Elsewhere Today 430
Aljazeera:
'Military build-up' in Yangon
FRIDAY, AUGUST 24, 2007
8:25 MECCA TIME, 5:25 GMT
Myanmar's military government is building up troops in Yangon, following days of protests over a massive hike in fuel prices, pro-democracy groups have said.
The reports come amid word that anti-government protests have spread beyond the country's largest city to other parts of Myanmar.
The London-based Burma Campaign UK said it had received information that military vehicles and personnel were being deployed out of sight in government houses and compounds across Yangon.
The United Nations meanwhile has urged the military government of Myanmar, formerly Burma, to practice restraint in responding to the biggest protests the country has seen in nearly a decade.
On Thursday a group of government supporters backed by police broke up a small protest on Thursday, the third since Sunday's silent march against the fuel price rises.
On the same day a former political prisoner, Ohn Than, staged a solo demonstration outside the US Embassy shouting slogans in English and Burmese for 10 minutes before he was arrested.
'Disturbing'
Describing the reports of a troop build-up in Yangon as "very disturbing", Mark Farmaner, the head of the Burma Campaign UK, said that past experience had shown "that the regime is quite prepared to open fire on peaceful protestors".
In 1988 the military crushed a pro-democracy uprising in a nationwide crackdown rights group say claimed thousands of lives. The government says little more than a dozen were killed.
Reports of a troop build-up also came from the Asia Pacific People's Partnership on Burma (APPPB), a pro-democracy group based in Thailand.
It cited sources in the country saying that about 2,000 security personnel have been deployed around the City Hall building in Yangon.
Khin Ohmar, coordinator with the APPPB, said the reports follow news that a third anti-government protest on Thursday had been forcibly broken up by members of the pro-government USDA.
Among those taking part in the protest was Phyu Phyu Thinn, a leading HIV/AIDS activist.
"About 20 protesters were beaten and dragged into the trucks and taken away. Phyu Phyu Thin and some others were able to avoid the violence," Khin Ohmar told Al Jazeera on Friday.
She said sources in Myanmar had reported that other demonstrations were being held on Friday in the country's second-largest city, Mandalay, and Magway in central Myanmar.
She added that there has so far been no word on the fate of the 13 dissidents arrested late on Tuesday for organising the first protest march on Sunday.
Among those held is Min Ko Nain, the country's most prominent political leader after democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi.
After at least three protests in Yangon and word of others elsewhere in the country, Khin Omar said the situation was becoming "quite volatile".
"Another demonstration is planned for later today, this time not at the City Hall but near a housing area called Tam We."
Crackdown
She said she feared the crisis was building up into "a violent clash".
"My feeling is that today's reaction by the government will reflect its true intentions… [There] could even be a repeat of the 1988 crackdown on the people.
"Whatever the case, the people are really fed-up and cannot cope with the additional burden of living in difficult conditions," she said.
On Thursday she said authorities had searched the houses of four detained 88 Generation student leaders late on Thursday night and detained the wife of one.
"Those who were not home at the time have gone into hiding," she said.
Commenting on speculations that the removal of fuel subsidies was planned to indirectly delay promised political reforms, Khin Omar said such tactics were "always possible".
"In the past they’ve done things like that… created riots between ethnic Muslims and Chinese, so there is a possibility of a similar tactic being used now."
The government's abrupt removal of fuel-price subsidies – resulting in an up to 500 per cent spike in rationed fuel prices – has sparked demands for intervention to arrest spiralling costs of goods and services.
Call for restraint
On Thursday a spokeswoman for UN secretary-general Ban Ki Moon said he was monitoring the situation in Myanmar, particularly the crackdown on former student leaders, very closely and with concern.
Michele Montas said Ban urged authorities to "exercise maximum restraint" in their response to the protests and encouraged all sides "to avoid any provocative action".
"He calls for a constructive dialogue towards national reconciliation at this important time in Myanmar's history," she added.
Myanmar's last major upheaval in 1988 was sparked by economic dissatisfaction, when mass demonstrations seeking an end to the military rule was violently crushed by the army.
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/EBE57CF3-2CA4-4950-8EB8-DAE4E14FACDB.htm
AllAfrica:
20 Feared Killed in Fresh Onslaught in Rivers
By Jimitota Onoyume, Port Harcourt
Vanguard (Lagos) NEWS
24 August 2007
REGARDLESS of the massive deployment of soldiers on the streets of Port Harcourt in the aftermath of the recent cultists' activities in Rivers State, armed cultists yesterday struck afresh at Rumuekpe in Emohua Local Government Area of the state, killing 20 people.
One Baribor Kerebion was also reportedly matcheted to death at Bodo yesterday by people suspected to be cultists. Emohua local government area is a short distance from Port Harcourt.
The state government has, in the meantime, extended the curfew imposed on the state by another week with a view to consolidating the relative peace in the state capital.
One of the main gang leaders locked in the supremacy battle in the state, Ateke Tom, has also reportedly applied to Governor Celestine Omehia for pardon.
Efforts to get the state Commissioner of Police, Mr. Felix Ogbaudu, or the Police PRO, Mrs. Baresua Ireju, to comment on yesterday fresh attack failed. A police source, however, said nine persons were killed.
Community sources put the death toll at over 20. Sources said the community had been embroiled in a chieftaincy/youth leadership tussle for some time now. One of the groups in the disagreement reportedly mobilised the gunmens who launched the attack.
The army PRO in the state, Major Sagir Musa, said the army had not been briefed on the incidents. He, however, vowed that the army was ready to crush any mayhem in any part of the state.
The state Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice, Mr. Okey Wali, who announced the extension of the curfew after a meeting of the State Executive Council said the exco deliberated on the security situation in the state and commended the steps taken to secure lives and property, emphasizing that the need to sustain the gains recorded necessitated the extension of the curfew by one week.
Mr. Wali said the executive council also expressed gratitude to President Umaru Yar'Adua and the Service Chiefs for their interest and love for Rivers people and the prompt action taken to ensure that peace returned to the state.
The Commissioner said the council considered the statement from some indigenes of Rivers State in collaboration with some non-indigenes who addressed a press conference in Lagos calling for emergency rule in the state and described their action as most regrettable because there was no basis for such a call.
He explained that the problem in the state was that of cultism and all such security problems were being adequately handled by the security agencies, pointing out that internal security and defence of the country is the responsibility of the Federal Government of Nigeria.
Mr. Wali asked Rivers people to take interest in the return of peace to Port Harcourt and the state in general and urged the elders involved in the statement to retrace their steps and join hands to take the state to the next level.
Ateke pleads for amnesty
Meanwhile, one of the cultists on the wanted list of security agenciess in Rivers State and leader of the Niger Delta Vigilante, Ateke Tom, has reportedly applied to Governor Celestine Omehia for pardon. Tom in a letter allegedly urged government to guarantee his safety.
He said since the peace/reconciliation parley he had with other cult groups at Okrika on July 14 he has been shunning violence. Meanwhile, when Vanguard contacted the Secretary of the Peace and Rehabilitation Committee constituted by the state government to rehabilitate reformed cultists in the state, Mr. Jerry Needam, if he was aware of any letter to the governor from Tom for forgiveness, he merely said the Governor had not granted amnesty to anybody but declined to say if there was such letter before the governor.
According to the letter, Tom said his boys were not part of the recent cult mayhem in the state. His words: "Your Excellency, I use this medium to deny any involvement in the recent spate of shootings in the city of Port Harcourt. I did not and will never again engage in such conduct.
"Sir, I believe that your public and unambiguous offer of amnesty to all who renounce violence is genuine; and I and NDVM members hereby request and appeal to be rendered the amnesty promised by you. With the granting of amnesty to me and my members and the guarantee of our safety by your government, I am sure the process of peace in our land will be complete," he said.
The spokesman of the JTF in the state, Major Musa, who also could not confirm the letter, however, said the JTF was not in the state to harm lawful and responsible citizens. He said any cultist offering to surrender would not be killed by the soldiers.
Copyright © 2007 Vanguard. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200708240016.html
AllAfrica:
Opposition Wins Parliamentary Elections
allAfrica.com NEWS
24 August 2007
Sierra Leone’s opposition has taken control of the country’s parliament but its candidate in the presidential elections still faces uncertain prospects in a second round of voting.
The All People’s Congress (APC) of Ernest Koroma has won 59 of the 112 seats in Parliament, according to results posted by the National Electoral Commission on its website.
But Koroma drew only 44 percent of votes in the presidential race, forcing him into a run-off election against Vice-President Solomon Berewa, the candidate of the ruling Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP). Berewa received 38 percent of the votes. To win, a presidential candidate needed 55 percent.
The final tally of results posted by the electoral commission confirms that supporters of the third-placed presidential candidate, Charles Margai of the People's Movement for Democratic Change (PMDC), have the potential to make a decisive impact on a second round of voting. They accounted for 14 percent of the vote.
However, the PMDC does not hold the balance of power in Parliament. The APC’s 59 seats give the party a clear majority, with the SLPP holding 43 seats and the PMDC 10.
Copyright © 2007 allAfrica.com. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200708240272.html
Asia Times:
Bush whips up a storm over 'surge'
By Jim Lobe
Aug 24, 2007
WASHINGTON - Opening a new campaign to sustain his "troop surge" strategy in Iraq, US President George W Bush on Wednesday compared Washington's ongoing struggle there to both World War II and the Vietnam War, in the latter of which, he said, Washington's withdrawal led to disaster for "millions of innocent citizens".
Speaking in the state of Missouri to the perennially hawkish Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention, Bush also reiterated strong support for Iraq's increasingly besieged prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, whose reluctance to implement US plans for national reconciliation has spurred growing disillusionment - and even calls for his ouster by influential lawmakers here.
"Prime Minister Maliki's a good guy, good man with a difficult job, and I support him," Bush declared. "And it's not up to the politicians in Washington, DC, to say whether he will remain in his position. That is up to the Iraqi people, who now live in a democracy and not a dictatorship."
Bush's remarks, the first in a series of appearances and other administration initiatives designed to rally support for maintaining as many as 170,000 US troops in Iraq well into next year in advance of a critical report to Congress due in mid-September, suggested to supporters and critics alike that the president remains as determined as ever to hold out against pressure, even from his own party, to begin withdrawing troops in the coming months.
"The president is not going to change; he's going to insist on staying the course," said retired General John Johns, a counterinsurgency specialist. "What is required is that the Republican leadership in Congress force the president [to change course]. I do not see that in the works today, and I don't understand why."
Bush's speech, which followed the overnight crash of a US Black Hawk helicopter in which 14 American soldiers were killed - the worst one-day US death toll in more than a year - came amid growing speculation about both the fate of Maliki's government and the report by Washington's ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, and its military commander there, General David Petraeus, which Congress may receive as early as September 11.
