"We the people of the United Nations determined, to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war... to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights...
to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained."
Preamble to the Charter of the United Nations
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a British think-tank, released a report this week entitled Shared Responsibilities - A National Security Strategy for the United Kingdom. The central policy recommendation of the report was that Britain needs to rethink its role on the world stage, to move away from the idea of Britain as a “mini me” United States and towards closer strategic military cooperation with its European allies. The report does not call for Britain to abandon its “special relationship” with the US, nor does it call for European defence and security cooperation as an alternative to NATO, rather it is of the view that Britain and Europe could play a more effective role in the alliance and on the world stage by working better together. For a very great many reasons, this analysis is absolutely spot on.
In 1962, then US Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously remarked that “Great Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role”. Almost half a century later, Britain resolutely maintains its shoulder-to-shoulder relationship with the United States as the most effective method of enhancing its global influence, though its European policy has been decidely more mixed. British foreign policy towards Europe has, at times, closer resembled a scene from Yes, Minister, in which Britain continues its centuries old European policy of divide and weaken on the continent, as opposed to treating its liberal-democratic European partners with the respect they deserve.
In assessing the direction any country’s foreign policy should take, it is necessary to take a more philosophical approach, grounded in historical lessons and current realities, than perhaps some people do. Those who oppose closer European security integration need to ask themselves why.
“The Global Village” is an apposite simile to describe how technology, the era of instantaneous communications and the ever closer economic integration of states have contracted the world to the point that social and commerical relations can be had with someone on the other side of the earth as easily as if they lived in the same village. No nation is an island any longer, and those that try to be, such as North Korea and Iran, quickly discover that there’s nothing splendid about isolationism. Yet every coin has two sides, and just as the benefits of living in a global village are evident, so too the dangers posed by far away countries of which we hitherto knew nothing are also much more real than they used to be. In the 21st century, regional conflicts are much more likely to produce global shockwaves. Instability in Iran can produce a spike in global oil prices; conflict in Africa leads to hundreds of thousands of refugess fleeing to the West for asylum; the US housing market sneezes, and the global economy catches a very severe cold.
The bad news, given all this, is that the world is becoming a less, as opposed to a more secure and stable place. Global history since the end of the Second World War has given meaningful weight to the idea, first put forward by Immanuel Kant in his 1795 essay Perpetual Peace, though subsequently refined and modified, that democracy is much the most stable and benign form of government. Unfortunately, however, according to data from Freedom House, the number of liberal democracies in the world stands at just 89, a mere 46 per cent of the world’s 183 countries. Worse is the fact that global freedom suffered its third year of decline in 2008, and two of the countries named as heading in the wrong direction fastest, China and Russia, are also two of the world’s most influential, nuclear armed states, both with permanent, veto-wielding seats on the United Nations Security Council.
The decline of the West, relative to emerging nations is not yet terminal, but it is happening. If the United Kingdom wants to play its part in remaining influential on the world stage and promoting liberal democracy abroad, then it needs to realise that liberal democracies work best together. For all their historic differences with Europe, the British need to realise that closer economic, political and military integration is a guarantee, not a threat to their cherished way of life. In Britain, there is in some quarters an almost paranoid phobia of closer European integration as somehow a threat to everything honest, freedom-loving Britons hold dear. But let’s sit back for a moment and reflect on what exactly that way of life that we hold so dear actually is. Surely tolerance, freedom of speech and association, freedom of the press, and a legally enshrined respect for fundamental human rights are close to the top of the list. Working with, as opposed to competing with Europe will actually strengthen all these things. The EEC/EC/EU has proved itself to be hugely effective at maintaining peace amongst democracies within its borders, and encouraging liberal democratic reforms in those states outside the union that desperately want in. The likelihood of Europe threatening those other great British traditions, cricket on the green, warm ale and the freedom to complain about the weather, is unlikely to say the least. The greatest threat Europe poses to the British way of life is a sustained challenge to the imperial system of weights and measures.
If Britain wants to find genuine challenges to its traditional way of life, it needs to look beyond Europe’s borders, towards China, Russia, rogue states such as Iran and North Korea and trans-national terrorist organisations. In attempting to tackle all of these challenges, Britain will achieve far more by working with the EU, and other like-minded countries generally, than by pursuing, or even wishing to maintain the ability to pursue, a unilateralist foreign policy.
On the issue of combating terrorist activity it should be made clear from the outset that this is, overall a much bigger and more multifaceted problem than can be dealt with here. However, on a purely strategic level, it should be clear that multilateral cooperation is far more effective than unilateral action. Terrorists do not respect state borders, and countries serious about combatting terrorist activity need to be committed to cooperation on all levels, right from intelligence sharing up to coordinated military action. The reluctance of the Pakistani government to cooperate more fully with NATO in its efforts to combat the Taliban operating in the Hindu Kush has been greatly to the detriment of both, and Pakistan’s recent and well documented volte-face on this issue is a clear, if belated, realisation of this fact.
On the issue of rogue states such as Iran and North Korea, it is also the case that the United Kingdom cannot operate alone, and in fairness, it does not try to do so. As regards North Korea, there is little that anyone can do to alter the course of that regime, short of somehow persuading China that supporting a highly unstable, poverty-stricken, nuclear armed totalitarian dictatorship on its border is not in its best interests, even if doing so does spite the West. What influence can be had with China is most certainly better projected through the EU as a whole. Likewise on Iran, it is the case that the EU already seeks to coordinate its efforts, though it does not do so well enough. Iran is more dependent on the EU, even with all the existing sanctions, for imports than any single country, including China. If Europe were to use this influence in a bolder, and perhaps more creative manner, then it could wield greater influence in Tehran than it does at present.
On the issue of Russia and China, the challenges are multifaceted, and stem not only from their recent growth in wealth and power, but also from the increased ambition to exert influence abroad that generally accompanies such growth. None of this would be a problem, but for the fact that neither Russia nor China could be counted amongst countries with any meaningful respect for civil liberties and other democratic norms.
China has never made much of a pretence about the repressive nature of its regime. Russia, by contrast, puts up the pretence of being a democracy, whilst in actuality appears to be sliding backwards. In 2005, Freedom House declared Russia “Not Free”, down from “Partly Free”, citing the virtual elimination of opposition parties in the county, and the ever-tighter grip of the executive’s hold on power. The stage-managed 2008 presidential election, which the OSCE went so far as to boycott, and the fact that Russia still ranks as one of the most lethal countries in the world for journalists to operate in, does little to convince skeptics that Freedom House was mistaken in its judgement.
In and of itself this is bad enogugh, but as just mentioned, what is worse is that both countries are currently in the process of seeking to align themselves as alternatives to the United States as poles of global influence. Russia’s recent hosting of the BRIC conference (Brazil, Russia, India and China) in Yekaterinberg, though failing to agree on much, nonetheless signified an overt desire to look for alternatives to the current, Western-led global economic status-quo. Likewise, President Medvedev was candid in his declaration of Russian intent to gain greater influence in Africa, during his visit to the continent that almost immediately followed the BRIC conference. China, likewise, has been increasing its influence in Africa for a number of years, and its booming economy, perhaps most vividly demonstrated by the fact that as a January 2009, it holds a staggering 24 per cent of US public debt, make it a country the West can no longer ignore.
Where this becomes a problem is that both countries, if not actively promoting their political systems abroad, are becoming increasingly assertive in their opposition to Western efforts to promote liberal democratic progress in the developing world. Russia has been traumatised by the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the seemingly unstoppable gravitation of former Soviet republics Westward, first into NATO, and then, in many cases, into the European Union itself. Its invasion of Georgia in August last year, and the de facto annexation of the semi-autonomous regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, sent a clear message that Russia is no longer willing to tolerate the perpetual Westernisation of what it sees as its neighbourhood. Likewise, Russia has proved itsef increasingly willing to use its huge gas and oil reserves as a political weapon, particularly against Ukraine since its so-called “Orange Revolution” of 2004-05.
