LIBYA AND THE LEFT

by Seth Weiss, World War 4 Report

The Libyan uprising and subsequent NATO intervention have already, much in the manner of the conflict in the Balkans in the 1990s, precipitated considerable debate and acrimony, along with disorientation and paralysis, within the Left. Some opposed to intervention, displaying a narrow and reflexive anti-imperialism, lend support, tacitly or otherwise, to Qaddafi’s forces. Others opposed to intervention endeavor a principled “neither/nor” position, neither Qaddafi nor NATO. Here, committed to opposing both Western imperialism and the Qaddafi regime, we ask if a strict anti-interventionist position—specifically, opposition to the rebels’ call for a “no-fly zone”—is consistent with a commitment to protecting civilian populations and supporting freedom struggles in Libya and throughout the region.

The Arab Spring Reaches Libya
On February 15th, four days after Hosni Mubarak was toppled in Egypt, Fathi Terbil, a prominent Libyan human rights advocate and attorney, was arrested by security agents at his home in Benghazi, an eastern port city and the country’s second largest. With Terbil’s arrest, the Arab Spring, which began in Tunisia and Egypt and has now spread to Bahrain, Jordan, Syria, and Yemen, reached Libya. Terbil, along with a handful of other lawyers, was representing the families of the more than 1200 political prisoners murdered at Benghazi’s Abu Salim prison in 1996. According to the New York Times, “a crowd armed with gasoline bombs and rocks” gathered in Benghazi to demanded Terbil’s release, and “demonstrators, estimated at several hundred to several thousand, marched to the city’s central square, where they clashed with riot police officers.” (“Protests Take Aim at Leader of Libya,” New York Times, Feb. 16, 2011)

By February 17—a date which apparently previous to the February 15 events had been designated as a “Day of Rage” via social media websites like Facebook and Twitter—protest had spread across the country, reaching the capital, Tripoli. By the 19th, as reported in the Times, thousands were in the streets, including a demonstration of 20,000 at the courthouse in Benghazi; protestors were met with brutal force, the Times also reported, producing a death toll in Human Rights Watch’s estimation of 104 people (“Cycle of Suppression Rises in Libya and Elsewhere,” New York Times, February 19, 2011)

By the 20th, the rebels had taken Benghazi, and mass unrest rocked Tripoli and a number of other towns and cities. According to the Times, “Though the Libyan revolt began with a relatively organized core of longtime government critics in Benghazi, its spread to the capital was swift and spontaneous, outracing any efforts to coordinate the protests… [T]he revolt in Tripoli appears far more genuinely spontaneous and unorganized than the Benghazi uprising or, for that matter, the revolutions that toppled the leaders of Tunisia or Egypt.” (“Qaddafi’s Grip on the Capital Tightens as Revolt Grows,” New York Times, February 22, 2011)

Popular councils materialized in cities and towns throughout the east. On March 5, the official establishment of the Interim Transitional National Council was announced in Benghazi. The Council, in a statement on its website, recognizes its obligation to “Guarantee every Libyan citizen … the right to vote in free and fair parliamentary and presidential elections” and to “denounce violence, terrorism, intolerance and cultural isolation…” As well, the Council recognizes its obligation to ensure “[t]he nation’s economy to be used for the benefit of the Libyan people… in order to eradicate poverty and unemployment” and that “the state will guarantee the rights and empowerment of women in all legal, political, economic and cultural spheres.” (“A Vision of a Democratic Libya,” National Transitional Council).

The leadership of the Interim Transitional National Council, including its chairman, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, a former Justice Minister, comes largely from elite sectors of Libyan society. A piece in Foreign Policy—which describes allegations by Admiral James Stavridis, NATO’s commander for Europe, of “flickers in the intelligence of potential al-Qaeda, Hezbollah” present among the rebel forces as “representing a new level of irresponsibility”—characterizes the Council as “led by a group of well-known and respected Libyan professionals and technocrats.” (“Getting Libya’s Rebels Wrong,” Foreign Policy, March 31, 2011).

Still, this is not reason to lose sight of the popular and democratic character of the uprising that some on the Left have endeavored to downplay, focusing instead on the opposition’s purported links to al-Qaeda, CIA support, and co-optation by Western powers (see, for instance, the commentary of Alexander Cockburn and Vijay Prashad in Counter Punch). Bill Weinberg offers a more nuanced portrait, noting the different layers composing the rebel force, in his World War 4 Report:

…the Libyan opposition does indeed seem to be a “hodge-podge”: In one corner, a small coterie of aspiring bourgeois-democratic technocrats (now in ascendance thanks to deals being quietly made in Paris and Washington); in the other, a few fanatical cells of jihadi types like the “Islamic Emirate of Barqa”; and in the middle, a very large swath of very angry Libyans who have no particular ideological commitment but basically secular and progressive instincts. [“Libya: What is the imperial agenda—and where do anti-war forces stand?” World War 4 Report, March 27, 2011]

Jihan Hafiz, reporting on the ground in Libya for the Real News Network, also draws out the popular character of the rebellion. Her video reporting from the International Women’s Day march in Benghazi is especially worth viewing. (“Libyan Women March in Support of Rebellion,” Real News Network, March 10, 2011). According to Hafiz, this was an unprecedented event, in which thousands of women, most for the first time in their lives, marched and protested. Also notable in Hafiz’s reporting is her documentation of the shift on the ground in Benghazi from opposition to Western intervention to calls for assistance. (“Jihan Hafiz on Reporting From Libya,” Real News Network, April 2, 2011)

In March, Qaddafi’s forces had decisively regained the offensive. The rebels reported more than 8,000 killed in the regime’s brutal crackdown. (“Libya rebel spokesman: More than 8,000 Libyans killed in revolt,” Haaretz, March 20, 2011)

On March 12, in an unprecedented move, the Arab League, meeting in Cairo, voted in favor of a no-fly zone over Libya, and on March 17th the United Nation Security Council, with Russia and China abstaining, also voted in favor a no-fly zone. By this point an attack on Benghazi, with the likely possibility of a massacre of civilian populations, was imminent.

At present, it seems the NATO bombing campaign has yielded a stalemate between the rebel armies and Qaddafi’s forces, as the Financial Times reports. (“West sees Libyan conflict heading for lengthy stalemate,” Financial Times, April 1, 2011). Meanwhile, there are reports of Qaddafi’s sons proposing a transition to a constitutional democracy under the leadership of one of his sons, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, the London School of Economic’s doctorate who had threatened Libyans with “rivers of blood” in February. (“2 Qaddafi Sons Are Said to Offer Plan to Push Father Out,” New York Times, April 3, 2011).

With events still unfolding, we turn now to the Left’s response to the question of intervention.

Left Anti-imperialist Response
Those on the Left advancing an anti-interventionist position can be divided into two camps. The first camp supports the Qaddafi regime, some explicitly and others tacitly, as a bulwark in a struggle against Western imperialism. Most prominent here are Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Also in this camp are many of the same Left intellectuals and journalists—including Alexander Cockburn, Jean Bricmont, Michel Chossudovsky, and Diana Johnstone—who carved out an anti-imperialist position on the wars in the Balkans in the 1990s by way of genocide denial and apologetics for Slobodan Milosevic and his henchmen. Here, a narrow and reflexive anti-imperialism—that is, an “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” kind of mentality—prevails.

Consider, for instance, a recent announcement by a Trotskyist group in New York City for a meeting on Libya at the CUNY Graduate Center. It stresses:

Unlike Tunisia and Egypt, Libyan rebels have avidly sought Western aid,
and eventually bombs against Qaddafi. Rebels who fly the flag of the 
monarchy while allying with religious reaction and the CIA are appealing 
to imperialism instead of fighting it. [“Forum: Obama’s African War,” New York Activist Calendar, posted April 10, 2011]

As Trotsky himself noted in reply to this kind of mechanical anti-imperialism:

In ninety cases out of a hundred the workers actually place a minus sign where the bourgeoisie places a plus sign. In ten cases however they are forced to fix the same sign as the bourgeoisie but with their own seal, in which is expressed their mistrust of the bourgeoisie. The policy of the proletariat is not at all automatically derived from the policy of the bourgeoisie, bearing only the opposite sign—this would make every sectarian a master strategist … [“Learn to Think: A Friendly Suggestion to Certain Ultra-Leftists,” May 1938, online at Marxists Internet Archive]

A second camp of the Left anti-interventionists endeavors a principled anti-imperialist position which rejects both NATO intervention and the Qaddafi regime. Most in this camp also, although not all, share a genuine commitment to supporting popular forces for freedom within Libya. However, a narrow anti-imperialism, although of a different sort, also prevails here. This camp faces a real antinomy between its anti-imperialist principles and its interest in supporting freedom struggles in Libya and throughout the region. It has been unable to find a positive resolution to the contradiction, and it has allowed opposition to Western intervention to trump both solidarity with freedom struggles and protection of civilian populations from massacre by tank brigades and aerial bombardment.

As Gilbert Achcar argues in a recent interview with Stephen Shalom on Z Net:

…if Gaddafi were permitted to continue his military offensive and take Benghazi, there would be a major massacre. Here is a case where a population is truly in danger, and where there is no plausible alternative that could protect it. The attack by Gaddafi’s forces was hours or at most days away. You can’t in the name of anti-imperialist principles oppose an action that will prevent the massacre of civilians. In the same way, even though we know well the nature and double standards of cops in the bourgeois state, you can’t in the name of anti-capitalist principles blame anybody for calling them when someone is on the point of being raped and there is no alternative way of stopping the rapists. [“Libyan Developments,” Z Net, March 19, 2011]

At stake, as well, was the fate of the Libyan revolution and perhaps that of the other Arab revolutions, too. A victory for Qaddafi, draining the confidence of the masses and emboldening other despots in the region, might well have spelled the end of the Arab Spring.

In the Z Net interview, Ashcar goes on to argue that:

…without coming out against the no-fly zone, we must…advocate full vigilance in monitoring the actions of those states carrying it out, to make sure that they don’t go beyond protecting civilians as mandated by the UNSC resolution. In watching on TV the crowds in Benghazi cheering the passage of the resolution, I saw a big billboard in their middle that said in Arabic “No to foreign intervention.” People there make a distinction between “foreign intervention” by which they mean troops on the ground, and a protective no-fly zone. They oppose foreign troops. They are aware of the dangers and wisely don’t trust Western powers.

Such qualifications, especially on the issue of boots on the ground, are extremely important. The issue of military aid to the rebels also needs careful consideration. U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973 doesn’t affirm the right of the rebels to arm themselves or loosen up the arms embargo to the rebels’ advantage. As well, calls for Qaddafi’s frozen assets to be handed over to the rebels to fund arms purchases have gone unanswered.

Military aid is not likely, of course, to come without strings attached, and the Western powers are free to favor groupings more compliant to their interests over others for aid. Some have argued that such circumstances present a case for advocating a no-fly zone rather than military aid. Still, others argue that what distinguishes NATO planes from arms in the rebels’ hands is direct control over the weapons by the rebels. Regardless, one thing is clear: The Left has no immediate way of coming to the aid of the rebels on its own, no international brigades to send to fight, and no resources to provide military assistance.

To be sure, solidarity with the Libyan freedom struggles doesn’t demand uncritical support. (And there may be much that deserves strong criticism and condemnation; allegations of reprisals against black Africans alleged to be in the pay of the Qaddafi regime are especially disturbing.) It should also go without saying that NATO intervention is not motivated by humanitarian concern, and the rhetoric of Obama, Sarkozy, and Cameron has reached astounding levels of hypocrisy. Moreover, Western intervention may well have very negative repercussions, including drawing the rebels into positions of accommodation. (This latter argument may be overstated by some—is there not some possibility that the Libyan masses, having thrown off the yoke of one tyrant, will not readily accept a new one?) Still, for all of this, what is the alternative to supporting the rebels’ call for assistance?

—-

From our Daily Report:

Qaddafi shells Misrata, calls for ceasefire
World War 4 Report, April 30, 2011

See related story, this issue:

THE TWO WARS IN LIBYA
Revolutionary Struggle and NATO Intervention
by Art Young, Green Left Weekly
World War 4 Report, May 2011

——————-
Special to World War 4 Report, May 1, 2011
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingLIBYA AND THE LEFT 

SYRIA: THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL

by Rene Wadlow, Transcend Media Service

The United Nations has tried to stop the downward spiral of Syria into repression and potential chaos. It has been five weeks that what began as peaceful protests and demands for limited reforms have been increasingly met by government violence. Discussions on what the UN could do to help the Syrian people and to speed up necessary reforms started in both New York and Geneva. Governments and UN Secretariat members discussed different possibilities against the backdrop of the UN Security Council resolutions on Libya and the continued fighting there.

The representatives of China and Russia who had not blocked the resolution to use “all necessary force” to protect the civilian population in Libya but who have grown increasingly ill-at-ease with the NATO-led attacks did not want to open the door to a possible repeat over Syria. Thus all possibility of action within the Security Council was blocked with the insistence on the part of China and Russia that the situation was an internal affair of Syria and did not pose a danger to regional peace.

Thus the UN focus moved to Geneva and the UN Human Rights Council, for if events in Syria did not pose a danger to peace in the area, the events were still an open violation of the UN human rights standards. Syria is a party to all the major UN human rights conventions. Thus, on April 29, 2011—when the eyes of much of the world were turned to London and a Royal wedding—in Geneva a path-making Special Session of the UN Human Rights Council was being held. A Special Session is the “highest profile” which the Council can give to a situation. It can be called on short notice, but before a Special Session is held, there are usually intense negotiations among governments. The representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) also have a short time to prepare common positions and statements for a Special Session. Since NGOs speak after the governments, there is usually time for only a few statements prior to voting on the outcome resolution. However, for this Special Session, government representatives stuck to their time limits, and 16 NGOs were able to speak even if few said anything which had not already been said by governments.

The human rights situation in Syria was well set out at the start by Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Kyung-Wha Kang of Korea:

Information gathered since mid-March points a disturbing picture: the widespread use of live fire against protestors; the arrest, detention, and disappearance of demonstrators, human rights defenders, and journalists; the torture and ill-treatment of detainees; the sharp repression of press freedoms and other means of communication; and the attacks against medical personnel, facilities and patients.

Yet even these deplorable practices have been exceeded over the past week. According to reports, entire towns have been besieged. Tanks have been deployed and shelled densely-populated areas. The delivery of food has been impeded. Access to electricity has been cut. And transportation systems have been shut down. There have been reports of snipers firing on persons attempting to assist the injured or remove dead bodies from public areas.

