For two countries that have disagreed so bitterly on basic definitions in the past, a joint "institutional mechanism" to combat terrorism must seem the height of wishful thinking, of vaulting political ambition seeking in vain to reach beyond limits imposed by mechanisms of governance and enforcement. But such has been the promise of the Havana joint statement between India and Pakistan, issued after an encounter between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Pervez Musharraf on the sidelines of September's Non-Aligned Movement summit.
There could be different opinions about how far this statement departs from the long list of surprise outcomes to high-level encounters between the two countries. Early speculation centred around the possibility that, as in recent such dramatic turnarounds in relations between India and Pakistan, there had been an unseen hand guiding the course of events. Clearly, since the jealous competition between the two countries for the affections the U.S. ended in stalemate, it has become evident that a superpower tilt will not be a decisive factor in resolving neighbourhood issues. That would leave accommodation on mutually agreed terms as the only possible recourse. Though Manmohan Singh has been anxious to dispel the impression, it is likely that, as with the Indian Prime Minister's border crossing to Lahore in February 1999 and the Pakistani President's odyssey to Agra in July 2001, the two countries were pushed towards their current engagement by a gentle nudge from the U.S.
On India's part, the Havana statement represents a recognition that the diplomatic strategy of the stiff demarche served on Pakistan every time there is a terrorist atrocity on Indian soil, is beginning to look increasingly unconvincing. By characterising Pakistan too as a country that has been at the receiving end of terrorism, India has seemingly gone a long way towards an approach to the issue that it has so far disdained: of seeking the underlying causes of terrorism and recognising that forces of moderation on both sides have equal stakes in reining in extremism.
A first requirement of a credible "joint institutional mechanism" would be at least a semblance of mutual agreement on what constitutes terrorism. The challenge here is enormous, since no other border has bristled with quite the same antagonism over the distinction between "terrorism" and "freedom struggle". And this is not merely a phenomenon confined to the Kashmir issue, long derided within India as Pakistan's singular and solitary obsession in international forums. Viewed from the other end , Pakistan has been deeply irked in recent months by what it views as India's undue interest in the Balochistan insurgency and its overwrought concern over the brutal strike that killed the traditional feudal overlord of a part of that province, Sardar Akbar Khan Bugti. Pakistan has been convinced that the problem in Balochistan has acquired its current dimensions only after India opened four consulates in Afghanistan. This level of diplomatic representation, it has argued, has little to do with neighbourly intimacy and everything to do with India's strategic interests in the wider region of south and central Asia.
Even if an agreement on principle can be forced through an exertion of political will at the highest level, it would require to filter through the security and intelligence apparatuses on both sides of the border to be of any substantive value. Beyond the sharing of information between intelligence services that have been bitter opponents in the past, and indeed, derive a great deal of their institutional legitimacy from the depredations – both real and imagined – of the other side, this would also require the coordination of operations between security agencies that share an equally tortured relationship. Finally, it would require cooperation between India and Pakistan in the legal and judicial realm.
The record here on both sides has been undistinguished. Pakistan has routinely declared several of the militant formations that operate in its territory unlawful and placed their leaders under legal restraints. But in most cases a mere change of nomenclature has sufficed in keeping these outfits on the right side of the law.
Though Pakistan's omissions are often highlighted and adversely commented upon in the Indian media, there is no denying that on any objective reading, the record back home has been dismal. Significant figures within the ranks of the Kashmir militancy have been held without charge in Indian prisons for years. Major anti-terrorist operations by the security forces, such as the supposed encounter in which the guilty of the Chittisinghpora massacre of March 2000 were eliminated, were rapidly proven to have been random acts of reprisal against innocent civilians. And highly publicised preemptive actions, such as the elimination of all the intending authors of a June 1 terrorist plot against the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) headquarters in Nagpur, have been surrounded by more than a whiff of suspicion.
It cannot again do very much good for public confidence in the security and intelligence agencies' commitment to the task, that the only prosecution launched under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), now lapsed, concluded with distinctly ambivalent results. Indeed, of the four persons who were arrested after the December 13, 2001 attack on New Delhi's Parliament premises and swiftly convicted, the charge of involvement has stuck only against one. And he was a surrendered militant, obliged by the terms of his capitulation, to keep regular contact with the anti-insurgency wing of the Jammu and Kashmir Police.
More than anything else, a joint institutional mechanism that deals with terrorism would require on both sides of the border, that security and intelligence agencies be subject to certain strict norms of public accountability. This is a process that has to be politically driven. And it is really questionable how far political establishments on both sides, that ostensibly derive their legitimacy from the people, but finally depend far too much on covert agendas to sustain themselves in power, can respond to this challenge.
Monday, October 02, 2006
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Vande Mataram: Nationalism and its Precursors
September 13, 2006
Well into the recent political rumpus over Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Vande Mataram, it was established that the whole controversy had been ignited by a serious misreading. September 7 as a date has no historic significance in the life of Bankim’s best-known poem. Though there is little dispute over the fact that Vande Mataram as a political slogan, acquired a certain resonance in the years 1905 and 1906, the effort to commemorate the poem in isolation from the wider events that it was part of, would seem a rather questionable decision. A centenary observance of the Swadeshi movement may well have been an occasion for looking back on some of the more significant episodes in India’s long march to freedom. But India’s political establishment remains, at best, ambivalent about these commemorations, as its indifference to the upcoming 150-year anniversary of the 1857 uprising clearly suggests.
Vande Mataram was, as authoritative commentaries have shown, authored between 1870 and 1875. It was subsequently enlarged and expanded, with explicit religious imagery entering what could, till then, have been construed as worshipful obeisance towards a nurturing motherland. It remained confined within select audiences in Calcutta for years together and became in its entirety, the motif and inspirational theme of Bankim’s novel Anandamath, whose serialisation began in a Calcutta journal in 1882. It was set to music in the mid-1880s by Rabindranath Tagore and the musical score was included in the third edition of Anandamath published in 1886, evidently as an indication of Bankim’s approval. As the eminent historian Sabyasachi Bhattacharya puts it, all this suggests that the song had by the late 19th century, begun receiving a fair degree of “appreciation in a limited circle of connoisseurs and enthusiasts”. But its career as an anthem of rebellion and an articulation of nationalist aspirations begins with the Swadeshi movement of 1905 (Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Vande Mataram, The Biography of a Song, Penguin Books, Delhi, 2003).
Bande Mataram, the English language newspaper that represented the most radical trend within the Swadeshi movement, began publishing in August 1906, edited first by Bepin Chandra Pal and later by Aurobindo Ghosh. And the Bande Mataram Samproday, set up with the principal aim of raising funds through public renditions of Bankim’s poem, dates from April 1906 (Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-08, Peoples Publishing House, Delhi, 1973).
In 1937, Rabindranath Tagore claimed in a letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, that “the privilege of originally setting (Vande Mataram’s) first stanza to the tune was mine when the author was still alive and I was the first person to sing it before a gathering of the Calcutta Congress” (Bhattacharya, page 21). Bankim died in 1894 and the Calcutta Congress session of 1896 where Tagore gave his rendition of the song was held, as was customary, in December.
However it is examined, there is no historic significance for September 7 in the life of Vande Mataram. That indeed has now been conceded in a spirit of contrition, by the Congress party itself. First the Congress disclaimed all responsibility for the Government announcement that September 7 would be a day of commemoration in schools across the country. Shortly afterwards, the Union Minister for Human Resources Development, Arjun Singh, himself conceded the point. The entire controversy in short, which revisited well-trodden ground and offered little by way of fresh insights, had been an unnecessary diversion from other more pressing tasks.
Vande Mataram was by a decision of the Constituent Assembly, given the status of a “national song” equal in status to the national anthem. This is a curiosity of Indian history since the rendition of the national anthem – like the salutation of the national flag – is an act of allegiance that every nation has a right to demand of its citizens. There cannot by definition, be another song or flag that has the same status. The decision to put Vande Mataram on par with the national anthem, in fact, reflected an uneasy compromise. There were several who insisted that the special status of Vande Mataram as a hymn to the motherland that inspired the Indian freedom movement, entitled it to be declared the national anthem. Equally, there were others within the nationalist leadership, who were uneasily aware that several of the nation’s citizens would find the many cultural and historical associations of the song, deeply discordant with their own beliefs.
The constitutional position in India as laid down by the Supreme Court in the famous case of Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1986, is that no citizen can be compelled to sing even the national anthem, should he or she consider it contrary to deeply held personal belief. Jehovah’s Witnesses are a sect within Christianity that forbids the worshipping of any being other than the one they deem to be the creator. The three children who were expelled from a school in Kerala for refusing to join the daily rendition of the national anthem, were reinstated by the Supreme Court, on the grounds that their rights to freedom of expression and belief, had been seriously violated by the expulsion. The Court found that though they refused to partake of the rendition, the children showed no disrespect to the national anthem. They stood up for their beliefs without in any way offending another’s.
If this is the situation with regard to the national anthem, then Vande Mataram, as a “national song” reflecting an uneasy political compromise, can enjoy only a secondary claim to the loyalties of the Indian citizen. And since a citizen of this country can decline to partake of a rendition of the nation anthem, it is the settled position in the law of the land, that he or she can exercise his freedom of choice in relation to any lesser song. But while declining to partake in any public rendition or homage, he or she is obliged not to insult or dishonour another’s beliefs.
Following the initial gaffe in calling for nationwide celebrations on September 7, the Ministry for Human Resource Development did nothing more or less than affirm this well-established point of law. Those who shared in the reverence for the song could sing it at the appointed time and day. Those who had reason to believe it antithetical to their faith, could refrain from joining the rendition, though not disrupt or dishonour the proceedings.
In kicking up a furore over a fairly simple point, the BJP and its affiliates have yet again shown their eagerness to coercively apply their articles of faith on those of other persuasions. Their noisy declamations indeed, have done little honour to the traditions of the freedom movement and only highlighted how certain aspects of what have been considered the seamless web of Indian nationalism, need reconsideration today. Vande Mataram has been a sentimental favourite for the most ardent of Indian nationalists. But clearly, the recent fracas, itself inseparable from the long and contentious history of the song, shows that it needs to be treated not as an anthem of the nation, but of the nation seeking to come into being. It bears in short, the unmistakable scars of its birth in historical circumstances when the “nation” was an alien concept for all of India.
In the novel Anandamath, Vande Mataram serves as the invocation of a group of ascetics who call themselves the Santans, or the “children” of the Mother. Early in the development of the novel, a leader of the band, Satyananda, is captured by the rulers’ troops. One of his followers, Jnanananda, then vows to have him released from the rulers’ fort. He exhorts a group of Santans for the task in the following manner: “We have long contemplated breaking this nest of pernicious birds, totally destroying this Mussalman city and throwing it into the river… Come, let us go and reduce to dust that city of the Mussalmans. Let us purify with fire that den of swine and cast it into the river”. After the assault is successfully concluded and Satyananda is set free, the Santans set off on a rampage. And “wherever they found the home of a Mussalman, they burnt it”.
This is merely one among several recurrent passages through Anandamath, where the theme of violence against “Mussalmans” is explicitly foregrounded. The historian Sumit Sarkar, in his authoritative account of the Swadeshi movement, argued that this may have been because Bankim, as an official of the British raj, was anxious to avoid punitive action and needed to use the “Mussalmans” as a surrogate for the British. But in a piece written in the context of the recent controversy, he clearly seemed to reconsider this position: “Not perhaps an entirely convincing plea, for censorship, except on the public stage, was not really very stringent before the Swadeshi days. In any case, one needs to separate the possible intentions of the author, from the likely responses of readers. Is it really irrational for Muslims – and by no means Muslims alone – to object to the compulsory imposition of a song that collapses the country into a specific Hindu deity, and forms part of a novel full of apparently communal passages?”
No consideration of this question would quite be complete without looking at the purposes that Vande Mataram, as a political slogan, have served. It was in reaction to the political abuse of the slogan that Mahatma Gandhi remarked in 1947, that it should never become a “chant to insult or offend the Muslims”. What had once been in his perception a “beautiful national song” had been transformed in time, into a “purely political cry” with a clearly sectarian appeal. From the invocation of a motherland suffused with divine grace, Vande Mataram had become the slogan of rioters and arsonists.
This was a reality that Tagore portrayed with an abundance of creative passion and acuity in his novel Ghare Baire. Among those shown resisting the Swadeshi movement’s insistence on boycotting foreign-made goods, is a small trader who obviously is a person from outside the caste hierarchy. He meets the demand of his aristocratic zamindar, that he destroy his bales of cotton cloth to prove his fealty to the spirit of Swadeshi, with outright refusal. Under pressure, he sets down the condition that the zamindar should compensate him for the financial investment he had made in the cotton bales. But this is read as unforgivable effrontery, most unbecoming of a lower-caste person. His cotton bales are destroyed by the zamindar’s agents, who in his account of the event, were numerous and “kept shouting Bande Mataram”.
Clearly, just as long as it has been a call to battle in the cause of the nation, Vande Mataram has also been a slogan of provocation and coercion. It was this dual character of Bankim’s legacy that Nehru and Tagore had occasion to reflect upon in 1937, when Congress governments were in place in several provinces of British India and communal tensions were rapidly rising. The compromise solution, to raise the first two stanzas of the song to an exalted status and effectively banish the rest into oblivion, was hammered out in part through their intervention. Both Nehru and Tagore were aware of the provocative use of the slogan by certain kinds of political forces, but helpless in restraining it. Beyond the terrain of principled liberalism where they conducted their debate, the Hindutva parties and their affiliates were pursuing the issue in the street. Authenticity in history and aesthetics has been trampled upon in this brand of politics. Inevitably, Vande Mataram has also become a living testament to India’s failure to overcome the sectarianism of “cultural nationalism” and evolve a brand of civic nationalism that all citizens can identify with.
Well into the recent political rumpus over Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Vande Mataram, it was established that the whole controversy had been ignited by a serious misreading. September 7 as a date has no historic significance in the life of Bankim’s best-known poem. Though there is little dispute over the fact that Vande Mataram as a political slogan, acquired a certain resonance in the years 1905 and 1906, the effort to commemorate the poem in isolation from the wider events that it was part of, would seem a rather questionable decision. A centenary observance of the Swadeshi movement may well have been an occasion for looking back on some of the more significant episodes in India’s long march to freedom. But India’s political establishment remains, at best, ambivalent about these commemorations, as its indifference to the upcoming 150-year anniversary of the 1857 uprising clearly suggests.
Vande Mataram was, as authoritative commentaries have shown, authored between 1870 and 1875. It was subsequently enlarged and expanded, with explicit religious imagery entering what could, till then, have been construed as worshipful obeisance towards a nurturing motherland. It remained confined within select audiences in Calcutta for years together and became in its entirety, the motif and inspirational theme of Bankim’s novel Anandamath, whose serialisation began in a Calcutta journal in 1882. It was set to music in the mid-1880s by Rabindranath Tagore and the musical score was included in the third edition of Anandamath published in 1886, evidently as an indication of Bankim’s approval. As the eminent historian Sabyasachi Bhattacharya puts it, all this suggests that the song had by the late 19th century, begun receiving a fair degree of “appreciation in a limited circle of connoisseurs and enthusiasts”. But its career as an anthem of rebellion and an articulation of nationalist aspirations begins with the Swadeshi movement of 1905 (Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Vande Mataram, The Biography of a Song, Penguin Books, Delhi, 2003).
Bande Mataram, the English language newspaper that represented the most radical trend within the Swadeshi movement, began publishing in August 1906, edited first by Bepin Chandra Pal and later by Aurobindo Ghosh. And the Bande Mataram Samproday, set up with the principal aim of raising funds through public renditions of Bankim’s poem, dates from April 1906 (Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-08, Peoples Publishing House, Delhi, 1973).
In 1937, Rabindranath Tagore claimed in a letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, that “the privilege of originally setting (Vande Mataram’s) first stanza to the tune was mine when the author was still alive and I was the first person to sing it before a gathering of the Calcutta Congress” (Bhattacharya, page 21). Bankim died in 1894 and the Calcutta Congress session of 1896 where Tagore gave his rendition of the song was held, as was customary, in December.
However it is examined, there is no historic significance for September 7 in the life of Vande Mataram. That indeed has now been conceded in a spirit of contrition, by the Congress party itself. First the Congress disclaimed all responsibility for the Government announcement that September 7 would be a day of commemoration in schools across the country. Shortly afterwards, the Union Minister for Human Resources Development, Arjun Singh, himself conceded the point. The entire controversy in short, which revisited well-trodden ground and offered little by way of fresh insights, had been an unnecessary diversion from other more pressing tasks.
Vande Mataram was by a decision of the Constituent Assembly, given the status of a “national song” equal in status to the national anthem. This is a curiosity of Indian history since the rendition of the national anthem – like the salutation of the national flag – is an act of allegiance that every nation has a right to demand of its citizens. There cannot by definition, be another song or flag that has the same status. The decision to put Vande Mataram on par with the national anthem, in fact, reflected an uneasy compromise. There were several who insisted that the special status of Vande Mataram as a hymn to the motherland that inspired the Indian freedom movement, entitled it to be declared the national anthem. Equally, there were others within the nationalist leadership, who were uneasily aware that several of the nation’s citizens would find the many cultural and historical associations of the song, deeply discordant with their own beliefs.
The constitutional position in India as laid down by the Supreme Court in the famous case of Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1986, is that no citizen can be compelled to sing even the national anthem, should he or she consider it contrary to deeply held personal belief. Jehovah’s Witnesses are a sect within Christianity that forbids the worshipping of any being other than the one they deem to be the creator. The three children who were expelled from a school in Kerala for refusing to join the daily rendition of the national anthem, were reinstated by the Supreme Court, on the grounds that their rights to freedom of expression and belief, had been seriously violated by the expulsion. The Court found that though they refused to partake of the rendition, the children showed no disrespect to the national anthem. They stood up for their beliefs without in any way offending another’s.
If this is the situation with regard to the national anthem, then Vande Mataram, as a “national song” reflecting an uneasy political compromise, can enjoy only a secondary claim to the loyalties of the Indian citizen. And since a citizen of this country can decline to partake of a rendition of the nation anthem, it is the settled position in the law of the land, that he or she can exercise his freedom of choice in relation to any lesser song. But while declining to partake in any public rendition or homage, he or she is obliged not to insult or dishonour another’s beliefs.
Following the initial gaffe in calling for nationwide celebrations on September 7, the Ministry for Human Resource Development did nothing more or less than affirm this well-established point of law. Those who shared in the reverence for the song could sing it at the appointed time and day. Those who had reason to believe it antithetical to their faith, could refrain from joining the rendition, though not disrupt or dishonour the proceedings.
In kicking up a furore over a fairly simple point, the BJP and its affiliates have yet again shown their eagerness to coercively apply their articles of faith on those of other persuasions. Their noisy declamations indeed, have done little honour to the traditions of the freedom movement and only highlighted how certain aspects of what have been considered the seamless web of Indian nationalism, need reconsideration today. Vande Mataram has been a sentimental favourite for the most ardent of Indian nationalists. But clearly, the recent fracas, itself inseparable from the long and contentious history of the song, shows that it needs to be treated not as an anthem of the nation, but of the nation seeking to come into being. It bears in short, the unmistakable scars of its birth in historical circumstances when the “nation” was an alien concept for all of India.
In the novel Anandamath, Vande Mataram serves as the invocation of a group of ascetics who call themselves the Santans, or the “children” of the Mother. Early in the development of the novel, a leader of the band, Satyananda, is captured by the rulers’ troops. One of his followers, Jnanananda, then vows to have him released from the rulers’ fort. He exhorts a group of Santans for the task in the following manner: “We have long contemplated breaking this nest of pernicious birds, totally destroying this Mussalman city and throwing it into the river… Come, let us go and reduce to dust that city of the Mussalmans. Let us purify with fire that den of swine and cast it into the river”. After the assault is successfully concluded and Satyananda is set free, the Santans set off on a rampage. And “wherever they found the home of a Mussalman, they burnt it”.