The report, which is supposed to be an assessment of the six-month-old "surge" strategy, is likely to echo what has become a growing consensus in Washington over the past several weeks - that while the addition of some 30,000 US troops and the adoption of more aggressive counterinsurgency tactics have succeeded in reducing sectarian violence in Baghdad, virtually no comparable progress has been made on the political front.
Not only has the Iraqi Parliament failed to approve legislation on the distribution of oil revenues, on the eligibility of former Ba'ath Party officials to return to government, or on the holding of elections that would give Sunnis a greater voice in provincial and local councils, but the largest Sunni bloc aligned with the government walked out this month.
Crocker himself on Tuesday called progress toward national reconciliation "extremely disappointing", while even Bush appeared to be hedging his support for Maliki during a visit to Canada the same day, calling on the Iraqi government "to do more through its Parliament to help heal the wounds of ... having lived years under a tyrant".
Their remarks followed a harsh assessment this week by the chairman of the powerful US Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Carl Levin, on his return from his latest trip to Iraq. Calling the regime "non-functional", Levin said he hopes "the Parliament will vote the Maliki government out of office and will have the wisdom to replace it with a less sectarian and more unifying prime minister and government".
Levin also released a joint statement signed by the senior committee Republican and another "surge" skeptic, Senator John Warner, which conveyed much the same message, albeit in somewhat softer language.
But most analysts here believe it unlikely that Maliki will be forced out, and that even if he is, a successor will be any less sectarian given the current balance of forces within the Parliament and the apparent unwillingness of either the majority Shi'ites or their Kurdish partners to make major concessions to the Sunnis of the kind the US and Crocker have been urging.
"You could swap Maliki out for another Shi'ite, but frankly I don't see the basic dynamics of Iraqi politics as opening the door to the kind of reconciliation we need," said Steven Simon of the Council on Foreign Relations, who spoke with Johns during a teleconference organized by the National Security Network after Bush's speech.
Even while Bush himself reiterated support for Maliki, the Iraqi leader during a visit to Damascus on Wednesday lashed out against the growing pressure against him.
"The Iraqi government was elected by the Iraqi people; no one has the right to set a timetable for it," he said, referring to Levin's remarks. "These statements do not concern us much. We care for our people and our constitution and can find friends elsewhere," he added in a comment that Simon described as an "implicit threat" that Iran is "perhaps a more reliable ally [of his government] than the US".
By reiterating his support for Maliki and by once again suggesting that a US withdrawal from Iraq would have catastrophic results, Bush appeared on Wednesday to be digging himself in for a major new confrontation with Democrats in Congress.
Boasting of recent military successes, Bush said US troops were asking "whether elected leaders in Washington pulled the rug out from under them just as they're gaining momentum and changing the dynamic on the ground in Iraq. Here's my answer: we'll support our troops; we'll support our commanders; and we will give them everything they need to succeed."
Comparing Washington's current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan to the "ideological struggles" of World War II and "the communists in Korea and Vietnam", Bush argued that the subsequent transitions of Japan and South Korea into democratic states should offer hope for similar results in the Middle East.
As for the Vietnam War, Bush implied that Washington's withdrawal constituted a moral abdication to the people of Indochina. "One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people', 're-education camps' and 'killing fields'.
"Unlike in Vietnam," he went on, "if we were to withdraw before the job was done, this enemy would follow us home." On the other hand, a "free Iraq will be a massive defeat for al-Qaeda [and] an example that provides hope for millions throughout the Middle East. It'll be a friend of the United States, and it's going to be an important ally in the ideological struggle of the 21st century."
But critics argued that Bush fundamentally misunderstood the historical precedents he cited. "Bush is cherry-picking history to support his case for staying the course," said Johns, who was a senior military planner during the Vietnam War. "What I learned in Vietnam is that US forces could not conduct a counterinsurgency operation. The longer we stay there [Iraq], the worse it's going to get."
As for Bush's references to the violence, especially in Cambodia, that followed its withdrawal from Indochina, Simon noted that much of it happened "because the United States left too late, not too early. It was the expansion of the war [into Cambodia] that opened the door to Pol Pot and the genocide of the Khmer Rouge. The longer you stay the worse it gets."
(Inter Press Service)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IH24Ak02.html
Clarín: Cerca de seis millones de chicos
son obligados a llevar una vida de esclavos
Sufren ataques, son explotados o violados regularmente. Lo denunció en un informe la organización no gubernamental británica "Save The Children", que además sostiene que grupos vinculados al tráfico infantil ganan hasta US$ 32 mil millones anuales.
Clarín.com
23.08.2007
Unos seis millones de niños son obligados en todo el planeta a llevar vida de esclavos, sufren de ataques, explotación o son violados regularmente, denunció hoy la organización británica "Save The Children".
El documento dado a conocer por esa organización no gubernamental titulado "Small Hands of Slavery" (Pequeñas Manos de Esclavitud) y coincide con el Día Internacional de la Trata de esclavos y su Abolición.
El jefe de campañas de Save the Children, Bill Bell, dijo que "la esclavitud infantil no es un problema del pasado", informó la agencia italiana ANSA. "Sigue habiendo millones de niños tanto en países ricos como pobres, que son forzados a llevar una vida de esclavos en condiciones horribles de humillación y abuso", agregó.
Bell sostuvo que "en la actualidad, hay en todo el mundo 1,8 millones de niños atrapados en el comercio de la prostitución, más de un millón de menores que trabajan como esclavos en minas, y otros millones más, algunos de hasta seis años, que son forzados a trabajar hasta 15 horas diarias como empleados domésticos".
El experto de "Save the Children" destacó que esos niños "son tratados como productos comerciales, listos para ser prestados o vendidos a otros dueños sin aviso".
"Los mandatarios del mundo y los donantes internacionales deben actuar con urgencia para solucionar el flagelo de la esclavitud infantil, y poner en marcha leyes y recursos necesarios para erradicar estas prácticas terribles", sostuvo. El informe de esa ONG revela que 1,2 millones de niños y bebés son traficados anualmente en países de Europa Occidental, América y el Caribe y aclara que esa cifra está en aumento.
Además sostiene que grupos criminales vinculados al tráfico de niños y adultos ganan hasta 32.000 millones de dólares anuales y que casi dos millones de niños son abusados a través de la prostitución, la pornografía infantil y el turismo sexual.
El informe dado a conocer hoy coincide con el Día Internacional de la Trata de esclavos y su Eliminación, instituído para recordar la noche del 22 al 23 de agosto de 1791, cuando se produjo en la isla que comparten Haití y República Dominicana el comienzo de una sublevación de esclavos. Esa revuelta sería de decisiva importancia para la abolición del comercio trasatlántico de esclavos.
Según la Unesco la finalidad que persigue el Día Internacional del Recuerdo de la Trata de esclavos y de su Abolición es inscribir la tragedia del comercio de esclavos en la memoria de todos los pueblos.
Copyright 1996-2007 Clarín.com - All rights reserved
http://www.clarin.com/diario/2007/08/23/um/m-01483989.htm
Guardian: Sudan expels western diplomats
as pressure mounts over Darfur
Ian Black, Middle East editor
Friday August 24, 2007
Sudan has expelled a top Canadian diplomat and the European commission's envoy as it faces international pressure over the crisis in Darfur.
The two were summoned on Wednesday to the foreign ministry in Khartoum, which confirmed yesterday that it had declared them persona non grata for "intervention in the internal affairs of the Sudan" - a euphemism for spying.
Canada and the EU, like many western countries, have been highly critical of the Sudanese government's role in Darfur, where more than 200,000 people have died since ethnic African rebels took up arms against the Arab-dominated central government in 2003.
Khartoum is accused of unleashing the janjaweed militias, blamed for atrocities against civilians in a conflict that has displaced more than 2.5 million people.
Amnesty International, meanwhile, today accuses the Sudanese government of continuing to deploy offensive military equipment in Darfur despite a UN arms embargo and peace agreements. Photographs taken in July at El Geneina airport in Darfur show containers being offloaded by Sudanese soldiers from an Antonov aircraft onto military trucks, as well as Russian-supplied helicopters reported to have delivered weapons to both government and janjaweed forces.
Last month the UN security council agreed to send a strengthened African Union-UN hybrid force to Darfur. But the resolution fails to give peacekeepers a mandate to disarm or demobilise the janjaweed or armed opposition groups.
Sudan's justice minister meanwhile yesterday attacked a UN report on rapes in Darfur. The document was produced by the UN human rights commissioner, the Canadian Louise Arbour.
"This is a false report and it is clear to us that the human rights commissioner does not care about her credibility," said Mohamed Ali al-Mardi.
The report said Sudanese soldiers and militiamen subjected around 50 women to multiple rapes and other forms of violence in an attack on the village of Deribat in late December.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sudan/story/0,,2155177,00.html
Jeune Afrique: Un témoin raconte le meurtre
du journaliste franco-canadien Guy-André Kieffer
CÔTE D'IVOIRE - 23 août 2007 - par AFP
Le journaliste franco-canadien Guy-André Kieffer, disparu en 2004 en Côte d'Ivoire, a été enlevé par un commando, détenu pendant deux jours à la présidence à Abidjan et abattu, raconte un homme se présentant comme un témoin clef à la chaîne de télévision France 3.
A Abidjan, la présidence ivoirienne n'était pas disponible jeudi soir pour commenter ces informations diffusées le jour où le président Nicolas Sarkozy a reçu la famille de Guy-André Kieffer qui parle elle "d'affaire d'Etat".
M. Kieffer, un journaliste indépendant, enquêtait sur des malversations dans la filière cacao. L'enquête menée en France s'est orientée vers l'entourage du président ivoirien Laurent Gbagbo. Le corps n'a jamais été retrouvé.
L'enquête française a établi que le journaliste avait été enlevé le 16 avril 2004 par un commando, sur un parking de supermarché du centre d'Abidjan, alors qu'il avait rendez-vous avec Michel Legré, beau-frère de Simone Gbagbo, l'épouse du président ivoirien.
France 3 a interrogé à Abidjan un homme, Berte Seydou, se présentant comme un témoin direct des dernières heures de M. Kieffer.
Dans son témoignage diffusé jeudi soir, cet homme affirme avoir été le chauffeur du chef présumé du commando, un ex-membre des services spéciaux ivoiriens, le capitaine Jean-Tony Oulaï, mis en examen le 13 janvier 2006 en France pour "enlèvement et séquestration" dans le cadre de cette affaire.
Selon ce témoin, Kieffer est arrivé emmené par un commando à bord d'un 4X4 blanc dans une villa d'Abidjan, où il a passé environ 30 minutes.
A son arrivée, Guy-André Kieffer "était stressé, comme quelqu'un qui courrait un danger", a dit M. Seydou.
