South Africa After Mandela

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

On July 18, Nelson Mandela turned 95. Although he left office in 1999, after serving five years as South Africa’s first democratically elected president, he has remained the conscience of the country and a man beloved throughout the world. He has been a unifying symbol of the “rainbow” nation.

How will South Africa fare after he is gone? Will it remain, two decades after the dismantling of white-minority rule and legally-entrenched apartheid, and as the most industrialized state on the continent, a beacon of hope, or might it slide into ethnic conflict and dictatorship – the fate of so many other states in Africa? 

The transition from white-only to majority rule was carefully managed and thus the country did not fall into chaos. The interim constitution, in place from 1994 to 1997, introduced an entrenched bill of rights, and created a Constitutional Court with broad powers of judicial review.

In any new country – and post-apartheid South Africa was effectively just that -- individual leaders have played important roles. They set the “rules of the game” and provide the state with a new political culture. In general, they can either enhance democracy and state legitimacy or undermine it through corruption and excessive preoccupation with power, which often leads to dictatorial rule.

Fortunately for South Africa, Mandela’s absolute commitment to democracy kept post-apartheid South Africa on a democratic path. Although the African National Congress (ANC), the organization Mandela headed for decades, has won every election since 1994 by overwhelming majorities, elections have been free and fair and opposition parties have had full opportunity to contest them.

Mandela’s successor was Thabo Mbeki, like Mandela a member of the Xhosa national group. During Mbeki’s time in office between 1999 and 2008 he created employment in the middle sectors of the economy and oversaw a fast-growing Black middle class. He expanded trade with other rising powers such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China, the so-called BRIC nations.

However, Mbeki was criticized for his failure to denounce Robert Mugabe’s dictatorial rule in neighbouring Zimbabwe, and, according to some observers, he grew remote, paranoid and autocratic while in power. His ongoing clashes with his own deputy president, Jacob Zuma, who had been accused of corruption, fraud and rape, led the ANC’s executive in 2007 to remove Mbeki as party leader. Instead, Zuma was nominated by the party as its presidential candidate in 2009 and won the presidency.

The country’s first Zulu president, Zuma has battled controversies throughout his career. He has been reproached for introducing Zulu nationalism into a party that prides itself on rising above tribalism. Then there were the allegations of money-laundering and racketeering, stemming from a controversial $5 billion 1999 arms deal; Zuma was charged with enriching himself in the procurement of arms for the country by accepting bribes while he was deputy president under Mbeki. However, the charges were thrown out just weeks before the election which saw him become president.

Zuma has also faced repeated investigations over $27 million in government money spent on security upgrades to his private residence in his home village of Nkandla, in KwaZulu-Natal province. Not surprisingly, he has failed to tackle increasing corruption among members of the ANC at all levels, from government members to local councilors.

While some people were getting rich, life remains very hard for the majority of Black South Africans. The unemployment rate averages 25 per cent but twice that among young Black workers. Whites, just 10 per cent of the population of 48 million people, earn on average six times as much as Blacks. About 40 per cent of the population survives on less than $2 a day, nearly a quarter are without electricity, and nearly a fifth are without proper sanitation facilities.

South Africa has one of the greatest divides between haves and have-nots anywhere in the world. But Black-empowerment schemes to redress apartheid’s injustices have been widely abused to enrich ANC-linked people, including Zuma’s relatives. Meanwhile the economy is floundering.

In August 2012 miners went on strike at the Marikana platinum mine in the nation’s northwest. The strike turned violent, and police opened fire on demonstrators, killing 34 workers. An additional 10 people died in the protests, including two police officers. Working and living conditions were terrible, as was the pay.

Deadly violence, illegal strikes and union infighting have continued to plague South Africa’s platinum belt since last year’s deadly strikes. This past June, a union official was killed and another injured in shootings at the Marikana mine.

Thousands of truckers have also staged strikes, threatening supplies of fuel and food. But since 1994 the ANC has overwhelmingly won every election and controls two-thirds of the seats in Parliament. The opposition Democratic Alliance is still largely perceived as “too white.”

None of this bodes well as the country faces a future without the stabilizing inspiration of Nelson Mandela.

Concern for all Rights is Increasing

Henry Srebrnik [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Do you despair of human beings ever changing their ways, given the state of our planet? Then I recommend that you watch some old Hollywood movies made in the 1930s through 1950s, on the Turner Classic Movies television channel. It will give you renewed hope.