China, meanwhile, in seeking to exert its economic reach in the developing world, has operated on a strict policy of political non-interference in the states with which it seeks to trade, however unsavoury the regime. Nowhere has this policy been more in evidence than in Sudan, 80 per cent of whose exports go to China, and 85 per cent of those in the form of fuel and raw materials that China’s booming economy badly needs. The consequence of this live and let buy mode of foreign policy, which China regularly enforces by way of its veto power on the UN Security Council, is that the genocidal regime of Omar al-Bashir is able to cling to power. Both countries, indeed, regularly use the threat of their vetoes on the UN Security Council to water down meaningful resolutions that seek to promote democratic reforms and the protection of human rights in the developing world. As the humanitarian catastrophe began to unfold in Sri Lanka in April, China and Russia prevented even the discussion of the issue in a proposed resolution put forward by France, claiming it was a strictly internal matter.
Where does all of this leave Britain? On all of these issues, the United Kingdom will have more influence working with Europe than competing with it. Some people may well ask at this point, “Why should we care what happens abroad? How other countries govern themselves is none of our business, and the Iraq war has shown us the danger of foreign meddling.” Yet even if an altruistic concern for universal human rights does not sway such people, the simple equation, democracy equals peace equals prosperity, should. The fact is that efforts at democratic promotion are of proven economic benefit both to the promoters and those on the receiving end. Data from the Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Peace Index puts figures on a fact that most people know to be true merely from the benefit of their own observations, namely that democracies are more peaceful than other forms of government, and that peace provides greater prosperity than conflict. Measuring the economic benefits of conflict against the economic benefits of peace, the Index has calculated that global conflict costs the world $7.2 trillion more than it generates. Add to this the fact that 19 of the 20 most peaceful countries in the world are democracies, the vast majority of those being amongst the world’s most prosperous nations, and the link between democratic forms of government and economic prosperity becomes evident.
Prosperous and stable states provide countries such as the United Kingdom with greater trading opportunities whilst simultanously reducing the vast economic and increasingly social burden of foreign development assistance, and absorbing refugees and asylum seakers from failed or conflict-ridden states. A much more robust commitment to the promotion of democracy in the developing world should not be seen as unrealistic idealism, but as the central plank of a pragmatic foreign policy.
In seeking such promotion, the EU is ideally placed. It posesses the foreign policy weapon to beat all others in the 21st century global village, one that it has already used to great effect in its eastern neighbourhood: Money. The EU accounts for a larger share of world trade, for both imports and exports, than any country, and it also has the largest economy on the planet bar none. Money talks, as the saying goes, and it has been the desire to get a larger slice of that prosperity that has seen so many ex-Soviet-bloc countries bending over backwards to implement the kind of civil and democratic reforms that would almost certainly not have been so quickly forthcoming had the economic incentives of EU membership not been in place. The EU needs to use all of the economic carrots at its disposal to encourage the developing world of the merits of democratic reforms, whilst concomitantly making the case that democracy is in the long term economic interests of such countries anyway. Unfortunately, Western efforts to promote democracy and the rule of law abroad are still seen by many in the developing world as thinly disguised attempts at neo-colonialism. Robert Mugabe has tried to fool his citizens with this mantra for many years, and the accusations currently being made by the Iranian government against the United Kingdom are clearly born of a similar objective. The EU, and the West in general, needs to learn to make the case far better that democracy is as much a rational pragmatic choice as it is an ideology.
It cannot be emphasised enough that a vigorous and unified commitment to the promotion of democracy abroad should be at the very top of the foreign policy agendas of all liberal democracies everywhere. The greater the number of countries that share our value systems, the fewer the threats we have to face. As the Prussian soldier and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously observerd: “War is just politics by another means”. It is also the most costly form of politics, and more often than not, it is not a long term solution to the divisions that provoked the conflict in the first place. Better by far, if possible, is to use all the means at your disposal to persuade the opposing side of the benefits of your point of view, thus negating the need for conflict altogether. This will surely come as a statement of the blindingly obvious, and yet amazingly, so much of our foreign policy at present appears to be conducted without much consideration for what should be a guiding principle. Britain, like most other European countries, seems to spend most of its time seeking specific resolutions to localised issues, with little appetite for an overarching strategy of fundamental reform that could and should guide all such efforts. Britain needs to increase the ambition of its foreign policy efforts in this regard, and the obvious vehicle through which this might be achieved is of course the European Union.
In the interim period, Britain needs to accept that on a military and strategic level, Britannia now needs Europe if it wishes to rule the waves. This is not, as stated at the outset, to suggest that Europe should develop a military strategy that seeks to divorce itself from NATO. Rather, Europe must establish itself as a stronger and more viable partner of the alliance than it is at present. Far too many Britons who oppose what they see as a European “challenge” to NATO seem to equate, whether they realise it or not, a wholehearted commitment to the alliance with a total dependence upon the United States for its continued existence. NATO would be a far stronger entity than it is at present if European states worked harder at integrating their military systems and developing common foreign policy objectives that could more easily become those of the alliance.
The rise of China, and to a lesser extent the re-emergence of Russia, are demonstrations of the fact, already touched upon, that in the 21st century, the United States will not remain the unchallenged locus of global influence. The United Kingdom has not enjoyed such a position since the end of the 19th century. Yet in today’s world, neither Britain nor the United States needs to seek global influence independent of any other country. Liberal democracies can and should work more closely together to collectively enhance their global influence on a permanent basis. Geo-politically speaking, the countries of the European Union are particularly well placed to effect such an integration. Britain, in particular, needs to realise that in the 21st century global players work best in teams.
Filed under: Africa, Home — Tags: AU, Somalia, UN — by George on 19 June 2009 at 10:32 am
Picture the scene. Unable to tolerate his authoritarian tendencies any longer, Luxembourgers rise up and overthrow Jean-Claude Juncker, execute Grand Duke Henri and seek to implement a representative people’s government. Competing interests, factional rivalries and negative external interference from Belgium and the Netherlands, who are themselves in an ill-disguised state of unofficial war, thwart the efforts of the new government to restore stability. In the abscence of proper jobs and security, Luxembourgers resort to crime and violence to sustain themselves and their families. Lured by offers of money, food, and a measure of personal security, Luxembourgers join the militias of the highest bidder, whilst others head to see, ravaging German and French fishing fleets in ever more brazen acts of piracy.=The international community, led by the United Nations Security Council, expresses its “deep concern”, “calls upon” all parties to reject the use of violence and work for a sustainable solution and agrees that the best thing would be to do very little other than issue reports and strong words, if indeed, such words could be considered strong.
This scenario is so unlikely as to rightly appear absurd. There would be massive injections of international aid, intervention on a massive scale to guarantee as swift a return to normality as is humanly possible, whilst the international courts would swing into action to prosecute the worst offenders.
Yet almost two decades after the ousting of the repressive regime of Siyad Barre in 1991, the international community has failed comprehensively to assist a return to normality in Somalia. What is it, exactly, that makes Somalis less worthy of our efforts and attention? Skeptics of international action in Somalia will doubtless cite the failed UN and US-led interventions between 1992-1995, and more recently the Ethiopian invasion in 2006, as evidence that international intervention will only serve to inflame an already dire situation in the world’s most comprehensively failed state. In his most recent report on the situation in Somalia, the UN’s Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned that the UN peacekeeping force mooted by Security Council resolution 1863 could have precisely that effect if not handled properly.
In spite of this, skeptics must realise that the situation on the ground at present does not lend itself well to parallels with past interventions, and if international action is not taken in Somalia quickly, the political progress brought about through the already faltering Djibouti agreement will be undone completely. The incumbent Transitional Federal Government (TFG), led by Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed since January, is an unusually broad coalition of old enemies and current friends, that seeks to represent all of the country’s main clans and represent some form of compromise on questions of ideology and religion. The appointment of Sheikh Sharif as president is a good example. Formerly head of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), the rebel Islamist movement that briefly took power before being ousted by an Ethiopian invasion in 2006, he is nonetheless seen as a reformer on the more liberal Islamic wing. However, any progress the government might have hoped to make is now being dangerously threatened by advances by Al-Shabaab, the main Ismalist opposition in the country.