This is merely one among several recurrent passages through Anandamath, where the theme of violence against “Mussalmans” is explicitly foregrounded. The historian Sumit Sarkar, in his authoritative account of the Swadeshi movement, argued that this may have been because Bankim, as an official of the British raj, was anxious to avoid punitive action and needed to use the “Mussalmans” as a surrogate for the British. But in a piece written in the context of the recent controversy, he clearly seemed to reconsider this position: “Not perhaps an entirely convincing plea, for censorship, except on the public stage, was not really very stringent before the Swadeshi days. In any case, one needs to separate the possible intentions of the author, from the likely responses of readers. Is it really irrational for Muslims – and by no means Muslims alone – to object to the compulsory imposition of a song that collapses the country into a specific Hindu deity, and forms part of a novel full of apparently communal passages?”
No consideration of this question would quite be complete without looking at the purposes that Vande Mataram, as a political slogan, have served. It was in reaction to the political abuse of the slogan that Mahatma Gandhi remarked in 1947, that it should never become a “chant to insult or offend the Muslims”. What had once been in his perception a “beautiful national song” had been transformed in time, into a “purely political cry” with a clearly sectarian appeal. From the invocation of a motherland suffused with divine grace, Vande Mataram had become the slogan of rioters and arsonists.
This was a reality that Tagore portrayed with an abundance of creative passion and acuity in his novel Ghare Baire. Among those shown resisting the Swadeshi movement’s insistence on boycotting foreign-made goods, is a small trader who obviously is a person from outside the caste hierarchy. He meets the demand of his aristocratic zamindar, that he destroy his bales of cotton cloth to prove his fealty to the spirit of Swadeshi, with outright refusal. Under pressure, he sets down the condition that the zamindar should compensate him for the financial investment he had made in the cotton bales. But this is read as unforgivable effrontery, most unbecoming of a lower-caste person. His cotton bales are destroyed by the zamindar’s agents, who in his account of the event, were numerous and “kept shouting Bande Mataram”.
Clearly, just as long as it has been a call to battle in the cause of the nation, Vande Mataram has also been a slogan of provocation and coercion. It was this dual character of Bankim’s legacy that Nehru and Tagore had occasion to reflect upon in 1937, when Congress governments were in place in several provinces of British India and communal tensions were rapidly rising. The compromise solution, to raise the first two stanzas of the song to an exalted status and effectively banish the rest into oblivion, was hammered out in part through their intervention. Both Nehru and Tagore were aware of the provocative use of the slogan by certain kinds of political forces, but helpless in restraining it. Beyond the terrain of principled liberalism where they conducted their debate, the Hindutva parties and their affiliates were pursuing the issue in the street. Authenticity in history and aesthetics has been trampled upon in this brand of politics. Inevitably, Vande Mataram has also become a living testament to India’s failure to overcome the sectarianism of “cultural nationalism” and evolve a brand of civic nationalism that all citizens can identify with.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
India and the WTO
August 31, 2006
In some part, the career of globalisation – both as a phenomenon and as a term -- is congruent with that of the World Trade Organisation. In the early-1990s, when multilateral trade negotiations under the Uruguay Round were mired in seemingly irreconcilable differences between the industrialised countries, “globalisation” as a term featured but rarely in the policy lexicon. Key breakthroughs in the negotiations occurred in 1993, following which the final act of the Uruguay Round -- which among other things established the WTO -- was signed in April 1994. Since its genesis on January 1, 1995, the WTO’s life of just under twelve years has seen “globalisation” become an integral part of the policy vocabulary in all parts of the world.
Partly on this account, the WTO has become emblematic of the hopes and anxieties that surround the process of globalisation, in both the policy discourse and the dissenting view. The sharp polarisation of views on the WTO as an institution has again been evident since the ongoing round of trade negotiations -- under what is called the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) -- ran aground in July. Critics have reacted with grim satisfaction, rehashing their well-worn line that no deal is better than a bad deal. Champions of free trade as the best prescription for growth have, in equal measure, been dismayed that the only hope developing countries had to escape the poverty trap, is rapidly receding because of the deadlock in the global negotiations.
Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Laureate economist, has few doubts about who bears the responsibility for the current impasse. The European Union and the U.S., he says, have long since “reneged on the promises they made in 2001 at Doha to rectify the imbalances of the last round of trade negotiations”. And in the lead-up to the mid-term elections to the U.S. Congress, the George Bush administration has in Stiglitz’s words, proven more attentive to the “25,000 wealthy cotton farmers” in the country, and the “10,000 prosperous rice farmers”, than to the many millions of the world’s poor. When bold decisions were called for, the U.S. political establishment has chosen to play along with the “corrupt system of campaign-contributions-for-subsidies”.
The sixth ministerial conference of the WTO at Hong Kong produced a final declaration only because expectations had quite deliberately been moderated – in the words of WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy, “recalibrated” -- over the preceding weeks and months. For most part, the December 2005 conference remained deadlocked over the developing countries’ insistence – represented by a group of twenty countries including India and Brazil – that an end-date for export subsidies in agriculture be written into the final declaration. The E.U., which saw itself as the main target of this demand, responded by putting the onus on the U.S., Australia and other major agricultural exporters to commit themselves to ending their disguised export subsidies.
In the event, the E.U. conceded a provisional end-date for export subsidies, but insisted that it would be inoperative if modalities were not agreed on the parallel elimination of all other forms of unfair practices. The deadline for agreed modalities was put at April 30, 2006. Effectively, the EU, the US and other developed country exporters, gave themselves four months to unravel a conundrum that has defied solution for four years or more.
That effort was preordained to fail. The April 30 deadline passed with agreement nowhere in sight and it took an extraordinary appeal by leaders of the group of eight industrialised countries (the G8), to bring six big negotiators in the WTO – the U.S., the E.U., Japan, Australia, Brazil and India -- to Geneva in July for another effort at breaking the logjam. Expectedly, agriculture proved the main hurdle and the Geneva conclave did not have an opportunity to begin addressing the other issue of “non-agricultural market access” (or NAMA, which in WTO-speak, refers in the main to industrial goods).
Bitter recriminations followed the breakdown of talks and both Brazil and India tilted towards the E.U. in holding the U.S. responsible. The U.S. demand that all other countries should ensure significantly higher market access – by sharply cutting tariffs in agricultural products – in return for a reduction in subsidies, failed to win much favour. Under the Uruguay Round’s Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), every WTO member is obliged to maintain its “aggregate measure of support” in the sector below a specified level. This commitment is laid down in terms of “final bound commitment levels”, which leave a generous amount of head-room for developed countries. At Geneva, the U.S. offered to cut farm subsidies by 53 percent – referring of course, to the final bound level. This meant reducing the allowable ceiling from $ 48.2 billion to around $ 22.5 billion, when the most reliable data available with the WTO indicate that aggregate support to U.S. agriculture has increased since the AoA entered into force, but remained well within the mandated ceiling. Indeed, aggregate support has grown from $ 6.2 billion in 1995 to $ 14.4 billion in 2001, and the figure for the last U.S. accounting year stands at around $ 19.7 billion – still well below the final bound level that the U.S. has consented to.
There will in short, be no effective cut in U.S. domestic support for agriculture. And for this phantom concession, the U.S. demands from the rest of the world, a significant increase in market access for agricultural products. The E.U. reportedly was asked to reduce tariffs in the sector by upto 66 percent, since that would provide the benchmark for market access commitments on the part of the developing countries. India for one, has agreed that it is prepared for a tariff cut equivalent to two-thirds the magnitude of that agreed by the rich countries. The standards of market access established in agriculture were in turn, expected to set the framework for talks on NAMA. But with the negotiations failing to clear the first hurdle, there was no opportunity to even approach other significant issues.
Needless to say, India was among the countries most outraged by the U.S. demand. Commerce Minister Kamal Nath accused the U.S. of cavalier disregard for the subsistence needs of many millions in India who depend on agriculture. This reflected the longstanding complaint of the developing countries – where an estimated 90 percent of the global population dependent on agriculture live – that they can compete with U.S. farmers, but not with the U.S. treasury. As Kamal Nath said after the Geneva failure, the very idea that market access should be a price that developing countries pay to secure a cut in rich country subsidies, speaks of a “gap in mindset”. The subsidies that the developed countries hand out to their farmers have no business being there in the first place.
These reactions prove how seriously the WTO continues to be scarred by the circumstances of its birth. Between 1990 and 1992, the Uruguay Round negotiations were deadlocked by the rival perspectives of the U.S. and the E.U. on agricultural trade. The Blair House agreement in 1992, which was no more than an attempt to circumvent the problem by defining it differently, took care of that. After sealing a limited deal on subsidies payable to oilseeds growers, the U.S. and the E.U. agreed on numerous other artifices to break down the issue of agriculture into a complicated, quasi-legal maze that would defy the best efforts at comprehension. Thus, subsidies were classified into three colour-coded entities, and limits specified under each of these. A de minimis level of domestic support was permitted and a “peace clause” agreed, under which domestic support in agriculture would not be cause for WTO complaint except under pressing circumstances.
Developed countries in other words, agreed to limits on their agricultural subsidies, which were well above the actual sums paid. Calculations done then, showed that agriculture in most developing countries was in contrast, negatively subsidised. The rich countries gained the freedom to increase subsidies, while the developing world remained under compulsion to cut them. In return for significant concessions on intellectual property rights and industrial trade, the developing world got nothing by way of additional space for agriculture. And the only substantive gain for it was a heavily “back-loaded” agreement on textiles that deferred most of the purported gains to the very end of a ten-year implementation period.
Stiglitz’s assertion that the foremost priority of the Doha agenda should be the removal of the imbalances of Uruguay, resonates strongly with the view that India has long held. Indeed, prior to the launching of the Doha agenda, India had, in league with a group of developing countries, insisted that more than a new round of trade negotiations, attention needed to focus on issues in the implementation of existing trade agreements. The Uruguay Round had produced agreements that covered a large number of areas, but in many of these, the experience of the developing countries had been far from happy.
India's insistence that these glitches, both major and minor, need to be ironed out as a matter of priority failed to stem the tide of defections to the cause of a new trade round. Singapore, which hosted a meeting of a smaller group of the world’s major economies just prior to the Doha ministerial conference of the WTO, produced what was delicately described as a “quasi-consensus” on implementation issues: to discuss these in most part within the framework of a new round of trade negotiations. Indeed, in an elaborate concession to global sensitivities on the issue, the minister from Singapore who chaired the meeting, urged that future negotiations should seek to move towards working out a global “development agenda”. India’s reservations were assuaged in other words, by merely calling the new trade round by another name.
The fourth ministerial conference of the WTO at Doha in 2001 almost collapsed over agriculture. Till the dying hours of the conference, the E.U. had insisted on playing hardball and resisting any reference to the objective of phasing out export subsidies in agriculture. And despite being the only recalcitrant on this issue, the E.U. was playing for high stakes on other fronts, demanding an explicit acknowledgment that negotiations on a bundle of issues of special interest to European corporations would begin no later than the fifth Ministerial Conference scheduled for 2003.
Developing countries were equally adamant then, that there could simply be no presumption that the WTO could venture into these areas - investment, competition policy, government procurement and trade facilitation – which were potentially deeply intrusive on national decision-making processes. But as the clock was stopped and the conference went into overtime, the E.U. conceded that it would not be averse to the objective of phasing out export subsidies, provided there would be no “pre-judgment” of the issue. Partly in response, a number of developing countries began softening their stand on the four new issues that the E.U. wanted in the WTO agenda.
India then stood well and truly isolated. If ever there was a moment when India’s relations with the WTO reached breaking point, that was it. Early on the morning of November 14, 2001, India was presented a draft declaration that put in place all the issues that it had spared no effort to remove from the WTO agenda. Crunch time had come and the Indian delegation without further heed to diplomatic delicacy made known that its intention to vote with its feet. Commerce Minister Murasoli Maran, as the leader of the delegation, informed the conference that India would not be party to the purported consensus. The situation was only retrieved when the host government, as chair of the conference, issued a declaration that said among other things, that the four new issues would only be taken up for negotiations on the basis of an “explicit consensus” at the fifth ministerial meeting.
These issues in turn, proved the deal-breaker at the 2003 ministerial conference in Cancun. This was a surprise in itself, since the pre-conference expectation had been that agriculture had reserved that role for itself. India and Brazil had prior to the conference, taken the initiative in constituting the G20 which brought together a number of major developing countries on a joint platform to frontally challenge the insincerity of the rich countries on agriculture. The immediate provocation had been an effort by the U.S. and the E.U. in the lead-up to Cancun, to reprise the dubious record of the 1992 Blair House accord and present the developing countries a virtual fait accompli. All through the five-day conference at Cancun, it was agriculture that dominated discussions. And the four new issues that the E.U. in particular wanted on the agenda, only proved decisive because many countries did not want the talks to clear that hurdle. That would have brought the focus of discussions perilously close to their strong protectionist interests in agriculture.
The proposals on agriculture submitted by India and other countries at Cancun, were remarkable in seeking to harmonise the interests of developing country exporters and economies that have a strong defensive interest in protecting their markets. India counted itself quite decisively in the second category, whereas Brazil fell unequivocally in the first. That the unity forged in Cancun has, despite this strong divergence in interest, lasted right till the Hong Kong conference and beyond, speaks of a determination to ensure that the errors of the Uruguay Round are not repeated.
In the days since the breakdown at Geneva, India has expressed an interest in joining negotiations towards creating a mega-trade bloc involving the ten ASEAN nations, Japan, China, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. It has been a feature of the years since the creation of the WTO, that RTAs – which in most instances, institutionalise a “WTO plus” model of trade liberalisation -- have increasingly tended to dominate world trade. Yet India has failed to integrate itself into a strong regional trading arrangement, reflecting in part the adverse political and economic circumstances in its own neighbourhood, as also the strong defensive trade interests it continues to have. Though talks are still at a very preliminary state, trade observers are unsure that India has any realistic prospect of joining the proposed Asian trade bloc. Typically, the East and South-East Asian models of trade liberalisation operate with very limited “negative lists” of products and if India is to go on board, it would only be with a rather long list of exempted items.
There are political sensitivities involved. Early in April, Sonia Gandhi as president of the ruling Congress Party, wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, urging that ongoing bilateral negotiations on possible free trade arrangements be put on hold. The farm sector, she pointed out, was going through an acute crisis. And the last thing the country needed was an influx of cheap imports – quite possibly subsidised by source country governments – that would deprive the Indian farmer of the few market opportunities he had.
It does not take very much knowledge of the Indian farm scene, to figure out that a major increase in imports has not been a serious concern. The problem rather is more a consequence of declining investment, a drying up of institutional credit, and the absence of appropriate marketing infrastructure. Though India has since the Uruguay Round, earned a reputation for being a forceful and well-informed negotiator in world trade councils, the sustenance of this role would require at the least, that these infirmities of domestic economic policy be addressed. This is especially the case since regional free-trade agreements seem to suit India’s interests even less than a multilateral arrangement.
In some part, the career of globalisation – both as a phenomenon and as a term -- is congruent with that of the World Trade Organisation. In the early-1990s, when multilateral trade negotiations under the Uruguay Round were mired in seemingly irreconcilable differences between the industrialised countries, “globalisation” as a term featured but rarely in the policy lexicon. Key breakthroughs in the negotiations occurred in 1993, following which the final act of the Uruguay Round -- which among other things established the WTO -- was signed in April 1994. Since its genesis on January 1, 1995, the WTO’s life of just under twelve years has seen “globalisation” become an integral part of the policy vocabulary in all parts of the world.
Partly on this account, the WTO has become emblematic of the hopes and anxieties that surround the process of globalisation, in both the policy discourse and the dissenting view. The sharp polarisation of views on the WTO as an institution has again been evident since the ongoing round of trade negotiations -- under what is called the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) -- ran aground in July. Critics have reacted with grim satisfaction, rehashing their well-worn line that no deal is better than a bad deal. Champions of free trade as the best prescription for growth have, in equal measure, been dismayed that the only hope developing countries had to escape the poverty trap, is rapidly receding because of the deadlock in the global negotiations.
Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Laureate economist, has few doubts about who bears the responsibility for the current impasse. The European Union and the U.S., he says, have long since “reneged on the promises they made in 2001 at Doha to rectify the imbalances of the last round of trade negotiations”. And in the lead-up to the mid-term elections to the U.S. Congress, the George Bush administration has in Stiglitz’s words, proven more attentive to the “25,000 wealthy cotton farmers” in the country, and the “10,000 prosperous rice farmers”, than to the many millions of the world’s poor. When bold decisions were called for, the U.S. political establishment has chosen to play along with the “corrupt system of campaign-contributions-for-subsidies”.
The sixth ministerial conference of the WTO at Hong Kong produced a final declaration only because expectations had quite deliberately been moderated – in the words of WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy, “recalibrated” -- over the preceding weeks and months. For most part, the December 2005 conference remained deadlocked over the developing countries’ insistence – represented by a group of twenty countries including India and Brazil – that an end-date for export subsidies in agriculture be written into the final declaration. The E.U., which saw itself as the main target of this demand, responded by putting the onus on the U.S., Australia and other major agricultural exporters to commit themselves to ending their disguised export subsidies.
In the event, the E.U. conceded a provisional end-date for export subsidies, but insisted that it would be inoperative if modalities were not agreed on the parallel elimination of all other forms of unfair practices. The deadline for agreed modalities was put at April 30, 2006. Effectively, the EU, the US and other developed country exporters, gave themselves four months to unravel a conundrum that has defied solution for four years or more.
That effort was preordained to fail. The April 30 deadline passed with agreement nowhere in sight and it took an extraordinary appeal by leaders of the group of eight industrialised countries (the G8), to bring six big negotiators in the WTO – the U.S., the E.U., Japan, Australia, Brazil and India -- to Geneva in July for another effort at breaking the logjam. Expectedly, agriculture proved the main hurdle and the Geneva conclave did not have an opportunity to begin addressing the other issue of “non-agricultural market access” (or NAMA, which in WTO-speak, refers in the main to industrial goods).
Bitter recriminations followed the breakdown of talks and both Brazil and India tilted towards the E.U. in holding the U.S. responsible. The U.S. demand that all other countries should ensure significantly higher market access – by sharply cutting tariffs in agricultural products – in return for a reduction in subsidies, failed to win much favour. Under the Uruguay Round’s Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), every WTO member is obliged to maintain its “aggregate measure of support” in the sector below a specified level. This commitment is laid down in terms of “final bound commitment levels”, which leave a generous amount of head-room for developed countries. At Geneva, the U.S. offered to cut farm subsidies by 53 percent – referring of course, to the final bound level. This meant reducing the allowable ceiling from $ 48.2 billion to around $ 22.5 billion, when the most reliable data available with the WTO indicate that aggregate support to U.S. agriculture has increased since the AoA entered into force, but remained well within the mandated ceiling. Indeed, aggregate support has grown from $ 6.2 billion in 1995 to $ 14.4 billion in 2001, and the figure for the last U.S. accounting year stands at around $ 19.7 billion – still well below the final bound level that the U.S. has consented to.
There will in short, be no effective cut in U.S. domestic support for agriculture. And for this phantom concession, the U.S. demands from the rest of the world, a significant increase in market access for agricultural products. The E.U. reportedly was asked to reduce tariffs in the sector by upto 66 percent, since that would provide the benchmark for market access commitments on the part of the developing countries. India for one, has agreed that it is prepared for a tariff cut equivalent to two-thirds the magnitude of that agreed by the rich countries. The standards of market access established in agriculture were in turn, expected to set the framework for talks on NAMA. But with the negotiations failing to clear the first hurdle, there was no opportunity to even approach other significant issues.
