The Chronikler

EU election monitoring… junket, joke or both?

By Christian Nielsen

“The Afghan elections were fair, but not free,” declared European election monitors. Meaningless sound-bite or what?

2 September 2009

What the hell was the European Union doing monitoring the recent Afghan elections when hardly anyone showed up to the EU's own parliamentary elections earlier in the year? If it can’t motivate democracy at home, what makes the Union think it should join the circus of monitoring organisations in countries like Afghanistan?

The answer: part arrogance, part a widening foreign policy interest, and a good chunk of junketeering – where tens of EU officials and hangers-on clock up mission-miles.

And gauging from the ridiculous statement by European monitors in Afghanistan following the August presidential elections – that they were fair but not free – I can’t help but wonder if this important event was reduced to a sound-bite. It just smacked of the EU ponying for political cred on the international stage.

I hope I’m wrong.

According to Reuters on 22 August, General Philippe Morillon, who is chief observer of the EU’s election mission to Afghanistan said it had been “fair generally” but “free was not the case in some parts of the country due to the terror”.

Reuters went on to say that “the EU, like other western groups that observed the poll, had few staff able to access the violent southern provinces”.

So what is the EU doing making big statements like that? Big and confusing. Morillon could as easily have said the election was generally free but not fair in all parts and it would have been equally as meaningless.

Perhaps more meaningful was the statement issued by the local election monitors, the Free and Fair Election Foundation, which no doubt did have people on the ground to back up their claim that some instances of fraud and irregularities were noted.

If the EU wants to play a more prominent role in international relations, it needs to work on its credibility at home and abroad. Sound-bites might win headlines but they don’t guarantee you a place in the international relations big tent.

© Copyright - Christian Nielsen. All rights reserved.

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What about the Western warlords?

By Khaled Diab

Cherie Blair’s chastisement of the African Union for not co-operating with the International Criminal Court is pretty rich coming from the wife of a man many believe is a war criminal.

18 July 2009

Cherie Blair's article

Lightly disguised under her maiden name which she uses for professional purposes, Cherie Booth, the wife of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, took the African Union to task on Saturday in The Guardian over its decision not to co-operate with the International Criminal Court (ICC) – and, by implication, not to assist in executing the indictment of Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. She wrote:

 The truly disheartening part of this resolution is that it is backed not just by those countries who have opposed the ICC from the start but also by those – the majority on the African continent – who have signed the Rome treaty [establishing the ICC].

Yes, I too find it a terrible shame that African – and Arab – countries have shown solidarity with a war criminal. I even wrote a column about it for The Guardian in April. I concluded:

There is a widespread belief that, in the ugly balance of reality, African and Arab lives are worth less than Western ones. But by expressing solidarity with a known mass murderer, Arabs and Africans are also cheapening the value of their own lives.

Booth expresses a similar frustration: “It is disheartening to see politicians showing their solidarity with the Bashirs of the world rather than with the victims of mass rapes, murders and mutilations.”

Had this article come from someone else, I would’ve found it easier to swallow. But this person expressing how “depressing” and “disheartening” those benighted Africans are just happens to be the wife of a man widely perceived as a war criminal, one of the worst living warlords in the West (I’ve outlined before the powerful case for indicting both George W Bush and Tony Blair for war crimes and crimes against humanity).

 Well, Cherie, how do you suggest we should feel towards people who not only show “solidarity” but actually share a house with an alleged war criminal? Should we find that equally “depressing” and “disheartening”?

Naturally, no wife is her husband’s keeper nor vice versa; and I don’t hold Cherie responsible for Tony’s war-mongering. But surely a woman of as much conscience as she professes should take a moral stand against injustice wherever it is perpetrated. After all, as a barrister, Cherie Booth QC should be aware that justice is blind.

If she feels unable to speak up for justice at home, then I would advise Ms Booth to keep her opinion on this matter to herself because Africans will undoubtedly find it pretty cheeky that the wife of the co-author of the Afghan and Iraq catastrophes should condemn their inaction.

