Silk Road Stories

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August 2009, pages 38-40

Special Report
Uzbekistan: The Former Soviet Republic’s Silk Road Glory Days a Faded Memory
By Ian Williams

Bukhara’s Kalon Mosque and Minaret, from which condemned prisoners were thrown (photo I. Williams).

OTHERWISE unknown, the British Arabist diplomat James Elroy Flecker immortalized the Central Asian cities of the Silk Road with his poem, “The Golden Journey to Samarkand.” His merchants sing as their caravan embarks from Baghdad:

We travel not for trafficking alone:

By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:

For lust of knowing what should not be known

We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.

Symbolizing the antiquity of the Silk Road oases strung along the sere Central Asian desert is the Magok-i-Attari mosque in the Uzbekistan city of Bukhara. A palimpsest in brick, the mosque has served at different times throughout history as a Zoroastrian fire temple, Buddhist shrine, Arab mosque, Mogul tomb, and now a carpet museum with all the layers visible inside.

Even if they were not to be found in that building, Nestorian Christians and Bukharan Jews lived in the neighborhood as well. The latter are sometimes suggested to be the descendants of the converted Khazars, but even though there are now more of them in Brooklyn than in Bukhara they keep alive their own distinctive traditions—which include being custodians of Uzbekistan’s musical history. They left for opportunity, not because of persecution, and maintain friendly relations with the regime in Tashkent.

Over the millennia, Persian kings of kings, Alexander the Great and his generals, Sassanians, Arabs, Iranians, Mongols and most recently Russians have been through, leaving their marks behind them. For some untold centuries what is now Uzbekistan was a center of learning, where ideas passed to and from India and between China and the Arab lands along the Silk Road.

Although for thousands of years Uzbekistan has been a crossroads country, under its perpetually “re-elected” President Islam Karimov it has been stalled at the junction for almost two decades. As a result, for far too many Uzbeks the real golden road is the one that leads to construction jobs in Moscow, store counters in Qatar and kitchens and hotels in London. Getting out is the main aim of most of the educated young people we met.

This, however, requires a Soviet-style exit visa, as well as an entry visa to get into another country—which is no easy task, since the foreign consulates are well aware that there is more money to be made washing dishes in Brooklyn than in being a professor in Uzbekistan.

Uzbekistan’s President (seemingly for life) Karimov began his career as a loyal Soviet apparatchik and became an Uzbek nationalist almost inadvertently, when it became clear that Moscow was no longer interested. Thus the first secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan became the president of the independent republic and had to play off the various forces within the society. Essentially, he renamed the Communist Party, let Lenin lapse, but kept Leninist discipline.
A Fossilized Political Structure

* Samarkand, before and after restoration (photo I. Williams).

The regime’s political structure is fossilized in Soviet times, and since independence it has been more concerned about maintaining power than expanding the economy. At least on paper, it maintains all the pervasive regulation of communist times, such as the internal passports and exit visas for its citizens and registration for visitors, domestic or foreign. Rather than being the basis for an efficient police state, however, these regulations serve more as profit points for the government, which levies fees and fines for imprisonment, or, just as commonly, for the individual bureaucrat or police officer who will overlook their flouting for a bribe.

On the way out my wife was held at the airport in Tashkent for not registering her presence in her mother’s house with the local militia. They tried to shake her down for $20 or so (it would have been $700 for me, as a foreigner), but she pointed out that she had no money, two children, and a foreign husband—who was busily taking notes in the corner on his laptop. The inspector eventually sighed and entered in long hand in a big ledger that she had been warned.


* Wads of cash for a meal (photo I. Williams).



“Foreigners don’t understand these things,” my wife was told when we went for airline tickets and were told there were no seats available on the flight to Khiva. She was called back so the clerk could explain that for a small token of appreciation, $10 in fact, the tickets would suddenly be there. It would be pointless going to the police about it. The green-uniformed militiamen are everywhere, zealous in stopping drivers for real or imagined infractions, but every time one of my drivers was stopped, there was nothing that a dollar or so in bribes would not excuse.

In fact since the biggest banknote, a 1,000 soms, equals about 70 cents, it is an effective counterinflationary restraint on bribery. Even a restaurant bill involves bundles of notes looking like a Medellin cocaine transaction, so it would be difficult to pay larger bribes discreetly. As it is, the resigned citizenry looks upon them more in the nature of tolls and tips than amoral bribery.

Similarly, although the country has also preserved some aspects of the Soviet social net such as a universal health service, it is generally accepted that medical staff deserve something extra from the patients and their families to supplement their abysmal salaries. And while across the country the government is building new schools and universities, additional payments—bribes—to teachers and professors may be necessary if you want to graduate. I met alleged university lecturers in English who could not speak the language. Luckily I did not have to call upon the services of a recently graduated brain surgeon.
Karimov-Style Nationalism

* Colorful clothes and a traditional puppet show reflect Uzbekistan’s Silk Road heritage (photos I. Williams).

Insofar as there is an ideology for Karimov’s state, it is a resentful nationalism. While this does evoke a sympathetic response from a proud population, it is not enough for him to risk an election. Of all the ‘stans, the Uzbeks have been more intent to reassert their identity against the Russians. With the twin spurs of local chauvinism and economic immiseration driving them, most Russian expats have hightailed it for home. The Russian language is rapidly being replaced by Turkic Uzbek, which has adopted its fifth script in 70 years: from Arabic, to Roman, to Cyrillic, then to Turkish Roman and now to a more standard Roman script. (Karimov did not like the Turkish version.)

Replacing Lenin with Timurlaine as the national hero may have a certain gruesome appropriateness for those who consider the Bolshevik leader a ruthless mass murderer, but even so Timurlaine, the builder of skull pyramids and destroyer of cities, is not everyone’s idea of a 21st century icon. His wooden coffin is on display in the Samarkand museum—as part of a display of Uzbek woodwork!—but his body was reinterred in the lavishly restored Gur Emir, his tomb. Timurlaine’s statue has replaced Lenin’s in many of the de-Sovietized town squares.

Unlike neighboring Kazakhstan, whose nomadic Islam was worn lightly, the cities of Uzbekistan traditionally have been architectural and intellectual monuments to Islam—and the Gur Emir is just one of a huge complex of mosques, madrassas, and khans for wandering dervishes and merchants, and monuments.

With no reliable supplies of building stone nearby, the architects used mud brick for the massive but delicate piles, which they protected with ceramic tiles in predominately blue shades. Those huge minarets towering above the desert must have been like lighthouses for the caravans of two-humped Bactrian camels trudging their way through the scrub, although the biggest one in Bukhara served a more nefarious purpose: the emirs used to throw from the top condemned prisoners sewn in sacks. These are deservedly world heritage sites—the Registan in Samarkand is like having three cathedrals surrounding St Peter’s Square, but the buildings, while huge, are not intimidating. They are open and welcoming, with garden courtyards, wells and fountains to shield worshippers and travelers from the desert blasts outside.

In fact, most of the people in these cities of the Silk Road are actually Farsi-speaking Tadjiks, although most of them also speak Uzbek to avoid upsetting the new nationalism of the republic. Although ethnic Uzbeks in the north tend to combine impassivity of expression with generous hospitality, in Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva their welcoming smiles survived Soviet suspicion and Uzbek tradition. The great miracle and ice-breaker was our six-month-old, carried in a back harness—universally regarded as the greatest innovation in transport since the local camels got their extra hump.

But in Bukhara the local kids happily accepted our five-year-old in a soccer match in the shadow of the minaret from which malefactors were thrown. Much more welcoming, they made sure he had easy runs at the goal—he was a guest, after all!

Water is a big issue for Uzbekistan. When our friend who met us at the airport told us, “The water in Tashkent is quite good—you can drink it if you boil it,” we should have taken it as a warning. We saw what he meant at the Saramboy Choikhana, or teahouse, on the road between Khiva and Bukhara. Deep in the desert, the brackish water is trucked into this waystation for travelers on the long trek. The outhouse was two planks that ran into an open pit, visible and smellable just on the other side of the wall. Our driver recommended distillation before drinking the water, and bringing one’s own food.

Even Marco Polo in his day would have had problems with water on the road, but it has become worse for the same reason that the Aral Sea is now a shrinking pond whose former seabed is being blown toxically about the region, while the irrigation techniques are causing salination of croplands.
An Ecological Disaster

The water problem is a hangover of the Soviet era dependence on cotton, which in turn is dependent on massive irrigation works diverting rivers to the fields. Moscow is now blamed for this ecological disaster, since it is not often mentioned that Karimov was a leading figure in the Uzbek Communist Party when these environmental atrocities were perpetrated. He now must balance the immediate social and financial costs of curtailing the government’s main source of revenue—and the mainstay, albeit at not much above subsistence, of the rural population—against the long-term environmental costs.

The cotton industry epitomizes the handicaps of incomplete reform. While it once was large-scale, mechanized and industrialized, privatization led to small plots, and most cotton now is harvested by hand. In an odd hangover, schoolchildren and college students alike are forced to pick the crop, and their labor became increasingly vital as the former Soviet machinery broke down without the resources for replacement.

But the state buys the cotton at a fraction of the price it sells it on the world market. The state gets assured revenue but, in an overwhelmingly rural country, the results do not percolate down to the farmers. Quite apart from the pervasive anti-entrepreneurial bureaucracy and corruption, this hybrid private-commandism is no way to create a dynamic modern economy.

There is little sign of a Karimov personality cult, which is just as well—he is about as charismatic as you would expect a former Brezhnev-era apparatchik to be. The government is concerned about what its citizens do, not what they think. However, its paranoia reflects its own deep feelings of insecurity. When the citizens of Andijon dared to protest in 2005, up to two thousand of them were gunned down—and posthumously accused of being Muslim fundamentalists.

Indeed, any unauthorized prayer meetings or uncontrolled congregations will bring the robustly fatal hand of the secret police down on the heads of people deemed to be Islamic militants, a catch-all phrase which covers all dissident activity.

Since Uzbek nationalism contained a strong element of Islamic reaction to Soviet-era atheism, that involved setting up what is almost a state “church.” In the Soviet era, the few mosques and the seminary for training imams were under strict state control. They remained so under the new dispensation, but greatly expanded in numbers.

At prayer times, especially in Ferghana, the small neighborhood mosques are packed with men covering their heads with the chopon, the square, easily folding hat that is traditional Uzbek headgear. Interestingly, there is no provision at all for women to pray in the mosques.

As in Iran, however, the old Zoroastrian tradition of Noruz is still a major festival, so strong that even the ayatollahs have been unable to stamp out this pre-Islamic fire worshippers’ fest.

The older Sufi traditions of the Silk Road prevail in Uzbekistan, with few headscarves on the women, and a general liking for beer and vodka. Oddly enough, several hosts recommended Kyrgyz vodka as preferable to and safer than Uzbek spirits, although that was in Ferghana—a fast smuggler’s drive across the border to Kyrgyzstan.