One senior source in the Somali government said recently that in his view, the military capabilities of the TFG and the militants were roughly equal. This does not bode well for a quick end to the fighting. The TFG’s current strategy of trying to undermine the hardline Al-Shabaab leadership by trying to coax away the younger, perhaps more mercenary elements in the movement, is almost certainly being nullified by the influx of foreign militants to swell Al-Shabaab’s ranks.
The only international military presence for the TFG to rely on at present is AMISOM, the African Union Mission in Somalia. AMISOM is, however, both undermanned and under-resourced. Only two countries, Uganda and Burundi, have so far committed forces to the mission, and two and a half years after its creation, the force is barely at 50 per cent of its mandated strength. What forces there are are short of armoured personnel carriers, body ar mour and other vital equipment, and Burundi recently declared that it would not contribute any further forces to the mission until such time as the international community agrees to do more. In addition, its mandate is too weak to allow it to effectively combat militants.
As Ban Ki-moon re-emphasised in his recent report, the key to a sustainable solution in Somalia is capacity building, that is, strengthening the internal institutions of Somalia to enable them to independently maintain a handle on the situation rather than externally imposing a solution that is ultimately unsustainable. However 18 years of almost uninterrupted chaos has clearly demonstrated that the Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG) is unable to resolve its problems alone. Only if it is given the space and the security to strengthen its position will the TFG have a realistic chance of succeeding, and that space and security can only be provided by a properly manned and resourced international peacekeeping force.
On 18 August last year, Somalia’s Joint Security Committee (JSC) called for the deployment of UN peacekeepers, a call that was repeated on 10 December by the African Union, who would like to see the UN assume responsibility in place of AMISOM. Few people on the ground in Somalia are in any doubt that the TFG needs real support if it is to succeed. The recent assissination of Somalia’s Security Minister, Omar Hashi Aden, by a suicide bomb is a bitterly ironic proof of the TFG’s inability to provide proper security, even in the one third of the country it currently controls. The UN refugee agency’s representative to Somalia, Guillermo Bettocchi, said on Wednesday the recent bout of bloodletting in the country was the “worst ever” in nearly two decades of chaos.
Yet in spite of this, there is good evidence that the militants enjoy but little support amongst the majority of Somalis. Contrary to the worst fears of some observers, Al-Shabaab did not overrun the country following the withdrawal of Ethiopian forces in January, and clan militias opposed to the group’s radicalism have plugged the gaps in many areas. Militants have endeared themselves still less to the country’s Sufi element with their desecration of Sufi graves in the south of the country as “idolotrous”. In his March report, Ban Ki-moon concurred with the view that Al-Shabaab do not enjoy the support of most Somalis. Indeed, the motivation for most Somalis to take up arms appears not to be religious fervour but money. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than with the country’s piracy problem. Pirates who have given interviews freely admit they are in it for the money, and perhaps also the women. Payouts can sometimes be in the tens of thousands of dollars, and ransom demands often exceed $1 million, huge sums in a country where per capita GDP is just $600. Similar motivations seem to drive many of the country’s land based militants.
One does not need to be familiar with Thomas Hobbes to know that if the state cannot provide protection and the rule of law, then a people will become a law unto themselves to ensure their own protection. Until the TFG is able to provide a genuinely stable environment, in which jobs can be both created and guaranteed, there is no hope for Somalia. Two decades of out and out civil war have demonstrated they cannot do this alone.
The international community has taken upon itself the Responsibility to Protect, the logic being that if a government was either unable or unwilling to protect its people, then the international community had a moral duty to intervene. There is no doubting the TFG’s willingness to protect its people, but its ability is quite another matter. The Security Council’s most recent resolution on Somalia has once again re-iterated the UN’s “intent” on deploying a UN peacekeeping force in Somalia to follow on from AMISOM. Unfortunately, the Secretary General has reported a fairly universal unwillingness amongst the international community to commit any soldiers to such a force at the present time. One wonders, giving this apathy, whether any proposed force would be given an adequate mandate even if it were to be established. It is almost as though the international community has become numbed to the chaos in Somalia, as though the fact that some 3.2 million Somalis, almost one third of the populaion, relying on aid does not really matter. Yet in the TFG, there is a government genuinely committed to restoring order, if only it were given the capability to do so. Few decisions of any international significance were ever borne of altruism alone. But the cost to international shipping of the piracy problem, and now the influx of foreign militants in to the country, threatening to turn it into an unregulated Islamist hotbed in north-east Africa, should convince the international community that meaningful action in Somalia is in everyone’s best interests.
Filed under: Home, Middle East — Tags: Iran — by George on 15 June 2009 at 11:40 pm
For centuries it has been a central tenet of political philosophy that no state can yield legitimate authority without at least the tacit consent of those over whom it seeks to govern. Current events are showing this is as true in Iran as it is anywhere else.
Since the revolution of 1979, Iran’s leaders seem to have believed that their mandate to govern was established through the popular, bottom-up protests that overthrew the shah and installed the current regime. Yet the recent protests, as big as anything seen since the revolution, seem to suggest that 30 years on, that mandate is starting to expire. Contrary to much popular opinion, Iranians are a people of sophistication and learning, with a long and distinguished lineage of poets, historians and others capable of seeing beyond the kind of zero-sum politics that characterises the incumbent regime.
Ironically, perhaps, the fact that Iran is a democracy of sorts, in which people are given the chance to express whether or not they consent to the continuation of an incumbent’s mandate to govern, has only made matters worse for the ruling regime. Once you let a man taste a good thing, he will usually want more. The Iranian regime has made a catastrophic and potentially fatal mistake in believing that it could placate the masses with a cosmetic democracy, but continue on as though such a democracy did not actually exist.
Even if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did defeat his main rival, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, it seems exceedingly unlikely that he would have triumphed in quite such the comprehensive fashion official statistics claimed that he did, polling 62.6 per cent of the vote, given the contentiousness that has characterised so many of his policies. Reports in the international media, citing Iranian bloggers, claim that an unofficial leaks showed Mr Ahmadinejad polling just 13.6 per cent of the vote, behind not only Mr Mousavi, but also the liberal reformist Mehdi Karroubi. The BBC tonight broadcast allegations that Mr Mousavi had in fact been informed of his victory by the supreme council (the religious body ruled by Ayatollah Khamenei, which holds the real power in Iran) before later being informed that he was to remain silent.
Whether there is any truth to these claims is highly uncertain. What is certain is that the Iranian regime is attempting what may well turn out to be the impossible task of closing Pandora’s box. In the run-up to the election the regime belatedly attempted to impose some sort of control over the internet, clamping down on popular networking sites such as Facebook, widely seen as the preserve of liberal, anti-establishment youths who oppose the current regime. Following the announcement of Mr Ahmadinejad’s victory, protests in support of Mr Mousavi were announced to be illegal, though the sheer size of protests appears to have rendered the security response impotent for the time being.
As is the case almost everywhere in the world, the internet revolution in Iran is empowering people to circumnavigate the traditional top-down sources of information to obtain alternative points of view. It is also enabling them to better co-ordinate opposition to the ruling regime. No longer can governments simply impose their doctrines on peoples safe in the knowledge that no other view can realistically prevail, and if the Iranian regime is found to have perverted the outcome of this election, then it may yet pay the price.
The brutal conclusion to the quarter century long conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE has left a quarter of a million refugees and between 7,000-20,000 civilian dead in its wake. That the death toll varies to such a degree is testament to the Sri Lankan government’s abject failure to allow international aid agencies and the media access to the conflict zone, almost certainly for fear that to do so would hinder it in its zeal to finish the job.
Though reprehensible, the failure of the Sri Lankan government in this matter is not surprising, and though not necessarily forgivable, is at least understandable. The conflict between the government and the LTTE cost Sri Lanka the lives of tens of thousands of its citizens and several billion dollars of economic disruption. That the government would always seize the chance to terminate the conflict with both hands was wholly predictable.
