Category: Jonathan Power

Who was Ariel Sharon?

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By Jonathan Power

The Middle East has been living a nightmare, partly because of a man of Russian origin who became Israel’s greatest general and, later, prime minister of Israel: Ariel Sharon. What were the inner thoughts of this man? This is what Amos Oz, an acclaimed Israeli journalist, writer and novelist, with a world-wide reputation, helped us to discover in an interview published by the Israeli daily, Davar, in December 17, 1982.

“Call Israel by any name you like, call it a Judeo-Nazi state. Better a live Judeo-Nazi than a dead saint. I don’t care whether I am like Gaddafi. I am not after the admiration of the gentiles. ….I will destroy anyone who will raise a hand against my children, I will destroy him and his children, with or without our famous purity of arms…..

“We’ll hear no more of that nonsense about the unique Jewish morality, the moral lessons of the Holocaust or about the Jews who were supposed to have emerged from the gas chambers pure. As for Eyn Hilwe [Lebanon’s largest refugee camp] it’s a pity we did not wipe out that hornet’s nest completely.”

Sharon first stirred up controversy with the massacre at Qibiya, a Palestinian village. Read More »

Legalizing opium in Afghanistan

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By Jonathan Power

Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine who lived 460-357 BC, concluded that diseases were naturally caused and were cured by natural remedies. Opium, he wrote, was one of the latter. But he was also of the opinion that it should be used sparingly and under control.

If only our governments today could take such a sanguine and informed view of the use of opiates in medicine today.

No one needs a more enlightened attitude than the Western forces now operating in Afghanistan where for years they have been committed to destroying the peasants’ main source of income. Afghanistan produces more opium that anywhere else in the world.

Some observers say this eradication programme has done much to push country people into the Taliban camp. The West has long been shooting itself in the foot.Read More »

Tribalism lives, for better and for worse

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By Jonathan Power

There was a time, not that long ago, when African leaders insisted that it was politically incorrect to discuss tribalism. Tribalism was the face of old Africa that the modernizers, inheriting their domains from the departing colonialists, refused to accept.

Today’s African leaders have learned to be not so glib. Southern Sudan is the latest turn of the screw that started with Katanga and Biafra and went on to Angola, Rwanda and Burundi with passing stops in Zimbabwe, Uganda and Senegal.

One hundred years of colonialism (less in many countries) and the subsequent creation of four dozen new states, each insisting on the sanctity of colonial boundaries as a sensible way of avoiding future conflicts, could not blot out over 1000 tribal boundaries.

On Africa’s left it has been a common jibe that the Europeans “divided” Africa. In fact they brought Africa together.Read More »

Good cheer at the end of the year – 2013

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By Jonathan Power

We have a lot to be thankful for in 2013.

Look at the protests now going on in Bangkok. After some initial clashes at the beginning both sides have become non-violent. One can praise the government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra for this. She ordered the gates and doors of the ministry of the interior, of the police and the Thai equivalent of Scotland Yard/FBI to be opened. The protesters poured into the buildings and then left – bored.

In the Ukraine after a couple of nights of police brutality President Vikto Yanukovych ordered the police to restrain themselves. Both sides now use peaceful tactics.

Non-violence à la Gandhi and Martin Luther King doesn’t always achieve its objectives, but it keeps the political temperature down and avoids many deaths. It is more likely to work when there is a grave injustice. This is not the case either in Thailand or Ukraine. Indeed in Thailand it is the middle class protesting at the government’s policies of favouring the poor and the rural peasantry, although the demonstrators are not trying to take away the progress the poor have already made. Read More »

Chile beats a path on the murder rate

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By Jonathan Power

Chile has moved to the left. With Michelle Bachelet’s overwhelming victory in the presidential poll she now has the freedom to legislate as she wants. Poverty reduction, income re-distribution and education are the sharp end of her political program.

