Blood on the Rizla

Human Rights in Israel

2009-01-27T12:53:00.003Z

Alon Harel is a prominent Israeli commentator, civil rights activist and renowned legal expert teaching at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His wide ranging career has included being a visiting professor at the Universities of Austin, Toronto, Columbia and Harvard. Given the atmosphere of outrage and allegations surrounding the recent violence in the Gaza Strip, Harel shares his views on war-crimes, human rights, segregation and the future of Zionism.

Judah: What chance is there that the IDF committed war-crimes as defined under international law in the recent Gaza Operation?

Harel: To be frank, this is a question that I’m not going to be able to answer for three reasons. Firstly, I’m not sufficiently well versed in the legal complexity of international law as it currently stands, secondly I don’t as yet know all the facts and primarily the main thing you have to remember about the standards of international law is that they are incredibly vague, ill defined and subject to interpretation. Therefore it’s very difficult to assess for instance what the concept of ‘proportionality,’ meaning how many innocent civilians you are ‘allowed to kill’ as collateral, actually means. It falls under the vague category. Some things however, are emerging quite squarely from my viewpoint as war crimes. What I have in mind is the killing of Hamas policemen, very early on in the recent wave of violence. They had just completed some form of training course and were at a ceremony when they were attacked, and as non-military officials this would contravene international law. Yet the Israeli line would be that the distinction is not sharp enough, another illustration that the norms are far too vague.

Judah: How are actions such as these tolerated by Israeli society and is it taken seriously enough by the political and military elites?

Harel: My stance is that it’s not being taken seriously enough, that is taken only as things that are to be avoided in a strictly lawyerly manner. The thinking is along the lines of “now we’ve done it, how do we get out of it.” My impression is that the political elites view international law as some kind of nuisance, so they get people to help them get out of it. They view it as just a hassle and don’t inculcate and instil the values and norms of into the system, rather treating it something to avoid. They are simply not taking it seriously and for me this is deeply frustrating. Recently in the high-brow Israeli broadsheet Ha’aretz, there was a piece showing how military lawyers co-operate in erasing military acts. There was a lot of discussion on how to prevent Israeli officers from being stopped by foreign authorities as a result of actions recently committed in Gaza. The newspaper claimed that the military lawyers were behaving legalistically, yet only in the sense that they were telling the army how to avoid it. They treated international law in the manner that I don’t think military lawyers should, that is they behaved like a criminal’s advocate might and did not internalise its core principles. And this is disappointing.

Judah: Are the checks on the excesses of war strong enough in Israel?

Harel: The war indicates that they are not. I think that the way the way to do this is to make sure that the press brings the horror of violence to every home in Israel. This could not happen as the Government blocked reporters entering Gaza and this was wrong. The war was rather popular in Israel and the press went along with it, with the possible exception of Ha’aretz, but their stance was not picked up on by the rest of the media. However though there were some annoying limitations on reporting from the conflict-zone itself, anybody could publish anything he wanted in Israel about the violence.

Judah: Are Israelis seduced by war?

Harel: I don’t think that Israelis have a special sympathy for violence – but the long conflict has desensitized many Israelis to the horrors that it generates towards the Palestinians. Of course the rockets do this; the insecurity makes it worse and the whole feeling of living on the edge that pervades modern Israel. None of this is very conducive to ‘peaceful sentiments.’ This has engendered a culture of fear, insecurities and a little bit of paranoia that leads Israelis to view themselves as righteous, as the victims of the whole affair. And this is not desirable in the Israeli context. Yet things can change if you modify this context. The right journalists, thinkers and of course leaders are what you need. What I have said however is completely different what the questions suggest. There is a tendency to ‘psychologise’ modern warfare and especially the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There are a lot of theories, which are very popular in Britain, that the Zionist movement is somehow ‘prone’ or ‘inherently’ violent. I don’t think that is supported by the evidence, much of which is dubious and is all highly disputed, and certainly doesn’t stand up in a comparative analysis with other nationalist or post-nationalist movements. Imposing a psychological paradigm on any complex society and its decision and implementation procedure is flawed, unhelpful methodology. I don’t see how any psychologising of this conflict can be useful.

Judah: The Israeli Government recently announced that it would offer protection to IDF soldiers accused of war-crimes. What is the likelihood of us seeing people in the dock and was this the right decision for the Israeli Government to make?

Harel: I think that if war-crimes were committed then those involved should be prosecuted. If this were done properly at home, then no international body would be needed as Israel herself could be trusted. Some of the alleged war-crimes, and by alleged I am stressing that we need further investigation and fact-gathering from Gaza, were taken by very high-up officials so this is why the Government is unkeen and seeking to offer protection. Israel needs to interrogate these claims, but you should not forget that there is scope for doubt here. This further stresses that it needs to be inculcated that war has become legalised and that this needs to be taken constantly into account when you do things. Israel needs to instil the values, norms and values of international law into the upper ranks or the army and political establishment. That would be the right decision to take. Of course there can be debates and discussions, but behind the complexities and legal sophistication things need to be undertaken in spirit. And this had not occurred.

Judah: How did the Israeli Supreme Court emerge as such a pro-active force in modern Israel? How this start and what has this achieved?

Harel: the Israeli Supreme Court filled a void and this was partly due to the weakness of both the legislature and the Government, as they both suffered from a critical lack of legitimacy. Key jurists pulled forward the process, engendering great hostility towards the Courts, which became seen as political, sectarian or serving sectional interests. I think the Israeli Supreme Court, when using the powers of judicial review that it has at its disposal has, in fact been highly responsible and professional. Now the Court managed to achieve this position by enjoying great legitimacy at certain chosen periods, when other institutions were tarnished as their leaders had become perceived as self-interested, corrupt and no longer reflective to Israeli society. This was congruent with the energy and dynamism of Justice Barak, and his great convictions about the role of judges in modern societies and especially in Israel. I personally think the claims of the Israeli Court being over-active, yet this is very hard to evaluate. Comparing court activism is such a multi-dimensional and slippery process and I have never seen clear, persuasive evidence that the Court is indeed over-active. Yet, many people challenge and resent its decisions. That’s why there are many people who hate the court.

Judah: Would you qualify Israel as a segregated society?

Harel: First of all voluntary segregation is not necessarily bad, letting people as it does choose to live amongst those that share their values and preferences and to be frank Israel, excluding the West Bank which is not part of the state, is in my opinion not necessarily any more segregated than other Western countries. Take the United States, deeply segregated along line of race, class and faith and of course France. Now, voluntary segregation is not a bad thing as long as it doesn’t become enforced segregation and thus a form of oppression. There is obviously a lot of segregation, on the case of the Israeli-Arabs for example there were restrictions that have been dismantled by the court and any attempts by some political figures to bring elements of them back have been fired down. However segregation is mostly to do with the fact that there is a different language being used, requiring for instance different schools. Of course a lot of Jews are hostile when Arabs come and live amongst them, but this isn’t a universal. Haifa is famously un-segregated, or less than other places, whilst Jaffa is highly divided. There is willingness on the part of some and not of others and the Israeli-Arabs a not free of blame for the worrying deterioration of in the relationship between the two communities. They have been highly provocative and made challenges to certain basic values and beliefs of the Jewish community. Yet, there is no question however that the relationship has deteriorated in the past fifteen years and that there is economic and unconscious discrimination practised in Israel by the majority in a very similar manner that is practised in Western countries. Given Israel has become less of a social-welfare state - this has hurt the Israeli-Arabs more. Where is this going? That’s hard to know, harder to predict. There is a lot of goodwill, especially amongst the young, lots of groups and, at least in the labour market, a lot of interactions. Personal relationships however are still very segregated. For example I first interacted with Israeli-Arabs when I went to University and even there the Israeli-Arabs tended to stick amongst themselves. Before then I had barely met anyone from that community.

Judah: Could you elaborate on the forms of legal, political and social discrimination that exist in Israel today affecting non-Orthodox Jews and Israeli-Arabs? How are things developing and what can be done?

Harel: Family law is outdated and quite horrible, with many people resenting this. However thanks to the Courts if you live with someone you can now achieve as may rights and benefits as you need or want, but marriage is of course different. Israeli-Arabs face a lot of discrimination but they are not the only ones, Ethiopian Jews do as well. Degrees of intolerance like this are almost inevitable ion highly heterogeneous societies. Socially, we need structures that offer a little more inclusion. We need a new situation and a will to be able to achieve this and overcome existing barriers. There are of course factors that are trying like the Courts, with their insistence of legal authority and groups such as the Association of Civil Rights. Some are trying to work through the Courts to achieve real change, others via public opinion. However there have not been changes for the better in recent years, like there was during the Second Rabin Government, which was highly effective on those issues.

Judah: With the rise of Yisrael Beitanu and the opinion polls suggesting a swing to the Likud, is this coming election a test of human-rights and tolerant pluralism in Israel?

Harel: No the election is not a test for anything. I don’t think the rightward swing is very serious as people vote mostly with hunches, especially in an atmosphere of violence like this. People’s underlying values should not be judged primarily on who they vote for. And to be frank I don’t think there is a major difference between the three main parties. They are all usually unable to solve things and as a result just muddle through the problems. There is not a sharp correlation between voting patterns and respect for human rights in the centre of the spectrum of society and moreover the broad swath of voters. Labour, Likud and Kadima are all parties with some goodwill, talent and even a little bit of vision – yet they all critical lack that certain something that permits a political force to transform things.

Judah: In 2004 you spoke of the need to “separate Zionism from State,” what does that entail and why is this necessary?

Harel: This was an intellectual exercise and what I suggested was that the Israeli political map should include parties that do not define themselves as Zionist, primarily Ultra-Orthodox, Arabs and others. I think it should be recognised that Zionism is a political movement in Israel, a dominant one, but a political one none the less.

Judah: In your work you have touched on the treatment of sexual minorities in Israeli politics and society. Is their dignity or just tolerance in Israel today?

Harel: I think this was the great success of the Israeli human rights movement, changing the situation of Israeli gays. I think now there really is dignity and not just tolerance. In Tel Aviv there is one long chain of success stories, not only legal but only social, fundamental changes in people’s underlying values. It all happened very quickly between 1988 and 1995 in the main hubs of Israeli society, yet on the periphery it’s still bad. Yet now there are even voices in the Orthodox community, the issue is now discussed and finally visible.

Russia is Losing: A Reply to James Schneider

2008-09-06T10:39:00.002Z

Dear James,

I appreciate you want to move the debate forward. Let’s not get stuck in the mud. However there are a few things I think you should know, not being in Tbilisi. Yesterday some conversations with a senior Georgian politician revealed some vital clues as to why Russia stopped 21 km from Tbilisi. Here is an extract from a fascinating briefing.

“The reason the Russians did not take Tbilisi is clear. They had spoken time and time again about the need for regime change, removing the ‘criminal’ leader Mikheil Saakashvili and demanding his arrest as a pre-condition for a cease-fire. However they did not achieve this objective. The reason was that over 70,000 people mobilised to protest in Freedom Square, from all sides of the political divide, to show they refused to be cowed. Keeping the morale high was crucial, if it had broken, or there had been looting or flight from Tbilisi, the Russians would have entered the capital to ‘restore order.’ The Russians didn’t. What could they have done? Driven their tanks from Igoeti those 21km away and found tens of thousands of protestors waiting for them on the anniversary of the Prague Spring? No. They couldn’t there objectives were stopped. However what were the Russian intentions when they invaded…? We have a clue from their petrol. When their officers arrived in Gori and surrounding areas they made contact with out local authorities. And offered to sell them large amounts of cheap petrol. At first we were unsure and then then soon urged our men to offer and keep asking to buy it. The officers couldn’t sell it as first, ‘we need to know if we are going to drive to Tbilisi on this or if were going back.’ On the fourth day, the corrupt officers sold us the petrol and drove off. We had a celebratory drink with them and they were delighted to have cut the deal. And that’s how we knew they weren’t coming into Tbilisi and we had stopped them.”

Paul Berman argued that the invasion of Georgia signified the death of 1989. I believe this fact shows he is wrong. The very reason that this is not 1968 is that protestors and high morale actually - prevented Russian forces from entering the capital, which they had obviously planned to do given their stated objectives and the amount of petrol they carried with them. The liberal-left, instead of sniffing about Saakashvili’s democratic credentials which are far from perfect (whilst in fact they are mostly angered by his pro Bush stance), should recognise that the mass-protests in Tbilisi are a triumph for democracy and a show that 1989 still breathes. Due to the spread and deepening of the values of the Free World within Russian itself it is no longer acceptable for the Kremlin to send tanks to crush civilian protestors. It wasn’t in Berlin in 1989, nor was is it in Moscow in 1991 and now neither is it in Tbilisi in 2008. In this sense you need to recognise that Russia just lost categorically, and in a sense need to stop feeling threatened by them and sign up to your own first point, a solidarity campaign with Georgia.

The liberal-left, instead of feeling uncomfortable with Saakashvili due to his pro-American stance and thuggery should come and support him – by virtue of all major parties supporting the continuance of his Presidency and democracy in Georgia, he does have an astounding popular mandate. That’s democracy, it’s not always pretty. That’s what we pledged ourselves to defend. Again, I underline my support for your first point.

Moving on. What we urgently need to avoid in Georgia is economic collapse. If the economy nose-dives, the Kremlin will succeed stamping its own agenda on the country in the face of the expressed wishes of the Georgian people to be part of the West. Economic meltdown will lead to the FSB having free reign in Tbilisi and of course over the BTC pipeline. This is what we need to avert. Instead of escalating along your points, I would urge Governments to follow the lead of the United States. I may have spent much of yesterday listening to some horrific accounts of ethnic cleansing, but the amount of people actually permanently driven form their homes is relatively small. There simply were not many Georgians left in South Ossetia or Abkhazia. The 1 Billion US$ aid package from America and the 750 Million US$ loan from the IMF are actually way superior in value to the actual amounts of damage done by Russian forces. The delivery of the aid shipments to Poti includes stuff that isn’t really needed (unlike in Bihar). Both of these are symbolic gestures to show that anyone can use Poti and that we are not abandoning Georgia. In a sense the Georgia solidarity campaign we need has already begun, if you want to put out some bunting that’d be great – but they’ve actually cleared away the ‘Stop Russia’ posters here so I don’t think it’d be necessary. What they need is investment to continue and the only wait it can is if the West affirms it guarantees Georgia’s tarnished – but living democratic choice not to be a Russian satellite.

Russia is losing in Georgia. I repeat. Russia is losing in Georgia. For that reason I am going to suggest that whilst many of the points of your scale, ( 1,3,6 and 9 especially) I broadly agree with as possible options to be used if Russian aggression continues into say the the Ukraine or Moldova, I don’t think it’s necessary to apply them just yet. As for some of your other remaining points (4,5 and 10) they raise the general questions of doing business with authoritarian government in general, there cannot be one rule for Russia and one for China – do you not agree? This is an avenue for further discussion. As for 7, I see it as impossible to implement and 8 is totally useless strategically or militarily. It’s simply a waste of money.

For the moment Moscow is losing with our current post-invasion strategy of keeping the competition confined to Georgia and refusing to abandon it by pledging eventual NATO membership and keeping the economy afloat to ensure the FSB do not manipulate bread-riots or unemployment lines into the emergence of a Russian puppet-regime. Capital flight from Russia has already been over 21billion US$ and the Russian stock-market has yet to recover. It’s been a pricey war for a few scrappy villages. One option outlined by a senior CIA regional analyst was that the Muscovite elite might put pressure on the Kremlin to ‘hold back from the brink’ to protect their investments. This is a possibility and we have market forces to rely on. However, visa-bans remain an option. I suggest making an example of one or two individuals to show what will happen if aggression continues things will escalate. Eduard Kokoity perhaps? He’s made some pretty horrific demands for ethnic cleansing recently. It'd be wrong to retaliate in the ways you outlined, let's continue the current policy of denying victory in Georgia whilst continuing normal relations in other spheres unless something further aggression continues. If it does, I'll take another look at them.

Saakashvili and dare I say, the popular momentum to turn Georgia into a modern and western state we can still call the ‘Rose Revolution’ is moving forward. On the diplomatic level, the Federation is looking even more humiliated. Nino Burjanadze, the speaker of Parliament stressed in conversation that the diplomatic offensive had just suffered a historic reversal. Indeed close inspection of what just happened at the Shanghai Co-Operation Council meeting shows this. Did you see that photo of Medvedev looking as if he was about to cry? The reason is that he turned up expecting CSTO countries to rally behind Russia – and for the first time in history China showed leadership and Central Asia hid behind Beijing. Clearly Medvedev needs to chew on this quote by Ivan Kratsev before setting back to work on a post-modern Empire.

“Russia's failure to persuade the world of the legitimacy of its actions in and towards Georgia should force Moscow to rethink its plans for a return to the world stage. Russia is a born-again 19th-century power that acts in the post-20th-century world where arguments of force and capacity cannot any longer be the only way to define the status or conduct of great powers. The absence of "soft power" is particularly dangerous for a would-be revisionist state. For if a state wants today to remake the world order, it must be able both to rely on the existing and emerging constellation of powers and be able to capture the international public's imagination.”

This is the price you pay for installing a managed democracy. The illusion that all editors and reporters are like those of ORT. Indeed there is some good news for Putin to dwell on – Russia now has company in recognising the breakaways. Nicaragua’s Ortega has decided to anger the Americans. Oh, so have Hezbollah and Hamas. Russia has some pretty friends – the people of the Federation urgently need to take stock of this and realise just into what company they are being driven. This takes us into you point C. – I really don’t think we can discuss CSTO and the SCO as if they are alternative structures to NATO, as the events of the past few days have shown they are incredibly weak and have no clear agenda or organisational capacity for the moment.`

Stephen Kotkin once said “the CIS is not a commonwealth but a question mark.” I think the same applies to the SCO and CSTO. If the Kremlin are smart they will take a sharp lesson from this ( I have little reason to believe that are dramatically less wise than Bush’ Whitehouse so it is a possibility.) The discreet empire-building that has actually been working is the behind the scenes Russian take-over of the borders of Armenia, Belarus Tajikistan and aspects of the military in CSTO countries through the use of these organisations. Using them carefully to empower Russia might see new life breathed into the Russia-Belarus State Union or meaning into the CIS. Moscow seeks to build a sphere. This is how I expect, after a period of trial and error – it will proceed to d so using the CIS, State-Union and CSTO. Two of which Georgia has sharply exited and one it had no interest in joining. As for the SCO, I view the mutually exclusive goals of China and Russia to mean it will be unlikely to deeply dramatically in the foreseeable future, whilst their even deeper fear of each others intentions will hold them together.

This takes us to NATO reform. My knowledge-set has information for how NATO can improve as a fighting force, though institutionally I feel there is little more we can do for the moment apart from increasingly interoperability and avoiding duplication . I subscribe to the notion of NATO as the defence force of the Western democracies and have long argued that non-whites are more than welcome. Georgia without the enclaves, Israel without the territories are two invites I would hope to write, whilst Japan and Brazil can be constructively engaged with and hopefully associated with at the very least. You mentioned in one of your previous notes the need for ‘new’ organisations – let NATO evolve, that is if you believe the democracies need a common army. As for engaging with Russia within a framework or even China, I don’t see the need for creating new offices and mechanisms. When I suggested such a concept to Giovanni Grevi at the EUISS in Paris, he retorted, “there are loads of organisations, some practically defunct that can be used to engage with Russia, which if it desired could easily empower the OSCE for example." As for China, there is a lack of mechanism, what do you suggest? However I am deeply suspicious about founding a new global security-pact between what is essentially just ‘Permanent 5’ states, when almost everything the great power can agree on could and should be done through the UN Security Council. Maybe we should focus out attention on UN reform and seek a new global-pact as part of the next United Nations.

Yours truly,

Ben

Quote of the Day

2008-09-05T19:40:00.002Z

I recommend reading these short opinion pieces by leading Russian experts. They include two I have discussed in the past, the impressive Stephen Kotkin and the Economist's Ed Lucas. This quote sums up some thoughts I've been having today.

"Russia's history is not only about authoritarianism and imperialism. It is also the story of astonishingly brave men and women who struggled for freedom, like the eight protesters who went to Red Square in August 1968 to denounce the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. Like countless others in past decades, their slogan was: "For your freedom and ours."

"The best way that the outside world can help Russia now is by example. The West has squandered the moral authority it had at the end of the cold war. Dick Cheney's America and Silvio Berlusconi's Italy don't look much different from Putin's Russia, at least when viewed from Moscow. We have to practice what we preach before we can expect anyone else to believe it."

- Ed Lucas, Economist Central Europe Correspondent and author the 'New Cold War'

Response to James Schneider II

2008-09-05T15:14:00.002Z

Dear James,

You are out of date and articulating a position similar to the French and German attitudes to Russia at the Bucharest Summit in December 2007 in your reply to my recent Henry Jackson Society policy proposal . Anatol Lieven, in an interview in July explained to me that France’s new NATO stance was based on “one enormous condition: which is that Russia does not once again become an enemy.” He explained that was why the “French approach calls for selective co-operation with the US, supporting the mission in Afghanistan but opposing US calls for NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia.” Berlin and Paris were backing exactly the proposals you outline. That we do not offer Georgia and the Ukraine MAPs to the Western Alliance as it would constitute an aggressive and bellicose act towards Russia and risked igniting a phase of ‘acute competition,’ what you could call a ‘new Cold War.’ The French and the Germans publicly opposed US plans for a missile shield in Eastern Europe, I hope you remember Jacques Chirac’s attitude to the project and I also hope you have taken on board Gerhard Schroeder’s attempts to co-operate, open-dialogue and derive mutually enriching wealth from his post inside Gazprom. This was a fair and sound policy until the Russian invasion of Georgia.

You argue, just as the previous French and German positions were, that there are alternatives and a passive, non-reactive policy towards Moscow is necessary. You talk a lot about ‘co-option’ and ‘mutual-beneficent’ strategies we could have with Russia. However we are not dealing with the Russian people, but a criminal-gang at the helm of the state. The Putin-Medvedev tandem has already shown it is not interested in your policy, that of Sarkozy and Merkel before the war. If it had been interested in a deliberate act of Western respect for a zone of neutrality it would not have prepared to invade Georgia since December 2007. This is how Moscow responded to that path James, let’s not make the same mistake twice.

In my response I decided to address your fears of things spiralling out of control, by calling for a summit where Moscow could be offered either a neutral Georgia with internationalised South Ossetia and Abkhazia, where once refugees had returned their homes we could hold free and fair referendums on their futures. The alternative is to accept partition, recognise these breakaways and make Moscow aware that because it forcibly changed borders by force we are now going to guarantee Georgia independence and right to join any international organisation it meets the criteria for. You suggest the US can guarantee Georgian independence, as it does of the State of Israel. I posit that comes down to the same thing as NATO membership, just with the EU free-loading off America’s defences, as usual. If you believe that one of the goals of European foreign policy is to solidify and strengthen democracy abroad, why are you suggesting the US enter into a pact with Tbilisi, and the UK just smile and wave?

You didn’t address the fact that in creating ‘neutral-ground’ in the Caucasus and over Russia the proposals I outlined, this matches with both Moscow’s stated agenda and as far as I judge – our own. You chose to divert attention away from this and focus on what I suggest we do if Russia refuses to accept such a deal, thereby fully owning up to its desires not protect itself from encroachment – but to build a sphere of exclusive political influence, one over which it wields a veto on who rules. A post-modern Empire if you like to rival America’s. I personally do not believe that any of the parties are ready for such a bold attempt to tie up the loose ends of the Cold War.

The European liberal-left are continuing to believe that the Franco-German strategy of halting NATO expansion and congratulating Medvedev on his ‘election victory,’ will show results. It’s failed. The European ‘tough-men’ are shouting and doing nothing when they should be silent and doing everything. The US is in election-mode and lead by those who have shown themselves rather un-adept at foreign policy. Georgia itself would probably without (the highly unlikely) massive Western push to accept new borders in exchange for a guarantee they will never alter again is sinking into national-narratives of betrayal, incapacity and failure. And the Russians are aiming at building a new sphere, thinking on a different wave-length to Brussels about the use of force, empire and nation. So we are headed for the worst of all worlds. Georgia is a paralysed country under Russian-veto, Ukraine is heading for a similar dock, the US and a few European countries are incompetently trying to live out Reagan fantasies whilst others turn a blind eye to Moscow. This is not a new Cold War. It’s something far dirtier, messier and it’s already begun. Faded ‘90s proposals won’t work anymore – we need to offer Russia a deal that updates Reykjavik or be ready for more thrusts as an unstable criminal group of spies try and keep their people drugged to ‘glory.’

These are the harsh realities of the 21^st century and this is why if you believe the Russians are not willing to update Reykjavik and accept a neutral Georgia, it is our duty to work for a total pull out of Russian forces, accept partition and fast-track Tbilisi onto the MAP into the Western Alliance. Accepting Georgia as in the Russian sphere legitimizes the Putin Doctrine, of 'Once Russian, Always Russian.'

The fact you are willing to repeat the mistakes Europe just made, I hope you are ready for deeper consequences, demonstrates that liberals are stuck in yesterday’s tomorrow. You need a time machine James, but then again so does the world.

Yours truly,

Ben

P.S You made a lot of factual errors. I presume because you were tired. For instance I did not suggest a NATO Georgia would be neutral, I suggested it as the only alternative to a Russian rejection of neutrality. And there were others, mostly minor.

A Response to James Schneider

2008-09-04T23:24:00.003Z

Dear Schneider,

I apologise for not having been able to write back to your reply to my recent Henry Jackson Society policy proposal soon. I spoke to Tulman today on the telephone. She was very nervous and asked for me not to print her surname. She lives in Karaleti, a village over the line I visited under Russian escort just after the fighting had stopped. “They haven’t gone…”

“They have dug in a earth-fortress and started getting things ready, for the winter, we’ll that’s what some of us say. They make the Ossetians who burnt our homes stay away now. But it makes me to sick to watch them there. They allowed it. They participated. We heard them shouting when we were hiding in the cellars.”

Most of Karaleti isn’t there anymore. Neither is a lot of Tskhinvali, but what Tulman is living in the reality of the new Georgia. It is a country that has been partitioned, had its infrastructure pulverised, large swathes of its countryside raided, its people displaced and its future turned from a promise - into a question mark. Georgia is occupied by Russian forces. True, this is not Ramallah, but the choice of placing troopers from the Federation at strategic locations way outside the enclaves is the Kremlin’s way of having a veto on tomorrow. Russian forces in Poti, just like those in Kerateli are there to say – we can come to Tbilisi any time we want. Is this against the terms of the cease-fire? Of course, but that’s another matter. Is this an occupation? To these the phraseology, ‘it’s light foot-print.’ But even just a few platoons means Moscow has the final say.

I am not interested in discussing how the war began, leave that to the historians, but in how it is ending. This is what is being written now. By moving inside Georgia-‘proper’ Moscow established the Putin Doctrine. In 1968 a frail Brezhnev, deeply confused and under pressure from his coterie to act, decided to implement his doctrine. It was simple. ‘Once Socialist, Always Socialist.’ Forty years later Putin is telling us, ‘One Russian, always Russian.’ In one fell-swoop the Kremlin forces every former Soviet, indeed ‘Socialist’ country to re-evaluate its relationship with Russia. You are right to point out that the war did not ‘create a new reality,’ by which I presume you alter the balance of power. The shift had been coming for years, TIME had even nominated Putin as man of the year (remember those photos of the throne?), but Georgia did change something. It showed Moscow was going to use guns to get what it wanted. Now, that was unexpected. And frightening.

I had initially favoured your position on conflict-resolution. That we should avoid the partition of Georgia and aim for a non-combatative ‘internationalisation’ of the conflict. I had discussed with senior French diplomats how such a plan might look, EU and OSCE observers, return of refugees, reconstruction and maybe even referendums at some unspecified date. The Kremlin chose not only to ignore such options, but to spit a them – by handing recognition (along with Nicaragua) to the breakaways. This shattered my already slim hope we had a negotiating partner in the Kremlin. The news today about Moscow, pushing for ‘peace’ in Moldova sharpened my conclusions. We have a bully who shows no respect for national autonomy and does not hesitate to play foul. Or with polonium.

You think you can co-opt these people? I’m suggesting you be a little more hesitant before inviting the boys who blasted Grozny to design a new ‘security architecture with you.’ These are dangerous, criminal people. That’s before we even get to the (albeit it pretty short) KGB careers of the top-brass. And I urge you to think about what we are trying to secure.

We had an argument a while back, at the pub in Oxford. I remember precisely thirty seconds of what I presume was several hours we spent there. I am saying, “I don’t care about Georgia. It’s a small country far-away about which I know nothing. We can’t secure it, it’s a waste of time.” I think with all eloquence, I then said something like - “Fuck it.”

I changed my mind in Tbilisi. The Georgians do not deserve to be bullied into a Russian sphere. They are not a satellite, but a feeling, aspiring people. Those I have met, even the peasants, do not want to be run by spies and oil-barons. They want to live with democratic standards, wi-fi and free. Georgians are not some rebellious tribe in a far away mountain range led by a US puppet. This is a rich and complex nation, that has been trying to leave the Kremlin’s cage since the 1880s. If there is any historical parallel here, it is to Georgians own European road to socialism undertaken before the Russian invasion after World War One. Lenin took out Tbilisi first. Because he knew, as a cosmopolitan city and a symbol, it mattered.

The West failed Georgia. We made them promises, of EU and NATO membership that led to run, rush straight into a Russian trap. Any future Georgian leader will be wary of our siren-call. It can dash more than a career. You say that Saakashvili is an unreliable partner, I suggest we gave the Georgians an flawed map Westward. So what are we to do?

If we let Russia block Georgian entering NATO and the EU, and thereby choosing not to cowed by force, by blackmail into being a servant of Moscow – we send a signal. In the 21^st century you can build an Empire, stamp of the wishes of millions of people and deny freedom, and we won’t stop you. We send a signal. In the 21^st century the EU and the US will not defend you from invasion. The EU and the US will watch your (fragile, flickering, but living) democracy be crushed. This is why I believe Georgia can join NATO and the EU if it wants to. I believe there has never been a more urgent time to stress this and to made this a foreign policy priority.

You say we must not antagonise Moscow. I have stressed myself we should not fall into their trap of starting the Second Cold War. Having laid out my principles, let me list my proposals. It is crucial we deny Moscow the right to determine Georgia’s future. So let us call Putin’s bluff. Six-weeks ago over Kosovo, he insisted that territorial-integrity mattered above anything else. He’s changed his mind, but let us make one things very clear to him. If Abkhazia and South Ossetia are like Kosovo, let’s do it like Kosovo. If there is a return of refugees, observers and a referendum – we will recognise their right to leave Georgia and join any international organisation or federation they desire. But the same rule applies to Georgia. If Putin and Medvedev desire that in five years Sukhumi and Tskhinvali are in the Russian Federation, Tbilisi and Senaki will be in NATO. Or they can take another option.

