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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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

Continue ReadingPOGROMS, PARANOIA AND POLLING IN INDIA 

AFGHANISTAN: WOMEN’S RIGHTS TRAMPLED DESPITE NEW LAW

from IRIN

As the world marks International Women’s Day, ambivalence, impunity, weak law enforcement and corruption continue to undermine women’s rights in Afghanistan, despite a July 2009 law banning violence against women, rights activists say.

A recent case of the public beating of a woman for alleged elopement—also shown on private TV stations in Kabul—highlights the issue.

In January domestic violence forced two young women to flee their homes in Oshaan village, Dolaina district, Ghor province, southwestern Afghanistan. A week later they were arrested in neighbouring Herat Province and sent back to Oshaan, according to the governor of Ghor, Mohammad Iqbal Munib.

“One woman was beaten in public for the elopement and the second was reportedly confined in a sack with a cat,” Munib told IRIN.

According to the governor, the illegal capture of the women was orchestrated by Fazul Ahad who leads an illegal armed militia group in Dolaina District. Locals say Ahad, a powerful figure who backed President Hamid Karzai in the August 2009 elections, has been running Oshaan as his personal fiefdom.

“When the roads reopen to Dolaina [closed by snow] we will send a team to investigate,” said the governor, adding that he was concerned that arresting Ahad could cause instability. “We have asked the authorities in Kabul for support and guidance.”

IRIN was unable to contact Fazul Ahad and verify the charges.

Self-immolation
“I poured fuel over my body and set myself ablaze because I was regularly beaten up and insulted by my husband and in-laws,” Zarmina, 28, told IRIN. She, along with over a dozen other women with self-inflicted burns, is in Herat’s burns hospital

Over 90 self-immolation cases have been registered at the hospital in the past 11 months; 55 women had died, doctors said.

“People call it the ‘hospital of cries’ as patients here cry out loudly in pain,” Arif Jalali, head of the hospital, told IRIN.

Beneath the cries lie cases of domestic violence and/or disappointment with the justice system.

“Self-immolation proves that the justice system for female victims is failing,” said Movidul-Haq Mowidi, a human rights activist in Herat.

Barriers to justice
Despite laws prohibiting gender violence and upholding women’s rights, widespread gender discrimination, fear of abuse, corruption and other challenges are undermining the judicial system, experts say.

“Women are denied their most fundamental human rights and risk further violence in the course of seeking justice for crimes perpetrated against them,” stated a report by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan on the situation of Afghan women in July 2009.

Orzala Ashraf, a women’s rights activist in Kabul, blames the government: “Laws are clear about crimes but we see big criminals thriving and being nurtured by the state for illicit political gains,” she told IRIN, pointing to the government’s alleged failure to address human rights violations committed over the past three decades of conflict.

“Because no one is put on trial for his crimes, a criminal culture is being promoted: violators have no fear of the law, prosecution and a meaningful penalty,” said Ashraf.

Deep-seated ambivalence to women’s rights is evident from a law signed off by President Hamid Karzai in early 2009: The Shia Personal Status Law, dubbed a “rape legalizing law,” was amended after strong domestic and international pressure.

“The first version [of the law] was totally intolerable,” said Najia Zewari, a women’s rights expert with the UN Fund for Women (UNIFEM). “Despite positive changes in the final version, there are articles that still need to be discussed and reviewed further,” she said.

Another example of this ambivalence is the case of the men who threw acid in the faces of 15 female students in Kandahar city in November 2008: Karzai publicly vowed they would be “severely punished” but court officials in Kandahar and Kabul have said they are unaware of the case and do not know where the alleged perpetrators are.

“Judges say the men were wrongly accused and forced to confess,” Ranna Tarina, head of Kandahar women’s affairs department, told IRIN.

Violence database
Over the past two years more than 1,900 cases of violence against women in 26 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces—from verbal abuse to physical violence—have been recorded in a database run by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and UNIFEM.

One recorded case is the murder, by her in-laws in Parwan Province north of Kabul, of a young woman who had refused to live with her abusive husband. Another is the regular physical and mental torture meted out to a woman by her husband and mother in-law in Kabul.

“The database does not give a perfect picture but it helps to highlight some of the common miseries of Afghan women,” UNIFEM’s Najia Zewari told IRIN.

UNIFEM is keen to make the database publicly available on the internet.

“Violence against women is not a new phenomenon in Afghanistan but it is good to see crimes do not remain confined to a home and a village,” said activist Orzala Ashraf.

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This story first appeared March 8 on the Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN), a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

From our Daily Report:

Afghan women march against warlord impunity
World War 4 Report, Dec. 12, 2009

Afghanistan: Karzai “legalizes rape”
World War 4 Report, April 2, 2009

See also:

THE AFGHANISTAN WAR: A CALL FOR CLARITY
No to Fundamentalist Criminals, No to the U.S. Occupation
by Sonali Kolhatkar, Foreign Policy in Focus
World War4 Report, December 2009

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

Continue ReadingAFGHANISTAN: WOMEN’S RIGHTS TRAMPLED DESPITE NEW LAW 

THE TRAUMAS OF IMMIGRAITON LAW

by Kent Paterson, Frontera NorteSur

It began as an ordinary academic presentation. Backed by a power-point, sociologist Alison Newby showed a crowd at New Mexico State University (NMSU) in Las Cruces how more than 400 public and privately-contracted immigrant detention facilities imprison more than 440,000 people, at a cost surpassing $1.7 billion annually to the taxpayers.

“Not only are families potentially losing their breadwinners, it’s costing us to keep people in immigration detention,” Newby said, adding $95 per day on average is spent to detain an immigrant.

