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It will be interesting to see exactly which customs the Vatican is going to allow from the past rich five centuries of Anglican worship, life and thought. — Diarmaid MacCulloch...
Posted:2009-11-06 12:31:36 GMT
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of eastern European communism, international commentary has focussed on what these events meant for the spread of democracy and the disintegration of the authoritarian regimes modelled on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Such attention is me...rited: 1989 marked not just the fall of half a dozen or so communist ruling parties, and the onset of the the Soviet Union's own end of two...Read more
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-11-06 10:00:42 GMT
urbanity is the horizon of the modern, not to mention the postmodern condition — Iris Marion Young...
Posted:2009-11-05 15:29:58 GMT
Ivan Krastev: A political exhaustion Adam Szostkiewicz: The iron rule of history Vladimir Tismaneanu: The end and the beginning Krzysztof Bobinski: On the move Alexander Rahr: A great reversal Rein Müllerson: Old walls, new fences Emily Lau: An indelible mark Tibor Dessewffy: In the mirror of the future Neal A...scherson: How it ended Patrice de Beer: Two worlds Takeshi Inoguchi: A view across continents ------------ Ivan Krastev, Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia A political exhaustion Ivan Krastev is chair of the Centre...Read more
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-11-05 18:17:59 GMT
Democracy is a world of clashing viewpoints, fragmentary and conflicting interests where the overriding colour is grey, an endless search for compromise, eternal imperfection — Adam Michnik ...
Posted:2009-11-04 18:04:42 GMT
What amazes me now is how long it took us - we in the west - to see what was happening. For journalists, it was a case of a great story blotting out a world-changing one. The communist regimes of Europe were transforming themselves, quarrelling openly. In the first part of that year, the East Germans snarled at the Pol...es, the Hungarians hinted that they would license free political parties, the Czechoslovak regime became slightly more tolerant...Read more
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-11-04 16:37:49 GMT
1948 was a year of triumph and tragedy - triumph for the Jews and tragedy for the Arabs of Palestine. Israelis refer to the key event of that year as "the war of independence" whereas Palestinians refer to it as the nakba or the catastrophe. Each of the participants in the first Arab-Israeli war has its own narrative o...f what happened in that fateful year. In this article I shall look exclusively at the Israeli...Read more
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-11-04 15:54:15 GMT
What threatens us right now is over-communication - the tendency to know exactly in one part of the world what is going on in all other parts of the world — Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) ...
Posted:2009-11-02 14:04:42 GMT
The trial of Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Serbian nationalist regime in Bosnia in the early 1990s, resumed in The Hague on 27 October 2009. The accused initially refused to appear in court on the basis that he needed more time to prepare his defence, but announced in a letter to the presiding judge on 2 November that he would indeed be present to face the court at a procedural hearing...
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-11-03 16:52:32 GMT
Two decades have passed since the chain of dramatic events in east and central Europe that led to the accomplishment of what most had regarded as unthinkable: the collapse of communist regimes, the end of a system that had seemed destined to last forever. Indeed, the very idea of a post-communist situation appeared before 1989 to be utopian....
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-11-02 12:41:19 GMT
A number of events has projected Brazil into the headlines of international news, besides the traditional stories about violence, natural catastrophes or environmental issues. Behind this news-buzz is a deeper sense of the giant Latin American country as having in some elusive but unmistakable way "arrived" as a global player....
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-11-02 12:09:10 GMT
What were the revolutions of 1989? Timothy Garton Ash has a review article in the NYRB on a large clutch of accounts of that year, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the end of the Cold War. We know what they did - they led to the end of the Soviet Union and its bloc....
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-11-02 01:45:24 GMT
The term "global war on terror" has long since been dropped from the United States's official vocabulary. The phrase that came to be proposed as a replacement even when George W Bush was still in office, the "long war", has similarly fallen by the wayside, to be succeeded in March 2009 by a less overtly combative Pentagon formulation: "overseas contingency operation"....
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-11-02 00:57:00 GMT
"You've got just one year when they treat you right, and before they start worrying about themselves." The speaker was Lyndon B Johnson, laying out the facts of presidential life to his aide, Harry McPherson. ‘They'' were first, Congress, and second, the news media. "The third year", LBJ went on, " you lose votes ....
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-11-02 00:55:47 GMT
In the early hours of 2 November 1975, the body of Pier Paolo Pasolini – writer, poet, film director and one of Italy’s leading intellectuals – was found on wasteland in Ostia, just outside Rome. Several hours later, Pino “The Frog” Pelosi, a 17-year-old male prostitute, was arrested speeding along the Ostia seafront in Pasolini’s Alfa Romeo....
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-11-02 00:00:00 GMT
To oppose is to live / To oppose is to get a grip on the very self — Kaneko Mitsuhara (1895-1975)...
Posted:2009-10-31 04:04:42 GMT
The wave of arrests in Iran that followed the presidential election of 12 June 2009 means that many more Iranians are now experiencing the brutal treatment already endured by thousands of their fellow citizens. For the repressive response to the civic uprising that followed the shocking declaration of Mahmoud Ahmadinej...ad's landslide victory has many precedents in the thirty-year history of the Islamic Republic of Iran (as of its imperial predecessor). The capacity of the Iranian regime to render its prisoners...Read more
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-10-30 22:48:34 GMT
The lures and perils of gender activism in Afghanistan [1] Those of us who work on gender issues routinely lament their marginality to discussions of the global economy, conflict and politics. In Afghanistan, by contrast, I found myself in a context where there was an abundance- even an excess- of analysis and com...mentary, descending, at times, into "gender chatter".[2] I recall a vague sense of unease over the tone and content of some of these contributions. ...Read more
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-10-30 18:44:39 GMT
"You've got just one year when they treat you right, and before they start worrying about themselves." The speaker was Lyndon B Johnson, laying out the facts of presidential life to his aide, Harry McPherson. ‘They'' were first, Congress, and second, the news media. "The third year", LBJ went on, " you lose votes ....
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-10-30 06:22:47 GMT
This month's most surprising Nobel Prize winner was not Barack Obama - after all, every post-war Democrat President apart from Bill Clinton has won it - but Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist from the University of Indiana who picked up the coveted Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Science. Jamie Bartlett is hea...d of the independence programme at the think tank Demos. Not only is Ostrom the first female recipient, she is also...Read more
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-10-29 12:02:19 GMT
In a footnote to ‘the Meaning of Truth’ (published 100 years ago), William James suggested a thought experiment: Suppose what appears to be a loving young woman is really an ‘automatic sweetheart (merely programmed, as we would now say). ‘Would anyone regard her as a full equivalent?’ asks James, and robustly answers ‘Certainly not’ in full expectation of his readers’ total, immediate agreement....
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-10-29 11:37:43 GMT
"The Russians are microwaving our brains." The comment of my corner-shopkeeper in Tehran reflects a widely-held view about the state's use of powerful jamming signals to block foreign media. The blocking of key communication links has played a big part in the violent crackdown that followed Iran's R Tousi is the pseudonym of an Iranian writer election of 12 June 2009....
