Is the New Iranian President a Moderate?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Everyone has seen the “Peanuts” cartoon where Lucy is holding a football that Charlie Brown is about to kick. As he runs towards it, she pulls it away at the last minute. She’s done it many times, yet Charlie Brown never learns.

Iran held its presidential election on June 14, won by an ostensible “moderate,” 64 year old Hasan Rowhani. But we’ve seen this movie before. All I can say is, “Here we go again.”

Western observers have been waiting for signs of moderation in the Islamic Republic run by the 12-member Council of Guardians, now under the control of Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, for more than three decades.

But no such saviour has ever arrived, and the hardliners have gone from strength to strength, supporting Hezbollah and Assad’s Syria in the ongoing civil war in that country, destabilizing Iraq, and, most ominously, working towards acquiring nuclear weapons in order, many believe, to defeat Israel.

Like the other five candidates in the race, the newly-elected Hasan Rowhani, who won 50.7 per cent of the vote, first had to meet with the approval of Iran’s real rulers, the mullahs. Still, Rowhani’s backers, such as Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, president between 1989 and 1997 and another supposed reformer, urged Iranians to cast ballots and abandon plans to boycott the election in protest -- even though the mullahs vetoed Rafsanjani’s own attempt to get on the ballot.

Himself a cleric and long-time acolyte of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the theocratic state in 1979, Rowhani has been a loyal servant of the Islamic Republic from its inception and supports Iran’s nuclear program.

He is no outsider – he has been a lawmaker for 20 years and the country’s lead nuclear negotiator between 2003-2005. In a 2004 speech he stated that even when Iran had suspended uranium enrichment, it was able to make its greatest nuclear advances because, he remarked, the pressure was off.

Rowhani’s conservative opponents, Iran’s Supreme Leader and even the Revolutionary Guard have all issued statements in support of the president-elect, who will take office on August 3.

I don't think they were unhappy that Rowhani won. The mullahs will now resume the good cop-bad cop routine, with this “moderate” and more “pragmatic” president becoming the benign face of Iran, thus allowing U.S. President Barack Obama and others to breathe a sigh of relief and resume negotiations. “We have to enhance mutual trust between Iran and other countries,” said Rowhani after his victory.

Already Iranian intellectuals are touting Rowhani as a leader who is wary of a purely ideological approach to foreign policy. In an article in the June 19 New York Times, on “How to End the Stalemate With Iran,” Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a research scholar at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and Mohammad Ali Shabani, a contributing editor at the Iranian Review of Foreign Affairs, argued that “Rowhani’s victory demonstrates that there is now real momentum toward the initiation of direct talks between Iran and the United States.”

The mullahs need Rowhani to ease tensions with the United States in order to reduce the tough sanctions that have crippled the economy. Suzanne Maloney, a Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, has suggested that Khamenei has allowed Rowhani’s victory in order to repair Iran’s frayed relations with the world, one that enables the country to revive oil exports and resume normal trade. It’s the strategy of two steps forward, one step back. Rowhani’s power is limited by Iran’s other institutions, many of which are in conservative hands. Since an Iranian president has little real power, the benefits outweigh the costs.

Is it working? Maybe. Obama has already said that voters in Iran “rebuffed the hardliners and the clerics in the election who were counseling no compromise on anything, anytime, anywhere.”

The Council of Guardians also didn’t want a repeat of 2009, when a fixed election resulted in mass demonstrations against incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In today’s volatile Middle East, that would be too dangerous.

The real winner four years ago, Mir Hossein Mousavi, has been under house arrest since 2011, after he called his supporters onto the streets for a rally in support of the uprisings in the Arab world. Even his daughters were detained this past February.

Ayatollah Khamenei, who retains the final word on Iranian policy, including its nuclear program, issued “necessary guidelines” to Rowhani during their first meeting after the vote.

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

Israel's Enemies Are at Loggerheads

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

In the summer of 1939 there was a little known war that took place on the Mongolian-Manchurian border, between the Soviet Red Army and the Imperial Japanese Army. Mongolia was at the time a Soviet satellite, while Manchuria, renamed Manchukuo, was a Japanese puppet state.

The fighting involved over 100,000 troops and  one thousand tanks and aircraft. Some 30,000-50,000 men were killed and wounded.

The famed journalist John Gunther, author of the classic work “Inside Asia,” published in 1939, quipped at the time that “the whole world was hoping that both sides would lose.” (Actually, in the climactic battle, at the end of August, the Japanese were defeated.)

This is probably the way most Israelis feel about both sides in the Syrian civil war. For that reason, among others, the country aims to stay out of Syria’s civil war, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told Israelis, despite some violence eroding security on the Golan Heights border area.

Obviously the Syrian regime itself is no friend of Israel’s. But many of the rebel groups are also opposed to non-Sunni governments in the region – including, of course, a Jewish one.

The Syrian Islamic Liberation Front is similar to the Muslim Brotherhood, while the Syrian Islamic Front (SIF) is an alliance of more hardline Islamist forces. Finally, there is Jabhat al-Nusra, affiliated with al-Qaeda. True, the Free Syrian Army (FSA) is a moderate grouping, but they have been losing strength in relation to the other groups.

So, as far as Israel is concerned, all the combatants inside Syria oppose the Jewish state. And this is true also of Israel’s main non-state enemies outside Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas. But due to the war, both of these militant movements are losing support.

Hezbollah, the well-armed Lebanese Shi’te movement which fought Israel to a standstill in a major conflict in the summer of 2006, is now involved in the Syrian civil war on the side of the Shi’ite regime in Damascus. The group has at least 5,000 fighters in the Syrian battle theater, and has been turning the tide against the rebel opposition. They helped the regime capture the strategic town of Qusair near the Lebanese border recently.

But this comes at a cost. “There is no doubt that Hezbollah is being degraded,” said Shai Feldman, director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA.

The organization, he told the Forward newspaper in New York, is not only losing men and weapons in the Syrian combat; it is also coming under increasing attacks from political rivals in Lebanon and in the broader Arab world. “For the short term,” Feldman said, “this means Israel is safer, because Hezbollah’s focus is in a completely different direction.”

In Gaza, to Israel’s southwest, Hamas, the Sunni organization close to the Muslim Brotherhood, has also suffered because of the Syrian civil war. The group’s constant rocket attacks into Israel led to all-out war in the winter of 2008–2009 and again in 2012.

Now, because of its backing of Sunni opposition groups fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Hamas has lost millions of dollars in funding and weaponry it used to get from Shi’ite Iran, which supports the Syrian regime. A cash-strapped Hamas has lost some of its capabilities and is less able to launch attacks on Israel.

Ghazi Hamad, the Hamas deputy foreign minister, told The London newspaper the Telegraph in late May that relations with Iran were “bad” and said that, “for supporting the Syrian revolution, we lost very much.” He indicated that military aid from Iran had come to a full stop.

Meanwhile, in early June al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri urged Syrians to unite to bring down President Assad and thwart what he said were U.S. plans to set up a client state in Syria to safeguard Israel's security. Al-Qaeda is militantly Sunni.

Zawahri, an Egyptian who became Al-Qaida’s head after Osama bin Laden was killed, also criticized Iran for supporting Assad, saying the conflict in Syria had “revealed the ugly face of Iran.”

The internecine Arab warfare has taken diplomatic pressure off Israel to renew talks with the Palestinians as well. Even so, Israel must tread warily. The Middle East is, after all, a minefield, and no one knows whether the fighting in Syria may yet spread.

Samantha Power, Syria and the Issue of Genocide

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

President Barack Obama has nominated Samantha Power to be the American ambassador to the United Nations. Her appointment, if confirmed by the U.S. Senate, will be quite timely, given the widening war in Syria - especially with the intervention of Hezbollah.

Power is probably best known for her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, published in 2002, following her years covering atrocities in the Balkans as a journalist.

"No U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence," she wrote. "It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on."

More recently, she served as senior director of the Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights at the National Security Council and as chair of Obama's Atrocities Prevention Board. She is also a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Will her appointment usher in a more robust - and interventionist - foreign policy by the Obama administration? Her writings would suggest so. "Outside powers cannot wait for confirmation of genocide before they act," she wrote in "Remember Rwanda, but Take Action in Sudan," an April 6, 2004 article in the New York Times. " In 1994 the Clinton administration spent more time maneuvering to avoid using the term ‘genocide' than it did using its resources to save lives."