M. Seydou a affirmé que le captif a ensuite été emmené à la présidence où il est resté deux jours et deux nuits.
Puis de là il a été conduit dans une ferme utilisée comme "un lieu caché des exécutions", selon ce récit. "Oulaï a donné le signal par un pistolet et deux éléments (du commando) ont mitraillé" Guy-André Kieffer, a affirmé M. Seydou.
Selon lui, le corps a été gardé sur place par des militaires, avant d'être exhumé, et transporté dans une autre villa. M. Seydou affirme qu'il ne sait pas où le corps a été emmené.
La justice française a vérifié ces informations et les a jugées "crédibles", affirme France 3.
Le frère de la victime Bernard Kieffer a lui estimé, à l'issue de son entretien avec Nicolas Sarkozy, que ces informations demandaient "à être prouvées judiciairement". "C'est une piste intéressante mais ce n'est pas la vérité établie", a-t-il ajouté.
Selon une source proche du dossier, les enquêteurs, qui tentent désormais de localiser le corps de M. Kieffer, auraient identifié depuis des mois les auteurs de l'enlèvement et du meurtre du journaliste.
M. Oulaï, qui a fui la Côte d'Ivoire pour se réfugier en France, conteste avoir supervisé l'enlèvement. Placé en détention en France, il a ensuite été remis en liberté sous contrôle judiciaire.
Un autre personnage clef du dossier, M. Legré, a été interrogé plusieurs fois en Côte d'Ivoire par la justice française qui l'a mis en examen en octobre 2004 pour "enlèvement et séquestration".
M. Legré est également poursuivi à Abidjan pour "complicité d'enlèvement", "séquestration" et "assassinat". Emprisonné en Côte d'Ivoire en mai 2004, il a été remis en liberté en octobre 2005.
"M. Sarkozy nous a donné son assurance que ce dossier était une priorité pour l'Etat français" et qu'il l'évoquerait avec son homologue ivoirien Laurent Gbagbo, a déclaré à la presse Osange Silou-Kieffer.
"Tout ce que nous demandons à M. Gbagbo, c'est de permettre au juge d'interroger les personnes citées dans ce dossier. Jusqu'à présent, la Côte d'Ivoire a empêché la justice de suivre son cours", a-t-elle ajouté.
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP21607untmoreffei0#
Mail & Guardian:
India's history: 'Holocaust where millions disappeared'
24 August 2007 07:31
A controversial new history of the Indian Mutiny, which broke out 150 years ago and is acknowledged to have been the greatest challenge to any European power in the 19th century, claims that the British pursued a murderous decade-long campaign to wipe out millions of people who dared rise up against them.
In War of Civilisations: India AD 1857, Amaresh Misra, a writer and historian based in Mumbai, argues that there was an "untold holocaust" that caused the deaths of almost 10-million people over 10 years, beginning in 1857.
Britain was then the world's superpower but, says Misra, came perilously close to losing its most prized possession: India.
Conventional histories have counted only 100 000 Indian soldiers who were slaughtered in savage reprisals, but none have tallied the number of rebels and civilians killed by British forces desperate to impose order, claims Misra.
The author says he was surprised to find that the "balance book of history" could not say how many Indians were killed in the aftermath of 1857. This is remarkable, he says, given that in an age of empires, nothing less than the fate of the world hung in the balance.
"It was a holocaust, one where millions disappeared. It was a necessary holocaust in the British view because they thought the only way to win was to destroy entire populations in towns and villages. It was simple and brutal. Indians who stood in their way were killed. But its scale has been kept a secret," Misra told the Guardian.
His calculations rest on three principal sources. Two are records pertaining to the number of religious resistance fighters killed -- either Islamic mujahedin or Hindu warrior ascetics committed to driving out the British.
The third source involves British labour-force records, which show a drop in manpower of between a fifth and a third across vast swaths of India, which as one British official records was "on account of the undisputed display of British power, necessary during those terrible and wretched days -- millions of wretches seemed to have died."
There is a macabre undercurrent in much of the correspondence. In one incident, Misra recounts how two million letters lay unopened in government warehouses, which, according to civil servants, showed "the kind of vengeance our boys must have wreaked on the abject Hindoos and Mohammedans, who killed our women and children".
Misra's casualty claims have been challenged in India and Britain.
"It is very difficult to assess the extent of the reprisals simply because we cannot say for sure if some of these populations did not just leave a conflict zone rather than being killed," said Shabi Ahmad, head of the 1857 project at the Indian Council of Historical Research. "It could have been migration rather than murder that depopulated areas."
Many view exaggeration rather than deceit in Misra's calculations. A British historian, Saul David, author of The Indian Mutiny, said it was valid to count the death toll but reckoned that it ran into "hundreds of thousands".
"It looks like an overestimate. There were definitely famines that cost millions of lives, which were exacerbated by British ruthlessness. You don't need these figures or talk of holocausts to hammer imperialism. It has a pretty bad track record."
Others say Misra has done well to unearth anything in that period, when the British assiduously snuffed out Indian versions of history.
"There appears a prolonged silence between 1860 and the end of the century where no native voices are heard. It is only now that these stories are being found and there is another side to the story," said Amar Farooqui, history professor at Delhi University. "In many ways books like Misra's and those of [William] Dalrymple show there is lots of material around. But you have to look for it."
What is not in doubt is that in 1857 Britain ruled much of the subcontinent in the name of the Bahadur Shah Zafar, the powerless poet-king improbably descended from Genghis Khan.
Neither is there much dispute over how events began: on May 10 Indian soldiers, both Muslim and Hindu, who were stationed in the central Indian town of Meerut, revolted and killed their British officers before marching south to Delhi. The rebels proclaimed Zafar, then 82, emperor of Hindustan and hoisted a saffron flag above the Red Fort.
What follows in Misra's view was nothing short of the first war of Indian independence, a story of a people rising to throw off the imperial yoke. Critics say the intentions and motives were more muddled: a few sepoys misled into thinking the officers were threatening their religious traditions. In the end British rule prevailed for another 90 years.
Misra's analysis breaks new ground by claiming the fighting stretched across India rather than accepting it was localised around northern India. Misra says there were outbreaks of anti-British violence in southern Tamil Nadu, near the Himalayas, and bordering Burma. "It was a pan-Indian thing. No doubt."
Misra also claims that the uprisings did not die out until years after the original mutiny had fizzled away, countering the widely held view that the recapture of Delhi was the last important battle.
For many the fact that Indian historians debate 1857 from all angles is in itself a sign of a historical maturity.
"You have to see this in the context of a new, more confident India," said Jon E Wilson, lecturer in South Asian history at King's College London. "India has a new relationship with 1857. In the 1940s and 1950s the rebellions were seen as an embarrassment -- all that fighting, when Nehru and Gandhi preached non-violence. But today 1857 is becoming part of the Indian national story. That is a big change."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=317369&area=/
breaking_news/breaking_news__international_news/#
New Statesman:
Bush: is the president imploding?
Andrew Stephen
Published 23 August 2007
His aides are jumping ship, his inner circle is torn apart by feuds and his orders are being ignored. Bush has 17 months left in the White House, but he is now a rudderless leader.
You certainly wouldn't think there was a crisis. There's no sense that the Bush administration has plunged into a shambles of epic and probably unprecedented proportions, either: Dick Cheney has gone fishing, Congress is out for the summer, and much of Georgetown has fled the August mugginess of Washington for the beaches of Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard or the Hamptons. President George W Bush himself, 61 last month, is about to break a record previously held by Ronald Reagan: before the end of this month, according to my calculations, he will have surpassed the old Gipper's record of having taken 436 days' holiday while in office.
Indeed, this past week, Air Force One touched down at Waco airport in Texas - I swear this is true - for the 66th time since Bush took office, so he could relax at his 1,583-acre "ranch" (there's not so much as a hint of any livestock to be seen or heard there) nearby. Nor should we forget - how could we? - that, barring anything extraordinary happening, the 43rd US president still has almost 17 months left in the White House.
But the symbolic meltdown of his administration came on the South Lawn of the White House on 13 August when a semi-tearful Karl Rove, 56, announced he will be leaving the administration on 31 August. Though nominally only deputy chief of staff, Rove had become increasingly indispensable to Bush since they first met 34 years ago. He was the amoral political über-strategist who somehow propelled Bush - an alcoholic who had already failed in both politics and business - to four election victories between 1994 and 2004, handing him two terms as Texas governor and then as US president. Bush bristles at the implications of Rove being described as "Bush's brain", but happily calls Rove the "boy genius" and "the architect" behind his supreme electoral triumph.
And yet, that hot August morning, the dreams of both men lay in tatters. The wheels of amorality had come full circle. Though Bush was Rove's best-known political trophy, he had also virtually single-handedly turned Texas from the stolidly Democratic state of LBJ into a strongly Republican one. I have catalogued in these pages before some of the smear tactics Rove used while doing that, such as starting a whispering campaign in 1994 that Ann Richards - Bush's Democratic rival that year and the then popular incumbent Texas governor, since deceased - was a closet lesbian.
But Rove's ultimate dream, which he came perilously close to realising in the 21st century, was to pull off what he had done to Texas with the entire country: to create a durable Republican base, centred on the so-called "Christian right" he set about mobilising, despite being an avowed agnostic himself, which would become the springboard of local and federal Republican rule throughout the US for decades to come.
Instead, in 2007 Rove has found himself the target of both criminal and congressional investigations, and Bush is now frequently described by friends and enemies alike as the worst and most unpopular US president in history. Yet each squandered unique political capital of which they could only have dreamed when Bush took office in 2001: shortly after the 11 September atrocities, Republicans were favoured 57-28 per cent over Democrats across the nation.
Today, says Gallup, just 41 per cent of Americans identify themselves as Republicans, compared with 51 per cent who see themselves as Democrats; 40 per cent of Republicans believe the Democrats will win the 2008 presidential election. According to an NBC/WSJ poll a few days ago, Americans believe by margins ranging from 22 to 39 per cent that the Democrats would do better than Bush on issues ranging from education to global warming. Because the Democrats regained control of both the House and Senate last November - a further blow to Rove's reputation as electoral wonderboy - Bush, Rove et al are the targets of countless congressional probes and subpoenas that threaten to uncover ever more scandal and incompetence.
All of which explains why there was such a sombre, almost funereal, mood on the South Lawn that sunny morning on 13 August. Rove the non-believer vowed to Bush, with a straight face, that he would pray "for God's continued gifts of strength and wisdom for you and your work . . . and for the Almighty's continued blessing of our great country". Bush described Rove as "a dear friend" who is now "moving on down the road", adding grimly, and rather strangely: "I'll be on the road behind you here in a little bit."
