March 2015
Vol 15, No.03
THE YOGYAKARTA STATEMENT A high-level summit of Buddhist and Muslim leaders was held at Yogyakarta and the Borobudur Temple, Indonesia on the 3rd and 4th of March 2015. It was themed “Overcoming Extremism and Advancing Peace with Justice.” Hosted by the Indonesian Buddhist Association (WALUBI) and the Indonesian Council of Ulama (MUI), it was organized the International Forum on Buddhist Muslim Relations (BMF). The BMF’s core comprises the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB); the International Movement for a Just World (JUST); Muhammadiyah Indonesia; and Religions for Peace New York. The Summit adopted a Statement — the YOGYAKARTA STATEMENT — which is published below. We, Buddhist and Muslim leaders, recognize that our followers have developed together a harmonious relationship, which has become
the foundation for building peace and prosperity in many parts of the world. Buddhism and Islam share in their respective scriptures and other canonical texts the importance of holistic and positive peace, which encompasses the notions of inner peace, peace among humans, and peace with nature. We reaffirm that Islam and Buddhism are religions of mercy and compassion committed to justice for all humankind. Both traditions respect the sacredness of life and inherent dignity of human existence, which is the foundation of all human rights without any distinction as to race, color, language, or religion. We reject the abuse of our religions in support of discrimination and violence. Buddhism and Islam have been misused by some for their own political purposes
to fuel prejudice and stereotyping and to incite discrimination and violence. We categorically reject such abuse and pledge to counter extremist religious interpretations and actions with our authentic primary narratives of peace. We also recognize the need to strengthen governmental measures to prevent religiously motivated discrimination and violence. Based on universally accepted international legal instruments such as Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the United Nations Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18, we call on all states to take measures to fulfill their responsibilities to protect their citizens from religious and racial hatred, and incitement to discrimination and violence in the name of religion. Freedom of Turn to next page
STATEMENT BY CHANDRA MUZAFFAR.........................P4
.INTEGRITY: CASTING ASPERSIONS
ARTICLES . SAUDIS SAID TO AID ISRAELI PLAN TO BOMB
BY ROBERT PARRY......................................P 5 . GENOCIDE IN KASHMIR: INDIA’S SHAME
BY ANDRE VLTCHEK..................................P 8 . ISIS DESTROYS ANCIENT SITES NEAR MOSUL
BY SANDY ENGLISH...................................P 14
.INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY: ITS SIGNIFICANCE
ARAB AND PALESTINIAN WOMEN BY MAZIN QUMSIYEH.............................P17 FOR
. DEAR SYRIA: FROM ONE REFUGEE TO ANOTHER BY RAMZY BAROUD.............................P 18 . WEALTH
THE WORLD’S 400 RICHEST BILLIONAIRES ROSE $92 BILLION IN 2014 BY ANDRE DAMON...............................P 19 OF
.AUSTRALIA’S SOVEREIGNTY SEVERELY COMPROMISED FOR
US-ISRAELI DESIGNS BY DAUD BATCHELOR................................P 16
. THE REAL AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
BY ALFRED W. MCCOY.......................P21
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We reaffirm our fundamental common values shared by our respective scriptures and other canonical texts as follows: I.Religious Diversity and Peaceful CoExistence Buddhism “All religions should reside everywhere, for all of them desire self-control and purity of heart.” “Contact (between religions) is good. One should listen to and respect the doctrines professed by others. Beloved-ofthe-Gods, King Piyadasi, desires that all should be well-learned in the good doctrines of other religions.” “You are true to your own beliefs if you accord kindly treatment to adherents of other faiths. You harm your own religion by harassing followers of other creeds.” (Edicts of Emperor Ashoka, 269232 BC) Islam “O humankind! We [Allah] have created you from a single [pair] of a male and a female and have made you into nations and tribes, so that you may come to know one another.” (The Qur’an 49:13). It reminds humanity that they belong to one family, with the same set of parents, a diverse family as it may be. This is a reminder that diversity in unity and unity within diversity are possible. This is further reinforced by the assertion that diversity is part of the divine plan and is in fact a way of testing human beings. “If God had so willed He would have made you a single people, but (His Plan is) to test you in what he hath given you: So strive as in a race in all virtues. The goal of you all is to God.” (The Qur’an, 5: 48) 11. Universal Mercy and Compassion Islam It is significant that every one of the 114 chapters of the Qur’an — except one —
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begins with the proclamation “In the name of God, the Compassionate and the Merciful.” Compassion and Mercy are among the most exalted of God’s attributes. This is why the Qur’an says “And [thus, O Muhammad], We have not sent you, but as mercy to all the worlds” (The Qur’an 21:107). Buddhism “Let your love flow outward through the universe, To its height, its depth, its broad extent, A limitless love,without hatred or enmity.” Just as a mother would protect her only child at the risk of her own life, even so,cultivate a boundless heart towards all beings. Let your thoughts of boundless love pervade the world.” (Sutta Nipata 149150) 111. Universal Justice Buddhism One who, while himself seeking happiness, oppresses with violence other beings who also desire happiness, will not attain happiness hereafter. (Dhammapada 131) While being completely law-abiding, some people are imprisoned, treated harshly and even killed without cause so that many people suffer. Therefore your aim should be to act with impartiality. It is because of these things — envy,anger, cruelty, hate, indifference, laziness or tiredness — that such a thing does not happen. Therefore your aim should be: “May these things not be in me.” And the root of this is non-anger and patience. (Edicts of Emperor Ashoka, 269-232 BC) Islam “O ye who believe! Stand out firmly for justice as witnesses to God, even as against yourselves, or your parents, Or your kin, and whether it be (against) rich or poor; for God can best protect both. Follow not the lusts (of your hearts), lest you swerve, and if you distort (justice) or decline to do justice, verily God is well acquainted with all you do.” (The Qur’an, 4: 135)
L E A D A R T I C L E “We sent aforetime Our apostles with Clear Signs And sent down with them The Book and the Balance Of Right and Wrong, that men May stand forth in Justice. (The Quran, 57: 25) IV. Human Dignity and Non-Violence Islam “Now, indeed, We have conferred dignity on the children of Adam and borne them over land and sea, and provided for them sustenance out of the good things of life, and favoured them far above most of Our creation.”(The Qur’an, 17: 70). “…if anyone slays a human being, …it shall be as though he had slain all humankind; whereas, if anyone saves a life, it shall be as though he had saved the lives of all humankind” (The Qur’an 5:32) Buddhism “Whoever settles a matter by violence is not just. The wise calmly considers what is right and what is wrong.Whoever guides others by a procedure that is non-violent and fair is said to be a guardian of truth, wise and just.”(Dhammapada 256-57) “Even though he be well-attired, yet if he is poised, calm, controlled and established in the holy life, having set aside violence towards all beings - he, truly, is a holy man, a renunciate, a monk.(Dhammapada 142) V. Living in Harmony with the Environment. Buddhism As the bee derives honey from the flower without harming its colour or fragrance — So should the wise interact with their surroundings. (Dhammapada 49) One day a deity asked the Buddha, “Whose merit grows day and night, who is the righteous, virtuous person that goes to the realm of bliss?” Answered the Buddha, the merit of those people who plant groves, continued next page
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parks, build bridges, make ponds, dwelling places etc. grows day and night, and such religious persons go to heaven. (Vanaropa Sutta) Islam For the true servants of the Most Gracious are only those who walk gently on earth — (The Qur’an 25:63) What this means is that by reducing one’s ecological footprint one is being faithful to God. And there are on earth many tracts of land close by one another (and yet widely differing from one another ); and( there are on it) vineyards, and fields of grain, and date-palms growing in clusters from one root or standing alone,(all) watered with the same water: and yet, some of them have We favoured above others by way of the food (which they provide for man and beast). Verily, in all this there are messages indeed for people who use their reason. (The Qur’an 13:4). This is a clear call to respect the environment as God’s creation. VI. Pluralism, Tolerance, and Religious Freedom Islam “There is no compulsion in religion…” (The Qur’an 2:256) “Will you then compel mankind, against their will,to believe? No soul can believe, except by the Will of God.” (The Qur’an 10.99-100) There are many examples of the Prophet’s tolerance of other faiths. Islam recognizes that there are a plurality of religions on this earth, and gives the right to individuals to choose the path which they believe to be true. Religion is not to be, and was never, forced upon an individual against their own will. Buddhism “Let him not therefore think himself better (than others or) low or equal (to others); questioned by different people,let him not adorn himself. (Sutta Nipata 918) The Buddha says, “To be attached to a certain view and to look down upon others’ views as inferior—this the wise men call a fetter.”
(Sutta Nipata 798) Guiding his disciple called Upali on how to treat the follower of another religion, the Buddha clearly stated that he was to treat him with the same respect. Throughout his life the Buddha urged people to respect all religious people in spite of the differences of opinion between them. VII. Rejection of Hate, Hate Speech, Retaliation, and the Importance of SelfIntrospection Buddhism “They insulted me; they hurt me; they defeated me; they cheated me. In those who do harbor such thoughts, hate will never cease. They insulted me; they hurt me; they defeated me; they cheated me. In those who do not harbor such thoughts, hate will cease. For hate is never conquered by hate. Hate is conquered by love. This is an eternal law. (Dhammapada 3-5) Bad words blaming others.Arrogant words humiliating others.From these behaviors. Come hatred and resentment. ...Hence conflicts arise, rendering in people malicious thoughts. (Dhammapada, 8) “Do not look at the faults of others, or what others have done or not done; observe what you yourself have done and have not done.” (Dhammapada 4.7) Islam “O you who believe! Stand out firmly for Allah, as witnesses to fair dealing, and let not the hatred of others to you make you swerve to wrong and depart from justice. Be just: that is next to piety and fear Allah, for Allah is well acquainted with all that you do.” (The Qur’an 5:8) Based upon our shared core values mentioned above, We commit ourselves, through the facilitation of the core group of the International Forum on Buddhist Muslim
L E A D A R T I C L E Relations (BMF: International Network of Engaged Buddhists, InternationalMovement for a Just World, Muhammadiyah and Religions for Peace), to implementing the agreed upon action plan and working to further strengthen BMF to: • serve as a platform for intra-religious and inter-religious initiatives in education & advocacy; • enable rapid reaction/ solidarity visits/ early warning/ conflict prevention in the event of conflict; • develop and provide tools and materials for constructive engagement and strategic common action, and; • develop the effective use of media for positive messaging, particularly via social & alternative media. We appeciate our Indonesian hosts, Indonesian BuddhistAssociation (WALUBI) and theIndonesian Council of Ulama (MUI) for their warm hospitality and their offering us a criticalopportunity to dialogue among ourselves. Partial List of Signatories Bangladesh 1.Most Ven. Mahathero Sreemathsatyapriyorev, Chief Priest of Cox’s Bazar,Buddhist 2. H.E. Mr. Hasanul Haq Inu, Minister of Information, the Government of Bangladesh, Muslim 3. Ven. Bhikkhu Sunandapriyarev, Joint General Secretary, Bangladesh Buddhist Federation, Buddhist Indonesia 4. Prof. Dr. Din Syamsuddin, Chairman, Ulama Council of Indonesia (MUI) and Chairman, Muhammadiyah, Muslim 5. Mr. Muhyidin Junaidi, Vice Chairman, Ulama Council of Indonesia (MUI),Muslim 6. Prof. Dr. Philip K. Wijaya, Secretary General, Buddhist Association of Indonesia (WALUBI), Buddhist 7. Mr. Arief Harsono, Vice President, Buddhist Association of Indonesia (WALUBI), Buddhist continued next page
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8. Drs. H. Slamet Effendy Yusuf, M.Si, Vice Chairman, Nahdlatul Ulama 9. Mr. Ahmad Suaedy, Executive Director, Wahid Institute, Muslim Malaysia 10. Ven. K Sri Dhammaratana, Chief Priest, Kuala Lumpur, Buddhist 11. Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, President, International Movement for a Just World,Muslim Myanmar 12. Most Ven.AshinAriawonthar Biwontha, Mandalay, Buddhist 13. Al Haj U Aye Lwin, Chief Convener, Islamic Center of Myanmar, Muslim Sri Lanka 14. Ven. Dr. Bellanwila Wimalaratana Anunayaka Thera, President, SriLankan Council of Religions for Peace, Buddhist 15. H.E. Mr. Rauf Hakeem, Minister of Urban Development, Water and Supply and Drainage, Government of Sri Lanka: National Leader, Muslim Congress of Sri
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Lanka,Muslim 16. Mr. Moulavi Athambawa, VicePresident, Sri Lankan Council of Religions forPeace, Muslim 17. Mr. Harsha Kumara Navaratne, Chairman, Sewa lanka Foundation;Chairman, Sewa lanka Foundation, Buddhist
Executive Secretary, International Network of Engaged Buddhists, Buddhist
Thailand 18. Dr. Ismail Lutfi Japakiya, Rector, Yala University, Muslim (represented by Dr. Sukree Langputeh) 19. Ven. Phrakhruudomthammathon, Narathiwat Province, Southern Thailand,Buddhist 20. Dr. Parichart Suwanbubbha, Director, Institute of Human Rights and Peace Studies, Mahidol University, Buddhist (represented by Dr. Suphatmet Yunyasit)
Muhammadiyah 23. Dr. Alpha Amirrachman, Executive Director, Centre for Dialogue and Cooperation among Civilisations (CDCCMuhammadiyah)
BMF Core Group Representatives International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB) 21. Mr. Somboon Chungprampree,
International for a Just Movement World (JUST) 22. Mr. Hassanal Noor Rashid, Program Coordinator, International Movementfor a Just World, Muslim
Religions for Peace 24. Rev. Kyoichi Sugino, Deputy Secretary General, Religions for Peace International International Forum on Buddhist-Muslim Relations (BMF) 25. Mr. Vidya KV Soon, Interim Secretary, International Forum on Buddhist-Muslim Relations (BMF) 4 March 2015.
