Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
The French economist Thomas Piketty, who teaches at the Paris School of Economics, has published a book which is generating a lot of attention. In this latest work, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” Piketty puts forward a theory of capitalism that tries to explain its uneven distribution of rewards in the United States and elsewhere.
An article Piketty co-authored with University of California at Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez in 2003, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” detailed how the share of U.S. national income taken by households at the top of the income distribution had risen sharply during the early decades of the twentieth century, then fallen back during and after the Second World War, but began to escalate again beginning in the 1980s.
Their findings are backed by other research. “Fiscal Policy and Income Inequality,” a report prepared by the International Monetary Fund earlier this year, revealed that in the U.S., the share of market income captured by the richest 10 per cent surged from around 30 percent in 1980 to 48 percent by 2012, while the share of the richest one per cent increased from eight per cent to 19 per cent.
“One observes in the recent period an unprecedented rise of top managerial compensation in the United States” as well, Piketty told the New York Times in an interview last month. “This is a new form of inequality, which I attempt to explain in terms of the particular U.S. history of the social and fiscal norms over the past century.”
While the average American chief executive was paid about twenty times as much as the typical employee of his firm in the 1950s, today the pay ratio at major corporations is more than two hundred to one, and many executives do even better.
According to Deborah Hargreaves, director of the campaign group the High Pay Centre, the compensation received by chief executives of companies in the S&P 500 index in 2012 was 354 times that of rank-and-file staff.
Last year, the 10 highest-paid chief executives in the U.S. received more than $100 million in compensation, according to the Governance Metrics International Ratings annual poll of executive compensation.
A typical worker at Walmart earns less than twenty-five thousand dollars a year; Michael Duke, the retailer’s former chief executive, was paid more than $23 million in 2012.We see soaring profits and bonuses even as employment and wages stagnate.
Nor do these oligarchs have to give much of it back to society. The single most scandalous tax loophole in America, which allows people with the highest earnings to pay an insignificant amount in taxes, is the one on capital gains, because that carries a lower tax rate (a maximum of 23.8 per cent) than that on earned income (with a maximum of 39.6 per cent).
As billionaire Warren Buffet has famously remarked, his tax rate is lower than that of his secretary.
The result? The richest 10 per cent of American households now own some 70 per cent of all the country’s wealth while the entire bottom half of households own just five per cent. And the gap keeps widening.
A Gallup Poll conducted last September reported that 20 per cent of American said that they had, at times, lacked enough money to buy the food that they or their families needed during the year.
How will this inequality affect the very future of the American political system? Most people have assumed that capitalism and democracy are bound together in a symbiotic relationship. Is this no longer the case? Might there come to be a divergence between capitalism and democracy?
The poor won’t get much help from Congress – more than half of its members have an average net worth of $1 million or more.
A 2012 poll released by the Pew Research Center, “Rising Share of Americans See Conflict Between Rich and Poor,” is not encouraging. It revealed that young Americans were 14 per cent more likely than older Americans to say that the wealthy in America got there mainly because “they know the right people or were born into wealthy families” rather than because of their “hard work, ambition, and education.”
Is social mobility, the heart of the “American Dream,” becoming a thing of the past? President Barack Obama has called rising income inequality and lack of economic mobility “the defining challenge of our time.” He’s right.
Professor Henry Srebrnik
Monday, April 07, 2014
Tuesday, April 01, 2014
Baltic States Cast Wary Eye on their Former Russian Masters
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
The only countries once part of the Soviet Union to have attained membership in both the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. They all joined in 2004.
They had been forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940, as part of the division of eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin. Never reconciled to Soviet domination, they were the first among the 15 Soviet republics to proclaim their independence from the USSR in 1990, and they gained it the following year.
In 2004 they were admitted into both the EU and NATO, and they are culturally, economically, and politically now part of Europe.
Both Latvia and Estonia have unsettled disputes with Russia along their eastern borders. But apart from their continued wariness about Russian ambitions, particularly following the events in Ukraine, they also are faced with the challenge of dealing with large internal Russian-speaking minorities, the legacy of decades of Soviet subjugation.
The Baltic states are very small in both territory and population. Estonia has 1.3 million people, Latvia about two million, and the biggest, Lithuania, has three million.
Estonians and Latvians were historically Lutherans, having been influenced by the Germans and the Swedes, whereas Lithuanians were traditionally Roman Catholics, because of a close political alliance with Poland over much of their medieval history.
In fact the current capital, Vilnius, was part of Poland between the two world wars, when the capital was in Kaunas.
After the Second World War, immigrants from the Soviet Russian republic soon became a dominant minority in Estonia and Latvia, though less so in Lithuania.
Today the Russian minorities range in population from six per cent in Lithuania, to 25 per cent in Estonia, all the way to 27 per cent in Latvia.
Some 94 per cent of the current population of Narva, Estonia’s third-largest city, next to Russia, are Russian-speakers. In some Latvian cities, too, ethnic Latvians constitute a minority, and even in the capital of Riga, they make up slightly less than half of the total population.
The newly sovereign Baltic nations regarded those Soviets who had arrived while their countries had been forcibly incorporated into the USSR not as immigrants or fellow nationals but as illegitimate occupiers, not even entitled to real inclusion within the polity.
So Estonia and Latvia enacted restrictive citizenship laws soon after independence; these entitled Russians to citizenship only after stringent tests. (Lithuania, with its small minority, did not see the need for this.)
Knowledge of the respective national language and history was set as a condition for obtaining citizenship through naturalisation. However, the purported difficulty of the initial language tests became a point of international contention, human rights organizations claiming that they made it impossible for many older Russians who grew up in the Baltic region to gain citizenship.
This problem was compounded by the fact that application for EU and NATO membership became directly linked to democratic requirements, including protection of minority rights.
Consequently, the Estonian and Latvian governments modified their strict citizenship legislation -- but this was not accompanied by an equivalent liberalization of their attitudes.
In their heart of hearts, the Baltic peoples would love to see the Russians leave. Their very presence reminds Estonians and Latvians, in particular, of their decades-long condition of Soviet oppression, which included mass murders, expulsions, and exile to gulags.
Today, though, the majority of ethnic Russians in Estonia and Latvia (as well as Lithuania) have attained citizenship. In fact, specific political parties voicing the rights and demands of the Russian minority are active. In Estonia, the Centre Party is supported by much of the ethnic Russian population. The Latvian equivalent, the Harmony Centre Party, has gained a strong voice in national politics.
Yet Moscow continues to demand better treatment of the Russian-speaking minorities in Estonia and Latvia, and some Estonians and Latvians fear that their Russian populations could be potentially manipulated by Russian President Vladimir Putin to destabilise the region.
The Baltic States are engaged in talks with their NATO partners to step up security in the region. “For us it is a very important issue that NATO is capable of acting,” said Urmas Reinsalu, the Estonian Minister of Defence.
The only countries once part of the Soviet Union to have attained membership in both the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. They all joined in 2004.
They had been forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1940, as part of the division of eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin. Never reconciled to Soviet domination, they were the first among the 15 Soviet republics to proclaim their independence from the USSR in 1990, and they gained it the following year.
In 2004 they were admitted into both the EU and NATO, and they are culturally, economically, and politically now part of Europe.
Both Latvia and Estonia have unsettled disputes with Russia along their eastern borders. But apart from their continued wariness about Russian ambitions, particularly following the events in Ukraine, they also are faced with the challenge of dealing with large internal Russian-speaking minorities, the legacy of decades of Soviet subjugation.
The Baltic states are very small in both territory and population. Estonia has 1.3 million people, Latvia about two million, and the biggest, Lithuania, has three million.
Estonians and Latvians were historically Lutherans, having been influenced by the Germans and the Swedes, whereas Lithuanians were traditionally Roman Catholics, because of a close political alliance with Poland over much of their medieval history.
In fact the current capital, Vilnius, was part of Poland between the two world wars, when the capital was in Kaunas.
After the Second World War, immigrants from the Soviet Russian republic soon became a dominant minority in Estonia and Latvia, though less so in Lithuania.
Today the Russian minorities range in population from six per cent in Lithuania, to 25 per cent in Estonia, all the way to 27 per cent in Latvia.
Some 94 per cent of the current population of Narva, Estonia’s third-largest city, next to Russia, are Russian-speakers. In some Latvian cities, too, ethnic Latvians constitute a minority, and even in the capital of Riga, they make up slightly less than half of the total population.
The newly sovereign Baltic nations regarded those Soviets who had arrived while their countries had been forcibly incorporated into the USSR not as immigrants or fellow nationals but as illegitimate occupiers, not even entitled to real inclusion within the polity.
So Estonia and Latvia enacted restrictive citizenship laws soon after independence; these entitled Russians to citizenship only after stringent tests. (Lithuania, with its small minority, did not see the need for this.)
Knowledge of the respective national language and history was set as a condition for obtaining citizenship through naturalisation. However, the purported difficulty of the initial language tests became a point of international contention, human rights organizations claiming that they made it impossible for many older Russians who grew up in the Baltic region to gain citizenship.
This problem was compounded by the fact that application for EU and NATO membership became directly linked to democratic requirements, including protection of minority rights.
Consequently, the Estonian and Latvian governments modified their strict citizenship legislation -- but this was not accompanied by an equivalent liberalization of their attitudes.
In their heart of hearts, the Baltic peoples would love to see the Russians leave. Their very presence reminds Estonians and Latvians, in particular, of their decades-long condition of Soviet oppression, which included mass murders, expulsions, and exile to gulags.
Today, though, the majority of ethnic Russians in Estonia and Latvia (as well as Lithuania) have attained citizenship. In fact, specific political parties voicing the rights and demands of the Russian minority are active. In Estonia, the Centre Party is supported by much of the ethnic Russian population. The Latvian equivalent, the Harmony Centre Party, has gained a strong voice in national politics.
Yet Moscow continues to demand better treatment of the Russian-speaking minorities in Estonia and Latvia, and some Estonians and Latvians fear that their Russian populations could be potentially manipulated by Russian President Vladimir Putin to destabilise the region.
The Baltic States are engaged in talks with their NATO partners to step up security in the region. “For us it is a very important issue that NATO is capable of acting,” said Urmas Reinsalu, the Estonian Minister of Defence.
Monday, March 31, 2014
Israel Watches Warily As Assad Gains Ground in the Syrian Civil War
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
Thanks to Russian support and American indecision, the Bashar al-Assad regime is now gaining the upper hand in the Syrian civil war. In towns near the Lebanese border, the Syrian army and its Hezbollah allies are methodically making progress in the struggle against the Sunni rebels.
With Russia holding veto power at the Security Council, there is nothing the United Nations can do, to the frustration of Washington.
Israel has tried to steer clear of the Syrian civil war, but it did launch a series of airstrikes into Syria near the town of Quneitra on March 19 in retaliation for injuries sustained by four of its soldiers along the border in the Golan Heights – though the perpetrators were probably Hezbollah operatives. “We hold the Assad regime responsible for what happens in its territory,” Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon explained.
But Israel does not want an escalation of tensions with Damascus. It remains concerned that an ouster of Assad could see power in Syria fall to Islamic militants there, particularly al-Qaeda-linked groups such as the Jabhat al-Nusra, and further destabilize the region.
Founded in January 2012, al-Nusra has been described as one of the most aggressive and successful rebel forces in Syria.
A chaotic collapse of the Syrian state and disintegration of government troops could provide such extremists with a safe haven to launch operations into Israel itself. In that scenario, the Israeli army could be facing a permanent low-intensity war with various militant groups in the Golan Heights, similar to the situation in the Gaza Strip.
On the other hand, if the regime loses in Syria that will weaken Iran, the only country posing a potential existential threat to Israel. The fall of Assad’s regime would remove Syria as a conduit for weapons flowing from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
And if Iran loses Syria as an ally, it would mean the end of the Iranian bid for Arab hegemony, because the majority Sunnis will have nothing to do with the Shi’a theocrats in Tehran.
The Iranian Kayhan newspaper, which usually reflects the views of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, wrote that Iran should draw lessons from the Crimean crisis and learn from Russia’s conduct:
“From a national perspective, Russia is helped by Iran in addressing most of its security and diplomatic concerns, and in return Iran is helped by Russia’s support on the Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi, Afghan, nuclear, and other issues. Furthermore, in this affair Russia is in conflict with our enemies, that is, the West. That in itself means we must be pleased with the defeat of our enemies, even if we have criticism of the Russian side.”
Still, Russia and the United States are continuing to cooperate in pressuring Syria to comply with its pledges on chemical weapons. Under a United Nations Security Council resolution that was supported by both Russia and the United States, the entire Syrian chemical arsenal must be destroyed by June 30.
Nearly half of Syria’s chemical stockpile for weapons use has now been removed from the country. “The latest movements increased the portion of chemicals that have now been removed from Syria for destruction outside the country to more than 45 percent,” said the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the group that is collaborating with the United Nations to ensure the arsenal’s destruction.
Thanks to Russian support and American indecision, the Bashar al-Assad regime is now gaining the upper hand in the Syrian civil war. In towns near the Lebanese border, the Syrian army and its Hezbollah allies are methodically making progress in the struggle against the Sunni rebels.
With Russia holding veto power at the Security Council, there is nothing the United Nations can do, to the frustration of Washington.
Israel has tried to steer clear of the Syrian civil war, but it did launch a series of airstrikes into Syria near the town of Quneitra on March 19 in retaliation for injuries sustained by four of its soldiers along the border in the Golan Heights – though the perpetrators were probably Hezbollah operatives. “We hold the Assad regime responsible for what happens in its territory,” Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon explained.
But Israel does not want an escalation of tensions with Damascus. It remains concerned that an ouster of Assad could see power in Syria fall to Islamic militants there, particularly al-Qaeda-linked groups such as the Jabhat al-Nusra, and further destabilize the region.
Founded in January 2012, al-Nusra has been described as one of the most aggressive and successful rebel forces in Syria.
A chaotic collapse of the Syrian state and disintegration of government troops could provide such extremists with a safe haven to launch operations into Israel itself. In that scenario, the Israeli army could be facing a permanent low-intensity war with various militant groups in the Golan Heights, similar to the situation in the Gaza Strip.
On the other hand, if the regime loses in Syria that will weaken Iran, the only country posing a potential existential threat to Israel. The fall of Assad’s regime would remove Syria as a conduit for weapons flowing from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
And if Iran loses Syria as an ally, it would mean the end of the Iranian bid for Arab hegemony, because the majority Sunnis will have nothing to do with the Shi’a theocrats in Tehran.
The Iranian Kayhan newspaper, which usually reflects the views of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, wrote that Iran should draw lessons from the Crimean crisis and learn from Russia’s conduct:
“From a national perspective, Russia is helped by Iran in addressing most of its security and diplomatic concerns, and in return Iran is helped by Russia’s support on the Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi, Afghan, nuclear, and other issues. Furthermore, in this affair Russia is in conflict with our enemies, that is, the West. That in itself means we must be pleased with the defeat of our enemies, even if we have criticism of the Russian side.”
Still, Russia and the United States are continuing to cooperate in pressuring Syria to comply with its pledges on chemical weapons. Under a United Nations Security Council resolution that was supported by both Russia and the United States, the entire Syrian chemical arsenal must be destroyed by June 30.
Nearly half of Syria’s chemical stockpile for weapons use has now been removed from the country. “The latest movements increased the portion of chemicals that have now been removed from Syria for destruction outside the country to more than 45 percent,” said the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the group that is collaborating with the United Nations to ensure the arsenal’s destruction.
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Germany Again a European Colossus
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
By the spring of 1941, Germany was master of Europe. Hitler’s New Order included conquered countries, such as France and Poland; allies, such as Hungary and Italy: and states with an affinity to its ideology, like Portugal and Spain.
When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union that June, Moscow had no allies on the continent save Great Britain, which remained at war with Hitler.
Today, a reunited and resurgent Germany is the economic driver of the 28-member European Union – which includes Britain. And the EU keeps expanding eastwards, with another half-dozen countries vying for membership. Germany is also the most important nation in NATO after the United States.
France and the United Kingdom may have permanent seats on the UN Security Council, but if one were to reconfigure that body today, at least one of them would be replaced by Germany.
Someone just arrived from Mars could be forgiven for assuming that it was Germany that had won the Second World War.
Russia, on the other hand, has since 1989 lost not only its old Warsaw Pact buffer zone, but also the non-Russian Soviet republics, including the Baltic States, Ukraine, the Caucasian countries, and central Asia. NATO expanded eastward and Russia became more isolated. Belarus is now its only ally in Europe.
To add a dollop of irony, the current German chancellor, Angela Merkel, grew up in the old East Germany, then a vassal state of Moscow’s, and a country where Russian President Vladimir Putin had served as a KGB officer.
From Hitler’s “Gotterdammerung” of 1945, which left Germany in ruins and occupied by the victors of the war, including the Soviets, to the reunification in 1990, two generations of Germans were careful not to throw their political weight around.
Those who had supported Hitler were basically in a type of political purgatory, while their children’s generation was consumed by the evils inflicted upon the world by their parents.
Today, though, a new German generation is no longer wracked by shame or guilt; they no longer feel the need to atone for Germany’s war crimes. So Germany is today a “normal” – and indeed, much admired – country.
This has had profound implications for the Russians, who have moved in the opposite direction – much weakened and increasingly reviled by liberals in Europe and North America.
Merkel told the German parliament on March 13 that Putin’s obsessions with “spheres of influence and territorial claims” were throwbacks to an era “that we thought we had transcended.” She declared that the Group of 8, a forum of major industrial nations in which Russia was originally included as a means of nudging it toward democracy and free enterprise, had ceased to exist.
By the standards of German foreign policy towards Russia, such a tough tone is new. Unless Putin stops, Merkel added, Germany and its allies will step up their resistance, though only through economic means. The country has very close business relations with Russia and has the greatest capacity to exert pressure.
Last year, trade between Germany and Russia amounted to almost close to 77 billion euros ($107 billion). Russia primarily supplies petroleum and natural gas to Germany. Germany, on the other hand, exports mechanical engineering products, medicines, trains and automobiles to Russia.
Sigmar Gabriel, the German Minister of Economics and Energy, has halted a major Russian military contract for the Rheinmetall defence technology group, at least temporarily. “The German government considers the export of the combat training center to Russia unjustifiable in the current situation,” he said, as he cancelled delivery of the120 million euro ($165 million) battle simulation facility.
