AUSTRALIA'S DAY FOR SECRETS, FLAGS AND COWARDS - BY JOHN PILGER

22 JANUARY 2016 from CounterPunch

Australia’s Day for Secrets, Flags and Cowards

by John Pilger

On 26 January, one of the saddest days in human history will be celebrated in Australia. It will be “a day for families”, say the newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch. Flags will be dispensed at street corners and displayed on funny hats. People will say incessantly how proud they are.

For many, there is relief and gratitude. In my lifetime, non-indigenous Australia has changed from an Anglo-Irish society to one of the most ethnically diverse on earth. Those we used to call “New Australians” often choose 26 January,  “Australia Day”, to be sworn in as citizens. The ceremonies can be touching. Watch the faces from the Middle East and understand why they clench their new flag.

It was sunrise on 26 January so many years ago when I stood with Indigenous and non Indigenous Australians and threw wreaths into Sydney Harbour. We had climbed down to one of the perfect sandy coves where others had stood as silhouettes, watching as the ships of Britain’s “First Fleet” dropped anchor on 26 January, 1788. This was the moment the only island continent on earth was taken from its inhabitants; the euphemism was “settled”. It was, wrote Henry Reynolds, one of few honest Australian historians, one of the greatest land grabs in world history. He described the slaughter that followed as “a whispering in our hearts”.

The original Australians are the oldest human presence. To the European invaders, they did not exist because their continent had been declared terra nullius: empty land. To justify this fiction, mass murder was ordained. In 1838, the Sydney Monitor reported: “It was resolved to exterminate the whole race of blacks in that quarter.” This referred to the Darug people who lived along the great Hawkesbury River not far from Sydney. With remarkable ingenuity and without guns, they fought an epic resistance that remains almost a national secret. In a land littered with cenotaphs honouring Australia’s settler dead in mostly imperial wars, not one stands for those warriors who fought and fell defending Australia.

This truth has no place in the Australian consciousness. Among settler nations with indigenous populations, apart from a facile “apology” in 2008, only Australia has refused to come to terms with the shame of its colonial past. A Hollywood film, Soldier Blue, in 1970 famously inverted racial stereotypes and gave Americans a glimpse of the genocide in their own mythical “settlement”. Almost half a century later, it is fair to say an equivalent film would never be made in Australia.

In 2014, when my own film, Utopia, which told the story of the Australian genocide, sought a local distributor, I was advised by a luminary in the business: “No way I could distribute this. The audiences wouldn’t accept it.”

He was wrong — up to a point. When Utopia opened in Sydney a few days before 26 January, under the stars on vacant land in an Indigenous inner-city area known as The Block, more than 4,000 people came, the majority non-Indigenous. Many had travelled from right across the continent. Indigenous leaders who had appeared in the film stood in front of the screen and spoke in “language”: their own. Nothing like it had happened before. Yet, there was no press. For the wider community, it did not happen. Australia is a murdochracy, dominated by the ethos of a man who swapped his nationality for the Fox Network in the US.

The star Indigenous AFL footballer Adam Goodes wrote movingly to the Sydney Morning Herald demanding that “the silence is broken”. “Imagine,” he wrote, “watching a film that tells the truth about the terrible injustices committed against your people, a film that reveals how Europeans, and the governments that have run our country, have raped, killed and stolen from your people for their own benefit.

“Now imagine how it feels when the people who benefited most from those rapes, those killings and that theft – the people in whose name the oppression was done – turn away in disgust when someone seeks to expose it.”

Goodes himself had already broken a silence when he stood against racist abuse thrown at him and other Indigenous sportspeople. This courageous, talented man retired from football last year as if under a cloud — with, wrote one commentator, “the sporting nation divided about him”. In Australia, it is respectable to be “divided” on opposing racism.

On Australia Day 2016– Indigenous people prefer Invasion Day or Survival Day– there will be no acknowledgement that Australia’s uniqueness is its first people, along with an ingrained colonial mentality that ought to be an abiding embarrassment in an independent nation. This mentality is expressed in a variety of ways, from unrelenting political groveling at the knee of a rapacious United States to an almost casual contempt for Indigenous Australians, an echo of “kaffir”-abusing South Africans.

Apartheid runs through Australian society. Within a short flight from Sydney, Indigenous people live the shortest of lives. Men are often dead before they reach 45. They die from Dickensian diseases, such as rheumatic heart disease. Children go blind from trachoma, and deaf from otitis media, diseases of poverty. A doctor told me, “I wanted to give a patient an anti-inflammatory for an infection that would have been preventable if living conditions were better, but I couldn’t treat her because she didn’t have enough food to eat and couldn’t ingest the tablets. I feel sometimes as if I’m dealing with similar conditions as the English working class of the beginning of the industrial revolution.”

The racism that allows this in one of the most privileged societies on earth runs deep. In the 1920s, a “Protector of Aborigines” oversaw the theft of mixed race children with the justification of “breeding out the colour”.  Today, record numbers of Indigenous children are removed from their homes and many never see their families again. On 11 February, an inspiring group called Grandmothers Against Removals will lead a march on Federal Parliament in Canberra, demanding the return of the stolen children.

Australia is the envy of European governments now fencing in their once-open borders while beckoning fascism, as in Hungary. Refugees who dare set sail for Australia in overcrowded boats have long been treated as criminals, along with the “smugglers” whose hyped notoriety is used by the Australian media to distract from the immorality and criminality of their own government. The refugees are confined behind barbed wire on average for well over a year, some indefinitely, in barbaric conditions that have led to self-harm, murder, suicide and mental illness. Children have not been spared. An Australian Gulag run by sinister private security firms includes concentration camps on the remote Pacific islands of Manus and Nauru. People often have no idea when they might be freed, if at all.

The Australian military — whose derring-do is the subject of uncritical tomes that fill the shelves of airport bookstalls — has played an important part in “turning back the boats” of refugees fleeing wars, such as in Iraq, launched and prolonged by the Americans and their Australian mercenaries. No irony, let alone responsibility, is acknowledged in this cowardly role.

On this Australia Day, the “pride of the services” will be on display. This pride extends to the Australian Immigration Department, which commits people to its Gulag for “offshore processing”, often arbitrarily, leaving them to grieve and despair and rot. Last week it was announced that Immigration officials had spent $400,000 on medals which they will award their heroic selves. Put out more flags.

On January 26, Indigenous Australians and their supporters will march from The Block in Redfern, Sydney, to the Sydney Town Hall. The march will begin at 10 am.
On Thursday February 11, Grandmothers Against Removals will address a rally in Canberra. This will start at 12 noon at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, then march to Parliament House.

John Pilger can be reached through his website: www.johnpilger.com

THE BIG SLEEP - EUTHANASIA STORY OF PAT AND PETER SHAW

The big sleep

By Julia Medew
Jan. 16, 2016, 10:01 a.m.