The first thing you’ll notice is that virtually everybody smoked – everywhere, all the time, from the time they woke up in the morning to their bedtime. They smoked at breakfast, lunch and dinner, they smoked at work and while driving, doctors even smoked in hospitals! People were always offering each other cigarettes, and ashtrays were everywhere.

Women were constantly being sexually harassed, in dramas and even in comedies, where it was deemed to be “funny.” They had to swallow their anger, ignore it, or “laugh it off.” (And by the way, they wore fur coats.) Domestic abuse was swept under the rug, lest families be “shamed.”

Blacks appeared in films only as “Stepin’ Fetchit” type buffoons, played for amusement, or else they were super-polite butlers, maids, servants, or porters on trains, always at the ready to wait on their white employers.

In the “real world,” of course, southern states practised legal segregation, and African-Americans couldn’t attend the same schools, stay in the same hotels or resorts, and eat at the same restaurants, as whites. They had to sit in separate sections on public transit or in theatres. The military was segregated. In many states, they couldn’t marry whites.

Most of these laws were still in place 50 years ago in many places. And Blacks had no political power, not even being able to vote in most jurisdictions. Every now and then, public lynchings took place as authorities stood by and did nothing.

Gay and lesbian people didn’t exist in American motion pictures, other than as unmarried, “effete” and nervous men, or as “spinsters” – usually in minor roles.

Ethnic groups such as the Irish, Italians or Jews were usually typecast as immigrants with “humorous” accents, comic sidekicks to handsome Anglo-Saxon heroes.

This trip down memory lane to the “good old days” (of racism, sexism, and homophobia) gives us hope that attitudes towards our fellow non-human creatures are also undergoing a transformation. We have begun to recognize another “ism” – “speciesism,” the exclusion of all non-human animals from the protections afforded to humans.

We can see this idea – that animals, whether domestic or in the wild, also have rights -- gaining strength here on Prince Edward Island. Three recent examples will demonstrate this point.

In 2010, two Island snowmobilers pleaded guilty to causing unnecessary suffering to a fox killed after their snowmobiles ran over the animal four months earlier, and were fined and placed on probation. In another case, a man who ran a “puppy mill” was sentenced to five months in jail for improperly caring for animals, and ordered to pay the province $68,000 to provide care for the 76 cats and dogs removed from his property.

This year three teenagers were fined and ordered to perform community service for their roles in the death of 65 seals on a Prince Edward Island beach. “They did not expect the immediate and severe reaction to their behaviour,” said the judge who sentenced them. “They now understand what a big deal it is.”

Decades ago it would not have been a big deal. We are making progress.

Pakistan Lurches from Crisis to Crisis

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Pakistan has been called “the most dangerous place in the world” by Pakistani journalist Imtiaz Gul, the executive director of the Islamabad-based Centre for Research and Security Studies.

It was an artificial state right from the start, the product of the territorial partition, based on religious criteria, of the Indian subcontinent, with Muslim majority areas in the west and east forming the new country, and the rest, mainly Hindu and Sikh, remaining in India. Both countries achieved independence in mid-August of 1947.

The Hindu ruler of the disputed princely state of Kashmir, though majority Muslim, joined India, resulting in a war that divided it between the two new countries; it has been a source of conflict ever since.

Sind, Baluchistan, the North-West Frontier Province (now called Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the “area of Pashtuns”), and part of the Punjab, along with some princely states, became West Pakistan. Some 1,600 kilometres to the east, Bengal was also partitioned, with Muslim areas becoming East Pakistan. This didn’t last and in 1971 the east became Bangladesh, after a bloody war.

Even the name Pakistan was invented, agreed upon at a meeting of the Muslim League in Lahore in 1940. It means “Land of the Pure” in Urdu, the Muslim language similar to Hindi.  As well, the name Pakistan is also an acronym, referring to the names of the five northwestern regions of British India: the initials of Punjab, Afghania (North-West Frontier Province), Kashmir, and Sind, with the ending the last four letters of Baluchistan. (It was not a good omen for the future that Bengal didn’t get a place in the name.)

The country got off to an inauspicious start, as hundreds of thousands of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs died in the in the bloodletting that followed the partition – nor have things improved much in the succeeding 66 years. For most of its history, Pakistan has been run by the military, which has had little compunction deposing civilian presidents and prime ministers.

