71 Years On, We’re Still Dodging Bullets While Australia Leads The Charge To Promote Nuclear Weapons
By Sue Wareham | New Matilda | August 8, 2016
Early August marks the anniversaries of the atomic bombings on August 6 and 9, 1945, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – dates which most often come and go with little to offer except a terrifying reminder of humanity’s capacity to destroy ourselves. Nevertheless, we’ve made it to 71 years, having tempted fate with tens of thousands of the most destructive devices ever created, escaping within a whisker of global catastrophe more times than bears thinking about.
Still, there are over 15,000 nuclear weapons in the hands of just nine nations – Russia, the US, China, France, the UK, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. Double standards that divide the world into nuclear weapons haves and have nots are writ large – stark, provocative and unsustainable.
However, in this 71st anniversary year, some good news is creeping in. The stranglehold that the nuclear-armed states have held on the disarmament agenda is starting to unravel. In recent years, a groundswell of governments and civil society actors have demanded with increasing clarity and effect that humanitarian imperatives take precedence over the military doctrines of nine countries.
In a nutshell, the effects of a nuclear weapon explosion are so catastrophic that the weapons must never be used again. As a result, 127 nations and counting have signed the “Humanitarian Pledge” that commits them to efforts to “stigmatise, prohibit and eliminate” the weapons.
These are not empty words. The UN has initiated an Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) which met in February and May this year in Geneva, and will meet for the last time from August 5 to 19, to discuss “legal provisions and norms” for a nuclear weapons free world.
The group will make recommendations to the UN General Assembly which meets later in the year, and negotiations for a treaty to ban nuclear weapons are high on the list of expected recommendations. Already, some nations are urging the commencement of such negotiations as early as 2017.
The OEWG’s dreary title is unfortunate, for its very existence is nothing short of historic. It is bringing us closer than we have ever been to stigmatising, banning and eliminating the worst of all weapons of mass destruction.
The Australian government’s role, notwithstanding its ineffectual murmurings about how bad the weapons are, has been to lead the charge in opposing the growing push for a ban treaty, arguing that, without the support of the nations with the weapons, it’s an impractical process. That’s a bit like arguing that we must consult with criminals about the sort of laws they’d agree to before we enact any.
It also misrepresents the purpose of a ban treaty, which is to delegitimise and stigmatise the weapons and change the legal landscape by which nations are judged.
Australia’s stance, of course, has everything to do with our reliance on “extended nuclear deterrence”, which is a preparedness to have US weapons destroy cities on our behalf. Just which cities, or in what circumstances, the government refuses to say.
Two other classes of weapons of mass destruction – chemical and biological – are both explicitly banned by treaty. In 2014, former UN high representative for disarmament affairs, Angela Kane, described the strong stigma that the prohibitions attract:
“How many states today boast that they are ‘biological-weapon states’ or ‘chemical-weapon states’? Who is arguing now that bubonic plague or polio are legitimate to use as weapons under any circumstance, whether in an attack or in retaliation?”
Let’s look at the example of the UK, whose leader in 2003 helped initiate a catastrophic war based on the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. On July 18 this year, the British parliament voted strongly in favour of renewing, at budget-breaking expense, the country’s own WMD program, the Trident nuclear submarines.
The new British PM, Theresa May confirmed that she would be prepared to press the button that unleashes them. No doubt she is aware that when Trident was chosen in 1980 as a replacement for its predecessor, Polaris, it was estimated to be capable of killing up to 10 million Russians.
If, however, a ban treaty were already in place, the pressure that could have been exerted for Britain to abandon these horrific weapons is likely to have been overwhelming. To vote to renew a WMD program is bad enough, but to do so when the vast majority of the world’s governments have banned these weapons because they are immoral and illegitimate could prove one step too far.
If we’re serious about a nuclear weapons free world, it is imperative that the current momentum for a ban treaty is not lost. The nuclear-armed states and their supporters such as Australia are doing their best to undermine it. From the perspective of the rest of the world however, criminals are not the best people to have control of the law.
Finally the “never again” plea from the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has a glimmer of optimism about it. We face enormous opportunities as well as challenges.
The absurd reaction to actor’s Palestine flag badge reflects a wider taboo in Britain
MEMO | August 5, 2016
British actor John Altman was invited to appear on TV show “Loose Women” recently to discuss the release of his new book and his battle with alcoholism. Moments into his appearance on-screen, people took to social media to express outrage at what he was wearing in his lapel; a pin badge of the Palestinian flag.
The British tabloid Daily Express was quick to feature an article about this, documenting the “disgust” of some viewers at Altman’s so-called “political statement” and the support he received from others. The polarised reactions to the badge appeared to be driven by viewers’ opinions on the Israel-Palestine conflict; that’s understandable. What is arguably more worrying is the fact that there were people insisting that the production company should have not let him appear on the programme wearing the badge in the first place.
The fact that such anti-Palestine sentiments were expressed almost immediately takes the issue further than Altman’s decision to wear the badge; he is, by the way, a long-term, outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights. The aggressive reaction is further evidence that support for Palestine in British society is becoming increasingly controversial, and pushes the idea that neutrality is in fact the most moral approach in this conflict.
This is even more obvious in a political climate that is becoming more and more unforgiving about showing support for Palestine. Indeed, Palestinian activism is under scrutiny not only in Britain but also other parts of the world. The non-violent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has been denounced as “terrorism” in Israel. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is vehement in his opposition to BDS, insisting that it has “no place on Canadian campuses.” In the UK, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson described it as “completely crazy” and described BDS supporters as “corduroy-jacketed, snuggle-toothed, lefty academics.”
More recently, a 15 year old British-Palestinian girl won a regional final of the Jack Petchey Speak Out Challenge for delivering a speech on the occupation of Palestine and Israeli brutality against Palestinian civilians. However, she was then expelled from the national contest on the grounds that “a speaker should never inflame or offend the audience or insult others.”
It is clear that complicity in Israel’s occupation of Palestine is becoming normalised in the mainstream British narrative on the conflict; speaking out about the rights of Palestinians is becoming a controversial move. The reaction to John Altman’s badge should not, therefore, be a surprise. Nevertheless, it signifies a serious threat to Britain’s much-vaunted free-speech and the dynamics of press freedom.
