The Daily Star
Friday, April 25, 2014
By Michael Glackin
Much learned ink has been spilt in recent weeks marking the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, where Hutu extremists, in a 100-day orgy of violence, murdered an estimated 800,000 ethnic Tutsis. While the United Nations had boots on the ground in Rwanda, the world stood by and watched the tragedy unfold.
NATO’s belated attack against Serbia over Kosovo five years later, in 1999, stemmed in large part from guilt over the U.N.’s failure to intervene in Rwanda. The Kosovo intervention was thought to have established a new world order, one in which human rights were paramount and where those leaders who abused their power and people had nowhere to hide.
Kosovo was the heyday of the doctrine of “humanitarian intervention.” Today, in Syria, we see its nadir. Humanitarian intervention has become the doctrine that dare not speak its name. On Syria, the so-called “liberal hawks” are silent.
The American writer Paul Berman, who I recently interviewed in Brooklyn, where he lives, wrote a fascinating book chronicling the political journey of some of the most vocal supporters of humanitarian intervention. They include the former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and the former French foreign minister and founder of Doctors Without Borders, Bernard Kouchner.
Berman’s “Power and the Idealists: Or, The Passion of Joschka Fisher and Its Aftermath” is a classic – a history book that reads like a novel, played out against the backdrop of global events from the late 1960s to the aftermath of the Iraq invasion in 2003.
An unabashed proponent of humanitarian intervention, Berman is angry that those who were most vocal in demanding action in Kosovo, and indeed more recently, in Libya, refuse to advocate intervention to protect civilians in Syria.
Fischer has consistently failed to back military action against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad. As for Kouchner, he told BBC Radio last July, when a Western missile attack on Syria seemed imminent, that he wasn’t sure intervention was the best course of action. He thus reversed (and not for the first time) his earlier position on an issue.
Fischer and Kouchner are peripheral players on the political stage today. However, other liberal hawks, most notably U.S. President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, and his U.N. ambassador, Samantha Power, are very much at center stage. And their silence on the Syrian bloodbath is deafening.
Commenting on the Clinton administration’s failure to act in Rwanda, Rice famously said: “I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required.” Now Rice appears content to watch innocent Syrians go down in flames instead.
As for Power, her entire career has been built around her advocacy of humanitarian intervention. Her book, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” on America’s failure to stop several 20th-century genocides, won a Pulitzer Prize. That is why her quietude in particular is a disgrace and smacks of political expediency.
Berman summed up why the liberal hawks have become cowed liberal doves in a single word: Iraq. “It sounds simplistic, but unfortunately, the shadow of Iraq now hangs over the concept of humanitarian intervention,” he says. “Afghanistan too has become very unpopular, and because of the failures of both wars, but particularly Iraq, the idea of humanitarian intervention has become a mob debate in which people just jeer. The possibility of a nuanced position has all but disappeared.”
Berman believes that the West is now firmly wedded to the notion that Middle Eastern societies are dysfunctional and beyond helping. “The mood now is that nothing can be done for the people who are suffering in Syria, because there are no good guys,” he observes. “The unfortunate trend of most of the Arab Spring has contributed to this and strengthened the view that the best we can do is keep out of it. It’s simplistic, but it is the general public feeling, on both left and right, and here in the U.S. it conforms to President Barack Obama’s instincts, which are anti-war and isolationist.”
And yet, Obama played a key role in the limited NATO-led humanitarian intervention in Libya in 2011, an action he undertook without consulting the U.S. Congress, and that may now be seen as the last flight of the liberal hawks.
Clearly, the descent into chaos of post-Gadhafi Libya, including the murderous attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, strengthened the hand of the isolationists.
But Berman draws an altogether different lesson from Libya. “The real lesson from Libya, and all these places, is that interventions have to be large,” Berman insists. “We didn’t intervene enough. We helped the Libyans get rid of Gadhafi and then left them alone. Without any great risk to ourselves we could have coordinated programs with the other Western powers to aid the admirable people in Libya. We didn’t and the vacuum was filled by tribal fighting, and so Libya became another factor in why we should not intervene elsewhere.”
What really disturbs Berman, however, is that Kosovo and other smaller interventions, and even the botched operation in Iraq, have failed to provide a consensual template for humanitarian intervention. “You would think almost 13 years after 9/11 that the U.S. in particular would have institutionalized responses for handling situations like Libya, Syria, the Central African Republic and Mali,” he argues. “At the end of the Second World War our leaders set up the United Nations, Bretton Woods, NATO. Why wasn’t anything along those lines set up after 9/11? Part of the problem is that we live in an age of political midgets. There are no Roosevelts or Trumans on the world stage.”
Berman makes a compelling case. However, blaming Iraq for the silence of the liberal interventionists today may be too easy. Key supporters of intervention in Kosovo, most notably French President Jacques Chirac and Fischer, were opposed to the Iraq invasion. And for all British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s espousal of human rights in a famous Chicago speech in 1999, neither he nor President George W. Bush used it to justify their ambition to invade Iraq. They preferred, instead, to invent, or cynically exaggerate, the threat Iraq posed to the West’s security in a largely failed attempt to win public support.
With that in mind, perhaps the real reason for the silence of the liberal hawks on Syria goes back to Berman’s earlier point about “political midgets.” Politicians today act like weathervanes and tend to respond to public opinion rather than lead it. Particularly in the U.S., there are few votes to be had in standing up for human rights in faraway lands.
Meanwhile, Assad will continue to accept the deafening silence of the liberal hawks as a signal from the West to continue the slaughtering of his own people. The wrenching pain of Rwanda cannot be unlived. But the tragedy today is surely that in Syria it is being lived again. Happy anniversary.
Michael Glackin is a former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on April 25, 2014, on page 7.
Sunday, 27 April 2014
Monday, 3 March 2014
Tony Blair, the superfluous envoy
The Daily Star
Friday, February 28, 2014
By Michael Glackin
It’s hard to keep the former British prime minister, Tony Blair, out of the headlines. Whether it is avoiding an attempt by a waiter to arrest him for war crimes while he dined in a London restaurant, or his praising of the Egyptian Army coup, with its repression of civilians and jailing of journalists, Blair appears destined to always be with us.Last week, his name even popped up during one of the most high-profile British criminal trials of recent times. The court at London’s Old Bailey heard that the former prime minister offered his services as an “adviser” to media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, his son James, and Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of Murdoch’s newspaper group News International, at the height of the phone-hacking scandal in 2011.
The one thing in which Blair doesn’t appear to be making any headlines is in his role as peace envoy for the Middle East Quartet. Yet, at around the same time as his name came up in the phone-hacking trial, Blair was in Jerusalem, on what his official spokesperson informed me was his 113th trip to the city as envoy. But Blair’s latest visit begs the question: What have Blair’s trips to Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Middle East, after almost seven years as envoy, actually achieved?
The long-standing political logjam between Israel and the Palestinians cannot entirely be laid at Blair’s door. Blair’s remit as envoy is, in the words of his spokesperson, “to promote economic growth and job creation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and support the institution-building agenda of the Palestinian Authority.”
Fair enough, but in the seven years since Blair was appointed, economic growth and unemployment in the Palestinian Territories have worsened. Last October, the World Bank noted that foreign budget support for the West Bank and Gaza had fallen by more than half in the last seven years. Meanwhile, GDP growth in the territories tumbled from 9 percent in 2008 to 5.9 percent in 2012 and plummeted to just 1.9 percent in the first half of 2013. In the West Bank, economic growth actually shrank for the first time in a decade, declining by 0.1 percent.
In the seven years since Blair became Quartet envoy, private investment in the Palestinian territories has averaged a mere 15 percent of GDP, way below standard rates in other small developing countries.
Political instability and infighting within and between Hamas and Fatah isn’t likely to attract investment in a hurry. However, the World Bank report made clear that Israeli restrictions on trade, imports, movement and access were the “dominant deterrent” to investment and cost the West Bank alone around $3.4 billion annually, almost 35 percent of GDP.
Despite Blair’s 113 trips to Jerusalem, and many meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he has failed to significantly ease these restrictions. What progress he has boasted of, the lifting of a handful of the hundreds of checkpoints and unmanned barriers, is frankly small beer and has made no impact on improving the Palestinian Authority’s 25 percent unemployment rate.
Blair’s failure to boost economic growth because of the wider political wrangling has merely emphasized the futility and impotence of the role of envoy in effecting change.
