"I would like to clarify comments made to the press by United Nations Resident Coordinator and Humanitarian Coordinator in Nepal, Matthew Kahane, on 24 January," said the statement by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. "His comments were not intended to suggest that the Government of India has influence over Nepalese groups that have recently been limiting the steady flow of essential goods into the Terai region of Nepal, such as food. India is an important partner in the region and we appreciate very much the unfailing and long-standing assistance and support that India has provided to the United Nations and, more importantly, to the people of Nepal." The statement came after less specific efforts by the Secretary-General's spokeswoman in New York to back away from Kahane's statement had failed to mollify Delhi.
To understand what the flap was about, we have to look at what has been happening in Nepal, and perhaps more importantly, what is likely to happen there if someone does not get a handle on the country's very tricky politics.
As Nepal approaches the April 2008 elections to a Constituent Assembly that will work on a new republican constitution, it seems increasingly likely that the process will be chaotic. The 31,000 Maoist guerrillas who have been gathered in 28 separate camps around the country are increasingly restive as their leaders, who quit the interim government last September, are faced with public opinion polls showing they are not popular. Some analysts think they might win no more than 10 per cent of the vote. If that should happen, or to preventit from happening, the temptation to resort once again to "armed struggle" will be strong.
To complicate matters, the political atmosphere in the country has been poisoned recently by bomb attacks at political rallies and violence at the hands of the Young Communists League (YSL). The Maoist leadership is not being blamed for this; the bombers are supposedly from one of the violent groups that have sprung up in the steamy Terai region along the southern border with India, and the YSL is reported to have an urban, English-speaking membership, unlike the peasant rank and file of the Nepali speaking Maoists.
These developments suggest that if the constitutional process breaks down there will be no return to the status quo ante, especially in the Terai. A combination of factors, including tensions between highland and plains Nepalese, has led to growing violence and lawlessness in the region that produces most of Nepal's food. The Maoists will have to contend with other well-armed groups, including criminal gangs and one that wants an independent state in the Terai.
As is usual in the region, the weapons in the Terai are said to be coming from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency; on a program secretly taped last year by the Indian television station Tehelka, an arms dealer in Kathmandu was voluble about the ISI being the source of the AK-47s, rocket launchers and plastic explosives he was selling. If they were for use against India, he said, there would be a special discount.
It was against that background that Kahane, a British national who has been in Nepal since 2005, called on India to "control" the violent groups in the Terai, implying that they were, in fact, sponsored by Delhi. What made it worse was that India had just blocked what it saw as a quite gratuitous effort by another British UN official, Ian Martin, the Secretary-General's Special Representative in Nepal, to have his mandate strengthened by the Security Council. Martin evidently tried to get himself the authority to oversee the amalgamation of Maoist forces into the army; that would have put him in a position to do a great deal of mischief.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Saturday, February 2, 2008
On Cora Weiss And ....
As I clicked through my daily blitz of email messages last Friday, one brought me up short. It said that the Hague Appeal for Peace was passing the "peace education" torch to another organization. It made it seem as if Cora Weiss, the primary mover in the HAP process, was retiring. However, a call to Cora quickly put me right. No. "There's too much to do for me to retire" she said. "I was just in Costa Rica, speaking at the University for Peace. I think there should be a crisis intervention team sent to Kenya, to work with faculty and students on conflict resolution and reconciliation. And I'm writing a book."
As it usually does with Cora, the conversation took unexpected turns. The book, she said, was about the "African airlift, the one that brought over Barack Obama's father to the United States." What airlift was that? The answer widened the background even more. "It was a vision that Tom M'boya had." [For those too young to remember, M'boya was one of the most dynamic of Africa's anti-colonial leaders, and after Jomo Kenyatta, the unquestioned star of Kenyan politics. He was assassinated in 1969.] "
M'boya wanted a generation of young Kenyan leaders educated here. The Brits were under pressure to leave Kenya, and they were threatening to pull out all the civil servants. So a committee was set up here to make the arrangements, and my husband was president of the American Committee on Africa, one of the groups that came together to form the African American Students Foundation (AASF) I was asked to be the Executive Director and a member of the Board. That's how I first got involved. One newspaper described me as a 'housewife from Bronx.' They thought I was black because the committee was dealing with Africa!"
The committee managed to get some 779 Kenyan students admitted to American colleges, but then the question arose of how to get them here. Jack Kennedy (then a senator), offered to have his family foundation pay for chartered aircraft, but Vice President Nixon had the State Department, which had initially denied the grant request, step in with an offer to pay for the program. The airlift group, AASF, refused the government money after the Kennedy Foundation made its offer. The first batch of students came in 1959, and the program went on till 1963. Of the original committee the only surviving members are Cora and Peter Weiss, Ted Kheel and Harry Belafonte. "I thought I'd better write it up before its entirely forgotten" Cora said.
Cora's speech at the University for Peace in Costa Rica also sums up some history worth remembering. Here are some extracts (with occasional light edits):
"It is an honor and privilege, actually, a thrill, to be in the country I’ve talked about for years. The country where army barracks were transformed into school rooms and where the world’s only University for Peace is located. I dream that you will lead the majority of nations to follow this example. “When we dream alone it is just a dream, but when we dream together it becomes reality.” Dom Helder Camara.