It brings to mind the words of English philosopher John Stuart Mill who wrote in his book On Liberty in 1859, that, “The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.” Whether this opinion is built upon fact, or not, censorship is unhealthy and could begin to nullify the “entire courage of human kind.”
When it comes to the issue of Palestine, though, it is more than intellectual freedom and the value of speech at stake. Wearing a Palestine badge, for example, not only represents the wearer’s moral standpoint, but also displays respect for international law. It must not be forgotten that UN Security Council Resolution 194, adopted in 1948, states explicitly the Palestinian refugees’ right to return to their land; it has never been allowed by Israel. The UN General Assembly voted near-unanimously for resolution A/67/L.28 to recognise Palestine as a state; though it is not binding, Israel’s colonial-settlements built on occupied land beyond the 1967 borders and intended to be the territory of that state clearly violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. It is also important to note that in 2014, British MPs voted to recognise Palestine as a state, so the controversy created around showing support for Palestine in public contradicts international norms and official British policy.
Such undermining of free speech when it comes to support for Palestine signifies a degree of complicity in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people. It is also destructive to the social fabric of this country, because taboos and censorship, especially in terms of who is and is not worthy of benefiting from humanitarian law and human rights, create additional unnecessary divisions and polarisation within society.
Britain should apologise for the Balfour Declaration, not ‘celebrate’ it
By Professor Kamel Hawwash | MEMO | August 6, 2016
The Balfour Declaration is a letter from the then British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Walter Rothschild, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. The critical part of this short letter said: “His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
This was a prime example of colonial arrogance by which Britain, which was not then in occupation of Palestine, promised the Zionist Federation, which did not represent all Jews, without the consent of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine, the Palestinians, to facilitate the creation of a homeland for Jews in Palestine. The letter was dated 2 November 1917.
Thus, November 2017 will mark the centenary of Balfour and rumours abound that the British government plans to mark it in some form. Israel’s recently arrived Ambassador Mark Regev claimed: “It’s being taken very seriously at the highest levels. We’re hoping to do a public celebration together with the British government.” The former spokesman for Israel’s prime minister talked up the possible events, saying that “senior leadership from both sides [will be] uniting to celebrate Balfour.”
Former British Prime Minster David Cameron told leaders of the Jewish community, “I want to make sure we mark it together in the most appropriate way.” He said this without any consultation with British Palestinians about whether, and how, they would wish to see the Balfour centenary commemorated. This seems to be at best misguided and, at worst, a demonstration of Britain’s double standards when it comes to the Palestine-Israel issue. Israel was not established on empty land; it has been built on the homeland of the Palestinian people. How then can it be logical for the British government not to consult the Palestinians, either in Palestine or in the UK, about the Balfour centenary?
The notion that Britain should “celebrate” the Balfour Declaration is extremely offensive to every British Palestinian I have talked to and to the Palestinian leadership. Balfour gave the green light to the Zionist movement, which perpetuated the lie that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land”. The truth is that Jews, like Muslims and Christians, were citizens of many countries, including Syria and Iraq, and Palestine was inhabited by a people, the mainly Muslim but also Christian and Jewish, Palestinians. Had Israel not been created in Palestine, it is quite logical to assume that Palestine would have eventually gained independence and that Arab Jews, just like their Christian and Muslim brethren, would have continued to live in all the Arab countries in which they had thrived for centuries.
The Balfour Declaration and Britain’s League of Nations Mandate rule in Palestine were key reasons for the growth of Jewish migration to Palestine, which accelerated following the Second World War and the Holocaust. The creation of Israel as Britain rushed to abandon Palestine left the Palestinians at the mercy of murderous Zionist terror groups hell-bent on expelling many if not all of them from their homeland. The injustice felt in the Middle East at the creation of Israel also contributed to the tensions that led to Arab Jews leaving their home countries for the nascent Zionist state.
The injustice of the lack of a viable Palestinian state and the continuing refugee catastrophe continues to this day. How can Britain celebrate this? Even if Britain claims that it is not “celebrating” Balfour, but simply “marking” the document’s centenary, that will also offend Palestinians living under Israel’s military occupation in Palestine, and in the refugee camps of Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, as well as the diaspora.
If fair minded people read the text of the Balfour Declaration and then look at what happened subsequently, they will surely find it difficult to accept that the conditions implicit in the British government’s “favour” have been fulfilled. Israel brazenly flouts the “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” on a daily basis, and has done since its creation in 1948. Its illegal occupation continues to oppress, humiliate and generate hatred. Israel’s siege on the Gaza Strip — described by David Cameron as “a prison” — continues unabated. House demolitions in the first half of 2016 are already markedly up on 2015. Settler violence has escalated and Jewish terror has taken the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
The fact is that Britain has not even recognised Palestine as a state following the October 2014 Parliamentary vote requesting the government to do so. Add to this that 2017 also marks the 50th anniversary of the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and other Arab land and Israel’s refusal to end this, and it is obvious that any reasonable person would say that a “celebration” of the Balfour Declaration would be completely inappropriate. If you do something shameful, as Britain did, from a Palestinian perspective, then you would do far better to apologise for it than to mark or celebrate it.
The argument for a celebration of Balfour is that the Jewish community in Britain see the creation of Israel as a major achievement in which the declaration played a major part. However, not all British Jews share this view. Has the government consulted widely even within the Jewish community about possible Balfour events? There is no evidence that it has. If it does mark the centenary in some way then it should know that there will be many Jews in Britain siding with the oppressed Palestinians to mark the Catastrophe (Nakba) that the creation of the state of Israel represents to them. Discussions among Palestinian groups in Britain and supporters of justice for Palestine are ongoing in order to formulate a suitable response to the governments’ intentions.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian leadership has finally stirred itself and threatened to sue Britain for the Balfour Declaration. What that really means and to which court the Palestinians would make a case remains unknown. It may be yet prove to be another example of the Palestinian leadership making grandiose claims which lead to nothing and are then retracted. This, though, remains to be seen.
