just commentary march 2015
DESCRIPTION
ÂTRANSCRIPT
Vol 15, No.03 March 2015
Turn to next page
ARTICLES
THE YOGYAKARTA STATEMENT
. GENOCIDE IN KASHMIR: INDIA’S SHAME
BY ANDRE VLTCHEK..................................P 8
.INTEGRITY: CASTING ASPERSIONS BY CHANDRA MUZAFFAR.........................P4
. ISIS DESTROYS ANCIENT SITES NEAR MOSUL
BY SANDY ENGLISH...................................P 14
.AUSTRALIA’S SOVEREIGNTY SEVERELY COMPROMISED FOR
US-ISRAELI DESIGNS
BY DAUD BATCHELOR................................P 16
. DEAR SYRIA: FROM ONE REFUGEE TO ANOTHER
BY RAMZY BAROUD.............................P 18
. WEALTH OF THE WORLD’S 400 RICHEST
BILLIONAIRES ROSE $92 BILLION IN 2014
BY ANDRE DAMON...............................P 19
STATEMENT
. THE REAL AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
BY ALFRED W. MCCOY.......................P21
.INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY: ITS SIGNIFICANCE
FOR ARAB AND PALESTINIAN WOMEN
BY MAZIN QUMSIYEH.............................P17
. SAUDIS SAID TO AID ISRAELI PLAN TO BOMB
BY ROBERT PARRY......................................P 5
A high-level summit of Buddhist and Muslim
leaders was held at Yogyakarta and the
Borobudur Temple, Indonesia on the 3rd and
4th of March 2015. It was themed “Overcoming
Extremism and Advancing Peace with Justice.”
Hosted by the Indonesian Buddhist Association
(WALUBI) and the Indonesian Council of
Ulama (MUI), it was organized the
International Forum on Buddhist Muslim
Relations (BMF). The BMF’s core comprises
the International Network of Engaged
Buddhists (INEB); the International
Movement for a Just World (JUST);
Muhammadiyah Indonesia; and Religions for
Peace New York.
The Summit adopted a Statement — the
YOGYAKARTA STATEMENT — which is
published below.
We, Buddhist and Muslim leaders, recognize
that our followers have developed together a
harmonious relationship, which has become
the foundation for building peace and
prosperity in many parts of the world.
Buddhism and Islam share in their respective
scriptures and other canonical texts the
importance of holistic and positive peace,
which encompasses the notions of inner
peace, peace among humans, and peace
with nature.
We reaffirm that Islam and Buddhism are
religions of mercy and compassion
committed to justice for all humankind. Both
traditions respect the sacredness of life and
inherent dignity of human existence, which
is the foundation of all human rights
without any distinction as to race, color,
language, or religion.
We reject the abuse of our religions in
support of discrimination and violence.
Buddhism and Islam have been misused
by some for their own political purposes
to fuel prejudice and stereotyping and to
incite discrimination and violence. We
categorically reject such abuse and pledge
to counter extremist religious
interpretations and actions with our
authentic primary narratives of peace.
We also recognize the need to strengthen
governmental measures to prevent
religiously motivated discrimination and
violence. Based on universally accepted
international legal instruments such as
Article 20 of the International Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights and the United
Nations Human Rights Council
Resolution 16/18, we call on all states to
take measures to fulfill their
responsibilities to protect their citizens
from religious and racial hatred, and
incitement to discrimination and violence
in the name of religion. Freedom of
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D
2
continued from page 1
L E A D A R T I C L E
continued next page
expression includes the obligation to respect
each other.
We reaffirm our fundamental common
values shared by our respective scriptures
and other canonical texts as follows:
I.Religious Diversity and Peaceful Co-
Existence
Buddhism
“All religions should reside everywhere, for
all of them desire self-control and purity of
heart.” “Contact (between religions) is good.
One should listen to and respect the
doctrines professed by others. Beloved-of-
the-Gods, King Piyadasi, desires that all
should be well-learned in the good doctrines
of other religions.” “You are true to your
own beliefs if you accord kindly treatment
to adherents of other faiths. You harm your
own religion by harassing followers of other
creeds.” (Edicts of Emperor Ashoka, 269-
232 BC)
Islam
“O humankind! We [Allah] have created you
from a single [pair] of a male and a female
and have made you into nations and tribes,
so that you may come to know one
another.” (The Qur’an 49:13). It reminds
humanity that they belong to one family,
with the same set of parents, a diverse family
as it may be. This is a reminder that diversity
in unity and unity within diversity are
possible.
This is further reinforced by the assertion
that diversity is part of the divine plan and is
in fact a way of testing human beings. “If
God had so willed He would have made
you a single people, but (His Plan is) to test
you in what he hath given you: So strive as
in a race in all virtues. The goal of you all is
to God.” (The Qur’an, 5: 48)
11. Universal Mercy and Compassion
Islam
It is significant that every one of the 114
chapters of the Qur’an — except one —
begins with the proclamation “In the name
of God, the Compassionate and the
Merciful.” Compassion and Mercy are
among the most exalted of God’s attributes.
This is why the Qur’an says “And [thus,
O Muhammad], We have not sent you,
but as mercy to all the worlds” (The Qur’an
21:107).
Buddhism
“Let your love flow outward through the
universe, To its height, its depth, its broad
extent, A limitless love,without hatred or
enmity.” Just as a mother would protect
her only child at the risk of her own life,
even so,cultivate a boundless heart towards
all beings. Let your thoughts of boundless
love pervade the world.” (Sutta Nipata 149-
150)
111. Universal Justice
Buddhism
One who, while himself seeking happiness,
oppresses with violence other beings who
also desire happiness, will not attain
happiness hereafter. (Dhammapada 131)
While being completely law-abiding, some
people are imprisoned, treated harshly and
even killed without cause so that many
people suffer. Therefore your aim should
be to act with impartiality. It is because of
these things — envy,anger, cruelty, hate,
indifference, laziness or tiredness — that
such a thing does not happen. Therefore
your aim should be: “May these things not
be in me.” And the root of this is non-anger
and patience. (Edicts of Emperor Ashoka,
269-232 BC)
Islam
“O ye who believe! Stand out firmly for
justice as witnesses to God, even as against
yourselves, or your parents, Or your kin,
and whether it be (against) rich or poor;
for God can best protect both. Follow not
the lusts (of your hearts), lest you swerve,
and if you distort (justice) or decline to do
justice, verily God is well acquainted with
all you do.” (The Qur’an, 4: 135)
“We sent aforetime Our apostles with Clear
Signs And sent down with them The Book
and the Balance Of Right and Wrong, that
men May stand forth in Justice. (The Quran,
57: 25)
IV. Human Dignity and Non-Violence
Islam
“Now, indeed, We have conferred dignity
on the children of Adam and borne them
over land and sea, and provided for them
sustenance out of the good things of life,
and favoured them far above most of Our
creation.”(The Qur’an, 17: 70).
“…if anyone slays a human being, …it shall
be as though he had slain all humankind;
whereas, if anyone saves a life, it shall be
as though he had saved the lives of all
humankind” (The Qur’an 5:32)
Buddhism
“Whoever settles a matter by violence is
not just. The wise calmly considers what
is right and what is wrong.Whoever guides
others by a procedure that is non-violent
and fair is said to be a guardian of truth,
wise and just.”(Dhammapada 256-57)
“Even though he be well-attired, yet if he is
poised, calm, controlled and established in
the holy life, having set aside violence
towards all beings - he, truly, is a holy man,
a renunciate, a monk.(Dhammapada 142)
V. Living in Harmony with the
Environment.
Buddhism
As the bee derives honey from the flower
without harming its colour or fragrance —
So should the wise interact with their
surroundings. (Dhammapada 49)
One day a deity asked the Buddha, “Whose
merit grows day and night, who is the
righteous, virtuous person that goes to the
realm of bliss?” Answered the Buddha, the
merit of those people who plant groves,
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D
3
continued from page 2
continued next page
parks, build bridges, make ponds, dwelling
places etc. grows day and night, and such
religious persons go to heaven. (Vanaropa
Sutta)
Islam
For the true servants of the Most Gracious
are only those who walk gently on earth —
(The Qur’an 25:63) What this means is
that by reducing one’s ecological footprint
one is being faithful to God.
And there are on earth many tracts of land
close by one another (and yet widely
differing from one another ); and( there are
on it) vineyards, and fields of grain, and
date-palms growing in clusters from one
root or standing alone,(all) watered with the
same water: and yet, some of them have
We favoured above others by way of the
food (which they provide for man and
beast). Verily, in all this there are messages
indeed for people who use their reason. (The
Qur’an 13:4). This is a clear call to respect
the environment as God’s creation.
VI. Pluralism, Tolerance, and Religious
Freedom
Islam
“There is no compulsion in religion…” (The
Qur’an 2:256) “Will you then compel
mankind, against their will,to believe? No
soul can believe, except by the Will of God.”
(The Qur’an 10.99-100) There are many
examples of the Prophet’s tolerance of other
faiths. Islam recognizes that there are a
plurality of religions on this earth, and gives
the right to individuals to choose the path
which they believe to be true. Religion is
not to be, and was never, forced upon an
individual against their own will.
Buddhism
“Let him not therefore think himself better
(than others or) low or equal (to others);
questioned by different people,let him not
adorn himself. (Sutta Nipata 918) The
Buddha says, “To be attached to a certain
view and to look down upon others’ views
as inferior—this the wise men call a fetter.”
(Sutta Nipata 798)
Guiding his disciple called Upali on how to
treat the follower of another religion, the
Buddha clearly stated that he was to treat
him with the same respect. Throughout
his life the Buddha urged people to respect
all religious people in spite of the differences
of opinion between them.
VII. Rejection of Hate, Hate Speech,
Retaliation, and the Importance of Self-
Introspection
Buddhism
“They insulted me; they hurt me; they
defeated me; they cheated me. In those
who do harbor such thoughts, hate will
never cease. They insulted me; they hurt
me; they defeated me; they cheated me. In
those who do not harbor such thoughts,
hate will cease. For hate is never conquered
by hate. Hate is conquered by love. This is
an eternal law. (Dhammapada 3-5)
Bad words blaming others.Arrogant words
humiliating others.From these behaviors.
Come hatred and resentment. ...Hence
conflicts arise, rendering in people malicious
thoughts. (Dhammapada, 8)
“Do not look at the faults of others, or what
others have done or not done; observe what
you yourself have done and have not done.”
(Dhammapada 4.7)
Islam
“O you who believe! Stand out firmly for
Allah, as witnesses to fair dealing, and let
not the hatred of others to you make you
swerve to wrong and depart from justice.
Be just: that is next to piety and fear Allah,
for Allah is well acquainted with all that you
do.” (The Qur’an 5:8)
Based upon our shared core values
mentioned above,
We commit ourselves, through the
facilitation of the core group of the
International Forum on Buddhist Muslim
Relations (BMF: International Network of
Engaged Buddhists, InternationalMovement
for a Just World, Muhammadiyah and
Religions for Peace), to implementing the
agreed upon action plan and working to
further strengthen BMF to:
• serve as a platform for intra-religious
and inter-religious initiatives in education &
advocacy;
• enable rapid reaction/ solidarity visits/
early warning/ conflict prevention in the
event of conflict;
• develop and provide tools and materials
for constructive engagement and strategic
common action, and;
• develop the effective use of media for
positive messaging, particularly via social
& alternative media.
We appeciate our Indonesian hosts,
Indonesian Buddhist Association (WALUBI)
and theIndonesian Council of Ulama (MUI)
for their warm hospitality and their offering
us a criticalopportunity to dialogue among
ourselves.
Partial List of Signatories
Bangladesh
1.Most Ven. Mahathero
Sreemathsatyapriyorev, Chief Priest of
Cox’s Bazar,Buddhist
2. H.E. Mr. Hasanul Haq Inu, Minister of
Information, the Government of
Bangladesh, Muslim
3. Ven. Bhikkhu Sunandapriyarev, Joint
General Secretary, Bangladesh Buddhist
Federation, Buddhist
Indonesia
4. Prof. Dr. Din Syamsuddin, Chairman,
Ulama Council of Indonesia (MUI) and
Chairman, Muhammadiyah, Muslim
5. Mr. Muhyidin Junaidi, Vice Chairman,
Ulama Council of Indonesia (MUI),Muslim
6. Prof. Dr. Philip K. Wijaya, Secretary
General, Buddhist Association of Indonesia
(WALUBI), Buddhist
7. Mr. Arief Harsono, Vice President,
Buddhist Association of Indonesia
(WALUBI), Buddhist
L E A D A R T I C L E
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D
4
S T A T E M E N T Scontinued from page 3
8. Drs. H. Slamet Effendy Yusuf, M.Si, Vice
Chairman, Nahdlatul Ulama
9. Mr. Ahmad Suaedy, Executive Director,
Wahid Institute, Muslim
Malaysia
10. Ven. K Sri Dhammaratana, Chief Priest,
Kuala Lumpur, Buddhist
11. Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, President,
International Movement for a Just
World,Muslim
Myanmar
12. Most Ven. Ashin Ariawonthar Biwontha,
Mandalay, Buddhist
13. Al Haj U Aye Lwin, Chief Convener,
Islamic Center of Myanmar, Muslim
Sri Lanka
14. Ven. Dr. Bellanwila Wimalaratana
Anunayaka Thera, President, SriLankan
Council of Religions for Peace, Buddhist
15. H.E. Mr. Rauf Hakeem, Minister of
Urban Development, Water and Supply and
Drainage, Government of Sri Lanka:
National Leader, Muslim Congress of Sri
Lanka,Muslim
16. Mr. Moulavi Athambawa, Vice-
President, Sri Lankan Council of Religions
forPeace, Muslim
17. Mr. Harsha Kumara Navaratne,
Chairman, Sewa lanka
Foundation;Chairman, Sewa lanka
Foundation, Buddhist
Thailand
18. Dr. Ismail Lutfi Japakiya, Rector,
Yala University, Muslim (represented
by Dr. Sukree Langputeh)
19. Ven. Phrakhruudomthammathon,
Narathiwat Province, Southern
Thailand,Buddhist
20. Dr. Parichart Suwanbubbha,
Director, Institute of Human Rights
and Peace Studies, Mahidol University,
Buddhist (represented by Dr.
