Hey Idiot

by ELLIOT SPERBER

It is interesting to observe that the word idiot derives from the Greek idiotes, which refers to a “private person” – as distinct from a public person, or one who is involved in determining public life. That is, an idiot follows the rules and laws that others draft and sign – irrespective of whether or not it is in the idiot’s interest. Some people in society determine how society will be organized – how its economic surpluses are distributed, how its resources are employed, how its energies are directed, how its cities are designed, its transportation systems are routed, etc. – and others simply follow (or are determined by) these rules. Many of these followers (the idiots) don’t even seem to mind this state of affairs. Still others live under the delusional understanding that they are, in fact, somehow in charge of determining the course of social life – through their duly elected representatives, of course, or through their reputed “consumer power.”

What is of especial interest to those observing political idiocy is how thoroughly inconsistent and incoherent its ideologies can be. Indeed, many idiots justify the status quo (in which they are consigned to the position of idiot) by appealing to the founding documents of the United States, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the Declaration of Independence’s main argument is that the only legitimate form of political organization is one in which people govern themselves. It does not take much critical acumen to recognize that self-government – or autonomy – is irreconcilable with the heteronomy that the idiot is subjected to – irrespective of the degree to which the idiot is aware of his or her particular political impotence.

In other words, we are idiots whether we are aware of our political impotence or not. All that it takes to be a political idiot is to be excluded from the actual processes that determine how the world we live in is organized. And how many of us are in any meaningful way able to determine how things are governed? Because public interest polls consistently show majorities of people supporting social policies (such as universal health care, increased environmental protections, access to free education, an end to the wars of aggression committed by the US, etc.) that are not pursued, it does not seem to be much of a stretch to conclude that most people in this country are idiots. In this respect I am a total idiot. And I suspect that I am not alone in being aware of the fact that I suffer from this regrettable condition. Moreover, I suspect that I am not alone in wanting to change this harmful situation. As with other collective problems, however, our collective political and economic idiocy requires a collective solution; the first step of which is recognizing that most of us are these alienated political idiots in the first place.

 

Israeli Property Theft is Nothing New

by Dr. PAUL LARUDEE

cus·to·di·an (kəs-ˈtō-dē-ən) n.  1.  One who has charge of something: caretaker

– The Heritage Illustrated Dictionary of the English Language, International Edition, 1973

The office of Ronen Baruch, the current Custodian of Absentee Property for Israel, is in an ancient Arab home at 8 Yoel Salomon Street in Jerusalem. A house of this type is not unusual in this part of Jerusalem, and this one has few markings to indicate its function.  Even its mail is delivered to the main building of the Ministry of Finance in another part of the city.

The apparent location of the Office of the Custodian of Absentee Property

Searching the Internet will not yield this information unless you read Hebrew, and even then not much else. Much more is available about the Mossad, but perhaps only because it is bigger and more interesting.  Information about the Custodian is not necessarily secret, just possibly of little interest to journalists.  However, it has no website and does not advertise its contact information.  It is almost as if Israel would prefer that no one knows it is there.

Despite this, the office plays a pivotal role in the existence of Israel.  Most Israelis live and work on land that was once in the charge of the Custodian of Absentee Property, an office created less than two months after the Israeli state and existing to this day as part of the Ministry of Finance.

Who or what is the Custodian of Absentee Property?

To many of the indigenous nations of North America, the European notion of land ownership was strange.  The role of humans was to be custodians of the land and for the land to be the custodian of its human inhabitants.  Similarly, the rulers of Makkah and Medina have historically referred to themselves as custodians, not owners, of the holy shrines.

Thus, when Israel created the Office of the Custodian of Absentee Property in July, 1948, to take charge of property belonging to refugees that fled or were expelled, was its intention for the custodian to be a steward and trustee for the property of these refugees while they were away?  Certainly, the title of the office implicitly acknowledges that the property belongs to the absentees, not the Custodian, which land registry documents in fact confirm.

Of course, land and the structures on it – some dating back a thousand years or more – were not the only property that came into the charge of the Custodian.  Many millions of dollars of gold, jewelry, antiques, cars and other items made their way into the inventory.  However, real estate was by far the most important and valuable.  The absentee owners were almost all Palestinian Arab refugees and exiles, both rich and poor.  A few were Jews, and their property was quickly returned to them.  Not so for the rest, except a tiny fraction that were able to prove that they had not fled at all.

How much of the territory within the 1949 ceasefire line did the absentees leave behind?  Prior to the proclamation of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, some 6% of Mandate Palestine was Jewish property (Sami Hadawi, Village statistics: 1945).  Considering that Zionist forces seized 78% of Palestine, however, the proportion within those areas would have been closer to 8%, excluding Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.  In addition, the remnant of the Palestinian Arab population that was not expelled retained some of their lands and homes, currently estimated to be less than 3% of the same areas.  Roughly half of the captured territory was state land of the government of Palestine, mostly the Naqab (Negev) desert.

It is likely that all the rest, roughly 39%, was declared absentee property, and placed under the control of the Custodian.  This figure agrees with an inventory made by the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP) of 7,069,091 dunams. If the Custodian also took charge of state lands, the total would have been 89%.  This information has not been released, but a statement by Jacob Manor, the Custodian in 1980, to journalist Robert Fisk (Pity the Nation, p. 45) indicates that the higher figure may be more accurate.

