Shattering The Last Of Our Moral Credibility

Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan's killing was 'a cold-blooded act of terror' [EPA]


The Killing Of Mostafa Ahamdi Roshan Is A Prime Example Of The Impunity Characteristic Of US Foreign Policy.

By Najla Abdurrahman 
Najla Abdurrahman, a Libyan-American writer and activist, is a teaching fellow at Columbia University.
Last Modified: 25 Jan 2012 10:46 
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

New York, NY - On a recent trip to Libya, I was staying at the Corinthia Hotel in Tripoli at the same time that Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir was meeting with members of Libya's transitional council in the same hotel. Like many other Libyans I spoke with during the course of my trip, I was outraged by the visit, and extremely critical of the decision of our transitional leadership to host the Sudanese strongman.

After all, hadn't Libya just endured a painful uprising and sacrificed thousands of lives to rid itself of its own brutal dictator? Didn't the transitional leaders see a moral conflict (if not a looming public relations disaster) in welcoming Bashir to Libya, their common enmity for the late Colonel notwithstanding? How could our leaders - how could Libya - continue to claim that theirs was a struggle for democracy, human rights and an end to totalitarian rule? 

Weren't the hypocrisy and the double standards glaringly obvious? Hadn't Libya's transitional leadership - and by extension, Libya itself - lost a crucial part of its moral credibility in the process?

The following week, I returned to my other country, the United States, and to news that an Iranian nuclear scientist and university professor, 32-year-old Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, was killed along with his driver, when unidentified men on motorcycles attached a magnetic bomb to his car in a Tehran street. Again, I felt that familiar sense of indignation, but this time it was even more pronounced, because it involved the killing of an innocent man in cold blood.

Although Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other government officials have publicly denied US involvement in Roshan's murder, I'm going to go out on a limb and just say what most reasonable observers are probably thinking: The US and/or Israel are almost certainly responsible for (or, in the case of the United States, at least tacitly approving of) this attack, whatever our government officials may publicly claim.

Impunity and Unfairness

I found myself a bit surprised by the intensity of my reaction to the news of Roshan's killing. What was it - beyond the ugliness inherent in any act of terror and murder - that made this particular attack so heinous in my mind to the point that it angered me?

Listening Post - Murder in Tehran

After thinking about it for a while, I realised that it boiled down to two things: the impunity with which the attack was carried out and the subsequent apathy with which it was regarded by the US public and its leaders (with the noteworthy exception of commentators and politicians such as Rick Santorum, whoactually celebrated it); and the idea that a powerful nation could attack the most precious resource of a much weaker one. No, I'm not talking about oil - I'm referring to the destruction of the latter's human resources: its brains, its talent and its experts (Roshan was not the first, but the fourth Iranian scientist murdered in recent years).

Politicians in the US may pretend, for a few months every two to four years, to lament our dependency on foreign oil and the danger this addiction supposedly poses to our national security interests. But many Middle Eastern countries have long been dependent on the West for a different type of resource: technology and scientific expertise (the Arab Gulf states are a prime example of this).

Iran is a notable exception in the region, and has a far more technically capable population than, say, Saudi Arabia or Kuwait (indeed, more than most Arab states). An attack on Iran's scientists, experts, academics and intellectuals - on its most talented human resources - is an attack on Iranian society's ability to function independently of western hegemony and influence, by forcing that country's dependence on (among other things) western technical and scientific knowledge - which, as we all know, always comes with strings tightly attached.

As we continue to pressure and now, it would appear, to intimidate the rest of the world into isolating Iran politically and economically, it will become increasingly important to the Iranian state to develop the technical capabilities to function independently of foreign, and particularly Western, influence.

Aggression and Sabotage

Iranian government officials and their supporters may chant "Death to America and to Israel", but when we actually bother to examine the historical relationship between Iran and the West (and particularly its history with the US and Britain), it becomes glaringly obvious that gross acts of aggression, intervention and sabotage overwhelming take place in the opposite direction (hence the frequent chants against us).

One startling example, which has long since vanished from the American public's collective memory, was the shooting down of an Iranian commercial airliner in Iranian airspace (over the Strait of Hormuz, no less) by a US guided missile cruiser, the USS Vincennes, in 1988. All 290 people on board the plane were killed, and the bodies of many mutilated beyond recognition. To this day, our government refuses to apologise or acknowledge wrongdoing for what it has described as a "mistake". Of course, the toppling of Iran's democratically elected prime minister by the CIA and Britain's MI6 in 1953, followed by the installation of a brutal dictator more sympathetic to western economic and energy interests, also comes to mind. And there are many other examples.

The Iranian state habitually represses its own people (as do many states that we consider friends), and all conscientious individuals must vigorously and unequivocally condemn its record of gross human and civil rights abuses, as we support the efforts of the Iranian people to demand reform. But this doesn't change the fact that our foreign policy towards Iran is seriously flawed and not in our nation's best interest.

Neither are our policies towards Iran in the interest of the Iranian people (for whatever that's worth to the average US politician). In fact, many Iranians who vehemently oppose their current regime reserve equal condemnation for the West's lengthy record of interference and aggression towards their country. 

