up 47 percent to $175.067 million; Singapore, up 60 percent to $107.945 million; Greece, up 67 percent to $93.446 million; Cyprus, up 23 percent to $46.390 million;
The Netherlands, up 114 percent to $41.281 million; Denmark, up 182 percent to $28.864 million; Oman, up 24 percent to $24.948 million; Hong Kong, up 33 percent to $24.870 million; and Sweden, up 126 percent to $24.223 million.
The double to triple-digit increases more than offset the 24 percent drop in remittances from Filipino sailors based in the U.S., to $1.216 billion from $1.595 billion.
The cash sent home by sailors accounted for 20 percent of the aggregate remittances from all migrant Filipino workers in the nine-month period.
Migrant Filipino workers wired home a total of $12.789 billion in the nine months to September this year, up $516.62 million or 4.21 percent from the $12.273 billion they remitted in the same period in 2008, according to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.
[N.B.: All the foreign hard currency sent as remittance home by worker from the Philippines is channelled through the system of the Philippine government first before given to the families in local currency. Therefore the labour abroad - if maid or mercenary - from the governmental perspective needs to be pushed as hard possible, which safeguards unscrupulous manning agencies from being prosecuted for their abusive practices and abused workers hardly find any assistance or help at their foreign missions. In Syria it is specifically bad, where Filipinas after running away from their employers, because they can not stand the working conditions "under their masters" any longer then are sued and even arrested until they pay a "disengagement fee" - often several thousand dollars. The benefit of foreign currency generation for the Philippine government is also the reason why the governmental orders to not let Filipinos sail into piracy-prone areas are neglected and were never enforced.]
WE SAY: Corruption is all about perception (IslandsBusiness)
‘So do people in the islands need to take note of these rankings? Is there anything they must do about it? We think not. From the foregoing discussion, it is clear that it is all about perceptions and it is hard to change those. The Cook Islands tried to grab the world’s attention by declaring itself a recession free zone earlier this year. While it was a brilliant marketing ploy, it didn’t change people’s perception. Indices like these, like many other “perception indices” are of little value and contribute nothing to the profiles of nations and only serve as a distraction’
Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index for 2009 was published last month. The index measures the perceived level of corruption in a nation’s public sector, which obviously includes government, its various departments and public enterprises. This year, New Zealand has bagged the numero uno spot. It has always been hovering at the top but this time it beat the reputedly squeaky clean Scandinavian countries like Denmark, Sweden and Finland (2nd, 3rd and 6th places respectively) and the exceptionally entrepreneurial Singapore.
New Zealand must feel lucky to have bagged the top spot this year. In fact, some people were even surprised that it did.
For, in the past couple of years, the country’s governments have been embarrassed by more than a smattering of corruption cases, not to mention the questionable financial dealings of several ministers while in office.
The most high profile one was of former Labour Party—and later independent—Member of Parliament Taito Phillip Field, who became the first New Zealand MP to be convicted on charges of corruption and awarded a six year jail sentence. Field, a long time citizen of New Zealand but of Samoan origin, was found guilty of 11 charges of bribery and corruption and 15 charges of attempting to obstruct or pervert the course of justice.
Also last year, an enquiry into the academic qualifications claim of the head of Immigration New Zealand and Deputy Secretary of Labour, Mary Anne Thompson, revealed that she did not hold a degree from the prestigious London School of Economics. She had used that claim, it was believed, to apply for a number of government positions. It was also brought to light that under her watch the performance of the Pacific Division had deteriorated and it was alleged that she helped relatives or friends from Kiribati gain residency in New Zealand.
Some commentators at the time sought to give these two high profile cases an “us and them” type of spin saying such incidents were inevitable as New Zealand’s population becomes culturally diverse and that as some immigrants rise to positions of power, whether administrative or political, they are bound to bring the social and cultural mores of their original countries along with them. Both the individuals in question having had Pacific roots, the invisible finger was pointed at Pacific islands culture.
But like love, sex, crime and politics, corruption too is a starkly human trait and cannot be blamed exclusively on culture or race by any stretch of logic. Just as these New Zealand commentators found out in the months after the Field and Thompson sagas.
Several ministers have been found to have used ingenious subterfuge to claim allowances and pecuniary gain for travel (in some cases palming off the costs of travel of partners to taxpayers), housing and other benefits, especially in an environment that was charged with public anger on the continuing fall out of not just the global financial meltdown but also of New Zealand’s own subprime crisis—the domino-like fall of dozens of finance companies gobbling up the life savings of thousands of mums and dads’ investors.
And most recently, an investigation has found that New Zealand lawyers have been fraudulently skimming off more than a hundred million dollars from tax payers annually through the legal aid system—yet another damning evidence of corruption going unchecked for years. All this in a country that the world perceives to be the most clean and green in the world.
Incidentally, the green image also has received a bit of a bruising recently with the country’s agriculture and farm sector contributing excessively to greenhouse gases when compared to its geographic size and that of its population and the more recent revelation that one in six New Zealanders may be drinking unsafe water.
In the case of the lawyers, it was not about an individual or two. It was a whole bunch of them that were rorting the system almost giving it the colour of the “institutionalised” corruption that is most commonly associated with governments in developing countries.
Clearly, therefore, as the Transparency International report calls itself, corruption is all about perception, notwithstanding the fact that there are dozens of statistical tools that are employed to compute the final rankings using the expertise of a number of professionals and researchers.
And people’s perceptions of nations are no different from their perception of brands. Some nations, like some brands, are always favoured in the public mind (no matter how many chain emails you receive about the amazing corrosive tooth dissolving and toilet cleaning powers of bottled fizzy drinks, no one really stops drinking them. In fact their sales grow every year).
The Pacific Islands score far worse than New Zealand and Australia (ranked eighth). While Fiji has not been ranked this year, Samoa leads the islands pack at 56, followed by Tonga at 99, the Solomon Islands and Kiribati sharing the number 111 spot and Papua New Guinea coming in last at 154 (the last in the list is Somalia at 180).
So do people in the islands need to take note of these rankings? Is there anything they must do about it? We think not. From the foregoing discussion, it is clear that it is all about perceptions and it is hard to change those. The Cook Islands tried to grab the world’s attention by declaring itself a recession free zone earlier this year. While that it was a brilliant marketing ploy, it didn’t change people’s perception. Indices like these, like many other “perception indices” are of little value and contribute nothing to the profiles of nations and only serve as a distraction and of course fodder for the news media.
On the other hand, indices that are based on hard research and verifiable data and not mere “perception”, which help the people of a nation to hold their governments accountable—such as those that measure human development and those that evaluate the ease of doing business in countries—are far more useful.
It will be interesting to see if, following the string of incidents of corruption that have come to light in New Zealand this past year, whether it still retains the top spot next year.
Haven’t They Always?
Nobel Committee Celebrates War As Peace
By Rick Rozoff
On Thursday December 10 U.S. President Barack Obama will receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced its selection for the prize on October 9 of this year, less than nine months after Obama assumed the mantle of the American presidency and less than a month after that announced the doubling of his nation’s troops for the world’s longest-running war in Afghanistan. The first contingent of new forces, consisting of 1,500 Marines, is to arrive next week, right before Christmas.
Ten days before the bestowal of the Nobel Peace Prize, the American president delivered a speech at the West Point Military Academy in which he pledged an additional 30,000 troops for a war now in its ninth year. His (and his predecessor George W. Bush’s) Defense Secretary Robert Gates hastened to add that 3,000 more support troops would be deployed, bringing the total to over 100,000, only 20,000 short of American soldiers in Iraq, and with as many as 50,000 more non-U.S. forces serving under the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force. In his West Point address Obama reminded his listeners that “When I took office, we had just over 32,000 Americans serving in Afghanistan….” He has ordered that number to be more than tripled.
A brief report on Obama’s peace prize appeared on the CBS News website on December 7 with the seemingly paradoxical title “A Peace Prize for a War President” by the news agency’s White House correspondent, Mark Knoller.
Neither the title nor the article it introduced was ironic. They reflected the straightforward truth.
The feature stated “There’ll be no effort by Barack Obama to disguise or obscure the fact that he’s a war president when he accepts the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Thursday.
“The ceremony takes place ten days after he announced plans to escalate the U.S. military engagement in Afghanistan by deploying another 30,000 American troops there.”
The selection of Obama evoked a prompt and aptly indignant response from Michel Chossudovsky at the Centre for Research on Globalization, who on October 11 published a piece called “Obama and the Nobel Prize: When War Becomes Peace, When the Lie becomes the Truth” [1] which stated inter alia that “When the Commander in Chief of the largest military force on planet earth is presented as a global peace-maker,” then “the Lie becomes the Truth.”
Although there are no firm, codified guidelines for nominating and agreeing upon a Peace Prize recipient, Alfred Nobel’s will states that it should be conferred upon a “person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
Those criteria have arguably never been honored or strictly abided by since the annual prize was first awarded in 1901. Several winners have been cited for helping to end wars – often by simply prevailing in them. One of the two American presidents previously awarded the prize, Woodrow Wilson, is such a one.
The other was Theodore Roosevelt, who as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1897 said “I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.”
Both Roosevelt in 1906 and Wilson in 1919 were standing presidents when they received the prize. The first had fought in Cuba during the Spanish-American War (the war he demanded a year before it began) and Wilson brought the United States into the First World War.
The Spanish-American War inaugurated the expansion of the U.S. from a hemispheric to an Asia Pacific power. And an empire. World War I placed the American army on the European continent for the first time and signaled its emergence as a international military power. Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901 when William McKinley, who launched the conflict with Spain and acquired Cuba, Guam, the Philippines and Puerto Rico as spoils of war, was assassinated; Wilson not only sent over one million soldiers to France but also deployed 13,000 troops to fight the new Russian government of Vladimir Lenin in 1918.
But neither Roosevelt nor Wilson were commanders-in-chief of a war when they were given the Nobel Prize. And they received it for, at least in theory, contributing to ending wars; the Russo-Japanese War and World War I, respectively. Granting the Nobel Peace Prize to a head of state escalating a war already in its ninth year half a world away from his own nation is a precedent that was reserved for this year.
Reuters quoted White House spokesman Robert Gibbs on December 7 stating “We’ll address directly the notion that many have wondered, which is the juxtaposition of the timing for the Nobel Peace Prize and – and his [Obama's] commitment to add more troops around – into Afghanistan.”
Juxtaposition, paradox, irony, contradiction and so forth are terms too weak and inaccurate to describe the timing of the announcement of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipient, coming as it did between two pledges of military reinforcements for the world’s largest-scale and longest-running war. Travesty is a better word.
Speculation was rife after October 9 regarding the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s rationale and motives for awarding Obama the prize, and press pundits were not amiss in offering explanations. But actions are more revealing than assumed or imaginary intentions and what the Nobel Committee has accomplished is to yet further tarnish its reputation and that of the prize it grants.
It is hard to think of any recipient, and surely any recent one, who personifies the qualities indicated by Alfred Nobel himself. Advocating and working for peace seem to have little if anything to do with being awarded the nominal Peace Prize. But twice in the last three years it has been conferred upon individuals far more deserving of indictment for violating the Principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal, especially that section of Principle VI, Crimes against peace, which is defined as “Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances.”
Two years ago the prize was shared by Al Gore, who as the vice president of the U.S.’s first post-Cold War administration helped preside over deadly street battles in Somalia and bombing – incessant bombing – attacks in Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sudan and Yugoslavia. And the launching of Plan Colombia in 1999, the latest fruit of which is the Pentagon’s acquisition of seven new military bases in the country and the resulting threat of armed conflict with its neighbors. Arranged by this year’s Peace Prize recipient. But, again, Gore received the prize years after leaving office and for work in an area unrelated to his former government posts.
Obama’s December 1 speech was larded with lines evocative of the worst rhetorical excesses of his predecessor combined with allusions to broadening the war reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s and Henry Kissinger’s expansion of what had previously been America’s longest war from Vietnam into Cambodia in 1970. “[S]hortly after taking office, I approved a long-standing request for more troops. After consultations with our allies, I then announced a strategy recognizing the fundamental connection between our war effort in Afghanistan, and the extremist safe-havens in Pakistan. I set a goal that was narrowly defined as disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al Qaeda and its extremist allies….”
The current administration has, in addition to plans to boost combined U.S. and NATO (“our allies”) military forces to 150,000 in Afghanistan, dramatically escalated drone missile attacks inside neighboring Pakistan and, as the above quote demonstrates, declared western and southern Pakistan part of the expanding war theater.
The president mentioned or alluded to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization several times in his address, in one instance with a degree of hyperbole that is as frightening as it is extravagant. “For what’s at stake is not simply a test of NATO’s credibility – what’s at stake is the security of our Allies, and the common security of the world.
“We are in Afghanistan to prevent a cancer from once again spreading through that country. But this same cancer has also taken root in the border region of Pakistan. That is why we need a strategy that works on both sides of the border.”
The entire world is threatened by a spreading cancer. This alarmist and crude phraseology was employed by a 21st century leader of the world’s superpower, a Harvard graduate, but could as well have been lifted from the lowest yellow journalism screed of the Cold War.
In attempting to deny the obvious – the inevitable – Obama continued by stating that “there are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. They argue that it cannot be stabilized, and we are better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. Yet this argument depends upon a false reading of history. Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations….”
Troops from America’s NATO and NATO partner vassals and tributaries in the war against barbarians – the terms are those of Zbigniew Brzezinski from his 1997 The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives – will not be limited to the war in Afghanistan, which in fact is a laboratory for a far broader global strategy, as “The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly, and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan….Where al Qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a foothold – whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere –
they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships.”
U.S. National Security Adviser James Jones said in October that “according to the maximum estimate, al Qaeda has fewer than 100 fighters operating in Afghanistan without any bases or ability to launch attacks on the West.” Government estimates for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan are in the neighborhood of 20,000.
This is the global cancer that requires 150,000 U.S. and NATO troops and an Afghan army of a quarter million or more troops. And a war that will continue well beyond the 2011 deadline mentioned in the West Point speech and be fought with intensified vigor and as far from Afghanistan as the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Southeast Asian archipelago.
With the deployment of “senior members of Mr. Obama’s war council,” as the New York Times characterized them, on the Sunday morning television news program circuit on December 7, the scope and the length of the already biggest and longest war in the world became undeniable.
The National Security Adviser, former Marine general and NATO top military commander James Jones, told CNN’s State of the Union: “We have strategic interests in South Asia that should not be measured in terms of finite times. We’re going to be in the region for a long time.”
He added that the influx of more American and NATO troops “will allow us to move our forces back towards the border regions, where really the most important struggle that we’re going to have is to make sure that on the Pakistani side of the border, that we eliminate the safe havens.”
Pentagon chief Robert Gates said on NBC’s Meet the Press that although there would still be over 100,000 American troops in Afghanistan in 2011, only “some handful, or some small number, or whatever the conditions permit, will begin to withdraw at that time.”
The Pentagon’s Central Command chief, General David Petraeus, appeared on Fox News Sunday and acknowledged that there were no plans for a “rush to the exits” and that there “could be tens of thousands of American troops in Afghanistan for several years.” [2]
Little noted with the expansion of the war is that its range is widening as its intensity is deepening.
The top U.S. Air Force commander in Europe and Eurasia, General Roger A. Brady, was in Georgia on December 7 and in the neighboring South Caucasus nation of Azerbaijan on the 8th to discuss both nations’ increased troop deployments to Afghanistan and solidifying strategic military relations.