In the case of Darfur, she continued, "American officials need not focus on whether the killings meet the definition of genocide set by the 1948 Genocide Convention; they should focus instead on trying to stop them."

Three years after the end of World War II, the United Nations General Assembly passed the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Absolute state sovereignty, including the "right" to engage in the mass murder its own or other peoples, would be a thing of the past.

The man most responsible for this was a Jewish lawyer from Poland, Raphael Lemkin, who fled Poland ahead of the Nazis in 1939 and came to the United States. But 49 members of his family were killed in the Holocaust.

In 1944, he published Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, where he coined the term "genocide," defining it as "a co-ordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves."

But Lemkin, who died in 1959, would be saddened by what has transpired since then, in places such as Cambodia, Chechnya, the Congo, Rwanda, and the Sudan. Little was done to stop mass killings in these places.

Like much of what passes for international law, genocide, as one lawyer recently said to me, is now just a concept that you shape to suit your politics. The term has become politicized and contentious: "what you call genocide is my defensive reaction," some might respond.

Many Turks make that claim, for instance, when rationalizing the more than one million Armenians killed by the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. They contend that the Armenians were supporting the country's enemies, the Russians, in a time of conflict.

The term has also become terribly vague and malleable. We now even hear of "cultural genocide," referring to oppressed people who are deprived of their languages, religions, or traditions - even if no attempt is made to actually physically murder them.

If the killing of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995, or Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic's actions in Kosovo in 1999, were considered acts of genocide, why doesn't the slaughter of at least 80,000 Syrians, most of them unarmed civilians, also amount to genocide?

Does the fact that this is a civil war, and the Syrian rebels have guns, nullify that definition? But the disparity in weaponry between them and the Assad regime is still immense - as was the case in Kosovo, until NATO stepped in.

And even when the international community does in large part agree that certain mass murders and war crimes have risen to the level of genocide, then what? It's been years since the Darfur atrocities were declared to be genocide, but Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir is still thumbing his nose at Samantha Power - and us.

And by the way, since no one wants to confront Russia, the 160,000 dead in the two Chechen wars have also been ignored.

Power has been credited with convincing Obama in 2011 to push for a UN Security Council resolution to authorize a coalition using military force to protect Libyan civilians during the uprising against Moammar Gadhafi.

But she's also aware of the limitations of multilateralism. In "Full Force," published in the New Republic, March 3, 2003, she admitted that "The UN Security Council is anachronistic, undemocratic, and consists of countries that lack the standing to be considered good-faith arbiters of how to balance stability against democracy, peace against justice, and security against human rights."

So, given the veto power exercised on the Security Council by Russia, Bashar al-Assad's backer, there may not be all that much the U.S. can do, unless it organizes a ‘coalition of the willing', outside United Nations auspices.

The Rise and Decline of Arab Nationalism

Prior to the First World War, most of the Middle East was ruled by the Ottoman Turks. Communal identity under the Ottoman millet system was religious, not ethnic or territorial – Christians, Jews, and Muslims could live side by side in the same town, each under their own hierarchy. Communal and religious loyalty was one and the same thing.

Muslim Arabs played important roles and suffered no real discrimination. Arabic was the language of the Quran and mosque; Arabs were religious and legal figures throughout the empire. There were even Arab generals, governors and prime ministers.

While Muslim Arabs were theoretically on a par with Turks, Christian Arabs    in any case divided into Greek Orthodox, Catholic, Maronite, and Coptic communities    were in law not fully equal citizens of the empire.

But as the Ottoman Empire decayed in the 19th century, Europeans brought printing presses and western ideas to the region. An Arabic literary revival began, planting the seeds of modern nationalism. Cairo, Damascus and Beirut became intellectual centres, where thinkers introduced the idea of regenerating the Arab people and culture, and creating an Arab, as opposed to simply a Muslim, consciousness.

The Arab nationalists gained further influence after 1908, when the liberal Committee of Union and Progress (the so-called “Young Turks”) took power in the empire. They too were nationalists, disgusted with the cosmopolitan Ottoman elite, and sought to make the empire more Turkish. Turkish replaced Arabic as the language of instruction in schools in the Arab provinces.

The Arab reaction was to emphasize its own ethnicity and language. Encouraged by the British, during the First World War an Arab revolt against Turkish rule broke out. But the Arabs were betrayed by the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, which called for the division of the region between France and Britain after the war.

The heart of Arab nationalist sentiment was in Greater Syria (including Lebanon) and in 1920 a National Congress in Damascus proclaimed the Emir Feisal of the Hashemite dynasty king of Syria. But the movement was crushed, and France, as agreed by the western powers, became the colonial ruler.

The French governed through divide and conquer tactics, separating Christian Lebanon (much enlarged) from Syria, and also creating autonomous units for Alawites, Druze, and Kurds. This assured Paris of some support from minorities.

The British, too, faced uprisings in Egypt and Iraq, while in Palestine, they confronted permanent animosity between the Arab population and the growing Jewish community being developed by the Zionist movement. This burst into flames on numerous occasions, especially in the Arab revolt of 1936 1939.

 After the Second World War the League of Arab States was formed, but none of the newly independent individual states gave up any sovereignty.

The loss in the 1948 war to the newly formed Israel by the Arab armies of Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon came as a shock, demonstrating to Arab nationalists the levels of corruption and inefficiency in their states. It led to nationalist overthrows of old regimes in Egypt, Syria and Iraq, and attempts in Jordan, Lebanon and elsewhere.

Gamel Abdel Nasser, who took power in Egypt, attempted to reconstruct Egyptian society and inspire the rest of the Arab world, by applying a socialist and revolutionary pan Arab ideology that called for a unified Arab state. He appealed to youth across the Arab world.

He had overthrown a corrupt old king, introduced social and economic reforms, and thwarted the western powers at Suez in 1956.

His slogans were republicanism, neutralism, socialism and Arab unity. Other Arab parties    especially the Ba’ath (Arab Socialist Renaissance) in Syria and Iraq    espoused similar ideals.

In 1958 Egypt and Syria formed the United Arab Republic, but it lasted for only three years. There was also an attempted federation between Iraq and Jordan before the 1958 Iraqi revolution, and at various times Libya attempted to federate with Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and even Morocco.

These pan Arab ventures failed to get off the ground. And the defeat suffered by Egypt and Syria in the 1967 war with Israel led to disillusionment with secular nationalism among many in the Arab world. Nasser died in 1970 and his successors abandoned his political ideals.

And even as Saddam Hussein tried to stoke up pan-Arab nationalism during Iraq’s eight-year war with Persian Iran in the 1980s, the Lebanese civil war was pitting Christians against Muslims, Sunnis against Shiites All were Arabs.

By the turn of the century, the Ba’ath regimes in Iraq and Syria had become little more than authoritarian dictatorships. The Iraqi Ba’ath party was destroyed in 2003 and the one in Syria is embroiled in a sectarian civil war – one that is also inciting Sunnis and Shiites in neighbouring Iraq and Lebanon to attack one another. More than 1,000 Iraqis were killed in May.

Sunni-led Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey (as well as militant groups allied with Al-Qaeda) are backing the uprising against the Syrian regime, while Shiite Iran and its ally Hezbollah in Lebanon provide arms and men to Bashar al-Assad.

As for Egypt, the country is now ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Today, from Morocco to Iraq, radical forms of Islam have become the main inspiration for political change in the Arab world. The fault lines now are religious, rather than ethnic or nationalist.

Why is Russia Backing the Assad Regime in Syria?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Why have the Russians remained such steadfast supporters of the Syrian regime, supplying Damascus with diplomatic and political aid as well as sophisticated military equipment?

Is it a vestigial ideological attachment, dating back to the days when the Soviet Union backed left-wing Arab states like Iraq and Syria against American Middle East allies, including Israel?

Is it President Vladimir Putin’s desire to demonstrate that Russia has returned to the world stage as a major player, after the country’s weakness and humiliation during the Boris Yeltsin years in the 1990s, when the United States and NATO had a free hand in the Balkans and elsewhere, wresting Kosovo from Russia’s Serbian ally?

Or is it that the Russians prefer a weak Shiite regime that is ostensibly secular to the Sunni militants fighting to remove Bashar al-Assad?

