Around this time last year, Anders Fogh Rasmussen posed as a man of peace. “There can be no justification for anyone, political movement or state, to perpetrate violence deliberately targeting civilians,” the NATO secretary-general said in an interview with the Tel Aviv daily Haaretz.
If Rasmussen was true to his words, he would be handing himself into the police. A new report by several organisations has presented evidence indicating that NATO categorised civilian areas of Libya as military targets. Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, who helped prepare the report following a visit to Libya, concluded “we have reason to think that there were some war crimes perpetrated”, identifying NATO’s killing of 47 non-combatants in Sirte during September 2011 as an incident of particular concern.
The truth is that Rasmussen is too busy with high politics to fret about the little people of Libya. Near the top of his “to do” list is the preparation of a summit in Chicago slated for May.
Hosting the event in his adopted hometown, Barack Obama will more than likely use the occasion to boost his prospects of re-election by illustrating how the US controls the alliance and is adamant that it continues doing so. The only caveat I wish to add to this prediction is that Obama may be slightly more nuanced in his choice of words.
“Smart defence”
My forecast is based on two documents published in January (as well as America’s general belligerence).
NATO’s annual report says that “smart defence” will be the hot topic in the Windy City. In his preface, Rasmussen implies that “smart defence” involves making the kind of planes and weapons supplied by the US to attack Libya more available to other members of the alliance. In keeping with these straitened times, it is a question of “doing better with less by working more together,” he wrote.
It would be naive to think that “smart defence” will mean any loosening of America’s iron grip over NATO.
The second document aiding me as an amateur clairvoyant comes from the Pentagon and is called “Sustaining US Global Leadership”. Despite containing some mollifying language about finding “partners” throughout the world, this tract effectively threatens both China and Iran with military action. “Sophisticated adversaries”, it warns, will “complicate our operational calculus” by means ranging from cyber warfare to ballistic missiles.
A wet dream for prospectors
The provocative talk is not confined to the Pentagon. In 2010, Hilary Clinton declared that the US had a “national interest” in the South China Sea. “National interest” is a synonym for “economic interest”; with its vast amounts of unexploited gas and oil, the South China Sea is one big wet dream for prospectors.
Duelling with China should be seen as either a key factor behind or the subtext to the wars Obama has inherited, as well as the fresh ones he has initiated or appears intent on declaring (under pressure from his clients in Israel and the Zionist lobby at home).
Trade magazines for the energy industry have been commenting lately about China’s increasing involvement in Central Asia. A gas pipeline between Turkmenistan and China opened in 2009 and has been extended to carry gas from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
All of those countries are in the same neighbourhood as Afghanistan. The official narrative holds that America and NATO’s occupation of Afghanistan is purely a response to how the Taliban sheltered Osama bin Laden. More quietly, the West’s marauders have been plotting to get their paws on Central Asia’s resources.
Shortly before his death in 2010, the diplomat and businessman Richard Holbrooke was examining ways of increasing energy cooperation between Afghanistan and the surrounding region. Considering Holbrooke’s track record, it’s impossible to believe he undertook that work for benevolent reasons; in the 1970s, the same Holbrooke helped keep up the flow of arms to Suharto’s regime in Indonesia. Holbrooke was unperturbed by the likelihood those weapons would assist the genocide being undertaken in East Timor; rather, his assessment was that the US needed to have cordial relations with Indonesia because it was an “important oil producer”.
Attacking any “enemy”, any time
After the Pentagon issued its aforementioned paper, Defence Secretary Leon Panetta bragged about a “bunker-buster” bomb assembled for the US military by Boeing. Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, Panetta said the purpose of this Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) is to “be able to get at any enemy, anywhere”.
His words are indicative of how there has been no change in mindset between the Bush and Obama administrations on foreign policy. As Tariq Ali wrote in his book The Obama Syndrome, the only differences have been in “diplomatic mood music”.
Later this month George W Bush will be decorated with the Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana, Estonia’s highest civil award. Why? Because he helped the country join NATO in 2004.
Estonia is one of 13 former Soviet republics so far used by NATO as transit routes to bring troops and equipment to Afghanistan. Obama wants to go a step further; in the past few weeks, he has promised to support Georgia’s bid for full NATO membership.
The consequence of NATO expansion is that Russia is encircled by its Cold War foe. Just as Russia is feeling the heat, the US is stoking the fires of animosity towards China.
Many of us wept the night Obama was elected. There’s no point in shedding new tears of disappointment. Rage is a better response.
●First published by New Europe, 5-11 February 2012.
Showing posts with label Libya. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Libya. Show all posts
Monday, February 6, 2012
Monday, November 7, 2011
Who killed more: Gaddafi or NATO?
In a 1936 essay Aldous Huxley summarised how warfare relies on dishonesty. “War is enormously discreditable to those who order it to be waged and even to those who merely tolerate its existence,” he wrote. “Furthermore, to developed sensibilities the facts of war are revolting and horrifying. To falsify these facts, and by so doing to make war seem less evil than it really is, and our own responsibility in tolerating war less heavy, is doubly to our advantage. By suppressing and distorting the truth, we protect our sensibilities and preserve our self-esteem.”
Shortly after reading those words, I checked NATO’s website and was greeted with cheerful images of Libyan children returning to school. The message was clear: now that Muammar Gaddafi is dead, the people who lived under his dictatorship can finally breathe easily. The truth, of course, is more sobering.
Yes, Gaddafi did appalling things. Hundreds of people suspected of opposing him “disappeared”. About 1,200 were estimated to have been massacred by his forces at Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison in 1996. The case for bringing him before the International Criminal Court (ICC) was compelling.
But who killed more Libyans: Gaddafi or NATO? While accurate data is impossible to come by, educated guesswork indicates that NATO caused a higher number of civilian deaths over the past six months than Gaddafi did over several decades.
According to estimates from the new Libyan government in September, at least 30,000 had died because of the war. Thomas Mountain, a member of an American group that laid flowers in Tripoli graveyards in 1987 to remember the children bombed at Ronald Reagan’s behest a year earlier, calculated (also in September) that NATO’s 2011 war involved the dropping of 30,000 bombs. Assuming that each bomb killed an average of two civilians, that brings the death toll to 60,000.
Supporting war crimes “all the way”
And what about those Libyan rebels that Catherine Ashton pledged to support “all the way”? When the EU’s foreign policy chief uttered those words during a visit to Benghazi in May, she did not specify what “all the way” meant. Did it include racist attacks on the inhabitants of Tawergha, a small town south of Misrata, who are largely descendants of African slaves? Human Rights Watch has reported in the past fortnight that witnesses and victims interviewed by its researchers provided “credible evidence of Misratan militias shooting and wounding unarmed Tawerghas and torturing detainees, in a few cases to death.” A report in August by Al Jazeera gave prima facie evidence that Ashton’s beloved rebels resorted to ethnic cleansing. It showed a large residential block set ablaze and one of the few remaining civilians left in Tawergha being evicted.
On 23 October, Ashton applauded the announcement of a “day of liberation” and exhorted the construction of a “new Libya based on respect for human rights, the rule of law and democratic principles.” Two days earlier, the decomposing bodies of 53 people were found at the Mahari Hotel in Sirte. They appear to have been Gaddafi supporters, who were executed by Ashton’s rebel friends. Ashton has not yet made a public call for an investigation into their deaths. And why would she? The rebels who seem to have carried out the attacks had been told she supported them “all the way”.
And what exactly happened in Abu Salim hospital in Tripoli? In August, an Al Jazeera TV crew counted 39 dead bodies when it visited this trauma treatment centre. Numerous patients seem to have been killed in fighting between Gadaffi supporters and the rebels. Did any of the men Ashton promised to support carry out these atrocities?
Humanitarian imperialism
And what about the killing of Gadaffi himself? I didn’t shed any tears over his death. But if we are to believe in the universality of human rights and international law, then they must not be applied selectively. There is a term for the deliberate killing of someone who is already in captivity during a conflict, as Gaddafi was. That term is war crime. It would be hypocritical to gloss over that fact, just because the assassination was undertaken by rebels that Ashton supports “all the way”.
Jean Bricmont, a Belgian academic, coined the phrase “humanitarian imperialism” to describe the agenda behind war in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The suffering of civilians in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq has been used as a pretext for military intervention by the US and its European lackeys, in an attempt to divert attention from their ulterior motives. The war against Libya fits that pattern.
Gaddafi had long been a tyrant. But until recently he was “our tyrant”; his rapprochement with the West meant he was a valued customer for our arms dealers. The Italian weapons company Finmeccanica had a backlog of orders worth 800 million euros with his regime when NATO started bombing Libya in March.
Ashton was not known to be troubled by the plight of Libyan civilians when her mentor Tony Blair was cosying up to Gaddafi. She has not expressed any disquiet either about the obscene haste which BP has displayed in trying to wrap its paws around Libyan oil contracts in the post-Gaddafi era. In 2007, that British corporation signed a 900 million dollar deal with the Tripoli authorities for exploiting two wells. Bob Dudley, the chief executive, says “we remain enthused” by their potential now that BP can return to them. You bet he does.
●First published by New Europe, 7 November 2011.
Shortly after reading those words, I checked NATO’s website and was greeted with cheerful images of Libyan children returning to school. The message was clear: now that Muammar Gaddafi is dead, the people who lived under his dictatorship can finally breathe easily. The truth, of course, is more sobering.
Yes, Gaddafi did appalling things. Hundreds of people suspected of opposing him “disappeared”. About 1,200 were estimated to have been massacred by his forces at Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison in 1996. The case for bringing him before the International Criminal Court (ICC) was compelling.
But who killed more Libyans: Gaddafi or NATO? While accurate data is impossible to come by, educated guesswork indicates that NATO caused a higher number of civilian deaths over the past six months than Gaddafi did over several decades.
According to estimates from the new Libyan government in September, at least 30,000 had died because of the war. Thomas Mountain, a member of an American group that laid flowers in Tripoli graveyards in 1987 to remember the children bombed at Ronald Reagan’s behest a year earlier, calculated (also in September) that NATO’s 2011 war involved the dropping of 30,000 bombs. Assuming that each bomb killed an average of two civilians, that brings the death toll to 60,000.