The president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, has recently and once again threatened war against Nagorno Karabakh and by unavoidable implication Armenia, which is a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization with Russia. The latter is obligated to provide Armenia military assistance under terms of the treaty in the event of it becoming the victim of aggression. With the American commander listening attentively, defense minister of Azerbaijan Colonel-General Safar Abiyev said that ongoing negotiations over Nagorno Karabakh “were not fruitful and such a situation forced Azerbaijan to use other ways to liberate its lands from the occupation.” [3]
On December 4 the president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, who fought a five-day war with Russia in August of last year, spoke of his offering the U.S. and NATO 1,000 more troops for the Afghan war and ominously added: “This is a unique chance for our soldiers to receive a real combat baptism.
“We do not need the army only for showing it in military parades….While our allies – in this case the United States and Europe – are concentrating on other issues [Afghanistan and Iraq], our enemy is getting active. The sooner the Afghan situation is resolved and sooner the war is over in Iraq, [the sooner] Georgia will be more protected.” [4]
The enemy is Russia and the quid pro quo is U.S.-trained Georgian troops receiving a war zone “baptism” for a future conflict with their “numerous, dangerous and perfidious” adversary. The adjectives are also Saakashvili’s, as are these words: “We need an army that knows how to fight. And participation in the operation in Afghanistan is a unique chance to study this and receive experience….Our final aim is to free the occupied territories [Abkhazia and South Ossetia] and unite and integrate Georgia.” [5]
Other nations are obtaining combat experience in Afghanistan under NATO auspices for use in and on the borders of their homelands, including, like Azerbaijan and Georgia, nations bordering Russia – Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Mongolia, Norway, Poland and Ukraine – as well as future belligerents in conflicts elsewhere like Colombia, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates.
If the world’s sole superpower and its NATO entourage can employ the military necessity at will to advance their interests abroad, their “vassals” will be emboldened to do so nearer home and will receive the arms and training to execute their designs.
Far from promoting peace, even an enforced peace, a Pax Americana, the war in Afghanistan and U.S. foreign policy in general are igniting power kegs around the world.
If it can be argued that Obama inherited the war in South Asia from George W. Bush and is intent on “finishing the job,” his signing of the $106 billion Iraq and Afghanistan War Supplemental Appropriations in July and the $680 billion 2010 National Defense Authorization Act in late October belies any claim of objection to the enhanced use of the military in general and war in particular.
Next year’s Pentagon budget is the largest, in both current and real U.S. dollars, since 1945, the last year of World War II. Although it contains $130 billion for the war in Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq that previously would have been appropriated as separate supplemental funds, immediately after the signing of the Defense Department budget the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, stated “he expected the Pentagon to ask Congress in the next few months for emergency financing to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” [6] with the first request to be approximately $50 billion.
With the announcement on December 1 of another Afghan troop surge, the Pentagon’s requests for “emergency financing” can be expected to grow in both size and frequency. As with the claim of a troop withdrawal (or “drawdown”) by 2011, the alleged ending of war supplements is a public relations ploy and sleight of hand trick employed to beguile a gullible public.
Even in a world that over the last decade has been afflicted with such logical and moral affronts as humanitarian war and preemptive retaliation, awarding a peace prize to a war president represents a new nadir of cynical realpolitik and a flagrant endorsement of militarism, however well-disposed many may have been toward its most recent recipient.
Notes:
1) http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?aid=15622&context=va
2) New York Times, December 7, 2009
3) Azeri Press Agency, December 8, 2009
4) Civil Georgia, December 5, 2009
5) Rustavi2, December 4, 2009
6) Associated Press, November 1, 2009
International Counterterrorism Policy in the Obama Administration
By Daniel Benjamin (*)
If memory serves, when I spoke to you two years ago, my view was that the United States had developed great skills at what I called tactical counterterrorism–taking individual terrorists off the street, and disrupting cells and operations. On the strategic side, I thought we were losing ground. Now, I believe the administration is redressing that gap. In my roughly six months in office, my view of our tactical capabilities in the areas of intelligence, the military, and law enforcement have more than amply been confirmed. One of the great rewards of government service is the chance to work with colleagues in all of these areas, and I must say that their level of competence and professionalism is really extraordinary. When I consider how far we have come since my days at the NSC in the late 90s, I think it is quite remarkable.
And we are now working to match their proficiency by formulating the kind of policies that seek to shape the environment that terrorists operate in so that they find their efforts more constrained. We are rebuilding and reinvigorating old partnerships to combat terror and establishing new ones with others who have been on the sidelines. As we look at the problem of transnational terror, we are putting at the core of our actions a recognition of the phenomenon of radicalization—that is, we are asking ourselves time and again: Are our actions going to result in the removal of one terrorist and the creation of ten more? What can we do to attack the drivers of radicalization, so that al- Qaida and its affiliates have a shrinking pool of recruits? And finally– and vitally–are we hewing to our values in this struggle? Because as President Obama has said from the outset, there should be no tradeoff between our security and our values. Indeed, in light of what we know about radicalization, it is clear that navigating by our values is an essential part of a successful counterterrorism effort. Thus, we have moved to rectify the excesses of the past few years by working to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, forbidding enhanced interrogation techniques, and developing a more systematic method of dealing with detainees. We are also demonstrating our commitment to the rule of law by trying Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and other al-Qaida operatives in our court system.
Finally, we have a strategy for success in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The President has put forward a clear plan to constrain the Taliban and destroy the al-Qaida core, and the administration is putting up the resources necessary to achieve that goal. Moreover, we are working with Pakistan to establish the kind of relationship, based on trust and mutual interests, that will lead to the defeat of radicalism in that country, which has in recent months seen so much violence. We understand the trust deficit, built up over decades that created the current situation. We know that challenges in the region will not be overcome overnight. But we believe we are now firmly on the right track.
Before going any further, we need to consider the threat today: On any given day, al-Qaida remains the foremost security threat the nation faces. Yet having said that, it is clear that for al-Qaida, it has been a difficult period. The group is under severe pressure in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the U.S. and its allies have succeeded in severely degrading its operational leadership. The coming troop increase in Afghanistan will further reduce al-Qaida’s capabilities and those of other extremist organizations. The Pakistani military has been working to eliminate militant strongholds in its territory. As a result, al-Qaida is finding it tougher to raise money, train recruits, and plan attacks outside of the region.
In addition to these operational setbacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, al-Qaida has not been successful in carrying out the attacks that would shake governments in the Arab world, which continues to be a primary long-term focus. It has failed to mobilize the masses–and this is a key point–which they have repeatedly said is their means of establishing Islamic emirates in the region.
Finally, there has been a decline of support for al-Qaida’s political program and there are several reasons for this: indiscriminate targeting of Muslim civilians in Iraq and Pakistan alienated many who were previously sympathetic to al-Qaida’s larger aspirations. The result has been both popular disaffection and a backlash from clerics in Muslim countries who have issued fatwas against the killing of other Muslims, notably in Iraq, although I note that this has yet to happen on a large scale in Afghanistan.
Second, al-Qaida’s ideological hard line has alienated more pragmatic organizations and individuals in the wider militant community. It has also created confusion over who carries the true banner of Islamic resistance to Western imperialism.
Third, denunciations of al-Qaida by extremist clerics have damaged the religious legitimacy of the group and raised questions about the proper use of violence in countries where there is no overt military action.
Fourth, al-Qaida and similar groups are becoming increasingly vague about who the primary enemy is, creating confusion in the militant community about the fundamentals of its strategic direction.
Yet despite these setbacks, al-Qaida has proven to be adaptable and resilient in two arenas. The first is in ungoverned or under-governed areas, often where there are tribal conflicts in which it can attach itself to the different parties. Thus in Yemen, al-Qaida operatives are marrying into the local tribes, and taking up their grievances against the government. In the sparsely populated Sahel, al-Qaida operatives, sometimes operating with individual local tribesmen and nomads, kidnap foreigners. In the FATA, operatives are marrying into local Pashtun tribes and are serving the larger interests of the Taliban insurgency by providing technical know-how and disseminating propaganda. And in Somalia, al-Qaida’s allies in al-Shabaab now control significant tracts of territory. These weakly-governed or entirely ungoverned areas are a major safe haven for al-Qaida and its allies and to dismiss their significance is to misunderstand their historical importance for training, recruitment, and operational planning. Quite frankly, the problem of un- and under-governed spaces is one of the toughest ones this and future administrations will face.
The second arena where Sunni radicals continue to succeed is in persuading religious extremists to adopt their cause, even in the United States. A bus driver, Najibullah Zazi, was trained in Pakistan and now faces charges in federal court for planning to set off a series of bombs in the United States. An indictment that was unsealed Monday in Chicago portrays an American citizen–David Headley–playing a pivotal role in last year’s attack in Mumbai, which killed more than 170 people and dramatically raised tensions in South Asia. So even if this radical movement is not mobilizing the masses, it is still galvanizing enough people to take to violence and poses a continuing, powerful threat. The importance of these two cases should not be glossed over–the conspiracies these men were engaged in had roots in the FATA, and eight years after 9/11, should give us all pause. The threat to the U.S. remains substantial and enduring despite the operational constraints on al-Qaida central.
It is also multifaceted as we have seen in the movement of young men, many of them motivated by a sense of ethnic duty, who have left their communities in Minnesota, been radicalized in Somalia, and fought and died for al-Shabaab.
As the example of David Headley indicates, al-Qaida is not the only group with global ambitions that we have to worry about. Lashkar e-Taiba has made it clear that it is willing to undertake bold, mass-casualty operations with a target set that would please al-Qaida planners. The group’s more recent thwarted conspiracy to attack the US embassy in Bangladesh should only deepen concern that it could evolve into a genuinely global terrorist threat. And let me say as an aside, very few things worry me as much as the strength and ambition of LeT, a truly malign presence in South Asia. We are working closely with allies in the region and elsewhere to reduce the threat from this very dangerous group.
As you know, I worked on terrorism in the White House when al-Qaida first surfaced in the late 1990s and I can tell you now, after having access to the intelligence again, that the threat has become far more complicated due to the proliferation of groups and the cross-pollination of networks. The global radical milieu has become thicker. There is so much more that we have to keep tabs on than there was in 1999.
So what are we doing to meet this challenge? Faced with this continuing and evolving threat, President Obama has articulated a clear policy – to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaida and its allies. That is our overriding objective, and to achieve it we are using all the tools at our disposal. In weakly-governed areas we are collaborating with the relevant local authorities to bolster their security forces to prevent al-Qaida safe havens. Moreover, our intelligence and law enforcement agencies and those of our allies continue to disrupt terrorist plots at home and abroad–as we have here in Denver and New York, in London, and in other countries around the world. We are working with the international financial community to deny resources to al-Qaida and its supporters. Now, as al-Qaida affiliates turn to kidnapping for ransom to raise funds, we are urging our partners around the world to adopt a no-concessions policy toward hostage-takers so we can diminish this alternative funding stream in regions like the Sahel, the FATA, and Yemen.
But this is not enough, as the continuing flow of recruits–and the lengthening roll call of conspiracies testifies. As President Obama succinctly put it, “A campaign against extremism will not succeed with bullets or bombs alone.” We need to look to look to what my colleague Deputy National Security John Brennan has called the upstream factors. We need to confront the political, social, and economic conditions that our enemies exploit to win over the new recruits…the funders…and those whose tacit support enables the militants to carry forward their plans.
The threat is global and our enemies latch on to grievances on behalf of the entire Muslim world, so we must work to resolve the long-standing problems that fuel those grievances. At the top of the list is the Arab-Israeli conflict, and, as you know, President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and Special Envoy George Mitchell are working very hard to resolve it.
Even with their efforts, peace in the Middle East will take time, and as we know, it will not eliminate all of the threats. But while the big policy challenges matter in radicalization, local drivers are critical as well. We are developing tailored-approaches to alter them. How do these different elements of our global counterterrorism strategy fit together?
To be sure, terrorism is a common challenge shared by nations across the globe—one that requires diplomacy—and one that the United States cannot solve alone. As Secretary Clinton has said, “Today’s security threats cannot be addressed in isolation. Smart power requires reaching out to both friends and adversaries, to bolster old alliances and to forge new ones.” The Obama administration has worked hard to reach out and, on the basis of mutual interests and mutual respect, to forge international coalitions. The administration has been working at reinvigorating alliances across the board and reengaging in the multilateral fora concerned with counterterrorism—fora that, in all honesty, were neglected for some time at the many UN entities, the G8, and the vast range of regional organizations that are eager to engage on counterterrorism issues.
Building the counterterrorism capacity of our partners at the national level is also a top priority. Consistent diplomatic engagement with counterparts and senior leaders helps build political will for common counterterrorism objectives. When the political will is there, we can address the nuts and bolts aspect of capacity building. We are working to make the counterterrorism training of police, prosecutors, border officials, and members of the judiciary more systematic, more innovative, and far-reaching, and we are doing this through such efforts as the Antiterrorism Assistance Program. In its more than 25-year old history, the ATA program has trained more than 66,000 professionals from 151 countries, providing programs tailored to the needs of each partner nation and to local conditions.
ATA is just one of many programs–on the civilian and the military sides of the house—that is increasing the ability of others to ensure their own security. With this kind of work, we are making real the President’s vision of shared security partnerships as an essential part of US foreign policy. This is both good counterterrorism and good statecraft. We are addressing the state insufficiencies that terrorism lives on, and we are helping invest our partners more effectively in confronting the threat–-rather than looking thousands of miles away for help or simply looking away altogether.
We are also addressing the local drivers of radicalization that still lead large numbers of people to adopt al-Qaida’s ideology, and as I said earlier, we understand the dangers of radicalization, and we are working both to undermine the al-Qaida narrative and to ameliorate the conditions that make it attractive. We know that violent extremism flourishes where there is marginalization, alienation, and perceived–-or real–-relative deprivation. In recognition of this, my first step has been to build a unit focusing on what we in the government call “Countering Violent Extremism” in my office to focus on local communities most prone to radicalization. There is a broad understanding across the government that we have not done nearly enough to address underlying conditions for at-risk populations–-and we have also not done enough to improve the ability of moderates to voice their views and strengthen opposition to violence.
Adopting a tailored-approach to countering violent extremism does not mean we can neglect broader structural problems. There is no denying that when children have no hope for an education, when young people have no hope for a job and feel disconnected from the modern world, when governments fail to provide for the basic needs of their people, when people despair and are aggrieved, they become more susceptible to extremist ideologies. But a tailored-approach to CVE requires identifying which of these problems are driving radicalization and are amenable to change with the help of local governments and leaders who understand the problems best.
Over time, the measures and the methods I have described above will reduce terrorists’ capacity to harm us and our partners. No element can be neglected if we are to succeed since they reinforce one another. Global engagement builds coalitions based on mutual interests and mutual respect. And these coalitions, in turn, help us partner with individual nations to enhance their capacity to counter extremism. This, finally, enables us to work with them to develop tailored-approaches to preventing extremists from becoming violent extremists.
I don’t want to leave you today with the impression that we have figured it all or that there won’t be real setbacks in the future. The contemporary terrorist threat was decades in the making and it will take many more years to unmake it. There is much we still need to learn, especially about how to prevent individuals from choosing the path of violence. But I believe we now have the right framework for our policies, and ultimately, I am confident, this will lead to the decisions and actions that will strengthen security for our nation and the global community.
