Is Hungary Being Unfairly Maligned?

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

Hungary has been the subject of increased criticism in the past few years, with Prime Minister Victor Orban accused of harbouring authoritarian tendencies and being hostile to migrants crossing into the country. 

On June 20 the Hungarian Parliament approved a package of laws that criminalizes the act of helping undocumented migrants; some fear it will help transform the country into an “illiberal democracy.”

Is Hungary being unfairly maligned? I recently attended a conference in Washington on “Faces of Persecution,” organized by Coptic Solidarity, an advocacy group for Egyptian Christians. It featured two Hungarian government officials as speakers. 

Dr. Laszlo Szabo was appointed the Hungarian ambassador to the United States last year, while Tristan Azbej is Hungary’s Deputy State Secretary for Aiding Persecuted Christians, a government department now located within the Prime Minister’s office.

Szabo, who previously served as Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Prime Minister Orban’s government, explained that his government is helping to rebuild Christian settlements and churches in northern Iraq for Christians who fled the region when it was conquered by the Islamic State.

“Hungary believes it is best to create a meaningful future for these people, working with churches in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, to provide solutions, he said.

“They need help on the ground, hence identifying whom to talk to is important. We went to one town, Telesquf, north of Mosul in Iraq, and have rebuilt hundreds of houses. 

“We also rebuilt three schools and one hospital after Islamic State was pushed out.” Out of 1,300 families that had fled the town, about 1,000 have returned.

 “We are proud to lead by example. We also created the Stipendium Hungaricum scholarship program for students. We have to create a future of jobs and opportunities.”

Szabo emphasized that there must be meaningful solutions in the affected countries themselves. “This is better than having people flee to Europe.” And at the same time, it will allow Hungary to “preserve its self-identity.”

Azbej served in Hungary’s Tel Aviv embassy in Israel prior to the launch of his unit in 2016. 

It focuses on raising awareness and providing humanitarian aid in regions of crisis.

The ultimate goal, he indicated, is to help persecuted Christians in the Middle East to remain in their ancient lands and to strengthen their communities.

Their primary need is to be able to return to their homes with international support.

Hungary will topple the wall of silence that surrounds the persecution of Christians, he told the attendees. They are victims of  “cruel acts of aggression and discrimination.” 

Helping them, he added, has become a national policy for Hungary. “We have dedicated programs for those living in the crisis zones.”

He told the conference that hundreds of young Copts are studying at Hungarian universities, while Copts injured in terrorist attacks in Egypt have been treated in Hungarian hospitals.

Uncontrolled mass migration is a threat both to Europe and the Middle East, he maintained. In Europe, it will lead to a loss of a nation’s culture, while in the Mideast it results in that region losing its best people.

The Roots of Hitler's Anti-Semitic Worldview

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

I recently presented a paper on Nazi Germany’s de-legitimization of Europe’s Jewish population as a prelude to the Holocaust.

Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. The Nazi seizure of power was carried out step-by-step through the first half of 1933, each step disguised as a seemingly legal act.

Everything was completely legal and in conformity with statute and precedent. Hitler governed by executive decree, a form of government that was subject to no checks or balances.

Issuing from the government, these laws had the appearance of legitimacy, yet they had transformed the country into a dictatorship.

What lay behind Hitler’s incredible animus towards the Jews? 

When the Nazis came to power, Jews made up less than one per cent of the population in Germany. But the Nazis regarded them as a vast, powerful, and deadly threat. Hitler viewed the world as poisoned by the “Jewish” idea of human equality. 

Political and religious systems had all been used by the Jews to achieve dominance over more naturally powerful peoples. They were the makers and enforcers of a corrupt planetary order.

Hitler was convinced that without a proper sense of urgency, Germany would be eventually defeated, dominated, and very likely destroyed by the Jews.

Influenced by the tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Hitler contended that there was a worldwide conspiracy of Jews to overthrow the German race, annihilate its culture, and render it impotent before its enemies. All Jews everywhere, no matter their political views, were part of this vast plot.

The Jews constituted the greatest threat to Germany’s racial purity and fighting spirit, asserted Hitler, and thus to its capacity to wage the eternal struggle needed to sustain and expand Germany’s population and vanquish its rivals. He claimed that they were a “spiritual pestilence,” worse than the Black Death. The only way to remove this plague was to eradicate it at the source.

Germany’s mission, he declared, was the conquest of lebensraum (living space) in the east, which could only be achieved at the expense of “Judeo-Bolshevik” Russia. This depended on overcoming its own decadence by breaking with democracy and purging itself of racial enemies. 

This Manichean world view, a world-historical struggle and apocalyptic-like global campaign, led to the burning of books, anti-Jewish legislation, expropriation, promotion of emigration, and also extensive efforts to “purify” art, science, legal thought and language from assumed Jewish influences. It would eventually culminate in genocide.

Think of SS troops sending clearly helpless old Jews to Treblinka. Can anyone be any less harmless? But they were, in Hitler’s mind, merely the “surface” embodiment of a worldwide conspiracy, one that remained headquartered in London, Moscow, Washington, and other capitals, and was trying to destroy Germany and all “Aryans” in a world war. They were a poison to a civilization's political and spiritual “health,” something Hitler was fixated on.

It was this kind of metaphysical racism which made Hitler’s policy against the Jews distinct from other forms of state sponsored killing, whatever the relative number of deaths. 

