Saturday, December 30, 2006

Saddam Hussein, 1937-2006 (David Hirst)

An obituary and political biography of Saddam Hussein by the veteran Middle East correspondent David Hirst, who writes mostly for the Guardian. This is the most substantial, illuminating, and honest summing-up of Saddam's career and significance that I have seen today.

--Jeff Weintraub
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Guardian Unlimited
December 30, 2006
Saddam Hussein
Brutal and opportunist dictator of Iraq, he wreaked havoc on his country, the Middle East and the world
David Hirst

The Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who was executed this morning at the age of 69, may not yield many general biographies - he was personally too uninteresting for that - but he will be a case study for political scientists for years to come. For he was the model of a certain type of developing world despot, who was, for over three decades, as successful in his main ambition, which was taking and keeping total power, as he was destructive in exercising it.

Yet at the same time, he was commonplace and derivative. Stalin was his exemplar. The likeness came from more than conscious emulation: he already resembled him in origin, temperament and method. Like him, he was unique less in kind than in degree, in the extraordinary extent to which, if the more squalid forms of human villainy are the sine qua non of the successful tyrant, he embodied them. Like Stalin, too, he had little of the flair or colour of other 20th-century despots, little mental brilliance, less charisma, no redeeming passion or messianic fervour; he was only exceptional in the magnitude of his thuggery, the brutality, opportunism and cunning of the otherwise dull, grey apparatchik.

His rise to power was no more accidental than Stalin's. If he had not mastered Iraq as he did, someone very similar probably would have, and very probably also from Tikrit. Saddam's peculiar fortune was that, on his political majority, this small, drab town, on the Tigris upstream from Baghdad, was already poised to wrest a very special role in Iraqi history.

Saddam was born in the nearby village of Owja, into the mud house of his uncle, Khairallah Tulfah, and into what a Tikriti contemporary of his called a world "full of evil". His father, Hussein al-Majid, a landless peasant, had died before his birth, and his mother, Sabha, could not support the orphan, until she took a third husband.

Hassan Ibrahim took to extremes local Bedouin notions of a hardy upbringing. For punishment, he beat his stepson with an asphalt-covered stick. Thus, from earliest infancy, was Saddam nurtured - like a Stalin born into very similar circumstances - in the bleak conviction that the world is a congenitally hostile place, life a ceaseless struggle for survival, and survival only achieved through total self-reliance, chronic mistrust and the imperious necessity to destroy others before they destroy you.

The sufferings visited on the child begat the sufferings the grown man, warped, paranoid, omnipotent, visited on an entire people. Like Stalin, he hid his emotions behind an impenetrable facade of impassivity; but he assuredly had emotions of a virulent kind - an insatiable thirst for vengeance on the world he hated.

To fend off attack by other boys, Saddam carried an iron bar. It became the instrument of his wanton cruelty; he would bring it to a red heat, then stab a passing animal in the stomach, splitting it in half. Killing was considered a badge of courage among his male relatives. Saddam's first murder was of a shepherd from a nearby tribe. This, and three more in his teens, were proof of manhood.

The small-town thug possessed all the personal qualifications he might need to earn his place in the 20th-century's pantheon of tyrants. And the small town of Tikrit, lying in the heart of the Sunni Muslim "triangle" of central Iraq furnished the operational ones, too. Orthodox Sunni Arabs are only a small minority, 15% at most, of Iraq's population, outnumbered by the Shias of the south, 60% at least, and the Kurds of the mountainous north. Yet they always dominated Iraq's political life.

Thanks partly to the decline of traditional river traffic, Tikritis had taken to supplying the British-controlled Iraqi state with a disproportionate number of its soldiers. With time and plentiful purges, they emerged within the army as a distinct group; a preponderance which had been fortuitous at first finally became so great they could deliberately enlarge it. A close-knit minority within the Sunni minority, they exploited ties of region, clan and family to seize control of the army, then the state. Saddam, perfect recruit to the sinister, violent, conspiratorial underworld that was Iraqi politics, positioned himself at the heart of this process.

He himself was never a soldier, but he used a formidable array of Tikritis who were, and Ba'athists to boot. Ba'athism was a radical, pan-Arab nationalist doctrine then sweeping the region. Though doubtless impelled in that direction by the extreme, chauvinist beliefs of his uncle Khairallah, who had been dismissed from the army and imprisoned for five years for his part in a 1941 attack on an RAF base near Baghdad, it was mainly out of convenience, not conviction, that Saddam joined the party; strong in Tikrit and the Sunni "triangle", dedicated to force not persuasion, it readily appealed to a man of his ambition and temper.

In theory he remained a Ba'athist to his dying day, but for him Ba'athism was always an apparatus, never an ideology: no sooner was command of the one complete than he dispensed entirely with the other. For next to brutality, opportunism was his chief trait. Not Stalin himself could have governed with such whimsy, or lurched, ideologically, politically, strategically, from one extreme to another with quite such ease, regularity, and disastrous consequences, and yet still, incredibly, retain command to the end.

The Ba'ath, and other "revolutionary" parties, had come into their own with the overthrow, in 1958, of the "reactionary", British-created Hashemite monarchy. They quickly fell out with General Kassem's new regime and with each other, rivalries that expressed themselves mainly in streetfighting and assassinations. That was the way of life that Saddam fell into as a street-gang leader, after going, in 1955, to live with his uncle in Baghdad to study at Karkh high school.

Saddam first achieved national prominence in 1959 with a bungled attempt to kill Kassem. He seems to have lost his nerve and opened fire prematurely. But though his role was less than glorious, it became an essential component of the Saddam legend - that of the dauntless young revolutionary extracting a bullet from his leg with his own hand, and, with security forces in hot pursuit, swimming the icy waters of the Euphrates, knife between clenched teeth, before galloping to safety across the Syrian desert; eventually fetching up in Cairo, where his university law studies were terminated by the next political convulsion back home - Kassem's overthrow in February 1963.

Securing a share in the new regime, the Ba'athists lost it the following November when they fell out with the other parties. Pushed back into the underground, Saddam took what subsequently turned out to be his first, concrete step towards supreme office. In 1964, he formed the Jihaz al-Hunein, the Instrument of Yearning, the first, embryonic version of a terror apparatus of which, in its full fruition, Stalin would not have been ashamed.

It was an outgrowth of the party. That meant that, through it, Saddam, though not an officer, could now see his way to the summit. But at this stage his main asset was his collaboration with his fellow-Tikriti, Brigadier Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr. Thanks to a combination of Bakr's traditional military means and Saddam's new, "civilian" ones, the pair pulled off the "glorious July 1968 Revolution".

At 31, as deputy secretary general of the Ba'ath party, Saddam was the power behind President Bakr's throne. But at first he assumed, like Stalin in his similar period, a disarmingly modest and retiring demeanour as he lay the foundations of what he called a new kind of rule; "With our party methods," he said, "there is no chance for anyone who disagrees with us to jump on a couple of tanks and overthrow the government." Gradually he subordinated the army to the party.

There was nothing modest about the Ba'athists' inaugural reign of terror; few knew it then, but it was chiefly his handiwork, and quite different from anything hitherto experienced in a country already notorious for its harsh political tradition. Saddam's henchmen presided over "revolutionary tribunals" that sent hundreds to the firing squad on charges of puerile, trumped up absurdity. They called on "the masses" to "come and enjoy the feast": the hanging of "Jewish spies" in Liberation Square amid ghoulish festivities and bloodcurdling official harangues.

That was the public face. Behind it were such places as the Palace of the End. So called because King Faisal died there in the 1958 Revolution, it was now more aptly named than ever. Saddam's first security chief, Nadhim Kzar, had turned it into a chamber of horrors. But Kzar, a Shia, nursed a grudge against his Sunni patrons; in 1973, he turned against them; Saddam, Bakr and a host of top Tikritis had a very narrow escape indeed.

Thereafter the badly shaken number two relied almost entirely on Tikritis; the more sensitive the post, the more closely related its incumbent would be to himself. Meanwhile, with guile and infinite patience, he worked his way towards his supreme goal. Purge followed judicious purge, first aimed at the Ba'athists' rivals, then the army, then the party, then influential, respected, or strategically located people whom he deemed most liable, at some point, to cry halt to his inexorable ascension.

When, in June 1979, all was set for him to depose and succeed the ailing Bakr, he could have accomplished it with bloodless ease. But he wilfully, gratuitously chose blood in what was a psychological as well as a symbolic necessity. He had to inaugurate the "era of Saddam Hussein" with a rite whose message would be unmistakable: there had arisen in Mesopotamia a ruler who, in his barbaric splendour, cruelty and caprice, was to yield nothing to its despots of old.

