Back to the Future? Battling Jihadis in Africa

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Across a wide swath of North Africa and the Sahel countries, the United States has assumed an old European role: combating Islamist jihadis.

The situation has become worse since the overthrow of Libya’s brutal dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011; many of his former mercenaries, along with their large stockpile of weapons, are now active in this vast region, especially in Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger.

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), founded in Algeria in 1998, and the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), a splinter group formed in 2011, took control over a large part of Mali in early 2012; they captured Mali’s three largest northern cities, Kidal, Gao and Timbuktu, imposing draconian versions of sharia law. They also damaged or destroyed a number of historical sites on the grounds that they were idolatrous, particularly in Timbuktu.

In January 2013, the old colonial power, France, began operations against the Islamists, aided by African Union troops. The Islamists were pushed into the barren northern deserts but they still remain a danger.

The Central African Republic has also experienced horrific violence, after the mostly Muslim Séléka rebel group seized power in March 2013 in the majority Christian state. They were dislodged by 1,600 French soldiers along with a 6,000-man African Union force, but the violence has continued.

Former colonial power France has done most of the heavy lifting in these former colonies, but the United States has now also become a major presence. In Mali, for instance, American aircraft airlifted the French troops and their vehicles and provided intelligence.

In 2003, the Pan-Sahel Initiative was developed by the U.S. to enhance security in Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger. Two years later, Washington announced the creation of the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative/Partnership to prevent terrorists from establishing a foothold in Africa; it eventually included ten countries.

Its first project, Exercise Flintlock, involved U.S. Special Operations forces training 3,000 soldiers in seven Saharan and sub-Saharan countries. This year it involved soldiers from 18 countries.

In 2007, the Pentagon established its Africa Command (Africom) because, it asserted, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, al-Shabaab in Somalia, and Boko Haram in Nigeria were increasingly trying to coordinate and synchronize their operations on the African continent.

Today the Pentagon is spending nearly $70 million on training, intelligence-gathering equipment and other support to build a counter-terrorism battalion in Niger and a similar unit in nearby Mauritania. The U.S already launches unarmed surveillance drones from Niger to fly over Mali in support of French and United Nations troops.

Washington also operates a base in the small Red Sea country of Djibouti, adjoining Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somaliland. Camp Lemonnier, with about 4,000 troops, is used to launch counter-terrorism missions, including drone strikes, in Yemen and the Horn of Africa.

“My job is to look at Africa and see where the threat to the United States is,” Brigadier- General James B. Linder, who commands U.S. Special Operations forces in Africa, said in a recent interview with the New York Times. “We have a real global threat,” he continued. “The problems in Africa are going to land on our doorstep if we’re not careful.”

When the European powers divided Africa among themselves in the late 19th century, opposition typically came from Muslim peoples. In the Sudan, a fiercely fundamentalist state was established in 1885 when Muhammad Ahmad, who called himself the Mahdi (the Redeemer), defeated a British army at Khartoum. It lasted until 1898.

Further west, in what is now Chad, one of the Mahdi’s disciples, Rabin ibn Fadl Allah, led the resistance against the French. On his death his son followed in his footsteps and fought the French for 15 more years until he died in 1901.

In what are now parts of Mali and Burkina Faso, an Islamic theocratic state known as the Tukulor Empire flourished in the 19th century and successfully held off French military incursions until its defeat in 1893.

A more formidable enemy of the French was Samori Ture, the founder of the Wassoulou Empire, an Islamic state that resisted French colonial rule in West Africa from 1882 until 1898.

MUJAO claims to be a successor to Usman dan Fodio, a 19th-century reformer who waged jihad across West Africa to purify Islam and founded the Sokoto Caliphate in what is now northern Nigeria.

There is nothing new in the Sahel region when it comes to militant insurgencies against non-Muslims, as the European knew and the Americans are learning.

Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan Gains Upper Hand over Military

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Last week we saw something unprecedented in Turkey: In a landmark decision meant to curb the power of the country’s massive military establishment, a court sentenced two top former generals, army chief Kenan Evren and air force head Tahsin Sahinkaya, to life imprisonment for leading a 1980 coup that resulted in widespread torture, arrests and deaths.

Evren, who then served as president of Turkey from 1980 to 1989, claimed the coup had saved Turkey from anarchy after thousands were killed in fighting between militant left-wingers and right-wingers.

Is the Republic of Turkey, the resolutely secular state founded in 1923 by Kemal Ataturk on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, undergoing a fundamental transformation?

Ataturk reformed everything from dress codes to the alphabet during his 15-year reign as president. He even moved the country’s capital from Istanbul, the old imperial capital, to Ankara, in the heart of Anatolia.

And his legacy was guarded for decades afterwards by the Turkish Army. They carried out three coups between 1960 and 1980 and pushed an Islamist-led government led by Necmettin Erbakan from power in 1997. In 1998, his Welfare Party (RP) was banned.

But things have been changing. Since the 1990s, the revival of a Sunni-infused sense of nationalism is transforming the country.

The old republican verities have been challenged, especially by the current prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, himself a former member of the Welfare Party, who has been in office since 2003. He has now even taken on the generals, something earlier rulers did at their peril.

His popularity -- he has won three elections in a row -- has afforded him protection while he moved to break their power. His Justice and Development Party (AKP) holds a majority of the seats in parliament.

Erdogan, who was elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994, was himself arrested four years later, sentenced to 10 months in jail for “inciting religious hatred.”

He had publicly read an Islamic poem including the lines “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.” Because of his criminal record, he was barred from standing in elections or holding political office until 2001.

In another case, 230 army officers who were convicted in 2012 in the so-called “Sledgehammer” trial, accused of taking part in in an alleged plot to topple Erdogan, have been released.

Turkey’s Constitutional Court ruled that the officers’ rights had been violated in the handling of digital evidence and the refusal to hear testimony from two former top military commanders, as requested by defendants.

So the prime minister is not yet home free, though he himself recently began discrediting the convictions, because many of the prosecutors and investigators are followers of Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic preacher who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania. He was once Erdogan’s ally but now opposes him.

As well, could the country’s so-called “deep state” return? The term refers to a supposed clandestine network of military officers and their civilian allies who, for decades, suppressed and sometimes murdered anyone thought to pose a threat to the secular order.

Human rights groups accused them of thousands of political deaths and disappearances during the 1990s.

It’s no secret that Erdogan plans to run for president this coming August, when Turkey’s head of state will be directly elected by the people, for the first time ever.

Will there now be genuine civilian oversight when it comes to the armed forces? Has Erdogan actually managed to tame the Turkish military, or will he meet the fate of earlier civilian rulers unseated by coups? Right now, he does seem to have the upper hand.

So What if Iraq Splinters?

Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax, NS] Chronicle Herald

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been asking Washington to intervene in his war against Sunni insurgents. U.S. President Barack Obama should take a pass.

I was somewhat agnostic about the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. I wasn’t ready to believe Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, nor that he was a major danger to the Middle East.

It seemed to me he was more of a caged beast after the 1991 Gulf War.

Still, I thought, there’s no harm in removing such a tyrant, even if, unlike the fantasists who hoped this would bring democracy to Iraq, I was certain his successors would be little better.

All this proved to be true. America’s attempt at “nation building,” in a place where there is no “nation,” failed, of course. It couldn’t have been otherwise.

Now it looks as if no lessons have been learned in the past decade. I’m old enough to remember the endless propaganda during the Vietnam War about the necessity to “save” South Vietnam – from whom? From themselves, it turned out!

Those of us who felt the United States should simply get out were derided as “defeatists” and “simpletons” who “didn’t understand” the intricacies of international politics, and so on. More than 58,000 American (and millions of Vietnamese) deaths later, it turns out we were right.

