Category: Jonathan Power

Peace at last in the Congo – black Africa’s largest state ?

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By Jonathan Power

It is not so long ago that Susan Rice, then the US’s Ambassador to the United Nations, was talking about the Congo as the site of “Africa’s First World War”. Has the UN at long last really pacified this country, the largest in black Africa, that has been continuously in a state of unrest since the Belgian colonisers, after effectively looting the country dry, fled in 1960, turning the country over to a hastily improvised African government led by Patrice Lumumba?

Reports coming in today indicate that the last rebel group, the M23, formally supported by Rwanda, has been defeated by Congolese and UN troops working together.

Perhaps yes, the fighting that has consumed the Congo is over. But, given the history of the most turbulent of all African countries, we should say, let’s wait and see. Nevertheless, it is encouraging to know that the UN’s largest peacekeeping operation ever has met with this degree of success. (One other plus: China sent peacekeepers to the UN force.)

This second UN intervention in the Congo appears to be more successful than the first, back in 1960 when, fearful of the US and the Soviet Union competing to gain a foothold in Africa, Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, pushed for UN intervention, as the country’s post-independence civil war appeared to spin out of control. The UN did pacify the country to some degree- at the cost of claiming Hammarskjold’s life in a supposed accident of his plane- but it left with its tail between its legs, handing the country over to 32 years of decadent and cruel rule by the masterful dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko.Read More »

The great European refugee crisis

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By Jonathan Power

Europeans really shouldn’t be worrying about the number of refugees trying to gatecrash Europe by travelling in rickety boats across the Mediterranean. The recent tragedies have the effect of inflating in our minds the numbers. In truth the numbers are not overwhelming.

The present almighty flap was triggered when, on October 3rd, 360 refugees died when their boat sank off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa.

Over the last two decades 20,000 migrants are estimated to have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean. That’s only 200 a year. In Italy that’s less people than drown in the whole country. Most come on safer land routes.

In 2011 there were 300,000 applicants for asylum in the EU. Last year it grew, as Syria erupted, to 333,000. If every one of the 28 EU countries did its bit by taking in a few it would only amount to 12,000 each. In fact the bigger countries could easily take double that and the smaller ones could take half.

Sweden has just announced that it is giving asylum to 17,000 Syrians. Moreover, it is issuing them with permanent residency papers straight away which means they can go out and look for a job. That is the way to go.Read More »

Saudi Arabia withdraws from UN Security Council

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By Jonathan Power

Diplomats at the UN were amazed last week when Saudi Arabia did the unthinkable and turned down the seat it had just won on the Security Council.

The ten rotating seats – that join those of the Permanent Five (the US, UK, France, Russia and China) – are regarded as the most prestigious spots in international diplomacy.

Saudi Arabia had badly wanted that seat. But the moment it got the votes that handed it to it, it stepped back. The BBC reported that this created “shock and confusion”. The Russian Foreign Ministry called it “bewildering”. No state has done this before.

Saudi Arabia accused the UN of “double standards”. It pointed to the Security Council’s failure “to find a solution to the Palestinian cause for 65 years”. It also criticised the UN for its “failure” to rid the Middle East of weapons of mass destruction, including Israel’s nuclear weapons. Strangely, in the light of a joint Russian-US accord on how to get rid of Syria’s chemical weapons that won the endorsement of the Security Council, Saudi Arabia accused the UN of allowing the Syrian government “to kill its own people with chemical weapons….without confronting it or imposing any deterrent sanctions.”

But in the next two years there will be many other issuesRead More »

Why doesn’t the US implement its treaties?

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By Jonathan Power

The US Senate – usually the Republican members – reject multilateral treaties as if it were a sport. Others it rejects through inaction – the Law of the Sea Treaty, for example, negotiated under President Jimmy Carter and fruitlessly pushed for ratification by every president since. Republicans justify their blocking tactics by arguing that such treaties are a threat to sovereignty.

However, after almighty struggles – it takes only one third of the Senate to block a treaty – the important nuclear arms’ treaties with the Soviet Union and Russia – were ratified. So was the Convention against Torture which Republican president, Ronald Reagan, successfully fought for but which President George Bush junior illegally ignored, without a word of protest from Congress or the press. His vice-president, Dick Cheney, became torturer-in-chief and should have been arrested by the incoming Obama Administration. But Obama, wanting a peaceful life with Congress for the sake of future legislation, decided not to prosecute the torturers.

On Monday this week Syria joined the Chemical Weapons Treaty that the US has long been a party to.Read More »

Time overdue to cut nuclear weapons

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By Jonathan Power

At the time of the “Cuban Missile Crisis” in 1962 when the Soviet Union secretly shipped into Cuba nuclear weapons and the US, under President John Kennedy, threatened to bomb them, the world came as close to nuclear war as it ever has. Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defence, wondered if he would ever see another sunset. At universities students marched. The crisis ended when Kennedy agreed – with only a handful of his inner circle knowing this – to remove US nuclear missiles in Turkey which, with their short flight times, threatened Russia as much as the Cuban missiles threatened the US.

