Alternatives International Journal

The answer to the nuclear issue is more democracy"

Siddharth VARADARAJAN — 2006-12-01T16:35:10Z

What is your assessment of the effect the so-called global war on terrorism has had on the human rights situation around the world?

I must say at the outset that any kind of violence is reprehensible to me. Terrorism solves no problem. But fighting terrorism has become an excuse to infringe on human rights. On the pretext of national interest,' governments around the world are increasing their powers and controls. But this has not led to a decrease in terrorism. In fact, it seems as if it's on the rise. And the reason may be that we are only looking at the effects and not the causes of terrorism. It's only when we look at the root causes that we can combat terrorism. {{And what are the root causes?}} Terrorism has two main causes. First, prejudice, which comes from ignorance and illiteracy. By bringing awareness, one can possibly fight prejudice. The education system everywhere is inadequate. For example, let's take history. We learn of wars and how one side has been the victor and one side the loser. But never do we learn of the actions that would have led to prevention of those wars. Of course, worse than insufficient education is the lack of any education at all. For example, in your country, many children do not go to school due to poverty. The second cause of terrorism is injustice. When a nation lives under poverty for generations and the world is indifferent, when several generations live under dictatorships and the world is indifferent, when many generations are forced to migrate away from their lands and the world is indifferent, then, because they are hopeless, people may take actions and forget reasoning and common sense and light fires that can burn both themselves and others. {{ Like the Palestinian grandmother in Occupied Gaza who recently became a suicide bomber...}} This is one of the manifestations of hopelessness. I'm against any kind of violence, even if it's carried out against oneself. But I want to understand why some people attempt violent action. Eighty per cent of the world's wealth is controlled by one per cent of its population. With food wasted in European and American restaurants, one can feed many in other countries. How do we ever expect in such a world to find peace? {{Turning to Iran specifically, how has the coming to power of President Ahmadinejad affected the human rights situation there?}} It hasn't gotten any better. {{In what way?}} Censorship is tougher. More newspapers have been shut down. The police have attacked peaceful gatherings of women's groups, student and workers' groups. Many workers have been arrested. Inflation has sharply risen. Mr. Ahmadinejad promised in his election campaign that he would fight corruption. But we're yet to see anything happen in that area. {{As a human rights defender inside Iran, what are the avenues available for you to struggle? Are there any legal remedies, for example? What about mobilising public opinion?}} Unfortunately, our courts are not independent and they do not carry out justice. For years, I've been defending only political prisoners. And in none of these courts have I ever seen justice carried out. One of the most famous Iranian journalists was my client. He was sentenced to six years in prison just for writing an article. {{Akbar Ganji?}} Yes, Ganji. Two of Iran's most famous trial lawyers are also my clients. Both have been sentenced to five years only because they accepted to represent political prisoners. One of them has been in jail for the past four and a half years. His name is Nasser Zarafshan. And the other has been in jail for seven months and we have brought him out on bail. If his sentence becomes final, he must also go to prison for the five years. As such, you can see that I have no hope in the courts. Our only hope is public opinion, whether nationally or internationally. And it is for this reason that I go on trips repeatedly. {{What about the so-called reformist wing? Do new parties such as Ettemad-e-Milli of Mehdi Karroubi and others offer any hope?}} For years, the people thought the reform wing of the establishment could offer a way out. And it is for this reason that Khatami got elected [as President]. Unfortunately, his programme was defeated and he couldn't implement his reform ideas. One of the reasons he failed was that power is in the hands of extremists and fundamentalists within the establishment and they never did let him implement his programmes. Let me give you an example. Khatami wanted the government to join the Convention against Torture and the [Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women] CEDAW. At the time, the parliamentary majority was with the reformists and they did pass these laws. But the Guardian Council refused to allow them to stand. In fact, one of the high-ranking members of the Guardian Council said in public that one of the worst days of his life was when the CEDAW came before him. His point was that why should the parliament of an Islamic Republic pass this law in the first place for him to then have to reject it! {{When I was in Tehran last August, I interviewed the Islamic scholar and dissident Mohsen Kadivar and he spoke of attempts being made to restrict his international movements. Do you experience such attempts?}} It always happens but as a Nobel Peace Prize winner, by name is quite well known. Also, I must add that I go only to places that are independent of governments. I'm not siding with any government. For example, I am here in India on the invitation of a small NGO, Apne Aap, which works on women who live in red light districts with their children. Neither the Iranian government nor the Indian [government] can limit or repress such small organisations. I'm a human rights activist and I work only with people. Today, I am going to pay a visit to the Manipuri human rights activist Irom Sharmila, to visit a person who has protested and raised her voice by being on hunger strike for six years against a law that is unreasonable, the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. [Later on Sunday, Ms. Ebadi met Ms. Sharmila at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and said she would raise her case and the AFSPA issue before the U.N. Human Rights Commission.] {{As a human rights activist, does it complicate life when you have the U.S. Congress passing laws giving money fordemocracy' and regime change in Iran? Does this help your work or make it more difficult?

Democracy cannot be purchased and America cannot hope to designate money to bring democracy. It is not a commodity to export. Democracy is a culture. This culture exists in Iran and for years Iranians have fought for democracy. The budget that the U.S. has set aside to bring democracy in Iran does not make anything easier for human rights defenders and activists. If anything, it gives the government a pretext to crack down on anybody who is fighting for democracy by branding them as people who get money from outside.

As a concerned Iranian, how do you look at the nuclear controversy? Do you think the United States' approach of threatening sanctions against your country will produce a good outcome?

I'm categorically against nuclear bombs for any country — India, Pakistan, Israel, Iran, all of them. But regarding nuclear power in Iran, I've never been part of the government and I've no idea what goes on behind closed doors. As such, I'm not really sure what stage we're at in the nuclear energy programme. The Iranian government claims that it is using nuclear energy peacefully but the international community does not accept this claim. And the reason is clear: Because democracy is not advanced in Iran, there is no public supervision. It is only natural that when decisions are made behind closed doors, the world does not trust those claims. The only way out is advanced democracy. And if the world can see that people are supervising, or watching, the government's actions, then they will have to trust what it has to say.

Economic sanctions have never been detrimental to governments, only to people. The Iraq experience proves this. Hundreds of thousands of children died in Iraq of hunger but Saddam and his family became richer. Other solutions need to be sought out.

Are you afraid that the nuclear question is becoming a pretext to target Iran, to attack it militarily?

I can only hope that America has learned something from the Iraq situation. And I don't think the American people are for another war.

No Plan B for Bush

Siddharth VARADARAJAN — 2006-11-22T12:53:42Z

WITH the absence of weapons of mass destruction and a rising number of U.S. military casualties exposing both the lies and the hubris of the Iraq occupation, the conviction of Saddam Hussein was meant to be the cathartic moment when all misgivings about the wisdom of the war enterprise could finally be put to rest. If the invasion, in the final retelling of the tale, was about ridding the Iraqi people of dictatorship, what better way to bring about closure than to have the dictator packed off to the gallows? Brushing aside the well-documented concerns of human rights groups and even a United Nations panel — the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention — the Iraqi High Tribunal rushed through its work completely oblivious to the need for fairness. But in the end, not even its improbably timed and wholly predictable verdict sentencing the former Iraqi president to death could extricate the Bush presidency from the jaws of political defeat.

Reaction to loss

President Bush has reacted to the loss of both houses of Congress to the Democrats in this month's elections by replacing Donald Rumsfeld, the Iraq war's chief prosecutor, with Robert M. Gates, a former head of the Central Intelligence Agency. A close associate of James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, who served as Bush 41's Secretary of State and National Security Adviser respectively, Gates has directly and indirectly been associated with a policy line on critical foreign policy issues such as Iran that is sometimes at variance with the Bush orthodoxy. The Deep Establishment of which he is a part was always a little wary of the ideological baggage that the Neoconservatives had loaded on to the project for the preservation and extension of American power in the Post-Cold War world. And as the Iraq fiasco threatens to undermine American hegemony in West Asia by dragging the U.S. to the brink of a political and even military defeat, the search for an alternative strategy to defeat the resistance and stabilise Iraq has emerged as the number one strategic concern of all sections of the establishment.