All over the United States today, people, the media, and the candidates for President are celebrating the birth of Martin Luther King, jr. Barack Obama reminds us of King´s phrase, “The fierce urgency of now”. And as I will be talking about the Hague Appeal for Peace and its call for the abolition of war, I remember Dr King´s words, “It is as possible and as urgent to put an end to war and violence between nations as it is to put an end to poverty and racial injustice.” .......
Historians agree that the 20th century was the most bloody in history. The wars and the weapons capped with the most lethal, the use of nuclear bombs, demonstrated the enormous damage that humanity is capable of committing in terms of human life, destruction to the earth, pollution of the atmosphere, and obscene cost in money that is stolen from human security. Of course it was also a remarkable century in so many ways.
The unlimited violence and misuse of national treasuries has resulted in oppression, gross violations of human rights, major contributions to climate change, ethnic cleansing, hatred to say nothing of death and lifelong wounds.
I fear that we have become seduced by war and violence. The media are seduced by violence. Military budgets are sacred cows immune from being reduced or having funds transferred to desperately needed human security.
The United Nations decided that the last decade of the last century was to host 10 summits, among them government meetings on housing, human rights, women, children food, population, environment, etc., and the last was to be on peace. But a certain country´s ambassador declared that there was summit fatigue, that summits were circuses and the UN was asked to drop the peace meeting.
Thus it was left to civil society, which had always been a guest at world summits, never the host, to give peace the last word of the most violent century. Three organizations that had demonstrated their ability to mobilize public opinion, The International Peace Bureau, (IPB) the Int´l Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, (IPPNW) and the Int´l Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA) the first two of which are Nobel Peace laureates, came together with the World Federalist Movement and agreed to call a gathering on the 100th anniversary of the world´s first peace congress. .....
The world´s first peace conference met in 1899; it was called by the Tsar of Russia and the 19 year old Queen of the Netherlands. .... Bertha von Suttner, a leading figure for peace who wrote Die Waffen Neider, Lay Down Your Arms, and later became a secretary, housekeeper or girlfriend to Alfred Nobel and pèrsuaded him to turn the profits from his invention of TNT into a peace prize, was an important voice in convening that first conference, and helped persuade reluctant governments to attend. Indeed she was the only woman delegate.
The 1899 conference resulted in the convention for the pacific settlement of disputes; the Permanent Court of Arbitration; the Hague Convention the basis of humanitarian law, and a third agreement on maritime warfare. The conference called for a ban on “throwing projectiles from hot air balloons; use of asphyxiating gasses and dum dum bullets.” There were to be two more conferences one in 1907 and the third in 1915. The second meeting, with strong support from civil society from the US, had an agenda filled with items postponed from the first meeting. Two million women from 20 countries signed a petition in support of the conference hoping for disarmament measures as a result. These meetings led to the League of Nations and then the United Nations.
The third government conference (postponed because of the First World War), was convened in 1999 at The Hague and St Petersburg, but was attended by small numbers of low level government officials and had no public impact. The pressure from and voice of civil society was totally absent. Because of the huge success of the Hague Appeal for Peace conference which had taken place just a week before, the government organizers allowed a few of us, from civil society, to testify at that meeting.
The single most important impact of the Hague Appeal for Peace conference was the significant role that civil society does and must continue to play to be the conscience of the world. Bertha von Suttner, a role model for all, at the turn of the last century said, “Whatever is expressed by the peace movement is not a dream dreamt by people far removed from reality, it is, rather civilization´s drive to sustain itself.” And she said of the world´s first peace congress, “If public opinion did express itself with appropriate vigor, there is nothing the Congress would not try to do. Public opinion is the master, even the god, of the conference.”
Back to 1996, when we decided to give peace the last word of the 20th century and to call for the abolition of war and peace as a human right.
We called the conference for May 1999 and held preparatory meetings in every part of the world in the years leading up so that we could find international agreement on an Agenda for Peace and Justice for the 21st Century. We continued the three themes from the 1899 conference, a) Disarmament and Human Security, b) Prevention, Resolution and Transformation of Conflict, c) International Humanitarian and Human Rights Laws and Institutions and and added a fourth, Root Causes of War/Culture of Peace.
We planned on a gathering of 3,000 and quickly adjusted when 10,000 people showed up. This may have been largely due to President Clinton´s decision to ask NATO to bomb Serbia and Kosovo in response to ethnic cleansing. The reaction to that bombing nearly broke up our meeting. We received thousands of petitions from both sides asking for us to condemn the bombing and asking to support it. We decided to do neither, and instead set up two microphones in large rooms for people to express their views and organize. .......
The conference was unique because civil society called it, paid for it, and organized it, never done on such a scale before, but also because we invited governments and international non governmental organizations to participate. Traditionally at other summits, civil society ( NGO´s), are kept miles apart from government meetings under their own tents. Our meeting was democratic, huge, totally participatory, integrated with art, music, dance, theater, photography, cinema, panels, round tables, open discussion and only 2 plenary sessions, at the opening and the end, starring a mix of grassroots activists and the world´s leading moral authorities, Nobel Peace laureates and heads of state and foreign ministers. .............
What emerged was, The Hague Agenda for Peace and Justice for the 21st Century, a 50 point program for moving from a culture of violence to a culture of peace- now a UN document; (A/54/98) a dozen new programs or organizations dedicated to working on small arms, child soldiers, coordinating the campaign to ratify the Int´l Criminal Court, campaigns to abolish nuclear weapons and implement the land mine treaty and the Global Campaign for Peace Education.