Lack Of Debate

Yet Iran represents the Bermuda Triangle of US foreign policy discussions. When it comes to the issue of our relationship with the Islamic Republic, rational debate - or any debate - tends to simply vanish into thin air.

Rather than take a good hard look at why we are so obsessed with the idea of Iran acquiring the bomb (the answer to this and to so many other questions about our self-destructive foreign policies may be found in Israel and its lobby), or whether such an acquisition really poses a serious threat to the most powerful nation in the world (one whosemilitary bases are quite literally choking the Iranian state) and its Middle Eastern proxy, we've resorted to blowing up civilian scientists on their own streets in an effort to cut their country's independent nuclear energy programme off at its knees.

This culture of impunity and contempt for the lives of foreign nationals whom we habitually kill on their own soil is reflected in the painfully telling video, which emerged around the same time as Roshan's killing, showing US Marines urinating on the corpses of Afghan Taliban fighters as they taunt the dead and appear to revel in their repulsive behaviour.

This was not some random group of debauched individuals engaging in hooliganism, but a group of soldiers belonging to an elite corps of the US military - uniformed representatives of our country before the world. I felt sick watching the video, and once again, ashamed that such individuals represented my country. I couldn't help but recall the infinitely more barbaric 2005 Haditha massacre, in which Marines slaughtered 24 innocent Iraqi men, women and children between the ages of one and 76, mostly in their homes, after one of their fellow soldiers, Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, was killed by a roadside bomb.

Like the Haditha victims, the lives of Afghan Taliban fighters were worthless to this group of soldiers, and they had no qualms about desecrating them in the most dishonourable of manners. Dehumanising the enemy - whether real, imagined or created - and acts of unthinkable cruelty and disregard for human life (and death) suddenly become thinkable - even inevitable.

This cycle of dehumanisation and violence is the same mechanism that prompted Daniel Pearl's captors to behead the innocent journalist back in 2002; that convinced "insurgents" to bomb crowded public markets and holy shrines in Iraq, and to lay the roadside bomb that killed Lance Corporal Terrazas; and that caused the soldiers in the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine regiment to shoot innocent civilians in their homes at point blank range, including an infant, several children and a 76-year-old wheelchair-bound man, in a country the soldiers themselves were forcibly and illegitimately occupying.

No Accountability

Just today, news emerged that Staff Sgt Frank Wuterich, leader of the group of Marines that carried out the massacre at Haditha, accepted a deal to plead guilty to a lesser charge of dereliction of duty, for which he is expected to receive a whopping three months in prison. The remaining soldiers who participated in the massacre have already been acquitted or seen their charges dropped. The failure of our government to hold these men accountable for what amounts to a war crime ought to shake the collective conscience of our nation to its core. But it probably won't.

As I watched this recent group of Marines urinating on and taunting dead enemy-strangers while fighting an unwinnable war thousands of miles away from their homes, I wondered if they would feel quite as smug or amused with themselves if they could hear how former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had once described them. Military men are "dumb, stupid animals to be used" as pawns for foreign policy, Kissinger told then-White House chief of staff Alexander Haig, according to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their book, The Final Days.

"The killing by car bombing of an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran was an act of terror, murder and intimidation, period. It is an act that reeks not only of hubris and inhumanity, but also of desperation - the very hallmarks of terrorism."

Even in the cold and calculating words of Kissinger, a central architect of US foreign policy whose influence has extended far beyond his time in office, the chilling relationship between dehumanisation and violence - this time directed at duped soldiers - is unmistakable, and the irony undeniable.

To Kissinger's credit, he was at least honest about the disgraceful and self-serving motives that he and other policymakers have, as they send hapless soldiers off to fight and die in illegal wars while convincing them that they are somehow defending their country rather than advancing the economic interests of a powerful elite. In contrast, most US politicians these days persist in invoking a sanctimonious authority predicated on an imagined moral superiority vis-a-vis the rest of the world, and particularly the non-western world. 

Fictitious Righteousness

Indeed, many in the US bask in this fictitious self-characterisation. We are, after all, what Reagan called "a beacon of hope for those who do not have freedom", a phrase which has been regurgitated in one form or another by more politicians than I care to count. Yet nearly every administration in recent history - and many current politicians - have not only consistently chipped away at any moral credibility we may have once had as a nation, but now have completely shattered it, even as they continue to invoke meaningless and hypocritical tropes.

For the more thoughtful among us, what happened in Tehran, what happened in Afghanistan, and the moral failure of our government to hold the perpetrators of the Haditha massacre accountable is cause for alarm, and hopefully for engaging in sober introspection and self-criticism. Yet for a significant proportion of our public, and certainly for too many of our political leaders, it would seem that we can do no wrong to others, no matter how much wrong we do. For a great number of US citizens, it seems that our foreign policy decisions - and in particular, our acts of violence against Other states and Other peoples - are justifiable, simply by virtue of the fact that they are ours.

The killing by car bombing of an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran was an act of terror, murder and intimidation, period. It is an act that reeks not only of hubris and inhumanity, but also of desperation - the very hallmarks of terrorism.

