Australia Continues to Support East Timor

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

 

A new parliamentary election to be held on May 12 in Timor-Leste (East Timor) will be the second one in less than a year. A minority government formed after elections last July and led by the Fretilin party collapsed in January after its policy program and budget were defeated in parliament.

Ex-rebel leader and independence hero Xanana Gusmao, who is heading an alliance of three opposition parties including his National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction, urged East Timorese to elect the grouping to “strengthen and improve our country in order to bring development to free people from poverty.”

Fretilin Secretary-General Mari Alkatiri also vowed development by creating more special economic zones.

In 1999, about 70 per cent of the economic infrastructure of East Timor was destroyed by Indonesian troops and anti-independence militias when East Timor was struggling to cast off control by Indonesia, which had occupied the small former Portuguese colony in 1975.

In the years after independence in 2002, the country had one of the highest fertility rates in the region, with almost seven births per mother. Most of the population is younger than 25, with unemployment on the rise. More than half the population lives on less than US $1.25 a day.

Though Timor-Leste’s 1.3 million people still face grim poverty, things may be looking up.

Since 2004, almost 80 per cent of East Timor’s gross domestic product has come from the oil field in the Timor Sea, where reserves are projected to run dry by 2023. 

But in March, Gusmao led negotiations with Australia, expanding East Timor’s sea border. The new maritime border treaty determines each nation’s entitlement and ownership of the rich oil and gas reserves in the Timor Sea, including the untapped Greater Sunrise basin, estimated to hold $53 billion worth of gas reserves.

The treaty recognises the rights of both nations, and establishes a special regime for the joint development, exploitation and management of the Greater Sunrise gas fields.

 

Australian help was essential to East Timor’s success in freeing itself from rule from Jakarta. Since then, it has been a major source of aid, not only as the largest bilateral donor of development assistance, but also by ensuring security and stability in the country.

Canberra led the International Force East Timor (INTERFET) military force that helped stabilize the country after it gained independence, as well as the later UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET).

Australia also landed combat troops in the country in 2006 to quell ethnic fighting that involved East Timorese police and soldiers. 

About 600 members of the army, known as Loromonu, from the western part of the country, went on strike to protest what they contended was ethnic discrimination and a lack of promotions at the hands of the military leadership.

The last Australian peacekeeping forces left Timor-Leste in December 2012. The East Timorese military continues to receive assistance with training, advice and other forms of support as part of Australia’s Defence Cooperation Program.

This is conducted independently of the Australian military commitment to the UN’s mission in Timor-Leste.

Australia has been the biggest development partner with Timor-Leste. Under the Timor-Leste- Australia Strategic Planning Agreement for Development signed in 2011, both countries work together, in close cooperation, to improve the lives of citizens of Timor-Leste.

The agreement is based on priorities taken directly from Timor-Leste’s Strategic development Plan 2012-2030 on economic development, infrastructure development, social capital, and institution framework.

Australia’s Foreign Policy White Paper of 2017 asserts that Canberra will remain committed to working with Timor-Leste to support its economic growth and governance. Its security and stability “is a fundamental Australian strategic interest.”

Australia Worries About Unstable Neighbours

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The potential fragmentation of a number of states on Australia’s doorstep remains a worry for the country’s decision-makers. Problems in the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea have required Canberra’s active involvement. 

As Andrew Pickford and Jeffrey Collins point out in their recent study “Reconsidering Canada’s Strategic Geography: Lessons from History and the Australian Experience for Canada’s Strategic Outlook,” published by the MacDonald-Laurier Institute, “Failed states create an authority vacuum, drawing in criminal and extremist groups, and prompting irregular emigration of populations.”

The authors note that such states “often attract external powers who seek to protect their citizens and interests. Such interventions inevitably incorporate a military dimension, and could result in an external power creating a semi-permanent footprint within striking distance of the Australian mainland.”

In the case of the Solomon Islands, by the turn of the century, the government and associated structures were collapsing. Governments rarely survived a full four-year term. 

What Solomon Islanders called ping-pong politics -- frequent government changes and side-switching by politicians in search of more lucrative jobs -- took its toll, increasing public disillusionment and leading to outbursts of violence.

There was intense and bitter rivalry between the Isatabus on Guadalcanal, the largest island, and migrant Malaitans from the neighbouring island. Not wishing to have a failed state to its northeast, Canberra felt it necessary to intervene.

In 2003 the Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI), consisting of more than 7,000 police and troops, was created  in response to a request for international aid by the Solomon Islands’ governor-general, John Ini Lapli.

RAMSI helped to end five years of ethnic conflict that brought the island nation back from total collapse.

Last year, Australia and the Solomon Islands signed a security treaty, which allows the island archipelago to request assistance from Australia in emergency situations of national security, including humanitarian involvement in natural disasters.

It will enhance cooperation with the two countries Post-RAMSI.

Australia is the largest provider of development assistance to the Solomon Islands, providing it with almost two thirds of overseas aid in 2016-17. In 2017-18, total Australian assistance will be an estimated $139 million.

The prospect of Papua New Guinea, due north of Australia, descending into civil war has also been a major cause of concern for Canberra. It was under Australian rule until 1975.

Occupying the eastern half of New Guinea, the world’s second-largest island, linguistically, it is the world's most diverse country, with more than 700 native tongues.

There was an armed conflict fought from 1988 to 1998 in the North Solomons Province of Papua New Guinea by the secessionist forces of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA). The civil war saw 15,000 people killed.

During the 1960s, as independence approached, there had been debate over whether or not Bougainville would be part of the new nation. 

The island is the largest in the Solomon Islands archipelago and its people have more in common in terms of ethnic, tribal and customary values with Solomon Islanders than with Papua-New Guinea.

Peace talks brokered by New Zealand finally led to autonomy for the island. A multinational Peace Monitoring Group (PMG) under Australian leadership was deployed in 2001.

Following the Bougainville Peace Agreement, the PMG focused primarily on facilitating the weapons disposal program, in co-operation with the small UN Observer Mission on Bougainville (UNOMB). A referendum on independence is scheduled for June 2019.

Papua-New Guinea will host the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation Summit this coming November and Australia will foot much of the bill. Currently, Australia’s total annual aid budget to Papua-New Guinea amounts to $547 million.

As well, 73 Australian Federal Police officers will remain in the country until the end of November. This will cost Australian taxpayers another $98 million.