Supporting war crimes “all the way”
And what about those Libyan rebels that Catherine Ashton pledged to support “all the way”? When the EU’s foreign policy chief uttered those words during a visit to Benghazi in May, she did not specify what “all the way” meant. Did it include racist attacks on the inhabitants of Tawergha, a small town south of Misrata, who are largely descendants of African slaves? Human Rights Watch has reported in the past fortnight that witnesses and victims interviewed by its researchers provided “credible evidence of Misratan militias shooting and wounding unarmed Tawerghas and torturing detainees, in a few cases to death.” A report in August by Al Jazeera gave prima facie evidence that Ashton’s beloved rebels resorted to ethnic cleansing. It showed a large residential block set ablaze and one of the few remaining civilians left in Tawergha being evicted.
On 23 October, Ashton applauded the announcement of a “day of liberation” and exhorted the construction of a “new Libya based on respect for human rights, the rule of law and democratic principles.” Two days earlier, the decomposing bodies of 53 people were found at the Mahari Hotel in Sirte. They appear to have been Gaddafi supporters, who were executed by Ashton’s rebel friends. Ashton has not yet made a public call for an investigation into their deaths. And why would she? The rebels who seem to have carried out the attacks had been told she supported them “all the way”.
And what exactly happened in Abu Salim hospital in Tripoli? In August, an Al Jazeera TV crew counted 39 dead bodies when it visited this trauma treatment centre. Numerous patients seem to have been killed in fighting between Gadaffi supporters and the rebels. Did any of the men Ashton promised to support carry out these atrocities?
Humanitarian imperialism
And what about the killing of Gadaffi himself? I didn’t shed any tears over his death. But if we are to believe in the universality of human rights and international law, then they must not be applied selectively. There is a term for the deliberate killing of someone who is already in captivity during a conflict, as Gaddafi was. That term is war crime. It would be hypocritical to gloss over that fact, just because the assassination was undertaken by rebels that Ashton supports “all the way”.
Jean Bricmont, a Belgian academic, coined the phrase “humanitarian imperialism” to describe the agenda behind war in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The suffering of civilians in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq has been used as a pretext for military intervention by the US and its European lackeys, in an attempt to divert attention from their ulterior motives. The war against Libya fits that pattern.
Gaddafi had long been a tyrant. But until recently he was “our tyrant”; his rapprochement with the West meant he was a valued customer for our arms dealers. The Italian weapons company Finmeccanica had a backlog of orders worth 800 million euros with his regime when NATO started bombing Libya in March.
Ashton was not known to be troubled by the plight of Libyan civilians when her mentor Tony Blair was cosying up to Gaddafi. She has not expressed any disquiet either about the obscene haste which BP has displayed in trying to wrap its paws around Libyan oil contracts in the post-Gaddafi era. In 2007, that British corporation signed a 900 million dollar deal with the Tripoli authorities for exploiting two wells. Bob Dudley, the chief executive, says “we remain enthused” by their potential now that BP can return to them. You bet he does.
●First published by New Europe, 7 November 2011.
Monday, September 5, 2011
Projection of US power: the real reason for war in Libya
The reasons why NATO’s official narrative about its war in Libya should not be accepted can be summed up in one word: WikiLeaks.
According to the propaganda from this US-led alliance, Libya was bombed to keep its civilians out of harm’s way. Anyone inclined to believe that blather is advised to read a February 2009 note sent to Hillary Clinton from Ronald Spogli, then about to leave his post as America’s ambassador in Rome.
Spogli’s cable – as made public by Julian Assange’s courageous combo – attaches much importance to the US Africa Command (Africom), which was established under George W Bush’s presidency in 2007. While Africom’s headquarters are in Stuttgart, two of its key offices are in Italy.
“Italy provides a unique geostrategic platform within Europe for US forces, allowing us to reach easily into troubled areas throughout the Middle East, Africa and Europe,” Spogli wrote. “And because of that advantage, Italy is home to the most comprehensive set of military capabilities - from the 173rd Airborne to cutting edge Global Hawks - that we have anywhere outside the United States.” Later on, he adds: “With the establishment of Africom, Italy has become an even more significant partner in our power projection calculations.”
True, Spogli expressed some reservations about Silvio Berlusconi, saying “he is not as attuned to our political rhythms as he is wont to believe”. Yet the ambassador was even more effusive in an earlier cable, dating from August 2008. “Italy remains our most important European ally for projecting military power into the Mediterranean, Middle East and North Africa,” he told Dick Cheney, then America’s vice-president. “We have 14,000 US military and DOD [Department of Defence] civilian personnel and 16,000 of their family members on five Italian bases.”
Calling the shots
So that is what the war in Libya is really about: a projection of power. Even though France started the bombing in March, the US has emphasised that it calls the shots. Robert Gates, its defence secretary until recently, stated in June that the bombardment required the stationing of extra targeting specialists, primarily from the US, in NATO’s air operations centre in Italy. Europe is supposed to be grateful for this helping hand, Gates implied.
Ruffle through the WikiLeaks treasure trove a bit further and you’ll see that power is being projected in at least three directions: towards Tripoli, Beijing and Moscow.
Several cables can be found where America indicates its frustration with efforts by Muammar Gaddafi to let Libya get a bigger share of revenue from the exploitation of the country’s oil resources than Western multinationals were prepared to give it. A 2007 document says that the US should explain to Gaddafi that there are “downsides” to the renegotiation of contracts with energy giants. After such firms as ExxonMobil, Total (France), Eni (Italy) and Petro-Canada, had to cough up over $5 billion as a result of rejigged contracts, another cable warned in 2008 that Tripoli’s approach was establishing an international precedent. Using diplomatic language, this was described as a “new paradigm for Libya that is playing out worldwide in a growing number of oil producing countries.”
WikiLeaks has also shown that Gaddafi was wary of the $300 million-a-year Africom project. When he had a meeting with William “Kip” Ward, the general then in charge of Africom in 2009, Gaddafi reportedly predicted that China would “prevail in Africa” because it did not meddle in the internal affairs of African countries. Other cables hint at US unease with how Russia had secured energy and construction work in Libya. More generally, the aforementioned Spogli said: “We must recognize that Italy's buy-in will be crucial to any common US-EU energy security policy to counter [Vladimir] Putin's increasingly blatant and aggressive use of energy as a tool for increasing Russia's influence.”
Are we to deduce from his remarks that the US would never dream of using energy in that way? OK, that was a silly question.
Even though he was perturbed by the cordial ties between Berlusconi and Putin, Spogli appears to have been prescient. Franco Frattini, the Italian foreign minister (who Spogli rates highly), stated over the past few weeks that Eni will have a “number one role in the future” of Libya.
Keen to flex muscles
Africom will undoubtedly now be keen to flex its muscles in other parts of Africa. A November 2010 report by the Atlantic Council, a “think-tank” partly financed by the arms industry, observed that 14% of natural gas and 18% of oil imported by the US comes from West Africa, principally Nigeria. Forecasting that the figure for oil will rise to 25% by 2015, the paper argued that America’s economic strength relies on a ready supply of oil at a stable price.
At the moment, the US has just one military base on the African continent: in Djibouti. WikiLeaks has revealed plans for the American private security firm Blackwater (now Xe) to work from Djibouti and use “lethal force” against pirates operating off Somalia. The same Blackwater, as we know, did not flinch at using force in Iraq.
A 2009 cable, meanwhile, alerted Africom to how China had 10 times more diplomats in the Central African Republic than the US. China was “ramping up its military cooperation” with the CAR, “a country rich in untapped natural resources”, the cable added.
Let us be clear: there is a new race to colonise Africa. America and its European cronies are determined to win it.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 5 September 2011.
According to the propaganda from this US-led alliance, Libya was bombed to keep its civilians out of harm’s way. Anyone inclined to believe that blather is advised to read a February 2009 note sent to Hillary Clinton from Ronald Spogli, then about to leave his post as America’s ambassador in Rome.
Spogli’s cable – as made public by Julian Assange’s courageous combo – attaches much importance to the US Africa Command (Africom), which was established under George W Bush’s presidency in 2007. While Africom’s headquarters are in Stuttgart, two of its key offices are in Italy.
“Italy provides a unique geostrategic platform within Europe for US forces, allowing us to reach easily into troubled areas throughout the Middle East, Africa and Europe,” Spogli wrote. “And because of that advantage, Italy is home to the most comprehensive set of military capabilities - from the 173rd Airborne to cutting edge Global Hawks - that we have anywhere outside the United States.” Later on, he adds: “With the establishment of Africom, Italy has become an even more significant partner in our power projection calculations.”
True, Spogli expressed some reservations about Silvio Berlusconi, saying “he is not as attuned to our political rhythms as he is wont to believe”. Yet the ambassador was even more effusive in an earlier cable, dating from August 2008. “Italy remains our most important European ally for projecting military power into the Mediterranean, Middle East and North Africa,” he told Dick Cheney, then America’s vice-president. “We have 14,000 US military and DOD [Department of Defence] civilian personnel and 16,000 of their family members on five Italian bases.”
Calling the shots
So that is what the war in Libya is really about: a projection of power. Even though France started the bombing in March, the US has emphasised that it calls the shots. Robert Gates, its defence secretary until recently, stated in June that the bombardment required the stationing of extra targeting specialists, primarily from the US, in NATO’s air operations centre in Italy. Europe is supposed to be grateful for this helping hand, Gates implied.
Ruffle through the WikiLeaks treasure trove a bit further and you’ll see that power is being projected in at least three directions: towards Tripoli, Beijing and Moscow.
Several cables can be found where America indicates its frustration with efforts by Muammar Gaddafi to let Libya get a bigger share of revenue from the exploitation of the country’s oil resources than Western multinationals were prepared to give it. A 2007 document says that the US should explain to Gaddafi that there are “downsides” to the renegotiation of contracts with energy giants. After such firms as ExxonMobil, Total (France), Eni (Italy) and Petro-Canada, had to cough up over $5 billion as a result of rejigged contracts, another cable warned in 2008 that Tripoli’s approach was establishing an international precedent. Using diplomatic language, this was described as a “new paradigm for Libya that is playing out worldwide in a growing number of oil producing countries.”
