A manuscript from Maqdala now at the British Library. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

By James Jeffrey
LONDON, Apr 23 2018 (IPS)

A new exhibition that opened April 5 at London’s famous Victoria and Albert museum of ancient treasures looted from Ethiopia has revived debate about where such artifacts should reside, highlighting the tensions in putting Western imperialism in Africa and the past to rest.

The exhibit comprises 20 royal and religious artifacts plundered during the Battle of Maqdala in 1868, when a British force laid siege to the mountain fortress of Ethiopian Emperor Tewodros.  “We have both a growing opportunity and growing responsibility to use the potential of digital to increase access for people across the world to the intellectual heritage that we safeguard.” -- Luisa Mengoni, head of Asian and African collections at the British Library

After their victory, the British force was at liberty to take what it wanted. The scale of the treasures stolen by the army isn’t widely known—inside the British Library are hundreds of beautiful Ethiopian manuscripts taken too.

While the argument for returning such artifacts appears strong, and perhaps obvious to most, legal issues surrounding a museum’s responsibility as a global custodian, as well as how best to make items available to the public, make the matter more nuanced than it seems.

“Museums have a global responsibility to better understand their collections, to more fully uncover the histories and the stories behind their objects, and to reveal the people and societies that shaped their journeys,” says Tristram Hunt, the Victoria and Albert museum’s director. “To this end, we want to better reflect on the history of these artifacts in our collection – tracing their origins and then confronting the difficult and complex issues which arise.”

The V&A website describes the museum’s collection of Ethiopian treasures as an “unsettling reminder of the imperial processes which enabled British museums to acquire the cultural assets of others.”

Hence efforts over the years by those like Richard Pankhurst, recognised as arguably the most prolific scholar in the field of Ethiopian studies, who helped found the Association for the Return of the Ethiopian Maqdala Treasures (AFROMET), and focused his efforts on the roughly 350 Maqdala manuscripts that ended up in the British Library.

“It is not widely known what happened,” said Pankhurst before his death in 2017. “The soldiers were able to pick the best of the best that Ethiopia had to offer. Most Ethiopians have never seen manuscripts of that quality.”

Tewodros had the country scoured for the finest manuscripts and collected in Maqdala for a grand church and library he planned to build.

“They are so lavish as they were made for kings,” says Ilana Tahan, lead curator of Hebrew and Christian Orient studies at the British Library, whose staff take their duties of guardianship as seriously as those trying to get the manuscripts returned to Ethiopia.

The front page of one of the Makdala manuscripts given to the British Library, on which is written: Pres. [Presented] by H. M. the Queen [Queen Victoria] 21 Jan. 1869. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

Tewodros had actually admired Britain, even hoping they would help develop his country. But a perceived snub when Queen Victoria didn’t reply to a letter of his, led to him imprisoning a small group of British diplomats, resulting in General Robert Napier mounting a rescue mission with a force of 32,000.

On Easter Monday, 13 April 1868, with the British victorious in the valleys surrounding his mountaintop redoubt Maqdala and about to launch a final assault, Tewodros bit down on a pistol—a previous present from Queen Victoria—and pulled the trigger.

In Ethiopia today, Tewodros remains revered by many for his unwavering belief in his country’s potential, while the looting of Maqdala continues to spur the efforts of AFROMET and others continuing the activism of Richard Pankhurst.

“Though Richard was unsuccessful with the British Library manuscripts, there was the return of a number of crosses, manuscripts from private collections,” says his son, Alula Pankhurst, himself a historian and author.

Alula Pankhurst notes that the family of General Napier recently returned a necklace and a parchment scroll to the Institute of Ethiopian Studies.

“My father would have argued that the items should be returned as they were wrongly looted,” Alula Pankhurst says. “There is now the technology available to make copies [of the manuscripts] that are indistinguishable from the originals and microfilms mean that copies could be retained.”

But such technology is also seen by those at the British Library as a reason why the manuscripts can remain where they are.

“We have both a growing opportunity and growing responsibility to use the potential of digital to increase access for people across the world to the intellectual heritage that we safeguard,” says Luisa Mengoni, head of Asian and African collections at the British Library.

One of the items in the V&A exhibit: a gold and gilded copper crown with glass beads, pigment and fabric, made in Ethiopia, 1600-1850. Photo courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

The British Library is continuing its efforts to make the manuscripts accessible to the public through new exhibits. And during the next two years the library plans to digitise some 250 manuscripts from the Ethiopian collection, with 25 manuscripts already available online in full for the first time through its Digitised Manuscripts website.

“The artwork suffers when it is digitalised, plus many of the manuscripts have detailed comments in the margins—there are many reasons scholars need to attend to the originals and which are not met by digital copies,” Andreas says.

But the return of the manuscripts is actually out of the library’s hands. New legislation would have to be passed by the British Parliament for the manuscripts, or any artefacts held in British museums, to be returned.

“While some restitutionists may grumble that the majority of items have not been returned, much has been done to spread knowledge of their existence – and great artistry – to Ethiopian scholars, and to the world at large,” says Alexander Herman, assistant director of the Institute of Art and Law,  an educational organisation focused on law relating to cultural heritage. “This has been made possible by the willingness of the British Library to invest in this once-overlooked part of its collection.”

The complex issue of repatriating looted objects has rumbled on in Europe and the United States for years without much resolution, though now there appears an increasing openness to engage with the issue, both on the part of major Western museums and governments.

President Emmanuel Macron of France said in November that the restoration of African artefacts was a “top priority” for his country, and at a speech in Burkina Faso said that “African heritage can’t just be in European private collections and museums.”

In the meantime, other options treading a middle ground are beginning to be talked about more openly. Hunt says he is “open to the idea” of a long-term loan of the objects to Ethiopia, a move Alula Pankhurst says “would be a step in the right direction.”

But that’s still not good enough for others.

“The restitution of Ethiopian property is a matter of respecting Ethiopia’s dignity and fundamental rights,” says Kidane Alemayehu, one of the founders of the Horn of Africa Peace and Development Center, and executive director of the Global Alliance for Justice: The Ethiopian Cause.

“Looting another country’s property and offering it on loan to the rightful owner should evoke the deepest shame on any self-respecting country.”

By Farhang Jahanpour
OXFORD, Sep 5 2015 (IPS)

Article Six of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) makes it obligatory for nuclear states to get rid of their nuclear weapons as part of a bargain that requires the non-nuclear states not to acquire nuclear weapons. Apart from the NPT provisions, there have been a number of other rulings that have reinforced those requirements.

However, while nuclear states have vigorously pursued a campaign of non-proliferation, they have violated many NPT and other international regulations.

Farhang Jahanpour

An advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice in 1996 stated: “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.” Nuclear powers have ignored that opinion.

The nuclear states, especially the United States and Russia, have further violated the Treaty by their efforts to upgrade and diversity their nuclear weapons. The United States has developed the “Reliable Replacement Warhead”, a new type of nuclear warhead to extend the viability of its nuclear arsenal.

The United States and possibly Russia are also developing tactical nuclear warheads with lower yields, which can be used on the battlefield without producing a great deal of radiation. Despite U.S. President Barack Obama’s pledge to reduce and ultimately abolish nuclear weapons, it has emerged that the United States is in the process of developing new categories of nuclear weapons, including B61-12 at a projected cost of 348 billion dollars over the next decade

India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea cannot be regarded as nuclear states. Since Article 9 of the NPT defines Nuclear Weapon States (NWS) as those that had manufactured and tested a nuclear device prior to 1 January 1967, it is not possible for India, Pakistan, Israel or North Korea to be regarded as nuclear weapon states.“All nuclear powers have continued to strengthen and modernise their nuclear arsenals. While they have been vigorous in punishing, on a selective basis, the countries that were suspected of developing nuclear weapons, they have not lived up to their side of the bargain to get rid of their nuclear weapons”

All those countries are in violation of the NPT, and providing them with nuclear assistance, such as the U.S. agreement with India to supply it with nuclear reactors and advanced nuclear technology, constitutes violations of the Treaty. The same applies to U.S. military cooperation with Israel and Pakistan.

Nuclear states are guilty of proliferation 

Paragraph 14 of the binding U.N. Security Council Resolution 687 that called for the disarmament of Iraq also specified the establishment of a zone free of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in the Middle East.

It was clearly understood by all the countries that joined the U.S.-led coalition to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait that after the elimination of Iraqi WMDs, Israel would be required to get rid of its nuclear arsenal. Israel – and by extension the countries that have not implemented that paragraph – have violated that binding resolution. Indeed, both the United States and Israel are believed to maintain nuclear weapons in the region.

During the apartheid era, Israel and South Africa collaborated in manufacturing nuclear weapons, with Israel leading the way. In 2010 it was reported that “the ‘top secret’ minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa’s Defence Minister P.W. Botha asked for nuclear warheads and the then Israeli Defence Minister Shimon Peres responded by offering them ‘in three sizes’.”

The documents were uncovered by an American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in research for a book on the close relationship between the two countries. Israeli officials tried hard to prevent the publication of those documents. In 1977, South Africa signed a pact with Israel that included the manufacturing of at least six nuclear bombs.

The 1995 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review and Extension Conference also called for “the early establishment by regional parties of a Middle East zone free of nuclear and all other WMDs and their delivery systems”. The international community has ignored these resolutions by not pressing Israel to give up its nuclear weapons. Indeed, any call for a nuclear free zone in the Middle East has been opposed by Israel and the United States.

The 2000 NPT Review Conference called on “India, Israel and Pakistan to accede to the Treaty as Non-Nuclear Weapons States (NNWS) promptly and without condition”. States Parties also agreed to “make determined efforts” to achieve universality. Since 2000, little effort has been made to encourage India, Pakistan or Israel to accede as NNWS.

The declaration agreed by the Iranian government and visiting European Union foreign ministers (from Britain, France and Germany) that reached an agreement on Iran’s accession to the Additional Protocol and suspension of its enrichment for more than two years also called for the elimination of weapons of mass destruction throughout the Middle East.

The three foreign ministers made the following commitment: “They will cooperate with Iran to promote security and stability in the region including the establishment of a zone free from weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East in accordance with the objectives of the United Nations.” Twelve years after signing that declaration, the three European countries and the international community have failed to bring about a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction.

While, during the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) refused to rule out first use of nuclear weapons due to the proximity of Soviet forces to European capitals, this policy has not been revised since the end of the Cold War. There have been repeated credible reports that the Pentagon has been considering the use of nuclear bunker-buster weapons to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites.

For the past 2,000 years and more, mankind has tried to define the requirements of a just war. During the past few decades, some of these principles have been enshrined in legally-binding international agreements and conventions. They include the Covenant of the League of Nations after the First World War, the 1928 Pact of Paris, and the Charter of the United Nations.

A few ideas are common to all these definitions, namely that any military action should be based on self-defence, be in compliance with international law, be proportionate, be a matter of last resort, and not target civilians and non-combatants.

Other ideas flow from these: the emphasis on arbitration and the renunciation of first resort to force in the settlement of disputes, and the principle of collective self- defence. It is difficult to see how the use of nuclear weapons could be compatible with any of these requirements. Yet, despite many international calls for nuclear disarmament, nuclear states have refused to abide by the NPT regulations and get rid of their nuclear weapons.

In his first major foreign policy speech in Prague on 5 April 2009, President Barack Obama spoke about his vision of getting rid of nuclear weapons. He said: “The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War… Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up.”

He went on to say: “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons…”

Sadly, those noble sentiments have not been put into action. On the contrary, all nuclear powers have continued to strengthen and modernise their nuclear arsenals. While they have been vigorous in punishing, on a selective basis, the countries that were suspected of developing nuclear weapons, they have not lived up to their side of the bargain to get rid of their nuclear weapons. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

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:

Cloud from an atmospheric nuclear test conducted by the United States at Enewetak Atoll, Marshall Islands, in November 1952. Photo credit: US Government

By Ramesh Jaura
HIROSHIMA, Aug 28 2015 (IPS)

A three-day landmark U.N. Conference on Disarmament Issues has ended here – one day ahead of the International Day Against Nuclear Tests – stressing the need for ushering in a world free of nuclear weapons, but without a consensus on how to move towards that goal.

The Aug. 26-28 conference, organised by the Bangkok-based United Nations Regional Centre for Peace and Disarmament in Asia and the Pacific (UNRCPD) in cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) of Japan and the city and Prefecture of Hiroshima, was attended by more than 80 government officials and experts, also from beyond the region.

It was the twenty-fifth annual meeting of its kind held in Japan, which acquired a particular importance against the backdrop of the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the founding of the United Nations.“In order to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons, it is extremely important for political leaders, young people and others worldwide to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki and see for themselves the reality of atomic bombings. Through this, I am convinced that we will be able to share our aspirations for a world free of nuclear weapons” – Fumio Kishida, Japanese Foreign Minister

Summing up the deliberations, UNRCPD Director Yuriy Kryvonos said the discussions on “the opportunities and challenges in nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation” had been “candid and dynamic”.

The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) Review Conference from Apr. 27 to May 22 at the U.N. headquarters drew the focus in presentations and panel discussions.

Ambassador Taous Feroukhi of Algeria, who presided over the NPT Review Conference, explained at length why the gathering had failed to agree on a universally acceptable draft final text, despite a far-reaching consensus on a wide range of crucial issues: refusal of the United States, Britain and Canada to accept the proposal for convening a conference by Mar. 1, 2016, for a Middle East Zone Free of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs).

Addressing the issue, Japan’s Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida joined several government officials and experts in expressing his regrets that the draft final document was not adopted due to the issue of WMDs.

Kishida noted that the failure to establish a new Action Plan at the Review Conference had led to a debate over the viability of the NPT. “However,” he added, “I would like to make one thing crystal clear. The NPT regime has played an extremely important role for peace and stability in the international community; a role that remains unchanged even today.”

The Hiroshima conference not only discussed divergent views on measures to preserve the effective implementation of the NPT, but also the role of the yet-to-be finalised Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in achieving the goal of elimination of nuclear weapons, humanitarian consequences of the use of atomic weapons, and the significance of nuclear weapon free zones (NWFZs) for strengthening the non-proliferation regime and nuclear disarmament.

Speakers attached particular attention to the increasing role of local municipalities, civil society and nuclear disarmament education, including testimonies from ‘hibakusha’ (survivors of atomic bombings mostly in their 80s and above) in consolidating common understanding of the threat posed by nuclear weapons for people from all countries around the world regardless whether or not their governments possess nuclear weapons.

UNRCPD Director Kryvonos said the Hiroshima conference had given “a good start for searching new fresh ideas on how we should move towards our goal – protecting our planet from a risk of using nuclear weapons.”

Hiroshima Prefecture Governor Hidehiko Yuzaki, the city’s Mayor Karzumi Matsui – son of a ‘hibakusha’ father and president of the Mayors for Peace organisation comprising 6,779 cities in 161 countries and regions – as well as his counterpart from Nagasaki, Tomihisa Taue, pleaded for strengthening a concerted campaign for a nuclear free world. Taue is also the president of the National Council of Japan’s Nuclear-Free Local Authorities.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki city leaders welcomed suggestions for a nuclear disarmament summit next year in Hiroshima, which they said would lend added thrust to awareness raising for a world free of nuclear weapons.

Though foreign ministry officials refused to identify themselves publicly with the proposal, Japan’s Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida, who hails from Hiroshima, emphasised the need for nuclear-weapon and non-nuclear weapon states to “work together in steadily advancing practical and concrete measures in order to make real progress in nuclear disarmament.”

Kishida said that Japan will submit a “new draft resolution on the total elimination of nuclear weapons” to the forthcoming meeting of the U.N. General Assembly. Such a resolution, he said, was “appropriate to the 70th year since the atomic bombings and could serve as guidelines for the international community for the next five years, on the basis of the Review Conference”.

The next NPT Review Conference is expected to be held in 2020.

Mayors for Peace has launched a 2020 Vision Campaign as the main vehicle for advancing their agenda – a nuclear-weapon-free world by the year 2020.

The campaign was initiated on a provisional basis by the Executive Cities of Mayors for Peace at their meeting in Manchester, Britain, in October 2003. It was launched under the name ‘Emergency Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons’ in November of that year at the 2nd Citizens Assembly for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons held in Nagasaki, Japan.

In August 2005, the World Conference endorsed continuation of the campaign under the title of the ‘2020 Vision Campaign’.

Foreign Minister Kishida expressed the views of the inhabitants of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when he pointed out in a message to the UNRCPD conference: “… the reality of atomic bombings is far from being sufficiently understood worldwide.”

He added: “In order to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons, it is extremely important for political leaders, young people and others worldwide to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki and see for themselves the reality of atomic bombings. Through this, I am convinced that we will be able to share our aspirations for a world free of nuclear weapons.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

Moroccan security forces charge against a group of Sahrawi women in Laayoune, occupied Western Sahara. Credit: Courtesy of Equipe Media

By Karlos Zurutuza
LAAYOUNE, Occupied Western Sahara, Aug 23 2015 (IPS)

Ahmed Ettanji is looking for a flat in downtown Laayoune, a city 1,100 km south of Rabat. He only wants it for one day but it must have a rooftop terrace overlooking the square that will host the next pro-Sahrawi demonstration.

“Rooftop terraces are essential for us as they are the only places from which we can get a graphic testimony of the brutality we suffer from the Moroccan police,” Ettanji told IPS. This 26-year-old is one the leaders of the Equipe Media, a group of Sahrawi volunteers struggling to break the media blackout enforced by Rabat over the territory.

Ahmed Ettanji and a fellow Equipe Media activist edit video taken at a pro-independence demonstration in Laayoune, occupied Western Sahara. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

“There are no news agencies based here and foreign journalists are denied access, and even deported if caught inside,” stressed Ettanji.

Spanish journalist Luís de Vega is one of several foreign journalists who can confirm the activist´s claim – he was expelled in 2010 after spending eight years based in Rabat and declared persona non grata by the Moroccan authorities.

“The Western Sahara issue is among the most sensitive issues for journalists in Morocco. Those of us who dare to tackle it inevitably face the consequences,” de Vega told IPS over the phone, adding that he was “fully convinced” that his was an exemplary punishment because he was the foreign correspondent who had spent more time in Morocco.

“The Western Sahara issue is among the most sensitive issues for journalists in Morocco. Those of us who dare to tackle it inevitably face the consequences” – Spanish journalist Luís de Vega
This year will mark four decades since this territory the size of Britain was annexed by Morocco after Spain pulled out from its last colony of Western Sahara.

