Britain, Libya and the Mediterranean

Dan Glazebrook

Last week’s drownings in the Mediterranean were the foreseeable, and indeed deliberate, result of the anti-human policies of strategic violence by a dying neo-colonial empire. They were the consequence, firstly, of a series of wars of aggression that have made life intolerable across vast swathes of Africa and West Asia, and secondly of the fateful EU decision last November to end Italy’s search-and-rescue programme, Mare Nostrum. This much has been admitted by politicians and commentators from across the entire British political establishment, from Nigel Farage and the Daily Telegraph to David Cameron and Ed Miliband. Whilst these admissions have often been tempered with caveats, denials, distortions and half-truths, the hideous reality behind them is increasingly impossible to deny.

NATO’s war of aggression against Libya in 2011 turned the country over to racist death squads, with hundreds of sub-Saharan migrant workers and black Libyans beaten and burnt to death by the ‘revolutionaries’ and tens of thousands illegally detained and tortured by the militias. Tawergha, the only black African town on the Mediterranean, and formerly home to around 30,000 people, is now a ghost town after NATO’s shock troops – militias with names like the ‘Brigades for the purging of black skins’ – ‘ethnically cleansed’ the region. Last week’s butchering of 30 Ethiopian workers by ISIS is but the latest chapter in the anti-African pogroms that have characterised the Libyan insurgency from the very start. This is the reality of NATO’s ‘Libyan revolution’ (led by AbdulHakim BelHaj, now leader of ISIS in Libya) and it is precisely this which black Africans in Libya are now fleeing. As Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi put it, “a person has to risk his life because he needs to escape from a situation where they are chopping off the heads of those near him”.

And this head-chopping has not been restricted to Libya’s borders. NATO’s war has boosted head-choppers across the entire region, from Tunisia and Algeria to Mali, Nigeria and Cameroon. Before 2011, Boko Haram barely existed. Today, thanks to NATO opening up Libya’s arsenals to them and their friends, they are killing hundreds every week, often burning them alive in churches and mosques. As one Nigerian told a reporter last week, “We prefer to die trying (to migrate) than stay back there and die….Stay at home and get shot dead or maybe burnt to death; I just prefer to die while trying or survive.”

Yet the Libyan war itself is only the latest in a long series of acts of aggression launched by the British state and its allies, all of which continue to have disastrous consequences across the entire Middle East and North Africa region. A look at the list of where the migrants come from makes this devastatingly clear. The majority of the world’s refugees come from one of three countries: Afghanistan, Somalia and Syria. What all have in common is that they have all been subject to vicious terror campaigns by Britain, the USA and their allies: whether directly, as in Afghanistan; through allied states, as with the US-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006 (which toppled the first stable government the country had had in decades); or through the provision of cash, weapons and diplomatic cover to sectarian death squads, as in the case of Syria. Yemen is the latest additional source of refugees, with the Saudi bombing campaign bringing new arrivals to almost 10,000 per week.

This, then, is what the vast majority of the world’s refugees are fleeing – conflicts and massacres created and stoked by the West and its allies.

Yet before last November, most of the refugees who took to the Mediterranean were not left to drown. Rather, they were rescued by the Italian navy’s Mediterranean-wide search and rescue operation, Mare Nostrum, launched in October 2013 after a number of very similar disasters to those last week. Mare Nostrum is estimated to have saved around 150,000 lives during the year it was in operation. Yet it was never supported by other European countries: the Italians had hoped that the rest of the EU would contribute to the operation, but it was not to be. Worse, the EU was subject to a concerted campaign by Britain demanding that Mare Nostrum be closed down, and in October 2014, acceding to these demands, ordered an end to the operation. It was replaced with a border patrol operation, Operation Triton, run by the EU with a third of the budget of Mare Nostrum, and designed to patrol a mere 12 miles of the Italian coast and no further. All search and rescue operations ceased. This was a major victory for British diplomacy, which had lobbied hard for this outcome.

The argument used by Home Office minister Lady Alenay was that saving drowning migrants would only encourage them to flee; whereas leaving them to drown would act as a deterrent. It is important to realise, therefore, that the horror witnessed last week was not the unfortunate byproduct of British policy, but rather its very purpose: that is, the creation of a terrifying spectacle of death that would serve as a warning to anyone else attempting to escape NATO’s warzones. “When these tragedies happen”, said David Cameron last week, “Britain is always there.” Indeed it is – with a smoking gun.

So this crisis was desired, and now it has been created. Almost 2000 have been drowned already this year, compared to 56 for the same period last year, thanks to the replacement of Mare Nostrum with the intentionally ineffective Triton. Indeed, only one third of those few who have been saved this year were saved by the EU’s patrol operation, the rest being picked up by passing fishermen and commercial vessels.

And yet the EU has so far managed to stave off calls to restore search and rescue missions. Despite all the trumpeting about ‘tripling the budget’ for Operation Triton, it is important to note exactly what was and was not agreed at the EU emergency summit on Thursday 23^rdApril.

Firstly, the funding announcement needs to be put in context. Tripling the budget of Operation Triton – an operation funded by the (28-member) EU will only put it up to the previous level of funding of Mare Nostrum, which was funded by one single Southern EU state, Italy – and this at a time when estimated refugee numbers are now 160% higher than they were last year. In other words, the promised funding per refugee remains barely one third the level of last year. It is also important to note that even this meagre funding is only a promise, and on past evidence, the likelihood of it actually being delivered is slim. As the head of Frontex, the border agency in charge of Operation Triton noted, many of the resources already promised last November were never delivered. Cameron has boasted that Britain will be doubling its share of the bill for Triton to £1 million – yet this equates to barely 1% of the costs of the £86 million operation.

