Australian government pushing ahead on revoking citizenships

Mike Head

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his supporters have vowed to proceed with unprecedented plans to strip individuals, even if Australian-born, of citizenship purely on the basis of ministerial determination that they are supporting or advocating “terrorist” acts.

This is despite public rifts in his government over the issue, and deep concerns expressed by a range of civil libertarians, Islamic organisations and legal experts about the potential for these powers to be used to revoke the basic right of citizenship on broad political grounds.

Cancelling a person’s citizenship will not only abolish their basic political and social rights, such as to vote, travel and access healthcare and welfare. It will also render them liable to be either deported or detained indefinitely without trial, as is the case already with asylum seekers and other non-citizens who are denied visas.

Abbott last week denied leaked accounts of a cabinet split on revoking the Australian citizenship of people who are born in the country and have no other citizenship. He brushed aside media reports of objections by six senior cabinet members, including Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, Attorney-General George Brandis and Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

Abbott claimed the “overwhelming support” of cabinet and government parliamentarians to examine the proposal, as well as to move quickly to legislate to cancel the citizenship of dual-citizens suspected of “terrorist” activity or sympathies.

The prime minister seized on a letter, reportedly signed by 43 government backbenchers, pressing the government to proceed with its full proposal. Abbott publicly urged them, in writing, to “actively” campaign on the question throughout the “public consultation process” that the government has launched, headed by former Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock, to try to drum up public support for the plan.

The discussion paper issued for this “consultation” insists that citizenship is an “extraordinary privilege,” which can be taken away by government fiat, rather than a fundamental right that goes to the very core of democracy. Abbott’s determination to proceed is another warning of how far the political, security and corporate establishment will go to abrogate legal and democratic rights.

To qualify for citizenship, according the discussion paper, a person must adhere to “core Australian values” and accept wartime military obligations. It proclaims: “All Australians are responsible for respecting and protecting our country” and must be prepared to “defend Australia should the need arise.”

These requirements would effectively prohibit opposition to war and militarism. Even during the two world wars last century, no powers to revoke citizenship were proposed, although socialist and anti-war leaders were certainly framed-up and jailed, and people of German, Italian or Japanese descent were interned without trial.

The government has framed its legislation as being directed against the alleged 100 or so Australians fighting with various Islamist groups in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. These “foreign fighters,” many of them marginalised young people outraged by the predatory and catastrophic US-led military interventions in the Middle East, are only the first targets of the government’s plans. The measures would affect far wider numbers of people.

No details of the government’s legislation have been released, but Immigration Minister Peter Dutton declared last weekend that the powers would apply to citizens within Australia, as well as overseas. He said he was looking closely at laws passed last year in Britain, where it is now possible for a person to be deported by the UK home secretary, with no access to judicial review until after the deportation.

During a media conference, Dutton insisted that his arbitrary powers, as the relevant minister, to revoke citizenships would extend to those “who would seek to counsel” terrorist acts. Interviewed on Network Ten’s Bolt Report, he said the government would strip citizenship from people “if they’re deemed to be a terrorist or acting in support of those terrorists, fundraising, [or doing] acts preparatory to.” As the word “deemed” indicates, citizenship rights would be annulled by decree, without any criminal conviction by a court.

Because of the very broad definitions in the “anti-terrorism” laws adopted since 2002, citizenship could potentially be stripped from anyone, for example, voicing opposition to the escalating US-led wars in the Middle East, or even demonstrating against budget cuts or other austerity measures, if the protest damages property or disrupts infrastructure.

The government claims that citizenship would be revoked only where a person had dual citizenship or “reasonable grounds” to apply for another nationality. This proviso is designed to avoid openly breaching international law, which forbids rendering people stateless. But statelessness would often be the result. There is no guarantee that any other country would accept such a person, leaving them in limbo, probably in immigration detention.

To provide a fig leaf of legality, the government insists that citizenship decisions would be subject to judicial review. But Dutton confirmed last Friday that courts could not review the substance of a ministerial ruling, only whether a legal or procedural error occurred. He bluntly declared: “[T]he government’s not going to have the court second-guessing ministerial decisions.”

The government’s offensive has provoked widespread concern. Silma Ihram, of the Australian Muslim Women’s Association, warned that some Muslim Australians could end up like the Rohingya people of Burma, left stateless or “shipped off to Cambodia.” She also pointed to the wider political impact of the plan. “Everyone is going to lose so many freedoms under these laws,” she told the Guardian .

Speaking to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, prominent Melbourne barrister Julian Burnside warned: “To leave it in the hands of a minister of the Crown is effectively making a person an exile from their own country without any sort of hearing at all. And that’s the most fundamental breach of the rule of law.”

On the Conversation web site, University of Sydney law lecturer Rayner Thwaites pointed out that the government’s “discussion paper” on citizenship repudiated the very notion of citizenship as a right. He also noted that it was far from clear, as a matter of constitutional law, if a government could remove or suspend a citizen’s right to enter or remain in Australia.

None of the six dissenting government ministers have publicly explained their reservations. Comments by other government members or supporters indicate nervousness about the public response, and concern about the far-reaching implications of the legislation. Handing the power to governments to cancel the fundamental right of citizenship by administrative directives, effectively without any judicial process, is an attack on the foundations of the legal system.

Cory Bernardi, a right-wing government backbencher, said it would be a “power creep” to permit citizenship to be revoked by a minister, without a court ruling. Amanda Vanstone, an immigration minister in the former Howard Liberal government, wrote column in the Age, expressing “profound disappointment” that no proper cabinet protocol was followed before rushing to “take away citizenship” with “no appeal, no judicial process, just a ministerial decision.”

Vanstone also cautioned that “excluding the courts” could backfire politically by allowing “radical Islamists” to “make a mockery” of Australia’s claims to democracy.

While expressing qualms about leaving people with single Australian citizenship stateless, opposition leader Bill Shorten last week pledged “in principle” support for the planned bill to revoke the rights of dual citizens. Adopting the same language as the government, he supported the denial of “the marvellous gift of Australian citizenship” to people “prepared to be part of terrorist organisations.”

With Labor’s agreement, the government is also pushing ahead with a lesser-known bill, introduced into parliament last year, which would allow the immigration minister to revoke citizenship from non-native born people on sweeping political grounds. These would include where the minister was “satisfied” that a person was “not of good character,” or was “directly or indirectly a risk to security”—all without trial or conviction.

People could lose all their citizenship rights via “adverse security assessments” by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). They would find themselves, like scores of refugees, detained indefinitely and denied the right to even know why they have been branded security risks.

By pushing ahead with powers to annul citizenships rights, the political establishment is adding a further major plank to the scaffolding of a police state, under conditions where an escalating drive to war and deepening austerity will provoke opposition and resistance from the working class.

Erdogan’s AKP loses parliamentary majority in Turkey

Halil Celik & Jean Shaoul

The conservative Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) led by President Recep Tayyep Erdoğan won the largest share of the votes in Sunday’s general election, but lost its absolute majority in the Turkish parliament.

Erdoğan must now call on the parliamentary leader of the AKP, outgoing Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu or some other AKP legislator, to try to put together a coalition government.

Clearly stunned by the result and anxious to avoid another election in the near future, the president adopted a conciliatory tone and urged all the political parties to work together to preserve stability. Davutoğlu, while promising to maintain Turkey’s political stability, said of his opponents, “No one should try to build a victory from an election they lost.”

The election marks an end to the 13 years of single-party rule and a defeat for Erdoğan and the AKP, which it largely fought on the issue of amending the constitution in favour of an executive presidency that would be even more authoritarian and with a reduced role for parliament.

While the electorate has decisively rejected that proposal, the results, far from resolving Turkey’s deep-seated social and political problems, will only intensify the crisis of rule in the country.

More than 86 percent of the registered electorate turned out to vote. According to official figures after 99 percent of votes had been counted, the AKP won 41 percent, the main opposition Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP) 25 percent, the ultra-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) 16.5 percent, and the predominantly Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) 13 percent. This translates into 258 seats for the AKP in the 550-seat parliament, 132 for the CHP, 81 for the MHP and 79 for the HDP.

