The IDF’s New Tactics

Neve Gordon

Several months ago, a young woman working in Kibbutz Dorot’s carrot fields noticed a piece of paper lying on the ground with a short inscription in Arabic. It looked like a treasure map. She put it in her pocket. Some time later, she gave it to her friend Avihai, who works for Breaking the Silence, an organisation of military veterans who collect testimony from Israeli soldiers to provide a record of everyday life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Avihai was in the middle of interviewing soldiers about their experiences during Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip last summer. He recognised the piece of paper as a leaflet that had been dropped by an Israeli plane above Palestinian neighbourhoods in the northern part of the Strip; the wind had blown it six miles from its intended landing point.

The leaflet helps explain why 70 per cent of the 2220 Palestinians killed during the war were civilians. The red line on the map traces a route from a bright blue area labelled Beit Lahia, a Palestinian town of 60,000 inhabitants at the north edge of the Strip, and moves south through Muaskar Jabalia to Jabalia city. The text reads:

Military Notification to the Residents of Beit Lahia

The IDF will be undertaking forceful and assertive air operations against terrorist elements and infrastructure in the locations from which they launch their missiles at the State of Israel. These locations include:

From east Atatra to Salatin Street. From west [unclear] to Jabalia Camp.

You must evacuate your homes immediately and head toward southern Jabalia town along the following road:

Falluja Road, until 12 noon, Sunday 13 July 2014.

The IDF does not intend to harm you or your families. These operations are temporary and will be of short duration. Any person, however, who violates these instructions and does not evacuate his home immediately puts his own life as well as the lives of his household in danger. Those who take heed will be spared.

‘The significance of this leaflet,’ Yehuda Shaul, the founder of Breaking the Silence, told me, ‘cannot be appreciated fully without reading our new report.’ The report is made up of 111 testimonies, provided by around seventy soldiers who participated in the fighting.

One thing is immediately clear from the interviews: the IDF’s working assumption was that once the leaflets were dropped, anyone who refused to move was a legitimate target:

Q: You said earlier that you knew the neighbourhood was supposed to be empty of civilians?

A: Yes. That’s what they told us … they told us that the civilians had been informed via leaflets scattered in the area, and that it was supposed to be devoid of civilians, and civilians who remained there were civilians who apparently chose to be there.

Q: Who told you that?

A: The commanders, in off-the-record type conversations, or during all kinds of briefings.

The IDF has the technology to tell whether people had actually left, but the claim that ‘no civilians should be in the area’ is a recurring refrain.

The land invasion began on 17 July and was generally limited to within a mile of the border. An infantry soldier deployed either in or near Beit Lahia described a typical incident:

There was one time when I looked at some place and was sure I saw someone moving. Maybe I imagined it, some curtain blowing, I don’t know. So I said: ‘I see something moving.’ I asked [permission] to open fire toward that spot, and I opened fire and [the other soldiers] hit it with a barrage …

Q: What were the rules of engagement?

A: There weren’t really any rules of engagement … They told us: ‘There aren’t supposed to be any civilians there. If you spot someone, shoot.’ Whether the person posed a threat or not wasn’t a question; and that makes sense to me. If you shoot someone in Gaza it’s cool, no big deal. First of all because it’s Gaza, and second because that’s warfare. That, too, was made clear to us – they told us, ‘Don’t be afraid to shoot,’ and they made it clear that there were no uninvolved civilians.

It seems safe to assume, however, that most of the civilians who died weren’t killed by infantry troops. One of the IDF’s basic doctrines is to try to guarantee zero risk for its troops. The region was ‘softened’ by artillery fire for nine days before the ground forces were scheduled to invade. Planes, helicopters and drones (though the IDF does not admit to using killer drones) bombarded the region from the air, and there was heavy artillery fire from inside Israel. As one soldier put it,

We knew that by the time we got there on Friday there were not supposed to be any people in the area, since leaflets were dispersed and also because there wasn’t very much left of the place. The artillery corps and the air force really cleaned that place up.

The Israeli zero risk doctrine was developed with the help of Asa Kasher, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University and one of the authors of the IDF’s ethical code. Kasher interprets just war theory and international humanitarian law as stipulating a hierarchy of protection: Israeli civilians must be protected at all costs, then come IDF soldiers, and only then do the enemy’s civilian population enter into the equation. ‘When it is impossible to accomplish a military mission without endangering the lives of a terrorist’s non-terrorist neighbours,’ Kasher writes in ‘The Ethics of Protective Edge’, ‘as much compassion as possible under the circumstances must be shown without aborting the mission or raising the risk to Israeli soldiers.’

As the troops prepared to enter Gaza, artillery and intelligence officers determined which targets should be eliminated before the ground invasion: tall buildings overlooking the incursion route, for example, and places from which rockets had been launched at Israel. One soldier describes a high-ranking officer looking at an aerial photo on which targets had been circled, and then pointing at several other Palestinian houses and instructing the artillery officer to eliminate them too.

The Israeli military fired 34,000 artillery rounds during the war: 12,000 smoke, 3000 illumination and 19,000 explosive. With an American-made Howitzer 155-millimetre cannon, a strike is considered precise when the round falls anywhere within 100 metres of the target. Howitzer shells can kill anyone within 50 metres and injure anyone within 100 metres.

There is this perception that we know how to do everything super accurately, as if it doesn’t matter which weapon is being used … But no, these weapons are statistical, and they hit 50 metres to the right or 100 metres to the left, and it’s unpleasant. What happens is, for seven straight days it’s non-stop bombardment, that’s what happens in practice.

The artillery officer has to ensure the target is a certain distance from sensitive sites, such as UN facilities, schools, clinics and hospitals. These distances are not set in stone, but determined by what the IDF terms ‘activity levels’. If, for example, the activity level is one, then the target of a 155-millimetre projectile can’t be within 500 metres of a school. But if the activity level is changed to three, then the safety range is decreased dramatically. An officer explains:

First level means you can fire artillery up to a certain distance from civilians, or from a place where you think it’s likely there’ll be civilians … For fighter jets and the bigger bombs of one ton, half a ton, it’s defined verbally … as ‘Low level of damage expected to civilians.’ Next is the second level. The mortar ranges stay the same, and for artillery the distance from civilians decreases. For jets, it says, ‘Moderate harm to civilians’ or ‘Moderate harm to civilians is expected,’ or ‘Moderate collateral damage’, something like that. This means something undefined, something that’s according to the way the commander sees things and the mood he’s in: ‘Let’s decide ourselves what “moderate” means.’ In the third level, the artillery’s [safety range from civilians] gets cut by about half. I’m not talking about jets, where there’s already significant damage and it’s considered acceptable, that’s the definition. We expect a high level of harm to civilians. Like, it’s OK from our perspective, because we’re in the third level. They aren’t given a specific, defined number, this is something I remember clearly. That’s left to the commander.

