Soapbox time again...22:41 Nov 04 2007
Times Read: 1,398
It's been a fair while since I wrote down anything about how I feel on the current state of global politics, even though it sloshes around in my head constantly.
Somehow I get the feeling that not many on VR really care to know, or to understand. I know some are switched on to whats going on in the world outside of America, but it's a rare mind that actually has deep consideration about it.
It takes a very considerable attitude to relate it to one's life. How do these things affect us and why should we even be concerned about how many people die in the Jo'burg slums every day?
Why are protests in Burma relevant at all to anyone outside of that isolated mountainous jungle land?
President Musharraf has declared emergency rule for the military in Pakistan. Why, is a good question. Does it matter to America, to Britain, to anyone?
Yes, very much so. Critically, Pakistan is an 'ally in the War on Terror'. (terror is a noun, incidentally, so yet again, I am amazed for the American capacity to mash up the English language)
So in this capacity, Musharraf has commited himself and his country to a fight against Muslim ideologists. Pakistan, is a majority Muslim nation, so that doesn't go down at all well.
Mix into this the recent assault on the Red Mosque, a seat of Islamic teaching and a symbol for Sharia law following Muslims, where hundreds were killed. Add several assassination attempts on Musharraf, with a recent upsurge in fighting in the border area with Afganistan, resulting in hundreds of Pakistani soldiers killed and captured.
Top it off with a recent supreme court hearing, where the decision, due on Monday (tomorrow), was likely to go against Musharraf, where they would rule his recent election as the country's President illegal, due to his being the head of the army.
The result is that Musharraf has suspended the constitution, surrounded the courts, sacked the cheif justice, put troops on the street and has essentially enacted a military coup to retain control of the country, demolishing all sense of democracy.
Benazir Bhutto, a polical rival, recently returned for self-imposed exile, to be greeted with bomb attacks and hundreds killed. She is currently out of the country and looks unlikely to return in the current climate. All of the opposition parties in Pakistan are untied against Musharraf's actions, but since he controls the army, the only recourse is demonstration, which have almost always turned violent in the past.
So, now that America's key South Asian ally is now a military dictatorship, how does that affect us?
For Britian, we have a large Pakistani immigrant population and already have a great deal of bad feeling between those communities and 'The English'.
The UK also sells a lot of arms to Pakistan, a country who also have intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons.
Sat in an extensive mountainous region by Afganistan, the Northwest frontier has become (or may always have been) a base of operations for the Taleban and Al Qeda supporting fighters, seeping easily over a porous border.
Recent attempts by the Pakistani army have been futile in preventing these cross-border incursions, with many soldiers actually defecting.
Now that there is a political stalemate, the Mullah's are calling for war against the state and the imposition of an Islamic Theocracy.
Consider what will happen in Afganistan if this happens. The twenty thousand or so American, UK and European troops in the South, will be overwhelmed, with no likelihood of reinforcments, due to the beleaguered armies in Iraq.
And what of Iraq?
Turkey recently began amassing troops and armour on the Northern border with Kurdistan, amidst threats of invasion in order to root out the PKK, an organisation identified as terrorist by 'The West', yet widely supported by the Kurdish people in their aim of an autonomous Kurdish state in South Eastern Turkey.
And they have a case, since discrimination and violence against Turkish Kurds has been rife for decades. However, the Turkish people want blood after recent military losses in the region.
This means a potential destabilising of the one currently manageable region of Iraq. Not good news for America at all.
One small piece of positive news for America, although massively ironic, is the Sunni tribal leaders agreement to fight with the US against the Al Qeda and Shi'a militias.
Unfortunately, many of the leaders of these tribes are being assassinated on a regular basis. The irony comes in that these are the same tribes that were once favoured under Saddam Hussein. (remember him- hung like a dog after a kangaroo court, not long after Bush declared 'Mision Accomplished' on that aircraft hanger?)
Skip over to the 'Holy Land', where Isreal is applying collective punishment against a civilian population for the actions of Hamas rocket attacks. This is in the form of restrictions to food and fuel supplies, the cutting off of electricity and water and the destruction of essential civilian services, such as power stations.
See the Geneva Convention:
'Article 33:
No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.
Pillage is prohibited.
Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.
Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions collective punishments are a war crime.
By collective punishment, the drafters of the Geneva Conventions had in mind the reprisal killings of World Wars I and II. In the First World War, Germans executed Belgian villagers in mass retribution for resistance activity. In World War II, Nazis carried out a form of collective punishment to suppress resistance. Entire villages or towns or districts were held responsible for any resistance activity that took place there. The conventions, to counter this, reiterated the principle of individual responsibility. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Commentary to the conventions states that parties to a conflict often would resort to "intimidatory measures to terrorize the population" in hopes of preventing hostile acts, but such practices "strike at guilty and innocent alike. They are opposed to all principles based on humanity and justice."
Since Isreal is an apartheid state, much as South Africa was, I don't see them taking much notice of the horrendous suffering inflicted upon an innocent civilian population, other than by small groups such as B'tselem, who do fantastically brave work to prevent inhumane and immoral treatment of any people in that war.
Again, there is the face of Islam being the main source of consternation, where a democratically elected party was refused by The West, causing a schism and eventual meltdown in the Palestinian political structure, undermining any future possibility of nationhood for them.
Move across Egypt and into Sudan and more fighting between Islamic and Western ideals, where more than 200,000 are dead in the last decade, with millions displaced, starving and still dying. Next door, is Ethiopia and then Somalia.
Most of us in the west know about these two countries, with the Live Aid concerts set up to bring attention to the Ethiopian famines of the 1980's and in 1993, the now infamous events of Black Hawk Down.
Recently, US funded operations by the Ethiopian government resulted in the Ethiopian army invading Somalia, in order to drive out the Union of Islamic Courts- an organisation which had just begun stitching the country back together after years of destruction and poverty.
Now, there are once again running battles in Mogadishu, tens of thousands fleeing their homes and hundreds dead already.
Switch to the west of the continent and find the Nigerian government being accused of corruption in stealing the wealth of the oil reserves, an infrastructre which is so dangerous that hundreds of people ae killed regularly trying to syphon off the petrol.
Who buys this oil? Yes, it's the good ol' boys in the US. Just as they buy from Saudi, another state which seems to lack the understanding of Democracy and human rights.
Incidentally, the UK is selling arms to them (the Saudi's), which they will buy with several billion dollars (about 9$ billion, if memory serves), of US taxpayers money.
And this is all without mention of North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Central America, China, Japan, Eastern Europe and Russia.
Where is the world going and who's driving it there?
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