Robert Fisk: Someone remembers this atrocity at last – to Obama's dismay

by Robert Fisk

The Independent

Once more we have to forget the Armenian Holocaust – the first of the 20th century – in order to appease the Turks. Bill Clinton did it.

George W Bush spinelessly caved in to the Turkish generals. And now our favourite Nobel prize winner – another brave president who promised to acknowledge the Armenian genocide if he was elected and then declined to do so – went whinging and whining to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington and pleaded with them not to tell the truth about the savage rape and murder of 1.5 million Armenian civilians by the Turks in 1915. Good for the committee that it did not give in. But it will do no good.

Sure, the Turkish ambassador has been recalled from Washington in a huff. But equally certain is that there will be no vote on the genocide by the full House of Representatives. And if there is, there'll never be a vote in the Senate. Obama will help see to that. The man who wanted change doesn't want change on the little matter of a genocide that led directly to the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews.

The events in Washington prove a few things. The Armenian American community have a more powerful and wealthier lobby than ever before. More seriously – for the Turks – is that this year Turkey did not have the Israeli lobby behind it. In the past, Israel, which disgracefully claims that the Armenian Holocaust was not a genocide, has supported its close ally Turkey. But this year, Israel and Turkey have fallen out and the Israelis are still miffed at Turkey's condemnation of the bloodbath in Gaza.

The Turks sent their generals to bully Bush last time round. This time, the Turkish Foreign Minister warned that "Turkish-US ties are going through a very important phase in which they need strategic co-operation at the highest level in their history." The message is simple. Acknowledge the genocide, and the US will lose its airbases in Turkey and the Turkish roads its military convoys use into Iraq.

The fact, unfortunately, is that these roads are the very highways down which the Armenians were sent on their death marches in 1915. That's not mentioned, of course. Our faithful Turkish ally might even pack up its support for the US in Afghanistan, where they are helping fight "Obama's war". But Robert Gates is still in Washington to remind congressmen what he said last year; that America needed "those roads and so on". Well, let's just hope the American troops don't halt their convoys and dig in the fields around those roads in the coming years. The skeletons are still there in their tens of thousands.

One wonders what would happen if Germany suddenly decided that the Nazi Holocaust was not a genocide. Would Chancellor Merkel get away with it? Would Obama lobby that Germany should be allowed to get away with such an obscenity? Perhaps it's worth remembering that in 1939, Hitler asked his generals – before setting off into Poland to murder the millions of Jews in eastern Europe – a simple question: "Who now remembers the Armenians?" Well, Hitler got the answer he would have wanted from Obama this week.

Robert Fisk’s World: The true eloquence of letters from the front

by Robert Fisk

The Independent

Is it their humanity, or fear, that spares real soldiers from the clichés of journalism?

How come old soldiers don't write in clichés? We reporters fill our dispatches with clichés about "gathering war clouds" and guns "falling silent" – read any (and I repeat, any) newspaper, and you'll see what I mean. Is it their basic humanity – or savagery, or fear – that largely spares real soldiers from the clichés of journalism and the ungrammatical shorthand of the email?

Take Hal Crookall, whom readers last met in this column as he tramped with his platoon over the sand dunes of Dunkirk, the first reaction of his soldiers on seeing the thousands of soldiers on the beaches identical to that of the British sergeant in the movie Atonement. "Fuck me!" they roared. Well, Hal has dropped me another note – and be warned, Reader, this is strong stuff, not for the breakfast table – after reading an article by me on the Menin Gate at Ypres, which bears the names of more than 56,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers whose bodies were never found after the First World War.

Hal's memories were of that same Menin Gate – during the Second World War. Retreating with the BEF rearguard in 1940, he found himself defending Ypres, the very same Belgian city still undergoing reconstruction from the ruins of the 1914-1918 war. And – irony of ironies – he was ordered to take up position next to Lutyens' gloomy monument. "I saw the Menin Gate for the first time, amazed at the number of names on it, with the ghastly thought that maybe our names would soon be added to them."

