Electoral Reform in Ireland – Part 4: More mixed-member action

FINAL EPISODE! Last time I suggested that a mixed-member system – where some MPs are elected in constituencies and some by national lists – would be worth introducing in Ireland. Then I mentioned research undertaken for an Oireachtas committee, which found that if the German system (plurality voting in constituencies for half the members, closed national lists for the rest) were introduced here we would end up with Fianna Fáil sweeping the constituency seats and the other parties winning all the list seats. This skewed result did not appeal and the Oireachtas committee recommended against moving to a mixed-member system. So are mixed-member systems that rubbish? Well, no.

There was maybe a certain failure of imagination on the part of the people doing the research for the Oireachtas committee, in that they only seem to have considered an exact replica of the German system*. What would produce less extreme results would be a mixed-member system where half the TDs were elected by STV in multi-member constituencies, the other half by list. The multi-member constituencies would of necessity be very large, but we could reasonably expect that one party would not win all or even most of them. The likelihood is that candidates would still compete for these seats on something like the localist manner we are used to now. The other seats – the party list seats – would allow at least for the possibility that parties could win seats by campaigning on national issues. If there was some kind of hitherto unfulfilled drive for national politics then this would provide some chance that it could find expression.

There are a couple possible issues to this kind of system. One of them is that the STV constituencies would be so big that they would often have to include several counties. The likelihood would be that people from some of the less populous counties would have no constituency TD from their county. This is only a serious problem if you think that every county, no matter how underpopulated, needs to have at least one TD.

Another issue would be that if you have TDs elected in two different ways then one set of TDs might see themselves as having more legitimacy than the others. The constituency TDs, in particular, might scoff at the list TDs on the basis that they, as individuals, had never been chosen by the voters. In practice, though, politicians throw all kinds of brickbats at each other, and another set of insults should be easy enough to shrug off.

The downsides of mixed-member systems are manageable. The advantages are that the constituency elections allows people who like voting for individual TDs to keep doing so, while the list election makes it easier for a less locally oriented politics to emerge. Electing the constituency TDs by STV in multi-member constituencies prevents the unpleasantly skewed outcome a straight import of the German system could produce.

That, then, is my proposed new electoral system for Ireland. There is no great prospect of it being adopted, as I have never heard it suggested by anyone else as an alternative electoral system for Ireland. Even if my wonderful proposal was somehow adopted, we should be realistic about the likelihood of it actually effecting any great change to how politics works. I am highly sceptical of the power of institutional setups alone to transform politics, and experience suggests that the localist impetus in Irish politics is sufficiently strong that under any electoral system it will still dominate. Still, electing some TDs by party at a national level might just concentrate some electors' minds on the fact that elections are about picking people who will form a government.


*maybe I should look at their report and see if this is actually the case.

Electoral Reform in Ireland – Part 3: The magic of mixed-member systems

In the last post I made a case for electoral reform in Ireland, but then argued that a number of electoral systems people sometimes talk about moving to are a bit problematic. Astute readers may have noticed that I omitted any discussion of mixed-member systems, the subject of today's post.

Mixed-member systems are so called because they mix up how parliamentarians are elected, typically electing some of the MPs in local constituencies and some nationally by list. Germany is the great mixed-member poster child, with its adoption of the system in the Federal Republic's Basic Law often seen as one of the things that embedded democracy in (West) Germany after the Second World War. Germany elects half its MPs in constituencies, using Westminster-style plurality voting. The other half is elected from closed national lists. The list seats are allocated so as to ensure the overall proportionality of the Bundestag. There is also the 5% threshold – if a party wins less than 5% of the list vote then it wins no list seats.

The German Federal Republic has proved to be a rather successful country, especially given the travails it experienced under previous regimes. This means that people are always talking about borrowing aspects of its institutional setup. Advocates of electoral reform often talk about introducing mixed-member systems in their country. The advantages of the system are seen as being that it allows people to keep voting for a local representative while ensuring a proportional overall result. In Ireland's case, the list side of the election offers the possibility of voters' minds being focussed on national issues, while letting them continue to vote for individual politicians.

As it happens, a move to a mixed-member system here was considered not too long ago. Following a 1996 report by the Constitution Review Group that suggested mixed-member systems were worth looking at, an Oireachtas Committee commissioned further research on the issue, bringing forth a report in 2002. The research was not particularly favourable. Looking at how an exact replica of the German system in Ireland would operate, the report found that it would produce a very skewed allocation of seats between list and constituency members – basically, Fianna Fáil would win all (or almost all) of the constituency seats, with almost all of the list seats then going to the other parties*. The committee recommended against adopting a mixed-member system.

So is that it for mixed-member systems? Come back next time for the FINAL EPISODE and see.


*This was based on the relative levels of party support then applying. Fianna Fáil's support is currently much lower, and if a general election were to be conducted right now using the German system then it might not produce such a skewed result.

Blue aliens protest against Israeli Wall

People are always protesting against Israeli building of their big wall thing at Bilin on the West Bank in Palestine. Now they are dressing up as characters from the new James Cameron film Avatar. I have not seen the film, but I gather it is partly about people from an advanced society colonising natives, so there are obvious parallels.

One thing I am a bit confused by is why protests against the building of the Wall always take place at Bilin, and have been doing so for years. Surely the Israelis would have finished building that section of the Wall by now?

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Electoral Reform in Ireland – Part 2

In part 1, I discussed proposals periodically made to change Ireland's electoral system. The proposers of such change hope that by doing so they can orient Ireland's politics away from localism. The potential for intra-party competition in the current system is typically seen as causing our localist politics, so advocates of change typically propose electoral systems where politicians will not have to compete with their own party colleagues. I suggested that a lot of this thinking is a bit woolly, in particular claiming that these people overstate the extent to which electoral systems drive politics.

For all that, a case can still be made for electoral reform. Even if our electoral system does not cause localist politics, it could be said to assist it; STV provides a fertile ground for localism and does not encourage politicians to take a more national view. A new electoral system would not conjure a more agreeable politics into being, but it could provide space for it to emerge. This assumes there is a latent drive towards "good" politics currently being blocked by the electoral system.

When thinking about what kind of electoral system to move to, you need to first think about what is wrong with the one we have at present. People typically see the opportunities it offers for intra-party competition as driving clientelism in Irish politics. I think this is over-stated. One feature of the current electoral system that is, I think, more relevant is that we vote for people in constituencies – if you elect people by locality then it should not be too surprising if they spend a lot of their time trying to look after the locality. If you have an electoral system that elects people at a national level then there is more scope for a nationally based politics.

So, what electoral system might encourage a more nationally oriented politics? Other systems based on geographical constituencies are not going to break the link to localism; that stops me from advocating anything like the alternative vote, plurality voting (the crazy Westminster system), that funny two-round voting thing they have in France, and so on. Then there are the various types of list system that are used for proportional representation in other countries. If you want to challenge the localist orientation of Irish politics then you will want national rather than regional lists.