Such moves might also backfire. Russia supplies 36 percent and 35 percent of Germany’s imports of natural gas and oil, respectively. Russia might react to economic sanctions by reducing those exports.
But the German economy is a powerhouse and would manage to acquire other sources. In any case, when asked about the consequences for German companies of an economic war with Russia, many Germans have replied that political principles are more important than profits.
By the spring of 1941, Germany was master of Europe. Hitler’s New Order included conquered countries, such as France and Poland; allies, such as Hungary and Italy: and states with an affinity to its ideology, like Portugal and Spain.
When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union that June, Moscow had no allies on the continent save Great Britain, which remained at war with Hitler.
Today, a reunited and resurgent Germany is the economic driver of the 28-member European Union – which includes Britain. And the EU keeps expanding eastwards, with another half-dozen countries vying for membership. Germany is also the most important nation in NATO after the United States.
France and the United Kingdom may have permanent seats on the UN Security Council, but if one were to reconfigure that body today, at least one of them would be replaced by Germany.
Someone just arrived from Mars could be forgiven for assuming that it was Germany that had won the Second World War.
Russia, on the other hand, has since 1989 lost not only its old Warsaw Pact buffer zone, but also the non-Russian Soviet republics, including the Baltic States, Ukraine, the Caucasian countries, and central Asia. NATO expanded eastward and Russia became more isolated. Belarus is now its only ally in Europe.
To add a dollop of irony, the current German chancellor, Angela Merkel, grew up in the old East Germany, then a vassal state of Moscow’s, and a country where Russian President Vladimir Putin had served as a KGB officer.
From Hitler’s “Gotterdammerung” of 1945, which left Germany in ruins and occupied by the victors of the war, including the Soviets, to the reunification in 1990, two generations of Germans were careful not to throw their political weight around.
Those who had supported Hitler were basically in a type of political purgatory, while their children’s generation was consumed by the evils inflicted upon the world by their parents.
Today, though, a new German generation is no longer wracked by shame or guilt; they no longer feel the need to atone for Germany’s war crimes. So Germany is today a “normal” – and indeed, much admired – country.
This has had profound implications for the Russians, who have moved in the opposite direction – much weakened and increasingly reviled by liberals in Europe and North America.
Merkel told the German parliament on March 13 that Putin’s obsessions with “spheres of influence and territorial claims” were throwbacks to an era “that we thought we had transcended.” She declared that the Group of 8, a forum of major industrial nations in which Russia was originally included as a means of nudging it toward democracy and free enterprise, had ceased to exist.
By the standards of German foreign policy towards Russia, such a tough tone is new. Unless Putin stops, Merkel added, Germany and its allies will step up their resistance, though only through economic means. The country has very close business relations with Russia and has the greatest capacity to exert pressure.
Last year, trade between Germany and Russia amounted to almost close to 77 billion euros ($107 billion). Russia primarily supplies petroleum and natural gas to Germany. Germany, on the other hand, exports mechanical engineering products, medicines, trains and automobiles to Russia.
Sigmar Gabriel, the German Minister of Economics and Energy, has halted a major Russian military contract for the Rheinmetall defence technology group, at least temporarily. “The German government considers the export of the combat training center to Russia unjustifiable in the current situation,” he said, as he cancelled delivery of the120 million euro ($165 million) battle simulation facility.
Such moves might also backfire. Russia supplies 36 percent and 35 percent of Germany’s imports of natural gas and oil, respectively. Russia might react to economic sanctions by reducing those exports.
But the German economy is a powerhouse and would manage to acquire other sources. In any case, when asked about the consequences for German companies of an economic war with Russia, many Germans have replied that political principles are more important than profits.
Monday, March 24, 2014
Colonialism Was Part of a Now Discredited Zeitgeist
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
Incredible as it seems to us today, until the end of the Second World War, the colonial empires of European powers plus the United States were considered “normal,” and even beneficial to the non-western peoples under their domination.
Imperial rule was justified and supported by most of the citizens in the imperial countries. The notion of rule over tropical lands commanded widespread acceptance, even among those who associated imperial colonization with oppression and exploitation.
For example, the 1904 Congress of the Socialist International concluded that the colonial peoples should be taken in hand by future European socialist governments and led by them into eventual independence.
One of the biggest motivations behind imperialism was the idea of “civilizing” people in underdeveloped places. This was a religious motive for many Christian missionaries, in their attempts to “save the souls” of non-Christian people. Other Europeans claimed that they were only in these areas because they wanted to protect the weaker tribal groups they conquered.
Virtually all of Africa, the Caribbean and South Pacific islands, and much of Asia and the Middle East, were run from capitals in Europe and America. Even such populous and large areas as today’s India, Indonesia and Indochina (Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam) were under British, Dutch, and French control, respectively.
Until 1945, no colonial power had given up a single colony, save to another empire. Germany lost all its colonies after the First World War to the victorious Allies, but in the 1930s Hitler kept demanding their return. And a latecomer to the imperial game, Italy, conquered Ethiopia, one of the only two independent countries in Africa, in 1935-36.
Yet four decades later, virtually all these places had become sovereign states, and only a few specks on the map -- mostly tiny islands -- remained under foreign rule.
So what changed? Why was colonialism suddenly discredited? A number of factors came together as a result of the 1939-1945 war.
Fascism, which glorified conquest, and Nazism, which divided humanity into “superior” and “inferior” so-called “races,” made the philosophical underpinnings of imperialism illegitimate. As well, the European countries were all devastated by the war: Belgium, France and the Netherlands had all been defeated by Germany, and even Britain emerged in a much weakened state.
Most of their Asian colonies, meanwhile, had been occupied by Japan, a non-European state, and the subject peoples there were in no mood to allow their colonial masters to return.
Finally, one of the victors in the war, the Soviet Union, set itself up as a champion of “national liberation.” After 1949, a newly established Communist China, itself a non-western country, followed suit.
Both provided economic, military and political aid to independence movements. (The Chinese and Soviets wouldn’t acknowledge that they were themselves land-based empires, with millions of non-Russian and non-Han Chinese inhabitants.)
So as the Cold War began, the western powers were forced onto the defensive. The Philippines were granted independence by Washington in 1946, India and Pakistan by London, in 1947, and Indonesia by Amsterdam in 1949. The remaining Asian colonies soon followed.
In Africa, fighting began in 1954 against French rule in Algeria and soon all of North Africa was self-governing. In sub-Saharan Africa, Ghana’s independence in 1957 was followed by most of the continent attaining freedom from European rule by 1980. Caribbean and South Pacific islands also gained their independence during that time.
A map of the pre-1939 world looks to us today like that of a different planet. That’s what happens when one zeitgeist replaces another.
Incredible as it seems to us today, until the end of the Second World War, the colonial empires of European powers plus the United States were considered “normal,” and even beneficial to the non-western peoples under their domination.
Imperial rule was justified and supported by most of the citizens in the imperial countries. The notion of rule over tropical lands commanded widespread acceptance, even among those who associated imperial colonization with oppression and exploitation.
For example, the 1904 Congress of the Socialist International concluded that the colonial peoples should be taken in hand by future European socialist governments and led by them into eventual independence.
One of the biggest motivations behind imperialism was the idea of “civilizing” people in underdeveloped places. This was a religious motive for many Christian missionaries, in their attempts to “save the souls” of non-Christian people. Other Europeans claimed that they were only in these areas because they wanted to protect the weaker tribal groups they conquered.
Virtually all of Africa, the Caribbean and South Pacific islands, and much of Asia and the Middle East, were run from capitals in Europe and America. Even such populous and large areas as today’s India, Indonesia and Indochina (Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam) were under British, Dutch, and French control, respectively.
Until 1945, no colonial power had given up a single colony, save to another empire. Germany lost all its colonies after the First World War to the victorious Allies, but in the 1930s Hitler kept demanding their return. And a latecomer to the imperial game, Italy, conquered Ethiopia, one of the only two independent countries in Africa, in 1935-36.
Yet four decades later, virtually all these places had become sovereign states, and only a few specks on the map -- mostly tiny islands -- remained under foreign rule.
So what changed? Why was colonialism suddenly discredited? A number of factors came together as a result of the 1939-1945 war.
Fascism, which glorified conquest, and Nazism, which divided humanity into “superior” and “inferior” so-called “races,” made the philosophical underpinnings of imperialism illegitimate. As well, the European countries were all devastated by the war: Belgium, France and the Netherlands had all been defeated by Germany, and even Britain emerged in a much weakened state.
Most of their Asian colonies, meanwhile, had been occupied by Japan, a non-European state, and the subject peoples there were in no mood to allow their colonial masters to return.
Finally, one of the victors in the war, the Soviet Union, set itself up as a champion of “national liberation.” After 1949, a newly established Communist China, itself a non-western country, followed suit.
Both provided economic, military and political aid to independence movements. (The Chinese and Soviets wouldn’t acknowledge that they were themselves land-based empires, with millions of non-Russian and non-Han Chinese inhabitants.)
So as the Cold War began, the western powers were forced onto the defensive. The Philippines were granted independence by Washington in 1946, India and Pakistan by London, in 1947, and Indonesia by Amsterdam in 1949. The remaining Asian colonies soon followed.
In Africa, fighting began in 1954 against French rule in Algeria and soon all of North Africa was self-governing. In sub-Saharan Africa, Ghana’s independence in 1957 was followed by most of the continent attaining freedom from European rule by 1980. Caribbean and South Pacific islands also gained their independence during that time.
A map of the pre-1939 world looks to us today like that of a different planet. That’s what happens when one zeitgeist replaces another.
Saturday, March 22, 2014
How Will Worsening American-Russian Relationship Impact the Middle East?
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
The ideological rivalry between the western world and the Communist bloc may have ended a quarter-century ago, but national interests and realpolitik are with us still.
Indeed, the antagonistic relationship between U.S. President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, is arguably more intense these days than that between President George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, in the waning days of the Cold War.
Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the sanctions put in place by western countries in response, an angry and defiant Putin on March 18 denounced what he called a history of dishonesty and cheating by the West.
This belligerent attitude will undoubtedly affect the way Putin feels when it comes to the ever-volatile Middle East.
If you think the Russian leader has been dragging his feet when it comes to the international community trying to frame a robust response to Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime in Syria or Iran’s ongoing nuclear program, then, as they say on the street, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Emile Hokayem, a Senior Fellow for Regional Security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies based in Manama, Bahrain, remarked in the New York Times that “to irritate the West, Russia can do a lot more to augment Assad’s power over the rebels; the political and material support Russia has extended from Day 1 has already proven crucial to his survival and recovery.”
Assad, grateful for Moscow’s support, has described the Russian stance over the situation in Ukraine as a “wise policy” in the face of “coup attempts against legitimacy and democracy in favor of the terrorist extremists.” He reiterated Syria’s commitment to Putin’s “rational approach” and applauded Russia for “saving the world from dangerous events.”
And Assad is now gaining the upper hand in the civil war. With Russia holding veto power at the Security Council, there is nothing the United Nations can do, to the frustration of Washington.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on March 18, Syrian deputy foreign minister Faisal al-Mekdad said that he sees no point in further peace talks in Geneva if the opposition and its Western backers keep insisting that Assad relinquish power, and indicated his regime had the backing of Russia in its stance.
Nuclear negotiations with Iran could get more complicated as well, if Moscow breaks ranks with Western powers and Tehran manages to play on these divisions. “Iran may feel sufficiently supported by Moscow that it backtracks on its recent conciliatory actions and rhetoric and continues to develop its nuclear program,” stated Paul de Quenoy, an associate professor of history at the American University of Beirut.
“If you’re Putin and you think you’re going to be a target of sanctions, the most obvious leverage is in the Iranian file, where Russian cooperation is so important,” remarked Mark Dubowitz, the executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based group.
Meanwhile, Egyptian Field Marshal Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi seems likely to revert to his predecessors’ Cold War roles of playing the U.S. and Russia off of each other to secure maximum concessions from both sides while making minimal commitments of their own.
Sisi, who now rules Egypt, visited Russia in February to negotiate a deal to buy as much as $2 billion worth of Russian weapons. Egypt’s main arms supplier, the United States, has suspended certain shipments in response to the ouster of former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi.
“Our visit offers a new start to the development of military and technological cooperation between Egypt and Russia,” Sisi told Putin. “We hope to speed up the cooperation.”
The only thing certain about the Middle East is the uncertainty generated by its shifting political sands.
The ideological rivalry between the western world and the Communist bloc may have ended a quarter-century ago, but national interests and realpolitik are with us still.
Indeed, the antagonistic relationship between U.S. President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, is arguably more intense these days than that between President George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, in the waning days of the Cold War.
Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the sanctions put in place by western countries in response, an angry and defiant Putin on March 18 denounced what he called a history of dishonesty and cheating by the West.
This belligerent attitude will undoubtedly affect the way Putin feels when it comes to the ever-volatile Middle East.
If you think the Russian leader has been dragging his feet when it comes to the international community trying to frame a robust response to Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime in Syria or Iran’s ongoing nuclear program, then, as they say on the street, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Emile Hokayem, a Senior Fellow for Regional Security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies based in Manama, Bahrain, remarked in the New York Times that “to irritate the West, Russia can do a lot more to augment Assad’s power over the rebels; the political and material support Russia has extended from Day 1 has already proven crucial to his survival and recovery.”
Assad, grateful for Moscow’s support, has described the Russian stance over the situation in Ukraine as a “wise policy” in the face of “coup attempts against legitimacy and democracy in favor of the terrorist extremists.” He reiterated Syria’s commitment to Putin’s “rational approach” and applauded Russia for “saving the world from dangerous events.”
And Assad is now gaining the upper hand in the civil war. With Russia holding veto power at the Security Council, there is nothing the United Nations can do, to the frustration of Washington.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on March 18, Syrian deputy foreign minister Faisal al-Mekdad said that he sees no point in further peace talks in Geneva if the opposition and its Western backers keep insisting that Assad relinquish power, and indicated his regime had the backing of Russia in its stance.
Nuclear negotiations with Iran could get more complicated as well, if Moscow breaks ranks with Western powers and Tehran manages to play on these divisions. “Iran may feel sufficiently supported by Moscow that it backtracks on its recent conciliatory actions and rhetoric and continues to develop its nuclear program,” stated Paul de Quenoy, an associate professor of history at the American University of Beirut.
“If you’re Putin and you think you’re going to be a target of sanctions, the most obvious leverage is in the Iranian file, where Russian cooperation is so important,” remarked Mark Dubowitz, the executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based group.
Meanwhile, Egyptian Field Marshal Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi seems likely to revert to his predecessors’ Cold War roles of playing the U.S. and Russia off of each other to secure maximum concessions from both sides while making minimal commitments of their own.
Sisi, who now rules Egypt, visited Russia in February to negotiate a deal to buy as much as $2 billion worth of Russian weapons. Egypt’s main arms supplier, the United States, has suspended certain shipments in response to the ouster of former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi.
“Our visit offers a new start to the development of military and technological cooperation between Egypt and Russia,” Sisi told Putin. “We hope to speed up the cooperation.”
The only thing certain about the Middle East is the uncertainty generated by its shifting political sands.
Thursday, March 20, 2014
Malaysia is no Friend to Israel
Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune
The recent disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines airplane en route from Kuala Lumpur, the country’s capital, to Beijing, has brought that country to the world’s attention.
Malaysia was formed in 1963 when the former British colonies of Singapore, as well as Sabah (North Borneo) and Sarawak on the northern coast of the island of Borneo, joined with mainland Malaya to create the country.
More than half of its 30 million people are ethnic Malays, almost one-quarter are Chinese, another eight percent are of Indian heritage, and the final eleven percent are indigenous peoples on the island of Borneo.
The Malays are uniformly – and devoutly – Muslim, while the other groups practice Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and various Chinese faiths.
Constitutionally, one must be a Muslim to be considered Malay in Malaysia. The rationale for this is that Islam is considered intrinsic to Malay ethnic identity. In September 2001then Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad declared that the country an Islamic state, despite its very large non-Muslim Chinese and Indian population.
The country is governed by a National Front dominated by the United Malays National Organization (UNMO), which has a hammerlock on power. It has governed Malaya, and then Malaysia, since 1957. The party is dedicated to uphold and protect the Malay culture and defend Islam.
Since its establishment, the country has rejected formal diplomatic relations with Israel, and it does not allow entry into the country by Israeli passport holders.
In 1981 Mahathir Mohamad was elected Malaysia’s prime minister, and he strengthened the country’s support for the Palestine Liberation Organization. He accused his critics of being agents of Zionism and claimed that Zionists were undermining Malaysia’s integrity and trying to destroy Islam.
In 1994, the government prohibited the screening of Steven Spielberg’s movie “Schindler’s List” on the ground that it was an anti-German propaganda film aimed at winning support for Jews.
Three years later, during a financial crisis, Mahathir attributed the collapse of the Malaysian ringgit to a conspiracy of Jews led by the financier George Soros: “The Jews robbed the Palestinians of everything, but in Malaysia they could not do so, hence they do this,” he stated.
In October 2003, soon to retire, he provided an anti-Semitic diatribe at a meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference near Kuala Lumpur.
“We are up against a people who think,” Mahathir told his listeners. “They survived 2,000 years of pogroms, not by hitting back but by thinking. They invented and successfully promoted socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others.”
Mahathir added that the Jews “rule the world by proxy,” since “they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power.”
That same year the prime minister’s political party, the UMNO, provided its members copies of Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic book from the 1920s, “The International Jew,” which had been translated into Malay.
Now retired, Mahathir has not moderated his views. This past January, he accused Israel of treating African migrants in Israel the way Nazi Germany had treated Jews. “The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu fears the possibility of African blood being mixed with Jewish blood. The Jews must remain pure.
“There is no difference then between the Nazis and the Israelis. Their oppression of the Palestinians is another indicator. Given power Jews behave in the same way as the Nazis,” he stated.
On Sept. 21, 2012, about 3,000 demonstrators marched on the American embassy in Kuala Lumpur. They burned an American flag topped with the Jewish Star of David, incensed over a 13-minute anti-Islamic YouTube film that had been produced in California.
So it is no surprise that current Prime Minister Najib Razak was the second head of government (after Qatar’s) to visit the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, on Jan. 22, 2013, following its eight-day war with Israel two months earlier.