Suphatmet Yunyasit)
BMF Core Group Representatives
International Network of Engaged
Buddhists (INEB)
21. Mr. Somboon Chungprampree,
Executive Secretary, International
Network of Engaged Buddhists, Buddhist
International for a Just Movement World
(JUST)
22. Mr. Hassanal Noor Rashid, Program
Coordinator, International Movementfor
a Just World, Muslim
Muhammadiyah
23. Dr. Alpha Amirrachman, Executive
Director, Centre for Dialogue and
Cooperation among Civilisations (CDCC-
Muhammadiyah)
Religions for Peace
24. Rev. Kyoichi Sugino, Deputy
Secretary General, Religions for Peace
International
International Forum on Buddhist-Muslim
Relations (BMF)
25. Mr. Vidya KV Soon, Interim
Secretary, International Forum on
Buddhist-Muslim Relations (BMF)
4 March 2015.
STATEMENT
INTEGRITY: CASTING ASPERSIONS
By Chandra Muzaffar
continued next page
Like many other Malaysians, I am deeply
concerned about allegations in the media
hurled at the Malaysian Prime Minister and
his family which have cast serious
aspersions on their integrity.
Some of these allegations have been
circulating for a while but they have now
re-surfaced in a more trenchant form. The
New York Times has played a big role in
this.
Why have they re-appeared at this time?
The NYT article entitled “Jho Low, Well
Connected in Malaysia, Has an Appetite
for New York” by Louise Story and
Stephanie Saul was dated February 8,
2015 — two days before the Federal
Court announced its verdict in the Anwar
Ibrahim case. Is this a coincidence? Or
was it a mischievous attempt to pile
pressure upon the powers-that-be in
Kuala Lumpur so that the Court would
be compelled to make a decision in
favour of Anwar? The five member
Federal Court panel, needless to say,
guided by the principles of law and the
canons of justice, upheld the earlier
decision of the Court of Appeal and found
Anwar guilty of sodomy.
It is valid to ask whether pressures were
brought to bear upon the Judiciary in view
of what transpired in 2012. It would be
recalled that on January 8 2012, an editorial
in the Washington Post warned bluntly
that, “If the verdict fails that test (Malaysia’s
commitment to democracy and the rule
of law) there should be consequences for
Mr. Najib’s relations with Washington.”
This was a day before the Kuala Lumpur
High Court was scheduled to pronounce
its verdict in Anwar’s sodomy trial. On
January 9, Anwar was acquitted by the
High Court. It could of course have been
a mere coincidence.
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D
5
continued next page
A R T I C L E S
Nonetheless, it is a fact that sections of
the American and British media, leading
US and British based human rights
NGOs, and even some British and US
leaders had made vociferous demands in
the months preceding the 2012 verdict
for Anwar’s release. I had argued in a
couple of newspaper articles at that time
that this was part of their push for regime
change in Malaysia. Even before 1998,
when Anwar was sacked from the
government and UMNO, there were
already moves in some circles in the West
to fast-track Anwar as a replacement for
Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad who
they regarded as a ‘thorn in their flesh.’ In
contrast, Anwar was then described as
“the darling of the West.”
But why is there still a desire for regime
change when the present Prime Minister,
Dato Sri Najib, has gone out of his way
to strengthen ties with Washington and
London and even with their allies in West
Asia? Part of the explanation lies in Najib’s
unwavering support for the Palestinian
cause, demonstrated through actual
deeds, which has always incensed the
Israeli regime and its Zionist and Christian
Zionist backers in the US. Perhaps
another equally important reason for
Washington’s uneasiness with Kuala
Lumpur is Najib’s warm relationship with
Beijing which has gone beyond trade,
investments, education and culture to
embrace issues of security and military
cooperation. This may be why regime
change is still on the agenda of those who
see themselves as the rulers of the world.
Those of us who are vehemently opposed
to regime change instigated and
orchestrated by outsiders are very much
aware of how the vulnerabilities and
shortcomings of the wielders of power in
a particular country can be so easily
exploited by both external and internal
forces to bring down a leader. Allegations
about the unexplained wealth of individuals
linked to the Prime Minister, their opulent
lifestyles, a controversial naval
procurement and the questionable
operations of a sovereign wealth fund, are
bound to create distrust and to erode the
confidence of the people in the ruling elite.
It is quite conceivable that some of these
allegations are utterly baseless but unless
there is an honest endeavour to explain
the whole situation, public perceptions will
be formed quickly to the detriment of the
Prime Minister and his family.
The coming parliamentary session starting
March 9 affords an opportunity to the
Prime Minister to provide a
comprehensive response to the issues
raised through various media outlets. At
the same time, he should of his own volition
invite the Malaysian Anti-Corruption
Commission (MACC) to conduct a
thorough investigation into the allegations
made against him, his family and his friends.
The MACC should leave no stone
unturned. The Prime Minister should also
seize the opportunity to expedite the
introduction of long awaited reforms in the
fight against corruption such as a law
requiring all elected legislators to declare
their assets and liabilities and those of their
close family members to the public and
another prohibiting relatives of federal and
state officials exercising executive powers
from bidding for government contracts
and projects. Most of all, there should be
a sincere attempt to jettison the lavishness
and extravagance that has become
synonymous with a section of the elite.
A tangible demonstration of such a
change in attitudes and values is what
the people expect at this time — not
the targeting of individuals and groups
who are trying to point out elite
misdemeanours that may have a
devastating impact upon the nation’s
future.
16 February 2015
Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is the
President of the International
Movement for a Just World (JUST).
continued from page 4
ARTICLES
SAUDI SAID TO AID ISRAELI PLAN TO BOMB IRANBy Robert Parry
As the Obama administration is
rushing to complete a nuclear
agreement with Iran and reduce
regional tensions, the Israeli media is
reporting on a deal with Saudi Arabia
to let Israeli warplanes transit Saudi
airspace en route to bombing Iran.
According to an Israeli media report,
Saudi Arabia has agreed to let Israeli
warplanes fly over Saudi territory to
save fuel while attacking Iranian
nuclear sites, the latest indication of
how the two former enemies have
developed a behind-the-scenes alliance
that is reshaping geopolitics in the
Middle East.
“The Saudi authorities are completely
coordinated with Israel on all matters
related to Iran,” a European official in
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D
6
continued next page
A R T I C L E S
Brussels told Israel’s Channel 2 in a
report broadcast on Tuesday and
described in other Israeli media outlets.
Riyadh’s only condition was that Israel
make some progress in peace talks with
the Palestinians, a stipulation that may
be mostly cosmetic so the Saudis can
save face with other Arab states
without really interfering with an Israeli
flyover to strike Iran.
Disclosure of this Israeli-Saudi military
cooperation comes as the United States
and five other world powers rush to
finish an agreement with Iran to curtail
but not eliminate its nuclear program,
which Iran says is only for civilian
purposes. Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu is set to appear
before the U.S. Congress on March 3
to undercut President Barack Obama’s
negotiations.
The reported Saudi permission for
Israeli warplanes to take a shorter
route to bomb Iran also suggests that
Netanyahu may be laying the
groundwork for his own plans to attack
the Iranian nuclear sites if the
international negotiations are
successful. Netanyahu has denounced
a possible deal as an “existential threat”
to Israel.
In recent years, Israel and Saudi Arabia
have quietly begun cooperating on a
range of mutual interests with the goal
of blunting Iran’s regional influence.
For instance, they have sided with
rebels fighting to overthrow Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad, an Iranian
ally, even if the victors might be
Islamist radicals affiliated with al-Qaeda
or the Islamic State.
Elements of the Saudi royal family have
long been known to support Islamist
militants, including forces associated
with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
Earlier this month, the New York
continued from page 5Times reported that convicted al-Qaeda
operative Zacarias Moussaoui identified
leading members of the Saudi
government as financiers of the
terrorist network.
According to the story, Moussaoui said
in a prison deposition that he was
directed in 1998 or 1999 by Qaeda
leaders in Afghanistan to create a digital
database of the group’s donors and that
the list included Prince Turki al-Faisal,
then Saudi intelligence chief; Prince
Bandar bin Sultan, longtime Saudi
ambassador to the United States;
Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, a prominent
billionaire investor; and many leading
clerics.
“Sheikh Osama wanted to keep a
record who give money,” Moussaoui
said in imperfect English — “who is
to be listened to or who contributed to
the jihad.” Moussaoui also said he
discussed a plan to shoot down
President George W. Bush’s Air Force
One with a Stinger missile with a staff
member at the Saudi Embassy in
Washington, at a time when Bandar
was the ambassador to the United
States and considered so close to the
Bush family that his nickname was
“Bandar Bush.”
Moussaoui claimed, too, that he passed
letters between Osama bin Laden and
then Crown Prince Salman, who
recently became king upon the death
of his brother King Abdullah.
While the Saudi government denied
Moussaoui’s accusations, Saudi and
other Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms have
been identified in recent years as
financial backers of Sunni militants
fighting in Syria to overthrow Assad’s
largely secular regime, with al-Qaeda’s
Nusra Front the major rebel force
benefiting from this support.
Shared Israeli Interests
The Israelis also have found
themselves on the side of these Sunni
militants in Syria because the Israelis
share the Saudi view that Iran and the
so-called “Shiite crescent” – reaching
from Tehran to Beirut – is the greatest
threat to their interests.
In September 2013, Israel’s
Ambassador to the United States
Michael Oren, then a close Netanyahu
adviser, told the Jerusalem Post that
Israel favored the Sunni extremists
over Assad. “The greatest danger to
Israel is by the strategic arc that
extends from Tehran, to Damascus to
Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime
as the keystone in that arc,” Oren told
the Jerusalem Post in an interview.
“We always wanted Bashar Assad to
go, we always preferred the bad guys
who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad
guys who were backed by Iran.” He
said this was the case even if the “bad
guys” were affiliated with al-Qaeda.
In June 2014, speaking as a former
ambassador at an Aspen Institute
conference, Oren expanded on his
position, saying Israel would even
prefer a victory by the brutal Islamic
State over continuation of the Iranian-
backed Assad in Syria. “From Israel’s
perspective, if there’s got to be an evil
that’s got to prevail, let the Sunni evil
prevail,” Oren said.
That hostility toward Assad’s regime
has taken a tactical form with Israeli
forces launching attacks inside Syria
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D A R T I C L E S
7
continued from page 6
continued next page
that benefit Nusra Front. For instance,
on Jan. 18, 2015, Israel attacked
Lebanese-Iranian advisers assisting
Assad’s government in Syria, killing
several members of Hezbollah and an
Iranian general. These military advisers
were engaged in operations against
Nusra Front.
Meanwhile, Israel has refrained from
attacking Nusra militants who have
seized Syrian territory near the Israeli-
occupied Golan Heights. One source
familiar with U.S. intelligence
information on Syria told me that Israel
has a “non-aggression pact” with
Nusra forces, who have even received
medical treatment at Israeli hospitals.
Israel and Saudi Arabia have found
themselves on the same side in other
regional struggles, including support
for the military’s ouster of the elected
Muslim Brotherhood government in
Egypt, but most importantly they have
joined forces in their hostility toward
Shiite-ruled Iran.
I first reported on the growing
relationship between Israel and Saudi
Arabia in August 2013 in an article
entitled “The Saudi-Israeli
Superpower,” noting that the
complementary strengths of the two
countries made their alliance a
potentially powerful influence in the
world. Israel could wield political and
media clout while the Saudis could use
their oil, money and investments.
At the time, the story was met with
much skepticism, but, increasingly, the
secret alliance has gone public. On Oct.
1, 2013, Israeli Prime Minister
Netanyahu hinted at it in his United
Nations General Assembly speech,
which was largely devoted to
excoriating Iran over its nuclear
program and threatening a unilateral
Israeli military strike.
Amid the bellicosity, Netanyahu
dropped in a largely missed clue about
the evolving power relationships in the
Middle East, saying: “The dangers of
a nuclear-armed Iran and the
emergence of other threats in our
region have led many of our Arab
neighbors to recognize, finally
recognize, that Israel is not their
enemy. And this affords us the
opportunity to overcome the historic
animosities and build new relationships,
new friendships, new hopes.”