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-10-28 18:18:26 GMT
It is puzzling that obituary notices of Irving Kristol obviously intended to be positive designate him the "Godfather" of neo-conservatism. Likening this group of thinkers and writers to a gang of Mafiosi may or may not be accurate; it is certainly not flattering. In fact, the neo-conservative first generation aro...und Kristol behaved no differently than any group in joining to promote their own careers. Selflessness can be left to the saints, if any are around. Norman Birnbaum is University Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University Law Center. His last book was: After Progress: American Social Reform And European Socialism In The Twentieth Century, 2001. He is writing a memoir (From The Bronx To Oxford-And Not Quite Back.) Also on openDemocracy, Neo-conservatism: Irving Kristol's living legacy, US neo-cons jump the conservative ship Kristol was not an original thinker and never claimed to be one. The actual origins of neo-conservatism will provide material for historians for some time to come. Distinct streams of thought, in sometimes contradictory co-existence, made it up. Jewish Democrats with roots in the New Deal concluded that the Great Society had gone too far-especially with its programs of affirmative action for women and minorities. Technocratic sceptics like the political scientist James Q. Wilson thought that much government intervention failed and was socially counter-productive. Defenders of familial and religious values, often Catholic, thought that Americans should not trade their ethnic identities for what they saw as a sterile universalism. The theme of the superior wisdom of ordinary Americans triumphing over the unrealistic notions of educated elites was prominent. It contrasted with the views of the followers of the philosopher Leo Strauss, who did not think that citizenries could, or should, rule themselves. Yet they found themselves in the same movement. The neo-conservatives were at one with much of the nation in their backing of an aggressively interventionist foreign policy. The Jewish members were strong partisans of Israel, and opposed to agreements with the Soviet Union unless it allowed Jewish emigration. A highly selective idea of "human rights" was voiced by Daniel Patrick Moynihan when he was UN Ambassador. The neo-conservatives held that the US was the authentic revolutionary power in the world since we had achieved our ideals, legitimating our claims to global moral leadership. McGovern's pathetic appeal, "come home, America," implied that our revolution was unfulfilled, that progress remained to be accomplished. It was derided as a symptom of inner uncertainty, indeed weakness. Later, Reagan claimed that the US was "standing tall again." Perhaps there was a double anatomical reference, in which claims of national strength were compensations for the potency anxieties bothering many American males. Kristol himself was notably free of hyper-patriotism. He treated it as he dealt with religion-something politically useful but not binding on a superior observer like himself. To this was added, as the originally Democratic neo-conservatives drew away from their party, the idea of the efficiency and justness of the market. That was a favoured theme of Kristol---who appropriated the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Kristol was quite open in his appeals to American business to pay for the neo-conservative advocacy of the sovereignty of the market. He warned bankers and industrialists that the money they gave to the colleges and universities was wasted -indeed, was used by academics critical of capitalism to depict the benefactors of the academy as asocial and rapacious, if not worse. Kristol taught for many years at New York University, but persisted in depicting American higher education in bitterly negative terms. He even declared that our institutions were so remote from American tradition that they ignored the Federalist Papers---an assertion falsified by a cursory glance at any college or university catalogue. As for the anti-capitalism of the universities, it is singular that they produced economists who were, overwhelmingly and unthinkingly, partisans of the market. Once, at a symposium at the American Enterprise Institute at which the universities were anathematized, I asked why Kristol (and Lynne Cheney) were so fearful of students being indoctrinated by socially critical professors. Anyone who had spent much time in a classroom, I objected, would have encountered the obdurate resistance of American students to any ideas -left, right and center. Cheney replied somewhat lamely, but Kristol enjoyed the conceit. I concluded from his grin that he wished to communicate that he did not wish to be mistaken for being overly serious: we each, in our separate ways, saw through the game. Kristol's detractors make much of the fact that as a student at City College on the eve of the Second World War, he subscribed to the revolutionary views of Leon Trotsky. He substituted, they said, counter-revolution for revolution and so defended the existing order with the simplifying ardour with which he earlier sought to overthrow it. There, his critics are the simplifiers. Kristol's journey is a story of the upward social mobility of an entire generation, growing up in the Depression but presented after the war with openings for social ascent they might not have previously imagined, but which they were quick to seize. Kristol was not a gangster, but an instinctively gifted retailer-with great abilities at sensing new consumer demands. Like many successful merchants, he both identified with his customers---and was patronizing of them. His knowing smile and self-possession were quite unlike the missionary zeal that possessed, in contrapuntal Jewish and Irish tones, those close friends Norman Podhoretz and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Kristol in his journey through American (and British) society, acquired an indispensable elite trait: he learned to cool it. He had the long run very much in mind and the decisive steps in his career were quite calculated. I had a different path than my neo-conservative contemporaries. My father was a high school teacher and already quite assimilated to as much of American culture as was available to us in the Jewish Bronx. He had gone to City College in the early nineteen twenties, and I went to the City College high school, spent a term at City itself in the spring of 1942, and then left for a very different place, Williams College. Kristol's family was in the lower rungs of the garment business. The student body at City College (attended by Moynihan too) was if not entirely Jewish predominantly so, and I was able to experience the milieu at first hand in my term there. It was intellectually and politically intense---but so were Berkeley, Minnesota, and Harvard. What made City different was the direct connection of these immigrant offspring with the European experience, often the Ghetto experience, of their parents. They hoped, but could not be sure, that City would be a way station on their journey into the larger society-much of it, despite the New Deal, at the end of the thirties on economic and ethnic grounds closed to them. It is not surprising that they were fascinated by the varieties of revolutionary rhetoric. They knew of the torments of Nazi and Fascist Europe, had even heard of the Chinese Communists, and their debates about the Soviet Union and the nature of American exceptionalism were parts of a desperate effort to find a positive connection with history before it overwhelmed them. Many first learned of the rest of the nation when they joined the armed forces. Kristol has described the experience as curing him of belief in an American socialism: he did not find his fellow soldiers promising material for a cooperative commonwealth. Some, he said, were anti-Semitic---but this did not induce in Kristol the extremely acute Jewish self-consciousness of some of the Neo-Conservatives. He shrugged his shoulders, hoped that it would pass, and accepted it as part of the price for living in what was, after all, an exceptionally open society. That, at any rate, seemed to be his attitude when I first knew him (slightly) as an editor at Commentary in the forties. Commentary was founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945 Its founding editor, Elliot Cohen, did have an acute Jewish self-consciousness but he was also immersed in the mixed culture of New York. Commentary set about chronicling the situation of American Jewry just as many of the pre-war barriers were bending and breaking, in the academy, business and the professions, government and politics. The editors did not confine themselves to discussions of the struggles in Palestine, or within the Jewish community. They chronicled much of what was happening in the city and the country, and somewhat to their own surprise, found themselves publishing a national magazine. In the period, I had returned to Williams College from wartime work in New York at the Office of War Information and from 1947 to 1952 I was at graduate school in Harvard. I did not yet write for Commentary, but I read it. I knew one of the editors, Clement Greenberg, and he introduced me to Kristol. I did not see much of him but had the impression of someone, like all the rest of us, very determined about his career---and in strenuous pursuit of the spirit of the times. He, like Cohen and many of their contributors, found it in the new American empire. Much of Commentary was given to film and novel, to the dramas of urban and suburban living, to a running ethnography of post-war America. The great passion of the editors, however, was the integration of the Jewish community in the nation. The journal's articles in the years 1945-52 are a record of affirmation of the nation's new global role, accompanied by an unsentimental farewell to what were ceaselessly depicted as the illusions Read more
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-10-27 18:37:59 GMT
