Korea Prospects

Korean model triumphs over West
By Ian Williams
Asia Times 17 November 2009

The resurgence of the South Korean economy as Western countries, most notably the United States, struggle to emerge from financial crisis should put paid to long-standing criticism of the Asian country's chaebol- (or conglomerate-) based approach to growth.

In the most recent quarter, South Korea surprised even its own forecasters by achieving 3.9% annual economic growth, helped by a 4% increase in exports to China. That followed on the previous quarter's 2.6% growth, the highest in the 30-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Underlining the strength of the economy, Korea's jobless rate rose in September at the slowest pace among the world's major economies - up by 0.4%, to 3.4%, compared with a year earlier, indicating its employment conditions remain relatively better than others in the face of the economic slowdown, a report from the Paris-based OECD showed on November 10. The OECD average rise was 2.3 percentage points.

Despite being a member of the OECD and of the Group of 20, nominally the successor to the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations, Korea has not really been regarded as a full member of the industrialized nations club.

For example, Korea was accepted into the OECD in 1996, yet it was only late last year, just before the global meltdown, that it was promoted from the FTSE emerging markets indices - and that was only after the admission of Israel raised some eyebrows.

Ironically, it's the aspects of Korea's business and economy that led Western business pundits to look down on it and caused reservations about its "developed" status that appear to have given the country its comparative advantage during the crisis.

The role in the economy of chaebol (or conglomerates, often family-based and with interlinked shareholdings), an emphasis on actually making things that people want, and the years of government protection and coordination on which key industries were built, now seem to be paying off.

Even before the financial crisis broke last year, the United Nations Development Program's Human Development Index, which takes into account education, longevity and other factors besides gross domestic product, placed Korea in its "Very Highly Developed" group. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other compilers showed the country as the world's 15th-biggest economy.

As a measure of Korea's progress, its export strength to China is not goods for finishing and re-export, a feature of much of, for example, of Taiwan's and other East Asian economies' export industry, nor were they low-quality "cheap" goods in the pejorative sense. South Korea produces high-quality but economical goods that Chinese consumers demand.

Chinese consumers are not alone in being attracted to these products, as rising sales of Hyundai cars in the United States during the "cash for clunkers” program this year testify. Hyundai Kia Automotive Group's October sales in the US not only jumped nearly 50% from the same month last year, according to the automotive industry publication Ward's Auto; the increase rates of the two carmakers was the largest among light-vehicle brands, and nearly 14 times higher than the average increase rate for foreign brands.

At home, Korea's Industrial Production Index increased 5.4% in September from the previous month and 11.0% from the year before, according to Statistics Korea.

More impressively, and demonstrating that Korean manufacturers have money and confidence to invest, September's Equipment Investment Index surged 18.8% from the previous month and 5.8% from a year earlier. The government has also locked up money to spare, with currency reserves in October, at US$264 billion, reaching their second highest level ever.

In contrast, the Anglo-American consensus, which saw manufacturing and engineering as synonymous with rust-belts and obsolescence, is now suffering. Former British premier Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, his chancellor of the Exchequer and now prime minister, and former US president George W Bush were alike seduced with the charms of the service economy, where the population exist by lending each other money and selling (on credit) to each other things other people have made in less-blessed and sophisticated countries. Iceland is the extreme example of where that attitude can get you. Whaling might soon be their only source of income.

In any case, the economic advisers to both Prime Minister Brown and US President Barack Obama now seem to be reconsidering the previous neglect of manufacturing after years in which American and British governments reinterpreted and applied the commandment to it in the poet Arthur Hugh Clough's words:

Thou shalt not kill
But need'st not strive
Officiously to keep alive.

Similarly, years of Western hectoring of the Koreans about their lack of transparency as compared with Western corporate governance suddenly look more than a little foolish, in light of the opacity and indeed mendacity of Wall St and the City of London that has now brought the world to the brink of economic collapse.

Korean success has also been achieved without the widening of the income gap between richest and poorest that the bonus-collectors of the West tell us is an inescapable concomitant of economic growth. The country's Gini coefficient, used as a gauge of the wealth gap, with a lower figure indicating a smaller divide between rich and poor, was 31.3 in 2007 in South Korea, compared with 45 for the US the same year, according to CIA data.

Recent events might suggest that Seoul is committing itself to the broader principles of the Anglo-Saxon "Washington Consensus" on economic strategy. [1] It recently signed a free-trade agreement with the European Union, the world's biggest such deal since the North American Free Trade Agreement between Canada, the US and Mexico came into force in 1994. The US Congress is also under pressure to ratify a Korea-US free-trade deal.

But the newfound attachment to free trade comes at an appropriate time. The Asian tigers, just like the US and Germany before them, grew their industries to maturity in the greenhouse of protectionism before exposing them to competition.

Those allegedly inefficient and old-fashioned chaebol have grown into world-class companies, whose flexibility, innovation and nimbleness the crisis has demonstrated. Hyundai, Samsung, LG and others are global leaders in their fields, with clear success in marketing their wares.

Yet there is more to Korea's progress than that. Its government did not abstain from discussion about which direction the economy should take. The rapid turnaround from the recent financial crisis was in part because the size of its stimulus package, starting with US$11 billion last November, and the quickness with which it was passed and implemented by the government, but also because of a degree of social cohesion that allowed the stimulus package to be targeted more precisely.

"In times of crisis, Koreans come together," said one analyst, contrasting it with Washington, where a crisis is an opportunity to eviscerate one's political enemy.

Seoul's response as the economy turned around was not to let the economy coast along on the same, renewed trajectory, but to direct massive funding towards green and energy-conserving technologies, which seems to be meeting a response from the companies involved.

Similarly, its Development Bank is playing hardball with struggling General Motors over the future of its Korea-based Daewoo unit, demanding guarantees on future production and technology transfer before committing funds to the GM subsidiary, which is the US company's main producer of export model cars but which is excluded from Washington's bailout package.

Korea still needs to resolve tensions between the permanent and temporary workforce; it also needs to expand its service sector. Probably, it needs to rebalance its export sector to lessen its dependence on the US economy, to build on its comparative advantages in China and the developing world, and even to exploit the EU free-trade agreement.

This latest crisis, however, means that Korea, and indeed other Asian economies, should have even more self-confidence to develop in the direction that the empirical evidence indicates is successful, rather than burning sacrifices at the altar of an economic deity - the Anglo-Saxon Washington consensus - that has so spectacularly failed.

Note
1. The term "Washington Consensus" has come to be associated with fundamental free-market policies, with limited state interference in industry and trade.

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

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

Obama and the Nobel

Front page of the current Washington Spectator has my take on Obama's Nobel peace prize.

Once More unto the Breach, Dear Friends

Much remains for Obama to do – but what's remarkable is how much he has achieved in the face of financial crisis

*
o Ian Williams
o guardian.co.uk, Saturday 31 October 2009 13.00 GMT


There is little doubt that, if UN staff and ambassadors could vote, Barack Obama would have won by an even bigger landslide than he achieved. From his speeches they expect him to negotiate where possible, to build consensual international alliances. They may not get all that they want.
(Winning back hearts and minds, 6 November 2008)

After Obama's election I wrote here: "It may not be the second coming, but to use the eschatological phraseology of the Palins of this world, it is certainly the end of the reign of the Antichrist." I also recalled what I'd said during the campaign: "The world looked upon these elections as an IQ test for the American public. The electorate has aced the test. It has put centuries of racism behind it and elected a president who shows signs of knowing where the rest of the world is."

Frankly, while still far from euphoric, I feel vindicated. The coalition of not-so-covert racists, teabaggers, birthers and defenders of Medicare against the state should be a reminder to the purist Obama-detractors of the left just who could instead be staffing the US government now.

OK, Rush Limbaugh's "magic Negro" did not wave a wand and change everything immediately. But in many ways it is remarkable how much Obama has achieved in the face of financial crisis. And no one who saw how much money and support he got from Wall Street can be honestly be surprised at the shape of his response.

The current plans for healthcare reform leaves a lot to be desired, above all a public option. But it is happening, at least. One hopes that Obama is biding his time to come in and leash the Blue Dogs of Capitol Hill to get it through. But even then he has breached the wall of opposition, and another term and "once more into that breach" should bring in reform – if only because of the fiscal costs of not doing it.

Guantánamo is not closed, but it is closing, and with it the lawless domestic and international doctrines of the Bush-era justice department. US troops have been pulled from Iraqi cities, and we can be reasonably sure that if the Iraqi government asked them to leave the country, they would go. Yes there is talk of a build up in Afghanistan, but that is, after all, what Obama promised, even if he certainly should take a more active role in revising the tactics and strategy there. He has scrapped the son-of-Star Wars missile defence programme in Europe that was expensive, ineffective and needlessly provocative to the Russians.

The UN dues are paid up, and Obama has adopted a multilateral outlook. On the Middle East, he has quietly confronted Binyamin Netanyahu, held firm on Israel meeting its own promises on settlements and, relatively un-noticed, told Israel that it should do as Richard Goldstone says and hold an impartial inquiry into Gaza.

When he backslides, by all means let people shove. But let them remember how far up the slope he's pushed us in less than a year.

