In the case of its ally Sri Lanka it did not need to send troops to win the war against Tamils struggles for liberation. The Western powers provided Sri Lankan governments military with weaponry, war intelligence and training to win the long war against Tamil nationhood. But, after the mutual victory, the axis also criticizes the current government for having committed excesses. This approach is the best of all possible worlds for Western dictates: world domination for the cause of humanity is what they say if you read between the lips of communicators for globalization George Bush- Barack Obama-Hilliary Clinton, Tony Blair-Gordon Brown-David Cameron.

While China and Russia also militarily and economically assisted Sri Lankan governments in avoiding federalism for the two peoples: majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils, they did so without the hyperbole of “protecting human rights”. Unfortunately, Cuba and its associates in the eight Latin American nations ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance of the peoples of the Americas) got caught up in the geo-political game by supporting Sri Lanka Sinhalese chauvinism politically but without funds and weapons.

Rodolfo Reyes Rodríguez, Cuba’s Permanent Representative to United Nations Office at Geneva, argued at the 19th session of the Human Rights Council (HRC), last March 22, that the United States acted contradictorily for presenting a resolution asking Sri Lanka to implement its own mild report, Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), and slightly criticizing the government for not addressing human rights abuse that occurred during the end of the civil war between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).¹

Rodríguez ridiculed the US position given that, as he said, 40% of military hardware sold to Sri Lankan governments between 1983 and 2009 (the duration of the war for liberation) came from it and its closest allies, the UK and Israel.

“Why do they doubt Sri Lanka after having sold so many weapons?” Rodríguez inquired. While Cuba backed Sri Lanka 100%, disregarding the plight of over two million Tamils, its ambassador considered the US resolution as “interference” into the affairs of the sovereign state.

An excellent book, Arms Trade with Sri Lanka: global business, local costs, put out by the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society and the Swedish Sri Lanka Committee provides some hard-to-find figures on what countries provided what armaments to Sri Lanka. Most of the weaponry that the LTTE acquired came from capturing enemy arms and some were bought on the black market. Sri Lanka bought its weapons from a score of governments of all stripes. The Sinhalese governments spent between 7 and 17% of their budgets on the military during the war.

Between 1999 and 2008, the largest military equipment (towed guns, tanks, fighter and trainer and transport aircraft, helicopters, fast sea craft, mines, radar, missiles and rockets, armored bridge layers, surveillance and communication equipment) came from China and Russia, later also Ukraine and Iran—on the one end of the spectrum—and from the US and nine EU states on the other end. Military suppliers also included Pakistan and India from the middle.

This article focuses on military support the US, EU and Israel provided the repressive Sri Lankan governments. Moreover, the US and EU are Sri Lanka’s greatest economic trading partners.

Israel

The Zionist State—which practices genocide against the Palestinians whose right to self-determination was recognized by 46 governments on the HRC during the 19th session with only the US voting against—hardly comes into the spotlight when the Sri Lanka-Tamil conflict is discussed.

Nevertheless, “Israel has been a faithful supplier to Sri Lanka” serving the military, commerce and politics, as the Swedish book maintains.

The most decisive sales and donations in the latter years of war came from Israel (and China). A vast number of combat aircraft—nine of 24 since 2000; 16 Kfir jets in all—and many of the ships (especially six Super Dvora and 38 Shaldag fast patrol craft) used by Sri Lanka came from Israel. It also supplied seven unmanned vehicles, 16 anti-ship mines, communication and surveillance equipment, and great quantities of ammunition; plus pilots and Mossad intelligence agents.

Makhdoom Babar, editor-in-chief of the pro-Sri Lanka government Daily Mail reported that Israel uses Sri Lanka waters to test their missiles.

A 2009 SIPRI report, “International Arms Transfers”, shows that between 2000 and 2007, Sri Lanka acquired “several large warships from India, Israel and the USA”. The Swedish-based international arms conflict monitor reported that Israel has been a major and effective arms supplier.²

Mossad-Israel military intelligence also played an important role in preventing Tamils from gaining their liberation. In the 1980s Israeli experts advised Sri Lanka to create border villages and arm Sinhala civilians as home guards. This is what the US also did in parts of Southeast Asia during its genocidal war in the 1960s-70s.

Economic Union

EU sale of weaponry to Sri Lanka has violated its code of conduct on arms export since it was enacted in 1998 to prevent aiding and abetting human rights abuse. As if to compensate for its hypocrisy, the EU lifted part of the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) in August 2010 due to Sri Lanka’s “poor human rights record”. But EU still offers “limited tariff preferences” to Sri Lankan imports.

Despite this lessened export tax break, the EU continues to be a major market (SL largest apparel buyer), and the island’s economy grew by 8%, in 2010, thanks to loans from the IMF.

During the last decade of war, France provided several small sea craft. Czech Republic sold 16 rocket systems and 52 tanks. Slovakia is, after the UK, the only European country that publicizes its military sales to SL after the restart of the war, in 2006. It lists the sale of 10,000 rockets worth £1 million.

A June 2, 2009 article, “UK sold arms to Sri Lanka during Tamil Tiger conflict”, points out the hypocrisy of European governments in voicing criticism of human rights abuse while they continue to sell arms to the Sri Lankan mass murdering regime.

In 2008, the UK approved £4 million worth of weaponry including armored vehicles, pistols and machine guns, and 12 large naval guns.

At the close of the war, the EU Observer reported:

“The EU is appalled by the loss of innocent civilian lives as a result of the conflict and by the high numbers of casualties, including children, following recent intense fighting in northern Sri Lanka,” said European foreign ministers in a statement, 18 May, 2009.

The EU calls for the alleged violations of these laws to be investigated through an independent inquiry,” the statement continued. “Those accountable must be brought to justice.”

Nevertheless, EU member states – including Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the UK, France, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Poland – had armed the Sri Lankan government since the election of Mahinda Rajapaksa, in 2005.

According to the EU’s latest report on arms export licenses published in December, the nine governments authorized arm sales licenses to Sri Lanka to the value of €4.09 million in 2007 [small weapons, ammunition, explosives, missiles, vehicles, naval vessels, aircraft], the same year that Colombo launched its final offensive on the Tamil rebels.

Australia is among the western suppliers to Sri Lanka. It granted $52.5 million in development assistance (2010-11) — plus $11 million to catch criminals including Tamil refugees trying to flee the blood-torn nation.³

“U.S. Military Assistance to Countries Using Child Soldiers, 1990-2007”

This Center for Defense Information report (above sub-head) shows how the United States continues to supply military support to many countries, including Sri Lanka, when the government or its paramilitary allies recruit children to war against opponents, despite United Nations ban on such support.⁴

“The U.S. Department of State’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices” shows where it supplied military assistance between 1990 and 2007, and often to states that commit human atrocities: “the United States continues to provide millions of dollars in Foreign Military Sales (FMS), Direct Commercial Sales (DCS), Excess Defense Articles (EDA), International Military Education and Training (IMET), and Foreign Military Financing (FMF).”

A CDI chart shows that the US sold (or donated) $143 million in military aid to Sri Lanka’s military in the 17-year period. US foreign military sales, in 2007, were $60.8 million—the greatest amount for any single year—plus $1.44 million was spent on military training and financing. Green Berets were used since 1996 in “Operation Balanced Style” to train soldiers.

Contrary to claims that the US cut off military sales or assistance, it has not done so. Between 2007 and 2009, the US sold a few cutters, radar systems, and 300 trucks. It also sold helicopters, some of which were made in Canada. (Canada also sold small arms amounting to less than $1 million in 2007-9.) The US did cut back sales in 2009 but the 2010-12 fiscal year budget calls for nearly $3 million in Foreign Military Financing and International Military Education and Training.

Economic and Military sales and assistance continue despite the fact that the US admits that the Sri Lanka government and its paramilitary allies practice torture, murder, disappearances, child recruiting and other brutalities. The US Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor report of March 6, 2007 reads:

The [Sri Lanka] government’s respect for the human rights of its citizens declined due in part to the breakdown of the CFA [Cease-Fire Accord of 2002]. Credible sources reported human rights problems, including unlawful killings by government agents, high profile killings by unknown perpetrators, politically motivated killings by paramilitary forces associated with the government and the LTTE, and disappearances. Human rights monitors also reported arbitrary arrests and detention, poor prison conditions, denial of fair public trial, government corruption and lack of transparency, infringement of religious freedom, infringement of freedom of movement, and discrimination against minorities. There were numerous reports that armed paramilitary groups linked to government security forces participated in armed attacks, some against civilians… the government strengthened emergency regulations that broadened security forces’ powers in the arrest without warrant and non-accountable detention of civilians for up to 12 months.

The US State Department’s April 6, 2011 “Background Note on Sri Lanka” shows that the US has steadily supported Sri Lanka militarily and has benefited economically from trade.

Exports to the United States, Sri Lanka’s most important single-country market, were estimated to be around $1.77 billion for 2010, or 21% of total exports. The United States is Sri Lanka’s second-biggest market for garments, taking almost 40% of total garment exports.

U.S. assistance has totaled more than $2 billion since Sri Lanka’s independence in 1948… In addition the International Broadcast Bureau (IBB)–formerly Voice of America (VOA)–operates a radio-transmitting station in Sri Lanka. The U.S. Armed Forces maintain a limited military-to-military relationship with the Sri Lanka defense establishment.

Even as it publicly expressed some criticism of Sri Lanka for not implementing its own investigation into possible human rights abuse, the Obama administration backed a $213 million World Bank loan last March for Colombo development.

US assisted in annihilating Tamils

In January 2006—just weeks after the Rajapaksa-led government had come to power—then US ambassador, Jeffrey Lunstead, warned the LTTE that if it refused a settlement on Colombo’s terms it would face “a stronger, more capable and more determined Sri Lankan military.”

Lunstead added: “Through our military training and assistance programs, including efforts to help with counter-terrorism initiatives and block illegal financial transactions, we are helping to shape the ability of the Sri Lankan government to protect its people and defend its interests.”

For such support, Sri Lanka signed the Access and Cross Servicing Agreement in March 2007 that allows US warships and aircraft to use facilities in Sri Lanka. Combined support by the US and its allies, as well as China-Pakistan-Iran immense sums of military armaments, weakened the ability of the LTTE to hold its ground. This led to the “liberation” of Kilinochchi, “the city that for a decade had served as the capital of the LTTE-controlled enclave in parts of the island’s north and east,” as Keith Jones wrote.

“Last Wednesday [January 7, 2009], the US embassy in Colombo issued a statement that welcomed the Sri Lankan state’s recent victories in the war…and urged Sri Lanka’s government and military to press forward with the annihilation of the LTTE. The key passage in the statement read: ‘The United States does not advocate that the Government of Sri Lanka negotiate with the LTTE, a group designated by America as a Foreign Terrorist Organization since 1997.’”

“US pressure was critical in getting Canada, the states of the European Union, and other countries to proscribe the LTTE. These bans have deprived the LTTE of financial support from the hundreds of thousands of Tamils chased from their island homes by the civil war,” Jones continued.

“The new-found prowess of the Sri Lanka military is due almost entirely to the support it has received from Washington directly or from key US allies.”

The United States and its allies thoroughly supported Sri Lanka governments, allowing genocide and aiding in war crimes, and now dawns a façade of “concern for human rights.”

Conclusion

US-UK axis hypocritical complicity should lead Tamils and their supporters everywhere to change strategy in the struggle for justice.

Sinhala academic Dr. Jude Lal Fernando speaking in Toronto recently on the “Tamil struggle for self-determination: a leftist Sinhala perspective” compared the success of the peace process in Ireland to the failure of the peace process (2002-6) in Sri Lanka. His conclusion, as summarized, shows how it was primarily the US-UK axis that prevented a peaceful solution in which autonomy (some at least for Tamils) could have been the outcome for both sides. And he spoke of a new strategy.

The negotiations in Ireland were based on “parity of status” between the warring parties while in Sri Lanka neither the Sri Lankan Mahinda Rajapaksa government nor the US-UK axis allowed for parity and that is why the LTTE did not surrender arms and sometimes engaged the government army in battle during the cease-fire.

In the case of the warring parties in Ireland, the Clinton regime allowed representatives of the Catholic liberation forces to meet the Irish Diaspora in the US and to negotiate equally. In contrast, the Bush regime forbad the LTTE to enter its territory. Dr. Fernando argues that the former treatment bolstered the confidence of the Irish Republican Army in the peace process, while the latter treatment resulted in the opposite, and thus the US is as “blameworthy for the 2009 massacre” as is the Rajapaksa regime. This also includes the role of UK-EU since its 2006 ban on the LTTE made explicit a military solution by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party and its allies.

Dr. Fernando was a key coordinator of the Dublin Permanent People’s Tribunal in Sri Lanka, which, in January 2010, concluded that Sri Lankan governments had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, and that the issue of genocide should be investigated.
The “tactic employed by the Sri Lankan government, aided and abetted by the international community, was to bomb the Tamil people until they were ‘reduced to a survival instinct’ but not to the human instinct of demanding freedom. In this light, the entire reality of the 2009 genocide has been misconstrued and misrepresented to the world as simply a military operation against terrorism. On the contrary, the peace process itself confirmed that the Tamil national question is a legitimate political question and not a terrorist problem”, asserted Fernando, according to Tamil Net.

Finally, Fernando speaks directly to the erroneous tactic of many Tamil groups in the Diaspora. He maintains that many have been deceived by the US sponsored resolution at the Human Rights Council. The pro-LLRC resolution does not oppose or even mention the root causes of the national question, nor the history of genocide. In fact, it accepts the legitimacy of waging war to protect the sovereignty of the state, which is, ironically, the same position as Cuba-ALBA, Russia and China.

By launching a slight criticism of the state, without going to the core of the matter, the US-UK axis diverts attention away from the real causes of the long-standing conflict: nationalist Sinhalese chauvinism, racism, religious intolerance, and the “right” to practice discrimination and genocide.

“Instead of trying to align itself with international powers, the Diaspora must stand on its own two feet and say that the aspirations of the Tamils uncompromisingly remain the same based on the principles of nation, homeland, and self-determination,” concludes Fernando.

1. See “Cuba Outvoted at UN Human Rights Council over Sri Lanka-Tamils.”
2. Israel is, in fact, the world’s fourth largest arms seller: $7.3 billion sold in 2010. The US government is the biggest weapons exporter at $31.6 billion. Much of the armaments that Israel sells come from the US.
3. “Rudd ignores war crimes and boost ties with Sri Lanka,” Sam King, February 19, 2010.
4. The CDI was founded in 1972 as an independent non-NGO monitoring institution of US and international security defense policy.

We dance round in a ring and suppose
But the secret sits in the middle and knows.

— Robert Frost

Victors’ celebrations harbor shadows that lurk in the soul as revelers dance in remembrance, burying in laughter the suffering screams of those displaced and destroyed, furiously hiding forgotten faces framed in fear from mocking the glorious dance should they be awakened once more by the reverie. May 14 and 15 are paradoxically days of celebration and catastrophe; victors “dance round in a ring and suppose,” caught in a never ending quest to know if indeed this celebration is for victory or for defeat, while those vanquished understand “the secret that sits in the middle and knows.” Are the secrets Truth that we are afraid to delve into, too ashamed to acknowledge, or fear of a pending Nakba for the victor signaled by a merciful and just God?

As this May day approaches, a Biblical age of three score and four for the state of Israel, only six years short of Biblical death, an appropriate time for reflection about judgment and retribution, about peace and justice lest the sins of the fathers remain the curse of the children. What is the secret that sits in the middle and knows? What is it keeping secret? Who is it, since it is personified and knows? Who are the dancers this May 14? Are they the children of the next generations whose fathers sinned? What do they suppose? What do they suppose the victory remembrance celebrates? Does it celebrate the men, the fathers and husbands and sons that massacred the fathers and husbands and sons at Deir Yassin? Do they meditate on those relatives of the dead who live now in refugee camps in foreign countries who have not been home for 64 years, nor seen the town now transformed into a psychiatric institution, nor visited the graves across the street, tombstones upended and defaced? What minds contemplated the barbarity of Deir Yassin a month and five days before the state of Israel declared its freedom as a democratic country desiring recognition by the nations of the world? What minds could lie to the President of the United States, even as they laid waste the town and its people, appealing to him to immediately recognize Israel because they would bring peace to Palestine by obeying the Charter and Declaration of Human Rights held sacred by the United Nations?

What personified being knows? Is it the omniscient and just God who heard the voices of the dying mothers and children and the lamentations of the men trucked through the streets of Jerusalem, living proof of Israeli might, mocked and ridiculed as inferior beings before they were returned to their town for execution? What is it about secrets that stir such fear in the hearts of the revelers? Certainly they know the faces of the dead do not die to the mind of the reaper; they live just below the twisted thoughts that gave rise to the slaughter, for why kill if remembrance of that fulfilled savagery is not possible? And isn’t that after all what the Almighty meant when he proclaimed the “sins of the father are visited upon the children”?

But what if we turn to the ring; what does it represent? Perhaps it’s the Wall that Israel built to hide the enemy they have been unable to cleanse in the manner of Deir Yassin and the other known and unknown massacres recorded by Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe. Perhaps the Wall does not hide the indigenous people as it was supposed to do; that may be what they suppose as they dance round in a ring. Perhaps it rather makes obvious that lives exist beyond that wall, that freedom to move is curtailed for them, that hours can pass attempting to get permission slips to visit Jerusalem, and hours more can pass to travel the seven miles to their former home. Perhaps this is more than just an “inconvenience” as explained by Michael Oren on 60 Minutes, perhaps it’s an intentional and calculated inhuman interference in personal lives that casts as dirty an image on the occupiers as the affront casts on those dispossessed of rights.

How unfortunate that those who dance must have their backs to something or someone they cannot see; how disturbing that must feel since it is the unknown that raises fear and turns it inward corroding the comfort that comes with openness and friendship. What peace of mind exists when one knows that life has been made miserable for people beyond the Wall; what peace blossoms when fear circles behind the back because the government determines the on-going need for greater and greater military power making a police state of a nation inside and outside the Walls built to contain both the body and the soul. What hope evaporates for a future without the shadows that the Wall casts on both those hemmed in and those cut out and life becomes a constant search for unknowns that threaten life and limb even as the very protection the Wall supposes to create destroys friendships with others and isolates each citizen in the sick minds of those who rule the country.

The sins of the fathers began 64 years ago when they swore allegiance to a group of men who had taken control of Palestine from the British Government laying waste both the Arab people and the Mandate government of Britain regardless of agreements made and pledges of cooperation signed between the Mandate authorities and the Jewish Agency. It began with an oath that necessitated selling the soul.

From the moment an individual takes the oath,** they are committed to a life of secrecy and hence of disloyalty and betrayal to those they are most intimate with in their day to day life. Neither their actions nor their true identity is discernible to those with whom they interact regularly. This is a life that encapsulates the necessity of lies, deceit, coercion, extortion, and obedience to a group that dictates the actions one must pursue; freedom no longer exists, self-direction no longer exists, loyalty to others no longer exists, indeed, friendship with others is compromised or impossible, one becomes the subject of that group, a veritable slave to their desires and wills. The mindset that promotes such control allows for spying, for deception of friends, for ostracism in one’s own community for thinking differently, for imprisonment without due process, for torture, even for extrajudicial executions. It is a total commitment to a cause that supersedes all others determined and dictated by an oligarchy in silence and subject to no legitimate institution and to no one.

The darkness of the Zionists’ deceit was and is camouflaged by the appearance of civil structures existing within the framework of a legal authority, the Mandatory Government’s accepted agency for the Jewish community in Palestine and, today the presence of lobbies, think tanks, controlled media of communication, and legalization of policies that allow for dual citizenship among others. Fear still operates, fear of the non-friendly, enemy states that surround the friendly, democratic state of Israel promoted as existentially threatening to America’s security, fear for representatives in Congress who dare not confront the desires of AIPAC and its affiliates lest they find themselves bereft of political support and consequently bereft of their position, and fear induced by corporate media that fears offending the power base represented by the lobby.

Until Israel’s fall 2006 blitzkrieg of Lebanon, when the world had an opportunity to witness the ruthlessness of Israeli Zionist violence unimpeded by concern for helpless civilians fleeing for their lives or orphans unable to take shelter from missiles or children returning home after fearful flight from invading forces only to find toy-like cluster bombs left intentionally to maim or slaughter, the world’s communities felt a sympathy for the offspring of those victimized by the Nazis. Prior to that destruction wrought by a military of enormous power, the people of the world knew little of what went on in Palestine and knew only that the Jews of Palestine in 1948 and 1967 had to fight against overwhelming odds against Arabs of many nations intent on pushing them into the sea, victims of human violence once again. Then came December 27, 2008, Israel’s Christmas bombing of Gaza, Holiday giving with a vengeance. Once again, the might of Israel’s state of the art military — its air force, navy, army — invaded the defenseless, imprisoned, physically destitute residents of Gaza. Once again, the world witnessed the ruthlessness of Israel’s Zionist intent to subjugate, humiliate, and obliterate the indigenous people of Palestine. Now the world knows the truth: the Zionist Consultancy that ruled the Jewish people in Palestine in 1930s and 1940s, like their counterparts in the Israeli government of Ehud Olmert in December of 2008 and January of 2009, intended to expel the people of Palestine from their land and had the military means to do it against an anemic enemy incapable of defending the people.

There is an unraveling of the lies of omission that have quilted the truth these many years. As each square rots in the sun now shed on it, the plight of the people of Palestine becomes more and more apparent. Benny Morris revealed in June of 2009 that “there were far more acts of massacre than I had previously thought (with the new documents made available) … and many cases of rape … and (between April-May 1948) units of Haganah were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves.” He continued in response to the interviewer’s questions: “Because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported … are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the iceberg.”; “The worst cases (of massacre) were Saliha (70-80 killed, Deir Yassin (100-110), Lod (250), Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70); Ben Gurion “covered up for the officers who did the massacres.”; “Yes … the commander of the Northern Front, Moshe Carmel, issued an order in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arab population.”; “From April 1948, Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transfer… The entire leadership understands that this is the idea.”; and quoting Morris himself, “Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here.”

In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pappe states: “The Zionist project could only be realized through the creation in Palestine of a purely Jewish state, both as a safe haven for Jews from persecution and a cradle for a new Jewish nationalism. And such a state had to be exclusively Jewish not only in its socio-political structure but also in its ethnic composition.” Pappe’s accounting of the ethnic cleansing is not pleasant reading. It is a detailed presentation of calculated ruthlessness. Considered alongside Walid Khalidi’s All That Remains, it provides the reader with a visual context that forces consideration of the mothers and fathers and children who once lived and worked and played and prayed in the 418 villages destroyed. It is that human element that can give meaning to “Never Again.” (Introduction The Plight of the Palestinians, section “Selling the Soul.”) Such is the sorrowful tale of the sins of the father.

—————–

** The Hagana Oath (Secret files of Sir Richard C. Catling, Deouty Head CID, Mandate Police)

For those entering the military forces of the Jewish Agency, the Hagana, the badge is replaced with the Hagana Oath (XVI A 157).

I hereby declare that of my own free will and in free recognition I enter the Jewish defence organization of the Land of Israel, (Irgun Haganana Haivri Be’Eretz Israel).

I hearby swear to remain loyal all the days of my life to the defense organization, its laws and its tasks as defined in its basic regulations by the High Command.

I hearby swear to remain at the disposal of the defense organization all my life, to accept its discipline unconditionally and without limit, and at its call to enlist for active service at any time and in any place, to obey all its orders and to fulfill all its instructions.

I hearby swear to devote all my strength, and even to sacrifice my life, to defense and battle for my people and my Homeland, for the freedom of Israel and for the redemption of Zion.

That video was the first time most Americans had heard about Wikileaks. Not long after, the name of Bradley Manning also entered the US consciousness. He would be accused of releasing that video and thousands of other documents relating to the US wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, along with thousands of diplomatic cables describing in oftentimes explicit detail the crimes and morally questionable actions and words of Washington officials. Soon, Mr. Manning would be charged with treason and aiding the enemy (among other charges) for his actions. He is currently on trial in a US military court located at Fort Meade, MD and faces life imprisonment. It is my belief that only an immense and broad popular movement could possibly change that fate.

Bradley Manning’s decision and the subsequent reaction is the subject of a newly published book by civil rights attorney and commentator Chase Madar. This book, titled The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History, presents Manning’s decision in the context it was meant to be understood: as a political act by a man who saw his duty to humanity to be greater than his orders to protect the Pentagon and politicians that sent him and thousands of other GIs to war.

Madar attacks the very system of secrecy Manning is charged with violating. He details the overzealous use of secret and top secret classifications by government officials, calling it a “tragic, bloated farce.” He questions the use of the Espionage Act to charge Manning and other men whose actions are not about aiding the enemy, but about exposing the misdeeds of the US government. In discussing the frequent use of strategic leaks by government officials to get a piece of legislation approved, Madar surmises that Manning’s biggest mistake is that, unlike those government officials, he didn’t break the law properly.

What did the documents Manning sent to Wikileaks contain? While it is impossible to even begin to summarize the millions of words in those documents in the brief space of Madar’s text, he does list the basics of some of the content. The documents showed a brutal pacification campaign in Afghanistan where civilian deaths were all too common and sometimes intentional. They acknowledged massive civilian casualties from US fire in Iraq and detailed Washington’s retail diplomacy with the Vatican hoping to convince the Holy See to call the US wars just. In other areas, the diplomatic cables exposed the role of the US Embassy in Haiti in fighting attempts to raise the minimum wage there to 61 cents an hour and US complicity in covering up Israeli atrocities in Gaza.

Yet, despite the revelations they contained, the US government has been unable to prove that the leaks harmed any individual. Unfortunately, neither have they changed the essence of US policy. After acknowledging this, Madar writes about two leaks that probably did matter. One was a 1968 leak by Daniel Ellsberg to presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy that detailed the Johnson administration’s plans to expand the US war to Laos and Cambodia. The leak and Kennedy’s revealing it probably prevented that expansion under LBJ. Of course, Nixon wasted little time in doing exactly what Johnson didn’t do. Another more recent example occurred in 2003 when the national intelligence assessment of Iran’s nuclear weapons capability was leaked. This document stated clearly that Iran had no nuclear weapons and was not building any at the time. That leak probably prevented the US from attacking Iran.

Like it or not, since his arrest Manning’s treatment has been shameful. His imprisonment, which includes solitary confinement and forced nakedness is nothing short of torture. Indeed it has been condemned as such by the German Bundestag and several other individuals in European governments and even some high ranking US officials. Madar’s discussion of Manning’s treatment is revealing and likely to garner a number of denials by liberals and neocons in the halls of power. This is especially true when he argues against the view promulgated by US liberals that the treatment is an aberration. The fact is, writes Madar, the abuses experienced by Manning and by prisoners in US-run prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, and Afghanistan are also commonplace in US prisons. Furthermore, torture is a common occurrence in US jails at all levels of the penal system.

In the early 1970s Kris Kristofferson recorded a song whose chorus includes the lines “The law is for protection of the people/Rules are rules as any fool can see….” The song proceeds to show the use of this maxim by the powers that be to lock up those that disrupt their rule. The sarcasm of the lyrics continues, pointing out how laws are not only applied unequally, but are often written only to protect the wealthy and powerful. If Kris Kristofferson were to add a verse to his tune in 2012, it could be about Bradley Manning. When pressed to explain the charges arrayed against Manning, the reason given most often is that he broke the rules regarding classified information and that is reason enough. As Madar points out over and over in his book, these rules are broken quite often by government officials in the pursuit of certain policies and those violations are rarely challenged. Furthermore, and considerably more appalling, is the reality that the atrocities and diplomatic maneuverings revealed in the documents Manning released are not illegal. Why? Simply put, because the laws are written by the warmakers and profiteers. So, those that reveal the machinations of the powerful are more likely to go to prison than those that kill, torture, bribe and steal in the name of empire.