It’s probably a combination of all three.

Lest we forget, the Soviet Union for decades had a very close military and political alliance with Syria, which had declared itself a “socialist” country under the Ba’ath Party. The USSR was Syria’s main arms supplier. In turn, the Russians acquired a Mediterranean naval base at Tartus in 1971.

Indeed, it was Moscow’s erroneous intelligence reports warning that Israel was going to attack Syria that led to the Mideast war in 1967 -- a war in which the defeated Syrians lost the Golan Heights.

In 1972, President Hafez al-Assad (father of the current leader) signed a peace and security pact with the Soviet Union as a means to strengthen its defense capability. During that year, Moscow delivered more than $135 million in Soviet arms to Damascus. In 1980 Assad and Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev signed a further twenty-year treaty of friendship and cooperation.

The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in 1987 assured Assad that the Soviet Union would continue to provide Syria with economic and military aid. These promises were kept when Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father in 2000.

Since the turn of the century, Russia has sold over $1.5 billion worth of weaponry to Syria. And it now appears that Russian MiG-29 fighter jets and S-300 air defence missiles may be headed to Syria. This would make it harder for the U.S. to impose a no-fly zone over Syria. It will also make Israel, which has already bombed Syria recently to stem the flow of Iranian arms to Hezbollah, more vulnerable to Syrian counter-attacks.

Apart from the arms trade, Russia has strong economic ties to Syria. Russian business investment there now stands at nearly $20 billion.

Russia has used its veto on the UN Security Council three times to protect the Assad regime. Moscow has blocked resolutions aimed at condemning Assad or imposing sanctions.

Putin remains disgruntled at the way UN resolutions passed against the Gadhafi regime in 2011 were extended by NATO into bringing about regime change in Libya, and he doesn’t don’t want the same thing to happen with Syria. He wants the west to know that it can’t do an end-run around Moscow.

Putin also worries that Sunni militancy may spread further, into his own country. The Russian Federation includes some 16 million Muslims, and the Russians are already contending with Islamist terrorism in Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia in the Caucasus. There are even militant rumblings in Tatarstan, an important economic and geographic republic on the Volga.

Some of this ideological and religious extremism is being fuelled by Saudi Arabian money – the same country backing the Syrian rebels. So Putin doesn’t want a Sunni takeover of Syria, one that may include elements allied with al-Qaeda. This could inspire renewed violence at home.

As a corollary, Russia is also trying to present itself as the protector of Christians in the Mideast. There are nearly a million in Syria and 52 per cent are Greek Orthodox, as are most ethnic Russians. Syria’s Christians, along with the ruling Alawites, also fear a Sunni takeover of the country and so most support, or are neutral towards, the Assad regime.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will be meeting soon to discuss when and how to get Assad’s government and the rebels to sit down together and talk peace. In the meantime, though, the Russians continue to bolster Assad’s military.

Apart from Russia, Shiite Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon are also providing aid to Damascus. Even Iraq, now governed by a Shiite regime, has some involvement. This war has now entered its third year and no end seems in sight.

The Troubled Mexican-American Border

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

University of Arizona historian Oscar Martinez, in his 1994 book Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, developed four models of interaction in the borderlands between countries: alienated, coexistent, interdependent and integrated. There may be elements of more than one in each case, but one usually predominates.

Alienated borderlands have virtually no cross-boundary interchange, due to warfare, political disputes, or ideological or religious animosity. Tension prevails and there are rigid controls over cross-border traffic. North and South Korea share such a border, as do Israel and Syria. 

Coexistent borderlands have limited cross-border interaction. There may still be disputes about the location of the border. The Russian-Chinese and Indian-Pakistani borders are examples.

Interdependent borderlands: In this case the borderlands of the two countries are symbiotically linked and there is a mutually beneficial economic system. Often the productive capacity of the wealthier country is matched with raw materials and cheap labour in the poorer one. Such has been the Mexican-American border.

Finally, there are integrated borderlands, where most existing barriers to trade and movement are eliminated and capital, products and labour move without restrictions. Internationalist ideology emphasizes peaceful relations and each country relinquishes a significant part of its sovereignty for the sake of mutual progress. This is largely the case within the 27-member European Union.

In interdependent and integrated borderlands, relatively unimpaired interaction makes it possible for people to participate in social systems that foster trade, consumerism, tourism, migration, cultural exchanges, and personal relationships.

Ethnic or cultural affinity enhances transnational interaction. Thus the American-Mexican border has always had intense activity because of the presence of large numbers of people of Mexican descent on the American side. They fused a highly interdependent bi-national system.

A strong border culture set the area apart from the main culture in either the United States or Mexico. Some cities have been almost unified entities: for example, Brownsville-Matamoros, Laredo-Nuevo Laredo, and Ciudad Juarez-El Paso, in the Rio Grande Valley; and Calexico-Mexicali and San Diego-Tijuana along the California border.

But things have changed for the worse in recent years. With increasing pressure on this border through illegal immigration and narco-trafficking, the frontier is becoming highly militarised. Is an interdependent border becoming a coexistent one?

There has been an anti-immigrant backlash on the American side. When Americans think of “the border,” they think of Mexico, not Canada. And it only too often relates to undocumented migrants and drug smugglers.

This has become a major political issue, and has become part of the larger debate about immigration reform. Washington now spends $18 billion a year trying to secure its border with Mexico; some 20,000 border patrol officers now guard the border. As well, a 1,030-kilometer barrier has been built between the two countries.

U.S. President Barack Obama met with his Mexican counterpart, Enrique Pena Nieto, in early May. U.S. officials are concerned that the new Mexican government, in office since last year, seems less inclined to provide the same level of deep coordination with U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies as its predecessor.

The border stretches for 3,169 kilometres, 595 of them in Arizona, and that state has gone furthest in attempting to control illegal movement across the border. The mistrust is exemplified by the high concrete and steel fence that now separates Nogales, Arizona, from Nogales, Sonora.

The writer Paul Theroux visited Nogales last year. He wrote about his experience in “The Country Just Over the Fence,” in the New York Times of Feb. 26, 2012. “In a lifetime of crossing borders I find this pitiless fence the oddest frontier I have ever seen — more formal than the Berlin Wall, more brutal than the Great Wall of China, yet in its way just as much an example of the same folie de grandeur. Built just six months ago, this towering, seemingly endless row of vertical steel beams is so amazing in its conceit you either want to see more of it, or else run in the opposite direction.”

In the 1990s, I visited the border between Texas and the Mexican state of Tamaulipas twice, once at Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, the other time between McAllen and Reynosa. Though it’s just a short walk or drive across the Rio Grande River, the difference is indeed astounding. It is a divide between an industrialized country and one far poorer.

The border cities were already dangerous places, and I didn’t tarry. Drug gangs have since made them considerably worse.

America: Land of Guns and Murders

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Many years ago, an author whose name I’ve since forgotten, figuratively threw up his hands in despair at the increasingly fractured American political landscape, and remarked in a magazine article that “there is New York City, a couple of neighbourhoods in Boston, and the rest of the country is the South.” (Actually, he could have included a few more liberal cities, such as San Francisco.)

By this he meant that the United States was becoming ideologically an increasingly right-wing country. Imagine what he would be saying today.

Despite two horrific mass shootings last year, one in a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado, the other in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, by young men with military-grade assault weapons, the United States Senate on April 17 refused to even consider the possibility of tightening gun controls. Even background checks seem too radical!

This defeat occurred despite the fact that upwards of 90 per cent of Americans, according to recent public opinion polls, backed the failed legislation. One wonders whether the National Rifle Association, which opposed the legislation, not Congress, is the legislative branch of American government.

Today the NRA, with five million members, is arguably the most powerful lobbying organization in the nation’s capital and certainly one of the most feared. Annual revenue tops $200 million. Its mission, states the organization, is “to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution, to promote public safety, law and order and the National defense.” To that end, it produces numerous pamphlets, magazines and television shows.

The NRA is heavily supported by the country’s thousands of gun manufacturers and dealers. NRA lobbying in the 1980s led to American manufacturers increasing the production of military-style weapons, including semiautomatic assault rifles and high-capacity pistols.

One Pennsylvania gun maker, Keystone Sporting Arms, even produces rifles geared toward children!