The current president is Asif Ali Zardari of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party. He is the widower of Benazir Bhutto, who served two terms as prime minister and was assassinated in 2007. He was called “Mr. Ten Per Cent” over accusations of widespread kickbacks and other corruption. His term ends in September. The presidential election for his replacement will be held Aug. 6 and official nominees will be announced on July 29.

A former general, Pervez Musharraf, who came to power in a coup in 1999 and ran the country until 2008, now sits in jail, charged with treason over the emergency rule he imposed in 2007 which saw the suspension of the country’s constitution, the firing of senior judges and the arrest of thousands of people. He is also accused of having been involved in the conspiracy to kill Bhutto.

In the most recent parliamentary election, the winner was the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz. Ironically, its leader, Nawaz Sharif, now the prime minister, was the one deposed in the army coup mounted by Musharraf in 1999.

Sharif, whose stronghold is in the Punjab, faces major challenges, as have all his predecessors. The country suffers from a homegrown Taliban-led insurgency in the Pashtun-inhabited federally administered tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan and mounting anger over the retaliatory CIA drone strikes, especially in North Waziristan. Other parts of the country also suffer from terrorism: President Zardari’s own security chief was killed in a suicide bombing in Karachi earlier in July.

Figures provided by the Edhi emergency services organization show that between April and the end of June, 247 people were killed in bombings in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan. And these figures do not include Waziristan, a militant hotspot.

There has also been deadly violence against Shi’ites, who comprise about 10-15 per cent of the population, by Sunni extremists. In the last five years, more than 1,000 Shiites, belonging to the Hazara community, have been targeted and killed in the Baluchi city of Quetta by, among others, the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.

In Baluchistan, whose people are poor and feel neglected, the separatist Baluchistan Liberation Army (BLA) is also responsible for numerous attacks.

And in the large port city of Karachi, ethnic and political divisions fan the violence. There is considerable animosity between the native Sindis, Pashtuns from the war-torn region along the Afghan border, and Muhajirs, the term for Muslims from elsewhere in India who moved into what became Pakistan after the partition. More than 2,400 Karachi residents were shot in the street or kidnapped and tortured to death in 2012.

And, of course, there’s the continued tension with India, over Kashmir. Both countries have nuclear arsenals. Maybe Imtiaz Gul is right.

What Were the Crusades About?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Many modern people think of the Crusades, lasting almost 200 years between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, as an unprovoked attack by “white Europeans” on the “Third World,” an early example of “western imperialism” trying to conquer the “Arab Middle East.” Osama bin Laden used the word as an epithet for today’s western powers.

A quick look at the historical record that contextualizes them will disabuse one of that idea. These were medieval people – religion, not economics or ethnicity, is what mattered to both sides.

The nine major crusades began with a call to arms by Pope Urban II in 1095: Christians in western Europe were answering a plea from the Greek Orthodox Byzantine Empire, whose army had been defeated by the Seljuk Turks in 1071 and was in danger of collapse. The pope also wanted to regain Jerusalem from the Muslims, who had conquered it from Byzantium in 637.

Jewish communities in the region favoured the Muslims, who were less hostile to them than the Christians were. In fact, on their way to the Middle East, the Crusaders in 1096 massacred Jews in France, the Rhineland and in central Europe.

Jews were perceived as just as much an enemy as Muslims and thousands were killed. It is estimated that one quarter of the Jewish population of Germany and northern France perished. When Jerusalem was taken in 1099, all its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants were killed.

The Catholic Crusaders set up a number of feudal statelets in Antioch, Galilee, Jerusalem, Tripoli and elsewhere, in what are now Israel, Lebanon and Syria. The Muslim general Saladin reconquered much of the Christian-held territory in the 12th century. The last Crusade took place in 1271–1272, and the last Crusader holdout, at Acre, fell in 1291.

In reality, the Crusades were just another chapter or two in the continuous Christian-Muslim religious warfare that had begun almost from the time of Islam’s founder, Muhammad. The Muslim Arabs had already been fighting the Greek Orthodox Byzantines in the east, and the Roman Catholic Christians in Iberia, for centuries. Most of what are today Spain and Portugal were Muslim Arab al-Andalus for hundreds of years, with the peninsula slowly retaken by Christian kingdoms, and the last Muslim state, Granada, subjugated in 1492.