Newby’s talk hit home. In February, Texas-based Corplan Corrections went before the Las Cruces City Council with a plan to build what company representative Toby Michael was quoted as calling a “family residential center” for mainly women and child immigrants. In the view of critics, the envisioned facility is a buffed-up prison. Recently, Corplan made the same proposal to the city government in Benson, Arizona.

While ample attention has been placed on the dramatic increase in immigrant detention since the Bush administration, Newby traced the phenomenon to the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, both of which passed in 1996.

According to the NMSU professor, the laws expanded the definition of “aggravated felony” to encompass minor crimes for which no jail time was served, thus making greater numbers of immigrants eligible for detention and deportation. Legal reforms virtually eliminated judicial discretion to take into account individual histories, family ties and even the nature of the crime, Newby said.

A fundamental contradiction of the current system, she argued, is that violations of civil immigration laws are treated as criminal offenses without the corresponding rights to a speedy trial, rules of disclosure, a court-appointed attorney and other bedrock legal guarantees of the US justice system.

“None of this matters. The judge’s hands are potentially tied as well,” Newby said.

Then Newby got personal. She recalled that morning a little more than one year ago, on February 28, 2009, when men came knocking on her door. Representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal agents spirited away Newby’s Cuban immigrant husband and charged him with an immigration law violation because of a prior drug conviction. Outside the couple’s home where their two children witnessed the arrest, several SUVs with armed men awaited, in a deployment Newby said “seemed like overkill.”

Incarcerated in a detention center in neighboring El Paso, Texas, Newby’s husband was housed with hundreds of other prisoners awaiting their fates. Navigating a legal maze, the detainee was afforded 15-minute contact visits with his children under the watchful eyes of guards. As a Cuban national, he could not be readily deported, because the Cuban government would not accept him back home. Instead, the detainee was hustled off to citizenship interviews where he sat shackled next to children getting vaccinations, according to Newby.

In the El Paso detention center, some work was available for inmates at the rate of one dollar per day. “I don’t know about the legality of the US government employing [immigrant detainees], and some of them may not have documents,” Newby quipped, sending chuckles rippling through the audience.

Newby said her husband was finally released after spending nearly one year in detention; he still awaits final disposition of his case. “This is an extremely horrific Kafkaesque system,” charged the sociologist. “It is ripping families apart… I don’t know if we are any safer.”

Sponsored by NMSU’s Center for Latin American and Border Studies and International Relations Institute, Newby’s talk resonated in other presentations at a conference on immigration and human rights held at the university’s main Las Cruces campus earlier this month. Many speakers examined the impact of toughened immigration law enforcement on children, families and communities in the New Mexico borderlands and beyond.

Nicholas Dagones, regional manager of protective services for the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department, touched on thorny situations in which his agency’s staff come into custody of minors whose immigrant parents are detained.

Since many families have citizen and undocumented parents, the mixed status of many immigrant households creates complications, Dagones said. Undocumented children who are in state custody could face deportation when they turn 18, according to the child advocate. To address individual cases, the state government of New Mexico works with the Mexican Consulate, he said.

Dr. Pat Sandau-Beckler of NMSU’s School of Social Work told the New Mexico conference researchers have detected Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome in many children whose immigrant parents have been arrested. According to Sandau-Beckler, three of every four such children experience eating and sleeping problems. Adolescents, she said, have been observed more withdrawn than even younger children.

“Families of mixed status along the US-Mexico border are living under siege,” contended Vicky Gaubeca, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Regional Center for Border Rights in Las Cruces. “The only part of the economy that seems to be growing is the law enforcement economy.”

Calling for family protection, Gaubeca and other presenters urged sweeping reforms to the immigration law system.

Together with other New Mexico immigrant rights activists, the ACLU participates in the Task Force for Immigration Advocacy and Services (TIAS), a two-year-old initiative of different service providers and advocates. The task force supports measures that will ensure family unity, increase possibilities for citizenship and residence, uphold equal rights for all workers, end local enforcement of federal immigration laws, reform detention standards, eliminate privatized immigrant prisons, and restore due process and constitutional rights to all regardless of immigration status.

Johnny Young, executive director of migration and refugee services for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington. DC, joined other speakers in Las Cruces in calling for reform. The ordeal of Newby’s family, Young said, is a “vivid example” of a “broken” immigration system.

A former US ambassador to Sierra Leone, Togo, Bahrain and Slovenia, Young said the Roman Catholic leadership organization has an 80-year history of involvement in immigration issues, and has helped settle about one million new immigrants to the US since 1975.

“This is part of our religion, the Judeo-Christian tradition, welcoming the stranger,” Young said.

Currently, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops is mounting a campaign to send three million postcards to Congress in support of immigration law reforms that include a pathway to legalization for undocumented residents, a new guest worker program and the elimination of detention centers. The bishops also support a March 21 pro-immigrant rally in Washington that will include calls to pass an immigration reform bill sponsored by Democratic Congressman Luis Gutierrez of Illinois.

Although Young voiced confidence that momentum was building on the side of reform advocates, opponents of legalizing undocumented residents are also gearing up for action. For instance, members of the Tea Party movement and their allies plan numerous rallies across the United States on April 15.

“Despite the fake polls, bought and paid for by the Open Borders Lobby groups, the truth remains that 80 percent of Americans oppose Amnesty for illegal aliens and turning millions of illegals into voters would have a catastrophic effect on America,” said William Green of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC in a statement this week.

“We will be sending tens of thousands of people out to support Tea Party events on April 15 to properly present public opposition to illegal immigration and Amnesty for illegals,” Green said. To help organize opposition to the Gutierrez bill and related proposals, the Tea Party
Against Amnesty has set up a website at AgainstAmnesty.com.

Broadening their reach, anti-amnesty groups are also utilizing Twitter and Facebook to mobilize.