Pat and Peter Shaw took their own lives together in their home, both aged 87.

Scientists Pat and Peter Shaw died in a suicide pact in October. Their daughters reflect on their parents’ plan - and their remarkable lives. 

For as long as the blue-eyed Shaw sisters can remember, they knew their parents planned to one day take their own lives.

It was often a topic of conversation. Patricia and Peter Shaw would discuss with their three daughters their determination to avoid hospitals, nursing homes, palliative care units - any institution that would threaten their independence in old age.

Having watched siblings and elderly friends decline, Pat and Peter spoke of their desire to choose the time and manner of their deaths.

To this end, the couple, from the Melbourne bayside suburb of Brighton, became members of Exit International, the pro-euthanasia group run by Philip Nitschke that teaches people peaceful methods to end their own lives.

Letter to the editor: The Age, January 31, 2007.

The family had a good line in black humour. The three sisters recall telephone conversations with their mother in which she would joke about the equipment their father had bought after attending Exit workshops. “He’s in the bedroom testing it,” Pat would quip.

About four years ago, Pat and Peter’s resolve to stay away from hospitals was heightened. While hanging washing in the backyard of their beloved home, Pat, then 83, tripped and broke a bone in her thigh. She was carted off to the emergency department. Her fracture healed well but doctors were concerned about her high blood pressure. They wanted to keep her in and treat it until it was under control.

Pat with her daughters in the '60s.

Pat disagreed. A biochemist who had taught medical students at Monash University for decades, she blamed the medicos for driving up her blood pressure. She said she knew how to treat it and so, against dire warnings, she left the hospital with Peter. Sure enough, when she got home her blood pressure dropped within days.

The two scientists relished life. They skied, went bushwalking and climbed mountains, often taking their three young daughters with them. Their cultural and intellectual pursuits were many - classical music, opera, literature, wine, arguments over dinner with their many friends. They donated 10 per cent of their annual income to political and environmental movements. Family events were spent thoroughly debating the topics of the day.

As their capacity declined, the conversation about ending their own lives became more serious and their rejection of what Peter called “religious do-gooders” became more fierce.

The Shaws at a backyard gathering.

“It was also a way into their favourite topics; philosophy, ethics, politics, the law …,” says their youngest daughter, Kate. “The idea that their end-of-life decisions could be interfered with by people with the superstitions of medieval inquisitors astounded them, and alarmed them.”

In April, Peter, an eminent meteorologist, was labouring. He sat down at his computer and typed a letter to his daughters, three highly educated women - two have PhDs and one is a concert violinist in Germany.
“My head swims,” he wrote. “When I am reading, I can’t follow a difficult argument, so I give up, telling myself that it doesn’t matter, and I will read something else. I have just now been reading the history and politics arguments at the end of the latest Quarterly Essay and I am very disappointed that I can’t follow them.”

Going bush in the '60s.

“My condition is getting worse bit by bit, slowly week by week. On top of all this, my eyesight and hearing are no good, my pulse is occasionally irregular. So how long can it go on? Weeks? Months? As you all know, I am not afraid of dying but I am dead scared of incompetence.”

Pat was also troubled by her old age. Arthritis was corroding her joints and she was getting dizzy, putting her at risk of another fall. She had swollen knees and hands, and was finding it increasingly difficult to get out of bed and out of chairs.

Following Peter’s letter, his daughters tried to keep him and Pat as content as possible. They visited more often. They tried to work out ways of helping. They attempted to cheer up the pair with fine whisky and wines. Surely they wouldn’t go when there was another bottle of duty-free Laphroaig in the pantry, Kate thought. But her parents had other plans.

Taking a tumble on Mount Hotham.

Anny, their second daughter, asked if they could wait for one last Christmas. But they couldn’t. Or wouldn’t.
They set a date. Peter said it was time and Pat agreed. They would enter the “big sleep” together on October 27, the day after Pat’s 87th birthday.

Anny got on a plane. When she arrived in Melbourne on October 21, she was shocked at how frail her parents looked. She would often find her father slumped in his chair. Her mother was struggling to move in the purposeful way she used to. Anny showed them a DVD of concerts she had performed with the Munich Radio Orchestra. But she could see that her parents had changed. They were tired. Even a bit bored, she thought.

On their final night together, the family shared a last supper of sorts. The sisters prepared a plate of cheeses, avocado and smoked salmon to eat with wine. Peter and Pat pecked at it. They didn’t seem very interested in food. Anny picked up their grandmother’s violin and played for her parents. They went to bed around 10pm.

The next morning, Peter and Pat got up early. They showered, dressed and made their bed. Peter had breakfast, a fried egg and coffee. Pat did not eat. She wanted to keep her stomach empty for what was to come.

The family sat in their backyard in the soft morning sun, enjoying the native garden that had flourished around their Robin Boyd-style home. Peter had designed the house himself in the 1960s.

“They were more cheerful than I had seen them since I arrived,” Anny said.

“They were just relaxed and ready to go.”

Everybody knew the plan. The sisters were to leave around noon. They felt they had no choice. Assisting, aiding or abetting a suicide carries a penalty of up to five years’ jail in Victoria. Their mother would have liked them to stay, but not at the risk of prosecution.

Pat did not want to die by herself, so she would take a lethal drug first. After leaving her in their bed, Peter would walk alone down the hall of their home and into the living room where they had shared so many hours. He would open the back door and trek one last time through his yard and into his shed where his equipment was set up.

In those final hours, everybody was calm. They discussed the need to lock the doors after the sisters left. People were always coming and going through the house. It would be a bad time for anyone to come knocking.

Peter Shaw (centre) on the Antarctic expedition for which he later received a Polar Medal.

While Peter discussed the logistics, Pat mused about any final homilies she could offer her daughters before she left them. Peter joked that they had never listened anyway.

“It was all so normal,” says Kate. “I just started laughing at the surreality of it ... and took out my phone to take some photos - something I never do.”

And then it was time.

Just before noon, the sisters embraced their mother and father and left. There were no tears.

They walked out of their family home and walked down to the cafe where Peter regularly sipped coffee during his “morning totters” with his friend Frank. They wandered on the beach where they had grown up, and waited.

Peter Shaw (left) in Antarctica in 1953.

Somewhere in Antarctica, there is a mountain named after Peter Shaw. He conquered it in 1955 on a pioneering mission with the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions. The following year, he was awarded a Polar Medal for the mission and he was immortalised on a postage stamp. The trip had been tough. He and his companions had endured at least one terrifying storm that was so traumatic no one ever spoke about it again. They relied on candles for light and layers of wool for warmth. There were no fancy gadgets.

The year that Peter stuck an Australian flag in that peak was the same year he fell in love with his sweetheart.
Patricia was the “it girl” in their mountaineering club. Dazzling blue eyes and blonde hair. But Pat - or Patsy as she was sometimes called - was more comfortable in shorts and hiking boots than dresses and baby-doll heels. She was whip smart, too. Had plenty to say and knew what she was talking about. The first time Peter ever saw Pat, he later told the girls, he had turned to a friend at the club gathering and asked who she was. The attraction was mutual. They married when they were 27.