To read the rest of the Cif America series looking back on Obama's election victory, click here

Goldstone Deserves Support

Ian Williams: Stand up and defend Richard Goldstone
October 24, 2009 11:59 pm Tribune

Under Tony Blair, Britain joined Palau and a few other Pacific quasi dependencies in voting along with the United States at the United Nations on Israeli issues, rather than abstaining as even Margaret Thatcher used to do. So it is not just a small mercy, more a medium sized one, that Britain (and France) refused to vote against the resolution on the Goldstone Report at the UN Human Rights Council last week,

Britain did not abstain in a formal way, but did not vote with the US and that is a big advance. However, in the annals of lame critiques, it would be difficult to beat the cackhanded attempt to be soft on Israel epitomized in the British ambassador’s desperate search for something critical to say. “Because Israel did not co-operate with the Mission, which we regret, the report lacks an authoritative Israeli perspective on the events in question, so crucial to determining the legality of actions.” That has to be up there with a child who has murdered his parents asking the court for mercy because he is an orphan.

Despite the ambassador’s revealing fatuity, this time Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly tried to persuade Benjamin Netanyahu that, in return for a “No” vote, Israel would agree to an impartial inquiry, end the blockade on Gaza and freeze settlements.

The big question is: what does Israel have to fear from mounting its own inquiry? For the answer, we can look to the Kahan commission into the Sabra and Chatila massacres back in 1982, which improbably somehow contrived to find Ariel Sharon culpable, but Israel not guilty. It was an unconvincing greywash that left most of the world convinced of complicity by the Israeli Defence Forces. Israel’s leaders know that their actions in Gaza cannot bear objective scrutiny.

Across much of the West, the 1982 massacres marked the point that Israel and its mostly Labour governments went into overdraft on the sympathy account. Under Tony Blair, once he had removed the recalcitrantly principled Robin Cook as Foreign Secretary, Britain returned to a reflexive support for Israel. The presumption of sympathy for the Israeli Labour Party has rarely been justified. It presided over the building and expansion of the settlements, annexed Jerusalem, demolished houses and imprisoned Palestinians in the same way as Likud. It was just that, unlike Likud, Labour made the right noises while doing so.

It was a Labour Prime Minister who scorched South Lebanon to get re-elected. Interestingly, Netanyahu told the Knesset after hearing the UNHRC vote: “We will not allow Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak, who sent our sons to war, to arrive at the international court in The Hague.” One cannot help suspecting that this was the Likud leader’s reminder to the White House that, despite the Israeli Prime Minister’s vigorous defence of Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, it was the “peace” Labour/Kadima coalition that had planned and initiated it.

For the record, in the flood of personal attacks on former international war crimes prosecutor Richard Goldstone, neither the US nor Britain and France seriously challenged the substance of his report or the integrity of his mission. They have been reduced to the inanities mentioned earlier, lamenting its failure to hear the case that the Israelis refused to make.

There have been occasional references to the imbalance of his mandate. Yet Goldstone, a self-professed Zionist and Israel supporter, altered his mandate to include investigations of Hamas’ actions. Occasionally, in deference to the Israeli furore, references are made about the report being unbalanced – which could only come from people who have not read it. It calls on Hamas, as well as Israel, to investigate its actions.

Bearing mind the almost 100 to one Palestinian to Israeli death toll and the numerous mentions of one Israeli prisoner, Gilad Shalit, compared with the skimpy references to as many as 10,000 Palestinian prisoners, including many elected legislators, held by Israel, pro-Palestinian commentators have much more room to complain of bias about the report’s allocation of space.

The Israeli government is seriously worried that its charm of impunity is wearing off. It should be. Goldstone is a person of the highest integrity. From his work in South Africa, to the International Tribunal for the Balkans and even on the Volcker Commission on the Oil For Food programme in Iraq, he has shown his dedication to international law and accountability. He has even condemned the resolution adopting his report for not explicitly mentioning Hamas.

The question for the West is: who are you going to believe? Goldstone and his colleagues or the politicians who gave you Sabra and Chatila, who shelled refugees in Qana, who shelled UN compounds in Gaza, who continue building the “defence wall” in defiance of the World Court, who continue building settlements and evicting families from their homes in defiance of international law and their own promises?

Take away the reflexive pro-Israeli position and there is only one answer, which Gordon Brown seems to be arriving at – no matter how reluctantly.

Anyone who cares about international law and human rights should be standing up to defend Goldstone and attack his detractors. After all, his demands are most modest: investigate yourself, transparently – as even members of the Knesset are asking.

Goldstone, Touchstone for Obama ME Peace Plan

Goldstone as a touchstone for Obama
By Ian Williams

Asia Times 20 October 2009

NEW YORK - The heavy pressure put on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas last week by the United States and Israel to defer consideration of the Goldstone report, which was on Friday approved by the Human Rights Council, backfired. It not only made the US and Israel look like bullies, but also destroyed the credibility of Abbas and reinforced the image of Hamas among Palestinians. The attempt has also eroded US President Barack Obama's recently improved status among Arabs and Muslims, with the prospect of more damage to come.

International and domestic pressure was fierce enough for Abbas to ask for a reconvened meeting of the Human Rights Council last Thursday and Friday, but despite the outcome of the vote, this has done little to enhance his reputation. The 47-member Human Rights Council approved by 25-6 a resolution on Friday that endorsed the war crimes charges against Israel and Hamas as spelled out in the report.

Compiled by a four-member international fact-finding mission headed by Justice Richard Goldstone, the report covered war crimes during Operation Cast Lead, the 22-day Israeli military offensive on the Gaza Strip in December-January during which an estimated 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis died. The report recommends that Israel and the Gaza authorities investigate alleged war crimes and, should that not happen within six months, that the UN Security Council should pursue prosecutions.

Israel and its allies have launched a tide of vituperation against Goldstone since the release of the report in September, but it risks splashing back in their faces. They have accused Goldstone, a Jewish pro-Israeli judge whose daughter made Aliyah to settle in Israel, of anti-Semitism. This charge stretches credulity almost as far as their accusation of bias against Goldstone, a judge who is the West's favorite legal maven at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Some of that embarrassment was evident in the statements made by American and other Western allies at the Security Council and at the Human Rights Council. For example, the US and UK's statements at the October 14 Security Council meeting, which considered the Middle East without voting on the report, were carefully worded to suggest that the mandate was biased - but without impugning Goldstone's integrity. Indeed, the mandate had been biased, but Goldstone only accepted the position on the condition, accepted by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, that he would expand it and investigate all sides.

The statements from the Western allies were clearly thrown in as a sop to Israel and its supporters, but only an extraordinarily blinkered Likud politician would draw much comfort from the persistent calls from the US, the UK, France and others that Israel and Hamas should indeed investigate the allegations of war crimes in a transparent and impartial way. Even UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, who came into office as a close friend of Israel, joined the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in calling for an impartial investigation - not to mention Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other respected non-governmental organizations.

Much of the strongest vilification comes from commentators who have clearly not read the report. The fact-finding mission found that there was a serious case to answer - not guilt - so even as they damned the report with faint praise, the US and its allies were implicitly endorsing its major conclusion - the need for a credible and independent investigation by both Israelis and Palestinians.

The report calls for a referral to the International Criminal Court only if after six months neither Israel nor Hamas have carried out the investigations. As with Sudan, the ICC does not have jurisdiction against a state such as Israel, unless the Security Council refers it. The ICC's convention actually provides that it only has jurisdiction where the states concerned have failed to investigate and initiate due process where warranted.

Well aware of the type of pressure that would be brought to bear, the Goldstone report also calls for referral to the United Nations General Assembly, which even if it does not have legal teeth, could continue to embroil Israel in unwelcome legal attention. Hot on the tails of the report's release, in early October, Israeli Vice Premier and Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya'alon cancelled a trip to Britain in November for fear of arrest on war crimes - the latest in a series of such cancellations. More can be expected.

Interestingly, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Knesset (parliament) in September, "We will not allow [former prime minister] Ehud Olmert, [opposition leader] Tzipi Livni and [Defense Minister] Ehud Barak, who sent our sons to war, to arrive at the international court in the Hague." One cannot help suspecting that this statement was a reminder to the White House that despite the Israeli prime minister's vigorous defense of Operation Cast Lead, that it was in fact the Labor/Kadima coalition that planned and initiated it.

There are some calmer voices in Israel, even among supporters of Cast Lead, who think that an investigation is a reasonable price to ward off increasing international isolation. After all, if no crimes were committed, why the noisy reluctance to look into them? In the minds of others, however, is the damning Israeli Kahan Commission report into the massacres at Sabra and Shatila during the 1982 Lebanon War, even though many believe it soft-pedaled on direct Israeli involvement and more particularly on former prime minister Ariel Sharon's role.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect is how the report will play out in relation to Obama's Middle East peace plans. Will he earn that Nobel Prize? His credibility in the region is already suffering from the seeming impunity with which Netanyahu is scorning the US insistence on the settlement freeze that Israel was already committed to.

The US attempt to kill the Goldstone report at the Human Rights Council certainly makes Obama's job more difficult. It will become even more so if the report comes to the Security Council and the US ambassador vetoes a referral to the ICC if Israel did not institute an inquiry.