The Gutierrez bill does not advocate blanket amnesty, but proposes a $500 fine as part of a package of steps leading to the legalization of undocumented residents.

Immigration law reform was at the center of a flurry of activity in Washington on Thursday, March 11, when President Obama met with two key senators, Republican Lindsay Graham and Democrat Charles Schumer, to discuss prospects for passing legislation. According to a dispatch from the Associated Press, Obama earlier met with the National Council of La Raza and other immigrant advocates, assuring the activists he was still committed to immigration reforms.

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This story was made possible in part by a grant from the McCune Charitable Foundation for Frontera NorteSur‘s special coverage of key issues in the southern New Mexico borderland.

Resources:

Corplan Corrections
http://www.corplancorrections.com/

AgainstAmnesty.com.
http://www.AgainstAmnesty.com

See also:

A NEW DEAL FOR IMMIGRANTS IN 2010?
by David L. Wilson, MR Zine
World War 4 Report, January 2010

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

Continue ReadingTHE TRAUMAS OF IMMIGRAITON LAW 

AFRICOM AND THE USA’s HIDDEN BATTLE FOR AFRICA

by Ba Karang, The Hobgoblin

What is the current meaning of “War against Terror” for Africa? The true intention of America’s recent military interventions in the African continent (both covert and open) is nothing other than the expansion and consolidation of Western capital. It all started in 2001 when George W. Bush declared his “War on Terror” in the continent, but has developed in a manner that has gone beyond human imagination in the body counts on the streets of Somalia, in the jungles of Uganda and Congo, and deserts of Sudan. The chief of the US African Command, General E. Ward, explained this in language more clear than that of any US politician when he stated that an Africa in which “African populations are able to provide for themselves, contribute to global economic development and are allowed access to markets in free, fair, and competitive ways, is good for America and the world…”

AFRICOM (or USAFRICOM) is a Unified Combatant Command of the US Department of Defense, responsible for US military operations and military relations with 53 African nations (excepting Egypt). Africa Command was established October 1, 2007, and formally activated October 1, 2008 at a public ceremony at the Pentagon attended by representatives of African nations. It has become clear that the idea was not primarily to fight against the Islamic terror, which was said to be growing in influence, but to protect and help expand American military and economic (mainly energy) interests.

Pending legislation, “The Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act 2009,” being pushed by Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA) would empower AFRICOM not only to give technical support but to physically go to war with the armed groups that both Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo Forces have not been able to dislodge. Royce said:

Africa’s emerging potential as a major oil producer and supplier to the United States, has been of interest to the Sub-Committee on Africa that I’ve chaired for some time. The sub-committee held a hearing to look at this topic in 2000. It’s clearly in our national interest to diversify our energy supply, especially given the turbulent political climate in key parts of the world today. The expansion of energy production in Africa matches to that interest…

This is big money talk rather than humanitarian outrage. On January 2, 2002, a Washington DC symposium held to discuss African oil came up with a document entitled “African Oil: A Priority for US National Security and African Development,” which paved the way for the rest to happen. It was attended by Washington’s Africa heavyweights: people like Barry Schutz, a Bush administration specialist on Africa; Lt-Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a high-ranking Air Force officer, and Water Kansteiner, Bush’s under-secretary of State for African Affairs. The Christian Science Monitor reported on the Symposium thus:

In January last year [2002], the IASPS [Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies] hosted a symposium in Houston, Texas, which was attended by government and oil industry representatives. An influential working group called the African Oil Policy Initiative Group (AOPIG) co-chaired by IASPS researchers Barry Schutz and Paul Michael Wihbey, which has been largely responsible for driving American governmental policy concerning west African oil, emerged from the symposium… The document urges Congress and the Bush administration to encourage greater extraction of oil across Africa, and to declare the Gulf of Guinea ‘a area of vital interest’ to the US.”

We have now definitely entered the aggressive birth of AFRICOM. The man who is put in charge of this task, Gen. William E. “Kip” Ward, is not new to the battlefields of Africa. He was in Somalia in 1993 when US forces were serious bitten by small insurgent groups, forcing the US to withdraw from that crisis.

Africom in Action
AFRICOM justifies its presence in Africa on its website as follows:

Africa is growing in military, strategic and economic importance in global affairs. However, many nations on the African continent continue to rely on the international community for assistance with security concerns. From the US perspective, it makes strategic sense to help build the capability for African partners, and organizations such as the African Standby Force, to take the lead in establishing a security environment. This security, will, in turn, set the groundwork for increased political stability and economic growth.

This helps explain why the AFRICOM budget rose from $50 million in the fiscal year of 2007 to $310 million in FY 2009 fiscal year—in running costs, not military aid to the member countries. It also shows the significance of this program for the US government. The command gave the US military the possibility of having a physical presence in numerous African countries and assigning Defense Department personnel to US embassies and diplomatic missions to coordinate Defense Department programs. The US Africa Command is now spending billions in training and arm supplies. It is expecting to spend nothing less than $20 billion in 2010, and this will benefit the armies of a very many repressive regimes.

Take the case of Sudan. Openly, Western governments, including the US, have never been more critical of the regime in Khartoum, even accusing it of committing genocide in Darfur. The fact that the head of Sudan’s intelligence agency, wanted by the International Criminal Court, was secretly jetted to the US by the CIA to discuss military interests in the Horn of Africa was one of the most disgusting acts of hypocrisy by the Bush administration.

The right-wing Republican lobbyists for AFRICOM never made their intentions secret. They have said time and again that America cannot rely on the unconquered Middle East for its oil supply; for them, Africa is the answer. But the aggressive nature of this thirst for African oil and other resources has no doubt also been fueled by the presence of China in key strategic areas.