Only now did he emerge, personally and very publicly, as accuser, judge and executioner in one. He called an extraordinary meeting of senior party cadres. They were solemnly informed that "a gang disloyal to the party and the revolution" had mounted a "base conspiracy" in the service of "Zionism and the forces of darkness", and that all the "traitors" were right there, with them, in the hall. One of their ringleaders, brought straight from prison, made a long and detailed confession of his "horrible crime".

Saddam, puffing on a Havana cigar, calmly watched the proceedings as if they had nothing to do with him. Then he took the podium. He began to read out the "traitors'" names, slowly and theatrically; he seemed quite overcome as he did so, pausing only to light his cigar or wipe away his tears with a handkerchief. All 66 "traitors" were led away one by one.

Thus did the new president make inaugural use of that essential weapon of the ultimate tyrant, the occasional flamboyant, contemptuous act of utter lawlessness, turpitude or unpredictability, and the enforced prostration of his whole apparatus, in praise and rejoicing, before it. Those of the audience who had not been named showed their relief with hysterical chants of gratitude and a baying for the blood of their fallen comrades.

Saddam then called on ministers and party leaders to join him in personally carrying out the "democratic executions"; every party branch in the country sent an armed delegate to assist them. It was, he said, "the first time in the history of revolutionary movements without exception, or perhaps of human struggle, that over half the supreme leadership had taken part in a tribunal" which condemned the other half. "We are now," he confided, "in our Stalinist era."

But in one way he had actually surpassed his exemplar. Upon entering the Kremlin, the former Georgian streetfighter had at least kept himself fittingly aloof from his "great terror". Not Saddam. Newly exalted, he was to remain down-to-earth too; new caliph of Baghdad, but, direct participant in his own terror, very much the Tikriti gangster, too.

The "Leader, President, Struggler" now emerged as a regional and international actor with the disproportionate capacity for promoting well-being and order or wreaking havoc which Iraq's great strategic and political importance, vast oil wealth, relatively educated citizenry and powerful army conferred on him. With U-turns, blunders and megalomaniac whimsies, he chose havoc; he wreaked it on the region and the world, but above all on Iraq itself.

In September 1980 he went to war against Iran. It was known as "Saddam's Qadisiyah", after the Arabs' early Islamic victory over the Persians. His official, strictly limited war aims revolved round the Shatt al-Arab estuary and his determination to renegotiate the "Algiers agreement" he had concluded a mere five years before. A dire emergency had forced that humiliation on him: the Iraqi army had been close to defeat in its campaign to suppress the last great, Iranian-backed Kurdish uprising led by Mullah Mustafa Barazani. The quid pro quo for Algiers had been the American-inspired withdrawal of the Shah's support for Barazani.

His "Qadisiyah", first of his spectacular volte-faces, was now to avenge the humiliation. But he also had a higher, unofficial aim: to weaken or destroy the Ayatollah Khomeini's new-born Islamic Republic, or at least its subversive potentialities in Iraq itself. For Iraq's Shia majority now saw in their Iranian co-religionists a means of bringing down Sunni minority rule. Hitherto closely bound to the Soviet Union, Saddam now bid for the west's favour as the Shah's natural heir as the "strong man" of the Gulf.

In the terrible eight-year struggle that followed, the Ayatollah's Iran remorselessly turned the tables on the Iraqi aggressor, recovered all its conquered territory, and, in a series of fearsome "human wave" offensives, tried to conquer Iraq, and turn it into the world's second "Islamic Republic".

That would have been a geopolitical upheaval of incalculable consequences. To forestall it, the west, beneath a mask of outward neutrality, put its weight behind one unlovely regime because it found the other unlovelier still. While the frightened, oil-rich Gulf furnished cash, the west furnished conventional weapons, and the means to manufacture a whole array of unconventional ones: nuclear, chemical and biological. Almost miraculously, Saddam held out, until, in July 1988, Khomeini drank from what he called "the poisoned chalice" of a ceasefire.

Of course, Saddam hailed this, his "first Gulf war", as a victory. Though what possible victory there could have been in an outcome which, in addition to hundreds of thousands of dead, wounded and captured, immense physical destruction and economic havoc, left Iraq on a permanent war footing, still seeking to renegotiate the status of the Shatt al-Arab?

Even if he could not officially admit it, he had good reason to give his people some recompense for their sufferings. He made as if to offer them two things, material betterment and some democratisation. But he cannot have been serious about either. Thanks to the ravages of his "Qadisiyah", he had no money for economic reconstruction. And, in another great volte-face, he staged a virtual counter-revolution against the one ideal of Ba'athism, its socialism, which he had made a passable attempt to put into practice. Worse, the main beneficiaries of the economic revisionism were the Tikriti pillars of his regime, now corrupt as well as despotic.

With the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu, the east European dictator he most closely resembled, Saddam abandoned talk of "the new pluralist trends" he discerned in the world. Indeed, he persisted, more surrealistically than ever, in the despot's law: the more disastrous his deeds the more they should be glorified. His cult of personality expressed itself most overbearingly in monumental architecture, where the public - an amazing array of bizarre or futuristic memorials to his "Qadisiyah" - merged with the private (his proliferating palaces) in grandiose tribute to all the attributes, bordering on the divine, ascribed to him.

It reflected a degree of control that enabled him, amazingly, to embark, within two years of the first, on his "second Gulf war", and then, more amazingly still, to survive that yet greater calamity in its turn. It was a resort to the classic diversionary expedient, a flashy foreign adventure, of the dictator in trouble at home. He cast himself once again as the pan-Arab champion, boasting that, having secured the Arabs' eastern flank against the Persians, he was now turning his attention westwards, with the aim of settling scores with the Arabs' other great foe, the Zionists. He threatened "to burn half of Israel" with his weapons of mass destruction, thrilling large segments of an Arab public desperately short of credible heroes.

But instead of Israel, it was Kuwait which, on the night of August 2 1990, Saddam attacked, or, rather, gobbled up in its entirety. Hardly had he done that than, to appease Iran, he unilaterally re-accepted the Algiers agreement on the Shatt al-Arab. It was the most breathtaking of his volte-faces; even as he dragged his people into another unprovoked war, he was in effect telling them that, in the first, they had shed all that blood, sweat and tears for nothing.

The Kuwait invasion was the ultimate excess, whimsy and Promethean delusion of the despot: the belief that he could get away with anything. Yet nothing had encouraged this excess like the west's indulgence of his earlier ones. Sure, it had never loved him. But neither had it protested at his use of chemical weapons against Iran. It had contented itself with little more than a wringing of hands when he went on to gas his own people.

In March 1988, in revenge for an Iranian territorial gain, he wiped out 5,000 Kurdish inhabitants of Halabja; then, the war over, he wiped out several thousand more in "Operation Anfal", his final, genocidal attempt to solve his Kurdish problem. In effect, the west's reaction had been to treat the Kurds as an internal Iraqi affair; exterminating them en masse may have briefly stirred the international conscience, but it tended, if anything, to reinforce the existing international order.

But now that he was so ungratefully, so shockingly threatening this order itself, the west finally awoke to the true nature of the monster it had nurtured. Before long, Saddam faced an American-led army of half a million men assembled in the Arabian desert.

He did not blench. And for a few months he won adulation as the latter-day Saladin, who, after Kuwait, would go on to liberate Palestine. He said his army was eagerly awaiting the coalition's great land offensive to reconquer Kuwait; in "the mother of all battles", Iraq would "water the desert with American blood".

But he stood no chance. For a month, allied aircraft rained high-tech devastation on his army, air force, economic and strategic infrastructure. He panicked, ordering his army's withdrawal from Kuwait. It was not enough for the allies. As their ground forces swept almost unopposed through Kuwait, then into southern Iraq, the withdrawal became a rout. They could have marched on Baghdad. He caved in utterly, accepting every demand that the allies made. Only then did they cease their advance.

They had shattered most of his "million-man army" except for its elite Republican Guards, held in reserve to defend the regime against the wrath of the people. And this time their wrath was truly unleashed. The two oppressed majorities, Shias and Kurds, staged their great uprisings. These began spontaneously, when a Shia tank commander, having fled from Kuwait to Basra, positioned his vehicle in front of one of those gigantic, ubiquitous murals of the tyrant and addressed it thus: "What has befallen us of defeat, shame and humiliation, Saddam, is the result of your follies, your miscalculations and your irresponsible actions."

But the uprisings foundered on the rock of Saddam's residual strength, western betrayal and, in the south, their own disorganisation, vengeful excesses and failure to distance themselves from Iranian expansionist designs. Exploiting the Sunni minority's fear that if he went, so would many of them, in the most horrible of massacres, Saddam sent in his guards. Dreadful atrocities accompanied the slow reconquest of the south. And when the Guards turned north, the whole population of "liberated" Kurdistan fled in panic through snow and bitter cold to Iran and Turkey.

