Exodus in reverse and the Zionist pharaoh

By Ameen Izzadeen
As the world’s attention is on the crisis in Syria, the problem at the core of the Middle Eastern conflict gets scant media coverage. Yes, the Palestinian crisis which has been eluding a solution for the past 65 years appears to be off the international radar. The last time Palestine made big news was when, in September last year, it obtained United Nations observer state status.
This week the Palestinians will mark the 65th anniversary of Nakba or ‘catastrophe’ that has its beginning in the creation of Israel in 1948. Sixty five years ago, as the world was preparing to welcome the new state of Israel that emerged from what was then British mandate Palestine, Zionist terrorist gangs raided Palestinian villages and terrorised unarmed people, telling them that they either leave the villages or face death. As tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs were ethnically cleansed by the new state’s goon squads, the so-called civilised world chose not to see the terror. In comparison to what took place in 1948, the Bosnian ethnic cleansing in the late 1990s pales into insignificance. One such Palestinian village that was ethnically cleansed was Dier Yassin. It took place just a month before Israel declared itself an independent state on May 15, 1948.

Just before dawn on April 9, 1948, armed members of the Zionist terror groups Irgun and Stern Gang raided Dier Yassin, a village that lay outside the area allocated by the United Nations to Israel. More than 100 Palestinians who defied the orders to evacuate were massacred while the rest were evicted at gun point.
But sadly Nakba that saw the expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland does not evoke sympathy the way the Nazi holocaust does. Some may say that one cannot compare Nakba with the holocaust because the holocaust is about millions of Jewish deaths at the hands of their Nazi persecutors during and just before World War II. But if suffering is measured not only by the death toll but also by other factors such as the number of years the persecution lasts, then one can understand the magnitude of the Palestinian suffering by multiplying it by six and a half times the period during which the Jewish suffering took place. With an unknown number of Palestinians killed since 1948, the Palestinians are as much victims today as the Jews had been at the hands of the Germans.
Renowned British historian Arnold J. Toynbee has this to say: “The treatment of the Palestinian Arabs in 1947 (and 1948) was as morally indefensible as the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis. Though nor comparable in quantity to the crimes of the Nazis, it was comparable in quality.”
Some say it is a sad twist of fate that the persecuted – in this case the Jews — have become the persecutors of the Palestinians who sheltered them when they were being hounded by the Nazis. But those who died in the holocaust were innocent Jews, not the Zionists, some of whom were collaborationists.
It smacks of an ulterior motive when the Zionist-controlled Western media and Hollywood regularly highlight the horrors of the holocaust. There are articles and movies galore. They evoke the world’s sympathy for the Jews. But in the process, the crimes of the present day Zionists are washed away. In this process, the long suffering of the Palestinian people is ignored or even denied, encouraging the Zionists to further oppress and deliberately dehumanise the Palestinian people living in Israel, the occupied territories, and outside in their diaspora.
Nakba that began 65 years ago is still continuing with Israel becoming an apartheid state. Its 20 per cent Arab population is virtually treated like second class citizens. Rights activists say more than 50 laws enshrine their status as second-class citizens. Yet there is little or no condemnation from the United States or the so-called human rights champions. In occupied Palestine, Palestinian land is being grabbed to build settlements for Jewish immigrants. Even East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians regard as their capital, has been encroached upon. Israel captured East Jerusalem during the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed it, declaring the city sacred to all three monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – as its capital. However, the international community has not recognised this declaration.
While any Jew born in any part of the world can obtain Israeli citizenship upon entering that country, more than four million Palestinian scattered around the world have no right to return to their original homeland. Many Palestinian refugees living in squalid conditions in sprawling camp cities in Lebanon, Jordan and elsewhere still hold on to the fast-rusting keys of their homes which they were forced to vacate by Israeli terrorists.
The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in a statement yesterday said Israel’s “segregation policies” had caused deep economic isolation and left more than 80 per cent of Palestinian children in East Jerusalem wallowing in poverty.
Pointing to discriminatory policies and the different legal status of the city’s Palestinian dwellers, compared to Israeli settlers there, UNCTAD chastised Israel for not doing enough to meet its obligations as an occupying power.
Before Israel was set up, Palestine was a peaceful province, a part of the Ottoman Empire. But things began to change in the 18th century with European leaders wooing the Jews. The first to declare a homeland for the Jews in Palestine was Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799. However, he was defeated in his war for Palestine by the Ottomans. Later in the late 19th century, Theodore Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian journalist, spearheaded what is known as ‘political Zionism, a movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine. As opposed to this concept, religious Zionism seeks the setting up of a Jewish state only after the arrival of the final messiah. In this conflict, the political Zionists who had the money and influence prevailed. Even today Orthodox Jews such as Neturei Karta view the creation of Israel as a rebellion against God. Neturei Karta Jews say, “Jews are not allowed to dominate, kill, harm or demean another people and are not allowed to have anything to do with the Zionist enterprise, their political meddling and their wars… The true Jews remain faithful to Jewish belief and are not contaminated with Zionism. The true Jews are against dispossessing the Arabs of their land and homes. According to the Torah, the land should be returned to them…. The world must know that the Zionists have illegitimately seized the name Israel and have no right to speak in the name of the Jewish people!”
The movement’s official website http://www.nkusa.org carries several photographs of its activities. One photograph shows a Neturei Karta rabbi carrying a poster which reads: “Hypocrisy – the Zionist Movement was implicated of collaboration with the Nazis”. Another story on the web site appeals for funds to buy ambulances for Gaza, a 350 sq km land area or Israeli-run prison or concentration camp where more than 1.5 million Palestinians live with little or no freedom to migrate or to deal with the outside world. Even essential items such as medicine and construction material can get into Gaza only with Israel’s approval.
The slogan linking the Zionists with the Nazis may come as a shock to many who are not familiar with the ‘political’ Zionist movement’s schemes such as the Protocols of the Elders of the Zion, which the Zionists slam as a “Russian hoax”. Many academics and researchers have exposed the Zionists’ links with the Nazis. Among them were French Philosopher Roger Garaudy and Henry Ford. The former exposed the Zionist plan to expand Israel by balkanising the Middle East, while the latter wrote ‘The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem,’ a controversial book even today because of conspiracies and disclaimers associated with it.
But anyone who exposes Zionism is labelled as anti-Semite. In some European countries anti-Semitism is a punishable crime. Racial profiling of the Jews, no doubt, deserves condemnation. Moves aimed at inciting hatred against the Jews or any other people should not be tolerated. But at the same time, we must not shy away from condemning Zionist crimes. It is not anti-Semitism to expose the crimes that Israel has been committing in occupied Palestine for the past 65 years.
But partly because of the moral, financial and military support the United States extends to Israel, and partly because of the Zionists’ control of politicians not only in the United States and the West but also in the developing world and their hold on the world media, the horrendous human rights violations of the Zionist state go unpunished. So much so, Israel had the audacity to show its middle finger to the United Nations Human Rights Council in January in an act of defiance.
By aiding and abetting Israel’s crimes, including the occupation of Palestine, the United States has become an accomplice. This is notwithstanding, US President Barack Obama’s repeated declarations supporting the creation of a Palestinian state. Obama asked Israel to stop settlement building activities in Palestinian land, but the Zionist state showed little respect for the request. He avoided meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in what was described as a snub. But soon he was seen cosying up to Israel during his campaign for re-election last year. He also opposed the Palestinian bid to seek observer state status at the UN.
Five months into his second term, Obama has made little or no progress in bringing about a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He stirred much hope when he made his first overseas call as the President of the United States in 2009 to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. But five years later, little has changed. The US-brokered peace talks remain stalled. The so-called Middle East quartet – the US, Russia, the UN and the EU – is nowhere to be seen with its envoy Tony Blair interested largely in building his financial empire by giving advice to oil sheikhs and oil companies. The support of oil rich Gulf Arab countries to the Palestinian cause is limited to dollars and talk. These countries, including Saudi Arabia, have miserably failed to use their influence with the US and get justice for the Palestinians. Is there anyone who cares for the plight of the Palestinians?
(This article first appeared in the Daily Mirror, Sri Lanka)

