A.Loewenstein Online Newsletter

So much for that grand “coalition” for Libya invasion

Posted: 03 Apr 2011

 
Welcome to the world of Western foreign policy; only certain kinds of repression are troubling. Pepe Escobar in Asia Times:

You invade Bahrain. We take out Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. This, in short, is the essence of a deal struck between the Barack Obama administration and the House of Saud. Two diplomatic sources at the United Nations independently confirmed that Washington, via Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, gave the go-ahead for Saudi Arabia to invade Bahrain and crush the pro-democracy movement in their neighbor in exchange for a “yes”vote by the Arab League for a no-fly zone over Libya – the main rationale that led to United Nations Security Council resolution 1973.
The revelation came from two different diplomats, a European and a member of the BRIC group, and was made separately to a US scholar and Asia Times Online. According to diplomatic protocol, their names cannot be disclosed. One of the diplomats said, “This is the reason why we could not support resolution 1973. We were arguing that Libya, Bahrain and Yemen were similar cases, and calling for a fact-finding mission. We maintain our official position that the resolution is not clear, and may be interpreted in a belligerent manner.”
As Asia Times Online has reported, a full Arab League endorsement of a no-fly zone is a myth. Of the 22 full members, only 11 were present at the voting. Six of them were Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members, the US-supported club of Gulf kingdoms/sheikhdoms, of which Saudi Arabia is the top dog. Syria and Algeria were against it. Saudi Arabia only had to “seduce” three other members to get the vote.
Translation: only nine out of 22 members of the Arab League voted for the no-fly zone. The vote was essentially a House of Saud-led operation, with Arab League secretary general Amr Moussa keen to polish his CV with Washington with an eye to become the next Egyptian President.
Thus, in the beginning, there was the great 2011 Arab revolt. Then, inexorably, came the US-Saudi counter-revolution.

War in Libya pushed by “insufferable” French mini-imperialists

Posted: 03 Apr 2011

 
As the war in Libya drags on, this piece in the Daily Beast fully explains the role of French President Sarkozy and the supposed French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL), a man who loves a good Western-led war to allegedly protect the innocent but he reveals his true side by blindly backing Israel at the expense of the Palestinians:

From the uprising’s outset, the French president’s objective was to take down Gaddafi, says an intelligence source close him. “We almost decided to do it ourselves,” he adds. The French have a long history of unilateral interventions in Africa, including against Gaddafi in Chad in the 1980s. This time, however, they quickly found partners. The British under Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron were very much on board. So were the leading members of the Arab League, who had their own grudges against Gaddafi. But Sarkozy seemed practically obsessed.
It’s worth remembering that Sarkozy once made a mission of bringing Gaddafi into the world’s good graces. Just weeks after his election in 2007, the new French president outbid his European partners to ransom five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who had been imprisoned in Libya for eight years and threatened with execution. And late that year, clearly hoping for huge contracts from a supposedly rehabilitated Gaddafi, Sarkozy spent almost a week playing host to him, only to be humiliated daily by the Libyan leader’s outlandish demands. Gaddafi pitched his famous tent next to the presidential palace, at the 19th-century Hôtel de Marigny, and when Gaddafi decided to visit the Louvre on the spur of the moment, Sarkozy ordered the museum cleared. Still, the really big contracts did not materialize. Helping Libyans to get rid of their dictator might help wipe that memory clean.
But you can’t just support an amorphous “uprising.” You need somebody to call. Who could speak for the New Libya? Sarkozy had no idea.
At just that moment, BHL rang the Elysée Palace switchboard to tell the president he’d decided to go to the rebel capital of Benghazi. Sarkozy told BHL to let him know if he found any leaders among the fighters, and the self-styled intellectual swashbuckler needed no further encouragement. From Bosnia to Afghanistan, Iraq to Pakistan, BHL has always taken the side of those he saw as oppressed—and never failed to promote himself in the process. “BHL did the usual,” says a close friend of Sarkozy. “You know, ‘Save this! Save that!’ But he did manage to push the system to do something that cannot now be undone.”
Sarkozy and BHL used to be good friends. They went skiing together in Alpe d’Huez and vacationed on the Riviera. When BHL was pushing for intervention in Bosnia in the early 1990s, Sarkozy (a relatively junior minister in the cabinet of then prime minister Jacques Chirac) took BHL’s side against formidable opponents like Alain Juppé, who was then, and is again, France’s minister of foreign affairs.
The BHL-Sarkozy friendship turned icy during Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential run. BHL backed the Socialist candidate and, adding ink to injury, published the story of Sarkozy’s failed efforts to recruit him. “Now I hear the clannish, feudal, possibly brutal Sarkozy that his opponents have denounced, and which I never wanted to believe in,” BHL wrote: “a man with a warrior vision of politics, who hystericizes relations, believes that those who aren’t with him are against him, who doesn’t care about ideas, who thinks interpersonal relations and friendship are the only things that matter.”
Then Sarkozy’s wife ditched him and Sarkozy hooked up with Carla Bruni, who had previously stolen the husband of BHL’s daughter. To describe relations among the French elite as incestuous is almost literally true.
Even as BHL took off for Libya at the beginning of last month with Sarkozy’s blessing, the relationship between the two remained uneasy. It was a mission on a wing and a prayer. Inveterate networker BHL knew no one in the country, in fact. He had to hitch a ride in a vegetable vendor’s panel truck to get to Benghazi. And once he was there the protestors seemed to be losing the revolutionary fervor that had enabled them to seize half the populated areas of the country with scarcely a shot fired in the previous weeks. “What I smelled was the democratic revolution cooling down,” BHL recalls. His cause was slipping away from beneath him. And at the same time, Gaddafi’s forces had begun to regroup for a counteroffensive. So BHL grew bolder. With a lot of name-dropping, he got himself invited to a meeting of the newly named Interim National Transitional Council.
On a sketchy old satellite phone that shut off every few minutes, BHL repeatedly called Sarkozy—who put up with the interruptions—and brokered a deal for a Libyan delegation to be received in Paris at the presidential palace. Two days later, on Monday, March 7, BHL was back in Paris, meeting with the president. Sarkozy said he’d take the extraordinary step of recognizing the rebels’ government the following Thursday. Then BHL took an extraordinary step of his own. He asked Sarkozy to keep the whole thing a secret from the Germans, who were already expressing reservations about supporting the Libyan uprising—and also from French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé, who would, BHL insisted, “throw a wrench in the works.”