We have noted with concern that military and security officers have been among those killed. Still, the preponderance of information emerging from Syria depicts a widespread, persistent and gross disregard for basic human rights by the Syrian military and security forces. Syrian and international human rights organizations have already documented more than 450 killings and around four times that number of injuries…

Let me conclude by emphasizing the importance of holding perpetrators of serious human rights violations accountable, and in this regard, the urgent need for an independent, impartial, effective and prompt investigation into recent events in Syria. The convening of this Special Session should not only convey to the people of Syria that the international community is aware of their plight and supports their struggle for fundamental rights and freedoms. It should affirm to people everywhere that the Human Rights Council will be resolute in ensuring justice for victims of human rights worldwide.

As with all serious UN meetings, the decisions have been negotiated before the meeting starts. There was broad agreement that the Human Rights Council would vote the creation of a working group for an independent, impartial investigation to be named by the President of the Council after consultation. The consultations have started, but the names of the members have not yet been announced. It is unclear at this stage if Syria will allow the group to enter to carry out interviews and other investigations. The working group on the situation in Darfur was not able to enter Sudan, and Israel did not allow the working group chaired by Justice Goldstone to enter Israel.

However, some countries have allowed Special Rapporteurs on country situations named by the Human Rights Council or the earlier Commission on Human Rights to visit the country in question. Much of the debate during the Special Session concerned basic attitudes on general human rights matters over which negotiations would not lead to any compromise. There are States which do not want country-specific discussions, basically by fear that they might one day be discussed. This is the long-standing position of China and Cuba and can be taken up by others depending on the specific case. With the situation in Syria, there was a newer and more interesting balance to be found between those States who, in addition to the creation of an investigation body, wanted a condemnation of the current violations in Syria on the basis of information now available and those States which wanted “constructive dialogue.” Those for constructive dialogue stressed that while not opposing an investigation, felt that there was an opportunity to “engage in constructive dialogue with the Syrian government.” They maintained that condemnation measures would hinder finding peaceful solutions. This group of States, largely led by Pakistan and the Russian Federation, put an emphasis on the reforms which had already taken place after the start of the demonstrations, in particular the lifting of the state of emergency, abolishing the State Security Court, the granting of citizenship to 250,000 Kurds who had been registered until then as “aliens” and the replacement of the Cabinet and some governors of provinces.

The Syrian Ambassador, Faysal Khabbas Hamoui, could have played on these calls for engagement and dialogue, and he may have done so in private. In his public statements prior to the start of the debate and again just prior to the vote, his position was so “hard line” as to destroy any idea that “constructive dialogue” was possible at all. He attacked the idea of having a Special Session at all and then went on to attack the protesters as agents of a foreign-led conspiracy and as extremists wanting violence. His presentation left no visible door open for dialogue, and there was no call for a possible national reconciliation.

The vote on the only resolution, A/HRC/S-16/1 came with few surprises:

Votes in favor: 26
Against, 9: Bangladesh, China, Cuba, Ecuador, Gabon, Malaysia, Mauritania, Pakistan, Russian Federation
Abstentions, 7: Cameroon, Djbouti, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Uganda, Ukraine
Left the room so they could not be counted in any category, 4: Angola, Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar

The motivations of Angola are unclear. However, given the solid structuring of power in Syria, the inter-twinning of power and wealth, the mosaic of security services, quick reforms are unlikely. As President Bashar al-Assad has said “haste comes at the expense of the quality of reforms.” There may be a possibility for external NGOs, civil society organizations in Syria and the Syrian government to discuss peaceful advances toward a more just and inclusive society. We need to keep looking for possible doors even as people are being killed on the ground.

—-

Rene Wadlow, is representative to the United Nations at Geneva for the Association of World Citizens

This story also appeared May 1 on Transcend Media Service.

From our Daily Report:

Syrian security forces split over “day of rage” repression?
World War 4 Report, April 30, 2011

See related story, this issue:

LIBYA AND THE LEFT
by Seth Weiss, Marxist-Humanist Initiative
World War 4 Report, May 2011

——————-
Reprinted by World War 4 Report, May 1, 2011
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingSYRIA: THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL 

LIBYA: THE WASHINGTON-LONDON DILEMMA

by Paul Rogers, OpenDemocracy

The emerging pattern of resistance and repression in Libya following the outbreak of protest in the eastern city of Benghazi on February 15 is very different from that in other parts of the Arab world. In part this reflects the distinctive nature of the country, and of the regime of Moammar Qaddafi which has ruled Libya for 42 years.

The military-political standoff there, and the degree of violence the regime is using (and seems prepared to use) to maintain and restore its control, raises the acute question of what and how much the international community can do to support Libyans’ rights and security.

The question has been forcefully raised in the United States and Britain in the first week of March 2011, where domestic pressures from senior members of the media and the foreign-policy community have combined to press the respective governments to take a firm stand.

The hardening rhetoric has included talk (especially from Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron) of some form of military action against Libya, including the imposition of a “no-fly zone”; though states such as Russia and Turkey instantly discounted this suggestion, and the US defense secretary Robert M. Gates—with a reference to “loose talk” that represents a coded rebuke of Cameron—is notably cautious about the logistics of enforcing such a zone.

There may be elements of diplomatic bluff in the efforts of Washington and London in particular to exert pressure on the Qaddafi regime. But words have consequences, and the effect of the rhetoric is also to create expectations (including among Libyans) that action will be taken to resolve the crisis in a positive way. The relatively tough resolution passed on February 26 by the United Nations Security Council, and the International Criminal Court’s declaration on March 3 that it would investigate leading figures of the Qaddafi regime for possible crimes against humanity, contribute to the sense of momentum here.

Yet the international community and its leading states still face broader problems over whether and how to intervene in relation to Libya. They involve calculations over how the complex and fluid conflict inside Libya will unfold, assessments of the capacity and impact of the instruments at their disposal, and issues relating to the legitimacy and inheritance of earlier interventions in the wider region—especially those led by the United States and Britain in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Libyan Prospect
The immediate problem is the uncertain course and outcome of the crisis within Libya. The regime appears to be maintaining reasonably firm control of the greater Tripoli district; this contains nearly a third of Libya’s population of 6.1 million, including many of those with direct or indirect links to the regime (including key army units).

It is just possible that Moammar Qaddafi and his key allies (including his immediate family) will seek to consolidate this area and refrain from serious attempts to regain control of the whole country—in turn providing a degree of space for some new form of governance to be introduced.

The assaults on Libyan oil-terminal towns such as Brega towards the east on March 2-3 make this option look even less likely, however. Against it, the evident determination and effectiveness of those resisting his rule may succeed in eroding the confidence of some of his forces and create a tipping-point of change towards a different order.

But perhaps a more feasible development (and in many ways the worst-case one) is that the regime deploys extensive force against lightly-armed protesters, inflicting many casualties and much destruction. The regime has greatly superior military resources at its disposal: strike-aircraft, helicopter-gunships, and elite forces, such as the 32nd Brigade and paramilitary units attached to the security and intelligence organizations.

The Military Response
The problem of what the international community should do is highlighted by the rapid switch in David Cameron’s position towards greater denunciation of Qaddafi, which followed stinging criticism of the delays and inefficiency of his government’s response to the crisis (especially in evacuating British civilians from Libya).

The new approach soon proved equally vulnerable, as it coincided with the revelation of weaknesses in national defense—over the Eurofighter project (now costing around £100 million per plane), the announcement of cuts of 11,000 in armed-forces personnel (including soldiers returned from Afghanistan), and a report from a parliamentary foreign-affairs committee critical of the military-political strategy in Afghanistan.

The Barack Obama administration too has been obliged to take account of a wider climate of opinion. This is composed of both belligerent Republicans who see in every foreign-policy crisis a military solution, and policy experts concerned that the US develop a more coherent policy towards the Arab uprisings (and, in the case of Libya, explore ways of implementing the “responsibility to protect”—that is, the obligation of United Nations member-states to act together to protect people’s lives and safety when these are under attack, including from their own government).

The administration’s response has centered on the redeployment of the US Navy’s sixth fleet. The fleet is headquartered near Naples; its carrier battle-group (headed by the USS Enterprise), recently on anti-piracy patrol off Somalia, transited the Suez Canal into the eastern Mediterranean on March 2. This powerful amphibious-assault capability includes the USS Kearsarge and the USS Ponce. The Kearsarge alone is a 41,000-ton Wasp-class ship twice the size of Britain’s recently decommissioned aircraft-carrier, HMS Ark Royal; it is normally deployed with 1,850 marines, forty-two CH46 transport helicopters and five AVH-8B jump-jets.

This build-up, together with that of other naval and US aerial forces in the region, is significant. But in itself it does not offer a solution to the interventionist dilemma.

The Interventionist Dilemma
The combination of events on the ground, public pressure and limited military re-deployments (as well as the humanitarian crisis resulting from the large-scale flow of displaced workers of many nationalities inside Libya) is difficult enough for Western governments to handle. It would become even more so if a war of attrition develops further in Libya, with greater suffering and increased calls (including by Libyans at the sharp end of conflict) for direct foreign military intervention.

The broad-based appeals for international action from within the region include one from a coalition of over 200 Arab non-government organizations drawn from eight countries, including Egypt, Morocco, Qatar, Syria and Saudi Arabia (see Thalif Deen, “Arab Civil Society Calls for No-Fly Zone over Libya,” TerraViva/IPS, March 1).

Even the proposal of a no-fly zone over the Tripoli area would be a huge operation that would require several carrier battle-groups and aircraft with permission to operate out of neighboring countries. The effort to stop Libyan strike-aircraft from flying would (as the US defense secretary outlined before a congressional panel on March 2) require the suppression of air-defense missile systems, associated radar stations and command-and-control centers; after all this, even more difficult would be preventing the use of helicopters (an issue whose omission from the ceasefire agreement that concluded the war over Kuwait in 1991 allowed Saddam Hussein to crush the Shi’a uprising in southern Iraq with extreme violence).

Moreover, there remains a possibility that—even were a no-fly zone to be established and succeed in controlling aircraft movements—the regime might still be able to maintain control via the intensive use of ground forces. In that event, the coalition enforcing the zone would be required either to acknowledge failure or escalate.

The Political Dilemma
The current scenario plans of leading states must take such concerns into urgent account. But there is a further problem over military intervention (as opposed to other forms), which is at heart political.

Any successful campaign to protect Libyans from the Qaddafi regime by military means would need to be organized by the United States, and be aided by supportive countries such as Britain. The reputation of these states across the region remains in key respects very negative, however, after what is perceived as their history of self-interested and illegitimate intervention (most of which had minimal United Nations approval).

Thus, the imposition of a no-fly zone (and its accompanying attacks) would be portrayed by the Qaddafi regime as part of a campaign to colonize Libya and grab its oil—a narrative that would almost certainly resonate even among many of the Libyans who had called for such a policy (and many other people in the region).

The immediate transformation from an internal war to one of “external aggression” would also have many implications beyond Libya, including in the Arab countries whose citizens have been mobilizing in support of freedom and democracy. It would not take many air-strike targeting disasters of the kind that have become so common in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia for ambivalence at western action to revert to deep hostility.

All this emphasizes the position of the United Nations in relation to the debate over intervention, and in particular the doctrine of the international “responsibility to protect” (R2P) developed in the late 1990s following the disastrous failures to prevent genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda. The work of putting this doctrine into practice at the highest level then collided with rival geopolitical agendas, especially following 9-11 and the George W. Bush administration’s declaration of the “war on terror.”

The UN was from the start central to the discussions over R2P, many of which led to a recommendation that a UN standing force supported by a full logistics capability was essential to put the idea into effective practice. In the event, this proposal has so far come to nothing, leaving a handful of individual states with any kind of rapid-intervention capability: Britain and France (on a small scale), India (in theory, and close to its borders), and the United States (the only state with a global reach).

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have had appalling human consequences. But their damage goes far wider, for they have made genuine international cooperation in pursuit of shared human interests—including the “responsibility to protect”—much more difficult. In the absence of a sudden capitulation by Libya’s regime, the costs of this damage may continue to be demonstrated in the coming days and weeks.

—-

This story first ran March 3 on Open Democracy.

See related story, this issue:

THE LAST CIRCLE IN LIBYA
by Rene Wadlow, Toward Freedom
World War 4 Report, March 2011

——————-
Reprinted by World War 4 Report, March 6, 2011
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingLIBYA: THE WASHINGTON-LONDON DILEMMA 

THE LAST CIRCLE IN LIBYA

by Rene Wadlow, Toward Freedom

While the People’s Revolution in Tunisia and Egypt was largely non-violent, the revolution in Libya may turn still more violent as the last of the palace guard circle around Colonel Qaddafi, his family and a small number of people with tribal ties to him.

Somewhat too late in the day, the UN Security Council demanded an embargo on arms sales to Libya. However, the country has more arms than it can use. The Security Council also requested the International Criminal Court to investigate if there have been war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Libya as well as freezing the foreign bank holdings of the Qaddafi family.

The UN Human Rights Council, like the Commission on Human Rights, had been silent on human rights violations in Libya for years. In fact, the then Libyan Ambassador, Najat al-Hajjaji, a former wife of one of the Qaddafi sons, had chaired the Commission on Human Rights in 2003. There is now discussion of expelling Libya from the Human Rights Council; however, the Libyan representatives in both New York and Geneva have resigned in order to join the opposition. At this stage, Colonel Qaddafi is not interested in diplomatic symbols.

The representatives of the European Union are worried, especially of a possible migration of Africans through Libya towards Europe. Colonel Qaddafi had signed an agreement that he would try to control migration through Libya toward Europe, and he had been given speed boats from Europe to help him in his task. The Europeans are also worried about energy supplies from Libya, although Libya represents a very small—some 2 percent—of energy to Europe, easily replaced from other sources. However, revolution in Libya and unrest in other parts of the Arab world has moved oil prices upward, and they are not likely to go down soon. NATO planners are meeting, reflecting the same worries as those of the EU officials.

The EU and US officials remind one of the aristocrats watching the French Revolution from safety in London or Belgium. They had not seen that the people were getting tired of the contempt in which they were held, nor that there was a rise of an educated middle class that could take care of itself without the nobles and the clergy. Likewise many in the Arab world can do without the kings and tribal chiefs, without the higher military officers who played a role of nobles and without the preaching of the Islamic clergy.

Today’s People’s Revolution, like that of France in 1789, is the victory of an educated middle class bringing along with it in its current a mass of the unemployed, small merchants, regular soldiers often from the rural farming milieu which has little prospered from modernization.