Secondly, this money will not be spent on search and rescue. No new search and rescue operation is planned; the additional money is going into Operation Triton, which is to remain a purely border control operation, as the head of the agency responsible was at pains to point out last week: “Triton cannot be a search-and-rescue operation” said head of Frontex Fabrice Leggeri . “I mean, in our operational plan, we cannot have provisions for proactive search-and-rescue action. This is not in Frontex’s mandate, and this is, in my understanding, not in the mandate of the European Union,” . The Guardian reiterated the point, noting that the mandate of Frontex “is to monitor the external borders of the EU’s Schengen free-travel zone, not to save people in distress. There was no proposal to change the mandate”.

Finally, the Summit did not call for actually accepting any of the refugees. The draft proposal had suggested that 5000 might be taken in – which, as RT pointed out, equated to just 1/30^th of the total numbers arriving – but the final communique omitted even this miserly commitment. For comparison, it is worth noting that tiny Lebanon alone, with a GDP about 1/300^th of the EU, has taken in over 1.5million Syrian refugees, with a similar number in Turkey and nearly a million more in Jordan – the direct result of an armed insurgency aided and abetted by the West.

Instead of a humanitarian response, the EU has in fact jumped to a military response – led, once again, by David Cameron. From the moment the refugee crisis hit the headlines last week, the British government has led a media campaign to demonise those who help them escape. Rather than examining the conditions which people are fleeing, or the willful negligence of the EU, Cameron argued that “we should put the blame squarely on the appalling human traffickers who are the ones managing and promoting and selling this trade in human life”. This line has been echoed throughout Europe, with Italian Defence Minister Roberta Pinotti claiming that “We know where the smugglers keep their boats, where they gather…The plans for military intervention are there…. We think it’s the moment in which Europe decides, forcefully, to have an international police operation, which will undo this band of criminals”. A meeting of EU foreign ministers on Tuesday 21^st April immediately drew up plans to “hit people-smuggling networks in Libya and destroy the vessels used to send the migrants on their perilous voyages”, with leaders announcing that “We commit to undertake systematic efforts to identify, capture and destroy vessels before they are used by traffickers”. Said the Guardian, referring to “diplomatic sources”, “Apache helicopter gunships attacking traffickers’ vessels from a range of up to 2km would be the optimal way to operate”, whilst London Mayor Boris Johnson called for the SAS to be sent in to Libya. The Daily Telegraph made it clear that it was Britain which had been leading the call for this militarized response: “Following calls from David Cameron, Federica Mogherini, the EU’s top diplomatic, has been tasked with drawing up plans to “identify, capture and destroy” potential people trafficking vessels”. These plans, according to the Guardian, will indeed require special forces on the ground: “Senior officials say the model is the EU operations launched off the Horn of Africa in the Indian Ocean in 2009 to combat Somali piracy. That entailed special forces operations along the Somali coast and on land”. European military/ police forces will also presumably be required in Africa in large numbers to implement the other aspects of the Summit Agreement, which include“demands that the frontline states of Italy, Malta, and Greece fingerprint every person who arrives across the Mediterranean, that quicker repatriation be organised for “irregulars” who fail to qualify for asylum, and that the EU establish offices in the countries neighbouring Libya to gather intelligence on and try to stem the flow of migrants.”

Needless to say, humanitarian agencies have been unimpressed with the EU’s cynical determination to use humanitarian concern to expand its military operations whilst rejecting calls to save lives. The heads of the UN High Commission for Refugees and the International Organisation for Migration issued a joint statement which noted that: “A tragedy of epic proportions is unfolding in the Mediterranean. The EU response needs to go beyond the present minimalist approach which focuses primarily on stemming the arrival of migrants and refugees on its shores. Enforcement alone will not solve the issue of irregular migration, but could increase the risks and abuse faced by migrants and refugees.” Aurelie Ponthieu, meanwhile, a humanitarian adviser for Medical charity Medicins sans Frontieres said that “We are amazed to see that the huge means and resources allocated to declaring war on smugglers are not equally invested in saving lives. Focusing on keeping people out by cutting their only existing routes is only going to push people fleeing for their lives to find other routes, potentially even more dangerous.”

Lets be clear about what this EU Summit declaration actually means. Desperate people fleeing ISIS butchery are not going to be given asylum, or even saved from drowning – rather, they are to have their only means of escape blown up.

Fabrice Leggeri, the Frontex head in charge of Operation Triton, is nevertheless pessimistic about these military measures ever coming to fruition: “If we have difficulty to find civilian assets such as one or two patrolling boats, and one aircraft” he said, referring to the equipment promised to Triton by EU states that has still not been delivered, “you can imagine what kind of questions will be raised if it comes to military assets.” Leggeri’s pessimism on this front, however, is, I suspect, sadly misplaced. For whilst it is true that search and rescue operations are underfunded, this is because they are deemed irrelevant to the securing of strategic goals. The deployment of military assets, however – that is, tools of strategic and economic domination – tend to be viewed as very worthwhile investments.

And as Africa’s determination to free itself of centuries of colonial and neo-colonial domination continues – illustrated vividly by the election of Mugabe to the AU’s Chair this February – the desperation of Europe, and Britain in particular, to reinsinuate itself on the continent knows no bounds.

So what exactly is Britain aiming to do with its special forces and Apaches should they gain access to the African coast? The answer, I suspect, is to shore up the death squads it unleashed on Libya in 2011, whose defeat is now a very real prospect.

If, as I have argued elsewhere, the death squad project is a fundamental plank of current Anglo-US imperial strategy, then the ‘turning of the tide’ against the death squads in Libya would be an acutely worrying development for the West’s strategic planners.