Simultaneously an indictment of a government obsessed with secrecy and a nation addicted to war, The Passion of Bradley Manning is also a concise and clear explanation of who Bradley Manning is. It explains why he risked his life and future by committing the overtly political act of exposing his government’s crimes and lies. Perhaps most importantly, it is a call to us to act not only in defense of Manning, but in defense of our futures.

In addition to reporting on the International Brigades fighting Franco and fascism, which included members of the Lincoln Brigades from the United States, Hughes was particularly focused on the volunteer Moors, those soldiers of color primarily from Morocco who signed up for both Republican and Nationalist causes. He and African-Cuban poet, Nicolás Guillén, bussed through Barcelona admiring relics of its modernist antiquity while lamenting the visible destruction in the wake of war.  By day two of their trip, Hughes and Guillén witnessed an air raid for themselves, which rattled Hughes from his bed and sent him scurrying to his hotel lobby where he met Guillén.  Hughes was overwhelmed with the traumatizing scenes of death and inhumane violence to such a degree that he would record the event in several articles, essays, and poems.  Together, these macabre vignettes speak volumes about how the war impacted his political and artistic consciousness.  Not long after the experience in Barcelona, he penned these verses:

Black smoke of sound
Curls against the midnight sky.

Deeper than a whistle,
Louder than a cry,
Worse than a scream
Tangled in the wail
Of a nightmare dream,
The siren
Of the air raid sounds.

“Air Raid: Barcelona” is a lyrical testimony to fascist bombing campaigns employed during the Spanish Civil War and a paean to its victims.  The short, staccato phrasing elicits confusion and anxiety, as if to place the reader in the center of the frightening chaos.  Hughes’s punctuated, march-like iambs slowly accelerate in anticipation of the bedlam to come:

Flames and bombs and
Death in the ear!
The siren announces
Planes drawing near.
Down from bedrooms
Stumble women in gowns.
Men, half-dressed,
Carrying children rush down.
Up in the sky-lanes
Against the stars
A flock of death birds
Whose wings are steel bars
Fill the sky with a low dull roar
Of a plane,
two planes,
three planes,
five planes,
or more.
The anti-aircraft guns bark into space.
The searchlights make wounds
On the night’s dark face.

The verses read like an image taken from a journalistic account that puts a print story in lyrical form.  “Air Raid: Barcelona” literally reads as a headline, making Hughes’s rendering of war a kind of textual documentary and therefore more immediate and sensorial to the reader.

We live in a time when Hughes’s horror may be relived in a different context, when leaders in Washington increasingly advocate the use of drones in the arsenal against terrorism. In contrast to the high visibility of the German- and Italian-backed bombing campaigns in Spain, which proved to be a dress rehearsal for World War II, today we remain at a safe distance from the sequestered scenes of the “War on Terror.”  The strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia pose a different moral dilemma for western observers because there appear to be no witnesses and few “innocent” bystanders.  Civilian casualties are by and large disavowed in favor of an assertion that modern technology has cleaned up war, so that only the guilty are eradicated and the lawful safely preserved.  The use of drones reportedly maximizes security for the United States with minimal civilian casualties.  Local governments and international media outlets silence the voices of those impacted by surgical strikes. Implemented with the consent (and even urging) of foreign governments, these clandestine operations seek to promote regional and international stability yet actually contribute to domestic inquietude, as leaders pay a price for allowing and encouraging U.S. actions.

In conventional war, the argument proffered by the administration is that the use of drones for surveillance and “signature attacks” is, in fact, in accordance with international law.  Most recently, John O. Brennan, President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, defended the wide implementation of drones against terror suspects, saying they were “legal, ethical, and wise.”  But it is precisely their legality, ethicality, and wisdom that are in doubt.  In targeting non-state individuals, questions of human rights and rightful protections readily present themselves.  They center on uncovering the criteria that deem certain individuals “terrorist,” “militant,” or “insurgent.”  A select, multinational decision making network of high level intelligence officials act as judge and jury regarding who and what constitute global and local threats.  But in this process there are no democratic standards, no transparent forms of indictment, no outside accountability.  We do not always know the exact crimes suspects were meant to have committed.  In short, there is no definite way of pinpointing how guilt of an individual is assessed or the resulting consequences bore by families and communities that fall victim to unmanned war.

Consequently, omitted from much of the public record is exactly how many civilians have been killed in the 260 Predator and Reaper Drone attacks since President Obama took office.  According to the New American Foundation, out of the nearly 300 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, somewhere between 1,785 and 2,771 individuals have died, with a “non-military fatality rate” of roughly 17%.  With the expansive use of drones, estimates vary on the number of innocent people killed.  In Yemen, where strikes are on the rise, some 50 civilians have perished in over two dozen operations since 2009. Numbers vary according to independent tabulators, but most point to several hundred as the total number of collateral damage to date, dozens of them children.

Hughes painted his bombing scene as indiscriminate, a slow crescendo and accelerando that peaks as the bombers arrive, which generates the gruesome frenzy of war:

The siren’s wild cry
Like a hollow scream
Echoes out of hell in a nightmare dream.
Then the BOMBS fall!
All other noises are nothing at all
When the first BOMBS fall.
All other noises are suddenly still
When the BOMBS fall.
All other noises are deathly still
As blood spatters the wall
And the whirling sound
Of the iron star of death
Comes hurtling down.
No other noises can be heard
As a child’s life goes up
In the night like a bird.
Swift pursuit planes
Dart over the town,
Steel bullets fly
Slitting the starry silk
Of the sky:
A bomber’s brought down
In flames orange and blue,
And the night’s all red
Like blood, too.
The last BOMB falls.

Today, bombing “militants” for national preservation and regional stabilization poses the additional problem of labeling.  How do we distinguish militant from civilian?  For targets also have families, friends, and communities.  Those killed are uncles, fathers, brothers, children, wives, and mothers.  Such actions increase the probability of fueling flames of anti-American discontent.  The matter is further complicated when U.S. citizens are added to the list of targets, as were Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, both killed in Yemen for their suspected role in Al Qaeda.  Critics question the elimination of due process that formally charges and sentences suspected criminals.

However, more human rights organizations are taking note.  The ACLU, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other agencies are crying foul at the Obama administration’s expansion of the drone program.  Recently, a Drone Summit was convened in Washington, D.C., by CODEPINK, Reprieve, and the Center for Constitutional Rights as an effort towards interrogating the legality and morality of state-sponsored bombing of individuals and their communities. A multinational conglomeration, which included attendees from Pakistan, discussed the controversial deployment of drones and their wider social and political ramifications.

Hughes’s evocation of war was made more surreal with its reliance on natur alist metaphor to convey destruction wrought by technology.  He concluded his poem with the avian attackers retreating but leaving damage behind:

The death birds wheel East
To their lairs again
Leaving iron eggs
In the streets of Spain.
With wings like black cubes
Against the far dawn,
The stench of their passage
Remains when they’re gone.
In what was a courtyard
A child weeps alone.

Men uncover bodies
From ruins of stone.

One cannot help but ruefully ponder Hughes’s words when reading headlines about drone strikes seventy-five years later.  Further use of drones not only means the laying of more “iron eggs” but also increased surveillance of U.S. citizens in the effort to enhance border security.  Beyond surveillance is the human toll that such warfare inflicts anonymously, with little public record or scrutiny.  In wanting to install democracy in conflicted areas around the world, the U.S. loses credibility while undermining sovereignty abroad by resorting to an anti-democratic method of eliminating its enemies.  These developments should beckon America’s attention and spark urgency to seek information about conditions on the ground.  It is the public’s right to know whose lives are overturned and the degree to which such strikes actually produce a more peaceful world.

The present struggle is directly aimed at the peaceful and happy life of our future generations on this planet.

— Dr. Nguyen Trong Nhan

The widespread employment of the defoliant and herbicide Agent Orange (AO) by the U.S. military during its barbarous war against the peoples of Vietnam should by all accounts be considered one of the greatest war crimes of the twentieth century.  The mass ecocidal-herbicidal campaign to utilize dioxin-containing AO against the tropical environment of Vietnam, begun in 1961 by the liberal-imperialist Kennedy administration, greatly helped facilitate the murder of between 2 and 5 million Vietnamese that was prosecuted by U.S. forces in their war.

Continuing in the traditions practiced previously by Indochina’s French administrators of violently defending colonial relations—and, indeed, vastly extending the scope of these traditions—the U.S. military came to subject the Vietnamese people to a “chemical holocaust,” as writes Fred A. Wilcox, journalist and author of Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam. According to Vietnamese government statistics cited by Wilcox, 3 million Vietnamese are presently suffering from the effects of toxic weapons used by the U.S. in its neo-colonial war, with 500,000 of this total number being children.  150,000 of these minors today suffer specifically from the effects of exposure to AO 40 to 50 years ago, given the biologically persistent properties of dioxin.  As a means of considering and reflecting on these negating realities, Wilcox’s Scorched Earth is an important work, one that resists forgetting—instead attempting adequately to respond to the “call to all humans for help” made by Nguyen Quynh Loc on behalf of his children and all others victimized by AO and war.

As Wilcox reviews, the historical mass-utilization of AO aimed to suppress the Vietcong armed resistance both directly through the eradication of tropical forests that effectively served as a refuge for VC soldiers as well as indirectly by destroying agricultural communities that were suspected of nourishing the VC effort.  The AO defoliation campaign, estimated to have eradicated at least 3 million acres of vegetation, comprised a true scorched earth strategy.  Wilcox quotes Dr. Arthur Westing, one of the world’s foremost chemical experts on the TCCD-dioxin found in AO, as summarizing the general U.S. approach in the war as being characterized by “long term systematic fury inflicted… upon the environment of an enemy dependent for its survival upon a rural natural-resource-based economy.”  It is important not to forget that this highly destructive aspect of the larger counter-insurgency strategy in Vietnam was merely a complement to the mass terror-bombing campaigns carried out by the U.S.—with several hundreds of times the order of magnitude of the Hiroshima bombs being dropped in incendiary and napalm forms on Vietnam, in accordance with Henry Kissinger’s maxim of “anything that flies on anything that moves.”¹

As is to be expected, the herbicide strategy directly destroyed the lives and livelihoods of those deemed to be potential VC supporters by bringing about widespread hunger in rural regions and provoking severe erosion and flooding-events through its devastation of forests.  In part, this dual AO-bombing strategy sought forcibly to depopulate rural regions in its mass-displacement of agriculturalists who then fled to Vietnam’s cities—a vision for which the reactionary public intellectual Samuel P. Huntington famously served as an apologist, thus fulfilling his role as Geheimrat, or adviser of the sovereign, as write Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, or “expert in legitimation,” as Antonio Gramsci or Edward Said might call him.² The “moonscapes” or “parking lot[s]” to which Wilcox likens much of the land of Vietnam ravaged by U.S. imperial administration might serve as a symbol of the overall effects of the mad war on Vietnam’s resident peoples and ecology.

To begin to understand the devastating effects of dioxin exposure on humans, it is necessary to consider some basic biology, which Wilcox provides to us.  Through experimentation on Rhesus monkeys and other animals, scientists have determined the TCCD-dioxin to be carcinogenic and fetotoxic, in addition to being possibly mutagenic, meaning that it induces mutations in DNA.  Among other effects, it acts on animals by inhibiting mitosis, or cell division.  Dioxin has been observed to remain concentrated within fatty tissues for decades—indeed, it is unknown how long it will persist in human tissues.  The toxin is also transplacental, such that it passes from mother to developing fetus.  These considerations thus help explain the emergence of the various disabilities and birth defects seen in children of Vietnamese parents who were exposed to AO by U.S. forces: lack of limbs or eyes, hydrocephaly (large head), musculoskeletal inhibition, severe intellectual impairment, and other neurological effects, to give only a few examples.

Basic reflection on these realities demonstrate the extreme hardships impelled by imperial power relations.  The photographs taken by Wilcox’s son Brendan as printed in the book are a testament to the irrevocable fate to which the U.S. has subjected these children and their families, as to its generalized destruction of the lives of millions of people in Vietnam, as in many other of the world’s societies.  The anecdotal stories Wilcox shares about the means that Vietnamese fighters took to protect themselves from the effects of AO following suspected exposure by spraying—that is, taking baths and eating green beans due to their belief in the antitoxic properties of the latter—similarly well-illustrates the extreme power inequalities represented in the Vietnam War, like other colonial wars.

Rather than be a work that examines horror triumphant, Scorched Earth also examines the litigation efforts undertaken by Agent Orange victims against Dow Chemical and other manufacturers of AO in 1984 and 2004.  The proceedings of the two cases as related by Wilcox are at once disconcerting and typical of established power.  The same Judge Weinstein who presided over both cases practiced legal positivism in denying the plaintiffs’ claims regarding the willfull destruction of human life resulting from AO exposure, perpetuating the reactionary view that the U.S. government was unaware of its effects on humans at the time of its employment, and did not in any case intend directly to harm individuals by using it as an herbicide.  A similarly absurd argument is one advanced by the chemical companies’ legal defense, which claimed that the plaintiffs’ claims, if taken seriously in a court of law, would “risk a stark lack of respect for the Executive Branch” and potentially set a precedent for interfering with its war-making capacities.

Wilcox rightly likens the outcome of this attempt at legalistic redress as being governed by a “Realm” of power, a disorienting and Kafka-esque “magic show” in which dominant social forces hold sway.  As Kafka himself might argue, the fate of the Vietnamese litigants subjected to dioxin poisoning serves as yet another example of the radical inadequacy of approaches that would pursue struggles for justice within established institutions.  It should be evident that the millions of cases of Agent Orange victims to begin with are themselves embodied condemnations of established society, responsible as it is for the “bourgeois-democratic holocaust” that was Vietnam.³  Justice for these persons and all others similarly brutalized by imperial violence cannot be achieved within existing social relations: Wilcox’s elucidation of the juridical proceedings should be seen as confirming this.

This is not to say that Wilcox himself presents his testimony on the Vietnam War within a frame that is expressly anti-racist or revolutionary—however much his findings could be seen to serve these ends.  He invokes the slave-owning Thomas Jefferson to argue against the absurdities of the chemical companies’ legal defense, likening the hegemony of these corporations to that of kings.  Beyond this, Wilcox questionably claims that the US and its allied South Vietnamese military “intended to warn” rural Vietnamese of their plans for mass-application of AO to the environment—as though this postulated intention, never actualized in reality, lessened the actual crime, if it can be said to have existed at all in the first place.  Furthermore, the listing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is glaringly absent from a brief list Wilcox assembles of the usage of chemical and other non-conventional weapons throughout history.  Imperial Japan, Saddam’s Iraq, and Nazi Germany are listed, but the advent of direct employment of nuclear arms against persons is strangely overlooked.  Moreover, Wilcox’s closing words in the book—that we onlookers “ignore” the ongoing suffering of Vietnamese “at our own peril”—seem puzzling: Is the legacy of chemical warfare in Vietnam really about us?  These lapses aside, Wilcox’s book importantly represents a broadside against prejudice, egotistical narcissism, and self-induced blindness.

Representative in this sense is Wilcox’s quoting of Professor Ken Herrmann, an ex-veteran who has dedicated time to researching the effects of AO in Vietnam, as posing the question of why the unavoidably monstrous ongoing legacy of the U.S. military’s crimes in Vietnam does not “haunt the conscience of America.”  Part of the reason for this disconcerting suspension of mind may be due to a lack of awareness, one that Wilcox hence has crucially and helpfully addressed with Scorched Earth.  Yet this absence of awareness is likely associated more broadly with prevailing society’s tendency to render invisible the lived experiences of those persons who suffer the myriad ill-effects of imperialist power-arrangements—the dismissal of the interests of those Chomsky terms “unpeople,” who are even preconsciously denied interests altogether.⁴

The task of overcoming the “bourgeois coldness” Adorno observes as perpetuating life-negating political projects is a decidedly pressing one, given the various threats to life contemporarily observed around the planet, from the endless massacres in Afghanistan to Israel’s continuous bombings of Gaza and the plight of malnourished and ill children or those subjected to radioactive exposure, whether from depleted-uranium rounds, as in Fallujah, or from the melted-down nuclear reactors of Fukushima.⁵  In his comment that the fate of Vietnam is the “toxic mirror into which avaricious corporations do not want ordinary people throughout the world to look,” Wilcox points to the potential collective power of the now subordinated multitudes, hence perhaps pointing to a future possibility that could dismantle imperial rule and so finally succeed in preventing the recurrence of anything resembling the genocidal Vietnam War.

Thus, Wilcox is mistaken to claim that “all we [observers] can do is promise that we will tell [other] people” about the tragic realities of Vietnam.  Documentation and bearing witness—“lend[ing] suffering a voice,” as Adorno advocates—surely are important projects for the present and likely futures, but they are not all.⁶  We observers of the myriad negations perpetrated and overseen by constituted power can, instead of mere spectators, be subjects and agents—actors who rather than resign themselves to world-destructiveness rebel against it, seeking to overturn it.  Against the catastrophe that “just goes on,” in the words of Walter Benjamin, and the “normality” of “death”—the reign of genocidal-imperial racism and environmental devastation, or capitalism—a conscious humanity must labor, abolishing the institutions and ideologies that perpetuate brutality and unreason.⁷

1. Quoted in Noam Chomsky, “‘Losing’ the World: Amercan Decline in Perspective,” Truthout, 15 February 2012.
2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (London: Penguin, 2006).
3. Ronald Aronson, The Dialectics of Disaster: A Preface to Hope (London: Verso, 1984).
4. Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010), 133.
5. Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models (trans. Henry W. Pickford, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 201.
6. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (trans. E.B. Ashton, London: Routledge, 1973), 17-18.
7. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 4: 1938-1940 (trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2003), 184; Adorno, Minima Moralia, §33.

Dense but thinly veiled
Transparent but flowing like cream
Medicine fashioned from steel
Surgeons with dirty tools
Incisions made at the jugular

Homes with buried roofs
Children with broken toys
Mothers with husbands jailed
Lovers separated at birth
Followers with no one to lead

Nation with flag
Flag without nation
Waiting in line
Naked but wearing a coat
Turned back without an explanation

Terror sips from a carafe
Garrisons gather with no one to fight
Lungs labor to breathe
Enemies say they can be trusted
Friends are gathered on Facebook

Kin was once rock
But now is mere rubble
Stones are gathered
Thrown by the arms of skinny children
On dirty streets littered with tanks

Once asked to be chosen
Only to be denied
Rip my skin with a bullet
Release the pin that secures this mortal coil
If Hell is a place for love to die

Father is dead
Mother just sits
Brother has disappeared
Sister has found another way
I am left alone

Death and shambled dreams
Life and recurring nightmares
Stench of the victims
Fragrance of killers
Suited and armored to feast

In 1900, there were no Ashkenazi Jews living in Palestine; essentially none, that is, but a few, small mostly temporary Russian Jewish settlers, not totally unusual for various cults in the Holy Land at that time. Theodore Herzl, frequently designated ‘The Father of Modern Zionism’, because of the publication of his book, The Jewish State, in 1896, and because of the founding of the World Zionist Congress a year later,  stated in 1897:

[We shall] spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.

Thus the concept of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians was introduced.

By the 1930s, the ‘transfer’ of Arabs was the unanimous opinion of the founders of Israel. So-called transfer committees, headed by Joseph Weitz, Director of Land Management for the Jewish Agency, were set up explicitly for the purpose of studying ways of transferring Arabs out of Palestine.

At the beginning of 1948, despite 50 years of land purchases, Jews only owned 6% of the land of Palestine. By the year’s end, the Israeli army controlled 78% of Palestine in a process of ethnic cleansing that saw the destruction of 531 Arab cities or villages and 11 Arab urban areas, with massacres at almost all of those towns or villages, the almost complete looting of Palestinian property and wealth, including looting of banks, confiscation of Palestinian homes and property, businesses, fields and orchards.

The Palestinian people lost everything. Those who survived the massacres lost their careers, their means of livelihood, only to find refuge in tent cities set up by the United Nations which were later to become squalid refugee camps of cinder block buildings dotted around the Middle East.

By just checking the time line, one quickly disposes of the 60 year old Israeli propaganda myth that the state of Israel was innocently minding its own business when it was attacked by five armies of surrounding Arab states.

The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians began on November 30, 1947 in Haifa when the Jewish army under David Ben Gurion, along with the Jewish terrorist group, the Irgun, under Manachem Begin, began shelling the Arab sections of that city. In March of 1948, David Ben Gurion finalized and distributed Plan D to his officers, which was a program for destroying and depopulating Arab villages and eliminating any resistance. The massacre at the Arab village of Deir Yassin, only one of many, but possibly the most famous, occurred on April 9, 1948. Israel declared itself a state on May 14, 1948, and it was the next day, May 15, that the first regular soldier of an Arab army set foot in Palestine. By then, about half of the 800,000 Palestinian refugees had been generated and all of Palestine’s urban centers and been depopulated of Arabs.

One cannot understand the natural anger and resentment of the Arab people, and particularly the Palestinian people, toward Israel, and also to the West, for supporting their oppressors and for being blind to their own suffering, without coming to a full understanding of the catastrophe, which they call the Nakbah, that befell the Palestinian people in 1948.

Nor can one understand the futility of the exalted ‘peace process’, ongoing now for the last 22 years, concurrent with the further erosion of Palestinian rights and freedom, and migration of new Jewish settlers into the West Bank and East Jerusalem, without understanding that Israel acquired its present status as a state, not by negotiation with Palestinians, but by brute force and very much against the will of the indigenous people.

For the Arab people, Israel is an alien implant, imposed by western powers, in the heart of the Arab world against the will of the Arab people.

The Palestinians living under occupation have been living in that situation for 40 years, deprived of natural human rights, abused and, more often than not, humiliated, suffering degradation and humiliation on a daily basis, as their land and property and resources are daily confiscated by the state of Israel, who also winks at settler violence and looks the other way as settlers, who have built their settlement so hilltops, dump their sewage onto Palestinian farmland, as they also cut down their olive trees, burn their fields and poison or otherwise kill their livestock, in order to make way for more settlers and settlements as well as to make life as miserable as possible for the Palestinians.

Zionism is a political program of clearing Palestine of Palestinian Arabs in order to create the space for an exclusive Jewish state. As such, its goal is to destroy the Palestinians as a people with an identity as a people and with an attachment to the land of their births and the births of their ancestry. Such a project meets the definition of genocide in international law. Genocide is a crime against humanity as well as against its immediate victims. Genocide is a crime in which all of humanity is degraded.

Libya

In his March 19, 2011 interview with Stephen Shalom (“Libyan Developments”) Achcar discusses what he says is the “composition of the opposition,” which he said was the case for “all the other revolts shaking the region.” They were “very heterogeneous,” and that in “all the disparate forces [there] is a rejection of the dictatorship and a longing for democracy and human rights.”¹

This was written and published nearly a month after numerous reports began coming in about vicious “rebel” attacks on black Africans. But for Achcar, who says nothing of the plight of black Africans, their tormentors long for “human rights.”

As for these “disparate forces” Achcar said “the Libyan opposition represents a mixture of forces, and the bottom line is that there is no reason for any different attitude toward them than to any other of the mass uprisings in the region.” But there were not, in places like Egypt, Bahrain and Tunisia, former regime officials (with the likes of former Libyan justice minister, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil) leading the rebels in alliance with the West, nor the racist attacks on minorities. Egypt and Tunisia didn’t need several months of NATO bombings to overthrow their governments, nor did they need to carry out terrorist attacks, indiscriminately shelled civilians, torture, execute and deny humanitarian assistance. And unlike Benghazi, Egyptian and Tunisian didn’t fly Al Qaeda flags over their courts following their revolutions. Achcar’s “bottom line” is simply false. There was and still are plenty of reasons to have a different attitude towards what happened in Libya and what happened in Egypt and Tunisia.²

In Egypt and Tunisia the uprisings were actually greeted with popular support. In Libya it was the Gaddafi regime which retained the popular support, as witnessed by the massive pro-government rally³ in Tripoli in July of 2011, the “citizen volunteers”⁴ of Sirte, and the residents of Bani Walid⁵ who have reclaimed their town since the fall of the government. It’s worth remembering that Libyan “rebels” would never have been able to overthrow the government and unleash the nightmare that they did without the help of NATO. Or as Luis Rumbaut, a Cuban-American lawyer put it:

At its peak, the 26 of July Movement had some 300 fighters, ill fed and poorly armed, bitten by mosquitoes and accompanied by the rain. Against them, Gen. Fulgencio Batista mobilized an army, a navy, an air force, a coast guard, and the Rural Guard, aside from a network of spies and irregular bands of enforcers at his command.

How could the 26 of July Movement have achieved victory? The majority of the people were against Batista and for the 26 of July. There was also an active underground, and organized resistance among student, union, and political organizations. Batista fell because he had no support. Revolutions succeed when the system they replace can no longer survive.

Libya’s rebels are a different story …⁶

In the same interview with Shalom, Achcar spoke of “the urgency of preventing the massacre that would have inevitably resulted from an assault on Benghazi by Gaddafi’s forces, and the absence of any alternative means of achieving the protection goal,” by saying that “no one can reasonably oppose” UN Resolution 1973.

The problem that many on the left had was not so much the wording of the resolution—though it was pointed out how one-sided it was in that the resolution demanded “that the Libyan government comply with their obligations under international law, including international humanitarian law, human rights and refugee law and take all measures to protect civilians and meet their basic needs, and to ensure the rapid and unimpeded passage of humanitarian assistance,” but said nothing of the legal obligations of the rebels—but that hardly anyone expected the US and NATO to actually protect civilians, de-escalate the conflict, or accept a cease fire (which the resolution made its first demand for). In fact, by the time the resolution was adopted, and Achcar’s interview was published, the Libyan government had already offered a cease fire which was rejected!

Here is a list of the numerous ceasefire offers. The source of the offers is revealing.⁷

February

25| Gaddafi’s Son Sees Negotiaton, Ceasefire in Libya

25| Gaddafi’s Son to Negotiate Ceasefire

March

18| Libya Calls Ceasefire in Response to UN Resolution

18| Pro-Gaddafi Forces to Observe Ceasefire

18| Libya Ceasefire Analysis

18| David Cameron Cautious over Libya Ceasefire Offer

18| Gaddafi’s Ceasefire May Split Coalition

18| Clinton Unimpressed by Libya’s Ceasefire Pledge

19| Libyan Minister Claims Gaddafi is Powerless and the Ceasefire is Solid

21| US-led Forces Reject Gaddafi Ceasefire

27| Turkey Offers to Broker Ceasefire Talks

April

1| Libyan Rebels Prepared to Accept Ceasefire if Gaddafi Lifts Sieges, Allows Protests

1| Libyan Rebels Seek Ceasefire as US Vows to Withdraw Jets

6| Gaddafi Accepts African Roadmap to End Libya Civil War Including Ceasefire

7| Gaddafi Writes to Obama, Urging End to Airstrikes

10| Libyan Rebels Spurn African Union Ceasefire Unless Gaddafi Gives Up Power

11| Ceasefire ‘Must Meet UN Conditions’ says Hague

11| Benghazi Rebels Reject African Union Truce Plan

13| Crucial Libya Talks as Rebels Again Reject Ceasefire

19| UN Appeals for Libya Ceasefire

30| Gaddafi Calls for Ceasefire as NATO Strikes Tripoli

30| Muammar Gaddafi Calls for Ceasefire in Libyan TV Address

30| Libyan Rebels Reject Gaddafi Offer

30| Libyan Opposition Rejects Gaddafi Truce Offer

30| Rebels and NATO dismiss Gaddafi Truce Offer

May

3| Turks Offer Libya Ceasefire Plan as Western, Arab Officials Meet in Rome

26| Libya Ready for Ceasefire, Demands End to NATO Strikes

26| Libyan Regime Makes Peace Offer that Sidelines Gaddafi

26| Libya’s Prime Minister Calls for Ceasefire

26| White House Says Libya Ceasefire Not Credible

26| Libya Ceasefire Offer Regarded Coldly by the West

26| Libya Approaches Spain for NATO Ceasefire

27| Comment: Why no mention of a Ceasefire for Libya, Obama?