In any case, even in the Middle Ages, Anatolia (modern Turkey), the Levant (Palestine and Syria), and even Mesopotamia, weren’t distant lands, like far-off India or China. Nor were they “exotic” or “strange” – this area is after all the birthplace of Christianity! Europeans probably knew more about the geography and landscape of the “Holy Land” from their Bibles and religious instruction than about neighbouring countries.

The Crusading Franks and Germans were, from their perspective, simply reclaiming what had been lost to Arab armies over time. And the losses had been ongoing for centuries, as the Arabs and then Seljuk Turks nibbled away at the Byzantine Empire and seized many islands in the Mediterranean – even Sicily for a time.

This wasn’t the same as Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes turning up “out of nowhere” in the Americas and destroying the Aztec Empire, or Portuguese sailors arriving in India, the East Indies and Japan. In any case, the various Muslim polities were at the time stronger than their European counterparts (which is why the Latin kingdoms didn’t survive).

And of course not long after the Crusades had ended, a new Muslim power, the Ottoman Turks, arrived. In 1396, at the Battle of Nicopolis in Bulgaria, the Ottomans crushed a pan-European crusading force and continued their advance into the Balkans. By 1453 they had extinguished the Byzantine Empire and for centuries ruled over much of Europe, twice almost capturing Vienna.

In 1600 the Muslim states of Ottoman Turkey, Safavid Persia, and Mughal India were, along with China, the most powerful empires in the world. The western Europeans only began to pull ahead of them following their conquests in the Americas and in South and Southeast Asia over the next three centuries.

The Maldives Confront Environmental, Political and Religious Issues

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The Republic of the Maldives, in the Indian Ocean southwest of Sri Lanka, consists of a double chain of twenty-six atolls comprising 298 square kilometres. Its population of 328,000 people inhabit 192 of its 1,192 islands. The national language, Maldivian, or Dhivehi, is closely related to Sinhalese, spoken on Sri Lanka.

The Maldives were originally settled by peoples who came from South Asia and today’s Maldivians are closely related to the Sinhalese, with an admixture of Arab, Malay, and African background as well. Formerly Buddhists (like the Sinhalese), they adopted Islam in the 12th century and the Maldives became a devoutly Muslim country. The system of government was monarchical with sultans as sovereigns.

The islands become a protectorate first of the Dutch rulers of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and later of the British who took control of Ceylon in 1796. The Maldives Sultanate became an internally self-governing British protectorate in 1887.

The islands acquired full independence in 1965, but three years later Sultan Muhammad Fareed Didi was removed after a referendum and the country became a republic with Ibrahim Nasir as president.

In 1978 Maumoon Abdul Gayoom was elected president and he would go on to rule in an increasingly autocratic fashion, winning five further elections of dubious legality. Amnesty International and other human rights groups accused his government of imprisoning and torturing its opponents, and he managed to survive three unsuccessful coups and an assassination attempt.

Forced by increasing protests to democratise the political system, Gayoom finally allowed honest elections in 2008, and was defeated by opposition leader Mohamed Nasheed, who had been imprisoned more than twenty times for his struggles against Gayoom. “In politics in this country,” Nasheed had told the British magazine the Economist in 2006, “you’re either in government or in jail.”

But Nasheed was forced out in February of 2012 after a mutiny by police and the military. He said his resignation had been forced on him at gunpoint. The vice-president, Mohammed Waheed Hassan, widely seen as a puppet of Gayoom’s, was sworn in as his replacement.

Nasheed was later arrested on a charge of illegally arresting a judge, a charge he dismissed as politically motivated. This past February he briefly took refuge in the Indian High Commission in the capital, Malé. Nasheed maintains that the charges against him are intended to keep him from trying to reclaim the presidency in elections set for September. He will be running against Waheed Hassan.

Islam is the state religion and government regulations must conform to Sunni Islamic law. Adherence to Islam is legally required of citizens following a revision of the constitution in 2008.

Religious parties had protested against policies advocated by Nasheed that they contended were anti-Islamic. On the day Nasheed resigned, a group of men swarmed into the National Museum in Malé, and destroyed about 30 Buddhist statues dating back to the sixth century.