What statement on Sri Lankan crimes does; Tamil victims not forgotten

Posted: 02 Apr 2011

 
The recent public campaign against the Galle Literary Festival in Sri Lanka – I signed a statement alongside Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Ken Loach and others – was aimed to highlight Colombo’s gross human rights abuses and lack of accountability after the end of the civil war in 2009.
PEN is currently holding a series of events in London over the question of free speech, cultural events and boycotts. South African writer Gilliam Slovo writes in the Guardian over these questions and struggles with the proper response to state repression.
Personally speaking, the success of the Galle statement – like advocacy on Israeli crimes in Palestine – is to raise in the public domain the inherent human rights abuses, often backed by Western media and political power.
Somebody needs to speak about them.
Here’s Slovo:

At last weekend’s PEN International conference on writers in prison, a Sri Lankan journalist, Lokeesan Appuththurai, described how, during the Sri Lankan government’s 2009 onslaught against the Tamils, the only safe way to get a report out was to switch on your mobile phone, rapidly type and send – and then, just as rapidly, switch off. And there was one other essential precaution to take if you wanted to stay alive: you had to make sure to keep on the move. If you didn’t, the Sri Lankan military would use your mobile signal to fix your coordinates and bomb you. “We don’t need a writers in prison committee in Sri Lanka,” Appuththurai ended his speech, “because in my country they don’t put writers in prison. They just kill them.”
No wonder then, that Sri Lanka’s Galle literary festival has come under scrutiny. A recent call by the French-based organisation Reporters Sans Frontières to boycott this year’s festival was signed by a list of high-profile names that included Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy and Tariq Ali. The festival, they said, gave “legitimacy to the Sri Lankan government’s suppression of free speech”.
The festival organisers were quick to rebut this charge. Theirs was a private initiative, they said, privately funded, and, rather than suppressing speech, it provided a forum for discussion. The opening session of this year’s festival, titled After Shock, was a debate about the legacy of civil wars, including Sri Lanka’s. The festival organisers seemed to have won the argument: among the invitees from all over the world, South Africa’s Damon Galgut was the lone boycotter.
Calls for cultural boycotts such as this one pose a special challenge for me. I am, after all, the new president of English PEN, whose work is focused not only on the defence of persecuted writers but also on the expansion of cultural engagement. At the same time I am a product of my South African heritage and of an early political engagement framed by the boycotts that helped to bring down the apartheid regime.
I lived through so many years of boycotting South Africa that I had to train myself out of the habit of rejecting Outspan oranges. And it wasn’t only South African goods we shunned. There was rugby and cricket, with the worldwide Stop the Tour protests that hit sports-mad white South Africa where it really hurt. And there were cultural boycotts that saw actors refusing to play on segregated stages, writers refusing to go on tour, and academics refusing inter-university collaborations. When, at his inauguration as president, Nelson Mandela articulated his country’s relief that it would no longer be the “skunk” of the world, it was a sign that these boycotts had, in their own small way, helped to make the change.
So I was uneasy during a recent Radio 4 Front Row programme, when I was booked to discuss the issue of cultural engagement and boycott with the Sri Lankan writer and artist Roma Tearne. Ours was the most sisterly of debates. We started out on the Galle Festival, with Tearne arguing that, although she wouldn’t stop writers from going, she would never go herself because there would be no space for open discussion. I, who had been to Galle the previous year, countered with my experience of an audience – albeit an elite audience, as is the case for most literary festivals – that was ravenous to talk politics and, in particular, to talk Sri Lankan politics. And then, inevitably, our conversation turned to Ian McEwan.
McEwan had recently been awarded the Jerusalem prize, given to writers whose work deals with themes of individual freedom in society. Like Margaret Atwood, who had previously ignored appeals not to accept the Dan David prize that was given by Tel Aviv University, McEwan refused calls to boycott his prize, choosing instead to weave into his acceptance speech an acknowledgment of the injustice of the evictions, demolitions and purchases of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and to donate money to an organisation that brings together Israeli and Palestinian former fighters.