In the 2012 election cycle, the NRA spent $18.6 million, according to the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks money in political races, backing (mostly Republican) opponents of gun control.

The NRA has turned the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed in 1791, which refers, somewhat vaguely, to the “right to bear arms,” into a rigid doctrine that proclaims the right of every individual American to, effectively, be armed to the teeth. Today’s guns, of course, have firepower unimaginable to the founding fathers.

Its solution to gun violence is – more guns. After the Newtown massacre, it recommended placing armed guards in American schools, and suggested that even teachers carry weapons.

Americans today possess some 270 million privately held firearms. They have the highest gun ownership per capita rate in the world, with an average of about nine guns for every 10 Americans. There are four times as many federally licensed firearms and ammunition dealers in the U.S. as there are grocery stores.

Not surprisingly, the country’s gun-related murder rate is the highest in the developed world. There are approximately 45 murders committed in the United States every day, mostly with guns.

The U.S. is a statistical outlier: Americans are 20 times more likely to be killed by a gun than is someone from another developed country.

It wasn’t always this way. Until the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, guns were not a major cultural issue in the country.

True, there was a history of violence: after all, the United States emerged after an armed revolution against Britain.

This continued as Americans moved across the West, battling native peoples, Mexico, and each other in the Civil War. Hollywood films often glorified the John Wayne loner settling matters with a rifle.

But by the mid-20th century, it was assumed that this was all in the past, a matter of temporary lawlessness before proper political institutions were in place.

The culture wars following the 1960s changed that. In rural America, in the old South, and elsewhere, people frightened by the rapid changes in American life and fearful that they were “losing the country” to rich elitists on the coasts, new immigrants, and minorities, became easy targets for the purveyors of guns.

Some, spinning conspiracy theories, even formed militias, convinced that “Washington” had fallen into the hands of “un-American” enemies willing to abandon them to a UN-based “world government” that would take away their rights and impose “socialism” on the country.

We saw echoes of this type of thinking in the debate over “Obamacare” a few years ago, though the president’s health care reforms were, by the standards of most of the Western world, very mild indeed.

The NRA held its 142 annual convention in Houston the first weekend of May, attended by some 70,000 members. “This is not a battle about gun rights,” incoming president James Porter told them, but rather part of a larger “culture war.”  Added Wayne LaPierre, the association’s executive vice president, “We are in the midst of a once-in-a-generation fight for everything we care about.”

In 1964 the American historian Richard J. Hofstadter published The Paranoid Style in American Politics. He asserted that American politics “has often been an arena for angry minds.” Such people emerge into the political arena whenever they perceive “enemies at the gates.”

The NRA and the gun lobbyists did not gain their power by accident – they have had fertile fields to plow.

Nigeria's Ethnic and Religious Divisions Are Difficult to Manage

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Africa’s most populous country, independent since 1960, is also one of its most troubled.
The 923,768 square kilometre nation of Nigeria is riven by ethnic rivalries, religious divisions, and extremism. Officially a federal republic of 36 states plus the capital, Abuja, for much of its post-colonial history Nigeria has been ruled by military men and kleptocrats.

Europeans, particularly the British, brought Christianity to the south, while in the north powerful Muslim entities like the Kano emirate and the Sokoto caliphate became bastions of Islam.

Frederick Lugard, who was the British governor from 1912 to 1919, developed the policy of indirect rule. If the emirs accepted British authority, the colonial power was willing to confirm them in office.

Though Nigeria’s 170 million people comprise some 500 ethnic groups, the three most powerful (and rival) ones are the Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa.

In the north, the Hausa, numbering 40 million, are almost entirely Muslim. Nine northern Muslim-majority states, as well as parts of three Muslim-plurality ones, adhere to various forms of figure in Nigeria.Islamic shari’a law; Sa’adu Abubakar, the current sultan of Sokoto, remains the most powerful religious

The Yoruba, in the southwest, are more divided religiously, with some two-thirds of their population of 35 million professing Christianity (mainly Protestant faiths), and one-third Islam.

The 30 million Igbo, living mainly in the southeast, are mainly Roman Catholic Christians. Subjected to horrific massacres following a coup in 1966, in which tens of thousands were killed, they formed the breakaway nation of Biafra in 1967, which was crushed by the Nigerian army three years later.

Lieutenant Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, who became Biafra’s president, fled but returned to Nigeria from exile in 1982 and died two years ago. The world-renowned Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, also an Igbo, published There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra, not long before his own death this year.

Altogether, the country is about evenly divided between Christianity and Islam, with the so-called middle belt of the country an area of mixed Christian-Muslim population.

Attempts of extend Islamic law elsewhere in the country has been a major source of discord. Recurring religious conflict has claimed many thousands of lives over the years. In the city of Jos alone, thousands of people have died and tens of thousands have lost their homes in the last decade.

Much of the violence is attributed to Boko Haram, the Islamist armed group operating in northern Nigeria, in particular in Kano. Boko Haram’s main goal is to overthrow the federal government and impose Islamic law throughout northern Nigeria.

Formed in 2002, the group has killed thousands of people, including more than 2,600 in the past two years alone. Clashes in April in the northeastern town of Baga between Nigerian security forces and Boko Haram left more than 200 people dead and some 2,000 homes destroyed. Many people accused the army of dousing houses with gasoline, setting them on fire, and shooting residents when they tried to flee.

The government is hoping to strike a deal with Boko Harem which would include an amnesty as well as a ceasefire. But previous attempts at dialogue have failed. As well, Ansaru, an even more extreme jihadist group that broke away from Boko Haram, is also now active in the north.

Corruption has been deeply engrained in the political culture of this oil-rich country. While those in power grew fabulously rich, most Nigerians remain poor, and the Nigerian state itself has been blamed for the inequality.

The most corrupt of Nigeria’s presidents was General Sani Abacha, from Kano, who ruled from 1993 until 1998. After his death from a heart attack, it was alleged that he and his family had enriched themselves to the tune of $3 billion, reportedly siphoned out of the country’s coffers and sent abroad. Some $473 million was discovered in Swiss bank accounts alone.

After emerging from nearly three decades of uninterrupted military dictatorship, the country returned to civilian rule under Olusegun Obasanjo in 1999.

Upon the death in 2010 of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, a Muslim Hausa from the north, his vice-president, Goodluck Jonathan, assumed the office. He is a Christian from the Niger delta region in the southeast, a member of one of the country’s smaller ethnic groups, the Ijaw.

Militants in Boko Haram, displeased with the idea of a Christian as head of state, in August 2011 bombed the UN building in Abuja. Jonathan asserted that it was not merely an attack on Nigeria, but on the international community.

Given the immense problems that beset Nigeria, Jonathan needs all the luck he can get.

The Demise of the Canadian Jewish News

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

The demise of the Canadian Jewish News (CJN) is as sad as it is unexpected. Obviously the major reason for this has to do with the changing nature of the newspaper business. The rise of the internet has enabled people to get their news (mostly for free) on various electronic devices from all over the Jewish world.

I was a long-time contributor to the CJN – from 1975 to 2006 I published 91 articles, mostly op-eds, in the paper. I have been a very close friend, for 55 years now, of their best journalist (in my opinion). Since 2006, though, I’ve been writing for the Jewish Tribune.

Living far away from the Jewish centres of Toronto and Montreal, people like me have no inside knowledge about the business decisions that may have prompted this move.

But is it possible the changing face of the Canadian Jewish community might also be a factor? There has always been a perception – one to which I subscribe – that the CJN tended to be a voice of the Jewish ‘establishment,’ one closely tied to the Liberal Party. These people were particularly enamoured of the country forged by Pierre Trudeau, and many of them supported his son Justin in the recent party leadership contest.

The Jewish Tribune, on the other hand, has backed the Conservative Party of Stephen Harper, in particular for its steadfast support of Israel. In the last federal election, much of the community followed suit.

But one senses that many of the ‘machers’ still hanker for the ‘good old days’ of Liberal hegemony and have some disdain for the Tribune. In one e-mail I received, a well-known Toronto communal figure made some unflattering references to its publisher, Frank Dimant, and bemoaned the fact that with the closure of the CJN the community will lose “the voices of some of our esteemed” figures.

Are the contributors to the Jewish Tribune just burnt toast? I’m sure the Tribune will continue to do its best to continue to serve the community well.

