Peace and Justice Post

The Violence Debate

by Agustín Velloso, Dissident Voice,  October 26th, 2010

As a Western supporter (non Muslim/Arab) of the Palestinian cause, I have always find it rather difficult to talk (let alone to advocate) about how best Palestinians can resist occupation, especially when this occupation is usually extremely violent and genocidal at times.

Ramzy Baroud’s restrained criticism of Western and some other willing peace teachers, has prompted me to introduce a different point of view, which probably is much more common amongst Westerners than the Palestinians themselves would believe, although the mainstream media, as it happens with many other issues, have successfully managed to keep under a lid.

War in Iraq and Afghanistan are just two outstanding examples. It does not matter how many Westerners speak out and demonstrate against Western intervention (read aggression) in those countries. It does not matter that international law (let alone pure and humble common sense and humanity) prohibits wars of aggression and occupation. The fact is that Western presidents and parliaments “democratically” invade and withdraw as they see fit, “democratically” they are not held accountable in court for these crimes, and their victims are either dead of left to their own devices, also “democratically”.

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Gethin Chamberlain in Panaji, The Guardian, Oct 26, 2010

By Jeremy R. Hammond, Foreign Policy Journal, Oct 26, 2010

This essay is available for download in PDF format at the author’s website.

There is a widely accepted belief that United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 “created” Israel, based upon an understanding that this resolution partitioned Palestine or otherwise conferred legal authority or legitimacy to the declaration of the existence of the state of Israel. However, despite its popularity, this belief has no basis in fact, as a review of the resolution’s history and examination of legal principles demonstrates incontrovertibly.

Great Britain had occupied Palestine during the First World War, and in July 1922, the League of Nations issued its mandate for Palestine, which recognized the British government as the occupying power and effectively conferred to it the color of legal authority to temporarily administrate the territory.[1] On April 2, 1947, seeking to extract itself from the conflict that had arisen in Palestine between Jews and Arabs as a result of the Zionist movement to establish in Palestine a “national home for the Jewish people”,[2] the United Kingdom submitted a letter to the U.N. requesting the Secretary General “to place the question of Palestine on the Agenda of the General Assembly at its next regular Annual Session”, and requesting the Assembly “to make recommendations, under Article 10 of the Charter, concerning the future government of Palestine.”[3] To that end, on May 15, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 106, which established the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to investigate “the question of Palestine”, to “prepare a report to the General Assembly” based upon its findings, and to “submit such proposals as it may consider appropriate for the solution of the problem of Palestine”.[4]

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Simon Jenkins

Writer for the Guardian and the London Sunday Times, The Huffington Post, Oct 25, 2010

A small band of Brits still try to defend America’s current foreign policy to a sceptical world. When US forces abroad do something cruel or counter-productive, like bombing another wedding party or fighting the wrong country, we point to their nobler values and to past defences of freedom. Surely they at least meant well. The Wikileaks revelations now gleefully headlined across Europe have left us floundering.

The brutality and apparent collapse of front-line discipline is charted in thousands of meticulously filed US government reports, proving only one thing, that any war “among the people” that goes on too long degrades its participants and degenerates into senseless cruelty. Our friends become our victims and our enemies triumphant.

The fact that the leaks are irresponsible and helpful to the enemy is by now immaterial. The enemy, mostly Iran, is riding high on the sheer incompetence of coalition and NATO operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and increasingly Pakistan. Hilary Clinton’s objection to them, that they are leaks, hardly meets the case. These are true records from the side that claims “higher values”, of helicopters shooting innocent individuals in cold blood, of the massacring of 600 civilian drivers, women and children among them, at checkpoints, of the killing of people trying to surrender, of a litany of prisoner torture and maltreatment that shows Abu Ghraib was no exception. The idea that the American invasion liberated Iraqis from kidnap, torture, rape and summary execution is shown to be a sick untruth. Indeed a shocking feature of the leaks is that few Iraqis appeared surprised.

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Andy Worthington, October 24, 2010

Last week, Truthout published an important article by Jason Leopold, Truthout’s Deputy Managing Editor, and psychologist and blogger Jeffrey Kaye, revealing, for the first time, a secret memorandum dated March 25, 2002, approved by deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, which authorized human experimentation on detainees in the “War on Terror.” The release of the memo followed some little-noticed maneuvering in Congress in December 2001, when the requirement of “informed consent” in any experimentation by the Defense Department (introduced in 1972) was quietly dropped.

The article — which involved over a year of research, as Leopold and Kaye persuaded former officials to open up to them — not only adds to Leopold’s important work and to Kaye’s formidable track record as a chronicler of the development of human experimentation in the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” torture program (which he has also revealed as part of an obsession with human experimentation reaching back to the 1950s), but also confirms the existence of an important new front in the struggle to raise awareness of the horrors of torture, and the requirement that those who authorized it be held accountable for their crimes.

Leopold and Kaye delivered a presentation about their article the day after its publication, as part of “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week, and their work on human experimentation added to a compelling catalog of the many reasons why the acceptance of torture must continue to be opposed, which I developed during the week: namely, that it is not only illegal, morally corrosive, counterproductive and unnecessary, but also that, at its heart, the Bush-era torture program continued work in the field of human experimentation that the US took over from the Nazis, and also involved treasonous lies on the part of senior officials, who pretended that the program was designed to prevent future terrorist attacks, when, from the very beginning (in late November 2001, according to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff), it was actually being used to extract false confessions about connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that could be used in an attempt to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

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The combination of official reports downplaying the Afghanistan peace talks and other official reports, often from the exact same sources, lauding them as making great progress has been quite confusing over the past weeks. Reports in the Guardian appear to explain this however, citing officials saying the claims are being intentionally hyped as “part of a misinformation campaign aimed at the Taliban leadership.”