WikiLeaks has also shown that Gaddafi was wary of the $300 million-a-year Africom project. When he had a meeting with William “Kip” Ward, the general then in charge of Africom in 2009, Gaddafi reportedly predicted that China would “prevail in Africa” because it did not meddle in the internal affairs of African countries. Other cables hint at US unease with how Russia had secured energy and construction work in Libya. More generally, the aforementioned Spogli said: “We must recognize that Italy's buy-in will be crucial to any common US-EU energy security policy to counter [Vladimir] Putin's increasingly blatant and aggressive use of energy as a tool for increasing Russia's influence.”
Are we to deduce from his remarks that the US would never dream of using energy in that way? OK, that was a silly question.
Even though he was perturbed by the cordial ties between Berlusconi and Putin, Spogli appears to have been prescient. Franco Frattini, the Italian foreign minister (who Spogli rates highly), stated over the past few weeks that Eni will have a “number one role in the future” of Libya.
Keen to flex muscles
Africom will undoubtedly now be keen to flex its muscles in other parts of Africa. A November 2010 report by the Atlantic Council, a “think-tank” partly financed by the arms industry, observed that 14% of natural gas and 18% of oil imported by the US comes from West Africa, principally Nigeria. Forecasting that the figure for oil will rise to 25% by 2015, the paper argued that America’s economic strength relies on a ready supply of oil at a stable price.
At the moment, the US has just one military base on the African continent: in Djibouti. WikiLeaks has revealed plans for the American private security firm Blackwater (now Xe) to work from Djibouti and use “lethal force” against pirates operating off Somalia. The same Blackwater, as we know, did not flinch at using force in Iraq.
A 2009 cable, meanwhile, alerted Africom to how China had 10 times more diplomats in the Central African Republic than the US. China was “ramping up its military cooperation” with the CAR, “a country rich in untapped natural resources”, the cable added.
Let us be clear: there is a new race to colonise Africa. America and its European cronies are determined to win it.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 5 September 2011.
Friday, August 26, 2011
NATO mulls marriage with Israel
Israel wishes to participate in NATO’s future wars, judging by the content of a diplomatic cable released this week by WikiLeaks.
Dating from November 2009, the document from the American embassy in Tel Aviv summarizes a briefing given by Claudio Bisorgniero, NATO’s deputy-secretary general, during a visit to Israel.
Fresh from talks with Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister, Bisorgniero noted that Israel wishes to sign a status of forces agreement (SOFA) with the alliance. Such an accord lays down the rules covering a country’s troops when they are operating abroad.
The notion of a SOFA (a silly acronym) between Israel and the alliance has been advocated by the Zionist lobby for a few years now. Less than a fortnight before the cable was drawn up, the policy journal Europe’s World published an article by Matthew Mark Horn from the American Jewish Congress on Israel’s relations with NATO. He indicated that a status of forces accord would allow Israel join NATO operations more swiftly than it has to date.
Horn, a former official in the US defense department, hinted at his frustration over how it took two years of negotiations before an Israeli officer could be posted to the headquarters of Operation Active Endeavor in Naples. Originally, that Mediterranean-patrol mission was part of NATO’s response to the atrocities on 11 September 2001; its remit has subsequently been expanded to serve a reactionary agenda of stopping impoverished foreigners from sailing to Europe.
“Sensitive”
Bisorgniero described Israel’s idea of a SOFA as “sensitive”, according to the cable. It could be problematic, he suggested, for NATO to conclude such an agreement with Israel, unless similar arrangements could be found with some Arab countries. Since 1994 NATO has been involved in a process called the Mediterranean dialogue with states neighboring members of the alliance. Along with Israel, those states are Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan and Mauritania. Israel has used this forum for dialogue to forge greater ties with the alliance than all of the others, however.
It is telling that the cable does not allude even once to Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2008 and 2009. NATO gave its tacit approval for that act of aggression earlier this year. When Gabi Ashkenazi, the Israeli military chief who oversaw Cast Lead, visited Brussels in January, he was treated to a farewell dinner to mark his imminent retirement as head of the world’s “most moral army.”
No guilt over massacres
Under Ashkenazi’s leadership, that army wiped out 22 members of the al-Dayah family -- including 12 children and a pregnant woman -- when it bombed the family’s Gaza home in early 2009. NATO commanders may be feeling a sense of affinity with Ashkenazi this month as they have tried to excuse an even bloodier massacre in Libya. On the night of 8 August, NATO attacked residential areas in Zliten, a city in the district of Misrata. According to the Libyan authorities, 85 people were killed. Thirty-three of them were children; 32 them of them women, some reports say.
Don’t feel bad if you have not heard of that massacre; it received scant attention in the Western press. The BBC’s Matthew Price visited the scene of the attack and admitted that he saw the corpses of women and children in the morgue. But he also sought to lend credence to the NATO narrative that it had struck a “legitimate target” (the words of its propagandist Roland Lavoie), where Gaddafi loyalists were sheltering. “The front line is not far away,” Price reported. “From the site, plumes of white smoke can be seen rising from where the fighting is taking place. It would make sense that soldiers would need somewhere to rest in the area.”
NATO’s killing of children does not elicit even the faintest pang of conscience among its commanders and their lackeys in the media. It would be logical, then, for NATO to make sure its flirtations with Israel lead to a proper marriage.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada, 25 August 2011.
Dating from November 2009, the document from the American embassy in Tel Aviv summarizes a briefing given by Claudio Bisorgniero, NATO’s deputy-secretary general, during a visit to Israel.
Fresh from talks with Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister, Bisorgniero noted that Israel wishes to sign a status of forces agreement (SOFA) with the alliance. Such an accord lays down the rules covering a country’s troops when they are operating abroad.
The notion of a SOFA (a silly acronym) between Israel and the alliance has been advocated by the Zionist lobby for a few years now. Less than a fortnight before the cable was drawn up, the policy journal Europe’s World published an article by Matthew Mark Horn from the American Jewish Congress on Israel’s relations with NATO. He indicated that a status of forces accord would allow Israel join NATO operations more swiftly than it has to date.
Horn, a former official in the US defense department, hinted at his frustration over how it took two years of negotiations before an Israeli officer could be posted to the headquarters of Operation Active Endeavor in Naples. Originally, that Mediterranean-patrol mission was part of NATO’s response to the atrocities on 11 September 2001; its remit has subsequently been expanded to serve a reactionary agenda of stopping impoverished foreigners from sailing to Europe.
“Sensitive”
Bisorgniero described Israel’s idea of a SOFA as “sensitive”, according to the cable. It could be problematic, he suggested, for NATO to conclude such an agreement with Israel, unless similar arrangements could be found with some Arab countries. Since 1994 NATO has been involved in a process called the Mediterranean dialogue with states neighboring members of the alliance. Along with Israel, those states are Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan and Mauritania. Israel has used this forum for dialogue to forge greater ties with the alliance than all of the others, however.
It is telling that the cable does not allude even once to Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2008 and 2009. NATO gave its tacit approval for that act of aggression earlier this year. When Gabi Ashkenazi, the Israeli military chief who oversaw Cast Lead, visited Brussels in January, he was treated to a farewell dinner to mark his imminent retirement as head of the world’s “most moral army.”
No guilt over massacres
Under Ashkenazi’s leadership, that army wiped out 22 members of the al-Dayah family -- including 12 children and a pregnant woman -- when it bombed the family’s Gaza home in early 2009. NATO commanders may be feeling a sense of affinity with Ashkenazi this month as they have tried to excuse an even bloodier massacre in Libya. On the night of 8 August, NATO attacked residential areas in Zliten, a city in the district of Misrata. According to the Libyan authorities, 85 people were killed. Thirty-three of them were children; 32 them of them women, some reports say.
Don’t feel bad if you have not heard of that massacre; it received scant attention in the Western press. The BBC’s Matthew Price visited the scene of the attack and admitted that he saw the corpses of women and children in the morgue. But he also sought to lend credence to the NATO narrative that it had struck a “legitimate target” (the words of its propagandist Roland Lavoie), where Gaddafi loyalists were sheltering. “The front line is not far away,” Price reported. “From the site, plumes of white smoke can be seen rising from where the fighting is taking place. It would make sense that soldiers would need somewhere to rest in the area.”
NATO’s killing of children does not elicit even the faintest pang of conscience among its commanders and their lackeys in the media. It would be logical, then, for NATO to make sure its flirtations with Israel lead to a proper marriage.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada, 25 August 2011.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Arms industry promoter latest recruit for UK Israel lobby
What is the next career move for a promoter of the arms industry? Join the Israel lobby, it seems.
Over the past few days, I have been writing about how the Britain Israel Communications and Research Center (BICOM) has indicted war criminal Michael Herzog on its staff. Herzog’s newest colleague at the center is Luke Akehurst, until recently a “defense” specialist with the public relations giant Weber Shandwick.
Enticing Akehurst to work for her is quite a coup for Lorna Fitzsimons, BICOM’s chief executive. He was named “UK consultant of the year” at the 2008 Public Affairs News Awards. The prize was in recognition for his invaluable services for several companies that arm dictators.
Libya connection
Finmeccanica, one of his clients, cultivated strong links with Muammar Gaddafi lately. While it has predicted that its revenues for 2011 will exceed €18 billion, the civil war in Libya will inevitably have repercussions. The Italian firm has a backlog of orders worth €800 million from the Gaddafi regime.
Akehurst also represented GKN, which supplied water cannons to Indonesia in the 1990s, unperturbed about how its then military ruler Suharto was overseeing an occupation in East Timor, that involved one of the twentieth century’s worst cases of genocide. Serco, another client of his, manages Britain’s Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) as part of a consortium that bands it together with the world’s number one weapons maker Lockheed Martin.
