Desmond Tutu had a point

.   Sir Geoffrey Bindman agrees with Tutu that the Iraq war was illegal and aggressive and breached UN charter provisions. The International Criminal Court should hear their case

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown                 Independent/UK                         9 Sept.  2012

Caryl Churchill, the greatest of modern British playwrights, is showcasing her new work at the Royal Court Theatre. Love and Information is a dazzling, inventive, unsettling theatrical piece.  The cast includes EastEnders' Amanda Drew, the talented black actor Rhashan Stone and Linda Bassett. . In one memorable exchange, women talk about the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein before the Iraq war. [Bush and Blair] "didn't know" says the first woman and her friend replies, "didn't want to know, they wanted it to be true". It goes on playing with the idea of truth wished for and willed, truth made up. The masters of our universe ignored public opposition, played us, broke international law and got away with it.

They still cut and paste facts to suit them and have remade their reputations with consummate proficiency. Those who backed the catastrophic desert adventure are rehabilitated with a kiss – Blair and his wife, his Cabinet, chief spin doctor Alastair Campbell and Tory and media hawks. Blair is a multimillionaire, so successful in the business world that last week he is said to have earned £620,000 for his help in brokering the world's biggest corporate takeover. Campbell, meanwhile, has a flourishing career and is sought out to comment on all human life and on his deeply-held principles.

Valerie Amos got the international development portfolio when Clare Short later resigned in protest at the way her government was building up the case for war. Amos was sent off to sceptical African nations to get them to back the illegal war, a task she carried out with gusto. Now this war cheerleader is the UN Under-Secretary-General for humanitarian aid and emergency relief. All is forgiven, all forgotten. Christian redemption itself has been duped and dishonoured.

Last week the conscientious and watchful Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Tutu upset that wicked, Western consensus of absolution. He refused to share a platform with Tony Blair at a conference in Johannesburg (for which our man was paid £150,000), accused Bush and Blair of behaving like "playground bullies" and fabricating reasons to go to war. He even called for the two leaders to be tried at the International Criminal Court. Well why not? Why should the court only ever try "darkie" and Commie baddies? Blair and Bush  have a case to answer in an autonomous court and ought to be held accountable for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed during action and the many who are still dying every day.

Blair's response to Tutu was typically slippery and soapy: "To repeat that old canard that we lied about the intelligence is completely wrong as every single independent analysis of the evidence has shown". The ex-PM then listed Saddam's many horrendous crimes and sanguinely claimed that Iraqi children were blossoming, investments booming. Perhaps Brits suffering miserably during the recession should migrate to Iraq, now such an oasis of happiness and opportunity.

This month it is ten years since the infamous, discredited September dossier was released. The Prince (as in Machiavelli) and his gang of New Labourites told us that Saddam Hussein had the capacity to mobilise weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes. Lord Falconer, one of the insiders, now accepts that the war had little public support and had a "hugely damaging effect" on politics and democracy. The esteemed human-rights lawyer Sir Geoffrey Bindman agrees with Tutu that the war was illegal and aggressive, breached UN charter provisions and should be investigated by the international court. Pigs will fly before that ever happens. God knows how long we have to wait until the Chilcot report is published.

But watching the ease with which all the main figures shook off any suggestion of wrongdoing and manipulation didn't give me hope that the chairman, a career diplomat, will deliver serious rebukes or accountability. A-level students I went to speak to recently wanted to know why a young person stealing shoes or a bottle of water ends up in jail while Blair and his tribe are not punished and instead get rich.  I couldn't give them an honest answer without dousing their young hearts with cynicism.       [Abbrev.] 
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/yasmin-alibhai-brown/desmond-tutu-had-a-point-

A final warning that the Pope ignores at his peril

Leading article                      Independent/UK                      03 September 2012

If Pope Benedict does attend the funeral in Milan of Cardinal Martini, whose body, robed and mitred, crosier at his side, was laid out for the veneration of the faithful at the weekend, it will surely be with mixed feelings. The danger of not attending the last obsequies of such a high-ranking prince of the Church is that it might appear cowardly, tantamount to a public admission that a rift had grown up between them. But to attend will take real nerves, and humility, for Carlo Maria Martini's parting shot was a devastating and – coming from a cardinal – an almost unprecedented attack on the Catholic Church's leadership, in effect on the Pope himself, in the form of a final interview with an Italian newspaper.

