4 undisputed facts about the Gaza situation

Unless you've been completely out of contact with any form of news media in the past twelve days, you've probably heard a great deal about an Israeli commando raid on a Turkish aid flotilla bound for the Gaza strip that left 9 civilians dead.

Since the raid occured, two competing narratives have emerged, one supporting the point of view of the aid workers who were trying to bring humanitarian supplies into Gaza, and one supporting the Israeli government position.

Regardless of the arguments and evidence presented by the protagonists for either side, there are (at least) 4 facts that remain undisputed by any party.

1. A civilian ship was raided by Israeli commandos. An Israeli craft was not raided by a civilian ship

2. The raid was conducted at night, from a helicopter.

3. The raid took place in international waters

4. The siege of Gaza was a response to the victory of Hamas in Palestinian legislative elections.

One may draw different conclusions from these facts, but I have yet to see any source, representing any point of view, that disputes that they are facts.

My conclusions are as follows:

The first is important because it is mostly forgotten by spokespeople of various zionist organizations who want to blame the activists for being raided. "They had pipes and knives!" they say, "clearly this was a premeditated attack on Israel." Clearly, if Israel's enemies have been reduced to attacking its soldiers with pipes and kitchen knives, the threats to the country are greatly overstated.

#2 is important because it the timing of events was completely under Israeli control. If they had wanted to intercept the ship in broad daylight and tow it to another destination, they could have - they have done this with previous flotillas that have tried to run the Gaza blockade. If we make the charitable assumption that Israeli planners did not mean for violence to occur, the fact that its plans may have gone awry cannot be blamed on anyone but them.

#3 is not of relevance to what occured during the raid, but tells us something about the international reaction. This was an act of piracy. The Turkish reaction is, therefore, justifiable - Turks were killed on the high seas by a foreign power while not themselves violating any international statute. The American lack of reaction is equally unjustifable, given that an American citizen was also killed.

#4 needs to be pointed out because the justification for the siege - and therefore the excuse for the humanitarian crisis that the Israeli government has created - is often made out to be Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli cities. The Hamas campaign of firing homemade rockets into Israel, however, really only picked up in response to the siege. At the time that the siege was implemented, the rationale was to weaken a democratically-elected Palestinian government by punishing the population from which it drew its greatest support.

The claim, therefore, that the siege is necessary to keep weapons out of Gaza is, therefore, a post facto justification, dredged up to justify a policy that failed in its original goals.

The hasbara machine, however, has a conveniently short memory.

Amira Hass: The one thing worse than denying the Gaza report

Now that international jurist and affirmed zionist John Goldstone has suggested in his UN report that the IDF committed war crimes in Gaza, the denial machine amongst zionists worldwide has swung into overdrive.

The brilliant Israeli journalist Amira Hass explains the horror of this well in her latest piece for Ha'aretz:

. . .

Israel struck a civilian population that remains under its control, it didn't fulfill its obligation to distinguish between civilians and militants and used military force disproportionate with the tangible threat to its own civilians. Air Force drones and helicopters fired deadly missiles at civilians, many of them children; the Tank Corps and Navy shelled civilian neighborhoods with weapons not designed for precision strikes; soldiers received orders to fire on rescue crews; others fired on civilians carrying white flags; and others killed people in or near their homes. Troops used Gazans as human shields, soldiers detained civilians in abusive conditions, the army used white phosphorus shells in dense civilian areas and, on the eve of withdrawing, destroyed wide residential, industrial and agricultural areas.

There is only thing worse than denial - the admission that the IDF indeed acted as has been described, but that these actions are both normal and appropriate.

Dr. Abdel-Rahman Lawendy is a resident in Orthopaedic Surgery and Trauma at the London Health Sciences Centre in London, Ontario, who visited Gaza during the bombardment. His talk here is informative on an intellectual and emotional level. A spirited discussion follows in the Q&A, also available on YouTube.

Those are outdated concepts. . .

More fascism from Canada's Konservative party:

From Embassy Magazine:
Leaked DFAIT Memo Documents Struggle between Conservative Political Staff and Foreign Service

"Furthermore, the word 'humanitarian' is excised from every reference to 'international humanitarian law.' References to gender-based violence are removed. And in every phrase 'child soldiers' is replaced by 'children in armed conflict.'"

. . .

Given this ambassadorial "gagging," the source said, it's no surprise Conservative political agents are delving deeper into the fundamental language of Canadian foreign policy.

"It's more than just a close-hold by the PMO....in this case there's actually a determined effort to re-orient Canadian foreign policy, and so the standing speaking lines don't work and need to be checked.

(Hat-tip to Atlas Hugged).

In principle, it is the job of the civil service to inform and to execute the decision made at a political level. In practice, though, the implications of this are frightening. Either the political agents don't know what they're doing, in which case somebody in the bureaucracy has to do a better job of informing them, or even more frighteningly, the political decisions are being made deliberately - that is to say, with deliberate disregard for any common Canadian sense of ethics or decency.