Australia’s Foreign Policy White Paper of 2017 asserts that Canberra will remain committed to working with Papua New Guinea and other Pacific island countries “to support their economic growth and governance, and to strengthen our cooperation. Their security and stability is a fundamental Australian strategic interest.”

Instability in the South Pacific “could have strategic consequences for Australia should it lead to increasing influence by actors from outside the region with interests inimical to ours.” It’s assumed this refers to China.

On April 15, the Chinese navy challenged two Australian frigates and an oil replenishment ship in the South China Sea as the Australian vessels were sailing to Vietnam.

The Saga of the Polish Anders Army

By Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press

In North America, too little is known about the eastern front in World War II, including the tragic fate of Poland, caught between Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union.

When Poland was conquered and partitioned in September 1939, many Polish military personnel escaped, and would join the Allied forces in Great Britain.

In the east, though, Polish troops that had surrendered to the Soviets were placed in prisoner of war camps, while Russia and Germany remained de facto allies under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

At least 22,000 officers and soldiers from the Polish Army were executed by the Soviets in April-May 1940 in the Katyn forest, near Smolensk, by the Soviet NKVD.

With the Nazi invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941, the Soviets suddenly found themselves on the same side as Britain and Poland. This allowed the Polish government-in-exile to sign the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement of July 30, as a result of which a Polish army was to be formed in the territory of the Soviet Union.

Joseph Stalin, desperate to obtain help from the western allies, agreed to declare all previous pacts with Nazi Germany to be null and void, invalidating the September 1939 Soviet-German partition of Poland.

Tens of thousands of Polish citizens held in Soviet forced labor camps were released under a so-called “amnesty.” Their recruitment into a new Polish army under General Wladyslaw Anders began. 

Initially numbering some 40,000 men, the Anders Army was loyal to the Polish government-in-exile in London.

Anders had commanded a cavalry brigade fighting German forces in the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, but when the Russians invaded from the east he retreated south. Intercepted by Soviet forces and captured, he would remain a prisoner until Adolf Hitler’s attack on Russia.

After much pressure on Moscow, Anders managed to get his troops evacuated to Iran, where they were equipped by the British and became the Polish II Corps. About 77,000 combatants and 41,000 civilians, all former Polish citizens, left the USSR.

For the next three years the Anders Army would travel from central Asia, through the Middle East, and North Africa, to eventually confront the Germans in Italy in one of the most crucial battles of the war. By March-April 1942, the force had made its way through Iran to Palestine.

Leaving Palestine at the end of 1943, the Corps took part in the campaign in Italy. From January 17 to May 19, 1944 the Anders Army played a crucial role in defeating the Germans in the battle of Monte Cassino.

This hard-fought victory -- Polish losses amounted to about 10 per cent of the Corps-- allowed the Allied forces to capture Rome and later, the whole of southern Europe.

Another decisive battle fought by the Anders Army was the Battle of Ancona, in which Polish troops took over a strategic Adriatic port. On June 17, 1944, Anders was given command of the Adriatic sector of the Italian theatre, and one month later Polish troops entered the city. The operation contributed to the breaking of the Gothic Line and subsequent surrender of the Axis forces in Italy.

There is also a Jewish aspect to the story of this long-neglected Polish force. The Anders Army included thousands of Polish Jews. Zionist leaders in Palestine were in close correspondence with Jewish Polish troops under Anders as soon as they reached the British military camps of Iran and Iraq in 1942.

When they arrived in Palestine, Anders turned a blind eye to desertions by many of the army’s Jewish soldiers, who left the force to join Jewish military organizations fighting for the independence of Israel. According to Anders, 3,000 out of some 5,000 Jews deserted.

“The Jews are fighting for their freedom and I do not intend to stand in their way,” Anders told a group of Polish officers. “I gave precise instructions not to pursue the deserters. I considered that the Jews who saw their first duty in the struggle for Palestine’s freedom, had every right to that view.”

This mass release of Jewish soldiers was dubbed the “Anders Aliya” and played an important role in the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. Many were destined to become highly trained members of Israel’s nascent military force.

Among the soldiers was Mieczyslaw Biegun -- Menachem Begin, later head of the Irgun underground, founder of Israel’s Likud Party, and eventually Israel’s sixth prime minister after 1977. He personally asked to be released from his oath before he left.

In line with the Polish government in-exile, the Anders Army also helped civilians of Jewish descent, including soldier families, groups of Jewish children and war orphans, to escape Soviet repression and travel safely to Palestine against a British ban.

Polish authorities circumvented the interdict by loading Jews on ships and navigating them around the Arabian Peninsula. Jewish children, on the other hand, are said to have been clad in Catholic school uniforms and transported to Palestine through Iraqi deserts by trucks.

By the time the Polish army left Palestine at the end of 1943, the one third of Jewish soldiers who remained with Anders -- 850 soldiers and 126 Jewish officers, many of whom would be decorated in battle -- went with him to Italy. 

These soldiers stayed in Italy until the end of the war, when the entire Anders Army, consisting of 55,780 men and approximately 1,500 women in auxiliary services, was shipped to Britain for a new life as refugees.

General Anders died in exile in London in 1970. A memorial dedicated to him and his army was unveiled in Jerusalem in 2006.

China Intensifies Minority Oppression

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

The Uyghur minority in China, numbering about 11.3 million people, mostly in Xinjiang, have faced increased repression in recent years.

A Muslim Turkic people, their language is related to Turkish, and they regard themselves as culturally and ethnically close to neighbouring Central Asian countries that were once part of the Soviet Union but have been sovereign states since 1991.

The region’s economy has largely revolved around agriculture and trade, with towns such as Kashgar thriving as hubs along the famous Silk Road.

But while the Russians lost their Asian republics, Beijing is determined to hold on to the Uyghur homeland in what many Uyghur nationalists call East Turkestan.

The first historical reference to Uyghurs occurred in the sixth century, when they were described as a nomadic people. During the eighth century they established a kingdom in Mongolia, but in the following century they were driven south by invaders into present-day Gansu and Xinjiang in China. 

There they founded a Buddhist kingdom, referred to as “Uyghuristan”, but Islam made gradual inroads from the eleventh century onwards. 

The region was contested by various Turkic groups, Mongols and the Chinese until the Qing Dynasty brought the whole area under Chinese control in 1884. 