The U.S. is again “saving” people who don’t want to be saved. For some reason, it has become paramount, for the “best and the brightest” in Washington, to try to hold together an artificial state created by the British after the First World War, incorporating three groups who clearly have little use for each other – and never have. (Read a history book to see if I’m right.)

Do they really plan to use air power against the Sunnis on behalf of a puppet Shi’ite regime in Baghdad that is beholden to Iran, the most dangerous state in the region? Is America about to become Tehran’s air force?

Let us assume the Sunnis in central Iraq regain control of that part of the country, while the Kurds hold the north, and a rump Shi’ite state emerges in the south. So what? There are already numerous states in the Middle East, why would a few more matter? After a few years, no one will remember this was once a so-called country.

Partition is the worst possible outcome – save for all the others! Or do you think Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis would have been better off in a united India, or Arabs and Jews in one-state Palestine? Would you like to put the Yugoslav and Soviet empires back together? Actually, all these peoples would be at each others’ throats.

Good fences may not always make good neighbours; sure, there are still problems between these now separate countries – but having no fences would be even worse.

Kurds Capitalize on Iraqi Chaos

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Iraq is imploding. The Sunni jihadis of the group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have moved to within sight of Baghdad, while the Shi’ite government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki becomes more dependent than ever on Iran.

More and more, even Americans – who suffered tens of thousands of soldiers killed and wounded during their occupation of the country between 2003 and 2011-- are staring the obvious in the face: Iraq is really composed of three mutually hostile groups: Arab Sunnis in the center, Arab Shi’ites in the south, and Kurds in the north.

With talk of partition, has the moment of historical opportunity finally arrived for the Kurds, the largest ethnic group in the world without a state of its own? Will one of the results of the current chaos be the formation of a sovereign entity on Kurdish territory?

After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the United States and Great Britain established a so called “no fly zone” above the 36th parallel in northern Iraq, allowing Kurds in that region to establish a de facto autonomous jurisdiction.

The defeat of Saddam Hussein by the United States in 2003 enabled the Kurds to strengthen their hold. Though divided into two major political groupings, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which were often at odds, the Kurds presented a united front in their efforts to gain control of northern Iraq.

Iraqi Kurdistan is now virtually independent, with its own flag, executive, legislature, and judiciary. Its capital is Erbil (sometimes spelled Arbil).

Last September, Iraqi Kurdistan held its fourth legislative election for the 111-seat Kurdish National Assembly, with the KDP winning 38 seats to the PUK’s 18. A new opposition group, Gorran (the Movement for Change), which split off from the PUK, took 24, while two Islamic parties won another 16.

However, since the parliamentary elections of 2005, the KDP and PUK have ruled the Kurdish region as a united government, though the KDP has had the upper hand. Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish Region and son of the famed rebel leader Mustafa Barzani, heads the KDP. The PUK’s leader is Iraq’s President Jalal Talabani, who has been ill and holds little power in that largely ceremonial position.

Taking advantage of the turmoil in Iraq, the Kurdish military, known as the Peshmerga, has now seized large tracts of Kurdish-populated territories that had remained disputed and outside its control, including Kirkuk, which the Kurds see as a future capital.

Capturing the city and its huge oil reserves, just outside the area controlled by the Kurdish regional government is a huge achievement.

In Mosul, Sunni insurgents have gained control of the area on the west bank of the Tigris River, the Kurds on the other side.

Will the Kurds be able to gain -- and retain -- cities such as Kirkuk and Mosul, surrounded by oil-rich areas that would enable a Kurdish state to become economically self-sufficient, indeed wealthy? In two decades of de facto autonomy in Iraq's north, the Kurds have proved they can run a civil state.

The Kurds have also benefitted from improved relations with Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Ergogan, a religious Sunni, is no friend of the Shi’ite regime in Baghdad.

So Ankara and Erbil have built strong economic and diplomatic relations; they have signed a 50-year energy deal and Kurdish oil is being exported via a pipeline that connects the autonomous region to the port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean. Turkey is now the KRG’s main business partner.

Last November Erdogan met with KRG President Barzani in the largely Kurdish-populated city of Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey. The city was adorned with Turkish and KRG flags.

Earlier this month, Huseyin Celik, a spokesman for Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), declared that the Kurds of Iraq have the right to decide the future of their land. “Turkey has been supporting the Kurdistan Region,” he said, and will continue to do so.

This is probably the best chance the Kurds have had in 80 years to form a sovereign state in at least a part of their historic patrimony. They are certainly laying the groundwork for it to come to pass.

Reminiscing About Israel, Then and Now

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

In 1972, while a graduate student at Brandeis University outside Boston, I spent the summer at the Mount Scopus (Har ha-Tsofim) campus of the Hebrew University, which had been an enclave within Jordanian east Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967 and was not reopened until after the Six-Day War. (When the Jordanians denied Israeli access to Mount Scopus, a new campus was built at Givat Ram in western Jerusalem; it was completed in 1958.)

I used to walk down the hill from the campus, through east Jerusalem and the Old City, into West Jerusalem, with its cafes and museums – sometimes even in the evening.

That same summer, I visited the West Bank, including Ramallah, now the capital of the Palestinian Authority. Along with graduate student friends, I travelled down to Sharm el-Shek, the resort at the southernmost tip of the Sinai Peninsula, then occupied by Israel (the town had been renamed Ofira). We slept on the beach at night. Could anyone imagine doing that now?

Israel had come into possession of all these territories in the 1967 Middle East War, and a feeling of elation enveloped the country. During the so-called War of Attrition between Israel and Egypt in the years immediately following the war, Israeli aircraft bombed targets deep within Egyptian territory.

Some of the aerial dogfights that ensued involved Russian pilots flying Egyptian planes. Defence minister Moshe Dayan boasted that Israel could even defeat Egypt’s then ally, the Soviet Union.

Prior to 1967, Israel had been a small country that, unlike today, wasn’t in the news day and night. Tel Aviv looked like a modest European city. (I was there just after the war.) The country had been established by European Jewish pioneers who founded kibbutzim and labour unions.

It had been governed, from independence in 1948 on, by the semi-socialist Labour Party, and secular Haifa was more important than Jerusalem. Most non-Orthodox diaspora Jews did not regard Israel as the very center of their religious or cultural identity.

Israel had not yet become the focus of a global attack by its enemies, many of whom today consider it the very embodiment of evil, a state that must be destroyed.

In some ways, 1967-1973 was a golden age for Israel, but the dangerous sense of hubris set the stage for the catastrophe of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the ideological and political  retreats that would follow, and that now place it in grave danger.

Czech People Face Adversity Throughout History

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The Czechs may have the saddest history of any European people. At many times, they have been thwarted in their desire for freedom and independence.

The years 1415, 1620, 1938, and 1968, in particular, were disastrous.

The historic lands of Bohemia and Moravia in central Europe have been home to the Czech people since the Middle Ages and an independent Bohemian kingdom existed from the ninth century until 1306, when it became a component, but distinct, kingdom within the Holy Roman Empire.

A full century before Martin Luther inaugurated the Protestant Reformation, a Czech theologian, Jan Hus, was burned at the stake for heresy, setting off decades of warfare. Following his execution in 1415, the Hussite movement continued to advance the Czech cause.

The Protestant Reformation gained support in the 16th century; soon some 90 per cent of the Czech population had become Protestant. But in 1620, two years after the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War between Catholics and Protestants throughout Europe, the Protestant Czech landowners were defeated by the Imperial Habsburg armies at the Battle of the White Mountain, and Bohemia lost its autonomy.

Now part of the Habsburg Empire, the country for the next three centuries would be ruled from Vienna. Czechs were forced to convert to Catholicism or leave Bohemia and Moravia. Many of the cities became culturally and ethnically German.

Perhaps this is why the Czechs, unlike their Catholic Slavic neighbours in Poland and Slovakia, have worn their religion lightly and have not fused it with their national identity.