The war against the Jews was of greater importance to Hitler than the war against the Allies. Even when it was being lost, Hitler refused to allow redeployment of the trains rolling to the death camps, though they were needed for the war effort. 

And when the trains finally did stop running, because the Russians were about to overrun the mainly Polish-based camps, the SS troops were not redeployed to stave off the Russians. Instead they were ordered to take their captives on the road in what became the final phase of the so-called Final Solution to the Jewish Question: the Death Marches. 

More than 250,000 concentration camp prisoners died in this way shortly before the end of the war. Many of them were murdered by German civilians. The killing had to continue at all costs. Killing Jews was more important than military objectives. 

The so-called “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was pure ideology put into murderous practice. Destroying the Jews -- every man, woman and child -- was a metaphysical imperative. All Jews, anywhere and everywhere, would have to be eliminated so that the world could survive. For the Nazis, this was an absolute existential necessity. Such was the madness.

Canada's Flags, Then and Now

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Canada Day is almost here, and the Maple Leaf will soon be fluttering everywhere.

Nations are essentially “tribes with flags,” as the Egyptian diplomat Tahseen Bashir once remarked. Flags unite people but can also divide them, and even become emblems of racial and ethnic bigotry.

Since 1965, the flag has come to symbolize the “new,” non-ethnic, Canada, bereft of old colonial symbols. This did not happen without a great deal of struggle.

The old Canadian Red Ensign, with its Union Jack in the corner and a coat of arms on a red background, was, prior to that date, in effect the de facto Canadian flag.

It was described by Governor General Lord Stanley in 1891 as “the Flag which has come to be considered as the recognized Flag of the Dominion both afloat and ashore.”

Following the authorization of a distinctive Canadian coat of arms in 1921, that became part of the Red Ensign. However, the flag often flew alongside the British Union Jack, in a period when Canada still considered itself a part of the British Empire.

With the growth of Canadian nationalism in the 1960s, many saw the flag as a symbol of the past. During the federal election campaign of 1963, Liberal Party leader Lester Pearson promised to introduce a distinctive national flag for Canada.

Canada needed a flag that would be relevant to all Canadians, not just those of British descent, he insisted. As Pearson recalled in his memoirs, “the flag was part of a deliberate design to strengthen national unity, to improve federal-provincial relations, to devise a more appropriate constitution, and to guard against the wrong kind of American penetration.”

Contentious arguments would rage for more than six months, cause acrimony in the House of Commons. It would unleash an emotional debate among Canadians everywhere, and, in the end, do little to unite the country.

The debate in the House of Commons was finally ended by closure and on Dec. 17, 1964, Canada’s new flag was declared official by a vote of 163 to 78.

Most Progressive Conservatives, including former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, were opposed. Historian Marcel Trudel warned in 1964 that Canada’s new flag had “no historic significance” and was a lamentable failure.

“I am convinced, for my part,” he stated, “that any flag, if it is to be truly significant, must contain or represent the symbols of the nation or nations which contributed to establishing the country.”

C.P. Champion, author of The Strange Demise of British Canada: The Liberals and Canadian Nationalism, 1964-68, agrees.

“Unlike Canada’s original flag --the Canadian Red Ensign -- the maple leaf tells no story of our country. The Red Ensign, by comparison, vividly embodies Canada’s rich history, inclusive of First Nations, the fleur-de-lis, and the diversity represented by Scottish, English and Irish symbols.”

The Red Ensign largely disappeared from public view. I remember bicycling past a school in Montreal in 1965 and seeing a pile of Red Ensigns that had been used in its schoolrooms stacked in the schoolyard, ready to be thrown away. I took one home with me but it has since disappeared in one of my many moves.

But the Red Ensign has recently taken on a darker symbolism, adopted as Canada’s equivalent of the Confederate battle flag by some extremists, who see it as a throwback to a time when Canadians were overwhelmingly white and of European extraction.

Caitlin Bailey, executive director of the Canadian Centre for the Great War, in Montreal, said the Red Ensign was a symbol of unity as a young nation went to war. It was the flag that flew over Vimy Ridge to signal its 1917 capture by Canadian troops.

“It’s unfortunate that it has turned into a white nationalist symbol,” she said. “It’s not right, and it flies in the face of what the Red Ensign means.”

The Slansky Trial Was A Ghoulish Affair

By Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press

The British-made satirical film “The Death of Stalin,” released last year, made fun of the absurdity of Soviet “justice” in the years when the dictator ruled his empire like an Oriental satrap. 

Accusations against people could come out of thin air. Trials, preceded by torture to extract confessions, took minutes.A bullet in the head by the secret police soon followed.

In real life, of course, this was no joke.

The final years of Stalinist repression in the eastern bloc countries where Communism had been imposed on Russian bayonets saw the wholesale execution of Communist apparatchiks, mainly Jews.

Despite their loyalty to Moscow during the war years, they found themselves accused of “bourgeois nationalism,” “Titoism,” “Trotskyism,” “Zionism,” and numerous other  ideological crimes.

In reality, Stalin was cleaning house, getting rid of genuine revolutionaries, who had the intelligence and stature to challenge diktats coming from the Kremlin, and replacing them with sycophantic apparatchiks.

Such show trials took place throughout the east European satellite states, but the ones in Czechoslovakia in November 1952 were particularly gruesome.

