My essay on alternate history is up as the cover story in the Common Review
http://www.thecommonreview.org/spotlight.html
Orwell, Plato, Turtledove, PK Dick, all human life is there, and a bit extra
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Monday, March 10, 2008
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Never Again, - and Again and Again
With the furor about Samantha Power's comments on Hillary Clinton I tried to look up my review of her book from the June 24 2002 In These Times, to discover it was lost in cyberspace. I thought it worth looking over again.
Never Again, -- and Again and Again
Samantha Power’s book is about the American government’s responses to genocide, from the Turkish massacres of the Armenians through to modern times, with the Kurds, Cambodia, `Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo. Unaccountably she omits East Timor, or even earlier, the pogroms in Indonesia, where the problem was not Washington’s insouciance in the face of genocide, but an active complicity in the fomentation of it.
Since her book it is about official attitudes, it mostly excludes the American left, which had little power or part in shaping the debate. Sadly, one can only suspect that if the left /had/ had any influence, it would have been wielded on the side of the isolationists and America-firsters whose influence ensured that the usual response from Washington was evasion and dissimulation.
Right, Left and Center have all too often conspired in various forms of denial. Beginning with attempts to downplay the number of the victims, followed by attempts to reduce them and perpetrators to the spurious equivalence of “opposing sides” warped by inextinguishable hatreds, they both seize at any excuse to deny that foreign mass murder is any of our business.
People in the centers of powers also tend to assume that the perpetrators are people of integrity. For several secretaries of State, Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein were people with meaningful negotiations could take place, while, despite that, for many sectarians, both later became poster-boys of anti-US-hegemony.
In fact, what Samantha Power reveals is that far from the concept of “genocide” being a convenient cover for a rapaciously expansive US global hegemony, it has in fact been largely ineffectual in getting any action by successive US administrations.
Power’s book takes its title from Warren Christopher’s famous description of Bosnia as “A problem from Hell,” which he said was the result of “hatred” that was “centuries old.” With suitable encouragement the media began to trace the problem back to the split between the Eastern and Western Roman Empires – several hundred years before the first Slav hit the Balkans. Maybe it’s something in the water there.
In fact, what he really meant was that it was a problem from Hell for the Clinton administration, with its public commitments to stop the killings, a “feel their pain” sympathy with the victims warring against its determination to avoid any American casualties.
Power details the efforts by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to launch the Genocide Convention and indeed both to invent the name and to define the meaning of genocide to remedy what Churchill had said about the reports coming from Occupied Europe of a “crime without a name.” “Sovereignty cannot be construed as the right to kill millions of innocent people,” Lemkin had concluded in what to most of us seems to be a self-evident truism, but which, in fact flies in the face of received legal doctrine - across the political spectrum.
Lemkin’s campaign had been largely inspired by the Turkish massacres of Armenians. Reinforced by the Holocaust, of which he had early evidence, he fought tenaciously for the Convention at the United Nations, where the world gave the concept a far more inclusive definition than suspected by those who pooh-poohed events in the Balkans because “only” thousands were killed.
Ironically, Power points out, despite the election-tide shouts of “Never Again” from all over the US, the Senate did not ratify the convention for almost forty years – and when it did it was a desperate attempt by the Reagan administration to cover up the President’s gaffe in laying wreaths for dead SS troopers in the Bitburg Cemetery. Even then, the US anticipated its attitude to the International Criminal Court by adding reservations that even Reagan’s British allies complained nullified the ratification.
Power points out the awesome responsibility of the media in rousing public opinion for international action, but is candid about the awful way so much of the media carried out the task. The lesson to all future perpetrators has become clear – mount your main massacres off camera, except for a few showy killings of peacekeepers, preferably American, to ensure non-intervention.
The US networks averaged 30 seconds a month of coverage of Cambodia while the Khmer Rouge tortured and killed their way through any Khmers suspected of having an IQ above subnormal. The response of the US government was to fight to keep the genocidal regime in the UN seat for some years after the Vietnamese had driven them out of power. Interestingly George McGovern, an archetypal anti-Vietnam War figure showed that he could differentiate between interventions: he called for diplomatic and international action against Pol Pot and his regime.
Similarly, after Saddam Hussein’s gassing of Kurdish insurgents in the late 80’s, the same Republican Right who recently returned to the bully pulpits of Washington determined to punish Hussein for his moral failings, were then killing efforts to deprive him of credits and food supplies for his genocidal activities. They denied the evidence, and materially and diplomatically encouraged him to continue his war against Iran, gas notwithstanding. The US delegation– whose brief recent absence from the UN Human Rights Commission was considered such a blow to the organization’s credibility, refused to support European allies who called for a Human Rights rapporteur against Iraq in 1989.
When not denying the evidence, another common trope from government is to emphasize the enormity of resources needed for intervention. As Power demonstrates, history has tended to disprove most of such fearful hyperbole. In most – indeed maybe all, recent cases, any sign of firmness, diplomatic and economic, let alone military, would have saved thousands of lives at little cost. Perhaps one of the most shameful manifestations of invertebracy was the Clinton administrations stalling of reinforcements and resupply for the tiny beleaguered UN force in Rwanda which still managed to save thousands, even as Madeleine Albright as US representative at the UN tried to strangle its supply lines rather than go to Congress for a few million peacekeeping appropriation..
It is of course true that even when governments do good, they often manage to make a mess of it. Power mentions the final NATO air assault that accompanied the joint Bosnian Croat offensive against the Serbs. It showed that intervention could have been relatively painless and speedy two hundred thousands corpses before. But what she does not mention is that as soon as Bosnian forces looked like taking more territory than earlier negotiations with Milosevic had envisaged, the air support was withdrawn. The Bosnian Serbs, Srebrenica and Sarajevo notwithstanding, were still to keep their ethnically cleansed half of Bosnia. It was a comeuppance but no Nemesis.
In Kosovo, Power demonstrates that there was indeed every justification for intervention and reminds those who wondered about the body count that many of those missing bodies turned up under police yards in Serbia. However, even so, there was enough dubiety about both motives and methods to sully the first direct interference to stop genocide that the US and NATO had ever undertaken. The high flying planes sacrificed accuracy not to protect the pilots so much as to protect the politicians whose polls would suffer if they were downed. Clinton obtusely discounted the only option that Milosevic feared, by announcing in advance that he would not put in ground forces. If he had announced differently at the beginning, the air war may not have needed – but on the other hand, Milosevic may still have been in Belgrade.
Power does not waste much time on the Left as a force in these developments. She is correct. While far too many of the Left were denouncing imaginary hegemonistic and opportunistic interventions on the part of Washington, she knows that the administrations were doing all they could stay out. She concludes that “The US record is not one of failure – it is one of success. US officials worked the system and the system worked.” Intervention was avoided and what is a river of corpses abroad in comparison with poll ratings at home?
It is not a happy conclusion, since she also deduces that “The last century shows that the walls that the US tries to build around genocidal societies almost inevitably shatter.” In other words, ignoring genocide is not only immoral – it is impractical. We all have to pay the price in the end. The torch in this field has been held, in general, not by the left, but by human rights groups and activists across the world, who have had the courage and tenacity to belabor all regimes that have abused their citizens.
It is largely their work that has led to the small harbingers of global accountability we see now: the arrest of Pinochet, the trial of Milosevic –and the establishment of an International Criminal Court. A world where Henry Kissinger and Ariel Sharon have to check with their lawyers at the same time as their travel agents is one that is surely improving. Power’s book is an eloquent and detailed testimony of why we should not let our government stand on the sidelines, let alone collude with crimes against humanity.
ENDS
Samantha Power, Ä Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.” Basic Books, NY 2002, $30.
Never Again, -- and Again and Again
Samantha Power’s book is about the American government’s responses to genocide, from the Turkish massacres of the Armenians through to modern times, with the Kurds, Cambodia, `Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo. Unaccountably she omits East Timor, or even earlier, the pogroms in Indonesia, where the problem was not Washington’s insouciance in the face of genocide, but an active complicity in the fomentation of it.
Since her book it is about official attitudes, it mostly excludes the American left, which had little power or part in shaping the debate. Sadly, one can only suspect that if the left /had/ had any influence, it would have been wielded on the side of the isolationists and America-firsters whose influence ensured that the usual response from Washington was evasion and dissimulation.
Right, Left and Center have all too often conspired in various forms of denial. Beginning with attempts to downplay the number of the victims, followed by attempts to reduce them and perpetrators to the spurious equivalence of “opposing sides” warped by inextinguishable hatreds, they both seize at any excuse to deny that foreign mass murder is any of our business.
People in the centers of powers also tend to assume that the perpetrators are people of integrity. For several secretaries of State, Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein were people with meaningful negotiations could take place, while, despite that, for many sectarians, both later became poster-boys of anti-US-hegemony.
In fact, what Samantha Power reveals is that far from the concept of “genocide” being a convenient cover for a rapaciously expansive US global hegemony, it has in fact been largely ineffectual in getting any action by successive US administrations.
Power’s book takes its title from Warren Christopher’s famous description of Bosnia as “A problem from Hell,” which he said was the result of “hatred” that was “centuries old.” With suitable encouragement the media began to trace the problem back to the split between the Eastern and Western Roman Empires – several hundred years before the first Slav hit the Balkans. Maybe it’s something in the water there.
In fact, what he really meant was that it was a problem from Hell for the Clinton administration, with its public commitments to stop the killings, a “feel their pain” sympathy with the victims warring against its determination to avoid any American casualties.
Power details the efforts by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to launch the Genocide Convention and indeed both to invent the name and to define the meaning of genocide to remedy what Churchill had said about the reports coming from Occupied Europe of a “crime without a name.” “Sovereignty cannot be construed as the right to kill millions of innocent people,” Lemkin had concluded in what to most of us seems to be a self-evident truism, but which, in fact flies in the face of received legal doctrine - across the political spectrum.