The stage is set. "I was a very young second lieutenant, and I was sent with my platoon to take up a position to the left of the Menin Gate on what seemed to be a canal bank. There were German snipers on the opposite side ... I got a message from the CO to join him underneath the Menin Gate, for instructions." Second Lieutenant Crookall was almost killed by a German mortar bomb when he arrived and was told that a Royal Engineers unit was placing an explosive charge under the bridge behind the Menin Gate. Hal's job was to take a platoon to the other side of the bridge and hold off Hitler's legions. He ran to the second floor of a house, finding a window that faced up the street with a pile of rubbish under the window covered with a tarpaulin.

"I dived on top of it, poked a Bren gun through the window and started firing... I soon became aware that there was a most dreadful smell in the room. As soon as I was able, I folded back the tarpaulin... I was to have nightmares for many years after what followed. I realised that I was lying on top of a pile of dead bodies. Immediately facing me, inches away, was what was left of an old man's face, covered in crawling white maggots." Then Hal ran back to the great gate, noticing "a magnificent Alsatian dog in a doorway with half its nose blown off", and another human body being eaten "by an animal resembling a polecat".

The explosives went off, blowing up the bridge and damaging the Menin Gate – and though Hal may not know it, the shrapnel marks of that blast are actually still on the gate – before heading for the Channel coast. "So you see, Robert, your accounts about Ypres can also trigger more recent memories than the First World War!" So it would seem. A soldier's-eye view of danger and horror and history. And by chance when I got Hal's letter, I was reading Arthur Stockwin's lovely, deeply sad book about an affair of letters between the woman who would become his mother, Edith Ainscow of Birmingham, and her soldier sweetheart of the Great War, Second Lieutenant Geoff Boothby. He was a tunneller close to Ypres, digging 30 feet into the blue clay of Flanders to attack the German lines from beneath the ground. She was 18, he 21. Edith had known Geoff for only four days and their letters are a moving bond between them. Geoff tries to spare his young lady the darkness of the trenches although he speaks of the death of a young officer, the cold, the damp – this is Ypres in the early spring of 1916: "I've had a mouldy night of it, sinking a shaft under the most trying conditions of wet, cold & bad luck... Huns reported working two yards from my gallery, which meant yours truly lying on his tummy in sodden clay for half an hour and hearing nothing... Yesterday three crumps (shells) made themselves considerably de trop by landing 10 yards from our dugout, one smashing the entrance. But we're getting used to such trifling things as shells." Edith pleads for a picture of Geoff in is uniform. "Geoff Dearest, I've got your photo just now and I can hardly take my eyes off it even to write to you. I didn't know anything could make anybody so happy."

But by 20 March, Geoff was writing: "Nearly all my friends in the Staffords have been killed in the fighting round Ypres a few weeks ago. It's a horrible sad thing how many friendships have been made & broken by this war... But it does make one feel really proud to be an Englishman, when one knows how unselfishly one's friends go west." Ouch. Just two months later, Geoff was killed by a German underground explosion, dying instantly, 30 feet down in the Flanders mud only a mile or so from where – almost a quarter of a century later – Hal himself would be fighting for his life against the Germans. Geoff's body was not recovered but his name is remembered on the monument at Bellewaerde Wood.

When Geoff's officer, Major J M Bliss, writes to his mother Alice, he begins with devastating eloquence. "I am more sorry than I can express to have to send you some very bad news, in fact the worst, of your son Lieut Boothby..."

In Alice's papers, Arthur Stockwin found a handwritten note from Alice, dedicated to her dead son.

Will you come back when

The Tide Turns?

After many days?

My heart yearns to know.

And so I seem

To have you still the same

In one world with me

As if it were part and parcel,

One shadow, and we need not

dissemble

Our darkness: do you understand?

For I have told you plain how it is.

I shall always wonder over you, and

look for you

And you will always be with me.

I think even Hal will be lost for words at that.

Protest of the Friends of the IDF dinner at the Waldorf, NYC

International Solidarity Movement

On March 9th 2010, The Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, a registered 501-(c)(3) tax-exempt organization that provides support and services to members of Israel’s national army, will be holding a gala $1,000 a plate fundraiser at the Waldorf Astoria. The keynote speaker will be Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, IDF Chief of General Staff, who was responsible for the prosecution of last year’s Operation Cast Lead against the people of Gaza. At the same time as the dinner, a broad coalition of local groups will stage a mobile protest outside the hotel to highlight the crimes committed by the IDF during Operation Cast Lead and Israel’s ongoing illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip.