So apparent is the impending humiliation that even the Neocon ideologues who supplied the ideological justification for the Iraq invasion are now rapidly deserting the sinking ship of the "Greater Middle East" that the 2003 invasion was meant to launch. Richard Perle, ranking hawk on the Defence Policy Board Advisory Committee until 2004, is no longer so sure the war was a good idea. "I think now I probably would have said, Let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists'," he is quoted by Vanity Fair magazine as saying in a forthcoming issue. Other influential Neocons who have done a flip-flop include Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute whose proximity to senior Bush strategist Karl Rove is well known. In 2002, Ledeen launched a withering attack in the National Review on Scowcroft for "[coming] out against the desperately-needed and long overdue war against Saddam Hussein and the rest of the terror masters". Today, he claims "there are many ways to wage a war" and that he never advocated military action. In 2002, Perle and Ledeen were no lone rangers but part of a cabal with deep influence in the Pentagon and White House. Other members of the group included Rumsfeld, his erstwhile deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, senior Pentagon intelligence official Stephen Cambone, and Abram N. Shulsky, who headed theOffice of Special Plans' from which crooked intelligence about Iraqi WMD flowed thick and fast.

When he takes charge of the Pentagon, the easiest job Gates will have will be to shut down Shulsky and the rest of the Neocons but that will not take him or the Bush administration any closer to an honourable exit from Iraq. As matters stand, two high-level panels are in the process of reviewing United States' strategy in that country. There is the Iraq Study Group headed by James Baker and former Congressman Lee Hamilton. Set up by Congress in March this year, its recommendations are expected shortly. There is also the military's own review process undertaken by a team of colonels put together by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace. With the prospect of failure weighing heavily on its mind, the Bush administration is hoping that either of these panels will come up with an elusive roadmap out of the Iraq quagmire.

Today, more than 150,000 U.S. troops are deployed in Iraq. The total number of U.S. service personnel killed is 2,838 and is rising every week. The bill for military operations stands at over $300 billion, compared to the $38 billion spent by the U.S. government on the reconstruction of Iraq. Economists Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz have pegged the overall cost to the U.S. economy of the Iraq war at over $2 trillion. On the other side of the ledger, the comprehensive field-based survey of mortality rates published in the Lancet suggests close to 700,000 Iraqis have lost their lives since the U.S. invasion of their country. Most parts of the country still do not have uninterrupted power supply with even Baghdad neighbourhoods getting electricity for just a few hours a day. Oil production, the bedrock of the Iraqi economy, stands at 12 per cent less than the level it was at before the war.

But more than economic hardship, it is the relentless, mysterious, all-pervading violence, which most concerns the average Iraqi. The U.S. says it wants an end to sectarian killings but many of its policies have exacerbated divisions. [There is now open talk of the U.S. "unleashing the Shiite card" as a strategy]. And the occupation, in turn, has benefited from the bloodletting. Shia-Sunni violence, which had abated in 2004 and 2005 as rival militias sought to coordinate their attacks on the U.S. occupation force, has once again become a major problem following the mysterious bombing of the Askari mosque in Samara earlier this year.

Though the Bush administration is waiting for the Baker-Hamilton and Pace reports with bated breath, there are only a discrete number of policy options from which these two panels will have to choose their recommendations. And each has its own limitations and weaknesses.

Option 1: Reduce troops

This is the option favoured by most Democrats, and presumably by the U.S. electorate, which would like to get its soldiers out of harm's way in Iraq. But the drawback here is that the `Iraqisation' of security has not at all gone according to plan. Not only are the U.S.-trained Iraqi soldiers poorly motivated, it is clear that they are functioning as little more than a sectional army with links to the Shia militias. In any event, a drawn down U.S. force would continue to be the target of resistance attacks and would eventually give rise to pressure to withdraw completely from Iraq. Neither the White House nor the Pentagon is keen for such an eventuality.

Option 2: Increase troops

Influential military analysts and politicians like Senator John McCain have argued that the U.S. has too few soldiers on the ground and that far from reducing the number of service personnel deployed in Iraq, there is a need dramatically to augment their presence. The McCain plan would see tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops rotated into trouble spots like Baghdad and the "Sunni triangle", as well as Shia strongholds with the aim of taking on and liquidating the Mahdi militia of Moqtada al-Sadr. Tempting though this option sounds, all previous U.S. attempts to defeat the Iraqi resistance by overwhelming force as in Fallujah, Tal Afar, Baqubah and elsewhere have led to higher U.S. casualties and an increase in Iraqi alienation. Sending more U.S. troops in, then, will only aggravate the situation further.

Option 3: Partition by another name

With neither a reduction nor an increase in troops that are palatable as options for U.S. planners, it is possible that the scenario of partition might gain more traction. Senator Joseph Biden and Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations have come up with a plan for the three-way division of Iraq into loose confederating units that will amount to partition by another name as time passes and religious and ethnic militias become stronger. This is the nightmare scenario for most Iraqis, the one option that would make matters — intolerable though they are now — even worse. The division of Iraq into Shia, Sunni and Kurdish enclaves will inevitably lead to demographic cleansing and bloodshed of an unimaginable proportion and also force Iraq's neighbours, especially Turkey, to intervene. To forestall a Turkish invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan, the suggestion made is that U.S. forces relocate there. Even if that maintains stability in the north, the southern part of Iraq would descend into chaos.

Option 4: Regional conference

Given the experience of the Dayton conference, which allowed the U.S. to enforce peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina, some analysts have suggested that the convening of a regional conference on Iraq with the participation of the invading powers as well neighbours like Iran, Turkey and Syria might open up the prospects for the eventual stabilisation of the country. But as Richard Holbrooke, the architect of Dayton has reminded us in a recent interview, the Ohio conference worked because the U.S. was there to bomb recalcitrant factions into submission. Here, the conference is being convened because of the failure of the military option. And that will certainly affect the dynamics of the process as far as the U.S. is concerned.

Nevertheless, of all the options available, certainly this one looks the least unpalatable from the Iraqi and regional perspective. Of course, it would involve the Bush administration giving up its aversion to direct engagement with Iran despite the latter's refusal to suspend uranium enrichment. In 2004, Robert Gates and Zbignbiew Brezinski co-chaired a Council on Foreign Relations report on Iran, which advocated the resumption of dialogue between Washington and Tehran. In 2003, Rumsfeld and the Neocons in government got the Bush administration to rebuff a major overture made by the Iranians for a comprehensive dialogue. With Rumsfeld gone and the Neocons in retreat, it is possible Washington may be more receptive to the idea of working with Tehran. At any rate, as part of his work for the Iraq Study Group, James Baker recently had a long meeting with Javad Zarif, Iran's ambassador to the United Nations.

There was a time the U.S. used to boast of its ability to fight and win two wars simultaneously at different locations halfway around the world. Iraq has shown that it is not even possible for it to win one properly. Iran today has said it is willing to work with the U.S. provided the U.S. is receptive to its legitimate concerns. In many ways, this offer holds the key to winning the peace in Iraq. But does President Bush have the courage and foresight to realise it?

To the victor belongs the judge's gavel

Siddharth VARADARAJAN — 2006-11-08T15:15:08Z

THROUGHOUT HISTORY, law and war have been uncomfortable companions, each acknowledging the importance of the other but unwilling to compromise on the integrity of its domain. And yet, when the scales of justice meet musket and bomb, it is usually the logic and exigencies of war that prevail over the norms of law — with the task of explication and synthesis left for future generations of generals and jurists to work out.