The television images of that grim stampede caught the measure of western betrayal. Four weeks previously, President George Bush senior had urged the Iraqis to rise up. But when they did so, he turned a deaf ear to their pleas for help. "New Hitler" Saddam might be, but he was also the only barrier against the possible break-up of Iraq itself. Saudi Arabia, for one, could not tolerate the prospect. It told the US it would work to replace Saddam with an army officer who would keep the country in safe, authoritarian, Sunni Muslim hands.

Saddam was saved again. And for 12 more years he hung on, as his people sank into social, economic and political miseries incomparably greater than those which had propelled him into Kuwait. Tikriti solidarity continued to preserve him against putsch and assassination. And never again would the people stage an uprising without assurance of success. Only the west could provide that. But the West, preoccupied with other crises, was paralysed.

It would, or could, not withdraw from what, after the Gulf war, it had put in place, a curious, contradictory amalgam of UN sanctions that penalised the Iraqi people, not its rulers, a moral commitment to safeguard "liberated" Kurdistan, an ineffectual "no-fly zone" over the Shia south.

But it also feared to go further in and, completing the logic of what it had begun, join forces with a serious Iraqi opposition that could bring the tyrant down and keep the country in one piece thereafter. This was inertia, which, the longer it lasted, the more dearly it would pay for in the end. Every now and then confrontations erupted between the world's only superpower and this most exasperating of "rogue states"; they arose out of Saddam's attempts to break out of his "box", via some renewed threat to Kuwait, an incursion into the western-protected Kurdish enclave, or - most persistently - showdowns over the UN's mission to divest Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction.

In the last of them, in 1998, his elite military and security apparatus took a four-day pounding from the air. Heavy though this was, it proved to be the last, symbolic flourish behind which the Clinton administration acquiesced in what, with the expulsion of the arms inspectors, was a diplomatic victory for Saddam.

In the end, it was less his own misdeeds that brought the despot down, but those of the man who, for a while, supplanted him as America's ultimate villain, Osama bin Laden. Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, but he fell victim none the less to the crusading militarism, the new doctrine of the pre-emptive strike, the close identification with a rightwing Israeli agenda, that now took full possession of the administration of George Bush junior. Iraq became the first target among the three states (with Iran and North Korea) that it had placed on its "axis of evil", and with the launch of the invasion by the US, UK and their allies in March 2003, Saddam's days were numbered.

However, three years passed between his capture and his execution yesterday. In December 2003, following a tip-off from an intelligence source, US forces found him hiding in an underground refuge on a farm near Tikrit, where his life had begun. It was the middle of the next year before he was transferred to Iraqi custody, and in July 2004 the former president appeared in court to hear criminal charges. Another year passed before the prosecution was ready to proceed with counts related to the massacre in the small Shia town of Dujail in 1982. The trial at last opened in October 2005 and the proceedings were immediately adjourned. Saddam, who two months earlier had sacked his legal team, pleaded innocence. A second trial on war crimes charges relating to the 1988 Anfal campaign opened on August 21 this year. He refused to enter a plea, and episodes of black farce, which characterised his earlier appearances in court, recurred, with the judge switching of his microphone because of his interruptions, and ejecting him from the court four times. The trial was adjourned on October 11, but on November 5 the court handed down a guilty verdict and sentenced Saddam to death by hanging.

Saddam married Saida Khairallah in 1963. Their sons Uday and Qusay (obituaries, July 23 2003) were killed by American forces; they had three daughters.

· Saddam Hussein abd al-Majid, politician, born April 28 1937; died December 30 2006.

Another endorsement of the Euston Manifesto (Roger Cohen, IHT)

The Euston Manifesto, issued in April 2006, stands out as a valuable and important initiative in a mostly depressing landscape of public debate on both sides of the Atlantic. To restate what I said at the time (in The Euston Manifesto: For a Renewal of Progressive Politics):
I am proud to be a signer of The Euston Manifesto, a statement of principles for a genuinely democratic, egalitarian, humane, and libertarian progressive politics put together by a group of people belonging, in one way or another, to the British democratic left. This is in part a response to the moral, political, and intellectual derangement of much of the so-called "left" in recent years, but the drafters focused on trying to set forth a positive agenda. I myself would not have formulated every detail in precisely the same way, but I fully endorse its central thrust and animating spirit. [....]
Since April 2006 the Euston Manifesto has drawn supporters and stimulated discussion in a range of countries. (For some examples, see here & here & here & here.) But the Manifesto itself and the issues it raises still deserves more attention than they have received.

=> For those to whom the Euston Manifesto is still news, I recommend the piece endorsing it by Roger Cohen in today's International Herald Tribune, "A manifesto from the left too sensible to ignore" (see below).
This has been a bleak year for nuanced thinking. President George W. Bush likes to speak in certainties; contrition and compromise are not his thing. Among hyper-ventilating left-liberals, hatred of Bush is so intense that rational argument usually goes out the window. The result is a mindless cacophony. [....]

Fortunately, in the face of such hysteria, an expression of moderate sanity has emerged over the past year. Precisely because of its sanity, it has received too little attention.

I refer to the Euston Manifesto (www.eustonmanifesto.org), published last March by a group of mainly left-of-center thinkers, and the supporting statement called "American Liberalism and the Euston Manifesto," published by U.S. intellectuals in September. [....]
For those of you who are not yet acquainted with the Euston Manifesto itself, I strongly urge that you read it now and consider signing it.

I would also urge everyone, but especially Americans, to do the same for the companion statement cited by Cohen, "American Liberalism and the Euston Manifesto"

Yours for democracy,
Jeff Weintraub

P.S. By the way, those of you who feel intensely angry (as I do) about some things going on in the world--for example, the works of the Bush/Cheney administration, genocidal mass murder in places like Darfur and international indifference to it, or whatever--should not be put off by Cohen's reference to the "moderate sanity" of the Euston Manifesto. I agree that it is sane and reasonable, but it is not bland, and it does not simply propose a wishy-washy 'middle-of-the-road' position. At the same time, while the Euston Manifesto makes a lot of substantive and controversial points, its tone and approach are deliberately non-sectarian.
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International Herald Tribune
December 30, 2006
A manifesto from the left too sensible to ignore
By Roger Cohen

NEW YORK. This has been a bleak year for nuanced thinking. President George W. Bush likes to speak in certainties; contrition and compromise are not his thing. Among hyper- ventilating left-liberals, hatred of Bush is so intense that rational argument usually goes out the window. The result is a mindless cacophony.

Bush, even after the thumping of the Republicans in November, equates criticism of the war in Iraq with defeatist weakness. Much of the left, in both Europe and the United States, is so convinced that the Iraq invasion was no more than an American grab for oil and military bases, it seems to have forgotten the myriad crimes of Saddam Hussein.

There appears to be little hope that Bush will ever abandon his with-us-or-against-us take on the post-9/11 world. Division is the president's adrenalin; he abhors shades of gray. Nor does it seem likely that the America-hating, over-the-top ranting of the left - the kind that equates Guantánamo with the Gulag and holds that the real threat to human rights comes from the White House rather than Al Qaeda - will abate during the Bush presidency.

This state of affairs is grave. The threat posed by Islamic fanaticism, inside and outside Iraq, requires the lucid analysis and informed disagreement of civilized minds. Bush's certainties are dangerous. But so is the moral equivalency of the left, the kind that during the Cold War could not see the crimes of communism, and now seems ready to equate the conservative leadership of a great democracy with dictatorship.

I am grateful to Niall Stanage, a Belfast-born, New-York based journalist, for pointing out to me in an e-mail that the leftist Respect coalition represented in the British Parliament by George Galloway had this to say about Iraq:

"The resistance in Iraq is engaged in a battle to liberate the country. The Iraqi resistance deserves the support of the international antiwar movement."

That's a call for the mass of European pacifists to back the beheading brigade, the child-bombers and other fundamentalist loonies who want to restore the Caliphate. A call made in the name of defeating what Galloway and his ilk see as the greater evil, the United States.

Fortunately, in the face of such hysteria, an expression of moderate sanity has emerged over the past year. Precisely because of its sanity, it has received too little attention.

I refer to the Euston Manifesto (www.eustonmanifesto.org), published last March by a group of mainly left-of-center thinkers, and the supporting statement called "American Liberalism and the Euston Manifesto," published by U.S. intellectuals in September.

These outlines of liberal principle - liberal in its best Enlightenment sense rather than in its debased Fox- News guise of insult - constitute a solid foundation for debate of Iraq and the struggle against terrorism that the White House now calls "The Long War."

The statements are signed by backers and opponents of the Iraq war who, despite their differences, are united by strong support for freedom of speech and ideas, democracy and pluralism, as well as by unqualified opposition to all forms of terrorism and totalitarianism.

The Euston Manifesto says: "We reject without qualification the anti-Americanism now infecting so much left-liberal (and some conservative) thinking."