Today, US Africa Command is involved in almost 38 African countries with the presumed agenda of training anti-terrorist forces. These include Chad, Kenya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Sierra Leone. The expansion of the AFRICOM central command in Djibouti adds to the significance that the US government puts into this project. According to AFRICOM, “US Central Command maintains its traditional relationship with Egypt, but AFRICOM coordinates with Egypt on issues relating to Africa security.” In Egypt, the US state is spending billions of American tax payers’ money in military equipment and training to arm one of the most repressive military forces in the continent. All of this speaks for itself rather than the simple and cheap rhetoric of bringing stability to the continent in the name of the “war against terror.”

The 2006 invasion of Somalia by the Ethiopian forces was clearly a proxy war, with AFRICOM providing the logistics—allowing a criminal organization like al-Shabab to claim a legitimate reason for its war and brutal terror against the very people both sides claim to be freeing: the poor ordinary Somalis. It is significant that as debate was held on where the headquarters of AFRICOM should be located, the Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi declared that Ethiopia will be willing to work closely with the Command. According to a UN situation report of February 5, 2010, an estimated 3.2 million people in Somalia are in need of emergency food aid, one in six children are seriously malnourished, and the internally displaced population is in the millions and continues to rise.

The planned assault on Mogadishu has registered its first civilian casualties this March, forcing more civilians to flee the capital. The aim of this military operation is to retake control of the capital from the al-Shabab militants. The Obama administration has been planning this assault for a while now. Assistant secretary of state for Africa, Johnnie Carlson is said to have been very instrumental in the preparation. He nonetheless said: “This is not an American offensive… the US military is not on the ground in Somalia. Full stop.” In another press briefing Carlson held with the Ertharin Cousin, US ambassador to the UN Mission in Rome, he said: “We have provided limited military support to the Transitional Federal Government… We do so in the firm belief that the TFG seeks to end the violence in Somalia that is caused by al-Shabaab and other extremist organizations…”

True, there might not be any US troops on the ground—but it is an American war contracted to some Somalis, African Union forces, and Ethiopians. The US has been training intelligence forces, providing surveillance, logistic support and money to buy bullets and guns; and there are even speculations that American forces might provide aerial bombing of militant positions.

This is against the recent advice given to the Obama administration, which warns of a need for a change of approach from US support to the Transitional Federal Government headed by Sheik Ahmed Sharif. The Report, “Somali: A New Approach,” prepared by the Council on Foreign Relations, advised the administration to engage in “Constructive Disengagement” rather than spending so much on ineffective government that has very little support among the Somali population. Critics might be right to say that the Obama administration is playing into the hands of the Islamic extremists.

This was the case too with “Operation Lightning Thunder” in 2008, involving Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the liberated Southern Sudan. It was clear to all sincere analysts that the Lord’s Resistance Army was cornered and pacified, and that operation “Lightning Thunder” was no more than the clearing of the oil fields. Dr. Jendayi Frazer, then an assistant secretary of state in the Bush government, was said to have been the main initiator of that operation. Riek Machar, vice president of Southern Sudan, said as much in a documentary aired by the AlJazeera TV. Ugandan military commanders have openly confirmed that they have received logistics support from the Americans, including satellite phones, GPS receivers, maps and US contributions to fuel costs of the military vehicles involved in the operation. The results: over 1,000 civilians dead and the internal displacement of an estimated half million people. All this followed the 2006 failed operation by a UN team of US-trained Guatemalan commando to assassinate Joseph Kone, leader of LRA—in which all members of the commando were killed by the LRA. Southern Sudan refused to actively take part, only closing their borders to avoid crossing of arm groups into their territory.

Conclusion
When the Chad-Cameroon pipeline project was put on the table in the prelude to AFRICOM’s unveiling, the oil companies made sure of IMF and World Bank support. This was not because of lack of capital. These two institutions are the most reliable and effective discipliners of the African nations involved should they at any time violate the contract against the interest of the big oil companies involved in the project. The arrangement was never designed for transparency, and when the initial funds of the project were embezzled in the member countries there was never a call to halt the project—even though the World Bank had put in a code of conduct as condition for the funding.

There is nothing new in armies conquering territories before the looting begins. For centuries states have been using their armies in foreign adventures in the interest of capital. The modern world has just surpassed the crude methods that were used in centuries past, and is now utilizing sophisticated techniques consciously designed to confuse the human mind. With the “moral high ground” of free market capitalism, the African bourgeoisie are content with being sub-contractors; the whole mathematics becomes easier, especially when it comes to the “ethical sharing” of the wealth from the looting. To say that Africans are benefitting from the project through employment and the creation of a middle class are fine words that defy the lawlessness and suffering on the continent.

But the fact of AFRICOM’s involvement in any battle ground in the continent strengthens the resolve of the African people to define their struggle on their own.

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This story first appeared in slightly longer form March 19 in the UK Marxist-Humanist journal The Hobgoblin

Resources:

Doubts grow on Somali offensive’s chances at peace
Associated Press, March 20, 2010

US Aiding Somalia in Its Plan to Retake Its Capital
New York Times, March 5, 2010

US Policy in Somalia — No Direct Support for Somali Government Military Operations
Combined Joint Task Force—Horn of Africa press briefing, March 12, 2010

Somalia: A New Approach
Council on Foreign Relations, March 2010

After Operation Lightning Thunder: Protecting communities and building peace
ReliefWeb, April 28, 2009

Hard Target: The hunt for Africa’s last warlord
Newsweek, May 16, 2009

See also:

AFRICOM: MAKING PEACE OR FUELING WAR?
by Daniel Volman and William Minter, Foreign Policy in Focus
World War 4 Report, May 2009

DARFUR: NOT A “CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS”
Global Capital Connives with African Genocide
by Ba Karang, The Hobgoblin
World War 4 Report, November 2007

CHINA IN AFRICA: THE NEW DEBATE
by Walden Bello, Foreign Policy in Focus
World War 4 Report, May 2007