Of course, Israel had no intention of respecting the legal records of land ownership.   The Absentee Property Law of 1950 made clear that the job of the Custodian was to “release” the property in its custody to other agencies, which would use the land without regard to the registered owners.

Thus, in effect, the Custodian of Absentee Property became Israel’s largest “fence” for stolen property.  Under the powers authorized by the Absentee Property Law, the Custodian “released” the land to the Israeli state, the Development Authority and the Jewish National Fund (JNF), with the combined lands (93% of the state of Israel) under the management of the Israel Land Administration (ILA).  The ILA thus became the largest recipient of stolen property in Israel, notwithstanding the international racketeers and blood diamond traffickers that have found a safe haven there.

Curiously, however, the ILA has until recently been prohibited from offering the land for sale, but rather to lease it to users, although in 2009 plans were made to begin granting title.  This policy was promoted in the 1950s allegedly as an enlightened socialist program of collective ownership borrowed from the institution of the kibbutz.  Was it instead a means of protecting individual Israeli citizens from the accusation of receiving stolen goods?  If so, it constitutes another implicit admission that the property legally belongs to expelled Palestinians and not to either the Israeli government or its citizens.

 

Villa Salameh, Jerusalem

The Absentee Property Law is in fact contrary to the Fourth Geneva Convention and the International Declaration of Human Rights, both of which were constituted less than two years earlier and to which Israel became a signatory.  This discrepancy came to light in the case of the Jerusalem residence of the Consul General of Belgium, which has been located since 1948 on absentee property known as the Villa Salameh.  In order to be in compliance with international law, Belgium elected to pay rent to the exiled Palestinian owners of the property rather than to any Israeli authority or to Israeli businessman David Sofer, who claims to have “bought” (leased) the property from the Israeli government since 2000.

Surprisingly, Israel has been one of the strongest proponents for the restoration of absentee property to its original owners or their rightful heirs.  One of the best examples of this is the HEART (Holocaust Era Asset Restitution Taskforce) Project, established in 2011 with more than $2.5 million per year funding from the Israeli government, in cooperation with the Jewish Agency for Israel.  Its purpose is to seek restitution for Jewish property seized by the Nazi government in Germany.  Other victims of the Holocaust, such as Slavs, Poles, Romanies (Gypsies), disabled persons, non-Europeans, political prisoners, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others are apparently ineligible for this service, as well victims of the 1948 Israeli ethnic cleansing project known to Palestinians as the Nakba (catastrophe).

Although the extent of past Israeli property theft is well known to students of such matters, popular awareness is lagging.  Current activists are likely to consider the more recent thefts of Bedouin property in the Naqab (Negev), confiscation of Palestinian property in Jerusalem and West Bank land seizures, house demolitions and village eradications as the major problem without taking into account the much larger scale of earlier crimes.  They might be shocked to learn, for example, that the land stolen from Palestinian owners prior to the 1949 ceasefire is equal in size to more than the total area of the West Bank and Gaza combined.

The issue is sometimes raised when defining “Arab land” in the Palestinian context.  If, for example, “Arab land” is defined only as that which was seized in the June 1967 war, it disregards the enormous amount of property that was confiscated without compensation from “absentee” Palestinian refugees and exiles in 1947-49 and soon after.

Is the Custodian of Absentee Property awaiting the return of the absentees to reclaim their property?  In a sense probably so, though not with a sense of joy.  Rather, all who are responsible for the theft of the property and for the ethnic cleansing and other crimes committed in furtherance of that theft know that a day of reckoning always greets those who think they are above the law.

 

Life is Cheap in Karachi

by ASHRAF KHAN

Karachi, Pakistan.

Laiq Hussain, a member of the radical Sunni group Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, was riding his motorbike down a busy street in central Karachi, with a friend on the pillion, when they were ambushed. A bullet hit Hussain in the right temple: “I thought someone had thrown a sharp stone at me. My friend told me to start reciting verses from the Holy Qur’an; that’s when I realised someone was shooting at us, probably using a silencer.” Hussain was blinded; his friend Mufti Saud Rehman died. Theirs is a common story: over 2,400 Karachi residents were shot in the street or kidnapped and tortured to death in 2012.

“Target killings”, as the police and media call them, have become a daily nightmare in Karachi, where security and policing are poor. “We were watching the news about the latest target killings and feeling sad for the parents who had lost their beloved children,” said Fatima Tanveer. “Then someone knocked at the door and told us our son was a victim. He was going to be married in a few months.”

“The wave of killings is mainly due to an increase in sectarian violence, though killings for political or criminal motives are contributing,” said Zohra Yusuf, chair of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP). But the authorities seem to be in denial. In November 2012 Sharjeel Memon, then information minister for Sindh Province (of which Karachi is the capital), told a press conference: “Out of more than 2,000 homicides, only 370 were reported to the police as target killings.”

Nearly everyone in Karachi, regardless of religious, ethnic or political affiliation, fears for their own life or those of their relatives when they leave the house. Huma Habib, 45, a human resources manager for a private company, has great hopes for her two sons, who are currently at university: “But my heart nearly stops every time they leave the house. Life is cheap here.” One can be killed just for a mobile phone.

Many see the lack of security as a kind of social protest, the precursor of a social revolution, yet Shahid Hassan Siddiqui, chairman of the Research Institute of Islamic Banking and Finance, said: “We are going through the worst economic and political turmoil this country has ever known, but I don’t see any revolution emerging from this mess.”