It also declares: "Drawing the lesson of the disastrous history of left apologetics over the crimes of Stalinism and Maoism, as well as more recent exercises in the same vein (some of the reaction to the crimes of 9/11, the excuse making for suicide-terrorism, the disgraceful alliances lately set up inside the antiwar movement with illiberal theocrats), we reject the notion that there no opponents on the left."

It states: "We stand against all claims to a total - unquestionable or unquestioning - truth."

It supports a global "responsibility to protect" - the principle of armed intervention in a state where the slaughter and torture of citizens is rampant.

On Iraq, it has this to say: "We recognize that it was possible reasonably to disagree about the justification for the intervention, the manner in which it was carried through, the planning (or lack of it) for the aftermath, and the prospects for the successful implementation of democratic change. We are, however, united in our view about the reactionary, semi-fascist and murderous character of the Baathist regime in Iraq, and we recognize the overthrow as a liberation of the Iraqi people."

The proper concern of the left after Saddam's overthrow should have been "the battle to put in place in Iraq a democratic political order" rather than "picking through the rubble of the arguments over intervention."

The manifesto observes that: "The many left opponents of regime change in Iraq who have been unable to understand the considerations that led others on the left to support it, dishing out anathema and excommunication, more lately demanding apology or repentance, betray the democratic values they profess."

The American supporters of the manifesto, who include the historian Walter Laqueur, several journalists from The New Republic and Michael Ledeen of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, reject "the ossified and unproductive polarization of American politics."

They deplore the tendency on the left to substitute hatred of Bush for thought about fighting jihadism. Why, they ask, is the left more incensed by America's errors in Iraq than "terrorist outrages by Islamic extremists?"

They note: "In World War II and the Cold War, liberals, centrists and conservatives found moments of commonality. Indeed, if those efforts had been borne exclusively by the left or the right they very well might have failed."

Taken together, the two statements set out core principles of the Anglo-American liberal tradition, bringing Europe and the United States together at a time of apparent ideological divergence. As the U.S. signatories note, the Euston Manifesto hews to "the traditions of American liberal anti-fascism and anti-totalitarianism."

If you're tired of sterile screaming in the wilderness, tired of the comfortably ensconced "hindsighters" poring over every American error in Iraq, tired of facile anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism masquerading as anti- Zionism, try the Euston road in 2007. It might actually lead somewhere.

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Irwin Cotler: "Courageous Bangladeshi journalist" Salah Choudhury deserves our support (Montreal Gazette)

The prominent international human-rights lawyer and Canadian Member of Parliament Irwin Cotler, former Minister of Justice & Attorney-General, recently agreed to join in the defense of Bangladeshi journalist Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury (as noted here).

On December 26 Cotler published an op-ed piece about Choudhury's case and its significance in the Montreal Gazette. This is a compact but powerful discussion that cuts right through to the crucial issues:

---------------
Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury is not a household name. But he should be - and his case is becoming - a cause celebre. For this courageous Bangladesh journalist and human-rights defender is about to stand trial on the charges of sedition, treason and blasphemy, offences possibly punishable by the death penalty.

His crime? Promoting inter-faith dialogue among Muslims, Jews and Christians, seeking peaceful relations with Israel, and expressing concerns about extremist radical Islam. [....]

It is not Choudhury who should be on trial; rather, it is the Bangladesh authorities who have violated his fundamental rights guaranteed under the Bangladesh constitution, international treaties as well as the basic principles of criminal justice, including:

a. the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty;
b. the right not to be arbitrarily arrested and detained;
c. the right to be informed promptly and in detail of the nature of the charge, and the right to a prompt appearance before a judge to challenge the lawfulness of arrest and detention;
d. the prohibition against torture and the right to humane conditions during detention;
e. the right to protection against coercive interrogation;
f. the right of access to legal counsel;
g. the right to equal access to, and equality before, the courts;
h. the right to a fair hearing by a competent, independent and impartial tribunal;
i. the right to freedom of religion and conscience;
j. the right to freedom of expression and freedom of the press;
k. the right to freedom of association and assembly; and
l. the right to freedom of movement, including the right to leave and re-enter the country.

Apart from these violations of Choudhury’s fundamental rights - that are reasons enough to quash the charges even before the trial begins - the trumped-up charges themselves are devoid of any basis in fact or law. [....]

At the time of Choudhury’s first arrest in 2003, a New York Times editorial characterized him as having "a rare virtue - he champions dialogue and decency in a culture hemmed in by extremism and corruption." The charges against Choudhury, said the New York Times editorial, are a "baseless sham." It went on to say, after describing the plight of journalists in Bangladesh: "Bangladesh may now be among the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists. That makes Choudhury’s courageous stand for Muslim-Jewish dialogue all the more admirable - and vital to defend."

Three years later, Choudhury faces possible death from this "baseless sham." It is vital now to defend Choudhury’s rights as we defend the courageous stand that brought about his ordeal.
---------------

You can read the rest below.

See also Terry Glavin's account of a recent radio interview in which Cotler discussed these matters at greater length ("Cotler Moving Ahead On Shoaib Choudhury's Case").

--Jeff Weintraub
====================
Montreal Gazette
December 26, 2005
Courageous Bangladesh journalist deserves Canadian support
Choudhury faces trial for the sin of promoting inter-faith dialogue

By Irwin Cotler
Irwin Cotler is MP for Mount Royal, a former justice minister, and a law professor at McGill University (on leave). He has acted on behalf of many political prisoners all over the world
Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury is not a household name. But he should be - and his case is becoming - a cause celebre. For this courageous Bangladesh journalist and human-rights defender is about to stand trial on the charges of sedition, treason and blasphemy, offences possibly punishable by the death penalty.

His crime? Promoting inter-faith dialogue among Muslims, Jews and Christians, seeking peaceful relations with Israel, and expressing concerns about extremist radical Islam.

These views - published in the Bangladesh Weekly Blitz, which he edits - resulted in Choudhury first being arrested on Nov. 29, 2003 at the Bangladesh National Airport as he was about to board a plane to attend a conference in Israel on the media’s role in education for peace.

Since Bangladesh law forbids its citizens from visiting countries, such as Israel, with which Bangladesh does not maintain diplomatic relations, Choudhury was originally cited for a violation of the Passport Act, which is usually sanctioned with an $8 fine. But that was not the punishment meted out to Choudhury. Following his arrest, he was taken into custody and - as he has reported - was subsequently blindfolded, beaten and interrogated incessantly for 10 days in an attempt to coerce a confession that he was an Israeli "spy."

Choudhury, who refused to confess to the false charge, for which no evidence was ever adduced, was charged two months later with "sedition," and was subsequently held for 16 months in solitary confinement in a Dhaka prison, without access to counsel or even medical treatment for a debilitating glaucoma.

Choudhury was released on bail on April 30, 2005 after interventions by the U.S. State Department and congressional involvement, together with protest by the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Journalistes sans frontieres. Indeed, on Sept. 29, 2005, he was awarded the Freedom to Write Award by Pen U.S.A., and in May 2006 he received the American Jewish Committee Moral Courage Award in absentia in Washington. Two days before the award, Bangladesh officials rescinded his permission to travel and warned him not to leave the country.

From July 2006 on, as Choudhury told me, he became the target of continuous threats, intimidation and violence. For example, on July 6, his newspaper offices were bombed by an extremist Islamic organization after his newspaper published an article supportive of the Ahmadiyya Muslim minority. On Sept. 18, a judge with alleged ties to an extremist Islamic party ruled that Choudhury was to stand trial for sedition, despite the fact that the public prosecutor had testified two days earlier that the government did not have evidence to proceed with the charges and was prepared to have them dropped.

On Oct. 5, Choudhury was attacked at his newspaper offices by a large crowd, including prominent members of the ruling Bangladesh National Party, was called an "agent of the Jews," and badly beaten. When he reported the attack to the police, no action was taken; on the contrary, after he lodged a formal complaint, the police responded by issuing an arrest warrant for him.

It is not Choudhury who should be on trial; rather, it is the Bangladesh authorities who have violated his fundamental rights guaranteed under the Bangladesh constitution, international treaties as well as the basic principles of criminal justice, including:

a. the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty;

b. the right not to be arbitrarily arrested and detained;

c. the right to be informed promptly and in detail of the nature of the charge, and the right to a prompt appearance before a judge to challenge the lawfulness of arrest and detention;

d. the prohibition against torture and the right to humane conditions during detention;

e. the right to protection against coercive interrogation;

f. the right of access to legal counsel;

g. the right to equal access to, and equality before, the courts;

h. the right to a fair hearing by a competent, independent and impartial tribunal;

i. the right to freedom of religion and conscience;

j. the right to freedom of expression and freedom of the press;

k. the right to freedom of association and assembly; and

l. the right to freedom of movement, including the right to leave and re-enter the country.