But during the same seven years Blair has been Quartet envoy, he has managed to amass a personal fortune, now estimated to be in the region of $110 million, a large chunk of which has been paid to him by Middle East governments for his advice and contacts. This has led to accusations that his very successful consultancy business, Tony Blair Associates, is cashing in on contacts he has cultivated as envoy.
The role of envoy is unpaid – although expenses are picked up by taxpayers – but it affords Blair an obvious business platform in the region for his role as a “consultant” to governments and various investment houses. For instance, last week, in addition to being in Jerusalem, Blair also popped up in Kuwait, where he met with the country’s prime minister, Sheikh Jaber al-Mubarak al-Sabah. Blair’s office said the visit was in his capacity as Quartet envoy.
TBA has had a lucrative contract with the Kuwaiti government for many years and has also carried out work for Mubadala, an Abu Dhabi government-owned investment vehicle. Blair has also visited both countries in his role as envoy.
Blair’s spokesperson said: “All commercial work is completely separate from Mr. Blair’s role as Quartet Representative. ... Mr. Blair’s office adheres to the strictest of conflict of interest policies and is held to the gold standard in this respect.”
Blair’s spokesperson rightly pointed out that “serious progress on Palestinian economic development requires a political process. This has only really been possible since [U.S.] Secretary [of State] Kerry started his push for political negotiations last year.” It should be noted that these negotiations, aimed at removing some Israeli restrictions on movement and goods, will not include the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, with its 1.6 million inhabitants, or 40 percent of the population of Palestinian areas.
But the real problem is that the role of envoy has actually enabled political progress to fall into abeyance. It has provided threadbare cover for the failure of the Quartet to bring Israel to the negotiating table.
Blair espouses so-called “peace-economics” – laying the economic foundations of a Palestinian state ahead of its creation. But this is at best meaningless rhetoric and at worst a charade. It has done nothing other than allow Israel space to sidestep engaging with the Palestinians. While the Quartet discusses meaningless economic initiatives, Israeli settlements in the West Bank continue to multiply, making any prospect of a future settlement far less likely.
Blair’s predecessor as envoy, former World Bank President James Wolfensohn – who mostly based himself in the region during his year in the post – quit because he felt neither Israel nor the U.S. was serious about negotiating with the Palestinians. Why, given the absence of any achievement, does Blair doggedly cling to his role? Who benefits?
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beiurt newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on February 28, 2014.
Friday, February 28, 2014
By Michael Glackin
It’s hard to keep the former British prime minister, Tony Blair, out of the headlines. Whether it is avoiding an attempt by a waiter to arrest him for war crimes while he dined in a London restaurant, or his praising of the Egyptian Army coup, with its repression of civilians and jailing of journalists, Blair appears destined to always be with us.Last week, his name even popped up during one of the most high-profile British criminal trials of recent times. The court at London’s Old Bailey heard that the former prime minister offered his services as an “adviser” to media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, his son James, and Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of Murdoch’s newspaper group News International, at the height of the phone-hacking scandal in 2011.
The one thing in which Blair doesn’t appear to be making any headlines is in his role as peace envoy for the Middle East Quartet. Yet, at around the same time as his name came up in the phone-hacking trial, Blair was in Jerusalem, on what his official spokesperson informed me was his 113th trip to the city as envoy. But Blair’s latest visit begs the question: What have Blair’s trips to Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Middle East, after almost seven years as envoy, actually achieved?
The long-standing political logjam between Israel and the Palestinians cannot entirely be laid at Blair’s door. Blair’s remit as envoy is, in the words of his spokesperson, “to promote economic growth and job creation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and support the institution-building agenda of the Palestinian Authority.”
Fair enough, but in the seven years since Blair was appointed, economic growth and unemployment in the Palestinian Territories have worsened. Last October, the World Bank noted that foreign budget support for the West Bank and Gaza had fallen by more than half in the last seven years. Meanwhile, GDP growth in the territories tumbled from 9 percent in 2008 to 5.9 percent in 2012 and plummeted to just 1.9 percent in the first half of 2013. In the West Bank, economic growth actually shrank for the first time in a decade, declining by 0.1 percent.
In the seven years since Blair became Quartet envoy, private investment in the Palestinian territories has averaged a mere 15 percent of GDP, way below standard rates in other small developing countries.
Political instability and infighting within and between Hamas and Fatah isn’t likely to attract investment in a hurry. However, the World Bank report made clear that Israeli restrictions on trade, imports, movement and access were the “dominant deterrent” to investment and cost the West Bank alone around $3.4 billion annually, almost 35 percent of GDP.
Despite Blair’s 113 trips to Jerusalem, and many meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he has failed to significantly ease these restrictions. What progress he has boasted of, the lifting of a handful of the hundreds of checkpoints and unmanned barriers, is frankly small beer and has made no impact on improving the Palestinian Authority’s 25 percent unemployment rate.
Blair’s failure to boost economic growth because of the wider political wrangling has merely emphasized the futility and impotence of the role of envoy in effecting change.
But during the same seven years Blair has been Quartet envoy, he has managed to amass a personal fortune, now estimated to be in the region of $110 million, a large chunk of which has been paid to him by Middle East governments for his advice and contacts. This has led to accusations that his very successful consultancy business, Tony Blair Associates, is cashing in on contacts he has cultivated as envoy.
The role of envoy is unpaid – although expenses are picked up by taxpayers – but it affords Blair an obvious business platform in the region for his role as a “consultant” to governments and various investment houses. For instance, last week, in addition to being in Jerusalem, Blair also popped up in Kuwait, where he met with the country’s prime minister, Sheikh Jaber al-Mubarak al-Sabah. Blair’s office said the visit was in his capacity as Quartet envoy.
TBA has had a lucrative contract with the Kuwaiti government for many years and has also carried out work for Mubadala, an Abu Dhabi government-owned investment vehicle. Blair has also visited both countries in his role as envoy.
Blair’s spokesperson said: “All commercial work is completely separate from Mr. Blair’s role as Quartet Representative. ... Mr. Blair’s office adheres to the strictest of conflict of interest policies and is held to the gold standard in this respect.”
Blair’s spokesperson rightly pointed out that “serious progress on Palestinian economic development requires a political process. This has only really been possible since [U.S.] Secretary [of State] Kerry started his push for political negotiations last year.” It should be noted that these negotiations, aimed at removing some Israeli restrictions on movement and goods, will not include the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, with its 1.6 million inhabitants, or 40 percent of the population of Palestinian areas.
But the real problem is that the role of envoy has actually enabled political progress to fall into abeyance. It has provided threadbare cover for the failure of the Quartet to bring Israel to the negotiating table.
Blair espouses so-called “peace-economics” – laying the economic foundations of a Palestinian state ahead of its creation. But this is at best meaningless rhetoric and at worst a charade. It has done nothing other than allow Israel space to sidestep engaging with the Palestinians. While the Quartet discusses meaningless economic initiatives, Israeli settlements in the West Bank continue to multiply, making any prospect of a future settlement far less likely.
Blair’s predecessor as envoy, former World Bank President James Wolfensohn – who mostly based himself in the region during his year in the post – quit because he felt neither Israel nor the U.S. was serious about negotiating with the Palestinians. Why, given the absence of any achievement, does Blair doggedly cling to his role? Who benefits?
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beiurt newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on February 28, 2014.
Tuesday, 28 January 2014
Writing an autopsy of Assad’s victims
The Daily Star
Tuesday, January 28 2014
By Michael Glackin
Sixty-nine years ago this week, soldiers of the Red Army liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz in southwest Poland.
That the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the site of what is thought to be the largest mass murder in history, should have coincided with the release of a report exposing the atrocities of Bashar Assad’s regime, was not lost on one of the report’s authors.
Speaking to me last week, Sue Black, a world-renowned forensic anthropologist and co-author of the report, which accused the Assad regime of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, said: “It is ironic that we are so close to the Auschwitz anniversary. Because examining the photographs of those starved remains was like going back in time and looking at photographs of the concentration camps. I have been doing forensic work for over 30 years and this is the worst I have seen. It is absolutely horrendous.”
Considering that Black led the British forensic team that exhumed the mass graves of Kosovo in 1999 and later identified victims of the 2004 Asian tsunami, you can appreciate this is not hyperbole.
The photographs of prisoners killed by the Syrian security services and smuggled out of Syria by “Caesar,” an Assad regime photographer and defector, are, she insists, evidence of the torture and brutal murder of some 11,000 people.
Black is a scientist. She relies on hard evidence to reach conclusions, and for that reason retains an objective, unemotional detachment from the dark deeds her skills lead her to investigate. It is her painstakingly clinical approach that makes her conclusions about the suffering of those shown in the report all the more damning.