The Cardinal pulled no punches in his indictment of the contemporary Church, describing it as moribund and out of touch. It was 200 years behind the times on numerous social issues, he said, which was why churches built to hold great congregations now served huddles. By failing to accommodate itself to new kinds of patterns of family life, he added, the Church risked throwing away contact with the next generation. "Why don't we rouse ourselves?" he concluded. "Are we afraid?"

The answer to that question from beyond the grave, is, alas, yes. The rest of the Catholic hierarchy is afraid of its authoritarian leader, and seems unwilling even to question, let alone oppose, his hard-line views on contraception, homosexual relationships, the remarriage of divorced people in church, the admission of women to the priesthood, the abolition of clerical celibacy and a lot of other issues.

This culture of silence is not surprising. A policy of replacing liberal bishops and cardinals with conservatives of the same stamp as the Pope, which has been in place since the late 1970s, when Benedict's predecessor and hero, Karol Wojtyla, became Pope John Paul II, has cleansed the Church's inner sanctum of questioning minds. Martini's promotion to Archbishop of Milan in 1979 came just before the clampdown got going. In other words, we may have heard the last of the more open-minded Catholic leaders, and we may be wrong if we imagine that the Cardinal's call for modernisation will restart a debate inside the Church on topics that the Pope regards as off-limits.

To the Pope's conservative allies, this can only be good: the less discussion the better. They tend to see all or most of the changes that took place in the Church since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s as regrettable, and prize obedience as a virtue. Their allies, in a sense, are those militant atheists who draw satisfaction from the sight of the Catholic Church, and all the other churches, rendering itself ridiculous in the eyes of the modern world by tying itself up in the moth-eaten brocade of worn-out dogmas.

Most of the rest of us will feel regretful that the doors of the papal apartments remain so tightly closed to voices like that of the Cardinal – if only because what he said in his interview ought to have been blindingly obvious.

As Archbishop of Milan, the city from which the Emperor Constantine in 317 issued the historic edict proclaiming toleration for the Christian religion, Martini was keenly aware of the importance of maintaining the Church's association with the broad currents of social and intellectual life in Europe – a partnership that lasted the best part of two millennia but which is dwindling to nothing. His message was about the need to re-engage before it's too late. Perhaps it already is too late, and the Church and Europe are destined to go their entirely separate ways, inhabiting the same space but not involved in any kind of conversation, in which case both sides will be impoverished – the Church, perhaps, more than the world around it, as the Cardinal appeared to recognise.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-a-final-warning-that-the-pope-

Hague is wrong... we must own up to our brutal colonial past

We associate the term 'concentration camps' with the Nazis. But it started with the British

Owen Jones                               Independent/UK                            03 September 2012

Remember all that national soul-searching over Empire and all the horrors committed in its name? No, me neither. There has never been an apology for British imperialism. Consider India, the "jewel in the crown" of the British Empire. At the beginning of the 18th-century – before it was conquered – its share of the world economy was well over a fifth, nearly as large as all of Europe put together. By the time the country won independence, it had dropped to less than 4 per cent. India was treated as a cash cow. India was the world's biggest buyer of British exports and provided highly paid work for British civil servants – all at India's expense.

As India became crucial to British prosperity, millions of Indians died completely unnecessary deaths.  As a result of laissez-faire economic policies ruthlessly enforced by Britain, between 12 and 29 million Indians died of starvation needlessly. Millions of tons of wheat were exported to Britain even as famine raged. When relief camps were set up, the inhabitants were barely fed and nearly all died.

The last large-scale famine to take place in India was under British rule. Up to four million Bengalis starved to death in 1943 after Winston Churchill diverted food to well-fed British soldiers and countries such as Greece. "The starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis is less serious" than that of "sturdy Greeks", he argued. "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion," he said to his Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery. In any case, the famine was their fault for "breeding like rabbits". Churchill had form: back in 1919, he declared himself "strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes", arguing that it would "spread a lively terror".

We normally associate "concentration camps" with the Nazis, but the term entered into general circulation because of the British. During the Boer War at the turn of the 20th-century, up to a sixth of the Boer population – mainly women and children – perished after the British imprisoned them in camps. Their homes and crops were burned, their sheep and cattle butchered in a scorched earth policy.