STATEMENT INTEGRITY: CASTING ASPERSIONS By Chandra Muzaffar Like many other Malaysians, I am deeply concerned about allegations in the media hurledattheMalaysianPrimeMinisterand his family which have cast serious aspersions on their integrity. Some of these allegations have been circulating for a while but they have now re-surfaced in a more trenchant form. The New York Times has played a big role in this. Why have they re-appeared at this time? The NYT article entitled “Jho Low, Well Connected in Malaysia, Has anAppetite for New York” by Louise Story and
Stephanie Saul was dated February 8, 2015 — two days before the Federal Court announced its verdict in theAnwar Ibrahim case. Is this a coincidence? Or was it a mischievous attempt to pile pressure upon the powers-that-be in Kuala Lumpur so that the Court would be compelled to make a decision in favour of Anwar? The five member Federal Court panel, needless to say, guided by the principles of law and the canons of justice, upheld the earlier decisionoftheCourtofAppealandfound Anwar guilty of sodomy.
brought to bear upon the Judiciary in view of what transpired in 2012. It would be recalledthatonJanuary82012,aneditorial in the Washington Post warned bluntly that,“Iftheverdictfailsthattest(Malaysia’s commitment to democracy and the rule of law) there should be consequences for Mr. Najib’s relations with Washington.” This was a day before the Kuala Lumpur High Court was scheduled to pronounce its verdict in Anwar’s sodomy trial. On January 9, Anwar was acquitted by the High Court. It could of course have been a mere coincidence.
It is valid to ask whether pressures were
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Nonetheless, it is a fact that sections of theAmerican and British media, leading US and British based human rights NGOs, and even some British and US leaders had made vociferous demands in the months preceding the 2012 verdict for Anwar’s release. I had argued in a couple of newspaper articles at that time that this was part of their push for regime change in Malaysia. Even before 1998, when Anwar was sacked from the government and UMNO, there were already moves in some circles in theWest to fast-trackAnwar as a replacement for PrimeMinisterMahathirMohamadwho they regarded as a ‘thorn in their flesh.’ In contrast, Anwar was then described as “the darling of the West.” But why is there still a desire for regime change when the present Prime Minister, Dato Sri Najib, has gone out of his way to strengthen ties with Washington and London and even with their allies inWest Asia? PartoftheexplanationliesinNajib’s unwavering support for the Palestinian cause, demonstrated through actual deeds, which has always incensed the IsraeliregimeanditsZionistandChristian Zionist backers in the US. Perhaps another equally important reason for Washington’s uneasiness with Kuala LumpurisNajib’swarmrelationshipwith
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Beijing which has gone beyond trade, investments, education and culture to embrace issues of security and military cooperation. This may be why regime change is still on the agenda of those who see themselves as the rulers of the world. Those of us who are vehemently opposed to regime change instigated and orchestrated by outsiders are very much aware of how the vulnerabilities and shortcomings of the wielders of power in a particular country can be so easily exploited by both external and internal forces to bring down a leader.Allegations abouttheunexplainedwealthofindividuals linked to the Prime Minister, their opulent lifestyles, a controversial naval procurement and the questionable operations of a sovereign wealth fund, are bound to create distrust and to erode the confidence of the people in the ruling elite. It is quite conceivable that some of these allegations are utterly baseless but unless there is an honest endeavour to explain thewholesituation,publicperceptionswill be formed quickly to the detriment of the Prime Minister and his family. Thecomingparliamentarysessionstarting March 9 affords an opportunity to the Prime Minister to provide a comprehensive response to the issues raised through various media outlets. At
thesametime,heshouldofhisownvolition invite the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) to conduct a thorough investigation into the allegations madeagainsthim,hisfamilyandhisfriends. The MACC should leave no stone unturned. The Prime Minister should also seize the opportunity to expedite the introductionoflongawaitedreformsinthe fight against corruption such as a law requiring all elected legislators to declare their assets and liabilities and those of their close family members to the public and another prohibiting relatives of federal and state officials exercising executive powers from bidding for government contracts and projects. Most of all, there should be a sincere attempt to jettison the lavishness and extravagance that has become synonymous with a section of the elite. A tangible demonstration of such a change in attitudes and values is what the people expect at this time — not the targeting of individuals and groups who are trying to point out elite misdemeanours that may have a devastating impact upon the nation’s future. 16 February 2015 Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is the President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST).
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By Robert Parry As the Obama administration is rushing to complete a nuclear agreement with Iran and reduce regional tensions, the Israeli media is reporting on a deal with Saudi Arabia to let Israeli warplanes transit Saudi airspace en route to bombing Iran.
According to an Israeli media report, Saudi Arabia has agreed to let Israeli warplanes fly over Saudi territory to save fuel while attacking Iranian nuclear sites, the latest indication of how the two former enemies have developed a behind-the-scenes alliance
that is reshaping geopolitics in the Middle East. “The Saudi authorities are completely coordinated with Israel on all matters related to Iran,” a European official in continued next page
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continued from page 5 Brussels told Israel’s Channel 2 in a report broadcast on Tuesday and described in other Israeli media outlets. Riyadh’s only condition was that Israel make some progress in peace talks with the Palestinians, a stipulation that may be mostly cosmetic so the Saudis can save face with other Arab states without really interfering with an Israeli flyover to strike Iran. Disclosure of this Israeli-Saudi military cooperation comes as the United States and five other world powers rush to finish an agreement with Iran to curtail but not eliminate its nuclear program, which Iran says is only for civilian purposes. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to appear before the U.S. Congress on March 3 to undercut President Barack Obama’s negotiations. The reported Saudi permission for Israeli warplanes to take a shorter route to bomb Iran also suggests that Netanyahu may be laying the groundwork for his own plans to attack the Iranian nuclear sites if the international negotiations are successful. Netanyahu has denounced a possible deal as an “existential threat” to Israel. In recent years, Israel and Saudi Arabia have quietly begun cooperating on a range of mutual interests with the goal of blunting Iran’s regional influence. For instance, they have sided with rebels fighting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, an Iranian ally, even if the victors might be Islamist radicals affiliated with al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. Elements of the Saudi royal family have long been known to support Islamist militants, including forces associated with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Earlier this month, the New York
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Times reported that convicted al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui identified leading members of the Saudi government as financiers of the terrorist network. According to the story, Moussaoui said in a prison deposition that he was directed in 1998 or 1999 by Qaeda
A R T I C L E S other Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms have been identified in recent years as financial backers of Sunni militants fighting in Syria to overthrow Assad’s largely secular regime, with al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front the major rebel force benefiting from this support. Shared Israeli Interests The Israelis also have found themselves on the side of these Sunni militants in Syria because the Israelis share the Saudi view that Iran and the so-called “Shiite crescent” – reaching from Tehran to Beirut – is the greatest threat to their interests.
leaders in Afghanistan to create a digital database of the group’s donors and that the list included Prince Turki al-Faisal, then Saudi intelligence chief; Prince Bandar bin Sultan, longtime Saudi ambassador to the United States; Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, a prominent billionaire investor; and many leading clerics. “Sheikh Osama wanted to keep a record who give money,” Moussaoui said in imperfect English — “who is to be listened to or who contributed to the jihad.” Moussaoui also said he discussed a plan to shoot down President George W. Bush’s Air Force One with a Stinger missile with a staff member at the Saudi Embassy in Washington, at a time when Bandar was the ambassador to the United States and considered so close to the Bush family that his nickname was “Bandar Bush.” Moussaoui claimed, too, that he passed letters between Osama bin Laden and then Crown Prince Salman, who recently became king upon the death of his brother King Abdullah. While the Saudi government denied Moussaoui’s accusations, Saudi and
In September 2013, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, then a close Netanyahu adviser, told the Jerusalem Post that Israel favored the Sunni extremists over Assad. “The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc,” Oren told the Jerusalem Post in an interview. “We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.” He said this was the case even if the “bad guys” were affiliated with al-Qaeda. In June 2014, speaking as a former ambassador at an Aspen Institute conference, Oren expanded on his position, saying Israel would even prefer a victory by the brutal Islamic State over continuation of the Iranianbacked Assad in Syria. “From Israel’s perspective, if there’s got to be an evil that’s got to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail,” Oren said. That hostility toward Assad’s regime has taken a tactical form with Israeli forces launching attacks inside Syria continued next page
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that benefit Nusra Front. For instance, on Jan. 18, 2015, Israel attacked Lebanese-Iranian advisers assisting Assad’s government in Syria, killing several members of Hezbollah and an Iranian general. These military advisers were engaged in operations against Nusra Front. Meanwhile, Israel has refrained from attacking Nusra militants who have seized Syrian territory near the Israelioccupied Golan Heights. One source familiar with U.S. intelligence information on Syria told me that Israel has a “non-aggression pact” with Nusra forces, who have even received medical treatment at Israeli hospitals.
Amid the bellicosity, Netanyahu dropped in a largely missed clue about the evolving power relationships in the Middle East, saying: “The dangers of a nuclear-armed Iran and the emergence of other threats in our region have led many of our Arab neighbors to recognize, finally recognize, that Israel is not their enemy. And this affords us the opportunity to overcome the historic animosities and build new relationships, new friendships, new hopes.” The next day, Israel’s Channel 2 TV news reported that senior Israeli security officials had met with a highlevel Gulf state counterpart in Jerusalem, believed to be Prince
Israel and Saudi Arabia have found themselves on the same side in other regional struggles, including support for the military’s ouster of the elected Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, but most importantly they have joined forces in their hostility toward Shiite-ruled Iran. I first reported on the growing relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia in August 2013 in an article entitled “The Saudi-Israeli Superpower,” noting that the complementary strengths of the two countries made their alliance a potentially powerful influence in the world. Israel could wield political and media clout while the Saudis could use their oil, money and investments. At the time, the story was met with much skepticism, but, increasingly, the secret alliance has gone public. On Oct. 1, 2013, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu hinted at it in his United Nations General Assembly speech, which was largely devoted to excoriating Iran over its nuclear program and threatening a unilateral Israeli military strike.