Following the defeat of Germany and Austria-Hungary in the First World War, a new state, Czechoslovakia, a union of the Czech and Slovak peoples, emerged. However, it also contained the Sudetenland, with its three million Germans, almost one-quarter of the country’s population, and this would lead to disaster two decades later.

At the infamous Munich meetings held in September 1938 between Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and Edouard Daladier of France, the Sudetenland was handed over to Nazi Germany, leaving Czechoslovakia virtually defenceless.

Hungary and Poland also bit off small chunks of the country. (My father was part of the Polish army that occupied the Zaolzie region of Cieszyn Silesia.)

In March 1939 Hitler completed the destruction of the country. Slovakia became a separate puppet state, while the Czech lands were incorporated into Nazi Germany, as the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.”

The Nazi occupation lasted for most of the war; Prague was not freed until May 8, 1945.After the German defeat the Czechoslovak state was reconstituted and its German inhabitants, now considered “fifth columnists,” were expelled. Three years later, though, the country fell under Soviet domination.

In the 1960s the tight grip of the Communist apparatchiks began to loosen. In January 1968 a reformer, Alexander Dubcek, became the country’s leader. A program adopted in April 1968 set guidelines for a modern, humanistic socialist democracy that would guarantee freedom of religion, press, assembly, and speech, as well as abundant consumer goods. It would be “socialism with a human face.”

But in August 1968 Warsaw Pact troops snuffed out Dubcek’s attempt to liberalize Marxist-Leninist doctrine. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev claimed that the country was falling into the hands of “western imperialists” and following Dubcek’s overthrow the Soviets installed a regime loyal to Moscow.

Those who could not be intimidated into collaborating were punished or marginalized. When I visited Czechoslovakia in July 1977, I was struck by the contrast between the beauty of the country, Prague in particular, and the despondency and sadness of its inhabitants. The heavy hand of Communist repression was evident everywhere – this was only nine years following the dashed hopes of the “Prague spring.”

However, dissidents regrouped, led by human rights activists and intellectuals such as Vaclav Havel; they founded the group known as Charter 77, which in the 1980s became the Civic Forum, an umbrella group championing bureaucratic reform and civil liberties.

By the late 1980s Communism was a discredited ideology throughout eastern Europe. In Czechoslovakia, the “velvet revolution” of November-December1989 – a very secular affair – would be followed by the “velvet divorce” of January 1993, which split the country into Czech and Slovak states. Following the collapse of the Communist regime, Havel had become president of the country. 

Today’s Czech Republic is a homogenous, liberal multi-party parliamentary democracy, and a member of both the European Union and NATO. The current president is Milos Zeman, of the Party of Civic Rights. The prime minister, Bohuslav Sobotka of the Czech Social Democratic Party, heads a three-party coalition government. The Czechs, it seems, have finally overcome their sad history.

Le Pen, the National Front, and France

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer 

Who is Jean-Marie Le Pen? This is no idle question, as he is the founder of a French political party that has been making significant gains in recent years and, as such, he remains an important figure in his country.

Capitalizing on anti-Muslim sentiment and anger about the state of the French economy, the party he created, the National Front (NF), came first in French balloting for the European parliament elections held this past May, with a full 25 per cent of the vote.

Born in 1928, Le Pen led the NF from its foundation in 1972 until 2011. His longevity in politics and his five attempts to become president of France have made him a fixture on the political right.

Le Pen’s political career began in Paris in 1956, when he was elected to the National Assembly as a member of Pierre Poujade’s populist party, the Union de Defense Commercants et Artisans. Le Pen was a deputy until 1962, and again (for the NF) from 1986 to 1988.

In 1984, Le Pen won a seat in the European Parliament and has been continuously re-elected since then, though in 2000 he was banned from public office and stripped of his seat for one year, following a 1998 conviction for assaulting a Socialist politician the year before.

In the 2002 presidential election, he obtained 16.86 per cent of the votes in the first round, good for second place, before losing badly to incumbent Jacques Chirac in the run-off. He finished fourth in the 2007 election. His daughter Marine Le Pen, who has headed the party since 2011, finished third in the 2012 presidential election, with 17.9 per cent of the vote.

Ever since the French Revolution, France has been divided by two ideological strands: the first is the Jacobin republicanism of liberty, equality, fraternity, the second the organic Catholic nationalism and monarchism that morphed into fascism and racism in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

The former championed secularism, universalism and anti-clericalism. Its advocates prevailed in the famous Dreyfus case at the turn of the 20th century, when a Jewish army officer who had been falsely imprisoned as a German spy by anti-Semitic elements in the general staff was exonerated. The issue divided France from the affair’s inception in 1894 until its resolution in 1906.

The right-wing tradition culminated in the Nazi collaborationist Vichy government in the Second World War under Marshal Philippe Pétain, when some 90,000 Jews were sent to their deaths.

The decades preceding the 1940 defeat of republicanism saw the rise of fascist movements and ideologues.In January1934, fascist groups in Paris rioted trying to overthrow the Third Republic.

Writers such as Edouard Drumont, Maurice Barrès, Drieu La Rochelle, and Charles Maurras presented a resurgent clericalism and a heightened xenophobia as the solution to France’s malaise, in opposition to the Enlightenment rationality of the left.

The Vichyites, defeated in the Second World War, lost their ideological and political power, and their ideas became anathema to most. Upon his conviction in 1945 for “complicity with the enemy” during the German occupation, Maurras exclaimed: “It’s Dreyfus’s revenge!”

But has the National Front emerged out of this tarnished tradition? Le Pen himself certainly has. Already in the 1960s, he called for the rehabilitation of collaborationists, asking “Was General de Gaulle more brave than Marshal Pétain? It was much easier to resist in London than to resist in France.”

Le Pen was fined by a French court in 1996 for saying that the gas chambers used to kill Jews in the Holocaust were “merely a detail in the history of the Second World War.” Three years later a German court fined him for a similar comment judged to have minimised the Holocaust.

In 2004 France’s highest court convicted him of inciting racial hatred for telling a newspaper in 2003 that Muslims would one day run France and strike fear into the hearts of the non-Muslim population.

Marine Le Pen has modified the party’s positions while remaining opposed to the European Union. She also favours a “radical change of politics” in order to drastically reduce the influx of illegal immigrants towards France, as well as a moratorium on legal immigration.

The NF leader maintains that the party resolutely “condemns any form of anti-Semitism in the strongest terms.” She has rebuked her father for recent remarks many construed as anti-Semitic. Indeed, she even hopes the NF gains some Jewish support, since the main danger to the French Jewish community now comes from Islamist radicals.

The Revolt in China's Uighur Autonomous Region

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in the far west of the People’s Republic of China is more than 1.6 million square kilometres in area.

An arid region that historically was called East Turkestan, it is the homeland of the Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim people. In recent decades, though, Han Chinese moved in and took the better jobs and housing.

Today it is estimated that Uighurs make up only about 45 per cent of its 22 million people. Most of Xinjiang's Uighurs live in the southwestern portion of the region, in the Tarim Basin.

The influx of Chinese settlers has sparked resentment and calls for an independent Uighur state. But the Uighur struggle to assert a right to national self-determination is a difficult one. Unlike most formerly colonized peoples around the world, the Uighurs have never benefited from the fruits of de-colonization, since they were absorbed by a non-western neighbouring state, China.

Beijing refuses to acknowledge that it acts as a colonial power in the region; after all, it considers itself as having also been historically a victim of imperialism.

A Uighur Empire stretched from the Caspian Sea to Manchuria from 745 to 840 but it fragmented into smaller kingdoms and eventually came under Mongol control. Originally Buddhists, the Uighurs were converted to Islam by the beginning of the 16th century.

Xinjiang was conquered by the Qing (Manchu) dynasty in the mid-18th century and the Uighurs became subjects of the Chinese emperors.

