Mugabe Finally Toppled

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal
 

It’s been a long time coming, but one of Africa’s longest-serving and brutal dictators, Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, was finally removed from office after 37 years in power. 

But his successor, long-time Mugabe ally and former Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa, is no new broom.

The 93-year-old Mugabe, who presided over the ruination of Zimbabwe’s economy, and was poised to have his wife continue his policies, resigned on Nov. 22, as Zimbabweans poured onto the streets of Harare in celebration.

Some people were holding posters of Mnangagwa, whose dismissal earlier this month triggered the military takeover that forced Mugabe out.

Mugabe had fired Mnangagwa to create a path to the presidency for his wife Grace, 52, known to her critics as “Gucci Grace” for her reputed fondness for luxury shopping. 

Reviled for her greed, her ostentatious excesses irritated everyone in Zimbabwe. Indeed, the vitriol directed against her since the coup has been remarkable.

Mugabe had clung on for a week after the army takeover and expulsion from his own ruling ZANU-PF party, but resigned shortly after parliament began an impeachment process to oust him.

Nonetheless, he has been treated with kid gloves. It is widely reported that he and his wife could get a $10 million retirement bonus and immunity from prosecution.

Mugabe’s $150,000 annual salary will also be paid until his death, and his wife will then receive half that amount for the rest of her life.

The opposition Movement for Democratic Change is furious, saying it is an unconstitutional bribe to get the president to stand down. Douglas Mwonzora, the MDC secretary general, stated that they will fight the deal in the courts. 

Mugabe has left Zimbabwe with a worthless currency, massive debts, an impoverished population and an estimated unemployment rate of more than 80 per cent (some list it as over 90 per cent). 

Roads are in poor shape, many rural communities have no electricity, education is basic, and health care almost non-existent. Life expectancy of 60 is one of the lowest in the world.

The 75-year-old Mnangagwa, who has now taken over the leadership of the ruling ZANU-PF party, was quickly sworn in as president. He pledged to govern for “all Zimbabweans” and pledged that “free and fair elections” would be held next year as scheduled.

Mnangagwa has promised to create jobs and make efforts to attract foreign investors. He also indicated that the land reforms that had led to the violent seizure of thousands of white-owned farms would not be reversed, but promised compensation. 

Of course Mnangagwa is no angel. After all, for decades he has been part of the brutal government that presided over Zimbabwe’s decline. One of Mugabe’s closest aides, he has always been part of the regime’s human rights abuses and corruption. He held six cabinet positions under Mugabe. 

As minister of state security, Mnangagwa played a major role in the ethnic massacres of the 1980s, when thousands of civilians were slaughtered by the Zimbabwean military. Most were ethnic Ndebele in Matabeleland, who were supporters of Joshua Nkomo, Mugabe’s rival.

“It’s difficult to see how going forward he can be respectful of human rights, given his history,” remarked Dewa Mahvinga, Southern Africa analyst for Human Rights Watch. 

“People may not see it now, or realise now, because of the relief of seeing the end of Mugabe’s political era, but Zimbabwe is in grave danger in terms of constitutional democracy.”

Not for nothing is Mnangagwa widely known as “the Crocodile,” a nickname referring to his tenacity and ruthless cunning. The story of Zimbabwe’s tumult is far from over.

The Old and New in Tel Aviv

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

If Tel Aviv weren't an Israeli city with a Jewish majority, usually only noticed abroad in relation to conflict and terrorism, its Mediterranean ambience would be better appreciated.

With its climate of 318 sunny days a year, beaches, and "la dolce vita" way of life, it reminds one of cities in Italy and Greece.

Even in mid-November, when I spent more than a week here, the sun shone, temperatures were between 25-30 C, the beaches were full, and the outdoor cafés along thoroughfares like Rehov Dizengoff were packed into the early hours of the morning.

The wide boulevards with their palm trees and the Bauhaus International style architecture make walking in its various neighbourhoods a wonderful experience, and its outdoor markets, some old, some new, can be a shopper's delight.The city is vibrant and the streets are full of life.

The amount of new construction here is incredible, it takes your breath away. There are scores of new office towers, skyscrapers, and amazing high-rise apartment buildings, that just go on for what seems like miles. This is particularly true in Ramat Aviv, across the Yarkon River.

None of this existed 40 years ago, when I was last here; I was taken aback by the way the city looks today.

Tel Aviv also has its share of museums.  We stopped at Independence Hall, on Sderot Rothschild, where David Ben-Gurion on May 14, 1948, declared the creation of the state of Israel, as the British Mandate came to an end.

Another important site is Kikar Yitzhak Rabin, the square where the then prime minister of Israel was assassinated in 1995.

Though Tel Aviv is only 108 years old -- the blink of an eye in the Middle East -- some older areas which are now part of the city were settled earlier.

One area of Tel Aviv, located in the south-west corner of the city adjacent to Jaffa, is Neve Tzedeck (Hebrew for Dwellings of Justice).

Founded in 1887, the first Jewish district outside of old Jaffa, the original town on the coast, its dozen or so narrow and tranquil winding streets are free of noise and traffic. Many of the houses have distinctive red-tiled roofs.

This was home to the first cinema in the country, the Eden, which opened in 1914.

Long neglected, many of the buildings in Neve Tzedeck have now been renovated, and are home to art galleries, boutiques, restaurants, and small craft shops, along its main street, Rehov Shabazi.

One example is the old Tel Aviv railway station (HaTakhana), on Rehov Koifman, now totally redeveloped, with wine bars and live entertainment.

The former home of Shimon Rokach, on the street that bears his name, contains videos and exhibits that chronicle the early days of Tel Aviv. He was one of the earliest Jewish settlers here. In 1983, his grand-daughter, an artist, opened its doors to the public.

The Nahum Gutman Museum, on the same street, features works by the 20th-century Israeli artists. Between 1907 and 1914 the building served as home to the left-wing HaPoel HaTzair's newspaper. It was later home to several authors.

In 1992, after the inclusion of the building in the Tel Aviv Building Preservation Program, it underwent renovation by the architect Roni Zaibert. The museum was opened in May 1998.

The most impressive venue here, located on Rehov Yechieli, is the Suzanne Dellal Centre for Dance and Theatre. It sits in a beautiful square with fountains and orange trees.

In two buildings originally constructed in  1892 and 1908, it is home to the Batsheva Dance Company. It offers shows by leading local and international performers.

Neve Tzedeck is well worth a visit, and tourists have now discovered its charms.

Leaving a Rich Legacy in World Affairs

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

While in Israel this month, we visited a former colleague of mine, from the time when I worked as a journalist in Washington in the 1980s.

Judith Colp Rubin, a native New Yorker and graduate of the University of Chicago, has been a foreign correspondent in the Middle East for various American newspapers.

She was married to Barry Rubin, who died in 2014. A former Fulbright and Council on Foreign Relations fellow who received his PhD from Georgetown University in Washington in 1978, he was at first a left-wing pro-Palestinian activist.