WHO: A broad and diverse tri-state coalition, including peace and Palestine solidarity groups as well as grassroots community organizations and religious institutions. (Complete list below)

WHEN: Tuesday, March 9th, 5-7 P.M.

WHERE: Starting 53rd ST. and Lexington Ave. then moving through the neighborhood.

VISUALS: Hundreds of protesters dressed in black, carrying placards detailing war crimes and names of civilians killed by the IDF, and marching silently around the blocks near the Waldorf Astoria.

Gabi Ashkenazi led the Israeli military assault against the people of Gaza in Dec.- Jan. of 2008-9, in which 1400 Palestinians were killed, more than one-fifth of whom were children. This included forcing 100 members of the extended Al-Samouni family into a storage shed and then bombing the structure, killing 23 people. Under Ashkenazi’s leadership, the Israel Defense Forces attacked schools and hospitals and flouted international humanitarian law and the laws of war with regard to the treatment of unarmed civilians.

The protest outside the Waldorf Astoria is a part of the 6th International Israeli Apartheid Week.

Co-sponsoring groups include: A.R.T. (Activist Response Team), Adalah-NY, American Jews for a Just Peace, Brooklyn For Peace, Center for Immigrant Families, Codepink, Committee for Open Discussion of Zionism, Gaza Freedom March, Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions-USA, Jewish Voice For Peace, Jews Say No!, Judson Church, Middle East Crisis Response, National Lawyers Guild – NY Chapter, NYC Anti-War Coalition, New York Collective of Radical Educators, Post Road, Progressive Democrats of America, Regeneración Childcare NYC, WESPAC Foundation, Women In Black Union Square, Women of a Certain Age, Woodstock Veterans For Peace.

Endorsed by the Israeli groups: Coalition of Women for Peace, Boycott! Supporting the Palestinian Call for BDS From Within.

Hebron’s women march in protest to the Judaization of the Ibrahimi mosque

International Solidarity Movement

Today over a 100 Palestinian women marched Hebron’s streets to resist Ibrahim’s mosque becoming an Israeli Heritage Site. The Women’s Empowerment Project gathered women from Hebron district to march from Hebron’s Muncipality down to the mosque. The exclusively female crowd chanted and held banners while peacefully, but decisively demonstrating. At the checkpoint, the women had to wait for approximately 20 minutes before being allowed entrance into the mosque. An overall elated atmosphere affirmed this was a powerful demonstration, illuminating the power of women, while simultaneously empowering women to take resistance out on the streets.

On 21 February 2010, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced the Israeli government’s intention to designate the Ibrahimi Mosque in Al-Khalil (Hebron) to become an Israeli Heritage Site. The shrine, located in the ancient city of Hebron, is considered to be sacred by Moslims, Jews and Christians. Supposedly it is the burial place for three Biblical couples: Abraham and Sara, Isaac and Rebekah and Jacob and Leah.

Netanyahu’s statement has caused increased tensity in Hebron. The Palestinian population fears that this entails a “Judaization of the Ibrahimi mosque” with restricted access to the Mosque for Muslims. In the past ten days several demonstrations and clashes between the Palestinian population of Al-Khalil and the Israeli army have taken place. In contrast to these previous demonstrations, today’s march was not met with IOF violence, nor were there any arrests made.

'Long March' for Aafia's release from 10th

by Farehia Rehman

The Nation

ISLAMABAD – Exhibiting grave concerns over the alleged sluggishness of the PPP-led regime to get Dr Aafia Siddique released from illegal imprisonment of USA, civil society activists on Wednesday announced to launch “Long March” from 10th of March.

A series of events are in pipeline as a part of a “Long March” that would be launched from Faisalabad Bar Association. The announcement was made in a peaceful demonstration at Abpara Chowk organised by the Pakistan Professionals Forum and student community of the twin cities to condemn and convey shock and abhorrence against the unjust verdict in Dr Aafia Siddique’s case and to show solidarity with her and her family.