In a sense, the Russian Revolution of 1917 helped shape a modern Uyghur sense of nationhood. Uyghurs living in Soviet territory began to shape the idea of a Uyghur nation. The Uyghurs twice declared an independent state of “East Turkestan” in the 1930s and 1940s, with Soviet support.

The Nationalist Chinese government also started to use “Uyghur” in official discourse in the mid-1930s.  Post-1949 Maoist China retained the practice.

The discriminatory nature of Chinese government policy in Xinjiang since the Communists took control has served to strengthen Uyghur identity, which nowadays is often defined in opposition to Han Chinese.

The Chinese strategy is to demographically overwhelm the Uyghurs; Xinjiang’s population of 23.6 million is now 40.4 per cent Han Chinese, just 5.5 per cent less than that of the native Uyghurs. 

Most of the new towns and cities springing up across Xinjiang are overwhelmingly populated by Han Chinese attracted by work in new factories. In fact even Urumqi, the capital, may now be majority Han.

The Han Chinese are said to be given the best jobs and the majority do well economically, something that has fuelled resentment among Uyghurs. 

There are ongoing campaigns against aspects of Uyghur identity that involve religious observance.

Protests in March 2008 in the cities of Urumqi and Hotan spread to Kashgar and elsewhere through the summer, coinciding with the Olympic Games in Beijing. More inter-ethnic rioting erupted in 2009, leading to over 200 deaths. 

Restrictions on Islam are pervasive. Signs across Xinjiang forbid long beards and full veils, and surveillance cameras are everywhere.

In February Human Rights Watch reported that Chinese authorities were sweeping up citizens’ personal information to police the population. Thousands of people have been sent to detention and political indoctrination centres.

The U.S. State Department’s annual Human Rights Reports, released this month, also indicated that official repression worsened in 2017.

For China, Xinjiang is too strategically important to allow an independence movement to get off the ground. It has oil and s part of the new “one belt, one road” project China is developing as a route for exports to central Asia and Europe.

America, China and the Thucydides Trap

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

U.S. President Donald Trump has begun what many see as an escalation in his economic conflict over trade with China, as he announced a series of tariffs totaling $50 billion against China.

 

Trump has made no secret of the fact that he feels China engages in unfair trade practises, to the detriment of the American economy and American workers.

Beyond trade, though, the enmity between these two states follows historical precedents – and not very good ones, either.

Both countries, whether they acknowledge it or define themselves as such, are empires. They are vast territorial units with global military, economic and diplomatic influence. 

And although, as Oxford University political scientist Jan Zielonka has suggested in his 2012 article “Empires and the Modern International System,” in the journal Geopolitics, they each “have an impressive record of interfering in their respective peripheries.” 

This has become obvious in the case of China, since it has only risen to such prominence in the past two decades, and now challenges American hegemony. This might lead to what is known as the “Thucydides trap.”

Thucydides was an Athenian historian and general. His History of the Peloponnesian War recounts the fifth-century BC war between Sparta and Athens which gave rise to this concept. It refers to the danger that ensues when a rising power begins to challenge the dominance of an established one, with the latter likely to respond with violence.

In cases where one empire denies the other’s claims to legitimacy, and insists there can be only one imperial overlord, the likelihood of a major clash increases.

Graham Allison, a professor of government at Harvard University, last year published Destined for War: Can American and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

“Reviewing the record of the past five hundred years, the Thucydides’s Trap Project I direct at Harvard has found 16 cases in which a major nation’s rise has disrupted the position of a dominant state,” he writes.

“In the most infamous example, an industrial Germany rattled Britain’s established position at the top of the pecking order a century ago. The catastrophic outcome of their competition necessitated a new category of violent conflict: world war. 

“Our research finds that 12 of these rivalries ended in war and four did not -- not a comforting ratio for the 21st-century’s most important geopolitical contest.”

Today, an increasingly powerful China is unraveling the post-1945 American-defined world order, throwing into question the peace that generations have taken for granted.

“If Hollywood were making a movie pitting China against the United States on the path to war, central casting could not find two better leading actors than Xi Jinping and Donald Trump,” Allison states. “Each personifies his country’s deep aspirations of national greatness.”

Both countries consider the Asia-Pacific region as their own back yard, and Beijing’s attempt to turn both the East and South China Seas into Chinese lakes has alarmed the United States, along with many of China’s neighbours.

As China grows more powerful, it is displacing decades-old American pre-eminence in parts of Asia. China has started to wield growing military power and economic leverage to reorder the region, pulling long-time American allies like the Philippines and Indonesia closer. Sri Lanka has become a virtual economic vassal of China’s.

On March 5 Beijing announced that it will boost its defense spending by 8.1 per cent this year, the biggest increase in three years, even as it insists that it poses no threat to other countries.

The 2018 spending increase would outpace China’s economic growth. President Xi wants to modernize China’s military, vowing to turn it into a “world-class force” that is capable of fighting and winning wars.

China now has the world’s second-largest defense budget after the United States, enabling it to achieve the biggest and fastest shipbuilding expansion in modern history.

It plans to acquire the world’s largest navy, coast guard and maritime militia by number of ships; and the world’s largest conventional ballistic and cruise missile force.

While China grows in strength and confidence under Xi, who has recently assumed virtual dictatorial powers under the country’s constitution, Trump’s America seems to be at war with itself, especially in view of the country’s economic and political turmoil. 

Washington faces exhaustion after costly yet inconclusive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as anti-terrorist missions across the globe.

Turkish Nationalism Utilizes Maps

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Under the intensely nationalistic regime of President RecepTayyip Erdogan, Turkey is moving further away from its NATO partners. This has accelerated since the failed coup of July 2016.

Unlike its allies, Turkey has refused to distance itself from Russia. Their economic ties are substantial. Turkey is Russia’s number two trading partner.

Erdogan and President Vladimir Putin met in Ankara recently and agreed to speed up the delivery of S-400 air-defence missile systems sold by Russia to Turkey, a purchase that has raised concern among Turkey’s NATO partners.

They also formally launched the construction of Turkey’s first nuclear power plant, a $20 billion project in Turkey’s southern Mediterranean coastal region of Mersin. It is being built by Russia’s nuclear regulatory agency, Rosatom.

The two countries are also building the TurkStream pipeline, estimated to be worth more than $12 billion, to transport Russian gas to Turkey.

Erdogan has been particularly irritated by the United States’ alliance in Syria with the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a Kurdish group that Turkey claims is linked to terrorism.