Lemkin’s campaign had been largely inspired by the Turkish massacres of Armenians. Reinforced by the Holocaust, of which he had early evidence, he fought tenaciously for the Convention at the United Nations, where the world gave the concept a far more inclusive definition than suspected by those who pooh-poohed events in the Balkans because “only” thousands were killed.
Ironically, Power points out, despite the election-tide shouts of “Never Again” from all over the US, the Senate did not ratify the convention for almost forty years – and when it did it was a desperate attempt by the Reagan administration to cover up the President’s gaffe in laying wreaths for dead SS troopers in the Bitburg Cemetery. Even then, the US anticipated its attitude to the International Criminal Court by adding reservations that even Reagan’s British allies complained nullified the ratification.
Power points out the awesome responsibility of the media in rousing public opinion for international action, but is candid about the awful way so much of the media carried out the task. The lesson to all future perpetrators has become clear – mount your main massacres off camera, except for a few showy killings of peacekeepers, preferably American, to ensure non-intervention.
The US networks averaged 30 seconds a month of coverage of Cambodia while the Khmer Rouge tortured and killed their way through any Khmers suspected of having an IQ above subnormal. The response of the US government was to fight to keep the genocidal regime in the UN seat for some years after the Vietnamese had driven them out of power. Interestingly George McGovern, an archetypal anti-Vietnam War figure showed that he could differentiate between interventions: he called for diplomatic and international action against Pol Pot and his regime.
Similarly, after Saddam Hussein’s gassing of Kurdish insurgents in the late 80’s, the same Republican Right who recently returned to the bully pulpits of Washington determined to punish Hussein for his moral failings, were then killing efforts to deprive him of credits and food supplies for his genocidal activities. They denied the evidence, and materially and diplomatically encouraged him to continue his war against Iran, gas notwithstanding. The US delegation– whose brief recent absence from the UN Human Rights Commission was considered such a blow to the organization’s credibility, refused to support European allies who called for a Human Rights rapporteur against Iraq in 1989.
When not denying the evidence, another common trope from government is to emphasize the enormity of resources needed for intervention. As Power demonstrates, history has tended to disprove most of such fearful hyperbole. In most – indeed maybe all, recent cases, any sign of firmness, diplomatic and economic, let alone military, would have saved thousands of lives at little cost. Perhaps one of the most shameful manifestations of invertebracy was the Clinton administrations stalling of reinforcements and resupply for the tiny beleaguered UN force in Rwanda which still managed to save thousands, even as Madeleine Albright as US representative at the UN tried to strangle its supply lines rather than go to Congress for a few million peacekeeping appropriation..
It is of course true that even when governments do good, they often manage to make a mess of it. Power mentions the final NATO air assault that accompanied the joint Bosnian Croat offensive against the Serbs. It showed that intervention could have been relatively painless and speedy two hundred thousands corpses before. But what she does not mention is that as soon as Bosnian forces looked like taking more territory than earlier negotiations with Milosevic had envisaged, the air support was withdrawn. The Bosnian Serbs, Srebrenica and Sarajevo notwithstanding, were still to keep their ethnically cleansed half of Bosnia. It was a comeuppance but no Nemesis.
In Kosovo, Power demonstrates that there was indeed every justification for intervention and reminds those who wondered about the body count that many of those missing bodies turned up under police yards in Serbia. However, even so, there was enough dubiety about both motives and methods to sully the first direct interference to stop genocide that the US and NATO had ever undertaken. The high flying planes sacrificed accuracy not to protect the pilots so much as to protect the politicians whose polls would suffer if they were downed. Clinton obtusely discounted the only option that Milosevic feared, by announcing in advance that he would not put in ground forces. If he had announced differently at the beginning, the air war may not have needed – but on the other hand, Milosevic may still have been in Belgrade.
Power does not waste much time on the Left as a force in these developments. She is correct. While far too many of the Left were denouncing imaginary hegemonistic and opportunistic interventions on the part of Washington, she knows that the administrations were doing all they could stay out. She concludes that “The US record is not one of failure – it is one of success. US officials worked the system and the system worked.” Intervention was avoided and what is a river of corpses abroad in comparison with poll ratings at home?
It is not a happy conclusion, since she also deduces that “The last century shows that the walls that the US tries to build around genocidal societies almost inevitably shatter.” In other words, ignoring genocide is not only immoral – it is impractical. We all have to pay the price in the end. The torch in this field has been held, in general, not by the left, but by human rights groups and activists across the world, who have had the courage and tenacity to belabor all regimes that have abused their citizens.
It is largely their work that has led to the small harbingers of global accountability we see now: the arrest of Pinochet, the trial of Milosevic –and the establishment of an International Criminal Court. A world where Henry Kissinger and Ariel Sharon have to check with their lawyers at the same time as their travel agents is one that is surely improving. Power’s book is an eloquent and detailed testimony of why we should not let our government stand on the sidelines, let alone collude with crimes against humanity.
ENDS
Samantha Power, Ä Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.” Basic Books, NY 2002, $30.
Art of Manipulation- full text
As part of my ongoing psychopathological studies into American politics, I get emails with Ann Coulter, Robert Novak, Newt Gingrich and others from Human Events, "leading the conservative moment since 1944", and Newsmax, "the leading independent online news site with a conservative perspective".
The sites explain the high circulation of many an unreadable conservative tome such as Mark Steyn's America Alone, or Ann Coulter's If Liberals Had Brains They'd Be Republicans. They are given away free with each subscription.
Of course, normal prejudice inclines one to think that conservatives, apart from those few who are cynically manipulative, are inherently gullible. While the left has its share of conspiracy theorists who can draw maps with "planned" pipelines to explain all geopolitics, you don't often see ads for pipeline futures on liberal websites.
And who can argue with the market? Check out the advertisements that appear on American conservative sites, or the emails they send out to their lists. Going right through the looking glass you will find General Jack D Ripper is alive and well and ranting on about conspiracies against his pure bodily fluids.
While calls for donations to the Republican National Committee are a matter of taste, if you want to sell penny stocks, oil sands futures, miraculous cancer cures, doctors trekking into the Amazon for wonder panaceas, not to mention tax-avoidance schemes, then the conservative internet is your oyster. That was a small sample from this week's inbox.
Newsmax's Dr Russell Blaylock is "disgusted by the unmitigated gall of the giant pharmaceutical machines and their giant propaganda factories" and peddles a whole range of alternative medicines and cures. But hang on, aren't those pharmaceutical companies and their giant lobbying machines the ones that the Bush administration helped give the US the highest drug prices in the world?
In wacko world there is a "conspiracy between the FDA and the drug companies
to hide the truth from you" - the truth being that "in 21 days you can get rid of just about any cancer," presumably except all the ones that stubbornly keep killing people.
Never mind advertisers not knowing which half of their budget is wasted, in the new internet age they get instant feedback, so these guys presumably have commercial evidence that they have drilled into a bottomless reservoir of wooden nickel takers. These assorted snake-oil vendors buy the lists and pay for space on these sites, presumably because they know that it generates customers and revenue.
It is easy to see why. If the editorial pages of these sites can get their readers to believe impossible things - for instance that George Bush was a war hero, John Kerry was a coward and American healthcare is the best in the world - before they eat their high fructose corn syrup and pancakes for breakfast, then it is no great stretch to get them enthusiastically voting for a party that backs the great pharmaceutical conspiracy that keeps them from the instant cancer cure.
Michael Scanlon, the sidekick of imprisoned Indian casino lobbyist Jack Abramoff, gave the perfect description of the manipulability of Newsmax and Human Events readers when selling his services to the tribes:
"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."
So Obama is a Muslim, Hillary is a dyke, the UN has black helicopters taking over America - and if you discount the danger of such frenetic and fanatic gullibility, just watch out for those swift boats coming over the cyber-surf on a screen near you soon.
The sites explain the high circulation of many an unreadable conservative tome such as Mark Steyn's America Alone, or Ann Coulter's If Liberals Had Brains They'd Be Republicans. They are given away free with each subscription.
Of course, normal prejudice inclines one to think that conservatives, apart from those few who are cynically manipulative, are inherently gullible. While the left has its share of conspiracy theorists who can draw maps with "planned" pipelines to explain all geopolitics, you don't often see ads for pipeline futures on liberal websites.
And who can argue with the market? Check out the advertisements that appear on American conservative sites, or the emails they send out to their lists. Going right through the looking glass you will find General Jack D Ripper is alive and well and ranting on about conspiracies against his pure bodily fluids.
While calls for donations to the Republican National Committee are a matter of taste, if you want to sell penny stocks, oil sands futures, miraculous cancer cures, doctors trekking into the Amazon for wonder panaceas, not to mention tax-avoidance schemes, then the conservative internet is your oyster. That was a small sample from this week's inbox.
Newsmax's Dr Russell Blaylock is "disgusted by the unmitigated gall of the giant pharmaceutical machines and their giant propaganda factories" and peddles a whole range of alternative medicines and cures. But hang on, aren't those pharmaceutical companies and their giant lobbying machines the ones that the Bush administration helped give the US the highest drug prices in the world?
In wacko world there is a "conspiracy between the FDA and the drug companies
to hide the truth from you" - the truth being that "in 21 days you can get rid of just about any cancer," presumably except all the ones that stubbornly keep killing people.
Never mind advertisers not knowing which half of their budget is wasted, in the new internet age they get instant feedback, so these guys presumably have commercial evidence that they have drilled into a bottomless reservoir of wooden nickel takers. These assorted snake-oil vendors buy the lists and pay for space on these sites, presumably because they know that it generates customers and revenue.
It is easy to see why. If the editorial pages of these sites can get their readers to believe impossible things - for instance that George Bush was a war hero, John Kerry was a coward and American healthcare is the best in the world - before they eat their high fructose corn syrup and pancakes for breakfast, then it is no great stretch to get them enthusiastically voting for a party that backs the great pharmaceutical conspiracy that keeps them from the instant cancer cure.
