Nepal is No Shangri-La

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The powerful earthquake that killed thousands of people on April 25 in Nepal drew the world’s attention to the country. Large parts of the capital, Kathmandu, were in ruins.

A Himalayan country north of India, Nepal has often been seen as an idyllic place. It was perhaps the setting for “Shangri-La,” the mystical, harmonious valley described in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by British author James Hilton.

Hilton pictured Shangri-La as an earthly paradise. The book enjoyed great popularity, and when the novel was turned into a Hollywood movie by Frank Capra, it was an instant success.

In the 1960s, Kathmandu was on the “hippie trail.” The city was seen as a panacea for the ills of Western culture. Remember the 1975 song “Katmandu” recorded by American rock artist Bob Seger?

The reality is very different. Kathmandu is overcrowded -- the city now has more than 2.5 million residents, or nearly 10 per cent of the country’s population. And Nepal’s 30 million people are mainly poor.

It is an incredibly fractured country: 125 caste and ethnic groups, and 123 languages, were reported in the 2011 national census. The two largest demographic groups are Nepali-speaking hill Chhetri (15.8 to 18 per cent) and Nepali-speaking hill Brahmin (12.7 per cent).

Some 81 per cent of Nepalese are Hindus, with Buddhists, at nine percent, and Muslims at about five percent, making up most of the remainder.

An armed revolution was launched in Nepal in 1996 by Maoist rebels who studied and admired Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong’s works and wanted to implement them.

Their goal was to abolish the country’s 240-year-old Hindu monarchy. The Maoists quickly developed a following by vowing to provide economic and political equality to the country’s marginalized communities.

Their People’s Liberation Army engaged in armed struggle for a decade, killing about 13,000 people, before the rebels laid down their weapons and decided to engage in the political process.

A mass movement demanding greater democracy led to the election of a Constituent Assembly in 2008. It removed the country’s last monarch, King Gyanendra, and declared Nepal a federal democratic republic. It then spent four years trying to write a constitution, but without success.

Between 2008 and 2011 there were four different coalition governments, led twice by the United Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), which received a plurality of votes in the 2008 election, and twice by the Communist Party of Nepal-United Marxist-Leninist (CPN-UML).

In November 2013 a new Constituent Assembly was elected, in which the Nepali Congress Party won the largest share of seats and formed a coalition government with the second place CPN-UML. Sushil Koirala of the Nepali Congress Party became prime minister in February 2014.

Even so, the threat of crippling strikes by the Maoists still prevents the country from drafting a constitution. Little wonder that Nepalese have been emigrating to neighboring countries, especially India, in large numbers.

The Armenian Genocide a Century Later

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

April 24 marked the centenary of the start of the genocide of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. Historians estimate that as many as 1.5 million Armenians were killed in state-organized violence between 1915 and 1922, some in massacres, others in forced marches to the Syrian desert that left them starved to death.

That this constituted genocide is the official view of Canada and about 20 other countries – though not of Britain or the United States.

On April 12, Pope Francis, at a special mass in the Armenian Catholic rite in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome to mark the anniversary, described the mass killings as the “first genocide of the 20th century.”

The Pope was joined by Kerekin II, the Supreme Patriarch of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Armenian President Serzh Sargasyan, and other dignitaries. “Bishops and priests, religious women and men, the elderly and even defenceless children and the infirm were murdered,” the Pope said. 

This touched off a diplomatic furor with Turkey. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned the Pope’s words and warned him to “not repeat this mistake.” Ankara recalled its ambassador to the Vatican. 

“We will not allow historical incidents to be taken out of their genuine context and be used as a tool to campaign against our country,” Erdogan declared. “The Armenian diaspora is trying to instill hatred against Turkey.”

Last year, Erdogan offered “condolences” to the families of those who died and called the events “inhumane.” But Turkey rejects the use of the term genocide to describe the killings, arguing it was part of a larger war in which ethnic Turks, Kurds, and other Muslims also died. 

In winter 1914 and spring 1915, there was fierce fighting in eastern Anatolia between Turks and Armenians; sometimes the Armenians had Russian help. So in May 1915, a law was passed calling for the “relocation” of the entire Armenian population of eastern Anatolia.

Was the subsequent massacre of the Armenians a genocide? It depends on the definition of the word, which was coined by a Polish Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, during the Second World War. 

Ethnic cleansing, massacres, and many other war crimes, while reprehensible, are not the same as genocide, even if they involve large numbers of deaths. What matters is the “intent” to destroy a group as such.