He told legislators from his Justice and Development Party that “if there are those who prefer a couple of terrorists, marauders against such a nation, such a state, we will no doubt slap this answer in their faces, on their hearts. They should know that.”

Nationalism, as a political discourse requiring a fundamental connection to a particular territory has constantly referred to maps as evidence of the existence of the respective nation. 

In the case of modern Turkey, nationalism has been sensitive towards the borders defining national territory, and maps have been instruments for the cultural production of nationalism in Turkey.

The favorite use of the map in popular culture in recent decades has been the flag-map logo superimposing the crescent-and-star of the Turkish flag onto the outline of the national territory. 

Isolated from its surrounding geographical context, it implies a national unity within Turkey’s boundaries.

Each and every classroom in elementary and high schools is required to have a national map hung on its walls. In addition, a decree regulating textbooks has also required them to include national maps.

Some maps are frankly irredentist, claiming territory as Turkish that is legally part of Greece or Cyprus.

The Aegean islands, which belong to Greece, are shown in one school map while mainland Greece is cut out. Depicted this way, the islands appear as located within the territorial waters of Turkey. 

In addition, the southern border of the map cuts the island of Cyprus into two; the northern part, which is a de facto Turkish state, appears, while the southern Greek Cypriot part is omitted.

In some unofficial maps, northern Iraq, including Mosul, Kirkuk and Erbil; all of Armenia; and Cyprus and the Greek islands in the Aegean Sea are incorporated into Turkey. 

More extreme versions include a larger portion of Iraq together with a considerable section of Syria, including Aleppo. 

As well, Turkey’s eastern frontier is expanded to include territory in Iran, Armenia and Azerbaijan, while the western border is moved further to integrate Western Thrace, including Salonika, now in Greece.

Most of these territories at one time were part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Are such maps making sure that this memory does not disappear?

The Miraculous Resurgence, Resilience of Modern Israel

By Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax, NS] Chronicle Herald

 

Seventy years ago the State of Israel came into being. It is a miracle that Israel was born, just three years after the greatest Jewish tragedy, the Holocaust, had ended, and that it has endured in the way that it has.

On April 18^th, Israel celebrated its 70th anniversary under the banner “A legacy of innovation.” (The state was declared on May 14, 1948, but the anniversary varies by year in the western calendar because it is based on the Hebrew one.)

It was a near-run thing: In November 1947, one day prior to the expected United Nations vote on partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, the CIA urged President Harry Truman not to throw his weight behind the idea. 

America would have to defend the new Jewish state when it faltered, the CIA’s secret memorandum warned, adding that “the Jews will be able to hold out no longer than two years.”

Today, of course, Israel has the most advanced army in the region. It is also the West’s only reliable ally in the Middle East.

“The people kept faith with the land throughout their dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom,” declared David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, as he read out its declaration of independence in Tel Aviv.

The state was born in war: that very day, Arab armies from Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Syria attacked the fledgling nation. Within Palestine itself, there had already been continuous Arab-Jewish violence once the British government had announced it would terminate its Mandate.

Ten months of fighting ended in an armistice in 1949. More wars would follow: in 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, as well as continuous violence and terrorism within the borders of the state itself.

Yet Israel has become a modern, prosperous nation. The “ingathering of the exiles” is no longer a dream: In 1948, there were some 650,000 Jews in Israel, who represented about five per cent of the world’s Jews. 

Today, Israel’s Jewish population has grown ten-fold and stands at about 6.8 million people. Some 43 per cent of the world’s Jews live in Israel; this is now the world’s largest Jewish community.

A visitor to the country would be astounded at its infrastructure. A worldwide center for technology, it has more companies listed on the Nasdaq than any country other than the U.S.

No other post-colonial state has remained a democracy while granting its people a developed-world standard of living. 

In the International Monetary Fund’s 2018 forecasts for GDP per capita, Israel, at $40,762, is 23rd out of 193 states -- just behind France and New Zealand, and just ahead of Japan and the United Kingdom.

Speaking at the ceremonies marking the anniversary, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed that no one would “extinguish” Israel’s “light.”

“All the ancient peoples who were exiled from their lands vanished and scattered all over the place. Only we, the Jewish people, who were like a leaf blown away in the storm of exile, refused to disappear and remained faithful to Zion,” he said.

Seventy years after a Star of David was first featured on its flag, the country remains an inspiration to many people across the world.

Did the Syria Attack Make Sense?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

 

The United States, Britain, and France on April 13 fired cruise missiles at three sites linked to Syria’s chemical weapons program.

It was, they declared, in response to the Assad regime’s reported chemical attack April 7 in Douma.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg expressed support for the strikes by its three member states.

Canada, too, “supports the decision by the United States, the United Kingdom and France to take action”, Prime Minister Trudeau said. Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland added that it was “clear to Canada” that the Assad regime was responsible for the chemical attack.

But the reaction to the attacks is playing out differently in Britain and France.

The leader of the British opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, criticized Prime Minister Teresa May, arguing that “bombs won’t save lives or bring about peace.”He called the attack “legally questionable.”

Vince Cable, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, said that May was wrong not to seek parliamentary consent. 

“Riding the coattails of an erratic U.S. president is no substitute for a mandate from the House of Commons,” he remarked.

Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland, tweeted: “Air strikes have not resolved situation in Syria so far.” She stated that foreign policy should be set by the British Parliament, not Washington.

Many Britons still remember Tony Blair’s decision in 2003 to join George W. Bush’s disastrous war in Iraq.

In France, President Emmanuel Macron has also faced criticism, mainly from the political left and right.

The leader of the left-wing France Insoumise (France Unbowed) Party, Jean-Luc Melenchon, accused Macron of attacking Syria without proof of chemical weapons use and without a United Nations mandate, a European Union agreement or a vote of the French Parliament.

“This is a North American adventure of revenge, an irresponsible escalation,” he declared. “France deserves better than this role. It must be the force of international order and peace.”

Marine Le Pen, the head of the Rassemblement National (National Rally), the new name for the National Front, said much the same. France had lost a chance to “appear on the international scene as an independent power.” The party’s deputy leader, Nicolas Bay, called Macron “a vassal” of the U.S.

American policy towards the Syrian war does seem to be incoherent. First of all, why make a chemical attack that killed less than 50 people different in kind, not just in degree, from the half million already dead via “conventional” weapons? 