There is no change in our daily lives as revolutionary, or as taken for granted, as the transformation of food production in the past century. Scientific and technological advances have allowed us to feed a human population that doubled twice in the 20th century alone. While malnourishment and famine continue to haunt... many regions of the world, the mass starvation feared in the 1960s and 70s has been averted. Every revolution is first a thought in a man’s mind and this Green Revolution was born in the brain of the remarkable Dr. Norman Borlaug, who passed away at age 95 on September 12th. Dr. Borlaug’s quiet and tireless devotion to his cause was inspired by early experience with the effects of hunger. As a young man working for the U.S. Forestry Service, he met members of the Civilian Conservation Corps; these were men who had once nearly starved during the darkest days of the Great Depression. In later interviews, in the midst of the controversies inevitably born of great accomplishments, Borlaug would always bring his listeners and readers back to the core purpose of his decades of work – preventing our fellow men, women and children from suffering the pangs of hunger. In fact, some would say his singular dedication to this crusade may have blinded him to its long and short-term consequences in both the developed and developing worlds. Borlaug’s work began in Mexico, at the behest of an unusually farsighted government concerned about the country’s increasing importation of basic crops, such as wheat. The Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government helped fund Borlaug’s initial research efforts through the Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maiz y Trigo (CIMMYT). Borlaug and his colleagues created a high-yield dwarf variety of wheat; by reducing its height, the wheat could expend more energy on the production of the nutrient-rich grain. By the late 1950s, Mexico was producing enough wheat to become an exporter of the crop. This sudden transformation into a more food-independent economy was desperately needed in other developing nations; Borlaug was invited to India in 1966 to try to bring his miraculous crops to a country perilously balanced on the precipice of a massive famine. India’s population had exploded and was quickly outstripping food production capacity. This dire situation was dramatized by Paul Ehrlich in his apocalyptic book, “The Population Bomb.” He claimed it was a “fantasy” to believe India would be able to feed herself, and essentially suggested they resign themselves to a horrific level of starvation. Ehrlich may have been a bit overzealous in his Malthusian soothsaying, but to feed its hungry mouths, India would have had to convert another 100 million acres of land into farmland using the methods available in the 1950s and 60s. Instead, thanks to the painstaking introduction of high-yield crops (initially 18,000 tons of wheat seed were imported directly from Mexico) and the accompanying fertilizers and pesticides, much of this land has been spared and India became self-sufficient in cereal production. Borlaug’s work in India and Pakistan earned him a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. By 1971, these countries had doubled their annual wheat production. But Borlaug’s work did not end there. Africa was his next challenge, and a daunting one. It is the only part of the world where food production has not kept pace with population growth, and where even in the 21st century, it is estimated that one third of the continent’s population suffers from hunger. Borlaug’s efforts in Africa were hindered for a number of reasons, such as lack of basic infrastructure, but also the resistance to his mission on the part of some activists and environmentalists in the developed world. High-yield crops require the use of certain fertilizers and pesticides to survive; since these hybrids did not evolve naturally, they produce grain more efficiently, but this in turn means they need more water and fertilizer since they use up soil nutrients faster. The controlled use of pesticides is also necessary though the genetically modified varieties carry genes that increase their resistance to certain diseases. Agronomists like Borlaug saw this as a positive development since it would encourage more controlled, specific use of pesticides rather than the blanket attempts made by farmers desperate to save a dying harvest from weeds or insects or fungi. The Rockefeller Foundation distanced itself from Borlaug in his attempts to bring new farming techniques to Africa; the rising tide of anti-GM sentiment helped to make these projects politically unpalatable. But Borlaug refused to give up. With the help of a Japanese philanthropist, Riyoichi Sasakawa, and former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, Borlaug started to apply his techniques in Ghana and Sudan. The results were as impressive as they had been in Asia, but global concerns over genetically modified food slowed the progress of this project. In an interview with Reason magazine in 2000, when asked if it was wrong to cross genetic barriers between species, Borlaug replied: “…Mother nature has crossed species barriers. Take the case of wheat. Today’s modern red wheat variety is made up of three groups of seven chromosomes, and each of those three groups came from a different wild grass. So modern bread wheat is the result of crossing three species barriers, a kind of natural genetic engineering.” To Borlaug, not only was fear of genetically modified crops unfounded, it was dangerous to those living in the developing world since it could prevent their access to the biotechnology that had allowed the advanced industrialized nations to feed themselves – in fact, overfeed themselves – for more than fifty years. Contemporary concerns about GMOs are often focused less on their possible harmful health effects and more on who controls their production and use. Borlaug conducted and disseminated his research with the support of governments, non-profit organizations and universities - not under the auspices of a for-profit company. In 2003, Borlaug expressed his concern about the shift from public to private-sector research in biotechnology, particularly its impact on universities and their independence (many U.S. public universities are under contract to private seed companies such as Monsanto for research). The shrinking number of large companies who monopolize the research and development of the technology behind our food supply is worrying to anyone who distrusts a lack of competition and transparency. A recent article in Scientific American noted that while some end-user agreements are necessary for protecting a company’s intellectual property rights (which are in place to foster innovation and research), today’s major agricultural technology giants not only limit what can be done with their seeds, but also who can research them. These companies therefore have eliminated the possibility of independent research being conducted on the seeds they produce and sell all over the world. This has also limited the production of more diverse genetically modified crops that could be planted in different terrains and climates. The large agritech companies focus on the production of just three crops grown monoculturally – corn, soy and wheat. Borlaug was an advocate of crop diversity since he believed maintaining and studying our biodiversity was key to the development of more scientifically enhanced crops in the future. The Rockefeller Foundation may have avoided Borlaug and his farming strategies in the 1990s, but in 2006 they began a program in conjunction with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop high-yield seeds for Africa, called the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. The results of programs like this one will have a long-term impact not just on Africa’s ability to feed herself, but also on improving social, economic and political conditions. In India, there have recently been calls for a “new” Green Revolution since many farmers have given up sowing wheat and turned to more profitable export crops such as coffee or mushrooms. There is also growing concern about water tables in many parts of India and Pakistan; critics of high-yield crops point out that their thirst has dried up some regions where nearly all the available water was used for irrigation. This brings us to the sustainability of Borlaug’s techniques. Industrial agriculture is yet one more modern activity dependent on the use of that frustrating, finite resource – petroleum. The inorganic fertilizers that have helped to feed burgeoning populations are developed using fossil fuels, and of course, the transportation of crops from farm to supermarket consumes oil as well. The close ties between food and energy resources were highlighted in the so-called “food crisis” that began in 2007 and was marked by steeply rising prices for basic food products around the globe. Governments and companies keen to encourage the growth of corn and other crops for biofuels shifted the balance in production, which was one of the key factors in the price spike. However, the legacy of Borlaug should be considered more broadly: he showed that crops can be engineered, both through hybridisation and genetic modification, to attain specific goals. When Borlaug was active, the goal was yield. That is now changing: we are adding sustainability as an objective, which means new crops that are particularly efficient at converting scarce inputs into nutritional outputs. The socioeconomic consequences of the Green Revolution are manifold, and are not even entirely clear yet. Undoubtedly, the hastening urbanization of the world has partly been propelled by the mechanization and industrialization of agriculture, which has reduced its significance as a source of labor in most economies today. The rising price of food has caused alarm in the past few years sRead more
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-10-26 16:00:34 GMT
The decision to restage Afghanistan's presidential election on 7 November 2009, following serious doubts over the integrity of the result on 20 August, takes place amid intense consultation over the international community's military and political strategy in the country. Pierre Schori is director-general of the ...Fundacion para las Relaciones Internacionales y el Dialogo Exterior (FRIDE) in Madrid and former United Nations special envoy in Côte d'Ivoire Also by Pierre Schori in openDemocracy: "Europe and the Arab world: divided souls" (30 May 2007) "Europe's global challenge: three crucial months" (9 September 2009) - with Simon Maxwell, Paul Engel & Dirk Messner Whatever the final outcome of the lengthy electoral process, a broad rethinking of the current international approach is required. This will need to take account of a wide range of voices and perspectives, including from Europe and Afghanistan's neighbours as well as from within the country itself. This rethinking will be effective only if it takes a hard look at the problems in Afghanistan, sees them in the round, and establishes a clear sense of the roles and responsibilities of the various international organisations. In this light, the result of the debate among President Obama's closest advisers over the recommendation in General Stanley A McChrystal's report for a sharp increase of 40,000 additional troops is important. If such an escalation were to take place, among its effects would be to expose further the divergence of roles of the key international forces: between the Nato/International Security Assistance Force (ISAF's) mandate to support the government in Kabul, the United States's operation to eradicate insurgency, and the political mandate of the United Nations. In particular, it would reinforce both the reality and the perception that the US is calling the shots in Afghanistan - and that Nato and the UN have little influence on the overall strategy. The international intervention in Afghanistan raises three questions that are relevant to the future of peacekeeping missions more widely: * Can external forces help bring political stability? * How effective can the role of the UN be in such a process? * How can "outsourcing" stabilisation to regional-security organisations support such a role? The cost of dysfunction A recent study of United Nations peacekeeping operations, which we have co-authored along with four colleagues at the Fundación para las Relaciones Internacionales y el Diálogo Exterior (FRIDE), considers these questions in relation to Côte d'Ivoire, Kosovo and Sierra Leone as well as Afghanistan (see Security Council resolutions under Chapter VII: Design, Implementation and Accountabilities, 29 September 2009). In the case of Afghanistan, it argues that Security Council resolutions have made the peace-enforcement operation legal, but that a combination of problems have made it ineffective and in some respects lacking in legitimacy. Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh is lecturer and director of the unit on human security at the Masters on Public Affairs in Sciences-Po, Paris The peace-building process in Afghanistan from early 2002 was not based on a genuine peace agreement, but on the assumption that the Taliban had been permanently defeated through military intervention before the UN authorised a security force (ISAF) and a political mission (the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). The state-building agenda then became increasingly challenged by both a resurgent Taliban and a series of institutional problems, of which three stand out. The first is an imbalance of resources and attention. The UN mission itself was underfunded, whereas the Nato-run military contingents - and even more so the US's Operation Enduring Freedom - were the recipients of inflated resources, personnel and equipment; the latter increased even more as the operation moved from security assistance to full-fledged combat. The role of the UN also became increasingly difficult to implement the tasks assigned to UNAMA expanded. It was expected to coordinate aid from a large and fragmented international community while at the same time implementing its own projects and advocating peace and reconciliation, all in an environment where insecurity, civilian casualties and institutional weaknesses were reversing the democratising gains made in the early post-Taliban period. The second problem is that the initial unanimity over intervention gradually dissipated with the resurgence of the Taliban and the deterioration of the security situation. Russia and China, both members of the UN Security Council, and numerous states in the global south began to question US actions on the ground. The third (and most fundamental) problem is that the short-term goal of counterinsurgency through war-fighting has continued to undermine the long-term objectives of state-building and peacekeeping. This alone means that peacekeeping is being conducted in a situation where there is no peace to keep. As a result the international community, by becoming engulfed in a reactive counterinsurgency, is losing its credibility to act as an independent peace-enforcer. Three challenges, two priorities The implication of these points is that three challenges must be met if peacekeeping operations are to succeed, in Afghanistan and elsewhere: * The question of impartiality * The division of responsibilities, and better cooperation, among political and military sectors * A more strategic role for the UN. First, the lack of impartiality that has hampered the effectiveness and legitimacy of the international presence in Afghanistan must be redressed. UNAMA and Isaf were created in 2002 to assist the new Afghan government, and thus neither can be considered neutral by design. The direct involvement of troops from some Security Council member-states in war-fighting further complicates the issue. The military operation is being waged on behalf of the Kabul government against insurgency, yet this insurgency has increased directly as a reaction to the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan. In the mind of many Afghans, the international community is a party to the war - a natural perception, given that the war against the Taliban on Afghan soil combines with the international "war on terror" and al-Qaida. This double war both adds a confusing element and increases the militarisation of the campaign at the expense of the focus on a political settlement. The greater the number of US and Nato troops in Afghanistan, the larger the resentment, resistance and violence. Second, the relationship of the United Nations and regional security actors such as Nato needs to be recalibrated. In an optimistic scenario, the two can cooperate through a division of labour: security organisations clear the terrain while the UN can focus on organising elections, state-building and delivery of humanitarian and development assistance. Such a division of responsibilities is far from clear in Afghanistan, however. The foray of the military into development and humanitarian-aid delivery, as well as the reaction of insurgents to the massive military presence and operations, have ensured that the political and development role of the UN is - at best - ineffective. Third, the role of the UN is in the end vital to bringing stability to a volatile region. The UN alone can be perceived as an impartial actor able to act as a legitimate third party, broker negotiations within Afghanistan and lead a political strategy for the region. In practice, a role of this kind for the UN should entail the international community finding ways to put Afghanistan and Afghans at the heart of peace-building efforts and the creation of a regional solution. Afghanistan's neighbours are after all interlinked in a common regional-security complex. A unified and UN-led political strategy, in coordination with key international and regional stakeholders (Russia, China, Iran, and Pakistan, in addition to the US and Europe), could address the main regional challenges and create a peace-conducive atmosphere. To this end, the UN should appoint contact-groups and special envoys responsible for shuttle-diplomacy and strategic interventions. The re-run of the Afghan presidential elections, and Barack Obama's decision over troop escalation, will be important moments. But the implication of the above analysis is that the international community as a whole now has two pressing priorities in relation to Afghanistan: * To transform the current international presence in the country from a heavily militarised to a civilian one * To shift its foreign direction to a locally-owned enterprise with a regional buy-in. Among openDemocracy's many articles on Afghanistan: Hamish Nixon, "Afghanistan's election world" (13 September 2005) Irfan Husain, "Kabul vs Islamabad: a war of words" (16 March 2006) Marco Niada, "Afghanistan: the last chance" (12 July 2006) Antonio Giustozzi, "The resurgence of the neo-Taliban", 15 December 2007) Daniel Korski, "Europe's Afghan test" (22 January 2008) Kanchan Lakshman, "India in Afghanistan: a presence under pressure" (11 July 2008) Shaun Gregory, "The Pakistan army and the Afghanistan war" (25 November 2008) Antonio Giustozzi, "The neo-Taliban: a year on" (11 December 2008) Mariano Aguirre, "Barack Obama and Afghanistan: a closer look" (8 April 2009) Paul Rogers, "Afghanistan: the point of decision" (27 August 2009) Paul Rogers, "Afghanistan: limits of military power" (18 September 2009) Paul Rogers, "Afghanistan: from insurgency to insurrection" (8 October 2009) Plus: Paul Rogers's weekly column has tracked and analysed the war since SRead more
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-10-26 04:29:00 GMT
It is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks — Alan Turing
Posted:2009-10-26 14:04:42 GMT
On 10 October 2009 in the city of Zürich representatives of Armenia and Turkey signed two crucial protocols: one on the development of bilateral relations and another on the establishment of diplomatic relations. The long confrontation between the two has involved a closed land frontier and ideological warfare over th...e political dimension of history and the historical dimension of politics. The question is whether this marks the beginning of a new stage of bilateral relations? The significance of these two documents should not be exaggerated. There have been many examples, including recently, of situations when even the award of the Nobel prize to advocates of compromise has not guaranteed that the peace process did not stagnate or, even break down. The best example of this is the situation in the Middle East, where the spirit of Oslo has been replaced by new local conflicts with new elements. A less well-known example is Cyprus, where the so-called "Annan plan" (the April 2004 unification referendum to be held in both parts of the divided island) increased expectations, but the negotiations then ran into the sand for the next 4 years. ((There were not many improvements, even when they re-opened. Moreover at the parliamentary elections in the unrecognised Turkish Republic of North Cyprus (19 April 2009) the victors were the nationalists from the rightwing National Unity Party, who garnered slightly more than 44% of the vote. Unlike the situation in the Middle East, the Cyprus conflict is a "frozen" confrontation inside the European Union (the Republic of Cyprus, which is recognised worldwide, acceded to the EU in 2004).)) Not all the documents for action have yet been admitted. The parliaments of both countries will then have to ratify them. The Armenian parliament is controlled by the party of power (the republicans) and its allies in the government coalition (Prosperous Armenia and Rule of Law {Orinats Yerkir}). Parliament could well support the efforts of President Serzh Sarkisyan and his team, though the Turkish deputies might start talking very tough. The Azeri factor They have their reasons: the protocols make no mention of the Nagorny Karabakh conflict, or of the need to move to a solution of the Armenia-Azerbaidjan conflict. There is another, shadowy, player in the Armenia-Turkey rapprochement: Azerbaidjan stands to lose considerably if its main strategic ally, Turkey, establishes a new relationship with Yerevan, one that does not depend on the dynamics of the Karabakh conflict and the whole complex relationship between the two former republics of Soviet Transcaucasia. In Turkey itself the defenders of the "Azeri cause" play an important part, attempting to influence the course of the peace process. Just before the signing in Zürich Cemil