“In Kosovo, horrific as it was, one could understand the conflict side of things, and the victims were killed by gunshots. In the Asian tsunami, it was an unfortunate natural disaster. But here, the intensity of the one-to-one infliction of injury is horrendous. The deliberate personal suffering that has been inflicted on the victims is truly shocking.”
The images, which Black carefully examined, came from a single location inside Syria, and since more than half of the photographs were taken by a single cameraman, it is realistic to assume that they only represent a fraction of the regime’s victims. Yet even allowing for the fact that the images are just the “tip of the iceberg” in terms of prisoners killed by the regime since the uprising in Syria in 2011, the murders are still not on the scale of Auschwitz in size.
But Black’s comparison comes from the systematic nature of the torture and killing, what she calls the “incredible organization, the coordinated, cold blooded, efficiency” of the process of torture and death. It is this that she says bears the chilling resemblance to the Auschwitz example.
Black told me more than 60 percent of the bodies showed evidence of starvation, “not thin, but clinically starved so there is almost zero body fat.” She said ligature marks found on necks of victims indicated death by slow strangulation, with a garrote-type implement that resembled the fan belt on a car. Many bodies had been severely beaten, and some had their eyes gouged out. Others showed signs of electrocution, while some were burned.
“You do not starve quickly, it takes time,” she said. “Then there is the brutality of the beatings. But beyond that, there is the cost to the families of those young men. Like a stone thrown into the water, there is a ripple effect, it impacts on families, and beyond families onto an entire nation.”
The evidence provided by Caesar should increase the likelihood of Assad facing a war crimes tribunal – he is of course already facing investigation by war crimes prosecutors over the Sarin gas attack that killed up to 1,300 civilians last August. It has also lead to renewed calls for the West to finally act, and acknowledge that talk alone will not achieve its avowed aim of ending Assad rule.
But don’t hold your breath. For one thing, the United States has been aware of the Caesar images since last November. The British government couldn’t confirm when it first learnt of the photographs, but Foreign Secretary William Hague said they were “compelling and horrific,” and that the perpetrators must be held to account. But the reality is that the United Kingdom is compelled to do nothing.
Just four months ago parliament, which includes many of those expressing horror and faux sympathy last week – such as Labour leader Ed Miliband and his foreign affairs spokesman Douglas Alexander – led the parliamentary vote against British involvement in Syria.
The West balked at a meaningful display of its outrage at the use of chemical weapons and by doing so aided and abetted an evil regime, enabling it to carry out more atrocities. Other young men in the regime’s prisons will be tortured and starved and slowly murdered today or tomorrow, and their abused bodies will be photographed by other Caesars. We can blame the likes of Russia or Iran, but the truth is, many in the West do not care about Syria.
What the Red Army found at Auschwitz confirmed beyond doubt that World War II, the destruction of the Nazi regime, was a necessary and noble war. On a visit to Auschwitz in 2005, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney said: “The story of the camp reminds us that evil is real. It must be called by its name and must be confronted.”
Cheney’s words harken back to a time when the civilized world matched its words with deeds. Everyone agrees that the Caesar images reveal a deep-rooted evil. The failure to confront it today means that tyranny and fear is prevailing. As the 18th century statesman Edmund Burke succinctly put it: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on January 28, 2014, on page 7.
Tuesday, January 28 2014
By Michael Glackin
Sixty-nine years ago this week, soldiers of the Red Army liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz in southwest Poland.
That the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the site of what is thought to be the largest mass murder in history, should have coincided with the release of a report exposing the atrocities of Bashar Assad’s regime, was not lost on one of the report’s authors.
Speaking to me last week, Sue Black, a world-renowned forensic anthropologist and co-author of the report, which accused the Assad regime of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, said: “It is ironic that we are so close to the Auschwitz anniversary. Because examining the photographs of those starved remains was like going back in time and looking at photographs of the concentration camps. I have been doing forensic work for over 30 years and this is the worst I have seen. It is absolutely horrendous.”
Considering that Black led the British forensic team that exhumed the mass graves of Kosovo in 1999 and later identified victims of the 2004 Asian tsunami, you can appreciate this is not hyperbole.
The photographs of prisoners killed by the Syrian security services and smuggled out of Syria by “Caesar,” an Assad regime photographer and defector, are, she insists, evidence of the torture and brutal murder of some 11,000 people.
Black is a scientist. She relies on hard evidence to reach conclusions, and for that reason retains an objective, unemotional detachment from the dark deeds her skills lead her to investigate. It is her painstakingly clinical approach that makes her conclusions about the suffering of those shown in the report all the more damning.
“In Kosovo, horrific as it was, one could understand the conflict side of things, and the victims were killed by gunshots. In the Asian tsunami, it was an unfortunate natural disaster. But here, the intensity of the one-to-one infliction of injury is horrendous. The deliberate personal suffering that has been inflicted on the victims is truly shocking.”
The images, which Black carefully examined, came from a single location inside Syria, and since more than half of the photographs were taken by a single cameraman, it is realistic to assume that they only represent a fraction of the regime’s victims. Yet even allowing for the fact that the images are just the “tip of the iceberg” in terms of prisoners killed by the regime since the uprising in Syria in 2011, the murders are still not on the scale of Auschwitz in size.
But Black’s comparison comes from the systematic nature of the torture and killing, what she calls the “incredible organization, the coordinated, cold blooded, efficiency” of the process of torture and death. It is this that she says bears the chilling resemblance to the Auschwitz example.
Black told me more than 60 percent of the bodies showed evidence of starvation, “not thin, but clinically starved so there is almost zero body fat.” She said ligature marks found on necks of victims indicated death by slow strangulation, with a garrote-type implement that resembled the fan belt on a car. Many bodies had been severely beaten, and some had their eyes gouged out. Others showed signs of electrocution, while some were burned.
“You do not starve quickly, it takes time,” she said. “Then there is the brutality of the beatings. But beyond that, there is the cost to the families of those young men. Like a stone thrown into the water, there is a ripple effect, it impacts on families, and beyond families onto an entire nation.”
The evidence provided by Caesar should increase the likelihood of Assad facing a war crimes tribunal – he is of course already facing investigation by war crimes prosecutors over the Sarin gas attack that killed up to 1,300 civilians last August. It has also lead to renewed calls for the West to finally act, and acknowledge that talk alone will not achieve its avowed aim of ending Assad rule.
But don’t hold your breath. For one thing, the United States has been aware of the Caesar images since last November. The British government couldn’t confirm when it first learnt of the photographs, but Foreign Secretary William Hague said they were “compelling and horrific,” and that the perpetrators must be held to account. But the reality is that the United Kingdom is compelled to do nothing.
Just four months ago parliament, which includes many of those expressing horror and faux sympathy last week – such as Labour leader Ed Miliband and his foreign affairs spokesman Douglas Alexander – led the parliamentary vote against British involvement in Syria.
The West balked at a meaningful display of its outrage at the use of chemical weapons and by doing so aided and abetted an evil regime, enabling it to carry out more atrocities. Other young men in the regime’s prisons will be tortured and starved and slowly murdered today or tomorrow, and their abused bodies will be photographed by other Caesars. We can blame the likes of Russia or Iran, but the truth is, many in the West do not care about Syria.
What the Red Army found at Auschwitz confirmed beyond doubt that World War II, the destruction of the Nazi regime, was a necessary and noble war. On a visit to Auschwitz in 2005, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney said: “The story of the camp reminds us that evil is real. It must be called by its name and must be confronted.”
Cheney’s words harken back to a time when the civilized world matched its words with deeds. Everyone agrees that the Caesar images reveal a deep-rooted evil. The failure to confront it today means that tyranny and fear is prevailing. As the 18th century statesman Edmund Burke succinctly put it: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on January 28, 2014, on page 7.
Monday, 20 January 2014
The West may pay for its inaction in Syria
The Daily Star,
Friday, January 17, 2014.
By Michael Glackin
For months, while the atrocities and body count in Syria have risen, the West, and the United Kingdom in particular, has insisted that the often-postponed Geneva II conference, now scheduled for Jan. 22, is the lever that will take power away from President Bashar Assad and end the bloodshed in Syria.
Speculation about backroom deals with Russia and Iran paving the way for a diplomatic breakthrough have been making the rounds for months. However, so far Geneva II has only succeeded in pushing an already weak and divided moderate opposition movement to the brink of collapse.
