For Many Republicans, Distrust of the Federal Government is Paramount

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

For many Republican members of the United States House of Representatives, with their Tea Party ideology, the constitution they would prefer would resemble the Articles of Confederation, ratified by the original 13 states by 1781.

Under that initial governmental pact, the states were primary, as they are for most Republican House members today. The United States was not defined by the Articles as a country or nation but rather a loose union of states, each of which retained its sovereignty and independence. The Continental Congress, made up of one representative appointed by each state, had very little power.

It lacked the power to lay or collect taxes, found that requisitions asked of the states were almost always ignored, and could not even impose uniform tariff policies throughout the nation. Most significantly, the central government lacked the instruments with which to effectively confront economic crises that were national in scope, such as the post-war conflict between debtors and creditors. Leaders of states like Rhode Island routinely refused to honor their debts. In the words of George Washington, who would become the first president of the new federal United States in 1789, the 13 states were united only “by a rope of sand.”

To put an end to this chaos, in 1787 the Continental Congress issued a call for the states to send delegates to Philadelphia to revise the Articles. But they proceeded to construct a charter for a new, more centralized form of government. The new document was completed in 1787, and was officially adopted two years later. 

If the Republicans today were given the choice between the Articles and the present-day United States Constitution, many might well chose the former. This might be particularly the case with southern members, who represent Congressional districts in states that tried to leave the federal Union in 1861, and who still smart over the federal government’s imposition of civil rights legislation ending segregation in the 1960s.

Actually, the Articles still live on in a sense, since the states determine federal voting procedures, have their own armies (the National Guard), and their own legal systems – which, for example, allows some to abolish the death penalty, others to retain it.

Today’s Republicans distrust the federal government since they identify it with progressive legislation. They prefer a country run in the interest of the “one percent,” with very little emphasis on cultural diversity or on correcting the legacy of slavery and segregation, with few new refugees and immigrants, and a gerrymandered House of Representatives which allows them to control the lower house of Congress.

They also are engaged in vote suppression, by demanding stringent forms of identification and by limiting voting days and hours, to make it harder for people – especially the poor and minorities – to exercise the franchise. (Of course in the 18^th century only rich white men could vote.) And they have shut the federal government down to achieve that kind of country.

 

 

Somalia, Kenya and al-Shabaab: More Than Meets the Eye

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

In the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya Sept. 21-24, which resulted in at least 67 deaths, many people have wondered who the perpetrators, known as al-Shabaab, are, and why they carried out such a murderous assault.

While the Somali group has been active for less than a decade, the antagonistic relationship between Somalis and Kenyans dates back to the pre-1960s colonial days.

In the colonial era, the territories inhabited by the Somali people were divided between Britain, France, Italy, and Ethiopia. But only the old British and Italian Somaliland colonies were united as one nation, in 1960.

Upon independence, therefore, the new Somalia laid claims to all of the remaining areas inhabited by Somalis, based on the irredentist idea that all Somalis should be united in one country. In 1977, Somalia fought a war with Ethiopia to try to gain the Ogaden, an area populated by Somalis, but lost.

As for Kenya, which itself gained its independence from Britain, in 1964, its Northern Frontier District, now the North Eastern Province, was handed over to Kenyan nationalists at the end of British colonial rule despite the fact that it is inhabited almost entirely by Somalis.

The Somalis in the region fought a war against Kenyan troops between 1963 and 1967 to join their kin in the Somali Republic to the north. Although the war ended into a cease-fire, the Somalis there still identify and maintain close ties with their kin in Somalia, and see themselves as one people. They number more than two million people, out of Kenya’s total population of 44 million.

The two countries continued to have a troubled relationship. Kenyan forces were engaged in two massacres of ethnic Somalis in the province in 1980 and 1984.

But Somalia itself has been without an effective government since 1991, when the last dictator, Mohamed Siad Barre, fled the country. It has been governed, or more accurately misgoverned, by a collection of clan-based “warlords,” who have looted and murdered their way through the country ever since.

As a reaction to this Hobbesian lawlessness, a system of Islamic courts became the main governmental body in much of the country. United into the Islamic Courts Union by 2006, they were eliminated by other Somalis, backed by the Ethiopian military, in a brutal war. But a militant offshoot morphed into the al-Qaeda affiliated Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen (Mujahideen Youth Movement), or al-Shabaab.

Ethiopia and Kenya, neither of them Muslim-majority states, have periodically crossed into Somalia ever since then to battle the terrorists. In 2011 their troops entered Somalia in a coordinated attack, known as Operation Linda Nchi, against the al-Shabaab insurgents in southern Somalia.

As well, in November of last year, Kenyan forces launched a military attack on the Garissa district of their own North Eastern Province, inciting violence, raping women and shooting at students; a mass exodus of Somali residents followed.

In return, al-Shabaab has carried out attacks on Ethiopian and Kenyan troops in Somalia, but also against those countries on their owl soil as well. We learned the full extent of their retaliation when they wreaked havoc in Nairobi.

Ethiopia Is a Unique African Country

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Ethiopia is that rarity among African states: a country with a very long continuous history and one of the two never conquered by Europeans during the 19^th century partition of Africa. It also has one of the world’s oldest Christian churches, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, dating back to the fourth century. Christianity was declared the state religion in the Kingdom of Axum, forerunner of today’s Ethiopia, in 330 AD.

The medieval Christian kingdom was known to Europeans, often in the form of myths regarding Prester John, a mythical Christian king in the heart of Africa.

Unlike most parts of Africa, Ethiopia also had a feudal social system, with a land-owning nobility ruling over a peasantry from which it exacted tribute.

The Italians had tried to incorporate Ethiopia (also known as Abyssinia) into their empire but were defeated by Emperor Menelik II at Adwa in 1896, thus allowing Ethiopia to retain its independence.

But 40 years later, Ethiopia was subjugated by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and amalgamated with neighbours Eritrea and Italian Somaliland into an East African empire. Mussolini’s dream didn’t last long, though; in 1941, during World War II, the British expelled the Italians and restored Emperor Haile Selassie to his throne.

However, Ethiopia remained a feudal backwater. This came to a sudden end in 1974, when Haile Selassie was overthrown in a military coup, and was dead a year later, probably murdered by the revolutionaries who had assumed power.

The next few years marked a period of turmoil, as the Derg, the military council now running the country, quickly fell into internal conflict. In 1977 Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam became Ethiopia’s leader. Calling himself a Marxist-Leninist, he instituted a regime of terror, killing thousands of his opponents.

He also began to collectivize agriculture. All rural land was nationalized, stripping the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the Imperial family, and the nobility of all their sizable estates. But within a matter of years the country was suffering from a major famine which killed hundreds of thousands of people.

By now the country was beset by various separatist movements, operating in regions inhabited by peoples who were not Amhara, the ruling ethnic group who represent only about one-fourth of the population. The Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front launched a war for regional autonomy; the Oromo Liberation Front started political agitation in the Oromo areas; while in the Ogaden, the eastern part of the country inhabited by Muslim Somalis, the Western Somali Liberation Front began armed struggle. In 1977 Somalia invaded the Ogaden region in an attempt to annex it, but with Cuban and Soviet aid, Ethiopia drove its army back.

All of these different struggles merged into an overall civil war in the 1980s. Mengistu was finally toppled by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), an alliance of the various insurrectionary movements, and he fled to Zimbabwe in 1991. He remains there despite an Ethiopian court verdict finding him guilty in absentia of genocide for the deaths of some two million Ethiopians overall.

With Mengistu’s removal, the country, which had been run as a centralized state by both emperors and Marxists, acknowledged its diverse nature. In 1993 Eritrea, which had been attached to Ethiopia against its will after the Second World War, and had fought against its incorporation for decades, was granted independence. A year later the rest of the country, under a new constitution, was reorganized as a federal polity.

