International Impotence

'If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal'

Emma Goldman

Oh, les Nations Unites. How I am flummoxed by your (un)hallowed halls.

A few years ago while in India, I went to Wagah. This is the point on the India/Pakistan border where every evening at sunset since independence, soldiers from both sides have marched at each other in full military regalia, affecting an extremely threatening goose-step (which, admittedly, occasionally tipped across into Ministry of Silly Walks), opened the gates, closed the gates, opened the gates, closed the gates ad nauseam, and then everyone had a party.

A very astute friend I was travelling with turned to me during this palaver and said, ‘it’s everything I’ve ever learned about international relations conveniently portrayed through the medium of dance’.

I didn’t really know what he meant at the time. I’ve just been repeating the line ever since.

Perhaps I understand a little better now? Who knows. But I’ve been working in Geneva for a month now and the Human Rights Council is almost identical to that summer evening in 2007. Minus the dancing. Which is a shame.

The 21^st Session of the Council has been held over the last few weeks. I’ve been very much in an observer role, as my organisation is officially a monitor, which helps to demystify the UN for anyone who needs to access it for justice, lobbying, or throwing eggs at Syria (I was dangerously, dangerously close to this actually occurring: more on this at a later point).

During these sessions, draft resolutions are discussed by interested states, with a view to their being enshrined in INTERNATIONAL LAW (imagine said in X-Factor bloke’s voice). I covered a really great one on how best to protect journalists in conflict zones, as well as how to prevent states from smushing said journalists if they say anything ‘not in the national interest’ (i.e. calling a spade a spade when the government behave like cretins).

The conversation in these sessions was at point fairly informal (the Austrian and German ambassadors at one point started joking about the latest football match won by Germany); and at other points extremely tense, when thinly veiled insults were thrown from ‘my honourable colleague from Russia’ to ‘my learned friend from the United States’. For ‘honourable’ and ‘learned’, read ‘jackass’ and ‘muncus’.

Russia basically wanted to be able to legally harass journalists. The US said that would be ridiculous. China said that objectivity should be part of the resolution. The UK said that this allusion to neutrality would be used as a pre-requisite for protection of journalists – that is, that if a journalist was *gasp* critical about their government and not wholly neutral about something like the senseless slaughter of a thousand innocent ducklings or summat, they would no longer be entitled to protection under this resolution.

Ultimately, the resolution went through, and the objectivity clause was kept out. There is sense and reason in the world! Many times huzzah.

And then. Oh.

Russia happened again.

They put forward a resolution entitled ‘Using Traditional Values to Promote Human Rights’. It was essentially a two-finger salute to countries which have condemned the incarceration of Pussy Riot. No prizes for guessing which countries though this was a great idea. Don’t get me wrong, I am not an interventionist, and I think that Western states jumping on the universalist bandwagon can be extremely damaging; I also believe that there are traditional customs, beliefs and diversities which must be protected at all costs (for example, Pon Farr. Or is that Vulcan?). But I don’t care who you are or where you’re from: killing a journalist because they say something bad about your government is wrong.

And read in conjunction with Russia’s reservations about the resolution on journalists (‘in Soviet Russia, freedom expresses YOU’), this is kind of what they want to be able to do. Cutting a child’s clitoris out with a blunt piece of glass is NOT OK. Neither are a whole host of other things that might be included in the guise of ‘traditional values’, from child marriage to the killing of gay people, which, insofar as one can belief in objective right and wrong, are objectively wrong.

Anyhoo, this notwithstanding, Russia’s resolution was passed. There is very clear bloc voting going on in the Council, and Latin America, Asia and Africa pretty much thought this was a great idea, outweighing the nay-sayers by around 30 votes.

It’s a good thing the UN can’t enforce a bean’s worth of this resolution.

This does mean, however, that it can’t enforce the protection of journalists either.

The problem is that the traditional values resolution represents a much larger step than the journalists’ resolution. It’s just that (in my opinion) it’s very much a step in the wrong direction. The latter shows rhetorical consensus on the need for the protection of media freedoms, when in reality, it’s much easier for states to keep doing exactly what they’re doing, and given that resolutions aren’t even legally binding, there’s really little incentive for them to change. 

The former, on the other hand, presents really quite a lot of incentive for states to force further repression on whichever groups they see fit, and sadly, this might well be what happens as a result of the vote. They can hardly be prosecuted for contravening a law that doesn’t exist when prosecution for laws that do exist is so utterly flimsy in the first place.

I left the Council that day feeling simultaneously thrilled and devastated that the UN represents little more than a dance between a bunch of really stubborn, wordy, sarcastic peacocks.

Ah, merde. 

