Nuclear madness
March 31, 2004
“In an all out nuclear war, more destructive power than in all of World War II would be unleashed every second during the long afternoon it would take for all the missiles and bombs to fall. A World War II every second - more people killed in the first few hours than all the wars of history put together. The survivors, if any, would live in despair amid the poisoned ruins of a civilisation that had committed suicide.”
These words were spoken by a man who had his finger on the nuclear button for four years, former US president, Jimmy Carter.
The delegations from the five declared nuclear powers, USA, Russia, France, China and the UK should reflect on Carter’s prophetic words as much as the India, Pakistan and Israel, who hold nuclear weapons but have so far refused to be part of the Non Proliferation Treaty system.
Next month the preparatory committee for the five yearly review of the Non Proliferation Treaty will be held in New York, and the full review will take place a year later. The NPT was agreed in 1970, after years of haggling and negotiation, eight years after the near miss of the Cuban Missile crisis, and six years after China had dramatically detonated an atmospheric nuclear device.
The NPT committed the five to two essential causes. To prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons and to eventually get rid of their own. In neither respect has it been successful. Since its signing we have had the developments of cruise missiles, Trident submarine launched missiles, and now National Missile Defence by the USA, amongst the many other horrible accoutrements of the nuclear nightmare.
We have also had dramatic escalation of nuclear danger with India, Pakistan and Israel developing nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and suspicions that a number of other countries have developed their own technology from nuclear power to manufacture plutonium, or used material from the break up of the Soviet Union to achieve the same purpose.
Thus the inspection regime that ought to be examining the facilities in Iran, Libya and North Korea would be far more powerful and effective if the five declared states, the five permanent UN Security Council members also re-iterated their 1970 commitment to peace and disarmament.
It would also help in persuading India, Pakistan and Israel to join the NPT process. The peace and disarmament process does not work in a vacuum; the big five need to make some dramatic moves otherwise moral protestations against proliferation are just hollow statements. It is easy for big international conferences in the rarefied atmosphere of self importance to forget the realities of life outside.
The victims of nuclear weapons were the 60,000 who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the tens of thousands who have perished since in horrific cancerous pain, the test victims in Australia, the Pacific and British soldiers and those who have been denied decent health care and education as their leaders preferred to spend resources on weapons of mass destruction instead of health and education.
There have been achievements; the huge protests across the globe from the 1950s onwards when the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was founded have made leaders more wary of promoting nuclear “solutions”. The ludicrous Government publication Protect and Survive which the Thatcher administration produced as a cover to further proliferation was met with derision. Hiding under a stout table with a few bottles of water, having just white washed the windows, hardly seemed a reasonable response to a nuclear threat. Edward Thompson’s brilliant riposte Protest and Survive was a factor in the huge pan European anti nuclear movement of the early 1980s. The women of Greenham Common inspired a whole generation for peace; that a former air base has been restored as a public common is a testament to their steadfastness.
The peace movement and process has thrown up huge figures and people of moral stature. Mordechai Vanunu was an Israeli nuclear scientist. He knew Israel was wrong to develop nuclear weapons and that it was illegal. He also knew that it would do nothing to bring peace to the Middle East, just create another killing field. He spilt the beans on a visit to Britain when the Sunday Times carried his story and dramatically broke the news to the world. Later he was conned out of Britain by Mossad agents and illegally arrested in Rome and clandestinely taken to Israel. The world only knew this because he wrote his name on his hand and held it up to the window of the van he was imprisoned in. Convicted at a Military Court he has spent fourteen years in Ashkalon prison, most of them in solitary confinement. He is due for release on April 21st when an international welcoming party will be at the prison gates.
South Africa under Apartheid developed nuclear weapons. It is to the eternal credit of the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela that the end of Apartheid meant the end of the programme and the declaration of the whole continent as nuclear free. For those who continue to claim that nuclear weapons give us a place at the high table of international diplomacy, look to the South African example. The influence of post Apartheid South Africa is huge in the world for the ending of a system of evil and its renunciation of nuclear weapons.