The next day, Israel’s Channel 2 TV
news reported that senior Israeli
security officials had met with a high-
level Gulf state counterpart in
Jerusalem, believed to be Prince
Bandar, the former Saudi ambassador
to the United States who was then head
of Saudi intelligence.
Even the MSM
The reality of this unlikely alliance has
now even reached the mainstream U.S.
media. For instance, Time magazine
correspondent Joe Klein described the
new coziness in an article in the Jan.
19, 2015 issue.
He wrote: “On May 26, 2014, an
unprecedented public conversation took
place in Brussels. Two former high-
ranking spymasters of Israel and Saudi
Arabia – Amos Yadlin and Prince Turki
al-Faisal – sat together for more than
an hour, talking regional politics in a
conversation moderated by the
Washington Post’s David Ignatius.
“They disagreed on some things, like
the exact nature of an Israel-Palestine
peace settlement, and agreed on others:
the severity of the Iranian nuclear
threat, the need to support the new
military government in Egypt, the
demand for concerted international
action in Syria. The most striking
statement came from Prince Turki. He
said the Arabs had ‘crossed the
Rubicon’ and ‘don’t want to fight Israel
anymore.’”
Israel and Saudi Arabia also have
collaborated in efforts to put the
squeeze on Russia’s President Vladimir
Putin, who is deemed a key supporter
of both Iran and Syria. The Saudis
have used their power over oil
production to drive down prices and
hurt Russia’s economy, while U.S.
neoconservatives – who share Israel’s
geopolitical world view – were at the
forefront of the coup that ousted
Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor
Yanukovych a year ago.
Saudi hostility toward Russia also
surfaced in 2013 when Bandar met
Putin and delivered what Putin viewed
as a crude threat to unleash Chechen
terrorists against the Sochi Winter
Olympics if Putin did not reduce his
support for the Syrian government.
According to a leaked diplomatic
account of a July 31, 2013 meeting in
Moscow, Bandar informed Putin that
Saudi Arabia had strong influence over
Chechen extremists who had carried
out numerous terrorist attacks against
Russian targets and who had since
deployed to join the fight against the
Assad regime in Syria.
As Bandar called for a Russian shift
toward the Saudi position on Syria, he
reportedly offered guarantees of
A R T I C L E SI N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D
8
continued next page
continued from page 7
protection from Chechen terror attacks
on the Olympics. “I can give you a
guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics
in the city of Sochi on the Black Sea next
year,” Bandar reportedly said. “The
Chechen groups that threaten the security
of the games are controlled by us.”
Putin responded, “We know that you
have supported the Chechen terrorist
groups for a decade. And that support,
which you have frankly talked about just
now, is completely incompatible with the
common objectives of fighting global
terrorism.”
Bandar’s Mafia-like threat toward the
Sochi games – a version of “nice
Olympics you got here, it’d be a shame
if something terrible happened to it” –
failed to intimidate Putin, who
continued to support Assad. But Putin
became obsessed with security at
Sochi, distracting him from the
worsening crisis in Ukraine where
Yanukovych was ousted in a neocon-
orchestrated coup on Feb. 22, 2014, a
day before the Olympic torch was
extinguished.
Now, with Obama nearing a possible
agreement to rein in but not end Iran’s
nuclear program – against the wishes
of the Israeli-Saudi tag team – the leak
in the Israeli media suggests that
Netanyahu with the support of Saudi
Arabia’s royal family may be
contemplating his own bombing
campaign against Iran.
26 February 2015
Robert Parry is an American
investigative journalist best known for
his role in covering the Iran-Contra
affair for the Associated Press (AP)
and Newsweek, including breaking the
Psychological Operations in Guerrilla
Warfare (CIA manual provided to the
Nicaraguan contras) and the CIA and
Contras cocaine trafficking in the US
scandal in 1985.
Source : consortiumnews.com
GENOCIDE IN KASHMIR: INDIA’S SHAME
By Andre Vltchek
Welcome to Kashmir! It is deep winter. The
mountains are covered with snow and the
naked trees above the lakes at sunset, look
melancholic and magnificent, precisely like
a completed Chinese brush painting.
Welcome to a nation overrun by the
700,000-strong security forces of the
occupying power – India. Welcome to the
continuous presence of barbed wire, of
military columns, and ‘security checks’.
Welcome to a brutality unimaginable almost
anywhere else on earth!
Welcome to a land of joint military exercises
conducted by the United States, Israel and
India.
Kashmir! Still beautiful but scarred. Still
proud but bleeding and thoroughly
exhausted… Still standing, still resisting, still
free and independent, at least in its heart!
Four kids are standing near the Grand
Mosque in Srinagar. They are edgy; they
appear to be ready to jump, to run, and to
fight, also ready to run and retreat if
necessary. It all depends on the
circumstances.
“They are raping our sisters and mothers!”
screams one youth. I am shown teargas
canisters, similar to those used in so many
other parts of the world to disperse
protesters. They are usually fired into the
air. Here they are fired by the security forces
directly at people’s heads – with the intention
to kill.
In this Kashmiri Intifada, the police, army
and paramilitary use slings, guns, teargas
canisters, everything that is available, to
suppress rebellion.
It also uses video cameras; it films stone-
throwing protesters and then it detains them,
“disappears” them, and sometimes uses
savage torture methods in order to subdue
them.
Young men in this neighborhood are
routinely detained, and most of them have
at least once, been brutalized.
I am photographing empty gas canisters
in their hands, always pointing my lenses
away from their faces. But kids actually
want to pose: they are not afraid, anymore.
Ironically, it is 26th January, the Indian
Republic Day.
“We are going later today! To fight them!
Come with us!”
They use Arabic words. They point their
fingers towards the sky. They are smiling,
pretending that they are brave and ready
to die, to martyr themselves. But I know
that they are scared. I have been in this for
many years… I can sense how frightened
they are.
They are good kids. They are desperate,
cornered, but good.
I promise. I say I will come. Later: as
always, I keep my word.
***
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D
9
A R T I C L E Scontinued from page 8
A few days later, in New Delhi, in his
comfortable, old-fashioned apartment, the
great Indian Kashmiri independent
documentary film director, Sanjay Kak, talks
to me about the Indian colonialism, in both
Kashmir and the Northeast.
We both agree that all over the world, there
is very little knowledge about the horrors
of the occupation of Kashmir, and almost
no knowledge at all about the occupation
of the Northeast. In unison, the mass media
in India and in the West, censors the
information about the true nature of
oppression, killing, torture and rapes.
It is because India has betrayed BRICS and
moved closer and closer to the Empire,
towards the West, signing military pacts
with it, while spreading market-oriented
gospel. Now it can count on having ‘special
status’, like Indonesia. No matter what it
does, it will easily get away with it!
Mr. Kak also says that these days it is
“difficult to compete in the market-place of
global sorrow.”
When I mention the involvement of both
the United States and Israel in joint exercises
with India, in Kashmir, as well as in the
training of Indian police and army officers
deployed in Kashmir, Sanjay Kak replies:
“When it comes to brutality, Indian forces
could actually teach both Israelis and the
United States quite a few things.”
A friend of Sanjay Kak, an Indian writer
and activist, Arundhati Roy, explained in
March 2013, on “Democracy Now”:
“Today Kashmir is the most densely
militarized zone in the world. India has
something like 700,000 security forces
there. And in the ’90s, early ’90s, the fight
became—turned into an armed struggle,
and since then, more than 70,000 people
have died, maybe 100,000 tortured, more
than 8000 disappeared. I mean, we all talk
a lot about Chile, Pinochet, but these
numbers are far greater.”
***
In Kashmir itself, I work closely with
“Jammu & Kashmir Coalition of Civil
Society” – with both its President,
ParvezImroz, and with Parvaiz Matta, a
human rights researcher. Both men became
my good friends.
JKCCS actually believes that since the 90’s,
more than 70,000 people have lost their lives
in Kashmir, mostly civilians. The
organization is openly calling what occurs
in Kashmir – genocide.
Mr. ParvezImroz wrote for this essay:
“The army since 1989 has resorted to war
crimes as they have been given the legal
impunity and seldom have any armed
personnel for crimes against humanity have
been punished. The militarization in Jammu
and Kashmir has affected all aspects of life
and unfortunately the Indian media and civil
society, with some exceptions, have been
also extending the moral and political
impunity to the army who they believe are
fighting trans-border terrorism. The
systematic disappearance, mass graves,
torture has been completely ignored by the
Indian and international media.”
“In order to suppress the freedom struggle
in Jammu and Kashmir, the Indian
government has resorted to systematic and
institutional repression. More than 700,000
armed forces have been pressed into
service to neutralize the armed struggle and
to control the people of Jammu and Kashmir
who are seeking the right of self-
determination which government of India
had promised before the United Nations in
the 1948 and 1949 resolutions. The
repression of the Indian state has been part
of their policy. In this lie culpable even the
judiciary who as a wing of the State has
served the interests of the executive and
not the people of Jammu and Kashmir.
“The international institutions and
particularly the western civil society and
governments after 9/11 and because of
Islamophobia and other interests are
completely ignoring the situation in Jammu
and Kashmir.”
In Kashmir, no matter where I go, no matter
where I drive, there are constant, powerful
reminders of the occupation: from the
almost grotesque presence of the military,
police and paramilitary forces, to mass
graves. Army barracks are lined up along
all the major roads. Military and police trucks
drive on them in all directions, on all the
major and secondary roads. There are
countless roadblocks and checkpoints.
But it is not just the direct and brutal force
that is bleeding and destroying Kashmir.
Parvaiz Matta explains that this enormous
Indian security force has managed to
infiltrate and divide local society. Spies and
snitches have been inserted. Brave resistance
fighters were discredited as informers.
Resistance movements have been broken,
divided, and so have entire communities,
even families.
There is great sense of insecurity.
Interrogators telephone formerly detained,
alleged resistance figures, and tell them: “We
will soon get your sister.”
The brutality of the torture here is
unimaginable by any standards. I have
investigated and reported on countless
warzones, all over the world and countless
times, I was entrusted with hair-raising
stories of savagery. However, what I
learned in Kashmir exceeds the most terrible
practices.
In modern history, the cruelty of Indian
continued next page
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D
10
A R T I C L E S
continued next page
continued from page 9
forces in Kashmir can only be compared
to the Indonesian atrocities of 1965 and to
its genocide in East Timor, as well as in
Papua, or to the brutality of the Rwandese
and Ugandan forces in the Democratic
Republic of Congo. Or to the Empire’s direct
extermination campaign in Indochina.
Not surprisingly, both India and Indonesia
are the West’s client states, promoted as
examples of ‘democracy’ and ‘tolerance’.
***
“India is deprived, hegemonic and violent”,
I am told at the house of ParvezImroz,
outside of Srinagar city.
In the highly traditional Kashmiri custom,
several people sit on the floor, legs stretched,
old-fashioned heaters placed under the
blankets. We are drinking tea.
When it comes to this meeting, I can only
identify two men in this essay from the
JKCCS, by their real names. The rest are
those who are working on behalf of their
abused land, but their positions in the
international organizations and press
agencies would be compromised, were they
to go publicly on the record.
They all helped me a lot, guiding me,
explaining the situation, supplying me with
contacts and information. They were willing
to speak on condition of anonymity, and it
is clear where their hearts and allegiances
were:
“Indians are very moralistic, when it comes
to Palestine… Although, even that is
changing, after this administration of Prime
Minister Modi is moving India closer and
closer towards the West. US and Israel here
are deeply involved in ‘anti-terrorist training’.
Countless military and police officers are
receiving their education in the US,
European Union, and Israel. Police officers
are being flown abroad. The army is
performing regular exercises with the US
and Israeli forces, mainly in the area of
Ladakh, near Pakistan.”
“Ladakh is actually extremely popular
among Israelis. 20,000 to 30,000 come
here, every year, as tourists, or in some
double capacity.”
“The ideas and methods of Israeli
settlements are widely used in Kashmir. But
they are ‘improved’ here. The Indian state
is fine-tuning Israeli policies of apartheid.”
Everybody here agrees that the brutality
factor is much higher in Kashmir than in
Palestine:
“The brutality of Israeli forces is not hidden:
it is all in the open. Every action against the
Palestinian people is well documented. Israeli
actions are constantly criticized from
abroad, even at home. Huge blocks of
countries, even the EU, are demanding
independence for Palestine. Kashmir is
different: our Intifada is hidden from the
rest of the world. At least 8,000 of our
people have already died. Hundreds of
thousands have been tortured. But there is
almost total silence coming from abroad.”
The similarities between Palestinian and
Kashmiri resistance and their aim for
independence and statehood, are striking.
One of the most famous films made by my
friend Sanjay Kak from New Delhi, is called
“Jashn-e-Azadi – How We Celebrate
Freedom”, and it is exactly about the topic.
Sanjay also edited a book: Until My Freedom
Has Come – The New Intifada in Kashmir
(2011).
***
Kupwara. Mass graves dot the hill.
When we arrive, the town itself is totally
shut down. It is the 21st anniversary of the
massacre of local people by Indian forces.