Anti-Muslim hate campaign: Peace activists’ cry only a murmur

Civil society’s voice only a murmur: A section of a small group at a peace rally in Colombo on Sunday April 28.

The Muslim identity is conspicuous: Muslim women in Abaya at Colombo’s Galle Face Green.

By Ameen Izzadeen
The genie is out and it is difficult to put it back into the bottle, say concerned Sri Lankans as anti-Muslim hatred spreads far and wide, evoking fears of a major ethnic riot which the country last witnessed in July 1983. But the voice of the concerned citizens is a murmur against the raucous anti-Muslim hate speech.
At dusk on Friday, April 12, a small group of concerned Sri Lankans gathered for a candlelight vigil outside a state-owned building which houses the head office of the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS), a group that has become synonymous with the anti-Muslim hate campaign. The protesters charged that the BBS and its hardline monks were tarnishing the image of Buddhism and violating its precepts such as compassion and non-violence.
Barely an hour into the peaceful protest, police broke up the vigil and dragged a few outspoken among them to a police jeep while BBS office staff took pictures of the crowd.
Angry protesters, among them members of the social-media group ‘the Buddhists Questioning Bodu Bala Sena’, claimed that the police action once again proved that the anti-Muslim hate campaigners had state patronage.
Visakha Tilekeratne, a member of a civil society network working to create a Sri Lankan identity, says the vigil was a good move, though it was badly organised. “The protest was a good thing because the Bodu Bala Sena’s true colours came out and the government’s bias was exposed,” she says. “They may have succeeded in dispersing the demonstration. But people have begun to question the BBS. This is a blessing in disguise.”
But she also admits that the seeds of hatred have been planted deeply even in tender minds – children. Members of civil society have to play a big role to reverse the trend, she says adding that like-minded people have come forward to form a network called “Citizens for Secure Sri Lanka” to strengthen moves to create a “Sri Lankan” identity irrespective of religion, ethnicity or language. She says they were concerned because 65 attacks on Muslim and Christian places of worship have taken since a mosque in Dambulla came under attack 12 months ago.
But BBS denies the group is anti-Muslim. Its Chief Executive Officer Dilantha Vithanage says his group’s main focus is to protect Buddhism. “We are not a Buddhist army. Ours is a non-violent intellectual force that seeks to protect Buddhism,” he says.
But others disagree. They say the BBS’s hand is visible in regular attacks on mosques and Mulim-owned businesses, the latest being a mob attack on one of the well-known fashion stores in suburban Colombo in March.
“We have not harmed a single person. Instead, we have made peace among communities,” Vuthanage says challenging anyone to prove that the BBS has taken part in violence or condoned it.
But people who have listened to BBS speeches or watched YouTube clips of its rallies disagree. In one such clip, a monk claimed that an underage Sinhala girl was raped in the head office of the fashion store. The Muslims say this was the lie that led to the attack on the store. In yet another tape, a monk urges the Sinhalese not to eat Muslim food, because the Quran says that Muslims should spit three times into food before serving it to non-Muslims. Another untruth. When confronted, Vithanage says these were remarks uttered by guest speakers and his group has little control over them.
But Muslims and civil society activists say the BBS has floated several front groups and their hate-speech has done irreversible damage to the coexistence between ethnic groups.
They say they have reason to be worried about the situation because the country’s Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, brother of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, is seen to be backing the BBS. Described as the most powerful Sri Lankan, he was the chief guest at the opening of a BBS training centre in the southern city of Galle in March. The Defence Secretary also played a key role in resolving a dispute over the ‘halal’ label on food items. But the Muslims say the solution he helped worked out was in favour of the BBS which spearheaded the anti-halal campaign.
However much Secretary Rajapaksa says he has little to do with the BBS, the Muslims are not convinced.
A retired Muslim businessman from Matara, a city south of Galle, refused to be interviewed on phone because he feared the phones were tapped. Other Muslims believe that state intelligence officers have been keeping a tab on mosques. “They wanted to know which mosque recited ‘Qunut an-Nazila’ {a special petition to God during times of crisis},” a Muslim youth said. The mosques have since discontinued the practice.

