Thursday, November 08, 2007
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Neuer released
There is a certain irony: Hillel Neuer was arrested by panicked locals who saw someone who looked foreign behaving in strange ways in a Pizza Parlor. One would almost suspect that they thought he was an Arab and treated him accordingly, assuming that if there were any crimes locally he must be guilty.
But Arabs tend not to have the charges dismissed so lightly.
Ian
Judge dismisses charge against man caught during Needham frenzy
Jessica Fargen By Jessica Fargen
Tuesday, November 6, 2007 -
Police reports and 911 tapes released yesterday show how downtown Needham, already on edge with a murderer on the loose, sunk fast into hysteria Friday afternoon as panicked workers led police to believe an armed killer was holed up inside a pizza shop.
“Oh my God he has a gun,” screamed a woman who called 911 to alert cops about man inside Stone Hearth Pizza, her voice growing more fevered by the second. “We think he has a gun. Oh my God, we need someone here.”
That man was Hillel Neuer, an unarmed 37-year-old international human rights scholar, whose arrest at gunpoint was fueled by fear and broadcast on Boston TV stations.
Yesterday, a Dedham District Court judge found no probable cause for his disorderly conduct charge, but the damage is done, said his attorney, David Eisenstadt.
“Mr. Neuer was an innocent victim who went to a restaurant in Needham and was traumatized and almost killed,” he said. “There was no justification to charge Mr. Neuer with anything.”
Neuer was arrested amid the hunt for the man police say killed a Needham grandfather inside his home and fled on foot. William Dunn, 41, of Norwood, was arrested for the murder later that afternoon in the reeds off Route 128.
Neuer, the executive director of the Geneva-based group U.N. Watch, was in Needham to meet with supporters when he popped by Stone Hearth Pizza, changed clothes in the bathroom and started acting “erratically,” according to police reports.
Chris Robbins, the restaurant owner, said his employees told him Neuer asked for a cab five times, changed into a suit and darted out to next-door CVS pharmacy halfway through his pizza.
“I don’t think there was any fault on our part,” he said.“He was pacing back and forth up and down the restaurant at enormous speeds. He was walking in and out of the restaurant.”
One pizza worker said Neuer looked nervous and was “constantly fixing himself and looking around,” a police report states.
At about 2 p.m., Needham police were flooded with 911 calls from Stone Hearth.
One of those calls was even from Neuer, who was ordered by police to walk out of the pizza parlor into the arms of SWAT team members.
Needham police maintain that they responded to the incident “with proper care and consideration for public safety,” according to a statement released yesterday.
Eisenstadt was outraged by the “reckless” arrest.
But Arabs tend not to have the charges dismissed so lightly.
Ian
Judge dismisses charge against man caught during Needham frenzy
Jessica Fargen By Jessica Fargen
Tuesday, November 6, 2007 -
Police reports and 911 tapes released yesterday show how downtown Needham, already on edge with a murderer on the loose, sunk fast into hysteria Friday afternoon as panicked workers led police to believe an armed killer was holed up inside a pizza shop.
“Oh my God he has a gun,” screamed a woman who called 911 to alert cops about man inside Stone Hearth Pizza, her voice growing more fevered by the second. “We think he has a gun. Oh my God, we need someone here.”
That man was Hillel Neuer, an unarmed 37-year-old international human rights scholar, whose arrest at gunpoint was fueled by fear and broadcast on Boston TV stations.
Yesterday, a Dedham District Court judge found no probable cause for his disorderly conduct charge, but the damage is done, said his attorney, David Eisenstadt.
“Mr. Neuer was an innocent victim who went to a restaurant in Needham and was traumatized and almost killed,” he said. “There was no justification to charge Mr. Neuer with anything.”
Neuer was arrested amid the hunt for the man police say killed a Needham grandfather inside his home and fled on foot. William Dunn, 41, of Norwood, was arrested for the murder later that afternoon in the reeds off Route 128.
Neuer, the executive director of the Geneva-based group U.N. Watch, was in Needham to meet with supporters when he popped by Stone Hearth Pizza, changed clothes in the bathroom and started acting “erratically,” according to police reports.
Chris Robbins, the restaurant owner, said his employees told him Neuer asked for a cab five times, changed into a suit and darted out to next-door CVS pharmacy halfway through his pizza.
“I don’t think there was any fault on our part,” he said.“He was pacing back and forth up and down the restaurant at enormous speeds. He was walking in and out of the restaurant.”
One pizza worker said Neuer looked nervous and was “constantly fixing himself and looking around,” a police report states.
At about 2 p.m., Needham police were flooded with 911 calls from Stone Hearth.
One of those calls was even from Neuer, who was ordered by police to walk out of the pizza parlor into the arms of SWAT team members.
Needham police maintain that they responded to the incident “with proper care and consideration for public safety,” according to a statement released yesterday.
Eisenstadt was outraged by the “reckless” arrest.
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
The Day the Dark Ages Began: Full text
Yesterday, November 4, was the anniversary of the 1979 student takeover of the American Embassy in Teheran, where over 50 hostages were kept until Iran released them on the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as president of the United States 444 days later, perhaps coincidentally, although many argue otherwise.
For many people, the incident is ancient history. But it is one of those seemingly inconsequential, "for want of a nail", events that change the course of history in profound ways.
To mark the occasion, this weekend I was on PressTV, Iran's international network, along with Massoumeh Ebtekar, the spokeswoman of the students and known to the hostages, without fondness, as "Sister Mary". She is still active politically and now a reformist - but totally unrepentant about the hostage -taking. She has just >written a book about it, which was published in Canada because she could not find a publisher in the US prepared to take the risk of associating with the wrong side in the "war on terror" - and to be fair, the surviving hostages would almost certainly have litigated any royalties she was due.
She felt that occupying the embassy preserved the Islamic Revolution against American counter-coups. I differed. The student occupation was understandable in the context of American support for the Shah, but totally reprehensible when, unplanned, it turned into long-term hostage taking.
Of all recent American presidents, Jimmy Carter is the one who would have tried to accommodate a democratic regime in Iran. But he was a strongly moral man, and to turn away the cancer-stricken Shah from medical treatment would have been unthinkable. But for obvious reasons of history, Iranian students and Ayatollahs did not think in terms of American presidents having moral qualms. They were happier to come to a deal with Ronald Reagan.
By ensuring Reagan's defeat of Jimmy Carter, the hostage crisis ushered in one of the most regressive eras in US history. It also represented the end of the New Deal and Great Society era, and the resurrection of Gradgrindism as a philosophy in the domestic governance in the US. Since then, the rich have prospered beyond measure while working Americans have, if they are lucky, trodden water.
And it was not only at home in the US that it marked the end of any sense of community. Globally as well, it heralded the triumph of American militarism and unilateralism.
We are still living with the unintended consequences of the bushy tailed, bright-eyed enthusiasm of those Iranian students, and in Iraq, Americans and Iraqis alike are dying with them.
The crisis had its results closer to home as well. The Iranian revolution, which had joined more secular democratic and Islamist elements, became the hybrid theo-democracy it is now, with the Ayatollahs able to over-rule democratically elected politicians. Ms Ebtekar thinks this is a good thing. Many, not necessarily pro-American, inside and outside Iran would differ, and both the new regime and the hostage crisis left Iran pretty much friendless when Saddam Hussein invaded a year later.
The Iranian anchorwoman wanted to know if I could think of anything positive to conclude from the incident. The one small point I could think of was that it showed Americans how unpopular abroad their government's policies were. But as we saw after 9/11, there is strong trend in the US, in fact, the one now in power, that feels fortified by foreign disapproval. And, after all, taking diplomats hostage violated international law, as indeed the US forces have done by taking Iranian diplomats prisoner in Iraq - despite the protests of the Iraqi government.
In the past the US has found it convenient to overlook direct and indirect attacks agaianst it, such - for example - Franco's past as a Nazi ally, the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, not to mention the Korean and Vietnam Wars. If the embassy hostage issue were brought up in arguments against talking to Iran, after 28 years, it would be an excuse, not a reason - and not a very good one either. Perhaps Washington could apologise for the Shah, Tehran for the embassy - and the students to the world for the dark ages they inadvertently ushered in.
For many people, the incident is ancient history. But it is one of those seemingly inconsequential, "for want of a nail", events that change the course of history in profound ways.
To mark the occasion, this weekend I was on PressTV, Iran's international network, along with Massoumeh Ebtekar, the spokeswoman of the students and known to the hostages, without fondness, as "Sister Mary". She is still active politically and now a reformist - but totally unrepentant about the hostage -taking. She has just >written a book about it, which was published in Canada because she could not find a publisher in the US prepared to take the risk of associating with the wrong side in the "war on terror" - and to be fair, the surviving hostages would almost certainly have litigated any royalties she was due.
She felt that occupying the embassy preserved the Islamic Revolution against American counter-coups. I differed. The student occupation was understandable in the context of American support for the Shah, but totally reprehensible when, unplanned, it turned into long-term hostage taking.
Of all recent American presidents, Jimmy Carter is the one who would have tried to accommodate a democratic regime in Iran. But he was a strongly moral man, and to turn away the cancer-stricken Shah from medical treatment would have been unthinkable. But for obvious reasons of history, Iranian students and Ayatollahs did not think in terms of American presidents having moral qualms. They were happier to come to a deal with Ronald Reagan.
By ensuring Reagan's defeat of Jimmy Carter, the hostage crisis ushered in one of the most regressive eras in US history. It also represented the end of the New Deal and Great Society era, and the resurrection of Gradgrindism as a philosophy in the domestic governance in the US. Since then, the rich have prospered beyond measure while working Americans have, if they are lucky, trodden water.
And it was not only at home in the US that it marked the end of any sense of community. Globally as well, it heralded the triumph of American militarism and unilateralism.
We are still living with the unintended consequences of the bushy tailed, bright-eyed enthusiasm of those Iranian students, and in Iraq, Americans and Iraqis alike are dying with them.
The crisis had its results closer to home as well. The Iranian revolution, which had joined more secular democratic and Islamist elements, became the hybrid theo-democracy it is now, with the Ayatollahs able to over-rule democratically elected politicians. Ms Ebtekar thinks this is a good thing. Many, not necessarily pro-American, inside and outside Iran would differ, and both the new regime and the hostage crisis left Iran pretty much friendless when Saddam Hussein invaded a year later.
The Iranian anchorwoman wanted to know if I could think of anything positive to conclude from the incident. The one small point I could think of was that it showed Americans how unpopular abroad their government's policies were. But as we saw after 9/11, there is strong trend in the US, in fact, the one now in power, that feels fortified by foreign disapproval. And, after all, taking diplomats hostage violated international law, as indeed the US forces have done by taking Iranian diplomats prisoner in Iraq - despite the protests of the Iraqi government.