Each issue was picked up by a participating organization and the Hague Appeal for Peace, which had been in existence since 1996 for the purpose of organizing this centennial conference, took on the peace education campaign. Why? Because peace does not come with our DNA, we must learn non violence, learn cooperation, learn to make peace and to sustain it. There are universities for war, and I think only the U Peace is exclusively for peace, while today more and more schools and universities are including peace and justice studies and peace education in their curriculum. But teacher education colleges are not yet catching on to the need to integrate peace education methodology into the preparation of educators for a new kind of education needed to meet today´s violence.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said, “More than an end to war we need an end to the beginning of war.” I believe we need peace education to prevent war, to train generations of children, youth, students, in alternatives to violence and understanding peoples needs and ways to meet them, and an appreciation of cultural differences.
H G Wells in 1921 said that “Human history becomes a race between education and catastrophe.” We were dedicated to education, peace education. And our first publication was a three volume book called Time to Abolish War: teaching for a culture of peace.
Before our conference we were laughed at for calling for the aboilition of war….never, we were told. But look at the institutions in history that have been abolished, or virtually abolished: slavery, colonialism, apartheid, the prohibition of women voting--- why not war?
We published two more books, Peace Lessons from Around the World and Peace and Disarmament Education based on our two year partnership with the United Nations Department for Disarmament Afairs where we worked with local teachers and their schools in Albania, Niger, Cambodia and Peru. These are all available on our web site, www.haguepeace.org, for free.
The HAP has also produced an unusual document written by the Israeli and Palestinian
Co chairs of the GCPE, which is available for all and any negotiators of peace agreements reached from now on. It calls for every peace agreement written after violent conflict to include the integration of peace education and re examination of text books. .......
We could talk about how we go about abolishing the institution of war; about the desperate need to stop the theft of funds from human needs that goes instead to pay for militarism and wars which this year, not including the enormous costs of the Afghan and Iraq wars, came to 1.1 trillion dollars world wide; Iraq and Afghanistan will come to another aggregate cost of over $1trillion.we could talk about the new Peace Building Commission and about the need to run a parallel civilian peace brigade with every peacekeeping operation, and we could talk about the desperate need to implement SC Res 1325 on women peace and security so that equal numbers of good women are at every decision making table everywhere. We could talk about why there is a new generation of women dying to kill. Some are no longer victims of war but perpetrators of war. There are many urgent matters to discuss in this war weary world.
But I would like to raise a Fierce Urgency of Now issue.
..................
I am wondering if U Peace would be interested in first trying to contact Kenyan education authorities and local organizations to see if your skills would be welcome. Then to figure out if you have the capacity to have a few educators and students go to Kenya to do short term crisis training for people who would be gathered by the Ministry and or local organizations or churches…and help them work out their own hatred and other feelings and then work on methods they could use to work with young people. These youngsters would then bring what they have learned into their homes with a domino effect.
This is a very short hand proposal. You have the imagination and experience to know what is probably needed and how it might be done. It shouldn't be too expensive to send 4-6 people and maintain them for a few weeks. "
As it usually does with Cora, the conversation took unexpected turns. The book, she said, was about the "African airlift, the one that brought over Barack Obama's father to the United States." What airlift was that? The answer widened the background even more. "It was a vision that Tom M'boya had." [For those too young to remember, M'boya was one of the most dynamic of Africa's anti-colonial leaders, and after Jomo Kenyatta, the unquestioned star of Kenyan politics. He was assassinated in 1969.] "
M'boya wanted a generation of young Kenyan leaders educated here. The Brits were under pressure to leave Kenya, and they were threatening to pull out all the civil servants. So a committee was set up here to make the arrangements, and my husband was president of the American Committee on Africa, one of the groups that came together to form the African American Students Foundation (AASF) I was asked to be the Executive Director and a member of the Board. That's how I first got involved. One newspaper described me as a 'housewife from Bronx.' They thought I was black because the committee was dealing with Africa!"
The committee managed to get some 779 Kenyan students admitted to American colleges, but then the question arose of how to get them here. Jack Kennedy (then a senator), offered to have his family foundation pay for chartered aircraft, but Vice President Nixon had the State Department, which had initially denied the grant request, step in with an offer to pay for the program. The airlift group, AASF, refused the government money after the Kennedy Foundation made its offer. The first batch of students came in 1959, and the program went on till 1963. Of the original committee the only surviving members are Cora and Peter Weiss, Ted Kheel and Harry Belafonte. "I thought I'd better write it up before its entirely forgotten" Cora said.
Cora's speech at the University for Peace in Costa Rica also sums up some history worth remembering. Here are some extracts (with occasional light edits):
"It is an honor and privilege, actually, a thrill, to be in the country I’ve talked about for years. The country where army barracks were transformed into school rooms and where the world’s only University for Peace is located. I dream that you will lead the majority of nations to follow this example. “When we dream alone it is just a dream, but when we dream together it becomes reality.” Dom Helder Camara.
All over the United States today, people, the media, and the candidates for President are celebrating the birth of Martin Luther King, jr. Barack Obama reminds us of King´s phrase, “The fierce urgency of now”. And as I will be talking about the Hague Appeal for Peace and its call for the abolition of war, I remember Dr King´s words, “It is as possible and as urgent to put an end to war and violence between nations as it is to put an end to poverty and racial injustice.” .......
Historians agree that the 20th century was the most bloody in history. The wars and the weapons capped with the most lethal, the use of nuclear bombs, demonstrated the enormous damage that humanity is capable of committing in terms of human life, destruction to the earth, pollution of the atmosphere, and obscene cost in money that is stolen from human security. Of course it was also a remarkable century in so many ways.
