The Riddle of the Sands and the Sound of Silence

IAN WILLIAMS

NORTH AFRICA

A group of Sahrawi demonstrators wearing face masks hold flags and placards in Malaga, Spain on Nov. 28, during a protest in support of the self-determination of Western Sahara. On Nov. 13 the Polisario Front declared war against Morocco after the Moroccan government broke the peace truce with Western Sahara. (PHOTO BY JESUS MERIDA/SOPA IMAGES/LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2021, pp. 20-21

United Nations Report

By Ian Williams

PALESTINIANS AND THEIR FRIENDS have every reason to lament the sound of silence about the Palestinians, but even noise about them is not necessarily that productive. The “Annual Resolution Fest” has just finished with the General Assembly passing the “traditional” resolutions on Palestine and the even more often overlooked Golan Heights.

As always, it is geopolitically instructive to see who votes with the U.S. and Israel and thus against international law and previous U.N. decisions which their countries had originally supported. Even the abstentions are significant in their way, since in this context they usually mean “We agree with the resolution but we don’t want or don’t dare, annoy Israel and its big brother in Washington.” But lest we get too scornful of smaller weaker powers who bow to bullying, just remember that many U.S. congress people take a similar attitude when AIPAC’s lobbyists come calling!

It is a source of wry amusement and consolation for the Palestinians that the tiny cabal of states, which actually side with Israel are, well...tiny, either in size or moral standing in the world. The assorted Israeli-allied atolls of the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Nauru are totally dependent on foreign aid, but this year they were not even joined by Palau, whose recent votes for Israel have always been a shocking fall from grace.

The U.S. denied Palau, a former U.S. “strategic trust territory,” even nominal sovereignty for ten years for its principled refusal to come under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. The Pacific Islands, all threatened by climate change and sea level rise are happy to vote with Trump, the president who denies them.

So it is perhaps not surprising that the other Trumpista states backing Israel form an “Axis of Intolerance” to immigrants and their own indigenous peoples: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Czechia, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary and Malawi whose tolerance for apartheid was always outstanding for an African country.

Since 2004, Canada has been the epitome of unprincipled invertebracy and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau continued the floppy spinelessness of Stephen Harper’s regime under pressure from its vociferous domestic Israel lobby. Although its official positions agree with the U.N. resolutions on issues like the illegality of settlements and the wall, its weaselly excuse was that the resolutions were “one-sided” and directed disproportionately at Israel. This lobby-engendered trope of “whataboutery” completely evades the actual irrefutable Israeli violation of international law by implying that it’s rude and repetitive to go on about it. So Canada and likeminded casuists do not defend Israeli behavior, but will not condemn it.

This year, on the core issue, Ottawa had a lucid moment and voted with the majority, which is, possibly, a belated rediscovery of its principles, but perhaps also because of its equally belated realization that its pro-Trump, pro-Israeli votes had again lost it a term on the Security Council.

To complete the cycle of unrighteousness, Nauru, a desolate island from which all the valuable avian excreta had been scraped, housed its own settlements of boat people dumped there by racist Australian governments. There is a pattern here.

While one could make the pragmatic case that there are too many Palestinian resolutions, the Israeli effort and lobbying against them suggest it is worth keeping up the pressure. And similarly, the rapture with which the pro-Israeli camp greets the defection of the Saudis, Emiratis and Bahrainis does strongly reinforce just how damaging their treachery is.

On the other hand, if people would remember, it was only a few years ago that part of the “whatabout” refrain from Israel lobbyists was the relative silence about the misogyny, cruelty and lack of democracy in the Gulf states. Fortunately, a vital pre-requisite for being an Israeli supporter is a conveniently short-term memory.

MOROCCO ALSO FLOUTS U.N., FOLLOWING THE ISRAELI EXAMPLE

On the other side of the Sahara, this publication is one of the few that has kept an eye on the plight of the Sahrawis and their Moroccan occupiers. Israelis just ignore U.N. resolutions and, in some cases, insist that their singular idiosyncratic interpretation holds against the unanimity of the rest of the world, while the Moroccans go the whole hog and claim, for example, that the International Court of Justice decision negating the Moroccan king’s claim means exactly the opposite, or that the Security Council has NOT repeatedly called for a referendum.