The Communist Party had taken over the Czech government in 1948, but Stalin was greatly disturbed when Yugoslavia, under Josip Broz Tito, broke from his control that same year. 

He ordered a purge in Czechoslovakia that would be intimidating. Fourteen Czech officials were chosen, chief among them Rudolf Slansky, the secretary general of the Communist Party. Eleven of the accused were Jews. 

This was no coincidence, as Stalin in his final years had become increasingly paranoid and anti-Semitic. He was apparently also angry that Israel, born four years earlier with considerable Soviet and Czech help, had not become a Communist state.

The anti-Jewish character of the Slansky trial was part and parcel of the late Stalinist turn toward anti-Semitism and was introduced into the case by Soviet advisers, who encouraged Czech investigators to stress the dangers of a purported world Zionist conspiracy.

Anti-Semitism was also visible within the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Officially deplored by the Communist regime, anti-Jewish sentiment took form as a struggle against Zionism and cosmopolitanism. 

Among the leadership, the party ideologue Vaclav Kopecky engaged in anti-Semitic diatribes. He repeatedly spoke out against Zionism and cosmopolitanism, depicting Jews as foreign, bourgeois, and unassimilated.

The indictments were prepared, the accused were arrested and isolated, and after some months of “interrogation,” they all pleaded guilty. 

They were forced to confess to being part of a Zionist conspiracy, with Zionism understood as a proxy for Western imperialism. 

Eleven of the defendants, including Slansky, were hanged; three were given life sentences. Those three, including London, were released after Stalin died. They were posthumously rehabilitated in 1968 during the “Prague Spring” period of liberalization.

The openly anti-Semitic character of these events came as a profound shock to many Jews and forced them to re-examine their positions vis-à-vis Zionism, Communism, and the Left. 

The Slansky trial has been documented in films. In 1970 the Greek-French film director and producer Costa-Gavras made The Confession. The screenplay was based on the book of the same name by one of the defendants in that trial, Artur London.

In 2001 a Czech-born American director, Zuzana Justman, made a documentary on the same subject, called "A Trial in Prague."

Now, 66 years later, actual archival footage of these events has come to light. Six hours of 35-millimetre black-and-white film and 80 hours of voice recordings, much of it mould-damaged, believed to cover most of the eight-day proceedings, have been found.

They were stashed in 14 metal and six wooden boxes in the basement of a bankrupt former metal research business in Panenské Brezany, near Prague.

Plans to turn the trial footage into a propaganda film had been shelved after Stalin died in March 1953 and so were never made public. They are a rare depiction of Stalin-era show trials, very few of which have available long-form footage.

Historian Petr Blazek and filmmaker Martin Vadas inspected the material in mid March and revealed that it included a filmed record of the 1952 Slansky show trial.

The material is now with the Czech National Film Archive, which hopes to restore the material to make it available for public viewing.

 “The priority is to make the footage safe,” said Michal Bragant, the archive’s chief executive. “We still have not learned enough from the 20th century. The more people learn about it and the horror of the show trials, the safer we will be.”

No truer words were ever uttered.

Amazing Academic Life of Bernard Lewis

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Bernard Lewis, the eminent scholar of Middle East politics and religion, died on May 19. The outlines of his long career are well known. Born to Jewish parents in London in 1916, Lewis received his Ph.D. from the University of London in 1939.

After serving in the British army during the Second World War, Lewis became a professor of history at the School of Oriental and African Studies, part of the University of London, from 1949 to 1974. 

Subsequently, he was appointed professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He retired from Princeton in 1986.

The author of some 30 books and 200 articles, his works have been translated into more than 25 languages. Most deal with Islamic history, chiefly Arab and Turkish, although he also translated poetry from Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, and Persian into English. He published his own memoirs, Notes on a Century, in 2012.

Most famous – and controversial – were the books What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (2002), and The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (2003). 

In “The Return of Islam,” an article Lewis published in Commentary magazine in January 1976, he predicted that Islam’s conflict with Christendom and the West would once again take centre-stage in global politics, because each “recognized the other as its principal, indeed its only rival.”

Lewis argued the roots of the battle lay in the similarities at the core of the two faiths. “You had two religions with this shared ideology living side by side,” he told National Public Radio in 2012. “Conflict between them was inevitable.”

Lewis was also notable for his public debates with the prominent Palestinian academic Edward Said, a humanities professor at Columbia University. Decades of discord between Lewis and Said led to a famous debate between them in the New York Review of Books in 1982. 

Said contended that Lewis had an “extraordinary capacity for getting everything wrong” and Lewis responded by calling Said’s comments “an unsavory mixture of sneer and smear, bluster and innuendo, and guilt by association.”

In a 1990 article for the Atlantic, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” he warned that “we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations” – a term that three years later was popularized by the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 had already helped transform Lewis into a well-known academic, because it made Washington pay attention to political Islam. Two decades later, in “License to Kill,” published in Foreign Affairs in 1998, he drew attention to Osama bin Laden’s call for jihad against America--three years before 9/11. After September 11, 2001, Lewis observed, “Osama bin Laden made me famous.”

Lewis harbored few illusions about the “Arab Spring” of 2011. “Many of our so-called friends in the region are inefficient kleptocracies. But they’re better than the Islamic radicals,” he told Jay Nordlinger, a senior editor at the National Review.