The unlimited violence and misuse of national treasuries has resulted in oppression, gross violations of human rights, major contributions to climate change, ethnic cleansing, hatred to say nothing of death and lifelong wounds.
I fear that we have become seduced by war and violence. The media are seduced by violence. Military budgets are sacred cows immune from being reduced or having funds transferred to desperately needed human security.
The United Nations decided that the last decade of the last century was to host 10 summits, among them government meetings on housing, human rights, women, children food, population, environment, etc., and the last was to be on peace. But a certain country´s ambassador declared that there was summit fatigue, that summits were circuses and the UN was asked to drop the peace meeting.
Thus it was left to civil society, which had always been a guest at world summits, never the host, to give peace the last word of the most violent century. Three organizations that had demonstrated their ability to mobilize public opinion, The International Peace Bureau, (IPB) the Int´l Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, (IPPNW) and the Int´l Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA) the first two of which are Nobel Peace laureates, came together with the World Federalist Movement and agreed to call a gathering on the 100th anniversary of the world´s first peace congress. .....
The world´s first peace conference met in 1899; it was called by the Tsar of Russia and the 19 year old Queen of the Netherlands. .... Bertha von Suttner, a leading figure for peace who wrote Die Waffen Neider, Lay Down Your Arms, and later became a secretary, housekeeper or girlfriend to Alfred Nobel and pèrsuaded him to turn the profits from his invention of TNT into a peace prize, was an important voice in convening that first conference, and helped persuade reluctant governments to attend. Indeed she was the only woman delegate.
The 1899 conference resulted in the convention for the pacific settlement of disputes; the Permanent Court of Arbitration; the Hague Convention the basis of humanitarian law, and a third agreement on maritime warfare. The conference called for a ban on “throwing projectiles from hot air balloons; use of asphyxiating gasses and dum dum bullets.” There were to be two more conferences one in 1907 and the third in 1915. The second meeting, with strong support from civil society from the US, had an agenda filled with items postponed from the first meeting. Two million women from 20 countries signed a petition in support of the conference hoping for disarmament measures as a result. These meetings led to the League of Nations and then the United Nations.
The third government conference (postponed because of the First World War), was convened in 1999 at The Hague and St Petersburg, but was attended by small numbers of low level government officials and had no public impact. The pressure from and voice of civil society was totally absent. Because of the huge success of the Hague Appeal for Peace conference which had taken place just a week before, the government organizers allowed a few of us, from civil society, to testify at that meeting.
The single most important impact of the Hague Appeal for Peace conference was the significant role that civil society does and must continue to play to be the conscience of the world. Bertha von Suttner, a role model for all, at the turn of the last century said, “Whatever is expressed by the peace movement is not a dream dreamt by people far removed from reality, it is, rather civilization´s drive to sustain itself.” And she said of the world´s first peace congress, “If public opinion did express itself with appropriate vigor, there is nothing the Congress would not try to do. Public opinion is the master, even the god, of the conference.”
Back to 1996, when we decided to give peace the last word of the 20th century and to call for the abolition of war and peace as a human right.
We called the conference for May 1999 and held preparatory meetings in every part of the world in the years leading up so that we could find international agreement on an Agenda for Peace and Justice for the 21st Century. We continued the three themes from the 1899 conference, a) Disarmament and Human Security, b) Prevention, Resolution and Transformation of Conflict, c) International Humanitarian and Human Rights Laws and Institutions and and added a fourth, Root Causes of War/Culture of Peace.
We planned on a gathering of 3,000 and quickly adjusted when 10,000 people showed up. This may have been largely due to President Clinton´s decision to ask NATO to bomb Serbia and Kosovo in response to ethnic cleansing. The reaction to that bombing nearly broke up our meeting. We received thousands of petitions from both sides asking for us to condemn the bombing and asking to support it. We decided to do neither, and instead set up two microphones in large rooms for people to express their views and organize. .......
The conference was unique because civil society called it, paid for it, and organized it, never done on such a scale before, but also because we invited governments and international non governmental organizations to participate. Traditionally at other summits, civil society ( NGO´s), are kept miles apart from government meetings under their own tents. Our meeting was democratic, huge, totally participatory, integrated with art, music, dance, theater, photography, cinema, panels, round tables, open discussion and only 2 plenary sessions, at the opening and the end, starring a mix of grassroots activists and the world´s leading moral authorities, Nobel Peace laureates and heads of state and foreign ministers. .............
What emerged was, The Hague Agenda for Peace and Justice for the 21st Century, a 50 point program for moving from a culture of violence to a culture of peace- now a UN document; (A/54/98) a dozen new programs or organizations dedicated to working on small arms, child soldiers, coordinating the campaign to ratify the Int´l Criminal Court, campaigns to abolish nuclear weapons and implement the land mine treaty and the Global Campaign for Peace Education.
Each issue was picked up by a participating organization and the Hague Appeal for Peace, which had been in existence since 1996 for the purpose of organizing this centennial conference, took on the peace education campaign. Why? Because peace does not come with our DNA, we must learn non violence, learn cooperation, learn to make peace and to sustain it. There are universities for war, and I think only the U Peace is exclusively for peace, while today more and more schools and universities are including peace and justice studies and peace education in their curriculum. But teacher education colleges are not yet catching on to the need to integrate peace education methodology into the preparation of educators for a new kind of education needed to meet today´s violence.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said, “More than an end to war we need an end to the beginning of war.” I believe we need peace education to prevent war, to train generations of children, youth, students, in alternatives to violence and understanding peoples needs and ways to meet them, and an appreciation of cultural differences.