Apart from these violations of Choudhury’s fundamental rights - that are reasons enough to quash the charges even before the trial begins - the trumped-up charges themselves are devoid of any basis in fact or law. As well, there is a particular Canadian connection to the Choudhury case. Canada has been an active partner and participant in a Canada-Bangladesh Rule of Law project, including, in particular, joint initiatives to promote the protection of fundamental rights as well as "due process" principles and the rule of law in the Bangladesh criminal justice system.

Indeed, during my tenure as Canadian justice minister and attorney-general, I held two meetings with the Bangladesh law minister Mouad Ahmed in which the rule of law and the protection of fundamental rights were prominent in our discussions. Moreover, Ahmed had himself been a political prisoner, and therefore had an abiding interest in promoting the rule of law in Bangladesh.

At the time of Choudhury’s first arrest in 2003, a New York Times editorial characterized him as having "a rare virtue - he champions dialogue and decency in a culture hemmed in by extremism and corruption." The charges against Choudhury, said the New York Times editorial, are a "baseless sham." It went on to say, after describing the plight of journalists in Bangladesh: "Bangladesh may now be among the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists. That makes Choudhury’s courageous stand for Muslim-Jewish dialogue all the more admirable - and vital to defend."

Three years later, Choudhury faces possible death from this "baseless sham." It is vital now to defend Choudhury’s rights as we defend the courageous stand that brought about his ordeal.

Sunday, December 24, 2006

Darfur philanthropy update

This follows up some suggestions I passed along--and possibly buried--in a previous item (Reflections on the Darfur student activism conference at Swarthmore).

For people who would like to contribute money to support ongoing efforts against the Darfur genocide, and who want to know how they can get the most bang for their buck, what follows is a compilation of advice I have received from a few informed sources.

=> In terms of political advocacy with a concrete practical focus, three interconnected organizations of student (or mostly student) activists are doing serious and effective work with limited financial resources--the Genocide Intervention Network, the Sudan Divestment Task Force, and STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition. They seem to be off the radar screen for many potential donors, so financial assistance to one of them (or all three) would be money well spent. Another option is Physicians for Human Rights, which Eric Reeves has described as the best of all the major human rights groups in their response to Darfur.

=> Humanitarian assistance for victims of the Darfur atrocity is also severely under-funded in relation to the overwhelming needs involved (quite aside from the fact that humanitarian relief organizations are being driven out of Darfur and eastern Chad by targeted violence and general chaos & insecurity). Of course, one ongoing focus of political advocacy is to press governments and international organizations for funding to support humanitarian relief operations. At the same time, contributions can also be sent directly to humanitarian relief organizations working with victims of the Darfur catastrophe, and I gather that two of the most effective and deserving of these groups are the International Rescue Committee and Save the Children/USA.

=> The Darfur Action Campaign of the American Jewish World Service has played a very active and effective role in both political advocacy and humanitarian relief. As an American Jew myself, I find this a source of pride. (Of course, such efforts have been used to fuel various anti-semitic conspiracy theories and assorted paranoid insinuations--but that sort of thing just goes with the territory.) This work can be supported by donations to the AJWS Sudan Relief and Advocacy Fund.

Yours in struggle,
Jeff Weintraub

Friday, December 22, 2006

Reflections on the Darfur student activism conference at Swarthmore (Adam Lebor)

The British journalist Adam LeBor (recently author of "Complicity with Evil": The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide) was one of the non-students invited to participate in panels and workshops at the student-run Darfur activism conference at Swarthmore (December 1-3, 2006).

(Others included Eric Reeves, Darfurian exile Mohamed Yahya of the Damanga Coalition, photo-journalist Ryan Spencer Reed, UNICEF spokesperson and Darfur activist Mia Farrow, and yours truly.)

This was the Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference of STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition., a national umbrella organization of student groups working to end the genocidal mass murder in Darfur. There were also representatives from an affiliated organization of students and recent students, the Genocide Intervention Network, that was originally started at Swarthmore By my rough estimate, there seemed to somewhat over 100 activists participating in the conference. Some were Swarthmore students, and others came from the immediate area (including Philadelphia-area high school students), but the majority were representatives from STAND chapters at other colleges and universities ranging from New Jersey through Virginia--which meant that they represented a larger constituency of Darfur-oriented student activism.

After returning home to Europe, LeBor posted some reflections on the Swarthmore conference (see below). His remarks perfectly capture my own impressions.
Despite the grim subject matter, it was a fascinating, and encouraging couple of days. These kids were all in their late teens and early twenties, black, white and Asian. (None were from Jewish organisations - so much for the claims that Darfur is all a trick by the Zionist lobby to distract attention from Israel/Palestine.) Their level of commitment and knowledge was remarkable. They spoke fluently of congressional instruments, UN resolutions, the shortcomings of the African Union peacekeepers, splits in the Security Council and the role of China. They were up to speed on different lobbying and public awareness techniques. And they were angry about the world's feeble response to the slaughter.

They had all sorts of plans to increase the pressure on the Sudanese government, by focusing on their local legislators, the Bush administration, even the Beijing Olympics. Such conferences do have an effect, keeping Darfur in the public eye in the US and helping catalyse the Bush administration's sporadic - sadly only sporadic - attempts to pressurise Khartoum.
Despite everything, I also found the conference encouraging for the reasons LeBor emphasizes. The energy, commitment, and sophistication of the participants was impressive. The dominant spirit was one of serious practical idealism rather than ideological venting, moral self-congratulation, or hopeless hand-wringing. I confess that I couldn't help being reminded of the early days of the student civil rights movement (for which, as it happens, Swarthmore was one epicenter). I took it as a heartening sign that capacities for active citizenship and democratic collective action still have some real vitality in American political culture.

=> Of course, one of the most encouraging facts about student activism to stop the Darfur genocide is simply that it's a live phenomenon--at least, in the US. So far, unfortunately, there has been appallingly little active public concern about the Darfur atrocity in most of the rest of the world, and the absence of public outrage and pressure for action from European public opinion has been especially devastating in its consequences. LeBor concludes his remarks with a rueful observation:
But all through the weekend of the student activists' debates and discussions and workshops one question kept nagging at me: where are their British equivalents?
Good question. And to make matters even worse, the sad fact is that there has been significantly more public attention to the Darfur catastrophe in Britain than in the rest of Europe (including fairly extensive and often high-quality coverage by the BBC and the British press). As I noted recently myself (in connection with Eric Reeves's urgent reminder that Europe's indifference is helping to doom Darfur):
What makes European indifference to Darfur so tragic and appalling is that action by Europe could make a genuine difference, and Europe's failure to act has been catastrophic. Overall, Europe has the capacity to exert considerably more economic, diplomatic, and political leverage over the Khartoum government and its foreign backers (including those with seats on the UN Security Council, like China and Russia) than the US. [....] And to put it the other way around, it is almost certainly the case that no serious measures to stop the ongoing mass murder in Darfur and to help the victims can be successful without the active support and initiative of western European governments (in cooperation with the US)..

But none of these governments will feel inclined to pay serious attention to Darfur, and especially not to take even the slightest political or diplomatic risks in connection with Darfur, unless they feel some pressure to do so from their own publics. Therefore, the pervasive failure of western European public opinion (with rare exceptions) to become aroused about the Darfur atrocity--even to the extent of public opinion in the US--and to put pressure on European governments to take constructive steps has been absolutely devastating. Changing this situation is crucial.
This European failure was emphasized as far back as 2004 by former US Presidential candidate Howard Dean in a powerful, eloquent, but evidently ineffective appeal that Europe should act on Darfur. Samantha Power (author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide) made the same point in a piece she wrote in the spring of 2006 after the "Save Darfur" rally in Washington DC (quoted here). Having offered some sharp criticisms of US government policies, Power ended by re-emphasizing this even more depressing wider perspective.
But, at this juncture, U.S. pressure is not sufficient to do the job, and other countries must be brought around. And, for that to happen, the burgeoning endangered people's movement must spread beyond U.S. shores.
Walking away from the [Save Darfur] rally in Washington, a British friend of mine shook his head and said, "You'll never hear me say this again, but today made me want my kids to grow up American." When I asked why, he said, "What happened today could never, ever happen in Europe." Europeans fond of denouncing both the Rwandan genocide and American imperialism had better prove him wrong.
I'll second that.

=> Meanwhile, let me pass along a practical suggestion offered by Eric Reeves at the Swarthmore conference. Anyone who wants to contribute money to support ongoing efforts against the Darfur genocide can probably get the best bang for their buck by assisting the Genocide Intervention Network, the Sudan Divestment Task Force, or STAND (or all three).