(*) Daniel Benjamin, Coordinator, Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism – U.S. Government
We do not send pictures with these reports, because of the volume, but picture this emetic scene with your inner eye:
A dying Somali child in the macerated arms of her mother besides their bombed shelter with Islamic graffiti looks at a fat trader, who discusses with a local militia chief and a UN representative at a harbour while USAID provided GM food from subsidised production is off-loaded by WFP into the hands of local “distributors” and dealers – and in the background a western warship and a foreign fishing trawler ply the waters of a once sovereign, prosper and proud nation, which was a role model for honesty and development in the Horn of Africa. (If you feel that this is overdrawn – come with us into Somalia and see the even more cruel reality yourself!) – and if you need lively stills or video material on Somalia, please do contact us.
There is no limit to what a person can do or how far one can go to help
- if one doesn’t mind who gets the credit !
ECOTERRA Intl. maintains a register for persons missing or abducted in the Somali seas (Foreign seafarers as well as Somalis). Inquiries by family member can be sent by e-mail to office[at]ecoterra-international.org
For families of presently captive seafarers – in order to advise and console their worries – ECOTERRA Intl. can establish contacts with professional seafarers, who had been abducted in Somalia, and their wives as well as of a Captain of a sea-jacked and released ship, who agreed to be addressed “with questions, and we will answer truthfully”.
ECOTERRA – ALERTS and pending issues:
PIRATE ATTACK GULF OF ADEN: Advice on Who to Contact and What to Do http://www.noonsite.com/Members/sue/R2008-09-08-2
NATURAL RESOURCES & ARMED FISH POACHERS: Foreign navies entering the 200nm EEZ of Somalia and foreign helicopters and troops must respect the fact that especially all wildlife is protected by Somali national as well as by international laws and that the protection of the marine resources of Somalia from illegally fishing foreign vessels should be an integral part of the anti-piracy operations. Likewise the navies must adhere to international standards and not pollute the coastal waters with oil, ballast water or waste from their own ships but help Somalia to fight against any dumping of any waste (incl. diluted, toxic or nuclear waste). So far and though the AU as well as the UN has called since long on other nations to respect the 200 nm EEZ, only now the two countries (Spain and France) to which the most notorious vessels and fleets are linked have come up with a declaration that they will respect the 200 nm EEZ of Somalia but so far not any of the navies operating in the area pledged to stand against illegal fishing. So far not a single illegal fishing vessel has been detained by the naval forces, though they had been even informed about several actual cases, where an intervention would have been possible. Illegally operating Tuna fishing vessels (many from South Korea, some from Greece and China) carry now armed personnel and force their way into the Somali fishing grounds – uncontrolled or even protected by the naval forces mandated to guard the Somali waters against any criminal activity, which included arms carried by foreign fishing vessels in Somali waters.
LLWs / NLWs: According to recently leaked information the anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden are also used as a cover-up for the live testing of recently developed arsenals of so called non-lethal as well as sub-lethal weapons systems. (Pls request details) Neither the Navies nor the UN has come up with any code of conduct in this respect, while the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program (JNLWP) is sponsoring several service-led acquisition programs, including the VLAD, Joint Integration Program, and Improved Flash Bang Grenade. Alredy in use in Somalia are so called Non-lethal optical distractors, which are visible laser devices that have reversible optical effects. These types of non-blinding laser devices use highly directional optical energy. Somalia is also a testing ground for the further developments of the Active Denial System (ADS) Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD). If new developments using millimeter wave sources that will help minimize the size, weight, and system cost of an effective Active Denial System which provides “ADS-ACTD-like” repel effects, are used has not yet been revealed. Obviously not only the US is developing and using these kind of weapons as the case of MV MARATHON showed, where a Spanish naval vessel was using optical lasers – the stand-off was then broken by the killing of one of the hostage seafarers. Local observers also claim that HEMI devices, producing Human Electro-Muscular Incapacitation (HEMI) Bioeffects, have been used in the Gulf of Aden against Somalis. Exposure to HEMI devices, which can be understood as a stun-gun shot at an individual over a larger distance, causes muscle contractions that temporarily disable an individual. Research efforts are under way to develop a longer-duration of this effect than is currently available. The live tests are apparently done without that science understands yet the effects of HEMI electrical waveforms on a human body.
WARBOTS, UAVs etc.: Peter Singer says: “By cutting the already tenuous link between the public and its nation’s foreign policy, pain-free war would pervert the whole idea of the democratic process and citizenship as they relate to war. When a citizenry has no sense of sacrifice or even the prospect of sacrifice, the decision to go to war becomes just like any other policy decision, weighed by the same calculus used to determine whether to raise bridge tolls. Instead of widespread engagement and debate over the most important decision a government can make, you get popular indifference. When technology turns war into something merely to be watched, and not weighed with great seriousness, the checks and balances that undergird democracy go by the wayside. This could well mean the end of any idea of democratic peace that supposedly sets our foreign-policy decision making apart. Such wars without costs could even undermine the morality of “good” wars. When a nation decides to go to war, it is not just deciding to break stuff in some foreign land. As one philosopher put it, the very decision is “a reflection of the moral character of the community who decides.” Without public debate and support and without risking troops, the decision to go to war becomes the act of a nation that doesn’t give a damn.”
ECOTERRA Intl., whose work does focus on nature- and human-rights-protection and – as the last international environmental organization still working in Somalia – had alerted ship-owners since 1992, many of whom were fishing illegally in the since 1972 established 200 nm territorial waters of Somalia and today’s 200nm Exclusive Economic Zone (UNCLOS) of Somalia, to stay away from Somali waters. The non-governmental organization had requested the international community many times for help to protect the coastal waters of the war-torn state from all exploiters, but now lawlessness has seriously increased and gone out of hand – even with the navies.
ECOTERRA members with marine and maritime expertise, joined by it’s ECOP-marine group, are closely and continuously monitoring and advising on the Somali situation. (for previous information concerning the topics please google keywords ECOTERRA (and) SOMALIA)
The network of the SEAFARERS ASSISTANCE PROGRAMME and ECOTERRA Intl. helped significantly in most sea-jack cases. Basically the East African Seafarers Assistance Programme tackles all issues of seafarers welfare and ECOTERRA Intl. is working in Somalia since 1986 on human-rights and nature protection, while ECOP-marine concentrates on illegal fishing and the protection of the marine ecosystems. Your support counts too.
Please consider to contribute to the work of SAP, ECOP-marine and ECOTERRA Intl. Please donate to the defence fund.
Contact us for details concerning project-sponsorship or donations via e-mail: ecotrust[at]ecoterra.net
Kindly note that all the information above is distributed under and is subject to a license under the Creative Commons Attribution. ECOTERRA, however, reserves the right to editorial changes. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/uk/. The opinion of individual authors, whose writings are provided here for strictly educational and informational purposes, does not necessarily reflect the views held by ECOTERRA Intl. unless endorsed. With each issue of the SMCM ECOTERRA Intl. tries to paint a timely picture containing the actual facts and often differing opinions of people from all walks of live concerning issues, which do have an impact on the Somali people, Somalia as a nation, the region and in many cases even the world.
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Ecoterra Press Release 286 – The Somalia Chronicle June – December 2009, no 99b
Interview with Jan Knippers Black, the author of “The Politics of Human Rights Protection”
By Maria Lewytzkyj (SF Foreign Policy Examiner)
In a thought-provoking interview, Jan Black, the author of “The Politics of Human Rights Protection – Moving Intervention Upstream with Impact Assessment,” explores and makes interesting revelations about humanitarian intervention and human rights protection, the sentiments of our current era, the importance of impact assessments, differences in defining civilization with commentary about Iranian Nobel Laureate winner Shirin Ebadi’s thoughts on the topic, on the use of various ‘trump cards’ in political discourse, and most significantly, the use of denial as a shield.
My opportune discussion with the author provides readers with a comprehensive valuable addition to a very thorough book that fears little in its frank and bold exploration of the obstacles that human rights protectors face in being heard at the policy decision level and in forming a world where the motivation to protect human rights supersedes the motivation to walk away with a profit.
Envisioning a world that considers the idea of triage a good guiding practice when a conflict is being sorted out toward an improved situation, Jan Black offers great advice to human rights protectors on how to advocate that human rights become a top priority among other policy factors (trump cards as she calls them): economics, religion and security.
These trump cards have become the assumed priorities in assessing situations that lead to policy implementation around the globe, but they often overlook the consequences of policy choices. In her in-depth look at individual and collective rights, her candid inquiry questions what is found acceptable when it comes to living conditions and conflict conditions and makes a brilliant argument for pulling the whole business of preventing human rights abuses to the top of any action plan. She challenges people to re-engage actively in bringing to the foreground their observations and impact assessments of how policies and decisions affect the people before they ever become the established practice.
The book is a must-read and in the following interview, the author provides a sneak peek as well as applies her deep understanding to many current conflicts that are plaguing the globe. Few people have the type of determination Jan Black exerts, and few have taken the time to help us better understand the current situation we are all in. From the get-go, she challenges people to have the courage to understand and act to make the world a better place by no longer accepting failure or looking backwards to pick up the pieces, but by aiming to approach conflict resolution by taking the responsibility of becoming mindful well-informed concerned citizens who preserve the sanctity of human rights.
Tell me three top ways to move intervention upstream with impact assessment.
The three summed up would be: first is dream freely, second is think holistically, and the third is to act strategically. The first one I would say is about keeping your eyes on the prize, which is to say, don’t get bogged down in the details of trying to move incrementally beyond the most immediate crisis or problem. Remember that there is something much bigger than just getting past this little obstacle that you have in mind. Then also, to know where you are going, you have to know where you are coming from, so that means that you have to start by understanding:
where you are, where you’ve been, and why. Otherwise action without understanding is dangerous. So that understanding, I would say, comes from thinking holistically, which involves looking at the issue from a bottom-up perspective, which is very different from the way we look at most things. The framing for most issues comes down from those who command the floor, the people who have the power and the access to start with.
If you are promoting change, you’ve got to look at the perspective not of those who have the most to lose, but of those who have the most to fear. You also have to consider all the rights of all of the people. If you try to break them up and just choose one set of people and one set of the rights of theirs that are violated, you’re not going to understand what the big picture is about and then you can’t get very far.
The third is act strategically. I think that the most important aspect of acting strategically is to try to strip the cover of denial from people all the way up and down the system, not only the plausible deniability that presidents and other people at the top demand, but also the garden-variety denial that people use to protect themselves all the time. The main idea of mine is to lift the shield of denial from people at so many different levels in this process. I would say that is the ultimate objective. How you do that is something else. Coming up with the right kind of strategies of education and information and political advocacy.
I’ll back up a little to say that one of the reasons I think along these lines, like so many people who have been active in human rights for a long time, I just get tired of idea of counting bodies after the disaster has happened. Especially when it is so clear to us that it is going to happen. That to anyone who has been paying attention to the nature of the conflict in the region or to the consequences of this kind of policy, you can see for sure this disaster is going to happen. The problem is that the more important the decision, the less well-informed will be the decision-maker. If you look at the way that decisions about war and peace are made, the people who make those decisions for the most part really don’t know the region, the history that would need to be taken into consideration, even the history of the past wars of the country deciding to go to war. Such decisions are made by non-experts often for political reasons on intelligence that is pre-misinterpreted.
What I would like so much to be able to do, to inspire other people to do, is to try to get in ahead of those decisions and make sure that the people making the decisions from the top of the system understand that they will not be able to get away with plausible deniability any more. They will not be able to say, ‘but who could have predicted?’ We’re not going to let them say that. We did predict it – it’s on the record. But not just ‘we the activists’ or the experts could have predicted it. We want them to know that the public is going to know what we know about it. We are getting the word out, so forget your cover story. It’s not going to work. That’s the idea. One of the reasons that our leaders have been able to get away with plausible deniability for such a long time is that the public wants it too. That’s the most painful part and the most painful part to deal with too.
How do you break through that protective shield that allows people to avoid understanding what’s painful to understand? And it’s painful to understand, because you need to be able to believe in the reliability of your leaders or a power system, a social system. If you are able to understand what happens without your intervention there, then it imposes some kind of an obligation on members of the public at large. Understanding too much imposes obligations on anyone who does understand too much. Understanding is actually an act of courage in itself. It’s a step that is hard to get people to take.
It’s so easy to understand this when people have such huge obligations on their time. It’s a problem that keeps getting worse. If they don’t have three jobs just to get by, then they are doing a lot of volunteer work, or handling obligations for their own families that they didn’t have to handle before. That’s the evolution of the last several decades of our economic system; it has put a lot more pressure on every individual. So it’s easy to see how they feel like they can and must subconsciously avoid knowing these things. So it’s not enough that the information that it would take to know how to avoid disaster is not there, it’s just that you have to be able to force people to see it and understand it.
You have to make it hard for them not to know.
How you get there: there are a lot of different ways to get there. I became aware of this a long time ago when I worked on my dissertation, I wanted to look at how it happened that the U.S. became involved in the overthrow of a democratic government in Brazil in 1964, because I could see that a similar thing was about to happen in Uruguay and Chile. I wrote about it in the proposal to my dissertation. The evidence was that they were headed in the direction of a counter-revolutionary episode that Brazil had suffered and partly because of the way the U.S. was pushing it. I was amazed when I got to working on the dissertation that no one else had worked on this. At least in the U.S., you could not find even a suggestion that the U.S. had been involved in this kind of thing. In the first place, it was shocking to find out that something that was so obvious to me wasn’t out there. And I never believed for a minute that nobody else had an inkling of it, I just believed that nobody else was naïve enough to get into the kind of trouble it takes to tell the truth. The other thing that I learned in the process, in getting the information out there, is that the book that came out of it got some good publicity, but that was not enough. If people don’t want to learn what you have to tell them, then you need an organizational effort to get people informed.
It seems that one of the messages of your book is that human rights as an afterthought has become habitual in many cultures. It seems that the pain and suffering goes unnoticed and it isn’t until the system is fixed that wrongs are then righted. If there were a preventive approach to human rights in every sector, which ones would you suggest first? Also, there are already human rights commissioners in many governments with human rights abuses, why are they not meeting with success?
When you are starting from where we are now, from a fully developed kind of world empire – where there are a series of influences and hegemonies around and there are competitions for global hegemony – at least from our perspective in the U.S., we are in the belly of the beast of the empire that now assumes a right to control the ways of the world, and that’s to prevent so much of the kind of abuse that has become routine, you have to be willing to give up the idea of controlling the world. You can try influencing the world, you can try to lead by example, there are all kinds of ways we could try to have a positive influence on the world, but dropping bombs on them is not going to be one of those ways. And if we still think that whatever good we want to do for the world has to be done with the final idea that we have to control it, we’ve lost from the start.
We could approach human rights impact assessment in the same way that an environmental assessment has been approached, which is to try to get in ahead of the kinds of policies that affect the most people. Certainly you start with war, and there are basic approaches to foreign assistance, humanitarian assistance that if you study them carefully, and saw what had been done in the past and saw what has gone right and what has gone wrong, then you would have a much better idea than just starting with what is best practices from the perspective of how it works for the institution undertaking the practices. We don’t really look back after we’ve finished projects to try and figure out how the projects really worked for the people on the ground. It turns out to be how it worked for the World Bank, for the IMF, for the creditor institutions, for the aide agency.
It would be nice if you could have human rights impact assessment built into the system in the way that environmental impact assessment has been. I understand very well why that hasn’t really taken place and why it’s less likely to, because it’s a lot safer politically to hug a tree than a poor person.