Najib laid the foundation stone of the new office of the Hamas Prime Minister. The old office had been destroyed in an Israeli bombing. He also visited the site of a Malaysian-funded school in Gaza, Al-Madrasah Al-Malaziah.
The recent disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines airplane en route from Kuala Lumpur, the country’s capital, to Beijing, has brought that country to the world’s attention.
Malaysia was formed in 1963 when the former British colonies of Singapore, as well as Sabah (North Borneo) and Sarawak on the northern coast of the island of Borneo, joined with mainland Malaya to create the country.
More than half of its 30 million people are ethnic Malays, almost one-quarter are Chinese, another eight percent are of Indian heritage, and the final eleven percent are indigenous peoples on the island of Borneo.
The Malays are uniformly – and devoutly – Muslim, while the other groups practice Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and various Chinese faiths.
Constitutionally, one must be a Muslim to be considered Malay in Malaysia. The rationale for this is that Islam is considered intrinsic to Malay ethnic identity. In September 2001then Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad declared that the country an Islamic state, despite its very large non-Muslim Chinese and Indian population.
The country is governed by a National Front dominated by the United Malays National Organization (UNMO), which has a hammerlock on power. It has governed Malaya, and then Malaysia, since 1957. The party is dedicated to uphold and protect the Malay culture and defend Islam.
Since its establishment, the country has rejected formal diplomatic relations with Israel, and it does not allow entry into the country by Israeli passport holders.
In 1981 Mahathir Mohamad was elected Malaysia’s prime minister, and he strengthened the country’s support for the Palestine Liberation Organization. He accused his critics of being agents of Zionism and claimed that Zionists were undermining Malaysia’s integrity and trying to destroy Islam.
In 1994, the government prohibited the screening of Steven Spielberg’s movie “Schindler’s List” on the ground that it was an anti-German propaganda film aimed at winning support for Jews.
Three years later, during a financial crisis, Mahathir attributed the collapse of the Malaysian ringgit to a conspiracy of Jews led by the financier George Soros: “The Jews robbed the Palestinians of everything, but in Malaysia they could not do so, hence they do this,” he stated.
In October 2003, soon to retire, he provided an anti-Semitic diatribe at a meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference near Kuala Lumpur.
“We are up against a people who think,” Mahathir told his listeners. “They survived 2,000 years of pogroms, not by hitting back but by thinking. They invented and successfully promoted socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others.”
Mahathir added that the Jews “rule the world by proxy,” since “they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power.”
That same year the prime minister’s political party, the UMNO, provided its members copies of Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic book from the 1920s, “The International Jew,” which had been translated into Malay.
Now retired, Mahathir has not moderated his views. This past January, he accused Israel of treating African migrants in Israel the way Nazi Germany had treated Jews. “The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu fears the possibility of African blood being mixed with Jewish blood. The Jews must remain pure.
“There is no difference then between the Nazis and the Israelis. Their oppression of the Palestinians is another indicator. Given power Jews behave in the same way as the Nazis,” he stated.
On Sept. 21, 2012, about 3,000 demonstrators marched on the American embassy in Kuala Lumpur. They burned an American flag topped with the Jewish Star of David, incensed over a 13-minute anti-Islamic YouTube film that had been produced in California.
So it is no surprise that current Prime Minister Najib Razak was the second head of government (after Qatar’s) to visit the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, on Jan. 22, 2013, following its eight-day war with Israel two months earlier.
Najib laid the foundation stone of the new office of the Hamas Prime Minister. The old office had been destroyed in an Israeli bombing. He also visited the site of a Malaysian-funded school in Gaza, Al-Madrasah Al-Malaziah.
Saturday, March 15, 2014
Missing Plane Highlights Woes in Malaysian Society
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
The ineptitude and confusion that has surrounded the disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines airplane en route from Kuala Lumpur, the country’s capital, to Beijing, has brought to the world’s attention the deficiencies in that country’s political system, ones that are integral to its very economic and social policies.
During the late 18th and 19th centuries, Great Britain established colonies and protectorates in the area of current Malaysia. In 1948, the British-ruled territories on the Malay Peninsula, nine of them constitutionally headed by traditional Muslim princes, formed the Federation of Malaya, which became independent in 1957.
Malaysia was formed in 1963 when the former British colonies of Singapore, as well as Sabah (North Borneo) and Sarawak on the northern coast of the island of Borneo, joined with mainland Malaya to create the larger country, which now consists of thirteen states and three federal territories.
More than half of its 30 million people are ethnic Malays, almost one-quarter are Chinese, another eight percent are of Indian heritage, and the final eleven percent are indigenous peoples on the island of Borneo.
The Malays are uniformly – and devoutly – Muslim, while the other groups practice Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and various Chinese faiths.
The country is governed by a National Front dominated by the United Malays National Organization (UNMO), which has a hammerlock on power. It has governed Malaya, and then Malaysia, since 1957. The party is dedicated to uphold and protect the Malay culture and defend Islam.
Malaya itself is a society riven by tension between the native Malays and the Chinese and Indians who settled there in the 19th and 20th centuries, when the peninsula was under British control.
It is an ethnically polarized society where a system of ethnic preferences discourages the country’s minorities from government service. Ethnic Malays hold nearly all top government positions and receive a host of government preferences because of their status as indigenous “bumiputra” (in Malay, “sons of the soil”).
These policies were entrenched in the Federation’s constitution and further strengthened in the 1970s, when the government implemented the New Economic Policy, a more aggressive form of affirmative action, following anti-Chinese riots by Malays over the economic success of the ethnic Chinese; nearly 200 people died.
It provided for the use of quotas in the granting of scholarships, entrance to universities, positions in the civil service, and business licences, as well as native reservations of land. It targeted a 30 percent share of the economy for the native Malays. Malaysia thus requires citizens to carry a national identification card.
Indeed, in 1965 the island city-state of Singapore, at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, was actually expelled from Malaysia because it was feared by the Malays that the city’s overwhelmingly Chinese and Indian population (now comprising 5.3 million people) might tilt the ethnic ratio in the country against the Malays.
In the 2013 national election, Prime Minister Najib Razak, who heads the UMNO-led coalition National Front government, won 133 of the 222 seats in the federal Parliament. But the tally represented a loss of seven seats compared with 2008, as more Chinese voted for the opposition People’s Alliance.
Non-Malays have criticized the preferences given to ethnic Malays; they say the policy treats them like second-class citizens. Analysts said that Chinese voters were upset that the government had not made more progress in rolling back official preferences for ethnic Malays. But Najib insists affirmative action needs to stay.
Plural societies with deep ethnic, linguistic, and religious cleavages, such as Malaysia’s, have few common political or ideological institutions to bridge the chasm between groups. In effect, one group rules over another through political or military force, while those who are dominated feel little sense of shared identity with the political system. Competition and conflict form the usual pattern of politics and hostility can quickly flare into communal violence.
The American travel writer Paul Theroux, in his 1977 book “The Consul’s File,” paints a portrayal of Malays, Chinese and Indians living in one small Malayan town, “in uneasy proximity, rather than harmony. They grate on each other, offend each other by their very being.” He found no integration, only parallel communities. Not much has changed since then.
The ineptitude and confusion that has surrounded the disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines airplane en route from Kuala Lumpur, the country’s capital, to Beijing, has brought to the world’s attention the deficiencies in that country’s political system, ones that are integral to its very economic and social policies.
During the late 18th and 19th centuries, Great Britain established colonies and protectorates in the area of current Malaysia. In 1948, the British-ruled territories on the Malay Peninsula, nine of them constitutionally headed by traditional Muslim princes, formed the Federation of Malaya, which became independent in 1957.
Malaysia was formed in 1963 when the former British colonies of Singapore, as well as Sabah (North Borneo) and Sarawak on the northern coast of the island of Borneo, joined with mainland Malaya to create the larger country, which now consists of thirteen states and three federal territories.
More than half of its 30 million people are ethnic Malays, almost one-quarter are Chinese, another eight percent are of Indian heritage, and the final eleven percent are indigenous peoples on the island of Borneo.
The Malays are uniformly – and devoutly – Muslim, while the other groups practice Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and various Chinese faiths.
The country is governed by a National Front dominated by the United Malays National Organization (UNMO), which has a hammerlock on power. It has governed Malaya, and then Malaysia, since 1957. The party is dedicated to uphold and protect the Malay culture and defend Islam.
Malaya itself is a society riven by tension between the native Malays and the Chinese and Indians who settled there in the 19th and 20th centuries, when the peninsula was under British control.
It is an ethnically polarized society where a system of ethnic preferences discourages the country’s minorities from government service. Ethnic Malays hold nearly all top government positions and receive a host of government preferences because of their status as indigenous “bumiputra” (in Malay, “sons of the soil”).
These policies were entrenched in the Federation’s constitution and further strengthened in the 1970s, when the government implemented the New Economic Policy, a more aggressive form of affirmative action, following anti-Chinese riots by Malays over the economic success of the ethnic Chinese; nearly 200 people died.
It provided for the use of quotas in the granting of scholarships, entrance to universities, positions in the civil service, and business licences, as well as native reservations of land. It targeted a 30 percent share of the economy for the native Malays. Malaysia thus requires citizens to carry a national identification card.
Indeed, in 1965 the island city-state of Singapore, at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, was actually expelled from Malaysia because it was feared by the Malays that the city’s overwhelmingly Chinese and Indian population (now comprising 5.3 million people) might tilt the ethnic ratio in the country against the Malays.
In the 2013 national election, Prime Minister Najib Razak, who heads the UMNO-led coalition National Front government, won 133 of the 222 seats in the federal Parliament. But the tally represented a loss of seven seats compared with 2008, as more Chinese voted for the opposition People’s Alliance.
Non-Malays have criticized the preferences given to ethnic Malays; they say the policy treats them like second-class citizens. Analysts said that Chinese voters were upset that the government had not made more progress in rolling back official preferences for ethnic Malays. But Najib insists affirmative action needs to stay.
Plural societies with deep ethnic, linguistic, and religious cleavages, such as Malaysia’s, have few common political or ideological institutions to bridge the chasm between groups. In effect, one group rules over another through political or military force, while those who are dominated feel little sense of shared identity with the political system. Competition and conflict form the usual pattern of politics and hostility can quickly flare into communal violence.
The American travel writer Paul Theroux, in his 1977 book “The Consul’s File,” paints a portrayal of Malays, Chinese and Indians living in one small Malayan town, “in uneasy proximity, rather than harmony. They grate on each other, offend each other by their very being.” He found no integration, only parallel communities. Not much has changed since then.
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Hindu Nationalism on the Rise in India
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
In a telling sign of the growing power of Hindu nationalism in India, an American author has had her book “The Hindus: An Alternative History,” withdrawn, and remaining copies pulped, by her publisher, Penguin India.
This followed a lawsuit filed by a Hindu nationalist group, which took exception to Wendy Doniger’s handling of Hindu mythology.
Doniger, who teaches at the University of Chicago, is a well-regarded scholar and author of many books on India. Her previous books have been positively received in India and elsewhere. But she has faced regular criticism from those who consider her work to be disrespectful of Hinduism in general.
In an article written for the magazine “Outlook India,” Doniger responded that “I was, of course, angry and disappointed to see this happen, and I am deeply troubled by what it foretells for free speech in India in the present, and steadily worsening, political climate.”
She went on to say that her publisher was “finally defeated by the true villain of this piece -- the Indian law that makes it a criminal rather than civil offense to publish a book that offends any Hindu, a law that jeopardizes the physical safety of any publisher, no matter how ludicrous the accusation brought against a book.”
The Indian Constitution lists “freedom of speech and expression” among the fundamental rights it guarantees, but also allows the government to impose “reasonable restrictions” on this freedom.
Many Indian authors were incensed. Arundhati Roy accused the publisher of having meekly surrendered to extremists: “You have not only caved in, you have humiliated yourself abjectly before a fly-by-night outfit,” she said. “What was it that terrified you?” she asked in a column in the Times of India.
The group that brought the suit against Doniger, the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti (Movement to Save Education), claimed to be defending “the sentiments of Hindus all over the world.” They contended that “she misunderstands and deliberately misrepresents Hindu texts and practices, insults Hindu gods in her readings of myth, and crudely focuses, through a psychoanalytic lens and above all else, on sex.”
Dinanath Batra, one of the plaintiffs, who is associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers Organization), charged that the book was “written with a Christian missionary zeal and hidden agenda to denigrate Hindus and show their religion in poor light.”
The RSS has carried out acts of violence against Muslims and other minority groups throughout India since its creation in 1925. It is part of an array of Hindu nationalist movements that subscribe to the ideology known as Hindutva, literally “Hindu-ness,” the idea of India as culturally, racially, and religiously Hindu in nature.
In this interpretation of Indian history, Muslims are invaders, outsiders, and foreigners. Hence India had been illegitimately ruled by Muslim dynasties prior to the arrival of the British.
Hindu nationalism is also making gains in the political arena. In the forthcoming Indian general election, which will begin on April 7 and continue on nine separate dates until May 12, the ruling secularist Congress Party is predicted to suffer one of the worst losses in its history, to the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP. Its leader, Narendra Modi, has a long association with the RSS.
Currently, the Congress Party holds 201 seats against 112 for the BJP in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, which has 543 members. Both parties form coalitions with other groups when contesting national elections. Congress led the United Progressive Alliance to victory in 2009, while the BJP headed the National Democratic Alliance.
But 70 percent of Indians now say they are dissatisfied with the way things are going in India, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. And 63 percent of those polled said they would prefer that the BJP lead the next government, compared with just 19 percent who picked the Congress Party, which is led by Sonia Gandhi and her son, Rahul Gandhi.
Modi, the chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, on the border with Pakistan, led the state when riots broke out in 2002, costing the lives of more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims.
He has been linked with a secret police assassination squad. Many Indians, especially the country’s 138 million Muslims and its many other minorities, worry he would exacerbate sectarian tensions in the country.
In a telling sign of the growing power of Hindu nationalism in India, an American author has had her book “The Hindus: An Alternative History,” withdrawn, and remaining copies pulped, by her publisher, Penguin India.
This followed a lawsuit filed by a Hindu nationalist group, which took exception to Wendy Doniger’s handling of Hindu mythology.
Doniger, who teaches at the University of Chicago, is a well-regarded scholar and author of many books on India. Her previous books have been positively received in India and elsewhere. But she has faced regular criticism from those who consider her work to be disrespectful of Hinduism in general.
In an article written for the magazine “Outlook India,” Doniger responded that “I was, of course, angry and disappointed to see this happen, and I am deeply troubled by what it foretells for free speech in India in the present, and steadily worsening, political climate.”
She went on to say that her publisher was “finally defeated by the true villain of this piece -- the Indian law that makes it a criminal rather than civil offense to publish a book that offends any Hindu, a law that jeopardizes the physical safety of any publisher, no matter how ludicrous the accusation brought against a book.”
The Indian Constitution lists “freedom of speech and expression” among the fundamental rights it guarantees, but also allows the government to impose “reasonable restrictions” on this freedom.
Many Indian authors were incensed. Arundhati Roy accused the publisher of having meekly surrendered to extremists: “You have not only caved in, you have humiliated yourself abjectly before a fly-by-night outfit,” she said. “What was it that terrified you?” she asked in a column in the Times of India.
The group that brought the suit against Doniger, the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti (Movement to Save Education), claimed to be defending “the sentiments of Hindus all over the world.” They contended that “she misunderstands and deliberately misrepresents Hindu texts and practices, insults Hindu gods in her readings of myth, and crudely focuses, through a psychoanalytic lens and above all else, on sex.”
Dinanath Batra, one of the plaintiffs, who is associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers Organization), charged that the book was “written with a Christian missionary zeal and hidden agenda to denigrate Hindus and show their religion in poor light.”
The RSS has carried out acts of violence against Muslims and other minority groups throughout India since its creation in 1925. It is part of an array of Hindu nationalist movements that subscribe to the ideology known as Hindutva, literally “Hindu-ness,” the idea of India as culturally, racially, and religiously Hindu in nature.
In this interpretation of Indian history, Muslims are invaders, outsiders, and foreigners. Hence India had been illegitimately ruled by Muslim dynasties prior to the arrival of the British.
Hindu nationalism is also making gains in the political arena. In the forthcoming Indian general election, which will begin on April 7 and continue on nine separate dates until May 12, the ruling secularist Congress Party is predicted to suffer one of the worst losses in its history, to the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP. Its leader, Narendra Modi, has a long association with the RSS.
Currently, the Congress Party holds 201 seats against 112 for the BJP in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, which has 543 members. Both parties form coalitions with other groups when contesting national elections. Congress led the United Progressive Alliance to victory in 2009, while the BJP headed the National Democratic Alliance.
But 70 percent of Indians now say they are dissatisfied with the way things are going in India, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. And 63 percent of those polled said they would prefer that the BJP lead the next government, compared with just 19 percent who picked the Congress Party, which is led by Sonia Gandhi and her son, Rahul Gandhi.
Modi, the chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, on the border with Pakistan, led the state when riots broke out in 2002, costing the lives of more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims.
He has been linked with a secret police assassination squad. Many Indians, especially the country’s 138 million Muslims and its many other minorities, worry he would exacerbate sectarian tensions in the country.
Monday, March 10, 2014
Crisis in Ukraine: The Putin Version
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
Are Russia’s actions in the Crimea and elsewhere in Ukraine illegitimate or did Moscow have cause to intercede? Demography and history suggest Russian President Vladimir Putin has more of a case than North American media and politicians would like to believe.
This question becomes even more pertinent, as the Crimean Parliament has announced that a referendum will be held on March 16 offering citizens a choice of remaining part of Ukraine, becoming independent, or joining the Russian Federation. Western countries have declared the referendum illegal.
In his March 4 press conference Putin provided his own interpretation of what has transpired in Ukraine, and his viewpoint cannot simply be written off as self-serving propaganda.
He defended Russia’s actions as a response to an “orgy” of violence by nationalists, fascists, reactionaries and anti-Semites who are now in control of an illegitimate government. He was referring to members of groups such as Pravy Sektor (Right Sector) and the All-Ukrainian Union Svoboda.
Svoboda won 10 per cent of the vote in parliamentary elections in 2012 and holds four positions in the interim government in Kyiv. Its leader, Oleg Tyagnibok, and many party members, have made many anti-Semitic statements.