The two men hugged each other for a long time and then Laura Bush, too, emotionally embraced Rove before they all headed for Marine One, the waiting presidential helicopter. Rove's wife and teenage son joined them at Andrews Air Force Base and all boarded Air Force One - en route, naturally, to a holiday at the beloved "ranch". Rove insists, unconvincingly, that he and his second wife, Darby, will now settle in the tiny town of Ingram in mid-Texas so they can be near their son, Andrew, a student at Trinity University in San Antonio, 63 miles away.
If you believe that, you'll believe that Rove is at this moment on his knees, praying fervently to the Almighty in whom he does not believe for Bush's deliverance. The August quiet of Georgetown and Pennsylvania Avenue is therefore misleading - rather like the summer doldrums before the coming megastorm - because Rove's departure signals that the game really is up for the Bush administration. It's routine for White House staff to start to look elsewhere at this stage of an administration, but Bush has now been deserted by almost his entire cast - with the notable exceptions, so far, of Cheney and Condi. Alberto Gonzales, his almost comically inept attorney general, stays only because Bush has too much hubris to swallow the universal view that he should be sacked.
The exodus started with Rummy's resignation on 8 November last year (actually, we learned a few days ago, he handed it in on 6 November - but it was election day on 7 November so the news was suppressed by the administration for 48 hours, though it didn't do them any good). The following month John Bolton, Bush's less-than-lovable ambassador to the UN, called it a day knowing his appointment would never be ratified by a Democratic Senate. In January, Harriet Miers - Bush's former family lawyer in Texas whom he wildly over-promoted to be White House counsel and then nominated, in a doomed move that was egregious even by Bush's standards, to the Supreme Court - finally went in the midst of more disclosures about the administration's firing of eight federal prosecutors for political reasons (in which Rove, too, was prominently involved: watch this space).
I can count 16 more front-line people who have gone, including Dan Bartlett (a key White House counsellor who vetted speeches, planned events and shaped communications strategy) and Rob Portman (who had been director of the Office of Management and Budget for barely a year when he resigned in June, citing the unconvincing Rovian cliché that he wanted to spend more time with his family). Tony Snow, Bush's likeable chief spokesman and a former Fox News anchor, who is now stricken with advanced cancer of the colon, says he will also go before Labor Day on 3 September.
Feuding and vicious warfare have flared in the inner circle, too. Matthew Dowd, Rove's former protégé-in-chief, is no longer on speaking terms with him and says publicly what everybody else says privately: that he has lost faith in Bush. Matthew Scully, special assistant and senior speechwriter in the White House until 2004, has just published an article excoriating the honesty of Michael Gerson - Bush's chief speechwriter until last year and a self-proclaimed Christian often dubbed "the conscience of the White House", who came up with many of Bush's pithiest scripted lines. David Frum, yet another former White House speechwriter, whose "axis of hatred" Gerson changed to Bush's infamous "axis of evil" for his first post-9/11 State of the Union address, now says that "polarisation is Karl Rove's speciality".
Catastrophic consequences
The conundrum, of course, is that it was precisely that dark art which got Bush into the White House in the first place. The poisonous divisiveness that gradually festered around him as a result now allows the state department, to take just one example reported in the Washington Post, to think nothing of simply ignoring an order from the president. Yet I suspect that the extent to which the Bush administration has become so shambolic will not come home to many Americans until the country returns to work on 4 September. Bush is now a truly rudderless president, with no realistic agenda left for the next 513 or so days, other than to tread water and hope for the best.
He has already decreed that the much-awaited "Petraeus report" - the supposedly crucial testimony on Capitol Hill from General David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, US ambassador in Baghdad, on what the military situation in Iraq is really like following "the surge" - will not now go ahead as planned. The most Congress can expect by the promised 15 September deadline is a private briefing and a report written by administration staff, rather than by Petraeus or Crocker themselves.
Bush will undoubtedly trumpet the resulting flammed-up "report" as proof that significant progress is being made in Iraq - none other than Rove himself was on duty peddling the line on the talk shows that 50 per cent of Baghdad is now under the control of the US army, compared with only 8 per cent in February, and that things are going wonderfully in Anbar Province, too. But cynicism with the Bush administration is such that, according to a CNN/Opinion Research poll released on 16 August, 53 per cent of Americans believe that the "report" will try to make the situation in Iraq sound better than it actually is, and 47 per cent of those opposed to the Iraq War say they simply will not trust it.
The Bush-Rove tragedy is that the two complemented each other and combined to create a uniquely combustible mix that has had such catastrophic consequences for America and the world. To Rove, a college dropout, Bush was a morally malleable blank slate with everything he lacked: an exceedingly well-known, respected family name and a wealthy political background that had enabled him to start life in the privileged Wasp enclaves of Connecticut and end up in Texas via Yale and Harvard. Perfect for the White House in, say, 2001?
For Bush, Rove represented proven cunning viciousness and, yes, a brain - one that was crammed with political and demographic facts and figures. Besides his enthusiasm for peculiarly nasty dirty tricks, Rove's genius was to invent wedge issues which did not actually concern the overwhelming majority of Americans, but which he managed to push to the forefront of political debate. Rove may have been an agnostic himself, but he could certainly work up the electoral bloc that he invented and called "the Christian right" into lathers of rage over, say, gay marriage.
We now know that Rove was chairing meetings of the shadowy and secret White House Iraq Group plotting the invasion of Iraq as early as 2002, and that he was already pushing the line that, because of 9/11, the Bush administration was engaged in a messianic struggle between good and evil. He seized the opportunity to convince Bush that he was a president placed on this planet by God to liberate mankind and bring "democracy" to the un-American and thus politically pagan world. For Bush, it was an intoxicating vision to fill the blank slate.
By 2003, Rove had an office in the West Wing and Bush let him loose on cherished domestic dreams such as "reforming" social security and immigration. But his high-handed approach soon enraged congressional Republican leaders such as Tom DeLay and Dick Armey, and the beginning of the collapse of the Bush edifice had started. The wars on Iraq and terror were sacrosanct, but when it came to their bread-and-butter issues, the likes of DeLay and Armey weren't going to be pushed around by a power-mad, devious Washington outsider like Rove.
Hence the terrible mess Washington will soon be in. Bush has always been obsessed with how history will view him, and all that now keeps him safely wrapped inside his bubble of self-delusion is an almost Hegelian certainty that he is a providential and necessary creation of our times whom history will not only vindicate, but glorify - even if it is long after our deaths. Rove's job after 31 August, once he is released into the big-bucks world of the lecture, talk-show and publishing circuits, will be to spin the Bush-Rove legacy. He seems less optimistic than Bush, telling TV viewers: "The president will say to me, 'Don't worry about it. History will get it right and we'll both be dead.'"
In the meantime, the cicadas in Georgetown are chirping away, the weathermen tell us we will all be under a "heat advisory", and children are flocking to swimming pools before the dreaded return to school. And 1,500 miles away, in Texas, America's president is furiously biking away while Iraq and Afghanistan burn. Yet history will come to see him as the brave hero who did what he knew was right - even if it takes centuries to come round to that conclusion.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200708230011
Página/12:
Dos héroes del pueblo
SACCO Y VANZETTI EN BUENOS AIRES
Por Osvaldo Bayer
Viernes, 24 de Agosto de 2007
Ochenta años de uno de los crímenes “legales” más mentados. El de Sacco y Vanzetti, cometido por el poder de Estados Unidos, en la ciudad de Boston. La silla eléctrica. Pero no pudieron matarlos en la memoria. Sacco y Vanzetti pasaron a ser, para siempre, “Héroes del pueblo”. Publicaciones, actos, conferencias, obras de teatro, filmes, hermosas canciones, los recuerdan. Nicola Sacco y Bartolomeo Vanzetti, un zapatero y un vendedor de pescado, así de humildes. Dos italianos inmigrantes. Pero saltaron a la gloria. A los jueces, a los funcionarios que actuaron en este increíble crimen legal ni se los recuerda. Pero se los nombra. Principalmente al juez Fuller. En realidad, todos los jueces que interpretan las leyes a favor del poder quedan en la lista negra de la historia.
Como hacen los norteamericanos, cuarenta años después del crimen oficial contra Sacco y Vanzetti pidieron disculpas. Había sido una “equivocación”. Claro, entonces era fácil, ya estaban muertos. La misma conducta norteamericana contra aquellos también héroes populares, condenados a muerte –esta vez en la horca– por pedir las ocho horas de trabajo. Fueron “Los Mártires de Chicago”, a cuyo recuerdo se debe para siempre el 1º de Mayo como Día de los Trabajadores. También, cien años después de ese crimen infame, la Justicia norteamericana pidió disculpas. Porque fue una “equivocación”.
Sacco y Vanzetti. Libertarios. Luchadores por la Igualdad en Libertad. Dos anarquistas. Con la palabra y el ejemplo. Cuando fueron detenidos, sin ninguna prueba, se los acusó de un atentado. La policía supo hacer la trampa. El juez Fuller y los demás no se tomaron ningún trabajo. Se “dejaron llevar” por las “pruebas policiales”. Total era lo mismo, si no habían cometido ese delito valía la pena matarlos por sus ideas. Bush también los hubiera calificado de terroristas. Y eso basta.
Fue impresionante cómo la palabra Solidaridad, en todo el mundo, se hizo protagonista. En todos los países hubo mitines, huelgas, protestas, atentados de repudio por Sacco y Vanzetti. En la Argentina, ni que hablar. Los anarquistas no eran niños de pecho. Ante la violencia de arriba no se prosternaban ni huían. Respondían. El 16 de mayo de 1926, a las 23, estalla la protesta en Buenos Aires con una bomba en la embajada norteamericana, en Arroyo y Carlos Pellegrini. El boquete que abre la explosión es tan grande que los policías que llegan pueden entrar por él al edificio. El escudo de Estados Unidos va a parar al medio de la calle. Del almacén de enfrente caen las botellas de las estanterías. Poco después, como se usa, los más altos funcionarios de la policía del gobierno radical de Alvear, encabezados por el jefe de Investigaciones, Santiago, irán a pedirle disculpas al embajador norteamericano y asegurarle que los culpables caerían muy pronto. Pero no sería la única. El 22 de julio de 1927 estalla una bomba en el pedestal de la estatua a Washington, en Palermo. Un banco de mármol, situado junto al monumento, va a parar a cinco cuadras del lugar. Cincuenta minutos después estalla otro artefacto en la empresa Ford, de Perú y (hoy) Hipólito Yrigoyen. El automóvil último modelo expuesto en la vidriera queda totalmente inutilizado.
