As the Turkish President signed a decree last week converting the ancient Hagia Sophia in Istanbul into a mosque, the UN cultural agency (UNESCO) said it "deeply regrets the decision" made "without prior discussion." It also called on Turkey to abide by its “legal commitments and obligations” in accordance with its status as a museum, on the World Heritage List. Credit: UN News/Jing Zhang

By Ian Williams
NEW YORK, Jul 14 2020 (IPS)

President Erdogan’s “reconversion” of the Hagia Sophia, into a mosque is a very Trumpian move, making a populist gesture to his base evoking shared misconceptions of history, reckless of its actual diplomatic and economic cost.

The late Roman mother church of Orthodoxy was turned into a mosque by the Ottomans when they took the city in 1453, and then converted to a museum by Kamel Ataturk, the secularist founder of Modern Turkey.

It is highly unlikely that there is any Muslim left alive who ever worshipped in the building, restored with taxpayer’s and tourist cash over most of a century.

The move by Erdogan-appointed courts also violates UNESCO conventions on World Heritage Sites, which include the whole area around Hagia Sophia, the Topkapi palace and associated mosques.

It is a godsend to Greek nationalists, since ironically its conflation of nationalism and religion puts it on a level with Greece, which, after a century is still stalling on building an official mosque in Athens.

He expediently evokes Al Aqsa, but provides a precedent for a similarly loaded Israeli court to “hand back” Al Aqsa to those who want to repossess the site of Herold’s temple.

As a combined blunder and illegality, it overturns a wise decision by Kamal Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish state. And, in fact, most of the region and indeed the world, has a habit of viewing the past through the “patriotic” prism of modern day nationalism with imaginatively reconstructed histories.

When Erdogan began, he showed signs of an ecumenical reaching out to Christians, Kurds and other minorities, but those days are long gone and he has been throwing away advantages, not least the real restrictions on the Orthodox Church to which the de-museification of Hagia Sophia is just a tweak.

If he were less tunnel-visioned, he could make Istanbul a pilgrimage center, a world capital that with its potential attraction to both Orthodox Christians and Muslims. would make Rome or Mecca look like one-ring Circus.

Following World War I, Kemal Ataturk’s republican government showed itself blind not only to the city’s aesthetic grandeur but also to its sacred history. As Erdogan and his party know, Ataturk and his colleagues were no particular friends of Islam and had no sentimental attachment to the Ottomans they had overthrown, who had been dangerously cosmopolitan, encompassing far too many ethnic identities to be truly “Turkish,” in the new ethnonationalist mode.

Even as a mosque, the Hagia Sophia had kept its Greek name, “Holy Wisdom.” Astute Islamic architects – far from demolishing it like Modi’s Hindu nationalists, added minarets and made it the very model of the Ottoman Mosque.

Mehmet the conqueror of Constantinople did not see himself as replacing its glories, but more inheriting them. For the Ottomans, he took the title Kayser i Rum, Caesar of Rome, and many of their Greek-speaking subjects became partners of the sultans in running the empire.

Modern nationalist mouth-frothing notwithstanding, the people of “Constantinople” regarded themselves as Romans, not Greeks and called their city Stam Polis – the city – from which the Turks made Istanbul!

After Ataturk demoted it from imperial capital to provincial town, whatever it was called, they city went into economic decline. Its Greek population, although exempt from the unethical population exchanges between Greece and Turkey shrank and most of those remaining were driven out in a politically inspired pogrom in the 1950s—not because they were Christians but because they were considered a fifth column for Greeks nationalists who still cherished the idea of retaking the city. Nevertheless, a small remnant survived. They still call themselves Romans, “Rumi.”

Chief among the remaining Romans is His All Holiness, Bartholomew, Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome, and Ecumenical Patriarch, who in the eyes of the world’s Orthodox is, if not infallible, first among equals and certainly merits a twenty-one mass salute or whatever the equivalent for patriarchs, along with the pope.

However, Ataturk’s secularist and nationalist successors regarded him as merely the head of the church in Turkey. They insist that the patriarch be a Turkish citizen, but for fifty years have kept closed the only seminary that trained priests in Turkey. Hidden in a corner in the Phanariot district, poor Bartholomew cannot assemble the pilgrims the way the pope can in Saint Peter’s Square.

This is unenlightened policy. and just plain bad for business. The great religions may have had their hearts in Mecca and Jerusalem, but their heads were in Istanbul and Rome. Istanbul combines both. It is the original ecumenical pilgrimage place, offering you patriarchate and caliphate in one, churches and mosques to die for, and relics galore.

Ataturk’s followers were equally ambivalent about the glories of the sultans’ Topkapi Palace where the sultans, doubling up as caliphs, amassed the Amanat—“the Sacred Trusts.” Still on display is a collection of the Prophet’s facial hairs, head hairs, and even the fragment of one of his teeth.

This is the sort of thing that the devout are willing to pay to see. Topkapi is a reminder of a time when Istanbul was to Islam what Rome is to Catholicism. Similarly, the patriarchate is testimony that the city still hosts the head of hundreds of millions of Orthodox.