Not that Lewis was infallible: For instance, in “The Revolt of Islam,” an article published in the New Yorker in November 2001, he seemed to suggest that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein may have been implicated in the al-Qaeda 9/11 operation and that he had what Lewis called “unconventional” weapons. This, we now know, was untrue. 

Lewis also wrote that in both Iraq and Iran, “there are democratic oppositions capable of taking over and forming governments.” In an essay in the Wall Street Journal in 2002, he predicted that Iraqis would “rejoice” over an American invasion. That, too, did not happen.

Lewis summed up his whole career this way: “For some, I’m the towering genius,” he told the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2012. “For others, I’m the devil incarnate.”

The Bizarre Phenomenon of Dictator Literature

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The British journalist Daniel Kalder’s new book The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy, deals with something rather odd: the writings of despots and mass murderers. 

While living in Moscow, he set himself the task of reviewing an extensive selection of works penned by the dictators of the 20th and early 21st centuries. (The British title of the book is Dictator Literature.)

Kalder argues that Vladimir Lenin should be viewed as the father of this literary genre. Even before he had studied Marx, the young Lenin had read Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel What is to be Done? 

It inspired Lenin to dedicate himself fully to revolution. Deeply impressed, Lenin gave the same title to one of his own books, of which there were many. His collected works runs to 55 volumes.

While exiled by the tsarist government in Siberia, Lenin produced what Kalder calls “the first major book by the father of 20th-century dictator literature.” Over its 500 pages, The Development of Capitalism in Russia argued that the country was now industrialised rather than agricultural and so ready for rule by the urban proletariat.

Joseph Stalin, his successor as Soviet leader, as a trained seminarian collected and commented on and refocused Lenin’s writings. And, of course, he too wrote dozens of books of his own – turgid, boring nonsense. 

Stalin was so impressed by Alexander Kazbegi’s novel The Patricide, written in 1882, that he renamed himself “Koba” after its central character, and used the pseudonym throughout his early career. 

To bolster his claim to be a theorist; his works were published. His own ambitious history of the Bolshevik revolution, known as the Short Course, was not only printed in the tens of millions of copies, but also became an object of study by the Soviet masses.

Yet, Kalder tells us, as a young man even Stalin penned some not insignificant poetry in his native Georgian.

Mao Zedong first encountered Marxism while working in a library, “the ideal location for a cash-strapped nascent megalomaniac in need of easy access to inspirational bad ideas,” writes Kalder. He devoured the texts that would provide his ideological cover for the cruel regime he later imposed on China. 

His infamous “Little Red Book,” Quotations of Chairman Mao Zedong, was waved by millions of addled revolutionaries around the world during the years of the Cultural Revolution.

It was read out in factories, the way sacred texts are in monasteries. It was also credited with the ability to improve table-tennis skills and cure cancer.

These Communists had intellectual pretentions and their “works” became an important part of the promotion of their cults.

The Italian fascist Benito Mussolini immersed himself in the reading of classic texts. He was later a professional journalist, and highly successful newspaper editor, so it’s no surprise Il Duce went on to write poems and plays, including a historical drama based on Napoleon’s last days.

He published a biography of Jan Hus, the early proto-Protestant reformer, and even wrote a romance novel, The Cardinal’s Mistress.

Fellow fascist General Francisco Franco of Spain wrote the screenplay-novel Raza at the end of 1940 and start of 1941. The Caudillo’s narrative is set during the just-concluded Spanish Civil War.

As for the most notorious piece of “dictator literature,” that prize must go, hands down, to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. If ever we needed proof, Kalder contends, that in some cases “books and reading can cause immense harm,” this one is it.

More recently, Libya’s Colonel Moammar Gaddafi’s Green Book achieved a certain notoriety, while Saddam Hussein, even when busy slaughtering Iraqis, found time to publish the historical romance Zabiba and the King, after falling in love with the twenty-four-year-old daughter of one of his advisers.

More books emerged: He finished Get Out You Damned One!, a direct rebuke to the invading American forces, right before the Battle of Baghdad in 2003.

Kalder mocks those Western intellectuals whose anti-Western dogmas made them susceptible to any old nonsense. Jean-Paul Sartre sold Maoist newspapers in Paris, and the actions of the vicious Red Guards were lauded on the left as models of revolution. Michel Foucault managed to admire both Mao and Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. 

Kalder sums up by noting that most of these works are full of “tedium, megalomania, banality, mendacity, vanity and inadvertent self-revelations.” But, he observes, each dictator “has what every author can only dream of: a captive audience.”

Minorities Persecuted in Middle East

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

It’s a famous statement attributed to Adolf Hitler in a speech he gave to German army commanders on Aug. 22, 1939. The Fuehrer asked: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

The quote is now inscribed on one of the walls of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Most Canadians do not realize that, despite the fact that Christianity originated in today’s Israel, Christians for centuries following the introduction of Islam in the region still constituted a majority of the population in the Middle East. From Greece to Egypt, this was the eastern half of Christendom.

When the first Islamic armies arrived from the Arabian Peninsula during the 7th century, the Assyrian Church of the East was sending missionaries to China, India and Mongolia. The shift from Christianity to Islam happened gradually.

In the lands of the Fertile Crescent, Eastern Orthodox Christians were divided between Jacobites and Greek Orthodox. Catholics included Melkites and Maronites, as well as followers of the Latin rite.

There were Assyrian Nestorians, Chaldeans, and various small groups of Protestants, who were converted by 19th-century Europeans.