Many years later in June 1982, after only modest progress in mutually reducing nuclear weapons on each side, around three-quarters of a million demonstrators gathered in New York’s Central Park demanding a freeze on nuclear weapon production. The New York Times reported that “it was the largest demonstration in American history”.

But in 2013, despite more cutting, the Cold War over, the two old adversaries still have 6,400 nuclear weapons. Read More »

Soon an accord on Iran’s nuclear program?

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By Jonathan Power

Now that Iran and the US have agreed to negotiate over Iran’s nuclear program hopes are rising that a deal can be made that will end the 34 year-long mutual estrangement.

But wait a minute. Before we discuss the possibilities of such a deal coming to fruition there is lurking in the wings a would-be putative saboteur – Israel. At the UN last September Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented to journalists a caricature of an Iranian nuclear bomb and with a marker pen drew a red line near the top. He made it clear there was a step in the Iranian nuclear program that would be a step too far. The implication was that Israel would make air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, just as it did against Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981 and Syria’s in 2007. Netanyahu appears convinced that Iran is on the nuclear bomb route and that President Barack Obama is in danger of being irresponsible.

Israel did not inform the US in advance of the attacks on Osirak or the Syrian reactor. Perhaps, if it feels that the Americans have got it wrong in the present negotiations, it would do the same again. After all, say the Israelis, it is Israel that is the most likely target of an Iranian bomb.

This is ludicrous thinking since Israel could retaliate with its huge stock of nuclear weapons. That is deterrence enough.Read More »

Germany for peace and austerity

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By Jonathan Power

The Germany of the victorious Angela Merkel, the second most powerful political leader in the world, is the peacenik nation of the West. But it is also the quasi-authoritarian keeper of the “austerity” that uses its economic clout to impose its standards on the rest of Europe, reminding some southern European countries of the Nazi government of Adolf Hitler that imposed a sort of common market on its captured nations. We may like the one and detest the other but Germany, for better or worse, is at the moment a package deal.

Germans themselves would like to shed the responsibilities of the second and concentrate on the first, encouraging Europe to use its underlying strength to do good and bring peace to the world. After all, not only is this the land of Hitler, his war and his Holocaust, it is the land of Bach and Beethoven which produced, along with Mozart of neighbouring German-speaking Austria, the most exquisite religious music of all time; it is the land of remorse for what its fathers, mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers did in supporting Hitler; and it is the land of Immanuel Kant, one of the greatest of European philosophers. In his treatise on “Perpetual Peace” he wrote of the need for a federation of free states bound together by a covenant forbidding war.Read More »

The great Syrian deal

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By Jonathan Power

One way of measuring the success of President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry in forging a plan with Russia to rid Syria of chemical weapons is to think how the scenario would have been conducted if George W. Bush were still president. He wouldn’t have taken the issue to Congress. He would have distrusted any Russian initiative and not delayed his timetable for an imminent military strike. Strike first, talk afterwards, is how he would have seen it.

This makes President Obama look good. But not as good as he might have been. From the beginning he made it clear he would neither wait for the UN on-the-ground inspectors’ report or the approval, which he knew he would not get, of the UN Security Council. At the same time he made no convincing case why the US should ignore its solemn commitment to the UN Charter, opening the way for Russia, China or anyone to ignore it when they had, in their own opinion, reason to do so.

He also never answered the conundrum of why Read More »

Mankind’s lifestyle in the year 2250

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By Jonathan Power

In 1776 Adam Smith published his “Wealth of Nations” which has guided economists and political thinkers ever since. It marks the start of the Industrial Revolution that began in England and then spread throughout most of the world. That was 237 years ago.

It is not that long ago – only 4 life-spans or so, the time of your great, great, great, grandparents. Where will we be 237 years hence? Presumably just as today we listen to Mozart, born 257 years ago, and watch or read Shakespeare, born 439 years ago – they have survived all changing tastes and spread well outside their original orbit of European culture to countries as varied as Japan, China, Argentina, Tanzania and South Korea – we can be sure that generations to come will have much the same cultural interests.

In all likelihood in 2250 we will probably still enjoy tastes picked up from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – perhaps the Beatles, Picasso, some of the outstanding Nigerian and Indian novelists writing today or the pristine recordings of the magnificent Chinese classical violinists and pianists now emerging. We won’t have better artists – who can ever rival Tchaikovsky, Leonardo da Vinci, Tolstoy or Shakespeare?- but a handful who are as good.

Our religions will persistRead More »

Obama’s Syrian imbroglio

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By Jonathan Power

President Barack Obama let the chickens out of the cage when foolishly he pronounced that he had drawn a red line across which the Syrian government should not go. Now, after what he says is its second use of chemical weapons, the red line has been crossed and the chickens are coming home to roost. He has announced he plans to strike Syria, albeit it in a limited fashion.

He has made it clear that he won’t go to the UN about it, even to the General Assembly where a Russian veto doesn’t count but where there could be a slim majority in favour. It would give Obama some sort of political cover.

Neither is he prepared to wait for the results of the investigation by the UN team that has just visited the site of the atrocity. Read More »