People who think they have something to lose feel very threatened by the fact that there are a lot of people out there who have needs, and so security systems are really built to keep the have-nots from going after what the haves have. In fact, most of the systemic grand theft that happens is the rich stealing from the poor, not the other way around, because it is very easy for the rich to steal from the poor. It’s not easy for the poor to steal from the rich. But, there is so much that is systemic like that that you need to break through in some way. One of the reasons is that everyone wants to say that they are in favor of human rights. No one wants to be seen as being opposed to human rights. It’s gotten to be not only an accepted part of the discourse, but an obligatory part in a way. The way they get around actually being for human rights, is that they have trump cards that in the system are allowed to override it. One of them being security, of course. Once you play the security card, it overrides everything, including common sense. It means that decisions can be made very hurriedly without looking at any of the possible consequences. People are inclined to stop thinking themselves when somebody else plays that card, it’s a conversation stopper. It means that the argument stops here. To a lesser extent but also to devastating results, the economic card is played that way. You would think that in times of economic crisis, reasonable people would say, well, triage means you handle the greatest need first.
One of the worst things that happens with the myth of expertise about economics, the economists say that of course you have some starving people down there, but we can’t think about that right now, because the banking system is about to collapse. Wait a minute! The bankers are in trouble, so we are supposed to turn away from the starving people? I don’t think so.
If there are people who are in danger of starvation, if they are without shelter, if they are without the most basic health care needs, if they are disabled, if they need help for whatever reason, if they are old or young, in times of economic crisis, you direct whatever you have first of all to the greatest need. But actually, the opposite is the case. It’s never been seen more clearly than in the U.S. since September ‘08. What we have done is throw incredible amounts of money we don’t have to the financial institutions that got us into this mess in the first place. All over the country, budgets from local to state to federal budgets that were designed to help the people in the greatest need are the ones that are stripped. It’s not just us, that’s just not here and now, that’s the way the world has worked. That’s how the economy trump card is played. If the economy is in trouble that means that there has to be belt tightening. But guess whose belt gets tightened: the belts that are around the narrowest waists. That’s the way that works.
Also, when I talk about triage in the book, I counter-posed it against the broader issues. A lot of people will challenge pursuit of rights that are not well understood and abuses that are not necessarily understood as abuses, because, wait a minute, if you’re talking about human rights, you have to be dealing with genocides and execution and torture, and I say absolutely yes, we must maintain an idea of what has to be dealt with expeditiously and urgently, and of course we have to keep an eye on it! That doesn’t mean we can ignore the borderlines where the issues are not well understood or not agreed upon, because that is where most of conflict actually will be. Right there on the fuzzy border.
The rights of immigrants, legal or otherwise, right now that’s a huge issues. The U.S. has been imprisoning and abusing in all kinds of ways people rounded up of all ages. Immigrants, legal or otherwise – it takes them a long time to get things sorted out. In the meantime, they just abuse people right and left. It’s not just the U.S., we hear more about that all the time, but Europe is getting worse and worse on this all the time. It’s these borderline issues that call for policy and that cause conflict. We can’t ignore them, because there are even worst things going on.
If we are not expanding the boundaries of the rights that are understood as rights and must be protected, then we are losing ground. The more we lose, the more we stand to lose. This is a dynamic that is moving in one direction or another all the time. You can always say, well yes, there is an increasing number of homeless people on the streets, but we don’t have time to think about that, because we have bigger problem to deal with.
It’s easier to see the nature of ‘cause and effect’ if you look at things in the farming sector. We know that where you have farm labor involved and you are spraying pesticides, there is going to be tremendous damage to the people working there, but we keep doing it. When you are mining – mining gold and other such metals – there is going to be mercury released that will get into the water and it will be damaging to the health of children in the area. But we don’t do anything to prevent that sequence. We may check later, and find lots of kids in the Amazon who are suffering from mercury in the system. How could we have known? Of course we knew. There are many sectors like this. We know the downside. We don’t know how to stop the perpetrators from doing it.
The best example of them all is war, and the very idea that you send the bull in to set up the shelves in the china shop, never mind to clean up the mess that the bull made in the china shop. We talk as if we were so seriously concerned about the underprivileged, the disadvantaged, the discriminated against people in all these other parts of the world that we know so little about and, so what we are going to do about it is make war on them to straighten it out. How on earth can thinking people come to a conclusion like that? But imperial societies have always come to that conclusion. We have gotten to be an imperial society and we don’t face that.
That would be dealing with the problem of denial, if we could just get people to face the idea that our whole mindset is drawn from the business of having become an empire and that if we don’t deal with that, it’s not just that we’ll keep getting into wars, it’s that we are in a state of war. The system will require conflict all the time to keep itself going. That’s why you have to get out in front of it and recognize that this is empire, and if we don’t want the wars and we don’t want the cost of it, we have to start turning that around instead of going ahead down that path.
The more we build the military industry complex, the more there will be war. It’s a systemic thing. Once you have an empire, to keep the economy of the empire going, you also have to keep the wars going. The nature of demand is that you have to scare the people in order to keep the budgets coming out. We are building other aspects of this empire in the same way, like the prison industrial complex system. Our prisons are privatized and they are in it for profits. In order to continue to get the profits, you have to keep filling the prisons and having more demand for places to put the prisoners. So instead of thinking about whether it is really necessary to imprison people who have used a little bit of marijuana. Even if you’re sure you don’t want marijuana, there is surely a better way to deal with users of a substance than put them in jail. There is much about our prison system that is also quite insane. Not just immoral, but insane.
About human rights commissioners:
It’s one of those tools that is up for grabs always, it can be used to squelch criticism and curiosity about human rights if controlled by a government that doesn’t want to invite anybody into the discussion, but it can also be used to bring pressure on the government from the inside and the outside – like so many institutions and agencies it can be used for good or ill. The name of our game if we are promoting human rights, is that it works for the benefit of human rights instead of against it.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, I was working on some cases with Amnesty International, one of them being that of Annette Lew and other people who were fighting for organizing and trying to build a political base for respect for human rights and women’s rights and indigenous rights (or at least people’s rights). The Taiwanese felt like they were occupied more or less by mainland China and so they wanted their own government. And so I went over to see if I could get into the prison and be able to do a report for Amnesty on what was going on there. But also I knew that would not be easy, but perhaps making enough of a fuss, people would bring focus on the issue in the U.S. and around the world and bring pressure on what was then the government of the Republic of China. I was turned away from the prison of course by the human rights office of the government there.
Of course, if you anticipate that there are people who are going to come over looking into your human rights situation, then you set up a barricade, and the intelligent way to do that is to set up a human rights office to push these people back. That’s one thing. Human rights as a discourse, and the existence of human rights offices can be a tool and a tool can be used by anyone who picks it up. It can be used for good or ill. The language we use, is the same way.
When Jimmy Carter was in office in the U.S., we set up, for the first time, a human rights office in the State Department, to actually look into abuses in other parts of the world, including some that the U.S. had a great deal to do with (Latin America, but also along the fringes of what was then the Soviet sphere). And then when Carter was gone, and Reagan took over, the office came to be used for the opposite. I had an article that went to the New Republic on the situation of human rights in Chile – this would have been in the early 1980s. After they had published my article, the magazine got a really heated nasty message from Elliott Abrams, who was then head of the human rights office for the State Department. They were using that office the same way that the government of the Republic of China had been using it in Taiwan: to redefine human rights as they choose to and to push back those who were serious about it. That’s something we should understand about any kind of office, any kind of use of language, that it becomes a political football that can be used either way.
That said, I also have to say that a lot of good has been accomplished by many of those offices in parts of the world, particularly in Africa, because when the people who are trying to fight for human rights have so little clout behind them – when it’s so dangerous to do so – if you can get United Nations involvement in trying to set up and monitor such an office, even if the UN then is having to deal also with a repressive regime that is trying to control how that office is used, at least there is some push back FOR human rights. I’m not against countries having human rights offices, in fact I’m for it, but it’s something that people need to understand, like government or social institution itself: an operation that is called a human rights office can go either way.
Can you elaborate a little on your call to indiscipline?
I was thinking of it first in the sense of my advocacy of multidisciplinary studies, but in a way, I think I should go farther and say anti-disciplinary, because usually the whole idea of discipline is used to put up walls beyond which one set of people is not supposed to tread in search of an answer to a question, or a solution to a problem. I think that almost gives away the un-seriousness of the pursuit. If you look for example in the social science disciplines, political science all by itself, the study of politics by itself is entertainment, and economics by itself is religion. But, politics that is not based on an understanding on an intent to incorporate economics is just a popularity contest. Economics without politics has nothing to do with what is actually going to happen, so it’s a game. It’s chess that is less realistic than an actual chessboard. It goes beyond that. It’s a kind of discipline that is imposed by religions and the idea that you don’t dare question what I say god says. You get that also with any category of people that claims expertise and priority. That includes security systems and the economic systems at the top. The mess of expertise is one of the worst things that we have to contend with. The kind of expertise that says don’t question me, you’re not supposed to think about this, I have all the answers.
Can you tell me about a few world leaders who you think have moved away from that self-contradictory thinking that you mention in your book and are implementing indiscipline in their policymaking?
Yes, there is an awful discrepancy between the leaders who can accomplish that sort of thing and the once who are the decision makers. One of the biggest problems we have is that once people are in a position, elected or otherwise, to be seen as leaders, then they have something to lose, and then they are afraid to lead. Because leading means taking risks. Especially if you are trying to lead on behalf of the people, that is, as opposed to the elite. People like Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Ghandi, all kinds of people around the world have been willing to step up to do what it took to make a difference on behalf of the people as a whole. Not many people who are acknowledged people in public office or private power are willing to do that. Some are. I would say Soros has. George Soros has used his economic power to do some good. But that is kind of rare. There are international leaders. Right now for example, Lula from Brazil. He started a program “Fome Zero” (“No Hunger”) and it changed names and “Bolsa Familia” (“Family Safety Net”). It has cut back on poverty and kept a lot of students in school. Things can be done, even when it looks very difficult.
“To every solution there is a problem: any remedy devised to protect the interests of the less powerful will soon be turned by the powerful to their own advantage.” I quote from your book. I see your point. Everyone can play victim, is what I’ve heard. How do you suggest staying ahead of that game?
Anticipating it, and understanding that it will happen. Don’t be blindsided by it every time it happens, and understand that it is systemic. As soon as you implement an increase in minimum wage the folks who don’t want to pay their workers more will say that they have to downsize, because we can’t afford that. They’ll say it’s all your fault and you’re going to lose half those jobs instead. There may be some companies that are handicapped and some kinds of small companies that need some tax credits when such pay raises are implemented, but for the most part that’s just greed and hegemony. We have to expect that they will say that we know that they will downsize. We have to make it harder for them to downsize in response to an increase in minimum wage.
Same thing with laws that have come in to protect women or protect children, the first thing you know is that they are used to discriminate against women. We have to stay awake all the time and anticipate what they are going to do, and counter it and get back on track.
How do you suggest that the root causes of human rights violations be explored more in the public’s eye? For example, when you see a show or read an article or a study that talks about refugees in Sudan, or pirates in Somalia or other injustices in the news, what do you think that the media is doing wrong in telling the story?
One understands the nature of the news business and some of it is hard to get around. Of course, the focus will be on what is happening right now. It’s hard to get people just to give us a back-story and to give it in a way that makes what is happening now comprehensible, but they should try. I think also there is a tendency to focus primarily on the victims, without asking how did this happen and why did it happen without looking in the first place to the perpetrators and not to just the immediate abusers, but to the ones who enabled that abuse, and the ones who promoted the abuse, and the system that promotes it.
For example, sex trafficking. It’s such a big issue now. Of course, it’s horrifying. So the immediate attention is to the particular people who we can identify as having being trafficked and the particular immediate traffickers, but there are all kinds of systemic things that make that turn of events more likely. Look at the kind of economic collapse, meltdown, that means that public jobs will be lost. Well most of those jobs, that have been lost every time there is that kind of meltdown that destroys the public sector first, are women’s jobs, and they are left desperate. They have to be reaching for whatever looks like an opportunity for them. No wonder they are easily fooled in that kind of thing. Also you find more trafficking where there are swarms of workers that are immigrant workers, so we should make it less necessary for people to have to travel so far to do their work. That’s a systemic problem, that so much of the work force is on the move now and can’t settle down and make a real home for a real family.
Also, the warzones – that’s another part of the demand side of the human trafficking business. Where you have a lot of troops gathered, of course, there will be demand for sex services, so you will have people trafficked to meet that demand. There are systemic features on the supply side and the demand side that we never seem to look at or try to do anything about. That would be true with almost any kind of issue that you look at. And when you get right down to the bottom of it, rights abuse is always about inequality, because the bullies don’t go after people who are just as big as they are, the ones who can fight back.
Where you have vulnerability on the one hand and impunity on the other, of course you’re going to have rights violations.
Do you think that there have been any impact assessments on failed states that included that countries with poor governance would rely more on international organizations such as the UN and international aide? Do you think that that impacts whether or not other countries choose to improve their own governance or know that they can rely on these organizations and aide groups when domestic politics and internal strife as a fall-back plan?
I don’t really think it’s the governments, or the would-be leaders trying to put together a government for what are borderline failed states, that are so much the problem, as the countries that destroy these states. Like the way the U.S. goes into Iraq and smashes it up like a bull in a China shop and then says, yeah sure, the UN ought to come in and clean it up. I worry a lot about the U.S. having more impunity precisely, and other hegemonic states, that can act recklessly vis-à-vis another people or another state, and then turn around and say that it’s the role of the United Nations to pick up the pieces. I think that’s a problem.
I also think that whether or not we are talking about human involvement, part of the problem is that we so readily accept failure. We don’t go back. In the first place, if it worked for us, the ones who are supposed to be fixing it, it doesn’t seem to matter nearly enough that it might have been a failure for that bunch of folks we left behind. As long as it works for us, our budget, our careers, our media image, that’s what seems to be what matters too much. Not only do we too readily accept failure, we don’t even define it in a realistic way. But under any circumstances we seem to more readily accept failure than we accept an ongoing challenge. Or we can accept failure like the way we accept responsibility, which is without doing anything about it. That’s a big problem. Especially when it comes to what might be called nation-building, or post-conflict reconstruction or whatever has inspired the West to get involved somewhere, that it didn’t know enough about or care enough about, our model still has been the colonial system. We don’t admit that, we talk an awful lot about how important local buy-in and participation are and we don’t pay any attention to that on the ground, we just run it the way we always have, which is a colonial model.
We can’t stand to think that a project that we think is ours is getting out of control. It has to be out of control, unless we are going to stay on as colonial masters, but that’s a hard one to accept for the hegemonic.
How do those who feel vulnerable and recognize that injustice and feel that powerless get their impact assessment reports read by the proper decision makers who are going to make responsible policies?
Sometimes, it happens because they are determined enough to organize broadly enough to bring their demands into the streets, but lord knows it’s a really, really uphill game. Any group of really vulnerable has to gain allies who are not as vulnerable and build layers of coalitions around them. They also need to organize anybody they see as being in the same category of vulnerability, like indigenous people need to pull together across all the lines they can.
Amazingly enough, a lot of that is happening! There really are international organizations of indigenous peoples. You’d think that would be the last category of people who would be able to find common ground with people on the other side of the world. But there has been a lot of help from lots of international organizations and non-governmental organizations and it does make a difference, but then if the problem being addressed is one within one particular state, then you also need alliances and coalitions within that state too.
