Filed under: International Affairs
It’s now a year since I went over to see the elections in Bangladesh which brought a civilian government back into power with a huge popular mandate. During its first year in office the new government has had to deal with mutineers, assassins and war criminals.
Almost immediately into the government’s 5-year term, in February we heard stories of a mutiny amongst the military in Dhaka which sent alarm bells ringing and raised fears that the military had once again taken control of the country. It transpired that rank-and-file soldiers from the Dhaka-based Bangladesh Rifles were revolting against their officers and not against the new civilian government. This was met with some relief but the aftermath of the mutiny has caused controversy.
For example, Amnesty International has raised concerns about justice for the alleged mutineers currently on trial in Bangladesh (download their report here). In truth the suspects are fortunate that they have not been court-martialled and are being charged through civilian courts rather than by the army, as clearly officers wanted to take matters into their own hands. Furthermore, it appears that officers have somehow got involved in the prosecution of these suspects if the allegations of mistreatment in detention are to be believed. The officers should be told quite clearly to go back to the barracks and let the civilian courts get on with it.
It is not only the trials of the mutineers that have kept the courts busy, as the government had immediately to deal with some unfinished business, namely prosecuting the assassins responsible for the deaths of the founding father of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and his family on the 15th of August 1975. The court case was successfully concluded in mid-November with death sentences confirmed on those convicted. The challenge now is to get them back to Bangladesh as some of them are abroad.
Prosecutions are also imminent in connection the war crimes committed by those who collaborated with the Pakistani army during the war of liberation in 1971. The government was given a popular mandate during the election last year to deal once and for all with this issue which has been hanging over Bangladeshi politics since the creation of the state. Thankfully the cases will start around February or March 2010 and will also undoubtedly have an impact on internal politics with the Bangladeshi community in the UK.
So where in the world but Bangladesh would mutineers, assassins and war criminals feature so dramatically in a single year of the nation’s political life? That’s one reason why I’ll continue to take interest in the politics of my ancestral home even though sadly I no longer have my father to tell me what’s happening out there.
January 1, 2010
As often happens with the newly converted, Boris is now piously preaching to the rest of us on all matters green, for example in his latest Telegraph column on his way to the sideshows at the Copenhagen Summit. Not that he necessarily practises what he preaches. For a start, it would have been better if he had made the effort to get to Copenhagen by train via Brussels rather than on a short-haul flight.
Nor was it clear what he was doing there. Telling the world how London shows the way with retrofitting public buildings and promoting electric cars is all very well, but Boris can take little credit for the former policy, which was launched under the previous Mayor. As for electric cars, it is not at all clear that the Mayor is in a position to lead on this, given that the vast majority of charge points will have to be on suburban roads controlled by local authorities and not on the TfL red routes where we rightly have little off-street parking. And Boris fails to explain what the source of supply for the electricity will be. Is it to be from renewable energy sources or from the sources we are already using? If the latter, then even if electic cars would reduce noise and air pollution they would contribute little to reducing our carbon emissions.
And whilst Boris is preaching to the world about London’s achievements, we should not lose sight of the fact that, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s recently published European Green City Index, we are only a middle ranking city when it comes to greenery – in 11th place, just behind Paris. That’s the reality: in the European cities league table we occupy an equivalent position to Fulham or Sunderland in the Premier League, not Chelsea or Man United. Quite honestly only the host city Copenhagen, which comes out top of the Green City Index, is entitled to go preaching to the rest of the world on what cities can do to reduce their residents’ combined carbon footprint.
While he has a look at the tables in the Green City Index and London’s position in them, Boris should also take time out to reconsider his neo-Malthusian views on population growth as a cause of potential environmental catastrophe. (“We are replicating too fast,”, he tells his Telegraph readers, “hurtling towards nine billion souls on the planet like bacteria multiplying on a Petri dish.”) While the Evening Standard has highlighted how this does not fit very well with Boris himself having four kids (which of course is a personal choice), a more fundamental criticism is that the perspective of disaster caused by rising population has been discounted on numerous occasions before in history.