Since the ceasefire signed in 1991 between Morocco and the Polisario Front – the authority that the United Nations recognises as a legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people – Rabat has controlled almost the whole territory, including the entire Atlantic coast. The United Nations still labels Western Sahara as a “territory under an unfinished process of decolonisation”.

Mohamed Mayara, also a member of Equipe Media, is helping Ettanji to find the rooftop terrace. Like most his colleagues, he acknowledges having been arrested and tortured several times. The constant harassment, however, has not prevented him from working enthusiastically, although he admits that there are other limitations than those dealing with any underground activity:

“We set up the first group in 2009 but a majority of us are working on pure instinct. We have no training in media so we are learning journalism on the spot,” said Mayara, a Sahrawi born in the year of the invasion who writes reports and press releases in English and French. His father disappeared in the hands of the Moroccan army two months after he was born, and he says he has known nothing about him ever since.

Sustained crackdown

Today the majority of the Sahrawis live in the refugee camps in Tindouf, in Western Algeria. The members of Equipe Media say they have a “fluid communication” with the Polisario authorities based there. Other than sharing all the material they gather, they also work side by side with Hayat Khatari, the only reporter currently working openly for SADR TV. SADR stands for ‘Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic’.

Hayat Khatari, the only reporter currently working openly for SADR TV in Laayoune. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

Khatari, a 24-year-old journalist, recalls that she started working in 2010, after the Gdeim Izzik protest camp incidents in Laayoune. Originally a peaceful protest camp, Gdeim Izzik resulted in riots that spread to other Sahrawi cities when it was forcefully dismantled after 28 days on Nov. 8.

Western analysts such as Noam Chomsky have argued that the so-called “Arab Spring” did not start in Tunisia as is commonly argued, but rather in Laayoune.

“We have to work really hard and risk a lot to be able to counterbalance the propaganda spread by Rabat about everything happening here,” Khatari told IPS. The young activist added that she was last arrested in December 2014 for covering a pro-independence demonstration in June 2014. Unlike Mahmood al Lhaissan, her predecessor in SADR TV, Khatari was released after a few days in prison.

In a report released in March, Reporters Without Borders records al Lhaissan´s case. The activist was released provisionally on Feb. 25, eight months after his arrest in Laayoune, but he is still facing trial on charges of participating in an “armed gathering,” obstructing a public thoroughfare, attacking officials while they were on duty, and damaging public property.

In the same report, Reporters Without Borders also denounces the deportation in February of French journalists Jean-Louis Perez and Pierre Chautard, who were reporting for France 3 on the economic and social situation in Morocco.

Before seizing their video recordings and putting them on a flight to Paris, the authorities arrested them at the headquarters of Moroccan Association of Human Rights (AMDH), one of the country’s leading human rights NGOs, which the interior ministry has accused of “undermining the actions of the security forces”.

Likewise, other major organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have repeatedly denounced human rights abuses suffered by the Sahrawi people at the hands of Morocco over the last decades.

Despite several phone calls and e-mails, the Moroccan authorities did not respond to IPS’s requests for comments on these and other human rights violations allegedly committed in Western Sahara.

Back in downtown Laayoune, Equipe Media activists seemed to have found what they were looking for. The owner of the central apartment is a Sahrawi family. It could have not been otherwise.

“We would never ask a Moroccan such a thing,” said Ettanji from the rooftop terrace overlooking the spot where the upcoming protest would take place.

Edited by Phil Harris   

In response to the rapidly growing numbers of refugees and asylum seekers flooding European shores, France and the UK have announced new measures to crack down on English Channel crossings.

The deal consists of a new joint command and control centre in the northern French port city of Calais that aims to “relentlessly pursue and disrupt the callous criminal gangs that facilitate and profit from the smuggling of vulnerable people, often with total disregard for their lives,” Britain’s Home Secretary Theresa May stated during a press conference Thursday.

Calais has become the focal point of a growing migration crisis, largely fueled by wars, hunger and political repression driving hundreds of thousands of desperate civilians out of countries like Syria, Libya, Sudan and other states across the Middle East and Africa.

An estimated 3,000 refugees live in makeshift tents in French port city.

The agreement also includes tough security measures such as increased police numbers, fencing, and CCTV to secure the Channel’s tunnel. The UK government has also pledged to establish a fast-track asylum process and to fund return flights for migrants. Britain plans to contribute 11.2 million dollars to the effort.

“Our joint approach rests on securing the border, identifying and safeguarding the vulnerable, preserving access to asylum for those who need it and giving no quarter to those who have no right to be here or who break the law,” said May and French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve in the 6-page agreement.

However, Calais is only one of many regions seeing increased migration.

The European Union’s border agency Frontex declared on Aug. 18 that in the month of July alone, some 107,500 migrants crossed into Europe, more than triple the figure in July 2014, representing the first time since the agency began keeping records in 2008 that new arrivals surpassed the 100,000 mark in a single month.

What will the new agreement mean for Eritreans?

Many of the migrants that make the perilous crossing into Europe are from Eritrea. Each month, approximately 5,000 Eritreans leave the small country of six million people in the Horn of Africa, reported a U.N. commission of inquiry on June 2015.

In a migration pattern report, Frontex found that Eritrean refugees were the second largest group in 2014 to have migrated to Europe, after Syrians.

Eritreans flee to escape gross human rights violations committed by the Eritrean government.

In the 2015 inquiry report, the U.N. commission found cases of extrajudicial killing, arbitrary arrest and detention, forced labour, enforced disappearance, as well as restrictions on speech, religious expression, and movement.

The commission also detailed the Eritrean government’s policy of military conscription, which forces men and women into national service indefinitely. This has prompted thousands of young Eritreans to flee the country.

Though the U.N. commission recognised that military conscription of citizens is a “prerogative of sovereign States,” it stated that it still involves the unlawful denial of freedoms and rights.

The commission concluded that the Eritrean government’s human rights restrictions could constitute crimes against humanity.

As a result, Eritreans migrate to Europe via neighboring countries of Sudan and Egypt. The U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Eritrea, Sheila Keetharuth, expressed concern over the human rights abuses in Eritrea to the General Assembly in 2013, stating, “The fact that they have crossed borders is indicative of the scale of despair these children are facing at home.”

The journey is not without its risks. Human Rights Watch has reported the brutal trafficking and torture of Eritreans for ransom money. Refugees also face the threat of treacherous boat accidents such as the 2013 Lampedusa shipwreck that killed over 350 Eritreans.

But many are willing to face such dangers. While speaking to the Guardian, an Eritrean refugee discussed the decision to migrate to Europe, stating: “I have two choices – one is to die, the other is to live. If I die at sea, it won’t be a problem – at least I won’t be tortured.”

Such sentiments are heard often among refugees and asylum seekers who are increasingly risking hazardous journeys on makeshift vessels to escape brutal, degrading or even deadly conditions in their home countries.

In response to the situation in Calais, Amnesty International UK’s Refugee Programme Director Steve Symonds said that May must drop “tough” rhetoric on refugees and discuss “how the UK can save lives and protect the vulnerable.”

According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, over 3,000 asylum seekers entering the UK in the first three months of 2015 were Eritrean, constituting the majority of applicants.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

By Daya Thussu
LONDON, Jul 1 2015 (IPS)

As the leaders of the BRICS five meet in the Russian city of Ufa for their annual summit Jul. 8–10, their agenda is likely to be dominated by economic and security concerns, triggered by the continuing economic crisis in the European Union and the security situation in the Middle East.

The seventh annual summit of the large emerging economies – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – also takes place with a background of escalating tensions between Russia and the West over Ukraine and the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), as well as the growing economic power of Asia, in particular, China.

Daya Thussu

Nearly a decade and a half has passed since the BRIC acronym was coined in 2001 by Jim O’Neill, a Goldman Sachs executive, now a minister in David Cameron’s U.K. government, to refer to the four fast-growing emerging markets. South Africa was added in 2011, on China’s request, to expand BRIC to BRICS.

Although in operation as a formal group since 2006, and holding annual summits since 2009, the BRICS countries have escaped much comment in international media, partly because of the different political systems and socio-cultural norms, as well as stages of development, within this group of large and diverse nations.

The emergence of such groupings coincides with the relative economic decline of the West.

This has created the opportunity for emerging powers, such as China and India, to participate in global governance structures hitherto dominated by the United States and its Western allies.

That the centre of economic gravity is shifting away from the West is acknowledged in the view of the U.S. Administration of Barack Obama that the ‘pivot’ of U.S. foreign policy is moving to Asia.“The major countries of the global South have shown impressive economic growth in recent decades … [it is predicted that] by 2020 the combined economic output of China, India and Brazil will surpass the aggregated production of the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Italy”

And there is evidence of this shift. In the Fortune 500 ranking, the number of transnational corporations based in Brazil, Russia, India and China has grown from 27 in 2005 to more than 100 in 2015. China’s Huawei, a telecommunications equipment firm, is the world’s largest holder of international patents; Brazil’s Petrobras is the fourth largest oil company in the world, while the Tata group became the first Indian conglomerate to reach 100 billion dollars in revenues.

Since 2006, China has been the largest holder of foreign currency reserves, estimated in 2015 to be more than 3.8 trillion dollars. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), China’s gross domestic product (GDP) surpassed that of the United States in 2014, making it the world’s largest economy in purchasing-power parity terms.

More broadly, the major countries of the global South have shown impressive economic growth in recent decades, prompting the United Nations Development Programme to proclaim The Rise of the South (the title of its 2013 Human Development Report), which predicts that by 2020 the combined economic output of China, India and Brazil will surpass the aggregated production of the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Italy.

Though the individual relationships between BRICS countries and the United States differ markedly (Russia and China being generally anti-Washington while Brazil and South Africa relatively close to the United States and India moving from its traditional non-aligned position to a ‘multi-aligned’ one), the group was conceived as an alternative to American power and is the only major group of nations not to include the United States or any other G-7 nation.

Nevertheless, none of the five member nations are eager for confrontation with the United States – with the possible exception of Russia – the country with which they have their most important relationship. Indeed, China is one of the largest investors in the United States, while India, Brazil and South Africa demonstrate democratic affinities with the West: India’s IT industry is particularly dependent on its close ties with the United States and Europe.

Although the idea of BRIC was initiated in Russia, it is China that has emerged as the driving force behind this grouping. British author Martin Jacques has noted in his international bestseller When China Rules the World, that China operates “both within and outside the existing international system while at the same time, in effect, sponsoring a new China-centric international system which will exist alongside the present system and probably slowly begin to usurp it.”

One manifestation of this change is the establishment of a BRICS bank (the ‘New Development Bank’) to fund developmental projects, potentially to rival the Western-dominated Bretton Woods institutions, such as the World Bank and the IMF. Headquartered in Shanghai, China has made the largest contribution to setting it up and is likely that the bank will further enhance China’s domination of the BRICS group.

Beyond BRICS, Beijing has also established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which already has 57 members, including Australia, Germany and Britain, and in which China will hold over 25 percent of voting rights. Two other BRICS nations – India and Russia – are the AIIB’s second and third largest shareholders.

Such changes have an impact on the media scene as well. As part of China’s ‘going out’ strategy, billions of dollars have been earmarked for external communication, including the expansion of Chinese broadcasting networks such as CCTV News and Xinhua’s English-language TV, CNC World.

Russia has also raised its international profile by entering the English-language news world in 2005 with the launch of the Russia Today (now called RT) network, which, apart from English, also broadcasts 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in Spanish and Arabic.

However, as a new book Mapping BRICS Media – which I co-edited with Kaarle Nordenstreng of the University of Tampere, Finland – shows, there is very little intra-BRICS media exchange and most of the BRICS nations continue to receive international news largely from Anglo-American media.

The growing economic cooperation between Moscow and Beijing – most notably in the 2014 multi-billion dollar gas deal – indicates a new Sino-Russian economic equation outside Western control.

Two key U.S.-led trade agreements being negotiated – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), and both excluding the BRICS nations – are partly a reaction to the perceived competition from nations such as China.

For its part, China appears to have used the BRICS grouping to allay fears that it is rising ‘with the rest’ and therefore less threatening to Western hegemony.

The BRICS summit takes place jointly with Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Heads of State Council meeting. The only other time that BRICS and the SCO combined their summits was also in Russia – in Ekaterinburg in 2009.

Apart from two BRICS members, China and Russia, the SCO includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. SCO has not expanded its membership since it was set up in 2001. India has an ‘observer’ status within SCO, though there is talk that it might be granted full membership at the Ufa summit.

Were that to happen, the ‘pivot’ would have moved a few notches further towards Asia.

Edited by Phil Harris    

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:

By Hazel Henderson
ST. AUGUSTINE, Florida, Jun 20 2015 (IPS)

Challenges to advertisers and marketers arose in the past century. Critics deplored the role of cigarette marketers who exploited the aspirations of women by associating smoking with liberation. 

Such manipulations were explored by Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders (1957), along with Marshal McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message (1967) and Stuart Ewen’s Captains of Consciousness (1974).  The use of subliminal advertising (rapid flashing of product images faster than human cognition) was challenged and the public discussion led to its disuse.

Hazel Henderson

By the 1980s, Ian Mitroff and Warren Bennis described the “deliberate manufacturing of falsehood” in The Unreality Industry (1989), followed by William Schrader’s Media Blight and the Dehumanizing of America (1992), Naomi Klein’s No Logo (1999) and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (2005).

Fast forward to today’s ethical challenges.

Political advertising of candidates was likened to selling toothpaste as it emerged in the 1970s and summarized by Charles Lewis in The Buying of the President (1996) and James Fallows in Breaking the News (1996). Today, the gutting of restrictions on money in U.S. elections has led to the well-financed blizzard of attack ads that lead millions of voters to turn off their TV sets in disgust. Media corporations and their TV channels have come to rely on such financial bonanzas during elections.

What this confirms is that advertising influences media owners and the content of programmes and often distorts news coverage, leading to subtle commercial censorship rarely recognised as a threat to free speech in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.

Civic groups’ limited funding precludes challenging false and misleading advertising and the “greenwashing” of many companies’ poor environmental records. “Civic groups’ limited funding precludes challenging false and misleading advertising and the “greenwashing” of many companies’ poor environmental records”

I summarised these issues a few years ago in an interview in Forbes magazine on why I founded the EthicMark Awards for “advertising that uplifts the human spirit and society”.

These Awards recognise that advertising, a global 500 billion dollars a year  industry, can be a powerful force for good beyond consumerism, in educating, inspiring and showcasing the best innovations for growing more inclusive, greener, knowledge-rich and sustainable societies.

The newest challenge to advertisers comes from Silicon Valley with the many apps that allow users to skip and block ads, including AdBlockPlus (downloaded 400 million times), as well as add-ons to Chrome and Firefox browsers.  Ad block users have grown to 200 million a month, according to PageFair and The Economist.

Advertisers could redeem their reputations and business models via Truth in Advertising Assurance Set Aside (TIAASA) which would disallow their tax exempt funds on false advertising and then award these funds to civic challengers to hire ad agencies to prepare counter-advertising campaigns.

All this highlights the growing vulnerability of media business models in the United States, other industrial societies and worldwide.

Many new media business models which no longer rely on advertising are debated in The Death and Life of American Journalism (2010) by Robert McChesney and John Nichols who compare media access policies in many countries which subsidise investigative journalism, such as Britain’s BBC.

In the United States, foundations support news organisations such as the National Geographic, the Center for Public Integrity and ProPublica, and media outlets such as the Columbia Journalism Review. The American Prospect and The Nation are largely funded by subscribers as well as PBS and NPR in broadcasting, along with many internet-based media such as The Real News Network.

Google banned ad-blocking apps in 2013, yet alternative web-browsers such as UC Browser already claims 500 million users, mostly in China and India, and Eyeo launched its ad-blocking browser available for mobile devices running Google’s Android.  These battles will rage on until legal systems – always lagging behind technology – catch up.

Two reports from the Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society Program led by Charles Firestone – “Navigating Continual Disruption” and “The Atomic Age of Data” – discuss the digitisation of ever more sectors of industrial societies and the internet of things (IOT).

In the United States, the monopolising of internet access by Comcast, AT&T and Verizon has restricted broadband access to millions in less affluent, rural communities and prevented small towns from competing with public broadband systems, as reported by the Center for Public Integrity and Susan Crawford in Captive Audience (2013).

The good news follows the analysis and proposals of Kunda Dixit in DatelineEarth: Journalism as if the Planet Mattered (IPS, 1997) and includes Dan Gillmore’s We the Media (2004) on grassroots journalism; David Bollier’s In Search of the Public Interest in the New Media (2002); Democratizing Global Media (2005); Making the Net Work: Sustainable Development in a Digital Society (2003) from Britain’s Forum for the Future; and Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns the Future? (2013). (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

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:

Migrants send a message – “We are humans, not animals”. Credit: Amnesty International France

By A. D. McKenzie
PARIS, Jun 13 2015 (IPS)

Human rights groups are calling for a sustainable solution to the migrant crisis in Europe, especially following the dismantling of refugee camps in Paris and Calais, France, over the past two weeks.

In one of the latest incidents, tense confrontations occurred in the French capital when security forces evicted migrants from a park last Thursday, with activists later blocking the police from entering a former barracks where the migrants were temporarily sheltered.“The state has a duty to ensure durable accommodation solutions for all those who seek asylum” – Marco Perolini, Amnesty International

Amnesty International, present as observer during the operation, said that the state needs to do more to find housing solutions for migrants who have been sleeping on the street and in public parks.

“The state can evict people for various reasons, but migrants also have rights,” Stephan Oberreit, director general of Amnesty International France, told IPS.

“If the state informed people, explained the regulations and offered decent shelters, then that would be fine,” he added. “But this is not the case. They are not providing enough shelters for migrants and asylum seekers.”

Some of the migrants in the park – at the Bois Dormoy in the city’s 18th district – had already been evicted from a makeshift camp set up under a metro overpass, where conditions had become increasingly unsanitary.

Others came from a second cleared camp in northern Paris where about 350 migrants had been living. Most of those affected are from Sudan but there are also Somalis, Eritreans, Egyptians and other nationalities among the groups, officials said.

Activists and migrants protest evictions in Paris. Credit: Amnesty International France

The authorities had additionally evicted about 140 migrants from two makeshifts camps in Calais, northern France, where more than 2,000 migrants have been living in rough conditions in tent settlements.