He wrote for such publications as MERIP Reports, the Journal of Palestine Studies, and the Communist-founded ultra-leftist Guardian, published in New York.

He even turned up in Beirut in 1974, in the company of his Georgetown mentor, the Palestinian professor Hisham Sharabi.

But he began to grow disillusioned with the far left and moved to Israel in the 1990s, where he founded the Global Research in International Affairs Center (GLORIA).

A prolific author, Rubin wrote dozens of books about the Middle East region and the Israeli-Arab conflict, including The Israel-Arab Reader, The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East, The Truth About Syria, and Israel: An Introduction. He also frequently wrote for the Jerusalem Post.

Silent Revolution, published a year before his death, describes how the Left rose to political power and cultural dominance in the United States.

Barry and Judy co-authored several books on the Middle East, terrorism, and America’s modern-day reputation. Their 2003 book Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography, was an in-depth look at the life and political career of the Palestinian leader.

Hating America: A History, published in 2004, addressed various aspects of the ways in which the U.S. has been vilified, concentrating in general on the opinions held in European nations.

They also co-authored Anti-American Terrorism and the Middle East: A Documentary Reader, in 2003, and Chronologies of Modern Terrorism, in 2008.

Judy is now the honorary president of what has been renamed the Rubin Center for Research in International Affairs.

The current director, Jonathan Spyer, holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the London School of Economics and a Master’s Degree in Middle East Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

The Center publishes two quarterly journals, the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA), and Turkish Studies. They cover developments in the region from a wide variety of viewpoints, including American policy, radical movements, and minorities.

As well, it produces analyses and reporting on the Middle East by research associates and scholars.

Quite a legacy, and one which Judy and the Center try to carry on.

Mexico's Politics Affected by Relations with U.S.

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The ongoing North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) negotiations and Donald Trump’s plan to build a wall at the Mexican-American border will both get an airing in Mexico’s forthcoming presidential election, scheduled for next July. 

A Mexican president can serve only one six-year term, so there will be no incumbent.

Enrique Pena Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), won election in 2012 against two major opponents. 

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the candidate of a left-wing coalition formed by the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the Convergence Citizens’ Movement, and the Labour Party (PT), ran second. Josefina Vazquez Mota of the right-of centre (PAN) came third.

The PRI had ruled Mexico continuously for more than 70 years, until losing power to the PAN in the 2000 vote, 12 years earlier.

In 2006, Lopez Obrador, then the PRD candidate, suffered a razor thin loss to the PAN’s Felipe Calderon, with the PRI’s Roberto Madrazo running third. It was the PAN’s second victory, coming after Vincente Fox’s breakthrough in 2000.

Lopez Obrador and his supporters cried fraud. He had himself declared “the legitimate president” of Mexico as his constituents took to the streets for weeks of protest in Mexico City.

Recent polls now show Lopez Obrador, who broke with the PRD in 2014 and who now leads the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), as the front-runner ahead of next year’s presidential election. Respondents selected the PAN second, with the PRI third. Neither has yet chosen their nominee.

Pena Nieto has become increasingly unpopular with Mexicans, seen as not standing up to Trump on NAFTA or the border wall, and his PRI is suffering accordingly.

The right-wing PAN party, which ruled the country from 2000 to 2012, has three main candidates: Margarita Zavala, a former legislator and wife of ex-President Felipe Calderon; Ricardo Anaya, the current party leader; and Rafael Moreno Valle, the former governor of the state of Puebla.

Among those the PRI may choose are Secretary of Foreign Affairs Luis Videgaray, and the Minister of the Interior and former governor of the state of Hidalgo, Miguel Angel Osorio Chong.

As for the PRD, its main contender appears to be Miguel Angel Mancera, the current mayor of Mexico City.

Lopez Obrador’s campaign is focused on criticisms of corruption and neoliberal policies under the previous three governments.

PRI leaders have been allegedly involved in bribery schemes costing the country an estimated $450 million, according to the anti-corruption watchdog PRENDE, at the Universidad Ibero-Americano.

Lopez Obrador also wants to give voice to the more indigenous populations of Mexico, who often are seen as second class citizens to the Spanish-descended ruling elites. 

Many of them have seen NAFTA in negative terms, arguing that it has destroyed Mexico’s rural economy and forced dependency on American imports.

Lopez Obrador has also declared that if he wins the presidency, he will kill an energy reform law that opened oil and gas to private investments in 2013.

Trump’s election has triggered a rise in Mexican nationalism: A poll in July found that 88 per cent of Mexicans viewed him unfavorably.

Mexican officials have warned White House aides that Trump’s behavior could help make the forthcoming election a referendum on which candidate is the most anti-American.

A victory for the combative Lopez Obrador, in his third try for the top job, could increase tensions with the Trump administration.

In a speech Sept. 5 at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute in Washington, Lopez Obrador declared that “the 50 Mexican consulates in the U.S., in a short period of time, will fully take on the defence of Mexicans and migrants in the U.S.”

Meanwhile, the PAN and PRD, despite their ideological differences, have called for a “broad alliance” and the installation of a coalition government in an attempt to oust the ruling PRI party and halt Lopez Obrador next year.

They depict him as a demagogue who would create the same chaos in Mexico that Hugo Chavez did in Venezuela.

He in turn called the proposed coalition an alliance of sycophants and a “mafia of power.”

A Radical Outpost in a Religious Jerusalem

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Jerusalem is today known as a religiously conservative city, unlike liberal and trendy Tel Aviv and secular Haifa.

But even the Holy City has a radical past; it is, after all, home of the Hebrew University. And many of the city's radicals and bohemians used to gather at one spot, at 27 King George St., the Cafe Ta'amon.

However, on my current visit to Israel, I discovered that the place that was, in its own small way a Jerusalem landmark, is gone.

It was once the place to go, where left-wing activists, politicians, artists and writers came together and where they quarreled about one thing: Israel. Some fierce arguments even came to blows.

I should know. I spent the summer of 1972 as an overseas student at the Hebrew University, but much of my education took place hanging around with the regulars who frequented the Cafe Ta'amon.

A home away from home for members of left wing groups like Matzpen, Siach, and the Black Panthers, many a planned demonstration against one or another government policy (especially those relating, after 1967, to the territories acquired after the Six-Day War) was hatched within its walls.

Social activist and founder of the Gush Shalom peace movement Uri Avnery was a regular.

Film director and producer Noemi Schory was the force behind the documentary series, The Generals, an Israeli-European co-production about Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon, produced in 2003.

In an interview she gave that year, she remarked that she enjoyed being in Jerusalem in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with friends at the Cafe Ta'amon.

 

"I wasn't involved with Matzpen though after the '67 war, my political awareness kept growing. I identified more with the New Israeli Left," Siach.

