Here’s the venerable decorated elephant – tusker as it’s known locally – fronting the procession at this year’s Navam Perahera festival in Colombo. Organized by the Gangaramaya Temple, a local landmark, and held during the February poya (full moon), the event always draws a sizeable and enthusiastic crowd.
Herschel Grynszpan at his first interrogation, one day after he shot the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath at the German embassy in Paris, November 8, 1938
Here is another typically engaging and informative review by historian Timothy Schneider from the pages of The New York Review of Books, this time looking a new set of books broadly looking at Jewish life in Europe during the 1930s as communities across the continent struggled to come to terms with the threat posed by the rise of Hitler and a Nazi Germany.
I learned much from it. For example, the fact that on the eve of World War II, the Jewish population of just two Polish cities, Warsaw and Łódź was larger than the entire Jewish community in Germany. I was also reminded of a few telling details, such as the fact that right up until a few months before the war’s outbreak in September 1939, the Polish military was training young Zionist paramilitaries – principally members of the Irgun – for their departure to Palestine with a view to making much trouble as possible for the British authorities there in the hope of persuading them to accept the creation of a new Jewish state. Or that not so long prior to the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland in autumn 1939 Hitler had proposed to Warsaw an alliance with the goal of invading the Soviet Union. (Poland refused).
As Snyder notes, moreover, to attempt to understand ‘the life and death of European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s is, almost by definition, to engage with [Hannah] Arendt’. Pointing in particular to her seminal work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Snyder notes that Arendt highlighted what he calls ‘the elemental connection between statelessness and mass murder’. In doing so Arendt was also pointing to a central theme of Snyder’s most recent book, Black Earth: The Holocaust As History and Warning. And as he expresses that thesis here with reference to Hitler’s effective annihilation of many of the states occupied by the Nazis during the early states of World War II:
The denial of civil rights to Jews within states was one form of repression. The destruction of states themselves rendered Jews vulnerable as nothing else could. Hitler’s aspiration to rid the earth of Jews could only proceed to completion after the states themselves were destroyed.
Nor is this a purely historical point. When we consider the appalling destruction of minority communities in the ‘destroyed states’ of our time – most notably Iraq and Syria – the continued relevance of this insight becomes all too grimly apparent.
Herschel Grynszpan shot the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris on November 7, 1938. The Nazis claimed that the young man was an agent of the international Jewish conspiracy, and that his act of murder was an early salvo in the “Jewish War” against Germany. In fact, he was a confused and angry teenager who, like thousands of European Jews in late 1938, was unwanted both in Poland, where he was a citizen, and in Germany, which he knew as home. Both Germany and Poland were pursuing policies designed to get rid of Jews, Berlin with deadly but hidden purpose, Warsaw with cynicism and calculation. Anti-Semitism, however, did not unite the two governments but rather ruined their mutual relations. People like Grynszpan were caught in the middle. He was the victim not of German-Polish agreement but of a growing German-Polish conflict.
In Poland in 1938, an authoritarian clique in power had to deal with public anti-Semitism as well as opposition from an anti-Semitic party, the National Democrats, that had never run the state by itself and organized pogroms as a challenge to public order. There were three million Jews in Poland, a tenth of the total population, a third of the urban population. There were about as many Jews in the Polish cities of Warsaw and Łódz as there were in all of Germany, or for that matter in all of Palestine.
In domestic policy the Polish regime copied some of the tactics of the National Democrats, founding a ruling party that did not admit Jews and presenting mass Jewish emigration as a goal of foreign policy. Polish leaders supported the establishment of a state of Israel with the most expansive possible boundaries. In secret the foreign ministry and the ministry of defense supported the right-wing Zionist militants of Betar and Irgun. Young Jewish men were trained on Polish military bases and then sent back to Palestine to make trouble for the British Empire in the hardly hidden hope that the British could be driven out, or at least induced to permit mass emigration of Jews from Poland.
In Germany, Hitler had already made Jews second-class citizens and proclaimed his hatred of them and his intention to eliminate them. The Nazi leadership was far more anti-Semitic than the general population, for whom Jewish matters in general had little salience. Less than 1 percent of the German population was Jewish, and most German Jews would be induced to emigrate by repression and theft. “World Jewry,” the wraith that haunted Hitler’s speeches, was mostly present, even in the Nazi mind, beyond the borders. In 1938 Hitler, Göring, and Ribbentrop confused Polish leaders by proposing to them as common interests a war against the Soviet Union and the deportation of the Jews.
The Poles, though fearful of Soviet power and desirous of reducing their Jewish population, did not see how those two goals could be pursued at the same time. Surely a large-scale continental war would disrupt any plan for Jews to emigrate? The group of Polish “colonels” who ruled the country, though quite cynical after their own fashion, could not begin to anticipate where Hitler’s logic would lead after 1938: toward the mass killing of Jews under the cover of war.
In any event, German policy in 1938 was bringing Jews to Poland rather than drawing them away. After the German annexation of Austria (or Anschluss) in March 1938, some twenty thousand Jews with Polish citizenship living in Austria tried to return to Poland. After humiliating pogroms, Austrian Jews were subjected to a systematic policy of expropriation and forced emigration devised by Adolf Eichmann. As these methods were then applied to German Jews, Polish diplomats feared that the tens of thousands of Polish Jews living in Germany would also seek to return. The foreign ministry decided to exclude Polish Jews abroad from the protection of the Polish state.
Right after the Anschluss, the Polish government demanded that all of its citizens living abroad register with embassies—and in October, right before the deadline, instructed its ambassador in Berlin not to stamp the passports of Jews. The Germans could see where this was headed, and responded by deporting about 17,000 Polish Jews to Poland in late October. Very often these were people whose entire lives had been spent in Germany and whose connection to Poland was quite limited. Grynszpan’s parents, for example, had moved to Germany in 1911, before an independent Poland had been established. Their children had been born in Germany.
Grynszpan’s parents had sent their son, then fifteen years old, to an aunt and uncle in Paris in 1936 to spare him from Nazi repression. By 1938, both his Polish passport and his German visa had expired, and he had been denied legal residency in France. He faced what his biographer Jonathan Kirsch perceptively calls the “existential threat of statelessness.” His aunt and uncle had to hide him in a garret so that he would not be expelled. They shared with him a postcard from his sister, mailed right after the family was deported from Germany to Poland: “Everything was finished for us.”
The young man had some sort of disagreement with his aunt and uncle about how to react to the family tragedy, and left the house in a rage. The next day he bought a gun, took the métro to the German embassy, asked to meet a German diplomat, and shot Ernst vom Rath, the one who agreed to meet him. It was, he confessed to the French police as he allowed himself to be arrested, an act of revenge for the suffering of his family and his people.
Kirsch has a dramatic story, and he tells it well. There is a climax: Hitler and Goebbels seized upon the murder as an occasion for the first national German pogrom, the Kristallnacht of November 9 and 10, 1938. There is the long, slow denouement: Grynszpan, when the Germans later got hold of him, changed his story, and claimed that Rath was his lover. German jurists dutifully added a violation of Paragraph 175, the ban on homosexual intercourse, to the list of the charges against Grynszpan. This of course implicated Rath, whom the Nazis wished to present as a blood martyr, in crimes of a sexual and racial character involving a minor. Kirsch argues that Grynszpan believed that Hitler would not be able to tolerate his testifying about a love affair on the witness stand.
