On Monday, Mohammad Yusuf Tarigami, 72, who was In Delhi for medical treatment after a court order, has been allowed by the Supreme Court to return home to Jammu & Kashmir (J&K). He was brought to Delhi from Srinagar, where he had been under house arrest.

Tarigami is a four-time Member of the Legislative Assembly, which had been dissolved by the Narendra Modi government last year. He is a central committee member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M). The CPI(M)’s general secretary, Sitaram Yechury, had twice tried to go to Srinagar, and then – armed with a Supreme Court order – was able to enter the city, see Tarigami, return to Delhi with the news that he was very unwell, and then – thanks once more to the top court – arranged his transfer to AIIMS, Delhi. Tarigami, the brave communist, who was shifted to J&K House in the capital, remains gagged by the government of India.

Communists are loath to talk about themselves. They see themselves as part of the tidal wave of history, just another person in a monumental struggle to make the world a better place. Tarigami, like other communists, is like that. He prefers to talk about the issues at stake and not about himself. Those who have met him or seen him talk on television, rightly assume that he is in his 50s. There is a youthfulness about him, not just about his personality but also about his physique. He is energetic, his hands flying in all directions, but his concern for the working-class, the peasantry, and – in broader terms – the Kashmiri people, remains steady.

Since 2014, Tarigami’s general demeanour has been less optimistic as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) have taken an already belligerent Indian government position regarding Kashmir and made it toxic and dangerous. The framework of ‘national security’ has not made any positive impact on the people of Kashmir, who have been steadily alienated from New Delhi. Tarigami’s sober warnings should have been taken seriously. Now, the state’s future seems even more bleak.

Sabrangindia’s co-editor Teesta Setalvad had interviewed him in July 2016. The interview may be heard here.
Then again in 2018, as the BJP pulled out of the state government, we again spoke to this fiery communist from the Valley. That interview may be heard here.

From Tarigam

Tarigami was born in 1947 – which makes him not a man in his 50s but in his 70s. His family name, like that of other similar peasant families, comes from his village – Tarigam. This village is along the old road that links Shopian to Anantnag, an arc below Srinagar that lies near National Highway 44 to Jammu. The village is in Kulgam district, where Tarigami had four times won a seat to the J&K Assembly (1996, 2002, 2008, and 2014). It is a remarkable feat, since this district – and large parts of southern Kashmir – is in the grip of the Jamaat-e-Islami and other separatist organisations.

A walk around Kulgam’s villages, such as Arwani, Bichroo, and even Tarigam, shows the depth of support for the Jamaat and its former leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani. But, Tarigami and the CPI(M) have worked hard to build up their own support in the villages of this district. He was able to win the seat first in 1996 because of his reputation as an honest and decent man, but also because the Jamaat and other separatists had decided – since 1989 – to boycott elections.

Over these decades, Tarigami has insisted on putting development ahead of any other issue, making sure that schools, hospitals, and roads reshaped the character of his district. It is on this platform of development that Tarigami emerged as a singular leader in the state. And it helped that there is not one whiff of corruption about him.
 

A Communist in Kashmir

Politics did not come easily to Tarigami. His family was not political, even as Kashmir was swept into the centre of world politics within months of his birth. The shortened timeline for India’s partition by the British imperialists left the question of Maharaja Hari Singh’s Kashmir unsettled. It was Singh’s fear of the intrusion of irregular troops from the newly formed Pakistan that forced him to sign an Instrument of Accession to India. This entire episode remains deeply controversial, and one of the reasons for the tension between India and Pakistan.

Tarigami’s uncle – for some reason – would take his little nephew to listen to Abdul Karim Wani, an important communist leader in Kashmir. Wani’s lectures had an impact on Tarigami, who then moved slowly not only into politics, but more firmly into the world of Indian communism.

It is important to pause and consider that the early Kashmiri nationalism of the 1940s had intimate ties to communism. Founded in 1932 by Sheikh Abdullah, the All-Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference was renamed seven years later as the All-Jammu and Kashmir National Conference. This drift into secularism was derived from Sheikh Abdullah’s close association with communists such as B. P. L. [Baba] Bedi and Freda Bedi (the parents of the film star Kabir Bedi), Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Alys Faiz, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad and G. M. Sadiq, Ghulam Mohiuddin Qarra and Mahmooda Ali Shah (later an immensely popular principal at Government College for Women on MA Road in Srinagar). The communists had a powerful presence in Kashmir, not only amongst intellectuals but also amongst the peasantry, who desired above all else, land reform.

In 1944, the National Conference adopted the Naya Kashmir programme, which was essentially written by Baba Bedi. It called for the abolition of landlordism, extensive land reform, and ownership of the key industries by the Democratic State of Jammu and Kashmir. The NC took this message to the people, who wanted to throw off the wretched conditions of exploitation for something better. The communist influence on Sheikh Abdullah and the National Conference led to the creation of a militia in 1947 that both effectively overthrow the Maharaja and blocked the lashkar columns from taking Srinagar.