The question now is how will the young and educated middle class in the Arab world be able to structure a new society based on relative equality and justice. In each country, there are remains of the old society with some power, some skills, and a continuing sense of their own importance. We have seen in Tunisia how some of the old structure wanted to continue in power though this was met with continuing street protests.

Creation of new structures in a society is never easy. Both Tunisia and Egypt face an influx of workers fleeing Libya. Just as the French Revolution did not have only friends abroad, the People’s Revolution of the Arab world has more sceptical observers saying “what next?” than friends.

The governments, such as those of Algeria, Morocco and Jordan where only the first shocks have been felt, are promising “reforms” or “bread and circuses” but probably too little and too late.

The People’s Revolution is just that, the rise of a new people, not yet structured into a real social class. It has some leaders but rarely on a national level, and interest groups are only partly structured. This is not chaos except in the sense described by the classical Greek thinker Hesiod who saw chaos, creativity, and transformation working together. For Hesiod, chaos was not confusion but a richly creative space which flowed from the dual cosmic forces of heaven and earth or as in Chinese philosophy, from Yin and Yang. From this chaos comes new and more mature organization, one with more complexity and greater adequacy for dealing with the challenges of life.

Thus we need to find ways to support the People’s Revolution, to keep an eye open for counter-revolutionary activities and to watch closely as the next structures are put into place.

—-

Rene Wadlow is a representative to the United Nations, Geneva, for the Association of World Citizens. This story first ran March 3 in Toward Freedom.

See related story, this issue:

INTERNATIONALISM, LIBYA AND THE ARAB REVOLTS
by Pierre Beaudet, Viento Sur
World War 4 Report, March 2011

——————-
Reprinted by World War 4 Report, March 6, 2011
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingTHE LAST CIRCLE IN LIBYA 

INTERNATIONALISM, LIBYA AND THE ARAB REVOLTS

by Pierre Beaudet, Viento Sur

The right-wing press in Venezuela and throughout the world is raving against the government of Hugo Chávez for its expressed support for the regime of Qaddafi. The Venezuelan exterior minister, Nicolás Maduro, has declared that the repression in Libya was necessary in the name “of peace and national unity.” The same Venezuelan right recalls that Chávez has visited Libya frequently since 2001, most recently in October 2010, with the aim of signing various accords relating to oil, agriculture, communications and higher education. In his turn, Fidel Castro emphasizes that the destabilization of Qaddafi’s regime forms part of a NATO strategy to invade Libya, implying that we consequently must support the regime.

This is all amazing, and brings back bad memories. For several years, Hugo Chávez has been seeking to reinforce his cooperation with states whose principal characteristic, from his point of view, is opposition to United States hegemony (Iran, Belarus, Zimbabwe, etc.). In Iran, the reactionary regime of Ahmadinejad vaingloriously boasts the good relations maintained with his Venezuelan “brother.” Certainly Fidel Castro has a point in at least one aspect: US imperialism is ready to intervene to “save”” Libya as in its day “save” Iraq and Afghanistan. For the anti-imperialist and other-worldist movements of the world, the dilemma is not trivial.

It is impossible to defend these reactionary regimes on the pretext that they oppose the United States. There is no room for doubt that Libya or Iran are ruled by autocratic and predatory regimes that beat back popular aspirations. The repression in the form of massacres of innocent civilians or the denial of fundamental rights (arbitrary detentions, torture, etc.) have nothing to do with the vulgar “anti-Americanism” of Qaddafi and Ahmadinejad, but reflects a pathological obsession with maintaining power. Even so, the fact is certain that the current crisis opens the door for imperialist intervention that will hoist, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, the “humanitarian” flag.

It is already known that the “humanitarian aid” operations on the part of US imperialism only generate still more repression, still more massacres. After the programmatic destruction of these states and their peoples by US occupiers, Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar seem retrospectively to be mere heads of criminal bands.

The Double Standard
Likewise, it is not necessary to emphasize the absolute hypocrisy of the Western powers that are “scandalized” by the repression in Libya as they “ignore” that carried out by their Israeli, Saudi or Colombian allies. Said powers not only support these dictatorships, but they maintain commercial and military links with “strong” states whose merit is to maintain “stability.” Do we recall that Qaddafi himself, today condemned by Washington and its allies, was just recently a “partner” in oil exploitation, and was welcomed in the “endless war” of the United States against “international terrorism”?

Where does this leave us? Should we support the enemy of our enemy at the expense of the truth and struggle for justice?

In a time not long distant, this Manichean logic acquired caricatured forms. Movements of the left across the world declaimed their support for the Soviet Union, for China (or Albania!). They said, “the world is divided in two and we have to choose sides, like it or not.” We had to swallow a lot of toads [accept the unacceptable—ed.] in regard to the brutal Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. There were parties of the extreme brain-damaged left that defended the same Chinese government that supported repression in Chile and Sudan, or that invaded Vietnam under the pretext of opposing “Soviet hegemony.”

This antique political culture that has done so much damage to the left vanished after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the monstrosity that called itself the “international communist movement.” Later, unprecedented mobilizations and movements surged in many parts of the world, and especially in Latin America, finally liberated of this sickly vision: it was no longer necessary to support the Soviet “Big Brother,” which in any case had ceased to exist. It was no longer necessary to be afraid to solidarize with the Chinese people in Tiananmen Square. There was no longer doubt in condemning dictatorships such as those of Khomeini in Iran or Saddam Hussein in Iraq, because failing to do so would be playing the game of the United States’ “humanitarian” imperialism. In this way, the social movement reinforced its legitimacy, reaffirming untouchable principles, beginning to support all people who struggle against oppressors, no matter who they are.

New Threats
Today, things have become a little complicated. US imperialism is retreating, yet at the same time on the offensive. It has been exposed as incapable of winning the “endless war” in pursuit of the foolish dream of “re-ordering the world.” Nonetheless, it has not suffered a strategic defeat, and maintains under Obama the same strategy, even if many of the tactics have changed. In the center of this effort is the will of the US, together with its subalterns in the European Union, Japan and Canada, to establish absolute supremacy in the world. The real adversaries in this project are above all China and Russia, in a competitive logic that is the soul of capitalism and imperialism. But given that these states are powerful, it is not possible to attack them head-on; therefore the tactic consists of waging conflicts on “secondary” fronts—weak or fragile states that refuse to submit to the Empire. This was the case with Saddam and today it is the case with Ahmadinejad.

Clearly, this offensive against “rogue states” thusly defined by Washington forms part of a long-term strategy to shore up its supremacy and prevent real or potential adversaries from expanding their influence. Evidently, to not let these “competitors” reinforce themselves, capitalist and imperialist practices are consolidated on the backs of the world’s peoples.

Epicenter of the Crisis
In the current phase, the epicenter of the crisis is in that vast arc that crosses Asia and Africa through the Middle East, where the main energy resources are located, and where persists a culture of anti-imperialist resistance that has caused hard reverses for United States hegemony on several occasions—and where the present rebellions have surged. There is no doubt that for the US and its strategic partner Israel, the prisons, the tortures and massacres are acceptable when the dictatorships demonstrate their “effectiveness.” But now they have ceased to be so.

Nonetheless, the battle has not ended. Washington is seeking to stabilize the situation and assure an orderly “transition,” which implies maintaining essentially the same politics as before. They need to support the repressive apparatuses, modernizing them and maintaining them under the authority of US military mechanisms. They also seek to seduce part of the so-called “middle class” which has acquired privileges, but which also seeks to loosen archaic and antiquated autocracies, installing “liberal democracies” whose mission consists of maintaining neoliberal policies and controlling the region to the benefit of the US and at the expense of its multiple enemies. The operation is risky, but has at times been obtainable, as occurred in Indonesia, the Philippines and other countries. In this “crisis management,” it can also be very tempting to totally or partially occupy select countries, as much to install in them new centers of military command as to eliminate “free radicals” or uncontrollable elements in the mode of Qaddafi (or Saddam Hussein in his moment).

This could also come to pass in Yemen, in Sudan, in other places where repressive regimes persist that have occasionally confronted the US and which now “dissimulate” in order to gain a place in the sun under the “Pax Americana.” If this project materializes, the consequences will be disastrous for the peoples of these countries. In any case, Libya in the hands of the imperialists will be a real threat for the emancipation struggles throughout the region.

History Continues
Meanwhile, on the ground, the popular revolt continues. In Egypt and in Tunisia, the popular classes begin to enjoy their freedom and (self-)organization. Every day, new popular organizations appear in the factories and barrios. The people continue occupying the streets and reminding the “renovated” dictatorships that they will not accept subterfuges.

The task of this new popular movement is enormous, especially considering that during the years of the dictatorships, with the aid of their Western mentors, they repressed everything that moved. Thousands of activists were assassinated, imprisoned, exiled. All opposition movements were crushed or—when they played by the “rules of the game,” as the Islamist movement did in Egypt—co-opted, content to occupy a subaltern space and collaborate with the regime. It is understood, therefore, that now the proletarian masses seek new instruments, new identities. This cannot be constructed from one day to the next.

It is correct and justified to expose Western hypocrisy—but not to portray the “anti-imperialist” dictators as allies of the “cause.” In this sense, the policy of the Hugo Chávez government is not acceptable. Worse still, it threatens to delegitimize that state which has had the courage to impose new priorities in response to the popular expectations in Venezuela. It is necessary to find the way to say this in a way that will not be exploited by the discourse of “humanitarian” imperialism.

But in the end, this is not the highest priority. That must be to support, seriously and systematically, our true allies in the womb of the popular movements. In the first place, they lack everything, including the indispensable resources which are now monopolized by the middle classes, little prone to facilitate the organization of the masses. It is in this point that internationalist mobilizations can intercede. We maintain our course towards Helwan and Gafsa [working class cities in Egypt and Tunisia, respectively] and the various places of popular mobilization by those little spoken of, and see what we can do to assist them in a concrete and immediate manner.

In the second place, it is mandated to incorporate and involve these sectors in the construction of the world social movement, where they can and wish to contribute much, and also where they can fertilize the popular dynamic of all the world. In this sense, the World Social Forum must redefine its priorities for 2011 and 2012, and concentrate is forces in North Africa and the Middle East.

—-

Pierre Beaudet is a professor at the University of Ottawa, an editor of the French-language Journal des Alternatives, and an organizer of this year’s World Social Forum, to be held in Dakar. This story first ran March 4 in the Spanish-language publication Viento Sur, which translated it from the French. It was in turn translated into English by World War 4 Report.

From our Daily Report:

Libya: rebels retake oil port, US sends warships
World War 4 Report, March 3, 2011

Libya: rebels tighten circle around Tripoli; Western intervention next?
World War 4 Report, Feb. 25, 2011

See related story, this issue:

FROM LATIN AMERICA TO THE ARAB WORLD
What’s going on in Libya?
by Santiago Alba Rico & Alma Allende, Rebelión
World War 4 Report, March 2011

——————-
Reprinted by World War 4 Report, March 6, 2011
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingINTERNATIONALISM, LIBYA AND THE ARAB REVOLTS 

FROM LATIN AMERICA TO THE ARAB WORLD

What’s going on in Libya?

by Santiago Alba Rico & Alma Allende, Rebelión

We have the impression that a great worldwide liberation process may be aborted by the unappeasable ferocity of Qaddafi, US interventionism, and a lack of foresight in Latin America.

We might describe the situation like this: in a part of the world linked once again to strong internal solidarities and from which only lethargy or fanaticism was expected, a wave of popular uprisings have arisen which have threatened to topple the allies of Western powers in the region, one after the other. Independent of local differences, these uprisings have something in common that radically distinguishes them from the orange- and rose-colored “revolutions” promoted by capitalism in the former Soviet bloc: they demand democracy, certainly, but far from being fascinated by Europe and the United States, they are the holders of a long, entrenched, radical anti-imperialist tradition forged around Palestine and Iraq. There’s not even a hint of socialism in the popular Arab uprisings, but neither is there one of Islamism, nor—most importantly—of Euro-centric seduction: it is simultaneously a matter of economic upheaval and democratic, nationalistic and anti-colonial revolution, something that, 40 years after their defeat, suddenly opens an unexpected opportunity for the region’s socialist and pan-Arabist left.

Progressive Latin America, whose pioneering liberation processes constitute hope for world-wide anti-imperialism, ought to support the Arab world right now without reservation, moving beyond the strategy of the Western powers overtaken by events, as well as those who are providing an opportunity for Qaddafi’s return—perhaps militarily, but above all, propagandistically—as a champion of human rights and democracy. That discourse is hardly credible in this part of the world, where Fidel and Chávez enjoy enormous popular credit; but if Latin America aligns itself, actively or passively, with the tyrant, the contagious popular advances that are already extending toward Europe, and have gone as far as Wisconsin, will not only see themselves irreparably halted but will also produce a new fracture in the anti-imperialist camp, so that the world’s ever-vigilant timekeeper, the United States of America, can seize advantage in order to recover lost ground. Something like this may already be occurring as a result of a combination of ignorance with schematic and summary anti-imperialism. The Arab people, who are returning to history’s stage, need the support of their Latin American brothers and sisters. But above all, it is the relationship between world powers that cannot allow for vacillation by Cuba and Venezuela without having Cuba and Venezuela also suffer the consequences, with Latin America and the hopes for transformation at a global level suffering along with them.

We might say that we know very little of what it happening in Libya and are suspicious about the condemnations coming from the Western media and institutional powers in recent days. We might leave it at that. The imperialists are more intelligent. With many specific interests in the area, they have defended their dictators to the bitter end, but when they have understood that those dictators were unsustainable, they have let them fall and chosen another strategy: that of supporting controlled democratic processes, choosing and deploying post-modern minorities as a driving force for limited change, a new rainbow of democratic rhetoric, in the sure knowledge that memory is short and leftist reflexes quite immediate. Any kind of Western interference must be opposed, but we don’t believe, truly, that NATO is going to invade Libya; it seems to us that this threat, just barely hinted at, has the effect of entangling and blurring the anti-imperialist camp, even to the point of making us forget something that we ought to know: who Qaddafi is. Forgetting this produces three terrible effects in the end: breaking the ties with the popular Arab movements, giving legitimacy to the accusations against Venezuela and Cuba, and granting new prestige to the very damaged imperialist discourse on democracy. All without a doubt, a triumph for imperialist interests in the region.