Bandar, the former Saudi ambassador to the United States who was then head of Saudi intelligence. Even the MSM The reality of this unlikely alliance has now even reached the mainstream U.S. media. For instance, Time magazine correspondent Joe Klein described the new coziness in an article in the Jan. 19, 2015 issue. He wrote: “On May 26, 2014, an unprecedented public conversation took place in Brussels. Two former highranking spymasters of Israel and Saudi Arabia – Amos Yadlin and Prince Turki al-Faisal – sat together for more than an hour, talking regional politics in a
A R T I C L E S conversation moderated by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius. “They disagreed on some things, like the exact nature of an Israel-Palestine peace settlement, and agreed on others: the severity of the Iranian nuclear threat, the need to support the new military government in Egypt, the demand for concerted international action in Syria. The most striking statement came from Prince Turki. He said the Arabs had ‘crossed the Rubicon’ and ‘don’t want to fight Israel anymore.’” Israel and Saudi Arabia also have collaborated in efforts to put the squeeze on Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, who is deemed a key supporter of both Iran and Syria. The Saudis have used their power over oil production to drive down prices and hurt Russia’s economy, while U.S. neoconservatives – who share Israel’s geopolitical world view – were at the forefront of the coup that ousted Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych a year ago. Saudi hostility toward Russia also surfaced in 2013 when Bandar met Putin and delivered what Putin viewed as a crude threat to unleash Chechen terrorists against the Sochi Winter Olympics if Putin did not reduce his support for the Syrian government. According to a leaked diplomatic account of a July 31, 2013 meeting in Moscow, Bandar informed Putin that Saudi Arabia had strong influence over Chechen extremists who had carried out numerous terrorist attacks against Russian targets and who had since deployed to join the fight against the Assad regime in Syria. As Bandar called for a Russian shift toward the Saudi position on Syria, he reportedly offered guarantees of continued next page
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protection from Chechen terror attacks on the Olympics. “I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics in the city of Sochi on the Black Sea next year,” Bandar reportedly said. “The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are controlled by us.” Putin responded, “We know that you have supported the Chechen terrorist groups for a decade. And that support, which you have frankly talked about just now, is completely incompatible with the common objectives of fighting global terrorism.” Bandar’s Mafia-like threat toward the Sochi games – a version of “nice
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Olympics you got here, it’d be a shame if something terrible happened to it” – failed to intimidate Putin, who continued to support Assad. But Putin became obsessed with security at Sochi, distracting him from the worsening crisis in Ukraine where Yanukovych was ousted in a neoconorchestrated coup on Feb. 22, 2014, a day before the Olympic torch was extinguished. Now, with Obama nearing a possible agreement to rein in but not end Iran’s nuclear program – against the wishes of the Israeli-Saudi tag team – the leak in the Israeli media suggests that Netanyahu with the support of Saudi Arabia’s royal family may be
contemplating his own bombing campaign against Iran.
26 February 2015 Robert Parry is an American investigative journalist best known for his role in covering the Iran-Contra affair for the Associated Press (AP) and Newsweek, including breaking the Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare (CIA manual provided to the Nicaraguan contras) and the CIA and Contras cocaine trafficking in the US scandal in 1985. Source : consortiumnews.com
GENOCIDE IN KASHMIR: INDIA’S SHAME By Andre Vltchek Welcome to Kashmir! It is deep winter. The mountains are covered with snow and the naked trees above the lakes at sunset, look melancholic and magnificent, precisely like a completed Chinese brush painting. Welcome to a nation overrun by the 700,000-strong security forces of the occupying power – India. Welcome to the continuous presence of barbed wire, of military columns, and ‘security checks’. Welcome to a brutality unimaginable almost anywhere else on earth! Welcome to a land of joint military exercises conducted by the United States, Israel and India. Kashmir! Still beautiful but scarred. Still proud but bleeding and thoroughly exhausted… Still standing, still resisting, still free and independent, at least in its heart! Four kids are standing near the Grand Mosque in Srinagar. They are edgy; they appear to be ready to jump, to run, and to fight, also ready to run and retreat if
necessary. It all depends on the circumstances. “They are raping our sisters and mothers!” screams one youth. I am shown teargas canisters, similar to those used in so many other parts of the world to disperse protesters. They are usually fired into the air. Here they are fired by the security forces directly at people’s heads – with the intention to kill. In this Kashmiri Intifada, the police, army and paramilitary use slings, guns, teargas canisters, everything that is available, to suppress rebellion. It also uses video cameras; it films stonethrowing protesters and then it detains them, “disappears” them, and sometimes uses savage torture methods in order to subdue them. Young men in this neighborhood are routinely detained, and most of them have at least once, been brutalized.
I am photographing empty gas canisters in their hands, always pointing my lenses away from their faces. But kids actually want to pose: they are not afraid, anymore. Ironically, it is 26th January, the Indian Republic Day. “We are going later today! To fight them! Come with us!” They use Arabic words. They point their fingers towards the sky. They are smiling, pretending that they are brave and ready to die, to martyr themselves. But I know that they are scared. I have been in this for many years… I can sense how frightened they are. They are good kids. They are desperate, cornered, but good. I promise. I say I will come. Later: as always, I keep my word. *** continued next page
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A few days later, in New Delhi, in his comfortable, old-fashioned apartment, the great Indian Kashmiri independent documentary film director, Sanjay Kak, talks to me about the Indian colonialism, in both Kashmir and the Northeast. We both agree that all over the world, there is very little knowledge about the horrors of the occupation of Kashmir, and almost no knowledge at all about the occupation of the Northeast. In unison, the mass media in India and in the West, censors the information about the true nature of oppression, killing, torture and rapes.
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*** In Kashmir itself, I work closely with “Jammu & Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society” – with both its President, ParvezImroz, and with Parvaiz Matta, a human rights researcher. Both men became my good friends. JKCCS actually believes that since the 90’s, more than 70,000 people have lost their lives in Kashmir, mostly civilians. The organization is openly calling what occurs in Kashmir – genocide. Mr. ParvezImroz wrote for this essay: “The army since 1989 has resorted to war
It is because India has betrayed BRICS and moved closer and closer to the Empire, towards the West, signing military pacts with it, while spreading market-oriented gospel. Now it can count on having ‘special status’, like Indonesia. No matter what it does, it will easily get away with it! Mr. Kak also says that these days it is “difficult to compete in the market-place of global sorrow.” When I mention the involvement of both the United States and Israel in joint exercises with India, in Kashmir, as well as in the training of Indian police and army officers deployed in Kashmir, Sanjay Kak replies: “When it comes to brutality, Indian forces could actually teach both Israelis and the United States quite a few things.” A friend of Sanjay Kak, an Indian writer and activist, Arundhati Roy, explained in March 2013, on “Democracy Now”: “Today Kashmir is the most densely militarized zone in the world. India has something like 700,000 security forces there. And in the ’90s, early ’90s, the fight became—turned into an armed struggle, and since then, more than 70,000 people have died, maybe 100,000 tortured, more than 8000 disappeared. I mean, we all talk a lot about Chile, Pinochet, but these numbers are far greater.”
crimes as they have been given the legal impunity and seldom have any armed personnel for crimes against humanity have been punished. The militarization in Jammu and Kashmir has affected all aspects of life and unfortunately the Indian media and civil society, with some exceptions, have been also extending the moral and political impunity to the army who they believe are fighting trans-border terrorism. The systematic disappearance, mass graves, torture has been completely ignored by the Indian and international media.” “In order to suppress the freedom struggle in Jammu and Kashmir, the Indian government has resorted to systematic and institutional repression. More than 700,000 armed forces have been pressed into service to neutralize the armed struggle and to control the people of Jammu and Kashmir who are seeking the right of selfdetermination which government of India had promised before the United Nations in
A R T I C L E S the 1948 and 1949 resolutions. The repression of the Indian state has been part of their policy. In this lie culpable even the judiciary who as a wing of the State has served the interests of the executive and not the people of Jammu and Kashmir. “The international institutions and particularly the western civil society and governments after 9/11 and because of Islamophobia and other interests are completely ignoring the situation in Jammu and Kashmir.” In Kashmir, no matter where I go, no matter where I drive, there are constant, powerful reminders of the occupation: from the almost grotesque presence of the military, police and paramilitary forces, to mass graves. Army barracks are lined up along all the major roads. Military and police trucks drive on them in all directions, on all the major and secondary roads. There are countless roadblocks and checkpoints. But it is not just the direct and brutal force that is bleeding and destroying Kashmir. Parvaiz Matta explains that this enormous Indian security force has managed to infiltrate and divide local society. Spies and snitches have been inserted. Brave resistance fighters were discredited as informers. Resistance movements have been broken, divided, and so have entire communities, even families. There is great sense of insecurity. Interrogators telephone formerly detained, alleged resistance figures, and tell them: “We will soon get your sister.” The brutality of the torture here is unimaginable by any standards. I have investigated and reported on countless warzones, all over the world and countless times, I was entrusted with hair-raising stories of savagery. However, what I learned in Kashmir exceeds the most terrible practices. In modern history, the cruelty of Indian continued next page
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Ladakh, near Pakistan.”
forces in Kashmir can only be compared to the Indonesian atrocities of 1965 and to its genocide in East Timor, as well as in Papua, or to the brutality of the Rwandese and Ugandan forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Or to the Empire’s direct extermination campaign in Indochina.
“Ladakh is actually extremely popular among Israelis. 20,000 to 30,000 come here, every year, as tourists, or in some double capacity.”
Not surprisingly, both India and Indonesia are the West’s client states, promoted as examples of ‘democracy’ and ‘tolerance’. ***
“The ideas and methods of Israeli settlements are widely used in Kashmir. But they are ‘improved’ here. The Indian state is fine-tuning Israeli policies of apartheid.” Everybody here agrees that the brutality factor is much higher in Kashmir than in Palestine:
“India is deprived, hegemonic and violent”, I am told at the house of ParvezImroz, outside of Srinagar city.
They all helped me a lot, guiding me, explaining the situation, supplying me with contacts and information. They were willing to speak on condition of anonymity, and it is clear where their hearts and allegiances were: “Indians are very moralistic, when it comes to Palestine… Although, even that is changing, after this administration of Prime Minister Modi is moving India closer and closer towards the West. US and Israel here are deeply involved in ‘anti-terrorist training’. Countless military and police officers are receiving their education in the US, European Union, and Israel. Police officers are being flown abroad. The army is performing regular exercises with the US and Israeli forces, mainly in the area of
Kupwara. Mass graves dot the hill. When we arrive, the town itself is totally shut down. It is the 21st anniversary of the massacre of local people by Indian forces. Around 27 people were slaughtered here, more than two decades ago, as they demanded the end of the Indian occupation. “Here, many people were ‘disappeared’; they were killed in so-called staged battles. It happened on several occasions”, explains Parvaiz Matta. “Countless bodies arrived mutilated at the local hospitals: some with no legs, a clear result of torture.” There are rusting stretchers resting against a tree. I am told that they were used to shuttle bodies from the hospital to this mass grave. And the bodies kept arriving, being carried by security forces from the forest.