Needless to say, India was among the countries most outraged by the U.S. demand. Commerce Minister Kamal Nath accused the U.S. of cavalier disregard for the subsistence needs of many millions in India who depend on agriculture. This reflected the longstanding complaint of the developing countries – where an estimated 90 percent of the global population dependent on agriculture live – that they can compete with U.S. farmers, but not with the U.S. treasury. As Kamal Nath said after the Geneva failure, the very idea that market access should be a price that developing countries pay to secure a cut in rich country subsidies, speaks of a “gap in mindset”. The subsidies that the developed countries hand out to their farmers have no business being there in the first place.
These reactions prove how seriously the WTO continues to be scarred by the circumstances of its birth. Between 1990 and 1992, the Uruguay Round negotiations were deadlocked by the rival perspectives of the U.S. and the E.U. on agricultural trade. The Blair House agreement in 1992, which was no more than an attempt to circumvent the problem by defining it differently, took care of that. After sealing a limited deal on subsidies payable to oilseeds growers, the U.S. and the E.U. agreed on numerous other artifices to break down the issue of agriculture into a complicated, quasi-legal maze that would defy the best efforts at comprehension. Thus, subsidies were classified into three colour-coded entities, and limits specified under each of these. A de minimis level of domestic support was permitted and a “peace clause” agreed, under which domestic support in agriculture would not be cause for WTO complaint except under pressing circumstances.
Developed countries in other words, agreed to limits on their agricultural subsidies, which were well above the actual sums paid. Calculations done then, showed that agriculture in most developing countries was in contrast, negatively subsidised. The rich countries gained the freedom to increase subsidies, while the developing world remained under compulsion to cut them. In return for significant concessions on intellectual property rights and industrial trade, the developing world got nothing by way of additional space for agriculture. And the only substantive gain for it was a heavily “back-loaded” agreement on textiles that deferred most of the purported gains to the very end of a ten-year implementation period.
Stiglitz’s assertion that the foremost priority of the Doha agenda should be the removal of the imbalances of Uruguay, resonates strongly with the view that India has long held. Indeed, prior to the launching of the Doha agenda, India had, in league with a group of developing countries, insisted that more than a new round of trade negotiations, attention needed to focus on issues in the implementation of existing trade agreements. The Uruguay Round had produced agreements that covered a large number of areas, but in many of these, the experience of the developing countries had been far from happy.
India's insistence that these glitches, both major and minor, need to be ironed out as a matter of priority failed to stem the tide of defections to the cause of a new trade round. Singapore, which hosted a meeting of a smaller group of the world’s major economies just prior to the Doha ministerial conference of the WTO, produced what was delicately described as a “quasi-consensus” on implementation issues: to discuss these in most part within the framework of a new round of trade negotiations. Indeed, in an elaborate concession to global sensitivities on the issue, the minister from Singapore who chaired the meeting, urged that future negotiations should seek to move towards working out a global “development agenda”. India’s reservations were assuaged in other words, by merely calling the new trade round by another name.
The fourth ministerial conference of the WTO at Doha in 2001 almost collapsed over agriculture. Till the dying hours of the conference, the E.U. had insisted on playing hardball and resisting any reference to the objective of phasing out export subsidies in agriculture. And despite being the only recalcitrant on this issue, the E.U. was playing for high stakes on other fronts, demanding an explicit acknowledgment that negotiations on a bundle of issues of special interest to European corporations would begin no later than the fifth Ministerial Conference scheduled for 2003.
Developing countries were equally adamant then, that there could simply be no presumption that the WTO could venture into these areas - investment, competition policy, government procurement and trade facilitation – which were potentially deeply intrusive on national decision-making processes. But as the clock was stopped and the conference went into overtime, the E.U. conceded that it would not be averse to the objective of phasing out export subsidies, provided there would be no “pre-judgment” of the issue. Partly in response, a number of developing countries began softening their stand on the four new issues that the E.U. wanted in the WTO agenda.
India then stood well and truly isolated. If ever there was a moment when India’s relations with the WTO reached breaking point, that was it. Early on the morning of November 14, 2001, India was presented a draft declaration that put in place all the issues that it had spared no effort to remove from the WTO agenda. Crunch time had come and the Indian delegation without further heed to diplomatic delicacy made known that its intention to vote with its feet. Commerce Minister Murasoli Maran, as the leader of the delegation, informed the conference that India would not be party to the purported consensus. The situation was only retrieved when the host government, as chair of the conference, issued a declaration that said among other things, that the four new issues would only be taken up for negotiations on the basis of an “explicit consensus” at the fifth ministerial meeting.
These issues in turn, proved the deal-breaker at the 2003 ministerial conference in Cancun. This was a surprise in itself, since the pre-conference expectation had been that agriculture had reserved that role for itself. India and Brazil had prior to the conference, taken the initiative in constituting the G20 which brought together a number of major developing countries on a joint platform to frontally challenge the insincerity of the rich countries on agriculture. The immediate provocation had been an effort by the U.S. and the E.U. in the lead-up to Cancun, to reprise the dubious record of the 1992 Blair House accord and present the developing countries a virtual fait accompli. All through the five-day conference at Cancun, it was agriculture that dominated discussions. And the four new issues that the E.U. in particular wanted on the agenda, only proved decisive because many countries did not want the talks to clear that hurdle. That would have brought the focus of discussions perilously close to their strong protectionist interests in agriculture.
The proposals on agriculture submitted by India and other countries at Cancun, were remarkable in seeking to harmonise the interests of developing country exporters and economies that have a strong defensive interest in protecting their markets. India counted itself quite decisively in the second category, whereas Brazil fell unequivocally in the first. That the unity forged in Cancun has, despite this strong divergence in interest, lasted right till the Hong Kong conference and beyond, speaks of a determination to ensure that the errors of the Uruguay Round are not repeated.
In the days since the breakdown at Geneva, India has expressed an interest in joining negotiations towards creating a mega-trade bloc involving the ten ASEAN nations, Japan, China, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. It has been a feature of the years since the creation of the WTO, that RTAs – which in most instances, institutionalise a “WTO plus” model of trade liberalisation -- have increasingly tended to dominate world trade. Yet India has failed to integrate itself into a strong regional trading arrangement, reflecting in part the adverse political and economic circumstances in its own neighbourhood, as also the strong defensive trade interests it continues to have. Though talks are still at a very preliminary state, trade observers are unsure that India has any realistic prospect of joining the proposed Asian trade bloc. Typically, the East and South-East Asian models of trade liberalisation operate with very limited “negative lists” of products and if India is to go on board, it would only be with a rather long list of exempted items.
There are political sensitivities involved. Early in April, Sonia Gandhi as president of the ruling Congress Party, wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, urging that ongoing bilateral negotiations on possible free trade arrangements be put on hold. The farm sector, she pointed out, was going through an acute crisis. And the last thing the country needed was an influx of cheap imports – quite possibly subsidised by source country governments – that would deprive the Indian farmer of the few market opportunities he had.
It does not take very much knowledge of the Indian farm scene, to figure out that a major increase in imports has not been a serious concern. The problem rather is more a consequence of declining investment, a drying up of institutional credit, and the absence of appropriate marketing infrastructure. Though India has since the Uruguay Round, earned a reputation for being a forceful and well-informed negotiator in world trade councils, the sustenance of this role would require at the least, that these infirmities of domestic economic policy be addressed. This is especially the case since regional free-trade agreements seem to suit India’s interests even less than a multilateral arrangement.
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Israel's Failure in Lebanon: One More Nail in the Coffin for Pax Americana
August 30, 2006
A week into the uneasy ceasefire in Lebanon, an Israeli battle tank retreating in navigational disarray from an engagement with Hezbollah guerrillas, drove into a minefield laid prior to the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the country in May 2000. One soldier was killed and two injured. It was a vivid illustration, even if a perverse one in which perpetrator became victim, of the legacy of decades of Israeli aggression against Lebanon. Since Israel’s supposed withdrawal from a self-declared security belt in the south of the country, the Lebanese government has repeatedly asked for a map of the minefields sown through the years of occupation, only to be consistently turned down.
Inquiries by a number of global bodies meanwhile, provided a summation of widespread moral concerns over Israel’s war-fighting strategies. To take the lesser – though more persistent -- of the simultaneous bloodbaths that Israel has been engaged in, a recent report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), has documented 202 Palestinian deaths, of which 44 have been children, in Gaza since June. Thousands of Palestinians have been forced to flee their homes by continuing Israeli ground incursions and artillery shelling. Only limited quantities of humanitarian aid have reached the beleaguered Gaza population because the main crossing point into the territory has been shut. The damage to the region’s electricity and water supply systems, inflicted in the first week of the Israeli attack, remains unrepaired. With Gaza’s only power plant rendered inoperative, the territory’s 1.4 million people have had to cope with at best, intermittent supplies of electricity and water.[i]
The London-based human rights group, Amnesty International, had as far back as June 30, offered an authoritative judgment on Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Referring to Israel’s scorched earth policy in the territory, ostensibly in retaliation for a militant attack on an army post in which one soldier was taken prisoner, Amnesty observed that the “deliberate attacks by Israeli forces against civilian property and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip violate international humanitarian law and constitute war crimes”. Israel was obliged under international law, Amnesty decreed, to “take urgent measures to remedy the long-term damage it has caused and immediately restore the supply -- at its own cost -- of electricity and water to the Palestinian population in the affected areas”.[ii]
With all these strictures, when a very similar provocation occurred on its northern frontier, Israel was only emboldened to transfer its patented military techniques to Lebanon: attacking an entire civilian population to achieve a military objective against poorly equipped adversaries. What Israel’s opponents lacked in terms of weaponry though, they made up in determination and organisational skills. And for all that, they engaged in the conflict with a far greater sense of scruple. A few days before the ceasefire in Lebanon, an enumeration of the casualties put the number of those killed in Israel at 98, of which no more than 35 were civilians. The total killed in Lebanon though, numbered 1,103, of which all but 98 were civilians.[iii] Even if more lives were lost in the following days of hostilities, the proportion between civilian and combatant casualties remained substantially unchanged on either side.
Far from exciting the moral scruples of Israel’s champions, this only challenged them to evolve newer doctrines of humanitarian law. Alan Dershowitz, a professor of law at Harvard University and author of a recent bestseller, The Case for Israel – proven to be at least a borderline case of plagiarism from a thoroughly discredited 1982 book – argued that it was no longer axiomatic that an individual’s civilian status rendered him innocent, or ensured him immunity from military action.[iv] There is a vast difference in both moral and legal terms, Dershowitz wrote, “between a 2-year-old who is killed by an enemy rocket and a 30-year-old civilian who has allowed his house to be used to store Katyusha rockets”. Though both are technically civilians, “the former is far more innocent than the latter”. Then there was another essential distinction to be made between “civilians who are held hostage against their will by terrorists who use them as involuntary human shields, and civilians who voluntarily place themselves in harm's way in order to protect terrorists from enemy fire”.
This range of situations suggested to Dershowitz, that the term “civilian” did little else than equate “the truly innocent with guilty accessories to terrorism”. What was required in place of this vague and unsatisfactory term, was the notion of a “continuum of civilianity” -- admittedly an awkward phrase, but one that allowed for all the inherent complexities of the real-world. If this continuum were to become part of the commonsense, then the civilian casualties of Lebanon would in Dershowitz’s estimation, “fall closer to the line of complicity” than “the line of innocence”. “Every civilian death is a tragedy”, the learned professor concluded, “but some are more tragic than others”.
The upshot of this exercise in legal chicanery then, is simply that an Israeli civilian’s life, supposedly so detached and distinct from that of a soldier, is worth much more than an Arab’s. Most Arabs, whether civilian or combatant, believe subliminally in the wicked, terrorist agenda of destroying Israel. This makes them accessories, if not active agents, of terrorism. To expect conventional rules of war to be observed in this situation was plain foolishness. Norms worked out in a context of warfare between rival armies, clearly distinguished by the uniforms they wore, were clearly inapplicable in a situation of terrorism.
A similar rationalisation for the killing of innocents was advanced in The New Republic, shortly after the Qana massacre of July 30 – when Israel devastated an entire multi-storey structure in southern Lebanon, killing an estimated 28, including 16 children. As the literary editor of the journal put it, “the killing of children” though an unequivocal evil, is not quite the same thing when it happens in a “just war”. “Moral clarity” is easily achieved about “the evil done in a wrong cause”, since an “unjust war” must “be opposed even when no such outrages occur, even when it is conducted with humanitarian diligence”. Such clarity of moral conviction though, was virtually impossible in a just war, where despite every effort to avoid needless suffering, the wickedness of the adversary makes unwitting victims of civilians on its side.[v]
As a corollary of these exercises in moral obfuscation, it could be asked where exactly on the “continuum of civilianity” the citizens of Israel fall. Despite encountering the Palestinians on a daily basis and being aware of their presence as a dispossessed people living on the land that world Jewry claims as its exclusive patrimony, Israeli civilians have repeatedly elected governments that have denied Palestinian rights and engaged in a quite deliberate effort to thin down their population by making their life under occupation intolerable. It is a question that Dershowitz chooses not to address.
Beyond the legal subterfuge, those who entered the field of hostilities to seek an understanding of ground realities, had little difficulty arriving at the appropriate judgments. Shortly after the Qana massacre, Human Rights Watch (HRW), the advocacy body based in New York, released a report documenting how this incident was merely one among many deliberate efforts to terrorise the civilian population of Lebanon.[vi] After exhaustive inquiries at the site of the atrocity and a significant forensic effort, HRW concluded that every alibi Israel had advanced, failed to measure up to any standard of credibility.
Qana on July 30 seemed eerily reminiscent of a day over ten years before -- April 18, 1996 -- when Israel, executing what was titled “Operation Grapes of Wrath”, laid siege to a U.N. refugee compound in the same village, ignored repeated pleas from peacekeepers entrusted with securing the facility, and in essence, showed its contempt for all norms of civilised conduct, by shelling and bombing hapless refugees from its own campaigns of ethnic cleansing, killing over a hundred women and children. As history now repeats itself, HRW has found that there was no legitimate military target anywhere in the vicinity of the apartment building where some 63 Lebanese civilians had taken shelter on July 29. With its much vaunted military sophistication, which enables withering responses to missile launches within seconds, Israel should have known that no hostile actions had been undertaken from anywhere near that forlorn site of refuge for a besieged people. And yet, as the HRW report documents, Israeli fighter jets made two bombing raids on the building, the second seemingly to underline a deliberate intent to kill and maim.
After a July 25 attack on a U.N. military observers’ post which killed four peacekeepers, Israel angrily rebuffed the perfectly reasonable surmise by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, that the attack had been “apparently deliberate”. Israel then contrived to parlay this simulated outrage into a bid to keep the U.N. out of the official inquiry. After its own investigations, HRW found adequate cause for a more serious and systematic investigation, since subsequent days too had seen a number of attacks that placed U.N. personnel in jeopardy and in some cases actually caused them grievous injury. In very few, if any, of these cases, were Hezbollah guerrillas known to be operating in the vicinity of U.N. installations, which could have made the plea of targeting error credible.
The depopulation of civilian areas through military action constitutes an unequivocal war crime. HRW concedes that a belligerent power could, in particular circumstances, legitimately warn civilians of impending military strikes, so that they have time to get out of harm’s way. But it also observes quite definitively, that Israel adopted this procedure in a particular perverse fashion. All Lebanese civilians south of the Litani river were at some stage or the other, ordered to leave and Israel’s Justice Minister concluded after a few such perfunctory efforts, that anybody choosing to stay behind, should be deemed a terrorist liable to attack without further notice. Yet the order to leave, in most instances, was followed by a deliberate effort to cut off all routes of exit, with bridges and roads being repeatedly bombed. In several instances, civilians fleeing the scene of aerial bombing and artillery attacks were mowed down, despite flying the white flag that universally symbolises the absence of hostile intent.
A forgetful international community could soon consign this year’s atrocities in Lebanon to the black hole of historical memory, as with the 1996 Qana massacre, as with the carnage on Gaza beach of June 9, which killed seven innocent civilians and left the traumatised ten year-old, Huda Ghalia, as the sole survivor in a family of eight. But there are fresh stirrings in civil society groupings, which have in recent times sought to bring war criminals of the worst stripe to account through the principle of universal jurisdiction.
Though contentious as a concept, universal jurisdiction, championed by organisations like Amnesty International, has a simple basis in law. States that are party to covenants like the Geneva Conventions on the laws of war, are obliged by the terms of their accession, to enact domestic legislation to operationalise these commitments. Even when certain States Party fail to do so, whether on account of legislative inertia or internal political resistance, other States Party are entitled to assume universal compliance. Despite all its implications of extra-territorial application of national laws, universal jurisdiction is soundly based in the rule of law. In a paper prepared in 1999, Amnesty International, explained that the principle was invoked by the victorious parties in World War II, when they began to prosecute the main agents of the war from the defeated side. This legal action was undertaken on behalf of the international community and pertained in most cases to “crimes against humanity and war crimes” that the victorious powers had no jurisdiction over in terms of national law. In the years that followed, a few states had exercised universal jurisdiction to bring to book those guilty of particularly odious crimes. And interestingly, the list that includes Australia, Canada and the U.K., also counts Israel among its member.[vii]
For this reason, Amnesty’s judgment after its review of much the same ground that HRW went over, is especially compelling: many of the “violations” of international humanitarian law by Israel, it has said, “are war crimes that give rise to individual criminal responsibility”. This means in essence, that, “people against whom there is prima facie evidence of responsibility for the commission of these crimes are subject to criminal accountability anywhere in the world through the exercise of universal jurisdiction”.[viii]
Precedents are not lacking, though they have all failed to arrive at a final determination of the validity of universal jurisdiction and the powers that judicial bodies can assume under the doctrine. Belgium in 2003, acting on the strength of a decade-old law, admitted a petition pleading for the arrest and prosecution of Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s Prime Minister, for complicity in the 1982 massacre of Palestinian refugees in the Shabra and Shattilla refugee camps on the outskirts of Beirut. In 2005, a London magistrate issued warrant for the arrest of Major-General Doron Almog, commander of Israeli occupation forces in Gaza, for a 2002 bombing attack which killed 15 Palestinians, including 8 children, in a supposed effort to eliminate one militant of the Islamic resistance. Petitions for the arrest and prosecution of Lieutenant-General Dan Halutz, chief of staff of the Israel Defence Force, and his predecessor, Moshe Yaalon, are also pending before London courts. Needless to say, after the experience of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1999, no officer, whether serving or retired, from Israel’s top military command has been very keen on visiting London. Sharon himself won immunity from arrest after the Belgian law was amended under pressure from the U.S. But till he was laid low by an incapacitating stroke in January this year, he did not show much interest in visiting Belgium or any other country which might have had a mutual cooperation treaty in criminal matters with Belgium.
The severe setbacks that Israel’s image has suffered, must be weighed against the dubious strategic gains garnered from the operations in Lebanon. As the ceasefire came into effect, the Israeli public remained bitterly divided over the outcome of the war. The stated objective – the destruction of Hezbollah – had widespread public endorsement. But the day the hostilities were suspended, as many Israeli citizens were convinced they had lost as believed they had won. A substantial plurality was unsure of what exactly the war had achieved. And Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who commanded almost universal approval within the country at the beginning of the war, had fallen sharply in public esteem in this space of five weeks.
All this makes for a rather unsatisfactory outcome for the vaunted Israeli military machine, which by all accounts, had prepared intensively for this war over many years. Indeed, the moment Israeli forces pulled out of Lebanon in May 2000, it was foretold that another visitation of mayhem in the region was inevitable, a final settling of accounts. More than Israel’s own objective of liquidating Hezbollah, there was by fairly reliable accounts, a strong U.S. interest in a successful outcome to the operations in Lebanon. The investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has indeed proposed that the U.S. may have been the more ardent of the two for war.[ix]
The demonstration effects of Lebanon were something that the U.S. hoped to garner major strategic gains from. Haunted by the possibility that it would only be able to escape from the military quagmire of Iraq by accommodating Iran’s ambitions for a heightened role in regional geopolitics, the U.S. was hoping that the decimation of Iran’s supposed proxy in Lebanon would minimise the need for painful concessions. In operational terms, Israel’s military action against fortified Hezbollah positions and missile launching pads, was expected to give the U.S. valuable inputs for possible action against Iran’s nuclear assets at a time of its choice.