Over the past ten years, Qaddafi has been a great friend to the European Union and the United States, and its dictator allies in the region. We need only recall the inflammatory statements of support from the Libyan Caligula for the deposed Ben Ali [of Tunisia], to whose militias he quite probably provided weapons and money in the days following January 14. It’s sufficient as well to recall Qaddafi’s docile collaboration with the US in the framework of the so-called “war on terrorism.” The political collaboration has been accompanied by close economic ties with the EU, including Spain: the sale of oil to Germany, Italy, France and the United States has paralleled the entry into Libya by the large Western oil companies (the Spanish Repsol, the British BP, the French Total, the Italian ENI and the Austrian OM), not to mention the juicy contracts for European and Spanish construction firms in Tripoli. Moreover, France and the US have continued providing the weapons that are now killing Libyans from the air, following imperial Italy’s example from 1911 [the year Italy took Libya from the Ottoman Empire]. In 2008, the former US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice made it quite clear: “Libya and the United States share permanent interests: cooperation in the fight against terrorism, trade, nuclear proliferation, Africa, human rights and democracy.”

When Qaddafi visited France in December of 2007, [French-based commentator] Ayman El-Kayman summarized the situation in the following paragraph: “Almost ten years ago, as far as the democratic West was concerned, Qaddafi was no long a reprehensible individual: in order to get off the US terrorist list, he took responsibility for the bombing over Lockerbie; in order to normalize his relations with the United Kingdom, he turned over the names of all the Irish Republicans who’d trained in Libya; for normalization with the United States, he turned over all the information he had about Libyans suspected of participating in jihad along with bin Laden, and renounced his ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ as well as calling on Syria to do the same; in order to normalize relations with the European Union, he became the guardian of concentration camps where thousands of Africans headed for Europe are held; in order to normalize his relations with his sinister neighbor Ben Ali, he turned over the opponents of the Tunisian regime who had been living as refugees in Libya.”

As is apparent, Qaddafi is neither a revolutionary nor an ally, not even a tactical one, of the world’s revolutionaries. In 2008 Fidel and Chávez (along with Mercosur) rightly denounced what was known as the “shameful directive” from Europe that reinforced an already very severe persecution in Europe of defenseless immigrants who’d been stripped of everything. Of all Qaddafi’s crimes, perhaps the most serious and least known is his complicity in the EU’s immigration policy, particularly that of Italy, as the executioner of African migrants. Anyone seeking a wealth of information on the subject can read Il Mare di Mezzo, by the courageous journalist Gabriele del Grande, or consult his website, Fortresseurope, where there is a collection of horrifying documents. By 2006 Human Rights Watch and AFVIC [Association des amis et familles des victimes de l’immigration clandestine] denounced the arbitrary arrests and tortures taking place in Libyan detention centers financed by Italy. The Berlusconi-Qaddafi agreement of 2003 can be read in its entirety at Gabriele del Grande’s site, and its consequences summarized succinctly and painfully in the cry of Farah Anam, the Somali fugitive from Libyan death camps: “I’d prefer to die at sea than return to Libya.” Despite the denunciations of the real extermination practices taking place—or precisely because of them, proof of Qaddafi’s efficiency as Europe’s guardian—the European Commission signed a “cooperative agenda” [with Tripoli] in order to “direct migration flows” and “control borders,” valid until 2013 and accompanied by the delivery of 50 million Euros to Libya.

Europe’s relationship with Qaddafi has been a submissive one. Berlusconi, Sarkozy, Zapatero and Blair received him with open arms in 2007 and Zapatero himself visited him in Tripoli in 2010. Even the Spanish king, Juan Carlos, was dispatched to Tripoli in January of 2009 in order to promote Spanish business. On the other hand, the EU didn’t hesitate to humiliate itself and make a public apology on March 27, 2010, through the Spanish foreign minister at the time, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, for having prohibited 188 Libyan citizens entry into Europe due to the conflict between Switzerland and Libya over the arrest of one of Qaddafi’s sons in Geneva where he was accused of assaulting his maids. More than that: the EU didn’t issue the slightest protest when Qaddafi imposed economic, trade and human reprisals against Switzerland, nor when he effectively called for a holy war against that country and made a public statement about his wish that it be wiped from the map.

And so now when Qaddafi’s imperialist friends—who’ve seen how the Arab world revolted without their intervention—condemn the Libyan dictatorship and talk about democracy, we vacillate. We apply the universal template of the anti-imperialist struggle, with its conspiracy theories and its paradoxical distrust of the people, and ask for time so that the clouds of dust thrown up by the bombs dropped from the air might clear—to be sure that there are no CIA cadavers underneath. That is, when we don’t offer direct support, as the Nicaraguan government did, to a criminal with whom the slightest contact can only stain forever anyone who claims to be leftist or progressive. It’s not NATO who’s bombing the Libyans, but Qaddafi. “Rifle against rifle” is how the revolutionary song goes; “Missiles against civilians” is something that we cannot accept and that, without even asking ourselves, we ought to condemn with all our might and indignation. But let’s ask ourselves the questions as well. Because if we ask ourselves, the answers that we have—few as they might be—provide further proof of which side the revolutionaries of the world should be on right now. With any luck, Qaddafi will fall—better today than tomorrow—and Latin America will understand that what is happening right now in the Arab world has to do, not with the Machiavellian plans of the EU and the US (which without a doubt are maneuvering in the shadows), but with the open processes of Our America, that America which belongs to everyone, that of ALBA and dignity, since the beginning of the 1990s, following in the wake of the Cuba of 1958.

The opportunity is great, and possibly the last for a definitive reversal in the balance of forces, and for isolating the imperialist powers within a new global framework. We ought not to fall into such a simple trap. We ought not to underestimate the Arabs. No, they aren’t socialists, but in the last two months, in an unexpected way, they have stripped away the hypocrisy from the EU and the United States, have expressed their desire for authentic democracy, far removed from any colonial tutelage, and have opened a space for the left to thwart capitalism’s attempts to recover lost ground. It’s the Latin America of ALBA, of Che, and Playa Girón [Bay of Pigs], whose prestige in this area remained intact until yesterday, that must support the process before the world’s timekeeper manages to turn the hands back and to its favor. The capitalist countries have “interests,” the socialist ones only “limits.” Many of these “interests” were with Qaddafi, but none of these “limits” have anything to do with him. He is a criminal and moreover, a hindrance. Please, revolutionary comrades of Latin America, the revolutionary comrades of the Arab world are asking that you not support him.

—-

This story first ran in Spanish Feb. 24 on the Mexico-based website Rebelión. This translation by Machetera, of the multi-cultural translators’ network Tlaxcala, first appeared March 3 on VenezuelAnalysis. It has been slightly edited by World War 4 Report.

From our Daily Report:

Libya: battle for Tripoli begins; more massacres reported
World War 4 Report, March 6, 2011

Hugo Chávez to mediate in Libya crisis?
World War 4 Report, March 3, 2011

Latin leftist leaders in love-in with Libyan lunatic
World War 4 Report, Feb. 26, 2011

See related stories, this issue:

INTERNATIONALISM, LIBYA AND THE ARAB REVOLTS
by Pierre Beaudet, Viento Sur
World War 4 Report, March 2011

LIBYA: THE WASHINGTON-LONDON DILEMMA
How Will the Empire React?
by Paul Rogers, OpenDemocracy
World War 4 Report, March 2011

——————-
Reprinted by World War 4 Report, March 6, 2011
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingFROM LATIN AMERICA TO THE ARAB WORLD 

THE MOSQUE CONTROVERSY —IN CHINA

Paranoia in Xinjiang; Harmonious Confusion in Kaifeng

by Sarkis Pogossian, World War 4 Report

International eyes are on the case of Córdoba House, the Islamic community center slated for two blocks away from “Ground Zero” in New York City, which has been met with vociferous protests from the jingo legions.

Across the planet, on the remote steppes of China’s western Xinjiang province, mosques are being targeted by the government for surveillance, infiltration and indoctrination one year after a wave of deadly unrest in the region. Last summer’s riots in the provincial capital Urumqi pitted the indigenous Uighurs—a Turkic and Muslim people—against Han settlers from the east. In August, a month after the riots’ one-year mark, a terror attack claimed the lives of six military police in Urumqi, as an assailant rammed his explosives-laden car into a highway checkpoint.

Xinjiang seems headed into a dystopian situation where an authoritarian state is opposed by militant Islamic factions—predictably resulting in a policy of official Islamophobia which will only harden the will of the extremists, and serve as their recruiting tool.

Elsewhere in China, Islam flourishes far from the influence of fundamentalism that now emanates from the Middle East, through Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia. In Muslim enclaves such as Kaifeng, on the banks of the Yellow River in Henan province, mosques permit women to be imams—a grave apostasy for the fundamentalists. Co-existence and syncretism with Buddhism, Taoism and even Judaism is deeply ingrained. The state appears to take little interest in the mosques, and an ethic of laissez-faire prevails in spiritual matters. The government is even making an effort to export the tolerant traditions of the Kaifeng Muslims to restive Xinjiang.

Which seems to indicate that even the authoritarian Chinese state is more sophisticated than the USA’s reactionary nativists in its perceptions of Islam.

Big Brother in Urumqi
Video surveillance is growing explosively as in China, where seven million cameras already watch streets and businesses, with experts predicting an additional 15 million cameras by 2014. Rights observers warn that Uighur mosques and Tibetan Buddhist monasteries are being especially targeted by the state’s electronic eyes.

In Urumqi, where last year’s unrest left some 200 dead, there are now 47,000 cameras in place, with plans to install another 13,000 by year’s end. Residents say a disproportionate number are trained on mosques and Uighur districts of the city.

Similarly, following the March 2008 riots in the Tibetan capital Lhasa, authorities awarded China Telecom—maker of the “Global Eye” surveillance cameras—a $6.5-million contract to install cameras at 624 locations around the city. The surveillance program has been given the Orwellian sobriquet of “Peace in Lhasa.” A cluster of cameras has also monitored the Tibetan neighborhood around Beijing’s Yonghegong Temple since the prelude to the 2008 Olympics there.

Along with the escalated surveillance, China’s Ministry of Public Security has launched a program of state control over spiritual institutions in the restive western regions of Xinjiang and Tibet in recent weeks. The program includes intensive propagandizing of Xinjiang’s Muslim clerics and Tibet’s Buddhist monks in the importance of patriotism and party loyalty. The increased oversight of mosques in Xinjiang has preceded the onset of Ramadan, wile the similar measures at Tibetan monasteries followed the recent visit of the government-designated Panchen Lama to Lhasa and other areas in Tibet.

The program has predictably sparked resentment among the Uighurs—especially over the issue of non-Muslim officials and party cadre attending meetings at mosques. In an incident that received little coverage outside a lone report in the Sri Lanka Guardian, local Uighurs apparently protested in Peyziwat county of Xinjiang’s Kashgar prefecture on July 24 against a Communist Party-organized meeting at the village mosque to hold a speech contest on the them “Love the Country, Promote the Homeland.”

Rebiya Kadeer, exiled president of the World Uyghur Congress, who lives in the US, has protested the campaign, as have other Uighur diaspora leaders. Abdukadir Asim, a Uighur cleric based in Turkey, declared: “It is a common principle among all religions that the privacy of the place of worship is fundamental. It is a strange and abhorrent event that communist propaganda was conducted in a mosque.” He criticized the general secretary of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Ekmelledin Ihsanoglu, for not raising the issue on his recent visit to China.

Along with the effort to tighten control over the mosques, the Chinese state has launched a program for the demolition of exclusively Uighur areas in Urumqi, and forcing the displaced residents to re-settle in apartment complexes built for them in areas dominated by Han Chinese. This has also been resented by Uighur leaders an attempt to erode their identity.

A ban on the use of loudspeakers for the call to prayer at Xinjiang’s mosques has also been imposed, according to a recent account by reporter Ananth Krishnan who traveled through the region for India’s Hindu Times. But outside the now-silenced 550-year-old grand Id Kah mosque in Kashgar, a police van patrols at prayer time, its own loudspeaker issuing a recorded message urging all ethnic groups “to maintain harmony, support the Communist Party and serve the motherland.” A battalion of armed police watch over the square.

The Female Imams of Kaifeng
The Muslims of Kaifeng and central China are known as the Hui, and constitute one of the 56 official “nationalities” of China. The Hui probably share an ethnogenesis with the Uighurs. Islam was brought to China by Arab conquerors in Central Asia and more significantly by Persian traders on the Silk Road beginning in the eighth century. The Uighurs were the first to convert. In the 13th century, they allied with the Mongols in their invasions of China, serving as both military advance guard and the official scribes of the Mongol court. (The Uighur script was used by the Mongol bureaucracy until Chinese was eventually adopted.) Through trade and warfare, many Uighurs ended up considerably to the east of what is now Xinjiang. These inter-married with Han, eventually adopting the dominant Han language and culture, while remaining true to Islam. They are today the Hui, who have an Autonomous Region in Ningxia, much as Xinjiang is officially the Uighur Autonomous Region. There are also large Hui populations in the provinces of Gansu, Qinghai, Hebei, Shangdong and Yunnan as well as Henan.

A recent report by the USA’s National Public Radio notes how Kaifeng’s Muslim community distinguishes itself in the Islmaic world with a long tradition of female imams. These imams—or ahong as they are called in China—perform many of the same duties as their male counterparts, leading prayers and teaching the Koran, although they do not lead funeral rituals.

“In a country with about 21 million Muslims, women also have their own mosques to worship in—another practice different from other countries,” said Shui Jingjun, of the Henan Academy of Social Sciences who co-authored a book on the subject. The tradition of Koranic schools for girls in central China began in the late 17th century—mostly in Henan but also in Shanxi and Shandong provinces. Some 100 years ago they evolved into women’s mosques, starting in Henan.

The state-controlled Islamic Association of China has given political assistance to establish some women’s mosques in northwest China, where historically there have been none—a probable effort to undercut the influence of fundamentalism in the restive region. Guo Baoguang of the Islamic Association of China admitted to NPR that the effort had met with some resistance. But he also offered this optimistic quote: “Given the fast development of China’s economy, and as its political status rises, I think Chinese Islam will become more important in the Islamic world. The development Chinese Islam has made, like the role played by Chinese women, will be more accepted by Muslims elsewhere in the world.”

For the moment, China’s Muslims are virtually alone in permitting women to be imams. Morocco became the first Arab country to officially sanction training women as religious leaders in 2006.

At Kaifeng’s Wangjia Hutong women’s mosque—China’s oldest, built in 1820 as a Koranic school for girls—14-year veteran imam Yao Baoxia leads prayers. NPR notes that as she leads the service, Yao stands alongside the other women, not in front of them as a male imam would. But she asserts that her role is the same as a male imam. “The status is the same,” Yao said. “Men and women are equal here, maybe because we are a socialist country.”