Kirsch’s version (which here follows an earlier book by Gerald Schwab*) credits Grynszpan with an intelligence he did not always display, but this defense had already been suggested to him in France by a lawyer, and he had a long time to consider his strategy. Most likely the crime was political but the defense was calculated. Rumors about a sexual connection between Grynszpan and Rath were current after the shooting but seem unlikely to be true. Kirsch, to his credit, is interested in the purported homosexual relationship only as a possibility to be considered and analyzed in order to clarify what happened.
Bernard Wasserstein has set himself a difficult task in On the Eve, his history of the Jewish Europe of the 1930s: to hold the attention of readers who already know how the story will end. His research is superb, but in an important respect he has written a work of art rather than of social science: he seeks to convey a moment rather than arrive at an explanation. The pertinent epigram is from Simon Dubnow, the founder of modern Jewish historiography: “The historian’s essential creative act is the resurrection of the dead”—which in this case means the murdered. The challenge comes with a double edge if we remember that Dubnow himself is one of those murdered, shot in Riga in 1941 during the Holocaust.
We cannot forget the Holocaust when we read of the Jews of the 1930s, nor does Wasserstein expect any such thing. But we must remember that our knowledge of a Holocaust in 1941 cannot have been shared by Jews in 1938, and more broadly that the meaning of lives cannot be reduced to the motives of the murderers. Wasserstein meets Dubnow’s challenge with a dozen thematic chapters about Jewish ways of life; one of the later ones, on “youth,” is perhaps the most representative and the finest. For young people (such as Grynszpan) formed entirely by the 1930s, this moment was everything they had, all they knew of life. In essays written by Jewish schoolchildren in Poland, Wasserstein finds a haunting collective loneliness.
In earlier sections devoted to Western and Central Europe, Wasserstein calls attention to the absence of children, seeing the smallness of Jewish families as evidence of an individualist “road toward collective oblivion.” This seems to take the demographic doomsaying of the 1930s too seriously. For one thing, as Wasserstein acknowledges a few pages later, Jews had smaller families in Western and Central Europe not because they were in despair about the fate of their people but because they had become bourgeois. Their low fertility rates, low infant mortality, and long lives anticipated the demographic transition of postwar Europe. For another, Jews in the major Jewish homeland, Poland, were still reproducing at a fairly high rate; without emigration the Jewish population grew by about 50,000 a year. And as the Polish origins of the Grynszpan family remind us, in Germany immigration rather than reproduction was the natural source of demographic growth.
The extreme difficulty of movement in the late 1930s thus becomes the theme of the book. After the United States restricted immigration in 1924 and the British limited migration to Palestine in 1936, most Jews knew that their fate, whatever it might be, would come in Europe. Although German and Polish restrictions on citizenship policies toward Jews set the final trap for families like the Grynszpans in 1938, these policies were part of, and in some measure a reaction to, the global constriction of emigration. The Évian Conference of July 1938, on the issue of Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution, had demonstrated that no major country was willing to take the Jews of Germany—and, to Warsaw’s frustration, the far more numerous Jews of Poland were not even discussed. Insofar as Jews in Poland were moving at all, it was from the small towns to the cities. Wasserstein gives excellent descriptions of Jewish urban misery, although much of the misery was, of course, simply urban and not particularly Jewish. Polish peasants, whose unemployment rate was even higher than that of the Jews, were also flooding the cities.
Wasserstein writes of “New Jerusalems,” the cities that Jews considered to be special. In Poland this was Vilna (Wilno in Polish, Vilnius for Lithuanians, whose capital it is today), where the historian Simon Dubnow, among many others, gathered historical and ethnographic materials for YIVO—the Institute for Jewish Research (today in New York). From the neighboring Soviet Union, the other European country with a Jewish population in the millions, Wasserstein chooses Minsk: notable indeed for its Soviet-era Yiddish culture, at least before the Stalinist Great Terror of 1937–1938 and the Holocaust.
Adolf Hitler and the Slovak leader Jozef Tiso, Salzburg, Austria, July 1940
One of Wasserstein’s many achievements is to integrate Soviet Jewish experiences, with all of their radical differences, into a European history. Because the Soviet Union is an integral part of his history, concentration camps do not loom in the future but define the present. There were twice as many Jews in Soviet camps in 1938 as there were people in German camps. The Soviets killed about a hundred times more Jews in the 1930s than did the Germans. For the most part, this was not from any special anti-Jewish animus: Jews were sometimes killed in the USSR for political reasons associated with their being Jewish, as Wasserstein tends to stress, but much more often simply because they seemed to be standing in the way of some larger policy; for example, the deliberate famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1933. Thousands of Soviet Jews were shot by the Soviet secret police as Polish spies in 1938, unlikely though that might seem. This was part of what the Soviets called the “Polish Operation” of the Great Terror, which was particularly bloody in Minsk.
The large number of Jewish victims of Soviet power was mainly a function of the repressive character of the Soviet state at the time. Despite all the bloodletting, the Soviet Union was then the only officially anti-anti-Semitic state in the world, and it assimilated more Jews into its system than any other country had done. Wasserstein points to what he considers an unmistakable sign of this integration: many Jews in the Soviet Union forsook their God. Whereas most Christians in the USSR admitted to their beliefs in the 1937 census, only 10 percent of Jews did.
Wasserstein doesn’t know Polish or Russian. Perhaps as a result his account of the integration of Jews into the two major Slavic cultures can seem a bit more exotic than it actually was; but he does know, aside from German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and French, the languages of his other two “New Jerusalems”: Dutch for Amsterdam and Ladino for Salonika. Each city is presented in impressively credible detail, and the juxtaposition of all four illustrates, about as well as can be done, the multiplicity of the different Jewish cultures in Europe. Wasserstein himself clearly loves languages, and they give him an occasion for brief moments of erudite playfulness in a work whose tone is generally calm and earnest. His confident multilingualism permits an interesting European counterhistory of mass literacy and mass politics. Christian national elites were eager in the first third of the twentieth century to raise up the Christian masses to democracy, socialism, or nationalism by teaching them to read. Male Jews, for the most part, were already literate in a language or two or three. They were bemused or afraid or, sometimes, fascinated by the cultures around them.
The missing chapter is about the Jews who tend most to fascinate us, the writers and the scientists. Leaving them out is the most interesting, and perhaps the most un-Jewish, move that Wasserstein makes. Sigmund Freud figures not as the founder of psychoanalysis but as the author of a self-reflective note about his Jewish identity; Julian Tuwim appears not as the most-read Polish poet but as an example of ambivalent self-regard; György Lukács is not the leading Marxist philosopher of his time but only an admirer of the “foggy” Jewish nationalism of Martin Buber. In a kind of postmodern chivalrous gesture, only the achievements of Jewish feminists get close attention. There is no consideration of the “contributions,” as Wasserstein says with irony, of Jews to European culture. This choice denies the reader any vicarious sense of superiority (“we made the culture and they destroyed it”) or any redeeming access to the uses of adversity (“look what we did despite it all”). With a supple but irresistible force, this insistence on the typical experience and not on exceptional achievement holds the book squarely in the category of social history: a portrait of a people, a collective one.
Wasserstein restores, as well as anyone could, a moment of life. He even begins a kind of reclamation of life from death. The suicides that followed the tragedies of 1938—the Anschluss in Austria, the deportation of Jews from Germany to Poland, and Kristallnacht in Germany—were not only predictable consequences of oppression but rather attempts, at least in some cases, to preserve the shape of a life whose continuation, in the new circumstances, could only corrupt. Yet the suspense can only be maintained for so long; these tragedies, though presented again and again in human terms by Wasserstein, are also general turning points, beginnings of an ending. By the time Wasserstein reaches Grynszpan and his deed in late 1938, in a chapter entitled “In the Cage, Trying to Get Out,” the darkness is falling.