Even so, list systems remain problematic. You can have closed lists (where the order in which people are elected from a list is determined by the party) or open lists (where people on a list are elected on the basis of which individuals on it have the most votes*). I suspect that a move to closed lists for Dáil elections would be unacceptable in Ireland – people are too rooted to the idea of voting for an individual candidate rather than a party. The problem with open lists is that by retaining the element of competition between individuals, they allow for politicians to continue differentiating themselves on local issues. This might not happen in a country like Finland, where open lists are used for parliamentary elections, but in a country like Ireland with a strong local tradition politicians might well continue to look for votes from people a particular geographical area.

That leaves us in a bit of a pickle – I have suggested that a change in electoral systems would be desirable, but have then raised problems with any of the electoral systems we could consider moving to. Come back next time as I attempt to resolve this conundrum.


*I am somewhat simplifying how open lists work, or how they can work – there are open list systems that give the voters astonishing abilities to reorder, split, and combine lists.

Siopaí na Cheann

There is a bit of a flap on in Ireland at the moment about “Head Shops”. These are premises that sell products to customers who wish to get a “deadly buzz” without breaking the law – for the “gear” sold in the “Head Shops” is entirely legal. There is talk of bringing in sweeping legislation to ban “Head Shop” products, perhaps even to ban these places entirely.

Action needs to be taken quickly. Some years previously, Ireland had an emerging problem with the misuse of heroin and cocaine. This was developing into a considerable scourge, until the authorities took action, banning the sale of these substances. There is no longer a heroin or cocaine problem in Ireland.

Evaluating Cuba

I am taking a bit of an interest in Cuba, partly driven by my impending holiday there. As you know, Cuba has an authoritarian socialists government and has also been subject to a long trade boycott organised by the United States of America. I understand that Cuba is also pretty poor, when compared to first world countries like the one I live in. But comparing Cuba with first world countries is problematic – more appropriate are comparisons with its neighbours in the Caribbean and in Central America, as they are the countries from which it diverged when it embraced socialism.

Writing in the Guardian, Stephen Kinzer makes such a comparison: Caribbean communism v capitalism. It is a short article, but Kinzer is able to throw out a couple of statistics suggesting that the mass of people in Cuba lead more materially comfortable lives than those of neighbouring countries. He also says that while Cubans have their political rights curtailed by their government, these rights are often a bit notional in neighbouring countries – if a Cuban were to try and set up an oppositional newspaper, they would be thrown in jail, but if a Guatemalan were to set up a stridently oppositional newspaper they might well be killed by a death squad.

Now, Kinzer does pick and choose his indicators, but I reckon it would be interesting to do a more thorough analysis of different levels of human development statistics across the Caribbean basin to see how the country ranks. If Cuba were to rank ahead of the others, then this would raise troubling questions. Generally speaking, we tend to assume that freedom associates with prosperity, with people in authoritarian countries living materially poorer lives than their freer fellows. Now, if Cuba were to buck this trend then we would have to wonder whether its relatively better condition was a product of its authoritarianism or something merely coincidental. Put another way, would Cuba acquire the less savoury characteristics of its neighbours if it were to open up politically?

I may at some stage trawl through the statistics myself. If so then I will be back to you.

Forgotten Crimes

Here is an interesting interview with cartoonist Joe Sacco. Sacco made his name with the comic Palestine, and has since published a number of books, including several fascinating works on the wars in the former Yugoslavia. His new book, Footnotes in Gaza sees him researching a largely forgotten incident in 1956, when a three-figure number* of Palestinians were massacred in Rafah and Khan Younis by Israeli troops. I have not read the book, so I cannot really comment on it, but it seems to do the usual Sacco thing of being partly about him researching the 1956 events, partly showing those events. I sometimes find that style of writing - foregrounding the writer over the events they are writing about – a bit annoying. With Sacco it works better, as he has a good eye for detail, and the minutiae of his gathering information (travelling around the Gaza Strip, talking to survivors and eye witnesses etc.) is often fascinating.


*111? 275? It depends who you talk to; I do not consider either of these numbers acceptably low

A Negative View of Uzbekistan

This is a picture of children in Uzbekistan playing in tandyr cooking pots

And here some men walk in a scenic valley.

These pictures come from a book called Men and Women from Dawn to Dusk by Umida Akhmedova. You might see them as interesting scenes from everyday life, ones that might even encourage visitors to faraway Uzbekistan. The rulers of that country see things differently. A special commission was created to examine the photographs; it concluded that they distort reality. Ms Akhmedova has been barred from leaving the country and is now awaiting trail. If convicted, she faces six months in jail or three years hard labour.

More pictures

Cyprus to split?

The Guardian reports that Turkish Cypriot officials have warned that Cyrpus is in danger of splitting into two separate countries. This astonishing development could happen as a result of a failure in current talks between the leaders of the two jurisdictions on the island – the internationally recognised Republic of Cyprus, and the unrecognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Leaders of both jurisdictions are under pressure from hard-liners, and it may be impossible to reach a deal.

Given that the island is already divided into two jurisdictions, it is not entirely clear what difference it would make if the talks failed. Maybe the international community might give up trying to put Cyprus back together again and move to recognition of Northern Cyprus as a de facto and de jure state. It is unlikely, however, that Northern Cyprus will find itself a full member of the international community any time soon. The Republic of Cyprus is a member of the EU and could probably block its engagement with the other Cyprus, while various prominent countries who hate secessionists would probably block wider recognition for it. So, if the talks fail then it's business as usual, though it would probably mean Cyprus would continue obstructing Turkish accession to the EU.

Croatia: “If you want a fight, we’ll give you one”

Croatia’s president Stipe Mesic has informed Bosnia’s Serbs that if they attempt to secede from Bosnia then he will despatch Croatian troops to crush them. At the moment, Bosnia is federated into two regions, one for ethnic Serbs and one for ethnic Croats and Bosniaks*, but the country remains grossly dysfunctional and still under international supervision. President Mesic of neighbouring Croatia seems to believe that the sulky Serbs of Bosnia plan to organise a referendum on secession, after which they will seek to unify with their pals in Serbia proper. Should they try such a thing, his plan is not to launch an all out war against them, but to send forces to cut the narrow corridor that links the two sub-units of the Bosnian Serb region.

Milorad Dodik, the prime minister of Bosnia’s Serb region, has reacted angrily to Mesic’s threat.

I do not know how likely the Bosnian Serbs are to declare independence, nor if Mesic is serious about intervening militarily against them. Mesic is coming to the end of his term of office, with his successor already elected, and he may be engaging in a bit of sabre rattling to give posterity something to remember him by. At the same time, Mesic has hitherto demonstrated an interest in maintaining the integrity of Bosnia, forcibly rebuffing the pretensions of Bosnian Croats who wished for a closer union with his country.

Even if the former Yugoslavia is not quite ready to descend into another bout of war, the incident also demonstrates the problematic nature of the Bosnian state. Its constitution seems based on a series of externally imposed compromises that ended the war of the early 1990s but did not create anything approximating to viable institutions of governance. How to get the country into some kind of shape that allows it to govern itself will be one of the great conundrums of the years ahead.