Pakistan has no middle class

The chaos has put many companies out of business, depriving hundreds of thousands of workers of their livelihoods. Tension is high. “Nearly half the year, work is at a standstill because one [political] party or another has called for a strike,” said Amjad Ali, 65, a porter at the Judia Bazar, Pakistan’s biggest market. Ali has a family of seven, but earns 200-300 rupees ($2-3) a day, and he is one of the lucky ones. According to Hassan, 40% of the population earns less than 100 rupees ($1) a day, and a family of two adults and two children living in one room needs at least 12,000 rupees ($120) a month to maintain an adequate calorie intake: “Pakistan has no middle class. Most people live in grinding poverty; a handful are filthy rich.” Economists estimate that Pakistan’s richest 2% control most of the economy.

Even the richest have known easier times. Pakistan suffers from a chronic shortage of electricity, due to the growing gap between supply and demand. Daily power cuts have had a disastrous impact on every industry, especially the garment and textile sectors, which are major generators of underpaid jobs and foreign currency earnings. “The electricity crisis cost our exporters over a billion dollars in lost contracts,” said Ahsan Bashir, chairman of the trade association All Pakistan Textile Mills Association (APTMA). This is significant as Pakistan’s total textile exports were expected to generate $13.5bn last year. In 2012 the industry accounted for more than 50% of Pakistan’s exports and employed 39% of the workforce (1). Without unions to defend them, many workers have found themselves jobless.

Social instability and power cuts have prompted a wave of industrial relocations to Bangladesh and Malaysia. The government has offered generous financial incentives for companies to come back, but without much success. “I believe a few companies have returned because of tariff concessions,” said Yasin Siddique, head of APTMA in southern Pakistan. But it would take more to reassure his colleagues: “If your livelihood, your property and your business are threatened, to avoid economic death you just have to find another solution.”

Businesses unable to find “another solution” face another obstacle: extortion by gangs. This is a growing phenomenon, especially in the Lyari district, next to the port and the country’s biggest industrial estate. Traders and industrialists who refuse to pay bhatta (protection money) run the risk of assassination or kidnapping and torture. Many end up in a sack dumped at the roadside. Meetings, protests and lockouts to pressure the administration into taking action have had no result. “To stay alive, many of our members have agreed to pay monthly protection money to the gangs,” said Atiq Mir, head of the All Karachi Traders’ Association. “The government has totally failed to protect us and it feels as if the whole city is falling into the hands of the gangsters. They already control many districts.”

The growth of violent crime is a huge challenge for the authorities, whose incompetence and lack of commitment have never been so obvious. “The pattern of killings in 2012 differed from 2011,” said Zohra Yusuf of the HRCP. In 2011 ethnic conflict was limited to a few districts such as Katti Pahari, which saw bloody clashes between Pashtuns and Urdu-speaking Muhajirs. Today, the violence has spread across the city and permeated every social class. Sharfuddin Memon, security advisor to the government of Sindh Province, talked of “multidirectional killings”, with a variety of motives, political, ethnic, religious and criminal. Some killers, he said, take advantage of the confusion to settle personal scores.

Extremist religious groups play a major part. They exist throughout Pakistan, and have a long history in the country. In 1971 it was ethnic sectarianism that led to the division of Pakistan, the eastern part declaring dependence to become Bangladesh, the land of the Bengalis. Successive Pakistani governments have failed to learn from history, allowing ethnic divisions to grow.

Internal tensions

The Muhajirs fled to Pakistan from India in 1947, after Partition (muhajir means migrant in Urdu). Educated and qualified, they made an important contribution to the new country’s development. Over the years, quotas established by the government have given them privileged access to jobs in government and teaching. This has resulted in tensions and bloody clashes between the Muhajirs and indigenous populations, especially the Sindhis and Pashtuns, who have united under the banner of the Awami National Party (ANP).

The clashes intensified as a result of the dispute between Muhajirs and Sindhis in 1972, when the Sindhis refused to accept Urdu as the official language of Sindh Province. In the mid-1980s, the establishment of a Muhajir political party, the National Movement for Refugees (MQM), led to massacres of Muhajirs, instigated by Pashtun drug lords. This violence deepened the divide between Karachi’s two main ethnic groups.

Tensions remained high with further clashes between Sindhis and Muhajirs in 1988 and 1990, and military and police repression of the MQM between 1992 and 1995. These did not prevent the MQM from attracting supporters from beyond its ethnic base, and in the general election of 2008 it won 69.2% of the vote in Karachi.

Karachi has become a battleground for criminal gangs involved in racketeering, drugs, arms and human trafficking. Ethnic and political divisions fan the violence. Turf wars between the many gangs in Lyari, where the ethnic majority are Baluchs, often turn into ethnic clashes. Organised crime is also manipulated by political parties and linked to terrorist movements, which further strengthens its hold on society and economic life. The Lyari gangs wield immense power: they could paralyse the Judia Bazar, or even the entire city centre, if traders grew tired of paying for protection.