There are allegedly sixty hairs of the Prophet’s beard in the collection, although only one was on display last time I looked. That number may seem excessive, if not so much as Voltaire’s suggestion of building a fleet with wood from the Cross and floating it on the Virgin’s milk, but ancient accounts report Muhammad giving away his beard and hair clippings in his latter days, which would surely have been cherished by his followers.

Indeed, in contrast, some of the more dubious relics in the Topkapi were inherited from the Christians, such as the skull fragment, arm, and hand of St. John the Baptist. The provenance of Moses’s staff, Joseph’s turban, and Abraham’s cooking pot, not to mention King David’s sword, all seem to lack the chain of evidence of the more directly Islamic relics such as the hairs and the Prophet’s “honored standard” that the caliphs used to rally the faithful in arms.

Some of these relics were brought to Istanbul from Mecca to protect them from the Wahabi upsurge, with its disdain for tombs, relics, and such quasi-idolatrous habits of Turkic Muslims. The relics are displayed as museum pieces, aids to study rather than agents of sanctity, and most of the foreign\ tourists arriving seem to be in search of secular history.

They spend as much if not more of their time gawking at the sundry bejeweled tchotchkes of the sultans as they do at the relics. They show the same lack of reverence as the echoing tour parties trotting at the double through the Hagia Sophia, which has been for decades in a dusty state of perpetual repair and renewal: more scaffolding than mosaics.

Küçük Ayasofya, the little Hagia Sophia, the former church of SS. Sergius and Bacchus. Its dome was a forerunner and template for the big one. It gives a better impression of the original church than its larger descendant.

Its marble walls survived, and around its interior frieze the original Greek inscription to the emperor Justinian and empress Theodora survives intact after fifteen hundred years. Its serenity and dignity is far more likely to evoke the city’s glory days than its quasi-fossilized successor further up the hill.

Istanbul is ready to step up to its destiny. But not enough people know about it. All it lacks is a strong marketing campaign with the appropriate state sponsorship to give the Vatican a run for the tourist purse. The vision is clear; all that is needed is the implementation.

This city could be the crossroads between Islam and the West. The history of the caliphate, the Islamic relics and the Ecumenical Patriarch, the churches and mosques, if given the chance, could begin to pull in the pious punters from across the globe.

It may seem odd for a secularist like myself to advocate it, but many people who could not sprint across the road to save their lives have waved their pom-poms for the economic benefits of staging the Olympics.

More seriously, though, it must surely be a good stereotype buster to remind people of the centuries of coexistence of Christianity and Islam in Istanbul during a period when the Inquisition burnt brightly in the West and the Orthodox emperors hosted mosques within the walls even before the “Fall of Constantinople.”

If the new administrators of the Hagia Sophia show similar reverence for history as those looking after the Küçük Ayasofya, the little Hagia Sophia, down the hill from the big one, the reckless decision could be ameliorated. Its dome was a forerunner and template for the big one. It gives a better impression of the original church than its larger descendant.

Its marble walls survived, and around its interior frieze the original Greek inscription to the emperor Justinian and empress Theodora survives intact after fifteen hundred years. Its serenity and dignity is far more likely to evoke the city’s glory days than its quasi-fossilized successor further up the hill.

But a gesture from Erdogan to the Rumi and patriarchal office and seminary would go even further to build bridges to the Orthodox world. Erdogan does not do sensitive but if he wants his missile supply assured, he could remember Putin’s espousal of Orthodoxy!

* Ian Williams is also a senior analyst who has written for newspapers and magazines around the world, including the Australian, The Independent, New York Observer, The Financial Times and The Guardian.

Excerpt:

Credit: UN

By Ian Williams
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 12 2019 (IPS)

An old adage passed on by veteran U.N. staff to younger recruits is, “Do nothing whenever possible. It’s safer.” For a junior officer that might indeed be career-enhancing. 

But—in the face of persistent hostility from the U.S. and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s friends around the world—for the secretary-general of the U.N., or even the commissioner general of UNRWA, it is a recipe for disaster.

And sometimes doing a little is even worse.

Antonio Guterres announced the appointment of Christian Saunders as deputy commissioner general of UNRWA but the U.N secretary-general failed to explain what had happened to Saunders’ predecessor,  Sandra Mitchell, let alone the chain of circumstances that led to her departure.

Saunders is experienced and well-respected, but making him deputy commissioner general while leaving Pierre Krähenbühl, the person primarily responsible for the scandal, as commissioner-general for UNRWA is like throwing a sardine into a school of sharks. It has, predictably, just whetted the appetites of UNWRA’s enemies—but has not provided sustenance for its friends.

The secretary-general is presumably aware that after Al Jazeera (and the Washington Report) began its investigation into the UNRWA Ethics Office’s report on Krähenbühl’s management (see Aug./Sept. 2019 Washington Report, p. 17), Krähenbühl in quick succession lost three senior staff members, including both his chef de cabinet and deputy commissioner.