The tide began to turn in Libya in the parliamentary elections last year, when the parties supported by the Misrata militias – the most vicious and racist of the death squads brought to power by NATO – were decisively rejected in the parliamentary elections. The newly elected parliament then began to reverse a series of persecutory laws that had been passed (literally at gunpoint) over the previous years. The defeated parties, however, seized Tripoli by force, resulting in a de facto partition of the country between the militias’ government in Tripoli and the government appointed by the elected parliament now based in Tobruk. The country looked set for a long drawn out civil war, or at best a long term stalemate and partition. However, the intervention of Egypt on the side of the Tobruk parliament from February this year has massively changed the equation, worrying the Tripoli government and its supporters that they could be decisively beaten.

The prospect of a total military defeat is a worrying one for Britain and the US’ strategic planners. Such a defeat could lay the basis for Libya’s eventual return to stability, which would in turn cut off a key source of training and weapons to death squads across the whole region, including Boko Haram and AQIM. This would in turn allow the region to develop more independently, develop its economies outside of Western influence, and free itself from a reliance on the West’s security and military services for protection.

The West and its allies certainly have form in protecting their death squads from defeat. The Libya war itself was of course triggered by the imminent defeat of the insurgents, who had been routed from the entire country except Benghazi, and were on the verge of being defeated there too until given a new lease of life by NATO. In Syria, as large numbers of FSA soldiers began to defect to the government or simply go awol in the face of a government pushback in 2012, the Saudis flooded them with money to pay soldiers, effectively turning the FSA into a mercenary army. Then last year, when the momentum lay with the Syrian government following the insurgents’ surrender of Homs, the US began weapons drops to the various anti-government forces under the guise of the ‘war against ISIS’ – despite the fact that they were aiding ISIS’s anti-government allies and even dropping weapons to ISIS themselves. In Ukraine, the West’s coup-installed government were seemingly on the verge of abandoning their war against the East of the country following a series of disastrous military failures last April until emergency visits by Joe Biden and John Brennan resulted in the renewal of the war effort, this time relying on neo-nazi brigades as auxiliary forces, now being trained by US, Canadian and British forces. And most recently, in Yemen, when the Houthis began their rout of Al Qaeda, the Saudis began an aerial assault on their positions, allowing AQAP to regroup.

And so to Libya where, once again, the West must find a way to prop up their death squads before they are smashed completely. This attempt has followed something of a ‘twin-track’ approach: firstly, attempts have been made through the UN to conduct peace talks that would patch together a deal that would bring the death squads back into the official government. These, however, have fallen flat, largely due to the intransigence of the militias themselves.

So instead, Britain urgently needs to ensure adequate support is provided to the death squads via the insertion of special forces who could provide training as well as acting as a conduit for weapons and fighters.

One obvious pretext would be to intervene as part of the phoney ‘war against ISIS’ – but the Tobruk parliament has completely ruled this out. The other major pretext of recent years, then, is the need to respond to a ‘humanitarian emergency’. Time and again, this has been proven a most effective way to railroad public opinion and the UN into supporting military action. So a humanitarian emergency is exactly what has been created.

It is particularly revealing that, within the UK Cabinet, it has been Home Secretary Theresa May and Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond who have been the most determined that the EU should not restart search and rescue operations. These two positions are Cabinet representatives of the British intelligence services and the Foreign Office, the institutions which control long term British strategy.

The call to military action must be resisted. With Hammond and May successful, and search and rescue operations blocked, their policy of drowning migrants is set to continue, with each new crisis being used as a pretext for the further insertion of military forces in Libya and beyond. Instead we must work to ensure that search and rescue is restarted, but most importantly that the West’s death squad policy is exposed and smashed, and its victims fully compensated – starting with the accommodation of refugees, but ultimately extending to full reparations.

The Hidden Tears of Punjab

Andre Vltchek

A lane, a narrow passage to Jallianwala Bagh Garden inside the old city of Amritsar, in the state of Punjab. It is a monument now, one of the testaments to madness and crimes committed by the British Empire during its colonial reign over Sub-Continent.

This is where, on April 13 1919, thousands of people gathered, demanding release of two of their detained leaders, Dr. Satyapal and Dr. Saifuddin. It was right before the day of Baisakhi, the main Sikh festival, and the pilgrims came to the city, in multitudes, from all corners of Punjab.

The British Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer brought fifty Gurkha riflemen to a raised bank, and then ordered them to shoot at the crowd.

Bipan Chandra, an Indian historian, wrote in his iconic work, “India’s Struggle for Independence”:

“On the orders of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, the army fired on the crowd for ten minutes, directing their bullets largely towards the few open gates through which people were trying to run out. The figures released by the British government were 370 dead and 1200 wounded. Other sources place the number dead at well over 1000.”

While reading through the draft of this essay, my friend and comrade, renowned Canadian international lawyer Christopher Black, added:

“… At the investigation into the Amritsar massacre, General Dyer said his only regret was that he had not killed more people. He also used armoured cars to block the entrances and machine guns were also used on the crowd. After that the British made people in the streets crawl on the stomachs when they passed a British officer. Terrible, terrible things-and what the British did in Kenya in the 50’s is worse than what the Nazis did in Europe.”

Jallianwala Bagh is now a monument, a testament, a warning. There are bullet holes clearly marked in white, penetrating the walls of surrounding buildings. There is a well, where bodies of countless victims had fallen. Some people had chosen to jump, to escape the bullets.

There is a museum, containing historic documents: statements of defiance and spite from the officials of British Raj, as well as declarations of several maverick Indian figures, including Rabindranath Tagore, one of the greatest writers of India, who threw his knighthood back in the face of the British oppressors, after he learned about the massacre.

There are old black and white photos of Punjabi people tied to the polls, their buttocks exposed, being flagged by shorts-wearing British soldiers, who were apparently enjoying their heinous acts.