The absorption of Austria into the Third Reich in March 1938 led to a German-Polish-Jewish refugee crisis in October, which in turn led to Grynszpan’s assassination of Rath and to Kristallnacht in November. The Anschluss was also the beginning of the end of the European state system. Hitler, much encouraged by his unexpectedly rapid success, pressed onward toward Czechoslovakia. At Munich in September 1938, the French and British abandoned their Czechoslovak ally, allowing Germany to annex the rim of mountainous territory called the Sudetenland. Hitler, further emboldened, moved in March 1939 to destroy the remaining Czechoslovak state.
The Jews of western Czechoslovakia were absorbed into the Reich along with a “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.” The Jews of the farthest reaches of eastern Czechoslovakia, the region known as Subcarpathian Ruthenia, found themselves under Hungarian rule after Berlin granted Budapest this territory in the First Vienna Arbitrage of 1940. The destruction of Czechoslovakia left these Jews stateless, and Hungary refused to recognize about 20,000 of them as its own citizens. Hungary would expel these people in 1941, and they would become the victims of the first large-scale shooting action of the Holocaust.
In Hitler’s disposition of Czechoslovakia, Slovakia became an independent state, subordinate to the Reich but formally sovereign. As James Mace Ward shows in his finely researched biography, the Slovak leader Monsignor Jozef Tiso understood this new beginning as a chance for Christian, national, and social revolution. The end of Czechoslovakia deprived the Jews of their previous civil status; the new Slovak state denied them equal citizenship and deprived them of property rights. Tiso wanted Slovaks to seize Jewish property and take up Jewish professions, and thus expand the national middle class. The Jews, suitably impoverished, could then be deported to the Reich as laborers, as was arranged in October 1941. Slovak leaders asked, that December, for assurances that Jews sent to Germany would never return. This was superfluous: the endpoint of the deportations was Auschwitz.
In March 1938 the Warsaw government expressed no objection to the annexation of Austria, and in September 1938 it actively supported the partition of Czechoslovakia. After these two easy triumphs, though, Hitler turned again to Poland, and now his tone was far less cordial. The German proposals to the Polish government in late 1938 and early 1939 remained incoherent. There was some vague assurance that Poland could share in the spoils of a German-Polish war against the Soviet Union, as well as some incomprehensible hints of a common solution to the Jewish problem. Far more precise were German demands: that Danzig, then a free city in which Poland had important interests, be ceded to the Reich; and that Poland allow an extraterritorial highway to connect Germany with East Prussia.
Polish leaders understood that even a victory against the Soviet Union alongside Germany would be a defeat, since Poland would surely become a German satellite the moment it became a German place d’armes. For Polish public opinion and to Polish leaders, the German plans for Danzig and the highway were themselves intolerable violations of sovereignty. Poland decided to resist such German demands and risk war. Great Britain and France then endorsed Poland’s independence and offered security guarantees. When the Polish foreign minister visited London in April 1939, he still was hoping to persuade the British to allow Jewish settlement in Palestine. In May the Polish army was still training the Irgun.
Hitler wanted war in 1939, and was not choosy about allies. Although his ultimate goal was, as he had been telling the Poles for years, an attack on the USSR, he was perfectly willing to make an arrangement with Stalin if it served his immediate aims. Thus in the summer of 1939 Hitler changed his basic conception from that of an attack on the Soviet Union with Polish help to an attack on Poland with Soviet help (with the Soviets, of course, to be betrayed later on).
This is where Wasserstein, quite understandably, ends his study: with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, the de facto German-Soviet alliance that doomed Poland. We are shown a photograph of the forlorn delegates at the World Zionist Congress as they hear the news of the arrangement between Hitler and Stalin. As they immediately understood, this meant a German war on Poland and Nazi domination over millions of Jews. It also opened the way to a German attack on the Western European nations of many of the delegates. The session ended early so that the delegates could hurry home; Chaim Weizmann closed the meetings with his prayer that “we shall meet again, alive.”
Poland was quickly defeated by the joint German and Soviet invasions of September 1939. Britain and France provided no meaningful assistance to Poland but did declare war on Hitler’s Germany. Herschel Grynszpan, then still in a French jail awaiting a trial, asked to be able to join the French army. In June 1940 France fell almost as quickly as had Poland. Grynszpan was now hastily evacuated to the south. The French often allowed people in his situation to escape, but Grynszpan, fearing the Germans, wanted to remain in French captivity. He wandered through the south of France, the territories that came to be governed by the collaborationist Vichy regime, searching for a French prison that would take him. Meanwhile German diplomats filed a formal request for his extradition, which the new Vichy authorities quickly granted.
Grynszpan’s position, here as throughout his short life, was both glaringly unusual and yet highly representative. Vichy was eager to rid itself of foreign Jews. Grynszpan was in the worst possible legal position for a Jew in France, lacking both French citizenship and foreign citizenship, since Poland, according to the Germans, had ceased to exist as a state. After his deportation to Germany, where the Nazis failed to arrange a show trial, he was killed, although the precise circumstances of his death, according to Kirsch, are unknown.
We know a good deal, thanks to the careful chronicle of Annette Wieviorka and Michel Laffitte, of the fate of Polish and stateless Jews in Vichy France in general. They were rounded up, often with the help of the French police, dispatched to the holding camp at Drancy outside Paris, and deported to Auschwitz. So despite everything, Grynszpan was in one way typical. He belonged to the largest group of victims. Polish Jews were well over half of those murdered in the Holocaust overall. And Polish Jews were also the largest group of Holocaust victims in France itself. More Polish Jews residing in France were killed than were French Jews. In this sense, the Holocaust in France was a chapter of the Holocaust in Poland, and in the history of statelessness.
Hannah Arendt noticed in her wartime writings and then in her Origins of Totalitarianism the elemental connection between statelessness and mass murder. She observed from France the events of 1938, as Jews were forced back and forth in what Wasserstein calls “refugee tennis.” The denial of civil rights to Jews within states was one form of repression. The destruction of states themselves rendered Jews vulnerable as nothing else could. Hitler’s aspiration to rid the earth of Jews could only proceed to completion after the states themselves were destroyed. Where any vestige of sovereignty remained, as in Vichy France and Slovakia, Jewish policy could change and deportations could cease, as indeed happened in both places in 1943. Where sovereignty was completely removed, Jews had no chance, either at home or abroad. Polish Jews were at greater risk of death than anyone else in German-occupied Poland—but also in Vichy France. Arendt’s point was stronger than she realized herself.
To try to understand the life and death of European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s is, almost by definition, to engage with Arendt. Ward ends his book with a citation of The Origins of Totalitarianism, but Wasserstein misses few opportunities to disagree with her, and Kirsch energetically denies her strange interpretation of the Grynszpan case as a Gestapo conspiracy. And yet the Grynszpan case itself, when considered against the broader setting of the events of 1938, confirms Arendt’s broader point. Grynszpan was not, as the Nazis claimed, a representative of a “Jewish War” declared by a Jewish international conspiracy against Germany; but he and his family were typical victims of a particular tactic of the war against the Jews, the deprivation of citizenship. Several governments acted in the late 1930s to deny Jews citizenship or to destroy states where Jews were citizens. Nazi Germany combined the ambition of eliminating the Jews with the eradication of sovereignty that allowed that ambition to be realized.