In 1998 a “New Agenda” coalition of non nuclear countries from each continent, Brazil, Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, Slovenia and South Africa proposed a UN resolution on the elimination of all nuclear weapons, as envisaged in the 1970 Treaty. The United States voted against; almost predictably the UK followed suit.
This Easter, CND will be marching from London to Aldermaston. This is not a trip down memory lane, but an effort to mobilise and excite a new generation against the weapons of ultra mass destruction, and to show that the Aldermaston factory’s ability to make nuclear bombs is not only a violation of all the principles of non proliferation, but a threat to life itself. It is also a message to the British Government that the existence of National Missile Defence bases for the USA at Fylingdales links us to the ultimate destructive power of nuclear weapons with an instant global reach.
The preparatory committee meetings for the NPT review in New York will set the agenda. If the 2005 review does not succeed in reducing the nuclear threat to the planet then more proliferation will make a nuclear war all the more possible. Security comes from clean water, good housing, education and health. Nobody is made more secure by this insane waste of resources on destruction.
Human rights action?
March 28, 2004
Geneva was once a city state and gradually became absorbed into Switzerland. Due to its neutrality it has always been a centre for meetings, congresses and international institutions. The city is full of them, which gives it the strange combination of hope that war can be ended, and despair; it was here that the League of Nations failed to prevent the fascist occupation of Abyssinia.
This year, as every spring, hundreds of delegates descend on this wealthy and self satisfied city for the United Nations Human Rights Commission. The UN Conference Centre is a 1950s marble and glass extension of the 1920s brutal concrete League of Nations construction.
The Commission follows a normal format with State representatives seated in a horseshoe formation in front of the President, all of who get fifteen minutes to speak, followed down the pecking order by observers to the Non Governmental Organisations with observer status, who are reduced to three minutes.
The whole session goes on for a month but has a theme. This time the theme was post the Durban declaration on what has actually been done by member states.
All states open their submission by saying how much they support all the declarations to end all forms of discrimination and are taking action themselves. In one short burst last Monday, the full range of opinions on human rights was addressed. The US principle delegate gave an almost off the cuff performance. A self made businessman who came to the US from Vietnam in the 1960s, told a rather sceptical audience that the free market model showed how discrimination was not an issue, it was all about economic opportunity. He started out poor, has made it, and his children are all in college because he can afford it. He did not say anything about the 40 million Americans without access to health care. This rather strange interpretation of the Durban process, to counteract racism and xenophobia, followed a Chinese representative who essentially asserted that human rights are about the collective good, as well as access to health, housing, food and education being central.
Next up came the Cubans (one twentieth the population of the USA) who pointed out that 49 per cent of all prisoners were Afro American and that 40 per cent of those facing the death penalty were also Afro-Americans, with a chilling figure that there was a 15 times greater chance of being executed for a capital offence if you were a black American, rather than a white.
The US used their right of reply to hit back at Cuba, but never dealt with the illegal nature of the blockade, or the prison in Guantanamo Bay.
In the same session the Indian Government, stung by the Commission’s reports and many non Governmental Groups who had raised the question of caste, suggested that the UN should “shine its light elsewhere”. This seemed to be an invitation to look at other problems because caste discrimination was rooted in 3000 years of history. The UN special representative on the issue, from Senegal, hit back tersely to remind the Commission that caste was a form of discrimination and it existed in his own country as well as India and Japan; and that it is wrong.
Ireland speaks on behalf of the EU and gave a lengthy and very well written statement about the acceptance of the Durban declaration and all the anti discrimination measures that are part of European law.
I am in Geneva on behalf of Liberation, the anti racist and anti imperialist organisation that owes its antecedents to the Movement for Colonial Freedom founded by Fenner Brockway in 1954.
