Saturday, March 29, 2014

Kharkiv citizens' appeal to the International Community





Published on Mar 24, 2014

          

Kharkiv citizens' appeal to the International Community.


We speak on behalf of nearly two million Kharkiv people. Kharkiv is the second largest city in Ukraine, a hub of culture, education and technology.


As well as the rest of Ukraine our city is a multiethnic and multiconfessional community. Here you can meet people speaking Russian (the most common language in any Eastern Ukrainian city), Ukrainian (it is Ukraine after all), Vietnamese (Kharkiv has its own little Vietnam), Dari (there are a lot of people from Afghanistan as well), Hebrew and Yiddish (a large Jewish community has lived in Kharkiv for a long time), Armenian, Georgian, Uzbek, Tajik, Mandarin, Cantonese, and many other languages.


Our city has Orthodox churches and a Catholic church, a synagogue, a mosque and a pagoda.
And we are proud to have here all this diversity.


Regardless of origin, mother tongue and religion, we tolerate and respect other people's cultures.
There are many Russian people in Kharkiv, Russian by language, origin and culture. However, being of Russian ethnicity is not at all the same as being a national of Russia.


We are Russian speaking nationals of a sovereign and independent state — that is Ukraine. And we are willing to keep it this way.


We do not want to meddle with internal affairs of any country, including Russia, and we see Russian actions within Ukrainian borders as aggression, an unjustified intrusion into our internal affairs.
We love our country. We support Ukrainian national interests. We strive to redevelop our country on principles of democracy and the rule of law. We unequivocally reject xenophobia and fascism of any kind.


These times are not easy for Ukraine.


While we support our newborn democracy, Russia has shown disrespect of a number of international agreements, defied its obligations to protect Ukrainian territorial integrity and dishonorably anschlussed Crimea which is a part of Ukraine.


Such aggression threatens not only our fellow countrymen but fundamental principles of democracy and the international law as well. It is not just some local troubles, it is a challenge to the entire civilized world.


We are asking you to support Ukraine and help us stop the Russian aggression.
We are asking you to support economic sanctions against Russia and boycott any Russian goods.

Martin Luther King once said: "I have a dream". And he changed the world. Now we say: "We have a dream". We want to make our country better.


Please, hear our voices! Ukraine is a European nation and a nation that is united against any foreign intrusion.
And say with us:


NO aggression! NO war!
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Friday, March 28, 2014

Second conference on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons, Nayarit 2014 (4242)

Today the risk of nuclear weapons use is growing globally as a consequence of proliferation, the vulnerability of nuclear command and control networks to cyber-attacks and to human error, and potential access to nuclear weapons by non-state actors, in particular terrorist groups.
http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/disarmament-fora/others/hinw/nayarit-2014/statements

Statements and presentations to the second conference on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons

The Testimony of the Hibakusha
Working session I: From Oslo to Nayarit
Working session II: The challenges of a nuclear weapons detonation to national, regional, and global economic growth and sustainable development
Working session III: The impact of a nuclear weapon on global public health
Working session IV: The risk of a nuclear blast and other effects of a nuclear weapon detonation
General exchange of views
Concluding session
General information
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Today, President Obama announced his proposal for ending the Section 215 Bulk Telephony Metadata Program

DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE
WASHINGTON, DC 20511

March 27, 2014

Statement from DNI Clapper on Ending the Section 215 Bulk Telephony Metadata Program


Today, President Obama announced his proposal for ending the Section 215 Bulk Telephony Metadata Program. The President's proposal will, with the passage of legislation, ensure that we have the information we need to meet our intelligence requirements while protecting civil liberties and privacy and being as transparent as possible.

I look forward to working with our oversight committees to implement the President’s proposal while we continue to focus on the intelligence challenges facing the United States and our allies.

As we implement the reforms announced today, the hardworking men and women of the Intelligence Community will continue – as we always have – to do our part to keep the nation safe.