In the past the US has found it convenient to overlook direct and indirect attacks agaianst it, such - for example - Franco's past as a Nazi ally, the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, not to mention the Korean and Vietnam Wars. If the embassy hostage issue were brought up in arguments against talking to Iran, after 28 years, it would be an excuse, not a reason - and not a very good one either. Perhaps Washington could apologise for the Shah, Tehran for the embassy - and the students to the world for the dark ages they inadvertently ushered in.
Monday, November 05, 2007
The Day the Dark Ages Began
The Day the Dark Ages Began - how bright eyed bushy tailed students in Teheran gave us Reagan, Bush, Star Wars, Iraq and Ayatollahs in the Guardian Comment is Free
Sunday, November 04, 2007
UN Watch Under Guard!
It could just be a mistake.... but.
Hillel C. Neuer, a noted U.N. critic, was arrested in Needham Friday.
The man arrested at a Needham pizzeria Friday leads a human rights watchdog group, has penned op-eds for international newspapers and delivered a scathing and widely publicized address on Israel before the United Nations earlier this year.
Hillel C. Neuer, 37, who lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland, was cuffed after an hourlong standoff with police when jittery pizza shop workers thought they spotted him with a gun. No gun was found. Neuer was charged with disorderly conduct.
Neuer’s shocked colleagues at the American Jewish Committee in New York said he was in the United States on a speaking tour regarding his new report on anti-Semitism in the U.N. Earlier in the week, Neuer spoke in New York and at Yale University, and he’d stopped in Needham to meet with a fund-raiser. Neuer is slated to speak to the Boston chapter of the AJC today.
“Hillel Neuer seems to have been an unfortunate victim of a profound mistake which led to his arrest,” said Kenneth Bandler, national spokesman for the American Jewish Committee. “We are hopeful that with legal help, this will be resolved this weekend.”
Just before Neuer walked in to Stone Hearth Pizza Friday afternoon, news of a brutal murder and a killer on the loose had spread through the suburban enclave. A pizza shop worker said Friday night that Neuer had entered the shop acting as if he was in distress, carrying several large bags and saying he wanted a taxi to Newton.
“He was just really nervous when he came in talking to me. He said, ‘I want you to get me a cab.’ Right after that, he got up, went to the bathroom to change and came back with new clothes on,” said Dante Rogers, 24, of Needham.
Rogers said Neuer emerged wearing a blue suit and tie, sat down to eat his pizza, took one bite, then left and ran next door to CVS. Rogers said he was in the back making himself a pizza when Neuer returned and someone screamed.
“Someone yelled, ‘Gun. Gun. Gun,’ ” Rogers said. “Everyone was on the phone with 911. He saw the cruisers and he dove behind the tables and I ran out the back door.”
Yesterday, Rogers said his co-workers were likely jittery from the news coverage of the murder, but he said they did not overreact.
“They hear there’s a murder. They see a guy acting funny. They’re going to go crazy,” he said. “People are people, you know? They do what they have to do to make themselves feel safe.”
Neuer, a Montreal native, holds three law degrees. Since 2004, he has worked as executive director of U.N. Watch, a 14-year-old Geneva-based nongovernmental organization affiliated with the AJC. The group believes in the United Nations’ mission to “provide for a more just world,” according to its Web site.
Neuer has written nearly a dozen op-eds blasting the U.N.’s Council on Human Rights for papers including the International Herald Tribune, The Jerusalem Post and The Boston Globe. He has appeared as a commentator on CNN, Fox New
s and the BBC, and testified before Congress last year on human rights issues.
In March, he appeared before the U.N. Human Rights Council, calling it a “do-nothing, good-for-nothing council” that seeks to “scapegoat the Jewish people.”
The speech made the rounds on the blogosphere and was viewed more than 267,000 times on YouTube.com’
Hillel C. Neuer, a noted U.N. critic, was arrested in Needham Friday.
The man arrested at a Needham pizzeria Friday leads a human rights watchdog group, has penned op-eds for international newspapers and delivered a scathing and widely publicized address on Israel before the United Nations earlier this year.
Hillel C. Neuer, 37, who lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland, was cuffed after an hourlong standoff with police when jittery pizza shop workers thought they spotted him with a gun. No gun was found. Neuer was charged with disorderly conduct.
Neuer’s shocked colleagues at the American Jewish Committee in New York said he was in the United States on a speaking tour regarding his new report on anti-Semitism in the U.N. Earlier in the week, Neuer spoke in New York and at Yale University, and he’d stopped in Needham to meet with a fund-raiser. Neuer is slated to speak to the Boston chapter of the AJC today.
“Hillel Neuer seems to have been an unfortunate victim of a profound mistake which led to his arrest,” said Kenneth Bandler, national spokesman for the American Jewish Committee. “We are hopeful that with legal help, this will be resolved this weekend.”
Just before Neuer walked in to Stone Hearth Pizza Friday afternoon, news of a brutal murder and a killer on the loose had spread through the suburban enclave. A pizza shop worker said Friday night that Neuer had entered the shop acting as if he was in distress, carrying several large bags and saying he wanted a taxi to Newton.
“He was just really nervous when he came in talking to me. He said, ‘I want you to get me a cab.’ Right after that, he got up, went to the bathroom to change and came back with new clothes on,” said Dante Rogers, 24, of Needham.
Rogers said Neuer emerged wearing a blue suit and tie, sat down to eat his pizza, took one bite, then left and ran next door to CVS. Rogers said he was in the back making himself a pizza when Neuer returned and someone screamed.
“Someone yelled, ‘Gun. Gun. Gun,’ ” Rogers said. “Everyone was on the phone with 911. He saw the cruisers and he dove behind the tables and I ran out the back door.”
Yesterday, Rogers said his co-workers were likely jittery from the news coverage of the murder, but he said they did not overreact.
“They hear there’s a murder. They see a guy acting funny. They’re going to go crazy,” he said. “People are people, you know? They do what they have to do to make themselves feel safe.”
Neuer, a Montreal native, holds three law degrees. Since 2004, he has worked as executive director of U.N. Watch, a 14-year-old Geneva-based nongovernmental organization affiliated with the AJC. The group believes in the United Nations’ mission to “provide for a more just world,” according to its Web site.
Neuer has written nearly a dozen op-eds blasting the U.N.’s Council on Human Rights for papers including the International Herald Tribune, The Jerusalem Post and The Boston Globe. He has appeared as a commentator on CNN, Fox New
s and the BBC, and testified before Congress last year on human rights issues.
In March, he appeared before the U.N. Human Rights Council, calling it a “do-nothing, good-for-nothing council” that seeks to “scapegoat the Jewish people.”
The speech made the rounds on the blogosphere and was viewed more than 267,000 times on YouTube.com’
Deja Vu All Over Again: full text
When it comes to Iran's nuclear capabilities, whose word would you rather take: that of a Nobel prize-winning head of an international agency specializing in nuclear issues who was proved triumphantly right about Iraq, or that of a bunch of belligerent neocons who make no secret of their desire to whack Iran at the earliest opportunity and who made such a pigs ear of Iraq?
That is the stark choice facing the sane people of the world, given the smearing of IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei for not joining the hysterical lynch mob building up against Iran. Criticised by Condoleezza Rice and others in the Bush administration, it is uncannily reminiscent of the slurs against him and UN weapons inspector Hans Blix in the run up to the invasion of Iraq - and we should remember that the US vindictively tried to unseat him afterwards for not joining in the lying game.
ElBaradei is hardly acting as cheerleader for the Iranians. He says that his inspectors have not seen "any concrete evidence that there is a parallel military program," though he could not yet swear to its absence. But he does believe that our issues with Iran can be resolved through negotiations - in which it would help if the US were not implicitly threatening war. But it looks as though we have reached a similar stage to when Saddam let in the inspectors. When they found no WMDs Washington cried foul, ordered the UN inspectors out and sent the troops in. The US and its allies will not accept anything short of regime change in Teheran - no matter what ordinary Iranians might want and what the IAEA says.
The only difference from last time is that France has defected, and France's opposition to the war in Iraq was as much because of Saddam's oil contracts with Total and Elf-Aquitaine as any deep attachment to international law. Teheran should sign a contract immediately!
There are, of course, several separate issues here. One is whether Iran has the right to enrich uranium. The second is whether it is abusing the putative right to build nuclear weapons. A third is whether the nuclear issue is not just some sort of White House feint, since we all know that if the shooting starts, it will really be about fighting terrorism, liberating gays and women, restoring democracy and taking down a major rival in the region to both Saudi Arabia and Israel - or any permutation of the above.
On the first question, stupid though it is, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty does not ban countries from reprocessing and purifying uranium. It should have done, and it should have allowed more intrusive inspections, but it doesn't, and one reason for that is that the US, under the influence of the people who now want to cite non-proliferation against Iran, fought against attempts to strengthen the treaty. These are the same people, in fact, who have successfully fought against the senate ratifying the comprehensive test ban treaty.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's maladroit diplomacy led to Iran being outmanoeuvred. His comments on Israel and the Holocaust, no matter whether interpreted correctly or not, have made it difficult for many countries to support him. The US got a resolution against Iran through the IAEA council calling on Iran to stop its uranium reprocessing, largely by promising council member India a free pass for developing nuclear weapons outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and with the enthusiastic support of Israel, the only definite nuclear state in the Middle East.
The US then took that IAEA council resolution to the UN security council, whose word, whether Iran likes it or not, is law under the UN charter, even though it is manifestly a political rather than a judicial body. (The law is not always just, and that goes for international law as well). It does not help Iran as much as it should that Washington, a major scofflaw in the international field, is once again talking piously about the need to enforce UN resolutions, with its own interpretation and its own timetable - just as was the case with Iraq.
Iran is playing a dangerous game. Most countries have deep reservations about what the US, France and, to a lesser extent, the UK are up to, but few of them are prepared to go to the wall, diplomatically, let alone militarily, for the ayatollahs.
Iran should accept the additional and more intrusive inspections that it did before, and throw open its program to the IAEA inspectors, but the war talk in Washington and Jerusalem gives it a plausible excuse not to, since it would be tantamount to offering them a list of targets.
Of course it is difficult to support someone like Ahmadinejad, even when he does for once have a point in the nuclear stand-off. But we can support ElBaradei and the IAEA, as the only sane voices around. With enemies such as ElBaradei has marshalling against him, he must be right.