It is fitting that Akehurst, a Labor Party elected representative for Hackney council in London, has joined BICOM. For the largest donor to that center Poju Zabludowicz inherited a vast fortune through his father’s involvement in the arms industry. Shlomo Zabludowicz set up a firm called Soltam, which is today owned by the top Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit.
In 2009, TheObserver reported that Poju Zabludowicz gave BICOM (which he chairs) nearly £1 million in 2007 alone. A subsequent TV documentary about Britain’s pro-Israel lobby showed how he has invested in a shopping centre in the illegal Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Adumim and other Israeli business activities in the occupied West Bank.
Blood money
According to The Sunday Times, Zabludowicz is placed at number 31 on the list of Britain’s richest residents.
Even though Fitzsimons and Akehurst hail from a Labor background, Zabludowicz is a generous contributor to the rival Conservatives, led by Prime Minister David Cameron. It is de rigueur for that party’s members of parliament to join the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFOI) and take part in its trips to the Middle East. One such junket – in February this year – included a visit to Elbit’s headquarters. A briefing note prepared by the CFOI underscored how Elbit “provides the British armed forces with the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that play such a crucial role in intelligence-collection.” The MPs weren’t reminded that such warplanes were used to kill and maim women and children in Gaza during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in late 2008 and early 2009.
I would like to congratulate Luke Akehurst on his new appointment and suggest that he studies his payslips carefully. If he does, he will see they are stained with the blood of innocent Palestinians.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 23 August 2011.
Over the past few days, I have been writing about how the Britain Israel Communications and Research Center (BICOM) has indicted war criminal Michael Herzog on its staff. Herzog’s newest colleague at the center is Luke Akehurst, until recently a “defense” specialist with the public relations giant Weber Shandwick.
Enticing Akehurst to work for her is quite a coup for Lorna Fitzsimons, BICOM’s chief executive. He was named “UK consultant of the year” at the 2008 Public Affairs News Awards. The prize was in recognition for his invaluable services for several companies that arm dictators.
Libya connection
Finmeccanica, one of his clients, cultivated strong links with Muammar Gaddafi lately. While it has predicted that its revenues for 2011 will exceed €18 billion, the civil war in Libya will inevitably have repercussions. The Italian firm has a backlog of orders worth €800 million from the Gaddafi regime.
Akehurst also represented GKN, which supplied water cannons to Indonesia in the 1990s, unperturbed about how its then military ruler Suharto was overseeing an occupation in East Timor, that involved one of the twentieth century’s worst cases of genocide. Serco, another client of his, manages Britain’s Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) as part of a consortium that bands it together with the world’s number one weapons maker Lockheed Martin.
It is fitting that Akehurst, a Labor Party elected representative for Hackney council in London, has joined BICOM. For the largest donor to that center Poju Zabludowicz inherited a vast fortune through his father’s involvement in the arms industry. Shlomo Zabludowicz set up a firm called Soltam, which is today owned by the top Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit.
In 2009, TheObserver reported that Poju Zabludowicz gave BICOM (which he chairs) nearly £1 million in 2007 alone. A subsequent TV documentary about Britain’s pro-Israel lobby showed how he has invested in a shopping centre in the illegal Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Adumim and other Israeli business activities in the occupied West Bank.
Blood money
According to The Sunday Times, Zabludowicz is placed at number 31 on the list of Britain’s richest residents.
Even though Fitzsimons and Akehurst hail from a Labor background, Zabludowicz is a generous contributor to the rival Conservatives, led by Prime Minister David Cameron. It is de rigueur for that party’s members of parliament to join the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFOI) and take part in its trips to the Middle East. One such junket – in February this year – included a visit to Elbit’s headquarters. A briefing note prepared by the CFOI underscored how Elbit “provides the British armed forces with the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that play such a crucial role in intelligence-collection.” The MPs weren’t reminded that such warplanes were used to kill and maim women and children in Gaza during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in late 2008 and early 2009.
I would like to congratulate Luke Akehurst on his new appointment and suggest that he studies his payslips carefully. If he does, he will see they are stained with the blood of innocent Palestinians.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 23 August 2011.
Why did the BBC whitewash NATO massacre in Libya?
For me, the summer of 2011 started in March. On a beautiful day, I visited Portcullis House in London, a spacious building where members of parliament work. And who did I see staring at me only Tony Blair?
Not literally, I hasten to add. There were several portraits of the former prime minister hanging on the walls. In one of them, he looked tired and pensive; in another, ruthless and sinister.
Later on that long, hot day, I briefly met an inspiring young man called Jody McIntyre. Towards the end of last year, McIntyre was in the news when police pushed him out of his wheelchair at a demonstration against David Cameron’s efforts to reserve university education for the rich. When he was interviewed by the BBC, that gormless newscaster Ben Brown suggested McIntyre (who has cerebal palsy) had provoked the attack by “rolling your wheelchair towards the police”.
I have been thinking about McIntyre over the past few weeks. The BBC’s coverage of the riots that were the top story in Britain this August once again displayed how the corporation is a propaganda service for the ruling elite. In an apparent effort to put the riots in a historical context, the BBC invited the veteran broadcaster and civil rights activist Darcus Howe to comment. Yet the interviewer Fiona Armstrong had no interest in Howe’s cogent analysis of why the unrest occurred. Instead, she tried to malign him by inferring (without evidence) that he had started riots in the past.
What, you may wonder, have those haunting images of Blair to do with this? The aforementioned Ben Brown played his part in trying to dress up as facts those lies with which Blair took his country to war. Brown’s reports as an “embedded” journalist in Iraq served little purpose other than as PR promos for the British Army.
As images of looting in English cities were shown repeatedly this month, it was easy for the casual viewer to forget that Britain is still bombing foreign lands. The mainstream media paid scant attention to atrocities committed by British and other NATO forces in Libya. On the night of 8 August, NATO attacked residential areas in Zliten, a city in the district of Misrata. According to the Libyan authorities, 85 people were killed. Thirty-three of them were children; 32 them of them women, some reports indicate.
Parroting Western propaganda
Like everyone else, I have no means of verifying whether or not those reports are accurate. But why should journalists regard NATO’s version of events as the only one that could possibly be credible? In his report from the scene a few days later, the BBC’s Matthew Price sought to lend credence to NATO’s insistence that it had hit farm buildings used by pro-Gaddafi forces and had therefore struck a “legitimate target” (the words used by Roland Lavoie, a colonel tasked with selling the Libya war to the press). “The front line is not far away,” Price wrote. “From the site, plumes of white smoke can be seen rising from where the fighting is taking place. It would make sense that soldiers would need somewhere to rest in the area.”
Price gave an account of what he saw in the local morgue. Most of the corpses he saw were of men of “fighting age” (his words) but there were also two women and two children. Price’s online biography says he graduated in geography from Cambridge in 1994; it does not indicate he has ever been trained to perform an autopsy. Yet he appears to regard himself as sufficiently qualified in medical matters to insinuate that the children could not have been killed by NATO. “One child, a two year old, bore no visible scars,” he wrote. “Its skin was clean.”
BBC reporters, it should be recalled, can do well for themselves by currying favour with NATO. Oana Lungescu and Mark Laity both used to cover NATO’s activities for the BBC. Both were then hired as spindoctors for the alliance. The case of Laity’s appointment represents a particular affront to journalistic ethics as it was patently a reward for his reporting (stenography would be more accurate) of the war against Serbia in 1999. When NATO killed numerous ethnic Albanian refugees in one attack, he helped spread the myth that it had bombed a military convoy.
An elite addicted to war
This summer’s riots could tell us many things about British society. They could tell us what happens when you have a lethal cocktail of police brutality and rising inequality. Tottenham, where they started, has the highest level of unemployment in London. Is it any wonder that its young people reacted angrily when the police shot dead a black man, especially when we know that blacks are 26 times more likely to be stopped and searched by English and Welsh police than whites?
There is an even bigger issue here. Britain has one of world’s most violent governments, regardless of which parties comprise it. Britain is home to one of the world’s largest arms manufacturers, BAE. Since 1999, Britain has bombed Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Only the US has chalked up more acts of aggression.
Britain’s greatest thugs are not the looters on its streets, they are the immaculately groomed men (and some women) who have committed the UK to endless wars. Unlike the rioters, their crimes go unpunished.
And BBC journalists with flawless diction can be relied on to whitewash these crimes.
·First published by New Europe, (www.neurope.eu), 22 August 2011.
Not literally, I hasten to add. There were several portraits of the former prime minister hanging on the walls. In one of them, he looked tired and pensive; in another, ruthless and sinister.
Later on that long, hot day, I briefly met an inspiring young man called Jody McIntyre. Towards the end of last year, McIntyre was in the news when police pushed him out of his wheelchair at a demonstration against David Cameron’s efforts to reserve university education for the rich. When he was interviewed by the BBC, that gormless newscaster Ben Brown suggested McIntyre (who has cerebal palsy) had provoked the attack by “rolling your wheelchair towards the police”.
I have been thinking about McIntyre over the past few weeks. The BBC’s coverage of the riots that were the top story in Britain this August once again displayed how the corporation is a propaganda service for the ruling elite. In an apparent effort to put the riots in a historical context, the BBC invited the veteran broadcaster and civil rights activist Darcus Howe to comment. Yet the interviewer Fiona Armstrong had no interest in Howe’s cogent analysis of why the unrest occurred. Instead, she tried to malign him by inferring (without evidence) that he had started riots in the past.
What, you may wonder, have those haunting images of Blair to do with this? The aforementioned Ben Brown played his part in trying to dress up as facts those lies with which Blair took his country to war. Brown’s reports as an “embedded” journalist in Iraq served little purpose other than as PR promos for the British Army.
As images of looting in English cities were shown repeatedly this month, it was easy for the casual viewer to forget that Britain is still bombing foreign lands. The mainstream media paid scant attention to atrocities committed by British and other NATO forces in Libya. On the night of 8 August, NATO attacked residential areas in Zliten, a city in the district of Misrata. According to the Libyan authorities, 85 people were killed. Thirty-three of them were children; 32 them of them women, some reports indicate.