The Unique Version of Governance in Switzerland

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Pioneer Journal

Arguably the most successful, and certainly the most peaceful, nation in Europe, is the Swiss Confederation, or Switzerland.

Since it is rarely in the news, most people, if they think of Switzerland at all, call to mind the Alps, banks, cheese, chocolates, cuckoo clocks, Geneva-based international organizations like the Red Cross, watches, and the story of William Tell. (Also, in my case, Swiss postage stamps, which I collected as a youth; they are artistic gems.)

But there’s a lot more. It is a country which, though diverse in ethnicity, language, and religion, has held together in relative peace for centuries – perhaps a model for less fortunate places.

Switzerland comprises three distinct ethnic groups -- Germans, French and Italians; four official languages – German, French, Italian, plus Romansh (a Romance language); and two established religions – the Protestant Swiss Reformed Church and Roman Catholicism.

About two thirds of the country’s eight million citizens speak German, some 20 per cent French and seven per cent Italian. The country is historically about evenly balanced between Catholic and Protestant regions.

Switzerland is a true confederation. The 1999 constitution guarantees the sovereignty of the 26 cantons, leaving the federal government only those powers that the cantons entrust to it. Each canton has its own constitution, and its own parliament, government and courts.

Most of the cantons are historical entities that predate the formation of the confederation and hence have first call upon the patriotism of their citizens -- in a quarrel between themselves and the confederation, they take precedence in terms of the loyalty of their population.

There is no overall state religion, though all of the cantons except for Geneva and Neuchatel recognize either the Catholic Church or the Swiss Reformed Church as official churches.

It is also the cantons, not the country, that preserve ethnicity and language. Language rights in Switzerland are accorded on a strictly territorial basis, by canton, and in 22 of them, territorial unilingualism is the price of linguistic peace. (All but nine cantons are in their official language German only.)

Indeed, since the French and German language communities make few concessions towards each other, when francophones and German speakers do business, they often end up speaking English to each other!

The nucleus of the Swiss confederation dates back to three cantons which came together some seven centuries ago. From 1515 to 1798 there was a Helvetic Confederation of 13 cantons. French armies imposed a unitary republic in 1798 but in 1815 the Congress of Vienna recognized the modern state, with its 25 cantons. (In 1980 this rose to 26 when the French-speaking Jura was carved out of German-majority Berne.)  The modern Swiss state dates back to a constitution promulgated in 1848, following a brief civil war.

Cantons strengthen the feeling of localism in many ways. For example, there is a hereditary cantonal citizenship that existed prior to the creation of the modern confederation. There are all sorts of professional and other qualifications that vary from one canton to the next, making mobility difficult. Switzerland has no capital city as such -- Berne, Zurich, and Geneva all house different government branches and offices.

Also, referenda have been a central component of Swiss cantonal decision-making since the 1830s; they have existed at the country-wide level since 1891.

Given all this, politics at the national arena are relatively unimportant. The members of the country’s 200-member lower house, the National Council, are elected via proportional representation, but the constituencies into which the country is divided are the cantons.

The Council of States, the 46-member upper house, also represents the cantons. Twenty cantons elect two members each, while the remaining six – the so-called half-cantons -- elect one each.

The Federal Council is a collegial body of seven members, elected by the two houses of parliament, and functions as the Swiss collective head of state, with each councilor, in rotation, serving a one-year term as confederation president. So at the top, in an arrangement known as the “magic formula,” a coalition of parties (now five) has governed by consensus since 1959.

 In 1848 Switzerland declared itself neutral and, though bordered by Austria, France, Germany, and Italy, managed to keep out of both 20th century world wars. It is not a member of the European Union and only joined the United Nations in 2002.

The Swiss are an insular people and have not been overly welcome to outsiders. Swiss officials said recently that they planned to restrict immigration from Western European countries; they already impose quotas on residence permits for people from eight Eastern European countries.

Situated in the heart of the continent, Switzerland is indeed a European country like no other.

What Constitutes Sovereignty in Today's World?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

We think of nations as being either independent or not. But in actual fact, some jurisdictions that are not entirely sovereign possess many -- in some cases most -- of the attributes of statehood.

They are to all intents and purposes independent actors in the global community, unconstrained by the fact that they are legally still bound to some other entity. But for a variety of economic, ethnic, geographic or political reasons, they choose not to become fully sovereign states. Most are small islands.

This is the case with many British territories, such as Bermuda and the Isle of Man. These islands run their own show with virtually no interference from London. Denmark allows the Faroe Islands and Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) complete autonomy. The Swedish-speaking Aland archipelago is part of Finland, but enjoys a high degree of “home rule.”

Caribbean islands such as Aruba and Curaçao are constituent self-governing units of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The African island of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean, which united with mainland Tanganyika in 1964, is a self-governing region that elects its own president, who has control over internal matters.

The Caribbean island of Puerto Rico has the anomalous status of a “Commonwealth.” Its inhabitants are American citizens but it has no representation in the U.S. Congress. Whereas some Puerto Ricans wish to opt for full independence, others would like to see the island become the 51st American state.

Even more curious is the relationship between the U.S. and three former island chains in the Pacific that it governed as United Nations trusteeships. Now fully sovereign states, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau, have entered into Compacts of Free Association (COFAs) with the United States.

These allow the U.S. to station armed forces in Compact areas; Washington is also responsible for administering all international defense treaties and other relations. In turn, the U.S. provides financial assistance and access to many U.S. domestic programs. Citizens of these three countries are also able to work in the U.S.

Queen’s University political scientist Ronald Watts has noted that some 87 islands or archipelagoes are involved in some combination of autonomous self-government combined with formal collaboration in a wider political partnership.

Such mutual interdependence may be more suitable for many islands. The trick, he maintains, is to find the appropriate collaborative institutions and processes that take into account the circumstances of each case, thus surmounting the limitations of the independence/dependence dichotomy.

In federations, of course, there is a constitutional division of powers. The self-governing status of the component units, as well as the division of power between them and the central government, are typically constitutionally entrenched and may not be altered by a unilateral decision of either party.

Federations often include members that have a very powerful sense of their own identity, and which may even at one time have been countries – for instance, Quebec in Canada, Bavaria in Germany, and Texas in the United States. Devolution in the United Kingdom has given Scotland and Wales their own assemblies.

Really, sovereignty exists on a continuum, rather than being a binary “yes” or “no” attribute.

I’ve come up with what I call a “sovereignty index” which can be used to establish the degree of independence which a sub-unit of a larger state possesses. These are the variables:

The degree of constitutionally entrenched jurisdictional autonomy the entity is accorded, including executive powers, legislative powers, and judicial powers, including control over the legal system, both civil and criminal.

The territory’s ability to engage in autonomous relations with other jurisdictions, including the ability to sign international agreements and have representation abroad.

Its right to a separate electoral system and political parties.

The degree of control it has over the following:

Customs, duties, taxation and other revenues and fiscal resources; banking and insurance; the currency; international trade; the environment and natural resources (including offshore resources); citizenship, immigration, and rights of residency; land ownership and use; aviation, communications, postal services and transportation; defence, foreign affairs and security; culture and language; education and institutions of higher learning.

And, perhaps most important, the population’s sense of a distinct identity and shared history.

The diverse forms of governance around the world are more complex than is often realized.

The Worse Things Get the Less They Are Noticed

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown PEI] Guardian

There must be a name for the political version of the law of diminishing returns, especially as it applies to warfare.

If 15 people were to die in a violent incident in Sweden today, that would be big news, spread across the front pages of newspapers outside that country.

But if 15 people get killed in Syria on the same day, it will hardly be noticed. After all, some 70,000 have already been slaughtered in that country's civil war, now into its third year. Two million more Syrians have been internally displaced and 800,000 have fled into neighbouring countries.

Last year Kofi Annan, the UN's former secretary general, was appointed a special envoy and presented a six-point plan under which hostilities would immediately cease within the framework of a ceasefire. Nothing came of it. President Bashar al-Assad will not cede any power because he knows he and his Ba'ath Party would be doomed.

Syria's major cities, including Aleppo, Damascus, Homs, and Hama, have seen entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble. Thousands more will die before one side or the other wins.

So, ironically, the worse things get, the less they get noticed. How many people even know that the endemic anarchic warfare in the Congo has taken many millions of lives? People get "violence fatigue" and tune out. It becomes the equivalent of a "dog bites man" story - nothing new there.