Non-Arab Armenians, most of them Armenian Orthodox, arrived in the early 20th century, fleeing the Turks. And then of course, there are the Copts, the largest Christian group in the Middle East.

But today, repression and religious cleansing is taking place in the Middle East. Entire communities have been uprooted, many fleeing for their lives, in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere.

The percentage of Christians in the region has dropped precipitously, as fanatical forces such as the Islamic State, al-Qaida, and others, seeking to re-create the expansionist Islamic empires of the past, make it clear that for them, all Christians are enemies.

From 1910 to now, the percentage of the Middle Eastern population that is Christian has declined from 14 per cent to just four per cent; this is large-scale ethnic cleansing, often ignored by the West.

The Aid to the Church in Need papal charity last year described the current level of persecution against Christians as being “worse than at any time in history.”

The report “Persecuted and Forgotten?” examined the plight of Christians in 13 countries over the past 12 years, and found the number of Christians in the Middle East had dropped drastically.

In Syria, it fell to just 500,000 from about 1.5 million when the Syrian civil war began, driven out by extremist groups like the Nusra Front and Islamic State.

With the fall of Saddam Hussein, Christians began to leave Iraq in large numbers, and the population shrank to less than 500,000 today from as many as 1.5 million in 2003.

“Governments in the West and the UN failed to offer Christians in countries such as Iraq and Syria the emergency help they needed as genocide got underway,” the report said.

Why the lack of attention? Politicians are reluctant to address the plight of Christians explicitly for fear of appearing to play into the “crusader” and ‘‘clash of civilizations’’ narratives the West is accused of embracing.

When the Islamic State massacred Egyptian Copts in Libya in 2015, the U.S. State Department referred to the victims merely as “Egyptian citizens.”

Aid to the Church in Need observed that “at a time in the West when there is increasing media focus on the rights of people regardless of gender, ethnicity or sexuality, it is ironic that there should be such limited coverage of the massive persecution experienced by so many Christians.”

Philippine Presidents Imperil Democracy

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

Among the presidential systems in Southeast Asia, the Philippines has the oldest one in the region.It has been an independent state since 1946.

Philippine presidents have usually dominated other branches of government and their hegemonic position led to the collapse of democracy there several decades ago and periodic instability since then. 

The Ferdinand Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte presidencies, in particular, demonstrate the dangers.

Marcos, elected in 1965, declared martial law in 1972, with authoritarian rule lasting until his overthrow in 1986. With his wife Imelda, his autocratic regime, based on widespread favoritism, eventually led to economic stagnation and recurring reports of human rights violations.

After free and fair elections were restored following his ouster, there were several periods of instability but Philippine democracy again faces a major challenge under the current leadership of Duterte.

He has already proved to be dangerous by undermining political checks and balances.

Duterte’s “war on drugs,” launched after he took office in 2016, has claimed an estimated 12,000 lives of primarily poor urban dwellers, including children. He has vowed to continue the anti-drug campaign until his term ends in 2022.

He also repeatedly subjected United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings Agnes Callamard to profanity-laced ridicule for her repeated efforts to secure an official visit to the Philippines.

A prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in the Hague in February started a preliminary examination into a complaint accusing Duterte and at least 11 officials of crimes against humanity.

On May 6 Duterte threatened to resort to emergency powers and enforce them “to the hilt” to deal with relentless criticism over his human rights record, crimes and government wrongdoing. He is already harassing dissenting voices in the country’s media.

The Philippines, not surprisingly, given its Spanish colonial history, is similar in its political culture to many Latin American countries. 

Presidents consider themselves entitled to rule as they see fit, constrained only by their term of office. Some scholars have referred to this as “hyper-presidentialism.” 

How could it be otherwise for somebody who claims to embody the whole of the nation? In this view, other institutions are nuisances. Accountability to courts and parliaments seem a mere impediment to the full authority that the president has been elected to exercise.

Philippine parties are quite weak and lack strong societal roots or clear party platforms. They are electoral vehicles which employ clientelist ties rather than programmatic appeals to win voters’ support. 

Also, patronage controlled by the president usually insures strong congressional majorities for the incumbent. So weak parties help avoid the gridlock which makes presidentialism elsewhere perilous.

Presidents in the Philippines’ “hyper-presidential” system are equipped with massive formal and informal powers. Their hegemonic position has enabled power hungry chief executives like Marcos and Duterte to undermine even the even weak checks and balances in the Philippine political system. 

Egypt’s Beleaguered Coptic Christians

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

 

The Copts of Egypt are over 10 million strong and have lived in the country as Christians for two millennia. They are the largest Christian and largest non-Muslim community in the Middle East.

The history of Egyptian Christianity predates that of Islam. Coptic Orthodox Christianity started in the first century when the first church was established in the city of Alexandria. By the fourth century, Alexandria and its popes had emerged as one of the leading pillars of Christendom.

After the seventh century Islamic conquest, however, Egypt has become Islamized and Arabized and Arabic gradually replaced the Coptic language. Slowly the country lost its Christian majority as Copts converted to Islam. 

In the eleventh century, Pope Christodolos was forced to move the seat of the papacy to Cairo, which had eclipsed Alexandria as Egypt’s largest city.

The Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt is today led by Pope Tawadros II, elected in November 2012. The 118^th Coptic pope, he succeeded the late Pope Shenouda III.