27| US Rejects Libya Ceasefire, Vows War will Continue

28| Talks Under Way to End Libya Fighting

29| South Africa PM to Visit Gaddafi, Push for Ceasefire and Talks

31| Zuma Says Gaddafi Ready for Truce

31| Gaddafi Wants Truce in Libya, Says Zuma, but Terms Remain Unclear

June

2| Comment: NATO’s Strategy in Libya is Working – Talks with Gaddafi Won’t

10| Libya’s Gaddafi Writes to Congress for Ceasefire

11| Gaddafi Ceasefire Letter to USA

11| Gaddafi’s Letter to Congress Urges Ceasefire

21| Arab League Chief Calls for Ceasefire and Political Solution

22| Italy Asks NATO to Consider Ceasefire in Libya

22| Italy Ceasefire Call Exposes NATO Split on Libya

22| Italy Urges Suspension of Hostilities

22| Downing Street Rejects Allies’s Call for Libyan Ceasefire

22| France Rejects Italian Libya Ceasefire Call

23| Italian Minister Calls for Libyan Ceasefire

23| Italy Breaks Ranks to Call for Ceasefire in Libya so Aid can Get Through

26| Calls for Ceasefire in Libya Ring Louder

[Arab League has Second Thoughts About Air-Strike]

26| Gaddafi Vows Not to Put Pressure on AU Peace Talks

27| Comment: Libya is not Ready for a Political Solution

July

3| Libya Rebels Welcome African Union’s Gaddafi-Free Talks Offer

12| Nato Suggests Ramadan Libya Ceasefire

17| NATO Chief Cautious on Libya Ceasefire

20| France: Ceasefire Deal Could Include Gaddafi Remaining in Libya

21| France Says Gadaffi Can Stay in Libya if He Relinquishes Power

22| UN Peace Envoy Suggests a Ceasefire to be Declared

22| UN Plan Sees Unity Government in Post-Gaddafi Libya

26| Comment: Libya’s Stalemate Shows it is Time to Tempt Gaddafi Out, Not Blast Him Out

28| UN Official: Truce and Transitional Pact Key to Ending Libya Crisis

August

12| UN Calls for Ceasefire in Libya and Political Talks by Gaddafi and Rebels

15| UN Envoy Seeks Ceasefire to Break Impasse in Libya with Tunisia Meetings

18| Gaddafi Regime Urges Ceasefire as Libya Rebels Claim Control of Key Refinery

18| Casualties Mount in West Libya as Regime Urges Ceasefire

18| Libya Regime PM Calls for a Ceasefire

19| Libya Regime Calls for Ceasefire

24| Gaddafi’s Son Offers to Broker Ceasefire

September

1| NATO Keeps War Footing Until Gaddafi Regime is Smashed

4| The UN was Hijacked on Libya

28| Venezuela Calls for Libyan Ceasefire

Notice the date of the offers and those that preceded Achcar’s interview and his comment about “the absence of any alternative means of achieving the protection goal.” And let’s not forget that President Obama responded to the African Union’s attempt to negotiate a peaceful settlement by sending an envoy to the region to pressure them to stop their efforts.⁸

Which brings up another thing. Achcar wrote of “the urgency of preventing the massacre that would have inevitably resulted from an assault on Benghazi by Gaddafi’s forces.” Elsewhere in the interview Achcar also said, “The fact remains, nevertheless, that if Gaddafi were permitted to continue his military offensive and take Benghazi, there would be a major massacre,” and that “from an anti-imperialist perspective one cannot and should not oppose the no-fly zone, given that there is no plausible alternative for protecting the endangered population.”

Somehow it is anti-imperialist to go along with an imperialist intervention on the dubious grounds that it’s a “humanitarian intervention.” And like other pro-interventionsts at the time, Achcar says nothing about the validity of the claim itself. Had he bothered to look he would have found out that the claims were made by the rebels themselves, and there was no evidence to support the claim. Nearly three weeks before Achcar talks of “the urgency,” the Russian government said their satellite images revealed no truth to the claim.⁹

This kind of incident is not without an historical precedent. It was in August of 1990 when the US launched Operation Desert Shield for the claimed purpose of protecting Saudi Arabia from an Iraqi invasion, which was said to be imminent as Iraqi troops were moving towards the border. Like the Benghazi claim, Russia furnished evidence to the contrary.

Even the person at the UN who spread the Benghazi claim, later admitted he had no evidence and was basing it on what the rebels told him. It was Dr. Sliman Bouchuiguir, the Secretary-General of the Libyan League for Human Rights, who went to the UN to make the claim without it ever being verified. It was accepted hook, line and sinker, and the rest is, as the saying goes, history.¹⁰

And it wasn’t just that many saw the UN resolution as an escalation of the conflict, rather than a de-escalation. Many also didn’t think the US/NATO would protect civilians. Again as noted, by the time the resolution was adopted it was already known that NATO’s racist rebels were already committing massacres of black Africans. And as time went on these massacres turned into a full-blown campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide, all of which received no concern or interest from the NATO powers who were “protecting civilians” in Libya, and certainly not activists like Gilbert Achcar who saw the perpetrators as “longing for democracy and human rights.”

Worse, at one point Achcar actually had the nerve to write that he “won’t dwell on the unacceptable arguments of those who try to shed doubt on the nature of the uprising’s leadership.” For Achcar, anyone who dared to criticize them “are most often the same as those who believe Gaddafi is a progressive.” It was very troubling to read a leftist scholar like Achcar say that it is unacceptable to doubt leaders, and to claim that those who do are apologists for a dictator. This was the same argument the pro-war right-wingers used against anti-war activists in the rush to war with Iraq in 2003. If you opposed the war then you were an apologist for Saddam Hussein. This is an observation worth consideration, especially when Achcar’s pro-US war in Syria is being repeated.¹¹

Considering Achcar’s silence on the things mentioned above and his comment in the interview with Shalom that “one must maintain a very critical attitude toward what the Western powers might do,” it is hard to imagine he himself maintained such an attitude. Where was the critical attitude towards the rebel leadership, which he said it was “unacceptable” to have? Where was the critical attitude towards their claims?

It would be bad enough that he made the colossal mistake once, but now Achcar is making it again. This time in regards to Syria. The difference between his mistake on Libya is that he at least had some (though not much) protection of criticism since his comments preceded much of the nightmare that happened afterwards.

For example, the ceasefire offers by the Libyan government continued, while the rebels rejected them and carried out massive war crimes.

Earlier this year the UN released its Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Libya, where it too notes that there was no evidence of genocide by Gaddafi’s forces. While they did find excessive use of force against their political opponents, “the Commission has not found evidence that one particular group was targeted more than others.” However, they did find extensive evidence of the rebels targeting various communities, including Tawerghans. It also noted that “from the beginning of the uprising in February 2011, dark-skinned migrant workers were targeted – including being killed,” and that, “The Commission continues to receive reports of sub-Saharan Africans, some long-term residents of Libya, being arbitrarily arrested and beaten in detention.” It also noted that it is “deeply concerned that no independent investigations or prosecutions appear to have been instigated into killings committed by [the rebels].” Much of the documented crimes committed by the rebels amount to genocide, though of course considering the politicization of the UN it is not likely that their reasonable “recommendations” will ever be implemented, or that the UN will ever refer it to the ICC.¹²

The report also found no evidence of Gaddafi using mercenaries, or child soldiers. This is not surprising because there was never any proof of the “mercenaries.” Amnesty International was in Libya looking into this from late February to late May. After three months of looking this is what they had to say,

We examined this issue in depth and found no evidence. The rebels spread these rumors everywhere, which had terrible consequences for African guest workers: there was a systematic hunt for migrants, some were lynched and many arrested. Since then, even the rebels have admitted there were no mercenaries, almost all have been released and have returned to their countries of origin, as the investigations into them revealed nothing.¹³

That being said, Amnesty International could have identified foreign mercenaries operating in Libya … against the will of the population. And the whole world already knows the location of their headquarters. They are a composite of professional soldiers from different countries and belong to a single organization they call NATO, whose headquarters is located in Brussels, Belgium.

Back to the UN report. It said that while they “received reports of theft on a small scale perpetrated by Qadhafi forces during the conflict,” what they were able to establish was “widespread pillaging and destruction of public and private property across the country” by the rebels.

As far as sexual violence the report found that most of the claims against Gaddafi’s forces “cannot be relied upon” because they “believe that there is a strong possibility that the confessions were made under torture.”

Furthermore, the claim that Gaddafi attacked civilian institutions was confirmed, however in many instances the Commission either “could not determine without further investigation whether schools, hospitals and mosques and other civilian objects were hit deliberately,” or found that the civilian objects were being used by the rebels and therefore “could not consider them as purely civilian objects,” and “after these buildings could be said to have taken on a military character by encouraging or supporting combat operations [...] their targeting would not necessarily violate international law.”

In other words, the overall picture puts “the disparate forces” who long for “democracy and human rights” as the main perpetrators of the genocidal violence, not Gaddafi’s forces.

Syria

As noted, it is one thing that Achcar made such a mistake once, but twice?

In a recent interview on Syria, again features on ZNet, Achcar says that, “The Syrian National Council is a heterogeneous combination of people.”¹⁴

Déjà vu.

He also says that, “The SNC is held together by the pressure of various states intervening in the Syrian situation,” and that the SNC is staffed “with a number of figures linked to Western governments, the US or France in particular.” This may be the most truthful thing he says, though he downplays it by not specifying the “figures linked to Western governments,” and by stressing that, “The Syrian opposition within the country starts, of course, with the Local Coordination Committees (LCC),” who Achcar says is “the most authentic representation of the uprising in the sense that they are its principal organizers” of which he says “are networks of people, mostly young, coordinating the mobilization.”

As with Libya, it’s worth noting that Achcar steers away from the specifics. Those with links to the Western governments that are holding the SNC together, or the links off the LCC’s to the SNC and foreign governments, again, goes un-named. As is the quality of their claims. Though there is already plenty to draw from. Writers like Patrick Cockburn of The Independent UK and Robert Dreyfuss of The Nation have written on the propaganda of the Syrian activists.

Before continuing it should also be pointed out that Achcar, in his recent interview, continues to defend his pro-intervention position on Libya even after all that is now known. While he says that in Libya there was “no other group challenging [the TNC] as representing the Libyan opposition,” he fails to note how much more popular the regime was, or how it took a nearly eight-month long bombing campaign, coupled with rebels committing ethnic cleansing and indiscriminately bombing civilians and disrupting the delivery of humanitarian aid to overthrow the government, or how the rebels faced stiff resistance from “citizen volunteers” in places like Tripoli, Bani Walid, and Sirte.

And even after Achcar says that Libya is now “a chaotic country with the state being replaced by independent armed groups” he goes on to refer to what happened in Tripoli as “liberation,” with no mention of the well-documented tortures, massacres and executions that followed. And Achcar certainly doesn’t call what the residents of Bani Walid did when they took back their town a “liberation.” In fact, Achcar simply ignores them and their struggle, like that of black Africans or the people of Sirte where Achcar’s rebels said the people “chosen to die” by not siding with them.¹⁵

Achcar even points out that last August he was opposed to continued NATO bombing (note he doesn’t say he was opposed to it entirely, just “the continuation of the bombing by NATO”), though was “calling instead for arms deliveries to the insurgents.” But by August “the insurgents” were already well underway to committing massive war crimes, and crimes against humanity and Achcar continued to support arming them. In fact, Human Rights Watch (HRW)¹⁶ reported on rebel abuses and said that, “How the rebels behave in towns that have supported Gaddafi gives an indication of what they may do if they gain control in other areas, especially if they approach Tripoli.” And when they did approach Tripoli their indication proved all too true. In an article by Independent journalist Kim Sengupta in late August, titled “Rebels settle scores in Libya”, [17]

The killings were pitiless.

They had taken place at a makeshift hospital, in a tent marked clearly with the symbols of the Islamic Crescent. Some of the dead were on stretchers, attached to intravenous drips. Some were on the back of an ambulance that had been shot at. A few were on the ground, seemingly attempting to crawl to safety when the bullets came.

Around 30 men lay decomposing in the heat. Many of them had their hands tied behind their back, either with plastic handcuffs or ropes. One had a scarf stuffed into his mouth. Almost all of the victims were black men.¹⁷ [emphasis added]

Back to Syria.

In “The United States Should Stay Out of Syria,” by The Nation’s Robert Dreyfuss, the writer wastes no time and gets to the point:

Lined up in support of regime change in Damascus are the Middle East’s major Sunni powers, led by Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Also backing regime change, though less publicly, is the international network known as the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni powerhouse that is providing much, if not most, of the increasingly militarized Syrian opposition forces, especially in Sunni strongholds such as Homs. And backing the Sunni-led regional forces for regime change is NATO, the United States and its allies, who are outraged, just outraged, that Russia and China would dare to veto a carefully crafted UN Security Council resolution targeting President Bashar al-Assad.¹⁸

Dreyfuss then goes on to quote Aisling Byrne of Asia Times as writing, “What we are seeing in Syria is a deliberate and calculated campaign to bring down the Assad government so as to replace it with a regime ‘more compatible’ with US interests in the region.”

Yet the most explosive comment was when Dreyfuss wrote that,

The killings in Syria are ugly, but no doubt wildly exaggerated. Nearly all, repeat all, of the information about the violence in Syria is coming from a handful of exiled Syrian opposition groups backed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and various Western powers. Did 200 people really die in Homs this past weekend, conveniently just on the eve of the UNSC debate? Who knows? The only source for the fishy information, though ubiquitously quoted in the New York Times, the wire services, the network news and elsewhere, are the suspect Syrian opposition groups, who have axes galore to grind.

It’s not just the Times, but even the BBC, and nearly all of the mainstream press.

As for the BBC, in their online article “Syria crisis: Shelling ‘kills dozens’ in restive Homs” we read about how, “The worst shelling has been in the Baba Amr district, where activists say 50 people were killed on Wednesday alone.”¹⁹ [emphasis added]

Who are these “activists”? Why “The Local Co-ordination Committees, a network of anti-government,” of course, or as Dreyfuss put it: “a handful of exiled Syrian opposition groups backed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and various Western powers,” and getting considerable coverage from the dominant press.

Patrick Cockburn of The Independent has also written on the propaganda element that is facilitated by the Western media:

The Syrian opposition needs to give the impression that its insurrection is closer to success than it really is. The Syrian government has failed to crush the protesters, but they, in turn, are a long way from overthrowing it. The exiled leadership wants Western military intervention in its favour as happened in Libya, although conditions are very different.

The purpose of manipulating the media coverage is to persuade the West and its Arab allies that conditions in Syria are approaching the point when they can repeat their success in Libya. Hence the fog of disinformation pumped out through the internet.²⁰

Writing for al Akhbar in late February, Sharmaine Narwani wrote in her piece “Questioning the Syrian ‘Casualty List’” about Nir Rosen’s coverage within Syria. Narwani quoted Rosen as saying,

Every day the opposition gives a death toll, usually without any explanation of the cause of the deaths. Many of those reported killed are in fact dead opposition fighters, but the cause of their death is hidden and they are described in reports as innocent civilians killed by security forces, as if they were all merely protesting or sitting in their homes.²¹

All of this, on the claims of the Syrian opposition, precede Achcar’s interview by months. It is amazing that in the nearly 3,500 words Achcar questions the validity of their claims.

And again there is absolutely nothing about the violence of the Syrian opposition. The torture, terrorist attacks, murder, using civilian institutions as military installations, and killing of foreign journalists doesn’t get any mention from Achcar.

While there was a lot of coverage in the mainstream press about the two Western journalists who were killed in Syria earlier this year, it is noteworthy that there was considerable less attention and outrage at a French journalist killed in Syria, especially after it was revealed the victim was killed by armed opposition forces. There is another aspect about the most recent killings of the two journalists that is (predictably) not being emphasized on: they were not only embedded with the Free Syrian Army, but the “media center” they were operating from was in an apartment building—a residential building.

According to Spiegel Online, “They had been in the back of the apartment serving as the “media center” when the first missile shook the room.” Later the article notes that, “Increasingly little word was coming from the surviving activists in the “media center,” which was moved from the third to the first floor of a residential building.”²²

Initially, articles were questioning whether or not the Syrian government was specifically targeting these journalists. Case in point, this recent article by the New York Times says that “citizen journalists in Homs have been killed recently in what activists interpret as part of a deliberate campaign to choke off news of the opposition.” The article also notes that “the two journalists died after shells hit the house in which they were staying…”²³

What is interesting about the coverage is that there is no questioning the FSA for using residential buildings for military operations even though that is a serious war crime. It is using the people as a human shield, and increases the civilian casualty rate. There was no condemnation from the US or other Western powers, and certainly not Qatar, Saudi Arabia, or even Gilbert Achcar.

So when the Times reports that, “The French foreign minister, Alain Juppé also said in a statement that he had called on the Syrian government to order an immediate halt to the attacks on Homs and to respect its ‘humanitarian obligations,’ ” it is strange how there is no mention of the “humanitarian obligations” of the Free Syrian Army, nor was any similar statement issued when Gilles Jacquier was killed at a pro-government rally last month by the resistance, along with Belgian journalist Steven Visner and seven civilians. Rather, Juppé called on the Syrian government “to ensure the security of international journalists on their territory, and to protect this fundamental liberty which is the freedom of information.” To be sure, for the recent incident, Juppé didn’t call on the FSA to provide similar protections.²⁴

This is all a part of the overall coverage, or lack of, that is coming out about Syria. Not only is their quite a bit of silence about the political, religious, and sectarian views of the “resistance,” and their support coming from the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, but much of the relevant context is missing. All one is likely to find is a repetitive anti-al-Assad presentation. Al-Assad is evil incarnate, the “resistance” are glorious liberators battling a genocidal dictator. If you don’t support the rebellion then you are an apologist for the dictatorship. The truth is not nearly so black and white.

The Syrian government retains a lot of support, and has shown considerable constraint over the last year—much more than one would expect from the U.S. and other nations who are shedding crocodile tears. When the Arab League sent in an observer mission in December and January progress was made, but when the observer mission issued its report (which noted its success and warned that its discontinuation could lead to a worsening of situation), which was suppressed and the mission suspended the U.N. Security Council quickly tried to push through a resolution that only called for the Syrian government forces to cease fire and withdraw. With Syria facing a foreign-directed rebellion and no serious prospect of a fair settlement coming from either the Arab League or the UN, but rather a concerted effort for regime change, it’s not surprising that they moved in on the rebel stronghold. How indiscriminate the regime is being is hard to tell since the only information we have to go on is coming from the rebels, and even they admit they are operating from “residential buildings.”

So it is strange to read that while “The UN mediation has been accepted by all factions of the Syrian opposition,” according to Achcar, “most people are skeptical about the Syrian regime’s true willingness to implement Kofi Annan’s plan.” Achcar says that, “The regime knows too well that if it were to actually withdraw its armed forces from the cities and stop its bloody repression, the popular mobilization against it will immediately reach new heights — similar to the huge popular rallies that took place in Hama last summer when the regime’s forces refrained from attacking the demonstrations for a short while.”

Notice he talks about the regimes “bloody repression” but says nothing about that of the rebels, or how he mentions “huge popular rallies that took place in Hama last summer” but says nothing about the much larger pro-government rallies, or how one poll found that 55% of Syrians supported retaining al-Assad out of fear for their country (i.e. they fear what the rebels represent more than the tyranny of al-Assad).

As for the claim that “most people are skeptical about the Syrian regime’s true willingness to implement Kofi Annan’s plan,” we can look to the Arab League’s report from earlier this year to get an idea of how accurate that statement is.²⁵

For starters, here are some comments about the “opposition”:

In Homs and Dera‘a, the Mission observed armed groups committing acts of violence against Government forces, resulting in death and injury among their ranks. In certain situations, government forces responded to attacks against their personnel with force. The observers noted that some of the armed groups were using flares and armour-piercing projectiles.

[…]

In Homs, Idlib and Hama, the Observer Mission witnessed acts of violence being committed against Government forces and civilians that resulted in several deaths and injuries. Examples of those acts include the bombing of a civilian bus, killing eight persons and injuring others, including women and children, and the bombing of a train carrying diesel oil. In another incident in Homs, a police bus was blown up, killing two police officers. A fuel pipeline and some small bridges were also bombed.

[…]

In Homs, a French journalist who worked for the France 2 channel was killed and a Belgian journalist was injured. The Government and opposition accused each other of being responsible for the incident, and both sides issued statements of condemnation. The Government formed an investigative committee in order to determine the cause of the incident. It should be noted that Mission reports from Homs indicate that the French journalist was killed by opposition mortar shells.

[…]

Recently, there have been incidents that could widen the gap and increase bitterness between the parties. These incidents can have grave consequences and lead to the loss of life and property. Such incidents include the bombing of buildings, trains carrying fuel, vehicles carrying diesel oil and explosions targeting the police, members of the media and fuel pipelines. Some of those attacks have been carried out by the Free Syrian Army and some by other armed opposition groups.

While the opposition is blowing up buses, killing journalists, attacking government security forces and civilians, bombing trains and other acts of sabotage and terrorism, we read how, “In Latakia, thousands surrounded the Mission’s cars, chanting slogans in favour of the President.”

And while the “armed gangs” continue to carry out attacks, the report notes how,

Based on the reports of the field-team leaders and the meeting held on 17 January 2012 with all team leaders, the Mission confirmed that all military vehicles, tanks and heavy weapons had been withdrawn from cities and residential neighbourhoods. Although there are still some security measures in place in the form of earthen berms and barriers in front of important buildings and in squares, they do not affect citizens.

Furthermore, even after we are informed that the government has opened up to an observer mission, offered amnesty, released thousands of detainees, and “withdrawn from cities and residential neighbourhoods” we read of an “armed entity” roaming the streets and “attacking Syrian security forces and citizens, causing the Government to respond with further violence.” More on this in a moment via Wikileaks.

As for the Syrian governments behavior during the mission it is reported that, “The Mission noted that the Government strived to help it succeed in its task and remove any barriers that might stand in its way. The Government also facilitated meetings with all parties. No restrictions were placed on the movement of the Mission and its ability to interview Syrian citizens, both those who opposed the Government and those loyal to it.”

And ever mindful of what happened in Iraq and Libya, the report found that “the citizens believe the crisis should be resolved peacefully through Arab mediation alone, without international intervention.” Translation: We don’t want a NATO “humanitarian intervention,” thanks. No wonder Qatar, who has come out in support of an armed intervention and pretends to support “democracy,” has suppressed the report and went along with the suspension of the mission. Which is at odds with the report itself.²⁶

In the conclusions, it asked for “administrative and logistic support in order allow it to carry out its tasks.” The report said it must have “the media and political support required to create an appropriate environment that will enable it to fulfil its mandate in the required manner,” which includes a “political process [that] must be accelerated and a national dialogue [that] must be launched.” According to the report, “That dialogue should run in parallel with the Mission’s work in order to create an environment of confidence that would contributes to the Mission’s success and prevent a needless extension of its presence in Syria.” The report gave the following warning: “ending the Mission’s work after such a short period will reverse any progress, even if partial, that has thus far been made.” That was very likely the reason for ending the mission, silencing the report, and its ultimate leak. Some want war and regime change, regardless of what the mission observers, or the people of Syria want.

Afterwards one of the observers came out and said that,

The Arab League is entirely discredited by burying the report of its own observers’ mission and its appeal to the Security Council. It missed the opportunity to participate in the settlement of the Syrian affair. All it can offer in the future will be worthless.²⁷

This is at odds with Achcar’s statement about the willingness of the Syrian government to accept and honor a peaceful mediation.

Achcar finds no room for mentioning the violence of the opposition, or the Arab League report. And he certainly doesn’t mention that Wikileaks has already shown that the U.S. has been supporting the opposition forces since before Obama took office,²⁸ or how the U.S. has only been pushing for the Syrian government to cease fire while ignoring the violence and war crimes of the opposition forces. There is also no mention of the new Wikileaks release of Stratfor emails.²⁹

In an email written in December of 2011 it is stated that “SOF teams (presumably from US, UK, France, Jordan, Turkey) are already on the ground focused on recce missions and training opposition forces,” and that while the U.S. “distanced themselves” from a bombing campaign because “Syrian air defenses are a lot more robust and are much denser, esp around Damascus and on the borders with Israel” it was noted that the plan “is to commit guerrilla attacks, assassination campaigns, try to break the back of the Alawite forces, elicit collapse from within.” This means, “There wouldn’t be a need for air cover, and they wouldn’t expect these Syrian rebels to be marching in columns anyway.”

The Stratfor emails makes another startling comment. “[U.S. forces] think the US would have a high tolerance for killings as long as it doesn’t reach that very public stage.” If there can be “enough media attention on a massacre” then the U.S., who is “already on the ground . . . training opposition forces” would find it easier to carry out a bombing campaign like they did in Libya and “would have a high tolerance for killings as long as it doesn’t reach that very public stage,” which with the current state of media subservience to the Western establishment is very likely. U.S. use of force is almost always treated as “constructive,” whereas so-called “enemies” use of force (i.e. Syria under al-Assad) is “nefarious.”

The last interesting revelation on the Stratfor email is the date: December 7, 2011. This is just over two weeks before the Arab League sent their observer mission.

Why is it that Achcar doesn’t mention the bogus propaganda of the opposition, or their violence, or the Arab League report, or how the Stratfor emails show that the US plan “is to commit guerrilla attacks, assassination campaigns”?

It all comes to a disastrous end when Achcar ends his recent interview on Syria by saying that,

Anyone who is truly not a supporter of Bashar al-Assad and opposes hypothetic arms deliveries to the Syrian insurgents — in the name of an idealistic commitment to non-violence, for instance — should focus their opposition on the very real and massive Russian and Iranian arms deliveries to the Syrian regime in order to remain consistent.

Yet again we are told that unless you “focus [your] opposition on the very real and massive Russian and Iranian arms deliveries to the Syrian regime”—what Achcar calls remaining “consistent”—then you are a “supporter of Bashar al-Assad.”

There is no concern for consistency in regards to opposing the violence and politics of the armed rebels that are serving the American Empire’s interests. It is not even a concern for consistency to get the facts right. The “focus” should be on Iran and Russia arming the Syrian regime that is defending itself from a foreign-directed rebellion using civilian buildings as military installations for their terrorist and guerrilla attacks, assassinations, torture and more. Even Human Rights Watch sent a letter to the SNC late last month expressing their “concern about increasing evidence … of kidnappings, the use of torture, and executions by armed Syrian opposition members.” Again, arousing no comment from Achcar.³⁰

What are readers to make of Achcar’s position on Libya and Syria? The one “consistent” theme I have found in Achcar’s position is he is selective in how he approaches and frames them. He ignores the violent and criminal aspect of the foreign-directed rebellions, and says anyone who doesn’t support them is a supporter of the dictatorship. He claims we must “focus” on the crimes and armaments of America’s enemies, and even attempts to describe this as an “anti-imperialist perspective.” This is a very odd position for a supposed anti-imperialist leftist to take. It is also radically juxtaposed to Noam Chomsky’s comments to the UN about the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine, which the conflicts in Libya and Syria are intimately a part of:

The discussions about R2P, or its cousin “humanitarian intervention,” are regularly disturbed by the rattling of a skeleton in the closet: history, to the present moment. Throughout history, there have been a few principles of international affairs that apply quite generally. One is the maxim of Thucydides that the strong do as they wish while the weak suffer as they must. A corollary is what Ian Brownlie calls “the hegemonial approach to law-making”: the voice of the powerful sets precedents. Another principle derives from Adam Smith’s account of policy-making in England: the “principal architects” of policy — in his day the “merchants and manufacturers” — make sure that their own interests are “most peculiarly attended to” however “grievous” the effect on others, including the people of England – but far more so, those who were subjected to “the savage injustice of the Europeans,” particularly in conquered India, Smith’s own prime concern. A third principle is that virtually every use of force in international affairs has been justified in terms of R2P, including the worst monsters. Just to illustrate, in his scholarly study of “humanitarian intervention,” Sean Murphy cites only three examples between the Kellogg-Briand pact and the UN Charter: Japan’s attack on Manchuria, Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, and Hitler’s occupation of parts of Czechoslovakia, all accompanied by lofty rhetoric about the solemn responsibility to protect the suffering populations, and factual justifications. The basic pattern continues to the present.³¹

Achcar’s comments on Libya and Syria also stand in stark contrast with Chomsky’s classic work on “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” where Chomsky wrote nearly fifty years ago that, “Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments [and their media parrots], to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions,” and that, “Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.” In short, Chomsky argues persuasively that, “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.”³²

Rather than expose, analyze, seek, and speak the truth lying hidden behind the propaganda that has been filling the media, Achcar has apparently accepted and repeated much of it.