The AKP led in most provinces and cities, including Istanbul, the largest city, and Ankara, the capital, with its highest percentage of the vote in central Anatolia. The CHP’s strongholds are in Thrace, parts of Istanbul and the coastal cities along the edge of western Anatolia, including Izmir, while the MHP ran most strongly in Adana and Osmaniye. The HDP’s vote came almost entirely from the impoverished southeastern and predominantly agricultural and Kurdish region that has derived little benefit from Turkey’s recent economic growth.

This was the first time that the AKP’s total vote has fallen since 2002 when it first came to power. Its votes were nearly 10 percentage points below that of the last general election in 2011, when it received 50 percent of the vote and 327 seats, although more than the votes it won in 2002. While it maintained its support in the capital Ankara, it lost votes in the two other biggest cities, Istanbul and İzmir.

This reflects growing discontent over increasing poverty, unemployment, social inequality, rampant corruption that pervades Turkey’s corporate and political elite, opposition to the AKP’s backing for right-wing Islamist forces against the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad, as well as the crackdown on all forms of dissent.

The CHP is so discredited that, despite opposing Erdoğan and the AKP’s authoritarianism, promising an increase in the minimum wage, reducing the price of fuel and doubling the aid to poor families, it actually lost votes.

In contrast, the nationalist MHP increased its vote by 3 percentage points compared to 2011. It made similar promises to increase the minimum wage, get rid of taxes on fuel and fertilizers, fight corruption and grant job security to public sector workers, but largely focused on nationalist appeals, whipping up anti-Kurdish sentiment.

The main winner was the predominantly Kurdish HDP, which sought to reposition itself as a “left” party along the lines of Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. Following the largely middle-class protests that started in Gezi Park in June 2013, it has secured the backing of most of the petty-bourgeois liberal left that previously supported the AKP government either openly or through the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), the HDP’s predecessor, under the mantra of “peace and democracy.” The HDP has consciously orientated towards these layers, campaigning on women’s and gay rights and opening up 50 percent of the party list to women.

The HDP won a significant vote in the southeast and also picked up some votes from former CHP voters in Istanbul, İzmir and Ankara. It also won a measure of support from Turkey’s US and European allies, among whom Erdoğan’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has engendered considerable distrust.

It was the first time the HDP fielded a national list, rather than independent candidates from the Kurdish region where the party is strongest, although it is by no means the only party to which the Kurds give their allegiance. It was a gamble that meant the party had to win at least 10 percent of the nationwide vote to beat Turkey’s prohibitively high election threshold to win representation in parliament.

This measure as set out in the 1980 military-authored constitution was aimed at least in part at reducing Kurdish representation in the parliament. Its practical effect since 2002 was to give the leading party a disproportionate share of the seats relative to the popular vote. In the event, the HDP did better than the polls had predicted. A factor involved is that some CHP voters cast their votes for the HDP to enable it to pass the threshold and scupper Erdoğan’s ambitions for an executive presidency.

Though as president he is supposed to be above party politics, Erdoğan focused his attacks on the HDP, accusing party members of being terrorists and anti-Muslim infidels. In the last two months, there have been nearly 60 reported attacks on HDP offices and election stands, including the bombings of the party’s local headquarters in both Mersin and Adana on May 18. While there is no evidence of AKP involvement, many believe the attacks were the result of Erdoğan’s interventions.

During the election campaign, the CHP and HDP ruled out any possibility of forming a coalition with the AKP, at least as long as Erdoğan plays a leading role in his position as president. The MHP did not categorically rule out joining an AKP-led government, but its support for an anti-corruption campaign against the AKP leadership and Erdoğan make it difficult. At the very least, it would further imperil the much-stalled “peace process” with the Kurds.

It would also be technically possible for the CHP and MHP to form a minority government with HDP support, as touted by the liberal bourgeois media, something the HDP and CHP have not yet ruled out. A government dependent on the support of both the Kurdish HDP and the Turkish-chauvinist and anti-Kurdish MHP would be inherently unstable.

But with no party keen on holding an early election, which, according to the constitution must be held within 45 days if parliament fails to approve a government, all called for “responsibility” and the need for stability—indicating that at least some of the opposition parties will go back on their pledges not to participate in particular coalitions.

The political uncertainty sent the lira to a record low against the dollar in after-hours trading, while the stock exchange tumbled.

In a statement on Monday, Turkey’s leading business organization, the Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen’s Association (TÜSİAD) that has been a target of the AKP government for its alleged alliance with “foreign powers” to topple the government, stressed the importance of a robust coalition government and respect for the voters’ preferences.

Turkey’s allies are very concerned about the looming instability of a major regional power and a key NATO ally in the Black Sea as Washington and Berlin ratchet up the pressure on Russia, adding to the explosive situation in the Middle East.

Regardless of the ultimate composition of any coalition, it will be unstable and short-lived. Any coalition would seek to push through measures demanded by big business and rebuild relations with its Western allies, all of which will necessarily bring it into conflict with an increasingly restive working class.

Protests mount against US-backed regime in Ukraine

Thomas Gaist

In the latest eruption of mass protests against the US puppet government of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, thousands of demonstrators swept through the streets of Kiev this weekend. Marchers demanded cancellation of martial law decrees, the repeal of subsidy cuts that have driven up the price of energy and foodstuffs, and the reversal of cuts to wages and pensions imposed by the government.

Demonstrators held placards demanding an end to cuts in pensions and denouncing the spiking prices of basic commodities. Slogans included “Raise pensions,” “We are hungry,” “Out with Yatsenyuk and his reforms,” and “Impeach Poroshenko!”

The demonstrations over the weekend come on the heels of so-called “Financial Maidan” protests at the end of May, which saw thousands protest in Kiev against catastrophic economic conditions produced by the government’s austerity policies.

An LGBT pride parade was assaulted by members of Right Sector and other far-right groups on Friday. The parade was quickly dispersed by attackers who reportedly threw rocks and tear gas capsules at the demonstrators.

In addition to the protest marches, Occupy-style tent camps, referred to in media reports as “Maidan 3.0,” sprung up in the center of the city over the weekend. After refusing orders from police to take down the encampment, the campers were assaulted on Sunday by dozens of masked men brandishing black and red fascist flags. The attackers spoke with nearby police units before launching their attack, according to reports. Sputnik News, a Russian state media web site, charged US operatives with intervening inside the Occupy-style protest encampments. It alleged that the protest camps were organized by Rustam Tashbaev of the Stratagem Center for Political Analysis, a US think tank. Sputnik’s report featured an alleged photo of Tashbaev, a US citizen, posing for a portrait with US Senator John McCain.

Ukraine has undoubtedly become a hotbed of US intrigue, since a NATO-backed coup led by the fascist Right Sector militia toppled the country’s pro-Russian government, and US operatives may well be intervening in the protests. However, what is driving the protests is rising opposition in the Ukrainian population to the Kiev regime’s moves to transform Ukraine into a cheap labor platform and garrison state on behalf of the US-NATO war drive against Russia.

Since the February 2014 coup, the population has faced harsh cuts to pensions and social benefits, mass layoffs, sub-subsistence level wages, and skyrocketing prices of basic necessities. Thousands of Ukrainians have been killed and at least 1.5 million displaced, and production has virtually collapsed in the country’s main industrial centers in Luhansk and Donetsk.

Ukraine’s economy will likely contract by at least 9 percent in 2015, according to estimates by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). The value of the Ukrainian currency will likely fall by nearly 50 percent in 2015 alone, according to the EBRD.

Last month, the price of water surged by more than 70 percent. Previous months saw increases in natural gas prices of nearly 300 percent. Food, medicine and transportation prices all rose dramatically in the year following the 2014 coup, with some basic items rising by more than 200 percent.