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Equality: not even in death

By Khaled Diab

Tragic as the deaths of young British soldiers in Afghanistan are, why is the media not mourning Afghan civilian casualties?

13 July 2009

Every human life is precious. But there is something disturbing about the UK media’s obsession with the rising death toll of British troops in Afghanistan. Last Friday’s reports of the death of 15 soldiers in ten days has been generating a continuous stream of headlines for days.

It is sad that young men, many barely teenagers, should lose their lives in distant lands. But these are professional soldiers who signed up for a job which they knew carried with it a risk of death. But the campaign in Afghanistan has claimed a far larger number of victims who had taken no calculated decision to be there – Afghan civilians.

But was there any mention of these hapless victims? Hardly a peep. For example, in an entire BBC news report last week, I learnt about the number of British soldiers killed in the bloodiest incident since the war began, and the grand total of 184 who had died since 2001.

But in the coverage, I looked in vain for any indication of how many Afghans, particularly civilians, have been killed as a result of the recent fighting. For example, all the Beeb had to say on the matter, in a tone with disturbingly bellicose undertones, was that far more Taliban had died than British soldiers, and nothing at all about the civilian death toll. So much for the BBC’s reputation for balance – but the fog of war has a way of distorting truth.

At one level, it is not surprising that a society notices its own losses the most and sees them through a dispersive prism scattering the entire spectrum of grief across people’s conscience. But at another more troubling level, it reflects the relative value of human life: each dead British soldier has a name, a face and an inconsolable family, while dead Afghans are usually little more than a faceless footnote.

In fact, no one is actually keeping an official tab and Afghan civilian deaths have to be aggregated from individual reports. According to aggregated figures, as many as 28,000 civilians have died as a direct result of US-led military action since 2001, while more than 4,000 others were killed by insurgents. This makes the death of 184 professional soldiers seem relatively modest. The contrast is even more pronounced in Iraq.

Moreover, the fuss surrounding the number of British casualties does not stand up to historical comparisons. The First Anglo-Afghan War (1839-1842) claimed the lives of more than 5,000 soldiers of the British Empire and killed more than 12,000 British civilians – the number of Afghans who died, as you’d expect, is unknown.  More contrastingly still, of the 16 million who died in World War I, nearly 900,000 were British, and of the 73 million deaths in World War II, more than 400,000 were British.

It is a good thing that Britain and many other parts of the world have lost their tolerance for this kind of mindless and senseless carnage. However, the side effect of this has been a consistently high civilian death toll due to airstrikes undertaken to avoid body bags coming home. It is time the British public strove for more equality in the death stakes and mourned the deaths of Afghan civilians, too.

It is a shame that the British government has not learnt from their country’s historical mistakes. Despite Britain having got its fingers burned more than once in Afghanistan and the country’s reputation as the ‘graveyard of empires’, Tony Blair nevertheless decided to join George W Bush on this ill-conceived military folly.

As nearly two centuries of foreign intervention have proven, there is no military solution to the problems of Afghanistan – as has been known since the First Afghan War, Afghans resent the presence of foreign troops with a vengeance. It is about time that Gordon Brown and Barack Obama pulled out of the mess created by their predecessors.

If Britain, the United States and NATO want to help, they can put their money where their guns are and invest the billions spent on occupying the country in development instead. Before that, the UN can sponsor a peace process between the countries main ethnic groups to help them find a way to live together or to agree to dissolve the country.

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Justice, the American way

By Khaled Diab

Is there any chance that George W Bush will ever face indictment for his alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity?

January 2009

This column appeared in The Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free section on 14 January 2009. Read the related discussion.

This is an archive piece that was migrated to this website from Diabolic Digest

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Losing the plot

By Khaled Diab

Wacky conspiracy theories cause damage by drawing attention away from the real plots being hatched by our governments.