There is also a statement of General Dyer himself. It is chilling, arrogant and unapologetic statement:

“I fired and continued to fire until the crowd dispersed, and I consider this is the least amount of firing which would produce the necessary moral and widespread effect it was my duty to produce if I was to justify my action. If more troops had been at hand the casualties would have been greater in proportion. It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd, but one of producing a sufficient moral effect from a military point of view not only on those who were present, but more especially throughout the Punjab. There could be no question of undue severity.”

Not everyone in India is outraged by former crimes of the British Empire. Some want to forget and to “move on”, especially those closely linked to the establishment; to the new corporate and pro-Western India, where education is being privatized, mass media controlled by big business interests, and progressive ideologies buried under unsavory layers of greed.

At the grounds of Jallianwala Bagh, Anand P. Mishra, Professor at O. P. Jindal Global University, Haryana, spreads his arms:

“This happened almost 100 years ago and I don’t hold any grudges towards British, anymore.”

But when I approach Ms. Garima Sahata, a Punjabi student, she does not hide her feelings towards the British Empire and the West:

“I feel ager, thinking what they had done to our people. I think it is important for us to come here and to see the remnants of the massacre. I still feel angry towards the British people, even now… but in a different way… They are not killing us the same way, as they used to in the past, but they are killing us nevertheless.”

***

The British Empire was actually based on enforcing full submission and obedience on its local subjects, in all corners of the world; it was based on fear and terror, on disinformation, propaganda, supremacist concepts, and on shameless collaboration of the local “elites”. “Law and order” was maintained by using torture and extra-judiciary executions, “divide and rule” strategies, and by building countless prisons and concentration camps.

To kill 1.000 or more “niggers,” to borrow from the colorful, racist dictionary of Lloyd George, who was serving as British Prime Minister between 1916 and 1922, was never something that Western empires would feel ashamed of. For centuries, the British Kingdom was murdering merrily, all over Africa and the Middle East, as well as in the Punjab, Kerala, Gujarat, in fact all over the Sub-Continent. In London the acts of smashing unruly nations were considered as something “normal”, even praiseworthy. Commanders in charge of slaughtering thousands of people in the colonies were promoted, not demoted, and their statues have been decorating countless squares and government buildings.

The British Empire has been above the law. All rights to punish “locals” were reserved. But British citizens were almost never punished for their horrendous crimes committed in foreign lands.

When the Nazis grabbed power in Germany, they immediately began enjoying a dedicating following from the elites in the United Kingdom. It is because British colonialism and German Nazism were in essence not too different from each other.

Today’s Western Empire is clearly following its predecessor. Not much has changed. Technology improved, that is about all.

***

Standing at the monument of colonial carnage in Punjab, I recalled dozens of horrific crimes of the British Empire, committed all over the world:

I thought about those concentration camps in Africa, and about the stations where slaves who were first hunted down like animals were shackled and beaten, then put on boats and forced to undergo voyages to the “new world” – voyages that most of them never managed to survive. I thought about murder, torture, flogging, raping women and men, destruction of entire countries, tribes and families. It is all connected: colonialism, present-day riots in Baltimore, horrid ruins of Africa.

In Kenya, near Voi, I was shown a British prison for resistance cadres, which was surrounded by wilderness and dangerous animals. This is where the leaders of local rebellions were jailed, tortured and exterminated.

In Uganda, I was told stories about how British colonizers used to humiliate local people and break their pride: in the villages, they would hunt down the tallest and the strongest man; they would shackled him, beat him up, and then the British officer would rape him, sodomize him in public, so there would be no doubts left of who was in charge.

In the Middle East, people still remember those savage chemical bombings of the “locals”, the extermination of entire tribes. Winston Churchill made it clear, on several occasions: “I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas,” he told the House of Commons during an address in the autumn of 1937. “I am strongly in favour of using poisonous gas against uncivilised tribes.”

In Malaya, I was told, as the Japanese were approaching, British soldiers were chaining locals to the cannons, forcing them to fight and die.

The Brits triggered countless famines all over India, killing dozens of millions. To them, Indian people were not humans. When Churchill was begged to send food to Bengal that was ravished by famine in 1943, he replied that it was their own fault for “breeding like rabbits” and that the plague was “merrily” culling the population. At least 3 million died.

Wherever the British Empire, or any other European empire, grabbed control over the territory – in Africa, Caribbean, the Middle East, Asia, in Sub-Continent, Oceania – horror and brutality reigned.

***

V. Arun Kumar, MPhil in International Organization and researcher at Jawaharlal Nehru University, expressed his feelings regarding Partition, doubtlessly one more terrible result of the British “divide and rule” policy:

“India and Pakistan, two children born out of the same mother’s womb have today reached at a juncture where no mother would bear. From their birth and to more than sixty years down the history, India and Pakistan has gained the label of archenemies. These two countries have fought numerous wars over a narrow thread that divides them – which they call as border. State machinery on the both sides has constructed massive hatred-mongering propaganda programs, which ensure constant creation of fear psychosis in the minds of people against the other. Even when two countries are not in actual war, they are always in a state of war. A visit to Wagah border between India and Pakistan, one can see the mockery of peace, when soldiers on the both side perform a war like aggressive drill manoeuvre while opening the gates at the border. And the sea of people on both sides enthusiastically claps shouting abusive slogans on the other country- forgetting that they are abusing their own siblings.”

Beautifully said, and so true!

Only 30 kilometers from Amritsar, one of the most grotesque events on earth takes place: “Lowering of the Flag” on the Indian/Pakistani border. Here, what is often described as the perfectly choreographed expression of hate, takes place in front of thousands of visitors from both countries.

Wagah Border has even tribunes built to accommodate aggressive spectators. It goes everyday like this:

“Death to Pakistan! 
Long Live India!”
“Death to India! 
Long live Pakistan!”

“Hindustaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan Zindabad!!!!!!” They shout here, “Long Live India!!!!” and those endless spasms are immediately followed by barks glorifying India and insulting Pakistan. And vice versa.