Another soldier adds that the activity levels reflect ‘the degree of collateral damage you’re allowed to cause. [They] reflect the means that you’re permitted to use, and the distance you need to maintain from sensitive locations when you shoot. They reflect a whole lot of parameters concerning the activation of fire.’

There can be many reasons for changing the activity level. Some have to do with the intensity of the fighting. When Hamas blew up an armoured personnel carrier in Shuja’iyya and killed seven Israeli soldiers, the activity level immediately changed:

There were many, many targets that [weren’t attacked] because they didn’t qualify under the firing policy, and then after Shuja’iyya for example, suddenly some of those targets did get approved. The sort of problematic targets that were at a certain distance from some school – suddenly stuff like that did get approved.

The activity level may also change due to specific intelligence, or simply because the only remaining targets are not within the range permitted by level one, ‘because the “target bank” had been depleted.’

‘Hamas is pushing for a display of victory,’ that’s always the expression used … this sweeping expression that’s used at the end of every round [of fighting]. [There is talk that] the delegations are in Cairo, or on their way to Cairo, or will soon be arriving in Cairo. But the fighting keeps going on, and even if you think it’s about to end – you have to keep acting like nothing’s about to end. So that’s why you go up a level, to turn the threat around and also as a show of force. And so it’s possible that the target will be approved if it’s justified, if there’s a good reason, if it’s a valuable target, or if there’s a good chance to hit it in a way that’ll look good to the Israeli audience, and look bad for the Palestinian audience. That’ll hurt the military rocket-firing capabilities of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, or of other organisations …

Q: Collateral damage means only bodily harm, or also damage to property?

A: Bodily harm.

Q: Property isn’t counted at all?

A: Not as far as the levels – the levels are practically binary. These are the levels of collateral damage, and the grading is based solely on human lives.

After the 2006 Lebanon war, the IDF realised that its strictly hierarchical command structure had hindered the war effort. The idea, which is now common in the US military as well, is to create a network of interconnected decentralised cells with significant autonomy to make executive decisions. In the words of General Stanley McChrystal, who headed the US Joint Special Operations Command from 2003 to 2008, ‘to defeat a networked enemy, we had to become a network ourselves.’ Each cell is made up of officers from different branches – infantry, artillery, air force, military intelligence, secret service agencies – who work together on the basis of shared information and shared strategy. The way the IDF cells function is classified, but it seems likely there are two main kinds: ‘attack cells’ and ‘assistance cells’. Attack cells would include ‘hunting cells’ whose goal is to hunt down Palestinian militants and assassinate them. There are also thought to be ‘fishing cells’, whose task is to monitor a particular area to determine who the ‘big fish’ in it are; and ‘real estate cells’, which identify and monitor strategic buildings and facilities so that they can be destroyed at the right moment if necessary.

One soldier, who was very likely a member of an ‘attack cell’, was asked what happens when the target bank is depleted, i.e. whether the IDF attacks the houses of lower ranking Hamas activists when most higher ranking targets have already been eliminated. The soldier replied:

Absolutely. See, you start the fighting with a very clear ‘target list’ that has been assembled over a long period of time, and there are also units whose objective is to mark new targets in real time. When we start running out [of targets], then we begin hitting targets that are higher on collateral damage levels, and pay less and less attention to this. But there are also all sorts of efforts aimed at gathering intelligence that’s specifically for establishing new targets like, for example, which areas are being used to launch [missiles or mortars toward Israel], statistics on where rockets are being fired from, where mortars are being fired from. [The co-ordinates] are calculated in a pretty precise way, and are used to try and figure out where it’s likely that there is a rocket-launching infrastructure. And you say: ‘OK, I’ll strike that piece of land, because every morning at 7 a.m., ten mortar shells are fired from there.’

After the nine-day artillery assault on the Gaza Strip, the troops marched in. The testimonies suggest that every infantry brigade was accompanied by a tank battalion, an engineering battalion and several D9 bulldozers, and had back-up artillery at its disposal as well as constant reconnaissance that was communicated to the officers on the ground through an assistance cell. The soldiers say that the ground troops had instructions to kill any person within range. Before they entered Palestinian houses, a tank would shoot a shell to create a way in or soldiers would use hand-held missile launchers. Anyone inside would be incapacitated and so unable to surprise the troops. Once they were in, any movement outside was considered suspicious.

Several soldiers said that at first there were arguments about how they should behave in the Palestinian houses they occupied. In briefings, soldiers were instructed not to loot or plunder, and some argued that they shouldn’t sleep on the mattresses or make coffee on the stove. Others disagreed:

The way I saw it, I pictured this family returning to their house and seeing it totally wrecked: the windows all broken, the floors torn up and the walls messed up by grenades; and they say: ‘The sons of bitches ate my cornflakes, I can’t believe it.’ No chance. They wouldn’t care if you used their cooking gas, if you used their kitchen. That’s total bullshit in my opinion. I don’t think that type of quandary is complex at all.

Many others began to understand that the ethical dilemmas raised in the briefings were a farce:

We knew that we were entering a house and that we could be good kids, on our best behaviour, but even then a D9 [armoured bulldozer] would show up and flatten the house. We figured out pretty quickly that every house we left, a D9 would show up and raze it. The neighbourhood we were in, what characterised it operationally was that it commanded a view of the entire area of the [Israel-Gaza border fence] and also some of the [Israeli] border towns. In the southern and some of the eastern parts of Juhar ad-Dik, we understood pretty quickly that the houses would not be left standing … At a certain point we understood it was a pattern: you leave a house and the house is gone; after two or three houses you figure out that there’s a pattern. The D9 comes and flattens it.

This is the Dahiya doctrine in action, named after the Beirut neighbourhood which Israel turned into rubble in 2006. According to Gabi Siboni from the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, the IDF needs

to act immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate to the enemy’s actions and the threat it poses. Such a response aims at inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes. The strike must be carried out as quickly as possible, and must prioritise damaging assets over seeking out each and every launcher.

According to the 2009 Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, the essence of the doctrine was ‘widespread destruction as a means of deterrence’. Soldiers talk of the ‘day after’ effect:

Part of the [military] engineering rationale, of what’s called ‘the day after’ – I don’t know if that’s the term that’s published – is that when we blow up and flatten the area, we can in effect sterilise it. Throughout the period of combat, one keeps in mind that there is this thing called ‘the day after’, which is: the day we leave [the Gaza Strip], the more [areas] left wide open and as ‘clean’ as possible the better. One decides on a certain line – during the days after Operation Cast Lead it was 300 metres from the fence – and this area is levelled, flattened. Doesn’t matter if there are groves there, doesn’t matter if there are houses, doesn’t matter if there is a gas station – it’s all flattened because we are at war, so we are allowed to. You can justify anything you do during wartime … Everything suddenly sounds reasonable even though it isn’t really reasonable. We had a few D9s in our battalion and I can attest that the D9s alone destroyed hundreds of structures. It was in the debriefing. There were a few more structures that we blew up in the end. Obviously there were all kinds of other things, but the D9 was the main tool, it doesn’t stop working. Anything that looks suspicious, whether it’s just in order to clear a path, whether it’s some other thing, it takes it down. That’s the mission.