At the centre of the anti-Muslim hate campaign is the increasingly noticeable Muslim identity in this Buddhist majority country. In the country’s commercial capital, Colombo, there are more mosques than Buddhist temples. The crowd at the Galle Face esplanade in the evenings makes any foreign visitor wonder whether Muslims are really a minority in Sri Lanka. The sight of Muslim men in long beards and ‘Arab thaub’ or Pakistani Shalwar Kameez and Muslim women in black Abayas at this sea-front leisure park is conspicuous.
Adding to the Sinhala Buddhists’ worries are the latest census figures, which record a significant increase in the country’s Muslim population. Muslims now constitute nearly 10 per cent of the country’s 21 million population. The Sinhalese make up 70 per cent and the Tamils 17. These worries have given rise to groups such as the BBS and Sinhala Ravaya in the past year or so. Their message is: Buddhism is under threat in Sri Lanka, the chosen land to preserve the Buddha’s teachings in their pristine form.
Scores of anti-Muslim social media sites claim that the Muslims control the economy, procreate at a faster rate than other communities, build mosques from funds from Gulf countries and Muslim men marry Sinhala girls and forcibly convert them.
These websites urge the Sinhalese not to sell property to Muslims and to boycott Muslim businesses. Some even warn that the products the Muslims sell contain substances that affect the fertility of the Sinhala people.
With little action from the Government to check on these anti-Muslim websites, the Muslims fear the hate-campaign will sooner or later trigger a backlash like the July 1983 ethnic riots against the Tamils or the recent anti-Muslim riots in Myanmar, where the Buddhist group 969 has raised similar concerns about a ‘Muslim threat’ to Buddhist culture.
Peace activist Tilekeratne and the BBS’ Vithanage say they do not believe an ethnic riot is on the cards.
But many Muslim leaders fear a major clash is just a stone throw away. It almost happened in Kuliyapitiya in February when anti-Muslim demonstrators protected by police carried an effigy of a pig naming it Allah. Angry Muslim youths wanted to hit back, but elders restrained them, saying the protesters could be defeated if they were not provoked.
The Muslims say the Sinhala Buddhist extremist groups which have succeeded in removing the Halal label now want a ban on Niqab. BBS’ Vithanage says they want Niqab out. “The government imposed a ban on dark tinted glasses in vehicles for a particular reason. Such considerations should be there for Niqab also,” he says.
According to a Muslim lawyers’ collective which maintains a hotline to support victims of hate-campaign and compiles incidents of attacks on Muslims, the latest anti-Niqab incident took place at Colombo’ National Hospital, where a female doctor angrily removed the niqab of a Muslim patient and threw it away.
With sections of the private media also whipping up the hate, civil society members, engaged in bringing about ethnic harmony, face a hell of a task. Only about three hundred people turned up for a Colombo rally on Sunday April 28 to promote the message “hate has no place in Sri Lanka”. However, the positive sign was that among the crowd were prominent figures, academics, diplomats and politicians. At this rally former diplomat Dayan Jayatilleke told the media that because of the activities of some ethno-fascist groups, it had become increasingly difficult for diplomats like him to defend Sri Lanka abroad.
As a solution, Moulavi As-Shiekh M.S.M. Fazal (Madani), says the situation the Muslims in Sri Lanka are facing is similar to what the Muslims faced in the early days of Islam in Makkah.
“We should not create a differentiated identity through our appearance. Other people should not look at Muslims as a different community or a strange community. The Holy Prophet (PBUH) always dressed like everyone else in the community. Within the Islamic dress code, one should try to identify himself or herself with the community where he or she lives in. This helps promote harmony. What may be suitable for a Muslim majority country may not be suitable for a country like ours where Muslims are a minority,” he says.
Controversial though his remarks may be, there appears to be some food for thought in what he says.

The political chemistry of chemical weapons in Syria

By Ameen Izzadeen
If Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has not crossed the red line or won’t cross it, then take the red line to him. This was what some countries appear to be doing in their effort to bring about a US-led invasion of Syria with United Nations approval.
Two weeks ago, Britain and Israel claimed that Syrian forces used chemical weapons against the rebels fighting to overthrow the authoritarian regime of Assad. British Prime Minister David Cameron said it appeared a war crime was being committed by Syria. Similar fears were expressed by France. These countries claimed to possess evidence of chemical weapons use in Aleppo and Homs. Britain went one step further and claimed that it had obtained soil samples that indicated the use of Sarin gas.
These claims had their impact at the United Nations, which has become a tool in the hands of imperial forces. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s office said it wanted to investigate the claim – a move that may set in motion a process to rubber-stamp western intervention in Syria. Britain, France and Israel want Ban to send a team to Syria to investigate the claim that the Syrian forces have used chemical weapons. Such an investigation reminds one of the lies and deception that led to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. In the run-up to the Iraq war, the United States deliberately interpreted the reports of UN weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Mohammed al-Baradei to conclude that Iraq had not destroyed its weapons of mass destruction in compliance with UN resolutions.
Alarmed by these new developments, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that Syria, where Moscow maintains a naval base, should not face a repetition of the “Iraq scenario”.
Last week, addressing the UN Security Council, Jeffrey Feltman, UN under-secretary for political affairs, said: “The secretary-general [Ban Ki-moon]‘s position is that, at this time, the mission should investigate the allegations pertaining to incidents in Aleppo and Homs. While awaiting access to the Syrian territory, the experts of the mission are studying the information on the alleged use of chemical weapons….”
A UN team is already in Cyprus, awaiting Syria’s approval to enter the country. Syria which earlier said it had no objection to a UN investigation has since backtracked and blocked the UN team’s visit.
The Guardian (UK) newspaper quoted a Security Council source as saying: “While we would like the investigation to go ahead in Syria … we are hopeful that the investigation team will still be able to undertake elements of the investigation even without access to Syria. This could include conducting interviews in refugee camps.”
Well, all this indicates that the weapons-of-mass-destruction formula is being retrieved from the dustbin of Iraq’s history and given a new touch.
Syria has not denied it has chemical weapons, but said such weapons would be used only if the country’s sovereignty is threatened. Syria is one of the few countries that have not signed the UN chemical weapons ban treaty.
But what is intriguing is the United States’ blow-hot-blow-cold policy. Last month, President Barack Obama said if it was found that chemical weapons were used, the Assad regime would have crossed the red line and it would be a game-changer. But within weeks, Obama softened up his stance, much to the chagrin of the US hawks, Britain, Israel and others who are calling for a regime change in Damascus. US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel appeared to take a pragmatic approach when he played down the claims made by Britain and others. “Suspicions are one thing. Evidence is another … And that’s not at all questioning other nations’ intelligence, but the United States relies on its own intelligence. So until I can see that intelligence, I really don’t have anything else to say,” Hagel told reporters this week while in Egypt.
Obama said the US would decide on what to do next only if rock-solid proof was found that a gas attack had taken place. “If we end up rushing to judgment without hard, effective evidence, then we may find ourselves in the position where we can’t mobilise the international community to support what we do,” Obama told reporters. His comments came as analysts began to raise questions as to who gave the soil samples to Britain and how it obtained it and when. The British Defence Ministry has no answer.
So it is understandable that the Obama administration did not want to jump headlong into another unpopular war. According to a Reuter poll, more than 60 per cent of the Americans are opposed to a war in Syria.
Perhaps, Cameron needs such a war to consolidate his power before Britain goes to elections in May 2015 or even before that. His Conservative party could form the government only with the support of the Liberal Democrats.
But Obama has no such compulsions. With a desire to honour the expectations of those who gave him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 in the back of his mind, he is playing for the history books.
Besides, he has other reasons to be wary. The US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have produced outcomes that are only favourable to US foes. In the case of Iraq, it is Iran that is reaping the benefits and in Afghanistan it will be the Taliban, once the US troops are withdrawn next year. He is probably also not unaware that the Western intervention in the Libyan civil war has only produced a democratic anarchy with the government unable to provide security to even diplomatic missions while groups that fought for the ouster of strongman Muammar Gaddafi refuse to disarm themselves and dictate terms to the government.
Another concern for the Obama administration is the Islamic fundamentalist outlook of the Syrian resistance. Last year, the United States slapped the terrorist label on An-Nusra group. But this group which is allied with al-Qaeda in Iraq is the most successful rebel group in Syria. In Aleppo and other areas under its control, the group runs Islamic shariah courts. If the Americans intervene and help bring about a regime change in Damascus, they will be playing into the hands of Islamists who are not only against Israel but also against pro-US monarchies and dictatorships in the Arab world. This is why the Obama administration is yet to fulfil its promise to arm the rebels.
Yet the US hawks are not happy. They say that Iran’s nuclear threat could be neutralised and Israel’s security assured only if Assad is ousted and the lifeline to pro-Iranian militant group, Hezbollah, in Lebanon is cut off.
Rightwing politicians and the media scoff at Obama for pussyfooting on Syria and having a marshmallow spine. The hawks also say such inaction only strengthens the resolve of states such as Iran and North Korea to pose a threat to US interests.
As things stand today, Assad backed by Iran, Russia and China is playing his moves well and probably may have checkmated the US.
(This article first appeared in the Daily Mirror, Sri Lanka)