Indeed, the statements by the US, the UK and France calling for just such an inquiry could have added to the embarrassment of refusing to vote for a call for Israel to do what they all consider to be the right thing. Of course the Palestinians and their allies, one presumes, inadvertently, gave the US and others some excuses, since their resolution was not a straight yea or nay on the report. Even Goldstone himself complained that the actual resolution adopted by the council, while endorsing his report, did not mention Hamas and his call for it to also have an investigation. The resolution also included condemnations of Israeli behavior in East Jerusalem, which, even if justified, fogged the otherwise clear message of Goldstone's more balanced report on Gaza.

Despite heated discussions between Netanyahu and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Britain joined France in not voting at all, so they were not recorded as the abstentions which had been their original declared intent. With their close involvement in the Balkan wars and the subsequent tribunal, it would have been difficult to repudiate the former prosecutor of Balkan war criminals, quite apart from their expressed disquiet about Israeli actions in Gaza. The usual suspects, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia and Ukraine went along with the US in voting against, while the equally predictable non-aligned majority joined by China and Russia went with it.

The report now goes to the United Nations General Assembly and recommends a report back from Ban Ki-moon with his recommendations, which would then be referred back to the Human Rights Council. If Israel does not carry out the investigation mandated by the report, it will almost certainly be referred to the Security Council for action.

An American abstention there would be an act of courage. Indeed, the long process offers multiple opportunities for the White House to let Netanyahu's government know that there are limits to how many slights Obama can tolerate.

If the US cannot persuade its most favored aid beneficiary not to evict Palestinians in Jerusalem, how can it persuade Israel to investigate allegations against its armed forces? And can it trade diplomatic cover in Geneva and New York against Israeli cooperation in the peace process? Indeed the US could take hints from Brown, who reportedly was trying to extract concessions from Netanyahu on the Gaza blockade with the British and French vote in Geneva.

Used in that way, the White House's preferred strategy of procrastination could appear more pragmatic and less pusillanimous.

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

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

ENobeling Obama

Ian Williams: Change of course merits glittering prize
October 18, 2009 Tribune

A few hundred yards from where I write in upstate New York, an American Nobel Peace prizewinner was born. Not Barack Obama – after all, lots of Americans know he was born in Kenya and see the award as confirmation of his dangerous cosmopolitanism. No, it was the little-remembered John Raleigh Mott, born in the tiny Catskill town of Livingston Manor, who won the prize in 1946 for his work in establishing the YMCA internationally – for which the Village People surely owe him an anthem.

Mott’s prize was greeted as an honour for the whole country. He certainly deserved it more than Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres and Henry Kissinger – some of the sundry warmongers who have taken a bow in Oslo. Tom Lehrer gave up satire in the face of Kissinger’s medal, since he felt reality had overtaken his imagination at its fevered best.

All those Lutherans on the Nobel committee doubtless saw peace and Protestantism as the two sides of the same coin for Mott. Now their descendants see aspiration and achievement inextricably linked with their award to the President of the United States. “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future”, said the Nobel Prize committee in giving the Peace Prize to the man who has been in the White House for less than a year.

I was glad they said “hope”, which is much more qualified than an “expectation”. In the US, those on the far right and the much smaller far left are united in their disparagement. The first can’t accept a “socialist” black President and so will attack whatever he does. The second are disappointed that the first black President did not wave a magic wand and instantaneously remake America and the world in the way they want.

The latter do have some points. Peace in Iraq and Afghanistan – two wars where a peace-committed American President has a direct hand on the trigger – seems some way off. Meanwhile, over the next year, it is the Middle East issue that is going to assay the gold content of Obama’s medal.

There is always room for nuance, of course. Even as it joined with Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in forcing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to destroy whatever was left of his domestic credibility by deferring the Goldstone report resolution, condemning Israel’s assault on Gaza, to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, the US administration did suggest that an Israeli investigation might be a good idea.

The problem is that Obama is dealing with people who don’t do nuance. They do small print, evasion and outright mendacity. The government in Israel does not want peace in any form that the rest of the world would recognise. Its constant reinterpretation of its longstanding pledge to freeze settlement building has not cost it grants, loan guarantees, security back up or anything else tangible. If Obama’s intention is, as some of us hope, to give Netanyahu enough rope to hang himself, it is past time for the President to start ostentatiously tying a knot for the Israeli leader. A threat to let the report go to the UN Security Council and to vote for it, or even abstain, would have been the perfect way for Obama to regain the global credibility and the “hope” for which the committee awarded him the prize. And it would have been a warning to Netanyahu that giving the finger to the US President risks it being bitten off.

So should Obama have been awarded the prize? And should he have accepted it? If he had refused the award, it would not have appeased the vociferous minority of Americans who are palpably not quite four quarters to the dollar. Those die-hard ultra-leftists denouncing him as a sell-out should stop and think of his very genuine achievement. We have a US administration that is prepared to work multilaterally, to use diplomacy with alleged enemies, to consider joint action to combat global warming, multilateral action to protect the poor in the developing nations, to work with the UN.

The committee was quite right to make the award. The SS United States was steaming straight for the iceberg under the insouciant captaincy of George W Bush – who was pretty much following the same course set by Ronald Reagan. While he might not have shared their opinions, even Bill Clinton scarcely challenged the neo-conservatives and neo-liberals during his term of office, so what Obama has done is terminate the disastrous piratical cruise of three disastrous decades in which the policies of the world’s last superpower were a faith-based farrago of falsities.

Obama has changed course and, even if he has not yet steered the ship of state to a safe haven, the relief is worth recognition from the rest of the world. There is more than hope that the prize recognises. And, if he gets the message that the rest of the world is with him, Obama may yet do what is necessary. Sticking it to Netanyahu is just the place to start.

New Moon shining

Good Moon Rising?

Ian Williams | October 14, 2009
Foreign Policy In Focus


This year's General Assembly attracted more media attention than the United Nations usually attracts, at least since the feeding frenzy over the "oil for food" controversy. It was not just the recent stand-up routines of Libya's Qaddafi, Iran's Ahmadinejad, and Venezuela's Chavez that won the attention of the large press contingent. This time the organization really was dealing with substantive issues of global importance, and dealing with them rather than evading them with the traditional parade of orotundity. Disarmament and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, climate change, and a fair deal for the poor in the economic crisis were all on the agenda. It may not be coincidental that these issues are hardly calculated to warm a neocon heart.

So the usual suspects are sharpening their knives for Ban Ki Moon in a recent spate of conservative attacks on his lack of effectiveness. The UN general secretary had been relatively fortunate until recently. He does not have the reputation for charisma that his predecessor Kofi Annan enjoyed early on, but he also hasn't suffered the attacks that Boutros Boutros-Ghali experienced at the same point in his term. Even so, the attacks could presage the type of assault that cost Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan their chances of an additional term at the hands of respectively, Democratic and Republican administrations. As a nominee of John Bolton, Bush's UN representative, Ban might be expected to face an Obama administration veto of a second term. This is doubtful, however, since Ban's and Obama's agendas generally seem to be in close harmony. Above all, they subscribe to the Churchillian principle that jaw-jaw is better than war-war.

Yet, this U.S.-UN convergence has drawn neocon wrath down on Ban. His globalist multilateralism has not exactly endeared him to the far left either, although their concerns for the sacredness of sovereignty are unlikely to have as much effect in Washington.

No Puppet

Like almost any other secretary general, Ban stands guilty of thinking that he represents the UN rather than the right wing of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. This effrontery has generated a damning assessment in Rupert Murdoch's Times and Jacob Heilbrunn's blistering assault in Foreign Policy.

One of his detractors, a Norwegian diplomat denied the job she had wanted at the UN, described Ban in a retaliatory written-to-be-leaked memo as "charmless and spineless." In fact, he is remarkably affable and charming, and has shown strong attachment to principle — which may be one reason for the neoliberal disaffection.

Their calumny is precisely because Ban has not been just a cookie-cutter conservative puppet. If he were, he wouldn't have supported the International Criminal Court and the Responsibility to Protect while on the hustings for the UN's top job, nor would he have pushed so hard on climate change issues for two years of the Bush/Cheney duumvirate.

Ban Ki Moon has had less credit than he deserves for the prominence of the key issues at this General Assembly and the UN's relative success in tackling them, all overshadowed by the arrival of most foreigners' favorite president, Obama. Yet Ban has worked indefatigably to ensure that they were on the agenda and were supported in a practical way with commitments from world leaders. Of course, the change of administration in the White House boosted the event considerably. It is always good news when the world's only superpower decides to move in the same direction as the UN Charter, not least since it boosts the chances of successful practical outcomes. President Obama's speech pressed all the right buttons and promised a more constructive and less exploitive U.S. relationship with the organization than, for example, the Clinton administration had managed. Although Obama did warn that his administration would be looking after American interests, the decision to pay up U.S. arrears to the UN after decades of default had already sent a message.

These factual achievements have not yet succeeded in creating a positive image for Ban in the West, although the poll evidence suggests differently in the rest of the world. A recent global poll showed him to be the second most popular political figure in the world after Barack Obama. For a Korean to have high ratings in both China and Korea suggests that American audiences are missing something. U.S. misperceptions can have serious consequences, since it can detract from Ban's authority as a "secular Pope," one of the most useful tools of the office.