Such violence gets relegated to the back pages of newspapers; even the usual attempts at ending the violence through international efforts - United Nations "blue berets," peace talks in some foreign capital, appeals from Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), and You Tube videos - become passé. The term "peace process" after a while makes eyes glaze over and chases away insomnia.

Indeed, even the ultimate form of mass murder, genocide, after a while loses its unique ability to inspire horror. The president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, was charged four years by the International Criminal Court for the crimes in Darfur. Hundreds of thousands have been killed in "ethnic cleansing" operations by the Janjaweed militias.

An arrest warrant for al-Bashir was issued in 2009, charging him on five counts of crimes against humanity (murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture and rape) and two counts of war crimes.

Guess what: he's still running the country and Darfur remains a killing field, despite a so-called 2011 peace agreement signed between Sudan and one of the resistance groups in Darfur.

With great fanfare, the UN initiative known as the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was unveiled in 2005; former Canadian foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy was one of its main authors. It focuses on preventing and halting genocide, war crimes and ethnic cleansing.

But it has no real teeth. Unless war-weary western powers in NATO are willing to do something concrete - against expected opposition from China and Russia on the UN Security Council - the killings in places like the Congo, Darfur and Syria will continue.

Imperial Conquests Were Less One-Sided Than People Think

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Pioneer Journal

Thanks in part to the 1978 publication of the seminal book Orientalism, written by the late Palestinian-American academic Edward Said, many people assume that European countries have been the main imperialist powers in history, conquering and pillaging throughout the African and Asian “East,” as well as the Americas.

A whole host of professors of “post-colonial” theory, often with little knowledge of history, have taken his thesis as gospel truth.

But over the past 1,400 years, more often than not, it was the “East” invading “Christendom.”

Fuelled by their conversion to Islam, Arab armies in the decades following the death of Muhammad in 632 conquered vast areas of the Middle East, extinguishing eastern rite Christian communities and pushing the Greek Orthodox Byzantine Empire out of Egypt, Palestine and Syria. They also gained control of the eastern Mediterranean islands of Crete, Cyprus and Sicily.

Arab armies crossed the Strait of Gibraltar in 711 and had conquered most of the Iberian Peninsula by788. Moving over the Pyrenees into today’s France, they were stopped by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732.

Arab rule over large parts of Spain lasted for centuries and did not end until the capture of Granada, the last outpost of Arab Al-Andalus, in 1492.

Arriving on the vast Russian plain from the steppes of Asia, the Mongols conquered all of present-day Belarus, Russia and Ukraine by 1240 and ruled over its people for more than two centuries.

They moved further west, battling their way into Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, and Croatia, scoring further victories throughout the 13th century. Many European states became vassals and paid tribute to the Mongol Golden Horde. Infighting among various Mongol leaders finally led to their retreat from eastern Europe.

The Russian re-conquest of their lands began with Tsar Ivan III, who in 1480 formally refused to pay further tribute to the much weakened Golden Horde. Ivan IV in turn defeated the Kazan and Astrakhan Khanates between 1552 and 1556, pushing the Mongols eastwards and establishing Russia as a major power.

Meanwhile, the Seljuk Turks had moved into Anatolia in the 11th century, further reducing the lands under Byzantine control. The establishment of the Anatolian Seljuk state began the Islamic period in Turkey.

However, it was the Ottoman Turks who finally put an end to the Byzantine Empire, with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Soon thereafter, Ottoman armies captured the Balkans and southeastern Europe; they would rule over most of Greece, Albania, Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Bosnia-Herzegovina and parts of Ukraine for centuries.

Even much of Hungary was under Turkish rule between 1526 and 1687, and the Austrian capital of Vienna was besieged twice, in 1529 and 1683.

During this period, the Christian states of Europe only went on the offensive in the Middle East during the Crusades between the 11th and 13th centuries.

But that was, after all, their attempt to recapture the lands, in particular Palestine, that had been the heartland of Christianity prior to their conquest by the Arab caliphates.

Only with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War did the British and French take over much of the Middle East, and they controlled it for only three decades.

From the 16th century on, the tables did turn elsewhere in the world, as western European powers grew in strength and empires like China and Persia weakened.

It was in the Americas, and in South and southeast Asia, where European exploitation really took place, with the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese in the western hemisphere; the British in the Indian subcontinent; the Dutch in the East Indies; and the French in Indochina.

As well, almost all of Africa was partitioned in 1885 by the Belgians, British, French, Germans, Portuguese, and Spanish, and foreign rule there lasted for some 80 years.

Note that these were western European countries. Those in eastern and southeastern Europe were themselves under foreign rule and not involved in colonialism.

It’s easy to be captivated by a grand theory espoused by an academic with a political agenda. That’s why historical facts come in handy. It’s a much more balanced record than Said’s acolytes assume.

Detroit Continues to Face Poverty-Related Challenges

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Pioneer Journal

A friend of mine once said to me, “thirty miles outside of any city, you’re back in the middle ages.”

By this he meant that cities were the anchors of culture and progress. But, in the United States, this may not necessarily be true any longer.

Right up against the Canadian border, across the Detroit River from Windsor, lies a “dying” American city, Detroit. It has become so destitute that Michigan Governor Rick Snyder recently appointed an emergency financial manager for the city.

Detroit’s prosperity in the 20^th century was linked to the American automobile industry. The “Big Three” – Chrysler, Ford and General Motors – made it the centre of car manufacturing. It was “Motor City.”

But all that changed in the 1960s, as German, Japanese and Korean companies began to challenge the established auto companies. As their market share dropped and workforces shrunk, and as many of their plants moved to places with cheaper labour, so too did Detroit’s fortunes decline. By 2008 GM and Chrysler had gone bankrupt.

The decline of the auto industry has seen the city lose population. Between 2000 and 2010, Detroit’s population fell by 25 per cent, and it dropped in size from the country’s 10^th largest city to 18th. From a total of 1.8 million people in 1950, it shrank to 713,000 people.

The July 1967 race riot, finally quelled by National Guard and Army troops, also precipitated a mass exodus. Casualties included 43 dead, 467 injured, over 7,200 arrests, and more than 2,000 buildings destroyed in looting and arson. Tens of thousands left the city in ensuing years.

As plants and people moved, the property taxes and income taxes they had supplied went with them. The city could no longer afford even basic services without going deeply into debt.

Detroit is now running a $375 million deficit, and its long-term debt is $14 billion. Median household income in the city is $26,098, and the median income for a family is $31,011; 36 per cent of its residents live in poverty.

Urban decay is a major problem. The city has some 90,000 abandoned or vacant homes, many completely vandalized and beyond repair. Others have been turned into drug dens. Crime is rampant.

As downtown stores and businesses shut down, even the city’s centre began to look like a ghost town. Some people have even suggested demolishing entire neighbourhoods and turning the space into parkland.

Today, as journalist Charlie LeDuff, author of the book Detroit: An American Autopsy, remarked, the city is “an archaeological ruin.” He told the New York Times he was past finding the city “frightening anymore. It was empty and forlorn and pathetic.”

Detroit has seen a major demographic shift. In 1910, fewer than 6,000 Blacks called the city home; by 1930 more than 120,000 Blacks lived in Detroit. Thousands of African-Americans had come to Detroit from the South for jobs.

In 1950, Detroit had 1.5 million white residents. By 2010, that had fallen to 75,585. The Black population grew to 590,226 from 300,506 during that time. The city is now about 83 per cent African-American. And unlike in the past, jobs are few and not well paid.

But this isn't the whole story. Most of the whites who left Detroit proper (Wayne County) moved to nearby suburbs. Surrounding the city are five predominantly white counties, making the population of the metro area 4.2 million. These towns now have the amenities Detroit lacks.

Oakland County (75 per cent white) is home to a variety of cities, villages and townships. These communities range from blue-collar, inner-ring suburbs like Ferndale and Hazel Park, to wealthy places such as Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, and Franklin.

The white-collar cities of Southfield, Farmington Hills and Auburn Hills are home to many large companies. The median income for a household in the county is $61,907, and the median income for a family is $75,540.

Grosse Pointe, partly in Macomb County, and home to auto company executives, comprises five upscale individual communities.

Ann Arbor in Washtenaw County, 56 kilometres west of Detroit, is a college town, home of the renowned University of Michigan.