SOMALIA: THE NEW RESISTANCE
Successor Factions to the Islamic Courts Union
by Osman Yusuf, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, April 2007

DARFUR: NATO PREPARES INTERVENTION
Moral Imperative or “Regime Change” Strategy?
by Wynde Priddy, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, May 2005

——————-

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

Continue ReadingAFRICOM AND THE USA’s HIDDEN BATTLE FOR AFRICA 

A NEW DEAL FOR IMMIGRANTS IN 2010?

by David L. Wilson, MR Zine

Congress is almost certain to consider some sort of reform to the immigration system in 2010; when it does, we can expect a repeat of the “tea bag” resistance we saw at last summer’s town halls on healthcare reform. The healthcare precedent “bodes badly” for immigration, Marc R. Rosenblum, a senior policy analyst at the DC-based Migration Policy Institute, told a forum at Columbia University in New York City the evening of December 1.

Unfortunately, the discussion that night indicated that progressives are planning to follow the same scenario we followed in the struggle for healthcare: we propose legislation that falls short of what we need, the right wing then whittles it down, and in the end we are told we have to be responsible and accept half a loaf—or a good deal less than half.

What makes it worse is that, if we follow this plan, we will probably lose a unique opportunity to have a lasting effect on the way people think about immigration in this country.

The “Three-Legged Stool”
Most proposals for “comprehensive immigration reform,” or “CIR,” conform to the “three-legged stool” concept that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano outlined in a speech on November 13. Each “leg” is meant to appeal to a different constituency:

* for the country’s 12 million undocumented immigrants, CIR offers a limited legalization program;
* to satisfy the immigration restrictionists, the package expands the enforcement of immigration laws;
* to keep the corporations happy, the legislation includes a mechanism for bringing in foreign workers.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) introduced one version of this on December 15. His bill, CIR-ASAP, sets up an “earned legalization” process for out-of-status immigrants and eliminates some of the worst abuses of the current system—the lack of proper medical attention for immigration detainees, for example, and the 287(g) program that brought local sheriff’s offices into immigration enforcement. At the same time, it expands more “humane” enforcement methods, like the E-Verify program, which requires employers to use a government database to check every job applicant’s immigration status.

For the corporations, the bill sets up an independent bipartisan “Commission on Immigration and Labor Markets” to determine when and how much to increase the flow of foreign workers for different industries. This proposal, which is backed by the Migration Policy Institute and the AFL-CIO, includes labor rights protections that would cut down many of the abuses in the present H1 and H2 guest worker programs.

The Gutierrez bill has a number of attractive features. Its big flaw is that it’s not going to pass.

A bill along these lines is never going to placate the restrictionists and the employer associations. The restrictionists won’t be satisfied because an expanded E-Verify program won’t stop people from coming here to look for work; it will just drive more of them to work off the books or with shady subcontractors. And the corporations won’t be satisfied because they don’t want labor commissions—they want a guest worker program, preferably with as few labor protections as possible.

“If the unions think they’re going to push a bill through without the support of the business community, they’re crazy,” Randel Johnson, U.S. Chamber of Commerce vice president of labor, told the New York Times last April. “As part of the trade-off for legalization, we need to expand the temporary worker program.”

Welcoming the Debate
The restrictionists and corporations will of course follow the healthcare scenario once the CIR debate gets under way, mobilizing their right-wing bases and pouring tens of millions of dollars into lobbying. The results are predictable: an immigration bill with more enforcement and a larger guest worker program. The only question is whether legalization will go the way of the public option.

That is, if we stick to the script. But we don’t have to.

Instead of acting out a rerun of the healthcare compromise, devoting resources to lobbying and focusing on arcane points of parliamentary procedure, the grassroots movement for immigrants’ rights needs to take the issue out to the population at large. This after all will be one of the rare occasions when people are actively thinking about immigration; and the economic crisis means they will be more open than usual to new and radical ideas.

But we’ll need to state our position clearly and forcefully, without apologies and equivocations, and we’ll have to take the discussion directly to the union hall, the community center, and the classroom, bypassing the controlled “debate” in the corporate media. Above all we’ll need to come right out and say what many immigrant rights advocates have been strangely reluctant to say in the past: immigration reform isn’t just good for immigrants—it’s good for everyone who has to work for a living.

It’s not as if the arguments from the right are so hard to defeat. We know what the anti-immigrant groups will say: the 1986 amnesty encouraged more immigration; legalization now will mean millions of new workers competing for jobs at a time of double-digit unemployment. But we’ll have no problem answering this, since it’s simply not true: there’s no evidence that undocumented immigration increased because of the 1986 amnesty. The fact that right-wingers have gotten away with saying this for two decades just shows their ignorance and dishonesty—and our own unwillingness to confront them.

The reality is that, by ensuring labor rights for immigrant workers, legalization will help “end the race to the bottom” and create an upward pressure on wages. “If you want to fix the economy, part of the way to fix it is legalization,” Frank Sharry, president of the pro-reform America’s Voice, said at the December 1 forum. “I welcome the debate.”

Confronting Enforcement
It’s encouraging that many liberals are finally starting to make this argument around wages, and we should push them to keep up the good work. But they’re not “welcoming the debate” when it comes to enforcement. As Marc Rosenblum noted in an email, “even most progressive lawmakers are pretty heavily invested in the sanctions approach.”

We don’t need to follow them on this. Nothing stops people at the grassroots from pointing out that the tens of billions of dollars spent on enforcement over the past 25 years have done next to nothing to slow the flow of undocumented immigrants; their real accomplishment has been driving down wages and sabotaging union organizing.