What do the public and the media's largely indifferent response to this act suggest about the political culture we inhabit? More importantly, what does it say about the moral culture we live in, and about our collective capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism? About our attitudes toward the value of human life - not just lives of US citizens, but the lives of Others as well?

Wilful Disregard

Policy analysts, pundits and much of the media can spin any story they like about the murder, on his home soil, of Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, husband to Fatemeh and father to a young boy - who will now have to grow up without him. They can choose to use sterile language such as "targeted killing" and "elimination" in order to distort US public sentiment regarding his murder. But their questionable rhetorical and editorial choices don't change the ugly reality that this was, at the very least, a crime and a moral failure which will probably do little in the way of achieving its desired outcome (assuming, of course, that we have a right to pursue such an outcome, which is questionable in itself). 

This latest act of aggression, whether committed by the United States or by Israeli agents with the US government's tacit approval, will only intensify the Iranian public's widespread distrust for the US and its policies toward their country, a sentiment which is understandable, given the record of western interference in Iranian internal affairs.

Regrettably, it is a record which US politicians and policymakers - as well as most of its media and its public - persist in wilfully disregarding, even as the former continue to pursue a foreign policy which is destructive, both to Iran and to ourselves.

Najla Abdurrahman, a Libyan-American writer and activist, is a teaching fellow at Columbia University.

Follow her on Twitter: @Nejletta

The Iranian Oil Embargo Blowback

By Pepe Escobar 
January 28, 2012 
Courtesy Of "Asia Time Online"

If the sorry parade of European poodles - or what analyst Chris Floyd delightfully dubbed Europuppies - had any understanding of Persian culture, they would have known that blowback for their declaration of economic war in the form of an Iranian oil embargo would be nothing short of heavy metal. 

Better yet; death metal. The Majlis (Iranian parliament) will discuss this Sunday, in an open section, whether to cancel right away all oil exports to any European country that approved the embargo - according to Emad Hosseini, the rapporteur of the Majlis Energy Committee. And that comes with the requisite apocalyptic warning, relayed via the Fars news agency, courtesy of member of Parliament Nasser Soudani: "Europe will burn in the fire of Iran's oil wells." 

Soudani expresses the views of the whole Tehran establishment when he says that "the structure of their [Europe's] refineries is compatible with Iran's oil", and so Europeans have no alternative as replacement; the embargo "will cause an increase in oil prices, and the Europeans will be compelled to buy oil at higher prices"; that is, Europe "will be compelled to buy Iran's oil indirectly and through intermediaries". 

According to the EU sanctions package, all existing contracts will be respected only until July 1 - and no new contracts are allowed. Now imagine if this pre-emptive Iranian legislation is voted within the next few days. Crisis-hit Club Med countries such as Spain and especially Italy and Greece will be dealt a deathblow, having no time to find a possible alternative to Iran's light, high-quality crude. 

Saudi Arabia - whatever the oily spin in Western corporate media - does not have the spare capacity; and on top of it, the absolute priority for the House of Saud is high oil prices, so it can bribe - apart from repressing - its own population into forgetting about noxious Arab Spring ideas. 

So yes, already broken European economies would be forced to keep buying Iranian oil, but now from the winners of choice - middlemen vultures. 

Not surprisingly, the losers lost in these Cold War tactics anachronistically applied to a global open market are the Europeans themselves. Greece - already facing the abyss - has been buying heavily discounted oil from Iran. The strong possibility remains of the oil embargo precipitating a Greek government bond default - and even a catastrophic cascade effect in the eurozone (Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Spain - and beyond). 

The world needs a digital Herodotus to decode how these European poodles who claim to represent "civilization" were able, in a single stroke, to inflict simultaneous pain on Greece - the cradle of Western civilization itself - and Persia - one of the most sophisticated civilizations in history. In an astonishing historical replay of tragedy as farce, it's as if Greeks and Persians were bonded together at the Thermopylae facing the onslaught of North Atlantic Treaty Organization armies. 

Hit The Eurasian Groove 

Now compare it with the action all across Eurasia. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, "Unilateral sanctions don't help matters". The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing, exercising immense tact, nevertheless was unmistakable; "To blindly pressure and impose sanctions on Iran are not constructive approaches." 

Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said, "We have very good relations with Iran, and we are putting much effort into renewing Iran's talks with the 5+1 [Iran Six - the United Nations Security Council permanent members plus Germany] mediators' group. Turkey will continue looking for a peaceful solution to the issue.” 

BRICS member India - alongside Russia and China - also dismissed sanctions. India will keep buying Iranian oil and paying in rupees or gold. South Korea and Japan will inevitably extract exemptions from the Barack Obama administration. 

All across Eurasia trade is fast moving away from the US dollar. The Asian Dollar Exclusion Zone, crucially, also means that Asia is slowly disengaging itself from Western banks. 

The movement may be led by China - but it's irreversibly transnational. Once again, follow the money. BRICS members China and Brazil started bypassing the US dollar on trade in 2007. BRICS members Russia and China did the same in 2010. Japan and China - the top two Asian giants - did the same only last month. 