So it was that the horrors of World War I eventually gave rise to prohibitions on the use of chemical and poisonous weapons, and the deliberate bombing of civilians during World War II to the Geneva Conventions. International trials were conducted at Nuremberg and Tokyo and the top leadership of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan condemned for a range of war crimes and crimes against humanity. With the atomic devastation of Japan weighing heavily on his mind, the lone Indian judge, Radhabinod Pal, gave a dissenting opinion on the Tokyo tribunal, questioning the right of victors — who were perhaps as guilty of crimes of their own — to pass judgment on the vanquished. His disquiet was unfashionable but prescient, with the evolution of international legal thinking finally validating his key concern. Sixty years after Little Boy massacred the people of Hiroshima, the International Court of Justice ruled that the use of nuclear weapons would "generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law" and thus would constitute a war crime.

Despite the arguable taint of victor's justice, however, there was at least one vital sense in which Nuremberg represented a significant advance in humanity's quest to subordinate war to law. The tribunal concluded that aggression was the supreme international crime, the fount of "accumulated evil" from which flowed every other violation that the world found so reprehensible about Hitler and Tojo. Though international attempts to control and punish aggression have so far proved highly elusive, the experience of the past 60 years has confirmed many times over the correctness of that important legal pronouncement.

That is why, of all the historical analogies invoked to justify the trial and sentencing to death of Saddam Hussein, perhaps none is more inappropriate than Nuremberg. For the arrest and trial of the former President of Iraq, not to speak of the death of 654,965 Iraqis who would otherwise have been alive, all flow from the U.S. government's illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003. By any legal, political or moral yardstick, what President George W. Bush and his administration did in attacking Iraq constitutes the supreme international crime of aggression.

But if not Nuremberg, is there another reference point? During his presidency, Mr. Hussein committed numerous crimes against his own people and his neighbours. While the architecture for international criminal accountability is still evolving, the Iraqi people, as an expression of their sovereignty, certainly have the right and duty to hold him accountable in a domestic court of law. As the culture of impunity makes way for justice, this is precisely what sovereign people are trying to do in Chile and other countries in Latin America. Though the temptation to resort to summary trial is enormous, these societies have realised the restitutive, cathartic value of respecting the rule of law, including the requirements of due process. Verdicts produced the hard way have far more value, especially in divided societies, than the easy exertions of a kangaroo court.

Unfortunately for Iraq, the Iraqi people are today not sovereign in their own land. The tribunal established by the U.S. occupation and its Iraqi surrogates is intended to serve the political purpose of legitimising a war that ought never to have happened. So outrageous has been the conduct of the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal (SICT), so biased have been its procedures and norms, that the verdict pronounced on Sunday — coincidentally timed for just before crucial mid-term polls in the U.S. — was a foregone conclusion. As pointed out by jurists at the time, the SICT's rules of procedure were rigged by U.S. advisers from the start to favour the prosecution side. Just to be on the safe side, most of the SICT judges were sent to Britain, one of the invading and occupying powers, for legal `training.'

The trial for the massacre of 148 people at al-Dujail village in 1982 began in October 2005 and ended in June this year when the presiding judge, Raouf Rasheed Abdel-Rahman, abruptly terminated the defence side's arguments and presentation of witnesses. Mr. Abdel-Rahman had been carefully handpicked to run the court. An earlier presiding judge, Rizgar Mohammed Amin, was forced to resign after pressure from the puppet Iraqi authorities that he was too lenient on the former President.

U.N. Working Group's opinion

Mr. Hussein may appeal to the special Cassation Panel but the rules of the SICT state there is no further possibility for appeal or pardon and that the death warrant must be executed within 30 days of his appeal's disposition.

On September 1, 2006, concerned at the accumulating evidence of bias in the SICT's proceedings, the United Nations' Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) called for the trial to be replaced by an international tribunal. Established by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in 1991, the Working Group's mandate is defined both by the U.N. General Assembly and the new U.N. Human Rights Council, which the Bush administration itself rooted for. In its final opinion on September 1, the Working Group concluded: "The deprivation of liberty of Mr. Saddam Hussein is arbitrary, being in contravention of Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which Iraq and the US are parties."

The U.N. Working Group described Mr. Hussein's detention and trial as a "Category III" case under its mandate, defined as a situation where "the complete or partial non-observance of the relevant international standards set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the relevant international instruments accepted by the States concerned relating to the right to a fair trial is of such gravity as to confer on the deprivation of liberty, of whatever kind, an arbitrary character."

Among the issues highlighted in the Working Group's opinion was the serious and repeated violation of Article 14 of the ICCPR, which concerns a detainee's right to a defence and a fair trial. More specifically, the WGAD found that Mr. Hussein did not enjoy the right to be tried by an independent and impartial tribunal as required by Article 14(1) of the ICCPR. "The presiding judge of the chamber trying Saddam Hussein changed twice, as the result of political pressure. The current presiding judge is reported to have made statements incompatible with impartiality and the presumption of innocence enshrined in Article 14(2) of the ICCPR. The known circumstances surrounding the changes of the presiding judge of the trial chamber render the fact that the identities of the other judges composing the chamber are not known all the more preoccupying... Neither the defendants nor the public are in a position to verify whether these judges meet the requirements for judicial office, whether they are affiliated with political forces, whether their impartiality and independence is otherwise undermined."

The U.N. Working Group also concluded that Mr. Hussein "did not get adequate time and facilities for the preparation of his defence," as mandated by Article 14(3) of the ICCPR. "The severe restriction on access to top lawyers of his own choosing and the presence of US officials at such meetings violated his right to communicate with counsel. The assassination of two of his counsel during the course of his trial, Mr. Sadoun al-Janabi on 20 October 2005 and Mr. Khamis el-Obeidi on 21 June 2006 seriously undermined his right to defend himself through counsel of his own choosing."

Finally, Mr. Hussein, according to WGAD, did not enjoy the possibility to "obtain the attendance and examination of witnesses on his behalf under the same condition as witnesses against him," as required by Article 14(3)(e) of the ICCPR. "This guarantee was undermined by the failure to adequately disclose prosecution evidence to the defendants, the reading into the record of affidavits without an adequate possibility for the defence to challenge them and the sudden decision of the presiding judge to cut short the defence case on 13 June 2006."

So pitiable has been the legal procedure that the defence was not even afforded the chance of making its final written submissions to the court, as specified by the SICT's own rules. In their final plea, on the eve of the pronouncement of Sunday's verdict, Mr. Hussein's defence team argued that at the very least the court should comply with this legal requirement. But their plea fell on deaf ears because justice and law is not what the trial and tribunal are all about. Whatever his own sins, Mr. Hussein is being hanged to expiate for the transgressions of those who defied international law, world opinion, and common sense to invade and occupy Iraq in 2003. For them, sadly, there is no court where they could be arraigned. At least not today.

The New Challenge

Siddharth VARADARAJAN — 2006-10-27T13:39:42Z

Reconfiguring the nuclear order is no longer a simple matter. For the simple reason that there is no longer any nuclear order.

THE ONE "silver lining" Indian diplomats have latched on to is the "Pakistani connection" to North Korea's "clandestine" nuclear status but this clever point aside, Pyongyang's test of a nuclear weapon has immensely complicated India's quest for assimilation in the existing nuclear order.

The fact is that as of Monday, there is no longer any nuclear order, at least not in Asia. Experts can quibble about its low yield but the North Korean test has brought to a formal end the core bargain on which American nuclear policy in East Asia has rested: that in exchange for Japan and South Korea forswearing their right to nuclear weapons, the United States would guarantee not just their security against nuclear attack from Russia or China but also that there would be no new nuclear weapons state in the region.

Pyongyang may have delivered a body blow to Washington's security architecture but it is China which is likely to be most affected in the medium to long-term. For one, it is now apparent that Beijing has rather less influence over Pyongyang than it had let the U.S. and the wider world believe. Secondly, the spectre of "Japanese militarism" — which continues to haunt not just China but a broad swathe of East Asia including South Korea as well — will start looming larger as Tokyo moves to reassess its security policies in the light of the North Korean test.