The Cafe Ta'amon served as a venue for speeches by European New Leftists such as the German student radical Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who visited in 1970.

The Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, was between 1950 and 1966 temporarily located in the Beit Froumine right across the street, so the 

Ta'amon also became a meeting place for young and ambitious politicians.   

Mainstream Israeli leaders like Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, Menachem Begin, Golda Meir and Shimon Peres also drank coffee here.

The Cafe Ta'amon also hosted chess enthusiasts from all walks of life. Artists like the sculptor Shaul Baz exhibited their works there.

The Cafe, described by one old activist as an international meeting place in a provincial city, has even become the subject of a documentary directed by the German filmmaker Michael Teutsch, released in 2013. 

The Cafe Ta'amon was established in 1936 by German Jewish refugees, and was bought in 1960 by Mordechai Kopp, then 32 years old. Though Kopp was himself a religious nationalist, activists recall him sending food and cigarettes to customers arrested and jailed during demonstrations.

This simple, unobtrusive Cafe managed to survive a divided city, three wars, and competition from the more fashionable bars and cafes that abound today. 

Alas, Koop retired not long after the film was produced, so the  Cafe Ta'amon is no more. In its heyday, it was worth a visit to soak up, along with the coffee, some of Israel's less well-known history.

The Balfour Declaration One Century Later

By Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press

This year marks the 100^th anniversary of one of the seminal events of the 20^th century: the release of the Balfour Declaration.

There are few documents in Middle Eastern history which have had as much influence as the Balfour Declaration. It was sent as a 67-word statement contained within the short letter addressed by the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, to Lord Rothschild, on November 2, 1917.

Before that date, Zionism was still a marginal movement that divided Jews and was little noticed by others. After the Balfour Declaration, the Jewish national project enjoyed the support of the leading imperial power of the age.

In the letter, the British government stated its intention to endorse the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine:

“His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

The Declaration emerged as part of Britain’s growing desperation to seek allies in the ongoing bloodbath of the First World War.

The Zionists had a hard time engaging the interest of British officials at first. As late as 1913, the chief diplomat of the World Zionist Organization, Nahum Sokolow, could get a hearing at no higher a level than low-level Foreign Office functionaries.

Many in the Anglo-Jewish elite themselves opposed political Zionism. Edwin Samuel Montagu, for example, a minister in the British government at the time, denied there was a Jewish nation. “When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens, and you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants.”

Much credit for turning things around is credited to Chaim Weizmann, the Russian-born Zionist who, as a scientist at the University of Manchester, helped the British war effort by developing a new method for the manufacture of acetone, used in the manufacture of cordite explosive propellants critical to the Allied war effort. But this alone would not have sufficed, of course.

The truly decisive moment in paving the way to the Balfour Declaration took place on December 6, 1916, when British Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith was compelled to resign, and was replaced by David Lloyd George.

Asquith had no interest in Zionism and did not support the Zionist aspirations, but Lloyd George and his foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, believed that support for Zionism would advance British war aims.

The problem, though, was that at the time many Jews in the United States tended to favour Germany, due to the fact that Britain was allied with tsarist Russia, home of anti-Jewish political and economic repression and pogroms.

But this changed in the spring of 1917, when, on March 15, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated and a liberal regime emerged in Russia.

Now, the British believed, American Jews could be persuaded to encourage their government to enter the war, and Russian Jews would also throw their weight behind efforts to ensure Germany's defeat and the creation of a Jewish national home under British sponsorship.

Moreover, support for Jewish nationalism might advance Britain’s territorial ambitions in Palestine.

Britain, after all, would do nearly all of the expected fighting against Ottoman forces in the Sinai and Palestine. Lloyd George and Balfour saw an opportunity to use Zionism to gain international support to place the Holy Land entirely under British rule.

Following the end of the war, when Britain acquired a League of Nations Mandate over Palestine, its purpose was partially to put into effect the Balfour Declaration, in conjunction with the World Zionist Organization. 

The Mandate specifically referred to “the historical connections of the Jewish people with Palestine” and to the moral validity of “reconstituting their National Home in that country.” 

Furthermore, the British were instructed to “use their best endeavors to facilitate” Jewish immigration, to encourage settlement on the land and to “secure” the Jewish national home. 

The British would backtrack on these early promises. The British establishment itself was divided and began to respond negatively to Zionism by the late 1920s, in the face of Arab hostility to Jewish immigration.  

By the mid-1930s, fearing that the Palestinian Arabs would side with Germany and Italy in a war they knew would soon come, Britain increasingly reneged on the Declaration’s commitments. 

Indeed, at the moment European Jews were most desperate to seek entry to Palestine, the White Paper issued on May 17, 1939 virtually eliminated that possibility.

Still, by the time the UN General Assembly on November 29, 1947 voted to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, the Jewish population had reached one-third of the Mandate’s total of almost two million people. Six months later, the State of Israel was born.

With the Balfour Declaration, Britain had laid the foundations for a Jewish state -- and a conflict between Arabs and Jews that a century later remains unresolved.

More to Jerusalem than Famous Sites

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

 

I’m sending this article from Jerusalem, the city that has doubtless had more written about it than any place of comparable size anywhere on the globe.

Visitors and tourists know about the sites holy to the three Abrahamic faiths; the more recent Israeli points of interest; and the various museums.

There’s arguably more to see in Jerusalem than anywhere else on earth. So I’m not going to re-invent the wheel by describing, for instance, the Old City’s Western Wall, the Al-Aqsa mosque, or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Hundreds of thousands of words have been written about them.

The same holds for more modern venues in west Jerusalem, such as the Israel Museum, which houses the Dead Sea Scrolls; Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust; or the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.

Instead, I’ll describe a more idiosyncratic place with its own, less well known, history.

Between 1948 and 1967, Jerusalem was a city divided between Israel, which controlled the western, newer parts, and Jordan, governing East Jerusalem and the Old City.

The small area in-between the final ceasefire lines in Jerusalem became No-Man’s Land, and part of the “urban border” between the two parts of the city. 

And the only way to cross from one part to the other was a checkpoint known as the Mandelbaum Gate, just north of the western edge of the Old City.

The crossing point was located at the intersection of Shmuel Hanavi Street and St. George Road, next to the building that gave it its name. It became a symbol of the divided status of the city.

The Gate was run by Israeli and Jordanian customs officials, largely serving diplomats and UN people, as well as Christian pilgrims. The bi-weekly convoy to the Israeli enclave on Mount Scopus passed through the Mandelbaum Gate.

Clergy, diplomats and United Nations personnel used the Gate to pass through the concrete and barbed wire barrier between the sectors, but Jordanian officials allowed only one-way passage for non-official traffic. Anyone with an Israeli stamp in his or her passport was denied entry.

The Gate was named after Rabbi Simchah Mandelbaum and his wife, who had built their home on the northern side of the intersection in 1927, when the British ruled Palestine as a League of Nations mandate. 