Which would put a whole new light on Richard Holbrooke’s claims today that a number of new “high-level” Taliban are seeking the talks because “of the growing pressure they’re under from General Petraeus.”

It would also explain the actual Taliban’s surprise at the claims that such talks are ongoing, and the public rejection of those claims. A number of previous talks over the past several years seemed to amount to the same thing, with the reports centered around convincing low ranking Taliban that a deal was imminent and that they should accept offers from the Karzai government.

And even if the “misinformation” is aimed at the Taliban it also has a side-effect of becoming another part of the growing collection of false claims of “progress” by the administration ahead of key conferences on the war. With many of the public comments directed at Western audiences the question of how much of this is really a military strategy and how much is just overt lying remains an open question.

By Prof. Angana Chatterji, AHRC, October 25, 2010

The 8-point Plan, New Delhis political initiative to address the crises in Kashmir, attests to the parallel and incommensurate realities of the sovereign and the subjugated, the Indian state and the Kashmiris.

The 8-point Plan renders obvious New Delhi’s limited comfort zone. The Plan is not an overture to healing the reality of suffering and outrage inside Kashmir. Rethinking militarization and military governance is not the priority. The ambition is to manage Kashmiris and to keep the disarray concealed from the international gaze.

New Delhi announced its 8-point Plan on September 25, 2010, following the visit to India-ruled Kashmir of a 39-member All Party Delegation from New Delhi led by Union Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, and parallel to the 65th Session of the United Nations General Assembly meetings in New York City. That Defence Minister Arackaparambil Kurian Antony did not accompany the All Party Delegation was indicative of New Delhis mood.

On the part of New Delhi, the will to mend the rupture between India and Kashmir will require a non-deceptive gaze into power and history. India evidences how powerful states are unable and unwilling to act with humility. There is no admission of culpability on the part of the Indian state — no acknowledgement of the violence of militarization, authoritarian government, and crimes against humanity perpetrated on Kashmir since the 1990s.

On the part of New Delhi, there is no cognition of the actual grievances voiced by the people of Kashmir. There is no recognition of the shifts in the peoples struggle for self-determination within Kashmir, or of how the shift from violence to nonviolence within the Kashmir resistance movement offers a rich space for critical engagement and principled dialogue toward resolution.

The 8-Point Plan

The provisions of the 8-point Plan stated that interlocutors from India would be appointed to dialogue with civil society and political leaders in Jammu and Kashmir, even as the terms for dialogue were not defined. The Plan committed to releasing youth who were detained and arrested on charges of stone pelting this summer. This is imperative and urgent. The number of such youth was listed at 245, while various human rights defenders and journalists in Kashmir state the figure to be higher.

The Plan made no commitment to review the conditions in which the youth were detained or arrested, to freeing political prisoners, or to endorsing the right to civil disobedience. The Plan made no mention of holding the perpetrators accountable. Neither did New Delhi intend to negate the Government of Indias tactic of violence used to govern and domesticate Kashmiris.

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The United States and Afghanistan should develop a joint plan to replace private security guards gradually rather than enforce a ban, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Saturday.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Clinton telephoned Afghan President Hamid Karzai “to offer ideas” on his decision to ban all private security contractors from December.

Clinton “suggested building a joint plan to steadily replace contractors while managing the impact on existing operations,” Crowley said in a message on Twitter.

“Clinton pledged to work cooperatively to support a smooth transition to full Afghan security responsibility,” Crowley said.

U.S. media reports have said the proposed security guard ban could imperil about $1.5 billion in reconstruction work, including projects key to NATO’s counterinsurgency strategy in the Afghan war.

The private security firms have become a point of friction because some have been involved in high-profile shootings and other incidents.

A U.S. Senate inquiry into private security contracting in Afghanistan concluded this month that funds had sometimes been funneled to warlords.

Karzai issued a decree in August banning all private security contractors in Afghanistan within four months.

Thousands of private security contractors guard everything from U.S. military bases to embassies.

Karzai modified his decree last week, agreeing to permit private security guards to protect embassies, military bases and depots, diplomatic residences and the transport of diplomatic personnel.

By Sampath Perera , wsws.org, October 23, 2010

Seven of the 21 million Pakistanis affected by this summer’s floods are still without shelter, the United Nation’s Pakistan Office reported this week. And an estimated 14 million continue to need urgent humanitarian assistance.

These figures are an indictment of the Pakistan ruling elite’s incompetently organized and poorly funded flood relief effort.

They also are an indictment of the imperialist powers. Under conditions where Pakistan has faced what the UN has repeatedly described as the world’s largest humanitarian crisis in decades, the agency has repeatedly had to plead for the “international community” to come to assist Pakistan.

The western-dominated IMF and World Bank have tied flood aid to their demand for Pakistan to implement market reforms. Washington, meanwhile, has intensified its pressure on Pakistan to expand its counter-insurgency war against Taliban-aligned groups in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

Pakistan’s floods began with heavy rains in the country’s north-east in late July and continued as the water travelled the length of the Indus Valley over the next two months. More people were displaced in Sindh, the country’s southern-most province, than anywhere else, although authorities had weeks of warning about the impending floods. The vast majority of those now lacking shelter are from Sindh.

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