Georgia and the Ukraine can become neutral-ground. The disputed enclaves in Georgia can be internationalised, with peace-keepers from all countries and open borders. This would be ideal for states bound to both sides. But it is not going to happen. Get Real. Moscow just partitioned Georgia and showed it had no interest in such a solution. We have to ask ourselves are we going to let them ‘liberate’ South Ossetia and Abkhazia alone, or are we going to let them build a ‘sphere’ within which countries cannot freely who they elect or where they tread in the world?

Let’s make this offer to Moscow. Let’s invite them to a grand bargain. It’s one or the other. I would ideally wish to see an EU-US-RF gathering in which the following issues could be addressed. The Allies could offer full Russian minority-rights in EU member-states, solutions could be worked on with three-way efficacy in the frozen battlefields of Moldova and the Caucasus and we could pledge that NATO would only expand if validated by popular referendum. That would rule out the Ukraine’s membership as polls have consistently shown a strong majority against such a move. It would be a gesture of respect that would be both principled and wise. On Georgia we outline the either/or I outlined above. And on the broader security-architecture of Europe we propose a deep set of arms reductions, troop limitation and transparency agreements. Is Moscow scared of US nuclear warheads in Europe? They can go – if Russia’s go behind the Urals too. Such a summit would give the Russian people what they desire, a sense of respect, of being a great nation with a special destiny – and a way for the Kremlin to accept concessions without losing face.

If Mr Medvedev says his country does not want to start a new Cold War and warns us not to fire the first shots, let’s give him the summit he wants. I just don’t believe a word he says. Putin his clique are thieves, criminals and killers who have shown no respect for law, borders of decency. Two more journalists were shot today in Ingushetia, as I’m sure you know. How many more do you think we’ll see by the end of the year?

There are fragmentary, but my earliest memories are off Lenin being torn down in Sofia, to be sent back to Russia. There is a small toy Red Army tank on my bookshelf, given to me as a four year old in Bucharest. The Romanian neighbour jokes ‘it’s the only one the kid’s gonna see.’ I have grown up in the carcass of an Empire, and I fell in love with Russia. With an sensibility, a culture, a way of thinking. But I fell in love with a country that was opening. A country that would never have invaded Georgia. A country that was trying to build a democracy. A country that deserved dignity and respect. Partly by Western errors Russia is closing. We need to show the Russian people that we respect them and the strength they hold so dear by offering them a conference to a avert a new Cold War. And if their criminal leadership refuse?

Admit what remains of Georgia into NATO and recognise South Ossetia and Abkhazia, albeit it grudgingly. Turn off the rhetoric. Build up our defences, on the net and on the ground, give Russian minorities the rights they deserve, fix frozen conflicts, avoid confrontation and the political minefield of the Ukraine and turn up the volume on Radio Free Europe.

Yours truly,

Judah

News Round Up

2008-09-01T21:13:00.002Z

James Schneider has launched a debate based on his excellent critique of my latest piece for the Henry Jackson Society. I will be posting my extended response once I reach Tbilisi again tomorrow evening. In the meantime, here's for something completely different. I read this marvelous piece of art criticism today in the Guardian and urge you all to do the same. It's an exploration of the life of Rothko and the meaning of his Chapel in Houston. Here's an extract:

Rothko planned it this way. His chapel is one of the most overwhelming syntheses of art and architecture in the world. It is as compelling as the great Italian religious interiors he admired, yet as terrifying as Munch's Scream. It is a tragic theatre of emptiness, death's antechamber, the self-expression of a suicide. As such, the Rothko Chapel was destined to be misunderstood. Had it been understood, it would not have been built.

Letters from Nagorno Karabakh

2008-09-01T13:08:00.002Z

In the breakaway Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh inside Azerbaijan there is a feeling of short-term security and long-term dread.

Read Original Here

By Ben Judah in Stepanakert for ISN Security Watch

Outside the Defense Ministry in Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, a dozen teenage conscripts, some barely over 17, are waiting for orders. Laughing and trying to sneak coffee or cigarettes into the base without being caught, they readily confess how lucky they feel.

Intensely wary, like everyone I spoke to in the enclave, they asked for their names to be changed. Sergei knows he's lucky. "We are spending our days guarding the HQ; however, our friends are down at the frontlines. There is shooting everyday down there…you know…the volume goes up and down on the killing."

Sergei translates for some of the other boys. One claims to have seen an Azeri troop build-up through his binoculars; others stress that the enemy is scared of their troops and is wary about attacking.

I ask Sergei how many of the conscripts think there will be war within the next year. Of the group of 12 or so, two shake their heads. When I ask is if war will come "eventually," they all seem in agreement. Sergei tries to explain: "They cannot allow us to live on our land. When that happens what else can you do but fight?"

Across the road from the Defense Ministry, a small building barely bigger than a large post office houses the Foreign Ministry. A senior official who refused to disclose his name gave me a curt briefing on the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh.

He sits before a map of the Caucasus showing six carefully drawn out states. Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno Karabakh are all displayed in this cartography as sovereign and equal alongside Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan.

He begins, "We have been working with the OSCE group since 1994 and are committed to a solution. The other side, however, is still refusing to acknowledge and therefore there can be no movement. What makes this conflict so intractable is that they are Muslims, we are Christian. They are violent by nature."

The conversation turns to recent events in the Caucasus and the official gestures to the map: "We are not like South Ossetia or Abkhazia - we are not a Russian puppet. We are more independent than them. However, this is a tough situation. These are uncertain and serious times."

And then he hisses, "just remember before you start accusing Russia that your country is doing whatever it can to help the Muslims swallow us."

My encounter in the Foreign Ministry brought me face-to-face with what Caucasian expert and historian Tom de Waal has termed the deepening of the "hate-narratives" that simplify and distort the conflict into easily digestible and mutually exclusive world-views.

Most of the other people I encountered in Stepanakert, having lived through the bitter war that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union held this world view close to heart. When I asked a taxi driver what his feelings were toward Azerbaijan, he laughed and asked: "What are your feelings towards cockroaches? They breed fast and you want them out of your house!"

In the same way that the frozen conflict in Georgia began to heat up slowly in 2007 with sporadic shootings and a cranking up of rhetoric that eventually led to war, there have been disturbing signs of a thaw in Nagorno-Karabakh.

In March, during the Armenian election crisis, a small group of Azeri troops tried to pierce the lines near Stepanakert and the resulting fire-fight - the most intense since the unofficial cease-fire came into effect in 1994 - caused deep concern for stability in the region.

Azeri rhetoric continued to rise with calls from Baku that it may be "forced to re-take the region by military means."

However, since the war broke out in Georgia, things have frozen over once more; yet they are far from being resolved. Nothing is certain in this great power game, and this has left the inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh on edge.

In the village of Shushi, 5 kilometers from Stepanakert, local businessman Nelson Ketchurian shared his fears with me.

"I have been trying to make a living here since the Azeris withdrew from Shushi. They used this town as a position to bomb Stepanakert and almost destroyed it. How do I know that will not happen again?

"Right now I think they are scared of us and they will not attack. We don't want war. We are peaceful people. But I think they do - and sooner or later, war will be coming back. Right now we just can't say - and it's hard living like this, never knowing."

In Stepanakert, the streets are tidy and clean and the massive investment made by the Armenian Diaspora has returned economic vitality to the town. But in the midst of an atmosphere of calm and short-term security, almost banality, recent events in the Caucasus have triggered a sense of long-term dread for those living on the fault-lines of this frozen conflict.

Georgian Lessons

2008-09-01T13:05:00.002Z

Exclusive for the Henry Jackson Society

Read Original Here

Executive Summary:

1. The Russo-Georgian war must give halt to the ‘crisis management’ mode European diplomacy has been stuck in since the end of the Cold War and bring into focus the need to develop an effective long term strategy to deal with a resurgent Russia.

2. Europe must reckon with the Kremlin. There can be no more wishful thinking about the Putin-Medvedev regime now. We must prepare for acute confrontation whilst working harder to prevent it. In preparation for dealing with a challenging neighbour, Europe’s efforts should focus on the diversification of energy sources, the addressing of Russian minority grievances and associated border-disputes and frozen conflicts, as well as implementing first-rate cyber defences.

3. This is not a return to the Cold War. Both the EU and post-Soviet Russia are still emerging entities, and a Europe not yet at ease about its foreign policy mechanisms must quickly grasp the nature of this complex challenge and its implications. Simplistic Cold War thinking risks policy-makers falling into a self-defeating trap.

4. There should be no illusions as to the Russo-Georgian war having been won by Russia. The realities on the ground may ultimately force us to forego Georgian integrity to salvage the situation. Georgia’s President will have to make tough concessions, but Georgian suffering – and European failure – must be rewarded with immediate fast-track accession to NATO.

Tbilisi does not look like misery, but you only have to turn off the main avenues to find it right there, waiting for you. The schools are crammed with those displaced during the fighting, conversations are filled with lurid tales of Russian damage to national-parks, infrastructure or property, but it is in people's eyes that you see the real damage. Outside most main buildings, the EU flag still hopelessly flies – but the promise of membership of the core Western institutions of NATO and the EU now seems like a deadly siren's call to most citizens.

Since the 2003 'Rose Revolution,' a surge of nationalism and a desire for Western political and economic standards of life have driven Georgia down an almost romantic adventure led by Mikheil Saakashvili. Despite his errors and none too perfect civil rights credentials, the French Ambassador Eric Fournier stressed to me that whatever questions could be posed, "Saakashvili still transformed this place from a sort of post-Soviet ruin into a modern functioning country."

Forget the 'acquis communitaire,' inspections by Brussels bureaucrats or the costly transition process. Georgia paid the highest price for EU and NATO membership it never achieved. It has been clear to all observers that the Kremlin's fixed hatred of Saakashvili rested on his successes at bringing Georgia out of Moscow's orbit. Russia’s decisions to build-up troops, repair the railways it would deliver its tanks by and begin aggressive over-flights were designed to make Tbilisi realize it would pay a heavy price for its ambitions. Increased fighting in the border-lands near South Ossetia only brought the tension higher, and finally provocative shootings by Ossetian militias brought the crisis to a head. Nobody started this war - it was a long process that played itself out. The Georgians had sent frequent messages to Western leaders saying they were worried, but we chose not to follow what was going on too closely. Like any bad player we can now see the costs of taking our eyes off the ball. Frozen-conflicts are not fixed. They can thaw at any moment.

Saakashvili screwed up by responding to Russia in the worst possible way. He went against US advice and launched a reckless attack on South Ossetia hoping to prevent the break-away region from falling outside Georgian control for good. He miscalculated enormously. Standing in the ruins of large swathes of the South Ossetian capital, it is clear that in the targeting of civilians and in bombing indiscriminately, Saakashvili squandered forever the chance for these territories to re-enter a possibly federal Georgia.

Georgians themselves must not be held accountable for this mistake. Saakashvili has always been a nationalist, modeling himself on medieval kings and coming to power as much on promises of re-conquering these lands as providing western standards of living. There is no use eulogizing him like some US politicians do. Others have called him delusional; I posit that he is simply a nationalist. This experience should make us take another look at the often frightening post-Soviet nationalism of our Baltic, Ukrainian or Polish allies. It should teach us to be wary, but never to abandon the popular sentiment that drives these countries to the West.

The Georgian people do not deserve to pay a higher price for Saakashvili's blunder than they already have. They deserve EU and NATO membership more than ever. However, we cannot pretend that Russia did not win this war. The only option now available to bring Georgia onto a fast-track into the West is to acknowledge Moscow's facts on the ground, accept Abkhazian and South Ossetian independence as a reality and give Tbilisi the recompense it deserves. Only by abandoning Georgia's territorial integrity can we save the country from becoming a new Russian satellite state.

Keti Tsikhelashvili of the European Stability Initiative, a major think-tank dealing with the EU's near abroad, looked forlorn as she tells me: "There were those that urged that Georgia take a major balanced approach before the war in dealing with Russia and the West, taking geography into account. Now perhaps they seem vindicated. I personally think we may have put all of our eggs into one basket." Through making tough and even humiliating concessions, Georgia can if the West commits to it, still achieve its place in Europe.

With Russian tanks still stationed in Georgia and warnings of a new Cold War flying around we should ask ourselves how we got here. European diplomats have since the end of the first Cold War been struggling through crisis-management without ever developing serious long term strategies towards the rest of the world. Too engrossed in EU or domestic politics, we woke up to a shock on September 11th that the Muslim world existed and was full of grievances. This August we woke up to Russia. We found a country with a deep anger at the often appalling way it had been treated, which - perhaps due to our lack of planning, bad economic advice and poor engagement - had fallen into the hands of an authoritarian, criminal, KGB-trained clique.

We need to take the Kremlin seriously from now on. When Putin says he believes the fall of the USSR was the greatest geo-political disaster of the 20th century or that he wants Russia to be a great-power again, he means it. The crisis has demonstrated what Russia’s weapons of choice are. Russia has at its disposal great-energy resources which a dependent Europe needs, frozen-conflicts it can set alight at will, loyal Russian speaking minorities, former KGB networks across the old bloc, cyber-warriors, as well as old-fashioned military might.

Russian armies are unlikely to come face to face with NATO's, despite radical Russian generals being on record stating that war with the U.S. is inevitable within 15 years. In any case, they would be no match. Other Russian levers are de-fusible, for example, European energy markets can be diversified. Yet, dealing with the other aspects of Russia’s potential for troublemaking will require more effort and real imagination. Europe's border areas are littered with frozen conflicts and un-settled borders, in Moldova, and between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Europe should take a clear signal from what happened in Georgia and re-invest its time, money and effort into creating lasting peace on these fault-lines before the Kremlin's sees an opportunity. If this requires Russia being at the negotiating table, so be it. We cannot wish them away and treating them with the respect they deserve cannot hurt. The ‘rogue’ former British Ambassador to Yugoslavia Ivor Roberts, personally told me he views the only solution to the tangled web of bad-borders from Kosovo to Nagorno Karabakh as being "a new congress of Europe." Maybe we should heed his views, no doubt formed in the face of much experience.

If there are fears of Russian-speaking rebellions in the Baltics and the Ukraine we must ask ourselves why citizens of democratic or EU members states could even be considered likely to act in such a way. The reality is that discrimination is real, language rights for Russian-speakers non-existent and ethnic chauvinism towards the large Russian groups painful. Instead of ignoring a fuse ready to light we can eliminate the grievances that make it likely they would side with an authoritarian regime against a democratic one.

Back on the home-front the secret-services have been warning for months that the spying activity within Europe is back at Cold War levels. The simple response is that we need to recognize that modern war is more than ever about intelligence, maybe even more so than it is about guns. The secret-services need to have the funding and scope of an army, navy or air-force, even if that comes at the expense of any of the existing branches of our defense forces. A smart army is worth more than a large but ill-informed one.

Moving swiftly requires working out a long-term destination for EU-Russian relations. The issue is that neither the EU nor the Russian Federation have reached their final destinations themselves. The Russia of today is an impermanent structure. Both too large to be governed conventionally as a representative nation state and too weak to dominate its neighbors effectively, Russia is now hovering between joining the club of great post-imperial states along with Britain, France, and Germany, or embarking on a quest to build a new post-modern Empire. The trouble is that the EU is, in a sense, also stuck in a similar position.

The ‘malaise’ of Brussels, reflects a Europe of unfinished projects. The Union today is left somewhere between a confederation and a near-federation capable of speaking with a single voice. Diego Alonso, a veteran Spanish diplomat once explained to me in Moscow that “The EU right now is an uncertain thing. Maybe it will take on the capacities of single state in foreign affairs, but just as likely is that it will become divided over foreign policy issues, entangled and maybe split or drift apart.” Europe is littered with institutions that have slid into irrelevance. Neglect could spell a similar fate for the EU. Stuck between these two un-identified political flying saucers - is the post-soviet space. For the moment it would be wise for a national leader to tread his country’s path carefully.

Working out what relationship Britain, as a leading EU member, should aim to construct with Russia, forces us to work out what we see Europe becoming. The success that the Russians have already shown in dividing Europe amongst itself - broadly along Donald Rumsfeld’s “Old” and “New” Europe lines - shows that if we seek to mitigate the damage a resurgent Kremlin can do to the fabric of the Union, we need to re-start the drive towards a common European foreign policy. If anything the Bush era should have taught us that the US cannot, despite the greatest of commitments, solidify positions in the Caucasus, Central Asia or the Middle East. However, the EU has proven that through the transformative power of integration, its approach can offer the greatest rewards towards extending democracy. We need to stand firm and together.

Right now, without a serious European strategy towards tackling Russia or even a set of tools truly in place to speak with one voice, the Kremlin is bold and the continent is puzzled and uncertain. Seemingly we are making the two worst mistakes imaginable. One is to fall into Moscow’s trap of Cold War rhetoric and thinking, such as David Miliband and David Cameron seem to have done; the other is the denial which large swathes of the German and French left seem to wallow in. Mr Miliband should remember that talks “of anti-Russian coalitions” do as much to justify or encourage potential further Russian grabs in the Ukraine or the Baltics, as they do to discourage them. In many ways this response is exactly what Putin and Medvedev want, as it is ‘regime legitimizing’ and seems to suggest the publicly flared fears of encirclement and ‘Russophobia’ were justified. This is not the return to the Cold War, but the beginning of something far more unpredictable, dirty and dangerous. A phase of ‘acute competition.’

Looking at Russia’s actions leaves us in a position that makes it hard to strike back without risking even more. The democratic potential for the country is still enormous and we cannot risk falling into a trap set by the Kremlin to launch a new Cold War, so as to permanently rule that out. Neither can we permit populist revanchism to re-draw the map of Eastern Europe on the vague hope that it might produce democracy in the back-wash. Proving that Russian minorities need not turn to Moscow for protection, un-freezing the frozen conflicts and launching serious rounds of negotiations with the Russians on disarmament – whilst never ceasing our democracy promotion efforts should be our first steps. Keeping rhetorically quiet, whilst practically piecing together our defenses is the creative combination we need. There is a way as to how we can avoid losing Russia’s masses without losing part of Europe to Russia. It will require exquisite strategy and diplomacy.

Ben Judah a senior correspondent for ISN Security Watch. His work on the Russo-Georgian war has recently been published by The New Republic (online).

Kremlin's Cruel Intentions

2008-09-01T06:03:00.002Z

As the dust settles from the War I suggest reading Luke Harding from the Guardian's piece on claims of ethnic cleansing that have occurred in and around South Ossetia. I accompanied Luke along with other journalists to the ruined village of Kerateli he describes in this comment-piece. He's the 'Brit' who almost got thrown off the press-tour truck I described in my recent New Republic piece. Read here how he hits back at the Kremlin's cruel intentions.

War of the Words: New Republic Exclusive

2008-08-28T04:58:00.002Z

by Ben Judah in Tskhinvali for the New Republic Read Original Here Now that the fighting has stopped, the real battle between Russia and Georgia begins.

"Everybody out. You have 20 minutes to inspect this damage," barks Alexander Machevsky, shock-trooper of the Kremlin's propaganda war in Georgia, as he tries to shepherd 25 Western journalists out the open back of a military truck. Machevsky is not having a good day. As one of Vladimir Putin's senior advisers and an official presidential spokesman, he's had to come back early from his summer vacation to lead this slow-moving group of foreign correspondents around a half-ruined Georgian village just north of Gori--the eastern city Russia occupied during the war this month. And his guests are not exactly the most cooperative. At one point, Machevsky gestures towards a row of bombed-out buildings and explains, "The Georgians have been claiming that this [wreckage] was caused by Russian forces. However, that's not the case. There were gas-leaks, lights were left on, there was criminal activity and of course cases of arson--this was specifically done by Georgian special commandos."

A British journalist butts in: "You're not suggesting, Sasha, that the Georgians burn their own houses--are you?"

Contorting his face in disbelief, Machevsky turns and hisses in Russian to the smiling, implacable Russian colonel accompanying the tour: Wish we could kick him off the truck and leave him here. But the Brit isn't cowed: "Sasha, I speak Russian."

Like the United States and Israel before it, Russia is learning the hard way that twenty-first-century wars are played out almost as much in the treacherous battlefield of the international media as on any actual battleground. Months of low-level shootings around the borders of the break-away republic of South Ossetia erupted into war on August 7, when Georgia mounted a full scale assault on the capital, Tskhinvali. Tbilisi soon recognized its mistake, however, when Russia troops poured over the border in retaliation. Within four days, Russians forces had practically destroyed the U.S.-and Israeli-trained Georgian army and moved far beyond the borders of South Ossetia, occupying the strategic city of Gori in the heart of the country.

But, if Russia has so far dominated the military struggle, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has succeeded in completely dominating the struggle over influencing the Western media, convincing global leaders to issue stirring statements in his defense and even eliciting a declaration from German Chancellor Angela Merkel that Georgia can join NATO. If this happens, it would be a major p.r. victory for Georgia--and would render Russia's military victory, which has only succeeded in cementing Russia's image as a neo-imperialist and barbaric state, worse than useless.

The Georgian propaganda strategy--helped along by such bumbling Kremlin attempts as Machevsky's tour of Gori's ruins--has been two-fold: First, they've tried to amplify the reports of death and destruction caused by the Russian invasion, knowing that journalists, who weren't permitted into the critical areas, would have no ability to check their claims. Secondly, and most cleverly, they've tried to brand the Russian invasion as Cold War redux, counting on the emotional memories throughout the West of past Russian interventions.

In Gori, I meet with regional Georgian Governor Vladimir Vardzelashvili in his office overlooking the statue of Joseph Stalin in the town square. Coughing and smoking, he gives me the Georgian spin on events: "The destruction is huge. There has been ethnic cleansing, use of the cluster bomb, indiscriminate bombing and violence." When I push him for details of the terror campaign he was describing, he gestures vaguely to a map pinned up on the wall and begins spouting off Georgian government talking points: "Gori is the same as Prague in '68 or Budapest in '56. They are invading and occupying Georgia just as they have done in the past."

The reference to the invasion of Prague, which happened 40 years before Russia's invasion of Georgia almost to the day, is especially deft because of the symbolic importance of the Prague Spring--and because journalists and world leaders love such easy parallels. Much of the coverage of the Georgian crisis has focused on comparing this invasion to the 1968 one, including a strongly worded piece in the August 26 Daily Telegraph by the leader of the U.K. Conservative Party, David Cameron, and the Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek. Georgia has also benefited from the toughness contest that is the American election: John McCain's strong messages have repeated the framing of Russia's actions as imperialist, referring to Russia as seeking to rebuild, not the USSR, but the "Russian Empire." Such rhetoric has shifted the focus of the coverage away from the actual events of the crisis--such as who started shooting first.

Meanwhile, Russia is doing its best to fight back, with spokesmen like Machevsky peddling their own wildly inflated statistics and offering dubious opinions on the sequence of events. At one point in the press tour, Machevsky gives the civilian death toll in Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, as 2,000--a number that causes discreet amusement to the assembled journalists who know, as the Kremlin's man in Georgia apparently doesn't, that Boris Salmakov of the Russian prosecutor's office had just that day announced that the actual number was 133 (according to Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, the hospitals in Tskhinvali have only reported 44 civilian deaths). The journalists repeatedly ask Machevsky if they can see the cemeteries where these 2,000 poor souls are buried--a request that he, not surprisingly, denies.

Part of Machevsky's--and the Kremlin's--problem is that the Russian government is simply not used to dealing with a free press. Putin's regime has done so much to destroy independent Russian media that flaks like Machevsky have little experience responding to journalists who can't be silenced--whereas the Georgian government, more media-savvy and with its close ties to the West, has had more room to develop its spinning skills. At the same time, of course, Machevsky and the Kremlin have a much harder case to make than Georgia does. By portraying the South Ossetians as valiant defenders of freedom, the new Kosovo Albanians, the Russians are stretching the facts beyond credibility. Russia's actions in South Ossetia are not parallel to NATO's in the former Yugoslavia by any stretch of the imagination, and no one has forgotten Russia's pre-invasion flights into Georgian airspace or the troop build-ups that have been going on behind the Russian side of the border. It's just not believable for the Kremlin to argue that it's acting selflessly in the matter--and Machevsky's misinformation-filled presentation, ironically, only fuels the "Russia-as-imperialist-overlord" narrative.

The real victims of the propaganda war, as of the actual war, may be found some distance from Gori's combating spinmeisters. Gori itself, contrary to expectations (and to the fevered descriptions from both sides), doesn't look that bad: The damage is remarkably lighter than expected, and certainly not even on the same scale as in Tskhinvali. But in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, the propaganda battles are taking their toll.

At the luxurious Tbilisi Courtyard Marriot, the Georgian government has set up a press center for Western journalists, with large maps of the country covered in red pins that indicate Russian troop movements. Late one evening, I observed a British journalist accidentally knock down a significant portion of them as he tried to run his finger along hypothetical Russian withdrawal routes, before scuttling away. Several minutes later, an earnest Japanese reporter appeared and took down in detail what he presumed were the new positions.

Meanwhile, in the center of the capital, School Six holds almost 400 refugees from Gori and surrounding areas who have been camped out for days in already dilapidated classrooms. Exposed only to passionately nationalist Georgian television and radio, the refugees have become tense and frightened. Dali Szarcemi, sitting with his two-year-old son and the large sacks holding their belongings, says to me, "The TV says there's been massive ethnic cleansing. They say there's been rapes, burning, pillages. It's terrible. I may never be able to return to my village north of Gori. I think Gori may be half ruined when I return. I'm a farmer--I know about cows. I have no idea what to do in the city."

Ben Judah is a correspondent for the International Security Network's Security Watch.

The New Map of Georgia

2008-08-26T11:07:00.003Z

The Kremlin has re-drawn the map of Georgia and forced the country into a new place in the world. The invasion has torn up previous perceptions of where power lies on Europe’s borderlands and now the fighting is over we can begin to make out the contours of a new order.

By Ben Judah in Tbilisi for ISN Security Watch

Hours before the Russians pulled their forces out of the strategic Georgian town of Gori, the self-declared commandant General Vlachyslav Borisov stopped his jeep and gruffly threw open the door to speak to journalists. Sweating and smelling faintly of cognac, he barked at your correspondent, “I’m out of here. I’m withdrawing my combat forces form the area. But peacekeepers are staying.” And slammed the door.

Russians officials accidentally left another tantalising hint to their intentions. ISN Security Watch managed to see a roughly draw ink diagram left behind after a meeting of Russian and Georgian officials on the 21^st had concluded. This is the new map of Georgia. It showed two circles emanating from the centres of both the Ossetian and Abkhaz enclaves that reached out to touch the Georgian cities of Gori and Senaki. These are the buffer-zones where General Borisov plans to leave his troops. However the future of these territories is still uncertain.

Just outside the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali, the peace-keeping barracks that once hosted a five hundred strong Russian contingent is a burnt out wreck. The Kremlin’s spokesman and one of Putin’s chief aides, Alexander Machevsky accompanied a tightly controlled press-tour through the enclave to inspect the damage. Standing in front of the rubble, pointing through the smashed walls of the base to the dozens of scorched bare metal-bed frames, Machevsky makes his point clear. “There can be no return to the status quo ante.” He trudges over a floor littered in bullet casings from AK-74 fire, pieces of burnt clothing and the shredded personal belongings of the soldiers, stressing the brutality of the Georgian attack. Unnoticed by their superiors, a few troops are sitting around drinking heavily in the evening gloom. None look happy.

In Tskhinvali the South Ossetian President bellows from a podium on Stalin Street at the crowds, “The Caucasus is a Russian region. It has always been that way. We are not going to let adventurers like Saakashvili or Rice change that. We are going to be an independent state within Russia - It’s logical.” The poorly dressed and glum looking huddle drifts away, perhaps contemplating his implications. The Kremlin’s flag flies from the Government buildings and paramilitaries are wearing little ribbons of Russian and Ossetian colours.

Russia is in control – but for the moment this is nothing like a permanent settlement. In Moscow the state Duma may have voted on the 25th to acknowledge the sovereignty of the break-away region, but their future will most likely be decided in back-room deals during the trade-offs and negotiations, between all sides that have a stake in this conflict. Russia may have won the war militarily, but politically it still has to reckon with the United States and the European Union if it is to achieve its objectives in any peace-deal.

In Tbilisi, Keti Tsikhelashvili of the European Stability Initiative think-tank advances a more nuanced view of how the situation might play itself out, “there are several possible outcomes considering these territories. The fist is that the Europeans have been dropping hints about the possible internationalisation of the conflict. This would involve the stationing of observers and maybe peacekeepers in Ossetia and Abkhazia and their futures being brought under intense discussion.”

However the European Stability Initiative believes such an outcome to be unlikely. “The EU and the US remain committed to Georgian sovereignty and territorial integrity. The most likely outcome I can imagine will be the North Cyprus situation. The world will recognise Georgia’s territorial integrity, whilst Russia and maybe a few of its satellite states will acknowledge South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent.” She continues, “the South Ossetians already can see what an example of Russian rule in the Caucasus is like if they look to North Ossetia. How many schools there teach in Ossetian? The answer is none. In a few years the concern of cultural autonomy will mount and they will begin to realise the trap they are in.”

This is not how Georgians hoped the ‘Rose Revolution’ would turn out. In 2003, a wave of nationalism and a desire for western living standards and true democracy swept Saakashvili to power. Young and intensely charismatic, he led his country on an adventure that has turned sour. A senior Western European diplomatic source told ISN Security Watch, “the President turned this country for a sort of post-Soviet ruin into a modern country,” he gestures at perhaps the rather unrepresentative setting of the ornate restaurant in the Tbilisi Marriott hotel to prove his point. “However, Saakashvili’s definitely in until September. Then I can’t say. There will be serious questions asked about what has happened and those questions will have consequences.”

The Russian invasion has put a stop to those ‘rose’ aspirations for now. Georgia is reckoning with defeat. Tbilisi may not look misery, but you only have to venture into one of the public buildings being used to house over 60,000 displaced people - or drive for under an hour to some of the burnt-out villages to find it right there waiting for you. Reconstruction will take years. Georgia’s transport infrastructure has been badly damaged, communities in the conflict zone are atrociously hit, national parks have reportedly been set alight, commercial shipping has taken a massive blow, the economy has been shaken but above all - its diplomatic and military position has been smashed. The armed forces that Saakashvili painstakingly build up though clever arms deals with Israel, the United States and ex-Communist states simply no longer exists.