Since then, there have been periodic uprisings against Chinese domination. In 1933 and 1944, the Uighurs temporarily gained their independence from Nationalist China, backed by the Soviet Union. The second East Turkistan Republic lasted from 1944 to 1949.

In 1949, the Chinese Communists took over the territory and declared it a Chinese province. In October 1955, Xinjiang was classified as an autonomous region.

There are ideological divisions among the Uighur nationalists. Some Uighurs call for an Islamic state, while others support a more ethnically independent and self-governing East Turkestan.

In July 2009, ethnic tension between the Han Chinese and Uighurs led to severe riots in the capital city of Urumqi. According to Chinese state media, almost 200 people were killed, and more than 800 injured.

There has been an upsurge in violence since then. In June 2012, six ethnic Uighur men tried to hijack an aircraft heading to Urumqi, but failed after passengers and crew resisted and restrained the hijackers. A year later, 27 people were killed in disturbances in the township of Lukqun; 17 of them were killed by rioters, while the other ten were alleged assailants who were shot dead by police.

At least 29 people were killed in early March in an attack at a railway station in the Chinese city of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. It was an organised, premeditated assault by knife-wielding Uighur assailants, according to the Chinese Xinhua news agency.

In late May, attackers in two cars ploughed through shoppers while setting off explosives at a busy street market in Urumqi, killing 39 people. The Xinjiang regional government, which is Chinese-controlled, said in a statement that it was “a serious violent terrorist incident of a particularly vile nature.”

In response, China’s president Xi Jinping has called for moving more Uighurs to inland areas of China in order “to enhance mutual understanding among different ethnic groups and boost ties between them.”

All told, at least 180 people have been killed in attacks across China over the past year. But the anti-colonial goals that motivate Uighur nationalists to work to construct a modern Uighur nation remain unfulfilled. The plight of the Uighurs should command more attention.

Pope Francis in the Middle East

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Pope Francis I visited Jordan, the Palestinian West Bank, and Israel in May. The three-day pilgrimage was his second trip outside Rome since becoming head of the Roman Catholic Church.

In Bethlehem, Francis called for “a stable peace based on justice, on the recognition of the rights of every individual, and on mutual security,” and for intensified efforts for the creation of two states, Palestinian and Israeli, before moving on to Israel.

He also invited Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas, the Israeli and Palestinian presidents, to pay a symbolic visit to the Vatican to pray for peace.

To say that the Church historically had a contentious relationship with the Jewish people is an understatement.

For some two millennia, the Church considered itself the successor to the Biblical covenant between the Israelites and God and, as the “new Israel,” the proper heir to the “promised land.”

The Jewish people were doomed to a diasporic existence; their very lives would be circumscribed and they would remain at the mercy of their Christian neighbors.

Clearly, for the Church, the rise of Jewish nationalism in the 19th century, with its program of reconstituting a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, was theological anathema.

But the Zionist movement sought allies wherever it could find them, and the founder of the World Zionist Organization, Theodor Herzl, even made entreaties to the Vatican. In 1904, he asked Pope Pius X for help in his efforts to establish a modern Jewish state in the historic homeland of the Jewish nation. Pius rejected the request.

At the time of the 1947 UN decision to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, the Vatican expressed its support for Jerusalem to become a “corpus separatum” under an international regime. And when Pope Paul VI visited Israel 50 years ago he never once uttered the name of the Jewish state, preferring to call it the Holy Land. He avoided meeting with Israeli statesmen.

But things would begin to improve. “Nostra Aetate,” the “Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions,” was passed by the Second Vatican Council in 1965. The document absolved the Jewish people as a whole of deicide: “The Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God,” it asserted.

This theological pivot led to a sea change in Church relations with the Jewish state, especially under John Paul II, the Polish pope. In 1985 the State of Israel was for the first time mentioned by name in a public Vatican document, and the Holy See established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1993.

By 2000 John Paul had prayed at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism, and visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. He met with the president, the prime minister and the chief rabbis of Israel. In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI followed the same itinerary.

In February 2013, a papal conclave elected the Argentinian Jesuit Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires, as Benedict’s successor.

As archbishop, the future pope had cultivated closer relations with Argentina’s large Jewish community. He attended services at a synagogue in 2007 and told the congregation that he was there to examine his heart “like a pilgrim, together with you, my elder brothers.”

In 2012 he hosted a Kristallnacht memorial event at the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral, commemorating the Nazi destruction of Jewish lives and property in Germany in November 1938.

As Francis I, the pope has followed in the footsteps of his two predecessors. Addressing a delegation in Rome in June 2013, Pope Francis described “Nostra Aetate” as a “key point of reference” for Catholic relations with the Jewish people.

“A Christian cannot be anti-Semitic,” he declared, due to “our common roots” with the Jewish people. And he has praised the Jews for remaining faithful to God “despite the awful trials of these last centuries.”

In Jerusalem, Pope Francis laid a wreath on the grave of Theodor Herzl. The symbolism was evident to all.

Populist Anti-EU Parties Make Gains in Elections for European Parliament

Henry Srebrnik. [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

While much of the world’s eyes were on Ukraine, and wondering about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions, populist parties often tinged with xenophobic, racist and anti-Semitic beliefs, made gains in May’s elections to the European Parliament, the legislative body for the 28-member European Union.

Parties strongly opposed to the European Union performed well in several countries, including France, Denmark, Greece, and Britain.

Much of this was fuelled by opposition to Muslim immigration into the continent, and the feeling that EU apparatchiks in Brussels, rather than national parliaments, were increasingly in control of policies. Mass unemployment and economic austerity added to the discontent.

The 751- member European Parliament, which meets in Brussels as well as Strasbourg, seems remote from most voters, who still define themselves first and foremost as members of their respective nations rather than as abstract “Europeans.” Yet its principal concern, according to Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, a London-based research group, “has been to get more power for itself and more money for the European Union.”

This does not go over well in hard economic times, and protest parties are making the most of the situation.

Most startling was the French result, where the far-right National Front (NF) won about 26 per cent of the vote, edging out the two major parties, President François Holland’s governing Socialists and the Union for a Popular Movement. The NF won 25 of the 74 seats allocated to France in the European Parliament.

The NF quadrupled its vote from the six per cent they won at the last European parliamentary elections in 2009. Its support has been driven by growing discontent with historically high jobless claims and an economy that has barely grown in two years.

Marine Le Pen, the NF’s leader, told supporters that “The people have spoken loud and clear.” They no longer want to be led “by those outside our borders, by EU commissioners and technocrats who are unelected. They want to be protected from globalization and take back the reins of their destiny.”

In Britain, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) won 28 per cent of the vote, ahead of both the Conservatives of Prime Minister David Cameron and the main opposition Labour Party. This almost doubled the 16.5 per cent the UKIP secured in 2009 and brought it 24 of the country’s 73 seats.

Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader, asserted that this would help those in Britain and elsewhere who want to slash the European Union’s powers and return decision-making to individual states.

“As members of this union we cannot run our own country and crucially, we cannot control our own borders,” said Farage. “I don't just want Britain to leave the European Union,” he added. “I want Europe to leave the European Union.”

The far-right Danish People’s Party became Denmark’s biggest party with 27 per cent of the vote and doubled its number of seats in the European parliament from two to four of Denmark’s 13 member delegation. It had campaigned to reclaim border controls and curb benefits to other EU citizens living in Denmark.

The anti-euro Alternative for Germany party won its first seats in any election in that country with seven per cent of the German vote, good for seven of Germany’s 94 seats. “It’s springtime in Germany,” leader Bernd Lucke told chanting supporters in Berlin. “Some flowers are blooming and others are wilting.”

In Greece, best by economic troubles and an unemployment rate of 27 per cent, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn picked up votes, while the far left made even greater gains. Golden Dawn will enter the European Parliament for the first time after winning nine per cent of the vote and three of 21 seats, a third place finish.

