Category: AA ARTICLES BY ASSOCIATES

The U.S. calamities: There are solutions

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By Johan Galtung

Political terrorism failed. The House Republicans used voting in one US chamber to put millions of people inside and outside the US at livelihood risk for their own political goals. And made the mistake of most terrorists, non-state or state: when people suffer they will join us, against our enemy; to find out that people turn against the terrorists instead. And they were not a small group of Tea Party extremists but a clear majority of the House Republicans: 144 voted NO in the end, only 87 YES.

Obama has himself to thank for the general House Republican majority; having betrayed most groups voting for him in 2008 he was punished in the 2010 mid-term elections. Like the Republicans will be in 2014 for their political terrorism.Read More »

The Chomsky/Vltchek worldview

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By Richard Falk

Recently I read On Western Terrorism: from Hiroshima to Drone Warfare, published in 2013 by Pluto Press here in London, and consisting of a series of conversations between Chomsky and the Czech filmmaker, journalist, and author, Andre Vltchek, who is now a naturalized American citizen.

Vltchek in an illuminating Preface describes his long and close friendship with Chomsky, and explains that these fascinating conversations took place over the course of two days, and was filmed with the intention of producing a documentary. The book is engaging throughout, with my only big complaint being about the misdirection of the title—there is virtually nothing said about either Hiroshima or drone warfare, but almost everything else politically imaginable!

Vltchek, previously unknown to me, consistently and calmly held his own during the conversations, speaking with comparable authority and knowledge about an extraordinary assortment of topics that embraced the entire global scene, something few of us would have the nerve to attempt, much less manage with such verve, insight, and empathy. After finishing the book my immediate reaction was that ‘Chomsky knows everything’ and ‘Vltchek has been everywhere and done everything.’

Omniscience and omnipresence are not often encountered, being primary attributes commonly attributed by theologians to a monotheistic god! Leaving aside this hyperbole, one is stunned throughout by the quality of the deep knowledge and compassion exhibited by these two public intellectuals, and even more by their deeply felt sympathy for all those being victimized as a result of the way in which the world is organized and Western hard power has been and is being deployed.

The book left me with a sense of how much that even those of us who try to be progressive and informed leave untouched, huge happenings taking place in domains beyond the borders of our consciousness. It suggests that almost all of us are ignoring massive injustices because they receive such scant attention from mainstream media and our access to alternative sources is too restricted. And, maybe also, the capacity for the intake of severe injustice is limited for most of us.

The book is well worth reading just to grasp this gap between what we care about and what is actually worth caring about. Read More »

A tale of two speeches: Rouhani and Netanyahu at UN General Assembly

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By Farhang Jahanpour*

With the progress of the talks in Geneva between Iran and the six world powers (the so-called P5+1) on 15 and 16 October, there is growing optimism about a lasting solution to Iran’s nuclear program and to the resumption of relations between Iran and the United States after 34 years of estrangement. After an hour-long power-point presentation by the Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, which he called “closing unnecessary crisis, and opening new horizons”, Michael Mann, the spokesman for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton who is leading the talks for the P5+1 group, described the Iranian proposal as “very useful” and said: “For the first time, very detailed technical discussions took place.” (1)

The exact choice of words was also repeated by a senior US official taking part in the talks. After the formal talks between the two sides, there was another US-Iran bilateral meeting between the chief US representative in the talks, Ms. Wendy Sherman, and Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi who led the Iranian delegation after the Iranian foreign minister’s original presentation. This was the second time after the meeting of Iranian and US foreign ministers in New York that senior officials from the two sides had had a bilateral meeting.Read More »

BRICS: The real “Global South” today

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By Johan Galtung

Keynote European Center for Peace and Development, Beograd, 12 Oct 2013

Two basic facts stand out in the world economic development, leaving aside military, political, cultural and social development:

* The BRICS – an acronym becoming a social fact–are emerging;

* The USA-EU are declining; not only as markets, also as producers.

Another way of saying this is that the West has been outcompeted, not by the Rest but by – so far – a select part. The world market is not constant but increasing sum, but much demand may be met by domestic production, not by import-export. As part of the story.

The West got the definition of development wrong, still clinging to economic development = economic growth (measured by annual GNP/capita increase). The BRICS understood development differently, adding economic distribution (measured by the ratio in acquisitive power between the top and bottom 20%, and between the CEO and average worker salary; at the macro and micro levels). No growth spells recession-depression, no distribution spells worse: death. For economic, like for geographic, positioning, at least two dimensions are needed. A professor in latitudes, or growth, only, is simply not good enough.