Diplomatically Georgia is in a disastrous position. Seen as unreliable and as a liability by many EU members states and now probably shorn of Abkhazia and South Ossetia for good, Georgia is reaping the consequences of its failed attempt to join the West. Nona Varanadze, a retired professor supporter of the opposition blames Saakashvili for what has happened. “Under Shevernadze, we practised a political balancing act between Russia and the West. Just look at where we are on a map. When the balance got upset, we angered a neighbour and it destroyed so much of the good development that was going on. We could have avoided this and just got rich.”

Keti Tsikhelashvili of the European Stability Initiative, stresses that “though my political and cultural values are completely western. I am starting to think that Georgia put all of its eggs in one basket.” In many ways the European Union and the United States should hold themselves responsible for Georgia’s current predicament. Having ostensibly supported a country’s bid to remove itself from what Russia considers its exclusive sphere of influence, the failed to give the necessary security guarantees to make such a transition possible. Staring a Russian forces stationed inside their territory, where EU flags still fly hopelessly from most major buildings, the promise of the West is starting to like a deadly siren’s call to many Georgians.

The recent conflict has achieved a primary Russian objective, in proving that American power cannot be solidified along in borderlands. This leaves only two powers that can actually integrate or control these territories - the European Union or the Russian Federation . The post-Soviet space can either seek to emulate the Baltic Republics are find security inside the Union or embrace and hope to benefit from Russian dominance like Armenia or Belarus. Both are a-symmetrical in how they wield influence. Russia’s strength lies in the areas of hard-power such as its military capacities, energy power, cyber-warriors, pro-Russian parties and ethnic minorities or former KGB networks. However it lacks the powers of persuasion.

The esteemed Bulgarian expert Ivan Krastev persuasively argued in a recent think-piece that “Russia is a born-again 19th-century power that acts in the post-20th-century world where arguments of force and capacity cannot any longer be the only way to define the status or conduct of great powers. The absence of ‘soft power’ is particularly dangerous for a would-be revisionist state. For if a state wants today to remake the world order, it must be able both to rely on the existing and emerging constellation of powers and be able to capture the international public's imagination.”

The European Union has the opposite strengths. It’s power is soft and lies in the promise of membership, cultural appeal, diplomatic influence and financial clout. However just as the Kremlin’s failure to convince the world its actions were legitimate should force a re-think in its inner circles about a return to great-power status, the European Union needs to learn that it does not exist in a vacuum. Russia’s strategy may be 19^th century – but Europe is stuck in the future.

The great source of instability for the borderlands is that neither the European Union or the Russian Federation have reached their final destinations. Both are lost in transition. The European Union is stuck between a disunited vague confederacy and a near-federation capable of speaking with a single voice in foreign policy and acting purposefully in a single direction. It’s foreign policy mechanisms may slip into irrelevance and it’s own stability is far from assured. The news from Brussels is still frustration and malaise following on from the French and Dutch ‘No’ votes in 2005. The Irish ‘No’ vote earlier this year does not bode well.

Russia itself is in a similar unsettled position. It’s own territory is too large to be run in a conventional democratic manner and the state is still too weak to dominate its neighbours successfully. In the long run, further disintegration cannot be ruled out and the Kremlin is well aware of this. Hovering between a post-modern empire and joining the club of post-imperial European great powers alongside Britain, France and Germany, Russia will continue its struggle to find institutional stability at home and a place in the state-system. To the great detriment of both it’s citizens and surrounding countries. Trapped between two uncertain creatures the post-soviets states need to learn from the Georgian experience and tread carefully to avoid its fate.

Questions Answered: War and Nationalism

2008-08-24T13:50:00.003Z

Would love to hear more about the nationalist sentiment that you identify as being crucial, however. How does Georgian identity compare to that of the Ossetians? How does Ossetian ethnic character coexist alongside Russian nationalism?

On Georgian Nationalism it is important to remember that Saakashvili came to power promising national re-unification first and liberalism of all its forms second. For instance he went as far as to change the flag and national symbols to reflect his new project. To say he's delusional is wrong, though he may constantly compare himself to medieval Georgian Kings. He's simply a nationalist, and if you come from my standpoint on that - it comes to the same thing. Georgian nationalism is like most non-Russian post-soviet variants. It’s over-exaggerated on one end and non-existent on the other. You have some people who have a feverish hatred of Russian, that denies much of their own culture who live alongside others who might have - like a massive chunk of the Georgian population have emigrated there quite happily.

Since the ‘Rose Revolution’ and the ‘Orange Revolution’ its this cultural projects that have been in play. However that seems to be ending. The New York Times Correspondent Chris Chivers told me – “If the Russians are clever they don’t have to worry about the Ukraine. The next government is Blue and the Orange alliance is split. They just go to wait. The Orange popularity is on 20%.” In Tbilisi, the French Ambassador told me that “Saakashvili is solid for the moment, but after September I can’t say. People are going to be asking serious questions and a lot people are going to blame him and his crew for having moved in such a stupid way.”

In Ossetia things are different. It's a question of a few villages. Some had loyalty to Georgia, most however have a real and sincere desire to be part of Russia. However, the Ossetian leadership are basically a Caucasian mafia gang (including a few Russians from Tambov) and they have their own agenda. Which is basically to run their little smugglers-town with the minimum of fuss and have the tightest grip on it.

What people, if you pry deeper really want is union with their kith and kin over the mountain, ideally in a 'free Ossetia.' However since the War, a lot of mixed feelings towards Russians that did exist due to history have wafted away and been replaced by a genuine feeling the Kremlin is their protector.

In the main square in Tskhinvali I watched the President of the Enclave announce the following. “The Caucasus is a Russian region. We will not let adventurers like Rice or Saakashvili end that. We will be an independent state inside Russia. It’s logical.” Then he switched to Ossetia. I’m not sure what he said – but the people who had been looking rather grumpy suddenly cheered.

News Round-Up

2008-08-24T10:51:00.003Z

We have been flooded by appalling commentary since the fighting in Georgia began and it has got worse since it ended. Things have been intensely emotive and a lot of terms like 'new 19th century' or 'New Cold War' have been thrown around without people exactly knowing what they mean. From my perspective in Tbilisi the three most relevant pieces of commentary have been by Walter Lacquer, Ivan Kratsev, Paul Berman and Tim Judah. Please read them and tell me what you think. Also link me either on my blog or facebook-notes to which pieces you have found the most relevant.

Battle Company Is Out There

2008-08-23T17:07:00.003Z

This piece of reportage is one of the most striking piece of journalism I have ever read. 'Battle Company Is Out there' is a breathtaking account of a US brigade fighting a losing battle for the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. It is also a piece writing with its own story.

Nominated for the 'Prix Bayeux,' the most esteemed award in war-reportage, it failed to win. Adrien Jaulmes, the Figaro Correspondent covering the war in Georgia with me was on the jury. He explained his shock to me about why a masterpiece failed to win as we rattled down dirt tracks on the back of a Russian military truck in South Ossetia.

"I was on jury and it was absolutely set to win. Then all of a sudden somebody said 'it's an embedded piece' - it's not a fair objective reportage. Suddenly half the jury started to panic about the whole idea of being embedded. And all the votes slipped away. I looked at the piece. And I suddenly realized all this bullshit about being embedded being bad is total crap. Is Robert Capa supposed to land on D-Day with the Americans and then rush over to photograph the Germans? Journalism is about access. You get what you get and you try to get as much as you can. I still can't believe it didn't win"

Read the piece and tell me what you think - is being embedded bad? What should a war- reporter do in trying to get to the front in these modern wars?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/magazine/24afghanistan-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

Into the Zone: Part II

2008-08-22T23:21:00.001Z

An open-back military truck pulls up. At first the Figaro and the Sunday Times think the people onboard are refugees. A short brown man in a t-shirt jumps off. “Who are you, what you want?” He’s shouting. “You’re journalists? Get on the truck and I’ll show you the destroyed villages and take you to Ossetia.” I don’t have a moment to wonder what the fuck is going on. Five minutes later I’m in the open-back of a truck filled with the big-player journalists hitting 60 km/h on the dust track to the mountains.

The guy in charge is following us in a mini-man. Déjà vu. I’ve seen him before. Just from where. I can’t be. In April I was sitting in a bar overlooking the Lubyanka, the orange- stoned Stalinist baroque headquarters of the FSB. Opposite me a Russian petrol-princess is earnestly deciding if she wants to have coffee or a drink. She decides she wants two coffees. This makes us dizzy. I can see her smiling and a slick little man bending over-and monologing at us about the Model United Nations. I desperately wanted him to piss off – but remember remarking how bright he was and how I thought he was probably Jewish. Now I know who he is. Putin’s chief aide and first spokesman. He screams at the Colonel driving the truck to speed up.

The New York Times has the eyes of a drug-addict. They’ve seen more than you can imagine. We are chatting about Putin when he notices the boss is shouting to speed-up. “This you first war…rookie?” I nod politely. I travelled around Iraqi Kurdistan, but it wasn’t like this. “You smell that?” A deep rot fills my nostrils as we enter a village. “That’s dead.” Somebody whistles in the truck. All the journalist have smelt it. Cameramen rush to the side of the truck trying to snap. The Russian Colonel standing in the back with us starts shouting something incompressible. We swerve round another corner. And grind to a halt.

The boss shouts at us to jump out of the truck and we clamber out. “This is a damaged Georgian village. We want to explain that the damages was caused gas-leaks, accidents, criminals, and some cases of arson.” The Guardian looks at him. “Sacha are you telling me that thinking I’ll believe it.” He snaps something in Russian to the Colonel. “Sacha I speak Russian. You can’t throw me off the truck and leave me here.” He screws up his face. “You have twenty minutes. Watch out for bombs. You know what your doing.”

I follow six camera men as they rush into a burnt-out building. Devastation is in the details. It’s the shards of glass, the burnt documents, the smashed plates, the torched items of daily life. We hear wailing from the top floor. The camera men rush up the stair. “Watch out for cluster bombs” shouts Getty Images. I follow in his footsteps. An elderly women in simple peasant clothes is shrieking. It’s clear there wasn’t a gas-leak here. As the camera-men snap she screams louder in terror and begins to panic. The Italian shouts, “she’s useless, too much screaming.” They rush off – there is a crying grandmother outside. I stand there watching these men. Aghast. Like wasps to honey, they rush to death. My eyes are glued to the howling women. I step back slowly, then dash down the stairs.

Outside I follow the Figaro into a shelled house. Imagine you put a building through a blender. All your possessions shredded and crushed up under a pile of rubble. I stand there picking up pieces of a plate in what used to be a kitchen. The Figaro finds something. “Oh, look a bullet casing.” He chucks it away nonchalantly.

Sacha the boss is screaming. “Your time is up. Your time is up.” In front of the truck an old women is being literally pursued by eight flash-photographers. She is trying to get away. Back on the truck the guys show off pictures of her terrorised face. “Make a great front page…this one.” The truck bobs along the valley, spraying a trail of dust behind us onto the mini-van behind. Le Monde is smoking a cigarette and puts on his Raybans. “Beautiful day…look that’s a rocket launch.” A trail of smoke lights a distant corner of the valley. “Ah…there’s something missing in this war. I’m not enjoying so much.” He flicks the Marlboro out onto an abandoned field. The tools are still left where the people dropped them as they ran away.

Rising peaks of the Caucasus mountains are up in front. I start to feel like a tourist and a rising enjoyment. I feel the grin of Le Monde pulling across my face. There are some sand-bags ahead and another group of tanks. The excitement in the truck is palpable. The photographers jump, jostle and swear at each other as they try and snap a picture. This is border of the enclave. Welcome to South Ossetia.

The truck pulls into a village-town. Tskhinvali - the ‘capital.’ It’s wretched. Sacha is shouting. ‘Out, out.’ My feet land on a street that simply isn’t there anymore. Buildings have been punched open. Walls have collapsed. Le Monde gestures to me. “Let’s not listen to Sasha’s bullshit. Follow me.” We wander down a side-street. The roofs of the Ossetian hovels have all been ripped off. A man with a massive gash across his skull wanders up to us. He doesn’t even speak Russian. He points to his head and then to a wreck. We follow him. I have seen countless pictures of charred teddy-bears but when picks one off the ruin of his house and thrusts it into my hands, I felt like I had never understood what they actually mean. The he points at the fruit he was saving for the summer in large glass jars. Rotten. Fly ridden and starts to shout incomprehensibly. “Enough of him,” goes Le Monde.

We enter into a shack. A short Ossetian women shows us her ‘home.’ Tin-roofing. I am inside a photo of a favela, and she tries to explain what ruined even this. Her Russian breaks down after the word - “they did it…” The tin-roofing is gone and scorch marks are in the middle of the dust floor. Her husband sleeps on a filthy bed in the corner. She doesn’t wake him up. A little child wanders in. His arm is bandaged. I am feeling a little bored. Yet another one. I catch myself. Shake my head a little.

“Your time is up. Get out. We need to leave.” Sasha is pacing around frantically shouting at a General down the Nokia. “Just do it…We’ll be there in twenty minutes.” He clears his throat and spits into the shards of glass beneath his feet.

We swerve out of Tskhinvali onto the road further up the mountains. Jerkily the trucks bounces along. A few burnt out tanks are permanently parked under some plane trees. It stinks. I swallow but it stays in my mouth. The Sunday Times notices and passes me a bottle of water. “You get used to it.” The clouds have merged and the afternoon has turned into a dense gloom. The Colonel shouts – “This Khetagurovo.”

I am still bad at climbing off the truck. Maybe I’m too short but when I land on the floor I slip on some bullet casings and whack my head into the dust-track. No time to do anything but get up. There are barely any houses but they are all pock-marked and some windows are blackened. There’s been fire. Sacha is explaining how ‘Russia’ sees what happened here. The New York Times bends over. “Ak-74s…interesting. Let’s go check out the post-office.” We push open the door of the shattered bureau. The safe was blown open and the floor is covered in piles of Soviet era postcards. Happy Revolution Day. Pictures of Red Flags. Old Soviet pension books are ripped up and in every corner. This is the ruins of the Empire personified in a single six by ten metre space. It stinks. I push behind the desk. There is a sheet of glass that people who work in offices in any country place pictures under. I push off bits of burnt wood to look at the photos. The faces are staring at me. A faded colour picture of a goggle eyed baby-girl. A black and white passport photo of a young man. A school photo from the ‘50s. I don’t know why. I just pushed off the side covering and shoved them into my computer bag. I haven’t looked at them since.

I rush with the Figaro into a dilapidated old school. There are the Ossetian paramilitaries. They don’t bother to acknowledge us. They are crowded around a lap-top. You can tell paramilitaries because they are clownishly dressed troops. The wrong khaki trousers with cammo-tops. Pixelated green jackets clashing with old fashioned urban combat pattern pants. I asked them what happened. If I said the leader was a ‘mean looking mother-fucker’ it doesn’t capture just how threatening this twenty-five year old man was. “They did this. And we took vengeance. Krov za Korv. Blood for blood.” On my way out an old man is lying in the dirt sucking a plastic Kvass bottle.

“Are you OK?”

He raises what appears to be his only arm and shouts. “To the great Russian people. You saved us. Saved us.” He spills the brown fluid over-himself. Le Figaro looks him up and down.

“He’z di-zgust-ing.”

I follow the New York Times. A brown-skinned man has latched onto him. He’s speaking slowly.

“What are their names? Where are they buried.”

I suppose this is what Poland must have looked like in the late summer of ’45.

“Can you show us? Great. Is it far?”

We trudge across a field and come to an earth pile. It was just an fresh-earth mound. I didn’t see anything. It just stunk.

Into the Zone: Part I

2008-08-22T22:08:00.004Z

There are four of us in this car. The road ahead is empty and the camera-man is trying to hide his equipment as we draw up at the first checkpoint. “You…tell them you’re my brother, that we are a family going to see our aunt in Gori. Just say it in Russian…quickly. If they ask… say you’re ID is back home…on their side of the Checkpoint.” I nod. This isn’t the moment for disagreements. She gestures to the driver. “Go slower you idiot…you’ll frighten the Russians.”

He isn’t listening to Irina. He is chewing a piece of paper he tore off the corner of the daily-news and listens intently to the radio. He clutches the steering wheel. Irina, sighs and stuffs her press-card into the little box under the dashboard. She’s in her late twenties and is wearing simple clothes to pass unnoticed through the Russians. I think she might be nervous too. For the past few days virtually no Georgian journalists has been allowed into Gori. And she must get the ‘story’. To my left a French photographer is drinking a can of Sprite.

“It’s really nothing. I mean…The Russians are so polite. These Georgians don’t know what they’re talking about. They aren’t shooting the wheels off cars like the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Seriously…boring war….this…You want some Sprite….You thirsty?”

I don’t answer. He crunches the can and screws down the window to lob it out into some pins trees. The air bats my face. Brown-plains and barren hills are passing by at 120 km/h. A few cows are wondering around in gloomy serenity - but I am trying to calm myself down. I thought until five minutes ago we were going just to the check-point. My stomach feels a little unsettled. Pictures of TV News flash through my head. Then I realise there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. I smoke a Kent as we draw up to Russian lines. I suppose I’m trying to look ‘hard’ by pulling some kind of frown. I repeat to myself. “This is what you wanted…what you wanted.”

The Russian standard is flying 21 km from Tbilisi by a stream. Some soldiers are taking a nap. Others are re-enforcing earth dugs-out. It’s looks like their kit and attitude hasn’t changed since Life Photographers snapped scenes like this is in the ‘40s. I feel inside one those pictures. I open the car door into what I had only known from photos. This should be in black and white. This should be 2-D. But I’m in it – this is in colour. The Tank is hanging over the side of the tarmac, three hastily thrown together pieces of concrete mark the control-spot. In the drizzle the Officer lumbers up and stares us up and down. A uniformed guy taps Irina shoulder and lift up his early 2000’s Oakley sunglasses. There are large scars along his left-cheek. He smiles with unwashed teeth.

“Good morning….Pretty.”

So these are the ‘peace-keepers.’ You can see the Tartar in those long eyes. He holds an AK-74, spits out some phlegm and takes down the code on the number-plate. Unlike a British officer, he seems to be just the biggest thug – whilst being some kind of dad. There’s no saluting, I can’t see a seniority system between these twenty-somethings. But he’s definitely in charge. Three of his men open the boot, push some stuff about and signal we can go on. They are quite polite and laugh a little idiotically when they find a bottle of cheap vodka in there. The French photographer keeps muttering under his breathe. After a few minutes they let us through.

“Ridiculous. This is nothing. Not like when I was in Afghanistan -”

Irina pulls round and snaps at him. “How the hell would you feel if there were Russians soldiers – no matter how polite…21km from Paris?” He rolls his eyes and takes out some biscuits. “Want…one?” He chews the chocolate all the way into Gori. He’s still being rude about her but has just switched to French. “You see those APCs there…she’s afraid of them. I’m not. I’m a reporter…I see it almost like a toy. I want to snap it… Can’t be afraid of it….”

Tanks are loitering around the edge of the town like metal-animals. Young men are sitting on them are looking rather bored. “You see…” The Frenchman mutters. “War is about waiting. That’s what you’ll learn.”

All is empty. There’s nobody home. The deserted streets eerily remind me of a Christmas Day in England – just all the window panes are smashed in and a few apartment blocks are blackened. They’ve been bombed. The car bumps along the road. Irina shouts, “they used cluster bombs so be careful. You all know what they’re like.” I smile. I have no idea what a cluster bomb looks. And rather stupidly I don’t ask. We park in the main square under the statue of Joseph Stalin. He was born in Gori - but musing about his historical legacy seems ridiculous when I can actually breathe it. Russian soldiers are on patrol so we push quickly into the Town Hall.

Soviet Baroque columns hold up a space crammed with the frightened and the confused. The wounded are sitting around dejectedly in the ante-chambers. Cuts, bandages and slings for broken arms fill the four corners of the room. As we walk up the stairs an old women is in tears. I don’t stop to ask why. The Georgian Governor is waiting for Irina.

He’s a young guy and has a nice pink shirt and a thick black desk in a room with a large conference table. Head in hands he smokes another Parliament Kingsize and coughs. Really badly. Behind him are his shelves. There are sixteen icons, a collection of knives and a framed photo of a five year aiming a pistol. I Imagine he took it when war seemed like something fun. The Governor is sullen and spends most of the time scribbling down tank positions onto a map of his district and keeping an eye on the TV. Movements, pull-backs and new strikes are running along the announcement ticker.

“My country is occupied. We are resisting.”

I hear a grating laugh. Some journalists find that funny. Outside I run into the correspondents of the Figaro and the Sunday Times. These grinning men suggest I wander down to see the prisoner exchange. We arrive too late. General Borisov, the supreme Commander of Russian Forces in Gori is already leaving in his four by four. He’s visibly drunk, is sweating profusely and speaks a foul-mouthed car-mechanics Russians. “Look guys…I’m getting my fighting boys outta here….just leaving some peacekeepers OK…? Just outside, right?” I ask him if that tanks are there going to be needed for that. He burps. Everybody pretends they didn’t notice. “Peacekeeping’s tough man. My guys are getting the fuck outta here tomorrow…. Don’t hassle me…I’m bu-sy!” The door is slammed and he hits the road. A piece of paper fell out of the door as he brutally shut it. Later that evening, the Le Monde Correspondent explains what the circles means. It’s the new map of Georgia.

“They are occupying everything north of Gori and everything West of Senaki. For good. Or so it appears."

Letter from South Ossetia: Land and Vengance

2008-08-22T15:46:00.004Z

In Tskhinvali Ossetian paramilitaries tell a story of revenge as Russians flags fly from Government buildings.

By Ben Judah in Tbilisi

Standing besides an Orthodox priest, the South Ossetian President Eduard Kokoity asks for a minute of silence, “to remember those that died in this bloodthirsty attack by a criminal Georgian regime against our people.” He is addressing a forlorn crowd of roughly a thousand in the capital of the breakaway enclave, Tskhinvali last Thursday. Along Stalin Street the crowd is waving Russian flags and trying to host some kind of victory celebration. Their faces are worn. Nobody cheers and slowly people start to drift away. President Kokoity continues his speech, “We are going to be an independent state inside Russia – it’s so logical.” Then he suddenly switches from Russian and makes some closing remarks in Ossetian - and then the people cheer.

Down Stalin Street the damage becomes more and more extensive as you approach the edge of town. Alexander Machevsky, an advisor to the Russian President and senior spokesman for the Russian authorities points into the wreckage. “As we can see there has been extensive indiscriminate shelling of civilian targets in Tskhinvali. Serious violations have been committed here by the Georgian side.” Several streets are completely devastated. Compared to the Georgian town of Gori, where most of the Western media has been reporting from - the damage is simply on a different scale. In Gori only a few apartment blocks a strategic targets have been shattered, however in Tskhinvali whole districts came under direct assault. This sight goes a long in explaining the ferocity with which Ossetian troops retaliated against Georgian villages in the surrounding valleys.

Russian authorities estimate that over 2,000 people were killed during the conflict. Yet accusations that the figures have been inflated appear to be justified. Russian Authorities repeatedly refused to show ISN Security Watch and other members of the Western Media in Tskhinvali evidence for the claim at the cemetery. However speaking to Russian officers and Ossetian civilians suggested that the inflated figures came more from the initial confusion brought by the shelling than any deliberate plan.

Inside a half-ruined house that was make-shift and made up of wood and tin-roofing to begin with, the middle-aged Fatima Tatdaeva and her two boys are living without a roof over their head. “It was terrifying when the Georgians came. We hid for days in the shelter. We lost family members and when we came out we found we had lost our roof too. They are evil people to have done this – done this to simple people like us.” Her neighbour, the elderly Gayuz Kozayev has a huge, if healing cut, along his skull. “That happened to my head – but look what they did to my house.” It simply isn’t there anymore. The fruit he had been storing for the summer is rotting in jars. Burnt children toys sit atop a broken mess of every imaginable personal belonging, from plates to documents lay in a glass and rubble heap. “I never want to see a Georgian again.”

Land and Vengeance

Along the road to the Khetagurovo village several Georgian burnt out tanks are stark reminders of just how intense the fighting during in the first few days of the war. Standing in front of the heavily damaged cemetery and war-memorial to lives lost in the Second World War, Russian Colonel Igor Konashenko explains what he insists happened here. “The Georgians attacked the village, it had previously been at peace. They arrived and we have reports from the locals that hostages have been taken and not returned. Several people where shot dead. Including an old woman.” The villagers can confirm the his statement by listing the names of the disappeared and taking me to the shallow grave of the dead grandmother.

A few metres away the post-office has been completely ransacked and the safe blown open, possibly by looters. The office is full of Soviet era pension booklets and postcards that were for some reason being stored there. Sitting in the corner of this evocative ruin of the USSR and old man drinking Kvass mistakes me for a Russian. “To the great Russian people. We’d be chased from here without you. I salute you!”

Outside a group of Ossetian paramilitaries share their feelings with me. They ask not be named. “They came to this village and did this damage. They shelled our city. And we took revenge – blood for blood.” Along the main street of Khetagurovo the interpretations of the war arguing that it is either a proxy conflict or a direct clash between Russia and Georgia seem more than inadequate. For the South Ossetian people in the wreckage it was a question of vengeance and part of a long and vicious feud over villages, hills and fields.

Letter from Tbilisi

2008-08-20T23:13:00.002Z

On the streets of Tbilisi refugees from Gori arrive by the truck-load into an atmosphere filled with fear and nationalism.

By Ben Judah in Tbilisi for ISN Security Watch

Children are playing outside Tbilisi’s School Six but they are not taking a break from their studies. Inside the dilapidated classrooms almost four-hundred refugees from South Ossetia and Gori are unpacking the few belonging they brought with them in rubbish sacks and plastic bags. Georgian sources estimate that as many as 60,000 such refugees are now in the capital.

Dali Dzarcemi points at the map of Georgia that hangs above the black-board at where his village once was. “A week ago Russians, Ossetians, Chechens and Cossacks came and brunt our house. All the Georgian people who were living there in the village had to flee. I don’t think I am going to be able to go back as my village. It’s in the area the Ossetians want to keep. I’m terrified. I’m a farmer. I have no clue how I can make a good life for me and my family in the city.” His wife’s brother was shot during the fighting and is in hospital, but he is mostly concerned about his two year old son Sergo. “We are not hungry. We have what we need. But the special stuff you need for children is expensive and they don’t give it for free. My wife is pregnant, how can I raise a new-born and small boy in a classroom with two bin-bags of possessions?”

In the next class room along the corridor Achiko Yelkcenuli is worrying about his brother in the army. “I haven’t heard from him today. Normally he calls every day. You never know if something could have happened.” Achiko has lost his home and knows dozens of people who have either lost family members of friends. I ask him if the refugees blame the Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili in any way for what has happened. “No. I am a proud Georgian. I am proud of my leader. He is defending our lands against the enemy.” Talking to other people in centre bring similar replies and often nationalist claims that the Ossetians only arrived on the back of Russian invading troops into the area in the 1920s. There are tones of compromise.

Shota Manjavidze is the Director of the School and has hastily become the man in charge of the refugees. When I ask him what people’s feelings towards the leadership are I get a more nuanced reply. “There are people who don’t like Saakashvili here in this refugee-centre. I think half of them. But they keep quiet about it. It’s best not heard speaking against him. It’s not patriotic. People could get very angry about that.”

As I make my way to Georgian State TV centre I pass three military truck-loads of refugees. Dato is from Gori and has just finished studying at the Georgian Technical University. He and his friends explain to me how they feel about the situation. “The Government tried really hard to bring us to Europe and NATO and almost managed. They really improved people’s lives. But this war is not about that – Russia can have on its borders only slaves or enemies. She could not have a free and successful Georgia.”

Talking to Dato and his friends bring me closer to the way Georgians themselves are interpreting the war – not as an opening clash between Putin’s resurgent Russia and the West in a Second Cold War - but as a national struggle for land and independence. Nationalist graffiti on the walls tell a the press is full of patriotic photos of Georgian soldiers holding holy icons. For most people I speak to the EU and NATO are dream-like concepts whilst the real story is about reclaiming territory they view as having been stolen from them by Russian back separatists. Dato argues that Saakashvili is the right leader at the right time. “The Rose Revolution was about national pride. He personifies that. When I see how the whole world is with him during this War it makes me proud to be Georgian – and certain that somehow we will win.”

Inside the buildings of the Georgian National TV I meet Tamar Urushadze, a young reporter who was shot four time by Russian troops live on air. Her arm is bandaged up and hangs in a sling. She will never really be able to use it again. For her these are frightening times. “There is fear. Nobody really knows what is going to happen to our country and our people. Right now people are rallying to the flag and the Government. Even the opposition parties are behind Saakashvili now. This is about our survival as a free and sovereign state.”

The atmosphere in Tbilisi is one nationalism and fear as more refugees continue to arrive. As the uncertainty about what is about to unfold only deepens the narrative of the conflict has been sold by the Government and taken up by most of the population as a national struggle against a barbaric enemy to defend the inviolable borders of the state. This is something that European peacemakers and the American ally need to take into account when they attempt to bring not just a cease-fire to Georgia – but also a lasting solution to its woes.

The Man From Gori

2008-08-20T23:09:00.001Z

Mirian wears ‘90s Reebok trainers, black badly-cut jeans and a lumberjack shirt of the worst imaginable quality. He is holding a rubbish sack filled with a few books, a family-photo album, more ugly clothes and a lock of his girlfriend’s hair wrapped in a green elastic band. He tries to speak English very quickly, over-annunciates the ‘o’ and spends half the time looking for a blue lighter he claims somebody has ‘stolen’ from him.

His mother died last Tuesday, from bowel-cancer. Over the week-end a group of Ossetian ‘irregulars’ broke down the door of his father’s apartment and informed them that due to the strategic view-point their balcony offered over the town of Gori their presence was now a ‘liability.’ One of them kicked in the glass door-pane of the old display cabinet to get his message across. He broke a china dog and a prized frame of his younger sister (all-in-pink) winning a local ballet contest. Sometime later that afternoon, probably when he passed out of his home-town towards Tibilsi through a check-point manned by inebriated Russians, Mirian realised he had become a refugee.

Three olive-green trucks unload their human cargo under plane trees on the outskirts of the city. He lets his rubbish-sack of belongings drop to the ground, so he can use his hands in this speech. I try to write down everything he says in my note-book, but I can’t record their shouting or draw his face. He stubs out his Yigor Light, looks for another one – but realises there are none left. Then his eyes stay still on mine. I stop note-taking.

“My cousin…was in the base…when they broke in and trashed it…he hid…in the boiler-room…and he heard them shouting…‘They’ve got everything…they’ve got all the equipment they could have dreamed of….and we’ve got nothing...’