These sorts of atrocities are not all part of some distant past. In July, three survivors of the 1950s Mau Mau uprising against British rule in Kenya demanded reparations from the Government for alleged torture. In the brutal crackdown of the insurgency, thousands of members of the Kikuyu tribe were driven into detention camps. Estimates of deaths vary widely; historian David Anderson puts the death toll at 20,000.  British crimes were hidden from the population back home in favour of a daily diet of Mau Mau atrocities.

None of this is to single out Britain: a conspiracy of silence remains over European colonialism as a whole. Belgium's King Leopold II should be regarded as a tyrant up there with Hitler and Stalin. Under his tyrannical rule over the modern-day Democratic Republic of Congo, about 10 million people – or half the population – died horrible deaths. Millions were forced to collect sap from rubber plants; those that missed their quotas had their hands chopped off. It is difficult to know where to start with other European horrors, like the forgotten German genocide against the Herero and Nama people in South-West Africa in the early 1900s, or the post-war French slaughter of hundreds of thousands in Indochina and Algeria.

European moral superiority is often asserted, despite the fact that the greatest atrocities in human history – colonialism, two catastrophic wars, Nazism, the Holocaust – were all committed by Europeans, and within living memory. But it is all too tempting to airbrush the colonial era from history. It is all too easy for an aggressor to say "let bygones be bygones". Hundreds of millions still suffer from the consequences of colonialism. As the then-South Africa President Thabo Mbeki put it in 2005, colonialism left a "common and terrible legacy of countries deeply divided on the basis of race, colour, culture and religion". Across Africa, the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent, divisions created or exacerbated by colonialism remain.

We could learn from our colonial past, too. The siren voices of armchair bombers, loudly demanding intervention in foreign lands, would be far less appealing if we were aware of past horrors. In the 19th century, Britain was bogged down in an unwinnable war in Afghanistan; and so history repeats itself.

Both William Hague and Gordon Brown would have us believe that we have tortured ourselves enough over Empire, and that it is time to move on. But a national debate over this largely ignored – and crucial – part of our history has not even begun. It is desperately overdue.           Twitter: @OwenJones84              [Abridged]

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/owen-jones-hague-is-wrong-we-must-own-up-to-our-

Getting Rid of George W. Bush Wasn't Enough

The issue isn't Obama, any more than it was Bush before him. The issue is US power

by Owen Jones                         Independent/UK                         September 2, 2012

How easy it was to scrutinise US power when George W. Bush was in office. After all, it was difficult to defend an administration packed with such repulsive characters, like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, whose attitude towards the rest of the world amounted to thuggish contempt Many will shudder remembering that dark era: the naked human pyramids accompanied by grinning US service personnel in Abu Ghraib; the orange-suited prisoners in Guantanamo, kneeling in submission at the feet of US soldiers; the murderous assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah. By the end of Bush's term in office, favourable opinion of the US had plummeted.

But US foreign policy these days escapes scrutiny. In part, that is down a well-grounded terror of the only viable alternative to Barack Obama: the increasingly deranged US right. A deliberate shift to a softer, more diplomatic tone has helped, too. But it is also the consequence of a strategic failure on the part of many critics of US foreign policy in the Bush era. Bush seemed to be the problem, and an understanding of US power – the nature of which remains remarkably consistent from president to president – was lost.

This week, the UN's Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism, Ben Emmerson QC, demanded that the US allow independent investigation over its use of unmanned drones, or the UN would be forced to step in. These drones target militants, it is claimed, but according to a study by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, between 282 and 585 civilians have died in Pakistan as a result.

According to Pakistan's US Ambassador, Sherry Rehman, the drone war "radicalises foot soldiers, tribes and entire villages in our region". After the latest strike this week, Pakistan's foreign ministry said the attacks were "a violation of its sovereignty and territorial integrity and are in contravention of international law". Its Parliament has passed a resolution condemning the drone war. It is armed aggression by the Obama administration, pure and simple. Two months ago, former US President Jimmy Carter described drone attacks as a "widespread abuse of human rights" which "abets our enemies and alienates our friends". He's not wrong:

Guantanamo was iconic of Bush's brutality, and after his election Obama signed executive orders mandating its closure. The camp remains open for business, pledged to take new "high-value" detainees if captured. The same goes for Obama's pledge to shut down CIA-run "black site prisons" in Afghanistan. At least 20 secret temporary prisons remain in place, with widespread allegations of ill-treatment.