Putin added that he would not recognize a new round of elections “if they were held under the same terror which we are now seeing in Kyiv.” Putin also compared the desire for Crimeans to “determine their own future” with that of Kosovar Albanians in the 1990s.
Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs a few days later went on to catalog nine past interventions by the United States and NATO, stretching from the 1958 invasion of Lebanon to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, making the case that Washington “doesn’t and can’t have the moral right to lecture us about compliance of international norms.
“Nevertheless, they dare to reproach Russia for ‘armed aggression’ when she stands up for her countrymen, who constitute the majority of the Crimean people,” the statement continued.
Ukranians in the western part of the country are quite different than those in the east; because both groups are called by the same name, we sometimes gloss over that fact. But a parallel case would be that of Croats and Serbs in the former Yugoslavia. Those two peoples, too, are very similar in ethnicity and language, yet deeply divided by religion and history.
Croats, like many western Ukrainians, are Catholic, Serbs are Orthodox. Croats, like western Ukrainians, lived under Austro-Hungarian rule before the creation if Yugoslavia; Serbs were under Ottoman Turkish domination.
The Russian Orthodox Church, to which most eastern Ukrainians belong, has endorsed Putin’s stand.
Meanwhile, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the same day as Putin’s press conference compared the Russian leader to Hitler.
At a fundraising event in California, she told her audience that Putin’s concerns for ethnic Russians in Ukraine is reminiscent of Hitler’s desire to protect ethnic Germans “in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they’re not being treated right.”
This statement betrays an incredible ignorance of history; Germans in those countries were not being mistreated by new regimes that had overthrown the established political order. It is also, for a former diplomat, most undiplomatic language.
“You keep drawing up these analogies, they hurt more than they can help,” remarked Lawrence J. Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “Whatever Putin is, he wasn’t like Hitler. He didn’t massacre thousands of non-Russians in Georgia or anything like that.”
Should she ever again hold high office, how would Clinton be able to speak to the Russian leader – whose country, by the way, suffered more than any other from Hitler’s aggression in the Second World War.
Western politicians fail to understand the intense feeling Russians have for the Crimea. In the 19th century Crimean War Russian troops withstood a brutal artillery bombardment for nearly a year in Sevastopol, and during a second siege in 1942 in the Second World War, the Red Army held out for eight months against the invading Germans.
“Yes, Crimea is part of Ukraine, but psychologically Russians do not accept that,” explained Alexei Makarkin, deputy director of Moscow’s Centre for Political Technologies. “So much Russian history took place there. From society’s point of view, Russia was correct to defend its right to this territory.”
Sergey Kiselev of Tavrichesky National University in Simferopol said that Russians have not forgotten that one of every 10 soldiers in the Red Army who died during the Second World War was killed there.
When Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met in Yalta, in the Crimea, in February 1945, to discuss the post-war world, they were not meeting in Ukraine.
Actually, the most likely outcome of this crisis will be a vastly more autonomous Crimea, technically still part of Ukraine, but to all intents and purposes a de facto state controlled from Moscow.
Are Russia’s actions in the Crimea and elsewhere in Ukraine illegitimate or did Moscow have cause to intercede? Demography and history suggest Russian President Vladimir Putin has more of a case than North American media and politicians would like to believe.
This question becomes even more pertinent, as the Crimean Parliament has announced that a referendum will be held on March 16 offering citizens a choice of remaining part of Ukraine, becoming independent, or joining the Russian Federation. Western countries have declared the referendum illegal.
In his March 4 press conference Putin provided his own interpretation of what has transpired in Ukraine, and his viewpoint cannot simply be written off as self-serving propaganda.
He defended Russia’s actions as a response to an “orgy” of violence by nationalists, fascists, reactionaries and anti-Semites who are now in control of an illegitimate government. He was referring to members of groups such as Pravy Sektor (Right Sector) and the All-Ukrainian Union Svoboda.
Svoboda won 10 per cent of the vote in parliamentary elections in 2012 and holds four positions in the interim government in Kyiv. Its leader, Oleg Tyagnibok, and many party members, have made many anti-Semitic statements.
Putin added that he would not recognize a new round of elections “if they were held under the same terror which we are now seeing in Kyiv.” Putin also compared the desire for Crimeans to “determine their own future” with that of Kosovar Albanians in the 1990s.
Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs a few days later went on to catalog nine past interventions by the United States and NATO, stretching from the 1958 invasion of Lebanon to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, making the case that Washington “doesn’t and can’t have the moral right to lecture us about compliance of international norms.
“Nevertheless, they dare to reproach Russia for ‘armed aggression’ when she stands up for her countrymen, who constitute the majority of the Crimean people,” the statement continued.
Ukranians in the western part of the country are quite different than those in the east; because both groups are called by the same name, we sometimes gloss over that fact. But a parallel case would be that of Croats and Serbs in the former Yugoslavia. Those two peoples, too, are very similar in ethnicity and language, yet deeply divided by religion and history.
Croats, like many western Ukrainians, are Catholic, Serbs are Orthodox. Croats, like western Ukrainians, lived under Austro-Hungarian rule before the creation if Yugoslavia; Serbs were under Ottoman Turkish domination.
The Russian Orthodox Church, to which most eastern Ukrainians belong, has endorsed Putin’s stand.
Meanwhile, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the same day as Putin’s press conference compared the Russian leader to Hitler.
At a fundraising event in California, she told her audience that Putin’s concerns for ethnic Russians in Ukraine is reminiscent of Hitler’s desire to protect ethnic Germans “in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they’re not being treated right.”
This statement betrays an incredible ignorance of history; Germans in those countries were not being mistreated by new regimes that had overthrown the established political order. It is also, for a former diplomat, most undiplomatic language.
“You keep drawing up these analogies, they hurt more than they can help,” remarked Lawrence J. Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “Whatever Putin is, he wasn’t like Hitler. He didn’t massacre thousands of non-Russians in Georgia or anything like that.”
Should she ever again hold high office, how would Clinton be able to speak to the Russian leader – whose country, by the way, suffered more than any other from Hitler’s aggression in the Second World War.
Western politicians fail to understand the intense feeling Russians have for the Crimea. In the 19th century Crimean War Russian troops withstood a brutal artillery bombardment for nearly a year in Sevastopol, and during a second siege in 1942 in the Second World War, the Red Army held out for eight months against the invading Germans.
“Yes, Crimea is part of Ukraine, but psychologically Russians do not accept that,” explained Alexei Makarkin, deputy director of Moscow’s Centre for Political Technologies. “So much Russian history took place there. From society’s point of view, Russia was correct to defend its right to this territory.”
Sergey Kiselev of Tavrichesky National University in Simferopol said that Russians have not forgotten that one of every 10 soldiers in the Red Army who died during the Second World War was killed there.
When Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met in Yalta, in the Crimea, in February 1945, to discuss the post-war world, they were not meeting in Ukraine.
Actually, the most likely outcome of this crisis will be a vastly more autonomous Crimea, technically still part of Ukraine, but to all intents and purposes a de facto state controlled from Moscow.
Sunday, March 09, 2014
A Famous Professor who Loathes Israel
Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press
The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) Special Rapporteur on “the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967” recently issued his annual report, accusing Israel of “inhuman acts” and “apartheid,” and has called on the UN to support a “legitimacy war” against the country.
But that shouldn’t surprise anyone: First, because the 47-member Council, which includes in its membership Algeria, China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia and Saudi Arabia, has consistently singled out Israel for condemnation. Secondly, because Richard Falk, author of the document, has a history of anti-Israel statements.
Falk, the Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice at Ivy-League Princeton University, is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including Human Rights and State Sovereignty; Religion and Humane Global Governance; Revolutionaries and Functionaries; and The Declining World Order: America’s Imperial Geopolitics.
So how did a well-regarded professor of international law and political science (and Jewish), become an inveterate enemy of Israel?
Falk, radicalized in the 1960s by the works of Karl Marx and the sociologists C. Wright Mills and Herbert Marcuse, was more than an “ivory-tower” scholar. He has described himself as a “citizen pilgrim” working towards “the gradual construction of a new world order that assures basic human needs of all people, that safeguards the environment, that protects the fundamental human rights of all individuals and groups without encroaching upon the precarious resources of cultural diversity.”
This led, as has been the case with so many on the left in recent years, to a fundamental opposition to America’s role in the world -- and also to the activities of Israel.
Following his retirement from teaching, Falk became more active in the pro-Palestinian movement. In 2008, he was appointed to a six-year term as the Special Rapporteur. His reports have been consistently one-sided.
Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based human rights group UN Watch, noted that Falk’s latest 22-page document “makes no mention of war crimes or human rights violations by Hamas, Islamic Jihad or the Palestinian Authority. In fact, the word ‘Hamas’ appears nowhere in the report.”
In 2007, Falk wrote “Slouching Towards a Palestinian Holocaust” for the Swedish-based left-wing Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, where he asked, “Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.”
Falk blamed last April’s Boston Marathon Bombings, which killed three people and injured more than 260 others, on the United States and Israel. In an article in the journal Foreign Policy, “A Commentary on the Marathon Murders,” he asserted that the “American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world.” Furthermore, “as long as Tel Aviv has the compliant ear of the American political establishment, those who wish for peace and justice in the world should not rest easy.”
Susan Rice, the then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said that she was “outraged” by Falk’s “highly offensive Boston comments. Someone who spews such vitriol has no place at the UN.” British and Canadian diplomats also objected to his remarks.
Perhaps the most respected scholar who lent his name to the Palestinian cause was the late Edward Said, a Palestinian American professor of English at Columbia University. As an icon among an entire generation of teachers of literature, Said’s critiques of Israel have been disseminated far and wide.
So it was only appropriate that it was Falk who on Feb. 18 delivered the Edward Said Memorial Lecture at Princeton, entitled “Edward Said’s Legacy and the Palestinian Struggle.” Palestinians should continue to pursue self-empowerment, legal justice and peaceful resistance in their ongoing territorial conflict with Israel, Falk said during the lecture.
There is something strange about all this. While the head of the Palestinian Authority, President Mahmoud Abbas, seems like a relative voice of reason, declaring that he would accept a demilitarized Palestinian state alongside Israel, with perhaps NATO troops serving as a buffer between them, the forces in the international community represented by people like Falk are playing “bad cop” to his “good cop.”
They sound more like Abbas’ fundamentalist enemies in Hamas-ruled Gaza, even though most would consider themselves secular leftists.
The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) Special Rapporteur on “the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967” recently issued his annual report, accusing Israel of “inhuman acts” and “apartheid,” and has called on the UN to support a “legitimacy war” against the country.
But that shouldn’t surprise anyone: First, because the 47-member Council, which includes in its membership Algeria, China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia and Saudi Arabia, has consistently singled out Israel for condemnation. Secondly, because Richard Falk, author of the document, has a history of anti-Israel statements.
Falk, the Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice at Ivy-League Princeton University, is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including Human Rights and State Sovereignty; Religion and Humane Global Governance; Revolutionaries and Functionaries; and The Declining World Order: America’s Imperial Geopolitics.
So how did a well-regarded professor of international law and political science (and Jewish), become an inveterate enemy of Israel?
Falk, radicalized in the 1960s by the works of Karl Marx and the sociologists C. Wright Mills and Herbert Marcuse, was more than an “ivory-tower” scholar. He has described himself as a “citizen pilgrim” working towards “the gradual construction of a new world order that assures basic human needs of all people, that safeguards the environment, that protects the fundamental human rights of all individuals and groups without encroaching upon the precarious resources of cultural diversity.”
This led, as has been the case with so many on the left in recent years, to a fundamental opposition to America’s role in the world -- and also to the activities of Israel.
Following his retirement from teaching, Falk became more active in the pro-Palestinian movement. In 2008, he was appointed to a six-year term as the Special Rapporteur. His reports have been consistently one-sided.
Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based human rights group UN Watch, noted that Falk’s latest 22-page document “makes no mention of war crimes or human rights violations by Hamas, Islamic Jihad or the Palestinian Authority. In fact, the word ‘Hamas’ appears nowhere in the report.”
In 2007, Falk wrote “Slouching Towards a Palestinian Holocaust” for the Swedish-based left-wing Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, where he asked, “Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.”
Falk blamed last April’s Boston Marathon Bombings, which killed three people and injured more than 260 others, on the United States and Israel. In an article in the journal Foreign Policy, “A Commentary on the Marathon Murders,” he asserted that the “American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world.” Furthermore, “as long as Tel Aviv has the compliant ear of the American political establishment, those who wish for peace and justice in the world should not rest easy.”
Susan Rice, the then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said that she was “outraged” by Falk’s “highly offensive Boston comments. Someone who spews such vitriol has no place at the UN.” British and Canadian diplomats also objected to his remarks.
Perhaps the most respected scholar who lent his name to the Palestinian cause was the late Edward Said, a Palestinian American professor of English at Columbia University. As an icon among an entire generation of teachers of literature, Said’s critiques of Israel have been disseminated far and wide.
So it was only appropriate that it was Falk who on Feb. 18 delivered the Edward Said Memorial Lecture at Princeton, entitled “Edward Said’s Legacy and the Palestinian Struggle.” Palestinians should continue to pursue self-empowerment, legal justice and peaceful resistance in their ongoing territorial conflict with Israel, Falk said during the lecture.
There is something strange about all this. While the head of the Palestinian Authority, President Mahmoud Abbas, seems like a relative voice of reason, declaring that he would accept a demilitarized Palestinian state alongside Israel, with perhaps NATO troops serving as a buffer between them, the forces in the international community represented by people like Falk are playing “bad cop” to his “good cop.”
They sound more like Abbas’ fundamentalist enemies in Hamas-ruled Gaza, even though most would consider themselves secular leftists.
Tuesday, March 04, 2014
Crimean Standoff Worsens American-Russian Relations
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
Russia has deployed troops to the Crimea following a request for help from its pro-Moscow prime minister, Sergei Aksyonov, following the overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in Kyiv. Interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk of Ukraine has called this a declaration of war.
Is Russia’s action illegitimate or do they have cause to intercede?
No independent Ukrainian state existed, except for very brief periods, until 1991. Its western areas were under Austro-Hungarian rule, then Polish, while the east was governed by the tsars in Moscow.
The Crimea was wrested from the Tatars by Russia in 1783 and has always had an ethnic Russian majority. It was never part of the Soviet Ukrainian republic until Nikita Khrushchev, the then leader of the Soviet Union, foolishly handed it to Kyiv in 1954 as a “gift,” to ingratiate himself with Ukrainians as he solidified his hold on power following the death of Joseph Stalin.
It also supposedly marked the 300th anniversary of the 1654 treaty unifying the eastern Ukraine with Russia.
But Ukraine is now an independent country, and the Crimea’s rule from Kyiv has been a major source of Russian resentment -- inside and outside Crimea -- and a major thorn in Ukraine’s relations with Russia.
Why can’t Russia have it back, if the local population supports this, as they no doubt will make it explicit in a referendum on secession scheduled for March 30? Crimea already has autonomy, with its own parliament and organs of government.
The Ukrainian nationalists who overthrew Yanukovych clearly have little interest in allowing any voice to the ethnic Russians and Russified Ukrainians in the east and south, so they shouldn’t be surprised that secession is now on the table.
President Barack Obama has accused Russia of a breach of international law and condemned the country’s military intervention, calling it a “clear violation” of Ukrainian sovereignty, and demanding that it desist from any action that might imperil that country’s territorial integrity..
It’s rather rich for the United States to be giving Russia lessons on international law. Such legal niceties didn’t stop the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Serbia for 78 straight days, 15 years ago, also in contravention of international law. This eventually forced the Serbs out and eventually allowed an independent Kosovo to emerge (despite pledges that it wouldn’t happen).
Why should the Russians trust what they consider an illegitimate government in Kyiv to protect their ethnic Russian compatriots; the U.S. certainly didn’t trust Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic when it came to protecting Kosovar Albanians. If spheres of influence are to mean anything, the Russians certainly have more cause to intervene in Crimea than NATO did in Kosovo.
The Kosovo case, which the West sought to make sui generis, a non-precedent, has indeed become one. What’s sauce for the goose, and all that.
(Washington has also had no compunction in toppling governments it didn’t like around the world, from Panama to Iraq.)
Since 1989, the Russians have lost, first, their east European empire, then their non-Russian Soviet republics. They were humiliated during the 1990s, as the Baltic states and other east European countries joined NATO. Russia’s borders are already further east than they were at any time in the past three centuries. How far does the United States think they can be pushed?
Note how quickly Cold War tropes have reasserted themselves, even though this has nothing to do with ideology. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions have been compared to the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Or are we also returning to an older, 19th century image: Russia as the “bear” seeking to dominate its neighbours and crush freedom. This was a favourite theme of British politicians and writers, as they competed with the Russians in Asia and also defended the Ottoman Empire against them.
How many people in the West today know about the Crimean War of 1853-1856, when Britain and France attacked Russia? Most of the fighting took place for control of the Black Sea, with land battles on the Crimea.
You can be sure the Russians remember it. As the British historian Orlando Figes has written, “Memories of the Crimean war continue to stir profound feelings of Russian pride and resentment towards the west.”
Russia has deployed troops to the Crimea following a request for help from its pro-Moscow prime minister, Sergei Aksyonov, following the overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in Kyiv. Interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk of Ukraine has called this a declaration of war.
Is Russia’s action illegitimate or do they have cause to intercede?
No independent Ukrainian state existed, except for very brief periods, until 1991. Its western areas were under Austro-Hungarian rule, then Polish, while the east was governed by the tsars in Moscow.
The Crimea was wrested from the Tatars by Russia in 1783 and has always had an ethnic Russian majority. It was never part of the Soviet Ukrainian republic until Nikita Khrushchev, the then leader of the Soviet Union, foolishly handed it to Kyiv in 1954 as a “gift,” to ingratiate himself with Ukrainians as he solidified his hold on power following the death of Joseph Stalin.
It also supposedly marked the 300th anniversary of the 1654 treaty unifying the eastern Ukraine with Russia.
But Ukraine is now an independent country, and the Crimea’s rule from Kyiv has been a major source of Russian resentment -- inside and outside Crimea -- and a major thorn in Ukraine’s relations with Russia.
Why can’t Russia have it back, if the local population supports this, as they no doubt will make it explicit in a referendum on secession scheduled for March 30? Crimea already has autonomy, with its own parliament and organs of government.