Israel’s failure in Lebanon has to be viewed in the context of the wider prospect of a collapse of the Pax Americana in West Asia. Whatever their other failings, top officials of the U.S. administration do not lack the ability to coin attractive life-cycle metaphors to describe the politics of the region. It was in May 2005 that Vice President Dick Cheney – the man who had visions of flower-strewn parades as Iraqis heralded the U.S. invasion as long-awaited liberation – asserted that the insurgency in the country was in its “death throes”. And mid-July this year, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, after surveying the wreckage of Lebanon and the mounting toll in human lives, made the chirpy prediction that these were the “birth pangs” of a new political order in the region.
John Prescott, the British Deputy Prime Minister, recently used an unflatteringly vivid four-letter epithet to describe U.S. policy in West Asia. Standing in for a vacationing Tony Blair, Prescott complained that the only reason he had gone along with the decision to invade Iraq was the promise held out that the “roadmap” to peace in Palestine would be implemented shortly after victory was sealed on that front. As with several other western leaders who still only partially realise how they were duped, or went along with all the pretexts for war in the belief that victory would be swift, Prescott fails to understand that the U.S. invasion was intended precisely to create the conditions in the wider region that would allow Israel to implement a larger, unilateral, agenda. This much was suspected and widely spoken of elsewhere in the world, well before the invasion began and particularly after all the frantic efforts failed to turn up evidence that Iraq was in possession of the proscribed weapons that had been the casus belli.[x]
In recent times, as public disillusionment within the U.S. has grown, the taboo subject of Israel’s role in instigating Bush’s misadventure, has emerged in public focus. And the debate was truly ignited in March 2006, when John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, professors of political science at Chicago and Harvard, published a working paper, arguing with a wealth of documentation, that Israel’s undue influence over U.S. foreign policy had become an insupportable strategic burden.[xi] They were promptly denounced as anti-Semites, but their case has not quite been so easy to dismiss.
The rebellion of the Palestinian nation under its occupation, forced Israel to confront a painful dilemma. Rather than opt for the many possibilities of peace that the Palestinians offered, Israel chose the path of unilateralism. Ehud Olmert, the hapless Israeli Prime Minister who faces within six months of his installation, a crisis of credibility with the Israeli public, was perceived for long as an accidental leader, placed in a position of authority only because of the sainted Ariel Sharon’s incapacitation. In elections held in March, Olmert won an endorsement, though of a far more modest magnitude than expected when Sharon had split from the Likud Party, and floated a new entity, the Kadima, as a vehicle for making a reality of what he saw as Israel’s final destiny. It was to be the Zionist programme’s climactic manoeuvre in the global strategic arena, rivalling in its historic significance, the declaration of the state of Israel by David Ben-Gurion in May 1948 and the conquest of all of the land of Palestine in 1967.
After Theodore Herzl who conjured up the dream of a Jewish homeland in Palestine and Ben-Gurion who made it a reality, Sharon’s role, as the third in this succession of Zionist prophets, was to work out a final definition of national borders that would safeguard Israel’s identity as a country with a stable and substantial Jewish majority. The Palestinians offered a way: Israel could withdraw to its 1967 borders, and acknowledge that the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 had made victims of a people with pre-existing rights to the land. This meant essentially that the Palestinian “right of return” would be recognised under international law, though it was not evident that all those who had been evicted from their land -- and their descendants -- intended to exercise it. Rather, the recognition of their rights as a dispossessed people, and their voluntary surrender of the right of return, would only mean that they would gain recompense in several other ways, which could be negotiated.
Obsessed by its own sense of power, Israel chose to turn its back on these proposals, and paint the Palestinians as an obstreperous people, undeserving of partnership in peace negotiations. It then proceeded, through innumerable provocations, to engineer a violent uprising by the occupied people, painting an entirely legitimate movement of resistance against military oppression as “terrorism”. Once the label was foisted on the Palestinian resistance, Israel had little problem gaining a licence from the international community to crush the movement through the most barbaric means. But since a constant state of war was not a prospect that it yearned to live with, Israel decided, within a year of the Palestinian uprising, that it would enforce a policy of “unilateral separation” of the Jewish people from the Palestinians.[xii] The program of “unilateral separation”, mooted by Israel’s Labour Party Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, in 2001, was taken over by Likud Party Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, in 2005. When he found that his own party would not easily yield on its entrenched commitment to a “Greater Israel”, Sharon split to form the Kadima, which entered into an alliance with Labour after the 2006 general elections, to impose Israel’s unilateral agenda.
Sharon’s project involved the pretence of an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the conversion of that tiny, over-populated and devastated strip into the world’s largest prison, garrisoned through air and sea-power. It involved the construction of an apartheid wall across the West Bank that sundered Palestinian communities one from another, destroying lives and livelihoods, and marking out illegal Jewish settlements – and the roadways and tunnels to access them -- as eternal parts of the Jewish nation. And finally, it involved securing the northern settlements by bludgeoning Syria and Lebanon into submission.
Israel’s failure in Lebanon is magnified by the collapse of its pretended withdrawal from Gaza. And an immediate consequence of the Lebanon fiasco has been that Israel’s plans for an aggressive effort to remake the topography of the West Bank, and formally declare the strategically more important and better endowed tracts an eternal part of the Jewish state, have had to be put on hold.
The strategic partnership between the U.S. and Israel to redesign the political geography of West Asia, is clearly in deep trouble. After all the purported rationalisations for the invasion of Iraq were dealt with and found to be hollow, a perfectly reasonable inference has begun increasingly to demand attention: that the U.S. in invading Iraq was seeking merely to destroy an Arab state that had been a strategic nuisance and a continuing impediment to Israel’s efforts to draw a new political map in the region. Israel’s failure in Lebanon now compounds the abject collapse of the U.S. project in Iraq. Between them, they constitute clear evidence that the Pax Americana in the region, is threatened as never before.
After recently surveying the miscued judgments that had led the U.S. into successive disasters in West Asia, Zbigniew Brzezinksi, a top advisor to several past Democratic administrations, concluded rather gloomily, that the “neoconservative (or neocon) prescriptions” that dominate U.S. policy today, would prove “fatal for America and ultimately for Israel”. The “lessons of Iraq”, he said, speak for themselves: “Eventually, if neocon policies continue to be pursued, the United States will be expelled from the region and that will be the beginning of the end for Israel as well”.[xiii]
Well into its sixth decade, the Zionist state is yet to define its borders. It sees no way of securing itself, except through random and indiscriminate acts of terrorist violence against its neighbours and those living under its military tyranny. And despite enjoying income levels that put it in the league of the more affluent European nations, it is still dependent on U.S. aid to the extent of $ 500 annually for every Israeli citizen. A state with such a dubious record is by any account, a failed state. The consequences for the region from a failed state equipped with nuclear arms, could well be grim. If ever there was a case for international guardianship over a country, it is now.
[i] U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, The Gaza Situation Report, 07-24 August, 2006, available at this writing at one of the OCHA websites, http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/LSGZ-6SZGFB?OpenDocument&RSS20=22-P.
[ii] Amnesty International, “Israel/Occupied Territories: Deliberate Attacks a War Crime”, June 30, 2006, available at: http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGMDE150612006?open&of=ENG-2MD.
[iii] “Pessimism on deal amid clashes at the U.N.”, The Guardian, August 10, 2006.
[iv] For a full rundown of the plagiarism case, for Dershowitz’s own defence and his various stratagems to ensure that the matter was not brought into the full glare of publicity, see the website of Norman Finkelstein: http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/, especially his remarks on the release of his book, Beyond Chutzpah. Dershowitz’s column on the war in Lebanon appeared in the Los Angeles Times of August 26: “Civilian Casualty? It Depends”, available at the time of writing at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-dershowitz22jul22,0,7685210.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail.
[v] Leon Wieseltier, “The Children of Qana”, The New Republic, August 14, 2006, available at this writing at: http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060814&s=diarist081406.
[vi] Human Rights Watch, Fatal Strikes, Israel’s Indiscriminate Attacks against Civilians in Lebanon, Volume 18, Number 3 (E), August 2006, available at this writing at: http://hrw.org/reports/2006/lebanon0806/.
[vii] Amnesty International, 14 Principles on the Effective Exercise of Universal Jurisdiction, May 1, 1999, available at: http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engior530011999?OpenDocument.
[viii] Amnesty International, “Israel/Lebanon: Deliberate Destruction of ‘Collateral Damage’? Israeli attacks on civilian infrastructure”, available at: http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGMDE180072006.
[ix] Seymour Hersh, “Watching Lebanon, Washington’s Interest in Israel’s War”, The New Yorker, August 21, 2006.
[x] See this author’s “Israel: An Equal Partner in Occupation of Iraq”, Economic and Political Weekly, October 9, 2004, available at: http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2004&leaf=10&filename=7776&filetype=html.
[xi] John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby”, London Review of Books, Volume 28, Number 6, March 23, 2006; available at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html. A version complete with footnotes and references is available at the website of the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University: http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011. The article had been commissioned by the Atlantic Monthly, which refused to publish it on learning of its full scope and contents. The authors were subsequently unable to find a publisher in the U.S. and had to cross the Atlantic to find one.
[xii] For more on the background to the “unilateral separation” decision, see this author’s “Intelligence, Incompetence and Iraq: Or, time to talk of democracy, demography and Israel”, in Social Scientist, Volume 33, Numbers 11-12, Nov-Dec 2004.
[xiii] Brzezinski’s rather grim prognoses was made in the course of an interview with a journalist, Nathan Gardels, who published the entire text on a news and current affairs website. The text is available at this writing at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-gardels/beginning-of-the-end-for-_b_26247.html.
A week into the uneasy ceasefire in Lebanon, an Israeli battle tank retreating in navigational disarray from an engagement with Hezbollah guerrillas, drove into a minefield laid prior to the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the country in May 2000. One soldier was killed and two injured. It was a vivid illustration, even if a perverse one in which perpetrator became victim, of the legacy of decades of Israeli aggression against Lebanon. Since Israel’s supposed withdrawal from a self-declared security belt in the south of the country, the Lebanese government has repeatedly asked for a map of the minefields sown through the years of occupation, only to be consistently turned down.
Inquiries by a number of global bodies meanwhile, provided a summation of widespread moral concerns over Israel’s war-fighting strategies. To take the lesser – though more persistent -- of the simultaneous bloodbaths that Israel has been engaged in, a recent report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), has documented 202 Palestinian deaths, of which 44 have been children, in Gaza since June. Thousands of Palestinians have been forced to flee their homes by continuing Israeli ground incursions and artillery shelling. Only limited quantities of humanitarian aid have reached the beleaguered Gaza population because the main crossing point into the territory has been shut. The damage to the region’s electricity and water supply systems, inflicted in the first week of the Israeli attack, remains unrepaired. With Gaza’s only power plant rendered inoperative, the territory’s 1.4 million people have had to cope with at best, intermittent supplies of electricity and water.[i]
The London-based human rights group, Amnesty International, had as far back as June 30, offered an authoritative judgment on Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Referring to Israel’s scorched earth policy in the territory, ostensibly in retaliation for a militant attack on an army post in which one soldier was taken prisoner, Amnesty observed that the “deliberate attacks by Israeli forces against civilian property and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip violate international humanitarian law and constitute war crimes”. Israel was obliged under international law, Amnesty decreed, to “take urgent measures to remedy the long-term damage it has caused and immediately restore the supply -- at its own cost -- of electricity and water to the Palestinian population in the affected areas”.[ii]
With all these strictures, when a very similar provocation occurred on its northern frontier, Israel was only emboldened to transfer its patented military techniques to Lebanon: attacking an entire civilian population to achieve a military objective against poorly equipped adversaries. What Israel’s opponents lacked in terms of weaponry though, they made up in determination and organisational skills. And for all that, they engaged in the conflict with a far greater sense of scruple. A few days before the ceasefire in Lebanon, an enumeration of the casualties put the number of those killed in Israel at 98, of which no more than 35 were civilians. The total killed in Lebanon though, numbered 1,103, of which all but 98 were civilians.[iii] Even if more lives were lost in the following days of hostilities, the proportion between civilian and combatant casualties remained substantially unchanged on either side.
Far from exciting the moral scruples of Israel’s champions, this only challenged them to evolve newer doctrines of humanitarian law. Alan Dershowitz, a professor of law at Harvard University and author of a recent bestseller, The Case for Israel – proven to be at least a borderline case of plagiarism from a thoroughly discredited 1982 book – argued that it was no longer axiomatic that an individual’s civilian status rendered him innocent, or ensured him immunity from military action.[iv] There is a vast difference in both moral and legal terms, Dershowitz wrote, “between a 2-year-old who is killed by an enemy rocket and a 30-year-old civilian who has allowed his house to be used to store Katyusha rockets”. Though both are technically civilians, “the former is far more innocent than the latter”. Then there was another essential distinction to be made between “civilians who are held hostage against their will by terrorists who use them as involuntary human shields, and civilians who voluntarily place themselves in harm's way in order to protect terrorists from enemy fire”.
This range of situations suggested to Dershowitz, that the term “civilian” did little else than equate “the truly innocent with guilty accessories to terrorism”. What was required in place of this vague and unsatisfactory term, was the notion of a “continuum of civilianity” -- admittedly an awkward phrase, but one that allowed for all the inherent complexities of the real-world. If this continuum were to become part of the commonsense, then the civilian casualties of Lebanon would in Dershowitz’s estimation, “fall closer to the line of complicity” than “the line of innocence”. “Every civilian death is a tragedy”, the learned professor concluded, “but some are more tragic than others”.
The upshot of this exercise in legal chicanery then, is simply that an Israeli civilian’s life, supposedly so detached and distinct from that of a soldier, is worth much more than an Arab’s. Most Arabs, whether civilian or combatant, believe subliminally in the wicked, terrorist agenda of destroying Israel. This makes them accessories, if not active agents, of terrorism. To expect conventional rules of war to be observed in this situation was plain foolishness. Norms worked out in a context of warfare between rival armies, clearly distinguished by the uniforms they wore, were clearly inapplicable in a situation of terrorism.
A similar rationalisation for the killing of innocents was advanced in The New Republic, shortly after the Qana massacre of July 30 – when Israel devastated an entire multi-storey structure in southern Lebanon, killing an estimated 28, including 16 children. As the literary editor of the journal put it, “the killing of children” though an unequivocal evil, is not quite the same thing when it happens in a “just war”. “Moral clarity” is easily achieved about “the evil done in a wrong cause”, since an “unjust war” must “be opposed even when no such outrages occur, even when it is conducted with humanitarian diligence”. Such clarity of moral conviction though, was virtually impossible in a just war, where despite every effort to avoid needless suffering, the wickedness of the adversary makes unwitting victims of civilians on its side.[v]
As a corollary of these exercises in moral obfuscation, it could be asked where exactly on the “continuum of civilianity” the citizens of Israel fall. Despite encountering the Palestinians on a daily basis and being aware of their presence as a dispossessed people living on the land that world Jewry claims as its exclusive patrimony, Israeli civilians have repeatedly elected governments that have denied Palestinian rights and engaged in a quite deliberate effort to thin down their population by making their life under occupation intolerable. It is a question that Dershowitz chooses not to address.
Beyond the legal subterfuge, those who entered the field of hostilities to seek an understanding of ground realities, had little difficulty arriving at the appropriate judgments. Shortly after the Qana massacre, Human Rights Watch (HRW), the advocacy body based in New York, released a report documenting how this incident was merely one among many deliberate efforts to terrorise the civilian population of Lebanon.[vi] After exhaustive inquiries at the site of the atrocity and a significant forensic effort, HRW concluded that every alibi Israel had advanced, failed to measure up to any standard of credibility.
Qana on July 30 seemed eerily reminiscent of a day over ten years before -- April 18, 1996 -- when Israel, executing what was titled “Operation Grapes of Wrath”, laid siege to a U.N. refugee compound in the same village, ignored repeated pleas from peacekeepers entrusted with securing the facility, and in essence, showed its contempt for all norms of civilised conduct, by shelling and bombing hapless refugees from its own campaigns of ethnic cleansing, killing over a hundred women and children. As history now repeats itself, HRW has found that there was no legitimate military target anywhere in the vicinity of the apartment building where some 63 Lebanese civilians had taken shelter on July 29. With its much vaunted military sophistication, which enables withering responses to missile launches within seconds, Israel should have known that no hostile actions had been undertaken from anywhere near that forlorn site of refuge for a besieged people. And yet, as the HRW report documents, Israeli fighter jets made two bombing raids on the building, the second seemingly to underline a deliberate intent to kill and maim.
After a July 25 attack on a U.N. military observers’ post which killed four peacekeepers, Israel angrily rebuffed the perfectly reasonable surmise by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, that the attack had been “apparently deliberate”. Israel then contrived to parlay this simulated outrage into a bid to keep the U.N. out of the official inquiry. After its own investigations, HRW found adequate cause for a more serious and systematic investigation, since subsequent days too had seen a number of attacks that placed U.N. personnel in jeopardy and in some cases actually caused them grievous injury. In very few, if any, of these cases, were Hezbollah guerrillas known to be operating in the vicinity of U.N. installations, which could have made the plea of targeting error credible.
The depopulation of civilian areas through military action constitutes an unequivocal war crime. HRW concedes that a belligerent power could, in particular circumstances, legitimately warn civilians of impending military strikes, so that they have time to get out of harm’s way. But it also observes quite definitively, that Israel adopted this procedure in a particular perverse fashion. All Lebanese civilians south of the Litani river were at some stage or the other, ordered to leave and Israel’s Justice Minister concluded after a few such perfunctory efforts, that anybody choosing to stay behind, should be deemed a terrorist liable to attack without further notice. Yet the order to leave, in most instances, was followed by a deliberate effort to cut off all routes of exit, with bridges and roads being repeatedly bombed. In several instances, civilians fleeing the scene of aerial bombing and artillery attacks were mowed down, despite flying the white flag that universally symbolises the absence of hostile intent.
A forgetful international community could soon consign this year’s atrocities in Lebanon to the black hole of historical memory, as with the 1996 Qana massacre, as with the carnage on Gaza beach of June 9, which killed seven innocent civilians and left the traumatised ten year-old, Huda Ghalia, as the sole survivor in a family of eight. But there are fresh stirrings in civil society groupings, which have in recent times sought to bring war criminals of the worst stripe to account through the principle of universal jurisdiction.