The development of the tourist industry has fueled economic growth in the Maldives. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita in terms of purchasing power parity was $8,700 in 2012.  However, many conservative Muslims frown upon the Europeans who come as tourists. As it is, most tourists are taken straight to a few uninhabited islands set aside for them by seaplane or speedboat, insulated from the populated Maldives, where alcohol is outlawed and skimpy beachwear frowned upon.

The current coalition government, led by Mohammed Waheed Hassan, which includes the Islamic Adhaalath (Justice) Party, could have a dramatic impact on the future of tourism in the archipelago. Growing Islamisation could lead to the banning of spas, same-sex beaches and alcohol from holiday resorts in the Maldives.

Nasheed has accused the current government of reversing “hard won freedoms” and awarding “Islamic extremists” with cabinet positions. (The Adhaalath Party dominates the Ministry of Islamic Affairs.)

The 2004, Indian Ocean tsunami caused severe damage to many of the country’s low lying islands. None of them measures more than 1.8 metres above sea level, making the country vulnerable to a rise in sea levels associated with global warming. There is a fear that as sea levels rise, island countries such as the Maldives, will simply disappear.

A documentary about Nasheed’s efforts to halt climate change, “The Island President,” was released in 2012, to worldwide distribution (including a showing at City Cinema in Charlottetown). He has also addressed the issue at venues in Europe and North America. It probably won’t help get him re-elected, though.

Mandela Had Help Fighting Apartheid

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Nelson Mandela, now almost 95 years old and in perilous health, is truly one of the great men of our time. He has been a source of inspiration to people around the world.

Mandela had joined the African National Congress (ANC), already 32 years in existence, in 1944 and would eventually become its leader. He was imprisoned by the South African apartheid regime for 27 years for leading the struggle against white minority rule. Released in 1990, four years later he became the first black president of South Africa.

Less well-known is the part played by some Jewish South Africans, many of them Communists, in the anti-apartheid movement. Among the white population, Jews were disproportionately involved in the struggle, many times greater than one would expect for a community that never formed much more than three per cent of the white population.

Mandela acknowledged this in his 1994 autobiography Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, writing that in his experience, he had "found Jews to be more broad-minded than most whites on issues of race and politics, perhaps because they themselves have historically been victims of prejudice."

The most prominent Jewish member in the ANC was Joe Slovo, who rose to occupy key positions within both the Communist Party and within the ANC's armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), founded in 1961. He was the first white to be elected to the national executive of the ANC.

After the transition to democracy in 1994, he served as minister of housing under President Mandela. His wife Ruth First, murdered while in exile in 1982, was also an active member of the resistance to the South African regime.

"When future generations look back on the 1994 breakthrough," said Nelson Mandela, speaking at Slovo's funeral in 1995, "they will be justified in saying: Uncle Joe was central in making it happen."

Two other opponents of apartheid were Arthur Goldreich and Harold Wolpe. After the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, in which 69 Black South Africans were killed, Goldreich, who had fought in Israel's War of Independence in 1948, and Wolpe, a lawyer, bought Liliesleaf Farm, near Johannesburg, in 1961.

It became an operations centre for Umkhonto we Sizwe. Goldreich passed on to Mandela and others the military expertise he had gained more than a decade earlier in Israel. As Mandela later recalled, "He was knowledgeable about guerrilla warfare and helped fill in many gaps in my understanding."

On July 11, 1963, security police raided the farm and captured 19 members of the underground, charging them with sabotage. All of the white activists arrested in the raid or shortly thereafter were Jews with Communist affiliations. Of these, only Lionel Bernstein and Denis Goldberg actually stood trial in the end.

In October 1963 Nelson Mandela joined Bernstein, Goldberg and seven others accused of sabotage in what became known as the Rivonia Trial, which stirred anti-Semitic responses. Criminal Investigation Chief R. J. van den Bergh made reference to the raid in a speech in which he stated that foes of apartheid might be "instruments of Jews."

On June 11, 1964 Nelson Mandela and seven others, including Goldberg, were convicted and the next day they were sentenced to life imprisonment. Goldberg was sent to Pretoria Prison because he was white while the others went to Robben Island. Bernstein was acquitted for lack of evidence.

Also radicalized by the Sharpeville massacre was Ronnie Kasrils, who was a founding member of Umkhonto we Sizwe and was appointed its Chief of Intelligence in 1983. He held various cabinet positions in the post-apartheid governments of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki between 1994 and 2008.