The Ukrainian nationalists who overthrew Yanukovych clearly have little interest in allowing any voice to the ethnic Russians and Russified Ukrainians in the east and south, so they shouldn’t be surprised that secession is now on the table.
President Barack Obama has accused Russia of a breach of international law and condemned the country’s military intervention, calling it a “clear violation” of Ukrainian sovereignty, and demanding that it desist from any action that might imperil that country’s territorial integrity..
It’s rather rich for the United States to be giving Russia lessons on international law. Such legal niceties didn’t stop the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Serbia for 78 straight days, 15 years ago, also in contravention of international law. This eventually forced the Serbs out and eventually allowed an independent Kosovo to emerge (despite pledges that it wouldn’t happen).
Why should the Russians trust what they consider an illegitimate government in Kyiv to protect their ethnic Russian compatriots; the U.S. certainly didn’t trust Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic when it came to protecting Kosovar Albanians. If spheres of influence are to mean anything, the Russians certainly have more cause to intervene in Crimea than NATO did in Kosovo.
The Kosovo case, which the West sought to make sui generis, a non-precedent, has indeed become one. What’s sauce for the goose, and all that.
(Washington has also had no compunction in toppling governments it didn’t like around the world, from Panama to Iraq.)
Since 1989, the Russians have lost, first, their east European empire, then their non-Russian Soviet republics. They were humiliated during the 1990s, as the Baltic states and other east European countries joined NATO. Russia’s borders are already further east than they were at any time in the past three centuries. How far does the United States think they can be pushed?
Note how quickly Cold War tropes have reasserted themselves, even though this has nothing to do with ideology. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions have been compared to the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Or are we also returning to an older, 19th century image: Russia as the “bear” seeking to dominate its neighbours and crush freedom. This was a favourite theme of British politicians and writers, as they competed with the Russians in Asia and also defended the Ottoman Empire against them.
How many people in the West today know about the Crimean War of 1853-1856, when Britain and France attacked Russia? Most of the fighting took place for control of the Black Sea, with land battles on the Crimea.
You can be sure the Russians remember it. As the British historian Orlando Figes has written, “Memories of the Crimean war continue to stir profound feelings of Russian pride and resentment towards the west.”
Monday, March 03, 2014
Is Ukraine Really on the Road to Democracy?
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, elected in 2010, has been deposed by the Ukrainian Rada, the parliament, following months of demonstrations, and presidential elections are scheduled for May.
Oleksandr Turchinov, the speaker of the parliament, has been named interim president. He is a close ally of former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who had been jailed by Yanukovych.
Most Canadians have seen this as a struggle between pro-European supporters of democracy and what has been seen as an authoritarian government under the influence of Moscow. But there may be more to it than that.
Although most of the protests we have seen in newscasts have concentrated on Kyiv’s Independence Square, areas in western Ukraine around the city of Lviv have been in the forefront driving the insurgency against Yanukovych.
Why was western Ukraine so opposed to Yanukovych, whereas his support lay in the east? Although a sovereign state for more than two decades, Ukraine still faces questions regarding its national identity.
The eastern part of the country was controlled by tsarist Russia after 1654. As a result, the people are overwhelmingly Orthodox in religion, and many people speak Russian. But the western portion was for many centuries part of Poland and then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Following the First World War, it became part of the reconstituted independent Poland.
A large proportion of western Ukrainians are members of the Uniate (Ukrainian Greek Catholic) Church, which combines Orthodox rites with a fealty to the Pope in Rome. Western Ukrainians speak largely Ukrainian and retain strong nationalist sentiments.
Following the Second World War, the victorious Soviet Union annexed the western Ukraine and united it with the Soviet Ukraine. But many in the region fought against incorporation.
Some, like Stepan Bandera, a wartime leader of the militant, terrorist branch of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), had been a Nazi collaborator and involved in the mass murders of Ukrainian Jews.
The western Ukraine -- where today there are statues honoring Bandera in various cities, including Lviv -- is also the political stronghold of the All-Ukrainian Union Svoboda, the ultra-nationalist, far-right anti-Semitic party which holds 36 of 450 seats in the Ukrainian parliament. It is the fourth-largest party in the legislature.
The party traces its roots to the Nazi-friendly partisan army during World War II. Some of Svoboda’s supporters are people who believe that the German invasion of Ukraine in the 1940s was not an occupation but a liberation from “Jewish Bolshevism.” Last month it held a torch-lit march in honor of Bandera.
Its leader, Oleh Tyahnybok, has been active in the anti-Yanukovych movement. He has a long history of making inflammatory anti-Semitic statements, including the accusation before parliament that Ukraine is controlled by a “Muscovite-Jewish mafia.” There are about 200,000 Jews living in Ukraine, mostly in Kyiv.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has asked, “Why do we not hear statements of condemnation toward those who seize government buildings, attack and burn police officers, and voice racist and anti-Semitic slogans?” The Russian foreign ministry has called the protests the “Brown Revolution,” comparing it to the Nazis’ rise to power in the 1930s.
“Svoboda’s prominence within the opposition movement is certainly concerning,” writes Joshua Keating, a staff writer at Slate, “not only because of the possibility they could now play a more prominent role in the future politics, but because they have allowed an increasingly authoritarian leader and his blatantly authoritarian international backers to make the case that their opponents are the ones who pose a threat to democracy.”
Yanukovych has denounced the takeover as “vandalism” and described it as a “coup” by “bandits.” In Kharkiv, in the mainly Russian-speaking east, regional leaders said they did not want the break-up of Ukraine, but they questioned the legitimacy of the parliament’s actions. They are particularly upset by a measure passed by the legislature to cancel the official status of the Russian language in Ukraine.
So it remains to be seen whether, once the dust settles, Ukraine will become less authoritarian than it has been. It all depends on who assumes power.
Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, elected in 2010, has been deposed by the Ukrainian Rada, the parliament, following months of demonstrations, and presidential elections are scheduled for May.
Oleksandr Turchinov, the speaker of the parliament, has been named interim president. He is a close ally of former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who had been jailed by Yanukovych.
Most Canadians have seen this as a struggle between pro-European supporters of democracy and what has been seen as an authoritarian government under the influence of Moscow. But there may be more to it than that.
Although most of the protests we have seen in newscasts have concentrated on Kyiv’s Independence Square, areas in western Ukraine around the city of Lviv have been in the forefront driving the insurgency against Yanukovych.
Why was western Ukraine so opposed to Yanukovych, whereas his support lay in the east? Although a sovereign state for more than two decades, Ukraine still faces questions regarding its national identity.
The eastern part of the country was controlled by tsarist Russia after 1654. As a result, the people are overwhelmingly Orthodox in religion, and many people speak Russian. But the western portion was for many centuries part of Poland and then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Following the First World War, it became part of the reconstituted independent Poland.
A large proportion of western Ukrainians are members of the Uniate (Ukrainian Greek Catholic) Church, which combines Orthodox rites with a fealty to the Pope in Rome. Western Ukrainians speak largely Ukrainian and retain strong nationalist sentiments.
Following the Second World War, the victorious Soviet Union annexed the western Ukraine and united it with the Soviet Ukraine. But many in the region fought against incorporation.
Some, like Stepan Bandera, a wartime leader of the militant, terrorist branch of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), had been a Nazi collaborator and involved in the mass murders of Ukrainian Jews.
The western Ukraine -- where today there are statues honoring Bandera in various cities, including Lviv -- is also the political stronghold of the All-Ukrainian Union Svoboda, the ultra-nationalist, far-right anti-Semitic party which holds 36 of 450 seats in the Ukrainian parliament. It is the fourth-largest party in the legislature.
The party traces its roots to the Nazi-friendly partisan army during World War II. Some of Svoboda’s supporters are people who believe that the German invasion of Ukraine in the 1940s was not an occupation but a liberation from “Jewish Bolshevism.” Last month it held a torch-lit march in honor of Bandera.
Its leader, Oleh Tyahnybok, has been active in the anti-Yanukovych movement. He has a long history of making inflammatory anti-Semitic statements, including the accusation before parliament that Ukraine is controlled by a “Muscovite-Jewish mafia.” There are about 200,000 Jews living in Ukraine, mostly in Kyiv.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has asked, “Why do we not hear statements of condemnation toward those who seize government buildings, attack and burn police officers, and voice racist and anti-Semitic slogans?” The Russian foreign ministry has called the protests the “Brown Revolution,” comparing it to the Nazis’ rise to power in the 1930s.
“Svoboda’s prominence within the opposition movement is certainly concerning,” writes Joshua Keating, a staff writer at Slate, “not only because of the possibility they could now play a more prominent role in the future politics, but because they have allowed an increasingly authoritarian leader and his blatantly authoritarian international backers to make the case that their opponents are the ones who pose a threat to democracy.”
Yanukovych has denounced the takeover as “vandalism” and described it as a “coup” by “bandits.” In Kharkiv, in the mainly Russian-speaking east, regional leaders said they did not want the break-up of Ukraine, but they questioned the legitimacy of the parliament’s actions. They are particularly upset by a measure passed by the legislature to cancel the official status of the Russian language in Ukraine.
So it remains to be seen whether, once the dust settles, Ukraine will become less authoritarian than it has been. It all depends on who assumes power.
Monday, February 24, 2014
Ukraine is a Country Torn Between East and West
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
If you think the struggle between the pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, and his pro-European opponents has been going on for months, think again.
This is actually the second go-around. The first time was during the so-called Orange Revolution in 2004, when then Prime Minister Yanukovych faced off in a presidential election against the pro-western Viktor Yushchenko.
Yanukovych was declared the winner, but independent observers reported widespread vote rigging. Yushchenko launched a campaign of mass street protests and civil disobedience, and the Ukrainian Supreme Court annulled the results. In a rerun a month later, Yushchenko won.
But within a few years, the political coalition he had put together had collapsed and some of his supporters joined Yanukovych’s forces in the Party of Regions. In presidential elections held in 2010, Yanukovych was returned to power.
And so the stage was set for the current crisis, which began last November. Thousands of protesters in Kyiv and other cities rallied to object to the government’s sudden decision to abandon an association agreement with the European Union in favor of a Russian loan bailout of $15 billion. The demonstrators blamed the about-face on Russian pressure.
In Soviet times, Ukraine was the second biggest republic in the country, after Russia itself. As the USSR was collapsing, Ukraine declared independence following a nationwide referendum in December 1991.
The loss of its 603,628 square kilometers and 46 million people still irks many Russians. When Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2005 described the dissolution of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, he was referring in particular to the loss of Russia’s Slavic neighbours, Belarus and Ukraine; both had been part of the Russian Empire for centuries.
Although most of the protests we see in newscasts today concentrate on Kyiv’s Independence Square, areas in western Ukraine around the city of Lviv have been in the forefront driving the insurgency against Yanukovych. The region favours closer ties with the European Union.
Why is western Ukraine so opposed to Yanukovych? It’s a long story – in fact it goes back centuries.
Although a sovereign state for more than two decades, Ukraine still faces questions regarding its national identity. It is an example of what political scientist Samuel Huntington called a “cleft” or “torn” country, because it faces both east and west religiously and politically. It comprises two distinct cultures -- a Western-oriented western portion and an eastern section that looks towards Moscow.
The eastern part of the country was controlled by tsarist Russia after 1654. As a result, the people are overwhelmingly Orthodox in religion, and many people speak Russian. Indeed, in the early 1990s, 22 percent of all Ukrainians were ethnic Russians, living mainly in the east, and 31 percent of the Ukrainian people spoke Russian as their primary language.
But the western portion was for many centuries part of Poland, Lithuania, and then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the partitions of Poland in the 18th century, the western Ukraine fell under the control of the Habsburgs.
A large proportion of western Ukrainians had over the centuries coalesced around the Uniate (Ukrainian Greek Catholic) Church, which combines Orthodox rites with a fealty to the Pope in Rome. Western Ukrainians speak largely Ukrainian and retain strong nationalist sentiments.
When Poland was reconstituted as an independent state after the First World War, these territories became part of the Polish republic. (Another small area, Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, came under Czechoslovak rule.) The eastern Ukraine, meanwhile, was incorporated into the new Russian-dominated Soviet Union.
Following the Second World War, the victorious Soviet Union annexed the western Ukraine and united it with the Soviet Ukraine. But there was strong opposition.
So cities like Lviv (previously in Poland) and Uzhgorod (previously in Czechoslovakia) were only under Soviet domination for some 45 years.
The recent elections have made these splits come to the fore. Yanukovych gained most of his support in the east, his challengers -- Yushchenko in 2004 and YuliaTymoshenko in 2010 -- in the west.
Yanukovych has agreed to create a national unity government and hold new presidential elections later this year, but now even that is in doubt. Protesters -- many from Lviv -- have taken control over much of Kyiv.
Will Ukraine eventually split in two, each half going in its favored direction? Huntington himself in his seminal “Clash of Civilizations” felt that “Ukraine will remain united, remain cleft, remain independent, and generally cooperate closely with Russia.” But centrifugal forces that may destroy the country’s unity are gaining strength.Henry Srebrnik is a profe
If you think the struggle between the pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, and his pro-European opponents has been going on for months, think again.
This is actually the second go-around. The first time was during the so-called Orange Revolution in 2004, when then Prime Minister Yanukovych faced off in a presidential election against the pro-western Viktor Yushchenko.
Yanukovych was declared the winner, but independent observers reported widespread vote rigging. Yushchenko launched a campaign of mass street protests and civil disobedience, and the Ukrainian Supreme Court annulled the results. In a rerun a month later, Yushchenko won.
But within a few years, the political coalition he had put together had collapsed and some of his supporters joined Yanukovych’s forces in the Party of Regions. In presidential elections held in 2010, Yanukovych was returned to power.
And so the stage was set for the current crisis, which began last November. Thousands of protesters in Kyiv and other cities rallied to object to the government’s sudden decision to abandon an association agreement with the European Union in favor of a Russian loan bailout of $15 billion. The demonstrators blamed the about-face on Russian pressure.
In Soviet times, Ukraine was the second biggest republic in the country, after Russia itself. As the USSR was collapsing, Ukraine declared independence following a nationwide referendum in December 1991.
The loss of its 603,628 square kilometers and 46 million people still irks many Russians. When Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2005 described the dissolution of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, he was referring in particular to the loss of Russia’s Slavic neighbours, Belarus and Ukraine; both had been part of the Russian Empire for centuries.
Although most of the protests we see in newscasts today concentrate on Kyiv’s Independence Square, areas in western Ukraine around the city of Lviv have been in the forefront driving the insurgency against Yanukovych. The region favours closer ties with the European Union.
Why is western Ukraine so opposed to Yanukovych? It’s a long story – in fact it goes back centuries.
Although a sovereign state for more than two decades, Ukraine still faces questions regarding its national identity. It is an example of what political scientist Samuel Huntington called a “cleft” or “torn” country, because it faces both east and west religiously and politically. It comprises two distinct cultures -- a Western-oriented western portion and an eastern section that looks towards Moscow.
The eastern part of the country was controlled by tsarist Russia after 1654. As a result, the people are overwhelmingly Orthodox in religion, and many people speak Russian. Indeed, in the early 1990s, 22 percent of all Ukrainians were ethnic Russians, living mainly in the east, and 31 percent of the Ukrainian people spoke Russian as their primary language.
But the western portion was for many centuries part of Poland, Lithuania, and then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the partitions of Poland in the 18th century, the western Ukraine fell under the control of the Habsburgs.
A large proportion of western Ukrainians had over the centuries coalesced around the Uniate (Ukrainian Greek Catholic) Church, which combines Orthodox rites with a fealty to the Pope in Rome. Western Ukrainians speak largely Ukrainian and retain strong nationalist sentiments.
When Poland was reconstituted as an independent state after the First World War, these territories became part of the Polish republic. (Another small area, Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, came under Czechoslovak rule.) The eastern Ukraine, meanwhile, was incorporated into the new Russian-dominated Soviet Union.
Following the Second World War, the victorious Soviet Union annexed the western Ukraine and united it with the Soviet Ukraine. But there was strong opposition.
So cities like Lviv (previously in Poland) and Uzhgorod (previously in Czechoslovakia) were only under Soviet domination for some 45 years.
The recent elections have made these splits come to the fore. Yanukovych gained most of his support in the east, his challengers -- Yushchenko in 2004 and YuliaTymoshenko in 2010 -- in the west.
Yanukovych has agreed to create a national unity government and hold new presidential elections later this year, but now even that is in doubt. Protesters -- many from Lviv -- have taken control over much of Kyiv.
Will Ukraine eventually split in two, each half going in its favored direction? Huntington himself in his seminal “Clash of Civilizations” felt that “Ukraine will remain united, remain cleft, remain independent, and generally cooperate closely with Russia.” But centrifugal forces that may destroy the country’s unity are gaining strength.Henry Srebrnik is a profe
Bosnia-Herzegovina Is a Failed Utopian Experiment
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
A former Yugoslav republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina (usually called Bosnia-Herzegovina) has hobbled along as a failed state since it declared its independence in 1992.
It had been an area of mixed population within Communist Yugoslavia, comprising Muslim Bosniaks, almost half the population; Orthodox Serbs, at 37 per cent; and Catholic Croats, at 14 per cent. Many lived together in mixed cities such as the capital, Sarajevo, and even ethnic intermarriages were not uncommon.
But it all quickly came undone – mainly because only the republic’s Bosniaks wanted a sovereign state. Croats wished to join Croatia while Serb nationalists, who wanted to bring Serbian-majority areas into a greater Serbia, began to engage in ethnic cleansing.
The fierce rivalries between the three groups led to a savage three and a half year war in which about 100,000 people were killed. A majority of the dead were Muslim Bosniaks; this included the massacre of some 8,000 Bosniak men and boys massacred by Serb forces at Srebrenica in July 1995. At least a million more Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs were driven from their homes, while much of the country’s infrastructure was destroyed.
Under intense American and European pressure, including a bombing campaign against Serb Bosnian forces, the Dayton Peace Accords were signed in November 1995, finally ending the fighting.
A few days later, President Bill Clinton hailed the agreement, declaring that the people of Bosnia now “have a chance to remind the world that just a few short years ago the mosques and churches of Sarajevo were a shining symbol of multiethnic tolerance, that Bosnia once found unity in its diversity.”