Kaifeng: Searching for the Jews, I Find the Muslims
I visited Kaifeng recently in search of traces of China’s one indigenous Jewish community, which flourished in the city from the ninth century. By official histories, the last of the Kaifeng Jews disappeared in the 1860s, when the dwindling community sold their synagogue—or, by some accounts, 1841, when the Yellow River burst its banks and the temple was removed to strengthen the city walls. The claim that the Kaifeng Jews do not survive was recently contested by reporter Matthew Fishbane of the New York Times, who visited living self-identified Jews in the city this spring—despite the fact that Jews are not one of China’s official nationalities.

The Jews of Kaifeng, who also arrived on the Silk Road from the west, were known to their Han neighbors as the “blue-turbaned Muslims”—the exotic faith of Judaism apparently considered to the Han a mere variant of Islam. Having not yet seen the New York Times article, I arrived in Kaifeng cold—and the responses to my inquiries indicated that the confusion persists to this day.

Kaifeng, China’s capital in the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127), is today a chaotic modern city, with much more of a “third world” feel than Beijing. Like all Chinese cities, it is rife with KFCs and crass commercialism—until the main drag ends in a traditional arch guarded by carved lions. Beyond this lies Old Kaifeng. Crossing over is like going back centuries in time.

Asking locals through my interpreter where the old Jewish district could be found, I was directed to Zhuxian, a peasant village a 20-kilometer bus ride south of Kaifeng—which turned out to be inhabited almost entirely by Hui Muslims. Not a trace of Judaism was in evidence, but a beautiful mosque, probably dating to the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty—in classical Chinese style, but with Arabic calligraphy in the intricate wood-carvings and relief work.

I finally figured out that the city’s most precious Jewish artifacts are sequestered in the Kaifeng Municipal Museum—literally kept under lock and key in a secret room on the building’s top floor. With special permission from the museum management, I was allowed entry. No photos were permitted. When the lights were turned on, the dusty “Exhibition on the History & Culture of the Ancient Kaifeng Jews” was revealed.

The principal artifacts are three stelae which stood outside the synagogue, telling the history of the Kaifeng Jews—dating to 1489, 1512 and 1679. The interpretive material in English refers to the synagogue as a “mosque.” The caption for the 1489 stele, which was erected after the demolition of the original synagogue dating to the 12th century, reads: “Stele of Rebuilding the Mosque.” The badly worn writing is all in Chinese.

On a China tourism website, I had read that relics from the last synagogue—particularly blue tiles from its roof—were still guarded by the Muslims at Kaifeng’s Dongda Si, or Eastern Grand Mosque. So the following morning, I took a bicycle-taxi to the Dongda Si, another magnificent centuries-old mosque, which lies hidden amid a warren of alleys invisible to the eyes of Kaifeng’s few foreign tourists. My interpreter’s questions about the Jewish relics were met with incomprehension, but we were welcomed to look around the mosque and take photos. Amid the exquisite wood-carvings with both Arabic and Chinese calligraphic work were two cross-beams which were a special historical prize—carved with lines in an ancient and esoteric script, which I was unable to certainly identify, despite my queries. This was possibly Kufic, the archaic form of Arabic in which the early Korans were written. Or possibly it was the ancient Uighur script, which was loosely based on Kufic through the intermediaries of the Persians—speaking to the ancient roots of the Hui culture.

The New York Times article indicated that a couple of small tourism companies are offering trips to Kaifeng for those seeking the city’s Jewish heritage, and perhaps I would have seen more of what I was looking for if I had known about them—for instance, the site of the old synagogue on Teaching Torah Lane. But my blind probings led me to an unexpected look at Kaifeng’s unique syncretism and fortuitous confusion.

Please click here for Sarkis Pogossian’s photo essay from Kaifeng.

—-

Struggling World War 4 Report researcher Sarkis Pogossian incurred great personal debt to travel to China for this story. If you appreciate his reportage, please make a donation, large or small.

Sources:

Big Brother widens his watchful eye in China
Toronto Globe & Mail, Aug. 12, 2010

In Restive Chinese Area, Cameras Keep Watch
New York Times, Aug. 2, 2010

Beijing Tightens Up Control Over Monasteries & Mosques
Sri Lanka Guardian, Aug. 25, 2010

Faith Against Odds
The Hindu, Aug. 8, 2010

China’s Female Imams
Illume, Aug. 17, 2010

Female Imams Blaze Trail Amid China’s Muslims
National Public Radio, July 21, 2010

China’s Ancient Jewish Enclave
New York Times, April 4, 2010

Resources:

Islamic Association of China

World Uygur Congress

Uighur Language

Uygur Alphabets, Pronunciation and Language

Kufic Script

China Tours page on Kaifeng Jews

China Corner page on Kaifeng Jews

Ctrip China Guide page on Kaifeng Jews

The Kaifeng Connection

Jewish Heritage Tours of China

Chinese Dynasties

From our Daily Report:

China: arrests in Xinjiang terror attack
World War 4 Report, Aug. 30, 2010

“Ground Zero Mosque” opponent supports terrorists
World War 4 Report, Aug. 19, 2010

Prison for Tibetan ecologist
World War 4 Report, July 24, 2010

Israelis, Palestinians woo China; Kaifeng crypto-Jews caught in the middle?
World War 4 Report, Feb. 25, 2010

See also:

THE ANTI-IMPERIALIST CASE FOR TIBETAN FREEDOM
by Bill Weinberg, AlterNet
World War 4 Report, June 2008

MEMOIRS OF A TIBETAN MARXIST
Middle Ground Between Mao and the Dalai Lama?
by William Wharton, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, May 2008

SUFISM AND THE STRUGGLE WITHIN ISLAM
Paradoxical Legacies of the Militant Mystics
by Khaleb Khazari-El, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, July 2006

——————-

Special to World War 4 Report, September 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingTHE MOSQUE CONTROVERSY —IN CHINA 

THE POLITICS OF DENIALISM

The Strange Case of Rwanda

Book Review:

THE POLITICS OF GENOCIDE
by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson
Monthly Review Press, New York, 2010

by Gerald Caplan, Pambazuka News

Edward Herman is a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania and David Peterson is described as a Chicago-based journalist and researcher. Those who have read Herman’s work, some of it in collaboration with Noam Chomsky, will only partly know what to expect from his latest book. Herman and Peterson argue that in a world controlled by the American empire and its media and intellectual lackeys, genocide has become a political construct largely manipulated by Washington and its allies. The claim of genocide becomes an excuse for so-called humanitarian intervention that disguises malevolent imperial motives: “The Western establishment rushed to proclaim ‘genocide’ in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Kosovo, and Darfur… In contrast, its silence over the crimes committed by its own regimes against the peoples of Southeast Asia, Central America, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa is deafening. This is the ‘politics of genocide’.”

Herman and Peterson give some examples that should be familiar to all who reject the notion of the US as a unparalleled force for good in the world. The suffering of Iraqis under US-led sanctions in the 1990s, American support for Israel’s repression in Gaza and destruction in Lebanon, the American role in the brutal massacres of Guatemalans and Salvadorans in the 1980s, America’s backing for Indonesia’s blood bath in East Timor—all are true, all are appalling, and all have been thoroughly documented. No doubt it’s good for a new generation to be reminded of these atrocities, invariably distorted or ignored by the mainstream media. But I’m not at all sure that it’s helpful to explore these issues against a frame of genocide, and it’s supremely destructive that incontrovertible incidents of American crimes, such as the above, are included with bizarre fictions that have poisoned the authors’ minds, such as below. This was decidedly unexpected from Edward Herman.

Playing the “Expert” Card in Rwanda
To this stage, this little volume might on balance just be considered recommended reading. Despite its strange biases and excesses in belaboring its thesis, it’s a useful reminder of American double standards that should not be forgotten (particularly given the disappointing record of the Obama administration).

But all of this is mere preliminary for Herman and Peterson. Their main target, which is none of the cases mentioned so far, can be found squarely in the heart of the book. It’s chapter 4, the longest single section, and its purpose is to show that the 1994 genocide of the Rwandan Tutsi never happened. In fact the entire “genocide” in Rwanda is an elaborate American conspiracy to “gain a strong military presence in Central Africa, a diminution of its European rivals’ influence, proxy armies to serve its interests, and access to the raw material-rich Democratic Republic of the Congo.” The authors’ greatest bete noir is Paul Kagame, commander of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebels during the 1990-94 civil war and 1994 genocide, long-time president of post-genocide Rwanda—and leading Yankee stooge.

Yes, in order to blame the American empire for every ill on earth, Herman and Peterson, two dedicated anti-imperialists, have sunk to the level of genocide deniers. And the “evidence” they adduce to back up their delusional tale rests solidly on a foundation of other deniers, statements by genocidaires, fabrications, distortions, innuendo and gross ignorance. In this Grimm fairy tale, everyone who contradicts their fantasies is an American/RPF pawn—Paul Kagame, human rights investigator Alison des Forges, the head of the UN military mission in Rwanda during the genocide General Romeo Dallaire, and entire human rights organizations.

The main authorities on whom the authors rest their fabrications are a tiny number of long-time American and Canadian genocide deniers, who gleefully drink each other’s putrid bath water. Each solemnly cites the others’ works to document his fabrications—Robin Philpot, Christopher Black, Christian Davenport, Allan Stam, Peter Erlinder. It’s as if a Holocaust denier cited as supporting evidence the testimonies of David Irving, David Duke, Robert Faurisson or Ernest Zundel. Be confident Herman and Peterson are now being quoted as authoritative sources on the genocide by Robin Philpot, Christopher Black, Davenport and Stam, Peter Erlinder.

In reality, there is only a relative handful of these American deniers, but the vast power of the internet makes them seem ubiquitous and forceful. Any online search for “Rwanda genocide” gives them a vastly disproportionate pride of place. Besides the five cited by Herman and Peterson, this rogue’s gallery of American deniers also includes Keith Harmon Snow and Wayne Madsen, who will bitterly resent the authors for failing to invoke them in their book.

Let me take a moment on Peter Erlinder, since he’s been in the news recently. (I wrote about the case the other day [June 11] in the Globe and Mail [“The law society of Upper Canada and genocide denial in Rwanda”]). As of this writing, Erlinder is in prison in Rwanda, charged, apparently to his great surprise, with genocide denial. I regret this decision by the Kagame government. I wish it had simply denied him entry when he provocatively showed up as counsel for Victoire Ingabire, a declared presidential candidate who is also controversially accused of being a denier. But no one could really be surprised at his arrest—especially Erlinder himself.

For Erlinder has explicitly conceded, more than once, that he knows he has broken Rwandan laws on genocide denial, and not in his work as a defense counsel at the International Criminal Tribunal For Rwanda (ICTR). For example, in a February 2008 article titled “Genocide Cover-up” [Global Research], Erlinder writes that “under the laws of Rwanda I too am a criminal ‘negationist’ for writing this essay.” And in a May 2008 article, “Victor’s Impunity” [Rwanda Democracy Watch], he agrees that “Under the laws of Rwanda, I have violated the ban against ‘negationism’ by questioning the Kagame version of events.” Of course he considers the laws he violated to be unjust. Nevertheless, he chose to enter Rwanda aware he had broken them. Was this not daring the Rwanda government to lock him up? Why would they not when he had confessed his guilt?

That was by no means his only provocation. Erlinder flew to Rwanda last month directly from a conference in Brussels that was notable for its collection of deniers and accused genocidaires. So extreme was the composition of the conference that one of the world’s most rabid Kagame-haters withdrew his participation. Indeed, shortly after the conference French authorities arrested one of the participants, Dr. Eugene Rwamucyo, accused of taking part in the genocide.

Perhaps even worse, Erlinder has shamelessly distorted a ruling of the ICTR on which he’s based so many of his attacks on Kagame and company beyond the Tribunal. A 2008 judgment ruled that there was not sufficient evidence to find that Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, seen by many as the mastermind of the genocide, had engaged in a conspiracy to exterminate all Tutsi. In a series of speeches and writings, including one of his better-known articles, “Rwanda: No Conspiracy, No Genocide Planning… No Conspiracy?” (Jurist, Dec. 24, 2008), Erlinder milked the decision for all he could. The title of the article said it all, and the question mark of course really doesn’t exist in his mind. As he said shortly before leaving America, there “was no conspiracy or planning to commit genocide or other crime.” No planning, no genocide. What could be simpler? (Once arrested, however, he found it far more prudent to declare that he in fact did not deny the genocide.)

Yet in none of his frequent references to this judgment has Erlinder thought it worth including the following statements from the judgment: 1. “Indeed, these preparations [by the accused] are completely consistent with a plan to commit genocide.” 2. “It cannot be excluded that the extended campaign of violence directed against Tutsis, as such, became an added or an altered component of these preparations.” Readers can judge for themselves whether this kind of intellectual dishonesty makes Erlinder a credible witness on any aspect of Rwanda history.

On the other hand, there are other writers on Rwanda on whom Herman and Peterson do not rely. They are many in number and they are totally ignored, except for the late Alison Des Forges, who is shabbily denigrated. In fact they include the overwhelming number of those who have ever written about the genocide. They include academics, human rights activists, journalists who were in Rwanda during the genocide or soon after, and others whose work brought them in close proximity to the events of 1994. Without exception, every single one agrees there was a genocide planned and executed by a cabal of leading Hutu extremists against Rwanda’s Tutsi minority. Except for Des Forges, plus Linda Melvern, whose indispensable oeuvre merits a lonely footnote, not a single one of the following authors is cited by Herman and Peterson:

Alison Des Forges
Linda Melvern
Alex de Waal
Rakiya Omaar
Gerard Prunier
Romeo Dallaire
Peter Uvin
Rene Lemarchand
Scott Straus
Andrew Wallis
Jean Hatzfeld
Samuel Totten
Mahmood Mamdani
Scott Peterson
William Schabas
Timothy Longman
Christian Jennings
Fergal Keane
Howard Adelman
Astri Suhrke
Villia Jefremovas
Michael Barnett
Alain Destexhe
John Berry and Carol Berry
Wendy Whitworth
Allan Thompson
Kingsley Moghalu
Susan Cook
Philip Gourevitch
Carol Rittner
John Roth
Henry Anyidoho
Patrick de Saint-Exupery
Frank Chalk
Bill Berkeley
Colette Braeckman
Jean-Pierre Chrétien
Bruce D. Jones
Hugh McCullum
Ingvar Carlsson
James Smith
Shaharyar Khan
Elizabeth Neuffer
Alan Kuperman

Before we dismiss all these authors as tools of Yankee imperialism, it needs to be added that several of the most prominent—Des Forges, Uvin, Prunier, Lemarchand, Kuperman—are (or were) fierce critics of the post-genocide Kagame government in Rwanda. Yet none has thought to retract their original views on the reality of the genocide.