We pointed out that for all these statements the reality is that Europe can be a cold, hard and unforgiving place as national governments appease populist newspapers and racist pressure by treating asylum seekers abominably. Those that are able to receive any kind of benefit are limited to seventy per cent of income support. Those appealing against a refusal get no benefit at all, and end up homeless and destitute, reliant on begging or charity whilst wanting to work legally, and many are sent back to the society they thought they had escaped from where their dangers are increased.
As if this is not bad enough, the development of laws designed to oppose terrorism are in reality targeted against specific groups. Under UN Human Rights declarations, the operation of Guantanamo Bay is certainly illegal, and in order to bring in the Special Immigration Appeals Tribunal under which foreign nationals own Governments can act, they have had to seek derogation from the Human Rights Convention.
Europe and America are often, quite rightly, critical of discrimination and racism that exists in many parts of the world, but need to be told in no uncertain terms that the growth of the far right is a response to social pressures, and the policies of appeasement.
The Commission, for all its isolation from the real world in comfortable Geneva, is not immune from the immediate. The assassination in Gaza of the Hamas leader (Sheikh Yassin) brought an immediate meeting of the Islamic Countries, and a demand for a special session on the plight of the Palestinian people. A poignant reminder that without justice for the Palestinian people there will never be peace or release from the occupation. The politics of state assassination are as much a denial of human rights as any.
In Geneva, at enormous expense and trouble, groups travel from many countries where their normal social and political rights are denied, and eyeball their own Government’s who try to ignore them. Thus the Colombian Government, in the same room as their own human rights groups, tell the world that they are opposed to all forms of systematic discrimination. Yet they represent a country where Trade Unionists and Human Rights advocates face routine assassination.
The International Labour Organisation also has its office in Geneva, and their submission concerning employment discrimination pointed out that the vulnerability of migrant communities to debt bondage, removed their employment rights. Denial of human rights comes from blind prejudice, unaccountable military power, and an economically imbalanced world. The Human Rights Commission will not solve all this, only universal popular action will ensure that, but it does provide a forum to embarrass and demand justice.
Combating racism and xenophobia
March 22, 2004
Statement to UN Human Rights Commission on behalf of Liberation.
All international in instruments to combat racism, discrimination and xenophobia must be applied to address the plight of refugees and asylum seekers. There is much evidence to suggest that laws on asylum are being developed in Europe which are designed to be target specific and this is, in itself, discriminatory.
Those uprooted or displaced by political persecution, civil war, economic or environmental catastrophe are, in today’s globalised economy, the principle victims of a new form of institutionalised racism.
This is best described as “xeno-racism” in that it is directed at any impoverished strangers.
The demonisation of asylum seekers has become a norm throughout Europe and the developed world; a process that has been encouraged by irresponsible and populist media reporting. Words such as “bogus”, “illegal” and “economic migrant” have become common parlance.
Policies to exclude asylum seekers from access to benefit systems and housing support have been gathering pace in recent years. In the UK, for example, asylum seekers were reduced to ninety per cent of Income Support in 1986. (income Support is the equivalent of the European Decency threshold). Since then the situation has deteriorated with those asylum seekers entitled to anything reduced to the equivalent of seventy per cent of income support. Those whose initial application has been refused are denied all access to benefits even whilst pursuing their legal appeal rights.
The very poorest in many European cities are asylum seekers refused access to any aspect of the welfare state, including housing. They are often also denied the right to work thus becoming prey to unscrupulous employers and by working illegally undermine the minimum wage and health and safety systems designed to protect all workers.
The “War Against Terror” has accentuated this discrimination still further by removing asylum seekers (and other foreigners) from the safeguards of ordinary law. In many countries the state reserves for itself the right to detain, indefinitely, foreign nationals, accused or suspected of involvement in terrorist activities. They are denied access to justice, representation and even knowledge of the charges against them. As in Guantanamo Bay where the US has held many people for over two years without access to court, lawyer or jury the process is being repeated in national laws.
It is simply a perversion of the very notion of justice for anyone to be held in these circumstances.