“We are about to see huge energy price increases. This will affect not just the poor but the middle class as well,” Volodymyr Ischenko said in comments to the Center for Social and Labor Research this week.

Already in January, months before the latest price hikes, some 30 percent of the population was unable to pay for utilities.

The rising prices are the result of cuts to subsidies for basic goods, dictated to Kiev by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The subsidy cuts free up government funds, which used to be earmarked for keeping energy and basic commodities relatively affordable for working people, to be shoveled into the pockets of Ukraine’s creditors in the US and European banks.

There is escalating popular anger against the Kiev regime. Nearly 60 percent of the population is strongly dissatisfied with Poroshenko, with less than 25 percent expressing confidence in Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, according to polls released in March.

The war mounted by the pro-NATO regime against separatist forces in the East has met with large-scale draft dodging by the population in western Ukraine. At least 13,000 soldiers have gone AWOL from Ukrainian government forces since the beginning of the civil war.

More than 80 percent of draftees have failed to respond to musters from the government, and Ukrainian officers now assume that only some 15 percent of soldiers sent on leave will return to their units, according to statistics published by the Washington Post in April.

Even as the economy plummets and popular opposition to the government grows, the re-eruption of military conflict between Kiev regime forces and pro-Russian separatists is plunging the country back toward the conditions of brutal civil war that developed in the aftermath of last year’s coup.

According to Foreign Policy, the outbreak of fighting last week has “shattered” the Minsk cease-fire agreement reached this February. The always unstable pause in the fighting, which was largely forced upon the Kiev regime by the deepening economic crisis, has likely been “permanently destroyed” by the renewed clashes, Foreign Policy wrote.

Fearful that its Ukrainian puppet regime could suffer a new defeat or implode politically due to popular opposition, Washington is mobilizing paramilitary forces to prop up the Kiev regime. “They’ve allowed the Right Sector to integrate with Ukraine’s national army. You have US army officers training units with members of Right Sector in them,” political analyst Aleksandar Pavic noted in comments to RT Tuesday.

A new generation of Ukrainian fascists are receiving training and advanced military hardware, including night-vision and communications technology, supplied directly by the US Defense Department.

In April, the Pentagon dispatched some 300 US soldiers to conduct training exercises with Ukrainian militants, including known members of the Azov Battalion and other forces affiliated with Ukraine’s neo-Nazi milieu, as part of “Operation Fearless Guardian.” Comments from Ukrainian anti-terror chief Andriy Lysenko made clear that the training would focus on counter-insurgency tactics designed to control enemy populations, along the lines of those used by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The death of Kalief Browder

Andre Damon

The suicide of Kalief Browder, who at 16 was accused of stealing a backpack and thrown into New York’s Rikers Island prison, where he was tortured and starved in solitary confinement without ever having been convicted of a crime, has exposed before the world the barbarity of America’s “justice” system.

Kalief’s three-year imprisonment was documented last year in a Pulitzer Prize-nominated exposé in the New Yorker magazine, which chronicled his struggle to adjust to life outside of prison after having been psychologically shattered by three years of incarceration at Rikers Island.

Kalief’s attorney and friend, Paul V. Prestia, spoke movingly about the young man’s death in a Los Angeles Times interview. “I think what caused the suicide was his incarceration and those hundreds and hundreds of nights in solitary confinement, where there were mice crawling up his sheets in that little cell… Being starved… That was the pain and sadness that he had to deal with every day, and I think it was too much for him.”

The treatment of Kalief is not an aberration at the infamous Rikers facility. The New York Times reported that over 11 months in 2013, 129 inmates sustained “serious injuries” in altercations with prison guards. According to an internal report obtained by the Associated Press in March 2014, nearly one-third of Rikers inmates had suffered a blow to the head by guards.

Kalief’s case is only the latest in an endless series of atrocities and human rights violations committed in the vast US prison system, the biggest and most densely populated in the world. On Friday, the state of Texas executed Lester Bower, 67, who became the oldest person to be executed in the US since the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976. Bower had spent more than three decades on death row, including more than 14 years in solitary confinement.

Bower’s conviction was based entirely on circumstantial evidence, and when new exculpatory evidence emerged, a judge denied a retrial on the absurd grounds that while the evidence “could conceivably have produced a different result at trial, it does not prove by clear and convincing evidence that [Bower] is actually innocent.”

On Tuesday, a federal appeals court once again blocked the release of Albert Woodfox, a prisoner at Angola Prison in Louisiana, despite the fact that a federal court overturned his conviction last year. Woodfox has served over four decades in solitary confinement, more than anyone else in the United States.

In the Kalief Browder case, defense attorney Prestia sued New York, accusing the prosecution of “seeking long, undue adjournments of these cases to procure a guilty plea from plaintiff.” Realizing that they had no case against him, prosecutors sought to use imprisonment to force Kalief to plead guilty.

The teenager was subjected to three years of torture to extract a confession, demonstrating that the medieval practices banned by the US Constitution and international law are alive and well not only in America’s foreign gulags and CIA black sites, but also at home. They are routinely used against workers and young people swept up by the sadistic machinery of what is called the US justice system. As Prestia declared, “He didn’t get tortured in some prison camp in another country. It was right here!”

Kalief refused to confess to a crime he did not commit. When a judge offered to release him immediately in exchange for a guilty plea, he declared, “I did not do it... I want to go to trial.”

The New Yorker piece noted that in the Bronx in 2011 there were only 165 felony cases that went to trial, while in 3,991 cases defendants pleaded guilty. Similar figures are to be found in working class cities and neighborhoods throughout the country, where the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a speedy and public trial is virtually a dead letter.

So is the rest of the Bill of Rights. Police routinely beat and arrest people for insufficiently deferential speech (in violation of the First Amendment), search people without cause (in violation of the Fourth Amendment), torture suspects into confessing to crimes (in violation of the Fifth Amendment), deny the right to a speedy trial (in violation of the Sixth Amendment), and subject detainees to excessive bail and “cruel and unusual punishment” (in violation of the Eighth Amendment).

Across the Harlem River from the Bronx, Kalief’s native borough, where half of all children live in households where there is not enough to eat, multi-millionaire and billionaire Wall Street speculators live in a different world. They are allowed to commit any crime, from fraud to insider trading to money laundering, with impunity.

Browder’s death has been met with crocodile tears from the political establishment. New York’s Democratic mayor, Bill De Blasio, called it an “eye-opener,” declaring that, “a lot of the changes we’re making at Rikers Island right now are the result of the example of Kalief Browder.”

Those changes barely merit the term “token.” Solitary confinement is to be banned only for inmates 21 years old and younger. Even this is not scheduled to take place until January 2016, and is contingent on funding.

At every turn, de Blasio has sought to defend prison guards and officials implicated in torture and violence. Despite the firing of guards and the resignations of three top officials, only one person, a guard, has been criminally charged for the reign of terror that has left several inmates dead, hundreds injured and untold thousands scarred for life.

On Tuesday, the New York Times published an editorial which, feigning sympathy for Kalief Browder, sought to present the Obama Justice Department as a force for reform of the prison system. There was not even a hint from the editors of the Times that anyone should be held accountable for Kalief’s tragic end.

In fact, all of the numerous settlements between the Justice Department and cities throughout the country over a “pattern and practice” of civil rights abuses have been toothless whitewashes, holding no one to account for the crimes revealed in the official investigations.

What the Times and the entire political establishment assiduously evade is the inseparable connection between the endemic brutality in America’s prisons, the functioning of militarized police as virtual occupation armies in working class neighborhoods, and the massive growth of social inequality.

Justice in America is class justice, enforced by a state apparatus serving the interests of a ruling elite that presides over a bankrupt socio-economic system. Capitalism, which has no solution to mounting poverty, unemployment and working class anger, relies increasingly on brute force to protect the interests of the financial oligarchy.