Major donors, not least, Krähenbühl’s own Swiss government pulled their funding because of the Report, which called for his immediate dismissal.

All those countries have been loyal friends of the U.N. and of UNRWA, and their defunding shows clearly that the Ethics Office report made a compelling case to them. It is also clear that the governments concerned are trying to send signals to the U.N., whose response to the crisis has been a textbook case of complacent bureaucratic ineptitude.

After this writer’s report on UNWRA corruption came out in Al Jazeera, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki R. Haley wrote on Twitter, “This is Exactly [sic] why we stopped their funding.”

In fact, that was an outright lie. The Trump administration only did as Israel asked and pulled its contribution to UNRWA for malicious reasons having nothing to do with Commissioner General Krähenbüh’s love life or travel arrangements.

Credit: UN

Instead it was because UNRWA’s continuing existence is a persistent institutional reminder of U.S. complicity in Israel’s dispossession of some six million Palestinians. Admittedly, it was also because a particular subset of ambitious Republicans looks for large campaign donations from a coterie of very rich right-wing donors who consistently display their disdain for Palestinian rights by helping fund Jewish-only settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

There is no need for the secretary-general to take advice from countries whose oft-condemned actions created and perpetuated so many decades of misery for the Palestinians

However, knowing that both Washington and Tel Aviv entertain such sentiments makes the insouciance of both Secretary-General Guterres and Krähenbühl even more egregious.  The ethics report detailing the managerial failings and turpitude in UNRWA was delivered to the secretary-general’s office back in December 2018.

The UNRWA staff who had contributed to it fretted that no action was being taken after many of them had risked their livelihoods and pensions.

They were amazed that such a compelling dossier from the organization’s own Ethics Department would be ignored, and it was only after months had passed that some of them leaked it to me, in the hope that media inquiries about the report would prompt pre-emptive action by the U.N., and that the commissioner general would lance the boil before the pustulent Trump/Netanyahu axis began to fester on it.

Ambassadors and senior U.N. officials were approached to press the secretary-general’s office for the action necessary, but to no avail.

Faced with such a damning indictment from his own ethics office, Krähenbühl could have, and should have, resigned or stepped aside for the good of the organization.  The secretary-general could have suspended or fired him and announced a genuinely independent inquiry, enlisting donors and others concerned with the welfare of UNRWA and the Palestinians.

Predictably, the failures of the commissioner general and U.N. headquarters to take action—of any kind—has set off a feeding frenzy among the enemies of the Palestinians and UNRWA, who want to punish refugees for the ethical failings of bureaucrats foisted on them by an international community that oversaw their dispossession. 

An unannounced internal investigation by the U.N.’s own Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS)—whose reputation is far from stellar even inside the U.N.—is a politically disastrous course of action. It took repeated questioning before we even discovered the investigation was under way—at a time when the secretary-general’s office denied it had even seen the report.

It was conceivable that, without media publicity, the OIOS report could have been a bland procedural whitewash, as have been too many about recent scandals involving senior U.N. staff.

But the media exposure means that Krähenbühl has little or no support from his present and recent senior staff, and certainly not from the donors.  His rigor mortis-like grip on office is profoundly damaging to UNWRA, to the U.N., and to the more than five million Palestinians it serves.

In any case, confronted with such a manifest managerial failure, a traditional international civil servant should have accepted responsibility and resigned: by clinging to office Krähenbühl is giving succour to his agency’s enemies.

One could add that the scandal reflects an erosion of the concept of an ethical international service under a constant corrosive drip of short-term contracts and outsourcing urged by those experts who brought us the 2008 financial crisis.    

Even so, Secretary-General Guterres can still ameliorate the crisis—first, of course, by inviting Krähenbühl’s immediate departure, but then by a resounding public declaration of how essential UNRWA’s work is.

Persuading a senior diplomat or U.N. figure to take over from Krähenbühl is a bit like fitting someone for a crown of thorns, but there are people out there who care enough about the Palestinians and who are prepared to stand up to the barrage of bile from worldwide Friends of Likud.

Above all, there is no need for the secretary-general to take advice from countries whose oft-condemned actions created and perpetuated so many decades of misery for the Palestinians.

He would, however, do well to invite donors and other humanitarian organizations to examine the agency and recommend much needed managerial and structural reforms, without pandering to those whose solution to the refugee problem is to leave them homeless and hungry while declaring them no longer to be refugees.

The original story appeared in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. 

Excerpt:

Secretary-General Kofi Annan (centre) addresses a Security Council Meeting on Iraq. 07 June 2004. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Ian Williams
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 27 2018 (IPS)

Looking at the deserved outpouring of eulogies over Kofi Annan I could not help remembering the advice of the old Latin saying, “Say nothing about the dead unless it’s good.”

But one can’t help wishing that there had been more support of Kofi Annan when he was alive, not least when the Murdoch media Faux News fabricators persecuted him with the spurious Oil For Food scandal.