Stupid, stupid, stupid

Well, it looks like the Iranians, along with Hamas, are sending their sympathies to Sudanese president Omar El-Bashir, whose arrest warrant was issued earlier this year, following his indictment in July 2008.

This is a stupid, stupid, stupid move. Iran, a country rich with its own oil wealth, with no need for standing amongst the Arabs, and no reason to spite the ICC (and plenty of reasons to cheer for it), is behaving in an unfathomably stupid manner. Hamas, whose power is confined to the beaten and bloodied Gaza strip, has nothing to gain from relations with El-Bashir's government either, besides a bad reputation.

If El-Bashir had really done nothing wrong, his response to the ICC arrest warrant should have been simple: Send a representative to the ICC, and plead innocent, while keeping himself as far away from the Hague as possible. If the court refused to hear the case in the presence of his surrogate, the situation would have been defused, and he could have blamed the court for the failure of the process. If he were found guilty, he still could have stayed away. If he were acquitted, he could trumpet his victory.

In this last case, the cause of a functioning system of public international law, with an enforcement mechanism, would also have been served as the fairness of the process, having reached its first acquittal, would have been proven.

Unfortunately, El-Bashir is not concerned about a functioning system of public international law, except in the very limited sense that he himself is, almost without a doubt, a war criminal, if not for Darfur, then for the civil war in southern Sudan.

It is sad that any other international actor would even consider taking his side.

"Why Darfur intervention is a mistake"

Interesting article from Alex de Waal for the BBC.

We don't understand Darfur. . .

And until we do, how can we intervene?

I recently had a couple of conversations with a Canadian advocate for the United Nations Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS). Well-informed and well-connected on all things related to "the responsibility to protect," one of his goals for the project, which is essentially a UN standby intervention force, was to create a mechanism whereby the UN would have both the mandate and the resources to intervene within a state where human security was being trampled.

Conventional wisdom has it that in Bosnia and Rwanda, the failure of the UN stemmed from the combination of opposing political interests in the UNSC and the unavailability of military resources to forcefully intervene. The failure of the international system in Darfur (not to mention the DRC) is often cited as the latest example of the UN's impotence in the face of brutality on the ground. The joint AU-UN force currently on the ground may have done some good, but it arrived late, was too small for the territory, and was criticised for its inability to guarantee human security (for a variety of reasons).

And so Darfur is invoked as a reason for why we need the UNEPS. I don't disagree with the idea. Once we have such a force, however, what exactly would its mandate within Darfur going to be?

"Stop genocide," obviously. The situation in Darfur, however, is not so straightforward. Omar El-Bashir, vile though he is, is not Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin. I have no problem laying the blame for at least some of Sudan's 1-3 (depending on the year) concurrent civil wars on his shoulders, and I hope that he is made to answer for at least some of what has happened in Darfur, in Southern Sudan, and in Eastern Sudan in front of the ICC. That said, however, he is not creating lists of people to be liquidated and marching them in front of firing squads or into gas chambers. His army is prosecuting wars, and either using violence against civilians as a tactic, or assisting other parties to do the same.

I began seriously following the conflict in Darfur in 2005. News wires from all the various agencies always spoke of some point in February 2003, or thereabouts, when Darfurian rebels took up arms against the government, because of "Khartoum's neglect" of their region. Beyond this, it was hard to figure out exactly what the rebels wanted, and what their politicial and military disposition was. As they fractured, and as their internal political differences were brought out by peace talks with the government, the way forward became even more difficult to see.

Fast-forward to the start of 2008, when the actors have all shifted to the point that the initial narrative no longer makes any sense. It isn't true anymore to say that "Arab Janjaweed militias are being helped by Khartoum to wipe out the Black Darfurians," if that even ever was true. This article, from the Lebanon Daily Star and Al-Arabiya, gives an account of just how fluid the lines are, and some idea of each party's interests.

Dealing with the Abdel Wahid "problem" by neglecting him is no longer an option. Nor can the Arabs of Darfur continue to be excluded from peace efforts, on the grounds that the government speaks for them. It neither speaks for nor cares for them. If groups like Hemeti's are engaged, Abdel Wahid is re-engaged and North-South war is averted, there is a chance that Darfur may eventually find peace and stability. If not, the players will take new partners - and the dance of war will continue.

Got it?

That's just the tip of the iceberg.

Given an understanding of the political situation, the sloganeering around Darfur suddenly seems trite, like a hero-fantasy entertained by university students in rich countries. Yet, we know that there is great suffering, and to stand by and do nothing seems inhuman.

So before we do "something," we should have a clear idea of what we are getting into.