On Thursday, at the Bois Dormoy, in incidents that lasted late into the night, the migrants took steps to organise their own response to the security operations after they had been told to leave the park. They held meetings among themselves and liaised with activists – who have been providing food and support – to make their concerns known.

City officials initially offered about 60 places at state shelters but eventually increased the number to accommodate more of the migrants, following negotiations. Rights groups feared, however, that many would still remain homeless.

“The French authorities cannot just keep moving these migrants and asylum seekers from pillar to post without seeking viable alternatives – the state has a duty to ensure durable accommodation solutions for all those who seek asylum,” said Marco Perolini, Amnesty International’s Researcher on Discrimination in Europe.

“Real and viable alternative solutions must be found to give these migrants and refugees adequate shelter and services, including access to asylum procedures,” he added.

Other groups such as GISTI (Group for Information and Support to Immigrants), told IPS that they were also providing legal assistance to the migrants, with their lawyers representing asylum seekers at court hearings.

Meanwhile, the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, said she would like to open a “welcome centre” for migrants who may be en route to other countries, or who may eventually decide to seek asylum in France.

“We are facing a huge increase in the numbers, and we need to open some kind of welcome centre,” she told French media. “One thing is certain – they cannot sleep on the streets.”

Such a centre would only be for temporary stays, and groups such as Amnesty International say that more permanent solutions are urgent and necessary.

This week, the European Commission, the executive branch of the 28-nation European Union (EU), called for member states to endorse its proposal to resettle 40,000 migrants as the boats keep arriving at Italian and Greek shores.

According to United Nations figures, more than 100,000 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean since the start of 2015, and about 1,800 have died in the perilous boat trips, as they flee poverty and warfare in their homelands.

Thousands have entered France, often in an attempt to reach other countries such as Britain.  But while both France and Britain are against the proposed EU quotas, the number of people who would be relocated in France is just a “drop in the ocean”, Oberreit of Amnesty International told IPS.

“We can’t keep looking at temporary solutions,” Oberreit warned. “Individuals must be able to have a proper process of their situation in order to have refugee status, and migrants must have some form of shelter so they don’t have to be out in the street and go hungry.”

Edited by Phil Harris    

United States Secretary of State John Kerry addresses the 2015 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) on April 27. The United States, along with the UK, and Canada, rejected the draft agreement. Credit: UN Photo/Loey Felipe

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, May 23 2015 (IPS)

After nearly four weeks of negotiations, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference ended in a predictable outcome: a text overwhelmingly reflecting the views and interests of the nuclear-armed states and some of their nuclear-dependent allies.

“The process to develop the draft Review Conference outcome document was anti-democratic and nontransparent,” Ray Acheson, director, Reaching Critical Will, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), told IPS.“This Review Conference has demonstrated beyond any doubt that continuing to rely on the nuclear-armed states or their nuclear-dependent allies for leadership or action is futile." -- Ray Acheson

She said it contained no meaningful progress on nuclear disarmament and even rolled back some previous commitments.

But, according to several diplomats, there was one country that emerged victorious: Israel, the only nuclear-armed Middle Eastern nation, which has never fully supported a long outstanding proposal for an international conference for a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

As the Review Conference dragged towards midnight Friday, there were three countries – the United States, UK, and Canada (whose current government has been described as “more pro-Israel than Israel itself”) – that said they cannot accept the draft agreement, contained in the Final Document, on convening of the proposed conference by March 1, 2016.

As Acheson put it: “It is perhaps ironic, then, that three of these states prevented the adoption of this outcome document on behalf of Israel, a country with nuclear weapons, that is not even party to the NPT.”

The Review Conference president’s claim that the NPT belongs to all its states parties has never rung more hollow, she added.

Joseph Gerson, disarmament coordinator at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) told IPS the United States was primarily responsible, as in the 2005 review conference, for the failure of this year’s critically important NPT Review Conference.

“The United States and Israel, that is, even if Israel is one of the very few nations that has yet to sign onto the NPT,” he pointed out.

Rather than blame Israel, he said, the U.S., Britain and Canada are blaming the victim, charging that Egypt wrecked the conference with its demands that the Review Conference’s final declaration reiterate the call for creation of a Middle East Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone.

But, the tail was once again wagging the dog, said Gerson, who is also the AFSC’s director of Peace and Economic Security Programme.

He said that Reuters news agency reported on Thursday, the day prior to the conclusion of the NPT Review Conference, that the United States sent “a senior U.S. official” to Israel “to discuss the possibility of a compromise” on the draft text of the Review Conference’s final document.

“Israeli apparently refused, and (U.S. President) Barack Obama’s ostensible commitments to a nuclear weapons-free world melted in the face of Israeli intransigence,” said Gerson.

John Burroughs, executive director of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, told IPS the problem with NPT Review Conference commitments on disarmament made over the last 20 years is not so much that they have not been strong enough. Rather the problem is that they have not been implemented by the NPT nuclear weapon states.

Coming into the 2015 Review Conference, he said, many non-nuclear weapon states were focused on mechanisms and processes to ensure implementation.

In this vein, the draft, but not adopted Final Document, recommended that the General Assembly establish an open-ended working group to “identify and elaborate” effective disarmament measures, including legal agreements for the achievement and maintenance of a nuclear weapons free world.

Regardless of the lack of an NPT outcome, this initiative can and should be pushed at the next General Assembly session on disarmament and international security, this coming fall, said Burroughs, who is also executive director of the U.N. Office of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA).

Acheson told IPS that 107 states— the majority of the world’s countries (and of NPT states parties)—have endorsed a Humanitarian Pledge, committing to fill the legal gap for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons.

The outcome from the 2015 NPT Review Conference is the Humanitarian Pledge, she added.

The states endorsing the Pledge now and after this Conference must use it as the basis for a new process to develop a legally-binding instrument prohibiting nuclear weapons.

“This process should begin without delay, even without the participation of the nuclear-armed states. The 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has already been identified as the appropriate milestone for this process to commence.”

Acheson also said a treaty banning nuclear weapons remains the most feasible course of action for states committed to disarmament.

“This Review Conference has demonstrated beyond any doubt that continuing to rely on the nuclear-armed states or their nuclear-dependent allies for leadership or action is futile,” she said.

This context requires determined action to stigmatise, prohibit, and eliminate nuclear weapons.

“Those who reject nuclear weapons must have the courage of their convictions to move ahead without the nuclear-armed states, to take back ground from the violent few who purport to run the world, and build a new reality of human security and global justice,” Acheson declared.

Gerson told IPS the greater tragedy is that the failure of the Review Conference further undermines the credibility of the NPT, increasing the dangers of nuclear weapons proliferation and doing nothing to stanch new nuclear arms races as the nuclear powers “modernize” their nuclear arsenals and delivery systems for the 21st century continues apace.

He said the failure of the Review Conference increases the dangers of nuclear catastrophe and the likelihood of nuclear winter.

The U.S. veto illustrates the central importance of breaking the silos of single issue popular movements if the people’s power needed to move governments – especially the United States – is to be built.

Had there been more unity between the U.S. nuclear disarmament movement and forces pressing for a just Israeli-Palestinian peace in recent decades, the outcome of the Review Conference could have been different, noted Gerson.

“If we are to prevail, nuclear disarmament movements must make common cause with movements for peace, justice and environmental sustainability.”

Despite commitments made in 1995, when the NPT was indefinitely extended and in subsequent Review Conferences, and reiterated in the 2000 and 2010 Review Conference final documents to work for a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East, Obama was unwilling to say “No” to Israel and “Yes” to an important step to reducing the dangers of nuclear war, said Gerson.

“As we have been reminded by the Conferences on the Human Consequences of Nuclear War held in Norway, Mexico and Austria, between the nuclear threats made by all of the nuclear powers and their histories of nuclear weapons accidents and miscalculations, that we are alive today is more a function of luck than of policy decisions.”

The failure of Review Conference is thus much more than a lost opportunity, it brings us closer to nuclear cataclysms, he declared.

Burroughs told IPS debate in the Review Conference revealed deep divisions over whether the nuclear weapon states have met their commitments to de-alert, reduce, and eliminate their arsenals and whether modernisation of nuclear arsenals is compatible with achieving disarmament.

The nuclear weapon states stonewalled on these matters.

If the nuclear weapons states displayed a business as usual attitude, the approach of non-nuclear weapon states was characterised by a sense of urgency, illustrated by the fact that by the end of the Conference over 100 states had signed the “Humanitarian Pledge” put forward by Austria.

It commits signatories to efforts to “stigmatize, prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons in light of their unacceptable humanitarian consequences”.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

By Prem Shankar Jha
NEW DELHI, May 10 2015 (IPS)

President Barack Obama’s Nowroz greeting to the Iranian people earlier this year was the first clear indication to the world that the United States and Iran were very close to agreement on the contents of the nuclear agreement they had been working towards for the previous 16 months.

In contrast to two earlier messages which were barely veiled exhortations to Iranians to stand up to their obscurantist leaders, Obama urged “the peoples and the leaders of Iran” to avail themselves of “the best opportunity in decades to pursue a different relationship between our countries.”

Prem Shankar Jha

This moment, he warned, “may not come again soon (for) there are people in both our countries and beyond, who oppose a diplomatic solution.”

Barely a fortnight later that deal was done. Iran had agreed to a more than two-thirds reduction in the number of centrifuges it would keep, although a question mark still hung over the timing of the lifting of sanctions against it. The agreement came in the teeth of opposition from hardliners in both Iran and the United States.

Looking back at Obama’s unprecedented overtures to Iran, his direct phone call to President Hassan Rouhani – the first of its kind in 30 years – and his letter to Ayatollah Khamenei in November last year, it is clear in retrospect that they were products of  a rare meeting of minds between him and  Rouhani and their foreign ministers John Kerry and Muhammad Jawad Zarif that may have occurred as early as  their first meetings in September 2013.

The opposition to the deal within the United States proved a far harder obstacle for Obama to surmount. The reason is the dogged and increasingly naked opposition of Israel and the immense influence of the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) on U.S. policymakers and public opinion.

Both of these were laid bare came when the Republican party created constitutional history by inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address  a joint session of Congress  without informing the White House, listened raptly to his diatribe against Obama, and sent a deliberately insulting letter to Ayatollah Khamenei in a bid to scuttle the talks.

Obama has ploughed on in the teeth of this formidable, highly personalised, attack on him  because he has learnt from the bitter experience of the past four years what Harvard professors John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt had exposed in their path-breaking  book, ‘The Israel lobby and American Foreign Policy’ in 2006.“Quietly, and utterly alone, Obama decided to reverse the drift, return to diplomacy as the first weapon for increasing national security and returning force to where it had belonged in the previous three centuries, as a weapon of last resort”

This was the utter disregard for America’s national interest and security with which Israel had been manipulating American public opinion, the U.S. Congress and successive U.S. administrations, in pursuit of its own security, since the end of the Cold War.

By the end of 2012, two years into the so-called “Arab Spring”, Obama had also discovered how cynically Turkey and the Wahhabi-Sunni sheikhdoms had manipulated the United States into joining a sectarian vendetta against Syria, and created and armed a Jihadi army whose ultimate target was the West itself.

Nine months later, he found out how Israel had abused the trust the United States reposed in it, and come within a hairsbreadth of pushing it into an attack on Syria that was even less justifiable than then U.S. President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.  And then the murderous eruption of the Islamic State (ISIS) showed him that the Jihadis were out of control.

Somewhere along this trail of betrayal and disillusionment, Obama experienced the political equivalent of an epiphany.

Twelve years of a U.S. national security strategy that relied on the pre-emptive use of force had  yielded war without end, a string of strategic defeats, a  mauled and traumatised army, mounting international debt and a collapsing hegemony reflected in the impunity with which the so-called friends of the United States were using it to serve their ends.

Quietly, and utterly alone, Obama decided to reverse the drift, return to diplomacy as the first weapon for increasing national security and returning force to where it had belonged in the previous three centuries, as a weapon of last resort. His meeting and discussions with Rouhani and Iranian foreign minister Zarif gave him the opportunity to begin this epic change of direction.

Obama faced his first moment of truth on Nov. 28, 2012 when a Jabhat al Nusra unit north of Aleppo brought down a Syrian army helicopter with a Russian man-portable surface-to-air missile (SAM).

The White House tried to  pretend that that the missile was from a captured Syrian air base, but by then U.S. intelligence agencies were fed up with its suppression and distortion of their intelligence and  leaked it to the Washington Post that 40 SAM missile batteries with launchers, along with hundreds of tonnes of other heavy weapons had been bought from Libya, paid for by Qatar, and transported to the rebels in Syria  by Turkey through a ‘rat line’ that the CIA had helped it to establish, to funnel arms and mercenaries into Syria.

A day that Obama had been dreading had finally arrived: heavy weapons that the United States and the European Union had expressly proscribed, because they could bring down civilian aircraft anywhere in the world, had finally reached Al Qaeda’s hands

But when Obama promptly banned the Jabhat Al Nusra, he got his second shock. At the next ‘Friends of Syria’ meeting in Marrakesh three weeks later, not only the   ‘moderate’ Syrian rebels that the United States had grouped under a newly-formed Syrian Military Council three months earlier, but all of its Sunni Muslim allies condemned the ban, while Britain and France remained silent.

Obama’s third, and worst, moment of truth came nine months later when a relentless campaign by  his closest ‘allies‘, Turkey and Israel, brought him to the verge of launching an all-out aerial attack  on Syria in September 2013 to punish it for “using gas on rebels and civilians in the Ghouta suburb of Damascus.”

Obama learned that Syria had done no such thing only two days before the attack was to commence, when the British informed him that soil samples collected from the site of the Ghouta attack and analysed at their CBW research laboratories at Porton Down, had shown that the sarin gas used in the attack could not possibly have been prepared by the Syrian army.

This was because the British had the complete list of suppliers from which Syria had received its precursor chemicals and these did not match the chemicals used in the sarin gas found in the Ghouta.

Had he gone through with the attack, it would have made Obama ten times worse than George Bush in history’s eyes.

Hindsight allows us to reconstruct how the conviction that Syria was using chemical weapons was implanted into policy-makers in the United States and the European Union.

On Sep. 17, 2012, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that the highly-reputed German magazine Der Speigel, had learned, “quoting several eyewitnesses”, that Syria had tested delivery systems for chemical warheads   at a chemical weapons research centre near Aleppo in August, and that the tests had been overseen by Iranian experts.

Tanks and aircraft, Der Speigel reported, had fired “five or six empty shells capable of delivering poison gas.”

Since neither Der Speigel nor any other Western newspaper had, or still has, resident correspondents in Syria, it could only have obtained this report second or third-hand through a local stringer. This, and the wealth of detail in the report, suggests that the story of a test firing, while not necessarily untrue, was a plant by an intelligence agency. It therefore had to be taken with a large pinch of salt.

One person who not only chose to believe it instantly, but also to act on it was Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. On Dec. 3, 2012, Haaretz reported that he had sent emissaries to Amman twice, in October and November, to request Jordan’s permission to overfly its territory to bomb Syria’s chemical weapons facilities.

Edited by Phil Harris   

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.

* The second part of this two-part analysis can be accessed here.

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Jan 12 2015 (IPS)

It is sad to see how a continent that was one cradle of civilisation is running blindly into a trap, the trap of a holy war with Islam – and that six Muslim terrorists were sufficient to bring that about.

It is time to get out of the comprehensible “We are All Charlie Hebdo” wave, to look into facts, and to understand that we are playing into the hands of a few extremists, and equating ourselves with them. The radicalisation of the conflict between the West and Islam is going to carry with it terrible consequences

Roberto Savio

The first fact is that Islam is the second largest religion in the world, with 1.6 billion practitioners, that Muslims are the majority in 49 countries of the world and that they account for 23 percent of humankind. Of these 1.6 billion, only 317 million are Arabs. Nearly two-thirds (62 percent) live in the Asia-Pacific region; in fact, more Muslims live in India and Pakistan (344 million combined). Indonesia alone has 209 million.

A Pew Research Center report on the Muslim world also inform us that it is in South Asia that Muslims are more radical in terms of observance and views. In that region, those in favour of severe corporal punishment for criminals are 81 percent, compared with 57 percent in the Middle East and North Africa, while those in favour of executing those who leave Islam are 76 percent in South Asia, compared with 56 percent in the Middle East.

Therefore, it is obvious that it is the history of the Middle East which brings the specificity of the Arabs to the conflict with the West. And here are the main four reasons.“We are falling into a deadly trap, and doing exactly what the radical Muslims want: engaging in a holy war against Islam, so that the immense majority of moderate Muslims will be pushed to take up arms … instead of a strategy of isolation, we are engaging in a policy of confrontation”

First, all the Arab countries are artificial creations. In May 1916, Monsieur François Georges-Picot for France and Sir Mark Sykes for Britain met and agreed on a secret treaty, with the support of the Russian Empire and the Italian Kingdom, on how to carve up the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War.

Thus the Arab countries of today were born as the result of a division by France and Britain with no consideration for ethnic and religious realities or for history. A few of those countries, like Egypt, had an historical identity, but countries like Iraq, Arabia Saudi, Jordan, or even the Arab Emirates, lacked even that. It is worth remembering that the Kurdish issue of 30 million people divided among four countries was created by European powers.

As a consequence, the second reason. The colonial powers installed kings and sheiks in the countries that they created. To run these artificial countries, strong hands were required. So, from the very beginning, there was a total lack of participation of the people, with a political system which was totally out of sync with the process of democracy which was happening in Europe. With European blessing, these countries were frozen in feudal times.

As for the third reason, the European powers never made any investment in industrial development, or real development. The exploitation of petrol was in the hands of foreign companies and only after the end of the Second World War, and the ensuing process of decolonisation, did oil revenues really come into local hands.

When the colonial powers left, the Arab countries had no modern political system, no modern infrastructure, no local management.

Finally, the fourth reason, which is closer to our days. In states which did not provide education and health for their citizens, Muslim piety took on the task of providing what the state was not providing. So large networks of religious schools and hospital were created and, when elections were finally permitted, these became the basis for legitimacy and the vote for Muslim parties.

This is why, just taking the example of two important countries, Islamist parties won in Egypt and Algeria, and how with the acquiescence of the West, military coups were the only resort to stopping them.