To refresh memories, while some Sahrawis live in refugee camps, many still live inside the Moroccan equivalent of the separation wall, “the Berm”, under extreme surveillance and political persecution. We know their views because occasionally they surface as political prisoners. We can also draw deductions from the refusal of Morocco to countenance holding the referendum there, even one including the Moroccan immigrants. Among the convenient memory lapses is, that when the Spanish withdrew, the Moroccans accepted and shared their claim to the territory with Mauretania to the south, and when the latter accepted defeat by Polisario, they blithely assumed the Mauritaian pretensions and claimed the lot.

The ceasefire line, the Berm, left a strip of territory on the Saharan side up to the Mauritania border at Guerguerat, which just happens to straddle the major land route between North and West Africa. Technically the strip is demilitarized but the Moroccans have been encroaching and Polisario has been countering.

It is a perfect combination of circumstances. MINURSO, the U.N. force which has for 30 years failed to fulfil its mandate to deliver the referendum, has been bribed, bullied and cajoled into quiescence by the Moroccans. It let the situation develop and watched Morocco launch an armed incursion into the territory without raising any alarm bells. It is probably significant that Morocco did this while the world was pre-occupied with the follies in Washington and assumed that it could get away with it.

But this time Polisario had had enough. They declared an end to the ceasefire and began shelling Moroccan bases. One cannot help but suspect that they chose empty ones to shell at this stage, but in any case the sound of silence is deafening.

Once again, it is about countries standing by countenancing illegality. There are clear decisions, accepted by everyone except Morocco: ICJ decisions, and General Assembly and Security Council resolutions, European Court decisions and more, all reaffirm the need for self-determination for the territory.

So while it is perhaps understandable that none of us want to pour blood and treasure into the Sahara, it is particularly pusillanimous that few (South Africa being an honorable example) will even mention that Morocco is breaking the law and burning through $50 million a year of the U.N. peacekeeping budget.

And of course the Gulf states, so busily courting Israel, express their solidarity with Morocco. But then the Palestinians would rather court Morocco than support their fraternal refugees. The U.N. might not make countries do the right thing, but in its own passive way, it sets firm standards that everyone can fail.

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U.N. correspondent Ian Williams is the author of UNtold: the Real Story of the United Nations in Peace and War (available from ­Middle East Books and More).

Annual Reform Ritual at the UN.

 But the members will not stand up to the P5!

https://www.urmedium.com/c/presstv/52116

Desert Storm or Deserted Norm... where is the UN?

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u50nGnBdHLI&feature=youtu.be

Desert Storm or Deserted Norm... where is the UN?

YOUTUBE.COM

Western Sahara ceasefire over after 40 years. FPA Press Conference with Professor Jacob Mundy.