James R. Clapper, Director of National Intelligence
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Saturday, March 22, 2014

Arab armies: agents of change? Before and after 2011

see all document
http://www.iss.europa.eu/uploads/media/Chaillot_Paper_131_Arab_armies.pdf  

Many aspects of the so-called Arab Spring came as a surprise: the mass demonstrations, the toppling of dictatorships, and indeed the timing. One of the most unexpected aspects, however, was the behaviour of the respective military forces. Regarded until 2011 as being unequivocal supporters of the regimes in power, they were expected to crack down on the demonstrators with an iron fist. Decades of military dictatorships, coups d’état and wars had entrenched the notion of Arab armed forces as agents of coercion, not agents of change.
But only one of the Arab militaries confronted with the massive social dislocation unleashed by the Arab Spring behaved in the expected way, i.e. unequivocally standing by the regime and suppressing the uprisings. The others facilitated regime change either actively or passively, and in Egypt assumed an even more direct role. In all cases, the armed forces were, and remain, the kingmakers, whose support is essential for rulers to hold onto, or accede to, power. But what drives these forces? Why do they choose to act, or not act, under certain political conditions? When do they have the capacity to act, and when is it that they do not?
While these questions are fundamental, they relate to the specific circumstances pertaining to the military in the post-2011 environment: how come the armed forces seem to possess the casting vote between secular and Islamist forces on the road to democracy? More puzzlingly, what is it that these forces stand for in the eyes of the populations in their respective countries – if it was modernity in the 1950s and 1960s, what is it today?
  
FORWORD
 
We all tend to look at new occurrences through old lenses: it is a fact of life.

Old lenses focus on those elements of the picture that appear most familiar but inevitably neglect or ignore those that are less so, thus missing the complexity of the whole picture. When the uprisings in the Arab world began three years ago,


Europeans – and Westerners at large – at first invoked familiar language: the term ‘spring’ echoed 1968 Prague or, further down the road of history, le printemps des
peuples

in 1848 Europe (the ‘contagion’ effect). Neither precedent was particularly
encouraging, as both were violently repressed – although those popular uprisings were eventually vindicated decades later.
Another recurrent comparison has been with 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, despite the different geopolitical backgrounds (no crumbling Soviet-type ‘empire’in the MENA region). In retrospect, however, the analogy with 1989 appears useful
when comparing the speed and scope of ‘regime change’ after the uprisings. In
Central Europe, the pace of change accelerated as regimes toppled in one country and then another. In the Arab world, by contrast, the pace has become ever slower, from the lightning speed of the ‘Jasmine revolution’ in Tunisia to the protracted civil war in Syria – let alone the dogs that did not bark (as Sherlock Holmes might

have put it) in Algeria and elsewhere, or the twists and turns that occurred even in the countries affected by the ‘Arabellion’ (as the

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung actually did put it). From 1989 onwards, transformation became work in progress
in all Central European countries. Since 2011, each Arab country has taken a markedly different path, and inside a few of them the dynamics of change have hardly been linear.
 

Florence Gaub’s Chaillot Paper

offers us a new and original pair of lenses through  
which to look. It delves into the history, the sociology, the economics and the
politics of the different national armies in the Arab world, trying to explain both la longue durée of traditions and identities and la courte durée

of tactical decisions. It sheds light on why certain developments have occurred (or not occurred) in certain countries. It helps us read a map full of crossroads, dead ends and roads less travelled. And it highlights factors that will have to be taken into account in order to put together a more reliable picture of our Southern neighbours, and to be better prepared to act – and react – in the future.

Conclusion
  
There are altogether nineteen Arab military forces, eight of whom by and large maintain a posture of aloofness from politics. The remaining eleven, however, do play a decidedly political role in their respective countries, for better or for worse.

While the events of 2011 highlighted those cases in which armed forces have effectively assisted or impeded regime change, they also served to draw attention to the fact that the long absence of Arab forces from the political sphere does not imply their actual removal from politics.

Instead, Arab forces continue to play a role beyond their military purpose even in those states which did not experience large-scale unrest in 2011. The involvement of the military in politics is perceived with deep suspicion by rulers in Arab states, such as Jordan for example, which regard a powerful military as posing a threat to their stability. In societies which are highly polarised and politicised, the military is seen as being part and parcel of the secular-nationalist camp and therefore hardly a neutral agent of the state.

Arab military forces will, by and large, continue therefore to act as political agents. This does not necessarily imply direct involvement in politics, but they accompany change in one way or another. Such a stance is in part the result of the army’s institutional outlook, but is in part also due to the highly unstable and politically volatile environments in which they operate.

This in itself has policy implications for those who seek to engage with the Arab world. The removal of the armed forces from politics is, by default, a long-term goal for the EU and for international donors: according to a World Bank study,23 it took the fastest states 17 years to relegate armed forces to their defence role only.
Successful attempts at neutralising the political role of armed forces always take into account the two key dimensions of the military, the societal as well as the institutional dimensions.