Only last week, Saudi Arabia and China rolled out a project for a giant oil refinery in the Red Sea. And India more or less secretly is deciding to pay for Iranian oil in gold - even bypassing the current middleman, a Turkish bank. 

Asia wants a new international system - and it's working for it. Inevitable long-term consequences; the US dollar - and, crucially, the petrodollar - slowly drifting into irrelevance. "Too Big to Fail" may turn out to be not a categorical imperative, but an epitaph. 

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). 

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com. 

(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The Downside Of Unbridled Support For Israel

'Israel-firsters' are not those who put Israel first, but rather those who put an Israeli right-wing agenda first, even at the expense of American interests. 

By Mairav Zonszein 
Published 03:07 27.01.12 
Latest update 03:07 27.01.12 
Courtesy Of "Haaretz Newspaper"

In his op-ed "A case of leftist McCarthyism?" (Haaretz English Edition, January 13 ), James Kirchick declares that the tables have turned in the Israel debate in America, now that liberal critics of U.S. support for Israel's rightist government are employing terms like "dual loyalists" and "Israel-firsters." He argues that this is indicative of "just how deep the rhetoric of the far right has seeped into the discourse of the mainstream left," and deems such language to be anti-Semitic because it has also appeared in white supremacist publications.

Kirchick's charge of anti-Semitism is baseless and unconvincing. Just because white supremacists used a term doesn't mean everyone who employs it is an anti-Semite. He also fails to mention that many of those employing the term "Israel-firster" are deeply concerned about Israel's future and about regional stability, and are no different from members of the Israeli peace camp - not to mention that some of them are Jewish themselves.

His argument also blatantly ignores the highly divisive role Israel plays in U.S. politics. American Jewish organizations are constantly battling over the definition of "pro-Israel," a term monopolized by powerful groups like AIPAC to mean "Israel right or wrong."

"Israel-firster" is admittedly a deliberately crude response, but use of the term should be understood within the context of decades of American Jewish right-wing rhetoric that has largely silenced dissent on Israeli policies by discrediting those who dare to criticize Israel. Calling rightists "Israel firsters" is not nearly as belligerent and certainly not as preposterous as labeling J Street "anti-Israel" and Thomas L. Friedman an anti-Semite.

This polemic has permeated internal American bipartisan politics, where Israel has taken center stage as a wedge issue. "Pro-Israel" has become political currency in the presidential race, despite bearing divergent connotations. For Newt Gingrich, the term means denying the existence of a Palestinian nation (and thus ruling out a two-state solution ); for Mitt Romney, it means ensuring security at all costs (and thus discounting Israeli settlements as a problem ). For Barack Obama, it means what it has meant for previous American administrations: A secure Jewish nation-state based on the '67 borders, alongside a viable Palestinian state.

Despite this being U.S. foreign policy for quite a while, GOP candidates and mainstream American Jewish groups - bolstered by what is arguably the most rigid right-wing government Israel has ever had - have attacked Obama regularly for what they deem to be his deficient "pro-Israel" record, simply because he has condemned settlement construction. Obama has capitulated under the pressure and reasserted his strong "pro-Israel" (read: Israel right or wrong ) stance, for fear of losing the political and economic support he needs to win another term. Indeed, it is no secret that "pro-Israel" money (albeit, not all of it from Jews ) comprises a substantial percentage of all donations to political parties in the United States. Talking about "Jewish" - or more accurately, "pro-Israel" - money in American politics is therefore not inherently anti-Semitic: It is a given, and the effort to silence such debate is the problem.

When progressive entities like the Center for American Progress and figures like M.J. Rosenberg use the term "Israel-firster," they are attempting to deconstruct and challenge the notion that being "pro-Israel" means demanding unchecked support for Israeli policies, even when they directly conflict with the U.S. administration's stated positions and its declared role as an arbiter in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Such people are trying to dismantle the equation between opposition to Israel's current reckless agenda, and concern for Israel's long-term interests and impact on American geopolitics. They are identifying those, whether Jewish or Christian, Democrat or Republican, who, as Rosenberg put it, "consistently - and without exception - thwart the efforts of U.S. presidents to achieve Middle East peace." "Israel-firsters" are not those who put Israel first, but rather those who put an Israeli right-wing agenda first, even at the expense of American interests.

Thus, Kirchick has it backward when he argues that the language of the far right has seeped into the left. It is, rather, Israel's far-right policies that increasingly clash with American liberal and democratic values. Long before Peter Beinart became famous for pointing to a conflict between Zionism and liberalism, academics and policymakers warned that unbridled American support for Israel (spearheaded by AIPAC's bullying influence on Congress ) would backfire.

This concern first surfaced in 1982 during the first Lebanon War, when many Americans began to wonder whether Israeli values were in line with American ones. It is reappearing again now within the context of a possible attack on Iran, on top of the incessant Israeli settlement project in the West Bank - a relentless policy that not only undermines Israel's claim to being a democratic state, but undercuts America's ability to be an honest broker of a two-state solution; all of which makes it much harder for American progressives, Jews and non-Jews alike, to cheerlead for Israel - that is, to be "pro-Israel."