That is the stark choice facing the sane people of the world, given the smearing of IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei for not joining the hysterical lynch mob building up against Iran. Criticised by Condoleezza Rice and others in the Bush administration, it is uncannily reminiscent of the slurs against him and UN weapons inspector Hans Blix in the run up to the invasion of Iraq - and we should remember that the US vindictively tried to unseat him afterwards for not joining in the lying game.
ElBaradei is hardly acting as cheerleader for the Iranians. He says that his inspectors have not seen "any concrete evidence that there is a parallel military program," though he could not yet swear to its absence. But he does believe that our issues with Iran can be resolved through negotiations - in which it would help if the US were not implicitly threatening war. But it looks as though we have reached a similar stage to when Saddam let in the inspectors. When they found no WMDs Washington cried foul, ordered the UN inspectors out and sent the troops in. The US and its allies will not accept anything short of regime change in Teheran - no matter what ordinary Iranians might want and what the IAEA says.
The only difference from last time is that France has defected, and France's opposition to the war in Iraq was as much because of Saddam's oil contracts with Total and Elf-Aquitaine as any deep attachment to international law. Teheran should sign a contract immediately!
There are, of course, several separate issues here. One is whether Iran has the right to enrich uranium. The second is whether it is abusing the putative right to build nuclear weapons. A third is whether the nuclear issue is not just some sort of White House feint, since we all know that if the shooting starts, it will really be about fighting terrorism, liberating gays and women, restoring democracy and taking down a major rival in the region to both Saudi Arabia and Israel - or any permutation of the above.
On the first question, stupid though it is, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty does not ban countries from reprocessing and purifying uranium. It should have done, and it should have allowed more intrusive inspections, but it doesn't, and one reason for that is that the US, under the influence of the people who now want to cite non-proliferation against Iran, fought against attempts to strengthen the treaty. These are the same people, in fact, who have successfully fought against the senate ratifying the comprehensive test ban treaty.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's maladroit diplomacy led to Iran being outmanoeuvred. His comments on Israel and the Holocaust, no matter whether interpreted correctly or not, have made it difficult for many countries to support him. The US got a resolution against Iran through the IAEA council calling on Iran to stop its uranium reprocessing, largely by promising council member India a free pass for developing nuclear weapons outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and with the enthusiastic support of Israel, the only definite nuclear state in the Middle East.
The US then took that IAEA council resolution to the UN security council, whose word, whether Iran likes it or not, is law under the UN charter, even though it is manifestly a political rather than a judicial body. (The law is not always just, and that goes for international law as well). It does not help Iran as much as it should that Washington, a major scofflaw in the international field, is once again talking piously about the need to enforce UN resolutions, with its own interpretation and its own timetable - just as was the case with Iraq.
Iran is playing a dangerous game. Most countries have deep reservations about what the US, France and, to a lesser extent, the UK are up to, but few of them are prepared to go to the wall, diplomatically, let alone militarily, for the ayatollahs.
Iran should accept the additional and more intrusive inspections that it did before, and throw open its program to the IAEA inspectors, but the war talk in Washington and Jerusalem gives it a plausible excuse not to, since it would be tantamount to offering them a list of targets.
Of course it is difficult to support someone like Ahmadinejad, even when he does for once have a point in the nuclear stand-off. But we can support ElBaradei and the IAEA, as the only sane voices around. With enemies such as ElBaradei has marshalling against him, he must be right.
Saturday, November 03, 2007
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Support Taiwan's Democracy
This piece is being riposted by mainland Academic Dr Yu Bin, and I will be replying to that as well.
Ian Williams | November 1, 200
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org
Neville Chamberlain famously excused the abandonment of Czechoslovakia at Munich by calling the victim “a faraway country of which we know little.” His infamy is not totally deserved. Britain had no treaty ties to Prague, nor did it have the military capacity to take on Germany at the time, and Chamberlain on his return immediately kick-started British rearmament.
For most Americans, Taiwan is even farther away and even less well known. Probably even less well known still is the U.S. commitment to defend the island against any attack from the Mainland. That commitment, made when Taiwan was an offshore counter-revolutionary base area run by Chiang Kai-shek who had open military ambitions to invade the mainland, now actually has both moral and realistic force. Taiwan is today a thriving democracy and a mid-level economic power in its own right. What is sometimes forgotten, it has voluntarily eschewed nuclear weapons in return for that U.S. military guarantee.
Taiwan’s unique anomalous position means that if it is part of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), it is covered by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and allowed to have nuclear weapons, or it is not part of China and not a signatory to the NPT, and so no treaty obligations prevent it from developing them. It certainly has the expertise to do so. Despite the temptations to go nuclear in the face of the nuclear-armed mainland’s thousand missiles pointed its way, and the massive manpower superiority of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), it is in everyone’s interest that the island maintains its pledge. On a wider scale, because U.S. guarantees to South Korea and Japan also dissuade them from the nuclear option, Seoul and Tokyo would certainly factor any abandonment of Taiwan into their own long-term military plans.
Bizarrely, however, the Bush administration does not have any serious high-level relations with Taipei, despite the commitment to defend it against another nuclear power. Washington even refuses to allow Taiwan’s senior leaders to visit the United States. Taiwan’s President Chen is restricted to brief stopovers in Alaska or Hawaii when he is in transit across the Pacific.
Bush apparently considers President Chen a troublemaker – but he is after all a democratically elected troublemaker, which rather makes nonsense of the administration’s claims that spreading democracy is a major plank of its foreign policy. The United States seems to share China’s view that a democratic referendum on Taiwan’s future is provocative and unreasonable. However, it is not conducive to reasoned exchange of views when the only meaningful communication between the United States and Taiwan is to restrict or extend how many minutes Chen can stop over at outlying airports.
Beijing v. Taipei
Cross-strait relations are a major issue in the domestic politics of both sides. In the PRC, in the absence of any ideological cement to bind the Communist Party together, the contenders for position in the leadership play the tough-on-Taiwan card as a trump. Taiwanese officials concerned with cross-strait relations discern a good cop/bad cop routine with their mainland counterparts. Both CPC factions want “reunification.” But while one thinks that open relations and sweet-talking are the way forward, the other has stationed a thousand missiles aimed at the island and passed the PRC’s “Anti-Secession” law, “legalizing” military action against the island.
The present obduracy of the PRC on the issue disguises some earlier wobbles. The constitution of Mao Zedong’s 1931 Chinese Soviet Republic promised the right of self-determination to the peoples of the former Chinese Empire, and Mao himself told Edgar Snow, in Red Star over a China, in a section that was fact-checked by the Chinese Communist Party, that Formosa, as Taiwan was then known, could choose its own fate.
Oddly, the Communist party is happier with the heirs of its old adversary Chiang Kai Shek. Chiang’s Kuomintang (KMT) has maintained a residual claim to the whole of China as the “Republic of China” while the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) wants to abandon both the title and the grandiose ambitions of the former Republic of China (ROC). “Reunification” with the PRC has infinitesimal support among Taiwanese. So, the KMT’s adherence to “One-China” is based partly upon the residual pan-Chinese politics of its rapidly deceasing members who came over in 1949, but mostly because annoying the mainland is bad for business.
The DPP’s independence position is extremely popular with Taiwanese, which is why President Chen is holding the referendum next March on applying to the UN under the name of Taiwan. The popularity of the issue forces the KMT to be pragmatic, instead posing the question of whether the application should be in any name that can get the island in the organization. Since in any case the UN defers to the unilateral mainland interpretation of the resolution that admitted the PRC to the organization, neither method will lead to Taiwan’s admission. But it will raise political heat on the issue from which the DPP is likely to benefit for both the presidential and legislative elections in the New Year.
Cannily, Chen timed the referendum not only with the elections in view, but also in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. He is tweaking the dragon’s tail with relative confidence that the Games are too important for China to risk disruption from overt action against Taiwan. Seen as an act of self-determination by the Taiwanese, the referendum plays to their biggest strength. Instead of legalisms about successor states, ROC versus PRC, the best argument for Taiwanese independence is that its 23 million people overwhelmingly want it.
Washington’s Approach
When the United States and the Western powers recognized the PRC, in general they accepted the reality that Beijing represented China. This was made easier because at the time the Chiang Kai-shek regime insisted that the Republic of China based on Taiwan was the legitimate government of all China and indeed of Tibet, Mongolia, Tannu Tuva in the Soviet Union, and the northern part of Burma! It broke off relations with any country that signed up with the PRC, thus setting the conditions for its own isolation.
But the countries that sent ambassadors to Beijing still hedged on the issue of whether Taiwan was part of China. The joint communiqués tended to “note”, “understand,” or “respect” Beijing’s position. The United States “acknowledges” China’s position. But its different interpretation is expressed in the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, which states that “Whenever the laws of the United States refer or relate to foreign countries, nations, states, governments, or similar entities, such terms shall include and such laws shall apply with respect to Taiwan.”
While the United States has not officially changed its position since, Bush administration officials have done so, in effect kowtowing to Beijing and implicitly accepting the PRC version of the relationship. That sends dangerous signals to the PRC, which may well encourage it to assume that a cross-straits adventure would not invoke the defense that the United States has otherwise pledged. It was the Thatcher government’s insouciance about the British South Atlantic territories that enticed Argentinean President Galtieri to attack the Falkland Islands. That was an expensive and relatively bloody conflict. But it never risked a global or nuclear conflict the way that a PRC invasion of Taiwan would.
Indeed, the eagerness to avoid giving offense to Beijing on issues of protocol is even more puzzling in the light not just of the willingness, but also of the eagerness, of Washington to sell weaponry to Taiwan, which is surely much more substantially provocative. Indeed recently Bush asked indignantly how the Taiwanese expected Americans to put their troops on the line “if they don’t buy our weapons,” according to a anonymous source at the meeting.
In fact, Taiwan celebrated the end of half a century of martial law in the 1990s with a conscious strategy to prioritize health, education and economic progress rather than military spending. This is not a decision that the Bush administration would necessarily understand. While there is a consensus that the Taiwanese military does need to re-equip to face the threat from the PRC, legislators have been haggling about the precise nature of those needs, and there is a strong suspicion that some of the items the United States is hawking are big on bucks and low on bangs. But politically, Taiwan may end up paying the price to ensure support in Washington, where both houses of Congress in bipartisan resolutions have called for Taiwanese officials to have free access to the United States.