Pat abseils on Sugarloaf, 1955.

During the 1950s, Peter worked as a meteorologist for the Bureau of Meteorology while Pat, one of the first women to study biochemistry at the University of Melbourne, worked as a nutritionist. She took a break from it in 1957 to have her first daughter. But she never fancied herself a stay-at-home mum. After their next two girls arrived in 1959 and late 1960, Pat started teaching at Monash University where she became a lecturer in the medical faculty.

In the early 1960s, Peter read the weather for the ABC and Channel Seven - a small taste of fame. But he was no peacock. He was better known for his principles and dedication to the Professional Officers Association where he concentrated on winning fair pay and conditions for his peers. He was admired for his encyclopedic knowledge of meteorology, and for his ability to be direct and frank when something needed to be said.

An old colleague, Michael Hassett, recalls him flooring everybody at a meeting in the late ’70s about a controversial plan to collect data on Bureau of Meteorology employees. After several timid questions from the crowd, Peter stood up and said, “I don’t have a question, I want to deliver a tirade.”

Pat on Mount Sugarloaf in 1955.

“He lambasted the proposal as a thoroughly bad idea from start to finish and suggested it should be abandoned. Not long after that, it sunk without a trace,” Michael said.

They lived their lives well, and on their own terms.

Now their daughters waited on the beach. Their greatest fear was not that their beloved parents would die, but that they - or worse, one of them - would not. The Shaw sisters trusted their parents and had faith in their plan but they were still aware of the many things that could go wrong. What if the drug their mother had buried in her garden for fear of a police raid had lost its potency? What if one of them survived to be accused of killing the other?

Nobody knows precisely what happened in Peter and Pat’s last moments but when the sisters returned to the house, about 1.30pm, their mother was lying still on her back in bed. There was a note on the bench from their father in spidery handwriting. It said, in part: “Satisfactory for Pat and for me, eventually”.

Peter plays a clarinet in Antarctica, 1955.

They found their father in the shed, reclining in a chair. They checked for signs of life - or death. Heartbeat, pulse. First their mother. Then their father. Nothing.

There is no good way to lose your parents. When the three sisters returned to their parents’ house, they were orphans. The plan had worked and there was no sign of suffering. Peter and Pat had set out to end their lives in a meticulous, scientific fashion without any fuss, just as they had lived. And they had done it.
What happened next was unsettling, though. The sisters called their parents’ GP. They had expected him to be able to come promptly and quietly certify their deaths. But he was caught up with patients all afternoon. He told them the two deaths required a call to triple zero.

Pat in 1956.

This was when the outside world started to push in. Within minutes of the call, paramedics arrived, lights flashing. The police were not far behind. Two people had died in a suicide pact and their three daughters were at their home. Suddenly, a very private decision had become a very public event.

Kate met the paramedics at the door. The medicos wanted to rush in. She stopped them to explain. Their parents had intended to die; they did not want to be resuscitated, she said. It took some discussion.
Eventually the paramedics entered, attended the bodies and documented the deaths. They were respectful, say the daughters. The police were also sympathetic and supportive when they understood what had happened. But the homicide squad still had to be called in. The Shaw family home became a crime scene.

The sisters were told to attend a police station to make statements. No charges have been laid.

To erase any doubts about their deaths, Peter and Pat had both written suicide notes. Each said they had died by their own hand, with no assistance or pressure from others. In a letter left with his solicitor and titled “To be opened after my death”, Peter had written that he was “sane, quite good-humoured, and not at all depressed”. He said he was making a rational decision.

“I am not religious, and I look forward calmly to a sleep from which I will not wake,” he said.

Peter Shaw's letter, September 17, 2015.

“I have had a good life, and prolonging it will not make it better.”

Pat wrote a note in her own cursive hand and tucked it into a notebook with the family’s “X’mas pud” recipe for her daughters. The note, written on cream paper, said she had no help from her family, whom she loved very much.

“I am of sound mind, with no hint of dementia or depression … Having seen my two sisters die in nursing homes, I have no wish to go that way,” the letter said.

Pat Shaw's letter, September 23, 2015.

“In case there should be any doubt, I declare that my death is by my own hand.”

Today the Shaw sisters are still coming to terms with the loss of both parents. They miss their wit and warmth. But they respect their choice and feel strongly that suicide can be rational. All three say their parents should not have had to risk prosecution to die together at the time of their choosing. Nor should they have had to be alone for the legal protection of their family.

“It shouldn't be so difficult for rational people to make this decision,” Kate said. “Obviously, care has to be taken but assisted suicide should not be illegal.”

Anny and Kate, the two sisters who have been willing to talk publicly about what happened that day, have been honest with many people about their parents’ choice. Some have been awed. Most have been deeply supportive. But a couple have passed judgement. One friend suggested Peter and Pat had been selfish for leaving their daughters. Another acquaintance hinted to the daughters that they must not have offered enough support. Why would their parents leave them if they knew they would be cared for?

But Kate says anyone who suggests this does not understand the Shaws, a family of fiercely independent rationalists. Her parents never wanted to leave their home nor be cared for. Nor were they the types to sit around for another decade with rugs on their knees.

“To those people who say we don’t have the right to choose the time and manner of our departure, our mother and father said, ‘Well, we do and we did’,” she said.

“I love their defiance right to the end. But these were two extraordinary human beings.”

Peter and Pat on the day they died.

For help or information, call Lifeline 131 114 and beyondblue 1300 224 636
theage.com.au

REFUGEES PERSECUTED FOR SEXUALITY - FOCUS OF MIDSUMMA PLAY - 2016

Refugees persecuted for sexuality focus of Midsumma play directed by John Kachoyan

12 January  2016

• Article in The Age supplement - the shortlist - 15 JANUARY 2016

John Bailey

Nick Simpson-Deeks stars in Elegy. Photo: Hayden Bevis

It can come as a surprise to learn that post-invasion Iraq is a much more dangerous place to be queer than it was before. "We tend to think in the languages of these countries being 'liberated' and 'freedom' being installed, but with the destabilisation came the rise of militias and things like ISIS," says director John Kachoyan. "You assume that the previous regime was always oppressive and always more rigorous. It's the same with the Taliban. You look at Afghanistan in the '70s and it was, relatively, an incredibly liberal place."

Kachoyan is directing the first Australian production of acclaimed UK play Elegy, a one-hander that taps into the real experiences of refugees persecuted for their sexuality. The typical image of an asylum seeker rarely gives rise to thoughts about sexual orientation, but Elegy was inspired by the work of photojournalist Bradley Secker, in particular a series of images named Iraq's Unwanted. From Turkey, where he is based, Secker says the series sought to convey "the reality of life in Iraq after the US-led invasion for minorities, and the fact that it clearly wasn't better than it was before for them. The images were trying to show their lives of hiding, their waiting, and total uncertainty of those that escaped the death squads."