And it’s just a really, really major undertaking, because otherwise a government once in office is accessible to the powerful, to the big businesses, people with money to protect and to offer as campaign contributions and it’s very hard for other kinds of people to get access.
If Israel met Hamas on their terms, how would an impact assessment that overrides trumps (i.e. religious concerns, economic concerns, security concerns) look? For example, let’s say Hamas actually played politics as it should since being elected, rather than tactics it used prior to election.
In assessing the problem, everybody seems to forget now that what distinguishes terrorists from other kinds of contenders is that they are put off from the table. They have no way within the system to be heard. That’s not to say that there are not awful people. That’s not to say that harming innocent people is justifiable under any circumstances, but it is to say that there is an approach that should make a difference, which is to bring them to the table.
Maybe some of them you can’t deal with at all, maybe you have to lock them up for the safety of all of us, but if it is a whole movement of people it must be that they have a need that should be dealt with. And in the case of a group like Hamas, for heaven’s sakes, we said, play the game within the system, run for office, have elections the way the rest of us do. They did, they won, and we refuse to acknowledge it and pushed them out again. So we’re not playing the game. The rest of the world is not playing that game fairly with Hamas. It’s hard to see from standing where we are, anything that absolutely promises success, but it’s very clear that the way we are going about it is doomed to failure.
An episode called the peace process that really means a 50-year war is the best example I can see of accepting failure. I can see some good reasons why we wanted to call it the peace process early on as a ploy hoping that it would become one, but at least we have to notice that it didn’t and that we better do something different if we want it to become a peace process.
It seems that all sides are stuck in a big stand-off. It seems that an impact assessment like you promote would have to do away with the kind of terminology we’re talking about right now.
Actually, there have been in-depth studies, you might say impact assessment, the Goldstone Report is one, and it’s amazing how quickly people back off from something that tells an uncomfortable truth, some things that they don’t want to know. That unwillingness to understand is also part of the problem. It goes along with the fact that, as I say, there is no such thing as a system that doesn’t work, every system works for somebody, and this 50-year war is working for a lot of people, and we have to understand that and find ways to make people face that and cut across it.
How do you suggest?
The U.S. and Israel have actually persuaded even the UN Human Rights Council to avoid considering the Goldstone Report that just came out about the consequences of the invasion of Gaza a while back, and the entrapment of a million and a half people in this tiny territory where they are not able to get even the things that they need most. That’s just terrible! It would be wonderful if we could have an international movement that would have to call upon the resources of the media as well to generate an international discourse about this thing, and make people focus on it and understand it. It’s not enough that it is possible for people to understand a situation of abuse, the point is that everybody is under so much pressure in so many ways now, you have to make it impossible for them not to understand in order to get any action.
It’s an occupation that has turned at least part of the area into an open-air concentration camp. People just find it a whole lot easier not to face that.
In your book, you bring up conventions that protect human rights and the importance of their being written, but do you see them being employed in current events?
I think the thing is that those conventions are very valuable. They give us a lever, a handle to pick this up by, but unless there is a category of people, a group, a coalition, a mobilization of activists who are willing to do what it takes to focus international public attention on something, there will be no enforcement. In other words, having the conventions there is essential, but it still doesn’t do the job unless you have people who are willing and able to make it work.
You talk about collective rights in your book, can you share with me your perspective on civil rights laws and the chance they have in countries that have the worst human rights abuses?
I guess, one of the problems, is that even if we are able to get people around the world to understand that there has been a terrible wrong perpetrated against a particular category of people at a time and at a place, we don’t somehow get across to enough people what the background of all that is, how ‘cause and effect’ work to make peoples vulnerable and gives peoples impunity, so that they recognize when there’s another category of people collectivity whose rights are being abused who need to see those rights protected. Most people now understand about the Holocaust and what an awful kind of thing that was and some of the reasons for it, most people understand something about the civil rights movement and how it overcame the terrible level of discrimination and abuse against blacks in the U.S..
A lot of people in the West understand the nature of abuse of women in the Middle East. It’s easier to understand abuses and protections when it’s somebody else, when it’s in some other country. If you talked in Europe about the idea whether people live or die in this country depends on how much money they have, that they can’t get adequate healthcare unless they have adequate money, and that people accept that, they would say it’s shocking, when you think about it. Americans are immune to it, because the kind of a violation that becomes routine ceases to be seen as a violation. So you can apply this to so many kinds of things, for example, the way land has been taken from the people who tilled it, country by country all around the world.
When I first started studying Latin American affairs, it was so easy to attribute the kind of poverty and inequality to the Spanish conquerors and the great landlords of the 15th and 16th centuries, without noticing that the business of pushing people off of their land has been accelerated – it wasn’t getting better, it was getting worse. It continued to get worse all over the world. There are still pressures like that on the indigenous everywhere. I’ve been working on the case of the Mapuche in Chile and taking students down to see first-hand how that works. It’s no longer the great plantations – the old fashion kind, it’s not the sugar or cotton plantations of an earlier day – it’s plantations of pine and eucalyptus, and other commercial logging operations depriving the indigenous people of their land. So, I think that’s the kind of thing you were talking about, and how collective rights, as well individual rights, continue to be violated all over the radar, because people aren’t able to take what they understand about such violations at one time and in one place and transfer it.
So, what about writing more civil rights laws in those areas to protect their rights?
They need tighter laws, but that’s not the main problem in itself. The security trump card is available to be played all over the world, since the U.S. has introduced the war on terror and that there should be laws that are applicable in a case when terror violations have been alleged. They override other kinds of laws that might protect people. There were anti-terror laws that came in under Pinochet, but that kind of thing – the insistence that countries should have anti-terrorist laws – was pushed by the Bush administration all over the world after 9/11, so laws like that are being used to override other laws that were there to protect vulnerable people.
How do we reverse that?
I think somehow it has to start with education, but that also means organization and coalition building and popular movements. How do you get them going? They also have to be in conjunction with communication media campaigns to bring political pressures. And then whatever you can get going on the ground, you have to be able to funnel it to decision makers. To get that kind of chain going is also very difficult. There is nothing easy about this.
Rights are not bestowed, they have to be won and they have to be protected then or else they will lose them again otherwise.
What are your thoughts on Lubna Hussein, the Sudanese woman who wore trousers in public and therefore was convicted of indecency under Islamic law, and the trousers trial in terms of addressing human rights and Islamic law? She had a huge number of supporters.
There was an awful lot of support. I think the trick is if you can genuinely educate people, if you can get them to understand, to allow themselves to understand what is going on, then they really do support human rights. Most people believe that they support human rights, even if they don’t know anything about the particulars. But then they don’t want to know more about it, because it’s painful to know, because it puts an obligation on you to do something about it, to think about it.
Our problem is not that most people don’t care, they do care in principle, we have to get them to care enough to say something, to stand up. There was a poll, I think it was earlier this year or late last year, of 16 countries representing 2/3 of the world population that said that they thought women should have equal rights and that governments and international organizations should contribute to protecting those rights. So, it’s not that public opinion runs the other way, it’s that public opinion does not lead people to take stands that are strong enough or open enough to override the power of those who have too much to lose by acknowledging equal rights.
Individual heroism like Lubna exercised really does make a difference. It doesn’t always, but it does sometimes make a huge difference. I think the government hedged a bit after they saw that reaction and that answers the question that it does make a difference when people get out there and express themselves.
Writing on the topic of individual versus collective rights, you wrote “Perhaps a recombination of supposed first and third world positions would better serve to protect the rights of the majority worldwide.” Can you elaborate?
The discourse and the use of the idea of collective rights for the discourse has so often been dominated by the male leadership of countries where gender rights are so unequal, and then the discourse becomes cover for abusing women. They say, ‘We don’t believe in individual rights, we believe in collective rights, and that includes our right to abuse women,’ but what about the women’s rights. That’s a sham!
What I meant too was that the use of the idea of individual right in the West has become absurd to the point of giving priority to profit. Corporate personhood means that they can steal like swine in the name of corporations, because the corporations get away with pretending that they are individuals. In the meantime, the same country that allows that to happen does not allow individuals necessarily to speak their own languages in the workplace, or to smoke their pot at home or whatever. It is not really a priority given in the West to give individual rights; it’s a priority to the rights of the people who have the most money. They have all kinds of ways written into the law to protect that.
Can you give a current example?
We have a pharmaceutical industry that is able to pour so much money into the Congress that they were able to get a law that says that even though they can sell the drugs more cheaply to other countries, we cannot buy them back from other countries. They can make a law that makes it impossible for a government agency to make a deal with Canadian pharmaceutical importers and exporters to sell them back to us cheap. It’s absurd, the kinds of supposed rights that corporations get under that myth that we call individual rights.
In your book, you say, that “the real victor in the cold war thus was neither West over East nor North over South so much as the private sector over the public sector. That by no means ordained that the state was to fade away or that public budgets were to shrink. Rather it meant that the boundary between public and private domains was to be set by the private sector rather than the public one and that the power base of governments would shift more decisively from popular constituencies to corporate ones.” Do you think this might change given the current economic hardships that we are seeing?
Certainly, it should. You would expect so. That’s what happened when we had the Great Depression of the 1930s. There was a big turn around, because we could get the kind of government that assumed responsibility for it. It isn’t happening now. It certainly has not begun to happen. In a way, ‘we the people’ are begging the supposed healthcare insurers to let in us in the gate, to give the people something to say about their healthcare system. The whole approach is as if it was theirs to give us. There is no reason to have insurance companies involved in healthcare. What do they have to do with healthcare? But they own it, and we are not seriously challenging that. You’re right it should be turning around now, but it has a long way to go. We’re still going in the wrong direction right now.
In your book, you talk about incarceration and that it should be countercyclical, in that rates of serious crime rise in periods of economic decline, but in fact it responds above all now to political climate, particularly the generation of fear. Can you be specific about this observation?
I forget the exact figures, but it seems to me that incarceration, and I’m not certain whether we’re talking about the country as a whole or just in California, but I believe it has quadrupled over the last two or three decades at a time when actual rates of violent crime were dropping. So what does that say? It’s bizarre.
It is an economy that operates on its own now. It manages to build its own demand by scaring people and then just locking up more people for reasons that in the past we wouldn’t have taken seriously as a reason for locking them up. Small amounts of consumption of some drug that happens to be illegal, or perhaps is made illegal for frivolous reasons, like marijuana.
Even economic reasons. We don’t have a debtors’ prison, but we sure drive people to doing the kinds of things that can somehow be defined as illegal and then locking them up. We’ve hugely expanded the prison industry to lock up people who may be in the country illegally, instead of just deporting them. It was bad enough the way they were deported without any of the court procedures that are supposed to be carried out, that they are entitled to, but now we are neither deporting them nor giving them their day in court, we are just holding them in prisons, then sooner or later deporting them. [They’re being thrown in] just for being in the wrong country, and for trying to get a job. The point is that we are feeding the prison industry, which is now a private industry, like the military industry complex. It’s gone the same way as the medical industry, which used to be largely public or at least non-profit, and is now private.
What countries currently have the worst human rights violations?
It depends. There are so many different kinds of violations. China’s record with respect to capital punishment is just awful. The U.S. is one of the worst – one of the top 4, I guess – in capital punishment per capita, but China is by far the worst. The U.S., on the other hand, is the worst by far in the number of people incarcerated. If you are looking at abuses in terms of categories of people, like women, well, maybe Saudi Arabia. It’s hard to say. There are a number of countries that abuse women systematically and straightforwardly as a matter of law, as in Saudi Arabia, others where that kind of abuse may not be sanctioned by law, but it happens anyway. Even in a very modern and sophisticated, and in many ways a democratic country, like Turkey, abuses occur like honor killings of young women, because they are in the company of men they are not related to. There are terrible abuses like that in so many different places.
Do you think the super global powers like China, like the U.S., and countries like Saudi Arabia could find a shared interest among all of them in improving their human rights records, or is this just an exercise in our collective ability to recognize these violations, but our hands are tied?
I don’t think an initiative to find a collective interest will ever come from governments, I think it has to come from people. We have to force our governments to see it. I think it would not be a problem of getting the people to see that they have a collective interest in having governments that respect their rights, but systems operate as they do, because they serve the interests of some people. So that’s what you have to cut across somehow. That means governments won’t act in the public interest unless ‘we the people’ force them to do so.
I liked your suggestion that in the long term, peace means many things and should include “re-visioning of what civilization can and must be about.” And that for the time being, most of all, investing in peace must mean investing in the UN, the ICC, and other multilateral organizations and institutions. The way that civilization is defined depends on what book you read, there’s the Eurocentric view of civilization, the Arab-centric view of civilization and those who want to merge those views and not promote a clash of these civilizations. Can you elaborate?
In a way, we have ceased to aspire to the kinds of things that most people were agreed upon in the 1960s and 1970s in terms of the kind of society that we want, much less we accept. We have accepted the idea that profit motives outrank human rights. How can we ever have accepted something like that?
It could be argued that civilization was built on slavery, but I would say that modernization was built on slavery. It’s not the same thing as civilization. You’re right it depends on what one means by civilization. I like what is attributed to Gandhi, the idea that he was asked about what he thinks about western civilization and he said, ‘I think it would be a good idea.’ Most of us in the so-called Western civilization assume that we have a corner on civilization, the right to define it for ourselves. I don’t think that you find a lot of clash in values among the non-hegemonic. I think that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights represents probably the needs and feelings of most people.
But we have to understand that the hegemonic will try to define it in ways that work particularly for them and in some areas people will claim a right to collective or cultural rights that are not recognized by the universal declaration, meaning that half the population has the right to abuse the other half of the population. Whether it’s men wanting to abuse women, or the rich wanting to abuse the poor, if you start with the assumption that human rights means all people and all rights and that everybody should have a say about what those rights are, then it’s democracy with a small ‘d’. I think there is a global view of what civilization is, but most people don’t have enough to say about the way they see it.
Speaking of civilization, you’ve probably heard about Iranian Nobel Laureate winner Shirin Ebadi who took issue with the “clash of civilization” posture that has characterized West-Middle East relations over the past 30 years. She was Iran’s first female judge, supported the Islamic Revolution in 1978, suffered and then became a human rights attorney. She has said that Middle Eastern leaders use Islam as a shield. “They use Islam to hide behind and violate human rights. Like [Samuel] Huntington, they claim Islam is not compatible with democracy. But this is their interpretation. They interpret Islam in a way that grants them power and supports their power. Any objection to them is then an objection to Islam.” Your thoughts?
I’m very sad about the appearance of that book. Whether Samuel Huntington really thought that something like that was inevitable, or whether he thought it was a timely popular topic, is an open question maybe, but I think it played into what was to come and helped a lot of people come to a conclusion that differences inevitably lead to clash and the thing to do about it is to prepare for clash, instead of prepare for mutual understanding among cultures that are different.
He basically said that Islam is not compatible with democracy. So what, we are supposed to take that at face value?
In the first place, whose democracy? Ours is not compatible with democracy. Ours is run by money. Is that what democracy is supposed to be about? It is just too helpful to too many people to have the idea that violence is inevitable so preparing for it is the way to go. If you prepare for violence of course you’ll get it. If you prepare for peace, maybe that’s what you’ll get.