Another soldier describes the last hour before a ceasefire:

There was a humanitarian ceasefire that went into effect at 6 a.m. I remember they told us at 5.15: ‘Look, we’re going to put on a show.’ It was amazing, the air force’s precision. The first shell struck at exactly quarter past five and the last one struck at 5.59 and 59 seconds. It was crazy. Fire, non-stop shelling of [a] neighbourhood [east of Beit Hanoun] … Non-stop. Just non-stop. The entire Beit Hanoun compound in ruins.

Q: When you saw this neighbourhood on your way out, what did you see?

A: When we left it was still intact. We were sent out of Beit Hanoun ahead of the ceasefire, ahead of the air force strikes.

Q: And when you went back in [after the air strikes], what did you see of that neighbourhood?

A: Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nothing. Like the opening scene in The Pianist. There’s that famous photo that they always show on trips to Poland that shows Warsaw before the war and Warsaw after the Second World War. The photo shows the heart of Warsaw and it’s this classy European city, and then they show it at the end of the war. They show the exact same neighbourhood, only it has just one house left standing, and the rest is just ruins. That’s what it looked like.

The U.S. Encouragement of Fanatic Islamism in the Arab World

GARY LEUPP

A beautiful essay posted on Medium.com, entitled “A Marine in Syria: Silhouettes of Beauty and Coexistence before the Devastation” by Brad Hoff, draws our attention to what for the warmongers in Washington is a highly inconvenient truth: the secular dictatorships in the Middle East the U.S. has sought to destroy since 9/11 (including most recently that of Libya) have been far more tolerant towards religious and cultural diversity than the regimes that have replaced them.

In particular, the much-vilified Baath Party, which governed Iraq during the Saddam years and continues to govern Syria, was and is based upon the principle of secularism (non-religious, relatively religiously tolerant) rule.

Hoff, who “served” (as they say) as a Marine in Iraq between 2000 and 2004, first visited Syria in 2004 in order to study Arabic. He describes his surprise at how the experience challenged the “false assumptions” about the Arab world acquired during his “Texas Baptist childhood.” Describing Damascus in 2004 under Bashar Assad’s Baathist rule he writes:

“What I actually encountered were mostly unveiled women wearing European fashions and sporting bright makeup — many of them wearing blue jeans and tight fitting clothes that would be commonplace in American shopping malls on a summer day. I saw groups of teenage boys and girls mingling in trendy cafes late into the night, displaying expensive cell phones. There were plenty of mosques, but almost every neighborhood had a large church or two with crosses figured prominently in the Damascus skyline. As I walked near the walled “old city” section, I was surprised to find entire streets lined with large stone and marble churches. At night, all of the crosses atop these churches were lit up — outlined with blue fluorescent lighting, visible for miles; and in some parts of the Damascus skyline these blue crosses even outnumbered the green-lit minarets of mosques.

“Just as unexpected as the presence of prominent brightly lit churches, were the number of restaurant bars and alcohol kiosks clustered around the many city squares. One could get two varieties of Syrian-made beer, or a few international selections like Heineken or Amstel, with relative ease. The older central neighborhoods, as well as the more upscale modern suburbs had a common theme: endless numbers of restaurants filled with carefree Syrians, partying late into the night with poker cards, boisterous discussion, alcohol, hookah smoke, and elaborate oriental pastries and desserts. I got to know local Syrians while frequenting random restaurants during my first few weeks in Damascus. I came into contact with people representative of Syria’s ethnically and religiously diverse urban centers: Christians, Sunni Muslims, Alawites, Druze, Kurds, Armenians, Palestinians, and even a few self-declared Arab atheists. The characterization of Syrian city life that increasingly came to my mind during my first, and many subsequent visits and extended stays, was of Syria a consciously secular society when compared to other countries in the region.”

Much of this description might have applied to Baghdad as well, before the ruinous U.S. invasion of 2003 based on lies and the subsequent occupation. The latter forcibly disbanded the Baath Party of Iraq. It destroyed the regime that had appointed a Christian (Tariq Aziz) as Foreign Minister and Deputy Vice President; refurbished the Baghdad synagogue; authorized liquor shops and bars; endorsed female education through the graduate level; supported the Iraq National Symphony Orchestra and promoted rock ‘n roll radio stations. During the years of Baath rule in Iraq (1963-2003) mixed marriages between Shiite Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Christians and others became common; mixed neighborhoods were the norm; and the regime’s often brutal repressive actions were largely directed towards activists opposed to secularism and favoring some form of Islamic rule.

Nowadays of course, anyone paying attention knows that the worst sort of Shiite fanatics control one part of Iraq, ethnically cleansing neighborhoods, driving out Christians and intellectuals, imposing a dress code, shutting down liquor and video stores, discouraging women from attending college. Meanwhile the worst sort of Sunni fanatics control Anbar province and adjoining areas to the north, beheading and crucifying, enslaving and forcing conversions.

Is it not apparent what even many anti-Baathists are now saying matter-of-factly: Things were better under Saddam Hussein?

There is no doubt that the Shiite majority population under the old regime were oppressed in many ways. The Baathists sometimes banned the Shiites’ traditional annual Karbala pilgrimage march, thinking it might produce violent demonstrations against the regime. Saddam was (perhaps) responsible for the murder of Ayatollah Mohammed Mohammed Sadden al-Sadr, revered father of the currently powerful Muqtada al-Sadr, in 1999. (But for what it’s worth, Saddam condemned the murder and vowed to hunt down the perpetrators, while calling for Sunni-Shiite unity).

In the wake of the U.S. destruction of the Baath Party, the secular Iraqi national army, and the modern state itself, self-defined representatives of the Shiite majority assumed power with U.S. support while a broad section of the Sunni Arab minority (Kurdish Sunnis being a separate matter) found themselves suddenly unemployed, without income, denied any significant role in the new order. The Sunnis had held a privileged position in Iraqi society since the early 1920s when British colonialists had decided to impose a Sunni king (of the Saudi Hashemite line) on the arbitrary chunk of real estate they’d carved out of the defeated Ottoman Empire that they decided to call Iraq. (Meanwhile the French created Syria, for a time privileging the Alawite minority in their colony, which helps to explain the power structure in that country today.)