UK writer and director Douglas Rintoul discovered the images and was stunned. "I was shocked that a country that we had 'liberated' showed more intolerance towards its minorities than it had under Saddam Hussein. This combined with a number of reports detailing the horrific injustice LGBTI asylum seekers were experiencing when they reached the UK compelled me to make Elegy."

John Kachoyan is directing the first Australian production of acclaimed UK play Elegy. Photo: Eddie Jim

It's not illegal to be gay in Iraq, and before the war there was a healthy gay scene. "It was tolerated," says Rintoul. "But the conservative Islamic forces that won power were unwilling to tolerate Western values, and homosexuality became wrongly linked with that. LGBTI people became easy and popular targets. Many are kidnapped, tortured and killed.

"ISIS have been grabbing news headlines more recently, with their unbelievable brutality towards LGBTs and wider humanity," says Secker. "[But] many people seem to have forgotten that militias in Iraq slaughtered hundreds of men they perceived to be gay after the fall of Saddam." Secker shot Iraq's Unwanted in Syria in 2010 – many of the gay men he captured on film have since been displaced a second time.

Elegy deals with the unthinkable horrors queer asylum seekers are fleeing, but it is also a love story; the figure at its centre is defined by much more than his refugee status, and in fact doesn't define himself as one. Such complexities of identity are compounded by the fact that "there is no word for homosexual in the Arabic language and many men who have sex with men don't necessarily identify in the same way we do."

All of Elegy's makers seem wary of what Kachoyan calls "well-meaning white people's theatre." The work draws on actual interviews, giving it "a little bit more of a claim to authenticity," he says.

But Rintoul notes how important it is to speak about, rather than for, these real individuals.

In its early stages the monologue was written in the first person, which felt "uncomfortable and untruthful," says Rintoul. "I remember the moment when we put the text into the third person. 'He'. A great barrier was removed and the piece became a collective imagining, a piece of storytelling."

He's directed three productions of the piece, and in every case has to remind his actors to dial back the theatricality. "Actors are naturally pulled towards the emotion of a piece. This is their language. I would constantly pull them back, away from sitting in the emotional centre of the experiences. We would listen to recording of refugees talking about their experiences and, in the same way we ourselves talk about the distressing events of our own lives, they spoke very simply about their experiences."

Kachoyan has tried to retain that unadorned aesthetic. "We thought we might Australian-ise it, or make it a story that wasn't about lorries and border crossings in Europe but about boats and sinkings. But Nick Simpson-Deeks plays the man talking to us and he essentially just tells us a story, so for me the show became about the simplicity of that storytelling. He's not pretending to be Iraqi or putting on an accent or anything like that."

Elegy opens at Gasworks Arts Park on January 19 gasworksartspark.org.au; an exhibition of Douglas Secker's photography will accompany the production.

PALESTINE - GENOCIDE AND ETHNIC CLEANSING BY ISRAEL

Palestine is in a situation in which it is being destroyed by Israel by what is called either ethnic cleansing or genocide, some definitions of which appear below.

It doesn't really matter what it is called, the result as perpetrated by Israel is that more and more Palestinians are dying every day and more and more of Palestine is being occupied by Israel as it creeps towards total occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by concentration camp methods - starvation, demoralisation, brutal occupation and other methods which can only be described as annihilation.

The worst aspect of what Israel is doing is that it is supported through thick and thin by the USA, by the EU, by the UK and by other countries around the world where the cristian zionists are as fanatical as - or even more fanatical than jewish zionists.

The outcome is genocide/ethnic cleansing by so many of the world's "democracies".

----------------------------------------------------

Defining Genocide - from infoplease:

by Borgna Brunner

genocide: from the Greek genos, meaning race; and the Latin suffix -cidium, meaning killing Related Links Encyclopedia:   Genocide   Holocaust Timeline:   The Holocaust   (1933–1945) The United Nations Treaty Collection The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

After learning the extent of Nazi atrocities against the Jews in World War II, Winston Churchill called it "a crime that has no name." Despite history's numerous precedents, the word genocide did not exist until legal scholar Raphael Lemkin originated the term in 1943. As as an internationally sanctioned, legal definition, genocide was not accepted until 1951.

Naming the Crime

As a consequence of the Nuremberg trials, in which top Nazi leaders were tried for "crimes against humanity," the United Nations drew up a treaty defining and criminalizing genocide. Called The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, it was adopted by the General Assembly on December 9, 1948, and came into effect on January 12, 1951.

The U.N. Treaty

The treaty defines genocide as the destruction of "a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group." Whereas the Nuremberg trials were conducted by an international military tribunal and specified that "crimes against humanity" related to war crimes, the 1951 U.N. Treaty encompasses war and peace:
Article I
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ethnic cleansing - from Encyclopaedia Brittanica

War crime

Written by: George J. Andreopoulos

Ethnic cleansing, the attempt to create ethnically homogeneous geographic areas through the deportation or forcible displacement of persons belonging to particular ethnic groups. Ethnic cleansing sometimes involves the removal of all physical vestiges of the targeted group through the destruction of monuments, cemeteries, and houses of worship.

The term ethnic cleansing, a literal translation of the Serbo-Croatian phrase etnicko ciscenje, was widely employed in the 1990s (though the term first appeared earlier) to describe the brutal treatment of various civilian groups in the conflicts that erupted upon the disintegration of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. These groups included Bosniacs (Bosnian Muslims) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbs in the Krajina region of Croatia, and ethnic Albanians and later Serbs in the Serbian province of Kosovo. The term also has been attached to the treatment by Indonesian militants of the people of East Timor, many of whom were killed or forced to abandon their homes after citizens there voted in favour of independence in 1999, and to the plight of Chechens who fled Grozny and other areas of Chechnya following Russian military operations against Chechen separatists during the 1990s. According to a report issued by the United Nations (UN) secretary-general, the frequent occurrence of ethnic cleansing in the 1990s was attributable to the nature of contemporary armed conflicts, in which

civilian casualties and the destruction of civilian infrastructure are not simply by-products of war, but the consequence of the deliberate targeting of non-combatants…. [I]n many conflicts, belligerents target civilians in order to expel or eradicate segments of the population, or for the purpose of hastening military surrender.

Ethnic cleansing as a concept has generated considerable controversy. Some critics see little difference between it and genocide. Defenders, however, argue that ethnic cleansing and genocide can be distinguished by the intent of the perpetrator: whereas the primary goal of genocide is the destruction of an ethnic, racial, or religious group, the main purpose of ethnic cleansing is the establishment of ethnically homogeneous lands, which may be achieved by any of a number of methods including genocide.