This compression of so many decades into a few lines is of course superficial and leaves out many other issues. But this brutally abridged historical process is useful for understanding how anger and frustration is now all over the Middle East, and how this leads to the attraction to the Islamic State (IS) in poor sectors.

We should not forget that this historical background, even if remote for young people, is kept alive by Israel’s domination of the Palestinian people. The blind support of the West, especially of the United States, for Israel is seen by Arabs as a permanent humiliation, and Israel’s continuous expansion of settlements clearly eliminates the possibility of a viable Palestinian State.

The July-August bombing of Gaza, with just some noises of protest from the West but no real action, is for the Arab world clear proof that the intention is to keep Arabs down and seek alliances only with corrupt and delegitimised rulers who should be swept away. And the continuous Western intervention in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and the drones bombing everywhere, are widely perceived among the 1.6 billion that the West is historically engaged in keeping Islam down, as the Pew report noted.

We should also remember that Islam has several internal divisions, of which the Sunni-Shiite divide is just the largest. But while in the Arab region at least 40 percent of Sunni do not recognise a Shiite as a fellow Muslim, outside the region this tends to disappear, In Indonesia only 26 percent identify themselves as Sunni, with 56 percent identifying themselves as “just Muslim”.

In the Arab world, only in Iraq and Lebanon, where the two communities lived side by side, does a large majority of Sunni recognise Shiites as fellow Muslims. The fact that Shiites, who account for just 13 percent of Muslims, are the large majority in Iran, and the Sunni the large majority in Saudi Arabia explains the ongoing internal conflict in the region, which is being stirred by the two respective leaders.

Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, then run by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (1966–2006), successfully deployed a policy of polarisation in Iraq, continuing attacks on Shiites and provoking an ethnic cleansing of one million Sunnis from Baghdad. Now IS, the radical caliphate which is challenging the entire Arab world besides the West, is able to attract many Sunnis from Iraq which had suffered so many Shiite reprisals, that they sought the umbrella of the very group that had deliberately provoked the Shiites.

The fact it is that every day hundreds of Arabs die because of the internal conflict, a fate that does not affect the much larger Muslim community.

Now, all terrorist attacks in the West that have happened in Ottawa, in London, and now in Paris, have the same profile: a young man from the country in question, not someone from the Arab region, who was not at all religious during his teenage years, someone who somehow drifted, did not find a job, and was a loner. In nearly all cases, someone who had already had something to do with the judicial system.

Only in the last few years had he become converted to Islam and accepted the calls from IS for killing infidels. He felt that with this he would find a justification to his life, he would become a martyr, a somebody in another world, removed from a life in which there was no real bright future.

The reaction to all this has been a campaign in the West against Islam. The latest number of the New Yorker published a strong article defining Islam not as a religion but as an ideology. In Italy, Matteo Salvini, the leader of the right-wing and anti-immigrant Lega Nord has publicly condemned the Pope for engaging Islam in dialogue, and conservative Italian pundit Giuliano Ferrara declared on TV that ”we are in a Holy War”.

The overall European (and U.S.) reaction has been to denounce the Paris killings as the result of a “deadly ideology”, as President François Hollande called it.

It is certainly a sign of the anti-Muslim tide that German Chancellor Angela Merkel was obliged to take a position against the recent marches in Dresden (Muslim population 2 percent), organised by the populist movement Pegida (the German acronym for “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West”). The marches were basically directed against the 200,000 asylum seekers, most of them from Iraq and Syria, whose primary intention, according to Pegida, was not to escape war.

Studies from all over Europe show that the immense majority of immigrants have successfully integrated with their host economies. United Nations studies also show that Europe, with its demographic decline, requires at least 20 million immigrants by 2050 if it wants to remain viable in welfare practices, and competitive in the world. Yet, what are we getting everywhere?

Xenophobic, right-wing parties in every country of Europe, able to make the Swedish government resign, conditioning the governments of United Kingdom, Denmark and Nederland, and looking poised to win the next elections in France.

It should be added that, while what happened in Paris was of course a heinous crime, and while expression of any opinion is essential for democracy, very few have ever seen Charlie Hebdo and its level of provocation. Especially because in 2008, as Tariq Ramadan pointed out in The Guardian of Jan. 10, Charlie Hebdo fired a cartoonist who had joke about a Jewish link to the French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s son.

Charlie Hebdo was a voice defending the superiority of France and its cultural supremacy in the world, and had a small readership, which it obtained by selling provocation – exactly the opposite of the view of a world based on respect and cooperation among different cultures and religions.

So now we are all Charlie, as everybody is saying. But to radicalise the clash between the two largest religions of the world is not a minor affair. We should fight terrorism, be it Muslim or not (let us not forget that a Norwegian, Anders Behring Breivik, who wanted to keep his country free of Muslim penetration, killed 91 of his co-citizens).

But we are falling into a deadly trap, and doing exactly what the radical Muslims want: engaging in a holy war against Islam, so that the immense majority of moderate Muslims will be pushed to take up arms.

The fact that European right-wing parties will reap the benefit of this radicalisation goes down very well for the radical Muslims. They dream of a world fight, in which they will make Islam – and not just any Islam, but their interpretation of Sunnism – the sole religion. Instead of a strategy of isolation, we are engaging in a policy of confrontation.

And, apart from September 11 in New York, the losses of life have been miniscule compared with what is going on in the Arab world, where just in one country – Syria – 50,000 people lost their lives last year.

How can we so blindly fall into the trap without realising that we are creating a terrible clash all over the world? (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

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:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Nov 3 2014 (IPS)

The Oct. 23 attack on the Canadian Parliament building by a Canadian who had converted to Islam just a month earlier should create some interest in why an increasing number of young people are willing to sacrifice their lives for a radical view of Islam. 

Until now, this was dismissed as fanaticism, but when you have over 2,000 people who blow themselves up, it is time to look to this growing reality and put stereotypes to the side.

Roberto Savio

It is worth noting that there are a growing number of voices arguing that the Muslim world and its values are intrinsically against the West. Well, basic data do not support that theory, even although it is being used by all xenophobic parties which have sprung up everywhere in Europe.

Let us recall that there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, with Indonesia the world’s largest Muslim country followed by India. The entire Middle East-North Africa region has 317 million, compared with 344 million in Pakistan and India alone. There are 3.4 million Muslims in the United States and 43.4 million in Europe, making perhaps one jihadist for every 100,000 Muslims.

There are four historical reasons for jihadism that are easily forgotten.“Unemployment is a great habitat for frustration with its lack of perspective on a future, especially when you have no participation and no voice in the political system ... And the fact that the Arab Spring did not bring any tangible change in economic terms has exacerbated frustration into rage or resignation”

First of all, all the Arab countries are artificial. In May 1916, Monsieur Picot for France and Lord Sykes for Britain met and agreed on a secret treaty, with the support of the Russian Empire and the Italian Kingdom, on how to carve up the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War.

Thus the Arab countries of today were born as the result of a division by France and Britain with no consideration for ethnic and religious realities or for history. A few of those countries, like Egypt, had an historical identity, but countries like  Iraq, Arabia Saudi, Jordan, or even the Emirates lacked even that.

It is worth remembering that the Kurdish issue of 30 million people divided among four countries was created by European powers.

As a consequence, the second reason. The colonial powers installed kings and sheiks in the countries that they created. To run these artificial countries, strong hands were required. So, from the very beginning, there was a total lack of participation of the people, with a political system which was totally out of sync with the process of democracy which was happening in Europe.

With a European blessing, these countries were frozen in feudal times.

As for the third reason, the European powers never made any investment in industrial development, or real development. The exploitation of petrol was in the hands of foreign companies and only after the end of the Second World War, and the ensuing process of decolonisation, did oil revenues really come into local hands.

When the colonial powers left, the Arab countries had no modern political system, no modern infrastructure, no local management. When Italy left Libya (it did not know that there was petrol), there were only three Libyans with university degree.

Finally, the fourth reason, which is closer to our days. In states which did not provide education and health for their citizens, Muslim piety took on the task of providing what the state was not. So large networks of religious schools and hospital were created, and when elections were finally permitted, these became the basis for legitimacy and the vote for Muslim parties.

This is why, just taking the example of two important countries, Islamist parties won in Egypt and Algeria, and how with the acquiescence of the West, military coups were the only resort to stop them.

This compression of so many decades into a few lines is of course superficial and leaves out many other issues. But this brutally abridged historical process is useful for understanding how anger and frustration is now all over the Muslim world, and how this leads to attraction to the Islamic State (IS) in poor sectors.

We should not forget that this historical background, even if remote for young people, is kept alive by Israel’s domination of the Palestinian people. The blind support of the West, especially of the United States, for Israel is seen by Arabs as a permanent humiliation. The July-August bombing of Gaza, with just some noises of protest from the West but no real action, is for the Arab world clear proof that the intention is to keep Arabs down and seek alliances only with corrupt and delegitimised rulers who should be swept away.

Not many decades ago, a modernised school system started to produce local cadres, with many at university level. But the lack of political modernisation, combined with the lack of economic development, has led to a generation of disaffected and educated young people, who made their voices heard during what was called the Arab Spring.

But that was an outburst, which did not lead to the creation of a vibrant civil society or real grassroots movements. The only grassroots movement remains the Muslim network of mosques, religious schools and assistance structures.

Besides, there are no modern political parties in Arab countries – this is the difference with the large Muslim countries of Asia, like Indonesia and Malaysia, with Pakistan half way between.

Unemployment is a great habitat for frustration with its lack of perspective on a future, especially when you have no participation and no voice in the political system. Rich countries, like Saudi Arabia, can buy people’s allegiance by offering them a generous subsidy system, but other countries cannot. And the fact that the Arab Spring did not bring any tangible change in economic terms has exacerbated frustration into rage or resignation.

It is highly instructive to read David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times in Tunisia ( from where the majority of jihadists come), Steven Erlanger, also of the New York Times, in London (on the phenomenon of women joining the ranks of IS as fighters or as the wives of fighters) or Ana Carbajasa from Melilla, the Spanish enclave in Morocco (onIslam in Melilla and the radicalisation of women). Few newspapers have given a voice to young Arabs, despite the need to understand them.

Kirkpatrick, Erlanger and Carbajasa found that, for many, the Islamic State has an image of historical revenge against the past, a place free from corruption, It is a beacon for the many young people who  have no way to study or find a job, and have nothing to lose.

Those interviewed declared that to join the radical movement – in the Middle East, in Paris or in Manchester – is to become part of an international moral elite, of a global and magnetic movement. It means having a life project and passing from frustrated anonymity to glorious recognition.

What is creating this mobilisation is that IS is a state, not a secret organisation like Al-Qaeda. And its unprecedented use of social media is attracting hundreds of new recruits every week, who feel that they can escape from their daily frustrations to enter a world of dignity and fairness.

Ahmed, a young Tunisian supporter of the Islamic State who did not want to give his family name for fear of the police, told the New York Times: ”The Islamic State is a true caliphate, a system that is fair and just, where you don’t have to follow somebody orders because he is rich or powerful. It is action, not theory, and it will topple the whole game”.

Another Tunisian, 28-year-old Mourad, with a master’s degree in technology but unemployed, called the Islamic State the only hope for “social justice”, because it would absorb the oil rich monarchies and redistribute their wealth. He said: “It is the only way to give people back their true rights, by giving the natural resources back to the people. It is an obligation for every Muslim.

This dream of a different Muslim world of identifying with the fight to get there finds an easy echo in the European ghettos where a large proportion of the young unemployed is Arab.  We should not forget the Parisian banlieu violence of 2005 or the riots in Birmingham, England, in the same year.

Meanwhile, the French police estimate that there are now at least 1,200 French citizens in the IS, and the British police estimate an equivalent number of British citizens. Those numbers will grow, as long ISIS can show in its efficient social media campaign that it is a successful reality.

So now we have the phenomenon of disaffected Westerners who have drifted away because they feel rejected by the society they live in and are joining Islam, as a radical change to their lives, and the armed struggle as a way to be part of a tidal change.

In their time, European anarchists were not drifters – they were convinced that to have a new world of social justice and human dignity, it was necessary to destroy the present one – and they were part of a very large political movement.

If some in Europe were able to a dream with violence as a necessary instrument, why can the Muslim world not have a similar dream, with much more justification? The attraction of radical Islam is destined to continue, especially if the Islamic State is destroyed by the West. (END/IPS COUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

By Johan Galtung
KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 28 2014 (IPS)

More senseless bombing of Muslims, more defeats for the United States-West, more ISIS-type movements, more West-Islam polarisation. Any way out?

“ISIS [Islamic State in Iraq-Syria] Appeals to a Longing for the Caliphate”, writes Farhang Jahanpour in an IPS column. For the Ottoman Caliphate with the Sultan as Caliph – the Shadow of God on Earth – after the 1516-17 victories all over until the collapse of both Empire and Caliphate in 1922, at the hands of the allies England-France-Russia.

Johan Galtung

Imagine the collapse of the Vatican, not Catholic Christianity, at the hands of somebody, Protestant or Orthodox Christians, meaning Anglo-Americans or Russians, or Muslims. A centre in this world for the transition to the next, headed by a Pope, an emanation of God in Heaven. Imagine it gone.

And imagine that they who had brought about the collapse had a tendency to bomb, invade,  conquer, dominate Catholic countries, one after the other, like after the two [George] Bush wars in Afghanistan-Iraq, five Obama wars in Pakistan-Yemen-Somalia-Libya-Syria and “special operations”.

Would we not predict a longing for the Vatican, and an extreme hatred of the perpetrators? Fortunately, it did not happen.

But it happened in the Middle East, leaving a trauma fuelled by killing hundreds of thousands. The Sykes-Picot_Agreement between Britain and France of 16 May 1916 led to the collapse, with their four well-known colonies, the less known promise of Istanbul to Russia, and the 1917 Balfour Declaration offering parts of Arab lands as “national home for the Jewish people”. Jahanpour cites Winston Churchill as “selling one piece of real estate, not theirs, to two peoples at the same time”.“Imagine the collapse of the Vatican, not Catholic Christianity, at the hands of somebody, Protestant or Orthodox Christians, meaning Anglo-Americans or Russians, or Muslims. A centre in this world for the transition to the next, headed by a Pope, an emanation of God in Heaven. Imagine it gone”

The Middle East colonies fought the West through military coups for independence; Turkish leader Kemal Atatürk was a model. The second liberation is militant Islam-Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Salvation Front in Algiers and so on against secular military dictatorships.

The West prefers military order against history.

The longing cannot be stopped. ISIS is only one expression, and exceedingly brutal. But, damage and destruction by U.S. President Barack Obama and allies will be followed by a dozen ISIS from 1.6 billion Muslims in 57 countries.

A little military politicking today, some “training” here, fighting there, bombing all over, are only ripples on a groundswell. This will end with a Sunni caliphate sooner or later. And, the lost caliphate they are longing for had no Israel, only a “national home”. This is behind some of the U.S.-West despair. Any solution?

The way out is cease-fire and negotiation, under United Nations auspices, with full Security Council backing. To gain time, switch to a defensive military strategy, defending Baghdad, the Kurds, the Shia and others in Syria and Iraq.

The historical-cultural-political position of ISIS and its successors is strong.

The West cannot offer withdrawal in return for anything because it has already officially withdrawn. The West, however, can offer reconciliation, both in the sense of clearing the past and opening the future.

Known in the United States as “apologism”, a difficult policy to pursue. But for once the onus of Sykes-Picot is not on the United States, but on Britain and France.

Russia dropped out after the 1917 revolution, but revealed the plot.

Bombing, an atrocity, will lead to more ISIS atrocities. A conciliatory West might change that. An international commission could work on Sykes-Picot and its aftermath, and open the book with compensation on it.

Above all, future cooperation. The West, and here the United States enters, could make Israel return the West Bank, except for small cantons, the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital – or else! – sparing the horrible long-lasting Arab-Israeli warfare.

This would be decency, sanity, rationality; the question is whether the West possesses these qualities. The prognosis is dim.

There is the Anglo-American self-image as infallible, a gift to humanity, a little rough at times civilising the die-hards, but not weak.

If not an apology, at least they could wish to undo their own policies in the region since, say, 1967. No sign of that.

So much for the willingness. Does the West have the ability? Does it know how to reconcile?

After Portugal and England conquering the East China-East Africa sea lane around 1500, ultimately establishing themselves in Macao and Hong Kong, after the First and Second Opium wars of 1839-1860 in China, ending with Anglo-French forces burning the Imperial Palace in Beijing, did Britain use the “hand over” of Hong Kong to reflect on the past?

Not a word from Prince Charles.

China could have flattened those two colonies – but did not. Given that Islam has retaliation among its values, the West may be in for a lot.

Le Nouvel Observateur lists “groupes terroristes islamistes” in the world: Iraq-Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Libya, Algeria, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Indonesia, Philippines, Uzbekistan, Chechenya.

The groups, named, grew out of similar local circumstances. Imagine that they increasingly share that longing for a caliphate; the Ottoman Empire covered much more than the Middle East, way into Africa and Asia. And more groups are coming. Invincible.

Imagine that Turkey itself shares that dream, maybe hoping to play a major role (in the past, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu a superb academic, a specialist on the Empire.)

Could that be the reason for Turkey not really joining, as it seems, this anti-ISIS crusade?

The West should be realistic, not “realist”. Switch to rationality. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

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:

“We need a transformative change in our food and agricultural policies to have sustainability” – Ren Wang, FAO’s Agriculture and Consumer Protection Department. Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

By A. D. McKenzie
NAPLES, Italy, Oct 9 2014 (IPS)

In his parody of the Michael Jackson hit “Beat It”, the American satirist and singer Weird Al Yankovic has a parent urging his son to eat the food on his plate, warning that “other kids are starving in Japan”.

The parody has raised smiles since it was released 30 years ago, but today “Eat It” could be a battle cry for activists trying to reduce the widespread waste of enormous quantities of food, an urgent concern around the world and no laughing matter.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that 1.3 billion tonnes of food go to waste globally every year. Meanwhile, 805 million of the world’s people are still experiencing chronic undernourishment or hunger, Ren Wang, Assistant Director General of FAO’s Agriculture and Consumer Protection Department, told the 11^th International Media Forum on the Protection of Nature.“Even if just one-fourth of the food currently lost or wasted globally could be saved, it would be enough to feed 870 million hungry people in the world” – SAVE FOOD Initiative

“We need a transformative change in our food and agricultural policies to have sustainability,” Wang said.