The 1915−1916 Armenian Genocide: An Ideology, Course And Consequences

Vladislav B. Sotirovic

A picture released by the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute dated 1915 shows soldiers standing over skulls of victims from the Armenian village of Sheyxalan in the Mush valley, on the Caucasus front during the First World War. Photo: STR/AFP/Getty Images

A massive destruction of the Ottoman (Orthodox Christian) Armenian population in 1915−1916 isprobably the greatest atrocity committed during the WWI and for sure a first 20th century case of the genocide as up to 1.500.000 ethnic Armenians were executed by the Ottoman authorities and their collaborators (the Kurds). As a consequence, the survivors are scattered across the globe. Today it is already a century old event, but the issue of the 1915−1916 Armenian Genocide is undoubtedly still alive and divisive political issue firstly between the Armenians and the Turks but also and among the western “liberal democracies” on the question of their responsibility in the genocide similarly to the question of the western indirect participation in the WWII Jewish holocaust.

Introduction

The Ottoman Empire, as all other empires in the world history, was multiethnic, multiconfessional, multilingual and multicultural state. At the eve of the WWI it was being located at three continents (Asia, Africa and Europe) with approximately two million Christian Armenians who have been living in historical-ethnogeographic Armenia, Istanbul and other towns within the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman (Turkish-Kurdish) committed genocide on the ethnic Christian Armenians, organized and realized a century ago, was one of the most comprehensive examples of ethnic cleansing ever happened and recorded. It started on April 24th, 1915 in the Ottoman capital Istanbul (a Greek Constantinople) and soon was spread over the whole empire when thousands of well-known and well-to-do Armenians were firstly arrested and detained and later tortured and murdered. The organized genocide was over in August 1916 when its second phase happened (March−August 1916) with a massive killings of the Armenians who were at that time deportees in the Syrian Desert, in or around Del el-Zor. It is today estimated that the genocide cost up to 1.500.000 Armenian lives what practically means that after the WWI left only a minority of the pre-war Armenian population (one quarter). In our days, as a direct consequence of the genocide from 1915−1916, for instance, it is very hard to find the Armenians living in the interior of Asia Minor (Anatolia, a word of the Greek origin that means the East).

Ideological background of the Armenian genocide

As all genocides, the 1915−1916 Arminian Genocide had its own ideological background. In principle, if the mass killing is not based on certain ideology it is considered to be “just” the mass killing but not either the ethnic cleansing or the genocide. Of course, every genocide ideology has its own historical background.

The rapid process of declination of the Ottoman Empire (Sultanate) started with the Serb (1804−1815) national revolution and the Greek War of Independence (1821−1829) against the Ottoman yoke. Prior to the WWI the Ottoman authorities lost almost all their European possessions followed by the establishing of the French, British and Italian protectorates (colonies) in the Ottoman North Africa from 1830 to 1912. What concerns the Armenians within the Ottoman Empire; they had very important economic and financial influence before 1915. The Ottoman government throughout the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century was allowing to the Armenian financial and industrial elite to develop their businesses. The Armenians became even responsible for the Ottoman state’s mint, having in their hands cannon and shipbuilding industries and above all the Ottoman Armenians dominated trade in the country. Especially the Armenian businesses located in Istanbul were well known in Europe. Such economic prosperity of the Ottoman Armenian higher social strata gave a foundation for the Armenian national-cultural revival in the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century. The Armenian economic superiority can be seen the best perhaps from the very fact that there were 32 Armenian bankers out of total 37 throughout the Ottoman Empire. However, the Armenian elite did not possess any political power in the Ottoman Empire for the very common reason and rules as this area of activity was reserved exclusively for the Muslim believers regardless on their ethnolinguistic origin.

Nevertheless, a year of 1889 is one of the most important turning points in the history of the Late Ottoman Empire as it was established illegal the Committee of Union and Progress (the CUP) by a group of well-educated civil servants and military cadets with the ultimate political-national goal to stop further declination of the state which could bring the Ottoman Empire to the end of its existence. More immediate goal was to restore the 1878 Constitution which was proclaimed as a consequence of the 1877−1878 Russo-Ottoman War and the 1878 Berlin Congress. The establishers of the CUP were the Young Turks, the Turkish intellectuals imbued by the West European nationalistic theories, of whom majority have been living in Paris where they were spreading propaganda against the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II (1876−1909). The CUP party’s leaders were Mehmed Talaat, Major Ismail Enver Pasha and Dr Bahaeddin Shakir – all three of them later became mostly responsible for the Armenian genocide in 1915−1916.

When the Young Turks took power in Istanbul in 1908 by the revolution their party’s ideology became more crystallized and threefold divided into the Ottomanism, Islamism and Turkism. The main ideological point developed by the CUP was that all Ottoman citizens have to accept the Turkish nationalism as the crucial ideological principle of the Ottoman state and society. Therefore, the policy of Turkification of the whole Ottoman Empire was unavoidable in the areas of language, confession, culture and ethics. However, as the Turks were the Muslims, a policy of Turkification in practice meant the Islamization of non-Muslim segments of the Ottoman society. Being already in power, the CUP government expressed open hostility towards non-Turkish and subsequently non-Muslim Ottoman population – a hostility that became the foundation of the Armenian genocide. A fact was that simultaneously with the declination of the state the party’s ideology, based on profoundly ethnic Turkish nationalism, was becoming more and more radicalized with, according to David Kushner, anti-Armenianism as one of the most radical issues.

Three factors as the main causes of the Armenian genocide

There were three factors which mostly influenced the Turkish-Kurdish committed genocide of the Ottoman Armenians in 1915−1916:

1. The Ottoman loss of the First Balkan War and as a consequence the loss of almost all Ottoman land possessions in Europe in 1912−1913.

2. The putsch by the Young Turks of January 23rd, 1913 during the First Balkan War.

3. The beginning of the WWI.

1. The First Balkan War started in October 1912 with the war declaration to the Ottoman Empire by Montenegro, Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria (the Balkan Alliance) for the sake to expel the Ottoman state from the Balkans and to share its Balkan possessions between themselves. Regardless to the German help in the improvement of the Ottoman military under the Young Turks the Ottoman army was in general not enough prepared and ill-equipped to successfully fight especially after the exhausting Italo-Ottoman War, 1911−1912 over the province of Libya. The Treaty of London signed between the Balkan Orthodox Christian states and the Ottoman Empire on May 30th, 1913 left to the Ottoman state in Europe only a strip of land around Istanbul and as an aftermath it had a very deep traumatic impact on the Muslim segment of the Ottoman society. After the Balkan Wars of 1912−1913 the Armenians and Greeks became two largest Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire. As both the Orthodox Christians, it was only a question of time when both of them will experience the Muslim Ottoman revenge: the Armenians in 1915−1916 and the Anatolian Greeks in 1922−1923. After the Balkan Wars the Ottoman society, culture and even identity suffered a heavy blow that brought an idea of revenge including and an option of genocide as the most radical instrument of its realization. The CUP’s leadership well understood that after 1913 a project of the Ottoman identity was over as unrealistic and unacceptable by all non-Muslim subjects of the empire. However, the most important impact of the Balkan Wars to the Muslims of the Ottoman society, especially to its ethnic Turkish segment, was the creation of a mental schizophrenia of a “knife in the back” by the Christians of the Ottoman Empire. The CUP’s MPs openly were accusing in the parliament the Ottoman Bulgarians, Greeks and Armenians for the state’s treason during the Balkan Wars.

2. A new putsch by the Young Turks, who never have been elected to power, committed on January 23rd, 1913 was the second factor of the main causes of the 1915−1916 Armenian Genocide. After the 1913 Coup a CUP’s dictatorship (Talaat-Enver) was established (1913−1918) that was followed by the restriction of a free-speech in the Parliament and terrorizing the members of the opposition. The final result of the putsch was a complete concentration of power in the hands of the CUP which started a policy of transformation of the Ottoman multiethnic society into a homogenous national state of the ethnolinguistic Turks. Such policy required either assimilation or extermination of non-ethnic Turkish Ottoman population. In addition, the course of the Armenian genocide was strongly influenced by the internal rivalry within the CUP’s dictatorship between Enver Pasha as the Ottoman military commander and Mehmed Talaat who was the civil leader of the empire.