The first multi-party election took place in 1995, with Meles Zenawi Asres, head of the EPRDF, elected prime minister; he served until his death in 2012. Allegations of human rights abuses were levelled against his government, which continued to battle political opponents and secessionists.

In 2005, a disputed election led to violent unrest, and security forces killed nearly 200 people while putting down demonstrations. The 2010 election was also marred by irregularities. A leader of the country’s largest opposition group, the Forum for Democratic Dialogue in Ethiopia, Gebru Asrat, said that “The ruling party has completely turned the country in to a one party state.”

Under Meles Zenawi’s tenure Ethiopia also fought a boundary war against Eritrea from 1998 to 2000, and sent troops into Somalia in 2006 to halt the gains of the al-Shabaab Islamist militants; some are still involved there. The current prime minister, Hailemariam Desalegn Boshe, was Meles Zenawi’s deputy.

The 94 million Ethiopians are now divided into nine ethnically based and politically autonomous regional states, and two chartered cities, Addis Ababa, the capital, and Dire Dawa. The constitution assigns extensive power to them; on paper, they even have the right to secede. In practice, though, Ethiopia is far from being a democratic state.

 

Canadian - South Korean Relations Over Five Decades

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Canada and South Korea, and on Sept. 12-13 the ambassador of the Republic of Korea, Cho Hee-yong, visited Prince Edward Island to celebrate 2013 as “the year of Korea in Canada.”

While bellicose North Korea languishes under the Orwellian dictatorship of the Kim family, focused on building nuclear weapons while its people starve, South Korea has gone from strength to strength, and is now a modern democratic state, with one of the world’s strongest economies.

Few people in the 1950s would have predicted this. Long a Japanese colony, Korea was partitioned between a Communist north and a capitalist south after 1945. The north, calling itself the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, attacked the south five years later, and soon Communist Chinese troops entered the war on the northern side.

Canada, as part of a 16-nation American-led United Nations force, fought in the war on behalf of the south. A total of 26, 791 Canadians troops participated; more than 1,200 were seriously wounded and 516 Canadians died in the conflict. Canada supplied the third-largest military contingent, after the United States and Britain, on the Allied side.

The Korean War lasted from 1950 to 1953. By the time it ended, the south was a wasteland, its capital Seoul, destroyed. In the 1960s, its economy was still comparable with levels in the poorer countries of Africa and Asia.

But South Korea over the past four decades has demonstrated incredible growth and global integration to become a high-tech industrialized economy. It adapted an export-oriented economic strategy, with finished products such as electronics, textiles, ships, automobiles, semiconductors, computers, wireless telecommunications equipment, and steel being some of its most important exports.

Some of its major firms are known throughout the world: Hyundai and Kia are major automobile manufacturers, and LG and Samsung produce televisions and other electronics.

Today South Korea, with its 49 million people, is one of the “Asian tigers,” along with Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. Despite a lack of major natural resources, the economy ranks 15^th in the world, with a gross domestic product (GDP) of $1.116 trillion, and it is a member of the G-20.

South Korea is Canada’s seventh-largest trading partner, and Canadian-South Korean two-way trade reached $10.1 billion last year. South Koreans have invested more than $11 billion dollars in Canada over the past four decades, mostly in the field of energy.

More than 23,000 Canadians currently live in South Korea, including over 5,000 English teachers. Altogether, over 100,000 Canadians have taught English in the country over the years. As well, Canadian missionaries were active in the country from the late 19^th century on; the first Korean-English dictionary was compiled by a Canadian.

“We are strong allies and partners,” Ambassador Cho told an audience at the University of Prince Edward Island, “and relations have never been stronger.” He expressed his thanks for the “tremendous contribution” Canadians played in the war sixty years ago and also noted that Canada is concerned about the disregard for human rights in North Korea.

Short Guide to the PQ's Charter of Values

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The so-called “Quebec Charter of Values” unveiled by the governing Parti Québécois has, predictably, been met with almost universal condemnation in the rest of Canada, as well as by most non-francophones in Quebec itself. However, a significant percentage of Québécois francophones are in support, according to polls.

The charter would forbid all public employees from wearing “overt and conspicuous” religious symbols and headgear, including Muslim face veils, Jewish yarmulkes, Sikh turbans, or large crucifixes. “This restriction would reflect the state’s neutrality,” the proposal for the charter states.

The regulations would apply only to publicly-paid employees. These include police officers, prosecutors, doctors, teachers, daycare workers and other government workers.

The PQ considers itself a left-of-centre party, yet to many advocates of multiculturalism in the country, this seems to place them in the same category as those xenophobes, and even racists, who oppose diversity.

To understand where this charter is, so to speak, coming from, it’s necessary to view the context in which it is being proposed. We have to examine the different historical circumstances that are behind it. This is not to condone it, but to understand its ideological roots.

I have identified four important issues:

First, Quebec is a French Canadian “homeland” nation, like Serbia or Sweden. It’s not just a “Nebraska” or “Saskatchewan,” places that don't “belong” to a specific ethnic group. In those places, no other community can be seen as a “threat” to the “nation.” The rest of Canada actually accepts this definition – the province is considered a “distinct society,” after all.

Secondly comes the fact that this people was conquered, in the 18^th century, by others who didn’t accommodate themselves to the majority culture. The British Protestants who took over after 1759 didn’t become French-speaking Catholics. And the immigrants that followed, especially non-Catholics, moved into the anglophone sphere, humiliating the majority population as a conquered people without control over their own “homeland.”

So for decades, the accommodation ran the other way – only with the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s did French Quebeckers become “maîtres chez nous” (“masters in our own house”). And so there is a fear, however unfounded, that a new wave of immigrants, even if speaking French, will also not become part of “la patrie.”

Third, in Quebec there is a strong strain of anti-clericalism, one that has followed centuries of what many consider cultural and religious oppression by a hegemonic Roman Catholic Church. The secularization of French Canadian society only began in the 1960s, and so many see all religion as repressive.

Pre-1960s Quebec is now viewed by those on the left as “la grande noirceur” (“the great darkness”), an era when so many Québécois were uneducated and under the supposed thumb of priests and nuns, and it makes many in the province wary of any religious presence. There was no equivalent to this in the pluralistic, largely Protestant, English Canada, where separation of church and state does not involve removing religion from the public square.

Finally, many strands of Quebec feminism, unlike the multicultural version prevalent elsewhere, consider all religious garb as inherently oppressive to women and forced on them by males.

If the charter ever manages to be passed into law by Quebec’s National Assembly, most of it will probably be struck down by the Supreme Court of Canada. The separatists will then claim that this demonstrates the need for Quebec to become a sovereign nation.

 

 

Israel and North American Jewish Youth

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

There has been no shortage of articles and books in recent years lamenting the apparent lessening of interest in and emotional ties to Israel on the part of North American Jewish youth. Peter Beinart’s book The Crisis of Zionism documents this in great detail. There are many programs, such as Birthright Israel, which sends teenagers from Canada and the United States to visit Israel, that have struggled against this trend, with only limited success.

Very often, the blame is placed on specific Israeli policies, in particular relations with the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. North American Jewish kids are mainly liberal, the argument goes, and they find much of what Israel does distasteful; as a result they feel defensive and uncomfortable when defending the Jewish state against its many detractors.

But perhaps the problem is even deeper than this. Perhaps today’s English-speaking North American young Jewish kids don’t see in Israelis “themselves,” the way older Jews did when they were young.

For the first 70 years or so of modern Jewish settlement in Palestine, following the creation of the Zionist movement in the late 19^th century, the community in Palestine, and then in the new state of Israel, was largely the child of secular east European Jewry. And so were the Jews who came to North America. The two were, so to speak, twins, and indeed, in many cases, individuals in the two communities were actual relatives. In almost all cases, they also spoke a common language, Yiddish.