The recent refusal of the Syrian National Council – arguably the most important of the moderate opposition groupings – to go to Geneva was expected. But the Syrian National Coalition, the umbrella group created by the West to represent all opposition groups, including the Free Syrian Army, is also bitterly divided and has yet to confirm its attendance. Meetings held by the coalition last week descended into chaos, forcing it to postpone a final decision until Jan. 17, days before the conference begins.
The Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), both affiliated with Al-Qaeda, have of course not been invited. Many of the armed Syrian opposition groups reject the very idea of negotiating with the Assad regime and don’t recognize the authority of the Syrian National Coalition.
Geneva II is an increasingly pathetic sideshow of a tragedy that those who will gather in Switzerland will be powerless to relieve or stop. Having spectacularly humiliated itself with hollow military threats for nearly three years, the West will add failed diplomacy to the wreckage of its Syria policy.
The United States and the U.K. are now busy arming the fervently pro-Iranian and pro-Assad regime of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as it struggles to combat Sunni Al-Qaeda-linked militias. Their previous hostility to the Syrian leadership has evaporated in the face of what is perceived as a worse threat.
The need to supply arms to the increasingly tottering regime in Iraq stems partly from the West’s inaction in Syria. This created the space for radical Sunni militias to become the main opposition on the ground to the Assad regime and wage a war against Alawites and Shiites. A similar picture is forming in Lebanon where bombings are occurring with familiar and frightening regularity. The continuing bloodshed in Syria is even starting to seriously threaten political stability in Turkey.
But the flames of the West’s disastrous foreign policy toward Syria are no longer just burning in Iraq, Lebanon and Turkey. They are poised to reach Europe as well.
There may have been little domestic support for British Prime Minister David Cameron in taking a firm line with the Assad regime, but increasingly the British public is becoming aware of the cost to national security of the West’s failure to stand up for right against might in Syria. There are now over 40,000 foreign jihadists fighting there, including, according to recent estimates, up to 400 British citizens, mainly from Pakistani backgrounds, along with some Sudanese and Syrians from the U.K.
With radicalized Britons having been exposed to the extremist views of the likes of the Nusra Front and ISIS (most British jihadists tend to fight alongside the latter), as well as trained by them, concerns are growing that they will return to the U.K. and unleash a campaign of violence. Indeed, a report in the New York Times on Jan. 10 appeared to confirm that Al-Qaeda affiliated groups were recruiting Westerners in Syria to carry out attacks at home.
The fear is that returning fighters will want to punish the U.K. for abandoning Syria’s Sunnis. Such a view will have been reinforced by a former U.S. ambassador, Ryan Crocker.
He recently wrote that the West should engage Assad on counterterrorism, because “he is not as bad as the jihadists who would take over in his absence.”
Last October, British police arrested two men who had recently returned from Syria and were allegedly linked to a terror plot within the U.K. And in November, the head of MI5, Andrew Parker, told a parliamentary hearing that the “interaction” of Britons fighting with radical groups in Syria was a “very important strand of the threat” the U.K. faced.
Parker said, “The attractiveness to these groupings is that they meet British citizens who are willing to engage in terrorism and they task them to do so back at home, where they have higher impact, in this country.”
The British suicide bombers who carried out the July 7, 2005, London bombings, which killed 52 people, had also made contact with radical Islamist groups abroad. Two more British Muslims who had become “radicalized” during visits overseas are due to be sentenced this month for the brutal murder of an off-duty soldier in the middle of a busy London street last year.
It is precisely this sort of unorganized terror attack, carried out by so called lone wolves acting spontaneously, that are impossible for the security forces to prevent. And it is the type of attack they fear the returning jihadists will commit.
In a bid to combat the threat, British citizens who fight in Syria are being stripped of their citizenship to prevent them from returning to the U.K. The government has revoked the passports of 20 people this year, more than in the previous two and a half years combined.
But it is not just the U.K. that faces a threat. The International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London says the number of European fighters in Syria has tripled to 1,900 in the last year. The number reported from France quadrupled to 412 (although President Francois Hollande gave a higher figure of 700 this week), while Belgium has the highest per capita rate with almost 300 fighters.
The West’s Syria strategy has been an unmitigated disaster. Assad remains in power, the region is dangerously unstable and Europe is facing the increased danger of terror attacks by its own citizens. Somehow, the futility of Geneva II sums up the entire fiasco. The West keeps fiddling, and Syria keeps burning.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on January 17, 2014, on page 7.
Friday, January 17, 2014.
By Michael Glackin
For months, while the atrocities and body count in Syria have risen, the West, and the United Kingdom in particular, has insisted that the often-postponed Geneva II conference, now scheduled for Jan. 22, is the lever that will take power away from President Bashar Assad and end the bloodshed in Syria.
Speculation about backroom deals with Russia and Iran paving the way for a diplomatic breakthrough have been making the rounds for months. However, so far Geneva II has only succeeded in pushing an already weak and divided moderate opposition movement to the brink of collapse.
The recent refusal of the Syrian National Council – arguably the most important of the moderate opposition groupings – to go to Geneva was expected. But the Syrian National Coalition, the umbrella group created by the West to represent all opposition groups, including the Free Syrian Army, is also bitterly divided and has yet to confirm its attendance. Meetings held by the coalition last week descended into chaos, forcing it to postpone a final decision until Jan. 17, days before the conference begins.
The Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), both affiliated with Al-Qaeda, have of course not been invited. Many of the armed Syrian opposition groups reject the very idea of negotiating with the Assad regime and don’t recognize the authority of the Syrian National Coalition.
Geneva II is an increasingly pathetic sideshow of a tragedy that those who will gather in Switzerland will be powerless to relieve or stop. Having spectacularly humiliated itself with hollow military threats for nearly three years, the West will add failed diplomacy to the wreckage of its Syria policy.
The United States and the U.K. are now busy arming the fervently pro-Iranian and pro-Assad regime of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as it struggles to combat Sunni Al-Qaeda-linked militias. Their previous hostility to the Syrian leadership has evaporated in the face of what is perceived as a worse threat.
The need to supply arms to the increasingly tottering regime in Iraq stems partly from the West’s inaction in Syria. This created the space for radical Sunni militias to become the main opposition on the ground to the Assad regime and wage a war against Alawites and Shiites. A similar picture is forming in Lebanon where bombings are occurring with familiar and frightening regularity. The continuing bloodshed in Syria is even starting to seriously threaten political stability in Turkey.
But the flames of the West’s disastrous foreign policy toward Syria are no longer just burning in Iraq, Lebanon and Turkey. They are poised to reach Europe as well.
There may have been little domestic support for British Prime Minister David Cameron in taking a firm line with the Assad regime, but increasingly the British public is becoming aware of the cost to national security of the West’s failure to stand up for right against might in Syria. There are now over 40,000 foreign jihadists fighting there, including, according to recent estimates, up to 400 British citizens, mainly from Pakistani backgrounds, along with some Sudanese and Syrians from the U.K.
With radicalized Britons having been exposed to the extremist views of the likes of the Nusra Front and ISIS (most British jihadists tend to fight alongside the latter), as well as trained by them, concerns are growing that they will return to the U.K. and unleash a campaign of violence. Indeed, a report in the New York Times on Jan. 10 appeared to confirm that Al-Qaeda affiliated groups were recruiting Westerners in Syria to carry out attacks at home.
The fear is that returning fighters will want to punish the U.K. for abandoning Syria’s Sunnis. Such a view will have been reinforced by a former U.S. ambassador, Ryan Crocker.
He recently wrote that the West should engage Assad on counterterrorism, because “he is not as bad as the jihadists who would take over in his absence.”
Last October, British police arrested two men who had recently returned from Syria and were allegedly linked to a terror plot within the U.K. And in November, the head of MI5, Andrew Parker, told a parliamentary hearing that the “interaction” of Britons fighting with radical groups in Syria was a “very important strand of the threat” the U.K. faced.
Parker said, “The attractiveness to these groupings is that they meet British citizens who are willing to engage in terrorism and they task them to do so back at home, where they have higher impact, in this country.”
The British suicide bombers who carried out the July 7, 2005, London bombings, which killed 52 people, had also made contact with radical Islamist groups abroad. Two more British Muslims who had become “radicalized” during visits overseas are due to be sentenced this month for the brutal murder of an off-duty soldier in the middle of a busy London street last year.
It is precisely this sort of unorganized terror attack, carried out by so called lone wolves acting spontaneously, that are impossible for the security forces to prevent. And it is the type of attack they fear the returning jihadists will commit.