These were not really “weapons of mass destruction,” unlike atomic or biological weapons. This has become a fetish and excuse for military action.

Second, what exactly is the U.S. accomplishing? When Hitler bombed London or when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the actions were part of larger war aims. 

They didn’t do it as just a one-time “lesson” and then went home. Theywere trying to win a war.

Is Washington trying to overthrow Assad? If so, they have to do more than shoot missiles at him every few months. 

Trump has indicated that the American aim all along has been to destroy the Islamic State and other Islamist groups. But obviously what’s left of these groups benefit from weakening Assad. 

The only thing that makes sense is that the Americans, British and French were warning Russia that they can do to Sevastopol, St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad what they just did in Syria.

The Polish Underground in Nazi-Occupied Europe

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

 

As we commemorate the 75^th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the doomed battle by Polish Jews against the Nazi murderers, which began on April 19, 1943, it is also important that we re-evaluate the role of the Polish underground during the Holocaust.

In his book The Polish Underground and the Jews 1939-1945, Joshua D. Zimmerman, a professor of history at Yeshiva University in New York, maintains that the reaction of the Polish underground to the ongoing catastrophe of Jews trapped in the ghettos varied, some elements being more sympathetic than others. 

As historian Peter Hayes of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has suggested in Why? Explaining the Holocaust, the Poles who actively helped to hide Jews and those who persecuted them were actually both minorities. 

The Germans made concealing Jews a crime punishable by death for everyone living in a house where Jews were discovered. Yet it is estimated that some 200,000 Poles were engaged in helping Jews despite the threat of execution. 

Poland had no collaborationist regime, and the London-based Polish government-in-exile included the participation of Jewish representatives on its governing council.

This strengthened the support for the Jews from within the government, especially as it needed Allied support, and so had portray their struggle for Poland as a democratic one.

The Social Committee to Aid the Jewish Population, later the Zegota Council, was formed on Sept. 17, 1942. 

A clandestine organization, it ran an extensive network of welfare activities, disseminated information in Poland and abroad regarding the ongoing mass murder of Jews, and demanded strong action against those who denounced Jews. 

The major Polish underground force, the Home Army (AK), by the end of 1942 numbering 200,000 soldiers, at first had counseled Jews against fighting back in cities and camps. 

But the Warsaw Ghetto Jews in 1943 established a fighting organization. The AK had undergone a change of heart at this time. Its commander, General Stefan Rowecki authorized the transfer of arms, ammunition, and explosives to the ghetto beginning in late January 1943. These were essential in the battle to come.

Rowecki came to the conclusion that Jewish resistance groups inside ghettos deserved, and as citizens of Poland were entitled to, assistance. He also approved or ordered actions on behalf of the ghetto fighters. Some AK soldiers would even join the battle.

When the armed uprising began, news was sent to the outside world, praising the ghetto fighters.  The underground also asked Poles to help any Jews fleeing the ghetto. A Krakow paper called the German action “an attack on Poland itself.” 

The AK had already created a Jewish Department on Feb. 1, 1942, distributing funds and passing on Jewish correspondence to London.

In late 1942 an AK courier, Jan Karski, was smuggled in and out of the Warsaw ghetto. He then traveled to London where he delivered a report to the Polish government-in-exile, describing what he had seen. 

The clandestine press of the Home Army was mostly favorable towards the Jews, reporting accurately on crimes committed not only by Germans but also by szmalcownicy, Polish blackmailers.

The top authorities of the underground issued powerful condemnations of their activities. On May 6, 1943, a declaration was printed in the largest circulation underground papers, condemning them as traitors who would be put to death. Special Civil Courts were created to prosecute collaborators.

Meanwhile, the final German “action” had begun on April 19. The ghetto population had constructed subterranean bunkers and shelters in preparation for an uprising and had barricaded themselves in these hideouts, taking the Germans by surprise. 

At least13,000 ghetto fighters were killed in the battle, almost half burnt alive in collapsing buildings set on fire by the Nazis. The Home Army called the struggle “worthy of emulation.”

Last month, Polish officials held ceremonies honoring Poles who gave shelter and aid to Jews during the Holocaust, as the country for the first time marked a new national holiday in their memory.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said helping Jews at that time was “one of the most glorious pages of Polish history.”

The First Urban Uprising in Nazi-Occupied Europe

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

 

This year’s Yom HaShoa, the commemoration of the Holocaust, includes events around the world marking the 75^th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which began on April 19, 1943.

It was the first popular uprising in a city in Nazi-occupied Europe, and, against incredible odds, lasted almost a month.

A year after invading Poland, Nazi Germany set up a ghetto in the heart of the occupied Polish capital in October 1940. Nearly half a million Polish Jews were confined in its squalid quarters, measuring just three square kilometres.

Between July 22 and Sept. 21 of 1942, some 260,000 inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto were deported to the Treblinka extermination camp. They were mainly the elderly or children.

After the deportations to Treblinka between 55,000 to 60,000 Jews, mainly younger people, remained in the ghetto and they were concentrated in a few building blocs.

They began to establish a fighting underground organization. Representatives of three Zionist youth movements, Hashomer Hatzair, Dror, and Akiva, established the first cell of the new organization. Members of the left-wing Poalei Tsion party joined them in October 1942. 

The Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB) was later joined by the non-Zionist Jewish Labour Bund and the Communists. The commander was 23 year old Mordechai Anielewicz of Hashomer Hatzair. They gained some help from the Polish Communist-led People’s Army (GL) militia.

The Revisionist Zionist youth movement Betar established its own fighting organization, the Jewish Military Union (ZZW); some of their arms were acquired from the mainstream underground Home Army (AK).

The final German “action” began on April 19. The ghetto population had constructed subterranean bunkers and shelters in preparation for an uprising and had barricaded themselves in these hideouts, taking the Germans by surprise. 

The ZOB scattered its positions throughout the ghetto, while the ZZW did most of its fighting at Muranowska Square, impeding the Germans’ attempts to penetrate their defenses. 

In response, the Germans began to systematically burn down buildings, turning the ghetto into a firetrap. The Jews fought valiantly for a month but by May 16 the Germans had crushed the uprising and the ghetto had been burned to the ground.

At least13,000 ghetto fighters were killed in the battle, almost half burnt alive in the collapsing buildings set on fire by the Nazis. 

Surviving ghetto residents were deported to concentration camps, though some managed to escape through underground sewers and took part in the larger Polish rising in the city that began on Aug. 1, 1944.