To get a sense of the brutality of the British conquest of Iraq, achieved through the suppression of the Iraqi Revolt (or Great Iraqi Revolution) of 1920, it is enough to note that between 6,000 and 10,000 Iraqis were killed and the British seriously considered using mustard gas to suppress resistance. Winston Churchill positively advocated it at the time.

From 1921 to 1958, the British-installed monarchy of foreign origin beholden to Anglo-American imperialism ruled over Iraq, meeting with consistent opposition from the Shiites and Kurds who represent well over 60% of the population. In 1958 a group of nationalist military officers led by Abd al-Karim Qasim seized power. Qasim’s regime angered Washington and London by withdrawing from the Baghdad Pact (an anti-communist military alliance of the U.K., Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Pakistan supported by the U.S.); embracing Egypt’s pan-Arabist president Nasser; establishing cordial ties with the USSR; legalizing the Communist Party of Iraq (which became the largest communist party in the Middle East) and demanding a 55% share in the profits of the Anglo-American owned Iraq Petroleum Company.

In 1959, the U.S. sought to engineer Qasim’s downfall, employing among others the young Saddam Hussein (then 22), who following a failed CIA-backed plot to assassinate Qasim fled to Cairo. There he remained in touch with his CIA patrons until the successful Baathist coup in 1963. Thereafter Saddam was in charge of the roundup and execution of Iraqi communists, gradually inching his way towards the presidency of the country in 1979.

The U.S. supported the Baathist Party at that time, as the only viable alternative to the Communists or the Islamists. Yes, it maintained the friendly relationship with the Soviet Union, and yes, it emphatically opposed the Israeli settler-state. But the relationship with the Baathists was useful to Washington—no more so than when, following the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, Iraq invaded its neighbor in an effort to produce the regime change that the U.S. so deeply craved. Who having seen them can forget those photos of Donald Rumsfeld in Baghdad in 1983, smiling and shaking hands with Saddam as they discussed U.S. military aid including the provision of chemical weapons?

The U.S. had, at the behest of Israel, placed Iraq on its black list of “terror-sponsoring nations” but the Reagan administration removed it in 1982 to allow for greater trade and military support. When Israel bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, the U.S. uncharacteristically joined the entire UN in condemning the aggression.

Of course, meanwhile, even as it allied itself with the Iraqi Baathists against the Shiite Islamists of Iran, the U.S. nurtured its closest Arab ties with Saudi Arabia, homeland of Sunni Islamism. If by “Islamism” we mean political Islam fired by an insistence on applying Sharia law, Saudi Arabia is of course the most striking example. While fearing the rise of Islamism elsewhere (for reasons which are now quite apparent to many people) Washington wedded itself to the Saudi regime.

This is an absolute monarchy dedicated to a Salafi version of Islam that makes no pretensions to any kind of democratic aspirations. There is no freedom of speech, press, assembly, conscience. The Shiite minority (maybe 20%) is grudgingly tolerated as a community of second-class citizens. Religious indoctrination is the crux of education. There are no open Christians in Saudi Arabia and to convert means death. (The many Filipinos and other Christians in the country as temporary workers may worship privately in their homes, but not hold services. Last September police from the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice raided the home of an Indian Christian in Khafji, arresting 38 attending a prayer meeting and confiscating their bibles.)

Saudi women have few rights other than those accorded by thousand-year-old laws; as is well known, they are forbidden to drive or venture out into society without the company of male relatives and most be covered head to toe on such occasions. People convicted of crimes are maimed, stoned to death or beheaded every year. In short, Saudi Arabia is almost everything the U.S. deplores in the Taliban or ISIL.

But the U.S. never undertakes to do what it might surely do at the drop of a hat: issue a devastating condemnation of the country as a human rights disaster far more egregious than anything seen in modern Iraq—or in Syria, which Obama seems determined to wreck just as his predecessor wrecked Baathist Iraq!

The reason for this is simple. Saudi Arabia with 16% of the world’s proved oil resources insures the supply of cheap oil to the west and Japan in return for U.S. military support. (Among the uses of U.S. supplied weaponry: the suppression of the “Arab Spring” demonstrations in Shiite-majority Bahrain against the absolute monarchy in 2013, to insure the Sunni king maintained control over the country that hosts the U.S. Fifth Fleet and the current Saudi attack on neighboring Yemen to crush the Shiite-led challenge to the U.S.-backed pro-Saudi, pro-U.S. dictatorship.)

It pays to spend some time studying the history of these places—something U.S. secretaries of state seem uniquely incapable of doing. (Why bother them with dead facts, after all, while they’re hell-bent on making history themselves?) But if we do make the effort we realize that the Baathist movement (which rose to power in Iraq and Syria and has been a presence in Jordan and Yemen) arose in the 1940s under the leadership of a Sorbonne-educated Syrian Christian named Michel Aflaq, who while deeply respectful of the historical role of Islam in the formation of Arab culture, opposed the union of the mosque and state and promoted religious pluralism. This is what Brad Hoff witnessed in Damascus.

Aflaq partnered with a Syrian Sunni activist, son of a grain merchant, named Salah al-Din al-Bitar, and with Alawi Shiites associated with the philosopher and historian Zaki al-Arsuzi. Their Arab Baath Movement, which became the Arab Baath Party in 1947, was a Pan-Arabist, secular, modernizing movement—the opposite of fundamentalist Islam. Its achievements in Iraq include the fact that before the U.S. invasion Iraq boasted the best national education system in the Arab world, the highest number of PhDs, and the highest rate of female education. But the U.S. has crushed Baathism in Iraq. Now it is aiming at the Syrian variant, and in the process repeating its toxic achievement in Iraq.

That is to say, the U.S. by attacking precisely those secular forces that have most opposed the horrors of religious fanaticism—realizing, as they are best placed to do, its horrific potential—are actually working in tandem with the fanatics to inflict incomprehensible suffering.

What if a series of U.S. administrations (influenced to say the least by Israel and its powerful Lobby) hadn’t come to view Baathism as a greater enemy than Islamic fanaticism? What if the U.S. occupiers of Iraq had allowed the party to compete in elections and represent its traditional constituents? What if, instead of declaring Assad’s regime “illegitimate” (as though Obama can be any judge of such things) Washington had stayed out of the Syrian conflict since 2011 altogether?

“What if” history is a tricky business. We can’t turn back the hand of time and experimentally do things over again. Still, I think it difficult to imagine ISIL in its lightning rise to power over much of the Middle East, frying people alive in cages, crucifying, beheading, burying alive and enslaving, hacking to bits 3000-year-old artworks and world heritage monuments, if George W. Bush and his team hadn’t responded to 9/11 with an all-out assault on the most modernizing, secular forces in the Arab world, in alliance with some of the most backward.