As I wrote about advocates of neo-Malthusianism in an earlier post:
“What they do not want to admit is that the fertility rate of half the world is now 2.1 or less, the magic number consistent with stable population, and that it’s expected to fall below this level between 2020 and 2050. (See the recent article in the Economist.) That’s not surprising as poor countries are going through the same demographic transitions that rich ones went through, but at an earlier stage in their development and much more quickly.
“As for environmental damage, the poorest people in the world like the Bangladeshis are producing at most 0.3 tonnes of CO2 emissions per capita annually, whereas a US citizen produces 20 tonnes. So, while it’s clear that if the poor countries recreate the same consumption patterns as the US we will certainly have some problems to deal with in the future, at present that is a distant prospect. It is the environmental damage caused by the developed countries that is the immediate challenge.”
Boris’s time in Copenhagen would have been better occupied advocating that cities should be party to any agreement, given that 75 per cent of the CO2 emissions originate from cities and the human race has reach a point now that 50 per cent of it now lives in these huge urban centres. Particularly now that nation states have proved unable to agree amongst themselves on the way forward after the Kyoto agreement, Boris should be calling for cities to step into the breach. Now that would be some leadership!
December 19, 2009
Oil refinery in Qatar
Speaking at a meeting of its Standing Committee for Economic and Commercial Cooperation at Istanbul in November, Bangladeshi president Zillur Rahman called on the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) to take a lead in combating climate change and in supporting countries like Bangladesh that are fighting the consequences of global warming, even though they make little contribution to its causes. Up to now, however, the OIC’s record on this has been poor.
A 2007 study concluded that the rich Arab states in the OIC had been reluctant to take a lead on addressing climate change: “… efforts by wealthier Muslim states are imbalanced with many of them doing very little and not acknowledging the urgency of the issue. Saudi Arabia, who holds most of the purse strings of the OIC, has long been a sceptic of climate change.” Indeed, the response of Saudi Arabia’s lead climate change negotiator at Copenhagen, Mohammad Al-Sabban, to the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit was: “It appears from the details of the scandal that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change.”
Looking at annual CO2 emissions per capita in the Gulf states (International Energy Agency figures for 2007), it is immediately apparent that the figures are much worse than even for the United States, which is usually seen as the villain of the piece. For example, Qatar’s annual emissions stand at 58.01 tonnes per capita, the United Arab Emirates’ at 29.91 tonnes, Bahrain’s at 28.23 tonnes and Kuwait’s at 25.09 tonnes, whereas the figure for USA is 19.10 tonnes. These emissions are even more astonishing when compared with the figure for Bangladesh, which stands at 0.25 tonnes per capita. It does make you wonder what is being done in these rich Arab Gulf states to produce such huge CO2 emissions.
As for discussions on climate change amongst the Arab states, here again the problem is the reluctance of the ruling elites in oil-rich countries to support any measures that might reduce demand for oil and petrol. This despite the fact that the Middle East is particularly vulnerable to rising temperatures, with vast areas of agricultural land between Egypt and Iraq expected to lose fertility as a result of global warming.
In November, at the launch of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) report on climate change in Cairo, UNFPA officials pointed out that 15% of people in the Arab world already have limited or no access to potable water and that water scarcity induced by climate change was expected to cut food production in the region by half. They called for more cooperation between the Arab League, UNFPA, and Arab NGOs to help governments draw up appropriate policies.
A report released in November by the Lebanon-based Arab Forum for Environment and Development (AFED) criticised the near complete lack of research data on climate change in Arab countries and called on Arab nations to immediately draw up adaptation and mitigation plans. One of the authors stated that “we have no data about the effects the greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere will have on our coastal zones, even though we know they are very vulnerable”, adding that this makes creating plans to reduce risks from climate change difficult.