People like Wani emerged out of this world, and he would bring this cosmopolitan anti-feudal and socialist outlook to a very young Tarigami in Kulgam.

Tarigami’s political work began in Kulgam, when he and his friends took up the cause of farmers against the forcible procurement of rice. This was in 1967, when the Chief Minister was G. M. Sadiq – a former communist who broke with the party and drifted into an association with the Congress party through his Democratic National Conference, formed in 1958.

Fifty years ago, for his fight with the agricultural workers and peasants, Tarigami was taken to prison. Over the decades, Tarigami would frequently be arrested by the government and thrown into places such as the Sub-Jail Reasi (not far from Vaishno Devi) and the very dangerous torture centres of Red-16 and Papa II.

Tarigami was in prison when his wife died tragically in 1975; the government released him on parole for a month but rearrested him – cruelly – after three days. None of this broke his spirit. He continued to fight for the vision that he had learned from Wani – helping build the confidence of Kashmiri peasants and workers, fighting for miners and midday meal workers, addressing the basic, everyday issues of the people to unite them against the forces of division. It is the most powerful legacy of people like Baba Bedi and Abdul Karim Wani, and now Mohammed Yusuf Tarigami.

Tearing Apart Kashmir

Kashmir sits in the eye of the vortex, dragged in many directions, pulled by external forces and by internal forces, unable to find its equilibrium. Wars have been fought between India and Pakistan putatively over Kashmir in 1948, 1965, 1971, and 1999 – with endless border skirmishes and interventions by irregular forces.

Since 1989, Kashmir has faced an internal insurgency that has been the excuse for the Indian State to send in tens of thousands of troops; Kashmir now appears to be the most militarised place on the planet. Rather than bring the people of Jammu, Ladakh and Kashmir together, the governments have put in place a dynamic that rips them apart. Political grievances are met with armed force. Dialogue has been set aside.

The Modi government has now literally torn apart the state, breaking it into Jammu, Ladakh and Kashmir. The communists – like Tarigami – opposed all this. Tarigami called for dialogue between India and Pakistan, and a process of reconciliation inside J&K. The dialogue across the border is essential, he has said on many occasions, and it has been recognised across the spectrum – expect perhaps by the RSS and Modi’s section of the BJP. There can be no real political settlement for Kashmir if there is a refusal to hold talks across the Line of Control.

The Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council could very well have provided an example to the rest of the state. It should have been a mechanism to devolve power to the people, and then use these locally rooted authorities to start a serious discussion between the relatively isolated sections of Ladakh, Jammu, and Kashmir. On the table for such a discussion would be the return not only of Kashmiri Pandits to the region, but also the young men who joined the insurgency and now live in limbo in Pakistan. Both should be given a pathway to return. All this has been raised by Tarigami in the Legislature. None of it has been taken seriously.

Several times Tarigami has said that despite terrible violence, and despite the presence of tens of thousands of Indian troops, dialogue between the Kashmiris and New Delhi provided the impetus for a majority of the population coming out to vote in 2008 and 2014. There is, he said, ‘accumulated anger’ against Delhi, but if there is any attempt to renew dialogue, the Kashmiri people have responded sincerely.

Since 2014, with the BJP in power in the Centre, seriousness of purpose towards dialogue by Modi and his government has not been in evidence. Kashmir’s desire for a new beginning has been met with more troops, more pellet guns, more young men being tortured. ‘The average Kashmiri’, Tarigami says, ‘feels threatened’. No wonder that only 7.14% of the voting population turned out for the Srinagar by-election in 2017. There is no confidence in the process, none in New Delhi.

Harsh repression is not new to the Valley. Tarigami has experienced it his entire political life. In 1967, he went to prison. He went there again in 1975. And then, in 1979, he was the first person to be booked under the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act of 1978. Legal protection for harsh violence traverses the security apparatus. The Public Safety Act is one such protection, while another is the Armed Forces Special Protection Act (AFSPA), which has been regularly condemned by the J&K Assembly. These laws are an invitation to human rights violations. They provide not only a shield for the violations once done, but also provide an incentive to torture. They create a view of the Kashmiri as a terrorist, creating the groundwork for the harsh crackdown and now for the endless curfew of the entire state.

People like Tarigami have insisted that there are not only two sides to this dispute, the side of the Indian State and the side of the secessionist insurgent. The State disregards him, preferring to see its adversary in Kashmir as the insurgent – whom it redefines as the terrorist. Tarigami appears out-of-focus to the State, which does not want to respond to the rational criticisms and proposals of the communists.