 

 

Another major controversy concerns the question of whether or not ethnic cleansing originated in the 20th century. Some scholars have pointed to the forced resettlement of millions of people by the Assyrians in the 9th and 7th centuries bc as perhaps the first cases of ethnic cleansing. Among other examples cited are the mass execution of Danes by the English in 1002, attempts by the Czechs to rid their territories of Germans in the Middle Ages, the expulsion of Jews from Spain in the 15th century, and the forced displacement of Native Americans by white settlers in North America in the 18th and 19th centuries. Others argue that ethnic cleansing, unlike earlier acts of forced resettlement, is the result of certain uniquely 20th-century developments, such as the rise of powerful nation-states fueled by nationalist and pseudoscientific racist ideologies in conjunction with the spread of advanced technology and communications. Examples of ethnic cleansing understood in this sense include the Armenian massacres by the Turks in 1915–16, the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews in the 1930s and ’40s, the expulsion of Germans from Polish and Czechoslovak territory after World War II, the Soviet Union’s deportation of certain ethnic minorities from the Caucasus and Crimea during the 1940s, and the forced migrations and mass killings in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s. In many of these campaigns, women were targeted for particularly brutal treatment—including systematic rape and enslavement—in part because they were viewed by perpetrators as the “carriers,” biologically and culturally, of the next generation of their nations. Because many men in victimized populations left their families and communities to join resistance groups once violence began, women and children were often defenseless.

 

 

The precise legal definition of ethnic cleansing has been the subject of intense scrutiny within various international bodies, including the UN, the two ad hoc international tribunals created in the 1990s to prosecute violations of international humanitarian law in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda (the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia [ICTY] and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda [ICTR], respectively), and the International Criminal Court (ICC), which began sittings in 2002. In 1992, in reference to the hostilities in Yugoslavia, the UN General Assembly declared ethnic cleansing to be “a form of genocide,” and in the following year the Security Council, citing widespread and flagrant violations of international humanitarian law within the territory of the former Yugoslavia, established a tribunal to investigate allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including ethnic cleansing. In its examination of the capture of the town of Kozarac by Bosnian Serbs, the ICTY described the ethnic cleansing that took place there as the process of rounding up and driving “out of the area on foot the entire non-Serb population.” In a subsequent case, the tribunal recognized similarities between acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing, noting that both involve the targeting of individuals because of their membership in an ethnic group. The significant difference between the two remains, however: whereas ethnic cleansing aims to force the flight of a particular group, genocide targets the group for physical destruction.

The establishment of the ICC reinforced the links between ethnic cleansing and other offenses such as genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. In its finalized text on the elements of the crimes in the court’s jurisdiction, the Preparatory Commission for the International Criminal Court made clear that ethnic cleansing could constitute all three offenses within the ICC’s jurisdiction. 

 

Genocide, for example, was defined as an act that may include the systematic expulsion of individuals from their homes; the threat of force or coercion to effect the transfer of a targeted group of persons was recognized as an element of crimes against humanity; and the “unlawful deportation and transfer,” as well as the displacement, of civilians were recognized as elements of war crimes.
Despite continuing controversies over its definition, the concept of ethnic cleansing has become firmly anchored within international law. It remains to be seen how mechanisms to prevent and deal with ethnic cleansing will develop and be implemented.

George J. Andreopoulos

BDS IN THE CROSSHAIRS - ARTICLE IN COUNTERPUNCH

Article from CounterPunch  8 January 2016

BDS in the Crosshairs

by Lawrence Davidson

Most readers will know that the United States has served as the patron of Israel for decades. Why has it done so? The commonly given reasons are suspect. It is not because the two countries have overlapping interests. The U.S. seeks stability in the Middle East (mostly by supporting dictators) and Israel is constantly making things unstable (mostly by practicing ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, illegally colonizing conquered lands and launching massive assaults against its neighbors). Nor, as is often claimed, is the alliance based on “shared Western values.” The U.S. long ago outlawed racial, ethnic and religious discrimination in the public sphere. In Israel, religious-based discrimination is the law. The Zionist state’s values in this regard are the opposite of those of the United States.

So why is it that a project that seeks to pressure Israel to be more cognizant in foreign affairs of regional stability, and more democratic and egalitarian in domestic affairs, is now under fire by almost every presidential candidate standing for the 2016 election?

That project in dispute is BDS, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, promoted by civil society throughout the Western world. BDS is directed at Israel due to its illegal colonization of the Occupied Territories and its general apartheid-style discrimination against non-Jews in general and Palestinians in particular.

The Candidates and BDS

With but two exceptions, every presidential candidate in both parties is condemning the BDS Movement. Lets start with the two exceptions. The first exception is the Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who has taken the accurate position that “the United States has encouraged the worst tendencies of the Israeli government.” She has pledged to use both diplomatic and economic means to change Israeli behavior, behavior which she rightly believes is in contravention of international law and violates human rights.

The second exception is the Republican candidate Donald Trump, who recently told a meeting of Jewish Republicans that he didn’t think Israel is serious about peace and that they would have to make greater efforts to achieve it. When he was booed he just shrugged and told the crowd that he did not care if they supported him or not, “I don’t want your money.” Unfortunately, this appears to be the only policy area where Mr. Trump is reasonable.

Jill Stein gets absolutely no media coverage and Donald Trump gets too much. And neither is in the “mainstream” when it comes to American political reactions to BDS. However, the rest of the presidential candidates are. Here is what is coming out of the “mainstream”:

Jeb Bush (Republican), 4 December 2015: “On day one I will work with the next attorney general to stop the BDS movement in the United States, to use whatever resources that exist” to do so.

Ted Cruz (Republican), 28 May 2015: “BDS is premised on a lie and it is anti-Semitism, plain and simple. And we need a president of the United States who will stand up and say if a university in this country boycotts the nation of Israel than that university will forfeit federal taxpayer dollars.”

Marco Rubio (Republican), 3 December 2015: “This [BDS] coalition of the radical left thinks it has discovered a clever, politically correct way to advocate Israel’s destruction. As president, I will call on university presidents, administrators, religious leaders, and professors to speak out with clarity and force on this issue. I will make clear that calling for the destruction of Israel is the same as calling for the death of Jews.”

Hillary Clinton (Democrat), 2 July 2015: In a letter to Haim Saban, who is a staunch supporter of the Zionist state and also among the biggest donors to the Democratic Party, she said, “I know you agree that we need to make countering BDS a priority, I am seeking your advice on how we can work together – across party lines and with a diverse array of voices – to fight back against further attempts to isolate and delegitimize Israel.”

Bernie Sanders (Democrat), 20 October 2015: “Sanders’ fraught encounter with BDS supporters who challenged his defense of Israel at a town hall meeting in Cabot [Vermont] last year was captured on YouTube.” Sanders told them to “shut up.”

The Legitimacy of Boycott

This hostility to the tactic of boycott runs counter to both U.S. legal tradition and the country’s broader historical tradition.