Development becomes increasing growth and increasing equality. Growth alone may lead to flagrant inequality at the expense of those at the bottom and nature–a system we know only too well–distribution alone may lead to the shared misery of some human past. We need both.

The map of the world was also wrong. Read More »

Balkan integration process in a global framework

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By Johan Galtung

Keynote, European Center for Peace and Development, Beograd, 11 Oct 2013

The Balkan integration process within, and the global framework without, are both parts of the story of empires that come, leave deep and bloody faultlines within and without, and then decline and fall.

Thus, the Balkans were doubly divided in the 11th century by the schism between the Catholics and the Orthodox in 1054, following the 395 split between the Western and Eastern Roman empires, Rome vs Constantinople; and the declaration of war on Islam by Pope Urban II on 27 Nov 1095.

The two dividing lines intersect in Sarajevo, the Bosnia and Herzegovina-BiH Ground Zero for Euro-quakes. The Hapsburgs from Northwest annexed BiH in 1908, and a shot followed in 1914. The Ottomans from Southeast defeated the Serbs in 1397 and were defeated in the 1912 Balkan war, leaving Slavic and Albanian Muslims. A little later, 1918, the Hapsburgs also went the way of Roman and Ottoman empires: Decline and Fall; over and out.

The Soviets came, and went the same way in 1991; the US Empire is following – by 30 years? – meeting their fates, not in the Balkans but in Afghanistan where empires are said to come to die. Today the Balkans are run from Brussels; by the deeply troubled European Union with “high” representatives, and by NATO, led by a bankrupt country, right now ridden by government shutdown and the threat of default.

A four factor formula for positive peace indicates four tasks:Read More »

Post-intervention Libya: A militia state

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By Richard Falk

Two apparently related and revealing incidents have turned public attention briefly back to Libya just after the second anniversary of the NATO intervention that helped anti-Qaddafi rebel forces overthrow his regime. The first incident involved the infringement of Libyan sovereignty by an American special forces operation that seized the alleged al Qaeda operative, Abu Anas al-Libi (also known as Nizah Abdul Hamed al-Ruqai), on October 5, supposedly with the knowledge and consent of the Libyan government.

The second incident, evidently a response to the first seizure, was the kidnapping a few days later of the country’s prime minister, Ali Zeidan, while he lay asleep in his hotel lodgings in the center of Tripoli. He was easily captured by a squadron of 20 militia gunmen who arrived at the hotel around 2:00 am and proceeded without resistance from security guards to carry off the head of the Libyan state. Such a bold assault on the state’s essential character as the sole purveyor of legitimate violence (according to the famous conception of Max Weber) is a telltale sign of a political system of shadow governance, that is, without security.

The capture of Ali Zeidan was reportedly prompted both by anger at the government’s impotence in the face of such an overt violation of Libyan sovereignty by the United States, as well as serving to warn the political leadership of the country that any further effort to disarm militias would be resisted. Read More »

Israel’s politics of fragmentation

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By Richard Falk

Background

If the politics of deflection exhibit the outward reach of Israel’s grand strategy of territorial expansionism and regional hegemony, the politics of fragmentation serves Israel’s inward moves designed to weaken Palestinian resistance, induce despair, and de facto surrender. In fundamental respects deflection is an unwitting enabler of fragmentation, but it is also its twin or complement.

The British were particularly adept in facilitating their colonial project all over the world by a variety of divide and rule tactics, which almost everywhere haunted anti-colonial movements, frequently producing lethal forms of post-colonial partition as in India, Cyprus, Ireland, Malaya, and of course, Palestine, and deadly ethnic strife elsewhere as in Nigeria, Kenya, Myanmar, Rwanda. Each of these national partitions and post-colonial traumas has produced severe tension and long lasting hostility and struggle, although each takes a distinctive form due to variations from country to country of power, vision, geography, resources, history, geopolitics, leadership.

An additional British colonial practice and legacy was embodied in a series of vicious settler colonial movements that succeeded in effectively eliminating or marginalizing resistance by indigenous populations as in Australia, Canada, the United States, and somewhat less so in New Zealand, and eventually failing politically in South Africa and Namibia, but only after decades of barbarous racism.

In Palestine the key move was the Balfour Declaration, Read 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 »

The EU foreign policy: Ten wishes

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By Johan Galtung

Speech given in Brussels to the European External Action Service, Free University, October 8, 2013

The EU is in a crisis mainly of its own making. Some of it is economic and can be solved by strict control on speculation, separating savings and investment banks, by gradual debt forgiveness, by lifting the bottom up, the most miserable communities, by the GIPSI (Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Ireland) countries cooperating, by stimulating agricultural cooperatives with direct sales points, etc. But much of it is political; the EU has become invisible on the world scene, incapable of a foreign policy building peace and security, also much too tied to US and Israeli fundamentalisms and too anti-Islamic.