No righteous ones

I was thinking of writing something about the recent conflict in Georgia, but Uri Avnery, of Gush Shalom, said it pretty well already in a very insightful article:

. . .
This is the historical background to the recent spat between Georgia and Russia. There are no Righteous Ones here. It is rather funny to hear Vladimir Putin, whose hands are dripping with the blood of Chechen freedom fighters, extolling the right of South Ossetia to secession. It's no less funny to hear Micheil Saakashvili likening the freedom fight of the two separatist regions to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. ...

I am not entirely certain if the peoples, writ large, of both Abkhazia and South Ossetia actually wanted full independance from Georgia. Everything I've read and heard over the past few weeks seems to indicate that, but I don't have a familiarity with the politics to really tell.

Let's pretend he's not a war criminal

That is, however, the key to the conflict. No matter what a vile, evil, unspeakably brutal murderer Vladimir Putin is, the morality of the enterprise rides on that - if the people of South Ossetia wanted independence, and were indeed being violently oppressed by Saakashvili's army, then all the hand-wringing from NATO is either irrelevance or hypocrisy: they can't castigate Russia for intervening in Georgia when America is sitting in Iraq.

A good month for International Law?

Has July been a good month for international law?

Today the Serbian government, to its credit, arrested Karadzic. Reconciliation in the Balkans will be important for the peace of the entire world, being seen as it is, as the fault line between the Muslim and Christian worlds. For Karadzic, however, there needs to be a harsh penalty - the man attempted to drive a literally defenseless nation of people into extinction, and nearly got away with it.

Last week, the prosecutor of the ICC (unfortunately not the same body that will try Karadzic, but then again the Rome Statute wasn't built in a day) indicted Omar El-Bashir, the serial killer in charge in Khartoum. He is the second sitting African head of state with an international warrant against him, the first having been Liberia's Charles Taylor.

Which civil war did they indict me for?

Shamefully, the Arab League, itself a cesspool of repressive tyrants and foreign puppets, is trying to stall. The African Union, hopefully for less self-interested reasons, is doing the same.

I applaud both the indictment and the capture, but I have mixed feelings about the entire project of public international law. How can you have criminal law without a monopoly on force? The rule of law means nothing if the brute force to circumvent it is readily available. Moreover, whom could we entrust with such a monopoly on force?

The entire project will prove its validity when we see an indictment passed not against defeated Balkan fascists or thuggish African dictators, but against sitting heads of powerful states. Currently, the evidence exists to charge the presidents of both Russia and the United States with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Is there any principled reason not to?

Update - Cluster Munitions Convention Concludes

Some good news for the cause of international law in warfare: the Dublin conference concluded with over 70 countries agreeing to the final wording of the convention. Some exceptions wound up being made, but the worst weapons were firmly banned, without a transition period. Surprisingly, Gordon Brown also jumped on board and agreed to eliminate his country's stockpiles, apparently including the M73 helicopter munition, which Brown had initially wanted exempted.

The US, the world's biggest stockpiler, producer, and user of the weapons naturally didn't show up, and neither did the countries which are most likely to use them in the future - although Britain's participation is significant in that they are still contending with US stockpiles at bases on Airstrip One (another Orwell reference for all you 1984 fans). Pakistan's absence as usual mirrored India's, which is doubly shameful, since the Pakistani army's only combat operations since 2000 have been against Pakistanis.

I myself sent off some of the form letters to various dignitaries that the campaign suggested. When you do that sort of thing, you don't typically expect a response. My own MP might be trusted to get back to me, but one expects to be ignored by the Polish foreign office. Surprisingly, the press secretary did reply (emphasis mine):

In response to your concerns expressed in your e-mail letter to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland with regard to Polish position on Cluster Munitions, please be advised that Poland is fully committed to seek the appropriate solutions to limit the use of this kind of weaponry.

. . .

Poland fully shares the humanitarian objectives of the Oslo Process along with its ambitious timeframe. However, we believe that streamlining the process within CCW will eventually bring a comprehensive solution, which is necessary to address divergent concerns related to this issue. Gathering at one table all major producers, suppliers and possessors of this weapon offers the best forum to exchange views on the issues related to humanitarian, technical and military aspects of cluster munitions.

Obviously, a form letter as well, and full of weasel words designed to make it clear that Poland is unwilling to risk making Uncle Sam mad. Nevertheless, the fact that someone in that office was ordered to sit down and write it up, and then send it to whoever contacts them tells you that the issue is at least on their agenda, even if their action on it consists only of apologetics for their position.

Like I said in my previous post on the topic, the effectiveness of international law in these matters is never ideal. War on the ground will never be what we want it to be on paper, but it needs limits. This was recognized by the first generation of Muslims, and probably by many ancient peoples before them. I don't think it will be possible for us as a species to stop killing eachother in the foreseeable future, but if we're going to invest so much in doing it, at least a significant minority of us need to insist that there be rules.