During the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the Mandelbaums’ house stood between the Jewish neighbourhoods and the area under Jordanian control. The building was blown up and demolished by Jordanian Legionnaires in July 1948 during the fighting. 

However, part of the front wall with the entry gate remained standing until 1967 as a memorial to divided Jerusalem. Outside this Gate was the official crossing between Israel and Jordan.

After Jerusalem was united in 1967 the last remains of the building were demolished. Today the square next to the site is called Mandelbaum Square. A sundial in the centre of the road marks the place where people crossed from Jordan to Israel and back. 

An interesting aside: in 1965, when the city was still divided, Scottish author Muriel Spark published The Mandelbaum Gate, a novel set in 1961. It became a classic and is still read today, though the Mandelbaum Gate is long gone.

Things Are Getting Worse in South Africa

 by Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s current president, is not a nice man. His political career was written off in the run-up to the 2009 election when he was simultaneously battling allegations of rape and corruption. Yet he managed to prevail, and was re-elected in 2014.

Critics charge Zuma with having replaced the idealism and ethics associated with the late Nelson Mandela with a brutal and avaricious bid for wealth and power, dividing the governing African National Congress (ANC), and tarnishing the reputation of the post-apartheid “rainbow nation.”

Zuma’s years in office have been marked by a series of scandals, including the use of millions of dollars in government funds to renovate his private home; accusations that Indian businessmen close to him offered to dole out powerful government posts in exchange for favorable treatment; and his appointment of allies with little experience to important positions in government and state-owned companies.

Zuma’s credibility was severely damaged in March 2016 when the country’s Constitutional Court ruled that he had violated the constitution by failing to repay the government for money used on upgrading his private residence. He apologized for the “frustration and confusion” caused by the scandal and repaid the money.

Zuma has also been accused of allowing members of the Indian-born Gupta family to wield undue influence over his regime. They moved to South African from India in 1993, and started a number of businesses through which they have amassed great wealth.

More than 100,000 documents and emails leaked to the press earlier this year detailed improper dealings in lucrative government contracts made with the family. Allies of Zuma have been linked to allegations involving suspected kickbacks.

One of President Zuma’s wives, Bongi Ngema-Zuma, worked for the Guptas, and two of Zuma’s children have served as directors in some of the Gupta family companies.

Not coincidentally, the Guptas were granted citizenship long before the law warranted it.

In March 2016, deputy Finance Minister Mcebisi Jonas asserted that a member of the Gupta family had offered to promote him to the post of finance minister in 2015.

He said that Ajay Gupta offered him the position as well as 600 million rand (about $56 million), and told him the family had already made six billion rand from the state planned to take that money to Dubai.

All of this has hurt the ANC. In municipal elections held in August 2016 the party suffered steep declines in support in nearly all of South Africa’s major urban areas. In Pretoria, the Democratic Alliance eked out a victory, with 43 per cent of the votes to the ANC’s 41 per cent.

Zuma has now survived six votes of no-confidence in parliament, most recently this past August, when a broad coalition of opposition parties and renegade members of his own ANC fell just short of the majority needed to force Zuma and his cabinet to resign.

The Democratic Alliance’s Mmusi Maimane told reporters that “I applaud the courageous ANC people who moved across and said we will vote with our conscience and we will vote for change.”

Julius Malema, leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, said the vote had proved South Africa's democracy works, and warned Zuma it proved they could unseat him.

A petition signed by more than a million people was delivered to the deputy president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who is seen as Zuma’s main rival in the ANC.

The party is now torn by factionalism. Over 60 people have been assassinated in intra-ANC killings in the province of KwaZulu-Natal alone in the past two years.

But some analysts believe that with Zuma due to step down as ANC leader in December and as president after general elections in 2019, he intends to back one of his ex-wives, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, as his successor.

He hopes that she will shield him from any further investigations involving 783 allegations of theft, fraud, and money-laundering.

The economy is now officially in recession and unemployment, reaching nearly 28 per cent, has hit a 14-year high, as the economy is stifled by corruption and mismanagement.

There is an almost complete lack of new investment, more businesses are closing than opening, and real incomes are steadily falling.

The health and education systems are a shambles, and community protests have now become an everyday occurrence throughout the country.

The title of the novel Cry, the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton, published in 1948, is more apt than ever.

Eventual Winner of Liberia's Election Faces Difficulties

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

As Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first female head of state, steps down as president of Liberia after 12 years in office, the presidential election that was held on Oct. 10 was seen as a crucial test for the country.

There were 20 candidates vying to replace her, among them Sirleaf’s vice president, Joseph Boakai of the governing Unity Party, and former soccer star George Weah of the Congress for Democratic Change.

Weah lost to Sirleaf in both 2005 and 2011, but he had better luck this time, coming first with 38.4 per cent of the vote. Boaka, who had been involved in a spat with Sirleaf, who declined to endorse him, trailed with 28.8 per cent. 

All the other candidates were in single digits. Charles Walker Brumskine of the Liberty Party, who ran third with 9.6 per cent, protested that there had been irregularities in the voting and that the election was marred by gross irregularities and fraud.

Nonetheless, Cultural Ambassador Juli Endee cautioned Liberians to embrace the culture of peace and denounce the culture of violence. 

‘‘Even though there were lots of irregularities and administrative issues during the  elections as many observers reported, it ended with peace, which has been our major concern, she said.

With neither Weah nor Boaka obtaining 50 per cent, a runoff will take place on Nov. 7.

In the House of Representatives, the Congress for Democratic Change coalition took 21 seats, two more than the Unity Party.

There were also those in the race who would never have been allowed to stand for office in most other countries. 

They included three men with blood on their hands: Prince Johnson, Benoni Urey, and George Dweh, who were all involved in terrible crimes during Liberia’s vicious civil war that lasted from 1989 to 2003 and resulted in the deaths of 250,000 people.

As well, Weah chose for his running mate Jewel Howard-Taylor, the ex-wife of former president Charles Taylor, now serving a 50-year jail term after convicted in 2012 for his part in the civil war. She vowed to put his old “agenda back on the table.”

Founded in the 19^th century by the American Colonization Society as a home for freed American slaves, Liberia has been a de facto protectorate of the United States ever since.

The Americo-Liberian elite that came to rule the country recreated a clone of a southern U.S. state and ended up oppressing the native African tribes. Indigenous people could not vote until 1951.

All this came to a head in 1980, when this ruling group was overthrown in a coup led by Samuel Doe, a member of the indigenous Krahn people. 

A decade later, the country descended into a horrific civil war, when Taylor formed an armed militia that overran much of the country.

Peace eventually returned to Liberia in 2003, in no small part due to the United States, which sent in the Marines to force Taylor out. 

In 2005, the return of electoral democracy brought to power Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first female head of state. She won re-election in 2012. The country’s constitution does not allow for a third term.