Çiçek, the Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey, emphasised the strategic importance of the Azeri-Turkish relationship thus: "This is not just a relationship based on mutual interest. There is nothing more important for Turkey than friendship with Azerbaidjan". Armenian opposition But the situation inside Armenia should not be idealised either. Sarkisyan and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs are up against stiff opposition in parliament from the Heritage party and the oldest political party in Armenia, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun), the ruling party during Armenia's first independence in 1918-20. The main challenge facing today's government is not the parliamentary opposition, but a conglomeration of opposition groups outside parliament. These are united under the umbrella of the Armenian National Congress (ANC), led by the charismatic Levon Ter-Petrosyan, the first president of Armenia. He is a brilliant orator and polemicist with experience of confronting the government in the streets. This was acquired during perestroika, when he was fighting for Armenian self-determination in Nagorny Karabakh. The Dashnaki lay claim to the "historical brand" and the role of a singular kind of defender of the Armenian tradition. The leader of the ANC tries to portray himself as the founding father and protector of the values of the third Republic, which arose out of the ashes of Soviet Armenia. This is why Ter-Petrosyan's team reacted very negatively to Sarkisyan's October tour of the Armenian diaspora ("we have first and foremost to consider the citizens of the Republic of Armenia"). Were these various protest groups to unite in support of Turkey, the peace progress could be very considerably complicated. The achievement thus far For all this, the signing of the two protocols is not just a significant step forward in the Armenia-Turkey reconciliation process. It is an event of crucial importance, if only because the two countries have taken on political and legal obligations. This is not football diplomacy, nor an exchange of declarations and articles of policy, nor even a road map, which would sketch only the outline of a peace process. There is a definite time frame for implementing the proposals enshrined in the protocols. In the protocol on the development of bilateral relations Ankara and Yerevan "agree to open their common border within a period of two months from the time the Protocol comes into force". In the protocol on diplomatic relations, the parties "have agreed to establish diplomatic relations as of the date of the entry into force of this Protocol in accordance with the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961 and to exchange diplomatic missions". Both the protocols come into force on the first day of the month following the exchange of the instruments of ratification. The creation of a working group headed by the two ministers of foreign affairs, charged with preparing the ground for an intergovernmental commission (and its sub-commissions) is planned two months after the protocol on the development of bilateral relations comes into force. It is not just the tone, but the language of the conversation between Yerevan and Ankara that has changed. The parties have moved on from words to implementing what has been planned and signed. Meanwhile, the Turks are now arguing among themselves about Armenia. The same can be said of Armenia. This gives some hope that the implementation of points laid down in the protocols will start soon. Possibly not exactly at the stipulated time, but a start will be made. Pragmatic motivation This brings us to what is probably the most important theme of the Armenia-Turkey rapprochement. The signing of the protocols in Zurich is yet another confirmation of what has already become a truism (though no less meaningful for that) - "never say never". Armenian and Turkish diplomats have shown yet again that even former enemies can, with enough good will, find common interests and points of contact. This is not the first reconciliation of two historical enemies. It has been done by Greece and Turkey, Bulgaria and Turkey, Poland and Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania, Germany and Russia and Hungary and Rumania - not to mention the reconciliation between Israel and Germany and the transformation into EU allies of such historical opponents as Germany and France. We are of course not talking of reconciliation in the spirit of that intelligent cartoon pacifist, Leopold the Cat. A historical reconciliation has first and foremost to meet the national needs of both parties, as well as being politically viable. Reconciliation for its own sake is unlikely to be of any interest to pragmatic politicians. In the light of this, it is extremely important to analyse Yerevan and Ankara's motivation and to understand the logic behind the change of landmarks which has taken place in the diplomatic approaches of the two neighbouring states. Before this "détente" President Serzh Sarkisyan of Armenia was regarded by many as continuing the tough stance of his predecessor Robert Kocharyan. We should not forget that Sarkisyan has occupied key positions in Armenia's security agencies, according to the more conservative part of the republican establishment, which is always professionally suspicious of a neighbouring state. In 1989-93 he was head of the Committee of Self Defence of Nagorny Karabakh, in 1993-5 he was head of the Department of National Security and in 1996-9 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Security. This impressive list makes it quite clear that we are not dealing with a liberal or a dove. But this is exactly why he has a much clearer understanding of Armenia's complex geopolitical situation. Turkey's land blockade, the closed border with Azerbaidjan, the unresolved conflict with Nagorny Karabakh, the two "windows on the world" - Georgia and Iran - which the longstanding conflicts between Russia and Georgia and America and Iran had made so unreliable. In these circumstances improving relations with Turkey (by establishing diplomatic relations and re-opening 350km of land frontier) could have hived off the whole complex of Ankara-Yerevan relations from the Nagorny Karabakh conflict, into which it had been locked since 1993. As both Washington and Moscow had signalled their interest in this, the Armenian diplomats tried to realise the project of opening a third window on to the world via Turkey. Although the question of relations between Armenia and Turkey has not been completely separated from the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaidjan, it is indicative that the situation in Nagorny Karabakh does not figure in the texts of the two protocols. This makes it clear that Turkish diplomacy too has its reasons for improving relations with its neighbour. These reasons are pragmatism. Firstly, Turkey has outgrown its position as elder brother to Azerbaidjan and is attempting to reposition itself in the Caucasus by "resetting the problem button" with its neighbours. This strateRead more
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-10-23 15:00:24 GMT
Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for capturing the world's attention and giving its people ‘hope for a better future.' There is humour here. Bush punished those deemed guilty of bad intentions, i.e., those who may harm the United States. Obama is rewarded for good intentions, i.e., for what virtuous deeds he ma...y accomplish. The emotion of hope points to another connection between them. Obama, like Bush, is a vehicle of emotional marketing or branding. The product is the same-Brand America-only the emotions used to sell it differ. Richard Marsden is an Associate Professor at Canada's open university, the Centre for Integrated Studies at Athabasca University, Alberta. Author of The Nature of Capital: Marx after Foucault, (Routledge 1999), he is now writing a book on The Business of EmotionWith Bush, it was fear. With Obama, it is hope. They have more in common than meets the eye. Both emotions concern unknown, future events. Fear entails a belief that the undesired situation (terrorist attacks on the U.S.) is probable. Hope entails a belief that the desired situation-whatever it might be-is probable. They are emotional twins. No hope without fear. No fear without hope. They are opposing imagined futures. All that changes is the balance between them. Bush and Obama are Janus-faces of the United States. Having frightened us half to death, now America wants us to be hopeful. How does this rebranding work? Emotional marketing works by permeating the thing to be sold with an emotional persona, woven from verbal and visual stories that simulate those emotions most likely to induce consumers to buy. As one interacts with the brand, one participates in the story, absorbing the brand's emotions. Emotional marketing works with just about anything that can be taken to market, from pickup trucks to iPods. It also works with politicians, especially U.S. Presidents and their wars. The Anglo-American war against Iraq was sold to the American public using these same emotional marketing techniques. The Bush Administration waited until the fall of 2002 to begin the drumbeats of war, because the summer is not a good time to roll out a ‘new product' (Andrew Card, September 2002). Republicans and Democrats, it is often said, target two different body organs, the heart and the head. Republicans have known for decades that it is the heart, not the head, which makes voting decisions. It took Democrats a while to realize that they can win the argument and yet lose the election. Obama's ‘hope' proved the ideal emotion to succeed Bush's fear. One attraction of hope to Americans is its religious overtones. It is one of the three Christian virtues, along with faith and charity. Obama's speeches are actually sermons. For the past four years, a graduate of the Society of Jesus, Jon Favreau, has crafted them with him. These speeches or sermons weave together the new Brand America. It is widely believed that Obama is a fine orator, but this is false. Orators think through speaking, improvising upon the briefest of notes, as their thoughts and feelings interact with their audience. Malcolm X was an orator. George Galloway is an orator, as was Michael Foot. Obama is undoubtedly a man of many fine qualities, but he is no orator. In itself, this is hardly a criticism. Good orators can be bad politicians, just as good politicians can bad orators. In this context, the point to note about oratory is that it is a test of the speaker's authenticity. The audience has a basis for distinguishing between truth and lies, realities from appearance, deception from sincerity. You cannot fake oratory. Words and feelings must resonate. If they don't, the performance falls flat. Obama reads speeches, crafted with Jon Favreau, projected on to a pair of transparent