The real failure in this saga was on the part of the United Nations to press the Sri Lankan government harder to allow the aid agencies and the press into the conflict zone, who together would almost certainly have succeeded in focusing the Sri Lankan government’s mind on the importance of minimising the collatoral civilian damage of the conflict.
Almost as bad has been the resolution passed by the ironically named United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in response to the conclusion of hostilities. Far from highlighting the civilian cost of the conflict, or criticising the Sri Lankan government’s exclusionary policy re international organisations, the resolution “Welcomes the conclusion of hostilities and the liberation by the Government of Sri Lanka of tens of thousands of its citizens that were kept by the LTTE against their will as hostages, as well as the efforts by the Government to ensure safety and security for all Sri Lankans and bringing permanent peace to the country.”
The roll call of nations that voted for this resolution included some with what could, at best, be called dubious human rights records, including China, Egypt, Russia and Saudi Arabia amongst others.
Casual observers of the UN may well ask how an organisation that pledges almost in the first sentence of its charter “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person”, can fail in this task quite as often as it does.
The truth is that at the heart of this organisation is a fundamental and perhaps even irreconcilable contradiction. On the one hand, the UN pledges to uphold human rights, but on the other to be a truly universal organisation that represents all nations and recognises the “sovereign equality of all its Members”. Unfortunately, the UN is and can only be as effective as its members wish to make it, and there are very many members of the UN, including two of the five permanent members of the Security Council, who do not possess governments committed to the maintenance of human rights in any meaningful sense of the word.
The composition of the Human Rights Council is a case in point. Predominantly made up of African and Middle Eastern countries with decidedly dubious track records on human rights protection, the UNHRC has been accused of “partisan posturing and regional divides” and failing to get on with actual protecting ordinary people from abuse by none other than UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon himself. Mr Ban is one of many to have criticised UNHRC members for voting more often with a view to protecting members’ interests than protecting human rights. The UNHRC was established in 2006 to replace the ineffectual and discredited Commission on Human Rights, though quite how Member States believed a change in the name would effect a change in conduct is hard to fathom. According to Freedom House, just 22 of the UNHRC’s 47 members can be called free countries.
The sad truth is that many UN Member States are staunchly opposed to the UN involving itself in human rights work that might highlight failings by a Member government because they fear that to do so would lead to greater pressure on them to show greater restraint toward their own dissident minorities. The problem of what to do to improve the situation seems almost insurmountable. Does the UN want to guarantee human rights, or to be a universally representative organisation that guarantees the soveriegn equality of all its members? It seemingly cannot do both.
One of the biggest problems confronting even those countries that are serious about human rights is the inevitability of power politics in any situation that involves one country putting pressure on another. This was historically the case during the Cold War, when Western countries, and in particular the United States, gave succour to often brutal dictatorships in order to prevent them from falling under the Soviet sphere of influence. Many have criticised India’s failure to do more in Sri Lanka in recent weeks, and New Delhi’s comparative silence might seem all the more surprising given the large number of ethnically Tamil Indians who live in the south of the country.
However, even putting aside recollections of India’s disastrous intervention in 1983, what also needs to be considered is the role of China in the region. China has been credited with supplying the Sri Lankan government with the arms it required to defeat the Tamil insurgency, and China’s desire to establish itself as a strategic entitity in the Indian Ocean is currently being facilitated by the construction of a $1 billion port in the Sri Lankan town of Hambantota. India cannot afford to push the Sri Lankan government too hard for fear of Sri Lanka turning away from India to China for strategic solidarity. It was China, aided by Russia, that blocked discussion of the Sri Lankan situation in the UN Security Council.
China, indeed, is the principle obstacle to the furtherance of human rights not just in Sri Lanka, but globally. It operates a strict policy of what could be termed “live and let buy”, trading with any and all of the world’s nations, asking no questions of their commitment to human rights, and doing everything it possibly can to prevent others from doing so. China’s relations with Sudan are a case in point. Wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity President al-Bashir may be, but that does not deter China from buying almost 80 per cent of Sudan’s exports. Without China’s willingness to provide the Sudanese regime with this economic prop, and without its obstructing the efforts of the Security Council to pass stronger resolutions on the Sudanese situation, considerable improvements in Sudan’s human rights record, if not outright regime change, might already have been effected.
Ultimately, where human rights are concerned, the economic strength of countries wishing either to effect or obstruct progress is what really counts. “Money talks” as the saying goes. It is no coincidence that the most frequently used weapon in the international community’s human rights armoury is the economic sanction.
This is why the West must seize the chance to effect meaningful change to the way the international community approaches the issue of human rights whilst it still can. With a combined GDP of more than $33 billion, the EU and the US alone account for more than half of the global economy of $62.3 trillion. Likewise, the EU and US together constitute more than 60 per cent of Sri Lanka’s export market. However, the seemingly unstoppable economic rise of China is reducing that ratio in both cases.
It can only be hoped that as China’s middle class increases in size, so in turn they will become less and less tolerant of their country’s human rights policy, both at home and abroad. Until then, however, those countries that are serious about human rights need to establish a human rights council that is separate from the United Nations, and that is able and willing to not only call human rights abuse by its name, but to authorise genuinely effective action as and when such abuse takes place. There is no pretending that this organisation would be a silver bullet. Sudan is one case in point, and North Korea another, that if a regime truly wishes to isolate itself and ruin the country’s economy in the process, then it will not shirk from doing so. So long as such regimes can find at least one strong ally such as China, they can very often hang on.
However, there are a great many other countries with regimes that are not quite so cavalier, and who may well respond to real pressure if effectively applied. At present, the approach of countries with a commitment to the furtherance of human rights is nowhere near coherant enough, and is still dominated by power politics. These countries still seek to present a united front through the vehicle of the UN, as the world body with the most international legitimacy. However, as has been demonstrated in Sri Lanka, the UN is all too often hamstringed by the truculence of members who do not share that commitment to human rights.
Countries that do hold that commitment should be willing to take a radical step and commit themselves to a human rights council that would put the maintenance of human rights above partisan considerations and whose decisions would be binding on all Member States. The Universal Declaration on Human Rights cannot continue to be an aspirational document devoid of any enforcement provisions. It should serve as the basis for this human rights council, and if its articles are deemed by the council to have been breeched by any country, then that should compel member states to take the action recommended by the council.
A government must exist solely for the purpose of serving the best interests of its people. That his fundamental human rights are protected is surely the highest earthly interest any man can have. Those governments that consistently fail to serve the best interests of their people must be made to pay the consequences. If the United Nations remains as the principle body through which nations with a respect for human rights seek to exert themselves, then that simply will not happen.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has begun his campaign for June’s presidential elections in typical style, calling Iran’s enemies “dogs” and exhorting his countrymen to stay the aggressive, isolationist course he has taken them down insisting “if you retreat, they attack. If you attack, they retreat.” The best possible attack the Iranian people could stage in June and the one that would be most likely to force the retreat of Iran’s “enemies”, would be to exercise the democratic rights Iranians still have and eject Mr Ahmadinejad from power. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a self-fulfilling prophecy, or rather, a self-fulfilling nightmare. He and others in the ultra conservative Iranian regime live in a perpetual siege mentality, convinced that all those around them seek nothing but their destruction. The policy and the oratory that this in turn perpetuates, mainly the relentless pursuit of nuclear capabilities, active support for Hezbollah and Hamas amongst others, and repeated calls for Israel’s destruction does nothing but add external pressure on Iran, in turn further convincing the regime that all the world is out to get them, and on it goes.