Uzbekistan’s place on the Silk Road and away from the puritanical Wahabi tradition is reinforced by its ubiquitous brightly colored silks and woolen rugs. A bride’s dowry begins with chests full of bolts of silk, and furniture for homes is mostly carpets on the walls and floors, with silk-covered cushions around the walls.

Karimov’s security is reputedly provided, or at least boosted, by Israelis. Despite the Episcopalian Islam of most Uzbeks, the regime was the first in the region to recognize Israel, and one of the few in the world to vote alongside the U.S. and Israel on Middle Eastern issues. That was in the early days, however, when Tashkent tried to counterbalance Moscow with Washington. Human rights issues put the brake on that rapprochement, but after 9/11, Karimov happily booked a seat on the Islamic Fundamentalist bandwagon. Casting itself as in the front line in the war against terrorism, like so many other autocratic regimes, any dissidence was conflated with fundamentalism and terrorism.

Location is everything in geopolitics. Being at the crossroads of Central Asia, and sitting on vast reservoirs of natural gas, gives a president for life a strong hand. After throwing out the Americans when they protested the Andijon massacre, Karimov is now being rewarded with overtures from Washington—not least since Kyrgyzstan took the Russian ruble to throw out its American base. (U.S. blandishments seem to have succeeded, however, as Kyrgystan’s parliament approved in late June an agreement allowing the base to remain open.) Karimov is under similar blandishments and pressure from Russia, while keeping close relations with China. The president seems happier now that he can use Beijing as another counterweight to Moscow—and happier still that he can use both to counter Western concerns about human rights.

Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations and has a blog at .
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WTC, 9-11, memories

I wrote this for a London magazine which in the end spiked it, as I remember for a piece by a close friend of the editor who was distressed by the smoke from a vantage point at the opposite end of the island. So here it is. In memoriam.
Ian



September 2001

I moved from midtown to lower Manhattan in late August 2001. South Street Sea Port seemed like home to someone who left Liverpool twelve years before. Indeed in some ways I had hardly left. The plaque on the esplanade mentioned that it built on rubble landfill from blitzed London that returning supply ships used as ballast.. Those ships actually came from bombed Liverpool. I’d used it to illustrate my thesis that American civilian experience of war was vicarious and inaccurate compared with that of Europeans, even younger ones like me brought up playing in bomb sites and listening to tales of evacuations and bomb shelters from older family members.

I had developed a routine in the new apartment. A brisk cycle ride round the southern tip of the island, past Battery Park and up the new bike up the Hudson that begins by running through the dark valley between the World Trade Centre and the World Financial Centre. On the morning of September 11, I began my day as usual by checking my email as I swigged my first mug of tea, sitting, I must confess, in stark naked comfort.

The email brought several promising commissions, and so I decided to postpone my daily ride, even though the blue skies and equable temperature outside promised one of New York’s few sweet spots between its more customary extremes of frigidity and torridity. Instead I began work on an article for Punch, on the underlying wobbliness of the American economy.

I had written “The” was when I heard the bang. It sounded like a building collapsing, so I ran to the window to look out. The fish porters from the Fulton market were standing in the square of Peck Slip staring up as if at the Second Coming. I pulled on clothes and ran down with a cell phone, recorder, binoculars and a camera. If this wa sindeed the second coming, it was the early stages, the arrival of Satan on Earth. The World Trade Centre’s north tower had an exit wound some three quarters of the way up, with flames erupting from the north east corner , and thick black smoke framing the brightness.

“Look there’re people jumping” a woman shouted in anguish. As far as I could see, what she thought were people was in fact metal siding drifting downwards on the wind. However, my reassurance was premature: shortly afterwards, that’s just what people trapped in the upper floors began doing.

I began trying to call various newsrooms on my cell phone, to no avail. Either everyone else in Lower Manhattan was hitting their dial buttons at the same time, or, I suspected, the antennae were on top of the Twin Towers.

I ran inside to call from my desk phone, but Canadian Broadcasting’s Toronto newsroom was already calling. Ducking between my fire escape platform and the phone, I began to tell them what was happening. The other tower exploding at a slightly lower level. Then the apocalyptic crash as it collapsed.

Up the East River Drive, the FDR. I could see along the shore line as ambulances, fire trucks and police cars fought the rush hour traffic to get closer. Then the evacuees began to trudge by. I had seen refugees in war zones before, but to see endless columns of necktied office workers was a new experience. Most of them marched onwards stolidly without a backward glance, perhaps not realizing that this stretch of their route offered a direct view of the disaster they were fleeing.

On the Brooklyn Bridge, the marching files were silhouetted against the sky like a scene from an Eisenstein film. But then, even those who still stood transfixed in the square had no view. A white cloud, like Pliny’s description of Vesuvius spread from the tower. Heavy choking white ash which fell like snow over the area. By then, most of the rubber neckers had joined the majority marching out the city. A few optimistic ones tried to stop yellow cabs, which sensibly wanted nothing to do with them: just to get out.

In the square some young Indian women had lost their shoes in the rush, and were bleeding from head wounds. My girlfriend invited them to wash off in the bathroom and phone relatives before setting off. A young African man, probably illegal since he did not want to give his name, waited anxiously. He’d been taking his three year old son to pre-school and had lost him in the stampede. In one of the day’s happy stories, he found him, intact at the nearby hospital where some passer by had taken him. He stood in the square in front of us, hugging him thankfully and staring at the column of smoke that marked the site.

I’d been describing the scene from my fire escape for CBC in Toronto, who told me to stand by for ninety seconds for “local announcements.” As they did so, the second tower collapsed. It was the first time I lost my calm. I bellowed down the phone, cursing them and telling them what to do with their local announcements, but to no avail. I had to hold the line open as it was transferred from editor to editor, producer to producer, mostly ignoring the call waiting signals which represented the more successful attempts of friends and family to check on our safety. As the news spread, inward circuits were blocked as people across the world tried to do the same.

A second cloud headed across Manhattan, adding more white ash to the dust that drifted like snow across downtown. By now I was recounting the morning’s events for the BBC, while wrestling with an illustrative side issue. I had mentioned to another editor earlier that Mayor Rudy Giuliani had built his $16 million dollar command and control centre for emergencies and disasters in the World Trade Centre. She commissioned an immediate piece.

I thought it was a potent metaphor for the inefficacy of expensive Star Wars defence systems against this type of attack and spent several hours alternating between radio interviews by phone and checking my memories. It was true. The “bunker,” widely derided as a grandiose folly when it was built, was indeed on the 23rd floor of number 7 WTC, already aflame and later to collapse.

I clicked the send button and as the call volume fell, the adrenalin aftershock set in. Coughing and hoarse with dust and talking, I decided I could take it no longer. I had to go to see what was happening closer to the scene.

The Pompeii parallels became more apt outside. On Fulton Street, the local deli’s display of flowers was shrouded in ash. A fish porter’s breakfast lay in its foil tray, similarly coated, and the little mobile hot dog stands stood abandoned, their bagels and buns buried in a drift of grey dust.

Smoke streamed across towards Brooklyn, and the emergency vehicles stirred up dust devils as if on a desert road as they sped through the police lines to the epicentre. Looking straight down Fulton St, I expected to see a stump, a pyramid of rubble. But who’d a thought the old towers had so little substance in them. It was clear that despite the column of smoke, there was nothing to be seen.

I could flee, or carry on working. Firstly I wanted to pay my debts so we went to the downtown hospital to give blood. They were not accepting it, and what’s more, there was what I thought of as a “fee fo fi fum” warning out. The blood of Englishmen smelt of mad cow disease and was not acceptable.

So brandishing a tape recorder I approached Alex MacLain, a junior doctor at NYU hospital. She had been on duty forty hours, recalled just as she was leaving. She described an early rush of burn victims, “glove injuries,” she said, and explained. “Like one woman came in, and all the skin on her arm and shoulder came off.” Then there was a rush of impact injuries and fractures: followed by an ominous hiatus. She had come to the corner of Fulton St to see what was happening.

As we spoke, behind us I could the lighthouse shaped Titanic monument. In front of us the world was ending in fire, not ice. Coughing despite the masks that the local hospital was distributing, I suddenly had a terrible thought. We were breathing people. There was no way that everyone could have escaped. This smoke, these ashes, were from a massive funeral pyre: the Windows on the World had become a peephole into Hell.

Blowing around in the ashes, the memories of the world’s life were flashing by in form of charred and chewed papers. Plans for environmental projects financed by Wall Street bonds, cheques for unimaginable numbers of zeroes, bunkering invoices from Pakistan, Japanese investment reports, and personnel files. I learned from a police deposition that a Ms Watkins earned $500 a day in a massage parlour, charging $40 for a hand job, $80 for oral sex and $150 for full sex. But it had done her little good since her pimp took the lot. Down by Wall St, in front of Federal Hall, where George Washington was proclaimed the first president, his statue overlooked his handiwork, his hair appropriately powdered like a Georgian wig for the first time in two centuries.


The NYPD working press pass says it entitles the bearer to cross police lines. It had never worked before, so I was not surprised to be greeted with customary brusqueness when I probed the police perimeter to get closer. I moved south and discovered a motley Dunkirk style line of tour boats and tug boats at Battery Park, waiting for evacuees. It was a weak link in the cordon and I sidled through.

On the Hudson side of Manhattan, the debris, smashed vehicles and even deeper ashes made for an even more apocalyptic scene. We were closer and the wind blew from the west into the fire, giving a clearer view of the firefighters trying to control the blaze in the surrounding buildings. Next to us, lines of hoses led from the fireboats which normally only seemed to provide water displays for the visiting cruise liners. Now they were pumping thousands of tons of Hudson water into the ruins.

I lent my cell phone to several exhausted firemen, checking on children, wives and friends. Someone had forced open a local Deli, and they were helping themselves to water and snacks. Even though it was technically looting, no one took more than they needed, except one young man, who looked like a local resident. He helped himself to a pack of cigarettes, paused, and then took two more. Tobacco does that to a person, I thought, even as I wondered at an ash covered fireman who came out with a huge lit cheroot in his mouth. How much smoke can you take!

Another fireman came out of the store. Caked in dust and sweat, he was voraciously stuffing a banana into his mouth in between gulps of water. He looked around with a sort of pugnacious puzzlement at the ash, the debris, the mud, and the smoke. “Can you believe it?” he asked me, “I’m looking for a fucking garbage can!” He threw the peel at the ashes on the floor as if it were a demonstration against the lack of civilization in the neighbourhood.

One of the firemen who had used my phone was telling me bitterly “you know, three hundred of guys got caught when they collapsed.” He then said. “I don’t want to offend anyone, but we just gotta go in and nuke the whole fucking Middle East now.” It was timely reminder. It was early days, and no one had fingered the perpetrators, but somehow, I didn’t want to remind him of Timothy MacVeigh and the anti Arab hysteria that the media had perpetrated before it had happened.

It was now eight hours from the first crash. I had enough local colour, and thought that I was in danger of degenerating from a reporter to a rubbernecker, so I decided to make my way back and file. I headed south only to meet a more than usually implacable police cordon on the Hudson River promenade, “Get on the boat, “they said. pointing to a tug whose bow was nudging the sea wall. “No thanks I said politely,” waving my press card. “You have to. It’s dangerous.”