Opposing the rebellions doesn’t necessarily make one a supporter of Gaddafi or al-Assad, just as opposing the Iraq War didn’t make one an apologist for Saddam Hussein. It is sufficient to oppose the armed rebellions on the grounds that they are not popularly supported, and run the very real risk of making things worse, as Vietnam, Rwanda, Congo, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and now Syria can attest to. If one wants to “remain consistent” they would look at not only the crimes and injustices (or how much support they retain) of the various dictatorships, whether they are supported or opposed by the US, but that of the armed opposition as well. When it comes to Gilbert Achcar on Libya and Syria it is hard to imagine he did so, and come to the remarks and conclusions he draws.

1. Libyan Developments, Gilbert Achcar, Znet, March 19. 2011.
2. Flying proudly over the birthplace of Libya’s revolution, the flag of Al Qaeda, Daily Mail UK, November 2, 2011.
3. One Third of Libya Turns Out to Support Qaddafi in World’s Largest March Ever, Mathaba, July 7, 2011.
4. Fighters Enter Qaddafi Stronghold City as Toll Rises, NYT, September 26, 2011.
5. Libya: Libyan city of Bani Walid still run by Gadaffi loyalists, AllVoices, March 1, 2012.
6. NATO’s Rebel Forces, Luis Rumbaut, MR Zine, August 24, 2011.
7. [7]
8. US bids to break Gaddafi Regime, Financial Times, August 9, 2011.
9. “Airstrikes in Libya did not take place” – Russian military, RT, March 1, 2011.
10. Humanitarian War in Libya : There is no evidence !, Youtube, November 28, 2011.
11. Libya: a legitimate and necessary debate from an anti-imperialist perspective, Gilbert Achcar, ZNet, March 25, 2011.
12. Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Libya, UN Human Rights Council, March 2, 2012.
13. “Es fand eine regelrechte Jagd auf Migranten statt“, derStandard, July 6, 2011.
14. ‘There’s a fear that the fall of Assad would lead to worse for Western interests and Israel…‘, Gilbert Achcar, ZNet, April 6, 2012.
15. Libya: exodus from Sirte as thousands flee rebel offensive, The Telegraph UK, September 28, 2011.
16. Libya: Contact Group Should Press Rebels to Protect Civilians, HRW, July 15, 2011.
17. Rebels settle scores in Libyan capital, Kim Sengupta, The Independent UK, August 27, 2011.
18. The United States Should Stay Out of Syria, Robert Dreyfuss, The Nation, February 6, 2012.
19. Syria crisis: Shelling ‘kills dozens’ in restive Homs, BBC, February 9, 2012.
20. Whose hands are behind those dramatic YouTube pictures?, Patrick Cockburn, The Independent UK, January 15, 2012.
21. Questioning the Syrian “Casualty List”, Sharmine Narwani, Al-Akhbar, February 4, 2012.
22. Syria’s ‘Srebrenica: Situation Grows Increasingly Grim in Rebel Stronghold of Homs, Spiegel Online, February 23, 2012.
23. Two Western Journalists Killed in Syria Shelling, NYT, February 22, 2012.
24. French journalist, several others killed in Syria, MSNBC, January 11, 2012.
25. League of Arab States Observer Mission to Syria, Global Research.
26. Syria Accuses Qatar of Arming Rebels, Defense News, January 18, 2012.
27. What you won’t read in the Western and Arab media, The Angry Arab News Service, February 8, 2012.
28. U.S. secretly backed Syrian opposition groups, cables released by WikiLeaks show, Washington Post, April 17, 2011.
29. INSIGHT – military intervention in Syria, post withdrawal status of forces, Wikileaks.
30. Open Letter to the Leaders of the Syrian Opposition, HRW, March 20, 2012.
31. Statement by Professor Noam Chomsky to the United Nations General Assembly Thematic Dialogue on the Responsibility to Protect, July 23, 2009.
32. The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Noam Chomsky, Chomsky.info, February 23, 1967.

How can you make a war on terror when you are actually the terrorist?

— Unknown

America’s 2003 assault on Iraq, already devastated by thirteen years of sanctions, infrastructure destruction consequently unrepaired from the 1991 bombing was, in the ridiculous annals of names the US military gives to their slaughter-fests, entitled “Shock and Awe.”

This approach to nation destruction is technically known – reminiscent of a sick sexual predator – as “rapid dominance”, the concept based on use of “overwhelming power.” It was devised by two arguably psychologically challenged military strategists, Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, in 1996.

Their days devising Machiavellian “shock” included destroying all means of  “communication, transportation, food production, water supply, and other aspects of infrastructure must (cause) the threat and fear of action that may shut down all or part of … society  (rendering) ability to fight useless short of complete physical destruction.”

Further: “Shutting the country down would entail both the physical destruction of appropriate infrastructure … so rapidly as to achieve a level of national shock akin to the effect that dropping nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese.”

In an interview with CBS Ullman stated:

You’re sitting in Baghdad and all of a sudden you’re the general and thirty of your division headquarters have been wiped out.

You also take the city down. By that I mean you get rid of their power, their water.

Iraq’s water had been deliberately targeted in 1991, on orders to the twenty seven country coalition from Central Command and had never recovered, as was intended. “We estimated it will take Iraq’s water six months to fully degrade”, stated the circulated instructions, which also advised,”Iraq will suffer increasing shortages of purified water because of the lack of required chemicals and desalination membranes. Incidences of disease, including possible epidemics, will become probable …”

Ironically, in an unprecedented action after 1991 hostilities ended, UN Security Council Resolution 687 held Iraq responsible, indeed liable, for all damage, including the Coalition destruction of its water supplies, targets prohibited by both Hague and Geneva Conventions.

Then, after twelve years of deprivation and bombing, of deformed and dying children poisoned by the radioactive and chemically toxic Depleted Uranium (read nuclear waste) weapons used in 1991, Iraqis were subject to further toxic “shock” of enormity, but certainly no “awe.”

As Baghdad’s great bridges spanning the Tigris, which I had walked and driven days before, burned and fell, for the second time in a decade, as the flames consumed Harun al Rashid’s  eighth century “Round City”, and its history was raped by looters, as it shook and tumbled, Iraqis hid in cupboards under stairs – or just waited to die, as Hades itself erupted around them – and Washington and Whitehall called it “liberation.”

Perverts in US and British uniforms put bags over peoples heads, tied their hands, chucked them into transportation and took them to hastily opened prisons, where they were stripped naked, tortured, sexually abused, murdered.

Fellow perverts took “trophy pictures” of the dead – and trophy fingers, bone fragments and worse, as momentos.

Journalists attempting to relay reality were also targeted and murdered by invading forces, setting a trend. Iraq is now the most dangerous place for journalists on earth and the third most corrupt.

On April 9th, the day Saddam Hussein’s statue was pulled down by US marines, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called it “a very good day.” Destruction by occupying forces of cultural history, ancient or modern, is, of course, another war crime. It is also low life vandalism and a damn cheek of – literally – historic proportions.

Anthony Shadid was a journalist who survived the invasion’s forces, but lost his life in Syria last month. His testimony to Iraq’s tragedy and his own courage as the carnage enveloped, remains part of his legacy, in countless words.

As the morgues filled to overflowing (victims were soon piled in refrigerated trucks outside) he visited the Mosques where the “caretaker” of humanity’s last hours on earth tended to the dead.

Haider Kadim, was carefully washing the body of fourteen year old Arkan Daif, killed with two friends. He had suffered: “a hole in his skull, when the sky exploded.” His relatives described Arkan as “like a flower.”

“It’s very difficult”, said Haider, his labour of love and respect over and the men closing the coffin.

Earlier in the week “he had gone to another Mosque to help bury dozens, when a blast ripped through a teeming market nearby. The memories haunted him. He remembered the severed hands and heads that arrived; he recalled bodies, even that of an infant, with more gaping holes.”

Even funeral parties, from day one, were attacked. Shadid records an eighty year old lady, whose family had risked the missiles to take her to be buried in the ancient cemetery in southern Najav, Shia Islam’s most holy site.

They never made it. U.S. forces, wrote Shadid, attacked the three cars, one carrying her body. It was March 31st, 2003.

Troops then moved in to the nations’s palaces, painted murals of missiles raining down on the walls – and subsequently held Christian Baptism ceremonies in the swimming pools, having brought in an “Alpha” Christian indoctrination course, enthusiastically run and embraced by the self- appointed “Vicar of Baghdad”, Canon Andrew White, who also came in with the tanks.

White’s  party piece for visiting journalists is to present them with a copy of one of his books and comment that he is signing it with the pen he lent Prime Minister Maliki to put his signature to Saddam Hussein’s death warrant. History does not relate how a man of the cloth became involved in this ghastly act.

Dismiss any doubts about it not really being a “Crusade” and that being another George W. Bush “miss-speak.”

By May 1st, to declare “Mission accomplished”, George W. Bush landed on USS Abraham Lincoln in a little flying suit, his manhood apparently encased in lead. Seldom “in the field of human conflict”, has a Commander in Chief looked such a prat. (Apologies to Winston Churchill.)

The episode, did, however, perhaps encapsulate the gargantuan, tragic, fantasy-land concept of the whole illegal, ill conceived Iraq invasion, the venture of a very “New World”, into the “Cradle of Civilization” and, as Petra, it’s archeologically ancient cities “half as old as time.”

On April 2, 2002 the Israeli military, having already encircled Bethlehem, entered Manger Square as part of a sweep of the entire city ostensibly to round up Palestinian militants and youths who might be considering a suicide operation. With hundreds of Palestinians – militants, priests, nuns, and civilians – cornered in Manger Square, they had nowhere to escape except into the sanctity of the Church of the Nativity – the site Christians believe to be the birthplace of Jesus Christ. The deadly Israeli military siege of the Church (and of the entire city) had begun, and would last for forty days and forty nights.

Fearing damage to one of the holiest sites of Christianity, the Israeli army initially fired only small arms at some walls of the Church. But by mounting remotely controlled guns with high-resolution cameras atop three cranes, Israeli gunners were able to kill one-by-one several Palestinians trapped inside. One Israeli attempt to take the Church by force set off a large fire in the Greek Orthodox monastery.

While the suicide bombings targeting Israeli civilians were misguided deviations in the then 54-year-old Palestinian resistance to occupation and in the Second Intifada, and cannot be justified, civilian locations were chosen because Israeli military targets were inaccessible. Needless to say, such suicide bombings neither can be justified, nor did they achieve the goal of lifting the Israeli occupation. In fact, on the contrary, the occupation has only become progressively more restrictive and draconian. At the same time, armed Palestinian resistance to occupation is no less understandable than the armed Jewish uprising led by Marek Edelman against the Warsaw Ghetto or the armed resistance led by Nelson Mandela against South African apartheid.

Despite this, in recent years, Palestinians supported by Israeli peace activists and internationals have been increasingly turning to nonviolent resistance against the wall, house and orchard demolitions, abusive and violent Israeli settlers, and the occupation itself. Witnessing the primarily nonviolent civil disobedience tactics of the continuing revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt has given a powerful boost to Palestinian nonviolent resistance and its embrace by the Palestinian leadership.

Nevertheless, the suicide attacks of 2002 gave Sharon the pretext to use armed force to reoccupy the West Bank. This is despite the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 which forbids collective punishment of an entire population for offenses of a few. Article 33 states: “No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.”

In an opinion piece on “Israel and the plight of Mideast Christians” for the Wall Street Journal (March 9, 2012, p. A13), Michael Oren, the Israeli Ambassador to the United States, claimed, “Palestinian gunmen seized Christian homes – compelling Israel to build a protective barrier between them and Jewish neighborhoods – and then occupied the Church of the Nativity, looting it and using it as a latrine.”

The fact is that Palestinian Christian civilians were among those trapped inside the Church of the Nativity. They did not choose to occupy it. Fearing for their lives, they were left with no choice but to take refuge in the Church. It was not Palestinian gunmen, but Israeli soldiers who seized private homes in Bethlehem. The only “looting” inside the Church was the human consumption of food offered by the priests from the stores of the monasteries. No Palestinian, whether Muslim or Christian, acted intentionally to desecrate the Church. The stench that prevailed throughout much of 40-day siege was of unbathed men, the decaying bodies of those killed by Israeli snipers and remote-controlled guns, and the traces of vomit from those who got sick. It was a direct consequence of the Israeli military siege.

Jiries Canavati is the Christian owner of a gift shop on Milk Grotto Street beside the Church compound. He witnessed the siege from within. Speaking to me inside the Church of the Nativity, he recounts why 248 Palestinians took refuge in the Church, and provides a harrowing eyewitness account of what it was like to be trapped under the Israeli military siege. His narrative has been edited very slightly for clarity.

Two weeks before April, Israeli soldiers were just preparing themselves with tanks, vehicles, soldiers, and they gathered themselves at the border [of the West Bank]. So they came on the first of April 12:00 midnight from all directions. They came from the Rachel Tomb, the checkpoint. They came from Beit Sahur where the Shepherd’s Field is. They came from al-Mukhabar village. They came from Beit Jala. They came from all the ways [directions].

Now, they cut the electricity in Bethlehem. And people, just to be honest with you, many of them were in the old town in the old center of Bethlehem. And they thought they were just watching a movie. They didn’t believe that soldiers are going to be here with tanks and that they will occupy the town – that it is really war.

So what happened was all the people were gathering in the town in the old center, in the old market. By 12:00 [midnight] to 1:00 [am] the helicopters came. They were shooting in all directions. They shot many people in the streets. Many young men were killed. No one could help. And I remember they shot many cars; they shot many houses. And by 2:00 to 3:00 [am] the tanks started to move toward Bethlehem from all directions. And I remember maybe 500 to 600 young men were in the old town of Bethlehem. By the time you saw people, they were shot in the streets. No one could help them. People from the first aid didn’t want to give help. No one helped them because they were shooting in all directions. So the situation became worse and worse. People had no chance. Almost 15 dead bodies were in the streets. They burnt cars and they burnt houses. All that is what happened.

At the end, one of the young men said, “We have no chance. You are talking about 500 to 1000 of the fighters. But we have 7,000 Israeli soldiers.”

They came with their vehicles, their tanks, their equipment, and their Apaches [helicopters]. And they were shooting bombs. It was really war.

So one of the young men said, “So what do you suggest?”

He said, “Let us go find a place to hide just to survive.”

And they said, “We have no place. We are here surrounded by Israeli soldiers.”

One of the young men said, “Let’s talk about the Church of the Nativity.”

And they called the Father. The Father said, “We love to give help, but if you can reach this area with soldiers and tanks everywhere.”

At the end one of the young men said, “Okay, we will do something.”

So what happened [was that] they came from around the main part of the Church. We have the Peace Centre. We have the Mosque of Omar. We have the Bethlehem Municipality [offices]. Even in the Syrian Orthodox Church there were people inside, and in the Santana Church there were people inside, and in the Lutheran Church there were people inside. So those churches the soldiers occupied. They invaded those churches. Why? Because [they were] not so important like the Church of the Nativity.

So at the end one of the young men said, “The only chance we have is the Church of the Nativity.”

So they came from the Catholic door. And the Father was a little late. So what happened was they shot the lock of the door and the opened the main door. They came inside. I was in Manger Square watching. I didn’t believe it. I was with my friends. And no one understood the situation. So we wanted to go back home.

I called my mom. “Mother, we are coming back home. How is the situation?”

She said, “Just don’t come back! Go away!”

I asked her, “What is going on?”

She said, “We have a lot of soldiers in our house. They occupied houses.”

We have three floors – one building. My cousins, my uncles, and my father — we live in three houses. There were 150 Israeli soldiers in those houses, and they stayed until the end – forty days – inside the home. So when they came to the Church of the Nativity, … I saw people just ran to the Church. They came to this path. I followed them. I had no chance [otherwise]. So we came though the Catholic door. The first group – we were like seventy. There was another group of maybe eighty. And the third group was a hundred. So we became altogether 248 people inside the Church.

We thought we would stay one day, two days, maximum one week, and then the Israeli soldiers will leave, and we will go back home. But in fact what happened inside the Church was there were some armed people who belonged to the Palestinian fighters and movements. So when the Israeli soldiers found out that some of them were armed, they said we want those. They considered them as “wanted.” So they started to siege the Church. They occupied the Peace Center, the Mosque [of Omar], the Bethlehem Municipality [offices], the whole neighborhood behind here. They occupied the Cassanova, the hotel for the Franciscans. They occupied the Terra Santa School. And behind the Church we have the Milgrota Church, we have Wy Sisters’ House, we have the Russian House, the Russian Hotel, and we have another building – the Multi-Catholic Society. And those were huge buildings and very high. So they occupied all the buildings and they put snipers everywhere.

More than that, what happened was that they brought three high cranes. They put them in Manger Square. Electronic machine guns attached with telescopes and video cameras, and they controlled it by computer. So they see you on the screen when you just move outside here or there, they just press the button and they shoot you. This is the way they shot people. The kind of bullet they used was the dumdum. The dumdum is the one that splits inside. If it touches your hand, your leg, your face, or whatever, you are a dead body. You have no chance.

At the beginning people here were very tired and very afraid, but at the end they said, “We have no chance. This [staying in the Church of the Nativity] is the only chance we have. We have to pray. We have to survive. We have to do our best.”

The fathers for two or three days were afraid, but after that not. So what happened was the fathers said, “We would like to help, but don’t forget you are in a holy place and this is the Church of the Nativity. So we don’t want more problems and any damage to the Church.”

By the time they saw the situation, the terrible things, the fathers became more friendly. They gave us a lot of food. We took from them for ten days the food of the monasteries. We have three churches – Greek Orthodox, Armenian, and Catholic.

They opened everything and said, “Take whatever you want.” So we ate for ten days very good because the fathers just said, “Okay, take it.” But after ten days the fathers said, “Now we have a problem. We don’t have food to give you.” Why? Because we are talking about 248 [people]. It is a big number. If you have a big store, it will not be enough.

So after that we started to move from the field of the Church. Between the grass and the leaves, we started to move slowly until we reached the outer area. We called some neighbors.

How did we charge the cellular phone? There was no electricity, no water, nothing at all. The only light inside the Nativity Church was the tower, the Christmas bells. Why? Because the tower is connected with the Bethlehem Municipality [offices]. It is the same line of electricity. Now, the soldiers were there at night. When they switched on the light, they gave us light, but they didn’t realize it. So one of the young men went up and he made a line and then he brought electricity to here. We started to charge the batteries. So we called some neighbors. They gave us food. But what happened was one of the young men was in the field. The soldiers saw him and they shot him. He was killed. They closed that area. So no one could move from that part.

One of the young men said that his brother works at the medical center, so let’s talk to him. We called him. The only people who could move at that time were the ambulances. Why? Because it was curfew the whole time. Every week they gave two hours for you to collect some medicines, some food, and that’s it. If they see you during curfew time, they shoot you right away. So this was what happened. We called him.

He said, “Okay, I would like to help. I have my ambulance car, and I can move. But what can I do? Just give me an idea.”

So we started to think. We found a way: the Beit Sahur Valley. We called people.

They said, “Okay, we will collect food there because the situation was more quiet than here.”

So they started to collect food from the houses, and then they gathered food at the medical center. The ambulance goes there to the medical center, carries bags in the ambulance, and then they bring as much as they can behind the Church of the Nativity. The young girls, 13 or 14 years of age, go walking at night. They carry bags from house to house, from house to house, until they reach the house which is in front of the Church. At night they carry the bags and then they throw them from the roof of the houses to the roof of the Church. We did that six or seven times to wait out thirty days. This is what happened.

Another mistake: One of the young girls got scared and she dropped a plastic bag in the street. She heard a soldier, so she ran away. The soldiers opened the food. They found rice, sugar, salt, bread, and all these things. So they closed everything, they occupied the houses, and they destroyed all these things. So we had no chance. I remember on the 28th or 29th [of April], we got eleven volunteers from the [Israeli] peace movement. On the 28th, they came through the main door, and they ran to the Church, to this part here. The governor of Bethlehem was inside, the fathers, and the director of the Catholic Society.

I asked him, “I saw people outside in the [Manger] Square.”

He said, “Open the door, open the door. I am the one who has the key.”

Why? Because the fathers cannot wake up at three or four in the morning when someone is injured or there is some problem.

So he said, “Take the key. Just follow orders from the governor and from the director of the Church.”

And then they say, “Open, open. Close, close.” So they said, “Open the door.”

I opened the door. People came inside. Eleven could come in, and seventeen were arrested by the Israeli soldiers. They were with their bags. There was some bread inside. They had also cameras. We took some pictures together. So we ate for four days together.

But the last one week – that was the worst and most terrible. No food at all. People started bleeding. Many people went to the use the bathroom. Everything they ate [went] “splat.” And I remember I was 79 [kilograms]. When I went outside of the Church, I became 63 [kilograms]. So in forty days, I lost 16 kilos. This is what happened.

Many people started to wake up in the morning screaming because they put loudspeakers and they started to bother people. They didn’t want anyone to sleep the whole day.

Many times they tried to occupy the Church and to invade the Church. One time, I remember, from the Catholic section … That is the place where they meet on Sunday and where they have the paperwork of the Church if someone wants to get married, if someone wants to make baptism, or whatever. They came also through the Greek Orthodox monastery. They burned the whole monastery. And many times they came through the walls. They put ladders and they started to come inside. Some of the people here started to shoot towards them [the soldiers] and they moved outside. This is what happened.

People here respected all the decisions. Why? Because they said, “This is a holy place, so we have to respect the Church.” The Church protected the people here. It saved the people. They were following orders.

They used to call Arafat in Ramallah. Arafat said, “Please, don’t shoot from the Church! Just take care of this holy place. This is the most important place in the Holy Land.” And people followed orders.

But what happened was that Arafat told them, “At the end, if you feel that you are going to die, that they want to kill you, that you are in a very dangerous situation, just shoot to let them go away.”

By that time, nine were killed in this Church and 26 were injured. For those people who were injured, we started – the governor, the leaders, and the father – to talk to Israeli leaders. They opened the door. They [soldiers] took them. Why?

The father and the governor said, “It is better for them to be in a hospital or in jail than to become dead bodies.” So until this moment they are still in prison.

Now, about the people who were killed – the first two dead bodies – we asked them, “Please, we have two dead bodies. Just take them.”

The first one was killed at the Catholic roof. He didn’t know the Church. He didn’t realize there’s locked doors everywhere. So he moved up to the roof just to check if he can find a way to bring food or if he wanted to run away to escape. So what happened was the soldiers were at the Bethlehem 2000 Building. They shot him with one bullet. We heard the bullets. We moved up to the roof. We saw him on the floor. So me and my friend carried him to bring him inside the Church. He was on his back like that. There was a little hole in his face which was like very very small. You cannot see it. So when we turned his head [we saw] he was completely destroyed from the back side. He was killed immediately.

And the second one was killed in the Casanova Guest House. He was looking for food. He said, “This is Casanova. This is a hotel for sure. I am going to find food.” They had nothing to eat. So what happened was he went down to bring food, and accidentally he found soldiers inside. He raised his head, and he saw the soldiers in front himself. They shot him with two bullets in the chest. We carried him. We brought him to here. He was 25 years old, married – wife and he has two daughters. All the time he cries like this, “My friend, I don’t want to die. Please help me! Do something! I’m still young. I miss my daughter. I want to see my wife. Please, please, please …” Five minutes, ten minutes maximum. You want to give to him. You want to support him. You have nothing! Bleeding, bleeding, and then he passed away. So those were the two dead bodies.

We asked the leaders, “Please! We have two dead bodies. Kindly respect our traditions. Just take them. Already finished. Just send them to their families. They want to bury them, to pray, whatever.”

They [the soldiers] said, “No. We don’t need them. Just keep them inside.”

What happened was at the Catholic part there were some boxes. Inside were instruments from Italy donated to the Church. We came to the boxes. We took the pieces outside of the boxes. We cut the boxes. We made two coffins. We put the dead bodies inside. They stayed inside the Church of the Nativity for fifteen days with us until the Israeli soldiers and the leaders agreed. They said, “Okay, bring!” We opened the door and they took them – two dead bodies.

Most of the people were shot from the cranes. Three of them were very accurate. If the first one misses, the second will touch immediately. This is what happened. They wanted to finish the problem.

Here the people inside the Church said, “We can stay here six months. No problem if we drink water with salt.”

The problem was what about our families? Many people were shot in their houses. They found out that there were dead bodies after ten days or one week or two weeks. It started to smell. They opened the door. They found a young girl with her mother. They were shot through the windows from the Apaches [helicopters]. I called many families and many friends. No medicine, no food was at the houses. Everything was very very difficult.

So they said, “At the end, we will accept any decision. It is not for us. But it is just for our families. We are here 248, but in this area we have 140,000. So we have to do something for them.”

And then they started to make a settlement through the CIA of America and the European Union.

They said, “We need a list with the names and the ID numbers.”

Se we put our names, ID numbers, and everything. And the CIA of American came at 3 o’clock in the morning. They took the list. They sent it to the Israeli leaders. At the end they showed that, “This one is dangerous. This one is not. This is wanted. This is not. This is a fighter. This is not.” They decided to send thirteen to Europe – they transferred them – and 26 to Gaza.

The worst thing in this situation was what happened when Colin Powell came here. He said, “Okay, we want to finish the siege. We want to finish the crisis. Arafat is in big problems in Ramallah.”

Remember what happened in Jenin? They killed a lot of people. There was a case in the United Nations against the Israeli government because of what happened in Jenin. The Israeli government said, “We will accept anything you need. Just close that file and then we will agree to do whatever you want.” Unfortunately, the Palestinian Authority said okay, they accepted it. So they closed that file in the United Nations, and then we lost that situation. After that they said, “Okay, let’s finish the siege.”

They brought all people here with the CIA in the morning at 6 o’clock. They opened the main door, one-by-one checking, pictures, inspecting your clothes and everything. They put them all in the buses. So they took the first thirteen to Europe. They sent the second 26 to Gaza. And they took the rest, like us, to the military point in Hebron. For two or three days, they made some investigation, and they released us. After that they put their names on the blacklist. They considered them “wanted” or “dangerous” anytime that you were here with fighters. They considered them as “bad” people. This is what happened.

So for me, I didn’t realize that it was really serious. What happened? The siege started on the first of April, and the end was on the tenth of May. After two weeks on the 25th of May, soldiers came to my house and they started to look for me. They called to my mobile. I told them that I am not going to come. I thought that they were playing games with me. I didn’t do anything. So what happened? I am the only one [in my family] who works. My father passed away. I have my little daughter. She is seven years old. I have my mom. She is sick. I am the only one taking care of the family. So if I go there to surrender myself, what will happen is that maybe I will stay two, three years or five years in jail. No one will ask about it. My family then will have nothing to eat.