Organised by the Rome-based environmental group Greenaccord and hosted for the second time by the city of Naples from Oct. 8 to 11, this year’s forum – entitled ‘Feeding the World: Food, Agriculture and Environment’ – has brought together experts, journalists and policy makers.

It comes as the United Nations’ International Year of Family Farming draws to a close, and as rising food prices continue to pound the incomes of vulnerable groups.

Wang said that although global food production has tripled since 1946 and the world has reduced the prevalence of undernourishment over the past 20 years from 18.7 to 11.3 percent, food security is still a crucial issue.

The food that goes to waste is about one-third of current global food production, so expanding current agricultural output is not necessarily the answer. In fact, the world produces enough food for every individual to have about 2,800 calories each day, according to scientists. But while some people are able to waste food, others do not have enough.

Even if waste and hunger might not be directly related, there is unquestionable inequality in the world’s food system, said Gary Gardner, a senior fellow with the Worldwatch Institute, a research and outreach institute that focuses on sustainable policies.

“In wealthy countries, food waste often occurs at the level of the retailer or consumer, either at the grocery store or at home where a lot of food is thrown away,” he told IPS.

By contrast, food waste in developing countries mainly happens at the “farm or processing” levels, Gardner said. “Food is lost because usually there aren’t systems for getting it to processing facilities and then to the consumer efficiently.”

Food losses and waste amount to roughly 680 billion dollars in industrialised countries and 310 billion dollars in developing countries, according to the SAVE FOOD Initiative, a project involving the German trade fair group Messe Düsseldorf in collaboration with FAO and the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP).

Saying that “consumers in rich countries waste almost as much food (222 million tonnes) as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa (230 million tonnes)”, the SAVE FOOD initiative found that “even if just one-fourth of the food currently lost or wasted globally could be saved, it would be enough to feed 870 million hungry people in the world.”

In Europe, the vast quantity of food thrown out by supermarkets has sometimes sparked public outrage, especially in countries where it is illegal for people to help themselves to the rejected items.

British supermarket chain Tesco has acknowledged discarding some 28,500 tonnes of food in the first six months of 2013, according to reports, and in Britain overall, an estimated 15 million tonnes of food is wasted annually.

In the United States, agencies estimate that roughly 40 percent of the food produced is discarded in landfills, with supermarkets accounting for much of this.

Yet, on both sides of the Atlantic, people can be prosecuted for taking food from dumpsters – a sore point with some activists who have organised public campaigns that offer meals cooked from thrown-away food.

At the Naples forum, where experts discussed the social and environmental consequences of food waste, among other issues, Gardner of the Worldwatch Institute described the experiences of activist Rob Greenfield, who has fed himself entirely from food from dumpsters while cycling across the United States.

“Many times the food was in packages that hadn’t been opened – whole boxes of cereal, sodas, that kind of thing – that for various reasons had been thrown out but which was perfectly good food to him,” Gardner told IPS in an interview.

“That’s not the optimal way for us to get rid of waste,” he added. “The better way would be not to generate that waste in the first place.”

Some solutions

Tesco and several other British supermarket chains have agreed to a programme of waste reduction, and restaurants in several countries are also taking steps not only to decrease the waste but to turn it into biogas to be used for energy.

Gardner told IPS that instead of throwing away food, supermarkets should be looking at donating produce to local organisations such as soup kitchens, although it would be better if they “weren’t generating the waste to begin with.”

On biogas, some speakers said that using food or household waste for energy at the local level could contribute to wider environmental solutions, but again the main aim should be to stem the creation of waste.

“Food security and climate change have certain challenges in common,” said Adriana Opromollo, international advocacy officer for food security and climate change at Caritas Internationalis, a federation of charity organisations.

“At the local level, we have seen where using food or household waste can be a successful strategy. But we have to focus on solutions that are tailored to the particular context,” she told IPS.

The ways to reduce waste can begin simply. Some U.S. food services companies found that by providing only plates (without accompanying trays), in school cafeterias, students were encouraged to take only the food they could consume, consequently throwing away 25 percent less waste.

Perhaps schools should record another version of “Eat It” for lunch hour.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

By Farhang Jahanpour
OXFORD, Sep 24 2014 (IPS)

When, all of a sudden, ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) emerged on the scene and in a matter of days occupied large swathes of mainly Sunni-inhabited parts of Iraq and Syria, including Iraq’s second city Mosul and Tikrit, birthplace of Saddam Hussein, and called itself the Islamic State, many people, not least Western politicians and intelligence services, were taken by surprise.

Farhang Jahanpour

Unlike in the Western world, religion still plays a dominant role in people’s lives in the Middle East region. When talking about Sunni and Shia divisions we should not be thinking of the differences between Catholics and Protestants in the contemporary West, but should throw our mind back to Europe’s wars of religion (1524-1648) that proved to be among the most vicious and deadly wars in history.

Just as the Hundred Years’ War in Europe was not based only on religion, the Sunni-Shia conflicts in the Middle East too have diverse causes, but are often intensified by religious differences. At least, various groups use religion as an excuse and as a rallying call to mobilise their forces against their opponents.

Ever since U.S. encouragement of Saudi and Pakistani authorities to organise and use jihadi fighters following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, to the rise of Al Qaeda and the terrorist attacks on Sep. 11, 2001, followed by the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, and military involvement in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, it seems that the United States has had the reverse effect of the Midas touch, in the sense that whichever crisis the United States has touched has turned to dust.“Now, with the rise of ISIS and other terrorist organisations, the entire Middle East is on fire. It would be the height of folly to dismiss or underestimate this movement as a local uprising that will disappear by itself, and to ignore its appeal to a large number of marginalised and disillusioned Sunni militants”

Now, with the rise of ISIS and other terrorist organisations, the entire Middle East is on fire. It would be the height of folly to dismiss or underestimate this movement as a local uprising that will disappear by itself, and to ignore its appeal to a large number of marginalised and disillusioned Sunni militants.

In view of its ideology, fanaticism, ruthlessness, the territories that it has already occupied, and its regional and perhaps even global ambitions, ISIS can be regarded as the greatest threat since the Second World War and one that could change the map of the Middle East and the post-First World War geography of the entire region, and challenge Western interests in the Persian Gulf and beyond.

When Islam appeared in the deserts of Arabia some 1400 years ago, with an uncompromising message of monotheism and the slogan “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the Prophet of God”, it changed the plight of the Arabs in the Arabian Peninsula and formed a religion and a civilisation that even now claims upward of 1.5 billion adherents in all parts of the world, and forms the majority faith in 57 countries that are members of the Islamic Cooperation Organization.

Contrary to many previous prophets who did not see the success of their mission during their own lifetime, in the case of Islam not only did Muhammad manage to unite the Arabs in the name of Islam in the entire Arabian Peninsula, but he even managed to form a state and ruled over the converted Muslims both as their prophet and ruler. The creation of the Islamic umma or community during Muhammad’s lifetime in Medina and later on in the whole of Arabia is a unique occurrence in the history of religion.

Consequently, while most religions look forward to an ideal state or to the “Kingdom of God” as a future aspiration, Muslims look back at the period of Muhammad’s rule in Arabia as the ideal state. Therefore, what a pious Muslim wishes to do is to look back at the life and teachings of the Prophet, and especially his rule in Arabia, and take it as the highest standard of an ideal religious government.

This is why the Salafis, namely those who turn to salaf or the early fathers and ancestors, have always proved so attractive to many fundamentalist Muslims. Being a Salafi is a call to Muslims to reject the modern world and to follow the example of the Prophet and the early caliphs.

When, in 1516-17, the armies of Ottoman Sultan Selim I captured Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Muslim holy places in Arabia, the sultan assumed the title of caliph, and therefore the Ottoman Empire was also regarded a Sunni caliphate.

Although not all Muslims, especially many Arabs, recognise Ottoman rule as a caliphate, the caliphate nevertheless continued in name until the fall of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War when the caliphate was officially abolished in 1922.

The fall of the last powerful Islamic empire was not only traumatic from a political and military point of view but, with the end of the caliphate, the Sunnis lost a unifying religious authority as well.

It is very difficult for many Westerners to understand the feeling of hurt and humiliation that many Sunni Muslims feel as the result of what they have suffered in the past century. To have an idea, they should imagine that a mighty Christian empire that had lasted for many centuries had fallen as the result of Muslim conquest and that, in addition to the loss of the empire, the papacy had also been abolished at the same time.

With the end of the caliphate, Sunni countries were left rudderless, to be divided among various foreign powers which imposed their economic, military and cultural domination, as well as their beliefs and their way of life, on them. The feeling of hurt and humiliation that many Muslims have felt since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and the strong longing for its reinstatement, still continues.

To add insult to injury, before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Western powers, especially Great Britain, had promised the Arabs that if they would rise up against the Ottomans, after the war they would be allowed to form an Islamic caliphate in the area comprising all the Arab lands ruled by the Ottoman Empire.

Not only were these promises not fulfilled, but as part of the Sykes-Picot_Agreement on 16 May 1916, Britain and France secretly plotted to divide the Arab lands between them and they even promised Istanbul to Russia. Not only was a unified Arab caliphate not formed, but the Balfour_Declaration generously offered a part of Arab territory that Britain did not possess to the Zionists, to form a “national home for the Jewish people”.

In Winston Churchill’s words, Britain sold one piece of real estate (to which it had no claim in the first place) to two people at the same time.

The age of colonialism came to an end almost uniformly through military coups involving officers who had the ability to fight against foreign occupation. From the campaigns of Kemal Ataturk in Turkey, to the rise of Reza Khan in Iran, Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, the military coups in Iraq and Syria that later led to the establishment of the Baâthist governments of Hafiz al-Assad in Syria and Abd al-Karim Qasim, Abdul Salam Arif and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and so on, practically all Middle Eastern countries achieved their independence as the result of military coups.

While the new military leaders managed to establish some order through the barrel of the gun, they were completely ignorant of the historical, religious and cultural backgrounds of their nations and totally alien to any concept of democracy and human rights.

In the absence of any civil society, democratic traditions and social freedom, the only path that was open to the masses that wished to mobilise against the rule of their military dictators was to turn to religion and use the mosques as their headquarters.

The rise of religious movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Ennahda Movement in Tunisia, FIS in Algeria and Al-Dawah in Iraq, were seen as a major threat by the military rulers and were ruthlessly suppressed.

The main tragedy of modern Middle Eastern regimes has been that they have been unable not only to involve the Islamist movements in government, but they have even failed to involve them in the society in any meaningful way.

This is why after repeated defeats, divisions and humiliation, there has always been a longing among militant Sunni Muslims, especially Arabs whose countries were artificially divided and dominated by Western colonialism and later by military dictators, for the revival of the caliphate. Even mere utterance of ‘Islamic caliphate’ brings a burst of adrenaline to many secular Sunnis.

The failure of military dictatorships and the marginalisation and even the elimination of religiously-oriented groups have led to the rise of vicious extremism and terrorism. The terrorist group ISIS is making use of this situation and is basing its appeal on the reinstatement of the caliphate. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

The recent collapse of the British Serious Fraud Office court case against Victor Dahdaleh has left the Bahraini prime minister’s reputation for corruption intact.

The case has been widely covered in British media reports, including the Guardian, the Financial Times, and the Independent. Reuters has also reported extensively on the case.Businessmen disagreed on whether to call him "Mr. 10%," "Mr. 30%," or "Mr. 50%."

Without going into the details, suffice it to say the case collapsed before any witnesses were called, sparing Prime Minister Sheikh Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa the public spectacle of being presented in the trial, at least virtually, as the most vivid face of corruption in Bahrain. He escaped that for now, but this is a Pyrrhic victory.

The SFO mishandling of the case, the Bahraini government’s admission that illicit payments were made to the state-run aluminium company ALBA with the prime minister’s knowledge and approval, the changing testimony of key witnesses, and the refusal of others to testify all contributed to the prosecutor’s inability to proceed against the defendant.

Having his uncle and prime minister saved from public humiliation, in British courts no less, King Hamad cannot possibly pretend that all is well with his prime minister or some of the family ministers who were tainted by the case. The formal admission by one of the prime minister’s deputies presented in a letter to the British court that the multi-million-dollar payments were made with Khalifa’s knowledge and approval will have serious, long-term implications for the ruling family.

According to media reports, this admission corroborated the defendant’s claims that he made the payments in response to the request of ALBA’s board chairman at the time. The chairman, Shaikh Isa Al Khalifa, was the minister of oil and is a close relative of the prime minister.

In fact, according to British media, the court case focused on the Bahraini government culture of “Pay for Play” and on the prime minister’s role in promoting such practices. Simply put, if a foreign businessman intended to do business in Bahrain on a large scale, he would have to pay. The bigger the “Play,” the higher the “Pay,” and the more senior the official involved.

Although the court cleared the defendant of all charges, the Bahraini prime minister has cast a long shadow of corruption on the case. The defendant will walk free, but the prime minister will be saddled by this story for years to come. The Bahraini public do not need to look at leaked diplomatic cables to know about the private life of the prime minister. As his deputy’s letter alluded to, it’s all out there in the public record.

Most observers believe there would have been no way for ALBA’s board chairman to receive such illicit payments from an international businessman without Prime Minister Khalifa knowing about it. Most successful Bahraini businessmen, Sunni and Shia, who hail from the country’s prominent Sunni and Shia families, knew of Khalifa’s practices.

They all agreed that Khalifa drove, practiced, and benefited from the “Pay for Play” insidious culture. They often disagreed on whether to call him “Mr. 10%”, “Mr. 30%” or “Mr. 50%.”

Businessmen told me over the years that several office buildings and hotels were known as “Shaikh Khalifa’s buildings.” His claim to ownership of reclaimed lands, which are dredged at public expense, is another sorry tale of corruption.

At the very least, the case has undermined the legitimacy of Al Khalifa rule, especially at this juncture when the king is touting the family’s “conquest” of the island over 200 years ago.

If the king hopes to retain a modicum of credibility, he should jettison his prime minister and clean up the corrupt culture that has underpinned the ruling family’s business practices at the highest levels. As the king is feverishly trying to endear himself to the British government, in an apparent snub to Washington, his efforts will be severely undermined by Khalifa remaining in the post of prime minister.

Bahraini law does not condone “Pay for Play” practices, but high-level official practices have trumped the law and set up a shadowy system of illicit financial transactions. If the king wishes to encourage international businessmen to invest in his country without violating their countries’ laws on corruption, he should clean up the system in word and in deed.

Under the 1906 British Prevention of Corruption Act, which covered Dahdaleh’s case, if the defendant could prove the payments were made with the knowledge and approval of senior government officials, he could be acquitted of the charges. New anti-corruption laws in Britain and the U.S., however, do not allow potential defendants such a luxury.

It’s somewhat ironic that the prime minister’s downfall could be brought about by corruption rather than repression and abuse of power. Dahdaleh’s case offers a clear lesson to multinational corporations and businessmen and to justice departments in Western and other countries that do not condone corrupt practices. The lesson should also be equally clear to the Bahraini king.

Emile Nakhleh is a former Senior Intelligence Service Officer, a Research Professor at the University of New Mexico, and author of A Necessary Engagement: Reinventing America’s Relations with the Muslim World.

Tarzie Vittachi, a Sri Lankan journalist who in his final years was the bemused occupant of a high United Nations office, once summed up with his characteristic terse wit a central truth about international affairs: “Everything is about something else.”

The situation in Syria, and indeed, across the Middle East, exemplifies that truth: amidst unprecedented confusion and stir, surface developments make little sense. Why, for instance, is the United States supporting an opposition grouping in Syria dominated by Islamist forces it has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan?

What caused Britain to shy away from supporting the Barack Obama administration’s move to punish the Assad regime for using chemical weapons?

Why did Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bandar bin Sultan, for 22 years ambassador in Washington and rumoured killed in a 2012 terrorist attack, suddenly reappear and meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, offering arms deals and a guarantee that Chechen terrorists would not attack the Sochi Winter Olympics?

To understand what is happening we have to look to the beginnings of the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States in the deal Winston Churchill struck in 1946 with the U.S. military-industrial establishment to manage the post-World War Two world.

The quid pro quo of that arrangement was that Britain would help an unconstitutional nexus of power in Washington to rule the world, and be allowed in return to preserve its lucrative imperial interests; in effect, it was a British-sponsored coup that subverted U.S. democracy.

In the Middle East, that dispensation meant U.S. support for extremely corrupt regional power structures that Britain and France had put in place as they took charge of Ottoman territories after World War I.

As the United States was by then entering a period of increasing dependence on Saudi Arabian oil, this was in line with its own interests; in fact, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had struck a deal with King Ibn Saud in February 1945, assuring the country’s security in return for preferred U.S. access to its petroleum.

Over the last two years, as domestic shale oil production has moved the United States towards energy independence, fundamental aspects of the transatlantic “special relationship” have come unstuck. Two aspects of change are particularly important:

The United States has moved vigorously against the money laundering system the British put in place as their Empire declined. The 1.9-billion-dollar fine that U.S. regulators imposed in 2012 on HSBC, Britain’s largest bank, is indicative of the pressures on the system central to Britain’s post-imperial power.

Washington has withdrawn support for dictatorial regimes in the Middle East, setting off the wave of instability the media have presented as the “Arab Spring”.

Although the “Arab Spring” has turned into an increasingly bloody Summer as the extremist Muslim Brotherhood has come to the fore, the writing on the wall for Britain’s imperial interests is clear: the cozy arrangements with the old dictatorial regimes cannot be renewed.

The latest Russian initiative to head off a U.S. strike on Syria points to an interesting aspect of the emerging scene in the Middle East. Despite the Russian defence of the Assad regime, Moscow and Washington have a shared interest in changing existing realities in the region, and especially in Saudi Arabia, which supplied most of the 9/11 attackers and has been quite openly behind the Chechen terrorist uprising.

The Saudi gift of 100 million dollars to the U.N. Counter-Terrorism Centre and Prince Bandar bin Sultan’s offers to President Putin should be read as signs that Riyadh is acutely aware of its danger.

The involvement of Prince Bandar also points to intriguing developments in Washington.

During his long stay in Washington Bandar developed very close relations with the nexus of oil, arms and military/intelligence interests central to the shadow government established by the British coup of 1946. The nickname “Bandar Bush” captures his intimacy with the family that has been for two generations at the centre of that unconstitutional power structure.