teleprompters which stand between him and his audience. His attention moves from one to the other as he speaks. Their transparency is intended to give the impression that Obama is thinking on his feet and to conceal that he is reading from a script. His reliance on teleprompters has become somewhat of a joke, even among his supporters. If he can avoid it, he will not utter a public word without them. And without them, as a public speaker, he is quite ordinary. Obama simulates oratory. As Baudrillard might put it, simulation is a reality in its own right, one that muddies the distinction between true and false, authentic and imaginary. What is true of the form is true of the content. Simulated oration facilitates this rebranding, for it makes it difficult to ask, what is authentic and what is imaginary? The ‘product'-the ‘new, improved' United States-is scripted to the letter, tirelessly rehearsed, and tailored to the expectations and prejudices of the target audience, whether it is in Berlin, Cairo or Pittsburgh. The central emotion in this rebranding of the United States, this hope, warrants scrutiny. It is not such a noble emotion. Other recent articles on Barack Obama on openDemocracy: "Barack Obama's great test" (30 September 2009) "Barack Obama's world" (16 July 2009) First, to hope is to expect to be delivered of something one wants, but does not have. The less we have, the greater the capacity to hope. This is why lotteries are popular with the poor. There is little ‘hopeful' about hope; it is a symptom of deprivation. The worse things get, the more we cling to hope. Things must be grim indeed for Obama to be awarded a Nobel prize for giving the ‘world's people', no less, ‘hope for a better future'. Second, hope entails pleasant feelings of optimism about the future and these make it easier for us to cope with our own hardship today. We can more readily suffer now if we think we are going to reap the benefit later. Obama's speeches about hope make his followers feel good. They enjoy the hoped for event in advance. It's the ideal emotion for Americans, as their country implodes. Third, hope about what exactly? ‘Hope for a better future' is broad enough to encompass everything from getting away with robbing a bank to finding a cure for cancer. A multitude of ill-defined, and probably conflicting, hopes centre on Obama. His attraction is that he is hope personified. He is the ‘blessed one', a bestower of hope. Hope was once a benediction given by God; now President Obama gives it. Fourth, Obama regards the Nobel Prize as a ‘call to action'. Whose action? Do not expect much from his followers, for hope is an opiate. It encourages deference, passivity, and political inaction. Only in this sense is hope peaceful and Obama's Nobel prize well-deserved. Hope might be more congenial company than fear, but they are equally useless guides to action. To hope is to gamble on deliverance in the future. It is the perfect complement to America's casino capitalism. We need to see things with equanimity, as they actually are, not how we, or others, would like them to be. Look to what the United States is and does, not just what its president says. Two corporate political parties take it in turns governing and call it change. The Obama presidency re-brands this merger of corporate and State power and calls it ‘change you can believe in'. The quality of his person and the sincerity of his intentions are not paramount. Obama is not the captain of a sailboat plotting a new course and direction. He is the president of heavily militarised corporate State in deep crisis-and States are causal powers unto themselves. His room for manoeuvre is limited. Obama is the marketing face of this rebranded American State. His moral sermons distract attention from the immorality of much of what the United States does, to its own people and anyone who fails to bend a knee in submission. Between their lines is the same old America-the-virtuous, with the responsibility for imposing its goodness on the rest of the world. The future lasts a long time. As Bush discovered, fear does not. As Obama will discover, nor does hope. Average rating (0 votes) Rate this: ---Excellent!Great!GoodQuite goodNot so great Read more
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-10-23 14:50:27 GMT
A number of recent developments at the United Nations have been welcomed as significant reassertions of the importance of multilateral diplomacy. Barack Obama's speech at the general assembly on 23 September 2009, followed a day later by the UN Security Council's unanimous resolution in favour of nuclear disarmament, ...are but two events that highlight the central role the UN can play in providing a means for states to work with one another. James Ker-Lindsay is senior research fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE). His books include Kosovo: The Path to Contested Statehood in the Balkans (IB Tauris, 2009) and EU Accession and UN Peacemaking in Cyprus (Palgrave, 2005) Also by James Ker-Lindsay in openDemocracy: "Cyprus: walk, don't run" (22 February 2009) There is a real danger, however, that such moves have come too late. For the UN's multilateral potential has already suffered great damage - and not always at the hands of the usual suspects (such as Iran or North Korea). Indeed, it is arguable that the single most significant challenge to the organisation's authority in recent times has been led by the western members of the Security Council: Britain, France and the United States. In particular, their decision to recognise Kosovo, following its unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia in February 2008, marked a major - perhaps irreparable - break with the established rules of UN politics. Such a statement may seem unduly harsh, if not a gross exaggeration. After all, climate change, nuclear proliferation and the conflicts in the middle east and Afghanistan would all rank as more serious threats to human peace and security than a relatively insignificant issue in the western Balkans. But the argument here is not about the magnitude of the threat but the erosion of UN authority. And if the UN is considered as the supreme forum for international cooperation of matters of peace and security, the handling of Kosovo has dealt a great blow to the UN's authority. Even the invasion of Iraq does not compare, for in that case the decision was at least based on a particular reading of a UN Security Council resolution. In the case of Kosovo, by contrast, the problem was that action was taken to bypass the Security Council altogether. The process The UN Security Council authorised the start of future-status talks between the Serbian government and the Kosovo Albanian leadership in autumn 2005; it appointed Martti Ahtisaari, the former president of Finland, to lead the talks. Ahtisaari decided that there was no alternative to independence - an option bitterly opposed by Serbia - and thus set to work drafting a proposal to this end. Also in openDemocracy on Kosovo and the region: Julie Mertus, "Slobodan Milosevic: myth and responsibility" (16 March 2006) TK Vogel, "Kosovo: a break in the ice" (2 February 2007) Marko Attila Hoare, "Kosovo: the Balkans' last independent state" (12 February 2007) Vicken Cheterian, "Serbia after Kosovo" (18 April 2007) Eric Gordy, "Serbia's Kosovo claim: much ado about..." (2 October 2007) Paul Hockenos, "Kosovo's contested future" (16 November 2007) Juan Garrigues, "Kosovo's troubled victory" (7 December 2007) Ginanne Brownell, "Kosovo's Serbs in suspension" (10 December 2007) Mary Kaldor, "The Balkans-Caucasus tangle: states and citizens" (9 January 2008) John O'Brennan, "Kosovo: the hour of Europe" (14 January 2008) Timothy William Waters, "Kosovo: the day after" (18 February 2008) Robert Elsie, "Kosova and Albania: history, people, identity" (25 February 2008)Florian Bieber, "Kosovo: one year on" (17 February 2009) This approach was troubling on two counts. First, in making no effort to reach a solution acceptable to both sides, it broke with established principles of conflict-resolution. Instead, one side was given everything it wanted, and the other side told that it should accept it. Many officials defended this decision by arguing that there was no other option, because the wars of the 1990s in the region had made reconciliation impossible. This is a weak argument. The same line of reasoning, after all, is not applied to other groups around the world who have suffered persecution at the hands of a larger or more powerful ethnic group (the Tamils of Sri Lanka, the Kurds of Turkey or Iraq, for example); and the claim that Kosovo's position in Yugoslavia supported its right to statehood alongside the six republics (Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia) does not hold up. Second, the decision to propose independence marked an important departure from international practice on the creation of new states. Ahtisaari, by proposing statehood against Belgrade's wishes, undermined the principle enshrined in the UN charter of the territorial integrity of states. This prompted Russia's then representative at the UN, Vitaly Churkin, to suggest that it was the most important issue to come before the organisation in the past decade. In response, many would see another right embodied in the UN charter - that of self-determination - as supporting Kosovo's independence. But this is not the position of western officials, who have instead consistently argued that the case for independence is rooted in unique factors arising from the collapse of Yugoslavia - something that many other groups around the world could equally claim. The rules The Russian government, influenced by these considerations (as well as other, perhaps less honourable, intentions) decided to block a resolution implementing Martti Ahtisaari's proposals when they were brought before the UN Security Council. Moscow held fast to its position against numerous pressures and inducements (including the offer of a further series of talks). In the end, the three western members of the Security Council - after Russia's veto of the Ahtisaari proposals in the UNSC, and amid a deteriorating situation in Kosovo itself - decided that there was no alternative but to let Kosovo go its own way without UN approval. The serious problem is that, in the context of a debate on UN authority, this argument has no validity. The permanent members' right to block decisions in the Security Council, whatever problems this may cause to the decision-making process, is also enshrined within the UN charter - and thus a fundamental cornerstone of international law. It cannot merely be ignored. Britain, France and the United States all expect their decisions to veto resolutions to be respected and accepted; even if it is deeply unpopular and isolates them in the council. If the sanctity of the UN system is to be preserved, the same principle must apply to