Por supuesto la policía detiene a toda persona con rostro sospechoso de anarquista. Y el comisario Santiago hace declaraciones optimistas. Pero esa misma noche, el 16 de agosto, explota en su lujosa residencia, Rawson 944, un artefacto que lo deja sin comedor, sin los muebles de esa habitación, sin balcón y sin ventana. Después de esto, el comisario Santiago no hará más declaraciones a los periodistas. Santiago pasó a la historia por inventar el suplicio llamado “pileta” para hacer hablar a los detenidos. Es decir, sumergirle la cabeza en una pileta de agua, hasta el límite.
Pero llegará la noche de la ejecución de los dos héroes, en Charlestown. Buenos Aires siguió ante las pizarras de los diarios, paso a paso, la ejecución de los dos inocentes. Hasta que apareció escrito: “Fueron ejecutados, primero Sacco, luego Vanzetti. Antes de morir gritaron: ¡Viva la Anarquía!”.
Buenos Aires vivió ese día la ira del pueblo. El paro fue general, ordenado por las centrales obreras. Todo el día explotaron petardos como gritos de furiosa protesta, manifestaciones, enfrentamientos con la policía. Como símbolo quedó un tranvía quemado en el centro de Buenos Aires.
El diario anarquista Cúlmine dirá: “Debemos oponer nuestros instrumentos vengadores que quemarán los mil tentáculos monstruosos de la fiera vampírica que envuelven todos los senderos de la tierra. Nuestra dinamita purificará los lugares que la maldita casta del dólar ha apestado”.
Seguirán los atentados, dos de ellos al CitiBank y al Banco de Boston.
Y volvemos al principio: no hay violencia de abajo cuando primero no hay violencia de arriba.
© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados
http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-90185-2007-08-24.html
The Independent:
Photos show Sudan breaking Darfur arms ban
By Steve Bloomfield, Africa Correspondent
Published: 24 August 2007
Sudan is continuing to deploy offensive military equipment, including attack helicopters, in Darfur in defiance of a UN arms embargo and numerous peace agreements, photographs obtained by Amnesty International show.
The photographs show military equipment supplied by Russia at West Darfur's Geneina airport. A previous Amnesty report accused Russia and Sudan's key ally, China, of supplying military equipment that was used by the Sudanese armed forces in the troubled region.
A comprehensive arms embargo has been in place in Darfur since March 2005, banning any deployment of military equipment and supplies into the region unless given prior approval by the UN Sanctions Committee on Sudan.
Despite this, Sudan makes little attempt to hide its military might in Darfur. In Nyala earlier this year The Independent witnessed MiG fighters and helicopter gunships flying low over the camps of Kalma and Attash, where tens of thousands of Darfuris have sought refuge.
The Sudanese armed forces are still carrying out offensive operations inside the province. Up to 2,000 government soldiers surrounded Kalma camp earlier this week to flush out rebels that Khartoum claimed were behind two recent attacks on police posts.
Aerial attacks have also continued. Russian-built Antonov aircraft were used to attack the town of Adila in south Darfur on 2 August, and there have been bombing raids on nearby villages. The UN Security Council agreed last month to deploy 26,000 personnel to Darfur to protect civilians. But under pressure from China, the council watered down the resolution, withdrawing the right of the UN force to disarm the militants.
Erwin van der Borght, Amnesty's deputy director of the Africa program, said: "If weapons continue to flow into Darfur and peacekeepers are not given the power to disarm... all armed opposition groups and janjaweed militia, the ability of the new peacekeeping force to protect civilians will be severely impeded."
The renewed military offensives, which have also seen Sudanese armed forces support janjaweed attacks on villages in west Darfur, has threatened the viability of peace talks planned for later this year.
Most of Darfur's rebel groups met in Arusha, Tanzania, this month to agree a common position ahead of fresh talks with Khartoum. But after the most recent bombings and the attack on Kalma, some rebels have said they will reconsider attending full negotiations.
The surge in attacks has led to renewed allegations this week by the UN human rights chief, Louise Arbour, of "systematic" rape carried out by Sudanese soldiers.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/article2891196.ece
The Nation:
An Inconvenient Truth
by ANDREW COCKBURN
[from the September 10, 2007 issue]
If the United States ever possessed a shred of moral authority for the invasion of Iraq, it came from Halabja, a Kurdish town of about 70,000 people nestling in a bowl in front of the towering mountain chain that fringes Iraq's northeast frontier with Iran. Halabja was once famous among Kurds as the "city of poets," and the townspeople were known for their love of books. It is doubtful that George W. Bush had ever heard of the poets, but he did find it useful to know that in 1988 Halabjans were the victims of the largest use of chemical weapons against a civilian population in history, thereby providing inspiration for Bush's repeated observation that Saddam was "evil" and had "gassed his own people."
Like Guernica or My Lai, Halabja (in Kurdish, "the wrong place") suffered an experience of mass murder intense enough to transform the town's very name into a historical event. That event occurred on the afternoon of March 16, 1988--a cold but pleasant day, with occasional showers, notes Joost Hiltermann in A Poisonous Affair, his comprehensive and powerful delineation not only of what happened that day but of all those who helped bring it about. The day before, Kurdish fighters, with Iranian encouragement and support, had occupied the town after driving out Iraqi government troops. Now the Iraqi air force had returned to deliver Saddam's response.
According to survivors, mustard and nerve gas bombs that rained down on the town and its outskirts did not sound like conventional explosives when they detonated but instead gave off a deceptively mild noise, "more like a 'tap,'" as one witness put it. A report from Human Rights Watch described how "dead bodies--human and animal--littered the streets, huddled in doorways, slumped over the steering wheels of their cars. Survivors stumbled around, laughing hysterically, before collapsing.... Those who had been directly exposed to the gas found that their symptoms worsened as the night wore on. Many children died along the way and were abandoned where they fell."
A large number of people perished in their cellars, where they had taken refuge from anticipated Iraqi artillery barrages. Many more were killed as they fled from town, pursued by the lethal vapors. On a 2005 visit to the area, I sat on one of the grassy mounds that line the roads out of town, not realizing that these marked where groups of terrified escapees had fallen and been hastily covered with dirt.
Abbas Abd-al-Razzaq Akbar, the cameraman who recorded the first images of the slaughter, recalled to Hiltermann, "The gas had killed all natural life.... I couldn't hear anything. No birds. There was absolutely no sound.... The silence drove me crazy."
In September 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell descended on the town to inaugurate a newly completed museum commemorating the 5,000 victims, making emotional reference to the "choking mothers [who] died holding their choking babies to their chests." Inside, tasteful displays featured dioramas of huddled corpses and other evocative memorabilia, including the empty casings of mustard and nerve gas bombs now painted up in bright colors.
"If you want evidence of the existence and use of weapons of mass destruction," Powell exhorted the press as he was leaving, "come here now to Halabja, look today and see it." Farther south, US military search teams were fruitlessly scouring the land for more contemporary evidence of WMDs. As usual, the people of Halabja, dead or alive, were being pressed into service on behalf of someone else's agenda.
Back in March 1988, Powell was National Security Adviser to President Reagan. While images of the massacre shocked, albeit briefly, a Western public jaded by reports of slaughter in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, the Administration moved quickly to protect its ally Saddam Hussein. Within a week of the attack, US diplomats began publicizing the canard that the Halabjans had died from Iranian chemical weapons, thereafter eliciting a Security Council resolution with no specific condemnation of Iraq that urged both sides to refrain from use of chemical weapons. This gambit was employed throughout the war, and Hiltermann, the Middle East deputy program director at the International Crisis Group, is particularly effective in exposing the utter falsity of the claim. Thus encouraged by the international silence, Saddam was free to expand his program of extermination against large swatches of the Kurdish population in Iraq. Hiltermann's demolition of the "Iranians did it" lie, and his meticulous tracking of the spurious intelligence used to buttress it (later embraced by many on the left in revulsion at Washington's subsequent anti-Saddam tub-thumping), are among the major contributions of the book.
Powell must have recalled these shabby maneuvers, yet during his day at Halabja he unblushingly declared, "At the time, Halabja was commented on by the Administration. And it was commented on both by the White House at that time as well as by the State Department. Strongly condemned. And there was no effort on the part of the Reagan Administration at that time to either ignore it or not take note of it."
Saddam never lacked for partners. He had launched his original ill-fated attack on Iran in September 1980 after garnering an indirect endorsement from Washington via the Saudis. The best the UN Security Council could do in the face of this act of unprovoked aggression was to issue a statement appealing to both parties to "desist from all armed activity." Two years later, US official complacency was jarred by the unexpected revival of Iranian military fortunes and consequent Iraqi retreats. As a result, for the rest of the war US policy was geared toward preventing an Iraqi defeat by any means necessary.
Iraq first resorted to chemical weapons in the mountains of the Kurdish north. In July 1983, the Iranians attacked at Haj Omran, a strategic mountain pass in the far northeast of Iraq. In a telling example of the ethnic and political complexities of that part of the world, the attacking force included elements of the Badr Corps, Iraqi Shiite prisoners recruited from POW camps, along with anti-Saddam Kurds from the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Masoud Barzani. Opposing this force were units of other Iraqi Kurds from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), headed by Jalal Talabani, who between 1983 and 1984 was allied with Saddam against the Iranians. The attackers were initially successful, until Iraqi planes swooped overhead and dropped bombs. Fighters in the area suddenly smelled garlic and soon afterward developed breathing problems and skin lesions, symptoms that inexorably spread to those lower on the mountain as the gas--sulphur mustard developed during World War I--drifted downhill.
Confident that gas was the answer to Iranian "human wave" attacks, Iraq invested ever more heavily in chemical weapons, developing sophisticated techniques for their employment that were studied with keen attention by Western military staffs. Iran repeatedly protested, imploring the UN to take action, and the Security Council did indeed lament the violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which banned the use of chemical weapons, but tactfully avoided any mention of who was responsible. In Washington, meanwhile, the Administration knew perfectly well, at least by the fall of 1983, who was doing what to whom but was loath to say so. There was, after all, a lot of official outrage and agitation at that time over the alleged use of a biological weapon, the so-called Yellow Rain, by the Communist governments of Laos and Vietnam against their own people. The Secretary of State himself, Alexander Haig, had denounced this as a violation of an international agreement, a position that was for the most part endorsed by the press. Later, a Harvard team conclusively demonstrated that Yellow Rain was in fact bee shit. Was there one law for the Communists and another for Saddam Hussein? The answer was yes. So while issuing occasional pious denunciations of Iraqi chemical use, the United States was at pains to reassure Iraq that there would be no serious consequences. In November 1983, State Department officials expressed their concerns about chemical use to Iraq, but discreetly, so as to "avoid unpleasantly surprising Iraq through public positions we may have to take on this issue." Hypocrisy, as la Rochefoucauld observed, is the homage vice pays to virtue.