Addressing the issue at the societal level will therefore require an approach which acknowledges the role these forces play beyond their primary military function.

Armed forces act not only because they can, but also because other social actors cannot (or will not) act. A solution to the question of the involvement of the military in politics always includes the civil society in which they are embedded.


23. World Bank, World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security, and Development (Washington D.C: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 2011), p. 11.
 
 
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Arab armies: agents of change? Before and after 2011
In addition to this, focusing on the institutional dimension of the armed forces provides a good starting point. First and foremost, the military is an institution seeking to accomplish its core task – the protection and defence of the state.


Assisting it in becoming a professional organisation will ultimately result in its gradual removal from politics, and the establishment of safe and sound civil military relations.
 
 
   
In addition to this, focusing on the institutional dimension of the armed forces provides a good starting point. First and foremost, the military is an institution seeking to accomplish its core task – the protection and defence of the state.


Assisting it in becoming a professional organisation will ultimately result in its gradual removal from politics, and the establishment of safe and sound civil military relations.
  
      

 
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Soft Power a la 6th-century-BC strategist: Sun Tzu







IN HUIMIN COUNTY in the Yellow River delta, a push by China to build up the nation's global allure has fired the enthusiasm of local officials. Young men and women dressed in ancient military costumes goosestep across a rain-soaked open-air stage. Their performance is in homage to the 6th-century-BC strategist, Sun Tzu, author of pithy aphorisms beloved of management gurus worldwide. Local cadres sitting on plastic chairs stoically endure the sodden spectacle.
Huimin county regards itself as the birthplace of Sun Tzu and thus the fountainhead of an ancient wisdom which, officials believe, can help persuade the world of China's attractiveness. The damp display marks Sun Tzu's supposed birthday. Organisers try to whip up enthusiasm with fireworks and a massive digital screen flashing images of the bearded sage and his one slim work, the “Art of War”, a 6,000-word booklet. Under an awning, journalists from the Communist Party's newspaper, the People's Daily, feed live video of the event onto their website. The world gets to see it, even if most locals have stayed at home.

At a local hotel, a Sun Tzu symposium is held. Colonel Liu Chunzhi of China's National Defence University (also a leader of the China Research Society of Sun Tzu's Art of War) told this year's gathering that Sun Tzu was part of “the riches of the people of the world”. Promotion of his work, he said, was “an important step toward the strengthening of China's soft power”. Sun Tzu may have written about stratagems for warfare, but Huimin's assembled scholars prefer to tout him as a peacenik. Their evidence is one of the sage's best-known insights: “The skilful leader subdues the enemy's troops without any fighting.” What better proof, say his fans in China, that the country has always loved peace?
Chinese leaders, determined to persuade America that they mean no harm, have recruited Sun Tzu to their cause. In 2006 President Hu Jintao gave President George Bush silk copies of the “Art of War” in English and Chinese (not, it seemed, as a way of suggesting better ways of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, but of hinting that the wars need not have been fought in the first place). Jia Qinglin, the fourth-ranking member of the party's supreme body, the Politburo Standing Committee, said in 2009 that Sun Tzu should be used to promote “lasting peace and common prosperity”. In July this year, Beijing's Renmin University presented an “Art of War” to Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of America's joint chiefs of staff, during a visit to the capital.
China has long been proud of Sun Tzu. Mao Zedong was a great fan, even sending aides into enemy territory during the civil war to find a copy of the “Art of War”. But it is only relatively recently that the party has seized upon the notion of building up soft power, a term coined 20 years ago by an American, Joseph Nye of Harvard University, a former chairman of America's National Intelligence Council and senior Pentagon official, to describe “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments”. President Hu's use of it in 2007 signalled a shift in party thinking. Throughout the 1990s and into this century, China had been trumpeting Deng Xiaoping's slogan of “economic construction as the core”. Over the past decade building soft power has emerged as a new party priority.
Mr Nye himself drew a link between soft power and Sun Tzu in a 2008 book, “The Powers to Lead”. Sun Tzu, he said, had concluded that “the highest excellence is never having to fight because the commencement of battle signifies a political failure”. To be a “smart” warrior, said Mr Nye, one had to understand “the soft power of attraction as well as the hard power of coercion”.
Mr Hu may have been slow to adopt Mr Nye's term openly, but soon after he took office in 2002 he began trying to make China a more attractive brand. In June 2003 a small group of senior propaganda officials and foreign-policy experts met in Beijing for the first time to discuss the importance of soft power. Later that year officials began touting a new term, “peaceful rise”, to describe China's development. Their message was that China would be an exception to the pattern of history whereby rising big powers conflict with established ones. Within months of the slogan's launch, officials decided to amend it. Even the word “rise”, they worried, sounded too menacing. The term was changed to “peaceful development”. Mr Hu also adopted the word “harmonious”, sprinkling speeches with references to China's pursuit of a “harmonious world” and a “harmonious society”.