Yours in struggle,
Jeff Weintraub
====================
Adam LeBor (at Harry's Place)
December 12, 2006
Silence on Darfur


I just got back from the United States, where I spent a weekend at Swarthmore College, Philadelphia, at a conference of student activists working to stop the genocide in Darfur.

http://www.swarthmore.edu/x8168.xml

Despite the grim subject matter, it was a fascinating, and encouraging couple of days. These kids were all in their late teens and early twenties, black, white and Asian. (None were from Jewish organisations - so much for the claims that Darfur is all a trick by the Zionist lobby to distract attention from Israel/Palestine.) Their level of commitment and knowledge was remarkable. They spoke fluently of congressional instruments, UN resolutions, the shortcomings of the African Union peacekeepers, splits in the Security Council and the role of China. They were up to speed on different lobbying and public awareness techniques. And they were angry about the world's feeble response to the slaughter.

They had all sorts of plans to increase the pressure on the Sudanese government, by focusing on their local legislators, the Bush administration, even the Beijing Olympics. Such conferences do have an effect, keeping Darfur in the public eye in the US and helping catalyse the Bush administration's sporadic - sadly only sporadic - attempts to pressurise Khartoum.

But all through the weekend of the student activists' debates and discussions and workshops one question kept nagging at me: where are their British equivalents?

Posted by Adam LeBor at December 12, 2006 03:16 PM | TrackBack

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Talking Darfur in a "Global Journalist" radio discussion

In case any of you is interested ...

Thursday morning I participated in a public-radio interview program about Darfur, together with three other people spread across several continents. Global Journalist, which describes itself on its website as "The online magazine for the international news business," runs a radio series with panel discussions on international issues.

You can listen to the broadcast here (and also see a list of their other programs). The four of us--two journalists, a Darfur aid worker, and myself--were:

Shashank Bengali
Africa correspondent
McClatchy Newspapers
Nairobi, Kenya

Gina Bramucci
Humanitarian relief worker formerly stationed in West Darfur
Portland, Oregon

Adam LeBor
Author & Central European correspondent for the London Times
Author of "Complicity With Evil": The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide
Budapest, Hungary

Jeff Weintraub
Visiting professor of political science and sociology
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

I was interested to hear from Shashank Bengali that the Darfur crisis is being extensively covered by news media in sub-Saharan Africa, and that the predominant tone is one frustration that nothing serious is being done to stop the killing. Otherwise, the discussion mostly conveyed information that will sound fairly basic to anyone who has already been following the Darfur crisis. But every bit helps--I hope.

(Again, the transmission is available on-line here.)

--Jeff Weintraub

Saturday, December 16, 2006

"Why are so many people unhinged these days?"

A sensible question from Eric at the group weblog Drink-Soaked Popinjays for War.

(Incidentally, in case anyone doesn't get the joke in the blog's name, it refers to a 2005 exchange between the British MP George Galloway, well-known fan of Stalin and Saddam Hussein and a bit of a popinjay himself, and Christopher Hitchens. Galloway responded to a pointed query from Hitchens by calling him "a drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay." No one can deny that British politicians, even despicable sleazeballs like Galloway, are more skilled at fluent invective than American politicians. On the other hand, an insult by someone like Galloway is a label to be worn proudly, albeit facetiously.)

--Jeff Weintraub
====================
Eric (at Drink-Soaked Popinjays for War)
December 13, 2006
Unhinged

Why are so many people unhinged these days? In a debate about the Euro at The Telegraph this comes out of no-where.
You need to visit Germany, France and other European countries to see that the Euro is king. It's also king in many countries which are not members of the EU who pay their staff in Euros. It's pathetic that you people are still "little Englanders" obsessed with moronic Bush and his war criminals and zionist aides.
Over at the right-wing hate site Stormfront someone else asks the opposite: "Is it just me, or does the euro currency smell of the jewish 'one world currency' conspiracy?"

Those wily Jews/Zionists, working both sides of the conspiracy, no wonder they run the world...

What's at stake in Afghanistan - "Disembowelled and murdered for teaching girls"

====================
New Zealand Herald
November 30, 2006
Disembowelled and murdered for teaching girls
By Kim Sengupta

GHAZNI - The gunmen came at night to drag Mohammed Halim away from his home, in front of his crying children and his wife begging for mercy.

The 46-year-old schoolteacher tried to reassure his family that he would return safely.

But his life was over.

He was partly disembowelled and then torn apart with his arms and legs tied to motorbikes. The remains were put on display as a warning to others against defying Taleban orders to stop educating girls.

Halim is one of four teachers killed in rapid succession by the Islamists at Ghazni, a strategic point on the routes from Kabul to the south and east which has become the scene of fierce clashes between the Taleban and United States and Afghan forces.

The day we arrived an Afghan policeman and eight insurgents died during an ambush in an outlying village. Rockets were found, primed to be fired into Ghazni city during a visit by the American ambassador a few days previously. But, as in the rest of Afghanistan, it is the civilians who are bearing the brunt of this murderous conflict.

At the village of Qara Bagh, Halim's family is distraught and terrified. His cousin, Ahmed Gul, shook his head. "They killed him like an animal. No, no. We do not kill animals like that. They took away a father and a husband, they had no pity. We are all very worried. Please go now, you see those men standing over there? They are watching. It is dangerous for you, and for us."

Fatima Mustaq, the director of education at Ghazni, has had repeated death threats, the notorious 'night letters'. Her gender, as well as her refusal to send girls home from school, has made her a hate figure for Islamist zealots. "I think they killed him that way to frighten us, otherwise why make a man suffer so much? Mohammed Halim and his family were good friends of ours and we are very, very upset by what has happened. He came to me when the threats first began and asked what he should do. I told him to move somewhere safe. I think he was trying to arrange that when they came and took him."

The threats against Mushtaq also extend to her husband Sayyid Abdul and their eight children. "When the first letters arrived, I tried to hide them from my husband. But then he found the next few. He said we must stand together. We talked, and we decided that we must tell the children, so that they can be prepared. But it is not a good way for them to grow up."

During the Taleban's rule she and her sister ran secret schools for girls at their home. "They found out and raided us. We managed to persuade them that we were only teaching the Koran. But they spied and found out we were teaching algebra. So they came and beat us. Can you imagine, beating someone for teaching algebra."

More by Kim Sengupta
Email Kim Sengupta

Friday, December 15, 2006

"Yes, there really is a way to help Darfur" - An update (Pham & Krauss) and practical proposals (James Smith)

The basic facts about the current situation in Darfur should already be well known, but it can't hurt to re-emphasize them. This overview of the latest bad news is provided by J. Peter Pham & Michael I. Krauss ("'Tis the Season in Darfur"):
--------------------
In the latest indication of how bleak the situation is, the United Nations recently evacuated its staff from El Fasher, capital of northern Darfur, one of the two major centers for its relief operation to what the world body itself has termed "the world's worst humanitarian crisis."

Armed forces of the Islamist Arab regime in Khartoum, acting in close coordination with roving bands of camel- and horseback-mounted Janjaweed militiamen, are closer than ever to completing their grisly undertaking. Up to half a million black Africans have now perished in a three-year-old orgy of rape, torture, mutilation, and killing. Another 2.5 million, driven from their homes, are dying a slow death in miserable camps for refugees like the ones surrounding the El Fasher base which the UN has just abandoned.

Those who have followed the unfolding of this tragedy have taken a sickening roller coaster ride: every announced "breakthrough" has been followed by a plummet into depths of ever-greater despair. [....] As Richard Williamson, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for special political affairs, noted succinctly in a recent commentary: "The diplomatic minuet to end this catastrophe has been long. The resolve insufficient. The results anemic."

Now the carnage has spilled beyond Sudan's borders. Chad, despite its own poverty, is playing host to a quarter-million refugees from Darfur. Chadian villages that sheltered Darfuris have come under attack from Janjaweed units, displacing 50,000 Chadians according to UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres. Guterres warns that the situation now risks destabilizing a region extending well beyond Sudan's borders, telling the Voice of America, "There is an earthquake in the area. The epicenter is Darfur but the effects can be felt quite far away."

There are troublesome indications that the tremors have already begun. Chadian rebels trying to overthrow that country's president with help from Khartoum have built a base in the Central African Republic (CAR), whose northeast frontier abuts Darfur. These Chadian fighters have recently aligned themselves with local dissidents trying to overthrow the CAR's government, thus conflating three different conflicts. The situation has become so dire—over 100 villages have been burned this year and about 220,000 forced to flee their homes—that as he was evacuating his personnel from El Fasher, outgoing UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egelund made an appeal for $50 million to provide food, shelter, and healthcare for up to one million people in the CAR. [....]

If the combined diplomatic efforts of the U.S. government (including the tireless shuttles of presidential envoy Andrew Natsios) and the United Nations (including last ditch efforts by Annan) cannot deter the Sudanese from their determination to finish off Darfuris, then the time for diplomacy is over. Someone must act. [....]
--------------------
Read the rest here.