Border guards, male and female, are then performing short marches, at a tremendously aggressive and fast pace, towards the border gate. The public, sick from the murderous heat and the fascist, nationalist idiocy, speeches and shouts, is roaring.

As I am made to sit on the pavement, right next to the border gate of Wagah, squeezed between two corpulent women wearing sweat-soaked saris, flies are buzzing all over my cameras. Here I feel hate being omnipresent: there is hate expressed by the Indian crowd towards Pakistan, hate of the border guards towards its own unruly crowd, even hate of the crowd towards me, a daring foreigner who came, most likely, to poke fun at this insane martial ceremony.

The issue is so explosive, that my friends from nearby Lahore conveniently “forgot” to supply me with their quote. Few people in New Delhi “forgot” as well.

***

Now, Punjab is split, because that old “divide and rule” scheme was applied here meticulously, as it was almost everywhere at the Sub-Continent.

The British never really left: they live in the minds of the Indian elites.

Punjab suffered terribly during the Partition, and later, too, from brutality of the Indian state. In fact, almost entire India is now suffering, unable to shake off those racist, religious and social prejudices.

Delhi behaves like a colonialist master in Kashmir (where it is committing one of the most brutal genocides on earth), the Northeast and in several other areas. Indian elites are almost as ruthless and barbaric as were the British colonizers; the faces changed, but the power system remained almost intact.

It goes without saying that the Indian elites, disciples and admirers of the British Raj, are treating its own people with similar spite and cruelty.

***

The seeds sown by the British Raj have been inherited by several successive states of the Sub-Continent. They are now growing, blooming into a tremendous toxic and murderous insanity. Instead of turning against the homicidal elites, the poor majority is yelling nationalist slogans.

Everything here is deeply connected: the colonial torture, the post-colonial genocides, the prostitution of the local elites, who are offering themselves to the Western rulers of the world, the over-militarization, the institutionalized spite for the poor and for the lower castes and classes.

Confusion is omnipresent. Words and terminology have lost their meanings. Dust, injustice, pain and insecurity are everywhere.

Anyone who claims that colonialism is dead is either a liar or a madman.

And if this – the direct result of colonialism – is “democracy”, then we should all, immediately, take a bus in the opposite direction!

US Hypocrisy Over Ukraine and Saudi Arabia

Brian Cloughley

Boris Nemtsov was a Russian politician who was shot dead in Moscow on January 27, 2015.  He was opposed to Russia’s government and its leader and therefore, according to Western dogma of these times, his murder must have been ordered by President Putin.

Police began investigating the crime promptly but there was no pause for deliberation on the part of some western leaders and much of their media : they reacted immediately and leapt to censure the Russian government and especially President Putin in terms that were not only abusive, insolent and confrontational but confirmation of the fact that there is no intention on their part to ever consider diplomacy in their dealings with Moscow.

French President Hollande described Nemtsov as a “defender of democracy” and called the death an assassination.  Britain’s prime minister Cameron declared that “Boris Nemtsov is dead. But the values he stood for will never die,” and demanded that the death be “fully, rapidly and transparently investigated.” President Obama  announced that “we call upon the Russian government to conduct a prompt, impartial, and transparent investigation into the circumstances of his murder.”

These Western heads of government knew well that their public pronouncements and peremptory demands were condemnatory insinuations against the democratically elected administration of Russia, but their intention is to cripple the country and topple President Putin and they seize any opportunity to disparage and insult him. Their line of attack is that if something unpleasant happens in Russia it is without doubt the fault of President Putin who must at once be subjected to vilification in terms that imply his personal responsibility for whatever crime has taken place.

There would have been sanctimonious uproar in the west if Putin ever commented in such a fashion about, for example, the killing by police of unarmed black people in America, but spiteful pronouncements on Russia’s domestic affairs by western leaders are considered praiseworthy by most western mainstream news outlets which have been very quiet about some strange happenings in Ukraine where, as The Economist observes, “Dodgy economic policy, distaste for reform and endemic corruption have brought the country to its knees.”

In the three months after the killing of Nemtsov there were at least eleven mysterious deaths in Ukraine, most in the capital, Kiev:

January 29:  politician Aleksey Kolesnik, dead by hanging.

February 24 : politician Stanislav Melnik shot dead.

February 25 : mayor of Melitopol Sergey Valter dead by hanging.

February 26 : deputy chief of Melitopol police, Aleksandr Bordyuga, found dead.

February 28 : politician Mikhail Chechetov, dead by fall from apartment window.

March 9 :  politician Stanislav Melnik shot dead.

March 12 :  politician Oleksandr Peklushenko shot dead.

March 22 :  former prosecutor Serhiy Melnychuk dead by fall from apartment window.

April 13:  journalist Sergei Sukhobok shot dead .

April 15 : politician Oleg Kalashnikov shot dead.

April 16 : journalist Oles Buzyna shot dead.

By coincidence most of the dead had been critical of the Ukraine government, supportive of Russia, or possessed information that might have been embarrassing for the Ukraine’s  billionaire President Petro Poroshenko, owner of a mammoth confectionary corporation, car plants, a shipyard, and a major television station, who delivered an address to a joint session of the US Congress and continues to receive unquestioning western support for his increasingly erratic statements and behavior.

Although most western media and all western political leaders ignored these deaths, the redoubtable Newsweek scented a story and began to investigate.  It recorded  that:

In reply to a legal request by Newsweek for information on investigations into the deaths of seven other former officials, all tied to [former President] Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, the General Prosecutor’s Office responded that all the information about all the deaths was a state secret — a staggering claim to make about a series of apparently unrelated civilian deaths they told the press were suicides.