Sirleaf was Washington’s choice for president. After fleeing Liberia in 1980, she worked for the World Bank, then the African Regional Office of Citibank, and finally, before returning to Monrovia, the Equator Bank, a subsidiary of the HSBC banking conglomerate.

Though feted by western leaders, and even becoming a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011, Sirleaf has accomplished less than those who laud her tenure will admit. 

Government corruption continued unabated, the health system remained in shambles and unemployment among young men, at 85 per cent, remained high. The 2014 Ebola epidemic killed 5,000 people.

The civil war largely destroyed Liberia’s economy and brought a steep decline in living standards. 

The absence of basic infrastructure such as adequate roads and water, sewage, and electrical services remain problems.

Most Liberians live on less than US$1.25 a day. Sirleaf herself has called the situation a real threat to the country. Liberia remained a fragile country with significant governance challenges.

Jason Robinson, an Africa analyst with Oxford Analytica, said that the final election results will determine whether Liberia’s “fragile” democracy “can be consolidated.” A tall order indeed.

Egypt's Nasser Political Colossus in Arab World

By Henry Srebrnik,  [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian 

Boston filmmaker Michal Goldman, who lives in Mermaid, P.E.I. part of the time, recently presented her new documentary, “Nasser’s Republic: The Making of Modern Egypt,” at the University of Prince Edward Island.

Her interest in Egypt goes back to the 1990s when she lived in Cairo for several years, and her film is a portrayal of the man who ruled Egypt from 1952 until his death 18 years later. 

This documentary was filmed between 2011 and 2015, years of turmoil in Egypt. It saw the Arab Spring lead to the downfall of one autocrat, Hosni Mubarak, the election to the presidency of the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Morsi, and his removal in a coup by another military man, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

But no one has dominated the Middle East as Gamal Abdel Nasser did, before or after, and this film is particularly timely, given that this year marks the 50^th anniversary of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

It is a conflict in which Nasser played arguably the most important part. And while he called Egypt’s defeat a “temporary setback,” as we now know it was much more than that; it shaped the modern Middle East, and gave rise to the seemingly intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

As well, Israel controlled most of the Sinai Peninsula for the next 15 years.

Goldman’s film presents Nasser as an authoritarian leader who challenged Western hegemony in the region, was responsible for economic and social progress in Egypt, but was foiled in his attempts to create a pan-Arab political entity.

Of humble origins, Nasser grew up in an Egypt still dominated by Great Britain, and became an opponent of the corrupt regime of King Farouk. 

On July 26, 1952, Farouk was forced to exile and Nasser, now a colonel, became leader of the Free Officers Movement. By 1954 he had achieved undisputed power as the country’s president. 

Determined to see Egypt free of colonialism, he nationalized the Suez Canal, which brought him into direct conflict with Great Britain, France and Israel two years later.

His stand brought him huge popularity throughout the Arab world, and two years later Syria joined Egypt in a United Arab Republic. This was the apogee of secular Pan-Arabism.

On the domestic front, agrarian reform laws widened the opportunities for land ownership by the peasantry. In 1962, Nasser, by then a Soviet ally, announced that Egypt would be run on Arab socialist lines, and numerous enterprises were nationalized. There were also major projects such as the Aswan High Dam.

Ordinary citizens enjoyed unprecedented access to public housing, free education, jobs, health services, and social welfare. 

However, much of what Nasser accomplished would be reversed. The United Arab Republic was dissolved in 1961, and no new pan-Arab entities were created. He also became mired in a civil war in Yemen. His defeat by Israel in 1967 was a major blow and may have hastened his early death three years later, at age 52.

His successors, Anwar el-Sadat and Mubarak, rolled back most of Nasser’s economic reforms, and Egypt became a far less egalitarian state.

What are we to make of Nasser’s legacy? He remains a revered figure in much of the Arab world. But does his politics hold as much sway today as those of two other Egyptians, the Islamists Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, both killed by Egyptian authorities? 

As the Egyptian writer Tarek Osman, author of Egypt on the Brink: From Nasser to the Muslim Brotherhood, has asserted, the blow to his Arab nationalism and the rise of religiously-based ideologies “took from Egypt a lot of its claim to leadership.” 

Kenya's Continuing Election Fiasco

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian 

A number of previous elections had led to massive violence, with thousands dead and injured. The one held in August was annulled due to irregularities. 

The main opposition candidate, who had lost to the incumbent, then announced he was withdrawing from the race. A member of the electoral commission fled the country. Finally, the do-over vote was a farce.

This is Kenya, a country riven by tribal rivalries that come to a head at election time, largely between President Uhuru Kenyatta’s Kikuyu tribe and Raila Odinga’s Luo community. 

Kenya has 44 official tribes and election candidates usually form alliances with politicians from other ethnic groups to broaden their appeal, but the Kikuyu and Luo have been the backbone of support for the two main contenders.

Following the 2007 election, a wave of ethnic violence lasted months, killed 1,400 people and displaced 600,000 more.

This year’s contest, held between Kenyatta and Odinga on Aug. 8, was also preceded by unrest for weeks before the balloting. 

In fact, in the major cities, where ethnic rivals live in close proximity, the run-up to the voting saw many residents head for the safety of their ancestral homelands in rural areas. 

It was won by Kenyatta, the incumbent, running under the banner of the Jubilee Alliance, with 54 per cent of the vote, to Odinga’s 44 per cent.

But few of Odinga’s supporters in his National Super Alliance (NASA) accepted the result. At least 70 opposition supporters have been killed since the results were announced August 11.

A legal challenge by Odinga, alleging widespread fraud, prompted the Supreme Court on Sept.1 to nullify the results.

Chief Justice David Maraga, citing irregularities, described the results as “invalid, null and void,” adding that the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) failed to conduct the election “in a manner consistent with the dictates of the Constitution.”

The IEBC had refused the court full access to its computer system, which meant the opposition’s claims of hacking could not be proved or disproved.

Odinga was as happy as he was surprised. He had appealed to the court after losing the last presidential race to Kenyatta, in 2013, as well -- and dismissed it as inept after it ruled against him.

President Kenyatta at first said he disagreed with the ruling but would respect it. However, he then denounced the justices. “They have been paid by white people and other trash,” he told supporters. 

On Oct. 10, though, Odinga announced that he was dropping out of the rerun of the election scheduled for Oct. 26.

He claimed that not enough has been done to address the problems and singled out the IEBC for particular criticism, deeming it “rotten.”

As well, Roselyn Akombe, one of seven IEBC officials in charge of overseeing the rescheduled election, resigned eight days later. 

She left the country, arguing that without Odinga, the election had no chance of being credible and that it had become “increasingly difficult” for her to perform her duties.

She pointed to the death of Chris Msando, the electoral commission’s top digital security officer, who was killed a week before the Aug. 8 vote; it remains unsolved.

The Supreme Court failed to hear a last-minute case that sought to delay the repeat presidential poll. 