This has changed dramatically. In recent decades very few North American secular Jews have moved to Israel. Today, the image of an Israeli might be a very religious “messianic” Zionist settler in the West Bank; a Jew from the Arab or Iranian Middle East; an Ethiopian or central Asian Jew; and a Jew from the Slavic republics of the former Soviet Union. Finally, there are the ultra-Orthodox. And most Israelis speak Hebrew (with some English), whereas North American Jews speak English – almost none can converse in Hebrew.

Therefore most Israelis today do not feel or sound or, in many cases, even look, like North American Jews. And even if some are relatives of people on this side of the world, they have typically never met them.

The West Bank settlers view the state in an eschatological context, seeing the entire land of Israel as having been given to the Jewish people by Divine decree, with not a square centimetre to be transferred to non-Jewish Arabs. Most North American Jews, especially younger ones, cannot subscribe to this view.

Other Jews in Israel, even if not religious, are also more likely to hold attitudes towards Arabs (including those who are Israeli citizens) that are at variance with the views of children on this continent, who are brought up in multicultural societies, where nationalism is often considered to be, ipso facto, racist and xenophobic. The Russian Jews, too, tend to be “hawks” when it comes to foreign policy.

So this chasm is clearly widening, despite the efforts of Jewish communal organizations to instill a sense of unity between Israel and the Diaspora, as it is a product of the current zeitgeist.

As this generation of North American Jews become adults, an embattled Israel may in future years find less emotional and uncritical support from among overseas Jewish communities than it did in, say, 1967 and 1973, when Israel was involved in major wars. This is for Israel a worrisome prospect.

 

It's Not the Zanzibar of Fantasy

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

For western travellers, the Zanzibar archipelago has long conjured up images of enchantment: palm-fringed beaches, ancient palaces and forts, and narrow streets overlooked by elaborately carved doors in the capital, Stone Town.

Books and films have long portrayed the Indian Ocean islands off the coast of Africa as an exotic paradise. Typical of the genre was “Road to Zanzibar,” a 1941 film starring Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour.

The real Zanzibar was always quite different. Slavery was a large part of Zanzibar’s commercial power, and from 1700 to 1850 the sultans of Zanzibar, who were Omani Arabs, effectively controlled the slave trade in East and Central Africa.

The British gained control in 1890 and ended the slave trade. However, the sultanate was allowed to remain in place and the Arab elite remained dominant over a Black African majority.

Independence from Britain in 1963, as an Islamic monarchy, was followed by a bloody revolution in which thousands of Arabs were killed or expelled. The Black majority gained control and the following year Zanzibar merged with mainland Tanganyika, as a semi-autonomous part of the United Republic of Tanzania.

Many Zanzibaris were unhappy about the union. Ever since, the islands have always been on the edge of political turmoil, with a sense of grievance against mainland political control and economic exploitation. This is exacerbated by tensions between the broadly Christian mainland and the predominantly Muslim islands.

Zanzibar has been wracked by political violence in recent decades. Contested elections in 2000 led to a massacre when the army and police shot into crowds of protestors, killing at least 35 people. Violence again erupted in 2005 when there were accusations of fraud by the losing party.

The push for independence, or at least greater autonomy from the mainland, gained new impetus after politicians and jurists began work last year on a new constitution for Tanzania. At first, the status of the union was off the table, enraging Zanzibari nationalists. (Zanzibar’s own constitution, amended in 2010, refers to the archipelago as a sovereign state, with no mention of the union with Tanganyika.)

There are many who would prefer a Zanzibar with its own currency and a seat at the United Nations. They maintain that an independent Zanzibar could develop into another Singapore or Hong Kong, an island entrepot for international trade (as was the case historically). But mainland politicians, they argue, don’t want Zanzibar to be free.

Some Zanzibaris have begun to blend their nationalism with religion. In recent years, a group called Uamsho, or “Awakening,” has called for an independent Zanzibar governed under Muslim shariah law.

Two churches were set ablaze in May 2012 in the midst of rioting after the police arrested leaders of the separatist group. On Christmas Day last year, a priest was shot in the jaw but survived. Another priest was shot and killed on Feb. 17.

The acid attack in August on a pair of British teenagers engaged in charity work on Zanzibar is likely to have a deleterious effect on the tourist industry. Tourism officially accounts for a little more than a quarter of the island’s economic activity, but 70 per cent of its foreign-exchange earnings. Fifteen thousand people work directly in tourism, and 50,000 are employed indirectly.

The minister of tourism, Said Ali Mbarouk, said that the episode had “shocked and shamed” his country. Security was increased in tourist areas, and measures were taken to curb the distribution and production of acid. However, Uamsho wants to enforce strict dress codes on foreign visitors and ban alcohol outside private hotels.

Forget the dated images of Zanzibar as portrayed in films and novels. It has become a fairly insecure place.

Hannah Senesh Should Not Be Forgotten

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune


When I was a teenager in Montreal back in the late 1950s-early 1960s, I was a member of the Zionist youth group Young Judaea. There, we learned the story of Hannah Senesh, the heroic young woman who, during World War II, left Palestine for Nazi-occupied Europe to try to save Jews.

Senesh was a young poet and diarist who was captured and executed in 1944, at age 23, after parachuting into Yugoslavia and then entering Nazi-occupied Hungary to try to smuggle Jews out of the country.

Hannah Szenes (the original spelling) was born in Budapest on July 17, 1921, to a wealthy, distinguished, and assimilated Hungarian Jewish family. Though given a modern Hungarian education, she was exposed to antisemitism during her high school years, and decided to join a Zionist youth movement, learning Hebrew in preparation for aliyah to Palestine.

In October 1938, she recorded in her diary: "I've become a Zionist. This word stands for a tremendous number of things. To me it means, in short, that I now consciously and strongly feel I am a Jew, and am proud of it. My primary aim is to go to Palestine, to work for it."

She came to Palestine in 1939 to study at the Agricultural Training Farm in Nahalal, and after two years became a member of Kibbutz Sdot Yam near Caesarea.

In 1943, however, Senesh enlisted in the British Army and began her training as a paratrooper. She and some others were parachuted into occupied Yugoslavia in mid-March 1944 in order to aid the anti-Nazi forces. Two months later she smuggled herself into her native Hungary but was captured.

Imprisoned and tortured, she refused to reveal details of her mission and was sentenced to death. She refused an offer of clemency and was executed by a firing squad in Budapest on Nov. 7, 1944.

In 1950 Hannah Senesh’s remains were brought to Israel where they were buried in the military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. In the same year a kibbutz was founded and named Yad Hana in her memory.

A poet and playwright, writing both in Hungarian and Hebrew, Senesh’s best known poem is probably "Halikha LeKesariya" ("A Walk to Caesarea"), often known as "Eli, Eli" ("My God, My God"), written in 1942. Her last poem "Ashrei HaGafrur" ("Blessed is the Match") was the title of a documentary about her life produced in 2008. Israeli President Shimon Peres, who knew Hannah as a young pioneer in the 1940s, appears on camera.

A number of books have also been published about her life. An early one, Blessed is the Match: The Story of Jewish Resistance, by Marie Syrkin, published in 1947, also takes its title from "Ashrei HaGafrur."

Yet for all that, I have always wondered why the story of Hannah Senesh is not as well known as that of Anne Frank. Senesh was much more the "agent" of her own life than was Frank. Is it because somehow the outside world prefers a Jewish victim to a Zionist heroine?

Don’t get me wrong. This is not a critique of Anne Frank, who was herself just a teenager. We have long ago rejected the callous insult to the victims of the Holocaust made by ill-informed people who had asserted that the Jews of Europe went "like sheep to the slaughter."