Dr Fauzia Siddqui, Dr Afia’ s sister was also present at the occasion along with the representatives of the Pakistan Professionals Forum, Defence of Human Rights (DHR) and the civil society activists. Peoples belonging to all walks of life including doctors, engineers, lawyers, academicians, students, and other professionals also massively participated in the demonstration and rejected, in unequivocal terms, the illegal detention and conviction of Dr Aafia Siddiqui by NY court. The demo was held during rain. Participants on the occasion vehemently condemned her detention and appealed for efforts to secure her immediate release.

They opined that Dr Afia Siddiqui is a citizen of Pakistan and she was illegally abducted by Pakistani intelligence agencies and handed over to US authorities. Pakistan has the legal authority and jurisdiction to hear her trial and decide her fate, if she has ever committed a crime. Handing her over to US authorities is a gross violation of the constitution of Pakistan and an insult to the judicial system in Pakistan and the nation as a whole.

They also said that the horrifying case of Aafia Siddiqui and her three children is a glaring example of the criminal and inhuman practices of US imperialism and its ally, the Pakistani government.

While addressing the gathering, Dr Fauzia Siddqui said that the aggrieved families of the missing persons under the leadership of Amna Janjua have been waiting for the recovery of their relatives and consider that the current situation is contrary to what the government and other people from ruling parties are announcing.

She said that the Kangaroo court of New York has held Dr Aafia Siddiqui guilty for a crime that she never committed despite the fact that no fingerprints of Dr Aafia were found on the gun; neither witnesses could testify their statements.

“Abduction, illegal imprisonment, torture and rape of Dr Aafia by US forces is insult of national integrity, dignity and sovereignty of 170 million Pakistani people,” she noted.

She maintained that government of Pakistan has not made sincere efforts to get Dr Aafia released from illegal imprisonment of USA during last two years.

She urged the leading political parties of Pakistan and their leaders, particularly, Asif Ali Zardari and Nawaz Sharif to put their act together and make sincere efforts beyond making press statements for immediate repatriation of Dr Aafia to her family in Karachi, otherwise nation would not forgive them forever.

In her address Amna Masood Janjua, Chairperson Defence of Human Rights (DHR) and wife of one of the missing persons Masood Janjua said that they demand that government of Pakistan should immediately withdraw its cooperation with US in so-called war on terror and ban all transit supplies of US and NATO armed forces to Afghanistan from Pakistan.

“Dr Aafia is daughter of Pakistan and her return to Pakistan is very vital issue, and government must take immediate steps for safe recovery of all the missing persons including Dr Aafia,” she noted.

Mauritius lashes out at UK over marine park project

AFP

PORT-LOUIS — Mauritius' premier said Thursday he was appalled by Britain's plans for a marine reserve around Chagos, an archipelago London forcibly evacuated to build a military base four decades ago.

"Mauritius is appalled by the British government's decision to press on with consultations for the creation of a protected marine park project around the Chagos archipelago," Mauritian Prime Minister Navin Chandra Ramgoolam said.

The Indian Ocean state's premier was speaking at an event inaugurating a building for the Chagos Refugees Group in the capital Port-Louis.

"It is unacceptable that the British claim to protect marine fauna and flora when they insist on denying Chagos-born Mauritians the right to return to their islands all the while," Ramgoolam said.

"How can you say you will protect coral and fish when you continue to violate the rights of Chagos' former inhabitants?" he went on.

The Chagos archipelago, also known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, is a tiny group of islands east of the Seychelles and north of Mauritius' main island.

Some 2,000 people were forcibly moved to Mauritius, which still claims the island and has regularly filed to that purpose with the United Nations. Most of the refugees are still campaigning to go back.

The British government has paid compensation to the Chagossians.

The islanders have won several cases on their right of return in UK courts, but a 2008 split judgment by the House of Lords ruled against it.

Diego Garcia, the main island in the Chagos archipelago, is now populated by an estimated 1,700 US military personnel, 1,500 civilian contractors and a mere 50 British troops. The base played a key role in the 1991 Operation Desert Storm against Iraq.

"The British had refused to create a base on Aldabra in the Seychelles not to harm its tortoise population," marvelled Olivier Bancoult, who heads the Chagos Refugees Group.

"Now they are trying to create a protected area to prevent Chagossians from returning to their native islands," he charged.

Britain had initially offered up its then Seychelles colony's Aldabra archipelago for the United States to build its Indian Ocean military base.