Odinga called for demonstrations on election day, and clashes occurred between opposition supporters and police, but the vote went ahead. Turnout, predictably, was low in areas that had supported him. And of course Kenyatta “won.”

Nic Cheeseman, a professor of African politics at the University of Birmingham, said Kenya was facing a “really dangerous situation” with few solutions.

When it comes to Kenya, a cynic might be inclined to ask: if elections are the answer, what is the question?

Human Rights Violations Increase in Zimbabwe

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Pioneer Journal

 

At the age of 93 Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president, has announced that he will lead his ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) in elections next year.

He would be 99 should he win and complete a five-year term. 

Millions of people in his long-suffering country must shudder at the thought.

Two recently published books, Kingdom, Power, Glory: Mugabe, Zanu and the Quest for Supremacy, 1960–87, by Stuart Doran; and The Struggle Continues: 50 Years of Tyranny in Zimbabwe, by David Coltart, describe the culture of violence and corruption that Mugabe has fostered since he gained power, and which is now deeply embedded among the ruling elite.

They have become accustomed to using methods of violence as a matter of routine and are able to act with impunity.

Corruption is found at every level. No road is built, no political or official appointment made, without opportunity to profit.

Ordinary Zimbabweans face shortages from electricity to water to fuel. Banks ration cash withdrawals. Poor service delivery and unemployment add to the despair. 

Economic growth is tepid, projected to slip to just 0.8 per cent in 2018. More than four million people – one-quarter of the population-- are in need of food aid. Another third have fled the country.

Yet the president and his family have money to burn. His wife Grace’s recent purchases include a $5 million mansion in South Africa and a Rolls-Royce. Her son from an earlier marriage, Russell Goreraza, bought two Rolls Royces and air-freighted them to Zimbabwe.

Just to be on the safe side, she and her sons have also established homes in Dubai, and also own real estate in Hong Kong.

The 52-year-old Grace, who was awarded a doctorate after only two months at the University of Zimbabwe, is secretary of Zanu-PF’s Women’s League and there is speculation that she might try to eventually succeed her husband. She is supported by a ZAPU-PF faction by the name of Generation 40.

Her main rival would be Vice-president Emmerson Mnangagwa, who leads a faction calling itself Team Lacoste.

How did everything go so wrong?

The British government formally granted independence to Zimbabwe on April 18, 1980 and Robert Mugabe became its head. He had been the most prominent leader of the1972-80 war of independence against the white minority that ruled what had been Rhodesia. 

Mugabe indicated that he was committed to a process of national reconciliation and reconstruction as well as moderate socio-economic change. These fine words, though, would soon prove empty.

Mugabe’s ZANU movement represented the Shona people, some 75 per cent of the population, while rival Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) was the political home of the minority Ndebele people, about 19 per cent and concentrated in the western part of the country.

Although both groups had united to defeat the white Rhodesian regime, they became rivals after independence, with ZANU soon seizing total control. 

Nkomo’s supporters in Matabeleland were brutally repressed in a campaign of mass murder, torture, arson, rape and beatings. About 20,000 were murdered by Mugabe=s notorious counterinsurgency unit, the Fifth Brigade, trained by North Korea. 

Nkomo finally surrendered politically and the parties formally merged in December 1989.

Mugabe’s ruinous agricultural policies, which involved seizing established farms and distributing them to political cronies, meant that by October 2003, half of Zimbabwe’s population was considered “food-insecure.” 

He also distributed state-owned grain only to his political followers and withheld it from supporters of a new opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), led by Morgan Tsvangirai.

The government’s urban slum demolition drive in 2005, which destroyed the homes of some 700,000 people, drew more international condemnation. 

The president said it was an effort to boost law and order and development; critics accused him of destroying slums housing opposition supporters.

Mugabe has rigged elections, hamstrung the independent press and left his country bankrupt and impoverished. The economy has been reduced to 1953 performance levels. Life expectancy, at 55 years, is one of the lowest in the world.

For its first decades as a sovereign state, Zimbabwe was a prosperous country by African standards. How distant that all seems now.

Austrian Election Strengthens Right Wing Parties

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Legislative elections in Austria Oct. 15 saw right-wing parties make gains, continuing a trend seen last month in neighbouring Germany.

Austria uses a proportional representation voting system to elect members of the country’s 183- seat National Council.

Sebastian Kurz’s centre-right Austrian People’s Party (OVP) emerged as the winner, with more than 31.4 per cent of the vote, good for 61 seats, while the far-right Freedom Party (FPO), led by Heinz-Christian Strache, took second place, with 27.4 per cent and 53 seats.

On the other hand, incumbent Chancellor Christian Kern, whose centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPO) came first four years ago, saw his party decline to 26.7 per cent of the vote and 52 seats, their worst showing in modern Austrian history.

As has been the case in many other countries these days, there was a stark polarization between urban left-leaning Vienna and the more conservative rural parts of Austria. The capital, whose metro area houses nearly a third of the country’s population, is at odds with its hinterland.

While the OVP emerged with the most seats, the FPO was the big winner, overtaking the Social Democrats and dictating the course of the election, with a campaign that centred largely around immigration and fears of radical Islam. 

Founded in 1956, the FPO emerged from the short-lived Federation of Independents, launched after the Second World War by former Nazis who had been stripped of their voting rights.

The FPO platform included the denial to migrants of access to welfare payments. They also advocated closer relations with the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, the so-called Visegrad group of European nations that tend to be more nationalistic than other European Union countries.

Those countries have refused migrant quotas approved by a western-dominated majority of EU member states. They also reject proposed reforms that would transfer more power from national governments to Brussels institutions. The FPO also wants a more decentralized EU. 

Strache intimated that Hungarian-American financier George Soros, a bête noir for European nationalists, is the shadowy instigator behind the refugee crisis and sanctions against Russia.

In the campaign, Kurz was forced to shift his People’s Party closer to the hard-line anti-immigration stance pushed by the FPO. 

He touted his role in the spring 2016 decision to close Austrian borders to new arrivals, and also emphasized his efforts to pass Austria’s recent so-called burqa ban.

Many Austrians fear that the roughly 90,000 refugees in the country of 8.4 million from 2015 to 2016 are draining its resources, Kurz said.

The FPO was able to criticize the cozy relationship between the two other parties, who have governed Austria in a grand coalition for the last decade, denouncing their control of public life. 

Opposition to the two-party duopoly attracted voters who objected to this “red-black elite,” as they called it, referring to the social SPO and Christian Democratic OVP, respectively.

Last year the FPO narrowly missed out on capturing Austria’s presidency for the first time, with its candidate Norbert Hofer defeated in the final round after a dramatic showdown with Green Party candidate Alexander Van der Bellen. 

In this parliamentary election, however, the Greens failed to meet the four per cent threshold needed to win seats and were wiped out. 