Parroting Western propaganda
Like everyone else, I have no means of verifying whether or not those reports are accurate. But why should journalists regard NATO’s version of events as the only one that could possibly be credible? In his report from the scene a few days later, the BBC’s Matthew Price sought to lend credence to NATO’s insistence that it had hit farm buildings used by pro-Gaddafi forces and had therefore struck a “legitimate target” (the words used by Roland Lavoie, a colonel tasked with selling the Libya war to the press). “The front line is not far away,” Price wrote. “From the site, plumes of white smoke can be seen rising from where the fighting is taking place. It would make sense that soldiers would need somewhere to rest in the area.”
Price gave an account of what he saw in the local morgue. Most of the corpses he saw were of men of “fighting age” (his words) but there were also two women and two children. Price’s online biography says he graduated in geography from Cambridge in 1994; it does not indicate he has ever been trained to perform an autopsy. Yet he appears to regard himself as sufficiently qualified in medical matters to insinuate that the children could not have been killed by NATO. “One child, a two year old, bore no visible scars,” he wrote. “Its skin was clean.”
BBC reporters, it should be recalled, can do well for themselves by currying favour with NATO. Oana Lungescu and Mark Laity both used to cover NATO’s activities for the BBC. Both were then hired as spindoctors for the alliance. The case of Laity’s appointment represents a particular affront to journalistic ethics as it was patently a reward for his reporting (stenography would be more accurate) of the war against Serbia in 1999. When NATO killed numerous ethnic Albanian refugees in one attack, he helped spread the myth that it had bombed a military convoy.
An elite addicted to war
This summer’s riots could tell us many things about British society. They could tell us what happens when you have a lethal cocktail of police brutality and rising inequality. Tottenham, where they started, has the highest level of unemployment in London. Is it any wonder that its young people reacted angrily when the police shot dead a black man, especially when we know that blacks are 26 times more likely to be stopped and searched by English and Welsh police than whites?
There is an even bigger issue here. Britain has one of world’s most violent governments, regardless of which parties comprise it. Britain is home to one of the world’s largest arms manufacturers, BAE. Since 1999, Britain has bombed Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Only the US has chalked up more acts of aggression.
Britain’s greatest thugs are not the looters on its streets, they are the immaculately groomed men (and some women) who have committed the UK to endless wars. Unlike the rioters, their crimes go unpunished.
And BBC journalists with flawless diction can be relied on to whitewash these crimes.
·First published by New Europe, (www.neurope.eu), 22 August 2011.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Europe's 'cautious' cant on Hamas
Is the European Union about to give its blessing to the reconciliation agreement between Hamas and Fatah? There is a possibility that it will but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, was trying to sound reasonable this week, while actually being distinctly unreasonable. She appeared to declare support for the idea of a national unity government, led by Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah. “I understand President Abbas’s desire to move forward on reconciliation,” Ashton said. “We have all argued there needs to be reconciliation and with caution we are moving to try and support his efforts. I say ‘with caution’ because we understand it needs to be based on principles of non-violence.”
It is telling that Ashton has never called on Israel to observe the principle of non-violence. A statement which she issued after Hamas fired rockets into southern Israel last month exemplified how she applies different rules to different parties to the conflict. While she directed the words “strongly condemn” at the “attacks” by Hamas and said that they “must stop immediately”, she merely called on Israel to “show restraint”. There was no explicit acknowledgment of how Israel had killed three members of Hamas a few days earlier, inevitably provoking a response.
And why does Ashton laud Mahmoud Abbas at every available opportunity? His term as president expired in January 2009; since then he has clung to power without any mandate.
Perhaps Ashton feels a sense of affinity with him as she has been a successful politician, without having to go through the messy business of winning elections. Her $435,000-a-year job was obtained thanks to her close ties with two UK prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Although she had sat in the elitist House of Lords, few of her compatriots had heard of her until 2009, when she was appointed the closest thing that Europe has to a foreign minister by the Union’s heads of state and government. This explains her apparent bemusement at the warm reception she received when she met Libyan “rebels” last weekend. “I am more popular in Benghazi than in Britain,” she quipped.
Interestingly, the same unelected Ashton has been extolling the virtues of “democracy promotion” in the Middle East. In her contacts with Hillary Clinton, she has been exploring how Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites can help spread liberty, she stated on Wednesday. Is she telling Arabs to stop worrying about the West’s indulgence of Israel and concentrate on tweeting their way to freedom?
·First published by Mondoweiss (www.mondoweiss.net), 25 May 2011
Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, was trying to sound reasonable this week, while actually being distinctly unreasonable. She appeared to declare support for the idea of a national unity government, led by Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah. “I understand President Abbas’s desire to move forward on reconciliation,” Ashton said. “We have all argued there needs to be reconciliation and with caution we are moving to try and support his efforts. I say ‘with caution’ because we understand it needs to be based on principles of non-violence.”
It is telling that Ashton has never called on Israel to observe the principle of non-violence. A statement which she issued after Hamas fired rockets into southern Israel last month exemplified how she applies different rules to different parties to the conflict. While she directed the words “strongly condemn” at the “attacks” by Hamas and said that they “must stop immediately”, she merely called on Israel to “show restraint”. There was no explicit acknowledgment of how Israel had killed three members of Hamas a few days earlier, inevitably provoking a response.
And why does Ashton laud Mahmoud Abbas at every available opportunity? His term as president expired in January 2009; since then he has clung to power without any mandate.
Perhaps Ashton feels a sense of affinity with him as she has been a successful politician, without having to go through the messy business of winning elections. Her $435,000-a-year job was obtained thanks to her close ties with two UK prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Although she had sat in the elitist House of Lords, few of her compatriots had heard of her until 2009, when she was appointed the closest thing that Europe has to a foreign minister by the Union’s heads of state and government. This explains her apparent bemusement at the warm reception she received when she met Libyan “rebels” last weekend. “I am more popular in Benghazi than in Britain,” she quipped.
Interestingly, the same unelected Ashton has been extolling the virtues of “democracy promotion” in the Middle East. In her contacts with Hillary Clinton, she has been exploring how Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites can help spread liberty, she stated on Wednesday. Is she telling Arabs to stop worrying about the West’s indulgence of Israel and concentrate on tweeting their way to freedom?
·First published by Mondoweiss (www.mondoweiss.net), 25 May 2011
Monday, May 9, 2011
The moral bankruptcy of Germany's Greens
We can judge if a nation is civilised by how seriously it takes cycling as a mode of transport. Germany scores well. As recompense for the indignity of turning 40, I have been treated to a two-wheel tour of Bavaria. Apart from being able to marvel at the Alps and the pride grown men take in donning lederhosen, the sojourn has filled with admiration for the state’s superb network of bike paths.
Bavaria is in many respects a role model for sane environmental policies. Two of the world’s largest solar energy plants can be found here; at street level, bins have separate compartments for different types of waste and ordinary people appear to be careful not to put their used bottles and papers into the wrong sections.
Ecological awareness does not happen by accident; it results from decades of campaigning, often by people who were ridiculed as fantasists when they started out. I first learned about the necessity of protecting nature from the work of Germany’s Green Party a few years after they were formed in the 1980s. The Greens were different to mainstream politicians, I was led to believe, because they were more interested in principles than power. While that may have been true once, it is certainly not now.
After elections in Baden-Württemberg in March, the Greens are now the largest party in a state legislature for the first time in their history. Becoming part of the next federal government is the overriding objective of their leader, Cem Ozdemir, whose public relations handlers like to depict him as Germany’s equivalent to Barack Obama (Ozdemir is of Turkish ethnicity and the party has even used the inane slogan “Yes We Cem” to promote him).
Given that Angela Merkel has declared multiculturalism “dead”, progressives can derive some satisfaction from Ozdemir’s popularity. Yet in other respects the Greens have become a deeply reactionary force. It is particularly galling that a party formerly wedded to pacifism has morphed into a bunch of war-mongers.
When Merkel abstained from supporting the bombardment of Libya recently, her most strident critics were prominent Greens. Renate Künast, a Green parliamentary leader who covets the post of Berlin mayor, accused Merkel of political failure. Her erstwhile boss, Joschka Fischer, was even more scathing.
In a syndicated opinion column, Fischer intimated that Germany could be isolated unless it followed the example he set as foreign minister, when it agreed to participate in the US-led occupation of Afghanistan. He wrote: “Germany and other European countries went to Afghanistan in solidarity with a NATO partner – our most important security guarantor, the United States – after it had been attacked from there on 11 September 2001. And solidarity within NATO – a term all but shunned these days in official German circles – is mutual: left to its own devices, Germany could one day wake up in a very precarious situation.”
Hold on a second. The best evidence we have tells us that the 11 September atrocities were planned in Hamburg, not in Osama bin Laden’s Tora Bora hideaway. There would have been no justification for the US to bomb German cities in retaliation; there was even less justification for how America and its stooges invaded Afghanistan. As part of a sordid sucking-up exercise to the Bush administration, Fischer gave his imprimatur to a war that widened inequality. Each week, the United States – a country that denies millions of its own people the right to health insurance - spends $2 billion on waging war on Afghanistan. Germany has helped “our most important security guarantor” to increase hardship in Afghanistan. According to World Bank data, 36% of the Afghan population lived below the national poverty line in 2008; in 2005, the corresponding figure stood at 33%.
Just as the German Greens showed a callous indifference to the plight of Afghanistan’s poor, they acted as cheerleaders for austerity measures at home from 1998 to 2005, when they last belonged to the federal government. Gerhard Schröder, the country’s chancellor at the time, encountered stiff resistance within his own Social Democrat party to the welfare reforms he introduced – some of his colleagues even quit the party in protest. The Greens, on the other hand, defended him vigorously, supporting extreme cuts in public expenditure in the full knowledge that they would hurt the disadvantaged most.
The U-turns of the German Greens have been copied by their sister parties elsewhere. With his slightly dishevelled appearance, Daniel Cohn Bendit still poses as a radical. It is a long time, though, since he was a student rebel in the Paris of 1968. As leader of the Green group in the European Parliament, he has been a hawkish advocate of US-led military operations. Disgustingly, he has cited humanitarian reasons to defend wars designed primarily to ensure America’s control of oil and other prized resources.