The Ties That Don’t Quite Bind
Ironically, even as cross-strait political relations have chilled, the economic ties between the two sides are closer than ever. There are a million Taiwanese working in the mainland for Taiwanese companies who have invested billions of dollars there. The island’s businesses specialize in high-tech research and development, but manufacture their products on the mainland. However the relationship does not leave Taiwan totally at the mercy of the mainland. Taiwanese capital, management and technology are essential for the development of China’s high-end electronic export trade, responsible for over 100 million jobs on the Mainland.
Taipei’s plans for the island to become a regional financial center have not prospered. The government has yet to take the risk of opening up its financial markets to mainland companies. Presently, to avoid being snagged by the government’s restrictions on investment, few of the vast revenues of Taiwan’s corporate presence on the mainland are repatriated.
The talks with the mainland are constrained by the PRC’s refusal to accept the legitimacy of the Taipei government and the latter’s understandable suspicion of Beijing. So, Taipei maintains much-evaded restrictions on investment in the mainland as well as a total ban on PRC investment in Taiwan and restrictions on mainland visitors. Talks on scheduled direct flights have also foundered. The PRC side is deliberately stalling in the hope that it will influence the impending election.
The PRC wants victory for Ma Ying-jeou, the KMT candidate for presidency. But the DPP’s Frank Hsieh is the favorite. Hsieh is considered to be more pragmatic that Chen Shui-ban, whose politics were hardened in the long struggle against Chiang’s dictatorship. Many Taiwanese hope that he can deliver some normalization of relations with the mainland while keeping the PRC politically away from the door.
A mutually satisfactory solution, however, is not yet on the horizon. The ham-fisted way in which Beijing abused the Hong Kong “one country two systems” solution for Hong Kong has excluded any such deal. The PRC’s insistence on one China confronts the desire of most Taiwanese to convert their de facto independence into de jure independence, with UN membership being the most tangible symbol.
Since the issue is so prominent in domestic politics on both sides there is an inherent danger of escalation and instability. The stalemate across the straits, with China’s threatened military options facing the promised U.S. defense, has dangerous implications for the region and the world. By its insouciance toward Taipei and its deference to the PRC on what one might call ceremonial issues, Washington has incurred military liabilities to defend a government over whose behavior it has only indirect influence.
The lack of U.S. diplomatic support for Taipei lessens the chance of a negotiated solution. It weakens the Taiwanese hand while encouraging Chinese obstinacy. If the United States has no official relations with the island, then why should Beijing? The recent appearance of President Bush at the presentation of the Congressional Medal of Honor to the Dalai Lama demonstrates that the sky does not fall in when Beijing is displeased. It is time for serious and open relations with Taiwan, predicated on the latter's abdication of any revanchist claims to the Mainland.
Ian Williams contributes frequently to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) on UN and international affairs.
Ian Williams | November 1, 200
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org
Neville Chamberlain famously excused the abandonment of Czechoslovakia at Munich by calling the victim “a faraway country of which we know little.” His infamy is not totally deserved. Britain had no treaty ties to Prague, nor did it have the military capacity to take on Germany at the time, and Chamberlain on his return immediately kick-started British rearmament.
For most Americans, Taiwan is even farther away and even less well known. Probably even less well known still is the U.S. commitment to defend the island against any attack from the Mainland. That commitment, made when Taiwan was an offshore counter-revolutionary base area run by Chiang Kai-shek who had open military ambitions to invade the mainland, now actually has both moral and realistic force. Taiwan is today a thriving democracy and a mid-level economic power in its own right. What is sometimes forgotten, it has voluntarily eschewed nuclear weapons in return for that U.S. military guarantee.
Taiwan’s unique anomalous position means that if it is part of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), it is covered by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and allowed to have nuclear weapons, or it is not part of China and not a signatory to the NPT, and so no treaty obligations prevent it from developing them. It certainly has the expertise to do so. Despite the temptations to go nuclear in the face of the nuclear-armed mainland’s thousand missiles pointed its way, and the massive manpower superiority of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), it is in everyone’s interest that the island maintains its pledge. On a wider scale, because U.S. guarantees to South Korea and Japan also dissuade them from the nuclear option, Seoul and Tokyo would certainly factor any abandonment of Taiwan into their own long-term military plans.
Bizarrely, however, the Bush administration does not have any serious high-level relations with Taipei, despite the commitment to defend it against another nuclear power. Washington even refuses to allow Taiwan’s senior leaders to visit the United States. Taiwan’s President Chen is restricted to brief stopovers in Alaska or Hawaii when he is in transit across the Pacific.
Bush apparently considers President Chen a troublemaker – but he is after all a democratically elected troublemaker, which rather makes nonsense of the administration’s claims that spreading democracy is a major plank of its foreign policy. The United States seems to share China’s view that a democratic referendum on Taiwan’s future is provocative and unreasonable. However, it is not conducive to reasoned exchange of views when the only meaningful communication between the United States and Taiwan is to restrict or extend how many minutes Chen can stop over at outlying airports.
Beijing v. Taipei
Cross-strait relations are a major issue in the domestic politics of both sides. In the PRC, in the absence of any ideological cement to bind the Communist Party together, the contenders for position in the leadership play the tough-on-Taiwan card as a trump. Taiwanese officials concerned with cross-strait relations discern a good cop/bad cop routine with their mainland counterparts. Both CPC factions want “reunification.” But while one thinks that open relations and sweet-talking are the way forward, the other has stationed a thousand missiles aimed at the island and passed the PRC’s “Anti-Secession” law, “legalizing” military action against the island.
The present obduracy of the PRC on the issue disguises some earlier wobbles. The constitution of Mao Zedong’s 1931 Chinese Soviet Republic promised the right of self-determination to the peoples of the former Chinese Empire, and Mao himself told Edgar Snow, in Red Star over a China, in a section that was fact-checked by the Chinese Communist Party, that Formosa, as Taiwan was then known, could choose its own fate.
Oddly, the Communist party is happier with the heirs of its old adversary Chiang Kai Shek. Chiang’s Kuomintang (KMT) has maintained a residual claim to the whole of China as the “Republic of China” while the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) wants to abandon both the title and the grandiose ambitions of the former Republic of China (ROC). “Reunification” with the PRC has infinitesimal support among Taiwanese. So, the KMT’s adherence to “One-China” is based partly upon the residual pan-Chinese politics of its rapidly deceasing members who came over in 1949, but mostly because annoying the mainland is bad for business.
The DPP’s independence position is extremely popular with Taiwanese, which is why President Chen is holding the referendum next March on applying to the UN under the name of Taiwan. The popularity of the issue forces the KMT to be pragmatic, instead posing the question of whether the application should be in any name that can get the island in the organization. Since in any case the UN defers to the unilateral mainland interpretation of the resolution that admitted the PRC to the organization, neither method will lead to Taiwan’s admission. But it will raise political heat on the issue from which the DPP is likely to benefit for both the presidential and legislative elections in the New Year.
Cannily, Chen timed the referendum not only with the elections in view, but also in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. He is tweaking the dragon’s tail with relative confidence that the Games are too important for China to risk disruption from overt action against Taiwan. Seen as an act of self-determination by the Taiwanese, the referendum plays to their biggest strength. Instead of legalisms about successor states, ROC versus PRC, the best argument for Taiwanese independence is that its 23 million people overwhelmingly want it.
Washington’s Approach
When the United States and the Western powers recognized the PRC, in general they accepted the reality that Beijing represented China. This was made easier because at the time the Chiang Kai-shek regime insisted that the Republic of China based on Taiwan was the legitimate government of all China and indeed of Tibet, Mongolia, Tannu Tuva in the Soviet Union, and the northern part of Burma! It broke off relations with any country that signed up with the PRC, thus setting the conditions for its own isolation.
But the countries that sent ambassadors to Beijing still hedged on the issue of whether Taiwan was part of China. The joint communiqués tended to “note”, “understand,” or “respect” Beijing’s position. The United States “acknowledges” China’s position. But its different interpretation is expressed in the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, which states that “Whenever the laws of the United States refer or relate to foreign countries, nations, states, governments, or similar entities, such terms shall include and such laws shall apply with respect to Taiwan.”
While the United States has not officially changed its position since, Bush administration officials have done so, in effect kowtowing to Beijing and implicitly accepting the PRC version of the relationship. That sends dangerous signals to the PRC, which may well encourage it to assume that a cross-straits adventure would not invoke the defense that the United States has otherwise pledged. It was the Thatcher government’s insouciance about the British South Atlantic territories that enticed Argentinean President Galtieri to attack the Falkland Islands. That was an expensive and relatively bloody conflict. But it never risked a global or nuclear conflict the way that a PRC invasion of Taiwan would.
Indeed, the eagerness to avoid giving offense to Beijing on issues of protocol is even more puzzling in the light not just of the willingness, but also of the eagerness, of Washington to sell weaponry to Taiwan, which is surely much more substantially provocative. Indeed recently Bush asked indignantly how the Taiwanese expected Americans to put their troops on the line “if they don’t buy our weapons,” according to a anonymous source at the meeting.
In fact, Taiwan celebrated the end of half a century of martial law in the 1990s with a conscious strategy to prioritize health, education and economic progress rather than military spending. This is not a decision that the Bush administration would necessarily understand. While there is a consensus that the Taiwanese military does need to re-equip to face the threat from the PRC, legislators have been haggling about the precise nature of those needs, and there is a strong suspicion that some of the items the United States is hawking are big on bucks and low on bangs. But politically, Taiwan may end up paying the price to ensure support in Washington, where both houses of Congress in bipartisan resolutions have called for Taiwanese officials to have free access to the United States.
The Ties That Don’t Quite Bind
Ironically, even as cross-strait political relations have chilled, the economic ties between the two sides are closer than ever. There are a million Taiwanese working in the mainland for Taiwanese companies who have invested billions of dollars there. The island’s businesses specialize in high-tech research and development, but manufacture their products on the mainland. However the relationship does not leave Taiwan totally at the mercy of the mainland. Taiwanese capital, management and technology are essential for the development of China’s high-end electronic export trade, responsible for over 100 million jobs on the Mainland.
Taipei’s plans for the island to become a regional financial center have not prospered. The government has yet to take the risk of opening up its financial markets to mainland companies. Presently, to avoid being snagged by the government’s restrictions on investment, few of the vast revenues of Taiwan’s corporate presence on the mainland are repatriated.
The talks with the mainland are constrained by the PRC’s refusal to accept the legitimacy of the Taipei government and the latter’s understandable suspicion of Beijing. So, Taipei maintains much-evaded restrictions on investment in the mainland as well as a total ban on PRC investment in Taiwan and restrictions on mainland visitors. Talks on scheduled direct flights have also foundered. The PRC side is deliberately stalling in the hope that it will influence the impending election.