The very act of seeking asylum can, in many circumstances, be regarded as a criminal act. This is used to justify extraordinary border controls that have scant regard to Article 31 of the Geneva Convention and of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The tragedy of deaths on European borders of desperate people trying to reach a place of safety is a stain on the whole world. Many are sub Saharan Africans who are desperate to simply survive.
The right to life, safety and dignity is one of the most fundamental of rights.
Asylum seekers in Europe are routinely subjected to arrest, detention and forced expulsion back to war zones and danger, with no regard to their human rights. In today’s world combating xeno racism and protecting human rights go hand in hand.
It is essential that the Human Rights Commission examines the whole process and vigorously defends the right to asylum enshrined in the 1951 Convention.
Palestine
March 1, 2004
The Middle East erupts once again as the running sore of the illegal occupation of Palestine continues.
The Road Map, promoted by Bush and enthusiastically supported by the British Government, is in tatters and is not a guide to anything. The construction of a wall, a medieval response to the cause of a people denied their own self determination and nationhood, is not so much illegal as immoral.
The wall, which the BBC insist on referring to as a “security fence”, does not follow the 1967 borders but is a further encroachment into Palestinian land and encircles villages and towns, thus denying farmers access to their land or people access to any kind of service in case of emergency. It is a ludicrous approach, and should be condemned by the whole world.
Israel’s pursuit of a shoot to kill policy against Hamas and other Palestinian groups is a brutal as it is wrong. To kill and old man in a wheel chair with a pinpoint accuracy weapon is not a sign of strength and efficiency but of weakness. A policy that has failed, and will fail, cannot bring peace or security to Israel or justice for the Palestinian people.
Recent reports show just how devastating Israel’s policy has been for the Palestinian people – terrifying levels of poverty, malnutrition, unemployment and lack of health and education are the lot of the Palestinian people. The Israeli incursions into Palestine have killed civilians and children using modern, effective and sophisticated weapons. It is not a war of equals but of occupation by the military of a first world state against the poor who live in third world conditions.
The other effects are less obvious: 5,000 Palestinians are held in Israel prisons and detention centres. 1000 of these are young people and 350 children under 16. The army attacks in Palestine kill unarmed people, as they did in Rafah, people who are merely defending their homes against Israeli army bulldozers.
In an attempt to save children Tom Hurndall, and international peace monitor was one of many who have laid down their lives for others.
None of this brings peace to Israel where the security measures are huge and a national psychosis against suicide bombers does not make anyone feel secure in any way. Yet the US and British Governments cannot it seems bring themselves to condemn Israel for either its numerous breaches of existing UN resolutions or the latest assassination of Sheikh Yassim. Britain abstained whilst the US used its veto on the Security Council.
To gain some idea of the thinking behind the US strategy it is worth looking at a 1996 paper written by an academic group, all of whom are now close to President Bush. Above the signatures of Richard Perle, Charles Fairbanks of John Hopkins University and Robert Lowenberg, of the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies comes a bizarre and interesting analysis.
Claiming that the problem with Israel is “Labor Zionism” it was, in effect, an advice note to the then new Netanyahu Government. In the document it envisages supporting a policy of “hot pursuit” of Palestinian fighters, taking the war to Syria, focussing on removing Saddam Hussein, destabilising Jordan. It concludes by calling for the liberalisation of the economy through privatisation, tax cuts and selling state lands. It sees Israel as a kind of free market powerhouse and US economic base in the region. Nothing in the paper acknowledges the rights of Palestinian people or the appalling human conditions under which they live as refugees in their own land. The US continues to give almost unlimited military and economic aid to Israel; in effect its guarantor and the UK, though the provision of diplomatic support and arms sales is also implicated.
Peace in the Middle East can only be achieved through justice for the people of Palestine. The occupation, wall and assassinations are no solution.
PSC are holding a Rally for Palestine on May 15th in Trafalgar Square from 1.30pm with speeches, music and stalls. Come and support the Palestinian people.