Michael Scanlon, the sidekick of imprisoned Indian casino lobbyist Jack Abramoff, gave the perfect description of the manipulability of Newsmax and Human Events readers when selling his services to the tribes:
"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."
So Obama is a Muslim, Hillary is a dyke, the UN has black helicopters taking over America - and if you discount the danger of such frenetic and fanatic gullibility, just watch out for those swift boats coming over the cyber-surf on a screen near you soon.
Friday, March 07, 2008
The politics of Business
Big business, big trouble
Feb, 2008, from IR magazine
Ian Williams dips into the writings of fellow revolutionary Bob Monks
Bob Monks is that most dangerous of revolutionaries: he does not want to overthrow the system, he wants it to live up to its stated aims and methods. In his new book, Corpocracy, he brings a lifetime of experience as an investor and shareholder activist to a trenchant depiction of how this age of CEO excess came about.
While others have noted that CEO compensation has created an unparalleled class of mega-wealthy individuals, the usual complainants are the axed workers or the retirees whose pensions have evaporated. But Monks points out that shareholders have also been looted. His thesis is that big company CEOs have collectively suborned the law and regulatory regimes to achieve their ends. ‘Out-of-control CEO compensation is the symptom, the smoking gun, but corpocracy and the discontinuity it has created with our political traditions is the real disease, the ultimate reality,’ writes the man who has spent decades trying to put checks and balances against ‘imperial’ corporate power.
Monks quotes Alan Greenspan, who says the ‘CEO-dominant paradigm’ will continue unless ‘large, primarily institutional, shareholders ... exert far more control over corporate affairs than they appear to be willing to exercise.’
While Monks berates shareholders for their reluctance to act as owners, he also excoriates the courts and the regulatory agencies for allowing CEOs to thwart initiatives such as those allowing shareholders to nominate directors. He scorns as ‘hokum’ the push for independent directors, pointing out that in the absence of shareholder nomination, CEOs invariably choose the board – just as they pick the compensation committee.
Monks puts much of the blame on the climate of legal and social opinion created by the former Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, in tandem with the Business Roundtable, which he characterizes as a cross between a cabal and a craft union for CEOs.
Sound paranoid? The Business Roundtable’s approach to RiskMetrics to avert discussion of Henry McKinnell’s $198 mn remuneration package from plummeting Pfizer gives plenty of reason for Monks to feel so. He contrasts that sum with Jeff Immelt’s $3 mn payout from GE the same year.
Monks sees the current fad for private equity as a way for the legal owners of enterprises to ‘toss the bums out’, ‘rein in outlandish pay schemes’ and ‘force the CFO to play fair with the books.’ But the purpose of private equity is to realize the hidden wealth in a firm, which ultimately implies a public valuation only the stock markets can provide, so a solution remains elusive.
How will things change? Monks suggests that investors will go to other countries where shareholder rights are better protected, but his main hope is for a change of heart. He hopes the government and courts will put some truth in the pious fiction that shareholders own the companies in which they have an interest, and that institutions such as Harvard University and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will see that ‘doing good and doing well gives ethics the sinew and legs it needs.
Feb, 2008, from IR magazine
Ian Williams dips into the writings of fellow revolutionary Bob Monks
Bob Monks is that most dangerous of revolutionaries: he does not want to overthrow the system, he wants it to live up to its stated aims and methods. In his new book, Corpocracy, he brings a lifetime of experience as an investor and shareholder activist to a trenchant depiction of how this age of CEO excess came about.
While others have noted that CEO compensation has created an unparalleled class of mega-wealthy individuals, the usual complainants are the axed workers or the retirees whose pensions have evaporated. But Monks points out that shareholders have also been looted. His thesis is that big company CEOs have collectively suborned the law and regulatory regimes to achieve their ends. ‘Out-of-control CEO compensation is the symptom, the smoking gun, but corpocracy and the discontinuity it has created with our political traditions is the real disease, the ultimate reality,’ writes the man who has spent decades trying to put checks and balances against ‘imperial’ corporate power.
Monks quotes Alan Greenspan, who says the ‘CEO-dominant paradigm’ will continue unless ‘large, primarily institutional, shareholders ... exert far more control over corporate affairs than they appear to be willing to exercise.’
While Monks berates shareholders for their reluctance to act as owners, he also excoriates the courts and the regulatory agencies for allowing CEOs to thwart initiatives such as those allowing shareholders to nominate directors. He scorns as ‘hokum’ the push for independent directors, pointing out that in the absence of shareholder nomination, CEOs invariably choose the board – just as they pick the compensation committee.
Monks puts much of the blame on the climate of legal and social opinion created by the former Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, in tandem with the Business Roundtable, which he characterizes as a cross between a cabal and a craft union for CEOs.
Sound paranoid? The Business Roundtable’s approach to RiskMetrics to avert discussion of Henry McKinnell’s $198 mn remuneration package from plummeting Pfizer gives plenty of reason for Monks to feel so. He contrasts that sum with Jeff Immelt’s $3 mn payout from GE the same year.
Monks sees the current fad for private equity as a way for the legal owners of enterprises to ‘toss the bums out’, ‘rein in outlandish pay schemes’ and ‘force the CFO to play fair with the books.’ But the purpose of private equity is to realize the hidden wealth in a firm, which ultimately implies a public valuation only the stock markets can provide, so a solution remains elusive.
How will things change? Monks suggests that investors will go to other countries where shareholder rights are better protected, but his main hope is for a change of heart. He hopes the government and courts will put some truth in the pious fiction that shareholders own the companies in which they have an interest, and that institutions such as Harvard University and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will see that ‘doing good and doing well gives ethics the sinew and legs it needs.
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Hans Janitschek and the Elephant Erection at the UN
From the Guardian Comment is Free
Journalist Hans Janitschek personified postwar Austria and the world. Ebullient and humorous, part Renaissance man and part dizzying dilettante, he had a hyperactive hand in every pie right up the moment he collapsed at the age of 73 with a fatal heart attack in the United Nations on February 21.
I met him the UN canteen during his candidacy for president of Austria, early in the 90s, and he confided, eyes twinkling behind his thin-rimmed glasses in his strong Austrian accent (which made him sound like Henry Kissinger, minus the pomposity and plus a self-deprecatory sense of humour): "You know Ian, I am bit worried that I might win, because I am on the verge of getting my green card, and I don't want to lose it." He lost the election, comfortably, and won his green card.
With his impatience for accepted channels and decorum, it is not entirely surprising that his career with large and bureaucratic organisations was sometimes less than smooth. Hans was a former secretary-general of the Socialist International and helped ferry cash to Indian socialists like George Fernandez who were being hunted by Indira Gandhi during the Emergency. He supported Bangladesh after the mass killings by Pakistani troops, and Chilean President Salvador Allende. But he did not fit in with organisations' more staid work style.
His career at the UN was equally rocky. With the odd "Red-Brown" condominium in Vienna between Christian- and Social-Democrats, it was not as surprising as it should have been that the recent head of the Socialist International was invited by UN secretary-general Kurt Waldheim to go to the UN as, he thought, press secretary. The UN bureaucracy differed and downgraded and sidelined his post. At a time when one of the mayors of New York was getting the usual cheap shots against the UN, Hans was caught in a vox pop on camera outside the UN, and expressed his trenchant opinion of Hizzoner. He was too well-connected internationally to be fired, but a UN staff member not turning the other cheek was too much for the bureaucracy who used the excuse to squeeze him into the position of a consultant.
Hans's phone book spanned the worlds of literature and politics, and he delved into it when he became president of the UN Society of Writers, which helped him exorcise his journalistic instincts. He instituted awards, which went to figures as various as Mikhail Gorbachev, Stephen Hawking, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Vanessa Redgrave, Arthur M Schlesinger Jr, Gloria Steinem and, in all modesty, myself.
An enthusiastic Austrian who continued to promote his homeland, notwithstanding his green card and chosen residence in New York, he did get carried away with enthusiasms for even more anomalous Austrians than former SS officer Waldheim, whose autobiography he ghosted. His socialism not withstanding, he also translated and published rightist Joerg Haider's book in the US and hosted him in New York, and he also wrote Arnold Schwarzenegger's biography for publication back home in Austria.
Taxed with his support for Haider, he suggested variously that the politician had been misunderstood and that he was a refreshing change to the stale conservative/socialist duopoly of Austria.
For a heavyweight gadfly like Hans it is perhaps fitting that his most tangible legacy was a life-size bronze elephant. Bulgarian sculptor Mikhail had downed an African bull elephant with narcotic darts and made a latex mould for the casting. Whether it was the rubber or the drugs, the effect considerably enhanced the pachydermic bullness. "It vass eeNORMous," Hans told me in a TV interview. The organ was cut to detumescent size for the final casting.
But Hans spent several years combating the UN bureaucracy who felt, with some justice, that headquarters was already bulging with white elephants donated by member governments and a real bronze one would be pushing it. They felt that the UN Charter began "we the peoples", not "we the fauna" of the world. Hans enlisted four elephant-populated countries as sponsors, so the UN had to give way, but their revenge was to site it in a wooded copse in a corner of the UN gardens, as far away from the actual building as possible.
The night before Kofi Annan was to unveil the statue, his chef de cabinet, Iqbal Riza, took a watchful walk to check, and peering under the veil noticed that even the bowdlerised bull elephant looked like it had a fifth leg - much thicker than the trunk. He promptly ordered up a coy hedge of shrubs to be planted around it to spare the secretary-general embarrassment. But it still looks like it has five legs.
It is a fitting monument to Hans Janitschek, substantial and memorable yet colourful and quirky. The UN, and the world, will be a duller place with his going.
Journalist Hans Janitschek personified postwar Austria and the world. Ebullient and humorous, part Renaissance man and part dizzying dilettante, he had a hyperactive hand in every pie right up the moment he collapsed at the age of 73 with a fatal heart attack in the United Nations on February 21.