From Russia without love: Putin wins the bloody Boston Marathon

By Ameen Izzadeen
(This article first appeared in the Daily Mirror, Sri Lanka)
From Boston to Beslan, the search for motive for the marathon blasts widens. Yet, there is no clear-cut answer as to why two young brothers of Chechen origin did what they are alleged to have done.
According to US prosecutors, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving suspect in the April 15 Boston Marathon bomb attacks, has been charged with use of a weapon of mass destruction and malicious destruction of property resulting in death. The charges carry the death penalty.
It is still not known whether Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, and his elder brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, were acting alone or whether they were being handled by some intelligence agency.
If they were acting alone, what led them to terrorism? This question gives rise to three propositions.
1. They were angered by the horrors that were taking place in the name of the United States’ war on terror in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. So they decided to act.
2. They were misguided Islamic extremists.
3. The two brothers, who were migrants from Russia, were depressed after they saw the hollowness of the American dream.
A Washington Post report on Tuesday said Dzhokhar, who is being treated for serious injuries which he sustained in the shootout during the chase to arrest him, had told interrogators that Washington’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack. The Post’s sources were “officials familiar with the interviews.”
Well known political journalist Glenn Greenwald also believed that US violence in other countries is what actually fuels terrorist attacks. Greenwald frequently cites a Pentagon report finding that, “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies,” including “American direct intervention in the Muslim world.” Greenwald also notes that this is one of the reasons mentioned by Osama Bin Laden as a justification for his support of violence against America. (Washington Post).
Greenwald’s arguments are valid. The ground reality is that the US is not on the side of justice as far as the Muslim world is concerned. For more than six decades, the United States has been financially, militarily and politically assisting Israel despite the Zionist state’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian land and its horrendous war crimes.
More than the United States’ involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is the blind support for Israel that has aroused Muslim anger against the US.
The fact that the US is not on the side of justice has made many disgruntled US soldiers turn their guns on colleagues. When a soldier realises that his country is in the wrong, then his conscience is troubled. Thus it was no surprise that a Zogby poll in 2006 found that 72 per cent of US soldiers in Iraq supported a withdrawal within a year while 25per cent said it should happen immediately.
This troubled conscience was probably why Major Nidal Malik Hasan of the United States Army Medical Corp killed 13 soldiers and wounded 32 others in Fort Hood on November 5, 2009.
This troubled conscience was probably why US soldier Hasan K. Akbar on March 23, 2003 in Kuwait killed two US army officers and wounded 14 others during the start of the US invasion of Iraq.
In May last year, another Muslim US soldier was convicted of plotting to blow up a Texas restaurant packed with American troops to get “justice” for civilians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It’s not only the Muslim soldiers who have been turning their guns on fellow soldiers. On Monday, a US Army surgeon pleaded guilty to the charge of killing five fellow servicemen at a military counselling centre in Iraq in 2009.
The act of a soldier killing a fellow soldier is known as ‘fragging’ in US military jargon. The term is also used to describe the act of manipulating the chain of command to have an individual, or unit, deliberately killed by placing them in harm’s way, with the intended result being their deaths. There were several such cases during the Vietnam War – another conflict where the US was not on the side of justice.
The propensity for fragging is higher if the conscience of the soldier is disturbed. Incidents of fragging will be more in an unjust war than in a war where a soldier believes he is fighting a just war.
The fragging mentality could also develop in ordinary people with a sensitive conscience, especially when they share a cause or an ethnic or religious identity with the victims of what they perceive as the unjust war. This was why Timothy McVeigh in 1995 carried out the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and injured more than 800. This was probably why convicted underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a US airliner bound for Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009.
Whether the Tsarnaev brothers were disturbed by US violence overseas is a study worth many a research by terrorism experts and academics. The fact that the Boston bombing took place just days after 17 civilians, including 12 children, died in a US attack in Afghanistan is also significant. Such civilian deaths in US attacks have become a regular feature and on many occasions, the survivors and family members of the victims do not get even a token apology. In his post-Boston-blast comment, President Barack Obama said a bomb that killed civilians was an act of terror. If he uses the same yardstick, then he may have to say that the US attacks on civilian targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan are mega terrorist acts.
However, the focus of investigators in the Boston blast case is on whether the Tsarnaev brothers were Islamic extremists and whether they had any links with Anwer al-Awlaki, a US Muslim cleric killed in a US drone attack in Yemen. Obviously, investigations in this direction keep US violence committed elsewhere out of public debate and focus.
The US media also do not show a desire to probe the link between US violence outside and the homegrown terrorism. Media reports paint the suspects as terrorists and insinuate that the Tsarnaev brothers learned their pressure cooker bomb-making method by reading Al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine which recently carried an article on “how to make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom”.
The Tsarnaev brothers may be extremists and dangerous, but the blame should also be pinned on the US foreign policy that breeds such extremism. Its foreign policy has little place for justice for the Palestinian people while it promotes interference in the internal affairs of other countries and shows scant respect for international law.
If the Tsarnaev brothers were extremists, they were either acting alone or being manipulated by a terrorist group or an intelligence agency. The suggestion that in the post-9/11 world, al-Qaeda or a similar group can operate without being detected in the US is an insult to the US intelligence community. Many believed even 9/11 took place not due to intelligence failure but due to a political decision to ignore warnings of the attack. Thus there is a strong possibility that the Tsarnaev brothers were manipulated by either the CIA or Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB, or by both.
According to reports, Tamerlan, the elder Tsarnaev, who died during the police chase last week, was regularly interviewed by FBI agents following a tipoff from Russia that he had links with terrorist groups. The first such contact was made in 2008 and the last in 2011. The FBI did not find any incriminating evidence then but kept an eye on him. Reports now say the FBI knew of the videos Tamerlan had watched, his YouTube activities and his regular visits to the site http://www.islam.ru. The FBI had even accessed Tamerlan’s text messages. In one such text message to his mother, Tamerlan had said he was ready to die for Islam.
Last year, Tamerlan visited Russia and moved about freely in Dagestan. There was no attempt by the Russians who had only a year ago tipped off the FBI about Tamerlan, to arrest him. Whether he was interrogated by the FBI upon his return to the US is not known. Russian officials now claim that Tamerlan met Dagestan separatist militant leaders during his visit to the Caucasus.
There is a strong possibility that the Dagestan militant leaders whom Tamerlan was supposed to have met were Russian agents who prodded him to go ahead with the plan to bomb the marathon. What is adding to the intrigue is the claim by the parents of the Tsarnaev brothers that their sons were set up by US intelligence agents. Thus confusion is compounded. Are the Russians posing off as US officers?
If one were to apply the theory of ‘who-benefits-from-it’, Russia tops the list of candidates. It has a serious problem in the Caucasus where Jihadists from Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia are challenging Russia’s sovereignty over these oil-and-mineral-rich provinces, through which Russia’s — and land-locked Central Asia’s — oil and gas go to Europe.
Russia’s wars in the Islamic Caucasus have come under severe criticism from the US. Russia won the war in Chechnya by simply using heavy weapons and its massive fire power. Yet the rebels have regrouped. They operate from the mountainous region and carry out regular attacks in Chechnya where a pro-Russian leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, a rebel-turned-Putin loyalist, is in charge.
President Vladimir Putin is determined to wipe out the menace probably by launching yet another major military operation in Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia – countries described by wikitravel as extremely dangerous tourist destinations. But Putin wants the US and the West on his side. The US and the West opposed Russia’s military action in the two Chechen wars – 1994-96 and 1999-2000 — due to the horrendous scale of human rights violations.
Much to the chagrin of Russia, the rebellion in Russia’s Caucasus is supported by US neoconservatives, in spite of the State Department declaring three Chechen groups as terrorists. The mollycoddling of Chechen rebels continued even after the 2004 Beslan school horror in North Ossetia – a hostage drama that ended in the death of 380 people, most of whom were children. Many neocons are patrons of the American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus, a group that highlights Russia’s human rights violations in the region.
It is also interesting to note that some Chechen jihadists are fighting alongside Syrian Islamic rebels to topple the Bashar al-Assad regime. The Marathon bomb has helped Putin, a former KGB spymaster, to make the US public see the war in the Caucasus as a terrorist problem linked to the global Islamic terror threat. Putin appears to be the winner of the bloodied Boston marathon.