For instance, advocating and practicing BDS can be seen as a constitutionally protected right. It certainly is more obviously protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech than is the use of money to buy elections.
Thus, if Zionist lobbyists can use money to buy support for Israel, why can’t anti-Zionists use their free speech rights to challenge that support? It should be noted that, in this regard, most Americans of voting age think it is the Zionists, and not the anti-Zionists, who have gone too far.

According to a December 2015 Brookings Institute poll, 49% of Democratic voters and 25% of Republican voters think that Israel has too much influence with U.S. politicians. Those supporting BDS in the United States might give some thought as to how to use these numbers to uphold their cause.

Then there is the fact of well-established historical tradition. The war for American Independence was build upon a framework of boycott. In November 1767, England introduced the Townshend Acts, requiring the colonists to pay a tax on a large number of items. The reply to this was both a boycott of British goods by many colonial consumers which was eventually followed by a boycott on the importation of such goods on the part of colonial merchants.

Subsequently, Americans have used the tactic of boycott against:

— (1930s) Goods produced by Nazi Germany
— (1960s and 1970s) California-grown grapes in support of the United Farm Workers


 — (1970s and 1980s) All aspects of the economy and cultural output of South Africa

 — (1980) The Moscow-hosted Olympics of 1980

— Myriad number of boycotts of various companies and products ranging from Nestle (baby formula) to Coca Cola. See the list given by the Ethical Consumer.

The reality is that the tactic of boycott has long been as American as the proverbial apple pie.

Apple pie not withstanding, the legal and historical legitimacy of boycott no longer has much impact on the attitudes of presidential candidates or, for that matter, members of Congress. Nor does the fact that the changes the BDS movement seeks to make in Israeli behavior would be to the benefit of U.S. interests in the Middle East.

Instead what the positions of the candidates seem to indicate is that there will be an almost certain attack on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, coming from the very highest levels of U.S. power, sometime soon after the 2016 elections.

How is it that such a contradiction between national interests and established tradition on the one hand, and imminent government policy on the other can exist? The answer is not difficult to come by. It is just a matter of fact that constitutional rights, historical tradition, and indeed the very interests of the nation, can be overridden by special interest demands. The demands of what George Washington once called “combinations and associations” of “corrupted citizens” who would “betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country” in favor of those of some other “favorite nation.” It is exactly such demands that are now given priority by the politicians in Washington.

This form of corruption will go on as long as the general public does not seem to care that it is happening. And it is sadly clear that the BDS activists alone cannot overcome this indifference. Thus, the politicians can dismiss the Brookings Poll numbers mentioned above. They can shrug and say, So what? As long as that majority does not express their opinion by actively demanding a change in the situation, as long as they are not successfully organized to do so, their opinion cannot compete with the millions of special interest dollars flowing into political campaigns.

In many ways our greatest enemy is our own indifference to the quiet erosion of important aspects of the democratic process. Allowing the attack on BDS only contributes to this disintegration of rights. A combination of localness and ignorance sets us up for this feeling of indifference. However, in the end, there can be no excuse for not paying attention. One morning you will wake up to find that valued rights and traditions are no longer there for you.

Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University in West Chester, PA.

ASYLUM SEEKERS AND THE DEPTHS OF DESPAIR

When I lived in South Africa during the apartheid years I desperately wanted to get myself and my family out of South Africa. I was, in fact, an asylum seeker in the 1970s. The basic difference between my situation and that of current day asylum seekers around the world was that I had a few advantages which were in my favour and so was much luckier than today's hundreds and thousands who are fleeing in desperate circumstances with no advantages other than a desperate desire to get out of their state of persecution and oppression and torture to a country - any country - which will let them in and allow them to have a safe home for themselves and their families.

I was a white, English speaking, qualified professional with other personal advantages in my favour, and therefore able to gain admission into Australia, which, in 1978 seemed such a good place to live after so many years of living in apartheid South Africa with deteriorating circumstances and more political oppression than had ever been seen in that country at that time.

Now we come to apartheid Australia in 2016 where politicians of all sorts forget that modern Australia was forged from "boat people" arriving here very often in desperate circumstances and doing their best to destroy indigenous people and their cultures and take over the country from the dispossessed who are now treated like squatters in their own country.

Then we get the world's horrors where Australians have gone to countries to fight wars which have nothing to do with Australia's security, causing refugees to flee from their countries and try to get to Australia to gain asylum. Those who managed to get close have now been removed to concentration camps set up by Australia in Manus - part of Papua New Guinea - and Nauru - where they are now left with no hope of getting into Australia because the government has determined not to allow them in.

How do you go on living under such circumstances and why is there no outcry from the Australian population?

Man's inhumanity to man or people's inhumanity to people - it is all scandalous and unforgiveable, particularly as the numbers trying to enter Australia are literally miniscule in relation to what is happening with asylum seekers in other countries.

It makes one embarrassed to actually be a citizen of this country with its disgusting behaviour and cruelty to fellow human beings.

AGED CARE FACILITIES IN THE NEWS

Aged care facilities are in the news because many are privately owned, are making vast profits,and providing reduced services with less staff and less support.

My partner is 93 and I am 89. We are very fortunate. We own our home and our illnesses at our advanced years have not required us to be hospitalised for any length of time, despite the seriousness of some of the problems.

We do not own a car and are still able to do most things on our own without requiring much assistance, although a very good friend who has a car helps us with shopping twice a week to do the heavy shopping.

We are determined to stay out of those institutions till the end as far as is humanly possible.

Everybody reading about some of what goes on in some of these institutions would be scared out of their wits at the thought of ending their days in one of them or having to be incarcerated in them at all.

We have been fortunate with our health care providers and also with our health in general and we anticipate continuing to help each other as long as possible without being institutionalised.

No doubt many aged care facilities are excellent with outstanding services, but publicity about some rogue operators perpetrating appalling control does not inspire confidence.

We hope to be able to talk about the issue until a happier outcome is achieved for all requiring aged care in an ever ageing population.

FEED-IN-TARIFF - BETRAYAL BY A SO-CALLED LABOR GOVERNMENT

As long as governments in Australia continue to support the coal industry, so much longer will it take to wean everybody off coal-fired generating plants and on to environment friendly renewable energy producers, such as wind energy, solar energy and other alternative energy generating systems.

The smoking lobby has been very successful for the last 100 years and more in trying to prevent governments advising populations of the deleterious health hazards of smoking.

The coal lobby has either learnt from the smoking lobby or vice versa and between them they have continued endangering lives and the health of large population groups.

The latest disaster on the renewable energy front is the secret and secretive decrease of the feed-in-tariff available to those who have alternative energy systems such as people with solar panels on their roof tops. The tariff, low as it was at 6.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, has been reduced to 5 cents and we can only assume that the coal lobby has got at the Victorian State Labor government to induce them to make this reduction.