“Then the Russians fell into a rage… they started to smash things up…their commander…couldn’t calm them down…and… and…they wouldn’t stop shouting… ‘we’ve got less than refugees…but we’ve won…we’ve won...we’ve won’

Then quite unexpectedly, he finds his blue lighter and begins to laugh.

Good Morning Georgia

2008-08-20T23:01:00.002Z

In Istanbul the bus-station is a multi-layered curved-concrete spiral - stuffed with little ticket-offices. Something that somebody might have found cool when concrete was young – or when they realised just how cheap it was to build. Outside each bureau a moustachioed man shouts out a destination.

‘Adana’ ‘Ankara’ ‘Izmir’ ‘Antakya’ ‘Diyarbakir’ ‘Kars’ ‘Batumi’

This isn’t a real place, but a place people go through to get somewhere else. Coaches are pulling in, people are pilling out. They’re migrating, trading cans for crates, lugging suitcases or picking up plastic bags of their belongings. Some are swearing as others rush to buy bits of food or bottled water. And then there are the goodbyes. The tearful ones. Some that seem almost indifferent.

‘Batumi’

So there are still buses to the Caucasus. An overweight, never-shaven guy in a stained orange shirt pulls me to the bureau. There is only one bus to Georgia. It’s his – and it leaves in twenty minutes. I don’t give myself enough time to properly make up my mind. So I am sitting next to Sofia, who starts to tell me her story in broken Russian.

She is looking for her son. His name is Soso. He’s seven and she hasn’t heard from him since the Russians pulled into Senaki last week. Sofia has dyed black-hair, more wrinkles than women of thirty tend to and a mobile phone. Soso is her background. Every ten minutes she pulls the Nokia out to look at him.

“I thought it would a good idea…for him to stay with his grandparents…I…I”

She never finishes that sentence. I sat next to her the whole twenty hours to Batumi. And she could never say anymore than that. At four in the morning the coach stopped somewhere on the motorway. Orange-lights from the streetlamps flooded the tarmac. As whole families boarded, I watched colourfully veiled women holding their babies and fathers telling jokes to little girls. Sofia jumped of the bus. I think she must have been sick. When she got back on she was pale. Her eyes are Georgian, they almost have something Cherokee to them. She tries to explain.

“This happened to my parents…when there was a war…this happened…happens..”

The Turkish peasants are too excited by the bus to fall asleep. Children rush up and down the alley. Men are strolling along talking to their new friends and seat-neighbours. None of them are going to Georgia. Sofia falls into a kind of sleep, but still every half-hour she pulls out her phone to look at Soso.

The grease-stain from my unwashed hair obscures the view through the pane. A grey sky that seems almost bruised above the Black Sea. The water is flat. Perfectly still. It seems to grow darker as I follow my line of sight to the horizon. It looks almost like a reservoir.

At the border the Georgian Cross of St. George is still flying – but little else is in its right place. Half the police have rushed off to the front-line, half the staff have gone to find their families. Papers are pilled up, left unfilled. And nothing has been cleaned for days. An exhausted women stamps my passport without bothering to scan it. I can’t make out where her mascara ends and where the black rings below her eyes begin.

Dense-forests cover mountain foothills that collapse onto stony beaches. Along the road life-size rusted metal crosses occasionally appear at the cross-roads. They are too comical to be truly ominous, but they are still there. We pull into Batumi. I never got to say goodbye to Sofia. I saw her pulling a wheelie-suitcase through rows of taxis and mini-buses shouting out the same of her village. Then she vanished.

All these buildings are cheap blocks of flats, painted ‘cheerful’ colours. The pinks and pale greens are greeting me. There is nothing in Batumi. Everything seems to be under sixty years old. Perhaps there was nothing here before. Maybe they all lived in huts. Maybe there was a big war that destroyed what was here. Maybe I’m right. I need an Internet Café. I need to get to Tibilisi.

The taxi-drivers won’t take me. Tattooed-men wave their hands in the air.

“We can’t the road is closed…there is War in on the highway…and I don’t know the mountain passes.” I asked several times and every answer was the same. Groups of people are arriving in the main-square clutching bags, suitcases and stacks of pots and pans. A handful refugees have just arrived. So this is what the edge of a war is like. Confusion. A mess in which nobody know what’s going on. People are shouting each headline to those around them.

“The trains aren’t working.” “Are they moving to Capital?” “They’re withdrawing did you see the news.” “They’ve dug in.” “What did Bush say?”

The only way out is the airport. The driver smokes Chesterfields, wears a neatly pressed yellow shirts and grips the steering wheel with thick hands used to labour. He has four rings, only one of them from his wedding.

“The Russians are coming…and they’ve brought Chechens. Aren’t you ashamed – you British…that they can just crush this place you made so many promises to? You see those ruined churches on the hills up there… there have been many wars here.”

He points at the air-port. You can see what he’s pointing at. The sleek new building shows that until a few weeks ago Georgia was a bold experiment in free-market capitalism and westernization. The EU flags hopelessly hangs down its pole.

The main hall echoes to screams for a ticket. Somebody’s mother, brother, whatever is in Tibilisi. Old woman are knocking on the closed booths of the airlines. Children are crying because they don’t know what’s going on. I try and imagine Heathrow falling to pieces. And it starts to come with frightening ease. Somehow there’s a seat for me.

Three policemen are sitting around smoking Parliaments are muttering in microphones. They offer me a lighter, then a seat. Levan is in his early thirties. His eyes never stop moving. His face still has bits of shock stuck to it.

“I was in the Zone…two days ago. We we’re both there.” He points across the table to his friend. “And there was another guy from the brigade. He stayed there.” He pulls out his mobile phone. His Russian is thickened by an accent I’m unused to. It’s hard to understand. He clicks play on his Motorola videos.

On the tiny-screen. A column of camouflaged men are moving through the mist. He taps this moving image. “That’s us. They sent the police in when they ran out of soldiers.” A guy is smiling. Another is smoking. Somebody tells a joke. “You see there was mist.” Then there is a whistling sound. Tiny-sounding gunfire. The camera rolls along the floor and starts to focus on somebody whose not getting up.

“He used to be the guy at the baggage counter.”

I once saw a happy-slap on a mobile phone and it disgusted me. A Turkish coach-driver once insisted I see his porn- collection on his Samsung. But seeing death on a Motorola leaves me numb. As I wait for the delayed plane the policemen smoke two packets of Parliaments and then moved onto mine. They are speaking to each other quickly in Georgian now. I can only make out a few words.

“Bush” “Shakashvili” “Sarkozy” “Putin”

A Question of Technique

2008-08-15T09:48:00.001Z

Some aspects of the Cold War refuse to die. As Putin’s troops manoeuvre in Georgia it’s high-time to remember that the intense competition between different American and Russian styles of warfare, hardware or technology is still going on.

The Georgian Army has since the ‘Rose Revolution’ been receiving military-aid and crucial knowledge-sets from the 130 US military advisors based in the country. With Israel giving a helping hand, almost a quarter of Georgia’s functional land forces are said to be Western trained. Schooled in the experience of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Georgia’s own 2,000 strong commitment in Iraq they came face to face in South Ossetia with a very different kind of Army.

The new Russian army is a product of Putin’s first Caucasian war – In Chechnya. Here a completely different and utterly ruthless understanding of counter-insurgency and occupation was forged. The dust has yet to settle but the clash in Georgia seems to have been a decisive rout for Westpoint training. Reports of collective punishment in South Ossetia and Gori, including the burning of fields, indiscriminate bombing of civilians, Chechen irregulars and the excessive use of force showed where the Russian Officers had learnt their techniques. And in this confrontation it was the Western trained Georgian Army that came off far the worse. It’s tiny size only explains part of the story. It simply did not have the training to deal with this different style of warfare. It wasn’t even thinking in the right paradigm. American experts have spent the past twenty years confronting Iraqis, Serbs or Afghans – they forgot about the Russians and what way of waging war was emerging in Chechnya.

But Georgia is not the only place where American and Russian techniques are facing off today. In Iran Russian nuclear techniques are being used by the Ayatollahs to build their nuclear programme and if a US or Israeli attempt to stop them does come about in the near future, from this winter it will turn into a deadly duel between the top of the range Russian S-300 anti-aircraft system and the latest American bombers. This competition is spread right across the Middle East. Russian weaponry and training in Syria eyes the heavily Americanised IDF across the Golan Heights. In Lebanon these same techniques come to blows. Hezbollah are said to receive much of their training form the Syrian security forces, who in turn are rumoured to be trained on Russian soil and certainly have decades of Russian experience going back to their early Soviet mentors. And in 2006 the Hezbollah launched it’s war against the Jewish State by blowing up a tank with – Russian made weaponry, the potent RPG-29. Again, we need to worry about how our techniques are faring.

And in wider worlds of arms sales, Russia and America are head to head in competing to arm India and other developing nations. In the Far East, China’s rising Army is composed of either Russian developed, copied or sold military hard-ware. In the world of military technology the Cold War goes on, as a question not of ideology but of technique.

Letter from Beirut

2008-08-15T08:57:00.002Z

The western media reported the repercussions of May’s Hezbollah takeover of Beirut as a failure for the pro-Western March 14^th coalition then in power. However on closer inspection it appears to have been a kind of victory and March 14^th failings mostly internal.

By Ben Judah in Beirut for ISN Security Watch

St. Martyr’s Square is the heart of Beirut and is the old dividing line between the mostly Muslim western districts and Christian East Beirut. Today it has taken on a different significance. In 2005 street-protestors mass in the square, eventually coming to such a crunch-point that on March 14^th that the decades long Syrian occupation was forced out of Lebanon. March 14^th was a day, but it has come to mean a western-orientated political coalition of parties committed to keeping Syrian influence in Lebanon to a minimum.

The square is empty in the late afternoon, but it is filled with symbolism. On the side of the Headquarters of the Christian Ketaeb, also know as the Phalangists, there is a large mural of the assassinated leader Pierre Gemayel. Further up rises the large, modern Rafik Hariri mosque. This is where Lebanon’s assassinated March 14^th Prime Minister is laid to rest. In am standing underneath the An Nahar building, a modern glass-construction, with a large hanging bearing the face of the murdered journalist and MP Gibran Tueni. All were leaders in the coalition and paid with their lives for their achievements.

Gibran Teuni’s daughter - Nayla Tueni, is now the deputy-managing editor of the An Nahar newspaper where her father worked. However there is a great dissatisfaction in her voice when she talks about politics. Nayla is often tipped for a bright future in this field, but she has no desire to be a politician for the moment. She explains that “we need a new kind of politics in the country, one that is no longer made up of blind followers, corrupt self-serving leaders and is actually interested in getting to grips with the social and infra-structural problems that make up real change.”

Nayla’s attitudes are echoed by many average March 14^th supporters. Jean Saade was one of the protestors who camped out for days in St. Martyr’s Square back in 2005. He is deeply dissatisfied. “March the 14^th was a day, whose name and significance was appropriated by political parties that had for the most part worked with and for the occupying power. They rode the wave and put themselves in power, all the energy and ideas we where having on the square about ending sectarianism and really transforming the system – is not their agenda. They proved to be too much parts of the system and unable to change it.”

Such criticisms are common throughout Lebanon. People frequently refer to March 14^th the political parties as clans, patronage systems or self-serving vehicles rather than real parties that can go about the profound re-construction the country needs. The Lebanese dryly remind me that the most hotly contested portfolios in the new Cabinet where those with the most patronage-webs available, such as public works or telecommunications. Indeed on closer inspection most March 14^th parties whilst pledging their commitment to modern politics, lack basic institutional capacities such as public forums, membership lists, regular-news-letters and so on. And on all core matters such as social policy or health-care they lack clear agendas or real expertise. Self-interested networks of elites stall progress on certain issues of liberalisation.

This goes a long way to explaining how the huge enthusiasm show in 2005 has withered in Lebanon, and a sullen and depressed attitude towards politics has taken hold. Part of this can be explained by the fact that the March 14^th coalition was faced with an incredibly difficult situation, an internal terror campaign that placed them under virtual house arrest and cost them many MPs, a confrontation with Israel that strengthened Hezbollah and a Jihadist takeover of the major Palestinian camp of Nahr el-Barad. However, such a situation might have rallied people to their cause had the leadership not proved themselves to be so much in the old-mould, incapable of coming up with creative answers to challenges and delivering the necessary social and economic transformations. In many ways March 14^th’s leadership squandered what could have been a rallying cry for them by failing to show their supporters what actual changes in the system they were fighting for on the ground.

After meeting Nayla Tueni I wander over to the re-built Downtown, clean and quiet Arabised Parisian buildings, to meet the political analyst, advisor and Chatham House representative of his country, Nadim Shehadi. When I ask if he feels the March 14^th movement has failed, he compares what happened in May to an 18^th century duel.

“Imagine your opponent challenges you to a duel, at a time you are set to lose, in a place that will defeat you and with a weapon to which you have no defences. If you manage to change the time, place and nature of the duel – live to tell the tale and emerge from it with your honor, then you may be seen as the victor of the duel.”

Shehadi argues that because Hezbollah challenged the March 14^th coalition militarily to a confrontation it could not win, the fact that through decisions to play weakness and not fight back, in transferring the end-game to Doha they kept the process political, which was the best possible outcome of the situation.

He continues, “What I need to stress now is the fact that Lebanon is not in a period of high-tensions and is calm. Large amounts of tourists are returning, things are quiet. There is a political battle and that is the way it will stay for the moment.”

March 14^th successfully avoided a Civil War and survived an almost impossible situation. Maybe only politicians of genius would have done better faced with such challenges. However the fact remains that in winning one side of the battle – keeping the civil war political, the March 14^th movement might still lose by being oddly the least politically appealing.

On the ground Hezbollah continues to pride itself on delivering charity, protection and its image of incorruptibility. This has allowed to eat away at the traditional Shi’a political party, Amal which is broadly seen as an elite network of clients and patrons. Like many Islamist parties – Hezbollah understands what winning hearts and minds is all about. Their Christian Ally Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement was originally part of the March 14^th coalition but has since allied itself with Hezbollah for electoral and political gain. Aoun’s strategy has been to build his party up by exploiting the sense of grievance and exploitation within the dissatisfied of Christian Lebanon. In this new duel for political power in Beirut the Western powers might be better served by sending an army of spin-doctors and campaign strategists to Beirut to help their allies.

A Jew in Beirut

2008-08-11T18:20:00.005Z

The metal-can shakes and the taxi driver wipes tiny beads of sweat from his brow. I ash on the floor. Inside this traffic clogged box, reeking of smoke and sweat, the driver suddenly spits out the window and slams his horn, accompanied by a fast paced diatribe. I’m too tired, de-hydrated and irritated to try and understand. The vegetation is crawling up the concrete slab apartment blocks from the 60s, scarred by bullet marks and mortar shell blasts. As if it is being gnawed away at by an urban concrete devouring leprosy. A pretty girl passes by the on the pavement, unveiled and in Milanese fashion, she’s trendy, almost too trendy. Why does it always seem to be the same one I see when I’m blocked stuck in this bottle-neck?

‘Habibi’ The driver pokes me; he’s reclining back now, having switched on the Egyptian pop-songs. My eyes swirl from the girl and land smack on the posters and the flags dangling above the streets. Always the same unflinching faces of the politicians, that same smart blue suit, the identical black-turban-beard combo. On the street corners the same tags mark off turf, that green fist holding the Kalashnikov or the blood red cross. ‘Habibi’ – It’s a macho thing to do here to call someone ‘darling,’ it’s like your manliness if measured by the amount of people you can call ‘darling.’ ‘Habibi – what religion are you?’ There is sweat on my forehead; a poster of Hassan Nasrallah is looking straight at me, an armed policeman is flirting with the pretty girl on the sidewalk, a designer’s glass shop front is exhibiting those exquisite handbags. This is Beirut. ‘Habibi – what is you religion?’ Chemicals surge up my spine, fear yes, but almost a terrible desire to tell him, ‘yes-deal with it,’ but then I’m paranoid, a Hezbollah flag is dangling from the building opposite, and a video I saw online of a beheaded Jewish journalist is swirling in my dehydration. ‘I’m Catholic.’ Damn, I should have told him. Stop scaring yourself. He’s not gonna tie you up and throw you in the back of the truck. He hasn’t got the time. Would he?

Elias arrives late, but that only adds to his image of quintessential Beirut man-about-town. Those are pretty expensive shades, at least three clearly visible designer labels, and a command of French that would put Sarkozy to shame. You know he went to all the best schools, a gold-rapper like cross dangles around his neck. He strokes it constantly; he is a proud Lebanese Christian. And quite brusquely he pulls up next to me, and states matter of factly.

‘So you’re looking for Jews?’ Elias is not someone to be afraid of but, I’m in enemy territory. Well kind of. ‘So you’re looking for Jews?’ He’s not smiling; this is clearly a serious matter. The waiter delivers his Mojito. It’s hard to grasp but just one mile from this uber-cool rooftop bar, themed in white and straight out of a cosmopolitan millionaire’s manual to the world, are the Hezbollah. The view over the bay, the spires of the cathedrals and the domes of the mosques, have almost deluded me I’m in a dream Lebanon where everyone is happy and totally cool with just about anything. Well there not. Well some of them are. I just don’t know.

‘I heard from Anne-Marie you where looking for Jews. So are you?’ I hesitate; I really should, shouldn’t I? It’s like who goes looking for Jews?

‘Yeah.’

He draws closer, strikes a match that briefly illuminates his face and looks me straight in the eye. ‘I know about them.’ With these words my heart suddenly sinks, flashing recollections of the casual anti-Semitism of taxi drivers across the Middle East. He knows I’m up to something. And this is Beirut. ‘I know your one of them.’ He smiles, yet that’s nothing you say in passing in Lebanon. I sip my drink and grin inanely. ‘Don’t worry. My closest friend as a young man was from your people.’ Elias is at most 23. ‘It was a secret. We never asked, they never said. Lebanon is not a place where you ask directly someone’s blood type – like your Israel. It’s a game of guesses. We were young. But one night we spoke of it. He told me his family where Jewish, that he had been to Israel and that that was that. We never spoke of it again. He disappeared. I think he is there now, but I can’t be sure. That’s all.’ Elias moves away to chat about the upcoming elections with a friend, rumours of a war drift over the table as I sit there, glued like an idiot to the spot. There are Jews over the frontlines. I try and imagine my family living through the Civil War and the Israeli bombardment in this city. I can’t. But damn, somebody did.

Over the next few days I started to try and track down these hidden Jews. It wasn’t always like this in the Arab world, I tell myself as I send of emails to no reply, try to track down friends of friends of friends, wait for people who never arrive and keep my Jew-dar for a familiar face. That tactic is profoundly unhelpful because it seems, one in three Beirutis has a brother or sister in Tel Aviv. There used to be loads of Jews here.

The first Jews arrived in Lebanon in and around 132 A.D, disposed and cut-up refugees from the destruction of the first Israel. Jews lived in a few of the villages of the Chouf Mountains, alongside the Christian warrior-peasants and in the Muslim port cities of Tripoli and Sidon. At the end of the nineteenth century, as Lebanon came under the protection of the French as the Ottoman Empire rotted around it a small community began to be built up in the sleepy seaside village of Beirut. Traders and adventurers began to be drawn in from Aleppo, Alexandria, Baghdad and Istanbul as this small village soon began to develop into a trading hub. By 1911 there where 5,000 Jews in Lebanon. In 1948 there where 24,000 living, working and holding Shabbat dinners mostly in a new thriving Beirut. For twenty-five years, Jews formed a key part of the rich mosaic. Protected by law, recognised as a sect in the constitution and even guaranteed a seat in parliament under the sectarian system, life was good. Testament to this was the population increased after the birth of Israel. But now there seemed to be nothing left. Another twenty-five years of war, murders, emigration and fear. Now there are just a handful of Jews left in Beirut.

The Armenian Taxi driver coughs violently and insists on letting me know that he is without a shadow of a doubt – an Armenian. I’m indifferent, he’s driven me way out of where I wanted to go, right into a dilapidated and run down district that slides steeply down a hill. Flags of the Lebanese Forces Militia dangle from balconies, children are running around in little packs through the street, old men and sitting on plastic chairs outside their apartment blocs in silence watching the day go by. Small shrines to the Virgin Mary mark out which sect’s territory this is. ‘There’s your Net-Café Habibi.’ A small grey and dimly-lit hole crammed full of kids and six computers from the early nineties. ‘Thanks.’ Achrafiye and those nice bars in East Beirut may not look like misery, but you only have to turn round the corner to find it right there waiting for you. The photographer I’m travelling with lights up, as a car blaring out the speeches of the Christian war-lord Bashir Gemayel swerves round the corner. The recordings echo through the roads that cut through the concrete towers, but there’s only grey sky above. The kids start to mob my friend, asking him repeatedly. ‘You Lebaneeeese – Lebaneeeese?’ He nods, explains he works from London and that he’s keen to move back to Beirut. Then one of the bigger boys comes up to him, at most he’s 14, and says very seriously to him. ‘Take your family to London. There is war here.’ Inside the dial-up connection hisses and when my email finally opens. A single sentence from a source inside the Jewish community is in my inbox.

‘The Jews are in hiding until after the Elections. There are plans to rebuild the synagogue but nothing can go ahead until the tensions are over.’

Over the next few days politics became tenser in Beirut as it started to become clear that the country was in for a rough ride as the Government and the Opposition’s vision for the country clashed. Another figure from the Jewish community currently travelling in the US for a significant period of time again stressed that there where plans to rebuild the synagogue, but that things had to be kept very quiet in the run-up to the Presidential Election due to the extreme sensitivity of the situation. The whole future of this hidden community hangs in the balance along with the destiny of the country in the coming weeks and months. And nobody seemed keen to risk their life talking to a teenage journalist with a hardcore Jewish name. It was then I decided to go to the ruins of the Synagogue myself. After all, I had my own personal reasons for being in Beirut all along.

My family left Baghdad and the other rotting corners of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the nineteenth century to the trading centres flourishing under British rule in the Far East. Settling in Singapore, Bombay, Shanghai and Calcutta where my grandfather was born. He would always tell me that the Judah family had come to Iraq, to Babylon as slaves when the Temple of Solomon was razed by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC. Yet he would always repeat our Middle Eastern roots came from numerous other cities in the region. One of those places was Beirut.

Abraham Sassoon, it is presumed, was born in Aleppo, though my great-aunt insists her grandfather’s father’s father was born in the mid nineteenth century in Alexandria. All that is certain is that my forefather Abraham was buried in 1898 in Beirut. Ninety years, a lifetime before I was born. In remembrance his son constructed the Maghen Abraham Synagogue, the oldest in the city, that was finished in 1925. I tried to imagine the funeral in the small costal village, the crying of the women, the laments for the sons far away in India. I tried to imagine the proud Sassoon family opening the new synagogue in the rising city of the new French mandate, bustling with migrants from the mountains and officers from aboard. But I couldn’t. The area around the synagogue had once been the Jewish quarter of Wadi Abu Jamil, with kosher butchers, schools from the Alliance Israelite, Talmudic schools and closely knit fabric of community life. Now there was nothing. Just flat black tarmac providing open air parking, two construction sites with modern Beirut surrounding the spots. Skyscrapers behind me, the Moorish style Grand Serail sticking out above where the seat of the Government is. The silence fizzed ominously as I walked through the tarmac towards the synagogue, the tent city of Hezbollah protestors rings the Serail and the Parisian style downtown has ceased to function as a result. Soldiers’ chewing gum and roadblocks have replaced French and Saudi tourists.

The gates where half-heartedly padlocked and the inner courtyard, was bursting with vegetation, whole bushes and trees had erupted from the near-ruin, covering the yellowed stone. I rattled the gate; there was just enough room to squeeze myself through. Pausing I went to investigate the two little annexes built out of the sides of the courtyard whose windows opened onto the road now car park in front. The pungent smell of decay hit me as I managed to pull ajar one of the widows, but what I saw inside was not what I was expecting. The room seemed to have been frozen in time during the Lebanese Civil War. Small capsules of iodine for treating wounds where on the window-sill, a stretcher was thrown across the room, dust hung in the air and litter from an encampment was strewn across the floor. On the facing wall was a graffiti symbol of the Amal Militia, a Shia movement now closely linked to Hezbollah. The walls of the Synagogue had stencilled graphs of the face of their leader the Iman Musa Sadr, distantly related to Moqtada Sadr in Iraq. The roof was ripped off, but the irony was it wasn’t by them. An Israeli shell had fallen on it during the war, and Amal had moved it to ‘defend’ the building. I had hoped to look in to find a glimpse of my ancestors and the deep past; instead I was staring straight into a time capsule of the Lebanese Civil War and at a monument to a community victim to the Jewish-Arab wars. I had gone in search of Abraham my forefather, but he was faceless amongst the dead, in a city where the ghosts outnumber the living. I stepped back, and wished at that instance I knew the words of some kind of Hebrew prayer, some kind of holy words for what was lost and those few who remain. But nothing came to mind but a swelling feeling of emptiness.

Good Morning Lebanon

2008-08-10T11:55:00.003Z

The bus out of Damascus is dirty. The windows are smeared and little children are sleeping along the floor. A Syrian petrol-pump mechanic is trying to practise his English. “Welcome. Now Leban-non. Leba-non. Good country.” But I feel nothing but thick-sweat and back-ache as we draw up at the border.

There is thick-dust on the road. Five lanes are filled with taxis, trucks and banged up ‘70s cars. Each being inspected by the Syrian border guards. I am beginning to see, that a militarised society isn’t a concept – it means gruff and unshaven guys, our age, everywhere and armed. But that isn’t the menacing thing about Syria. Mostly conscripts just sit around and chain-smoke on the street corners. It’s the posters.

I count six placards of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad stuck to the lampposts. There are different types, of course. His favourite appears to be ‘Bashar - businessman.’ Sharp-suited, wearing a beautiful black tie and a stern look. He could almost be a behind-the-times French Lawyer. But there’s also ‘Bashar sportsmen’ – where the leader is smiling, fist-forward and wearing gold-rimmed aviators. You can’t move fives minutes in this country without him looking at you.

I shuffle with the bus-passengers, a hijabbed and bearded crowd of stress, into the passport control. On the door of the hall a faded poster of Bashar al-Assad looking rather grumpy reads. ‘I believe in Syria.’ I’m not sure Syrian is something you can ‘believe in.’ I feel very certain it exists.

The hall is filled with scenes I thought only existed in old-movies. Twelve fans rotate ominously above. Clumps of shepherds wearing dish-dashes and red-kaiffyahs, the one’s you see as passé fashion items back home, are being inspected. Khaki-officers are leading a turbaned man into a plastic see-through booth for questioning. Lines of badly dressed men, mostly wearing lumber-jack shirts for some reason, are queuing in the line for ‘Syrians.’ Next to it a group of Saudis are waiting in line under a sign that says ‘Arabs.’ Immaculate white-dresses. Like a priesthood of pure money, clutching the keys to their SUVs. The box for foreigners if closed. So I move to the sign that says ‘Diplamats.’ There are eight pictures of al-Assad. One for each wall. And a small one of his dad.

A bald man in epaulettes stamps my passport whilst an over-made up women with blue eye-liner writes my details down in biro. Formalities finished we climb back into the bus and pull through the gates. The vehicle dips through a water-pit, then gets knocked on by some troopers. That appears to be it. I can see the Lebanese Cedar flag.

I notice a man actually sigh with relief as we leave the Ba’athist Dictatorship. But the first sign of change can be read in the faces stuck to the walls. A nervous looking General, with big bags under his eyes, is plastered in everywhere. Sometimes alongside the Hezbollah leader, turbaned and open-mouthed - the famous Hassan Nasrallah. Along the road to Beirut the pictures keep changing as we climb into the mountains. In some ways this is actually more stressful than being constantly glared at by one man. Some villages are covered in posters of a bald man with a thin moustache wearing a wooden cross. Others are adorned with the pictures of a white-haired man with a fat dyed-black moustache alongside what can only be his son. This is how you read the sectarian divisions of Lebanon. There is no clear racial divide between the sects, or even for the most part in how they dress. But the faces and the graffiti tell you who owns what.

An hour later the bus pulls above the capital. I get it in an instant. My eyes bulge. Dozens of skyscrapers, at least six more than in Tel Aviv. The city curves into the sea, surrounded by wealthy suburbs that could belong in either Athens or Naples. A city of Western buildings and Arab façades. You can feel the money. This is a prize worth fighting for. This is not what I imagined. This is Beirut.

On Dizengoff Street, Tel Aviv

2008-08-09T16:47:00.003Z

Along Dizengoff Street I am press-secretary, pub-stool comedian, tour guide or talk-show host. The worn faces of the passers by, the dirty corners of the shops that sell only Kosher products, they're cheaper than back home and then the crumbling buildings, maybe Bahaus ( I can't tell ), along Allenby Avenue or Ben Yehuda street are whispering to me.

"I didn't quite work."

The online papers I click through are now printed blocks strewn along the beach. The in-human voice of the radio-announcer speaks so fast I can hardly catch a single word.

"This is why we left."

Today I saw my Uncle, but he was working as a janitor at the Sheraton Hotel. Six hours later I saw my grandmother walking through the Azreali Mall, but she had a different name. My little borther and sister are playing on every street corner, but in the Polish clothes of Orthodox Jews. The Star of David is graphed onto walls where the Swastika usually is. The Arabic on the street signs is often scratched away. Humidity. Mosquitoes. Ethipoian Jews strolling bewildered along the Promenade.

"What do I have in common with the Jews?"

On the roof on the hostel I felt cool. Girls where looking at me. I am tanned. A half-Jew from London rolled me a joint and told me about how he was about to join the IDF. Then he slumped down and looked at the low flying fighter jets. Practising? I suggested a book to my Teenage self and lay down in the matress in the corner. My words of advice:

"You're not Israeli. You're not even properly Jewish. Be yourself. Be proud of that, mate."

I am reminded of Kafka's papers under the flea-bitten matress. Max Brod lived in the tree-lined and grey-three-flour blocks where shacks sell auto-repairs and beach clubs with the ubiquitous 'Hawaian' groove are tuccked away. I stood there and pictured his winters. The rain. Memories of Europe. Why did he let that paper-jammed suitcases rot?

"What do I have in common with the Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself. Sometimes I just want to sit down and just breathe." - His Diaries. (7/11/1919)

Standing there. A man with my father's forehead is laughing quietly as a Kebab vendor is showing off his theatrics with dizzying energy. That's when I understood my unease. In Kensington, as in the 8e I felt my family's sadness and long thought being by the others who went through "that" could, just maybe, heal our hearts. But it dosen't work like that. Humming anxiety is everywhere. It get into every crack like a soft summer rain.

How Stable Is Syria?