The PRC wants victory for Ma Ying-jeou, the KMT candidate for presidency. But the DPP’s Frank Hsieh is the favorite. Hsieh is considered to be more pragmatic that Chen Shui-ban, whose politics were hardened in the long struggle against Chiang’s dictatorship. Many Taiwanese hope that he can deliver some normalization of relations with the mainland while keeping the PRC politically away from the door.
A mutually satisfactory solution, however, is not yet on the horizon. The ham-fisted way in which Beijing abused the Hong Kong “one country two systems” solution for Hong Kong has excluded any such deal. The PRC’s insistence on one China confronts the desire of most Taiwanese to convert their de facto independence into de jure independence, with UN membership being the most tangible symbol.
Since the issue is so prominent in domestic politics on both sides there is an inherent danger of escalation and instability. The stalemate across the straits, with China’s threatened military options facing the promised U.S. defense, has dangerous implications for the region and the world. By its insouciance toward Taipei and its deference to the PRC on what one might call ceremonial issues, Washington has incurred military liabilities to defend a government over whose behavior it has only indirect influence.
The lack of U.S. diplomatic support for Taipei lessens the chance of a negotiated solution. It weakens the Taiwanese hand while encouraging Chinese obstinacy. If the United States has no official relations with the island, then why should Beijing? The recent appearance of President Bush at the presentation of the Congressional Medal of Honor to the Dalai Lama demonstrates that the sky does not fall in when Beijing is displeased. It is time for serious and open relations with Taiwan, predicated on the latter's abdication of any revanchist claims to the Mainland.
Ian Williams contributes frequently to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) on UN and international affairs.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
United Nations Opponents All at Sea Over Convention
United Nations Opponents All at Sea Over Convention
in the current Washington Spectator
by Ian Williams | November 1, 2007
Editor's note: On October 4 Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute addressed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Smith drew on all the anathemas of the far right to attack a treaty the committee was considering. "Did anyone expect the Endangered Species Act to become a national land use planning act? Did anyone expect Superfund to become one of the most costly green pork barrel measures in history or that the Clean Water Act would compel the Corps of Engineers to ban development throughout any area that might have been or might become at some time a wetland?" With a logic alien to the majority of Americans, Smith was trying to persuade the senators to vote against ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. In this issue, Ian Williams looks at the funders behind the isolationist rhetoric and the prospect that their money will prevail in the U.S. Senate. Williams is an occasional contributor to the Washington Spectator and has covered the United Nations for The Nation and other publications since 1989.
THE NEED FOR INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION and the rule of law is nowhere more apparent than at the Poles, where global warming is melting ice caps at an unprecedented rate. In 1957, before American isolationism and exceptionalism resurfaced as potent political forces in Washington, the U.S. signed the Antarctic Treaty, which froze all the old territorial claims and kept the icebound continent free from military action and landgrabs. Fifty years later the only change is that more countries have signed on. It has been an extremely successful agreement.
In contrast, the North Pole is heating up in every sense of the word. Russian claims to a significant part of the Arctic seabed are finally speeding up the glacial progress of U.S. ratification of another very successful international instrument: the U.N. Convention on the International Law of the Sea (CLOS). Russia is making its Arctic claim under the CLOS, but the U.S., by refusing to ratify the CLOS, has no standing in the discussions.
The Pentagon and the White House, backed by maritime, oil and telecom lobbies, are pushing for CLOS ratification, but they find themselves battling the same retrograde element of flat-Earthers who have been taking potshots at the treaty since 1982, and who indeed have forced the U.S. delegation to the U.N. into a holding action.
The military and business lobbies' near-universal support for the CLOS treaty has isolated and exposed the hard-core ideological—indeed faith-based—foundations behind this an other conservative causes. One can understand why lead makers have lobbied against banning lead in paints; tobacco makers against smoking restrictions; and oil and coal companies against carbon emission controls. Their rationale is self-interest. But the extremists who oppose the CLOS treaty have lost industry support in their fight against the treaty.
In September and October, at hearings held by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the groups that spoke against ratification, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and the Center for Security Policy (CSP), were both known as prominent campaigners against the idea that human activity is a cause of global warming. Both groups now contrive to depict the CLOS as some sort of "stealth" version of the Kyoto Protocol—reminiscent of earlier farfetched accusations of an undersea land grab by the United Nations.
Last year Exxon—Big Oil's last-ditch CLOS opponent—dropped its financial support for CEI. Yet the campaign against the treaty persists. Now that such opposition to a global treaty has been stripped of the veneer of the rational if amoral self-interest of the industry lobbies, the ideological core of the irrational campaign against multilateralism in any form is plain to see. Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 election, but the people like Richard Mellon Scaife who bankrolled him have remained a force on Capitol Hill, averting ratification of almost every multilateral agreement. They are still funding CEI and CSP, along with much of the conservative project they have kept on the road for decades.
The hard-core lobby now left in the field against ratification of the Law of the Sea treaty reveals the wacko money tail that has been wagging the Republican dog, and, more often than not, converting many Democratic politicians into fawning puppies. The process was described in an e-mail Mike Scanlon, a lobbyist who once worked for Tom DeLay, sent to his Indian tribal clients. It was released by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee when it was investigating disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Our mission is to get specifically selected groups of individuals to the polls to speak out AGAINST something. To that end, your money is best spent finding them and communicating with them on using the modes that they are most likely to respond to. Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them. The wackos get their information form [sic] the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet, and telephone trees.
HATE-FEST FOR THE U.N.—In the Clinton era, groups like CEI and CSP, backed by mining companies, used a spurious "sovereignty" issue to campaign against what they termed a "U.N. land grab," by which they meant listing U.S. national parks as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. It was not the prospect of blue United Nations flags flying over the parks that upset them, but rather the red flag against strip mining up to the park's boundaries.
Similar arguments threaten to sink the Law of the Sea treaty. The CSP's Frank Gaffney, who writes a column for the Washington Times, got himself into more convolutions than a chambered nautilus as he shifted from calling for total legislative prostration before President Bush and General Petraeus over Iraq, to total disregard for the views of the Pentagon and the White House over the Law of the Sea treaty. Retired Chief of Naval Operations Vernon Clark has described the treaty to the Foreign Relations Committee as "a Magna Carta for the oceans that guarantees navigation freedoms throughout the world's largest maneuver space." In contrast, Gaffney fulminated that the "transies" have "created organizations that will be used to implement that world view—a redistributionist, socialist and fundamentally hostile to the United States view." The U.S. view, is ipso facto that of the Scaife-funded conservative think tanks.
On the face of it, the unprecedented concatenation of a Republican President, the former Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Richard Lugar, and a Democratic majority in the Senate should make ratification of the sea treaty inevitable. But the Senate Foreign Relations hearings on the treaty may as well have been conducted in an octopus's garden in the shade for all the public exposure they got. Which implies that the Scanlon strategy may be under way: to "bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them." Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK), one of the major opponents of treaty ratification, was able to get thirty of his colleagues to sign on to a resolution against "U.N. Global taxes" this January, which is a bit like getting them to sign a resolution against the tooth fairy.
While the sane majority stays silent, the mailboxes of GOP senators will be flooded with letters and e-mails from black-helicopter-spotting backwoodsers who have decided that the goal of the supporters of sea-law ratification "is nothing less than the establishment of world government at the expense of traditional sovereignty."
CONVENTIONAL WISDOM—It should be evident that the oceans, which cover two-thirds of the globe, need the internationally accepted legal system that the Convention on the International Law of the Sea provides. The sea is the main highway for of all the world's nations. It is the source of food for many people. And for everybody, the oceans are the priceless resource on which life on Earth depends.
Former Canadian minster of state for external affairs Mark MacGuigan described the convention's global scope:
The Conference is not merely an attempt to codify technical rules of law. It is a resource Conference: it is a food Conference; it is an environmental Conference; it is an energy Conference; it is an economic Conference; it is a maritime-boundary-delimitation Conference; it is a territorial-limitation and jurisdictional Conference; it is a transportation, communications and freedom-of-navigation Conference; it
is a Conference which regulates all the uses of the ocean by humanity. Most important, it is a Conference which provides for the peaceful settlement of disputing the oceans. It is, in other words, a Conference dedicated to the rule of law among nations.
Since the convention was completed in 1982, 155 states have ratified it, including Britain, Japan and similar oceanic allies—as well as China and Russia. But not the U.S.A.
Until CLOS came into force, there was little anyone could do to police the world's seas, as they were beyond the jurisdiction of individual nation-states. Indeed, attempts to unilaterally enforce jurisdiction have brought nations to the brink of war in the past. For much of the last century there was no consensus even on what constituted territorial waters. Historically, many states accepted a demarcation of three miles from shore, the outside range of a cannonball. Some did not even accept that. Other countries claimed twelve and by the time the convention was first negotiated, many countries claimed 200 miles. Just as many disputed the concept itself, as the principle of extended territorial waters was in conflict with customary principles of freedom of navigation. Each claim and counterclaim hazarded a shooting war to determine whose claim was more valid.
The convention was the result of intense negotiations in which a constant balancing of interests allowed all parties to feel that they had made substantial gains. The U.S. was not only deeply involved in the drafting, but the other parties did their best to keep it involved in the negotiations, despite the U.S. Senate's refusal to ratify it. The Law of the Sea is a comprehensive package with no reservations allowed. To claim the legal backing of one part of the convention, countries had to sign on to all seventeen parts, 320 articles and nine annexes. Signatories cannot cherry-pick for parts they like and disregard clauses they find inexpedient.
An outstanding example of the elaborate balance of interests is found in the convention's pioneering concept of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), which codifies the conditions for states claiming a 200-mile maritime zone, or more in some circumstances, as Russia is now doing. States can make such claims for exploration and exploitation of economic resources, but cannot impede the right of passage of vessels and aircraft of other nations. At the same time the convention codifies a twelve-mile territorial limit and an additional twelve-mile "contiguous zone." Charts and claims to territorial seas must be lodged with the U.N. in New York. And to claim such rights, nations have to accept the right of innocent or transit passage for vessels. Yet as part of the delicately balanced structure of rights and obligations, coastal states can make regulations about shipping lanes and air routes in order to ensure safe passage.
The EEZs confer obvious advantages, not least of which is unchallenged title to 87 percent of the world's known undersea hydrocarbon reserves. The coastal shelves are also home to most of the world's major fisheries. I remember smiling when the U.N. began discussions, over a decade ago, on "highly migratory and straddling fish stocks." The cumbersome phrase evoked images of fish with fins turning into legs as they made their awkward way to land. Today, there are now little or no "wild" fish on the fish slab. The convention was too late to save, for example, the cod. But it may not be too late to save other species.