What, precisely, could a family like the Franks have done? They were, like most Jews, civilians, young and old, without weapons, hidden in a house, and facing the most fanatically trained killers the world has ever seen, masters of most of Europe between 1939 and 1945.

We have learned from this. If Anne Frank symbolizes the doomed stateless Jews of Europe, in the story of Hannah Senesh we see the glimmer of the Jewish state about to be born.

 

 

What Now for Obama and Syria?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

There’s a reason German statesman Otto von Bismarck, the “Iron Chancellor,” once advised an emissary to “strike while the iron is hot.” Because if you are indecisive, hesitate and temporise, you lose the moment and prove yourself weak.

It has now been two weeks since Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad crossed Barack Obama’s “red line” regarding chemical weapons and gassed almost 1,500 of his own people, including hundreds of children, on Aug. 21. That red line must have been drawn in shifting sands, because Obama has now announced that, while he remains prepared to punish the Syrian regime for this war crime, which he once declared would be a “game-changer,” he will seek approval from the U.S. Congress first.

According to various sources, he has nurtured doubts about the political and legal justification for action, even one of limited scope and duration, given that the United Nations Security Council had refused to sanction a military strike that he had not put before Congress.

Critics called it an example of a less than flattering Obama characteristic: delaying major decisions, muddling the power of his argument and, in this case, perhaps blunting the effectiveness of military action. After all, the delay allows Assad to move his assets elsewhere and strengthen his defences.

Meanwhile, there has been growing opposition in the United States and around the world from right-wing isolationists, pacifists, and assorted anti-Americans, including the Russians, who have effectively disabled the UN. (Vladimir Putin called the planned attack “foolish nonsense.”)

Even the American military, despite the bloated annual defence budget of more than $600 billion, are reluctant warriors – are they really afraid of Syria? Or is it Iran that looms in their vision?

What if the Congress votes to oppose Obama? There are many Republicans and left-wing Democrats, especially in the House of Representatives, opposed to any more involvement in overseas wars after the negative experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan. After all, British Prime Minister David Cameron lost a similar vote in his parliament on Aug. 29.

Obama claims that he doesn’t need congressional approval, but seeks it merely to make certain that the country is behind him. But will a defeat allow him to back down from his commitment to hold Syria accountable for this clear breach of long-standing international norms?

Obama himself in 2008 ran for the presidency as the “anti-Bush.” Is this now going to come back to bite him? That would indeed be ironic.

The president is an example of the worst muddle-headed thinking that came out of the 1960s – the concern about “exit strategies” and “quagmires” and “escalations” and “timelines” is as much a reaction – still -- to the disaster of the Vietnam War as it is to Iraq and Afghanistan.

During the Kosovo War, the United States bombed Serbia for 78 straight days, and Slobodan Milosevic never used chemical weapons. Madeleine Albright, the then Secretary of state, called the U.S. the “indispensable nation.” Under Obama, it’s no longer indispensable.

 

 

The Philippines: An American Ally in Southeast Asia

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 

The United States and the Philippines have had a long, and sometimes problematic, relationship. The 7,000-island nation became an American possession following the Spanish-American War of 1898, though it took many years for U.S. forces to subdue the entire archipelago.

 

Conquered by the Japanese during World War II, the country received its independence from the U.S. in 1946 but continued to maintain a close relationship with the former imperial power. Domestically it was embroiled in a counterinsurgency campaign against the Hukbalahap pro-Communist guerrillas on Luzon for many years.

In June 1950, American alarm over the rebellion during the Cold War prompted U.S. President Harry Truman to approve special military assistance that included military advice, sale at cost of military equipment to the Philippines and financial aid under the Joint United States Military Advisory Group. The insurrection petered out by the mid-1950s.

The Philippines also faced the growing might of Communist-ruled China after 1949. The Philippines sent an expeditionary force of around 7,500 combat troops to Korea in August 1950 as part of the American-led effort to push back the Chinese and North Korean troops that had invaded South Korea.

 

The country signed a mutual defence treaty with the United States in 1951 and joined the anti-Communist eight-member South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) upon its formation in 1954. SEATO ceased to exist in 1977 and after the fall of the Soviet Union and the decline of the threat of communism in the 1990s support for the mutual defense treaty has also declined in the Philippines. It does remain in force, though, and was reaffirmed with the November 2011 Manila Declaration.

 

The strategic location of the archipelago in the South China Sea, northeast of Malaysia and Indonesia, south of China and Taiwan, and east of Vietnam, made it a favorable location for American military bases during the Cold War, and the Clark Air Base and Naval Station Subic Bay were among the largest facilities maintained by Washington during much of that period, in particular when they were centres of logistical support for American forces during the Vietnam War.

 

With the Cold War over, Clark Air Base was closed in 1991, partly due to the refusal by the Philippine government to renew the lease; this was followed by the closing of Subic Bay a year later.

 

However in 2012 Manila approved limited U.S. deployments to the former American military outposts, after a tense standoff between Chinese and Filipino warships in the South China Sea, spurred by conflicting territorial claims to the contested waterway and some of its small island chains.

In more recent years, the country has been battling an Islamist insurgency in its southern island of Mindanao and in the Sulu Archipelago, led by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF).

 

Since 2002, the United States has provided non-combat assistance to the Philippine armed forces through the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines. Counterterrorism efforts, along with development aid, have helped to significantly reduce the size and strength of Islamist organizations.

After warfare that left tens of thousands dead, the MILF and the government signed a landmark peace deal in October 2012 aimed at ending the long-running insurgency.

The accord paves the way for a new autonomous region to be administered by Muslims in Mindanao, according to Philippine President Benigno Aquino III. “Today, we sign a framework agreement that can finally seal a genuine, lasting peace in Mindanao,” he announced in a speech. He said that the MILF is no longer seeking to form a new nation.

The deal sets up mechanisms to tackle issues such as power structure and revenues in the southern region, which will be named Bangsamoro. The new region is expected to replace the current one, the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, by 2016.

However, Nur Misuari, founding chair of the MNLF, rejected the deal, and remains in favour of declaring an independent Bangsamoro state. “We encourage Mr. Misuari to be a partner in ensuring the welfare of MNLF communities and actively engage with us in the drafting of the Bangsamoro Basic Law which will include the agenda of the MNLF,” stated Jose Lorena, a government advisor dealing with the peace process.

Still, things have definitely improved in the southern, Muslim areas of the country.

 

Alice in Wonderland (or Syria)

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

So, the West is going to bomb the facilities that contain Syria’s poison gas, but very carefully avoid “regime change.” Think of how absurd this is: it’s as if the Allies in World War II only bombed the Nazi death camps but left Hitler in power.

Actually, in World War II it was precisely the opposite – they only fought the German military while leaving the gas chambers intact.

Obviously, the United States and its allies could overthrow Bashar al-Assad’s regime in a matter of weeks, if not days, and stop him from continuing to massacre his own people. So I guess they think it’ s fine to kill unarmed civilians, as long as it’s done by bullets, bombs and shrapnel, not gas. At least 100,000 have already died, and some two million have fled the country, languishing in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and other countries.

It is very well to hope that the United Nations Security Council would approve a mission against Syria. Under the UN Charter, the use of force is permitted only when authorized by the Security Council, or for self-defence.

But the Great Powers must be unanimous for such an action to proceed, as they all have vetoes. And we know that Russia and China will block such action.

Some officials at the United Nations and other experts say the use of force against Syria, absent a Security Council resolution, would be illegal. Since we know Russia will veto any such resolution, it would mean, then, that Obama's so-called “red line,”  promising that the U.S. would punish Syria for using chemical weapons, is worthless.

And that would also be the case with the “red line” warning Iran not to develop nuclear weapons -- since Russia would use its veto in that case too. So, really, American guarantees in this instance would also be meaningless.