When I was talking about the trump cards, I really talked about a triad of trump cards, and the other one is religion, because if you credit that kind of religious thinking, I don’t mean from just the Islamic side, but from the so-called Christian side, there is a kind of mindlessness there that is also a conversation stopper that tells people that whoever can claim to speak for God has the last word and that people with better intentions and better sense are not supposed to weigh in. It has the same effect then as the security card and the economics card that just assume a right to override everything else.
I think that she’s right that a great many readers over there use Islam as a shield just in the way that many leaders, including supposedly religious leaders in the U.S., use family values as a shield. I think that people who are serious about human rights just have to keep trying to protect even our words and our dialogue. The whole discourse gets pulled into another direction, if we are not careful.
Ebadi mocked the idea floated by the same leaders that, instead of abiding by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they would write their own “Islamic Declaration of Human Rights.” “How many declarations do we need?” said Ebadi. “If Muslims are allowed to draft their own, we will have a Christian Declaration and a Hindu Declaration… We will have as many declarations as there are faiths. It would be impossible.” How do you react to this?
That’s the problem – it’s not so universal. The pretence at least is that most of the world has had a say in these major documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and if it is just a matter of one group’s dogma versus another group’s dogma, there is no end to that.
What age are we in now? Do you think that we are in a more selfish era than previously? For example, there was the age of enlightenment during the Industrial Revolution, the age of reason, the age of discovery or exploration, the great awakening…
I would say we are in the age of denial. It’s certainly not the age of reason, is it? In some ways, it’s an age of greed. I think most people go along with it, the idea that greed can override, but I don’t think most people are greedy. Most people accept empire, but I don’t think most people are hegemonic. But most people will settle for denial. Trying to survive however they can and to not notice, because they don’t feel empowered to challenge what they see.
That’s really what this book is all about, trying to get past that.
Do you think that it is a matter of time that those who implement the politics of human rights protection will not be vilified or seen as missing the importance of industry and economics, and seen as too sensitive?
I never seem to remember who said what, but I think it was Solomon who said a prophet is not without honour saving his own country. We don’t mind being reminded that somebody else way far away is being abused or abusing other people, we just don’t want to know that it is right here, because we don’t know what to do about it and we don’t want to feel responsible for it.
How do we stop the vilification?
There are ways. We need more ways of protecting and recognizing the kind of work that needs to be done when we see it. Instead of backing off and disassociating from people who have the nerve to tell the truth, we should protect them, we should do them honors. We don’t. We have laws that are supposed to protect whistle-blowers, but they don’t, because most people understand that it’s dangerous to be a whistle-blower and it can be dangerous to be associated with whistle-blowers. We just have that upside down and backwards. We bestow more honours on military leaders who bomb villages than we do the people who might have tried to point out ahead of time that if you drop that bomb you are going to destroy the village.
If you can get people to listen and think about it, maybe you can help them understand, that caring about what your country is doing is patriotic and taking responsibility is perhaps even more patriotic. We’re not led to think that way. We’re led that blindly following people right off a cliff is the way to go. The kind of twist that we need to our way of thinking is so huge.
(*) Jan Knippers Black is a Professor in the Graduate School of International Policy Studies of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. THE POLITICS OF HUMAN RIGHTS PROTECTION: Moving Intervention Upstream with Impact Assessment by Jan Knippers Black / Rowman & Littlefield
Blackwater Prepared Bribes After 2007 Nisoor Massacre (DemocracyNow)
Former executives at the private military firm Blackwater have revealed the company authorized around $1 million to bribe Iraqi officials in the aftermath of the September 2007 killings of seventeen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square. The New York Times reports the payments were approved after the Iraqi government called for Blackwater’s expulsion from Iraq, threatening the company’s lucrative annual contract. It’s unclear if any Iraqi officials ultimately received the payments, which would violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act banning bribes to foreign governments. Despite the Iraqi government’s initial calls for ousting Blackwater, it only revoked the firm’s main operating license earlier this year. Speaking to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Democracy Now! correspondent and independent journalist Jeremy Scahill said the revelations could lead to criminal charges against Blackwater.
Jeremy Scahill: “Let’s remember here that we are talking about the single worst massacre committed by a private force in Iraq of that war, committed by Blackwater, the Nisoor Square massacre. It was the biggest diplomatic crisis between Washington and Baghdad at the time. You had the Iraqi government saying that Blackwater was banned from the country and then suddenly doing an about face, and Blackwater remains in Iraq to this day. So on the issue of criminality here, when you have the FBI going over to conduct a criminal investigation, if you had Blackwater officials attempting to bribe Iraqis, that’s tantamount to tampering with a federal investigation. There is a grand jury sitting right now in North Carolina that has reportedly been informed of these allegations by Blackwater officials, very serious.”
Blackwater continues to work in Iraq under an aviation contract with the US State Department. As XE Services LLC it tries to get a foothold in Somalia, Kenya and surrounding seas.
Italy Convicts CIA Agents of Kidnapping (AP)
2003 case is first to challenge practice of extraordinary rendition
An Italian judge today convicted 23 Americans of the 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric on a Milan street, in a landmark case involving the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program in the war on terrorism. Judge Oscar Magi acquitted three other Americans, citing diplomatic immunity. Former Milan CIA station chief Robert Seldon Lady received the stiffest sentence, eight years in prison. The other 22 each received a five-year sentence. All were tried in absentia.
All but one of the Americans were identified by prosecutors as CIA agents. Their lawyers entered innocent pleas on their behalf, and they are considered fugitives from Italian justice. They were convicted of kidnapping Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr and transferring him to US bases in Italy and Germany. He was then moved to Egypt, where he says he was tortured. Nasr was released after four years in prison without being charged.
U.S. (In-)Justice Dept. Subpoenaed Indymedia Site for Web Visitors
The U.S. American Justice Department is coming under criticism for demanding information on visitors to the independent progressive news website Indymedia. A US attorney in Indiana reportedly subpoenaed the records from Indymedia earlier this year and then ordered the site to keep silent about the request. The Electronic Frontier Foundation says the subpoena demanded the individual internet protocol addresses of every single Indymedia visitor. The group says the subpoena was ultimately dropped.
We do not send pictures with these reports, because of the volume, but picture this emetic scene with your inner eye:
A dying Somali child in the macerated arms of her mother besides their bombed shelter with Islamic graffiti looks at a fat trader, who discusses with a local militia chief and a UN representative at a harbour while USAID provided GM food from subsidised production is off-loaded by WFP into the hands of local “distributors” and dealers – and in the background a western warship and a foreign fishing trawler ply the waters of a once sovereign, prosper and proud nation, which was a role model for honesty and development in the Horn of Africa. (If you feel that this is overdrawn – come with us into Somalia and see the even more cruel reality yourself!) – and if you need lively stills or video material on Somalia, please do contact us.
There is no limit to what a person can do or how far one can go to help
- if one doesn’t mind who gets the credit !
ECOTERRA Intl. maintains a register for persons missing or abducted in the Somali seas (Foreign seafarers as well as Somalis). Inquiries by family member can be sent by e-mail to office[at]ecoterra-international.org
For families of presently captive seafarers – in order to advise and console their worries – ECOTERRA Intl. can establish contacts with professional seafarers, who had been abducted in Somalia, and their wives as well as of a Captain of a sea-jacked and released ship, who agreed to be addressed “with questions, and we will answer truthfully”.
ECOTERRA – ALERTS and pending issues:
PIRATE ATTACK GULF OF ADEN: Advice on Who to Contact and What to Do http://www.noonsite.com/Members/sue/R2008-09-08-2
NATURAL RESOURCES & ARMED FISH POACHERS: Foreign navies entering the 200nm EEZ of Somalia and foreign helicopters and troops must respect the fact that especially all wildlife is protected by Somali national as well as by international laws and that the protection of the marine resources of Somalia from illegally fishing foreign vessels should be an integral part of the anti-piracy operations. Likewise the navies must adhere to international standards and not pollute the coastal waters with oil, ballast water or waste from their own ships but help Somalia to fight against any dumping of any waste (incl. diluted, toxic or nuclear waste). So far and though the AU as well as the UN has called since long on other nations to respect the 200 nm EEZ, only now the two countries (Spain and France) to which the most notorious vessels and fleets are linked have come up with a declaration that they will respect the 200 nm EEZ of Somalia but so far not any of the navies operating in the area pledged to stand against illegal fishing. So far not a single illegal fishing vessel has been detained by the naval forces, though they had been even informed about several actual cases, where an intervention would have been possible. Illegally operating Tuna fishing vessels (many from South Korea, some from Greece and China) carry now armed personnel and force their way into the Somali fishing grounds – uncontrolled or even protected by the naval forces mandated to guard the Somali waters against any criminal activity, which included arms carried by foreign fishing vessels in Somali waters.
LLWs / NLWs: According to recently leaked information the anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden are also used as a cover-up for the live testing of recently developed arsenals of so called non-lethal as well as sub-lethal weapons systems. (Pls request details) Neither the Navies nor the UN has come up with any code of conduct in this respect, while the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program (JNLWP) is sponsoring several service-led acquisition programs, including the VLAD, Joint Integration Program, and Improved Flash Bang Grenade. Alredy in use in Somalia are so called Non-lethal optical distractors, which are visible laser devices that have reversible optical effects. These types of non-blinding laser devices use highly directional optical energy. Somalia is also a testing ground for the further developments of the Active Denial System (ADS) Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD). If new developments using millimeter wave sources that will help minimize the size, weight, and system cost of an effective Active Denial System which provides “ADS-ACTD-like” repel effects, are used has not yet been revealed. Obviously not only the US is developing and using these kind of weapons as the case of MV MARATHON showed, where a Spanish naval vessel was using optical lasers – the stand-off was then broken by the killing of one of the hostage seafarers. Local observers also claim that HEMI devices, producing Human Electro-Muscular Incapacitation (HEMI) Bioeffects, have been used in the Gulf of Aden against Somalis. Exposure to HEMI devices, which can be understood as a stun-gun shot at an individual over a larger distance, causes muscle contractions that temporarily disable an individual. Research efforts are under way to develop a longer-duration of this effect than is currently available. The live tests are apparently done without that science understands yet the effects of HEMI electrical waveforms on a human body.
WARBOTS, UAVs etc.: Peter Singer says: “By cutting the already tenuous link between the public and its nation’s foreign policy, pain-free war would pervert the whole idea of the democratic process and citizenship as they relate to war. When a citizenry has no sense of sacrifice or even the prospect of sacrifice, the decision to go to war becomes just like any other policy decision, weighed by the same calculus used to determine whether to raise bridge tolls. Instead of widespread engagement and debate over the most important decision a government can make, you get popular indifference. When technology turns war into something merely to be watched, and not weighed with great seriousness, the checks and balances that undergird democracy go by the wayside. This could well mean the end of any idea of democratic peace that supposedly sets our foreign-policy decision making apart. Such wars without costs could even undermine the morality of “good” wars. When a nation decides to go to war, it is not just deciding to break stuff in some foreign land. As one philosopher put it, the very decision is “a reflection of the moral character of the community who decides.” Without public debate and support and without risking troops, the decision to go to war becomes the act of a nation that doesn’t give a damn.”
ECOTERRA Intl., whose work does focus on nature- and human-rights-protection and – as the last international environmental organization still working in Somalia – had alerted ship-owners since 1992, many of whom were fishing illegally in the since 1972 established 200 nm territorial waters of Somalia and today’s 200nm Exclusive Economic Zone (UNCLOS) of Somalia, to stay away from Somali waters. The non-governmental organization had requested the international community many times for help to protect the coastal waters of the war-torn state from all exploiters, but now lawlessness has seriously increased and gone out of hand – even with the navies.
ECOTERRA members with marine and maritime expertise, joined by it’s ECOP-marine group, are closely and continuously monitoring and advising on the Somali situation. (for previous information concerning the topics please google keywords ECOTERRA (and) SOMALIA)
The network of the SEAFARERS ASSISTANCE PROGRAMME helped significantly in most sea-jack cases. ECOTERRA Intl. is working in Somalia since 1986 on human-rights and nature protection, while ECOP-marine concentrates on illegal fishing and the protection of the marine ecosystems. Your support counts too.
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Ecoterra Press Release 282 – The Somalia Chronicle June – December 2009, no 95b
How dictators are blessed by the curse of terror
By Nicholas Sengoba
In case you missed it, late last week, part of Kampala’s Central Business District was closed off courtesy of a suspected bomb, planted in a building. This came soon after security agencies had warned that a militant Somali group called Al Shabaab had vowed to attack Uganda. For the record, Uganda provides the bulk of peacekeepers in Somalia who the militants view as the stumbling block on their way to capturing power and establishing an Islamist government.
I called a journalist friend who is usually in the know on security matters. He laughed and cynically said that what we were witnessing was the usual ploy by people who wanted to cause panic and make money out of it. Said he, ‘that is what we call credit crunch security. Now that Joseph Kony has run away, there are no more justifications for operational funds. Al Shabaab and the war on terror will provide the next excuse for making free money in the name of maintaining security!’
Indeed for all the theatrics of mean looking bomb experts and security agents in dark glasses, police cars with sirens demonstrating urgency and emergency, the whole thing turned up to be a costly glorified hoax. It is such incidences that should leave the ordinary citizen concerned not just for their money but for their lives as well.
The world has changed ever since the war on terror was announced after 9/11. In acts of self defence but more akin to vengeance, the so-called guardians of sanity and civil liberties -the West- have acted very high-handedly killing and torturing suspected terrorist.
That is where cynical dictators in Africa have picked up the baton. In almost every African country, leaders have over utilised the war on terror with the quiet acquiesce of the West. A soft approach has been adopted towards those viewed as allies in this war. The leader of a country like Uganda that has sacrificed its citizens in Somalia may get away with flawed elections without the fear of sanctions for bad governance.
The same applies to misuse of public funds. A few years ago the UK government saw no problem when a lot of tax payer’s money in Tanzanian was spent procuring a radar system from a British company for defensive purposes against ‘terror threats.’ The purchase was kept in the dark by corrupt officials under the excuse that transparency would expose security details to terrorists. The system turned out to be useless.
A lot of legislation allowing governments to infringe on privacy and basic human freedoms is either in the pipeline or is being enforced as laws to curb ‘the spread of terrorism.’ Uganda and Zimbabwe with long serving leaders, who have a history of rigged elections and intolerance to an ever growing opposition, were the first on the continent to moot the idea of legalising phone tapping by security agencies that may also open and read ‘suspected mail’ that compromises national security. There are laws making it criminal for the media to give audience to suspected terrorists.
Governments may now forcefully take over the property of citizens under the pretext that these properties are strategic in the fight against terrorism. In other instances businesses have been closed down and bank accounts frozen because of suspicion that they are generating funds for terrorists.
Citizens can be stopped from travelling citing intelligence reports of terrorism. Apparently many of these measures are intended for opponents of the government to cow them into submission. And we have not yet talked about denying suspected terrorists bail or detaining them for more than the stipulated 48 hours before being presented in court. This means that an opponent of the State may be kept away by simply being branded a terrorist.
That is why as we move closer to the election of 2011, it is important that the lips of public officials are read closely when they talk about terrorism. They could be trying their luck at reaping blessings out of a curse.
Somalia assassination undermines case for Obama’s Nobel
by Jessica Corsi (TheHarvardLawRecord)(*)
Many claim that President Barack Obama ’91 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to express international support for the U.S.’ reengagement with multilateral peace efforts, including efforts to bring an end to wars in Iraq and elsewhere.