The presidency of the senior Bush saw the Iraq war segue the world from the Cold War to the “War of Civilisations”. The stolen presidency of the junior Bush saw the 9/11 attacks inaugurate the “Homeland Security” era under the “Patriot Act”, with widespread violations of fundamental constitutional provisions.

The fact that Bandar Bush has emerged from the shadows in an attempt to win Russian support for the Saudi regime points to the threat felt by the Bush family.

In the past, a few choice assassinations would have resolved this situation. That might still happen, but I think the U.S. military/intelligence establishment has swung away from the Bush-centred power nexus. Edward Snowden’s decision to flee the farm is probably indicative of that, as is the “wrong name” on the papers sent to the Chinese authorities to extradite him from Hong Kong.

To sum up, the grim and confused situation in the Middle East could be the most tangible indicator of a historic U.S. shift back to fully constitutional government.

The “something else” that Syria signifies could be the exact opposite of all the dark readings of the situation.

Bhaskar Menon is the editor of Undiplomatictimes.com, which carries a longer version of this analysis.

What seemed inevitable just 48 hours ago – an imminent U.S. missile attack on Syrian targets in response to an alleged chemical attack that reportedly killed hundreds of Syrian citizens – stalled Thursday as the justification for military action faced increasing questioning both here and abroad.

Growing calls by both Republican and Democratic lawmakers for consultations with, if not formal authorisation by, Congress before Obama takes any military action have raised the potential political costs on Capitol Hill if Obama proceeds on his own.

While the administration continues to express certainty that the Syrian government was responsible for the alleged Aug. 21 attack, the Associated Press, quoting U.S. intelligence officials, reported Thursday that such a case fell short of a “slam dunk” – a reference to then-CIA director George Tenet’s mistaken declaration that President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the run-up to the Iraq War.

Some officials cited in the story said they could not entirely rule out the possibility that rebels were responsible for the attack on a Damascus suburb – as alleged by the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad."Simply lashing out with military force under the banner of 'doing something' will not secure our interests in Syria."
-- Representative Adam Smith

According to AP, officials could not tie Assad or his inner circle to any directive ordering the use of chemical weapons or even to foreknowledge of the attack, suggesting that the decision may have made by lower-ranking military officers or a rogue commander.

The administration has scheduled a telephone conference call with members of Congress for Thursday evening, but officials said the briefing would not include classified information that could confirm the nature of the attack or who was responsible. A White House spokesman said the administration still hopes to release an unclassified intelligence assessment by the weekend.

Meanwhile, the administration faced other problems overseas, not least of which was the refusal earlier this week of the Arab League to explicitly endorse a military attack and the appeals by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and his special envoy for Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, to await the findings of U.N. inspectors who have been in Syria this week investigating the site of the alleged attack, taking testimony and blood samples from its victims. Ban said Thursday the inspectors would not leave Syria until Saturday.

On Thursday, the British parliament voted against military intervention in Syria, leading Prime Minister David Cameron to say his country would not join the action in which he had previously pledged to participate, along with the leaders of France and Turkey.

Britain has long been Washington’s closest military ally, and most analysts consider it inconceivable that Obama would launch a strike, however limited, without allied and especially British support.

Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel, who during the administration’s deliberations late last week reportedly opposed striking, told reporters in Brunei Thursday that any action against Damascus would require “international collaboration”.

However, it appears now that whatever hopes the administration had earlier this week of carrying out “limited” military strikes for two or three days against Syrian targets as early as this weekend have dissipated.

It was widely believed that Obama had hoped to complete military operations against Syria before he left Tuesday Sept. 3 for the Group of 20 (G20) Summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, that begins Thursday Sept. 5.

Most analysts here consider it highly unlikely that he would want to carry out an attack while being hosted by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Assad’s most-important international backer and Washington’s co-chair in long-stalled negotiations between Assad and opposition forces to end the civil war in Syria.

Moscow has threatened to veto any resolution at the U.N. Security Council that would authorise military action against Damascus, and U.S.-Russian relations are already at their lowest point since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But growing domestic opposition to even limited strikes of the kind Obama suggested during a PBS interview Wednesday he would pursue may be more decisive.

As of Thursday morning, 140 members of the House of Representatives had signed a letter calling on Obama to gain Congressional approval before taking ay military action, according to the “Hill” newspaper.

“Engaging our military in Syria when no direct threat to the United States exists and without prior congressional authorisation would violate the separation of powers that is clearly delineated in the Constitution,” said the letter, which also charged that Obama’s participation in the NATO campaign against Libya in 2011 was unconstitutional because it lacked authorisation.

Over the last two days, a number of influential Democrats from both houses have also privately expressed serious reservations to the White House about attacking Syria, noting that even limited strikes could draw the United States into another Middle Eastern civil war.

“Simply lashing out with military force under the banner of ‘doing something’ will not secure our interests in Syria,” noted Washington Representative Adam Smith, the senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.

Recent public opinion polls suggest strong opposition to military action at the grassroots level. A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken Aug. 19-23 found that only a quarter of respondents said they would support U.S. military intervention if Assad used chemical weapons against the civilian population.

A Huffington Post/YouGov survey taken earlier this week found the same percent would support air strikes to aid Syrian rebels, while 41 percent were opposed. Thirty-one percent agreed with the statement that the U.S. has a responsibility to prevent Syria from using chemical weapons against rebels, while 38 percent disagreed.

Meanwhile, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the only independent international non-governmental organisation that has provided statistics regarding casualties resulting from the alleged attack and which reported Aug. 24 that three hospitals near the affected area had received 3,600 patients displaying neurotoxic symptoms, of whom 355 died, issued a formal statement Thursday “warn[ing] that its information could not be used as evidence to certify the precise origin” of the attack or designate “the perpetrators”.

It added that its previous statement should not “be used as a substitute for the [U.N.’s] investigation or as a justification for military action.”

In another statement released Thursday, Amnesty International said “the best course of action would be for the United Nations to complete its investigation into this latest outrage and for the United Nations Security Council to refer all evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity from this and other incidents to the International Criminal Court.”

The Council could consider other measures, it said, including “targeted economic sanctions and the deployment of international human rights monitors”.

Ervand Abrahamian, a leading historian of modern Iran, has recently explored the 1953 Anglo/American-sponsored coup that overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq.

The 28 months under Abrahamian’s scrutiny in The Coup: 1953, The CIA, and the Roots of US-Iranian Relations form a defining fault line in Iranian history.

Ervand Abrahamian. Courtesy of Baruch College.

His book is particularly timely given the striking parallels between the debates he recounts and those surrounding the current dispute over Iran’s nuclear dossier.

Competing narratives

The overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, who oversaw the nationalisation of Iran’s oil industry, significantly impacted Iranian collective memory and political culture.

While some Western analysts trace the roots of current U.S.-Iranian hostilities to the 1979 Revolution and the hostage crisis, for Iranians it begins with the coup, with the memory of Mossadeq representing a future denied.

In recent years, Western scholars and journalists have put forth a narrative asserting that U.S. policymakers recognised the shortcomings of British strategy in the age of postcolonial nationalism and had pressured London to accept Iran’s legitimate demands prior to 1953.

According to this argument, U.S. diplomats pressed both sides towards compromise and presented innumerable proposals that sought to reconcile British mandates with Iranian imperatives.

Such narratives also place the responsibility for the failed negotiations squarely on Mossadeq for his intransigence – even attempting to trace this to his aristocratic background or presumed martyrdom complex.

Abrahamian effectively challenges this understanding by providing a detailed account of the 1953 coup from its genesis to its aftermath.

The most impressive aspect of the book is its diligent scholarship and exhaustive use of primary sources.

The lion’s share of Abrahamian’s narrative is substantiated by declassified documents from U.S. and British national archives and those of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) – an antecedent of the modern BP.

To this he adds interviews from oral history projects, biographies, memoirs and the private documents of key individuals both Western and Iranian.

If Abrahamian has an axe to grind, he does so with facts and figures.

For him, the dispute was a zero-sum struggle for control over Iran’s oil industry.

Abrahamian underscores “control” as the operative word underlying the crisis, as it appears repeatedly in internal government documents, and is used by all parties to articulate their objectives.

For Iran, national sovereignty was equated with control over its oil industry.

For the British, the nationalisation of Iran’s oil meant the loss of their control over the global market during a period of imperial contraction.

The United States had as much invested in the crisis as Britain.

The U.S. thus participated in the coup not as a means of curbing communist expansion in Iran, as is often stated, but because of the repercussions that oil nationalisation could have in other parts of the world.

For this reason, Abrahamian argues, the negotiations were destined to fail.

Detailing a number of proposals made to Iran, Abrahamian demonstrates how much of what is lauded today as Anglo-American fair compromises were deemed even by some in the West as “raw deals” – at best meaningless oxymorons, at worst deceptive smokescreens.

These proposals were predicated on the principle of conceding to Iran “general authority” while maintaining “executive management” in British hands.

As the British ambassador to Washington reported in 1951, U.S. policymakers “suggested accepting the pretense and the façade of nationalisation while maintaining effective control.”

In other reports, he would replace “façade” with “cloak”.

An exception was a package offered by Assistant Secretary of State George McGhee, which was deemed acceptable by Mosaddeq during his 1951 visit to the United Nations.

But the incoming Tory government in Britain rejected it as “totally unacceptable”, insisting that it was “far better not to have an agreement than to have a bad one”.

Accounts like this debunk arguments that it was Mosaddeq’s absolutist rhetoric and intransigence that militated against a judicious resolution of the crisis.

Mossadeq’s legacy

For Abrahamian, the career politician and legal scholar Mosaddeq was a leader accountable to his people.

His actions were dictated by Iran’s national rights, interests and security.

Given the significance of oil to the economic livelihood of Iranians and their exploitation by the AIOC, Mosaddeq could not give ground at the whim of great powers.

Moreover, he was a willing participant in the negotiations.

As Abrahamian details, Mosaddeq offered compensation, sale of oil to the AIOC and the employment of foreigners.

This is significant because Western arguments against nationalisation highlighted Iran’s lack of skilled labour to manage the installations.

Throughout “The Coup”, Abrahamian approaches every episode in the crisis with due treatment.

His narrative locates the coup firmly inside the conflict between imperialism and nationalism.

While this refreshing perspective clears away much of the Cold War cobweb of existing literature, an outright rejection can be limiting and insufficiently nuanced.

The viewpoint Abrahamian provides and the one he counters must be viewed as complementary in providing a comprehensive understanding of the period rather than mutually exclusive.

Then and now

It’s impossible to read “The Coup” without relating what’s passed to the present.

The events leading up to 1953 involved sanctions, affirmations of Iranians’ sovereignty, the assertion of great power demands and interests and even the beating of war drums.

In 1952, a British press attaché in Tehran strongly urged the Foreign Office to keep a “steady nerve” and wait for Mosaddeq’s fall.

She insisted, “Our own unofficial efforts to undermine him are making good progress. If we agree to discuss and compromise with him, the effort will strengthen him.”

Such rhetoric might resonate with contemporary pundits whose analyses hinge on regime change in Iran.

One moral that can be extracted from “The Coup” is that negotiations only work when all parties involved are genuinely dedicated to the process.

On Iran’s side today, both the intention and the means seem to be present.

Nicknamed the “diplomatic sheikh”, Hassan Rouhani won the presidency following Jun. 14 elections on a platform of moderation, stating at the ballot box that he had “come to kill extremism”.

In his public statements he sharply criticised Iran’s inflexible stance on the nuclear issue and called for a more constructive dialogue.

During his tenure as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Iran signed two agreements with the UK, France and Germany to suspend enrichment and reprocessing activities, temporarily and voluntarily, in exchange for technical and economic incentives.

The show of popular force behind Iran’s president-elect is bound to allow the state a degree of flexibility in its negotiations and ability to grant concessions.

In short, if Washington is indeed committed to a diplomatic resolution of the impasse, the time to act is now.

*Reyhaneh Noshiravani is a doctoral candidate at King’s College London, where she studies Iranian foreign policy and Persian Gulf security.

Ethiopia invests more of its resources in hydropower than any other country in Africa. Pictured here is the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, situated in Ethiopia’s Benishangul-Gumuz Region on the Blue Nile. Credit: William Davison/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jul 17 2013 (IPS)

The U.S. and U.K. foreign assistance offices are being accused of ignoring, mischaracterising or downplaying testimony offered by ethnic communities in Ethiopia who accuse the Addis Ababa government of forcefully evicting them from their lands and violating their human rights in the name of mass development projects.

Despite multiple fact-finding missions to affected communities by USAID and DFID, the U.S. and U.K. foreign aid arms, both governments have repeatedly found the accusations of abuse to be unsubstantiated.“This whole idea of a ‘Renaissance state’ is taking place at a huge cost, being borne especially by the indigenous communities." -- Anuradha Mittal of the Oakland Institute

Yet according to recordings of some of the mission meetings, published Wednesday by the Oakland Institute, a U.S. watchdog group, officials from both agencies appear to have received repeated testimony of abuse allegations at the hands of the Ethiopian government. (The reports can be found here and here.)

“Transcripts of these recordings, made public with this report, leave no room for doubt that the donor agencies were given highly credible first-hand accounts of serious human rights violations during their field investigation and they have chosen to steadfastly ignore these accounts,” Will Hurd, the author of one of the new reports and a local NGO worker and translator who made the recordings, writes.

“According to a high-up official in USAID, the USAID member of the field visit party reported that the accounts of human rights abuses heard in the Omo were all ‘third-hand.’ It is clear from the transcripts, however, that many were first-hand.”

The recordings were made during a January 2012 mission to the Lower Omo Valley, in southwestern Ethiopia.

“These transcripts show that these delegations heard quite a lot,” Anuradha Mittal, the executive director at the Oakland Institute, told IPS. “These donor governments now need to take responsibility for their inaction, to look critically at these questionable development policies.”

While no formal report has ever been publicly released by either USAID or DFID following the January 2012 mission or a follow-up in November, IPS was able to see a leaked copy of a four-page joint briefing that followed the January discussions (no report was leaked following the November mission).

That report notes the mission members were offered allegations of “rape of women and … a young boy”, “use of force and intimidation with the presence of the ‘military’”, and “Government threats including ‘sell your cattle or we will inject and kill them’”, among others.

The report concludes: “As a consequence of these events the Mursi and Bodi [local ethnic communities] in particular stated that they were living in fear, resorting to other food sources or going hungry. The phrase ‘waiting to die’ was used. Although these allegations are extremely serious they could not be substantiated by this visit.”

This last phrase was bolded and underlined, and further follow-up was recommended.

According to the Oakland Institute, USAID and DFID subsequently reported this conclusion to the Development Assistance Group, comprised of 26 of the world’s largest aid and development agencies, including the United Nations Development Programme, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

In March, the World Bank’s Inspection Panel cited evidence that the institution may be supporting Ethiopian “villagisation” programmes and requested an investigation into the matter, though Addis Ababa officials have since refused to cooperate.

Additional information on the villagisation process can be found here. Neither USAID nor DFID responded to request for comment for this story by deadline.

Renaissance

Over the past two decades, Ethiopia has emerged as a rising economic powerhouse. This has prompted international donors to heap praise and aid monies on the country in the hopes that it can help to anchor the restive Horn of Africa and lead what has been referred to as an “African Renaissance”.

In recent years, this support has translated into around 3.5 billion dollars annually in various types of aid, comprising more than half of the country’s budget. Yet that assistance has in part bolstered a series of aggressive, far-reaching national development plans put in place by Ethiopia’s long-time former leader, Meles Zenawi.

These include contested hydroelectric dams and massive agricultural plantations, for which mass land-clearing programmes have threatened to drive an estimated 260,000 locals off their lands, to be forcibly resettled in other areas – the process known as “villagisation”.

Although Meles died last year, new Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn has made clear that his government would work to continue the development programme underway.

According to the recordings released by the Oakland Institute and other testimony gathered by rights groups in the past, the “villagisation” project has translated into an at times vicious programme of violence and intimidation against local communities, often perpetrated by the Ethiopian security forces.

“The Ethiopian government comes and takes up all our land and gives us violence, and they rape our wives,” one Mursi man can be heard telling the USAID and DFID officials during a meeting near the South Omo community of Hailewuha.

Another Mursi man warned: “We are only waiting for death. This land is being ploughed by the government.”

According to Hurd’s account, this particular meeting became quite heated. He states that the U.S. and U.K. officials present appeared to want to focus on development issues – what services the local communities wanted from the government, for instance – but that Mursi representatives kept steering the discussion back towards the abuses they said were being perpetrated by the government.

‘Obviously unacceptable’

It appears clear that the officials were moved by the testimony they heard.

“[O]bviously we agree that it’s unacceptable, beatings and rapes and lack of consultation and proper compensation,” a DFID representative stated at one point. “I totally agree … and would raise very strongly with the government as the wrong way to do this. It just simply is wrong. It simply is wrong. Obviously, we totally agree and it’s worrying to hear about those things.”

While it is unknown how strongly either delegation has since pushed these points with the Ethiopian government, the final decision on the part of both governments – that such allegations are impossible to substantiate – continues to stand as official policy. In any event, critics are warning that neither the villagisation processes nor the Western aid funding have changed in any meaningful way.

“This evidence clearly shows how these aid agencies are both directly and indirectly providing funding for a government that has been a human rights abuser with regards to its development policies,” the Oakland Institute’s Mittal told IPS.

“This whole idea of a ‘Renaissance state’ is taking place at a huge cost, being borne especially by the indigenous communities – and USAID and DFID are responsible for fuelling these policies.”

A man holds his ill son in Basra, Iraq shortly after his young daughter had died of cancer. The picture was taken in February 2011. The boy died of cancer a few months later. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Sudeshna Chowdhury
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 17 2013 (IPS)

A long-awaited study on congenital birth defects by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Ministry of Health (MOH) in Iraq is expected to be very extensive in nature.

According to WHO, 10,800 households were selected as a sample size for the study, which was scheduled to be released early this year but  has not yet been made public."There is reason why a group of very smart scientists are not exploring the 'why' question in their study.” -- Susanne Soederberg, Canada research chair at Queen’s University

Many scientists and experts have started questioning the time delay in publishing the study, but there is another aspect that is a cause for concern among some health experts.

The report will not examine the link between the prevalence of birth defects and use of depleted uranium (DU) munitions used during the war and occupation in Iraq, according to WHO.

A by-product of the uranium enrichment process, DU is prized by the military for its use in ammunition that can punch through walls and armoured tanks. The main problem, experts say, is that DU munitions vaporise on contact, generating dust that is easily inhaled into the lungs.