Learning Curve

Ban's uncollegial administrative style and, in some cases, inept appointments, have muffled his genuine achievements. All secretaries general have to be cliquish: the permanent five and major donors foist their nominees on them, and under the circumstances it is remarkable how independent of their sponsors many of them are.

But as a result, kitchen cabinets are the name of the game at the UN. In Ban's case however, it has been perceived as a very small Korean kitchen. He has appointed some very able senior officers who should really be encouraged to speak out more. Annan was no great orator and was in reality every bit as shy of controversy as Ban seems to be. But he also had a team to project his vision, who offered the benefits of controversy with deniability.

Admittedly, attacks on the secretary general go with the territory. If Ban didn't meet with the junta in Myanmar, for example, he would have been accused of doing nothing. But by making the trip, he risks accusations of countenancing tyranny — as well as the possibility of public failure. In the end, he did the right thing and went to Myanmar, where he spoke very forthrightly to the leadership. He secured the release of some political prisoners and is still pressing for the release of others. In late September, he moved from strong words in private to a public dressing down when he revealed that he'd told the Burmese prime minister "that the onus was on the Government to create the necessary conditions for credible and inclusive elections, including the release of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and all political prisoners."

That shift indicates a learning process. Part of the problem has been cultural. By temperament and culture Ban avoided public, and thus newsworthy, confrontations even though in closed rooms with leaders he can be very forthright. Although "kick and tell" is not a desirable trait in the world's arch-diplomat, the Western press disagrees. Despite his affability and accessibility to the media, Ban's refusal to deliver controversy or sound bites appears like evasiveness to the Western media. On some issues, he is in fact evasive. But his stance on Myanmar suggests that he is learning to use the bully pulpit of his office to reinforce his private messages.

Where he has shown the most rapid learning curve has been on the Middle East. As South Korean foreign minister, given the focus on Northeast Asia, the Middle East is understandably not on the top of his agenda. His initial impulse was to take the Israeli point of view. At U.S. and Israeli bidding, he purged "Arabists" at UN headquarters who upheld UN resolutions.

Exposure to Benjamin Netanyahu and the reality on the ground seem to have brought him a long way toward the common global view reflected in UN Resolution 242 on the principles for Middle East peace and other resolutions. His burying of the recent report he had commissioned on Israeli actions in Gaza is part of a long secretariat tradition of protecting Israel and suggests that he still has some way to go. Nonetheless he has gone much further than the Obama administration in characterizing Israel's settlements as illegal.

Bridging the Charisma Divide

The job of the secretary general is, by its nature, frustrating. Ban persuaded Sudan to accept peacekeepers in Darfur, but failed to secure essential Western logistics such as air support in particular. As always, subsequent scapegoating of "UN failure" obscured his initial success (not to mention Western culpability).

Recently, his staff has tried to remedy his perceived charisma deficit. They have pointed out that he has appointed more women to senior positions in the organization than ever before. There is also his work in persuading some countries and companies to set aside differences and donate flu vaccines for developing countries. These are fine achievements, but the world expects him to deliver more of the ethical dimension of a UN secretary general, even as he dips his arms in the sordid sink of realpolitik.

With the Obama administration, Ban has the best chance of any of his recent predecessors of speaking truth to power and emerging unscathed. Consider, for instance, his labeling the United States a "deadbeat" over its dues arrears this March. The recent firing of Clinton/Holbrooke protégé Peter Galbraith from the Afghan mission, whether wise or not, at least indicates a willingness to stand up to the United States.

Ban's independence is actually a boon for Washington. The secretary general, with his penchant for multilateral diplomacy, often says and does what President Obama believes but can't say publically. More straight-talking from Ban could actually help the declared foreign policy objectives of the White House.

Obama, International Law, Morocco & Israel

Obama Allowing Netanyahu Government To Be Hoist by Its Own Petard

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Pages 18-19

United Nations Report

Obama Allowing Netanyahu Government To Be Hoist by Its Own Petard

By Ian Williams

EU Foreign Minister Javier Solana arrives to meet with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in the West Bank city of Ramallah, June 11, 2009. That day Solana also urged Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to commit to the concept of a Palestinian state. (AFP photo/Abbas Momani)

European Union Foreign Minister Javier Solana recently upset the Israelis by declaring: “After a fixed deadline, a U.N. Security Council resolution should proclaim the adoption of the two-state solution. This should include all the parameters of borders, refugees, and Jerusalem and security arrangements. It would accept the Palestinian state as a full member of the U.N., and set a calendar for implementation. It would mandate the resolution of other remaining territorial disputes and legitimize the end of claims.”

One wonders whether he would have said so without a wink and a nod from Washington. It is, after all, a highly plausible end game to the current Obama strategy—and, indeed, all the more so since the latter is completely, and one presumes deliberately, silent about the United Nations.

For years, the beginning, middle and end of Israeli strategy was to keep the U.N. out of it. Israel was not interested in the implementation of U.N. Resolutions, whether on the right to return or 242 and the other resolutions on the occupied territories.

Then came the Quartet, which brought in the U.S., Russia, the EU and the U.N. However, this was not so much about bringing in the United Nations as about cocooning all its inconvenient resolutions in a cordon sanitaire of diplomacy. The U.N. found itself not only subscribed, by proxy, to American positions—such as the boycott of Hamas—which had no mandate whatsoever from its membership or previous resolutions, but hamstrung from reaffirming its own membership-mandated positions, even as successive Israeli prime ministers twisted the road map into an origami Möbius strip, going round infinitely without ever reaching an end.

Even under President Bill Clinton, the formula was to let the Palestinians and the Israelis negotiate “freely” in the full expectation that the Palestinians would negotiate away most of their impeccably legal positions based upon U.N. resolutions. As I said at the time, it was like putting a Sumo wrestler in the ring together with a toddler and calling for a fair fight.

Fortunately the PLO representatives in New York had a clearer vision. They constantly reaffirmed the U.N. resolutions, convening emergency General Assemblies, a meeting of the signatories to the Geneva Conventions and, of course, the successful referral of Israel’s separation wall to the International Court of Justice.

Arab opponents have attacked Obama for being soft on Israel, despite this administration being tougher than any since Bush-Baker turned the thumbscrews on Likud almost two decades ago. They are missing the point. Most notably, Obama and his team have had little or no domestic opposition to their policy—precisely because it has not invoked international law and the United Nations. Looking at the contempt with which Congress (and Israel) has treated the U.N. and international law on the issue, any evocation of it by Obama’s team would have been more likely to help create a focus of resistance to his policies than induce support for them.

Had the administration made grandiloquent statements of principles that were not accepted in Washington and in the U.S., those statements would have remained empty ones, thwarted by the Lobby in a Congress which has never accepted that U.N. resolutions apply to either the U.S. or Israel.

Instead, everything the Obama team has asked of Netanyahu—acceptance of a two-state solution and a freeze on settlements—is based on a prior commitment by Israel to the Quartet. Those commitments were supported by AIPAC and by most pro-Israel legislators, who so far have wisely chosen not to eat their own words.

It is an achievement all the more remarkable given Obama’s tussles with Capitol Hill over the economy, defense spending, climate change and healthcare, and suggests the Achilles heel of single-issue foreign interest lobbies. Their legislators could try to hold the White House hostage over pressing issues to get a more pro-Likud stance—but they would be committing electoral suicide if they were revealed as thwarting economic recovery on behalf of a foreign power.

The last thing the Lobby in its various manifestations wants is to highlight that the U.S. is sending $3 billion a year of hard-pressed taxpayers’ money to an ungrateful foreign government that is giving the bird to American policy.

More importantly, there has been a shift in view among American Jews and their organizations. Likudnik American Jews who vociferously oppose the road map and Obama are more likely to be found in West Bank settlements waving Uzis, or raving on about Obama’s birth certificate, than having the ear of Democratic Party leaders.

And like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, they are crying before they have been pricked. The White House has been very measured, restating its position firmly and frequently, but it has not yet had to make any threats. Simply holding firm on settlements has been enough to cause bewilderment and panic in the Israeli government, whose politicians are accustomed to enthusiastic acquiescence for whatever circumlocutions they use to disguise their contempt for restrictions on their land theft.

In that sense, Netanyahu’s coalition, not least with the odious Avigdor Lieberman, has been a godsend to Obama. In times past, Labor knew how to sound sincere even as it continued the bipartisan policy of settlement expansion. The open breach of Israeli road map commitments, the humanitarian and political disaster of Operation Cast Lead, and the inhumanity of the evictions in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood have even further reduced international and American domestic support for the Likud-led coalition.

Israel’s ruling coalition is ideological and theological in its make-up—faith-based, in fact. That gives some confidence that it will star in its own downfall. While its members see it as self-evident that Jews should be allowed to settle anywhere in the West Bank, seizing other people’s land to so, they take it as axiomatic that Palestinians should not be allowed to return to their ancestral homes. It is not an axiom that the rest of the world shares.

The Israeli electorate has been accustomed to taking U.S. support for granted regardless of what its elected governments do. There has been some realization that things have changed, as demonstrated by the huge contrast between the tepid support for Obama in Israel and his overwhelming support among American Jews. However, it seems as if the news that they have little or no American support at any level has not percolated down to the Israeli voters. Fortunately, Obama can count upon Lieberman, Netanyahu and company to extend their provocation to the point where the White House will have overwhelming support for getting tougher.