The following are some ideas about steps that can be taken.

The EU glittering success as a peace zone is much needed in zones of war and where war threatens: the Middle East, Central Asia, East Asia. A Middle East Community, of Israel with five Arab neighbors (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt); a Central Asian Community of Afghanistan with eight neighbors (Iran, Pakistan, five former Soviet republics, Ashad Kashmir) with open borders (crucial for the Pashtuns and others); and a North East Asia Community (with two Chinas, the two Koreas, Japan, Mongolia and the Russian Far East (now with Khabarovsk as capital) could all benefit from EU opening its archives, telling how it all happened, sharing a major learning experience for humanity.

A United Regions added to the UN but with no veto powers, of the EU, AU, SAARC, ASEAN and the coming Latin America and the Caribbean, Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Middle East, Central Asia, North East Asia could take shape and become a key tool of global governance.

EU and Crisis Management. There are many of them, and there will be more crises given the legacy of colonialism constructing countries, putting together what did not belong together, dividing what did. An example are the four Sykes-Picot colonies: Iraq and Palestine for England, Lebanon and Syria for France, built-in catastrophes, now exploding. The EU will have to recognize the responsibility of some members, and then listen to what all the parties want, trying to arrive at a bridging perspective. Generally speaking, two approaches:

* federation within, with high autonomy for the nations and democracy within each part – but not an all over “one person one vote” which would result in the majority dictatorship of the most numerous nation;

* confederation, community, between, with open borders for nations that belong together to travel freely.

For Syria this would mean both respecting the Sunni majority and the minorities protected by Shia rule, with a two-chamber parliament, territorial for the provinces and non-territorial for the nations, with veto rights in matters concerning their identity. EU should send well trained mediators to the crisis area to understand the parties, and facilitate dialogue between them at the local level, many places.

EU and the use of military force. Should be Chapter 6 peace-keeping, not Chapter 7 “peace enforcement” (a contradiction in terms). Given the strong attachment to their goals of autonomy, a ceasefire with no image of a solution will be used for rest, smuggling of arms and redeployment; the road to ceasefire passes through a vision of a solution, not vice versa. The role of peace-keeping is to prevent violence, not to use it, and with that in mind peace-keepers should have military expertise and weapons for self-defense; some police training for crowd control; nonviolence training; some mediation training to know how to understand and facilitate dialogues; be 50% women more focused on human relations, less on control; and be so numerous that we can talk about a blue carpet, not only blue helmets.

EU-Third World, mostly former colonies: time is overdue for some reconciliation. Just compensation for the genocide and sociocide–killing social structures and cultures–is out of question, but joint understanding is not. Mutually acceptable textbooks about that period would be very useful, building on the German experience rewriting text books for reconciliation.

West-Islam. At the political level Turkey should become member, making Istanbul a hub for positive West-Islam relations. North Cyprus should be recognized; all of Cyprus – unitary state, federation or confederation – should be an EU member. A dialogue of civilizations could aim at combining Western pluralism with Muslim closeness and sharing for mutual benefit. The Western approach to the Catholic-Protestant divide might be useful for Shia-Sunni understanding.

Russia. Historically the many invasions were from West to East with two exceptions: Russia hitting back after Napoleon and Hitler. There is room for reconciliation based on such facts rather than the paranoid use of the image of Russia, like of China, as peril.

China. The main Silk Road was not a track in the desert and the mountains but a major Buddhist-Muslim East Asia-East Africa sea lane for 1000 years, 500-1500; destroyed by the Portuguese and the English in the name of their Kings. Time for reconciliation – including gunboat “diplomacy”, opium export, and colonization of Macao-Hong Kong is overdue. And an EU recognizing Israel partly because of two thousand years old history might also recognize some Chinese ocean rights with a much more recent history–in no way leaving out joint Chinese-ASEAN ownership of some of the islands, and joint Northeast Asian Community in due time of Senkaku-Diaoyu islands, and others, with their EEZs.

Eurasian Partnership. The EU is a peninsula on the Eurasian continent; increasingly connected by excellent railroad links mainly built by the Chinese, coming ever closer together. This is the time to add an Eurasian orientation to a Trans-Atlantic one, today in abeyance, waiting for he USA to recover and stop spying on the world.

All this is feasible: with realism in the brain and idealism in the heart.

Originally published at Trancend Media Service here.

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 »