“I’m press- it’s my job to take risks. I’ve been in Beirut and Balkans. No one’s shooting at me here, I told him, brandishing my press card.
“Get on, or we put you on. We already put two of you guys on.” he said with “make my day” relish. The tug took us to New Jersey, and dropped us at a pier with large signs saying “Condemned structure. No trespassing.” I had no idea how to get back into Manhattan to file, or to wash or change for that matter.

The view from the boat was almost worth it. The Sun setting behind us was lighting up the intact windows of lower Manhattan as if they too were on fire, and tingeing the column of smoke with an appropriately bloody hue. All weekend I had been sailing on the Hudson from the Manhattan Yacht Club out of the North Cove in the shadow of the WTC. We had used the two towers as our navigation aids as we practiced tacking up and down the Harbour. Their absence was even more striking. And I remembered, so was that of my fellow crew member, a Brit I had met for the first time, who had just arrived and was working on the 25 floor of one of the towers. He only had an office number. Death moved from wholesale to personal.

In New Jersey, waiting on the pier were police, paramedics, Red Cross, waited for casualties. They had spent hours watching the pyre burn across the Hudson: they wanted desperately to help, but we were disappointments for their eleemosynary instincts, deportees more than evacuees. The lines of ambulances and doctors waiting on the other side, no casualties emerged, except as smoke.

Hours later, a train from New Jersey to midtown, and a long hike down the East River side brought us home. The police manned checkpoints on all the roads, but as so often in New York the bike paths and foot paths are invisible to drivers. The police overlooked the route along the esplanade, and it became my own personal route for several days. At home, the power was gone, so were the phone lines. And a week later they still were.

Downtown reminded me of divided Berlin or Beirut. To the North of the police perimeter, there were bright lights, shops, bars and restaurants open for teeming crowds. To the south the inhabitants stumbled about in the dark. If they trudged North to resupply, they were shaken down at innumerable checkpoints by a motley array of military and police uniforms. I suspect, despite rather than because of them, there was little of the looting or lawlessness that the stereotype of New York City would suggest. The only vehicles moving were official vehicles with flashing lights on top. Looking for light relief, I suggested ”Hey, if aliens were looking on, they’d think it was the lights made them move!”

At the end of the week, the Police commissioner reported that crime was way down. Even the criminal classes rose to the occasion. Radio reports dwelt on the few crimes. A man appropriated a fireman’s jacket, a retired warder stole some watches while someone else broke into Brooks Brothers. Brooks Brothers! Did he need a suit to start work on Monday? One thing was sure. He would pay some small part of the price for the absent perpetrators when the courts opened.

Our recently stocked refrigerator was thawing rapidly. On the first night, exhausted , dusty and thirsty I made an executive decision was made. There was a bottle of champagne in the fridge still cool. We knocked it back before it could warm and sank into fitful sleep, punctuated by long vigils at the window watching as the first convoys of armoured cars and troops arrived along the FDR, and noting the absence of ambulances among the sporadic bursts of traffic.

We began an ironic tribute to Paris Zoo menu from the siege of 1870. A born again carnivore with a cholesterol problem, I had stocked up on venison, buffalo burgers and ostrich loin. No fricassee of elephant trunk at the back of the freezer, but we ate our way through the rest.

Just around the corner, our problem was writ large, much larger in fact. There was no power for the Fulton Street fish market, where millions of dollars worth of fish waited in freezers without power. Never particularly sweet smelling, I quailed at the thought of their eventual exhumation.

Two days later, the police allowed in generators for them, and trucks to ship some out. I went down to check. “Is this fish being dumped or sol?” “It’s still in ice, it’s fine,” they told me, as I made a mental note to drop fish from my menu for a few weeks. In a way, it was a reassuring sign of the return of the commercial impulse. One bleak reminder of the shock of the tragedy was that no umbrella sellers appeared on the streets to sell their wares when the rain of dust fell. After two days, in China town, a store keeper was selling visitors photo postcards of the explosions at 2 for three dollars. And of course there were flags, a dollar each.

The flags began to appear two days later. CBC wanted a series of interviews for their local stations, so I got up at 6 and went down to the river side so my cell phone could get a strong signal from across the East River in Brooklyn. Half an inch of rain had fallen, and more was bucketing down I shuddered at the thought of the murky slurry that the rescuers would be working in.

In the grey morning light, the low clouds obscured the smoke and the rain even quelled the ubiquitous smell and dust. Under the shelter of the elevated highway, life had returned to normal. Elderly Chinese from nearby Chinatown did their exercises, and one solitary man brandished a sword in an intricate series of balletic movements. He did not pause as a column of a steel workers formed up in bright yellow water proofs and hard hats with their union Local number written on the side. Led by a large stars and stripes they headed south into the inferno.

About a dozen homeless usually live in the vicinity and four of them who seemed to make a virtual family were inspired to mount their own surreal march. Pushing the one in a wheel chair, they paraded with a placard, “United We Stand, Divided We Fall. New York City/The World.” Pausing in between radio interviews, I asked “Why?” “Gotta a ciggy?” one replied in an London accent. “No, sorry!” I apologized as the phone rang, from, of all places, Iquiluit in the Inuit new territories.

I’ve never understood flag fetishism, but I could see why people would want to respond. Over the next few days, the flags proliferated, but in almost reverse proportion to the distance from what the news reports were calling Ground Zero. “Positive patriotism” is all too often sullied with Xenophobia, which is never an exact science. Maronite Churches were firebombed along with Sikh temples. Maronite and Sikh enthusiasm for Islam, let alone Islamic fundamentalism, has been historically someone tenuous, as anyone should know. But few voters in the world’s only superpower ever take time to study the world, which was perhaps precisely why I was standing in a disaster zone.

Another friend called, with semi light relief, but again with a dark side.

His friend Mohammed worked in a restaurant where 11 of the 14 waiters were also called Mohamed. They used their colleges as names. “Hi Princeton! Hi Columbia!” He was earnestly seeking advice on how to change his name. Quickly

You could almost tell how foreign a storekeeper, or a yellow cab driver felt from how many flags they are flying or sticking like talismans on their doors and windows. And the more I spoke to people, I could see solid reasons for the fear. “Someone must be punished,” is a universal cry. I did a radio interview for the left wing station Pacifica in California. The anchorman on the other side of the continent said “We have to punish them.” Inhaling the smoke from what was after all a near miss for me personally, I asked, “ How do you punish eighteen people who have just killed themselves? And if they had accomplices, can you trust the ideologues round this administration, the Cheneys and Rumsfeldts, to identify the real perpetrators rather than use the opportunity to hit at their own perverse enemies’ list?”

I could trust Powell, who knows that even gestures have their price, but the others worried me. Each day, the news brought more suggestions of right wing wish lists being tacked across the stable door after the Trojan horse had already exploded. More wire taps, tougher immigration, more defence spending, and calls for action all the more ominous for being so nebulously targeted.

I had seen the best side of New York and America in the long lines of volunteers, the heroism of the rescuers, the donations of food, clothes, and money and the flood of resources available when the will was there. But the urge to do something could be as innocuous as standing on street corners with candles, or it could lead to applause for the incineration of other faraway cities of which they know or care little.

As Sunday drew on, Mayor Giuliani opened the way to Wall St. Back to normalcy. Radio advertisements told Americans that the way to show their patriotism was to show their support for American companies. “Buy Stock,” the broker harangued. I did a double take: it was genuine, not some subversive parody. And within sniffing distance, an army of rescuers used muscle power to sift the still smouldering ruins, looking with almost certain futility for survivors among the five thousand lives snuffed out in less than an hour on bright sunny morning in Manhattan.

When the Enemy Attacks....

A life under fire for Ban Ki-moon
By Ian Williams

Asia Times September 10th

WASHINGTON - United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon has been under attack in the Anglo-American press. This is perhaps why, despite a recent global poll [1] showing him to be the second-most popular political figure in the world after President Barack Obama, his ratings are not so glowing in the United States and Britain.

In August, the leak of a negative assessment from Norwegian deputy ambassador to the UN, Mona Juul, seemed to suggest that the criticism extended beyond the Anglo-Saxon neo-liberal consensus, but its effect was rather countered by a previous Norwegian invitation to the secretary general. Norway provided the UN's first secretary general, Trygve Lie, and helped organize Ban


Ki-Moon's visit to the North Pole last week to see the effects of climate change.

The Norwegian leak is puzzling. Unsourced, relying on gossip and clippings from conservative press outlets, the "highly confidential" report [2] to the Norwegian Foreign Ministry was relentlessly negative, calling Ban "spineless and charmless".

However, for UN insiders, its effect was somewhat mitigated by the recent, unsuccessful but active interest of its author, Juul, in an assistant secretary general's job under the same direly assessed Ban. That her husband, Terje Rod-Larsen's expectations of a UN position had also been allegedly frustrated by Ban did not add to her credibility.

Half-way through Ban's first term there is indeed room for a critical assessment of the former South Korean foreign minister, but the sources cited by Juul in her report bear similar examination of their motivation. For many of them, like Rupert Murdoch's London Times or the National Interest's Jacob Heibrunn - who wrote a blistering assault on Ban in Foreign Policy magazine (which in fact looked like the main reference for Juul's report) - the UN is always wrong.

Indeed, their attacks could suggest that Ban has in fact outgrown the do-nothing role that former US envoy to the UN John Bolton allegedly scripted for him on his election. This has led to him joining the long line of UN secretaries general to be excoriated by the conservative press for not following orders.

There are many odious comparisons made with former secretary general Kofi Annan, whose charisma is contrasted with Ban's. In fact, to some observers, Annan was not "charismatic" in the real sense of the word. His soft-spoken oratory style was not aimed at firing up the masses, despite the intensive efforts from his team. Rather he was "numinous". A charismatic leader can incite people to run over a cliff: Annan's demeanor reassured people that he would never allow that to happen. He exuded trust. And while he stood by his principles, he was no more forward in seeking out gratuitous enemies than Ban is.

One may remember that Annan drew down furious conservative fire for suggesting, under pressure from a BBC interviewer, that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was illegal (as did, incidentally, the late senator Ted Kennedy). But he had not exactly used the bully pulpit on which he stood to push that view.

Many analysts beleive Ban is most certainly not "charmless and spineless". He is remarkably affable, charming and has shown strong attachment to principle - which may be one reason for the neo-liberal disaffection. He went on the hustings to campaign for the seat and while running explicitly avowed support for the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) concept - a new international doctrine on the responsibility of sovereign states and the international community to protect civilians from mass atrocity crimes - and the International Criminal Court. Neither of these moves were calculated to win the affections of president George W Bush or Bolton, who were in office at the time - nor indeed of China. He has maintained those stands, and recently steered the R2P concept away from the shipwreck planned for it by the Nicaraguan president of the General Assembly.