As well, NATO deployed an Implementation Force (IFOR) of nearly 60,000 troops to Bosnia. Later, a smaller Stabilization Force (SFOR) took on the task.
But the decentralized political system that the agreement engineered has entrenched rather than healed ethnic divisions.
The peace agreement retained Bosnia-Herzegovina’s international boundaries but created two distinct geographic entities within the country, a joint Croat-Bosniak-run Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, itself subdivided into 10 separate Croat and Bosniak cantons; and a Republika Srpska adjoining Serbia itself. The Brcko district in the northeast became a separate self-governing administrative unit.
The result was a bizarre political system, since in effect this was in all but name a partition.
The central government’s power is highly limited, as the country is largely decentralized. On the national level, there is a bicameral parliament and a three-person presidency, made up of a Bosniak, a Serb and a Croat; the chair rotates every eight months. The current incumbent is Zeljko Komsic, a Croat.
However, the country’s two parts have their own presidents and parliaments, and these are responsible for most administrative functions, including policing, education, health, and judicial courts.
Sarajevo is the capital of the entire country and of the Bosniak-Croat entity. The government of the Serb republic is based in Banja Luka.
The entire political structure is supervised by the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, selected from a European country by an international Peace Implementation Council. Valentin Inzko, an Austrian diplomat, is the current incumbent. He has the power to “compel the entity governments to comply with the terms of the peace agreement,” including the dismissal of elected and non-elected officials.
In effect, he is the final authority, and so the country is in reality a European protectorate.
Political scientists Patrice C. McMahon and Jon Western in their September-October 2009 Foreign Affairs article “The Death of Dayton” noted that Bosnia was “once the poster child for international reconstruction efforts” and was considered “proof that under the right conditions the international community could successfully rebuild conflict-ridden countries.”
It didn’t work out that way. Bosnian Croat and Serb nationalists continued to block the emergence of a unified Bosnian state. Nationalist parties gained sweeping control of state-run enterprises, government jobs and the issuing of lucrative state contracts.
The multiple layers of government have led to corruption and economic stagnation, and today the country of 3.9 million people stands on the brink of collapse, despite having received billions of dollars in aid.
With unemployment at 44 percent and one in five people living below the poverty line, Bosnians have recently taken to the streets in a number of cities to vent their anger.
In 2004, NATO handed over peace stabilization duties to a European Union force (EUFOR), now numbering some 600 troops, but backed up by “over-the-horizon” reserves, allowing a rapid surge in numbers if needed. Renewed warfare is only avoided thanks to their presence.
Even Lewis Carroll couldn’t have created this Alice-in-Wonderland state.
A former Yugoslav republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina (usually called Bosnia-Herzegovina) has hobbled along as a failed state since it declared its independence in 1992.
It had been an area of mixed population within Communist Yugoslavia, comprising Muslim Bosniaks, almost half the population; Orthodox Serbs, at 37 per cent; and Catholic Croats, at 14 per cent. Many lived together in mixed cities such as the capital, Sarajevo, and even ethnic intermarriages were not uncommon.
But it all quickly came undone – mainly because only the republic’s Bosniaks wanted a sovereign state. Croats wished to join Croatia while Serb nationalists, who wanted to bring Serbian-majority areas into a greater Serbia, began to engage in ethnic cleansing.
The fierce rivalries between the three groups led to a savage three and a half year war in which about 100,000 people were killed. A majority of the dead were Muslim Bosniaks; this included the massacre of some 8,000 Bosniak men and boys massacred by Serb forces at Srebrenica in July 1995. At least a million more Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs were driven from their homes, while much of the country’s infrastructure was destroyed.
Under intense American and European pressure, including a bombing campaign against Serb Bosnian forces, the Dayton Peace Accords were signed in November 1995, finally ending the fighting.
A few days later, President Bill Clinton hailed the agreement, declaring that the people of Bosnia now “have a chance to remind the world that just a few short years ago the mosques and churches of Sarajevo were a shining symbol of multiethnic tolerance, that Bosnia once found unity in its diversity.”
As well, NATO deployed an Implementation Force (IFOR) of nearly 60,000 troops to Bosnia. Later, a smaller Stabilization Force (SFOR) took on the task.
But the decentralized political system that the agreement engineered has entrenched rather than healed ethnic divisions.
The peace agreement retained Bosnia-Herzegovina’s international boundaries but created two distinct geographic entities within the country, a joint Croat-Bosniak-run Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, itself subdivided into 10 separate Croat and Bosniak cantons; and a Republika Srpska adjoining Serbia itself. The Brcko district in the northeast became a separate self-governing administrative unit.
The result was a bizarre political system, since in effect this was in all but name a partition.
The central government’s power is highly limited, as the country is largely decentralized. On the national level, there is a bicameral parliament and a three-person presidency, made up of a Bosniak, a Serb and a Croat; the chair rotates every eight months. The current incumbent is Zeljko Komsic, a Croat.
However, the country’s two parts have their own presidents and parliaments, and these are responsible for most administrative functions, including policing, education, health, and judicial courts.
Sarajevo is the capital of the entire country and of the Bosniak-Croat entity. The government of the Serb republic is based in Banja Luka.
The entire political structure is supervised by the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, selected from a European country by an international Peace Implementation Council. Valentin Inzko, an Austrian diplomat, is the current incumbent. He has the power to “compel the entity governments to comply with the terms of the peace agreement,” including the dismissal of elected and non-elected officials.
In effect, he is the final authority, and so the country is in reality a European protectorate.
Political scientists Patrice C. McMahon and Jon Western in their September-October 2009 Foreign Affairs article “The Death of Dayton” noted that Bosnia was “once the poster child for international reconstruction efforts” and was considered “proof that under the right conditions the international community could successfully rebuild conflict-ridden countries.”
It didn’t work out that way. Bosnian Croat and Serb nationalists continued to block the emergence of a unified Bosnian state. Nationalist parties gained sweeping control of state-run enterprises, government jobs and the issuing of lucrative state contracts.
The multiple layers of government have led to corruption and economic stagnation, and today the country of 3.9 million people stands on the brink of collapse, despite having received billions of dollars in aid.
With unemployment at 44 percent and one in five people living below the poverty line, Bosnians have recently taken to the streets in a number of cities to vent their anger.
In 2004, NATO handed over peace stabilization duties to a European Union force (EUFOR), now numbering some 600 troops, but backed up by “over-the-horizon” reserves, allowing a rapid surge in numbers if needed. Renewed warfare is only avoided thanks to their presence.
Even Lewis Carroll couldn’t have created this Alice-in-Wonderland state.
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Vietnamese-American Relations Recover from the Vietnam War
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
Like many people of my generation, I was a passionate opponent of the Vietnam War while a college student. I took part in anti-war marches as a student at McGill University in Montreal in the 1960s and remained against the war while in graduate school at Brandeis University near Boston (then a hotbed of left-wing causes) in the early 1970s.
The war resulted in the deaths of more than 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese. The country was in ruins by the time the North Vietnamese Communists completed their conquest of the south in 1975.
Four decades later, it is more obvious than ever that the anti-war people were correct in their view that American involvement in Vietnam was not only tragic but absurd.
American intervention was based on the “domino theory,” which asserted that a monolithic worldwide Communist conspiracy, centred in Beijing and Moscow, rather than an indigenous nationalist movement, was behind the war, and that a Viet Cong victory would facilitate the spread of Communism throughout Asia and beyond.
In fact, the Chinese and Vietnamese have historically been at odds, and even fought a border war in 1979. Border conflicts between Vietnam and China continued until 1988.
True, Vietnam remains a Communist state, but it poses no threat to its neighbours, and is – ironically – today one of the safest countries in which Americans might find themselves.
Now a nation of 90 million people, Vietnam initiated economic reforms (known as “Doi Moi”) beginning in 1986, shifting from a centrally-planned economy with state subsidies to an “open door” market economy.
Vietnam signed cooperative economic and trade agreements with the European Union in 1992, became a member of ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) in 1995 and of APEC (the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum) three years later.
Nguyen Tan Dung, elected Prime Minister in June 2006 by the National Assembly, has continued the process of gradually liberalizing the economy, promoting more competitive, export-driven industries, and lifting millions out of poverty. He won Vietnam admission to the World Trade Organization in 2007.
Last year, gross domestic product (GDP) growth topped 5.4 percent, and the country’s GDP reached $153 billion.
In 1994, the United States lifted a 19-year trade embargo of Vietnam and a year later, the two countries normalized diplomatic relations. Apart from their respective embassies in Hanoi and Washington, the United States now operates a consulate in Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon), while Vietnam has one in San Francisco. Hanoi also signed a bilateral trade agreement with Washington in 2000.
Vietnam hosted the annual APEC gathering in November 2006, and then U.S. president George W. Bush, in addition to attending the meeting, met the Vietnamese leadership in Hanoi and visited Ho Chi Minh City, the country’s leading economic center.
Increasingly wary of China, Vietnam has also drawn closer to the U.S. in terms of defence.
China and Vietnam both claim the Paracel and Spratley island chains in the South China Sea, and in 1988 a naval battle close to the disputed islands left 70 Vietnamese sailors dead. A Chinese maritime patrol boat struck a Vietnamese fishing boat Jan. 3 near the Paracel Islands; the Chinese confiscated its catch of fish along with fishing equipment.
Vietnam’s strategically located naval bases, such as the one at Cam Ranh Bay, could also serve as an American counterweight to China’s growing naval might. Under an agreement reached in 2003, Vietnam and the United States agreed to exchange alternate visits by their defence ministers every three years, and cooperation has proceeded at a gradual but steady pace.
The two countries now hold two annual high-level security meetings: the Political, Security, and Defense Dialogue and the Defence Policy Dialogue. In 2011, Hanoi and Washington also signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Advancing Bilateral Defence Cooperation.
In July 2013 U.S. President Barack Obama hosted his counterpart, Truong Tan Sang, at the White House and the two presidents agreed to open a “new phase of bilateral relations.”
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced during a visit to Vietnam this past December that Vietnam will receive up to $18 million, including five fast patrol-boats that will be given to the Vietnamese Coast Guard, to protect its territorial waters and secure navigational freedom.
Vietnam might now well be the most pro-American country in Southeast Asia. Who could have imagined such a development forty years ago?
Like many people of my generation, I was a passionate opponent of the Vietnam War while a college student. I took part in anti-war marches as a student at McGill University in Montreal in the 1960s and remained against the war while in graduate school at Brandeis University near Boston (then a hotbed of left-wing causes) in the early 1970s.
The war resulted in the deaths of more than 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese. The country was in ruins by the time the North Vietnamese Communists completed their conquest of the south in 1975.
Four decades later, it is more obvious than ever that the anti-war people were correct in their view that American involvement in Vietnam was not only tragic but absurd.
American intervention was based on the “domino theory,” which asserted that a monolithic worldwide Communist conspiracy, centred in Beijing and Moscow, rather than an indigenous nationalist movement, was behind the war, and that a Viet Cong victory would facilitate the spread of Communism throughout Asia and beyond.
In fact, the Chinese and Vietnamese have historically been at odds, and even fought a border war in 1979. Border conflicts between Vietnam and China continued until 1988.
True, Vietnam remains a Communist state, but it poses no threat to its neighbours, and is – ironically – today one of the safest countries in which Americans might find themselves.
Now a nation of 90 million people, Vietnam initiated economic reforms (known as “Doi Moi”) beginning in 1986, shifting from a centrally-planned economy with state subsidies to an “open door” market economy.
Vietnam signed cooperative economic and trade agreements with the European Union in 1992, became a member of ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) in 1995 and of APEC (the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum) three years later.
Nguyen Tan Dung, elected Prime Minister in June 2006 by the National Assembly, has continued the process of gradually liberalizing the economy, promoting more competitive, export-driven industries, and lifting millions out of poverty. He won Vietnam admission to the World Trade Organization in 2007.
Last year, gross domestic product (GDP) growth topped 5.4 percent, and the country’s GDP reached $153 billion.
In 1994, the United States lifted a 19-year trade embargo of Vietnam and a year later, the two countries normalized diplomatic relations. Apart from their respective embassies in Hanoi and Washington, the United States now operates a consulate in Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon), while Vietnam has one in San Francisco. Hanoi also signed a bilateral trade agreement with Washington in 2000.
Vietnam hosted the annual APEC gathering in November 2006, and then U.S. president George W. Bush, in addition to attending the meeting, met the Vietnamese leadership in Hanoi and visited Ho Chi Minh City, the country’s leading economic center.
Increasingly wary of China, Vietnam has also drawn closer to the U.S. in terms of defence.
China and Vietnam both claim the Paracel and Spratley island chains in the South China Sea, and in 1988 a naval battle close to the disputed islands left 70 Vietnamese sailors dead. A Chinese maritime patrol boat struck a Vietnamese fishing boat Jan. 3 near the Paracel Islands; the Chinese confiscated its catch of fish along with fishing equipment.
Vietnam’s strategically located naval bases, such as the one at Cam Ranh Bay, could also serve as an American counterweight to China’s growing naval might. Under an agreement reached in 2003, Vietnam and the United States agreed to exchange alternate visits by their defence ministers every three years, and cooperation has proceeded at a gradual but steady pace.
The two countries now hold two annual high-level security meetings: the Political, Security, and Defense Dialogue and the Defence Policy Dialogue. In 2011, Hanoi and Washington also signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Advancing Bilateral Defence Cooperation.
In July 2013 U.S. President Barack Obama hosted his counterpart, Truong Tan Sang, at the White House and the two presidents agreed to open a “new phase of bilateral relations.”
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced during a visit to Vietnam this past December that Vietnam will receive up to $18 million, including five fast patrol-boats that will be given to the Vietnamese Coast Guard, to protect its territorial waters and secure navigational freedom.
Vietnam might now well be the most pro-American country in Southeast Asia. Who could have imagined such a development forty years ago?
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
The Self-Destructive Policies of Nations in the Grip of Madness
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
Though it seems to most of us almost impossible to fathom, there are times in a nation’s history when it engages in such self-destructive policies that its very future is in doubt.
Three of the most horrific examples in the 20th century were driven by ideologies gone mad, and they almost ruined Germany, Russia and China.
The case that first comes to mind is the Holocaust, the murder by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany of some six million Jews, as well as millions of Roma, gays, the disabled, Soviet prisoners of war, and other so-called “undesirables.”
This genocide involved the construction of hundreds of concentration camps and extermination centres, the use of railways to bring victims to their deaths, and it required the services of hundreds of thousands of guards, functionaries, police and other murderers -- all this, while Germany was fighting a world war.
Even after 1943, when it became clear the country would be defeated, the mass murders continued, right up to the very days of surrender in 1945.
Hitler’s racial ideology cost the Nazis a tremendous amount of brainpower, as Jewish chemists, physicists, mathematicians, and others fled the country or were murdered, and the country’s universities lost their pre-eminent place in the world.
Albert Einstein is the most famous of these scientists, but Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze’s book “Mathematicians Fleeing from Nazi Germany” describes the flight of more than 140 other mathematicians, mostly to the United States. The influx of these brilliant thinkers made America the leader in mathematics research.
In the Soviet Union, the paranoid Communist dictator Joseph Stalin unleashed the Great Terror in 1936, purging, in waves, all Soviet institutions and at all levels of society, from the highest echelons of administrative, cultural, and scientific life, to the engineers and apparatchiks, down to the factory workers and peasants. Millions died or would spend decades in gulags.
In a series of show trials he also decimated the high command of the Red Army. With his best generals dead or in prison camps, the country was in such a weakened state that it lost millions of people, and hundreds of thousands of square kilometres, when the Nazis invaded in 1941.
Even as the war raged on, the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, shot or imprisoned officers and large numbers of other mostly loyal citizens, at a time when military expertise was in desperately short supply. This further extended the war against the other fanatic, Hitler, and by the time it ended in 1945 at least 27 million Soviet citizens had perished.
In the mid-1960s, Mao Zedong unleashed the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” in China. The Communist ruler, believing that certain liberal bourgeois elements of society continued to threaten the Communist framework, encouraged groups of young people known as the Red Guards to wreak havoc against the state itself.
Chaos reigned in much of the nation, and millions were persecuted, as the schools in China were closed and intellectuals living in cities were ordered to the countryside where they performed hard manual labour, in order to be “re-educated” by the peasants.
Last August, Chen Xiaolu, the son of Chen Yi, a founder of Communist China and its long-time foreign minister, apologized for his role in the madness. A student leader in his Beijing high school in 1966, he had ordered teachers to line up in the auditorium, dunce caps on their bowed heads, as thousands of students howled abuse at the teachers. Then, suddenly, a posse stormed the stage and beat them until they crumpled to the floor, blood oozing from their heads.
An article by Evan Osnos, “Confucius Comes Home,” in the Jan. 13 issue of the New Yorker magazine documented one particularly poignant case. On August 23, 1966 in Beijing, a group of teenage Red Guards attacked 67 year old Lao She, one of the China’s most famous writers, and himself a Communist. They denounced him as a “counter-revolutionary” and whipped him with leather belts. The next morning, barely alive, he walked to a nearby lake and drowned himself.
There were many such stories. Estimates of deaths range from 1.5 million to three million across China from 1966 to 1976. The country lost an immense amount of learning and culture during that terrible decade.
All three of these examples (and many others, such as today’s North Korea and Cambodia in the 1970s) demonstrate the horrors of an ideology creating a form of mass hysteria and opening the way for unmitigated, yet sanctioned, evil by many of its “true believers.”
Though it seems to most of us almost impossible to fathom, there are times in a nation’s history when it engages in such self-destructive policies that its very future is in doubt.
Three of the most horrific examples in the 20th century were driven by ideologies gone mad, and they almost ruined Germany, Russia and China.
The case that first comes to mind is the Holocaust, the murder by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany of some six million Jews, as well as millions of Roma, gays, the disabled, Soviet prisoners of war, and other so-called “undesirables.”
This genocide involved the construction of hundreds of concentration camps and extermination centres, the use of railways to bring victims to their deaths, and it required the services of hundreds of thousands of guards, functionaries, police and other murderers -- all this, while Germany was fighting a world war.
Even after 1943, when it became clear the country would be defeated, the mass murders continued, right up to the very days of surrender in 1945.
Hitler’s racial ideology cost the Nazis a tremendous amount of brainpower, as Jewish chemists, physicists, mathematicians, and others fled the country or were murdered, and the country’s universities lost their pre-eminent place in the world.