From Little Red Books to little red boots

The results have been mixed. With rich countries on the skids, China's economic model is looking good. Development driven by the state as well as the market seems to be delivering dividends, and China's success has helped popularise the idea that state-owned companies should have a large role in economies. Businesspeople around the world admire the efficiency of both the public and private sector in China. Chinese investment in African countries is giving the continent a welcome boost. Yet the economic model is inseparable from the political model; and, as the Arab spring has shown, authoritarianism has little appeal in the West or anywhere else. China's hard power, in terms of cash, is certainly increasing; but its careless use of that power has not attracted admiration. Its truculent behaviour at the Copenhagen climate-change conference in 2009, its quarrels with Japan over fishing rights in 2010 and its more assertive behaviour recently in the South China Sea have created deep unease about the nature of its evolving power, not least among neighbours that once saw China's rise as largely benign. Such concerns have been compounded by its persistent efforts internally to suppress dissent, control the internet and stifle the growth of civil society.
This is not how the party sees it. After a meeting in October this year, the party's Central Committee declared that the soft-power drive had made “conspicuous gains”. But it said further efforts were urgently needed. Many Chinese would agree. The word “harmonise” is now widely used ironically by ordinary Chinese to mean suppressing dissent. Abroad, officials have been trying to win over Western audiences by pouring billions of dollars into the creation of global media giants to rival the soft power of brands such as CNN and the New York Times. A provincial propaganda official complained in January that America, with only 5% of the world's population, “controlled” about 75% of its television programmes. “Combined with the influence of brands and products such as Hollywood, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald's, jeans and Coca-Cola, American culture has permeated almost the entire world,” he wrote.
China is hamstrung by a contemporary culture that has little global appeal. Its music has few fans abroad; indeed, China's own youth tend to prefer musicians from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and America. Its political ideology has few adherents: Mao Zedong and his little red book no longer enjoy the cachet they did in Western counterculture during the 1960s. The goosestep of the Sun Tzu soldiers in Huimin county notwithstanding, officials are now well aware that to market China abroad they must avoid references to authoritarianism. The party and its ideology were barely hinted at in the pageantry of the opening ceremony of the Olympic games in Beijing in 2008. Since the present is a hard sell, China is having to lean heavily on the distant past.
The party has not bought into Mr Nye's view that soft power springs largely from individuals, the private sector and civil society. So the government has taken the lead in promoting ancient cultural icons whom it thinks might have global appeal. Even here it has limited options. Buddhism, which is anyway a foreign import, has been cornered by the Dalai Lama. Both it and Taoism, a native religion, sit uncomfortably with an atheistic party doctrine. This leaves only a handful of figures to choose from.
At the forefront is Confucius. Few Westerners can quote a saying of Confucius. But most at least regard him as a bearded, wise dispenser of aphorisms, far more profound than America's superficial consumerism. The party is promoting him as a kind of Father Christmas without the undignified jolliness; a sage whose role in the development of centuries of Chinese authoritarianism the party glosses over in favour of his philosophy's pleasant-sounding mantras: benevolence, righteousness and (of importance to Mr Hu) harmony. So it was that China used Confucius's name to brand the language-training institutes it began setting up abroad in 2004. There are now more than 300 Confucius Institutes worldwide, about a quarter of them in America.
But Confucius is problematic. Mao and his colleagues regarded Confucius's philosophy as the ideological glue of the feudal system they destroyed; and so attempts to promote him are vulnerable to the growing split in the Communist Party. In January, with great fanfare, the National History Museum unveiled a bronze statue of him standing 9.5 metres (31 feet) high in front of its entrance by Tiananmen Square. Three months later the statue was quietly removed. The sage's appearance so close to the most hallowed ground of Chinese communism had outraged hardliners. They saw it as an affront to Mao, whose giant portrait hung diagonally opposite.
Sun Tzu is not so tainted. His is the only big name among China's ancient thinkers to have survived the communist era with barely a scratch. In the 1970s he was held up as an exemplar in Mao's struggles against leaders he disliked. The study of Sun Tzu, said a typical tract published in 1975, offered useful guidance for “criticism of the rightist opportunist military line” and the “reactionary views of the Confucianists”. The party still keeps Confucius at the forefront of its soft-power drive, but Sun Tzu is making headway.
That's partly because the West's enthusiasm for Sun Tzu makes him an easy sell. The “Art of War” is widely used by after-dinner speakers short of ideas. Take, for example (from the 1910 translation by Lionel Giles, the first authoritative one in English): “The best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good”; “all warfare is based on deception”; and “it is the business of the general to be still and inscrutable, to be upright and impartial”. Sun Tzu beat the Christmas-cracker industry by two –and-a-half millennia.