all. True, it is inherently troubling and uncomfortable to see powerful states such as Russia blocking UNSC decisions on grounds of selfish national interest or Realpolitik. But Moscow has the same legal right as the other permanent members to express a view and cast a veto; and the UN's integrity cannot be retained if the will of one permanent member is simply ignored. The UN system desperately needs reform, but until this is achieved the rules it operates under should be observed. The repair The decision of three permanent members of the Security Council to recognise Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence without an explicit council resolution was understandable in terms of the regional situation in the Balkans, and may have been done with the best of intentions. It has also severely undermined the UN and opened the way for others to follow suit. It was all too apparent that Russia was able to use the decision of Britain, France and the United States in justification for its own recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in August 2008. If the western members can choose when to ignore the Security Council and the principles of international law when it suits them, so too can Russia - and China. Indeed, in an era when the balance of power is shifting in international affairs and new leaders are emerging on the world stage, it is ever more important to ensure that the rule of law and the principles established over sixty years are bolstered rather than weakened. The evidence of renewed commitment to the strengthening of the United Nations as a global actor, including from the Barack Obama administration, is welcome. The question is whether it is too late to repair the damage that has already been done - and if not, how to do it? Average rating (0 votes) Rate this: ---Excellent!Great!GoodQuite goodNot so great Read more
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-10-23 14:45:35 GMT
The president of Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, is guaranteed to be re-elected for a fifth term in the country's presidential election on 25 October 2009. This certain outcome both reveals the authoritarianism of this north African and Arab country and underlines how far the international community continues to ac...cept such a reality without question. Amel Boubekeur is associate scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Centre. Her work includes (co-edited with Olivier Roy) Whatever Happened to the Islamists?: Salafis, Heavy Metal Muslims, and the Lure of Consumerist Islam (C Hurst / Columbia University Press, 2009) Tunisia is a distinct case within the region: it does not formally reject western democratic standards (unlike its neighbour Libya), it is committed to high standards of education and protection of women's rights, and its open-market policies and containment of Islamist tendencies provide its European and American partners with an economically stable and secure environment. At the same time, this model of governance allows the president - operating through his party, the Democratic Constitutional Rally (RCD) - to present a benign face to the world while consolidating firm control over the country. The pattern of elections is well-established: the opposition is allowed to run candidates, but Ben Ali (who came to power in November 1987 after declaring his successor and the modern state's founder, Habib Bourguiba, infirm) always wins a landslide victory; in 2004 he officially received 94.5% of the votes, in 1999 it was 99.5%. The concentration of power extends to the economy. Tunisia has undergone a programme of privatisation since the late 1980s, but only those who are close to the regime enjoy control of the assets. The reality of the country exposes the hollowness of the president's official slogans, which celebrate "change" and declare "together we meet challenges". The single choice A key moment in President Ben Ali's period of rule came in 2002 with the removal of presidential term-limits (though the constitution's upper age-limit of 75 means that Ben Ali, now 73, will have to retire at the end of his 2009-14 term). Since 2002, his challenge has been to permit the minimal degree of pluralism compatible with maintenance of complete control. For example, in relation to the legislative elections (which take place on the same day as the presidential election) a new law assigns 25% of parliamentary representation to opposition parties. This proportion can have little impact beside the RCD's 75%, but in addition there are real questions over which of the opposition seats are occupied by "real" opposition parties and which are actually pro-Ben Ali ones in thin disguise. There is a similar scenario in the presidential elections. A new law requires any candidate to have led his or her party for at least two years before being allowed to stand; this has prevented the Democratic Forum for Labor and Freedoms to contest the poll, leaving the Movement for Renewal as the sole representative of the "real" opposition. The "opposition" candidates of the Unionist Democratic Union and the Party of Popular Unity state that the purpose of their candidacy is only "to get people accustomed to pluralism"; they actually call for the election of Ben Ali. Even the new National Elections Observatory Committee, intended to replace (potentially dangerous) monitoring by foreign observers - consists of members of the RCD who are appointed by the president. The position of the RCD "above" all other parties mean that Tunisian elections should be understood not as a competition but rather as a key moment when each Tunisian must choose to stand "for" or "against" the president. The RCD indeed dominates, regulates and controls Tunisian public life, backed by the police (who are intimidating potential boycotters) and civil society (trade unions and 8,500 civic associations - of a total of 9,300) have declared their support for Ben Ali). The RCD counts as many as 2.7 million Tunisians as members, in a country of 5 million voters. The fact that the (unofficial) turnout in elections is around 20%, however, reflects the fact that belonging to the party and supporting the president - in a context where other political parties are irrelevant - is the starting-point of access to state services and a certain level of economic welfare. The hollow miracle Tunisia's economic development since the late 1980s has been described as a "miracle". The fruits of progress have enabled Ben Ali to secure the support both of the middle class (whose standard of living has indeed steadily improved) and of his foreign partners (whose multinational companies find advantages in Tunisia's lower labour-costs and tax-rates). Also in openDemocracy on democracy and the Arab world: KA Dilday, "Morocco's illusory democracy" (21 September 2007) Deena Dajani, "Jordan: directing democracy" (13 March 2008) Tarek Osman, "Egypt: a diagnosis" (28 June 2007) Tarek Osman, "Democracy-support and the Arab world: after the fall" (17 March 2009) Robert G Rabil, "Lebanon at the crossroads" (5 June 2009) Hazem Saghieh, "Lebanon's elections: reading the signs" (12 June 2009) Zaid Al-Ali, "Iraq: new alliances, old repression" (3 September 2009) Fred Halliday, "Libya's regime at 40: a state of plutocracy" (8 September 2009) But there is little rationality or justice in Tunisia's approach to economic redistribution, which is mainly a vehicle for Ben Ali to reward his allies and marginalise or punish any who dare to protest. The middle-class's consumption is encouraged even at the risk of excessive debt, as a cushion against political demands. There is tax-relief for entrepreneurs if they agree to contribute financially to the system. A national solidarity fund (called "26-26") and the Tunisian Solidarity Bank cater to the needs of the poor and the unemployed, though both programmes are in fact financed by obligatory contributions from citizens and companies. The president is the only one who can decide how and to whom these funds should be allocated, which explains why they are often distributed by local cells of the RCD. Those who criticise the regime are de facto excluded from the Tunisian "miracle". The salaries of journalists who work for independent (that is, other than pro-government) publications are very low. Men wearing beards and women wearing veils (that is, Islamists) are banned from working in public institutions. The southern region, which is less touristic as the north and traditionally more hostile to Ben Ali, receives little or nothing in the way of infrastructural support or social services. In 2008, peaceful protests by workers of the southern mining region of Gafsa against their working conditions were violently repressed by the authorities; eighteen trade unionists involved in demonstrations were imprisoned for terms of up to ten years. The growth of these two decades has helped sustain a consensus in which many Tunisians welcomed economic development while accepting limits on fundamental freedoms. The impact of the global economic crisis and the worsening of Tunisian economic governance may undermine this. The unemployment rate for new graduates is now officially 43%, and foreign investors are beginning to worry about rising corruption and the opacity of the financial system. The way the system works makes it hard to address these concerns. Those with connections to the president's family have become more directly involved in economic decision-making; as a result, traditional allies of the regime (such as the pro-Ben Ali business class) have been increasingly marginalised. The growing intervention of the president's family members in state decisions raises the unresolved question of his succession. The prospect of Leila Ben Ali (the president's omnipresent wife) or Sakhr Materi (his son-in-law, a 28-year-old businessman who has been elected to the RCD's central committee) leading them leaves many Tunisians unenthusiastic. The last autocrat Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has consistently supported the policies of the United States and the European Union in the region: free-market zones, control of illegal immigration, anti- terrorism. Tunis is host to the French-led Union For the Mediterranean and the Middle East Partnership Initiative. But these international actors have never used their privileged relations in order to press for substantial changes in the country, but rather indulged Ben Ali's one-man rule. Tunisia appears stable, but only because of systematic media censorship and lack of information about human-rights violations. The international community would do a real service to the country's improvement if they encouraged true reform. This would require the creation of neutral state institutions where the exclusive patronage of the RCD would be abandoned, participation by civil society in national and international public debates without fear of police reprisals, and a public realm where accurate information is circulated. Tunisia is in its way a perfect example of the semi-authoritarian regimes that have emerged in the Arab world in the 2000s. But the fact that Ben Ali's power relies more on a police state than on the military makes it possible that international actors engage in a genuine dialogue directly with the president - perhaps more than in any other Arab country. The new tools and ideas of democracy-promotion could find in Tunisia an appropriate channel. If nothing is done, the president's current prerogatives will be transferred to a network of clans lacking any coherent political project for the country. The result will be to threaten Tunisia's much-vaunted stability. The promise of change has to be made real if this fate is to be avoided and Tunisians achieve the progress they deserve. Average rating (0 votes) Rate this: ---Excellent!Great!GoodQuite goodNot so greaRead more