In a bid to combat the threat, British citizens who fight in Syria are being stripped of their citizenship to prevent them from returning to the U.K. The government has revoked the passports of 20 people this year, more than in the previous two and a half years combined.
But it is not just the U.K. that faces a threat. The International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London says the number of European fighters in Syria has tripled to 1,900 in the last year. The number reported from France quadrupled to 412 (although President Francois Hollande gave a higher figure of 700 this week), while Belgium has the highest per capita rate with almost 300 fighters.
The West’s Syria strategy has been an unmitigated disaster. Assad remains in power, the region is dangerously unstable and Europe is facing the increased danger of terror attacks by its own citizens. Somehow, the futility of Geneva II sums up the entire fiasco. The West keeps fiddling, and Syria keeps burning.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Beirut newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on January 17, 2014, on page 7.
Wednesday, 18 December 2013
The West abandons its allies in Syria
The Daily Star
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
By Michael Glackin
The fake sign language interpreter at Nelson’s Mandela’s memorial service wasn’t the only person indulging in meaningless gestures last week. While the interpreter did what amounted to a four-hour version of the Macarena, British Prime Minister David Cameron decided to send equally confusing and worthless signals himself, on Syria.
The decision by both the United Kingdom and the United States to “suspend” assistance to a moderate Syrian rebel force, in the face of rising Islamist influence, was a bitter blow to the Syrian National Coalition and the Free Syrian Army. It underscores their, and indeed the West’s, increasingly marginal role in Syria’s fate.
The FSA and SNC need Western backing to maintain a semblance of credibility and to stop fighters from joining Al-Qaeda-backed groups and other extremist Islamist groups. The West needs the moderate opposition to be effective. The nonlethal provided aid didn’t amount to much, but the symbolism of its suspension will convince everyone from President Bashar Assad to rebel fighters on the ground that an already muddled Western strategy toward Syria is in total disarray.
It also sends a clear signal to those fighting in Syria that the opposition movement that the West helped create cannot rely on the West for even token support. Recall that Cameron successfully overturned the European Union arms embargo on Syria last May in a move intended to “send a clear message to Assad,” but has failed to send as much as a pea shooter to the FSA. Small wonder the extremists, along with Iran and Russia, are in the ascendant.
The aid suspension indicates that the West believes the moderates in the Syrian opposition cannot hold the ring in Syria any longer. While the British Foreign Office insists the move is temporary, it was unable to say when the support would resume.
The events that led to the decision appear to be pretty straightforward: The takeover of Free Syrian Army bases in northern Syria, including the headquarters of the Syrian Military Council, by fighters from the Islamic Front, which recently broke with the FSA.
The Islamic Front is a union of six major Islamist rebel groups, bankrolled by Saudi Arabia. Only one of the front’s groups appears to be linked to Al-Qaeda, but all of them want to establish an Islamic state based on Shariah law.
While the rebels probably won’t miss supplies of body armor, communications equipment and U.S. armored vehicles, the symbolism of the decision is that the moderates are being sidelined, as what passes for Western strategy in Syria switches to keeping the jihadists out rather than deposing Assad.
Along with the estimated 110,000 killed during the Syrian conflict, and the 2 million refugees scattered around the region, the alarming rise and success of Islamist groups is the most startling consequence of the West’s failure to stand up to Assad. When this conflict started almost three years ago, coordinated Western support might well have toppled the Syrian president and preserved Syria’s sectarian harmony. But the West’s halfhearted support for the moderate Syrian opposition created a vacuum that the likes of the Nusra Front and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria willingly filled. Now rebels and noncombatants alike have fallen headlong into a sectarian conflict, embracing the politics of hate as a means of survival.
The British government insists, not for the first time, that the Geneva II conference – now scheduled for January 22, 2014 – will provide the blueprint to end the war and remove Assad from power. This claim would be laughable were it not for the mounting death toll in Syria
The conflict in Syria is not just a civil war. It has become a regional battle between Iran and Saudi Arabia. As much as Russia and Iran, who have backed Assad with guns and money, need to be behind any peace deal that comes out of Geneva, it is increasingly clear that Saudi Arabia, which along with Qatar bankrolls the rebels, must back it too.
Iran is already a major player in Iraq. The last thing Saudi Arabia wants is for Tehran to end up expanding its regional influence via Syria. This scenario looks increasingly likely for Riyadh, against the backdrop of an apparent thaw between the West and Iran, evidenced by last month’s tentative nuclear deal in Geneva.
The SNC’s representative in the U.K., Walid Safur, said the coalition is committed to Geneva II. He added, however, that its attendance remains conditional on a guarantee that Assad will not be a part of a transitional government that may be created by the conference. “If that changes in the coming weeks we may change our mind and not attend,” Safur told me recently.
But in reality, whether the SNC attends or not is irrelevant. As in other Middle East conflicts, a deal that does not have the backing of those wielding the guns cannot deliver peace. And as events have shown, the Islamic Front, the Nusra Front, and others are the people who count on the ground, not the SNC or the FSA.
“We’re keeping with the same consistent approach,” a Foreign Office official insisted to me last week. “We’re now focused on Geneva II where that approach will continue.”
Unfortunately, it’s a consistent approach that has so far failed to deliver either an end to the war or an end to Assad rule. While the U.K. has pursued its consistent approach, Assad has unleashed chemical weapons on his people on at least five occasions according to the United Nations; rebel fighters summarily execute people; and tens of thousands of refugees are suffering another bitter winter in makeshift tents in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey.
I asked the Foreign Office official how many more Syrians the British government expected to die or become homeless before its consistent approach either paid off or was abandoned. He declined to answer.
This really has become the diplomacy of the deaf.
Michael Glackin, is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on December 17, 2013, on page 7.
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
By Michael Glackin
The fake sign language interpreter at Nelson’s Mandela’s memorial service wasn’t the only person indulging in meaningless gestures last week. While the interpreter did what amounted to a four-hour version of the Macarena, British Prime Minister David Cameron decided to send equally confusing and worthless signals himself, on Syria.
The decision by both the United Kingdom and the United States to “suspend” assistance to a moderate Syrian rebel force, in the face of rising Islamist influence, was a bitter blow to the Syrian National Coalition and the Free Syrian Army. It underscores their, and indeed the West’s, increasingly marginal role in Syria’s fate.
The FSA and SNC need Western backing to maintain a semblance of credibility and to stop fighters from joining Al-Qaeda-backed groups and other extremist Islamist groups. The West needs the moderate opposition to be effective. The nonlethal provided aid didn’t amount to much, but the symbolism of its suspension will convince everyone from President Bashar Assad to rebel fighters on the ground that an already muddled Western strategy toward Syria is in total disarray.
It also sends a clear signal to those fighting in Syria that the opposition movement that the West helped create cannot rely on the West for even token support. Recall that Cameron successfully overturned the European Union arms embargo on Syria last May in a move intended to “send a clear message to Assad,” but has failed to send as much as a pea shooter to the FSA. Small wonder the extremists, along with Iran and Russia, are in the ascendant.
The aid suspension indicates that the West believes the moderates in the Syrian opposition cannot hold the ring in Syria any longer. While the British Foreign Office insists the move is temporary, it was unable to say when the support would resume.
The events that led to the decision appear to be pretty straightforward: The takeover of Free Syrian Army bases in northern Syria, including the headquarters of the Syrian Military Council, by fighters from the Islamic Front, which recently broke with the FSA.
The Islamic Front is a union of six major Islamist rebel groups, bankrolled by Saudi Arabia. Only one of the front’s groups appears to be linked to Al-Qaeda, but all of them want to establish an Islamic state based on Shariah law.
While the rebels probably won’t miss supplies of body armor, communications equipment and U.S. armored vehicles, the symbolism of the decision is that the moderates are being sidelined, as what passes for Western strategy in Syria switches to keeping the jihadists out rather than deposing Assad.
Along with the estimated 110,000 killed during the Syrian conflict, and the 2 million refugees scattered around the region, the alarming rise and success of Islamist groups is the most startling consequence of the West’s failure to stand up to Assad. When this conflict started almost three years ago, coordinated Western support might well have toppled the Syrian president and preserved Syria’s sectarian harmony. But the West’s halfhearted support for the moderate Syrian opposition created a vacuum that the likes of the Nusra Front and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria willingly filled. Now rebels and noncombatants alike have fallen headlong into a sectarian conflict, embracing the politics of hate as a means of survival.