Mairav Zonszein is an Israeli-American journalist living in Tel Aviv and a writer and editor at +972mag.com. An abridged version of her master's thesis on the history of the "pro-Israel" paradigm in American Jewry was recently published in the Central European University Jewish Studies Journal.

Franve and The Last Genocide Of The 20th Century

French involvement in at least two genocides in Africa during the 20th century is still contested [EPA]


Unspoken History: Despite Evidence To The Contrary, France Still Completely Denies Involvement In Two Of Africa's 20th Century Genocides. 

By Julie Owono 
Julie Owono is a Cameroonian freelance journalist and international relations consultant based in Paris. 
Last Modified: 25 Jan 2012 18:41 
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

Paris, France - The recent publication of French judge Trevidic's report on the assassination of President Habyarimana, which triggered the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis and the deaths of moderate Hutus in Rwanda in 1994, revives the debate on the possible role of France in the last genocide of the 20th century. Moreover, it rekindles questions related to the attitude of French authorities and intelligentsia whenever the country is directly involved in a genocide in Africa.

More worrying, these findings question the poison slowly instilled in the veins of the French nation's collective body: A recent poll shows that one third of French citizens share the views of an openly racist and anti-Semite political party, the National Front.

Unspoken history, attempts at denial, and historical smokescreens systematically orchestrated by those who own the means of propaganda challenge the capacity - for those in France who disagree with the far-right - to help a disturbing truth emerge.

In the light of this revelation, one can notice strange similarities in the attitude adopted by those authorities regarding the question of the lesser-known Bamileke genocide orchestrated by the French army at the beginning of the 1960s, which might have caused the death of up to 400,000 people.

'France aided Rwanda genocide'

Equivocation Surrounding Rwanda Genocide

On January 11, 2012, French Judge Marc Trevidic published a 400-page investigation on the circumstances of the shooting of "Presidential Falcon 50", in which President Juvenal Habyarimana and the President of Burundi, along with other officials and three French crew members, were assassinated. The report concludes that the missiles which hit the airplane were shot from Konembe hill which was at that time in the hands of the Presidential guard.

The elucidation of these events will give an explanation to the beginning of the last genocide of the 20th century: the plane crash triggered the systematic murder of 1 million Tutsis in 100 days by extremist Hutus.

The Trevidic Report puts an end to 18 years of uncertainty and attempt to revise history. In fact, a first investigation led by French Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière showed that the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front) - the army of the actual Tutsi President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame - was responsible for the attack, and thus responsible for the elimination of other Tutsis. This theory was embraced by numerous French politicians and intellectuals, such as journalist Pierre Péan, who in 2005 published Black Furies, White Liars. His book, along the same lines as the legal investigation, not only suggests that RPF was the perpetrator of the presidential assassination, but also upheld that only 280,000 Tutsis had been killed, compared with possibly one million Hutus exterminated in revenge by Kagame's RPF.

Nevertheless, these explanations left many questions unanswered.

In the first place, one can question the position of Agathe Habyarimana, widow of former Rwandan president: it is indubitable that the massacres were started and encouraged by Hutu extremists. This vague expression conceals the name of the informal organisation, recognised by the French National Assembly in 1994, which regrouped these "extremists": the Akazu. Their most influential members were close relatives of President Habyarimana, and might have been headed by Agathe Habyarimana, along with three of her brothers, according to several reports. 

The day following the assassination of her husband, she was exfiltrated to France with the help of the French army. Since then, she has been living in France. Despite an international arrest warrant issued against her in 2009, and a complaint lodged by a French association over her alleged role in the perpetration of the genocide, she hasn't yet been judged by a court.

Listening Post - Rwanda's media 17 years after the genocide

Another enigma surrounds the alleged suicide of François de Grossouvre, former shadow adviser on African Affairs to President François Mittérand, at Elysee Palace, the French president's official residence. He died on April 7, 1994, just a few hours after Habyarimana was assassinated. Voices have been raised to denounce a possible murder and a slapdash investigation.

The role of Paul Barril also raises interesting questions. Barril, the former commander-in-chief of the GIGN (National Gendarmerie Intervention group), may have been introduced in Rwanda as the special adviser to Juvenal Habyarimana on military affairs after the launch of "Operation Noroit", which officially aimed to protect French interests in the country, but also served as a way to train the Rwandan army after the offensive by Paul Kagame's RPF in October 1990. This military help from France resulted in the increase of trained Rwandan soldiers: the army of the country went from 5,000 men in 1990 to 50,000 in 1994.

The aspects of these events obviously explain why French soldiers of "Operation Turquoise", which, in June 1994, was supposed to put an end to the massacres, were welcomed as liberators by the auxiliary of horror, those who were perpetrating the unspeakable crime against other human beings.

Denial Of The Bamileke Genocide

Going to the west of the continent and a few degrees of latitude north, arguably the first genocide in Africa of the 20th century was perpetrated nearly 40 years earlier in Cameroon. The death toll, still debated by many experts, ranges from 100,000 to 400,000 people killed between 1959 and 1964, with a reported 120,000 killed in 1960 alone - just in the country's western region, populated by an ethnic group named the Bamileke.