The situation worsened in 2007, with the arrival of a new wave of Pashtun refugees. Displaced by the military operations against the Taliban in the tribal regions of Swat and Waziristan (2), a million ended up in the suburbs of Karachi, especially the shantytowns. The authorities hoped to tame the Islamist fighters by letting them live in relative peace, providing healthcare and allowing them to raise funds. But they have declared war on every secular organisation in Karachi, including the MQM and its main rival, the ANP. Although the ANP’s members are almost all Pashtun, the Taliban regard them as traitors, for adopting secular positions and taking part in government in Islamabad. Police sources say attacks by Islamists have weakened the ANP considerably, even in its traditional strongholds.

Chaudhry Mohammad Aslam, a senior police superintendent in Karachi who has led many operations against the Taliban, told how, last year, two men claiming to be volunteers working for Tablighi Jamaat (Society for Spreading Faith) — a widely respected Islamic movement, with a non-violent reputation — recruited seven teenage boys in Karachi. The parents were told the boys would be going to the relatively quiet eastern city of Lahore, to be educated by the movement. Instead they were taken to Miranshah, administrative capital of North Waziristan, on the border with Afghanistan. They were held at a training camp for suicide bombers, directed by a senior Taliban commander, Wali Mohammad. After a US drone hit the camp, killing 17 recruits, the survivors told their story to the police and the principal recruiters were arrested. They told the magistrate who recorded their confessions: “We will attack and kill policemen, soldiers and law enforcement officers, because they are agents of America.”

No mercy for ‘traitors and tyrants’

It was not an empty threat. More than 150 police officers and magistrates were killed in Karachi during 2012 — most, probably, at the instigation of the Taliban. The message is clear. According to Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan, there will be no mercy for “the traitors and tyrants of Karachi”. Wasay Jalil, a spokesman for MQM, said: “We warned the authorities about the growing presence of the Taliban a long time ago, but they didn’t believe us. The war really has come down from the north.” But opponents of MQM shrugged off the warning as a publicity stunt, because of the party’s ethno-political rivalry with the Pashtuns.

The Taliban have followed the example of the gangs and taken up racketeering, attacking uncooperative traders with hand grenades. They also support extremist Sunni groups’ attacks on the Shia minority. In some of the Pashtun areas of the city, barbers are not allowed to shave beards and women cannot go out without a veil. The police offer no estimates of Taliban numbers in Karachi, but insiders say there may be 4,000-5,000 fighters. These numbers could mean trouble not only for Karachi residents, but for the US and its allies: Karachi is the only port through which Nato can import materials for its operations in Afghanistan.

According to Aslam, the Taliban were responsible for 14 bombings in 2011. This January his men seized 100kg of explosives in the Mangopir district. “It’s time to stop [the Taliban], otherwise the city will see bloodshed on an unprecedented scale,” said political analyst Tauseef Ahmed Khan. “That would be a severe setback for secular and progressive Karachi, and might take years to recover from.” But secular and progressive Karachi is already under threat from the violence used by political parties vying for power. “The political divisions here are extremely complicated, and the financial stakes are very high,” said Zohra Yusuf. “Criminal gangs, the Taliban, political decision-makers, banned extremist organisations — there are plenty of people ready to shed blood and burn buildings.”

Criminologist Fateh Muhammad Burfat, head of the sociology department at the University of Karachi, said: “There is only a 5% conviction rate in criminal cases, and 90% of inmates in Pakistan’s jails are awaiting trial.” Sharfuddin Memon blamed “institutional incapacity, due to insufficient police numbers and an intelligence network that is growing weaker.”

Is there a risk that the system will collapse? “We have to accept that the state has failed,” said Burfat. “All political parties should accept this harsh reality if they have any commitment to the nation.” Economist Shahid Hassan Siddiqui pointed out that Pakistan’s education budget is smaller than Ethiopia’s, while its health budget is the lowest in the world, and asked: “How can we hope for even a slight change for the better, let alone a revolution, when the economy is in such a poor state?”

Ashraf Khan is a journalist based in Karachi.

Translated by Charles Goulden

Notes.

(1) Pakistan Ministry of Textile Industry website, “Overview”, 2013.

(2) See Jean-Luc Racine, “Pakistan: out of money and time”, and Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, “Pakistan creates its own enemy”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, respectively November 2008 and December 2009.

 

What North Koreans Think

by STANSFIELD SMITH

I recently returned from a late March trip to North Korea [Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, DPRK], along with 45 others, through Koryo Tours. On that tour I had the opportunity to discuss with the Korean tour guides their views on the current situation.  I only recall the DPRK view mentioned here once in the corporate media, when Dennis Rodman returned with a message from new President Kim Jong. The message was “I don’t want war, call me.”  Nobel Peace Prize winning President Obama refused to accept it, evidently preferring an escalating threat of a regional nuclear war to talking.  I asked my Korean tours guides to be interviewed so I could present their views to US people. 

Has the DPRK made proposals for peaceful national reunification? 

Yes, now we have options:  the historic option of a federal republic, and the recent option.  In our history we proposed three principles for reunification: that the North and South unite the country independently of foreign forces, that we reunify peacefully, and that we work together over the years to create the unity of the whole nation.

Our historic option is a federal republic: a central government concerned only with national defense and diplomacy, and two local governments, North and South, handling all other issues.

But recently the situation on the peninsula is deteriorating. There are no signs of resolving the issue.  If South Korean provocations continue, war will break out and we are prepared to fight. Because the situation has deteriorated, that is why we invalidated the 1953 ceasefire agreement. Now there is no contact between North and South. Now there are no phone lines between North and South, there is no hotline.