The British government insists, not for the first time, that the Geneva II conference – now scheduled for January 22, 2014 – will provide the blueprint to end the war and remove Assad from power. This claim would be laughable were it not for the mounting death toll in Syria
The conflict in Syria is not just a civil war. It has become a regional battle between Iran and Saudi Arabia. As much as Russia and Iran, who have backed Assad with guns and money, need to be behind any peace deal that comes out of Geneva, it is increasingly clear that Saudi Arabia, which along with Qatar bankrolls the rebels, must back it too.
Iran is already a major player in Iraq. The last thing Saudi Arabia wants is for Tehran to end up expanding its regional influence via Syria. This scenario looks increasingly likely for Riyadh, against the backdrop of an apparent thaw between the West and Iran, evidenced by last month’s tentative nuclear deal in Geneva.
The SNC’s representative in the U.K., Walid Safur, said the coalition is committed to Geneva II. He added, however, that its attendance remains conditional on a guarantee that Assad will not be a part of a transitional government that may be created by the conference. “If that changes in the coming weeks we may change our mind and not attend,” Safur told me recently.
But in reality, whether the SNC attends or not is irrelevant. As in other Middle East conflicts, a deal that does not have the backing of those wielding the guns cannot deliver peace. And as events have shown, the Islamic Front, the Nusra Front, and others are the people who count on the ground, not the SNC or the FSA.
“We’re keeping with the same consistent approach,” a Foreign Office official insisted to me last week. “We’re now focused on Geneva II where that approach will continue.”
Unfortunately, it’s a consistent approach that has so far failed to deliver either an end to the war or an end to Assad rule. While the U.K. has pursued its consistent approach, Assad has unleashed chemical weapons on his people on at least five occasions according to the United Nations; rebel fighters summarily execute people; and tens of thousands of refugees are suffering another bitter winter in makeshift tents in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey.
I asked the Foreign Office official how many more Syrians the British government expected to die or become homeless before its consistent approach either paid off or was abandoned. He declined to answer.
This really has become the diplomacy of the deaf.
Michael Glackin, is former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on December 17, 2013, on page 7.
Thursday, 12 December 2013
Too much deference for the spooks?
The Daily Star
Monday, November 18 2013
by Michael Glackin
It was billed as a historic milestone in parliamentary sovereignty and oversight when the United Kingdom’s spy chiefs appeared before a committee of British parliamentarians and peers over a week ago. However, all it revealed was that Parliament hadn’t a clue what the spooks were up to, and if the committee’s appallingly timid questioning of the spymasters was anything to go by, they never will. The Intelligence and Security Committee is the body charged with oversight of the intelligence services. The spooks were called before it following American whistleblower Edward Snowden’s claims that American and British mass surveillance programs included snooping on the emails of millions of ordinary citizens.
During the 90-minute hearing, MI5 boss Andrew Parker, MI6 chief Sir John Sawers, and Sir Iain Lobban, the director of GCHQ, the British signals intelligence agency, dismissed claims that their monitoring of online and telephone data was excessive, and denied long-standing allegations that British intelligence had been complicit in torture. All without a murmur of dissent from the committee tasked with scrutinizing their activities.
It is extraordinary that no one even mentioned GCHQ’s Tempora program, which allows the agency to hoover up vast amounts of data from cables carrying internet traffic in and out of the country. The information is thoroughly analyzed and then shared with GCHQ’s counterpart in the United States, the National Security Agency.
Considering that neither senior ministers nor the government’s National Security Council, which oversees intelligence coordination and is chaired by Prime Minister David Cameron, were aware of Tempora’s existence before Snowden’s leaks, one would have thought the committee would have been curious to find out more.
Someone, probably one of the three people before the committee, decided that the data trawling did not need explicit parliamentary, or it seems government, approval. Surely it would have been worth asking how that happened? At least in Washington after Snowden’s revelations, President Barack Obama and Congress acknowledged that democratic and judicial oversight had broken down.
When the committee gently asked for examples of the 34 terror plots the spymasters said they had thwarted since the July 7, 2005, bombings in London, or for examples of the damage they claimed Snowden’s leaks had caused to their operations, the spooks replied they could only provide examples in private.
Much of what intelligence agencies do cannot be allowed into the public domain. But this insistence on secrecy amid all we know from Snowden had a distinctly hollow sound to it. It highlighted the unaccountable power that GCHQ, with America’s NSA, has accumulated to invade privacy and hide its activities from democratic oversight by claiming this is necessary for national security.
Sawers, who before heading MI6 served as British ambassador to Egypt and briefly as a special envoy to Iraq in 2003, even took a laughable swipe at the newspaper reporting Snowden’s leaks: “It is clear that our adversaries are rubbing their hands with glee and Al-Qaeda is lapping it up.”
One suspects Al-Qaeda is actually lapping up how Sawers and his colleagues allowed a terror suspect under 24-hour surveillance evade his minders last week by slipping into a burka and wandering off in broad daylight through the streets of central London.
Al-Qaeda and other terror groups have already lapped up the failure to find weapons of mass destruction that British intelligence agencies insisted the former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed – the reason Parliament supported the Iraq invasion, which arguably has done more to unleash global terrorism than any other.
No doubt terror groups also lapped up what the government called a “serious” security breach a few years ago when an intelligence official lost top-secret documents containing the latest intelligence on Al-Qaeda. The documents were eventually found by a member of the public on a busy commuter train.
There was probably much laughter in the Tora Bora mountains when Sawers’ wife posted details about his personal life on her Facebook page, including photographs of him frolicking around in a pair of skimpy swimming trunks on his holidays. His wife had few restrictions on her Facebook account, which meant that images of the head of the U.K.’s secret service were visible worldwide.
Oddly, Sawers recently gave a rare speech in which he defended the crucial role of secrecy in keeping us all safe. And while the spooks were insisting on privacy again last week, it might have been pertinent to ask why a lowly NSA contractor such as Snowden was among more than 850,000 U.S. staff given access to GCHQ’s secret files. Did GCHQ realize how insecure and open the U.S. system was that it enabled Snowden to leak all the information so easily?
Compare the treatment of the spymasters and the British government’s failure to properly investigate Snowden’s claims with what is going on at London’s Old Bailey, the country’s highest criminal court. A group of journalists and others who worked for Rupert Murdoch’s now defunct newspaper The News of the World are on trial, accused of ordering, or conspiring in, the hacking of the telephone calls of celebrities, politicians and crime victims.
Around $40 million of British taxpayers’ money has been spent on a public inquiry and several police investigations into phone hacking by newspapers culminating in this high-profile trial. Meanwhile the amount the government has spent investigating Snowden’s allegations amounts to a few thousand pounds and some softball questions from a committee that appeared to be in awe of those it is charged with scrutinizing.
Much of what those journalists did is indefensible – the hacking of a 13-year-old murder victim’s phone among them – but which is the bigger crime or threat to civil liberties? Snowden’s revelations dwarf the phone-hacking activities of journalists. Thanks to Snowden we know that the U.S. has been systematically tapping the phones of its allies, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, with GCHQ providing a helping hand.
It has even been reported that United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s phone was hacked by the NSA ahead of a meeting Obama at the White House this year. How does this protect our security?
The defense of the spymasters for programs such as Tempora is that they only targeted those involved in terrorism and “serious crime.” The hacking of Merkel’s and Ban’s phones, among others, betrays the lie.
The committee should have shown less deference to the spooks. Their demand for less publicity, lest accountability harm British and Western security, is increasingly threadbare. These are, after all, the same people who failed to foresee the end of the Cold War, the 9/11 attacks, and the Arab Spring. They have much to account for.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Lebanese newspaper THE DAILY STAR. This article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on November 18, 2013, on page 7.
Monday, November 18 2013
by Michael Glackin
It was billed as a historic milestone in parliamentary sovereignty and oversight when the United Kingdom’s spy chiefs appeared before a committee of British parliamentarians and peers over a week ago. However, all it revealed was that Parliament hadn’t a clue what the spooks were up to, and if the committee’s appallingly timid questioning of the spymasters was anything to go by, they never will. The Intelligence and Security Committee is the body charged with oversight of the intelligence services. The spooks were called before it following American whistleblower Edward Snowden’s claims that American and British mass surveillance programs included snooping on the emails of millions of ordinary citizens.
During the 90-minute hearing, MI5 boss Andrew Parker, MI6 chief Sir John Sawers, and Sir Iain Lobban, the director of GCHQ, the British signals intelligence agency, dismissed claims that their monitoring of online and telephone data was excessive, and denied long-standing allegations that British intelligence had been complicit in torture. All without a murmur of dissent from the committee tasked with scrutinizing their activities.