Before the drafting of the UN Charter, and various other international conventions and treaties, state sovereignty was deemed to be absolute. The lessons of World War II put an end to that. But if a country on the Security Council can prevent outside intervention into a civil war such as is taking place in Syria, aren’t back to square one?

Not necessarily, because there is a precedent: The U.S. and its allies ignored the Security Council when they attacked Serbia in 1999. Russia then, too, opposed any moves against its ally Serbia. Concerns over ethnic cleansing and mass murder in Kosovo trumped the worries about UN approval.

There was a lot of fanfare and self-congratulation by countries such as Canada when the UN in 2005 adopted the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) initiative. This doctrine adds humanitarian intervention as a category of lawful war. It is not, however, in the UN Charter, and it lacks the force of international law.

Several countries have argued that R2P should not allow the international community to intervene militarily, because to do so is an infringement upon sovereignty. Others argue that this is a necessary facet of R2P, and is justified as a last resort to stop mass atrocities.

Isn’t it truly immoral to quibble over such matters as thousands die every day?

The "Grand Bargain" Between Left and Right in America

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Sometime in the 1980s, it seems that an unspoken "grand bargain" somehow emerged between the Left and Right in America. The Left would get control of culture and education and drive the historical narrative, in such a way that Martin Luther King Jr. was "canonized" and the Stonewall Riots of 1969, demonstrations by members of the gay community against a police raid at the Stonewall Inn in New York, became a world-historical event.

Meanwhile, on the Right, "real existing capitalism" would face little economic or ideological opposition, resulting, within a few decades, of some Chief Executive Officers of corporations making up to 500 times that of the average worker, while tens of millions lost decent jobs and ended up working at minimum wage at places like Burger King and Walmart.

My question is: how exactly did this come about?

Well, to quote one wag, "the rebels of the New Left took over, not the economy, but the English Department" -- in other words, university humanities faculties. In the United States, as many of these elite, selective colleges were in rural communities, far from manufacturing and heavy industry, the students able to afford tuition, including on-campus living, running into the tens of thousands of dollars. So these "tenured radicals" ended up teaching the children of the well-off, rather than the poor and working-class in the big cities whom they never even saw.

Their upper class students regurgitated all of the dogmas fed to them, on tests and term papers, but after graduation they went off to positions in the "real world" of business, where all of the "critical" and "subversive" materials could be conveniently shelved, so to speak the way earlier generations ignored their Sunday School lessons. Few would become community organizers or labour union officials!

Perhaps the mistake made by the New Left was in focusing on identity politics and "diversity," rather than socialist economics, the forte of the pre-1950s Marxists and social democrats. (The collapse of Soviet Communism also made it harder to advocate socialism of any sort.) In this they have succeeded: affirmative action and other legislation helped put an end to overt discrimination and opened the doors to previously marginalized ethnic and gender groups. African-Americans, women, and others could now, as individuals, gain access to positions previously denied to them.

As one academic has observed, "Maybe one part of the story is that nothing the left wanted was incompatible with what a capitalist state requires. It can't hurt matters that the same people running the economy are coastal elites, highly educated, with no deeply embedded phobias about race or gender."

So, to a large extent, today’s American economic rulers include more people who, in generations past, would not have been able to "make it" into a wealthier stratum of society. The problem though, is that the economic gap between this entire class of people, and those less fortunate, has become a chasm.

The top one per cent of Americans earn twenty per cent of all income, twice the 1980 figure (and they now pay far less in taxes).The rich continue to do well even in hard times -- CEO pay in 2012 increased by sixteen per cent over the previous year, with the median compensation package now at $15.1 million.

Incomes rose more than 11 per cent for the top one per cent of earners during the economic recovery, but not at all for everybody else, according to data produced by Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley.

For the other 99 per cent, earnings declined by 0.4 percent. This ongoing increase in income disparity is not unrelated to the fact that the percentage of workers in unions stands at 11.3 per cent, its lowest level since 1916.

U.S. median household income, adjusted for inflation, has fallen 4.4 per cent in the last four years. The country still has two million fewer jobs than before the Great Recession, and most jobs created since have been at the low end of the wage scale. The number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million, about one in five Americans.

While four million homes have been foreclosed since 2007, and millions of others are "underwater," meaning their proprietors owe more on their mortgages than the current market value of their houses, a one-floor residence in a building on New York’s Park Ave. recently sold for $23 million. Although there have been a number of protests, such as the "Occupy" movement, they have accomplished little and petered out.

Some studies suggest that upward social mobility has now slowed so much in the United States that it is worse than in many European countries and Canada. The "American dream" is becoming, for far too many, just that -- a dream. And the large cohort of left-wing academics and intellectuals can't seem to do much about it.

Newfoundland's French Neighbours

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Apart from the longstanding boundary dispute with Quebec over Labrador, which remains unresolved, Newfoundland has also had problems with two remnants of the once-vast French empire in the Americas.
 

Some 20 kilometres off Newfoundland’s southern coast are the French islands of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, the only part of the old New France still under French control -- in fact, they were returned to France at the Treaty of Paris in 1763, when the rest of New France was transferred to Britain.

Possession of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon passed back and forth between France and Great Britain for the next 38 years; they finally became permanently French in 1815. The islands today are an “overseas collectivity” (collectivité d’outre-mer) and officially part of France.
 

There was a long history of smuggling of liquor from the islands to Canada and the United States, particularly during prohibition. Even today, spirits are cheaper on the islands and there continues to be smuggling of alcohol (and tobacco) from Saint-Pierre et Miquelon to Newfoundland.

More recently, there have been the important issues of fish and oil. In 1972, Canada and France delimited the maritime boundary between Newfoundland and Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, but left open a dispute about the extent of the two countries’ economic exclusion zones. The principal overlap was in the area south of the French islands, extending to the Saint-Pierre Bank, rich in fish and with a potential as well for oil.
 

When Canada tried to reduce the cod fishing around Newfoundland in the 1970s and 1980s, out of fear of seriously damaging the fish population, the French continued to fish in areas that were forbidden to Canadians. Ottawa inspected French fishing trawlers and jailed some fishermen.

It was only solved in 1992, when the International Court of Arbitration awarded the French islands an exclusive economic zone of 12,348 square kilometres to settle the longstanding territorial dispute with Canada, although it represented only 25 per cent of what France had sought.

The zone granted to France consisted of a 38-kilometre extrusion west of Miquelon, and a corridor southward from the islands, only 18 kilometres wide, but 348 kilometres long. The intention was to allow access to Saint-Pierre et Miquelon from the high seas; otherwise, they would have been surrounded by the Canadian exclusion zone. As well, in 1994, France and Canada mutually agreed to reduce the fishing industry in Saint-Pierre et Miquelon.

Offshore oil and gas exploration in both exclusive economic zones continues as well and the French feel they were short-changed by the 1992 agreement. In 2009, France submitted a letter of intent to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf claiming an extended continental shelf for Saint-Pierre et Miquelon. Canada has rejected the demand, which may end up in further arbitration.

 

Egypt's Spring Reverts to Unpleasant Winter

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Between a rock and a hard place. Between the devil and the deep blue sea. Between Scylla and Charybdis (mythical sea monsters depicted in Homer’s epic, the “Odyssey”).

Take your pick. They all refer to the situation the Egyptian people finds itself today.

Egypt has been the scene of almost unprecedented violence since July 3, when President Mohamed Morsi was ousted in a military coup – although for political reasons relating to the annual American delivery of $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt, the Obama administration refuses to call it that. (Not that Egypt would miss the money that much -- Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia together have pledged $12 billion to Egypt, and they have done so without the conditions that the U.S. Congress places on American-appropriated funds.)