Japan's reaction

Since the 1950s, Japan has remained wedded to the "three nuclear principles" — banning the possession, manufacture or presence of nuclear weapons on Japanese soil — and any explicit change on that front is highly unlikely. However, what the North Korean test will do is loosen the bounds of what has until now been a tightly controlled public discourse on this taboo subject. Secondly, greater Japanese commitment to and investment in missile defence systems is a foregone conclusion. Thirdly, a relaxation of constitutional norms on the nature and mandate of Japan's Self-Defence Forces is also inevitable. Article 9 of the country's Constitution says the "Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish [this] aim ... land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognised." Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is keen to amend this article to permit the Japanese military to play a pro-active and even pre-emptive role. Each of these three trends — which worry China and others in Asia — already existed in Japan but Pyongyang's test makes the development of a more robust military profile many times more likely.

In South Korea, the Dear Leader's nuclear test will be seen with a mixture of mostly shock but also a little awe. Whatever Seoul may say about North Korea having blasted its way into the nuclear club, one thing is certain: a reunified Korea, as and when it comes about, is unlikely to surrender the status claimed by one of its halves. The Indian nuclear tests were a serious blow to the U.S. but they eventually facilitated the emergence of closer political, economic, and military ties between the two. Inter-Korean relations have grown tremendously throughout the past decade of tension on the nuclear front and the trend is likely to return to that path once the initial shock of the nuclear test wears off.

Throughout the past two years, the South Korean government pleaded with Washington and Tokyo that the imposition of sanctions would not help resolve the North Korean nuclear question. Now that Pyongyang has crossed the Rubicon, Seoul's energies will be devoted to ensuring Washington gives up any idea of reversing its nuclear status through force or even sanctions. Countries do not take the decision to go nuclear lightly. If sanctions did not succeed in preventing North Korea from testing an unproved weapon, now that the bomb design has been validated there is even less chance that it can be forced to roll back.

For now, the main focus of the international community has to be to avoid converting international anger at the North Korean test into a confrontation. If anything, it is the Bush administration's policies of confrontation that slowly but surely pushed North Korea over the nuclear edge. North Korea signed the NPT in December 1985 but signed a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) only in January 1992. The reason for the delay was the presence in South Korea of American nuclear weapons. It is only when the U.S. decided to withdraw its nuclear weapons from the peninsula and suspend its provocative "Team Spirit" military exercises that Pyongyang felt confident enough to activate the safeguards agreement by mid-1992. But even then, there was a trust deficit with the U.S. insisting on the repeated inspection of non-nuclear facilities. In March 1993, after less than a year of safeguards, North Korea announced its withdrawal from the NPT.

Bush's role

During the Clinton presidency, and even until 2001, the Agreed Framework signed by Washington and Pyongyang in 1994 worked fairly well in ensuring the North Korean nuclear weapons programme remained verifiably frozen. What the Kim regime was looking for was regime survival, economic security, and diplomatic recognition. It also wanted the normalisation of relations on the Korean peninsula and an end to the virtual state of war that has existed between it and the U.S. since 1950. President George W. Bush upset this equation in January 2002 when he gratuitously placed North Korea in the "axis of evil" and marked its government as a target for future regime change.

The goal of regime survival had pushed Pyongyang to cut a deal with President Clinton but now the same imperative propelled it towards the development of a nuclear "deterrent." The lessons of Iraq — where a country that possessed no weapons of mass destruction was invaded and laid waste — were also not lost on the North Korean military. It is significant that in the October 3, 2006, statement warning the world of its impending nuclear test, North Korea referred indirectly to the devastation wrought by the U.S. in Iraq. "A people without reliable war deterrent are bound to meet a tragic death and the sovereignty of their country is bound to be wantonly infringed upon. This is a bitter lesson taught by the bloodshed resulting from the law of the jungle in different parts of the world," the North Korean Foreign Ministry had said.

For the Manmohan Singh Government, the primary concern for the moment will be what happens to the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal. With the Congressional approvals process delicately poised and the Nuclear Suppliers Group yet to study the "India exception" docket, the North Korean test will come as a shot in the arm for all those opposed to allowing the resumption of nuclear commerce with India. The election season debate in the U.S. this fall is likely to focus closely on the Bush administration's mishandling of the non-proliferation issue vis-à-vis North Korea. The Democrats, after all, handed over a non-nuclear Pyongyang to President Bush and now the unthinkable has happened on his watch. To the extent to which the Democrats seek to discredit Mr. Bush's nuclear policies, the India deal too is likely to come under renewed attack. At any rate, the task of keeping the "no nuclear test" clause out of the India-U.S. Nuclear Cooperation Agreement (the so-called `123 Agreement') — a key demand of India — looks much more difficult today now that North Korea has focussed renewed international attention on the danger of testing.

Looking beyond the Indo-U.S. agreement, India needs to join hands with South Korea, China, and Russia to ensure that the lessons of the North Korean fiasco are understood properly by the U.S., Japan, and Europe. As long as nuclear weapons exist and are legitimised in the doctrines and force postures of a handful of states, the "nuclear order" will never be stable. Force and sanctions cannot deter a country from developing nuclear weapons. If anything can work, it is diplomacy and dialogue. Confidence-building is a two-way street. In Korea, the international community has missed the bus. Let the same mistake not be repeated in Iran.

India and the Korean Crisis

Siddharth VARADARAJAN — 2006-10-11T21:39:36Z

For India, North Korea's test poses key challenge
Reconfiguring the nuclear order is no longer a simple matter

Japan's reaction

Bush's role

Time to check the dangerous drift

Siddharth VARADARAJAN — 2006-09-23T19:37:34Z

The road map for the formation of an interim government with Maoist participation is more or less in place. But powerful forces are intervening to derail the process.

AFTER MOVING forward quickly and purposefully towards the establishment of peace and democracy these past few months, Nepal's political parties have begun to stumble in the final crucial laps with a needless controversy over the disposition of Maoist arms.

At stake is the formation of an interim government consisting of the ruling Seven Party Alliance (SPA) and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), which will have the mandate of conducting elections to a Constituent Assembly. The interim government will also have to administer the country till the formation of a new government elected on the basis of the Constitution which emerges from the Assembly's deliberations.

While it is the Constituent Assembly that will largely determine the political contours of the future Nepal, the credibility and structure of the interim government is equally important if the entire process is to be seen through to completion. As such, the full and unreserved participation of the Maoists and all other parties is essential. Indeed, the historic eight-point agreement, signed by Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala and CPN (M) leader Prachanda on June 16 explicitly commits the SPA and the Maoists to the establishment of an interim government on the basis of an interim constitution. Although that agreement explicitly provides for the United Nations to "help in the management of arms and armed personnel of both the sides and to monitor it in order to conduct elections for the Constituent Assembly in a free and fair manner," nowhere does it say that the surrender of arms by the Maoists is a precondition for the interim arrangement to go forward.

There is a good reason for this. By foregrounding the necessity of a political settlement between the SPA and the Maoists — through the instruments of an interim government and Constituent Assembly — the June agreement makes it easier for the eventual settlement of the arms question. As a senior SPA leader told me during a visit to Delhi in July, insisting on the surrender of arms before a political settlement was like putting the cart before the horse. "Let us say they give up their weapons and then we fail to reach a political solution. It will not be difficult for them to pick up the gun again." As for ensuring a level playing field during the elections — a legitimate demand of the SPA, whose cadres might otherwise be intimidated by Maoist weapons — this would be taken care of by the U.N. monitoring of both Nepal Army soldiers and Maoist combatants.

As the prospects for durable political change strengthen, however, the old order and its backers have begun reasserting themselves. For example, hardly a day goes by without James F. Moriarty, the U.S. Ambassador to Nepal, warning the parties not to accept Maoist participation in government without disarmament first. So brazen has been his intervention in Nepal's internal affairs that a number of MPs have called for his expulsion from the country. Also involved in this anti-Maoist scare campaign are Army officers who have not yet reconciled themselves to the loss of the "Royal" prefix from the name of the Nepal Army.