A 1999 study by Columbia University economist Francisco L. Rivera-Batiz indicates that the “employer sanctions” instituted in 1986—as part of a “trade-off for legalization”—almost immediately forced wages down for undocumented workers. And last October the AFL-CIO and other groups put out a report showing how the effect of enforcement at the workplace has been “chilling the assertion and exercise of workplace rights, a result that hurts all workers, regardless of immigration status.”

We need to make these arguments, and we also need to say that there’s no real way to slow down immigration without addressing its root causes, the political and economic situation in the countries to our south—and that to a large extent this situation is the product of economic policies like NAFTA that are promoted by the U.S. elite.

If people who claim to be concerned about the pace of migration are really serious about addressing the issue, they can join with us in supporting struggles against “free trade” agreements in South America, or in solidarity with the 42,000 laid-off electrical workers in Mexico City, or the Honduran unions fighting last June’s coup d’état. They can back the movement for the “right not to migrate,” Mexicans organizing for “development that makes migration a choice rather than a necessity,” in the words of University of California Los Angeles professor Gaspar Rivera Salgado. And they can support the efforts of leftist governments in Bolivia and Ecuador to use economic incentives to get migrants to come home.

The Trail of Dreams
Can immigrants win a New Deal in 2010? That will depend on a lot of things. One will be the impact of mobilizations by immigrants and their allies—not just the large protests but also small dramatic actions like the “Trail of Dreams,” a 1,500-mile walk a group of Florida students are starting on January 1. But another factor will be how vocal and effective we are in presenting the issues behind the mobilizations. If we do the job right, we’ll at least be able to weaken the influence of the anti-immigrant “tea parties,” and we’ll start to change the terms of the debate. Under the right circumstances, we might even build enough pressure on Congress to get a real immigration reform.

—-

This article first appeared, with footnotes, Jan. 1 in MR Zine.

Sources:

Julia Preston Napolitano, “White House Plan on Immigration Includes Legal Status”
New York Times, Nov. 13, 2009

Randal C. Archibald, “New Immigration Bill Is Introduced in House”
New York Times, Dec. 15, 2009 (A summary of the bill is at the ACLU website.)

Michelle Chen, “Troubled ‘E-Verify’ Program Highlights Dysfunctional Immigration System”
In These Times, Sept. 14, 2009

Julia Preston and Steven Greenhouse, “Immigration Accord by Labor Boosts Obama Effort”
New York Times, April 13, 2009

David L. Wilson, “The Truth about Amnesty for Immigrants”
MRZine, Aug. 8, 2009

James Parks, “Report: Unbalanced Immigration Enforcement Hurts All Workers’ Rights”
AFL-CIO Blog, Oct. 27, 2009

Amy Traub, “Getting Tough on Exploitation”
The Nation, Nov. 17, 2009

“NAFTA Boosted Mexican Immigration: Study”
World War 4 Report, Jan. 24, 2009

David L. Wilson, “Mexican Layoffs, U.S. Immigration: The Missing Link”
MRZine, Nov. 22, 2009

David Bacon, “The Right to Stay Home—Derecho de no Migrar”
New America Media, July 8, 2008

“Bolivia: Government Wants Immigrants Back”
Weekly News Update on the Americas, Dec. 27, 2009, also at World War 4Report

“Correa pide a emigrantes regresar”
El Universo, Guayaquil, Ecuador, March 24, 2009

Jane Guskin and David L. Wilson, “A Grassroots Vision for U.S. Immigration Policy—and Beyond”
NACLA Report on the Americas, January-February 2009

See also:

AMNESTY NOW: HOW AND WHY
by Jane Guskin, Huffington Post
World War 4 Report, April 2009

THE GREAT WALL OF BOEING
Corporate Power and the Secure Border Initiative
by David L. Wilson, MR Zine
World War 4 Report, October 2008

From our Daily Report:

Arizona: anti-immigrant sheriff vows defiance of feds
World War 4 Report, Oct. 19, 2009

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

Continue ReadingA NEW DEAL FOR IMMIGRANTS IN 2010? 

HOLOCAUST DENIAL IN THE ARAB WORLD

Why It Is On the Rise

by Gilbert Achcar and Pierre Puchot, Mediapart

What pushes Arabs to deny the existence of the Holocaust? How and why does Israel continue to instrumentalize the memory of the destruction of European Jewry? What was the attitude of Arab intellectuals during the Second World War? Why does Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad incessantly brandish the denial weapon while Hamas and Hezbollah turn away from it? In his new book, Les Arabes et la Shoah (The Arabs and the Holocaust), political scientist Gilbert Achcar—professor at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)—reviews over a century of history from the birth of Zionism to last winter’s Israeli offensive against Gaza. Although he gives prominence to the political impasse constituted by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he indicates “new links” that today exist between Jews and Arabs.

Les Arabes et la Shoah is published in French by Actes Sud/Sindbad, and will be published in English by Metropolitan Books later this year. This interview with Pierre Puchot of the French online journal Mediapart ran along with an excerpt from the book in October.

Pierre Puchot: Your book’s subtitle is: “The Israeli-Arab War of Narratives.” What do you mean?

Gilbert Achcar: It’s about the war that opposes two entirely symmetrical visions of the origins of the conflict. Specifically, I refer here to the notion of “narrative” as the recitation of history as developed by post-modernism. The Israeli narrative describes an Israel that emerges as a reaction to anti-Semitism, beside the “Biblical rights” invoked by religious Zionists. And its justification by European anti-Semitism is extended to Arabs, who are presented as accomplices to this paroxysm of anti-Semitism that was Nazism—which would legitimate the birth of the State of Israel on lands conquered from the population of Arab descent. That’s why the Israeli narrative insists to such a degree on Amin al-Husseini, this character, blown up out of all proportion, who became the ex-grand mufti of Jerusalem.