So let it be with Thatcher!

By Ameen Izzadeen
So Maggie Thatcher the milk snatcher is dead. But her paradoxical legacy lives on. The former British Prime Minister will be remembered as the woman who by promoting unbridled capitalism sowed the seeds of a social revolution that is not so far away in Britain.

In 1991, when Communism as a state ideology lost its credibility in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union finally disintegrated, not many academics or political theorists asked whether the capitalist state ideology would also suffer the same fate. If socialism was the antithesis of Capitalism, both systems should fail and what should prevail is the synthesis – the good of the both systems. This system is widely known as the welfare state where the state’s primary duty is to ensure that its citizens are fed, educated, employed and liberated from fear – fear of hunger and fear of being oppressed. Although the ideal welfare state is yet to come, some form of welfare state existed after World War II in Britain. But Margaret Thatcher had the heart to kill the caring state and the womb to deliver the heartless capitalist system that came to be known as Thatcherism.

As Education Minister in the Edward Heath Government, she stopped the glass of free milk given to schoolchildren. For many children who came from the poorer segments of society, it was their breakfast.

One of these children was Britain’s Respect Party Leader, firebrand George Galloway. In an article he wrote on the death of Thatcher, he said:

“On one of my first political demonstrations – against the Conservative government of Edward Heath (1970-74) the slogan of the day was “Margaret Thatcher- Milk snatcher”. It was the first but not the last time I spat out her name in distaste. Before Thatcher, every primary school pupil received 1/3 of a pint of milk every morning. For some it was the difference between breakfast and no breakfast. I was sometimes one of those. I grew up in a brief period of social democracy in Britain, being dosed by the state with free cod-liver oil, orange juice and malt to build up my strength. Having been born in a slum tenement into a one-room attic in an Irish immigrant area, I needed all of that and more. And like millions I got it, until Thatcher took it away.”

That is one of Thatcher’s legacies – hitting the poor in the stomach as she continued with her new economic vision that allowed the capitalist rogues to rob the poor, though she believed that unbridled economic freedom was the only way to achieve high economic growth. But the trickle-down effect which she spoke of only came as crumbs from the master’s table to the poor working class.
Having set the foundation to wipe out the welfare state, she turned her attention towards trade unions, which were traditionally the vote base for the Labour Party, the political nemesis of the Conservative Party which she led. She brutally cracked down on the miners’ strike from 1984 to 1985, during which some 13,000 miners were arrested, two killed, 20,000 injured, 200 imprisoned and hundreds summarily sacked.

It was a victory of the witch, and a death knell for trade unionism. As she crushed Britain’s working class, Thatcherism became popular not only among billionaire bankers and captains of capitalism but also among dictators, authoritarian regimes and corrupt government leaders around the world.

Thatcherism claims to promote low inflation, the small state and free markets through tight control of the money supply, privatisation – including the privatisation of utility services such as water and electricity — and constraints on the labour movement. In other words, Thatcherism promotes the freedom of the individual and the corporate world — and the government‘s job is to get out of the way. But there were few checks and balances. Workers’ rights and welfare had little place in Thatcherism. It had initial success but the eventual damage was incalculable. Thatcherism was tantamount to the worship of Mammon, and the Bible says that one cannot worship God and Mammon, a person who worships Mammon hates God.

A community progresses, thrives and maintains its social cohesiveness only when its collective rights supersede the rights of the individual. For Thatcher, the collective rights of the community were nonsense. So she infamously declared that “there is no such thing as society … only individuals.” The remark drew a sharp retort from the then Labour leader Neil Kinnock. He said: “No such thing as society? Only individuals? No such thing as honouring other people’s parents? No such thing as cherishing other people’s children? No such thing as us and always? Just me and now? Me and now?”

Such was the myopia with which Maggie Thatcher tried to change the world, little realising she was only sowing the seeds of destruction of the very capitalism she was trying to promote and empower. She failed to realise that unbridled capitalism sustained selfishness and greed and was evil-incarnate. She failed to understand that when selfishness and greed became the core of the economy, there was little place for values which are vital for the progress of society and the human race. For Thatcher, community was only a market.