So far, the Obama administration has carefully refrained from doing anything that could in any way be construed as coercive or would in any way allow Netanyahu to rally the pro-Israel American faithful.

A good point to send a signal would be the “charitable” tax exemptions for deranged Zionist organizations funding the settlements (see p. 10). In Britain, many years ago, the Charity Commissioners refused to accept the Jewish National Fund as a tax-exempt entity—settling Jews was not a charitable objective. It appears to be one such organization that masterminded the “purchase” of the houses in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem from which 50 Palestinians, whose families were originally driven from West Jerusalem, were expelled to make way for settlers. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton quite rightly condemned this provocative and inhumane act. The European Union denounced it as being against international law.

Surely, forbearance notwithstanding, it’s time for a little more activity. The White House should have words with the IRS, which runs 501(c)(3) “charitable” organizations, to scrutinize the philanthropic status of bodies that thwart international law. After all, it is a perilous business to send funds to finance terrorist organizations, so why should those who fund such unsavory and illegal practices in the occupied territories be exempt from taxes?

We can leave the three billion until later, but this would surely send a message of serious intent.

Western Sahara: Another Intractable Problem

While there has been some talk of the U.S. proposing, and implicitly imposing, a solution on the Middle East, there is of course another intractable problem on which the U.N. and international law has an unequivocal position defied by one state. Yes, Morocco still occupies Western Sahara, and Christopher Cox, the former American diplomat who was belatedly appointed U.N. special representative, is supposed to be presenting a peace plan drawn up by the Obama administration. Recent estimates are that Morocco has been spending $12 million a day on its occupation—between 3-5 percent of its GDP and up to 20 percent of the state budget.

Most peace plans presented recently have been designed to abrogate the Sahrawis legal rights, clearly laid down by the International Court of Justice and successive U.N. resolutions, to an “act of self-determination”: a referendum. For more than three decades Morocco has thwarted this, precisely because it knows it would lose. The Polisario is more optimistic this time. Morocco resisted Cox’s appointment for many months since it suspected him of not being biddable enough—and it could in the past invoke discreet Israeli support for its stand. The latter factor may have lost its importance at the moment. Having Bibi Netanyahu as a character witness may not be the advantage it once was.

In a recent article before the Vienna talks between Morocco and Polisario, Polisario representative Mohammed Khadad said, “the people of Western Sahara have been clear that we are willing to work with the Moroccan monarchy and will act without recrimination in relation to Moroccans now living in Western Sahara.” The second part is eminently good political sense, but the first part is intriguing. It could be a response to a suggestion made by this writer.

Morocco’s nebulous claim, dismissed by the World Court, was that the tribes of the former Spanish colony owed fealty to the Moroccan ruling family. The parties could take a tip from the British Queen, whose head appears on the stamps and coins of the several dozen Commonwealth countries of which she is still head of state, but over which the British government has no control whatsoever. Offering King Mohamed VI of Morocco the position of Mohamed Iof Western Sahara—i.e., a constitutional monarch—could salve the wounded dynastic pride of the Moroccan leader, while stanching the bleeding of the economy for poverty-stricken Moroccans who have to sustain the huge army of occupation in the South.

The result would have to be endorsed by the United Nations to take legal effect, but if the U.S. is serious about it, Western Sahara could join East Timor on the list of cleared-up items on the Security Council’s backed up agenda—paving the way, perhaps, for the implementation of 242.

Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations and has a blog at <www.deadlinepundit.blogspot.com>.

Happy Birthday Dear China.

Greater China
Oct 2, 2009 Asia Times


The night Zhou was drunk under the table
By Ian Williams (the one with the long hair and beard)

As we approached the 60th anniversary on Thursday of Mao Zedong's declaration that the "Chinese people have stood up," I trawled through the memories of my time in China straddling 1970 and 1971, and found, with all the accuracy of retrospective prophesy, that there were more auguries of the current China than one might suspect.

Although my putative memoirs would be called "I was a Teenage Maoist", by the time I landed in Beijing I was a callow 21-year-old, a month older than the People's Republic. In fact, Zhou Enlai, the first premier, from 1949 until his death in 1976, repeated to us his dictum that it was too early to tell whether or not the French Revolution had been a success, let alone China's. Forty years later, I wonder what Zhou, one of the more sophisticated and cosmopolitan of the Chinese leaders, but nonetheless a devoted communist, would have made of present-day China.



I was part of a delegation from an obscure British party that enjoyed unprecedented access to the Chinese leadership, including a drinking competition with Zhou - and a very risky argument about literature with Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, who had, after all, instituted the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) by demonizing all but a tiny group of writers and artists. It was so long ago that even the Chinese used the old Wade-Giles Romanization system for the Mandarin language. We were in Peking (Beijing), and read the Peking Review every week. In fact, our visit featured in it.

Our sessions with the Chinese cadres were often like negotiations, conducted over innumerable cigarettes and a constant flow of tea. The idea was that whoever called for a bathroom break was conceding the field of battle. Sadly for Chinese pride, our side had been brought up on a diet of gallons of tea and bitter beer and had formidable resistance to such diuretics.

Even at the time, I had a sense of bewilderment at the relative isolation from the world outside, of the top leadership. They provided us with a daily English press summary of world affairs and the difficulties of a binary view of the world became apparent. For example, Pakistan was an ally of China, therefore it was socialist and progressive - which the Pakistanis themselves would hardly claim, while social-democratic governments, like the British Labour Party, were reactionary and capitalist to the core.

As for our visit: I suspect that Zhou had hoped that it would provide information and encouragement for his planned opening to the West. We were there before British premier Edward Heath, or former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and president Richard Nixon from the United States. Indeed, as almost the only gweilos (foreigners) in town, we could attract crowds just by peering in a shop window. In those far-off days, my hair was red, which was almost like having eyes on green stalks for some people. However, enlisting us as a resource for global realpolitik confirms the naivety of their approach.

We were a sectarian groupuscule with fewer members nationally than the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee. Our contact with the working political system in Britain was minimal and our knowledge of other countries tended to be based on contacts with equally out-of-touch groups. It would be nice to think that we changed the course of history, but there is absolutely no basis for thinking so. Our input probably pointed in the opposite direction to what they did. When we asked why they did not walk in and take Hong Kong, which was then ruled by Britain, Zhou suggested it was better to lessen the economic disparities between the two sides first.

Despite their own sectarian squabbles, despite the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese were at least dealing with some aspects of the real world. For example, they had built a state-of-the-art metro system in Beijing. Even though it was as yet unopened, Zhou took us for a ride on it, which tangentially introduced yet another paradox.

They told us, with almost schoolboyish glee at their boldness, that they were calling the metro station for Tiananmen Square "Zhuxi [Chairman] Station." It was a paradox even then, that in the midst of history's biggest-ever personality cult, no physical location was named after Mao, let alone any of the other revolutionary personalities. I can only presume that it was intended as a gesture of superiority to the Soviet proclivity for churning out city names in honor of top people.

This saved a lot of sign-painting during the various rectification campaigns, the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Not many of the leadership stayed in power throughout.

Apart from Zhou, we met the full Gang of Four - Jiang Qing and her close associates, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen - but we noticed the omissions. Lin Biao, the powerful military commander who rose to political prominence in the Cultural Revolution and whose picture and introduction was at the front of hundreds of millions of Little Red Books, was absent in name and person. In a seamen's club in Shanghai, I noticed a book on sale by Chen Boda, Mao's personal secretary. Our minders immediately took it out the case and said it was too old and faded to sell.

Our party chairman, Reg Birch, an old communist trade unionist, asked to meet his old chum, Kang Sheng. They brought along his wife instead, explaining that the head of the security and intelligence apparatus was indisposed. In fact, along with Chen Boda, it now seems as if he, and indeed Lin Biao, were at that time in the process of being purged.

Lin shortly afterwards died in a plane crash. Kang resurfaced long enough to ensure that the People's Republic put its weight behind Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In retrospect, I am glad I never had to shake his hand. Kang was posthumously accused of sharing responsibility (with the Gang of Four) for the Cultural Revolution. The Gang of Four had effectively controlled the power organs of the Communist Party through the latter stages of the Cultural Revolution.

In contrast with all the mass campaigns and circus antics of the Cultural Revolution, which resulted in widespread social and political upheaval and and economic disarray, these purges were being conducted in secrecy with no word of them leaking out from the leadership.

A case in point was a bizarre Christmas feast with an elderly American couple, old-style communists who had moved to China and taken up citizenship and party membership. They were brought out because they knew several of the delegation, who had asked about them.

The turkey dinner was odd in several ways. The couple were Jewish for a start, and although our Chinese hosts were trying to be hospitable with the seasonal bird, they obviously found something alien about the idea of cooking an intact animal: it came as a sort of turkey construction kit, disassembled, cooked and then reassembled. As for the couple, it was only many years later that I heard that their goose had been well and truly cooked. They were languishing in prison, brought out and dusted off for us, and then returned afterwards. But nothing they said gave any of us any grounds for suspicion.