4 July 2009

Conspiracy theories: some believe the 11 September attacks were an inside job. Image ©Copyright Katleen Maes

If I were paranoid, I might start believing that some sinister plot was afoot. It almost seems as though the sheer proliferation of far-fetched, madcap conspiracy theories doing the rounds has been designed by some evil genius to cause 'conspiracy fatigue' in the public mind and to discredit the whole idea that our governments actually do conspire. But as I'm not unduly paranoid, I realise that this is a reflection of the fact that there are legions of gullible and disillusioned folk out there who have lost their faith in the establishment.

As we approach the fourth anniversary of the July 2005 London bombings, there is one conspiracy theory that has proven particularly resilient to reason and evidence. According to advocates of this theory, the 7/7 attacks were not the work of a group of disgruntled and marginalised British Muslims angry at what they saw as their government's war against Islam – a variation on the stubbornly persistent 'clash of civilisations' theory. Instead, they believe – based on evidence so flimsy you wouldn't sit your coffee mug on it – that the whole affair was staged by the British government (possibly with Israeli help) to draw attention away from the catastrophe in Iraq and shore up support for the so-called "war on terror".

And how did the government achieve this? Through controlled explosions. Sounds familiar? Yes, it's a low-budget spin-off of the 11 September conspiracy theory. And like 9/11, it comes with its very own cult film entitled 7/7 Ripple Effect.

The film bases its conspiracy theory on a number of apparent contradictions and "an unbelievable set of circumstances" in the official narrative, such as the fact that an ex-police officer organised, in a nearby office, a mock exercise preparing for a possible terrorist attack on the underground. The film also claims that the alleged attackers were not on the trains that blew up. So, where were they? Apparently being assassinated in Canary Wharf by government agents who were out to frame them for the atrocity. Given the persistent popularity of 7/7 Ripple Effect, the BBC ran a special documentary this week which investigated the credibility of the DVD's claims.

Examining the film's claims one by one, the BBC documentary demolished them compellingly by drawing on convincing evidence. It also unmasked the man behind Ripple Effect, a certain John Hill from Sheffield who is living in Ireland. In addition to making conspiratorial mountains out of coincidental molehills, Hill's other beliefs include that he is the Messiah and that the 'Force' told George Lucas to write Star Wars.

Of course, the flimsiness of the case and the untrustworthiness of the source won't convince a certain faction of diehard conspiracy theorists. In fact, I've found out that it has been declaimed as a "hit piece" by a leading rightwing conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones. No doubt, I will be seen as a mindless pawn in the plot for writing this piece.

In the absence of an official public inquiry and given the government's lack of credibility following the 'sexed up' march to war in Iraq, some people are gullible or disenchanted enough to believe that the government – or other groups they don't like: corporations, Muslims, Jews, etc – is capable of hatching the most fantastical plots.

However, the sensation and ridicule elicited by crackpot conspiracy theorists discredits talk of the very real plots that take place and enables those involved to laugh them off. But just because there are fantastical conspiracy theories out there that does not mean there are no real conspiracies taking place. In fact, behind many far-fetched conspiracies, there is a germ of fact based on precedent. For example, there are rumours in the Middle East that the US is pulling the strings of the protests in Iran, even though no one has been able to show any convincing link or explain how a mass movement can be remote controlled from Washington. What sustains the rumours and gives them life is that the US and Britain have form, having covertly engineered a coup to oust Iran's first democratic government more than half a century ago.

Similarly, the 7/7 and 9/11 theories feed off a deep well of distrust dug by other lies. It seems clear to me that the British and American publics were misled in the run-up to the Iraq war, with all the fanciful claims of fictional weapons of mass destruction and the non-existent and farcical link between Saddam Hussein and his sworn enemies al-Qaida. Now that's a conspiracy, if ever there was one. Instead of giving any credence to 7/7 or 9/11 conspiracy theories, we should dedicate our efforts to campaigning for a proper public inquiry into the real deceptions that took place and demand that those responsible be brought to justice.

This column appeared in The Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free section on 3 July 2009. Read the related discussion.

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