H G Wells in 1921 said that “Human history becomes a race between education and catastrophe.” We were dedicated to education, peace education. And our first publication was a three volume book called Time to Abolish War: teaching for a culture of peace.
Before our conference we were laughed at for calling for the aboilition of war….never, we were told. But look at the institutions in history that have been abolished, or virtually abolished: slavery, colonialism, apartheid, the prohibition of women voting--- why not war?
We published two more books, Peace Lessons from Around the World and Peace and Disarmament Education based on our two year partnership with the United Nations Department for Disarmament Afairs where we worked with local teachers and their schools in Albania, Niger, Cambodia and Peru. These are all available on our web site, www.haguepeace.org, for free.
The HAP has also produced an unusual document written by the Israeli and Palestinian
Co chairs of the GCPE, which is available for all and any negotiators of peace agreements reached from now on. It calls for every peace agreement written after violent conflict to include the integration of peace education and re examination of text books. .......
We could talk about how we go about abolishing the institution of war; about the desperate need to stop the theft of funds from human needs that goes instead to pay for militarism and wars which this year, not including the enormous costs of the Afghan and Iraq wars, came to 1.1 trillion dollars world wide; Iraq and Afghanistan will come to another aggregate cost of over $1trillion.we could talk about the new Peace Building Commission and about the need to run a parallel civilian peace brigade with every peacekeeping operation, and we could talk about the desperate need to implement SC Res 1325 on women peace and security so that equal numbers of good women are at every decision making table everywhere. We could talk about why there is a new generation of women dying to kill. Some are no longer victims of war but perpetrators of war. There are many urgent matters to discuss in this war weary world.
But I would like to raise a Fierce Urgency of Now issue.
..................
I am wondering if U Peace would be interested in first trying to contact Kenyan education authorities and local organizations to see if your skills would be welcome. Then to figure out if you have the capacity to have a few educators and students go to Kenya to do short term crisis training for people who would be gathered by the Ministry and or local organizations or churches…and help them work out their own hatred and other feelings and then work on methods they could use to work with young people. These youngsters would then bring what they have learned into their homes with a domino effect.
This is a very short hand proposal. You have the imagination and experience to know what is probably needed and how it might be done. It shouldn't be too expensive to send 4-6 people and maintain them for a few weeks. "
Friday, February 1, 2008
International Decades, Years and Days
- International Decade for Action: Water for Life (2005-2015)
- International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-violence for the Children of the World (2001-2010)
- International Year of Languages 2008
- International Year of the Potato 2008
- International Year of Planet Earth 2008
- International Year of Sanitation 2008
- International Mother Language Day (21 February)
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Musharraf and Barak Meet By "Chance"
Right after India launched an Israeli spy satellite into orbit, Pakistan's President Musharraf met "by chance" in Paris with Israel's Defense Minister Ehud Barak. The Associated Press of Pakistan reported that the two were staying in the same hotel and ran into each other in the lobby. Evidently, Musharraf was on his way out of the hotel and Barak on his way in, and the latter introduced himself. The two shook hands and went their ways according to APP; but Israel's Haaretz reported that there was a later meeting of about an hour, at which the terrorist threat to Pakistan and the security of its nuclear weapons was discussed.
Pakistan does not have diplomatic relations with Israel because of its need to preserve solidarity with the oil-rich Arab nations on which it has depended for financial and political support. However, over the last few years, as Indo-Israeli relations have got ever closer and extended to the sharing of military technology and intelligence, Pakistan has felt the need to change its position. There have been earlier reports of diplomatic meetings, routinely denied, but this one seems to be different; a government spokesman admitted the meeting in the lobby.
Whether the "chance" meeting was occasioned by Pakistan's concerns at having an Israeli satellite peering down on it, or if it was Israeli interest in finding out why Pakistan was rattling its nukes (see 1/23 post: Is Push Coming to Shove on Pakistani Nukes), it was definitely not routine.
Pakistan does not have diplomatic relations with Israel because of its need to preserve solidarity with the oil-rich Arab nations on which it has depended for financial and political support. However, over the last few years, as Indo-Israeli relations have got ever closer and extended to the sharing of military technology and intelligence, Pakistan has felt the need to change its position. There have been earlier reports of diplomatic meetings, routinely denied, but this one seems to be different; a government spokesman admitted the meeting in the lobby.
Whether the "chance" meeting was occasioned by Pakistan's concerns at having an Israeli satellite peering down on it, or if it was Israeli interest in finding out why Pakistan was rattling its nukes (see 1/23 post: Is Push Coming to Shove on Pakistani Nukes), it was definitely not routine.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
More Assassination Plots
The Indian government is said to be acting on reports that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has contracted with a former leader of Mumbai's criminal underworld to assassinate two leaders of the opposition BJP party. Security is being tightened for right-wing politicians L.K. Advani, the leader of the parliamentary opposition in Delhi, and Narendra Modi, the recently elected Chief Minister of Gujarat state. The hit man -- or more accurately, the contract holder -- is said to be Dawood Ibrahim, who is wanted in connection with the 1993 bombings in Mumbai that killed 250 people and wounded 700; he fled India after those attacks and has been living in Karachi for over a decade.