Though contentious as a concept, universal jurisdiction, championed by organisations like Amnesty International, has a simple basis in law. States that are party to covenants like the Geneva Conventions on the laws of war, are obliged by the terms of their accession, to enact domestic legislation to operationalise these commitments. Even when certain States Party fail to do so, whether on account of legislative inertia or internal political resistance, other States Party are entitled to assume universal compliance. Despite all its implications of extra-territorial application of national laws, universal jurisdiction is soundly based in the rule of law. In a paper prepared in 1999, Amnesty International, explained that the principle was invoked by the victorious parties in World War II, when they began to prosecute the main agents of the war from the defeated side. This legal action was undertaken on behalf of the international community and pertained in most cases to “crimes against humanity and war crimes” that the victorious powers had no jurisdiction over in terms of national law. In the years that followed, a few states had exercised universal jurisdiction to bring to book those guilty of particularly odious crimes. And interestingly, the list that includes Australia, Canada and the U.K., also counts Israel among its member.[vii]
For this reason, Amnesty’s judgment after its review of much the same ground that HRW went over, is especially compelling: many of the “violations” of international humanitarian law by Israel, it has said, “are war crimes that give rise to individual criminal responsibility”. This means in essence, that, “people against whom there is prima facie evidence of responsibility for the commission of these crimes are subject to criminal accountability anywhere in the world through the exercise of universal jurisdiction”.[viii]
Precedents are not lacking, though they have all failed to arrive at a final determination of the validity of universal jurisdiction and the powers that judicial bodies can assume under the doctrine. Belgium in 2003, acting on the strength of a decade-old law, admitted a petition pleading for the arrest and prosecution of Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s Prime Minister, for complicity in the 1982 massacre of Palestinian refugees in the Shabra and Shattilla refugee camps on the outskirts of Beirut. In 2005, a London magistrate issued warrant for the arrest of Major-General Doron Almog, commander of Israeli occupation forces in Gaza, for a 2002 bombing attack which killed 15 Palestinians, including 8 children, in a supposed effort to eliminate one militant of the Islamic resistance. Petitions for the arrest and prosecution of Lieutenant-General Dan Halutz, chief of staff of the Israel Defence Force, and his predecessor, Moshe Yaalon, are also pending before London courts. Needless to say, after the experience of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1999, no officer, whether serving or retired, from Israel’s top military command has been very keen on visiting London. Sharon himself won immunity from arrest after the Belgian law was amended under pressure from the U.S. But till he was laid low by an incapacitating stroke in January this year, he did not show much interest in visiting Belgium or any other country which might have had a mutual cooperation treaty in criminal matters with Belgium.
The severe setbacks that Israel’s image has suffered, must be weighed against the dubious strategic gains garnered from the operations in Lebanon. As the ceasefire came into effect, the Israeli public remained bitterly divided over the outcome of the war. The stated objective – the destruction of Hezbollah – had widespread public endorsement. But the day the hostilities were suspended, as many Israeli citizens were convinced they had lost as believed they had won. A substantial plurality was unsure of what exactly the war had achieved. And Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who commanded almost universal approval within the country at the beginning of the war, had fallen sharply in public esteem in this space of five weeks.
All this makes for a rather unsatisfactory outcome for the vaunted Israeli military machine, which by all accounts, had prepared intensively for this war over many years. Indeed, the moment Israeli forces pulled out of Lebanon in May 2000, it was foretold that another visitation of mayhem in the region was inevitable, a final settling of accounts. More than Israel’s own objective of liquidating Hezbollah, there was by fairly reliable accounts, a strong U.S. interest in a successful outcome to the operations in Lebanon. The investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has indeed proposed that the U.S. may have been the more ardent of the two for war.[ix]
The demonstration effects of Lebanon were something that the U.S. hoped to garner major strategic gains from. Haunted by the possibility that it would only be able to escape from the military quagmire of Iraq by accommodating Iran’s ambitions for a heightened role in regional geopolitics, the U.S. was hoping that the decimation of Iran’s supposed proxy in Lebanon would minimise the need for painful concessions. In operational terms, Israel’s military action against fortified Hezbollah positions and missile launching pads, was expected to give the U.S. valuable inputs for possible action against Iran’s nuclear assets at a time of its choice.
Israel’s failure in Lebanon has to be viewed in the context of the wider prospect of a collapse of the Pax Americana in West Asia. Whatever their other failings, top officials of the U.S. administration do not lack the ability to coin attractive life-cycle metaphors to describe the politics of the region. It was in May 2005 that Vice President Dick Cheney – the man who had visions of flower-strewn parades as Iraqis heralded the U.S. invasion as long-awaited liberation – asserted that the insurgency in the country was in its “death throes”. And mid-July this year, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, after surveying the wreckage of Lebanon and the mounting toll in human lives, made the chirpy prediction that these were the “birth pangs” of a new political order in the region.
John Prescott, the British Deputy Prime Minister, recently used an unflatteringly vivid four-letter epithet to describe U.S. policy in West Asia. Standing in for a vacationing Tony Blair, Prescott complained that the only reason he had gone along with the decision to invade Iraq was the promise held out that the “roadmap” to peace in Palestine would be implemented shortly after victory was sealed on that front. As with several other western leaders who still only partially realise how they were duped, or went along with all the pretexts for war in the belief that victory would be swift, Prescott fails to understand that the U.S. invasion was intended precisely to create the conditions in the wider region that would allow Israel to implement a larger, unilateral, agenda. This much was suspected and widely spoken of elsewhere in the world, well before the invasion began and particularly after all the frantic efforts failed to turn up evidence that Iraq was in possession of the proscribed weapons that had been the casus belli.[x]
In recent times, as public disillusionment within the U.S. has grown, the taboo subject of Israel’s role in instigating Bush’s misadventure, has emerged in public focus. And the debate was truly ignited in March 2006, when John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, professors of political science at Chicago and Harvard, published a working paper, arguing with a wealth of documentation, that Israel’s undue influence over U.S. foreign policy had become an insupportable strategic burden.[xi] They were promptly denounced as anti-Semites, but their case has not quite been so easy to dismiss.
The rebellion of the Palestinian nation under its occupation, forced Israel to confront a painful dilemma. Rather than opt for the many possibilities of peace that the Palestinians offered, Israel chose the path of unilateralism. Ehud Olmert, the hapless Israeli Prime Minister who faces within six months of his installation, a crisis of credibility with the Israeli public, was perceived for long as an accidental leader, placed in a position of authority only because of the sainted Ariel Sharon’s incapacitation. In elections held in March, Olmert won an endorsement, though of a far more modest magnitude than expected when Sharon had split from the Likud Party, and floated a new entity, the Kadima, as a vehicle for making a reality of what he saw as Israel’s final destiny. It was to be the Zionist programme’s climactic manoeuvre in the global strategic arena, rivalling in its historic significance, the declaration of the state of Israel by David Ben-Gurion in May 1948 and the conquest of all of the land of Palestine in 1967.
After Theodore Herzl who conjured up the dream of a Jewish homeland in Palestine and Ben-Gurion who made it a reality, Sharon’s role, as the third in this succession of Zionist prophets, was to work out a final definition of national borders that would safeguard Israel’s identity as a country with a stable and substantial Jewish majority. The Palestinians offered a way: Israel could withdraw to its 1967 borders, and acknowledge that the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 had made victims of a people with pre-existing rights to the land. This meant essentially that the Palestinian “right of return” would be recognised under international law, though it was not evident that all those who had been evicted from their land -- and their descendants -- intended to exercise it. Rather, the recognition of their rights as a dispossessed people, and their voluntary surrender of the right of return, would only mean that they would gain recompense in several other ways, which could be negotiated.
Obsessed by its own sense of power, Israel chose to turn its back on these proposals, and paint the Palestinians as an obstreperous people, undeserving of partnership in peace negotiations. It then proceeded, through innumerable provocations, to engineer a violent uprising by the occupied people, painting an entirely legitimate movement of resistance against military oppression as “terrorism”. Once the label was foisted on the Palestinian resistance, Israel had little problem gaining a licence from the international community to crush the movement through the most barbaric means. But since a constant state of war was not a prospect that it yearned to live with, Israel decided, within a year of the Palestinian uprising, that it would enforce a policy of “unilateral separation” of the Jewish people from the Palestinians.[xii] The program of “unilateral separation”, mooted by Israel’s Labour Party Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, in 2001, was taken over by Likud Party Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, in 2005. When he found that his own party would not easily yield on its entrenched commitment to a “Greater Israel”, Sharon split to form the Kadima, which entered into an alliance with Labour after the 2006 general elections, to impose Israel’s unilateral agenda.
Sharon’s project involved the pretence of an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the conversion of that tiny, over-populated and devastated strip into the world’s largest prison, garrisoned through air and sea-power. It involved the construction of an apartheid wall across the West Bank that sundered Palestinian communities one from another, destroying lives and livelihoods, and marking out illegal Jewish settlements – and the roadways and tunnels to access them -- as eternal parts of the Jewish nation. And finally, it involved securing the northern settlements by bludgeoning Syria and Lebanon into submission.
Israel’s failure in Lebanon is magnified by the collapse of its pretended withdrawal from Gaza. And an immediate consequence of the Lebanon fiasco has been that Israel’s plans for an aggressive effort to remake the topography of the West Bank, and formally declare the strategically more important and better endowed tracts an eternal part of the Jewish state, have had to be put on hold.
The strategic partnership between the U.S. and Israel to redesign the political geography of West Asia, is clearly in deep trouble. After all the purported rationalisations for the invasion of Iraq were dealt with and found to be hollow, a perfectly reasonable inference has begun increasingly to demand attention: that the U.S. in invading Iraq was seeking merely to destroy an Arab state that had been a strategic nuisance and a continuing impediment to Israel’s efforts to draw a new political map in the region. Israel’s failure in Lebanon now compounds the abject collapse of the U.S. project in Iraq. Between them, they constitute clear evidence that the Pax Americana in the region, is threatened as never before.
After recently surveying the miscued judgments that had led the U.S. into successive disasters in West Asia, Zbigniew Brzezinksi, a top advisor to several past Democratic administrations, concluded rather gloomily, that the “neoconservative (or neocon) prescriptions” that dominate U.S. policy today, would prove “fatal for America and ultimately for Israel”. The “lessons of Iraq”, he said, speak for themselves: “Eventually, if neocon policies continue to be pursued, the United States will be expelled from the region and that will be the beginning of the end for Israel as well”.[xiii]
Well into its sixth decade, the Zionist state is yet to define its borders. It sees no way of securing itself, except through random and indiscriminate acts of terrorist violence against its neighbours and those living under its military tyranny. And despite enjoying income levels that put it in the league of the more affluent European nations, it is still dependent on U.S. aid to the extent of $ 500 annually for every Israeli citizen. A state with such a dubious record is by any account, a failed state. The consequences for the region from a failed state equipped with nuclear arms, could well be grim. If ever there was a case for international guardianship over a country, it is now.
[i] U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, The Gaza Situation Report, 07-24 August, 2006, available at this writing at one of the OCHA websites, http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/LSGZ-6SZGFB?OpenDocument&RSS20=22-P.
[ii] Amnesty International, “Israel/Occupied Territories: Deliberate Attacks a War Crime”, June 30, 2006, available at: http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGMDE150612006?open&of=ENG-2MD.
[iii] “Pessimism on deal amid clashes at the U.N.”, The Guardian, August 10, 2006.
[iv] For a full rundown of the plagiarism case, for Dershowitz’s own defence and his various stratagems to ensure that the matter was not brought into the full glare of publicity, see the website of Norman Finkelstein: http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/, especially his remarks on the release of his book, Beyond Chutzpah. Dershowitz’s column on the war in Lebanon appeared in the Los Angeles Times of August 26: “Civilian Casualty? It Depends”, available at the time of writing at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-dershowitz22jul22,0,7685210.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail.
[v] Leon Wieseltier, “The Children of Qana”, The New Republic, August 14, 2006, available at this writing at: http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060814&s=diarist081406.
[vi] Human Rights Watch, Fatal Strikes, Israel’s Indiscriminate Attacks against Civilians in Lebanon, Volume 18, Number 3 (E), August 2006, available at this writing at: http://hrw.org/reports/2006/lebanon0806/.
[vii] Amnesty International, 14 Principles on the Effective Exercise of Universal Jurisdiction, May 1, 1999, available at: http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engior530011999?OpenDocument.
[viii] Amnesty International, “Israel/Lebanon: Deliberate Destruction of ‘Collateral Damage’? Israeli attacks on civilian infrastructure”, available at: http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGMDE180072006.
[ix] Seymour Hersh, “Watching Lebanon, Washington’s Interest in Israel’s War”, The New Yorker, August 21, 2006.
[x] See this author’s “Israel: An Equal Partner in Occupation of Iraq”, Economic and Political Weekly, October 9, 2004, available at: http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2004&leaf=10&filename=7776&filetype=html.
[xi] John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby”, London Review of Books, Volume 28, Number 6, March 23, 2006; available at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html. A version complete with footnotes and references is available at the website of the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University: http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011. The article had been commissioned by the Atlantic Monthly, which refused to publish it on learning of its full scope and contents. The authors were subsequently unable to find a publisher in the U.S. and had to cross the Atlantic to find one.
[xii] For more on the background to the “unilateral separation” decision, see this author’s “Intelligence, Incompetence and Iraq: Or, time to talk of democracy, demography and Israel”, in Social Scientist, Volume 33, Numbers 11-12, Nov-Dec 2004.
[xiii] Brzezinski’s rather grim prognoses was made in the course of an interview with a journalist, Nathan Gardels, who published the entire text on a news and current affairs website. The text is available at this writing at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-gardels/beginning-of-the-end-for-_b_26247.html.
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Israel after Lebanon: Failed State
August 22, 2006:
Just before formally accepting a U.N. resolution mandating a cessation of hostilities in Lebanon, the Israeli government sent a request to the U.S., urging that shipments of a particularly lethal brand of anti-personnel munitions be speeded up. Within a week of the fragile and uneasy ceasefire, Israel had already conducted two armed intrusions into Lebanese territory with deeply suspect motives. There may have been, in one instance, an intent to abduct or murder a leader of the Hezbollah militia in the south of the country. In the other instance, the stated purpose was of interdicting an Iranian effort to resupply the militia with missiles. The first of these endeavours was reportedly repelled by Hezbollah fighters, who succeeded in shooting dead an Israeli officer involved. And the latter effort was roundly condemned by top U.N. officials, who saw it as a serious threat to the fragile ceasefire.
Israel remained unrepentant. It had through five weeks of vengeful destruction, portrayed the U.N. failure to call for a ceasefire as a sanction to wage war in Lebanon. In similar vein, it now chose to read the ambiguously worded ceasefire resolution as an endorsement of regular cross-border forays. Clearly though, even after a 34-day offensive that reduced much of southern Lebanon to rubble and destroyed the country’s civilian infrastructure, Israel considers its mission unaccomplished.
Hastily put together by the U.S., which had for the entire duration of the war, thwarted every effort to rein in its terrorist proxy in West Asia, the U.N. ceasefire resolution was within a week, beginning to be seriously weighed down by its ambiguities. France, which had been expected to lead the mobilisation of men and machines for a 15,000 strong peace-keeping army in Lebanon, had committed no more than 200 troops. Italy, Spain and Finland, were also expressing similar reservations about putting troops into Lebanon, absent a clear mandate and defined rules of engagement.
For its part, Israel firmly sought to discourage potential troop contributions from countries it did not have diplomatic relations with. Dan Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador to the U.N. – famously remembered for his jibe last March that all Muslims may or may not be terrorists, but all terrorists certainly are Muslim – argued in an interview with a prominent news channel, that Muslim countries which had friendly relations with Israel were welcome. But countries that had failed to recognise Israel could hardly be expected to guard its frontiers, said the diplomat who retains his job despite utterances that have clearly been beyond the pale of civilised discourse.
Clearly, the purpose of the U.N. peacekeeping deployment in Lebanon, in Israeli perceptions, is merely to serve as a surrogate for its own army. Between 1982 and 2000, Israel maintained a self-declared “security belt” within Lebanese territory, as the only available means it had to safeguard its northern towns. The effort proved rather too much for even Israel’s formidable military resources. Its precipitous withdrawal in May 2000 was celebrated all across the Arab world as a long overdue moment of reckoning for an arrogant foe. That vicarious sense of delight did not last long within the regimes that rule the Arab world. Celebration soon turned to concern that Hezbollah, which had led the resistance to the Israeli occupation, would capitalise on the legitimacy it had gained in the successful defence of Lebanese territorial sovereignty, to entrench itself still more deeply within the country’s political order and society.
When the recent hostilities began, the first instinct of collaborationist Arab regimes was to blame Hezbollah. Syria, still regarded a good Arab state, was chided for the alliance of convenience that put it in the dubious company of culturally alien Iran, in joint sponsorship of the Hezbollah. But the effort to prise Syria away from its proximity with Iran came a cropper. And as Hezbollah withstood the undiscriminating and promiscuous fury of the Israeli assault, defiantly firing rockets into enemy territory to the very moment of the ceasefire, the regimes sought to take out an insurance policy by committing themselves to finance the reconstruction of Lebanon once the guns fell silent.
All this may well have come too late in the day. Defying the continuing threat of Israeli bombing and the lurking danger of unexploded ordnance, almost a million Lebanese displaced by the fighting streamed back to their ruined homes in the immediate wake of the ceasefire. Though the Lebanese army was concurrently being deployed in the devastated south in a bid to reimpose the writ of the national government, there was little uncertainty about whose authority really mattered in the region. No sooner had the ceasefire taken effect than Hezbollah transformed itself from a fighting force into a reconstruction agency, clearing the rubble of the war, salvaging the few dwelling units that remained serviceable, handing out instant and generous cash grants to every family that had suffered.
Resentful murmurs were heard in western circles, about Iran under-writing the entire Hezbollah political project using the rich dollar harvest it was garnering as a consequence of unprecedented peaks in oil prices. Though true, this only served to further magnify the failure of the collaborationist Arab regimes, several of which have benefited in greater measure than Iran from the oil price boom, and chose cynically to blame the victim when a defenceless nation was bombed several decades back into the past.
Hezbollah’s undisputed claims to political pre-eminence were also recognised by the Lebanese national army as it moved into the south. Though the U.N. ceasefire resolution envisages the disarming of Hezbollah as a mission to be accomplished at the earliest, few in Lebanon – least of all the army -- seemed to be taking that project seriously. The consensus within Lebanese political circles and the media rather, was that Hezbollah had proved its mettle as a fighting force in the defence of the country. Far from disarming Hezbollah, the overwhelming priority in Lebanon seemed to be the incorporation of the militia’s fighting prowess into the formal structures of national defence.
Israel has ample reason to worry. As the ceasefire came into effect, the Israeli public remained bitterly divided over the outcome of the war. The stated objective – the destruction of Hezbollah – had widespread public endorsement. But the day the hostilities were suspended, as many Israeli citizens were convinced they had lost the war as believed they had won. And Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who commanded almost universal approval within the country at the beginning of the war, had fallen sharply in public esteem in this space of a mere five weeks.
Olmert was perceived for long as an accidental leader, placed in a position of authority only because the sainted Ariel Sharon, hero of some of Israel’s most brutal ethnic cleansing campaigns, had suffered an incapacitating stroke and slipped into coma in January. In elections held in March, Olmert won an endorsement, though of a far more modest magnitude than expected when Sharon split from the Likud Party and floated a new entity, the Kadima, as a vehicle for making a reality of what he saw as Israel’s final destiny. It was to be the Zionist programme’s climactic manoeuvre in the global strategic arena, rivalling in its historic significance, the declaration of the state of Israel by David Ben-Gurion in May 1948 and the conquest of all of the land of Palestine in June 1967. It was Theodore Herzl who conjured up the dream of a Jewish homeland in Palestine and Ben-Gurion who made it a reality. Sharon’s role, as the third in this succession of Zionist prophets, was to work out a final definition of national borders that would safeguard Israel’s identity as a country with a stable and substantial Jewish majority. It was a project that involved the “unilateral separation” of the Jewish people from the Palestinians, on the basis of territorial frontiers to be decided entirely at Israel’s convenience.
Needless to say, Sharon’s project involved the pretence of an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the conversion of that tiny, over-populated and devastated strip into the world’s largest prison, garrisoned through air and sea-power. It involved the construction of an apartheid wall across the West Bank that sundered Palestinian communities one from another, destroying lives and livelihoods, and marking out illegal Jewish settlements – and the roadways and tunnels to access them -- as eternal parts of the Jewish nation. And finally, it involved securing the northern settlements by bludgeoning Syria and Lebanon into submission.
Israel’s failure in Lebanon is magnified by the collapse of its pretence of a withdrawal from Gaza. Weeks before the crisis in Lebanon, the Gaza situation had erupted in fullblown military savagery, with a daily toll running into dozens of Palestinian lives. Though the carnage in Lebanon momentarily pushed Gaza off world headlines, the two have been linked inextricably in global perceptions as consequences on two different front of the same root cause: Israeli military unilateralism backed up by the unswerving support of the U.S. This unilateralism in turn, is seen to be the direct outcome of the pretence of a peace process that Israel, with the open encouragement of its superpower patron, engaged in since 1993. When stealth and subterfuge failed and the Palestinians refused to be accomplices in their own occupation, Israel unveiled its iron fist.