More


*you know, Bosnian Muslims

Beards and Ballots

Right now I am reading The Lost Revolution: the Story of the Official IRA and the Workers' Party. This tales the tale of one side of the Provisional-Official split of the Republican movement in the early 1970s. The Officials took a leftward course that ultimately saw the Official IRA declare a ceasefire and disappear into the shadows while Official Sinn Féin became first Sinn Féin - The Workers' Party and then just the Workers' Party. It is a big book and it covers a lot of stuff. As a busy man, it will take me an age to read it, so rather than wait to write a long review of it, I will instead just throw out a few titbits as I go along.

At the moment, the book is covering the early 1970s and the immediate aftermath of the Provisional-Official split. I am struck by how badly the Provisionals come out of this. In some respects, this is not too surprising – the Provisionals tend to come off badly in anything not written by their apologists, and the book is based heavily on interviews with their Sticky* rivals. But even with that, the Provisional do come across as a bunch of reactionaries who split off because they wanted no truck with the leftward path of the Officials; after the split, the Provisionals seemed to have been blessed with a maniacal tendency that had a fondness for exploding no-warning car-bombs in central Belfast.

Several decades later, the Provisionals followed the Officials down the leftward path and declared their own IRA ceasefire. They also started taking seats in Irish elected assemblies, now sitting in government in a devolved Northern Irish government. One theme of Hanley and Millar's book is the way the Officials blazed a trail only belatedly followed by others, with this being a particularly striking example.

In fairness to my friends from the Provisional side of the split, the Officials (and their descendants in the Workers Party, Democratic Left, Labour and so on) do not come across as saints here either. It is worth remembering that many respected figures in Irish public life today cut their political teeth in an organisation that killed its political enemies and was funded by extortion. Still, there is sometimes something to be said for just forgetting the past.

image source (includes lefty review of the book)


*The Officials became known as the Stickies (or Sticks), because their badges were fastened by adhesive; the Provisionals used pin fasteners, but the name Pinheads never stuck

Who bombed Lockerbie?

I have previously mentioned the release from a Scottish jail of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi. Mr al-Megrahi was convicted for causing the Lockerbie bombing. In my previous post I mentioned how the relatives of the British victims are much more open to the idea that Mr al-Megrahi was framed, while relatives of the American victims seem to be uniformly outraged at his release. I suggested this might be because of a series of high-profile miscarriages of justice, in which convictions for terrorist and other crimes were quashed, often after those falsely convicted had served many years in jail.

The solicitor Gareth Peirce played a major role in overturning those Britiish miscarriages of justice. Now she has written on the al-Megrahi case in the London Review of Books. She asserts that his conviction is a stitch-up and a travesty of due process. Forensic and eye-witness evidence were used to convict al-Megrahi. Peirce suggests these are both deeply flawed. The forensic evidence was largely prepared by the same dodgy scientists who produced the flawed evidence used in earlier miscarriages of justice. The eye-witness, meanwhile, initially failed to pick out al-Megrahi in an identity parade, but subsequently was miraculously able to do so and now is living in suddenly acquired affluence.

Peirce also points out that in the early stages of the Lockerbie investigation, the finger of suspicion was pointing at Iran. The Iranian regime had a motive – a US warship had just shot down an Iranian airliner, and then, grotesquely, the crew of that ship had been honoured by President Reagan. As the US regime started to engage with the Iranians to buy out its hostages in Lebanon, it became inconvenient to blame Iran for Lockerbie. Someone had to pick up the tab, with Peirce arguing that that someone ended up being Libya and Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi.

It is unfortunate that al-Megrahi was required to drop his appeal when he was released on compassionate grounds, as it would surely be better for everyone if these allegations could be addressed in an open court.


See also: 'Flaws' in key Lockerbie evidence (BBC)

Electoral Reform in Ireland – Part 1

Ireland uses an unusual electoral system – the Single Transferable Vote in multimember constituencies (STV). Only two other countries use STV for national elections, and of those one is very small and the other only uses it for the less important of its two parliamentary chambers.

Every so often someone proposes a move from STV to some other electoral system*. Whenever this proposal is mooted, it is argued that STV is a major cause of the political woes afflicting Ireland, so getting rid of it is necessary to improve the political climate. The argument basically works like this. As is, Irish TDs** spend most of their time on local issues – either directly servicing the needs of constituents or bringing home pork for their locality. This is seen as being because STV allows for competition for seats between politicians of the same party. To differentiate themselves from each other, they compete on their ability to service their constituency. Thus, the electoral system leads to the Dáil being full of locally oriented politicians who neglect national issues. Moving to some other electoral system would lead to a situation where parliamentarians are more engaged with national issues; the hope is then that the likes of the current economic crisis would never arise again.

A lot of this thinking is a bit woolly. The idea that it is intra-party competition that drives politicians’ localist orientation is somewhat problematic. It ignores the historical record, with it apparently being the case that politicians engaged in considerable amounts of constituency work before the foundation of the state, when a completely different electoral system was used. It also misses that TDs from parties that only field one candidate in their constituency still engage in plenty of constituency work. It does appear that there is something embedded in Irish political culture that drives politicians towards pork-barrelling and to work as direct service providers for their constituents.

International comparisons are also instructive. People here think of localist politicians as an exclusively Irish phenomenon, but looking further afield suggests differently. MPs in the UK, Canada, and France devote considerable energy to constituency work; none of these countries have electoral systems that not encourage intra-party competition. There are even examples of countries that use closed national lists to elect MPs seeing parliamentarians doing constituency work – despite not having to compete against party colleagues for votes and not even having constituents.

People also tend to forget that there are other electoral systems where candidates compete against members of their own party for the electorate’s favour. I am thinking here of the commonly used open list PR elections, where voters pick one candidate from a party’s list and the party’s seats are then allocated on the basis of which candidates have the most individual votes. In some of these cases, you see politicians engaging in a lot of constituency work, and in some you do not. My suspicion, therefore, is that constituency work is not solely driven by electoral systems, and so moving to another electoral system would not banish localism from Irish politics.

For all that, I think there is a case to be made for electoral reform in Ireland. Join me in part two for a discussion of what direction that reform should take.


*two examples, in articles that are also about other things: How inertia became the iron law of Irish politics & Opposition parties must tell electorate hard truths

**members of the Dáil, the lower and more important House of the Oireachtas

Iceland's President Acts

Iceland’s president, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, has vetoed a controversial bill designed to compensate the UK and Netherlands for people who lost money when the Icelandic bank Landsbanki collapsed last year. A quarter of the country’s population had signed a petition opposing the Bill. President Grimsson is going to put the bill to a referendum.

This is fascinating on any number of levels. The compensation deal was negotiated by the Icelandic government with their British and Dutch counterparts, and it seems to be a pre-condition for the country receiving IMF loans. Backsliding on it would also kill Iceland’s hopes for rapid accession to the EU.

The veto is particularly interesting to the select band of people who take an interest in semi-presidential politics. Iceland’s president is directly elected, but fulfils a primarily ceremonial role. The power to refer proposed laws to a referendum was inherited from the reserve powers of the Danish crown when Iceland became independent in the 1940s, and has never hitherto been used. There is an idea in constitutional theory that an office’s unused powers atrophy and effectively become unusual, but in this case President Grimsson has shown that, in times of crisis, moribund powers can suddenly spring back into life.