If the groups of teenage boys and girls Hoff once saw in Damascus “mingling in trendy cafes late into the night,” wind up crucified, beheaded, buried alive or merely blown to bits—or even just consigned to lives of unparalleled oppression—we should know who to thank. If the ISIL or al-Nusra thugs smash the treasures of the National Museum and Historical Museum in Damascus, or blow up the glorious ruins of Palmyra, we should know where to point the finger. Barbaric though such actions may be, they pale before the horrific crime of the U.S. invasion of this region twelve years ago. It opened Pandora’s Box, which has unleashed nothing but death and evil ever since.

The USA Freedom Act Doesn’t End Bulk Data Collection

Bill Blunden

The business records provision of the Patriot Act, known as Section 215, is scheduled to expire on June 1st. It’s the legal basis for the NSA’s collection of telephone metadata inside American borders. A few days ago the House Judiciary Committee proudly announced that it had approved a bill, (HR 2048/S.1123) the USA Freedom Act of 2015, which alters the provisions of Section 215. The Judiciary Committee claims that their proposed legislation “ends bulk collection.” At best this is a mischaracterization that flagrantly ignores additional surveillance laws.

According to language of the bill the revisions defined by the USA Freedom Act would narrow business record collection by restricting the “selection term” used to request call records to “an individual, account, or personal device.” In other words instead of requesting call record metadata from “everyone in the state of Ohio” government spies would be forced to explicitly limit the terms of their request to something like “John Q. Smith’s cellphone”. Though your author wonders if an Internet backbone router counts as a personal device.

The case for curbing phone record collection is fairly strong. Section 215 of the Patriot Act was ostensibly instituted in an effort to combat terrorism. Yet there’s very little evidence to suggest that vacuuming up telephone meta-data is useful as a way to prevent terrorism. In fact, Ed Snowden states for the record that it has more to do with imposing “social control.”

Hardly a Major Change

Even if phone record collection under Section 215 were to be completely eliminated it wouldn’t spell an end to “bulk collection.” No sir. What you’re witnessing is deft political sleight of hand. Instead lawmakers are probably betting that most people don’t realize that bulk collection would persist under the auspices of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 and Executive Order 12333. This explains why one senior American spy described the USA Freedom Act of 2015 as “hardly major change.”

Let’s take a look at both of these legal mandates. Section 702 covers data that crosses the border. It allows the government to monitor communications (email, text messages, and phone calls) to acquire “foreign intelligence” on a non-citizen without a probable-cause warrant if that non-citizen is “reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.”

Executive Order 12333 is the big kahuna. Naturally it receives the least attention as spy chiefs in Washington quietly signal to lawmakers that they stay the hell away. EO 12333 covers surveillance in other countries, essentially granting free rein to government spies. No one, including American citizens, has any legal protections from EO 12333 outside of U.S. borders.

This underscores the importance of privacy as a basic human right. Consider, for a moment, how American citizens would respond if there was an autonomous foreign power capable of monitoring their every move with abandon?

Ever More Political Theater

Politicians will dither around the edges by tweaking peripheral rules like Section 215 so that they can brag to the public that they took action against mass surveillance. They’ll confidently assure us that minor adjustments are “a step in the right direction” and that more serious reform can be implemented in the future.

Never mind that in the future political representatives will subsequently resist additional measures claiming that they’ve already “been there, done that” with regard to mass surveillance. The promise of substantial reform will go out of fashion as media headlines shift to fresh issues. And in the meantime American spies will simply relocate domestic monitoring programs abroad to sidestep pesky legal constraints.

The unfortunate reality is that lawmakers won’t institute measures that impact the physical infrastructure that constitutes the global panopticon. Because that, dear reader, is what really counts. As long as the raw mechanisms of control remain in place the policy for wielding it can be [secretly] reinterpreted as needed [in classified memos] to accommodate whatever alleged emergencies might arise. Real change will require mass political upheaval that puts government back under popular control and that won’t happen until the voting public arises from its propaganda-fueled slumber.

The Queen Rules

Michael Dickinson

“The definition of relief, if you are Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, is ringing up the Queen and saying, ‘Your Majesty, it is all right, your kingdom is still united’.”

– David Cameron

London.

As Election Day in the United Kingdom fast approaches with party leaders making last-minute promises to attract voters to put them in power, let’s not forget that whichever party wins, the elected Prime Minister must swear alliegance to the one who holds the REAL power in the country – the present monarch, Queen Elizabeth the Second.

The appointment of a Prime Minister is the prerogative of the Sovereign. Once he or she has been appointed, the Court Circular records that “the Prime Minister Kissed Hands on Appointment”. Let’s face it, the ‘ministering’ of British politicians is performed not for the people of the land but for the ruling monarch. HMG stands for Her Majesty’s Government, after all, and HMP means Her Majesty’s Prisons, where you might linger at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.

‘Power’ is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behaviour of others or the course of events”. The Queen has plenty of that. And although she is the only member of the Royal Family who is not allowed to vote, under the historic ‘Royal Prerogative’ she has

* The power to appoint and dismiss the Prime Minister

* The power to appoint and dismiss other ministers.

* The power to summon, prorogue and dissolve Parliament

* The power to declare war and make peace

* The power to command the armed forces of the United Kingdom

* The power to regulate the Civil Service

* The power to ratify treaties

* The power to issue and withdraw passports

* The power to appoint bishops and archbishops of the Church of England

* The power to create peers (both life peers and hereditary peers)

* The power to grant honours

Although she is a constitutional monarch who is supposed to remain politically neutral, both the Queen and the Prince of Wales do exercise their power to veto legislation that is proposed by Parliament. It was recently revealed that in 1999 she vetoed entirely a private member’s Bill, the Military Actions Against Iraq (Parliamentary Approval) Bill, that would have transferred the power to authorise military strikes against Iraq from the monarch to Parliament.

The strikes went ahead anyway, despite the protests of over a million demonstrators in the streets of London, probably approved after mutual agreement between the Queen (Commander in Chief of the Forces), and former Prime Minister Tony Blair at their weekly meetings at the time. Before that war ended, at least 550,000 Iraqis, including 120,000 civilians, died as a result.

The weekly audience given at Buckingham Palace by the Queen to the incumbent Prime Minister, where she has a right to express her views on Government matters, has been a regular event since she came to the throne in 1952. If not available to meet, they speak by phone. All communication between them is strictly confidential. No written record is made. The Royal Family is also exempt from requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

The Queen has held audiences with twelve British Prime Ministers during her reign, beginning with elderly eccentric warmonger Winston Churchill at the age of 25, and latterly with old-Etonian toff David Cameron (a fifth cousin twice removed), at the age of 89.

Relationships have varied, but one or two Prime Ministers have commented on the meetings. Labour leader Jim Callaghan wrote: “Conversation flowed freely and could roam anywhere over a wide range of social as well as political and international topics.”