Since taking office, he has made climate change his pet issue - once again not music to the ears of his original Republican nominators, nor the Chinese, and he has not eschewed berating the powers for not taking it seriously.

It was hardly spineless to chide the US for being a "deadbeat" over its UN dues arrears, as he did this year, and even if there is no direct causal relationship, he cannot be accused of sabotaging diplomatic efforts. The US is now paying up. In London, he was one of the major players in the successful incorporation of the needs of the developing world into the global stimulus response.

And just as Annan excited obloquy for going to Baghdad to avert a war, Ban is now under fire for going to Myanmar to persuade the junta to see sense. The recent Western style of what passes for leadership is that politicians will not take any steps until they are assured of success. Historically, this is not very effective. Ban went to Myanmar with the support of the UN Security Council, and returned to its applause. He had after all successfully pressed the murderously myopic junta into accepting foreign assistance after Typhoon Nargis in 2008. It is surely better to risk his reputation by trying than by keeping out in case it failed.

Where he has shown the most rapid learning curve has been on the Middle East. As South Korean foreign minister, surrounded by Japan, Russia, China and the US, not to mention North Korea, it is understandable that the issue was not top of his agenda. Under those circumstances, it is not totally remarkable that his initial stands took the Israeli point of view. Ironically, he deepened and consummated the purge of "Arabists" at UN headquarters who upheld UN resolutions, which Rod-Larsen had attempted under Kofi Annan.

However, even without them, exposure to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and reality on the ground seems to have brought him a long way towards the UN view on the issue. Although his burying of the recent report he had commissioned on Israeli actions in Gaza is part of a long secretariat tradition of protecting Israel and shows that he still has some way to go.

There are valid criticisms of Ban's administration, but in fact he has shown other signs of learning from experience. Part of the problem is indeed cultural. He suffers in the West from his "Confucian" background, which avoids public, and thus newsworthy, confrontations. However, aides and others report that in closed rooms with leaders he can be very forthright. One might think that "kick and tell" was not a desirable trait in the world's arch-diplomat, but the Western press differ. Despite his affability and accessibility to the media, Ban's refusal to deliver controversy or sound bites appears like evasiveness to the Western media.

Annan achieved great amplification by allowing his team to speak freely and occasionally controversially on major issues. One only has to think of former deputy secretary general Mark Malloch Brown's eminently reportable speeches and comments or former under secretary general Shashi Tharoor's ubiquity in the media. Disownable if they went too far, their media presence enhanced Annan's.

However, Ban's uncollegial administrative style and, in some cases inept appointments, have muffled his genuine achievements. All secretary general's have to be cliquish: their senior officials are foisted upon them by the permanent five (P5) and by major donors and under the circumstances it is remarkable how independent of their sponsors many of them are.

As a result, at the UN kitchen, cabinets are the name of the game. In Ban's case, it is a very small, Korean kitchen. He has appointed some very able senior officers who should really be encouraged to speak out more. He certainly needs to reassure UN staff that "thought-crime" will not result in the termination of the short-term contracts on which far too many of them are working - and contrarily, like all previous incumbents he needs to show that long-term contracts for incompetents can and will be terminated.

That a South Korean should be so popular in Japan and China indicates some serious diplomatic talents, as does his public espousal of views that irritate the permanent members on whom his second term depends.

Somehow, he has to combine the style that allows him to do that with the presence that moves the hearts and minds of other publics. But if the neo-liberals and unilateralists in the English language press attack him, it is worth considering that he may well be moving in the right direction.

Notes
1. Obama Rockets to Top of Poll on Global Leaders WorldPublicOpinion.org, June 29, 2009.
2. Norwegian UN diplomat slams Ban Ki-moon Foreign Policy, August 21, 2009.

Ian Williams is the author of Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Past, (Nation Books, New York).

(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

Blood on Hands

Readers can check my original article, Chomsky's response, my rebuttal, and his response to this, which explain the somewhat uncharitable tone I adopt in this. For some reason, having someone who is "objectively" making excuses for mass murder in the Balkans accusing me of having blood on my hands, vexes me.
Ian Williams


Response to Chomsky II

Ian Williams | September 8, 2009

Editor: John Feffer


Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

I look hard but fail to see a moral or logical compass in Chomsky's fast and loose recital of dates and deaths. In the end, his argument reduces to two basic principles. If someone other than the United States commits mass murder they did so with American encouragement, and so the guilt is ultimately Washington's. Or they did it in response to American actions, which either exonerates them or in some way mitigates their crime.

The second principle is that intervention to stop mass murder is wrong — particularly if the only powers with the economic and military strength for effective intervention, i.e. the "imperialist" powers, are behind it.

I am well aware of the dangers of humanitarian intervention as a doctrine. It was I, after all, who recorded the comment of a UN legal officer at the time of the Kurdish crisis post-Desert Storm, that the only legal precedent for "humanitarian intervention" was Hitler's invocation of the plight of Sudeten Germans.

However, the Axworthy Commission, whose consideration of the issue laid the groundwork for the Responsibility to Protect principle adopted at the 2005 UN General Assembly, considered those dangers and recommended a set of tests to avert politically expedient abuses of the principle — which, incidentally, clearly cut the legs off Blair's retrospective attempt to justify the Iraqi invasion as humanitarian intervention.

Like surgery, humanitarian intervention is only to be used as a last resort, but it is occasionally beneficial. I agree with Chomsky's comment to David Barsamian in Class Warfare: "I don't think you can give a general principle about when the use of military force is legitimate. It depends on what the alternatives are. So there are circumstances in which maybe that's just the least bad of the available circumstances. You just have to look at things on a case-by-case basis. There are some general principles one can adhere to, but they don't lead to specific conclusions for every conceivable case." But the professor doesn't seem to agree with himself. In this context, Chomsky is a political Seventh Day Adventist, opposed to military intervention in absolute dogmatic terms. Such attachment to state sovereignty is touching for him and his acolytes — but it suggests that their appeals to traditions of left internationalism are spurious at best and disingenuous at worst.

In Chomsky's Alice in Wonderland world, causality has been reversed: NATO intervenes to stop massacres and is accused of precipitating them. By the same looking-glass logic, my agreement with the UN General Assembly that the international community has a responsibility to prevent mass murders such as those perpetrated in East Timor, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sudan, and Rwanda, puts "blood on my hands" — and, according to at least one Chomskyite acolyte, makes me an "apologist for mass murder."

For a sense of Chomsky's own relaxed attitude about such mass murders, one just has to look at his breathtaking comments about Kosovo: "Up until the US/NATO bombing March 24th, there had been, according to NATO, 2,000 people killed on all sides, and a couple of hundred thousand refugees. Well, that's bad, that's a humanitarian crisis, but unfortunately it's the kind you can find all over the world." "Shit happens" seems to be Chomsky's motto to excuse his insouciance about other people's suffering — if they had the misfortune to be killed by an inappropriate enemy.

Chomsky has a neo-imperialist position of his own, disdaining the views of the victims. That is why in Pristina there are streets named after Clinton and Blair, but you would probably have to go to Belgrade to find a Chomsky Boulevard.

Apologizing for Milosevic's crimes in Bosnia and Kosovo, Chomsky pontificates that "much more shocking are Williams' continued efforts to deny U.S.-UK crimes in East Timor." Since he so often refers me to his writings, I take the liberty of referring him to mine, where I have regularly raised the question of U.S. involvement both at the United Nations and elsewhere. In contrast to Chomsky, however, at no point did I assume that the crimes of the United States, whether in East Timor or in Cambodia, in any way excused or mitigated the crimes of the Indonesian military or the Khmer Rouge.

In his cynical employment of the tragedy of East Timor against international action to stop Milosevic, Chomsky disdains the views of East Timorese leader Jose Ramos-Horta, whom I frequently interviewed over the years of the Timorese struggle and who, in his politically impure concern for humanity, was at the time calling for intervention both in Kosovo and in his own country, precisely to redress the actions of previous American interventions.

This leads neatly to Chomsky's accusation that I do not understand "the difference between 'perpetrate' and 'precipitate.'" He really should quote General Wesley Clark less selectively. The general considered that he had good reason to believe that Milosevic was going to kill more Kosovars whatever the response, and wanted to stop him.

More to the point, Chomsky is once again evading the issue. A linguist should know better. I can indeed tell the difference between perpetrating and precipitating. His use of "precipitating" in this context is an outstanding example of the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc: after this, so because of it. Hence, all the atrocities that followed the bombing are to be attributed to the bombing. Once again, he is faulty both in logic and in fact.

As Human Rights Watch reported about Serbian government actions in 1998, before the NATO attacks:

Some of the worst atrocities to date occurred in late September, as the government's offensive was coming to an end. On September 26, eighteen members of an extended family, mostly women, children, and elderly, were killed near the village of Donje Obrinje by men believed to be with the Serbian special police. Many of the victims had been shot in the head and showed signs of bodily mutilation. On the same day, thirteen ethnic Albanian men were executed in the nearby village of Golubovac by government forces...

The government offensive was an apparent attempt to crush civilian support for the rebels. Government forces attacked civilians, systematically destroyed towns, and forced thousands of people to flee their homes. One attack in August near Senik killed seventeen civilians who were hiding in the woods. The police were seen looting homes, destroying already abandoned villages, burning crops, and killing farm animals.

The majority of those killed and injured were civilians. At least 300,000 people were displaced, many of them women and children now living without shelter in the mountains and woods. In October, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) identified an estimated 35,000 of the displaced as particularly at risk of exposure to the elements. Most were too afraid to return to their homes due to the continued police presence.

And since Chomsky is so fond of the testimony of military men, perhaps he should refer to the testimony of General Naumann about the meeting he and Clark had with Milosevic when they were delivering the NATO ultimatum, and the latter looked forward to a "final solution" for the Kosovars, invoking the 1946 Drenica massacres, where, he obliging explained, "We got them all together and we shot them."

Equally unsustainably, and one might add, pointlessly, Chomsky avers that "the crimes in East Timor — carried out with decisive U,S,-UK support throughout — were vastly greater than anything charged in Bosnia, coming as close to authentic genocide as anything in the modern period."

While the professor blithely elides time to shape his polemic, the estimate total number of deaths in East Timor resulting from actions of the Indonesian army and its militia proxies in 1999 was 1,400 — around one tenth of Milosevic's butcher's bill in Kosovo the same year.

As for comparing East Timor and Bosnia, the truth and reconciliation commission in East Timor calculated that approximately 18,600 civilians were killed or disappeared between 1974 and 1999, 70% of them at the hands of the Indonesians and their surrogates. Additionally, at least 84,200 people died from hunger or disease resulting from the Indonesian occupation. The figure may be as high as 183,000.

In Bosnia at least 39,000 civilians were killed or disappeared between 1991 and 1995, 86% of them at the hands of the Serb forces. Additionally, over 57,000 soldiers died as a result of Milosevic's ambitions. These figures do not take into account people who died indirectly, of hunger or disease, as a result of the conflict.