After the eight-point agreement was signed, the first hitch arose when the Koirala Government — presumably under pressure from the U.S. — wrote to the U.N. in early July asking for help in the management and decommissioning of Maoist arms. This "misunderstanding" was eventually resolved with Mr. Koirala and Mr. Prachanda writing identical letters to Secretary-General Kofi Annan on August 9 inviting the U.N. to "deploy qualified civilian personnel to monitor and verify the confinement of CPN-M combatants and their weapons within designated cantonment areas" as well as "[m]onitor the Nepal Army to ensure that it remains in its barracks and its weapons are not used for or against any side."

The letters also requested the U.N. to continue its human rights monitoring through the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Nepal currently headed by Ian Martin, assist the monitoring of the `Code of Conduct' during the Ceasefire, and "provide election observation for the election of the Constituent Assembly in consultation with the parties." Nowhere do the letters speak of decommissioning.

At a press conference in Kathmandu earlier this week, Mr. Martin acknowledged there was some confusion over the sequencing of what he called "arms management" issues and political issues. By this he meant the precise moment when the U.N. will step in to monitor the Nepal Army and Maoist combatants, in particular whether the monitoring would kick in before or after the formation of the interim government. While this sequencing is a matter for the SPA and Maoist leadership to sort out, the laying down of weapons by the Maoists is a diversionary question that will only undermine the prospects of the peaceful political transition both sides say they are committed to.

When Prime Minister Koirala and Mr. Prachanda get together later this month for their summit meeting, they must put an end to the dangerous drift that has set in on the formation of an interim government. The Interim Constitution Drafting Committee (ICDC) has done a commendable job in preparing a draft covenant to oversee the transitional period, including the formation of an interim government and the holding of elections to a Constituent Assembly. No doubt ambiguities abound, not least about how the issue of the monarchy is to be resolved, but none of these is intractable. With statesmanship and patience, which both the SPA and the Maoists have already displayed in abundance, the last remaining hurdles can be overcome.

India's role

To the extent to which Washington has muddied the waters with its strident anti-Maoist campaign, however, India needs to counsel the SPA to stick to the path spelt out in the eight-point agreement of June 2006.

The inexplicable re-arrest in Chennai on Monday of Nepali Maoist leader C.P. Gajurel suggests the Manmohan Singh Government has still not realised the fragile nature of the transition Nepal is going through.

The Indian legal system can be chaotic and unpredictable but surely the Government of India knows how to negotiate its way through it.

In 2000, New Delhi pushed through the release of Masood Azhar. Unlike Azhar, who went on to found the Jaish-e-Mohammed, Mr. Gajurel is a political leader who has never been charged with a violent offence and who means India and its people no harm. Ensuring his swift release — as well as his speedy, safe and honourable return to Kathmandu — would not only be the right thing to do but it would also send an important message: that India supports the formation of an interim government with the participation of all of Nepal's political parties, including the Maoists, and believes such a government offers Nepal its best chance for peaceful democratic change.

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The quest for world order

Siddharth VARADARAJAN — 2006-09-12T00:38:34Z

The Manmohan Singh Government's foreign policy may or may not be independent. What is certain is that it is not effective or imaginative.

IN INTERNATIONAL affairs, minor details often tell us more about the big picture than ponderous declarations and weighty documents. Next week, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will travel to Brasilia and Havana for important meetings aimed at cementing India's trilateral relationship with Brazil and South Africa as well as its role in the Non-Aligned Movement. No doubt the visit will be a huge success. But on the long flight back home, where do you think Dr. Singh's aeroplane will make a fuel halt? Not Africa, which lies bang in the middle and which the Ministry of External Affairs and a large number of Indian companies have assiduously been cultivating, but Frankfurt.

Frankfurt? In the old days, the joke among wags was that Indian politicians liked a Zurich stopover to check up on their numbered accounts. Fortunately, Dr. Singh has no such accounts. Unfortunately, what he also doesn't have are advisors with imagination.

More than a dozen African countries lie on a straight line from Cuba to India and any one of them would have been more than willing to host the Indian Prime Minister for a brief unofficial or even official visit. Some of these countries, like oil-rich Chad, for example, have a lot of fuel and are even looking for new partners after having just thrown out Chevron-Texaco and Petronas. Sudan, too, has oil, some of which India has already invested in. Then there is Senegal, where the Tatas have a major presence and where Indian public sector companies are expected to play a major role in renovating the country's railways.

These are all countries where India is engaged diplomatically and economically. The only element missing is political, which could help to introduce a step change in the relationship. Compare the Indian approach with that of the Chinese. Hu Jintao, the President of China, has been in power for just a year longer than Dr. Singh. But he has already visited Africa twice on extended tours compared to the Indian Prime Minister's score of zero.

As for Latin America, the last time an Indian Prime Minister paid a bilateral visit there was in 1968, when Indira Gandhi travelled to Chile and Argentina. Her planned trip to Peru was cancelled because of General Velasco Alvarado's coup d'etat, and the experience evidently proved so traumatic for South Block that the entire continent remained terra incognita for subsequent Indian heads of government for the next 38 years.

Apart from the inexplicable and baffling absence of a Foreign Minister, Indian diplomacy suffers today from a combination of three ailments. The first is Eurocentrism, which looks at globalisation largely along predictable global axes, the second, a certain arrogance induced by the country's high growth rates and rising international profile, and third, diffidence in dealing with major questions of war and peace. This results in an over-eagerness to "engage" existing centres of global power at the highest levels in locales as distant as Gleneagles or Vladivostok but to avoid political engagements elsewhere.

NAM as restraining factor

Given the emerging crises and conflicts in its extended neighbourhood, however, it is not clear how long India can afford to remain aloof. And the NAM summit in Havana provides an ideal opportunity for India to signal its eagerness to re-engage the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in a partnership that could restore a sense of balance and proportion in a world under siege from a variety of destabilising influences.

But in order to understand the relevance of NAM today, it is important to recognise the paradoxical truth that the erstwhile bipolar division of the world was only incidental to the project of Non-Alignment. During the Cold War, NAM's utility lay in restraining impulses which its members felt were most negative in the international system, namely the use of military and economic power as an instrument of domination by the former colonial powers, the United States, and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union. The bipolar division helped NAM achieve this goal but was not as central to the Non-Aligned project as many believed it to be at the time. At the same time, it must also be conceded that NAM was not necessarily very successful in playing this restraining role since many of its members ended up being attacked by the superpowers.

In contrast to the certitudes of the Cold War era, the world order today is in a state of flux. While it is difficult neatly to characterise the international system as "unipolar," "multipolar" or something in between, some understanding of the concrete nature of world order can be gleaned by examining the multiple points of disorder that have emerged in recent years. Among these are the crises caused by the Anglo-American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the continuing Israeli occupation of Palestinian and Arab land, the recent Israeli aggression against Lebanon, the fast-spiralling dispute over Iran's civilian nuclear programme, which could lead to a huge increase in oil prices as well as war, the humanitarian crisis in Darfur in the Sudan, and the nuclear crisis in the Korean peninsula.

There are other points of disorder elsewhere — the conflict in Sri Lanka could easily become one of international proportion — but the ones enumerated above are surely among the most serious. All except Darfur lie in Asia. All of them have the potential of leading to war, with serious consequences for the national security and interests of India. But in each and every case, India — a major Asian power which sits at the very centre of continent — is not involved in efforts to try and find peaceful solutions. For Iran, there is the P5+1, for Korea the six-party talks, and in the Middle East peace process the Quartet. In Afghanistan, NATO is running the show while the U.S. occupation of Iraq shows no signs of ending. In Lebanon, India, which has a major troop contingent deployed as part of UNIFIL, chose not to get involved in the international discussions about the U.N. force's new mandate.

The issue at stake is not Asian pride or Indian delusions of grandeur but the sobering fact that the dominant approach to each of these crises is not only not working but is actually increasing the likelihood of conflict and war and fuelling the growth of terrorism. As such, India has a vital interest in restraining the exercise of U.S. power in the region.