Conservative leader John Major said: “Nothing is barred. You can be totally indiscreet. If the corgies had been bugged the Russians would have known all our secrets.”

And PM David Cameron apologized profusely to the Queen after he was caught by cameramen with ultra sensitive microphones confiding to Michael Bloomberg, former Mayor of New York, that when he rang the Queen to give her the news that Scotland had voted No to Independence: “She purred down the line.”

Although conversations between Queen and Prime Minister are confidential, you can be sure the topic of money is on her list. It’s an important subject between regents and ministers. In fact King George 11 made Sir Horace Walpole his first ‘prime’ minister as a reward for ‘screening his investments’ from the South Sea Bubble financial crisis which had ruined so many others. He gave Walpole the property of No. 10 Downing Street. Walpole didn’t use the new title, preferring the then customary title of First Lord of the Treasury.

The Queen won’t want to talk about the £13, 000,000 private income she earns from her estates of Balmoral and Sandringham, or the ‘Privy Purse’ (royal nickname for land and property in the Duchy of Lancaster, a huge chunk of land, from which she recieves all net profits and pays no Corporation tax.) That’s her own business.

And her personal investment portfolio, (estimated by royal financial observer, Professor Phillip Hall, at a total net worth of £400 million (only a guess), is protected by the 1976 Companies Act, which specifically excludes the Queen from having to disclose share holdings, as everyone else must.

What she wants to hear about is the ‘Sovereign Grant’ given by the Treasury to the monarch each year, (which has replaced the previous ‘Civil List’ with its yearly fixed £7.9 million handout). Now she is given 15% of profits from the massively profitable Crown Estate, which this year amounted to nearly £38,000,000.

The Crown is the second biggest landowner in Britain: 182,313 acres in England, 85,210 acres in Scotland, with large lucrative swathes of properties in London. Nice work if you can get it. How does she possess and retain such wealth and power? Well, it helps when you are one of those special people chosen by God.

If you examine any British coin you will see the letters ‘DG and FD’ around the inner rim of the ‘head’ side along with the Queen’s name. DG stands for ‘Dei Gratia’ (By the Grace of God), and FD means ‘Fidei defensatrix’ (Defender of the Faith).

‘By the Grace of God’ is historically considered to mean ruling by the ‘divine right of kings’, a doctrine which asserts that a monarch is subject to no earthly authority, deriving the right to rule directly from the will of God.

Basing his theories on his understanding of the Bible, King James 1 wrote that a king “acknowledges himself ordained for his people, having received from the god a burden of government, whereof he must be countable.. The monarch is the absolute master of the lives and possessions of his subjects; his acts are not open to inquiry or dispute, and no misdeeds can ever justify resistance. The state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth; for kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself are called gods”.

“Almighty God, such blasphemies are uttered!” thunders rebel preacher John Ball in Robert Southey’s play ‘Wat Tyler’, addressing the revolting peasants about to storm London in 1381. “Almighty God, such blasphemies believed! Ye are all equal. Nature made ye so. Equality is your birthright!”

According to ‘divine right’, the monarch is not subject to the will of his people, the aristocracy, or any other estate of the realm. Only God can judge an unjust king. Any attempt to depose the king or to restrict his powers runs contrary to the will of God and may constitute a sacreligious act. In fact, it is an officially treasonous act to “compass or imagine” the death of the Queen.

By the way, it was vain King Richard II, (he who triggered the 1381 Peasant’s Revolt by raising the poll tax), who first demanded that people address him as ‘Your Majesty’.   King James I was the one who came up with the idea of calling the islands he ruled ‘Britain’. He believed he was a descendant of an early king called ‘Brute’, whom he called ‘the most noble founder of the Britains’. The English weren’t so keen on the idea, but who can argue with a king?

Brutal suppression has always been the response. After an uprising in York, for example, William the Conqueror sent his army north with orders to kill every man, woman and child living there. Around 150,000 people died, and much of the north of England was depopulated for generations. Queen Elizabeth is the 40^th monarch in succession since the country was invaded and occupied by the brutal Norman ‘William the Bastard’ in 1066.

When German George 1(who spoke no English) came to the throne in 1714 he wasted no time introducing The Riot Act which gave his army the right to shoot-to-kill any group of over twelve people meeting for any purpose the King disagreed with. And the 1848 Treason Felony Act makes it a criminal offence, punishable by life imprisonment, to advocate the abolition of the monarchy in print.

The Queen’s full title is “Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith”.

‘Defender of the Faith’-( DF on your English coin)- reflects the Sovereign’s position as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, which makes her formally superior to the Archbishop of Canterbury. She’s Head of the Church, of the State,of the Army, and of the Police. By law, nobody has the power to arrest the Queen. She can do as she pleases and nobody can stop her.

Only Canada, New Zealand and the UK use the title of ‘Defender of the Faith’ for the Queen. Others have dropped it due to religious diversity. Australia, for example, styles her: “…by the Grace of God, Queen of Australia and Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth”.

On the Queen’s last State visit to Australia a young man was arrested for dropping his trousers and running alongside her motorcade as she was visiting Brisbane, Queensland, with an Australian flag swinging from his butt. 22 year old anti-monarchist Liam Warriner was found guilty of ‘public nuisance’ and fined 750 dollars.

“The Queen does not get cute granny status,” said Liam. “She’s a very powerful woman. The Queen represents where people can be born into importance. I don’t think that any one family should have more importance than any other family on this planet. I do believe in a free and equal society and unfortunately we don’t have that and will never have that while we have this system, while we have this police state, while we have this monarchy. Any elitist, any self-important, self-propagating elitist, I will happily bare my buttocks to and tell them what I think of them,” he said.

During the Queen’s Australian visit, Royalty commentator Barry Everinham asked: “Why the British taxpayer, who is suffering at the moment, has to put up with the indignity of paying people to have nannies and butlers and footmen and God only knows what … what do they do get it for, for God’s sake – for opening fetes and cutting ribbons?”

“I don’t know, it seems to me that it’s certainly time Australia moved on and got rid of all this nonsense, but far be it for me to tell the Brits what to do.”

As Britain gears up for the elections one wonders if the UK could really be described as a democratic country? Democracy, after all, is based on the idea that we are all equal, a system that gives power to the individual and the people as a whole. Monarchy, especially with its secret powers and influences, is the antithesis of democracy. It’s a sham – and it’s time for it to go.

The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that before the Roman conquest, the old Saxon kingdom’s tribes elected their ruler. The crown was bestowed by the people choosing their leader according to his fitness. The historian Hallam wrote: ‘No free people would entrust their safety to blind chance and permit a uniform observance of hereditary succession to prevail against strong public expediency.’