The insurgents – particularly the Jamaat section – are threatened by the communists, whom they know to be brave defenders of the Kashmiri people. To delegitimise them, the Jamaat says that communists like Tarigami are against religion, particularly against Islam. Several times Tarigami and Mohammed Khalil Naik – another communist leader – have been physically attacked. It is often not clear if the attack has come from para-military state forces or from the insurgents.

Either way, the communists – such as Tarigami – are seen as a threat by both. In 2004, as Naik campaigned in Wachi, he was attacked several times by grenade and gunfire. The next year, militants entered the heavily guarded Tulsibagh colony in Srinagar and attacked the homes of Tarigami and the Minister for Education Ghulam Nabi Lone. Lone was killed. Tarigami’s guards fought off the attackers, although one of his guards was killed. The day before this attack, the CPI (M)’s Ghulam Nabi Ganaie was assassinated in Anantnag. Last year, guns and grenades were fired at Tarigami’s home in Kulgam.

Suffocation

If matters were bad before 2014, since then they have been beyond terrible. Dialogue between India and Pakistan has broken down. The alliance between the BJP-RSS and the People’s Democratic Party alienated a population already alienated enough; faith in the political class went to zero. Meanwhile, as Tarigami frequently said, the anti-Muslim and anti-Dalit attacks across India and the disregard for the Sachar and Mishra Committees suggested to Kashmiris the fanatical face of the Modi government.

A few days before Kashmir was shrouded in the Modi curfew, Tarigami spoke to Frontline’s Anando Bhakto. The RSS, he said, ‘wants to change the demographics of the state’. A new cohort of Indian troops had arrived in the Valley, while the Indian government asked students from outside the state to leave in a hurry. ‘It appears as though somebody is at war with the people here’, Tarigami said. He knew that the repeal of Articles 370 and 35A was in the offing, and that the RSS-BJP government was eager to bifurcate the state and change its entire character. All this, he said, would increase insecurity and conflict.

In the days before the closure of Kashmir, Tarigami met with Farooq Abdullah, Omar Abdullah, Mehbooba Mufti, Ghulam Hassan Mir, Hakeem Yaseen, and others. All these political leaders agreed that the troop build-up presaged something nasty from the BJP. They were right. They are now all under house arrest and gagged.

The last few lines in Tarigami’s interview to Bhakto are worth quoting, because these are his last known public utterances: ‘Don’t forget that this [Modi] regime is more authoritarian and stands for more centralisation of power. Once they succeed in Kashmir, the impact will be felt in the rest of the country as well in the near future. That is my concern’.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. The views are personal

Courtesy: News Click

Thus far, according to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists, twenty-eight journalists have been killed this year. Too many of these journalists have been killed in Afghanistan. Their names are not well known, so here they are:
 
Abdullah Hananzai
Abdul Manan Arghand
Ali Saleemi
Ghazi Rasooli
Maharram Durrani
Nowroz Ali Rajabi
Sabawoon Kakar
Saleem Talash
Shah Marai
Yar Mohammed Tokhi
 
Yesterday, Shujaat Bukhari was shot dead in Srinagar’s Press Enclave in Lal Chowk. For those of us who write in the universe of The Hindu – where he was a correspondent from 1997 to 2012 – and for Frontline – for whom he was the Jammu and Kashmir Bureau Chief – Shujaat is not another name on a list. He was a colleague and a friend, a brave reporter, a real journalist. He had received police protection since an attack on him in 2006. In this fatal attack, his two security guards were also shot dead. Three men had been waiting for him. After they shot him and his guards dead, they jumped on a motorcycle and fled the scene.
 
Jammu and Kashmir, the state in northern India, has been hazardous for journalists ever since Doordarshan television director Lassa Kaul was killed by militants in 1990. The militants have not been the only assailants. Indian soldiers have also turned their ire on journalists – one remembers the death of cameraman Javed Ahmed Mir, who was shot during a demonstration in 2008. In 1996, Shujaat had been abducted by gunmen in Anantnag and held for several hours. A decade later, two gunmen seized him. When one tried to shoot him, his gun jammed. Shujaat – bravely – made his escape. At that time, Shujaat said something that rings true even today, ‘It is virtually impossible to know who your enemies are and who your friends are’. It is not clear who murdered Shujaat.
 
Shujaat was shot on the same day that the United Nations called for an independent evaluation of human rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir. In the UN’s 49-page report detailed accusations of these violations. It is on the basis of this report that the chief of the UN’s Human Rights Council called for the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry.
 
Two weeks before he was murdered, Shujaat went on twitter to document the terrible death of Kaiser Bhat, age 21, who had been run over by an Indian army jeep. Shujaat shared a video of the attack on Kaiser Bhat and then said, ‘These pictures from Srinagar downtown are very disturbing. This is a horrible way to quell a protest’. This is the kind of clear outrage that came from Shujaat. Having posted the video and picture, Shujaat began to be attacked. ‘I am being trolled’, he wrote.
 