 “I congratulate you for managing to resist the government’s terrorism and for not believing their lies,” Nikos Michaloliakos, the party leader, declared. “We are the only political power that actually stands up against our state being run by foreign powers.

In Hungary, the far-right Jobbik, also had some cause to celebrate. While it won 14.7 per cent of the vote, the same as in 2009, with its three of Hungary’s 21 seats it beat out the Socialists to become the country’s largest opposition party at the EU level.

 “I have important news for you: today Jobbik is the second largest party in Hungary,” Gabor Vona, the Jobbik leader told cheering supporters. “We all want a common Europe, but a different one to what we have at the moment.”

Vichy France is a Cautionary Tale

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

We are coming up to the 70th anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1944, when the liberation of France began. But four years earlier, a defeated France had effectively become a fascist state -- and it’s amazing how quick was the transformation.

Within a few weeks of the country’s invasion by Nazi Germany on May 10, 1940, the French government surrendered and signed an armistice with Adolf Hitler on June 22. (Remember, France was not conquered, the way Belgium or Poland were, so had no government-in-exile that had escaped the country.) 

The armistice gave Germany control over the north and west of the country, including Paris and all of the Atlantic coastline, but left the rest, around two-fifths of France's prewar territory, unoccupied.

And almost immediately, the country was transformed into an authoritarian state. On July 10, 1940, the French National Assembly, summoned to ratify the armistice, granted the hero of France’s success in the First World War, 84-year-old Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, authority to promulgate a new constitution. The vote, 569 in favour, 80 against, 18 abstentions, wasn’t even close. The Third Republic ceased to exist.

Pétain was able, the very next day, to assume in his own name full legislative and executive powers in the new political order. The République Francais was replaced by l'État Francais , the republican slogan “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” (“Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood”) by “Travail, Famille, Patrie” (“Work, Family, Fatherland”). The French tricolour flag now included in the middle Pétain’s personal emblem, a stylised francisque, an axe said to have been used in the early Middle Ages by the Franks.

The national holiday, Bastille Day, became a day of mourning, and the stirring French national anthem, the “Marseillaise,” gave way to a song of praise, “Maréchal, Nous Voila !” (“Marshal, Here we Are!”) for Pétain. He was now the “Chef de l'État Francais,” his portraits soon everywhere.

The Vichy government declared neutrality in the war between Germany and Great Britain, but was committed by the armistice provisions to cooperation with Germany. The aged Pétain now had become a Nazi collaborator – even though he had briefly served as prime minister in the last democratic government. There is an infamous photo of him shaking hands with Hitler on Oct. 24, 1940, in the town of Montoire-sur-le-Loir.

The Vichy prime minister and head of day-to-day governance between April 18, 1942 and August 20, 1944, Pierre Laval, had twice served as a prime minister in the Third Republic in the 1930s.

Vichy France, as the country became known – because the collaborationist regime was located in the town of Vichy, in the southern “unoccupied zone” – remained, even in the eyes of the Allies fighting Germany, the sovereign and legitimate government of France, technically ruler over the entire country.

Vichy continued to be recognized as such by, among others, Canada and the United States, for at least two more years.

French colonial officials in the country’s overseas empire also at first were loyal to Vichy – as everyone who has seen the 1942 movie “Casablanca” knows. In one of the film’s very first scenes, the wall of a building is painted with a large picture of Marshal Pétain and a quote attributed to him.

In the first years after the 1940 defeat, much of the war-weary French population fell in behind Pétain. General Charles de Gaulle, who had fled to England after the fall of France, faced a lonely uphill battle at first, as he formed the Free French forces abroad and encouraged the anti-Nazi resistance inside France. The French flag with the Cross of Lorraine in the centre was the emblem of the Free French.

Pétain blamed the Third Republic and its endemic corruption for the French defeat. He rejected its secular and liberal traditions in favour of an authoritarian, paternalist, Catholic society. Vichy even produced a legion of volunteers to fight against Soviet Russia.

But Vichy’s so-called “Révolution Nationale” (“National Revolution”) included the passage of numerous anti-Semitic laws. When France fell, there were approximately 350,000 Jews in the country. As early as October 1940, without any request from the Germans, the Vichy government passed anti-Jewish measures.

In 1941 the regime mounted a major anti-Semitic exhibition, “le Juif et la France” (“The Jew and France”), in Paris, depicting the Jews as a criminal race responsible for all of France’s problems. It is estimated that around 200,000 people visited the exhibition.

French Jews were denaturalized, and in many cases rounded up by French (not German) police and sent to death camps. According to historian Robert Paxton, some 90.000 Jews living in France were killed in the Holocaust.

In 1995 President Jacques Chirac publicly recognized France's responsibility for deporting thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps during the German occupation. His statement put an end to decades of equivocation by successive French Governments about France’s wartime role.

The French Vichy regime remains a cautionary tale, as it demonstrates how quickly a democratic political order can be reversed.

The Caribbean is a Sea of Islands

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The Caribbean Sea comprises more than 700 major islands. While most of the larger ones, like Cuba, Jamaica and Hispaniola (divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic) are independent, many of the smaller ones remain non-sovereign entities.

Integral parts of France as départements d’outre-mer (overseas departments) with full rights of citizenship, the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique are represented in the French parliament and, as part of the European Union (EU), use the euro as their currency.

They are relatively large: Guadeloupe has an area of 1,628 square kilometres and a population of 405,739 inhabitants, while Martinique is 1,128 square kilometres in size, with a population of 386,486.
 
The population of Guadeloupe is mainly of African or mixed descent, speaking French and Antillean Creole. Martinique’s demographics are similar.

France also governs Saint-Barthélemy and part of Saint-Martin; they are known as collectivités d’outre-mer (overseas collectivities) and are also part of metropolitan France and the EU.

The other half of Saint-Martin, known as Sint Maarten, is part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and thetefore also in the EU. The population of the entire island is 77,741, with 40,917 living on the Dutch side, and 37,429 on the French side.

Other Dutch jurisdictions in the kingdom (and in the EU) are Aruba and Curacao, which are officially called autonomous countries and have a status equal to that of the European Netherlands itself; and Bonaire, Saba, and Sint Eustatius, known collectively as the Caribbean Netherlands, which are part of the Netherlands proper and governed as ordinary municipalities of the metropolitan country.

The collective population of Aruba and Curacao numbers 249,318; the three smaller island municipalise have 16,912 inhabitants. Dutch is an official language throughout the Dutch islands, but Papiamento, a creole language with African, Portuguese, and Spanish roots, is also recognized on Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao.

None of the non-sovereign British islands in the Caribbean are formal parts of the United Kingdom, though their residents are British citizens. Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Montserrat, and the Turks and Caicos Islands are all British Overseas Territories. As such they are members of the Commonwealth of Nations via the United Kingdom, rather than in their own right.

While defence and foreign affairs are handled by Great Britain, they otherwise have considerably autonomy, including their own governments, currencies, and economic structures. The constitutions of the British Virgin Islands and Montserrat afford greater autonomy than those of Anguilla, the Cayman Islands, and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

This has enabled Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, and the Turks and Caicos Islands, with a combined population of some 130,000 residents, mostly of African heritage, to become tax havens and offshore financial centres. The Cayman Islands have more registered businesses than people.

An exception to this is Montserrat, which has been devastated by volcanic eruptions in recent years; its population declined from 13,000 in 1994 to 5,879 today. Much of the island is now uninhabitable and its economy has yet to recover.

The United States Virgin Islands of Saint Croix, Saint John and Saint Thomas have a combined population of 106,405, mostly people of African descent. As an “unincorporated United States territory,” its residents are American citizens, but cannot vote in presidential elections. The islands are self-governing, with an elected territorial governor and legislature.