To convince the Iraqi leader that we really were his friends, the Administration dispatched the President's Special Middle East Envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, bearing a gift for Saddam from Reagan: a pair of golden spurs. In much of the Middle East, Rumsfeld was an unpopular figure--the US Ambassador in Damascus would leave town, after locking up the liquor cabinet in the residence, whenever he heard the envoy was on his way. But Rummy was popular in Baghdad, where Saddam's men enthused that they regarded him as "a good listener" and "liked him as a person." Rumsfeld did not spoil the party by giving chemical weapons more than a passing mention; instead he spent much of his private time with Saddam trying to sell his host on the idea of an Iraqi oil pipeline to Israel.
The following March, when news of Iraq's revival of poison gas as a weapon finally surfaced in the press, the State Department condemned "the prohibited use of chemical weapons wherever it occurs," while Rumsfeld was sent back to Baghdad to pass the word that the condemnation had been essentially pro forma and that the American desire to improve relations "at a pace of Iraq's choosing remain[s] undiminished." Meanwhile, US diplomats worked to quash discussion of the issue at international forums. No wonder Saddam exulted later that year over what he called "the beautiful atmosphere between us."
The "beautiful atmosphere" soured for a period when it emerged that the United States had been simultaneously selling arms to Iran. So cynically confused had American policy become in this period that in a bloody battle for the Faw Peninsula in February 1986, both sides acted on the basis of intelligence supplied by the United States. But Washington ultimately returned to the embrace of its friend in Baghdad, scrambling to reassure him that the United States could be trusted. Quite apart from the need to curb the ayatollahs, there was money to be made. US companies rushed to sew up lucrative contracts. Even Richard Nixon got in on the act, blessing an enterprise organized by some of his staff to supply uniforms sewn in Romania to the Iraqi army.
Again and again, Hiltermann stresses that the Iraqis were very conscious of international reaction and probably would have called a halt to the use of gas if there had been a political cost to pay. But there wasn't. He quotes a CIA assessment from late 1986 that laid out the marginal battlefield effectiveness of Iraq's chemical weapons, citing, in his words, "poor tactical employment, lessened element of surprise [and] increased Iranian preparedness." But, the assessment claimed, "because the political costs of continued CW use have been so small, we doubt that Iraq will abandon its use of chemical weapons in the foreseeable future." Although Hiltermann's overall account of the background to Halabja is indispensable, it is his theme of witting US complicity, backed by years of meticulous research, that strikes the most chilling note.
The Iranians were indeed learning how to deal with the Iraq chemicals thanks to protective gear and medical services, but there were other potential victims who would not have these advantages. While the Iraqis had been battling desperately to hold off the Iranians in the south, the Kurds had seized control of much of the countryside in the north. In particular, Jalal Talabani and the PUK had switched sides in 1984 and forged a warm relationship with the Iranians, leading to a highly successful joint raid in October 1986 on Kirkuk, in the heart of Iraq's vital northern oilfield.
This growing threat led Saddam to appoint his vicious cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid as a new viceroy in Kurdistan. There Majid embarked on the classic strategy of "draining the sea" of support for the insurgents by depopulating the countryside. He later pithily summarized his strategy in a meeting with leading officials. "I will kill them all [Kurds] with chemical weapons," he announced in his distinctive high-pitched voice. "Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them...and those who listen to them." Majid's lethal role recently earned him a death sentence from an Iraqi court, but at the time he had no need to worry about the international community and certainly not its most influential member, which by then had joined the war on the Iraqi side. By 1988 the US Navy was in combat against the Iranians in the Persian Gulf, while Secretary of State George Shultz publicly criticized "both Iran and Iraq" for using poison gas.
Planning their traditional spring offensive for 1988, the Iranians, exhausted by the costly battles in southern Iraq, opted to attack in the north, in the area around the border town of Halabja, and with a leading role for Kurdish guerrilla units. As the CIA noted, "By avoiding an assault on a heavily defended strategic target, the regime would be more likely to avoid high casualties in the period leading to the Parliamentary elections" scheduled for April 1988. This is a story in which no one has a monopoly on cynicism. Given the Kurds' experience of Saddam's brutality over the years, they should have been in little doubt as to what would happen if they captured an Iraqi town and handed it over to the Iranians. For whatever reason, the Kurdish commanders went ahead.
The opportunistic offensive was of little benefit to the Iranians, but it was an utter disaster for the Kurds. Kurdish resistance collapsed, largely thanks to what Hiltermann calls "the Halabja demonstration effect." Encouraged by the effective silence of the international community, Saddam and Majid embarked on Operation Anfal, a methodical campaign to exterminate a large percentage of the Kurdish rural population, using gas to send terrified villagers fleeing into the arms of Iraqi units. The men would then be killed, the women and children incarcerated in desert concentration camps. Although the Baghdad press carried regular reports on Anfal (omitting specifics about the extermination part), US officials apparently failed to notice anything untoward happening until the genocide was almost over. It took the resourceful British journalist Gwynne Roberts (unfortunately unmentioned in Hiltermann's book) to make a covert expedition to Kurdistan in October 1988 and bring back contaminated soil samples as conclusive proof that Saddam had been gassing Iraqi citizens.
Halabja was finally liberated from Saddam's control in 1991, when the Iraqis withdrew from much of Kurdistan under US military pressure. The Halabjans could return to their shattered city (it had been looted by the retreating Iranians, then largely demolished by the vengeful Iraqis in 1988). Unnoticed by the uncaring outside world, many of them exhibited horrifying symptoms of the lingering aftereffects of the poison--soaring rates of obscure cancers, miscarriages, birth defects. In 1998, following a perilous journey to the town with a genetic scientist he had brought from England, Roberts reported that not only were the survivors suffering the horrible effects of the gas but so were children born long afterward. Roberts also noted that, partly out of bitter resentment at their neglect by the established Kurdish politicians, the townspeople had fallen under the sway of fundamentalist Islamists.
Victims of one war fomented and supported by the United States, the suffering Halabjans, old and young, were soon unwittingly recruited to play their part in promoting another. George Bush started invoking the gassing of the Kurds in October 2001, and never stopped. Furthermore, in a sinister paradox, the growth of fundamentalism in the area made it possible for the jihadist group Ansar al-Islam to establish control, with some Iranian support, in villages along the nearby border. It was here that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi first established a presence in Iraq, furnishing Colin Powell with some arresting if highly misleading passages on Zarqawi's putative links to the Baghdad regime in Powell's infamous February 2003 UN presentation. He was not alone in purveying such misinformation. The New Yorker ran an award-winning 16,000-word piece by Jeffrey Goldberg that artfully wrapped a highly detailed and affecting description of the original Halabja attack and subsequent massacres around a wholly fictitious saga linking Saddam to Al Qaeda via Ansar al-Islam. The shocking truth of the first element was designed to lend verisimilitude to the myth, apparently concocted by Kurdish officials eager to hasten the downfall of Saddam, of the second.
The memorial inaugurated by Powell six months after the invasion was a priority project for Kurdish officials, built, so locals concluded, for the benefit of visiting dignitaries who came to view the exhibit and grieve accordingly. Halabjans, chafing at their neglect by their supposed representatives, were not impressed. On March 16, 2006, the eighteenth anniversary of the attack, they marched to the building and torched it. "Many delegations went to that monument," one of the locals was quoted as saying. "They were paying a visit to the dead people, but neglecting the living." The memorial remains a burned-out shell. Thanks to Islamist resurgence, the town is now dangerous for outsiders to visit. The city of poets has played its part in history and been left with the poison.
Copyright © 2007 The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070910/cockburn
The New Yorker:
Lone Sailors
The films of Michelangelo Antonioni and “Deep Water.”
by Anthony Lane August 27, 2007
A man and a woman go for a walk in Turin. They have just made love in the afternoon, or, at any rate, spent time in a hotel room, talking about how difficult it is to find time to make love, or to talk. Simply to get out feels like a liberation. It must have been raining, because the street is damp, and the air is a milky haze. We see the pair strolling hand in hand toward a lamppost. She passes to the right of the post, he to the left; their locked hands bump against it, uncouple, and pull apart. The spell is broken. Nonetheless, for a moment, in the light of early evening, life was sweet.
The scene comes from “The Girlfriends” (1955), a film by Michelangelo Antonioni, and it is worth revisiting, because anyone who knew little of the director—who perhaps learned of him only when he died, on July 30th, at ninety-four—could be forgiven for believing, on the strength of the obituaries, that here was a merchant of the miserable. The impression delivered even by those who admired him is not just that Antonioni films were bleak but that the bleakness was unleavened; worse still, that the man himself was above all an intellectual, who happened to choose film as the medium in which to vent the results of his cogitation. Neither of these judgments is accurate, and, taken together, they are guaranteed to send novices scurrying for cover. All I can say is: hold your nerve, go online, order a stash of Antonioni, lie back with a grappa, and stare.
You will still be missing plenty, because his work demands to be seen on the big screen, every bit as vehemently as “Ben-Hur,” and one hopes that the repertory houses will pay homage before long. Even with a wide-screen TV, and the ravishing, polka-dot-perfect print that is available on Criterion DVD, what will Antonioni’s most acclaimed film, “L’Avventura,” look like in your living room? Will television not crunch and clutter the final shot—a man half-slumped on a bench, a woman standing next to him, and the menace of Mt. Etna in the distance—and thus deprive you of its serene and spacious despair? Will the movie freak you out, as it did the audience at Cannes in 1960, when the première was met with catcalls?
Even now, I wonder what spooked the cats. They may have mistrusted the sequence set in a depopulated modern village, all cubes and arches, but nobody who had ever inspected a de Chirico painting would be taken aback. As for the plot, which sees a beautiful woman go missing from a volcanic island on a pleasure trip, only for her lover to seduce her best friend, there was a sheen of robotic amorality about these wealthy folk, but nothing that would have caused Bette Davis to raise more than an eyebrow. (Why do so many masterpieces, including Rossellini’s “Stromboli,” Bergman’s “Persona,” and Godard’s “Contempt” and “Pierrot le Fou,” focus, with a pagan fierceness, on women beside the ocean? Did Picasso lead them there?) We never learn the fate of the lost beauty, and it may be that by 1960 the idea of a climax that was not a closure felt like a profound offense—to viewers’ sense of narrative neatness, to their faith in love as a cure for loneliness, and to their conviction that experience can be packaged and put to rights. Again, however, this was scarcely new, as shown by Henry James, whose later tales are like prophesies of Antonioni; there is even one called “The Bench of Desolation,” written fifty years before “L’Avventura,” which brings together a man and a woman, by the sea, and discovers “the vanity, the profanity, the impossibility, of anything between them but silence.”