Well before U.S. troops invaded Iraq in 2003, the whole world knew the tragic denouement that would follow. Similarly, if the U.S. insists on getting the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran, the crisis will inevitably escalate. Just as surely as night follows day, the level of sanctions will be increased and Iran will eventually announce its withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, as it is its sovereign right to do. At that point, Iran will either bite the bullet and be compelled to develop a nuclear weapon. Or will be subjected to aerial bombardment by the U.S., with disastrous consequences for the region.

Averting Iran endgame

More than the debate over the independent nature of India's foreign policy, it is this inability and unwillingness to involve ourselves in problem-solving that is worrying. The Manmohan Singh Government's foreign policy may or not be independent. But when it comes to being proactive in forestalling the danger of new wars in its neighbourhood, India is neither effective nor imaginative.

For example, whatever view one takes of India's vote against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency last September, surely the challenge confronting New Delhi today is to find ways of heading off this terrible ending that is all-too-predictable. As a country with vital interests in a peaceful settlement of the dispute, India cannot confine itself to making ritualistic statements about the importance of dialogue and negotiation.

Similarly on Lebanon, while it is laudable that Parliament passed a resolution condemning Israel's aggression, India did not leverage its much-vaunted friendship with Tel Aviv to counsel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that the path he was taking would only make his country less secure. Mr. Olmert may have rejected any advice proffered by an Indian high-level envoy or even refused to meet the bearer of such tidings but India would have succeeded in sending a powerful signal to the region that there are more players than just the Quartet.

It was precisely this calculation that led the Foreign Ministers of India, Brazil, and South Africa (IBSA) to declare in March 2004 that they intended to insert themselves in the Middle East peace process alongside the Quartet. Sadly, the declaration was never followed up. Prime Minister Singh did well to appoint a special envoy for West Asia last year. But it is also a fact that the government grounded the envoy for several months for fear that a visit to the region would lead to meetings with Hamas and Hizbollah, which in turn would make the legislative passage of the Indo-U.S. nuclear agreement in Washington more difficult.

During the first-ever IBSA summit to be held in Brasilia next week, Dr. Singh must seek to turn the trilateral forum into a ginger group that can energise NAM to once again play the role of a moderating and restraining factor in international politics. And upon his return, he must appoint on a priority basis a full-fledged Minister for External Affairs, the absence of whom severely limits the effectiveness of Indian diplomacy.

A defeat for Israel, but also for justice

Siddharth VARADARAJAN — 2006-08-14T10:36:01Z

The U.N. resolution is a consolation prize for the Olmert regime, whose failure in Lebanon throws the wider U.S.-Israeli game plan for the region into disarray.

WHEN ISRAEL attacked Lebanon a month ago, it had two stated and two unstated military objectives. The stated objectives were the unconditional release of two of its soldiers captured by Hizbollah, and the physical destruction of the Lebanese resistance force, its leadership and command structure. As for the unstated objectives, the first was to so totally degrade the civilian infrastructure of the country that the non-Shia population of Lebanon would turn against Hizbollah and the Shias for inviting the wrath of Israel upon them in this manner. And the second, to deny Iran and its supporters the chance of opening a second front against Israel from close quarters — in the event of American airstrikes on Iranian nuclear installations.

In turn, these military objectives were part of a wider political objective: to use Israel's overwhelming military superiority as the basis for implementing the Sharon-Olmert plan of a unilaterally imposed "peace settlement" on the region which would leave Tel Aviv in control of as much Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian land and water as it deems necessary.

Predictable blame-game

When the promised ceasefire takes effect on Monday morning, however, Israel will find that not a single one of its objectives has been achieved.

This failure has ignited a predictable blame-game within the Israeli military and political establishment but the repercussions of military defeat will travel much further afield. The Olmert regime took a big gamble in going to war and the Bush administration backed it to the hilt in the hope that a "New Middle East" could be built on the backs of a military machine that was believed to be invincible. By smashing that myth of invincibility and registering a decisive military and even moral victory over the Israeli Defence Forces, Hizbollah has thrown the neo-conservative agenda for a "New Middle East" into utter disarray.

The Lebanese militia has not only managed to preserve its capability to fight despite the withering bombardment of its strongholds in southern Lebanon but has also inflicted severe losses on the Israeli military. Nor has its ability to fire Katyusha rockets into northern Israel in retaliation for the Israeli bombing of civilian areas been effectively degraded. The IDF's desperate push towards the Litani river following the adoption of a ceasefire resolution by the United Nations Security Council has itself cost the lives of more than two dozen soldiers, taking the number of Israeli troops killed in the war to well over 100.

More than 30 years of enforcing a military occupation and fighting children and poorly-equipped guerrillas have clearly taken their toll on the ability of the legendary Israeli army to fight a full-fledged war. That is why, right at the outset, the IDF had hoped to rely more or less exclusively on air power and deploy ground forces only after Hizbollah had been sufficiently softened up. However, the international outrage that Israel's bombardment of Lebanon provoked, particularly after the Qana massacre, forced Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his backers in Washington to change tack. Israel realised it had to commit a more significant detachment of ground troops if Hizbollah was to be defeated. At the same time, it preferred the easier option of an international stabilisation force coming in to finish the job for it.

Since the political balance of power in the Security Council is more decisively in favour of Israel than the military balance is on the ground in southern Lebanon, Washington's priority has been to use its clout at the U.N. to bring in to the region a well-armed military force that could prosecute Tel Aviv's war aims more effectively. UNSC Resolution 1701, passed unanimously on Friday, was originally intended to do just that. Its original version ignited outrage in Lebanon and the Arab world but even as now amended, the resolution is problematic on a number of grounds. At the same time, its military provisions fall somewhat short of the original American-Israeli objective.

Rather than creating a new stabilisation force — which would respond, by default, to the command and control structures of the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) — the Security Council has expanded the mandate and size of the existing U.N. peacekeeping force on the ground, UNIFIL. The new mandate will include monitoring the cessation of hostilities, accompanying and supporting the Lebanese Army as it deploys up to the Israeli border in tandem with the Israeli withdrawal, assisting the Lebanese army "in taking steps towards the establishment" of an area between the border and the Litani river that is free of armed forces not authorised by the Lebanese Government, and assisting the Lebanese Government "at its request" to establish better control over its borders.

In order to discharge this enlarged mandate, UNIFIL has been authorised to "take all necessary action" — a code word for the use of even offensive military action — to ensure that the territory where it is deployed is "not utilised for hostile activities of any kind." In other words, UNIFIL would be authorised to attack Hizbollah if the militia sends fighters south of the Litani to launch rockets into Israel. UNIFIL has also been authorised to use deadly force "to protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence," which, at least in theory, could also apply to situations such as Israeli airstrikes and attacks on civilian areas of the kind Lebanon has witnessed this past month.

Whether this expanded mandate will help preserve the peace will depend entirely on UNIFIL's ability to avoid getting caught in the wider American political agenda. If it acts professionally and solely as a facilitator for the Lebanese army, there is no reason why Hizbollah will not cooperate with it. At any rate, Hizbollah, with the consent of the Lebanese Government, is free to preserve its military capability north of the Litani as a hedge against future Israeli aggression.

The problem with Resolution 1701, however, is that it is structured in such a way as to prolong or re-ignite the conflict between Israel and Lebanon rather than to settle it expeditiously on the basis of reason and justice.

The most important shortcoming is the resolution's vague formulation on the need for Israel to vacate the territories in Lebanon it has forcibly occupied over the past month. If Israel takes the view that it will not begin withdrawing until the expanded UNIFIL force is in place, Hizbollah will be perfectly justified in attacking what is after all an army of occupation. But apart from the immediate issue of an Israeli withdrawal, the resolution contains no timeframe for tackling the root causes of the conflict. Israel will remain in occupation of the Shebaa farms, which is Lebanese territory, it will not be obliged to hand over within any specified time period the map of land mines it has laid on Lebanese territory, nor is it obliged to return the Lebanese prisoners it is holding. As for the hundreds of Israeli violations of Lebanese airspace and territorial waters which occur every year, no specific mechanisms for redressal have been created to ensure these do not occur again.