The Legacy of the MegaEvent

 (I wanted to title this post ‘The Dark Side of Eurovision’, but considering the misadventures of Humperdinck and Jedward in Baku last week, that seems perhaps a little obvious.)

And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley

Euro 2012. Eurovision 2012. The Olympics 2012. A magnificent spectacle of sportsmanship, fair play, and beautiful people in little shorts (and a few grannies in headscarves if that floats your boat). A chance to show support for your country, have a few beers, paint your face an alluring and slightly terrifying array of red, white and blue, and to admire said beautiful people in little shorts (we all do it). I’m not a sports fan per se but have always rather enjoyed the benign mass hysteria that sporting and musical events offer.

Except that they are no longer benign; a worrying trend has begun across the world in preparation for massive sporting events and the consequential influx of extra millions into countries poorly equipped to deal with such occasions. Azerbaijan and the Ukraine this summer alone have elucidated the fact that a country’s human rights record is not reeeeaaallly considered before ‘awarding’ it the honour of hosting such a spectacle.

In India a few years ago (yes, on my gap yah, get over it), I came across thousands of flyers in Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile, declaring how wonderful it was that the upcoming Olympics were being held in Beijing – ‘finally,’ they cried, ‘China will be forced to answer for their crimes against humanity in Tibet; the eyes of the world upon them will hold them to account.’

Nope. What it really meant was that China had been accepted into the international community once and for all. It was beginning to cost too much not to. And now that China is amongst the world’s largest economies, it is becoming more and more difficult to critique them for even the smallest digression. Recently, a British citizen with severe learning difficulties was executed in China for carrying heroin. Despite the fact that he had been unwittingly trafficked by Eastern European smugglers (which elsewhere in the world, if proven, carries a greatly reduced sentence), and despite his disability (which according to numerous human rights treaties, makes execution of that individual illegal), China carried out the execution. The UK/China convo went something like this:

UK: Um, can we have our bloke back, please?

China: No.

UK: Pretty please?

China: We’ll stop making shit for you.

UK: Ok. We’ll take four millions iPhones, then, please.

The life of just one man would cost too much to fight for; Tibet will never be free.

During the build-up to the Games themselves, Beijing, rather than using the opportunity to increase transparency as promised when awarded the event in 2001, instead extended arbitrary detention periods and arrested anyone who they thought might disrupt the harmonious image of China they wanted the world to see. Journalists, activists and protestors were kept under lock and key.

What were they protesting? The forcible removal of street children and the homeless from their families, for one thing. This ‘beautification’ is a particularly hideous practice and has happened and is happening everywhere from South Africa to Russia to Brazil. It fails to provide for the people it removes, who are often taken without any consideration for their families who might be nearby, without compensation and without adequate protection wherever they end up. It is a quick fix for a problem which is not quickly fixable. It solves none of the issues which result in chronic homelessness and can cause profound psychological distress and more deeply entrenches poverty as those displaced are ostracised and left with nothing.

And Londoners thought that having to use a different tube line was just about the WORST THING EVER.

Brazil is another country on the up, and it has two shiny upcoming events to prove it. The Rio World Cup of 2014 and Olympics of 2016 have provided the impetus for massive and accelerated development. Development! Mass employment and greater living standards for all! Hurrah!

Erm, no. What it means is the forced eviction of hundreds of thousands of the city’s poorest from their homes. The slums of Rio, the favelas, are huge, sprawling, makeshift communities, and are now being razed to the ground to make way for roads and car parks. People are forced out at a moment’s notice, given no compensation or any claim to the land which may have been theirs for hundreds of years, and given no adequate replacement housing. Considering the billions being poured into development and industry, a bit of cash to put a roof over children’s heads doesn’t seem too much to ask.

Another example is Qatar, and its ongoing building projects for the 2020 World Cup, which is resulting in the chronic exploitation of the Bangladeshi workforce, whose passports are taken away on arrival. Who are paid the below the minimum wage, and far below what was promised when they left home. Whose vital remittance money sent home to their families leaves them with nothing to live on. Who are forced into squalid living conditions and treacherously long working hours.

Another example is Sochi, Russia, where the Winter Olympics of 2014 have already resulted in the arrest of journalists writing about Russian violations.

Another is London, during whose Games illegal prostitution and sex trafficking is expected to rise by two thirds.

Another is Saudi Arabia and its refusal to allow women to participate in this year’s Games, despite Afghanistan’s exclusion from the last three Olympics for precisely that reason. No prizes for guessing why women’s rights have fallen by the wayside in this particular example.

And still the international community smiles upon these countries. It is a fixed and insincere smile – these practices do not go totally unnoticed – but a State's ego does not recognise the difference, and even if it does, it doesn’t really care. These emerging super-economies can afford not to. And at the end, all that will be left are a few giant buildings that will jar painfully with the human desolation that surrounds them.