Around 27 people were slaughtered here,
more than two decades ago, as they
demanded the end of the Indian occupation.
“Here, many people were ‘disappeared’; they
were killed in so-called staged battles. It
happened on several occasions”, explains
Parvaiz Matta. “Countless bodies arrived
mutilated at the local hospitals: some with
no legs, a clear result of torture.”
There are rusting stretchers resting against
a tree. I am told that they were used to
shuttle bodies from the hospital to this mass
grave. And the bodies kept arriving, being
carried by security forces from the forest.
The mass graves are all over the hill, some
right next to a public school, which sits at
the summit.
“The security forces described the bodies
as being those of ‘unidentified foreign
terrorists’, I am told. But ‘foreign’ is already
a form of identification, isn’t it?”
There are 7000 unmarked and mass graves
in Kashmir, I am told…
***
The 700,000-strong security forces are
fighting between 200 and 300 active
Mujahedin, resistance fighters.
The ‘fighting’ mainly consists of murdering
innocent bystanders and villagers in the
remote areas. These corpses are then
passed off as the corpses of the
Mujahedeen, ‘killed in combat’. That
consequently ‘justifies’ huge military
operations and budgets.
The ‘fighting’ also includes torturing anyone
who is suspected or ‘accused’ of belonging
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D A R T I C L E S
11
continued next page
continued from page 10
to, or supporting the Mujahedeen; therefore
anyone whom the security forces decide
to identify as such.
The ‘signature’ torture in Kupwara, consists
of cutting off legs or fingers. Torture tools
and methods here, in this area, which is
very near the Pakistani border, are very
elaborate.
The chests of victims are burned with red-
hot coins, and electric current administered
through the penis. The testicles of victims
are burned. Bottles of alcohol are inserted
into the rectum of men who are then hung
upside down from the ceiling. Wooden
rollers are used to destroy legs. Nails are
hammered into the feet of prisoners. Those
who have half-moon tattoos, have them
removed by red-hot pliers.
When a woman gets arrested, it is almost
certain that her torture will include gang
rape.
Sodomizing male prisoners is also common,
all over Kashmir.
All of this, of course, could not pass as
anything ‘spontaneous’. There is clearly a
pattern. The security forces are trained to
do what they are doing. A new, extremely
brutal group has been created by the state.
It is called SOG, and it mainly consists of
the children of police and military personnel
killed in battles with the Mujahedeen. It is
easy to imagine the type of methods it uses.
“Most cases of torture and rape are not
documented”, explained Parvaiz. “But my
organization alone has already managed to
amass documentation on around 5,000
instances of torture. For instance, a father
had his head chopped off in front of his
horrified family…”
I make him stop, at least for a few minutes.
I need to at least have a short time to digest
what I see around me, as well as what I am
told.
We drive further, towards the Pakistani
border. It is all really lush here – lush and
stunningly beautiful. Tall mountains covered
by snowcaps, pristine lakes and meadows.
I ask our driver to stop; I need some fresh
air. I need to see this magnificence, in order
to regain strength, before we proceed
towards a place that I dread visiting, but
which I have to visit nevertheless.
We are heading towards two villages: Kunan
and Poshpora.
Here, on 23rd February 1991, the armed
forces of India surrounded Kunan, and
arrested all men older than the age of 13.
They arrived with the tools of torture, in
their vehicles, and the torture that they
administered, was horrible.
We park the car and I am led into one of the
houses.
It is a traditional, neat and extremely clean
house. We take off our shoes. Two men
are already waiting in the main room, resting
their backs against the wall and soft pillows.
A third man arrives shortly after.
We are not here to discuss torture. It is
mass rape I am supposed to hear about.
But first, the men recall their own suffering.
One of them begins:
“It was February and it was late at night;
cold outside, winter. It all began at 11 PM
and did not stop until 4 AM, early in the
morning. All the men were taken out, into
the bitter cold. They stripped us naked, and
forced us to stand in an ice-cold stream.
There was snow, 3 feet tall all around. They
tortured 100 of us; of the men… 40 to 50
were severely tortured. They used electric
current, and also, they put red chilly into
the water and forced our heads down into
it.”
There are no women in the room; no
women at all that could be spotted around
the house.
Another old man began speaking, while I
averted my eyes. It was all extremely
uncomfortable, and I knew what a great
effort and determination it took for these
men to speak about that horrible night,
almost a quarter of century ago.
“Women and girls were left in the houses.
They were alone and defenseless. The
soldiers, around 200 of them, entered the
houses, mostly 5-10 per house. They were
carrying bottles of alcohol with them – they
were drunk. It was all planned like this!”
Now the men spoke over each other:
“Women were raped. All of them… And
not only women, but also small girls, from
6 to 13 years of age… Their clothes were
torn off, they were insulted, humiliated, then
raped.”
Soldiers were screaming at women: ‘You
are bloody helping the militants, aren’t you?’
And this was done by Indian troops, and in
India, so often; even rape does not end with
the act itself. The brutality of the act is
regularly indescribable; it includes the
insertion of sharp objects, of rusty bars, of
anything.
“Many of our women bled profusely. Some
were unconscious for 4 or 5 days,” these 3
husbands whose wives survived that terrible
night told me.
“One of the women delivered a baby, just 4
days earlier. The baby was hugging her
mom when the soldiers entered. They first
killed the baby, then gang-raped the mother.”
“They tortured and raped a minor, a girl.
They broke her leg. She died later…”
“Some women have undergone treatment
for many years, as their rectums were
severely damaged”.
5 women died as a result of what took
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D A R T I C L E S
12
continued from page 11
place that night.
There were two cops, from the village, who
tried to assist the injured women. Later, they
were willing to come forward and to testify.
One of them was shot dead – murdered.
I am told that 40 women came forward
and gave testimonies. These were married
women. Minor, unmarried girls, had kept
their identity secret. But even so, almost no
young woman from Kunan could get
married, afterwards. The stigma was too
great and no villager from the area wanted
to marry a rape victim.
Parvaiz explained that the rapes are still
taking place in the deep provinces, in the
frontier areas, where the people are at the
mercy of the military. “Still, rape is used as
a weapon of war”, he said.
For the Kunan onslaught, not one soldier
has been punished, so far.
Before we left, the husbands of the rape
victims, explained:
“This happened at the beginning… Then
many other, terrible events took place. We
tried to play by the rules, using the Indian
legal system. But after almost a quarter of a
century, there has been no justice. Here,
the law only protects those guilty ones. This
militarization of Kashmir ruined our lives!
Now, we just want to be freed by destiny!
This was all a terrible trauma for us. Even
children from other villages are mocking
our women and girls: “Oh, you come from
that village where all the women were
raped!”
It was a humbling experience, facing those
tough Kashmiri men, who decided to open
themselves up to me.
After they spoke, we walked from Kunan
to Poshpora Village. Metaphorically, the ice
was broken. I was allowed to photograph
villagers, both men and women. I was
accepted.
As we began driving towards Srinagar,
there was a long silence inside the car. Then
I broke it:
“Parvaiz?”
“Hmmm?”
“The fact that they mock the girls and
women…” I began…
I knew he was thinking the same.
“Would you marry a rape victim?” He asked.
“If I were to be in love with her, yes, of
course I would.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” I said.
“This is where our culture has failed”, he
said. And this is when I knew, that he would
do the same.
I told him about the mass rape in the city of
Ermera, in East Timor. The Indonesian
forces did it – exactly the same scenario as
in the Kashmiri village of Kunan.
I was then working illegally in East Timor.
I was detained and tortured. Nobody ever
got punished for the rape or for the killings.
Many people directly responsible for the
genocide in East Timor are now governing
Indonesia.
***
As we passed Kupwara, the mood in the
car significantly improved.
“I did not want to tell you, but chances
were that before reaching Kupwara, we
could have been stopped, interrogated and
then…”
I got the point.
But now ‘it was fine’.
The further we drove away from Kupwara,
the safer it was getting; by now we would
have many arguments for justifying our trip.
I photographed a few military and
paramilitary camps, through the windshield.
Then I asked our driver to stop. I needed to
take a piss. He pushed the brakes right next
to some beautiful Kashmiri apple orchard.
I stepped out from the car and walked
towards the first tree; the fresh air and
beautiful countryside, and stuff like that…
Then I spotted him: a soldier, semi-
camouflaged, holding his machinegun,
ready. I pissed towards him, defiantly. Then
I saluted him, mockingly. He did not even
smile, just stood there, like an idiot, under
the apple tree.
I was wondering whether there are more
Indian security personnel in Kashmir, or
apple trees?
I visited Mr. Hassan Bhat in Sopore City,
known for its resistance fighters.
Mr. Bhat used to be one of them, but he
was captured and tortured savagely, on
several occasions, and he gave up on active
duty.
The security forces killed both his sons.
Just like that, both died by the time they
reached the age of 15.
One son had gone to a local store, in 2006,
to buy milk, and a security agent shot him
through the chest, from his speeding police
car. Another boy died in 2010, when some
kids got engaged in stone-throwing, and he
was caught in the middle of it, when he got
scared, and jumped into the river. Police
began shooting tear gas canisters at anyone
who was in the water. They hit him with
one of those, and he died.
“I know the perpetrators, I know the
officer who was in charge”, said Mr. Bhat.
He tried to file a complaint, but the police
refused to register the case.continued next page
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D A R T I C L E S
13
continued next page
continued from page 12
“The officer-in-charge was going to join
the UN Peacekeepers”, said Parvaiz. “India
often sends people who fought in Kashmir,
to the UN. It is a huge money-making
scheme for the country… But my
organization identified him, and supplied the
UN with detailed evidence on his crimes.
After that, his application got rejected.”
I actually saw the Indian UN “Peacekeepers”
in action, in Goma, in the Democratic
Republic of Congo, where even the former
UNHCR head, Ms. Masako Yonekawa,
complained to me about the many illegal
activities perpetrated by the Indian
‘peacekeeping contingent’.
Then, Mr. Bhat and I stood by the shore of
the River Jhelum.
“It flows all the way to Pakistan,” he sighed.
Mr. Bhat, despite all those horrors that he
has survived, is a kind, gentle man.
I asked him whether he thinks that Kashmir
will be able to, at some point, gain its
independence.
“80% of Kashmiri people want freedom”,
he said. “80% is a lot of people, don’t you
think?”
I am being shown where, in 1993, an entire
area had been destroyed, by the BSF (Border
Security Forces). Back then, 53 people died.
Later we go, in the middle of the night, to a
house where a battle took place between
the Indian forces and the Mujahedeen, just
a few days earlier.
Sopore is still fighting.
But there is fear. It is cold; it is an omnipresent
fear.
I am told by many, that now, people are
afraid of even protesting against the scarcity
of basic supplies. One could easily disappear.
I am told that here, the Indian forces are
trying to hook young people on alcohol and
drugs, in order to keep them away from
the resistance.
But others say: in this city, in Sopore, people
are determined. They resist. They are active
here. This city produces big people! People
that never surrender! Indian forces call it
“Little Pakistan”.
Can the huge oppressive force really be
defeated, and if yes, then how?
This is when, even in Sopore; even in the
middle of the night, in front of a house that
recently witnessed a real battle, everyone
gets realistic:
“Only international pressure can help!”
At some point, one gets exhausted, almost
numb, after listening to detailed and well-
documented accounts of extra-judicial
killings, disappearances, torture and rapes.
At one point I was presented with evidence
about a man who was detained, questioned
and when he appeared defiant, both of his
feet were chopped off. He survived. When
still in detention, sometime later, the security
forces cut off substantial parts of his flesh,
from different parts of his body; cooked it,
and forced him to eat it, for several days.
He survived… The case is documented and
HR organizations are demanding justice. No
one has been punished.
***
There is genocide: terrible, outrageous and
unreported by the cowardly media and the
intellectuals, in both India and the West.
People, who dare to speak and write about
the plight of Kashmir, are intimidated,
deported, and even physically attacked.
Arundhati Roy is periodically threatened with
sedition charges, lawsuits and life
imprisonment.
Others, like the legendary radio host David
Barsamian, got deported from India, no
explanation given.
In October 2011, a senior Supreme Court
advocate Mr. Prashant Bhushan (who
drafted the Lokpal Bill), was brutally beaten
in his chambers at the Supreme Court after
he made comments on Kashmir. Mr.
Bhushan’s spoke on human rights violations
and militarization in Kashmir.
***
There are tourists in Kashmir, not only
Indian, but foreigners as well. They go
skiing and snowboarding in Gulmarg, or
hiking to Ladakh. There are Europeans and
Israelis, some North Americans.
Many locals call it “horror tourism in
Rapistan”.
I encountered several couples, high in the
mountains, in Gulmarg: red cheeks from
too much fresh air at the high altitude. I
talked to a British couple enjoying skiing, a
German couple on vacation… They had
no clue about what was happening in
Kashmir. When I pressed them a bit: “But
you must have noticed all those bunkers,
military convoys and checkpoints”, their
simple reply was: “Yes… Well, India has to
do something about the terrorism problem,
right?”