Training of cadets at the Joint Army School of Cameroon in 1960 [National Archives of Yaounde]

Much less about this is known however, since the archives detailing direct French involvement remain under the seal of secrecy by the French state. The recent publication of ajournalistic and historical thesis by two French journalists and a Cameroonian historian, recounts in detail the war by France on the edge of the independence of Cameroon to impose the first president, Ahmadou Ahidjo, to a population which in a majority supported the Cameroonian Independence Party, testimony in support of survivors of the massacres and actors, as well as the paradoxically more accessible archives of the Cameroonian army, and has gradually begun to open the wall of silence in which the French authorities had sealed the question of this genocide.

The answer given by French Prime Minister François Fillon during his official visit in Yaounde in 2009 might therefore attest the same memoricide will: "I absolutely deny that the French forces were involved in anything related to murder in Cameroon. All this is pure invention."

However, the Cameroonian national archives reveals that the training of Cameroonian military loyalists included the French technique named "counter-revolution", which proved its efficiency in Algeria and Indochina a few months earlier; the sending of French troops, who, for months, directly plundered hundreds of villages and hamlets in the mountainous Bamileke area; and the direct implication of the highest French authorities.

The evils of history are alive. Regarding the Bamileke farming villages wiped out by pilots of the French army, terrifying and eloquent figures exist. A French military report counts "43,363 incendiary cartridges of 7.5mm used against the enemy" for the single month of March 1960. According to a witness, the planes flew over the villages in pairs: the first poured fuel and the second shot incendiary bullets. How many Bamileke farmers were killed in these raids?

How many villages were simply wiped off the map? On the use of napalm or other combustible fuel on the Bamileke by the French army. Pierre Messmer, who was defence minister under General de Gaulle for nine years, probably gained his appointment thanks to the success of this "pacification of Cameroon" operation. Then the prime minister answered in a television documentary on French television: "It's not important."

Riz Khan - Rwanda: An African success story?

General Max Briand, named to head the French Expeditionary Corps from December 1959, acknowledged in a report to his superiors 20,000 deaths for the year of 1960 alone. This figure is to be taken with great care; the assessment of the French military is a low figure, in terms of military resources deployed, the ammunition used and the demographics of the country. Unlike Prime Minister Francois Fillon, the soldier nowhere denies direct involvement of French troops in what can be called with no euphemism a mass killing, and even concedes that the "rebels" had almost no weapons: "It seems that the only weapons that were introduced in Cameroon are forty Czech guns..."

If today, General Semengue, a major actor in the Cameroonian forces and Auxiliary of the French army, who later became Chief of Staff of the Cameroonian army, can make jokes before cameras, smile at the corner of the lips, and explain away the decapitation of heads [FR], it is precisely because this memoricide work was conducted in an implacable way.

Contrary to what some will assume, this memory work should not and will not be a pretext for repentance or reparation demands, but will give the possibility to millions of French, Rwandan and Cameroonian citizens to imagine an appeased future. As Urugayan writer Eduardo Galeano writes: "We know that the loss of our memory mortgages the future. Those who cannot learn from their past are condemned to live without the possibility of imagining it."

Julie Owono is a freelance Cameroonian journalist and international relations consultant based in Paris. She blogs at Global Voices and is the Africa Desk Cordinator at Internet Sans Frontières, a French NGO which promotes online freedom of expression.

Follow her on Twitter: @JulieOwono

U.S. Culpable In African Atrocities

By Clarence Lusane, 
January 27, 2012 
Courtesy Of "The Progressive"

The United States is shamefully implicated in the terror that Charles Taylor, erstwhile leader of Liberia, inflicted on the people of West Africa.

Beginning in the 1980s, Taylor was an informant and collaborator with a number of U.S. intelligence agencies that included at least the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA, according to Freedom of Information documents obtained by the Boston Globe. While it is still unclear exactly what Taylor did for the United States, apparently it was at least worth a jailbreak.

On Sept.15, 1985, while languishing in a maximum-security penitentiary in Boston for embezzling nearly $1 million when he was in the government of Liberian dictator President Samuel Doe, Taylor made a dramatic prison escape. He strolled into freedom through an open cell door. It’s likely that someone in the U.S. security apparatus helped him slip away.

Four years later, Taylor launched a civil war in Liberia to overthrow the Doe regime. The war raged on for five years. He financed it by the illicit sale of blood diamonds, iron ore, timber and rubber, and by gang-pressing children into his National Patriotic Front of Liberia. This militia committed countless atrocities across the nation. He forced more than 15,000 children, some as young as six, to fight.

Taylor also played a huge and ugly part in the civil war in Sierra Leone. In both countries, he allegedly committed virtually every type of war crime possible, including using child soldiers, conducting and ordering massacres, gang rapes and torture, and generally terrorizing millions.

By 2003, he was forced out of the Liberian presidency. On the run, he ended up on Interpol’s most-wanted list. Eventually captured and brought to justice, he currently sits in a prison in the Netherlands waiting for the verdict in his trial on charges of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The West has long lambasted the civil and ethnic wars in Africa and used them as an excuse for creating harsh conditions for aid. U.S. political leaders have demanded that nations in Africa stop tyrannizing their citizens and build democratic and transparent governments. Those arguments have become a lot more hypocritical and toothless with new revelations regarding Taylor and his reign of oppression.