In the West Sun Tzu's advice has been adapted for almost every aspect of human interaction from the boardroom to the bedroom. The publishing industry feeds on Sun Tzu spin-offs, churning out motivational works such as “Sun Tzu For Success: How to Use the Art of War to Master Challenges and Accomplish the Important Goals in Your Life” (by Gerald Michaelson and Steven Michaelson, 2003), management advice such as “Sun Tzu for Women: The Art of War for Winning in Business” (Becky Sheetz-Runkle, 2011) and sporting tips such as “Golf and the Art of War: How the Timeless Strategies of Sun Tzu Can Transform Your Game” (Don Wade, 2006). Amazon offers 1,500 titles in paperback alone. Paris Hilton, an American celebrity and author of an aphorism of her own: “Dress cute wherever you go, life is too short to blend in”, has been seen dipping into him (see picture).
The sage's popularity in the West still owes more to Hollywood than China's own efforts
Rather more seriously, in his recent book, “On China”, Henry Kissinger revealed how impressed he was by the ancient strategic wisdom Chinese officials seemed to draw upon when he visited the country in the 1970s as America's national security adviser. Mao, he noted, “owed more to Sun Tzu than to Lenin” in his pursuit of foreign policy. To some historians Mao was a dangerously erratic despot. To Mr Kissinger, he was “enough of a Sun Tzu disciple to pursue seemingly contradictory strategies simultaneously”. Whereas Westerners prized heroism displayed when forces clashed, “the Chinese ideal stressed subtlety, indirection and the patient accumulation of relative advantage”, Mr Kissinger enthused in a chapter on “Chinese Realpolitik and Sun Tzu's Art of War”. Praise indeed, from the West's pre-eminent practitioner of Realpolitik, whose mastery of the art of ideology-free diplomacy enabled President Nixon's visit to China in 1972.
Yet a closer look reveals Sun Tzu's flaws as a tool of soft power. Chinese attempts to remould him as a man of peace stumble over the fact that his book is a guide to winning wars, avidly studied by America's armed forces as it was by Mao. Sam Crane of Williams College in Massachusetts says that during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq he delighted in telling students attending his Sun Tzu classes (some of whom were preparing to join the army) that the “Art of War” advised that prisoners be treated kindly. But, he says, “I think the thing that makes [the book] universal in a grim way is war and competition. War is not a Western construct: the Chinese have been really good at war for a long time.”
American strategists often read the “Art of War” to understand China not as an alluring and persuasive wielder of soft power, but as a potential enemy. A psychological operations officer in America's Army Central Command, Major Richard Davenport, argued in the Armed Forces Journal in 2009 that China was making use of Sun Tzu's advice to wage cyber warfare against America. The incriminating quotation was “Supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy”.
The sage's popularity in the West still owes more to Hollywood, source of much American soft power, than China's own efforts. John Minford, whose translation was published in 2002, says that after Gordon Gekko, a villainous corporate raider played by Michael Douglas in the film “Wall Street”, quoted a line from Sun Tzu (“Every battle is won before it's ever fought”), the book acquired a “mystique” among students of entrepreneurship.