2008-08-07T18:03:00.000Z

Syria faces tough decisions in an atmosphere of uncertainty about its economic and political stability, Ben Judah writes for ISN Security Watch.

By Ben Judah in London and Damascus for ISN Security Watch (07/08/08)

The past few weeks have seen the Syrian regime acting in both predictable and unusual ways, leaving analysts and commentators divided as to what intentions are driving President Bashar al-Assad.

The recent upswing of positive sounding statements concerning Syria's secretive negotiations with Israel and the declarations of intent toward opening an embassy in Lebanon made by al-Assad during the Mediterranean Union summit in Paris last month are strong signs that Syria might be changing its diplomatic course. This has led to intense speculation as to what is driving Damascus, with rumors circulating that hidden power-plays or economic problems are forcing the pace of change.

Opposition spokesperson Nawaf Bashir of the moderate Islamist party Movement for Justice and Development says that behind the facade is a fundamentally unstable dictatorship.

"Economic conditions are declining rapidly, leaving the country with some of the lowest incomes and highest prices in the region and an extreme vulnerability to high inflation," Bashir told ISN Security Watch from London, where he is living in exile.

"According to indicators such as [from] Transparency International, Syria is now the fourth most corrupt country in the world. [Al-Assad] arrived promising economic reforms, but this dictatorship has found it impossible to answer society's problems with anything other than violence. This corrodes the moral fabric of the nation. Fundamentally, this is still minority Alawi rule over the majority, and this cannot last."

Since the Ba'ath Party takeover in 1963, Syria has been dominated by the Shia Alawite sect, which constitutes barely 10 percent of the population; a major structural vulnerability. (Parallels have been drawn to Saddam Hussein's Sunni-led Iraq - a grave weakness to the regime that the opposition has been at times overly wary or enthusiastic to exploit.) However, over the years, an increasing number of Christians and Sunni Muslims have been co-opted into the system.

Democratic developments

The Movement for Justice and Development is a signatory to the Opposition Damascus Declaration - a pro-democracy statement demanding an end to the dictatorship signed in 2005 by Islamist, secular and nationalist groups.

Since then, the movement toward establishing a viable alternative has been slow but tangible.

On 1 December 2007, 163 members of a 250-member opposition national council met in Damascus to establish an alternative government. Bashir believes that the fact that all 17 of Syria's national minorities were represented, transcending traditional political divisions, frightened al-Assad.

"He can see that the democratic forces in this country have finally started to broaden their horizons, are learning from anti-dictatorial movements that have toppled regimes across the world, primarily looking at the Eastern European experience," Bashir said. "The slope of improvement is now there, even if it is minimal, as we begin to tackle the serious problems of mobilization, information and undermining the system."

Late 2007 and early 2008 have seen al-Assad both intensify his propaganda efforts and order fresh clampdowns on reformists; an effort to clearly show that attempting to establish an alternative political pole within Syria is a line that cannot be crossed right now.

The prosecution this month of senior leaders who signed the Damascus Declaration shows just how seriously Syria takes the slow-burning threat of civil society movements. However, al-Assad faces fundamental problems in trying to continue to control the flow of information available.

When attempting to file this story from an internet café in Damascus this reporter found that most of his email accounts and news service sources had been blocked by the Information Ministry. The problem was quickly solved however when an eight-year-old playing an online game opened a "proxy server" that circumvents such blocks, completely undermining the Ministry's efforts with a click.

Political security, economic volatility

However, most analysts do not share such enthusiasm for the opposition's prospects.

Syrian political expert Joshua Landis of the University of Oklahoma argues that most western understandings of Syria are still very caricatured.

"Syria is not an Alawite state as many have argued," Landis told ISN Security Watch. "The [al-Assad] family is Alawite and there is an overrepresentation of them at the top of the system, but most members of the government and even security establishment are actually Sunni."

Landis believes that most discussions of internal divisions within the Syrian regime are pure speculation. He argues that "George Bush legitimized dictatorship across the Middle East by the Iraq war disaster.

"Most Syrians have now come to a grudging acceptance that Assad represents a known and, for the most part, non-lethal status quo. Bashar's future politically looks very bright. He has managed to neutralize most rivals, the opposition is minimal and a great propaganda effort to get everyone onboard has taken place," he said.

However, according to Landis, Syria's economic future isn't as bright as the president's.

"The IMF and the World Bank estimate inflation is running at between 16 percent to 18 percent in a society with a large proportion of people on fixed state incomes. Those in liberal professions are ok, but it's the ones who actually work for the state who are in trouble."

Economic volatility extends beyond inflation. Syria has been badly hit by the rising prices in commodities, especially imported food. Agriculture remains an important part of the economy, but limited irrigation leaves it highly sensitive to variations in rainfall.

There is also considerable uncertainty over Syria's trade figures and hence its current account balance with large discrepancies between government and IMF figures.

The economy at large is being held back by deep infrastructure problems. The transport and energy sectors are antiquated and bureaucratic, while internet and telecommunications are expanding from an extremely low-base, hampered by Syria's authoritarian model.

According to Justin Alexander, an expert on Syria at the Economist Intelligence Unit, "the main battles being fought inside Damascus are over economic liberalization and how far to take the process.

"One of the main problems this opening up might lead to is for younger members of the Syrian elite, who have no managed to accrue vast wealth through corrupt or extensive patronage networks, might become angry that they have missed out," he told ISN Security Watch.

But Alexander believes that al-Assad has few options.

"In 2008, Syria became a net importer of petrol for the first time in decades during a major oil shock. He has been left will little choice but to update his economic framework. This explains his movements westward as economics drives the politics."

Rumblings in the inner circle

Syria's attempts to update its economic framework and rehabilitate its image internationally have been taking place against the backdrop of a series of rumors and conspiracy theories relating to al-Assad's inner circle.

The February assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, former chief of military operations for Hizbollah, has upset the Syrian security elite. The attack was widely believed to have been the work of Israeli agents, though it begged tough questions about Syria's ability to defend itself less than a year after Israel's air-raid on the alleged nuclear facility in the country's north.

Many have speculated that Mughniyeh was playing internal Syrian politics and paid with his life. This, however, remains impossible to confirm or deny.

Further rumors linking al-Assad's brother-in-law to General Assef Shawkat, head of the country's military intelligence unit, have also been circulating. The first such report appeared in France's Le Figaro in June, indicating that Shawkat had been held responsible for the recent breaches in security and had been placed under house arrest.

Another more lurid account appeared a few days later in the German daily Die Welt, suggesting that Shawkat had himself been planning a coup.

However, such stories need to be taken with a strong dose of suspicion as they often originate from self-serving sources, such as opposition leaders or Syria's own disinformation machine.

Shawkat has not been spotted since his appointment, but his highly secretive lifestyle means that he's hardly mentioned in the Syrian media.

Still, the recent assassination of General Muhammad Suleiman suggests that the trail of deaths and rumors may have weight. The silence of the Arab media in Damascus on the issue - including the usually vocal correspondents from the networks al-Hayat and al-Jazeera - indicate that the issue is deemed too serious and far too sensitive to report.

Lebanese and Middle East affairs expert Nadim Shehadi of Chatham House says the rumors shed a different perspective on the usual stories.

"In answering the question of how strong or weak is Bashar Assad, my answer is that he is as strong as [former Romanian dictator] Nicolai Ceausescu when he met [Queen Elizabeth II] on a state visit in the early 80s," he told ISN Security Watch in Beirut.

"Syria will, like an authoritarian state, never have small problems. It will either collapse utterly or continue. That is the paradox of such a state structure - they are both as strong as they appear and as weak as they fear."

Syrian strength, but not stability

Al-Assad's engagement with the West and Israel is much more an economic necessity than a genuine desire for peace and openness. If al-Assad is successful in updating his economic model and finding alternatives, such as possibly vastly increasing gas exports to pay for the loss of oil-money, the regime will continue to strengthen its legitimacy in Syrian society.

In many ways, the Syrian state is at its strongest since the death of Hafez al-Assad in 2000. The opposition is weak and the country is diplomatically being brought back in from the cold. However, these factors should not be mistaken for regime stability.

Despite the Iraq war having strengthened dictators across the Middle East, al-Assad's regime is like any economically feeble and undemocratic state - a fundamentally fragile creature. One that is very vulnerable to events both at home or across the region.

Avi Shlaim on Israel and Syria

2008-07-14T13:31:00.002Z

Avi Shlaim is a renowned Israeli historian. Over the past twenty years he has taken part in the famous 'historians debates' over the course of Zionism, battling over what exactly had taken place in the bloody birth pangs of the Jewish State. Shlaim has been in contact with me in relation to a piece I am preparing for ISN Security Watch regarding the strength of Syria. With Olmert and Assad talking peace in Paris and preparing for War on the Golan I thought I would reveal some of his thoughts on the matter. Things change quickly in the Middle East and his attitude is pessimistic.

"Israel's strategy has always been to divide
the Arabs. This makes sense in war but for peace Israel needs a united
Arab world. The basis for peace is clear: 242 and the principle of land
for peace. It worked with Egypt and it worked with Jordan. In the case
of Syria Israel still prefers land to peace. This is the reason for the
deadlock since Madrid. The current low level talks in turkey are
unlikely to lead anywhere, especially with Olmert fighting for survival.
The American position is also unhelpful. Instead of engaging with Syria
and encouraging Israel to negotiate, they continue to isolate Syria and
to dream of regime change in Damascus."

Ambition and Uncertainty: France's New Security Policy

2008-07-09T10:01:00.002Z

Sarkozy's ambitions for the French military begin to take shape in an atmosphere of public uncertainty and unease.

By Ben Judah in Paris for ISN Security Watch (09/07/08)

French President Nicolas Sarkozy launched his latest campaign designed to force a rupture with the past on 17 June. In the first rethink of France's strategic aims in 14 years, the "White Book on Defense and Homeland Security" prioritizes intelligence gathering and network warfare designed to turn the French military into a 21st century fighting force.

These gains are intended to be paid for by steep cuts in the number of staff and bases across the country.

The plan also calls for the re-integration of France into NATO's military command structure, in exchange for a possible trade off of increased common European defense policies.

Such bold moves are causing a stir in Paris, while senior military commanders have come out angrily against troop cuts.

Bold moves forward

"We are abandoning European military leadership to the British, when we know their particular relationship with the United States," wrote the group of senior officers calling itself Surcouf - the name of a legendary French corsair who captured dozens of British ships in the Napoleonic wars - in an open and anonymous letter to France's right-wing daily Le Figaro.

The cutting of 54,000 military and civilian defense jobs, the closing of regiments, the postponement of a second aircraft carrier and the shutting down of bases across France to pay for high-technology and military reform has been anything but welcomed in the French leadership.

Labeling Sarkozy's plan "amateurish," Surcouf has argued that while the UK has understood that more troops are necessary to hold the frontlines where they are engaged, the decision to cut troops and harm morale at a time when the French military is engaged on many fronts is a desperate mistake.

The results of the stand-off between the military and the presidency has left the French in a state of confusion.

On 3 July, Le Monde added to the confusion by stating in an editorial that "nobody knows where such conflicts could lead." What had caused France's renowned newspaper to take such a sensationalist (albeit ambiguous) point of view was the dismissal of French Military Chief Bruno Cuche after an incident in which members of the public where harmed during a military parade due to military negligence. It was a move widely believed to be the presidency's attempt to restore order to the military.

Most Parisians are sanguine about the issue. The views of Gilles Cahoreau, a scriptwriter from the 8e arrondisment, sums up those of a large proportion of the French.

"It's impossible to know if this instance if we are seeing the mobilizing of networks and interest groups trying to defend narrow economic concerns or if they are truly acting to defend the national interest. I doubt they are aware there is a difference between the two however," he wrote.

Céline Forgues, 21, a student at the University Science-Po Paris, suggested that younger and more left-leaning people were more concerned.

"This is all about Sarkozy trying to break other poles of influence. He's drained all power from his ministers and now he's trying to do the same thing with the army," she told ISN Security Watch.

Atlantic ideas

Jean-Dominique Merchet, senior defense correspondent at Liberation and French strategy blogger, dismisses these public concerns.

"There is simply no strategic debate with these people. It's all about jobs. They are simply unwilling to let these vast amounts of money and troops go. They want new technology and no change to the existing system. And at the end of the day - generals must respect the president's wishes," he told ISN Security Watch.

"The old plans were still outlined for a Russian invasion of France and dated from the Cold War. This is ridiculous, especially at a time when wars are getting harder. The little affair in Chad - that ended with tanks, anti-aircraft attacks and helicopters. We need new equipment to deal with the increasing violence in such missions. There is very little alternative. […]"

Daniel Keohane, an Irish research fellow at the European Union Institute for Security Studies, argues that we should interpret the new strategy in many ways an adoption of Atlantic thinking.

"If I was British I'd be highly flattered by the latest French plans in the 'White Book,'" he told ISN Security Watch.

"The French haven't had a proper defense review since before the Kosovo war and the thinking contained in the proposals show that they have understood that the world has changed."

Interestingly, Keohane points out that the French had two options: either the German military option of a large but relatively unsophisticated standing army; or the UK/US option.

"We can see they have opted for this [latter] approach based on the focus on "network warfare" - making sure things can coordinate and speak to one and other on the battlefield."

Keohane points out that French procurement strategies are to be re-focused onto satellites, intelligence gathering, flexible transportation and first-class communications. In many ways, France is implementing the "Revolution in Military Affairs" which saw UK and US forces move toward a reliance on high-technology in the run-up to the Iraq and Afghan wars, with the added benefit of the experience those conflicts have brought to military planners.

Keohane believes that "the proposals outlined in the White Book are broadly good, taking into account what has been the accepted wisdom of top-class European military planners for the past five years."

However, he cautions, the issue is largely mathematical.

"Reforms save you money in the long term, but they cost you a lot in the short term. It remains to be seen if the French have done the right calculations in a field that is notoriously hard to estimate. The second uphill struggle they will face is one of institutional dialogue; of actually making the various distinct and competitive organizations you have today in the security domain communicate with each other and act effectively."

Sarkozy has bold plans for his new 21st century fighting force. He intends that instead of fighting slightly outside of NATO's command structure, following the ambiguous Gaullist maxim toward the US of "friend, allied, non-aligned," France will play a leading role and the heart of the western alliance.

Renaud Girard, a senior foreign correspondent and Professor of Strategic Affairs at Science-Po believes that "Sarkozy sees a family of nations in existence. The family of democracy, of France, the UK and the US."

Girard said Sarkozy also believes in a "world where you are instantly accountable for your own mistakes, by the media or terrorists alike, in a world where you are responsible too for the mistakes of your friends."

As such, Girard said, there is no place for Gaullist dogma and "it makes no sense to keep the vulgate of Chirac's policy going - that belongs to the era of great power blocs. No NATO standing forces exist as they did in the Cold War. France has participated in every major NATO mission and is leading some of them. It's a deeply symbolic, pragmatic and mostly cosmetic move."

French gains and losses

The question of whether Sarkozy has secured a good deal for France is causing the French great concern as the new strategy unfolds.

Professor Anatol Lieven of Kings College London, author and expert on Euro-American relations, sees the deal as highly beneficial to France.

"The new NATO structures do come with one enormous condition, which is that Russia does not once again become an enemy. If NATO has to plan for the possibility of a war in Ukraine or Georgia, then France's new forces make no sense at all," Lieven told ISN Security Watch.

"From that point of view, the French approach of selective cooperation with the US, supporting the mission in Afghanistan but opposing US calls for NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, does seem logical."

However, there is a self-limiting nature to Sarkozy's possible gains in strategic affairs.

The president's personality (something that has proved beneficial in certain cases of advancing French interests) may prove a liability during the French presidency of the EU.

The concept behind the trade off of rejoining the NATO command structure has been sold in Paris as resulting in a greater drive toward a common European defense and security policy. Shorn of any concepts that France might be acting as a rival to the US, by removing its ambiguous position symbolically through NATO and establishing excellent relations with the superpower, the French expected to achieve gains on European defense during their Presidency.

However, given the institutional and political malaise the EU is facing following the Irish "no" vote - which ruined Sarkozy's big idea of the Lisbon "mini-treaty" to replace the rejected Constitutional Treaty - there simply isn't enough political capital to make moves toward European defense in the near-future.

The UK foreign secretary came out on 2 July in favor of supporting French aims for a common security and defense policy, but given the weakness of Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government, such support will not be the rock-solid political will Sarkozy will need.

Keohane, for his part, expects a more incremental, but none the less significant approach to be taken.

"We can expect steps to be taken toward a joint-procurement list, joint-exercises and more joint training. What Sarkozy wants from the EU is a General HQ and a system to be put in place and a road-map to be put in place for the future. But we are only at a very early stage of the French presidency," he said.

Marc Semo, foreign editor of the French center-left French daily Liberation, views the main failing of French foreign and security policy being one of discourse.

"The problem is that nobody knows what France wants. You have Sarkozy's discourse for the Germans, for the Israelis, for the Russians, for the British and the Americans, but no overall sense of where the country is going. It's lurching forward by its own dynamic," he told ISN Security Watch.

"However, the paradox of France's current position is that given the excellent relations that Sarkozy's foreign policy adviser, Jean-David Levitte, has in the US and the recent strategic moves back toward an Atlantic posture, we are in a position to be the most pro-American country in Europe - one that could be extremely beneficial to France if Barack Obama wins, which is something Levitte has been anticipating for over a year."

With ambition and uncertainty, France is rebuilding its military capacity from a Gaullist Cold War posture to that of a high-tech, networked force playing a leading role within the Atlantic Alliance. The question remains whether or not Sarkozy will be able to actualize his promises and capitalize on his positions.

Iran War Watch: Heatwave

2008-06-22T15:43:00.003Z

The headlines on the 20th of June that the Israeli Air Force was had finished a mass rehearsal over the eastern Mediterranean, involving over a hundred cutting edge F-15 and F-16s, did not surprise anyone in the Middle East. The exercise had taken place in co-ordination with the Greeks, whose anonymous military sources confirmed to the international press they had been practising for strikes, dogfights, dodging incoming missiles and rescue missions. It is now clear that not only are people considering an attack on Iran, but they are now training in earnest. That is reason enough to worry. But behind the scenes in the Israeli press and amongst the US mandarin think-tank caste there have been a series of articles and reports published arguing that Iran is in fact far weaker than appears. The drift towards such thinking is alarming, as it adds credence to those who think they can win a war tactically without thinking strategically. A prime example of this the latest neo-con send-around by The Washington Instituter for Near east Policy. Amongst some of its recommendations are bombing the Iranian oil infrastructure to destroy the regime's financing.

Perhaps we are entering a new era. In the Middle East, the old assumptions that given the correct formula, you could unlock ‘peace’ has given way to a cynical pessimism and a grudging belief that problems are permanent features. Mountains, not clouds, on the horizon.

Chechnya: Book Review

2008-06-12T12:40:00.002Z

Trying to get your head round the Chechen catastrophe is something that even most of us interested in Russia avoid. An imborgilo of murders, contradictions and lies leave Russia's dirty war in the North Caucasus laregly ignored. This shouldn't be the case. The Chechen war has become the defining event for Russian culture in the past ten years, crystallysing post-Soviet imperial attitudes, violent behaviour, the FSB elite and distinctions of who exactly 'us' and 'them' are within the Federation.

Tony Wood's account makes for an excellent introduction into the quagmire. Rich in historical detail, easy to read and well argued, 'The Case for Independence' should be the first port of call for any understanding of what Russian's refer to as 'the Zone.'

Read Wood's work in the New Left Review by clicking this link. I shall a longer piece on whether or not I agree with Wood at some point in the near future. Please let me know what you think.

Auden: Poem of the Day

2008-06-11T21:50:00.001Z



Epitaph On A Tyrant

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets

Dolphins Commiting Suicide

2008-06-11T16:16:00.003Z

It appears Dolphins might also commit mass suicide. Depressing.

Iran War Watch: What is Bush Planning?

2008-06-11T15:24:00.002Z

George Bush is on what will hopefully be his last tour of Europe and he has made is views clear. "All options are on the table." Like with many things the President says - what that means is rather cryptic. It appears that the negotiations with the Europeans are the Administration's last attempt to build up a robust and goal-orientated mechanism to deal with Iran. It is likely to produce warnings, hand-shakes but little else.

The trouble is that they don't share the same goals. Bush and most Republicans want to stop Iran acquiring nuclear weapons full stop, whereas the Europeans and some democrats want to 'slow the clock ticking towards nukes down, whilst speeding up the clock ticking towards democracy.' Privately most Europeans think they can live with a nuclear Iran. It remains to be seen whether or not the Americans can. The US has fought hot, cold and prudent wars to prevent regional powers from dominating spheres of the globe. German in Europe, Japan in Asia, the USSR on every continent and then Saddam in the Middle East. Supremacy is for the 'Hawks' an ideological end in itself. It remains to be seen if that vision will endure.

Bush is putting two mechanism in place simultaneously - a diplomatic one and a military one. However the overriding strategy is that of fear. The idea is that the Iranians will back down either in the face of sanctions or strikes. This is bound to fail. The dynamic towards nationalism and glory as a way of justifying the regime is in motion in Iran and fear of the US only increases the Iranian sense of isolation, vulnerability and pride. It will only push them to increasingly hardline and aggressive leaders. We need a change of strategy.

Either we need to other Iran some kind of grand bargain. For instance excellent sources of mine can confirm that the Gulf States have been working behind the scenes for over a year to get Iran to accept either nuclear facilities in their territory or a strict international monitoring system and a consortium to manage them. Fear will not force them to accept these proposals. Instead we should examine what we could trade in exchange. Iraq is already lost to Iranian influence. It might be a place to start. This might not be the best of solutions. The fundamental myth of the Iranian revolution is that it will stick it to the West and American in particular. Another alternative, instead of guaranteeing the regime's survival would be a series of pacts and agreements with Israel and Arab allies of the US based on a cold-war containment strategy. If Iran does acquire nuclear weapons the same way the USSR did, containment might just work again.

The only alternative to these strategies is to continue to pursuing Bush's two failed strategies. And the diplomats along with the Generals will tell you that they just aren't working.

Muller: Poem of the Day

2008-06-10T21:18:00.004Z

Heart of Darkness Adapted from Joseph Conrad

by Heiner Muller

In the hard-currency-bar of the Hotel METROPOL

Berlin Capital of the GDR a Polish whore

A foreign worker is hitting

Up a very old man with a cold

Between the chapters of his lecture

About freedom in the U.S.A.

He snorts into a snot-rag and yells for the trash can

Still feeling pity for her difficult profession

I hear two travelling salesmen

Bavarian from the sound of it

Dividing up Asia: WELL I WOULD LIKE MALAYSIA

THAILAND KOREA TOO IS PART OF IT

WELL I WOULD ALSO PLAN THE CROSS-TRACK SYSTEM

FOR YEMEN THEN

THAT WOULD TAKE CARE OF IT

CHINA IS PART OF IT TOO

CHINA IS THE ONLY PROJECT THAT'S BEEN SOLD

In the elevated train ZOOLOGISCHER GARTEN

FRIEDRICHSTRASSE

I came to know two citizens of the GDR

One of them says My son three weeks old

Was born with a sign in front of his chest

I WAS IN THE WEST ON THE NINTH OF NOVEMBER

My daughter same age I have twins

Carries the inscription ME TOO

THE HORROR THE HORROR THE HORROR

Iran War Watch: Reasons to Worry

2008-06-10T13:45:00.002Z

Six months ago a trusted source close to the Administration at the Woodrow Wilson Institute told a friend of mine that "they're planning it, but it all depends on the American electoral cycle. It'll either be after the nominations but before the elections - or after the election but before the inauguration." Following the National Intelligence Estimate, most analysts decided that the case for strikes had been gravely damaged and was now off the agenda. Recent news and rumors suggest otherwise.

The leading Neocon Daniel Pipes recently stated that if Barack Obama wins in November, President Bush will "do something" to ensure Iran does not acquire nuclear weapons. He suggested that if McCain won, Bush would leave the decision to his hawkish successor. These may be words but looking at recent little reported moves causes for alarm.

Signs from the Middle East are ominous. Rumors that Israel has created an 'Iran Command' for a coming conflict and Minister Shaul Mofaz's recent threats need to be taken into serious consideration. The perilous situation of Ehud Olmert suggest that a lot of people in the Knesset could benefit politically from such a war. Olmert has tried turbo-peace with Syria and used war in the past as means of shoring up his position. Why should we no discount the idea that the thought has crossed his mind this time? If and when elections come in Israel, it is increasingly likely that Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud will form the government, will polls suggesting it could be one of the most right-wing in it's history. This will only increase the dangers of a war.

But the decision is not Israel's to take - but America's. General Fallon's resignation and the appointment of Norton Schwartz to head the USAF indicate that unhelpful generals who had made their stand against the feasibility of war clear, may be on the way out. There are now US warships off the Lebanese coast and certainly the amount of 'noise' about such a strike has surged in recent days. Revelations that the US has been practicing long-range bombing raids and the Israeli strike on Syria last summer left everyone in the region worrying. Some may have started to panic.

Iraqi leaders certainly seem to think that America is contemplating an attack as they just signed an agreement with Iran stating that their airspace would not be used in the event of a war. That seems like a pretty clear indication that though an attack is not imminent - it is being seriously planned. And that is reason enough to worry.

Robert Lowell: Poem of the Day

2008-06-09T23:02:00.001Z

Mouth of the Hudson

A single man stands like a bird-watcher,
and scuffles the pepper and salt snow
from a discarded, gray
Westinghouse Electric cable drum.
He cannot discover America by counting
the chains of condemned freight-trains
from thirty states. They jolt and jar
and junk in the siding below him.
He has trouble with his balance.
His eyes drop,
and he drifts with the wild ice
ticking seaward down the Hudson,
like the blank sides of a jig-saw puzzle.

The ice ticks seaward like a clock.
A negro toasts
wheat-seeds over the coke-fumes
of a punctured barrel.
Chemical air
sweeps in from New Jersey,
and smells of coffee.

Across the river,
ledges of suburban factories tan
in the sulphur-yellow sun
of the unforgivable landscape.

By Robert Lowell

For the Union Dead, 1964.

Zagajewski: Poem of the Day

2008-06-09T15:39:00.003Z

Old Marx

I try to envision his last winter,
London, cold and damp, the snow’s curt kisses
on empty streets, the Thames’ black water.
Chilled prostitutes lit bonfires in the park.
Vast locomotives sobbed somewhere in the night.
The workers spoke so quickly in the pub
that he couldn’t catch a single word.
Perhaps Europe was richer and at peace,
but the Belgians still tormented the Congo.
And Russia? Its tyranny? Siberia?
He spent evenings staring at the shutters.
He couldn’t concentrate, rewrote old work,
reread young Marx for days on end,
and secretly admired that ambitious author.
He still had faith in his fantastic vision,
but in moments of doubt
he worried that he’d given the world only
a new version of despair;
then he’d close his eyes and see nothing
but the scarlet darkness of his lids.

–Adam Zagajewski

Baudelaire: Poem of the Day

2008-06-09T15:29:00.003Z

La Béatrice

Dans des terrains cendreux, calcinés, sans verdure,
Comme je me plaignais un jour à la nature,
Et que de ma pensée, en vaguant au hasard,
J'aiguisais lentement sur mon coeur le poignard,
Je vis en plein midi descendre sur ma tête
Un nuage funèbre et gros d'une tempête,
Qui portait un troupeau de démons vicieux,
Semblables à des nains cruels et curieux.
À me considérer froidement ils se mirent,
Et, comme des passants sur un fou qu'ils admirent,
Je les entendis rire et chuchoter entre eux,
En échangeant maint signe et maint clignement d'yeux:
— «Contemplons à loisir cette caricature
Et cette ombre d'Hamlet imitant sa posture,
Le regard indécis et les cheveux au vent.
N'est-ce pas grand'pitié de voir ce bon vivant,
Ce gueux, cet histrion en vacances, ce drôle,
Parce qu'il sait jouer artistement son rôle,
Vouloir intéresser au chant de ses douleurs
Les aigles, les grillons, les ruisseaux et les fleurs,
Et même à nous, auteurs de ces vieilles rubriques,
Réciter en hurlant ses tirades publiques?»
J'aurais pu (mon orgueil aussi haut que les monts
Domine la nuée et le cri des démons)
Détourner simplement ma tête souveraine,
Si je n'eusse pas vu parmi leur troupe obscène,
Crime qui n'a pas fait chanceler le soleil!
La reine de mon coeur au regard nonpareil
Qui riait avec eux de ma sombre détresse
Et leur versait parfois quelque sale caresse.

— Charles Baudelaire

English Translations

French Social Utopianists: A Thought

2008-06-08T19:40:00.002Z

Engels famously described the origins of Marxism as "English economics, German idealism and French social-utopianism." Current academia is still wrestling with the Marxist legacy in the social-sciences and in historiography, whilst philosophers debate where exactly to place Marx in the pantheon. Since the '60 a vast corpus of work has arisen that seeks to come to terms with Marx as a either a perverted product classical economics or as a German idealist. However comparatively little has been spoken of him in relation to Engel's third element, French social-utopianism. The works of Fourier and Saint-Simon are mostly dismissed today as hallucinatory tracts. The Twentieth Century immunized us against attempts to build Utopia. This also had the adverse affect of causing us to lose sight of why the reasons most social- utopianists wrote. When Thomas Moore wrote his Utopia, its purpose was not present an imminently achievable society, but more to show the flaws in his own. Re-interpreting Fourier and Saint-Simon as vicious social critics and not hallucinatory prophets may shed light on the intellectual climate of the late Nineteenth Century. It may also help us finally come to terms with Marx.

The sketch is of a young Karl Marx.

Nightwalking: A Short Story

2008-06-07T02:07:00.002Z

Spiteful scars slashed her arms. “How did this happen to you.”

Brown circles ringed her eyes, she’d been walking the night.

“I was fourteen, and there was a razor, and I put it to my skin. And the pain, made me feel more alive. And I used to like waking up in my bed, soaked with blood.”

The sky was a dark brown, violent purple, lit up and illuminated. Street lamps ringed the roundabout, street cats howled and yapped and a nasty tramp walked by with a stolen bottle of wine sticking out of the pocket of his coat.

“It all started when I couldn’t sleep. I went out to smoke a cigarette on the pavement and a junkie started to talk to me. Since then, I go on these night walks. You see all the craziest stuff.”

A police car rattled past, sirens started to howl as they picked up the signal, to make chase. Foxes yapped, snarled underneath the train bridge. A group of rudeboys on the other side of the road are throwing bricks at the shining train line.

“Do you know they bombed everything along this route during the war, because it shone at night out of the black city. I said”

No cars are passing now, an old woman pushing trolleys with a face like a troll is coming this way.