This new U.S. foreign policy stands in contrast to the U.S. Special Forces’ recent targeted assassination of a highly wanted Al Qaeda member in Somalia. On September 14th, U.S. helicopters opened fire on a convoy of trucks in southern Somalia and shot and killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nbahan, who is said to be responsible for the bombing of an Israeli hotel on the coast of Kenya in 2002, and is suspected to have played a role in two 1998 attacks upon American embassies in East Africa. Targeted assassinations in the territory of a country whose government is both recognized and supported by the U.S. is a counterproductive way to reengage factions that the U.S. had previously alienated.
We could start by asking the question of whether or not this attack was legal under international humanitarian law, but this is neither the most interesting nor the most pressing question. Instead of debating whether the war on terror is in fact a war, whether the people shot and killed were enemy combatants, and whether the U.S. had just cause to fly over Somalia and shoot these people dead, we should instead ask: was this a good idea? The legality of the issue is fuzzy and doubtful, but more importantly, this type of military operation is bad policy: we want to change the world’s opinion about the U.S., and in particular ideas about the U.S.’ use of force, and who is or is not its “enemy”. If President Obama wants to move away from George W. Bush’s aggressive military posture, a targeted assassination that sends the message “if you cross us, we will take you out” is not a change in tune but simply more of the same.
There are several other messages the U.S. could send that would fit with the underlying assumptions that prompted the award of the Nobel Peace Prize. If we want to reengage international institutions, reinvigorate the idea that the U.S. is a team player, and promote the notion of an international rule of law, we could begin with a message that if you break the law, we will do everything in our power to deal with this disagreement through the law. It is not clear whether the Obama administration has considered this approach. We have not heard any talk of, for example, capturing Saleh Ali Saleh Nbahan and bringing him to his native Kenya, or to the International Criminal Court, for trial (and now, it’s too late). It is discomfiting to learn of the assassination after the fact without being assured that alternative international legal strategies designed to strengthen global systems and global security were considered.
Perhaps the most important message that the Obama administration could have chosen to send instead would have been that, if there are some fundamental differences at issue between the U.S. and people set on attacking the U.S., the country will do everything in our power to understand and better meet the interests of the other side. Commentators supporting Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize have emphasized the President’s unprecedented engagement with the Muslim world. But swooping in and shooting suspected terrorists dead undermnines such efforts, which would better ensure the U.S.’ long term national security. In the process, the U.S. fails to learn where terrorists are coming from, why they are fighting, for what they are fighting for, how it is they have come to believe so strongly that the U.S. is an enemy to be attacked, and why it is that terrorist groups are not running out of converts.
It is both too easy and too flimsy of an explanation to think that all terrorists are madmen that can’t be reasoned with. The story can be written from another angle, and that story is one of an oppressive U.S. that wages war in Afghanistan and Iraq; abducts, tortures, and kills innocent people because they are of Arab descent or are Muslim; and gets away with flouting international human rights standards in torture prisons like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. This story continues to gain strength, as evinced with such recent developments as Wednesday’s Italian conviction of 23 Americans involved in CIA renditions – a conviction that sends a strong message that the world has not forgotten nor is it willing to let the U.S. off the hook for its violence and illegal war on terror strategies. If we want to change the perception that the U.S. gets to run around the world shooting whoever it wants because it has the biggest guns, we should at least stop sending special forces to assassinate suspects as they drive through remote deserts.
What is even more eerie is that this represents a significant shift in U.S. foreign policy towards Somalia. Not since the 1993 “Battle of Black Hawk Down” has the U.S. launched a helicopter attack there. The attack came at a time when Somalia is considered increasingly lawless, and the local Islamist insurgent group, Al-Shabab, which has links to Al Qaeda, continues its attempts to overthrow Somalia’s internationally recognized government. Since Black Hawk Down, the U.S. has limited its strikes on the country to the use of long-range missiles. In this attack, we see the capability and willingness of the Obama administration to gather precise intelligence as to the location of wanted terrorist suspects, and to then strike quickly to assassinate them. As this is the first military action of this sort since Obama took office, it could be an indication that we should expect more targeted attacks in the future, especially as U.S. troops are withdrawn from the ground, in Iraq and elsewhere. Unlike a prolonged ground war, this attack communicates that the Obama administration intends to attack Al Qaeda officials wherever they are found.
Knee jerk reactions to this news are often that we can claim victory and a smart strategy. “We got the guy! He deserved it!” people cry. It is smarter to fight them where we find them than to keep our troops under fire in any one country, others think. But this is neither a strategic nor a victorious approach. It is not peaceful and its not smart, because it doesn’t address the underlying issues that have led us into a fight against terrorists and extremism in the first place. Here’s hoping the Nobel Peace Prize is enough of a motivational tool to effectuate this much-needed reorientation.
(*) Jessica Corsi is a 3L and is Opinion Editor of the Harvard Law Record.
The Inhuman Stain: Saying Yes to State Terror
Written by Chris Floyd
I’ve been writing about the case of Maher Arar since December 2003. He is the innocent Canadian man who was seized by U.S officials on his way back to Canada and then, at the order of the Justice Department, “renditioned” to Syria, where it was known that the authorities would torture the alleged “terrorist.” They did, brutally. He was finally released, and his innocence was confirmed by the Canadian government, which paid him some $9 million for its part in his ordeal. – The United States, on the other hand, made no apologies, no restitution; instead, the government has resolutely blocked any attempt by Arar to seek justice in American courts.
Now the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has dismissed his case, ruling instead that the Executive Branch can capture and torture innocent people as they please, with no legal remedy for the victim, as long as they evoke, however spuriously, the sacred doctrine of “national security.” Indeed, it is entirely accurate to say that “national security,” as determined solely by the president and his designated minions, is now the actual constituion of the United States, the principle by which the state is shaped and governed. Scott Horton at Harper’s has the details.
Below is the first piece I wrote on the Arar case. It should be noted that all the draconian authoritarian powers discussed in this article – almost six years and two presidential elections later – are still in force, and still being rigorously defended by the Obama Administration.
There is a horrible scandal eating away the heart of the American body politic. Among the many corrupted currents loosed upon the nation by the Bush Regime, this scandal is perhaps the worst, for it abets all the others and breeds new pestilence, new perversions at every turn.
Last month, Maher Arar of Canada detailed his ordeal at the hands of Attorney General John Ashcroft’s shadowy security “organs.” On his way back home from a family holiday in Tunis, the Syrian-born Arar — 16 years a Canadian citizen — was seized at a New York airport. Jailed and interrogated without charges, on unspecified allegations of unspecified connections to unspecified terrorist groups, he was then summarily deported, without a hearing, to Syria. When he told the Homeland Chekists he would be tortured there — his family was marked down as dissidents by Syria’s Baathist regime — the Chekists replied that their organ “was not the body that deals with the Geneva Conventions regarding torture.” They shackled him and flew him to the American-friendly regime in Jordan; from there he was bundled across the border to Damascus.
But this is not the scandal we were speaking of.
For 10 months and 10 days, Arar was held in a dank cell in Syria: a “grave,” he called it, a three-by-six unlighted hole filled with cat and rat piss falling down from the grating overhead. He was beaten over and over, often with electrical cable, for weeks on end, kept awake for days, made to witness and hear even more exquisite tortures applied to other prisoners. He was forced to sign false confessions. Ashcroft’s Baathist comrades had a pre-set storyline they wanted filled in: that Arar had gone to Afghanistan, attended terrorist training camps, was plotting mayhem — the usual template. Arar, who had spent years working as a computer consultant for a Boston-based high-tech firm, had done none of those things. Yet he was whipped, broken and tortured into submission.
But this is not the scandal we were speaking of.
Arar’s case is not extraordinary. In the past two years, the Bushist organs have “rendered” thousands of detainees, without charges, hearings or the need to produce any evidence whatsoever, into the hands of regimes which the U.S. government itself denounces for the widespread use of torture. Apparatchiks of the organs make no secret of the practice — or of their knowledge that the “rendered” will indeed be beaten, burned, drugged, raped, even killed. “I do it with my eyes open,” one renderer told the Washington Post. Detainees — including lifelong American residents — have been snatched from the homes, businesses, schools, from streets and airports, and sent to torture pits like Syria, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan — even the stateless chaos of Somalia, where Ashcroft simply dumped more than 30 Somali-Americans last year, without charges, without evidence, without counsel, and with no visible means of support, as the London Times reports.
But this is not the scandal we were speaking of.
Of course, the American organs needn’t rely exclusively on foreigners for torture anymore. Under the enlightened leadership of Ashcroft, Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and other upstanding Christian statesmen, America has now established its own centers for what the organs call “operational flexibility.” These include bases in Bagram, Afghanistan and Diego Garcia, the Indian Ocean island that was forcibly depopulated in the 1960s to make way for a U.S. military installation. Here, the CIA runs secret interrogation units that are even more restricted than the American concentration camp on Guantanamo Bay. Detainees — again, held without charges or evidentiary requirements — are “softened up” by beatings at the hands of military police and Special Forces troops before being subjected to “stress and duress” techniques: sleep deprivation (officially condemned as a torture method by the U.S. government), physical and psychological disorientation, withholding of medical treatment, etc. When beatings and “duress” don’t work, detainees are then “packaged” — hooded, gagged, bound to stretchers with duct tape — and “rendered” into less dainty hands elsewhere.
But this is not the scandal we were speaking of.
Not content with capture and torture, the organs have been given presidential authority to carry out raids and kill “suspected terrorists” (including Americans) on their own volition — without oversight, without charges, without evidence — anywhere in the world, including on American soil. In addition to this general license to kill, Bush has claimed the power to designate anyone he pleases “an enemy combatant” and have them “rendered” into the hands of the organs or simply killed at his express order — without charges, without evidence, with no judicial or legislative oversight whatsoever. The life of every American citizen — indeed, every person on earth — is now at the disposal of his arbitrary whim. Never in history has an individual claimed such universal power — and had the force to back it up.
But this is not the scandal we were speaking of.
All of the above facts — each of them manifest violations of international law and/or the U.S. Constitution — have been cheerfully attested to, for years now, by the organs’ own appartchiks, in the Post, the NY Times, Newsweek, the Guardian, the Economist and other high-profile, mainstream publications. The stories appear — then they disappear. There is no reaction. No outcry in Congress or the courts — the supposed guardians of the people’s rights — beyond a few wan calls for more formality in the concentration camp processing or judicial “warrants” for torture. And among the great mass of “the people” itself, there is — nothing. Silence. Inattention. Acquiescence. State terrorism — lawless seizure, filthy torture, official murder — is simply accepted, a part of “normal life,” as in Nazi Germany or Stalin’s empire, where “decent people” with “nothing to hide” approved and applauded the work of the “organs” in “defending national security.”
This is the scandal, this is the nation’s festering shame. This acquiescence to state terror will breed — and attract — a thousand evils for every one it supposedly prevents.
Anti-Empire Report
By William Blum
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” — Voltaire
Question: How many countries do you have to be at war with to be disqualified from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?
Answer: Five. Barack Obama has waged war against only Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. He’s holding off on Iran until he actually gets the prize.
Somalian civil society and court system are so devastated from decades of war that one wouldn’t expect its citizens to have the means to raise serious legal challenges to Washington’s apparent belief that it can drop bombs on that sad land whenever it appears to serve the empire’s needs. But a group of Pakistanis, calling themselves “Lawyers Front for Defense of the Constitution” , and remembering just enough of their country’s more civilized past, has filed suit before the nation’s High Court to make the federal government stop American drone attacks on countless innocent civilians. The group declared that a Pakistan Army spokesman claimed to have the capability to shoot down the drones, but the government had made a policy decision not to. 1
The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, behaves like the world is one big lawless Somalia and the United States is the chief warlord. On October 20 the president again displayed his deep love of peace by honoring some 80 veterans of Vietnam at the White House, after earlier awarding their regiment a Presidential Unit Citation for its “extraordinary heroism and conspicuous gallantry”. 2 War correspondent Michael Herr has honored Vietnam soldiers in his own way: “We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.” 3
What would it take for the Obamaniacs to lose any of the stars in their eyes for their dear Nobel Laureate? Perhaps if the president announced that he was donating his prize money to build a monument to the First — “Oh What a Lovely” — World War? The memorial could bear the inscription: “Let us remember that Rudyard Kipling coaxed his young son John into enlisting in this war. John died his first day in combat. Kipling later penned these words:
“If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.”
“The Constitution supposes what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the legislature.” — James Madison, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, April 2, 1798.
A wise measure, indeed, but one American president after another has dragged the nation into bloody war without the approval of Congress, the American people, international law, or world opinion. Millions marched against the war in Iraq before it began. Millions more voted for Barack Obama in the belief that he shared their repugnance for America’s Wars Without End. They had no good reason to believe this — Obama’s campaign was filled with repeated warlike threats against Iran and Afghanistan — but they wanted to believe it.
If machismo explains war, if men love war and fighting so much, why do we have to compel them with conscription on pain of imprisonment? Why do the powers-that- be have to wage advertising campaigns to seduce young people to enlist in the military? Why do young men go to extreme lengths to be declared exempt for physical or medical reasons? Why do they flee into exile to avoid the draft? Why do they desert the military in large numbers in the midst of war? Why don’t Sweden or Switzerland or Costa Rica have wars? Surely there are many macho men in those countries.
“Join the Army, visit far away places, meet interesting people, and kill them.”
War licenses men to take part in what would otherwise be described as psychopathic behavior.
“Sometimes I think it should be a rule of war that you have to see somebody up close and get to know him before you can shoot him.” — Colonel Potter, M*A*S*H
“In the struggle of Good against Evil, it’s always the people who get killed.” Eduardo Galeano
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a Taliban leader declared that “God is on our side, and if the world’s people try to set fire to Afghanistan, God will protect us and help us.” 4
“I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.” — George W. Bush, 2004, during the war in Iraq. 5
“I believe that Christ died for my sins and I am redeemed through him. That is a source of strength and sustenance on a daily basis.” — Barack Obama. 6
Why don’t church leaders forbid Catholics from joining the military with the same fervor they tell Catholics to stay away from abortion clinics?
God, war, the World Bank, the IMF, free trade agreements, NATO, the war on terrorism, the war on drugs, “anti-war” candidates, and Nobel Peace Prizes can be seen as simply different instruments for the advancement of US imperialism.
Tom Lehrer, the marvelous political songwriter of the 1950s and 60s, once observed: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” Perhaps each generation has to learn anew what a farce that prize has become, or always was. Its recipients include quite a few individuals who had as much commitment to a peaceful world as the Bush administration had to truth.
One example currently in the news: Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres which won the prize in 1998. Kouchner, now France’s foreign secretary, has long been urging military action against Iran. Last week he called upon Iran to make a nuclear deal acceptable to the Western powers or else there’s no telling what horror Israel might inflict upon the Iranians. Israel “will not tolerate an Iranian bomb,” he said. “We know that, all of us.” 7 There is a word for such a veiled threat — “extortion”, something normally associated with the likes of a Chicago mobster of the 1930s … “Do like I say and no one gets hurt.” Or as Al Capone once said: “Kind words and a machine gun will get you more than kind words alone.”