And yet the elected Prime Minister of Great Britain will not officially be recognized as such until he or she has bowed or curtsied in obeisance and “Kissed Hands on Appointment” with the real, unelected, ruler of the country.

Screw the elections! The Queen Rules – OK?

Universities: Incubating Innovation in Africa

Mandla Makhanya

I am reminded of the important contribution of the African civilization through various epochs of human history, something that is not properly exposed in our mainstream literature. When I reflect on that rich heritage and emerging opportunities for an African Renaissance in the 21st century I feel proud to be an African. I am mindful of the fact that some of you may wonder how such optimism come from in the midst of recent tragic incidents on the continent of Africa.

Yes indeed, we have witnessed tragic incidents such as the kidnapping of girls by the Boko Haram in the northern region of Nigeria, we have seen the cold-blooded murder of 148 students at Garrisa University College in Kenya, the xenophobic attacks in South Africa, the civil war in Libya and the Central African Republic, and indeed we continue to receive heart-wrenching stories of African and Middle East refugees fleeing conflict zones and drowning in their hundreds in the Mediterranean Sea.

Indeed, Africa is vast and complex hence it is always unwise to essentialise this great continent whenever something happens in any region. But in the same vain economists, development experts and many investors have noted that Africa, the second largest continent in the world, is rising in the midst of the aforementioned challenges. Some of the important indicators that they highlight include:

1. Africa is, on average, one of the fastest growing regions in economic terms albeit from a low base.

2. Africa boasts demographic dividends that include a relatively young population that is increasingly more educated middle class.

3. Africa today holds the largest reserves of natural resources and arable land than anywhere else in the world.

4. The African continent is increasingly becoming a serious player in the space of innovation in science, engineering and arts.

It is for these reasons that both emerging global markets, especially BRICS countries, and old developed economies have been reaching out to invest in the African continent. Global corporate powerhouses such as Microsoft and Samsung are investing in the African continent on an unprecedented scale.

On the occasion of the adoption of South Africa’s democratic post-apartheid Constitution in 1996, the former President Thabo Mbeki captured the mood and the African moment with a profoundly perceptive depiction of the African continent when he proclaimed the shared suffering, African continent’s triumph over adversity and the spirit of perseverance and determined hope that prevailed against all odds.

Former President Thabo Mbeki said,

“I am an African.
I am born of the peoples of the continent of Africa.
The pain of the violent conflict that the peoples of Liberia, Somalia, the
Sudan, Burundi and Algeria is a pain I also bear.
The dismal shame of poverty, suffering and human degradation of my continent is a blight that we share.

The blight on our happiness that derives from this and from our drift to the periphery of the ordering of human affairs leaves us in a persistent shadow of despair. This is a savage road to which nobody should be condemned.

Whatever the setbacks of the moment, nothing can stop us now! Whatever the difficulties, Africa shall be at peace! However improbable it may sound to the sceptics, Africa will prosper!

Whoever we may be, whatever our immediate interest, however much we carry baggage from our past, however much we have been caught by the fashion of cynicism and loss of faith in the capacity of the people, let us err today and say - nothing can stop us now!”

It is with this consciousness and spirit that the University of South Africa Unisa), our government, all higher education institutions in the country as well as organized business and civil society at large strongly condemned the xenophobic attacks by a few criminal elements in a society that is otherwise generally welcoming of its foreign nationals.

We are of the strong view that South Africa is a nation premised on the practice of Ubuntu/botho and good neighbourliness with one another as citizens, with the whole of Africa as our fellow brothers and sisters and the world at large as members of the same human race.

In our condemnation of acts of violence against fellow Africans I said it behoves on all of us to remember the hospitality and shelter afforded by African countries to South African freedom fighters of yesteryear when we sought refuge in flight from the oppressive regime of the time. We are reminded of the fact that we are beneficiaries of international solidarity in our struggle against apartheid and that will always be the memory of our gratitude etched in our hearts.

It cannot, and it must not be, that when it is our turn to give shelter to our brothers and sisters, we instead worsen their lot with such despicable acts of intolerance, inhumanity and violence. What we are doing as a people is a betrayal of what our founding father, the late President Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, and his generation stood for. Needless to say, our government is hard at work to stamp out these acts of criminality and to assist fellow Africans to restore their lives in the spirit of Ubuntu.

Let me now return to one of the primary reasons why today it feels good to be an African. Africa has become a good news story. Analysts have noted that a new wave of optimism is sweeping across the continent and that this has to do with the continent’s good economic performance. Africa’s growth has accelerated by an average of 5.7% since 2000, making it one of the fastest growing regions in the world, and increasingly an attractive investment destination.

Notable in this context is the significant economic growth and huge international investments in developments in South Africa, Mozambique, Namibia, Botswana, Ghana, Nigeria and Angola in recent years. With the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and China among the biggest investors in Africa.

Although these levels of growth are not uniform across all of Africa’s subregions, “at the current rate domestic gross domestic product (GDP) will reach 2.6 trillion US dollars by 2020” This is set to be underpinned by a youthful population that is rapidly urbanising and increasingly educated according to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute.

It is the “increasingly educated population” that the McKinsey Report refers to that warrants further scrutiny. It is an accepted fact that Africa is endowed with abundant natural resources – from precious metals and minerals to crude oil -- hence the significant international investments that I have referred to earlier. But the bulk of these centres around African economies that are still heavily reliant on exports of primary resources. Furthermore, this abundance of natural resources has not lifted its population out of poverty.

And herein sits one of our biggest challenges. One that we can tackle with a song of innovation in our hearts in our quest to rejuvenate Africa, or a challenge that can leave us with a debilitating sense of paralysis. Fact is that most African countries feature very low on the Human Development Index of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), which measures life expectancy, education and GDP. Of the world’s 43 least-developed countries in terms of education 33 are African.

From all the analyses across the world, particularly in studies on development in Asian countries, it has been conclusively proven that education forms a critical pillar of sustainable human development. Africa is no exception.

Manuel Castells, the world renowned Spanish sociologist, described universities “as the engines of development.” In a lecture on Higher Education in 2009 at the University of the Western Cape he said:

“In the current condition of the global knowledge economy, knowledge production and technological innovation become the most important productive forces. So, without at least some level of national research system, which is comprised of universities, the private sector, public research centers and external funding, no country, even the smallest country, can really participate in the global knowledge economy.”

The University of South Africa, like all universities in Africa, squarely endorses the “engine of development role.” The size and scope of Unisa in the South African higher education landscape and its unique position in terms of open distance learning locates the university in a special position to not only influence the evolution and realization of development in South Africa, but across the entire continent.