I don’t mean to ruin everyone’s fun (all evidence to the contrary; I do apologise). These events can showcase human achievements in the most positive light; who can forget Tommie Smith’s iconic black salute, or Jesse Owens soundly trouncing every member of Hitler’s Ubermensch? Sport is pure achievement, classless, raceless, and testament to hard work (although I’m fairly sure I’ll never be an Olympic hurdler, come hell or high water). But they come, apparently inevitably, with an unpleasant undercurrent. The world of realpolitik and foreign policy (in my opinion, shorthand for ‘we’re going to ignore everything naughty that so-and-so does because if we have a go they might not let us build our bomb/spaceship/Lord of the Rings theme park next door’) is used to being the centre of attention, and to a certain extent I can appreciate the difficulty of squaring human rights concerns with economic policy, geopolitical alliances and very sensitive international relationships; but I’m personally not sure a singing competition should be included in that already very broad definition. Just sayin’.

PS. Lord of the Rings theme park? Hellooooo Frodo.

PPS. This video says it much better than I ever could; do give it a watch.

Starving for the Cameras.

 Not a lot of lols in this one, I'm afraid. It's just not terribly funny. 

I recently visited the Imperial War Museum to see Shaped By War, the exhibition of Don McCullin’s war photography. The images were earth-shattering. One or two were particularly striking; a shell-shocked marine in Vietnam, eyes wide with horror, trying to unsee what can never be forgotten. A Greek Cypriot woman’s grief in the moment she learns of her husband’s death. But the pictures that stayed with me are the children. A Bangladeshi child screaming with hunger in her mother’s arms, face wet with tears; a starving albino Ethiopian boy, eyes huge with reproach and exhaustion; an abandoned baby in the mud, bawling with loss and terror. In a Beirut mental hospital, a scene of utter bedlam during the massacre of Palestinians by Phalangist Christians, one figure alone caught my eye amidst the chaos; one little girl, naked on the ground in the bottom right of the photograph – hardly the focus – but her face is contorted in a primal scream of confusion.

A ‘biblical famine.’ This was Michael Buerke’s appraisal of the suffering in Ethiopia in 1984. The images flooding out of Africa precipitated a global response, much needed media attention, and a subsequent flood of aid, as did Bob Geldof’s presence and Band Aid. The world declared a lesson learned, and the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS Net) was established in the region to aid efficient prevention of starvation on a massive scale rather than cure; Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) initiatives boomed. The media presence in the area refused to allow the world to forget, and moved unprecedented numbers of people to donate. Governments around the world were held to account; failure to intervene while highly emotive images of dead and dying children were beamed across the globe would have been political suicide. 

Why? Because to see a child starve to death is to see where we as an increasingly global community have failed, and continue to fail. And the pity – and guilt – we feel is infinitely powerful.

But it seems that we have become all too dependent on such images. When the recent 2011 famine in the Horn of Africa loomed – affecting Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia – it took time for even the UN to declare an emergency. FEWS Net had forecast famine as early as November 2010, but it was not until July 2011 – when the journalists arrived – that the UN offered its first tentative aid deliveries to the region. 

Eight months had slipped away before the world took significant action. In this time, famine – defined as such when a terrible 30% of children are acutely malnourished, and 20% of a population is without food – took hold. Not only is the shambolic response ‘criminally wasteful’, according to The Economist, but resulted in the needless deaths of thousands. Children are disproportionately affected; too many died in the interim from starvation, and from diseases their tiny bodies were too weak to fight.  By this point, almost ten million people were in serious danger of death by starvation. It was the pictures of these starving people that caused the well-meaning people in the wealthy West to reach for their chequebook. In and of itself, this is by no means a bad thing.

The problem is that by this point – the point at which children’s stomachs balloon beneath razor-sharp ribs – the damage has already been done. Famine has not been averted, and people have not been protected. Treatment of famine-related illnesses and starvation is expensive, and bringing a severely underweight child out of danger is more costly and difficult than maintaining the condition of a healthy one. Prior to the famine in Niger in 2005, the cost of preventive aid was put at $7 per person. When famine struck, the cost of simply keeping a person alive rose to $23. The media, despite its power to galvanise empathy, too often arrives too late; and donors are unwilling to donate without the guarantee of media coverage, even in the face of official warnings of impending disaster. Perhaps this is misplaced altruism; a picture of a dying child shocks the world into greater action, and therefore more generous donation, than a thousand images of laughing toddlers ever could. Put bluntly, more money can be made by waiting. Our empathy for the starving innocents of the world has worked against them.