It is extraordinary that no one even mentioned GCHQ’s Tempora program, which allows the agency to hoover up vast amounts of data from cables carrying internet traffic in and out of the country. The information is thoroughly analyzed and then shared with GCHQ’s counterpart in the United States, the National Security Agency.
Considering that neither senior ministers nor the government’s National Security Council, which oversees intelligence coordination and is chaired by Prime Minister David Cameron, were aware of Tempora’s existence before Snowden’s leaks, one would have thought the committee would have been curious to find out more.
Someone, probably one of the three people before the committee, decided that the data trawling did not need explicit parliamentary, or it seems government, approval. Surely it would have been worth asking how that happened? At least in Washington after Snowden’s revelations, President Barack Obama and Congress acknowledged that democratic and judicial oversight had broken down.
When the committee gently asked for examples of the 34 terror plots the spymasters said they had thwarted since the July 7, 2005, bombings in London, or for examples of the damage they claimed Snowden’s leaks had caused to their operations, the spooks replied they could only provide examples in private.
Much of what intelligence agencies do cannot be allowed into the public domain. But this insistence on secrecy amid all we know from Snowden had a distinctly hollow sound to it. It highlighted the unaccountable power that GCHQ, with America’s NSA, has accumulated to invade privacy and hide its activities from democratic oversight by claiming this is necessary for national security.
Sawers, who before heading MI6 served as British ambassador to Egypt and briefly as a special envoy to Iraq in 2003, even took a laughable swipe at the newspaper reporting Snowden’s leaks: “It is clear that our adversaries are rubbing their hands with glee and Al-Qaeda is lapping it up.”
One suspects Al-Qaeda is actually lapping up how Sawers and his colleagues allowed a terror suspect under 24-hour surveillance evade his minders last week by slipping into a burka and wandering off in broad daylight through the streets of central London.
Al-Qaeda and other terror groups have already lapped up the failure to find weapons of mass destruction that British intelligence agencies insisted the former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed – the reason Parliament supported the Iraq invasion, which arguably has done more to unleash global terrorism than any other.
No doubt terror groups also lapped up what the government called a “serious” security breach a few years ago when an intelligence official lost top-secret documents containing the latest intelligence on Al-Qaeda. The documents were eventually found by a member of the public on a busy commuter train.
There was probably much laughter in the Tora Bora mountains when Sawers’ wife posted details about his personal life on her Facebook page, including photographs of him frolicking around in a pair of skimpy swimming trunks on his holidays. His wife had few restrictions on her Facebook account, which meant that images of the head of the U.K.’s secret service were visible worldwide.
Oddly, Sawers recently gave a rare speech in which he defended the crucial role of secrecy in keeping us all safe. And while the spooks were insisting on privacy again last week, it might have been pertinent to ask why a lowly NSA contractor such as Snowden was among more than 850,000 U.S. staff given access to GCHQ’s secret files. Did GCHQ realize how insecure and open the U.S. system was that it enabled Snowden to leak all the information so easily?
Compare the treatment of the spymasters and the British government’s failure to properly investigate Snowden’s claims with what is going on at London’s Old Bailey, the country’s highest criminal court. A group of journalists and others who worked for Rupert Murdoch’s now defunct newspaper The News of the World are on trial, accused of ordering, or conspiring in, the hacking of the telephone calls of celebrities, politicians and crime victims.
Around $40 million of British taxpayers’ money has been spent on a public inquiry and several police investigations into phone hacking by newspapers culminating in this high-profile trial. Meanwhile the amount the government has spent investigating Snowden’s allegations amounts to a few thousand pounds and some softball questions from a committee that appeared to be in awe of those it is charged with scrutinizing.
Much of what those journalists did is indefensible – the hacking of a 13-year-old murder victim’s phone among them – but which is the bigger crime or threat to civil liberties? Snowden’s revelations dwarf the phone-hacking activities of journalists. Thanks to Snowden we know that the U.S. has been systematically tapping the phones of its allies, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, with GCHQ providing a helping hand.
It has even been reported that United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s phone was hacked by the NSA ahead of a meeting Obama at the White House this year. How does this protect our security?
The defense of the spymasters for programs such as Tempora is that they only targeted those involved in terrorism and “serious crime.” The hacking of Merkel’s and Ban’s phones, among others, betrays the lie.
The committee should have shown less deference to the spooks. Their demand for less publicity, lest accountability harm British and Western security, is increasingly threadbare. These are, after all, the same people who failed to foresee the end of the Cold War, the 9/11 attacks, and the Arab Spring. They have much to account for.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of Lebanese newspaper THE DAILY STAR. This article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on November 18, 2013, on page 7.
The popes and their love of football
The Daily Star
Friday, November 1 2013
by Michael Glackin
Pope Francis has impressed people of all creeds with his humility and modest lifestyle since becoming leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics.
Just as important for many though, is the fact that Pope Francis is also a well-known football fan, the sport that is akin to a global religion, one that that cuts across national and sectarian boundaries, and is played and watched by more than 800 million people, around one in eight of the global population.
Pope Francis can even claim credit for a bit of divine intervention last Sunday, when English Premiership strugglers Sunderland scored a late winner against their local rivals Newcastle United that lifted them off the bottom of the League. In case you missed it, the goal was scored in the dying minutes of the game, by a late substitute who hadn’t scored for the club this season.
A few days before the match, a beaming Pope Francis was photographed in St. Peter’s Square holding aloft a Sunderland football shirt emblazoned with “Papa Francisco” and offered to pray for the club before the big game.
Pope Francis is famously a card-carrying fan of San Lorenzo football club in his native Buenos Aires. Despite being domiciled in the Vatican Francis still pays his monthly club membership subs according to the club’s vice president, Marcelo Tinelli.
He also granted Italy’s and Argentina’s national football teams a private audience at the Vatican in August – an event one Italian newspaper headlined “Pope meets God” in a witty, or for some heretical, reference to Francis meeting Argentinian star Lionel Messi, currently the game’s top player.
But Francis isn’t the first pope to carry his love of the beautiful game into the Vatican.
Although unlikely ever to be photographed enthusiastically waving a football shirt, former Pope Benedict XVI is a supporter of current European Champions Bayern Munich. During his reign the Vatican even organized a team of Catholic priests to play a friendly game against the Palestinian national team in the Al-Khader Stadium outside Bethlehem. Palestine predictably won the match 9-1, although bizarrely the priests somehow managed to get to the end of the first half 0-0.
Pope Benedict granted audiences to a number of, mostly Italian, footballers who ensured he was photographed close to a team shirt, if never quite embracing it ala Francis.
But the papal record for audiences with football teams must surely rest with Pope John II.
He gave the Republic of Ireland football team a private audience during the World Cup in Italy in 1990 and famously revealed to Irish goalkeeper Packie Bonner that he had also played as goalkeeper when he was growing up in Poland.
A few days after meeting the pope, Ireland were knocked out of the World Cup by a single goal. Legend has it that after the match team manager Jack Charlton turned to Bonner and said: “By the way, the pope would have saved that.”
More famously, John Paul II also granted a private audience to Italian club Napoli, which in those days included the brilliant but decidedly temperamental superstar Diego Maradona.
Typically, Maradona arrived at Vatican late and things went downhill at a rate of knots after that when the Argentinian proceeded to have an argument with the pope.
In his book, “I Am The Diego,” published in 2000, Maradona wrote:
“Yes, I argued with the pope. I argued with him because I was in the Vatican and I saw all these golden ceilings and afterward I heard the pope say the church was worried about the welfare of poor kids. So? Sell the ceilings, amigo! Do something!”
In what was likely to have been a quieter Vatican audience in 2004, John Paul II also met and blessed his beloved Polish national team.
He also had a lifetime membership of Barcelona, given to him by the Spanish giants after he celebrated Mass at the Nou Camp stadium in 1982.
In 1987 German club Schalke 04 made John Paul II an honorary member, again, after celebrating Mass at Schalke’s Parkstadion in 1987. Not to be outdone, Schalke’s bitter local rivals, Borussia Dortmund, awarded him the same accolade when John Paul II granted two of their players an audience in 2005 for their work in helping to stamp out child prostitution.
John Paul II is also known as the “protector” of Brazil’s Fluminense. The club’s famous chant is the “A Bênç?o, Jo?o de Deus” – “Bless us, John of God,” a tune composed in the pope’s honor during his visit to Brazil in 1980. Legend has it Fluminense fans burst into the song in 1984, during a tense penalty shootout against rivals Vasco da Gama – Fluminense won the shootout and the Brazilian championship. It would be a quarter of a century before Fluminense repeated the feat.