Professor Minford says he is mystified by this. “I had to struggle with the book at the coal face, with the actual Chinese, and it's a very peculiar and particularly unpleasant little book which is extremely disorganised, made up of a series of probably very corrupt bits of text, which is very repetitive and has extremely little to say.” He calls the work (whose authorship is even disputed) “basically a little fascist handbook on how to use plausible ideas in order to totally destroy your fellow man”.
Some Chinese say openly that using ancient culture to promote soft power is a bad idea. Pang Zhongying of Renmin University says it does not help the country boost its standing abroad. Instead, says Mr Pang, a former diplomat, it highlights what he calls “a poverty of thought” in China today. “There is no Chinese model, [so] people look back to Confucius and look back to Sun Tzu.” Mr Pang argues that democracy is the best source of soft power. President Hu gives short shrift to that notion.
As Mr Nye sees it, soft power stands a better chance of success when a country's culture includes “universal values” and its policies “promoted interests that others share”. But China's soft-power push has coincided with an increasingly strong rejection by Chinese leaders of the very notion of universal values. Among China's leaders, the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, has come closest to supporting the universalists' view, but his is a lone voice.
At least in Huimin, Mr Wen appears to enjoy some support. The title last year of the county's annual Sun Tzu symposium was “Universal values in Sun Tzu's Art of War and [the work's] use in non-military realms”. But local officials are more preoccupied with revving up the economy of Huimin, whose dreary main street enjoys a burst of colour from the frontage of a 24-hour McDonald's. Sun Tzu is seen as a potential new engine of growth; a draw for tourists to the agricultural backwater. In 2003, at a cost of 65m yuan ($7.9m), the county opened Sun Tzu Art of War City, a vast complex of mock-imperial buildings which hosted the rain-soaked birthday celebration. Huimin's main urban district has been renamed Sun Wu (as Sun Tzu is also called).
But the vast empty car park outside the Art of War City and its near-deserted courtyards suggest the town is struggling. It is not being helped by fierce competition with another county 100km (60 miles) away, Guangrao, which in recent years has been laying a rival claim as Sun Tzu's birthplace. In June the county, whose tyre, petrochemical and paper-making industries have made it much richer than Huimin, held a foundation-stone ceremony for its own Sun Tzu theme park. Chinese media say this is due to open in 2013 and will cost a prodigious 1.6 billion yuan ($250m).
But Guangrao too will have a hard time turning Sun Tzu into a soft-power icon. In April about 700km (430 miles) to the south, Disney broke ground in Shanghai at the site of an amusement park that it says will feature the world's largest Disney castle. It is due to cost 24 billion yuan and open in five years. Xinhua, a government news agency, published a commentary on its website calling such theme parks “a big platform for soft-power competition between nations”. One widely reposted blog put it more bleakly. American soft power, it said, had “conquered 5,000 years of magnificent Chinese civilisation”.
Sun Tzu had an aphorism to suit China's predicament: “Know the enemy, know yourself and victory is never in doubt, not in a hundred battles”. If China wants to influence the world, it needs to think hard about the values it promotes at home.
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[344] NATO Leaves US Behind in Afghanistan, Debating Ukraine & Cenk Uygu...