More:

Iceland leader vetoes bank repayments bill (BBC)

Iceland president vetoes collapsed Icesave Bank's bill to UK (Guardian)

Ethiopian dissidents sentenced to death

A court in Ethiopia has sentenced to death people accused of plotting to stage a coup against the government. Among those sentenced was Melaku Tefera, a prominent opposition politician. The Ethiopian state has accused the plotters of being part of a sinister dissident group associated with the exiled former mayor of Addis Ababa, Berhanu Nega. The alleged coup plotters were partly convicted on the basis of confessions. Judge Adem Ibrahim rejected their claims that the confessions were extracted under torture. The accused are appealing their sentences and the verdicts.

Ethiopia retains the form of a multi-party democracy, but it has been assuming an increasingly overt authoritarian path over the last number of years. The last general elections in 2005 became a farce when the government announced victory before the votes could be counted, and then used lethal force to clear protesters from the street. Opposition leaders were then arrested and held in jail until they signed confessions admitting to fomenting riots. The government did allow the election of Berhanu Nega as mayor of Addis Ababa, but then arrested him, charged him with treason, and eventually obliged him to leave the country. Ethiopia is apparently going to be holding new elections in 2010. It will be interesting to see whether anyone bothers contesting them, given the government’s clear determination to remain in office no matter which way the vote goes.

That said, for all the incipient authoritarianism of the Ethiopian regime, they government do not seem to be the kind of Stalinist maniacs seen in neighbouring Eritrea. And for all that Ethiopia is desperately poor, its state sector does not seem to be as grotesquely dysfunctional as that of Somalia or even as obviously crooked as that of Kenya. That is partly what is so frustrating about Ethiopia – for all its poverty, the country has a lot going for it, but it seems unable to deliver the goods. At least part of the fault for this must be laid at the feet of the government, who seem more determined to perpetuate themselves in office rather than address the country’s problems.

More:
Ethiopia death sentences over assassination plot (BBC)

There's No Other Way

I was saying recently that a precondition for any real advance in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is the USA being clearly willing to put real pressure on Israel. I do not think that is the only condition – some kind of resolution of the Palestinians' internal political issues is probably also required. By that I mean that some kind of unified Palestinian government (or negotiating team) is required, or that somehow a Palestinian negotiating team with the legitimacy* to make deals on behalf of the Palestinians is required (PA President Mahmoud Abbas does not have that legitimacy). But, even with the emergence of a credible Palestinian interlocutor, I still believe that no progress can be made if the USA is unwilling to play hard-ball Israel.

This is a fairly depressing view. Virtually unconditional support for Israel is effectively a core value of the United States, one that has persisted across any number of administrations. For all his big talk about reaching out to the Arab world, Barack Obama is now falling into the old patterns of putting minimal (if any) pressure on Israel. I do not think there is likely to be any change in the US position at any foreseeable point in the future.

So, does that mean that the Middle East peace process is doomed? If I am correct, then yes it does. But am I correct? Is there another way to advance the quest for a just and lasting settlement to the Israel-Palestine conflict? I throw this question to you and await your responses.



*I mean legitimacy to Palestinians. I do not think anyone else should be able to specify who talks on their behalf.

Montazeri dies

If I followed Iran a bit more closely I could say interesting things about the death of Hoseyn Ali Montazeri. This Grand Ayatollah was a Shia scholar highly respected as a theologian and an early supporter of the Islamic Revolution, but he fell foul of the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1988 and has lived under house arrest ever since. Montazeri was interesting in that he represented a religious opposition to Khomeini's Republic of Faith, someone who had far more impressive religious credential than Khomeini's successor, the current supreme leader Ali Khamenei. Montazeri recently criticised the regime after the rigged presidential election earlier this year.

There are suggestions that reformists in Iran may use Montazeri's funeral as an opportunity to stage protests.

Montazeri obituary

Crowds gather to mourn reformist Iran cleric Montazeri

The Forbidden Laptop

Israeli Border Police have shot the laptop of a visiting American student. Lily Sussman was travelling in from Egypt when she was stopped and subjected to a series of bizarre questions for several hours. The Kafka-esque approach of the Israeli Border Police will be familiar to anyone who has ever visited Israel, but blasting a few caps into a laptop (just to be on the safe side, presumably) seems a bit extreme, even for them.

More:
Police shoot U.S. student's laptop upon entry to Israel (Haaretz)
I’m sorry but we blew up your laptop (welcome to Israel) (Ms Sussman’s blog)

Power Corrupts

If I had more time, I would post something more considered on the just published report on child sexual abuse by priests in Dublin. In broad terms, I reckon that the clerical perpetrators of abuse did this because they could - in a society where the Church could sack government ministers, and where the institution looked after its own, some priests with paedophile urges must have realised that they could get away with anything, that nothing would happen to them if they molested children. It's a depressing business.

A Nation of Cockfarmers?

One bad thing about direct democracy is that you can't really blame anyone else when patently egregious decisions are made. In the light of Switzerland's referendum vote to ban minarets, it must be difficult for anyone from that country to argue that it is not a nation of cockfarmers.

Wall Fail

Wow, twenty years since the Wall came down. I have nothing exciting to say about this, but on my other blog I talk about East German music.

Sad Tony's EU Fail

Tony Blair's attempt to become EU President has failed. President Sarkozy of France and Chancellor Merkel of Germany seem to have decided that they were never really in favour of his candidacy, leaving Gordon Brown and Italy's charming Silvio Berlusconi as Blair's only serious backers; Ireland's Brian Cowen had also lent his support. Tony Blair can now go back to his day job of sitting on boards of companies and giving speeches to American neo-cons. In his spare time he will be able to continue his good work bringing the Israel-Palestine conflict to a conclusion.

I am starting to wonder if this President Blair thing was all some kind of complicated joke. In retrospect, how could he ever have been a serious candidate? Aside from his being a cockfarmer, he headed a euro-sceptic government that kept Britain out of the Euro and negotiated opt-outs from everything for his country. This hardly makes him an attractive person to take on the job of being Mr EU.

A flawed and one-sided post about Israel's Gaza campaign

Do you remember last January, when the Israeli army was once more blowing up everything they could in the Gaza Strip? At the time, there was a lot of discussion about whether war crimes had been committed. Partly this arose from the Israeli army's indiscriminate shelling and the targeting of Gaza's infrastructure as a way of punishing everyone there for the actions of militants who fired rockets over the border. There were also reports of instances where Gazan civilians were herded into buildings by Israeli soldiers, only for these buildings to then be shelled. It was also suggested that actions by Hamas and other militant groups (firing un-aimed rockets at Israeli towns) were also contrary to the laws of war.

A United Nations fact finding mission, headed by Richard Goldstone, looked into the accusations of war crimes. Goldstone's team found that there had been extensive war crimes committed by Israeli forces, and recommended that the perpetrators be indicted for trial by an international court. The report also mentioned human rights abuses by Hamas and the other militant groups operating in Gaza, but the main thrust dealt with crimes by the Israelis.

Normally, when a UN report identifies people as having committed these kind of crimes, the wheels of international justice start turning, and people who have been accused of doing bad things find themselves on their way to trial in the Hague or before some other international tribunal. That is what happened with previous investigations with which Goldstone was involved. In this case, however, something different happened. The United States of America, and other allies of Israel (notably Germany and the United Kingdom), dismissed the report as flawed and one-sided, and procedural rules were used to prevent the report coming before the UN Security Council.