I met him the UN canteen during his candidacy for president of Austria, early in the 90s, and he confided, eyes twinkling behind his thin-rimmed glasses in his strong Austrian accent (which made him sound like Henry Kissinger, minus the pomposity and plus a self-deprecatory sense of humour): "You know Ian, I am bit worried that I might win, because I am on the verge of getting my green card, and I don't want to lose it." He lost the election, comfortably, and won his green card.
With his impatience for accepted channels and decorum, it is not entirely surprising that his career with large and bureaucratic organisations was sometimes less than smooth. Hans was a former secretary-general of the Socialist International and helped ferry cash to Indian socialists like George Fernandez who were being hunted by Indira Gandhi during the Emergency. He supported Bangladesh after the mass killings by Pakistani troops, and Chilean President Salvador Allende. But he did not fit in with organisations' more staid work style.
His career at the UN was equally rocky. With the odd "Red-Brown" condominium in Vienna between Christian- and Social-Democrats, it was not as surprising as it should have been that the recent head of the Socialist International was invited by UN secretary-general Kurt Waldheim to go to the UN as, he thought, press secretary. The UN bureaucracy differed and downgraded and sidelined his post. At a time when one of the mayors of New York was getting the usual cheap shots against the UN, Hans was caught in a vox pop on camera outside the UN, and expressed his trenchant opinion of Hizzoner. He was too well-connected internationally to be fired, but a UN staff member not turning the other cheek was too much for the bureaucracy who used the excuse to squeeze him into the position of a consultant.
Hans's phone book spanned the worlds of literature and politics, and he delved into it when he became president of the UN Society of Writers, which helped him exorcise his journalistic instincts. He instituted awards, which went to figures as various as Mikhail Gorbachev, Stephen Hawking, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Vanessa Redgrave, Arthur M Schlesinger Jr, Gloria Steinem and, in all modesty, myself.
An enthusiastic Austrian who continued to promote his homeland, notwithstanding his green card and chosen residence in New York, he did get carried away with enthusiasms for even more anomalous Austrians than former SS officer Waldheim, whose autobiography he ghosted. His socialism not withstanding, he also translated and published rightist Joerg Haider's book in the US and hosted him in New York, and he also wrote Arnold Schwarzenegger's biography for publication back home in Austria.
Taxed with his support for Haider, he suggested variously that the politician had been misunderstood and that he was a refreshing change to the stale conservative/socialist duopoly of Austria.
For a heavyweight gadfly like Hans it is perhaps fitting that his most tangible legacy was a life-size bronze elephant. Bulgarian sculptor Mikhail had downed an African bull elephant with narcotic darts and made a latex mould for the casting. Whether it was the rubber or the drugs, the effect considerably enhanced the pachydermic bullness. "It vass eeNORMous," Hans told me in a TV interview. The organ was cut to detumescent size for the final casting.
But Hans spent several years combating the UN bureaucracy who felt, with some justice, that headquarters was already bulging with white elephants donated by member governments and a real bronze one would be pushing it. They felt that the UN Charter began "we the peoples", not "we the fauna" of the world. Hans enlisted four elephant-populated countries as sponsors, so the UN had to give way, but their revenge was to site it in a wooded copse in a corner of the UN gardens, as far away from the actual building as possible.
The night before Kofi Annan was to unveil the statue, his chef de cabinet, Iqbal Riza, took a watchful walk to check, and peering under the veil noticed that even the bowdlerised bull elephant looked like it had a fifth leg - much thicker than the trunk. He promptly ordered up a coy hedge of shrubs to be planted around it to spare the secretary-general embarrassment. But it still looks like it has five legs.
It is a fitting monument to Hans Janitschek, substantial and memorable yet colourful and quirky. The UN, and the world, will be a duller place with his going.
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Monday, March 03, 2008
Deadline pundit on TV! OK Iranian, but still
It's nice to know my pulpitting makes news!
Ian
Is Peace Even on the Agenda?
Washington seeks confrontation not reconciliation with Iran
Chris Gelken (chrisg) Email Article Print Article
Published 2008-03-04 06:00 (KST)
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has returned to Tehran after his landmark two-day visit to Iraq.
Upon his arrival in Baghdad, Ahmadinejad was feted and warmly welcomed with military bands and honor guards. It's hard to believe such a reception would be laid on for the man that Washington accuses of being largely responsible for destabilizing Iraq.
"Well obviously the ruling party in Washington must be seething," author and political analyst Ian Williams told PressTV News. "This has got to raise serious questions for the American public."
How is it, Williams asked, that after 160,000 troops and 4,000 dead, Western leaders have to sneak in and out of Iraq under cover of secrecy "while Iran, the other part of the alleged Axis of Evil, can send its president along a flower strewn route in a motorcade through the streets of Baghdad, and be greeted by the government that the US troops have supposedly put in power?"
In contrast to Ahmadinejad's colorful arrival in Iraq, the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, arrived in Baghdad on an unannounced visit with his itinerary a closely guarded secret.
Notwithstanding two wars, years of crippling sanctions and continued occupation, Washington accuses Tehran of "meddling" and "interfering" in Iraq, a country with which Iran shares a 1,500-kilometer border.
"It seems very odd," Williams said, "that most of the attacks on the US forces are coming from the Sunni militias and al-Qaida, and these are the people who it is least likely for the Iranians to be supporting. It's possible that some weapons might come from Iran. But in the end, the aircraft that went into the World Trade Center were American but they certainly were not directed by the United States."
Iran denies charges that it has been supplying weapons to any groups in Iraq, an assertion flatly rejected by Washington. With the entire region awash with weapons combined with Iraq's long and porous border, the possibility that sympathetic or criminal elements might be smuggling guns and ammunition is a possibility that, apparently, has not occurred to Pentagon and White House analysts.
Painting Iran as the culprit for continued instability in Iraq, on the other hand, appears to suit Washington policymakers.
"It's a claim the Bush administration is going to make because it wants to avoid confronting the reality that it actually has to talk to the Iranian leadership and come to some sensible provisions for the region. It's very difficult for them to admit that. They are ideologically incapable of it at the moment," Williams told PressTV.
Government statements from Baghdad said talks between Ahmadinejad and Iraqi leaders focused mainly on economic, political and security issues -- all areas where the United States has considerable influence or vested interests.
In a separate interview, Mahmoud Othman, member of the Iraqi Council of Representatives, told PressTV's Middle East Today that with warnings from Washington to be wary of Iran on the one hand, and accusations from Tehran that the United States is to blame for the insecurity in Iraq on the other, Baghdad needs to tread a fine line in order to maintain a balance.
"I think the Iraqi leadership is stuck in between the conflict between Iran and America and obviously both countries have their influence in Iraq. That is why Iraq has tried to arrange meetings between the two countries," Othman said.
Speaking on the same edition of Middle East Today, professor of politics and head of the Department of American Studies at Tehran University, Seyed Mohammad Marandi said from Tehran's perspective it seems Washington is determined to maintain its hostile policy toward Iran.
"But this is not really in the interests of the United States," he said, "If Iraq is to stabilize, and if the American government wants Iraq to stabilize, then the most important neighbor Iraq has is Iran because of its very long borders and because of the economic potential that exists between the two countries."
But according to Williams, Iraq's mediation efforts are unlikely to bear fruit in the short term.
"I don't think it's the beginning of a rapprochement in itself," he told PressTV News, "I think wiser heads in Washington might draw some lessons from it and say we really have to deal with this."
Williams noted that Iran has previously been remarkably cooperative in both Afghanistan against the Taliban and in Iraq against Saddam Hussein, "and the United States at the time did not grasp those opportunities."
Closer ties with Iran would be at odds with Washington's policies toward Israel, Williams said, and blamed a stubborn inability to admit past mistakes for the continued standoff.
"There are elements in Washington that refuse to admit that they've been wrong, that they basically either were having illusions or pipe dreams about the whole Axis of Evil to begin with, and there's this bedrock reluctance to engage sensibly with Iran."
Williams was speaking on the eve of a Security Council meeting seeking to impose further sanctions on Iran over its nuclear activities, an event taking place at the time of filing this article.
"Sadly," Williams said, "when you look at the 'resolutionary' creep at the United Nations it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that some people in Washington still want to see a confrontation with Iran."
Ian
Is Peace Even on the Agenda?
Washington seeks confrontation not reconciliation with Iran
Chris Gelken (chrisg) Email Article Print Article
Published 2008-03-04 06:00 (KST)
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has returned to Tehran after his landmark two-day visit to Iraq.
Upon his arrival in Baghdad, Ahmadinejad was feted and warmly welcomed with military bands and honor guards. It's hard to believe such a reception would be laid on for the man that Washington accuses of being largely responsible for destabilizing Iraq.
"Well obviously the ruling party in Washington must be seething," author and political analyst Ian Williams told PressTV News. "This has got to raise serious questions for the American public."
How is it, Williams asked, that after 160,000 troops and 4,000 dead, Western leaders have to sneak in and out of Iraq under cover of secrecy "while Iran, the other part of the alleged Axis of Evil, can send its president along a flower strewn route in a motorcade through the streets of Baghdad, and be greeted by the government that the US troops have supposedly put in power?"
In contrast to Ahmadinejad's colorful arrival in Iraq, the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, arrived in Baghdad on an unannounced visit with his itinerary a closely guarded secret.
Notwithstanding two wars, years of crippling sanctions and continued occupation, Washington accuses Tehran of "meddling" and "interfering" in Iraq, a country with which Iran shares a 1,500-kilometer border.
"It seems very odd," Williams said, "that most of the attacks on the US forces are coming from the Sunni militias and al-Qaida, and these are the people who it is least likely for the Iranians to be supporting. It's possible that some weapons might come from Iran. But in the end, the aircraft that went into the World Trade Center were American but they certainly were not directed by the United States."