“I know,” she said. The smells, the silence, the lights are beginning to go out in the tower blocks. Only one will stay on till four. I know, I watch these things.

“What are you looking for?”

There is no silence, everything hums, this is the white noise, the crackle of static, brown-yellow streetlight, of the city. Two stars.

“I can see things more clearly at night, when you’re in your room and just a pool of light is shining on a knife, like a puddle of light in darkness, shinning, You can see it more clearly. It’s like that with everything, she says.”

Her hair, red-brown, curling-straight, over old headphones. A helicopter passes overhead, my heart skips a beat. Shadows larger than myself, swirl over the train line. “They’re, there.” She says.

Third eye vision, pictures flash of an early childhood, frightened mother.

“Every family’s seen one. I can only say.”

We walk. The shops are closed; trash and needles litter the floor. I can taste the sorrow of the wind, Turkish men lurk in corners. Only a newsagent is open, like a cube of white light and chocolate.

“They always come up and talk to me, and confess, it’s almost as if I’m not really there. Almost like I’m a ghost…”she says.

We don’t need to talk, I know she sees what I see.

In an alley a man is a punching a prostitute.

‘You like it, you like it.’ Blood on the pavement spills in darkness, is black.

I can hear her screams from far away. Shadows and light roll round the corner, the clattering shaking of the bus. There is nobody on the bus, just the grease on the window where someone fell asleep, a strand of gold hair and a half eaten piece of chicken. She rolls her head back, and lets it drop over the top of the seat. I seem to see her eyes roll back into her head. She hiccups. We don’t talk, the music beats gently from the headphones before cutting out.

“I can feel, such pain. I can feel their pain. It cuts and glides through me,” she says.

I look out the window, at the main streets. I catch sight of the few Arab cafes, which never close. The ones where the pizzas sit behind glass for weeks, going cold and hard under electric yellow light. A group of guys are standing around and shouting. Leather jackets and jeans. The bus rattles; stops, bleeps and the lights turn off. There are crowds on the main street; everyone’s from somewhere else. Different languages. I’ve spent my life on these roads, by I still don’t know the stations names. A group of Italians pass, a police dog on a leash barks at an old man in a baseball cap. Christmas lights, big stars and adverts, cover up and commercialise the sky.

“There’s so much going on, there’s something, another level. Everything Is Happening in this city. It’s got seven million souls, some of them live in hotels, some of them live in holes.” She says.

A corner turned, and it’s another sphere another zone, of quiet squares and old houses, sleeping people and shiny cars. We stop. She swoons.

“They’re everywhere, they protect you too…. Hold my hand.” She says, breathes deeply.

The dead streets, and the silence now. Odd shops, obscure widows. This is another level, as if we have walked through glass. Rats crawl and scatter, tiny lights flash above doors. Far a siren, police chase, ambulance. Fading out.

“I’m looking for death. I want to walk the edge.” She says.

And I know she’s not lying. Busy streets now empty, rubbish piling up, the colour of the sky screwed up into a pitch of blackness before it starts to lose its shades.

“I, know. I feel them too.”

A knot ties and unties inside. An acheing, rush.

“I want to show you this place.” I said.

We continue, and then we’re under the train bridge. By the station. Next to the surviving record shop.

“Do you feel it?”

It drags me down, like another shade of bleakness is over my eyes, a heaviness sombreness sleepiness. It begins to mingle and swirl inside.

“Yes,” she says. “I’ve always felt it.”

Then we walk out, a few metres and stop. Light crispness, lucidity and clarity.

“That’s a plague pit,” I say.

Her pupils swell, glisten. Above a growl and a gush as the first plane passes. Her breath close, blows thick-wet-hot and cold, she is close to me. A white van pushes along, and the city begins to breath.

“I wasn’t even waiting for the sun to come up,” she says.

We walk, as men jump out of stations and cars. Begin to clean up as the light grows brighter. We stop, there’s aren’t many around just yet.

“I feel your pain, this longing to touch the faces of the dead, that’s why you wander the night.”

She looks at me, as a friend might gaze. Her cold face moves close through air, to mine, as a lover’s could. “Breathe. Let death fill down and spread. Breathe.”

The Angel of History

2008-06-07T01:41:00.003Z

Though the Jewish quest for the Messiah marks a final harrowing point to Walter Benjamin's life's work it is worth contemplating his Ninth Thesis on History before drawing conclusions about his message.

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

Benjamin sough to expose in the Arcades Project, by examining the time in which modernity was at its most fragile, to understand the different possible cultural trajectories it could have taken. Each velvet sofa, gilded gallery or sculpted signpost signaled to him not just the past but many possible futures. In today's political and social-science discourse a sense of determinism lurks beneath the surface, especially concerning the behavior and attitudes of 'modern man.' Seen as a rational self-optimization machine, constantly seeking his logical self-interest, the consensus cuts out the possibility that we could think it different ways or be influenced by different factors. Benjamin believed that as modernity developed and the relationship between its economic base and cultural superstructure became more complex, a mechanism was set in motion that could ensure stability by which all commodities where rendered beautiful and all beautiful things commodified.

At the end of his long essay, Paris Capital of the 19th Century, Benjamin applied Freud's theory of the dream-state to modernity. A dream uses all possible devices and motifs to create a perfect illusion in order to keep us asleep. Dreams go as far as to incorporate elements of reality in order to trick us. His final call to apply to sense of awareness the surrealist sought to apply to ever aspect of life in order to be able to re-imagine them, is a message that should not be forgotten. Self-awareness may never pause the Angel of History, but she may teach her to better make use of her wings.

On Rabbinic Thought

2008-06-05T15:05:00.002Z

Walter Benjamin, at the height of World War Two turned to Hassidic mysticism, as it seemed to offer an answer to the enormity of irrational violence that surrounded him. His last published words would be these.

"We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter."

We ask ourselves questions in the ways that we hope will best provide the answers we are looking for. Different cultures have developed different analytical and questioning strategies that reflect their situations and the goals they are trying to achieve. The differences between ancient Greek and say, Confucian methodologies being prime examples of this. Having stated the obvious, I wish to address the eastern European Rabbinic approach to thought that emerged during the late Middle Ages and was further extrapolated since the emergence of Hassidism. It stood in stark opposition to the Ashkenazic enlightenment, known as the 'Haskalah.' Those thinkers posed themselves questions, adopting the scientific method that were designed to produce demonstrable improvements in quality of life for their communities. However, the Rabbinic thought-mechanism for theological and personal-political reasons sought to preserve the existing communities as far as possible. They thought in order to freeze.

Today the end results of both gaols can be measured in terms of how secular and orthodox Jews, live, dress and love. However, the point of interest is observing the strategy that the Rabbis adopted. In sharp contrast to Catholic or Islamic conservatives, who shun questioning - they flooded the mind with as many questions, contradictions and possibilities as possible. Thus it became clear that the only possible answer for those adopting this strategy was either total acceptance, or madness. Perhaps it is time to address the fact that far from being uniquely liberating, questioning can be subjugating too. By turning the world into a question mark whose sole answer was God, Judaism actually created the most totalitarian answer to the question of modernity of them all.

Rabbi Nachman's Radio: A Fable

2008-06-04T16:02:00.002Z

Rabbi Nachman of Breslau was asked by the Miller, who was well verseS in Torah but knew nothing of Talmud, why does it say ''Elohim," the Holy One Blessed Be He, ' that is in the plural, I hear it "'-im'.' There are many Gods then? The birch-weavers and the pattern-cutters, the bird-chripping drunk who sleeps by the station and the rotten-touth fool from Chernobyl overheard and began to shout. "'We have worshipped Him for years as one - without ever listening to his name." They were all shouting at once, so loudly, that Rabbi Nachman could not understand their Yiddish. It sounded like Cossack howls or Romanian. "'Listen,"' Rabbi Nachman who always noticed the smallest thing even be it as tiny as a mite in a scroll, "'Listen." He spoke.

"'There are many voices of God, all speaking at the same time."' He bit his finger-nail. And ate a bit of the white bit. "'You hear one in one place, another over there, somtimes two or three. He is infitnite and we can hear so few of his voices, but to us it seems already like a infinity."
Eliezer Nachman, an electrician cum-Rabbi of the Hamburg Technical School, replied. "'It is like frequencies. Some have AM, they are on FM, it blurs in between. It is all." He sniffs a little. "'One white noise, though."

But nobody could understand how God was like a Radio. And the Jews all became confused. They talked and yapped, scrolled and torn pieces of each other hair out. Soon all of Volhynia and Podolia were infected by the disease. Beady men who had said "'Elohim" their whole lives ate bacon-sarnies on the Lower East Side and in Russia, where things are always different, a head-scarfed Rebbetzin pulled the wings off a butterfly. Now that was just unnecessary.

Teepee: A Short Story

2008-06-04T14:09:00.002Z

I am drinking in the Turf, where I always come after finishing an essay. As usual, my drinking partner is Henry. He’s a Blues Footballer from Cheltenham, a snide Wyckhamist, a second year Classicist, a tireless rake, a banned OUCA member, a future Petrochemicals ‘recruiter’, a swallow-it all pillhead and an unflinching liar. He sits opposite me in the library, under a shelf dedicated to ‘Soft-Musculation’. He wears a violet Jordanian Kaffiyeh made of fine cloth that juts out of the collar of a Christchurch hoodie.

A year ago Henry went to Cornwall to stay in a teepee with his friends. His girlfriend was angry with him. So she cheated on him. With his best friend and on his birthday. They even did it up the arse. The day after he had comedown from his 2CB trip she told him all about it on the phone. The line crackled. It was raining.

It was morning, dawn and stoned-sleep sighed in the drizzle. Henry began to walk to the village. He went into the SPA and brought three packs of Dunhills, two bottles of whiskey and a lighter. He was wearing his cricket jumper. MDMA dribble was coming out of his nose. He came back and spoke to his friends one by one, inspecting their consolations. In his teepee he found his Nike sports bag, his ex-girlfriends black g-string, his Ketamine folded in glossy Elle paper and his cricket bat. His friends sat around a campfire and smoked skunk from a bong. They had thrown a beer into it that soon boiled. Then exploded everywhere. They watched him from a distance and listened to their I-pods. Henry drank the first bottle of whiskey. When he had finished he took her pants, smelt them and wiped his nose into the fabric. He sat there all afternoon and drank, sang, cried and began to whack down the tent-poles with his Lords bat.

On that second morning his friends saw smoke rising from the wreck. Stoned and gashed, he came out staggering, hauling his sports bag and wielding his weapon. A class-mate tried to stop him. And he punched him right on the nose. The plastic fabric of the teepee was burning, releasing a stinging noxious gas. Their eyes all watered. And the fire was as bright as a blank white screen. Henry walked out of the encampment, threw the string into the flames and began to dissapear.

The Irony of Victory

2008-05-16T03:59:00.005Z

Interpreting the consequences and implications of the ideological victories and defeats that ended the Cold War.

This belief is widespread and already deeply inculcated into the discourse held by the intellectuals. The debate is no longer merely localised to specific schools or journals, or even restricted within a hemisphere, it is a planetary conviction taught by technocratic and academic inculcators, repeated with conviction by the wielders of capital and the political controllers of society. The assumption is that political decisions and society’s debates are taking place in a discourse where ideology has been removed, or at worse minimised to a negligible component. The ideologues are supposed to be febrile historical curiosities that have finally been removed from the debating chambers to safer, air-conditioned glass cabinets, within poorly visited museums and ill-illuminated libraries. This is a crude and dogmatic mirage.

Rather the intellectual debate, once so ferociously typed-out for publication in constellation varying from Commentary to the New Left Review has now all but dried up. The savage political contestation has given way to an unquestioned consensus, which is ironically publicised as the third way. A geo-political event, the dramatic collapse of an Empire, was interpreted as a singularity of philosophical dimensions. As the fall of the Roman Empire was of such dimensions it produced transformation of the metaphysical subject matter of the ideologies and belief structures of late antiquity, our political and philosophical debates have all been written in response to the political narrative of victory, whether consciously or not.

Reading the ‘victory culture’ as philosophy in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, where it is hailed that the fall of the Soviet Union has marked “the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government,” the impact is clear. Victory curtailed an ideological debate that was far from having worked itself out, and as a result turned a vibrant discourse of competitive attitudes to policy, economics, society and culture into an inherently ideological and un-questioned orthodoxy. The discourse is now so ideological it refuses even to recognise itself as such. That is not to say that the invasion of Iraq or the privatisation of British Rail, where self consciously ideological decisions – they where expected, natural, almost conventional expressions of the consensus. That is the sense in which we now live in a world without ideologies, because we live in a world without the questions to reveal them. Everyone knows that when the mirror is broken you can no longer see your own face.

There are only small shards, each glinting off a broken and glossy part of the picture. We have lost our ability to see the bigger picture. This may be hard for some of us to accept, but periods of creativity and intense political, ethical and philosophical questioning are the exceptions that prove the rule in human history. Stable, confident societies are unquestioning – because they can afford to be. The Roman Empire scarcely innovated, but copied and re-sculpted Athenian and then Judeo-Christian ideas. Those ideas had emerged in the intense struggles of the Peloponese and the Palestinian hills that forced people to grapple mentally and renovate ethically. The enormity of the Chinese empires is only matched by their inability to innovate. The China of paper, gunpowder and fire-works is one over-run by savage Mongol overlords. Once the Ming were rid of them, they cast off too that brief ephemeral flourishing with a Great Wall. Medieval Europe, was an immobile centuries long stretch marked by prayer and joust and little else. Only does the Black Death, by killing over 60% of the European population changed attitudes towards death forcing an ethical re-evaluation that kick-starts the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. We have just emerged from a period of intense stress and corresponding reflection. The breakdown of the long Victorian peace, that tore to shreds a globalised market and a European imposed values system was a period of unbounded horror for our recently deceased. The impact of World War One, World War Two and the fear of impending and annihilating World War Three exposed the bankruptcy of a long unchallenged ideological and ethical framework, in which people thought, loved and worked.

Stefan Zweig had already noticed that an ethical transformation was underway in 1942, as he wrote the World of Yesterday, far away, driven to Petropolis, somewhere in Brazil. This is what he saw. “When today I see young people come out of their schools and colleges with their heads high, with happy faces, when I see boys and girls in free, untroubled companionship, without false modesty and false shame, at their studies, sport, and play, coursing, over the snow on skis, competing classically with one and other in the swimming pool, racing over the country in pairs in automobiles, akin in all forms of healthy, carefree life without any inner or outer burden, the it seems to me that not forty but a thousand years stand between them and us who, in order to procure or to receive love always had to seek shadows and hiding places.” When he understood that they would be dying too. It didn’t matter where, Stalingrad, Hiroshima, Auschwitz or Nanking to him, he committed suicide. In Petropolis. The peace came without peace of mind. Brinkmanship, Berlin, MAD and Vietnam. Every few months the next war was coming, from Cuba or another crisis. And as the ethical crisis deepened the ethical renovation accelerated. The next generation were exactly eighteen to twenty-three years old in 1968. Twenty years into the Cold War.

Street riots, acid-circles and guitar, hair, all everywhere were the markers of a new liberationist spirit. They chose Mao and Castro as their idols. Not because they agreed with them. They knew nothing about them – but because they were not White, not part of two bastard child civilisations of the Enlightenment. The West and its cancerous Soviet twin. Politically it can be mistaken for a flash in the pan. But we still broadly have sex when we want, smoke weed and raise children in a post-Victorian way. Quietly, but profoundly, the ethical transformation was complete within a generation. The France of De Gaulle and the USA of Eisenhower, those Generals, is completely different from the countries we live in today. Where sex sells children’s toys and mixed-race, mixed-sexuality, mixed-belief, mixed-identity is the norm. The aim, for most. Measure this gulf simply. Go talk to your grandparents, watch their marriages, their timid visits to the empty Church and ask your parents what it was like for them. The little struggles of their lives.

The shift is one thing. The intellectual struggle that occurred was one with the mirror, in universities and in reviews. The mirror-image of the enlightenment on the Eastern Bloc and the might have been Nazi you and me, drove thinkers to re-examine and re-evaluate all values they could address. Foucault and Rawls, Derrida and Strauss, Left and Right, were real and opposing, debating. Forcing people to make choices, question identities and work things out about themselves. This intellectual current did not complete its flow. When the end of the Cold War shattered the mirror the collapse of an Empire was interpreted as a singularity of philosophical importance. It ushered in the End of History and unreflective and intellectual barren approaches in economics and the social sciences.

While the main drive of innovative philosophical and intellectual activity in the Cold War had been digging and deconstructing, staring from the premise that the presumed is evidently a fallacy, the new thinking begins with a presumption. The idea that human beings are rational, optimising agents, Homo Economicus of a sort underwrites the conceptual framework of classical economics, contemporary linguistics. It seems vulgate A. J. Ayer is the order of the day. By presuming so we produce de-historicized and de-humanised theoretical paradigms. This is the kind of thinking that led to the invasion of Iraq and the Shock Doctrine in the former Soviet Union. It kills people. It impoverishes them. That’s what happens when you refuse to understand them and instead place your faith in a hallucinatory hope that all is manageable… finally, that codes and dialectics, rules and diagrams underscore it all. This is anti-humanism of a new, insidious and sublimated kind. Maybe the ideal is the computer. The influence of the scientists who designed the missiles that won those long Wars, are hovering over us all. Funny coincidence it might seem that we want to build tower-blocks shaped like circuit boards, malls gleaming like silicon chips, ‘centres’ boxed and nodulous, grey like machines.

If you came to university expecting to engage in the kind of discourse that existed forty years ago and found un-reflective, un-contemplative and un-challenging grind it isn’t because you picked the wrong place but because you were born too late. It would have been the same forty years after the Lyceum. Ironically, this is the result of Victory. We are engulfed in a society and an age where the vanishing of the totalitarian twin means we have no perceived and pressing need to shore up civil liberties, social justice and financial structures. The memory fades of what militarism means and we pass quietly from Cold Wars to Pre-emptive Wars. Twice, already. Liberty having become conscious of itself, loses that awareness, discreetly and thus deadens.

Russia's Opposition: Long Game, Long Odds

2008-04-10T08:39:00.002Z

With oil prices and Putin's popularity sky high it may be too little too late for a chance to play out a long game to undermine the Medvedev presidency. Ben Judah reports for ISN Security Watch.

By Ben Judah in St Petersburg for ISN Security Watch (10/04/08)

Last week, Russia's fractious and divided political opposition gathered in Moscow and St Petersburg to try to set aside their differences and concentrate on building a united front to restore democracy and raise awareness of the deteriorating human rights situation in the country, but it may be too little too late.

The Russian opposition has been in a state of crisis due to its inability to effectively stand up to President Vladimir Putin's rollback of press and political freedom, let alone even challenge the transition to his hand-picked presidential successor, Dmitry Medvedev.

Today's opposition is the fractured remnants of what were either political forces in the 1990s, a strange collection of punk-fascist movements associated with youth culture and recent media-focused and vacuous civil rights organizations. It would seem that Russia has regressed from being a country where political disputes were part of everyday life in the 1990s, to a state were being interested in politics is like being interested in monarchy.

The democratic parties there were doubly hit during the build-up to the parliamentary and presidential elections by the regime's manipulation of the law in order to cut them out of the contest, massive fraud, unfair access to the national media and a country-wide mood that saw their popularity collapse.

Neither the Union of Rights Forces, a right-of-center liberal party, nor the left-leaning Yabloko managed to pass the threshold necessary to gain seats in the Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament.

The mainstream non-Kremlin-backed democratic candidates were all blocked from participating in the presidential elections. The result is that the parties are in financial meltdown, with serious leadership disputes between the generations building up in Yabloko.

Fractious arguments about whether the party should try and act as a lobbying influence on the government or a government in embryo have led to acrimony between the two major leaders, Grigory Yavlinsky and Ilya Yashin.

In forthcoming elections, short of a financial miracle, it seems unlikely that more than one democratic party will be able compete. Mergers are actively being discussed, but more probable is that one or more will simply fold.

A democratic front?

Garry Kasparov, the renowned chess player, cut a sorry figure standing in the lobby of the Hotel Anglia in St Petersburg. Crowds gathered on the historic St Isaac's Square outside, but not for him or anyone from the dissident conference. The electronics company Samsung was distributing free balloons to delighted masses of people, while the only group paying any attention to the opposition was a squadron of visibly bored and chain-smoking riot police.

Speaking to ISN Security Watch, Kasparov was defiant, both about the chances of rebuilding Russian democracy and about his own relevance. He insists it is not too late.

"I wouldn't be so pessimistic. The window of opportunity is open and though time is slowly running out, more and more people are coming round to our point of view.

"Advocating your ideas is not a one way street: It depends on the needs of society. The steady decline of living standards [...] is turning a lot of people against the state propaganda machine, when people begin to experience a rise in living standards they will see the necessity of our ideas," he said.

Kasparov recently entered the minefield of Russian politics. According to his press secretary Ludmilla Mamina, "He entered due to a sense of pressing moral urgency, hoping to apply his grasp of strategy to helping his country. The Other Russia coalition was founded in order to bring in all different kinds of groups under an effective banner.

"Though we have received criticism for bringing in groups such as the National Bolshevik Party [a punk-fascist party] we have strongly moderated their position. We do this because we need another Russia."

However, Other Russia has received much criticism for being sensationally hostile to the ever-popular Putin, and suffered a serious blow when it was abandoned by Mikhail Kasyanov, leader of the small People's Democratic Union. Kasparov's aloof and combative style, along with his ties to the West, have not endeared him to the Russian public. He is widely suspected of trying to further his own personal ambitions above all else.

The gatherings of democratic forces in Moscow and St Petersburg at a conference entitled "A New Agenda For Russian Liberal Forces" must be a turning point if the opposition is going to pose a serious challenge to the regime during the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev.

Riven by personal disputes, theoretical wrangling about policy and financial meltdown, the urgency of establishing a unity coalition to defend human rights and restore free and fair elections is essential if the parties are going to survive the next few years in a meaningful shape.

Kasparov insists that "the mood is optimistic, we are making progress and I'm happy with what we've agreed on."

Denis Bilunov, director of the United Civil Front - the social movement lead by Kasparov - believes that the steps being taken represent a real turning point for Russia.

"The hope is that after these conferences we will be able to establish an alternative parliament for all the forces locked out of the political process. Our estimates are that roughly 15 million people support the opposition, with optimists going as high as 30 million," he told ISN Security Watch.

"An alternative parliament could convert in time into a real national institution and not a political party. I am actively looking forward to the disputes we will be having and all that they will do to build civil society in this country. More importantly, it represents a historic chance for the Russian left and right to make a bold declaration of faith in democratic principles."

Ekaterina Vinokurova , a 20-something journalist and press secretary of the Russian Democratic Party, has pessimistic views that reflect much of the attitude of young Russians who have positioned themselves against the regime.

"My position and that of my party is that we either have to liquidate or unite, we urgently need new leaders, new organic party structure and internal democracy within our movements. The simple question is who are these fratricidal leaders, where do they come from and who chose them? These are not the structures that create real democratic parties," she told ISN Security Watch.

"We have an opportunity that as the generational transition plays itself out, the last cohort of leaders trained in the USSR will be retiring when the new generation reaches the right age to be able to act politically. We are breeding a generation of apathetic, individualistic young people in Russia that feel turned off by the undemocratic structures of current opposition parties and dislike the old fashioned leadership," she continued.

"If we are to bring people into the fold we need to get involved with all kinds of aspects of the arts, social movements, internet culture as quickly as possible. This is how we can begin playing a long game."

The long game

Ordinary Russians feel even more disenchanted with the opposition, with frequent accusations that they are out of touch, self-interested intellectuals.

Dmitry Koryakin is a traveling salesman whose opinions capture a vast swathe of the Russian population.

"I want respect, I want it from the foreigners, I want it from the immigrants, I want it from the police. But more importantly I want clean water, cheap food and better services. The 'democratic parties' don't seem to be offering either of those things. Who are these intellectuals anyway who are having their own private argument with the government and claiming the people are behind them? If they want to help they should start coming up with plans for better hospitals then," he told ISN Security Watch.

Being unable to advertise their views on mainstream nationwide television channels or spread information that is potentially damaging to the government to a citizenry that was almost wholly born and bred in the USSR and in Russia's disastrous 1990s has left the opposition with only one option, according to Maxim Reznik, head of the St Petersburg branch of the left-leaning democratic party Yabloko.

"We are a political and social movement that concentrates on what we think are the most pressing problems facing us, those being the erosion of human rights and raising awareness of that fact. However, you have to realize that in Russia we have to start by convincing the elite before we can spread our ideas to the population. This is the beginning of a long process for us."

The assumptions guiding the unity conferences last week were that the regime's popularity has peaked along with oil prices and that inflation - especially rising food prices and the continued decline in infrastructure - would soon begin to rapidly undermine the Kremlin's grip on things.

Speaking to opposition activists the mood seemed to be one of confidence that an economic crisis was imminent and even joyfully so.

A source close to Kasparov expressed personal distaste at his insistence that "the worse it gets for the country, the better it gets for us."

There appears to be little idea of what to do when the awaited economic crisis arrives and none of what should be done if it does not. For now the opposition strategy is focused on building a new front where decisions can be taken in the long term, but at the present moment no common long-term strategy exists.

Seeds of change

Oleg Zykov, a senior lobbyist, president of the Moscow Medical Academy and member of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation, which monitors parliament and scrutinizes legislation, believes that working toward improving the lives of his fellow countrymen should be done by trying to achieve better governance and social standards aiming to build a civil society and not another political rupture.

In an interview with ISN Security Watch he said the problems lie deeper than the opposition would have us believe.

"Post-totalitarian society is deeply based on its members' paternalism, when people strongly believe that it is the authorities who should, and even must, solve their problems, which vastly extends functions and powers of government bureaucracy," he said.

"This is costly and ineffective. A simple change of personalities at the helm, whether they be loyal, pro-Kremlin figures or opposition leaders, will not alter society's mental pattern. The way to improve this situation is to promote social initiative, being a fundamental basis of civil society, which is now only being developed. Contemporary Russia is facing evolution in understanding the role of social initiative."

The average Russian tends to lean toward his position. The Other Russia's plan for an opposition alternative parliament has generated as much laughter as interest while many of the other groups are dismissed as games for rich kids and fantasists.

With support for the regime running so high and the average citizen so fearful of a return to the chaos and social collapse of the 1990s, it seems unlikely that this politically exhausted nation will throw itself into another adventure without serious reasons.

One of the most crucial threats to Russia's transition to a stable model is the estimated 70,000 neo-Nazi skinheads in the country (and their numbers continually rising) and the fact that all major Kremlin-backed political parties espouse varieties of soft nationalism, with political extremism fuelled by anti-immigration and declining living standards for the poor.

If the country's democratic potential is to be tapped, time, patience and the ability to compromise and build up real grass-roots support and responsive political party structures is essential. Given these circumstances, the Russian opposition needs to play a long game, at long odds - by making improved awareness, governance and civil society construction its priorities.

The Coma Patient : A Short Story

2008-02-26T17:41:00.002Z

The Coma Patient: A Short Story.

Though the next day I wasn’t on duty, I found myself going several times just to check on him. His skin had yellowed and jaundiced into the colour of old wallpaper. His flesh had taken on the texture of peeling paint, as patches of fat where turning brown round his eyes, speckling his cheeks like ingrained dirt on a surface-top.

The patient had not been washed for days, and the grease shone under the electric light. The bleeps and rhythms of the machines, the soft neons of the electric screens, so familiar, soothed my disquiet. In the corner, a greying, dying solider, hauled himself to the window to smoke. Their story is my story, it belongs to each of us as completely as it does to us all.

The respiratory ward was emptying, we had seen three patients leave ‘giving up on paying their bills’ during the long, dry afternoon. A suffocating wind was choking our ventilation systems with dust and the porters where shirking duties This was what Dr Herut had nonchalantly informed me on the way in. I pitied her, I pitied the place. But I especially pitied Herut not because she was intelligent, but because she still cared about patients the way doctors used to.

“There are rhythms and seasons to sickness and death,” this is something your learn as you wrinkle is the white washed and tiled rooms where you can smell the edge of life. More in mid-week, strangely enough. I often wondered what day the coma patient would “give up on paying his bills.”

The charts where steady, as always, his fleeting pulse quickened as I touched his vein-crossed hands. For over a year, he had been lying there, somewhere, turned over regularly by the nurses to stop the skin-rot creeping up his back. I bent forward, wiping the sweat from his brows. His eyes opened briefly, unfocused, the pupils wide. He screamed sometimes, but most of the time he sobbed. It is a little known fact about coma patients, perhaps wilfully forgotten, that merely because they are unconscious does not mean they are either silent, subdued or still.

Doctor Herut would calm the other patients by saying he was not crying from his nightmares, but neurones and chemicals where randomly firing off as his brain slowly collapsed. I knew this was taking its toll on her, driving her slowly to that point I crossed in the army, when life and death suddenly become, one and the same.

Dror asked during one of these lectures, as the wails echoed down the hall, why the patient did not laugh, but only howl. Dr Herut didn’t reply for a moment, her eyes fixing on an freshly emptied bed. The blueish-gloom hid her eyes from us, but not her words – “Ariel would not laugh.” We dispersed without words to our files and patients after that.

A small child had lain in the bed opposite the patient a few weeks back, with severe if routine pneumonia. He would sit bolt upright, clutching a piece of wood with his brothers name etched on it. Hassan, I think it was. He shook almost uncontrollably when we tried to talk to him, dish plate eyes reflecting white gowns and glasses. He spoke only a few words our language, and when he spoke at all his lungs where so damaged there was no point trying to listen. The cleaners called him the ‘brown-sick thing’ from across the line, and I wondered if they stole his meals occasionally. His brown vomit stained the sheets irrevocably, and the smell brings bile to my mouth even to think of it.

The patient shrieked uncontrollably during the child’s short stay. He barely stopped until the white cloth had been draped over they little thing’s head. The gurling, the harrowing screams, oh if you had heard them, ceaseless day and night, they grew so intense that even Dr Herut showed signs of an impeding crack-up. It was then the nurses started saying, “Ariel’s not in a coma.” I heard mutterings in the staff room from some of the more religious doctors, especially the blue-eyed survivor Dr Weisz that this was a punishment from Hashem.

That evening I went back, I could see him now in the blueish-light, the echoing sobs. His eyes where wide, no, I knew this was no coma. The lights clunked off and the fans and pumps sighed and collapsed with a thud as I flicked the switch. I walked slowly, passing the reception desk and the security guards smoking in the courtyard into the warm night, so that I might look into the darkness between the stars. The closest thing to the desperation of broken men. Blessed be Oblivion, for she knows no sins.