It was evident that ocean-bed mining could lead to environmental despoliation, and even military conflict over competing claims. So the convention makes it illegal to mine the deep-sea bed without permission of the International Sea Bed Authority, and no country is supposed to begin mining without ratifying the convention. The issue is moot because economics and technology have not advanced as far as people feared or hoped twenty years ago. U.S. objections to mining restrictions were substantially met in a 1994 redraft. Yet while no one is currently mining the seabed, the prospect of regulation when mining inevitably begins has the conservative groups fuming about socialism.
Seemingly they prefer anarchy.
INCONVENIENT TRUTHS—When whole shorelines can be devastated by the activities of passing ships leaking oil or dumping waste, the question of rules and jurisdiction becomes crucial. On the other hand, if coastal states can impede or detain passing foreign ships, there is an almost unlimited prospect of dangerous disputes, and, at the very least, an impediment to commerce. The convention allows coastal states to inspect and take proceedings against ships suspected of violating anti-pollution regulations. Yet CEI and CSP witnesses at the Foreign Relations Committee inverted the logic of that provision and warned that debris washed into the Gulf of Mexico from Katrina would lay the U.S. open to prosecution if the convention were ratified. If debris washing into the Gulf is an unlikely cause of action, there are ample grounds for prosecuting many people over the government's response to the hurricane. Internationally, however, there is no real mechanism. And the free-enterprise right to dump garbage, oil and bilge on the high seas has somehow become part of U.S. sovereignty.
LAW, NOT WAR—The very first case to be brought to the Hamburg-based International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea could have been designed to prove the need for multilateral jurisdiction. In 1997 the MV Saiga, an oil tanker registered in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, owned by Cypriots, chartered by Swiss, managed by a Scottish company, officered by Ukrainians and crewed by Senegalese, had been bunkering fishing vessels off the coast when patrol boats from the Republic of Guinea seized the ship and detained the crew. Guinea claimed a customs zone that extended 250 miles from its coast. In the past, no serious legal remedies existed, and there was the ever-present threat of war to resolve such issues. The Tribunal was able to secure the release of the ship and crew on payment of a bond, and after consideration, it threw out the Guinean claim and ordered the ship and its crew freed. Under the convention, Guinea was not entitled to claim more than 200 miles for its exclusive economic zone.
FIRST WAVE?—For decades, conservative ideologues have rallied their forces and their receptive audiences on Capitol Hill to reflexive rejection of the United Nations and any other multilateral agency or convention. The U.S. refusal to ratify the International Criminal Court, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the conventions on landmines, women's rights and child soldiers, and the Kyoto Protocol, let alone to pay U.N. dues in full and on time, has devalued American diplomatic standing and made a mockery of Washington's attempts to preach to other so-called "outlaw" states. The Goldwater-era ideologues lurking behind this diplomatic war on the rest of the world have been able to hide behind other groups. The wackos are now in the spotlight.
The Law of the Sea ratification presents a unique opportunity to break the conservative hold on multilateralism. If the Senate cannot ratify the convention with the White House, the Pentagon and former Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee onside a Democratic majority, then Americans had best resign themselves to being all at sea in the world of international law. It is just possible that the extremists who see the U.N. as a world government about to occupy and disarm the United States could thwart the two-thirds vote required in the Senate for the treaty to be ratified. For years they've succeeded in keeping the convention off the Senate floor despite support from the Foreign Relations Committee. For irrationality to triumph, all that's needed is for sane men and women to do nothing.
print article email article
in the current Washington Spectator
by Ian Williams | November 1, 2007
Editor's note: On October 4 Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute addressed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Smith drew on all the anathemas of the far right to attack a treaty the committee was considering. "Did anyone expect the Endangered Species Act to become a national land use planning act? Did anyone expect Superfund to become one of the most costly green pork barrel measures in history or that the Clean Water Act would compel the Corps of Engineers to ban development throughout any area that might have been or might become at some time a wetland?" With a logic alien to the majority of Americans, Smith was trying to persuade the senators to vote against ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. In this issue, Ian Williams looks at the funders behind the isolationist rhetoric and the prospect that their money will prevail in the U.S. Senate. Williams is an occasional contributor to the Washington Spectator and has covered the United Nations for The Nation and other publications since 1989.
THE NEED FOR INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION and the rule of law is nowhere more apparent than at the Poles, where global warming is melting ice caps at an unprecedented rate. In 1957, before American isolationism and exceptionalism resurfaced as potent political forces in Washington, the U.S. signed the Antarctic Treaty, which froze all the old territorial claims and kept the icebound continent free from military action and landgrabs. Fifty years later the only change is that more countries have signed on. It has been an extremely successful agreement.
In contrast, the North Pole is heating up in every sense of the word. Russian claims to a significant part of the Arctic seabed are finally speeding up the glacial progress of U.S. ratification of another very successful international instrument: the U.N. Convention on the International Law of the Sea (CLOS). Russia is making its Arctic claim under the CLOS, but the U.S., by refusing to ratify the CLOS, has no standing in the discussions.
The Pentagon and the White House, backed by maritime, oil and telecom lobbies, are pushing for CLOS ratification, but they find themselves battling the same retrograde element of flat-Earthers who have been taking potshots at the treaty since 1982, and who indeed have forced the U.S. delegation to the U.N. into a holding action.
The military and business lobbies' near-universal support for the CLOS treaty has isolated and exposed the hard-core ideological—indeed faith-based—foundations behind this an other conservative causes. One can understand why lead makers have lobbied against banning lead in paints; tobacco makers against smoking restrictions; and oil and coal companies against carbon emission controls. Their rationale is self-interest. But the extremists who oppose the CLOS treaty have lost industry support in their fight against the treaty.
In September and October, at hearings held by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the groups that spoke against ratification, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and the Center for Security Policy (CSP), were both known as prominent campaigners against the idea that human activity is a cause of global warming. Both groups now contrive to depict the CLOS as some sort of "stealth" version of the Kyoto Protocol—reminiscent of earlier farfetched accusations of an undersea land grab by the United Nations.
Last year Exxon—Big Oil's last-ditch CLOS opponent—dropped its financial support for CEI. Yet the campaign against the treaty persists. Now that such opposition to a global treaty has been stripped of the veneer of the rational if amoral self-interest of the industry lobbies, the ideological core of the irrational campaign against multilateralism in any form is plain to see. Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 election, but the people like Richard Mellon Scaife who bankrolled him have remained a force on Capitol Hill, averting ratification of almost every multilateral agreement. They are still funding CEI and CSP, along with much of the conservative project they have kept on the road for decades.
The hard-core lobby now left in the field against ratification of the Law of the Sea treaty reveals the wacko money tail that has been wagging the Republican dog, and, more often than not, converting many Democratic politicians into fawning puppies. The process was described in an e-mail Mike Scanlon, a lobbyist who once worked for Tom DeLay, sent to his Indian tribal clients. It was released by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee when it was investigating disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Our mission is to get specifically selected groups of individuals to the polls to speak out AGAINST something. To that end, your money is best spent finding them and communicating with them on using the modes that they are most likely to respond to. Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them. The wackos get their information form [sic] the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet, and telephone trees.
HATE-FEST FOR THE U.N.—In the Clinton era, groups like CEI and CSP, backed by mining companies, used a spurious "sovereignty" issue to campaign against what they termed a "U.N. land grab," by which they meant listing U.S. national parks as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. It was not the prospect of blue United Nations flags flying over the parks that upset them, but rather the red flag against strip mining up to the park's boundaries.
Similar arguments threaten to sink the Law of the Sea treaty. The CSP's Frank Gaffney, who writes a column for the Washington Times, got himself into more convolutions than a chambered nautilus as he shifted from calling for total legislative prostration before President Bush and General Petraeus over Iraq, to total disregard for the views of the Pentagon and the White House over the Law of the Sea treaty. Retired Chief of Naval Operations Vernon Clark has described the treaty to the Foreign Relations Committee as "a Magna Carta for the oceans that guarantees navigation freedoms throughout the world's largest maneuver space." In contrast, Gaffney fulminated that the "transies" have "created organizations that will be used to implement that world view—a redistributionist, socialist and fundamentally hostile to the United States view." The U.S. view, is ipso facto that of the Scaife-funded conservative think tanks.
On the face of it, the unprecedented concatenation of a Republican President, the former Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Richard Lugar, and a Democratic majority in the Senate should make ratification of the sea treaty inevitable. But the Senate Foreign Relations hearings on the treaty may as well have been conducted in an octopus's garden in the shade for all the public exposure they got. Which implies that the Scanlon strategy may be under way: to "bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them." Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK), one of the major opponents of treaty ratification, was able to get thirty of his colleagues to sign on to a resolution against "U.N. Global taxes" this January, which is a bit like getting them to sign a resolution against the tooth fairy.
While the sane majority stays silent, the mailboxes of GOP senators will be flooded with letters and e-mails from black-helicopter-spotting backwoodsers who have decided that the goal of the supporters of sea-law ratification "is nothing less than the establishment of world government at the expense of traditional sovereignty."
CONVENTIONAL WISDOM—It should be evident that the oceans, which cover two-thirds of the globe, need the internationally accepted legal system that the Convention on the International Law of the Sea provides. The sea is the main highway for of all the world's nations. It is the source of food for many people. And for everybody, the oceans are the priceless resource on which life on Earth depends.
Former Canadian minster of state for external affairs Mark MacGuigan described the convention's global scope:
The Conference is not merely an attempt to codify technical rules of law. It is a resource Conference: it is a food Conference; it is an environmental Conference; it is an energy Conference; it is an economic Conference; it is a maritime-boundary-delimitation Conference; it is a territorial-limitation and jurisdictional Conference; it is a transportation, communications and freedom-of-navigation Conference; it
is a Conference which regulates all the uses of the ocean by humanity. Most important, it is a Conference which provides for the peaceful settlement of disputing the oceans. It is, in other words, a Conference dedicated to the rule of law among nations.
Since the convention was completed in 1982, 155 states have ratified it, including Britain, Japan and similar oceanic allies—as well as China and Russia. But not the U.S.A.
Until CLOS came into force, there was little anyone could do to police the world's seas, as they were beyond the jurisdiction of individual nation-states. Indeed, attempts to unilaterally enforce jurisdiction have brought nations to the brink of war in the past. For much of the last century there was no consensus even on what constituted territorial waters. Historically, many states accepted a demarcation of three miles from shore, the outside range of a cannonball. Some did not even accept that. Other countries claimed twelve and by the time the convention was first negotiated, many countries claimed 200 miles. Just as many disputed the concept itself, as the principle of extended territorial waters was in conflict with customary principles of freedom of navigation. Each claim and counterclaim hazarded a shooting war to determine whose claim was more valid.