As we approach 2017 with Israel entrenching its military occupation of Palestine and senior politicians articulating their rejection of a Palestinian state, Britain should avoid inflaming the situation by marking Balfour in any way. A more helpful act would be to establish an inquiry into Britain’s role in the creation of Israel and dispossession of the Palestinian people. Its role would be to establish the facts and to assess how justice can be brought to the Holy Land as the Balfour centenary approaches. This would be far better than “celebrating” what is indeed a dark chapter of Britain’s colonial history.
It’s only propaganda when they do it
Irrussianality | August 1, 2016
A couple of newspaper articles caught my attention this weekend. The first was in The Times, and claimed the following:
President Putin has launched a secret propaganda assault on Britain from within its own borders, The Times can reveal. The Kremlin is spreading disinformation through a newly opened British bureau for its Sputnik international news service, and is infiltrating elite universities by placing language and cultural centres on campuses. Analysts said that the push was part of Russia’s military doctrine, which specifies the use of ‘informational and other non-military measures’ in conflicts.
The Times is particularly alarmed by the fact that, ‘the University of Edinburgh accepted £221,000 from the Russkiy Mir (Russian World) Foundation to host Britain’s first Moscow-sponsored language and cultural centre. The foundation has also opened centres at Durham University, which accepted £85,000, and St Antony’s College, Oxford.’ According to The Times, ‘A NATO source accused Russia of “operationalising information” from within Britain. “The Russian information effort is to muddy the waters, to create uncertainty,” he said.’
The second article was published in Sunday’s New York Times. In this, the former US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul claims that ‘Everywhere, autocrats are pushing back against democrats, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is the de facto leader of this global movement.’ America must resist this movement, McFaul says. Otherwise, ‘The threats will grow and eventually endanger our peace, as we saw in Europe and Japan in the 1930s, and Afghanistan in the 1990s.’
What exactly should America do? McFaul suggests:
Just as the Kremlin has become more sophisticated at exporting its ideas and supporting its friends, so must we. We should think of advancing democratic ideas abroad primarily as an educational project, almost never as a military campaign. Universities, books and websites are the best tools, not the 82nd Airborne.
But it’s best not to do this openly, McFaul admits. He says, ‘Direct financial assistance to democrats is problematic: A check from an American embassy can taint its recipients. America’s next president should privatize such aid and help seed new independent foundations.’
So, let me get this straight. Russkii Mir openly provides money to the University of Edinburgh for the study of Russian language and culture. That constitutes a ‘secret propaganda assault on Britain’. Ambassador McFaul proposes giving money to Russian universities through disguised channels and for decidedly political purposes, and that is ‘advancing democratic ideas’. ‘Nuff said!
Renouncing Jewishness: Shlomo Sand and Gilad Atzmon
By Eric Walberg | July 30, 2016
For years now, I’ve known there was something wrong when my well-meaning anti-Zionist Jewish friends found it necessary to join Jewish anti-Zionist groups opposing Israel. In the US, Jewish Voice for Peace, in Canada, Not in Our Name; in Britain, Jews Against Zionism — every country has its group, usually more than one. “I am a Jewish witness against Israel,” I would be told. Sounds good, even brave. Sand’s latest deconstruction of Jewishness and Israel, How I Stopped Being a Jew (2014), makes it clear why my suspicions were well founded.
Barely 100 pages, it is a page-turner, a precis of his earlier more scholarly works, arguing that the romantic, heroic age of Jewish nationalism, as embodied in the creation of a Jewish state, is coming to an end. Israel will not disappear, but it is an anachronism, an embarrassment in the postmodern age. A reminder of the horrors of Nazism, but not as the Zionist crafters of the “holocaust industry”, or “holocaust religion”, would have it. The Zionist project is exposed by Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Gilad Atzmon, Israel Shamir and many more Jewish critics as reenacting the same policies of yesteryear. A flawed answer that is doomed, “an insidious form of racism“.
For the Israeli Sand, the Jewish “national” identity is a fraud (an Israeli identity is fine); the only viable Jewish identity is a religious one, and as a nonbeliever, he logically concludes, “Cogito, ergo non sum.”
Gilad Atzmon takes Sand’s logic further. He tore up his Israeli passport, becoming an ex-Israeli as well as an ex-Jew.
What’s so wrong with a secular, ethnic Jewish identity? Well, it can be based on only one of two things: persecution (being “forced” into being a Jew whether one likes it or not, as in the Nazi’s racial laws) or being “born” into the Jewish people. The former is no longer an issue and the latter is full of holes, and based on a dangerous myth.
When was the Jewish People invented?
Sand’s answer is simple: “At a certain stage in the 19th century, intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took upon themselves the task of inventing a people ‘retrospectively’, out of a thirst to create a modern Jewish people.” For Jews, this required a homeland, and the westernized Jewish elite were able to provide this. As the West suffered one mortal blow after another (WWI&II), Zionism took on a new meaning. Voila! Israel.
But the exile legend is a myth. Sand is a historian and couldn’t find any texts supporting it. The Romans did not exile peoples. “Judaic society was not dispersed and was not exiled.” Jews continued to live in the Holy Land through thick and thin, freer under Muslim rule than Christian, but even the latter never “ethnically cleansed” them. Most converted to Christianity or Islam. Voila! The (Christian, Muslim) Palestinians. However, a tiny core stuck stubbornly to the original monotheism, nurtured by the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BC (the only bona fide exile–from which they returned, the earlier Egyptian exile legend being crafted much later, when the Torah was written down and collected in the 3rd century BC).
Jews are not a race but rather a collective of many ethnic groups who were hijacked by a late 19th century ‘national’ movement. There is no racial or ethnic basis for being Jewish any more than there is for being Christian or Muslim. The great majority of those who today consider themselves Jewish are descended from converts in Central Asia, eastern Europe and north Africa, not from ancient Hebrews expelled from the Holy Land by the Romans. They are not ethnic “Semites”, of near eastern origin, or ethnic anything else.
Atzmon is a noted jazz musician, and deconstructs a popular 1970s Israeli pop song by Shlomo Artzi: All of a sudden a man wakes up in the morning. He feels he is people and to
everyone he comes across he says shalom. Artzi’s youth suggests Jews suddenly became “people” thanks to the state of Israel, conflating being Jewish with being Israeli, suggesting only Israelis can really feel free as Jews. What Artzi ignores is that feeling proud to be an Israeli is only for those Israelis who have “Jew” stamped in their passport, and, among them, only those who are blind to the bloody colonial basis for this privilege. Hardly a recipe for a healthy feeling.