So I called Israeli leader. I talked to him and I told him that I am not going to surrender myself. They came maybe 15 times to my house. They destroyed my house. They destroyed furniture, my car, everything.

After that my family caught me and they said, “You have no chance. The last message from Israeli intelligence said, “If we see you anywhere, we will shoot you.” At the end, my family put more pressure, and they told me, “You have a daughter. Do something for your daughter, not for yourself!”

I told them, “What?”

They said, “You have to surrender yourself.”

I felt very upset, and then I went to the Israeli intelligence. Three of them with M16s came and carried me without any clothes and put me in jail. I spent five months in jail. And then they sued me. They gave me 30 months. I spent half of the time inside [jail], and then I paid money. My lawyer was a Jewish guy. He was a very very good one. He said, “If you want to pay money they might release you because you are a Christian guy. And then we will let the Church help you.”

So they charged me 70,000 shekels, which equalled 17,500 dollars. Then they released me. And they said, “Don’t do any problem. Don’t do this and this and this.”

I told them, “I am going back to take care of my mom, my daughter, my business, and thank you so much.”

So this is the situation. I lived in prison. I lived between prisoners. I lived here in the siege. So I believe that everything that happened was just wasting time because both sides are suffering. The Israeli governments care about control, about money, about this and this and this. But who pays the price? The people. If you go to the Israeli people and ask them, they want peace. About Palestinians, most of them want peace. But for small amounts of people, like small groups or fanatics, you have to find a good solution for them. You have to stop them. Many innocent people from both sides were losing. Many innocent people were killed. And it is not a game. Our lives are a grace from God. I killed your brother. Tomorrow you kill my uncle.

When asked whether things have changed since 2002, Jiries Canavati told one more story:

[Not long ago] one of the young men was killed in Bethlehem. They buried him. If you ask why, you are not going to believe it. He was a [Palestinian] soldier with his uniform. He was in the street. He had to operate a [Palestinian Authority] checkpoint. They work with the tax department. They just check the cars, especially the big ones. When they bring goods, you have a tax invoice and you pay money for the [PA] government. So there was a van. They stopped the van. The driver didn’t want to stop, but wanted just to hit him. The Palestinian soldier just tried to open the door. When he opened the door, he found an Israeli Special Forces Unit with their machine gun. The Israeli soldier raised his weapon, and shot him with four bullets. He was afraid. The Palestinian soldier didn’t realize what was going on – that it was a Special Unit. He was 37 years old, married with children. And they killed him like that.

The Israelis called the Palestinian leaders in Bethlehem and they said, “We are sorry. We will open the file and make some investigation. We will see what was going on and how this happened.” It was like a mistake.

The plight of the Tamils is chronicled in Ron Ridenour’s book, Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka (Chennai: New Century Bookhouse, 2011). The oppression and genocide experienced by the Tamils is not as well-known as the occupation, oppression, and genocide experienced by the Palestinians even though it is of much longer duration.

I had known that many Tamils lived in Canada having escaped persecution back home. However, in 1997, I became more intimately familiar with the civil war in Sri Lanka while working in Maldives. Many of the workers — and some of my colleagues — were from Sri Lanka. I heard complaints that Tamils were discriminated against because of their language and religion. Worse were the tales of bloodthirsty pogroms of Sinhalese against the Tamils, including torture, murder, rapes — all this committed by Buddhists, people supposedly seeking enlightenment.

Tamils are victims of Sinhalese, but one cannot escape the conclusion that they are also victims of themselves. This comes through in the details of Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka, although the author leaves this mainly for the reader to piece together. The solidarity of the Tamil people is underwhelming.

Ridenour holds, “The Tamils have every right and need to exist in peace and equality, and this is possible only if they have their own state.” The first clause is axiomatic from any human rights-observing person; however, the second part is more open to dissension. There are plenty of examples of different ethnicities eventually coming to a more-or-less peaceful co-existence within the same state. Sometimes autonomus regions can grant the equal human rights desired by all humans. However, circumstances certainly indicate that the Sinhalese were disrespectful of the rights of Tamils and tried to impose — violently, if need be — their nationalism, language, and religion into every nook and cranny of Sri Lanka.

Tamils, of course, had every right to resist and agitate for their rights. Would partitioning the geography of Sri Lanka solve the situation, as Ridenour alludes? Or would it have served as a durable cause célèbre for Sinhalese to reunite the island? As Ridenour notes, the Tamils had a de facto state. What if they had more earnestly negotiated from the strength of their position of de facto statehood toward securing an autonomous Tamil region within a Sri Lanka nation (as an acceptable fallback position from separation)?

Very importantly, Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka provides a historical backdrop to the Sinhalese-Tamil civil war, starting with the first humans in Sri Lanka and working forward. Ridenour writes that a Tamil presence dates back many centuries in Sri Lanka. Both the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils have India as their origin. The European invasions and colonization of Sri Lanka (Ceylon) began in the sixteenth century, and were enabled by the lack of solidarity between Sinhalese and Tamils. During their colonial rule, the British brought over Tamil coolies to work the plantations.

The Tamils did economically better under British administration than Sinhalese causing envy and friction. The majority Sinhalese sought to exert themselves through making their religion, Buddhism, the sole national religion and their language, Sinhala, the sole official language. “The Tamils history in Sri Lanka is one of constant and widespread discrimination.” These chauvanistic moves were followed up with bloody violence wreaked on the Tamils, which Ridenour argues, fit the legal definition of genocide.

Eventually, Tamils formed resistance groups that defended Tamils and pressed for a Tamil state where they felt they could be free from Sinhalese discrimination and violence. The best known group was the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE) who were no stranger to using extreme violence and were declared terrorists by many, although Ridenour puts this label into perspective.

“Really, if I starve the Tamils, the Sinhala people will be happy.” President Junius Richard Jayewardene was quoted in the Daily Telegraph in 1983. Strangely enough, many so-called terrorists are victims of genocide.

Tamils did not just fight Sinhalese military. Tamil rebel factions fought each other; Tamils fought the Indian “peacekeepers.” The Tamils were adept at finding enemies to fight, but what allies did Tamils find?

Lack of Solidarity

Even the Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuṇa (People’s Liberation Front) was opposed to a ceasefire with the Tamils, calling it “part of a western conspiracy to destabilize, divide and re-conquer” Sri Lanka. Yet, if the reasoning proffered by Ridenour for Marxist reluctance to lay down arms is correct, then it exposes a gaping contradiction among the Marxists: they preferred to fight a divisive civil war to avoid being divided.

In the end, the deep divisions among the Tamils would be their very undoing. The egos of LTTE “leader” Velupillai Prabhakaran and Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan (Colonel Karuna) in the East split the Tamils further. Karuna disobeyed orders for the transfer of his fighters, and Prabharakan expelled him from the LTTE. Karuna went over to the Sri Lankan government side.

Now the LTTE was forced to fight the government troops and three Tamil paramilitary groups. It was a losing proposition for Tamils.

Ridenour attempts to answer the question: Why the Tigers failed? The question also implies why the Tamil people failed?

Among the reasons, Ridenour points to Karuna’s defection, Prabharakan’s authoritarian leadership, his reliance on conventional warfare rather than guerrilla warfare, and Prabharakan’s brutality.

The Tigers defeat was ultimately a defeat for the Tamil people. They were a house divided. There was no unity between Sri-Lankan Tamils and Indian Tamils, no unity between Tamils and Muslims, and, of course, what unity can one expect from within an ethnicity that has an oppressive caste system? There was even divisiveness among Tamil fighters; they had to defend against each other as well as Sinhalese fighters. This is hardly a successful strategy for liberation.

A whirlwind of genocidal ferocity engulfed the Tamil people. The western media reported little of it; after all, it did not directly involve western fighters. The Tamils have lost control of areas they held in the north and the east. Ridenour writes of “enforced disappearances” of Tamils, maybe into the human trafficking market that opened. Sinhalese subsequently were being “settled” into Tamil areas and homes.

UNICEF spokesman James Elder spoke of the children’s “unimagineable suffering,” now no longer recruited as fighters are instead coerced into prostitution, sex trafficking, and alcohol smuggling.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon called the devastation “… the most appalling scene I have seen …”

The Sri Lankan defense ministry triumphed its ”humanitarian operation” victory as one with zero civilian casualties. Ridenour pointed to the videos that appeared on UK’s Channel 4 which belie that defense ministry claim.

Where now?

There is a substantial Tamil diaspora that has begun to organize internationally. A young Tamil socialist, Sharmini Lathan, seems to know the way out of the morass. He told Ridenour: “We need to combine all our forces and struggles: Tamils, Arabs, Latin Americans… We need to help each other, [sic] because we have common problems and goals.”

That the United Nations accomplished nothing to protect humans from the scourge of war in Sri Lanka was unsurprising. Of some surprise was the non-solidarity not just among the Sri Lankans; it was among Arab states, leftist states such as Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia who abandoned Tamils. It leads Ridenour to a sad conclusion that “we are heading for moral collapse, and then fascism throughout much of the world.”

Clearly, the Tamils were discriminated against; they were persecuted; and they were forced to resist violently. They resisted largely with minimal support of leftists, communists, and revolutionaries elsewhere. Ridenour found out what he could about the Tamil struggle; he held to to his moral and ideological principles. This single person did not turn his back on the Tamils on the other side of the globe, and he called his fellow leftists out on their lack of solidarity.

Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka gives the background information necessary for the reader to become informed of what led to the civil war and its still unfolding aftermath. Ridenour criticizes the lack of leftist solidarity with the Tamil struggle, but how much of the blame do the Tamils themselves share? One surely would not go so far as to blame any people for a genocide against them, but part of the Tamil struggle was internecine. Readers of Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka will have a solid base to discuss, research further, and form their own conclusions.

1. Yes, even Arab nations unmindful of or insouciant to how that reflects on their Arab brethren in Palestine.

The resolution called upon Sri Lanka to implement its own findings and recommendations made in its report of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), but extended that call to “initiate credible and independent actions to ensure justice, equity, accountability and reconciliation for all Sri Lankans.” (“Independent action” is not defined.)

Furthermore, the resolution with 24 in favor, 15 against, and 8 abstentions, “encourages” the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to offer the government “advice and technical assistance” in implementing the LLRC recommendations and to make a report on the provision at the 22nd HRC session, a year from now.

In an earlier draft, Sri Lanka would have had to provide a time table to show implementation was underway. To acquire India’s vote, perhaps, the final resolution was watered down. No mention of war crimes or crimes against humanity is included; instead, Sri Lanka is asked to investigate “allegations of extra-judicial killings and enforced disappearances.”¹

The resolution implies a lack of confidence in the Sri Lankan government to enact even its own mild investigation, while preventing any discussion of a more solid investigation into allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity that the “Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka” called for last year when it recommended an independent international investigation.

Comparison with May 2009 resolution

The resolution that US allies backed in May 2009 (the US was not on the HR Council then) also called upon Sri Lanka to investigate itself for possible human rights abuse, while condemning only the LTTE for terrorism and war crimes and other human rights abuses. Even though this resolution only asked the police to investigate themselves, many governments took this as an affront to sovereignty. 29 countries voted to applaud Sri Lanka and condemn only the LTTE. Nothing was stated about the suffering of hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians. This resolution was opposed by 12 votes and there were six abstentions. The pattern was clear then: nearly all the Non-Aligned Movement governments voted for Sri Lanka, and the West voted for a possible critique.

This time the geo-political voting pattern was broken, and, coincidently, disproved my prediction that Sri Lanka would come through without a slap on the face.

The changes in voting are interesting:

Latin American and Africa changed votes significantly.

In 2009, all of the African governments on the Council voted fully in favor of Sri Lanka with one abstention. This time the vote was split with five in favor of the possible criticism, three opposed and five abstentions.

In 2009, five of Latin American governments voted to fully support Sri Lanka, two voted for some critique (Chile and Mexico) and Argentine abstained. Today, six governments voted for the critique with only the two ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America) governments voting against any critique (Cuba and Ecuador).

The Middle Eastern governments did not change. They all voted not to criticize with one abstention, the same pattern as in 2009.

Europe, west and east, voted the same way: slight critique.

Russia and China backed Sri Lanka fully.

The countries still on the Council since 2009, which changed their votes from support of Sri Lanka to critique are: Cameroon and Nigeria; India; Uruguay.

The most significant reversal is India, given its several decades-long relationship supporting the Island nation so close to it. Although India changed its vote, it balanced the change with sovereign state solidarity with Sri Lanka.

“While we subscribe to the broader message of this resolution and the objectives it promotes, we also underline that any assistance from the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights or visits of UN Special Procedures should be in consultation with and with the concurrence of the Sri Lankan Government,” read the Indian statement, as reported by Tamilnet.com.

“Observers in Tamil Nadu said that the Indian statement contradicted the demands put forward by Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Ms. J. Jayalalithaa, who had demanded India to declare SL President Mahinda Rajapaksa complicit in genocide and war-crimes and to call for economic sanctions against Sri Lanka till the country ensured equal status to Tamils,” the website reported.

Uruguay’s change is also important. Its new president, José Mujica, was a left-wing guerrilla who spent 15 years in prison, two of it at the bottom of a well. He has placed poverty as the first order of business.

Peru was not on the Council in 2009, but its new government with Ollanta Humala as president voted to criticize Sri Lanka. He has also vowed to tackle poverty as his first priority.

The fact that two African governments have reversed their vote may indicate that international agitation has had an effect. More NAM governments abstained this time as well.

Why the difference?

Although it was the greatest terrorist state in the world that introduced the critical resolution, the United States is still a partner in the war crimes and in genocide against Tamils. It always backed Sinhalese chauvinism, discrimination against Tamils, and offered no aid to Tamil civilians. But it sees an opportunity here to polish its image as a “human rights supporter” while maintaining systematic human rights abuse in its many invasions and military interventions in the world.

The current US president is at war in seven countries, all circumscribing United Nations laws against invading countries that have not invaded the propagator of war: Afghanistan, Iraq (tens of thousands of US war mercenaries still occupy Iraq), Pakistan, Somalia, Uganda, Sudan and Libya. Furthermore, without US backing the Palestinian people would have been liberated from Zionist Israel ages ago.

These are some factors in the change:

1. Indian Tamils in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka Tamils living in the Diaspora in many countries have, since the end of the war, conducted many protests and lobbied governments for justice. A few Tamils have even committed suicide in despair and in protest.

2. Channel 4 two-part Killing Field series. The second episode was shown during these sessions and clearly pointed an accusing finger at the Rajapaksa-family regime for standing behind horrendous murders, mutilations, rape; in short, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

3. Mainstream Tamil parties in parliament in Tamil Nadu, India, were a major influence in convincing the central government to change its vote from one of applauding Sri Lanka to this critical stance.

4. The US is making it clear to Sri Lanka’s government that it is dissatisfied with it even while approving a World Bank loan of $213 million for development in the capital city, Colombo, just a week ago. The US keeps its fingers in the economy while it shows its unhappiness because Rajapaksa is offering more economic concessions to China and Russia. The US has lost its long-hoped for port in Trincomalee harbor, which China will probably acquire.

It was China, as well as Russia, Israel, Iran, and Pakistan (not exactly blood brothers) that gave and sold more military hardware to Sri Lanka in the last two to three years of war to annihilate the LTTE. The US-UK and NATO offered far less in the latter period given that they were bogged down in the Middle East.

Conclusion

Perhaps nothing substantial for Tamils in Sri Lanka will come out of this Human Rights Geo-Political game, not simply in and of itself. But the game’s rules are changed, at least in this area of the world, when so many NAM members have not sided with a fellow member. I believe that this is the case, in large part, because the evidence of gross atrocities has come to the surface. No doubt, US machinations have had some effect. But we should not be fooled that these governments are interested in the human rights of any people. The current US president sees an opportunity to score points by pointing a finger at a real culprit, just as he sought to do in Libya under false pretenses, and as he is trying to do in Syria. He, like all capitalist presidents, seeks oil, profits, and domination. He can afford to point a finger at Sri Lanka’s government today because he has lost influence there and because he wants re-election votes from human rights-concerned citizens, albeit beguiled ones.

Cuba, which started the ALBA coalition with Venezuela in 2004, needs to reflect upon its foreign policy stance and especially in regards to Sri Lanka. It has politically backed Sri Lanka, in part, because they are both members of NAM, and Cuba often acts in a knee jerk manner when the US points its finger at other nations, especially third world countries—understandably.

Yet Cuba goes overboard in backing this most ruthless Sri Lankan regime responsible for scores of thousands of civilian deaths, incarcerating hundreds of thousands without due process, continuing to militarize traditional Tamil homeland in the North and East, taking over homes, businesses, places of worship, and building hotels upon Tamil graveyards.

Cuba has acted immorally and in contrast to its long-time solidarity with the oppressed and exploited peoples of the world.

The evidence of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and even genocide, is much too irrefutably vivid due to testimonies of victims, satellite photos, and the excellent Channel 4 documentaries with photos and videos taken either by UN aid workers, some by victims or by Sri Lankan murdering soldiers which were then sold or otherwise released to the public.

If Tamils in India and in the Diaspora keep up the pressure, if left organizations, grassroots groups, representatives of other oppressed peoples seeking liberation (such as Palestinians, Kurds in Turkey, Basques, Irish, etc.) would join in united fronts for liberation for one and all, then we might be able to bring some real hope for Tamils in Sri Lanka.

Do not be fooled: The US does not want true accountability or a Tamil Eelam homeland for the oppressed minority, but the spotlight is turned on and peoples’ power could stoke the light bringing, at least, relief to the down-trodden Tamil people.

1. See Tamilnet’s story with draft changes.

Balandi is located in the Panjwai District of Kandahar Province, which has seen some of the toughest resistance to the US-NATO occupation of the country. Kandaharis have received a bad reputation for spoiling the war party devised by the US, NATO, and their corrupt local allies.

In a way, Balandi is a microcosm of Afghanistan.

When the US-led bombing campaign of Afghanistan commenced in October 2001, many commentators cheered. In a strikingly unequal war – with the world’s most advanced nations attacking the world’s poorest – the US wanted to teach al-Qaeda terrorists a lesson. The latter quickly disbanded and poured through neighboring borders across the region (the violent network is now being sighted in several Arab countries). Meanwhile, the Afghani people shouldered the brunt of the war. Tens of thousands have since perished in a vengeful war they had no part in creating.

Many commentators have supported the war, rationalized it, or simply pretended it was not happening. The Afghans seemed to be dispensable on account of their being less ‘civilized’ somehow. The war was presented as a ‘good war’, with a rationale that swayed the likes of Christopher Hitchens, who stated: “‘Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age’ was quite a favorite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant’s thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed OUT of the Stone Age” (Daily Mirror, November 2001).

Even those who were actually committed to human rights and international law found some sort of logic in the war in Afghanistan.  “To my lasting regret I supported the war initially as an instance of self-defense validated by the credible fear of future attacks emanating from Afghanistan,” wrote Richard Falk, a renowned human rights scholar and UN envoy. However, he came to realize that “senseless and morbid wars produce senseless and morbid behavior” (Foreign Policy Journal, March 15).

The words “senseless” and “morbid” don’t begin to describe the dirty war in Afghanistan. A recent indication of callousness was on display in Washington, as President Barack Obama welcomed British Prime Minister David Cameron to the White House. Our alliance is “rock-solid,” Obama said. “Our world has been transformed over and over, and it will be again. Yet, through the grand sweep of history, through all its twists and turns, there is one constant: the rock-solid alliance between the US and the UK.” The intended reference was mostly about Afghanistan, as the latest massacre of Afghan civilians prompted a call by the country’s president, Hamid Karazi, to ask the US to redeploy its troops out of villages throughout the country.

“Rock-solid” means the US and its allies will stick to their plan of not ending their combat operations until 2014, and then, through a US-Afghan memorandum, maintaining a permanent military presence. Considering the alarming killing rates of Afghans, the term ‘rock-solid’ could also indicate numerous more deaths of innocent people simply because Obama doesn’t want to be seen as “soft” and inconsistent during an election year.

But Afghans cannot maintain this charade for long. Expectedly, the Taliban will no longer engage the US in direct or indirect talks. As for the country’s weak president, he cannot find the right balance of accommodating the US plans and managing the active anger brewing among his countrymen.

The original orchestrators of the Afghanistan war are waking up to the new reality. The Afghans will accept no less than a full US-NATO withdrawal from their country, no matter the cost of that freedom. Empowered by an inflated sense of military superiority, the Bush and Obama administrations failed to grasp what has become a historical imperative: Afghanistan belongs to its people, who will fight to reinstate that fact over and over again.

Freedom is an absolute value. Its meaning is not diminished by war or military occupation. The moral clarity of the Afghan struggle for freedom in 2012 remains as strong as it was in 2001. What may prove ominous in future months is the fact that even the feeble excuse for war – that it was actually a “war on terror” – is hardly as ubiquitous as it once was. The war now merely exists to save face, to assert a degree of American dominance, and to arrange for some beneficial future that allows the US to reap unclear gains. This lack of moral and strategic centrality is turning the war into something sadistic, strange, racist and utterly inhumane.

The US is turning its citizens into ‘pathological killers’ wrote Falk. “American soldiers urinating on dead Taliban fighters, Koran burning, and countryside patrols whose members were convicted by an American military tribunal of killing Afghan civilians for sport… (Whatever US officials say to explain all of this) has become essentially irrelevant.”

In a meeting with Karazi, an elder from Balandi asked the president: “They killed so many of our loved ones, and do you have an answer why?”

No one is likely to offer an answer, for pathology cannot always be explained by carefully worded diplomatic language. What is clear, however, is that the recent spree of violence and humiliation will further fuel the determination of Afghans to end yet another bloody episode of their history on their own terms. “I don’t want any compensation. I don’t want money, I don’t want a trip to Hajj (pilgrimage), I don’t want a house. I want nothing but the punishment of the Americans. This is my demand, my demand, my demand and my demand,” said another elder (Al Jazeera, March 17).

Speaking of demands, what are the US’ demands and objectives? Do American soldiers even know what they are fighting for, or whom they are fighting against? (Bales’ victims were mostly women and children.)

Former US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld said in March 2003: “Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.”

Richard Falk is right; senseless and morbid wars do produce senseless and morbid behavior. They produce bizarre logic as well.

I went to turn her over and there was a little baby with her that I had also killed.  The baby’s face was half gone.  My mind just went.  The training came to me and I just started killing.  Old men, women, children, water buffaloes, everything.  We were told to leave nothing standing.  We did what we were told, regardless of whether they were civilians.  They was the enemy. Period.  Kill.

— Soldier testifying to his part in the My Lai massacre, Vietnam, 16 March, 1968

So the US military and administration are terribly, dreadfully, grievously sorry for the deaths of all those Afghan villagers killed by a ‘suspected’ lone staff sergeant who’d lost the plot, had a breakdown,  suffered a brain injury.  I’m not going to address all the holes in the story that is being told, in a desperate effort to convince the public this is something that has never happened before and never will again (the Western public that is.  Afghans know better.)  Other news watchers will do a better job than me.

No.  What really angers me is the use of language I have heard so many times before.  Not really his fault, you understand.  It was just that war had got to him.  You’d got to feel sorry for him really, lost in ‘the fog of war’ as he was.  One might – if one didn’t suspect that he was not alone; that this wasn’t an isolated incident; that one hadn’t heard all the same lame excuses last week or last month about another ‘tragic’ (and ‘isolated’) event; that he (or they) weren’t doing what so many soldiers have done before: slaughter innocent civilians because they had been trained to see them as ‘gooks’, ‘ragheads’ or whatever dismissive name the current conflict is using to diminish the humanity of the people whose country they have invaded.

It happens in every war, and not once, but again and again. My Lai was not the only atrocity in Vietnam, not by a long way.  And as Jonathon and Orville Schell wrote in a letter to the New York Times*: ‘Such atrocities were and are the logical consequences of a war directed against an enemy indistinguishable from the people.’  It applies particularly to American forces that have fought war after war in the underlying belief that in order to ‘civilise’ the savage you have to kill him (and here I would recommend you read The Deaths of Others by John Tirman).  In this well researched and thoughtful book, Tirman looks at the appalling numbers of civilians who have died in America’s wars, and the absolute uncaring apathy of the American public towards those deaths, even while they care so much about the death toll among their own ‘heroes’.  And before the rest of us pat ourselves on the back, remember that all states with an imperial or colonial past have taken this attitude towards the citizens of the countries they have invaded, occupied, conquered and stripped of resources.

The atrocity in Afghanistan a few days ago is just one of many, and it cannot be talked into forgetfulness.  One cannot excuse it by saying it is part of ‘the tragedy of war’.  No.  The tragedy is that so many refuse to see the victims as having any real presence in the event, any rights, any humanity.  Again and again we refuse to acknowledge the victims or to recognise that our ‘heroic’ soldiers have wilfully and knowing murdered innocent  people.  The ‘fog of war’ is not to blame for this deliberate blindness, and it is deliberate.  What is to blame is the arrogance of belief that some people have more right to life than others.

So – I am tired of the language of war.  I am tired of the denials, the lame excuses, the justifications, the heartfelt and unreserved apologies and the finger pointing at just one singular mad individual.  I am tired of generals saying the US forces ‘do not kill civilians’; that this orgy of killing, torture or abuse was an ‘isolated incident’; that all those killed were’ terrorists’ or ‘insurgents’; that there would be a ‘full investigation’; that ‘lessons would be learned’.

Above all, I am tired of Obama being ‘heartbroken’ at the news from Afghanistan.  The only way I could express myself over his breaking heart would be to resort to a whole page of very coarse swearing.  I could but I won’t – there is enough filth being created by US forces or ISAF or NATO in their illegal war-making around the Middle East and beyond.

So Obama’s heartbroken.  Would that he were. Would that he were burying his parents, wife, children, grandchildren, brothers, sisters and friends.  Would that his house had been bombed into a heap of rubble. Would that he was sitting under a sheet of plastic in the coldest winter weather outside the gates of Washington, with no food, no medical care and no comfort except that somewhere the other side of the world a self-important man was ‘sorry’, was offering an apology.  Would he know what heartbreak meant then?

And I am really tired of the media, the TV channels and mainstream press supinely parroting the statements they are given about isolated incidents, rogue soldiers, alleged and apparent killings by a suspected single member of the US forces.  Was it only last month they were reporting another ‘isolated incident’?  How many times do they have to report a story like this before they stop repeating the rubbish that it is a one-off, could never happen again, due to a single rotten apple that’s had a breakdown?  Will they ever get honest enough to look back at last week’s news without doing their share of copy-and-paste when writing this week’s piece?  And will they ever wonder in print how many similar incidents have gone unreported?  That perhaps this kind of thing is all too common?

And when will the public wake up and recognize that this is what war is; this is what soldiers do; this is what they are trained to do when fighting wars; that there are no heroes in war, just countless obscene and unnecessary deaths.  And when, oh when, will we learn to care about the death of people other than our own?

The results of this policy have been predictable and constant: the highest incidents of suicide in the history of the military; PTSD manifestations that follow the soldiers throughout their lives, and a rash of murders, assassinations, and violence unlike anything we have witnessed since the debacle in Viet Nam.

The latest atrocity we have seen comes from an as-yet unnamed Sergeant, an E-6 in the Army, who left his post to enter the homes of numerous Afghan civilians, and shoot and burn nine children, several women and a few old men. He then went back to his base and went to sleep. This sort of “aberration,” as Secretary of Defense Panetta characterizes it, was as predictable as the sun rising the next day in Afghanistan. It was as predictable as the burning of the Quran, or the murder of hundreds of innocent civilians by unmanned drone bombs, or the desecration of dead soldiers by American GIs who could not resist the joy of urinating on their bodies.