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Published on Mar 17, 2014

Abby Martin Breaks the Set on Afghanistan Withdrawals, Debating Ukraine, and Cenk Uygur on the Rise of Alternative Media.

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EPISODE BREAKDOWN: On this episode of Breaking the Set, Abby Martin remarks on the news that Canadian and British forces have all but withdrawn from Afghanistan, while the US continues to indefinitely pour money into the country's failed institutions. Abby then reports on the latest news from Ukraine, and speaks with John Feffer, Co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus, and Eric Draitser, founder of StopImperialism.org about what Crimea's referendum means for the people of Ukraine, and where superpowers fit into this geo-political tug of war. BTS wraps up the show with an interview with host and founder of The Young Turks, Cenk Uygur, discussing why he left his job at MSNBC, the corporate media's superficial coverage of news events and the recipe for success in alternative media.
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Saturday, March 8, 2014

Le CONGO un CHOC documentaire

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C'est un documentaire choc que propose France 2 dans "13h15 le dimanche", une enquête sur le viol au Congo. Lisez également ci-dessous l'interview de Jean-Sébastien Desbordes, l'un des auteurs du film:
Que retenez-vous de votre enquête intitulée "Larmes de guerre" ?
Je retiens avant tout la jeunesse de ces femmes violées au Congo. Je m'attendais à rencontrer des femmes de 25 ans. J'ai vu des gamines de 17, 18, 19 ans. Elles sont encore enfants. Il y a des jeunes filles comme Aline, 17 ans, qui a l'air d'en avoir 12. Aline est petite, rachitique. Comment imaginer qu'elle a 17 ans. Au Congo, les groupes armés terrorisent les enfants des campagnes et des villes. Et cette situation s'aggrave. Les femmes violées sont de plus en plus jeunes. Là-bas, environ 200 femmes se rendent à l'hôpital après avoir été violée. Ces femmes ne se plaignent jamais. Elles arrivent à se relever, à plaisanter, à sourire. Au Congo, et il faut bien comprendre cela, les femmes sont les forces vives de la société. Elles tiennent la maison, s'occupent des enfants. En les détruisant, leurs agresseurs ne se contentent pas de les mutiler pour qu'elles n'aient plus d'enfants. Ils détruisent aussi toute une société.
Pourquoi avoir suivi, plus particulièrement, l'histoire d'Aline ?
Aline, c'est un exemple concret de cette violence. On voulait plus que des témoignages, on voulait montrer ce qui se passe réellement. On a suivi l'évolution d'Aline, pour savoir si elle allait s'en sortir. On voulait faire connaître son histoire aux téléspectateurs. Montrer les choses, c'est aussi transmettre un message.
Avez-vous éprouvé des difficultés à faire parler ces femmes torturées, violées ?
Non. Nos questions étaient frontales, leurs réponses naturelles. L'hôpital nous a communiqué les noms de femmes d'accord pour s'exprimer devant la caméra. Comme nous étions deux hommes, Matthieu Martin et moi, on s'attendait à un exercice difficile. Mais elles n'ont pas été perturbées. Ces femmes sont vraiment très très fortes. Leur témoignage sont tellement forts... Pour la première fois de ma carrière, j'ai fait des cauchemars sur l'un de mes reportages.
Qui est Denis Mukwege, gynécologue-obstétricien à l'hôpital de Panzi, et fil rouge du reportage ?
Depuis 2010, je m'intéresse à la situation au Congo. Le docteur Mukwege, je le connaissais de nom. Il a remporté de nombreux prix internationaux comme celui des droits de l'homme des Nations Unies. Il était aussi en lice, en 2013, pour le Prix Nobel de la Paix. Quand je l'ai contacté, il était tout à fait d'accord pour témoigner. Mais il a fallu s'adapter à ses disponibilités. Pas simple. En 2012, il a en effet été victime d'une tentative d'assassinat et est alors parti à Bruxelles.
Les femmes se rendent-elles spontanément dans son hôpital ?
Certaines viennent de très loin pour rencontrer Denis Mukwege et les médecins de l'hôpital Panzi. Parfois, elles mettent plusieurs jours à venir, à pied ou en train. Elles sont alors prises en charge par l'hôpital, qui leur apporte une aide physique, sociale, psychologique, logistique et même juridique en les aidant à porter plainte contre leur agresseur. Mais la majorité des femmes victimes de viol au Congo ne se rendent pas à l'hôpital. C'est pour cette raison que des équipes médicales se déplacent dans des camps de réfugiés.
Ces femmes violées sont rejetées par leur famille, leur mari, leur père.
Soit ces jeunes filles se retrouvent à la rue, sans rien, soit elles retournent dans leur maison mais il faut beaucoup de temps pour que cela redevienne comme avant. Surtout avec le père. C'est une honte intégrale. C'est également très compliqué pour les jeunes filles qui gardent un enfant issu d'un viol. On ne s'intéresse plus à elles. Des organismes leur apportent du soutien, mais à 18 ans, leur vie est foutue. Et malgré tout, elles veulent s'en sortir.
Denis Mukwege est consterné par l'absence d'aide internationale. Et vous?
Le Congo est un pays très compliqué. Le Congo, c'est un peu le Far West des minerais. Les enjeux économiques et financiers sont énormes. Ce sont toujours ces enjeux qui l'emportent sur le reste. Au Congo, tout est pourri. La corruption est omniprésente. Et tout le monde préfère se taire.
Propos recueillis par Julie Lanique
(Publiés par Apareco, Jeudi 06/03/2014)
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Thursday, March 6, 2014

Twenty years after the Rwandan genocide, six lessons to remember

Liberal MP Irwin Cotler stands during Question Period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Wednesday, December 14, 2011. (Sean Kilpatrick/THE CANADIAN PRESS)4118

IRWIN COTLER
Contributed to The Globe and Mail
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Recently, I addressed Kwibuka 20 – the official launch of commemorative activities marking the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide wherein one million Rwandans – mostly ethnic Tutsis – were murdered in less than 100 days. What makes this genocide so unspeakable is that it was preventable. No one can say we did not know; we knew, but we did not act.