In the highly traditional Kashmiri custom, several people sit on the floor, legs stretched, old-fashioned heaters placed under the blankets. We are drinking tea. When it comes to this meeting, I can only identify two men in this essay from the JKCCS, by their real names. The rest are those who are working on behalf of their abused land, but their positions in the international organizations and press agencies would be compromised, were they to go publicly on the record.
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The mass graves are all over the hill, some right next to a public school, which sits at the summit. “The brutality of Israeli forces is not hidden: it is all in the open. Every action against the Palestinian people is well documented. Israeli actions are constantly criticized from abroad, even at home. Huge blocks of countries, even the EU, are demanding independence for Palestine. Kashmir is different: our Intifada is hidden from the rest of the world. At least 8,000 of our people have already died. Hundreds of thousands have been tortured. But there is almost total silence coming from abroad.” The similarities between Palestinian and Kashmiri resistance and their aim for independence and statehood, are striking. One of the most famous films made by my friend Sanjay Kak from New Delhi, is called “Jashn-e-Azadi – How We Celebrate Freedom”, and it is exactly about the topic. Sanjay also edited a book: Until My Freedom Has Come – The New Intifada in Kashmir (2011). ***
“The security forces described the bodies as being those of ‘unidentified foreign terrorists’, I am told. But ‘foreign’ is already a form of identification, isn’t it?” There are 7000 unmarked and mass graves in Kashmir, I am told… *** The 700,000-strong security forces are fighting between 200 and 300 active Mujahedin, resistance fighters. The ‘fighting’ mainly consists of murdering innocent bystanders and villagers in the remote areas. These corpses are then passed off as the corpses of the Mujahedeen, ‘killed in combat’. That consequently ‘justifies’ huge military operations and budgets. The ‘fighting’ also includes torturing anyone who is suspected or ‘accused’ of belonging continued next page
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to, or supporting the Mujahedeen; therefore anyone whom the security forces decide to identify as such. The ‘signature’ torture in Kupwara, consists of cutting off legs or fingers. Torture tools and methods here, in this area, which is very near the Pakistani border, are very elaborate. The chests of victims are burned with redhot coins, and electric current administered through the penis. The testicles of victims are burned. Bottles of alcohol are inserted into the rectum of men who are then hung upside down from the ceiling. Wooden rollers are used to destroy legs. Nails are hammered into the feet of prisoners. Those who have half-moon tattoos, have them removed by red-hot pliers. When a woman gets arrested, it is almost certain that her torture will include gang rape. Sodomizing male prisoners is also common, all over Kashmir. All of this, of course, could not pass as anything ‘spontaneous’. There is clearly a pattern. The security forces are trained to do what they are doing. A new, extremely brutal group has been created by the state. It is called SOG, and it mainly consists of the children of police and military personnel killed in battles with the Mujahedeen. It is easy to imagine the type of methods it uses. “Most cases of torture and rape are not documented”, explained Parvaiz. “But my organization alone has already managed to amass documentation on around 5,000 instances of torture. For instance, a father had his head chopped off in front of his horrified family…” I make him stop, at least for a few minutes. I need to at least have a short time to digest what I see around me, as well as what I am told.
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We drive further, towards the Pakistani border. It is all really lush here – lush and stunningly beautiful. Tall mountains covered by snowcaps, pristine lakes and meadows. I ask our driver to stop; I need some fresh air. I need to see this magnificence, in order to regain strength, before we proceed towards a place that I dread visiting, but which I have to visit nevertheless. We are heading towards two villages: Kunan and Poshpora. Here, on 23rd February 1991, the armed forces of India surrounded Kunan, and arrested all men older than the age of 13. They arrived with the tools of torture, in their vehicles, and the torture that they administered, was horrible. We park the car and I am led into one of the houses. It is a traditional, neat and extremely clean house. We take off our shoes. Two men are already waiting in the main room, resting their backs against the wall and soft pillows. A third man arrives shortly after. We are not here to discuss torture. It is mass rape I am supposed to hear about. But first, the men recall their own suffering. One of them begins: “It was February and it was late at night; cold outside, winter. It all began at 11 PM and did not stop until 4 AM, early in the morning. All the men were taken out, into the bitter cold. They stripped us naked, and forced us to stand in an ice-cold stream. There was snow, 3 feet tall all around. They tortured 100 of us; of the men… 40 to 50 were severely tortured. They used electric current, and also, they put red chilly into the water and forced our heads down into it.” There are no women in the room; no women at all that could be spotted around the house.
A R T I C L E S Another old man began speaking, while I averted my eyes. It was all extremely uncomfortable, and I knew what a great effort and determination it took for these men to speak about that horrible night, almost a quarter of century ago. “Women and girls were left in the houses. They were alone and defenseless. The soldiers, around 200 of them, entered the houses, mostly 5-10 per house. They were carrying bottles of alcohol with them – they were drunk. It was all planned like this!” Now the men spoke over each other: “Women were raped. All of them… And not only women, but also small girls, from 6 to 13 years of age… Their clothes were torn off, they were insulted, humiliated, then raped.” Soldiers were screaming at women: ‘You are bloody helping the militants, aren’t you?’ And this was done by Indian troops, and in India, so often; even rape does not end with the act itself. The brutality of the act is regularly indescribable; it includes the insertion of sharp objects, of rusty bars, of anything. “Many of our women bled profusely. Some were unconscious for 4 or 5 days,” these 3 husbands whose wives survived that terrible night told me. “One of the women delivered a baby, just 4 days earlier. The baby was hugging her mom when the soldiers entered. They first killed the baby, then gang-raped the mother.” “They tortured and raped a minor, a girl. They broke her leg. She died later…” “Some women have undergone treatment for many years, as their rectums were severely damaged”. 5 women died as a result of what took continued next page
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place that night. There were two cops, from the village, who tried to assist the injured women. Later, they were willing to come forward and to testify. One of them was shot dead – murdered.
As we began driving towards Srinagar, there was a long silence inside the car. Then I broke it: “Parvaiz?” “Hmmm?”
I am told that 40 women came forward and gave testimonies. These were married women. Minor, unmarried girls, had kept their identity secret. But even so, almost no young woman from Kunan could get married, afterwards. The stigma was too great and no villager from the area wanted to marry a rape victim. Parvaiz explained that the rapes are still taking place in the deep provinces, in the frontier areas, where the people are at the mercy of the military. “Still, rape is used as a weapon of war”, he said. For the Kunan onslaught, not one soldier has been punished, so far. Before we left, the husbands of the rape victims, explained: “This happened at the beginning… Then many other, terrible events took place. We tried to play by the rules, using the Indian legal system. But after almost a quarter of a century, there has been no justice. Here, the law only protects those guilty ones. This militarization of Kashmir ruined our lives! Now, we just want to be freed by destiny! This was all a terrible trauma for us. Even children from other villages are mocking our women and girls: “Oh, you come from that village where all the women were raped!” It was a humbling experience, facing those tough Kashmiri men, who decided to open themselves up to me. After they spoke, we walked from Kunan to Poshpora Village. Metaphorically, the ice was broken. I was allowed to photograph villagers, both men and women. I was accepted.
“The fact that they mock the girls and women…” I began… I knew he was thinking the same. “Would you marry a rape victim?” He asked. “If I were to be in love with her, yes, of course I would.” “Are you sure?” “Yes,” I said. “This is where our culture has failed”, he said. And this is when I knew, that he would do the same. I told him about the mass rape in the city of Ermera, in East Timor. The Indonesian forces did it – exactly the same scenario as in the Kashmiri village of Kunan. I was then working illegally in East Timor. I was detained and tortured. Nobody ever got punished for the rape or for the killings. Many people directly responsible for the genocide in East Timor are now governing Indonesia. *** As we passed Kupwara, the mood in the car significantly improved. “I did not want to tell you, but chances were that before reaching Kupwara, we could have been stopped, interrogated and then…” I got the point. But now ‘it was fine’.
A R T I C L E S The further we drove away from Kupwara, the safer it was getting; by now we would have many arguments for justifying our trip. I photographed a few military and paramilitary camps, through the windshield. Then I asked our driver to stop. I needed to take a piss. He pushed the brakes right next to some beautiful Kashmiri apple orchard. I stepped out from the car and walked towards the first tree; the fresh air and beautiful countryside, and stuff like that… Then I spotted him: a soldier, semicamouflaged, holding his machinegun, ready. I pissed towards him, defiantly. Then I saluted him, mockingly. He did not even smile, just stood there, like an idiot, under the apple tree. I was wondering whether there are more Indian security personnel in Kashmir, or apple trees? I visited Mr. Hassan Bhat in Sopore City, known for its resistance fighters. Mr. Bhat used to be one of them, but he was captured and tortured savagely, on several occasions, and he gave up on active duty. The security forces killed both his sons. Just like that, both died by the time they reached the age of 15. One son had gone to a local store, in 2006, to buy milk, and a security agent shot him through the chest, from his speeding police car. Another boy died in 2010, when some kids got engaged in stone-throwing, and he was caught in the middle of it, when he got scared, and jumped into the river. Police began shooting tear gas canisters at anyone who was in the water. They hit him with one of those, and he died. “I know the perpetrators, I know the officer who was in charge”, said Mr. Bhat. He tried to file a complaint, but the police refused to register the case. continued next page
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of basic supplies. One could easily disappear.
“The officer-in-charge was going to join the UN Peacekeepers”, said Parvaiz. “India often sends people who fought in Kashmir, to the UN. It is a huge money-making scheme for the country… But my organization identified him, and supplied the UN with detailed evidence on his crimes. After that, his application got rejected.”
I am told that here, the Indian forces are trying to hook young people on alcohol and drugs, in order to keep them away from the resistance.
I actually saw the Indian UN “Peacekeepers” in action, in Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where even the former UNHCR head, Ms. Masako Yonekawa, complained to me about the many illegal activities perpetrated by the Indian ‘peacekeeping contingent’. Then, Mr. Bhat and I stood by the shore of the River Jhelum.
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But others say: in this city, in Sopore, people are determined. They resist. They are active here. This city produces big people! People that never surrender! Indian forces call it “Little Pakistan”. Can the huge oppressive force really be defeated, and if yes, then how?
sedition charges, lawsuits and life imprisonment. Others, like the legendary radio host David Barsamian, got deported from India, no explanation given. In October 2011, a senior Supreme Court advocate Mr. Prashant Bhushan (who drafted the Lokpal Bill), was brutally beaten in his chambers at the Supreme Court after he made comments on Kashmir. Mr. Bhushan’s spoke on human rights violations and militarization in Kashmir. ***
This is when, even in Sopore; even in the middle of the night, in front of a house that recently witnessed a real battle, everyone gets realistic: “Only international pressure can help!”
There are tourists in Kashmir, not only Indian, but foreigners as well. They go skiing and snowboarding in Gulmarg, or hiking to Ladakh. There are Europeans and Israelis, some North Americans.