Albert Einstein is the most famous of these scientists, but Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze’s book “Mathematicians Fleeing from Nazi Germany” describes the flight of more than 140 other mathematicians, mostly to the United States. The influx of these brilliant thinkers made America the leader in mathematics research.
In the Soviet Union, the paranoid Communist dictator Joseph Stalin unleashed the Great Terror in 1936, purging, in waves, all Soviet institutions and at all levels of society, from the highest echelons of administrative, cultural, and scientific life, to the engineers and apparatchiks, down to the factory workers and peasants. Millions died or would spend decades in gulags.
In a series of show trials he also decimated the high command of the Red Army. With his best generals dead or in prison camps, the country was in such a weakened state that it lost millions of people, and hundreds of thousands of square kilometres, when the Nazis invaded in 1941.
Even as the war raged on, the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, shot or imprisoned officers and large numbers of other mostly loyal citizens, at a time when military expertise was in desperately short supply. This further extended the war against the other fanatic, Hitler, and by the time it ended in 1945 at least 27 million Soviet citizens had perished.
In the mid-1960s, Mao Zedong unleashed the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” in China. The Communist ruler, believing that certain liberal bourgeois elements of society continued to threaten the Communist framework, encouraged groups of young people known as the Red Guards to wreak havoc against the state itself.
Chaos reigned in much of the nation, and millions were persecuted, as the schools in China were closed and intellectuals living in cities were ordered to the countryside where they performed hard manual labour, in order to be “re-educated” by the peasants.
Last August, Chen Xiaolu, the son of Chen Yi, a founder of Communist China and its long-time foreign minister, apologized for his role in the madness. A student leader in his Beijing high school in 1966, he had ordered teachers to line up in the auditorium, dunce caps on their bowed heads, as thousands of students howled abuse at the teachers. Then, suddenly, a posse stormed the stage and beat them until they crumpled to the floor, blood oozing from their heads.
An article by Evan Osnos, “Confucius Comes Home,” in the Jan. 13 issue of the New Yorker magazine documented one particularly poignant case. On August 23, 1966 in Beijing, a group of teenage Red Guards attacked 67 year old Lao She, one of the China’s most famous writers, and himself a Communist. They denounced him as a “counter-revolutionary” and whipped him with leather belts. The next morning, barely alive, he walked to a nearby lake and drowned himself.
There were many such stories. Estimates of deaths range from 1.5 million to three million across China from 1966 to 1976. The country lost an immense amount of learning and culture during that terrible decade.
All three of these examples (and many others, such as today’s North Korea and Cambodia in the 1970s) demonstrate the horrors of an ideology creating a form of mass hysteria and opening the way for unmitigated, yet sanctioned, evil by many of its “true believers.”
Friday, February 14, 2014
The World is Full of Occupied Territories
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
What do most people think of when someone talks about “the Occupied Territories?” They assume the speaker means the West Bank of the Jordan, of course, which has been under Israeli control following a defensive war in 1967, though much of it is now internally governed by the Palestinian Authority.
It shows us the power of the long-term attempt to de-legitimize Israel -- because, in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world, there are huge amounts of land occupied by various states or ethno-religious groups.
Next door to Israel, a civil war has been raging for the last three years in Syria, as the Sunni Arab majority is trying to wrest control of much of the country from the Alawite Shia minority, only 12 per cent of the population and centred in the country’s northwest. They have “occupied” the rest of Syria since the 1970s.
In next-door Iraq, the Shia-dominated regime of Nouri al-Maliki now “occupies” the “Sunni Triangle” in the mid-third of the country. Here too an insurgency in underway. The Kurdish entity in the north is now self-governing, but Kurds in southeastern Turkey, across the border, remain “occupied” by the Ankara-based Turkish state founded by Kemal Ataturk.
Kurds also live under occupation in Syria and Iran. Persians constitute just 61per cent of the population in the Islamic Republic, followed by Azeris at 16 per cent and Kurds at 10 per cent. In 1945, Azeris in Iran’s northwest, where they form a majority, were defeated in their attempt to set up their own state.
India is effectively an occupying power in Muslim-majority Kashmir, while to its north, China occupies Tibet and Xinjiang, with its large Uyghur and other Muslim populations. In Myanmar, the Burman-majority state occupies large swaths of the country inhabited by various ethnic groups, including the Shan, Kayin, Mon and Kachin. They have been fighting for independence for decades.
Most African states are artificial entities, often dominated by one group to the exclusion of others. Ethiopia, for example, occupies the Ogaden region in its southeast, populated by Somalis. Until South Sudan gained its independence in 2011, it was occupied by Arab-majority Sudan. East Timor freed itself from Indonesian occupation in 2002. The Ibo of southeastern Nigeria failed to gain an independent state of Biafra in the 1960s.
The Russian Federation is a colonial occupier in the north Caucasus region, where Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia are populated by Muslim peoples.
As far as many people in Ireland are concerned, Great Britain’s control of Northern Ireland is also little more than an occupation, following the partition of the island in 1922. In Spain, many Basques and Catalans feel the same way about rule from Madrid.
And, of course, the settler states in the western hemisphere, in particular Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay in South America, and Canada and the United States in North America, were all wrested away from indigenous populations. The same holds true for Australia and New Zealand.
So the next time someone refers, without further elaboration, to “the occupied territories,” you might wish to respond, “which ones?”
What do most people think of when someone talks about “the Occupied Territories?” They assume the speaker means the West Bank of the Jordan, of course, which has been under Israeli control following a defensive war in 1967, though much of it is now internally governed by the Palestinian Authority.
It shows us the power of the long-term attempt to de-legitimize Israel -- because, in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world, there are huge amounts of land occupied by various states or ethno-religious groups.
Next door to Israel, a civil war has been raging for the last three years in Syria, as the Sunni Arab majority is trying to wrest control of much of the country from the Alawite Shia minority, only 12 per cent of the population and centred in the country’s northwest. They have “occupied” the rest of Syria since the 1970s.
In next-door Iraq, the Shia-dominated regime of Nouri al-Maliki now “occupies” the “Sunni Triangle” in the mid-third of the country. Here too an insurgency in underway. The Kurdish entity in the north is now self-governing, but Kurds in southeastern Turkey, across the border, remain “occupied” by the Ankara-based Turkish state founded by Kemal Ataturk.
Kurds also live under occupation in Syria and Iran. Persians constitute just 61per cent of the population in the Islamic Republic, followed by Azeris at 16 per cent and Kurds at 10 per cent. In 1945, Azeris in Iran’s northwest, where they form a majority, were defeated in their attempt to set up their own state.
India is effectively an occupying power in Muslim-majority Kashmir, while to its north, China occupies Tibet and Xinjiang, with its large Uyghur and other Muslim populations. In Myanmar, the Burman-majority state occupies large swaths of the country inhabited by various ethnic groups, including the Shan, Kayin, Mon and Kachin. They have been fighting for independence for decades.
Most African states are artificial entities, often dominated by one group to the exclusion of others. Ethiopia, for example, occupies the Ogaden region in its southeast, populated by Somalis. Until South Sudan gained its independence in 2011, it was occupied by Arab-majority Sudan. East Timor freed itself from Indonesian occupation in 2002. The Ibo of southeastern Nigeria failed to gain an independent state of Biafra in the 1960s.
The Russian Federation is a colonial occupier in the north Caucasus region, where Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia are populated by Muslim peoples.
As far as many people in Ireland are concerned, Great Britain’s control of Northern Ireland is also little more than an occupation, following the partition of the island in 1922. In Spain, many Basques and Catalans feel the same way about rule from Madrid.
And, of course, the settler states in the western hemisphere, in particular Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay in South America, and Canada and the United States in North America, were all wrested away from indigenous populations. The same holds true for Australia and New Zealand.
So the next time someone refers, without further elaboration, to “the occupied territories,” you might wish to respond, “which ones?”
Monday, February 10, 2014
Chinese Enterprises in Africa Are Changing the Continent's Economies
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
China is propelled abroad by the need to secure energy, metals and strategic minerals in order to support the rising living standards of its people. Being driven by economic survival, China is, in the words of author Robert Kaplan, “an uber-realist power” that “cares little about the type of regime with which it is engaged; it requires stability, not virtue as the West conceives of it.”
Leaders in Beijing need to keep economic growth rates high to continue to bring hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. And to do so, China needs the use of arable land, oil and minerals. Africa is rich in these.
This is a boon to African states whose governments may not live up to the liking of western countries. The Chinese don’t care how African governments run their affairs, nor do they make their investments contingent on government reform.
In 2009, China became Africa’s single largest trading partner, overtaking the United States. Annual trade now surpasses $200 billion. Chinese companies operate two thousand enterprises in more than fifty African countries and claim to employ at least 300,000 Africans. They have built 60,000 kilometres of roads and 3.5 million kilowatts worth of power stations there.
Since 1995 mineral products have dominated China’s imports from African countries with Angola and South Africa being China’s main African trading partners. Trade between China and South Africa has grown to $45 billion a year. Chinese companies are investing in oil exploration in Algeria, Angola, and Nigeria. They had invested some $20 billion in Sudan before it split into two countries in 2011 -- and they now worry about the turmoil in South Sudan, which produces most of the oil.
Chinese firms are involved in mining enterprises in Gabon, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. They are also buying up land on which to build huge agribusinesses. In 2010 China signed a contract with Kinshasa to grow 2.8 million hectares of palm oil for biofuels. In Zimbabwe, Chinese investment has increased so much that Chinese-language signs greet visitors arriving at the international airport in Harare, the capital.
In January 2012, the 54-nation African Union held its summit in a $200-million headquarters financed and built by the Chinese government. “The people of China and Africa are good friends, good partners and good brothers,” a senior Chinese official, Jia Qinglin told the summit. “Our friendship is as solid as the towering Mount Kilimanjaro and as vibrant as the Yangtze River and the Yellow River.” (Soon afterward, Chinese investors opened a $27-million leather-goods factory in Ethiopia.)
In Zambia, a country of 14 million people with a GDP of $20 billion, the impact of China has been enormous. China is one of the world’s biggest users of copper, and Zambia has the second-largest reserves of raw copper in Africa, among other precious resources like coal, nickel, uranium, and gemstones.
In 2008, China and Zambia set up a zone in which Chinese investors didn’t have to pay taxes to the Zambian government and fifty companies invested a total of eight hundred million dollars.
By the end of 2013, the Chinese government and private sector had together invested $2.5 billion in the nation. More than 500 Chinese companies are engaged in farming, retail trade, pharmacies, hospitals, information and communication technologies as well as road-building, and manufacturing. China is also helping Zambia overcome electricity shortages by building a $2 billion hydro-electric project.
But there have been problems between Chinese overseers and Zambian workers. In February 2010 a Chinese supervisor was murdered at the Collum Coal Mine, owned by private Chinese entrepreneurs.
Later that year, two Chinese managers opened fire on African mine workers during a riot at the mine.
In early August 2012 a Chinese mine manager was killed during a protest against delays in implementing a new minimum wage. In February 2013 the Zambian government took over the mine, citing “gross abrogation of mining and environmental laws.”
As China continues to increase its economic footprint in Africa, are the Chinese starting to behave as badly as the Europeans did a century ago?
China is propelled abroad by the need to secure energy, metals and strategic minerals in order to support the rising living standards of its people. Being driven by economic survival, China is, in the words of author Robert Kaplan, “an uber-realist power” that “cares little about the type of regime with which it is engaged; it requires stability, not virtue as the West conceives of it.”
Leaders in Beijing need to keep economic growth rates high to continue to bring hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. And to do so, China needs the use of arable land, oil and minerals. Africa is rich in these.
This is a boon to African states whose governments may not live up to the liking of western countries. The Chinese don’t care how African governments run their affairs, nor do they make their investments contingent on government reform.
In 2009, China became Africa’s single largest trading partner, overtaking the United States. Annual trade now surpasses $200 billion. Chinese companies operate two thousand enterprises in more than fifty African countries and claim to employ at least 300,000 Africans. They have built 60,000 kilometres of roads and 3.5 million kilowatts worth of power stations there.
Since 1995 mineral products have dominated China’s imports from African countries with Angola and South Africa being China’s main African trading partners. Trade between China and South Africa has grown to $45 billion a year. Chinese companies are investing in oil exploration in Algeria, Angola, and Nigeria. They had invested some $20 billion in Sudan before it split into two countries in 2011 -- and they now worry about the turmoil in South Sudan, which produces most of the oil.
Chinese firms are involved in mining enterprises in Gabon, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. They are also buying up land on which to build huge agribusinesses. In 2010 China signed a contract with Kinshasa to grow 2.8 million hectares of palm oil for biofuels. In Zimbabwe, Chinese investment has increased so much that Chinese-language signs greet visitors arriving at the international airport in Harare, the capital.
In January 2012, the 54-nation African Union held its summit in a $200-million headquarters financed and built by the Chinese government. “The people of China and Africa are good friends, good partners and good brothers,” a senior Chinese official, Jia Qinglin told the summit. “Our friendship is as solid as the towering Mount Kilimanjaro and as vibrant as the Yangtze River and the Yellow River.” (Soon afterward, Chinese investors opened a $27-million leather-goods factory in Ethiopia.)
In Zambia, a country of 14 million people with a GDP of $20 billion, the impact of China has been enormous. China is one of the world’s biggest users of copper, and Zambia has the second-largest reserves of raw copper in Africa, among other precious resources like coal, nickel, uranium, and gemstones.
In 2008, China and Zambia set up a zone in which Chinese investors didn’t have to pay taxes to the Zambian government and fifty companies invested a total of eight hundred million dollars.
By the end of 2013, the Chinese government and private sector had together invested $2.5 billion in the nation. More than 500 Chinese companies are engaged in farming, retail trade, pharmacies, hospitals, information and communication technologies as well as road-building, and manufacturing. China is also helping Zambia overcome electricity shortages by building a $2 billion hydro-electric project.
But there have been problems between Chinese overseers and Zambian workers. In February 2010 a Chinese supervisor was murdered at the Collum Coal Mine, owned by private Chinese entrepreneurs.
Later that year, two Chinese managers opened fire on African mine workers during a riot at the mine.
In early August 2012 a Chinese mine manager was killed during a protest against delays in implementing a new minimum wage. In February 2013 the Zambian government took over the mine, citing “gross abrogation of mining and environmental laws.”
As China continues to increase its economic footprint in Africa, are the Chinese starting to behave as badly as the Europeans did a century ago?
Thursday, February 06, 2014
Boko Haram Insurgency in Northern Nigeria Intensifies
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
The Michigan State University geographer Harm de Blij, in the 2012 edition of his book Why Geography Matters, writes about an “Islamic Front” in sub-Saharan Africa that stretches from Sudan, bordering the Red Sea in the east, to Sierra Leone on the Atlantic Ocean in the west. And the line cuts many countries, including Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, in two.
When the British created the colony of Nigeria, its territory extended from the coastal forests along the Gulf of Guinea to the semi-deserts of the north, throwing together Muslim and non-Muslim ethnic groups. While the south was Christianized by European missionaries, the north remained devoutly Islamic, its people continuing to live in pre-colonial entities such as the Sokoto caliphate, Borno sultanate, and Kano emirate.
Today, Muslims, who live mainly in the north of the country, make up a little more than half the country’s population, while Christians, who predominate in the middle and south, account for almost all of the remainder.
Of Nigeria’s 36 states, the Sharia, the civil and criminal Muslim legal system, is now in force in nine Muslim-majority states and in some parts of three Muslim-plurality states.
The Islamic Front, notes de Blij, has become “a zone of conflict that now threatens the cohesion of countries and facilitates the actions of terrorists and insurgents.” Sparsely populated places to Nigeria’s north are increasingly becoming destabilized; parts of Mali were under the control of Islamist groups affiliated with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb for much of 2012-2013.
In Nigeria, conflict began in 2001 with the formation of Boko Haram (Congregation of the People of Tradition for Proselytism and Jihad). It is particularly active in the northern states of Adamawa, Bauchi, Borno, Kaduna, Kano and Yobe.
Violence since the insurgency began has resulted in some 10,000 deaths, especially since 2009, when the group’s founder, Mohammed Yusuf was killed. The current leader Abubakar Shekau, calls interaction with the non-Muslim world forbidden, opposes western-style education, which the group considers sacrilege, and wants to overthrow the secular Nigerian state.
Many Boko Haram militants, and those of an even more radical splinter faction known as Ansaru (Vanguard for the Protection of Muslims in Black Lands), formed in early 2012, joined the Islamist insurrection in Mali and returned with sophisticated weapons and tactics learned there, according to Nigerian officials.
“I enjoy killing anyone that God commands me to kill,” Abubakar Shekau remarked after Boko Haram had killed more than 180 people in Kano, northern Nigeria’s largest city in January 2012.
As the violence intensified, Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian, declared a state of emergency in the three northern states of Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe last May. It did not quell the brutality.
Nigerian military officials say those being targeted are Boko Haram militants, but Western governments and international human rights organizations have also expressed concern. American Secretary of State John F. Kerry called on Nigeria to uphold human rights as it tries to crush Boko Haram.
In late December Abubakar Shekau appeared in a video, claiming responsibility for a Dec. 20 attack on a Nigerian army barracks in Bama, south of Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state.
He promised to “decapitate and mutilate” more people and ridiculed the United States for putting a bounty on his head.
There was further heavy fighting between the Nigerian army and Boko Haram in Banki, also in Borno state, last month and militants were blamed for a deadly bomb attack on Jan. 14 that killed 43 people in a crowded market in Maiduguri, during festivities marking the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad.
Worse was to come. An attack by Boko Haram insurgents on Kawuri, a village in Borno state, on Jan. 26 killed 85 people. In the village of Waga Chakawa, in neighbouring Adamawa state, they murdered at least 26 people on the same day during an attack on a Roman Catholic Church service.
Altogether, over 200 people died this past January at the hands of militants. The United Nations stated that 4,000 people had also fled northeast Nigeria to Cameroon and 1,500 to Niger since mid-January, both as a result of the insurgency and the military response to it.
In December 2013, Canada listed Boko Haram as a terrorist organisation. Ottawa’s Ambassador for Religious Freedom, Andrew Bennett, in a statement said that “Canada condemns the terrible attacks by Boko Haram in north-eastern Nigeria.”