Here is a convincing recent thinkpiece from Isabel Hilton, published in Prospect, on the paradoxical role implacable US opposition to Fidel Castro played in helping consolidate and later prop up his dictatorial regime.
“Mishandling the developing world nationalism that was such a pervasive phenomenon of the post-war world was one of the significant errors of US foreign policy. Washington viewed such movements exclusively through the distorting lens of superpower rivalry, casting Moscow as the arch manipulator of every local and regional movement that manifested antipathy to the United States or its interests. It led the US to argue the virtues of democracy while simultaneously propping up right-wing dictatorships from Chile to the Philippines.”
Isabel Hilton, Prospect, 28 December 2016
It was the early 1990s. I was in Havana, on one of several frustrating reporting trips. Cuba then was an unrewarding place for a journalist to visit: the Party elite was all but impossible to meet, and if you succeeded, they spoke in the dead language of the Communist bureaucrat. The result was a notebook full of unusable political sloganising.
To call Cuba’s press operation unhelpful would be to pay it a compliment: accepting a minder was a condition of a journalist’s visa, but minders would vanish for days on end, wasting precious reporting time. Calls to them went unanswered or unreturned, the Cuban press was brain-crushingly uninformative, and blanket state surveillance served as a strong disincentive for ordinary Cubans to speak to foreign journalists.
It was before everybody had mobile phones, so waiting for the minder’s call back entailed long hours in stale hotel rooms. I filled some of those hours watching Fidel Castro on a fuzzy black-and-white TV set. He was reading what seemed to be the world’s longest shopping list.
Cuba was hungry. The Soviet Union had collapsed and had taken with it a cozy trading system that allowed Castro to supply sugar at inflated prices in exchange for pretty much everything that Cuba needed at preferential rates. When it collapsed, Cuba lost around 80 per cent of both imports and exports, and GDP dropped by more than 30 per cent. Fidel was explaining to his people why the shelves were empty and were likely to remain so for some time, a task that took several hours.
The shopping list included, importantly, oil and petrochemicals: bicycles were soon to make their appearance on the streets of Havana, posing a lethal hazard in a city in which the street lighting had gone dark. But Castro’s interminable speech was testament to Cuba’s comprehensive dependency on the Soviet bloc: it included everything from matches to motor parts, powdered milk to wheat; kerosene to medicine, soap to agricultural machinery. Cuba’s neighbourhood supermarket had closed and its credit was no good at any other.
Thus began the “special period” of material hardship that gave hope to optimists in Miami that this time, Fidel Castro’s regime would surely collapse. It was, after all a moment—now rather distant—in which liberal democracies congratulated themselves on their victory in the long struggle against totalitarianism. Commentators were casting around the surviving regimes, speculating on who would be next.
For my friends in Cuba these were hard times. One couple whom I had got to know well had started out as supporters of the revolution and had lived scrupulously by its rules. As young people, they had volunteered in literacy programmes and contributed to the once vibrant cultural life of Havana. Neither had contacts with exiles across the water; none of their family members had sought to escape; they had put their shoulders to the wheel to build the new Cuba. Both were well respected in their professions—one a television director, the other a cultural critic and broadcaster—but they lived in a house so dilapidated that it seemed as though banging the front door might bring it crashing down.
Holding hard currency had been a crime, and although a few special dollar shops had opened up, the stigma of the Miami connection had persisted. Now, though, Cubans with relatives abroad and access to dollars were becoming a new elite. Those who had none were forced to rely on a meagre and intermittent state ration system. In Havana’s hotels, highly trained professionals jostled for shifts carrying luggage for tourists, in the hope of harvesting a few dollars in tips. Young Cuban women could be seen entwined around excited male tourists and public spaces became theatres of prostitution. Havana seemed to be spiralling back to pre-revolutionary days, when vice and organised crime ruled the city.
Yet Castro’s regime did not collapse. Then, as at every other point of crisis in his long reign, Fidel was saved by the unremitting hostility of the United States, giving him a ready scapegoat for Cuba’s domestic privations and an overwhelming argument for resistance. His popular appeal remained embedded in Cuba’s fierce nationalism and the more impatient the US calls for his departure, the firmer his grip.
Much ink has been spilled over the intriguing question of whether it might have been different—whether Fidel was a Communist from the beginning and the Cuban revolution always destined to turn to Moscow. Both Cuban revolutionaries and US Cold Warriors had reason to argue that he was, and, in the absence of available Cuban archives on the subject, the question may never be definitively settled. But it is intriguing to reflect on the possibility that, had the Eisenhower administration played its cards differently, it might have avoided having and spared subsequent administrations five decades of provocation from a Soviet ally 90 miles off its coast, whose example inspired anti-American movements around the world.
There is evidence in support of both positions: the young revolutionary Fidel Castro was not a member of the Cuban Communist Party and his 26 July Movement encompassed a range of political views, bound together by a hatred of President Batista. The Cuban Communist Party strongly disapproved of what they saw as Fidel’s bourgeois adventurism. He overthrew a dictator whom the US had supported for far too long, but perhaps a friendlier reception by Washington would have kept Fidel from turning to Moscow.
The US was in the grip of a ferocious anti-Communism that would produce, among other things, the McCarthy hearings, but it did not seem unremittingly opposed to the Cuban revolution at the beginning. Washington recognised the new order within days and regarded Fidel as more politically moderate than his brother Raul, a misapprehension that persisted for decades.
Richard Nixon, then Eisenhower’s vice-president and himself an enthusiastic Cold Warrior, met Castro in April 1959. He wrote in his memoirs that he had identified Castro in that meeting as a man the US should not do business with, but in this, as in other things, Nixon’s word is unreliable. A memo that he wrote at the time suggests a more sympathetic view.
Nixon was deeply impressed by Castro’s leadership qualities. “The one fact we can be sure of,” he wrote, “is that he has those indefinable qualities which make him a leader of men. Whatever we may think of him he is going to be a great factor in the development of Cuba and very possibly in Latin American affairs generally. He seems to be sincere; he is either incredibly naive about Communism or under Communist discipline—my guess is the former… But because he has the power to lead… we have no choice but at least to try to orient him in the right direction.”
But by March 1960, Eisenhower had decided to try to overthrow Fidel and economic sanctions were imposed. The following year, Fidel declared himself a Marxist-Leninist. The well-known catalogue of CIA-sponsored farce, from exploding cigars to the Bay of Pigs, duly followed. The fact that Castro was—or would become—a dictator was not the point: the US went on installing and supporting dictators throughout the period, so long as they were, to paraphrase the words of diplomat Jeanne Kirkpatrick, some version of “our son-of-a-bitch.” But Castro’s strength lay in not being a US “son-of-a-bitch.” The ideological overlay always came a poor second to his nationalism.
How might it have looked from Castro’s perspective? Fidel clearly benefitted from US animosity as he consolidated his power, eliminating his rivals and growing into the mythologised liberator, a familiar Latin American character. Where does nationalism get its energy and legitimacy, after all, if not from the threats of the hegemon, and what greater excuse could there be for domestic repression than the permanent national emergency of US aggression?
Even if that attitude was not embedded from the start, Fidel had plenty of evidence that the US had little compunction about overthrowing elected governments that tried to assert national against its corporate interests. Fidel’s triumph came only five years after the US-sponsored coup against the elected leader of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, who had had the temerity to propose that the American company United Fruit should pay tax. (Guatemala subsequently suffered three decades of military dictatorship and a protracted civil war that cost tens of thousands of lives.)