For many years now it has been the case that whenever some respected body issues a report on human rights abuses have been committed by Israel, the USA leaps in to condemn the report as "flawed" and "one-sided". Only Israel seems to receive this kind of protection, and when the same bodies issue reports on human rights abuses by other actors, the USA is happy to see them trigger an international response. That the new administration of Barack Obama is continuing in this tradition is depressing. It suggests that behind his shiny rhetoric, his government is continuing the same morally bankrupt policies of Bush and Clinton.

One argument that has been expressed for burying the Goldstone report is that it would set back the peace process if Israeli officers (and politicians?) find themselves in danger of arrest for war crimes. The idea here is that it is better to choose peace over justice, and to forget past crimes so that Israelis and Palestinians can move forward to a peaceful and happy future. This kind of argument might have some purchase in other conflict situations. In the Israel-Palestine situation, it is nonsense. There is no credible peace process at the moment. Furthermore, there is unlikely to be one until the USA demonstrates a willingness to rein in Israel. If the USA remains intent on sheltering Israeli criminals then it cannot hope to broker any kind of settlement.


Some more links:

Prospect of war crimes trials in Middle East alarms US diplomats (Irish Times, 30/9/2009)

Goldstone defends UN Gaza report (BBC, 30/9/2009)

Abbas seeks vote on Gaza report (BBC, 12/10/2009) The USA had leaned on Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority, getting him to support the shelving of the Goldstone Report. As can be imagined, this played very badly within Palestine. In an effort to not look like a complete pawn of the West, he has now called for the UN Human Rights Council to vote on the report.

Turkey's Ironic Peace Statue

Here is a more human interest story about the Armenia-Turkey peace process. It is about Naif Alibeyogluin, the former mayor of Kars, in Turkey, who decided to build a monument to peace, showing two stylised figures on the brink of shaking hands. Although Kars is in Turkey, local geography means that when floodlit at night the statue is visible across the Armenian border, 40 kilometres away. The statue is meant to symbolise the Armenian and Turkish peoples overcoming their troubled past and joining together in friendship.

The fact that Mr Alibeyogluin is the former mayor of Kars is significant. Many people in Turkey are unconvinced by the desirability of friendship with Armenia. Local politician Oktay Aktas of the National Action Party asserted that one of the figures has their head bowed – taking this as signifying Turkish guilt over the Armenian genocide, an event that Turkish
law says never happened. Mr Aktas sees the statue as indicating an Armenian desire to take over eastern Turkey, and has vowed to demolish it. In recent elections, Mr Alibeyogluin found himself sidelined by his own Justice and Development party, with someone else taking the mayoral title.

The future of Mr Alibeyogluin's monument to peace remains uncertain.

see also

Turkey, Armenia, and the Armenian diaspora

Armenia and Turkey are two countries that have long had a fractious relationship, largely arising over the Armenian genocide of 1915, in which the Ottoman Empire massacred over a million ethnic Armenians. Recently, there have been moves towards some kind of rapprochement between the two countries. I do not know the details of the engagement between them, but it is interesting to note that the Armenian diaspora community (many of whom are descended from survivors of the genocide or of people who were expelled from Anatolia during it) seems to be very against the rapprochement.

Armenia's president, Serzh Sarkisian, has felt obliged to tour the Armenian diaspora, in an effort to head-off opposition to his Turkish policy. His success in this endeavour seems to be a bit mixed – earlier this week he had to be shielded by Lebanese cops from angry Lebanese-Armenian demonstrators. I do not know what exactly in the Armenia-Turkey engagement the diaspora are objecting to, but I find it interesting that the Armenian president finds it worth his while to try to secure the exile community's support for his policy. I am assuming that the Armenian diaspora does not get to vote in Armenian elections, but it still seems to be important for him to engage with them.

I am not sure if there has been any general research done on the role of diasporas in conflict situations. The other obvious one I can think of is the role of the exile Palestinian community in the Israel-Palestine conflict, but I understand that ethnic diasporas have been important factors in the Sri Lankan and Aceh conflicts. Working from first principles, I can imagine a strong diaspora to be a major complicating factor in the search for a settlement. On the one hand, they have relatively little to lose by the continuance of a conflict, while oftentimes they are not going to gain anything by its resolution. Diaspora interests will often diverge from those of the non-exile community, so a settlement that works for one community could not be acceptable to the other.

That is not to see diasporas as "bad", or as groups that have to be marginalised or blocked if a conflict is to be settled. If they are in a position to block settlements, then they should be engaged with as another actor in the conflict. Maybe it would be best to break the fiction of their sharing an identity of interests with the home community, and instead give them some kind of separate representation at negotiations. This might depend on the specifics of any conflict.

Stop press: Armenia and Turkey today signed an accord, though they were unable to agree a statement on it.

some random links:

ARMENIA: KARABAKH TALKS POSES BIG CHALLENGE FOR ARMENIAN-TURKISH RAPPROCHEMENT

Lebanon Armenians angry over planned Turkey deal

Armenians anxious over Turkish plan

Europe's Malaise

Ireland voted last Friday to ratify the Lisbon Treaty, having voted last year to reject it. My understanding is that Ireland is the only country that has voted on the Treaty, with tradition and constitutional quirks here meaning that we always get to vote on EU treaties that other countries nod through their national parliaments. One problem, of course, with referendums is that you can never be quite sure that people will vote the right way; this is the second time that the Irish electorate have not played ball, and the second time they were then obliged to troop out and vote on the issue again. Whatever about the substantive issue of whether the Lisbon Treaty is a good idea or not, the whole process leaves a nastily undemocratic taste in the mouth. What is the point of voting on something if only a Yes vote is accepted?

When Ireland voted against Lisbon last year, there was a suggestion in some quarters that we had become a nation of ingrates – trousering the EU cash that had lifted the country out of penury only to stick two fingers up when the organisation tried to streamline its decision-making procedures. There might be something to this, but it ignores one crucial fact – the poor track record of EU treaties at referendums in other countries. Whenever the citizens of EU countries are given the opportunity to vote on any EU treaty, or the EU constitution, they have a marked tendency to vote No. If rejecting EU treaties is a mark of Euro-scepticism then the Irish people are no more Euro-sceptic than anyone else.

Too much can maybe be read into people's willingness to block EU treaties. Oftentimes the public seems to vote on the basis of things that have nothing to do with the treaty at hand – last time round, some Irish people rejected Lisbon out of a false belief that it would institute conscription here, while some French voters reputedly voted down the EU Constitution in 2005 thinking that it would lead to Turkey joining the Union. But still, the willingness of people to vote against EU treaties based on things that are not in them betokens a fundamental lack of trust in EU institutions and their leaders. This is a serious problem, but I am not sure what can be done about it.

One thing that is sometimes thrown out about the EU is its lack of democratic accountability. This argument is somewhat overstated – it is often said or implied that some shadowy Elders of Brussels make all EU decisions, when the main EU decisions are taken by the Council of Ministers or the European Council. These both comprising people who represent the governments that took office in the member states after democratic elections. Many of their decisions have to be approved by the European Parliament, but that body is an interesting example of how a body can be directly elected and yet still have little or no democratic legitimacy. With the European Council and Council of Ministers, we are looking at people who got where they are as a result of elections, but is still a bit remote from the public will.