“It flows all the way to Pakistan,” he sighed. Mr. Bhat, despite all those horrors that he has survived, is a kind, gentle man. I asked him whether he thinks that Kashmir will be able to, at some point, gain its independence. “80% of Kashmiri people want freedom”, he said. “80% is a lot of people, don’t you think?” I am being shown where, in 1993, an entire area had been destroyed, by the BSF (Border Security Forces). Back then, 53 people died. Later we go, in the middle of the night, to a house where a battle took place between the Indian forces and the Mujahedeen, just a few days earlier. Sopore is still fighting. But there is fear. It is cold; it is an omnipresent fear. I am told by many, that now, people are afraid of even protesting against the scarcity
At some point, one gets exhausted, almost numb, after listening to detailed and welldocumented accounts of extra-judicial killings, disappearances, torture and rapes. At one point I was presented with evidence about a man who was detained, questioned and when he appeared defiant, both of his feet were chopped off. He survived. When still in detention, sometime later, the security forces cut off substantial parts of his flesh, from different parts of his body; cooked it, and forced him to eat it, for several days. He survived… The case is documented and HR organizations are demanding justice. No one has been punished. *** There is genocide: terrible, outrageous and unreported by the cowardly media and the intellectuals, in both India and the West. People, who dare to speak and write about the plight of Kashmir, are intimidated, deported, and even physically attacked. Arundhati Roy is periodically threatened with
Many locals call it “horror tourism in Rapistan”. I encountered several couples, high in the mountains, in Gulmarg: red cheeks from too much fresh air at the high altitude. I talked to a British couple enjoying skiing, a German couple on vacation… They had no clue about what was happening in Kashmir. When I pressed them a bit: “But you must have noticed all those bunkers, military convoys and checkpoints”, their simple reply was: “Yes… Well, India has to do something about the terrorism problem, right?” It is a well-documented fact that the Empire is counting on several countries, all over the world, for acting on its behalf, spreading terror in the ‘neighborhood’, often brutalizing even its own people. These countries are, for instance, Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya in Africa, Honduras and Columbia in Latin America, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in the Middle East, Indonesia, Thailand and now India in Southern Asia. continued next page
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Most of the brutal lackey states are christened as ‘democracies’, as tolerant, as the examples worth following. These countries are promoted as ‘Lands of Smiles’, or as ‘cultures of non-violence’. It is all farcical, but somehow, not many people seem to be laughing. It is because they don’t know. It is because brutality and cynicism still pays. And this approach should stop! Brutal crimes against humanity have to be exposed. Countries that are murdering thousands of innocent people have to be shamed publicly and dealt with, internationally. It goes without saying that a state that is serving the Empire, torturing and raping those who are longing for independence, while in the same time spitting on its own poor, should never have place in an organization like BRICS! I went back to the area of the Grand Mosque in Srinagar, on 26th January, as I promised. I followed the kids. A few streets away, after 2 pm, fighting erupted.
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It was all raw and tough, and it clearly resembled Palestine. The only great difference was that other than me there were no witnesses, to describe the courage of local youth, as well as the oppression of the Kashmiri people by the Indian state. Two days later I took the longest cable car in Asia, at Gulmarg. I wanted to see ‘what was up there’. There is, of course, a military base! On the way down, the electricity collapsed and our gondola froze, suspended in midair. The door would not close, and there were holes, all over. It was India, after all. I could have frozen to death, if the stuff did not begin moving a few minutes later. India is facing some of the most serious challenges on Earth: from illiteracy to deep poverty. 700,000 security forces cost billions of dollars, annually, pragmatically speaking. Even if the Indian elites, government and military do not care about the Kashmiri people and their plight, they should care at least about their own poor!
A R T I C L E S Holding Kashmir against its will brings no benefits to India and its people. It is definitely undemocratic and brutal… and absolutely unnecessary! Welcome to Kashmir! Its beauty is fabled. Its lakes, mountain ranges, deep valleys and rivers are proud and striking. Its people warm, welcoming, but strong. Kashmir is bleeding. Its valleys are divided by barbed wire. Its women are raped. Its men tortured and humiliated. The cries of Kashmiri people are muted. The world knows almost nothing about their plight, about their suffering. 700,000-man security force fighting around 300 men! And they cannot win. Why? The answer is simple: It is because no brutal force on earth could ever defeat those who are fighting for the survival of their land, for something so dear, so beloved! 08 February, 2015 Andre Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. Source: Counterpunch.org
ISIS DESTROYS ANCIENT SITES NEAR MOSUL By Sandy English The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has reportedly used heavy equipment to demolish the site of the ancient Assyrian capital of Nimrud, 18 miles south of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. Reports describe ISIS militiamen trucking away statues and tablets from the site and the demolition of the area since last Thursday. The fundamentalist group considers pre-Islamic artifacts to be idolatrous and worthy of destruction. Nimrud, built over 3,000 years ago, was the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire after 883 BC. The Neo-Assyrian Empire, whose
rulers spoke a language distantly related to Arabic and Hebrew, ruled Mesopotamia, the ancient name for Iraq and parts of Syria, from about 900 BC to 600 BC. The site along the Tigris River contained monumental statues, frescos, temples, private dwellings and a ziggurat, the stepped pyramid characteristic of Mesopotamian civilizations. Nimrud boasted some of the most extensive carvings in ivory of any site in the world, most of which had been removed and placed in museums in Iraq and Britain.
A week earlier, the Islamic State released video showing men smashing statues with sledgehammers in the Nineveh Museum, about 20 miles from the site of Nimrud. Nineveh was the capital of the NeoAssyrian Empire after 705 BC. In recent weeks, ISIS has also set off incendiary devices around Mosul Central Library. Estimates of the books and manuscripts destroyed range from 8,000 to 10,000. Bookshops on the central AlNujaifi Street have been burned, and ancient Christian monasteries have been vandalized. continued next page
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Over the weekend, the Associated Press reported that residents near Hatra, 68 miles southwest of Mosul, saw ISIS fighters removing artifacts form the 2,000-year-old city. Hatra was built during the Seleucid Empire in the second or third century BC and changed hands over the next several hundred years, belonging in turn to the Parthians, the Romans and Araba, one of the first pre-Islamic Arab kingdoms. Next to the tremendous loss of life, the destruction of the past is one of the most grievous products of the conflict that was initiated by the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. A whole people is being cut off from its historical roots and the study of the Mesopotamian past by historians has suffered a serious blow. The plunder of Iraq began onApril 10, 2003, when American occupation forces in Baghdad, in spite of warnings by archaeologists, allowed the National Museum to be looted of tens of thousands of historical artifacts of great artistic and scientific value. Only about half the artifacts have been recovered. TheAmerican military, in violation of cultural heritage regulations, fired on the museum. In that first month of the occupation, dozens of other museums and libraries were burned or looted, including the Mosul Museum, where the 2,000-year-old statue of Parthian King Saqnatroq II was stolen. In 2003-2004, American troops occupied the site of ancient Babylon, where they dug ditches across excavated areas, filling sandbags with ancient bricks labeled with cuneiform writing of the Mesopotamian civilization. The occupation forces built a heliport, and vibrations from American aircraft caused the bases of temples to collapse. “The damage to Babylon is both extensive and irreparable,” Columbia University archeologist Zainab Bahrani said in 2007.
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“The occupation has resulted in a tremendous destruction of history, well beyond the museums and libraries that were looted and destroyed at the fall of Baghdad. At least seven historical sites have [like Babylon] been used by US and coalition forces since 2003, one of them being in the historical heart of Samarra, where the Askari shrine built by Nasr al Din Shah was bombed in 2006.” The destruction and looting of Iraqi archaeological sites has been going on nonstop ever since. Iraq’s archeological sites and tells—unexcavated mounds of earth that cover formerly inhabited areas— have been dug up with earth-moving equipment and the spoils have been sold on the antiquities market for private gain. In 2010, the New York Times noted the collusion of the police with antiquities thieves in southern Iraq, areas controlled by Shia sectarian militias. One of the great cultural crimes brought on by the American occupation of Iraq was the bombing of alMutinabbi Street, Baghdad’s historic street of booksellers, on March 5, 2007. Both Nimrud and Nineveh were plundered several times during the American occupation. Before ISIS’s destruction last week, the advanced state of decay of the Nimrud site was causing archaeologists great concern. The American and European media have expressed “shock” and “outrage” over ISIS’s cultural destruction. Irina Bokova, director of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESO) said, “We cannot remain silent. The deliberate destruction of cultural heritage constitutes a war crime.” The Iraqi government, somewhat more forthrightly, has used the ISIS vandalism to call for stepped-up intervention by the American and coalition air forces in Iraq.
A R T I C L E S UNESCO, and the miserable servants of the US in the Iraq government conceal the essential causes and nature of this barbarism, and omit even naming the force that is chiefly responsible for the destruction of the past: American imperialism. This exercise in unbridled hypocrisy assumes that the people of the world have forgotten the destruction of Iraqi, and now Syrian, heritage sites, museums and libraries as the result of 12 years of almost continuous imperialist military intervention in the region. Over a million Iraqis have died as a result of the American invasion and occupation, and the sectarian fighting stoked up by US imperialism. Tens of millions remain internally displaced and mired in poverty. The utilities infrastructure and the Iraqi health care system have been destroyed and have yet to recover. The World Socialist Web Site has accurately defined this process as “sociocide,” “the deliberate and systematic murder of an entire society.” The same is true for the devastation wrought by right-wing political movements such as ISIS, and the destruction of Iraq’s cultural heritage. Just as there was no presence of Al Qaeda in Iraq before the American invasion, there was no plunder of the country’s archaeology or cultural institutions. Those above all responsible for the destruction of Nimrud, Nineveh and Hatra bear the names of Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell. One must add to this list Barack Obama, who continued the occupation for nearly three years and has now launched a new war in Iraq and Syria that can only lead to the further destruction of the region’s historical and cultural legacy, in addition to more civilian deaths and an increase in the number of refugees. In a more direct sense, the vandalism of
But the corporate-controlled media,
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to the widespread destruction of antiquities.
ISIS is an American production. In its eagerness to implement regime-change in Syria, the CIA, working withAmerican allies among the Gulf monarchies, as well as Turkey and Jordan, armed the Islamists fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The American-stoked civil war in Syria led
Last year, the UN found that 24 archaeological sites have been completely destroyed, 189 severely or moderately damaged, and a further 77 possibly damaged. All six of Syria’s World Heritage sites have been damaged.