In the early 1990s, I was an active member of the Irish Greens. Although I knew several Green members of the Dublin parliament personally, I was delighted to see all of them losing their seats in the recent general election. Their willingness to accept public service cutbacks demanded by the IMF and EU amounted to treason.
Because climate change imperils our survival as a species, I am convinced that we need a genuine green movement, separate from any political party. Having a few politicians who claim to be green answering to the title “minister” is no substitute for people power.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 8-14 May 2011
Bavaria is in many respects a role model for sane environmental policies. Two of the world’s largest solar energy plants can be found here; at street level, bins have separate compartments for different types of waste and ordinary people appear to be careful not to put their used bottles and papers into the wrong sections.
Ecological awareness does not happen by accident; it results from decades of campaigning, often by people who were ridiculed as fantasists when they started out. I first learned about the necessity of protecting nature from the work of Germany’s Green Party a few years after they were formed in the 1980s. The Greens were different to mainstream politicians, I was led to believe, because they were more interested in principles than power. While that may have been true once, it is certainly not now.
After elections in Baden-Württemberg in March, the Greens are now the largest party in a state legislature for the first time in their history. Becoming part of the next federal government is the overriding objective of their leader, Cem Ozdemir, whose public relations handlers like to depict him as Germany’s equivalent to Barack Obama (Ozdemir is of Turkish ethnicity and the party has even used the inane slogan “Yes We Cem” to promote him).
Given that Angela Merkel has declared multiculturalism “dead”, progressives can derive some satisfaction from Ozdemir’s popularity. Yet in other respects the Greens have become a deeply reactionary force. It is particularly galling that a party formerly wedded to pacifism has morphed into a bunch of war-mongers.
When Merkel abstained from supporting the bombardment of Libya recently, her most strident critics were prominent Greens. Renate Künast, a Green parliamentary leader who covets the post of Berlin mayor, accused Merkel of political failure. Her erstwhile boss, Joschka Fischer, was even more scathing.
In a syndicated opinion column, Fischer intimated that Germany could be isolated unless it followed the example he set as foreign minister, when it agreed to participate in the US-led occupation of Afghanistan. He wrote: “Germany and other European countries went to Afghanistan in solidarity with a NATO partner – our most important security guarantor, the United States – after it had been attacked from there on 11 September 2001. And solidarity within NATO – a term all but shunned these days in official German circles – is mutual: left to its own devices, Germany could one day wake up in a very precarious situation.”
Hold on a second. The best evidence we have tells us that the 11 September atrocities were planned in Hamburg, not in Osama bin Laden’s Tora Bora hideaway. There would have been no justification for the US to bomb German cities in retaliation; there was even less justification for how America and its stooges invaded Afghanistan. As part of a sordid sucking-up exercise to the Bush administration, Fischer gave his imprimatur to a war that widened inequality. Each week, the United States – a country that denies millions of its own people the right to health insurance - spends $2 billion on waging war on Afghanistan. Germany has helped “our most important security guarantor” to increase hardship in Afghanistan. According to World Bank data, 36% of the Afghan population lived below the national poverty line in 2008; in 2005, the corresponding figure stood at 33%.
Just as the German Greens showed a callous indifference to the plight of Afghanistan’s poor, they acted as cheerleaders for austerity measures at home from 1998 to 2005, when they last belonged to the federal government. Gerhard Schröder, the country’s chancellor at the time, encountered stiff resistance within his own Social Democrat party to the welfare reforms he introduced – some of his colleagues even quit the party in protest. The Greens, on the other hand, defended him vigorously, supporting extreme cuts in public expenditure in the full knowledge that they would hurt the disadvantaged most.
The U-turns of the German Greens have been copied by their sister parties elsewhere. With his slightly dishevelled appearance, Daniel Cohn Bendit still poses as a radical. It is a long time, though, since he was a student rebel in the Paris of 1968. As leader of the Green group in the European Parliament, he has been a hawkish advocate of US-led military operations. Disgustingly, he has cited humanitarian reasons to defend wars designed primarily to ensure America’s control of oil and other prized resources.
In the early 1990s, I was an active member of the Irish Greens. Although I knew several Green members of the Dublin parliament personally, I was delighted to see all of them losing their seats in the recent general election. Their willingness to accept public service cutbacks demanded by the IMF and EU amounted to treason.
Because climate change imperils our survival as a species, I am convinced that we need a genuine green movement, separate from any political party. Having a few politicians who claim to be green answering to the title “minister” is no substitute for people power.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 8-14 May 2011
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Why NATO cannot be trusted
What do bagpipes have to do with the war in Libya? On NATO’s website, you can read about Marc Forterre, a French colonel and avid piper, whose musical instrument was mistaken for a weapon by airport staff in Addis Ababa. It would make a charming vignette, if it wasn’t for how the tale segues into editorialising about how the alliance helps the African Union to conduct its own military operations.
This celebration of trans-continental harmony is deceitful. It omits any acknowledgment of how most African governments are at odds with NATO over its attacks on Libya – and with good reason.
Apologists for the war maintain that it is based on the “responsibility to protect”, a concept usually abbreviated as R2P. Yet by examining past comments of James Jones, the decorated general who was Barack Obama’s national security adviser until November last, we might get a more accurate explanation. “As commander of NATO, I worried early in the mornings about how to protect energy facilities and supply chain routes as far away as Africa, the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea,” Jones said in 2008. (It is instructive that he joined the board of Chevron earlier that year).
Though the main tenets of R2P look laudable, the background of its chief proponent Gareth Evans can only arouse suspicion. When he was Australia’s foreign minister in 1989, Evans signed the Timor Gap Treaty with his then Indonesian counterpart Ali Alatas. This enabled the theft of oil resources off East Timor, where 250,000 people died in one of the twentieth century’s most brutal occupations.
Just as the motives of a sham humanitarian like Evans should be questioned, doubts must be cast on Obama’s sincerity when he defended bombing Libya on the pretext “we were faced with the prospect of violence on a horrific scale”. Could the haste with which the West intervened not have more to do with Libya boasting Africa’s largest proven oil reserves? And were Western leaders and their chums in BP and Total not jittery over threats made by Muammar Gaddafi in 2009 (and reiterated in the past few weeks) to nationalise those resources?
Yes, it may be too reductionist to describe what is happening in Libya as another war for oil. The truth is probably that it is not only a war for oil but also to assert the control of America and its European stooges over Africa.
Having already declared war in Europe (Serbia) and taken charge of one in Asia (Afghanistan), it was perhaps logical that NATO would soon stretch its imperial tentacles into Africa. In 2007, Africom, its command for operations in Africa, was set up. “Factsheets” churned out from Africom’s headquarters in Stuttgart bragged of support for health, education and water projects. Yet that mask of charity belies a remark made by Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, then NATO’s secretary-general, the previous year, when he said the alliance was willing to use warplanes to secure oil and gas supply routes from Africa.
No war is fought for noble motives. If you really think that Sarkozy or Obama wished to protect civilian lives, study the eyewitness account signed by Russian, Ukrainian and Belarussian doctors working in Libya on 24 March. They document how dozens of innocent people were killed and maimed by NATO bombs falling on residential areas of Tajhura, a suburb of Tripoli. The onslaught led to the roof collapsing in the maternity ward of a hospital, causing numerous miscarriages.
This serves as a reminder of how NATO bombed Serbia in 1999. On that occasion, a children’s hospital in Belgrade’s embassy district was targeted. As Michel Chossudovsky, a Canadian economist, points out on the website Global Research, sleeping babies were spared by the alliance’s missiles. Generators were hit instead, depriving incubators of power.
Moreover, there is a distinct possibility that the consequences of NATO’s actions will continue to be felt in Libya long after the bombs have stopped falling, especially if those bombs were coated with depleted uranium (DU). While the Pentagon has said it has no reports that the substance is being used, the A-10 Warthogs flown by the US Air Force are equipped with guns designed to fire DU-tipped munitions.
I called a NATO spokesman to ask if the alliance has any policy or rules on depleted uranium. “The jury is still out scientifically on what the ramifications and dangers of using it are,” the spokesman told me. That appears to me as a flimsy attempt to justify the unjustifiable. While it may be impossible to prove that the upsurge of childhood cancer found in Iraq following the First Gulf War (1991) was linked to DU, there is ample circumstantial evidence to suggest it can have lethal consequences. Jawad Khadim al-Ali, an Iraqi doctor, is among those to have found an abnormally high incidence of cancer in parts of Basra where intense bombardment took place.
If you still need reasons why NATO should not be trusted, check out Rolling Stone’s new account of what young soldiers serving with the alliance got up to in Afghanistan. After Andrew Holmes, a corporal, nonchalantly shot dead an unarmed farmer, his squad leader presented him with the man’s finger as a trophy.
“Our values are firmly based on freedom, democracy and the rule of law,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO’s secretary general and former Danish premier, said at the end of March. How are those values compatible with rewarding a murderer?
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 3-9 April 2011
This celebration of trans-continental harmony is deceitful. It omits any acknowledgment of how most African governments are at odds with NATO over its attacks on Libya – and with good reason.
Apologists for the war maintain that it is based on the “responsibility to protect”, a concept usually abbreviated as R2P. Yet by examining past comments of James Jones, the decorated general who was Barack Obama’s national security adviser until November last, we might get a more accurate explanation. “As commander of NATO, I worried early in the mornings about how to protect energy facilities and supply chain routes as far away as Africa, the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea,” Jones said in 2008. (It is instructive that he joined the board of Chevron earlier that year).
Though the main tenets of R2P look laudable, the background of its chief proponent Gareth Evans can only arouse suspicion. When he was Australia’s foreign minister in 1989, Evans signed the Timor Gap Treaty with his then Indonesian counterpart Ali Alatas. This enabled the theft of oil resources off East Timor, where 250,000 people died in one of the twentieth century’s most brutal occupations.