The possibility of successful external engagement with this regime is next to none. Only if the moderates and reformists in Iran can defy the Ayatollahs and vote in a president receptive to co-operation with the outside world can they hope to see the kind of foreign retreat that Mr Ahmadinejad and doubtless they themselves are looking for. This is by no means a wholly implausable possibility. Contrary to the images usually shown on Western televisions, of swarms of Iranians chanting death to America and death to Israel after Friday prayers, the majority of Iranians seek reconciliation with the West and others in the Middle East, as opposed to further confrontation. From reformers to conservatives, one of the latest reports on Iranian public opinion shows that more Iranians favour cooperation with other Middle Eastern countries than any other course, including seeing Iran the dominant power in the region. Likewise, over 60 per cent believe that it is possible to find common cultural ground with the West. Perhaps most revealing, however, is that more than 90 per cent of all Iranians wish to forego nuclear weapons. All of this is in very stark contrast with the public ravings of Ahmadinejad and it is also at odds with much popular Western opinion about ordinary Iranians.
The economic and political consequences of Ahmadinejad’s wretched isolationism are clearly taking their toll. Yet in spite of the aspirations of most Iranians for a rapprochement with the outside world, many remain highly suspicious of it. The Iranian government still enjoys the support of most Iranians, and the truth is that just as Ahmadinejad is bringing about his own worst fears through the policies he pursues, so Western policy towards Iran can also be its own worst enemy.
For some reason, strategists, politicians and diplomats on both sides seem either unwilling or unable to put themselves in the other man’s shoes. Neither the West nor Israel seems to take sufficient account of why Iran pursues the policies that it does, instead focusing exclusively on how to stop those policies from being realised. This is nowhere more evident than in the West’s approach to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Clearly, the ambition for nuclear capability is not an end in itself but a means to an end. In the eyes of the Iranian regime, nuclear capability equals greater security and greater regional influence. But security from what and influence why? It is precisely because the regime believes that all the world is out to get them that they are so desperate to acquire a nuclear bomb. The harder the West pushes Iran, and the louder Israel rattles the sabre, the more convinced becomes the regime of the need for a bomb to silence them. The current regime is beyond redemption, and Ahmadinejad’s latest utterances show that. However, that is not to say that the Iranian people themselves cannot still be won round. Yet to do this, both the West and Israel may need to radically rethink their strategy towards Iran. It is here that Aesop’s fable of the sun and the wind comes to mind: the harder you push another to do something they do not want to do, the harder they will resist, particularly if they feel threatened.
This is especially true of Israel. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported yesterday that one in four Israelis would consider leaving the country if Iran got the bomb, reflecting growing concern that Iran’s nuclear ambitions may soon be realised. Israel has made it clear that it cannot and will not tolerate such a thing coming to pass, and has warned both Iran and the international community, in not quite so many words, that it will not hesitate to bomb Irananian nuclear facilities if the international community and the IAEA cannot convince the regime to give up its nuclear ambitions peacefully. With the election of Likud right-winger Binyamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister in March, the chance of a tempered Israeli policy towards Iran is smaller still. Yet the international community, and in particular the United States, cannot allow Israel to pursue this course, for if there is one thing that would unite Iranians behind Ahmadinejad and the need for nuclear capabilities, it would be military action against Iran. At present, most Iranians still believe that nuclear ambition is costing more than it’s worth. Nothing would change that view quicker than military strikes.
The campaign that the West needs to wage in Iran in the run up to the June elections, is one that convinces Iranians of the horrendous counterproductivity of the current regime’s actions. Iranians must be made to believe that the very things Ahmadinjad’s programme hopes to achieve - military and economic security and regional respect and influence - can only be achieved through working with, as opposed to against the international community. Unfortunately, an insufficient number of Iranians still believe this, partly because the United States and Israel have threatened Iran with too much stick, with very few real carrots in sight. The reason so many Iranians burn the American flag each Friday after prayers is because they see the United States as implaccably opposed to themselves and everything they stand for. Labelled part of the “Axis of Evil” by George W. Bush, there may have been truth in this under the previous administration. Obama needs to show Iranian’s that this is no longer so, and that means a huge PR campaign that reaches ordinary Iranians to convince them of this. There are signs that Obama is already working in this direction. Haaretz also reported yesterday that “Israel’s military option against Iran has died”, thanks to pressure from the Obama administration forbidding any such action. Whether this is actually so remains to be seen.
Either way, the first rule in politics is always that perception is as, if not more important than reality. In actually convincing Iranians that the West is not out to get them, the US and others need to make a much bigger effort.
“It is apprehended, that arbitrary power would steal in upon us, were we not careful to prevent its progress, and were there not an easy method of conveying the alarm from one end of the kingdom to the other. The spirit of the people must frequently be roused, in order to curb the ambition of the court; and the dread of rouzing this spirit must be employed to prevent that ambition. Nothing so effectual to this purpose as the liberty of the press.”
So said the enlightenment philosopher David Hume in his essay Of the Liberty of the Press in 1742. His words ring as loudly today as they did more than two centuries ago. The recently exposed scandal of the way British MPs have been abusing the internally-regulated expenses system, often to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds at taxpayers’ expense, has brought shame on the British Parliament, and rightly so. Acres of column inches have been devoted to lamenting the demise of the once immutable British sense of fair play, as it was revealed that it was not so much the letter but the spirit of the expenses rules that had been broken so badly.
Yet in one sense - a sense, indeed, that appears to have been lost on almost everybody - this whole fiasco is tremendously reassuring. The reason the British people are able to get so angry about the whole issue is because they live in a country where they get to hear of corruption in politics from a media unafaraid to write about it in the first place. The truth is, that whatever abuses British parliamentarians attempt to perpetuate, ultimately the truth will out and they will reap the consequences. This was true of the cash for questions scandal of the early 1990s, it was true of the cash for honours scandal in the mid 2000s, and it is true of the expenses scandal now. The two cornerstones of any democratic society, a free press and free speech, are still alive and well in the United Kingdom.
The inquiry that followed the cash for honours affair revealed the strength of the system when it was permitted to go as high as the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who was himself questioned by police. That episode saw Blair the subject of a laughably ironic taunt from then Russian President Vladimir Putin, who responded to Blair’s criticism of Russian democracy at the 2006 G8 summit by suggesting that the British premier could be a useful advisor in the fight against corruption, since he himself appeared to have such intimate first hand experience with the problem. Yet there is a good reason why so little (beyond dangerous speculation) has been written about the financial misdealings of Russian politicians, namely that they do not operate in a society that tolerates such a level of exposure and accountability. Since 23 June 2000, Russia has been on the International Press Institute’s (IPI) Watch List owing to its “repression of the independent media… physical harrassment… [and] murder” of journalists who report critically of the Kremlin administration. With two dead already in 2009, Russia is second equal on the IPI’s death watch list, behind Pakistan, and equal with Somalia, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Iraq.Reporters sans frontiers provides a worldwide picture of the state of press freedom generally.
If corruption cannot be exposed, then it cannot be rectified, and in this sense, Britain should be thankful. There are those who question the methods used by the Daily Telegraph, the paper responsible for breaking the expenses story, over how it obtained the data and whether, indeed, it should be prosecuted for aiding and abetting breaches of the Data Protection Act, the Computer Misuse Act, and even the Official Secrets Act. In reality, the paper is performing a clear public service and has a strong public interest defence. The press should not be punished for truth-telling and holding authority to account. Indeed, that is their very raison d’être.
British politics is currently in a sorry state. That even Prime Minister Gordon Brown has seen fit to apologise is a good indicator of just how bad things are. What the expenses system needs is simply a far greater level of transparency combined with tighter rules imposed by an independent authority, such as will hopefully be recommended by Sir Christopher Kelly’s report to be published later this year. What Britons need to be thankful for is that such a review, and such revelations to which it responds, are possible and indeed encouraged in the first place.
“The two-state solution is very near death”, said Alon Pinkas, Israel’s former consul general to the US back in February. In reality, the two-state solution never really lived as a viable solution to the decades old Israel-Palestine conflict in the first place. From before Israel’s inception, the idea has always faced vigorous opposition from one or other of the two sides and usually both. The original partition plan was unanimously opposed by the six Arab countries represented at the UN when it went before the General Assembly on 29 November 1947. When the plan was agreed upon by the UN in spite of this, fatal violence instantly followed. By 16 February 1948, the UN’s Palestine Commission reported that but for British security forces “the two communities [Jews and Arabs] would by now have been fully engaged in internecine slaughter.”