Should the FPO enter government, as seems certain, Hofer would most likely become Austria’s foreign minister. Strache declared that the result showed that his party had “arrived at the centre of society.”

Julia Ortner, a political commentator for the newspaper Vorarlberger Nachrichten, said that “after what we have experienced elsewhere in Europe, especially in Hungary and even in the United States,” allowing right-wing parties into government “is no longer a taboo.”

The Permanence of Borders

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Humans draw lines that divide the world into specific places, territories, and categories; this has been an essential component of activity for millennia. 

Beginning as fuzzy zones between tribal groups, boundaries became more clearly defined with the development of states.

Following Europe’s wars of religion during the sixteenth century culminating in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, frontiers across Europe morphed into fairly rigid lines. 

This model of organizing political space was subsequently exported to the rest of the world through European colonial conquest, most prominently during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

By the late nineteenth century, the extent of a nation’s territory had become an index of its power, with overseas colonial possessions augmenting prestige and wealth and redefining territoriality.

Without frontiers, there can be no exercise of sovereignty -- the authority and control over a distinct territory and its corresponding population and resources. Territorial boundaries provide a framework for organizing political and economic life.

National borders create imagined communities, which are limited by boundaries and are where people are aware of their sovereignty within finite frontiers. 

Harvard historian Charles S. Maier has explored the evolution of territorial organization as a worldwide practice of human societies. His 2016 book Once Within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth and Belonging Since 1500, tracks the changes that have defined territories over five centuries and draws attention to ideas and technologies that contribute to territoriality’s remarkable resilience.

At a time when the technologies of globalization are eroding barriers to communication, transportation, and trade, the interdependence of economies and the emergence of cyberspace seem to have reduced the salience of physical territorial control and weakened traditional notions of sovereignty and citizenship, he notes. 

But if Maier is correct, the rise of cross-border processes and institutions, often defined as part of “globalization,” may challenge established notions of territorial sovereignty, but they are far from transcending them. 

Territory will continue to claim an important place in the human imagination. “People still want frontiers. There’s a certain comfort in them,” he suggested in a January interview with the Harvard Gazette. They remain a foundation for statehood, power and identity.

“I thought that borders were coming down all over, that we were moving toward a borderless world. 

The fall of the Berlin Wall remained a vivid memory. Going into this project, I assumed territory didn’t matter as much as it had earlier. Well, that was innocence. Now I think that if borders are fading, they’re fading slowly and with a lot of pushback.”

In fact states throughout the world are enhancing their border security in an effort to better manage the flows into and out of their territories. Good fences may not make good neighbours, but they at least keep them from causing trouble.

When the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, there were 16 border fences around the world. Today, there are at least 65 either completed or under construction.

Examples include the United States constructing hundreds of miles of fencing along the Mexican border (and this predates Donald Trump’s intention to build a wall), and India fencing its 4,000-kilometre border with Bangladesh and 2,900-kilometre border with Pakistan. 

Pakistan has built fences along sections of the Afghanistan border, while Iran strengthened its 700-kilomtre border with Pakistan. 

Israel has constructed a 760-kilometre security barrier around many Palestinian areas in the West Bank, while shorter fences have been built along Israel’s borders with Gaza and Egypt. 

More recently, Hungary erected a border fence with Serbia to prevent migrants from crossing into the country. Macedonia decided to block the border with Greece, and Bulgaria with Turkey, for the same reason.

Kenya, Saudi Arabia and Turkey constructed border fences in a bid to keep out jihadist groups next door in Somalia, Iraq and Syria, respectively.

Along the Moroccan border with Western Sahara a sand wall called the “Berm,” is surrounded by mines to stop Polisario Front fighters from crossing. It is second in length only to the Great Wall of China, and has kept families separated for decades.

Numerous other countries, including China, Greece, Kuwait, Spain, Thailand, Uzbekistan, and the United Arab Emirates, launched new fence construction projects over the past decade.

It isn’t the borderless world of the utopian dreamers just yet. As long as there are sovereign states, there will be borders, even if “soft” ones.

The British Empire Was an Unwieldy Creation

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

 

It is hard for 21^st century people to comprehend a geographic institution so huge and long-lasting that at one time it was assumed that the sun would never set upon it.

Today, the sun can’t even find it – but its legacy, in terms of language, laws, international organizations, and models of governance, are with us still.

At its height, the British Empire, which lasted half a millennium, spanned the world, from the Arctic shores of northern Canada and the deserts of Australia to the humid tropics of India and the beaches of Fiji. A quarter of the globe was coloured pink on maps.

By 1921, it contained a population of some 460 million people, then approximately one-quarter of the world's population. It covered more than 35 million square kilometres.

The empire was decentralized, as there had never been a master plan of conquest. It wasn’t governed from an imperial centre, as others, like the French or Spanish ones, were.

Much of it was created piecemeal, and happenstance and chance were often involved in the absorption of all of the bodies of land on every continent and the numerous islands throughout all the world’s oceans that eventually comprised the empire.

Britain frequently found itself unintentionally the owner of new territories through the actions of individuals whose policies had either not been thought through in London or even sanctioned. 

Indeed, much of its most important possession, India, was initially the property of a private enterprise, the East India Company, which expanded its holdings on the subcontinent over the decades. Other regions, too, were originally owned by firms such as the Hudson’s Bay Company and the British South Africa Company.  

“The British Empire was nothing more than a series of improvisations conducted by men who shared a common culture but often had very different ideas about government and administration,” concludes Kwasi Kwarteng in his 2011 book Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World. “There is very little unifying ideology in the story of Britain’s empire.” 

Kwarteng agrees that it was created, as the famous phrase has it, “in a fit of absence of mind.”

Bernard Porter, in British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t, and Empire Ways: Aspects of British Imperialism, both published in 2016, concurs with this assessment. 

He maintains that Britain was “a less imperial society than is often assumed.” The empire was neither monolithic nor guided by an overarching vision that defined its function and objectives. 

British possessions had little in common with each other beyond the fact that the Union Jack flew over them.

This pragmatic approach enabled powerful colonial officials, often described as “men on the spot,” to direct policy in each jurisdiction with little supervision from London. 

Such individualistic behaviour meant that procedures developed over the years by one governor could simply be reversed as a new one took his place. They were elitists who sought to wield power without much oversight.

Nonetheless, while the empire-building enterprise involved colonial settlement, missionary activity, and administration, the primary goal was usually to make huge amounts of money through trade. 

Profits from all these far-flung outposts, especially India, ultimately found their way back to enrich the centre.

Most shameful of all was the purchase and sale of people. More than three million Africans were transported across the Atlantic to toil in Britain’s American, Caribbean and Indian Ocean colonies for more than two centuries.

Slavery on an industrial scale was a major source of the wealth, based upon the West Indies sugar trade and cotton crop in North America was based. Slavery was finally abolished in Britain's colonies in 1833.