3. Nevertheless, the beginning of the WWI was the crucial factor of the causes of the Armenian genocide. From the very start of the WWI it was clear which side the Ottoman Empire is going to support as the Ottoman government signed an agreement with Germany on close bilateral cooperation on August 2nd, 1914 including and the issue of mobilization. The Ottoman army’s commander-in-chief Enver Pasha became directly responsible for the start of military operations against the Entente as he ordered to the Ottoman navy to bomb the Russian sea coast on October 29th, 1914 without official proclamation of war. That was reason for the Entente to declare war on the Ottoman Empire. Therefore, the Armenian position became very delicate as the Armenians were living on the very border with Russia and as such they were seen by the Young Turk’s regime as a potential collaborators with the Entente and even as a dangerous “fifth column” in the Ottoman Empire. Subsequently, from September 1914 the CUP’s government started with persecution of the Armenians by different means as, for instance, arbitrary war requisitions, arrests, closing the Armenian-language schools, banning Armenian political-national parties and societies, etc. The Ottoman Empire became officially at war with the Entente on November 11th, 1914. For the Young Turks’ government the Ottoman participation in the WWI was a good opportunity for both recovering the empire and implementation of radical solutions to the acute internal cluster of problems. One of the crucial motifs for the participation in the war was territorial expansion of the empire that was possible only in the East, i.e. at the expense of Russia. However, on the very border with Russia there were the Armenians who were in principle supporting the Russian Empire as a potential liberator of them from the Ottoman yoke. Nevertheless, the Ottoman army suffered heavy losses as a number of the Ottoman invasions finished with catastrophic results. But the crucial point was that Enver Pasha accused exactly the Armenians for these abortive military campaigns as a nation who betrayed the Ottoman national interest. The Turkish propaganda openly accused the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire of state’s treason, calling the Turks and other Muslims to boycott all Armenian businesses and even it was spreading stories about alleged crimes against the Turks committed by the Armenian nationals. As a consequence, Mehmed Talaat Pasha on December 26th, 1914 ordered the resignation of all government’s officers of the Armenian origin and arresting of all who defy these measures. From January 1915, more radical anti-Armenian policy was implemented as the Armenian-language newspapers are shut down and some of prominent Armenians, especially in Istanbul, have been arrested and later murdered.

A course of the Armenian genocide

The Armenian genocide was deliberate action of systematic destructions, executions, dispossessions, deportations, forced assimilation, induced famine, ethnic cleansing and annihilation of material signs of the Armenian culture and national existence on the territory of the Ottoman Empire. Originally, the genocide started with the massive killings of the economic, religious, political and intellectual elite of the Armenian society in Istanbul on April 24th, 1915, but it soon became a pattern for whole-range genocide on all segments of the Ottoman Armenian national elite throughout the empire who were arrested, imprisoned, terrorized and ultimately exterminated. The entire higher social and national strata of the Armenians became eliminated during only several weeks up to June 1915. The executions of the Armenian dignitaries have been organized even on the public squares of the towns according to preserved documentary material (photos) in Armenian National Institute and Armenian Genocide Museum Institute in Yerevan.

The next and real genocide’s phase started when Mehmed Talaat Pasha as a Minister of Internal Affairs issued on May 23rd, 1915 the official order for the ultimate deportation of all Armenian population. The CPU’s government of the Young Turks introduced new provisional Law of Deportation on May 29th, 1915 which gave a legal provision for the beginning of the mass deportation of the ethnic Armenians to very inhospitable Syrian Desert’s city of Der el-Zor and its vicinity. This law was followed on June 10th, 1915 by new law that was providing a legal ground for appropriation of the Armenian properties in business and trade. More precisely, it was a law on establishing of the Abandoned Property Commission with the only task to organize collection of the Armenian properties after their deportation or killings. That was a final blow to the Arminian economy as all Arminian property simply became legally transferred to the Ottoman government and put to its disposition. The administration for the deportation of the Armenians was given to the Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants that was under direct authority of the Ottoman army. It is known that a Minister of Internal Affairs was all the time well informed about the course of deportation by telegraph correspondence and other means. For the matter of illustration, for instance, there is a report by the German consul in Erzurum on deportation from Erzurum when around 40.000 Armenians living in the city were sent by force to Der el-Zor. According to the report, that was “an absolute extermination” of the Armenian city’s population. During the march the Armenians were tortured and killed and their bodies are thrown to the Euphrates River. Finally, only about 200 Armenians from Erzurum succeeded to reach a city of Der el-Zor. In the other words, a destruction rate was in this case almost 100 percent.

Very quickly after the start of the “Final Solution” of the Armenian Question in the Ottoman Empire the Armenians were uprooted and bound for the Syrian Desert (by mid-July 1915). In many cases the Armenians had to travel around 1.000 km. throughout inhospitable territories during the hot summer time and constantly tortured by the Ottoman army who was escorting them to the final destination to which overwhelming majority never came. The essence of the whole issue is that the members of the Young Turks’ government in Istanbul knew very well that chances to survive on the road to the region of Der el-Zor are basically zero especially for the children, pregnant woman and elderly people. In fact, that was a “March of the Death”. Nevertheless, those survivors of the death march found simply nothing to be arranged for them. The bad living conditions in Der el-Zor caused a terrible famine at the beginning of 1916 to prolong a progress of genocide. Moreover, Talaat Pasha’s decision in the summer of 1916 was that too many Armenians survived the march to Der el-Zor, and consequently gave an order to the local city’s authorities to collect the Armenians into the surrounding caves and to exterminate them.

The forced loss of authentic ethnolinguistic, cultural or confessional identity is a part of the genocide definition accepted by the contemporary post-1945 international law. That was exactly implied to the Armenians in 1915 and after by the Young Turks’ regime as a part of the “Final Solution”. More precisely, the Armenians, especially children and women, had to renounce their original Christian (Orthodox) religion and identity and to be converted into Islam. The Armenian orphan children were placed in the Muslim orphanages (like in Konya or Beirut) where they became converted into Islam, allowed to speak only Turkish language and changed their original names into the Turkish according to the Ottoman pattern of “devshirme” (“taxation in blood” of non-Muslim subjects) from the 14th to the mid-17th centuries. Therefore, many Armenian survivors of the march through the desert lost their collective national identity and original cultural-linguistic characteristics.

Material culture of the Armenians became destroyed or transformed into different purposes. The Armenian churches have been systematically destroyed and inscriptions in the Armenian language removed from the buildings. The purpose of such policy of genocide was clear and successful: to as much as eliminate cultural-national traces and roots of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Knowing that, it is “understandable” why the Turks destroyed a number of Armenian medieval churches and monasteries. As the Armenians have been understood as the first nation to accept Christianity, a destruction of their medieval Christian shrines by the Muslim Turks and Kurds had the feature of the “Clash of Civilizations”. The destruction of Armenian material culture and private property, as in all similar cases of the genocide and ethnic cleansing, had at least a dual aim:

1. To make an impression that the Armenians as a nation never existed on certain territories.

2. To ensure that the Armenian survivors will never return back to their original places of living.

The cardinal perpetrators directly involved in the Armenian genocide have been the Turks and the Kurds (both Muslims) composed by almost all social strata. The main force taking open actions in the murdering of the Armenians were the Muslim bands of violent convicts who were at the beginning of the WWI released from the prisons to fight against the Russian troops. When the Armenian genocide started their new task has been to eliminate the Armenian population. The main engineer of the genocide was Mehmed Tallaat Pasha as a Minister of Internal Affairs who created a propaganda framework of it by accusing all Armenians as a collective national body of high treason, disloyalty and practical sabotage actions against the Ottoman army and state. It is clear from his conversations with the German consul that his government has to use the war situation to get rid of all internal enemies of the empire but on the first place of all indigenous Christians. More precisely, the Turkification of the Asia Minor by ethnic cleansing of all Armenians was a prime goal of such policy. However, Dr Bahaeddin Shakir, as one of the most prominent CPU’s members, had a crucial role in the process of practical implementation of the genocide which had its second stage in 1916 from March to August when were the massive killings of the Armenian deportees in Syrian Desert and in vicinity of Der el-Zor.