On the Arab side, the most rational narrative—later we’ll mention the denialist escalations that are on the rise at present—may perhaps be summarized in these terms, “We had nothing to do with the Shoah. Anti-Semitism is not an established tradition for us, but a European phenomenon. Zionism is a colonial movement that really took off in Palestine under the British colonial mandate, even though there were earlier instances. In consequence, it’s a colonial implantation in the Arab world, on the model of what was seen in South Africa and elsewhere.” It’s the war between these two narratives that I explore in this book.

Is there a dominant Arab reading of the Shoah? In what respects is it specific and how does it differ from those in Europe or the United States?

There’s not a single Arab interpretation of the Shoah, just as there isn’t a single European reading either, even though there’s certainly more homogeneity in the perception of the Holocaust in Europe. However, even that is recent, since, as you know, the Shoah was not a very current theme in European news and education during the two decades that followed the end of the Second World War.

In the Arab world, the situation is far more diversified. That is chiefly the result of the existence of a great variety of political regimes in the Arab countries, with very different ideological legitimatizations. Similarly, very diverse—and even broadly antithetical—ideological currents traverse Arab public opinion.

In these last few years, there has been an escalation in the brutality of Israeli military operations—which have gone from being wars that Israel could present as defensive to wars that could no longer be presented that way at all—beginning with the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. That has been accompanied by an intensification of hatred in the Israeli-Arab conflict, notably because of the fate reserved for the Palestinians of the territories occupied since 1967.

In the face of growing criticism of Israel, including in the West, since 1982 especially, we have seen that state systematically resort to instrumentalization of the memory of the Shoah, beginning no later than the Eichmann trial in 1960. And that instrumentalization arouses, on the “opposing side,” a knee-jerk reaction that sometimes goes so far as to deny the Holocaust. The best indicator of this reactive quality is the fact that the Arab population which has received the widest education on the memory of the Shoah, the population of Arab citizens of Israel, has been prone to an absolutely striking explosion of denial these last few years.

To my mind, that very clearly illustrates the fact that denial in these cases corresponds more to a “gut reaction” out of political rancor, than to a true denial of the Shoah as is seen in Europe or the United States, where the deniers spend their time devising historical theories that don’t stand up to refute the existence of the gas chambers, etc.

Another indication of this difference is that within the Arab world where denial is riding high, there’s not a single author who has produced anything original on that theme. All the Arab deniers do is pick up theories produced in the West.

The political instrumentalization of denial as formulated by Ahmadinejad today was not used before in the Arab world, in the time of Nasser, for example. What does this development tell us?

The Islamic fundamentalism that has developed over the most recent decades, from the perspective of the Israeli-Arab conflict, carries an essentialist vision, even though it is not anti-Semitic in the strict racial sense of the term. It’s a vision that picks up the anti-Judaism that may be found in the Abrahamic religions that followed Judaism: Christianity and Islam. Those elements present in Islam are going to be pointed out to facilitate a convergence between this ideologically extreme current and Western denial.

What elements of Islam allow the realization of this anti-Judaism?

There are criticisms of Judaism within Islam and echoes of the conflict that arose between the Prophet of Islam and the Jewish tribes on the Arab peninsula. But it’s a contradictory background: we find anti-Christian and anti-Jewish statements in Islamic scripture. But at the same time, Christians and Jews are considered “people of the book” and may in consequence enjoy privileged treatment compared to other populations in the countries Islam conquered, populations which were forced to convert. The people of the book were not forced to convert and their religions were considered legitimate. Consequently, there is tension between these two contradictory dispositions.

I show in my book how the man who may be considered the main founder of modern Islamic fundamentalism, Rachid Rida, switched from a pro-Jewish attitude due to anti-Christianity—especially during the Dreyfus Affair, when he denounced anti-Judaism in Europe—to an attitude that, towards the end of the 1920’s, began to repeat an anti-Semitic discourse of Western inspiration, including the big Nazi anti-Semitic narrative attributing all kinds of things to the Jews in continuity with the fake Russian “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” including responsibility for the First World War. Then we see a graft occur between certain Western anti-Semitic discourse and Islamic fundamentalism which veers in that direction on this question because of what was happening in Palestine. Before the conflict turned ugly in Palestine, this same Rachid Rida tried to dialogue with representatives of the Zionist movement to convince them to form an alliance between Jews and Muslims to confront the Christian West as a colonial power. From that anti-colonialism that determines anti-Westernism, they were to move on to anti-Zionism, which, in the case of a fundamentalist religious mentality, combined very easily with anti-Semitism.

With that said, the signs of anti-Judaism that one finds in Islam, one finds a hundredfold in Christianity, and in Catholicism in particular, with the idea of the Jews as deicides, the Jews responsible for the death of Jesus, the son of God. This anti-Jewish charge contained in Christianity has, moreover, resulted in a persecution of the Jews in the history of the West incomparably worse than was the case in Islamic countries. We have seen, for example, how Jews of the Iberian Peninsula, fleeing the Christian Reconquista and the Inquisition, found refuge in the Muslim world, in North Africa, Turkey and elsewhere.

How have Hezbollah and Hamas used this rising tendency towards denial for political ends?

Rachid Rida’s discourse, integral to their ideologies, was present from the outset in Hamas and Hezbollah. Much more, by the way, in Hamas, which is an emanation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. The founder of the Brotherhood, Hassan El-Banna, was largely inspired by Rachid Rida.

In the case of Hezbollah, the discourse is presented through the slant of what was to come from political Iran: in Shiite fundamentalism originally, there is no source for an anti-Judaic dimension comparable to the one developed by Rida. It was to be elaborated along with the Iranian regime’s opposition to the West, to the United States and to Israel.