Thatcherism found its partner in crime in Reaganomics – an economic policy adopted by President Ronald Reagan in the United States. Like Thatcherism, it called for widespread tax cuts for the corporate world, decreased social spending, increased military spending, and the deregulation of domestic markets. Together, Thatcher and Reagan virtually removed all restrictions on wealth accumulation by the so-called one per cent who controlled 80 per cent of their nations’ wealth.
The ill-effects of Reaganomics haunted the United States and the rest of the world in 2008 in the form of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the late 1920s. The main reason for the 2008 crisis was Reaganomics and its deregulation policy.

In Britain, Thatcherism which was responsible for job cuts and trimming of welfare measures, exploded like a fire in an ammunition dump when the 2011 London riots broke out. Shocked by the degree of deprivation and depravity, Prime Minister David Cameron admitted there was something seriously wrong with society. But he failed to acknowledge that the fault lay in Thatcherism which his Conservative Party had embraced as economic gospel. This column, writing about the 2011 London riots had said:

“Thatcherism sowed the wind and Britain reaped the whirlwind with children as young as ten becoming looters. They did not loot book stores. Rather they targeted shops that sold items that guaranteed immediate liquidity. A photograph in London Daily Mail showed a ten-year-old boy carrying a bottle of wine which he had looted while another showed two teenagers running away with bottles of vodka. Perhaps, the difference between the Wall Street bankers and the British looters is that the former did not break windows.

“What has happened to Britain? Where are the values? Perhaps, a girl looter provided the answer. She told a BBC reporter that rioting and looting gave them an opportunity to show ‘the rich’ and the police that ‘we can do what we like’.”

The London riots were a mini revolt by the marginalised against the rich – against a state that protected the rich at the expense of the poor. The pro-rich, pro-capitalist and Thatcherist Cameron government may have succeeded in quelling the riots, but it has not addressed the root causes. The gap between the rich and the poor in Britain keeps widening.

Months after the London riots, a survey carried out by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said the wealthiest tenth of society earned 12 times as much as the poorest. The disparity was eight times in the 1980s during which Thatcher was introducing her economic reforms favouring the rich. The survey also said the amount of total income taken by the top 1 per cent of earners — including bankers, managers and executives — had doubled to 14 per cent.

The mass-scale plunder by the capitalists continues with trade unionism in tatters while the poor and the marginalised are being dragged into drugs, liberal sex and pornography. Perhaps, her son, Mark Thatcher – sorry, Sir Mark Thatcher – epitomised her greed-driven economic policy when he was arrested in South Africa in 2004 for being a co-conspirator in a coup to topple the government of Equatorial Guinea, a country rich in oil and other minerals. The coup leaders wanted to topple the government and hand over lucrative oil contracts to the companies that were financing the coup attempt.

This is the legacy of Thatcher, a chemistry graduate who married a wealthy businessman and doled out an oxidised formula for economic cancer.

Her follies were not confined to economics. In foreign relations, she put money before principles. She was a friend of Augusto Pinochet, the ruthless dictator of Chile, and supported South Africa’s apartheid system, calling Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress a terrorist organisation. There were hardly any tears in South Africa when the news of her death reached there. Sensing the mood in South Africa, the visiting Manchester United football club had do shelve its plan to have a minute’s silence before they played their first match after Thatcher’s death.
Together with Reagan, Thatcher during her three-term premiership saw and worked towards the collapse of the Communist system in Eastern Europe.

Surviving an assassination attempt by the Irish Republican Army in Brighton in 1984, she was ruthless in her crackdown on the Catholic rebellion in Northern Ireland, which together with the Malvinas/Falkland Islands stands testimony to Britain’s imperialistic past. In 1981, she let Northern Ireland’s Sinn Fein Parliamentarian Bobby Sands die when he together with nine others launched a hunger strike at the notorious Maze Prison. One year later, for her own electoral advantage, she launched a war on Argentina over the Malvinas/Falkland Islands. Victory was hers, with the United States covertly extending its full support to Britain. During this war, she committed a war crime by deliberately sinking an Argentinean warship that was retreating from the exclusion zone arbitrarily imposed by Britain. Some 323 Argentinian sailors died in the cowardly attack. Though the victory fanned nationalist passions in Britain and helped her to consolidate her hold on power, critics said Thatcher, known by the sobriquet ‘Iron Lady’, only chose enemies who were destined to lose. One such enemy was Saddam Hussein, when he invaded Kuwait in 1990.

She stepped down from the premiership following a party revolt in 1990. Her successors, Conservative Prime Minister John Major, and later Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair did not discard Thatcherism. Blair especially was more Thatcherist than the Conservatives were.

As Thatcher is laid to rest next Wednesday, Prime Minister Cameron said a fitting epitaph would be “she made Britain great again”. But little did he realise that behind the word “Great” lies Britain’s legacy of imperialism and colonial plunder. What Colonial Britain did openly, Thatcher’s Britain tried to do subtly – as Blair, the fanatic disciple of Thatcherism, proved with his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – imperialist wars that sought to strengthen war capitalists or disaster capitalists who increased their wealth at the cost of other people’s misery.
(This article also appeared in the Daily Mirror, Sri Lanka)

Korean crisis: China the real target of the U.S.