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Sandy English is a writer for the World Socialist Web Site. Source: WSWS.org
AUSTRALIA’S SOVEREIGNTY SEVERELY COMPROMISED FOR USISRAELI DESIGNS By Daud Batchelor As Australia’s international standing has risen, the country’s sovereignty is being dangerously subsumed by the United States, itself controlled by powerful elites:the disproportionately influential militaryindustrial complex and Zionist lobbies.Australia’s sovereignty is being compromisedby the political elite within the ruling Liberal Party and Labour Party caucus. Former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser presciently warned that the relationship was becoming dangerous and we “have effectively ceded to America the ability to decide when Australia goes to war”. External threats facing Australia include a commercial takeover of critical resources, primarily by China. The second is inordinate influence by the US, our “friendly” ally under the ANZUS Treaty. Evidence suggests some US covert involvement in removing former PMs Gough Whitlam and Kevin Rudd. Near neighbours, Indonesia and Malaysia,have no expansionist aims. Our defences should not be overly strained but Australia increased its ‘defence’ budget 32% since 2003 with the target to achieve 2% of GDP. Fighting distant wars of questionable merit and overinflating domestic terrorism sucks funds from needy domestic programmes and puts Australia into massive debt paralleling the United States itself. John Howard dramatically changed Australia’s defence policy to project military power globally. The 9/11 attacks occurring
while PM Howard visited President Bush Jr cemented a tight alliance. Howard offered virtually a blank cheque for Australia’s military to support future US engagements.Significantly, many since Mearsheimer and Walt’s exposure have chronicled the excessive influence Israeli lobbies e.g. AIPAC,have over US foreign policies.Israeli is set not only on protecting itself but creating a Greater Israel involving fragmentation of neighbouring Arab states - the Yinon Plan of the World Zionist Organization. Australia is locked into engagements of the US resulting from certain US-Zionist strategies. The US domineering worldview is inculcated whenever American forces and agencies meet counterparts in the Australian Defence Forces, ASIO and Australian Federal Police. Impacts on Australia’s foreign polices result from the powerful Murdoch media oligopoly, which champions Israel, and the Zionist-led Lowy Institute for International Policy, which has a snug relationship with the ADF, ASIO and AFP, all Institute members. The Institute’s Board of Directors includes Martin Indyk, former Israeli government propagandist. Great concern is that Allan Gyngell, founding ExecutiveDirector of the Lowy Institute, is now Director-General of Australia’s Office of National Assessments. Gyngell leads a supposedly independent organisation providing key analyses on which Cabinet relies to decide foreign policies. Zionists can well influence key decisions. Abuse is of grave concern given faulty ONA reports
claiming WMDs in Iraq used to incite Australia’s participation in the infamous 2003 invasion.Former ONA officer,Andrew Wilke, resigned claiming pre-invasion pressures to exaggerate reports. Former Foreign Minister, Bob Carr, explained that the pro-Israel lobby enjoys such a “very unhealthy level” of influence in dictating Australia’s foreign policy through party donations and MP trips to Israel. The Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council had a direct line into the PM’s office and aggressively lobbied politicians. Politicians have been drawn deeply into Israel’s global strategy: a visit to Israel is essential for any aspiring PM. Australia has developed arguably the harshest anti-terrorism legislation and supports illegal Israeli settlements.Australia with only the US recently voted against a proposal in the Security Council demanding Israel ends its Palestinian occupation.Israel defies UN resolutions and commits war crimes violating Geneva conventions and international law. Despite this, the government strongly supports Israel. In the 2008-09 and 2014 Gaza wars, Israel killed 3,500 Palestinians, 75% civilians, while the fewer Israeli fatalities were overwhelmingly soldiers. Israel attacked densely-habited areas causing slaughter and damage to hospitals, schools and UN shelters.Ban Kimoon and European nations condemned Israel’s disproportionate response and targeting of civilians.Israel could well face charges in the International Criminal Court. continued next page
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Legitimate concerns questioning Australia’s involvement in distant wars unrelated to Australia’s security raise the spectre of ‘blowback’ in supporting American global hegemony and destruction of Muslim lands.Emergence of ISIS is directly linked to failed Australian-American strategies in Iraq. The government’s embrace of America’s pro-Israel anti-Muslim agenda is against Australia’s best interests in ignoring our peaceful Muslim neighbours Indonesia, and Malaysia, successful liberal democracies on whom Snowdon showed Australian and US governments aggressively spy. Such conduct could drive these friendly neighbours closer to China and Russia to our detriment. Prior to expanding anti-terrorist laws deemed by many to be targeting the preponderantly peaceful Muslim community, massive AFP raids were conducted in NSW and Queensland. Their scale implied citizens were under imminent attack by numerous terrorists. Was this to forestall opposition
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to the government’s retrenchment of citizen rights? Numbers arrested were low and prosecutions will likely be few.Bernard Keane commented, “Australians are less safe now then a few weeks ago because of decisions taken, primarily for political ends, by the Abbott government, namely to intervene in a conflict in Iraq and Syria that has nothing to do with Australia’s national interests”. Apart from the Martin Place shootings, there have been no fatalities in Australia by Muslim hands since1915 when Britain invaded Turkey.PM Abbott overemphasises terrorism in Australia while neglecting family violence that causes 80 deaths annually.Samuel Makinda warned that with the expanded anti-terror legislation, politicians have legislated away citizens’ rights. Alerting Australians that it was now a “police state”, Gideon Polya, estimated there were “only 6 Australian deaths by terrorists (none Muslim) in the last 36 years. Yet the major Australian parties ... have committed $125 billion in terms of longterm accrual cost to the Islamophobic War on Terror.”
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Australia’s subservience to the US and Israeli lobbies should change and stop fighting their wars and blowing out Australia’s finances. With a forecasted A$40 billion budget shortfall, either the government will raise taxes, diminish services, or increase debt. In the absence of military threats at home, our main concern should be economic security. Australians should consider an alternative from heightened militarism in this Gallipoli centenary honouring our heroes, who spoke little wishing not to glorify war for imperialism’s sake. Let us resist the insidious takeover of our independence to chart our own course and further peace and stability of Australia and harmonious relations amongst our own citizens and neighbouring countries.
26 February 2015 Dr Daud Batchelor, political analyst, whose grandfathers/father fought to protect Australia’s security. He is a JUST member.
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY: ITS SIGNIFICANCE PALESTINIAN WOMEN.
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By Mazin Qumsiyeh Today is International Women’s Day . The mainstream media misses the point intentionally. They highlight certain women (some who make the lives of women everywhere difficult, people like Hilary Clinton, Condoleeza Rice, Angela Markel etc) and they fail to give credit to those who change things or to even explain to us the origin of this day. Having an annual dedicated day for women (action) was proposed by Clara Zetkin of Germany to attendees at the International Conference of Working Women in 1910. Inspired by women socialist movements for fair working conditions in the USA in 1908 and 1909, movements grew of women demanding their rights (until then they did not even have a right to vote). The first women’s day on 8 March 1911 launched demonstration and
marches for women workers’ rights (right to vote, right to fair work condition, right to live free from oppression, right to life, against wars etc). After a long struggle and many lives lost along the way, the UN finally recognized 8 March as an “International” (I prefer global) women’s day in 1977, 66 years after it was launched by brave socialist women. Thus women’s day is about actions against injustice not about Hilary Clinton! The First Arab Women’s Congress of Palestine gathered about 200 women and was held on 26 October 1929 in Jerusalem. The demands were rights of women and against the Balfour Declaration, against the racist idea of Zionism, for selfdetermination, and for full equality (gender,
religion etc). They elected a 14 member Executive Committee headed by Matiel E. T. Mogannam. Mogannam wrote a book titled “The Arab Women and the Palestinian Problem” published 1937. Moghannam explained how Palestinian women in the 1920s were innovative in many ways: lobbying the colonial power, writing in newspapers, and holding the first demonstration in human history that used automobiles with 120 cars in 1928 (gathered from all over Palestine to drive in the streets of Jerusalem). See my book on “Popular Resistance in Palestine: A history of hope and empowerment” (http://qumsiyeh.org/ popularresistanceinpalestine/) The struggle of women here continues unabated. Many people like me believe
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sincerely that had women been in charge here, we would have had a free Palestine by now. My mother who is 82 years old showed us by example what giving and self-sacrifice and love of people and land means. My wife and three sisters are likewise examples of what we all should aspire to do: kind, dedicated, and hardworking human beings. Like millions before them and millions contemporary with them, these women make life livable while many
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men (and a few women) engage in hurting others and pushing for conflicts and war. Words are too mediocre and inadequate to express our feelings but I simply want to say to all the women working for peace and justice: thank you and to pledge that we will work with you for more progressive change in our societies.
through Indiegogo https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ palestine-museum-of-natural-history/x/ 10068075 More at http://palestinenature.org
Donate to the Palestine Museum of Natural History and our institute of biodiversity and sustainability. New campaign launched
Mazin Butros Qumsiyeh is a Palestinian scientist and author and the director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History.
8 March 2015
DEAR SYRIA: FROM ONE REFUGEE TO ANOTHER By Ramzy Baroud Whenever the word ‘refugee’ is uttered, I think of my mother. When Zionist militias began their systematic onslaught and ‘cleansing’of the PalestinianArab population of historic Palestine in 1948, she, along with her family, ran away from the once peaceful village of Beit Daras. Back then, Zarefah was six. Her father died in a refugee camp in a tent provided by the Quakers soon after he had been separated from his land. She collected scrap metal to survive.
In fact, we have a name for it. It is called waja’ - ‘aching’ - a character that unifies millions of Palestinian refugees all across the globe. With our refugee population now dominated by second, third or even fourth generation refugees, it seems that our waja’ is what we hold in common most. Our geographies may differ, our languages, our political allegiances, our cultures, but ultimately, we meet around the painful experiences that we have internalized throughout generations.
My grandmother Mariam, would venture out to the ‘death zone’ that bordered the separated and newly established state of Israel from Gaza’s refugee camps to collect figs and oranges. She faced death every day. Her children were all refugees, living in shatat – the Diaspora.
My mother used to say – ihna yalfalastinieen damitna qaribeh – tears for us Palestinians are always close by. But our readiness to shed tears is not a sign of weakness, far from it. It is because throughout the years we managed to internalize our own exile, and its many ramifications, along with the exiles of everyone else’s. The emotional burden is just too great.
My mother lived to be 42. Her life was tremendously difficult. She married a refugee, my dad, and together they brought seven refugees into this world - my brothers, my sister and myself. One died as a toddler, for there was no medicine in the refugee camp’s clinic.
We mask the unbearable aching somehow, but it is always close to the surface. If we hear a single melody by Marcel Khalifeh or Sheikh Imam, or a few verses by Mahmoud Darwish, the wound is as fresh as ever.
No matter where we are, in time and place, we carry our refugee ID cards, our undefinable nationalities, our precious status, our parents’ burden, our ancestors’ pain.
Most of us no longer live in tents, but we are reminded of our refugee status every single day, by the Israeli occupation, by the Gaza siege and the internally-displaced Palestinians in Israel, by the Iraq war and
the displacement of the already displaced Palestinians there, by the despicable living conditions of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, and throughout the Middle East. But for us, Syria has been our greatest waja’ in years. Aside from the fact that most of Syria’s half a million Palestinian refugees are on the run again , living the pain of displacement and loss for the second, third, or even fourth time. Nine million Syrian refugees are now duplicating the Palestinian tragedy, charting the early course of the Palestinian Nakba, the catastrophe of 1948. Watching the destitution of the Syrian refugees is like rewinding the past , in all of its awful details. And watching Arab states clamor to aid the refugees with ample words and little action feels as if we are living Arab betrayal all over again. I watched my grandparents die, followed by my parents and many of my peers. All of them died refugees, carrying the same status and the same lost hope of return. The most they ever received from the ‘international community’ was a few sacks of rice and cheap cooking oil. And of course, numerous tents. With time our refugee status morphed from being a ‘problem’ to an integral part of our continued next page
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identities. Being a ‘refugee’ at this stage means insisting on the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees as enshrined in international law. That status is no longer just a mere reference to physical displacement but also to a political, even a national identity. Political division may, at times, dominate Palestinian society, but we will always be united by the fact that we are refugees with a common cause: going home. While for the Palestinians of Yarmouk near Damascus, being a refugee is a matter of life and death – often by starvation – for the larger Palestinian collective, the meaning of the word has become more involved: it has been etched onto our skin forever. But what can one say by way of advice to the relatively new refugees of Syria, considering that we are yet to liberate ourselves from a status that we never sought? There can be only reminders and a few warnings: First, may your displacement end soon. May you never live the waja’ of displacement to the extent that you embrace it as a part of your identity, and pass it on from one generation to another. May it be a kind of fleeting pain or passing nightmare, but never a pervasive everyday reality. Second, you must be prepared for the worst. My grandparents left their new blankets in their village before they fled to the refugee camps because they feared they
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would have been ruined by the dust of the journey. Alas, the camps became home, and the blankets were confiscated as the rest of Palestine was. Please remain hopeful, but realistic. Third, don’t believe the ‘international community’ when they make promises. They never deliver , and when they do, it is always for ulterior motives that might bring you more harm than good. In fact, the term itself is illusory, mostly used in reference to western countries which have wronged you as they have us. Fourth, don’t trust Arab regimes. They lie. They feel not your pain . They hear not your pleas, nor do they care. They have invested so much in destroying your countries, and so little in redeeming their sins. They speak of aid that rarely arrives and political initiatives that constitute mostly press releases. But they will take every opportunity to remind you of their virtues. In fact, your victimhood becomes a platform for their greatness . They thrive at your expense, thus will invest to further your misery. Fifth, preserve your dignity. I know, it is never easy to maintain your pride when you sleep in a barren street covered in cardboard boxes. A mother would do whatever she can to help her children pass into safety. No matter, you must never allow the wolves awaiting you at every border to exploit your desperation. You must never allow the Emir, or his children or some rich businessman or sympathetic celebrity to use you as a photo-op. Do not ever kneel. Don’t ever kiss a hand. Don’t give anyone the
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satisfaction to exploit your pain. Sixth, remain united. There is strength in unity when one is a refugee. Don’t allow political squabbles to distract you from the greater battle at hand: surviving until the day you return home, and you will. Seventh, love Syria. Yours is an unparalleled civilization. Your history is rife with triumphs that were ultimately of your own making. Even if you must leave to distant lands , keep Syria in your hearts. This too shall pass, and Syria shall redeem its glory, once the brutes vanquish. Only the spirit of the people shall survive. It is not wishful thinking. It is history. Dear Syrian refugee, it has been 66 years and counting since my people’s dispossession began. We are yet to return, but that is a battle for my children, and their children to fight. I hope yours ends soon. Until then, please remember the tent is just a tent, and the gusts of cold wind are but of a passing storm. And until you return home to Syria, don’t let the refugee become who you are, as you are so much more. 29 January, 2015 Ramzy Baroud – www.ramzybaroud.net - is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com.