The government installed last month by General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi seems to be reverting to the autocratic rule Egyptians knew under the 30 year reign of former president Hosni Mubarak, the dictator deposed by mass demonstrations in February 2011 and in detention since April 2011.

Ironically, most of the people who engineered the ouster of Mubarak in order to transform Egypt into a democracy, now, two years later, had called on the army to overthrow Morsi.

Commented one observer, “The problem in Egypt is that the democrats aren’t liberals, and the liberals aren’t democrats.”

Morsi won a fairly free and fair election in June 2012, with 51.7 per cent of the vote in a runoff; the turnout was 51 per cent of eligible voters. That’s actually a little more than Barack Obama received in November 2012, and far more than the Conservative Party obtained in the Canadian federal election of May 2012.

But the people who demanded Morsi’s resignation and almost goaded the army into moving against him were clearly dissatisfied with his Islamic agenda and wished to be rid of him, by any means. They refused to wait until the next election.

Of course many Americans hate Obama, and many Canadians detest Stephen Harper – but no one has advocated their removal by force. That’s not how democracy works.

On the other hand, the Muslim Brotherhood has no ideological love for democracy; they would prefer a state run by the precepts of Islam (with no voice for those opposing “God’s will”)  and so when in power, Morsi alienated all those Egyptians – at least half the country – who feared he might turn the country into some kind of theocracy.

The Brotherhood, founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928, has often suffered repression, arrests and torture. But its solidarity network and the genuine self-denial of its activists gave it credibility for many people. This vanished once they were in power.

Last November, Morsi issued a declaration that gave him full executive and legislative authority. It’s possible there might not have been another election – many of the people backing Morsi only support the electoral process when it suits their purposes, nor do they have much use for due process, pluralist democracy, or the rights of minorities. Hence the total polarization.

More than 1,000 Brotherhood members and other supporters of Morsi have died since Aug. 14, and his ouster has set off a wave of retaliatory violence from his supporters, mainly targeting churches around the country and security forces in the northern Sinai.

New regulations now in place include an “emergency law” removing the right to a trial and curbs on police abuse, the appointment of generals as governors across the provinces and moves to outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist threat. Most leaders of the organization have now been arrested, including its spiritual leader, Mohammed Badie. He will be tried later this month on charges of complicity in the killing in June of eight protesters outside the Brotherhood’s national headquarters in Cairo.

On the other hand, a court has now ordered the release from prison of Mubarak, which certainly serves to symbolize the return of the ancient regime. General Sisi, the defence minister, was Mubarak’s head of military intelligence, and the figurehead president, Adli Mansour, a judge, was appointed to a top court under Mubarak.

Will Egypt’s choice always be between two forms of authoritarianism?

Quebec, Newfoundland, and the Question of Labrador

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

It had been a proud, self-governing British dominion after 1931, but fell on very hard times during the Depression and ended up being again governed by London, which wanted to rid itself of the colony after the Second World War, and so engineered its amalgamation with Canada in 1949, in what many in the province still consider an act of betrayal.

We are talking, of course, about Newfoundland.

The island of Newfoundland became England’s very first colony, in 1583, but mainland Labrador was part of New France until its conquest by the British in 1760. In 1763, the coast of Labrador was granted to Newfoundland "to the end that the open and free fishery may be extended and carried on upon the coast of Labrador and the adjacent islands."

The 1774 Quebec Act re-transferred Labrador to what was formerly New France but in 1809 it reverted to Newfoundland. The 1825 Labrador Act fixed Labrador’s southern border with Quebec at the 52nd parallel.

But title to the large interior of the territory remained unclear. Finally, on behalf of Quebec, in 1922 Ottawa submitted the dispute to the Judiciary Committee of the Privy Council in London, since both Canada and Newfoundland were then separate and equal members of the British Empire.

In 1927, the Privy Council fixed Labrador’s inland border on the watershed between the Atlantic Ocean and Hudson Bay. It coupled this to the 1825 straight-line border. When Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, it made sure to cement its Labrador border in the Terms of Union.

Quebec still regards this decision as unfair and refuses to accept Labrador’s southern, straight-line border. Some maps published by the Quebec government show the straight line as "non-definitive" and place the actual border further north. I have also seen non-official outline maps of Quebec which incorporate all of Labrador into the province.

So who owns Labrador? Newfoundlanders want to make sure the world knows its theirs. On December 6, 2001, an amendment to Canada's Constitution officially approved a name change from the province of "Newfoundland" to the province of "Newfoundland and Labrador." Now our newspapers and television broadcasts have to use the clumsy term "Newfoundlanders and Labradorians" to describe its inhabitants.

But that re-naming prompted the government of Quebec to reiterate its position regarding its land border with Labrador: "No Québec government has ever formally recognized the course of the border between Québec and Newfoundland in the Labrador Peninsula, as defined by the judgment made by the judiciary committee of the Privy Council of London in 1927. For Québec, this border has never been definitively defined."

In 2007, a map posted on the website of Quebec’s Natural Resources Department showed large parts of southern Labrador as being inside the Quebec boundary. "We don't like it," John Ottenheimer, at the time Newfoundland and Labrador’s Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, told CBC News. "We've seen this over the years -- it happens time and time again." And there the matter stands.

Labrador is ethnically as well as geographically quite different from the island of Newfoundland, and some of its people would prefer it became a separate province. A 1999 resolution of the Assembly of First Nations claimed Labrador as a homeland for the Innu, much as Nunavut, created that year, is for the Inuit.

Perhaps all this seems somewhat arcane today -- but no one 30 years ago would have predicted that Abkhazia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, and Transnistria would someday become war zones. But they did, after the countries they had been part of, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, broke apart. Borders that don’t matter much when they are internal lines on a map suddenly assume tremendous importance when they become international frontiers.

One thing is certain: Newfoundlanders will do their utmost to retain Labrador within its present borders. "Je me souviens" ("I remember"), Quebec’s motto, could just as easily be theirs.

Deteriorating Relationship

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

Turkey’s relations with Israel have always been somewhat ambivalent. Although Turkey, a Muslim country, recognized Israel in 1949, Ankara did not want to worsen its relations with the Arab world, which it had ruled for centuries prior to 1920.

Though the Turks were not pleased with Israel’s role in the Suez crisis of 1956, or the two Arab-Israel wars of 1967 and 1973, relations remained relatively "correct." Turkey was run by secularists, often military men, who subscribed to Kemal Ataturk’s separation of politics and religion.

Indeed, relations grew warmer in the 1990s, with increased cooperation between the two countries’ militaries. As well, cooperation in areas such as investment, manufacturing, technical cooperation, and joint enterprises began to expand as a result of agreements.

But the coming to power of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) following the November 2002 elections brought a more Islamic tone to Turkish foreign policy. This became more pronounced as the Oslo Peace process between Israel and the Palestinians began to falter.

Following the Palestinian parliamentary election in January 2006, a Hamas delegation headed by Khaled Mashaal visited Ankara unexpectedly. As a result of this visit, Turkey became the first country to meet officially with Hamas. Israel, obviously, was not pleased.

Things would go from bad to worse. On Dec. 27, 2008, a three-week armed conflict between Hamas and Israel began, following continuous rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel. The Turkish government, following public opinion, came out strongly against Israel.

Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan had an angry exchange with Israeli president Shimon Peres during a panel discussion on Gaza at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, at the end of January 2009. "When it comes to killing, you know well how to kill," Erdogan told Peres, and walked off the stage.

In late May of 2010, the Mavi Marmara, a ship purchased by the Turkish-based Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (IHH), an NGO with Islamic ties, left Istanbul to break Israel’s Gaza blockade as part of a Gaza Freedom Flotilla. The ship was boarded by Israeli commandos in international waters on May 31, following warnings to the ship by Israel to turn back. In the resulting melee, nine activists were killed and several more wounded. Seven Israelis were also injured in the skirmish.