Iran denies charges that it has been supplying weapons to any groups in Iraq, an assertion flatly rejected by Washington. With the entire region awash with weapons combined with Iraq's long and porous border, the possibility that sympathetic or criminal elements might be smuggling guns and ammunition is a possibility that, apparently, has not occurred to Pentagon and White House analysts.
Painting Iran as the culprit for continued instability in Iraq, on the other hand, appears to suit Washington policymakers.
"It's a claim the Bush administration is going to make because it wants to avoid confronting the reality that it actually has to talk to the Iranian leadership and come to some sensible provisions for the region. It's very difficult for them to admit that. They are ideologically incapable of it at the moment," Williams told PressTV.
Government statements from Baghdad said talks between Ahmadinejad and Iraqi leaders focused mainly on economic, political and security issues -- all areas where the United States has considerable influence or vested interests.
In a separate interview, Mahmoud Othman, member of the Iraqi Council of Representatives, told PressTV's Middle East Today that with warnings from Washington to be wary of Iran on the one hand, and accusations from Tehran that the United States is to blame for the insecurity in Iraq on the other, Baghdad needs to tread a fine line in order to maintain a balance.
"I think the Iraqi leadership is stuck in between the conflict between Iran and America and obviously both countries have their influence in Iraq. That is why Iraq has tried to arrange meetings between the two countries," Othman said.
Speaking on the same edition of Middle East Today, professor of politics and head of the Department of American Studies at Tehran University, Seyed Mohammad Marandi said from Tehran's perspective it seems Washington is determined to maintain its hostile policy toward Iran.
"But this is not really in the interests of the United States," he said, "If Iraq is to stabilize, and if the American government wants Iraq to stabilize, then the most important neighbor Iraq has is Iran because of its very long borders and because of the economic potential that exists between the two countries."
But according to Williams, Iraq's mediation efforts are unlikely to bear fruit in the short term.
"I don't think it's the beginning of a rapprochement in itself," he told PressTV News, "I think wiser heads in Washington might draw some lessons from it and say we really have to deal with this."
Williams noted that Iran has previously been remarkably cooperative in both Afghanistan against the Taliban and in Iraq against Saddam Hussein, "and the United States at the time did not grasp those opportunities."
Closer ties with Iran would be at odds with Washington's policies toward Israel, Williams said, and blamed a stubborn inability to admit past mistakes for the continued standoff.
"There are elements in Washington that refuse to admit that they've been wrong, that they basically either were having illusions or pipe dreams about the whole Axis of Evil to begin with, and there's this bedrock reluctance to engage sensibly with Iran."
Williams was speaking on the eve of a Security Council meeting seeking to impose further sanctions on Iran over its nuclear activities, an event taking place at the time of filing this article.
"Sadly," Williams said, "when you look at the 'resolutionary' creep at the United Nations it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that some people in Washington still want to see a confrontation with Iran."
Friday, February 29, 2008
Hanging Down Bill Buckley's head
Confronting the tsunami of hagiography that has greeted his demise, it may be timely to correct the impression that conservative litterateur and laide-lettrist William F Buckley was some kind of saint. In fact, as I write, the pampered Ivy Leaguer is facing the traditional challenge of rich men at the gates of heaven: trying to squeeze a camel through the needle's eye. If the Gospels have any truth, then it is a Bactrian camel with two humps and very small micro-surgical needle, since Buckley combined inherited riches with acquired callousness to those who had not been so fortunate in their choice of parents.
I cannot say definitively that the millions of words penned by Buckley, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, completely eschew concern for the poor or underprivileged of the world. However, I think we can safely say that they were not prominent in his works.
A Catholic of the school of Torquemada and Franco, whom he described as "an authentic national hero", whose victory brought "forty years of relative prosperity, peace and independence", to Spain, he seemed to overlook the modern Church's teachings on social justice.
He could be witty, and relished shocking received opinion, in contrast to many of his would-be successors in American conservatism who would can George Bush's farts and sell them as deodorants. But even that independence of thought was the arrogance of an American aristocrat of the old school for whom the purpose of government was to keep the plebs in their place while civilisation and culture were guarded and developed by the elite.
"Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time? I couldn't think of anyone," he crowed in the New York Times, but was of course only accurate if "Right" had an uppercase "R".
Supporting the Vietnam war, opposing civil rights for African-Americans, cheerleading for murderous (but anti-communist) regimes across the globe, may have been modernised versions of the family's deep Ku Klux Klan tradition, but have hardly been vindicated by history.
But when you see obituaries praising his principles for opposing Nixon after Watergate, they miss the salient point. Buckley was unhappy with Nixon because he considered him too liberal, which in the demonology of the American right meant socialist, which meant communist.
Even the free markets that he espoused so firmly and, according the hagiographers, played such a large part in bringing about, have hardly been unmitigated triumphs. The era of deregulation that came from Ronald Reagan's reign quickly brought the savings and loans debacle, in which the taxpayer picked up the tab for trillions of dollars, followed recently by Enron and the other scandals and of course now by the subprime mortgage scandal, where taxpayers abroad are picking up the tab.
For Buckley's people, Roosevelt's New Deal, which rescued most of the nation from poverty, was a communist conspiracy whose effects needed reversing. That is a work still in progress, but sadly well-advanced.
Interestingly, the spectacle of an American behaving as a braying, brainlessly snobbish, aristocratic cad from Black Adder gave him a certain cachet in Britain - and of course the convicted Conrad Black has rushed out with a fittingly fawning tribute.
As Buckley's form of braying elitism held sway, the US ran up the biggest fiscal and trade deficits in history, putting itself in hock to the Chinese Communist party, and for 30 years of a growing economy saw the plebs' income static or declining while his pals, like Black, amassed wealth on a scale unseen for a century.
During his overlong life Buckley gilded the fungus by casting a gossamer-thin veil of erudition on the brawling mélange of crude bigotry, racism, self-satisfied ignorance and isolationism that characterised American conservatism until the neocons turned up. It takes more than yachting and harpsichord-playing, more even than sense of humour and a belated admission that Iraq was a big mistake, to weigh the balance in his favour.
I wish a long life to Gore Vidal, equally aristocratic but with a sense of noblesse oblige totally missing in Buckley, and a genuine intellectual who has indeed been correct and not "Right" about most off the issues of the last century. But I almost look forward to the tide of unthinking vituperation with which Buckley's hagiographers on the right will greet the demise of a much better person.
I cannot say definitively that the millions of words penned by Buckley, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, completely eschew concern for the poor or underprivileged of the world. However, I think we can safely say that they were not prominent in his works.
A Catholic of the school of Torquemada and Franco, whom he described as "an authentic national hero", whose victory brought "forty years of relative prosperity, peace and independence", to Spain, he seemed to overlook the modern Church's teachings on social justice.
He could be witty, and relished shocking received opinion, in contrast to many of his would-be successors in American conservatism who would can George Bush's farts and sell them as deodorants. But even that independence of thought was the arrogance of an American aristocrat of the old school for whom the purpose of government was to keep the plebs in their place while civilisation and culture were guarded and developed by the elite.
"Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time? I couldn't think of anyone," he crowed in the New York Times, but was of course only accurate if "Right" had an uppercase "R".
Supporting the Vietnam war, opposing civil rights for African-Americans, cheerleading for murderous (but anti-communist) regimes across the globe, may have been modernised versions of the family's deep Ku Klux Klan tradition, but have hardly been vindicated by history.
But when you see obituaries praising his principles for opposing Nixon after Watergate, they miss the salient point. Buckley was unhappy with Nixon because he considered him too liberal, which in the demonology of the American right meant socialist, which meant communist.
Even the free markets that he espoused so firmly and, according the hagiographers, played such a large part in bringing about, have hardly been unmitigated triumphs. The era of deregulation that came from Ronald Reagan's reign quickly brought the savings and loans debacle, in which the taxpayer picked up the tab for trillions of dollars, followed recently by Enron and the other scandals and of course now by the subprime mortgage scandal, where taxpayers abroad are picking up the tab.
For Buckley's people, Roosevelt's New Deal, which rescued most of the nation from poverty, was a communist conspiracy whose effects needed reversing. That is a work still in progress, but sadly well-advanced.
Interestingly, the spectacle of an American behaving as a braying, brainlessly snobbish, aristocratic cad from Black Adder gave him a certain cachet in Britain - and of course the convicted Conrad Black has rushed out with a fittingly fawning tribute.
As Buckley's form of braying elitism held sway, the US ran up the biggest fiscal and trade deficits in history, putting itself in hock to the Chinese Communist party, and for 30 years of a growing economy saw the plebs' income static or declining while his pals, like Black, amassed wealth on a scale unseen for a century.
During his overlong life Buckley gilded the fungus by casting a gossamer-thin veil of erudition on the brawling mélange of crude bigotry, racism, self-satisfied ignorance and isolationism that characterised American conservatism until the neocons turned up. It takes more than yachting and harpsichord-playing, more even than sense of humour and a belated admission that Iraq was a big mistake, to weigh the balance in his favour.
I wish a long life to Gore Vidal, equally aristocratic but with a sense of noblesse oblige totally missing in Buckley, and a genuine intellectual who has indeed been correct and not "Right" about most off the issues of the last century. But I almost look forward to the tide of unthinking vituperation with which Buckley's hagiographers on the right will greet the demise of a much better person.
Kosovo Duet..
Strategic Dialogue: Kosovo
Ian Williams and Stephen Zunes | February 29, 2008
Editor: John Feffer
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org
Was the United States too hasty in recognizing the new state of Kosovo? Ian Williams and Stephen Zunes have different takes in this strategic dialogue. To see the original essays, follow these links to Williams and Zunes.
Ian Williams
Stephen Zunes is quite right to point out the inconsistencies of U.S. policy in the Balkans, which has been fairly consistently wrong! Beginning when James Baker declared that the United States had no dog in the fight in the Balkans. Contrary to what some far leftists claim, U.S. policy in the beginning depended on keeping Yugoslavia together even though it was clear that Milosevic's power grab had effectively dissolved the fragile federation. Once Slovenia declared independence, that was the end.