David Ben-Gurion’s declaration of Israeli independence on 14 May 1948 prompted an invasion by no fewer than seven Arab armies, four of them rolling into Israel the very next day. Their publicly declared intention was “the creation of a United State of Palestine” in place of the two-state plan. The Arab defeat did not, however, herald an acceptance of a two-state solution by either side. The 1949 armistice agreements ceded the West Bank to Jordan, which had never gone into the war to destroy Israel so much as to annex as much Palestinian territory as possible, whilst he Gaza Strip was occupied by Egypt.
The history of the succeeding decades up to the present day has been one in which neither Israelis nor Palestinians accepted the other’s right to exist, or as has been the case more recently, neither side has been willing to concede enough so as to make a two-state solution workable. At the same time, and further complicating matters, major elements on both sides still do not accept the other’s right to exist.
One of the most fundamental problems is that the physical space being fought over just isn’t big enough to accomodate the wants and needs of both sides. Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip between them comprise barely 26,000 sq km, fully half of which is made up of the inhospitable Negev desert in the south. In that space are expected to live peacefully and prosperously 11 million of some of the most acrimonious people on earth. As Israel’s former National Security Council chief Giora Eiland put it, the “pie” is just too small. “In terms of political survival, the maximum that any government in Israel can agree to offer the Palestinians is less than the minimum that any Palestinian government can agree to accept. The conventional two-state paradigm has become a zero-sum game, providing insufficient incentive for both sides to take the necessary risks and move forward.”
The failure of the 1993 Oslo accords - the first direct, face-to-face agreement between Israelis and Palestinians - failed because they deliberately left to a later date agreement on the fundamental issues, namely the question of Israeli settlements, the final status of Jerusalem, the right of return of Palestinian refugees, borders and security. When attempts were subsequently made to address those issues, the result was predictable enough: failure. The first serious attempt to address these issues, at Camp David in 2000, fell down because neither side was willing or able to make the necessary levels of compromise. The closest both sides have come to an agreement was undoubtedly at Taba in January 2001, yet set against the onset of the Al-Aqsa intifada that followed the collapse of the Camp David summit, the election of Ariel Sharon as Israeli Prime Minister in February saw the accords thrown out and the violence escalate.
Yet even if, by an almost unfathomable miracle, these issues could all be resolved, few people seem to have considered the actual viability of a Palestinian state. From where has the assumption come that if and when a Palestinian state is finally created, it will be able to live peacefully and prosperously alongside Israel? The truth is that the animosity between Israelis and Palestinians runs too deep, and the violence has become too personal for any deal to be adhered to for long. No better evidence of this exists than the spectacular fallout following the withdrawal of Israeli forces and settlers from the Gaza Strip in September 2005. Instead of electing a government that could or would work with Israel, the Gaza Palestinians elected Hamas, an organisation whose founding charter states “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it”. In part, the election of Hamas was borne of an abiding resentment amongst Palestinians over perceived corruption in the Fatah party, but it was also borne of a conviction that Hamas was the better group to represenent Palestinian interests. The result has been a devastating blockade of the entire strip by Israel, culminating most recently in the Israeli invasion and occupation of Gaza from 27 December 2008-18 January 2009, during which time some 5,000 people were killed.
There is precisely nothing to say that a fully fledged Palestinian state would not likewise elect a government overtly hostile to Israel, nor that Israel would tolerate such hostility. Aside from the enormous political and economic cost of shifting the 350,000-odd religious fundamentalists that are the West Bank and East Jerusalem settlers, one of the main things stopping Israel from pulling out of the West Bank is a very real concern that if it does so, the region will quickly be taken over by Hamas. This is an outcome that Israel simply will not allow. In addition to the group’s commitment to the destruction of Israel and its militant Islamist ideology, Hamas also enjoys Iranian sponsorship. Allowing Iran, which is establishing itself as one of the Middle East’s strongest powers, still further influence on Israel’s border would be absolutely unacceptable to the Israeli government. A potentially volatile and Hamas-led Palestine would also be highly objectionable to both Jordan and Egypt, the two other countries with which Palestine would share a border. Neither country wishes to see a militant, Iranian-backed state on their borders any more than Israel does.
In addition to this, one has to look at the geographic and economic reality of any future state of Palestine and ask whether such a state would be truly viable in those terms. The answer once again is no. Neither the West Bank nor the Gaza Strip have any natural resources to speak of, and the country would be dependent upon Israel for its economic survival. The geographical separation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip also poses a serious issue for the integrity of any future Palestinian state. The agreed solution at present would be one or two land corridors connecting the territories running through the heart of Israel. Should the Palestinians elect an overtly hostile government, or as is even more likely, should any Palestinian government find itself unable to control the militant elements that would undoubtedly still exist within the country, then Israel could and very likely would strangle Palestine.
The truth is, however, that even this unhappy scenario is still a pipe-dream at present, still more so following the recent election of Binyamin Netanyahu as Israeli Prime Minister, a man who has described the entire peace-process as “a waste of time”. The pie is too small, the disagreements too severe and the stakes too high for a workable agreement on any of the major obstacles to be forthcoming in the near future. What then, is the solution?
Perhaps the two-state solution needs to be ditched altogether. The idea that the two-state solution might seriously need to be dropped will not come easily to large swathes of the international community, and global publics generally, who have come to see it as the only acceptable and indeed thinkable solution to the region’s problems. Yet maybe it is time to take a step back and realise that “justice for the Palestinians” might not necessarily be the same thing as a state called Palestine. Some have put forward the idea of a single, unified Israeli state encompassing the entire area, in which both Jews and Arabs would enjoy equal rights and opportunities. This notion is antithetical to the notion of Israel as a culturally Jewish state, not least because, with higher birth-rates, the number of Arabs in the area (5.2 million) is soon set to surpass the number of Jews (6.2 million). Netanyahu’s Likud government is already working on ways to counter this “threat” and there is little chance that the two communities would live either peacefully or equally side-by-side in a unified Israel.
The most viable and workable solution would in fact seem to be the so-called “three-state solution”, which would see the Gaza Strip annexed to Egypt, and the West Bank annexed to Jordan. Neither Egypt, whose border with Gaza has remained predominantly closed since the Hamas takeover in 2006, nor Jordan have given any sign that they would give this idea serious consideration at present. However, the very real possibility of a militant, Hamas-led Palestine may well make this idea of greater appeal to the Egyptians and Jordanians than it has been in the past. Without question, this solution would have to come with massive levels of international aid to help rebuild infrastructure and compensate Egypt and Jordan for the cost of taking in almost 4 million of among the world’s most impoverished people. However, the short and long-term security benefits for both countries, as well as Israel, are evident. Not only would this sollution nullify the potential of further Iranian influence in the area, it would also go a long way towards dealing with the wider issue of Middle Eastern terrorism generally, which is in large part the result of the very real and perceived injustices endured by the Palestinians. There is no guarantee that an independent Palestinian state would be an end to these injustices, because of the weakness of such a state and its utter dependence upon Israel. Poverty, resentment and terrorism all go hand in hand.
The three-state solution would also be to the benefit of the large numbers of Palestinians who simply wish to live a peaceful and prosperous life, free from Israeli occupation. The exact form of the solution will not matter so much so long as it delivers upon these objectives. The potential for peace and prosperity, free from Israeli interference, would be considerably higher under the three-state solution than in a weak and politically vulnerable Palestine. Moderate Palestinians would rather live under Egyptian and Jordanian rule than under a militant and Islamist Hamas. Furthermore, even in a politically stable Palestine, the aformentioned weakness of the economy and the geographic limitations mean that Palestinians would be afforded far fewer economic opportunities than they would under an Egyptian or Jordanian aegis, replete with the full economic and political backing of those respective governments. The main losers in such a scenario would of course be the Palestinian leaderships, which is possibly why more of this idea has not been heard already. For them of course, the only acceptable solution is a fully independent Palestine, but the point needs no ellaboration that what is in the best interests of a people and what is in the best interests of their leaders are very often not the same thing.