Can a liar tell the truth?
Israel is a “democratic and Jewish state” according to Israeli law. The “Jewish” nature was first defined in the Declaration of Independence of 1948. The “democratic” character was added by the Knesset in 1985. This is a contradiction in terms, as Jewish by definition determines the state according to race, making it undemocratic for those in the state not Jewish. In cartesian lingo, both ‘A’ and ‘not A’ are true.
This flawed logic now lies at the heart of what it means to call oneself a secular Jew, either Israeli or ‘diaspora’. Sand joins other ex-Jews, Gilad Atzmon, Israel Shamir, and Will Self, who have renounced Jewishness, either as secularists, or as converts to Christianity, shedding a contradictory, now empty, signifier. Given what Israel has become, “democratic” and “Jewish” are no longer compatible. Sand rejects the faux Jewish nationalism served up by Zionism, which excludes non-Jews from the narrative, and is left with nothing except himself, his books, his sense of right and wrong. A lonely world.
Atzmon takes Sand’s attack on identity politics a step further, arguing in The Wandering Who that secular Jewish anti-Zionism feeds into the Zionist narrative, the do-gooder counterpoint to the more sinister role of the diaspora, taking Sand’s concerns to an even more uncomfortable conclusion: The Jewish Diaspora is there to mobilize lobbies by recruiting international support. The Neocons transform the American army into an Israeli mission force. Anti-Zionists of Jewish descent (and this may even include proud self-haters such as myself) are there to portray an image of ideological plurality and ethical concern.*
Sand dismisses both religion and nationalism as the basis for his identity. Atzmon argues both are legitimate, though they both are perverted in the case of the Israeli state. Nationalism is an authentic “bond with one’s soil, heritage, culture, language”, a cathartic experience, not at all “empty” as a signifier. Though nationalism may well be an invention, it is still “an intrinsically authentic fulfilling experience”. It can be misused, is often suicidal, but nonetheless, “it sometimes manages to integrate man, soil and sacrifice into a state of spiritual unification.”
What is especially moving about ex-Jews like Sand, and ex-Israel ex-Jews like Atzmon, is that they are trapped by their own Israeli heritage, whether or not they emigrate. Reading Sand’s book in Hebrew, writes Atzmon, “is for me, an ex-Jew and ex-Israeli, a truly authentic experience that brings me closer to my roots, my forgotten homeland and its fading landscape, my mother tongue or shall I simply say my Being.” He is confronted not by some “‘identity’ or politics but rather the Israeliness, that concrete nationalist discourse that matured into Hebraic poetry, patriotism, ideology, jargon, a dream and a tragedy to follow.” Israel’s present state has “robbed him of that Israeliness which was once to him a home.”
Hollow identity
Most still yearn to keep a diaspora Jewish identity alive. Judith Butler’s Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2013) is by a liberal-leaning Jew who feels she must salvage her Jewishness from Israel’s nationalism and occupation policies. “A new Jewish identity might emerge that connects Tel Aviv with New York’s Upper West Side, Berlin, Paris, London and Buenos Aires — and all of them on an equal footing,” writes Carlo Strener in his review.
For Sand and Atzmon, there is no “new Jewish identity” possible, because there is no diaspora. French Jews are French. Canadian ones are Canadian. It’s fine to be a believing ‘person of the Book’, and even an Israeli, speaking Israeli (really a new language) and being a citizen of a well-behaved multi-ethnic nation state, based on universal norms, like France or Canada. But everyone eats matzo balls already.
Assimilation is not like extermination, despite Golda Meir’s cries of “Wolf!” Non-religious Jewishness will continue to evaporate, along with Christian and Muslim identities for those who abandon their faith. There is no shame in calling oneself an ex-Christian or ex-Muslim.
Occam’s Razor: less is more
Anti-Zionists “rightly see [Zionist] policies as threatening the renewal of Judeophobia” that identifies all Jews as a “certain race-people, and confuses them with Zionists.”** Yes, but, as Atzmon argues, this “confusion” is part of the agenda, pushing Jews outside of Israel to support Israel unthinkingly and accept the resultant resentment they experience as “anti-Semitism”.
And even if they protest–as Jews–they inadvertently support the “Zionist world conspiracy”:
If those who call themselves anti-Zionist Jews without having lived in Israel, and without knowing its language or having experienced its culture, claim a particular right, different from that of non-Jews, to make accusations against Israel, how can one criticize overt pro-Zionists for granting themselves the privilege of actively intervening in decisions regarding the future and fate of Israel?*
The Jewish signifier undermines the anti-Zionist one. Slots muddy things. Medea Benjamin, a “one percenter, a nice little Jewish girl” founded the now legendary peace group Codepink. QAIA (Queers against Israeli apartheid) folded when its organizers realized by highlighting their ‘gay’ signifier, they were doing more harm than good. The queers don’t have the luxury of renouncing their queerness, but thoughtful Jews like Benjamin similarly downplay their own tribalism, and Sand and Atzmon have renounced it, as the honorable way out of their Catch-22.
* Gilad Atzmon, The Wandering Who?, Zero Books, 2011, p70.
** Shlomo Sand, How I Stopped being a Jew, Verso, 2014, p94–95.
‘Special forces shadow wars’ face legal threat from Corbyn
RT | August 1, 2016
Special forces operations should be subject to proper democratic oversight through a new War Powers Act, which would prevent troops being risked in Britain’s ‘shadow wars,’ according to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
He told Middle East Eye on Friday of his concerns over the repeated use of a legal loophole to deploy troops from the secretive SAS unit into war zones such as Iraq and Libya without a democratic mandate.
The prime minister is currently able to deploy special forces without a vote, a capability which is buttressed by the UK’s long-standing but increasingly controversial policy of refusing to comment on clandestine military activities.
“I’m very concerned about this because [former Prime Minister] David Cameron – I imagine [Prime Minister] Theresa May would say the same – would say parliamentary convention requires a parliamentary mandate to deploy British troops. Except, and they’ve all used the ‘except,’ when special forces are involved,” Corbyn said.