If the equivalent office in Moscow had given such a response to a western media inquiry there would have been scathing headlines in theNew York Times, the British Telegraph and all the other determinedly anti-Russian media machines of the west.  Newsweek’s informative observations on obvious corruption in official legal circles in Ukraine elicited no follow-up of any kind in the west’s media — but had there been similar revelations about Russia there would have been a blitz of self-righteous condemnation.

The end of Newsweek’s piece is especially noteworthy:

Watching the [Ukraine's] top prosecutors leaving the General Prosecutor’s Office in sharp suits and stepping into gleaming Porsches, BMWs and Land Rovers, it’s clear that the average state prosecutor’s wage, equivalent to 400 euros [USD 430]  per month, isn’t their only source of income. Within the same building, officials are representing an array of different interests. With such great wealth at stake, the truth about these deaths is unlikely to emerge any time soon. Back in Odessa, three prosecutors laugh as they dismiss allegations that their office tried to cover up Sergei Melnychuk’s murder. They have good reason to be happy. They’re off to the Rugby World Cup in London later this year, an event where one ticket . . .  sells for the equivalent of 400 euros.

Just the sort of people you would trust to conduct legal action concerning mysterious deaths of anti-government figures.

The leader of the west’s anti-Russian campaign is President Obama who told the media on March 2 that “freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of information, basic civil rights and civil liberties inside of Russia are in much worse shape now than they were four or five, ten years ago.”  If this is so, then he was right to point it out.

But Obama’s condemnation of countries that are guilty of denying “civil liberties” is intriguingly selective. There is one particularly rich country that escapes the net of his disapproval.

The US State Department records that in Saudi Arabia its “citizens lack the right and legal means to change their government” while there are “pervasive restrictions on universal rights such as freedom of expression, including on the internet, and freedom of assembly, association, movement and religion; and a lack of equal rights for women . . .”  Saudi Arabia, a valued ally of the United States, indulges in “torture and other abuses [and] arbitrary arrest and detention,” while “freedom of religion is neither recognized nor protected under the law.”  It might be imagined that the President of the United States might feel it proper to indicate his righteous disapproval of the fact that in Saudi Arabia “civil law does not protect human rights, including freedom of the speech and of the press.”

But no.

President Obama pronounced on January 15, 2015 that “promoting religious freedom has always been a key objective of my Administration’s foreign policy” — but he seems to be selective about achieving that admirable goal.

Later in January Obama visited India in order to bond with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and promote US commercial ventures and military interests.  Modi had been forbidden entry to the United States for nine years, on the grounds that he violated a US law denying a visa to those who had committed “severe violations of religious freedom,” but this was resolved by ignoring the problem.

While Obama was hugging the person who was no longer deemed as having committed severe violations of religious freedom there came the death of the King of Saudi Arabia,  unelected ruler of the country that was noted by the US State Department as refusing to recognize or protect freedom of religion.

So the President of the United States of America cut short his visit to India and flew to Saudi Arabia to join other world leaders paying respects and offering condolences for the death of King Abdullah, in whose fiefdom “citizens lack the right and legal means to change their government.”  According to Obama, King Abdullah had “in his own fashion presented some modest reform efforts within the kingdom;” but Obama obviously forgot that last year, during the reign of the modestly reforming Abdullah, the writer and commentator Raif Badawi was sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison for “insulting Islam through electronic channels” and “going beyond the realm of obedience.”

Badawi suffered his first 50 lashes in front of a mosque on January 9 — six days before Obama enthusiastically declared support for religious freedom and three weeks before he offered “condolences on behalf of the American people” concerning the death of the monarch under whose authority the flogging was ordered.

On January 26 President Obama was asked if his discussions with Saudi Arabia’s new ruler, King Salman, would include mention of the kingdom’s policy concerning human rights and replied that  “Sometimes we need to balance our need to speak to them about human rights issues with immediate concerns we have in terms of counter-terrorism or dealing with regional stability.”  These were weasel words intended to deflect attention from the fact that he intended to do nothing whatever about Saudi Arabia’s violations of human dignity, and one result of his complacent inaction was the king’s sacking of Nora al-Fayez, the country’s first and only female minister “whose attempt to shift the boundaries of women’s education attracted the hostility of religious conservatives.”

The government of the United States considers that Ukraine and Saudi Arabia can do no wrong and that their rulers must be supported unconditionally.  Support for Ukraine is based solely on its opposition to Russia which the US wishes to humiliate and destroy economically.  Unqualified endorsement of the repressive Saudi regime, with its contempt for human liberty and freedom of religion, stems from motives of regional power and direct financial advantage.  But whatever the purposes of Washington’s policies, the world is presented with the unedifying spectacle of the President of the world’s greatest nation indulging in grubby hypocrisy.  It’s not a pretty sight.

The Pentagon’s ‘Long War’

Pepe Escobar

Whatever happens with the nuclear negotiations this summer, and as much as Tehran wants cooperation and not confrontation, Iran is bound to remain — alongside Russia — a key US geostrategic target.

As much as US President Barack Obama tried to dismiss it, the Russian sale of the S-300 missile system to Iran is a monumental game-changer. Even with the added gambit of the Iranian military assuring the made in Iran Bavar 373 may be even more efficient than the S-300.

This explains why Jane’s Defense Weekly was already saying years ago that Israel could not penetrate Iranian airspace even if it managed to get there. And after the S-300s Iran inevitably will be offered the even more sophisticated S-400s, which are to be delivered to China as well.

The unspoken secret behind these game-changing proceedings actually terrifies Washington warmongers; it spells out a further frontline of Eurasian integration, in the form of an evolving Eurasian missile shield deployed against Pentagon/NATO ballistic plans.

A precious glimpse of what’s ahead was offered at the Moscow Conference on International Security (MICS) in mid-April.