Sergei Eisenstein

2008-02-26T17:29:00.002Z

"Perhaps the most synoptic view of Russian culture under Stalin is provided by the development of the cinema, an art medium with little history prior to the Soviet period. The innumerable movie theatres large and small that sprang up across the USSR in the twenties and thirties were the new regimes equivalent to churches of the new order – its chronicles of successes that promised bliss – were systematically and regularly presented to the silent masses, whose main image of a world beyond that of immediate physical necessity was so derived from a screen of moving pictures rather than a screen of stationary icons."

– James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe

Developments in the darkroom reflect, wrapping as they do around the lens of the this cinematographic pioneer, capture in cut-scenes the trudge towards the reinterpretation of a word. It is the march from the cameraman of a new revolutionary world-culture to the visual-crafter of the affirmation of a new ‘rossiski’ state-sponsored identity. This concept of being ‘rossiski,’ close but distinct to the word for an ethnic Russian identity, ‘russki’, is an expression that conveys an all imperial idea of state loyalty and belonging, the word for a culture that crosses racial and religious divides, uniting nationalities as varied as the Tartars or the Jews to Russians. The idea that Stalin, in his attempt to create a new mass culture for socialism in the run up to the Second World War abandoned revolutionary forms and ideals and chose instead to focus on an amorphous fusing of Imperial and old Russian cultures in a Soviet context is one that Geoffrey Hoskings has made his own, and can be seen reflected not only in the architecture of the Seven Sisters but above all in a mass-movie culture.

Michelet once said that the French Revolution really began not with the storming of the Bastille on July 14^th, 1789, but with the symbolic re-enactment of the storming a year later. In this manner one could say that the Russian Revolution – as a symbol of liberation was born not in the turbulent events of November, 1917, but in the subsequent scenes of pictorial pageantry and mythic recreation, one that was brought in reels and along agitprop-trains – and not by the by the bayonets to the Soviet people. This is where Sergei Einsenstein’s Battleship Potempkin and Ten Days That Shook The World enter the people’s story. Those clips of the street-fighting and the famous running-wave attack on the Winter Palace are our imaginative, ingrained images of the Revolution, used and over-used again and again in documentaries and across the Planet – more often than not without an asterix to remind us they are pure theatre. Yet these pictures are more deeply burnt into the psyche in Russia than abroad. Journalist John Kampfner once told men that when researching a piece for the London Times on the last survivors of that year 1917 in the early nineties, he would mostly find that the veterans ‘memories’ actually consisted of internalised moments of Einsenstein’s epic. Kafkaesque. Quite a way for a Director to be remembered.

However Eisenstein was not merely a Revolutionary as an Icon maker. As a disciple of the fanatical Movie-Eye clan, where Leo Kuleshov pioneered documentary accuracy, precise chronology and above all out-door scenes and monumental compositions – he would bring that verve forward, carrying as far as to Ivan the Terrible. The breakthrough at Mosfilm in the early tensely creative period of Soviet Cinema before Stalin turned his expertise to culture, was to be found in a unique, but now widespread montage. The moving from scene to scene, jumping from the steps of Odessa to the rebellious ship or from Ivan and swirling shadows to Boyars secrecies, was a momentous breakthrough in Cinema. Indeed, as is the case in thinking about so many Russian artists from these years, the deeply expressionist scenes in Ivan the Terrible where light and shadow inter-play or the depictions of the Teutonic Knights in Alexander Nevsky, oddly reminiscent of the Seventh Seal, are radically ahead of their time. The use of landscape in Alexander Nevsky was something rarely matched in Russian cinema until Mikhalkov’s nineties production Urga, but these aspects are not what it is striking about Einsenstein’s films. Like is moving procession of Icons across the Ice, a short and stringy-haired Jewish guy with a penchant for self-congratulation, created in these movies the unforgettable and iconic images that not only presented the Russia and Revolution, but defined her to herself. The shift in content from Battleship Potempkin and Ten Days That Shook The World, via an abortive screenplay devised with Isaac Babel on collectivisation, ending up at Alexander Nevsky and Ivan The Terrible, is the shift in what it actually meant to be ‘Soviet’ from revolutionary to ‘rossiski.’ Who is it though, making this mind-control? Maybe Stalin, laughing, was talking about himself when he said ‘artists are the engineers of the human soul.’

"On the stage an actor plays before hundreds of persons, the film actually before millions. Here is a dialectical instance of quantity increasing over the boundary into quality to give rise to a new kind of excitement."

– Vladimir Pudovkin

Anna Akhmatova

2008-02-23T18:57:00.002Z

Lot’s Wife

The just man followed then his angel guide

Where he strode on the black highway, hulking and bright;

But a wild grief in his wife’s bosom cried,

Look back, it’s not too late for a last sight

Of the red towers of your native Sodom, the square

Where you once sang, the gardens you shall mourn,

And the tall house with empty windows where

You loved your husband and your babes were born.

She turned, and looking on the bitter view

Her eyes were welded shut by mortal pain;

Into transparent salt her body grew,

And her quick feet were rooted in the plain.

Who would waste tears upon her? Is she not

The least of our losses, this unhappy wife?

Yet in my heart she will not be forgot

Who, for a single glance gave up her life.

- Anna Akhmatova, adapted by Richard Wilbur

It brought disquiet to the noble Gorenko family when they unearthed that their daughter, Anna, then only seventeen, was about to publish a selection of poetry in a St. Petersburg literary magazine. Disgruntled and cloying her to ‘maintain appearances’ her father beseeched her not to “befoul a good and respected name,” and choose instead a pseudonym. His daughter agreed, but perhaps in spite she chose to write as Akhmatova, with its dissonant sonority and its distant, oriental, Tartar flavour. Yet it was not then that Gorenko’s name exited history, but just over a decade later, when a war and a revolution washed away their landed influence in its unforgiving tides.

The arrival of that balding man at Finland Station would change the course of history, and with it the trajectory of that Russian, but above all Petersburgian culture that had been accelerating with such intensity in the run up to that moment. To touch the memory of that cultural efflorescence, think of those evenings where Mayakovsky, “I’ll play the flute of your spine, on the street 22, good looking, not one of you;” would bang his drum as another futurist entered the smoke-filled chambers of the Stray Dog Cabaret, as Mandelstam would recite verse, swaying Rabbincally for effect, in the same place where Akhmatova would pass indiscreet verse to her lovers. This was not just an atmosphere but a movement made glued together with a young energy so intense it would take a full decade for it to slow down. So it is ironically, that the art-scene of the Soviet Twenties could be mistaken for a triumphal unleashing of talent in a socialist context, as it was for many decades in the West, and not the withering and battering of what was left under the most extreme of circumstances. In Cultural Amnesia Clive James melancholically notes that “had things gone differently the cafés of Vienna, that so dominated the early Century, even those of Berlin, would have been surpassed by those of St. Petersburg, which might have gone on to culturally dominate in the manner that Paris would in the early post-war period.” Akhmatova knew this only too well as she and Mandelstam’s widow, Nadezhda tried to keep the tradition alive and above all attempt to become the moral anchors of a society adrift in lies under state-terror.

The USSR would send Mayakovsky disjointed and suicidal, Mandelstam wind up dead whilst Akhmatova, the master of the short, perfectly phrased tender love poem would end up writing epic poetry as a bare witness to what she was living through. It is here that she ended up in the Russian literary canon, as the poet of cosmic suffering and emotional transcendence, not exactly what her father might have imagined, or her for herself when she started writing verse that was intensely feminine, sensitive, uncannily exact in capturing the delicate shadings of emotion.

Joseph Brodsky argues that “more than any other art, poetry is a form of sentimental education, and the lines that Akhmatova readers learned by heart were to temper their hearts against the new era’s onslaught of vulgarity. The comprehension of the drama betters chance’s of weathering the drama of history.” Here we can picture the historical significance of A Poem Without A Hero or Requiem, one almost medieval, or dark-age, they were repeated, mouthed around dinner tables in tightly intimate circles, memorised and repeated until they fused in with the interior monologue of a silent generation. Akhmatova not only kept the fragile Petersburgian tradition alive with her, she also through her poetry transpired to hold the dignity of a nation a float by hoping to become through verse a poet of suffering. However suffering does not lead to good art, suffering blinds and often destroys, therefore what she achieved was a way of creating through her own self, a prism into which personal suffering could be comprehended, absorbed and passed across intact to others. Akhmatova’s poems achieve something very rare, her art does not commit a weird ‘theft’ – they hold out a hand to those in distress, like a friend’s might.

Olga Carlisle, the westernised scion of an émigré family, described in her collection of portraits Poets on Street Corners her homage to Akhmatova. “I had the impression that I was being initiated into a poetic rite. She shut the door so as not to be disturbed even by the discreet household activities of her hosts, and sat at a tiny writing table, placing me across from her. Reciting from memory, her eyes half-closed, her head slightly bowed, she seemed to listen intently to the music of her own verse. She usually recited three or four poems in succession. Her voice was muffled yet melodious, and her reading had the incantatory quality of many Russian poets readings: it emphasised the sounds rather than the meaning of the poem. The sound was slightly monotonous yet paradoxically, the poems took on a marvellous life as she recited them, with a strange stinging immediacy.” The fusing of the sonority Asiatic and Slavic folk ballards, their manners of delivery and chant-like qualities in the classical context of Acmeism is a large part of what brings about ‘this stinging immediacy.’ Watching Akhmatova deliver verse on old recordings, recalls both the melodies of Siberian throat singing and the recitations of Nabokov, PBS and the BBC made a generation familiar with in the West. This is the Tartar, the distinctively different element of Russia, separating her from Europe.

Her strict metres provided the skeleton of the sonic momentum, however aged they seemed in comparison to the more modern free-form poetry, Joseph Brodsky argues that she chose them “as the more she did so, the more inexorably her voice was approaching the impersonal quality of time itself, until they merged into something that makes one shudder trying to guess – as in her Northern Elegies – who is hiding behind the pronoun I.” However, as her images take a more classical turn in a Requiem, her ‘Я’ manages through its impersonal intimacy to convey the grieving and foreboding of a generation. This is what gained Akhmatova her popularity and sage like status, to the extent that D.M Thomas notes that she was not alone in suspecting she had “witch-like powers, capable of inflicting great pain, at times joy” but that Requiem “belongs to a select number of sacred texts, which like American Indian dream-poems but for far more sinister reasons were considered too momentous, too truthful to write down.”

Akhmatova’s masterpiece, her Poem Without A Hero, which begins as a hideous returning masquerade of her dead, which she addresses for it was the only way for her song not to turn into a howl, is filled with images of mirrors, murmurs, culture’s dashed and inverted icons and guilt. D.M Thomas argues that A Poem Without A Hero begins with the reckoning of a very personal event, the suicide of the poet Knyazev who killed himself when he realised the great symbolised Alexander Blok was a love-rival. Thomas is insistent Akhmatova sensed a “demonism in Blok nature” and in his symbolist cult that celebrated violence, acceleration and an exhilaration in the destruction of forms. She did after all say that “his eyes were so astonishing, still they compel my memory, And I thought, I must be careful, Not to look at them at all.” As if she was looking into the future’s frenzy.

Poem Without A Hero becomes through the reader’s experience of murmurs, confessions and hallucinations of lost friends of 1913, an attempt for her to deal with her role in a youth movement in which all where anticipating ‘violence’ and some where even relishing its coming, like so many fellow Viennese. As the lines roll on, and the poet is evacuated to Tashkent during the siege of Leningrad, with “her dry eyes lowered, Russia walks before me to the East,” this verse ties personal tragedy with that of the land, drawing both Tsarist and Soviet epochs of her life in its inspiration.

Akhmatova’s poetry is the cultural link between the pre-Revolutionary writers and those that followed, her classical lyrical structure filled with this new world, her childhood spent walking through the gardens of Tsarskoe Zelo, where Pushkin had youthfully wandered, linked through words to the queue outside the prison of Requiem. Pushkin was her closest friend she never met, and as he was to her, she was to become through the samizdat and the spoken word to Russia’s silenced generation.

•

VII

With such an elegant Satan

-So colourful –this motley ancient

Caliogostro, you can’t resist.

It goes against his belief

To mourn the dead, for grief

And conscience do not exist

VIII

Well…it doesn’t smell of a Roman

Carnival. Over the closed domes a

Melody of Cherubim

Trembles. No-one is hammering on my

Door, only stillness watches

Over stillness, mirror of mirror dreams.

Especially when our dreams imagine

All that must still be enacted:

Death everywhere – Our city burnt through…

And Tashkent in flower for a wedding…

Very soon Asiatic wind will tell me

What is eternal and true

Anna Akhmatova, from A Poem Without A Hero

Osip Mandelstam

2008-02-21T01:35:00.002Z

Insomnia. Homer. The tight-rigged sails.
I’ve read the list of ships – half-way, at least:
That long parade, that crane –flotilla once
That rose and sailed beyond the land of Greece.

A cry of cranes to pierce an alien shore,
You kings all crowned with heavenly foam –
Where are you sailing? What would Troy mean,
Achaeans, if Helen had stayed home?

Homer, the sea…and love, that moves us all.
What’s left to hear? Homer is silent, fled –
And the wine-dark sea recites and roars,
Thunders hard and wild against my bed.

– Osip Mandelstam, adapted by Paul Schmidt

He was “a little Jewish boy with a heart full of Russian iambic pentameter,” a mouth full of ridiculous dreams and an eloquent tongue for phrasing them – back when he first arrived in St. Petersburg. His early childhood had been spent in Warsaw and remarkably, given the strictures of the Tsarist order, his parents managed to leave that Judaic chaos of the Pale of Settlement and make it to the Imperial capital. So it was as a son of ‘Peter,’ and not a member of the Yiddish Writers Club, he would live to die as. Imagine the young Mandelstam, walking through the forests of collandes, through the geometry of “that so very artificial city,” maybe singing along to himself or playing with words as if they were clay, and see him as a jumped-up little man stuck in a paradox. Those of ownership, pedigree and belonging. For one hand Mandelstam could lay claim to the Russian language, as his very instrument, to the songs and souls of the whole city whilst at the same time being denied the right to them. Like his far flung contemporaries James Joyce in English or Paul Celan for German, Mandelstam was naturally cut out of the language he felt was the ‘one pure voice of art,’ by his very nose, ears and name. It may be called the ‘modernist’ paradox, one where an sense of estrangement to the language produces in racially creative expression. This force that George Steiner identified as working on Franz Kafka and Theodore Adorno saw influencing Heinrich Heine can clearly be seen in the poetry of Mandelstam. This is how he crafted his place in the St. Petersburg Acemeist scene, who were orientated in a very similar direction to T.S Eliot or Ezra Pound’s version of modernism.

Mandelstam’s inventiveness was not merely limited to his craftsmen-like eyes, ones that could be “wrapped and wrapped around Schubert, like a pure diamond,” but surges from the images and ideas he weaves together. Some poems are oddly reminiscent of Robert Lowell, another poet obsessed by history who wove new and old stylistic techniques into one. Joseph Brodsky describes the emotional affects of reading these poems as a “nostalgia for a world culture,” and indeed this very Jewish and deeply Russian hope, blending together images of Ancient Greece, Christianity East and West to the beats of the steppe is what makes poetry cycles such as Stone or the Ovidically named Tristia so intoxicating. If read aloud, as it demands, the recitor can almost feel a Deplhic quality overtake him, like what could have been is choosing his words, so carefully.

Lines such as these from 1918, are not only pieces of a ‘world literature’ but shot through with History, and an anguish not only personal but All-Union in its dimensions.

Who knows when the times comes to say goodbye,

What separation we are to bear
And what for us cockcrow shall signify
When the acropolis burns like a flare,
And why, at the new daybreak of life,
When the ox is ruminating in his stall,
The herald cock prophetic of rebirth,
Should flap his wings on the town wall?

Within Tristia and other verse is the rebelliousness of the insider-outsider of the colonnades, or as Marshall Berman might suggest “evocative of a St. Petersburg radicalism that refused to die.” Mandelstam, like so many other scientists, workers and many small minds was a revolutionary in his own way, in the old way, that was devoured by a revolution that demanded that the ‘new man’ be an unthinking and obedient genetically-engineered Soviet super-worker. Where Mandelstam in his unique way represents all those Russians that truly made up the fizzing spirit of the cultural ‘Revolution’ from below, it was the image of the practically sado-masochistic Stakhanovite worker that the ‘Revolution from above’ was determined to mould its citizens into. This was to be a paradox he could not overcome.

As the Russian Twenties roared and it became clear that Alexander Blok had been painfully wrong to figuratively place Christ as leading the Revolutionary masses, Mandelstam began to see more and more his friends die and the dream life he and his wife Nadezhda had hoped to lead was reduced to a communal flat, ration cards and repression. Unlike so many others, he didn’t stop, but wrote the deeply condemnatory Leningrad. But he still didn’t listen, but wrote verses like this: “his cockroach moustache is laughing, about him the great, his think-necked, drained advisors. He plays with them. He is happy with half-men around him. They make touching and funny animal sounds. He alone talks Russian."

Those were recited in a cramped, probably brown and stuffy soviet ‘apartment,’ were never written down and memorised so as not to be forgot. But that was crime enough. It was here that Mandelstam began to personify another All-Union phenomena, that of exile, deportation and slavery, but this is the stop that Nadezhda picks up, scrabbling his poems together and mumbling them out over and over, in a struggle to keep that prism alive. But that is another story. First it was exile to the black earth region, but Stalin’s ‘murder-obvious’ thriller ended up outside Vladivostok, where the poet collapsed. He was on his way to Magadan, the Soviet Auschwitz of Kamchatka. Evgenia Ginsburg describes her memoirs Through the Whirlwind how on these death boats that departed Russian’s furthest city to the camp, throngs of starving ‘birdlike’ peasants who had never seen the ocean before throw into the other-worldly lights near the Pole would notice the curvature of the Earth – and scream. They believed they were being taken to another Planet. In some sense they were.

Mandelstam narrowly escaped those gold-mines of death. As he was dying in some termite hole of a quarry-camp he tasted the ironies of art, perhaps of fate and confessed to a fellow inmate of that great prison; ‘My first book was Stone, so it seems shall be my last.’ The prisoner found his Nadezhda a long time after, and told her. If we ask did Mandelstam die meaninglessly, then the answer can only be yes. However he may of shown us how to die, in one of those poems his love memorised in Voronezh about a certain Jewish musician, “where are you going, it’s all the same, Alexander with love of music, for you its not a shame to die, on a peg like you’re raven-feathered cloak, to hang.”

Leningrad

I’ve come back to the town I know by heart -

In my veins, like the swell of childhood sickness.

You’re back? Then take your medicine:

Fish-oil, slick, lights tracks in the canals.

Take a long look: In December dusk

The ill-reflecting asphalt stains the sky.

I do not want to die. Not yet, Petersburg.

My number’s in your phonebook, not up yet.

I still have some addresses, Petersburg,

To find the faces of the dead, the gone.

I live in a backstairs walk-up, the doorbell hurts,

It rings inside torn out by roots.

All night long I wait for friends to call;

I shake like handcuffs at the footsteps in the hall.

– Osip Mandelstam, adapted by Paul Schmidt

Andrei Platonov

2008-02-20T18:34:00.004Z

“Now that we have from the archives so many letters written by ordinary Russians to Pravda and Stalin, we can see that they often expressed themselves in a manner reminiscent of Platonov. He articulated the mood of workers and peasants, their frustrated and fearful utopianism, better than any other writer.”

Geoffrey Hoskings, Rulers and Victims: Russians in the Soviet Union.

Andrei Platonov was from a village near Voronezh, the city to which Mandelstam was to be initially exiled. He was the son of a metal-worker, one of ten children and an engineer. At any rate a normal proletarian guy who would become a regular engineer. Apart form the fact that normal guys don’t write like that. In his hopes for the revolution and his sensibility to its transformative effects, his attitudes are far closer to those of the average enthusiastic inter-war Soviet citizen. Platonov had hoped that “proletarian art will be outrageous. We grow out of earth, out of all its dirt, and everything there is on earth is in us… Out of our ugliness will grow the world’s heart.” He was to be bitterly disappointed as the hideous extreme of Tolstoyian realism, Socialist Realism, would come to be implemented from above as the Stalinists moulded a mass neo-imperial or ‘rossiski’, culture through soviet iconographic cinema, the blaring of false statistics from megaphones and the omnipotent glare of Lenin from the statues, the signposts and the ubiquitous portraits.

What Platonov in his reaction to the Revolution captures is what Walter Lacquer calls the ‘Red Generation’ “whose youth and idealism coincided with its construction, whose defining manhood experiences was to be the war, only to age, cynically and bitterly into immbolism like the state.” Platonov stories are filled with scientists and technicians, proletarians ploughing up the world. A few elderly women dotted across the former Soviet Union bare the name Rem, named after the an acronym for the ‘Homeland Electrical Management,’ and they were named by men such as these. Platonov shared with Lenin the belief that electrification of the Russian countryside would transform life and allow man to finally take control of his own destiny, a belief he fused with a conventional and deep mysticism. Workers like Maltsev in The Fierce and Beautiful World lose their sight only to regain it, seemingly under the unheard and incomprehensible orders of a science may is set to unlock.

However, as Platonov aged and the state began to do things he would never have wished for even in his most sordid fantasies, his stories took a darker turn. In the Foundation Pit workers are struggling to build a new ‘All-Proletarian Home,’ eagerly anticipating that as soon as it is finished they will all be able to abandon their old homes and move into this wondrous structure. However the project, uncannily like the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow, or the whole USSR itself turns into a fiasco, and a deadly and unrealisable one at that. After a little girl dies in the foundations of the new 'home', the reader is left facing the agonising pain of dashed utopianism unable to rise up to the unreachable, only driving itself further into the dirt. Dzhan, where a man returns to ‘build socialism’ in his abandoned Central Asian valley only to find his people have lost all sense of language or memory, is another story that in the power of its metaphor, a reductio ad absurdiam of the Soviet project. It is another story that continues to obsess contemporary Russian writers since Platonov re-discovery. Victor Pelevin, by far the most popular Russian novelist around, likes to think of himself as a writer in search of a metaphor for the USSR, whereas in-fact all the man-released rocket stages, the trains going nowhere and the nations of moths and flies is just an attempt to pick up where Platonov ended.

Joseph Brodsky in his 1984 essay Catastrophes in the Air argues that not only does Platonov achieve a closeness to Soviet hearts incomparable to other writers of the era, but that he achieves this as he is the only writer to have continued down the Dostoevskian route, instead of like almost all Russian writers opting for Tolstoy and his hyper-realism and removed, intelligently omnipotent narrator. Brodsky slurs the continuation of this tradition of having eventually, through Chekhov and lesser writers, having created the barren catastrophe that was Russian literature in the late Soviet epoch. Dreary and unflinchingly, monotonous in its pursuit of detail and accuracy, and therefore automatically Socialist Realism. Brodsky argues that in daring to grapple metaphysical conflicts he creates a new, terrifying and living alternate reality, Platonov’s work is the true heir of Crime and Punishment and the Brothers Karamzov.

However for Brodsky this is not the limit of Platonov’s triumph. He argues that “Platonov speaks of a nation which in sense has become the victim of its own language which turns out to be capable of generating a fictitious world, and then falls into grammatical dependence on it.” The messianism of the metaphors, images and symbols unleashed by the Revolution and locked within language itself are what Platonov’s 'utopia turned prison’s' walls are made of. His language thus takes on a quality of its own, eerily out of time, omitting and including these keys images at will before inverting them, obeying rules seemingly Platonov alone new the code to. Russian, a language into which ambiguity and uncertainty are built into its very syntax, is thus turned into a hushed, steady and unknowable voice of a suffering humanity. It re-defines a storyteller’s human-ness through words, and with it thus our own.

Platonov’s voice marshals surging, confused feelings in a reader’s heart, in which the terrifying and the unknowable, are one and within the tender and the practical. The Potudan River with its cold mimetic unity, hauntingly sung voice and cosmic energy packed tightly into a simple story of the fear born of love, is not only Platonov at his best. It is literature at one of its greatest heights of understanding, close to what some would call ‘truth.’

•

“On the return trip we travelled the same way: Maltsev sat in the driver’s seat, while I stood up, leaning over him and holding my hands over his. Maltsev had already become so used to working in this way that I only had to exert the slightest pressure on his hands and he would sense exactly what I wanted. This man who had formerly been the complete master of his engine was trying to overcome his loss of sight and feel the world around him by other means, so he could work and justify being alive. On some quiet, straight runs, I walked away from Maltsev altogether, and looked out of the assistant’s place. We were already on the approach to Tolubeyev, our regular run was finishing satisfactorily, and we were arriving on time, and drove up to the signal under full steam. Maltsev was sitting there quietly, holding his left hand on the reverse lever: I was watching my teacher with a secret hope…

“Cut down on the steam!” Maltsev said to me.

I said nothing, my heart pounding inside me. Then Maltsev stood up from his seat, put his hand on the steam valve and closed it.

“I see a yellow light,” he said and pulled the break lever toward him.

“But maybe you’re just imagining, again, that you see the light?” I said to Maltsev.

He turned his face toward me, and began to cry. I walked over to him and kissed him.

“Go on, and drive the engine all the way now, Alexander Vassilievich: now you can see all the lights there are!”

He drove the train to Tolubeyev without my help. After work was over, I walked with Maltsev, and we sat there together all evening and all night. I was frightened of leaving him alone as if he were my own son, without any protection against all the sudden, hostile forces loose in our fierce and beautiful world.”

Andrei Platonov, The Fierce and Beautiful World

Historian H.

2008-02-20T17:16:00.002Z

Very rarely historians themselves can become as elusive as their subject matter, nowhere more so than in dealing with the murky war on the Russian peasantry. In conversation with Robert Service, author of a critically acclaimed Stalin biography, one such oddity revealed himself:

“His name, I can’t remember, I think it was H. I first ran into him at a talk in London about twenty years. He was all bedraggled, his clothes were filthy and he had a bit of beard. Clearly one of those men who have no interest in living a comfortable life at all. And he was an American. He came up to me and began to explain how he had spent the years since the War wandering around the northern RFRSR, the Russian bit of the Soviet Union, recording what was left of a peasant culture as it vanished. I was very hesitant about inviting him to give talks at first. How had he managed to do that? To wander loose across that landscape? I still have no idea. Maybe he was spy. Maybe something stranger. But still. We invited him and he gave these wonderful lectures on Russian peasants, the life at the bottom, the folklore, the culture, what it was really like. He never wrote anything down. Not a bit, but what he would insist was that the end of the Soviet peasantry had not come in the ‘30s during collectivisation, because even thought Stalin had battered down the peasantry to their knees, he left the old village structures intact. The end came later, under Khrushchev. He razed countless villages and created these huge mega-farms, uprooting whole regions and finally breaking the backs of the country people. H. – of, if only I could remember his name, he kept insisting this that we have let our understanding of what happened over there be subliminally marxified. Isn’t it ironic that so much of our understanding in the West about the period actually turns out to be based around facts the Soviet leadership themselves were announcing as truths.”

Perhaps we should remember Lenin’s own theory of History, that he who commands the present, controls the past, and he who controls the past, conquers the future.

Isaac Babel

2008-02-20T16:03:00.003Z

“The Soviet Union represented Russia’s crisis of messianism. It was the state form in which Russians’ sense of being a chosen people worked itself out into a reality. It is true that the deity doing the choosing was not God but history itself. It is also true that the messianic impulse was not uniquely Russian, but also Jewish. The Soviet Union in its energetic early phases was a Russian-Jewish enterprise, and the later exclusion of Jews from its role of honour profoundly changed its nature.”

Geoffrey Hoskings, Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union.

It is almost as if Mandelstam had found Isaac and named him Babel, but he was born with that fitting name, circumcised and raised in Odessa, the sea-port city where a flourishing Yiddish and Hebrew culture bruised alongside babbling throngs of Ukrainian peasants, Romanian street hawkers, Greek traders and proud Russian manual workers, all of whom were coarse in their distaste for his kind. He grew up speaking some Yiddish in an semi-assimilated home, but as he studied Hebrew and went on to become a great Russian writer, one of the first Russian words he would have learnt was ‘pogrom.’ This Slavic stem means lighting, but the word was uttered to speak of the raiding massacres, mobs or lynchings that regularly struck Jewish communities in the Russian Empire. Sometimes state-sponsored, sometimes spontaneous, Isaac Babel grew up on plain where murder came unexpected like the thunder.

By the turn of the Century, the great vanished masses of Ashkenazi Jewry where in crisis and ferment. The population was booming inside cramped ghettos, where living standards could barely rise at all, as all the while persecution and Slav nationalism accelerated. Nobody wanted the unbearable situation to stay the same and vast numbers wanted to change what being Jewish actually meant. Zionist leaders such as Ben Gurion and Golda Meir came from these same backgrounds as Trotsky, Kamenev and Zionviev and shared similar ambitions. To transform the Jew into a ruthlessly modern man through a connection to the earth, machinery, atheism and socialism. The only difference between these two audacious hopes was scope, whereas Zionists hoped to build a new Jewish State in Palestine through the value of labour, the Jewish Marxist Revolutionaries who flocked in disproportionate numbers to join the underground movements, hoped to transform the whole of the Russian Empire into a zone where nationality, religion and deprivation where abolished through a march to Communism. Doubtless, it was not just the Jewish origins of Marx that saw him give birth to a creed that gave life and energy to the ancient Jewish idea that history has a purpose that can be actualised through deeds, but it was to this shinning and obscure light that young men broke with their fathers and flocked to the Revolution. To rescue themselves from Judaism through the redemption of the world.

Isaac Babel is the writer for these fervent early phases of the Revolution and the Civil War, to a degree vastly superior to Ivan Bunin or even to Mikhail Bulgakov’s White Guard. Oddly echoing the life-stories of Vasily Grossman and Andrei Platonov to come, he covered the drive of the Red Cavalry into Poland for the Soviet Press, and like a visceral craftsmen placed like all that couldn’t be in the articles in his masterpieces, the two-dozen short stories that snap-shot this chaos he moved through.

Like the later Yiddish writer Isaac Bacheavis Singer, Babel’s prose crackles with a metaphysical horror and harrowing uncertainty, but unlike Shosha or Enemies: A Love Story the greater plot is left wide open, as History still was. The figures moving through Babel’s works are mostly Jewish men, achieving through glacial belief an awe full self-affirmation through violence, as they not only throw their lot with the Revolution, but become its very breathe moving across the steppe. Men like General Tuckhachevsky, the supreme Commander of the Red Cavalry, and of course Jews like Trotsky, Kamenev and Zionviev. What grants Babel’s prose a place in the pantheon is that it makes a grand stylistic breakthrough, that distinguishes it so much from the ultimately orthodox conclusions of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or War and Peace by Tolstoy, the two traditions that together dominate Russian literature to this day. Babel creates a new form of deeply ambiguous narrator that reflects the great hopes and deep fears of the moment by exposing its harrowed, pulsing morality.