Panetta made the profound announcements that “war is hell” and that “we will not tolerate such misbehavior!” Obama apologized to the Afghan people for this “inexplicable” crime perpetrated by Americans. What total hypocrisy!! Obama is responsible for the death of thousands of people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Muslims anywhere in the Middle East who do not do the bidding of our imperial army. Why does he apologize for the deaths of these 16 people instead of the thousands he is slaughtering on purpose? Does anybody in the world, except for the U.S. citizenry, believe that he gives a damn about the casualties of his war? When the Commander-in-Chief provides no leadership, the troops are accountable to no one.

Lewis-McChord, an army base in the state of Washington was also the home to the high-profile court-martial of several of our war heroes who were members of a “kill team” in Afghanistan who were responsible for murdering civilians in Kandahar province for sport. The base has one of the highest suicide rates in the nation. It is the staging area for soldiers going to and from Iraq and Afghanistan, where the instances of domestic violence and murders outnumber the suicides.

Mr. Unnamed Sergeant had done three tours of duty in Iraq, had received a significant brain injury in an automobile accident in Iraq, and was then sent to Afghanistan to continue his “service” to our country. He was a trained sniper, i.e. an assassin.

While he was earning his stripes in Iraq and Afghanistan, here in the United States, one cannot watch a sporting event without listening to chants about “supporting our troops,” watching war planes fly above our heads, and witnessing the unfurling of American flags as large as an entire football field. Even Hitler could not match the majesty of our accolades for these “war heroes” who kill enemies at will who do not even have air forces or navies to protect them. The “support-our-troops” bandwagon was the Pentagon’s response to the treatment Viet Nam veterans had when they returned from that unpopular war. This time, the military decided that returning troops would be honored and respected, and the propaganda campaign has blinded the American people for too long.

Panetta and Obama talk about seeing to it that justice will be done in this case, and that the Sergeant could face the death penalty for his unforgivable actions. However, the Pentagon’s record is not one to be proud of concerning service members killing innocents and being prosecuted: On September 16, 2007, Blackwater military contractors killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square, Baghdad. On December 31, 2009, a U.S. District Court judge dismissed all the manslaughter charges because the case against the Blackwater guards had been improperly built on testimony given in exchange for immunity.

Army Specialist Michael Wagnon, stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, had been charged with premeditated murder in the death of a villager in Afghanistan during a tour of duty in February 2010. He had been accused in what prosecutors described as a conspiracy to kill Afghan civilians for sport and then cover it up. The charges against Spec. Michael S. Wagnon ultimately were dismissed.

The Haditha massacre was an incident in which 24 unarmed Iraqi men, women and children were killed by a group of United States Marines on November 19, 2005, in Haditha. On October 3, 2007, the Article 32 hearing investigating officer recommended that former Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich be tried for negligent homicide in the deaths of two women and five children, and that charges of murder be dropped. Further charges of assault and manslaughter were ultimately dropped, and Wuterich was convicted of a single count of negligent dereliction of duty on January 24, 2012. Wuterich received a rank reduction and pay cut, but avoided jail time. By June 17, 2008, the cases of the six defendants were dropped and a seventh found not guilty.

Mr. Unnamed Sergeant will probably be given a medal for his conduct, once the wheels of military justice grind out their version of the truth. After all, there is no assurance that the three and four year old girls that he shot would not have become terrorists, or at a minimum, sympathetic to the Taliban.

Rather than being “inexplicable” or an “aberration,” this soldier’s conduct was the very essence of what we are doing throughout the Middle East. When these “heroes” return from slaughtering defenseless people, they will come home to a nation that is cutting their benefits, having their homes foreclosed, and abandoning health care for the majority of their countrymen. Their employment options will be greatly limited, since killing women and children is not honorable employment here in the heartland, and the job market is worse than it has been at any time since the Great Depression.

It’s bad enough that we have become the monsters that we read about in the newspapers every day. We don’t kill Jews, gays, and Communists; we kill Muslims and “terrorists.” And then we act as if we are shocked at the violence perpetrated by our armed ambassadors abroad. Mr. Unnamed Sergeant: Welcome Home

As FAIR reported here, the media treated this as simply a public relations disaster like the urination on the bodies of slaughtered Afghans by the soldiers of the Empire or the “accidental” burning of the Koran.

The Mainstream Media assured us this latest atrocity must be an “isolated incident.”  Or they simply took it for granted in their coverage as they dutifully repeated Obama’s line.  But this is certainly not the case – not even close.   Much of the progressive media was almost as bad.  United for Peace and Justice blared in the opening of its statement on the massacre “The surge has not worked,” the precise words also used by the Center for Creative Nonviolence which urges the Afghanis not to resist with force as they watch their families massacred by the imperial occupation.  Leftists should be opposing the occupation of Afghanistan because it is unjust and immoral – not because it “has not worked” for the Empire.

Consider a similar imperial atrocity in Iraq caught in detail on video and published by Wikileaks under the heading of “Collateral Murder.”   As those murders proceeded, the helicopter gun ship crew got approval from their commanders via radio every step of the way.  Certainly the commanders were watching the same video scenes remotely as the gunship crew.  Approval was given for the atrocity by the off-site commanding officers.   It was no accident and no rogue operation. Now consider this.  There are thousands upon thousands of videos of such encounters.  We have seen only one!  Where are the others and why are they hidden?  How many atrocities they must reveal!

Leon Panetta, commenting on the massacre, said “War is hell,” and conceded that such incidents were bound to occur in the future.  But he is wrong.  This is not war; it is an occupation.  And every occupation since the Romans and before is a bloody business.  That is no less true of U.S. occupations whether in Iraq or Afghanistan. Every occupation is built on a mountain of corpses – mainly of those who struggle to throw off the yoke of occupation.  This latest massacre which has touched a nerve in the US and Afghani body politic is no exception – it is the rule for occupations

Let us be perfectly clear.  The right to resist occupation by any and all means is enshrined in international law and somewhere deeply in the human brain.  And that includes resisting by force. Libertarians recognize this right to self-defense, and so did the Left once upon a time before it fell under the spell of “humanitarian” imperialism during the presidencies of Clinton and Obama.

Afghanistan did not attack the U.S.  If the terrorist attack on 9/11 was hatched anywhere, it was in Saudi Arabia, Europe, Florida and Minnesota – by Saudis for the most part.  And also in the White House and the Pentagon since Al Qaeda was created and funded there.  (Even Jimmy Carter has crimes against humanity for which to answer since he and Zbigniew Brzezinski aided, abetted and funded the formation of Al Qaeda by their own admission.)

So whose cause is just?  It is the cause of those Afghanis who are fighting to throw off a bloody Occupation. That has to be recognized.   It may not be a slogan around which to build a movement of millions.  But it is surely the truth and we must point it out at every turn.

And we would also do well to remember that Afghanistan was labeled as “smart” war by Obama, the kind he says he likes.  It is not a “smart” war at all – but a brutal, murderous occupation.

China’s re-emergence as a world economic power raises important questions about what we can learn from its previous rise and fall and about the external and internal threats confronting this emerging economic superpower for the immediate future.

First we will outline the main contours of historical China’s rise to global economic superiority over West before the 19th century, following closely John Hobson’s account in The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization. Since the majority of western economic historians (liberal, conservative, and Marxist) have presented historical China as a stagnant, backward, parochial society, an “oriental despotism”, some detailed correctives will be necessary. It is especially important to emphasize how China, the world technological power between 1100 and 1800, made the West’s emergence possible. It was only by borrowing and assimilating Chinese innovations that the West was able to make the transition to modern capitalist and imperialist economies.

In part two we will analyze and discuss the factors and circumstances which led to China’s decline in the 19th century and its subsequent domination, exploitation and pillage by Western imperial countries, first England and then the rest of Europe, Japan and the United States.

In part three, we will briefly outline the factors leading to China’s emancipation from colonial and neo-colonial rule and analyze its recent rise to becoming the second largest global economic power.

Finally we will look at the past and present threats to China’s rise to global economic power, highlighting the similarities between British colonialism of the 18 and 19th centuries and the current US imperial strategies and focusing on the weaknesses and strengths of past and present Chinese responses.

China: The Rise and Consolidation of Global Power 1100-1800

In a systematic comparative format, John Hobson provides a wealth of empirical indicators demonstrating China’s global economic superiority over the West and in particular England. These are some striking facts:

As early as 1078, China was the world’s major producer of steel (125,000 tons); whereas Britain in 1788 produced 76,000 tons.

China was the world’s leader in technical innovations in textile manufacturing, seven centuries before Britain’s 18th century “textile revolution”.

China was the leading trading nation, with long distance trade reaching most of Southern Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

China’s “agricultural revolution” and productivity surpassed the West to the 18th century.

Its innovations in the production of paper, book printing, firearms, and tools led to a manufacturing superpower whose goods were transported throughout the world by the most advanced navigational system.

China possessed the world’s largest commercial ships. In 1588 the largest English ships displaced 400 tons, China’s displaced 3,000 tons. Even as late as the end of the 18th century China’s merchants employed 130,000 private transport ships, several times that of Britain. China retained this pre-eminent position in the world economy up until the early 19th century.

British and Europeans manufacturers followed China’s lead, assimilating and borrowing its more advanced technology and were eager to penetrate China’s advanced and lucrative market.

Banking, a stable paper money economy, manufacturing, and high yields in agriculture resulted in China’s per capita income matching that of Great Britain as late as 1750.

China’s dominant global position was challenged by the rise of British imperialism, which had adopted the advanced technological, navigational, and market innovations of China and other Asian countries in order to bypass earlier stages in becoming a world power.²

Western Imperialism and the Decline of China

The British and Western imperial conquest of the East, was based on the militaristic nature of the imperial state, its non-reciprocal economic relations with overseas trading countries and the Western imperial ideology which motivated and justified overseas conquest.

Unlike China, Britain’s industrial revolution and overseas expansion was driven by a military policy. According to Hobson, during the period from 1688-1815 Great Britain was engaged in wars 52% of the time.³ Whereas the Chinese relied on their open markets, their superior production, and sophisticated commercial and banking skills, the British relied on tariff protection, military conquest, the systematic destruction of competitive overseas enterprises as well as the appropriation and plunder of local resources. China’s global predominance was based on “reciprocal benefits” with its trading partners, while Britain relied on mercenary armies of occupation, savage repression and a “divide and conquer” policy to foment local rivalries. In the face of native resistance, the British (as well as other Western imperial powers) did not hesitate to exterminate entire communities.⁴

Unable to take over the Chinese market through greater economic competitiveness, Britain relied on brute military power. It mobilized, armed and led mercenaries, drawn from its colonies in India and elsewhere to force its exports on China and impose unequal treaties to lower tariffs. As a result China was flooded with British opium produced on its plantations in India — despite Chinese laws forbidding or regulating the importation and sale of the narcotic. China’s rulers, long accustomed to its trade and manufacturing superiority, were unprepared for the “new imperial rules” for global power. The West’s willingness to use military power to win colonies, pillage resources and recruit huge mercenary armies commanded by European officers spelt the end for China as a world power.

China had based its economic predominance on “non-interference in the internal affairs of its trading partners”. In contrast, British imperialists intervened violently in Asia, reorganizing local economies to suit the needs of the empire (eliminating economic competitors including more efficient Indian cotton manufacturers), and seized control of local political, economic, and administrative apparatus to establish the colonial state.

Britain’s empire was built with resources seized from the colonies and through the massive militarization of its economy.⁵ It was thus able to secure military supremacy over China. China’s foreign policy was hampered by its ruling elite’s excessive reliance on trade relations. Chinese officials and merchant elites sought to appease the British and convinced the emperor to grant devastating extra-territorial concessions opening markets to the detriment of Chinese manufacturers while surrendering local sovereignty. As always, the British precipitated internal rivalries and revolts further destabilizing the country.

Western and British penetration and colonization of China’s market created an entire new class: The wealthy Chinese “compradores” imported British goods and facilitated the takeover of local markets and resources. Imperialist pillage forced greater exploitation and taxation of the great mass of Chinese peasants and workers. China’s rulers were obliged to pay the war debts and finance trade deficits imposed by the Western imperial powers by squeezing its peasantry. This drove the peasants to starvation and revolt.

By the early 20th century (less than a century after the Opium Wars), China had descended from world economic power to a broken semi-colonial country with a huge destitute population. The principle ports were controlled by Western imperial officials and the countryside was subject to the rule by corrupt and brutal warlords. British opium enslaved millions.

British Academics: Eloquent Apologists for Imperial Conquest

The entire Western academic profession – first and foremost British imperialist historians – attributed British imperial dominance of Asia to English “technological superiority” and China’s misery and colonial status to “oriental backwardness”, omitting any mention of the millennium of Chinese commercial and technical progress and superiority up to the dawn of the 19th century. By the end of the 1920s, with the Japanese imperial invasion, China ceased to exist as a unified country. Under the aegis of imperialist rule, hundreds of millions of Chinese had starved or were dispossessed or slaughtered, as the Western powers and Japan plundered its economy. The entire Chinese “collaborator” comprador elitists were discredited before the Chinese people.

What did remain in the collective memory of the great mass of the Chinese people – and what was totally absent in the accounts of prestigious US and British academics – was the sense of China once having been a prosperous, dynamic and leading world power. Western commentators dismissed this collective memory of China’s ascendancy as the foolish pretensions of nostalgic lords and royalty – empty Han arrogance.

China Rises from the Ashes of Imperial Plunder and Humiliation: The Chinese Communist Revolution

The rise of modern China to become the second largest economy in the world was made possible only through the success of the Chinese communist revolution in the mid-20th century. The People’s Liberation “Red” Army defeated first the invading Japanese imperial army and later the US imperialist-backed comprador-led Kuomintang “Nationalist” army. This allowed the reunification of China as an independent sovereign state. The Communist government abolished the extra-territorial privileges of the Western imperialists, ended the territorial fiefdoms of the regional warlords and gangsters, and drove out the millionaire owners of brothels, the traffickers of women and drugs as well as the other “service providers” to the Euro-American Empire.

In every sense of the word, the Communist revolution forged the modern Chinese state. The new leaders then proceeded to reconstruct an economy ravaged by imperial wars and pillaged by Western and Japanese capitalists. After over 150 years of infamy and humiliation the Chinese people recovered their pride and national dignity. These socio-psychological elements were essential in motivating the Chinese to defend their country from the US attacks, sabotage, boycotts, and blockades mounted immediately after liberation.

Contrary to Western and neoliberal Chinese economists, China’s dynamic growth did not start in 1980. It began in 1950, when the agrarian reform provided land, infrastructure, credits and technical assistance to hundreds of millions of landless and destitute peasants and landless rural workers. Through what is now called “human capital” and gigantic social mobilization, the Communists built roads, airfields, bridges, canals and railroads as well as the basic industries, like coal, iron and steel, to form the backbone of the modern Chinese economy. Communist China’s vast free educational and health systems created a healthy, literate, and motivated work force. Its highly professional military prevented the US from extending its military empire throughout the Korean peninsula up to China’s territorial frontiers. Just as past Western scholars and propagandists fabricated a history of a “stagnant and decadent” empire to justify their destructive conquest, so too their modern counterparts have rewritten the first thirty years of Chinese Communist history, denying the role of the revolution in developing all the essential elements for a modern economy, state, and society. It is clear that China’s rapid economic growth was based on the development of its internal market, its rapidly growing cadre of scientists, skilled technicians, and workers and the social safety net which protected and promoted working class and peasant mobility were products of Communist planning and investments.

China’s rise to global power began in 1949 with the removal of the entire parasitic financial, comprador and speculative classes who had served as the intermediaries for European, Japanese and US imperialists draining China of its great wealth.

China’s Transition to Capitalism

Beginning in 1980 the Chinese government initiated a dramatic shift in its economic strategy: Over the next three decades, it opened the country to large-scale foreign investment; it privatized thousands of industries and it set in motion a process of income concentration based on a deliberate strategy of re-creating a dominant economic class of billionaires linked to overseas capitalists. China’s ruling political class embraced the idea of “borrowing” technical know-how and accessing overseas markets from foreign firms in exchange for providing cheap, plentiful labor at the lowest cost. The Chinese state re-directed massive public subsidies to promote high capitalist growth by dismantling its national system of free public education and health care. They ended subsidized public housing for hundreds of millions of peasants and urban factory workers and provided funds to real estate speculators for the construction of private luxury apartments and office skyscrapers. China’s new capitalist strategy as well as its double digit growth was based on the profound structural changes and massive public investments made possible by the previous communist government. China’s private sector “take off” was based on the huge public outlays made since 1949.

The triumphant new capitalist class and its Western collaborators claimed all the credit for this “economic miracle” as China rose to become the world’s second largest economy. This new Chinese elite have been less eager to announce China’s world-class status in terms of brutal class inequalities, rivaling only the US.

China: From Imperial Dependency to World Class Competitor

China’s sustained growth in its manufacturing sector was a result of highly concentrated public investments, high profits, technological innovations and a protected domestic market. While foreign capital profited, it was always within the framework of the Chinese state’s priorities and regulations. The regime’s dynamic “export strategy” led to huge trade surpluses, which eventually made China one of the world’s largest creditors especially for US debt. In order to maintain its dynamic industries, China has required huge influxes of raw materials, resulting in large-scale overseas investments and trade agreements with agro-mineral export countries in Africa and Latin America. By 2010 China displaced the US and Europe as the main trading partner in many countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Modern China’s rise to world economic power, like its predecessor between 1100-1800, is based on its gigantic productive capacity. Trade and investment was governed by a policy of strict non-interference in the internal relations of its trading partners. Unlike the US, China did not initiate brutal wars for oil; instead it signed lucrative contracts. And China does not fight wars in the interest of overseas Chinese, as the US has done in the Middle East for Israel.

The seeming imbalance between Chinese economic and military power is in stark contrast to the US where a bloated, parasitic military empire continues to erode its own global economic presence.

US military spending is twelve times that of China. Increasingly the US military plays the key role shaping policy in Washington as it seeks to undercut China’s rise to global power.

China’s Rise to World Power: Will History Repeat Itself?

China has been growing at about 9% per annum and its goods and services are rapidly rising in quality and value. In contrast, the US and Europe have wallowed around 0% growth from 2007-2012. China’s innovative techno-scientific establishment routinely assimilates the latest inventions from the West (and Japan) and improves them, thereby decreasing the cost of production. China has replaced the US and European controlled “international financial institutions” (the IMF, World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank) as the principle lender in Latin America. China continues to lead as the prime investor in African energy and mineral resources. China has replaced the US as the principle market for Saudi Arabian, Sudanese, and Iranian petroleum and it will soon replace the US as the principle market for Venezuela petroleum products. Today China is the world’s biggest manufacturer and exporter, dominating even the US market, while playing the role of financial life line as it holds over $1.3 trillion in US Treasury notes.

Under growing pressure from its workers, farmers and peasants, China’s rulers have been developing the domestic market by increasing wages and social spending to rebalance the economy and avoid the specter of social instability. In contrast, US wages, salaries and vital public services have sharply declined in absolute and relative terms.

Given the current historical trends it is clear that China will replace the US as the leading world economic power, over the next decade, if the US empire does not strike back and if China’s profound class inequalities do not lead to a major social upheaval.

Modern China’s rise to global power faces serious challenges. In contrast to China’s historical ascent on the world stage, modern Chinese global economic power is not accompanied by any imperialist undertakings. China has seriously lagged behind the US and Europe in aggressive war-making capacity. This may have allowed China to direct public resources to maximize economic growth, but it has left China vulnerable to US military superiority in terms of its massive arsenal, its string of forward bases, and strategic geo-military positions right off the Chinese coast and in adjoining territories.

In the nineteenth century British imperialism demolished China’s global position with its military superiority, seizing China’s ports – because of China’s reliance on “mercantile superiority”.

The conquest of India, Burma and most of Asia allowed Britain to establish colonial bases and recruit local mercenary armies. The British and its mercenary allies encircled and isolated China, setting the stage for the disruption of China’s markets and the imposition of the brutal terms of trade. The British Empire’s armed presence dictated what China imported (with opium accounting for over 50% of British exports in the 1850s) while undermining China’s competitive advantages via tariff policies.

Today the US is pursuing similar policies: US naval fleet patrols and controls China’s commercial shipping lanes and off-shore oil resources via its overseas bases. The Obama-Clinton White House is in the process of developing a rapid military response involving bases in Australia, Philippines, and elsewhere in Asia. The US is intensifying its efforts to undermine Chinese overseas access to strategic resources while backing “grass roots” separatists and “insurgents” in West China, Tibet, Sudan, Burma, Iran, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere. The US military agreements with India and the installation of a pliable puppet regime in Pakistan have advanced its strategy of isolating China. While China upholds its policy of “harmonious development” and “non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries”, it has stepped aside as US and European military imperialism have attacked a host of China’s trading partners to essentially reverse China’s peaceful commercial expansion.

China’s lack of a political and ideological strategy capable of protecting its overseas economic interests has been an invitation for the US and NATO to set-up regimes hostile to China. The most striking example is Libya where US and NATO intervened to overthrow an independent government led by President Gaddafi, with whom China had signed multi-billion dollar trade and investments agreements. The NATO bombardment of Libyan cities, ports and oil installation forced the Chinese to withdraw 35,000 Chinese oil engineers and construction workers in a matter of days. The same thing happened in Sudan where China had invested billions to develop its oil industry. The US, Israel, and Europe armed the South Sudanese rebels to disrupt the flow of oil and attack Chinese oil workers⁶ In both cases China passively allowed the US and European military imperialists to attack its trade partners and undermine its investments.

Under Mao Zedong, China had an active policy countering imperial aggression. It supported revolutionary movements and independent Third World governments. Today’s capitalist China does not have an active policy of supporting governments or movements capable of protecting China’s bilateral trade and investment agreements. China’s inability to confront the rising tide of US military aggression against its economic interests is due to deep structural problems. China’s foreign policy is shaped by big commercial, financial, and manufacturing interests who rely on their “economic competitive edge” to gain market shares and have no understanding of the military and security underpinnings of global economic power. China’s political class is deeply influenced by a new class of billionaires with strong ties to Western equity funds and who have uncritically absorbed Western cultural values. This is illustrated by their preference for sending their own children to elite universities in the US and Europe. They seek “accommodation with the West” at any price. This lack of any strategic understanding of military empire-building has led them to respond ineffectively and ad hoc to each imperialist action undermining their access to resources and markets. While China’s “business first” outlook may have worked when it was a minor player in the world economy and US empire builders saw the “capitalist opening” as a chance to easily takeover China’s public enterprises and pillage the economy. However, when China (in contrast to the former USSR) decided to retain capital controls and develop a carefully calibrated, state-directed “industrial policy” directing western capital and the transfer of technology to state enterprises, which effectively penetrated the US domestic and overseas markets, Washington began to complain and talked of retaliation. China’s huge trade surpluses with the US provoked a dual response in Washington. It sold massive quantities of US Treasury bonds to the Chinese and began to develop a global strategy to block China’s advance. Since the US lacked economic leverage to reverse its decline, it relied on its only “comparative advantage” – its military superiority based on a world wide system of attack bases, a network of overseas client regimes, military proxies, NGOers, intellectuals and armed mercenaries. Washington turned to its vast overt and clandestine security apparatus to undermine China’s trading partners. Washington depends on its long-standing ties with corrupt rulers, dissidents, journalists and media moguls to provide the powerful propaganda cover while advancing its military offensive against China’s overseas interests.

China has nothing to compare with the US overseas security apparatus because it practices a policy of non-interference. Given the advanced state of the Western imperial offensive, China has taken only a few diplomatic initiatives, such as financing English language media outlets to present its perspective, using its veto power on the UN Security Council to oppose US efforts to overthrow the independent Assad regime in Syria, and opposing the imposition of drastic sanctions against Iran. It sternly repudiated US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s vitriolic questioning of the “legitimacy” of the Chinese state when it voted against the US-UN resolution preparing an attack on Syria.⁷

Chinese military strategists are more aware and alarmed at the growing military threat to China. They have successfully demanded a 19% annual increase in military spending over the next five years (2011-2015).⁸ Even with this increase, China’s military expenditures will still be less than one-fifth of the US military budget and China has not one overseas military base in stark contrast to the over 750 US installations abroad. Overseas Chinese intelligence operations are minimal and ineffective. Its embassies are run by and for narrow commercial interests who utterly failed to understand NATO’s brutal policy of regime change in Libya and inform Beijing of its significance to the Chinese state.

There are two other structural weaknesses undermining China’s rise as a world power. This includes the highly ‘Westernized’ intelligentsia which has uncritically swallowed US economic doctrine about free markets while ignoring its militarized economy. These Chinese intellectuals parrot the US propaganda about the “democratic virtues” of billion-dollar Presidential campaigns, while supporting financial deregulation which would have led to a Wall Street takeover of Chinese banks and savings. Many Chinese business consultants and academics have been educated in the US and influenced by their ties to US academics and international financial institutions directly linked to Wall Street and the City of London. They have prospered as highly-paid consultants receiving prestigious positions in Chinese institutions. They identify the “liberalization of financial markets” with “advanced economies” capable of deepening ties to global markets instead of as a major source of the current global financial crisis. These “Westernized intellectuals” are like their 19th century comprador counterparts who underestimated and dismissed the long-term consequences of Western imperial penetration. They fail to understand how financial deregulation in the US precipitated the current crisis and how deregulation would lead to a Western takeover of China’s financial system – the consequences of which would reallocate China’s domestic savings to non-productive activities (real estate speculation), precipitate financial crisis and ultimately undermine China’s leading global position.

These Chinese yuppies imitate the worst of Western consumerist life styles and their political outlooks are driven by these life styles and Westernized identities which preclude any sense of solidarity with their own working class.

There is an economic basis for the pro-Western sentiments of China’s neo-compradors. They have transferred billions of dollars to foreign bank accounts, purchased luxury homes and apartments in London, Toronto, Los Angeles, Manhattan, Paris, Hong Kong, and Singapore. They have one foot in China (the source of their wealth) and the other in the West (where they consume and hide their wealth).

Westernized compradors are deeply embedded in China’s economic system having family ties with the political leadership in the party apparatus and the state. Their connections are weakest in the military and in the growing social movements, although some “dissident” students and academic activists in the “democracy movements” are backed by Western imperial NGO’s. To the extent that the compradors gain influence, they weaken the strong economic state institutions which have directed China’s ascent to global power, just as they did in the 19th century by acting as intermediaries for the British Empire. Proclaiming 19th Century “liberalism”, British opium addicted over 50 million Chinese in less than a decade. Proclaiming “democracy and human rights”, US gunboats now patrol off China’s coast. China’s elite-directed rise to global economic power has spawned monumental inequalities between the thousands of new billionaires and multi-millionaires at the top and hundreds of millions of impoverished workers, peasants and migrant workers at the bottom.

China’s rapid accumulation of wealth and capital was made possible through the intense exploitation of its workers who were stripped of their previous social safety net and regulated work conditions guaranteed under Communism. Millions of Chinese households are being dispossessed in order to promote real estate developer/speculators who then build high rise offices and the luxury apartments for the domestic and foreign elite. These brutal features of ascendant Chinese capitalism have created a fusion of workplace and living space mass struggle which is growing every year. The developer/speculators’ slogan “to get rich is wonderful” has lost its power to deceive the people. In 2011 there were over 200,000 popular encompassing urban coastal factories and rural villages. The next step, which is sure to come, will be the unification of these struggles into new national social movements with a class-based agenda demanding the restoration of health and educational services enjoyed under the Communists as well as a greater share of China’s wealth. Current demands for greater wages can turn to demands for greater work place democracy. To answer these popular demands China’s new comprador-Westernized liberals cannot point to their “model” in the US empire where American workers are in the process of being stripped of the very benefits Chinese workers are struggling to regain.

China, torn by deepening class and political conflict, cannot sustain its drive toward global economic leadership. China’s elite cannot confront the rising global imperial military threat from the US with its comprador allies among the internal liberal elite while the country is a deeply divided society with an increasingly hostile working class. The time of unbridled exploitation of China’s labor has to end in order to face the US military encirclement of China and economic disruption of its overseas markets. China possesses enormous resources. With over $1.5 trillion dollars in reserves China can finance a comprehensive national health and educational program throughout the country.