The full Gang of Four came along to join Zhou for talks and a banquet on New Year's Eve. Jiang Qing stood out in a sea of nondescript cotton Mao suits. The still striking woman, who had reduced the repertoire of a huge nation to a handful of revolutionary Beijing operas, one ballet, the Red Detachment of Women, and pretty much one classical sonata, flounced in, every inch the imperial consort. The former actress' cotton greatcoat was draped around her shoulders like a cape, and she carried herself like an imperial consort.

When she discovered that I had been studying English literature, she immediately pronounced that Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens' Hard Times were the only two English proletarian novels. Even as I blurted out a negative, I was thinking hard. I saw the rest of the senior leadership of the party withdraw a little in expectation of the thunderbolt to come. Jane Eyre was clearly a bit too close to home. A governess who marries the boss had too much resonance with the career of a Shanghai starlet who married the chairman. I concentrated on Hard Times, pointing out that its hero was in fact a strikebreaker - a traitor to his class in Marxist terms.

Through narrowed eyes, Jiang delivered her ultimate riposte, "You have long hair. It makes you look like a girl." There was a barely concealed sigh of relief around the table. At least it was not "Off with his head!" or "Counter-revolutionary scum".

The evening, after a banquet fit for an emperor, ended with drinks for us and Zhou and his entourage. The Gang of Four did not, as I remember, hang around. It became a drinking match, with shots of mao tai, the ferocious-smelling sorghum-based overproof liquor that had become the official drink of the party.

As the youngest there, but already with a reputation as a determined drinker, I was moved forward as the champion on going glass-for-glass with Zhou, a man with an iron constitution. But I saw how he stayed ahead. He only drank half his, while I was drinking the lot. Even so, he gave up first, as I remember - allowing for the fact that after large amounts of the stuff, memories can be unreliable.

Despite the Moscow-style purges going on behind the wainscoting, economically, China's development was more balanced than that of the Soviets. We could go on a pub crawl through the streets of Beijing, pijui - beer, being one of the early accessions to our Mandarin vocabulary and although, for example, cotton was rationed, consumer goods seemed in adequate supply. In the covered market, locals looked superior as Aeroflot pilots came rushing through stocking up on things from soap to razor blades to tomatoes that the Soviets' heavy industrial base couldn't provide.

The variety of cigarettes, from coffin nails to the crush-proof packs of the most expensive brands, has always made me wonder about the role of tobacco in industrialization - selling the peasants highly profitable cigarettes was a financially painless way of raising state funds compared with expropriation. The other aspect was the amount of collective entrepreneurial activity that was taking place, even after years of disruption from the Cultural Revolution, which had not officially finished by then.

For example, in the countryside, communes were making cement boats for sale, while in Shanghai we visited a back-street factory that was etching silicon chips - almost state-of-the-art at the time. Even then, I remember wondering about the flue that vented the hydrofluoric acid fumes from the process onto the street. In a microchip, it encapsulated the future environmental problems of reckless development, even as it demonstrated the entrepreneurial urges that Deng Xiaoping was later to unleash.

I returned to Britain puzzled. The Cultural Revolution had not visibly destroyed the economy, as was sometimes claimed. But it was difficult to know what it was all about. It was bad enough when party leaders were denounced for esoteric sins of culture and ideology during the Cultural Revolution, but these silent purges and behind-the-scenes disappearances reduced the struggles to personalities and power-plays. Mao himself seems to have been playing off the leaders against each other.

So perhaps that was the twin legacy of the first 20 years. It developed the ground for the upsurge of economic activity in which China seems not only to have stood up but appears to be racing ahead. But it also has left the Communist Party totally committed to clinging onto power, without much in the way of ideology, while its leadership changes behind closed doors, with only the faintest pretence of consulting the masses. And by all accounts, party leaders at every level are still fond of banquets and mao tai.

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

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

Quaddafi, Michael Jackson, Finnegans Wake

Here is the podcast of As It Happens, the CBC show from Canada with my take on the Qaddafi speech... in which I suggest he was channelling Michael Jackson reciting Finnegans Wake.

Chumming with Chavez

Late last night, I saw this interview in the Nation with Hugo Chavez. It was the most sycophantic pandering I'd seen in print for a long time and I sent it round to friends citing it as a reason for pride that I no longer work for the Nation. I intended to post on it this morning but Marc Cooper to whom I'd sent the piece was faster off the mark. I republish his comments with my approval and plaudits.

Ian



Pillow Talk With Hugo


As a reporter, I've conducted interviews in myriad places: in a closet, in a church pew, in bars, steam baths, back alleys, jail cells, and often in the back seat of a car. But I've never done one in bed, at least not while simultaneously embracing my subject.

That was apparently the methodology employed by professor and writer Greg Gandin in this pillow talk session with Hugo Chavez.

About the only thing missing from the edited transcript are notations when puffs of post-coital smoke were being emitted. Oh yeah, one other thing missing: any real questions!

Gandin, who is a published expert on Latin America, was so smitten with his partner that instead of posing any substantial questions, he was happy to serve as little more than a human TeLePrompTer. He merely uttered periodic cues allowing the Venezuelan caudillo an opportunity to continue what was essentially his uninterrupted and unchallenged and self-serving monologue. Frankly, Larry King did a much better (and not at all antagonistic) interview with Chavez last week and Larry ain't no tenured prof.

Now, Gandin has the perfect right to dissent from my critical view of Hugo and be as ardent a supporter as he chooses of Chavez and his Bolivarian Revolution. But, I swear, if I were literally on the payroll of the Venezuelan government I wouldn't put out a piece of embarrassing fluff like this. I would, for my and my employer's own propaganda purposes, at least pretend to be asking a few critical questions...if for no other reason than to be teeing up soft balls for my client to whack out of the park. Wasn't that Tim Russert's perfectly honed method of appearing tough while really being a pushover for the powerful? You ask all the critical questions, but you do no follow up -- thereby allowing your subject the opportunity to knock down all his or her critics.

Gandin is not an employee of Chavez and I am not even vaguely implying that. He's just an ideologically-driven, starry-eyed instrument for Chavez and, in the end, apparently lacks sufficient confidence in El Presidente to be able to handle the most manageable of challenges.

I'm a contributing editor to The Nation where this piece appears but I am completely outside of the editorial loop (I have not been an employee of the The Nation for nearly two years). But it leaves me somewhat baffled why the editors allow this sort of foolishness to take place under their name. It only undermines their credibility. And even as a partisan journal of opinion, even if there is a conscious pro-Chavez consensus as an editorial position, you don't advance it by publishing such unabashed pablum.

I will be using this interview in my classes on interviewing as a prime example of how NOT to do one.

Hat tip to my old pal and former Nation U.N. correspondent, Ian Williams, who sent around an email calling attention to this piece.

Primary Causes

Ian Williams: US emulation will lead to Labour self-immolation
September 24, 2009 Tribune

Considering primary-style elections to select Labour candidates is just the latest episode in the recent sordid history of unthinking emulation of the United States. The American political system is bogged in complete unwillingness to catch up with the rest of the world in healthcare and it is worth remembering why Congress is gridlocked – or rather lobby-locked. Primary elections are the primary cause of that.

The British emulation of US deregulation that brought about the financial crisis was a secondary effect of the primary system. American bankers pay even more than the health industry to candidates, and they bought deregulation from Congress – cheaply.

To be elected, an American politician must first win a primary election against other candidates nominally in the same party. Anyone who registers as the supporter of a party can vote: they do not have to pay dues to it or even pledge support to its objectives. In around half the states, there are open primaries. That means registered Republicans can pick Democratic candidates.

There is no party money available for primary elections, so it is up to the candidates to finance their own campaigns. In fact, in the absence of any serious party organization there are no membership cards, so anyone with a chequebook can run on any party ticket. For example, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was a registered Democrat, until he decided he could win the Republican nomination more easily – not least because of his own substantial personal fortune. The biggest expense is buying television and radio time for candidates in the primaries.

Less well-endowed politicians have to raise money to compete in primaries. Unsurprisingly, they get their cash from people with money. So in the case of the swing vote of “fiscally responsible Democrats” sabotaging healthcare reform, this means after receiving backing from the health insurance lobbyists. When Senator Max Baucus introduced a healthcare bill last week that totally negated a public insurance option, let alone a single payer system, some lobbyists were bowled over with admiration – he had actually given them more than they had thought politically sustainable.

Senator Baucus proposes compulsory insurance policies that have to be bought from the very companies that give the US the most expensive and least assured and worst covered health system in the world. It must be totally coincidental that last year the health industry provided him with more than $1 million in campaign contributions. This would count as bribery and corruption in most countries, but it is just business as usual in the US and, it would appear, increasingly so in Britain.

Bill Clinton, when he was pioneering “Third Way” politics with his chum Tony Blair, made such fundraising his hallmark – not least because it freed what passed for the Democratic Party from its traditional supporters, unions, working people, and minorities, whom he dismissed as “special interests.” As we know, Blair learned his lessons and sadly Britain is halfway towards the American system. Labour reduced the role of party members and structures, so that the leadership could overlook their opinions and interests. Individual members deserted the party in disillusioned droves, traditional Labour supporters did not vote or, even worse, voted for the British National Party.