Not surprisingly, we have come to expect very little from the OIC in such global environmental summits as we are seeing in Copenhagen this week, where the negotiations on behalf of the developing world are undertaken by the G77 plus China. We hear much talk about the importance of the ummah as the basis for international unity among Muslims, but the oil-rich states have so far shown little sense of unity with their co-religionists over such a critical issue for mankind as climate change and global warming.
In addition to the conference of the parties reaching an agreement on limiting global warming to 2C over pre-industrial levels, the other bone of contention at the Copenhagen Summit is clearly money. That is, how much wealthy countries will be paying poor ones to help them deal with climate change. Given the huge sovereign funds that many of the oil-rich Muslim-majority states are sitting on, derived essentially from the sale of hydrocarbons, and given that the burning of these fuels makes a major contribution to greenhouse gases, you might think the oil producers would feel some moral obligation to the nations who suffer the consequences of global warming.
Moreover, at present the huge funds that the oil-producers possess are usually invested into property and assets in the developed world, when investment in the developing world in green industries and the low carbon economy could well give them better returns and certainly a better conscience. Now that would be a grand idea for all those funds standing idle in bank accounts in the world’s major cities. In the meantime, some zakat to those on the front line of climate change in countries like the Maldives and Bangladesh is surely not too much to ask.
Published in the Jakarta Globe, 16 February 2010
December 17, 2009
This is the text of the chapter I contributed to the Labour Friends of Palestine pamphlet, Stop Building Hatred.
THE occupation of the West Bank is rightly seen as central to the campaign for Palestinian rights and has been the main focus for media coverage of Israel’s construction of illegal settlements. But this has led to relatively little attention being paid to Israeli settlements in the Golan Heights, although these are equally in violation of international law and the continued occupation of the Golan stands as a major obstacle to a regional peace agreement.
Like the West Bank, the Golan Heights were seized by Israel in 1967 during the Six Day War, in this case from Syria. Most of the population was expelled (or fled voluntarily, if you believe the Israeli version of events) and Israel systematically destroyed 244 of the 249 Arab villages in the Golan so that the former inhabitants could never return to their homes. The displaced Golan Arabs and their families are now said to number about half a million.
In 1981 Israel passed the Golan Heights Law which annexed the region, declaring it to be subject to the Israeli state’s “laws, jurisdiction and administration”. Syria continues to insist that the Golan is part of its own territory, under foreign occupation, while Lebanon lays claim to a small area known as the Shebaa Farms.
The 1981 annexation was condemned by UN Security Council Resolution 497, adopted unanimously, which stated that “the Israeli decision to impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is null and void and without international legal effect”. The UN has consistently upheld this position and last year the General Assembly voted 161-1 in favour of a motion reaffirming support for Resolution 497 on the “occupied Syrian Golan”.
The issue of Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights hit the news recently when a pro-Israeli website bearing the misleading name of Honest Reporting launched a campaign under the slogan “Golan residents live in Israel not Syria” in protest against Israeli settlers being required to register Syria as their country of origin on Facebook. Regrettably, Facebook appears to have backed down in the face of this campaign, which was plainly aimed at legitimising Israel’s illegal occupation, and Golan residents are now allowed to register their country as either Israel or Syria.
In the years immediately following the Six Day War, Israeli civilian settlement of the Golan Heights proceeded slowly, as the area was seen as a potential future battleground and in 1972 there were still only 77 settlers there. After the end of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War numbers began to increase sharply and by 1989 the figure had reached 10,000. Today there are some 20,000 Israeli settlers occupying the territory in over 30 settlements.
The figures for Golan settlers may seem small compared with the 300,000 settlers in the West Bank or the 200,000 in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem. But the growth of settlements has now reached the point where Israelis constitute over half the population of the Golan Heights – the remainder being members of the Druze community who remained there after the Israeli invasion in 1967. The Israeli-occupied areas include farms, cattle ranches, orchards and vineyards and even a ski resort, in addition to a number of military bases.