Egyptians who have remained Christians today consider themselves the original Egyptians with Pharaonic origin. Thus some Coptic intellectuals argue that Coptic culture is largely derived from pre-Christian culture, and precedes not just Islam but Christianity as well. It gives the Copts a claim to a deep heritage in Egyptian history and culture.

Nonetheless, Christian religious symbols are a means of identity expression for Copts, and the cultural development that distinguishes them from Egyptian Muslims has constructed a Coptic ethnicity.

Some ethnic Copts participated in the Egyptian national movement for independence and occupied many influential positions in the late 19^th century. Many became prominent in business.

However, things took a turn for the worse after Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrew the monarchy ad established a socialist republic after 1952. 

Copts were severely affected by Nasser’s nationalization policies, and his pan-Arab ideology undermined the Copts’ strong attachment to Egypt and their sense of identity as pre-Arab Egyptians.

Discriminatory state policies and political violence have historically marginalized Copts, particularly in many cities of Upper Egypt and in the Nile Delta area.

In August 2013, following the army coup that unseated the Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohamed Morsi, there were widespread attacks on Coptic churches and institutions in Egypt, amid clashes between the military and Morsi supporters. 

Egyptian human-rights organizations strongly condemned “rhetoric employed by leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and their allies which includes clear incitement to violence and religious hatred in order to achieve political gains.”

Samuel Tadros, a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, described these assaults as the worst against the Coptic Church since the 14th century.

The violence unleashed on Egypt’s Christians, which in recent years has left hundreds dead, is just the tip of a much more troubling iceberg. 

The average Copt suffers from systematic forms of persecution and institutionalized discrimination emanating from all levels and segments of society, including at all levels of education.

Copts have not only been significantly underrepresented in politics but also have had limited opportunities for employment and promotions, compared to the Muslim majority.

Attempts to address this are usually met with denial by Egyptian media and government are underreported.  Sometimes Copts drawing attention to these injustices are portrayed as agitators out to tarnish Egypt’s image.  

The 2014 Egyptian Constitution defines Islam as the state religion. While it is the duty of the state to protect the religious freedom of Copts in constructing and renovating church buildings, establishing churches has at times elicited violence against Copts in several towns in Upper Egypt.

Like many other Middle East Christians, Copts have a large diaspora in the west. Tadros estimates that over 18 per cent of ethnic Copts now live outside of Egypt.

Gaining converts in countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia has proven particularly exciting. 

“For 2,000 years, we were the official Church of Egypt,” Tadros said. “Today, we are in Pakistan, Singapore, Thailand, New Zealand, Sweden, Fiji, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Brazil, Ghana -- we have invaded the world.”

In the past decade, dozens of Americanized Coptic churches have opened across the United States, concentrated in Texas, California, and along the East Coast. There are now at least 450,000 Copts in the U.S. and over 250 Coptic churches in the country.

Canada and Australia are estimated to have at least 50,000 Coptic Egyptians each. Toronto has the largest concentration in this country, while the same holds for Sydney in Australia.

Slovenian Election Moves Country to Right

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

In 1992, Slovenia emerged as an independent country from the wreckage of the former Yugoslavia.

Fortunately for the Slovenes, this was accomplished quickly and relatively peacefully. The country did not go through the protracted and brutal wars that enveloped the rest of the former state, and it has peaceful relations with all its neighbours.

The Slovenes were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the First World Wart. When Yugoslavia was established after the First World War, the Slovenes, a southern Slav people, were incorporated into the new state.

Following the conquest of Yugoslavia by the Germans and Italians in 1941, the southern part of Slovenia, including Ljubljana, was annexed to Italy, while the Nazis took over the northern and eastern parts of the country.

In 1945, Yugoslavia was liberated by the partisan resistance and soon became a Communist federation, with Slovenia one of its constituent republics.

As Yugoslavia began to disintegrate in the 1980s, Slovenes began to demand democratization and independence. The Slovenian declaration of independence on June 25, 1991 led to a brief conflict, known as the Ten-Day War, with the Yugoslav army, in effect establishing Slovenia as an independent polity.

So Slovenia's independence from Yugoslavia was almost bloodless. The country also found the transition from a state economy to the free market easier than most other former Yugoslav republics.

Since independence, the largely ethnically homogenous country of some two million people – a little less than 300,000 in the capital, Ljubljana -- has remained a vibrant democracy. 

Slovenes have looked towards Italy rather than to fellow Slavs in Croatia or Serbia, and are more west European than Balkan in orientation. Since 2004, the country belongs to both NATO and the European Union.

Long regarded as one of the best-performing new EU members, Slovenia was dragged into a deep recession by the European financial crisis in 2012, leading to political turbulence.

A coalition government headed by Prime Minister Miro Cerar of the Modern Centre Party (SMC), which he founded in 2014, was formed that year. The party won 34.6 per cent of the vote in the 2014 parliamentary election, good for 36 of the 90 seats in parliament.

However, in March Cerar resigned his position, after facing public-sector strikes, resistance to reform by his ruling partners, and a ruling by the Supreme Court that annulled a referendum he had won backing a new rail link from Koper, an Adriatic port, to Divaca, on the Italian border.  

Cerar had insisted the rail line would be of strategic importance for the development of Slovenia. “This was the straw that broke the camel's back,” Cerar said in his resignation note to parliament.