Glaring omissions

There are other glaring omissions too. For example, the resolution does not oblige Israel to pay Lebanon any compensation for the destruction of civilian life and property it has wilfully caused since its attack began on July 12.

Unless the international community moves sincerely to address these fundamental questions and finds a way to impose punitive costs on Israel for its wholly disproportionate use of military force, the underlying problem will never go away.

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Beware the 'new order' Israel is imposing

Siddharth VARADARAJAN — 2006-07-29T11:39:14Z

No peace or stability can emerge in West Asia through occupation, subjugation, and the military slaughter of civilians.

ON JULY 28, 1989, a detachment of heavily armed Israeli commandos descended upon the southern Lebanese village of Jibchit. The time was 2 a.m. They burst into the home of Sheikh Abdul Karim Obeid, leader of the Hizbollah militia, beat up his wife, and shot dead a neighbour before bundling the Sheikh and two other men into a helicopter. One of those seized was a young man named Hashem Fahaf who had no connection to Hizbollah, the other was the Sheikh's bodyguard.

According to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which carries a helpful if damning account of the kidnapping on its website, "Israel had hoped to use the sheikh as a card to affect an exchange of prisoners and hostages [held by Hizbollah] in return for all Shiites held by it."

So brazen was Israel's action that the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed a resolution (No. 638) calling for the "immediate safe release of all hostages and abducted persons, wherever and by whomever they are being held." Needless to say, Tel Aviv ignored the resolution. After all, kidnapping non-combatants, including minors, and holding them hostage, was an integral part of Israel's military strategy. In May 1994, Israeli soldiers abducted a prominent Lebanese businessman and former commander of the Shia Amal militia, Mustafa al-Dirani, and brought him into Israel. The aim of that kidnapping was to try and get information about the location of Ron Arad, an air force navigator who had been shot down over Sidon in 1986 during Israel's ongoing aggression against Lebanon.

Mr. Fahaf, whose presence Israel refused to recognise for years, spent 11 years in jail before the Supreme Court finally ordered his release. He was allowed to return home along with 18 other Lebanese nationals who — the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported in August 2003 — had been held "according to the official version ... as `bargaining chips' for Ron Arad". Two of those released had been kidnapped as boys and had grown into adulthood in captivity.

Sheikh Obeid and Mr. Dirani were finally released in 2004, after being held hostage by the Israeli government for 15 and 10 years respectively. Both men spent extended periods of time at Camp 1391, dubbed Israel's Guantanamo, a prison whose existence the Israeli authorities do not freely admit to. There, Mr. Dirani was raped, sexually abused, and tortured by Israeli soldiers . A lawsuit filed by him against the State of Israel is currently pending before a judge in Tel Aviv. He is claiming NIS 6 million ($1.5 million) in damages.

The 2004 release was part of a general prisoner swap brokered by the German government in which Hizbollah released an Israeli businessman and reserve colonel seized in 2000 in order to force Tel Aviv to free Sheikh Obeid. Hizbollah also returned the bodies of three Israeli soldiers killed in action. In exchange, Israel set free the Sheikh, Mr. Dirani, and 33 other Lebanese and Arab hostages, as well as 400 Palestinian prisoners. It also returned the bodies of 59 Lebanese nationals killed by its security forces over the years.

It is necessary to recall this entire sordid episode in order to put in perspective Hizbollah's foolish action of seizing two Israeli soldiers across the blue line dividing Lebanon from Israel. Thanks to Israel, kidnapping and hostage-taking — as well as the targeting of non-combatants and even children — have become "acceptable" military tactics in the region though one would be hard pressed to come across any reference to Sheikh Obeid or Mr. Dirani in the international news coverage that followed Hizbollah's action. The Shia militia wants Tel Aviv to free the handful of Lebanese prisoners still in Israeli jails who were promised freedom in 2004 but never released. Most prominent among them is Samir Kuntar, captured in 1978 during a guerrilla raid on an Israeli settlement near the Lebanese border. Kuntar was found guilty of killing a civilian man and his young daughter and sentenced to more than 500 years in prison by an Israeli court. The Israeli authorities may baulk at releasing a "convicted child killer." But in rejecting the possibility of a negotiated settlement and indiscriminately bombarding Lebanon, Tel Aviv has turned its own soldiers into the executioners of children. When a well-marked United Nations post takes a direct hit and ambulances are struck — according to a recent dispatch by Robert Fisk — with missiles that pierce the Red Cross and Crescent symbol right at the centre, it is hard to accept the Israeli claim that all civilian deaths were unintended.

Real war aims

Recalling the recent history of kidnappings is also necessary for another reason: To puncture the myth that the disproportionate and utterly criminal Israeli military response that is pulverising Lebanon and its people today is somehow driven by an urge to free its two kidnapped soldiers.

Read what Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former U.S. National Security Advisor, told a small gathering in Washington last week about this. "I hate to say this but I will say it. I think what the Israelis are doing today for example in Lebanon is in effect — maybe not in intent — the killing of hostages. The killing of hostages ... Because when you kill 300 people, 400 people, who have nothing to do with the provocations Hizbollah staged, but you do it in effect deliberately by being indifferent to the scale of collateral damage, you're killing hostages in the hope of intimidating those that you want to intimidate. And more likely than not you will not intimidate them. You'll simply outrage them and make them into permanent enemies with the number of such enemies increasing."

On a par with the fantasy that the latest Israeli aggression against Lebanon is about protecting the legitimate security interests of Israel is the demand being raised in various quarters for a NATO peacekeeping force to be deployed on the Lebanese side of the border in order to disarm Hizbollah. Frequent reference is made to Security Council resolution 1559 of 2004, which called on the Lebanese government to assert its sovereignty over the whole of its territory and disarm the Shiite militia. When it suits Israel and the United States, United Nations resolutions such as 242 and 338 on Palestine or 638 on releasing hostages can be ignored for years on end. But other resolutions acquire a Biblical patina and instant compliance is required of them. By grossly interfering in Lebanon's internal affairs, Resolution 1559 was clearly ultra vires of the U.N. Charter. That is why it passed with the barest possible majority. Russia and China chose to abstain rather than exercise their veto because the resolution envisaged no enforcement mechanism. In any case, it is absurd for Israel — which is bombing Lebanon at will and sending in its troops — to speak in favour of a resolution that calls for the Lebanese government to assert its sovereignty.

As the Israeli peace bloc, Gush Shalom, has said, the current offensive against Lebanon — like the 1982 invasion which led to two decades of occupation — was prepared in advance in anticipation of a suitable provocation. Hizbollah's kidnap raid provided the Olmert regime the excuse it needed to launch a war for the physical elimination of the militia and the eventual installation of a pliant regime in Lebanon that would do Israel's — and the U.S.' — bidding. In many ways, the script is not that different from the manner in which the abduction of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian guerrillas gave Tel Aviv the pretext to do something it was itching to do ever since Hamas won the elections.

In both cases, Israel and its principal international backer, the U.S., have proved how bogus is their vision of a "New Middle East" centred around respect for democracy and human rights. By attacking Gaza and Lebanon, that too with such overwhelming and disproportionate military force, Israel has decisively turned its back on the possibility of a negotiated peace settlement with the Palestinians and Syrians. The Olmert regime has no intention of relinquishing its illegal control over land and aquifers that belong to others. The U.S. does not want democracy to flourish in the region. Nor does Israel. What it wants are partners who are too weak, isolated or pliant to insist on their rights. What it has in mind are unilateral outcomes, imposed through gunboat negotiations if possible or through war if necessary. In both cases, the active support of the Bush administration and the silence of the rest of the world are essential.