That the CIA would employ an unsavory character may perhaps not be news. Taylor was, however, a particularly egregious case, with a personal pathological drive that went on for years.

Although the CIA claims that releasing more details about its relationship would jeopardize U.S. security, it is essential that the whole truth be told. Too many died and suffered at Taylor's hands for the entire story not to come out.

Clarence Lusane is an associate professor at American University in the School of International Service.

The US Is Fighting A Coward's War

As Technology Allows Machines To Make Their Own Decisions, Warfare Will Become Bloodier – and Less Accountable 

By George Monbiot 
Monday 30 January 2012 16.00 EST 
Courtesy Of "The Guardian"

The ancient Greeks, unlike the Jews or the Christians, invested their gods with human failings. Divine judgment, they believed, was neither flawless nor dispassionate; it was warped by lust, vengeance and self-interest. In the hands of Zeus, the thunderbolt was both an instrument of justice and a weapon of jealousy and revenge.

Those now dispensing judgment from on high are not gods, though they must feel like it. The people striking mortals down with drones are doubtless as capable as anyone else of self-deception, denial and cognitive illusions. More so, perhaps, as the eminent fictions of the Bush years and the growing delusions of the current president suggest.

Barack Obama began last week's state of the union address by claiming that the troops who had fought the Iraq war had "made the United States safer and more respected around the world". Like Bush, like the gods, he has begun to create the world he wants to inhabit.

These power-damaged people have been granted the chance to fulfil one of humankind's abiding fantasies: to vaporise their enemies, as if with a curse or a prayer, effortlessly and from a safe distance. That these powers are already being abused is suggested by the mendacity of those who are deploying them. The CIA, which is running theundeclared and unacknowledged drone war in Pakistan, insists that there have been no recent civilian casualties. So does Obama's chief counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan. It is a blatant whitewash.

As a report last year by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism showed, of some 2,300 people killed by US drone strikes in Pakistan from 2004 until August 2011, between 392 and 781 appear to have been civilians; 175 were children. In the period about which the CIA and Brennan made their claims, at least 45 civilians have been killed. As soon as an agency claims "we never make mistakes", you know that it has lost its moorings, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn suggested in his story of that title. Feeling no obligation to apologise or explain, count bodies or answer for its crimes, it becomes a danger to humanity.

It may be true, as the US air force says, that because a drone can circle and study a target for hours before it strikes, its missiles are less likely to kill civilians than those launched from a piloted plane. (The air force has yet to explain how it reconciles this with its boast that drones "greatly shorten decision time".) But it must also be true that the easier and less risky a deployment is, the more likely it is to happen.

This danger is acknowledged in a remarkably candid assessment published by the UK's Ministry of Defence, which also deploys drones, and has also used them to kill civilians. It maintains that the undeclared air war in Pakistan and Yemen "is totally a function of the existence of an unmanned capability – it is unlikely a similar scale of force would be used if this capability were not available". Citing the German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, it warns that the brutality of war seldom escalates to its absolute form, partly because of the risk faced by one's own forces. Without risk, there's less restraint. With these unmanned craft, governments can fight a coward's war, a god's war, harming only the unnamed.

The danger is likely to escalate as drone warfare becomes more automated and the lines of accountability less clear. Last week the US navy unveiled a drone that can land on an aircraft carrier without even a remote pilot. The Los Angeles Times warned that "it could usher in an era when death and destruction can be dealt by machines operating semi-independently". The British assessment suggests that within a few years drones assisted by artificial intelligence could make their own decisions about whom to kill and whom to spare. Sorry sir, computer says yes.

"Some would say one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist," George HW Bush opined on when he was vice-president. "I reject this notion. The philosophical differences are stark and fundamental." Perhaps they are, but no US administration has convincingly defined them or consistently recognised them. In Latin America, south-east Asia, Africa and the Middle East, successive presidents have thwarted freedom and assisted state terrorism. Drones grant governments new opportunities to snuff out opposition of any kind, terrorist or democrat. The US might already be making use of them.

In October last year, a 16-year-old called Tariq Aziz was travelling through North Waziristan in Pakistan with his 12-year-old cousin, Waheed Khan. Their car was hit by a missile from a US drone. As always, their deaths made them guilty: if we killed them, they must be terrorists. But they weren't. Tariq was about to start work with the human rights group Reprieve, taking pictures of the aftermath of drone strikes. A mistake? Possibly. But it is also possible that he was murdered out of self-interest. If you have such powers, if you are not held to account by Congress, the media or the American people, why not use them?

The danger to democracy, and not just in Pakistan but one day perhaps everywhere, should be evident. Yet, as fatalistic as the ancient Greeks, we drift into this with scarcely a murmur of debate, leaving the gods to decide.

A fully referenced version of this article can be found atwww.monbiot.com

Aggression Born Of American 'Exceptionalism'

By HIROAKI SATO 
Monday, Jan. 30, 2012 
Courtesy Of "The Japan Times"

NEW YORK — I thought American exceptionalism was debunked and dying. I was wrong.