With its 43,000 students, it shapes Ann Arbor’s economy. It employs about 30,000 workers, including about 12,000 in the medical center. Other employers are drawn to the area by the university's research and development money.

And of course there are numerous bars, restaurants, bicycle shops, and other businesses catering to the student population. When Michigan’s Big Ten football team, the Wolverines, play on a Saturday afternoon, 114,000 spectators fill the gigantic Michigan Stadium.

Health services are another major component of the city’s economy; numerous medical offices, laboratories, and associated companies are located in the city. High tech companies have been locating in the area since the 1930s.

There is also a wealth of cultural activity, with museums, theatres, art and film festivals, and bookstores (the Borders chain began in Ann Arbor).

We lived in Ann Arbor for two years in the 1980s, when my spouse Patricia was finishing her PhD at the university. There was no need to go to Detroit – Ann Arbor, like the other cities beyond Wayne County, had everything one could ask for.

 

Legacies of Empire Fuel Conflict Among Southeast Asian States

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

It sounds at first like the plot of a comic opera: A group of men from a small Filipino island chain attack a Malaysian village on the nearby island of Borneo.

But there’s actually quite a long history behind this.

The Philippines, an archipelago of some 7,000 islands in Southeast Asia, was a Spanish colony for centuries, until lost to the United States in the Spanish-American War of 1898. Occupied by the Japanese during the Second World War, it attained its independence in 1946.

Though most of its people are Roman Catholics, thanks to centuries of Spanish rule, the southern island of Mindanao is home to a large Muslim population. It has been the site of a long-term insurgency against the Manila government by rebels of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the Moro National Liberation Front, two groups seeking to create a Muslim state on Mindanao.

Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the Sultanate of Sulu, a Muslim entity, controlled the southwestern part of Mindanao, the Sulu Islands off Mindanao, and the northeastern part of Borneo, the world’s third-largest island.

While Mindanao and the islands of the Sulu Sultanate came under the control of Spain and became part of the Philippines, Spain relinquished all claims to the part of Borneo which had belonged to the Sultanate in an agreement made with Great Britain and Germany in 1885.

The southern three-quarters of Borneo, known as Kalimantan, is part of Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago, and it was ruled for centuries as part of the Dutch East Indies. The northern part, however, was divided into two British possessions, Sarawak and North Borneo, as well as the tiny Muslim protectorate of Brunei Darussalam.

North Borneo, which was proclaimed a British protectorate in 1888, included areas that had been under the jurisdiction of the Sulu Sultanate.

In 1963, Sarawak and North Borneo (now renamed Sabah), were joined with the former British colony of Malaya, the Muslim-majority peninsula across the South China Sea, as the Federation of Malaysia. Singapore was also, for a time, part of this new nation, though oil-rich Brunei never joined.

While Sabah is inhabited by numerous indigenous ethnic groups, about two-thirds are Muslim. Sarawak is the only state in Malaysia where Christians form a majority.

While the Sultanate of Sulu is no longer a sovereign state, many of its inhabitants still consider it a legitimate entity and recognize Jamalul Kiram III as sultan.

They also continue to claim Sabah, maintaining that it was only leased, not ceded, to the British North Borneo Company in the 19^th century, with the Sultan’s sovereignty never being relinquished.

The 1963 Manila Accord signed by the heads of Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia, at the time Sabah became part of Malaysia, stated that “the inclusion of Sabah in the Federation of Malaysia will not prejudice the interest of parties concerned until the issue of the Sabah claim is finally resolved by the United Nations.” This has not happened.

The Philippines broke diplomatic relations with Malaysia after the Federation had included Sabah in 1963; Malaysia, in turn, asserted that the people of North Borneo had been polled and supported joining the Federation.

Not wishing to continue the quarrel over territory with Malaysia, the Manila government has not pressed its claim in recent years. (For a time in the 1960s Indonesia, too, had claimed the entire island of Borneo and launched armed incursions into Malaysian territory.)

So supporters of the Sulu royal house decided to take matters into their own hands. Calling themselves the Royal Army of the Sultanate of Sulu and North Borneo, about 200 men attacked and occupied the coastal Sabah village of Tanduo on February 12 in order to reaffirm their claim to Sabah. Some members of the Moro National Liberation Front were also involved.

After days of sporadic fighting between the invaders and Malaysian forces, government troops mounted a full-scale assault on Tanduo at the end of the month and retook the village. “Our patience has reached the limit,” Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia declared.

Supporters of the Sultanate criticized Philippine President Benigno Aquino III for saying that the incursion into Sabah was triggered by self-interest and that the invaders had not considered the welfare of the 800,000 Filipinos working in Sabah.

However, Aquino affirmed the country’s claim on Sabah, stating that his administration would pursue it through dialogue and diplomacy.

Meanwhile, lawyers acting for the Sultanate of Sulu are preparing charges against Malaysia for usurpation of authority and illegal development of natural wealth in Sabah. They will be seeking a $25 billion “fine” from the Malaysian government before the International Court of Justice.

So this obscure, centuries-old territorial dispute, like so many others, will continue to fester and remain an issue between Malaysia and the Philippines, providing one more source of instability in Southeast Asia.

Where Is Cuba Heading as Castro Era Draws to a Close?

Henry Srebrnik [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

In the 1960s, many people around the world were inspired by the Cuban Revolution. It was the first state that had proclaimed itself a socialist society in the Americas, and the North American New Left looked to Cuba as a model for the Third World; some went to Cuba as volunteers. (Later, the Vietnam War would become its focus of attention.)

Many African-American intellectuals, then fighting for civil rights in the segregationist American South, were particularly enthusiastic, as Cuba proclaimed the elimination of racial discrimination as its official policy.

On New Year's Day 1959, the 26th of July Movement led by Fidel Castro and Ernesto ‘Che' Guevara had marched into Havana after more than two years of guerrilla warfare, and the dictator Fulgencio Batista fled the country.

The exuberant revolutionaries proceeded to nationalize agriculture and industry - mostly American-owned - at breakneck speed. As Washington reacted with economic and military pressure, including the failed April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, Cuba turned to the Soviet Union for help and protection and later that year Castro proclaimed himself a Marxist-Leninist.

Cuba had become, as far as the U.S. was concerned, an outpost of ‘Soviet imperialism'.
As we know, the closest the Cold War came to becoming a nuclear conflagration was during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Indebted to the Soviets, in the 1970s Cuban troops fought on behalf of left-wing regimes in Angola, Ethiopia and Mozambique, as surrogates for the Soviet Union. Communism, for many, appeared to be on the march.

Cuba back then saw itself as a vanguard of Marxist revolution - though when Guevara had tried to incite one in Bolivia, he was killed for his trouble in 1967. (Dead almost 46 years now, his image remains ubiquitous, thanks to the posters of him so many students had taped onto their dorm walls back then!)

Like many, I was caught up in the enthusiasm over Cuba. In the late 1960s, I wrote my MA thesis in political science at McGill University on Cuban-American relations.

I spent 10 days in Cuba in late December 1975, at a time when few North Americans could travel to the country. (I flew in via Jamaica.) I was able to walk around Havana, travel on buses, and speak to people at the university, without any hindrance.

The First Congress of the Communist Party was being held, December 17-22, and the various parks and sides of buildings were festooned with revolutionary slogans. The old Havana Hilton had been renamed the Hotel Habana Libre and was a hive of activity at the time.

This is all, so to speak, now ancient history. Announcing that "history is on our side" is a foolhardy enterprise. The Soviet Union and its east European allies were themselves nothing but history by 1991, leaving Cuba economically adrift. Very hard years followed, a time that came to be known as the "Special Period."

To survive, Cuba has in many ways reverted to what it was prior to the revolution.

The country now allows for self-employment, freer travel, and the buying and selling of homes and cars.

Small businesses have sprung up everywhere. Tourism once again has become a mainstay of the economy, and foreign capital, from Canada, Spain, and elsewhere has flowed in.

Many socially unsavoury practices have followed in its wake, and (despite the continuing American trade embargo) the U.S. dollar is again king, fuelling an underground economy. The health and education systems, too, have suffered declines.

The country has moved backward in terms of race relations as well.

Cuba was a Spanish-ruled sugar plantation economy, with a largely black workforce, until the Spanish-American War of 1898. Slavery had only been abolished a decade earlier.