The WHO study will also not consider pollutants such as lead and mercury as factors or variables, Syed Jaffar Hussain, representative and head of mission for the WHO in Iraq, told IPS.

According to WHO, establishing a link between the prevalence of congenital birth defects and exposure to DU would require further research by competent agencies or institutions.

Discussion and preparation for the study that started in mid-2011 was conducted in the wake of reports and individual studies conducted in Iraq which found a significant increase in the prevalence of congenital birth defects, says WHO.

Previous studies also pointed at some kind of correlation between metal pollutants, possibly DU used in 2003 and 2004 during the U.S. military attacks in Fallujah, with congenital birth defects in the region.

However, the causes will not be part of the MOH and WHO study. And this is what has invited criticism from some health experts and scientists.

Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, an environmental toxicologist based in Michigan, who along with her team had published papers on congenital birth defects in Iraq, said that for the WHO to not consider uranium and metal pollutants as a causal element of birth defects is “worrying”.

“I think this is going to be one of the big weaknesses of the report given that previous studies have shown links between pollutants and birth defects,” she said. “It would have been very logical for them to have carried out the analysis by collecting human samples and environmental samples and analysing if they have metals or pollutants.”

Previous studies

Large quantities of DU weaponry were used in Iraq during the war by the US and UK armed forces, according to a report released earlier this year by a Dutch NGO.

Another report titled “Metal Contamination and the Epidemic of Congenital Birth Defects in Iraqi Cities” suggests that the bombardment of Al Basrah and Fallujah may have “exacerbated public exposure to metals, possibly culminating in the current epidemic of birth defects”.

The genetic damage and cancer rates in Fallujah is worse than that seen among survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, according to another report published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

In one study, uranium and other contaminants were found in hair from the parents of children with congenital anomalies in Fallujah.

To not look into uranium “is an important omission”, said Keith Baverstock, a former health and radiation adviser to the WHO.

There is absolutely no doubt that DU is toxic if it becomes systemic and gets into the bloodstream, Baverstock told IPS. The question with respect to its military use is “under what circumstances can it become systemic?” he said.

As far as risk posed by DU in general is concerned, Baverstock believes that WHO has miserably failed to assess risks posed by DU. “There is no doubt in my mind that the upper management of WHO failed to fulfill their obligations to examine the public health implications of DU,” he said.

In another study, Human Rights Now (HRN), a Tokyo-based international human rights organisation, conducted a fact-finding mission in Fallujah earlier this year. The mission recorded birth defect incidences first-hand over a one-month period in February 2013, and conducted interviews with doctors and parents of children born with birth defects in Fallujah.

“[The] epidemic of congenital birth defects in Iraq needs immediate international attention,” Kazuko Ito, secretary general of HRN, told IPS.

“DU is one of the possible causes, even if it has not yet been proved as the very cause of problem,” Ito said. “WHO does not provide a reasonable explanation why it is fair to opt out of this issue.”

HRN sent its report to both the U.S. and UK governments. The British Ministry of Defence, in its reply, said that there is no reliable scientific evidence to suggest that DU is responsible for post-conflict incidences of ill health among civilian populations and that DU can be used in weapons, according to UK policy.

Remediation measures

Immediate intervention in the affected areas is paramount at this point, said Saeed Dastgiri, Department of Community and Family Medicine School of Medicine, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences in Iran.

Neural tube defects in Fallujah and Al-Ramadi are about 2.6, 3.4, 3.8, 4.7 and 6.7 times higher than that reported from Cuba, Norway, China, Iran and Hungary, respectively, Dastgiri told IPS. They are also 3.2 times higher than that estimated for the global population, he added.

However, John Pierce Wise Sr, director of the Maine Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health at University of Southern Maine, is of the opinion that WHO’s decision to first determine the prevalence before delving into the cause is not illogical.

“Such a design would be slow as it would take a while before one got to the root cause, but it is not illogical as logic does say one has to identify that there is a problem before one seeks to identify what the cause of the problem is,” he said.

While DU’s impact in causing birth defects is still not clear within the scientific community, Wise said that if there is data that point towards elements that are causing the birth defects, it seems more humane to design the study to tackle both issues together.

If the problem is identified then those children who are conceived can be protected by avoiding the problem, Wise added.

But Susanne Soederberg, a professor and Canada research chair at Queen’s University who is also waiting for the study to be published, did not mince words.

“I strongly believe that the WHO, like most international organisations, is not a neutral body, but is influenced by the geopolitical powers of its members,” she told IPS. “So, yes, there is reason why a group of very smart scientists are not exploring the ‘why’ question in their study.”

Britain has agreed to compensate Kenyans tortured during the Mau Mau uprising against colonial rule in the 1950s, Foreign Secretary William Hague said Thursday.

Hague expressed “sincere regret” that the abuses had taken place and told parliament the government would pay a total of 30.8 million dollar to 5,228 clients represented by a British law firm.

A lawyer for the victims said on Wednesday the settlement had been agreed without disclosing the sum.

“(The negotiations) have included everybody with sufficient evidence of torture. And that number is about 5,200,” Kenyan lawyer Paul Muite said.

Negotiations began after a London court ruled in October that three elderly Kenyans, who suffered castration, rape and beatings while in detention during a crackdown by British forces and their Kenyan allies in the 1950s, could sue Britain.

The torture took place during the so-called Kenyan Emergency of 1952-1960, when fighters from the Mau Mau movement attacked British targets, causing panic among white settlers.

Al Jazeera’s Peter Greste, reporting from the Kenyan capital Nairobi, said Britain would also pay for a special memorial to be erected at the site where the abuses took place.

He said that since the case was settled out of court, it would not set a legal precedent for future claims of compensation for abuses during colonial rule. But he added that it could set a “moral precedent” for other victims to step up.

‘Pain and grievance’

The 30.8 million dollars in compensation would work out at 5,891 dollars per claimant in a country where average national income per capita is 821 dollars.

The foreign office said in last month’s statement that “there should be a debate about the past”.

“It is an enduring feature of our democracy that we are willing to learn from our history,” the statement said.

“We understand the pain and grievance felt by those, on all sides, who were involved in the divisive and bloody events of the Emergency period in Kenya.”

In a test case, claimants Paulo Muoka Nzili, Wambugu Wa Nyingi and Jane Muthoni Mara last year told Britain’s High Court how they were subjected to torture and sexual mutilation.

Lawyers said that Nzili was castrated, Nyingi severely beaten and Mara subjected to appalling sexual abuse in detention camps during the Mau Mau rebellion.

A fourth claimant, Susan Ngondi, has died since legal proceedings began.

The Mau Mau nationalist movement originated in the 1950s among the Kikuyu people of Kenya. Its loyalists advocated violent resistance to British domination of the country.

The Kenya Human Rights Commission has estimated 90,000 Kenyans were killed or maimed and 160,000 detained during the uprising.

‘Triumph’

London tried for three years to block the Mau Mau veterans’ legal action in the courts, drawing condemnation from the elderly torture victims who accused Kenya’s former colonial master of using legal technicalities to fight the case.

Caroline Elkins, a Harvard history professor who acted as an expert witness in the case launched in 2009, said the settlement would be the first of its kind for the former British Empire.

“(It) should be seen as a triumph,” Elkins told Reuters during a visit to Nairobi for the British announcement.

Elkins wrote the book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya which served as the basis for the Mau Mau case.

Britain had first said that responsibility for events during the Mau Mau uprising passed to Kenya upon its independence in 1963, an argument which London courts rejected.

* Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is one of the most vociferous advocates of a world free of nuclear weapons.

The lack of publicity stands in contrast to the strong public stand taken by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who has consistently called for the total elimination of nuclear weapons. Credit: Bomoon Lee/IPS

“Nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation are not utopian ideals,” he says. “They are critical to global peace and security.”

Still, the Group of 77, the largest single coalition of 132 developing countries, implicitly accuses the United Nations of falling short in its efforts to publicise a meeting on nuclear disarmament scheduled to take place Sep. 26.

Ambassador Peter Thomson of Fiji, the G77 chair, last week described the upcoming talks as “the first-ever high level meeting of the General Assembly on nuclear disarmament.”

He said the meeting is of importance to developing nations, and therefore, all efforts should be made to give it timely and wide publicity.

A G77 delegate told IPS the conference is not getting the advance publicity it should, probably because three of the big powers, the United States, UK and France, are not supportive of the meeting.

“We have not seen anything on the high level meeting so far,” he added.

The lack of coverage stands in contrast to the strong public stand taken by the secretary-general, who has consistently called for the total elimination of nuclear weapons.

Asked about the significance of the upcoming meeting, Dr. John Burroughs, executive director of the New York-based Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, told IPS the meeting is a chance for world leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama and others, to give direction to the nuclear disarmament enterprise, “which is now drifting aimlessly despite much rhetoric over the past five years.”

“Of course they should reassert that the global elimination of nuclear weapons is a shared aim of the international community,” he said.

But they can and should do more, he said, specifically to set in motion concrete, multilateral processes to achieve that objective.

“If there can be a Nuclear Security Summit process, focused on securing nuclear materials, why can there not be a Nuclear Disarmament Summit Process?” he asked.

Or definitive action could be taken to overcome the 16-year deadlock in the Conference on Disarmament, if necessary by establishing a separate process, Dr Burroughs said.

The resolution calling for the high-level meeting, which was sponsored by Indonesia and the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement, was adopted last December in the General Assembly by a vote of 179 to none against, with four abstentions (Israel, and three of the five permanent members of the Security Council, namely France, UK and the United States).

The other two permanent members, China and Russia, voted for the resolution.

All five permanent members are the world’s five declared nuclear powers, with India, Pakistan, Israel, and more recently North Korea, outside the P-5 nuclear club.

In an explanation of his country’s decision to abstain on the vote, Guy Pollard, deputy permanent representative of the UK, told delegates last December, “We question the value of holding a high-level meeting (HLM) of the General Assembly on nuclear disarmament when there are already sufficient venues for such discussion.”

He cited the General Assembly’s First Committee (on Disarmament), the U.N. Disarmament Commission, and the Conference on Disarmament.

“We are puzzled about how such a HLM will further the goals of the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) Action Plan that was agreed by consensus in 2010,” Pollard said.

“In our view,” he said, “this roadmap of actions offers the best way of taking forward the multilateral nuclear disarmament agenda, along with related issues.”

“We continue to believe that nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament are mutually reinforcing and therefore regret that this high level meeting doesn’t treat both of these aspects in a balanced manner,” Pollard said.

Meanwhile, in a new study released last month, George Perkovich, director of the Nuclear Policy Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, points out one of the few ways that President Obama could restore confidence in U.S. intentions would be to update the declaration of the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. security policy, including in defence of its allies.

“In his searching Nobel Peace Prize speech (in December 2009), Obama recognised the occasional inescapability of war and the imperative of waging it justly,” Perkovich said.

So, too, Obama now could examine how the ongoing existence of nuclear arsenals, even if temporary, can be reconciled with the moral-strategic imperative to prevent their use, says the study titled “Do Unto Others: Toward a Defensible Nuclear Doctrine.”

“The president could articulate a limited framework for the legitimate use of nuclear weapons that the United States believes would be defensible for others to follow as long as nuclear weapons remain,” it says.

Such a nuclear policy, says Perkovich, could then be conveyed in the U.S. Defence Department’s Quadrennial Posture Review, which is due later this year.

Dr. Burroughs told IPS that non-nuclear weapon states have been doing their best to create opportunities to set a clear course on disarmament.

At the initiative of Austria, Mexico and Norway, the General Assembly in 2012 established an open-ended working group on taking forward proposals on multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations, scheduled to meet for three weeks this summer in Geneva.

Norway hosted a conference in Oslo in March on the humanitarian impact of nuclear explosions.

And Indonesia and the Non-Aligned Movement proposed the resolution last year that scheduled the September high-level meeting on nuclear disarmament.

“However, the P-5 in the Security Council have been recalcitrant. So far they have said they will not participate in the open-ended working group,” said Dr. Burroughs.

They also declined the invitation to participate in the Oslo meeting. And last year the UK, the United States, and France, along with Israel, abstained on the resolution scheduling the high-level meeting, expressing doubt as to its value, he added.

“So the personal engagement of heads of state/government and foreign ministers is clearly necessary,” Burroughs said.

At lower levels, the Permanent Five officials have been floundering, he added.

“Unless there is a change of tune coming from the very top, the September meeting will turn out to be a fruitless exercise,” he said.

The crisis on the Korean peninsula should be a wake-up call.

The nuclear threats exchanged by North Korea and the United States have once again laid bare an often underappreciated fact, the unacceptable risks arising from reliance on nuclear weapons.

In September, P-5 leaders and other governments possessing nuclear arsenals should seize the moment to signal clearly, to their own governments as well as to the world, that they will now engage constructively with non-nuclear weapon states on a process for the global elimination of nuclear weapons, he said.

Parliamentarians, mayors, and civil society groups working for a nuclear weapons-free world should also take advantage of this global platform, which surprisingly is the first time a General Assembly high-level meeting will be held on nuclear disarmament, Dr Burroughs said.

Environmentalists and others here are reacting with concern to a surprise announcement on Monday of a major deal that would see U.S. natural gas exported to the United Kingdom, marking the first time that such sales have been permitted.

The agreement, between the UK energy company Centrica and the U.S.-based Cheniere Energy Partners, would see more than 1.7 million metric tonnes of liquefied natural gas (LNG) per year shipped to the United Kingdom, starting in 2018. The U.K.’s gas supply has been extremely tight this winter, and the new sales would satisfy requirements for around 1.8 million British homes.Increasing demand via exports for a dirty, dangerous process is not something we think is a good idea.

The deal would mark the first time that the U.S. government has allowed any of the country’s booming natural gas production to be sold to state that does not have a free trade agreement with Washington. While 19 other permits have been allowed to countries with such agreements, only one, South Korea, has engaged in any significant U.S. gas imports.

Critics warn that the industry in the U.S. remains too unregulated and that exports will cause a spike in domestic gas prices. In recent months, the debate over exports has become highly divisive.

“We cannot guarantee that drilling occurs safely in the United States, because there is neither the science to justify nor do states enforce what regulations do exist,” Alan Septoff, the Washington-based director of communications for Earthworks, an advocacy group, told IPS. “Increasing demand via exports for a dirty, dangerous process is not something we think is a good idea.”

The Centrica deal comes after the U.S. Department of Energy published a commissioned study that found, among other things, that the negative economic impact of LNG exports on the United States would be negligible. Yet critics say the study failed to look at either environmental or health impacts, while downplaying the effect on poor and middle-class communities.

“We have problems with this study and have called on the Department of Energy to conduct another study that incorporates environmental and health assessments,” Jenny Chang, a campaigner with the Sierra Club, an advocacy group, told IPS.

She notes that some 200,000 people wrote the Department of Energy to criticise the report (the Sierra Club has published an exhaustive study here).

“But now that the department has finished its part of the bargain, there’s nothing stopping them from issuing more permits,” she continues, “even though doing so may not be in the public’s interest.”

Pressing decisions

Centrica is cautioning that the contract still hinges on Cheniere receiving “necessary regulatory approvals”. But according to a statement put out by the company on Monday, British Prime Minister David Cameron is already extending his “warm welcome” to the new deal, stating, “Future gas supplies from the U.S. will help diversify our energy mix and provide British consumers with a new long-term, secure and affordable source of fuel.”

Indeed, although the Centrica deal would be the largest agreement of its kind so far, it is also almost certainly only the beginning of a massive exports push. The Department of Energy reportedly has 21 pending LNG-export permit requests, constituting around 45 percent of the country’s gas production.

Of course, all of this is taking place in the context of a massively altered energy landscape in the United States, which is thought to have more extensive gas resources than any other country. Over the past five years, powered by new extraction techniques known as hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”), U.S. engineers have been able to extricate previously unreachable natural gas, much of it trapped in shale and other geologic formations.

From 2007 to 2012, gas production in the U.S. increased by 25 percent, with dramatic domestic effects. The cost of energy in the country has fallen, with some experts suggesting this helped stabilise the country’s economy following the 2008 international economic crisis.

More controversially, natural gas – which burns cleaner than coal and other petroleum products – has been touted as a “greener” energy solution, helping in part to bring U.S. greenhouse gas emissions down to 1990s-era levels.

Yet critics point to mounting evidence of environmental and public health issues cropping up in local communities near the thousands of wells that have gone into production over the past half-decade. In addition, the methane that tends to seep out of these wells during production is particularly potent in causing climate change.

As the United States has thus far refused to allow any major sales of its new gas reserves, however, the international ramifications of this sea change are only now starting to be understood.

Opponents of the push for exports highlight two main concerns: economics and environmental impact. First, if significant U.S. gas reserves were to enter the international market, the domestic price would almost certainly increase in response.

Second, the hydraulic fracturing industry here remains unusually unregulated, largely because politicians have yet to agree on how to deal with what remains a new – but extremely lucrative – technology. Critics say that politicians still don’t have a handle on either the impact of hydraulic fracturing on groundwater or on the extent that the technique is resulting in increased methane emissions.

In an open letter sent in mid-March to President Barack Obama, Earthworks and the Sierra Club joined with other groups to call for an “open and informed national conversation to test whether [gas exports] are actually in the public interest.” They also stated that, “Deciding whether and how to move forward with LNG exports is among the most pressing environmental and energy policy decisions facing the nation.”

Regulatory progress

In recent days, both regulatory and political processes on this issue have progressed.

On Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced the formation of a new advisory council, made up of 31 external experts, that will now formally look into the effects of fracking on drinking water. And on Friday, Senator Ron Wyden announced he was starting work on a new legislative bill that would aim to find common ground on natural gas exports and hydraulic fracturing.

Finally, in a major but polarising new initiative, last week also saw the opening of a new institute that has brought together some environmental groups and some major oil producers, including Chevron and Shell.

The Center for Sustainable Shale Development says it has already established “15 initial performance standards designed to ensure safe and environmentally responsible development” of shale gas, which will be used to offer “independent, third-party certification” of gas wells, including ensuring the use of certain methane-trapping technologies and techniques.

The iconic statue of a knotted gun barrel outside U.N. headquarters was created by Swedish artist Fredrik Reuterswärd and is titled "Non-Violence". Credit: Tressia Boukhors/IPS

By George Gao
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 22 2013 (IPS)

The U.N. organ tasked with maintaining international peace and security harbours a serious conflict at its core.