When he died, in 1959 Lemkin was nearly finished writing an autobiography. He described as a formative experience the 1921 trial in Berlin of Soghomon Tehlirian, an Armenian accused of murdering a former Ottoman minister of the interior, Mehmet Taalat Pasha, one of the architects of the killings. 

Though Lemkin himself later escaped death by fleeing Poland during the Nazi invasion and coming to the United States, the bulk of his family did not. Close to 50 of his relatives perished in the Holocaust.

Lemkin’s life’s work was to make the destruction of a people illegal. His book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in 1944, first coined the term “genocide,” identifying it as “actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” 

Thanks to his groundbreaking work, in 1948 the United Nations passed the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which defined genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such.”

When Lemkin was asked in February 1949, just after the Convention was ratified, why he became interested in genocide, he answered, “Because it happened so many times. It happened to the Armenians.”

Certainly the evidence is incontrovertible: “Reports from widely scattered districts indicate systematic attempts to uproot peaceful Armenian populations,” read a telegram from the American embassy in Constantinople to the State Department in Washington in 1915, with “wholesale expulsions and deportations from one end of the Empire to the other.”

The American ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, asked the United States government to intervene, but the U.S. was not a participant in the First World War at the time. In his 1918 book Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, he wrote that when the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, “they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact.”

Turkey may today deny this was the case, but most historians agree that the Armenian massacres do qualify as genocide.

Russians Playing Dangerous Game in Middle East

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 

I guess President Vladimir Putin of Russia thinks Iran has rejoined the family of nations. How else can we explain his sale of sophisticated weapons to Tehran?

Russia announced on April 13 the lifting of its ban on the sale to Iran of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles. Iran had ordered them in 2007, but Russia halted the sale under international pressure. 

The 2007 deal on the delivery of five S-300 PMU-1 systems was put on hold by then-President Dmitry Medvedev in 2010, following a UN Security Council embargo on arms deliveries to Tehran, imposed over fears that Iran was developing nuclear weapons.

Putin now defends his decision to sell the system. Moscow has stated that a preliminary agreement between the P5+1 world powers and Tehran over Iran’s nuclear program reached earlier this April makes the ban no longer relevant.

“We froze the fulfillment of this contract unilaterally and now, after there’s been positive progress on the Iranian nuclear path, we don’t see any reason to retain the ban,” Putin stated on April 16. He claimed that the Iranians “are demonstrating great flexibility and clear desire to reach compromises on the Iranian nuclear program.”

The missiles are capable of simultaneously tracking and intercepting dozens of airborne targets at ranges of up to 150 kilometres. They may be delivered to Iran as early as this year.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, on April 14 informed Putin of his “grave concern” regarding the sale. Putin reportedly replied that the S-300 served defensive purposes only and didn’t constitute a threat to Israel’s security.

However, Amos Gilad, head of the Israeli Defense Ministry’s political security division, maintains that it is not a defensive weapon, but rather one “which encourages aggression and the violent methods of the Iranian government.”

Israel fears Iran could supply the missile defense systems to Syria or Hezbollah, diluting Israel’s air supremacy over Syria and Lebanon.

 Zvi Magen, a former Israeli ambassador to both Kyiv and Moscow, has said that Israel has benefited considerably from the ties with Russia in recent years. Some Israeli officials fear that this may now be changing as the Kremlin rebuilds its standing in the Middle East.

Israel has now announced it will not send a representative to Russia for the ceremonies marking 70 years since its victory over Germany, set to take place in Moscow’s Red Square next month. 

Are relations between Moscow and Tehran becoming warmer? Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu traveled to Tehran in January to discuss increasing defense cooperation and arms trade with the Islamic republic. 

Moscow has also negotiated an oil-for-goods exchange with Iran that would involve acquiring some 500,000 barrels of Iranian oil a day in exchange for Russian equipment and goods. 

Recent sanctions against Russia may have driven the two countries closer together and the the S-300 deal may be an effective way for Moscow to retaliate against the West.

America's Two Greatest Presidents Died in Month of April

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

This month marks the 150th and 70th anniversaries, respectively, of the deaths of America’s two greatest presidents.

Abraham Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator,” died from an assassin’s bullet on April 15, 1865, just six days after the Civil War had drawn to a close with the defeat of the Confederacy. He was just 56 years old.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his fourth term as president, died at age 63 of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945, as the Second World War was drawing to a close. Nazi Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, Japan on Aug. 15.

Lincoln, the country’s 16th president came from humble beginning, born in a log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky in 1809.

The family moved to Illinois in 1830, and four years later Lincoln began his political career, becoming a lawyer and being elected to the Illinois state legislature as a member of the Whig Party.