Consequences

The Armenian genocide is one of the most important and influential instances of ethnic cleansing, people’s transfer and economic dispossession in the history of modern times. As the first 20th century’s genocide, the Armenian genocide has to be, and is, taken into consideration as an example and pattern for subsequent genocides in the coming decades. As such, it is of cardinal historical significance, and it is critically important that today’s generationscan properly understand this case study of inhumanity.

Before the act of genocide, the Ottoman Armenian community possessed around 2.600 churches, 450 monasteries and 2.000 schools. However, after the WWI around 3.000 Armenian settlements were depopulated. Today, the Armenian population in Turkey can be practically found only in Istanbul. Present day Armenian community in Turkey has only six churches and no single school or monastery.

The evidences and records of genocide are numerous but probably the most valuable archival material are gone forever when on November 2nd, 1918 the ultra right wing members of the CUP burned documents before the government’s top politicians and main organizers of the genocide escaped the country in a German submarine to Odessa. A new liberal government of the Ottoman Empire on February 5th, 1919 established a special tribunal in Istanbul for the war crimes which officially accused the previous Young Turks’ government of “deportation and massacre” but only after the British pressure. As a final result of a court procedure, the CUP’s government in April 1919 was sentenced to death and the court proclaimed that:

“The disaster visiting the Armenians was not a local or isolated event. It was the result of a premeditated decision taken by a central body… and the immolations and excesses which took place were based on oral and written orders issued by that central body”.

However, probably and unfortunately, the cardinal consequence of the 1915−1916 Armenian Genocide is a fact that this unpunished crime became a pattern for the other genocides in the 20th century. It is clear at least in two cases:

1) The Jewish holocaust during the WWII committed by the Nazi Germany’s NSDAP regime in occupied Europe.

2) The Serb holocaust on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia, 1941−1945 committed by the Ustashi Croat regime.

Namely, in both of these holocaust cases, a cardinal motif for the genocide was the fact that exactly the Armenian genocide became absolutely forgotten, no spoken and unpunished by the international community.In the other words, if very soon after the genocide the world was not remembering the Armenians and not punishing the perpetrators of the genocide it can be very likely to be the same with the Jews and Serbs or with any other nation in the coming future. 

Global Political Quagmire: Leaders Who Could Not Lead

Mahboob A. Khawaja

“We should already know more than enough to be horrified by the state of our American world. It should disturb us deeply that a government of, by, and for the war-makers, intelligence operatives, bureaucrats, privatizing mercenary corporations, surveillers, torturers, and assassins is thriving in Washington. As for the people -- that’s us -- in these last years, we largely weren’t there, even as the very idea of a government of, by, and for us bit the dust, and our leaders felt increasingly unconstrained when committing acts of shame in our name. So perhaps the last overlooked anniversary of these years might be the 12th anniversary of American cowardice. You can choose the exact date yourself; anytime this fall will do. At that moment, Americans should feel free to celebrate a time when, for our “safety,” and in a state of anger and paralyzing fear, we gave up the democratic ghost.”…..“Among the many truths in that still-to-be-written secret history of our American world would be this: we the people have no idea just how, in these years, we’ve hurt ourselves.” (Tom Engelhardt, “The 12th Anniversary of American Cowardice What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You.” TomDispatch.com: 3/28/2013).

In a knowledge-based age of reason and accountability, global politics is fast becoming a staged drama. Pretension and exploitation are the hallmarks of the global political leadership. The UNO is already an irrelevant and dysfunctional organization in world affairs. What led to the failure of the international institutions and the emergence of World War I and World 2 appears to be inescapable reality not on screen but in the prevalent human affairs. The liberal democracies have produced typical ‘right man syndrome’ in its worst shape to manage and control the minds of the people. Stereotyping of electoral victories produce egoistic, inept and incompetent leaders who are resourceful but misfit to serve the interests and priorities of the masses. Most use money and media-build image and capacity to win the elections but miserably fail to live upto the moral and intellectual norms and genuine expectations of the common folks. Once in power, the ego transforms into type of a cancer to commit unthinkable crimes against the very people who voted for them. Elections are presumptuous gimmick and do not bring any real political change at the grassroots levels but to recycle the disposable ambitions of the few to occupy political powerhouses. In an age of rising expectations, hopes are dashed away for any futuristic developments to imagine a promising future for the mankind to have peace, con-existence and normalcy across the globe. Most NATO affiliated leaders are quick to blame President Putin and Russian intervention in Eastern Ukraine but deny the facts that America and Britain waged repeated aggressive wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. The decade long occupation killed millions of innocent people and committed crimes against humanity. None seem to discuss it in the Western news media. Those sadistic leaders responsible for the crimes were not held accountable. The current global politics is a game of political distraction, killings, destruction of the human environment and continuing displacement and massacre of innocent people in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya and other parts of the Arab world.

Wars Negate Peace Except to Incapacitate the Mankind

Cynicism at its best, war rhetoric is fast becoming number games for leadership popularity. Most Western leaders view public as ignorant of the facts of life. The same absurd culture that separated power from wisdom and led to the cruelty of Two World Wars is overshadowing the prevalent realities for political change. At the G7 meeting in Germany, President Obama came out of the blue that he does not have a ‘complete strategy to defeat ISIL.’ If the strategy was to incapacitate the Arab countries to consider US-Israel synchronized agenda for the future of Palestine. A future without resolution of the freedom of Palestine is certainly at work. Did President Obama learn anything useful to honor his major global commitments to the humanity? “Yes we can” remained a broken promise for the large part of his official priorities. Advanced Western nations have not produced any credible leadership role model for the future generations to follow.

Unpredictable but paranoid and vengeful political leaders have incapacitated the in-born faculties of American lifelines to be a morally and intellectually crippled nation in global affairs. This was not accidental but a planned scheme of things although unknown in its short-long terms consequences over its ability to cope with the change phenomenon for a sustainable future. America became an insane – a victim of its own obsession with power and fearful of its future. Global mankind has passion for peace, not wars. Those mindless politicians claiming to have accomplished the mission in the War on Terrorism did so at the cost of ruthlessness, killings of millions of fellow mankind in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sherwood Ross (“US Sponsored Genocide against Iraq 1990-2012 killed 3.3 million including 750,000 children.” Global Research: 12/06/2012), recalls the statement of Professor Francis Boyle (Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal) and many other investigative reports clearly blaming the US led forces to have massacred more than three millions civilians in Iraq. The US and British are responsible for much of Iraq’s planned destruction, increased sectarian violence and dismantling of the political governance. Dreadful are becoming as abnormal frequency of violent killings, internal insecurity, drug-abuses and political mismanagement, several thousands Americans killed in global bogus wars and likewise wounded and crippled for life, 18-25 war veterans daily committing suicide. One wonders, what went wrong to America? William Boardman (“A Country At War With An Illusion.” Information Clearing House: 8/19/2013), spells out how America is at war with itself: “We are waging war on terrorism even as we embody terrorism. …No wonder we seem sometimes to be at war with ourselves, and have been for most of the 21st century….No American Under 12 Has Lived In A Country At Peace….America’s Main Enemy Is Nameless, Shapeless, “Associated Forces”… The American Enemies List Is Decided Anonymously and Secretly.