He said this backdoor method of using elite troops has a long and dubious history, drawing a comparison between today’s operations and those of the US military during the Vietnam War.
“The question of this of course goes back a long way to Vietnam in 1963, when the US managed to have I think 50,000 advisers to the South Vietnamese government before the Congress was even invited to vote on whether or not it should be involved in the Vietnam War. I think the parallel is a very serious one,” he said.
His comments were immediately attacked by former soldier-turned-Tory MP Bob Stewart, who told the Times on Wednesday the PM must have the opportunity to deploy troops “when they think it’s crucial.”
However, scholars and other Tory MPs have questioned the UK’s shadowy approach in recent times.
In May, Tory Foreign Affairs Committee chair Crispin Blunt told RT the government should simply come clean because British citizens are fully aware of the UK’s not-so-secret special forces shadow wars.
Blunt said there is no formal parliamentary process for overseeing SAS missions and “there’s obviously an issue as to whether the intelligence and security committee would be the proper vehicle for oversight of these kinds of operations, but we are not there at the moment.”
In a July paper on the issue published by the Remote Control Project, which investigates clandestine modes of warfare, security expert John Moran pointed out that many of the UK’s major military allies – including the US and Australia – are much franker with their citizens about the work of special forces.
BBC, other MSM guilty of ‘clear & consistent bias’ against Corbyn, study finds
RT | July 29, 2016
British news channels are blatantly biased against Jeremy Corbyn, giving far more airtime to commentators who openly criticize the Labour Party leader than those who support him, a second study of the phenomenon shows.
New research by the Media Reform Coalition and Birkbeck University of London shows there has been a “clear and consistent bias” both online and on television against Corbyn since the coup against his leadership was launched after the EU referendum.
Similar conclusions were drawn earlier in July by a similar London School of Economics (LSE) study.
Birkbeck academics studied news reports published in the wake of the June 23 vote, when a series of shadow cabinet members resigned en masse in the hope of forcing Corbyn to stand down.
Outlets, including the BBC, were found to have given Corbyn opponents double the airtime afforded to Corbynistas.
The report found “a marked and persistent imbalance in favour of sources critical of Jeremy Corbyn, the issues that they sought to highlight, and the arguments they advanced.”
It also found a “strong tendency within the main BBC evening news bulletins for reporters to use pejorative language when describing Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, including words like ‘hostile’ and ‘hard core.’”
Media critic Roy Greens said the findings should force reporters and editors to face “the reality of their bias.”
Compiled by Dr. Justin Schlosberg, the study compared news pieces about Corbyn’s leadership struggle as seen through the lens of the BBC, ITV, the Daily Mail, the Huffington Post, IBTimes, the Mirror, the Independent, the Guardian and the Telegraph.
And as far as opinion pieces were concerned both the Telegraph and the Daily Mail failed to publish any article supportive of the leader of the opposition.
The outlet most sympathetic with Corbyn was the Huffington Post, which divided its coverage between 50 percent pro-Corbyn comment and 50 percent critical or unclear.
“Amidst the social fracturing and polarisation of democratic life post-Brexit, the need for a more plural and inclusive mainstream news media has never been more urgent,” Schlosberg said.
“We hope that broadcasters and editors will respond positively to our call to consider the impact of imbalanced reporting on the democratic process.”
Earlier research by LSE echoed Schlosberg’s conclusions, finding that three quarters of newspaper reporting on Corbyn in his first months as leader either ignored or “distorted his views.”
“Allowing an important and legitimate political actor, i.e. the leader of the main opposition party, to develop their own narrative and have a voice in the public space is paramount in a democracy,” LSE’s Dr. Bart Cammaerts said.
A jolly bit of tender
Crimes Of Britain | July 28, 2016
Churchill has been chosen by the Bank of England’s to be the face on their new £5 note set to be in circulation from September 2016.
The Governor of the Bank of England stated “Our banknotes acknowledge the life and work of great Britons. Sir Winston Churchill was a truly great British leader, orator and writer. Above that, he remains a hero of the entire free world. His energy, courage, eloquence, wit and public service are an inspiration to us all. I am proud to announce that he will appear on our next banknote”.
Churchill is fawned over in Britain. He was voted ‘Greatest Briton’ of all time in a poll run by the BBC in 2002. He is praised across the political spectrum, held up as the man who stopped Brits speaking German. When the truth is Churchill was never an opponent of fascism. He was a white supremacist who talked of the need of non-Anglo Saxons to “recognise the superiority of race”. In 1927 he praised Mussolini, “What a man! I have lost my heart!… Fascism has rendered a service to the entire world”. He went on to hold Hitler up as the ideal figure to lead Britain if they were to be defeated, “If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations”.
Winnie was still swilling champagne when he engineered a famine in Bengal which saw at least 4 million men, women and children to starve to death. Food literally taken from the mouths of starving people to ship it where it wasn’t even needed. The Black and Tan thugs were his brainchild. An advocate for the use of poison gases whilst Secretary for War and Air. He assisted greatly in the looting of Iran which kept Britain afloat. And when the government of Mohammad Mosaddegh threatened British ‘interests’, Churchill was there ready to desecrate democracy. He believed that Kenya’s fertile highlands should be only for white colonial settlers, and approved the removal of the local population. Over 150,000 men, women and children were forced into concentration camps. It was Churchill who arranged for Ibn Saud to receive a subsidy of £100,000 a year in 1922. He later gifted the founder of Saudi Arabia a Rolls Royce and lamented that his “admiration for him was deep, because of his unfailing loyalty to us”. When the democratically elected government in ‘British Guiana’ rolled out their nationalisation plan Churchill sent war ships and 700 British troops to put a stop to that. He assisted Zionism and was rewarded with a bust in Al Quds for his contribution in helping create the colonial settler state of ‘Israel’. Winston and his cabinet were deeply concerned about British people viewing Black American GIs favourably in WW2. He was obsessed so much that he wanted to get the Americans to stop sending Black soldiers to Britain. His racism didn’t stop there, when debating the adoption of new laws limiting immigration from the Caribbean he suggested the use of the motto “Keep England White”. All of Churchill’s wars were for defending and preserving the thieving British Empire.