It was one of the greatest Fake News concoctions in history, almost up there with Iraqi WMDs, perhaps unsurprisingly since many of the sources for both were the same based on alleged UN corruption in the program that delivered food to Iraqi civilians in the face of US insistence on maintaining sanctions against the Iraqi regime.

They knew what they were doing: it was not just an individual they were slandering. Kofi Annan epitomized several facets of the role of a UN Secretary General, but none better than being an inspiring public face for the organization whose manifested dignity and integrity helped mitigate the sad reality of a body often hamstrung by the self-seeking sordid squabbles of its member states.

The attack was both an attempt to punish him for his temerity in saying that the Iraq war was illegal, and to challenge the prestige of the UN and the whole concept of international order.

The attack was both an attempt to punish him for his temerity in saying that the Iraq war was illegal, and to challenge the prestige of the UN and the whole concept of international order.

The onslaught was all the heavier because they sought to demolish the reputation of someone who was the archetypal nice guy, who would have made a good electoral candidate. He remembered families and people, greeted everyone of all ranks affably and kept his cool.

The only time I saw him lose his temper was when he reprimanded the juvenile behavior one of the Murdoch press corps who was baiting him about trivia associated with the Oil For Food scandal. Some of the correspondents were shocked that when this animal was attacked he fought back. Others welcomed the well-merited comeuppance.

His original election had come about against the background of the Balkan Wars and it must be remembered that it was the result of an American veto against the reappointment of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who suffered from a bipartisan alliance of Madeleine Albright and Republican Senator Jesse Helms, who were both incensed by the Secretary General’s refusal to bow to Washington.

Of course, that made Kofi Annan the American candidate, subject to some suspicion from other nations, and indeed his ideas of world governance and policy were not too far from the stated principles of the Clinton administration. However, as he was well aware, that just because an administration loudly declared lofty ideals did not necessarily mean it would implement them in practice, and was guaranteed to take umbrage if anyone pointed out the shortfall.

Boutros-Ghali was also the subject of posthumous eulogies from many who stayed silent when he was under attack, since he confronted the same quandary as Annan: how to cope with a US that wanted to treat the UN as, not just an instrument of foreign policy, but as a foil in domestic politics.

The White House wanted to make reassuring liberal noises about stopping atrocities to one wing of American politics, while promising the isolationist wing that it would trim spending on the UN and would not risk American lives to implement policies that the US supported.

At the time of Rwanda, that entailed a Presidential Directive from Clinton that was in essence more isolationist than anything most of the Republicans could dream up: that the US would veto any peacekeeping operation that did not directly benefit US foreign policy objective, which did not at the time seem to include the prevention of genocide, as untold thousands of Bosniaks and Rwandans discovered.

It was at first unsure whether Kofi Annan’s years of service in the UN were an asset or a disadvantage, but it became clear how useful they were, since he knew just how the organization worked and was all too aware of the competing pressures on UN staff, not least the political pressures.

And among those pressures was the major one: how to accommodate the US, which was essential for the effective functioning of the organization, while preventing the organization from becoming a mere instrument of US policies often opposed by most of the members.

He was no mob orator. He was not cut out for the bully pulpit or the soapbox. When he was first elected, his advisors pushed him into being coached for public speaking but gave up and people realized that his quiet authority was in some ways more effective than soaring rhetoric and inspired but content-free demagoguery. People had to strain to listen to him – and they did, because what he had to say was worth listening to.

His statements were carefully weighed  before delivery and designedly non-provocative. They aspired to higher things, but they were definitive and authoritative, and usually soundly based both in ethics and his own pragmatic sense of what was possible. He was an accomplished tightrope walker, even he was wobbling by the end, since while most of the member states recognized the competing imperatives, American administrations, of all complexions, have a notorious lack of empathy for other agendas beyond the re-election of the President.

People sometimes say that he was not outspoken enough, not loud enough, but that was actually a strength. When he spoke, it was not just a trite soundbite, he said what had to be said even it was sometimes unpopular.

When he came back from negotiating with Saddam Hussein and said it was a testament to the efficacy of diplomacy, not enough people listened to his corollary– when backed with the threat of force.

His other breakthrough was teamwork. He had risen through the UN ranks without acquiring the pompous self-importance of many promoted above their capabilities and assembled an articulate and confident team who could push out the envelope on events and say what needed to be said, without implicating him directly.

One of his landmark changes to UN culture was to open up a degree of transparency: Before only designated spokespeople were allowed to talk to the media but he mandated staff to respond to journalists’ enquiries as long as they did not purport to represent the organization’s views.

That posture of dignity allowed him to steer the landmark Responsibility to Protect resolution through the sixtieth anniversary summit and it is still a landmark even if many of those who did not have the political courage to oppose him and it at the Summit have done so much to frustrate it since. It allowed him to rally support for an ambitious world development agenda backed by a wide spectrum of disparate constituencies.