The raid drew widespread condemnation and resulted in the further deterioration of Israeli-Turkish relations. In September 2011, Turkey expelled Israel’s ambassador; Hamas praised the decision. That same month military agreements between Turkey and Israel were suspended.

A renewed week-long war between Israel and Hamas between November 14 and 21 of last year again drew Turkish condemnation of Israel, with the Turkish Foreign Ministry condemning it as "the latest example of the aggressive policy of Israel." Erdogan denounced Israel as a "terrorist state" that "massacres innocent children." He later called Zionism a "crime against humanity" while speaking before a Vienna forum of the Alliance of Civilizations, a UN framework for West-Islam dialogue last February.

Turkey welcomed a UN General Assembly vote last November giving Palestine non-member statehood in the world body, saying the dramatic gesture would bolster the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process. "The reality of Palestine is a bleeding wound in the conscience of all humanity," Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told the delegates.

Of late, there has been a slight thaw in the relationship. On March 22, 2013, in a half-hour telephone exchange between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Erdogan, the former apologized about the Mavi Marmara raid on behalf of Israel. Netanyahu acknowledged "operational mistakes" and made it clear that the loss of life was unintentional.

Erdogan told Netanyahu that he thought the deterioration of ties between the countries was regrettable, especially given "the shared history and centuries old ties of strong friendship and cooperation between the Jewish and Turkish peoples."

Despite these words, ties between the two countries will probably never return to the pre-2002 level. Israeli-Turkish talks have stalled, and there has been no normalization of relations or exchange of ambassadors. Erdogan’s Islamic-oriented foreign policy in a turbulent Middle East makes a rapprochement almost impossible.

　

　

Are Political Dynasties un-American?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Here we are, still more than three years away from the next American presidential election, and already, among Democrats, the drums are beating for Hillary Clinton to get the nomination.

Many assume that she is next in line to the throne, so to speak, as if the Clintons were royalty. NBC-TV is already planning a four-hour miniseries named “Hillary,” timed to precede the 2016 presidential election.

Bill Clinton was president for eight years. He defeated sitting president George H.W. Bush in 1992. When Clinton left office in 2000, he was succeeded by George W. Bush, son of George H.W., and he served a full two terms.

Even so, the Republicans seem less inclined to monarchical politics. Since 2008, two non-Bushes have run for the top job. Barbara Bush, wife of George H.W., has herself dampened expectations that another of her sons, Jeb, might seek the presidency. “There are other people out there that are very qualified, and we’ve had enough Bushes,” she told NBC’s “Today” show in April.

Not so with the Democrats. Indeed, of late there have been a number of articles wondering whether the Clintons’ 33-year-old daughter Chelsea might enter the political arena, despite her rather undistinguished career thus far. (She has worked at a Wall Street hedge fund, as an Assistant Vice Provost at New York University, and as a “special correspondent” for NBC News, all sinecures obtained through her family name.)

“I’m attempting to lead a purposely public life,” Chelsea Clinton told CNN recently, while on a trip to Africa with her father on behalf of their Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, which, according to a statement, works to improve “economic growth and empowerment, equality of opportunity, and health access.”

Dynastic politics are a feature of political life in many countries. India has been dominated by the Nehru-Gandhi family, Pakistan by the Bhuttos and Sharifs, Bangladesh by the Mujibur Rahmans and Ziaur Rahmans, and Sri Lanka by the Bandaranaikes.

All four states have had women as leaders – but they have been daughters or widows of male rulers. These are traditional societies, where high-status families expect and receive deference from their “subjects.” The United States, on the other hand, was founded as an egalitarian republic that repudiated aristocracy.

Every now and then, as in a monarchy, there is an “interregnum” – right now Barack Obama, who, to the shock and horror of Hillary Clinton’s supporters, beat her for the Democratic Party nomination in 2008, occupies the White House. But it’s interesting that nobody mentions his wife or two daughters as potential future presidents.

Isn’t it time, though, that a woman became commander-in-chief? Of course. But even apart from the “baggage” Hillary Clinton carries – her husband Bill’s notorious sexual peccadilloes; her close personal assistant Huma Abedin’s current problems with spouse Anthony Weiner, who has been caught “sexting” with various women across the country – there are two women who come to mind who should be more politically attractive to Democrats.

Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand, elected to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts and New York, respectively, both have had distinguished careers.

Warren has taught law at several universities throughout the country, while researching issues related to bankruptcy and middle-class personal finance; she is currently a law professor at Harvard University Law School. She also set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2011 for Obama as a response to the financial crisis that began in 2007.

Senator Warren has written several books, including “All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan” and “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke,” coauthored with her daughter, Amelia Tyagi.

“The ability to evoke genuine, organic passion in potential voters is the rarest and most critical of all candidate characteristics,” noted Washington Post columnist Chris Cillizza recently. “Warren has that ability.”

Gillibrand is another liberal Democrat. She has been lauded for her work advocating for same-sex marriage, and she was active in the opposition to the now-defunct federal “Defense of Marriage Act,” which had prevented same-sex married couples from being recognized as “spouses” for purposes of federal laws, or receiving federal marriage benefits.

She also was instrumental in the movement to repeal the federal “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” law, which had barred gays and lesbians from military service. And the Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence has “enthusiastically” endorsed her work on behalf of gun control.

This year, responding to an epidemic of sexual assaults in the U.S. military – the Pentagon estimates that 26,000 troops were sexually assaulted last year, but only 3,400 attacks were reported -- Senator Gillibrand has proposed legislation that would remove military commanders from the process of deciding whether sexual misconduct cases should be prosecuted.

“The fact that only one in 10 go to trial, those statistics are highly concerning,” she stated in a recent interview on the PBS “Newshour.”

These are all issues dear to the hearts of Democrats. Warren and Gillibrand don’t have Hillary Clinton’s “rock star” status, or the millions of dollars she has amassed from various “donors,” but they are far more preferable if the Democratic Party is not to become a Clinton “family business.”

The Turks Have a Proud History

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

No one doubts that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey since 2003, is a very tough man. He has demonstrated that in recent years, in run-ins with Israel, Libya, Syria, the United States, and his own citizens. In that sense, he epitomizes the Turkish character.

Historically a warrior people, the Turks are a proud nation. And why shouldn’t they be? Since the “entered” medieval history, they are virtually the only people in the entire world who have never been conquered and subjugated for any length of time by others.

Think about it: in the Western Hemisphere, all aboriginal peoples were overpowered by Europeans. The same holds true for all of Africa, with Ethiopia the last to come under foreign rule when defeated by fascist Italy in the 1930s.

With the exceptions of Great Britain, Sweden and Switzerland, every country in Europe has at some time been vanquished and occupied by another – particularly in the Second World War. The Russians may only have been partially conquered by Napoleon and Hitler, but they fell under Mongol rule for some 250 years during the 13-15^th centuries.

In the Middle East, all the Arab peoples, from Morocco to Iran, came under first Ottoman Turkish, and later western, rule, except for Saudi Arabia. Central Asia fell to the Russians. The Jews of Israel are the descendants of people who lived without sovereignty, at the mercy of others. Iran remained nominally sovereign but effectively under British and Russian control; this was also true of Afghanistan.

In Asia, only Japan held out, until occupied after 1945 by the United States. China lost immense amounts of territory to Japanese, Russian and western imperialists in the 19th and 20th centuries. Of course the entire Indian subcontinent was gobbled up piecemeal by the British.

The Ottoman Turks, themselves an imperial power in large parts of Europe and virtually the entire Middle East for many centuries, were defeated in the First World War. They lost their Mideast Arab holdings.

But plans were afoot to partition the ethnic Turkish heartland itself. The terms of the Treaty of Sèvres, signed by the defeated Ottomans in 1920, were severe, and involved dismembering Anatolian Turkey itself.