On April 19, during the battle in the ghetto, the ZZW had raised two flags atop the highest building in the ghetto: the red-and-white Polish Eagle and the blue-and-white Star of David. 

They were visible in much of the city and many Polish partisans were moved by the gesture. The Polish flag had not been displayed openly since the fall of Poland in 1939. The Home Army called the struggle “worthy of emulation.”

In his last message, dated April 23, Anielewicz wrote: “The dream of my life has risen to become fact. Self-defense in the ghetto will have been a reality. Jewish armed resistance and revenge are facts. I have been a witness to the magnificent, heroic fighting of Jewish men in battle.”

The Warsaw Ghetto uprising became an example for Jews in other ghettos and camps and there were smaller revolts elsewhere in Poland. 

My mother’s two brothers were part of the one in Czestochowa. After it ended they fled into a nearby forest, where they were hunted down and shot by the Nazi SS.

Tinderbox of Global Conflicts

By Henry Srebrnik, [St John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

Watching the BBC World News a few days ago, I happened to note one of those scrolls that move by at the bottom of the screen. It read “Experts: Are We Headed for a Third World War?” 

I'm afraid these people are not just hysterics. The second world war began almost 80 years ago, and now the entire post-1945 world order has broken down.

In turn, there are smoldering conflicts in several “hot spots.” That war could result in one or more of them is far from impossible.

It is clear the Americans are spoiling for a fight with Russia. Everything points in that direction -- the strident, ceaseless drumbeat of attacks blaming Moscow for everything from “interfering” in elections everywhere and being a “malign influence” around the world, down to poisoning an ex-Russian spy living in England (no proof required).

The U.S. wasn’t this aggressive towards the old Soviet Union during the Cold War. Maybe they didn’t expect Russia to revive after 1991 and are angry, having expected, as the world’s now- hegemonic power, to have a free hand around the globe.

In the Middle East, the Syrian Civil War keeps drawing more and more countries into its whirlpool. 

Israel, Lebanon, Iran, Russia, Turkey and the U.S. all are now involved to some degree or another.

Sooner or later, even if inadvertently, some of these countries will come to blows, either on the battlefield or in the air. 

Will American face off against Russians? What about Israelis against Iranians and their Lebanese Hezbollah proxies? And if Turkey continues its incursions into the Kurdish north, will they confront Americans supporting Kurds?

While Palestinians in Gaza try to enter Israel en masse to highlight their desire for a right of return to Palestine, Hezbollah’s tens of thousands of missiles in Lebanon are pointed at the Jewish state.

If they really do attack and turn much of Tel Aviv into ashes, Israel will undoubtedly prompt massive retaliation with great carnage. This is would result in an all-out conflagration in the region.

In fact, could the truly unthinkable even happen? I refer to Israel’s so-called “Samson Option,” the name given to the country’s “last resort” decision to use nuclear weapons if much of the state were destroyed.

The name is a reference to the Old Testament Israelite judge Samson, who destroyed a Philistine temple, killing himself but also thousands of Philistines.

Meanwhile, we should not discount the possibility of civil srife within the United States. If they win the 2018 Congressional midterm elections, the Democrats in the House of Representatives will impeach Donald Trump. A Democrat-controlled Senate could then remove him from office. 

Having lost power, the divided Republican Party may begin to implode. On the other hand, flush with power, the Democrats, using their catchwords “diversity” and “inclusion,” will in fact do the opposite, further marginalizing the white Christian heartland that supported Donald Trump.

In turn, these people could conceivably begin a low-level insurrection along the lines we’ve seen in other deeply divided societies, like eastern Ukraine.At that point, all bets would be off on election results being recognized as legitimate.Over time, the country is becoming more tribal -- politically and socially -- not less.

In fact, the 2020 presidential election might produce actual violence in the United States.Clearly we are living in not just interesting, but very interesting, times.

How Strong is the American-Israeli Relationship?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary, AB] Jewish Free Press

 

The relationship between Israel and the United States is, at the moment, very strong – but for how long?

It has not always been as close as it is today. Until the late 1960s, the relationship was actually quite limited. Only in the aftermath of the Six-Day War of 1967 did it begin to evolve into the strategic “special relationship” of today.

Today it encompasses military, political, economic, diplomatic, and cultural relations.

Economically, the United States is Israel’s single biggest trading partner. Militarily, total American assistance to Israel up to 2016 has amounted to $124 billion, making it the largest recipient of American military aid in the entire post-1945 period. And since 1981, this has been in the form of grants, not loans. 

Hari Sastry, the Director of the Office of U.S. Foreign Assistance Resources at the State Department, announced on Feb. 12 that Israel will receive $3.3 billion in funding under President Donald Trump’s Fiscal Year 2019 budget request.

He noted that Israel will receive a bump of $200 million in aid under the proposed budget. Last September the two nations signed a ten-year memorandum of understanding providing $38 billion in defence aid through 2028.

U.S. aid has constituted 17-20 per cent of Israel’s defence budget in recent years. Also, Israel generally has access to the latest American military technologies.

Washington also shields Israel diplomatically, in the United Nations and elsewhere, and it has used its veto on the Security Council to block anti-Israeli resolutions numerous times.

Also, while the Obama administration perceived Iran as part of the solution to Middle East instability, now Washington is defining Tehran as a contributor to the region’s problems. 

This of course is the Israeli view as well; it fears growing Iranian power as an existential threat to its very existence.

But will the American-Israeli relationship remain as robust as it is today? Some analysts foresee future changes that may prove detrimental to it.

Israel’s image as a liberal democracy has been increasingly called into question. For growing segments of the American population, Israel’s character as a vibrant, peace-loving democracy is no longer a given.

American support for Israel has been historically bipartisan. But that’s no longer the case. Republicans and conservatives are now far more supportive of Israel, by wide margins, than liberals and Democrats.

On Jan. 23, the Pew Survey Center released a study confirming that the partisan divide in Middle East sympathies is now wider than at any point since 1978. 

Currently, 79 per cent of Republicans say they sympathize more with Israel than the Palestinians, compared with just 27 per cent of Democrats.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), long the foremost lobby group on behalf of the Jewish state, also faces increasing difficulty. 

The perception that AIPAC represents a consensus among American Jews has always been a key to its political influence. Its annual policy conference in early March tried to highlight its commitment to bipartisan support for Israel, but that is crumbling.