No Comments…No Judgment… But Rationality demands Dialogue and Reconciliation for Global Peacemaking

Do politicians having small wisdom and big mouth and no rational knowledge can determine the future of mankind? How could the mankind be protected from the sadistic mindset of the few warmongers? The Universe and all it encompasses are the products of God-given command; and do not operate in concert with man-made laws, constitutions, foreign policies, judgments, hopes and desires. Light is One, and darkness are many. Life and the Universe exist because it is ordained by the Creator of the Worlds. Be it a reminder or an advice that human life is precious and we are accountable and we must all try to pursue peace and harmony, not wickedness and extermination of life and habitats from Earth. If history is relevant and is seen as a source of learning and warning, undeniably all those superpowers well equipped with weapons and animosity to destroy others or all have met the same fate of self annihilation. It is beyond doubts that when they challenged the sanctity of the Laws of God governing the Earth and the living Universe, and invaded small and poor nations in farfetched lands, they ultimately met their own end by natural causes such as earthquakes, flooding, tornados, exploding lavas, sound blasts, lightning and lot more. Are there any thinking people to take heed from the prevalent facts of human history?

War is racketeering. Since the renewed sectarian warfare in Arab world, leading American weapon manufacturers have increased 19% prices for weapon sales. None of the combatant forces offer any plan for stopping the bloody sectarian vindictiveness. If the coalition of the willing had working intelligence, they should engage ISIL in a political dialogue to explore peace and a durable future. Obviously, ISIL’s cold-blooded killings of few foreign prisoners cannot be accepted as precepts of the Islamic behavior and values of the Muslim world, but the group is gaining ground and after Ramadi attracting large number of recruits across the Arab countries. President Obama claimed diplomacy to deal with other nations. But nothing is initiated out of the fixed strategy against ISIL or to deal with Russia for a negotiated settlement of problems.. “It is Perfectly Reasonable to Negotiate with Villains like ISIS So, Why Don’t We Do It to Save Some Lives” The Independent: 9/28/2014), asks reputable international journalist Robert Fisk. Obama says, No at the UN and adds, we do not negotiate with Evil. The same message is echoed by the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon. The UN and its leadership are in desperate need of a navigational change to pursue dialogue and reconciliation for peacemaking with all the belligerent parties. To any impartial observer evil is not one-sided. Political temptations and compulsion can enforce evil’s supremacy but it can never acquire victory as a permanent factor. No wonder, why America is using the logic of power and not the power of logic to respond to a critical global humanitarian crisis.

The informed global community wishes to see dialogue, reconciliation and opportunities for peaceful settlement of conflicts. Have the Two World Wars resolved any problems facing the humanity? What is the cure to raging indifference and cruelty to the interests of the whole of the mankind? The 21st century new-age complex political, economic, social and strategic challenges and the encompassing opportunities warrant new thinking, new leaders and new visions for change, conflict management and participatory peaceful future-making. Is the 21st century political genius more redundant, backward and unable to speak against the political drudgery and wickedness of the few warlords to destroy the humanity? Perhaps, Robert Burns - the poet (“Man’s inhumanity to Man”, from his poem Man was made to Mourn: A Dirge, 1785), knew better and had unraveling and passionate moral and intellectual understanding of the human nature and interests of the global mankind to clarify:

'Many and sharp the num'rous ills
Inwoven with our frame!
More pointed still we make ourselves
Regret, remorse, and shame!
And Man, whose heav'n-erected face
The smiles of love adorn, -
Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!

It’s The Business, Stupid!

Parvez Alam

Politics is all about business and economics. Business conglomerates are running the world and not the elected governments. The recent Oxfam report 2015 says that “1% of the world’s population will own more wealth than the other 99% in 2016.”[1] This is grave issue of inequality where democracy prevails in more than 80% of the globe. Democracy stands for building egalitarian society, that’s what common masses believed and accepted as the political system. But it seems that ideals of democracy is muffled and twisted for the ruling class. Mind it. Ruling classes are not at all those who are at the helm of affairs in political affairs of the country. It is them, those who are prevailing in economic affairs of the country.

This is often repeated discourse in India that are you son of Tata, Birla or Ambani? And if you are then law is yours. The recent addition is Adani. Are you son of Adani? If you are reading then, keep your head high because your father is growing as no one has grown before in Indian history of capital accumulation. According to the statistic Gautam Adani is new name in the list of 100 richest in India. According to the Forbes, Adani rose to eighth rank in the list of Indian billionaires in 2015 from 609th rank in 2014. The rocket-speed growth of one industrialist is telling story of political economy of this country. Though it is sad story that, nothing much has changed in one year rule (2014-2015) of Narendra Modi led government except the change in nomenclature of the institutions and catchy titles.

Now coming back to the conceptual linkages between political economy, corporate houses and democracy, it is pertinent to establish the relational nexus between these three. Today throughout in the world, capitalists are accumulating wealth without any check and control. On the other hand people or critical masses are denied basic rights which are promised in the democracy. The political representatives everywhere in the world in one way or other are funded by the capitalist forces during elections, which is again one of the routine in five/six years. Political parties get huge amount of money from different corporate/sources as part of their fundraising. This leads to the political parties involving in doing courtesy to the corporate houses by passing favorable laws contrary to the ideals promised in the manifestos during election campaigns. This has become norms and also the unwritten laws in capitalist democracies.

Reflecting upon the resistance movements throughout the world against this loot and plunder of the natural resources and wealth of the common masses, I believe we are somehow convinced that one day our fate will change and our sons and daughters will become like Ambanis, Adanis and Birlas. We are disillusioned and at the same time optimistic about the future. Here ‘we’ represents I think, everyone who collectively forms the critical mass. After all believing in change is also Marxian thought. What’s wrong if we believe-in-change to become capitalist? Well, seriously the movement against the plunder is not coherent and we are also lacking global ideology to tackle the menace of imperial-capitalism.

So, thinking that any Modi or Gandhi will change the destiny of this country is total farce. They can do only business. Whether Aristotle will redefine his own idea of politics or not but certainly ‘Man is social animal’ and for being political animal, one needs to be businessman in 21st century. ‘Political’ today is thriving on the economic base of market and public share is shrinking from the national sphere and going into the hands of private enterprise. If we all know these linkages as well as leakages and we are also talking about the plight of this country then what is stopping us to question the governments or demanding for accountability of the state structures.

The fundamental point is that we are imparting our sons and daughters the kind of education which is making them, robotic, mechanical and not critical. In other words, we are imparting the kind of education which imperial-cum-capitalist forces wants us to impart. Today large chunk of our education system is controlled by these forces. They are in printing houses, they are running chain of schools, they are running media houses, they are making films, they are deciding cuisines and what not. This cumulatively combines the epistemology or knowledge of everyday life. We are so much into the trap of all these superfluous knowledge/s that we rarely get time to reflect critically that what are the ulterior motives of these hegemonic forces. The obvious answer of any laymen would be, control.

Yes, they want to control and drive the world according to their wishes. We are driven by their wishes. They wants us to fight among ourselves on petty issues of religion, caste and sects, we oblige them. They want to deprive us from our own basic rights, we accept it. They wants us to behave robotically, we put extra efforts to prove that they are right. Our mental faculty is shaped by their rosy promises about the future. Today what is necessary is very simple. Let’s question each and every authority, who is trying to dictate its own terms. Let’s question what is till today considered as unquestionable. Let’s question our body, our self, our identity, our knowledge, our government, our world, our opinions, our prejudices, our stereotyping of others. Let’s liberate ourselves through questioning. I might sound pessimistic. But I am sure there are hundreds and thousands of pessimists getting born everyday in opposition of illusionary optimism which lacks meaning and sensibility. The question I asked today is Was Marx right about accumulation of capital, class distinction of bourgeoisie and proletariat? Was he right that “history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles?” The class struggle of 1 per cent (haves) vs. 99 per cent (have nots). How far Marxian ideals are going to be fulfilled by withering away the state and uniting the workers of the world? Sorry, don’t judge me, I am not Marxist.

Playing Hard Ball With Soft Power

Diana Johnstone

The FBI agents who broke the International Football Federation scandal in late May by getting a bunch of foreigners arrested in Switzerland are naturally convinced that their sole purpose is to combat corruption. American ideologues who advocate “R2P” – the “right and responsibility to protect” – have no doubt that U.S. armed intervention is a suitable way to protect human rights. Air Force officers who bomb people in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen take it for granted that they are eliminating terrorism.