All idols have feet of clay, but for some the mud goes much higher than others. No one is perfect, high office demands compromises for practical achievements to win allies and majorities. But in office, on development goals, poverty, human rights, gender equality, Rwanda, Cyprus and many other issues, he advanced the UN agenda even as he rewrote it.

After leaving the UN he continued to do so, with the Elders and his own foundation. He was no mere bureaucrat, he was not after the big desk and the title, he wanted to contribute to the world and thought the SG’s office was the best place to do so.

His legacy  will survives for sometime, but one must wonder how he would have coped with the present President who, unlike Clinton, is unable to betray his principles, since he does not seem to have any.

But it is perhaps not too late for the present Secretary General to study and emulate Kofi’s tradition of quietly but prominently presenting himself on behalf of the organization, and the team work that made it possible.

Ian Williams is also a senior analyst who has written for newspapers and magazines around the world, including the Australian, The Independent, New York Observer, The Financial Times and The Guardian.

Excerpt:

By Ian Williams
NEW YORK, Apr 5 2018 (IPS)

President Trump’s nomination of John Bolton as his National Security Advisor highlights the deep irrationality of this White House’s global agenda. Apparently, the world has hitherto been spared Bolton’s robust sabotage only because the President has an eccentric visceral antipathy to his mustache, but so far could not find another, clean-shaven, candidate in the rapidly draining pool of applicants for White House jobs.

Ian Williams

Bolton and his ilk are indeed creatures of prejudice. They do not have a “joined-up” foreign policy, but rather a set of reflexes born out of ancient grudges. They have never forgiven the New Deal, nor the Truman “betrayal” of Chiang Kai Shek.

They probably sit upon the ground and tell sad tales of the dearth of nukes on North Korea during the war, and, as with far too many Leftists, they still see Putin’s Kremlin as a revenant of the ComIntern. And of course, they have never forgiven the Iranians for throwing out the Shah or storming the US Embassy.

Bolton supports the Taiwanese, not because of any abstruse feelings for democracy – the conservatives had no problem with Chiang Kai Shek’s corrupt tyranny- but because he sees Beijing as a major obstacle to Washington’s supremacy. If the Taiwanese, or indeed the South Koreans, were to become collateral damage to his vision, one feels that he could easily live with it.

Faced with this administration’s whimsical conduct of policy, it would be impossible to predict how long Bolton’s tenure would be, let alone its outcome. But nonetheless there are ominous signs that a Bolton-Trump partnership would be a match made in Hell. Bolton shares Trump’s hyper-nationalist prejudices – but he is much cleverer.

His bullying bureaucratic infighting techniques have often helped him bluster his way against his nominal superiors and colleagues in the State Department. He is, after all most memorably, the thug who strode into a library polling place in Florida in 2000 yelling, “I’m with the Bush-Cheney team, and I’m here to stop the count.”

Bolton’s advocacy of a “robust” approach to Iran and North Korea, and his cheerleading and facilitation for Israeli hawks is an ominous endorsement of the late Senator Jesse Helms’ accolade for him. ‘John Bolton is the kind of man with whom I would stand at Armageddon,’
neatly tying up the apocalyptic agendas of various strands of American conservatism.

Unfortunately, millions of others would fall with him if he realized his apocalyptic visions. Bolton has an often-unacknowledged track record of successes for his agenda. Armageddon is, of course, a long-term project.

For example, Bolton played a large role in pushing Colin Powell’s State Department into backing the war in Iraq, succeeded in “un-signing” the Convention on the International Criminal Court, rewriting the US relationship to International Law in the process. Once he got to the UN, he acted as Dick Cheney’s agent there, bypassing Condoleezza Rice’s slightly more reality-based agenda.

His other quick wins include setting the fuse for it by getting the Iran file shifted from the IAEA to the UN Security Council, which could impose sanctions. This involved a deal with India to vote for the IAEA referral of Iran to the UN Security Council. Iran has signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, India has not, but in return the US did not apply non-proliferation rules against Delhi!

Bolton could overcome his prejudices against the UN long enough to play diplomatic chess with foresight even if his plans were briefly checked by the JCPOA. Of course, Bolton is an advocate of a first strike on Iran – which is as close to a fuse for Armageddon as you could envisage, and in the appropriate region too!

No-one’s toady, Bolton ended up in a feud even with George W. Bush, who famously did not do nuance either. Whether Bolton will bond further with Trump is unsure, but he will surely play to all this president’s most ill-founded and dangerous prejudices.

In Bolton’s memoirs he denounced, “eastern elitists”, state department “careerists”, the “High Minded”, the “True Believers”, the “EAPeasers” (state department East Asia and Pacific staffers) and “EUroids,” not to mention the “Risen Bureaucrats” whom he accused of subverting Bush White House actions.

And that is in between Islamophobia that is almost clinically psychopathological. He has a better command of polemic than the tweet-constrained President, but messaging is similar!