In 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed individual states and territories to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery. It provoked violent opposition and gave rise to the new Republican Party, which Lincoln joined in 1856.

Four years later, Lincoln became the presidential nominee of the party and won the election in a four-way race. His views regarding the immorality of slavery led to secessionism in the south. On April 12, 1861, America’s most deadly war began.

Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, which stated that all individuals held as slaves in the rebellious states “henceforward shall be free.” He won re-election in 1864 and the war ended five months later.

Lincoln was shot on April 14, 1865, by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., and died the next day.

Two of Lincoln’s most famous speeches, the Gettysburg Address of Nov. 19, 1863 and the Second Inaugural Address of March 4, 1865, are without doubt the greatest in American history.

FDR, as everyone called him, was the country’s longest serving chief executive, having been first elected in 1932. He had presided over the Great Depression and most of the war, leaving an indelible stamp on American politics for several decades.

Born in 1882, the 32nd president came from a prominent New York family, and attended Harvard University. He entered politics in 1910 and was elected to the New York State Senate as a Democrat. He was nominated for vice- president by the Democratic Party in 1920 on a ticket headed by James M. Cox of Ohio, but the party lost the election.

He was elected governor of New York State in 1928, and four years later became president of the United States.

 The 1929 stock market crash had led to the Great Depression. Factory closings, farm foreclosures, and bank failures increased, while unemployment soared.

Roosevelt undertook immediate actions to initiate his New Deal and created numerous federal agencies, including the Works Projects Administration (WPA), to aid the unemployed. FDR also brought in Social Security to help the aged.

His programs involved the expansion of the role of the federal government in the economy. Roosevelt’s policies united labor unions, big city machines, white ethnics, African Americans, and rural white Southerners and made the Democratic Party for decades the dominant force in American politics.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941, brought the nation into the war. Roosevelt exercised his powers as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, and was responsible for the policy of “unconditional surrender,” leading to the complete defeat of the Axis powers.

Both men were deeply mourned. No other presidents have shaped the country’s history, during times of crisis, more than they did.

Iran, Pakistan Share Volatile Border

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

We think of the Sunni-Shia “border” as the one between Iran and its Arab neighbours to its west. But there’s another: the one between Iran and Pakistan, the mainly Sunni state to its east.

Two episodes in the volatile area in early April left eight Iranian border guards and three militants dead.
The border guards were killed in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchistan Province. A Sunni extremist group, Jaish ul-Adl (Army of Justice), claimed responsibility for the attack. They have been carrying out a program of harassment, including derailing trains and conducting assassinations.

Sistan-Baluchestan Province is one of the 31 provinces of Iran, in the southeast of the country, bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan. A significant segment of the province’s population, the Baluch, are Sunni Muslims, who have historically suffered from discrimination.

Iran has accused Sunni militants based in Pakistan of previous attacks by militant groups. In 2013, three members of the country’s Revolutionary Guards were killed by a bomb blast. Jaish ul-Adl said it also carried out that attack.

Pakistan in turn has protested Iranian incursions into Pakistani territory at least twice last year, and has complained about mortar attacks by Iranian forces.

Unlike Iran, Pakistan is already a nuclear-armed state, and is being increasingly drawn into the Middle East’s conflicts. Saudi Arabia wants Sunni-majority Pakistan to join its coalition fighting the Shia Houthis in Yemen and has requested ships, aircraft and troops.

Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, visited Islamabad to urge Pakistan to reject the request. Pakistan’s own Shia Muslim minority, who comprise upwards of one-quarter of the country’s 200 million people, fears any intervention in Yemen would fuel more anti-Shia violence at home.

Since 2008, Pakistan’s Shia community has been the target of an unprecedented escalation in sectarian violence as Sunni militants have killed thousands of Shia across the country.

The al-Qaeda and Taliban-linked Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (Army of Jhangvi), one of many groups organized in reaction to the Shia theocracy in Iran, has taken responsibility for most of the attacks, especially against the mostly Shia Hazara community in Pakistan’s Balochistan Province. The capital, Quetta, has been the site of many atrocities.

Iran and Pakistan definitely remain wary of each other.

Islamist Extremists Wreak Havoc in Africa

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

On April 2, gunmen from the Somali group al-Shabaab attacked Garrisa University College in Garissa, Kenya, killing 148 people. They warned that new attacks would be coming, and that Kenyan cities “will run red with blood.”

The alleged mastermind of the attack is a Kenyan national, Mohamed Mohamud aka Dulyadeyn, a close friend of al-Shabaab’s leader, Ahmed Omar Abu Ubeyd. Another gunman was Abdirahim Mohammed Abdullahi, a law graduate and the son of a government chief.