China can afford to pursue an intensive “public housing program” for the 250 million migrant workers currently living in urban squalor. China can impose a system of progressive income taxes on its new billionaires and millionaires and finance small family farmer co-operatives and rural industries to rebalance the economy. Their program of developing alternative energy sources, such as solar panels and wind farms – are a promising start to addressing their serious environmental pollution. Degradation of the environment and related health issues already engage the concern of tens of millions. Ultimately China’s best defense against imperial encroachments is a stable regime based on social justice for the hundreds of millions and a foreign policy of supporting overseas anti-imperialist movements and regimes – whose independence are in China’s vital interest. What is needed is a pro-active policy based on mutually beneficial joint ventures including military and diplomatic solidarity. Already a small, but influential, group of Chinese intellectuals have raised the issue of the growing US military threat and are “saying no to gunboat diplomacy”.⁹

Modern China has plenty of resources and opportunities, unavailable to China in the 19th century when it was subjugated by the British Empire. If the US continues to escalate its aggressive militaristic policy against China, Beijing can set off a serious fiscal crisis by dumping a few of its hundreds of billions of dollars in US Treasury notes. China, a nuclear power should reach out to its similarly armed and threatened neighbor, Russia, to confront and confound the bellicose rantings of US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton. Russian President-to-be Putin vows to increase military spending from 3% to 6% of the GDP over the next decade to counter Washington’s offensive missile bases on Russia’s borders and thwart Obama’s regime change programs against its allies, like Syria.¹⁰

China has powerful trading, financial and investment networks covering the globe as well as powerful economic partners. These links have become essential for the continued growth of many of countries throughout the developing world. In taking on China, the US will have to face the opposition of many powerful market-based elites throughout the world. Few countries or elites see any future in tying their fortunes to an economically unstable empire-based on militarism and destructive colonial occupations.

In other words, modern China, as a world power, is incomparably stronger than it was in early 18th century. The US does not have the colonial leverage that the ascendant British Empire possessed in the run-up to the Opium Wars. Moreover, many Chinese intellectuals and the vast majority of its citizens have no intention of letting its current “Westernized compradors” sell out the country. Nothing would accelerate political polarization in Chinese society and hasten the coming of a second Chinese social revolution more than a timid leadership submitting to a new era of Western imperial pillage.

1. John Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press 2004).
2. Ibid, Ch. 9: 190-218.
3. Ibid, Ch. 11: 244-248.
4. Richard Gott, Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt (London: Verso 2011) for a detailed historical chronicle of the savagery accompanying Britain’s colonial empire.
5. Hobson: 253-256.
6. Katrina Manson, “South Sudan puts Beijing’s policies to the test”, Financial Times, 2/21/12, p. 5.
7. Interview of Clinton NPR, 2/26/12.
8. La Jornada, 2/15/12 (Mexico City).
9. China Daily, 2/20/2012.
10. Charles Clover, ‘Putin vows huge boost in defense spending’, Financial Times, 2/12/2012.

Catastrophe is just a kind of change, a quick transition to a new equilibrium — and didn’t America recently vote for change? The discontinuity that marks collapse is simply the point at which prevailing fallacies are reduced to absurdity by life. Yeats saw war and British dominion reduced to absurdity, and wrote The Second Coming to make sense of it. It strikes me as a very cheerful poem: the unborn sphinx, a precious little bundle of joy.

Collapse is the obverse of renewal. Gibbon’s magnum opus, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is equally the story of the rise of Europe in all its centripetal glory. At the close of Volume VI, modern Europe has taken shape. The collapse of the Soviet Warsaw Pact has freed several subject peoples. As nations unite, states naturally come and go. Peace requires self-determination, as the UN Charter tells us, and self-determination is advanced as states fail in gross or subtle ways. Sometimes a state loses its reason to exist, and deserves to collapse.

We in America have weathered the collapse of commercial and financial integrity, property rights, and government legitimacy in an orgy of elite looting. We’ve seen legal and Constitutional protections collapse in oligarchic repression. What of any value is left in our state? Life in America is already nasty and brutish, and short, by rich-world standards, at 78.3 years, a state of nature with institutional predators and human prey. The yammering fury of public discourse gets more insistent as it’s clearer that the centre cannot hold. Here in America, who will decide when it’s time to retire our failing state? And as state failures cascade and compound, how much suffering will result?

States fall apart in various ways but rights and rule of law limit the discomfort — at least in the civilized world. Developed countries can handle their fissiparous tendencies:

Scotland

Scotland plans a referendum on independence in the Autumn of 2014. Consultation with the Scottish public has begun. A final referendum bill and implementation plan is to be in place by the end of the year. The Scottish parliament considers the referendum bill for planned passage in October, subject to royal assent. The English government is mounting a bureaucratic defense in depth, maneuvering behind the scenes to rig the options, to strip Scotland of its natural resources, and to cultivate support for the half-measure of home rule. Partly in reaction to that heavy hand, the Scottish majority now backs independence.

Slovakia

When the Velvet Revolution displaced a crumbling Soviet client state, trouble started early on. The first Slovak cause célèbre was a bid to drop the word socialist from the country’s name. Then the revolutionary Civic Forum tore itself apart, sidelining pinkos to form the Civic Democrats. Slovaks jibbed at the misery of the economic shock treatment imposed by Finance Minister Vaclav Klaus. Co-prime ministers and power sharing failed to heal the growing rifts. The majority Czech party turned down proposals for a looser union modeled on the Maastricht Treaty, and in July 1992, the Slovak National Council resolved:

We, the democratically elected Slovak National Council, solemnly declare that the thousand years’ struggle of the Slovak nation for independence (“self-standing”) has been fulfilled.

In this historical moment, we declare the natural right of the Slovak nation for self-determination, as embodied by all international agreements and treaties about the right of nations for self-determination.

Recognizing the right of nations for self-determination, we declare, that we also want to freely create the way and form of national and state life, while respecting the rights of everybody, all citizens, nations, national minorities, ethnic groups, and the democratic humanist legacy of Europe and the world.

By this declaration, the Slovak National Council declares sovereignty of the Slovak Republic as a basis for a sovereign state of the Slovak nation.

Concisely ticking all the boxes, self-determination, rights, and rule of law, the Slovaks broke away. The Czechs let them go. Klaus and his Slovak counterpart negotiated terms and in less than six months, Parliament dissolved the federal state.

The Slovaks have not lost their independent spirit. Just this February an anti-corruption protest drew 15,000 citizens who lobbed bananas, eggs, bottles, firecrackers and a flowerpot over the fence of their Presidential Palace. They are an inspiration to us all.

Quebec

Quebeckers have been restive since at least 1837, when they rebelled as Lower Canada. In the 1960s Quebec spawned various independence movements encompassing a spectrum of tactics, from party politics and illegal nonviolence to violent rebellion. As proper leftists, they bombed the stock exchange, but rural rightists were on board too. They felt like Frantz Fanon was talking to them, and even if he wasn’t, Charles de Gaulle was, when he yelled, Vive le Québec libre! Technocratic dithering bought time.

In 1995, at the Royal Commission on the Future of Quebec, the Marxist-Leninists emptied the stands by proposing that Quebec declare its independence. The ensuing referendum barely kept Canada together. The movement seems to be in remission now, subsumed by recent immigrants and ambivalent indigenes.

Slovenia

When the end of Soviet-style multinational rule uncorked the immemorial hatreds of the Balkans, Slovenia saw what was coming and determined to get out. The Yugoslav government planned to assert control of Tito’s decentralized armed forces, but before it could happen the Slovenes secretly mobilized a home guard command structure. They got to work on a war plan and a Tienanmen-themed media strategy. In December of that year, 88 per cent of Slovenes voted to secede from Yugoslavia. The Slovene people were on their own — the US and its European satellites could see no point to self-determination, and for NATO, ethnic tensions promised exciting new threats to bomb.

When the Yugoslav People’s Army took over in Slovenia, they found that no soldiers reported to them: the chain of command now took its orders from the new Slovene capital, Ljubljana. The Slovenes sat their Yugoslav border guards down and tactfully put them out to pasture. A bewildered Yugoslav army invaded itself. The tentative Yugoslavian Blitzkrieg featured desertions, mass surrenders, and serendipitous mechanical breakdowns, and was aborted by the Serbs, who didn’t really care. Forty-four Yugoslavs and 18 Slovenes gave their lives.

Collapse is a continuum linking devolution, autonomy, secession, disintegration, internecine warfare, and forcible dismemberment. When the government is evil, it’s all good — that’s US foreign policy, in essence. America’s ruling class has helped most of the world dissolve its governments again and again. The US government showcased its foreign-interference skills in Greece, Italy, Iran, Guatemala, North Vietnam, Hungary, Laos, Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Congo, Brazil, Indonesia, Bolivia, and Uruguay. Also in Cambodia, Chile, Australia, Angola, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Panama.

Our government’s enthusiasm for therapeutic collapse runs afoul of international norms, particularly UN General Assembly A/RES/36/103: Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention and Interference in the Internal Affairs of States.

The resolution points out that economic and political pressure tactics are subject to UN authority just as war is subject to UN authority, under Chapter VII. As required by the supreme law of our land, A/RES/36/103 limits national security policy to the two poles of self-defense or pacific settlement of disputes. The risky middle ground of graduated pressure requires the concurrence of the world, under UN rules.

UN Charter Article 39 reads:

The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security.

Article 41 reads:

The Security Council may decide what measures not involving the use of armed force are to be employed to give effect to its decisions, and it may call upon the Members of the United Nations to apply such measures. These may include complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations.

In the United States, economic or political sanctions without UN supervision are illegal under the supreme law of the land.

Yet the principle of non-interference, if applied, would paralyze US foreign policy. The US government would be lost without disruption, overthrow, armed intervention, subversion, occupation, destabilization, mercenaries, great-power confrontation, defamation, vilification, economic coercion, blockade, distortion of human rights, sabotage, or terror. The resolution rules out America’s favorite unilateral trick, use of transnational and multinational corporations as instruments of coercion. Our unilateral denial of the SWIFT banking network to Iran: illegal under US supreme law. US agents “striking at Egypt’s stability” with distorted selective claims of right: illegal, in the US as in Egypt.

When our Mideast puppet rulers began to collapse naturally, without us, the state’s urge to meddle swept away any notion of law. In Libya our government relied on traditional star-spangled carnage to topple the Libyan state, dispatching the CIA’s tame revolutionary, Khalifa Hifter. When routine interference failed, our government tried gun-running , direct reinforcements, and finally aerial bombardment in illegal support of civil war.

As soon as our government stubbed out its war in Libya, it lit another one in Syria.  Again, our subversion conformed with American tradition. We dusted off Kermit Roosevelt’s old plan, with its paramilitary insurgents, assassinations, coup de main, and sabotage.  Recognizing the growing importance of humanitarian law, our insurgents weaponized it, making up casualty numbers with whimsical abandon, posing executed soldiers in rubble as civilian victims of government bombardments. Our government fabricated crimes against humanity by cribbing old satellite photos, like term papers, right off the Internet.

But this time, when Uncle Sam offered to put the Syrian state out of its induced misery, the UN Charter tripped us up. Our government’s shaky grasp of the non-interference precept led Russia and China to cast unusual Security Council vetoes. Our great-power counterparts had been acting in accordance with UN reform principles, refraining from vetoes on votes involving human rights, but our fake atrocities and real slaughter were too much. Perhaps our Libyan mass-rape tall tale was the last straw. Like some greedy producer of action films who squeezes in one product placement too many, our spooks couldn’t resist the implausible propaganda flourish of Viagra as a rape aid.

Our government’s gotten away with it, so far. Libya’s a bestial bloodbath thanks to us. US proxies and paramilitaries are still gnawing like termites on Syrian society. Amateur revolutionaries in Congress are trying to cut Baluchistan loose from Pakistan. American bigwigs overtly support Kurdish terrorists in overthrowing the government of Iran, notwithstanding that’s a felony offense in the US.

There’s one slight adverse side-effect. Our spooks proved that you can topple a government anywhere — even here at home. Sauce for the Syrian or Libyan goose is sauce for the American gander. At some point a regional power or bloc will get tired of US spooks hiring traitors in their sovereign states, and decide to give our government a taste of its own medicine. After all, for every Ahmad Chalabi or Khalifa Hifter there must be a thousand dodgy Americans on the make, ready to fabricate intel, tug heartstrings, and organize resistance for the most treasonous designs. And why not? Everyone hates this government, patriots most of all. Public rage at pervasive state corruption and crime is barely contained by partisan divide-and-rule manipulation.

Caught red-handed throwing stones in front of its glass house, our police state is panicked to see its revolutionary social-justice weapons proliferating all the way back home. The National Defense Authorization Act is based on a world-view of a global state of siege with ubiquitous malefactors skulking behind every tree, striving to undermine and destroy America.  The see-no-evil gumshoes of the FBI, having slept through the greatest financial crime in history, are mobilizing the public to combat terrorists including beauty terrorists, home-improvement terrorists, and body-art terrorists.  The threat of accountability scares our government even more. The Defense Intelligence Agency fears “lone wolves” in its ranks, “radicalized” into complying with US supreme law such as the Geneva Conventions or Article 19.  The security state is even afraid of its old soldiers.

But as the Beltway death merchants know, one man’s existential threat is another man’s booming market. So in the spirit of traditional American FREE MONEY! seminars and infomercials, let us ask: If you as a domestic subversive want a piece of that foreign belligerent funding and training, how should you go about knocking over your tottering American kleptocracy?

First, let’s dispel the major misconceptions. There’s a lot of unhelpful nostalgia for the imagined golden age of the American Revolution. Our patriotic brainwashing seems to take hold when we try to face totalitarian encroachments by our state. The resulting historical conceit can take the sophisticated formulation of Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who predicts that with one bad break, “…you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence.” Or it can take the form of rattlesnake flags and silly buckskin costumes.

In fact, there is no going back. The American State Papers are as much use to you as the Dead Sea scrolls. They do not apply any more. They cannot help you with the forcible overthrow of the Government of the United States. Our state has set its founding documents aside. Besides, you do not need a war of independence. Independence is the last thing you want.

The key is to avail yourself of John L. Hargrove’s “web of living law.” Just leap and it will catch you like an acrobat’s net. Customary and conventional international law aligns the world with your self-determination goals.

This approach is particularly effective when the ruling regime is shown to hold those norms in contempt. The disgraceful failure of our state is amply documented in reviews by independent institutions of international repute: the Committee Against Torture, the Human Rights Committee, and the Human Rights Council. International law exposes domestic legal cover for impermissible state conduct. The scrutiny of the international community can void totalitarian enabling acts such as the PATRIOT Act and the National Defense Authorization Act, exacting escalating costs in national prestige and diplomatic influence. The US government’s client states become less malleable. Non-aligned states and autonomous blocs gain the moral high ground.

When it’s time to abolish the government, your declaration writes itself. No need for a founding genius to think it up de novo – you can cut and paste from universally-accepted boilerplate grounded in customary and conventional international law. Not so stirring, perhaps, but just as revolutionary in effect: in current doctrine, sovereignty is responsibility. An irresponsible state has forfeited its sovereignty and has no reason to exist. The world can and must step in.

By design, a state has to screw up pretty badly to flunk its sovereignty test. It has to be guilty of particular crimes:

- Of war crimes (Check. Fallujah, and dereliction of Afghan human security in breach of Article 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention);

- Or genocide (Check. Cambodia, and attributable failure to prevent in Palestine);

- Or crimes against humanity (keeping the jackboot on the neck of the Gulf States while BP poisons them);

- Or ethnic cleansing (our government’s brutal cattle-drive response to Hurricane Katrina).

For a taste of modern emancipatory bumf, let’s slap together a pastiche of the World Summit Outcome Document; the UN Secretariat’s report, Implementing the Responsibility to Protect; some foundational international law that subordinates national security to human security and rights; and just to make the old soldiers sniffle and salute, snippets of the Declaration of Independence.

Declaration of Interdependence

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for peoples to demand their birthright of peace, dignity, and a better life in larger freedom, customary and conventional law require that they demonstrate their sovereignty in reclaiming it from an overreaching state.

We hold these principles to be universal and binding on any sovereign American state: the United Nations Charter, the International Bill of Human Rights, and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to derogate core human rights and permit the most serious crimes, it is the urgent duty of nations and peoples to provide new guards for human security.

The Government of the United States (the State) has repudiated its duties under humanitarian law and human rights law. The State perpetuates an unlawful policy of official impunity with attacks on the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court including threat of force. The State exploits human-rights treaty commitments as pretexts for aggression, and subverts concomitant domestic obligations with legislative obstruction and federalist neglect.

Respect for human rights is an essential element of responsible sovereignty. The State uses domestic law as a weapon against its population, abridging the peoples’ civil and political rights while conferring impunity on compliant elites. The judiciary refuses redress for violations of fundamental human rights, in breach of the supreme law of the land.

Failures of governance have imposed profound and deepening inequalities. Development has reversed, opening lasting fissures in the social and political fabric. Incapacitating social divisions and an exploitative doctrine of corporatist growth intensify contention for resources. State repression lets domestic tensions worsen with no peaceful resolution. Political leaders have made a deliberate and calculated choice to take advantage of social divisions and institutional failures, using sovereignty as a shield to inflict widespread and systematic violence with impunity. Political leaders and ruling factions suppress and subvert rights and rule of law with war propaganda and hate speech, indoctrinating the public at large along with critical actors in society including police, soldiers, the judiciary, and legislators. Our rulers undermine and attack self-correcting mechanisms that could discourage and derail the most serious crimes.

To prove this, let the facts be submitted for a candid world:

- Consideration of Reports Submitted by States Parties Under Article 19 of the Convention: Conclusions and recommendations of the Committee against Torture – United States of America, CAT/C/USA/CO/2, 18 May 2006;

- Universal Periodic Review of the United States of America, Friday, 5 November 2010;

- Human Rights Committee, Eighty-seventh session, 10-28 July 2006, Consideration of Reports Submitted by States Parties Under Article 40 of the Covenant-United States of America, Concluding observations;

- Human Rights Committee: Consideration of Reports submitted by States Parties Under Article 40 of the Covenant – Fourth Report of the United States of America;¹

- Consideration of Reports Submitted by States Parties Under Article 19 of the Convention: Conclusions and recommendations of the Committee against Torture – United States of  America Fifth Periodic Report.²

In a mobilized military power with the privileges and unequal justice of permanent Security Council membership, this intensifying complex of repression and aggression constitutes a threat of paramount concern to the international community. The manifest failure of the state’s protective responsibilities have resulted in war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. Accordingly, we the American peoples request international assistance and capacity building to avert still greater crimes and to restore human security.

We call for concerted international suasion, education, and assistance, reinforced by parallel and consistent diplomacy, including measures in conformity with UN Charter Article 41 or Rome Statute Article 13 (b). Those contemplating the incitement or perpetration of crimes and violations relating to the responsibility to protect must be made to understand both the costs of pursuing that path and the potential benefits of seeking peaceful reconciliation and development instead.

We call for dialogue, education and training on human rights and humanitarian law to inform national agendas for institutional reform. The international community must engage with the State and the public to support a culture of peace, and to realize the educational obligations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

We call for international development assistance based on human rights as an alternative to exploitative regimes based on corporatist central planning, elite looting, trading in influence and abuse of function, coercive control of peoples’ natural wealth and resources, and private debt imposed for social control.

To curb our increasingly dangerous state, we the peoples of the United States urgently need external intervention to restore lost attributes of good governance: rule of law, a competent and independent judiciary, human rights, security sector reform, a robust civil society, an independent press, and a political culture that favors tolerance, dialogue and mobility. In a climate of violent state resistance to basic obligations, the international community must support civil society, assisting and protecting associations committed to human rights and rule of law.

The Government of the United States has compromised its sovereignty with domestic repression and crimes of concern to the international community. The peoples of America have lost control over their state, and cannot preserve peace and human security without the help of all the nations and the peoples of the world.

We, therefore, the assembled Representatives of the peoples of America do, solemnly publish and declare, that as Free and sovereign peoples, they have full Power to keep Peace, contract Alliances, protect human rights, and to carry out all other duties of sovereign states, subject to the free expression of the will of individual American electors in universal and equal suffrage. And for the support of this Declaration we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

It runs on a bit, in the gabby American way — it wouldn’t suit the taciturn Slovaks — but then the world might want to know exactly what to expect of American splittists or putschists, after the psychotic carnage of the country’s postwar history. If the wrong faction, or the wrong states, broke away leaving cooler heads behind, a spate of wars would surely ensue. Imagine Texas or Arizona breaking loose — or any state, led by the bloodthirsty nationalist ghouls of Harvard or Johns Hopkins. Nonetheless, things can’t go on this way, with the United States government as outsized as it is, and as murderous. The world knows this rogue state needs to be curbed or torn apart.

The thought has occurred to people here at home, and not just to crackpots and Dixie rednecks. Cold War statesman George F. Kennan daydreamed of breaking the US up. He worried that the USA’s huge scale would lead to overweening ambitions. He supported the affable insurgents of Sovereign Vermont. Near the end of his life Kennan wrote:

All power to Vermont in its effort to distinguish itself from the USA as a whole, and to pursue in its own way the cultivation of its own tradition.

And:

Such are at present the dominating trends in the U.S. that I can see no other means of ultimate preservation of cultural and societal values that will be not only endangered but eventually destroyed in an endlessly prolonged association of the northern parts of New England with the remainder of what is now the U.S.A.

Needless to say, a declaration’s only the beginning. Vermont’s declaration got them nowhere. The next steps would depend on the government’s response. An ace hustler like Ahmad Chalabi would hold that detail back until he clinched the deal with foreign agents. To an entrepreneur of induced collapse, the declaration is just promotional material, a teaser for his limited-enrollment seminars in dismal chain hotels.

The seminars could be packed with practical tips for aspiring American Chalabis. The art of destabilizing police states is advancing at a rapid pace. The revolutionist’s body of knowledge incorporates US foreign-subversion practices.  The world learned a lot ousting America’s Mideast puppets.

In response to state repression, modern subversives have a broadening spectrum of options. As part of its Iran strategy, the Brookings Institution devised a handy manual for toppling governments with popular revolutions, insurgencies, or coups. Traditional forcible-overthrow tricks continue to be refined. The Afghans and Iraqis are continually devising ingenious new ways to discourage illegal military occupation. The classics continue to inspire new generations and new ideas.

The US military funds destabilization research, producing weapons that deserve to proliferate at home and abroad. At the technical institute founded by Gilded-age oligarchs Carnegie and Mellon, scholars have devised CONSTRUCT-O to pinpoint the weaknesses of socio-technical systems. CONSTRUCT-O suggests that horizontal organizations like the Occupy movement are harder to destabilize than our increasingly autocratic state. CONSTRUCT-O can measure the frustration of America’s secret police when they attack non-hierarchical groups like Occupy. Our government’s fixation on its chain of command produces befuddled apparatchiks who scurry around dissident encampments demanding, “take me to your leader.” Heel-clicking government bureaucrats cannot see why you can’t decapitate an acephalous collective.

In the US, the state’s heavy reliance on debt peonage opens new possibilities for collective action.  The debt-encumbered underclass has grown to become an overwhelming majority. Secured debt exceeds the value of pledged assets. Predatory lending now regulates access to human rights like health and education, and as these basic services deteriorate, the state permits increasingly coercive collection measures. Well-coordinated debt strikes could paralyze the economy as effectively as work stoppages once did. The government is determined to purge this approach from the institutions under its control, but collective action for debtors is bound to be integrated into nonviolent resistance.

All in all, it’s got boundless potential for Multi-Level Marketing: not just training subversives, but training trainers of subversives, and training trainers of trainers in infinite regress, like AMWAY with collapse instead of soap. Free Foreign Money for Regime Change!  The entrepreneurial genius that gives America its weapons and prisons and wars could paralyze America for peace. Find a need and meet it, as the hucksters say, that’s the key to success. So for any threatened nation that wants to get America’s maniacal rogue state under control, a diverse selection of subversive elements can be reached through a network of dead drops and cutouts near you. Ask for Spitball, that’s my secret agent code name.

But there’s no guarantee. It doesn’t always work. Tibet and Western Morocco continue to languish in subjection. Sometimes you cannot effect rebirth, and freedom fighters fail, however greedy or grandiose or brave. Sometimes the repressive regime is too far gone for salutary collapse. In an irrational state lost to unchecked exploitation, renewal may be impossible.

In Palestine, freedom will play out with the grim futility of classical tragic κατάδεσμος, as a curse redounding through the generations. Despite press coverage of Palestine’s UN membership bid as a climactic contretemps, Palestine is a state – an occupied state under systematic genocidal attack, but a state nonetheless. The Palestinian state has gained recognition from more than two thirds of the UN member states. When the US quashed the formality of UN membership, UNESCO accepted Palestine as a state. Palestinians completed a National Plan, backed by the mediating Quartet countries, to build institutions ready for statehood — except for what the government of Israel could obstruct.

But in the grip of what the ancients called a curse, old victims are made mad, destroying new victims. When the State of Israel carpet-bombed its frontiers with poisoned uranium weapons  ³,  unfavorable winds sterilized Israel’s population. Now the nation’s in a spiral toward extinction. The state’s Moslem victims are holding their own for now, multiplying against a tide of monstrous birth defects and stillbirths, but if autonomy improves development and education, fertility will quickly drop below critical levels, as it has among Israeli Jews. Within a generation, peace will come to a depopulated waste.

The corrupt and brutal government of the United States lies between world-standard governance ideals and barbarism, on a continuum from the rights and rule of law of the civilized world down to outcast concentration camps like Israel or North Korea. America’s direction of movement is easy to discern: we’ve gone far beyond the civilized pale. The American peoples can no longer rein in their fanatical police state alone. For security and protection they must have recourse to the outside world. We don’t yet know if our predator state has passed the point of no return. It may be the world can only watch in horror.

1. At this writing the Department of State has released its own report but no Committee review documentation.
2. US report due November 19, 2011; at this writing the Department of State has released no documentation.
3. Poisoned weapons are prohibited by Rome Statute Article 8 (2b) (xvii) and may constitute a crime against humanity

Until the past few weeks it looked as though the “international community” (US, UK-Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan), the east (Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Iran), the Middle East-Libya/Africa) and the progressive South (Cuba-ALBA+, South Africa)were content with ignoring Sri Lanka’s war crimes and crimes against humanity.

This tragedy was not even placed on the agenda despite the UN’s “Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka” delivered to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, March 31, 2011. The panel determined that both the Sri Lankan government-military and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE/Tigers) had most likely committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. It called for an independent international investigation into credible allegations leveled at the state. The LTTE was crushed by May 18, 2009 and no longer exists.

On the agenda for the upcoming 19th session are 80 reports and missions with 40 addendums concerning about 50 countries. None deal with Sri Lanka, not even under section E, “Combating impunity and strengthening accountability, the rule of law and democratic society.” The 18th HRC session (May-June 2011) had also avoided placing the matter on the table despite the High Commissioner for Human Rights (Navi Pillay) request while the Secretary-General was/is silent.

While there would be no accountability, the “Human Rights Game” requires a façade of concern. At the end of last January, US State Department officials Thomas Melia and Lesley Taylor met with a Tamil citizen group in Jaffna to tell them what to expect at the 19th session. Eighteen notes of the meeting were taken by participants and sent to Tamilnet.

The key points were: “There is no possibility of a resolution” [concerning the UN expert panel and war crimes issue]. This is due, partially, to the lack of “sufficient pressure” from the affected people. What can be expected is a positive reference to the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) report conducted by appointees of the Sri Lankan government. While the US may ask the Rajapaksa family government to implement the recommendations the Commission made, which it has done nothing about in the three months since its delivery, the US will do nothing to “antagonize the GOSL” (Government of Sri Lanka) nor is it interested in “instituting an accountability mechanism”.