Some of Bolton’s past patterns anticipate Trump’s now – gratuitous insults to countries that more rational foreign policy experts would like to keep on side. He was especially vitriolic about the British at the UN, when for years they have acted as a bridge between US arrogance and the rest of the world. If he wants a war with Iran, he has to get the UK and most of the EU on side.

The mutual influence of Bolton and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley would almost certainly exacerbate the baleful effect of both of them, not least since Haley, as a first for the GOP, got a cabinet position with the office. One can perhaps foresee a clash of ambitions down the line between the monstrous egos and ambitions of Haley and Bolton, but few if any differences of prejudice, let alone opinion. Haley’s ambitions are personal, while Bolton’s, to give him his back-handed due, are ideological. Insofar as he wants position, it is to effect his agenda, not to polish his ego, which is quite monstrously buffed enough already.

Past patterns suggest that Bolton will bite his mustache and refrain from direct contradiction of the President, who is one fool he could suffer gladly, probably confident that Trump’s manifest inattention to detail would allow Bolton to unfold his plans unchecked.

*Ian Williams, formerly UN correspondent for The Nation, is also the author of Rum: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776; The Deserter: Bush’s War on Military Families, Veterans and His Past; The Alms Trade; and The UN For Beginners.

Excerpt:

By Ian Williams
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 23 2015 (IPS)

Will Tokyo’s bid for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council be frustrated by its Foreign Ministry’s undiplomatic and uncalled for attack on U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon?

Japan’s attempt certainly will not be helped by the Japanese Foreign Ministry official who complained sniffily that the world body “should take a neutral position on events that focus mostly on the past” and expressed “strong displeasure” at Ban’s attendance in Beijing for the 70th Anniversary of the end of the Second World War.

The churlish rebuff, with overtones of anti-Korean sentiment came just as the issue of reforming the Security Council is having a periodic upsurge of interest in this 70th session of the United Nations. It is of course no accident that the 70th Anniversary of the U.N. coincides with the 70th Anniversary of the end of the War. It was World War Two that gave birth to and shaped the United Nations, which is why China is on the Security Council and Japan is not.

But the U.N. Charter is about controlling inter-state aggression of the kind that the defeated nations in the Second World War indisputably started. Japan invaded its neighbors, not the other way round, and in general its occupations were brutal, despite the rhetoric about co-prosperity.

The U.N. is not neutral, it was an organization founded to defeat the Axis powers, particularly Germany and Japan and that is explicit in the U.N. Charter still. Although Poland moved a pious resolution in the General Assembly after the reunification of Germany declaring that the “enemy states” clause in the U.N. Charter no longer applies, the clause is still in the Charter – and the unrepentant attitude from the Abe administration is calculated to remind the Chinese, and indeed the Russians that because of the war they have a veto on all reform proposals.

Certainly, Poland realized that the reunified Germany was not the same country as in 1939 and was expediently magnanimous in its declaration. One can hardly imagine either of the Koreas emulating that with Japan, which had to be pressured by the other members of the Council to vote in the end for the Korean Secretary General to make it unanimous.

There is no end of skeptical comments one can make about the seventieth anniversary of Axis defeats. Historically, maybe Ban should have gone to the Chiang Kai Shek memorial in Taiwan – or the Republic of China as Beijing prefers they call themselves! It was after all the ROC not the PRC that was the official combatant and final victor in the war and which was accordingly granted a seat on the Security Council.

But then it was the USSR and not Russia that won a permanent seat and did so much to defeat the Nazis that we, as much as Moscow, tend to overlook the Stalin Hitler pact just before. Each of the victors has skeletons in their cupboards, from the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn Wood to Dresden and Hiroshima.

After 70 years, it is indisputably time to reform the Security Council, but it is also indisputable that the permanent five have a veto on that process and that many other members have mutually contradictory plans for how to reform it. It is highly likely that the Japanese comments have given ammunition to those hostile to its bid for a permanent seat.

There are in fact very good reasons, for justice and efficiency, not to expand the number of permanent seats on the council. Many countries have braved the displeasure of big neighbors who are candidates to say so, and to demand that at best the contestants be eligible for re-election or to have a longer mandate. The likely result is a stalemate in the reform process and Tokyo’s intemperate response has made that outcome even more likely. Chinese hostility and potential veto make the other reform proposals.

Speaking before the Beijing parade, Ban’s office said he “believes that it is important to reflect on the past, look at the lessons we have learned and how we can move ahead to a brighter future based on these lessons.” Shinzo Abe should have drawn some lessons. He would have been better accompanying his former colleague Tomiichi Murayama to Beijing and reinforcing his historic apology for the war in 1995 in Beijing.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

A little overshadowed by the Olympics, the Yeosu 2012 Expo is, in its own way, doing more than the London Games to promote global harmony – and without stirring up the waters the way the British did when they posted the ROK flag for the DPRK women’s soccer team.

Next weekend, as the Expo holds another session celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the Law of the Sea, with an Asian perspective, it is worth remembering that there are people in the U.S. establishment every bit as pugnaciously ideological as any Pyongyang commissar – and above all on the question of the Law of the Sea (ITLOS).