But of all Latin American presidents she is perhaps the most fortunate. Despite his draconian suppression of human rights, the dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, who ruled in the 1970s and 80s, not only engineered high economic growth he also kept deep poverty at bay.Read More »

Mandela and his economics

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By Jonathan Power

In the days when Mikhail Gorbachev was president of the Soviet Union, engaged in his policy of glasnost and disarmament, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize, he used to have a feisty press secretary who, asked about the deteriorating economic situation, replied that his boss didn’t win the Nobel for economics.

Could he have said the same about Nelson Mandela? Yes and no. Yes, when Mandela first came out of jail when he talked of the need for massive nationalisation and forcible wealth re-distribution. No, when president, having learnt a thing or two about what had been going on in Africa, he began to preach another message. He saw that most of black Africa had adapted “African socialism”. This, together with dictatorships and maladministration, had led to decades of rising poverty. Even in Tanzania, where the benign leadership of the sage-like, incorruptible, Julius Nyerere, gave the country a spirited sense of emancipation, the economy eventually lost momentum as Nyerere pushed socialist shibboleths.

Mandela told the African Union that “the fault lay not in our stars but in ourselves”.Read More »

Power scramble in the China seas

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By Jonathan Power

In 1978 Deng Xiaoping, architect of China’s economic miracle, said the intractable problems of which country owns what in the East and South China Seas should be left to the next generation. He was right. China should keep kicking that can of worms down the road.
The recent surprise declaration that a huge swathe of international air space above the East China Sea be part of a new Chinese “Air Defence Identification Zone” (ADIZ) is counterproductive. The zone includes the Senaku/Diaoyu islands, claimed by by both China and Japan. The ADIZ demands that any aircraft flying across it must seek permission from China.

What does history say? In 1971 the US post-war occupation regime returned the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands to Japan and China did not object. But, according to Meiji era documents unearthed by Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, in 1885 Japan acknowledged China as the owner.Read More »

North Korea and the Iran nuclear deal

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By Jonathan Power

The agreement just signed by Iran, the US, the EU and Russia is more than a milestone, it changes the world. Perhaps.

It is bitterly opposed by Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems determined to be the spoiler. Apparently Israel’s threat to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities remains a serious option, even though such an attack would only have a limited effect and would provoke Iran to raise the ante against Israel.

But that is not the only worry. There are two other things. Read More »

Should the UN go into battle?

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By Jonathan Power

This year the UN Security Council authorised the deployment of troops to the eastern Congo, armed with tanks and helicopter gun ships to defeat the one remaining dissident militia in the Congo. Two weeks ago UN officials declared that war in the Congo, which on and off has consumed the nation for over 50 years, seemed to be over. The UN, instead of using its blue helmets to keep the peace, used its soldiers to blast the enemy.

Rarely talked about is Article 42 of the UN Charter which says,“The Security Council ….may take such action by air, sea or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security.”Read More »

Does Saudi Arabia want a nuclear bomb?

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By Jonathan Power

The negotiations between Iran and the West have not yet produced a deal. At the same time the BBC’s Mark Urban, a defence correspondent, has unearthed a worrying connection between Iran moving towards the nuclear bomb threshold and a Saudi Arabian decision to produce a nuclear bomb with Pakistani help. “Saudi Arabia has invested in Pakistani nuclear weapons’ projects and believes it could obtain nuclear bombs at will”, he says.

This meshes with what I wrote in my column 20 years ago that the only way to explain Saudi Arabia’s purchase from China of CSS-2 ballistic missiles was that it was preparing to develop a nuclear arsenal if one day the security situation demanded it.

The Chinese missiles have a capacity to carry nuclear weapons. They are too inaccurate to be of use as conventional weapons. They are an insurance against Iran developing nuclear weapons and also have the additional purpose of providing a balance to Israel’s armoury of some 200 nuclear weapons.

The Saudis have recently completed a new base with missile launch rails aligned with Iran and Israel. According to the BBC, there is some evidence that the Pakistanis might have already set aside a number of warheads for delivery to Saudi Arabia.Read More »