Whatever their other failings, top officials of the U.S. administration today do not lack the ability to turn attractive life-cycle metaphors to describe the politics of the region. It was in May 2005 that Vice President Dick Cheney – the man who had seen visions of flower-strewn parades as Iraqis greeted invading U.S. troops as liberators – asserted that the insurgency in the country was in its “death throes”. And in mid-July this year, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, after blithely surveying the wrecked infrastructure of Lebanon and the mounting toll in human lives, made the chirpy prediction that these were the “birth pangs” of a new political order in the region.
John Prescott, the British Deputy Prime Minister, recently used an unflatteringly vivid four-letter epithet to describe U.S. policy in West Asia. Standing in for a vacationing Tony Blair, Prescott complained that the only reason he had gone along with the decision to invade Iraq was the promise held out that the “roadmap” to peace in Palestine would be implemented shortly after victory was sealed on that front. There was in another words, an explicit promise that the U.S. had held out between achieving its ends in Iraq and delivering justice to Palestine.
As with several other western leaders who still only partially realise their idiocy, Prescott fails to understand that the U.S. invasion was intended precisely to create the conditions in the wider region that would allow Israel to implement its unilateral agenda – drawing its borders according to its own strategic convenience and expelling large numbers of Palestinians, so that the Jewish majority within is not jeopardised for the foreseeable future. This much was suspected and widely spoken of elsewhere in the world well before the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003. But in recent times, as public disillusionment within the U.S. has grown, the hitherto taboo subject of Israel’s role in instigating Bush’s misadventure, has reemerged in public focus. The debate was truly joined in March 2006, when John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, professors of political science at Chicago and Harvard Universities, published a working paper titled “The Israel Lobby”, arguing with a wealth of documentation, that Israel’s undue influence over U.S. foreign policy had become an insupportable strategic burden.
Mearsheimer and Walt were promptly denounced by Zionist zealots as anti-Semites. But their case has not quite been so easy to dismiss. The strategic partnership between the U.S. and Israel to remake the political geography of West Asia, is clearly in deep trouble. A clear indication to this effect came from Zbigniew Brzezinksi, a top advisor to several past Democratic administrations in the U.S. Surveying the miscued judgments that had led the “neoconservative” lobby that dominates policy today into successive disasters in West Asia, Brzezinski told a recent interviewer that “these neocon prescriptions, of which Israel has its equivalents, (would be) fatal for America and ultimately for Israel”. The “lessons of Iraq”, he said, speak for themselves: “Eventually, if neocon policies continue to be pursued, the United States will be expelled from the region and that will be the beginning of the end for Israel as well”.
Well into its sixth decade, the Zionist state is yet to define its borders. It sees no way of securing itself, except through random and indiscriminate acts of terrorist violence against its neighbours and those living under its military tyranny. And despite enjoying income levels that puts it in the league of the more affluent European nations, it is still dependent on U.S. aid to the extent of $ 500 annually for every Israeli citizen.
A state with such a dubious record is by any account, a failed state. And from this perspective, the final outcome that Brzezinski suggests, more in sorrow than anger, may well be the most happy denouement that the world could hope for.
Just before formally accepting a U.N. resolution mandating a cessation of hostilities in Lebanon, the Israeli government sent a request to the U.S., urging that shipments of a particularly lethal brand of anti-personnel munitions be speeded up. Within a week of the fragile and uneasy ceasefire, Israel had already conducted two armed intrusions into Lebanese territory with deeply suspect motives. There may have been, in one instance, an intent to abduct or murder a leader of the Hezbollah militia in the south of the country. In the other instance, the stated purpose was of interdicting an Iranian effort to resupply the militia with missiles. The first of these endeavours was reportedly repelled by Hezbollah fighters, who succeeded in shooting dead an Israeli officer involved. And the latter effort was roundly condemned by top U.N. officials, who saw it as a serious threat to the fragile ceasefire.
Israel remained unrepentant. It had through five weeks of vengeful destruction, portrayed the U.N. failure to call for a ceasefire as a sanction to wage war in Lebanon. In similar vein, it now chose to read the ambiguously worded ceasefire resolution as an endorsement of regular cross-border forays. Clearly though, even after a 34-day offensive that reduced much of southern Lebanon to rubble and destroyed the country’s civilian infrastructure, Israel considers its mission unaccomplished.
Hastily put together by the U.S., which had for the entire duration of the war, thwarted every effort to rein in its terrorist proxy in West Asia, the U.N. ceasefire resolution was within a week, beginning to be seriously weighed down by its ambiguities. France, which had been expected to lead the mobilisation of men and machines for a 15,000 strong peace-keeping army in Lebanon, had committed no more than 200 troops. Italy, Spain and Finland, were also expressing similar reservations about putting troops into Lebanon, absent a clear mandate and defined rules of engagement.
For its part, Israel firmly sought to discourage potential troop contributions from countries it did not have diplomatic relations with. Dan Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador to the U.N. – famously remembered for his jibe last March that all Muslims may or may not be terrorists, but all terrorists certainly are Muslim – argued in an interview with a prominent news channel, that Muslim countries which had friendly relations with Israel were welcome. But countries that had failed to recognise Israel could hardly be expected to guard its frontiers, said the diplomat who retains his job despite utterances that have clearly been beyond the pale of civilised discourse.
Clearly, the purpose of the U.N. peacekeeping deployment in Lebanon, in Israeli perceptions, is merely to serve as a surrogate for its own army. Between 1982 and 2000, Israel maintained a self-declared “security belt” within Lebanese territory, as the only available means it had to safeguard its northern towns. The effort proved rather too much for even Israel’s formidable military resources. Its precipitous withdrawal in May 2000 was celebrated all across the Arab world as a long overdue moment of reckoning for an arrogant foe. That vicarious sense of delight did not last long within the regimes that rule the Arab world. Celebration soon turned to concern that Hezbollah, which had led the resistance to the Israeli occupation, would capitalise on the legitimacy it had gained in the successful defence of Lebanese territorial sovereignty, to entrench itself still more deeply within the country’s political order and society.
When the recent hostilities began, the first instinct of collaborationist Arab regimes was to blame Hezbollah. Syria, still regarded a good Arab state, was chided for the alliance of convenience that put it in the dubious company of culturally alien Iran, in joint sponsorship of the Hezbollah. But the effort to prise Syria away from its proximity with Iran came a cropper. And as Hezbollah withstood the undiscriminating and promiscuous fury of the Israeli assault, defiantly firing rockets into enemy territory to the very moment of the ceasefire, the regimes sought to take out an insurance policy by committing themselves to finance the reconstruction of Lebanon once the guns fell silent.
All this may well have come too late in the day. Defying the continuing threat of Israeli bombing and the lurking danger of unexploded ordnance, almost a million Lebanese displaced by the fighting streamed back to their ruined homes in the immediate wake of the ceasefire. Though the Lebanese army was concurrently being deployed in the devastated south in a bid to reimpose the writ of the national government, there was little uncertainty about whose authority really mattered in the region. No sooner had the ceasefire taken effect than Hezbollah transformed itself from a fighting force into a reconstruction agency, clearing the rubble of the war, salvaging the few dwelling units that remained serviceable, handing out instant and generous cash grants to every family that had suffered.
Resentful murmurs were heard in western circles, about Iran under-writing the entire Hezbollah political project using the rich dollar harvest it was garnering as a consequence of unprecedented peaks in oil prices. Though true, this only served to further magnify the failure of the collaborationist Arab regimes, several of which have benefited in greater measure than Iran from the oil price boom, and chose cynically to blame the victim when a defenceless nation was bombed several decades back into the past.
Hezbollah’s undisputed claims to political pre-eminence were also recognised by the Lebanese national army as it moved into the south. Though the U.N. ceasefire resolution envisages the disarming of Hezbollah as a mission to be accomplished at the earliest, few in Lebanon – least of all the army -- seemed to be taking that project seriously. The consensus within Lebanese political circles and the media rather, was that Hezbollah had proved its mettle as a fighting force in the defence of the country. Far from disarming Hezbollah, the overwhelming priority in Lebanon seemed to be the incorporation of the militia’s fighting prowess into the formal structures of national defence.
Israel has ample reason to worry. As the ceasefire came into effect, the Israeli public remained bitterly divided over the outcome of the war. The stated objective – the destruction of Hezbollah – had widespread public endorsement. But the day the hostilities were suspended, as many Israeli citizens were convinced they had lost the war as believed they had won. And Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who commanded almost universal approval within the country at the beginning of the war, had fallen sharply in public esteem in this space of a mere five weeks.
Olmert was perceived for long as an accidental leader, placed in a position of authority only because the sainted Ariel Sharon, hero of some of Israel’s most brutal ethnic cleansing campaigns, had suffered an incapacitating stroke and slipped into coma in January. In elections held in March, Olmert won an endorsement, though of a far more modest magnitude than expected when Sharon split from the Likud Party and floated a new entity, the Kadima, as a vehicle for making a reality of what he saw as Israel’s final destiny. It was to be the Zionist programme’s climactic manoeuvre in the global strategic arena, rivalling in its historic significance, the declaration of the state of Israel by David Ben-Gurion in May 1948 and the conquest of all of the land of Palestine in June 1967. It was Theodore Herzl who conjured up the dream of a Jewish homeland in Palestine and Ben-Gurion who made it a reality. Sharon’s role, as the third in this succession of Zionist prophets, was to work out a final definition of national borders that would safeguard Israel’s identity as a country with a stable and substantial Jewish majority. It was a project that involved the “unilateral separation” of the Jewish people from the Palestinians, on the basis of territorial frontiers to be decided entirely at Israel’s convenience.
Needless to say, Sharon’s project involved the pretence of an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the conversion of that tiny, over-populated and devastated strip into the world’s largest prison, garrisoned through air and sea-power. It involved the construction of an apartheid wall across the West Bank that sundered Palestinian communities one from another, destroying lives and livelihoods, and marking out illegal Jewish settlements – and the roadways and tunnels to access them -- as eternal parts of the Jewish nation. And finally, it involved securing the northern settlements by bludgeoning Syria and Lebanon into submission.
Israel’s failure in Lebanon is magnified by the collapse of its pretence of a withdrawal from Gaza. Weeks before the crisis in Lebanon, the Gaza situation had erupted in fullblown military savagery, with a daily toll running into dozens of Palestinian lives. Though the carnage in Lebanon momentarily pushed Gaza off world headlines, the two have been linked inextricably in global perceptions as consequences on two different front of the same root cause: Israeli military unilateralism backed up by the unswerving support of the U.S. This unilateralism in turn, is seen to be the direct outcome of the pretence of a peace process that Israel, with the open encouragement of its superpower patron, engaged in since 1993. When stealth and subterfuge failed and the Palestinians refused to be accomplices in their own occupation, Israel unveiled its iron fist.
Whatever their other failings, top officials of the U.S. administration today do not lack the ability to turn attractive life-cycle metaphors to describe the politics of the region. It was in May 2005 that Vice President Dick Cheney – the man who had seen visions of flower-strewn parades as Iraqis greeted invading U.S. troops as liberators – asserted that the insurgency in the country was in its “death throes”. And in mid-July this year, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, after blithely surveying the wrecked infrastructure of Lebanon and the mounting toll in human lives, made the chirpy prediction that these were the “birth pangs” of a new political order in the region.
John Prescott, the British Deputy Prime Minister, recently used an unflatteringly vivid four-letter epithet to describe U.S. policy in West Asia. Standing in for a vacationing Tony Blair, Prescott complained that the only reason he had gone along with the decision to invade Iraq was the promise held out that the “roadmap” to peace in Palestine would be implemented shortly after victory was sealed on that front. There was in another words, an explicit promise that the U.S. had held out between achieving its ends in Iraq and delivering justice to Palestine.
As with several other western leaders who still only partially realise their idiocy, Prescott fails to understand that the U.S. invasion was intended precisely to create the conditions in the wider region that would allow Israel to implement its unilateral agenda – drawing its borders according to its own strategic convenience and expelling large numbers of Palestinians, so that the Jewish majority within is not jeopardised for the foreseeable future. This much was suspected and widely spoken of elsewhere in the world well before the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003. But in recent times, as public disillusionment within the U.S. has grown, the hitherto taboo subject of Israel’s role in instigating Bush’s misadventure, has reemerged in public focus. The debate was truly joined in March 2006, when John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, professors of political science at Chicago and Harvard Universities, published a working paper titled “The Israel Lobby”, arguing with a wealth of documentation, that Israel’s undue influence over U.S. foreign policy had become an insupportable strategic burden.
Mearsheimer and Walt were promptly denounced by Zionist zealots as anti-Semites. But their case has not quite been so easy to dismiss. The strategic partnership between the U.S. and Israel to remake the political geography of West Asia, is clearly in deep trouble. A clear indication to this effect came from Zbigniew Brzezinksi, a top advisor to several past Democratic administrations in the U.S. Surveying the miscued judgments that had led the “neoconservative” lobby that dominates policy today into successive disasters in West Asia, Brzezinski told a recent interviewer that “these neocon prescriptions, of which Israel has its equivalents, (would be) fatal for America and ultimately for Israel”. The “lessons of Iraq”, he said, speak for themselves: “Eventually, if neocon policies continue to be pursued, the United States will be expelled from the region and that will be the beginning of the end for Israel as well”.
Well into its sixth decade, the Zionist state is yet to define its borders. It sees no way of securing itself, except through random and indiscriminate acts of terrorist violence against its neighbours and those living under its military tyranny. And despite enjoying income levels that puts it in the league of the more affluent European nations, it is still dependent on U.S. aid to the extent of $ 500 annually for every Israeli citizen.
A state with such a dubious record is by any account, a failed state. And from this perspective, the final outcome that Brzezinski suggests, more in sorrow than anger, may well be the most happy denouement that the world could hope for.
Friday, July 28, 2006
Lebanon ravaged: time to rein in the racist outlaw Israeli regime
Official India’s attitude towards West Asia displays a curious tendency to be several steps behind time. This is a region of unending turmoil, today the epicentre of a confrontation that could engulf the entire world. This much has been evident since at least 2003, when the U.S. began gearing up for its invasion of Iraq, the final act in a saga of destruction that would reduce one of the Arab world’s most viable states to a pathetic state of internal meltdown. For weeks on end, the Indian government dawdled, rather than take a stand. It sat through two weeks and a few days of the invasion, before finally issuing a statement in Hindi that cleverly sought to obscure the distinction between “condemning” and “deploring” the thoroughly illegitimate war of destruction. And it urged the withdrawal of invading forces from Iraq on the precise day that U.S. forces were entering Baghdad.
It is necessary to recall this bit of recent history since the habitual tendency to delay taking a stand has not changed with the UPA government. On July 20, the Ministry of External Affairs issued a statement declaring Israel’s actions “unjustified”. This might have seemed a timely response to the Israeli military’s destructive rampage through Lebanon, which had wrecked most of that country’s civilian infrastructure and killed in excess of 300 civilians. But no, the Indian government’ statement it transpired, bore reference to the trail of destruction that Israeli marauders had left in Gaza. It was at least three weeks since Israel had bombed Gaza’s only power plant, abducted most elected representatives of the Palestinian people, and ground the administrative offices of the Palestinian National Authority to rubble. And while the Indian government agonised over the appropriate response to these crimes against humanity, the Israeli killing machine had moved on to open another front in Lebanon. It was not as if the slaughter in the Gaza had ceased. It was just that it had acquired a “business as usual” dimension and been knocked off the world headlines, since the massacre in Lebanon had momentarily acquired greater dimensions.
A few days later, the criminal U.S. administration of George Bush sent its principal diplomat, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, to West Asia to find a way to end the bloodshed in Lebanon. In what was intended to be a conciliatory gesture towards bruised Arab sensibilities, Rice visited the beleaguered Lebanese capital of Beirut first. She met with the Prime Minister, the speaker of parliament, and other significant participants in the coalition of sectarian groups that is the ruling arrangement in Lebanon. She did not receive, by any account, a single word of sustenance and was sent on her way with the unequivocal demand that Israel stop its aggression and a reconstruction effort be set underway before the terms of a final peace settlement could be discussed.
The Lebanese perception in this sense was congruent with the global commonsense, that for a durable peace to be negotiated, the immediate provocation of Israel’s wanton military brutality should be reined in. Uniquely however, the U.S. had a different perception. Obviously believing that the deafening sound of missiles and bombs wrecking the civilian infrastructure of a country would concentrate minds, the U.S. was insisting that a ceasefire would only be the final outcome of a comprehensive peace settlement. The Lebanese were under duress, being stampeded into signing a peace agreement with Israel – much like the shameful documents of surrender authored by Egypt in 1980 and Jordan in 1994 – that would take the country out of the Arab orbit and make it an accomplice in the cultural genocide of Palestine.
It was already clear by the time of the Rice visit though, that the U.S.-Israeli stratagem was faltering. Much store had been set by this axis of evil on the sectarian groups within Lebanon’s political mosaic rebelling against the Shi’a militant group, Hezbollah, that had sparked off the crisis by its cross-border raid into Israel to kill six Israeli soldiers and capture two prisoners of war. Initial rumbles of discontent from the Maronite Christian leadership within Lebanon seemed to indicate that the game-plan may bear fruit. But during Rice’s visit to Beirut, when she met the Sunni prime minister, the Shi’a speaker of parliament and leaders of other factions within Lebanon’s unique mosaic of confessional politics, she was unequivocally told that the Israeli aggression was perceived across all schisms, as a national rather than a sectarian problem.
The reasons are not far to seek. The religious factions in Lebanese politics are all too aware of the disastrous consequences that disunity can have at this juncture. Memories of the country’s 15 year-long civil war, punctuated by the brutal Israeli invasion of 1982 and the destruction of much of its capital city, are still raw.
Then, the bloodletting was only ended by the 1990 Taif accord sponsored by the Arab League. The conditions both implicit and explicit under which the truce came into effect have never been a secret. Syria would under-write the peace in Lebanon and honour the National Accord of 1943, which was the foundational document of the brittle peace between the country’s different confessional groupings. Lebanese Christians had lost their social, economic and above all, numerical preeminence since the 1943 compact assured them the presidency of the republic in perpetuity. Natural growth and the influx of Palestinian victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing in 1948 and subsequent years, had altered the demographic balances. But if the Taif accord committed itself to honouring the 1943 compact, it was only on the essential condition that the resistance would be kept alive.
There would in other words, be no peace treaty with Israel without a broader settlement of all issues of concern to the Arab world. Uniquely for a process of national reconciliation, the Lebanese state agreed in 1990 to an abridgment of its powers, granting Hezbollah the autonomy in southern Lebanon to sustain the resistance. This was in part a recognition of the stellar role the Shi’a militant group – which operates as a full-fledged parliamentary party in Lebanese politics – had played in sustaining a sense of civil society and nationality in the south of the country through the years of Israeli aggression and occupation. As Rafiq al-Hariri, then the Prime Minister of Lebanon, put it in 1996: “The resistance...is not made by the Lebanese government. It is made by the people. All we are saying is that the people have the right to fight the occupation”.
Today, both the U.S. and Israel seek to portray Hezbollah as the terrorist proxy of hostile governments in Syria and Iran. This self-serving narrative overlooks the close links that Hezbollah has managed to forge with all sections of Lebanese national life. It is for precisely this reason that the U.S. and Israel, after wheedling and coercing the U.N. Security Council into passing resolution 1559 demanding the disarming of Hezbollah and the extension of the Lebanese government’s writ over the entire country, have been unsure about the means available to enforce it. An effort to deploy the Lebanese national army in disarming the Hezbollah would, absent a broader settlement in the region, fail to muster up a political consensus. Even if the battle were to be joined, it would be an unequal fight since Hezbollah, as the most powerful military force in Lebanon, commanding the allegiance of its largest confessional grouping, would easily prevail.