One example of how remote the EU decision making apparatus is from the public is the case of a new office created by the Lisbon Treaty – the president of the European Council. The actual powers of this office have been left a bit vague, and the president's main role will be to chair Council meetings (as is, the chair of the European Council rotates every six months). It has been reported that the favourite for this new office is none other than Tony Blair. This is, frankly, an astonishing development. It defies all common sense that Bush's warmongering sock puppet should be given any role by the European Union, let alone one that could lead to people calling him the President of Europe. There is, furthermore, Blair's status as the former head of a rejectionist government who refused to join either Schengen or the Euro. Yet, it is not clear at all how concerned European citizens could go about blocking Blair's accession, or how they could vote to prevent it.

Again, it is difficult to see institutional changes would make things better here. A directly elected president of the Council would be a bad idea, and would in any case piss off those people who moan about the EU going all federal on us. If the president of the European Council does nothing more than chair council meetings then arguably the members of the council should be the ones to pick who holds the office, as they are the ones who have to put up with their choice. But it still seems outrageous that Blair could end up with such a prestigious EU post, even if it is not clear what institutional changes could prevent it. This is maybe the problem with EU institutions in a nutshell – their faults are obvious, but what would improve them is less so.

Ireland decides, again

This whole post is basically an excuse to post the lovely picture above. Foreign readers may find it a bit confusing, so here is some context. Last year Ireland held a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, an agreement reached between European Union heads of government. The Treaty was rejected by Irish voters, causing a sensation throughout Europe.

Next Friday we are going to be voting on the Treaty again. There are a couple of justifications for having another referendum. First of all, many people last year claimed to be confused by the whole Lisbon Treaty business, so maybe with the passage of time they will have made some effort to inform themselves. Secondly, the EU heads of government have made some non-binding guarantees on some of the concerns of the Irish voters. Thirdly, the astonishing deterioration of the Irish economy since the last vote suggests that now might not be the time to piss off our powerful European friends.

The pro-Treaty side in the referendum are basically the entire Irish political establishment, in so far as they are from almost all the parties that people actually vote for in elections. The implicit main plank of their campaign is that the country will go down the plughole if Lisbon is rejected, though they have never been quite so crude as to explicitly state this on election posters.

The anti-Treaty side mine a broad vein of disaffection. There is a tendency in some quarters to divide the antis into right-wingers (typically worried that the EU will force everyone to have abortions) and left-wingers (typically worried that the EU will draft everyone into an EU army or make everyone slaves of large corporations). I think, though, that more unites the antis than this kind of analysis suggests. They all distrust mainstream Irish politicians. They all fear that Lisbon represents a terrible and irrevocable loss of sovereignty, a transfer of power to some sinister and shadowy EU elite; the only difference is in what they think the EU overlords will do with that power.

Cóir are one of the players on the No side. I have heard it said that they spring from the same stream that gave us Republican Sinn Féin (a fringe Republican movement who reject the Good Friday Agreement and almost everything else) and Youth Defence (a hardline anti-abortion movement). I'm not going to link to their website, but if you go there you will get a flavour of their campaign against Lisbon – slogans suggesting that Lisbon would reduce the minimum wage to around two Euro, that Lisbon would eliminate the freedoms for which our country's founding fathers died, or that Lisbon would lead to an inrush of foreigners to this sceptred isle. The above image is a parody of one of their posters*. It is rather like shooting fish in a barrel, as the petty concerns of Cóir are godsends to people who support Lisbon.

A spice burger is a fast food product that bears some mysterious relationship to meat. "Away with you, you wife swapping sodomites!" was the celebrated response of a Catholic conservative to the passing of the referendum that legalised divorce.

Parody posters seem to be quite a thing this time round. Another Cóir parody I have seen points out that 98% of Europeans are foreign. On the other side, a subtly ironic poster has Adolf Hitler urging a Yes vote.

Meanwhile, here is a home-made election poster, probably not a parody:


*I apologise to Irish readers for stating the obvious to an almost Wikipedia-esque extent.

Fiji latest

Fiji is a Pacific island nation whose dysfunctional politics keep it in the news. The other day it was a visit by a Commonwealth envoy, who was there to discuss a possible return to democracy with the country's military ruler. It was previously part of the British Empire, and in that period many people from India came to the island, eventually playing a major role in the economic life of the island. After independence, the institutions of the state were initially dominated by ethnic Fijians. Over time, a politics based almost entirely on ethnicity surfaced in the country, with parties for ethnic Fijians squaring up against ones for ethnic Indians. In the 1980s, a coup by the ethnic Fijian dominated army blocked a government of mainly ethnic Indian parties (but to be led by an ethnic Fijian) from taking office.

Mahendra Chaudhry succeeded in taking office as the country's first ethnic Indian prime minister in 1999, but in 2000 he was imprisoned in a bizarre coup attempt by failed local businessman George Speight. Speight's coup failed, but the fall-out from it lives on. One consequence was that many ethnic Indians have given up on Fiji. They had constituted c. 50% of the population, but the manifest unwillingness of many ethnic Fijians to accept a prime minister from their community led many ethnic Indians to take the hint and leave the country.

Another consequence of Speight's coup is that it exposed fissures within the ethnic Fijian community. The 1980s coup against the instatement of an ethnic Indian prime minister was staged by the army, with that body seeming to maintain a formidable degree of cohesion as it acted to advance the interests of ethnic Fijians. Speight's coup, however, was staged by a failed businessman and his cronies. The army performed badly in the coup – its leaders (ethnic Fijians, like the rank and file; ethnic Indians seem to have better things to do than join the armed forces) declared for the constitutional government, but many of the rank and file seem to have sympathised with Speight.

Speight's ability to break the army's cohesion seems to have rankled with Commodore Frank Bainimarama, the army's commander in chief. My impression is that much of Fiji's politics since Speight's coup attempt is explicable by Bainimarama's personal animus towards Speight. To Bainimarama, Speight is responsible for the army's humiliation during his coup. It was moves by Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase to pardon Speight and his pals that saw Bainimarama stage a coup in 2006 that has brought democracy in Fiji to an end.

Bainimarama has promised elections at some stage in the future, but no one is holding their breath. His regime has reputedly become increasingly dictatorial, arresting and harassing its opponents. It nevertheless represents an interesting development – an authoritarian government of ethnic Fijians justifying itself by fears of how a democratic regime would lead to political oppression of ethnic Indians. Bainimarama might simply be paying lip-service to the lofty goals of inter-communal fairness as a way of seizing power for himself. Even so, the army's advancing of its own corporate interest cuts across the ethnic issues that torment Fiji.

Increasing cross-community opposition to Bainimarama is, paradoxically, another positive consequence of his coup. This might be a sign that Fijians are hoping for some kind of more normal politics, one based on constitutions and rules as opposed to poisonous inter-ethnic competition and coups every couple of years.