There has also been a significant decline in support for Israel among younger Americans. Israel’s image has become one of a brutal occupier. Some 25 per cent of American students believe Israel to be an apartheid state.

Even younger American Jews have become more distant. Whereas more than half of older members of the community consider Israel a very important component of their Jewish identity, this holds true for just a third of younger people. 

In any case, low birth rates and assimilation means the American Jewish community will become relatively more marginal in the U.S. in the future. 

The alliance between Israeli leaders and Christian evangelicals may also be weakening. 

Groups such as Christians United for Israel, advocating views that are in agreement with the Israeli right, have had a major influence on American foreign policy. 

Protestants like these believe that God has conveyed a universal message by means of a particular people and a particular land, whose particularity is never to be superseded.

However, recent polls indicate that younger American evangelicals are growing less attached to Israel. 

Falling support among U.S. evangelicals younger than 30 “ought to keep every Israeli awake at night,” remarked Yoav Fromer, who teaches politics at Tel Aviv University.

At the same time, Hispanics and the religiously unaffiliated, for both of whom Israel is a low priority, is a growing segment of the U.S. population.

Anti-Russian Hysteria Grips Western Countries

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Are we back in a new Cold War? On March 4, Sergei Skripal and his adult daughter, Yulia, were poisoned with a nerve agent called Novichok, developed by Kremlin scientists several decades ago. 

Skripal, a Russian, had been arrested in 2006 for passing state secrets to Britain's MI6 and released in 2010 as part of a prisoner swap. He has been living in Britain ever since.

The British immediately claimed that the Russian government was behind this and Foreign secretary Boris Johnson likened Russian President Vladimir Putin to Hitler.

Since then, 28 countries, including Canada, have joined Britain in expelling more than 150 Russian diplomats. Russia has responded in kind.

Was Vladimir Putin involved? We don’t really know. And the British certainly won’t allow Moscow to conduct its own investigation. 

So all of this has happened without, at the moment, a shred of proof. In fact scientists at Britain’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory admitted on April 3 that they have not been able to say where the deadly agent was manufactured.

We’ve seen plenty of “fake news” in the past: remember the American denials regarding the downing of an American U-2 spy plane over Soviet airspace in 1960? The ongoing lies about the Vietnam War during the 1960s? The 2003 fabrication about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? 

First of all, if the Russians really did want Skripal dead, why employ a nerve agent? Why not just murder him in a faked robbery?

Why wasn’t he executed while he was in Kremlin custody? Why wait until eight years after Skripal had been sent to England?  

Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, almost everything that has gone wrong has been blamed on Russian “meddling.” So why would Russia make things worse by murdering a now-harmless exile? 

Putin, no fool, would have known what the political ramifications of this would be on relations with the west.

I’d think it more likely that someone who hates Putin, and somehow got access to the poison, was behind this. They would know the murder of Skripal would produce a deeper split between Russia and the west. 

Moscow claims they are being framed, in order to stir up Russophobia. It remains easy to tap into the anti-Russian feelings that have been part of western culture for centuries. The “bad Russian bear” stereotype is not dead.

Indeed, the reaction has been totally over the top -- it’s as if the western powers were just waiting for an excuse to mount a big anti-Russian campaign. But why? There’s an old Roman question: Cui bono? Who benefits?

There are many who hate the fact that Moscow took back the Crimea -- though it is historically and demographically Russian and should never have been handed to Ukraine in the first place. 

They’re also angry that Russia is no longer the pushover it was in the 1990s, when NATO attacked Serbia. Now it’s the Russians asserting their power on the world stage, in Syria and elsewhere.

Perhaps even more important, ever since the 2016 Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, there are worries that the European Union may disintegrate, because of the furor over Muslim migrants. 

The EU has very skilfully asserted control over large parts of eastern Europe and the former USSR. But now Hungary, Poland, and even the Czech Republic, have all been veering towards a Euroskeptic, pro-Russian stance, because their national identity is at risk. 

Austria, France, Germany and Italy have seen the rise of right-wing parties that favour a less confrontational attitude towards Moscow.

This had to be stopped by the European political elites in Brussels. The best way, of course, was to create anti-Russian hysteria.

It has also allowed the anti-Trump forces in the U.S. to continue to tighten the political noose around the president.

After all, any further increase in anti-Russian sentiment will continue to play favourably into their narrative of Trump as a dangerous Russian stooge.

Meanwhile, on April 4, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suggested the efforts of “Russian propagandists” to “smear” Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland factored into the Canadian decision to expel four of the country’s diplomats.

Last year, the Russians had revealed that Freeland’s grandfather had been a Nazi collaborator editing an anti-Semitic newspaper in wartime Krakow, something that Freeland had at first tried to dismiss as “fake news.”

Most of the former Warsaw Pact countries are now in NATO and the EU, and Russia’s defence budget is a tenth of that of the U.S. 

But as Serge Halimi, editorial director of the French newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique, reminds us in the April edition, “a good enemy is for life.”

Two Francophone African States in Trouble

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

In tropical Africa the French domain was larger than that of any other power, extending from southern Algeria to the Congo, and east to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. 

The African populations in French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa had the legal status of subjects and did not enjoy political and civil rights. 

They had to endure forced labour, imprisonment without trial, and taxation without representation. Autocratic colonial rule did little to build a democratic culture.

They all attained independence, starting in 1958, but most remain economically poor and saddled with weak political institutions.

Mali is somewhat better known to Canadians of late, because of Ottawa’s decision to participate in a United Nations peacekeeping mission in that torn country. Two of its francophone neighbours fare little better.

In next-door Niger, thousands of protesters descended on Niamey, the capital, in March, to denounce a new finance law they deemed “anti-social” for imposing taxes that they feared would raise living costs for citizens, while subsidizing the country’s utilities companies. 

Since October, opponents and supporters of the law have taken to the streets over the issue. Such grievances had already led to uprisings that precipitated a 2010 coup against President Mamadou Tandja.

The authorities have now imprisoned activists, journalists and opposition leaders for allegedly inciting rebellion.  Some have now been killed by the security forces of President Mahamadou Issoufou, who was elected in 2011.

He won a second term in 2016 through elections that U.S. and European officials declared free and fair despite numerous irregularities. Presidential contender Hama Amadou, for example, was seized on charges of baby trafficking. An opposition boycott followed.