Environmentalist groups at home raised a scandal because the Aldabra atoll, now a world heritage site, was home to hundreds of thousands of giant land tortoises.

The next option was Diego Garcia in the Chagos islands further east. Aldabra was uninhabited but the tortoises won the day.

Greenpeace said last month that it supports the creation of the marine reserve, which would be the largest in the world, but also stressed that it wanted to see justice for the Chagossians and was fundamentally opposed to the existence of the military base.

Robert Fisk: Mubarak's challenger can't rely on a fair race

by Robert Fisk

The Independent

World Focus: Opponents accuse ElBaradei of wanting to play Karzai in a new pro-American Egypt

What keeps old men in power in Egypt? And what keeps middle-aged men wanting power in a country whose crippled society, increasing sectarianism, brutal police force and endemic corruption is only compounded by an electoral system widely regarded as a fraud? Most Egyptians don't think that President Hosni Mubarak is immortal, even though he still reigns supreme at the age of 81. Even the pharaohs believed they would live on only in the next world.

But now the former head of the UN's nuclear agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, says that if there's a fair election next year, he might stand for president. "If" is a big word in Egyptian politics, however, and the saintly ElBaradei shows no sign of appreciating just how tough are his chances. He has called for changes in the Egyptian constitution and an end to emergency laws. But even he must realise that Hosni Mubarak will not be shaking in his shoes at this news.

The real problem, of course, is not ElBaradei's chances – pretty much nil – but Mubarak's age. Both the president and his son, Gamal, deny that Gamal wants to be president, but the son's steady ascent in Egyptian political life suggests otherwise. If he did inherit his father's throne, of course, there would be a second caliphate in the Arab world – the other being Syria, where Bashar al-Assad took over after his father's death and some deft switching of Baath Party rules.

Omar Sulieman, Mubarak's senior intelligence man – he is also involved in the constant negotiations with Hamas over the future of Gaza – has never publicly expressed interest in the presidency. Besides he suffers heart problems. Meanwhile in interviews with news agencies over the past week, ElBaradei has been waffling about Egypt's youth and the internet as organs of change. Indeed, his new coalition is called the National Front for Change. "People are talking about all sorts of things and they might go to civil disobedience if there is no change," he said. But when the opposition "Enough!" movement could not get enough support from youth in the streets of Cairo – some of its female members were assaulted by plain-clothes police officers – what chance does ElBaradei have? The internet is watched closely by the security cops, and ElBaradei is going to get no support from the likes of Barack Obama.

Many Egyptian intellectuals now suspect that the corrupted old Egyptian governments are partly responsible for the increasingly sectarian nature of disputes between Muslims and Egyptian Copts – always presented by the government, of course, as domestic disputes which have nothing to do with religion. But the alienation of the Christians and the increasingly "Islamicisation" of the country has got a lot to do with it.

The police force is virtually outside the law, and routine state violence is now accepted as a fact of life – or death. Indeed, the killing of 60 economic migrants by Egyptian police since 2007 – they were seeking to cross the border into Israel – has simply gone unreported.

Osama al-Ghazali Harb, editor of the monthly Al-Siyassa al-Sawliyya (published by Al-Ahram), traces the sectarian tensions right back to the 1952 military coup, when members of the Egyptian Free Officers had close links with the Muslim Brotherhood. All the coup officers were Muslims. He points out that great harm was also done to the Egyptian body politic later when Anwar Sadat described himself as "the Muslim president of a Muslim state".

But ElBaradei has other problems. Some opposition politicians in Egypt believe that he did not do enough to prevent the US invasion of Iraq, accuse him of wanting to play Hamid Karzai in a new pro-American Egypt, and even suggest that there should be a mock trial of the Nobel Prize winner for his failure to stop the American occupation of Iraq. Egyptian politics is an unkind sport.

ElBaradei says he is trying to make the connection between economic and social development and political reform, and that "if you move into a democratic system, everything else will fall into place". But why should the Mubarak father-and-son team try to change the system?

The previous contender for Mubarak's job, Ayman Nour, was imprisoned after the 2005 election for forgery, a charge which he said was fraudulent. It might be more difficult to lock up Mohamed ElBaradei. But he's likely to find "democracy" in Egypt a more daunting task than keeping his eye on Iran.