Nevertheless, has Washington’s door remained open, Cuba might have normalised. It was the most prosperous country in the region and the one with intimate ties to it giant neighbour. But as time went by, the US did Fidel the further service of focussing its animus increasingly on his person, even more than his professed ideology. In 1996, long after the collapse of the USSR, Bill Clinton signed the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, barring any US president from lifting sanctions on Cuba as long as Fidel was in power. What greater endorsement could they have given him?
Mishandling the developing world nationalism that was such a pervasive phenomenon of the post-war world was one of the significant errors of US foreign policy. Washington viewed such movements exclusively through the distorting lens of superpower rivalry, casting Moscow as the arch manipulator of every local and regional movement that manifested antipathy to the United States or its interests. It led the US to argue the virtues of democracy while simultaneously propping up right-wing dictatorships from Chile to the Philippines.
In the name of fighting Communism, the US entered a series of largely fruitless wars against nationalist movements that peaked in the debacle of Vietnam, and tailed off into Ronald Reagan’s military adventures in Central America. The paradox in Cuba was that US policy created almost exactly what it aimed to destroy—an unremittingly hostile, pro-Soviet and spectacularly long-lived regime, built around the personality of Fidel. Every tightening of the screw on Cuba, every failed assassination plot or invasion attempt burnished Fidel’s credentials as a heroic David against a reactionary and bullying Goliath.
Here’s a short video about an excellent initiative recently launched by a long-standing favourite city of mine. Niech zyie Gdańsk!
Here is my latest piece, a review of some recent books about Sri Lanka published in the Ceylon Today newspaper.
Mark Salter, 29/12/2017
2016 has been a good year for books about Sri Lanka. (Interest disclaimer: Hurst, the publishers in focus here, released my book on the country last year) First up was A Long Watch: War, Captivity and Return in Sri Lanka by Commodore Ajith Boyagoda, as told to Sunila Galappatti, a writer and former Director of the Galle Literary Festival.
As befits a prisoner of war memoir A Long Watch is couched in direct, lucid prose. It tells an extraordinary story. In September 1994, at the height of the civil war, Boyagoda was commanding one of the Sri Lankan Navy’s largest warships, the Sagrewardene. South of Mannar it came under attack by LTTE vessels and eventually sunk. Unlike many of his crew Boyagoda survived the assault, only to be pulled out of the sea with the other survivors and hauled away by LTTE cadres.
The highest-ranking officer ever captured by the Tigers, Boyagoda spent the next eight years in captivity, eventually being released in 2002, as part of a prisoner exchange deal. The majority of the book covers his long years of imprisonment. The picture that emerges is a complex one. Boyagoda makes no bones about his rejection of conventional ‘evil terrorist’ characterizations of the Tigers. He is also at pains to emphasize how fairly he was treated by his jailors, expresses sympathy for the injustices visited on the Tamil population, and even shows empathy for his captors, many of whom were, as he notes, forcefully conscripted by the Tigers in their youth.
As Galappatti has acknowledged elsewhere, telling a story as exceptional and as potentially charged as this one was never going to be an easy task. As a consequence she sticks firmly to a first-person narrative, keeping herself and her opinions firmly in the background. Inevitably, the resulting account has proved controversial. In particular, following its publication accusations that in a war time version of the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ Boyagoda had sold out – even spied for – the Tigers were voiced in a number of quarters.
Certainly, the return to the South in 2002 did not prove easy for Boyagoda: eventually released from the Navy, initially he struggled to relate to his children and family, from whose lives he had been separated for so long. Overall, the account of Boyagoda’s wartime captivity is best read for what it is: one man – albeit a particularly thoughtful, sensitive one’s – experiences, as opposed to what it is not: an objective, critical account of the Sri Lankan conflict.
Next came, Madurika Rasaratnam’s Tamils and the Nation: India and Sri Lanka Compared. An altogether denser, more academic work of comparative political history, Rasaratnam’s book is a magisterial effort to address a central question. Why did India and Sri Lanka’s post-independence evolution follow such hugely differing trajectories with respect to their Tamil populations? Why was it the case, for example, that whereas by the late 1960s, previously independence-oriented political parties such as the ADMK had fully embraced the notion of Tamil Nadu’s place within the wider Indian polity, in Sri Lanka the Sinhala-dominated State’s continuing failure to accommodate Tamil aspirations eventually succeeded in transforming political forces that had vocally advocated independence from Britain and national unity into advocates of Tamil Eelam– and eventually into those, such as the LTTE, with no qualms over the use of violence to achieve that goal?
Not that all was perfect on the western side of the Palk Straits. As Rasaratnam’s book makes clear, for all the Indian National Congress (INC)’s success in accommodating Tamil demands within a broader pan-Indian nationalist framework, the story with respect to another key minority – Muslims – was rather less rosy. In particular, in the lead up to independence Rasaratnam highlights growing antagonism between a nascent Hindu nationalist movement and its Muslim counterpart as a source of – arguably still unresolved – tension within Indian society.
Nonetheless, the overall picture of a nation-in-the-making struggling and in a number of important respects succeeding in accommodating cultural, social and ethno-religious differences is a fascinating one. Not least, as noted above, on account of the vital successes India later achieved with respect both to Tamils and other Southern Dravidian cultures.
What then, of Sri Lanka? Space doesn’t permit a full review of Rasaratnam’s account of Ceylon, and later Sri Lanka’s dealings with its minority communities. At least the post-independence part of the story is well known to students of the civil war, notably pivotal events such as the 1956 Sinhala Only Act and the succession of ultimately failed pacts negotiated between Sinhalese and Tamil political leaders in the 1950s and 1960s.
What needs underscoring here is the lessons this story carries for the Sirisena Government in its efforts to move beyond the post-war morass it inherited from the Rajapaksas. First of these –underscored by Indian experience – is the central importance of a concerted effort to articulate and promote an inclusive national consciousness. An effort, moreover, that needs to go beyond simply devising a new constitutional framework (though undoubtedly it does need to include this).
In other words, while necessary for reaching a ‘political solution’ to the ethnic conflict, devising a new Constitution incorporating a revised framework of devolved governance embodying and even going beyond the 13th Amendment won’t do the trick by itself. What’s needed is a concerted attempt to frame a new national vision in which minorities crucially, Tamils and Muslims are given a central place in the country’s essential self-understanding and political practice.
‘There ain’t no black in the Union Jack’, as British Jamaican poet Benjamin Zepaniah memorably pointed out. And the related question for Sri Lanka is this: can it put the colours excised by Sinha Le supporters back in the national flag in ways that will help make Tamils and Muslims as proud to be Sri Lankan as their Sinhalese compatriots in future?
Mark Salter is author of To End A Civil War: Norway’s Peace Engagement in Sri Lanka (Hurst, London, 2015). His website is at: www.marksalter.org
Syrian Army on the streets of Aleppo, 5 December 2016. Getty
Robert Fisk, iconoclastic as ever: this time on Syria. Some of his argument here – that the rebels in Aleppo include a large number of radical jihadi slamists, that they have killed civilians and committed other heinous crimes during the city’s seige – seem uncontroversial. Even if his contention that reporting of these in international media has been knowingly circumscribed in deference to Western political agendas seems a bit far-fetched.