There are of course also the many grim testimonies of both Tutsi who somehow survived and Hutu who are confessed genocidaires. Both kinds are now widely available in published collections or online; the three volumes by French journalist Jean Hatzfeld are a good beginning. Not a single such testimony or collection is referred to in The Politics of Genocide, and in fact I’ve never yet met a denier who had the guts to make his case before an audience of survivors.

Nor is a single mention made of the testimonies of the few outsiders who remained in Rwanda through all or much of the 100 days:

Romeo Dallaire (UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda–UNAMIR)
James Orbinski (Medicíns Sans Frontiérès)
Phillippe Gaillard (International Committee of the Red Cross)
Carl Wilkens (Adventist Development and Relief Agency International)
Henry Anyidoho (UNAMIR)

As it happens, I know all of the above and none has the slightest doubt, having lived through it, that a genocide organized against the Tutsi took place. Three of them—Dallaire, Orbinski and Anyidoho—have written about their experiences. Of course, some of Herman and Peterson’s most treasured sources like Robin Philpot insist that General Dallaire was also an American puppet. So we can obviously ignore Dallaire’s views completely.

How Deniers Handle Inconvenient Opinions
As for Alison Des Forges, until her untimely death perhaps the most prominent scholar and activist on the Rwanda file, she is dismissed as following: “[Prior to 1993], des Forges had worked for the US Department of State and National Security Council.” Nothing more is said to disqualify des Forges, so we must conclude that simply working for these bodies demonstrates the unreliability of her views on the genocide. That her MA and Ph.D. theses were on Rwandan history, that she knew the country for 30 years before the genocide, that she was among a tiny number of outsiders who spoke Kinyarwanda, that she spent five years after 1994 researching the crisis, that her Leave None to Tell the Story is a highly-respected encyclopaedic history of the genocide—all this is irrelevant to Herman and Peterson. In their obsessive anti-Americanism, they blithely smear des Forges entire life: “Alison Des Forge’s career is best understood in terms of the services she performed on behalf of US power-projection in Central Africa, with this policy-oriented work couched in the rhetoric of ‘human rights’. In the process, Des Forges badly misinformed a whole generation of scholars, activists, and the cause of peace and justice.” But if she was such a loyal American hack, why was she such an unrestrained critic of America’s great ally Kagame? This obvious contradiction is of no apparent interest to Herman and Peterson.

The work of the 1993 International Commission of Inquiry into Human Rights Abuses in Rwanda is similarly dismissed. The Inquiry brought together four well-known human rights organisations whose investigation led them to conclude that the Habyarimana government was deliberately targeting Tutsi for massacre, that extremists anti-Tutsi rhetoric was growing and that anti-Tutsi militia were being formed. Yet none of this needs to be taken seriously. Why? Because the Commission was little more than an RPF front, “either directly funded by the RPF or infiltrated by it.” The sole source for this very serious accusation—made by no others of whom I’m aware—is Robin Philpot, Canada’s preeminent denier of the genocide.

Is Philpot’s charge remotely credible? Has he exposed some deep conspiracy no one else has ever detected? By coincidence, I know both the person who initiated the Commission of Inquiry, Ed Broadbent, and one of its members, William Schabas. (Alison Des Forges was another member, representing Human Rights Watch.) Instead of just dismissing the Philpot charge, I asked each of them about the Commission. Broadbent, a former leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada, was then the president of Rights and Democracy, an independent Canadian-based international human rights organization funded by the Conservative government of the day. I spoke to him by phone. Rumors of foul doings in Rwanda took him to the country in 1992, he told me, and he was so shaken by the evidence he found of violence and discrimination against the Tutsi minority that he organized and mostly funded the International Commission to follow up his work. He told me he is simply incredulous that anyone would claim a role for the RPF in its work, since it wasn’t true.

Broadbent asked William Schabas, then professor of human rights law at the Universite du Quebec a Montréal, to represent Rights and Democracy in this investigation. Schabas is now director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland in Galway, where he also holds the chair in human rights law. In an email, Schabas told me he had never been to Rwanda before this mission and knew nothing about the country. “I certainly never detected any pro-RPF sentiment from Ed…There was one member who seemed to be a sympathizer of the RPF…Otherwise, many members were quite openly critical of or hostile to the RPF.”

Is this just a case of “he said–they said”? Does an open-minded reader consider that the accusations of Robin Philpot, a man who also believes General Dallaire was an American stooge, are as worthy of consideration as the two statements by Ed Broadbent and William Schabas? Are both Broadbent and Schabas, 17 years later, blatantly lying to me, just as Dallaire’s entire life for the past 17 years must be a lie?

Or does one rather draw another conclusion about how the deniers operate? If there are views that contradict your own, you simply dismiss them as tools of either the US State Department or the RPF. Further proof is not required.

The Ugly Americans Are Everywhere
Let me cite the authors themselves to assure readers I haven’t exaggerated or distorted their extraordinary re-writing of history. Chapter 4 of their little book is devoted to Rwanda and the Congo and its 18 pages constitute far and away their longest case study.

They begin by asserting that “the Western establishment [has] swallowed a propaganda line on Rwanda that turned perpetrator and victim upside-down.” In their Rwanda story, it’s not Hutu extremists, the Presidential Guard, the post-Habyarimana interim government and the Interahamwe militia who were the “prime genocidaires.” It was the RPF. As a matter of fact, “the Hutu members of Rwanda’s power-sharing government couldn’t possibly have planned a genocide against the Tutsi.” In fact, President Habyarimana repeatedly refused, until literally the end of his life, to implement the power-sharing agreement set out in the Arusha Accords. In any event, why the Hutu members of the government “couldn’t possibly have planned a genocide against the Tutsi” is never remotely explained.

Next: The 1990 invasion of Rwanda from Uganda was carried out not by Rwandans but by Ugandan forces under Ugandan President Museveni, the RPF being “a wing of the Ugandan army.” There is no source given for this assertion, which contradicts almost all other histories of the invasion.

“It is clear that Museveni and the RPF were perceived as serving US interests and that the government of President Habyarimana was targeted for ouster… The Ugandan army and the RPF were doing what the United States wanted done in Rwanda.” This is the central thesis of the entire chapter on Rwanda, but the only source who actually “perceives” matters this way seems to be Robin Philpot, the Canadian who denies the genocide, since he is the only source offered for this categorical assertion. No other historian of the genocide of whom I’m aware makes this claim and no evidence for it exists.

Turning Linda Melvern’s seminal book Conspiracy to Murder on its head, the authors give us “an RPF conspiracy” to overthrow the Hutu government and capture the state for themselves. Since one of their sources, Christopher Black, considers Melvern part of the “RPF-US propaganda machine,” she too can be dismissed. But then why, they want to know, has the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) “never once entertained the question of this conspiracy?” This is indeed a reasonable question; I wondered about it myself. Here is their answer: “This, we believe, flows from US and allied support of the RPF, reflected in media coverage, humanitarian intellectuals’ and NGO activism, as well as the ICTR’s jurisprudence.” In other words, a giant US-led conspiracy is at work here.

Dupes like me and most other writers believe the US and its allies betrayed Rwanda by refusing to reinforce the UN military mission there, as general Dallaire was pleading with them to do. Eyewitnesses in Rwanda believed they witnessed for themselves what was developing. The media actually played a deplorable role in the first month of the genocide, confusing a planned extermination with racist views of “primordial African savagery.” And the many different ICTR judges over 15 years, from around the globe, all pretended to base their findings on the legal evidence. Yet in reality, all this time everyone was subtly being manipulated by the United States. Indeed, so subtle was the manipulation that the devilishly cunning Yanks left no proof of it. Moreover, every leading member of the Clinton administration, including the president himself, Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright, after her stint as ambassador to the UN as Clinton’s Secretary of State, have shamefacedly admitted abandoning the Tutsi. Each claims to consider it perhaps the greatest regret of his/her time in office, merely demonstrating, of course, what unconscionable hypocrites they are.

Herman and Peterson hammer their charge home: “Paul Kagame and the RPF were creatures of US power from their origins in Uganda in the 1980s.” They have the undisputed evidence. From Allan Stam, “a Rwanda scholar who once served with the US Army Special Forces,” they learn that Kagame “had spent some time at Fort Leavenworth…not too far before the 1994 genocide.” Fort Leavenworth, Stam explains, is “where rising stars of the US military and other places go to get training… The training that they get there is on planning large-scale operations. It’s not planning small-scale logistics. It’s not tactics. It’s about how do you plan an invasion. And apparently [Kagame] did very well.”

This crucial paragraph deserves a little parsing. To begin, it’s absolutely no secret that Kagame was briefly at Fort Leavenworth, though Stam doesn’t mention how very brief his stay was. Kagame himself has never kept it a secret. Note too that Allan Stam’s credibility is based on two factors. First, that he is a “Rwanda scholar,” though I believe not a single scholar listed above ever cites his work. Second, that he “once served with the US Army Special Forces.” Presumably this service gives him special insight into how the US army works. Yet he presents not a single specific detail about Kagame’s few weeks at Fort Leavenworth that ties him to American interest in and plans for Rwanda, which no one has ever documented. And since thousands of officers from nations around the world have passed through Fort Leavenworth, you’d think that the thousands of large-scale invasions they would return home and orchestrate would be better-known to the world than they are.

Stam’s curious thought processes are on display again, thanks to another citation by Herman and Peterson. By 1994, Stam has written, Kagame’s “sophisticated plan for seizing power in Rwanda…looks staggeringly like the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 1991.” Perhaps it’s my failing, but I have no idea what this means.

The Hutu Genocidaires Become the Dead Hutu Victims
Herman and Peterson now take their argument further. They have concluded that the all-important conventionally-accepted truth about the 100 days of genocide is all wrong. In fact this was no genocide at all against the Tutsi in which at a minimum 500,000-600,000 and perhaps as many as a million unarmed Tutsi were slaughtered, along with many Hutu who wouldn’t cooperate with the extremists’ genocidal conspiracy. On the contrary. They cite the sensational estimate by Christian Davenport and Allan Stam that one million deaths occurred from April to July 1994, and that “the majority of victims are likely Hutu and not Tutsi.” That the methodology employed to arrive at such an Orwellian assertion has been totally discredited is of no interest to our authors and never mentioned.

Indeed, even a million dead, mostly Hutu, isn’t good enough for them. They refer to “a number of observers as well as participants in the events of 1994 [who] claim that the great majority of deaths were Hutu, with some estimates as high as two million.” With Herman and Peterson, you always have to watch your wallets. Checking the endnote for this rather extravagant statement, we find the figure comes from “a former RPF military officer Christophe Hakizimana” in a letter to the 1999 UN Commission of Inquiry into the genocide. But that Commission, chaired by former Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson, hadn’t the slightest doubt that genocide against the Tutsi had taken place and their report harshly criticised the US and its allies for refusing to intervene to stop it. So it’s hardly surprising that the Inquiry’s report never mentions Hakizimana and his accusations.

So how did our authors know about it? “We base this on personal communications with the international criminal lawyer Christopher Black of Toronto.” It will by this time come as no surprise to readers to learn that Christopher Black is prominent among the small notorious band of deniers who cite each other so faithfully and who alone are the sources for Herman and Peterson’s chapter 4. Even among the lunatic fringe of deniers, Black inhabits a universe of his own. Not only is the genocide of the Tutsi a “myth”, not only did France have nothing to do with it, not only did the RPF rampage “across the country massacring hundreds of thousands of Hutu and any Tutsi who were seen as non-reliable.” As well, he asserts, before 1994 there was no ethnic problem in Rwanda, then “a semi-socialist country considered a model for Africa.” For perspective, I note that this authority on Rwanda visited North Korea in 2003 and emerged to describe it as “a progressive, socialist country deserving the support of all progressive peoples around the world.” Black also considered Slobodan Milosevic completely innocent of the charges brought against him and believes Milosevic was consistently committed to a multi-ethnic Yugoslavia during his time in government.

Do I belabor the obvious by pointing out that not a single one of the long list of authors cited above mention either Christophe Hakizimana or Christopher Black? Yet they are the two sources Herman and Peterson give for their stunning statement that “a number of observers as well as participants in the events of 1994 claim that the great majority of deaths were Hutu, with some estimates as high as two million.”

The authors simply dismiss out of hand the widely-accepted facts about the genocide. “The established narrative’s 800,000 or more largely Tutsi deaths resulting from a ‘preprogrammed genocide’ committed by ‘Hutu Power’ appears to have no basis in any facts beyond the early claims by Kagame’s RPF and its politically motivated Western sponsors and propagandists.” With this single sentence, and with no further amplification of any kind, the question of the number of Tutsi murdered is closed.

But there’s much more about murdered Hutu. It is no surprise to the authors that the RFP killed so many people. After all, “the RPF was the only well-organized killing force within Rwanda in 1994… Clearly the chief responsibility for Rwanda political violence belongs to the RPF, and not to the ousted coalition government, the FAR [Rwandan army], or any Hutu-related group.” So much for the Interahamwe, apparently figments of everyone’s imagination. And for the Hutu Power and Zero Network hit lists, which many diplomats actually saw. And for the explicit public threats against the Tutsi from RTLM hate radio and Kangura magazine. In the report I wrote for the International Panel of Eminent Persons appointed by the Organization of African Unity to investigate the genocide, there is a chapter titled “The Eve of the Genocide: What the World Knew.” The report, published in 2000 and called “Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide,” is still available online [African Union Official Documents page, PDF], so readers can access it in full, as indeed could Herman and Peterson.