It may be that high ranking members of the Sinhalese government were not so keen even with this minor pressure to adopt its own commission’s report.

Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission

Led by former Attorney General C.R. de Silva, the eight Rajapaksa appointees on the LLRC did not address possible war crimes and crimes against humanity by the government. The commission of inquiry into the time of ceasefire (2002) and the end of the war found no government or military entities culpable that required any process of accountability. It did, however, poke a hole in the government’s constant litany that “no civilians were killed” by it, and implied that some security forces might have caused some deaths and injuries of civilians although there had been no intent to cause harm. It stated that numerous citizens’ testimonies related to disappearances. It admitted that there may have been some “bad apples” but no systematic atrocities took place.

The LLRC report’s major significance is its recommendations that the north and east be demilitarized, that paramilitary groups be dismantled, that a degree of devolution of local power to Tamils take place, and that the police departments be made a separate institution from the military.

Regarding the last point, there are more military and police today—300,000 —than during the war and all are under the command of the Minister of Defence, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, one of President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s brothers. G. Rajapaksa uses one-fifth of the state budget, $2 billion. About 40 members of the Rajapaksa family hold government, parliamentary and key institution posts.

Following the Jaffna meeting with a Tamil civilian group, the US initiated meetings with Sri Lanka government officials with the aim of having them step in line. Three leading US officials—Marie Otero, under secretary of state for democracy and human rights; Robert Blake, assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs and former ambassador to Sri Lanka; and Stephen Rapp, ambassador-at-large for international war crimes—traveled to Sri Lanka to let the GOSL know what was expected. Its arrogance was becoming an embarrassment to the Human Rights Game.

The Tamil coalition of political parties, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), must also pay attention. While it has long demanded that accountability of war crimes committed be addressed, some members also call for the LLRC recommendations to take precedence. One significant instance is the confusion caused by two Alliance leading MPs, R. Sampanthan and M.A. Sumanthiran, who told US’s man, Stephan J. Rapp, on February 7, that the TNA wanted an independent inquiry, accountability and “meaningful” devolution of power. One week later, Sumanthiran stated to BBC that the “TNA backs a domestic process to implement the LLRC recommendations. We ask for an international probe only after a failure at that.”

At the same time, a natural ally with the Tamils, South Africa’s government, signaled approval of the LLRC report and recommended the government implement the recommendations. It did say that the LLRC should have delved into accountability. Just the year before, the African National Congress called upon the UN to implement an investigation recommended by the panel of experts.

Perhaps the Rajapaksa brothers were still balking because the media reported, February 10, that Secretary of State Hiliary Clinton sent a letter explaining what the Sri Lanka government must do:

1. Submit an action plan with time frames to establish implementation of the LLRC;
2. Consent agreement to be signed between the government and the TNA;
3. Release General Sarath Fonseka, the key general victor over the LTTE, from prison, where Rajapaksa sent him over differences and because Fonseka challenged him in elections, something that the US might want to see happen again.

For emphasis the US threatened to reveal voice recordings of Defence Secretary G. Rajapaksa and field commanders in which he instructed them to kill all senior members of the LTTE even if they carried a white flag of surrender.

Under secretary Otero told Colombo journalists that the US will support a resolution calling for the government to implement its report. She spoke favorably of Sri Lanka’s government saying the US had over the years supplied it with $2 billion, much of it in military assistance to fight the Tigers and prevent a separate Tamil nation.

“The United States has long been a friend of Sri Lanka; we were one of the first countries to recognize the LTTE as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, in 1997,” she said.

Human Rights Game and the Players

1. The western US-EU-Israel-India axis
2. The eastern Russia-China-Pakistan-Iran semi-alliance
3. The Middle East/Africa parts of the Non-Aligned Movement
4. The progressive Latin American NAM area

Many of these governments, especially the western and eastern ones, have directly supported the various Sinhalese chauvinist governments with money and credits, military equipment, intelligence, military training and mercenaries.¹

In the writing mentioned above,¹ of the states materially and military supporting Sri Lanka, I inadvertently left out Russia, which has sold weapons and military aircraft to Sri Lanka governments over the years. Even after the war in 2010, during which hundreds of thousands of Tamils were suffering in concentration camps, Russia offered Sri Lanka $300 million in credit to buy military aircraft and armaments, among other items. Only $500,000 was allocated for “relief”.

There has not been much or any economic or military aid from Group 3 but these governments support Sri Lanka and oppose not only the guerrilla warfare but the very demand for an independent nation within the state of Sri Lanka. That is what Tamil Eelam means and what, until the end of the war, almost all Tamils in Sri Lanka wanted, including political parties that did not take up arms. Most people in Tamil Nadu, India, and the rest of the Diaspora sought the same.

Group 4 is caught in an ideological bind—between solidarity with oppressed peoples and solidarity with third world sovereign states—but concludes in condemning the Tigers for terrorism, ignoring the victimized civilian Tamils, and politically supporting the Sri Lanka government. In the May 26, 2009 HRC resolution, the Cuba-led majority praised S.L. for its “commitment” “to the promotion and protection of all human rights”; congratulated it for freeing Tamil civilians from the terrorist Tigers; reaffirmed “respect for the sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka”.

The Western group opposed this resolution for its geo-political reasons. It asked Sri Lanka to conduct its own investigation and the LLRC is the result.

So, what I think will happen at the 19th session is that there will be no talk about the UN expert panel report or independent investigations into accountability. Some NGOs disagree with me and think that the US will press for accountability.

In my view, the Rajapaksa’s government will present a “National action plan for the protection and promotion of human rights” in conjunction with the LLRC. This will please the US-EU-India axis. Israel may not take any position believing, perhaps, that the Rajapaksan absolute arrogance and unwillingness to do anything was the best course. This course is its’ own against the Palestinians.

If for some odd reason, Sri Lanka does not add implementations into its action plan, there will then be a Group 1 resolution demanding it to do so. The session will end either with the passage of such a resolution or, if Sri Lanka still balks then its ALBA-NAM allies, being the majority on the HRC, will vote down any western approved ploy.

Either way, the Human Rights Game will conclude (for now) thusly:

Group 2 will look gray in its lack of critique of Sri Lanka, its do-nothing approach. Group 3 can contend simply that it supports all 113 NAM governments. Group 4, the socialist-communist and progressive-led governments of Latin America, and especially Cuba-ALBA, will have egg on their faces for having only praised the brutal Sinhalese chauvinist government and not played any Human Rights role in favor of the civilian Tamils. They have only played the Geo-Political Game and done so in a staid manner: the enemy of my enemy is my friend type.

However the play unfolds, I predict that the western group will come out looking like the good guys in the Human Rights Game. The eastern and southern groups will especially look like the bad guys.

This will be the view most westerners, including many progressives, will take. For many voters in the US, Obama will look like the hero on the white horse in the White House.

Sri Lanka-Tamil conflict can also be viewed in the context of the Arab Spring and the role that Group 1 plays in diverting the uprisings to suit its imperial needs. Knowing little of the reality, most liberal-progressive-left westerners think Group 1’s role in Libya was best for the Human Rights Game, and also with the tragedy in Syria where complications are similar to those in Libya.

What should be clear to thinking people, to people who seek real human rights and justice, is that almost no government wants authentic accountability judged upon a friendly government because it could be its turn next.

If there were true accountability spread around how would Group 1 look led by the US with its long history of invading weaker countries for their resources and for political control, committing war crimes including systematic torture? What about accountability for the two-three million Iraqis killed since US attacks on that sovereign nation from 1991 to the present? What about accountability of the “coalition of the willing” for mass murder and seizure of Afghanistan? What about Obama accountability for seven wars for oil-$ and global domination (Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Uganda); and Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people? What about genocide in Rwanda where the “peacekeeping” mission of the US-UK-France played a major role? Then there is giant China and minority Tibet being overrun with Chinese just as Zionists overrun Palestine and Sinhalese do the same in Tamil’s traditional homeland in the north and east.

This appears to be the view also of at least one of the three international organizations representing Tamils rights and seeking a Tamil Eelam. The Transnational Government for Tamil Eelam issued its news release concerning the upcoming HRC session, February 17:

This dismal failure in the position taken by the US and several other governments to address the crucial issue of justice is a source of grave disappointment to the Tamils”…”Today, again, the world’s governments are disregarding their moral and legal obligations by focusing exclusively on Sri Lanka’s own LLRC Report, which has been rejected outright not only by the Tamil people…

It would be a fallacy to imagine that the very power structure which stands accused of these heinous crimes will now begin a process to bring its own members to justice. Therefore, we perceive the leading governments’ choice to focus exclusively on the LLRC Report amounting to an attempt to derail the mounting international clamor for formal international investigations on Sri Lanka.

Less clear in my eyes is what Cuba-ALBA thinks it achieves from the Human Rights Game by entirely denying Tamils’ suffering. These governments do not mistreat their own nationalities, ethnic groups or religious peoples and, unlike many governments in Groups 1-3, they are not terrorist states. It is also understandable that they are critical of any interference by Group 1, with all its hypocrisy and its subversion against almost all of Latin America. One might think that Bolivia and Venezuela could be skittish about Tamil Eelam because there are groups there that want to create their own separate nation. But these are small groups that are orchestrated by comprador capital aligned with the US and have nothing to do with discrimination against any nationality, ethnic group or religion.

I think that Che Guevara would understand the need for solidarity with the Tamil people. He would be on their side today!

In reality, Rajapaksa’s stonewalling criticism of his regime’s war crimes and his systematic denial of truth is working. Groups 1, 2 and 3 tell Rajapaksa to make a little concession and the Human Rights Game continues. The show must go on!

Out of the negative comes the positive

Although impunity for war crimes will continue, genocide be ignored, and an independent nation a pipedream, there are positive developments.

1. Media attention of the Tamils’ plight was garnered by the whistle-blowing medium Wikileaks, which began leaking correspondence between the US Department of State and hundreds of diplomatic missions around the world on November 28, 2010. Initially Wikileaks convinced five core mass media to use the raw data and produce articles. Subsequent to releases of many files about the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, followed by “cablegate”, hundreds more media picked up revelations of massive governmental lying and corruption, and crimes of many types including war crimes, not the least committed by United States governments. 3,166 of the 251,287 cables concerning Sri Lanka war crimes and obtained by Wikileaks—perhaps through brave Bradley Manning—are from the US Embassy in Colombo.

The Boston Globe reported, December 9, 2010: “No foreign leader fared worse in the cables released by Wikileaks than Sri Lanka’s Mahinda Rajapaksa”, referring to US Ambassador Patricia Butenis implications of his role in war crimes.

Minister of Economic Development Basil Rajapaksa, one of the President’s brothers, candidly remarked, according to Butenis’ January 15, 2010 cable, “I am not saying we are clean; we could not abide by international law—this would have gone on for centuries, an additional 60 years.”

Minister of Defence Gotabhaya Rajapaksa admitted the same to US Senate Foreign Relations staff members. Ambassador Butenis implicated all the Rajapaksa brothers in government as well as other senior civilian and military leaders in conducting war crimes.

World attention concerning the war crimes committed by the Sinhalese chauvinist government(s) has occurred because of the alternative medium Wikileaks but also due to a group of Sinhalese and Tamil journalists who escaped from Sri Lanka and formed the organization and website www.jdslanka.org. The Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka obtained a short video of 17 frames taken by a Sri Lanka soldier showing eight or nine naked prisoners bound and blindfolded being executed at Kilinochchi. JDS presented the film to UK’s Channel 4. After forensic verification of the film, which was taken January 2, 2009, Channel 4 broadcast it on August 25, 2009. Then in June 2011, Channel 4 broadcast the devastating documentary, “Sri Lanka Killing Fields”.

2. Despite the GOSL maintaining a “zero tolerance policy on torture,” the United Nations Committee against Torture (CAT) has determined that torture is apparently accepted and practiced by the government. In its November 28, 2011 report on Sri Lanka it was found that many allegations of torture and ill-treatment were common, also “enforced disappearances, sexual violence, unacknowledged detention” [as well as] “threats to civil society, journalists, lawyers, and other dissenting voices.”

CAT Rapporteur Ms. Felice Gaer asserted that Sri Lanka has the world’s largest number of disappearances. Sri Lankan cabinet advisor and previous Attorney General Mohan Peiris conceded that of the 6,000 people arrested annually, there were “only 400 torture allegations”.

CAT underlined “the prevailing climate of impunity” and “the apparent failure to investigate promptly and impartially wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed.”

CAT also criticized the LLRC for its “apparent limited mandate” and “alleged lack of independence”.

While the US government has a long history of torturing people and even offers instructions about how to torture at its “School of the Americas” in Georgia, its ambassadors do sometimes inform the Department of State when other governments conduct torture. Again thanks to Wikileaks, the world can know about a May 18, 2007 cable sent by Robert Blake, then ambassador to S.L. He reported how government-connected Tamil paramilitary groups, Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Pulikal and Eelam People’s Democratic Party, “keep critics of the GSL fearful and quite”.

These anesthetized Tamils torture and/or kill many of their own people, who sympathized with the Tigers or who seek basic rights from the government. The para-militarists also kidnap and sell Tamil women into prostitution and sell children into slavery. Leaders Karuna and Douglas Devananda were former leading Tiger guerrillas who now enjoy government posts. Karuna even joined the leading government party and became a minister.

3. On September 16, 2011, sixteen NGOs asked the HRC president of the 19th session to invite both the GOSL and the UN Secretary-General to place the UN expert panel report on the agenda, as well as the LLRC. This is significant grass roots pressure as the groups include some of the best known, such as Amnesty, but also others from third world countries, such as the African Democracy Forum. Furthermore, the current HRC president is a woman from Uruguay, Laura Dupuy Lasserre.

Following the May 2009 HRC emergency session in which Uruguay voted for the Sri Lanka prepared resolution, a new president has been elected in Uruguay, José Mujica. Not only is he a socialist but he was a guerrilla in the Tupamaro liberation movement. Once captured, he spent 15 years in prison, some of it under torturous conditions, including two years confined at the bottom of a well. It might just be that Uruguay will press for a bit of justice.

4. One institutional voice asking for the UN expert panel report to be taken seriously is the European Parliament. In a “join motion for a resolution”, February 9, 2012, the parliament agreed to “support efforts to strengthen the accountability process in Sri Lanka”, including the establishment of a “UN Commission of inquiry into all crimes committed, as recommended” by the panel.

Although the EP has no binding powers, it can prod and further inform the public.

5. For the first time (to my knowledge) an internationally renowned Buddhist has spoken out publicly against fellow Buddhists’ treatment of Tamils in Sri Lanka. In an apparently undated letter (sometime in February 2012), Thai activist-economist-philosopher Sulak Sivaraksa has appealed to the “Sinhala Buddhists first of all to acknowledge the crimes that they committed against their own Tamil sisters and brothers and ask for forgiveness from the Tamils.

”Rejoicing at the war victories, when thousands have been killed, ‘disappeared’, maimed, raped and hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced and detained, is totally against the dhamma” [the way].

Sivaraksa has been nominated twice for the Nobel Peace Prize. He received the 2011 Niwano Peace Prize for furthering world peace. He is considered a “Thai institution”.

These positive points I have listed can give us some hope that more and more people are not to be fooled about who the culprits are regardless of how the world’s governments do their best not to assure accountability while maintaining impunity for their war criminals, which otherwise would mean many of their own leaders would be imprisoned.

What to do

I conclude with a few pointers about how we can go forward.

Several Tamils I have come to know tell me that Tamils from Eelam are among the “most inward looking people” while complaining that other people are not interested in their welfare.

Furthermore, most of the Tamils in the Diaspora rely on western governments, and perhaps India, to fight their battles. They ask them to have the Sri Lankan government judged, condemned and punished, and even go so far as to ask for support to create a new legal nation, that of Tamil Eelam within the state of Sri Lanka. But this political-economic world has no place for pipedreams and fairy tales.

I take from the many millions of righteous rebels in the Arab Spring movement—those not doing the West’s errands—as an example of what could be done. I take also from what many of us were doing in the 1960s-70s in the US and around much of the world. I take also from what the folks are doing in the Occupy Wall Street (and beyond) movement today.

1. Drop illusions of winning through political parties’ parliamentary power. Stand up to all terrorist states.
2. Organize from the grass roots. Go door-to-door. Learn and educate.
3. Use fewer speeches, fewer rallies and connect organizing with speeches and rallies..
4. Join in with other peoples’ struggles. Engage in solidarity work especially with the Palestinians whose struggle is nearly identical to your own. Israel is to Palestine what Sri Lanka Sinhalese governments are to the Tamils.
5. We must combat the growing racism/fascism in the West against Muslims and Arabs.

We have wondered over the deserts and the seas. We have been hungry and thirsty. We have been murdered and tortured. We are of the working class, of the castes. We are many races, ethnic groups, nationalities, religions and non-religion. We share a common vision: freedom and equality; bread and water on the table; a shelter over our heads. We must fight together if we are to live in peace and equality.

1. See my Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka p. 121-5 to see who financed and finances Sri Lanka’s human rights abuse. Add Russia to the long list: India, US, Israel, U.K., EU, Japan, Iran, Pakistan and the greatest war crimes contributor of them all in Sri Lanka, China.

We gather tonight knowing that this generation of heroes has made the United States safer and more respected round the world.

— President Barack Obama, State of the Union address, 24th January 2012

On January 24th, the day President Obama delivered his last State of the Union speech to Congress before the election, citing the “selflessness and teamwork of America’s Armed Forces, (their) focus on the mission at hand”, the “selfless” Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, leader of the massacre at Haditha, in Iraq, became the seventh soldier to walk free from the mass murder of twenty four unarmed men, women and children in three homes and a taxi.

It was another chilling, ruthless, cold blooded, up to five hour rampage, revenge for the death a colleague in a roadside bomb which had nothing to do with the rural families that paid the price.

The youngest to die was one year, the oldest was a 76 year old wheelchair-bound amputee, Abdul Hamid Hassan Ali. He died with nine rounds in the chest and abdomen.

Other children who died were aged 3, 4, 5, 8, 10 and 14.

On May 9th, 2007, Sergeant Sanick De la Cruz received immunity from prosecution in return for testimony in which he said that he had watched Wuterich shoot five Iraqis attempting to surrender. He further stated that he and Wuterich had further fired into the dead bodies – and that he had urinated on one of the dead Iraqis.

“Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed (US troops) example”, pondered the President in his speech – in a week which worldwide revulsion was expressed at a video of Marines, allegedly with the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, urinating on dead bodies in Afghanistan.

It was, of course, “behaviour … not in keeping with the values of the US Armed Forces … not consistent with out core values (or) indicative of the character of the Marines in our Corps”, said a Defence Department spokeswoman.

Ross Caputi, a former Marine who took part in another massacre, Falluja, exactly a year before Haditha, was sickened at what he saw and experienced.  He now campaigns tirelessly for Iraq and for reparation for Falluja, and he disputes the Defence Department’s sunny view of “core values”.

”These attitudes are common in the Marine Corps. The guys who peed on the poor dead Afghans were not ‘bad apples’, they were average Marines”, Caputi told this publication. For his outspokenness, Caputi has received such volume of chilling and obscene threats from former colleagues and US Service personnel (seen by the writer) that they stand testimony to his words.

As Afghanistan, the litany of Iraq’s blood-lettings are silent witness to “core values” of an altogether different kind. In an expression disturbingly mirroring “cleansed”, homes are “cleared.” Grenades are thrown in and then troops storm in, automatic rifles (and more grenades) blazing.

A description of  the assault on one Haditha home from a Lt. William T. Kallop records:

The Marines cleared it the way they had been trained to clear it, which is frags (grenades)first … It was clear just by the looks of the room that frags went in and then the house was prepped and sprayed like, with a machine gun, and then they went in. And by the looks of it, they just … they went in, cleared to room, everybody was down.

In her meticulous, eye-watering article, “The Haditha Massacre:  No Justice for Iraqis“, Marjorie Cohn writes:

Citing doctors at Haditha’s hospital, The Washington Post reported: ‘Most of the shots … were fired at such close range that they went through the bodies of the family members and plowed into walls or the floor’.

She goes on to add that days after the mass murders at Haditha became public, “US forces killed eleven  civilians, after rounding them up in a room in a house in Ishaqi”, in Salahuddin Province.  All were handcuffed (presumably not the six month old) and executed.

The murdered civilians of Ishaqi are:

Turkiya Muhammed Ali, 75 years
Faiza Harat Khalaf, 30 years
Faiz Harat Khalaf, 28 years
Um Ahmad, 23 years
Sumaya Abdulrazak, 22 years
Aziz Khalil Jarmoot, 22 years
Hawra Harat Khalaf, 5 years
Asma Yousef Maruf, 5 years
Osama Yousef Maruf, 3 years
Aisha Harat Khalaf, 3 years
Husam Harat Khalaf, 6 months

“A report by the US military found no wrongdoing by the US soldiers”, writes Professor Cohen.

There are Falluja’s football fields of mass graves, Najav’s hotel and hospital parks turned graveyards, the pathetic uncounted ones in gardens, in yards, the lost buried in the family home across Iraq by families who would be also shot if they ventured with their beloved to the cemetery.

In Falluja, reminiscent of other historic “cleansings”, categorized war crimes, men between fifteen and fifty five were forbidden to leave or enter their city.

Iraqi families shot in their cars by US service personnel are beyond counting – and indeed have not been. “It is not productive to count Iraqi deaths”, as the inimitable General Kimmit reminded the world.

Deaths included the family of Ali Abbas by rogue US missiles in the residential Zafaraniya suburb of Baghdad, with its evocative Convent and ancient Catholic church. Ali lost his pregnant mother, father, brother and thirteen other family members. He also lost his arms. He was twelve years old.

Allegations of summary executions have emerged from Tel Afar, whose blood drenched toddler, her parents shot by troops in their car, remains a never to be erased image; Samarra, Quaim, Taal al Jal, Mukaradeeb, Hamdaniya, Ramadi, Tikrit, Mosul – and throughout the country.

In Mahmudiya, in 2008, fourteen year old Abeer Quasim Hamza was gang raped then killed by five US servicemen — after they had murdered her mother, Fakriyah (34) father Qasim (45) and six year old sister. All were burned in an attempt to cover the crime. There were two convictions.

And never forget Abu Ghraib.

Long forgotten are the wedding and funeral massacres, a particular target for the US military, a litany. One, early in the invasion, was just a month after the first Falluja onslaught.

On May 19th, 2004 46 people celebrating a wedding in Mugrideeb village were mown down by assault helicopters, other attack planes and Marines.

USMC Major General James Mattis at the time simply commented: “How many people go to the middle of the desert to celebrate a wedding …?” He later said that it had taken him thirty seconds to decide to attack.

Eman Khammas of Iraq Occupation Watch braved the dangerous road out to the village as soon as she heard. She found carnage – and remains of the musicians’ instruments, decorations, pots, sacks of rice, improvised bread ovens, sacks filled with leftovers for the animals, all who had been shot – and surviving eyewitnesses.

There were blood stained toys, clothes, childrens’ hair slides, camera batteries. The family were sheep traders. Khammas recalled:

The ground was full of bullets holes of different sizes, spots of blood every where, some a meter wide. In some of them the remains of human flesh were drying in the sun. . . . In one of these remains there was a long black lock still attached to the flesh. I could not see any more. I ran away back to the demolished house.

Those mown down of the Rakaad Naif family as they celebrated were:

1. Mohammad Rekaad, 28
2. Ahmed Rekaad, 26
3. Talib Rekaad, 27
4. Mizhir Rekaad, 20
5. Daham Rekaad, 17
6. Saad Mohammad Rekaad
7. Marifa Obeid, Rekaad’s wife
8. Fatima Madhi, Rekaad’s daughter in law
9. Raad Ahmed, grandson, 3
10. Ra’id Ahmed, grandson, 2
11. Wa’ad Ahmed, grandson, 1 month
12. Inad Mohammad, grandson, 6
13. Anood Mohammad, granddaughter, 5
14. Amal Rekaad, daughter, 30
15. Anood Talib, granddaughter, 2
16. Kholood Talib, granddaughter, 6 months
17. Hamid Monif, son in law, 22
18. Somayia Nawaf, wife, 50
19. Siham Rekaad, daughter, 18
20. Hamda Suleiman, wife, 45
21. Rabha Rekaad daughter, 16
22. Zahra Rekaad daughter,15
23. Fatima Rekaad daughter, 4
24. Ali Rekaad son, 12
25. Hamza Rekaad, 6

Five from a family called Garaghool also died, thirteen of the band and three photographic crew. Forty six mown down for celebrating a wedding..

Kholood, 8 months, Sabha, 22, Iqbal 14, Mouza, 12, Feisal and Adil (children, ages unknown) were hospitalized.

There were no prosecutions.

General Mark Kimmit, questioned on the liquidation of the party goers – the  dead women’s gold also torn from their necks by the troops, according to consistent survivors accounts – simply replied: “Bad people have parties too.” Asked about the near countless other acts of carnage, he responded: “Change the channel.”

As the cost in Iraqi lives at the hands of US troops briefly hits the headlines again, some of the names that are known, in the perhaps 1.7 million lost, should be remembered. They are not “collateral damage” or “regrettable incidents”.  Each one is a unique human being, often a small, fledgling one.

In Haditha the victims were:

House One:

Abdul Hameed Hassin Ali, 76.
Khamisa Tuma Ali, 66, wife of Abdul.
Rashid Abdul Hamid, 30.
Walid Abdul Hamid Hassan, 35.
Jahid Abdul Hamid Hassan, middle aged.
Asma Salman Rasif, 32.
Abdullah Walid, 4.
Injured: Iman, 8 and Abdul Rahman, 5.
Escaped: Daughter-in-law, Hiba, with 2 month old Asia.

House Two:

Younis Salim Khalfif, 43.
Aida Yasin Ahmed, wife of Younis Salim, died shielding her youngest daughter, Aisha.
Muhammad Younis Salim, 10, son.
Noor Younis Salim, 14, daughter.
Sabaa Younis Salim, 10, daughter.
Zainabl Younis Salim, 5, daughter.
Aisha Younis Salim, 3, daughter.
One year old girl staying with the family.
Survived: Safa Younis Salim, 13, who pretended to be dead.

House Three:

Ajamal Ahmed, 41.
Marwan Ahmed, 28.
Qahtan Ahmed, 24.
Chasib Ahmed, 27. Brothers.

Taxi: Passengers were students at the Technical Institute in Saqlawiyah:

20 Ahmed Khadir, taxi driver.
21.Ahram Hamid Flayeh.
22.Khalid Ayada al-Zawi
23.Wajdi Ayada al-Zawri
24.Mohammad Battal Mahmoud.

Lance Corporal Roel Ryan Briones, who, seemingly, was not involved, was ordered to photograph the bodies. He picked up a little girl, shot in the head. The contents of her small skull spilled out on to his trousers. “I need immediate help”, he said.

What of help for then thirteen year old Safa, pretending to be dead amongst her family’s bodies? Of Hiba, lone survivor of her home and her now six year old daughter?

What of  the heroic Taher Thabet al-Hadithi, young journalist and human rights activist, who filmed every minute, bloody detail the following day, and amassed the truth of what had really happened as the Defence Department were busy trying to cover their tracks? He fled to Syria in fear of his own life expectancy should the US military learn of his evidence.

It was his witness materials that made its way into Time magazine, engendering an “inquiry.” Evidence that was indisputable..

The reaction of Major General Steve Johnson, Commander of US Forces in the Province was salutary: “It happened all the time … it was just the cost of doing business …”

Routine massacres.

“The renewal of American leadership can be felt across the globe”, said President Obama, concluding his address, citing, “… the enduring power of our moral example … tyranny is no match for liberty.”

On the wall of the deserted house of one of the Haditha families, silent witness to this “moral example”, is written:

Democracy assassinated the family that was here.