Kaiser Bhat’s sisters – Toiba, aged 19, and Iffat, aged 17 – cried when they heard that their brother had been run over and killed by the Indian army jeep. ‘Where will we go now’, they asked, in voices faint with grief. Their parents had already died. They lived with their uncle and aunt. Kaiser had decided to forgo his own studies and get a job, so that he could earn money to make sure that his sisters continued with their education. This was important to them.
It was inevitable that Kaiser would get involved in the protests against the intolerable and suffocating Indian military presence in the Kashmir valley. There are over 700,000 Indian soldiers in Kashmir. The Indian government has itself said that there are no more than 150 militants in the state. What mathematics makes this ratio – 700,000 to 150 – reasonable is beyond belief. The soldiers are trained to see a ‘terrorist’ behind every tree. Given immense authority by the Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act (AFSPA), 1990, these soldiers are known to have acted with impunity against Kashmiri civilians. No wonder the new UN report calls upon the Indian government to immediately repeal this Act. To get a sense of why this act – AFSPA – is such a bone of contention, read Shujaat’s article from Frontline (March 16, 2018) on the Shopian firings (here).
 
Shujaat’s coverage for Frontline is an indictment of the Indian government’s policy in Kashmir, but it also offers a sharp criticism of the degeneration of politics in the state. Most recently, on May 11, Shujaat lead the coverage on the Kathua Rape Case. You can read his main story on the case here. Shujaat’s writings show us with preciseness and feeling that Kashmir is in deep distress. Shujaat had written a story this March that tracked why so many young men had turned to militancy (you can read it here). In one of his last tweets about Kaiser’s death, Shujaat wrote that the authorities have to realise ‘why this fear of death is missing in Kashmiri youth’. It is because of his reporting that a serious question should have been raised after the death of Kaiser. The question is not why such a sensitive and generous young man would such as Kaiser get involved. The real question is why everyone in the Kashmir valley is not on the street every day. Kaiser joined the protests and was killed.
 
In 2016, Shujaat said of the dangers to journalists, ‘Threats to life, intimidation, assault, arrest and censorship have been part of the life of a typical local journalist’. His life is now taken. It will be remembered.

 

The BJP and its ally – the Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura (IPFT) – have won the 2018 elections to the Tripura state legislature. The alliance of the BJP and the IPFT will now form a government.

The Left
It is the first time in twenty-five years that Tripura, a state of four million people in India’s northeast, will be without a government of the Left. The outgoing chief minister – Manik Sarkar of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI-M] – has been in that office since March 1998. Before Manik Sarkar, the chief minister was CPI-M leader Dasarath Deb, whose Left government ruled the state from April 1993.

Since the first elections in Tripura in 1963, the Left has played a crucial role in the state. It was the principle opposition to the Congress Party’s governments and to president’s rule. The Left ruled the state in coalition and then for a decade from 1978 to 1998 under the leadership of CPI-M leader Nripen Chakraborty.

During this long period of active work in Tripura, the Left played the role of the architect of the state’s tremendous achievements. When the Northeast was wracked by State violence and secessionist insurgency, the Left government in Tripura put its focus on education and health care, on human security over military security. Great investment of popular energy and social wealth went towards increasingly the literacy rate and decreasing vulnerabilities from ill health and old age. Recently, Tripura – this small state – moved into the top position on India’s literacy chart. The literacy rate in Tripura is now 94.65% – one of the singular achievements of the people of Tripura and of its Left government. V. K. Ramachandran and Madhura Swaminathan, who have closely studied the social progress in the state, make an important point about the literacy rate in their article last year in The Hindu ,

A measure of progress in schooling of the population in these villages is the number of years of completed schooling among women in the age group 18 to 45 years. In Khakchang in 2005, more than 50% of women in the age group had not completed a year of schooling. By 2016, the median number of completed years of schooling among women in the age group was seven — outstanding progress for a decade. The corresponding figure for Mainama, also a Scheduled Tribe dominated village, was six years in 2005 and nine years in 2016.

In terms of health care, Ramachandran and Swaminathan point out, the infant mortality rate ‘almost halved between 2005-06 and 2014-15 declining from 51 per thousand live births to 27 per thousand’. There are more numbers to look at – the sex ratio, the child mortality rate, and so on. In each of these, over the course of the past sixty years, Tripura has done better than any other comparable state and indeed better than most states in India. There is no question that the Left government and Left struggle has had a role in driving some of the state’s surplus towards improving the social lives of Tripura’s people.
There is little doubt that the Left in Tripura governed with sincerity. It is one of the states with almost no corruption. The Chief Minister Manik Sarkar is famously known as the poorest head of government in India. The Left’s Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) had little wealth amongst them. These are people who care about their state and care to put forward a left agenda for the people. Corruption scandals are unknown and no scandal of any kind wracked the government.