That said, what distinguishes Hamas as well as Hezbollah is that they’re mass movements, and, as such, they have a pragmatic dimension. As much as it suits Ahmadinejad to perform denialist one-upsmanship for reasons of state policy, these movements have to a large extent reduced the anti-Semitic discourse they previously expressed and which proved to be counter-productive.

What I understand from your book is that Holocaust denial has become a political instrument per se in the Middle East, whether one chooses to use it or not. How was this instrument integral to the political foundation of the Palestinian movement, especially with respect to the PLO?

The PLO, ever since the armed Palestinian organizations got the upper hand within it after 1967, very quickly came to understand that anti-Semitic discourse is bad in itself and altogether contrary to the interests of the struggle of the Palestinian people. Hence the insistence on the distinction to be made between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, which was the issue in a political battle within the Palestinian movement.

Conversely, what are the mechanisms of what you call the “positive” instrumentalization of the Shoah, as it emanates from Israel?

What may be the legitimatizations for the State of Israel? I’m not talking about questioning its existence, but about examining the legitimatizations that it gives itself. One has to confess that, apart from religious Zionists, the Biblical legitimatization convinces very few people! As for the justification that we find in secular Zionism as expressed most notably by Theodore Herzl, it’s a justification that does not take into account what is actually there where the “State of the Jews” is going to be created. The only justification he gives for that state is anti-Semitism in the West. He doesn’t concern himself with what’s already over there. Moreover, we know that at the outset the Zionist movement occasionally had very intense debates about the possible location for the Zionist state. Therefore, for the Zionist movement, it was a matter of inserting itself within a colonial undertaking and we find references to colonialism in Herzl’s book, including the idea of embodying a rampart of civilization against barbarism.

Colonial ideology having expired globally, it was necessary to find an alternative legitimatization: that’s when the instrumentalization of the Shoah began to intensify, especially from the beginning of the 1960’s with the Eichmann trial. Excellent work has already been done on this subject, particularly that of Tom Segev. It’s an absolutely remarkable work on the manner in which, within Israel itself, the question of the Shoah was to suddenly emerge and change character. The relationship to the Holocaust was to change from a relationship of contempt for the survivors to claiming that memory as a legitimatization for the State. Moreover, as a narrative, this legitimatization has been highly effective in the West on several levels, including in the relations maintained between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany at a time when the German administration was stuffed with former Nazis. People frequently obscure the absolutely significant role Germany played in strengthening the State of Israel, notably by the reparations Bonn dispensed, not to the victims of Nazism, to the survivors of the genocide, but to the State of Israel presented as the survivors’ state. Consequently, this legitimatization of the State of Israel was to appear over time as a very high-value political instrument for that State, an instrument that today is overexploited.

The memory of the Shoah is invoked to counter every criticism. At times, this has reached the level of the grotesque as when Prime Minister Begin made his famous answer to Ronald Reagan during the siege of Beirut: Begin compared Arafat to Hitler then, at the very moment when it was the Israeli Army besieging Beirut and while many Israelis and other observers were instead finding parallels with the Warsaw Ghetto.

Does the parallel between the Nakba and the Shoah exist in the Middle East? In what respect does it reveal possible political developments?

At that level, there are two different aspects: the one that we’ve talked about, the war over the instrumentalization of the Holocaust, and there is what you could call the local version of competition between victims: “My tragedy is more important than yours.” On the Palestinian side, one may often read statements that assert that the fate of the Palestinian people has been worse than that of the Jews under Nazism. These are obviously altogether outrageous and absurd exaggerations, but we can easily understand what drives them. Moreover, we find this victims’ competition with respect to the Shoah in the case of other historical tragedies such as the Armenian genocide, for example.

At the same time, it is good to listen to former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg’s remarks. He says out loud: “We are guilty of denying the genocides and the tragedies of others.” Confronted with a situation, where, in Israel, they deny the Nakba — and where it required the appearance of those who are called the “New Historians” and of post-Zionism for the official discourse of Nakba denial to be strongly questioned — there is not only a development of Holocaust denial on the Arab side, but also an escalation in their claims about the scope and the drama of their own tragedy. That can often lead to contradictory statements: on the one hand, Holocaust denial, a minimization of the crimes of Nazism, and, on the other hand, a discourse accusing Israel of reproducing the crimes of Nazism … It’s perfectly clear that it’s not logic that holds sway. It’s an ideological war that proceeds more through feelings and passions than through rational discourse.

In your conclusion, you present a rather optimistic analysis: “The progress made between Arabs and Israelis is significant when one considers the virtual impossibility of communication between them in the first decades following the Nakba.”

This progress has, in part, been a product of the PLO, which opened the way to a more rational attitude vis-à-vis the Shoah, the State of Israel and Israelis on the Arab side.

Connections between Arabs and Jews exist today and in the end must favor recognition of the Holocaust and of the Nakba. Israelis’ recognition of the latter is more difficult because it implies recognition of their own responsibility, with the direct implications you can imagine, and which would lead to an attitude radically opposed to that of Israeli governments up to now. Yet that recognition of the Nakba by Israel is today an indispensable step towards achieving a true settlement of this conflict that has gone on for too long.

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This interview first appeared Oct. 11 in Mediapart and was translated into English by Truthout, where it ran Nov. 9. It also appeared in November on ZNet.

See also:

LEBANON: THE 33-DAY WAR AND UNSC RESOLUTION 1701
by Gilbert Achcar, Alternative Information Center
World War 4 Report, September 2007

From our Daily Report:

Holocaust museum opens in Palestinian village on frontline of anti-wall struggle
World War 4 Report, April 22, 2009

Nazis planned Holocaust for Palestine: historians
World War 4 Report, April 11, 2006

Iran: protesters condemn Holocaust conference
World War 4 Report, Dec. 12, 2006

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

Continue ReadingHOLOCAUST DENIAL IN THE ARAB WORLD