I am releasing an in depth piece on his genocidal campaigns in the coming weeks. The British press have churned out a few articles here and there on Churchill but have glossed over the true extent of his crimes. Presenting them as OK because he led the Brits in their ‘finest hour’.
It really is no surprise that he is to decorate English currency, he is your archetypal Brit at the end of the day.
How the Australian, British, and US Governments Shamelessly Helped Kill Countless People in Indonesia in 1965
Asia-Pacific Research – July 23, 2016
The Hague-based International People’s Tribunal has ruled that the Indonesian regime that replaced Indonesian President Sukarno committed crimes against humanity in 1965. The governments of Australia, Britain, and the United States have also been pronounced guilty as complicit partners in the massacre of 500,000 to 1000,000 people or more in Indonesia. People were murdered in Indonesia due to their principles, political ideology, ethnic backgrounds, and opposition to foreign influence. Albeit the ruling is an important historical acknowledgment, the assistance that the Australian, British, and US governments provided to the coup and played in the massacres is not a secret.
Asia-Pacific Research presents these excerpts from the Australian journalist John Pilger’s book The New Rulers of the World, which was published by Verso in 2002, in the interest of providing the historical background about the massacres that took place in Indonesia. Reading them will educate one on the despicable and criminal roles that Australia, Britain, and the US played. ”There were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in Surabaya, and British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so that they could take part in this terrible holocaust,” for example Pilger writes. In his work John Pilger also notes that the US was directly involved in the operations of the death squads and helped compile the lists of people to be murdered while the Australian, British, and US media were used as propaganda tools to whitewash the coup and bloodbaths in Indonesia. A key point, however, that is emphasizes is that the underlying economic motivations and plunder hidden behind the ideological discourse of the Cold War that really motivated the massacres in Indonesia. – Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, Asia-Pacific Research Editor, 22 July 2016.
Indonesians preparing to die in a mass grave
Excerpts from The New Rulers of the World (Verso)
John Pilger, 2002
… according to a CIA memorandum, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and President John Kennedy had agreed to ‘liquidate President Sukarno, depending on the situation and available opportunities’. The CIA author added, ‘It is not clear to me whether murder or overthrow is intended by the word liquidate.’
Sukarno was a populist, the founder of modern Indonesia and of the non-aligned movement of developing countries, which he hoped would forge a genuine ‘third way’ between the spheres of the two superpowers. In 1955, he convened the ‘Asia-Africa Conference’ in the Javanese hill city of Bandung. It was the first time the leaders of the developing world, the majority of humanity, had met to forge common interests: a prospect that alarmed the western powers, especially as the vision and idealism of nonalignment represented a potentially popular force that might seriously challenge neo-colonialism. The hopes invested in such an unprecedented meeting are glimpsed in the faded tableaux and black-and-white photographs in the museum at Bandung and in the forecourt of the splendid art deco Savoy Hotel, where the following Bandung Principles are displayed:
I – Respect for fundamental human rights and the principles of the United Nations Charter.
2 – Respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations.
3 – The recognition of the equality of all peoples.
4 – The settlement of disputes by peaceful means.
Sukarno could be a democrat and a demagogue. For a time, Indonesia was a parliamentary democracy, then became what he called a ‘guided democracy’. He encouraged mass trade unions and peasant, women’s and cultural movements. Between 1959 and 1965, more than 15 million people joined political parties or affiliated mass organisations that were encouraged to challenge British and American influence in the region. With 3 million members, the PKI was the largest communist party in the world outside the Soviet Union and China. According to the Australian historian Harold Crouch, ‘the PKI had won widespread support not as a revolutionary party but as an organisation defending the interests of ‘the poor within the existing system’. It was this popularity, rather than any armed insurgency, that alarmed the Americans. Like Vietnam to the north, Indonesia might ‘go communist’ .
In 1990, the American investigative journalist Kathy Kadane revealed the extent of secret American collaboration in the massacres of 1965-66 which allowed Suharto to seize the presidency. Following a series of interviews with former US officials, she wrote, ‘They systematically compiled comprehensive lists of communist operatives. As many as 5,000 names were furnished to the Indonesian army, and the Americans later checked off the names of those who had been killed or captured.’ One of those interviewed was Robert J Martens, a political officer in the US embassy in Jakarta. ‘It was a big help to the army,’ he said. ‘They probably killed a lot of people and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.’ Joseph Lazarsky, the deputy CIA station chief in Jakarta, said that confirmation of the killings came straight from Suharto’s headquarters. ‘We were getting a good account in Jakarta of who was being picked up,’ he said. ‘The army had a “shooting list” of about 4,000 or 5,000 people. They didn’t have enough goon squads to zap them all, and some individuals were valuable for interrogation. The infrastructure [of the PKI] was zapped almost immediately. We knew what they were doing . . . Suharto and his advisers said, if you keep them alive you have to feed them.’
Having already armed and equipped much of the army, Washington secretly supplied Suharto’s troops with a field communications network as the killings got under way. Flown in at night by US air force planes based in the Philippines, this was state-of-the-art equipment, whose high frequencies were known to the CIA and the National Security Agency advising President Johnson. Not only did this allow Suharto’s generals to co-ordinate the killings, it meant that the highest echelons of the US administration were listening in and that Suharto could seal off large areas of the country. Although there is archive film of people being herded into trucks and driven away, a single fuzzy photograph of a massacre is, to my knowledge, the only pictorial record of what was Asia’s holocaust.
The American Ambassador in Jakarta was Marshall Green, known in the State Department as ‘the coupmaster’. Green had arrived in Jakarta only months earlier, bringing with him a reputation for having masterminded the overthrow of the Korean leader Syngman Rhee, who had fallen out with the Americans. When the killings got under way in Indonesia, manuals on student organising, written in Korean and English, were distributed by the US embassy to the Indonesian Student Action Command (KAMI), whose leaders were sponsored by the CIA.