Now the US and South Korea plan is that the DPRK will collapse. The situation continues to deteriorate. They are playing a dangerous game.

Japan is also very hostile. The present government is very rightwing.  It is trying to build a strong military using “dangerous” DPRK as a pretext to justify turning its self-defense force into a regular army. Not only the DPRK, but many Asian countries are concerned with this right-wing Japanese resurgence.

The American people should ask the US government to change its hostile policy. Make America aware of the real situation in the Korean peninsula. Ask the American government to sign a peace treaty and push for diplomatic ties with the DPRK.

Why did the DPRK feel the need to develop a nuclear bomb?

Koreans had to deal with the reality of nuclear weapons twice before. Many thousands of Korans were used as slave labor by the Japanese in World War II, and many of these were forced labor workers in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb.

Later, in the U.S. war in Korean, U.S. General MacArthur wanted to drop 50-70 atomic bombs along the China-Korea border to create a belt of land people cannot live on or cross.

Later in the Pueblo incident in 1968, when the DPRK captured a U.S. spy ship in our waters, President Johnson aircraft carriers with nuclear weapons to Korea. And in 1969 when the U.S. E-C spy plane was shot down over our territory, the U.S. again threatened us with a nuclear attack.

The “Team Spirit” US-South Korea war exercises from the 1970s to the 1990s practiced with using nuclear bombs.

The DPRK joined the International Atomic Energy Agency and became a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty member in 1985.  We wanted to develop cooperation in the field of nuclear energy. Our purpose for joining was to be safe from nuclear attack. But the threat has continued.

In 1994 with our agreement with the US, we froze our nuclear program. In exchange, President Clinton and the US promised to supply us with a light water reactor. As we now know, Clinton only made those promises because the US thought the DPRK would collapse, and so did not need to honor the agreement. We allowed nuclear inspections until 1999, to show that our nuclear power was only for peaceful purposes. The US broke the agreement in 2002 under Bush, and we resumed using our nuclear power plant.

The Yugoslav war showed us that we need to defend ourselves. We learned from the US that the US has no justice, no fairness. The US respects only power. So the DPRK developed nuclear weapons to have power.

The DPRK needs to allocate resources to meet people’s needs but must spend money on nuclear weapons to protect and defend our country. We learned the lesson in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan: be strong.

The DPRK negotiated with the U.S., but the U.S. broke agreements, and increased sanctions five times. When the DPRK would agree to some terms, the U.S. would raise the ante. The U.S. had said we cannot have nuclear power, because we could use it for bombs. We cannot have satellites because the missiles we send them into space with can be used as military missiles. These they these things can have dual purpose, one civilian, one military.  They deny us food because they say it can be used to feed the military. If we kept going along with this, they would say we cannot have kitchen knives because we could use them for fighting.

There are slave states and noble states. Noble states develop their own technological infrastructure, GPS, weather reporting, etc., so need satellites. These days satellites are used for many things. If your country doesn’t have your own technology, you end up a slave state, dependent on other countries.  Noble countries are in control of their own development and have a future.

Maybe without nuclear weapons we could already have been attacked by the US in a war. Now our people can live more peacefully. The people of the DPRK are proud we have nuclear weapons, they are a guarantee of peace.  Only we on our own can safeguard the peace.

The US has over 1000 nuclear weapons in South Korea – nuclear artillery, nuclear missiles, nuclear bombs, nuclear landmines.

The DPRK has called for a nuclear free Korean peninsula, but this call has been ignored. Now that we saw no choice but to develop nuclear weapons to defend ourselves, we are sanctioned. This is a double standard insulting to our people.

What do the people of the DPRK think of the US/UN sanctions? How do these sanctions affect the people here?

We have been used to coping with U.S. sanctions since 1945.  Our people think the sanctions are a clear example of a double standard and a misuse of the UN Security Council. There is no justification for them. Sanctions were applied because of our nuclear bomb tests and satellite launches.

Since World War II there have been 9000 missile/ satellite launches. Four were by the DPRK. There have been 2000 nuclear tests, 3 by the DPRK. But the UN never made a resolution or imposed sanctions against any country for doing that, only the DPRK.

This is a double standard by the UN. It is a misuse of the UN Security Council by the US.  Other countries are like US puppets to go along with this.

The sanctions affect every household, every individual in the DPRK. There are power cuts, a heating and energy shortage, a food problem. Even you visiting tourists are affected by the sanctions, as you see with your hotels. [in Pyongyang water and lights were only on certain hours of  the day; in other towns it was even less].  There is a lack of oil and spare parts for machinery.

The sanctions threaten any country that trades with the DPRK, so that they must choose who they want to trade with, the DPRK or other countries. Our trade now is really only with China.

How is the food situation now and what role is the US playing?

The food situation is still not satisfactory, and we are still trying to cover our basic food needs with the help of food imports and foreign aid.  Repeated US sanctions have stopped food aid. The sanctions have made the food situation worse.

At present US NGOs [Non-governmental organizations] give only some, limited, token medical aid and no food aid. For a period of 7-8 years there was no food aid from the US.  The US sanctions are interfering with solving the food situation. It has cut its food aid, and even interferes with other countries providing food aid.

What is the main emphasis in the DPRK’s economic plan now [for the last several years the country had a military first policy]?