The continuing desperate quest to find something good to say about US foreign policy
Not the crazy, hateful right wing, not racist or disrupting public meetings, not demanding birth certificates … but the respectable right, holding high positions in academia and in every administration, Republican or Democrat, members of the highly esteemed Council on Foreign Relations. Here’s Joshua Kurlantzick, a “Fellow for Southeast Asia” at CFR, writing in the equally esteemed and respectable Washington Post about how — despite all the scare talk — it wouldn’t be so bad if Afghanistan actually turned into another Vietnam because “Vietnam and the United States have become close partners in Southeast Asia, exchanging official visits, building an important trading and strategic relationship and fostering goodwill between governments, businesses and people on both sides. … America did not win the war there, but over time it has won the peace. … American war veterans publicly made peace with their old adversaries … A program [to exchange graduate students and professors] could ensure that the next generation of Afghan leaders sees an image of the United States beyond that of the war.” 8 And so on.
On second thought, this is not so much right-wing jingoism as it is … uh … y’know … What’s the word? … Ah yes, “pointless”. Just what is the point? Germany and Israel are on excellent terms … therefore, what point can we make about the Holocaust?
As to America not winning the war in Vietnam, that’s worse than pointless. It’s wrong. Most people believe that the United States lost the war. But by destroying Vietnam to its core, by poisoning the earth, the water, the air, and the gene pool for generations, the US in fact achieved its primary purpose: it left Vietnam a basket case, preventing the rise of what might have been a good development option for Asia, an alternative to the capitalist model; for the same reason the United States has been at war with Cuba for 50 years, making sure that the Cuban alternative model doesn’t look as good as it would if left in peace.
And in all the years since the Vietnam War ended, the millions of Vietnamese suffering from diseases and deformities caused by US sprayings of the deadly chemical “Agent Orange” have received from the United States no medical care, no environmental remediation, no compensation, and no official apology. That’s exactly what the Afghans — their land and/or their bodies permeated with depleted uranium, unexploded cluster bombs, and a witch’s brew of other charming chemicals — have to look forward to in Kurlantzick’ s Brave New World. “If the U.S. relationship with Afghanistan eventually resembles the one we now have with Vietnam, we should be overjoyed,” he writes. God Bless America.
One further thought about Afghanistan: The suggestion that the United States could, and should, solve its (self-created) dilemma by simply getting out of that god-forsaken place is dismissed out of hand by the American government and media; even some leftist critics of US policy are reluctant to embrace so bold a step — Who knows what horror may result? But when the Soviet Union was in the process of quitting Afghanistan (during the period of May 1988-February 1989) who in the West insisted that they remain? For any reason. No matter what the consequences of their withdrawal. The reason the Russians could easier leave than the Americans can now is that the Russians were not there for imperialist reasons, such as oil and gas pipelines. Similar to why the US can’t leave Iraq.
Washington’s eternal “Cuba problem” — the one they can’t admit to.
“Here we go again. I suppose old habits die hard,” said US Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, on October 28 before the General Assembly voted on the annual resolution to end the US embargo against Cuba. “The hostile language we have just heard from the Foreign Minister of Cuba,” she continued, “seems straight out of the Cold War era and is not conducive to constructive progress.” Her 949-word statement contained not a word about the embargo; not very conducive to a constructive solution to the unstated “Cuba problem”, the one about Cuba inspiring the Third World, the fear that the socialist virus would spread.
Since the early days of the Cuban Revolution assorted anti-communists and capitalist true-believers around the world have been relentless in publicizing the failures, real and alleged, of life in Cuba; each perceived shortcoming is attributed to the perceived shortcomings of socialism — It’s simply a system that can’t work, we are told, given the nature of human beings, particularly in this modern, competitive, globalized, consumer-oriented world.
In response to such criticisms, defenders of Cuban society have regularly pointed out how the numerous draconian sanctions imposed by the United States since 1960 have produced many and varied scarcities and sufferings and are largely responsible for most of the problems pointed out by the critics. The critics, in turn, say that this is just an excuse, one given by Cuban apologists for every failure of their socialist system. However, it would be very difficult for the critics to prove their point. The United States would have to drop all sanctions and then we’d have to wait long enough for Cuban society to make up for lost time and recover what it was deprived of, and demonstrate what its system can do when not under constant assault by the most powerful force on earth.
In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against the United States for $181.1 billion in compensation for economic losses and loss of life during the first 39 years of this aggression. The suit held Washington responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and the wounding and disabling of 2,099 others. In the ten years since, these figures have of course all increased. The sanctions, in numerous ways large and small, make acquiring many kinds of products and services from around the world much more difficult and expensive, often impossible; frequently, they are things indispensable to Cuban medicine, transportation or industry; simply transferring money internationally has become a major problem for the Cubans, with banks being heavily punished by the United States for dealing with Havana; or the sanctions mean that Americans and Cubans can’t attend professional conferences in each other’s country.
These examples are but a small sample of the excruciating pain inflicted by Washington upon the body, soul and economy of the Cuban people.
For years American political leaders and media were fond of labeling Cuba an “international pariah”. We don’t hear much of that any more. Perhaps one reason is the annual vote in the General Assembly on the resolution, which reads: “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba”.
This is how the vote has gone:
Year Votes (Yes-No) No Votes
1992 59-2 US, Israel
1993 88-4 US, Israel, Albania, Paraguay
1994 101-2 US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1995 117-3 US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1996 138-3 US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1997 143-3 US, Israel
1998 157-2 US, Israel
1999 155-2 US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2000 167-3 US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2001 167-3 US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2002 167-3 US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2003 173-3 US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2004 179-3 US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2005 182-4 US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2006 183-4 US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2007 184-4 US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2008 185-3 US, Israel, Palau
2009 187-3 US, Israel, Palau
How it began, from State Department documents: Within a few months of the Cuban revolution of January 1959, the Eisenhower administration decided “to adjust all our actions in such a way as to accelerate the development of an opposition in Cuba which would bring about a change in the Cuban Government, resulting in a new government favorable to U.S. interests.” 9
On April 6, 1960, Lester D. Mallory, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in an internal memorandum: “The majority of Cubans support Castro … The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. … every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.” Mallory proposed “a line of action which … makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” 10 Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the suffocating embargo.
Notes
1.The Nation (Pakistan English-language daily newspaper), October 10, 2009 ↩
2.Washington Post, October 20, 2009 ↩
3.Michael Herr, “Dispatches” (1991), p.71 ↩
4.New York Daily News, September 19, 2001 ↩
5.Washington Post, July 20, 2004, p.15, citing the New Era (Lancaster, PA), from a private meeting of Bush with Amish families on July 9. The White House denied that Bush had said it. (Those Amish folks do lie a lot you know.) ↩
6.Washington Post, August 17, 2008 ↩
7.Daily Telegraph (UK), October 26, 2009 ↩
8.Washington Post, October 25, 2009 ↩
9.Department of State, “Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba” (1991), p.742 ↩
10.Ibid., p.885 ↩
(*) William Blum is the author of:
•Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
•Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
•West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
•Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope. org
Business interests force China to take political action in Africa
By Pauline Bax and Mark Schenkel
It is becoming increasingly difficult for China to stay politically neutral in Africa as its economic interests grow.
As night falls over Conakry, the capital of Guinea, the street lights only come on in the neighbourhood of Manquepas (which translated means ‘no lack’). In the other neighbourhoods, children do their homework by candlelight or a petroleum lamp. Night watchmen read the Koran in the glow from the sign on a petrol station. Grocers illuminate their shop fronts with a neon light fed by a battery.
But in future, say the Chinese, everything will be different. The whole capital of Guinea will have electricity. Taxi drivers will no longer have to take six passengers at once in their rickety Peugeots, the capital will have a metro system. There will be flood control dams, new government offices, a fleet of passenger aircraft. Guinea will finally become modern, or so the Chinese promise. In exchange for that, all it has to do is supply raw materials like bauxite, oil and iron ore to China.
China is saving the developing countries,even the military junta in power in Guinea says so. On 9 October the Guinean minister of mining, Mohamed Thiam, announced the junta is on the verge of signing a treaty with China. It involves an investment plan worth 7 billion US dollars – one of the largest raw materials deals in Africa.
Shortly before the news was announced, soldiers in the African country shot dead 157 demonstrators. Foreign criticism of this massacre and the threats of sanctions that followed put the military rulers under such pressure that the treaty was used in order to show the population that Guinea has no need for the West whatsoever.
But the situation in Guinea is precarious. Observers say that ethnic tensions between factions in the military could result in a war that will also have serious consequences for neighbouring countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia.
A more honest partner
The instability in Guinea shows that it is becoming increasingly difficult for China to maintain its traditional policy of political and diplomatic non-intervention in Africa, says Mohamed Jalloh on the telephone from Dakar, Senegal. He is an analyst there for the Brussels-based think-tank International Crisis Group. China has invested so much in Africa in the past years that it can no longer avoid taking a more active diplomatic role, says Jalloh. “Not because China is suddenly more concerned about human rights or democracy, but out of enlightened self-interest. China benefits from a minimum level of stability in Africa, in order to secure the raw materials required for its rapidly growing economy.”
The Chinese presence in Africa extends beyond the recent hunt for raw materials. In the1960s the communist regime presented itself as a leader of the developing countries based on the idea that Africa and China were similar and had the same opponents. Beijing extended no-interest loans and provided economic aid to about twenty African countries, including Guinea. Unlike the West, however, it refrained from direct political interference.
Many Africans feel that China is a more honest partner than the rich countries, which they feel are simply meddlesome. “I think it would be a good thing if African countries could do business with China on the basis of equality,” says Baffour Ankomah, editor-in-chief of the weekly New African. “After years of Western involvement, Africa is now like a woman being pursued by two suitors. She can now choose which of the two men makes her happiest.”
But according to Western governments and human rights organisations, China can no longer stand aloof from corruption, election fraud and repression in those African countries where it has its foot in the door. The US Department of State voiced its concern in a reaction to the negotiations between China and Guinea. “We think it is important to be alert to human rights in countries with which you do business,” said a spokesperson.
Chinese UN peace-keepers in Sudan
At the same time China is realising that stability is important for securing its economic interests. “Everything seems to indicate that China is less ready to take risks,” wrote analyst Philippe de Pontet in the weekly African Business. “Chinese companies have not yet withdrawn from unstable countries, but they have clearly taken a more reticent attitude.”
The unrest in Guinea also threatens a neighbouring country like Liberia – where China invested 2.6 billion dollars this year in iron ore mines, the largest foreign investment in Liberia’s history.
The most prominent change to China’s Africa policy of the past years took place in Sudan. For years human rights activists have condemned Beijing for supplying arms to the regime in Khartoum, which is held responsible for the genocide in Darfur. Sudan supplies oil to China. In 2007, Beijing voted in favour of a peace-keeping mission in Darfur led by the United Nations and the African Union, a move that surprised many. China even sent UN peace-keepers. According to reports the new approach was entirely due to the Olympic Games in Beijing. China was in danger of reputation damage when celebrities like American actress Mia Farrow dubbed the games the ‘Genocide Olympics’.
Critics see the sending of peace-keepers as a small sacrifice in order to be able to continue China’s policy in Sudan. Beijing still supports African countries in their opposition to the international arrest warrant for Sudanese president Bashir. But according to Jalloh of the Crisis Group, the Sudan case shows that China more often feels compelled to take on responsibility. “It is a start.”
Observers take a similar view of China’s military involvement elsewhere in Africa. Beijing sends an estimated sixteen hundred peace-keepers – more than four other permanent members of the UN Security Council. Only a few dozen US peace-keepers operate throughout Africa. Good for China’s reputation and an exercise for the People’s Liberation Army, or good for stability in Africa? Both, perhaps. Just like the three Chinese frigates that fight piracy off the coast of Somalia.
Behind the scenes
These days Chinese ambassadors from Liberia to South Africa encourage their fellow countrymen to learn the local language, in order to prevent tensions with local workers. In Zambia local mine workers have already rebelled against the tough Chinese working conditions and against being elbowed out by Chinese labourers. In an interview with the Financial Times last year the ambassador to South Africa tried to soften the impression that China is keeping Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe in power. “We are not happy with what is happening in Zimbabwe,” said Zhong Jianhua. He felt that the Western condemnation of Mugabe only had an “adverse” effect however.
Critics say this is all for show. Behind the scenes the negotiations on economic cooperation are simply going ahead.
In Guinea the Chinese government explicitly denied involvement in the controversial raw materials deal. Huo Zhengde, ambassador in Conakry, told French radio station RFI a week and a half ago that Beijing does not play a role “in any way whatsoever.” According to the magazine Africa Confidential, there was concern when Guinea suddenly publicly announced the negotiations that had been secret until then. China feared a diplomatic situation like the one which arose earlier concerning Sudan, the magazine writes.
Ambassador Zhengde stressed that the talks with the junta are being held by the China Investment Fund (CIF) from Hong Kong – a private company. This is true on paper, but in practice it emerges that the CIF is intertwined with the Chinese government in many aspects. China often uses these kinds of constructions, whereby Beijing can deny that it is involved in controversial deals but in fact remains in control.
Jalloh wonders how long China can maintain this aloof approach. “If Guinea collapses, China will once again have to participate in a UN mission to secure its investments in the country.” Ankomah of the New African finds the Western concern about China’s political indifference hypocritical. Moreover he hopes that China will be less neutral than it seems. “Beijing now has interests in Guinea. Who knows, behind the scenes China might even persuade the junta to reform.”
America Needs Human Rights in China
By Sophie Richardson (*)
Beijing’s abuses affect many issues the U.S. holds dear.
“Don’t they know they need us?” So wrote a Chinese human-rights activist friend of mine, expressing frustration at the Obama administration. Since taking office, President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—both of whom mustered some criticism of China’s rights record while they were candidates—have said that human rights shouldn’t “interfere” with other issues in the U.S.-China relationship, knuckled preemptively under Chinese pressure not to meet the Dalai Lama, and generally behaved as if the United States has no power in the bilateral relationship.
The Obama team seems to think that such an approach will elicit greater cooperation from China. This is a miscalculation that demoralizes China’s small but vibrant human-rights community and gives the government leeway to crack down harder. As President Obama prepares for his first trip to China later this month, he needs to rethink his approach.
Beijing is clearly moving backward on human rights. Since Mr. Obama took office, the Chinese government has disbarred human-rights lawyers, rolled back key legal reforms, imprisoned critics and further tightened Internet and press censorship. It has tried to unilaterally impose new filtering software on all computers sold in China—ostensibly to block pornography but probably to control political discourse too. It has executed Tibetans suspected of taking part in March 2008 protests, despite concerns about due process, and “disappeared” dozens of Uighur men and boys in the wake of the July protests in Xinjiang.
The human-rights deterioration in China directly affects the U.S. and other Chinese trading partners. For example, the domestic press was prepared to write about a widespread case of tainted milk in June last year, but due to the ban on bad news during the Beijing Olympics, the story wasn’t published until September. By that point, tens of thousands of children, including some outside China, were sickened, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a general alert against processed foods from China. This had echoes of the SARS outbreak, which Beijing tried to handle by stifling all news of it. While the profusion of domestic Chinese media outlets in recent years implies a trend toward greater openness, the reality is that the government can and does continue to restrict expression, regardless of the consequences.
Given China’s importance to efforts to fight climate change, the Obama administration has expressed unprecedented interest in China’s environmental practices. But hopes for real environmental change will go unfulfilled if the Chinese government does not provide more transparent information about pollution and environmental degradation, and does not improve its tolerance of whistleblowers and environmental activists. It is precisely these people who should be sought out by U.S. government, because they would be instrumental in actually enforcing any agreement on the ground.
The crackdown has an impact on businesses operating in China, too. Executives of Australian mining giant Rio Tinto were jailed in July on ground