If a solution to the Palestinian problem were simple, then it would have been arrived at long ago, with many thousand fewer lives lost. Yet one of the principle reasons that the conflict has continued to drag on for as long as it has, with so little progress towards a solution, is because the solution being pursued is quite simply unworkable. Neither side is willing to give enough to make it workable; indeed, neither side has enough it can realistically give, and the prospects for peace and stability even if they did are very small for the reasons already outlined. If peace is ever to be achieved in Palestine, then there is going to need to be a radical rethink of what the right way forward actually is. The three-state solution might just be it.
The recent release of a video showing the brutal torture of a grain dealer accused of short-changing Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al-Nahyan, one of the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) 22 sheikhs, is a rare and graphic depiction of the reality of torture. The response of the US State Department, urging “all governments to investigate allegations of criminal acts” has been predictably tepid. One of the greatest staines on the reputation of the Bush administration was allegations of torture by the CIA of terror suspects and secret renditions to third countries where suspects were allegedly tortured. To his credit, Barack Obama recently chose to declassify documents detailing CIA “harsh interrogation” techniques, techniques that he banned during his first week in office.
Yet in spite of his repudiation of torture as a legitimate method of interrogation, Obama has refused to allow those responsible to be prosecuted saying that “those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice… will not be subject to prosecution”. In saying this Obama managed to violate not only the Constitution of the United States, which clearly separates the mandate of the executive and the judiciary, but also the United Nations Convention Against Torture of which the US is a signatory.
Article 1.1 of the convention clearly defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession”. Article 4 commits all signatory states to punishing those convicted of torture and crucially in this instance, Article 2.3 clearly states that “an order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.”
The Convention Against Torture aside, Obama’s logic of sparing those accused of involvement in such acts on the grounds that they were only obeying orders is highly flawed and deeply dangerous. In saying this, what Obama has effectively done is endorsed the view that it is alright for citizens to violate human rights and international law on the ground that their government says so. This is not the way to go about running an accountable democracy with genuine respect for the rule of law, nor is it the way to set an example that you wish others to follow, not least the UAE.
Obama’s decision is all the more bizarre in light of his public condemnation of torture as a method of interrogation, and moreover, given his public desire to reintegrate the US back into the international human rights framework. At the end of March 2009, the US announced its intention to join the UN Human Rights Council (UNHCR) and insodoing put forward its “Human Rights Commitments and Pledges“, a document that all UNHCR members produce. One of the first sentences declares: “As the United States seeks to advance human rights and fundamental freedoms around the world, we do so cognizant of our own commitment to live up to our ideals at home and to meet our international human rights obligations”.
These lofty aspirations seem hollow in light of Obama’s recent statements. Some commentators have called on critics to be more “pragmatic”, arguing that terror suspects pose a very real threat to national security. Much public opinion appears to support this view. According to World Public Opinion, on average, just nine per cent of people support the use of torture as a legitimate method of interrogation. That figure balloons to 26 per cent if used “on terrorists to save innocent lives”.
Former US vice president Dick Cheney has called on Obama to release memos detailing the efficacy of torture at obtaining confessions. Yet to accede to this logic is to set another very dangerous precedent. By its very nature, torture operates outside the rule of law and serves as an alternative to legitimate interrogation as a means by which to extract information. It goes without saying that torture does not come with a fair trial. The reason members of the public believe it is more acceptable to torture suspected terrorists is that they cannot envisage themselves being included in that group. Yet, in the abscence of a fair trial, what is there to distinguish between a dissident and a terrorist, or to distinguish between a genuine and a false confession with any degree of certainty?
Likewise, those suspected of torture must be tried. To try is not automatically to prosecute. There are some who say that the methods used by the CIA fell short of actual torture because they left no lasting physical or psychological damage and were not intended to cause severe pain. If a court agrees then the accused will be acquitted and the CIA’s reputation would be greatly improved by submitting to the process. But justice must be allowed to take its course and to be seen to do so. If the rule of law is to have legitimacy then no-one can be above it, not even the security services. Furthermore, the investigation must be permitted to go to the very top if it deems it necessary, up to and including trying the former president. If Barack Obama fails to allow an investigation into the CIA torture cases, then he cannot protest the actions of Sheikh Issa with any degree of legitimacy. This is not to say that those members of the CIA accused of torturing terror suspects went about it with anything like the same degree of severity and sadistic pleasure of Sheikh Issa. But torture is torture. Either it is permissable or it isn’t. The US cannot adopt a “do as I say, not as I do” approach to foreign policy; it must lead by example. Obama’s decisions to close Guantanamo Bay and to outlaw “harsh interrogation” were almost universally popular and in that sense they were easy. For Obama at least, the question of whether or not prosecutions should be permitted may not be so straightforward. But if he is not willing to take that decision then he cannot complain if and when the UAE’s “investigation” into Sheikh Issa’s behaviour fails to deliver justice. In fact, he might as well just tell the sheikh to carry on.
Almost ten years to the day after his defining speech to the Chicago Economic Club at the height of the Kosovo crisis, Tony Blair has been in Chicago once again, this time to give a speech on how best to tackle Islamic “extremism”. Blair’s apparent lack of comprehension of the huge complexities of the enemy he embarked upon fighting whilst British Prime Minister would not be such a cause for concern but for the fact that as the Quartet’s official envoy, he is supposedly our man to bring peace to the Middle East. Not only that, but a number of other world leaders appear to hold to his point of view.
One of the major problems is the methodology used by Blair and others who share his position to draw a line between “true Muslims”, whose faith is tolerant and peaceful, and “extremist Muslims” who believe it is justifiable to pursue their objectives by violent means. “They [extremists] are better organised. But they don’t represent true Islam or true Muslims”, Blair said. Similar statements are constantly being made by global statesman to the point that in 2007 this assertion was turned into an operative clause of a UN General Assembley Resolution, which expresses its “deep concern that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.” The need to make such statements is understandable. Yet the problem with this distinction between “true Muslims” and “extremists” is that it approaches the issue from completely the wrong angle, grading the legitimacy of faith according to how closely it conforms with Western values, wholly independent of what might actually constitute being faithful to Islam. In no way is this to take the position of Emperor Manuel II, whose famous dismissal of Islam as a religion of violence was recently quoted by Pope Benedict XVI, but it must be understood that the validity of a religious interpretation cannot be graded according to how closely it conforms with liberal-democratic ideals.
Those who argue that Islam does permit the use of violence often cite the law of abrogation, a concept unique to Islam that holds older teachings to be null and void when contradicted by later ones. Mohammed’s early statements whilst at Mecca are by-and-large more peaceful than the more warlike utterances pronounced once the fledgling Muslim community had consolidated itself at Medina.
Blair’s second major misunderstanding is the motivation of those Muslims who see violence as a legitimate means to an end. He dismisses as cynical manipulation the way extremists (for want of a better word) have “successfully inculcated a sense of victimhood in the Islamic world”. Yet these grievences are very real, and central to understanding and thus dealing with the problem. Furthermore, this mindset is not unique to Muslims. Down the centuries, extremism has always been a reaction to perceived injustice. It is also a common reaction of the weak to the strong. In Moorish Spain, instances of what could be termed Christian extremism were a reaction to Muslim ascendency. The terror tactics of the IRA in Northern Ireland were a consequence both of a perceived injustice and the fact that the IRA could not have hoped to beat the British Army in a straight fight. Much the same can said of militant activity in Palestine now. As Clausewitz said, “war is just politics by another means”. This is by no means to excuse such actions, merely to contextualise them.
So-called Islamic extremism is a direct response to Western ascendency and perceived encroachments upon the Islamic way of life. Blair is quite simply missing the point when he says “we have to understand we have not caused this phenomenon”. In his iconic work the “Clash of Civilisations” Samuel P. Huntington made the case very clearly: “Islam [is] a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.” The gradual ascendency of the West over the Muslim world, beginning perhaps with the Ottoman defeat at the hands of the Holy League at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, and culminating with the final Ottoman capitulation in 1918, is a phenomenon very intimately tied up with Islamic extremism today, principally because - in the eyes of the “extremists” - those defeats have yet to be reversed.