The numbers cannot meaningfully be called "vastly" different, but the numbers do not affect the moral issue at stake. Mass murder is wrong — whoever commits it and regardless of the relative size. Those East Timorese did not die to make a rhetorical rod for ivory-tower polemicists to beat other victims. In Chomsky's ghoulish calculus, East Timor was worse than the Balkans, so failure to act and indeed even encouragement in the one precludes anyone acting to stop the other. This is a complete non sequitur.

Chomsky says that "it would have been outlandish" to raise that question of intervention in East Timor, and I did not do so." In fact, he did, in The New Military Humanism, where he complains that "no call has been heard from the New Humanists for withdrawal of Indonesian military forces or for sending a meaningful UN observer force." Indeed, he is doubly inaccurate, since there were many such calls, in response to which the Australians — with a fairly dire record of their own in East Timor — did intervene.

When I say that Clinton's role in East Timor deserves some "some grudging credit," Chomsky upgrades this measured assessment to unqualified "praise" for Clinton's termination of U.S. participation in the aggression and atrocities. He continues, "By Williams' logic, he should praise Russia for intervening in Afghanistan by withdrawing its troops in 1989." Well, yes, one does "praise" — or at least acknowledge something positive about — governments for doing the right thing eventually, even Clinton, whose reluctance to intervene in Rwanda and Bosnia caused untold suffering and whose public renunciation of ground force intervention in Kosovo at the beginning of the crisis did so much to hearten Milosevic. And yet Chomsky ignores my criticism of the bombing campaign as counterproductive, a function of Clinton's unwillingness to risk U.S. troops.

Chomsky persistently evades the issue of the direct responsibility of the regime in Belgrade for carrying out the massacres in Kosovo. In fact, he also evades the core issue that motivated the framers of the Responsibility to Protect: When faced with a recidivist regime massacring civilians, what is the appropriate response of the international community? The Genocide Convention, and indeed arguably the Apartheid Convention, both created a duty, a responsibility, for signatories to act, but they clearly were not enough (not least, admittedly, because of Anglo-American complicity in South Africa).

In my original article, I gave Chomsky credit for admitting — as so many of his acolytes have refused to do — Milosevic's murderous nature. But he still has not suggested how Milosevic's crimes might have been stopped, or indeed whether they should have been. Perhaps Chomsky imagines that he can evade his own responsibility with such Pilatean hand-washing. But every time he refuses to answer the question, his hands would in Macbeth's words "rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red."

Such a burden of responsibility kept Macbeth awake at night. I hope that Chomsky loses some sleep over it occasionally.

Senior Foreign Policy In Focus analyst Ian Williams is a journalist and author. Much of his work can be found on his blog, Deadline Pundit.

Obama and ME Peace

And do get a subscription!

Prelude to an Obama Peace Plan

Washington Spectator
September 1

By Ian Williams

Long-time observers of the Middle East will note the sound of silence. In fact, the sound of two related and almost harmonious silences. Most mainstream Israel supporters in the United States have been silent about the Obama administration’s obduracy towards the Netanyahu administration, while the Obama administration has been completely silent about international law and United Nations decisions regarding the settlements and the Occupied Territories. It’s a bit like the episode of the John Cleese TV show, Fawlty Towers, where his mantra “Don’t mention the War!” prompts Freudian slips galore to a party of German guests.

U.N. resolutions, from the 1947 partition onwards, are at the core of the Middle Eastern situation, quoted and defied by all parties, yet central to any solution. It is very hard not to mention them.

Instead of invoking the U.N.’s decisions, the Obama administration has been rigid and repetitive regarding Israel’s own previous commitments to stop the growth of settlements in land recognized as a future Palestinian state.

President Obama and his team have maintained tight discipline, as the vice president, the secretary of state, Middle East special envoy George Mitchell and others have held the line. They have reiterated to their Israeli counterparts that Israel and all other parties in the “Quartet,” including the U.S., accepted the 2003 Road Map to peace, which mandates a two-state solution and an end to settlement building. For example, when Israel evicted two families from their homes of fifty years in East Jerusalem this July, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton forcefully condemned it as “not in keeping with Israeli obligations.” She did not mention the Geneva Conventions, or the U.N. resolutions deeming East Jerusalem occupied territory.

In contrast, U.N. Special Coordinator for the Peace Process Robert H. Serry declared, “These actions are contrary to the provisions of the Geneva Conventions related to occupied territory.” The Swedish Presidency of the EU condemned them even more categorically: “House demolitions, evictions and settlement activities in East Jerusalem are illegal under international law.”

Diehards on the left and the right assail the Obama policy as unprincipled. It is in fact very astute. By framing its demands around the Israeli government’s previous commitments, and in terms of policy accepted by almost all pro-Israeli legislators—and even the American Israel Public Affairs Committee—the White House has negated opposition to its Middle Eastern policy and also headed off attempts by single-issue lobbyists to ransom its domestic agenda.

The success of this strategy is evident in a July 24 head line in the Jewish Weekly Forward: “Jewish Leaders Give Obama No Push-Back on Settlement Freeze.” American Jews voted for Obama, and those who did not are almost certainly supporters of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhayu and his right-wing Likud Party.

In the past, “official” representatives of the American Jewish community uncritically supported Israeli government decisions—whatever the government and whatever the decision. Their support was unwavering even as proportional representation in Israeli elections has given zealous minorities, including the settlers, disproportionate power in the motley coalitions that have run the country for decades. In effect the U.S. Israel lobby lent proxy support to the settlers, which influenced official U.S. statements. Washington moved from outright denunciation of settlements as illegal, to describing them as obstacles to peace, and finally under former President George W. Bush to acceptably created facts on the ground. However, it is worthwhile to recall the Israeli government’s covert position on the settlements.

In January, the Israeli daily Ha’aretz published the contents of a secret Israeli Defense Ministry report. According to Ha’aretz “in the vast majority of the settlements—about 75 percent— construction, sometimes on a large scale, has been carried out without the appropriate permits or contrary to the per mits that were issued….[I]n more than thirty settlements, extensive construction of buildings and infrastructure (roads, schools, synagogues, yeshivas and even police stations) had been carried out on private lands belonging to Palestinian West Bank residents.”

Three years earlier, Talia Sasson, from the Israeli State Attorney’s office, reported that the outposts, like the settlements, had water, electricity, education and security provided by government agencies—even as governments pledged to stop them. Recently, the settlers’ own behavior has done much to alienate many Israelis and many of Israel’s friends abroad.

Similarly, the American peace lobby’s work was made easier by the election of the abrasive Netanyahu. The inclusion of the overtly racist Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister has handicapped any public diplomacy, not least with the over whelmingly liberal majority of American Jews. The minority Likudnik wing of Israel’s supporters in the U.S. fervently supported the Republicans in last year’s U.S. elections, while 78 percent of American Jews voted for Obama.

A new generation of American Jewish organizations lobbying for peace and implementation of the Road Map —such as the rapidly growing J Street, and Peace Now—not only gained influence with the election of “their” candidate, they now have access to the administration while the Likudniks do not. Most genuine friends of Israel, those who want the state to survive in peace as a democracy, long ago accepted the “two-state solution” broadly based on the 1967 boundaries, with some form of shared authority over Jerusalem.

The 2002 Arab Summit in Beirut offered normalization of relations with Israel in return for it. In effect, the Arabs—while still thinking that Israel should never have been created at the expense of the Palestinians—reluctantly came to accept the reality of Israel within its 1967 boundaries and were prepared to recognize Israel if it reciprocated with acceptance of a Palestinian state. The Palestinians have indicated flexibility about negotiating changes in the precise boundary and even about the actual exercise of the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

This basis for negotiation now has broad support among supporters of Israel and the Palestinians. Yet Netanyahu and Co. have continued to overestimate their political standing in Washington, pushing for war on Iran instead of peace with Palestine. Wrestling with the most serious economic crisis in eighty years, healthcare reform, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has shown an ability to chew gum and walk at the same time. It recognizes that the unresolved Israel-Palestinian issue is a catalyst for unending conflict and American unpopularity in much of the world. In the fever dreams if the Neocons, a democratic Arab world would immediately kiss and make up with Israel. In the real world, the plight of the Palestinians is a popular concern for a majority across the Arab world.

Obama astutely reached out to the Muslim and Arab world, with visits to Turkey and Cairo. Many Arabs are suspicious of Americans bearing gifts, and what Obama said would have been unexceptional had any other Western leader said it. But for an American president to attempt such outreach, and to visit the Muslim world before the obligatory pilgrimage to Israel, was a clear signal to many Israelis.

The White House may entertain some hopes that Netanyahu will be pragmatic enough to take the necessary steps for peace. After all, it was Likud premier Menachem Begin who was dragged to Camp David to make peace with Egypt and to withdraw from Sinai. Obama must know that this is a not a high probability, and that Netanyahu does not really want peace, but a big piece, ideally all, of the West Bank. So one must presume that there is a fall-back plan, which has to involve the Likud-led Coalition’s loss of electoral support in Israel for alienating the U.S.

Peacenik Israeli novelist David Grossman recently commented in an interview how difficult it is for outsiders to understand Israel’s vulnerability. He may exaggerate—much of the Western world has factored that in for decades. But he is probably accurate about the state of mind of Israeli Jews, even with the automatic support of the world’s superpower. The Israeli leader who puts that that safety net at risk is unlikely to remain long in office. In the same interview, Grossman pointed out the solution: “We need a mediator from the outside. I think Obama is much better equipped than his predecessor, George W. Bush, because of his multi-focal look at reality. I wish Obama would stand up for his vision. I wish he would impose on us the solution that we all know it is inevitable.”

That solution, as the Obama administration has hinted, is based on the Beirut plan steered through the Arab League by Saudi Arabia, which in turn is based upon the U.N. resolutions: accepting as the basis for negotiations the U.N. resolutions which call for a return of the border to the pre-1967 “Green Line.” It would be better received from Obama than from the U.N. But no matter who addresses the envelope, the contents are the same.

The sedulous care with which Obama has marshaled domestic and international support indicates that he does have a clear strategy, which is probably not dissimilar to what EU foreign minister Javier Solana explicitly, and Grossman implicitly, call for: the imposition of a U.N.-mandated solution on both parties if they can’t come to an agreement.

Negotiators on both sides are vulnerable to stabs in the back by zealots accusing them of selling out. The big advantage of a U.S. intervention is that it alone can guarantee a solution, whether implementation of the U.N. resolutions or any adaptation of them in way that no other entity can.

That is why, even when the U.S.—under Presidents Clinton and Bush pretending be an honest broker— acted like surrogate negotiators for the Israelis, the Palestinians wanted the Americans on board. They trusted a U.S. signature much more than an Israeli one. Unless the Israeli electorate is auditioning for a replay of Masada, an offer of secure borders and peace with an explicit security pledge from the United States is as good as it gets. New U.N. resolutions would give the state legal, internationally recognized boundaries for the first time – and the U.S. could legitimately guarantee them.

For the Palestinians, as long as the plan does not go further than their negotiators were prepared to go, it is likely to be acceptable—the Green Line with compensation in land for any adjustments and a presence, whether shared or not, in Jerusalem— even if they have to abandon their understandable longings for their original homeland.