When solar panels were first introduced into Victoria about 10 to 15 years ago, feed-in-tariffs apparently ranged to up to 60 cents - now in 2016 dropping to 5 cents.

FROM RENEWENERGY:

Victoria solar feed-in tariff to be slashed to 5c/kWh in 2016

By Sophie Vorrath on 25 August 2015

One Step Off The Grid

Less than a week after the Victorian Andrews government promised to fight network discrimination against rooftop solar households, the state’s Essential Services Commission has confirmed it will slash the feed-in tariff for solar power exported to the grid to 5c/kWh.

The ESC said in a statement on Monday that it has decided to set the minimum rate for purchases of small renewable energy generation electricity at 5 cents per kilowatt hour, starting January 2016.




It said that it had come to this price by weighing up the marginal cost of the equivalent amount of electricity that would otherwise need to be purchased from central generators, as well as “the locational value of electricity produced close to the final consumers compared to relatively distant central generators.”

The ESC said the energy value of PV electricity had been calculated as a weighted average of the forecast spot market prices for Victoria for each half-hour period of 2016, as prepared by ACIL Allen Consulting.

Ironically, the Commission also said part of its decision to go with the lower 5 cent rate, down from the previous 6.2c/kWh rate, was due to a lower forecast wholesale market price of electricity, particularly during daylight hours when PV electricity was being generated.

The commission said it did not take into account any environment or network benefits of rooftop solar, because of a “lack of evidence”. The decision was panned by the solar industry, who say the fair value of solar should be at least twice as much, if not equivalent to the full retail rate.

“This decision delivers a transfer of wealth from solar PV owners to electricity retailers,” said Australian Solar Council chief John Grimes.

“Solar energy exported to the grid is sold to your neighbors at the full retail rate, often upwards of $0.25 per kilowatt-hour. So paying a solar owner $0.05 cents per kilowatt hour for that exported energy is simply unfair.”

Solar Citizens national director Claire O’Rourke said the ESC had got its decision wrong, and was sending a starkly different message to Victorians that the state government, which just last week announced a Renewable Energy Roadmap aimed at achieving a renewable energy target of no less than 20 per cent by 2020 and with the stated goal of promoting rooftop solar uptake, and protecting the rights of existing rooftop solar households.

“The slashing of the feed-in tariff by the ESC is extremely unfair and risks undermining increased renewable energy as part of Victoria’s energy mix,” O’Rourke said in a statement on Tuesday.

“The Victorian government has committed to a review determining what a fair price should be later this year, but this could be too little too late if the ESC feed-in tariff cuts get the green light.

“It’s not proper process to cut the feed-in tariff now, before we know what a fair price for solar fed back into the grid should be.

“Energy Minister (Lily) D’Ambrosio should delay these changes until the results of the upcoming State Government review are available.

“It punishes tens of thousands of households that are likely to lose a large chunk of the already small financial return they receive from providing clean, renewable energy back into the grid.

“This cut will also make it more difficult for the thousands more families in Victoria who want to make the move to solar and enjoy the cost savings on electricity that rooftop solar can bring.”

This article was originally published on RE sister site, One Step Off The Grid. To sign up for the weekly newsletter, click here.

JOURNALISM IN AUSTRALIA

Journalism in Australia has deteriorated over the years as the media has narrowed its ownership and freedom of speech is only what governments and media bosses allow.

This does not mean that journalists have to become sloppy in how they write articles, reports, analyses and other items in papers including reviews of art shows, theatre, performers and performances.

Facts are still facts, even though media bosses try to distort them, but for really downright careless reporting, Steve Dow's "theatre" report about William Kentridge's forthcoming art show "Winterreise" takes some beating for one of its main errors of fact from start to finish.

William Kentridge's father was known around the world for being the leader of Nelson Mandela's defence team in the notorious treason trial which ended with Mandela being incarcerated on Robben Island and mainland South Africa for 27 years.

He was also known as Sydney Kentridge, one of the best and ablest barristers in apartheid South Africa.

Is this FACT so difficult for Steve Dow to establish, knowing how easily one finds out information on the internet?

I think not!

Sydney Kentridge was NOT called Stanley - ever! - unless Steve Dow can prove otherwise.

November 17, 2015 from CounterPunch

From Pol Pot to ISIS: the Blood Never Dried

by John Pilger

Following the ISIS outrages in Beirut and Paris, John Pilger updates this prescient essay on the root causes of terrorism and what we can do about it.

In transmitting President Richard Nixon’s orders for a “massive” bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, “Anything that flies on everything that moves”.  As Barack Obama wages his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and Francois Hollande promises a “merciless” attack on that the rubble of Syria, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger’s murderous honesty.

As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery – including the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields – I am not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again. A telling example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who had much in common with today’s Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). They, too, were ruthless medievalists who began as a small sect. They, too, were the product of an American-made apocalypse, this time in Asia.

According to Pol Pot, his movement had consisted of “fewer than 5,000 poorly armed guerrillas uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty and leaders”. Once Nixon’s and Kissinger’s B-52 bombers had gone to work as part of “Operation Menu”, the west’s ultimate demon could not believe his luck. The Americans dropped the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on rural Cambodia during 1969-73. They leveled village after village, returning to bomb the rubble and corpses. The craters left giant necklaces of carnage, still visible from the air. The terror was unimaginable. A former Khmer Rouge official described how the survivors “froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told… That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over.” A Finnish Government Commission of Inquiry estimated that 600,000 Cambodians died in the ensuing civil war and described the bombing as the “first stage in a decade of genocide”. What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot, their beneficiary, completed. Under their bombs, the Khmer Rouge grew to a formidable army of 200,000.

ISIS has a similar past and present. By most scholarly measure, Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the deaths of at least 700,000 people – in a country that had no history of jihadism. The Kurds had done territorial and political deals; Sunni and Shia had class and sectarian differences, but they were at peace; intermarriage was common. Three years before the invasion, I drove the length of Iraq without fear. On the way I met people proud, above all, to be Iraqis, the heirs of a civilization that seemed, for them, a presence.
Bush and Blair blew all this to bits. Iraq is now a nest of jihadism. Al-Qaeda – like Pol Pot’s “jihadists” – seized the opportunity provided by the onslaught of Shock and Awe and the civil war that followed. “Rebel” Syria offered even greater rewards, with CIA and Gulf state ratlines of weapons, logistics and money running through Turkey. The arrival of foreign recruits was inevitable. A former British ambassador, Oliver Miles, wrote, “The [Cameron] government seems to be following the example of Tony Blair, who ignored consistent advice from the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6 that our Middle East policy – and in particular our Middle East wars – had been a principal driver in the recruitment of Muslims in Britain for terrorism here.”

ISIS is the progeny of those in Washington, London and Paris who, in conspiring to destroy Iraq, Syria and Libya, committed an epic crime against humanity. Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, ISIS are the mutations of a western state terror dispensed by a venal imperial elite undeterred by the consequences of actions taken at great remove in distance and culture. Their culpability is unmentionable in “our” societies, making accomplices of those who suppress this critical truth.