After all, bad things like corruption, violations of human rights, terrorism, exist in the world. Wasn’t the United States of America created by the Founding Fathers, if not by God, to rid the world of bad things? FBI agents, mainstream editorialists, Air Force pilots, all enshrouded like space-walkers in the isolating cocoon of American self-righteousness, are not equipped to doubt their own good intentions.

Trouble is, a growing majority of people in the world outside that cocoon definitely have their doubts.

Extraterritoriality

In its perpetual mission to impose virtue on the world, the United States has three major weapons: its overwhelming killer arsenal, ideology, and the U.S. dollar. More and more people outside the self-styled “international community” (the English-speaking world and the European Union) perceive only one main purpose underlying the use of those weapons: the preservation and enforcement of U.S. world hegemony.

Thus, while Americans congratulate themselves for moving to “clean up international sports”, much of the world simply sees yet another instance of the United States using its power advantage to bully the world and get its own way.

The dollar is the primary U.S. “soft power” asset. The vast majority of international financial exchanges are in dollars, and must be cleared by a compensation chamber in the United States, enabling the United States to require that all dollars transactions conform to United States law. This in effect gives the United States unique powers of extraterritoriality.

As an example, the United States recently imposed a whopping fine of over eight billion dollars on the French bank BNP-Paribas simply for having done business with countries under U.S. embargo: Cuba, Iran and Sudan. The French bank’s dealings were perfectly legal under French law. But Washington uses the dollar to require other countries to conform to U.S. sanctions and embargos.

Thus, aside from its almost infinite financial advantages, owning the world’s main international currency also gives Americans the occasional opportunity to play their favorite Hollywood role of virtuous sheriff who rides into town, breaks up the cheaters’ poker game, disarms the bad guys with a few well-aimed shots, and rides into the sunset with the leading lady and the oil contracts.

This time the Hollywood scenario took the form of FBI agents charging officials of the International Football Federation (FIFA) with illegal financial dealings in the designation of World Cup host nations.

Bread and Circuses

All around the world, it seems that little boys love to kick balls around. But it isn’t only fun. Thanks to the soccer business, skill at kicking balls arouses a dream of fame, fortune, luxury, among youth whose hopes are otherwise extremely slim. Football is a hope of escape for millions, while for millions of others it is a release from stress, a way to stimulate gratuitous excitement and strong emotions unrelated to real needs and dangers. For the players, it can means rags to riches. For the owners, it means riches to riches.

Football is the ultimate bread and circuses of the globalized world.

Only the United States remains relatively aloof. And the United States wants to run the show.

FIFA is a hugely rich segment of the worldwide commercial entertainment business. Lots and lots of dollars slosh around in it. Its advertising and television rights are worth billions. International soccer has been subsumed into the globalized economy, which is rife with dubious deals, tax evasions and corruption. Nobody doubts for a second that large sums of money are exchanged “under the table” in FIFA. The main target for potential bribery is no doubt the choice of the World Cup host country. Pressures of all kinds are used to influence an essentially arbitrary choice. The prize can cost the host country a lot, but brings in business, advertising, prestige – and even the fun of watching the games.

This is a very big business, but it is not regarded as an American business. Americans call the game “soccer” and have their own “football”, which looks more like rugby with padding. So – and this is the reaction in much of the world – what are the Americans doing barging into our game?

The West is Best, To Hell With the Rest

The hypothetic answer was not long in coming. Although reports of FIFA corruption have been circulating for years, especially concerning the 2010 games in South Africa, the timing of this sudden crackdown can only be used to discredit the two future World Cup events, scheduled for Russia in 2018 and for Qatar in 2022. Now, it so happens that the United Kingdom bid unsuccessfully for 2018 and the United States for 2022. At a time when the United States is doing everything imaginable to “isolate Putin’s Russia”, it looks very much as though the FBI has conveniently chosen to disrupt FIFA just in time to build a campaign to rescind, or boycott, the World Cup in Russia in 2018.

Non-Western commentators such as Sukant Chandan see the campaign to unseat Sepp Blatter, as yet another “regime change” directed from Washington.

The 79-year-old Swiss President of FIFA, Sepp Blatter, was never a loyal servant of the Anglo-American “international community”. By hook or by crook, his policy was to spread the football cult to the rest of the world, moving in the direction of the rise of the non-Western developing countries.

Blatter opened things up to the Third World, which would hardly be possible without monkey business somewhere. Europe with the US normally control everything “honestly”, or at least legally, because they naturally have the power and influence, as well as the lawyers.

Corruption is the way business is done in South Africa, as South Africans themselves are the first to admit and deplore. However, is it up to United States courts to punish the corruption that is endemic in African countries?

The choice of Qatar for the 2022 matches was asking for trouble, since only bribes could explain such a choice.   Here is a country with no football tradition, no players, no fans, nothing but heaps of money and above all, with a climate so inappropriate that it must be artificially cooled for the event. Plus the fact that the infrastructure is being built by semi-slave labor. It was the reductio ad absurdum of FIFA corruption. That one really gave the game away.

The choice was so weird that Swiss authorities opened an investigation last March 10. The United States might have settled for assisting that investigation instead of leaping into the spotlight. But that would avoid raising questions about Russia.

It may well be that money has passed “under the table” in every case of World Cup attribution. In France, by the way, there are serious suspicions about the use of Anglo-Saxon influence to attribute the 2012 Olympics to unprepared London against a perfectly prepared Paris. However, from the imperial viewpoint, the choice of Great Britain or the United States will always look “normal”, and any baksheesh would be considered superfluous. In contrast, one can expect great scrutiny in the search for some funny business in regard to Russia, even though Russia is a great sports nation equipped in every way to host the games.

What Is Corruption?

The United States has encouraged a certain “globalization”, meaning privatization and deregulation, giving financial institutions and major corporations endless opportunities to exploit and cheat countries in the global South, as well as their own citizens. The whole system is a breeding ground for bribes and corruption. It favors a vast and deadly arms trade, with its “percentages”. The drug trade flourishes, along with all sorts of illicit trafficking.

There is strong evidence that it took bribes to get the World Cup to South Africa. That’s corruption. But is it or is it not corruption when Coca Cola, Adidas and McDonald’s threaten not to sponsor FIFA if things don’t go their way? That is done openly, but isn’t it a form of corruption?

And speaking of corruption, is bribery only bribery when it is secret? What about the American electoral system, which has a much greater effect on the world than football games? What about an electoral system in which billionaires can openly “fix the game” thanks to perfectly legal campaign contributions?

What about the haste with which Congress changed its position last May 14 and hastily adopted the Trans-Pacific Partnership “fast track” legislation – without debate or amendments – as soon as Congress members had been generously sprayed with dollars from Goldman Sachs, UPS, Citigroup, FedEx, Coca Cola, Boeing, Pfizer, Northrop Grumman, Morgan Stanley, Walmart, Disney, Monsanto, etc., etc., etc. This vote will affect the lives of millions of Americans, their jobs, their quality of life. It is infinitely more important than where soccer games are played.

And what is the FBI doing about it?

The United States decides what is or is not corruption. It decides what are or are not human rights. Extraordinarily long prisons sentences are not violations of human rights because they are practiced in the United States, as an example. Big corporations buying “the people’s representatives” is not corruption: it’s called freedom.

The United States seeks to impose moral rules on the immoral practices it fosters. While waging wars all over the planet, Washington seeks to impose “humanitarian” rules on war by having its weak opponents branded as war criminals and hauled before international courts and tribunals (from which the United States itself is exempt).

By the same token, United States insists on imposing a system of global “free enterprise” that inevitably breeds all kinds of unmanageable corruption, but then tries to make it look good by cracking down selectively on corruption.

This American mixture of righteous crusade and self-interest risks giving virtue a bad name.