The Security Council’s five permanent members (P5) – United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom and France – along with Germany, are the world’s six leading arms exporters, often shipping weapons used to perpetuate violence across the globe.

Meanwhile, over 150 member states have gathered at U.N. headquarters, from Mar. 18-28, to negotiate an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). If signed into law, this unprecedented rulebook may help regulate the international flow of arms, and curtail the arms’ potential for abuse.

According to Amnesty International – a human rights group that has journeyed two decades for a legally binding ATT – P5 weapons exports have fuelled a throng of human rights violations.

But some members of the Security Council are tough negotiators, hoping to water down the treaty and continue profiting from its loopholes. The U.S., China and Russia, for example, prevented the treaty from moving forward when the ATT was last negotiated in July 2012.

“They’ve got two interests at hand,” said Widney Brown, senior director of international law and policy at Amnesty International.

“One is all the profits they’re making from their engagement in traded arms… the other is their responsibility as permanent members of the Security Council for maintaining international peace and security,” she told IPS.

“In this negotiation, (the P5) are being called out,” said Brown. “In the end, are they going to be willing to put profits aside and create a strong treaty?”

Gathering momentum and moving roadblocks

Anna MacDonald, head of arms control at Oxfam, told IPS that nations leading the charge for a strong ATT include Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Nigeria, Ghana, Gambia, New Zealand, and “to a certain extent” the U.K. and Germany.

Asked about the U.K. – a P5 member and one of seven co-authors of the 2006 resolution that brought ATT talks to the U.N. – MacDonald said, “We do think the U.K. is (being) pressured from other members of the P5 to compromise their position.”

However, proponents of a strong ATT have gathered momentum. MacDonald noted that in the first few days of negotiations, at least 116 member states signed onto a joint statement pushing for a strong ATT.

Additionally, at least 69 member states signed for the ATT to include ammunition, and over 40 signed for sustainable development.

And as of Thursday afternoon, 59 countries signed onto a joint statement for the ATT to address gender-based violence. “That one is snowballing,” said MacDonald.

She noted that the same countries that pushed for an outcome document in the just-concluded 57th session on the Commission on the Status of Women – which focused on ending violence against women and girls – continued pushing for gender-based violence to be addressed in the ATT.

“It really demonstrates cross-regional majority support to get the text right,” she said.

Natalie J. Goldring, senior fellow in the Center for Peace and Security Studies (CSS) at Georgetown University, told IPS, “We’re seeing countries work in coalitions much more effectively than they did in July.”

Goldring explained that the “so-called sceptics” who were making rhetorical statements during negotiations in July are now approaching ATT talks more productively.

These member states include Pakistan, Iran, and “to a certain extent” India and Algeria.

“They’re still sceptical,” added Goldring, “and some of the changes would undermine the treaty in various ways and shouldn’t be accepted, but they’re engaging in a different way.”

Asked about China, MacDonald of Oxfam told IPS, “China began with a very negative attitude towards the arms trade treaty; they’ve abstained in resolutions in the past few years.”

This time around, China is more cooperative in the negotiating process, said MacDonald, but Beijing is still pushing for certain loopholes.

“For example, there is a loophole in the current text which would allow weapons if they are ‘gifted’ to not be subject to the same assessment and risk assessment process,” explained MacDonald.

“If you say it’s a gift, it’s not assessed. This is currently the way in which China transfers quite a lot of weapons to Africa, so it’s quite important that gifts are subject to the same procedures,” she added.

On Russia, MacDonald said, “We’d be quite surprised if Russia signed onto this treaty. However, we certainly hope they won’t block it.”

Sacrificing consensus for strength

Many delegates and civil society leaders argue that they would rather have a strong treaty signed onto by a majority of member states rather than a watered down treaty agreed upon by consensus.

Even if a strong treaty is not agreed upon during this round of negotiations, “there’s a provision in the latest resolution… that will allow it to go to the General Assembly and be voted through,” explained MacDonald.

“Weak treaties are rarely improved over time. Even if they achieve universal signature, they don’t transform situations,” she explained.

“Strong high standards will affect behaviour even if there are states that don’t sign on,” she added, noting that governments do not like being held accountable by other governments for “flouting high customary standards”.

Goldring added, “The history of negotiations and treaties at the U.N. is one in which countries have had grave difficulty improving those treaties and making them robust, once they’ve been agreed,” noting that the decision between consensus and strength is still not an easy choice.

Governments, however, can still sign onto a treaty at a later time.

New instruments to regulate arms

Goldring explained that a strong ATT would call on member states to monitor and assess what weapons are entering, passing through and leaving their borders, including transactions made by private companies.

Brown of Amnesty International told IPS, that a strong ATT should set up international norms, as well as a peer mechanism for monitoring those norms.

“Because (arms exporters) are competing for the same market, there will be a lot of pressure among them to abide by these norms when they’re there,” she explained.

“What we have now without any norms is a race to the bottom,” she added, citing that exporters sell arms to whomever they want.

If norms are established through the ATT, than “if you think of (exporters) as salespeople in a market, they’re going to pressure each other to all follow the agreed rules,” she noted.

The final stretch of a long run

After a week of gruelling negotiations, from 8 AM to midnight, a new ATT draft treaty is slated to emerge on the eve of Friday, Mar. 22, said MacDonald.

This draft is expected to contain significant changes, and it precedes a third draft on Wednesday, Mar. 27. Civil society members and U.N. delegates will pour over its text, paragraph by paragraph, for one final week of negotiations.

Chinese tanks in formation at Shenyang training base in China. Credit: public domain

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 18 2013 (IPS)

After ranking ahead of Japan as the world’s second largest economy, China has reached another milestone: displacing the UK as the world’s fifth largest arms supplier.

In a new study released Monday, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said, “This is the first time China has been in the top five arms exporters since the end of the Cold War (in 1992).”

Asked how Chinese arms compare with some of the more sophisticated Western weapons systems, Dr. Paul Holtom, senior researcher and director of the Arms Transfers Programme at SIPRI, told IPS, “It is perhaps also more pertinent to ask how Chinese weapons for export compare to those being offered by Russia, Ukraine etc. as it is with these suppliers that China is likely to be a rival in the short-to medium-term.”

Holtom said the profile of China’s recipients remains predominantly lower income states in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and the Americas.

China’s rise has been driven primarily by large-scale arms acquisitions by Pakistan, a country once described by a Chinese delegate as “our Israel”.

The United States is currently the largest supplier of weapons to Israel, a longtime political, economic and military ally, which is heavily protected against any forms of sanctions in the Security Council.

According to SIPRI, the five largest suppliers of major conventional weapons during the five-year period 2008-12 were the United States (30 percent of global arms exports), Russia (26 percent), Germany (seven percent), France (six percent) and China (five percent).

This is the first time that the UK has not been in the top five since at least 1950, the earliest year covered by SIPRI data.

Overall, the volume of international transfers of major conventional weapons grew by 17 percent between 2003-2007 and between 2008-12, according to the study.

Traditionally, the world’s five major arms exporters have been the five permanent members of the Security Council, the only U.N. body with the power to declare war and peace.

Germany, currently the third largest arms supplier, is a not a permanent member of the Security Council, but the UK is.

Besides being an exporter, China was also a key arms importer during the period 2008-12

Asia and Oceania accounted for almost half (47 percent) of global imports of major conventional weapons.

The top five importers of major conventional weapons worldwide were India (12 per cent of global imports), China (six percent), Pakistan (five percent), South Korea (five percent), and Singapore (four percent) – all in Asia.

These sales come at a time of heightening tensions over territorial disputes in the East and South China seas.

Asked if most developing countries were attracted to Chinese weapons due to discounted prices, or due to the fact that Beijing does not lay down political conditions, including human rights standards, Holtom told IPS it is difficult to definitively say what the main attraction is.

Cost and also the terms of the arrangements – e.g. long-term low interest loans, barter etc. – will obviously be an important element in procurement considerations, he pointed out.

The issue of “security of supply” could also be a factor.

From the perspective of some analysts in Moscow, for example, the decision to include S-300 SAM systems in the scope of the Russian arms embargo on Iran damaged Russia’s reputation with regards to a “secure source of arms supplies” and there is a fear that China will be a beneficiary of this.

Holtom said Wikileaks, the online organisation known to publish classified documents, indicates that Chinese companies are also sensitive to issues of human rights concerns and pressure from the United States.

“But it is likely to still be regarded as a ‘secure source of arms supplies’ compared with some of the other major suppliers that assess arms export against a wider range of criteria than China – e.g. European Union member states apply the eight criteria of the EU Common Position relating to serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law, impact on conflict and instability and diversion risks,” he said.

He said China’s three principles on arms sales are: contribution to the self-defence capability of the recipient state; not harming the peace, security and stability of the region or world; non-interference in the recipient country’s internal affairs.

Holtom also pointed out there have been very significant developments with regards to the Chinese arms industry since the reforms of the late 1990s.

However, he said it is perhaps important to stress that some sectors are able to deliver more advanced systems than others, and that there is also a difference between systems that are being produced for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and those that are being produced for export.

The items that feature in SIPRI data on deliveries remain low-cost and dated systems, such as the F-7 combat aircraft.

However, the JF-17/FC-1 has been developed and delivered to Pakistan and this has been an important factor for China’s rise in the SIPRI statistics and there is interest from a number of states.

Like the J-10 combat aircraft, these items contain Russian components that could come into play with regards to export prospects and competition.

With regards to battle tanks, armoured vehicles, artillery, frigates, anti-ship missiles and Man Portable Air Defence Systems (MANPADS), China has secured some clients that are perhaps attracted by the lower costs of these items and anecdotally there are comments that both the equipment, terms of the deals and training are improving.

A billboard in Yilan County, Taiwan asks voters to not let Yilan become another Fukushima. Credit: Dennis Engbarth/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Mar 12 2013 (IPS)

Two years after Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the country faces 100 to 250 billion dollars in cleanup and compensation costs, tens of thousands of displaced people and widespread impacts of radiation.

The nuclear industry and its suppliers made billions from building and operating Fukushima’s six reactors, but it is the Japanese government and its citizens who are stuck with all the costly “fallout” of the disaster.The laws in Canada and Japan are designed to protect the nuclear companies, not the people living near their reactors.

“People’s lives were destroyed and we will be paying trillions of yen in tax money because of the Fukushima disaster,” said Hisayo Takada, an energy campaigner with Greenpeace Japan.

“The nuclear industry, other than Tepco (Tokyo Electric Power Co), has paid nothing as they are specially protected by the law,” Takada told IPS.

On Mar. 11, 2011, Japan experienced a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and resulting tsunami that badly damaged Tepco’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Three of six reactors suffered a meltdown, and reactor unit four was damaged. The Fukushima accident has been rated at the highest level (7) of the International Atomic Energy Agency scale, the same as the Chernobyl accident.

A year after the disaster, Tepco was taken over by the Japanese government because it couldn’t afford the costs to get the damaged reactors under control. By June of 2012, Tepco had received nearly 50 billion dollars from the government.

The six reactors were designed by the U.S. company General Electric (GE). GE supplied the actual reactors for units one, two and six, while two Japanese companies Toshiba provided units three and five, and Hitachi unit four. These companies as well as other suppliers are exempted from liability or costs under Japanese law.

Many of them, including GE, Toshiba and Hitachi, are actually making money on the disaster by being involved in the decontamination and decommissioning, according to a report by Greenpeace International.

“The nuclear industry and governments have designed a nuclear liability system that protects the industry, and forces people to pick up the bill for its mistakes and disasters,” says the report, “Fukushima Fallout“.

“If nuclear power is as safe as the industry always claims, then why do they insist on liability limits and exemptions?” asked Shawn-Patrick Stensil, a nuclear analyst with Greenpeace Canada.

Nuclear plant owner/operators in many countries have liability caps on how much they would be forced to pay in case of an accident. In Canada, this liability cap is only 75 million dollars. In the United Kingdom, it is 220 million dollars. In the U.S., each reactor owner puts around 100 million dollars into a no-fault insurance pool. This pool is worth about 10 billion dollars.

“Suppliers are indemnified even if they are negligent,” Stensil told IPS.

Japanese nuclear operators are required to carry 1.5 billion dollars in insurance – not nearly enough for the estimated 100 to 250 billion dollars in decommissioning and liability costs for Fukushima. Suppliers like GE are explicitly exempt from any liability, even if defects in their equipment contributed to the disaster.

“The laws in Canada and Japan are designed to protect the nuclear companies, not the people living near their reactors,” Stensil said.

Radiation levels around Fukushima reactors are still high, too high for humans to work near in some places. The World Health Organisation has warned that one-third of workers face increased risks of cancer. Robots have failed and remote cameras cannot reveal the state of the damaged nuclear fuel. The fuel is still hot and requires massive amounts of water to cool, but the plant is running out of storage space for the radioactive water.

Tepco management acknowledges removal of the 11,000 radioactive fuel assemblies won’t begin until 2021. Decommissioning of the entire plant will take at least 40 years.

“We warned that Japan’s nuclear power plants could be subjected to much stronger earthquakes and much bigger tsunamis than they were designed to withstand,” said Philip White of the Citizens’ Nuclear Information Centre, an NGO based in Tokyo.

“Shockingly, this danger of tsunami-caused meltdowns had been publicised since 2008 in documents issued by the Japan Nuclear Energy Safety Organization, but plant owners effectively ignored this contingency,” said Alexander Likhotal, president of Green Cross International.

“It was the failure of human action to take the proper safety precautions against known, highly possible, natural threats that resulted in such a disaster,” Likhotal said in a statement.

Earthquakes are common in Japan, with nearly 2,500 quakes in the past two years. After Fukushima, all 50 of Japan’s nuclear reactors, supplying 30 percent of all electricity, were shut down. Only two have been restarted.

In the months that followed the disaster, the Japanese government launched an ambitious renewable energy programme and phased out nuclear power. About 3.6 gigawatts of solar, wind and geothermal have been approved so far. The goal is 35 percent renewable energy by 2030.

But with the recent election of conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government, nuclear power is back in favour. Nuclear plant operators who promise to make safety improvements such as airplane crash-resistant, waterproof containment and second control rooms will be allowed to resume operation.

“I don’t think this is logical to do it this way,” said Greenpeace Japan’s Takada.

Two months after he sought refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy, WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange was formally granted asylum by Quito on Thursday.

Julian Assange. Credit: Espen Moe/CC BY 2.0

But with Sweden and the United States pursuing him for potential criminal charges, Assange is unlikely to make his way out of the U.K., which has threatened to break in to the embassy to arrest him.

Assange has been avoiding extradition to Sweden for months, where he is to be questioned over sex assault claims, a mere “attempt to get (him) into a jurisdiction which will then make it easier to extradite (him) to the U.S.,” he told the Sun in December.

The Ecuadorean government said that the decision was taken after the UK, Sweden and the U.S. refused to guarantee that once extradited to Sweden, Assange would not be sent to Washington to face additional charges.

The three countries “would not provide any guarantees that he would not be sent to the U.S. to be tried for political crimes,” Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) told IPS.

“So (Ecuador) had no choice under international law but to grant him asylum,” Weisbrot said.

“We believe (Assange’s) fears are legitimate and that he could face political persecution if the measures are not taken,” Ricardo Patino, Ecuador’s minister of foreign affairs, said Thursday at a press conference in Quito.

The famous hacker, once called a “hi-tech terrorist” by the Barack Obama administration, fears that he would then face other charges for having leaked top-secret information, including 400,000 documents about the Iraq war and U.S. torture of detainees.

He has thus far found refuge in the premises of the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he has been sleeping on an air mattress since June. If he sets foot outside of the building, he will be arrested by the British police, sent to Sweden, and possibly the United States.

Thursday, applause from many of Assange’s supporters could be heard outside of the embassy as news came that Ecuador had granted diplomatic asylum to their Australian refugee.

“I am grateful to the Ecuadorean people, President Rafael Correa and his government. It was not Britain or my home country, Australia, that stood up to protect me from persecution, but a courageous, independent Latin American nation,” Assange wrote on WikiLeaks before posting “Gracias a Ecuador y ustedes” (Thanks to Ecuador and to you) on his Twitter.

If extradited to Washington, the famous whistleblower would likely face heavy charges.

“Assange would risk the severest penalties – life imprisonment or even the death penalty – if he were tried in the U.S.,” Reporters Without Borders’ Delphine Halgand told IPS.

“The resources deployed by the U.S. authorities to track down WikiLeaks activists and supporters and obtain their personal data can only reinforce these concerns,” she said.

But while the announcement of asylum came as good news for Assange and his numerous supporters, it did not change his situation in any way, with the U.K. police now surrounding the embassy in a “menacing show of force”, according to WikiLeaks.

Should Assange attempt to leave his safe haven, he would be arrested before reaching the airport.

“We will not allow Mr. Assange safe passage out of the U.K., nor is there any legal basis for us to do so,” the British foreign secretary said in a statement released Thursday.

“The U.K. does not accept the principle of diplomatic asylum,” the statement read.

London had previously threatened to enter the Ecuadorean embassy to arrest Assange. However, such a move would blatantly infringe on the inviolability of diplomatic premises as defined under the Vienna Convention, according to Michael Ratner, a legal adviser to WikiLeaks.

“The fact that the British – and I was as shocked as anybody – said yesterday that they might invade the embassy to get their hands on Julian Assange is an incredible violation of international law that is unheard of,” he told Democracy Now.

“I mean, think about the Chinese going into the U.S. embassy to get Chen out in China… This is unheard of in law, it’s unheard of in diplomacy, and it’s an outrageous and egregious undermining of the right of a country to give asylum,” Ratner added.

Other legal experts doubt the UK would actually follow through on such threats.

“(The UK) mentioned revoking diplomatic status for the embassy… Too legally risky in my view,” Carl Gardner, a former lawyer for the British government, told IPS.

If he still refuses to surrender, Assange has two options – holing up in his hideout or trying to reach an airport via an embassy vehicle, which would very likely lead to his arrest.

“I’d be tempted to advise him to go to Sweden and defend himself if there’s a trial. I think that’s inevitable in the end. I don’t think I could offer him any hope of a way out,” Gardner told IPS.

But Gardner adds, wryly, that there’s yet another possibility: “Ecuador could name Assange its representative to the United Nations. That would make him immune from arrest while traveling to U.N. meetings around the world.”