As we discussed McEwan’s decision, Tearne and I switched sides. She supported McEwan’s decision and I demurred. To my mind, accepting a prize from Jerusalem’s mayor, Nir Barkat, who has presided over the evictions, demolitions and compulsory purchases that McEwan condemned, risked normalising these policies. McEwan had struck a blow for freedom of expression, and yet, if that expression is used by others to justify the unjustifiable, how free then is it?
Tearne and I are not the only ones to puzzle over the complexities of the issue. As they walked me to the lift, the show’s producers said they’d had trouble finding writers to discuss the subject on air, not only because writers never like criticising other writers, but because many of us find ourselves pulled in conflicting directions. The call for the Galle boycott, for example, gained strength during the Jaipur literary festival. Yet if Galle is to be boycotted because of the Sri Lankan government’s abuse of human rights, then do India’s actions in Kashmir make Jaipur a suitable case for boycott? Does the exploitation of workers in Dubai make its film festival a no-go area? Does Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq mean that England’s many literary events should be shunned? A week tomorrow I will be debating the issue with Rachel Holmes and Romesh Gunesekera during PEN’s Free the Word festival in London.
The South African cultural boycott didn’t happen in a vacuum. It was called for by the African National Congress, which represented the majority of South Africans, and it ran alongside a United Nations condemnation of apartheid, a worldwide protest movement and economic sanctions. That, it seems to me, is the way to go. It is easy enough to embarrass a writer – many of us feel keenly the injustices around us – into making a grand gesture. Better perhaps to campaign effectively for real change . This might include putting pressure on global companies to make it more difficult for a government such as that in Sri Lanka to use mobile phone signals to kill its opponents.

Fighting privatised prisons is a noble act

Posted: 02 Apr 2011

 
Multinational G4S manages prisons the world over and its human rights record is troubling; the company makes money from misery.
These workers are right to protest the company in Britain:

The military has been put on standby as the prison service braces itself for a day of industrial disruption over the first privatisation of an existing British jail.
The Prison Officers’ Association has instructed branches at prisons throughout Britain to hold lunchtime meetings to discuss their mandate to take industrial action in protest, despite a strike ban.
More than 250 staff at Birmingham prison, which is to be run by private security company G4S from October, walked out when the decision was announced on Wednesday. They returned to work in the afternoon. Officials told staff to turn up as normal on Friday for a branch gate meeting.
The justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, said soldiers had been put on standby and told MPs: “If people are so unwise as to take industrial action in prisons, the situation can rapidly become far worse than in a normal strike because we start getting disorder among the prisoners.”
Governors said the “unprecedented decision” would have a resounding effect on the prison service.
The POA’s general secretary, Steve Gillan, said: “We will not make a kneejerk reaction. We will study what we can do and take direction from our members, but we will not rule out industrial action. The NEC have a strategy and this will be enacted in the forthcoming days.” He said that it was for a judge, not ministers or managers, to determine what was illegal industrial action.
Clarke told MPs that after a tendering process begun in 2009 under Jack Straw, then Labour justice minister, G4S were to take over the 1,450-place Victorian prison at Winson Green, Birmingham from October on a 14-year contract.
They are also to run a “super-size” 1,600-place prison, Featherstone 2, on the same site as Featherstone prison, Wolverhampton. G4S said the two contracts were worth £750m over their lifetime.
A third prison, Buckley Hall at Rochdale, is to remain in the public sector while Serco, a rival to G4S, retained the contract for Doncaster prison with a 10% “payment by results” element.
There are 11 privately run prisons in England and Wales. The first, the Wolds in East Yorkshire, opened shortly before Clarke became home secretary in 1992. All were newly built and no publicly run jail has yet transferred to the private sector. The unions fear more of the 140 prisons in England and Wales will follow and the justice secretary strongly hinted at further rounds of competitive tendering.

Another day of hating Arabs in the Israeli mainstream

Posted: 02 Apr 2011