During the mid-1960s, some 30 white anti-apartheid activists served prison sentences ranging from three years to life on account of their underground political activities. Twelve of these were Jewish.

Yes, there were those in the Jewish community who condoned the system of racial segregation, or looked the other way, though few voted for the Afrikaner-based National Party, the architect of apartheid, which took power after 1948.

Jews had to tread warily in a country governed by people who looked askance at them. The governing party was home to many anti-Semites who had admired Hitler and the Nazis during World War II.

Still, the best-known leaders of the opposition in the South African parliament were Jewish, including Harry Schwarz, who had been a defence counsel at the Rivonia trial, and Helen Suzman, who from 1961 to 1974 was the sole elected representative of the Progressive Party.

She was regularly jeered in the House of Assembly with taunts such as "Go back to Israel." Schwartz became South Africa's ambassador to the United States when apartheid was dismantled.

Within the white population of South Africa, none had a record as good as that of the Jewish community.

A Tropical Island State with a Troubled Political System: the Comoros

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

As most Journal Pioneer readers know, the academics affiliated with the University of Prince Edward Island’s Institute of Island Studies engage in research on island states around the world.

The findings of many scholars who study sovereign islands have demonstrated that island countries have a higher percentage of democratic political systems than other countries around the world. (I published an article on “Small Island Nations and Democratic Values” in the journal World Development in February 2004.)

This is especially gratifying, as most of these nations are located in the so-called Third World – where so many countries are victims of civil wars and dictatorships.

There are, though, exceptions, including two island chains in the Indian Ocean, the Comoros and the Maldives, one off Africa, the other south of India. I’ll deal with them in two instalments.

First, there’s the Union of the Comoros, an archipelago of 1,862 square kilometres located northeast of mainland Mozambique and northwest of the world’s fourth largest island, Madagascar.

Its 773,000 people live mainly on three islands, Grande Comore, Anjouan, and Moheli. A fourth Comoro island, Mayotte, with 194,000 people, refused to join the new country at independence from France in 1975, and is now a French overseas department.

The islands’ inhabitants are descended from Arab traders, Malay immigrants and African peoples and speak Arabic, French, and Comoran (a blend of Swahili and Arabic). Most are Muslim.

The islands’ chief exports -- vanilla, cloves and perfume essence -- are prone to the uncertainty of price fluctuations, so the country is heavily reliant on foreign aid and remittances from Comorans living abroad. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita in terms of purchasing power parity was only $1,300 in 2012. 

The Comoros become a French protectorate in 1886 and were granted autonomy in 1961 and sovereignty fourteen years later. The country has experienced more than twenty coups or attempted coups, beginning just weeks after independence, when the first president, Ahmed Abdallah, was deposed in a coup d’état, replaced by Prince Said Mohammed Jaffar.

His successor, Ali Soilih, tried to turn the country into a secular, socialist republic. But in 1978 Soilih was toppled and killed by mercenaries led by a French soldier of fortune, Bob Denard.

Denard was involved on attacks against the government of this small island group four times, the last being in 1995, when he removed Said Mohammed Djohar from office, before being himself arrested by French forces.

Mohamed Abdulkarim Taki, elected president in 1996, drafted a constitution which extended the authority of the president and established Islam as the basis of law. This increase in the powers of the central government, located in the capital Moroni, on Grande Comore, did not sit well with many islanders.

Secessionists on the islands of Anjouan and Moheli declared unilateral independence in 1997. After four years of violent conflict within and between the various islands, the Comoros gained some stability in 2001 under a new constitution granting the islands of Grande Comore, Anjouan, and Moheli greater autonomy within the federation. The new Union government retained control of security and financial matters.

Yet things went downhill again in 2006, when Anjouan politicians refused to accept the election of Ahmed Abdallah Mohamed Sambi as federal president and set up a rebel government. Two years later, Comoran and African Union troops recaptured the breakaway island.

The current president, Ikililou Dhoinine, from Moheli, won the presidency in 2010. The opposition said the poll was marred by massive fraud, alleging that ballot boxes were stuffed, voting papers stolen and opposition observers chased away from polling stations.

Clearly, the country is far from being a consolidated democracy. Political tensions and instability remain major issues.

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.