Given the fact that the resources of all African states to provide in the growing need for higher education are severely challenged and the corporate sector’s ability to transcend its profit-seeking motives is equally constrained, with few exceptions off course, institutions such as Unisa plays a vital strategic role as catalysts for such development. The key here is being agile and responsive to the needs and requirements of a developing Africa. Moreover, as pointed out by scores of scholars in the past, it requires strategic cross-border and global partnerships for development.

A call for responsive African universities is captured in the following observation by Olukoshi and Zeleza in their book African Universities in the twenty-first century when they say:

In the face of a rapidly globalising and technologically intensive world, traditional disciplinary boundaries are crumbling and new interdisciplinary configurations and research agendas are developing that require new organizational forms of knowledge production, dissemination, and consumption. Similarly, new local-level and transnational alliances in the higher education sector are emerging, designed to take advantage of openings offered by processes of globalization and to force reconstruction of the basic principles that underpin the entire higher education system.

It is in this spirit and conviction that the University of South Africa has purposefully pursued new opportunities for innovation in teaching and learning for human development to give concrete and practical expression to our vision statement of shaping futures in the service of humanity.

One such “opening offered by the processes of globalization” is President Barack Obama’s Young African Leadership Initiative offered via the Regional Leadership Centre Southern Africa (hosted at UNISA) to develop African young leaders in Business and Entrepreneurship Development, Civic Leadership; and Governance and Public Management through a hybrid of innovative and complimentary placements and experiential learning.

Another initiative is the creation of the Pan African Virtual University under the auspices of the African Union Commission to support the realization of Africa’s Agenda 2063. The University of South Africa is a seminal partner in this innovative platform to address the ever increasing need for higher education on the African continent. My university entered into a historic and unprecedented partnership when it signed the Memorandum of Understanding with the African Union Commission on 13 October 2014 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Let me briefly deal with each of them in turn:

The Young African Leadership Initiative

As you probably know, President Obama appointed the University of South Africa to host one of the five Regional Leadership Centres in Africa to drive his Young African Leaders Initiative on the basis of its continental leadership in Open Distance Learning, the state of the art facilities at its business school, as well as its extensive involvement in the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

The Regional Leadership Centre (South Africa) has aligned itself with the core principles of President Obama’s YALI objectives that seek to:

• Invest in the new generation of young African leaders who will shape Africa’s future
• Respond to the strong demand by young African leaders for practical skills that can help them take their work to the next level in the fields of public service and business
• Deepen partnerships and connections between Africa and the United States
• Build a prestigious network of young African leaders who are at the forefront of change and innovation in their respective sectors.

The overarching objective of the Regional Leadership Centre (South Africa) is to provide the platform and tools for empower dynamic young Africans and to awaken their innate leadership potential to the benefit of Africa and its global partners.

In collaboration with the University of Pretoria, the Innovation Hub and private commercial partners the Regional Leadership Centre from its hub at the Unisa Business Leadership School, will develop 21st Century skills that are indispensable for participation and achievement in the global knowledge economy, by developing critical thinking skills, problem-solving abilities, entrepreneurial thinking, communication and multicultural collaboration with a focus on contemporary African issues.

Due to the multi-country nature of the programme, technology will be an integral part of the training and it will also be employed to allow different experts and the youth to collaborate via virtual platforms.

The modules of all the programmes are developed and made available as open educational resources and a Computer Mediated Professional Development approach is utilized as a means of keeping participants and academics engaged during the training in residence and even after the residence period when participants return to their homes across Southern Africa. That this programme was developed and has honoured our founding president and the global icon, Nelson Mandela, is a fitting tribute as he had passion for education and young people. The following statement is reflective of his commitment as he proclaimed that,

“Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mine worker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farm workers can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.” (Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 1995).

The Regional Leadership Centre Southern Africa (hosted at UNISA) will thus develop African young leaders in Business and Entrepreneurship Development, Civic Leadership; and Governance and Public Management through a hybrid of innovative and complimentary placements and experiential learning. I also liken this programme to the Peace Corps that the former president of the USA, John Kennedy, developed in the early 1960s and it spread goodwill across the world utilizing cultural diplomacy of building ties amongst the people of the world.

The Pan-African Virtual University

Over the last few months the University of South Africa and key partners in African higher education have been working purposefully to create the Pan African Virtual University with the mandate of significantly increasing access to quality higher education and training through the innovative use of information communication technologies.

The other key partners are:

• The African Council for Distance Education (ACDE), a continental educational organization comprising African universities and other higher education institutions, that are committed to expanding access to quality education and training through open and distance learning;

• The Association of African Universities (AAU): who represents the voice of higher education in Africa on regional and international bodies and supports networking by universities in teaching, research and information exchange and dissemination.

• The African Academy of Sciences (AAS) who aims to be the engine for driving scientific and technological development in Africa; and

• Open Resources Africa: who plays a leading role in supporting higher education institutions across Africa in the development and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) to enhance teaching and learning.

The Pan-African Virtual University will be a dedicated Pan-African University operating through open distance and e-learning (ODeL) for the benefit of the African continent. It will provide access to a geographically remote and dispersed student population and to those who have been marginalised from Higher Education opportunities.

As such it will use the full spectrum of instruments available to present and deliver course material – including multimedia (audio and visual); ICT (Online and offline eLearning), as well as Blended learning (a combination of print, technology and face to face interaction in the learning situation).

The Pan African Virtual University will naturally focus on high impact programmes to support Agenda 2063 and will deliver and certify full qualifications and Short Courses.

Africa has more than 800 universities and around 1500 institutions of higher learning, with the percentage of private universities sharply increasing in recent years. And with an estimated population of around one billion people, of which the youth constitutes 60% of the unemployed, it is not rocket science to realize that innovative and pioneering partnerships such as the two that I have mentioned, facilitated by technological advances of the digital age are bound to become the bedrock of development in Africa and elsewhere in the world. Open Distance Learning is thus poised to become not only a key driver, but an accelerator of development of the human resource capacity of Africa going forward.

I guess the challenge for all higher education institutions, particularly in Africa, is our agility and ability to “take advantage of openings offered by processes of globalization and to force reconstruction of the basic principles that underpin the entire higher education system.”

At the heart of all this is cracking the paradox that afflicts many universities, that of tenaciously clinging to the conventional ways of doing things or preserving the status quo when they are assumed to be centres of innovation and theatres of experimentation of new solutions.

These habitual tendencies are best apprehended by Samuel Johnson’s simple and yet profound statement “The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.” Until there is a radical rapture of the chains of using the same methods in resolving new problems there will be little prospect for innovative solutions and a new deal for our students.

The challenge of our time is that the world is globalized and more integrated through communication and transport technologies but our efforts for advancement of humanity, of social justice and inclusive development is needed now more than ever before. Open and Distance Learning model present a range of opportunities in this regard and the University of South Africa, working with partner institutions like you, stands ready to deliver on these goals.