Prevention is surely better than cure. But the question becomes one of how to mobilise a population so saturated with images of suffering that only the most terrible of pictures will rouse us from apathy. It is now more apparent than ever to find the answer to this question; another drought is predicted by FEWS Net in the Horn of Africa this summer, and at this moment, renewed fighting between Sudan and South Sudan over oil and land has displaced thousands, leaving them vulnerable to food insecurity. If further human tragedy is to be avoided, DRR must be given adequate time and funding to work.

The world’s food reserves are abundant. Starvation is not a simple consequence of drought and dearth. The same can be said of aid; it is demonstrably and admirably present – but only when the cameras are rolling. In 1997, FEWS Net produced an inquiry simply entitled, ‘What Went Wrong’. The paper demanded that the world answer for its failure to respond quickly enough to save lives in the wake of the Niger drought of the 80s in that killed so many. It asked that we do better next time.

But the next time, and the time after that, and even after that, has come and gone, and still the world has failed to react. A child should not have to wait for a cameraman to turn up before she gets the food she needs to live. Yes, the human suffering angle is potent; yes, it musters support in an undeniably important way. But the causes of such events cannot be swept to one side. Engineers Without Borders, with its awareness of the potentially detrimental appetite for disaster coverage, has come up with this campaign: ‘Sponsor an African Child Spreadsheet’.  Perhaps this is the way forward; increasing awareness of the need for preventive measures. The individual suffering must not be forgotten – but we must not wait until their plight becomes irreversible before we recognise it as real. 

Marine Le Pen: A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

A wee scenario for you.

Oh no! The world needs a new leader!  Dunno what happened to the last one. Got bored. We have to vote for a new one! Now! DO IT!

Here are the illustrious candidates.

A: Associates with crooked politicians, and consults with astrologists.
He's had two mistresses. He also chain smokes and drinks 8 to 10
martinis a day.

B: He was kicked out of office twice, sleeps until noon, used
opium in college and drinks a quart of whiskey every evening.

C: He is a decorated war hero. He's a vegetarian, doesn't smoke, drinks an
occasional beer and never cheated on his wife.

.................................................................

Well, if you chose C, who admittedly sounds like a lovely, if slightly dull bloke, congratulations! You just installed Hitler as head of the WORLD. A is Roosevelt and B is Churchill, two men credited with successfully defending the free world from the fascist onslaught of Nazism. Appearances can be deceiving; I’m not suggesting that superstitious drunken adulterous dropouts are necessarily a good thing, but I am arguing that in the light of the disturbing results of the first round of French presidential elections, the French must delve a little deeper before making a catastrophic mistake.

Sarkophobia is in full swing in Paris. In the last year, his presidency has been a series of political mini-deaths; in the midst of a swathe of publicity for austerity measures, it emerged that he was spending £10,000 a day on food in the presidential palace, and kept an impressive (overcompensating for something, Nick?) 120 cars. His son, a DJ, was kitted out with bodyguards worth £150,000 a year. The average Jean-Pierre is, understandably , un peu pissed off.Sarkozy won only 27% of the vote, which is quite a feat; no other incumbent has failed to win this round of elections since 1965. Merde.

The real kick dans la derriere, however, is the fact that Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front, won 18% of the vote. This is the largest win for a right-wing party since the collapse of European fascism. On some level, she is a runaway success story. In 2002, her father, from whom she (cough) inherited the party, won 17% of French votes. A mass protest ensued against his plainly racist, xenophobic, homophobic views. She has turned much of that around; rather than launch a protest, most people have shrugged Frenchly (‘Baaaaah, vraiment?’) at the inevitable, and opened another bottle of Cognac. This is a woman who compared Muslims praying in the streets of Paris to Nazi occupation. How times have changed.

It is yet another example of a creeping and sinister nationalism pervading various Western states. White supremacist movements in the US have swelled in number in recent years; a documentary by Al Jazeera showed an elderly member of a neo-Nazi group shouting ‘No more n*****s, P***s, Jews!’ (If you don’t know what the starred words mean, bless your innocent cotton socks) before the rest of his group suggested a gentler tactic – ‘Jobs for whites! America for the whites! F**k off where you came from!’ (yes, job well done, there, much less offensive). It exemplified the way that racist groups have identified popular concerns – unemployment, immigration, global terrorism – and in this breeding ground of xenophobia have articulated racial agendas through the appropriation of political language to garner support. The same documentary spoke to the founder of one such group; he spoke eloquently of socio-economic concerns over the marginalisation of poor American whites. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see how this party line might appeal to a pretty wide demographic. He then also went off on a rant about how Obama can’t be American because he’s black – appealing to probably a far smaller number of people, but still very much part of this particular ontology.