Trouble in Somaliland

Somaliland is the unrecognised country comprising the northern bit of Somalia. Compared to the rest of Somalia, it is an oasis of calm. Unfortunately, the country's tranquillity was on Monday shattered by its parliamentarians. When officials announced that a motion to impeach Dahir Riyale Kahin, the country's president, could be debated, a bar-room brawl erupted, with rival politicians exchanging punches. There are reports of one MP brandishing a fire-arm, though no shots were fired. Police had to enter the chamber to restore order.

Unlike the rest of Somalia, Somaliland has a functioning political system, with a president, an elected parliamentary chamber (where the brawl broke out), and an upper house comprising elders of the country's various clans. Tensions have apparently been rising recently over the timing of a presidential election and a disputed register of electors.

It would probably be premature to see all this as a sign that Somaliland is about to slip into the chaos of the rest of Somalia. Parliamentary fist-fights are always good for a laugh, but they do not necessarily presage democratic collapse. That this was just a fist-fight suggests that things in Somaliland are nothing like as bad as they could be.

The disputes over the presidential election are maybe more worrying. One danger facing Somaliland is a slide into Somalia-style anarchy. Another, though, is a transition to the kind of authoritarianism that bedevils many of its neighbours. If the disputes over the electoral register and the election's timing are symptoms of a power-grab by the president then people should be concerned. As Somaliland's independence is unrecognised, it may well be the case that the international observers who scrutinise elections elsewhere will not engage with the country's electoral process. This is unfortunate; in a potentially shaky situation, external oversight could deter either electoral chicanery by the government or vexatious claims of fraud by bad losers.

more

Hebron's dark history

Hebron is an extremely depressing town. Apart from East Jerusalem, it is the only Palestinian town on the West Bank under direct Israeli occupation. The town's centre is partitioned into an Israeli zone and a zone under Palestinian Authority administration. Both of these have substantial Palestinian majorities, but the Israeli sector is blessed by the presence of a couple of hundred Israeli settlers. These settlers are heavily armed, and are in turn protected by a large contingent of Israeli troops. In their sector, they typically occupy the upper stories of buildings, and are famed for their tendency to throw rubbish down on Palestinians making their way through the streets below.

The Israeli settlers in Hebron belong to the most hard-line section of Israeli society. Their most famous scion is perhaps Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 made his way into a mosque during prayers and massacred 29 Palestinians before being overpowered and killed. Some argued at that stage that the Israeli government should have responded by evacuating his fellow settlers and then handing the entire town over to Palestinian administration. The Israeli government however demurred, leaving the settlers in place. This was perhaps the moment when people should have realised that the Oslo process would lead nowhere.

Israel's West Bank settlers are often religious nutters who claim a divine right to live anywhere in Biblical Israel. This is true of the Hebron settlers, but they also cite another justification for their presence in the town. Before the foundation of the state of Israel, Hebron also had a Jewish presence. In the British mandate period, increasing Jewish immigration to Palestine from those committed to political Zionism led to increasing tension. In 1929 in Hebron, many of the local Palestinians turned on their Jewish fellows. Many were killed (others survived, thanks to being sheltered by Palestinian neighbours and friends). The town remained unsafe for Jews until it was conquered by Israeli troops in 1967. The Hebron settlers claim that they are recreating the Jewish community that lived there before the riots.

One ironic feature of all this is that the actual Jewish survivors of the Hebron riots are far less solidly behind the settlers than one might imagine. It seems as though many of them back then were religiously Jewish but culturally Palestinian, often actively anti-Zionist in political outlook. Many of them and their descendants have retained something of this outlook, identifying more with the Palestinians in Hebron than with the Israeli settlers. While one would think that many would relish the opportunity to return to their ancestral home, a view expressed by many is that they could not return to Hebron until a just settlement with the Palestinians has been reached.

Links:
Long shadow of 1929 Hebron massacre (BBC)

Hebron Jews' offspring divided over city's fate (Jerusalem Post)

Imminent solution of Middle Eastern conflict

The Guardian reported yesterday that the Middle East peace process is on the brink of a breakthrough. This seems to be taking the form of Barack Obama caving in to the demands of Binyamin Netanyahu, the unsavoury prime minister of Israel. Obama had been looking for Israel to announce a freeze of settlement activity on the West Bank, including in East Jerusalem. From what the Guardian is saying, however, it looks like Obama will agree to Netanyahu continuing to evict Palestinians from East Jerusalem; in the rest of the West Bank, Israeli settlement expansion will freeze, except that settlement expansion currently underway will be able to proceed to completion. To sugar the pill of these non-concessions, Obama will cheer Netanyahu up by adopting a new tougher line against Iran and its alleged nuclear ambitions.

It is astonishing that anyone could consider this a breakthrough in the Middle East peace process, or that anyone could take Israel's commitments seriously as confidence building measures. Obama seems to be adopting the usual Clinton-Bush mode of reaching agreements with the Israelis and then presenting these on a take-it-or-leave-it basis to the Palestinians. Obama is currently facing domestic problems, and may have decided to park the Middle East process until the health care issue has reached some kind of resolution. If so then maybe he could spare us the pretence that this is something that is going to effect a just and lasting resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Even if Obama's "breakthrough" leads to the resumption of negotiations, they are unlikely to lead anywhere. One problem has always been the tendency of US presidents to blow hard about their credentials as an honest broker, but then to simply take an Israeli line during the negotiations. Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian also suggests a more fundamental problem. Recent negotiations have invariably focussed on the post-1967 situation, with talk being about Israel generously giving to a Palestinian state some of the territory it seized that year. Freedland feels that the conflict is more fundamental, and needs to go back to the issues of 1948, when the Israeli was formed. He may be right, though this does sound a bit like one-stater talk.

One other problem making any kind of credible outcome from negotiations unlikely is the question of who speaks for the Palestinians. At the moment, there are two entities purporting to be the government of the Palestinian Authority. One of these was appointed by the PA's president under emergency powers he was not constitutionally entitled to wield; that president's term of office has in any case expired, yet he clings on to office. The other government came into being through the PA's own constitutional features, and is based on the party that won a majority of seats in the last parliamentary election. As is the way of things, it is the more mickey mouse of these two governments that is going to be taking part in any negotiations, making it unlikely that it will be able to make any agreement stick. In any case, neither of these governments can credibly claim to speak for the wider Palestinian refugee community.

I would not, therefore, advise anyone to expect a resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict any time soon.

Links:

Barack Obama on brink of deal for Middle East peace talks
Peace plans come and go. Obama may have to try a wholly new approach
US peace plan gives Israel too much

Lockerbie relatives and their faith in legal systems

As you know, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was released from prison in Scotland and allowed to return home to Libya. Al-Megrahi had been convicted of causing the Lockerbie bombing, but was released by the Scottish government on compassionate grounds as he is terminally ill and due to die in the near future.

There are any number of interesting things that could be said about this case – the separate roles of the Scottish and UK governments, differing conceptions of what constitutes justice, and so on. One thing I was particularly struck by, though, was the differing attitudes of British and American relatives of those killed at Lockerbie. It was reported that while the US relatives were very angry about al-Megrahi's release, many of those in the UK were more sympathetic. This seemed to be related to doubts that have been raised about the safety of al-Megrahi's conviction (he had been appealing his conviction prior to his release, and still maintains his innocence), with many of the UK victims sharing doubts as to his guilt, doubts not shared by the Americans.