The Loss
So, why did the Left lose? It is important to point out that the Election Commission’s data shows that the Left won 43% of the total vote – almost identical to the vote secured by the BJP. This means that a sizable section of the voting public continues to vest its hopes and aspirations in the Left. It would be irresponsible to ignore this basic fact. No previous election in Tripura has been this close. In 2013, the Left won 48% of the vote, while its closest competitor – the Indian National Congress – won 36.5% and in 2008, the Left won 48% of the vote, while the Congress won 36% of the vote. This time, the two main parties won almost equivalent percentages of the vote.

It is also important to bear in mind that this is less the BJP’s victory than the complete decimation of the Congress Party. The BJP has operated here like a corporate megalith with its mergers and acquisitions strategy. It essentially used its immense money power to draw in large numbers of low level and senior level Congress leaders – many of them going through the Trojan Horse of the Trinamul Congress. An illustrative example is Sudip Roy Barman, the son of a former Congress leader and Chief Minister of Tripura Samir Ranjan Barman. Sudip Roy Barman was the Congress Party’s leader in the Tripura Legislative Assembly. He was a major figure in the party. In 2016, Barman joined the Trinamul Congress – hoping that its success in West Bengal would translate into Tripura. It did not. So Barman, in 2017 and in anticipation of this Assembly election, went with others into the BJP. So, the first important point to bear in mind is that the BJP was able to acquire Tripura’s ready-made political opposition and arm it with the full arsenal of the BJP’s financial and organisational resources.

Then, the BJP merged its campaign with that of the Indigenous People’s Tribal Front of Tripura, a secessionist group that demands the creation of Tripraland. Armed extremist groups such as the National Liberation Front of Tripura and the Tripura National Volunteers have backed the IPFT. In orientation, these armed groups – and the IPFT – are in favour of ethnic cleansing. The Tripura National Volunteers, which merged into the IPFT, stood for the expulsion of those of Bengali nationality from the state. The Congress had earlier allied with the IPFT, which gave this narrowly ethnicist party respectability. It did so to try and eject the Left. That failed. Now the BJP has used the IPFT to allow it to make inroads into the various tribal communities of Tripura.

A combination of this merger and acquisition strategy, immense amounts of money for the election and an anti-incumbency strategy (Chalo Paltai) allowed the BJP and its IPFT ally to prevail. They are now in power.

What Next?
A taste of what is to come can be seen in the 23-Dhanpur assembly seat, where Chief Minister Manik Sarkar is in the contest. The BJP hastily called for the counting to be stopped when it appeared that Sarkar was in the lead. According to a letter that the CPI-M sent to the Chief Election Commissioner, ‘we have got reports that with the help of the [police], counting agents of the CPI-M are being driven out from the counting centre leaving Manik Sarkar alone, who is being gheraoed and heckled by the BJP agents’. This is a taste of the thuggishness that is to come.

But the Left, with the support of almost half the population, is prepared to be a radical and sincere opposition force. It will fight to defend the social gains of the people and win the trust back of those who have voted for the BJP. There is no doubt that disenchantment with the BJP will come fast and furiously. The Left must be prepared to win those people back.

This was the first time the Left went head to head with the BJP. The loss is a blow, but it does not define the contest. The Left is the most trusted force to combat the fascistic RSS (from where the next Tripura chief minister Biplab Deb comes) and to combat the communalist BJP. It remains in power in Kerala and has asserted itself with dignity and courage on the streets besides the farmers of Rajasthan and the ASHA workers of Haryana.

There is no time to be lost. Today the ruling classes will preen about the defeat of the Left in Tripura. But the Left has ground to cover. This was not the defeat of the Left as much as the loss of an election. The Left is alive and well, awake to its responsibilities now and in the future.

Courtesy: Newsclick.in

Far away from Syria, in the air-conditioned offices of think tanks and war rooms sit the intellectuals of our current order. They gaze at maps of Syria – a country to which they have no emotional ties or on whose land they might not have walked. They are not the first men driven by the fantasy of seizing resources and solving problems by drawing new borders. They follow in the 1916 tradition of the British diplomat Mark Sykes and his French counterpart François Georges-Picot, who carved up Ottoman Syria into zones of influence for their respective countries. A hundred years later, the men who follow Sykes and Picot couch their imperial ambitions in humanitarian rhetoric. Their lines begin with ‘safe zones’ and then move to a confederation and finally to a dismembered Syria. Partition, guaranteed by American airpower and troops, they argue, is the solution to the Syrian crisis.