The DPRK now emphasizes two points: agricultural production and light industry. Light industry is what you call textiles, food processing, toys, furniture, shoes, and so on.  We want to invest and develop more these two areas.  We want to improve the living standard of people. We focus on these two even if the situation is dangerous. Even if war is coming, we will focus on agriculture and light industry until war starts.  We must work harder on developing agriculture and light industry.

Now with the nuclear bomb, the DPRK is a little safer and can turn from self-defense spending to light industry and consumer goods investment.  You saw in Pyongyang a big conference of 10,000 delegates from light industries all over the country.  They are here to discuss and exchange ideas about how to improve light industry, what has worked in their factories, what has problems, and how to solve them.

How are relations with South Korea since the Sunshine Policy? [Started by South Korean President Kim Dae Jung and continued by President Roh Moo-hyun, from the years 1998-2008.  In this period of less chilly relations between North and South, the heads of state of the two countries met in 2000 and again in 2007. Cooperative business developments began, several thousand South Korean tourists visited the North. Kaesong Industrial Park in the DPRK was opened.]

Since 2008 South Korea has shown only confrontation. There has been no cooperation. South Korea has broken all agreements we have made during the Sunshine policy. There is no more cooperation, no tourism from the South, no engagement.  Now relations are only negative, there are no positive signs.  This is because of both US pressure and a South Korean decision.  South Korea President Lee Myung-bak is a right-wing businessman, who changed the situation, just  like Bush reversed Clinton’s even moderate degree of cooperation.

The present South Korea president is Park Geun-hye, daughter of South Korean military dictator Park  Chung-hee , who was an officer in the Japanese Imperial Army. Cooperation has changed to confrontation. South Korea thinks military pressure on the North, combined with sanctions, will make the DPRK collapse

“We learned the lesson in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan: be strong.”

 

The Queen Mother of Global Austerity and Financialization

by MICHAEL HUDSON and JEFFREY SOMMERS

We typically honor the convention to refrain from speaking ill of the recently departed. But Margaret Thatcher probably would not object to an epitaph focusing on how her political legacy was to achieve her professed aim of “irreversibly” dismantling Britain’s public sector. Attacking central planning by government, she shifted it into much more centralized financial hands – the City of London, unopposed by any economic back bench of financial regulation and “free” of meaningful anti-monopoly price regulation.

Mrs. Thatcher transformed the character of British politics by heading a democratically elected Parliamentary government that permitted financial planners to carve up the public domain with popular consent. Like her actor contemporary Ronald Reagan, she narrated an appealing cover story that promised to help the economy recover. The reality, of course, was to raise Britain’s cost of living and doing business. But this zero-sum game turned the economy’s loss into a vast windfall for the Conservative Party’s constituency in Britain’s banking sector.

By underpricing her privatization of British Telephone and subsequent vast monopolies, she made it appear that customers would be the big gainers, rather than large financial institutions. And by giving underwriters a windfall 3% commission (formerly based on floating the stock of much smaller start-up companies), Mrs. Thatcher oversaw the start of Britain’s Great Polarization between the creditor 1% and the increasingly indebted 99%.

Attacking rent-seeking in government, she opened the floodgates to economic rent-seeking in its classical sense: land rent in real estate (with debt-inflated “capital” gains) to make British property so high-priced that employees who work in London must now live outside it, taking highly expensive privatized railroads to work. Privatization also created vast new opportunities for monopoly rent for privatized public utilities, along with predatory financial takings by increasingly predatory banking.

Finance has been the mother of monopolies ever since Dutch and other foreign creditors helped England incorporate the East India Company in 1600, the Bank of England in 1694, and other commercial monopolies culminating in the South Sea Company in the 1710s.

By time Mrs. Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, Britain had made over a century of enormous investment in public infrastructure. Financial managers eyed this commanding height as a set of potential monopolies to be turned into cash cows to enrich high finance. Mrs. Thatcher became the cheerleader for what became the greatest giveaway of the century as the City of London’s gain became the industrial economy’s loss. Britain’s lords of finance became the equivalent of America’s great railroad land barons of the 19th century, the ruling elite to preside over today’s descent into neoliberal austerity.

Her tenure as Prime Minister seemed to reprise Peter Seller’s role inBeing There. She made good television precisely because her philosophy was stitched together in a sequence of sound bites that flattened complex social and economic relationships into a banal personal psychodrama. Mrs. Thatcher’s ability to sweep the broad financial and economic polarization and financial “free lunch” behind a curtain enabled her to distract attention from the consequences of what Harold Macmillan characterized as “selling off the family silver.” It was as if the economy was a middle-class grocer’s family trying to balance its checkbook along the lines of what its banker insisted were necessary in the face of wages being squeezed by rising prices for basic needs.

The ground for Mrs. Thatcher’s rule was prepared by the fact that England’s economy was as much a mess as the rest of the world by the time she took office. The 1979 Winter of Discontent saw a perfect storm unfold. Unable to restrain Arthur Scargill and other and other labor grandstanders, the British Labour Party felt little need to wait for Britain’s share of North Sea oil to come on stream. That windfall would subsidize a decade of dismantling what was left of British industry. Oil states do not need to be efficient. They do not need industry, or even employment.

Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan made a token attempt to address these issues by requesting an IMF loan in 1976 to finance tangible industrial re-investment as bridge financing until the UK’s North Sea oil could begin generating foreign exchange. But US Treasury Secretary Bill Simon read him the riot act. IMF and U.S. policy was to provide credit only to pay bondholders, not to build up the real economy. Britain would be advanced loans only if it reoriented its economy to let high finance do the planning.