The most notorious Islamist terrorist groups in Africa are found in two very different countries, at opposite ends of the continent.

In Somalia, al-Shabaab is a product of the very collapse of the state, while in Nigeria, Boko Haram wishes to impose an extreme version of Islam in the Muslim north of a country torn by corruption, and ethnic and religious conflict.

Somalia is that rarity in Africa, an ethnically and religiously homogenous country; virtually all Somalis are Sunnis and speak Somali. Yet Somalia itself has been without an effective government since 1991, when the last dictator, Mohamed Siad Barre, fled the country.

The reason: fierce rivalry among the major clans into which Somalis are divided. Into that political vacuum, a militant Islamist group known as al-Shabaab emerged after 2006, following an incursion by Ethiopian troops. Kenyan forces also sent its forces into Somalia.

In return, al-Shabaab has carried out attacks against both countries. They wreaked havoc on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi in September 2013, which resulted in at least 67 deaths; claimed responsibility for two attacks on the Kenyan coast which killed more than 60 in June 2014; and now with the bloody massacre in Garissa.

The militants tried to justify the latest attack by saying that this part of Kenya was “a Muslim land” – it is populated mostly by ethnic Somalis and was in the past claimed by Somali governments.

Al-Shabaab has been recruiting among poor young Muslims in north-eastern Kenya, warning them that the school was part of Kenya’s “plan to spread their Christianity and infidelity.”

Boko Haram has been a reaction to the extreme corruption and religious volatility found in Africa’s most populous country. While fabulously wealthy, Nigeria’s elite shares very little with the masses, especially those in the Muslim north-east, traditionally the poorest and least influential part of the country.

Since the country’s independence in 1960, about $600 billion in oil revenue has flowed into the government’s coffers, yet an estimated $400 billion has been diverted, misspent or simply stolen.

During President Goodluck Jonathan’s tenure, 2010-2015, the corruption scandals of government ministers were quietly ignored. Parliamentary reports detailing these scandals were hushed up. High civil servants who exposed them were fired. In 2013, central bank governor Lamido Sanusi identified $20 billion in “leakages” from government oil accounts.

Boko Haram regards the Nigerian state as being run by non-believers, even when the country has had a Muslim president.

Since its formation in 2002, the extremist group has killed some 16,000 people and taken over swathes of the north-eastern states of Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe. It has lately even extended its military campaign by targeting neighbouring countries Cameroon and Chad.

In August 2014, Abubakar Muhammad Shekau, its leader, declared a caliphate in areas under Boko Haram’s control, and praised Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-declared caliph of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

President Jonathan, a southern Christian, seemed impassive in the face of this growing threat -- perhaps the reason he lost the recent presidential election to a former dictator, Muhammadu Buhari, the military ruler of Nigeria between 1983 and 1985.

Buhari waged a “war against indiscipline” that prescribed humiliating punishment for tardy civil servants. He is seen as selfless, disciplined and incorruptible. Perhaps Nigerians feel that only someone like Buhari, himself a Muslim from the north, can “fight fire with fire.”

Tajikistan - Poor and Repressive Country

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Central Asia is usually defined as consisting of five republics of the former Soviet Union: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.  It is a huge part of the world: 4,003,451 square kilometres, with a total population of about 66 million.

All of these countries have struggled since acquiring independence in 1991 and, though some are more repressive than others, in none can we say that democracy has taken root.

With an area of 143,100 square kilometres, Tajikistan is the smallest of the five, and its 8.2 million people are also the poorest. It borders Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. Mountains cover more than 90 per cent of the country. 

Prior to their absorption into the Russian Empire in the 19^th century, the Tajiks were governed by two Uzbeki entities, the Emirate of Bukhara and Khanate of Kokand. 

Along with other Muslim peoples in the region, the Tajiks fought against Russian, and later Soviet, rule, as part of the Basmachi movement, but were eventually subdued. In 1929 the Soviets created a separate Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic. There was some economic and social progress during this time, but the republic remained poor.

Independence in 1991 brought about civil war between militias representing different clans and regions of the country, and resulted in the deaths of over 50,000 people, with another 1.2 million becoming refugees or internally displaced persons.

Tajikistan is largely dependent on agriculture, with cotton the most important crop. The economy has never really recovered from the civil war, and poverty is widespread. State-funded educational and medical services were ended in 2003. Almost half of GDP is earned by migrants working abroad.