It is a well-documented fact that the Empire
is counting on several countries, all over
the world, for acting on its behalf, spreading
terror in the ‘neighborhood’, often
brutalizing even its own people. These
countries are, for instance, Rwanda, Uganda
and Kenya in Africa, Honduras and
Columbia in Latin America, Israel, Saudi
Arabia and Qatar in the Middle East,
Indonesia, Thailand and now India in
Southern Asia.
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D A R T I C L E S
14
continued from page 13
continued next page
Most of the brutal lackey states are
christened as ‘democracies’, as tolerant, as
the examples worth following.
These countries are promoted as ‘Lands
of Smiles’, or as ‘cultures of non-violence’.
It is all farcical, but somehow, not many
people seem to be laughing.
It is because they don’t know. It is
because brutality and cynicism still pays.
And this approach should stop! Brutal
crimes against humanity have to be
exposed. Countries that are murdering
thousands of innocent people have to be
shamed publicly and dealt with,
internationally. It goes without saying that
a state that is serving the Empire,
torturing and raping those who are
longing for independence, while in the
same time spitting on its own poor,
should never have place in an
organization like BRICS!
I went back to the area of the Grand
Mosque in Srinagar, on 26th January, as
I promised. I followed the kids. A few
streets away, after 2 pm, fighting
erupted.
It was all raw and tough, and it clearly
resembled Palestine.
The only great difference was that other
than me there were no witnesses, to
describe the courage of local youth, as
well as the oppression of the Kashmiri
people by the Indian state.
Two days later I took the longest cable
car in Asia, at Gulmarg. I wanted to
see ‘what was up there’. There is, of
course, a military base!
On the way down, the electricity
collapsed and our gondola froze,
suspended in midair. The door would
not close, and there were holes, all over.
It was India, after all. I could have
frozen to death, if the stuff did not begin
moving a few minutes later.
India is facing some of the most serious
challenges on Earth: from illiteracy to
deep poverty. 700,000 security forces
cost billions of dollars, annually,
pragmatically speaking. Even if the
Indian elites, government and military
do not care about the Kashmiri people
and their plight, they should care at least
about their own poor!
Holding Kashmir against its will brings no
benefits to India and its people. It is definitely
undemocratic and brutal… and absolutely
unnecessary!
Welcome to Kashmir! Its beauty is fabled.
Its lakes, mountain ranges, deep valleys
and rivers are proud and striking. Its people
warm, welcoming, but strong.
Kashmir is bleeding. Its valleys are divided
by barbed wire. Its women are raped. Its
men tortured and humiliated. The cries of
Kashmiri people are muted. The world
knows almost nothing about their plight,
about their suffering.
700,000-man security force fighting
around 300 men! And they cannot win.
Why? The answer is simple: It is because
no brutal force on earth could ever defeat
those who are fighting for the survival of
their land, for something so dear, so
beloved!
08 February, 2015
Andre Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker
and investigative journalist.
Source: Counterpunch.org
ISIS DESTROYS ANCIENT SITES NEAR MOSULBy Sandy English
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)
has reportedly used heavy equipment to
demolish the site of the ancient Assyrian
capital of Nimrud, 18 miles south of Mosul,
Iraq’s second largest city. Reports describe
ISIS militiamen trucking away statues and
tablets from the site and the demolition of
the area since last Thursday. The
fundamentalist group considers pre-Islamic
artifacts to be idolatrous and worthy of
destruction.
Nimrud, built over 3,000 years ago, was
the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire after
883 BC. The Neo-Assyrian Empire, whose
rulers spoke a language distantly related to
Arabic and Hebrew, ruled Mesopotamia, the
ancient name for Iraq and parts of Syria,
from about 900 BC to 600 BC.
The site along the Tigris River contained
monumental statues, frescos, temples,
private dwellings and a ziggurat, the stepped
pyramid characteristic of Mesopotamian
civilizations. Nimrud boasted some of the
most extensive carvings in ivory of any site
in the world, most of which had been
removed and placed in museums in Iraq
and Britain.
A week earlier, the Islamic State released
video showing men smashing statues with
sledgehammers in the Nineveh Museum,
about 20 miles from the site of Nimrud.
Nineveh was the capital of the Neo-
Assyrian Empire after 705 BC.
In recent weeks, ISIS has also set off
incendiary devices around Mosul Central
Library. Estimates of the books and
manuscripts destroyed range from 8,000
to 10,000. Bookshops on the central Al-
Nujaifi Street have been burned, and ancient
Christian monasteries have been vandalized.
continued from page 14
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D A R T I C L E S
15
continued next page
Over the weekend, the Associated Press
reported that residents near Hatra, 68 miles
southwest of Mosul, saw ISIS fighters
removing artifacts form the 2,000-year-old
city. Hatra was built during the Seleucid
Empire in the second or third century BC
and changed hands over the next several
hundred years, belonging in turn to the
Parthians, the Romans and Araba, one of
the first pre-Islamic Arab kingdoms.
Next to the tremendous loss of life, the
destruction of the past is one of the most
grievous products of the conflict that was
initiated by the American invasion of Iraq in
2003. A whole people is being cut off from
its historical roots and the study of the
Mesopotamian past by historians has
suffered a serious blow.
The plunder of Iraq began on April 10, 2003,
when American occupation forces in
Baghdad, in spite of warnings by
archaeologists, allowed the National
Museum to be looted of tens of thousands
of historical artifacts of great artistic and
scientific value. Only about half the artifacts
have been recovered. The American military,
in violation of cultural heritage regulations,
fired on the museum.
In that first month of the occupation, dozens
of other museums and libraries were burned
or looted, including the Mosul Museum,
where the 2,000-year-old statue of Parthian
King Saqnatroq II was stolen.
In 2003-2004, American troops occupied
the site of ancient Babylon, where they dug
ditches across excavated areas, filling
sandbags with ancient bricks labeled with
cuneiform writing of the Mesopotamian
civilization. The occupation forces built a
heliport, and vibrations from American
aircraft caused the bases of temples to
collapse.
“The damage to Babylon is both extensive
and irreparable,” Columbia University
archeologist Zainab Bahrani said in 2007.
“The occupation has resulted in a
tremendous destruction of history, well
beyond the museums and libraries that were
looted and destroyed at the fall of Baghdad.
At least seven historical sites have [like
Babylon] been used by US and coalition
forces since 2003, one of them being in the
historical heart of Samarra, where the Askari
shrine built by Nasr al Din Shah was
bombed in 2006.”
The destruction and looting of Iraqi
archaeological sites has been going on
nonstop ever since. Iraq’s archeological
sites and tells—unexcavated mounds of
earth that cover formerly inhabited areas—
have been dug up with earth-moving
equipment and the spoils have been sold on
the antiquities market for private gain.
In 2010, the New York Times noted the
collusion of the police with antiquities thieves
in southern Iraq, areas controlled by Shia
sectarian militias. One of the great cultural
crimes brought on by the American
occupation of Iraq was the bombing of al-
Mutinabbi Street, Baghdad’s historic street
of booksellers, on March 5, 2007.
Both Nimrud and Nineveh were plundered
several times during the American
occupation. Before ISIS’s destruction last
week, the advanced state of decay of the
Nimrud site was causing archaeologists
great concern.
The American and European media have
expressed “shock” and “outrage” over
ISIS’s cultural destruction. Irina Bokova,
director of the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESO) said, “We cannot remain silent.
The deliberate destruction of cultural heritage
constitutes a war crime.”
The Iraqi government, somewhat more
forthrightly, has used the ISIS vandalism
to call for stepped-up intervention by the
American and coalition air forces in Iraq.
But the corporate-controlled media,
UNESCO, and the miserable servants of
the US in the Iraq government conceal the
essential causes and nature of this
barbarism, and omit even naming the force
that is chiefly responsible for the destruction
of the past: American imperialism.
This exercise in unbridled hypocrisy
assumes that the people of the world have
forgotten the destruction of Iraqi, and now
Syrian, heritage sites, museums and libraries
as the result of 12 years of almost
continuous imperialist military intervention
in the region.
Over a million Iraqis have died as a result of
the American invasion and occupation, and
the sectarian fighting stoked up by US
imperialism. Tens of millions remain
internally displaced and mired in poverty.
The utilities infrastructure and the Iraqi health
care system have been destroyed and have
yet to recover. The World Socialist Web
Site has accurately defined this process as
“sociocide,” “the deliberate and systematic
murder of an entire society.”
The same is true for the devastation wrought
by right-wing political movements such as
ISIS, and the destruction of Iraq’s cultural
heritage. Just as there was no presence of
Al Qaeda in Iraq before the American
invasion, there was no plunder of the
country’s archaeology or cultural
institutions.
Those above all responsible for the
destruction of Nimrud, Nineveh and Hatra
bear the names of Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz,
Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell. One must add
to this list Barack Obama, who continued
the occupation for nearly three years and
has now launched a new war in Iraq and
Syria that can only lead to the further
destruction of the region’s historical and
cultural legacy, in addition to more civilian
deaths and an increase in the number of
refugees.
In a more direct sense, the vandalism of
continued from page 15
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D A R T I C L E S
16
continued next page
ISIS is an American production. In its
eagerness to implement regime-change in
Syria, the CIA, working with American allies
among the Gulf monarchies, as well as
Turkey and Jordan, armed the Islamists
fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The American-stoked civil war in Syria led
to the widespread destruction of antiquities.
Last year, the UN found that 24
archaeological sites have been completely
destroyed, 189 severely or moderately
damaged, and a further 77 possibly
damaged. All six of Syria’s World Heritage
sites have been damaged.
09 March, 2015
Sandy English is a writer for the World
Socialist Web Site.
Source: WSWS.org
AUSTRALIA’S SOVEREIGNTY SEVERELY COMPROMISED FOR US-ISRAELI DESIGNS
By Daud Batchelor
As Australia’s international standing has
risen, the country’s sovereignty is being
dangerously subsumed by the United States,
itself controlled by powerful elites:the
disproportionately influential military-
industrial complex and Zionist
lobbies.Australia’s sovereignty is being
compromisedby the political elite within the
ruling Liberal Party and Labour Party
caucus. Former Prime Minister Malcolm
Fraser presciently warned that the
relationship was becoming dangerous and
we “have effectively ceded to America the
ability to decide when Australia goes to
war”.
External threats facing Australia include a
commercial takeover of critical resources,
primarily by China. The second is inordinate
influence by the US, our “friendly” ally
under the ANZUS Treaty. Evidence
suggests some US covert involvement in
removing former PMs Gough Whitlam and
Kevin Rudd. Near neighbours, Indonesia
and Malaysia,have no expansionist aims.
Our defences should not be overly strained
but Australia increased its ‘defence’ budget
32% since 2003 with the target to achieve
2% of GDP. Fighting distant wars of
questionable merit and overinflating
domestic terrorism sucks funds from needy
domestic programmes and puts Australia
into massive debt paralleling the United
States itself.
John Howard dramatically changed
Australia’s defence policy to project military
power globally. The 9/11 attacks occurring
while PM Howard visited President Bush
Jr cemented a tight alliance. Howard offered
virtually a blank cheque for Australia’s
military to support future US
engagements.Significantly, many since
Mearsheimer and Walt’s exposure have
chronicled the excessive influence Israeli
lobbies e.g. AIPAC,have over US foreign
policies.Israeli is set not only on protecting
itself but creating a Greater Israel involving
fragmentation of neighbouring Arab states
- the Yinon Plan of the World Zionist
Organization. Australia is locked into
engagements of the US resulting from
certain US-Zionist strategies. The US
domineering worldview is inculcated
whenever American forces and agencies
meet counterparts in the Australian Defence
Forces, ASIO and Australian Federal Police.
Impacts on Australia’s foreign polices result
from the powerful Murdoch media
oligopoly, which champions Israel, and the
Zionist-led Lowy Institute for International
Policy, which has a snug relationship with
the ADF, ASIO and AFP, all Institute
members. The Institute’s Board of Directors
includes Martin Indyk, former Israeli
government propagandist. Great concern
is that Allan Gyngell, founding Executive-
Director of the Lowy Institute, is now
Director-General of Australia’s Office of
National Assessments. Gyngell leads a
supposedly independent organisation
providing key analyses on which Cabinet
relies to decide foreign policies. Zionists can
well influence key decisions. Abuse is of
grave concern given faulty ONA reports
claiming WMDs in Iraq used to incite
Australia’s participation in the infamous
2003 invasion.Former ONA officer, Andrew
Wilke, resigned claiming pre-invasion
pressures to exaggerate reports.
Former Foreign Minister, Bob Carr,
explained that the pro-Israel lobby enjoys
such a “very unhealthy level” of influence
in dictating Australia’s foreign policy
through party donations and MP trips to
Israel. The Australia/Israel and Jewish
Affairs Council had a direct line into the
PM’s office and aggressively lobbied
politicians. Politicians have been drawn
deeply into Israel’s global strategy: a visit to
Israel is essential for any aspiring PM.