The political grievances that such people give voice to publicly are part of their appeal. People are struggling. And given today’s political climate, what with current fears of radical Islamists being as they are, ‘foreigners’ make useful political scapegoats, if you are that way inclined. Sound familiar? Oh, yes – Hitler again. While she may have presented herself as the friendly face of French nationalism, the agenda has not changed. Young (ish), blonde, attractive, well-dressed, she makes a welcome change from the figures we usually associate with fascism (scary, shouting, black-shirted killers). And this is reflected in her electorate; a staggering 26% of young people, aged 18-24 are expected to vote for her. The young ‘don’t seem to smell sulphur and swastikas’ when they see her, says the Guardian; ‘they just see a fellow outsider.’ An outsider who is promising them reform, jobs, justice and national pride, and offering them people to blame for what has gone before. Ummm, yes, that sounds like Hitler again.

Such beliefs aren’t limited to the US; just last week, two pensioners in Lewisham protesting against a fascist rally were set upon by neo-Nazi thugs, and hospitalised. The broad appeal and danger of the far-right cannot be underestimated. In Norway, self-confessed racist Anders Breivik killed 77 people in what he calls a ‘legitimate’ fight against multiculturalism. Debate rages over whether he is clinically insane or not. My feeling is that he is not. A crime of terror is a crime of terror. We don’t seem to question the sanity of suicide bombers; he is demonstrably a violent and hideous individual, but his actions are rooted in issues of what he feels to be socio-economic ‘justice’, and nationalism.


The adage goes that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, chances are that, y’know, it’s a duck. But it’s no longer that simple. Le Pen, and fellow right-wing adherents and advocates, are increasingly shrouding their offensive bigotry in language that can be attached to powerful and important political concerns. Yes, unemployment must be addressed; yes, Islamic militancy is something we must keep a beady eye on; but attributing these problems to anyone ‘not like us’ is a dangerous precedent to set. Stirring up racial hatred to win votes is never right. Neither is apportioning blame where none exists. Europe took a real bashing the last time that happened. Let’s hope this is just another chapter in evolution of democratic multiculturalism and not its demise.

'East Timor...Who?

'Pol Pot killed 1.7 million people. We can't even deal with that. We think, if somebody kills someone, that's murder, you go to prison. You kill ten people, you go to Texas, they hit you with a brick, that's what they do. Somebody who's killed a hundred thousand people, we're almost going, 'Well done, well done. You killed a hundred thousand people? You must get up very early in the morning. I can't even get down the gym.''

Eddie Izzard

Well done, indeed. 

A few weeks ago I was teetering on the brink of upping sticks and exchanging my degree for a job waiting tables on a beach in Magaluf. Which might sound pretty tempting, if you don’t consider that I don’t like beaches (too sandy), clubs (I dance like a tool) and I’m a terrible waitress (I drop things). I felt utterly deflated, and it wasn’t just because I forgot to bring my Toffee Hoops Muller Corner in for lunch (although that was genuinely distressing, tbh). I discovered some pretty unpleasant stuff about our dear, democratic Great Britain and, actually, felt a bit betrayed by what was being done in the name of all British people. 

How many of you could place East Timor on a map? How about the hemisphere? Well, it’s a tiny island a stone’s throw from the northern tip of Australia, and in 1975 the Indonesian government invaded, unprovoked, and proceeded to massacre a third of the population. The Timorese people, having finally declared independence from their Portuguese colonial rulers, were invaded just nine days later by General Suharto of Indonesia, who, according to Noam Chomsky, was unhappy about a small, newly independent democracy setting an example in the largely autocratic South East Asia.

What followed over the next two decades was a bloodbath. 200,000 Timorese died during the occupation, caught up in the crossfire, deliberately targeted, or from starvation and disease. Sound like a tiny number? Well, yes, if you think of the 20 million killed by Stalin or the staggering potential 78 million killed by Mao Zedong. But bear in mind the population of East Timor was only 700,000 at the time of the invasion. Proportionally speaking, it was one of the worst genocides of all time.

This in itself was enough to make me want to crawl into the gap between my sofa cushions and cry. The thing is, the Cambodian genocide got underway in the same year. The eyes of the world were on Pol Pot – as well they should have been; the cruelty of Tuol Sleng and The Killing Fields was evil beyond belief, and the western media, rightly, would not let the world forget it. In the meantime, though, hardly a world away, the Timorese massacre was unfolding and the international community made barely a peep.

Why was this? Did the journalists all get distracted on their way there by the fabulous surf opportunities offered by Oz? Was East Timor just too darn hard to get to?