Emomali Rahmonov took over as head of state in 1992 and won election as Tajikistan’s first president in 1994. A ceasefire with the United Tajik Opposition – an alliance of Islamic and nationalist forces -- went into effect that year and a formal peace brokered by the United Nations in 1997 brought a final end to hostilities. 

The deal guaranteed the opposition, led by the Islamic Renaissance Party (IRP), 30 per cent of government positions. The IRP for many religious nationalists was seen as a preferable alternative to former Communist apparatchiks like the president – who got the message. He changed his last name to Rahmon, to de-Russify it, and undertook a pilgrimage to Mecca.

In 1999 Rahmon was re-elected for a second term with 96 per cent of the vote in what was clearly a fixed election. He won a third term in 2006 and a fourth in 2013 (this time with 83.9 per cent) in elections which international observers said were neither free nor fair. 

Rahmon’s People’s Democratic Party also won 55 of the 63 legislative seats in the Majlisi Namoyandagon (Assembly of Representatives) elections in 2010. The IRP and Communists each won two.

On March 1, Tajikistan held new legislative elections. This time the People’s Democratic Party won 57 seats; while the Communists held their two seats, the IRP was shut out.

Monitors from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe said that half the votes they saw being counted should have been thrown out. They also reported ballot-box stuffing and intimidation. IRP leader Muhiddin Kabiri refused to recognize the outcome, while Communist Party leader Shodi Shabdolov called the election “a political farce.” 

The IRP has been the victim of violent attacks by thugs on party meetings, accusations of polygamy, closure of multiple offices, and the enlistment of former members to record video messages warning people not to join the party.

Meanwhile, on March 5, Umarali Kuvatov, leader of a Tajik movement called Group 24, who fled the country in 2012, was assassinated in Istanbul. His movement, a vocal critic of the Rahmon government, was declared an “extremist organization” and banned last October. Two other members were sentenced by a Tajikistan court to 16 ½ years in prison each on March 13.

Though the civil war ended some two decades ago, younger insurgents, some with contacts to Salafi Islamists outside the country, remain a problem. Along with poverty, unemployment, and corruption under an increasingly autocratic regime, none of this bodes well for the country.

Yemen Civil War Draws in Neighbours

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

It seems that after years, indeed decades, of vacillation, Saudi Arabia has finally decided to challenge its rival, Iran, if only via a proxy fight in Yemen.

The rebel Houthi Zaidis belong to a Shia school of Islam and are supported by the regime in Tehran.

Living in the northern highlands of the country, they make up about 35-40 per cent of its Muslim population.

The Houthis began their offensive in September, seizing the capital, Sana’a. Now Saudi Arabia, the very centre of Sunni Islam, which borders Yemen to the north, has launched airstrikes against them. 

The Arab League has called for the establishment of a voluntary, unified military force for a potential ground assault, while Iran has called the escalation a “dangerous step.”

Many are worried about an Iranian takeover of the strategic Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, located between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula and Djibouti and Eritrea on the African side. It connects the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, so ships could easily come under fire. Egyptian and Saudi warships are now patrolling the strait.

Yemen has seen other civil wars in its past that led to foreign intervention. Until 1990, Yemen referred only to the northern part of the country. It became independent in 1918, under the Zaydi House of Al-Mutawakkilite. 

In 1962 Imam Muhammad Al-Badr was deposed by a group of Egyptian supported and financed Sunni officers and a republic was proclaimed. A lengthy civil war between Yemeni republican forces, based in the cities and supported by Egypt, and the royalist supporters of the deposed imam, backed by Jordan and Saudi Arabia, ensued.

Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser supported the republicans with as many as 70,000 Egyptian troops. According to official Egyptian army figures, they had 15,194 killed, and Nasser pulled out of the conflict after his loss to Israel in the 1967 war.

The civil war officially ended with a political agreement between the republican and royalist factions brokered in 1970. A republican government was formed in Yemen, incorporating members from the royalist faction.

Meanwhile, the old British colony of Aden in the south became a separate state called South Yemen in 1967. The two countries united in 1990, but many there were unhappy with the amalgamation, and a brief civil war followed in 1994. Today, a southern separatist movement, Heraq, has seized control of some territory. 

Yemen’s President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi has fled the country. Washington has shut its embassy in Sana’a and evacuated 125 Special Operations advisors. Houthi forces seized Al Anad air base, which until recently had been used by the Americans. 

The chaos in Yemen has made a mockery of Barack Obama’s statement last Sept. 10 that Yemen was an important U.S. ally and partner in American counterterrorism operations against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Now, there are even reports of an Islamic State branch operating out of Yemen.

Like many other states in the region, the Saudis realize that they can no longer depend on a war-weary America to counter Iranian aggression.