What’s really missing, however, is any sense of proportion. Syrian forces and their Russian, Iranian and Iraqi Shia militia allies are in possession of over-whelmingly stronger military firepower, and have accordingly been responsible for damage, destruction and killing on a far, far wider scale than anything the ‘insurgents’ have managed. This, moreover, alongside the fact that as a ruling government, the Assad regime has a fundamental duty to protect their country and citizens – not barrel-bomb, gas and shoot them. There is, as Fisk says, more than one truth to tell from Aleppo. But not all stories – as he seems to be implying – carry equal moral or political weight. The main (but not only) story from Aleppo – it seems to me – remains the one encapsulated in the UN Commissioner for Human Right’s contention that there’s evidence suggesting that war crimes may have been committed in Aleppo over the last week.
And no amount of special pleading should be allowed to obscure that grim fact.
Our political masters are in league with the Syrian rebels, and for the same reason as the rebels kidnap their victims – money.
Robert Fisk, Independent, 13 December 2016
Western politicians, “experts” and journalists are going to have to reboot their stories over the next few days now that Bashar al-Assad’s army has retaken control of eastern Aleppo. We’re going to find out if the 250,000 civilians “trapped” in the city were indeed that numerous. We’re going to hear far more about why they were not able to leave when the Syrian government and Russian air force staged their ferocious bombardment of the eastern part of the city.
And we’re going to learn a lot more about the “rebels” whom we in the West – the US, Britain and our head-chopping mates in the Gulf – have been supporting.
They did, after all, include al-Qaeda (alias Jabhat al-Nusra, alias Jabhat Fateh al-Sham), the “folk” – as George W Bush called them – who committed the crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania on 11 September 2001. Remember the War on Terror? Remember the “pure evil” of al-Qaeda. Remember all the warnings from our beloved security services in the UK about how al-Qaeda can still strike terror in London?
Not when the rebels, including al-Qaeda, were bravely defending east Aleppo, we didn’t – because a powerful tale of heroism, democracy and suffering was being woven for us, a narrative of good guys versus bad guys as explosive and dishonest as “weapons of mass destruction”.
Back in the days of Saddam Hussein – when a few of us argued that the illegal invasion of Iraq would lead to catastrophe and untold suffering, and that Tony Blair and George Bush were taking us down the path to perdition – it was incumbent upon us, always, to profess our repugnance of Saddam and his regime. We had to remind readers, constantly, that Saddam was one of the Triple Pillars of the Axis of Evil.
So here goes the usual mantra again, which we must repeat ad nauseam to avoid the usual hate mail and abuse that will today be cast at anyone veering away from the approved and deeply flawed version of the Syrian tragedy.
Yes, Bashar al-Assad has brutally destroyed vast tracts of his cities in his battle against those who wish to overthrow his regime. Yes, that regime has a multitude of sins to its name: torture, executions, secret prisons, the killing of civilians, and – if we include the Syrian militia thugs under nominal control of the regime – a frightening version of ethnic cleansing.
Yes, we should fear for the lives of the courageous doctors of eastern Aleppo and the people for whom they have been caring. Anyone who saw the footage of the young man taken out of the line of refugees fleeing Aleppo last week by the regime’s intelligence men should fear for all those who have not been permitted to cross the government lines. And let’s remember how the UN grimly reported it had been told of 82 civilians “massacred” in their homes in the last 24 hours.
But it’s time to tell the other truth: that many of the “rebels” whom we in the West have been supporting – and which our preposterous Prime Minister Theresa May indirectly blessed when she grovelled to the Gulf head-choppers last week – are among the cruellest and most ruthless of fighters in the Middle East. And while we have been tut-tutting at the frightfulness of Isis during the siege of Mosul (an event all too similar to Aleppo, although you wouldn’t think so from reading our narrative of the story), we have been willfully ignoring the behaviour of the rebels of Aleppo.
Only a few weeks ago, I interviewed one of the very first Muslim families to flee eastern Aleppo during a ceasefire. The father had just been told that his brother was to be executed by the rebels because he crossed the frontline with his wife and son. He condemned the rebels for closing the schools and putting weapons close to hospitals. And he was no pro-regime stooge; he even admired Isis for their good behaviour in the early days of the siege.
Around the same time, Syrian soldiers were privately expressing their belief to me that the Americans would allow Isis to leave Mosul to again attack the regime in Syria. An American general had actually expressed his fear that Iraqi Shiite militiamen might prevent Isis from fleeing across the Iraqi border to Syria.
Well, so it came to pass. In three vast columns of suicide trucks and thousands of armed supporters, Isis has just swarmed across the desert from Mosul in Iraq, and from Raqqa and Deir ez-Zour in eastern Syria to seize the beautiful city of Palmyra all over again.
It is highly instructive to look at our reporting of these two parallel events. Almost every headline today speaks of the “fall” of Aleppo to the Syrian army – when in any other circumstances, we would have surely said that the army had “recaptured” it from the “rebels” – while Isis was reported to have “recaptured” Palmyra when (given their own murderous behaviour) we should surely have announced that the Roman city had “fallen” once more under their grotesque rule.
Words matter. These are the men – our “chaps”, I suppose, if we keep to the current jihadi narrative – who after their first occupation of the city last year beheaded the 82-year-old scholar who tried to protect the Roman treasures and then placed his spectacles back on his decapitated head.
By their own admission, the Russians flew 64 bombing sorties against the Isis attackers outside Palmyra. But given the huge columns of dust thrown up by the Isis convoys, why didn’t the American air force join in the bombardment of their greatest enemy? But no: for some reason, the US satellites and drones and intelligence just didn’t spot them – any more than they did when Isis drove identical convoys of suicide trucks to seize Palmyra when they first took the city in May 2015.
There’s no doubting what a setback Palmyra represents for both the Syrian army and the Russians – however symbolic rather than military. Syrian officers told me in Palmyra earlier this year that Isis would never be allowed to return. There was a Russian military base in the city. Russian aircraft flew overhead. A Russian orchestra had just played in the Roman ruins to celebrate Palmyra’s liberation.
So what happened? Most likely is that the Syrian military simply didn’t have the manpower to defend Palmyra while closing in on eastern Aleppo.
They will have to take Palmyra back – quickly. But for Bashar al-Assad, the end of the Aleppo siege means that Isis, al-Nusra, al-Qaeda and all the other Salafist groups and their allies can no longer claim a base, or create a capital, in the long line of great cities that form the spine of Syria: Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo.
Back to Aleppo. The familiar and now tired political-journalistic narrative is in need of refreshing. The evidence has been clear for some days. After months of condemning the iniquities of the Syrian regime while obscuring the identity and brutality of its opponents in Aleppo, the human rights organisations – sniffing defeat for the rebels – began only a few days ago to spread their criticism to include the defenders of eastern Aleppo.
Take the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. After last week running through its usual – and perfectly understandable – fears for the civilian population of eastern Aleppo and their medical workers, and for civilians subject to government reprisals and for “hundreds of men” who may have gone missing after crossing the frontlines, the UN suddenly expressed other concerns.
“During the last two weeks, Fatah al-Sham Front [in other words, al-Qaeda] and the Abu Amara Battalion are alleged to have abducted and killed an unknown number of civilians who requested the armed groups to leave their neighbourhoods, to spare the lives of civilians…,” it stated.
“We have also received reports that between 30 November and 1 December, armed opposition groups fired on civilians attempting to leave.” Furthermore, “indiscriminate attacks” had been conducted on heavily civilian areas of government-held western as well as ‘rebel’ eastern Aleppo.