On June 3, new parliamentary elections saw the opposition centre-right Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS), led by Janez Jansa, a former prime minister, win almost 25 per cent of the vote, good for 25 of the 90 seats in parliament. 

It is opposed to immigration and is closely allied to Victor Orban’s Hungary. Jansa vowed to secure the border against illegal migration and opposes the EU’s imposition of migrant quotas on member states.

A hike in the number of people trying to cross into Slovenia had pushed migration up the electoral agenda. Police dealt with 1,226 illegal border crossings in the first four months of 2018, compared with 322 over the same period last year. 

The anti-establishment List of Marjan Sarec (LMS) party of comedian-turned-politician Marjan Sarec got 12.6 per cent, followed by the centre-left Social Democrats (SD) with almost 10 per cent, while Cerar’s SMC managed just 9.7 per cent. They will receive 13, 10 and 10 seats, respectively.

As Jansa’s party didn’t secure enough of the vote to rule on his own, postelection negotiations to form a new government are necessary. The SDS will need to link up with at least two other parties to gain a majority – not an easy task.

A New Day in Spain?

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

Has a new day arrived in Spain? Both the national and the Catalan governments have new leaders.

Pedro Sanchez was sworn in on June 2 in Madrid as Spain’s new prime minister following the fall of Mariano Rajoy over a corruption scandal involving his conservative People’s Party (PP). A court found the party guilty of operating a slush fund.

Sanchez’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), which led the parliamentary revolt, will now form a shaky government.

Rajoy was one of the longest-serving leaders in Europe. He got his first ministerial post in 1996 and was elected as prime minister on his third attempt, in 2011.

The Socialists hold just under a quarter of the seats in parliament, so Sanchez’s government will rely on support from the far-left We Can (Podemos) party and nationalists from Catalonia and the Basque region. So he may not last long.

One of the main challenges for Sanchez will be Catalonian secessionism. Rajoy had taken a hard line on the issue, jailing Catalan separatists and refusing to acknowledge the results of last October’s referendum on independence, won overwhelmingly by Catalans seeking sovereignty.

The Catalan parliament, under its president, Carles Puigdemont of the Catalan European Democratic Party (PDeCAT), had declared independence, in contravention of Spain’s constitution. Angered, Madrid imposed direct rule and called a snap regional election in Catalonia in December.

But three Catalan separatist parties formed an electoral alliance, Together for Catalonia (‎JuntsxCat), and took 70 seats in the 135-seat parliament. 

The PDeCAT won 34 seats, the Republican Left of Catalonia-Catalonia Yes (ERC-CatSi) gained 32, and the far-left, anti-capitalist Popular Unity Candidacy-Constituent Call (CUP-CC) took four.

So, after months of direct rule from Madrid, a new separatist administration led by Quim Torra, formally an independent, also took office on June 2, in the Catalan capital, Barcelona. 

Sanchez had said that one of the priorities of his government would be “rebuilding bridges” that could “start a dialogue between the Spanish government and the new government in Catalonia.”

But will Sanchez and Torra get off to a good start? The new Spanish prime minister recently called Torra a “racist” over remarks he had made about Spaniards. He also described Torra as “the Spanish Le Pen.”

Torra is a close ally of Puigdemont who, along with four other Catalan politicians, fled Spain last year; they remain in self-imposed exile following Madrid’s decision to arrest them for “rebellion.” 

Two of Puigdemont’s ex-ministers, Joaquim Forn of the PDeCATand Oriol Junqeras of the ERC-CatSi, remain in prison.

Torra declared that his government “accepts the charge to continue forward with the mandate to form an independent state.”

The Madrid government has been hiding behind the country’s constitution to thwart the clear political will of Catalans. The Catalan question is not just a legal matter but one that involves the issue of self-determination, and requires a political solution.

Russia and Iran are Wary Allies

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The relationship between Moscow and Tehran has been converted into a growing strategic partnership.

Since President Donald Trump took office, in 2017, Moscow and Tehran have shared increasingly common bonds: growing tensions with Washington and a quest to expand spheres of influence in the Middle East.

The deepening ties were reflected when Putin flew to Tehran, last November, for talks with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani. “Our co-operation can isolate America,” Khamenei told Putin, who in turn called the growing Russian-Iran co-operation “very productive.”

The chief of staff of Russia’s armed forces, General Valery Gerasimov, also visited Iran for talks with Major General Mohammad Bagheri, who oversees the Revolutionary Guards and the regular Iranian Army, Navy, and Air Force.

In April Iranian Rouhani hailed the “very close” relationship his government has formed with Russia and touted the alliance. “I’m glad that our relations are developing every year,” Rouhani said.

“Close relations and cooperation between Iran and Russia on Syria and peace and security in the region has been very effective,” he added.

And now that President Donald Trump has announced that the U.S. is pulling out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, they have become even closer.  Russia is one of the six signatories to the agreement. Russian President Vladimir Putin has expressed his “deep concern” over Washington’s withdrawal.

The Iranian and Russian foreign ministers met in Moscow not long afterwards. “Unfortunately once again we see that Washington is trying to revise key international agreements, this time to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Jerusalem issue and a number of other agreements,” Russia’s Sergei Lavrov said. Javad Zarif agreed, of course. 

However, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov did state that the nuclear deal with Iran could not be preserved without some concessions from Tehran.