But it was not for this reason alone that Babel was spotted by Maxim Gorky, who according to Stanford’s Gabriella Safran, was searching for a writer who could paint Jews are part of the Revolution, violently aware and totally unlike their Talmudic fathers. In doing so Gorky found us a writer that serves not only to explain the frontlines, the ambiguities and the blood of the revolutionary wars but serves as an insight into the ‘new’ Jew. For ultimately the USSR would fail to deliver to its Hebraic citizens, where today in Israel, Zionism has for all its faults by its own measure succeeded. Ironically Isaac Babel has become not only an insight into the mentality that gave birth to the IDF, but the writer who best captures how a whole segment of Russian society rose to the Revolution only to be betrayed. He was shot in interrogated in the basement of the Lubyanka, then shot in cold blood. During torture he is said to have confessed to the false charges raised against him, but none of it mattered by then, nothing at all.

•

“The girls, having placed on the floor the bandy legs of simple cows, coldly observed the virility of a Semite worn to a shadow. While I, who had seen him on one of my nights of stray wandering, began to pack the scattered belongings of the Red Army soldier Bratslavsky into a trunk.

Here everything was dumped together – the warrants of the agitator and the commemorative booklets of the Jewish poet. Portraits of Lenin and Maimonides lay side by side. Lenin’s nodulous skull and the tarnished silk of the portraits of Maimonides. A strand of female hair had been placed in a book of the resolutions of the Sixth Party Congress, and in the margins of Communist leaflets swarmed crooked lines of Ancient Hebrew verse. In a sad and meagre rain they fell on me – pages of the Song of Songs and revolver cartridges. The sad rain of sunset bathed my hair, and I said to the youth, who was dying in the corner on a torn mattress:

‘Four months ago, on a Friday evening, Gedali, the junk dealer brought me to your father, Rebbe Motale, but you were not in the Party then, Bratslavsky…’

‘I was in the Party then,’ the boy replied, scratching his chest and writhing in fever, ‘but I couldn’t leave my mother.’

‘And now, Ilya?’

'In a revolution a mother is a minor episode,’ he whispered.’

- Isaac Babel, from the short story the ‘The Song’ in the collection Red Cavalry

Nostalgia for the Twentieth Century

2008-02-20T15:29:00.004Z

A nostalgia for the Twentieth Century seems as hard to justify as it is natural to feel. However we all know it is hardly a feeling of loss that the young sense as we draw further away from the bloodied-mud, bombing raids and rationing queues of yesterday. It is a nostalgia for empathy. As a generations dies we are losing a link to those who managed to turn their experiences into a profound interrogation of being and death. This is why I have decided to paint a sequence of portraits of Eastern European artists whilst that connection can still be felt, before what they lived can no longer truly be understood. Drawing on extensive conversations with the poet Alexander Nemser and historian Robert Service, these pictures are far from complete, nor do they claim to be original, but present themselves for what they are, recapturings.

The Filipino Monkey - Just Fact or Sinister Fiction

2008-01-17T08:40:00.000Z

A collaborative effort by Schneider and Judah

The timing could not have better. With George W. Bush in the middle of his Near East tour drumming up support for sanctions and possible military action against Iran – a naval incident occurred in the Persian Gulf. In the flash point an American naval convoy of three ships were harassed by a group of Iranian speedboats that drew menacing close to the US ships, before dropping ‘suspicious boxes’ into the water. When the story broke, the Pentagon released a video file with accompanying sound file, which contained an odd sounding almost robotic voice was heard menacingly announcing ‘you will explode in a few…minutes.’ Everyone presumed the message was coming from the Iranians. The news-channels reported it as a direct threat from the naval unit – just as the US Navy had announced it as. For the President and those around him favouring military action against Tehran this was capitalised on immediately.

However no sooner had the Pentagon released its video-tape of the incident questions began to be asked. Why was it several shots collaged together and amongst other inconsistencies, how could the threatening voice sound so unlike an Iranian officer, if even a human being – radio allowed? Tehran quickly responded by releasing its own clips of the incident. They are a single piece of footage, with a life-jacketed serviceman sounding quite unlike the menacer going through the usual maritime protocol in a business like manner. Yet, in Washington the threat from Iran had rapidly been talked up with Admiral Mullen, the Chairman of the JSC remarking the incident stressed the seriousness of the situation.

But the suspicions did not go away. It was then announced by the Pentagon that it was possible that the Iranians might not have been behind the Dalek sounding threat at all. They opened up the possibility that it might be the ‘Filipino Monkey’ – a renowned “heckler” who has been interrupting radio signal signals and abusing ships for years. Strangely enough, a ‘renowned heckler’ who is almost completely unmentioned on Google News, Google Scholar or Google Blogs before the 6th of January. Rather a poor showing for a ‘renowned heckler.’ Yet ‘Filipino Monkey’ does throw up some interesting if few and far between finds online. A Russian sailor mentions he received abusing hecklers of ‘Filipino Monkey’ whilst at sea. A Portuguese sailor also comments on the same abusing chant off the coast of Angola. A marine blog nonchalantly states that abusing calls of ‘Filipino Monkey.’ Interestingly the diverse and vast pools of marine commentators fail to mention the ‘renowned’ Filipino Monkey in one location or very much at all.

However there is a piece to pick up on. Four articles where published in the late eighties in the American press mentioning a mysterious radio-jacker who in a ‘sing-song voice’ humourfully abused ships in the Gulf and even broke into a tense exchange between US and Iranian ships – to scream ‘Iranians your going to get it now.’ He is noted in the scarce and never first-hand reporting for a strong dislike of the Islamic Republic. So nothing in either tone or attitude like the ‘Filipino Monkey’ that fills the press today. It is important to add, however, a certain website, hoaxipedia, takes all this very seriously (if it can).

Just for the rest of us – the "Filipino Monkey" remains a deeply suspicious, legendary, or perhaps in this occasion fictitious. Either we’ve missed a serious amount of information or the Pentagon has got a lot of explaining to do.

Is this case similar to this one?

Facing The Storm: Re-Thinking European Security

2007-11-23T00:47:00.000Z

We must be prepared to face the storm. The acute challenges facing European security have not been as great since the height of the ‘second phase’ of the cold war in early eighties, whilst the institutional architecture of defence has either failed to adapt or is fundamentally inadaptable to today’s challenges.

The combination of an unwillingness in most European states to take defence spending seriously, increasing ideological differences with the United States and the pressing issue of its reliability as a friend and ally, the unfeasibility of taking European integration further given political opposition and institutional unwieldiness for the time being in an era of renewed danger is leaving EU citizens at risk and its elites directionless and unsure where to turn.

The immediate security challenges for the EU member states are both radically different and ominously familiar. The rise of a violent mass ideology of Islamic extremism in the near-abroad, with increasing in-roads at home in dissatisfied immigrant Muslim communities, has seen a serious threat of terrorism emerge within the Union. The same force is threatening to transform the political topography of North Africa and the Middle East from a series of cruel and unpopular regimes with friendly relations to Europe, into a sequence of bloody revolutions repeating Khomeini’s ’79 - with potentially catastrophic consequences for the continent. The resurgence of Russia now ruled by an FSB elite, buoyed by the strategic resources of oil and natural gas which have been increasingly used to further the restoration of an exclusive sphere of interest and roll back democratisation is now emerging as a major challenge. In terms of power-projection, Russia may now have more of capacity to influence and actually control western-European governments than at any time since the opening salvoes of the Cold War. Environmental concerns may present massive security challenges very shortly, of which recent mass flooding, forest fires and heat-waves could be mere overtures.

All of these Europe specific challenges are occurring during a dangerous phase of transition from American uni-polarity, which has been incredibly poorly managed by the Bush Administration, towards an age when economically, technologically and demographically multi-polarity is becoming a reality and no longer an abstract inevitability. The United Sates, poised on an edge between aggressive Jacksonian militarism and populist introversion, is fast becoming an un-reliable ally and as recent events in the Middle East suggest - even a liability to the EU. Neither Democratic protectionism and introversion or militaristic ideological Republicanism are consistent with European aims and ideals, both are harmful and will undermine our position if we continue to rely upon Washington. Looking at Asia’s rising powers, China is clearly not a ‘strategic partner’ as its enthusiasm for the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation has shown, and with India, despite the optimism, it is simply too early to say. The delicate and overlapping legal, financial and security realms of American uni-polarity are decomposing and face collapse if the mounting Iranian crisis leads to war. Europe cannot shelter from this storm, hope to ignore or not be affected by it. The challenge is real and the moment is now.

European security has been based around four axiomatic beliefs since 1991. The first is a conviction that American influence is broadly positive and that the US imperium is ‘shared’ with the EU and is furthering Europe’s own ends. Since 2001, needless to say American foreign policy has not been helpful. The second premise is that the democratisation experience in Eastern Europe could be repeated world-wide to encourage EU security, denying any counter-vailing opinions and evidence that suggest it was a historical ‘one-off’ based more on the re-integration of countries that had been militarily and culturally occupied by Soviet Russia. The third conviction was that NATO could evolve into a force to spread democratisation, eventually spread to include most former Soviet states and even the Russian Federation, and conduct ‘out of theatre’ operations in the near-abroad. Despite the extreme difficulty of responding even to the Balkan wars, considering it took genocide and an attempted mass-expulsion to get NATO on the ground and the extreme difficulties of operating in Afghanistan as an alliance commanders and journalists are reporting daily, for some reason this belief had remained axiomatic orthodoxy in the debate. Finally, European policy makers and debate formers have remained convinced that the options on the table are an either/or solution between a ‘European army’ and continuing NATO. The European alternative is none-viable for the short to medium terms as it is part of a vision of EU federalism that has, despite dominating political and intellectual debate, never been a short to mid term viable possibility in political organisation for the peoples of Europe. Even deepening moves to turn the EU Rapid Reaction Force, which is a bold step in the right direction with 60,000 strong battle groups nearing readiness; into a reactive solution are non-starters. Institutionally we do not want to mimic NATO’s failings, such as war by committee and or countries being able to politically ‘free-load’ under a security umbrella on an EU wide level. That would still leave us facing the same problems.

Re-thinking our strategic situation requires a tearing up of such orthodoxy. With Russian aircraft entering British airspace and the Kremlin threatening the energy security of the continent in barely coded warnings of a ‘cold-winter’ and a possibly calamitous enxhange in the Middle East between Iran and the United States a possibility, if not a likelihood, the time for a re-think is urgent.

Given the fact that we need to think outside the NATO and EU box and that most European states are unwilling to take their own security seriously, in particular Germany which whose defence spending has now hit 1.2% of GDP, we need to think fast before our forces lag too far behind technologically and in terms of training to make a difference in the future. As it stands only Britain, and to a lesser extent France have armed forces that can co-ordinate serious combat missions with the United States. Considering the intellectual and political path Germany has taken since re-unification in stark contrast to most other European states, a new ‘sonderweg’ is now well underway in favour of dogmatic near-pacifism and isolationism within an EU context, and first moves towards restoring Europe’s security need to take into account that Germany is never going to lead them and is highly-unlikely to throw its full weight behind them in the near and mid-term future. This leaves Britain and France, if they are serious about human and energy security no choice but to present an alternative force and vision to the United States by making a strong united stand.

Going back to the Entente would involve British and French forces training on a far closer level than previously done before, unprecedented technological transfer and joint-projects and a commitment towards making both our armed forces totally inter-operational as soon as possible. London and Paris should commit towards presenting a new shared vision and backing it up by joint increases in military expenditure that could be off-set by the large financial savings incurred by specialisation with an increasingly common and effective defence force. Huge increases in effectiveness could not only be incurred especially in naval forces and in troop transporters, but also across the board. Such moves could play into Gordon Brown and Nicholas Sarkozy’s desires to ‘do something’ in international affairs whilst not stumbling

Considering the none too optimistic nature of the recent UN state of the Environment report, it is essential we re-focus our security concerns and planning towards environmental disaster both at home and across Africa and the Middle East. Founding and equipping a new Anglo-French corps of professional engineers to deal with future meltdowns and specific peacekeeping brigade would be a step in the right direction, both open to participation for European countries serious about defence. Such steps could make serious impact on the European and world scene; it would demonstrate humanitarian action that did not necessitate American backing was possible and drive forward the moves towards European taking on the hard-power it needs to increase its influence world wide. A new entente would require a joint declaration of principles and mission in international affairs that could go a long way towards salvaging both countries reputations for lack of independence of action, Britain’s slurred by being ‘Bush’s poodle’ – France by failing to act significantly at all and Chirac’s poor leadership

A new Entente for action that by-passes EU institutions and NATO would not be about replacing either, but if the project proves a success could slowly re-found European hard-power and eventually be integrated into EU institutions if the current deep pessimism and immobility is breached thanks to popular support. However merely founding new brigades and taskforces to undertake emergency disaster relief, peacekeeping and military action in the near-abroad will not tackle Europe’s energy insecurity. In order to limit Russian influence and prevent member states being black-mailed, especially as recent reports of clan rifts in the Kremlin might lead to an increase in aggressive behaviour perhaps in the Baltic states, the EU needs to take a two-track approach. Britain and France need to spear-head an energy security pact within the EU, acknowledge the political nature of Gazprom and begin a process of market liberalisation and breaking up of monopolies that would allow no country to be totally dependent on one energy source and thus cut off. Smart market reforms are a way of ensuring Gazprom cut off our energy independence.

The perfect storm brewing over Tehran’s nuclear programme is the perfect opportunity for Britain and France to announce a new Entente in clear opposition to the current drift of Washington towards war. Europe is Iran largest trading partner and by proposing to fight Tehran through a pro-active containment policy like that taken towards the Soviet Union, whilst making it clear that that any future attack on Israel or the Gulf states means war, we can help avert America’s own Suez moment. London and Paris must take hard-choices and bold moves to face the storm.

Brown Sets New Course For Britain in Iraq

2007-09-25T16:12:00.000Z

Britain's prime minister steps away from Tony Blair's special relationship with the US and a rethink of foreign policy, particularly in Iraq, seems to be underway.

By Ben Judah in London for ISN Security Watch (25/09/07)

After years spent standing behind Tony Blair on the Iraq war, Britain's new prime minister is no longer standing shoulder to shoulder with the US, and rumors of a snap election are keeping analysts and MPs in London guessing as cracks appear in the special relationship.

Desperate not to ruin his long-awaited premiership with the continuing failure to bring security to Iraq, a pull-out plan is emerging alongside signs of a new foreign policy vision for a new Labour government.

Anglophilia has its limits

Phil Reeker was not expecting his current assignment as the senior spokesman to the billion-dollar US Embassy in Baghdad, which has grown to be more of a sealed fortress within the Green Zone than a diplomatic outpost. He is visibly pleased to be visiting London with US General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Speaking to ISN Security Watch, he joked about his previous meeting.

"As an American we all have this slight Anglophilia and it was exciting to meet the prime minister and his exceedingly bright young foreign minister in number 10 Downing Street. That's something I've never done before."

Anglophilia aside, Reeker made sure to brush away any hints of friction in the Anglo-American alliance since the departure of Tony Blair.

"I see no reason to doubt that Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his foreign minister, who were both exceedingly well informed on the matter, will continue to meet all of their commitments made to the international community. The fact we had this meeting this evening and were invited to London underscored the continued commitment Prime Minister Gordon Brown is willing to make to the Iraqi people and Britain's involvement in securing the country's future."

Rethink and redeployment

Brown has other commitments focusing on continuing his party's dominance of British politics. Above all, though, his priority is to himself, ensuring he can secure a successful and lengthy premiership. He has learned from watching how the pressure on Blair became unbearable during his last year because of Iraq and tarnished his legacy with what most Britons view as an unjust and futile war.

His dealings with US President George W Bush have already shown a shift away from the friendship and close partnership his predecessor established in favor of a more business-like approach.

The moves to separate Whitehall's Iraq stance from Washington come as two of the most senior British military figures associated with the war have spoken out vehemently against the US handling of the situation.

Major Tim Cross, who was the most senior British officer associated with post-war planning, stated in early September that he saw American policy as "fatally flawed."

This comes just weeks after General Sir Mike Jackson - former chief of staff and commander of Allied Forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo - slammed US policy as "intellectually bankrupt."

This sense of frustration and mutual accusation is increasingly straining cooperation between the two countries. Reports that Washington delayed any possible British withdrawal from Basra and has been pressuring UK forces to police the Iranian border have met with a concerned but mostly hostile reception in the press.

The interesting sight of French President Nicholas Sarkozy playing the role of Blair over the Iran crisis suggests that either the UK has been sidestepped or was not willing to go down the same road again. A rethink and redeployment is already under way.

A grim inheritance

Josh Grindon-Welsh joined the Labour Party when he was 16 and is one of the rare members to have kept up his attendance at the dwindling and ageing local branch in Hammersmith and Fulham. He scowls when Iraq is mentioned.

"That's not my party, that's not my attitude, that's not what I voted for and it disgusts me. I joined the Labour movement because I believed in society - not these wars. I can't bring myself to vote for Gordon Brown if he continues Blair's policy like that. Labour needs change. I'm not sure he's got it in him."

Grindon-Welsh's views are not rare among the crucial swing voters, core Labour party supporters and influential London media elites.

A recent poll by ORB conducted for the BBC television program Newsnight suggested grim figures for those in the Brown government who want to continue Blair's commitment to a strong presence in Iraq. Fifty-two percent believed victory was impossible and 42 percent favored an immediate and total UK withdrawal. A further 22 percent wanted all troops out by the end of the year.

Brown's inheritance of a deeply unpopular foreign policy disaster leaves his otherwise strong position at risk from critics both inside his party and the Conservative opposition.
Adam Holloway speaks with authority on Iraq. As a veteran elite SAS commando from the first Gulf War, a member of the House of Commons Defence Committee and Conservative MP, his criticism is telling.

"Frankly we could have stayed but our boys, brave as they were, weren't able to get any good done in Basra like in the rest of Iraq. I think we should focus on where we can actually get some good done - that's in Afghanistan," Holloway told ISN Security Watch.

"And to those who worry we'll lose our standing in the White House or in the region if we go - they only have to look at the humiliating 'Yo Blair' moment that showed just how influential we really were in the White House."

Snap election fever

As Brown's party gathers in Bournemouth for its annual conference, it cannot be doubted that troop withdrawal is definitely a vote winner. The opinion polls look good for Brown. A recent IPSOS-MORI Poll put the Labour party at 42 percent, with the Conservatives at 34 percent and the Liberal-Democrats at 14 percent of the vote.

This 8 percent lead shows that new opposition leader David Cameron has had a minimal impact in reviving the Conservative Party's fortunes. These results have led to speculation that Brown may call a snap election to take advantage of the positive political climate. Brown has refused to confirm or deny such a move in recent days.

The Labour Party is also advertising for 22 key jobs including graphic designers, policy and research officers, campaign assistants and press officers, suggesting it is gearing up for an election campaign.

Speculation abounds that the recent exit from Basra has been part of a plan to shore up any flagging support. Julian Borger, the diplomatic editor of the Guardian daily newspaper, believes that "we want out, and if they go into snap-election mode they're going to try and get out faster."

However John Kampfner, the author of Blair's Wars and the editor of The New Statesman, spoke to ISN Security Watch from the Bournemouth conference concerning the link between Iraq and the election. "Really the policy has already been decided upon, and the troops will be there up to and including next summer," he said.

The next steps in Iraq

A senior diplomatic source expressed concern that Britain could not be relied upon to continue to meet its commitments to the international community in the current political climate.
Kuwait has made it clear that it is deeply concerned about UK troops moving out and US troops taking over guarding the strategic highways to the north and the border areas.

The plan taking shape after the Basra exit to a new stronghold at the airport outside the city is that British troops are expected to begin a phased withdrawal from southern Iraq over the next year if "conditions permit."

Britain's exit from Basra two weeks ago saw 500 troops quit the city center to establish themselves at the airport outside the city. With no serious increase of violence having occurred since the pull-out and an upbeat security assessment by General Petraeus during his London visit, a 10 percent drawdown is to be expected in the next six weeks.

The UK Ministry of Defence recently told journalists that the government was working on withdrawing 500 extra troops from Iraq by November. This would coincide well with a potential election.

British strategy will be to continue making sure that the handover of the province that includes Basra can go off without a hitch by the end of the year. This would complete the transfer of all four provinces that where previously under British responsibility. Afterwards, the British troops will be on "overwatch" - training Iraqi troops and only going on the offensive in the event of a serious security breakdown.

Without a dramatic change in policy they will continue to guard the supply lines to Baghdad. It is widely expected that American forces will move in to replace them if it is deemed necessary.
The more serious issue for the British will be how to reduce the numbers below 5,000 during 2008 as the province is handed over considering that the airport base outside Basra requires a large presence to secure its perimeter.

The new military focus will continue to be Afghanistan, but there are strong hints that Labour special advisors and Brown's inner circle are working on a new vision for foreign policy.
Tantalizing hints that Brown "believes economic development is the key to peace in the region" may well develop into a new, less belligerent and more aid-based policy. Such moves would also appease the Labour base that feels betrayed by Blair's seeming abandonment of a promised "ethical" foreign policy.

A keynote speech over the next few weeks signaling a new direction is highly likely and could be a real break from Blair. It could also meet the Labour inner circle's desire to achieve renewal in office.

New direction

With Brown's new less engaged and decidedly less pro-American outlook beginning to shape policy, Bush has reason to worry.

Lacking strong British support in Iraq as the Iranian crisis deepens will leave the administration increasingly isolated and with less keen and trustworthy partners in the future.

The damage wrought by Iraq to the special relationship may, in the long run, come to be seen as deeper than the rupture with Paris in 2003.

Frustrated generals, grumpy citizens and wary leaders will be highly unlikely to commit forces as readily to American adventures in the future. This does not mean that Britain is turning to Europe though, but rather in on itself.

Hizbollah: State Within A State

2007-09-14T10:01:00.000Z

As Beirut allows its poorest Shi'a citizens to fall through the cracks, Hizbollah is positioning itself to catch them as they fall, and shore up support in the process.

By Ben Judah in Beirut for ISN Security Watch with additional reporting by Jonathon Tabet (14/09/07)

Lebanon is in crisis, its economy in full recession and the political process paralyzed. However, as the traditional elites of Beirut sink into a deeper malaise over the future, Hizbollah, the Shi'a Muslim faction funded by Tehran and Damascus, is stronger than ever.

The movement is setting forward a national vision and molding its districts as it sees fit, testing and breaking the rules of the political game as its power grows. With Lebanon still unable and unwilling to provide for its poorest Shi'a citizens or control the movement - Hizbollah is emerging as a state within a state.

Welcome to Dahiya

The power cuts with a thud from the air-conditioning in the shabby offices of Ibrahim Mousawi and across the Shi'a suburb of Dahiya, one of the poorest districts of south Beirut controlled by Hizbollah.

Mousawi - who emerged as one of the movement's main spokesmen during last summer's war - is the editor of Al Intiqad, Hizbollah's weekly newspaper, and former director of their international TV channel Al Manar.

He is a typical lieutenant of party leader Hassan Nasrallah, and his career is a testament to the increasing scope of their operations. His slick style, alongside impeccable organization and efficiency, are the characteristic marks of the men who made Hizbollah - and the spots that make them stand out in the corrupt and wasteful tradition left by Lebanese politicians.

Ibrahim Mousawi jokes he is far from a "Tora Bora Terrorist," but reminiscent of a bureaucrat of state.

"They call us a state within a state because of what we do for people," he told ISN Security Watch. "We are funding redevelopment, running schools, hospitals, orphanages, providing training, food aid, helping provide rent, spiritual counseling and education, direct help for farmers and much more alongside the political work we do and the resistance.
"This is not the case of a 'state within a state' - rather we are filing a state void. The government is not here, and I suggest it thank us for helping them provide these services. We are a force that changes people's lives for the better on every level!"

The electricity switches on again, and like the petrol station outside and even the restaurant across the road, it is part of Hizbollah's own extensive network that is managing life here. In Dahiya, every lamp post is adorned by the portrait of a martyr and posters of Ayatollah Khomeini and Nasrallah are never out of sight. Iranian flags flutter over busy roads, and unlike in north and central Beirut, no woman goes unveiled.

Moving through traffic, Hizbollah's brown-garbed "security forces" patrol the streets. Mousawi denies they are replacing the distinctly absent regular Lebanese police.
"They're just coordinating things - so much is going on! You know the way the Lebanese drive; you need people on the lookout."

Seen from the outside

Luis Awit, a young doctor from the Christian suburbs of Beirut in the Mettn region, does not see it that way.

"Oh yeah? Coordinating forces, how come then that a few weeks back the Lebanese police chased some thieves in their area - only to be arrested by these so called coordinators. They confiscated their weapons and then released them. Sure, Hizbollah denied it. But what happened to the weapons?"

The incident that so unnerved Awit was reported in the Arabic press as having occurred on 15 June.

"When the police can't go into their areas - are you going to tell me that's not a state within a state? I worry for the integrity of the country especially as it is so divided politically," he said.

The headquarters of the Kataeb on St Martyr's Square, a right-wing Christian front traditionally a fief of the powerful Gemayel clan, is adorned with a huge poster of Pierre Gemayel, who was assassinated last year. Many suspect that Syria and its Hizbollah allies may have played a role in the murder.

Sitting under a vast picture of the March 14 demonstrations that forced Damascus to withdraw its troops from the country in 2005, Michel Mecattaf weighs his words carefully as a rising star of the pro-western bloc. He has married into the Gemayel clan, sits on the party's central bureau and controls all its local national branches.

"We are opposed to anyone that plays outside the law," Mecattaf told ISN Security Watch. "We are opposed to all those who do so and do not have a Lebanese agenda. Hizbollah's recent actions, such as the discovery of the parallel phone network, are outside legality, and I sincerely hope their agenda is Lebanese. Otherwise, my country will be little Syria again - or little Iran.
"You may call them a state within a state if you think a state has the power to choose for itself war or peace. Remember last summer Hizbollah, and not Lebanon, chose war [with Israel]," Mecattaf said.

Nasrallah's cards

The strength of Hassan Nasrallah's movement is far from diminished a year on from last year's war with Israel. His social programs are better funded than ever thanks to Iranian money, and they have scooped up the vast majority of the Shi'a poor.

Long neglected, Shi'a were traditionally laughed at and despised as "peasants" by the Sunni and Christian bourgeoisie. The Lebanese government has left the south of Beirut, and the south and east of the country has been underfunded since the beginning of the French mandate period.

Rami, who sells belt buckles for a living in a gloomy shopping mall, views this as the secret of Hizbollah's success. "They just moved in and built all this stuff for the really poor. And so they love him [Nasrallah], because everyone abused them before. They are efficient and incorrupt and that has given them enormous power because the people who now rely on them will do anything they say. Because they now need Hizbollah - more than they need the government they never see."

For the western-orientated and the US Embassy in Lebanon, more disturbing news in the past few months testifies to just how deep Nasrallah's rule now extends in his areas.
The discovery of a parallel phone network has been condemned as a "state violation" by the government, which has set about trying to dismantle it, and the news that Hizbollah is buying up land along the Litani River to expand the areas under its control and better fight Israel in an anticipated future war is ominous.

Ensuing news that an Iranian-funded road will cross through the area, and accusations that Tehran's ambassador had been sold vast tracts of land have heightened a tense atmosphere as it becomes clear just how strong Hizbollah really is.

In Dahiya, the "Thank You Iran" placards mark out in the territory that Hizbollah and its allies have rebuilt, which far outperforms the Lebanese government.

The bloc's allegiance to Iran, which is theological, political and financial, unnerves the other Lebanese sects by putting into question just how national its agenda can possibly be.
Militarily, Hizbollah remains constitutionally the national resistance and its armed forces have been vastly expanded since the war. Israel estimates its rocket supplies are greater than ever, its recruits are increasing and there is much speculation that anti-aircraft weaponry is now in its hands. This leaves Hizbollah standing like a giant among rival political pygmies in the continuing cold civil war for Lebanon's political identity and orientation.

However, Hizbollah has not traditionally been the single dominant party among the Shi'a - or even the strongest.

Amal, led by Nabih Berri, who holds the reserved Shi'a position of speaker of parliament, still has a strong presence on the ground. Yet Amal has no militia and lacks the strong ties to Iran and Syria and the all encompassing social networks. The vast boost Hizbollah gained during the last war with Israel gave it even further stature above its older traditional rival. If anything, they have become partners in the political world in the "house Hassan built."
The nephew of a key Amal MP spoke to ISN Security Watch on the condition of anonymity about the state of the party. "Amal is over. It will linger for maybe 30 years at the utmost, but as a movement it is finished. The vitality has been sucked out of it because it has merely become an extended patronage network for the clan leaders and old bosses - what we know as zaim. Hizbollah is still not a zaim movement; it is a people's party and a true social movement."

Living apart, together

Controlling the politics, territory and society of its group - Hizbollah, like the Kurds in northern Iraq, can justly be said to lead a state within a state. Some believe that the Lebanese and the Iraqis both need to learn how to live together - apart. Hopefully then, the small open societies in Beirut and Baghdad would stand a chance of surviving political turmoil.

Nadim Shehadi, Lebanon representative for the UK think tank Chatham House, takes a balanced and nuanced view of the situation.

"The Lebanese don't do unity. This is a divided society like many others. You can't accuse Hizbollah of being different because they run schools, hospitals and universities. The Protestants do that in this country, as do the Maronites and the Sunnis," Shehadi told ISN Security Watch during an interview.

"What makes Hizbollah different is that they are armed, and it is vital to remember that they are permitted to do so under the constitution. This is a question of decommissioning, of finding a way to disarm the movement. The trouble is that the Israeli attack last year ruined the arguments of those who sought to stress that the resistance was no longer necessary."

In Bcharre in the north of Lebanon, the Christian Maronites fly their own flags and live out an identity greatly different than those in Dahiya, likewise the Sunni of Sidon.

As the political crisis deepens and the situation in the Middle East deteriorates, Lebanon still lacks a strong national cement to hold its people together. Hizbollah's state within a state is a reality, and considering even the Israeli army failed in its set task, one that cannot be destroyed or wished away.

The best eventuality may be for the country to legitimize it by moving toward a new federal structure based on the Swiss model that can ensure disarmament and stability for a fragile country. Perhaps, some feel, creating a weak central state not worth fighting over could keep it from being ripped apart. A new national pact and new political system may be the only way to prevent the cold civil war for control of the state from turning hot.