This is not to say that the Italian was a novelist manqué. He was, to a degree, ill served by the hothouse of philosophical debate in which his films of the nineteen-sixties were dissected and swooned over. I am at once jealous of moviegoers who saw them in New York or Paris at the time and grateful that I was spared the ordeal; I saw them later, on my own, unaware of what had been all the rage. To me they were, before anything else, exquisitely marshalled appeals to one’s sight, sound, taste, and rustling touch. I could do everything but smell them. I gave my heart to Lucia Bosé in “Story of a Love Affair” (1950), and never looked back; the fact that Antonioni was filming women in the age of the cinched waist, the pencil skirt, the fur collar, and the blindingly white blouse felt like the happiest of historical coincidences. No wonder “Blow-Up” (1966) came as such an embarrassment: one look at the clothes and the haircuts of swinging London, and you knew that Antonioni should not have forsaken his native ground.
If Hitchcock’s tombstone bore the word “suspense,” what would we engrave on Antonioni’s? “Alienation,” probably, yet that is a word forever applied to the films, not spoken within them. You may disagree with his vision of the sexes fighting to make connections that endure, as opposed to mere spasms of desire (avventura means not just an adventure but a fling), but there is no denying the sharp, concrete form in which that vision was set—actual concrete, if you remember Jeanne Moreau, in the role of an unloved wife, walking through city streets in “La Notte” (1961), sun-hot buildings frowning down upon her. And so the paradoxes accrue: sex solves nothing for Antonioni, yet somehow his films, blending tactility with froideur, remain a tease and a turn-on, and, for someone insistent on human solitude, he was awfully skilled at handling group situations—look at the beach party in “The Girlfriends,” or the search party climbing rocks in “L’Avventura.” He was an urbanist, yet few can match his eye for landscape or his nose for weather. Just ask Woody Allen, who borrowed his cameraman, Carlo Di Palma, and asked him to reproduce, for “Radio Days,” the same enveloping fog that he had conjured for Antonioni in “Identification of a Woman” (1982). In short, this great director, whose characters are said to be glazed with spiritual death, forged something intensely alive, as if celluloid were as strokable as skin. Think of Maria Schneider in “The Passenger” (1975), kneeling in the back seat of a speeding convertible, turning around, and revelling in the dappled, tree-bowered road that unspools behind her—what finer way to flee your past? Think even of Antonioni at his harshest, in “Red Desert” (1964), where a man attempts, yet again, to find common cause with a woman. “You wonder what to look at. I wonder how to live,” he says. He pauses, then adds, “Same thing.”
There is much in “Deep Water” that would have lured Antonioni: a secluded soul, a hostile sea, and a horror of what lies on land. This new documentary, directed by Louise Osmond and Jerry Rothwell, tells the story of Donald Crowhurst. He was an Englishman, born in India in 1932, and a pink-cheeked enthusiast, yet the images of him in “Deep Water” show something distant and dissatisfied in his gaze (not uncommon for those raised in the last gasp of imperial rule), and he came from a generation that kept its more potent feelings stowed safely away belowdecks. A weekend sailor, who ran an electrical company, he came to prominence in 1968, as one of a handful of men vying to complete the first single-handed non-stop circumnavigation of the world. Some contestants, like the eventual winner, Robin Knox-Johnston, set off well before the departure deadline of October 31st; Crowhurst left with just hours to spare. His wife and children came on board to say goodbye, but it was he who seemed like the child—a clever boy all at sea.
After less than a month, it became clear that Crowhurst’s trimaran would not last the course. She was leaking, and he was bailing by hand. His pride would not let him quit, but he could scarcely press ahead: was there another solution? I will reveal no more, except to say that his mind was blown far more violently off course than his vessel. We have some idea of the maelstrom, because Crowhurst recorded his actions on cine-film, his words on audiotape, and his fathomless fears in a log. In its calm and expert way, “Deep Water” confirms all the mythical terrors that lurk in our dreams of the sea, and the best person to watch it with would be Melville. He would cry out for Crowhurst, and for the Frenchman Bernard Moitessier—a fellow-adventurer in the race, and worthy of a film unto himself. Like Crowhurst, he was driven to extremes, and his onboard footage of his daily tasks shows a creature of pure sinew and purpose, more like an anatomist’s drawing of a man than like the real thing.
The first time I saw “Deep Water,” the trace of mystery in the Crowhurst affair gave the movie a kick of excitement. On second viewing, with a queasy foreknowledge of what was to come, I found it intolerably sad. What had seemed a hearty feat of the gentleman amateur (he set sail in sweater and tie) was now drained of comic bathos, leaving Crowhurst stranded not as the victim of mishap but as someone swept toward a predictable destiny. For further proof, seek out the book “The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst,” by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, with its horrifying peek into Crowhurst’s school reports, written in India decades before his journey. The eight-year-old boy was said to be good or fair at most subjects, but beside each report he wrote his own assessment: “Bad,” “Very Bad,” “Disgraceful,” “Failed.”
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2007/08/27/070827crci_cinema_lane
ZNet | Iraq
Pitching the Imperial Republic
Bonaparte and Bush on Deck
by Juan Cole; TomDispatch; August 23, 2007
French Egypt and American Iraq can be considered bookends on the history of modern imperialism in the Middle East. The Bush administration's already failed version of the conquest of Iraq is, of course, on everyone's mind; while the French conquest of Egypt, now more than two centuries past, is all too little remembered, despite having been led by Napoleon Bonaparte, whose career has otherwise hardly languished in obscurity. There are many eerily familiar resonances between the two misadventures, not least among them that both began with supreme arrogance and ended as fiascoes. Above all, the leaders of both occupations employed the same basic political vocabulary and rhetorical flimflammery, invoking the spirit of liberty, security, and democracy while largely ignoring the substance of these concepts.
The French general and the American president do not much resemble one another -- except perhaps in the way the prospect of conquest in the Middle East appears to have put fire in their veins and in their unappealing tendency to believe their own propaganda (or at least to keep repeating it long after it became completely implausible). Both leaders invaded and occupied a major Arabic-speaking Muslim country; both harbored dreams of a "Greater Middle East"; both were surprised to find themselves enmeshed in long, bitter, debilitating guerrilla wars. Neither genuinely cared about grassroots democracy, but both found its symbols easy to invoke for gullible domestic publics. Substantial numbers of their new subjects quickly saw, however, that they faced occupations, not liberations.
My own work on Bonaparte's lost year in Egypt began in the mid-1990s, and I had completed about half of Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East before September 11, 2001. I had no way of knowing then that a book on such a distant, scholarly subject would prove an allegory for Bush's Iraq War. Nor did I guess that the United States would give old-style colonialism in the Middle East one last try, despite clear signs that the formerly colonized would no longer put up with such acts and had, in the years since World War II, gained the means to resist them.
The Republic Militant Goes to War
In June of 1798, as his enormous flotilla -- 36,000 soldiers, thousands of sailors, and hundreds of scientists on 12 ships of the line -- swept inexorably toward the Egyptian coast, the young General Napoleon Bonaparte issued a grandiose communiqué to the bewildered and seasick troops he was about to march into the desert without canteens or reasonable supplies of water. He declared, "Soldiers! You are about to undertake a conquest, the effects of which on civilization and commerce are incalculable."
The prediction was as tragically inaccurate in its own way as the pronouncement George W. Bush issued some two centuries later, on May 1, 2003, also from the deck of a great ship of the line, the aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln. "Today," he said, "we have the greater power to free a nation by breaking a dangerous and aggressive regime. With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians."
Both men were convinced that their invasions were announcing new epochs in human history. Of the military vassals of the Ottoman Empire who then ruled Egypt, Bonaparte predicted: "The Mameluke Beys who favor exclusively English commerce, whose extortions oppress our merchants, and who tyrannize over the unfortunate inhabitants of the Nile, a few days after our arrival will no longer exist."
Bonaparte's laundry list of grievances about them consisted of three charges. First, the beys were, in essence, enablers of France's primary enemy at that time, the British monarchy which sought to strangle the young French republic in its cradle. Second, the rulers of Egypt were damaging France's own commerce by extorting taxes and bribes from its merchants in Cairo and Alexandria. Third, the Mamluks ruled tyrannically, having never been elected, and oppressed their subjects whom Bonaparte intended to liberate.
This holy trinity of justifications for imperialism -- that the targeted state is collaborating with an enemy of the republic, is endangering the positive interests of the nation, and lacks legitimacy because its rule is despotic -- would all be trotted out over the subsequent two centuries by a succession of European and American leaders whenever they wanted to go on the attack. One implication of these familiar rhetorical turns of phrase has all along been that democracies have a license to invade any country they please, assuming it has the misfortune to have an authoritarian regime.
George W. Bush, of course, hit the same highlights in his "mission accomplished" speech, while announcing on the Abraham Lincoln that "major combat operations" in Iraq "had ended." "The liberation of Iraq," he proclaimed, "is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We've removed an ally of al Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding." He put Saddam Hussein's secular, Arab nationalist Baath regime and the radical Muslim terrorists of al-Qaeda under the sign of September 11th, insinuating that Iraq was allied with the primary enemy of the United States and so posed an urgent menace to its security. (In fact, captured Baath Party documents show that Saddam's fretting security forces, on hearing that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had entered Iraq, put out an all points bulletin on him, imagining -- not entirely correctly -- that he had al-Qaeda links.) Likewise, Bush promised that Iraq's alleged "weapons of mass destruction" (which existed only in his own fevered imagination) would be tracked down, again implying that Iraq posed a threat to the interests and security of the U.S., just as Bonaparte had claimed that the Mamluks menaced France.
According to the president, Saddam's overthrown government had lacked legitimacy, while the new Iraqi government, to be established by a foreign power, would truly represent the conquered population. "We're helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq," Bush pledged, "as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people." Bonaparte, too, established governing councils at the provincial and national level, staffing them primarily with Sunni clergymen, declaring them more representative of the Egyptian people than the beys and emirs of the slave soldiery who had formerly ruled that province of the Ottoman Empire.
Liberty as Tyranny
For a democracy to conduct a brutal military occupation against another country in the name of liberty seems, on the face of it, too contradictory to elicit more than hoots of derision at the hypocrisy of it all. Yet, the militant republic, ready to launch aggressive war in the name of "democracy," is everywhere in modern history, despite the myth that democracies do not typically wage wars of aggression. Ironically, some absolutist regimes, like those of modern Iran, were remarkably peaceable, if left alone by their neighbors. In contrast, republican France invaded Belgium, Holland, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Egypt in its first decade (though it went on the offensive in part in response to Austrian and Prussian moves to invade France). The United States attacked Mexico, the Seminoles and other Native polities, Hawaii, the Spanish Empire, the Philippines, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic in just the seven-plus decades from 1845 to the eve of the U.S. entry into World War I.