In order to weaken the trade unions’ representation, prospective peers, racing car magnates and sundry special interests were tapped for funds. Whereas union officials, local councillors and the like could once enter Parliament, the Labour leadership winnowed out lists to ensure that docile apparatchiks cruised into safe seats.

It is worth remembering that the leadership elections which took place among Labour Party members cost a lot of money – of course, there were more members at the time. Blair’s leadership campaign was in part financed by a magnate who thought he would be good for Israel and was rewarded with a position dealing with the Middle East. Imagine if the constituency were extended even further to all voters, as is being proposed now for parliamentary candidates. It could hand over candidate selection to the likes of Rupert Murdoch or anyone else with the cash to buy a megaphone loud enough to reach the voters. Forget door-stepping candidates: it would be door-stepping hacks, inventing scandals.

Since a primary election would not be an official election, would candidates be able to buy television and radio time to win support? It would be tantamount to returning to the era before the Reform Acts and would effectively put the candidacy for sale to the highest bidder.

Labour should abandon primary elections and get back to primary causes. It should be attracting back those disillusioned members and the only way to do that is to make membership more significant than joining a fan club for whoever the lobbyists have blessed as the Labour candidate, whether for Prime Minister or Member of Parliament.

Elections should be inside the party and they should be open and transparent, with clear rules on finance and the sources of finance for candidates, and rigorous guidelines against conflicts of interest. Labour should address the needs and wants of its natural constituencies if it wants to spur people into voting for it. Otherwise, look across the Atlantic and despair. It should be “Westward no”, not “Westward ho”.

Gaddafi to go

I don't as a rule approve of coups, but watching Muammar Gaddafi perform yesterday on the podium of the United Nations, I could not help wondering if the military commanders back in Tripoli were watching, and thinking about the possibilities as he postured far from home.

Come on guys, now is the hour! The Green Revolution is way past its sell-by date, green mouldy. Retirement and care in the community surely beckons for the King of Kings of Africa!

CBC Gaddafi and ME

An impartial view of my interview with CBC on Gaddafi speech on their "As It Happens" programme, which, as it happens, I often listen to since it is broadcast on my local station WJFF.

Casting the stones at Goldstone

The Goldstone Report
23 September
Ian Williams, senior analyst Foreign Policy in Focus

Judge Richard Goldstone's report on the war in Gaza threatens the Obama administration's global public diplomacy options and its scrupulously graduated approach to whatever passes for a Middle East Peace process. State Department Spokesman Ian Kelly complained that Goldstone opted for "cookie-cutter conclusions" about Israel's actions, while keeping "the deplorable actions of Hamas to generalized remarks." However, Kelly urged the Israeli government to investigate further.

And that is in essence what Goldstone's commission asked for: investigation with the proviso that the Hamas-controlled authorities in Gaza do the same.

Susan Rice, Obama's envoy to the UN, said in the immediate aftermath of the report's publication that the United States had "very serious concerns about many of the recommendations" and pointed out a "very serious concern with the mandate that was given by the Human Rights Council prior to our joining the Council, which we viewed as unbalanced, one-sided and basically unacceptable." In fact, Goldstone refused to accept the position until he was assured that its mandate included looking into possible crimes committed by all parties in the conflict.

It was the mandate, not Goldstone's report, that Rice said was unacceptable, however. The report was still under study. She added, doubtless crossing her fingers for luck, "We will expect and believe that the appropriate venue for this report to be considered is the Human Rights Council (in Geneva) and that's our strong view. And most importantly, our view is that we need to be focused on the future," she said. However, how the administration reacts to the report could well be crucial to the future of its global credibility.
The Report's Recommendations

Rice understandably does not want to stand up in the Security Council to defend the indefensible, not least on behalf of a government that has so doggedly pushed back against the White House on settlements in the occupied territories. Indeed just as the White House has scrupulously restrained itself to asking Israel to honor its previous commitments on settlements, many of the Goldstone Mission's recommendations only reiterate previous Israeli commitments from Oslo onwards.

The core of the recommendations is that Israel itself conduct an impartial inquiry into the allegations made against it, or face a Security Council referral to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Admittedly, given experience of the Israeli Defense Forces' strategic reserve supply of whitewash kept in hand for just such occasions, the mission recommends that the Council set up an international commission to monitor the Israeli inquiry. The same applies to Hamas.

The report presents both a crisis and an opportunity to Obama's Middle East peace strategy. Hitherto Israel has relied on an automatic U.S. veto on its behalf. The reflex action has been to defend Israel, but the optimistic could detect some signs of nuance in the administration's response.

A U.S. abstention in the Security Council, let alone a positive vote, for a referral to the ICC would send a seismic signal high up the Richter scale to Israelis about what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is doing to relations with their only ally in the world. His provocations on settlement activity are eroding the White House's credibility. Although it may be difficult to get, for example, a cut in aid money past a Congress still mesmerized by the Israel lobby, the administration could indeed abstain in the Council without reference to lobby-tied Capitol Hill.

A U.S. veto might indeed protect Israel from the ICC, but a report with the credibility of a revered and honored jurist like Goldstone will certainly help mount prosecutions across the globe in other countries, particularly Europe. Indeed, his report already contains that fallback position (once again for Hamas too), invoking the universal jurisdiction of the Geneva Conventions as well as referrals to the UN General Assembly and other avenues. Many Israeli military and civilian officials already have to check with government lawyers before setting off on international trips. There will be many more, whatever happens in the Security Council.
Targeting Goldstone

Almost as bad as a veto in the Security Council for Obama's reputation and his broader diplomacy would be any visible pressure at the Human Rights Council to thwart the recommendations. At the very least the administration could defend Goldstone against the fervent witch-hunt now being mounted by a government that refused to cooperate with the inquiry and yet assured him that this refusal should not "in anyway be taken as an aspersion on your integrity or commitment to impartiality."

While Goldstone is indeed a revered jurist, a human rights stalwart from South Africa, a staunchly independent member of Paul Volcker's Oil For Food Inquiry, and a longstanding prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, such a disclaimer from the Israeli government is unusual. But of course there are reasons. Goldstone is Jewish and Zionist. He is chair of Friends of the Hebrew University, president emeritus of the World ORT Jewish school system, and has a devoted Zionist Hebrew-speaking daughter who made aliyah to Israel.

Yet, critics have derided his report as "one-sided" and, even more hilariously, "anti-Semitic." Apparently, even if he came to the conclusion that Hamas' activities bore examination as well, he didn't give as many pages to the evidence against them as he did to allegations against Israel.

Anyone who has ever met Goldstone, or had dealings with him, knows him to be a person of deep integrity, as the Israeli government had previously affirmed, firmly committed to human rights and very sensitive to suggestions of bias. He must have really screwed his courage to the sticking place to take this position, and on all evidence of his past career, weighed every word very carefully.

He deserves support from anyone who has called for justice in Rwanda, in the Balkans, in Cambodia or in Darfur. He deserves support from all those who pursue universal jurisdiction against Nazi war criminals.
Obama's Call

The administration would do well to note what Goldstone said in his op-ed in The New York Times. "Pursuing justice in this case is essential because no state or armed group should be above the law. Western governments in particular face a challenge because they have pushed for accountability in places like Darfur, but now must do the same with Israel, an ally and a democratic state. Failing to pursue justice for serious violations during the fighting will have a deeply corrosive effect on international justice, and reveal an unacceptable hypocrisy."

It is up to Obama. Does he want to build on the good work he started in Turkey and Egypt and send a signal to Netanyahu and the Israeli electorate? Or is he prepared to let the ethical dimension of his entire foreign policy be hijacked by unprincipled but powerful lobbyists?
"So why did the Israeli government boycott the commission?" Israeli dissident Uri Avnery has asked. "The real answer is quite simple: they knew full well that the commission, any commission, would have to reach the conclusions it did reach." And any adamantine refusal by Israel to carry out the impartial investigation that Goldstone called for, and any administration support for that refusal, would carry the same implication across the world.

Senior Foreign Policy In Focus analyst Ian Williams is a journalist and author.

Banking's charitable heart

Finding your Barings

Banks should give themselves to charity, says Ian Williams

Speculator, Investor Relations Magazine. Aug 2009

A good place to start a history of the current economic debacle would be Nick Leeson’s destruction of Barings. It should have sounded the alarm for bankers, regulators and governments alike with its demonstration of the dangers of opacity in the financial system, the perils of undeclared trading and the leveraged toxicity of the derivatives themselves. But the Barings case may also suggest a solution.

Some years before Leeson’s spree, I interviewed one of the Baring brothers at the firm’s London office, whose walnut display cabinets held memorabilia of the firm’s venerable M&A history. The cabinets did not, however, display any relics from 1890, when Barings pioneered the concept of ‘too big to fail’ and the British government had to rescue the bank after its Argentinean loans evaporated.

Barings was also pioneering in other ways. The brother explained how, in 1969, fearful of being nationalized by the Labor government, Barings had basically given itself to charity in the form of the Baring Foundation. The family controlled the foundation, which owned the bank, which in turn the family managed. The charity actually put some money into good causes, but not nearly as much as the partners paid themselves in salaries and bonuses.