Australia has developed arguably the
harshest anti-terrorism legislation and
supports illegal Israeli settlements.Australia
with only the US recently voted against a
proposal in the Security Council demanding
Israel ends its Palestinian occupation.Israel
defies UN resolutions and commits war
crimes violating Geneva conventions and
international law. Despite this, the
government strongly supports Israel. In the
2008-09 and 2014 Gaza wars, Israel killed
3,500 Palestinians, 75% civilians, while the
fewer Israeli fatalities were overwhelmingly
soldiers. Israel attacked densely-habited
areas causing slaughter and damage to
hospitals, schools and UN shelters.Ban Ki-
moon and European nations condemned
Israel’s disproportionate response and
targeting of civilians.Israel could well face
charges in the International Criminal Court.
continued next page
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D A R T I C L E S
17
continued from page 16
Legitimate concerns questioning Australia’s
involvement in distant wars unrelated to
Australia’s security raise the spectre of
‘blowback’ in supporting American global
hegemony and destruction of Muslim
lands.Emergence of ISIS is directly linked
to failed Australian-American strategies in
Iraq. The government’s embrace of
America’s pro-Israel anti-Muslim agenda is
against Australia’s best interests in ignoring
our peaceful Muslim neighbours -
Indonesia, and Malaysia, successful liberal
democracies on whom Snowdon showed
Australian and US governments
aggressively spy. Such conduct could drive
these friendly neighbours closer to China
and Russia to our detriment.
Prior to expanding anti-terrorist laws deemed
by many to be targeting the preponderantly
peaceful Muslim community, massive AFP
raids were conducted in NSW and
Queensland. Their scale implied citizens
were under imminent attack by numerous
terrorists. Was this to forestall opposition
to the government’s retrenchment of citizen
rights? Numbers arrested were low and
prosecutions will likely be few.Bernard
Keane commented, “Australians are less safe
now then a few weeks ago because of
decisions taken, primarily for political ends,
by the Abbott government, namely to
intervene in a conflict in Iraq and Syria that
has nothing to do with Australia’s national
interests”. Apart from the Martin Place
shootings, there have been no fatalities in
Australia by Muslim hands since1915 when
Britain invaded Turkey.PM Abbott over-
emphasises terrorism in Australia while
neglecting family violence that causes 80
deaths annually.Samuel Makinda warned
that with the expanded anti-terror legislation,
politicians have legislated away citizens’
rights. Alerting Australians that it was now
a “police state”, Gideon Polya, estimated
there were “only 6 Australian deaths by
terrorists (none Muslim) in the last 36 years.
Yet the major Australian parties ... have
committed $125 billion in terms of long-
term accrual cost to the Islamophobic War
on Terror.”
Australia’s subservience to the US and Israeli
lobbies should change and stop fighting their
wars and blowing out Australia’s finances.
With a forecasted A$40 billion budget
shortfall, either the government will raise
taxes, diminish services, or increase debt.
In the absence of military threats at home,
our main concern should be economic
security. Australians should consider an
alternative from heightened militarism in this
Gallipoli centenary honouring our heroes,
who spoke little wishing not to glorify war
for imperialism’s sake. Let us resist the
insidious takeover of our independence to
chart our own course and further peace
and stability of Australia and harmonious
relations amongst our own citizens and
neighbouring countries.
26 February 2015
Dr Daud Batchelor, political analyst,
whose grandfathers/father fought to protect
Australia’s security. He is a JUST member.
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY: ITS SIGNIFICANCE FOR ARAB AND
PALESTINIAN WOMEN.By Mazin Qumsiyeh
Today is International Women’s Day . The
mainstream media misses the point
intentionally. They highlight certain women
(some who make the lives of women
everywhere difficult, people like Hilary
Clinton, Condoleeza Rice, Angela Markel
etc) and they fail to give credit to those who
change things or to even explain to us the
origin of this day. Having an annual dedicated
day for women (action) was proposed by
Clara Zetkin of Germany to attendees at
the International Conference of Working
Women in 1910. Inspired by women
socialist movements for fair working
conditions in the USA in 1908 and 1909,
movements grew of women demanding
their rights (until then they did not even have
a right to vote). The first women’s day on
8 March 1911 launched demonstration and
marches for women workers’ rights (right
to vote, right to fair work condition, right
to live free from oppression, right to life,
against wars etc). After a long struggle
and many lives lost along the way, the UN
finally recognized 8 March as an
“International” (I prefer global) women’s
day in 1977, 66 years after it was launched
by brave socialist women. Thus women’s
day is about actions against injustice not
about Hilary Clinton!
The First Arab Women’s Congress of
Palestine gathered about 200 women and
was held on 26 October 1929 in Jerusalem.
The demands were rights of women and
against the Balfour Declaration, against the
racist idea of Zionism, for self-
determination, and for full equality (gender,
religion etc). They elected a 14 member
Executive Committee headed by Matiel E.
T. Mogannam. Mogannam wrote a book
titled “The Arab Women and the Palestinian
Problem” published 1937. Moghannam
explained how Palestinian women in the
1920s were innovative in many ways:
lobbying the colonial power, writing in
newspapers, and holding the first
demonstration in human history that used
automobiles with 120 cars in 1928 (gathered
from all over Palestine to drive in the streets
of Jerusalem). See my book on “Popular
Resistance in Palestine: A history of hope
and empowerment” (http://qumsiyeh.org/
popularresistanceinpalestine/)
The struggle of women here continues
unabated. Many people like me believe
continued from page 17
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D A R T I C L E S
18
sincerely that had women been in charge
here, we would have had a free Palestine
by now. My mother who is 82 years old
showed us by example what giving and
self-sacrifice and love of people and land
means. My wife and three sisters are
likewise examples of what we all should
aspire to do: kind, dedicated, and hard-
working human beings. Like millions before
them and millions contemporary with them,
these women make life livable while many
men (and a few women) engage in hurting
others and pushing for conflicts and war.
Words are too mediocre and inadequate to
express our feelings but I simply want to
say to all the women working for peace
and justice: thank you and to pledge that
we will work with you for more
progressive change in our societies.
Donate to the Palestine Museum of Natural
History and our institute of biodiversity and
sustainability. New campaign launched
through Indiegogo
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/
palestine-museum-of-natural-history/x/
10068075
More at http://palestinenature.org
8 March 2015
Mazin Butros Qumsiyeh is a Palestinian
scientist and author and the director of the
Palestine Museum of Natural History.
DEAR SYRIA: FROM ONE REFUGEE TO ANOTHER
By Ramzy Baroud
Whenever the word ‘refugee’ is uttered, I
think of my mother. When Zionist militias
began their systematic onslaught and
‘cleansing’ of the Palestinian Arab population
of historic Palestine in 1948, she, along with
her family, ran away from the once peaceful
village of Beit Daras.
Back then, Zarefah was six. Her father died
in a refugee camp in a tent provided by the
Quakers soon after he had been separated
from his land. She collected scrap metal to
survive.
My grandmother Mariam, would venture
out to the ‘death zone’ that bordered the
separated and newly established state of
Israel from Gaza’s refugee camps to collect
figs and oranges. She faced death every
day. Her children were all refugees, living
in shatat – the Diaspora.
My mother lived to be 42. Her life was
tremendously difficult. She married a
refugee, my dad, and together they brought
seven refugees into this world - my
brothers, my sister and myself. One died
as a toddler, for there was no medicine in
the refugee camp’s clinic.
No matter where we are, in time and place,
we carry our refugee ID cards, our
undefinable nationalities, our precious status,
our parents’ burden, our ancestors’ pain.
In fact, we have a name for it. It is called
waja’ - ‘aching’ - a character that unifies
millions of Palestinian refugees all across
the globe. With our refugee population now
dominated by second, third or even fourth
generation refugees, it seems that our waja’
is what we hold in common most. Our
geographies may differ, our languages, our
political allegiances, our cultures, but
ultimately, we meet around the painful
experiences that we have internalized
throughout generations.
My mother used to say – ihna yalfalastinieen
damitna qaribeh – tears for us Palestinians
are always close by. But our readiness to
shed tears is not a sign of weakness, far
from it. It is because throughout the years
we managed to internalize our own exile,
and its many ramifications, along with the
exiles of everyone else’s. The emotional
burden is just too great.
We mask the unbearable aching somehow,
but it is always close to the surface. If we
hear a single melody by Marcel Khalifeh or
Sheikh Imam, or a few verses by Mahmoud
Darwish, the wound is as fresh as ever.
Most of us no longer live in tents, but we
are reminded of our refugee status every
single day, by the Israeli occupation, by the
Gaza siege and the internally-displaced
Palestinians in Israel, by the Iraq war and
the displacement of the already displaced
Palestinians there, by the despicable living
conditions of Palestinian refugees in
Lebanon, and throughout the Middle East.
But for us, Syria has been our greatest waja’
in years. Aside from the fact that most of
Syria’s half a million Palestinian refugees
are on the run again , living the pain of
displacement and loss for the second, third,
or even fourth time. Nine million Syrian
refugees are now duplicating the Palestinian
tragedy, charting the early course of the
Palestinian Nakba, the catastrophe of 1948.
Watching the destitution of the Syrian
refugees is like rewinding the past , in all of
its awful details. And watching Arab states
clamor to aid the refugees with ample words
and little action feels as if we are living Arab
betrayal all over again.
I watched my grandparents die, followed
by my parents and many of my peers. All
of them died refugees, carrying the same
status and the same lost hope of return.
The most they ever received from the
‘international community’ was a few sacks
of rice and cheap cooking oil. And of
course, numerous tents.
With time our refugee status morphed from
being a ‘problem’ to an integral part of ourcontinued next page
continued from page 18
identities. Being a ‘refugee’ at this stage
means insisting on the Right of Return for
Palestinian refugees as enshrined in
international law. That status is no longer
just a mere reference to physical
displacement but also to a political, even a
national identity.
Political division may, at times, dominate
Palestinian society, but we will always be
united by the fact that we are refugees with
a common cause: going home. While for
the Palestinians of Yarmouk near
Damascus, being a refugee is a matter of
life and death – often by starvation – for the
larger Palestinian collective, the meaning of
the word has become more involved: it has
been etched onto our skin forever.
But what can one say by way of advice to
the relatively new refugees of Syria,
considering that we are yet to liberate
ourselves from a status that we never
sought?
There can be only reminders and a few
warnings:
First, may your displacement end soon. May
you never live the waja’ of displacement to
the extent that you embrace it as a part of
your identity, and pass it on from one
generation to another. May it be a kind of
fleeting pain or passing nightmare, but never
a pervasive everyday reality.
Second, you must be prepared for the
worst. My grandparents left their new
blankets in their village before they fled to
the refugee camps because they feared they
would have been ruined by the dust of the
journey. Alas, the camps became home, and
the blankets were confiscated as the rest of
Palestine was. Please remain hopeful, but
realistic.
Third, don’t believe the ‘international
community’ when they make promises.
They never deliver , and when they do, it is
always for ulterior motives that might bring
you more harm than good. In fact, the term
itself is illusory, mostly used in reference to
western countries which have wronged you
as they have us.
Fourth, don’t trust Arab regimes. They lie.
They feel not your pain . They hear not
your pleas, nor do they care. They have
invested so much in destroying your
countries, and so little in redeeming their
sins. They speak of aid that rarely arrives
and political initiatives that constitute mostly
press releases. But they will take every
opportunity to remind you of their virtues.
In fact, your victimhood becomes a
platform for their greatness . They thrive at
your expense, thus will invest to further
your misery.
Fifth, preserve your dignity. I know, it is
never easy to maintain your pride when you
sleep in a barren street covered in cardboard
boxes. A mother would do whatever she
can to help her children pass into safety.
No matter, you must never allow the wolves
awaiting you at every border to exploit your
desperation. You must never allow the Emir,
or his children or some rich businessman
or sympathetic celebrity to use you as a
photo-op. Do not ever kneel. Don’t ever
kiss a hand. Don’t give anyone the
satisfaction to exploit your pain.
Sixth, remain united. There is strength in
unity when one is a refugee. Don’t allow
political squabbles to distract you from the
greater battle at hand: surviving until the day
you return home, and you will.
Seventh, love Syria. Yours is an unparalleled
civilization. Your history is rife with triumphs
that were ultimately of your own making.
Even if you must leave to distant lands ,
keep Syria in your hearts. This too shall
pass, and Syria shall redeem its glory, once
the brutes vanquish. Only the spirit of the
people shall survive. It is not wishful
thinking. It is history.
Dear Syrian refugee, it has been 66 years
and counting since my people’s
dispossession began. We are yet to return,
but that is a battle for my children, and their
children to fight. I hope yours ends soon.
Until then, please remember the tent is just
a tent, and the gusts of cold wind are but of
a passing storm.
And until you return home to Syria, don’t
let the refugee become who you are, as
you are so much more.
29 January, 2015
- Ramzy Baroud –
www.ramzybaroud.net - is an
internationally-syndicated columnist, a
media consultant, an author of several books
and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com.
Source: Countercurrents.org
WEALTH OF THE WORLD’S 400 RICHEST BILLIONAIRES ROSE $92BILLION IN 2014
By Andre Damon
The wealthiest 400 people in the world saw
their combined net worth grow by $92
billion last year, hitting $4.1 trillion. The
bonanza for the super-rich was
underwritten by governments and central
banks around the world, which fueled
surging stock markets and record corporate
profits by pumping hundreds of billions into continued next page
the financial markets.