Here we had the Iranian Defense Minister, Brigadier-General Hussein Dehghan, openly stating that Iran wanted BRICS members China, India, and Russia to jointly oppose NATO’s uncontrolled eastward expansion, and characterizing NATO’s for all practical purposes offensive missile shield as a threat to their collective security.

We also had Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and Chinese Defense Minister Chang Wanquan emphasizing their military ties are an “overriding priority”; plus Tehran and Moscow stressing they’re strategically in synch in their push towards a new multipolar order.

Tearing up the New Iron Curtain

Washington’s Maidan adventure has yielded not only a crystallization of a new Iron Curtain deployed from the Baltics to the Black Sea. This is NATO’s visible game. What’s not so visible is that the target is not only Russia, but also Iran and China.

The battlefield is now clearly drawn between NATO and Russia/China/Iran. So no wonder they are getting closer. Iran is an observer at the CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization) and is bound to become a member of the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) by 2016.

Russia providing S-300 systems to Iran; S-400 systems to China (with new, longer-range guided missiles); and developing the S-500 systems, which are capable of intercepting supersonic targets, for itself, all point to an ultra high-tech counterpunch. And NATO knows it.

This budding military Eurasia integration is a key subplot of the New Great Game that runs parallel to the Chinese-led New Silk Road(s) project.

As a counterpunch to encroachment, it was bound to happen; after all Beijing is confronted by US encroachment via the Asia-Pacific; Russia by encroachment via Eastern Europe; and Iran by encroachment via Southwest Asia.

Washington would also go for encroachment via Central Asia if it had the means (it doesn’t, and especially now with the New Silk Roads bound to crisscross Central Asia).

Eurasian geopolitics hinges on what happens next with Iran. Some selected Washington factions entertain the myth that Tehran may “sell out” to the US — thus ditching its complex Russia/China strategic relationships to the benefit of an expanded US reach in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

The Supreme Leader as well as President Rouhani have already made it clear that won’t happen. They know Washington trying to seduce Iran away from Russia and turn it into a client state does not mean Washington ever accepting Iran’s expanded sphere of influence in Southwest Asia and beyond.

So the multi-vector Russia-China-Iran strategic alliance is a go. Because whatever happens with the nuclear negotiations this summer, and as much as Tehran wants cooperation and not confrontation, Iran is bound to remain — alongside Russia — a key US geostrategic target.

That Long and Winding Road

And that brings us — inevitably — to GWOT (Global War on Terror).

The Pentagon and assorted US neo-cons remain deeply embedded in their strategy of actively promoting Sunni-Shi’ite Divide and Rule with the key objective of demonizing Iran. Yemen is just yet another graphic example.

Only fools would believe that the Houthis in Yemen could get away with mounting a power play right in front of a CIA drone-infested US military base in Djibouti.

Once again, this is all proceeding according to the Divide and Rule playbook. Washington did absolutely nothing to “protect” its Yemeni puppet regime from a Houthi offensive, while immediately afterwards providing all the necessary “leading from behind” for the House of Saud to go bonkers, killing loads of civilians — all in the name of fighting “Iranian expansion”. US corporate media, predictably, has gone completely nuts about it.

Nothing new under the sun. This was already foreseen way back in 2008 by the RAND Corporation report Unfolding the Future of the Long War.
Yes, this is the good ol’ Pentagon Long War as prosecuted against enemies, fabricated or otherwise, all across the “Muslim world”.

What RAND prescribed has become the new normal. Washington supports the petrodollar GCC racket whatever happens, always in the interest of containing “Iranian power and influence”; diverts Salafi-jihadi resources toward “targeting Iranian interests throughout the Middle East,” especially in Iraq and Lebanon, hence “cutting back… anti-Western operations”; props up al-Qaeda — and ISIS/ISIL/Daesh — GCC sponsors and “empowers” viciously anti-Shi’ite Islamists everywhere to maintain “Western dominance”.

The Long War was first formulated in the “axis of evil” era by the Highlands Forum, a relatively obscure, neo-con infested Pentagon think tank. Not accidentally the RAND Corporation is a major “partner”.

It gets even juicier when we know that notorious Long War practitioners such as current Pentagon supremo “Ash” Carter, his deputy Robert Work, and Pentagon intelligence chief Mike Vickers are now in charge of the self-described “Don’t Do Stupid Stuff” Obama administration’s military strategy.

What the Pentagon — with customary hubris — does not see is Moscow and Tehran easily identifying the power play; the US government’s hidden agenda of manipulating a “rehabilitated” Iran to sell plenty of oil and gas to the EU, thus undermining Gazprom.

Technically, this would take years to happen — if ever. Geopolitically, it’s nothing but a pipe dream. Call it, in fact, a double pipe dream.

As much as Washington will never “secure” the Middle East with Iran as a vassal state, thus enabling it to transfer key US military assets to NATO with the purpose of facing the Russian “threat”, forget about going back to 1990s Russia under disaster capitalism, when the military industrial complex had collapsed and the West was looting Russia’s natural resources at will.

The bottom line: the Pentagon barks, and the Russia/China/Iran strategic caravan goes on.

The Myth of the Irish Recovery

Cillian Doyle

Dublin, Ireland.

Have you heard the news? Dear old Ireland is in the midst of a great economic recovery. Well, that’s according to the government, the mainstream media, the multinational sector and even Angela Merkel. Yes, one by one they have been lining up to cheer on the poster boy of European austerity. Their hearty tale goes something like this; after experiencing one of the greatest economic shocks in history, Ireland having swallowed the austere medicine mandated by the Troika became – in defiance of all economic logic – the fastest growing economy in Europe (see graph 1 of Eurostat data).

Our Prime Minister Enda Kenny talks of a ‘Celtic Phoenix’ rising from the ashes. The domestic and international media have been crowing ‘Ireland is on the way back’, ‘Economic recovery keeps on motoring’ and ‘Ireland shows struggling Europe the way ahead’. The multinationals (MNCs) think things are going so well we should be giving the rich tax cuts again – something the government is all for. Whilst Angela Merkel has credited us as a ‘tremendous success story’ – one the austerity averse Greeks should be emulating.