Most recently, American exceptionalism jumped to the political fore at the start of this century. It did so with a swagger, ironically, because of the 9/11 attacks. In his speech that night, President George W. Bush put forward the United States as "the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world."

That assertion was a bit odd in the circumstances, but no matter. He condemned those who carried out the attacks as "evil" and told the world that America, being goodness incarnate, would bring those responsible to justice, making no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbored the terrorists.

As Bush pushed his intent to attack Iraq, which had nothing to do with those "evil" acts, some advised that the U.S. assume the role that Britain played from the 19th to the early 20th century. The U.S. is powerful and enlightened enough, the argument went, to relegate those benighted, ne'er-do-well Middle Eastern countries back into colonial status and rule them as lord and master.

Even a plan was cooked up to send schoolteachers to Iraq after its "liberation." The story appeared in The Education Week — a periodical that constantly reports on the problems American education faces.

Behind all that lay the age-old belief that America is a country like no other. That high self-regard faltered as the Iraq War, like the war against Afghanistan that had started earlier, did. Then came the bursting of the financial bubble. The argument that American exceptionalism is a "myth" came to the fore.

Three years ago Godfrey Hodgson published the book "The Myth of American Exceptionalism" (Yale Univ. Press). The most cogent case against "the myth" I've read of late is Stephen M. Walt's article with the same title (Foreign Policy, November 2011). In it the Harvard professor dissects it from five angles to show it is fantasy based on ignorance and self-aggrandizement.

First, Walt points to the notion that "there is something exceptional about American exceptionalism." There simply isn't. Powers of any international standing at one time or another entertained similar ideas to justify their "missions."

Walt doesn't cite Japan among his examples, but Japan once projected itself as "the leading race" among the Asian nations. That self-appointed role included what may be called belligerent eschatology. Japan's exceptional mission required the country, some prominent men argued, to fight the U.S. even if that meant Japan's annihilation.

Walt's second point of rebuttal is the belief that the U.S. "behaves better than other nations." He cites expansionism and the accompanying slaughters. He doesn't mention it, but it was none other than Fortune magazine that plainly stated, in 1935, that the U.S. was second only to Great Britain in the total size of territories it had seized by then.

As for killings, it was in a website of President George W. Bush's secretive administration that I was surprised to see the simple statement: The population of American Indians had been reduced to just 5 percent of its original size by the early 20th century. "Ethnic cleansing" nonpareil.

In "The Elusive American Century" (Harper's, February 2012), Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich reminds us that it was Henry Luce, the creator of the publishing empire that included Fortune, that came up with the term "the American century." He did so in early 1941. What a "century" it has been so far, in large-scale, willful slaughters!

Walt's third point of refutation: "America's success is due to its special genius." Not really, he points out: America's success in becoming the envy of the world has to do not with its "uniquely American virtues" so much as with sheer luck that the new nation came with a vast land "lavishly endowed with natural resources and traversed by navigable rivers."

Walt's two other points for rebuttal — that the U.S. is "responsible for most of the good of the world" and that "God is on our side" — may be skipped, except for Otto von Bismarck's quip (which he quotes) that "God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States."

God, as a matter of fact, is what Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, in calling for a new American Century, invoked last fall when he spelled out his foreign policy were he to become president, as Bacevich ruefully noted in "America: With God on our side" (L.A. Times, Oct. 16, 2011).

"God did not create this country to be a nation of followers," Romney told the Citadel cadets. "America must lead the world." Without the "clarity of American purpose and resolve, the world becomes a far more dangerous place," he declaimed.

You expect something like that from a presidential candidate. But then, from a different quarter, came a full-throated case for American exceptionalism. In "Terror on Trial" (Wall Street Journal, Jan. 7-8, 2012), British writer William Shawcross said the opposite of what you might first expect from the title of his article.

What first caught my eye was the discordant assemblage of photos that topped Shawcross' article: shots of Guantanamo detainees in the infamous scarlet prison garb huddling in a wire-fenced gravelly garden, with masks and gloves; the Nuremberg trial; Khalid Sheik Mohammed (apparently after torture?); three Pakistani women holding up a sign saying "Burning Pakistan / Bush Gifted / Obama Granted"; the drone MQ-9 Reaper; and Bush and Obama together.

And what did Shawcross say? His concluding paragraph sums it up: "Since the beginning of the 20th century, America's commitment and sacrifices have been essential to the world's ability to resist the forces of nihilistic aggression. That was certainly true in the war against fascism, and it is still true today."

So, the photos were to buttress that argument. The Guantanamo prison, torture and the use of drones to murder people with impunity are all right to fight today's terrorism. Shawcross cites Nuremberg not just because his father, Hartley, was Britain's chief prosecutor at the trial, but because Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson was the chief U.S. prosecutor.

Shawcross neglects to mention that Jackson enunciated lofty ideals and principles that his country has trampled on. It doesn't seem to have occurred to Shawcross that willful misconduct of the U.S. in subsequent decades provoked "the forces of nihilistic aggression." American exceptionalism of this brand comes with blowback, as the CIA uses the term.

Hiroaki Sato is a translator and essayist in New York.