No. Sadly, the situation in East Timor was not covered as a salient issue in the media because the governments of the US and the UK – the world’s great champions of democracy – were actively funding the Indonesian army. They were handing over (for quite a hefty sum, let’s not forget) the weapons with which Suharto was slaughtering the Timorese in their thousands. Indiscriminate attacks on civilians villages – which happened, according to multiple eyewitnesses – with alarming regularity – were carried out by Hawk ground attack aircraft, supplied by the UK. Such things continued well into the 1990s – the Indonesian government began taking out its own citizens at various peaceful pro-democracy protests in Aceh and Jakarta. UN and UK arms trade documents show hundreds of millions of pounds worth of arms being shipped out to Indonesia during this period. In the latter years of Tony Blair’s administration, he condemned in the strongest terms the Taliban regime and their human rights violations and support of international terrorism: 'No art or culture is permitted,' he bemoans. 'All other faiths, all other interpretations of Islam are ruthlessly suppressed. Those who practice their faith are imprisoned. Women are treated in a way almost too revolting to be credible. First driven out of university; girls not allowed to go to school; no legal rights; unable to go out of doors without a man. Those that disobey are stoned.'

Yes. Condemn the Taliban. They’re awful. Well done, Tony, gold star to you. But don’t sell weapons to an equivalently brutal regime at the same time. Frankly, makes you look a bit of a dick. An undercover journalist posed as an Indonesian general wanting weapons from a UK arms dealer (in Oxford, of all places); the dealer himself was filmed saying words to the effect of, 'Well, I can't just send over the whole tank, but what I can do is send the body and the gun bit separately, along with some nice instructions, and you can set it up yourself, easy peasy. Tony told me that was cool.' 

The governments of the US and UK throughout the invasion and all the way up to Blair defended the UK’s support of the Indonesian regime by invoking Article 51 of the UN Charter: ‘Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations’. Lovely. Just one problem. INDONESIA WAS THE AGGRESSOR. They had no right to self-defence as they had not been attacked. What they did was entirely illegal.

Blair also manifestly failed to mention an equally significant portion of the same document, Article 1.2, which calls for the ‘respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples’. The principles which have been invoked time and time again to justify intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan and most recently Libya and Syria, were in this case used to defend the aggressor, and the self-determination principle given to the Libyans and Iraqis (theoretically, if nothing else) was demonstrably denied to the East Timorese.

An ‘illegitimate’ arms sale (I would say ‘illegal’, but as it stands there are painfully few legal instruments regulating the arms trade) essentially means the sale of weapons to any state which might use them for ‘internal repression or external aggression'. Realistically, though, most suppliers only care about the external aggression bit. Do what you like in your own back garden. Hitler, though, killed people next door. Stupid man.

Many companies get round the issue of ethically dubious sales by making and distributing only components. Or dual-use. So, the nuts and bolts that hold together a tank-mounted machine-gun. Yes, definitely dual-use. Could do with some of those to put together my new Ikea bookshelf. I spoke recently to someone who defended Rolls Royce (the UK’s second largest arms exporter) by saying, ‘But they only make aeroplane engines. That’s not really a weapon.’ HOW DO YOU THINK THE PLANE STAYS IN THE AIR? HOW ELSE DOES THE HELICOPTER HOVER OVER VILLAGES SPRAYING THEM WITH BULLETS? Selling a part of the weapon – especially a crucial part, like an engine, or the bullets – is selling the weapon. It is complicity. The people who developed Zyklon-B are not innocent of the deaths in the gas chambers. Without them, they would have just been, um, chambers. And the Nazis might have had to actually put some effort in to get the job done.

Just last year, British Aerospace (or BAe, the UK’s largest arms supplier) shipped a load of weapons to Bahrain, which had just been reported opening fire on unarmed protestors in an effort to quell the pro-democracy movement of the Arab Spring. And we helped them.

There is a huge albatross around the neck of those like Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT), though. There is no political will whatsoever to limit the power of arms manufacturers. And the reason is a good one (although in my opinion, not good enough); BAe employs 98,200 people, and in 2010 brought into the country profits of $34,609,000. Rolls Royce gives 38,900 people jobs, and its exports were worth $16,794,000 the same year. Companies in the US provide hundreds of thousands of jobs. I am not advocating that we ban the trade in weapons tomorrow and start selling flowers and jam jars full of kind thoughts and rainbows. It would be economically and individually disastrous.  BUT in an ideal world, we would begin a shift towards an economy that is not built upon the suffering of others.

Take slavery – at the height of the slave trade, it was a normal, acceptable and even necessary cog in the machinery of Britain’s imperial economy. It created one in every twenty pounds in circulation in the late 18^th/early 19^th centuries. It was not only the slave trade, but the profits from the sugar cane and cotton plantations of the West Indies and America, that poured vast sums into the coffers of Great Britain. Abolition was fought against, tooth and nail, on the grounds that it would destroy the economy and the empire. Yes, abolition put many out of business. Was that enough of a reason to continue to trade in the lives and bodies of other human beings? Of course not. An international awakening forced us into the realisation that such a practice was hideous. It ended. A huge leap forward for equality and humanity.