Despite all this, the long-term sustainability of the Moscow-Tehran alignment remains unclear. For example, Iran’s use of Syrian territory to create a permanent transit point for weaponry to Hezbollah has alarmed Russian policymakers who seek to preserve strong relations with Israel.

In any case, Russian-Iranian relations have never run smooth for long. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Iran was divided into British and Russian zones of political and economic influence. 

In 1941, during the Second World War, the Soviet Union and Great Britain invaded Iran. They feared Iran would join the war on the side of the Axis powers and were protecting their interests.

These included the oil deposits belonging to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and the corridor which allowed the United States to supply the Soviet Union with military equipment and materials during the war.

After the war, Iran saw the Soviet Union as a greater threat than the western powerst. The Red Army maintained a presence in northern Iran even after the end of the conflict, and supported the establishment of two short-lived separatist states.

In late 1945, the so-called Republic of Mahabad in northwest Iran came into existence, fueled by Kurdish nationalists. In early 1946, pro-Soviet Iranians proclaimed a separatist Peoples’ Republic of Azerbaijan.

Soon, an alliance of these two forces, supported in arms and training by the Soviet Union, engaged in fighting with Iranian forces, resulting in a total of 2,000 casualties. 

Diplomatic pressure on the Soviets by the United States eventually led to Soviet withdrawal and dissolution of the separatist Azeri and Kurdish states. The crisis is seen as one of the early conflicts in the growing cold war at the time.

To this day, Iranians speak resentfully of the Soviet occupation. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who became the supreme leader in 1979, disdained both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. His defining slogan was “Neither East nor West but Islamic Republic.”

However, with the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988, some Iranian officials sought to improve ties with Moscow on pragmatic grounds. By the end of the 1990s, Russia had emerged as Iran’s main conventional arms supplier. In addition, the two countries shared a strong opposition to Sunni Islamism.

The majority of Russia’s Muslims are Sunni and countering extremism has been among Putin’s official policies. Shia Iran shares this concern. So Tehran sided with Moscow during Chechnya’s separatist struggles in the 1990s. 

Still, historically there has been little love lost between these two countries, and therefore an alliance can only go so far. This is really a marriage of convenience.

In Malaysia, Someone Old is New Again

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

 

Meet the world’s oldest newly-elected prime minister: Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad, whose opposition coalition won the country’s parliamentary election on May 9.

But this is even more amazing: he was first elected prime minister 37 years ago – as leader of the party which he has now deposed from power. A party, by the way, that had ruled the country uninterruptedly for 61 years.

Ever since Malaya, as it then was, gained independence from Great Britain in 1957, it has been led by the United Malays National Organization (UMNO). Indeed, until now the party and its broader coalition, the National Front, had never lost its parliamentary majority.

Mahathir served as its prime minister between 1981 and 2003, when he retired from politics. But disgusted by the activities of his UNMO successors, Mahathir returned to political life as the head of a four-party multiethnic opposition, Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope). 

Formed three years ago, the Alliance included his own newly-formed Malaysian United Indigenous Party. A collection of reformers, nationalists, Islamists, ethnic minorities and even some of Mahathir’s former enemies, it has now ousted a government long dependent on stoking the fears of Malaysia’s Malay Muslim majority to prolong its grip on power. 

The Alliance gained almost half the popular vote and won 122 of the country’s 222 parliamentary seats, while the National Front, with 36.4 per cent, took only 79. A coalition of Islamist parties came third with 13.6 per cent, good for 18 seats.

Yet Mahathir is a strange choice to reform this corruption-ridden nation. During his years as prime minister from 1981 to 2003, he hounded the media, jailed his opponents on what were seen as trumped-up charges and turned a blind eye as members of his governing UMNO-led National Front coalition personally profited from their political positions. 

Mahathir’s ethnic Malay nationalism also alienated Malaysia’s sizable Chinese and Indian minorities. Mahathir brought in an affirmative action scheme policy gave “sons of the soil,” as Malays and indigenous people are known, preferential treatment in education and employment. Most civil service jobs went to Malays.

What kept Pakatan Harapan together was revulsion for Prime Minister Najib Razak, accused of immense greed and graft during his nine years in office. 

At least $3.5 billion stolen from a government fund was spent on expensive real estate, jewelry and art. Among the items the money was spent on was a $27.3 million diamond necklace for Najib’s wife, Rosmah Mansor, as well as a luxury yacht. 

The United States Justice Department believes much of the money has been laundered through American financial institutions.

Najib, whose father was the second prime minister of Malaysia, and whose uncle was the country’s third, grew up thinking that leading the country was his birthright.

 “You know the mess the country is in,” Mahathir said at a news conference after the election, “and we need to attend to this mess as soon as possible.”

Mahathir secured a pardon for another onetime protégé, the former opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, who was serving his second prison sentence after being convicted on sodomy charges three years ago. 

He was once Mahathir’s deputy prime minister, but the two had a falling out, and both of Anwar’s convictions were widely seen as politically motivated. Anwar’s supporters hope he can someday become prime minister himself. 

Mahathir has appointed Lim Guan Eng, an ethnic Chinese, as finance minister, the first non-Malay to be appointed to the powerful post in 44 years. He also named former Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin as home affairs minister and Mohamad Sabu as defence minister. The three are party leaders in his alliance.

The “old-new” prime minister promises to fight corruption, prosecute Najib – he and his wife have been prevented from fleeing the country -- and unite this diverse nation of 31 million people.