Deeply battered by the civil war, with half its population displaced and over half a million dead, Syria is weakened to the point of virtual collapse. The fall of the government of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus would not be – as many of these intellectuals of the American Empire agree – the best possible outcome. ‘Realistically,’ as Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institute put it in 2015, ‘the replacement of Assad’ does not ‘appear within reach’ given the lack of palatable alternatives. Moderate forces – as far as the US determines – are simply not available. Therefore, the ouster of Assad in a precipitous way is considered foolhardy.

Instead of removing Assad, then, the United States should – argues O’Hanlon – push for the establishment of ‘one or two safe zones in relatively promising locations,’ backed by ‘perhaps 1,000 American military personnel.’ In these ‘safe zones, local forces – moderates, it is hoped – could be trained to put pressure on Assad’s government. ‘Ultimately, and ideally,’ O’Hanlon argues, ‘some of the safe zones might merge together as key elements in a future con-federal arrangement.’ This dynamic could very well lead to the ‘outright partition of the country if necessary.’ The partition is envisaged along the lines of sect and ethnicity – a Sunni zone, an Alawite zone, and a Kurdish zone. O’Hanlon calls this ‘deconstructing Syria.’

In a recent column, New York Times’ Thomas Friedman muses over the possible futures for Syria. ‘The least bad solution is a partition of Syria,’ Friedman suggests, ‘and the creation of a primarily Sunni protected area – protected by an international force, including, if necessary, some US troops.’ The gap between O’Hanlon and Friedman is merely in that the former recognizes that in the large mixed cities of Damascus and Aleppo, Hama and Homs, a partition would not be easy. ‘Prudence would have to be the watchword,’ writes O’Hanlon.

Neither O’Hanlon nor Friedman – both influential voices in Washington, DC – seem bothered by their imperial gestures. They are quite happy to speak for Syrians, to offer tutelage to Syria which cannot seem to define its own destiny. These are men who will speak of democracy and human rights when it suits them, but then transform just as easily into imperial bureaucrats with their crayons ready to draw lines on someone else’s map.

The influence of these men can be felt quite palpably in the corridors of power. Late last year, CIA Director John Brennan said quite casually, ‘I don’t know whether or not Syria and Iraq can be put back together again. There’s been so much bloodletting, so much destruction, so many continued, seething tensions and sectarian divisions.’ The outcome of this, he suggested, is the partition of Syria. Former US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford has said that there is already an ‘emerging partition’ of Syria into six zones leading to the ‘Somalization of Syria.’ Amos Gilad, the Strategic Advisor to the Israeli Defense Ministry and well-regarded in US intelligence circles, said, ‘Syria has reached its end.’ They – quite cavalierly – call for the dismemberment of the country.

Last month, before the US strikes on a government airfield, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson suggested that once ISIS is removed from the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, it would be ‘governed by local forces’ with US backing. What is being considered is that the US would create – in northern Syria – an analogous development to the Kurdistan Regional Government, which is autonomous of the Iraqi government. This statement was made in Turkey, where there is fear of a Syrian Kurdish state on its border. Turkey is not bothered by the break-up of Syria. What it fears is the concrete reality that this fracturing shall produce a Syrian Kurdish autonomous region with US support long the length of its southern border. Even here Turkish sentiments are over-read. Last November, US General Joseph Dunford and Turkish General Hulusi Akar agreed that ‘the coalition and Turkey will work together on the long-term plan for seizing, holding and governing Raqqa.’ This means that the US and the Turks would adopt this region, with the Turks eager to make the Kurds marginal to their occupied zone.

In sum, all the major players who speak the syrupy language of democracy are quite willing to undemocratically plan for the dismemberment of Syria.

Weaken Syria To Weaken Iran.
Iran, since 1979, has confounded the West and its West Asian allies – Israel and Saudi Arabia. The point for these powers has been to find a mechanism to weaken Iran. Saudi Arabia and the West backed Iraq’s long war against Iran precisely to hem in the Islamic Republic.

In 1979, right after Iran’s Revolution, US embassy official Talcott Seelye wrote from Damascus that his government should exaggerate the Alawite hold on the Syrian state so as to break the legitimacy of Hafez al-Assad, the father of the current president. It was important to get rid of Assad, Seelye wrote, to dent Iran’s role in the region. ‘We are inclined to the view that his days are numbered,’ Seelye wrote, even if by ‘the assassination of Assad.’ Although there is not really an Alawite control over the government, Seelye noted, ‘perception is more important than reality.’