The arms trade must go the same way. Profits must be subordinate to human lives. End of.

In a (rather lengthy) nutshell, that is why Magaluf was briefly such a tempting option. Because this seems not only an uphill battle, but one already lost. But I know which side I’d rather be on. Hence why I am here and writing this. And not in Magaluf. 

The White Man's Burden or Colonialist Claptrap?: The KONY 2012 Debate

                                              Take up the White Man’s burden—

                                              And reap his old reward:

                                              The blame of those ye better

                                              The hate of those ye guard—

                                              The cry of hosts ye humour

                                              (Ah slowly) to the light:

                                              "Why brought ye us from bondage,

                                              Our loved Egyptian night?”

                                              Take up the White Man’s burden-

                                              Have done with childish days-

                                              The lightly proffered laurel,

                                              The easy, ungrudged praise.

                                              Comes now, to search your manhood

                                              Through all the thankless years,

                                              Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,

                                              The judgment of your peers!

                                                                   From The White Man's Burden, by Rudyard Kipling,

So. Kony. More specifically, KONY 2012. There can be very few members of the species homo sapiens sapiens who have missed the media onslaught over the past few weeks. I imagine even tiny purple men on Pluto: ‘Jeeesss, Jason Russell really didn’t pick the right time to be flail, tackle out, down a busy motorway, did he? FFS. LOL.’

What has the video achieved? Well, it got 70 million hits in 5 days, something of a record even for this era of super-speed communication; it mobilised hundreds of thousands, and, as the film shows, it turned a political no into a yes. Quite a feat in itself. It has made people care about the plight of the so-called ‘invisible children’, and anything which creates a bit of awareness amongst people almost pathologically inward-looking in their priorities is ok in my book. Russell has explicitly admitted the video oversimplifies the matter for emotional effect – mass mobilisation over political clarity was a very deliberate artistic choice, and by all accounts, it worked. A forum now exists for debate over the issue, and with the recent (and first – take your bloody time, ICC) conviction of the DRC’s Thomas Lubanga for exploitation of child soldiers, the topic has never been more salient.‘A simplistic (or simplified) issue,’ said Al Jazeera, ‘made meaningful by so many people believing it.’

Neither is the critique of the charity’s spending ‘only’ 32% of its profit in the affected area a particularly valid one; unfortunately, you’d be pushed to find an NGO in the world spending over 40% on service delivery, and Oxfam’s service expenditure at one point dropped as low as 17% (not that these low figures are a good thing; ideally every penny would be spent on beneficiary aid and empowerment, but I am being realistic, and to use Invisible Children’s statistics as a basis for panning them isn’t entirely fair). 

But – this is a very big but. Huge. A giant, ethical elephantine but.

But – the entire premise of the video and its campaign has been built on the denial of the agency, personality and political significance of the Ugandan people. Calling the abducted children ‘invisible’ has been met with huge resentment and anger by the people affected; in the northern Ugandan city of Lira, a public screening of the film was abandoned because of the fury it provoked – fury from the very people Russell was purporting to help. They weren't invisible, their families were probably pretty aware of the fact their children were being stolen, and to say otherwise is painfully paternalistic. They were enraged that their suffering had been framed through the eyes of one white bloke and his (admittedly very cute) kid. I have it on good authority (a Human Rights Watch reporter who spent time in the area) that these people are amongst the most laid back, calmest and kindest people he’s come across in his travels. And they rioted. It had been recreated as a western issue; the phrase ‘the white man’s burden’ has been bandied about a fair bit over this matter, and this phrase, taken from a (potentially) satirical poem by Kipling (see above), essentially describes it as the duty of the 'civilised' white man to help the poor suffering ‘savages’. There can be few among those entertaining liberal sensibilities who does not cringe at such verse, satirical or not.

Agitating for western military intervention as the ‘only’ recourse to such a problem merely resurrects this heinous notion. Kony makes a conveniently villainous figurehead for a terrible problem; but the problem itself is not solved by his removal. This is the constant battle of the human right defender, the aid worker, the foreign office diplomat; at what point are the facts twisted, even sacrificed, for the greater good? And how can the greater good be determined when the supposed beneficiaries have not even been consulted about what they want and need? Such a top-down approach to aid and policy is in itself just another neo-colonial assumption.