By Ameen Izzadeen
The danger of a nuclear holocaust in the Korean peninsula is precariously hanging by a thread that is getting thinner and weaker by the hour. This is the impression one gets going by the war of words between North Korea and its enemy alliance comprising South Korea and the United States.
But beyond the rhetoric, one can see the great game in the Asia Pacific unfolding, taking emerging superpower China by surprise. The tension in the Korean Peninsula is just a façade. The objective of the United States is apparently aimed at fortifying its defences in the Asia-Pacific region to check China whose phenomenal rise as a global military power has deprived Pentagon pundits of their sleep.
On Wednesday, the United States announced it was moving an advanced missile defence system — the ballistic Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System (Thaad) — to the Pacific island of Guam, a US-administered territory, where Washington maintains a huge naval base that is the home base of dozens of US Pacific Fleet, including the Seventh Fleet. The Thaad system includes a truck-mounted launcher, interceptor missiles and advanced tracking radar, together with an integrated fire control system.
The US could never have deployed such a highly advanced missile system to Guam under normal circumstances without provoking China. The current Korean crisis offers the right excuse for the US to deploy such a system which could also pose a threat to China.
The US Defence Department said the deployment of the missile system was a precautionary move to strengthen the US defence posture against the North Korean ballistic missile threat.
“The United States remains vigilant in the face of North Korean provocations and stands ready to defend US territory, our allies, and our national interests,” the Defence Department said.
So the current tension in the Korean Peninsula is all about the United States beefing up its defences in China’s neighbourhood. The real threat is not North Korea but China.
Thus it is unlikely that the sudden escalation of hostilities in the Korean Peninsula will lead to a major war or a nuclear holocaust, however precarious the situation seems. The people on either side of the 38th parallel which divides Korea, a united country before World War II ended, are accustomed to the war of words between the two nations. Since the Korean War ended 60 years ago, the two Koreas have been careful not to let their hostilities develop into a full-blown war. The last time the two countries came close to a war and then withdrew was in 2010, when a South Korean warship, Cheonan, was torpedoed allegedly by North Korea. It was a more serious situation than the present one. The incident in which 46 South Korean sailors died prompted the two countries to put their armies on high alert.
But in the end it was the United States which benefited from it. The 2010 crisis erupted against the backdrop of Japan’s then socialist Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama coming under pressure from the people of the Okinanwa prefecture to close down the US airbase there in keeping with his election campaign pledge. The tense situation following the Cheonan incident offered Hatoyama an ideal excuse to renege on his promise and keep the base. Both Japan and the United States feel the base is strategically vital to check China’s military power especially in view of the dispute over the ownership of the oil-and-gas-rich islands in the South China Sea.
The Korean peninsula is of strategic importance to both China and the United States. China considers the region as its backyard while the United States has been maintaining a strong military presence in Japan and South Korea since the end of World War II.
It is widely believed that the Middle East is the likeliest place from where the Third World War will break out. But the Asia Pacific region is also a contender for it, given the geopolitics of the region.
For the past five years or so, China has been asserting its power in the region and even dared to challenge Japan — a country protected by the United States under a defence treaty — in the dispute over a chain of islets, which Beijing calls Diaoyu and Tokyo Senkaku.
The United States, meanwhile, has begun to worry about predictions that it will not be a global power by 2030. The biggest challenge to US power comes from China, the world’s second largest economy and a rising military power. The United States is in no mood to surrender its top place. The Barack Obama administration last year announced its ‘Pivot to Asia’ foreign and defence policy in what was seen as a clear move to counter China’s rising power.
Under the Asia Pivot policy, the United States seeks to strengthen bilateral security alliances with countries in the Asia Pacific and the Indian Ocean regions. Last year, the United States opened up a marine base in Darwin, Australia and decided to set up a second missile defence system in Japan – moves that raised alarms in China. This week, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong met President Obama in the White House. At the joint media conference, the two leaders emphasised the need to promote closer military cooperation between the two countries and announced that more US warships would be deployed at Singapore’s Changi naval base overlooking China’s maritime trade route in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean.
At a dinner hosted by the US Chamber of Commerce and the US-ASEAN Business Council, the Singapore Premier said the US was not doing enough to challenge China’s rising power in the region. “We want the United States and its leadership to be the stabilising power in the region, but you are falling behind China, especially in terms of economic relations and trade.”
Some six years ago, the United States tried to set up a missile defence system in Russia’s backyard, saying it was to protect Europe from missiles that could come from rogue states such as Iran and North Korea. Washington had to shelve the plan when Moscow protested and warned that relations could plummet to the cold war days.
But China is not in a position to ask the United States to dismantle the advanced missile defence systems in China’s neighbourhood. This is because the US has North Korea to point its finger at.
But quite contrary to reports in the Western media, North Korea is not always the cause of the problem. Take for instance the 2010 sinking of the South Korean warship. Many believe a third party was behind the incident. North Korea said it was willing to cooperate with an international panel appointed by South Korea to probe the incident. But South Korea rejected North Korea’s offer while the panel found it guilty.
Even the present crisis was not of North Korea’s making. The root of the conflict lies in the annual joint military exercise involving South Korea and the United States. The two-month-long exercise codenamed “Eagle Foal”, featuring nuclear-capable B-2 stealth bombers and B-52 bombers, was the first since the US formally announced its ‘Pivot to Asia’ policy. The inclusion of such highly advanced aircraft was a major provocation — and North Korea was justified in declaring a state of war.
The exercise was to take place against the backdrop of the United Nations imposing sanctions on North Korea for conducting a nuclear weapon test in February.
Pyongyang responded by threatening to attack the South and the US and announced that it had reactivated a nuclear plant that was closed in 2007 in terms of an agreement reached with stakeholder nations. Experts say it will take at least one year for the plant to produce weapons grade nuclear material. Therefore, they say North Korea’s response cannot be regarded as an escalation. Yesterday, North Korea reportedly moved a medium-range missile to its east coast to counter US ballistic missile threat from Guam.
Yet the US interpreted North Korea’s reactions as a serious escalation and deployed more troops to the region and a second guided missile destroyer, the USS John McCain, while the new US Secretary of State John Kerry flew to Seoul to meet South Korean leaders. Kerry warned North Korea to halt its rhetoric and actions, calling them provocative, dangerous and reckless. He also vowed that the United States would defend itself and its allies South Korea and Japan from North Korean threats. He called on Russia and China, two of North Korea’s allies, to use their influence to persuade Pyongyang to change its course.
But Kerry chose not to see the provocations in the actions of the United States and South Korea. The South Korean regime of President Park Geun-hye, the daughter of former military dictator Park Chung-hee, on Monday announced that it had agreed to put the South Korean military under the United States operational control and even warned of pre-emptive strikes on North Korea. She told the troops: “If the North attempts any provocation against our people and country, you must respond strongly at the first contact with them, without political consideration.”
The unfolding events in the Korean peninsula are part of a script written by the Pentagon to lay siege to China if the need arises. Both China and the United States are nuclear powers and therefore they will not go to war. Besides, the United States is China’s number one trading partner. But at the same time, China is embroiled in territorial disputes with South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam – disputes that could trigger wars with these nations. But almost all the nations with which China has territorial disputes have signed defence pacts with Washington, warranting US intervention in the event of a conflict.
China has only one ally in the region – North Korea, a state with nuclear weapons. North Korea’s new leader Kim Jong-un is a novice at the game though he has the backing of military leaders who are veterans of the game. But it looks like they have all fallen into Washington’s trap – a move which enables the US to make its military presence bigger in the region by pointing at the North Korean bogey.
(This article first appeared in the Daily Mirror, Sri Lanka)