The convention was the result of intense negotiations in which a constant balancing of interests allowed all parties to feel that they had made substantial gains. The U.S. was not only deeply involved in the drafting, but the other parties did their best to keep it involved in the negotiations, despite the U.S. Senate's refusal to ratify it. The Law of the Sea is a comprehensive package with no reservations allowed. To claim the legal backing of one part of the convention, countries had to sign on to all seventeen parts, 320 articles and nine annexes. Signatories cannot cherry-pick for parts they like and disregard clauses they find inexpedient.
An outstanding example of the elaborate balance of interests is found in the convention's pioneering concept of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), which codifies the conditions for states claiming a 200-mile maritime zone, or more in some circumstances, as Russia is now doing. States can make such claims for exploration and exploitation of economic resources, but cannot impede the right of passage of vessels and aircraft of other nations. At the same time the convention codifies a twelve-mile territorial limit and an additional twelve-mile "contiguous zone." Charts and claims to territorial seas must be lodged with the U.N. in New York. And to claim such rights, nations have to accept the right of innocent or transit passage for vessels. Yet as part of the delicately balanced structure of rights and obligations, coastal states can make regulations about shipping lanes and air routes in order to ensure safe passage.
The EEZs confer obvious advantages, not least of which is unchallenged title to 87 percent of the world's known undersea hydrocarbon reserves. The coastal shelves are also home to most of the world's major fisheries. I remember smiling when the U.N. began discussions, over a decade ago, on "highly migratory and straddling fish stocks." The cumbersome phrase evoked images of fish with fins turning into legs as they made their awkward way to land. Today, there are now little or no "wild" fish on the fish slab. The convention was too late to save, for example, the cod. But it may not be too late to save other species.
It was evident that ocean-bed mining could lead to environmental despoliation, and even military conflict over competing claims. So the convention makes it illegal to mine the deep-sea bed without permission of the International Sea Bed Authority, and no country is supposed to begin mining without ratifying the convention. The issue is moot because economics and technology have not advanced as far as people feared or hoped twenty years ago. U.S. objections to mining restrictions were substantially met in a 1994 redraft. Yet while no one is currently mining the seabed, the prospect of regulation when mining inevitably begins has the conservative groups fuming about socialism.
Seemingly they prefer anarchy.
INCONVENIENT TRUTHS—When whole shorelines can be devastated by the activities of passing ships leaking oil or dumping waste, the question of rules and jurisdiction becomes crucial. On the other hand, if coastal states can impede or detain passing foreign ships, there is an almost unlimited prospect of dangerous disputes, and, at the very least, an impediment to commerce. The convention allows coastal states to inspect and take proceedings against ships suspected of violating anti-pollution regulations. Yet CEI and CSP witnesses at the Foreign Relations Committee inverted the logic of that provision and warned that debris washed into the Gulf of Mexico from Katrina would lay the U.S. open to prosecution if the convention were ratified. If debris washing into the Gulf is an unlikely cause of action, there are ample grounds for prosecuting many people over the government's response to the hurricane. Internationally, however, there is no real mechanism. And the free-enterprise right to dump garbage, oil and bilge on the high seas has somehow become part of U.S. sovereignty.
LAW, NOT WAR—The very first case to be brought to the Hamburg-based International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea could have been designed to prove the need for multilateral jurisdiction. In 1997 the MV Saiga, an oil tanker registered in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, owned by Cypriots, chartered by Swiss, managed by a Scottish company, officered by Ukrainians and crewed by Senegalese, had been bunkering fishing vessels off the coast when patrol boats from the Republic of Guinea seized the ship and detained the crew. Guinea claimed a customs zone that extended 250 miles from its coast. In the past, no serious legal remedies existed, and there was the ever-present threat of war to resolve such issues. The Tribunal was able to secure the release of the ship and crew on payment of a bond, and after consideration, it threw out the Guinean claim and ordered the ship and its crew freed. Under the convention, Guinea was not entitled to claim more than 200 miles for its exclusive economic zone.
FIRST WAVE?—For decades, conservative ideologues have rallied their forces and their receptive audiences on Capitol Hill to reflexive rejection of the United Nations and any other multilateral agency or convention. The U.S. refusal to ratify the International Criminal Court, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the conventions on landmines, women's rights and child soldiers, and the Kyoto Protocol, let alone to pay U.N. dues in full and on time, has devalued American diplomatic standing and made a mockery of Washington's attempts to preach to other so-called "outlaw" states. The Goldwater-era ideologues lurking behind this diplomatic war on the rest of the world have been able to hide behind other groups. The wackos are now in the spotlight.
The Law of the Sea ratification presents a unique opportunity to break the conservative hold on multilateralism. If the Senate cannot ratify the convention with the White House, the Pentagon and former Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee onside a Democratic majority, then Americans had best resign themselves to being all at sea in the world of international law. It is just possible that the extremists who see the U.N. as a world government about to occupy and disarm the United States could thwart the two-thirds vote required in the Senate for the treaty to be ratified. For years they've succeeded in keeping the convention off the Senate floor despite support from the Foreign Relations Committee. For irrationality to triumph, all that's needed is for sane men and women to do nothing.
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Monday, October 29, 2007
In Whose Name?
Why are English speakers almost uniquely subject to inverted nominal imperialism? Why do we allow others to dictate what names we give to other places?
Born in Liverpool of mostly Welsh ancestry, I was chuffed, as we used to say, rather than miffed, to discover that the Welsh name for the city was Lerpwl. (Although that did not impress the Welsh nationalists, who objected to plans to hold the 2007 Eisteddfod toga party there.) Cockneys react with indifference to the French saying they live in Londres, and most New Yorkers do not worry too much that their city is Nueva Yorca to many of its inhabitants.
Russians do not worry that Moskva is Moscow, let alone that Americans call it Mos-COW and the Brits Mos-COE. Deutschlanders do not give an oompah that we call them Germans, or the French call them Allemandes. People have languages and the proper nouns are part of it.
So who does the Burmese junta think they are telling us that we must use Myanmar, with the added indignity that most Burmese do not want the name? Why did we all slavishly let a bunch of murderous thugs force us to rebrand Cambodia as Kampuchea? Why have been allowing the stronger Greek nationalists (sorry, the people from Hellas) to tell us what name to use for Macedonia?
Why shouldn't Britain bristle at the temerity of the French calling part of their country Brittany? In fact, to give it a sense of perspective, Great Britain was called so simply because Grand Bretagne was bigger than Bretagne in France.
In India, local sentiment insists that Bombay is now Mumbai, Madras is Chennai, and Calcutta now Kolkata, for three cities that were essentially developed (admittedly exploitatively and imperialistically) by the British. One notes with approval that the Bombay Stock Exchange holds firm, and I've yet to see an Indian restaurant serving Mumbai Duck, while no one calls the capital Dili. And the Hindi for India is Bharat but the government of India happily uses the English even though it does mention Bharat in the constitution.
In fact, all my local Chinese restaurants serve (excellent) Peking Duck, but we are supposed to call the capital of China (not Zhongguo) Beijing. But one notices that Hong Kong keeps its English form, although Canton became Guangzhou - where people still speak Cantonese and do not call their city that, since it is the Mandarin name.
Adopting the Chinese roman letter spelling is even more bizarre. The letters mean different things. "X" in English does not represent "Hs" anymore than "Q" signifies "ch".
When a nationalist Turkish business spent some millions trying to get everyone to call his country Turkiye, the campaign soon foundered like a dead duck. That's the way it should be. When I was teaching journalism in Pristina, the Kosovar students bridled because the UN referred to the place as Kosovo instead of "Kosova." I pointed out that we called Shqiperia, Albania, and no one seemed to mind. Kosovo is the English name for the place.
Unlike the Romans who gave the world Latin and everyone who used it wrote nice things about Rome, a great thing about English as a doubly imperial language is that it has been so useful for anti-imperialists for everything from telling phrases, long treatises and quick slogans. Think of Jawaharlal Nehru's "tryst with destiny".
On the other hand, sometimes they are about as grammatical as Brian's slogan writing on the walls of Jerusalem, (aka Al Quds or Yerushalayim) in the Monty Python film, but that is the other great thing about it, is that there is no English academy to force spellings, definitions and purifications on its multifarious speakers.
So I don't mind if the speakers of Indian English want to say Mumbai, as long as they extend the same democratic linguistic privileges to others to keep on calling it Bombay. Non-English speakers can be as nationalist as they like - in their own languages. And I hope that Burma is free soon.
Born in Liverpool of mostly Welsh ancestry, I was chuffed, as we used to say, rather than miffed, to discover that the Welsh name for the city was Lerpwl. (Although that did not impress the Welsh nationalists, who objected to plans to hold the 2007 Eisteddfod toga party there.) Cockneys react with indifference to the French saying they live in Londres, and most New Yorkers do not worry too much that their city is Nueva Yorca to many of its inhabitants.
Russians do not worry that Moskva is Moscow, let alone that Americans call it Mos-COW and the Brits Mos-COE. Deutschlanders do not give an oompah that we call them Germans, or the French call them Allemandes. People have languages and the proper nouns are part of it.
So who does the Burmese junta think they are telling us that we must use Myanmar, with the added indignity that most Burmese do not want the name? Why did we all slavishly let a bunch of murderous thugs force us to rebrand Cambodia as Kampuchea? Why have been allowing the stronger Greek nationalists (sorry, the people from Hellas) to tell us what name to use for Macedonia?
Why shouldn't Britain bristle at the temerity of the French calling part of their country Brittany? In fact, to give it a sense of perspective, Great Britain was called so simply because Grand Bretagne was bigger than Bretagne in France.
In India, local sentiment insists that Bombay is now Mumbai, Madras is Chennai, and Calcutta now Kolkata, for three cities that were essentially developed (admittedly exploitatively and imperialistically) by the British. One notes with approval that the Bombay Stock Exchange holds firm, and I've yet to see an Indian restaurant serving Mumbai Duck, while no one calls the capital Dili. And the Hindi for India is Bharat but the government of India happily uses the English even though it does mention Bharat in the constitution.
In fact, all my local Chinese restaurants serve (excellent) Peking Duck, but we are supposed to call the capital of China (not Zhongguo) Beijing. But one notices that Hong Kong keeps its English form, although Canton became Guangzhou - where people still speak Cantonese and do not call their city that, since it is the Mandarin name.