However, the team John Paul II really supported was Krakow based KS Cracovia. This was the team he watched as a young man, and it appears to have been a love that remained with him throughout his life – just a few months before he died he granted KS Cracovia’s team and staff a private audience, his final meeting with a football club and one of his last Vatican audiences.
Then there’s Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the controversial former Vatican secretary of state who, among other things, called on Catholics to boycott Dan Brown’s best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code.
Bertone, a lifelong Juventus fan, who used to commentate on their matches for local radio while he was Archbishop of Genoa, has long dreamed of establishing a Vatican football team.
In 2006 he famously said – not entirely in jest – that he wanted to create a team that could compete in Italy’s top flight, “with Roma, Inter Milan, Genoa and Sampdoria.”
“If we just take the Brazilian students from our Pontifical universities we could have a magnificent squad,” he said.
However, Bertone had to be content with establishing the Clericus Cup, the annual football tournament between 16 teams from church seminaries in Rome which is now in its seventh year.
The holders for the last two years have been the North American Pontifical College, so the Clericus Cup is one of the rare (association) football competitions that can be said to be dominated by North America.
Incidentally there is also a Vatican City international team, which has been managed in the past by no less a personage than former Italy and Ireland coach Giovanni Trapattoni.
Vatican City is one of eight fully recognized sovereign states that are not members of FIFA. Its players are drawn from the Swiss Guard and other Vatican staffers but the team has only played three full international matches in 11 years, one draw and two defeats to Monaco. Pope Benedict regularly visited the team when it was in training during his papacy.
But lest football fans get too excited about the papacy’s love of the beautiful game, it is probably worth mentioning that earlier this month, Pope Francis officially launched St. Peter’s Cricket Club.
Undeterred by George Bernard Shaw’s belief that the English weren’t very spiritual “so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity,” Francis hopes the club will forge ties with cricket teams of other faiths, particularly in the Muslim world.
But for all Francis’ global ambition for it, the cricket club’s main aspiration at the moment appears to be what amounts to a local derby match against a Church of England 11 at Lord’s next year. If if he wants to really reach the masses, Francis should stick to The People’s Game.
Michael Glackin is a former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. This article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on November 01, 2013, on page 7.
Friday, November 1 2013
by Michael Glackin
Pope Francis has impressed people of all creeds with his humility and modest lifestyle since becoming leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics.
Just as important for many though, is the fact that Pope Francis is also a well-known football fan, the sport that is akin to a global religion, one that that cuts across national and sectarian boundaries, and is played and watched by more than 800 million people, around one in eight of the global population.
Pope Francis can even claim credit for a bit of divine intervention last Sunday, when English Premiership strugglers Sunderland scored a late winner against their local rivals Newcastle United that lifted them off the bottom of the League. In case you missed it, the goal was scored in the dying minutes of the game, by a late substitute who hadn’t scored for the club this season.
A few days before the match, a beaming Pope Francis was photographed in St. Peter’s Square holding aloft a Sunderland football shirt emblazoned with “Papa Francisco” and offered to pray for the club before the big game.
Pope Francis is famously a card-carrying fan of San Lorenzo football club in his native Buenos Aires. Despite being domiciled in the Vatican Francis still pays his monthly club membership subs according to the club’s vice president, Marcelo Tinelli.
He also granted Italy’s and Argentina’s national football teams a private audience at the Vatican in August – an event one Italian newspaper headlined “Pope meets God” in a witty, or for some heretical, reference to Francis meeting Argentinian star Lionel Messi, currently the game’s top player.
But Francis isn’t the first pope to carry his love of the beautiful game into the Vatican.
Although unlikely ever to be photographed enthusiastically waving a football shirt, former Pope Benedict XVI is a supporter of current European Champions Bayern Munich. During his reign the Vatican even organized a team of Catholic priests to play a friendly game against the Palestinian national team in the Al-Khader Stadium outside Bethlehem. Palestine predictably won the match 9-1, although bizarrely the priests somehow managed to get to the end of the first half 0-0.
Pope Benedict granted audiences to a number of, mostly Italian, footballers who ensured he was photographed close to a team shirt, if never quite embracing it ala Francis.
But the papal record for audiences with football teams must surely rest with Pope John II.
He gave the Republic of Ireland football team a private audience during the World Cup in Italy in 1990 and famously revealed to Irish goalkeeper Packie Bonner that he had also played as goalkeeper when he was growing up in Poland.
A few days after meeting the pope, Ireland were knocked out of the World Cup by a single goal. Legend has it that after the match team manager Jack Charlton turned to Bonner and said: “By the way, the pope would have saved that.”
More famously, John Paul II also granted a private audience to Italian club Napoli, which in those days included the brilliant but decidedly temperamental superstar Diego Maradona.
Typically, Maradona arrived at Vatican late and things went downhill at a rate of knots after that when the Argentinian proceeded to have an argument with the pope.
In his book, “I Am The Diego,” published in 2000, Maradona wrote:
“Yes, I argued with the pope. I argued with him because I was in the Vatican and I saw all these golden ceilings and afterward I heard the pope say the church was worried about the welfare of poor kids. So? Sell the ceilings, amigo! Do something!”
In what was likely to have been a quieter Vatican audience in 2004, John Paul II also met and blessed his beloved Polish national team.
He also had a lifetime membership of Barcelona, given to him by the Spanish giants after he celebrated Mass at the Nou Camp stadium in 1982.
In 1987 German club Schalke 04 made John Paul II an honorary member, again, after celebrating Mass at Schalke’s Parkstadion in 1987. Not to be outdone, Schalke’s bitter local rivals, Borussia Dortmund, awarded him the same accolade when John Paul II granted two of their players an audience in 2005 for their work in helping to stamp out child prostitution.
John Paul II is also known as the “protector” of Brazil’s Fluminense. The club’s famous chant is the “A Bênç?o, Jo?o de Deus” – “Bless us, John of God,” a tune composed in the pope’s honor during his visit to Brazil in 1980. Legend has it Fluminense fans burst into the song in 1984, during a tense penalty shootout against rivals Vasco da Gama – Fluminense won the shootout and the Brazilian championship. It would be a quarter of a century before Fluminense repeated the feat.
However, the team John Paul II really supported was Krakow based KS Cracovia. This was the team he watched as a young man, and it appears to have been a love that remained with him throughout his life – just a few months before he died he granted KS Cracovia’s team and staff a private audience, his final meeting with a football club and one of his last Vatican audiences.
Then there’s Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the controversial former Vatican secretary of state who, among other things, called on Catholics to boycott Dan Brown’s best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code.
Bertone, a lifelong Juventus fan, who used to commentate on their matches for local radio while he was Archbishop of Genoa, has long dreamed of establishing a Vatican football team.
In 2006 he famously said – not entirely in jest – that he wanted to create a team that could compete in Italy’s top flight, “with Roma, Inter Milan, Genoa and Sampdoria.”
“If we just take the Brazilian students from our Pontifical universities we could have a magnificent squad,” he said.
However, Bertone had to be content with establishing the Clericus Cup, the annual football tournament between 16 teams from church seminaries in Rome which is now in its seventh year.
The holders for the last two years have been the North American Pontifical College, so the Clericus Cup is one of the rare (association) football competitions that can be said to be dominated by North America.
Incidentally there is also a Vatican City international team, which has been managed in the past by no less a personage than former Italy and Ireland coach Giovanni Trapattoni.
Vatican City is one of eight fully recognized sovereign states that are not members of FIFA. Its players are drawn from the Swiss Guard and other Vatican staffers but the team has only played three full international matches in 11 years, one draw and two defeats to Monaco. Pope Benedict regularly visited the team when it was in training during his papacy.
But lest football fans get too excited about the papacy’s love of the beautiful game, it is probably worth mentioning that earlier this month, Pope Francis officially launched St. Peter’s Cricket Club.
Undeterred by George Bernard Shaw’s belief that the English weren’t very spiritual “so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity,” Francis hopes the club will forge ties with cricket teams of other faiths, particularly in the Muslim world.
But for all Francis’ global ambition for it, the cricket club’s main aspiration at the moment appears to be what amounts to a local derby match against a Church of England 11 at Lord’s next year. If if he wants to really reach the masses, Francis should stick to The People’s Game.
Michael Glackin is a former managing editor of Beirut based newspaper THE DAILY STAR. This article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on November 01, 2013, on page 7.
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