Just as the motives of a sham humanitarian like Evans should be questioned, doubts must be cast on Obama’s sincerity when he defended bombing Libya on the pretext “we were faced with the prospect of violence on a horrific scale”. Could the haste with which the West intervened not have more to do with Libya boasting Africa’s largest proven oil reserves? And were Western leaders and their chums in BP and Total not jittery over threats made by Muammar Gaddafi in 2009 (and reiterated in the past few weeks) to nationalise those resources?
Yes, it may be too reductionist to describe what is happening in Libya as another war for oil. The truth is probably that it is not only a war for oil but also to assert the control of America and its European stooges over Africa.
Having already declared war in Europe (Serbia) and taken charge of one in Asia (Afghanistan), it was perhaps logical that NATO would soon stretch its imperial tentacles into Africa. In 2007, Africom, its command for operations in Africa, was set up. “Factsheets” churned out from Africom’s headquarters in Stuttgart bragged of support for health, education and water projects. Yet that mask of charity belies a remark made by Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, then NATO’s secretary-general, the previous year, when he said the alliance was willing to use warplanes to secure oil and gas supply routes from Africa.
No war is fought for noble motives. If you really think that Sarkozy or Obama wished to protect civilian lives, study the eyewitness account signed by Russian, Ukrainian and Belarussian doctors working in Libya on 24 March. They document how dozens of innocent people were killed and maimed by NATO bombs falling on residential areas of Tajhura, a suburb of Tripoli. The onslaught led to the roof collapsing in the maternity ward of a hospital, causing numerous miscarriages.
This serves as a reminder of how NATO bombed Serbia in 1999. On that occasion, a children’s hospital in Belgrade’s embassy district was targeted. As Michel Chossudovsky, a Canadian economist, points out on the website Global Research, sleeping babies were spared by the alliance’s missiles. Generators were hit instead, depriving incubators of power.
Moreover, there is a distinct possibility that the consequences of NATO’s actions will continue to be felt in Libya long after the bombs have stopped falling, especially if those bombs were coated with depleted uranium (DU). While the Pentagon has said it has no reports that the substance is being used, the A-10 Warthogs flown by the US Air Force are equipped with guns designed to fire DU-tipped munitions.
I called a NATO spokesman to ask if the alliance has any policy or rules on depleted uranium. “The jury is still out scientifically on what the ramifications and dangers of using it are,” the spokesman told me. That appears to me as a flimsy attempt to justify the unjustifiable. While it may be impossible to prove that the upsurge of childhood cancer found in Iraq following the First Gulf War (1991) was linked to DU, there is ample circumstantial evidence to suggest it can have lethal consequences. Jawad Khadim al-Ali, an Iraqi doctor, is among those to have found an abnormally high incidence of cancer in parts of Basra where intense bombardment took place.
If you still need reasons why NATO should not be trusted, check out Rolling Stone’s new account of what young soldiers serving with the alliance got up to in Afghanistan. After Andrew Holmes, a corporal, nonchalantly shot dead an unarmed farmer, his squad leader presented him with the man’s finger as a trophy.
“Our values are firmly based on freedom, democracy and the rule of law,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO’s secretary general and former Danish premier, said at the end of March. How are those values compatible with rewarding a murderer?
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 3-9 April 2011
Monday, March 28, 2011
France, war and the denial of history
Recent history contains several examples of political leaders resorting to military action at times when public opinion is against them. Margaret Thatcher is widely credited with securing re-election in 1983 after going to war over those outposts of empire, the Falkland Islands, at a time of mass unemployment in Britain. Bill Clinton tried to distract attention from sexual peccadilloes that affected nobody beyond his immediate family in 1998 by bombing Afghanistan and Sudan. The resulting destruction of a Sudanese factory that was a principal supplier of medicines in a poor African country was deemed unworthy of comment by a supine US press.
Nicolas Sarkozy seems to be following the Thatcher/Clinton trend. One year before a presidential election, he has both political rivals and nominally independent editorial writers praising his hawkish stance on Libya.
France’s opening salvo of missiles against Libya has helped its president “win back his international stature”, according to Agence France-Presse. That verdict may have been slightly premature: there are rumblings of disquiet in NATO about France trying to upstage other “important” countries by making sure it was the first to attack.
The truth behind Sarkozy’s manoeuvre is doubtlessly crude. Sarkozy’s primary motivation in any major decision he takes is how it meshes with his plan to stay in office for as long as possible. So all his talk about being forced to assume a role “in the face of history” is claptrap. What he is really interested in is winning a second term.
You can be sure that Sarkozy has not been staying up at night shedding tears over how ordinary Libyans have been suffering under Muammar Gaddafi’s tyranny. Rather than protecting civilians, he is much more likely to be concerned with protecting the profits of Total, the French energy giant, which produced an average of 55,000 barrels of oil from Libyan wells per day in 2010. Let us remember that the same Sarkozy came out in favour of a ban on investment in Burma a few years back. The small print to his valiant act of support for Buddhist monks had an important caveat: Total could continue exploiting Burmese resources as before.
Nor should it be forgotten that Sarkozy had courted Gaddafi assiduously over the past few years. Business deals were central to this tawdry alliance. In 2009, the value of declared French arms sales to Libya came to €30.5 million. Ominously, these included nearly €500,000 worth of contracts belonging to a category called chemical and biological weapons and tear gas. They also included €17.5 million in sales of military planes. There is a breathtaking hypocrisy in calling for a no-fly zone against a country to which France had been supplying warplanes.
It is distressing, too, that the French Socialists have abandoned the chief responsibility of an opposition party: to oppose. Benoit Hamon, a leading member of the Socialists, has strongly backed Sarkozy on the Libya question.
Although Libya is a former Italian colony, rather than a French one, France has abetted crimes against humanity in various parts of the neighbouring region. Both Socialists and the centre-right in France are refusing to deal with imperialism’s toxic legacy. In 2005, they teamed up to introduce a provision in national law requiring that school textbooks celebrate “the positive role of the French presence in its overseas colonies, especially in North Africa.”
That amounted to a denial of historical reality. Four years earlier a book by Paul Assauresses revealed how France had supported widespread torture in Algeria, Libya’s next-door-neighbour. Assauresses admitted that as a French general he personally had committed grotesque abuses.
The US may be the world’s imperial leviathan today, yet French politicians are playing a supporting role. In his book The Breaking of Nations, Robert Cooper (now a senior official in the EU’s diplomatic service) lauds “limited form of voluntary empire” that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund embody. The IMF is headed by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a veteran French Socialist whose name keeps popping up whenever there is speculation about who could be the next president of his country (assuming Sarkozy’s defeat).
Strauss-Kahn has embraced neo-liberal ideology as zealously as any politician from the centre-right. The IMF’s prescriptions of austerity for countries stretching from Ireland to Jamaica in recent times all bear his signature. The idea that he would represent an alternative to his old nemesis Sarkozy is laughable.
There may be a few differences between Sarko and the Socialists on dossiers like working hours. But the Socialist leadership is not seriously interested in making society more egalitarian (in the country that is credited with inventing the concept of equality). Martine Aubry, its leader, has been exposed as a hollow opportunist. Last year, she was highly critical of government moves to expel Roma gypsies. Yet it emerged that she had supported the dismantlement of a Roma camp near Lille, where she was mayor. I have visited some of the Roma camps in that part of northern France myself and was deeply shocked by the poverty in them and how they lacked basic sanitation. Roma are among the most marginalised people in French society; shame on Aubry for attacking them.
The cowardice of the French Socialists is replicated by their sister parties in Greece, Spain and Ireland. Those parties are all cutting back on public expenditure in a way that harms the poor most. The case for building a genuine left has never been more urgent.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 27 March – 2 April 2011
Nicolas Sarkozy seems to be following the Thatcher/Clinton trend. One year before a presidential election, he has both political rivals and nominally independent editorial writers praising his hawkish stance on Libya.
France’s opening salvo of missiles against Libya has helped its president “win back his international stature”, according to Agence France-Presse. That verdict may have been slightly premature: there are rumblings of disquiet in NATO about France trying to upstage other “important” countries by making sure it was the first to attack.
The truth behind Sarkozy’s manoeuvre is doubtlessly crude. Sarkozy’s primary motivation in any major decision he takes is how it meshes with his plan to stay in office for as long as possible. So all his talk about being forced to assume a role “in the face of history” is claptrap. What he is really interested in is winning a second term.
You can be sure that Sarkozy has not been staying up at night shedding tears over how ordinary Libyans have been suffering under Muammar Gaddafi’s tyranny. Rather than protecting civilians, he is much more likely to be concerned with protecting the profits of Total, the French energy giant, which produced an average of 55,000 barrels of oil from Libyan wells per day in 2010. Let us remember that the same Sarkozy came out in favour of a ban on investment in Burma a few years back. The small print to his valiant act of support for Buddhist monks had an important caveat: Total could continue exploiting Burmese resources as before.
Nor should it be forgotten that Sarkozy had courted Gaddafi assiduously over the past few years. Business deals were central to this tawdry alliance. In 2009, the value of declared French arms sales to Libya came to €30.5 million. Ominously, these included nearly €500,000 worth of contracts belonging to a category called chemical and biological weapons and tear gas. They also included €17.5 million in sales of military planes. There is a breathtaking hypocrisy in calling for a no-fly zone against a country to which France had been supplying warplanes.
It is distressing, too, that the French Socialists have abandoned the chief responsibility of an opposition party: to oppose. Benoit Hamon, a leading member of the Socialists, has strongly backed Sarkozy on the Libya question.
Although Libya is a former Italian colony, rather than a French one, France has abetted crimes against humanity in various parts of the neighbouring region. Both Socialists and the centre-right in France are refusing to deal with imperialism’s toxic legacy. In 2005, they teamed up to introduce a provision in national law requiring that school textbooks celebrate “the positive role of the French presence in its overseas colonies, especially in North Africa.”
That amounted to a denial of historical reality. Four years earlier a book by Paul Assauresses revealed how France had supported widespread torture in Algeria, Libya’s next-door-neighbour. Assauresses admitted that as a French general he personally had committed grotesque abuses.