The reason this has led to such violent confrontations with the West is because of the highly orthopraxic nature of Islam, that is, the impossibility of legitimately separating church and state. Whereas such a division is made possible in Christianity by Christ’s command to “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things which are God’s”, no such provision exists in Islam. In Islam the success or failure of a human being to find favour with the Almighty very much depends on his or her actions and behaviour. Out of this has come a doctrine advocated in the Quran known as ‘Manifest Success’ which essentially links external success with the notion of being Gods people. In other words, the extent to which Muslims can know divine favour can be directly measured against the extent of their earthly success.
This idea is firmly grounded in the spectacular expansion of the Muslim geopolitical sphere under Mohammed and his immediate successors. The logic clearly follows that because Mohammed was supremely faithful to God’s commands, so he was granted unprecedented earthly success. Mohammed fought for what he believed in and did not capitulate to those who would follow their own laws as opposed to God’s laws. Muslims who wish for an uncompromising return to the laws and cultural standards of Mohammed’s 7th century world need look no further than the humiliation of the Ottoman Empire after it sought to incorporate Western practices in an effort to strenghten itself at the end of the 19th century as vindication of their position. “Extremist” Muslims look at their position today and conclude that only a radical rejection of Westernism and a return to the modus operandi as it existed under Mohammed can hope to see a revival of their fortunes.
Democracy and the nation state have two things in common. First is that they are, in their current form, fairly recent creations. Second is that they are very definitely man-made creations. Democracy rests on the idea that the people should make their own laws and determine their own future. The nation state rests on the idea that an individual’s first loyalty and duty is to his country. Neither was a tenable concept in 7th century Medina and both are anathema to a Muslim who believes in the absolute supremecy and rightness of God’s laws - which provide a clear template for the establishment of an earthly society - and whose first loyalty is to his brothers in faith, in whichever state on earth they may happen to live.
This has very far reaching implications for the way Blair and others need to understand the threat posed by “extremist” Islam. There are very firm grounds within Islam to contend that Western encroachments on perceived Muslim spheres on influence, far from helping solve the problem, are in fact the problem. Highly unfashionable though it may be to say so, the West cannot offer Muslims any kind of system that is compatible with their faith. Liberal democracy and Islam are not compatible systems. That is not to say that Muslims cannot live peacefully in Western societies, nor in fact that, as Turkey has demonstrated so successfully, a majority-Muslim state cannot rest on secular principles and largely Western inspired notions of the rule of law. What it is to say is that such systems are highly imperfect implementations of what the God of the Quran intended, if not outright rejections. Like it or not, there is much more method to “extremist” Muslims’ madness than Mr Blair and others like him appear to comprehend.
Filed under: Asia — Tags: Sri Lanka, UN — by George on 23 April 2009 at 9:22 am
The quarter-century long secessionist campaign of violence waged by the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) has almost completely collapsed. All that is left for the international community to do now is sit back and watch as thousands of civilians trapped in the cross-fire are slaughtered.
A recent statement by Seevaratnam Puleedevan, secretary-general of the Tigers’ peace secretariat saying that the “LTTE will never surrender and we will fight and we have the confidence that we will win with the help of the Tamil people,” does not bode well for the estimated 50,000 civilians still trapped in the rapidly shrinking conflict zone in the north-east of the country.
The UN has voiced its “deep concern” over the situation but has so far proved unable to act. A meeting of the Security Council called by France failed to agree on a resolution owing to the fact that Russia and China, two veto-wielding members, insisted the situation was strictly an internal matter and did not jeopardise international peace and security. Neither Russia nor China wishes to set a precedent of interference in a country’s internal matters for fear it could lead to increased pressure on themselves to deal less severely with their own dissident minorities. Strictly speaking, they have international law on their side.
The post-WWII Westphalian consensus restricts action from the Security Council to situations which threaten “international peace and security”. The so-called Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, which aimed to give the UN the mandate to act beyond its traditional role as a mediator of international disputes, has thus far proven to be nothing more than unenforceable cant.
Realistically speaking, the prospect of the Sri Lankan government allowing for the deployment of peacekeepers, even with a Security Council ready and able to act, is virtually zero. However, the international community should, at the very least, be putting serious pressure on the Sri Lankan government to allow the aid agencies to operate in the country right now, with the threat of economic sanctions the price of non-compliance. Sri Lanka is heavily dependent upon imports and foreign aid, and the EU and US are the country’s two biggest export markets, together accounting for almost 55 per cent of Sri Lankan exports.
There can be little doubt that serious human rights violations are taking place in the conflict zone, thus explaining why the Sri Lankan government is restricting aid agencies and media coverage in the area to the extent that it is. The government claims on its website to be conducting the “world’s largest hostage rescue mission” having rescued over 30,000 civilians from Tamil forces so far. The wildly varying estimates of refugee numbers coming from the various aid agencies demonstrates that the reality is no-one knows quite what is going on. A final confrontation between the government and the LTTE is inevitable and cannot be stopped. The LTTE will almost certainly go down. What can and must be stopped is the government’s enthusiasm to finish the job, and the LTTE’s determination to throw everything at them in a final cast of the dice, resulting in thousands of innocent civilians going down with them.
“The Global Village” is an apposite simile to describe how technology, the era of instantaneous communications and the ever closer economic integration of states have contracted the world to the point that social and commerical relations can be had with someone on the other side of the earth as easily as if they lived in the same village. No nation is an island any longer, and those that try to be, such as North Korea and Iran, quickly discover that there’s nothing splendid about isolationism. Yet every coin has two sides, and just as the benefits of living in a global village are evident, so too the dangers posed by far away countries of which we hitherto knew nothing are also much more real than they used to be. In the 21st century, regional conflicts are much more likely to produce global shockwaves. Instability in Iran can produce a spike in global oil prices; conflict in Africa leads to hundreds of thousands of refugess fleeing to the West for asylum; the US housing market sneezes, and the global economy catches a very severe cold.
somehow a threat to everything honest, freedom-loving Britons hold dear. But let’s sit back for a moment and reflect on what exactly that way of life that we hold so dear actually is. Surely tolerance, freedom of speech and association, freedom of the press, and a legally enshrined respect for fundamental human rights are close to the top of the list. Working with, as opposed to competing with Europe will actually strengthen all these things. The EEC/EC/EU has proved itself to be hugely effective at maintaining peace amongst democracies within its borders, and encouraging liberal democratic reforms in those states outside the union that desperately want in. The likelihood of Europe threatening those other great British traditions, cricket on the green, warm ale and the freedom to complain about the weather, is unlikely to say the least. The greatest threat Europe poses to the British way of life is a sustained challenge to the imperial system of weights and measures.
The reluctance of the Pakistani government to cooperate more fully with NATO in its efforts to combat the Taliban operating in the Hindu Kush has been greatly to the detriment of both, and Pakistan’s recent and well documented volte-face on this issue is a clear, if belated, realisation of this fact.
In and of itself this is bad enogugh, but as just mentioned, what is worse is that both countries are currently in the process of seeking to align themselves as alternatives to the United States as poles of global influence. Russia’s recent hosting of the BRIC conference (Brazil, Russia, India and China) in Yekaterinberg, though failing to agree on much, nonetheless signified an overt desire to look for alternatives to the current, Western-led global economic status-quo. Likewise, President Medvedev was candid in his declaration of Russian intent to gain greater influence in Africa, during his visit to the continent that almost immediately followed the BRIC conference. China, likewise, has been increasing its influence in Africa for a number of years, and its booming economy, perhaps most vividly demonstrated by the fact that as a January 2009, it holds a staggering 24 per cent of US public debt, make it a country the West can no longer ignore.
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has been written about the financial misdealings of Russian politicians, namely that they do not operate in a society that tolerates such a level of exposure and accountability. Since 23 June 2000, Russia has been on the 