During the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), the United States wished to hit Syria as a way to weaken Iran. In a revealing cable from 1983, CIA chief Graham Fuller urged his paymasters to bring ‘real muscle to bear against Syria.’ Fuller suggested that ‘the US should consider sharply escalating military threats against Syria from three border states hostile to Syria: Iraq, Israel and Turkey.’ He hoped that if these countries simultaneously attacked Syria, it would weaken its position and its prestige. If Syria’s position was dented, Fuller argued, Iran would be forced ‘to reconsider bringing the war to an end.’ What is important is that the regional countries – such as Iraq – ‘still need to remain on guard against Iranian influence and power throughout the Gulf.’ Hitting Syria would weaken Iran. That was the posture in 1983 as it was in 1979 and as it is today.

Twenty years later, in 2006, the US political officer in Damascus, William Roebuck, wrote that his country should join with Saudi Arabian intelligence to stoke fears of sectarianism in the country. Their stick would be to suggest to the Sunni community that Iran was promoting a Shiite agenda in Syria. Roebuck’s cable reveals the continuation of fear mongering around Iran to increase sectarian feeling to weaken Syrian society and the state. ‘There are fears in Syria,’ Roebuck wrote, ‘that the Iranians are active in both Shia proselytizing and conversion of, mostly poor, Sunnis.’ What is startling is that Roebuck then conceded that this is ‘often exaggerated.’ The Americans, Roebuck said, against all evidence, should join with the Saudis to ‘better publicize and focus regional attention to this issue.’

The evidence actually showed that Saudi preachers had entered Syria in large numbers and they had established themselves in the slums. It was in these mosques that they preached virulently sectarian rhetoric and prepared society for the outbreak of sectarian violence. This is precisely what overran Syria in 2011. Roebuck advised his paymasters to encourage splits in the military, advised the Gulf Arabs to stop investing in Syria and encouraged any mischief that would deprive the regime of any support. In other words, Roebuck insisted on preparing the terrain for regime change which would harm – as US intelligence openly said a decade ago – both the Lebanese political-military group Hezbollah and Iran.

Two years ago, the US State Department noted in a memorandum, ‘The best way to help Israel deal with Iran’s growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad.’ Fear of Iran saturates this document. The basic argument is that Iran has its grip on West Asia through Syria and into Hezbollah. These have to be brought to heel. If Assad’s government falls, then Iran’s conduit to Hezbollah would break. It was – therefore – essential to overthrow Assad. This has nothing to do with the Syrian people or their needs, but everything to do with the Washington and Tel Aviv’s hallucinations about Iranian power. The fall of Assad, the US diplomats calculated, would mean that ‘Iran would no longer have a foothold in the Middle East from which to threaten Israel and undermine stability in the region.’

If Assad falls and a new – perhaps radical Islamist – regime comes to power in Damascus, how would this help Israel? A US intelligence official told me this week that the word of this period is ‘Yugoslavia.’ The break-up of Yugoslavia, he said, left behind minor states with no regional power. Balkanization, he said with a smile, would be the appropriate solution for Syria. Break it up and Iran would lose its foothold and no powerful state would remain on Israel’s border to pose a threat. Israel could permanently claim the Golan Heights, a US-backed state would emerge on the Syrian border, Jordan could help itself to the totality of the Hawran plateau, an Alawite state would take the coastal plain, leaving a series of Sunni states from the al-Ghab valley to the Hamad desert. A weak Syria would be easy to dominate.

Mischief surrounds Syria. Partition is seen as a way to destroy that state and offer Israel relief on its borders with Syria and Lebanon. The rights and ambitions of the Syrian people are irrelevant to these plots and schemes.

 

Fifty years ago, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered a talk entitled ‘Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break the Silence’ at New York’s Riverside Church. He had come to talk in searing terms about the American war on Vietnam. That American war had begun in 1955, a year after the French withdrawal from their former colony. In the 1960s, US President Lyndon B. Johnson escalated the US presence in Vietnam, which faced sustained aerial bombardment. The sheer brutality of the use of chemical weapons and heavy bombs is reflected in the opinion of the Chief of Staff of the US Air Force Curtis LeMay who said, ‘we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.’ It was against this vulgarity that Dr. King decided to speak. Silence was no longer possible. Religious leaders had to move ‘beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent.’ Dr. King, on 4 April 1967, positioned himself squarely on those high grounds.

During that year – 1967 – the United States air force conducted over two thousand weekly bombing runs over both North and South Vietnam. The year’s total ordinance dropped would add up to 15 million tons of explosives. By the time the United States withdrew from Vietnam, it had dropped three times the total tonnage of ordinance used in World War II. On Laos, the US dropped 2.5 million tons of munitions, seven bombs for every Laotian. The nature of the weapons curdles the stomach – cluster bombs, Agent Orange, poisonous herbicide, napalm, and fleshettes. It is important to underline that at least three million Vietnamese civilians died in that war.

Dr. King’s prose is powerful – and unvarnished – on these atrocities. How do the Vietnamese experience the war? ‘They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children…Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness.’ Surely, he said, ‘this madness must cease.’