No Peace without Justice

I had almost forgotten that I had written this, and just stumbled across it!

No Peace without Justice


* Ian WILLIAMS

Eurasia Critic November, 2008

The decision of International Criminal Court Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo to seek arrest warrants for the President of Sudan and his associates has provoked a flurry of concerns about what effect such a prosecution would have on the peace process in Darfur. With varying degrees of sincerity, there have been calls to weigh the perils of impunity against the continuation of hostilities.
Even those most involved in drafting and bringing into being the International Criminal Court admitted that it was very much a work in progress. In particular, the US delegation under Clinton fought a tenacious battle to limit its effects on the US, and other signatories went a long way to accommodate what was, in effect, the agenda of the Pentagon and the America-Firsters in Congress.
Since there was no way that an explicit "get out of gaol free" card could be written exclusively for Americans, the Clinton administration's tenacity had the effect of weakening the Rome Convention and the Court itself. The Americans were not, of course, alone. France negotiated a seven-year pass before it would be affected by its signature.
While the Clinton White House was ultra-cautious, the Bush administration set John Bolton on the attack, and his unremitting, almost theological, hostility to the ICC led to some amusing scenes when the Council passed resolution 1593, which actually mandated the Prosecutor to investigate crimes committed in Darfur[1]. Bolton, now the US Ambassador to the UN, had spent a decade trying to strangle the ICC, but under pressure from domestic lobbies to show some action against Khartoum, he sent a deputy to explain why the US supported the referral, while still opposing the Court.
Sudan refused to cooperate with the resolution, and when the Prosecutor secured warrants for lesser figures, Ahmad Muhammad Harun, former Minister of State for the Interior of the Government of the Sudan, and Ali Kushayb, a leader of the Militia/Janjaweed, it ignored them. Having already indicted Bashir's surrogates in Darfur, it would certainly be a travesty of justice not to follow up the chain of command and indict the man without whom none of these massacres would have been possible. The prosecution of President Omar Al-Bashir goes to the core of what the court is supposed to be about - the end of sovereign immunity and impunity for crimes against humanity.

To underline what impunity means, just before Moreno announced his request for warrants, on the eve of the 13th anniversary of the massacres of some 8,000 Bosnians in Srebrenica that the Serb forces perpetrated with the tacit connivance of the under-supported and demoralized Dutch peacekeepers, Khartoum's surrogate militia in Darfur, the Janjaweed, killed seven African UN peacekeepers and wounded 19 more. The militia outgunned the peacekeepers - and escaped with impunity[2]
Recent historical experience suggests that a sense of impunity brings outrage in its wake. Srebrenica was the culmination of a long period during which the Serb forces had every reason to think that there would be no consequences for what they did, and during which they treated peacekeepers with contempt and worse.
Sadly, the only powers with the military strength to support the beleaguered peacekeepers in Sudan have locked themselves out of that option with the invasion of Iraq and uncritical support of Israel. Neither the US nor Britain are in a diplomatic position to lecture Khartoum about international legality.
Kofi Annan's great achievement was to get international support for the "Responsibility to Protect" at the 2005 UN Summit. However the abuse of the principle of "humanitarian intervention" retrospectively by Tony Blair to justify invading Iraq, and one might add, the more recent invocation of it by Moscow in Georgia, highlights the failure of the international community to formulate the proposals in ways that would avoid such tendentious abuses. Impotence that forced the US to accept the ICC investigation and prosecution is the only deterrence against the abuses of human rights in Darfur.
The objection that the Prosecutor's act militates against the peace process assumes that peace and justice are somehow irreconcilable. However, diplomacy, without the big stick, without the hint of handcuffs, has had little or no success at all in stopping Bashir's murderous recidivism, as the July attack on the peacekeepers demonstrates.
There were similar objections about the effect of the prosecution of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Liberia's President Charles Taylor on peace efforts. However, their indictments at the respective international tribunals did not hinder negotiations.
Indeed, the years of envoys queuing up for audiences with Milosevic simply persuaded him that he was so indispensable that he could carry on orchestrating killing with no personal consequences. However his rendition to The Hague, and Taylor's to the Sierra Leone court, provided a quick and easy removal of their baneful influence on domestic politics, without the political repercussions that would have ensued if local organs had attempted to prosecute and try them.
It was precisely to avoid the stigma of "victors' justice" that the ICC prosecutor was given independence. The judges of sister tribunals such as the ICTY have shown that they are not prejudiced in favour of the prosecutors, showing a willingness to dismiss charges they find unsupported by the evidence.
In the immediate aftermath of the Prosecutor's announcement, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon recognised the independence of the ICC prosecutor. Ban will persist in trying to talk to Bashir in an attempt to get him to do the right thing, but the talking will be done by phone. However, at the back of his mind Bashir will have the fate of Milosevic and Taylor. His travels to many parts of the world will be circumscribed until a trip to the ICC in The Hague can be arranged by the next coup in Khartoum.
One of the few positive developments of the last century is that politicians as varied as Augusto Pinochet, Ariel Sharon and Henry Kissinger have had to consult with their lawyers as well as their travel agents before leaving their homelands. That was with national courts applying international conventions and principles. There are serious problems with such courts of course - think of the stands that Georgian and Russian courts would take over recent events when their national stances are almost mirror images of each other's. Almost laughably, China wanted the Sudanese courts to deal with the perpetrators in Darfur.
The establishment of the ICC, with all its faults and loopholes, was the consummation of the abrogation of sovereign immunity for crimes against humanity. Its independence and multilateral nature give it a credibility to which partisan jurisdictions cannot pretend. Its case against the Sudanese leadership is its first crucial test. Ironically, the US's history of bitter hostility to the whole concept, while damaging the reputation of the US itself, probably enhances the Court's credibility globally.
It is important that the warrants are actively pursued with the backing of democratic states, not only to inhibit the actions of the regime in Khartoum, but also to give pause to others around the world before they emulate such murderous behaviour. Taking into account the justifiably tattered reputation of the UK and the USA, the European Union, Latin Americans and others should be in the vanguard of ensuring the implementation. They should pressure the AU to stop back-pedalling about it.

* Ian Williams is a British born author and journalist, now based in the USA who has been writing about the UN and international justice issues since the Balkan Wars. Currently Senior Analyst for the Washington based Foreign Policy in Focus, his columns often appear in the Guardian online. More details in http://www.ianwilliams.info and http://www.deadlinepundit.blogspot.com.
[1]http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2005/sc8351.doc.htm
[2]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7497708.stm

Obama and the Middle East

My article on Obama and the Middle East is up on the Washington Spectator site. I recommend it, and a subscription to all readers!

It's not the size...

UN Reform: Don't Hold Your Breath

Ian Williams | August 26, 2009

Editor: John Feffer


Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

The interminable wrangling over the composition of the UN Security Council, scheduled to resume August 27, is unlikely to bear much fruit anytime soon. And that may not be such a bad thing. Almost all the proposals are worse than the situation they purport to remedy.

Reform of the UN Security Council (SC), under "open-ended" negotiation for almost 20 years, isn't an issue to stir the masses. Those members of the global public who care about the UN at all are more likely to worry about the efficiency of the Council than its composition. However, in the diplomatic community the issue is about prestige and increasing the chances of smaller powers to get a seat at the top table.

In fact, all the various reform proposals should be read in the light of the motives of their proponents, who are often more concerned with diplomatic posturing than preparing the Council to deal more efficiently with global affairs. Indeed, many of the reforms suggested would tend to make the Security Council even less efficient.

The Italians, for instance, have suggested that a European Union seat should replace the British and French permanent memberships. The British and French vetoes rule out the idea, but even if the proposal has a spurious equity in terms of geographical balance on the Council, the EU is far from a decisive entity and a seat for it would effectively imply a perpetual abstention. Other maneuvers are simply blocking measures: the Italians are casting around for a way to deny Germany a permanent seat, the Pakistanis to thwart India, and the Argentineans to stop Brazil.
Expanding the Security Council?

Most of the current reform proposals involve adding members in order to broaden geographical representation, which is admittedly loaded in favor of the richer, more developed nations. Former unconfirmed U.S. representative to the UN John Bolton was rarely right about UN issues, but he certainly had a point that increasing the size of the Council much beyond 20 would turn it from a committee to a mass meeting.

Take the example of the Economic and Social Committee, which was supposed to handle the crises that possibly fueled World War II. This committee has trebled in size in order to become more "representative." In 1965 the UN Charter was altered to increase its membership from 18 to 27 and in 1971 to 54. Its effectiveness has diminished in inverse proportion. Its most newsworthy work now is blackballing various NGOs who have upset prominent members.

In the case of the permanent five members of the Security Council (P5) — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States — the motive behind opposing reform is naked: the preservation of their historical privileges. The UN Charter is explicit: Any of the P5 can veto any changes to the Charter. These five countries have made it clear that they will not accept any significant change in their prerogatives. Indeed, while divisions among them have been a major factor in stopping the Council from being effective, they all unite firmly in opposing any reduction in their prerogatives.

During the Cold War, there was a certain brutal logic to position of the P5, since they were the only declared nuclear states. This status gave their SC veto more heft. However, no one today suggests giving North Korea, India, Pakistan, or Israel a permanent seat because they now have the nuclear qualification.

The veto is a touchy issue. Clearly unjust and unfair to those that do not have it, it is also a pragmatic response to the experience of the League of Nations. A Security Council bound by consensus would be totally ineffective. At the same time, major members, in particular the United States, probably would walk out of the organization if faced with decisions they did not like. In fact, much of the damage the veto does is by implication. A veto-holder uses its threat to dumb down resolutions before, and this is an American specialty, vetoing the attenuated result.

The veto may be unjust, but so is the world. The United States did not have to veto a resolution condemning the invasion of Iraq — because nobody put one up for consideration. The positive resolutions by which the United Kingdom and United States sought Council approval were defeated, not by vetoes, but because Blair and Bush could not get a majority. Smaller powers have suggested that a nay vote be distinguished from the more portentous exercise of the veto. That would allow the United States and China to vote against a resolution, scoring points with their friends but allowing the majority vote to take effect.
Selective Additions

The P5 are now prepared to accept, in principle, the addition of more permanent members. But they continue to oppose any extension of the veto to the new permanent recruits. Their motives may be selfish but they are quite right. A Council frequently rendered ineffective by the possession of five vetoes would be condemning itself to perpetual irrelevance by doubling that possibility.

However, agreeing in principle is different from agreeing on exactly which countries get promoted. Since Japan and Germany pay more than four of the P5 in dues, they clearly have a claim to representation. But for the historical reasons that once stigmatized them as "former enemy powers," both countries punch way below their military and diplomatic weight. Their membership is also opposed, respectively by China and Italy. And if they were accepted, the industrialized world would be even more over-represented on the Council.