Kampala is the world capital for child prostitution – its human development statistics are amongst the lowest in the world, the education and health care services are in tatters. Monstrous as Kony is, he has not done this singlehandedly. Infrastructural fractures run far higher; and herein lies the film’s other great flaw – the total failure to even mention Yoweri Museveni, who came to power after Idi Amin’s brutal rule, and was hailed as a great hope for the nation. Since then he has failed to make even the slightest dent in Uganda’s crushing poverty, his own armies have committed some fairly hideous sexual crimes in the DRC in particular and have been given total impunity, and he has repeatedly attempted to impose the death penalty on LGBT individuals. I also hear it is now illegal to break wind publicly in Uganda (Quite how one can impose punishments for this I’m not sure. A lot of ‘he who smelt it dealt it’ accusations going on, I imagine).

Yes, justice must be done – but compressing the incredibly complex geopolitical situation in Uganda and the Great Lakes region as a whole into a half-hour racially patronising polemic is not the way to go about it. While social media has shone a much needed light on the issues, it has not done so in a particularly helpful way. Can the outcome justify the means if those means have patronised and belittled an entire people, depicting them as incapable of helping themselves? Some might argue yes, it can. The people of Lira vehemently disagree. They are the ones who have suffered. We owe them a little more sensitivity.

On a slightly less analytical note; if that doesn’t convince you, though, have a peek at this monstrosity. Nothing could be more painfully indicative of a neo-colonial hero complex – although almost more offensive is the High School Musical setting. And the lyrics. And the costumes. Genuinely vomit-inducingly awful. Actually, if you make it to the end I’ll buy you a beer. I really will. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWACLKaOC08

Assad, YouTube and the Banality of Evil

'I am in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er.'
Macbeth, Act 3

If you’ve missed the goings-on in the Middle East recently, you must have been living under a really spectacularly large and sound-proof rock. Assad is pulverising an increasingly back-footed group of freedom fighters into submission, and doesn’t seem to care how many of his people he tramples along with them. Even more disturbing are the recent reports that the regime is now deliberately targeting children for torture and murder. Perhaps to stop them becoming the next generation of dissidents? Who knows. 

So far, so evil. One of the strangest developments in the year-long uprising so far, though, has been the recent exposure of the emails sent between Assad and his wife, Asma. She’s ever so pretty and refined, has graced the cover of Vogue, was described as ‘the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies’, wears Christian Louboutins, and was born in nice, normal, humble Acton. According to Nicolas Sarkozy, such qualities even served to redeem Assad himself from the label of dictator-du-jour: ‘with a wife as modern as his, he can’t be all bad.’ Of course, a few Manolos do not a liberal make, as made apparent by the frankly bizarre interweb exchange between the couple. As Homs, Mrs Assad’s family home, was shelled to rubble, she shopped online for £26,000 worth of Parisian candlesticks.

The emails have also revealed Assad’s Harley Street cardiologist father-in-law’s advice as to how to quash rumours of human rights abuses. This includes accusing the (admittedly overzealously interventionist) UK of trying to ignite a Syrian genocide.

However, such nepotism and corruption is perhaps to be expected from a man whose regime is the product of a forty year dynasty brokered on the blood of dissenting citizens (in the most recent elections, the story goes that Assad’s aide reported to him, ‘Ninety six per cent voted for you, sir! What more could you want!’ to which Assad replied, ‘Their names and addresses.’).

What is perhaps most chilling is the sheer banality of the evil that Assad seemingly represents. He has, from his iTunes account registered in the US to avoid sanctions, downloaded country and western, and LMFAO. As Ben Macintyre of The Times posited this week, ‘the possibility of Syria’s ruthless leader getting down to Sexy and I Know It is the sort of mental image that can topple tyrannies.’ Think of Mao exhorting the Chinese masses to jump aboard the Vengabus. Pol Pot taunting prisoners with Take on Me. Or Milosevic rocking out to the Spice Girls’ Wannabe. Risible. Frightening.

So, it is not just the fact that Assad enjoys a good Lolcatz picture. It is the fact that he enjoys Lolcatz and orders the torture of Syrian civilians. Bond-villain – incomprehensibly evil and vindictive – no longer. He is suddenly more like us – and for that, less so. For me, one of the strangest facts about Hitler was that he adored animals, particularly his own German Shepherd (what else?), Blondi. So gentle, so hideous. Quite the frightening contradiction.

The couple have allowed us a glimpse of their human sides, and that their humanity can co-exist alongside the murderous crackdown in Syria is unsettling, to say the least. The sheer normality has been unveiled. Suddenly, we – the ordinary, boring, largely benevolent population – find ourselves with something in common with the Assads. Apparently the appeal of Biscuit the sleepwalking dog is universal.

And yet. And yet. The common ground we share is nothing to our differences. No longer a cartoon criminal, Assad is re-fashioned into a human being – and one capable, as only a relative few of our species are, of brutal, state-sanctioned mass murder. How much more evil he becomes for the emergence of such a juxtaposition.

Mr and Mrs Assad: mass murderers and YouTube fans. So near to us but, for that, so very, very far.