Source: Countercurrents.org
THE WORLD’S 400 RICHEST BILLIONAIRES ROSE $92 BILLION IN 2014 By Andre Damon
The wealthiest 400 people in the world saw their combined net worth grow by $92 billion last year, hitting $4.1 trillion. The bonanza for the super-rich was
underwritten by governments and central banks around the world, which fueled surging stock markets and record corporate profits by pumping hundreds of billions into
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Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which was initiated in 2012 and tracks the wealth of the 400 richest people in the world. The combined net worth of these 400 individuals is greater than the gross domestic product of Germany, the fourth largest economy in the world. The average net worth of each of the billionaires grew by $240 million, to $10.25 billion. Since the 2008 financial crash, which triggered multi-trillion-dollar bank bailouts and the infusion into the financial system of trillions more in virtually free cash, the wealth of the super-rich has nearly doubled. The net worth of the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans increased from $1.27 trillion in 2009 to $2.29 trillion in 2014. Over the past year, global stock markets have continued to soar. The American Nasdaq index has shot up by 14.1 percent. The Japanese Nikkei is up by 7.1 percent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 18,000 for the first time on December 26, after hitting a record 17,000 in July 2014 and 16,000 in November 2013. The Dow is up by 155 percent over its level in March 2009, when it was below 6,000. US corporate profits have likewise hit record highs, reaching $1.8 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2014, up from $671 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008. Investor Warren Buffett, the world’s second richest man, according to the Bloomberg list, saw his wealth grow to $74.5 billion, up by $13.7 billion, or more than 22 percent, in the past year. Buffett’s wealth has more than doubled since 2009. Bloomberg noted that “dozens of operating businesses the 84-year-old chairman bought over the past five decades churned out record profit” over the past year. Buffett’s business model has been to buy traditional industries such as railroads and food producers, then ruthlessly cut costs, making billions in the process. Buffett’s businesses have profited handsomely from the ongoing
fall in labor costs, which have been dropping year after year since 2008 as a result of falling wages and cuts in benefits for workers. Commentators did not hesitate to ascribe the growth in the wealth of the super-rich to the continuing infusion of cash by global central banks. This week, European Central Bank President Mario Draghi indicated that the bank would pursue additional stimulus measures, which markets predicted could mean the initiation of US-style “quantitative easing,” where the central bank essentially prints money to buy state bonds in addition to private securities. Two of the three billionaires who made the most in 2014 reside in China, which is experiencing a stock market bubble, with the country’s FTSE Xinhua 200 index up by 49.49 percent over the past year. Jack Ma, chairman of Alibaba Group, saw his wealth shoot up by $25.1 billion this year, to $28.7 billion, following the September initial public offering of shares in the Chinese Internet trading company he heads. The wealth of Wang Jianlin, chairman and founder of the Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda, nearly doubled over the past year, hitting $25.3 billion, after his company held an initial public offering for its commercial properties division last year. Of the six billionaires whose wealth more than doubled, five live in China. Bill Gates, the world’s richest man, saw his wealth grow by $9.1 billion, to $87.6 billion. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s net worth grew by $5.7 billion, to $49.4 billion. The wealth of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg increased $10.6 billion to $35.3 billion. Zuckerberg’s wealth has grown nearly 18fold since 2009, when it stood at $2 billion. The financial sector made up a significant share of the Bloomberg list. In addition to Buffett, billionaire investors George Soros and Carl Icahn featured prominently, with $26.1 and $23.6 billion, respectively.
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The soaring wealth of the super-rich comes amid growing warnings over the implications of rising social inequality. Last month, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published a report noting: “Today, the richest 10 percent of the population in the OECD area earn 9.5 times the income of the poorest 10 percent; in the 1980s this ratio stood at 7:1 and has been rising continuously ever since.” The OECD reported that the gap between the top 10 percent and the bottom ten percent had reached “around 10 to 1 in Italy, Japan, Korea, Portugal and the United Kingdom, between 13 and 16 to 1 in Greece, Israel, Turkey and the United States, and between 27 and 30 to 1 in Mexico and Chile.” The obscene enrichment of the world’s billionaires and multi-millionaires is accompanied by—and dependent on—the growth of unemployment and poverty around the world. According to a report issued by the International Labor Organization last year, the number of people worldwide without work has hit 200 million for the first time ever. The figure marked a 5 million increase in one year, surpassing 2009’s record high of 198 million. According to a separate report by the OECD, some 12 percent of the world’s population, or 860 million people, lives in poverty. Some 805 million people were chronically under nourished between 2012 and 2014, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. The ever-greater enrichment of the world’s financial elite is not the byproduct of a general growth in the real economy and development of the productive forces, let alone a broader rise in living standards. On the contrary. The real economy is stagnating or declining, the productive infrastructure of the US and other industrialized countries is being starved of investment and allowed to rot, and the living standards of the broad continued next page
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mass of people are falling. Today’s financial oligarchs generally make their fortunes on the basis of social plunder and economic parasitism, much of it borderline illegal or outright criminal. Increasingly, the meager benefits and savings of workers—in the form of
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pensions and other benefits—are being stolen by the corporate-financial elite by means of corporate and municipal bankruptcies and other pseudo-legal forms of swindling. The Bloomberg report on the super-rich is one more demonstration of the failure of capitalism and the necessity for the working
A R T I C L E S class to overthrow it and replace it with socialism. 03 January, 2015 Andre Damon is the National Secretary of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality. Source: WSWS.org
THE REAL AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM By Alfred W. McCoy “The sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” said conservative thinker Carl Schmitt in 1922, meaning that a nation’s leader can defy the law to serve the greater good. Though Schmitt’s service as Nazi Germany’s chief jurist and his unwavering support for Hitler from the night of the long knives to Kristallnacht and beyond damaged his reputation for decades, today his ideas have achieved unimagined influence. They have, in fact, shaped the neo-conservative view of presidential power that has become broadly bipartisan since 9/11. Indeed, Schmitt has influenced American politics directly through his intellectual protégé Leo Strauss who, as an émigré professor at the University of Chicago, trained Bush administration architects of the Iraq war Paul Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky. All that should be impressive enough for a discredited, long dead authoritarian thinker. But Schmitt’s dictum also became a philosophical foundation for the exercise of American global power in the quarter century that followed the end of the Cold War. Washington, more than any other power, created the modern international community of laws and treaties, yet it now reserves the right to defy those same laws with impunity. A sovereign ruler should,
said Schmitt, discard laws in times of national emergency. So the United States, as the planet’s last superpower or, in Schmitt’s terms, its global sovereign, has in these years repeatedly ignored international law, following instead its own unwritten rules of the road for the exercise of world power. Just as Schmitt’s sovereign preferred to rule in a state of endless exception without a constitution for his Reich, so Washington is now well into the second decade of an endless War on Terror that seems the sum of its exceptions to international law: endless incarceration, extrajudicial killing, pervasive surveillance, drone strikes in defiance of national boundaries, torture on demand, and immunity for all of the above on the grounds of state secrecy. Yet these many American exceptions are just surface manifestations of the everexpanding clandestine dimension of the American state. Created at the cost of more than a trillion dollars since 9/11, the purpose of this vast apparatus is to control a covert domain that is fast becoming the main arena for geopolitical contestation in the twenty-first century. This should be (but seldom is considered) a jarring, disconcerting path for a country that, more than any other, nurtured the idea of, and
wrote the rules for, an international community of nations governed by the rule of law. At the First Hague Peace Conference in 1899, the U.S. delegate, Andrew Dickson White, the founder of Cornell University, pushed for the creation of a Permanent Court of Arbitration and persuaded Andrew Carnegie to build the monumental Peace Palace at The Hague as its home. At the Second Hague Conference in 1907, Secretary of State Elihu Root urged that future international conflicts be resolved by a court of professional jurists, an idea realized when the Permanent Court of International Justice was established in 1920. After World War II, the U.S. used its triumph to help create the United Nations, push for the adoption of its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and ratify the Geneva Conventions for humanitarian treatment in war. If you throw in other American-backed initiatives like the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank, you pretty much have the entire infrastructure of what we now casually call “the international community.” Breaking the Rules Not only did the U.S. play a crucial continued next page
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role in writing the new rules for that community, but it almost immediately began breaking them. After all, despite the rise of the other superpower, the Soviet Union, Washington was by then the world sovereign and so could decide which should be the exceptions to its own rules, particularly to the foundational principle for all this global governance: sovereignty. As it struggled to dominate the hundred new nations that started appearing right after the war, each one invested with an inviolable sovereignty, Washington needed a new means of projecting power beyond conventional diplomacy or military force. As a result, CIA covert operations became its way of intervening within a new world order where you couldn’t or at least shouldn’t intervene openly. All of the exceptions that really matter spring from America’s decision to join what former spy John Le Carré called that “squalid procession of vain fools, traitors... sadists, and drunkards,” and embrace espionage in a big way after World War II. Until the creation of the CIA in 1947, the United States had been an innocent abroad in the world of intelligence. When General John J. Pershing led two million American troops to Europe during World War I, the U.S. had the only army on either side of the battle lines without an intelligence service. Even though Washington built a substantial security apparatus during that war, it was quickly scaled back by Republican conservatives during the 1920s. For decades, the impulse to cut or constrain such secret agencies remained robustly bipartisan, as when President Harry Truman abolished the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), right after World
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War II or when President Jimmy Carter fired 800 CIA covert operatives after the Vietnam War. Yet by fits and starts, the covert domain inside the U.S. government has grown stealthily from the early twentieth century to this moment. It began with the formation of the FBI in 1908 and Military Intelligence in 1917. The Central Intelligence Agency followed after World War II along with most of the alphabet agencies that make up the present U.S. Intelligence Community, including the National Security Agency (NSA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and last but hardly least, in 2004, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Make no mistake: there is a clear correlation between state secrecy and the rule of law — as one grows, the other surely shrinks. World Sovereign
America’s irrevocable entry into this covert netherworld came when President Truman deployed his new CIA to contain Soviet subversion in Europe. This was a continent then thick with spies of every stripe: failed fascists, aspirant communists, and everything in between. Introduced to spycraft by its British “cousins,” the CIA soon mastered it in part by establishing sub rosa ties to networks of ex-Nazi spies, Italian fascist operatives, and dozens of continental secret services.