Hezbollah fought the Lebanese general elections of 2005 with a slate of predominantly Shi’a candidates. But it draws the unswerving support of the Palestinian diaspora in the country. And the powerful Druze chieftain, Walid Junblatt, has also allied himself with Hezbollah in the ruling arrangement in Beirut. Further political sustenance has come from Michel Aoun, a former chief of staff of the Lebanese army and a Maronite Christian who has credibility and respect across all confessional groupings. Both Junblatt and Aoun have long opposed the influence exerted by Syria in Lebanese affairs and in allying themselves closely with Hezbollah, they have effectively rubbished the self-serving myth that the U.S. and Israel have sought to propagate.
Unfortunately, some of the more influential Arab states -- motivated both by loyalty to the U.S. aid-giver and apprehension over growing Iranian geopolitical influence – have chosen to buy the western myth. Foreign Ministers of the Arab League were called into session at Cairo on the fourth day of the offensive against Lebanon. In an obvious effort to set the tone for this meeting, King Abdullah of Jordan joined President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in issuing a statement putting the onus of finding a peace on Hezbollah. Its brand of “adventurism” did not serve “Arab interests” according to the joint declaration, which explicitly warned Hezbollah to steer clear of any actions that could plunge the region into “uncalculated confrontations”. Concurrently, a spokesman for the Saudi Arabian ruling family, came out with a denunciation of Hezbollah’s “uncalculated adventures” which had ostensibly exposed “Arab nations... to grave dangers without these nations having a say in the matter.”
In compliance with a U.S. demarche, the Saudi foreign minister read out a statement at the Arab League session, demanding that Hezbollah cease its “unexpected, inappropriate and irresponsible acts” of aggression against Israel. Saudi Arabia was joined in this demand by Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, the Gulf states and the Palestinian authority, represented not by its elected parliament but by the increasingly isolated president, Abu Mazen. Ranged on the other side, were Syria, Algeria, Yemen and Libya, among others.
Two weeks on, with the Hezbollah resistance showing no signs of crumbling, the mood in the Arab camp was somewhat different. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia authored a personal communication to the U.S. president, delivered by his kinsman and foreign minister, reportedly “beseeching” him to end the Israeli aggression. The Jordanian foreign minister declared that his country would support a ceasefire and the deployment of an international force in southern Lebanon to “dislodge” the Hezbollah from the strategic positions it had occupied. And reverting to the brand of diplomacy that it is most comfortable with, Saudi Arabia committed itself to provide a sum of $ 1.5 billion for the reconstruction of Lebanon.
Israel was by this time reconciled to the strategic reality that its use of air and artillery power had failed to complete the job of decimating the Hezbollah. Leaflets were being profusely dropped in southern Lebanon, warning the civilian population to leave, since Israel intended to convert the entire region into a free-fire zone where nothing would be safe. Israel’s chief of defence staff, Lt-Gen Dan Halutz – who is effectively persona non grata in several countries because of the threat of prosecution for war crimes under universal jurisdiction laws – was urging his forces to destroy at least ten buildings in Lebanon for every rocket that Hezbollah fired. And evidence was emerging that Israel had, as during its wars of destruction against Lebanon in 1982, 1993 and 1996, again been using banned incendiary weapons on civilians in the south of the country.
In 1996, the international advocacy group, Human Rights Watch, had recorded powerful and persuasive eyewitness testimony about Israel’s use of white phosphorus weapons -- which when not fatal, cause intense burns and permanent scars – on Lebanese civilians including children. “The available circumstantial evidence of the illegal use of phosphorus, and/or other incendiaries, by Israel against Lebanese civilians during the 1993 events and afterwards is so compelling as to warrant serious investigation and a public response by the Israeli government”, it had observed: “Among other evidence, Human Rights Watch saw several civilians, including children, in southern Lebanon with burns that are likely to have been caused by phosphorus”.
Far from being forced to account for its crimes, Israel has only been given greater licence and leeway to kill and destroy. As Israel presses on with its ground offensive into Lebanon, it is reportedly prepared for a long stay, till the U.S. is able to cobble together an international force that will be empowered to take aggressive enforcement action against Hezbollah. Few countries have yet volunteered troops for this enterprise. And just when the U.S. administration was seeking to step up its mobilisational efforts, the news emerged of the deliberate targeting by Israel of a U.N. observer post in Lebanon. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has expressed deep anger and called for an investigation into the incident, which has claimed at least four lives. At the time of writing, it seems that some of the casualties could have been Indian personnel on peace-keeping duties with the U.N.
As with Iraq in 2003, India could soon be faced with a request from the U.S. to volunteer troops for the dirty work of policing Israel’s regime of coercion and aggression in West Asia. And unlike then, it is greatly to be hoped that India will respond this time, not with waffling and equivocation, but with a firm and decisive “no”. The more worthwhile and principled foreign policy pursuit would obviously be to rein in the racist outlaw regime of Israel in the cause of justice for Palestine and Lebanon.
It is necessary to recall this bit of recent history since the habitual tendency to delay taking a stand has not changed with the UPA government. On July 20, the Ministry of External Affairs issued a statement declaring Israel’s actions “unjustified”. This might have seemed a timely response to the Israeli military’s destructive rampage through Lebanon, which had wrecked most of that country’s civilian infrastructure and killed in excess of 300 civilians. But no, the Indian government’ statement it transpired, bore reference to the trail of destruction that Israeli marauders had left in Gaza. It was at least three weeks since Israel had bombed Gaza’s only power plant, abducted most elected representatives of the Palestinian people, and ground the administrative offices of the Palestinian National Authority to rubble. And while the Indian government agonised over the appropriate response to these crimes against humanity, the Israeli killing machine had moved on to open another front in Lebanon. It was not as if the slaughter in the Gaza had ceased. It was just that it had acquired a “business as usual” dimension and been knocked off the world headlines, since the massacre in Lebanon had momentarily acquired greater dimensions.
A few days later, the criminal U.S. administration of George Bush sent its principal diplomat, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, to West Asia to find a way to end the bloodshed in Lebanon. In what was intended to be a conciliatory gesture towards bruised Arab sensibilities, Rice visited the beleaguered Lebanese capital of Beirut first. She met with the Prime Minister, the speaker of parliament, and other significant participants in the coalition of sectarian groups that is the ruling arrangement in Lebanon. She did not receive, by any account, a single word of sustenance and was sent on her way with the unequivocal demand that Israel stop its aggression and a reconstruction effort be set underway before the terms of a final peace settlement could be discussed.
The Lebanese perception in this sense was congruent with the global commonsense, that for a durable peace to be negotiated, the immediate provocation of Israel’s wanton military brutality should be reined in. Uniquely however, the U.S. had a different perception. Obviously believing that the deafening sound of missiles and bombs wrecking the civilian infrastructure of a country would concentrate minds, the U.S. was insisting that a ceasefire would only be the final outcome of a comprehensive peace settlement. The Lebanese were under duress, being stampeded into signing a peace agreement with Israel – much like the shameful documents of surrender authored by Egypt in 1980 and Jordan in 1994 – that would take the country out of the Arab orbit and make it an accomplice in the cultural genocide of Palestine.
It was already clear by the time of the Rice visit though, that the U.S.-Israeli stratagem was faltering. Much store had been set by this axis of evil on the sectarian groups within Lebanon’s political mosaic rebelling against the Shi’a militant group, Hezbollah, that had sparked off the crisis by its cross-border raid into Israel to kill six Israeli soldiers and capture two prisoners of war. Initial rumbles of discontent from the Maronite Christian leadership within Lebanon seemed to indicate that the game-plan may bear fruit. But during Rice’s visit to Beirut, when she met the Sunni prime minister, the Shi’a speaker of parliament and leaders of other factions within Lebanon’s unique mosaic of confessional politics, she was unequivocally told that the Israeli aggression was perceived across all schisms, as a national rather than a sectarian problem.
The reasons are not far to seek. The religious factions in Lebanese politics are all too aware of the disastrous consequences that disunity can have at this juncture. Memories of the country’s 15 year-long civil war, punctuated by the brutal Israeli invasion of 1982 and the destruction of much of its capital city, are still raw.
Then, the bloodletting was only ended by the 1990 Taif accord sponsored by the Arab League. The conditions both implicit and explicit under which the truce came into effect have never been a secret. Syria would under-write the peace in Lebanon and honour the National Accord of 1943, which was the foundational document of the brittle peace between the country’s different confessional groupings. Lebanese Christians had lost their social, economic and above all, numerical preeminence since the 1943 compact assured them the presidency of the republic in perpetuity. Natural growth and the influx of Palestinian victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing in 1948 and subsequent years, had altered the demographic balances. But if the Taif accord committed itself to honouring the 1943 compact, it was only on the essential condition that the resistance would be kept alive.
There would in other words, be no peace treaty with Israel without a broader settlement of all issues of concern to the Arab world. Uniquely for a process of national reconciliation, the Lebanese state agreed in 1990 to an abridgment of its powers, granting Hezbollah the autonomy in southern Lebanon to sustain the resistance. This was in part a recognition of the stellar role the Shi’a militant group – which operates as a full-fledged parliamentary party in Lebanese politics – had played in sustaining a sense of civil society and nationality in the south of the country through the years of Israeli aggression and occupation. As Rafiq al-Hariri, then the Prime Minister of Lebanon, put it in 1996: “The resistance...is not made by the Lebanese government. It is made by the people. All we are saying is that the people have the right to fight the occupation”.
Today, both the U.S. and Israel seek to portray Hezbollah as the terrorist proxy of hostile governments in Syria and Iran. This self-serving narrative overlooks the close links that Hezbollah has managed to forge with all sections of Lebanese national life. It is for precisely this reason that the U.S. and Israel, after wheedling and coercing the U.N. Security Council into passing resolution 1559 demanding the disarming of Hezbollah and the extension of the Lebanese government’s writ over the entire country, have been unsure about the means available to enforce it. An effort to deploy the Lebanese national army in disarming the Hezbollah would, absent a broader settlement in the region, fail to muster up a political consensus. Even if the battle were to be joined, it would be an unequal fight since Hezbollah, as the most powerful military force in Lebanon, commanding the allegiance of its largest confessional grouping, would easily prevail.
Hezbollah fought the Lebanese general elections of 2005 with a slate of predominantly Shi’a candidates. But it draws the unswerving support of the Palestinian diaspora in the country. And the powerful Druze chieftain, Walid Junblatt, has also allied himself with Hezbollah in the ruling arrangement in Beirut. Further political sustenance has come from Michel Aoun, a former chief of staff of the Lebanese army and a Maronite Christian who has credibility and respect across all confessional groupings. Both Junblatt and Aoun have long opposed the influence exerted by Syria in Lebanese affairs and in allying themselves closely with Hezbollah, they have effectively rubbished the self-serving myth that the U.S. and Israel have sought to propagate.
Unfortunately, some of the more influential Arab states -- motivated both by loyalty to the U.S. aid-giver and apprehension over growing Iranian geopolitical influence – have chosen to buy the western myth. Foreign Ministers of the Arab League were called into session at Cairo on the fourth day of the offensive against Lebanon. In an obvious effort to set the tone for this meeting, King Abdullah of Jordan joined President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in issuing a statement putting the onus of finding a peace on Hezbollah. Its brand of “adventurism” did not serve “Arab interests” according to the joint declaration, which explicitly warned Hezbollah to steer clear of any actions that could plunge the region into “uncalculated confrontations”. Concurrently, a spokesman for the Saudi Arabian ruling family, came out with a denunciation of Hezbollah’s “uncalculated adventures” which had ostensibly exposed “Arab nations... to grave dangers without these nations having a say in the matter.”
In compliance with a U.S. demarche, the Saudi foreign minister read out a statement at the Arab League session, demanding that Hezbollah cease its “unexpected, inappropriate and irresponsible acts” of aggression against Israel. Saudi Arabia was joined in this demand by Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, the Gulf states and the Palestinian authority, represented not by its elected parliament but by the increasingly isolated president, Abu Mazen. Ranged on the other side, were Syria, Algeria, Yemen and Libya, among others.
Two weeks on, with the Hezbollah resistance showing no signs of crumbling, the mood in the Arab camp was somewhat different. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia authored a personal communication to the U.S. president, delivered by his kinsman and foreign minister, reportedly “beseeching” him to end the Israeli aggression. The Jordanian foreign minister declared that his country would support a ceasefire and the deployment of an international force in southern Lebanon to “dislodge” the Hezbollah from the strategic positions it had occupied. And reverting to the brand of diplomacy that it is most comfortable with, Saudi Arabia committed itself to provide a sum of $ 1.5 billion for the reconstruction of Lebanon.
Israel was by this time reconciled to the strategic reality that its use of air and artillery power had failed to complete the job of decimating the Hezbollah. Leaflets were being profusely dropped in southern Lebanon, warning the civilian population to leave, since Israel intended to convert the entire region into a free-fire zone where nothing would be safe. Israel’s chief of defence staff, Lt-Gen Dan Halutz – who is effectively persona non grata in several countries because of the threat of prosecution for war crimes under universal jurisdiction laws – was urging his forces to destroy at least ten buildings in Lebanon for every rocket that Hezbollah fired. And evidence was emerging that Israel had, as during its wars of destruction against Lebanon in 1982, 1993 and 1996, again been using banned incendiary weapons on civilians in the south of the country.
In 1996, the international advocacy group, Human Rights Watch, had recorded powerful and persuasive eyewitness testimony about Israel’s use of white phosphorus weapons -- which when not fatal, cause intense burns and permanent scars – on Lebanese civilians including children. “The available circumstantial evidence of the illegal use of phosphorus, and/or other incendiaries, by Israel against Lebanese civilians during the 1993 events and afterwards is so compelling as to warrant serious investigation and a public response by the Israeli government”, it had observed: “Among other evidence, Human Rights Watch saw several civilians, including children, in southern Lebanon with burns that are likely to have been caused by phosphorus”.
Far from being forced to account for its crimes, Israel has only been given greater licence and leeway to kill and destroy. As Israel presses on with its ground offensive into Lebanon, it is reportedly prepared for a long stay, till the U.S. is able to cobble together an international force that will be empowered to take aggressive enforcement action against Hezbollah. Few countries have yet volunteered troops for this enterprise. And just when the U.S. administration was seeking to step up its mobilisational efforts, the news emerged of the deliberate targeting by Israel of a U.N. observer post in Lebanon. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has expressed deep anger and called for an investigation into the incident, which has claimed at least four lives. At the time of writing, it seems that some of the casualties could have been Indian personnel on peace-keeping duties with the U.N.
As with Iraq in 2003, India could soon be faced with a request from the U.S. to volunteer troops for the dirty work of policing Israel’s regime of coercion and aggression in West Asia. And unlike then, it is greatly to be hoped that India will respond this time, not with waffling and equivocation, but with a firm and decisive “no”. The more worthwhile and principled foreign policy pursuit would obviously be to rein in the racist outlaw regime of Israel in the cause of justice for Palestine and Lebanon.
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Israel in Lebanon: focusing minds through bombs and missiles
Over the third weekend of July, television studios in the U.S. were resonant with talk of an apocalyptic struggle of good against evil. Israel had just begun a destructive military rampage in Lebanon, gutting Beirut’s international airport, destroying the country’s electricity grid and throwing transportation networks out of gear. In obvious admiration, Newt Gingrich, the right-wing ideologue and prospective Republican candidate for the U.S. presidency, spoke of these actions as the first salvos of “World War Three”. Joining him in this ascent towards a variety of religious rapture, were news and talk-show hosts in virtually all channels with a tilt towards the right. If the “war on terror” has lost some of the spectral magic that earned the rabid right two significant electoral victories in the U.S., it evidently needs now to be supplanted by an ever more frightening vision.
But for a war that pitted such clearly defined moral categories as good and evil against each other, the line-up of geopolitical forces on either side of World War III remained indeterminate. With the exception of the U.S. and Israel, global public opinion remained firmly on the side of the supposed forces of darkness. And the dynastic regimes of the Arab world, none too firm in their adherence to democracy, stood uneasily on the side of the U.S. This arrangement of pieces on the international checkerboard had altered, though ever so subtly, in the days since the war began. But every minute shift conveyed grim suggestions of unending turmoil in the region.
Though no explicit words of approval were uttered in public, the U.S. was prepared to risk international isolation in resisting any multilateral involvement to curb Israel’s absolute freedom to terrorise its neighbourhood. At the same time, it was prepared with unseemly haste, to rush to unfavourable judgment in all matters involving Israel’s adversaries. Eleven days into the war, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice paid a visit to the region. In a gesture of conciliation towards bruised Arab sentiments, she chose Beirut as her first port of call, expressing sympathy for the Lebanese civilians caught up in a vicious war, but saying nothing that could be construed as disapproval of Israel’s military actions. Rather, she rehearsed yet again, her well-worn line that a ceasefire would be of little substantive value, if it were to be breached within a matter of months. To be of any enduring use, a ceasefire would have to be accompanied by a comprehensive peace that addressed all the fundamental problems of the region. And in identifying the problems that needed immediate attention, Rice proved disinclined to take a broad view. The one problem she had in mind was the pervasive presence and influence of the Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon, where it had effectively become a “state within a state”, unamenable to central control from Beirut and able to threaten Israel’s northern settlements at will through lethal rocket fire.
The U.S. attitude in effect reverses the commonsense of international diplomacy, which had been articulated the preceding Thursday by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Addressing the U.N. Security Council, Annan paid due obeisance to the U.S. sensibilities, criticising Hezbollah for its “provocative” foray across the border a week before, when two Israeli soldiers were taken prisoner. This action, carried out without the authority of a duly constituted political authority, showed a “reckless disregard for the interests of the government of Lebanon”. But having said all this, Annan was firm in his belief that Israel's “excessive use of force” was completely unwarranted. It did “little or nothing to decrease popular support” for Hezbollah, and made the Lebanese government, whose authority Israel wanted extended to the entire country, a hapless hostage to the actions of a guerrilla force. Staying well within the bounds of diplomacy, Annan chided Israel for instigating a humanitarian crisis that was likely in little time, to engulf upto a million people.
Fundamental to the divergence between the U.S. and the rest of the world are rival perceptions about the conditions under which negotiations should best be conducted. While conceding that there is a large complex of issues to be resolved, Annan’s proposals suggested that negotiations should ideally proceed in a calm and settled atmosphere. With her own interventions, Rice in effect, was articulating the U.S. position that peace talks are most likely to achieve their objective if conducted with the deafening crescendo of bombs and missiles in the background.
From behind the scenes though, another story was emerging in unsubtle leaks: that even as Rice was setting off for her tour of the region, the U.S. had given Israel a clear deadline of a week to complete its military campaign. Beyond that, the U.S. was reportedly, not prepared to hold out the assurance that it would resist the international call for a ceasefire. Whether this conformed to the professional military assessment from the Israeli side was unclear. At a cabinet meeting the day before the Rice visit, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had reportedly assured his ministerial colleagues that “the diplomatic process” would not be pursued “at the expense of destroying infrastructures of terror”, which would “take a very long time”.
Evidently to ensure that maximal havoc was created in the available time, the U.S. was also, as the New York Times reported on July 22, hastening its deliveries of lethal munitions to Israel. “The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration”, reported the newspaper: “Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah”.
Even without the additional element of rancour injected by this report, Arab states had begun by then to show deep signs of disquiet. Foreign Ministers of the Arab League were called into session at Cairo on the fourth day of the offensive against Lebanon. In an obvious effort to set the tone for this meeting, King Abdullah of Jordan joined President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in issuing a statement putting the onus of finding a peace on Hezbollah. The predominantly Shi’a Muslim formation, which represents the largest of Lebanon’s many confessional groupings and is a significant presence in the national parliament, was accused of “adventurism that does not serve Arab interests” and explicitly told to steer clear of any actions that could plunge the region into “uncalculated confrontations.” As if on cue, a spokesman for the Saudi Arabian ruling family immediately afterwards, came out with a denunciation of Hezbollah’s “uncalculated adventures” which had ostensibly exposed “Arab nations... to grave dangers without these nations having a say in the matter.”