The Greeks were to obtain almost all that was left of European Turkey, while the lands on either side of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, which link the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, would come under international control. The great Ottoman capital city of Istanbul was included in this zone.

Greece was also awarded a substantial area of western Anatolia facing the Aegean Sea, including the city of Smyrna (now Izmir). The rest of western and southern Turkey, including the port of Antalya on the Mediterranean, would become an Italian zone of influence.

France would take under its direct control a section of the country north of Syria (which was becoming a French Mandate, or colony), plus a very large zone of influence in the centre of Turkey. Britain would have a smaller zone, north of what was becoming the British mandate of Iraq.

Finally, the Armenians were to acquire an independent state that would consist of most of eastern Turkey, from the city of Trabzon on the Black Sea in the north down to Lake Van. Only a rump Turkish state centred around Ankara would retain its sovereignty. Some Kurds were also advocating an independent state of their own in eastern Anatolia.

None of this came to pass. A nationalist movement led by Mustapha Kemal, who became Kemal Ataturk (“Father of the Turks”), defied the Allied powers and refused to accept the loss of ethnic Turkish lands.

His armies defeated Armenian, French and Greek forces, reoccupying the entire Anatolian peninsula within a few years, and forcing the Allied powers into signing the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. It led to the international recognition of the sovereignty of the new Republic of Turkey as the successor state to the defunct Ottoman Empire.

The Greeks were forced out of all Turkish territories, and the Armenians, too, saw their dream of a greater Armenia evaporate. A small Armenian region that was already under Russian control before 1914 eventually became part of the Soviet Union. The Kurds in Anatolia remained under Turkish rule.

Since that difficult time 90 years ago, no one has tried to acquire any territory at the expense of Turkey.

Where is Erdogan Leading Turkey?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who heads the moderately Islamic Justice and Development Party (the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or AKP), is turning back the country’s clock.

In power since 2003, he has taken to glorifying the Ottoman imperial past, undoing the work of the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, who created the Republic of Turkey 90 years ago.

In the early 1990s, Erdogan was an Islamic politician in Istanbul, rising to become a successful mayor of the city. He was then a junior member of an earlier party, the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, or RP) that had ruled briefly but was banned in 1998 after a secular, military-led coup. Erdogan himself was jailed for citing a militant Islamist poem.

Then, in 2001, he formed the AKP, which has won three successive parliamentary victories with ever-increasing margins.

Erdogan called the 2011 AKP election triumph a victory not just for Turkey, but for its Ottoman heritage. Indeed, back in October 2009, his foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu had explicitly invoked Turkey’s former imperial grandeur.

“As in the sixteenth century,” he declared, “when the Ottoman Balkans were rising, we will once again make the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Middle East, together with Turkey, the center of world politics in the future. That is the goal of Turkish foreign policy and we will achieve it.”

The architect Ahmet Vefik recently presented his blueprint for a large mosque and that would honour the country’s Muslim and Ottoman heritage, to be located in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, a project that has met with fierce opposition from secularists. As well, a new bridge over the Bosphorus will be named after Sultan Selim I, the 16th-century Ottoman ruler.

The Turkish movie “Conquest 1453” (“Fetih 1453”), recounting the conquest of the Byzantine capital by Sultan Mehmet II, has become the highest-grossing film in Turkey’s history. A number of other new films portray the battle of Gallipoli, the First World War clash between the Ottomans and Allied forces over the straits of Dardanelles.

“The Ottoman revival is good for the national ego and has captured the psyche of the country at this moment, when Turkey wants to be a great power,” remarked Melis Behlil, a film studies professor at Kadir Has University in Istanbul.

As a consequent of this tilt in domestic politics, Turkey has been moving away from Europe and is less interested in joining the economically troubled European Union. In any case, as long as the Cyprus issue remains unresolved, Turkey knows that Greece will prevent it from entering the EU.

As Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, observed,  “It’s easy to argue that the E.U., with its sclerotic economies, has nothing to offer Turkey or that Turks, disgusted at Europe’s prejudice against Muslims, are no longer interested in joining a club that doesn’t want them anyway.”

“A great nation, a great power” was the theme of the fourth General Congress of the AKP, held in the fall of 2012. Foreign aid has risen 27-fold in the past decade and a resurgent Turkish state is making its voice heard in the Muslim regions of the Mideast and central Asia.

Multiethnic Afghanistan is at the Crossroads of Asia

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Afghanistan, as most readers know, comprises a number of ethnic groups other than the Pashtuns, who make up about 45 per cent of the country’s 30 million people and are the backbone of the Taliban.

Before 2001, while the Taliban were in power in Kabul and large areas of the south and west, they never managed to control the regions where the other ethnic groups live. The Hazara, Tajiks, Turkmen, and Uzbeks, who together account for another 48 per cent of the population, resisted Pashtun control with their own military formation, the Northern Alliance.

The Shi’a Muslim Hazara live mainly in the west, bordering Shi’a-majority Iran, while the other groups, mainly Turkic Sunni peoples (except for the Shi’a Tajiks, also of Iranian origin), are found in the borderlands next to the former Soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

Then there are the Kyrgyz, also aTurkic Sunni people, who have lived in the northeastern corner of the Wakhan Corridor, a narrow stretch sandwiched between some of the highest mountains in Asia. On maps, it looks like a tongue or panhandle between Pakistan in the south and Tajikistan in the north. It meets China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, also home to Kyrgyz and Tajiks as well as the Muslim Uyghurs, in the east.

A geographical aberration, 210 kilometres long and between 20 and 60 kilometres wide, the Wakhan Corridor belongs to Afghanistan only because the British and Russian empires created it as a buffer zone after fighting for influence in central Asia the mid-19th century in the so-called Great Game.

The Anglo-Russian Boundary Commission awarded the area to Afghanistan in 1895-1896. What is now Pakistan was within British India, while Tajikistan, which had been part of a Muslim state, the Emirate of Bukhara, had been conquered by tsarist Russia.

People in the corridor suffer from a range of problems including poverty, ill health, lack of education, food insecurity and opium addiction, according to the United Nations.

In 1978, some three to five thousand ethnic Kyrgyz in the corridor fled to Pakistan in the aftermath of a Communist regime coming to power in Kabul, and only some 1,300 remain. The corridor’s total population has been estimated at about 10,000, now mostly Pamiris, a Shi’a group Iranian in origin and related to the Tajiks.

In the 1980s, when the Soviets occupied Afghanistan, the Russians built a dirt road through part of the Wakhan Corridor, but it isn’t of much use today. And while the Americans have poured tremendous sums of money into the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan, in an effort to win “the hearts and minds” of Pashtuns and entice them away from the Taliban, in the Wakhan there’s never been an insurgency, so it has been ignored. It’s too remote to matter.

The part of the Wakhan Corridor that abuts China is 76 kilometres in width and includes the Wakhjir Pass crossing the Hindu Kush mountains at an elevation of more than 16,000 feet. In recent years, Afghanistan has asked China to open the border as an alternative supply route to help forces battling the Taliban.

In 2009 the Chinese Ministry of Defence constructed a new road to within 10 kilometres of the frontier, for use by border guards. But the border itself remains closed, partly because China fears it might lead to Uyghur separatists in Xinjiang getting help from Muslims in Afghanistan.

Still, as western countries ready themselves to exit Afghanistan, China is increasing its influence in the country. Its state-owned enterprises have made billion dollar investments, including the acquisition of major oil and copper mining concessions.

China has also established security ties with Kabul. Last year Afghan President Hamid Karzai visited Beijing, where he signed a bilateral “strategic and cooperative partnership” agreement.

The mountainous area at “the top of the world,” where the countries of east, central and south Asia meet, still remains a site of contestation between the great powers.