Barings did not list its shares, so its situation was different from the current state of all those major banks on Wall Street. Or was it? One independent analyst estimates that in general, US bank employees took ‘65 percent of the value created in good years, and even more in bad years, so there is only 15 percent to 20 percent for the shareholders.’

Now that shareholders are down to widows’ mites for their stock values, that managerial looting is of huge concern, even more so for taxpayers than shareholders. The rush to pay off troubled asset relief program funds, and thus set free bonuses, substantiates that. Bank executives know once they have the government off their back they will face few constraints from complaisant shareholders, even allowing for the legal obstacles investors face in exercising any real ownership of their corporations.

Could this be because so many institutional portfolio managers are paid on a similar basis and so have no incentive to rock the gravy boat? One would be shocked indeed if it were so. But it is amazing how the same pattern of diversion of earnings from shareholders to management has been spreading out from the financial industry to others. The trend is one of dividends down, perks up.

Nonetheless, with all Washington’s Bolshie talk about shareholder rights, the shareholder worm may be about to turn. Surely it is time for the US banks to follow in Barings’ footsteps and deed themselves to a 501(c)3 corporation so they can carry on as normal? The holding foundation would need a genuinely charitable purpose, but there are lots of good causes, such as relief of down-on-their-luck prisoners like Bernie Madoff, saving the art collections of companies in Chapter 11, or preserving historic corporate aircraft.

Israel and the UN

WRMEA Archives 2006-2010 - 2009 August

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August 2009, pages 33-34

United Nations Report

Love, Israeli-Style: Visit First, Then Ignore

By Ian Williams

TIME WAS when Israeli politicians ignored the U.N. Now they turn up in droves—and then ignore the international body. In the last month or so, President Shimon Peres, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Ehud Barak, Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom and, finally on June 19, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman all made the pilgrimage to New York to greet Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and bend his ear. Once can’t be sure whether this was out of a new-found deference to the world organization, or an opportunity to line up campaign donors in New York while visiting on “government” business.

In any case, each Israeli politician used the occasion to make the usual suspect Likudnik-style demands: against Iran, against Hamas. The Israeli desire to enforce every jot and tittle of U.N. resolutions on Hamas, Iran, Syria, or Lebanon is refreshing—until contrasted with their unspoken assumption that no resolution, whether admonitory or mandatory, applies to Israel.

Each subsequent press statement from the Israeli side detailing its demands received lots of media publicity, despite the total omission of what Ban told them. He is a person of almost infinite patience, but his quiet exasperation with Israeli deafness is growing, not least since he went to Gaza earlier in the year and saw for himself just how much disrespect Israel has for both the U.N. and Palestinians.

He sees his role as an interlocutor, however, so he tries to remain non-confrontational and refrains from giving the lie to his visitors. Sadly, to outsiders, there are times when he bends so far backwards that his tightrope walk looks almost like limbo dancing—as with his diplomatic refusal to release his own organization’s report on Israel’s attack on Gaza.

The media tended not to pick up information from U.N. press releases—for example, that the secretary-general told his visitors to stop settlements, to stop blockading Gaza and to allow the U.N. humanitarian agencies to operate there. Ban even called for a peaceful solution to the Iranian nuclear issue. Maybe he should shout, and the media might listen.

Of course, Ban Ki-moon can draw strength from the fact that President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the rest of the White House team are now effectively saying the same thing. While one applauds that, it would be interesting indeed if the White House started framing this not just as previously agreed Israeli commitments, but as the law: i.e., binding U.N. decisions and international law and conventions.

Of course, for domestic reasons, to defang the lobby on Capitol Hill, where Congress has traditionally displayed extreme insouciance to U.N. decisions about Israel, the Obama administration has cleverly framed all of its pressure on Netanyahu in terms of Israel’s own commitments under Oslo, the road map and the bipartisan policy of the U.S. for many years. Washington has never denied the illegitimacy of the occupation or settlements: it is just that successive U.S. administrations have connived at the Israeli evasions of its promises. Obama’s welcome change is crucial to his administration’s credibility. He cannot collude with the traditional Israeli smoke and mirrors over settlements that, while pleading compliance, has doubled the settler population in the occupied territories.

Since the Quartet line, as in fact reiterated by Shalom to Ban Ki-moon, is that Hamas must renounce terrorism, recognize Israel, and accept previous engagements, one does have to wonder why the secretary-general, or Hillary Clinton, let alone the EU, are meeting with politicians who ignore previous agreements to abide by the law and stop expanding settlements, refuse to renounce armed incursions into the Palestinian Authority, and above all do not accept a Palestinian state. But it is a good excuse to meet them and speak truth to power.

As Ban told a U.N. gathering on Palestine in June, “I remain seriously concerned about the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip. Nearly five months after the end of the hostilities, nothing beyond basic needs such as food and medicine is allowed in. Essential recovery efforts and long-term development initiatives are impossible in these conditions. I call on Israel to allow in the fuel, funds and materials that are urgently required to repair destroyed and damaged schools, clinics, sanitation networks and shelters and to restore a functioning market.

“In the West Bank, there have been encouraging developments by the Palestinian Authority toward building the institutions of an independent state and improving the security situation through the newly trained Palestinian Authority security forces. However, routine incursions by the Israel Defense Forces are a hindrance to progress. Palestinians continue to endure unacceptable unilateral actions, such as house demolitions, intensified settlement activity, settler violence, and ever increasing movement restrictions due to permits, checkpoints and the wall and fence barrier. The time has come for Israel to fundamentally change its policies in this regard, as it has repeatedly promised to do. There must be a full settlement freeze in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including from natural growth, and settlement outposts must be evacuated. Furthermore, I am extremely worried about intensifying Israeli actions to alter the status of East Jerusalem.”

Somehow, this strong, strictly factual and legal dressing down never appears in the Israeli press communiqués, nor much in the U.S. press reports of the meetings and the ministerial briefings afterwards.

Of course, when he visited the U.N., Lieberman threw in the Netanyahu gambit: the prime minister’s “acceptance” of a Palestinian state. Despite his lithe exterior, the Israeli prime minister conceals within him a Humpty Dumpty, who when he uses a word, means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” Netanyahu’s Palestinian state would make the South African Bantustans look like superpowers. It would be demilitarized, and as he commented afterward, would have to accept Israeli military incursions to keep it so. It would have no control of its own airspace above, and very little of its water resources below, and it would have to give up its internationally accepted legal rights to any part of Jerusalem, let alone the settlement blocs. In fact, as has been pointed out, it would have all the autonomy of the Warsaw Ghetto.

The Chutzpah Front

On the chutzpah front, Israel’s chief delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) complained that chief Mohamed ElBaradei was refusing to meet Israeli officials on alleged Syrian nuclear activities and was “biased.” Coming from a nuclear non-member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), this was enriched beyond measure. ElBaradei actually took it for granted that the Israelis had bombed the alleged Syrian reactor, and quite rightly pointed out that they had no right to. Indeed, he is so biased he has declared on the record that an Israeli strike against Iran would be “insane.” It was not for nothing ElBaradei got a Nobel Prize.

International concern was muted by Syria’s reticence on the issue of the Sept. 6, 2007 Israeli attack. Damascus does not want to confirm how vulnerable it is to Israeli air strikes and was almost certainly being evasive with the IAEA about its nuclear program. It is worth remembering that a nuclear enrichment program is neither illegal nor against the NPT or IAEA charter—although concealing it, not declaring it, is.

But the legal response is to report it, not bomb it, and ElBaradei forcefully told the Israeli delegate, “You, sir, did not allow us to do what we are supposed to do under international law. You are not even part of the [non-proliferation] regime to tell us what to do. We would appreciate that you stop preaching to us.”

There is one side-effect of Israel’s new love affair with the U.N., combined with the change of administration in Washington. After almost 30 years of shilly-shallying with the U.S. dues to the U.N., the House in June passed H.R. 2410 to authorize full payment of back dues to the U.N. going back a full decade.

Beginning in the 1970s, under pressure from mostly pro-Israeli legislators, grandstanding American politicians have tried to use non-payment of dues to browbeat the U.N. into a more “acceptable” Middle East policy. The campaign, which united otherwise liberal Democrats with rabid conservatives, has caused profound international embarrassment to U.S. diplomacy—not least when a private citizen, Ted Turner, actually paid several hundred million dollars out of his own pocket on behalf of the delinquent U.S. Treasury.

The U.S. paid some of its dues—almost always on the last possible day—to avoid losing its vote in the General Assembly. Recently, Congress refused to authorize sufficient funding for peacekeeping operations that the White House and State Department were pushing for in the Security Council. It did not add to Washington’s diplomatic credibility, even though allies and the U.N. were sympathetic to the plight of administrations hog-tied by a lobby-bound legislature. Less sympathetic nations, generally ignorant of how democracy works, and understandably bemused by the sight of its Washington version in action, simply saw it as yet another example of American double standards.

As of this writing, H.R. 2410, introduced by House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Howard Berman (D-CA), awaits its Senate counterpart. The Sanity Clause is long, long overdue.

Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations and has a blog at <www.deadlinepundit.blogspot.com>.

Silk Road Stories

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

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

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

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

We travel not for trafficking alone:

By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:

For lust of knowing what should not be known

We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations and has a blog at .
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