Adding representation from the developing world encounters many obstacles as well. India would appear to be the most widely accepted candidate, but Pakistan and Indonesia each would quibble. Brazil, the favored representative of Latin America, could expect some opposition from Argentinean pride. Egypt, Nigeria, and South Africa are in the running for the putative African permanent seat. The parlous state of democracy in the first two outweighs their population and power as candidates and there is no clear consensus.

One way around this regional opposition would be to add to the numbers of temporary seats on the Security Council. But this would bring the numbers to the breaking point. Indeed, the African states collectively pose almost as much of a threat to an effective UN as the veto-holders. The countries take turns for the temporary seats. The candidates are generally known decades in advance — and they are not always the continent's brightest and best.
Uniting for Change

The most creative proposal for change comes from the "Uniting for Change" group, which represents a range of motivations from Italy's obdurate resistance to Germany becoming a permanent member to Canada's apparently altruistic concern for UN efficacy. Instead of creating new permanent seats, this group suggests new, longer-term temporary seats, perhaps re-electable. To sweeten the pill for all the diplomats waiting their turn, they have also added more of the current form of temporary seats, putting the Council's size dangerously close to ineffectiveness.

Apart from the fatal flaw of not flattering the amour propre of the aspirant great powers, this proposal certainly does more to enhance the democracy that is on every diplomat's lips. The re-election provision would certainly help regional powers to be more accountable to their neighbor's wishes, while the ending of current term limits would boost their ability to counter the P5's current incumbent advantage.

Canada has also proposed three changes to make the Council work more effectively. First, the veto would be restricted to decisions taken under Chapter VII of the Charter — those that involved forceful solutions. Second, the veto should not apply in discussions about "genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes." And third, when a member does use a veto, it must explain and justify that use publicly.

For the Canadian proposals to move forward, the United States as the only effective veto-wielder must agree to some or all of such changes. The Obama administration might be temperamentally more inclined than any U.S. government in the last three decades to embrace such changes. But at the moment, the last thing the Obama administration needs is for the anti-UN nuts joining the National Rifle Association, the "birthers," and the anti-healthcare crowd.

Public diplomacy has hitherto meant states influencing people. The best, and sadly faint, hope for genuine UN reform is concerned citizens influencing states, particularly the United States and other permanent members, through monitoring and lobbying.

Senior Foreign Policy In Focus analyst Ian Williams is a journalist and author. Much of his work can be found on his blog, Deadline Pundit.

Compassion - A Scots term with no American translation

COMMENT
Lockerbie deal leaves no clean hands
By Ian Williams
Asia Times 24 August 2009

United States President Barack Obama owes Libya and Scotland a lot. The release of Abdelbeset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was like throwing red meat to the wolves who have been on the president's case. For a week, hysteria about Obama-care, euthanasia, abortion and the rest has been subsumed under a wave of bipartisan indignation about Megrahi.

The America that gave the world the Salem witch trials and the lynch mob ran unabashed and there was the unedifying spectacle of the Obama team running alongside, baying in harmony. (Although perhaps one of the most ill-augured boycott calls ever made is the one to eschew Scotch whisky.)

In contrast, over much of the world, Scotland's decision to release Lockerbie bomber [1] Megrahi on compassionate grounds because he is dying of terminal cancer seems reasonable, as Scottish Justice Minister Kenneth MacAskill so eloquently expounded when giving his decision.

Even so, listening to MacAskill's dithyrambs of self-praise for Scottish judicial compassion would have evoked a guffaw from generations of convicts who were victims of Scotland's vindictively Calvinist prisons in times past. Compassion is a relatively recent official trait in the country, but American furor can make Scotland pride itself on its double independence, cocking a snook at both London and Washington.

However, "compassion", no matter how recent in Scotland, still has no part in the US political or judicial make-up. The American news media were filled with reports about how Britain and Scotland were "on the defensive", and how the victims' families were crying for revenge. But victims' families in Britain supported the release, and the decision created nowhere near the fury in Britain and Scotland that it did on the other side of the Atlantic.

United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Robert Mueller called the Libyan's release "a mockery of the rule of law" and complained to MacAskill that his decision was "as inexplicable as it is detrimental to the cause of justice".

MacAskill does not need lessons in justice from the US, certainly not from the FBI, with its notorious use of paid informants and provocateurs. When the USS Vincennes indisputably shot down an Iranian Airbus in 1988, killing 290, the crew involved received medals. When the case of dubiously convicted murderer Troy Davis came up before the Supreme Court this month, two justices, fortunately a minority, declared that there was nothing unconstitutional about executing an innocent man as long as he had had a trial.

The US has an incarceration rate more then four times Britain's, almost 10 times that of the European Union as a whole and even higher than Russia's. Clearly, dying in prison has no fears in the US - for those who inflict it. Prisons have had to be adapted for wheelchairs for inmates too old to walk, let alone commit new crimes.

Few people come out with clean hands from the episode. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown certainly knew of the impending release, and did not strive too officiously to avert it, while his protests at Libyan celebrations provide cover against the equally expedient and contrived protests from the White House. British and American oil companies will still be knocking on doors in Tripoli - and finding them opened.

In an oil-short world, Libya has been able to behave with almost Chinese impunity. When I saw that the Swiss president had apologized to Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's son Hannibal, I briefly wondered if it was because his ancestors had mistreated the Carthaginian general's elephants on their way across the Alps.

But no, the Swiss had released Gaddafi's son a year ago after the latter had paid off the domestics who had complained to the police about abuse. However, since Libya ratted on the Irish Republican Army comrades it used to arm and finance, the British government has had no compunctions in cozying up to Gaddafi, and the eagerness of US business to get into the country has been palpable.

It was naive of Brown to expect the notoriously quixotic Gaddafi to abide by the "no public rejoicing" clause in whatever discussions led up to the release. Indeed, it meant that he showed much more loyalty to Megrahi than former president George W Bush did to his convicted aide Scooter Libby, or indeed Brown is likely to show to MacAskill.

Voluntary fall guys are the noblest fools in politics. Megrahi "volunteered" to go to The Hague and take the rap for Libya to rejoin the world economy. If one overlooks the possibility that dire things might have happened to his family if he hadn't, greater love hath no one ... [2]

His sacrifice is all the more so in view of the strong possibility of his innocence. Totally lost, as so often in the US, is any doubt that someone convicted could possibly be innocent. In fact, it would be a stretch to say that a secret policeman for Gaddafi was "innocent". The regime has proven blood aplenty on its hands, but there is plausible evidence that investigators were so determined to "convict" Libya that they ignored all other leads.

Megrahi's eventual conviction hinged on the confused and contradictory evidence of a Maltese shopkeeper, whose recollections had him aging, rejuvenating, growing and shrinking, depending on who was taking the testimony, and who only finally identified him after his photographs had been widely circulated. The trial as part of the "cleansing" of Libya along with the several billions in blood-money took place in The Hague with Scottish judges, who found his co-accused, on almost identical evidence, not guilty.

Many observers suspect a jury would have thrown both cases out. His release on compassionate grounds was predicated on him dropping his appeal against the conviction, which many felt had a good chance of success. Indeed, he seems to have needed Gaddafi's say-so before dropping the appeal. If Megrahi were guilty, it was because he was acting as an agent for the Gaddafi now being greeted by politicians all over the West. If he were not, then the intelligence agencies of the West framed an innocent man to score political points at Libya.

MacAskill's halo is the only one on the horizon in this murky world.

Note
1. Pan Am Flight 103 was Pan American World Airways' third daily scheduled trans-Atlantic flight from London's Heathrow Airport to New York's John F Kennedy International Airport. On Wednesday, December 21, 1988, the aircraft flying this route - a Boeing 747-121 named Clipper Maid of the Seas - was destroyed by a bomb, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members. Eleven people in Lockerbie, southern Scotland, were killed as large sections of the plane fell in and around the town, bringing total fatalities to 270.

2. "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." John 15:13.

Ian Williams is the author of Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Past, Nation Books, New York.

(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

Chomsky takes Slobbo's Bait.

Response to Chomsky

this my response to Chomsky's unphilosophical screed in response to mine on R2P



Ian Williams | August 21, 2009

Editor: John Feffer

Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

I am afraid that simply because Noam Chomsky makes an ex cathedra observation does not make it "uncontroversial" — not even when he hyperbolically accuses me of having "blood on my hands." He still defends his statement that "NATO air raids on Serbia [beginning March 24, 1999] actually precipitated the worst atrocities in Kosovo," and is surprised that I find this untrue — let alone morally unpalatable.

One hesitates to teach logic, let alone linguistics, to the distinguished professor, but his use of the world "precipitate" shifts the blame for the massacres and mass deportations that he admits took place from the actual perpetrators to those who were trying to stop them. (Incidentally, at the time Bogdan Denitch and I called for intervention but also condemned the form of intervention that President Clinton chose — high-level bombing.)

One can certainly accuse the West of neglecting the plight of the Kosovars, but it was Milosevic and his regime that deprived the Kosovars of their rights and then began to kill and deport them. It was that regime that had recently killed up to 8,000 Bosnians at Srebrenica, whose dismembered and reburied bodies are still being found. There was no NATO bombing to blame for that rather shameful inaction.

In fact, faced with that cold-blooded massacre, NATO leaders had every reason to fear the worst in Kosovo.

I would recommend that Chomsky read the judgment of the UN war crimes tribunal, after it had considered the evidence of 113 witnesses for the prosecution and 118 for the defense, not to mention tens of thousands of pages of documents submitted by both sides. It found five Serb officials guilty of the "criminal enterprise" that he attributes to NATO. It concludes that "the direct testimony from many witnesses demonstrates that the Kosovo Albanian population was fleeing from the actions of the forces of the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] and Serbia, rather than the NATO bombing and the KLA."

For a flourish that should excite some indignation, the report added that "there is no doubt that a clandestine operation consisting of exhuming over 700 bodies originally buried in Kosovo and transferring them to Serbia proper took place during the NATO bombing" and adds that the "great majority of the corpses moved were victims of crime and civilians, including women and children."

In finding the Serbian officials guilty, the tribunal noted that "the NATO bombing provided an opportunity to the members of the joint criminal enterprise — an opportunity for which they had been waiting and for which they had prepared by moving additional forces to Kosovo and by the arming and disarming process described above — to deal a heavy blow to the KLA and to displace, both within and without Kosovo, enough Kosovo Albanians to change the ethnic balance. And now this could all be done with plausible deniability because it could be blamed not only upon the KLA, but upon NATO as well [italics mine]." The blame-shifting certainly seems to have worked with Chomsky, but the judges looked at the mass of evidence and decided to the contrary.

Chomsky betrays a persistent Manichaean worldview in which the United States is always the source of evil in the world. Even with that in mind he would surely like to reconsider his implied comparison of the United States with Nazis. ("It would be like raising the question of why Nazis didn't intervene to stop the slaughter of Jews by local forces in the regions they occupied.")

The United States is often, but not always wrong, and its enemies are sometimes, but not always right. The United States was certainly wrong in East Timor, and indeed in the near contemporary situation in Western Sahara, and I have been reporting on those injustices for many decades. Along with the other members of the Security Council the United States had a clear duty to intervene to assert international law. In the absence of effective international (i.e., U.S.) intervention, the Indonesian military would have been every bit as brutal and aggressive.