In the early 1980s, there was some support for sovereignty in both Montserrat and the Turks and Caicos Islands, while Curacao has a pro-independence party. Guadeloupe saw the most militant pro-independence action with violence occurring periodically in the 1970s and early 1980s, leading to a further devolution of powers to it and Martinique from the French government, including a “cultural right to difference.”

The vast majority of the citizens of all these small islands appear to be satisfied with their non-sovereign status. They prefer the benign relationship with their metropole (which includes monetary transfers) to the alternative of full independence, a situation in which they would be more vulnerable, and responsible for their own economic self-sufficiency and military security.

The Ukrainian Crisis as Seen from Moscow

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The standard “CNN version” of the crisis in Ukraine goes as follows: In order to justify Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has concocted a narrative of resentment against America and NATO, seen as a purely defensive alliance and a force for peace and stability.

In actual fact, even before the present crisis, NATO has acted as a spearhead of American-West European attempts to bring most of the former eastern bloc –including parts of the old Soviet Union – under its suzerainty.

NATO now includes not just former Warsaw Pact countries but even the three Baltic states, former component republics of the Soviet Union. And American hawks like Senator John McCain, who never saw a crisis that American power might not take advantage of, has at times suggested that Ukraine, Moldova, and even Georgia, deep in the Caucasus, should be allowed into this “North Atlantic” alliance.

During the Balkan wars of the 1990s, this supposedly defensive alliance forced competing ethnic nationalists in Bosnia-Herzegovina to continue to co-exist in a shotgun marriage for reasons bordering on ideological fantasy. And it then, under false pretences, wrested Kosovo away from Serbia and handed it over to the Kosovo Liberation Army.

Jack F. Matlock, the American ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991, has stated that the effect of NATO actions in the 1990s was devastating, and turned Russian public opinion against the United States.

When it is in America’s interest, it has no trouble partitioning countries or interfering in their internal affairs – ask the Grenadans, Panamanians, and Nicaraguans, among others.

Yet for some reason, when Russia, already pushed back to pre-19th century borders, feels threatened by western moves, it is accused of aggression.

Day after day, we hear about threatening moves by Moscow – but in actual fact, most of the violence in Ukraine has been initiated by Ukrainian nationalists from the western part of the country.

A fire in Odessa on May 2 left at least 46 people dead after radicals joined by Right Sector militia blocked anti-government protesters in a trade union building and set it alight. Ethnic Russian secessionists also fought Ukrainian forces in Mariupol a week later, a battle that left more than 20 dead.

Putin is within his rights to invoke the emerging human rights norm known as “R2P” (responsibility to protect), which maintains that if a state fails to protect its nationals from severe human rights abuses, including ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, the international community assumes the responsibility of protection.

The nationalists seized power in an illegitimate coup in late February, and wish to make of the country a “pure” Ukrainian state. They don’t want any talk of decentralization or federalism, which Putin in fact has suggested.

Putin also discouraged ethnic Russians in cities like Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine from holding a referendum on May 11 on self-rule. (They went ahead anyhow, voting strongly in favour.)

The leading candidates in the Ukrainian presidential election scheduled for May 25 are all ethnic Ukrainians who support the aims of the coup leaders and are opposed to any forms of autonomy for Russian-inhabited regions.

Yet as far as CNN and the State Department are concerned, Putin remains behind the unrest!

Whereas the people who overthrew the Yanukovych regime were described in the press as “pro-democracy freedom fighters,” those ethnic Russians now wishing to protect their own interests are termed “militants” and “rebels.”

The only area that Russia has annexed is Crimea – rectifying a ridiculous decision made 60 years ago to transfer it to Ukraine, when internal borders in the USSR were largely meaningless anyhow. Crimea has a Russian majority and was Russian for centuries – including in Soviet times, when it was part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.

For Americans to suddenly become concerned about “territorial integrity,” when they wrested Kosovo away from Serbia, oversaw the partition of Sudan, and so forth, is rather rich, especially as it was clear the vast majority of Crimeans welcomed their return to Russia.

The view from Moscow is one very different from that of the American media, who seem to have forgotten, or don’t care, that Russia has been attacked by different countries over the centuries, and most recently lost 27 million lives in bearing the brunt of Hitler’s aggression in the Second World War.

This conflict with Russia is about geopolitics, not ideology. After all, NATO and the European Union now include countries like Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, and Romania, none of which have political systems in any way superior to Russia’s -- and neither will Ukraine, no matter who eventually controls it.

Who is a Russian?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

In English, we sometimes differentiate between people’s ethnicity and citizenship, especially when talking about “homeland” nation-states. For instance, we may refer to someone as an “ethnic Hungarian” in Romania, or an “ethnic Croat” who is a Serbian citizen.

And we’ve certainly heard a lot lately about “ethnic Russians” in Ukraine.

The names of such countries are synonymous with the historic majority nationalities that created them, and if other peoples live in them, they are distinct minority groups and usually identified as such.

Immigrant countries that are a melange of different groups are not ethnically-based, at least no longer, so there are no “ethnic Americans” or “ethnic Brazilians.”

Multinational states often have names that don’t specify any group’s ethnicity. “Soviet” and “Yugoslav” was a state identity; no actual peoples were Soviets or Yugoslavs.

The same holds true for many polyglot African countries. There are no “Nigerians” by ethnicity, only members of groups such as the Igbo or Yoruba.

Things get more complex when a multi-national state, with territorially concentrated peoples, is named after the dominant nation within it. We speak of “Russia,” but it is in reality the “Russian Federation,” and of its 143 million people, only 81 per cent are ethnic Russians.

The country’s political divisions include 22 ethnic republics, such as Chechnya, Ingushetia, or Tatarstan, where the indigenous ethnic nationality (known as the “titular nationality”) runs its own internal affairs in its own language.

These peoples are citizens of “Russia,” but are not “Russians.” And Russians acknowledge the distinction. The Russian language distinguishes between “ethnic Russian” (“russkiy”) and “citizen of Russia, regardless of nationality” (“rossiiskiy”).

Is Russia to be a nation of Russian citizens (“rossiiskaia natsiia”) or of ethnic Russians (“russkaia natsiia”) only? Because this remains unsettled, there is no consensus on whether Russia’s present-day borders should be accepted as given. Those who subscribe to an ethnically-based Russian state might seek to annex territories with large ethnic Russian populations, such as the northern part of Kazakhstan or eastern Ukraine; the Crimea has already been absorbed.

President Vladimir Putin has taken to calling much of eastern and southern Ukraine “New Russia,” a historical term referring to territories previously controlled by Muslim entities that were conquered and settled by ethnic Russians beginning in the 18th century.

At the same time, ethnic nationalists might see the need for Russia to rid itself of certain so-called “undesirable” territories that are currently part of the country, such as the Muslim areas in the north Caucasus.

In official, “politically correct” language “rossiiskaia natsiia” is considered the norm. But this is not always the case in everyday speech, where people see Russia in ethnic terms, or even religious ones, in which Orthodox Christianity becomes a component part of Russian identity.

A civic Russian nation, one whose identity is not simply ethnic, can only be a “rossiiskaia” nation. But Russian history is not very encouraging for those who see this as a necessity if the country is to become a modern pluralistic and democratic entity.

Critics of the old tsarist empire referred to it as a “prison house of nations,” and the Soviet Union was a totalitarian state. Under Vladimir Putin, Russia retains many elements of autocracy. So there’s still a long way to go.

Saudi Arabia a Politically Unique Country

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Saudi Arabia is a very unique country.

It’s the only state in the world named after a large royal family. It is home to Mecca and Medina, the holiest cities in Islam, and its religion is a severe – its supporters would call it pure – form of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism. 

And it sits on the world’s second largest oil reserves, estimated to be at 267 billion barrels. The Ghawar oil field, the world’s largest, has estimated reserves of 70 billion barrels.