It is 23 years since a holocaust enveloped Iraq, immediately after the first Gulf War, when the US and Britain hijacked the United Nations Security Council and imposed punitive “sanctions” on the Iraqi population – ironically, reinforcing the domestic authority of Saddam Hussein. It was like a medieval siege. Almost everything that sustained a modern state was, in the jargon, “blocked” – from chlorine for making the water supply safe to school pencils, parts for X-ray machines, common painkillers and drugs to combat previously unknown cancers carried in the dust from the southern battlefields contaminated with Depleted Uranium. Just before Christmas 1999, the Department of Trade and Industry in London restricted the export of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever. Kim Howells, parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Blair government, explained why. “The children’s vaccines”, he said, “were capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction”. The British Government could get away with such an outrage because media reporting of Iraq – much of it manipulated by the Foreign Office – blamed Saddam Hussein for everything.

Under a bogus “humanitarian” Oil for Food Programme, $100 was allotted for each Iraqi to live on for a year. This figure had to pay for the entire society’s infrastructure and essential services, such as power and water. “Imagine,” the UN Assistant Secretary General, Hans Von Sponeck, told me, “setting that pittance against the lack of clean water, and the fact that the majority of sick people cannot afford treatment, and the sheer trauma of getting from day to day, and you have a glimpse of the nightmare. And make no mistake, this is deliberate. I have not in the past wanted to use the word genocide, but now it is unavoidable.” Disgusted, Von Sponeck resigned as UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq. His predecessor, Denis Halliday, an equally distinguished senior UN official, had also resigned. “I was instructed,” Halliday said, “to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults.”

A study by the United Nations Children’s Fund, Unicef, found that between 1991 and 1998, the height of the blockade, there were 500,000 “excess” deaths of Iraqi infants under the age of five. An American TV reporter put this to Madeleine Albright, US Ambassador to the United Nations, asking her, “Is the price worth it?” Albright replied, “We think the price is worth it.”

In 2007, the senior British official responsible for the sanctions, Carne Ross, known as “Mr. Iraq”, told a parliamentary selection committee, “[The US and UK governments] effectively denied the entire population a means to live.”  When I interviewed Carne Ross three years later, he was consumed by regret and contrition. “I feel ashamed,” he said. He is today a rare truth-teller of how governments deceive and how a compliant media plays a critical role in disseminating and maintaining the deception. “We would feed [journalists] factoids of sanitised intelligence,” he said, “or we’d freeze them out.” Last year, a not untypical headline in the Guardian read: “Faced with the horror of Isis we must act.” The “we must act” is a ghost risen, a warning of the suppression of informed memory, facts, lessons learned and regrets or shame. The author of the article was Peter Hain, the former Foreign Office minister responsible for Iraq under Blair. In 1998, when Denis Halliday revealed the extent of the suffering in Iraq for which the Blair Government shared primary responsibility, Hain abused him on the BBC’s Newsnight as an “apologist for Saddam”. In 2003, Hain backed Blair’s invasion of stricken Iraq on the basis of transparent lies. At a subsequent Labour Party conference, he dismissed the invasion as a “fringe issue”.

Here was Hain demanding “air strikes, drones, military equipment and other support” for those “facing genocide” in Iraq and Syria. This will further “the imperative of a political solution”. The day Hain’s article appeared, Denis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck happened to be in London and came to visit me. They were not shocked by the lethal hypocrisy of a politician, but lamented the enduring, almost inexplicable absence of intelligent diplomacy in negotiating a semblance of truce. Across the world, from Northern Ireland to Nepal, those regarding each other as terrorists and heretics have faced each other across a table. Why not now in Iraq and Syria? Instead, there is a vapid, almost sociopathic verboseness from Cameron, Hollande, Obama and their “coalition of the willing” as they prescribe more violence delivered from 30,000 feet on places where the blood of previous adventures never dried. They seem to relish their own violence and stupidityso much they want it to overthrow their one potentially valuable ally,  the government in Syria.
This is nothing new, as the following leaked UK-US intelligence file illustrates:

“In order to facilitate the action of liberative [sic] forces… a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals [and] to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria. CIA is prepared, and SIS (MI6) will attempt to mount minor sabotage and coup de main [sic] incidents within Syria, working through contacts with individuals… a necessary degree of fear… frontier and [staged] border clashes [will] provide a pretext for intervention… the CIA and SIS should use… capabilities in both psychological and action fields to augment tension.”

That was written in 1957, although it could have been written yesterday. In the imperial world, nothing essentially changes. In 2013, the former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas revealed that “two years before the Arab spring”, he was told in London that a war on Syria was planned. “I am going to tell you something,” he said in an interview with the French TV channel LPC, “I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria… Britain was organising an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer Minister for Foreign Affairs, if I would like to participate… This operation goes way back. It was prepared, preconceived and planned.”

The only effective opponents of ISIS are accredited demons of the west – Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and now Russia. The obstacle is Turkey, an “ally” and a member of Nato, which has conspired with the CIA, MI6 and the Gulf medievalists to channel support to the Syrian “rebels”, including those now calling themselves ISIS. Supporting Turkey in its long-held ambition for regional dominance by overthrowing the Assad government beckons a major conventional war and the horrific dismemberment of the most ethnically diverse state in the Middle East.

A truce – however difficult to negotiate and achieve – is the only way out of this maze; otherwise, the atrocities in Paris and Beirut will be repeated. Together with a truce, the leading perpetrators and overseers of violence in the Middle East  — the Americans and Europeans – must themselves “de-radicalise” and demonstrate a good faith to alienated Muslim communities everywhere, including those at home. There should be an immediate cessation of all shipments of war materials to Israel and recognition of the State of Palestine. The issue of Palestine is the region’s most festering open wound, and the oft-stated justification for the rise of Islamic extremism. Osama bin Laden made that clear. Palestine also offers hope. Give justice to the Palestinians and you begin to change the world around them.

More than 40 years ago, the Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia unleashed a torrent of suffering from which that country has never recovered. The same is true of the Blair-Bush crime in Iraq, and the Nato and “coalition” crimes in Libya and Syria. With impeccable timing, Henry Kissinger’s latest self-serving tome has been released with its satirical title, “World Order”. In one fawning review, Kissinger is described as a “key shaper of a world order that remained stable for a quarter of a century”. Tell that to the people of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the other victims of his “statecraft”.  Only when “we” recognise the war criminals in our midst and stop denying ourselves the truth will the blood begin to dry.

John Pilger can be reached through his website: www.johnpilger.com

 

More articles by:John Pilger

 

next – Out of the Blue: Hillary’s Sociopathy Revealed in Des Moines,

previous – Kafka in Turkey: Will Tariq Ali and Onur Erem be Prosecuted for Calling Erdogan a “Tinpot Dictator”?,