Chapter 9 [of the OAU report] includes (among much else) the notorious 1990 racist document “Ten Commandments of the Hutu”; the dramatic increase in Habyarimana’s military budget; the formation of the extremist radical Hutu party CDR; the beginning of military training for the youth wings of both Habyarimana’s party (the Interahamwe) and the CDR; Leon Mugesera’s speech inciting annihilation of the Tutsi; the repudiation by Habyarimana and many of his officials and officers of the Arusha peace agreement; the opening of RTLM hate radio in mid-1993, funded by Habyarimana’s inner circle; the report by Belgian intelligence at the end of 1993 that “The interahamwe are armed to the teeth and on alert… each of them has ammunition, grenades, mines and knives. They are all waiting for the right moment to act”; the Dallaire “genocide fax” of January 11, 1994; the constant flow of new arms to Habyarimana’s forces from France or from South Africa and Egypt paid by France; RTLM’s broadcast on Match 1, as reported by the Belgian ambassador in Kigali, of “inflammatory statements calling for the hatred—indeed for the extermination of the Tutsi”; the late March statement by the officer in charge of intelligence for the Rwanda army that “if Arusha were implemented, they [the Rwanda army] were ready to liquidate the Tutsi”; the several RTLM and Kangura statements in the last days of March and early April that something major and dramatic was going to happen within the next few days; the public threat uttered on April 4, two days before the genocide began, by Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, widely considered the ringleader of the Hutu extremist conspirators, that “The only plausible solution for Rwanda appears to be the extermination of the Tutsi.”

Can every one of these well-documented points actually be some fantastically clever component of the American conspiracy behind Kagame’s RPF? Don’t bother asking Herman and Peterson; they don’t even try to explain them all away. They simply ignore hundreds of different pieces of evidence pointing to a developing Hutu extremist plot to annihilate the country’s Tutsi.

Instead, they focus on the crimes of the RPF. Despite recklessly throwing around figures such as a million or even two million Hutu killed, the numbers they seem to take more seriously total some 25,000 to 45,000 Hutu massacred from April to July 1994. As evidence they cite the investigation led by Robert Gersony for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and even though Gersony’s report mysteriously vanished, both UNHCR and the US State Department seem to have found these figures credible.

Typically, Herman and Peterson refer to the Gersony Report as “a whole body of important but suppressed research.” Maybe this reflects the problem of only reading other deniers. Yet look at chapter 22 of “Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide,” the report of the OAU-appointed panel, titled “The RPF and Human Rights.” It points out that while the actual Gersony report seemed to be missing, Alison Des Forges of Human Rights Watch had uncovered confidential notes based on briefings by Gersony and his colleagues. On p. 253, the panel describes the supposedly “suppressed research”: “Gersony reportedly estimated that during the months from April to August, the RPF killed between 25,000 and 45,000 persons.”

After reviewing all the other evidence we could, the panel approved the following paragraph: “Our own conclusion, based on the available evidence, is that it is quite unrealistic to deny RPF responsibility for serious human rights abuses in the months during and after the genocide. They were tough soldiers in the middle of a murderous civil war made infinitely more vicious by the genocide directed by their enemies against their ethnic kin… Some had lost family and were aggressively looking for revenge. But none of these factors excuse the excesses of which they [the RPF] were guilty.”

So in fact the so-called suppressed research by Gersony has been well-known for years. But the panel also knew this: The fact of the genocide against the Tutsi was proved beyond any question, and while 25-45,000 deaths is a huge and gruesome number, it pales beside the genocide being executed at the same time. As noted earlier, the lowest estimate by serious scholars of Tutsi killed during the 100 days is 500,000–600,000; some believe it could be closer to a million.

Beyond that, the reason the catastrophe is called a genocide is precisely because it meets the definition laid down in the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” That’s what qualitatively distinguishes the organized and systematic campaign led by a cabal of well-placed Hutu extremists in government and the military from the terrible killings by the RPF. That’s why the ICTR has deemed its priority to be the trial of accused genocidaire rather than of accused RPF soldiers. It’s the well-understood distinction between the Nazis and the fire-bombers of Dresden and Hamburg. All are horrific crimes. But genocide is, in our world, the crime of crimes, and it comes first.

Final Aspects of the Great American Conspiracy in Rwanda
Let me address only two remaining points that are integral to the authors’ case.

Almost every well-known writer on the genocide condemns the international community, led by the US, for refusing to intervene to stop the massacres of the Tutsi. Richard Barnett’s book Eyewitness to a Genocide, for example, describes his year as a staffer at the US Mission to the UN – it happened to be 1994—watching as the US and the entire UN chose to abandon Rwanda’s Tutsi to its inexorable fate. Samantha Power found a large number of President Clinton’s senior advisers who contritely explained to her why they failed to support General Dallaire’s urgent cries for reinforcements. Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s ambassador to the UN, has abjectly apologized for her role in leading the Security Council to decimate Dallaire’s puny military mission, and has righteously claimed that behind the scenes she attempted to get the White House to change its position. Non-permanent members of the Security Council later complained they were kept in the dark about the real situation in Rwanda by those who resisted intervention, including UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali. All of this is now well known.

Here’s what Herman and Peterson have to say: “What the United States and its Western allies (Britain, Canada and Belgium) really did was sponsor the US-trained Kagame, support his invasion from Uganda and the massive ethnic cleansing prior to April 1994, weaken the Rwandan state by forcing an economic recession and the RPF’s penetration of the government and throughout the country, and then press for the complete removal of UN troops because they didn’t want UN troops to stand in the way of Kagame’s conquest of the country, even though Rwanda’s Hutu authorities were urging the dispatch of more [sic] UN troops.”

The endnote for this dramatic paragraph gives as the source “the Rwandan UN ambassador Jean-Damascene Bizimana.” Presumably, though, it’s only the last part of the sentence that comes from Bizimana. Bizimana had been appointed by President Habyarimana. When the President’s plane was shot down on April 6, an interim government of Hutu extremists was formed under Theoneste Bagosora. Bizimana remained in his post. In one of the many mind-boggling sidebars of the genocide story, 1994 happened to be Rwanda’s turn to fill a rotating Security Council seat. So Bizimana ended up representing a genocidaire government on the Council throughout the entire genocide. Soon after the plane crash and the start of the genocide, Bizimana reported to his Security Council peers that the Rwandan military and its people had “reacted spontaneously” and were attacking those suspected of being responsible for killing their president. Bizimana’s peers eventually understood the obscenity of having a spokesperson for the genocidal regime sitting among them, but as the British ambassador told Linda Melvern, there was no procedure for getting rid of him.

The April 6 plane crash, as is entirely predictable, features prominently in Herman and Peterson’s Orwellian version of Rwanda. The plane, a gift from French President Mitterrand to Habyarimana, was bringing from Dar es Salaam to Kigali not only Habyarimana but the President of Burundi as well. Both were killed, along with everyone else on board. In what we have seen is a typical trick of the authors, they state that “It has also been important to suppress the fact that that the first Hutu president of Burundi, Melchior Ndadaye, had been assassinated by Tutsi officers of his army in October 1993.” That this assassination happened is true; that anyone has ever tried to suppress it is ludicrous. Why Herman and Peterson insist on it is incomprehensible. For the record, this incident is included in my own report, “Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide,” in Rene Lemarchand’s chapter on Rwanda in Century of Genocide, in Gerard Prunier’s The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide, in Stephen Kinzer’s A Thousand Hills, and in Linda Melvern’s A People Betrayed, just to mention the few volumes that I took down at random. Far from being suppressed, virtually everyone who writes about Rwanda recognizes the great impetus given to Hutu Power advocates in Rwanda by Ndadaye’s untimely murder.

Herman and Peterson have no doubt that the RPF shot down Habyarimana’s plane. In fact they go that extra mile and add that “the United States and its close allies…very possibly aided the assassins in the shoot-down.” The sole source for this “very possible” charge is Robin Philpot. As for the crash itself, the authors invoke the familiar figures of Michael Hourigan and Jean-Louis Bruguiere. Hourigan is a one-time ICTR investigator who found a few disaffected RPF soldiers who accused the RPF and Kagame personally of responsibility for the crash. Bruguiere is a French magistrate who used some of the same informants as Hourigan, as well as the testimonies of accused genocidaires being held in Arusha, Tanzania, whom he took the trouble to visit (though he never went to Rwanda or spoke to a single RPF official). He too concluded that the RPF and Kagame were guilty. Alas for both of them, their case fell apart when several key informants retracted their entire testimonies, some declaring they had never said anything like what they were quoted as saying. This is all public knowledge, yet the authors never even hint that the basis of Bruguiere’s conclusions had been substantially undermined.

It has always seemed most plausible to a majority of those studying the genocide that Hutu extremists and not the RPF shot down the president’s plane. But proof was never available and the issue remained moot. It’s been one of the great unsolved mysteries of our time. At the beginning of this year, however, a new report appeared by an Independent Committee of Experts appointed by the government of Rwanda, with the explicit title “Report of the Investigation into the Causes and Circumstances of and Responsibility for the Attack of 06/04/1994 against the Falcon 50 Rwandan Presidential Aeroplane [sic], Registration Number 9xR-NN.” The head of the seven-person committee was Dr. Jean Mutsinzi, former Justice of the Supreme Court of Rwanda, now a judge of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The Mutsinzi Report is available at mutsinzireport.com, and my review of the report can be found at Pambazuka News, Jan. 21, 2010.

While my review regretted that the Rwandan government hadn’t sought an independent investigation to take place, and while the Committee had obvious pro-RPF biases, I nevertheless found their comprehensive report highly persuasive. They also smartly included a ballistics report from staff at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom based at Cranfield University that supported their conclusions. The report demonstrates why the RPF could not have been in a position to launch the fatal missiles while elements of the Rwandan army and Presidential Guard had the capacity, the means and the will to do so.

The report also documents the only logical motive for the attack, one that many other scholars had already anticipated. In the Dar es Salaam meeting of regional presidents that he attended on his final day, April 6, Habyarimana announced what he had just told his own senior advisors. After stalling for months (a fact Herman and Peterson seem not to grasp at all), he was finally about to implement the Arusha Accords. That meant power-sharing in government and the full integration of the Rwandan and RPF armies. The personal consequences for many Hutu government and military officials would be disastrous. The latter had long sworn, publicly and privately, that they would accept Arusha over their dead bodies, and had pressured Habyarimana not to succumb to external pleas to implement. Finally, however, he decided he had no recourse but honor the agreement, and the extremists decided to nullify Arusha over their president’s dead body.

Any reasonable person open to the evidence, including the likely motivation for the deed, will find the Mutsinzi Report credible. But I don’t expect for a second that Messrs. Peterson or Herman or Black or Erlinder or Stam or Davenport or Philpot to accept a single word of it. No more do I expect them to agree with a single word in this review. They are well beyond evidence or reason or commonsense. They live in a different universe of witnesses and evidence, enough to satisfy themselves that the world has gotten Rwanda wrong and only they in the world have got it right.

The Tragedy of American Anti-Imperialism
Edward Herman and David Peterson have written a very short book that’s not nearly short enough. It should never have seen the light of day. It brings shame to its two American authors, its publisher Monthly Review, and all those who have provided enthusiastic jacket blurbs, many of them prominent in progressive circles—Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Norman Solomon, David Barsamian. If this is what Anglo-American Marxism, or socialism, or anti-imperialism has degenerated into, we can hang our heads in shame for the future of the left.

Why a lifetime anti-imperialist leftist like Herman (and presumably Peterson) wants to exculpate the Serbs of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia of crimes against humanity is beyond my understanding. Why would it not have been enough to point out that appalling crimes were committed by all sides, but in every case Serbs were one of those sides? The only conceivable reason seems to be that the US and its allies singled out the Serbs for attack, which ipso facto makes them the real victims. Indeed, the authors’ ally Christopher Black perversely sees Milosevic as an heroic figure.

As we’ve already seen, hyperbole and slipperiness are cherished tools of the authors, and not just in regards to Rwanda. “The leading mainstream experts on ‘genocide’ and mass-atrocity crimes today,” they assert, “still carefully exclude from consideration the US attacks on Indo-China as well as the 1965-1966 Indonesian massacres within that country.” First note the way they add “mass atrocity crimes” to genocidal crimes. In fact, in many circles it surely remains widely accepted that the US was guilty of appalling atrocities in its aggressions against Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia. As for the “exclusion from consideration” of those Indonesian massacres, chapter 7 of Totten and Parson’s popular volume Century of Genocide, is titled “The Indonesian Massacres.”

Two other similar examples: In true conspiratorial fashion, they argue that the crisis in Darfur was exaggerated to distract attention from America’s real African interest, the mineral resources of the Congo. Why both weren’t worthy of serious attention is beyond me. Nonetheless, they insist that Darfur solidarity activists dishonestly succeeded in framing Darfur as the “unnoticed genocide,” though many, including me, have long understood that it’s been the best publicized international crisis in decades. And they charge that it’s the calamity in eastern Congo that “has been truly ignored,” even though numerous celebrities, including playwright Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues), actor Ben Affleck (at least four times), UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have all made high-profile visits to the Kivus. When the US Secretary of State visits a small province in eastern Congo, you know it’s the opposite of being ignored.

Many of the Rwanda deniers flaunt their left-wing credentials. As this essay makes clear, they are driven by their anti-Americanism. Certainly I agree that every progressive necessarily must be anti-American to some degree or other. But this little band has driven over the edge. As Peter Erlinder once wrote, America is “the most dangerous Empire the world has ever seen.” Everything bad must be America’s responsibility. There’s not even room for others to share that responsibility, though the French government’s complicity in the Rwandan genocide, for example, has been definitively documented and is now even implicitly accepted by President Sarkozy and his foreign minister Bernard Kouchner.

Why the deniers are so determined, so passionate, so intransigent, so absolutely certain, so satisfied to remain part of a tiny minority of cranks, is completely unknown to me. Why they want to create such gratuitous, almost sadistic hurt for the survivors of the genocide in Rwanda is impossible to fathom. But in the end, it’s irrelevant what furies drive their obsessions. It’s their egregious views—not their motives—that matter. And their views relegate them squarely to the lunatic fringe.

—-

This review first appeared June 17 on Pambazuka News.

Resources:

International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
http://liveunictr.altmansolutions.com

From our Daily Report:

Rwandan Hutu first to be convicted under Canada’s war crimes act
World War 4 Report, May 23, 2009

Project Censored v. WW4 Report: war of perceptions on African genocide
World War 4 Report, Sept. 22, 2006

See also:

WHY DOES Z MAGAZINE SUPPORT GENOCIDE?
Against “Leftist” Revisionism on the Srebrenica Massacre
by Bill Weinberg, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, August 2005

——————-

Reprinted by World War 4 Report, August 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingTHE POLITICS OF DENIALISM 

IT’S OFFICIAL: THE U.S. IS NOT A SAFE HAVEN FOR HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSERS

by Pamela Merchant, Center for Justice and Accountability

This month, in one of the most significant human rights cases to be heard by the Supreme Court in years, the Court unanimously ruled that former foreign government officials who come to the US and avail themselves of the benefits of living here are not immune from suit under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.