Freedom and authoritarianism are nowadays taken to be stark antonyms, the provinces of heroes and monsters. Those closer to the birth of modern republics were comforted by no such moral clarity. In Danton's Death, the young Romantic playwright Georg Büchner depicted the radical French revolutionary and proponent of executing enemies of the Republic, Maximilien Robespierre, whipping up a Parisian crowd with the phrase, "The revolutionary regime is the despotism of liberty against tyranny." And nowhere has liberty proved more oppressive than when deployed against a dictatorship abroad; for, as Büchner also had that famed "incorruptible" devotee of state terror observe, "In a Republic only republicans are citizens; Royalists and foreigners are enemies."
That sunlit May afternoon on the USS Abraham Lincoln, President Bush seconded Büchner's Robespierre. "Because of you," he exhorted the listening sailors of an aircraft carrier whose planes had just dropped 1.6 million pounds of ordnance on Iraq, "our nation is more secure. Because of you, the tyrant has fallen, and Iraq is free."
Security for the republic had already proved ample justification to launch a war the previous March, even though Iraq was a poor, weak, ramshackle Third World country, debilitated by a decade of sanctions imposed by the United Nations and the United States, without so much as potable drinking water or an air force. Similarly, the Mamluks of Egypt -- despite the sky-high taxes and bribes they demanded of some French merchants -- hardly constituted a threat to French security.
The overthrow of a tyrannical regime and the liberation of an oppressed people were constant refrains in the shipboard addresses of both the general and the president, who felt that the liberated owed them a debt of gratitude. Bonaparte lamented that the beys "tyrannize over the unfortunate inhabitants of the Nile"; or, as one of his officers, Captain Horace Say, opined, "The people of Egypt were most wretched. How will they not cherish the liberty we are bringing them?" Similarly, Bush insisted, "Men and women in every culture need liberty like they need food and water and air. Everywhere that freedom arrives, humanity rejoices; and everywhere that freedom stirs, let tyrants fear."
Not surprisingly, expectations that the newly conquered would exhibit gratitude to their foreign occupiers cropped up repeatedly in the dispatches and letters of men on the spot who advocated a colonial forward policy. President Bush put this dramatically in 2007, long after matters had not proceeded as expected: "We liberated that country from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude. That's the problem here in America: They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that's significant enough in Iraq."
Liberty in this two-century old rhetorical tradition, moreover, was more than just a matter of rights and the rule of law. Proponents of various forms of liberal imperialism saw tyranny as a source of poverty, since arbitrary rulers could just usurp property at will and so make economic activity risky, as well as opening the public to crushing and arbitrary taxes that held back commerce. The French quartermaster Francois Bernoyer wrote of the Egyptian peasantry: "Their dwellings are adobe huts, which prosperity, the daughter of liberty, will now allow them to abandon." Bush took up the same theme on the Abraham Lincoln: "Where freedom takes hold, hatred gives way to hope. When freedom takes hold, men and women turn to the peaceful pursuit of a better life."
"Heads Must Roll"
In both eighteenth century Egypt and twenty-first century Iraq, the dreary reality on the ground stood as a reproach to, if not a wicked satire upon, these high-minded pronouncements. The French landed at the port of Alexandria on July 1, 1798. Two and a half weeks later, as the French army advanced along the Nile toward Cairo, a unit of Gen. Jean Reynier's division met opposition from 1,800 villagers, many armed with muskets. Sgt. Charles Francois recalled a typical scene. After scaling the village walls and "firing into those crowds," killing "about 900 men," the French confiscated the villagers' livestock -- "camels, donkeys, horses, eggs, cows, sheep" -- then "finished burning the rest of the houses, or rather the huts, so as to provide a terrible object lesson to these half-savage and barbarous people."
On July 24, Bonaparte's Army of the Orient entered Cairo and he began reorganizing his new subjects. He grandiosely established an Egyptian Institute for the advancement of science and gave thought to reforming police, courts, and law. But terror lurked behind everything he did. He wrote Gen. Jacques Menou, who commanded the garrison at the Mediterranean port of Rosetta, saying, "The Turks [Egyptians] can only be led by the greatest severity. Every day I cut off five or six heads in the streets of Cairo.... [T]o obey, for them, is to fear." (Mounting severed heads on poles for viewing by terrified passers-by was another method the French used in Egypt...)
That August, the Delta city of Mansura rose up against a small French garrison of about 120 men, chasing them into the countryside, tracking the blue coats down, and methodically killing all but two of them. In early September, the Delta village of Sonbat, inhabited in part by Bedouin of the western Dirn tribe, also rose up against the Europeans. Bonaparte instructed one of his generals, "Burn that village! Make a terrifying example of it." After the French army had indeed crushed the rebellious peasants and chased away the Bedouin, Gen. Jean-Antoine Verdier reported back to Bonaparte with regard to Sonbat, "You ordered me to destroy this lair. Very well, it no longer exists."
The most dangerous uprisings confronting the French were, however, in Cairo. In October, much of the city mobilized to attack the more than 20,000 French troops occupying the capital. The revolt was especially fierce in the al-Husayn district, where the ancient al-Azhar madrassa (or seminary) trained 14,000 students, where the city's most sacred mosque stood, and where wealth was concentrated in the merchants and guilds of the Khan al-Khalili bazaar. At the same time, the peasants and Bedouin of the countryside around Cairo rose in rebellion, attacking the small garrisons that had been deployed to pacify them.
Bonaparte put down this Egyptian "revolution" with the utmost brutality, subjecting urban crowds to artillery barrages. He may have had as many rebels executed in the aftermath as were killed in the fighting. In the countryside, his officers' launched concerted campaigns to decimate insurgent villages. At one point, the French are said to have brought 900 heads of slain insurgents to Cairo in bags and ostentatiously dumped them out before a crowd in one of that city's major squares to instill Cairenes with terror. (Two centuries later, the American public would come to associate decapitations by Muslim terrorists in Iraq with the ultimate in barbarism, but even then hundreds such beheadings were not carried out at once.)
The American deployment of terror against the Iraqi population has, of course, dwarfed anything the French accomplished in Egypt by orders of magnitude. After four mercenaries, one a South African, were killed in Falluja in March of 2004 and their bodies desecrated, President Bush is alleged to have said "heads must roll" in retribution.
An initial attack on the city faltered when much of the Iraqi government threatened to resign and it was clear major civilian casualties would result. The crushing of the city was, however, simply put off until after the American presidential election in November. When the assault, involving air power and artillery, came, it was devastating, damaging two-thirds of the city's buildings and turning much of its population into refugees. (As a result, thousands of Fallujans still live in the desert in tent villages with no access to clean water.)
Bush must have been satisfied. Heads had rolled. More often, faced with opposition, the U.S. Air Force simply bombed already-occupied cities, a technology Bonaparte (mercifully) lacked. The strategy of ruling by terror and swift, draconian punishment for acts of resistance was, however, the same in both cases.
The British sank much of the French fleet on August 1, 1798, marooning Bonaparte and his troops in their newly conquered land. In the spring of 1799, the French army tried -- and failed -- to break out through Syria; after which Bonaparte himself chose the better part of valor. He slipped out of Egypt late that summer, returning to France. There, he would swiftly stage a coup and come to power as First Consul, giving him the opportunity to hone his practice of bringing freedom to other countries -- this time in Europe. By 1801, joint British-Ottoman forces had defeated the French in Egypt, who were transported back to their country on British vessels. This first Western invasion of the Middle East in modern times had ended in serial disasters that Bonaparte would misrepresent to the French public as a series of glorious triumphs.
Ending the Era of Liberal Imperialism
Between 1801 and 2003 stretched endless decades in which colonialism proved a plausible strategy for European powers in the Middle East, including the French enterprise in Algeria (1830-1962) and the British veiled protectorate over Egypt (1882-1922). In these years, European militaries and their weaponry were so advanced, and the means of resistance to which Arab peasants had access so limited, that colonial governments could be imposed.
That imperial moment passed with celerity after World War II, in part because the masses of the Third World joined political parties, learned to read, and -- with how-to-do-it examples all around them -- began to mount political resistance to foreign occupations of every sort. While the twenty-first century American arsenal has many fancy, exceedingly destructive toys in it, nothing has changed with regard to the ability of colonized peoples to network socially and, sooner or later, push any foreign occupying force out.
Bonaparte and Bush failed because both launched their operations at moments when Western military and technological superiority was not assured. While Bonaparte's army had better artillery and muskets, the Egyptians had a superb cavalry and their old muskets were serviceable enough for purposes of sniping at the enemy. They also had an ally with advanced weaponry and the desire to use it -- the British Navy.
In 2007, the high-tech U.S. military -- as had been true in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, as was true for the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s -- is still vulnerable to guerrilla tactics and effective low-tech weapons of resistance such as roadside bombs. Even more effective has been the guerrillas' social warfare, their success in making Iraq ungovernable through the promotion of clan and sectarian feuds, through targeted bombings and other attacks, and through sabotage of the Iraqi infrastructure.
From the time of Bonaparte to that of Bush, the use of the rhetoric of liberty versus tyranny, of uplift versus decadence, appears to have been a constant among imperialists from republics -- and has remained domestically effective in rallying support for colonial wars. The despotism (but also the weakness) of the Mamluks and of Saddam Hussein proved sirens practically calling out for Western interventions. According to the rhetoric of liberal imperialism, tyrannical regimes are always at least potentially threats to the Republic, and so can always be fruitfully overthrown in favor of rule by a Western military. After all, that military is invariably imagined as closer to liberty since it serves an elected government. (Intervention is even easier to justify if the despots can be portrayed, however implausibly, as allied with an enemy of the republic.)
For both Bush and Bonaparte, the genteel diction of liberation, rights, and prosperity served to obscure or justify a major invasion and occupation of a Middle Eastern land, involving the unleashing of slaughter and terror against its people. Military action would leave towns destroyed, families displaced, and countless dead. Given the ongoing carnage in Iraq, President Bush's boast that, with "new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians," now seems not just hollow but macabre. The equation of a foreign military occupation with liberty and prosperity is, in the cold light of day, no less bizarre than the promise of war with virtually no civilian casualties.
It is no accident that many of the rhetorical strategies employed by George W. Bush originated with Napoleon Bonaparte, a notorious spinmeister and confidence man. At least Bonaparte looked to the future, seeing clearly the coming breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the likelihood that European Powers would be able to colonize its provinces. Bonaparte's failure in Egypt did not forestall decades of French colonial success in Algeria and Indochina, even if that era of imperial triumph could not, in the end, be sustained in the face of the political and social awakening of the colonized. Bush's neocolonialism, on the other hand, swam against the tide of history, and its failure is all the more criminal for having been so predictable.
Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His most recent book Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) has just been published. He has appeared widely on television, radio and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles. His weblog on the contemporary Middle East is Informed Comment.
[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of Mission Unaccomplished (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.]
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=13601
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