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On this important anniversary, where we have both the obligation to remember and the duty to act, we must ask ourselves: What have we learned? What must we do?
As former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan lamented on the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide, “Such crimes cannot be reversed. Such failures cannot be repaired. The dead cannot be brought back to life. So what can we do?”


The answer is that the international community will only prevent the killing fields of the future by heeding the lessons from past tragedies such as the Rwandan genocide. What then are these lessons? And, to paraphrase Kofi Annan: “What must we do?”


The first and enduring lesson of the Rwandan genocide – not unlike the Holocaust – is that they occurred not only because of the machinery of death, but because of state-sanctioned incitement to hate and genocide. It is this teaching of contempt, this demonizing of the other – this is where it all begins.


As the Supreme Court of Canada recognized, and as echoed by the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda, the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers – it began with words. These, as the Court put, are the chilling facts of history – the catastrophic effects of racism.
Indeed, as the jurisprudence of the Rwandan tribunals has demonstrated, these acts of genocide were preceded by – and anchored in – the state-orchestrated demonization and dehumanization of the minority Tutsi population – using cruel, biological ascriptions of Tutsis as “inyenzi” (cockroaches) – prologue and justification for their mass murder.


In the aftermath of the 65th anniversary of the Genocide Convention, the international community must bear in mind – as the Supreme Court affirmed in the Mugesara case – that incitement to genocide is a crime in and of itself. Taking action to prevent it, as the Genocide Convention compels us, is not a policy option; it is an international legal obligation of the highest order.


The second lesson is the danger of indifference and the consequences of inaction. The genocide of Rwandan Tutsis occurred not only because of the machinery of death and a state-sanctioned culture of hate, but also because of crimes of indifference and conspiracies of silence. What makes the Rwandan genocide so unspeakable is not only the horror of the genocide, but that this genocide was preventable. Simply put, while the UN Security Council and the international community dithered and delayed, Rwandans were dying.


The third lesson is the danger of a culture of impunity. If the last century was the age of atrocity, it was also the age of impunity. Few of the perpetrators were brought to justice. Just as there cannot be a sanctuary for hate or a refuge for bigotry, neither can there be a haven for the perpetrators of the worst crimes against humanity.

That is why, as minister of justice, I initiated the first ever prosecution under the War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Act of Rwandan war criminal Désiré Munyaneza.


The fourth lesson is the danger of the vulnerability of the powerless and the powerlessness of the vulnerable – the brutalized children, women victimized by massive sexual violence, the slaughter of the innocents – all the first targets of mass atrocity. It is our responsibility to empower the powerless while giving voice to the voiceless, wherever they may be.


The fifth lesson is the cruelty of genocide denial — an assault on memory and truth – a criminal conspiracy to whitewash the Rwandan genocide. In the most obscene form of genocide denial – as in the case also of Holocaust denial – it actually accuses the victims of falsifying this “hoax.” Remembrance of the Rwandan genocide is itself a repudiation of such denial – which tragically becomes more prevalent with the passage of time.


The sixth lesson is the importance of remembering the heroic rescuers, those who remind us of the range of human possibility; those who stood up to confront evil, prevailed, and transformed history.
Finally, and most important, we must remember and pay tribute to the survivors who endured the worst of inhumanity – of crimes against humanity – and somehow found in the resources of their own humanity the will to go on, to contribute and to make our society a better and more compassionate community.

And so, this anniversary must be an occasion not only to remember but to learn the lessons of the crime whose name we should even shudder to mention – namely genocide – and most important: to act on these lessons.

Irwin Cotler is a Liberal MP, an emeritus Professor of Law at McGill University. He represented the All Party Parliamentary Group for the Prevention of Genocide and other Crimes against Humanity at Kwibuka 20 – the Official Launch of the 20th anniversary marking the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi.
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Tuesday, March 4, 2014

24 SEVEN Exclusive: Summary of His Highness the Aga Khan's visit to Canada





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