Nigeria is an incredibly resilient nation. It has experienced civil war, military dictatorship, religious extremism, and ethnic violence since independence from Britain in 1960. Now, President Jonathan has committed himself to bringing an end to the activities of Boko Haram this year. But it won’t be easy.
The Michigan State University geographer Harm de Blij, in the 2012 edition of his book Why Geography Matters, writes about an “Islamic Front” in sub-Saharan Africa that stretches from Sudan, bordering the Red Sea in the east, to Sierra Leone on the Atlantic Ocean in the west. And the line cuts many countries, including Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, in two.
When the British created the colony of Nigeria, its territory extended from the coastal forests along the Gulf of Guinea to the semi-deserts of the north, throwing together Muslim and non-Muslim ethnic groups. While the south was Christianized by European missionaries, the north remained devoutly Islamic, its people continuing to live in pre-colonial entities such as the Sokoto caliphate, Borno sultanate, and Kano emirate.
Today, Muslims, who live mainly in the north of the country, make up a little more than half the country’s population, while Christians, who predominate in the middle and south, account for almost all of the remainder.
Of Nigeria’s 36 states, the Sharia, the civil and criminal Muslim legal system, is now in force in nine Muslim-majority states and in some parts of three Muslim-plurality states.
The Islamic Front, notes de Blij, has become “a zone of conflict that now threatens the cohesion of countries and facilitates the actions of terrorists and insurgents.” Sparsely populated places to Nigeria’s north are increasingly becoming destabilized; parts of Mali were under the control of Islamist groups affiliated with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb for much of 2012-2013.
In Nigeria, conflict began in 2001 with the formation of Boko Haram (Congregation of the People of Tradition for Proselytism and Jihad). It is particularly active in the northern states of Adamawa, Bauchi, Borno, Kaduna, Kano and Yobe.
Violence since the insurgency began has resulted in some 10,000 deaths, especially since 2009, when the group’s founder, Mohammed Yusuf was killed. The current leader Abubakar Shekau, calls interaction with the non-Muslim world forbidden, opposes western-style education, which the group considers sacrilege, and wants to overthrow the secular Nigerian state.
Many Boko Haram militants, and those of an even more radical splinter faction known as Ansaru (Vanguard for the Protection of Muslims in Black Lands), formed in early 2012, joined the Islamist insurrection in Mali and returned with sophisticated weapons and tactics learned there, according to Nigerian officials.
“I enjoy killing anyone that God commands me to kill,” Abubakar Shekau remarked after Boko Haram had killed more than 180 people in Kano, northern Nigeria’s largest city in January 2012.
As the violence intensified, Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian, declared a state of emergency in the three northern states of Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe last May. It did not quell the brutality.
Nigerian military officials say those being targeted are Boko Haram militants, but Western governments and international human rights organizations have also expressed concern. American Secretary of State John F. Kerry called on Nigeria to uphold human rights as it tries to crush Boko Haram.
In late December Abubakar Shekau appeared in a video, claiming responsibility for a Dec. 20 attack on a Nigerian army barracks in Bama, south of Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state.
He promised to “decapitate and mutilate” more people and ridiculed the United States for putting a bounty on his head.
There was further heavy fighting between the Nigerian army and Boko Haram in Banki, also in Borno state, last month and militants were blamed for a deadly bomb attack on Jan. 14 that killed 43 people in a crowded market in Maiduguri, during festivities marking the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad.
Worse was to come. An attack by Boko Haram insurgents on Kawuri, a village in Borno state, on Jan. 26 killed 85 people. In the village of Waga Chakawa, in neighbouring Adamawa state, they murdered at least 26 people on the same day during an attack on a Roman Catholic Church service.
Altogether, over 200 people died this past January at the hands of militants. The United Nations stated that 4,000 people had also fled northeast Nigeria to Cameroon and 1,500 to Niger since mid-January, both as a result of the insurgency and the military response to it.
In December 2013, Canada listed Boko Haram as a terrorist organisation. Ottawa’s Ambassador for Religious Freedom, Andrew Bennett, in a statement said that “Canada condemns the terrible attacks by Boko Haram in north-eastern Nigeria.”
Nigeria is an incredibly resilient nation. It has experienced civil war, military dictatorship, religious extremism, and ethnic violence since independence from Britain in 1960. Now, President Jonathan has committed himself to bringing an end to the activities of Boko Haram this year. But it won’t be easy.
Monday, February 03, 2014
Tunisia, Where the Arab Spring Began, Moves Towards Democracy
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
You may remember this old joke from the 1990s: What is Communism? Answer: The transition between capitalism and capitalism.
To this we can now add: What was the Arab Spring? In Egypt, it has been the transition between military dictatorship and military dictatorship (with a brief interlude of Muslim Brotherhood rule).
Remember all the nonsense about how the liberal youth in Tahrir Square were using social media to bring democracy to Egypt? Where are they now?
Actually, in Yemen and Libya, the Arab Spring brought, not military dictatorship, but semi-anarchy. And in Syria, it has resulted in a bloody civil war that has resulted in more than 130,000 deaths and two million refugees.
The only country not engulfed by chaos is where it all started, Tunisia. That North African country, whose former strongman, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, fled the country in January 2011, is in the process of creating a pluralistic, constitutional political system. Tunisia’s National Constituent Assembly on Jan. 26 approved a new constitution that has been called one of the most progressive in the Arab world by 200 out of 216 votes.
Ali Larayedh of Ennahda (the Renaissance Party), the moderate Islamist movement, stepped down as prime minister last month in an agreement with secular opponents, to put an end to the country’s months-long political crisis, triggered by the murder of two opposition politicians.
Ennahda’s founder and intellectual leader, Rachid al-Ghannouchi, who was in exile after 1988 and only returned following the ouster of ben Ali, has supported the constitutional process. “We are about to crown this historic process of democratic transition in Tunisia,” Gannouchi declared.
The role of Islam and women’s rights took up the bulk of the discussion about the constitution both inside the Constituent Assembly and in the public sphere. While Islam is enshrined, the document avoids defining it as a source of law.
Articles 20, 40 and 45 not only grant men and women an equal status but also stipulate that a certain number of seats in city and district governments must be given to women.
The country’s poorer, rural regions are being empowered, and the roles of president and prime minister are defined in a way that aims to prevent an autocratic takeover of power. Also, a newly formed constitutional court is to monitor the legitimacy of future laws.
Some on the left remain wary. Karima Souid, a member of the left-leaning Al-Massar (Social Democratic Path) party points out that the role of young people who were behind the protests three years ago has been marginalized. “Having to fight for the rights of women and young people in this day and age isn’t normal -- these rights should be something natural,” she commented.
And women’s rights campaigners fear that other articles in the constitution can be misused for the purpose of limiting the newly won freedoms. For example, they warn that the “holy right to life” can be used to combat abortion.
Still, months of acrimony gave way to a compromise between Islamists and secular leaders that contrasts sharply with upheaval in Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere. Said Ghazi Gherairi, secretary general of the International Academy of Constitutional Law in Tunis, the capital, “It is a result of consensus, and this is new in the Arab world.”
Tunisia has many advantages. It is ethnically and religiously homogenous, with well-defined borders. Its small military historically has had no interest in political power. In its civilian politics, Islamist and secular factions were relatively evenly matched, with the Islamists winning only a plurality in Tunisia’s first free vote, held in October 2011.
Pollster Craig Charney, an expert on democratization in post-conflict societies, also noted that Tunisia already had strong civil society institutions like the General Labor Union, the National Business Federation, the Tunisian Bar Association and the Tunisian Human Rights League. These “were able to play a nonpartisan moderating role between the different political factions.”
The new caretaker prime minister, Mehdi Jomaa, who has succeeded Larayedh in office, has now appointed a non-political cabinet. An election committee will then decide on a date for a presidential vote.
Jomaa has also promised to boost investment and employment in the country. “I will do everything in my power to confront the challenges, overcome the obstacles and restore stability and security to Tunisia,” he announced.
“Tunisia’s revolution was sparked not only by political grievances, but also economic grievances, and the new government will have a lot of challenges to face on the economic side,” Stephen McInerney, executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy, told Al Jazeera.
You may remember this old joke from the 1990s: What is Communism? Answer: The transition between capitalism and capitalism.
To this we can now add: What was the Arab Spring? In Egypt, it has been the transition between military dictatorship and military dictatorship (with a brief interlude of Muslim Brotherhood rule).
Remember all the nonsense about how the liberal youth in Tahrir Square were using social media to bring democracy to Egypt? Where are they now?
Actually, in Yemen and Libya, the Arab Spring brought, not military dictatorship, but semi-anarchy. And in Syria, it has resulted in a bloody civil war that has resulted in more than 130,000 deaths and two million refugees.
The only country not engulfed by chaos is where it all started, Tunisia. That North African country, whose former strongman, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, fled the country in January 2011, is in the process of creating a pluralistic, constitutional political system. Tunisia’s National Constituent Assembly on Jan. 26 approved a new constitution that has been called one of the most progressive in the Arab world by 200 out of 216 votes.
Ali Larayedh of Ennahda (the Renaissance Party), the moderate Islamist movement, stepped down as prime minister last month in an agreement with secular opponents, to put an end to the country’s months-long political crisis, triggered by the murder of two opposition politicians.
Ennahda’s founder and intellectual leader, Rachid al-Ghannouchi, who was in exile after 1988 and only returned following the ouster of ben Ali, has supported the constitutional process. “We are about to crown this historic process of democratic transition in Tunisia,” Gannouchi declared.
The role of Islam and women’s rights took up the bulk of the discussion about the constitution both inside the Constituent Assembly and in the public sphere. While Islam is enshrined, the document avoids defining it as a source of law.
Articles 20, 40 and 45 not only grant men and women an equal status but also stipulate that a certain number of seats in city and district governments must be given to women.
The country’s poorer, rural regions are being empowered, and the roles of president and prime minister are defined in a way that aims to prevent an autocratic takeover of power. Also, a newly formed constitutional court is to monitor the legitimacy of future laws.
Some on the left remain wary. Karima Souid, a member of the left-leaning Al-Massar (Social Democratic Path) party points out that the role of young people who were behind the protests three years ago has been marginalized. “Having to fight for the rights of women and young people in this day and age isn’t normal -- these rights should be something natural,” she commented.
And women’s rights campaigners fear that other articles in the constitution can be misused for the purpose of limiting the newly won freedoms. For example, they warn that the “holy right to life” can be used to combat abortion.
Still, months of acrimony gave way to a compromise between Islamists and secular leaders that contrasts sharply with upheaval in Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere. Said Ghazi Gherairi, secretary general of the International Academy of Constitutional Law in Tunis, the capital, “It is a result of consensus, and this is new in the Arab world.”
Tunisia has many advantages. It is ethnically and religiously homogenous, with well-defined borders. Its small military historically has had no interest in political power. In its civilian politics, Islamist and secular factions were relatively evenly matched, with the Islamists winning only a plurality in Tunisia’s first free vote, held in October 2011.
Pollster Craig Charney, an expert on democratization in post-conflict societies, also noted that Tunisia already had strong civil society institutions like the General Labor Union, the National Business Federation, the Tunisian Bar Association and the Tunisian Human Rights League. These “were able to play a nonpartisan moderating role between the different political factions.”
The new caretaker prime minister, Mehdi Jomaa, who has succeeded Larayedh in office, has now appointed a non-political cabinet. An election committee will then decide on a date for a presidential vote.
Jomaa has also promised to boost investment and employment in the country. “I will do everything in my power to confront the challenges, overcome the obstacles and restore stability and security to Tunisia,” he announced.
“Tunisia’s revolution was sparked not only by political grievances, but also economic grievances, and the new government will have a lot of challenges to face on the economic side,” Stephen McInerney, executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy, told Al Jazeera.
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Are the Jews of Israel an Aboriginal People?
I have recently read two articles, A Native and a Zionist, and Native, Jewish Bond Thicker Than Water, by Ryan Bellerose, published last March in the Métropolitain, a Montreal newspaper, and reprinted in the Jewish Tribune, and last June in the Toronto Sun, respectively.
The author is a Métis from Alberta. He founded Canadians for Accountability, a native rights advocacy group, and is an organizer and participant in the Idle No More movement in Calgary. And he calls himself a Zionist.
Citing the work of anthropologist José R. MartÃnez-Cobo, Bellerose concludes that Jews fit the definition of an aboriginal people. Their lands were occupied, first by the Romans, then by the Arabs in the seventh century. While different Jewish communities have slightly different traditions, they all share the same root culture and it has remained unchanged. And they have resurrected their traditional language, Hebrew.
“Alone among other nations, Jews’ language, history, culture and folklore were born and forged in the Holy Land. There is no statute of limitations on being indigenous. In stark contrast, Arabs arrived to the Holy Land only in the seventh century, when Arabian armies colonized the Middle East. Longstanding presence may generate rights, but it is not synonymous with being indigenous,” he wrote.
Liberal MP and former justice minister Irwin Cotler agrees. The Jewish people, he has stated, is the only people in the Middle East that still inhabits the same land, embraces the same religion, studies the same Torah, harkens to the same prophets, speaks the same aboriginal language – Hebrew – and bears the same aboriginal name, Israel, as it did 3,500 years ago.
No other people in the region, including today’s Palestinian Arabs, can make that claim, since their cultures all derive from Christianity or Islam, neither of which existed back then.
Israel, then, is the aboriginal homeland of the Jewish people across space and time and is, Cotler asserts, a successor state to the biblical, or aboriginal, Jewish kingdoms.
So why do few people (other than Jews) see us as the indigenous people in Israel? Is it simply that we were outside the land of Israel for too long? But some North American and Australian natives lost their lands and sovereignty at least 300 years ago, yet they are still referred to, in Canada, as ‘first nations.’
Nor did Jews vanish: they continued to live in the region, albeit as “dhimmis,” second-class people who did not enjoy certain political rights reserved to Muslims, and who were subject to payment of special taxes. In 1945 there were between 758,000 and 866,000 Jews living in communities throughout the Arab world; Jerusalem had a Jewish majority in the 19th century.
No, the reason for the denial of Jewish nationhood is the religious theory known as ‘supersessionism.’ From its inception, the founders of Christianity taught that G-d’s ‘Old Covenant’ with the Jewish people was fulfilled and was now replaced (superseded) by the ‘New Covenant in Christ,’ and so Judaism (and the Jews) were supposed to disappear. The Church was the ‘new Israel.’
Centuries later, theologians of Islam adopted similar views, which helps explain the hatred by many in the Arab and larger Muslim world toward Israel. Jews were not just ‘settlers’ taking Palestinian land (the way European colonists did in Africa, Australia and the Americas) but were an inferior people for whom Muslims had been taught to show contempt.
More recent, secular versions of supersessionism can be found in the various Marxist screeds against Zionism. Karl Marx himself denied Jews were a nation but rather a “caste,” surviving only because of their economic usefulness to the larger society, and Communists usually opposed the idea of a Jewish state. The animus against Jewish nationhood can also be found in works such as those of the British historian Arnold Toynbee, in which he spoke of the Jewish people in terms of a “fossilized civilization.”
When it comes to the denial of the right of Jews to exercise sovereignty in the land of Israel, what we sometimes find is an underlying theological condition.
The author is a Métis from Alberta. He founded Canadians for Accountability, a native rights advocacy group, and is an organizer and participant in the Idle No More movement in Calgary. And he calls himself a Zionist.
Citing the work of anthropologist José R. MartÃnez-Cobo, Bellerose concludes that Jews fit the definition of an aboriginal people. Their lands were occupied, first by the Romans, then by the Arabs in the seventh century. While different Jewish communities have slightly different traditions, they all share the same root culture and it has remained unchanged. And they have resurrected their traditional language, Hebrew.
“Alone among other nations, Jews’ language, history, culture and folklore were born and forged in the Holy Land. There is no statute of limitations on being indigenous. In stark contrast, Arabs arrived to the Holy Land only in the seventh century, when Arabian armies colonized the Middle East. Longstanding presence may generate rights, but it is not synonymous with being indigenous,” he wrote.
Liberal MP and former justice minister Irwin Cotler agrees. The Jewish people, he has stated, is the only people in the Middle East that still inhabits the same land, embraces the same religion, studies the same Torah, harkens to the same prophets, speaks the same aboriginal language – Hebrew – and bears the same aboriginal name, Israel, as it did 3,500 years ago.
No other people in the region, including today’s Palestinian Arabs, can make that claim, since their cultures all derive from Christianity or Islam, neither of which existed back then.
Israel, then, is the aboriginal homeland of the Jewish people across space and time and is, Cotler asserts, a successor state to the biblical, or aboriginal, Jewish kingdoms.
So why do few people (other than Jews) see us as the indigenous people in Israel? Is it simply that we were outside the land of Israel for too long? But some North American and Australian natives lost their lands and sovereignty at least 300 years ago, yet they are still referred to, in Canada, as ‘first nations.’
Nor did Jews vanish: they continued to live in the region, albeit as “dhimmis,” second-class people who did not enjoy certain political rights reserved to Muslims, and who were subject to payment of special taxes. In 1945 there were between 758,000 and 866,000 Jews living in communities throughout the Arab world; Jerusalem had a Jewish majority in the 19th century.
No, the reason for the denial of Jewish nationhood is the religious theory known as ‘supersessionism.’ From its inception, the founders of Christianity taught that G-d’s ‘Old Covenant’ with the Jewish people was fulfilled and was now replaced (superseded) by the ‘New Covenant in Christ,’ and so Judaism (and the Jews) were supposed to disappear. The Church was the ‘new Israel.’
Centuries later, theologians of Islam adopted similar views, which helps explain the hatred by many in the Arab and larger Muslim world toward Israel. Jews were not just ‘settlers’ taking Palestinian land (the way European colonists did in Africa, Australia and the Americas) but were an inferior people for whom Muslims had been taught to show contempt.
More recent, secular versions of supersessionism can be found in the various Marxist screeds against Zionism. Karl Marx himself denied Jews were a nation but rather a “caste,” surviving only because of their economic usefulness to the larger society, and Communists usually opposed the idea of a Jewish state. The animus against Jewish nationhood can also be found in works such as those of the British historian Arnold Toynbee, in which he spoke of the Jewish people in terms of a “fossilized civilization.”
When it comes to the denial of the right of Jews to exercise sovereignty in the land of Israel, what we sometimes find is an underlying theological condition.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)