We could deplore this intervention as much as we like, but I fail to see what was going to stop Indonesia's brutality otherwise. Indeed, Chomsky points out that it was Clinton's intervention that persuaded the Indonesian general's that the game was up in East Timor. Yes it was long overdue, but it was an American intervention, which deserves some grudging credit. Also, by delegating U.S. forces to the UN on the Macedonian border, the United States successfully prevented yet another former Yugoslav republic being sucked into Milosevic's bloodstained mire. There are hundreds of thousands of dead Rwandans who would have welcomed a U.S. intervention there.

However, Chomsky takes an absolutist position on intervention in principle, which would have had him picketing the Normandy beaches to stop the war against German workers.

The United States is culpable in many ways over East Timor, but that should not detract from the primary role of the Indonesian government and military. Nor should any person of ethics try to shield the Milosevic regime from its unique culpability for events in Srebrenica and Kosovo. Chomsky's quasi-theological conception of the United States as the supreme evil power tends to exonerate the less evil powers, turning Ariel Sharon, the Indonesian generals, Milosevic, and the others into mere secondary agents. Meanwhile, condemning in principle any effective action to stop these malign actors actually lends them aid and comfort — while doing nothing for their victims.

Senior Foreign Policy In Focus analyst Ian Williams is a journalist and author. Much of his work can be found on his blog, Deadline Pundit.

Talking Turkey Istanbul: A Great European City

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 2009, pages 38-40

Talking Turkey
Istanbul: A Great European City
By Ian Williams





AFTER HALF a millennium of Crusader-style propaganda, Westerners all know that Turks eat babies. But in fact, walking the streets of Istanbul with a six-month-old baby is a revelation: adult males—as much as, if not more than women—could not resist coming up to stroke the baby’s hand and chin.

The city defies expectations and stereotypes and now looks like the cosmopolitan world capital it was for so many centuries. It is an organic growth of ultra-modern high rises rising from a seedbed of traditional wooden houses, sadly being reduced to mulch by time and gentrification. Apart from the great monuments, the Roman walls, the mosques and churches, it is sad that so little of the ancient city survives, but that is because the all-too-flammable wood that has been the favored building material for millennia has led to urban renewal by conflagration.

Old Ottoman wooden houses crumbling on the backstreets are eloquent testimony to the relative fragility and evanescence of the city’s fabric over the centuries. A lamp overturned could do as much damage as barbarian invasion, and even Ottoman palaces went up in flames.

My favorite part of Istanbul is Sultanahmet, which clusters on the hills near the Topkapi Palace. A few decades ago, Sultanahmet was a louche quarter of gangsters and smugglers. They have moved on, but it still maintains a definite charm.

The narrow, steep and winding cobbled streets allegedly follow the Ottoman strictures: they were to be no wider than three horsemen could ride abreast. In many of them, their stirrups would have tangled with each other, and in any case the Sipahis—members of the Ottoman Empire’s elite mounted cavalry force—would have crashed their helmets on the overhanging medieval-style upper storeys.

Nevertheless, such restrictions do not prevent cars from trying to squeeze past pedestrians up the steep slopes and around the hairpin bends.

In keeping with their multi-faceted exterior walls, the roofs of Sultanahmet are a Harry Potter fantasy of tumbled tiles and random angles and equally random chimneys poking out, enhanced by rooftop flower pots and the new talismans of satellite dishes. Concrete in bright hues of yellow and pink escapes the Third World ubiquity of turquoise blue, and is interspersed with wooden and corrugated iron additions and extensions.




The area is undergoing serious gentrification, but only in a few favored cases does that involve repairing and repainting the topsy-turvy blackened wood structures. Rebuilding is done mostly in concrete, often with the same eccentrically shaped exteriors, and from a quick view of construction techniques they are unlikely to be much more durable than the rickety, and sometimes deserted, wooden houses alongside.

Perhaps the best indication of Turkey’s accretive civilization is the incredible archaeological excavations taking place in Yenikapi, just south of Sultanahmet. To set the contrast, I once stood in the Beersheba museum, in a confiscated mosque, perusing the Israeli Department of Antiquities time chart—in which the mosque did not exist, since history stopped in 660 and resumed in 1900.

When, during the digging for a new underground railway tunnel, Turkish archaeologists discovered the silted-up remains of a Byzantine harbor with the preserved remains of 9th and 10th century ships, they did not concrete over the inconvenient reminder. Instead they delayed the hugely expensive project while they excavated and rescued the relics. Indeed they went digging even further, and took the origins of the city back to Neolithic times.

The archaeologists assured me that there was no popular upsurge against the display, rather pride in this reinforcement of the antiquity of their city.

One of the joys of Istanbul is stumbling across ancient churches and mosques nestled among the houses, quite apart from the better-known and huger monuments such as Ayasofya (Hagia Sophia) and the Sultan Ahmet mosque that gives the district its name. One of the relatively unknown treasures hiding near the waterfront is the Küçük Ayasofya, the little Hagia Sophia, since it was a template for the big one when it was built.


The original late Roman Arches can be seen in the dome, and the adapted Arab style on the outside wall. In the foreground are the chimneys for the kitchens to feed pilgrims and travellers (Photo I. Williams).


Ironically, as an immaculately maintained and cleaned working mosque, in some ways it gives a better impression of the original church than its larger descendant, whose shabbiness, reconstruction work, dust and thronging tourists demand an effort of the imagination to conjure up its original effect. Its marble walls survived intact, while around its interior walls the Greek inscription to the Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora also remains intact after 1,500 years.

Indeed, shocking to more conservative Muslims, the Ottomans surrounded their holy places with graves and tombstones, emulating the Christian tradition. Indeed, one great Christian practice they adopted enthusiastically was collecting relics. The Amanat in the Topkapi Palace preserves relics of the Prophet and others. There may be some room for doubt about the rod with which Moses struck the rock, for example, but with a continuity of tradition and polity from the Prophet’s days, the hair from his head and beard, the fragment of his tooth and the original standard lends them serious credibility.

To fundamentalists, however, their provenance would not diminish their idolatrous nature—indeed, some emissaries were sent from Mecca specifically to protect them from iconoclasm. Fortunately, as the ruling AKP in Turkey is demonstrating, Turkish Islam covers a wide spectrum, and is self-reliant enough to eschew the excesses of more austere fundamentalists.

To some extent, it has little option. After the Ottomans, Kemal Ataturk constructed a Turkish identity that was not confessional, unlike many others in the region. That secularist identity—which can be fairly fundamentalist itself—has its drawbacks, one of which has certainly been the restrictions placed on the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch and the seminary that used to supply candidates.

Roman walls in the area the Turks stormed in 1453 (Photo I. Williams).


Those restrictions exist not because he is Christian, but rather because he is seen as “Greek” Orthodox, and has indeed been taken to court for claiming the title of ecumenical. It is a very shortsighted stance, which not only raises human rights issues for EU accession, but also deprives the city of prestige and tourism and pilgrimage dollars. As the sultans realized, it is better to have such a potent title to hand than drive it into exile!

History is always seen through the prism of the present, or the more recent past. The Cold War/Clash of Civilizations view places like Istanbul as a front line between Islam and Christianity, or more recently between Islam and Judeo-Christianity. The West looks at the Sufi-inspired Islam of the Turks and Balkans through a lens ground from the sand of the Saudi desert.

In reality, of course, these are crossroads and meeting places rather than battlegrounds. Istanbul is often regarded as a Turkish nationalist name imposed to erase the Greek past inherent in Constantinople, when in reality it is the Greek words “to the city,” the polis, that was its basis, while Constantine is a Latin name.

To confuse the simplicities of retrospective nationalism even more, the “Greeks” of the Byzantine Empire never called themselves either Byzantine or Greek. They were Romans. It was Westerners trying to assert the legitimacy of the Holy Roman Empire in the face of it being, as Voltaire quipped, neither Roman nor Holy who foisted these names on the citizens.

And right up to the end of the Sultanate, the Phanariots, the Greeks of Istanbul, were a considerable proportion of the cosmopolitan population of the Ottoman capital—and indeed crewed the navy and filled the bureaucracy.

Although, sadly, most of the Phanariots were driven out in the 1950s, some still remain, along with Armenians, Bosnians and Uzbeks and other peoples from along the Silk Road.




Turkish Islam is distinct from its more southerly forms. Sunday is the day off in Turkey and the environs of the Eyup mosque, allegedly the burial place of the Prophet’s standard-bearer, as revealed in a dream to a sultan, swarmed with the visibly pious, men in skull caps and women in chadors pinned across their face coming to pray. But the men and their wives walked hand in hand, and on less solemn occasions fundamentalist feminine fashion includes colorful figure-hugging silk attire, with chic headscarves surrounding immaculate maquillage.

However, as the more pious immigrants from the Anatolian hinterland move into the city, the headscarves are certainly more widespread, even if they coexist with miniskirts and tight blouses from the more secular. Another audible testimony to growing Islamic power is the decibels from the minarets, which are distinctly louder than they used to be. I am inclined to be fundamentalist on this issue. I think the muezzen should climb the minaret and use his lungs to benefit his own soul and body, and delight the ears of sleeping citizens. More secular citizens also complained that beer and raki were disappearing from supermarket shelves and restaurant menus, but that was the whim of the proprietors, not a legal edict.

This mixture of Islam and secularism, despite the occasional atavistic whiffs of authoritarianism, made Turkey a sensible place for President Barack Obama’s first major visit abroad, sending discrete but strong signals across the region. The country, as its involvement with Damascus has shown, is a possible partner in winning a Middle East peace process, an essential part of which is to persuade Muslims that the U.S. is not irredeemably Islamophobic—or, for that matter, irredeemably Israelophilic. It was well worth his blocking our access to the Blue Mosque on his visit.

One cannot help but suspect that Obama’s immediate predecessors would not have made a walk around the mosque and a trip to a Muslim country their first priority, especially if they had been accused of being a crypto-Muslim, and if their host had publicly dressed down Israeli President Shimon Perez on global TV.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, of course, gained immense popularity across the Muslim world, and indeed much further, for his sermon to the Israeli leader at Davos, when so many others prevaricated on or supported Israel’s attack on Gaza. Interestingly, the tidal wave of obloquy that would normally have deluged over him was muted—and then almost silenced. The Turkish armed forces are Israel’s only ally in the area.

The generals may have their own disagreements with Erdogan, but let their Israeli counterparts know that they would be unhappy with foreigners calumniating a Turkish leader. Hence the rapid silence which overcame the initial vociferous pro-Israel indignation. Even Obama benefited from the amnesty!

One lesson is clear: successful conduct of foreign policy comes by talking to foreigners, not listening to domestic lobbies. The other is that Turkey should be in the European Union. There are legitimate hurdles on minority issues—but the Muslim majority population should not be a bar to membership. Istanbul is one of the great European cities and should take its place with London, Paris, Madrid and Berlin.