It has been five years since the George W. Bush administration, not the most U.N.-friendly of recent presidencies, declared the need for the U.S. to ratify the treaty, backed by the Pentagon and the Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.That was already 25 years after the rest of the world had finished drafting the treaty.

Since then, the melting sea ice in the Arctic and the competing claims to seabed resources there under the former polar ice cap, have accentuated the U.S. need for the treaty. Not just the Navy, but telecoms, maritime and oil lobbies have put their weight behind ratification.

Recently an open letter signed by previous Republican secretaries of state also called for it.

On Jul. 16, however, 34 Republican senators signed a letter opposing ratification, which is one more than necessary to block the two-thirds majority necessary.

It is a moot point whether the opposition to the treaty from inside the U.S. is motivated by specific objections to its provisions or just a generalised conservative aversion to all forms of international law.

However, in any case it is a sad commentary on the U.S. government that a bigoted minority has thwarted U.S. participation in a convention universally welcomed by all rational U.S. political factions and which has already been signed by 162 other countries.

Former Canadian minister of state for external affairs Mark MacGuigan described the convention’s truly global scope at the conference which produced the final draft:

“The Conference is not merely an attempt to codify technical rules of law. It is a resource Conference: it is a food Conference; it is an environmental Conference; it is an energy Conference; it is an economic Conference; it is maritime-boundary delimitation Conference; it is a territorial-limitation and jurisdictional Conference; it is a transportation, communications and freedom-of-navigation Conference; it is a Conference which regulates all the uses of the ocean by humanity.

“Most important, it is a Conference which provides for the peaceful settlement of disputing the oceans. It is, in other words, a Conference dedicated to the rule of law among nations.”

Which is, perhaps, why some in the U.S. want nothing to do with it.

In fact, the treaty was carefully crafted over years of negotiations to provide inducements to countries to join the convention since it went beyond customary international law in what it offered signatories – and in an effort to woo the U.S. signature, Washington’s concerns were taken into account at every stage.

It was relatively easy to establish conventions on outer space, and indeed on the Antarctic, since there was little or no commercial or military activity going on there. Indeed, in 1957, before U.S. isolationism and exceptionalism resurfaced as potent political forces in Washington, the U.S. had signed the Antarctic Treaty, which froze all the old territorial claims and kept the icebound continent free from military action and land grabs. The treaty has stood the test of time.

But ITLOS had to take into account not only the millennia-long history of human endeavours on the oceans, but also the future aspirations, like sea bottom mining. It took decades of intricate negotiations to take into account the competing demands of countries that included not only the traditional maritime nations but those landlocked countries that understandably claimed rights to seabed resources that are, as it were, the shared patrimony of the whole world.

The very first case to go to the Hamburg-based International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea demonstrated the need for it. In 1997, the MV Saiga, an oil tanker registered in St Vincent and the Grenadines, owned by Cypriots, chartered by Swiss, managed by a Scottish company, officered by Ukrainians and crewed by Senegalese, had been bunkering fishing vessels off the coast of Guinea when patrol boats from there seized the ship and detained the crew.

Guinea claimed a customs zone that extended 250 miles from its coast. The tribunal ordered the release of the ship and crew on payment of a bond, and, after consideration, it threw out the Guinean claim and ordered the ship and its crew freed. Under the convention, Guinea was not entitled to claim more than 200 miles for its exclusive economic zone.

Conventional law could not have coped with such complex jurisdictional disputes, but ITLOS can. Only last year, the tribunal resolved its first boundary dispute between Myanmar and Bangladesh, to apparent mutual satisfaction – just as it could adjudicate on Russian claims to the seabed under the North Pole that compete with those of Canada and the U.S.

But Washington’s failure to ratify the treaty knocks it out of the process, hence the rush of interest by all but most blinkered. It is not only bad for the U.S., it sends a wrong signal to the rest of the world – not least to the countries surrounding the China Sea.

Half a dozen navies are circling round asserting competing claims to atolls and islets with their territorial waters. They are interested in the oil under the water, but their unresolved disputes are like gasoline waiting for a match. Clearly, an arbitrated legal adjudication could resolve the situation.

But the biggest navy in the area, with treaties with many of the claimant nations, belongs to a nation that has yet to sign up for the most appropriate body of law and institutions to cope with the complexity of the region.

One has to feel sympathetic to President Barack Obama, dealing with an opposition whose concerns about economic and military conflagrations come second to their desire to see him out the White House.

But ratification is not only good for the U.S. and for the world, it would allow the president, backed by all those Republican secretaries of state, presidents and chairmen of the Foreign Relations Committee, to expose the ideological obduracy of his opponents. President Obama should at least sign the treaty and challenge Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney to explain why his supporters oppose ratification.

We can assume that for some of them, it is simply a case of going along with raucous idiocy, and they might reconsider if the White House summoned some of those oil and defence lobbyists to make a call.

*Ian Williams is a senior analyst at Foreign Policy In Focus, and columnist, Tribune.