The objective of expanding Israeli settlement in the Golan Heights is of course the same as in the West Bank – to establish a permanent Israeli presence as one of the “facts on the ground” that will serve as an obstacle to any re-drawing of borders.
Three years ago settler leaders launched a $250,000 advertising campaign to attract young Israelis to the Golan with the promise of free land, the declared aim of the campaign being to double the Jewish population to 40,000 over the course of the following decade. In 1999, when the settler population stood at 17,000, Israeli treasury officials estimated that, in the event of a pull-out from the Golan, compensation to the settlers for losing their homes would amount to $10 billion. Obviously, existing Golan settlers calculate that the more Israelis they can persuade to join them there, the greater the financial obstacle to withdrawal.
The Syrians have repeatedly stated that if Israel will agree to end its occupation of the Golan Heights they are prepared to join Egypt and Jordan in signing a peace agreement with Israel. But Syria insists on a complete Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 border, which would return the eastern shore of the Sea ofGalilee to Damascus, whereas Israel wants to retain its control of the whole ofGalilee.
Talks between Israel and Syria over the future of the Golan heights have continued on and off over the years but without ever reaching a conclusion. Danny Yatom, who was head ofMossad during Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s first term of office in 1996-99, recently stated that Netanyahu had at that time indicated that Israel was willing to withdraw from the entire Golan heights in exchange for a peace deal with Syria and the normalisation of relations between the two countries.
However, since forming his new administration in March this year Netanyahu has adopted an intransigent position over the Golan heights. Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad points out that it is futile trying to pursue negotiations over the Golan when there is no partner for talks on the Israeli side.
Obama has stated that the resumption of talks between Israel and Syria is one of his main foreign policy goals. Certainly, given Israel’s political, economic and military reliance on the US, the Obama administration is in a position to exercise serious pressure on Netanyahu if the political will exists. The future of the Golan Heights therefore hinges on the question of whether Obama, unlike his predecessors in the US presidency, will defy the powerful pro-Israel lobby and confront the Israeli government. Adopting a carrot and stick approach, an Israeli hand-over of the Golan could perhaps be sweetened by the promise of a financial contribution from the US to help underwrite the cost of withdrawal. It’s President Obama’s call.
November 30, 2009
Last Thursday evening I shared a platform with Lawrence Bloom, a leading light from the World Economic Forum, where I outlined my views about the forthcoming conference of the parties in Copenhagen for the post-Kyoto agreement on climate change.
First I expressed my concern that, whatever is agreed at Copenhagen, it is likely that the US will face difficulties in ratifying it, given the problems that are already occurring in the Senate with the Obama adminstration’s proposed cap-and-trade legislation. This indeed would be in line with what happened with the Kyoto agreement, where the US took the whole world down the yellow brick road of tradeable permits, only for Al Gore to be unable to get it ratified in the US. This time round it’s going to be a lot more difficult for the US to persuade the world to swallow market-based solutions anyway, given the paradigm shift away from the Washington consensus.
If there is to be a Plan B, l emphasised the importance of mega-cities like London working to limit the impact of climate change, as some 75 per cent of CO2 emissions comes from our cities and towns where over 50 per cent of humanity now resides. Nation states will meet in Copenhagen but there is a lot of scope for cities to collaborate and take their own initiatives, and even become a conference of parties themselves with international agreements at city level. There is a localised green economy effect possible, particularly in the transport and housing sectors, and with the right city level leadership it would help move us to a less carbonised world.
Finally l made a moral plea for some thinking beyond the box, in connection with climate refugees, because environmental degradation leaves the poor most vulnerable to natural disaster. Migration as an adaptative response to poverty, hunger and environmental disasters is a practice humankind has followed since the beginning when our species came out of Africa. Today’s environmental refugees should be acknowledged and assisted in the host countries by a similiar Geneva Convention to that for political refugees. Such a safety net is the least we in the developed world should offer, in recognition of our contribution to global environmental problems and our imposition of particular models of development on the developing world.
September 14, 2009
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