The empire began to be wound down not long after the Second World War; Britain could no longer sustain it. And while decolonization was sometimes a brutal affair, as in Aden, Cyprus or Kenya, it was mostly a fairly orderly process. 

But in places with deep-seated religious rivalries, such as India and Palestine, both destined to be partitioned, the British simply lost control.

Even toward the end of empire mainstream opinion in Britain retained an unshakable confidence in the endurance of its values and centrality to world affairs.

Perhaps this was understandable. After so many centuries as the world’s pre-eminent nation, it took a long time for the British to come to terms with the fact that they were no longer a superpower.

The Dismal Beginnings of the Congo State

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Some nine decades ago, at the height of European imperialism in Africa, one colony, though ostensibly a “free state,” was so brutally managed that a European government had to wrest control from its ruler, who treated it as a personal possession.

The country known as the Congo Free State, until it became the Belgian Congo in 1908, emerged out of a treaty promulgated by the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, attended by 14 countries. 

Now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo, it gained its independence in 1960, but few countries in the world have had such a tragic past – nor are things much better today.

In 1876 King Leopold II of Belgium had hired the American explorer Henry Morton Stanley to explore and colonize the Congo River basin of equatorial Africa. 

His claims to the Congo, which emerged out of the scientific and philanthropic activities of the Association Internationale du Congo, would lead to a “scramble for Africa” especially amongst France, Germany, Great Britain and Portugal, among those represented at the conference.

By the mid-19th century, European nations such as Great Britain, France, and Germany had begun looking to Africa for natural resources for their growing industrial sectors as well as a potential market for the goods these factories produced. 

Neither the Berlin Conference itself nor the framework for future negotiations provided any say for the peoples of Africa over the partitioning of their homelands. It was a conference purporting to determine the future of Africa in which no Africans were involved.

At this major gathering to create an orderly division of European spheres of influence in Africa, King Leopold would convince the delegates that common trade in Africa was in the best interests of them all.

Though the centre of Africa was supposed to be internationalised, it eventually became Belgian, as the conference decisions would lead to the recognition of King Leopold’s fledgling Congo Free State, with dire consequences for its population.

 

It was not a colony as such, as there was no metropolitan power to which it was responsible; nor was it a state formed, like Liberia, as a consequence of settlement. It retained the form of a private “philanthropic” initiative ostensibly advancing the common interests of the peoples of Africa and Europe.

Leopold had cultivated the notion that he wished to sponsor a self-westernising native confederation. His so-called Free State would become a convenient device which would allow the European powers to preserve access to the area without undertaking financial or political obligations – Leopold would take care of those – while persuading themselves that they were advancing the well-being of Africans.

In reality, he instituted one of Africa’s most brutal and exploitative colonial regimes, marked by violence, slavery and mass murder, as its inhabitants were literally worked to death, with perhaps as many as 10 million killed.

Forced labour was used to gather wild rubber, palm oil, and ivory. Resistance elicited swift and harsh responses from Leopold’s private army, the Force Publique, who were also known for cutting off the hands of the Congolese.  

In 1890, the author Joseph Conrad traveled on one of the first steamboats on the Congo River. He saw a colonial regime of appalling greed, violence and hypocrisy. In 1899, he transformed his notes about the journey into his novel Heart of Darkness.

Such public outcries finally forced the Belgian government to take the Congo over in 1908.

The Berlin Conference remapped Africa without considering cultural or linguistic borders, dividing the continent into some 50 different colonies. 

This new map was superimposed over the more than one thousand indigenous cultures and regions of Africa, including dozens in the Congo itself.

It is by any measure one of the world’s most dysfunctional states. Since 1997, various civil wars have resulted in some five million deaths.

A "Second Israel" in the Middle East?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

In the recent Kurdish referendum on independence, the citizens of the Kurdish autonomous region of northern Iraq, to no one’s surprise, voted overwhelmingly to create a sovereign state. The yes side gained almost 93 per cent of the vote.

In the run-up to the vote, opponents of the move tried to smear the Kurds by claiming that they were, in effect, in the pay of Israel.

The “proof?” A statement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:  “While Israel rejects terror in any form, it supports the legitimate efforts of the Kurdish people to attain a state of its own.”

Turkey and Iran, as well as the government in Baghdad, then began to spread false news.

“We will not allow the creation of a second Israel in the north of Iraq,” Iraqi Vice-President Nouri al-Maliki, a former prime minister, said at a meeting with U.S. Ambassador Douglas Silliman.

A number of Turkish media outlets claimed that Kurdish groups had entered into a secret deal with Israel to gain their independence by resettling Jews to the region.

They alleged that Mahmoud Barzani, president of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), agreed to welcome some 200,000 Israeli Jews of Kurdish origin. 

In exchange, Israel would reportedly back Barzani’s bid for Kurdish statehood in the upcoming referendum. Another Turkish paper contended that Barzani is Jewish and comes from a long line of Kurdish rabbis. “Turkey, don’t be asleep!” one column warned.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency played a role in Iraqi Kurdistan’s independence vote.

Supporters of the ultra-nationalist Turkish Homeland Party protested outside the Israeli embassy in Ankara, claiming that Jerusalem was attempting to establish a “second Israel.”

Diliman Abdulkader, a Kurdish scholar and analyst of Middle East affairs, told Newsweek magazine that such attacks were designed to destroy Kurdish credibility in the region by associating them with Israel and playing on prejudices against Jews.

In Iran, Ali Akbar Velayati, a former foreign minister who now serves as foreign policy adviser to Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader, described Barzani as a fixer working for “Zionists” bent on causing the disintegration of Muslim states.

Major General Mohammad Hossein Baqeri, Chief of Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces, also denounced the referendum as a “plot” hatched by Israel and its allies. “The Zionist regime and the world arrogance” -- meaning the United States -- “are behind this,” he declared.

Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, chair of the Assembly of Experts, the body that selects the country’s Supreme Leader, asserted that Kurdistan’s bid for independence from Iraq is an attempt to “create another Israel” in the region.

And Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, a senior Iranian cleric, expressed the hope that Kurds would come to their senses and give up the Israeli plot.

In actual fact, the Kurds and Israelis do go back a long way as allies. The relationship dates back many decades, after the outbreak of the Kurdish rebellion in Iraq in the autumn of 1961 under Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani, father of the current president of the KRG.

However, these ties were abruptly stopped in March 1975 following the Algiers Accord between Iraq and Iran that put an end to the Kurdish rebellion. 

Tehran as part of the agreement agreed to suspend its aid to the Iraqi Kurds, and Israel did not wish to offend Iran, then an Israeli ally under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

But the 2003 war in Iraq and the establishment of a de facto Kurdish state reinvigorated ties between Israel and the KRG.

The referendum again reminds us of the injustice of a Middle East political order arbitrarily imposed by British and French colonial powers after 1918, one that had left the Kurds betrayed and without a state.