Saudi Arabia regards itself as the spiritual leader of the world’s Muslims – and sees Shi’a Iran as a religious as well as political rival. It is a founding member of the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council), an organization created to provide collective security against Tehran. Its other members are Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Most of the Arabian peninsula’s independent states, including Nejd and Hejaz, were conquered by the Saudi royal family between 1902 and 1927, and the consolidated kingdom was named Saudi Arabia in 1932. 

A few years later, the king, Abdulaziz al Saud, authorized a team of American engineers from Standard Oil of California to explore the desert bordering the Persian Gulf. In 1938 they discovered what would turn out to be the largest supply of crude oil in the world.

After the king’s death in 1953, five of his sons in succession have ruled Saudi Arabia as an absolute monarchy. The current monarch, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al Saud, ascended to the throne in 2005.

A founding member of OPEC (the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries), Saudi Arabia remains the world’s largest oil exporter, producing about nine million barrels per day. Its economy is largely backed by its oil industry, which accounts for more than 95 per cent of exports and 70 per cent of government revenues.

Thanks to the Internet, the young know all about life in more open Arab societies and in the West. As unrest spread throughout the Arab world in 2011, the Saudi state faced mounting pressure to introduce reforms. King Abdullah granted more rights to women, including the right to vote and run in municipal elections, and to be appointed to the consultative Shura Council.

He also announced increased welfare spending and a promise to build 500,000 homes for the poor, as well as opening the public sphere to quasi-independent civil society associations.

But at the same time public protests were banned, after small demonstrations in the mainly Shi’a Eastern Province along the Persian Gulf, where 90 per cent of the country’s oil reserves are located. The king warned that threats to the nation’s security and stability would not be tolerated.

Saudi troops also participated in a crackdown in 2011 on unrest in neighbouring Bahrain, whose Sunni royal family was under threat from its predominantly Shi’s population.

When U.S. president Barack Obama visited Riyadh in March, Saudi leaders expressed alarm at his diplomatic initiative with Iran, which it suspects is continuing its program to develop nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia fears an American-Iranian accommodation at the expense of the Arab world and has threatened to acquire its own nuclear arsenal should Iran acquire these.

Yet all the GCC states except Saudi Arabia and Bahrain approved the interim nuclear agreement reached by the U.S. and Iran in November 2013. And Qatar has backed the Muslim Brotherhood, which the Saudis consider a “terrorist organisation.”

The Saudis also provide aid to the Sunni rebels in Syria, who have been trying to overthrow Bashar al-Assad’s Shi’a regime, which happens to be Iran’s main ally in the region.

Aware that the Saudi kingdom cannot forever rely on oil revenues, Abdullah wants to diversify the economy and reduce the underproductive public sector. So now about a quarter of each yearly budget goes toward education and vocational training. The Ministry of Higher Education has placed its emphasis on technical, engineering, science and medical programs.

But all of this takes time. Meanwhile, as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Karen Elliott House, who has been visiting the kingdom for more than 30 years, writes in her 2012 book “On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines -- and Future,” the country remains a maze “in which Saudis endlessly maneuver through winding paths between high walls of religious rules, government restrictions and cultural traditions.”

Syria's Past is Being Obliterated

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

A crossroads in the fertile crescent of the Middle East, Syria has been the site of one civilization following a previous one. The country’s monuments and artifacts are, so to speak, piled one layer atop another. But all these treasures are now at risk, as the country’s civil war drags on, and its history is in danger of being obliterated.

Last August, the Director General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, called on all parties involved in the conflict in Syria to safeguard the country’s cultural heritage and take all possible measures to avoid further damage. 

The United Nations agency that works to protect historic places, UNESCO has classified as endangered all six of Syria’s World Heritage sites. But the destruction continues, some as the result of warfare, others due to intentional looting.

An oasis in the Syrian desert northeast of Damascus, the ancient city of Palmyra was one of the most important cultural centres of the ancient world. It was a wealthy caravan centre from 44 BC to 272 AD, on the trade route linking Persia, India and China, alternately independent from and under the rule of the Roman Empire. Its culture was largely Greek.

One of its rulers, Zenobia, who became queen of Palmyra in 267 AD, overran much of the Roman Middle East, even conquering Egypt, until defeated and taken as a hostage to Rome.

Palmyra’s art and architecture, standing at the crossroads of several civilizations, married Greco-Roman techniques with local traditions and Persian influences.

Its major public monuments include the Temple of the Semitic god Bel, the Agora (the centre of spiritual and political life), and the theatre, along with other temples and urban quarters. Outside the city walls are the remains of a Roman aqueduct and immense necropolises (cemeteries).

At first occupied by rebels, now it is the Syrian Army using the ruins for military purposes and artillery pieces and tanks have been positioned at the site.

Illegal digging has also accelerated. Grave robbers have stolen numerous objects from Palmyra’s tombs and smuggled them to Beirut. “I feel as if I’m dead,” Khalil al-Hariri, an archaeologist and the director of the Palmyra Museum, told the New York Times.

Another heritage site, the Old City of Aleppo, has been a battleground since the summer of 2012. Shelling gutted medieval covered markets after insurgents took refuge there, and government troops are now positioned in its 13th-century Citadel, a fortified palace in the centre of the old city. Last year the minaret of the Umayyad Mosque of Aleppo, built in 1090, was reduced to rubble during an exchange of heavy weapons fire between government forces and rebels.

Fighting has also damaged the Krac des Chevaliers, built by the Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem from 1142 to 1271. One of the world’s best-preserved Crusader castles, it was occupied by insurgents but recently recaptured by government troops. An air raid damaged one of its towers.

Syria’s past as well as its present and future are being destroyed.

Argentina Attacks: No Punishment

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai is planning a documentary about the July 18, 1994 AMIA Jewish community centre bombing in Buenos Aires that left 85 dead and 300 wounded.

It was the worst terrorist attack ever in Argentina, which has Latin America’s largest Jewish community, and one of the deadliest anti-Semitic attacks since the Holocaust. Two years earlier, a bombing at Israeli Embassy murdered 29 people and injured a further 242.

In 2006 prosecutors Alberto Nisman and Marcelo Martínez Burgos formally accused the Iranian authorities of directing Hezbollah to carry out the attack and last year Nisman published a 502-page indictment accusing Iran of establishing terrorist networks throughout Latin America.

Yet Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in January 2013 signed a memorandum with the Iranian government that would set up a “truth commission” of international legal experts to analyze evidence from the bombings.

Argentina’s Jewish community, international Jewish groups, Israel, and the United States protested the agreement and Argentinian Foreign Minister Hector Timerman this past February confessed in an interview that negotiations between Argentina and Iran over the AMIA bombing had made little headway.

Kirchner now says she is ready to abrogate the country’s memorandum with Iran and has asked Jewish leaders to prepare an alternative proposal, “one that is different than the current Memorandum of Understanding, but within the margins of international law and due process that will allow the investigation to move forward.”

As of now no one has ever been arrested, and Iranian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham even accused Israel of framing the country for the suicide attack, and called Nisman “a Zionist.”

One venue for Gitai’s film will be the Paraguayan city of Ciudad del Este, which shares a border with Argentina and Brazil, an area known as the “Triple Frontier.” The region, a crossroads of drug and arms trafficking, money laundering, counterfeiting and smuggling, has become a haven for terrorists, according to American intelligence.

In 1997, Argentina’s minister of the interior, Carlos Corach, described the region as “a sanctuary” for crime and terrorism; it has been a primary source of support for Hezbollah, Hamas and other extremist groups.

Argentina has always been a fertile field for anti-Semitism. Juan Peron, Argentina’s long time dictator, was an admirer of Italy’s fascist leader Benito Mussolini. After World War II many Nazi war criminals found refuge in Argentina, the notorious Adolf Eichmann being the best-known example.