Both BJP leaders are controversial and polarizing figures, lightning rods for disaffected lower-middle class Hindus strongly and intolerantly wedded to their religious identity. Advani was the primary architect of the BJP's rise to national power in 1999, winning a mass following with his campaign to demolish a 16th century mosque said to be built over a temple marking the birthplace of Rama, the divine hero of the Hindu epic Ramayana. Modi is widely seen as responsible for the massively violent reprisals against the Muslim community in Gujarat in July 2002 after 55 Hindus were burned alive in a railway carriage as they returned from a visit to the ruins of that mosque.
Why the ISI should want Advani and Modi dead at a time when relations between India and Pakistan are the warmest they have ever been, is an intriguing question. Islamabad has nothing to gain from raising tensions along a border that is now largely quiet, and it would be far-fetched to imagine that anyone in Pakistan, in its state of deepening crisis, would take time to pursue a long distance vendetta in India.
It is much more likely that the ISI -- or some part of it -- is acting on behalf of one of its strategic partners, the intelligence agencies of Britain, China, Saudi Arabia and the United States. This has happened in the past, most openly in Afghanistan and India, and more circumspectly in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Of the four, Britain and China have a consistent history of trying to destabilize India, but only the former has had a handle on communal (religious) conflict; Beijing has mainly been involved in running guns to separatist tribal elements along India's north-eastern border and funding its communist proxies.
British intervention has been much broader, rooted as it is in its colonial experience of using religion to "divide and rule." In the final decade of British rule in India Hindus and Muslims, who never before fought each other because of religion, were manipulated into a state of civil war. As American journalist William Shirer noted in his memoir on Gandhi, that was not a difficult achievement; he quoted the British Chief of Police in Bombay telling how a religious riot could be engineered simply by throwing a cow's head over a temple wall or a dead pig into a mosque. In pre-independence India the Muslim League under Mohammad Ali Jinnah was Britain's main proxy in mobilizing religious hatred. It organized the "great Calcutta killing" of August 1946 which took some 7,000 lives in three days and set in motion the wave of violence that culminated a year later in the killing of about a million people as Britain split India to create Pakistan.
Proof of covert British intervention in India after it became independent has been available only occasionally, but there is an abundance of circumstantial evidence. Items:
Both BJP leaders are controversial and polarizing figures, lightning rods for disaffected lower-middle class Hindus strongly and intolerantly wedded to their religious identity. Advani was the primary architect of the BJP's rise to national power in 1999, winning a mass following with his campaign to demolish a 16th century mosque said to be built over a temple marking the birthplace of Rama, the divine hero of the Hindu epic Ramayana. Modi is widely seen as responsible for the massively violent reprisals against the Muslim community in Gujarat in July 2002 after 55 Hindus were burned alive in a railway carriage as they returned from a visit to the ruins of that mosque.
Why the ISI should want Advani and Modi dead at a time when relations between India and Pakistan are the warmest they have ever been, is an intriguing question. Islamabad has nothing to gain from raising tensions along a border that is now largely quiet, and it would be far-fetched to imagine that anyone in Pakistan, in its state of deepening crisis, would take time to pursue a long distance vendetta in India.
It is much more likely that the ISI -- or some part of it -- is acting on behalf of one of its strategic partners, the intelligence agencies of Britain, China, Saudi Arabia and the United States. This has happened in the past, most openly in Afghanistan and India, and more circumspectly in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Of the four, Britain and China have a consistent history of trying to destabilize India, but only the former has had a handle on communal (religious) conflict; Beijing has mainly been involved in running guns to separatist tribal elements along India's north-eastern border and funding its communist proxies.
British intervention has been much broader, rooted as it is in its colonial experience of using religion to "divide and rule." In the final decade of British rule in India Hindus and Muslims, who never before fought each other because of religion, were manipulated into a state of civil war. As American journalist William Shirer noted in his memoir on Gandhi, that was not a difficult achievement; he quoted the British Chief of Police in Bombay telling how a religious riot could be engineered simply by throwing a cow's head over a temple wall or a dead pig into a mosque. In pre-independence India the Muslim League under Mohammad Ali Jinnah was Britain's main proxy in mobilizing religious hatred. It organized the "great Calcutta killing" of August 1946 which took some 7,000 lives in three days and set in motion the wave of violence that culminated a year later in the killing of about a million people as Britain split India to create Pakistan.
Proof of covert British intervention in India after it became independent has been available only occasionally, but there is an abundance of circumstantial evidence. Items:
- A former British intelligence operative, Peter Bleach, was caught in 1994 after parachuting crates of AK-47s, rocket launchers and ammunition for use by the Ananda Marg, a violent Hindu cult in West Bengal. During Bleach's trial in Calcutta the defense produced the transcript of a phone conversation in which the defendant informed an unnamed official of Britain's MI-6 of his assignment and was told to proceed. Found guilty of conspiring to make war against the State, Bleach was sentenced to life in prison in 2000, but was released in 2004 after persistent representations by the British government, which included a private chat between Tony Blair and Deputy Prime Minister Advani.