The figures were provided by the
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D A R T I C L E S
19
Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which was
initiated in 2012 and tracks the wealth of
the 400 richest people in the world.
The combined net worth of these 400
individuals is greater than the gross
domestic product of Germany, the fourth
largest economy in the world. The average
net worth of each of the billionaires grew
by $240 million, to $10.25 billion.
Since the 2008 financial crash, which
triggered multi-trillion-dollar bank bailouts
and the infusion into the financial system
of trillions more in virtually free cash, the
wealth of the super-rich has nearly doubled.
The net worth of the Forbes list of the 400
richest Americans increased from $1.27
trillion in 2009 to $2.29 trillion in 2014.
Over the past year, global stock markets
have continued to soar. The American
Nasdaq index has shot up by 14.1 percent.
The Japanese Nikkei is up by 7.1 percent.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed
above 18,000 for the first time on December
26, after hitting a record 17,000 in July 2014
and 16,000 in November 2013.
The Dow is up by 155 percent over its
level in March 2009, when it was below
6,000. US corporate profits have likewise
hit record highs, reaching $1.8 trillion in
the fourth quarter of 2014, up from $671
billion in the fourth quarter of 2008.
Investor Warren Buffett, the world’s second
richest man, according to the Bloomberg
list, saw his wealth grow to $74.5 billion,
up by $13.7 billion, or more than 22 percent,
in the past year. Buffett’s wealth has more
than doubled since 2009.
Bloomberg noted that “dozens of operating
businesses the 84-year-old chairman bought
over the past five decades churned out
record profit” over the past year. Buffett’s
business model has been to buy traditional
industries such as railroads and food
producers, then ruthlessly cut costs, making
billions in the process. Buffett’s businesses
have profited handsomely from the ongoing continued next page
continued from page 19fall in labor costs, which have been dropping
year after year since 2008 as a result of
falling wages and cuts in benefits for
workers.
Commentators did not hesitate to ascribe
the growth in the wealth of the super-rich
to the continuing infusion of cash by global
central banks. This week, European Central
Bank President Mario Draghi indicated that
the bank would pursue additional stimulus
measures, which markets predicted could
mean the initiation of US-style “quantitative
easing,” where the central bank essentially
prints money to buy state bonds in addition
to private securities.
Two of the three billionaires who made the
most in 2014 reside in China, which is
experiencing a stock market bubble, with
the country’s FTSE Xinhua 200 index up
by 49.49 percent over the past year. Jack
Ma, chairman of Alibaba Group, saw his
wealth shoot up by $25.1 billion this year,
to $28.7 billion, following the September
initial public offering of shares in the Chinese
Internet trading company he heads.
The wealth of Wang Jianlin, chairman and
founder of the Chinese conglomerate Dalian
Wanda, nearly doubled over the past year,
hitting $25.3 billion, after his company held
an initial public offering for its commercial
properties division last year. Of the six
billionaires whose wealth more than
doubled, five live in China.
Bill Gates, the world’s richest man, saw his
wealth grow by $9.1 billion, to $87.6 billion.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s net worth grew
by $5.7 billion, to $49.4 billion. The wealth
of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
increased $10.6 billion to $35.3 billion.
Zuckerberg’s wealth has grown nearly 18-
fold since 2009, when it stood at $2 billion.
The financial sector made up a significant
share of the Bloomberg list. In addition to
Buffett, billionaire investors George Soros
and Carl Icahn featured prominently, with
$26.1 and $23.6 billion, respectively.
The soaring wealth of the super-rich comes
amid growing warnings over the
implications of rising social inequality. Last
month, the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD)
published a report noting: “Today, the richest
10 percent of the population in the OECD
area earn 9.5 times the income of the poorest
10 percent; in the 1980s this ratio stood at
7:1 and has been rising continuously ever
since.”
The OECD reported that the gap between
the top 10 percent and the bottom ten
percent had reached “around 10 to 1 in Italy,
Japan, Korea, Portugal and the United
Kingdom, between 13 and 16 to 1 in Greece,
Israel, Turkey and the United States, and
between 27 and 30 to 1 in Mexico and
Chile.”
The obscene enrichment of the world’s
billionaires and multi-millionaires is
accompanied by—and dependent on—the
growth of unemployment and poverty
around the world. According to a report
issued by the International Labor
Organization last year, the number of people
worldwide without work has hit 200 million
for the first time ever. The figure marked a
5 million increase in one year, surpassing
2009’s record high of 198 million.
According to a separate report by the
OECD, some 12 percent of the world’s
population, or 860 million people, lives in
poverty. Some 805 million people were
chronically under nourished between 2012
and 2014, according to the United Nations
Food and Agriculture Organization.
The ever-greater enrichment of the world’s
financial elite is not the byproduct of a
general growth in the real economy and
development of the productive forces, let
alone a broader rise in living standards. On
the contrary. The real economy is stagnating
or declining, the productive infrastructure
of the US and other industrialized countries
is being starved of investment and allowed
to rot, and the living standards of the broad
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D A R T I C L E S
20
mass of people are falling.
Today’s financial oligarchs generally make
their fortunes on the basis of social plunder
and economic parasitism, much of it
borderline illegal or outright criminal.
Increasingly, the meager benefits and
savings of workers—in the form of
pensions and other benefits—are being
stolen by the corporate-financial elite by
means of corporate and municipal
bankruptcies and other pseudo-legal forms
of swindling.
The Bloomberg report on the super-rich is
one more demonstration of the failure of
capitalism and the necessity for the working
class to overthrow it and replace it with
socialism.
03 January, 2015
Andre Damon is the National Secretary of
the International Youth and Students for
Social Equality.
Source: WSWS.org
continued from page 20
THE REAL AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
By Alfred W. McCoy
“The sovereign is he who decides on
the exception,” said conservative
thinker Carl Schmitt in 1922,
meaning that a nation’s leader can
defy the law to serve the greater
good. Though Schmitt’s service as
Nazi Germany’s chief jurist and his
unwavering support for Hitler from
the night of the long knives to
Kristallnacht and beyond damaged
his reputation for decades, today his
ideas have achieved unimagined
influence. They have, in fact, shaped
the neo-conservative view of
presidential power that has become
broadly bipartisan since 9/11. Indeed,
Schmitt has influenced American
politics directly through his
intellectual protégé Leo Strauss who,
as an émigré professor at the
University of Chicago, trained Bush
administration architects of the Iraq
war Paul Wolfowitz and Abram
Shulsky.
All that should be impressive enough
for a discredited, long dead
authoritarian thinker. But Schmitt’s
dictum also became a philosophical
foundation for the exercise of
American global power in the quarter
century that followed the end of the
Cold War. Washington, more than any
other power, created the modern
international community of laws and
treaties, yet it now reserves the right
to defy those same laws with
impunity. A sovereign ruler should, continued next page
said Schmitt, discard laws in times
of national emergency. So the United
States, as the planet’s last
superpower or, in Schmitt’s terms,
its global sovereign, has in these years
repeatedly ignored international law,
following instead its own unwritten
rules of the road for the exercise of
world power.
Just as Schmitt’s sovereign
preferred to rule in a state of endless
exception without a constitution for
his Reich, so Washington is now well
into the second decade of an endless
War on Terror that seems the sum of
its exceptions to international law:
endless incarceration, extrajudicial
killing, pervasive surveillance, drone
strikes in defiance of national
boundaries, torture on demand, and
immunity for all of the above on the
grounds of state secrecy. Yet these
many American exceptions are just
surface manifestations of the ever-
expanding clandestine dimension of
the American state. Created at the
cost of more than a trillion dollars
since 9/11, the purpose of this vast
apparatus is to control a covert
domain that is fast becoming the main
arena for geopolitical contestation in
the twenty-first century.
This should be (but seldom is
considered) a jarring, disconcerting
path for a country that, more than
any other, nurtured the idea of, and
wrote the rules for, an international
community of nations governed by
the rule of law. At the First Hague
Peace Conference in 1899, the U.S.
delegate, Andrew Dickson White, the
founder of Cornell University, pushed
for the creation of a Permanent Court
of Arbitration and persuaded Andrew
Carnegie to build the monumental
Peace Palace at The Hague as its
home. At the Second Hague
Conference in 1907, Secretary of
State Elihu Root urged that future
international conflicts be resolved by
a court of professional jurists, an idea
realized when the Permanent Court
of International Justice was
established in 1920.
After World War II, the U.S. used its
triumph to help create the United
Nations, push for the adoption of its
Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, and ratify the Geneva
Conventions for humanitarian
treatment in war. If you throw in
other American-backed initiatives like
the World Health Organization, the
World Trade Organization, and the
World Bank, you pretty much have
the entire infrastructure of what we
now casually call “the international
community.”
Breaking the Rules
Not only did the U.S. play a crucial
A R T I C L E S
21
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D
role in writing the new rules for that
community, but it almost immediately
began breaking them. After all,
despite the rise of the other
superpower, the Soviet Union,
Washington was by then the world
sovereign and so could decide which
should be the exceptions to its own
rules, particularly to the foundational
principle for all this global
governance: sovereignty. As it
struggled to dominate the hundred
new nations that started appearing
right after the war, each one invested
with an inviolable sovereignty,
Washington needed a new means of
projecting power beyond
conventional diplomacy or military
force. As a result , CIA covert
operations became its way of
intervening within a new world order
where you couldn’t or at least
shouldn’t intervene openly.
All of the exceptions that really matter
spring from America’s decision to join
what former spy John Le Carré called
that “squalid procession of vain
fools, traitors. . . sadists, and
drunkards,” and embrace espionage
in a big way after World War II. Until
the creation of the CIA in 1947, the
United States had been an innocent
abroad in the world of intelligence.
When General John J. Pershing led
two million American troops to
Europe during World War I, the U.S.
had the only army on either side of
the battle lines without an intelligence
service. Even though Washington
built a substantial security apparatus
during that war, it was quickly scaled
back by Republican conservatives
during the 1920s. For decades, the
impulse to cut or constrain such
secret agencies remained robustly
bipartisan, as when President Harry
Truman abolished the CIA’s
predecessor, the Office of Strategic
Services (OSS), right after World
continued from page 21 War II or when President Jimmy
Carter fired 800 CIA covert
operatives after the Vietnam War.
Yet by fits and starts, the covert
domain inside the U.S. government
has grown stealthily from the early
twentieth century to this moment. It
began with the formation of the FBI
in 1908 and Military Intelligence in
1917. The Central Intelligence
Agency followed after World War II
along with most of the alphabet
agencies that make up the present U.S.
Intelligence Community, including the
National Security Agency (NSA), the
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA),
and last but hardly least, in 2004, the
Office of the Director of National
Intelligence. Make no mistake: there
is a clear correlation between state
secrecy and the rule of law — as one
grows, the other surely shrinks.
World Sovereign
America’s irrevocable entry into this
covert netherworld came when
President Truman deployed his new
CIA to contain Soviet subversion in
Europe. This was a continent then
thick with spies of every stripe: failed
fascists, aspirant communists, and
everything in between. Introduced to
spycraft by its British “cousins,” the
CIA soon mastered it in part by
establishing sub rosa ties to networks
of ex-Nazi spies, Italian fascist
operatives, and dozens of continental
secret services.
As the world’s new sovereign,
Washington used the CIA to enforce
its chosen exceptions to the
international rule of law, particularly
to the core principle of sovereignty.
During his two terms, President
Dwight Eisenhower authorized 104
covert operations on four continents,
focused largely on controlling the
many new nations then emerging
from centuries of colonialism.
Eisenhower’s exceptions included
blatant transgressions of national
sovereignty such as turning northern
Burma into an unwilling springboard
for abortive invasions of China,
arming regional revolts to partition
Indonesia, and overthrowing elected
governments in Guatemala and Iran.
By the time Eisenhower left office in
1961, covert ops had acquired such
a powerful mystique in Washington
that President John F. Kennedy
would authorize 163 of them in the
three years that preceded his
assassination.
As a senior CIA official posted to the
Near East in the early 1950s put it,
the Agency then saw every Muslim
leader who was not pro-American as
“a target legally authorized by statute
for CIA political action.” Applied on
a global scale and not just to Muslims,
this policy helped produce a distinct
“reverse wave” in the global trend
towards democracy from 1958 to
1975, as coups — most of them U.S.-
sanctioned — allowed military men
to seize power in more than three-
dozen nations, representing a quarter
of the world’s sovereign states.
The White House’s “exceptions” also
produced a deeply contradictory U.S.
attitude toward torture from the early
years of the Cold War onward.
Publicly, Washington’s opposition to
torture was manifest in its advocacy
of the U.N. Universal Declaration of
Human Rights in 1948 and the
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D A R T I C L E S
22
Geneva Conventions in 1949.
Simultaneously and secretly,
however, the CIA began developing
ingenious new torture techniques in
contravention of those same
international conventions. After a
decade of mind-control research, the
CIAactually codified its new method
of psychological torture in a secret
instructional handbook, the
“KUBARK Counterintelligence
Interrogation” manual, which it then
disseminated within the U.S.
Intelligence Community and to allied
security services worldwide.