I suspect we shall be hearing more of this in the coming days. Next month, we shall also be reading a frightening new book, Merchants of Men, by Italian journalist Loretta Napoleoni, on the funding of the war in Syria. She catalogues kidnapping-for-cash by both government and rebel forces in Syria, but also has harsh words for our own profession of journalism.
Reporters who were kidnapped by armed groups in eastern Syria, she writes, “fell victim to a sort of Hemingway syndrome: war correspondents supporting the insurgency trust the rebels and place their lives in their hands because they are in league with them.” But, “the insurgency is just a variation of criminal jihadism, a modern phenomenon that has only one loyalty: money.”
Is this too harsh on my profession? Are we really “in league” with the rebels?
Certainly our political masters are – and for the same reason as the rebels kidnap their victims: money. Hence the disgrace of Brexit May and her buffoonerie of ministers who last week prostrated themselves to the Sunni autocrats who fund the jihadis of Syria in the hope of winning billions of pounds in post-Brexit arms sales to the Gulf.
In a few hours, the British parliament is to debate the plight of the doctors, nurses, wounded children and civilians of Aleppo and other areas of Syria. The grotesque behaviour of the UK Government has ensured that neither the Syrians nor the Russians will pay the slightest attention to our pitiful wails. That, too, must become part of the story.
President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia at the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize concert in Oslo on Dec. 11. Vegard Grott/European Pressphoto Agency
Here’s a strong appeal to the international community from the US special envoy to the country to help make Colombia’s final peace agreement work in practice. Not least because it’s possibly the most far-reaching such agreement ever to be reached in Latin America – and even, perhaps, beyond the continent.
Bernard Aronson, New York Times, 13 Dec. 2016
OSLO — On Nov. 29, a 6-year-old Colombian girl, Yisely Isarama, was killed by a land mine in Choco Province. The same day, the Colombian Senate voted 75 to 0 to ratify peace accords to end the 52-year war between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC.
In microcosm, the two events encapsulate Colombia’s past and its potential future.
In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech here on Saturday, the president of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, the architect of the peace settlement, called the war “a half-century nightmare.” It claimed 220,000 Colombian lives, most of them civilians’, and drove six million from their homes. In United States population terms, that would translate into 1.3 million dead and 36 million displaced Americans. Colombians year after year are killed or injured by land mines at rates higher than in any country except Afghanistan.
Under the agreement, FARC combatants will disarm and demobilize over 180 days under United Nations supervision. For most Colombians, it will be their first day living in a nation at peace. But the peace settlement, hammered out in Havana after four and a half years of negotiations, and revised following the loss of a plebiscite, aims to do far more than silence the guns, as welcome as the end of the conflict is.
The peace accord sets out to bridge the great historic divide between what President Santos calls “the two Colombias”: the Colombia of developed, modern urban centers and the Colombia of the vast, impoverished interior, where historically there has been little or no government presence and, as a result, little security, justice, rule of law or access to roads, health care and education. That is where the war was fought.
To close this gap, the government has committed itself to a far-reaching program of rural development for the largely peasant population that includes provision of land, titles, credit, roads, and crop substitution programs. To allow arable land to be cultivated safely, land mines must be removed.
The Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, which is monitoring the enforcement of the agreement, reports that half of all negotiated peace settlements fail and the conflict resumes. Those that succeed address not just security, but also the social and economic roots of the war. The institute says Colombia’s agreement addresses root causes more comprehensively than any other negotiated settlement has.
That is no accident. More than in any previous conflict negotiation, Colombia put victims at the center of the process. Victims’ issues were not only on the table; victims themselves were at the table, regularly and often, asserting their rights and concerns. As a result, the agreement stipulates that the worst perpetrators of wartime atrocities — whether guerrillas, paramilitaries, or state actors — must confess their crimes, make reparations and accept sentences that include up to eight years of “restorative justice,” such as removing land mines, that are deemed acceptable to their victims and “effective restrictions on liberty.” Displaced persons must be compensated or returned to their homes and the remains of the disappeared, where possible, identified and returned to loved ones.
To fulfill these and other commitments, the government must create far-reaching programs and policies that will cost billions of dollars and take years to carry out. It must establish a system of transitional justice, a truth commission and investigative and protective units to safeguard the lives of demobilized former combatants and human rights activists.
Colombia will bear the largest burden, but the international community, led by the United States, must continue to help.
The United States has no closer strategic partner in Latin America than Colombia, and our interests in the region are intertwined. Colombian trainers and troops are working today with their American counterparts to help Mexico and Central America’s Northern Triangle countries — El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — combat the drug cartel violence that is fueling refugee flows, largely of unaccompanied minors. If, in turn, Colombia with American assistance can reverse its recent upturn in coca leaf production, it will take pressure off the Northern Triangle’s embattled governments and institutions.
Two decades ago, Colombia was nearly overrun by guerrilla armies, paramilitaries and drug cartels. Colombians, at great sacrifice, fought back, strengthened their democratic institutions, and created today’s opportunity for peace. Colombian leaders and citizens deserve the greatest share of the credit. But steady, sustained bipartisan American support and assistance for 16 years under Plan Colombia made a crucial difference.
If the peace agreement succeeds, Colombia will emerge as the strongest democracy in Latin America, a political and economic model for the region. As in the past, the United States should help Colombia reach that goal with continuing bipartisan support. Passage of President Obama’s request for $450 million in fiscal 2017 for an economic assistance program called Paz (Peace) Colombia would send the hemisphere, where support for Colombia’s peace process is universal, an encouraging signal about American staying power.
In September, at the United Nations General Assembly, Secretary of State John Kerry and his Norwegian counterpart, Borge Brende, secured commitments of $106 million from a coalition of 25 countries to help Colombia clear its land mines by 2021. President Santos showed the group a pamphlet that teaches Colombian children how to avoid land mines on the way to school.
Mr. Santos said he dreamed of the day when such pamphlets would teach Colombian students only science, art, mathematics or poetry, because Colombia would be land-mine free. Helping turn that dream into a reality would be a fitting memorial to Yisely Isarama.
Bernard Aronson, the United States special envoy to the Colombian peace process, was assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs from 1989 to 1993.
‘Destruction’, fourth in a five-painting series, “The Course of Empire”, by American artist Thomas Cole (1836). Via Wikimedia Commons.
Vigorous think piece by one of the authors of the forthcoming ‘Planning from the Future‘ report. Strong on diagnosis of the weaknesses of the current system, even if correspondingly a little weak on positive suggestions/alternatives.
All in all, well worth a read.
Antonio Donini, IRIN News 30 Nov. 2016
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ – Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, circa 1930.
Long before the November 2016 US elections, there were clear signals that multilateralism was in crisis. In fact, Donald Trump’s election is just the continuation of a downward spiral that has been under way for some time.
The most obvious symptom of this trend is the inability of the so-called international community to address armed conflict in any meaningful way. From Afghanistan to Ukraine, from Libya to Yemen, from South Sudan to Syria: the UN Security Council is blocked, and there is no respite in sight for civilians. Many conflicts are now “IHL-free war zones”: international humanitarian law is marginalised and humanitarian principles are jettisoned – whether by state or non-state armed groups. Slaughter, torture, and “surrender or starve” strategies thrive, despite much hand-wringing. Those who do manage to flee war zones do not fare much better.