- Indira Gandhi was assassinated on 31 October 1984 as she was heading for a BBC television interview to be conducted by Peter Ustinov. (Princess Anne was in Delhi at the time, scheduled to dine with the Prime Minister that evening.) The interview was delayed a half hour at the last minute, just the time needed for one of the two assassins (both on the Prime Minister's security detail), to begin his shift at the spot where the killing occurred. Initially, one of Mrs. Gandhi's aides was suspected of having made the change, but the judge who conducted the official investigation of the murder exonerated him completely. The judge noted the involvement of a foreign intelligence agency but did not go into detail. (A part of the report remains secret, so it is impossible to say what information he had.) Incidentally, Ustinov had a family connection with British intelligence: according to Peter Wright in his book "Spycatcher," Ustinov's father, Klop Ustinov, worked for MI-5. It is also worth recalling that the British government had rejected an official Indian protest about the BBC giving air time to a Sikh who called for Mrs. Gandhi's murder; London could not interfere with freedom of the Press, it said. For the record: the BBC Foreign Service is paid for by the government, and some of its prominent "journalists" are known to be spooks. (See the fascinating blog at http://shaphan.typepad.com/blog/bbc/index.html.)
- The Mark Bullough mentioned repeatedly in Shaphan's blog went from the Scots Guards to the post of Managing Director of Jardine Fleming in Bombay. He arrived in the city just as the Indian government was opening up the economy to foreign investment, and during his time there the following things happened: (1) a $1.5 billion stock market swindle in which four major foreign banks were implicated ; (2) the most serious Hindu-Muslim riots in India since independence; and (3) the March 1993 bomb attacks that demolished the stock market. It was also in the same period that the right-wing BJP party suddenly came alive with new funding (supposedly from wealthy Hindus abroad), and Advani's Hindu-supremacist campaign to demolish the mosque at Ayodha achieved its end. Bullough went on to co-found Aegis Defense Services with Tim Spicer, another Scots Guards alumnus, and both went to Iraq after the 2003 US-led invasion; they were given a $293 million contract to create what was for a while the largest private army in the world. Jardine Fleming, by the way, traces its roots to the glory days of the opium trade. Jardine Matheson led the effort to circumvent China's ban on the trade in the period before Britain fought two "opium wars" to force Beijing to accept the drug.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Imran Khan in New York
Last Friday the Asia Society's 258-seat Rose Conference Hall was filled to capacity at 8:30 in the morning. People were sitting on the steps. The attraction was Imran Khan, cricket star turned politician, speaking on "Pakistan's Political Future, an alternative perspective."
Khan argued that "it's the best of times and the worst of times in Pakistan." Although the country is in a state of deep political crisis, it is also experiencing an unprecedented political awakening. Television coverage of the drama over the Musharraf government's unsuccessful attempts to get the country's Chief Justice to resign had led to a ballooning protest movement. The government had not expected it, and attempts to put it down violently had backfired.
Military men don't understand politics, Khan said; you can tell them to "go take that hill" and they can do that, but they can't govern a country. He did not think the elections (re-scheduled for mid February after Benazir Bhutto's assassination), would be free and fair. For that reason, his Tareek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice) party is boycotting the elections. For the elections to be considered fair, at the very least, the Chief Justice and other members of the judiciary who had been dismissed by Musharraf in his November 3 "coup against his own government" would have to be reinstated. He was not hopeful that would happen. The major political parties had sold out, for they were financed by drug lords who were obedient to the government.
Khan said that the Taliban was not strong in the tribal areas (Waziristan, Swat and Baluchistan); in each area, it was Musharraf's violent policies that were the cause of growing support for it. If Washington followed up on its talk of intervening militarily in the tribal region the outcome could be disastrous: there were only about 2,000 al Qaeda fighters there, but any attempt at military intervention would arouse a million armed men who had a long and successful tradition of opposing external authority. The Pakistani army, which had gone into Waziristan in 2004, had suffered heavy losses, and if policies were not changed, it could suffer catastrophic damage. Already, the Pashtoons in the army were refusing to fight.
It was not just in the tribal areas that Musharraf was unpopular. There was "tremendous discontent" all over the country. Public opinion polls showed that nationally, about 75 per cent of Pakistanis were strongly opposed to Musharraf.
Khan, who captained Pakistan's cricket team to a World Cup victory in 1992, got a number of questions at the end of his talk, mostly, it seemed, from fans. (One mentioned getting an autograph at their last meeting.) But the answers were substantive. Pakistan's future depended on addressing four critical issues on an emergency basis, Khan said -- the rule of law, education, agriculture and the economy. Most of the country was still in a feudal state, with politically powerful people above the law. The educational system was in a state of collapse, with the vast majority of students forced to attend madrassahs run out of mosques. The tax system was grossly unfair, with 90 per cent of indirect taxes paid by the poor and remittances from poor Pakistanis working abroad providing the government's major source of revenue. That money was being spent on large government buildings, including a Military Headquarters that would be larger than the Pentagon. He saw the need to subsidize agriculture as had been done in India.
I had expected Imran to be like his outspoken sister Rabina, who I have known for many years at the UN, but he was not; there is a more considered quality about him even when he is lambasting Musharraf. There is also, to an Indian ear, a certain alarming fuzziness about history. He mentioned at one point that Pakistan had been created constitutionally, that its founder had been a great "constitutionalist." Pakistan, of course, was created in a welter of blood by Muhammad Ali Jinnah's "direct action," which involved bloody unprovoked attacks by members of the Muslim League on Hindus to set off "communal riots." The riots served to support British claims that India had to be divided because Hindus and Muslims could never be expected to coexist peacefully. The British got what they wanted, a country they could control and use, but the bad karma has flowed unstoppably on.