The Yeosu Expo 2012 exemplifies how the Republic of Korea (ROK) has made its debut on the world stage.

With one national, Ban Ki-moon, embarking on an uncontested second term as U.N. secretary general, Jim Kim Yong, a Korean American taking office in July as the new president of the World Bank, and a Korean President Judge Sang-Hyun Song of the International Criminal Court, the Expo shows the engagement of the Republic with the rest of the world.

The latter is especially significant: Seoul signed the Rome Treaty establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2000, when some sections of Washington were bitterly opposed, and Ban, then foreign minister, was forthright in his support for the court, even when running for the secretary general’s position with support from ICC-hating John Bolton as U.S. acting permanent representative.

The support for the ICC showed that Korea had emerged from the shadow of its neighbours. For years, its foreign policy outlook had been overshadowed by the U.S., China, Russia and North Korea – none of them friends of the ICC – and former occupier Japan.

Understandably, with such neighbours looming on all its horizons, South Korea found it difficult to rise above the event horizon to become an active member of the world community as befits its economic stature. It has certainly overcome that reticence now and its principled support for the ICC is emblematic.

In times past, Korea was known as the Hermit Kingdom. And in their different ways, both North and South lived up to their reputation. Both halves ignored the advice of the Washington consensus, each conducting a real time experiment in methods of development, neither of them in the early years factoring much democracy into the equations. In this real time experiment, Seoul won hands-down.

The fall of the dictatorship in the South accelerated its economic development, and demonstrated to cheerleaders for so-called free-market authoritarian regimes like Pinochet’s Chile that democracy and civil rights were entirely compatible with, indeed possibly inextricable from,increasing growth and prosperity.

The South now is one of the world’s most highly developed countries, according to the UNDP Human Development Index, where its ranking is 15th – above most European countries. Most other indicators of GDP and economic rankings put it in that ballpark as well.

Indeed, the ROK has not only joined the developed world on most financial market indices, for the last 20 years it has had universal health care – making it in some ways more advanced the world’s biggest economy.

Ironically, the World Bank and the MSCI index still count South Korea as an “emerging market”, one almost suspects in revenge for the temerity of Seoul’s government and industry in pursuing its own route to development, but also because along with the other Asian Tigers, like Taiwan, they form such a large part of of MSCI’s emerging market index that their official emergence to developed market status would leave it without customers.

Interestingly, MSCI’s objections to Korea’s “emerged” status invoke some of the very reasons that South Korea has developed on the scale that it has. That is state direction and protection of sectors such as aviation, telecommunication, utilities which have limits on foreign ownership and alleged manipulation of the currency.

Rather than confront the “Washington Consensus” directly, however, Seoul tends to use the security situation with the North as the excuse for behaviour that until a few decades ago was regarded as entirely desirable and normal for developing governments.

With bitter memories of the conditions the International Monetary Fund (IMF) imposed during what the rest of the world called the Asian Currency Crisis, but in Korea is known as the IMF crisis, it is understandable that South Korea does not give full faith and credit to advice from the institution. Indeed, since the crisis it has more than tripled its GDP – in spite of the IMF conditions.

There are indeed issues with the Chaebols, the interlinked business groups that dominate Korean finance and industry. They do not make for the market “transparency” so beloved by Wall Street and the IMF, but more pertinently their stranglehold on the economy can work against the interests of consumers and workers alike.

However, the South Korean government and society have the means and willingness to tackle such issues.

Additionally, those companies have become major players in the world economy, 14 of them in the world’s top 500 companies. Nor have they grown in isolation, with Samsung for example, having the majority of its business, its employees and even its shareholders overseas.

Which brings us back to the Yeosu Expo, which draws together all these strands, domestic and foreign. Ignoring the neoliberal calls for austerity across the world, Seoul has put billions of tax dollars not only into the Expo, but also into a “stimulus” package for a region that had not totally shared the prosperity of the growing economy: infrastructure investment in roads, rail, airports and associated development not only brings a short term stimulus but lays the foundations for future growth and investment in the area.

The Expo aims to “Raise the status of marine science, the new frontier for science,” and the theme “The Living Ocean and Coast” is in keeping with the traditions and history of the region.

Korea’s shipbuilding industry, the world’s biggest, has now been joined by the offshore plant industry in terms of revenue, while Korean ports are ranked fifth and its shipping industry 10th in the world.

But one would be naive to expect corporations to voluntarily sacrifice profits for ecological reasons, so another emphasis of the Expo is the need for national and international regulation and standard setting on pollution and energy efficiency, which harmonises with Korea’s attested support for global governance, whether from the U.N., the ICJ or the International Law of the Sea.

Add to that Seoul’s promotion from being a recipient of OECD aid to being a donor: in connection with Yeosu, it is stepping up its overseas development aid, targetting environmental projects above all.

The Expo does mean South Korea is joining the world with a symbolic splash.

*Ian Williams is a senior analyst at Foreign Policy In Focus, and columnist, Tribune.