Much of the torture that became
synonymous with the era of
authoritarian rule in Asia and Latin
America during the 1960s and 1970s
seems to have originated in U.S.
training programs that provided
sophisticated techniques, up-to-date
equipment, and moral legitimacy for
the practice. From 1962 to 1974, the
CIA worked through the Office of
Public Safety (OPS), a division of the
U.S. Agency for International
Development that sent American
police advisers to developing nations.
Established by President Kennedy in
1962, in just six years OPS grew into
a global anti-communist operation
with over 400 U.S. police advisers.
By 1971, it had trained more than a
million policemen in 47 nations,
including 85,000 in South Vietnam
and 100,000 in Brazil.
Concealed within this larger OPS
effort, CIA interrogation training
became synonymous with serious
human rights abuses, particularly in
Iran, the Philippines, South Vietnam,
Brazil , and Uruguay. Amnesty
Internationaldocumented widespread
torture, usually by local police, in 24
of the 49 nations that had hosted
OPS police-training teams. In
tracking torturers across the globe,
Amnesty seemed to be following the
trail of CIA training programs.
Significantly, torture began to recede
when America again turned resolutely
against the practice at the end of the
Cold War.
The War on Terror
Although the CIA’s authority for
assassination, covert intervention,
surveillance, and torture was
curtailed at the close of the Cold War,
the terror attacks of September 2001
sparked an unprecedented expansion
in the scale of the intelligence
community and a corresponding
resurgence in executive exceptions.
The War on Terror ’s voracious
appetite for information produced, in
its first decade, what the Washington
Post branded a veritable “fourth
branch” of the U.S. federal
government with 854,000 vetted
security officials, 263 security
organizations, over 3,000 private and
public intelligence agencies, and 33
new security complexes — all
pumping out a total of 50,000
classified intelligence reports annually
by 2010.
By that time, one of the newest
members of the Intelligence
Community, the National Geospatial-
Intelligence Agency, already had
16,000 employees, a $5 billion
budget, and a massive nearly $2
billion headquarters at Fort Belvoir,
Maryland — all aimed at coordinating
the flood of surveillance data pouring
in from drones, U-2 spy planes,
Google Earth, and orbiting satellites.
According to documents
whistleblower Edward Snowden
leaked to theWashington Post, the
U.S. spent $500 bill ion on its
intelligence agencies in the dozen
years after the 9/11 attacks, including
annual appropriations in 2012 of $11
billion for the National Security
Agency (NSA) and $15 billion for the
CIA. If we add the $790 billion
expended on the Department of
Homeland Security to that $500
billion for overseas intelligence, then
Washington had spent nearly $1.3
trillion to build a secret state-within-
the-state of absolutely unprecedented
size and power.
As this secret state swelled, the
world’s sovereign decided that some
extraordinary exceptions to civil
liberties at home and sovereignty
abroad were in order. The most
glaring came with the CIA’s now-
notorious renewed use of torture on
suspected terrorists and its setting up
of its own global network of private
prisons, or “black sites,” beyond the
reach of any court or legal authority.
Along with piracy and slavery, the
abolition of torture had long been a
signature issue when it came to the
international rule of law. So strong
was this principle that the U.N.
General Assembly voted unanimously
in 1984 to adopt the Convention
Against Torture. When it came to
ratifying it, however, Washington
dithered on the subject until the end
of the Cold War when it finally
resumed its advocacy of international
justice, participating in the World
Conference on Human Rights at
Vienna in 1993 and, a year later,
ratifying the U.N. Convention Against
Torture.
Even then, the sovereign decided to
continued from page 23
continued next page
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D A R T I C L E S
23
reserve some exceptions for his
country alone. Only a year after
President Bill Clinton signed the U.N.
Convention, CIA agents started
snatching terror suspects in the
Balkans, some of them Egyptian
nationals, and sending them to Cairo,
where a torture-friendly autocracy
could do whatever it wanted to them
in its prisons. Former CIA director
George Tenet later testified that, in
the years before 9/11, the CIA
shipped some 70 individuals to
foreign countries without formal
extradition — a process dubbed
“extraordinary rendition” that had
been explicitly banned under Article
3 of the U.N. Convention.
Right after his public address to a
shaken nation on September 11,
2001, President George W. Bush
gave his staff wide-ranging secret
orders to use torture, adding (in a
vernacular version of Schmitt’s
dictum),”I don’t care what the
international lawyers say, we are
going to kick some ass.” In this spirit,
the White House authorized the CIA
to develop that global matrix of
secret prisons, as well as an armada
of planes for spiriting kidnapped
terror suspects to them, and a
network of allies who could help
seize those suspects from sovereign
states and levitate them into a
supranational gulag of eight agency
black sites from Thailand to Poland
or into the crown jewel of the
system, Guantánamo, thus eluding
laws and treaties that remained
grounded in territorially based
concepts of sovereignty.
Once the CIA closed the black sites
in 2008-2009, its collaborators in this
global gulag began to feel the force
of law for their crimes against
humanity. Under pressure from the
Council of Europe, Poland started an
ongoing criminal investigation in 2008
into its security officers who had
facilitated the CIA’s secret prison in
the country’s northeast. In
September 2012, Italy’s supreme
court confirmed the convictions of
22 CIA agents for the illegal rendition
of Egyptian exile Abu Omar from
Milan to Cairo, and ordered a trial for
Italy’s military intelligence chief on
charges that sentenced him to 10
years in prison. In 2012, Scotland
Yard opened a criminal investigation
into MI6 agents who rendered Libyan
dissidents to Colonel Gaddafi’s
prisons for torture, and two years
later the Court of Appeal allowed
some of those Libyans to file a civil
suit against MI6 for kidnapping and
torture.
But not the CIA. Even after the
Senate’s 2014 Torture Report
documented the Agency’s abusive
tortures in painstaking detail, there
was no move for either criminal or
civil sanctions against those who had
ordered torture or those who had
carried it out. In a strong editorial on
December 21, 2014, the New York
Times asked “whether the nation will
stand by and allow the perpetrators
of torture to have perpetual
immunity.” The answer, of course,
was yes.Immunity for hirelings is one
of the sovereign’s most important
exceptions.
As President Bush finished his
second term in 2008, an inquiry by
the International Commission of
Jurists found that the CIA’s
mobilization of allied security
agencies worldwide had done serious
damage to the international rule of
law. “The executive… should under
no circumstance invoke a situation
of crisis to deprive victims of human
rights violations… of their… access
to justice,” the Commission
recommended after documenting the
degradation of civil liberties in some
40 countries. “State secrecy and
similar restrictions must not impede
the right to an effective remedy for
human rights violations.”
The Bush years also brought
Washington’s most blatant
repudiation of the rule of law. Once
the newly established International
Criminal Court (ICC) convened at
The Hague in 2002, the Bush White
House “un-signed” or “de-signed”
the U.N. agreement creating the court
and then mounted a sustained
diplomatic effort to immunize U.S.
military operations from its writ. This
was an extraordinary abdication for
the nation that had breathed the
concept of an international tribunal
into being.
The Sovereign’s Unbounded Domains
While Presidents Eisenhower and
Bush decided on exceptions that
violated national boundaries and
international treaties, President
Obama is exercising his exceptional
prerogatives in the unbounded
domains of aerospace and
cyberspace.
Both are new, unregulated realms of
military conflict beyond the rubric of
international law and Washington
believes it can use them as
Archimedean levers for global
dominion. Just as Britain once ruled
from the seas and postwar America
exercised its global reach via
airpower, so Washington now sees
aerospace and cyberspace as special
realms for domination in the twenty-
first century.
Under Obama, drones have grown
from a tactical Band-Aid in
Afghanistan into a strategic weapon
A R T I C L E SI N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D
24
continued from page 23
continued next page
for the exercise of global power.
From 2009 to 2015, the CIA and the
U.S. Air Force deployed a drone
armada of over 200 Predators and
Reapers, launching 413 strikes in
Pakistan alone, killing as many as
3,800 people. Every Tuesday inside
the White House Situation Room, as
the New York Times reported in
2012, President Obama reviews a
CIA drone “kill list” and stares at the
faces of those who are targeted for
possible assassination from the air.
He then decides, without any legal
procedure, who will live and who will
die, even in the case of American
citizens. Unlike other world leaders,
this sovereign applies the ultimate
exception across the Greater Middle
East, parts of Africa, and elsewhere
if he chooses.
This lethal success is the cutting edge
of a top-secret Pentagon project that
will, by 2020, deploy a triple-canopy
space “shield” from stratosphere to
exosphere, patrolled by Global Hawk
and X-37B drones armed with agile
missiles.
As Washington seeks to police a
restless globe from sky and space,
the world might well ask: How high
is any nation’s sovereignty? After the
successive failures of the Paris flight
conference of 1910, the Hague Rules
of Aerial Warfare of 1923, and
Geneva’s Protocol I of 1977 to
establish the extent of sovereign
airspace or restrain aerial warfare,
some puckish Pentagon lawyer might
reply: only as high as you can enforce
it.
President Obama has also adopted
the NSA’s vast surveillance system
as a permanent weapon for the
exercise of global power. At the
broadest level, such surveillance
complements Obama’s overall
defense strategy, announced in 2012,
of cutting conventional forces while
preserving U.S. global power through
a capacity for “a combined arms
campaign across all domains: land,
air, maritime, space, and
cyberspace.” In addition, it should be
no surprise that, having pioneered the
war-making possibili t ies of
cyberspace, the president did not
hesitate to launch the first cyberwar
in history against Iran.
By the end of Obama’s first term, the
NSA could sweep up billions of
messages worldwide through its agile
surveillance architecture. This
included hundreds of access points
for penetration of the Worldwide
Web’s fiber optic cables; ancillary
intercepts through special protocols
and “backdoor” software flaws;
supercomputers to crack the
encryption of this digital torrent; and
a massive data farm in Bluffdale,
Utah, built at a cost of $2 billion to
store yottabytes of purloined data.
Even after angry Silicon Valley
executives protested that the NSA’s
“backdoor” software surveillance
threatened their multi-trillion-dollar
industry, Obama called the
combination of Internet information
and supercomputers “a powerful
tool.” He insisted that, as “the
world’s only superpower,” the
United States “cannot unilaterally
disarm our intelligence agencies.” In
other words, the sovereign cannot
sanction any exceptions to his
panoply of exceptions.
Revelations from Edward Snowden’s
cache of leaked documents in late
2013 indicate that the NSA has
conducted surveillance of leaders in
some 122 nations worldwide, 35 of
them closely, including Brazil’s
president Dilma Rousseff, former
Mexican president Felipe Calderón,
and German Chancellor Angela
Merkel. After her forceful protest,
Obama agreed to exempt Merkel’s
phone from future NSA surveillance,
but reserved the right, as he put it,
to continue to “gather information
about the intentions of
governments… around the world.”
The sovereign declined to say which
world leaders might be exempted
from his omniscient gaze.
Can there be any question that, in the
decades to come, Washington will
continue to violate national
sovereignty through old-style covert
as well as open interventions, even
as it insists on rejecting any
international conventions that restrain
its use of aerospace or cyberspace
for unchecked force projection,
anywhere, anytime? Extant laws or
conventions that in any way check
this power will be violated when the
sovereign so decides. These are now
the unwritten rules of the road for
our planet. They represent the real
American exceptionalism.
24 February, 2015
Alfred W. McCoy is professor of
history at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. A TomDispatch
regular, he is the author of Torture
& Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of
Coercive Interrogation, among other
works.
Copyright 2015 Alfred W. McCoy
Source: TomDispatch.com
continued from page 24
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D A R T I C L E S
25
INTERNATIONAL MOVEMENTFOR A JUST WORLD (JUST)P.O BOX 288Jalan Sultan46730 Petaling JayaSelangor Darul EhsanMALAYSIAwww.just-international.org
Bayaran Pos JelasPostage Paid
Pejabat Pos BesarKuala Lumpur
MalaysiaNo. WP 1385
Please donate to JUST by Postal Order or Cheque
addressed to:
International Movement for a Just World
P.O. Box 288, Jalan Sultan, 46730, Petaling Jaya,
Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia
or direct to our bank account:Malayan Banking Berhad, Petaling Jaya Main
Branch, 50 Jalan Sultan, 46200, Petaling Jaya,
Selangor Darul Ehsan,MALAYSIA
Account No. 5141 6917 0716
Donations from outside Malaysia should be made
by Telegraphic Transfer or Bank Draft in USD$
The International Movement for a Just World isa nonprofit international citizens’ organisationwhich seeks to create public awareness aboutinjustices within the existing global system.It a lso attempts to develop a deeperunderstanding of the struggle for social justiceand human dignity at the global level, guided byuniversal spiritual and moral values.
In furtherance of these objectives, JUST hasundertaken a number of activities includingconducting research, publishing books andmonographs, organising conferences andseminars, networking with groups and individuals and participating in public campaigns.
JUST has friends and supporters in more than130 countries and cooperates actively withother organisations which are committed to
similar objectives in different parts of the world.
About the International Movement for aJust World (JUST)
It would be much appreciated if you
could share this copy of the JUST Com-
mentary with a friend or relative. Bet-
ter still invite him/her to write to JUST
so that we can put his/her name on our
Commentary mailing list.
TERBITAN BERKALA