=> Some readers who accept their description of the situation will dismiss their call to action with impatience, distrust, or discouraged skepticism--or some combination of all three. In some ways this is understandable. When people try to think about the Darfur atrocity, there is sometimes just a small step from apathy to despair. Both can lead to cynicism, indifference, and efforts to rationalize that indifference. Considering the magnitude of the crime, the utter inadequacy of the world's response, and the genuine difficulties and dangers inherent in any serious response now that so much mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and social devastation have already been allowed to occur ... it is tempting to conclude that the situation is simply hopeless, so that it is pointless to dwell on it and any complaints about genocide in Darfur are no more than empty self-indulgent moralizing (or perhaps some kind of Zionist plot).

But this conclusion (or rationalization) would be quite wrong. Serious steps that could at least begin to mitigate the catastrophe and to put effective pressure on the criminals (that is, the Khartoum government and their accomplices) are realistically quite possible--if there is a minimum of political will to do something constructive, especially among governments and publics in western Europe and North America.

This point is brought out quite forcefully in the piece below by James Smith, head of the Aegis Trust (to which I was alerted by Mick Hartley). The title and subtitle get right to the heart of the matter: "Yes, there really is a way to help Darfur: Politicians can do more than just give speeches". And they need to.
More than two years ago I met three women fleeing from Darfur to Chad. Their villages were burnt, they saw their husbands and children killed, and they were then gang raped, leaving two pregnant.

After trite words of sympathy I assured them the international community would bring protection; such atrocities would not be allowed to continue so soon after the genocide in Rwanda. World leaders who witnessed the atrocities in Darfur spoke strongly to Sudan’s Government. But the Sudanese, like the Serb nationalists a decade earlier, ignored these words and instead looked at the actions of these statesmen. The lack of action to back up the words told them they could get away with murder.

Months have dragged into years, and the killing and rape of Darfur continues. [....] A defector from the Arab Janjawid militia confirmed to Aegis last month that orders to “ kill and destroy” in Darfur come directly from Khartoum. He added: “We didn’t know the term ‘ethnic cleansing’, but when we heard what it meant we agreed it accurately described what we were doing.”

The rest of Smith's discussion addresses only part of the picture, but an important part. Let me fill in some background first.

In the end, introducing substantial peacekeeping forces with a serious mandate to enforce security is an essential part of any workable solution. And for the moment, I'm afraid, it does seem very unlikely that serious peacekeeping forces will be deployed in Darfur against the opposition of the Khartoum government (backed up by diplomatic support from the Arab League, the acquiescence of the African Union, and the threat of Chinese and Russian vetoes in the UN Security Council)--or even that there will be a credible threat of such intervention, to which the Khartoum government would have to pay attention..

However, as other analysts and activists have emphasized, this is not the end of the story. If western governments (including European ones) are really willing to use the leverage at their disposal, then both Khartoum and its foreign backers are susceptible to a range of effective economic, diplomatic, and political pressures that could well make them back down. In the absence of such pressures, the perpetrators of the genocide (and their foreign backers) have unsurprisingly responded to criticism and to diplomatic initiatives with arrogant contempt. Until that situation changes, it may well be true that
Negotiating with Khartoum to allow a UN peacekeeping force into Darfur is a waste of time. Sudan will never consent to allow UN troops on its soil and China will veto any intervention by force.
But that situation can and should be changed.

In the meantime, as Smith correctly argues, the so called "international community" is not condemned to plead impotently and do nothing. At the very least, if sending UN peacekeeping forces into Darfur itself is stymied, it can take a substantial and urgently necessary first step by acting in Chad, where it is hard to make a plausible claim that the Sudanese government deserves any veto power. Doing this would be worthwhile in itself, and in the process it would also add to the pressures on Khartoum.
Peace talks, of course, are essential but we should have learnt from the Balkans and Rwanda, that they also allow genocidal governments cover and time to carry on mass murder. The latest diplomatic round was won again by Khartoum last month. Kofi Annan jumped on a plane to Addis Ababa, grasping the straw that the Sudanese Government was now prepared to let Darfuris receive protection. Ministers around the world misled the media into believing an agreement had been reached to allow the UN to deploy troops alongside the AU in Darfur. Predictably, once the pressure was off, Sudan said it never agreed to this.

Instead, in South Darfur, Antonov bombers supported the Janjawid and the Sudanese Army in destroying villages. [....] Sudan is also destabilising neighbouring Chad in order to assist its campaign in Western Sudan. The ideologues in Khartoum, just as they are doing in Darfur, want to “Arabise” Chad and topple its black African president. Last week Sudanese-backed rebels in Chad briefly took Abeche, a town that is crucial to getting aid across the border and into Darfur.

What is happening in Chad revives bleak memories of Congo. [....] We know that genocidal violence does not respect borders and can quickly become a regional problem, yet we are standing by and allowing it to spill over from Darfur into Chad. Once security is lost in Chad, the aid agencies that use bases there to reach the four million Darfuris that depend on them will have to withdraw. [....] In the meantime, more people die and the crisis deepens.

So let’s stop fiddling and deploy UN forces into Chad, on the border with Darfur. This will serve three purposes — helping to stabilise the region, putting UN soldiers in striking distance of Darfur’s camps if all-out attacks require immediate intervention, and signalling to Khartoum that the international community takes the protection of civilians seriously. Finally, the UN Security Council should sanction a no-fly zone. We lent our Awacs equipment to monitor the Winter Olympics last year. Why can’t we lend it to monitor the safety of desperate human beings in Africa?

If we start acting according to our words, maybe there is a chance the Sudanese Government would do likewise.

--Jeff Weintraub
====================
The Times (London)
December 9, 2006
Yes, there really is a way to help Darfur
Politicians can do more than just give speeches
By James Smith

More than two years ago I met three women fleeing from Darfur to Chad. Their villages were burnt, they saw their husbands and children killed, and they were then gang raped, leaving two pregnant.

After trite words of sympathy I assured them the international community would bring protection; such atrocities would not be allowed to continue so soon after the genocide in Rwanda. World leaders who witnessed the atrocities in Darfur spoke strongly to Sudan’s Government. But the Sudanese, like the Serb nationalists a decade earlier, ignored these words and instead looked at the actions of these statesmen. The lack of action to back up the words told them they could get away with murder.

Months have dragged into years, and the killing and rape of Darfur continues. In the face of such genocide, the UN Security Council is demonstrating it is not fit for purpose. Britain, one of its five permanent members, may be generous with aid but is feeble when it comes to defending civilians. Why? Because the Foreign Office argues that Sudan bears responsibility for protecting the very civilians it is murdering.

The facts are changed to justify such an absurdity. In his statement today, Tony Blair implies a moral equivalence between Darfur rebels fighting for political and economic fairness and the Arab-controlled Sudanese Army that is leading a scorched-earth policy against the black tribes. A defector from the Arab Janjawid militia confirmed to Aegis last month that orders to “ kill and destroy” in Darfur come directly from Khartoum. He added: “We didn’t know the term ‘ethnic cleansing’, but when we heard what it meant we agreed it accurately described what we were doing.”

When the African Union sent its mission to Darfur in the summer of 2004, the phrase “African solutions to African problems” echoed across the diplomatic world, absolving non-African nations of the need to stop the crimes against humanity. States such as Rwanda readily contributed troops. However, the AU mission could not work without proper resourcing from wealthy nations. They were set up for failure. AU policemen in Darfur staged a sit-in last month because they had not been paid for three months.

Peace talks, of course, are essential but we should have learnt from the Balkans and Rwanda, that they also allow genocidal governments cover and time to carry on mass murder. The latest diplomatic round was won again by Khartoum last month. Kofi Annan jumped on a plane to Addis Ababa, grasping the straw that the Sudanese Government was now prepared to let Darfuris receive protection. Ministers around the world misled the media into believing an agreement had been reached to allow the UN to deploy troops alongside the AU in Darfur. Predictably, once the pressure was off, Sudan said it never agreed to this.

Instead, in South Darfur, Antonov bombers supported the Janjawid and the Sudanese Army in destroying villages. One witness interviewed by Aegis had seen 70 villages destroyed since August this year, the last in mid-November, before he was forced to flee the region. He made an appeal to Tony Blair; “Please, please come and save us.” But today, after three years of strong words and empty threats, our Prime Minister still has no new plans for action — just more words: “if rapid progress is not made, we will need to consider alternative approaches.”

Sudan is also destabilising neighbouring Chad in order to assist its campaign in Western Sudan. The ideologues in Khartoum, just as they are doing in Darfur, want to “Arabise” Chad and topple its black African president. Last week Sudanese-backed rebels in Chad briefly took Abeche, a town that is crucial to getting aid across the border and into Darfur.