The UK became the IMF’s best neoliberal poster child, establishing a comparative advantage in offshore finance in what ultimately would flower as Gordon Brown’s notorious Light Touch that brought about the banking collapses of 2008. In this sense her role was to serve as Britain’s version of Boris Yeltsin, sponsoring the carve-up of centuries of public investment.

Mrs. Thatcher stepped into the post of Prime Minister in 1979 just as the neoliberal ploy was getting underway. The “grocer’s daughter” depicted Britain’s problems as a result of uppity labor. Her view stuck a chord as labor leaders called a series of politically self-defeating strikes that disrupted daily life and made it even more of a struggle than usual for most voters. Britain’s economy had never been riper for a divide and conquer strategy.

The new twist was that the class war aimed at labor in its role of consumer and debtor, not as employee. England’s domestic industry took one beating after another as factories closed their doors throughout the country (with the most successful becoming gentrified real estate developments).

The Iron Lady was convinced she was rebuilding England’s economy, while in reality it was only getting richer from London’s outlaw banks. Throughout the world, the damage wrought by this financialized economy has been immense. By “liberating” national money from the constraints of taxing authorities, the Middle East stopped much of its projects for industrial development. After 1990 the Soviet bloc was deindustrialized to become an oil, gas and mining economy. And for Britain, trillions of dollars in global tax revenues that could have been used for industrial and social development were routed though London, where the UK has lived off the fees from this free-for-all. So despite Mrs. Thatcher’s admiration for Milton Friedman, famous for claiming that There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, she made Britain’s economy all about obtaining a free lunch – eaten by the world’s financial managers who flocked to its shores.

How much did Lady Thatcher come to understand about a financial sector of which she never deliberately favored? She never expressed regret about how her policies paved the way for New Labour to take the next giant step in empowering the City of London’s financial complex that has un-policed the banks to catalyze one financial crash after the next, hollowing out Britain’s economy in the process.

When Mrs. Thatcher took power, 1 in 7 of the England’s children lived in poverty. By the end of her reforms that number had risen to 1 in 3. She polarized the country in a ‘divide & conquer’ strategy that foreshadowed that of Ronald Reagan and more recent American politicians such as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. The effect of her policy was to foreclose on the economic mobility into the middle class that ironically she believed her policies were promoting.

Pundits the world over are chirping about her role in “saving” Britain, not as indebting it – destroyed an economy in order to save it. Her rule was historic mainly by posing the conundrum that has shaped neoliberal politics since 1980: How can governments nurture and endow financial kleptocrats in the context of rule by popular consent?

This can be achieved only by violating the Prime Assumption of classical liberal political philosophy: voters must be sufficiently informed to understand the consequences of their actions. This means that governments must take a long-term perspective.

But finance always has lived in the short run, and nowhere in the world is banking more short-term than in Britain. Nobody better exemplified this narrow-minded perspective than Lady Thatcher. Her simplistic rhetoric helped inspire an inordinate share of simpletons conflating supposed common sense with wisdom.

Not altogether simple, perhaps, but simply opportunistic. As the uncredited patron saint of New Labour, Mrs. Thatcher became the intellectual force inspiring her successor and emulator Tony Blair to complete the transformation of British electoral politics to mobilize popular consent to permit the financial sector to privatize and carve up Britain’s public infrastructure into a set of monopolies. In so doing, the United Kingdom’s was transformed from a real economy of production to one that scavenged the world for rents through its offshore banks. In the end, not only was great damage inflicted on England, but on the entire world as capital fled developing countries for safe harbors in London’s banks. Meanwhile, governments throughout the world today are declaring “We’re broke,” as their oligarchs grow ever more rich.

 

Thatcher’s Legacy and British Identity

by RUTH MICHAELSON

The news of Margaret Thatcher’s death earlier this week was hardly a shock; given her age as well as the ability of social media to conduct miniature dress rehearsals of the event almost once a year since the creation of Twitter. As journalists, economists and politicians queue up to eulogise the Iron Lady, no one doubts her impact, especially as her ideology is still very much alive and kicking in Britain today.

Her death brought a certain catharsis for those on the Left, despite her frail physical and mental state meaning that she was unlikely to be making any public speeches or privatising anything from her bedside in London’s Ritz hotel. This outpouring of relief seemed strange at first, not withstanding that Britain’s current Conservative government is making sure that they pick up where Thatcher left off by ensuring that the poorest in society pick up the slack left by the richest. If anything, her death was a reminder that there is little to celebrate, given both the axe-wielding power of the Conservatives and the total lack of any coherent or believable opposition.

The success, if you can truly call it that, of Thatcherite ideology was to reach beyond politics, especially given its ability to infect the Labour Party at its core, and to change the mentality of British citizens. As Russell Brand writes in the Guardian on the 10^th April, “what is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins…If you behave like there’s no such thing as society, in the end there isn’t.”

Thatcher re-defined what Britain stood for- self-serving and bullishly aggressive, both inside and out. We are still trying to decide if this is really us: are we people who marched in numbers against the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (something that might never have happened without the US-UK relations forged by Thatcher) or are we the nation who grudgingly accepted the financial and moral consequences of the war as they cosied up to George W.Bush’s foreign policy?