The United States and the European Union (EU), and indeed Russia in its various avatars, should have laid down the rules and effectively supervised the Yugoslav successor states. Guaranteeing boundaries and rights for minorities, establishing dual or even common citizenship, were all possibilities that could have ensured a soft landing for the wreck of Tito's enterprise.
The hands-off U.S. policy in effect removed the only threat that would have curbed Milosevic's excesses. Left to their own devices, the Europeans failed badly. Both Britain tacitly and France overtly, acted on the principle that the Serbs would win, and if it were done, then best t’were done quickly.
When the United States did intervene, it quickly produced results. Richard Holbrooke, the architect of the Dayton Accords that produced an agreement among the warring factions in Bosnia, emulated Kissinger in realpolitik. Honoring promises to Milosevic, the Republika Srpska was effectively rewarded for successful ethnic cleansing, which encouraged Milosevic.
But while the State Department maintained close back-channel relations with Rugova's shadow administration in Kosovo, bringing him and other leading figures to meet opinion formers, it was back-burner as well as back channel. One thing was clear: whenever Milosevic saw a clear and present danger of intervention, he backed down. But U.S. and Western policy was consistently unclear.
We should not exclude Russia from this. Russian diplomats at the time of the Kosovo crisis told me that what the Serbs were doing was unconscionable, but effectively the United States was not consulting them, and was being arrogant. This was true, but did not make Moscow's role much more moral or constructive.
Clinton then fatally refused even to consider UN authorization for intervention, for fear of a Russian veto, and refused to take the issue to the General Assembly, where he would have won support. He then began the campaign by effectively ruling out the one option that Milosevic feared: a ground invasion. Instead, Clinton launched a bombing campaign, which was all the more foolish for being conducted from on high to avoid the political embarrassment of American casualties abroad. (The now-interventionist Republicans were then quite the opposite of course). The mounting "collateral damage" allowed Milosevic to crawl to the moral high ground in some quarters. Notably, the day that NATO decided on a ground invasion, Milosevic ran up the white flag and pulled out of Kosovo – as he would have done months earlier if he had seen a real threat of ground attack.
The UN trusteeship of Kosovo has not been an unmitigated success. Despite the efforts of some, the mission was colonial and condescending to the Albanians, and in my experience, many of the UN staff had no appreciation for what had happened to the Kosovars earlier. It is difficult to know what Washington could do at the end of a trail of so many mistakes. Mostly, constructive engagement with Moscow may have averted the latter's amoral and expedient support for Serbian nationalism.
Insofar as I disagree with Stephen Zunes at all, it is over American responsibility for the declaration of independence and for the nature of the Serb governments since Zoran Djindjic's assassination. They have been much more center-right than center-left and are strongly nationalistic.
That is why the United States was once again reacting rather than initiating events. The Kosovars were determined, and gave Thaci's government a popular mandate to declare independence. The Kosovars were calling the shots. The trade-off with the United States and EU was to postpone the declaration from last year until now, after the elections in Belgrade, in return for recognition.
Looking back in history, and indeed at the Serb mobs and gangs at the border now acting with the same quasi-governmental backing that the paramilitary murder squads had a decade before, recognition and NATO back-up were essential to stop yet another Balkan War from breaking out. The Czech/Slovak dissolution could serve as a model here. But that presupposes realism and democracy on both sides. Every action the Belgrade government took showed the taint of old-style Balkan nationalism. And it showed no appreciation, let alone contrition, for what so many of its citizens had perpetrated back in 1999.
Negotiation is fine, but there comes a point when it is delaying the inevitable and keeping the wound open. That point was reached last year. Russia could make a precedent out of it for its various adventures in the near-abroad, in Moldova and Georgia, but it would be very foolish to do so. Chechnya and many other autonomous republics inside the Russian Federation would be delighted to cite it right back at them. Moscow would be better to join the EU chorus of how Kosovo is a one off.
Stephen Zunes
I have little fundamental disagreement with Ian William’s response to my article or in his original article, but I would like to challenge him on a couple of minor points.
My interpretation of what led to the end of the fighting in 1999 was not the threat of a NATO ground invasion, which was fraught with dangers and the prospects of which produced serious internal divisions within the alliance. Nor did Milosevic “run up the white flag.” Instead, it appears that it was the United States and NATO that were also forced to compromise due to the failure of the 11-week bombing campaign to coerce the Serbs to give in. If one looks at the original U.S./NATO proposal at Rambouillet and the counter-proposal presented by the Serbian parliament immediately thereafter, and then compares both of them with the text of the final cease-fire agreement, the agreement that ended the fighting pretty much splits the difference, perhaps even coming a tad closer to the Serb position. In other words, the United States and NATO had to compromise at least as much as did Milosevic. This raises the possibility that the Western nations could have worked out a similar deal without the tragic decision to go to war, a war that not only resulted in enormous human, economic, and environmental damage to Serbia, but led to Serbian repression in Kosovo that escalated dramatically into full-scale ethnic cleansing.
The Serbs agreed to the ceasefire on the condition that while Kosovo’s autonomous status and right to self-government would be restored, the province would not be allowed to secede. Indeed, UN Security Council resolution 1244 (1999), while calling for “substantial autonomy and meaningful self-administration for Kosovo,” also reaffirmed “the commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the other States of the region.” It is not surprising, therefore, that the Serbs feel betrayed by the international community.
I certainly agree with Kosovo’s right to independence on a moral level, for reasons spelled out in Ian’s original article. It would have been better, however, to have pressured the Kosovars to put off their declaration until after Serbia’s entrance into the European Union (and provide whatever combination of pressure on and assistance to the Serbian government to make that happen sooner rather than later.) When a country becomes part of the EU, national boundaries and what constitutes an independent nation-state become far less significant. Supporting Kosovo’s secession beforehand, however, has strengthened hard-line nationalists in both Serbia and Kosovo and will likely delay both nations’ integration into Europe.
Finally, I would have been thrilled if the United States had recognized an independent Kosovo a decade ago, when the Serbs were led by the autocratic and militaristic Milosevic and the Kosovar Albanians were led by the pacifist and democratic Rugova. Today, however, the roles are partly reversed, with Serbia led by democratic moderates, Kosovo led by national chauvinists, and the Kosovar Serbs being subjected to attacks and (small-scale) ethnic cleansing by Kosovar Albanians. Most of the Serbs governing in Belgrade today, while strongly nationalistic, were not responsible for and in most cases were strongly opposed to Milosevic’s brutal repression of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority. Indeed, they supported – and, in some cases, participated in – the nonviolent democratic revolution in October of 2000 that ousted Milosevic. With Kosovo’s secession having been recognized by the United States and other key Western states on their watch, however, these democrats will likely get the blame for having “lost” Kosovo. This will thereby create the conditions for a comeback by some of the hard-line Serbian nationalists responsible for the innumerable war crimes of the 1990s.
Ian Williams contributes frequently to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) on UN and international affairs. More of his work is available on www.deadlinepundit.blogspot.com. Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco. and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org). From 1996 to 1999, he served as chair of the board of Peaceworkers, a U.S.-based group supporting the nonviolent struggle of the Kosovar Albanians and other nonviolent movements and peacemakers in areas of conflict.
For More Information
Ian Williams, "A New Kosovo" (Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, February 20, 2008).
Stephen Zunes, "Kosovo and the Politics of Recognition" (Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, February 21, 2008).
Ian Williams and Stephen Zunes | February 29, 2008
Editor: John Feffer
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org
Was the United States too hasty in recognizing the new state of Kosovo? Ian Williams and Stephen Zunes have different takes in this strategic dialogue. To see the original essays, follow these links to Williams and Zunes.
Ian Williams
Stephen Zunes is quite right to point out the inconsistencies of U.S. policy in the Balkans, which has been fairly consistently wrong! Beginning when James Baker declared that the United States had no dog in the fight in the Balkans. Contrary to what some far leftists claim, U.S. policy in the beginning depended on keeping Yugoslavia together even though it was clear that Milosevic's power grab had effectively dissolved the fragile federation. Once Slovenia declared independence, that was the end.
The United States and the European Union (EU), and indeed Russia in its various avatars, should have laid down the rules and effectively supervised the Yugoslav successor states. Guaranteeing boundaries and rights for minorities, establishing dual or even common citizenship, were all possibilities that could have ensured a soft landing for the wreck of Tito's enterprise.
The hands-off U.S. policy in effect removed the only threat that would have curbed Milosevic's excesses. Left to their own devices, the Europeans failed badly. Both Britain tacitly and France overtly, acted on the principle that the Serbs would win, and if it were done, then best t’were done quickly.
When the United States did intervene, it quickly produced results. Richard Holbrooke, the architect of the Dayton Accords that produced an agreement among the warring factions in Bosnia, emulated Kissinger in realpolitik. Honoring promises to Milosevic, the Republika Srpska was effectively rewarded for successful ethnic cleansing, which encouraged Milosevic.
But while the State Department maintained close back-channel relations with Rugova's shadow administration in Kosovo, bringing him and other leading figures to meet opinion formers, it was back-burner as well as back channel. One thing was clear: whenever Milosevic saw a clear and present danger of intervention, he backed down. But U.S. and Western policy was consistently unclear.
We should not exclude Russia from this. Russian diplomats at the time of the Kosovo crisis told me that what the Serbs were doing was unconscionable, but effectively the United States was not consulting them, and was being arrogant. This was true, but did not make Moscow's role much more moral or constructive.