But alas, this is just one version of events, and there is certainly another, albeit a less publicised and more depressing account. This is what could be described as the everyday experience of ordinary Irish people. It’s by no means the tale of triumph over adversity that the government are trumpeting. On the contrary, it is one of ongoing economic hardship, tragedy and farce.

The supposed ‘recovery’ that our leaders are harping on about is completely alien to the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who have been consistently taking to the streets to protest against their policies. It’s alien to the ever growing number of people who are in long term mortgage arrears and face losing their homes, or to the people who have already lost theirs. And it’s alien to 10,000 people who just this month snapped up the entire allocation of work visas for Canada in less than 12 minutes, therein joining the 170,000 of our young people who have left since 2010.

So how do we reconcile these two contrasting/conflicting accounts? Could it be the case that a recovery is indeed underway but has yet to ‘trickle’ down to all sectors of the economy? Or is deprivation and stagnation a harsh reality which is merely being hidden by headline growth figures which just don’t add up?

Pliable Stats vs Stubborn Facts

The government are quick to point to our growth figures of 4.8% GDP and 4% GNP, but what does this really tell us? In short, not much. Ireland’s unique position in the global tax avoidance operation has rendered the standard economic indicator of GDP (gross domestic product) useless as measures of the health of the economy. It’s been well documented that the profit shifting activities of the multinational sector (MNCs) based here leads to massive distortions in this statistical indicator. So our politicians, analysts and commentators turned to GNP (gross national product) for a more accurate picture of the economy’s health.

But GNP is just GDP after we control for all the money that is flowing in and out of the country in a given period – and it too suffers from the same kind of distortions from MNCs profit shifting. Take for example the case of management consultancy firm Accenture who, along with several other big international groups, chose to relocate their headquarters to Ireland.

Now such ‘headquarters’ might consist of a small office with a single phone in it (see: Brassplate Company), which might lead you to believe makes it of zero consequence to domestic economy – but you’d be wrong. Even if such firms engage in no economic activity beyond their one roomed office, their massive profits are still recorded in the national accounts (GDP and GNP).

Then there’s issue of the major financial institutions located in the Irish Financial Services Centre (IFSC) which are currently managing some of the world’s largest investment funds. The Irish Funds Industry Association (IFA) recently announced that ‘Assets domiciled in Ireland in 2014 have reached a new high of €1.6 trillion‘. This is worth more than the entire value of all final goods and services produced in Australia last year.

And whilst you might be thinking that sounds great, the effect on the real economy has been negligible – aside from the distortions to our GNP. But don’t take my word for it, it was the Central Bank that stated ‘Financial Sector developments, which are for the most part unrelated to the domestic economy, account for a significant portion of the rise in GNP’.

So right about now you might be feeling like GDP and GNP offer us no great insight into the health of the real Irish economy, but let me tell, it gets worse. The methodology by which the national accounts (GDP and GNP) are compiled was recently changed to inflate the figures. How did they do this? Well, now goods that are not even being made here are being counted as if they were.

Once again it’s the Irish Central Bank we can thank for drawing our attention to this little peculiarity as they point out that ‘goods owned by an Irish entity that are manufactured in and shipped from a foreign country are now recorded as Irish exports’. In other words, goods that never saw Irish soil or touched the hands of Irish workers are being recorded as if they were one of our exports. The only criteria being that they are owned by an ‘Irish entity’. A term so elastic it can be stretched to fit just about any purpose. I’d say you couldn’t make this stuff up, but it appears somebody already has.

The Slow Death of Domestic Demand

The only means of comprehending the true health of the economy is to look at domestic demand – or what’s left of it. Domestic demand, which makes up about three quarters of the economy, is comprised of government investment and expenditure on public services and consumer spending. Thus it doesn’t suffer from the kind of distortions attributable to the MNCs that the likes of GDP or GNP does.

The two graphs below illustrate perfectly the superficial nature of this ‘recovery’. As we can see domestic demand fell off a cliff in 2008 and has pretty much remained there. Consumer spending – which is the largest component of domestic demand – is actually below 2009 levels. Given that disposable income has fallen by 20% since 2008, largely as a result of falling wages, rising taxes and cuts to welfare spending (in other words austerity), is it any wonder that the Irish Small and Medium Size Enterprise Association (ISME) just this month described the government’s recovery as ‘glacially slow and patchy’. But surely this was to be expected? If you depress people’s incomes to breaking point where’s your demand going to come from? And if you’ve got no demand, then you’ve got recovery.

The fact of the matter is you can’t tax and cut your way out of a recession in the same way that you can’t diet and starve your way out of a famine. But with over half a million Irish people now experiencing food poverty – try telling the government that.

A very ‘Irish’ Recovery

Have you ever heard the expression ‘that’s a bit Irish’? Collins English dictionary defines ‘Irish’ – in its adjective form – as something ‘ludicrous or illogical’. Well, judging by that standard, this is a very ‘Irish’ recovery.

Oh sure, there’s been a recovery for some. Ireland’s richest 250 individuals saw their combined wealth increase by 16% to a whopping 75 billion in the last year alone, so it’s fair to say they’re doing ok. Then there’s the multinationals, whose massive profits continue to enjoy de facto tax immunity. And things are even looking up for the politicians, who are planning to give themselves a pay increase as recognition for masterminding this great ‘recovery’.

Call me old fashioned if you will, but to me a recovery isn’t a recovery until the lives of the people who make up the bulk of that economy start to improve. We still seem a long way away from that point. And for that reason most Irish people don’t believe in this recovery; because they don’t see it and they certainly don’t feel it.