On October 5, 1965, Green cabled Washington on how the United States could ‘shape developments to our advantage’. The plan was to blacken the name of the PKI and its ‘protector’, Sukarno. The propaganda should be based on ‘[spreading] the story of the PKI’s guilt, treachery and brutality’. At the height of the bloodbath, Green assured General Suharto: ‘The US is generally sympathetic with and admiring of what the army is doing.” As for the numbers killed, Howard Federspiel, the Indonesia expert at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research in 1965, said, ‘No one cared, as long as they were communists, that they were being butchered. No one was getting very worked up about it.’
The Americans worked closely with the British, the reputed masters and inventors of the ‘black’ propaganda admired and adapted by Joseph Goebbels in the 1930s. Sir Andrew Gilchrist, the Ambassador in Jakarta, made his position clear in a cable to the Foreign Office: ‘I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change.’ With more than ‘a little shooting’ under way, and with no evidence of the PKI’s guilt, the embassy advised British intelligence headquarters in Singapore on the line to be taken, with the aim of ‘weakening the PKI permanently’ .
Suitable propaganda themes might be: PKI brutality in murdering Generals and [Foreign Minister] Nasution’s daughter . . . PKI subverting Indonesia as agents of foreign Communists . . . But treatment will need to be subtle, e.g. (a) all activities should be strictly unattributable, (b) British participation or co-operation should be carefully concealed.
Within two weeks, an office of the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD) had opened in Singapore. The IRD was a top-secret, cold war propaganda unit headed by Norman Reddaway, one of Her Majesty’s most experienced liars. It would be salutary for journalists these days to study the critical role western propaganda played then, as it does now, in shaping the news. Indeed, Reddaway and his colleagues manipulated the press so expertly that he boasted to Gilchrist in a letter marked ‘secret and personal’ that the story he had promoted – that Sukarno’s continued rule would lead to a communist takeover – ‘went all over the world and back again’ . He described how an experienced Fleet Street journalist agreed ‘to give exactly your angle on events in his article … . i.e. that this was a kid glove coup without butchery.’
Roland Challis, the BBC’s South-East Asia correspondent, was a particular target of Reddaway, who claimed that the official version of events could be ‘put almost instantly back to Indonesia via the BBC’. Prevented from entering Indonesia along with other foreign journalists, Challis was unaware of the extent of the slaughter. ‘It was a triumph for western propaganda,’ he told me. ‘My British sources purported not to know what was going on, but they knew what the American plan was. There were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in Surabaya, and British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so that they could take part in this terrible holocaust. It was only much later that we learned the American embassy was supplying names and ticking them off as they were killed. There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the IMF and the World Bank was part of it. Sukarno had kicked them out; now Suharto would bring them back. That was the deal.’
With Sukarno now virtually powerless and ill, and Suharto about to appoint himself acting president, the American press reported the Washington-backed coup not as a great human catastrophe, but in terms of the new economic advantages. The massacres were described by Time as ‘The West’s Best News in Asia’. A headline in US News and World Report read: ‘Indonesia: Hope . . . where there was once none’. The renowned New York Times columnist James Reston celebrated ‘A gleam of light in Asia’ and wrote a kid-glove version that he had clearly been given. The Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt, who was visiting the US, offered a striking example of his sense of humour: ‘With 500,000 to a million communist sympathisers knocked off,’ he said approvingly, ‘I think it’s safe to assume a reorientation has taken place.’
Holt’s remark was an accurate reflection of the complicity of the Australian foreign affairs and political establishment in the agony of its closest neighbour. The Australian embassy in Jakarta described the massacres as a ‘cleansing operation’. The Australian Ambassador, KCO Shann, enthused to Canberra that the Indonesian army was ‘refreshingly determined to do over the PKI’, adding that the generals had spoken approvingly of the reporting on Radio Australia, which he described as ‘a bit dishonest’.’ In the Prime Minister’s Department, officials considered supporting ‘any measures to assist the Indonesian army … cope with the internal situation’.
In February 1966, [British] Ambassador Gilchrist wrote a report on the scale of the massacres based on the findings of the Swedish Ambassador, who had toured central and eastern Java with his Indonesian wife and had been able to speak to people out of earshot of government officials. Gilchrist wrote to the Foreign Office: ‘The Ambassador and I had discussed the killings before he left [on the tour] and he had found my suggested figure of 400,000 quite incredible. His enquiries have led him to reconsider it a very serious under-estimate. A bank manager in Surabaya with twenty employees said that four had been removed one night and beheaded . . . A third of a spinning factory’s technicians, being members of a Communist union, had been killed … The killings in Bali had been particularly monstrous. In certain areas, it was felt that not enough people [emphasis in the original] had been killed.’
On the island of Bali, the ‘reorientation’ described by Prime Minister Holt meant the violent deaths of at least 80,000 people, although this is generally regarded as a conservative figure. The many western, mostly Australian, tourists who have since taken advantage of cheap package holidays to the island might reflect that beneath the car parks of several of the major tourist hotels are buried countless bodies.
The distinguished campaigner and author Carmel Budiardjo, an Englishwoman married to a tapol and herself a former political prisoner, returned to Indonesia in 2000 and found ‘the trauma left by the killings thirty-five years ago still gripping many communities on the island’. She described meeting, in Denpasar, fifty people who had never spoken about their experiences before in public. ‘One witness,’ she wrote, ‘who was 20 years old at the time calmly told us how he had been arrested and held in a large cell by the military, 52 people in all, mostly members of mass organisations from nearby villages. Every few days, a batch of men was taken out, their hands tied behind their backs and driven off to be shot. Only two of the prisoners survived . . . Another witness, an ethnic Chinese Indonesian, gave testimony about the killing of 103 people, some as young as 15. In this case, the people were not arrested but simply taken from their homes and killed, as their names were ticked off a list.’
[…]
‘In the early sixties,’ he said, ‘the pressure on Indonesia to do what the Americans wanted was intense. Sukarno wanted good relations with them, but he didn’t want their economic system. With America, that is never possible. So he became an enemy. All of us who wanted an independent country, free to make our own mistakes, were made the enemy. They didn’t call it globalisation then; but it was the same thing. If you accepted it, you were America’s friend. If you chose another way, you were given warnings, and if you didn’t comply, hell was visited on you. But I am back; I am well; I have my family. They didn’t win.’
Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA operations officer in the 1960s, described the terror in Indonesia from 1965 – 66 as a ‘model operation’ for the American-run coup that got rid of Salvador Allende in Chile seven years later. ‘The CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders,’ he wrote, ‘[just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965.’ He says Indonesia was also the model for Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, where American-directed death squads assassinated up to 50,000 people. ‘You can trace back all the major, bloody events run from Washington to the way Suharto came to power,’ he told me. ‘The success of that meant that it would be repeated, again and again.’
[…]
Indonesia, once owing nothing but having been plundered of its gold, precious stones, wood, spices and other natural riches by its colonial masters, the Dutch, today has a total indebtedness estimated at $262 billion, which is 170 per cent of its gross domestic product. There is no debt like it on earth. It can never be repaid. It is a bottomless hole.
Copyright © Asia-Pacific Research, Asia-Pacific Research, 2016
The dangers of Western military action in Libya
By Jessica Purkiss | MEMO | July 22, 2016
In April, the French and British foreign ministers visited Tripoli to show support for Libya’s UN-backed unity government. France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault urged Libya’s neighbours to get behind the government, adding, “There is no other possible path.” Reports have however recently surfaced showing that Western forces, including France, have been assisting General Khalifa Haftar – a figure who has been threatened with EU sanctions for refusing to support the unity government and who has been fighting some groups involved in the Western-backed campaign against Daesh.
Earlier this month, air traffic control recordings obtained by the Middle East Eye showed that British, French, Italian and US troops, have been coordinating air strikes in support of Haftar. On Wednesday, the death of three French soldiers led to the first official confirmation that French special forces are operating in Libya, something the unity government say they were not informed of. France’s presence in the country was first reported by Le Monde in February, with reports claiming that a detachment was aiding Haftar in his battle against Daesh from a base at Benghazi airport. Earlier this year, the Pentagon said its units were deployed to “partner” local militias against Daesh and Britain has admitted sending RAF reconnaissance flights over the country.
Since the fall of the Libyan leader Muammar Gadaffi in 2011, the country has struggled to stay on course. Today Libya is in the middle of a civil war and is split between two warring parliaments. The political vacuum has allowed for the powerful militant group Daesh to gain a foothold and criminal networks to flourish.
General Khalifa Haftar, who leads the Libyan National Army (LNA), has been the key force fighting against Libya Dawn, an umbrella of several armed groups who have supported Omar Al-Hassi’s General National Congress (GNC). The GNC was replaced by the House of Representatives (HoR) following an election but political opponents of the new parliament challenged its legitimacy and revived the GNC in Tripoli. Fighters from Libya Dawn forced the government of Prime Minister Abdullah Al-Thani and the HoR to Tobruk. Haftar’s crackdown is known as Operation Dignity.
The UN-backed unity government, effectively Libya’s third parliament, was formed in Tunisia in December 2015, with the aim of bringing an end to the conflict. It has the difficult task of replacing the two governments, bringing unity to the fractured country and dealing with security concerns arising from the presence of Daesh.
But it has faced endless opposition. The government only managed to sail into Tripoli in March 2016 as opposition groups prevented them from flying in. Daesh has also made things difficult – in the run-up to the January 16 2016 deadline for its formation, the militant group led a sustained attack against Libya’s vital infrastructure. While the unity government does have the mandate to call for the UN to militarily intervene, unsanctioned military actions by Western countries only works to undermine the already very thin veneer of legitimacy it has.
In Libya, the response to the news of the French soldiers has been strong, with condemnations from the UN-backed government and angry protests in Tripoli. As Fayez Serraj, the Prime Minister of Libya, said in a recent op-ed, “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Daesh) is not our greatest enemy. National division is.” The divisions within Libya have allowed it to veer into civil war, with groups such as Daesh managing to exploit the cleavages in the country. The growth of Daesh is a symptom of conflict in Libya not the cause.
Serraj continues, “The stark lesson from the past five years of turmoil is that when Libyans fail to work together they empower those who would destroy our country… terrorists will be defeated by our Armed Forces uniting under civilian command, not rival militias rushing to claim a political prize.” This applies to achieving peace in Libya- by backing one side politically while supporting another militarily, divides that are preventing peace only widen. In supporting Haftar whose power base is in the east, it undermines the unity government’s struggle to gain control of this heavily divided area.
Aside from the implications of peace for the country, there is also a question of the legality of the action. As Libya’s Supreme State Council put it, it is a “clear deception by a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a sponsor of the [December 2015] political agreement”. Stop the War Coalition’s Chris Nineham told RT: “They are not backed by the UN, these interventions. They are not checked anywhere. They are just unilateral acts of military aggression.” Some have gone even further. “This is a sort of coup against the political process and against the democratic path chosen by the Libyan people,” Mansour Al Hasadi, a member of the GNA, told Al Jazeera.
Britain and France took the lead in pushing for military intervention in 2011. While the intervention led to rapid results and was initially considered successful, the country now contends with three parliaments, the growing presence of Daesh and continued violence. Peace seems a distant prospect. Yet the same international powers have not learned from their mistakes.
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The Bulldozer Revolution: A Blueprint For American Meddling in Eastern Europe
By Patrick Pillow | The Libertarian Institute | June 8, 2026
By the summer of 2000, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević appeared firmly entrenched in power.
A decade earlier, he had risen to prominence by harnessing Serbian nationalism as Yugoslavia began to fracture. Over time, he consolidated control over political institutions and much of the media while leading Serbia through wars, sanctions, and NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign. Yet beneath the surface, public frustration was growing. The economy was struggling, unemployment remained high, and many Serbians had grown weary of international isolation and authoritarian rule.
When Milošević changed election rules in July 2000 to allow the presidency to be decided by popular vote, he likely expected another victory. Instead, the move created an opportunity for a united opposition.
On September 24, voters went to the polls. Milošević faced Vojislav Koštunica, the candidate of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS). Election observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe later described the vote as fundamentally flawed, citing irregularities, restricted monitoring, and unequal media access. State television overwhelmingly favored Milošević while opposition voices received little coverage.
When results were announced, the opposition claimed Koštunica had won outright. The government election commission insisted that no candidate had received a majority and ordered a runoff election. The opposition rejected the decision and called for nationwide resistance. … continue
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