Khan argued that "it's the best of times and the worst of times in Pakistan." Although the country is in a state of deep political crisis, it is also experiencing an unprecedented political awakening. Television coverage of the drama over the Musharraf government's unsuccessful attempts to get the country's Chief Justice to resign had led to a ballooning protest movement. The government had not expected it, and attempts to put it down violently had backfired.
Military men don't understand politics, Khan said; you can tell them to "go take that hill" and they can do that, but they can't govern a country. He did not think the elections (re-scheduled for mid February after Benazir Bhutto's assassination), would be free and fair. For that reason, his Tareek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice) party is boycotting the elections. For the elections to be considered fair, at the very least, the Chief Justice and other members of the judiciary who had been dismissed by Musharraf in his November 3 "coup against his own government" would have to be reinstated. He was not hopeful that would happen. The major political parties had sold out, for they were financed by drug lords who were obedient to the government.
Khan said that the Taliban was not strong in the tribal areas (Waziristan, Swat and Baluchistan); in each area, it was Musharraf's violent policies that were the cause of growing support for it. If Washington followed up on its talk of intervening militarily in the tribal region the outcome could be disastrous: there were only about 2,000 al Qaeda fighters there, but any attempt at military intervention would arouse a million armed men who had a long and successful tradition of opposing external authority. The Pakistani army, which had gone into Waziristan in 2004, had suffered heavy losses, and if policies were not changed, it could suffer catastrophic damage. Already, the Pashtoons in the army were refusing to fight.
It was not just in the tribal areas that Musharraf was unpopular. There was "tremendous discontent" all over the country. Public opinion polls showed that nationally, about 75 per cent of Pakistanis were strongly opposed to Musharraf.
Khan, who captained Pakistan's cricket team to a World Cup victory in 1992, got a number of questions at the end of his talk, mostly, it seemed, from fans. (One mentioned getting an autograph at their last meeting.) But the answers were substantive. Pakistan's future depended on addressing four critical issues on an emergency basis, Khan said -- the rule of law, education, agriculture and the economy. Most of the country was still in a feudal state, with politically powerful people above the law. The educational system was in a state of collapse, with the vast majority of students forced to attend madrassahs run out of mosques. The tax system was grossly unfair, with 90 per cent of indirect taxes paid by the poor and remittances from poor Pakistanis working abroad providing the government's major source of revenue. That money was being spent on large government buildings, including a Military Headquarters that would be larger than the Pentagon. He saw the need to subsidize agriculture as had been done in India.
I had expected Imran to be like his outspoken sister Rabina, who I have known for many years at the UN, but he was not; there is a more considered quality about him even when he is lambasting Musharraf. There is also, to an Indian ear, a certain alarming fuzziness about history. He mentioned at one point that Pakistan had been created constitutionally, that its founder had been a great "constitutionalist." Pakistan, of course, was created in a welter of blood by Muhammad Ali Jinnah's "direct action," which involved bloody unprovoked attacks by members of the Muslim League on Hindus to set off "communal riots." The riots served to support British claims that India had to be divided because Hindus and Muslims could never be expected to coexist peacefully. The British got what they wanted, a country they could control and use, but the bad karma has flowed unstoppably on.
Something Fishy in French Bank Scandal
There's something fishy about the revelation today that a rogue trader, Jérôme Kerviel, had caused the French bank Société Générale, one of the largest in Europe, to lose $7 billion in the futures market. Kerviel was reported to be a "computer genius" who engineered a series of "elaborate, fictitious transactions."
What's fishy is that the bank, which has known about the fraud since the weekend and has dismissed his supervisors, had not, by late Thursday, filed a criminal complaint against the absconding officer himself. Nor has it said anything about how Kerviel financed the huge positions he took in the market -- it had to be a very considerable amount -- and how he could have done it alone. The International Herald Tribune quoted C. Ricardo Esteves, executive director of Banco Hipotecario of Argentina: "It is not credible. One person responsible for this? I just don't believe it."
The announcement of the loss ate up most of Société Générale's healthy pretax profit for 2007 of $8.07 billion, forcing it to seek a multi-billion infusion of new capital to avoid a collapse. In addition to the loss caused by the fraud, the bank announced that it was writing off another €2.05 billion in fourth quarter losses linked to exposure to the US housing market.
For Société Générale, the timing of the whole affair could not have been worse, coming as stock markets tanked around the world and then revived dramatically as the US Federal Reserve announced a surprise cut in interest rates.
It almost seems as if someone is deliberately pushing the world financial system towards a catastrophic collapse.
What's fishy is that the bank, which has known about the fraud since the weekend and has dismissed his supervisors, had not, by late Thursday, filed a criminal complaint against the absconding officer himself. Nor has it said anything about how Kerviel financed the huge positions he took in the market -- it had to be a very considerable amount -- and how he could have done it alone. The International Herald Tribune quoted C. Ricardo Esteves, executive director of Banco Hipotecario of Argentina: "It is not credible. One person responsible for this? I just don't believe it."
The announcement of the loss ate up most of Société Générale's healthy pretax profit for 2007 of $8.07 billion, forcing it to seek a multi-billion infusion of new capital to avoid a collapse. In addition to the loss caused by the fraud, the bank announced that it was writing off another €2.05 billion in fourth quarter losses linked to exposure to the US housing market.
For Société Générale, the timing of the whole affair could not have been worse, coming as stock markets tanked around the world and then revived dramatically as the US Federal Reserve announced a surprise cut in interest rates.
It almost seems as if someone is deliberately pushing the world financial system towards a catastrophic collapse.