After independence in 1902 little changed. The population of African descent remained at the bottom of the economic and political ladder and whites at the top, with Mulattoes (of mixed European and African lineage) in between.

In the years following the triumph of the revolution the Cuban government was one of the world's most dedicated regimes in the fight against discrimination. It achieved significant gains in racial equality through a series of egalitarian reforms in the 1960s.

But today things are different - Afro-Cubans are often excluded from positions in tourism related jobs, where they could earn tips in hard currencies. They are relegated to poor housing.

"The government hasn't allowed racial prejudice to be debated or confronted politically or culturally, often pretending instead as though it didn't exist," contends essayist Roberto Zurbano in a recent article in the New York Times. After all, it's a socialist country!

Meanwhile, the aging and ailing Fidel Castro handed over power to his brother Raul in 2008, and the latter has said he will step down in 2018.

What happens then? Many older Cubans in the largely white anti-Communist expatriate community in Miami foresee a triumphant return to their homeland, but it's doubtful that they will ever regain control of the country.

It is more likely that post-Castro Cuba will become a country with a mixed economy and a pluralist political system, on the Scandinavian model.

Some of the Reasons Why Nations Fail

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

 “Inclusive economic institutions that enforce property rights, create a level playing field, and encourage investments in new technologies and skills are more conducive to economic growth than extractive economic institutions that are structured to extract resources from the many by the few.”

This is the thesis propounded by economist Daron Acemoglu and political scientist James A. Robinson, in their book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty,” published last year.

In countries with “extractive” economies, those in power destroy incentives and discourage innovation by creating an uneven playing field.

The elites who gain from the extraction also benefit from rigged political institutions, “wielding their power to tilt the system for their benefit.”

However, this inevitably produces instability and failure because it creates the motivation for others to depose the existing elites and take over, often through a coup d’etat. One set of exploiters succeeds another.

So states that are at the mercy of “extractive” economic institutions eventually collapse, the authors contend.

They cite numerous examples to illustrate their argument.

North Korea is a kleptocracy controlled by the armed forces and the Kim family, and its economic institutions make it almost impossible for people to own property. The state controls everything, so people don’t work for themselves, thereby destroying their incentive to succeed.

Such a regime, regardless of its military prowess, will never acquire legitimacy, whereas its South Korean neighbour has created a society with economic institutions that “encourage private property, uphold contracts,” and allows for “the entry of new businesses that can bring new technologies to life.”

Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, who ruled from 1981 until deposed on 2011, allowed big businessmen known as the “whales” to use their power to create monopolies and block the entry of new people and firms.

This, the authors note, blocked opportunities for the vast mass of Egyptians to move out of poverty. The country’s economic future remains precarious.

Libya’s Gadhafi family looted their country’s resources, to its detriment. Oil-rich states are particularly prone to this type of behaviour on the part of despots.

Central American countries like El Salvador and Guatemala, where small elites rule over an impoverished peasantry and appropriate most of the wealth, also make sustainable growth next to impossible.

In other places, the problems result from the failure to maintain an effective state, assert Acemoglu and Robinson. In such circumstances, there is no hope of providing order, a system of laws, a market economy, property rights, mechanisms for resolving disputes, or basic public goods. Many African countries, such as the Congo and Somalia, fall into this category.

Countries with extractive economic and political institutions may achieve temporary success – the Soviet Union was one such case – but they eventually stagnate.

The authors emphasize that none of this is preordained; human agency is always involved. Had a rising economic class in Britain in the 17th century been unable to overcome a repressive monarchy, for example, things might have gone in a very different direction. Whereas Russia might have followed a more “inclusive” path after 1917, had the Communists not seized power.

So the jury is still out on whether China can continue its present rate of growth. It is contingent on the path its rulers will follow.

In a nutshell, Acemoglu and Robinson argue that the wealth of a country depends on the degree to which the average person can participate in economic opportunities and share in the overall growth of its economy.

Economic opportunity sustains political democracy. This is a lesson even some developed nations seem to have forgotten in recent years.

Contending Territorial Claims are a Result of the Vestiges of Empire

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Boundary disputes and land claims often simmer between countries long after the major powers that collided over these regions are gone.

Two of the world’s largest empires, those of Great Britain and Spain, are, to all intents and purposes, no more. But in some cases, successor independent countries have continued the fight.

These claims and counter-claims stretch back centuries and often involve recourse to colonial maps and treaties as interpreted by each side to back its own position.

The best-known of these conflicts involves the Argentinian claim to the Falkland Islands, where a referendum held on March 10-11 reaffirmed the islanders’ desire to remain British.

But there are others. One vestige of the colonial demarcation of frontiers in South America concerns the old colony of British Guiana, which became independent as Guyana in 1966. Its western border with Venezuela continues to be a bone of contention (as does its eastern one with the former Dutch colony of Suriname).

The Guyana-Venezuela border largely follows theSchomburgk Line, so called after the German-born British explorer who sketched it in 1840.

The Venezuelans, however, have long maintained that the Essequibo River, further east, not the Schomburgk Line, is their natural eastern boundary. The area in between the line and the river, referred to as Guayana Esequiba on Venezuelan maps, covers fully 62 per cent of Guyana’s territory of 214,970 square kilometres!

In 1899 the dispute went to international arbitration. A tribunal, composed of two American, two British and two Russian judges, ruled largely in favor of the British. But Venezuela claimed they were biased.

Guyana’s 756,040 inhabitants consist mostly of English-speaking Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese, who consider themselves to be part of the Caribbean, not Latin America, and resist the idea of having part of their country absorbed by Spanish-speaking Venezuela.

Venezuela maintains its position to this day, though two years ago President Hugo Chavez declared that Guyana and Venezuela were “two sister nations” and that the issue would be treated “in a responsible way.” It’s uncertain whether his recent death will change things.

A similar story in Central America involves Guatemala and the old colony of British Honduras, which gained its independence in 1981 as Belize.

This small nation of 356,000 English-speaking inhabitants in an area of 22,966 square kilometres, bordering Mexico and Guatemala, also considers itself more Caribbean than Latin American.

Most Belizeans are of multiracial descent, with Mestizos (mixed Mayan-Europeans) and Kriols, of African background, making up a majority of the population.

While all of Central America was part of the Spanish Empire from the 16th century onwards, the Spanish never settled in this region, however, and increased British trade and settlement finally resulted in British Honduras being formally annexed as a crown colony in 1862.

Meanwhile, Guatemala had declared its independence from Spain in 1821, and under the terms of the Anglo-Guatemalan Treaty of 1859, Guatemala agreed to recognize British rule, while Great Britain promised to build a road from Guatemala to the Caribbean port of Punta Gorda.

As this never happened, the territory of Belize has been claimed in whole or in part by Guatemala since 1940. When Belize became a sovereign state, the territorial dispute remained unresolved. Currently, Guatemala claims everything south of the Sibun River, a total 12,272 square kilometres – more than half the country.

There have been periodic border clashes, but this past January the two countries signed an accord agreeing to refer their territorial dispute to the International Court of Justice for binding resolution. (Voters in both countries must still ratify the accord in referenda this coming October before it can be sent to the Court for final settlement.)

Then there is Gibraltar. Still a British possession, it is located at the western entrance to the Mediterranean Sea. It has an area of 6.8 square kilometres and borders Spain itself. At the foot of the Rock of Gibraltar sits the densely populated city area, home to almost 30,000 people.

Acquired by Britain from Spain “in perpetuity” by the Treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, following the War of the Spanish Succession, Gibraltar guarded the sea lanes that led to the Suez Canal, at the other end, and the passageway to India.

Spain continues to lay claim to Gibraltar. Its dictator General Francisco Franco closed the land border in 1969, to put pressure on Britain. In 1982, it was reopened and in 2006 the Spanish government agreed to relax border controls.

Today, while Gibraltar’s strategic value to Britain is gone, its inhabitants, the descendants of Britons, Indians, Italians, Maltese, Moroccans, Sephardic Jews, and Spaniards, do not want to become Spanish.

In referenda held in 1967 and 2002, they have overwhelmingly reaffirmed their desire to remain British. But recovering Gibraltar remains a stated objective of successive Spanish governments.

The legacy of imperial rule still haunts many parts of the world.