Prelude to King.
On April 17th, 1965, two years before Dr. King took the podium, twenty-five thousand people came to Washington as part of a protest called by the Students for a Democratic Society against the US war on Vietnam. The numbers of those who would come onto the streets as part of the anti-war movement would escalate from April 1965 to April 1967, including a hundred thousand people at protests across the country over the weekend of 15-16 October 1965. On 17 February 1966, world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali refused the draft saying, ‘I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.’ A few months later, Stokeley Carmichael, a leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, described the war colorfully as ‘white people sending black people to make war on yellow people in order to defend the land they stole from red people.’

Dr. King joined a major struggle that had begun two years before him. But, in characteristic fashion, Dr. King’s entry into the anti-war movement was both lyrical and decisive. He did not merely speak against the war on moral grounds. The war, he argued, would divert the energy of the United States from the promise of the Civil Rights movement. Precious public funds were being moved from tending to the American poor to warfare, and it was the American working-class of all colors that was being sent to operate in ‘brutal solidarity’ as they burnt the ‘huts of a poor village.’ When America’s dejected took up Molotov cocktails and rifles in 1965, Dr. King went amongst them to plead for nonviolent action. But now the country was using ‘massive doses of violence to solve its problem.’ Was this example not one for ordinary people in the United States to follow?

The war must end, Dr. King said, and to bring it to an end those who had been drafted must object. They must not go to war. The war machine must be paralyzed. The working-class that is forced to go fight the war of the rich must demand that the resources go toward their own broken lives. This was a powerful statement. It echoes in our times.

Shirtless and Barefoot People.
Who was responsible for this war? Not the Vietnamese. They were part of the Third World upsurge, which had emerged after World War II in Africa, Asia and Latin America. ‘These are revolutionary times,’ Dr. King said. ‘All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.’ Here is Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1950) and Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961), deeply felt prose on behalf of the world’s shirtless and barefoot peoples. Dr. King was speaking of the Vietnamese, but he had in mind all those others from Ghana (where he had attended the independence ceremony in 1957) to India (where he had been to the ‘land of Gandhi’ in 1959). The world’s people wanted to live with dignity. They had a right to self-determination.

It was the West, Dr. King said pointedly, that was against this upsurge. In his speech he mentioned the ‘counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala’ in 1954 and the actions of the Green Berets in Peru. Why was the United States so involved in ‘counterrevolutionary action’? Dr. King, unlike many liberals in the anti-war camp, went deeply into the heart of the American malady. ‘When machines and computers, profits motives and property rights, are considered more important than people,’ said the Reverend, ‘the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.’ The West, as the spear of global capitalism, wanted to suffocate the aspirations of the world’s people. This warfare, Dr. King underscored, would not only sabotage the planet’s hopes but it would also destroy the promise of the Civil Rights movement in the United States.

Fierce Urgency.
Three days later, the New York Times wrote an editorial titled ‘Dr. King’s Error.’ The basic point in this essay was that by linking the war with Civil Rights Dr. King had ‘done a disservice to both.’ The mandarins at the Times believed that Dr. King was wrong to say that the war would drain funds from the anti-poverty work in the United States. But the data did show, even in 1967, that the funds for urban redevelopment and for employment in Chicago, Harlem and Watts was being drawn down while the government increased its commitments to the war. It was also clear by 1967 that increasingly numbers of Black and Brown men went to fight in the war, in ‘brutal solidarity’ – as Dr. King said – with white soldiers against a war against the Third World upsurge. What the Times did not see was that the Civil Rights movement was kin to the Third World upsurge and that an attack on one – in Vietnam – was also an attack on the other – Civil Rights in the United States. Dr. King saw this clearly. It was not a matter merely of resources. It was a matter of participating in the global revolutionary dynamic.

As President, Barack Obama liked to quote Dr. King’s line about the ‘fierce urgency of now,’ which is a line that appears towards the end of this 1967 speech. That part of the speech was a rebuke to the kind of thinking in the Times editorial. Why was Dr. King excised with the ‘fierce urgency of now’? Because, he said, in human affairs there is ‘such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is the thief of time.’ Terrible events surround us. These events compel us to voice dissent. ‘Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, Too Late. There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect.’ King wanted to write his name on the side of justice. He was not bothered by the sanctimonious rhetoric from the Times and from establishment liberals who raised their eyebrows at his vigil.

A year later, Dr. King said, ‘Only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.’ It was of course dark enough in 1968. Dr. King was killed on the first anniversary of this speech. Whether that was a coincidence of not is not important (Reverend Vincent Harding, who helped King write the speech, thought it was not a coincidence). We are at the fiftieth anniversary of the speech. The sky is now so dark that even the stars are muted. Voices are stilled, afraid to say the full truth – that the ‘giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism’ break the spirit of humanity.

Courtesy: Alternet