The refusal of the U.N. to condemn the Israeli aggression against Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority, its failure to bring about an immediate ceasefire despite the mounting civilian toll, and its inability to get Israel to lift its inhuman blockade of Gaza and release the Hamas Ministers and MPs it kidnapped last month are paving the way for a human tragedy of monumental proportions. As long as the world continues to appease Israel in this manner, the people of the region — and especially the Israelis — will never know peace.

Arms control in a unipolar world

Siddharth VARADARAJAN — 2006-05-31T14:28:14Z

The new U.S. push on a fissile material cut-off treaty is an attempt to sidestep more urgent issues like weaponisation of space and the development of 'usable' nuclear weapons.

AFTER UNSIGNING the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, sabotaging the verification protocol of the Biological Weapons Convention, and taking the arms race into Outer Space, the United States has finally settled on a multilateral arms control measure it can support — a treaty to curtail the production of fissile material necessary for the manufacture of nuclear weapons. True to form, however, the latest U.S. approach is aimed more at increasing its already overwhelming relative military dominance by restricting the behaviour of others, rather than actually tackling the very real dangers posed to the world by nuclear weapons and their means of delivery.

On May 18, a senior State Department official, Stephen G. Rademaker, presented to the Conference on Disarmament (CD) — the Geneva-based United Nations disarmament negotiating body — a draft Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT) and urged the countries present to adopt it by the end of the year. In the take it or leave it' style so typical of the Bush administration's approach to diplomacy, Mr. Rademaker threatened that if the CD were unwilling to adopt the treaty in 2006 , its "continued existence ... as a meaningful international negotiating forum" would be in doubt and the U.S. itself could withdraw from its deliberations altogether. The American draft FMCT is a short and simple document. Fissile material for non-explosive purposes is not included in its scope. Unlike the CTBT, the proposed FMCT will enter into force on the day all five nuclear-weapon states as defined by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) accede to it. While none of these provisions is controversial, many countries are likely to object to two other aspects of the draft. First, the U.S. proposal would leave existing stocks of fissile material unaffected, thus doing nothing to address the threat posed by the enormous overhang of bomb-grade material currently in the possession of nuclear weapon states. Secondly, in line with the Bush administration's aversion to non-discriminatory international verification rules, the draft FMCT contains no provisions for monitoring compliance. Even without these two omissions, the American FMCT initiative is problematic on a number of counts. First and foremost is the attempt to push the control over fissile material production as the most pressing arms control measure to the exclusion of all the other urgent questions the CD needs to take up. Since everyone in the world except the five nuclear weapon states (U.S., Russia, China, Britain, and France) and the four non-parties to the NPT (India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea) are legally barred from producing fissile material, the proposed FMCT applies essentially to these nine countries alone. Of the big five, all except China are already observing a moratorium. China, too, is believed to have ended the active accumulation of fissile material but nobody can really be sure. In any case, it should be obvious that the purpose of the FMCT is to make sure China as well as India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel end fissile material production. Put another way, the American interest in an FMCT is to ensure that the Chinese arsenal remains relatively small (compared to the U.S. one) and that the Indian and Pakistani nuclear weapons programmes remain bounded by the amount of fissile material accumulated to date. In themselves, these are unobjectionable goals. But when they are combined with a drive to develop an ambitious missile defence programme, militarise space, produce new kinds of "usable" nuclear weapons, and increase manifold the lethality and flexibility of U.S. conventional arms, it becomes clear that what Washington is looking for is not disarmament or even arms control but "full spectrum dominance." Under the Shannon mandate, the CD is tasked with adopting a "non-discriminatory, multilateral and internationally and effectively verifiable" FMCT that bans the production of fissile material for weapons or explosive purposes. But for the past few years, the Conference has been deadlocked by the refusal of the U.S. and its allies to allow the CD to also take up three urgent but contentious issues that form an integral part of its mandate. These are general nuclear disarmament, the prevention of an arms race in outer space (PAROS), and negative security assurances, that is, multilateral, legally binding assurances that non-nuclear weapons states will never be subject to nuclear attack. Of these four tasks, each of which is important, it is evident that PAROS is the most pressing. The U.S. missile defence programme has direct implications for the weaponisation of space and recent budgetary appropriations indicate the U.S. military is pressing ahead with research aimed at developing an offensive capability in outer space such as the Starfire anti-satellite system . Every year since 1968, the U.N. General Assembly has passed a PAROS resolution calling on countries to use space for peaceful purposes and oppose its weaponisation. After abstaining for years, the U.S. in 2005 voted against the resolution for the first time. A study by the Center for Defense Information and the Stimson Center in March 2006 found one billion dollars had been set aside for military space matters in the financial year 2007. According to Victoria Samson of the CDI, "These systems, while ostensibly for other matters, could provide a dual-use space weapons capability. And a few of them — the Space Test Bed for starters — are flat-out space weapons programs." China and Russia, which are the primary targets for the U.S. drive to militarise space, have rightly sought to tie progress on an FMCT with progress towards a treaty banning an arms race in outer space. This has been unacceptable to the U.S. Phased disarmament and security assurances to non-nuclear weapon states is also not part of Washington's scheme of things. After years of deadlock, a way forward emerged in the form of the "five ambassadors' proposal" to have the CD establish four ad hoc committees for each of the separate disarmament or arms control goals. But even this proposal was unacceptable to the U.S. Now it has signalled its intention to press for anFMCT or nothing' and threatened the CD with irrelevance if its warning is not heeded.

Even on its merits, however, the U.S. FMCT draft is so weak as to render inoperative the international desire for a treaty controlling fissile material. Both the FMCT and the CTBT spring directly from the treaty obligation of nuclear weapon states to disarm. The purpose of the CTBT is "quality capping" and the FMCT is "quantity capping." In reality, however, the CTBT, by allowing sub-critical tests, hydrodynamic tests, and computer simulation exercises, does not effectively prevent the "qualitative" enhancement of nuclear weapons by an advanced nuclear weapon state like the U.S. On its part, the draft FMCT, by leaving out stockpiles and verification, will also only "quantity cap" the smaller nuclear weapons states.

India has all along advocated a verifiable FMCT, a position that was reiterated by Ambassador Jayant Prasad at the CD a day before the U.S. unveiled its draft text. Apart from standing its ground on this issue, New Delhi would do well to pursue some of the interesting proposals contained in the working paper submitted by Japan to the CD last month. Specifically, Japan is arguing that any ban on the future production of fissile material must lead to the permanent shutting down or conversion of military facilities currently used for the production of such material. Naturally, there would have to be a verifiable ban on their re-conversion. Also, the diversion of existing and future stocks of fissile material for civilian purposes to nuclear weapons purpose should be explicitly banned. This, in turn, has two implications. First, fissile material voluntarily declared as "excess" should never be reverted to nuclear weapons. Secondly, the voluntary safeguards agreements the five nuclear weapon states have signed with the International Atomic Energy Agency would have to be amended to ban the withdrawal of civilian nuclear material from international safeguards.

The Japanese proposal does not explicitly say so but eventually, all nuclear facilities in the nuclear weapons states other than those expressly designated as containing fissile material for military use must come under an IAEA safeguards regime identical to the one in force for non-nuclear weapons states.

It is in this context that the U.S. opposition to multilateral verification needs to be understood. Ambassador John Bolton says international verification will never be effective and is a Maginot Line' that will give the international community a false sense of security. But in the absence of non-discriminatory, transparent rules, what will emerge is alaw of the jungle' compliance mechanism. A country such as the U.S., with the most advanced national technical means, would be free to level accusations of cheating against any country it likes. But the world will be powerless to verify U.S. compliance.

For all these reasons, the U.S. draft FMCT can hardly be considered an acceptable text. If there is to be an FMCT, the international community must insist on a suitable verification mechanism and a formula for steady disposition of existing stocks in line with the Article 6 disarmament obligations of nuclear weapons states under the NPT. India should also join other countries at the CD in pressing for quick progress on a treaty banning the weaponisation of outer space.