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-10-23 14:40:38 GMT
For me the tragic story of Abkhazia's archive is inseparable from the story of its archivist. I first met Nikolai Ioannidi in May 1992 in Sukhumi, then capital of the autonomous republic of Abkhazia and still firmly part of Georgia. War was about to break out between the Abkhaz and the Georgians, but I sensed this ...only vaguely, noticing that there was a curfew at night, a dispute over which security forces had the right to bear arms and worried speculation from the people I spent my time with about the future. I had a rather skewed view of this strange tense situation because all my companions happened to be Greek. I had chosen Abkhazia, pretty much at random, as a location to make a BBC radio feature about the plight of the Pontic Greeks, and the dilemma they were facing as the Soviet Union collapsed: should they abandon their ancient Black Sea habitat and emigrate to a strange country called Hellas? I spent several days, living in a wooden hut by the Black Sea, being plied with too much cognac, touring villages, schools and cultural societies - and never for a moment freed from the hospitable guard of my Greek hosts. It felt as though I was the captive of some long-lost Greek domain from the Byzantine era. Thomas de Waal was Caucasus editor of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting in London. He is co-author (with Carlotta Gall) of Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus (New York University Press, 1998) and author of Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through peace and war (New York University Press, 2003) Also by Thomas de Waal in openDemocracy: "The north Caucasus: politics or war" (7 September 2004) "Musa Shanib in the Caucasus: a political odyssey" (12 October 2005) "Abkhazia's dream of freedom" (10 May 2006) "Abkhazia-Georgia, Kosovo-Serbia: parallel worlds? (2 August 2006) Thomas de Waal writes about Nikolai Ioannidi and Abkhazia's archive in: "Abkhazia: Cultural Tragedy Revisited" (IWPR, 28 March 2002) One day they took me to see the archive and its remarkable Greek curator, Nikolai Ioannidi. He was tall, gaunt, with parchment-pale skin and keen blue eyes - from his German mother, it seemed, rather than his Greek father. He smoked a lot, talked clearly and exactly and wore a navy-blue beret. He was the great expert about the history of Abkhazia and about the Pontic Greeks of the Black Sea. As Ioannidi spun a fascinating tale about the history of Abkhazia's Greeks - their role in the 19th-century Russian-Ottoman wars, the fortunes they made in shipping and tobacco, their mass deportation by Stalin in 1949 and begrudged return a decade later - I barely noticed the archive we were sitting in, except to register that it was home to a unique collection of Pontic Greek newspapers. Abkhazia had only three more months of peacetime existence. In August that year the Georgian army - or to be precise a collection of ragged armed looters nominally subordinate to the embryonic military forces of a new and barely functioning state - entered and sacked Sukhumi and ousted the Abkhaz authorities. War broke out. The Abkhaz were first driven north by the Georgians, then in the autumn of 1993, with Russian help, turned into vengeful victors, driving out the Georgians. A history erased It was ten years before I saw Sukhumi, the archive and Ioannidi again. In the meantime I had covered the war in Chechnya and the aftermath of conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, but had not been back to my first conflict zone in the Caucasus. I could barely make sense of the geography of the place I visited. Although fighting had ended eight years before, grass was growing in the streets of Sukhumi and half the city was still in ruins. The vast burned hulk of the Abkhaz parliament loomed over the town, a blackened shipwreck beached in the middle of the central square. There was an air of Pompeii about it: the city's largest community, its Georgians, had fled in their entirety, leaving Sukhumi the half-empty capital of a new separatist state, recognised by no one. The Abkhaz had won a "victory", but the price was impossibly high. Instead of an archive there was a damp square of ground with the low black empty shell of a building - one wreck amongst many. Ioannidi now worked out of two corridors in the cold wing of the university, piled waist-deep with cardboard packages. He told me the story of what had happened. Ioannidi lived in Sukhumi's "new town", a Soviet dormitory of tower-blocks two miles from the centre, where the archive was. On 22 October 1992, the city was under Georgian military control and curfew and he had made his precarious way home when it was still light, as the snipers were beginning their evening's work. At 8pm a neighbour who lived next to the archive rang and said the building was on fire. There was no way Ioannidi could make his way back, so he had to wait until morning to find out what had happened during the night. Late in the afternoon a car with five or six young Georgians wearing black uniforms of the Sukhumi military police had drawn up outside the archive. They broke down the door of the building, went in and set it on fire. Neighbours of all nationalities, including Georgians, rushed to put the fire out. However, the armed men returned forty minutes later. This time they drove away the neighbours with shots, ringed the building, poured kerosene over it and set it ablaze again. A fire-engine, which came to put out the fire, was not let through. Frantic telephone calls to the KGB, the police, even the Orthodox bishop, yielded no result. It seemed as though the arson had been officially sanctioned, though no one would ever claim responsibility for it. Ioannidi arrived at 6am the next morning to find it all gone. When he opened the safe in his wrecked office he believed for a moment that his own unpublished manuscripts had survived, only to see them turn to ashes from the heat before his eyes. A crowd of curious onlookers gathered. Then the distinguished Abkhaz writer, Shalva Inal-Ipa, walked up stiffly and, observing the ritual of an Abkhaz funeral, bowed his head to the ground. In a single night Abkhazia's documentary history had been virtually erased. 95% of the archive was destroyed. The only section that more or less survived at all was the radio archive from the 1930s. Nothing from the extensive 19th-century collection was preserved. The following year, Abkhazia's Communist Party archive, kept in a different building, was annihilated in fighting, as the Abkhaz recaptured Sukhumi from the Georgians. Ioannidi estimates that of 176,000 archival documents in Abkhazia, before the war, 168,000 were destroyed. He ensured that at least some of it survived, for a long time keeping the remaining documents piled at home in his damp ninth-floor apartment, before he was allocated the empty rooms at the university, where the remnant of the archive is now housed. A legacy project It is a truism that combatants in war try to rewrite history. This is a chilling instance where one side succeeded comprehensively in actually destroying the history of its adversary. Part of the struggle between Georgians and Abkhaz is the complaint by the latter that their history was always belittled by their bigger neighbour. But there are multiple ironies here: Abkhazia was a cosmopolitan Black Sea territory with many different nationalities. By erasing the documentation of its rich multi-ethnic past, the Georgians were not only denying the Abkhaz their right to have a history of their own, they were also wiping out the complexity of the real history of this mixed region and sending it back to Year Zero. And of course they also erased themselves. Nowadays, you would barely know that any Georgians had lived in Sukhumi as traces of their heritage have been removed. And the Greek community of the city, amongst which Ioannidi grew up, has virtually disappeared. What Stalin began and the Georgian warlords continued, the Greek government helped complete by sending a big empty cruise ship to evacuate a thousand Greek citizens from Abkhazia at the end of the war in what they grandly called "Operation Golden Fleece". Ioannidi stands as a dignified emblem of a multicultural road not taken. He has an unpublished manuscript on the Stalinist deportation of 1949 based on his study of KGB archives that went up in flames. And he has the authority to assert that that mass expulsion deprived Abkhazia of a community which was binding Abkhaz and Georgians together. "If there had not been 1949, the whole situation in Abkhazia would have been different," he told me. "If there had been a neutral force in the middle, war would not have been so possible." Ioannidi has now formally retired as chief archivist of Abkhazia, although he still spends most of his days there, drinking Greek coffee, casting a fatherly eye over what is left of the institution he ran for forty years. But he is no romantic and wants a younger person to carry on with the job. "I am from the Soviet generation, I am not the best person to know what to do with this now." The only catalogue perished with the archive itself and Ioannidi would dearly like to see the stacked bundles that remain properly catalogued. But the trouble with being an unrecognised state, he said, is that no one from the outside world offers any help and you live in international limbo, cut off from contact with international archivists. I am writing this partly in the hope that someone can suggest how to preserve the small charred archive of an inaccessible unrecognised state. It would not be an easy task. But it would be a blow for civilisation in this sad corner of the Caucasus - and a gesture of deserved respect for someone who is a rare curator of decent values as well as of yellowing papers. Average rating (6 votes) Rate this: ---Excellent!Great!GoodQuite goodNot so great Read more
Source:openDemocracy editorial
Posted:2009-10-23 14:35:10 GMT