Several generations of army officers were trained and modeled after the German army and the military junta that ran the country from 1976 to 1982 considered Jews an “alien” people, corrupting the nation’s “Christian soul” and disproportionately involved in left-wing activities. Jews were a prime target of the military government, with some generals being obsessed with the “Jewish question.’’

During this period, an estimated 15,000 political prisoners were “disappeared” (that is, killed). Despite comprising less than one per cent of the country’s population, Jews made up around 12 per cent of the victims of the military regime.

In his book Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without a Number, journalist Jacobo Timerman, who was imprisoned by the junta for reporting the atrocities of the military regime’s “dirty war,” described the anti-Semitism of his jailers.

They repeatedly questioned him about Israeli schemes to send military forces to Argentina in order to implement the “Andinia Plan,” a supposed Zionist conspiracy to occupy a broad section of southern Argentina and establish a second Jewish state there.

His son Hector is now Argentina’s foreign minister, so things have taken a turn for the better.

Armenian Genocide Remains Issue a Century Later

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The slaughter of some 1.5 million Armenian civilians in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War was one of the major atrocities of the 20th century. The starting date of the genocide is conventionally held to be April 24, 1915, the day Ottoman authorities rounded up and arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals, followed by the arrest of a further 2,000.

At present 23 countries, including Canada, have officially declared that the events of 1915-1918 were a genocide. The 2006 recognition of the Armenian genocide by the federal government had its basis in earlier actions, including a 2004 motion in the House of Commons and a Senate resolution in 2002.

The Turkish government still insists that the deaths were caused by the hardships and violence of the war, and not by government-directed mass killings or death marches. In the past, people in Turkey who expressed any disagreement with the official line could be jailed for up to two years.

However, on April 23, the office of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan posted a lengthy statement on its website, translated into nine languages, including Armenian, which, while not admitting that the slaughters amounted to genocide, expressed regret, adding that “we wish that the Armenians who lost their lives in the context of the early 20th century rest in peace, and we convey our condolences to their grandchildren.”

The genocide was the culmination of centuries of discord in the Caucasus, part of a larger civilisational conflict between Christian and Muslim peoples dating back to the Middle Ages. And it remains a deep source of animosity between Armenia and Turkey.

In the 19th century, the Russian tsarist empire, upholders of Orthodox Christianity, were intent on pushing the Muslims Turks out of the Balkans, the Caucasus, and parts of Anatolia itself. The Armenian people, who had been converted to Christianity back in the fourth century, and had found themselves in continuing struggles against the Turks and other Muslim peoples, looked to Russia for protection.

In 1829, the eastern parts of Armenia were incorporated into the Russian Empire, but the greater part of Armenia remained within the Ottoman lands. At the turn of the 20th century, there were some two million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire, 10 per cent of the total population.

There had already been a series of major massacres of Armenians between 1894 and 1896, resulting in some 100,000 deaths. On Oct. 29, 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary against Russia and its Western allies, Great Britain and France, and launched a disastrous military campaign against Russian forces in the Caucasus. It blamed defeat there on the Armenians, claiming they had colluded with the Russians.

The Ottoman government put together “Special Organisation” units, consisting of armed gangs, to massacre Armenians. Over the next three years, the Armenian people in the empire were subjected to deportation, massacre, and starvation, and epidemics which ravaged the concentration camps where they were interned.

The great bulk of the Armenian population was forcibly removed from Turkish Armenia and Anatolia to Syria and Lebanon. Today there are only between 50 and 70 thousand Armenians left in Turkey, out of a population of over 76 million.

After the Russian Revolution, the small Russian part of Armenia was incorporated into the Soviet Union. It became a sovereign state after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, but it is a rump state of three million people, since most of historic Armenia remains within the boundaries of Turkey, including two geographic symbols of the Armenian people, Lake Van and Mount Ararat.

Both were within the territory of the large Armenian kingdoms of the past. Mount Ararat has been revered by the Armenians as symbolizing their national identity and is the national symbol of the Republic of Armenia, featured in its coat of arms.

Given the relative strength of the two countries, it is unlikely Armenia will ever regain these.

The Strange Political Situation of Taiwan

Henry Srebrnik, (Summerside, PEI) Journal Pioneer

Is Taiwan part of China? In fact, should its government be considered the only legitimate authority over the entire country, not just the island? What about the reverse: does mainland China have the right to unite the island with the mainline – even by force?

Or – a third possibility -- is Taiwan a separate entity altogether that should declare its own independence?

Actually, despite their ideological difference and historical hostility, there is one thing the mainland government in Beijing, and the island government in Taipei, both agree on: Taiwan is a province of China.

Yet the island has not always been governed from China. From 1624 to1662 Dutch soldiers and traders maintained a colony in southwestern Taiwan, and the Spanish also maintained a colony in northern Taiwan between 1626 and 1642.

The Europeans were driven out and from 1683 to 1894 both Taiwan and mainland China were ruled by the Qing dynasty, the last one before China became a republic in 1912.

Following an 1895 war with Japan, however, Taiwan was ceded by the Qing government to Japan. In 1945, in the wake of Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, China regained Taiwan.

But rule from the mainland lasted a brief four years. Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) nationalist forces, in power in China since 1912, were ousted by Mao Zedong’s Communists in the civil war that followed Japan’s surrender. In 1949 Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing.

Chiang’s army retreated to Taiwan, where his government, which continued to call itself the Republic of China (ROC), remained intent on retaking mainland China and reunifying the country.

Chiang died in 1975, and under his son and successor, Chiang Ching-kuo, the KMT continued to rule the island with an iron hand. Until 1987 martial law was in place and any discussion of Taiwanese independence was banned.

Since his death, Taiwan’s political system has evolved into a multi-party democracy. While the KMT continued to govern, a new grouping, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), was formed, and became increasingly identified with independence for Taiwan, as a sovereign jurisdiction no longer associated with China.

The DPP won the presidency in 2000 with the election of Chen Shui-bian, who was born on the island. The party asserts that its efforts to promote a Taiwanese national identity are an effort to normalize a Taiwanese distinctiveness repressed during years of authoritarian KMT rule (most of whose politicians were mainland refugees).

In 2008 the KMT regained power, under the Hong Kong-born Ma Ying-jeou. His policies have been seen as part of a long-run effort to steer Taiwan towards closer ties to the PRC. Ma has stated that “for our party, the eventual goal is reunification, but we don't have a timetable.”

Following his election, Taiwan and the Chinese mainland resumed direct sea, air, and mail links. He has allowed mainland Chinese tourists to visit Taiwan and lifted restrictions on the financial sector to invest in mainland China.

Since 1971, Communist China has held the United Nations seat for China. It is also recognized as the official government of the country by most other states, including Canada. As of 2013, the ROC maintains official diplomatic relations with only 21 UN member states, although informal relations are maintained with nearly all others.

“Chinese Taipei” is the name used by the island when participating in some international organizations and almost all sporting events. Both the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China agree to the use of the name because it is ambiguous about the island’s political status.

While most residents of Taiwan are ethnically Han Chinese, about half a million people (some two per cent of the population) are Taiwanese aboriginals, people related to Austronesian ethnic groups in Malaysia, the Philippines, Madagascar and the Pacific islands. These native Taiwanese inhabited the island prior to the mainland migration that began in the 17th century.

They chafed under the repressive rule of the Japanese during the 1895-1945 period and mounted several rebellions, which were severely repressed. The autocratic KMT regime that followed was not much kinder.

The movement for indigenous cultural and political resurgence in Taiwan gained momentum in 1984 when a group of aboriginal political activists established the Alliance of Taiwan Aborigines.

Beginning in 1998, the official curriculum in Taiwan schools has been changed to contain more frequent and favorable mention of aboriginals. Their issues have now also become part of the discourse regarding the future political status of Taiwan.