Under Obama, the US role in the Middle East remains as cynically wedded to strategic self-interest as ever. Despotic tyrannies like Saudi Arabia are armed to the teeth: in 2010, the US signed an arms deal with the regime worth $60bn, the biggest in US history. Obama has resumed sales of military equipment to Bahrain's dictatorship as it brutally crushes protesters struggling for democracy. Last year, Saudi Arabia invaded Bahrain with tacit US support. And even when the US-backed Mubarak dictatorship was on the ropes in Egypt, Obama's administration remained a cheerleader, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arguing that the "Egyptian Government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people".

Coupled with the US's ongoing failure to pressure Israel into accepting a just peace with the Palestinians, no wonder there is rising global anger at Obama. But of course, the issue isn't Obama, any more than it was Bush before him. The issue is US power. But despite its best efforts – and as menacing as it can be for Pakistani villagers and Bahraini democrats – its power is in decline. The US share of global economic output was nearly a quarter in 1991; today, it represents less than a fifth.

With the last remaining superpower at its weakest since World War II, there is an unmissable opening to argue for a more equal and just world order, restricting the ability of Great Powers to throw their weight around. And a word of warning: if we don't seize this opportunity now, one superpower will simply be replaced by another – and our world will be as unequal and unjust as ever.      © 2012 The Independent         

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/09/02-4

Why I had no choice but to spurn Tony Blair

I couldn't sit with someone who justified the invasion of Iraq with a lie

Desmond Tutu                  The Observer,                     2 September 2012

The immorality of the United States and Great Britain's decision to invade Iraq in 2003, premised on the lie that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, has destabilised and polarised the world to a greater extent than any other conflict in history.

Instead of recognising that the world we lived in, with increasingly sophisticated communications, transportations and weapons systems necessitated sophisticated leadership that would bring the global family together, the then-leaders of the US and UK fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies and drive us further apart. They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand – with the spectre of Syria and Iran before us.

If leaders may lie, then who should tell the truth? Days before George W Bush and Tony Blair ordered the invasion of Iraq, I called the White House and spoke to Condoleezza Rice, who was then national security adviser, to urge that United Nations weapons inspectors be given more time to confirm or deny the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Should they be able to confirm finding such weapons, I argued, dismantling the threat would have the support of virtually the entire world. Ms Rice demurred, saying there was too much risk and the president would not postpone any longer.

On what grounds do we decide that Robert Mugabe should go the International Criminal Court, Tony Blair should join the international speakers' circuit, bin Laden should be assassinated, but Iraq should be invaded, not because it possesses weapons of mass destruction, as Mr Bush's chief supporter, Mr Blair, confessed last week, but in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein?

The cost of the decision to rid Iraq of its by-all-accounts despotic and murderous leader has been staggering, beginning in Iraq itself. Last year, an average of 6.5 people died there each day in suicide attacks and vehicle bombs, according to the Iraqi Body Count project. More than 110,000 Iraqis have died in the conflict since 2003 and millions have been displaced. By the end of last year, nearly 4,500 American soldiers had been killed and more than 32,000 wounded.

On these grounds alone, in a consistent world, those responsible for this suffering and loss of life should be treading the same path as some of their African and Asian peers who have been made to answer for their actions in the Hague. But even greater costs have been exacted beyond the killing fields, in the hardened hearts and minds of members of the human family across the world.

Has the potential for terrorist attacks decreased? To what extent have we succeeded in bringing the so-called Muslim and Judeo-Christian worlds closer together, in sowing the seeds of understanding and hope?

Leadership and morality are indivisible. Good leaders are the custodians of morality. The question is not whether Saddam Hussein was good or bad or how many of his people he massacred. The point is that Mr Bush and Mr Blair should not have allowed themselves to stoop to his immoral level. If it is acceptable for leaders to take drastic action on the basis of a lie, without an acknowledgement or an apology when they are found out, what should we teach our children? My appeal to Mr Blair is not to talk about leadership, but to demonstrate it. You are a member of our family, God's family. You are made for goodness, for honesty, for morality, for love; so are our brothers and sisters in Iraq, in the US, in Syria, in Israel and Iran.

I did not deem it appropriate to have this discussion at the Discovery Invest Leadership Summit in Johannesburg last week. As the date drew nearer, I felt an increasingly profound sense of discomfort about attending a summit on "leadership" with Mr Blair. I extend my humblest and sincerest apologies to Discovery, the summit organisers, the speakers and delegates for the lateness of my decision not to attend.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/02/desmond-tutu-tony-blair-iraq