A R T I C L E S As the world’s new sovereign, Washington used the CIA to enforce its chosen exceptions to the international rule of law, particularly to the core principle of sovereignty. During his two terms, President Dwight Eisenhower authorized 104 covert operations on four continents, focused largely on controlling the many new nations then emerging from centuries of colonialism. Eisenhower’s exceptions included blatant transgressions of national sovereignty such as turning northern Burma into an unwilling springboard for abortive invasions of China, arming regional revolts to partition Indonesia, and overthrowing elected governments in Guatemala and Iran. By the time Eisenhower left office in 1961, covert ops had acquired such a powerful mystique in Washington that President John F. Kennedy would authorize 163 of them in the three years that preceded his assassination. As a senior CIA official posted to the Near East in the early 1950s put it, the Agency then saw every Muslim leader who was not pro-American as “a target legally authorized by statute for CIA political action.” Applied on a global scale and not just to Muslims, this policy helped produce a distinct “reverse wave” in the global trend towards democracy from 1958 to 1975, as coups — most of them U.S.sanctioned — allowed military men to seize power in more than threedozen nations, representing a quarter of the world’s sovereign states. The White House’s “exceptions” also produced a deeply contradictory U.S. attitude toward torture from the early years of the Cold War onward. Publicly, Washington’s opposition to torture was manifest in its advocacy of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the
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Geneva Conventions in 1949. Simultaneously and secretly, however, the CIA began developing ingenious new torture techniques in contravention of those same international conventions. After a decade of mind-control research, the CIAactually codified its new method of psychological torture in a secret instructional handbook, the “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation” manual, which it then disseminated within the U.S. Intelligence Community and to allied security services worldwide. Much of the torture that became synonymous with the era of authoritarian rule in Asia and Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s seems to have originated in U.S. training programs that provided sophisticated techniques, up-to-date equipment, and moral legitimacy for the practice. From 1962 to 1974, the CIA worked through the Office of Public Safety (OPS), a division of the U.S. Agency for International Development that sent American police advisers to developing nations. Established by President Kennedy in 1962, in just six years OPS grew into a global anti-communist operation with over 400 U.S. police advisers. By 1971, it had trained more than a million policemen in 47 nations, including 85,000 in South Vietnam and 100,000 in Brazil. Concealed within this larger OPS effort, CIA interrogation training became synonymous with serious human rights abuses, particularly in Iran, the Philippines, South Vietnam, Brazil, and Uruguay. Amnesty Internationaldocumented widespread torture, usually by local police, in 24 of the 49 nations that had hosted OPS police-training teams. In tracking torturers across the globe,
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Amnesty seemed to be following the trail of CIA training programs. Significantly, torture began to recede when America again turned resolutely against the practice at the end of the Cold War. The War on Terror Although the CIA’s authority for assassination, covert intervention, surveillance, and torture was curtailed at the close of the Cold War, the terror attacks of September 2001 sparked an unprecedented expansion in the scale of the intelligence
community and a corresponding resurgence in executive exceptions. The War on Terror ’s voracious appetite for information produced, in its first decade, what the Washington Post branded a veritable “fourth branch” of the U.S. federal government with 854,000 vetted security officials, 263 security organizations, over 3,000 private and public intelligence agencies, and 33 new security complexes — all pumping out a total of 50,000 classified intelligence reports annually by 2010. By that time, one of the newest members of the Intelligence Community, the National GeospatialIntelligence Agency, already had 16,000 employees, a $5 billion budget, and a massive nearly $2 billion headquarters at Fort Belvoir, Maryland — all aimed at coordinating the flood of surveillance data pouring
A R T I C L E S in from drones, U-2 spy planes, Google Earth, and orbiting satellites. According to documents whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked to theWashington Post, the U.S. spent $500 billion on its intelligence agencies in the dozen years after the 9/11 attacks, including annual appropriations in 2012 of $11 billion for the National Security Agency (NSA) and $15 billion for the CIA. If we add the $790 billion expended on the Department of Homeland Security to that $500 billion for overseas intelligence, then Washington had spent nearly $1.3 trillion to build a secret state-withinthe-state of absolutely unprecedented size and power. As this secret state swelled, the world’s sovereign decided that some extraordinary exceptions to civil liberties at home and sovereignty abroad were in order. The most glaring came with the CIA’s nownotorious renewed use of torture on suspected terrorists and its setting up of its own global network of private prisons, or “black sites,” beyond the reach of any court or legal authority. Along with piracy and slavery, the abolition of torture had long been a signature issue when it came to the international rule of law. So strong was this principle that the U.N. General Assembly voted unanimously in 1984 to adopt the Convention Against Torture. When it came to ratifying it, however, Washington dithered on the subject until the end of the Cold War when it finally resumed its advocacy of international justice, participating in the World Conference on Human Rights at Vienna in 1993 and, a year later, ratifying the U.N. Convention Against Torture. Even then, the sovereign decided to continued next page
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reserve some exceptions for his country alone. Only a year after President Bill Clinton signed the U.N. Convention, CIA agents started snatching terror suspects in the Balkans, some of them Egyptian nationals, and sending them to Cairo, where a torture-friendly autocracy could do whatever it wanted to them in its prisons. Former CIA director George Tenet later testified that, in the years before 9/11, the CIA shipped some 70 individuals to foreign countries without formal extradition — a process dubbed “extraordinary rendition” that had been explicitly banned under Article 3 of the U.N. Convention. Right after his public address to a shaken nation on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush gave his staff wide-ranging secret orders to use torture, adding (in a vernacular version of Schmitt’s dictum),”I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.” In this spirit, the White House authorized the CIA to develop that global matrix of secret prisons, as well as an armada of planes for spiriting kidnapped terror suspects to them, and a network of allies who could help seize those suspects from sovereign states and levitate them into a supranational gulag of eight agency black sites from Thailand to Poland or into the crown jewel of the system, Guantánamo, thus eluding laws and treaties that remained grounded in territorially based concepts of sovereignty. Once the CIA closed the black sites in 2008-2009, its collaborators in this global gulag began to feel the force of law for their crimes against humanity. Under pressure from the Council of Europe, Poland started an
ongoing criminal investigation in 2008 into its security officers who had facilitated the CIA’s secret prison in the country’s northeast. In September 2012, Italy’s supreme court confirmed the convictions of 22 CIA agents for the illegal rendition of Egyptian exile Abu Omar from Milan to Cairo, and ordered a trial for Italy’s military intelligence chief on charges that sentenced him to 10 years in prison. In 2012, Scotland Yard opened a criminal investigation into MI6 agents who rendered Libyan dissidents to Colonel Gaddafi’s prisons for torture, and two years later the Court of Appeal allowed some of those Libyans to file a civil suit against MI6 for kidnapping and torture. But not the CIA. Even after the Senate’s 2014 Torture Report documented the Agency’s abusive tortures in painstaking detail, there was no move for either criminal or civil sanctions against those who had ordered torture or those who had carried it out. In a strong editorial on December 21, 2014, the New York Times asked “whether the nation will stand by and allow the perpetrators of torture to have perpetual immunity.” The answer, of course, was yes.Immunity for hirelings is one of the sovereign’s most important exceptions. As President Bush finished his second term in 2008, an inquiry by the International Commission of Jurists found that the CIA’s mobilization of allied security agencies worldwide had done serious damage to the international rule of law. “The executive… should under no circumstance invoke a situation of crisis to deprive victims of human rights violations… of their… access to justice,” the Commission
recommended after documenting the degradation of civil liberties in some 40 countries. “State secrecy and similar restrictions must not impede the right to an effective remedy for human rights violations.” The Bush years also brought Washington’s most blatant repudiation of the rule of law. Once the newly established International Criminal Court (ICC) convened at The Hague in 2002, the Bush White House “un-signed” or “de-signed” the U.N. agreement creating the court and then mounted a sustained diplomatic effort to immunize U.S. military operations from its writ. This was an extraordinary abdication for the nation that had breathed the concept of an international tribunal into being. The Sovereign’s Unbounded Domains While Presidents Eisenhower and Bush decided on exceptions that violated national boundaries and international treaties, President Obama is exercising his exceptional prerogatives in the unbounded domains of aerospace and cyberspace. Both are new, unregulated realms of military conflict beyond the rubric of international law and Washington believes it can use them as Archimedean levers for global dominion. Just as Britain once ruled from the seas and postwar America exercised its global reach via airpower, so Washington now sees aerospace and cyberspace as special realms for domination in the twentyfirst century. Under Obama, drones have grown from a tactical Band-Aid in Afghanistan into a strategic weapon continued next page
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for the exercise of global power. From 2009 to 2015, the CIA and the U.S. Air Force deployed a drone armada of over 200 Predators and Reapers, launching 413 strikes in Pakistan alone, killing as many as 3,800 people. Every Tuesday inside the White House Situation Room, as the New York Times reported in 2012, President Obama reviews a CIA drone “kill list” and stares at the faces of those who are targeted for possible assassination from the air. He then decides, without any legal procedure, who will live and who will die, even in the case of American citizens. Unlike other world leaders, this sovereign applies the ultimate exception across the Greater Middle East, parts of Africa, and elsewhere if he chooses. This lethal success is the cutting edge of a top-secret Pentagon project that will, by 2020, deploy a triple-canopy space “shield” from stratosphere to exosphere, patrolled by Global Hawk and X-37B drones armed with agile missiles. As Washington seeks to police a restless globe from sky and space, the world might well ask: How high is any nation’s sovereignty? After the successive failures of the Paris flight conference of 1910, the Hague Rules of Aerial Warfare of 1923, and Geneva’s Protocol I of 1977 to establish the extent of sovereign airspace or restrain aerial warfare, some puckish Pentagon lawyer might reply: only as high as you can enforce it. President Obama has also adopted the NSA’s vast surveillance system as a permanent weapon for the exercise of global power. At the broadest level, such surveillance complements Obama’s overall defense strategy, announced in 2012,
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of cutting conventional forces while preserving U.S. global power through a capacity for “a combined arms campaign across all domains: land, air, maritime, space, and cyberspace.” In addition, it should be no surprise that, having pioneered the war-making possibilities of cyberspace, the president did not hesitate to launch the first cyberwar in history against Iran. By the end of Obama’s first term, the NSA could sweep up billions of messages worldwide through its agile
surveillance architecture. This included hundreds of access points for penetration of the Worldwide Web’s fiber optic cables; ancillary intercepts through special protocols and “backdoor” software flaws; supercomputers to crack the encryption of this digital torrent; and a massive data farm in Bluffdale, Utah, built at a cost of $2 billion to store yottabytes of purloined data. Even after angry Silicon Valley executives protested that the NSA’s “backdoor” software surveillance threatened their multi-trillion-dollar industry, Obama called the combination of Internet information and supercomputers “a powerful tool.” He insisted that, as “the world’s only superpower,” the United States “cannot unilaterally disarm our intelligence agencies.” In other words, the sovereign cannot sanction any exceptions to his panoply of exceptions.
A R T I C L E S Revelations from Edward Snowden’s cache of leaked documents in late 2013 indicate that the NSA has conducted surveillance of leaders in some 122 nations worldwide, 35 of them closely, including Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff, former Mexican president Felipe Calderón, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. After her forceful protest, Obama agreed to exempt Merkel’s phone from future NSA surveillance, but reserved the right, as he put it, to continue to “gather information about the intentions of governments… around the world.” The sovereign declined to say which world leaders might be exempted from his omniscient gaze. Can there be any question that, in the decades to come, Washington will continue to violate national sovereignty through old-style covert as well as open interventions, even as it insists on rejecting any international conventions that restrain its use of aerospace or cyberspace for unchecked force projection, anywhere, anytime? Extant laws or conventions that in any way check this power will be violated when the sovereign so decides. These are now the unwritten rules of the road for our planet. They represent the real American exceptionalism. 24 February, 2015 Alfred W. McCoy is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of Torture & Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation, among other works. Copyright 2015 Alfred W. McCoy
Source: TomDispatch.com
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