Well before Trump’s election, the cradle of the Western enlightenment, Europe, had become a flag-bearer for an untrammelled rollback of rights. Many state parties to the 1951 refugee convention have abandoned their legal responsibilities, investing instead in deterrence measures aimed at blocking those seeking refuge from the terror of war zones or from tyrannical regimes. Europe is externalising its borders and pursuing short-sighted and aggressive return policies, undermining refugees in places such as Turkey and the Dadaab camp in Kenya, and making aid to the Sahel and Afghanistan conditional on pushbacks or migrant suppression. Meanwhile, the Global South, including some of its poorest countries, continues to host 86 percent of the global refugee population.
“Donald Trump’s election is just the continuation of a downward spiral”
As the refugee convention looks increasingly tattered, other negotiations on crucial issues have ground to a halt: witness the lack of any concrete intergovernmental consensus since the Paris climate change agreement (which is itself now in peril), including the absence of meaningful outcomes at the three major humanitarian conferences held this past year (the international Red Cross conference in December 2015, the World Humanitarian Summit in May 2016, and the New York summits on refugees and migration in September). Issues are raised, the rhetoric is loud and pompous, but action itself is avoided, or the can just kicked down the road.
More agreements are also falling apart. The erosion of the International Criminal Court and significant hostility to the “Responsibility to Protect” agenda, as well as the general decline of international respect for human rights, may well signal the dawn of a “post-human rights era”, meaning that the enforcement and expansion of human rights standards through binding international law is in decline. Meanwhile, populism, nationalism, and jingoism advance all around Europe, in Russia, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Accompanying these trends is a manifest decline in support for globalisation – and for international norms – coupled with a rise in tensions around growing inequality, as power shifts from West to East.
Under a Trump presidency, these and other “morbid symptoms” are likely to intensify. This might include the United States distancing itself or even withdrawing from the Paris climate change agreement, cuts to UN budgets and other “unfriendly” international agencies, and the slashing of US humanitarian and development aid, particularly to those countries “that hate us”. It could also lead to further disarray in NATO and in the post-Brexit EU, signalling a retreat from established or traditional interstate diplomatic practice. The rise of populism in Europe and despondency vis-à-vis the European project, the spread of anti-politics, and the growth of the Uber economy, as well as narcissistic cults of the individual only compound these symptoms. Echoes of the 1930s perhaps, with an increasingly irrelevant UN following in the steps of the League of Nations?
It is not too early to start reflecting on the possible consequences of rapidly declining multilateralism and its implications for global governance, international law, the refugee regime, war-affected communities, and humanitarian endeavour everywhere. By and large, it does not look good. A few hypotheses on where we are headed:
The functions that “humanitarian” action performs in the international sphere will change, perhaps dramatically. Historically, humanitarian endeavour – in its discourse, norms and practice – has grown in parallel with the expansion of Western economic and cultural power. Humanitarian action’s multiple functions have included acting as a conveyor belt for Western values, lifestyles, and the promotion of the liberal agenda, while making countries safe for capital. If the West is now in retreat, other centres of humanitarian discourse and practice are bound to blossom and grow. Meanwhile, Western humanitarian action is already being press-ganged into the service of containment (Fortress Europe, for example). This process will likely intensify. If so, this will be a major reversal for humanitarianism as we know it. For decades, humanitarian action represented the smiley face of globalisation. It was one of the West’s ways of opening up to the rest of the world. Now, it is much more about closure, about containment, about shutting the door. It is about keeping the bulk of refugees and “survival migrants” away from the ring-fenced citadels of the North.
Caught between the pessimism of reason and the flagging optimism of will, what is the reflective humanitarian to do?
Perhaps the first thing is to stand back from the current crisis, the confusing background noise, these “morbid symptoms”, and ask: how did we get here? What are the forces for change and how do we engage with them?
Organised humanitarianism is stuck in the eternal present and is poorly equipped to adapt to a more complex, insecure, and threatening world.
“Transformational change in the international system only happens in the aftermath of a major shock”
A more narrowly focused “back to basics” humanitarian enterprise – smaller in size, informed solely by the views and needs of the crisis-affected, and focused on saving and protecting lives in the here and now – would not necessarily be a bad thing.
It would perhaps be the best way of nurturing the values and ethos of an enterprise that may be battered, bruised, and often abused but is still often the only available safety net for people in extremis.
In any case, it is past time that organised humanitarianism acknowledged that it is in crisis and came to grips with a possible reform agenda. Ideas for change are already on the table. For example, the “Planning From the Future” report, available this week, offers a diagnosis of what ails the system and a broad outline of what change could look like. (Disclosure: I am one of the authors of the report).
It also underscores that transformational change in the international system only happens in the aftermath of a major shock. Will the combination of the crisis of multilateralism, climate change, ongoing vicious wars, and massive displacement provide such an impetus?
What is certain is that the current humanitarian system, broke, broken or both, won’t serve us well in the new international and political landscape we face. The challenge is to foster one that will.
Pakistani schoolgirls.
Here’s an excellent excerpt from a new book of letters to his son by a senior UAE diplomant. Sane and compassionate, amounting to nothing less than a call for a humanistic revival within Islam. Reccommended.
Published in this month’s issue of Foreign Affairs.
Saif, the elder of my two sons, was born in December 2000. In the summer of 2001, my wife and I brought him with us on a visit to New York City. I remember carrying him around town in a sling on my chest. A few days after we got back home to Dubai, we watched the terrible events of 9/11 unfold on CNN. As it became clear that the attacks had been carried out by jihadist terrorists, I came to feel a new sense of responsibility toward my son, beyond the already intense demands of parenthood. I wanted to open up areas of thought, language, and imagination in order to show him—and to show myself and all my fellow Muslims—that the world offers so much more than the twisted fantasies of extremists. I’ve tried to do this for the past 15 years. The urgency of the task has seemed only to grow, as the world has become ever more enmeshed in a cycle of jihadist violence and Islamophobia.
Today, I am the ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to Russia, and I try to bring to my work an attitude of openness to ideas and possibilities. In that spirit, I have written a series of letters to Saif, with the intention of opening his eyes to some of the questions he is likely to face as he grow ups, and to a range of possible answers.
People listen to music during Eid Mela in Birmingham, England, August 2013. Darren Staples / REUTERS
Alt. Right leader Milo Yiannopoulos
“Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!”
The audience’s Nazi salutes grabbed the headlines, but just listen carefully to self-proclaimed ‘Alt. Right’ leader Richard Spencer’s speech to the 19 November annual conference of The National Policy Institute, held at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington D.C.
It is truly chilling.
Video of an alt-right conference in Washington, D.C., where Trump’s victory was met with cheers and Nazi salutes.
Daniel Lombroso and Yoni Appelbaum, The Atlantic, Nov 21, 2016
“Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!”
That’s how Richard B. Spencer saluted more than 200 attendees on Saturday, gathered at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C., for the annual conference of the National Policy Institute, which describes itself as “an independent organization dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States, and around the world.”
Spencer has popularized the term “alt-right” to describe the movement he leads. Spencer has said his dream is “a new society, an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans,” and has called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing.”
For most of the day, a parade of speakers discussed their ideology in relatively anodyne terms, putting a presentable face on their agenda. But after dinner, when most journalists had already departed, Spencer rose and delivered a speech to his followers dripping with anti-Semitism, and leaving no doubt as to what he actually seeks. He referred to the mainstream media as “Lügenpresse,” a term he said he was borrowing from “the original German”; the Nazis used the word to attack their critics in the press.
“America was until this past generation a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity,” Spencer said. “It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.”
The audience offered cheers, applause, and enthusiastic Nazi salutes.
Here is the video, excerpted from an Atlantic documentary profile of Spencer that will premiere in December 2016.
Leah Varjacques contributed reporting to this story.