What is happening in Chad revives bleak memories of Congo. The UN’s failure to mobilise sufficient forces on the Rwanda-Congo border allowed Rwandan genocidaires to slip across the border and spark a civil war in Congo that left four million dead. The UN is still there now, picking up the pieces. We know that genocidal violence does not respect borders and can quickly become a regional problem, yet we are standing by and allowing it to spill over from Darfur into Chad. Once security is lost in Chad, the aid agencies that use bases there to reach the four million Darfuris that depend on them will have to withdraw.

Negotiating with Khartoum to allow a UN peacekeeping force into Darfur is a waste of time. Sudan will never consent to allow UN troops on its soil and China will veto any intervention by force. In the meantime, more people die and the crisis deepens.

So let’s stop fiddling and deploy UN forces into Chad, on the border with Darfur. This will serve three purposes — helping to stabilise the region, putting UN soldiers in striking distance of Darfur’s camps if all-out attacks require immediate intervention, and signalling to Khartoum that the international community takes the protection of civilians seriously. Finally, the UN Security Council should sanction a no-fly zone. We lent our Awacs equipment to monitor the Winter Olympics last year. Why can’t we lend it to monitor the safety of desperate human beings in Africa?

If we start acting according to our words, maybe there is a chance the Sudanese Government would do likewise.

James Smith is chief executive of the Aegis Trust

Pinochet's end - Death of a tyrant

The former Chilean dictator was one of the figures who helped to symbolize an era (as I noted here), so reactions to his death have been world-wide and often intense.
Here are some reflections on his death and life from:
Christopher Hitchens ("His overthrow of civilian democracy, in the South American country in which it was most historically implanted, will always be remembered as one of the more shocking crimes of the 20th century.");
Marc Cooper ("The chairs of power in Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Brazila, and La Paz – once occupied by dictators and generals—now seat democratically elected reformers, liberals, and socialists. Their task is formidable: to heal the trauma, reverse the damage, and bridge the yawning social gaps that are the real legacy of the Pinochet era. [....] As long as he was alive, even in a gargoyle state, he was a grotesque reminder of all that has haunted the continent, all that has been left unresolved.");
Oliver Kamm ("Pinochet was a thug, and his rule was a tragedy for Chile.");
the Economist ("No ifs or buts. Whatever the general did for the economy, he was a bad man.")
and others.

(I don't pretend that this is anything more than a quick and unsystematic roundup.)

--Jeff Weintraub

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Holocaust Denial Is No Joke (Anne Applebaum)

It might be tempting to regard the government-sponsored Holocaust-denial conference in Tehran this week as no more than a sick joke, and it certainly does have some ludicrous aspects. But it would be a mistake to take it too lightly or to minimize how genuinely appalling it is. Aside from being morally and intellectually despicable in itself, it exemplifies some very dangerous larger trends, so it is not simply an isolated oddity. We are living through an era in which an ideological climate of virulent anti-semitism, reminiscent of the 1890s or even the 1930s, is epidemic in large parts of the world and is treated with increasing indulgence and 'understanding' in others (for some overviews and examples, see here & here & here & here & here). And efforts to deny or minimize the Nazi Holocaust are often explicitly linked to the agenda of eliminating Israel (as they were at this conference--see here & here).

Some reasons to be outraged and alarmed are explained in Anne Applebaum's piece below and a recent London Times editorial, "Criminal Denial: Iran’s posturing on the Holocaust is an affront to history and to humanity".

=> There is a small silver lining in this cloud. One of the ironies the situation is that Iranians, especially young and middle-class people, are on the whole less anti-semitic (and less obsessively hostile to Israel) than other populations in the Middle East. On Monday a protest against President Ahmadinejad at Tehran University actually included denunciations of this conference ("Iran Students Denounce Holocaust Denial"):
Dozens of Iranian students burnt pictures of President Ahmadinejad and chanted “Death to the dictator” as he gave a speech at a university in Tehran yesterday.

Never has the hardline leader faced such open hostility at a public event, which came as Iran opened a conference questioning whether Nazi Germany murdered six million Jews.

One student activist said that the protest was against the “shameful” Holocaust conference and the “fact that many activists have not been allowed to attend university”. The conference “has brought to our country Nazis and racists from around the world”, he added.
(For a further roundup, including some photos, see this post by Gene at Harry's Place.)

The Iranian students' protest was brave and, as Norman Geras noted, served to defend their country's honor. Of course, one shouldn't make too much of one student protest. Bur, frankly, it is hard for me to imagine something similar happening in any Arab country. If anything, oppositionists in those countries are more likely to try to outbid their governments in expressions of anti-semitism than to get angry about a government-sponsored anti-semitic event. (If there are exceptions I have overlooked, I'd be happy to hear about them.) This protest is one more indication of why, despite present appearances, in the long run Iran offers more grounds for optimism than almost any other society in the region. (The short run is another story.)

--Jeff Weintraub

[P.S. 12/18/2006: It appears that some of the Iranian students involved in the protest against Ahmadinejad have gone into hiding after threats from regime goons.]
====================
Slate
December 12, 2006
Holocaust Denial Is No Joke
The Iranian Holocaust conference is sordid and cynical, but we must take it seriously.
By Anne Applebaum

On Monday, the Iranian foreign ministry held an international conference. There's nothing unusual in that. Foreign ministries hold conferences, mostly dull ones, all the time. But this one was different. For one thing, the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust dealt with history, not current politics. Instead of the usual suspects—deputy ministers and the like—the invitees seem to have included David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader; Georges Thiel, a Frenchman who has called the Holocaust "an enormous lie"; and Fredrick Töben, a German-born Australian whose specialty is the denial of Nazi gas chambers. The guest list was selective: No one with any academic eminence, or indeed any scholarly credentials, was invited. One Palestinian scholar, Khaled Ksab Mahamid, was asked to come but was then barred because he holds an Israeli passport—and also perhaps because he, unlike other guests, believes that the Holocaust really did happen.

In response, the United States, Europe, and Israel expressed official outrage. The German government, to its credit, organized a counterconference. Still, many have kept their distance, refusing to be shocked or even especially interested. After all, the Holocaust ended more than six decades ago. Since then, the victims of the Holocaust have written hundreds of books, and the scholarship on the Holocaust has run into billions of words. There are films, photographs, documents, indeed whole archives dedicated to the history of the Nazi regime: We all know what happened. Surely Iran's denial cannot be serious.

Unfortunately, Iran is serious—or at least Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is deadly serious. Holocaust denial is his personal passion, not just a way of taunting Israel, and it's based in his personal interpretation of history. Earlier this year, in a distinctly eerie open letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, he lauded the great achievements of German culture and assaulted "the propaganda machinery after World War II that has been so colossal that [it] has caused some people to believe that they are the guilty party." Such views hearken back to the 1930s, when the then-Shah of Iran was an admirer of Hitler's notion of the "Aryan master race," to which Persians were meant to belong. Ahmadinejad himself counts as a mentor an early revolutionary who was heavily influenced by wartime Nazi propaganda. It shows.

Of course, Holocaust denial also has broader roots and many more adherents in the Middle East, which may be part of the point: Questioning the reality of the Holocaust has long been another means of questioning the legitimacy of the state of Israel, which was indeed created by the United Nations in response to the Holocaust, and which has indeed incorporated Holocaust history into its national identity. If the Shiite Iranians are looking for friends, particularly among Sunni Arabs, Holocaust denial isn't a bad way to find them.

And yet—this week's event has some new elements, too. This is, after all, an international conference, with foreign participants, formal themes ("How did the Zionists collaborate with Hitler?" for example), and a purpose that goes well beyond a mere denunciation of Israel. Because some former Nazi countries have postwar laws prohibiting Holocaust denial, Iran has declared this "an opportunity for thinkers who cannot express their views freely in Europe about the Holocaust." If the West is going to shelter Iranian dissidents, then Iran will shelter David Duke. If the West is going to pretend to support freedom of speech, then so will Iran. Heckled for the first time in many months by demonstrators at a rally yesterday, Ahmadinejad responded by calling the hecklers paid American agents: "Today, the worst type of dictatorship in the world is the American dictatorship, clothed in human rights." The American dictatorship, clothed in human rights spouting falsified history: It's the kind of argument you can hear quite often nowadays, in Iran as well as Russia and Venezuela, not to mention the United States.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that this particular brand of historical revisionism is no joke, and we shouldn't be tempted to treat it that way. Yes, we think we know this story already; we think we've institutionalized this memory; we think this particular European horror has been put to rest, and it is time to move on. I've sometimes thought that myself. There is so much other history to learn, after all. The 20th century was not lacking in tragedy.

And yet—the near-destruction of the European Jews in a very brief span of time by a sophisticated European nation using the best technology available was, it seems, an event that requires constant re-explanation, not least because it really did shape subsequent European and world history in untold ways. For that reason alone, the archives, the photographs, and the endless rebuttals will go on being necessary, long beyond the lifetime of the last survivor.

Anne Applebaum, a Washington Post and Slate columnist, is currently a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Her most recent book is Gulag: A History.