The US may be the world’s imperial leviathan today, yet French politicians are playing a supporting role. In his book The Breaking of Nations, Robert Cooper (now a senior official in the EU’s diplomatic service) lauds “limited form of voluntary empire” that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund embody. The IMF is headed by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a veteran French Socialist whose name keeps popping up whenever there is speculation about who could be the next president of his country (assuming Sarkozy’s defeat).
Strauss-Kahn has embraced neo-liberal ideology as zealously as any politician from the centre-right. The IMF’s prescriptions of austerity for countries stretching from Ireland to Jamaica in recent times all bear his signature. The idea that he would represent an alternative to his old nemesis Sarkozy is laughable.
There may be a few differences between Sarko and the Socialists on dossiers like working hours. But the Socialist leadership is not seriously interested in making society more egalitarian (in the country that is credited with inventing the concept of equality). Martine Aubry, its leader, has been exposed as a hollow opportunist. Last year, she was highly critical of government moves to expel Roma gypsies. Yet it emerged that she had supported the dismantlement of a Roma camp near Lille, where she was mayor. I have visited some of the Roma camps in that part of northern France myself and was deeply shocked by the poverty in them and how they lacked basic sanitation. Roma are among the most marginalised people in French society; shame on Aubry for attacking them.
The cowardice of the French Socialists is replicated by their sister parties in Greece, Spain and Ireland. Those parties are all cutting back on public expenditure in a way that harms the poor most. The case for building a genuine left has never been more urgent.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 27 March – 2 April 2011
Monday, March 7, 2011
Put merchants of death out of business
Over the past few years I have developed an unhealthy obsession with the arms industry. Just as I tend to become transfixed in art galleries, the images of precision-guided missiles in “defence” magazines can leave me with a pleasantly blank sensation. That’s when I have to shake myself and recall that these photogenic instruments were designed for the sole purpose of ending human life.
The promotional copy pumped out by weapons manufacturers renders satire redundant. In February, Belgium’s FN Herstal displayed some of its shiny new assault pistols and submachine guns at the IDEX arms fair in Abu Dhabi. An explanatory note told us that the Liège-based firm “contributes to maintain and restore international peace and security”.
One day after the exhibition opened, a video appeared on YouTube. It showed a Libyan civilian clasping one of the “special” weapons held by forces under Muammar Gaddafi’s control. Branded an FN-303, the weapon was made by the aforementioned Herstal, as part of its contribution to international peace and security. About 2,000 such weapons were authorised for export to Libya by the Walloon regional government in June 2009. This is by no means the first time that Herstal has profited from grubby deals. Automatic rifles made by the company were found in eastern Congo in 2005, indicating they were used in a war that left nearly 400,000 people dead over the previous two years.
In a prescient report published in November last, the Dutch Campaign Against the Arms Trade cited Libya as one of the clearest cases where EU governments attach greater importance to “export promotion” than to ethical considerations when licensing the arms trade. When Gaddafi was the West’s favourite bogeyman in the mid-1980s, the European Community imposed an arms embargo on Libya. But as soon as it was lifted in 2004, arms exporters scrambled to do business with their new buddies. The British trade association Defence Manufacturers Association rhapsodised in 2005 about how Libya was a “relatively sophisticated customer with a political will to procure equipment”. The “relatively sophisticated” Gaddafi could be persuaded to be anything: one British deal to supply an elite brigade in Libya’s army was worth €100 million.
Since 1998, the EU’s governments have been committed to observing a “code of conduct” on arms exports. Made legally binding a decade later, it requires that weapons are not sold to countries where they are likely to be used for internal repression or to exacerbate regional tensions. Like more than a few policy documents, it looks great on paper and is routinely violated in practice.
It is not difficult to see why. Data published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that the arms trade has been largely cushioned from the global recession. In 2009, the volume of sales for the world’s top 100 arms companies amounted to $401 billion, a rise of almost $15 billion over the preceding year. One-third of these companies have their headquarters in Western Europe; they include BAE, EADS, Finmeccanica and Thales.
With their deep pockets, the representatives of these companies have no problem twisting arms in the Brussels bureaucracy and in national capitals of EU countries. Due to their diligent schmoozing, support for the arms industry is being treated as an enterprise promotion dossier in the nominally civilian European Commission. The EU’s multi-annual “framework programme” for scientific research has also been partly hijacked by the arms industry. A little-noticed study completed at the European Parliament’s request in 2010 decried a clash of interests: the same arms companies that persuaded the EU authorities to allocate science grants for “security research” after the 11 September 2001 attacks have been the biggest recipients of those same grants. Out of a sample of 91 projects with a total value of €443 million analysed for that study, the French firm Thales bagged well over half (€254 million) of the cash on offer.
Top-level politicians often double up as salespeople for the arms industry. Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, is pushing for the arms embargo slapped on China after the Tiananmen Square massacre to be scrapped on the grounds that relations with Beijing need to be nurtured for strategic reasons. Proving that she suffers from the same lack of scruples as other top players in New Labour, she is more concerned with drumming up business for the arms industry than in China’s oppression of Uighurs in Xinjiang or Buddhists in Tibet. Proving, too, that mollycoddling the arms industry transcends party lines in British politics, David Cameron toured the Persian Gulf last month with a few of his country’s leading arms traders. Critics of the trade are “completely at odds with reality”, the prime minister thundered.
It is right that a fresh ban on weapons sales to Libya has now been introduced. But we know that such bans can be lifted on the flimsiest of pretexts. The EU officially stopped selling weapons to Uzbekistan after its troops mowed down peaceful protesters at Andizhan in 2005. Four years later, the embargo was removed because the Uzbek authorities were deemed useful allies for NATO’s imperial war in Afghanistan.
At the United Nations, a July 2012 deadline has been set for a global treaty to regulate the arms trade. As weapons-sellers are so powerful, there is only one way to combat them: by massive public pressure. Everything must be done to put merchants of death out of business.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 6-12 March 2011.
The promotional copy pumped out by weapons manufacturers renders satire redundant. In February, Belgium’s FN Herstal displayed some of its shiny new assault pistols and submachine guns at the IDEX arms fair in Abu Dhabi. An explanatory note told us that the Liège-based firm “contributes to maintain and restore international peace and security”.
One day after the exhibition opened, a video appeared on YouTube. It showed a Libyan civilian clasping one of the “special” weapons held by forces under Muammar Gaddafi’s control. Branded an FN-303, the weapon was made by the aforementioned Herstal, as part of its contribution to international peace and security. About 2,000 such weapons were authorised for export to Libya by the Walloon regional government in June 2009. This is by no means the first time that Herstal has profited from grubby deals. Automatic rifles made by the company were found in eastern Congo in 2005, indicating they were used in a war that left nearly 400,000 people dead over the previous two years.
In a prescient report published in November last, the Dutch Campaign Against the Arms Trade cited Libya as one of the clearest cases where EU governments attach greater importance to “export promotion” than to ethical considerations when licensing the arms trade. When Gaddafi was the West’s favourite bogeyman in the mid-1980s, the European Community imposed an arms embargo on Libya. But as soon as it was lifted in 2004, arms exporters scrambled to do business with their new buddies. The British trade association Defence Manufacturers Association rhapsodised in 2005 about how Libya was a “relatively sophisticated customer with a political will to procure equipment”. The “relatively sophisticated” Gaddafi could be persuaded to be anything: one British deal to supply an elite brigade in Libya’s army was worth €100 million.
Since 1998, the EU’s governments have been committed to observing a “code of conduct” on arms exports. Made legally binding a decade later, it requires that weapons are not sold to countries where they are likely to be used for internal repression or to exacerbate regional tensions. Like more than a few policy documents, it looks great on paper and is routinely violated in practice.
It is not difficult to see why. Data published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that the arms trade has been largely cushioned from the global recession. In 2009, the volume of sales for the world’s top 100 arms companies amounted to $401 billion, a rise of almost $15 billion over the preceding year. One-third of these companies have their headquarters in Western Europe; they include BAE, EADS, Finmeccanica and Thales.
With their deep pockets, the representatives of these companies have no problem twisting arms in the Brussels bureaucracy and in national capitals of EU countries. Due to their diligent schmoozing, support for the arms industry is being treated as an enterprise promotion dossier in the nominally civilian European Commission. The EU’s multi-annual “framework programme” for scientific research has also been partly hijacked by the arms industry. A little-noticed study completed at the European Parliament’s request in 2010 decried a clash of interests: the same arms companies that persuaded the EU authorities to allocate science grants for “security research” after the 11 September 2001 attacks have been the biggest recipients of those same grants. Out of a sample of 91 projects with a total value of €443 million analysed for that study, the French firm Thales bagged well over half (€254 million) of the cash on offer.
Top-level politicians often double up as salespeople for the arms industry. Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, is pushing for the arms embargo slapped on China after the Tiananmen Square massacre to be scrapped on the grounds that relations with Beijing need to be nurtured for strategic reasons. Proving that she suffers from the same lack of scruples as other top players in New Labour, she is more concerned with drumming up business for the arms industry than in China’s oppression of Uighurs in Xinjiang or Buddhists in Tibet. Proving, too, that mollycoddling the arms industry transcends party lines in British politics, David Cameron toured the Persian Gulf last month with a few of his country’s leading arms traders. Critics of the trade are “completely at odds with reality”, the prime minister thundered.
It is right that a fresh ban on weapons sales to Libya has now been introduced. But we know that such bans can be lifted on the flimsiest of pretexts. The EU officially stopped selling weapons to Uzbekistan after its troops mowed down peaceful protesters at Andizhan in 2005. Four years later, the embargo was removed because the Uzbek authorities were deemed useful allies for NATO’s imperial war in Afghanistan.
At the United Nations, a July 2012 deadline has been set for a global treaty to regulate the arms trade. As weapons-sellers are so powerful, there is only one way to combat them: by massive public pressure. Everything must be done to put merchants of death out of business.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 6-12 March 2011.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)