War crimes: Big power politics turn human rights into human rites

By Ameen Izzadeen
(This article first appeared in the Daily Mirror, Sri Lanka)
The landmark Nuremberg trials and many war crimes tribunals that followed since then were largely political in nature while concern for retributive or restorative justice was more often than not a byproduct of the process or a façade.
In its criticism of the Nuremberg trials, the then United States Chief Justice Harlan Stone described it as a “high-grade lynching party” because the judges and the prosecutors ignored the common law principles.
US Justice Robert Jackson who played a key role as the chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal that inquired into Nazi war crimes, wrote to President Harry S. Truman in 1945 that the Allies themselves “have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for.”
Undoubtedly, the Nazis were wicked, but the Allied forces were no angels. The war crimes committed by Britain, the United States, Canada, France, the Soviet Union and other Allied nations largely went unpunished and often unpublicised.
In one of the most gruesome war crimes in human history, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and justified it by saying it was a necessary evil to bring the war to a speedy end. But was there any move to take the US before an international tribunal for causing instant death to more than 350,000 people in the two cities and slow and painful deaths to millions who survived the initial impact of the blasts? If Germany and Japan had won the war, that would have happened.
The US bombing of Tokyo during the World War II also warrants a war crime inquiry because the bombs that rained on the city killed some 120,000 people. So does the allied bombing of Dresden, the capital of the German province of Saxony. Some 25,000 civilians were killed in this attack. But the fact that little has been done to mete out justice to the millions of civilians who died at the hands of the Allied Forces highlights the victor’s justice and the sham behind the war crime tribunals. If the allied forces generals and political leaders had also been punished for war crimes, then one can say that the scales of justice were even.
In recent weeks and months, a so-called international war crimes tribunal in Dhaka has also come under fire from world jurists. The trial, heard by Bangladeshi judges and prosecuted by Bangladeshi prosecutors, is being seen as a witch-hunt against elderly clerics and leaders of the Jamath-e-Islami, a social activist group which is active in many Asian countries. The tribunal has sentenced two of the Jamath leaders to death for alleged crimes against humanity while the cases against ten other leaders are continuing.
They are charged with helping the Pakistani troops who went on a rampage allegedly killing tens of millions of Bangladeshis during the liberation war in 1971. Though the Jamath admits that it opposed the then East Pakistan’s call for a separate state called Bangladesh, it denied all charges of war crimes.
The tribunal’s independence has been called into question after it was revealed that the judges had colluded with leaders of the ruling Awami League, the party headed by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed. Though tribunal chairman Mohammed Nizamul Huq resigned in the wake, other judges with connections to the government continue to sit in the tribunal.
Bangladesh National Party leader Begum Khaleda Zia, who heads an opposition coalition which includes the Jamath, questioned the independence of the tribunal after Sheikh Hasina urged the judges to consider the prosecution’s call for death sentence for the accused. “No judge can now independently try the accused after her (the PM’s) call asking them to consider the demand for death sentences to the war criminals,” Zia said.
Questionable trials and sham inquiries are part and parcel of statecraft and politics. It is said if a government wants to soothe an angry public over an issue, it only has to announce the appointment of a commission to inquire into it and then forget it. Such commissions are like sperm – only one in million works. The one that succeeds often ends in a miscarriage. Even the so-called developed democracies resort to such tactics to silence public outcry or cover up their shame.
Take for instance, the 2003 Hutton inquiry in Britain. It was set up following the mysterious death of David Kelly, the Defence Ministry scientist and Iraq weapons inspector, who had apparently leaked information to the BBC for the channel to claim that the then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was deliberately “sexed up”. The Hutton inquiry cleared the Blair government of wrongdoing and instead blamed the BBC for the scientist’s suicide. The report drew fire from Britain’s media. Then there was the Butler inquiry which whitewashed Blair saying he was not personally responsible for pre-war intelligence that led Britain to join the Iraq war.
Another was the Chilcot Inquiry, which Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, appointed in 2009 to look into all aspects of Britain’s involvement in the Iraq invasion. The inquiry was to be in camera, but when public protests grew, the Brown government agreed to make parts of the inquiry public.
More than three years have lapsed since the Chilcot commission began its hearings. But the release of the report has been delayed. Media reports said the delay was due to the British government’s efforts to keep tight control over the report.
Last year, the government refused to share key information with the commission – minutes of Cabinet meetings in the days leading up to the Iraq war. The government also refused to divulge details of a phone call between Blair and the then US President George W. Bush, on the grounds that the release of such sensitive information would pose a significant danger to British-American relations. During the inquiry, it came to light that Bush and Blair discussed committing a war crime – to bomb the Al-Jazeera headquarters, a Qatar-based television station that employs thousands of civilians.
The British media this week said that the Chilcot report would not make any reference to the Bush-Blair conversations. The omission of this vital piece of information makes the Chilcot inquiry a damp squib. In the final analysis, the commission gives only a veneer of morality to the British government which has already achieved its Iraq war objectives immorally. In other words, whether the means to the objectives are right or wrong matters little in real politics.
The Chilcot report is unlikely to slap any war crime charges on Blair or Bush, two fugitives from international justice. In February 2011, Bush cancelled a trip to Switzerland following reports that human rights activists there were planning to file a case charging that he committed war crimes.
One wonders whether the ongoing Al-Sweady inquiry in Britain will also end up like the Hutton inquiry or the Chilcot inquiry.
Like the Chilcot inquiry, the Al-Sweady inquiry was initiated by the British government in 2009 to look into allegations that British soldiers killed, mutilated and tortured Iraqi detainees after the Battle of Danny Boy in southern Iraq in 2004. The inquiry, which began hearings only early this month, was told that British troops took some Iraqi captives to a British base where they were tortured and killed. Last week, the judges saw photographs that showed three bodies bearing signs of torture including missing eyes, a missing penis and crushed bones.
On Wednesday, the British military officers who appeared before the inquiry, named after Hamid Al-Sweady, one of those allegedly murdered at the British camp, dismissed the charges as “utterly groundless”.
Whether these inquiries lack credibility or not, they help Britain to ward off international pressure over allegations of human rights violations. However flawed they are, the credibility of these inquiries has not been questioned by international human rights community because there are also cases where the wrongdoers have been punished – as in the Baha Mousa case. Seven British soldiers were sentenced to one year’s imprisonment and dismissed from the military for torturing and killing Mousa, an Iraqi receptionist.
Besides, these commissions have a political value in that they help Britain to walk with its head held high inn the corridors of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.
However, across the Atlantic, the United States has adopted a different approach in facing international criticism over its violations of international human rights and humanitarian laws. It gives warped interpretations to national security laws and legalise torture, extrajudicial killings, targeted assassinations, indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas and indefinite detention of suspects without trial.
While doing the wrong things legally by twisting the law, the US has the gumption to preach human rights to the rest of the world. It is obvious that the manner, in which the United States names and shames countries like Sri Lanka at the UNHRC, is selective. Though it castigates small countries, it is quick to defend its friends who are the biggest violators of human rights. Israel, for instance, continues to violate human rights laws with impunity in occupied Palestine because the United States prevents moves to censure Israel at international fora. The world human rights community was aghast when in January this year the United States pleaded with the president of the United Nations Human Rights Council to take a soft approach towards Israel. This happened when a motion was taken up to punish the Zionist nation for snubbing the council by not attending a crucial session where it was called upon to answer charges of human rights violation.
With such politicisation of human rights, the ultimate sufferers are the people whose rights have been violated. They can expect justice only when the big powers learn to conduct their international affairs and wars by respecting international moral norms. A world order where justice prevails will not come about as long as the United Nations remains an undemocratic institution with the world’s biggest human rights violators enjoying veto powers in the Security Council.