As in Mali, the Tuareg ethnic group has periodically rebelled against the central government in response to political and economic marginalization.

But Issoufou needn’t worry, because he is propped up by both the United States and the European Union. Washington uses Niger as a base for counter-terrorism activities against Islamist terrorists in the Sahel region – four American soldiers were killed in Niger last October. 

And the EU needs him block migration from the northern Nigerien city of Agadez, as it is a gateway to the Sahara, Libya, the Mediterranean and, ultimately, to Europe. 

In 2016, therefore, the EU increased its economic aid to Niger, with a $635 million package, in return for Issoufou keeping a lid on migration.

Things are far worse in the misnamed Central African Republic, where years of rebellion, mismanagement and sectarian violence have left President Faustin-Archange Touadéra’s government unable to exert much authority beyond the capital, Bangui. 

More than a dozen armed groups and a local militias control about 80 per cent of the country. At least 600,000 people have been uprooted from their homes, and another half-million have fled into Chad and Cameroun.

Today’s internal wars stem from the nationwide outbreak of armed conflict in 2013, when the predominantly Muslim Seleka rebels seized power and primarily Christian militias known as anti-Balaka fought back. 

A United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission (MINUSCA) deployed about 10,050 military peacekeepers and 2,000 police across parts of the country in 2014, but has struggled to establish security and protect civilians. 

In fact the crisis has since intensified since the Seleka alliance, which lacks a unified hierarchy, has disintegrated into competing factions. 

The Union for Peace in the Central African Republic, a Seleka faction, has carried out some of the worst attacks. Fighters from the Central African Patriotic Movement, another Seleka faction,  have also been implicated in massacres.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) and a Special Criminal Court continue to investigate crimes committed in the country. Last October UN officials raised alarms about “early warning signs of genocide.”

Some analysts have referred to the Central African Republic as, not just a failed state, but a “phantom” state.

A Demand for Justice

By Henry and Patricia Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The Guardian has done an excellent job in bringing the public’s attention to the sad plight of the Munves, as Jim fights P.E.I. bureaucrats in order to bring his wife Barbara back home from a nursing facility where she is being confined against her will. 

Following your initial news story, there has been an outpouring of support for them, and many letters have been published. It’s exactly what the function of a newspaper should be.

We would like to add our voices to the chorus of Islanders who demand justice for them. We have known Jim and Barbara since coming to Prince Edward Island 25 years ago, and would like to mention something about them that none of the other letter writers have touched upon.

Jim served in the U.S. Army fighting Hitler in World War II. He was in the 51^st Armored Infantry Battalion of the Fourth Armoured Division in General George Patton’s Third Army.

During severe shelling by the Nazis in Lorraine, near the German border, in December 1944, his outfit took heavy casualties, and Jim was seriously wounded on Dec. 1. 

Strapped onto a stretcher, he was taken behind the lines, stabilized, and then sent, first, to a hospital in Paris, and then onto another medical centre near Birmingham, England, to recover. He spent three months there before he was sent back to the U.S.

Barbara, then in England, spent many a night in a bomb shelter in the naval town of Portsmouth, as it was being bombed by German aircraft.

With Jim’s loving encouragement, Barbara has written and published two novels under her maiden name, Barbara Parsons. They are based on her life in her native England and on her experiences working for many years, around the world, in the British Diplomatic Service.

Today, Barbara’s right even to leave her ward at the Atlantic Baptist Home has been revoked without warning, and she is deprived of  the  meaningful and stimulating activity that she has been accustomed to her entire adult life.

It is rather ironic that people who fought for our freedom should now be deprived of theirs by small-minded administrators.

South Sudan's Brutal Civil War

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Civil war erupted in South Sudan in December 2013 after President Salva Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, accused his former deputy, Riek Machar, an ethnic Neur, of fomenting a coup. 

The violence immediately took on an ethnic character. Soldiers from the Dinka ethnic group, one of the two largest ethnic groups in South Sudan, aligned with President Kiir and those from the Nuer ethnic group, the other largest ethnic group, supported Machar.

At the time the country was only two years old, having finally liberated itself from rule by the Sudanese regime in Khartoum after decades of warfare.

Since then, well over 50,000 people have died in the conflict, more than two million have fled to neighbouring countries and almost two million more are internally displaced, despite the presence of 17,000 UN peacekeepers in the country. 

Armed groups have targeted civilians along ethnic lines, committed rape and sexual violence, destroyed property and looted villages, and recruited children into their ranks.

Under the threat of international sanctions and following several rounds of negotiations Kiir had signed a peace agreement with Machar in August 2015 and the latter returned to the capital, Juba, in April 2016 after spending more than two years outside of the country. 

But soon after his return, violence broke out again between government forces and opposition factions and Machar again fled the country.

The Sudanese parties to the war signed another cease-fire deal in December 2017 but have not honored their commitment to end violence. In the latest example, the country’s military forces captured the rebel-held town of Lasu. 

Adama Dieng, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ special adviser for the prevention of genocide, has intensified the call for an end to violence in South Sudan, following sustained diplomatic pressure from the African Union on South Sudanese leaders.

Both the government and rebels have done very little to discipline individuals committing atrocities in the four-year conflict in South Sudan, he indicated, adding that the country is suffering from what he called the “total impunity of armed men who have embraced sexual violence as a systematic weapon of war.”

Diplomats believe real pressure for a deal to be implemented must come from neighboring states. Instead, Dieng remarked, Uganda and Kenya are contributing to the conflict.

He said large quantities of weapons and ammunition are flowing into South Sudan through those countries. “International partners have to start targeting the accomplices, intermediaries of the South Sudanese parties.”

Yet Uganda, which sent troops to fight on the side of the government of South Sudan in the early stages of the war, is still feeding the conflict with weapons, according to Richard Downie, deputy director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, who visited the region in January.

That’s because there are multiple and longstanding ties between Uganda and South Sudan. Since colonial times and the establishment of central governments, the two territories have shared a long border, traversing the home areas of several ethnic groups.

Uganda’s President Yoveri Museveni and his National Resistance Movement had close ties with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), the guerilla group that won independence for South Sudan and is now the country’s army. Kiir had become its commander in 2005.

The SPLM/A was allowed to operate inside Uganda, where hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese lived in refugee camps. The links are clearly deep.

So the barbarities continue. Investigators from the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan have reported that more than 40 senior military officers and officials, including three state governors, should be prosecuted on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.