Are we a nation who rejects the current government’s besieging of public services, or are we the people who turn their heads to focus on the concocted issues of immigration in the hope that will somehow keep the UK afloat? Most importantly: are we a country that sees value in the existence of community or are we people who will allow the riots that happened across England in 2011 to become a sadly inevitable occurrence?

Nothing showed the divisions in British identity better than the media gulf between the BBC’s coverage immediately following Thatcher’s death and the outpouring that happened via social media. Despite the BBC’s recent promises to increase its coverage from the North of England, the cameras bounced between interviews with elderly former constituents in Finchley, North London and the London studio, ensuring that criticism of the effects of Thatcher’s policy was extremely limited. Meanwhile, across Twitter and Facebook, residents from the towns and communities that Thatcherite policy decimated, posted pictures and videos of pubs full of revellers, singing songs to express the outpouring of relief. In effect, what the residents of the UK were doing on Monday evening was competing to grasp this moment as their own- seeing who could claim the moral high ground, and in the process questioning their own identities.

As the hangovers took hold and plans for a funeral, whose cost to the UK taxpayer is still unknown (some estimates have put it as high as £8-10 million), are unveiled, it is clear that this moment presents an opportunity. Thatcher’s death provides a moment for the residents of the United Kingdom to indulge in their favourite pastime, that being nostalgia with just a hint of self-analysis, and to truly decide if we want to allow her to define us. The pushback against David Cameron’s repulsive “Big Society” idea provides some hope, but the fight goes beyond a need to protest. This is, in its purest sense, a battle for hearts and minds- a fight that decides whether Thatcher’s “no such thing as society” adage is the prism by which we can choose to see society. In the process perhaps there even a chance to finally answer the question that Thatcherite ideology has caused us to ask ourselves while plagued with doubt: is there such a thing as British identity?

 

The Assassination of Patrice Lumumba: British Peer Reveals MI6 Role in Lumumba Killing

by Hasan Suroor

The British intelligence services may have just had one of their best-kept secrets blown: their role in the abduction and assassination of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister whose Pan-African nationalism and pro-Moscow leanings alarmed the West.

For more than 50 years, rumours have swirled over allegations of British involvement in Lumumba’s brutal murder in 1961, but nothing has ever been proved — leaving the CIA and its Belgian peers alone to take the rap for what a Belgian writer has described as “the most important assassination of the 20th century.” Now, in a dramatic revelation, a senior British politician has claimed that he got it from the horse’s mouth that it was MI6 that “did” it.

Patrice Lumumba (The Hindu)

In a little noticed letter to the editor in the latest issue of the London Review of Books (LRB), Lord David Edward Lea responded to the claim in a new book on British intelligence, Empire of Secrets: British intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire by Calder Walton, that the jury is still out on Britain’s role in Lumumba’s death. “The question remains whether British plots to assassinate Lumumba … ever amounted to anything. At present, we do not know,” writes Walton.

Lord Lea retorted: “Actually, in this particular case, I can report that we do. It so happens that I was having a cup of tea with Daphne Park… She had been consul and first secretary in Leopoldville, now Kinshasa, from 1959 to 1961, which in practice (this was subsequently acknowledged) meant head of MI6 there. I mentioned the uproar surrounding Lumumba’s abduction and murder, and recalled the theory that MI6 might have had something to do with it. ‘We did,’ she replied, ‘I organised it.’”

According to Lord Lea, she contended that if the West had not intervened, Lumumba would have handed over Congo’s — now called Democratic Republic of Congo — rich mineral deposits to the Russians. When contacted by The Hindu, Lord Lea confirmed the contents of his letter to the LRB and that the conversation over tea took place a few months before Ms. Park died in 2010. “That’s the conversation I had with her and that’s what she told me. I have nothing more to add,” he said when asked if he had any other independent confirmation of Ms. Park’s claim.

Ms. Park was a career intelligence officer who served in Kinshasa (then Leopoldville) between 1959 and 1961. On retirement, she was made a Life peer as Baroness Park of Monmouth. Her fellow peers in the House of Lords referred to her as a spokesperson for the Secret Intelligence Service. She was also briefly head of Somerville College, Oxford University.

There has been no comment from MI6 on Lord Lea’s revelation. “We don’t comment on intelligence matters,” an official said.

Lumumba, hailed as “the hero of Congolese independence” from Belgium in 1960, was shot dead on January 17, 1961 after being toppled in a US-Belgian backed military coup barely two months after being in office.

Lumumba had been sheltered by Rajeshwar Dayal — the Indian diplomat who was the UN Secretary General’s representative in the Congo — for several days but was captured and killed soon after he chose to leave the compound. “This heinous crime was a culmination of two inter-related assassination plots by American and Belgian governments, which used Congolese accomplices and a Belgian execution squad to carry out the deed,” wrote Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, a specialist on African and Afro-American studies and author of The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History.

Declassified American documents from the time have established Washington’s role in covert assassination plots — the most famous being a CIA plot to poison Lumumba’s toothbrush by smuggling poisoned toothpaste into his bathroom.

“The toothpaste never made it into Lumumba’s bathroom. I threw it in the Congo River,” Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief in Leopoldville, later said.

Not much is publicly known about UK role. But, in 2000, the BBC reported that in the autumn of 1960 — three months before Lumumba was murdered — an MI5 operative in the British embassy in Leopoldville suggested “Lumumba’s removal from the scene by killing him.”