Remembering Robert Fisk

Robert Fisk, who has died of a stroke at the age of seventy-four, did not always get it right, although he mostly did. He was in the right places, at the right times – but it was not just luck: he contrived to be there. If he made mistakes, as all such prolific journalists will, we can be sure they were honest ones, not the result of bribery or browbeating from the rich and powerful.
Having braved the sectarian battles of Belfast, Fisk was prepared for the bitter conflicts he covered when he reported from Beirut over so many years. He brought a sense of history that Western media pundits on drop-in visit tend to lack, the cable and internet sock-puppets pontificating from faraway studios. Not least of his assets was that he lived in the region and spoke Arabic – and did so directly to ordinary people. A consummate beat reporter, he cultivated local sources even as he listened carefully to what official sources said.
To report on the region, he advised, “we journalists have to fight the Trumps as well as the Arab dictators, the pro-Israeli lobbyists and the Muslim factions and sometimes, yes again, tolerate the anger of our colleagues.” Indeed, while herd immunity might be a myth, media herd mentality, whipped along by fears of standing alone against editors and proprietors, is a proven reality – as anyone watching the current bovine stampede against Jeremy Corbyn can see.
But Fisk was always the maverick, prepared to blaze his own trail. He would not profess the spurious objectivity so often honoured in the breach by the media of record. He said that journalism must “challenge authority, all authority, especially so when governments and politicians take us to war.” When most of the media were being rounded up to support the Iraq War, Fisk was among the who not only saw the transparent absurdity of the WMD evidence, but also detailed the massive support Britain and the US had given to Saddam Hussein – which is why, he suggested, the Iraqi leader was quickly hanged to prevent him revealing his persecutors’ complicity.
One of his first scoops was an accidental taxi-ride into the centre of the Syrian city of Hama in 1982 to see it being shelled by Hafez Al-Assad’s tanks. Despite later accusations of being soft on the Al-Assad dynasty, he pointed out the hypocrisy of Western governments decrying and threatening to bomb Syria over the clan’s current atrocities while nurturing the butcher of Hama, Hafez Al-Assad’s brother Rifaat, in luxury in London.
Beirut and the Middle East was indeed clearly the location for him to exercise his distinctive defiance of the official line, but even before this in Belfast he had defied British military attempts to embed or muzzle him to the extent that MI6 followed him to Dublin. Lest we forget, the British police and military were assassinating the awkward squad at the time, or at least facilitating the efforts of various sectarian death squads. The past is prelude to the present.
That he died in the week that Keir Starmer suspended Jeremy Corbyn is telling, since both of them suffered the accusations of being soft on terrorism in Ireland and the Middle East for speaking to combatants before the official peace process – and before a wave of journalistic and political figures would feel sufficiently comfortable in their own career prospects to do so.
While his reportage was fact-based, he tried to put those facts in context and draw conclusions. For example, he regularly wrote about the motives of Western leaders and about their inherent duplicity in lecturing others about their ethics. In speaking truth to power, the media should indeed expose hypocrisy – above all the hypocrisy of their own power brokers. But occasionally in his analysis Fisk showed signs of adopting the principle that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Following the logic through he was often too apologetic for the Milosevics, Putins and Assads of this world.
Sometimes genocidaires are indeed mass murderers, even when it is their fellow mass killers, Tony Blair or Bill Clinton, who make the charges. Earlier he was more nuanced. Even as Fisk admitted Hama’s Islamists massacred Baathists, he denounced Damascus’s murderous way with the citizens of the town. Even as he denounced the Western assault on Iraq, he recalled Saddam’s poison gas attacks on Shias and Iranians. But by the end he gave more benefit of the doubt to Bashir Al-Assad than the latter’s record merited.
Perhaps his finest hour was when he reported on the massacre of thousands of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila, for which an Israeli government commission held then Defence Minister Ariel Sharon personally responsible. Fisk’s attempt to remind people of this behaviour by Netanyahu’s political mentor, lauded by Biden and Blair at his funeral, led to the usual flurry of complaints. One critic wrote to him that “in this case, you have an anti-Israeli bias. This is based solely on the disproportionate number of references you make to this atrocity.”
Like Hama before, Sabra and Shatila has been erased from the collective memory of a media that, unlike Fisk, does not take time to research their beats. As he said, “No international or world leaders visit the mass grave… on the anniversary of the massacre of the Palestinians.”
But that wasn’t true for everyone. Jeremy Corbyn did go the massacre site for the 30th anniversary (with Gerald Kaufman) and later remembered “the Labour Party… until 1982, had a position of uncritical support for Israel… The 1982 Labour Party conference at last woke up to the reality of Israel’s behaviour towards the Palestinians after the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, and condemned them.”
It is hardly surprising, then, that Corbyn paid heartfelt tribute to Fisk yesterday as a “brilliant man with unparalleled knowledge of history, politics and people of Middle East.” Luckily for Fisk, his reputation kept his position at the Independent which badly needed big names in the course of its decline.
I strongly suspect that it will be some time before any Western media will repeat that “mistake” of allowing someone to report truthfully and fearlessly on the Middle East. Especially not when this involves the inevitable descriptions of Israel’s pernicious role and the unprincipled support of Western governments for the Palestinians’ oppressors.

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/11/remembering-robert-fisk