Clinton then fatally refused even to consider UN authorization for intervention, for fear of a Russian veto, and refused to take the issue to the General Assembly, where he would have won support. He then began the campaign by effectively ruling out the one option that Milosevic feared: a ground invasion. Instead, Clinton launched a bombing campaign, which was all the more foolish for being conducted from on high to avoid the political embarrassment of American casualties abroad. (The now-interventionist Republicans were then quite the opposite of course). The mounting "collateral damage" allowed Milosevic to crawl to the moral high ground in some quarters. Notably, the day that NATO decided on a ground invasion, Milosevic ran up the white flag and pulled out of Kosovo – as he would have done months earlier if he had seen a real threat of ground attack.
The UN trusteeship of Kosovo has not been an unmitigated success. Despite the efforts of some, the mission was colonial and condescending to the Albanians, and in my experience, many of the UN staff had no appreciation for what had happened to the Kosovars earlier. It is difficult to know what Washington could do at the end of a trail of so many mistakes. Mostly, constructive engagement with Moscow may have averted the latter's amoral and expedient support for Serbian nationalism.
Insofar as I disagree with Stephen Zunes at all, it is over American responsibility for the declaration of independence and for the nature of the Serb governments since Zoran Djindjic's assassination. They have been much more center-right than center-left and are strongly nationalistic.
That is why the United States was once again reacting rather than initiating events. The Kosovars were determined, and gave Thaci's government a popular mandate to declare independence. The Kosovars were calling the shots. The trade-off with the United States and EU was to postpone the declaration from last year until now, after the elections in Belgrade, in return for recognition.
Looking back in history, and indeed at the Serb mobs and gangs at the border now acting with the same quasi-governmental backing that the paramilitary murder squads had a decade before, recognition and NATO back-up were essential to stop yet another Balkan War from breaking out. The Czech/Slovak dissolution could serve as a model here. But that presupposes realism and democracy on both sides. Every action the Belgrade government took showed the taint of old-style Balkan nationalism. And it showed no appreciation, let alone contrition, for what so many of its citizens had perpetrated back in 1999.
Negotiation is fine, but there comes a point when it is delaying the inevitable and keeping the wound open. That point was reached last year. Russia could make a precedent out of it for its various adventures in the near-abroad, in Moldova and Georgia, but it would be very foolish to do so. Chechnya and many other autonomous republics inside the Russian Federation would be delighted to cite it right back at them. Moscow would be better to join the EU chorus of how Kosovo is a one off.
Stephen Zunes
I have little fundamental disagreement with Ian William’s response to my article or in his original article, but I would like to challenge him on a couple of minor points.
My interpretation of what led to the end of the fighting in 1999 was not the threat of a NATO ground invasion, which was fraught with dangers and the prospects of which produced serious internal divisions within the alliance. Nor did Milosevic “run up the white flag.” Instead, it appears that it was the United States and NATO that were also forced to compromise due to the failure of the 11-week bombing campaign to coerce the Serbs to give in. If one looks at the original U.S./NATO proposal at Rambouillet and the counter-proposal presented by the Serbian parliament immediately thereafter, and then compares both of them with the text of the final cease-fire agreement, the agreement that ended the fighting pretty much splits the difference, perhaps even coming a tad closer to the Serb position. In other words, the United States and NATO had to compromise at least as much as did Milosevic. This raises the possibility that the Western nations could have worked out a similar deal without the tragic decision to go to war, a war that not only resulted in enormous human, economic, and environmental damage to Serbia, but led to Serbian repression in Kosovo that escalated dramatically into full-scale ethnic cleansing.
The Serbs agreed to the ceasefire on the condition that while Kosovo’s autonomous status and right to self-government would be restored, the province would not be allowed to secede. Indeed, UN Security Council resolution 1244 (1999), while calling for “substantial autonomy and meaningful self-administration for Kosovo,” also reaffirmed “the commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the other States of the region.” It is not surprising, therefore, that the Serbs feel betrayed by the international community.
I certainly agree with Kosovo’s right to independence on a moral level, for reasons spelled out in Ian’s original article. It would have been better, however, to have pressured the Kosovars to put off their declaration until after Serbia’s entrance into the European Union (and provide whatever combination of pressure on and assistance to the Serbian government to make that happen sooner rather than later.) When a country becomes part of the EU, national boundaries and what constitutes an independent nation-state become far less significant. Supporting Kosovo’s secession beforehand, however, has strengthened hard-line nationalists in both Serbia and Kosovo and will likely delay both nations’ integration into Europe.
Finally, I would have been thrilled if the United States had recognized an independent Kosovo a decade ago, when the Serbs were led by the autocratic and militaristic Milosevic and the Kosovar Albanians were led by the pacifist and democratic Rugova. Today, however, the roles are partly reversed, with Serbia led by democratic moderates, Kosovo led by national chauvinists, and the Kosovar Serbs being subjected to attacks and (small-scale) ethnic cleansing by Kosovar Albanians. Most of the Serbs governing in Belgrade today, while strongly nationalistic, were not responsible for and in most cases were strongly opposed to Milosevic’s brutal repression of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority. Indeed, they supported – and, in some cases, participated in – the nonviolent democratic revolution in October of 2000 that ousted Milosevic. With Kosovo’s secession having been recognized by the United States and other key Western states on their watch, however, these democrats will likely get the blame for having “lost” Kosovo. This will thereby create the conditions for a comeback by some of the hard-line Serbian nationalists responsible for the innumerable war crimes of the 1990s.
Ian Williams contributes frequently to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) on UN and international affairs. More of his work is available on www.deadlinepundit.blogspot.com. Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco. and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org). From 1996 to 1999, he served as chair of the board of Peaceworkers, a U.S.-based group supporting the nonviolent struggle of the Kosovar Albanians and other nonviolent movements and peacemakers in areas of conflict.
For More Information
Ian Williams, "A New Kosovo" (Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, February 20, 2008).
Stephen Zunes, "Kosovo and the Politics of Recognition" (Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, February 21, 2008).
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Marooned by the Special Relationship
Marooned by the special relationship
Diego Garcia is the oceanic tombstone of British independence. The UK's violation of international law there is yet another of its epitaphs
Ian Williams
February 25, 2008 8:00 PM | Comment is Free Guardian
Of course we are all shocked, shocked, that the CIA would have misled the British government about renditions taking place via so-called British territory Diego Garcia.
But we should also be shocked that Whitehall did not suspect or know about it. We would not be that shocked if it turned out that that the CIA's assurances that none of the prisoners were tortured was more than a little wobbly. Indeed, five years ago, exactly such questions were being raised - and waffled away by Tony Blair's ministers. It is, let us say, coyly, not beyond probability that the CIA, which lies to its own legislators, may be economical with the truth with satellite state governments.
But apart from putting some truth in Robert Harris's novel The Ghost about a former British prime minister wanted by the International Criminal Court for aiding and abetting just such rendition, the brief flurry of interest in these islands may remind people worldwide of the original mass rendition, by which the British deported the island's inhabitants in order to hand over a nominal British colony to effective American control.
Luckily, the politicians involved then are now mostly dead, and the ICC has no retrospective authority, otherwise the ethnic cleansing and continued exclusion of the inhabitants would be subject to prosecution, as indeed would be complicity in the renditions.
Indeed, the British signature on the International Court of Justice, which precludes liability for any act occurring before 1974 and from any present or past member of the Commonwealth, also handily stops the Seychelles from protesting the timely removal of the islands from its jurisdiction just before independence.
Of course the American presence, and the islanders' absence from their home, is all in the name of defending the world for democracy and the rule of law - which is why the British government is defying successive court rulings in favour of the cleansees.
Indeed Diego Garcia is the distilled essence of the "special relationship" between Britain and the US. The British government stole the islands from their own inhabitants and the Seychellois, and handed them over rent-free to the US in return for a discount on the Polaris submarines that in turn marked the end of the genuinely independent British deterrent that the post-war Labour government had strived for, and tied the country's fate almost inextricably to the US. It involved giving up Blue Streak, the successful rocket which would have allowed Britain to have a presence in space as well.
Harold McMillan, who did the Polaris deal, believed like Blair that Britain could be Athens to Washington's Rome. He had marginally better expectations of constructive results from John F Kennedy than Blair did from his diplomatic duet with George Bush. At the insistence of the latter, Blair over-rode decisions of British courts on letting the inhabitants of Diego Garcia return.
Surely it's time for a declaration of independence. The lease of Diego Garcia is up for renewal in 2016. Britain should let the islanders back immediately and let them take it over then and join the Seychelles if they wish. And it should drop the pretensions to "independent" nuclear power and give up on the Trident replacement. Any relationship that involves the country in violations of international human rights law is indeed "special", but it is not necessarily desirable.
Diego Garcia is the oceanic tombstone of British independence. The UK's violation of international law there is yet another of its epitaphs
Ian Williams
February 25, 2008 8:00 PM | Comment is Free Guardian
Of course we are all shocked, shocked, that the CIA would have misled the British government about renditions taking place via so-called British territory Diego Garcia.
But we should also be shocked that Whitehall did not suspect or know about it. We would not be that shocked if it turned out that that the CIA's assurances that none of the prisoners were tortured was more than a little wobbly. Indeed, five years ago, exactly such questions were being raised - and waffled away by Tony Blair's ministers. It is, let us say, coyly, not beyond probability that the CIA, which lies to its own legislators, may be economical with the truth with satellite state governments.
But apart from putting some truth in Robert Harris's novel The Ghost about a former British prime minister wanted by the International Criminal Court for aiding and abetting just such rendition, the brief flurry of interest in these islands may remind people worldwide of the original mass rendition, by which the British deported the island's inhabitants in order to hand over a nominal British colony to effective American control.
Luckily, the politicians involved then are now mostly dead, and the ICC has no retrospective authority, otherwise the ethnic cleansing and continued exclusion of the inhabitants would be subject to prosecution, as indeed would be complicity in the renditions.
Indeed, the British signature on the International Court of Justice, which precludes liability for any act occurring before 1974 and from any present or past member of the Commonwealth, also handily stops the Seychelles from protesting the timely removal of the islands from its jurisdiction just before independence.