In compliance with a U.S. demarche, the Saudi foreign minister read out a statement at the Arab League session, demanding that Hezbollah cease its “unexpected, inappropriate and irresponsible acts” of aggression against Israel. Saudi Arabia was joined in this demand by Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, the Gulf states and the Palestinian authority, represented not by its elected parliament but by the increasingly isolated president, Abu Mazen. Ranged on the other side, were Syria, Algeria, Yemen and Libya.
Within a week, the Saudi foreign minister, accompanied by two other members of the ruling family, called on the U.S. President in Washington, to deliver a letter from Saudi King Abdullah. According to media reports, the King “beseeched” the U.S. President to intervene in Israel's military campaign in Lebanon. As he left the presidential premises, the Saudi minister said that he had “requested a cease-fire to allow for a cessation of hostilities”. The “bleeding in Lebanon” had to stop, and there had to be “an agreement to save Lebanese lives, Lebanese properties and what the Lebanese have built, and to save this country from the ordeal it is facing”.
Behind this shift in Saudi attitudes, lies a sense of alarm at the violence inflicted upon Lebanon. Israel had obviously calculated that the scale of mechanical and explosive force it was prepared to apply through air and artillery power, would unhinge the loose coalition of confessional groups that is the ruling arrangement in Lebanon. It had hoped that the Maronite Christian element, traditionally viewed as allies, would lead a revolt against the Hezbollah, if necessary ejecting the party from the ruling coalition and deploying the Lebanese national army to rein in its militia.
It did not take very long before this calculation came a cropper. The religious factions in Lebanese politics are all too aware of the disastrous consequences that disunity can have at this juncture. Memories of the country’s 15 year-long civil war, punctuated by the brutal Israeli invasion of 1982 and the destruction of much of its capital city, are still raw. The bloodletting was ended by the 1990 Taif accord sponsored by the Arab League and its conditions – both implicit and explicit – have never been a secret. Syria would under-write the peace in Lebanon and honour the National Accord of 1943, which was the foundational document of the brittle peace between the country’s different confessional groupings. The Christians had lost their social, economic and above all, numerical preeminence since the 1943 compact assured them the presidency of the republic in perpetuity. Natural growth and the influx of Palestinian victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing in 1948 and subsequent years, had altered the demographic balances. But if the Taif accord committed itself to honouring the 1943 compact, it was only on the essential condition that the resistance would be kept alive. There would in other words, be no peace treaty with Israel without a broader settlement of all issues of concern to the Arab world.
Shortly after the Israelis blasted a residential building of Beirut with 20 tonnes of explosives in an effort to kill him, Hezbollah’s leader Shaikh Hassan Nasrallah sat down for an interview with the Al Jazeera news channel. Asked about the impunity with which Hezbollah functioned in southern Lebanon, engaging in hostile actions that endangered the fragile peace with Israel, he was categorical that the Shi’a militia was operating within the terms of a broader agreement with the Lebanese government. “The government statement, on the basis of which we participated in the government, talks about the Lebanese Government's endorsement of resistance and its national right to liberate the land and the prisoners”, said Nasrallah. Uniquely for a process of national reconciliation, the Lebanese state agreed in 1990 to an abridgment of its powers, granting Hezbollah the autonomy in southern Lebanon to sustain the resistance. And the objectives of the resistance as laid out by Nasrallah, were manifold, though not all were of equal priority.
Despite vacating much of southern Lebanon in 2000, Israel continues to be in occupation of a small patch of land called the Shab’a farms. Furthermore, violations of the sovereign space of Lebanon through land, air and sea are almost a daily occurrence. But neither of these, in Nasrallah’s account, merited great attention on the part of the resistance. Though the border violations in particular, were a grievous provocation, Lebanon he declared, could live with them. Where it would not compromise though, was in respect of the Lebanese nationals and Palestinians who were being held without trial in Israeli prisons, and the civilians who were subject to the daily military atrocities of the Israeli armed forces. Strategically and tactically, in the aggravated situation that prevailed mid-July, with Israeli military action against civilians scaling new heights of random and disproportionate violence, the Hezbollah had no option but to conduct its raid across the border and take two soldiers prisoner.
The subsequent reaction by the Arab states had disappointed Lebanon, but there were in Nasrallah’s strategic estimation, no grounds for anxiety in the internal situation. “We do not fear the internal front”, said Nasrallah: “They are trying to play on the sectarian divisions. They know that playing on the sectarian divisions is dangerous. …. If they want to play on the differences between Sunni and Shi’a, Muslim and Christian, or Druze and Shi’a, it will be dangerous to the country”.
These locutions have multiple layers of significance. On the one hand, an effort to deploy the Lebanese national army in disarming the Hezbollah would, absent a broader settlement in the region, fail to muster up a political consensus. It would moreover, be an unequal battle, since Hezbollah, as the most powerful military force in Lebanon, commanding the allegiance of its largest confessional grouping, would easily overwhelm the Lebanese army. If external powers were to intervene, the outcome would be a descent into civil war, which in conjunction with the daily bloodshed in Iraq, could plunge the entire region into anarchy.
Within Lebanon itself, Hezbollah fought the general elections of 2005 with a slate of predominantly Shi’a candidates. But it draws the unswerving support of the Palestinian diaspora in the country. And the powerful Druze chieftain Walid Junblatt, has also allied himself with Hezbollah in the ruling arrangement in Beirut. Further political sustenance has come from Michel Aoun, a former chief of staff of the Lebanese army and a Maronite Christian who has credibility and respect across all confessional groupings.
Both Junblatt and Aoun have been long-time opponents of the overweening influence exerted by Syria in Lebanese affairs. In allying themselves so closely with Hezbollah, they have effectively rubbished the notion, so pronounced in the Israeli and U.S. narration, that Hezbollah is little else than a terrorist proxy for Syria, determined to work contrary to Lebanon’s national interests. At another level, Nasrallah’s statements reflect a certain confidence that the Israeli assault would heal, rather than deepen sectarian fissures within Lebanon. Since the Israeli strategy has been quite explicitly to inflict pain on all of Lebanon rather than only the offending elements, it seemed to have precisely this effect after the first two weeks. Further, in standing up and signaling that Israel would be called to account for its atrocities on the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, Hezbollah has the potential to transcend the sectarian split between Shi’a and Sunni Muslim, and appeal to a broad mass of the Arab people.
Since the farce of its withdrawal from Gaza, Israel has, with the acquiescence of all Arab regimes, considerably stepped up its daily attacks on the very fabric of civic life in occupied Palestine. These attacks have ascended several notches in virulence since Palestinian national elections in February brought the Islamic resistance group Hamas to power. Western governments have been mobilised to stop all aid flows to the beleaguered people, tax revenues rightfully belonging to the Palestinian administration have been withheld, and access routes through both land and sea have been blocked. In what would be recognised under international rules of war as a legitimate act of self-defence, Hamas militants in June carried out a raid on an Israeli military picket enforcing the illegal siege of Gaza. Two soldiers were killed and one taken prisoner. Since then, Israel has been engaged in the kind of destructive rampage through Gaza that it is now visiting on Lebanon.
That no Arab state managed to summon up the political will to condemn Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people, has been a blot on their already besmirched reputations. That a non-state actor like Hezbollah should have taken up the onus of demanding accountability from Israel, is a further challenge to the Arab state system. Early reactions to the atrocities in Lebanon were conditioned by the aversion most Arab regimes have towards any accretion to the regional strategic influence of Iran, which is still considered, with obvious inattention to truth, the external prop without which Hezbollah would be a negligible political force. The later mood within the Arab leadership, which seemed almost to verge on panic, could well suggest the beginnings of a rearguard to safeguard their rapidly shrinking political legitimacy.
July 25, 2006
But for a war that pitted such clearly defined moral categories as good and evil against each other, the line-up of geopolitical forces on either side of World War III remained indeterminate. With the exception of the U.S. and Israel, global public opinion remained firmly on the side of the supposed forces of darkness. And the dynastic regimes of the Arab world, none too firm in their adherence to democracy, stood uneasily on the side of the U.S. This arrangement of pieces on the international checkerboard had altered, though ever so subtly, in the days since the war began. But every minute shift conveyed grim suggestions of unending turmoil in the region.
Though no explicit words of approval were uttered in public, the U.S. was prepared to risk international isolation in resisting any multilateral involvement to curb Israel’s absolute freedom to terrorise its neighbourhood. At the same time, it was prepared with unseemly haste, to rush to unfavourable judgment in all matters involving Israel’s adversaries. Eleven days into the war, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice paid a visit to the region. In a gesture of conciliation towards bruised Arab sentiments, she chose Beirut as her first port of call, expressing sympathy for the Lebanese civilians caught up in a vicious war, but saying nothing that could be construed as disapproval of Israel’s military actions. Rather, she rehearsed yet again, her well-worn line that a ceasefire would be of little substantive value, if it were to be breached within a matter of months. To be of any enduring use, a ceasefire would have to be accompanied by a comprehensive peace that addressed all the fundamental problems of the region. And in identifying the problems that needed immediate attention, Rice proved disinclined to take a broad view. The one problem she had in mind was the pervasive presence and influence of the Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon, where it had effectively become a “state within a state”, unamenable to central control from Beirut and able to threaten Israel’s northern settlements at will through lethal rocket fire.
The U.S. attitude in effect reverses the commonsense of international diplomacy, which had been articulated the preceding Thursday by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Addressing the U.N. Security Council, Annan paid due obeisance to the U.S. sensibilities, criticising Hezbollah for its “provocative” foray across the border a week before, when two Israeli soldiers were taken prisoner. This action, carried out without the authority of a duly constituted political authority, showed a “reckless disregard for the interests of the government of Lebanon”. But having said all this, Annan was firm in his belief that Israel's “excessive use of force” was completely unwarranted. It did “little or nothing to decrease popular support” for Hezbollah, and made the Lebanese government, whose authority Israel wanted extended to the entire country, a hapless hostage to the actions of a guerrilla force. Staying well within the bounds of diplomacy, Annan chided Israel for instigating a humanitarian crisis that was likely in little time, to engulf upto a million people.
Fundamental to the divergence between the U.S. and the rest of the world are rival perceptions about the conditions under which negotiations should best be conducted. While conceding that there is a large complex of issues to be resolved, Annan’s proposals suggested that negotiations should ideally proceed in a calm and settled atmosphere. With her own interventions, Rice in effect, was articulating the U.S. position that peace talks are most likely to achieve their objective if conducted with the deafening crescendo of bombs and missiles in the background.
From behind the scenes though, another story was emerging in unsubtle leaks: that even as Rice was setting off for her tour of the region, the U.S. had given Israel a clear deadline of a week to complete its military campaign. Beyond that, the U.S. was reportedly, not prepared to hold out the assurance that it would resist the international call for a ceasefire. Whether this conformed to the professional military assessment from the Israeli side was unclear. At a cabinet meeting the day before the Rice visit, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had reportedly assured his ministerial colleagues that “the diplomatic process” would not be pursued “at the expense of destroying infrastructures of terror”, which would “take a very long time”.
Evidently to ensure that maximal havoc was created in the available time, the U.S. was also, as the New York Times reported on July 22, hastening its deliveries of lethal munitions to Israel. “The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration”, reported the newspaper: “Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah”.
Even without the additional element of rancour injected by this report, Arab states had begun by then to show deep signs of disquiet. Foreign Ministers of the Arab League were called into session at Cairo on the fourth day of the offensive against Lebanon. In an obvious effort to set the tone for this meeting, King Abdullah of Jordan joined President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in issuing a statement putting the onus of finding a peace on Hezbollah. The predominantly Shi’a Muslim formation, which represents the largest of Lebanon’s many confessional groupings and is a significant presence in the national parliament, was accused of “adventurism that does not serve Arab interests” and explicitly told to steer clear of any actions that could plunge the region into “uncalculated confrontations.” As if on cue, a spokesman for the Saudi Arabian ruling family immediately afterwards, came out with a denunciation of Hezbollah’s “uncalculated adventures” which had ostensibly exposed “Arab nations... to grave dangers without these nations having a say in the matter.”
In compliance with a U.S. demarche, the Saudi foreign minister read out a statement at the Arab League session, demanding that Hezbollah cease its “unexpected, inappropriate and irresponsible acts” of aggression against Israel. Saudi Arabia was joined in this demand by Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, the Gulf states and the Palestinian authority, represented not by its elected parliament but by the increasingly isolated president, Abu Mazen. Ranged on the other side, were Syria, Algeria, Yemen and Libya.
Within a week, the Saudi foreign minister, accompanied by two other members of the ruling family, called on the U.S. President in Washington, to deliver a letter from Saudi King Abdullah. According to media reports, the King “beseeched” the U.S. President to intervene in Israel's military campaign in Lebanon. As he left the presidential premises, the Saudi minister said that he had “requested a cease-fire to allow for a cessation of hostilities”. The “bleeding in Lebanon” had to stop, and there had to be “an agreement to save Lebanese lives, Lebanese properties and what the Lebanese have built, and to save this country from the ordeal it is facing”.
Behind this shift in Saudi attitudes, lies a sense of alarm at the violence inflicted upon Lebanon. Israel had obviously calculated that the scale of mechanical and explosive force it was prepared to apply through air and artillery power, would unhinge the loose coalition of confessional groups that is the ruling arrangement in Lebanon. It had hoped that the Maronite Christian element, traditionally viewed as allies, would lead a revolt against the Hezbollah, if necessary ejecting the party from the ruling coalition and deploying the Lebanese national army to rein in its militia.
It did not take very long before this calculation came a cropper. The religious factions in Lebanese politics are all too aware of the disastrous consequences that disunity can have at this juncture. Memories of the country’s 15 year-long civil war, punctuated by the brutal Israeli invasion of 1982 and the destruction of much of its capital city, are still raw. The bloodletting was ended by the 1990 Taif accord sponsored by the Arab League and its conditions – both implicit and explicit – have never been a secret. Syria would under-write the peace in Lebanon and honour the National Accord of 1943, which was the foundational document of the brittle peace between the country’s different confessional groupings. The Christians had lost their social, economic and above all, numerical preeminence since the 1943 compact assured them the presidency of the republic in perpetuity. Natural growth and the influx of Palestinian victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing in 1948 and subsequent years, had altered the demographic balances. But if the Taif accord committed itself to honouring the 1943 compact, it was only on the essential condition that the resistance would be kept alive. There would in other words, be no peace treaty with Israel without a broader settlement of all issues of concern to the Arab world.
Shortly after the Israelis blasted a residential building of Beirut with 20 tonnes of explosives in an effort to kill him, Hezbollah’s leader Shaikh Hassan Nasrallah sat down for an interview with the Al Jazeera news channel. Asked about the impunity with which Hezbollah functioned in southern Lebanon, engaging in hostile actions that endangered the fragile peace with Israel, he was categorical that the Shi’a militia was operating within the terms of a broader agreement with the Lebanese government. “The government statement, on the basis of which we participated in the government, talks about the Lebanese Government's endorsement of resistance and its national right to liberate the land and the prisoners”, said Nasrallah. Uniquely for a process of national reconciliation, the Lebanese state agreed in 1990 to an abridgment of its powers, granting Hezbollah the autonomy in southern Lebanon to sustain the resistance. And the objectives of the resistance as laid out by Nasrallah, were manifold, though not all were of equal priority.
Despite vacating much of southern Lebanon in 2000, Israel continues to be in occupation of a small patch of land called the Shab’a farms. Furthermore, violations of the sovereign space of Lebanon through land, air and sea are almost a daily occurrence. But neither of these, in Nasrallah’s account, merited great attention on the part of the resistance. Though the border violations in particular, were a grievous provocation, Lebanon he declared, could live with them. Where it would not compromise though, was in respect of the Lebanese nationals and Palestinians who were being held without trial in Israeli prisons, and the civilians who were subject to the daily military atrocities of the Israeli armed forces. Strategically and tactically, in the aggravated situation that prevailed mid-July, with Israeli military action against civilians scaling new heights of random and disproportionate violence, the Hezbollah had no option but to conduct its raid across the border and take two soldiers prisoner.
The subsequent reaction by the Arab states had disappointed Lebanon, but there were in Nasrallah’s strategic estimation, no grounds for anxiety in the internal situation. “We do not fear the internal front”, said Nasrallah: “They are trying to play on the sectarian divisions. They know that playing on the sectarian divisions is dangerous. …. If they want to play on the differences between Sunni and Shi’a, Muslim and Christian, or Druze and Shi’a, it will be dangerous to the country”.
These locutions have multiple layers of significance. On the one hand, an effort to deploy the Lebanese national army in disarming the Hezbollah would, absent a broader settlement in the region, fail to muster up a political consensus. It would moreover, be an unequal battle, since Hezbollah, as the most powerful military force in Lebanon, commanding the allegiance of its largest confessional grouping, would easily overwhelm the Lebanese army. If external powers were to intervene, the outcome would be a descent into civil war, which in conjunction with the daily bloodshed in Iraq, could plunge the entire region into anarchy.
Within Lebanon itself, Hezbollah fought the general elections of 2005 with a slate of predominantly Shi’a candidates. But it draws the unswerving support of the Palestinian diaspora in the country. And the powerful Druze chieftain Walid Junblatt, has also allied himself with Hezbollah in the ruling arrangement in Beirut. Further political sustenance has come from Michel Aoun, a former chief of staff of the Lebanese army and a Maronite Christian who has credibility and respect across all confessional groupings.
Both Junblatt and Aoun have been long-time opponents of the overweening influence exerted by Syria in Lebanese affairs. In allying themselves so closely with Hezbollah, they have effectively rubbished the notion, so pronounced in the Israeli and U.S. narration, that Hezbollah is little else than a terrorist proxy for Syria, determined to work contrary to Lebanon’s national interests. At another level, Nasrallah’s statements reflect a certain confidence that the Israeli assault would heal, rather than deepen sectarian fissures within Lebanon. Since the Israeli strategy has been quite explicitly to inflict pain on all of Lebanon rather than only the offending elements, it seemed to have precisely this effect after the first two weeks. Further, in standing up and signaling that Israel would be called to account for its atrocities on the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, Hezbollah has the potential to transcend the sectarian split between Shi’a and Sunni Muslim, and appeal to a broad mass of the Arab people.
Since the farce of its withdrawal from Gaza, Israel has, with the acquiescence of all Arab regimes, considerably stepped up its daily attacks on the very fabric of civic life in occupied Palestine. These attacks have ascended several notches in virulence since Palestinian national elections in February brought the Islamic resistance group Hamas to power. Western governments have been mobilised to stop all aid flows to the beleaguered people, tax revenues rightfully belonging to the Palestinian administration have been withheld, and access routes through both land and sea have been blocked. In what would be recognised under international rules of war as a legitimate act of self-defence, Hamas militants in June carried out a raid on an Israeli military picket enforcing the illegal siege of Gaza. Two soldiers were killed and one taken prisoner. Since then, Israel has been engaged in the kind of destructive rampage through Gaza that it is now visiting on Lebanon.
That no Arab state managed to summon up the political will to condemn Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people, has been a blot on their already besmirched reputations. That a non-state actor like Hezbollah should have taken up the onus of demanding accountability from Israel, is a further challenge to the Arab state system. Early reactions to the atrocities in Lebanon were conditioned by the aversion most Arab regimes have towards any accretion to the regional strategic influence of Iran, which is still considered, with obvious inattention to truth, the external prop without which Hezbollah would be a negligible political force. The later mood within the Arab leadership, which seemed almost to verge on panic, could well suggest the beginnings of a rearguard to safeguard their rapidly shrinking political legitimacy.
July 25, 2006
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