Adopting the Chinese roman letter spelling is even more bizarre. The letters mean different things. "X" in English does not represent "Hs" anymore than "Q" signifies "ch".
When a nationalist Turkish business spent some millions trying to get everyone to call his country Turkiye, the campaign soon foundered like a dead duck. That's the way it should be. When I was teaching journalism in Pristina, the Kosovar students bridled because the UN referred to the place as Kosovo instead of "Kosova." I pointed out that we called Shqiperia, Albania, and no one seemed to mind. Kosovo is the English name for the place.
Unlike the Romans who gave the world Latin and everyone who used it wrote nice things about Rome, a great thing about English as a doubly imperial language is that it has been so useful for anti-imperialists for everything from telling phrases, long treatises and quick slogans. Think of Jawaharlal Nehru's "tryst with destiny".
On the other hand, sometimes they are about as grammatical as Brian's slogan writing on the walls of Jerusalem, (aka Al Quds or Yerushalayim) in the Monty Python film, but that is the other great thing about it, is that there is no English academy to force spellings, definitions and purifications on its multifarious speakers.
So I don't mind if the speakers of Indian English want to say Mumbai, as long as they extend the same democratic linguistic privileges to others to keep on calling it Bombay. Non-English speakers can be as nationalist as they like - in their own languages. And I hope that Burma is free soon.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Friday, October 26, 2007
Don't Blame Westphalia!
Comment is Free on the Guardian
24 October 2007
Today, October 24, is the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, or at least the final part of it signed in Munster. When quoted nowadays the treaty is seen as the bedrock of the modern system of independent states, free of feudal entanglements and thus from foreign interference in internal affairs. Most often, it is the foundation of every thuggish ruler's claim: "T'ain't nobody's business what I do" to my own subjects.
Like many others I've pontificated about the Westphalian system and state sovereignty, and in fact I have usually pontificated against it. So to celebrate its birthday, I went to read it. The only version that seems generally available is a translation from Latin into English, probably at the beginning of the 18th century. And the amazing thing is the complete lack of direct quotes about sovereignty. Apart from being an extended suicide note for the Holy Roman Empire, there are few larger principles to be drawn from its text. Even the bits about religious toleration were basically reiterations of the Treaty of Augsburg, and it specifically allowed the Hapsburgs to keep the Inquisition burning away in their own lands outside the empire.
It had taken 30 years of war for the emerging sovereign states to "have form'd thoughts of an universal peace". The result of years of negotiations, the treaty is a detailed and highly pragmatic settlement of the myriad local and regional squabbles that became conflated into what was allegedly a religious war. Like current so-called clashes of civilisation and religions, the mere technical detail that the very Catholic "the most puissant prince, and most Christian king of France and Navarre," was the ally of protestant Swedish kingdom against the Holy Roman Hapsburgs.
Effectively, the treaty gave legal as well as practical independence to the constituent states of the Holy Roman Empire, allowing them to sign treaties and wage wars, with the oft-to-be ignored exception that they should not bear arms against the emperor. "Above all, it shall be free perpetually to each of the states of the empire, to make alliances with strangers for their preservation and safety; provided, nevertheless, such alliances be not against the emperor, and the empire". It also warned against interference in the internal affairs of these statelets.
But of whence their sovereignty came, the treaty saith nought. It deals with various claims and counterclaims of princes, marquises, landgraves, bishops, emperors, dukes and electors, but the "we the peoples," of the UN charter are nowhere to be seen. A state here is coterminous with its sovereign, with none of the 19th century romantic notions of organic nations with one people, one country and one government.
The "Westphalian system" is really a later interpretation of the results. Those "thoughts of an universal peace," did not last as long as the 30 year torrent of blood and fire it took to form them, although until the French revolutionary wars, the squabbles tended more to be conflicts between armies rather than the unbridled savagery of the 30 year war itself.
Replacing the nominal Holy Roman Empire (which as Voltaire pointed out, was none of the preceding) we now have the United Nations, which often appears to be misnomer as well. According to the charter, all nations have, "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war," surrendered their sovereign "Westphalian" right to wage war, except in self defence.
In an odd way, countless millions of dead notwithstanding, the UN has succeeded in preserving the Westphalian dream. The only outright invasion and annexation, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, was over-turned. Usually invaders are quick to set up regimes to legitimise their efforts retrospectively: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Panama, Grenada, Cambodia, Uganda and Iraq, to name but a few.
But while Westphalia enjoined freedom of religion, its modern invokers want to defend the presumed rights of the modern equivalent of those landgraves, marquises, princes and counts, to massacre their own people with impunity. Burmese, Sudanese and Serbian regimes have all enjoyed the support of a motley band of self-interested regimes and "anti-imperialist" orators and commentators.
Two years ago, the United Nations tried to square the circle of avoiding wars between states while fulfilling its pledges to "us the peoples," by adopting the "right to protect", setting out the principle of humanitarian intervention in the case of "national authorities manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity". Not one of the 191 member states voted against this effective rescinding of one of the alleged bedrock principles of Westphalia. Perhaps they were sadly confident that the veto-holders in the security council were only kidding, and would always protect their client genocidaires when the votes were taken. After all, every veto holder had attacked another country in defiance of the charter, but no one had ever disputed the alleged Westphalian right of each anointed thug to mistreat his "own" people.
It took almost 300 years for the protection of state sovereignty part to become mildly effective with the UN charter. The people in Burma and Darfur should not have to wait a century for the right to protect to be implemented.
24 October 2007
Today, October 24, is the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, or at least the final part of it signed in Munster. When quoted nowadays the treaty is seen as the bedrock of the modern system of independent states, free of feudal entanglements and thus from foreign interference in internal affairs. Most often, it is the foundation of every thuggish ruler's claim: "T'ain't nobody's business what I do" to my own subjects.
Like many others I've pontificated about the Westphalian system and state sovereignty, and in fact I have usually pontificated against it. So to celebrate its birthday, I went to read it. The only version that seems generally available is a translation from Latin into English, probably at the beginning of the 18th century. And the amazing thing is the complete lack of direct quotes about sovereignty. Apart from being an extended suicide note for the Holy Roman Empire, there are few larger principles to be drawn from its text. Even the bits about religious toleration were basically reiterations of the Treaty of Augsburg, and it specifically allowed the Hapsburgs to keep the Inquisition burning away in their own lands outside the empire.
It had taken 30 years of war for the emerging sovereign states to "have form'd thoughts of an universal peace". The result of years of negotiations, the treaty is a detailed and highly pragmatic settlement of the myriad local and regional squabbles that became conflated into what was allegedly a religious war. Like current so-called clashes of civilisation and religions, the mere technical detail that the very Catholic "the most puissant prince, and most Christian king of France and Navarre," was the ally of protestant Swedish kingdom against the Holy Roman Hapsburgs.
Effectively, the treaty gave legal as well as practical independence to the constituent states of the Holy Roman Empire, allowing them to sign treaties and wage wars, with the oft-to-be ignored exception that they should not bear arms against the emperor. "Above all, it shall be free perpetually to each of the states of the empire, to make alliances with strangers for their preservation and safety; provided, nevertheless, such alliances be not against the emperor, and the empire". It also warned against interference in the internal affairs of these statelets.
But of whence their sovereignty came, the treaty saith nought. It deals with various claims and counterclaims of princes, marquises, landgraves, bishops, emperors, dukes and electors, but the "we the peoples," of the UN charter are nowhere to be seen. A state here is coterminous with its sovereign, with none of the 19th century romantic notions of organic nations with one people, one country and one government.
The "Westphalian system" is really a later interpretation of the results. Those "thoughts of an universal peace," did not last as long as the 30 year torrent of blood and fire it took to form them, although until the French revolutionary wars, the squabbles tended more to be conflicts between armies rather than the unbridled savagery of the 30 year war itself.
Replacing the nominal Holy Roman Empire (which as Voltaire pointed out, was none of the preceding) we now have the United Nations, which often appears to be misnomer as well. According to the charter, all nations have, "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war," surrendered their sovereign "Westphalian" right to wage war, except in self defence.
In an odd way, countless millions of dead notwithstanding, the UN has succeeded in preserving the Westphalian dream. The only outright invasion and annexation, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, was over-turned. Usually invaders are quick to set up regimes to legitimise their efforts retrospectively: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Panama, Grenada, Cambodia, Uganda and Iraq, to name but a few.
But while Westphalia enjoined freedom of religion, its modern invokers want to defend the presumed rights of the modern equivalent of those landgraves, marquises, princes and counts, to massacre their own people with impunity. Burmese, Sudanese and Serbian regimes have all enjoyed the support of a motley band of self-interested regimes and "anti-imperialist" orators and commentators.
Two years ago, the United Nations tried to square the circle of avoiding wars between states while fulfilling its pledges to "us the peoples," by adopting the "right to protect", setting out the principle of humanitarian intervention in the case of "national authorities manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity". Not one of the 191 member states voted against this effective rescinding of one of the alleged bedrock principles of Westphalia. Perhaps they were sadly confident that the veto-holders in the security council were only kidding, and would always protect their client genocidaires when the votes were taken. After all, every veto holder had attacked another country in defiance of the charter, but no one had ever disputed the alleged Westphalian right of each anointed thug to mistreat his "own" people.
It took almost 300 years for the protection of state sovereignty part to become mildly effective with the UN charter. The people in Burma and Darfur should not have to wait a century for the right to protect to be implemented.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Petition against Puritan Pseudoscience
In April I carried a story The New Salem Witch Trials about the British Department of Social Security putting in lie detector tests for claimants. Pseudoscience pandering to the Puritan theory that it is better that a hundred starve than one undeserving claimant gets any relief.
Angela Murphy in Britain has organized an e-petition against it.. and I heartily recommend anyone who has British citizenship or residency to sign up for it.
As she says
"There are many people with learning disabilities, mental health problems, elderly people and their carers (who already save the state billions of pounds by forming a pool of cheap care) who will be subject to this...
Sign a petition against it
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ofbenefit/
(remember to click the link in the confirmation email they send to you otherwise your signing will not be registered)"
Angela Murphy in Britain has organized an e-petition against it.. and I heartily recommend anyone who has British citizenship or residency to sign up for it.
As she says
"There are many people with learning disabilities, mental health problems, elderly people and their carers (who already save the state billions of pounds by forming a pool of cheap care) who will be subject to this...
Sign a petition against it
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ofbenefit/
(remember to click the link in the confirmation email they send to you otherwise your signing will not be registered)"
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