Of course the American presence, and the islanders' absence from their home, is all in the name of defending the world for democracy and the rule of law - which is why the British government is defying successive court rulings in favour of the cleansees.
Indeed Diego Garcia is the distilled essence of the "special relationship" between Britain and the US. The British government stole the islands from their own inhabitants and the Seychellois, and handed them over rent-free to the US in return for a discount on the Polaris submarines that in turn marked the end of the genuinely independent British deterrent that the post-war Labour government had strived for, and tied the country's fate almost inextricably to the US. It involved giving up Blue Streak, the successful rocket which would have allowed Britain to have a presence in space as well.
Harold McMillan, who did the Polaris deal, believed like Blair that Britain could be Athens to Washington's Rome. He had marginally better expectations of constructive results from John F Kennedy than Blair did from his diplomatic duet with George Bush. At the insistence of the latter, Blair over-rode decisions of British courts on letting the inhabitants of Diego Garcia return.
Surely it's time for a declaration of independence. The lease of Diego Garcia is up for renewal in 2016. Britain should let the islanders back immediately and let them take it over then and join the Seychelles if they wish. And it should drop the pretensions to "independent" nuclear power and give up on the Trident replacement. Any relationship that involves the country in violations of international human rights law is indeed "special", but it is not necessarily desirable.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Friday, February 22, 2008
Accept the Reality of Kosovo Independence
I will be on KPFA Monday morning 0705 LA Time on Kosovo but in the meantime, the latest production from the connect to reality production line.
From Tribune, 22 February
Accept the Reality of Kosovo Independence
THE bluster about the illegality of Kosovo independence begs some questions. If you want legality, perhaps someone should ask Moscow to point out the United Nations resolution that gave the Russian Federation the former Soviet Union’s permanent seat and veto on the Security Council. There isn’t one. Sometimes people find it best to accept reality.
In contrast, now that Kosovo has declared its independence, we can expect many people, including so-called socialists, to discover a sudden attachment to international law. Most of them were not such devoted defenders of it when Slobodan Milosevic was defying 50 UN resolutions and committing the crimes against humanity for which he eventually ended up on trial in The Hague.
With the same insouciance that Palme Dutt once dismissed Stalin’s crimes as “spots on the sun”, apologists for Milosevic overlook or dismiss the thousands of Kosovars killed by his regime when it was expelling almost a million Kosovars. In their own language, it is perhaps “no coincidence” that, for some tankies,the Kosovars were indiscrete in their choice of allies. They were supported reluctantly by Bill Clinton and forcibly by European democratic socialists, while their murderers had Moscow’s blessing.
In the course of this sun-spotting, one frequent claim was that “only” 2,000 were killed. In fact, double that number of slaughtered had already been unearthed. Since then, hundreds more have been discovered whose rotting bodies were carried in refrigerated trucks to be disposed of in Serbia. Proportional to the population of Kosovo, “only” 2,000 would the equivalent of 60,000 victims in Britain. Multiply by at least three and you realise why Kosovars refuse to be re-integrated into a Serbia whose leaders have yet to seriously admit that their forces did anything wrong.
Any rational point of view would suggest that such atrocities by Belgrade extinguished any residual claim of sovereignty over or loyalty from the Kosovars. When, in 1971, the Pakistani army staged mass killings and rapes of the Bengalis in East Pakistan, and foolishly took on India, it lost and Bangladesh seceded. Bangladesh became a member of the Commonwealth, recognised by almost 90 countries, and a member of many of the subsidiary bodies even before its first application – supported by Moscow – to join the UN became the occasion off Beijing’s first veto. In the end, reality triumphed. China and Pakistan dropped the veto in 1974.
When one hears so-called socialists denying the right to self-determination to a people, claiming that they are Jihadists or Islamo-fascists and asserting the right of Serbia to the land they live in because of ancient monasteries there, one can only wonder why they don’t rush off and join the church. In fact, not only are many Kosovars, Catholic and Orthodox, refreshingly few of them are very religious at all – as any visit to a Pristina café to drink the potent local raki would soon demonstrate.
There are some very bad Kosovars, and on the body count across the Balkans, in absolute terms there are even more murderous Serbs. But self-determination applies to all people, not just those whose morals we approve of. Kosovo does risk being a dysfunctional state, with a limited economy, a severe crime and smuggling problem, undeveloped institutions and a flourishing gangster class. That puts it on a par with about half the membership of the UN. Indeed, looking at the wars that Belgrade has visited on its neighbours, the black-marketing and profiteering that Milosevic made the bedrock of its economy, its failure to reform its security apparatus to the extent of arresting war criminals, one might question Serbia’s credentials for independence. At least Kosovo insists on EU supervision of its administration.
No one has produced any reasonable plan to show how, without massive repression, Serbia is to re-assert its sovereignty over a country, 90 per cent of whose population does not want it. One parallel would be a government in London deciding to hold on to Scotland by military force, despite a clear vote by the majority of its population for independence. And perhaps a closer parallel would be London deciding to take back Ireland based on a much longer political history of continuous sovereignty than Serbia can demonstrate over Kosovo. This is more about Serbian politicians pandering to the nationalist vote at home – which is where Milosevic began the road to Kosovar independence in 1989, when he withdrew the province’s autonomy.
Russia’s support for Serbia also smacks of playing the nationalist card at home. And the EU could steal its ace by telling the US to forget the plans for positioning radars and missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic in return for a more mature attitude from Moscow.
Serbia’s rulers should be told firmly but politely that when they stop posturing over the “illegality” of Kosovar independence and attend to the genuine illegality of harbouring mass murderers wanted in The Hague, they will have a bright future in an EU which has made formerly fortified frontiers administrative boundaries, and which has guaranteed minorities unprecedented rights.
From Tribune, 22 February
Accept the Reality of Kosovo Independence
THE bluster about the illegality of Kosovo independence begs some questions. If you want legality, perhaps someone should ask Moscow to point out the United Nations resolution that gave the Russian Federation the former Soviet Union’s permanent seat and veto on the Security Council. There isn’t one. Sometimes people find it best to accept reality.
In contrast, now that Kosovo has declared its independence, we can expect many people, including so-called socialists, to discover a sudden attachment to international law. Most of them were not such devoted defenders of it when Slobodan Milosevic was defying 50 UN resolutions and committing the crimes against humanity for which he eventually ended up on trial in The Hague.
With the same insouciance that Palme Dutt once dismissed Stalin’s crimes as “spots on the sun”, apologists for Milosevic overlook or dismiss the thousands of Kosovars killed by his regime when it was expelling almost a million Kosovars. In their own language, it is perhaps “no coincidence” that, for some tankies,the Kosovars were indiscrete in their choice of allies. They were supported reluctantly by Bill Clinton and forcibly by European democratic socialists, while their murderers had Moscow’s blessing.
In the course of this sun-spotting, one frequent claim was that “only” 2,000 were killed. In fact, double that number of slaughtered had already been unearthed. Since then, hundreds more have been discovered whose rotting bodies were carried in refrigerated trucks to be disposed of in Serbia. Proportional to the population of Kosovo, “only” 2,000 would the equivalent of 60,000 victims in Britain. Multiply by at least three and you realise why Kosovars refuse to be re-integrated into a Serbia whose leaders have yet to seriously admit that their forces did anything wrong.
Any rational point of view would suggest that such atrocities by Belgrade extinguished any residual claim of sovereignty over or loyalty from the Kosovars. When, in 1971, the Pakistani army staged mass killings and rapes of the Bengalis in East Pakistan, and foolishly took on India, it lost and Bangladesh seceded. Bangladesh became a member of the Commonwealth, recognised by almost 90 countries, and a member of many of the subsidiary bodies even before its first application – supported by Moscow – to join the UN became the occasion off Beijing’s first veto. In the end, reality triumphed. China and Pakistan dropped the veto in 1974.
When one hears so-called socialists denying the right to self-determination to a people, claiming that they are Jihadists or Islamo-fascists and asserting the right of Serbia to the land they live in because of ancient monasteries there, one can only wonder why they don’t rush off and join the church. In fact, not only are many Kosovars, Catholic and Orthodox, refreshingly few of them are very religious at all – as any visit to a Pristina café to drink the potent local raki would soon demonstrate.
There are some very bad Kosovars, and on the body count across the Balkans, in absolute terms there are even more murderous Serbs. But self-determination applies to all people, not just those whose morals we approve of. Kosovo does risk being a dysfunctional state, with a limited economy, a severe crime and smuggling problem, undeveloped institutions and a flourishing gangster class. That puts it on a par with about half the membership of the UN. Indeed, looking at the wars that Belgrade has visited on its neighbours, the black-marketing and profiteering that Milosevic made the bedrock of its economy, its failure to reform its security apparatus to the extent of arresting war criminals, one might question Serbia’s credentials for independence. At least Kosovo insists on EU supervision of its administration.
No one has produced any reasonable plan to show how, without massive repression, Serbia is to re-assert its sovereignty over a country, 90 per cent of whose population does not want it. One parallel would be a government in London deciding to hold on to Scotland by military force, despite a clear vote by the majority of its population for independence. And perhaps a closer parallel would be London deciding to take back Ireland based on a much longer political history of continuous sovereignty than Serbia can demonstrate over Kosovo. This is more about Serbian politicians pandering to the nationalist vote at home – which is where Milosevic began the road to Kosovar independence in 1989, when he withdrew the province’s autonomy.
Russia’s support for Serbia also smacks of playing the nationalist card at home. And the EU could steal its ace by telling the US to forget the plans for positioning radars and missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic in return for a more mature attitude from Moscow.
Serbia’s rulers should be told firmly but politely that when they stop posturing over the “illegality” of Kosovar independence and attend to the genuine illegality of harbouring mass murderers wanted in The Hague, they will have a bright future in an EU which has made formerly fortified frontiers administrative boundaries, and which has guaranteed minorities unprecedented rights.
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