The Court’s ruling in Samantar v. Yousuf means that former foreign officials who have committed egregious human rights abuses, such as torture and extrajudicial killing, can be held accountable for their crimes and will not be able to find comfort and sanctuary in the US. In an era in which the Court has often moved to curtail plaintiffs’ access to courts, the Court’s unanimous ruling is truly noteworthy. The Court’s decision assures that US courts will remain open to survivors of human rights abuses and that the US can continue to serve as a leader in the protection and promotion of human rights and individual dignity.

The Supreme Court’s decision is the latest development in a case originally filed in 2004 by the Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA), a non-profit legal human rights organization based in San Francisco, California. CJA filed a lawsuit under the Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA) and the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) on behalf of five plaintiffs who were tortured or whose family members were killed under the command of former defense minister of Somalia, Mohamed Ali Samantar. It is undisputed that Mr. Samantar presided over a brutal campaign of violence in which at least 50,000 civilians were killed or tortured. Despite his past, Mr. Samantar has lived comfortably in a Fairfax, Virginia, suburb—just a stone’s throw away from the steps of the highest court in the land—for over a decade.

Mr. Samantar’s presence in the US landed him at the heart of a debate pitting accountability against impunity. In this case, Mr. Samantar had attempted to evade responsibility for his actions by claiming immunity under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) of 1976. Mr. Samantar’s claim of immunity relied on an inventive, but flawed, reading of the FSIA. Lawyers for Mr. Samantar argued that because he was acting on behalf of the government, he was entitled to the same immunity that the government of Somalia (if there were a recognized and functioning government) would enjoy. His argument ran counter to well-settled precedents dating back to the postwar Nuremburg trials and the guiding principle that individuals can and must be held liable for egregious human rights violations. His position would also have undermined decades of US jurisprudence on human rights law and recent US efforts to secure accountability for those crimes.

The plaintiffs, by contrast, joined by a diverse and broad group of supporters including former American diplomats, retired military professionals, Holocaust survivors, anti-genocide activists, and members of the US Senate and House of Representatives, argued that the FSIA could not be interpreted in a way that would afford immunity to individual human rights abusers. Various amici argued, for example, that human rights abuses are threats to both international security and our national interests, noting that the US commitment to internationally-recognized human rights is critical to our diplomatic and military strength. Moreover, plaintiffs asserted that when Congress passed the TVPA, it explicitly determined that the law was a necessary deterrent to human rights abusers seeking safe haven in the US.

The Court, faced with a choice between upholding accountability or permitting impunity—an impunity unsupported by either morality or law—concluded that US law provides for and demands accountability. Now, Mr. Samantar and other former officials who commit human rights abuses will not be able to hide behind a shield of FSIA immunity. Mr. Samantar will be forced to account for his past crimes. And the plaintiffs who have been pursuing him will finally have their day in Court—and an opportunity for justice.

—-

Pamela Merchant is executive director of the Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA).

This story first appeared June 18 on Huffington Post.

See also:

SOMALIA CASE THREATENS WAR CRIMINALS WORLDWIDE
US Supreme Court to Rule on Sovereign Immunity
by Paul Wolf, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, January 2010

——————-

Reprinted by World War 4 Report, July 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingIT’S OFFICIAL: THE U.S. IS NOT A SAFE HAVEN FOR HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSERS 

POGROMS, PARANOIA AND POLLING IN INDIA

A Muslim Woman Confronts Her Fear of Voting—Eight Years After the Gujarat Massacres

by Subuhi Jiwani, Sarai Reader

The dot on my index finger nail has been moving stealthily towards the edge. It is the show-sign of patriotism. I have voted, and this is supposed to make me a good Indian. The television commercials for the Jaago Re! One Billion Votes campaign, broadcast before the elections, insist that you’re sleeping if you don’t vote, that you aren’t actualizing your existence. They’re niftily crafted and catchy, and they stirred me. At 29, I had this niggling feeling that I was an apolitical, bourgeois citizen who hadn’t exercised her right to participate in democracy.

However, it wasn’t the sudden realization of unfulfilled political duties or steadfast national pride that had awoken me. I’d been awake—wide-eyed, shaken-out-of-my-sleep awake—since late February 2002. I registered to vote because I was afraid of a Hindu nationalist party coming to power in Maharashtra or at the Centre; of Gujarat 2002 happening in Mumbai; of being a number among the riot toll of Muslim women raped or maimed or killed in the streets. This fear had multiplied itself within me and grown another organism: the fear of being on the electoral roll.

I had lived through the 1992-93 riots in Bombay (then the city’s name) as a young girl on the cusp of puberty. Initially, I was disgruntled that people in faraway Ayodhya had decided to tear down a mosque on my birthday. After a rather damp morning of Cadbury chocolate distribution, I returned home feeling deprived of an entire day of wishes and attention. I remember taking the Andheri flyover highway that morning and thinking, “It’s never been this empty before.” There was a perceptible atmosphere of gloom, of confusion, and I felt the beginnings of fear. But it was soon replaced by the thrill of no school for three months and endless games of relay in the building compound. In fact, escaping my building’s boundaries became particularly exciting because my parents had strictly prohibited it. I knew that something was amiss because uncles would guard the building at night with cricket bats, and my mother had given me a Christian name, just in case someone asked. But it was not my time for sleepless nights.

Gujarat 2002 has been the most egregious and therefore the most memorable communal carnage of my adult life. I had witnessed it remotely, from my laptop in an overheated apartment in Brooklyn. I had accessed news websites online but hadn’t sought out video content. I had read: madly, obsessively, half-shivering, half-crying. At the time, I had just started writing for World War 4 Report, an independent, leftist e-journal that my editor, Bill Weinberg, ran out of his living room in the Lower East Side. I did mostly secondary-source news collation and spent hours each night after work ploughing through countless Google searches and reading articles about Gujarat in the mainstream and independent Indian press. I had printed out Smita Narula’s 70-page report for Human Rights Watch, “We Have No Orders to Save You”: State Participation and Complicity in Communal Violence in Gujarat, and kept it on my bedside table as necessary reading. I would force myself to read it every night, even though I struggled to get past the first few paragraphs.

I felt like a victim in absentia whose feelings of betrayal echoed those she could hear in the testimonies of Gujarat’s survivors. I heard the sounds of my romanticized notions of syncretic India being crushed. I hadn’t grown up thinking “these people” were “my people,” but suddenly I felt like a fish forced into a plastic bag while its bowl was being cleaned. I had waited with as much anticipation for the next episode of Mahabharat on Sunday mornings as any other kid in my building. My mother had worn a big kumkum bindi on her forehead for as long as I could remember. I had loved the color and magic and myth of Hinduism and, like a child whose ball is snatched from her, I felt crudely severed from it. I would repeat in my head the clichés one hears from miffed lovers on discovering that their partners have cheated on them: “I loved you, how could you do this to me?”

The fear that the porous and permeable dotted line between “us” and “them” had become impenetrable and double-bolded first made me articulate an ambivalent minority-hood in the diaspora. I was on an H1-B visa and working a dead-end job at a shelter for abused women and children. I eventually decided to leave New York and return to Mumbai, but the fear lingered on: could Mumbai become another Gujarat?

I’d shared these concerns with my mother over the phone in the months before I returned home. She had shrugged them off just as she did my fear of being on the electoral roll. “They tracked down the Muslims in Gujarat from the voter lists!” I’d exclaim in one of our many heated discussions. Her reply: “I’ve had my Muslim name on voting lists for 60 years, Subuhi, and nothing has happened!”

If nothing has happened, then my fear must be irrational, an outcome of an over-anxious mind. That’s the unspoken refrain I hear every time I confide in someone about this. A Gujarati Hindu friend recently came back with this retort: “You’re falling into the trap of minority-hood.” She reminded me of the classic argument of how class will protect me. Rioting only happens in the bastis, in the slums, to the poor, the uneducated. It is spontaneous, unplanned. It is the result of sudden political upheavals.

I try to explain that cooking gas cylinders were hoarded in Ahmedabad for weeks before the pogrom, which, by all indications, was premeditated. It was the outcome of anti-Muslim sentiment, which has been nurtured and brewed by Hindutva Vadi forces. I am met with retorts that point to the planned nature of Islamist violence and its roots in a deeply entrenched fundamentalism. Such arguments devolve into matches of Your Fundamentalism versus My Fundamentalism, and usually end on a predictably liberal note that underlines the tolerance of all religious systems and decries their “corruption” by politically motivated parties. I persist with arguments about the politicized nature of everything—religious philosophies, social movements, knowledge systems, interpersonal relationships, etc. This Marxist critique, applicable as it is to most social institutions and structures, takes the discussion away from the particular and into the universal. I am no closer to articulating a sentient theory about the experience of majoritarianism. I fumble, trip, digress and fall over my words.

I’ve decided to return to my fear, to understand before I can extrapolate. I’m cognizant of the fact that I am not overtly marked as Muslim, like someone whose last name is Khan or Sheikh. I don’t wear any visible markers of Muslim-ness, and it is not an integral part of my identity, culturally or spiritually. I have gone as far as writing newspaper op-eds about how Eid is uneventful in our home, a date on the calendar like any other. In addition, I have often skirted the “What are you?” question, and insisted that I am agnostic, disassociating myself from any socio-religious or spiritual history. But the electoral roster, when I finally looked at it, had a number of Mohammed and Sharifa Jiwanis before and after my name. While Islam is just something I inherited, I am Muslim by association on the electoral roll, whether I like it or not.

My decision to vote finally came from the desire to push myself into accepting that, try as I might, I cannot resist being tagged Muslim. It is on my birth certificate, in my passport and my family ration card. Like race and gender, our religious identities cannot be circumvented, however incidental they may be to the construction of our selves. They need not entrap us, however, and perhaps we can, with our particularities, break through their bondage and the essentialisms they force on us.

I landed on a revelation when I finally went to the electoral office in 2009 with a filled-out application form for my voter identity card. The electoral officer said to me in disaffected Marathi, “But, madam, your name is already on the list.” My fear had induced amnesia about the time when I was so angry about the Gujarat betrayal that I felt the only way I could overcome it was by voting out the possibility of a saffron government in Maharashtra and the Centre. It was a drizzly afternoon in 2004, a month after I had returned to Mumbai from New York, when I had tracked down the election office in Andheri’s concrete maze, handed in my form, and was formally written into the voter lists. It had slipped out of my mind, the way an ATM cash withdrawal receipt gets lost in my wallet, in the clutter of bills, Halls wrappers and bits of paper.

Did I simply forget the fear which projected itself as anger, a shudder deep inside my chest that threatened to explode? It ticked time bomb-like each time I passed a Shiv Sena shakha (public office), or saw forked saffron flags waved around during Ganpati Visarjan, the festival honoring the Hindu god Ganesh. I lived with it alone, and if I tried to share it, I was reminded of its irrationality. My class, it seemed, was immune to such fears, and the Shi’a Imami Ismaili community was as alien to me as farmers on the American prairie. My self-groomed cosmopolitanism had made me areligious and isolated, and my fear was driven into the ground with a shovel.

In a Kill Bill II moment, it re-emerged from its coffin in early 2008. It was my first semester as a Master’s student at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Journalist Sameera Khan had been invited to speak about Muslim identity. Of the many experiences she shared, I was moved by the story of how her family had to take shelter from a mob during the 1992 riots. They lived at a neighbor’s house for four days—hidden, in fear.

This was the first time I had heard an upper-middle class, Western-educated Muslim woman articulate that which I’d quietened so long ago. Images of poor, crying Muslim victims of the carnage were ubiquitous in documentaries and news; these were pictures of affect. The subterranean shivers and exigencies of the “unaffected” seemed rarely to find voice in
public fora.

The events that had spurred on our fears were from different decades; the nature and handling of our fears were different; but fears they were, finally united and echoing each other. Sameera had seemingly tabled her fear, and forced a predominantly Hindu audience to acknowledge a history of communal violence and majoritarianism. I felt less alone in my fear, less convinced of its irrationality, but reminded of it nonetheless.

Fear may be a confrontation with the unknown and the confusion that results from this meeting. In order to grapple with this unknowing, we translate it in terms of the known, in terms of memory. What has been leaves its imprint on us; it makes us and our present. We cannot predict what will be but want to, and this reflects our deep-seated desire to know and control. The impulse that drives institutions to obtain knowledge, classify, taxonomize, experiment and, finally, prognosticate has also trickled down to the individual. If we cannot know what the future will hold, we fill the gaps with our anxieties and extrapolate.

Indeed, un-knowing has inspired my own fears. And the inability to answer the following questions: will a Hindu nationalist party come to power? If so, will it instigate communal violence? Will I be caught up in it and become vulnerable? I’ve translated the insecurity that results from not being able to predict the future into a self-induced victimization. This essay grew out of the desire to admit my fears publicly, to share them with an audience and, perhaps, overcome them through articulation. In reality, it has been an attempt to control and rationalize them.

I would like to think, though, that the dot on my nail has brought me a little closer to submitting myself to the unknown. Honestly, though, that’s the logical me speaking. These days, I don’t get as nervous when I have to answer the “What kind of name is that?” question. If I am to be categorized, labelled, boxed or stereotyped, that’s about as unavoidable as the malleability of water. I do, however, wonder if a communal conflagration can flare up in a snap second. This worry, which inhabits a subliminal space, prevents me from divulging my religious identity to strangers or people I barely know. When the guy who runs a copying shop near my house asks me where I’m from, I usually say “Bombay” (still the city’s street name) and end it there. The local Shiv Sena corporators also give him business, and he might, at some point in the future, have to choose sides. In that moment, I’d like to slip though the gap.

—-

Subuhi Jiwani is a writer and researcher based in Mumbai.

This article first appeared in the February edition of the Delhi-based journal Sarai Reader under the title “SCARE QUOTES: Who’s Afraid of Voting? The Inexpressible Nature of Some Fears.” This version was slightly edited by World War 4 Report.

Resources:

“We Have No Orders to Save You”: State Participation and Complicity in Communal Violence in Gujarat
Smita Narula, Human Rights Watch, 2002, New York

Fascism’s Firm Footprint in India
Arundhati Roy, The Nation, Sept. 30, 2002
Online at Third World Traveller

From our Daily Report:

India: terror targets Muslims in Gujarat, Christians in Karnataka
World War 4 Report, Sept. 30, 2008

New violence at Ayodhya
World War 4 Report, July 5, 2005

From our archive:

Hindu right exults in Gujarat victory
World War 4 Report, Dec. 23, 2002

——————-

Reprinted by World War 4 Report, June 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingPOGROMS, PARANOIA AND POLLING IN INDIA