What interests me is why the UK relatives are more open to the idea of al-Megrahi's innocence. There might be deep-rooted cultural factors at play here, but something that must be significant here is the UK's experience over the last few decades with miscarriage of justice cases, where those convicted of high profile crimes (often of a terrorist nature) saw their convictions quashed years after their initial trials. These people were freed because it was shown that they had been convicted on the basis of such things as ludicrous forensic evidence or confessions extracted under torture. These cases must have planted the seeds of doubt in people's minds, establishing the idea that the authorities can get it wrong and can pin the blame for terrible crimes on the wrong people.

My understanding is the US justice system is not so rock solid that people are not sometimes convicted of crimes they did not commit. I have read of some analysis where innocent people were executed for crimes committed by others. However, I do not think that any of these miscarriage cases have become massive causes célèbres in the way that the cases of the Guildford 4, Maguire 7, Birmingham 6, Bridgewater 4, etc. did. This makes it easier for Americans to maintain a naïve confidence in the correctness of the judicial process. Britons, on the other hand, must find it far easier to believe that high-profile cases can produce miscarriages of justice.

This is not, by the way, to say that I believe in al-Megrahi's innocence or guilt, as I have not followed the case that closely. It is more the general idea of how much confidence people have in justice systems that I am interested in.

US Health Care Reform

The British media have noted that, in the current debate on Barack Obama's proposed health care reforms, the political right in the US have taken to characterising Britain's National Health Service as being some kind horrific amalgam of Stalin's gulag and the worst excesses of the Third Reich. Setting up anything even remotely similar to the NHS in the United States is being portrayed as an assault on fundamental freedoms, something that will lead to jack-booted Nazi doctors cackling as they deny treatment to your loved ones.

What is amusing about all this is that by any measure, the UK's health care system is better than that of the United States. The NHS costs less per capita than the USA's privatised health care "system", and it provides health care to the entire British population, whereas very large proportions of the US population are without health insurance and so without adequate health care.

So, who are the people in the USA who want to prevent any kind of move towards universal health care provision? I think they can be split into three groups:

1. Libertarians and market fundamentalists – this lot are people who oppose any state involvement in anything as a point of principle, not because they think it will lead to otherwise bad outcomes. I have every respect for the sincerity with which these people hold their beliefs, but their preconceptions are so strange that it is impossible to have any kind of rational discussion with them.

2. The US health insurance companies, and people in their pocket – the health insurers make a lot of money out of the current system, and they have a lot of money to throw around to buy lobbyists, journalists, and politicians. These people have a strong interest in keeping things as they are now, and most likely have no shame in spewing out lies to advance their interests.

3. Nutters who somehow hate universal health care because it would take away their freedom to die young because they can't afford health insurance.

At this stage it is not clear whether Obama's health care reforms will go through. It does seem like the opponents of functioning health care are succeeding in raising doubts in the minds of enough Americans to make the programme's passage far from certain. On the other hand, the people who oppose the health reform plans are adopting the increasingly strident tones that characterised Sarah Palin's supporters in the later stages of the recent presidential election campaign; this could mean that people increasingly see them for the crazies they are.

Borders open, regimes fall

It is now twenty years since Communism trundled off to the dustbin of history. This makes for an exciting series of 20th anniversaries. The first partially free elections in an Eastern Bloc state were held in June 1989 in Poland, with Solidarity doing so well that the communists were thrown out of office (though a government was not formed until the 24th August).

Today makes for another interesting anniversary - it marks the day when Hungary began to stop policing its border with Austria. This made the country a conduit for East Germans who fancied heading to the West, setting in motion events that led to the opening of the wall and disappearance of the DDR.

More (all BBC):

How Hungary let East Germans go

Hungary marks 1989 freedom event

1989 - Europe's revolution

The Mayor of Mostar

I have been reading a recent International Crisis Group report about the municipal politics of Mostar, the well-known town in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It is very interesting, but I think I need to read more about recent developments in that former Yugoslavian country (fortunately the Crisis Group have another report on just that subject).

Mostar's politics seem to be ethnically based. At the moment, the city has a Croat majority, with a large minority of Bosnian Muslims (or Bosniaks, as people now seem to call them) and a teeny tiny minority of Serbs. The city has been without a mayor or budget since the last local elections in October 2008. The mayor is meant to be elected by the town council, but they have been unable to elect a candidate.

To become Mostar's mayor, a candidate needs the support of two-thirds of the council, something no candidate has been able to obtain. However, the voting rules also state that if two mayoral candidates are tied, then the younger candidate wins. As mayoral elections are done by role-call vote of the councillors, there have been all kinds of disputes over what order the councillors should vote in, as the supporters of the younger candidate could tip the election to him by engineering a tie.

These eccentric mayoral election procedures seem to have been bestowed on Mostar by the Office of the High Representative, the international body that ultimately rules Bosnia-Herzegovina. They strike me, though, as having more in common with a Reiner Knizia boardgame than with anything intended to balance democracy, protection for minorities, and the need to provide a functioning civic government.

above: Mostar's ironic bridge

* * *

More generally, I have been finding anger rising in my heart when I read about Bosnia-Herzegovina, both from details contained in the Crisis Group's report on Mostar and other recent news report's on events in eastern Bosnia during the country's civil war. Before the war, Mostar had a three-way split in its population, albeit with a strong plurality of Bosniaks. Now Croats form a substantial majority, largely by running Bosniaks out of town during the war and forcibly preventing their return thereafter.

Other news reports recently focussed on the reburial of victims of the Srebrenica massacre (in which Serbian forces killed some eight thousand Bosniak men and boys while UN forces stood around ineffectually). I was reminded of how eastern Bosnia was brutally purged of its local majority population, to the extent that it is now a somewhat desolate land of shame and half-remembered horror. Terrible things were done during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. I know that some of the monsters who played a leading role in that conflict's horrors have found their way to the Hague, but it does seem like there has not really been a true reckoning or any serious effort to restore the rights of the victims.

image source

Phantom Countries: Tamil Eelam

Tamil Eelam is the name Tamil separatists give to the country they want to create on the island of Sri Lanka. The history of Tamil Eelam is an interesting example of just how badly wrong things can go for secessionist regimes. For many years, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (better known as the Tamil Tigers) were able to successfully defend the territory of notional Tamil Eelam from the Sri Lankan army. They established a de facto regime, essentially a garrison state, in the liberated territory, but were unable to get any external recognition of their independence. More recently, the Sri Lankan military was able to exploit internal divisions within the Tigers. In a series of bloody offensives, the separatist zones were over-run. The Tamil Tigers' last enclave was eliminated earlier this year, with massive loss of life, including that of the Tigers' leader.

I do not know if any general lessons can be learned from Tamil Eelam's Gotterdammerung, but it does illustrate the precarious situation in which unrecognised countries find themselves.

image source

Phantom Countries: Kosovo

Kosovo (capital city: Pristina) was formerly a part of Serbia. Although considered by Serbs to be the cradle of their civilisation (seemingly because in some mediaeval battle there the Serbs were stuffed out of it by the Turks) the area is predominantly inhabited by ethnic Albanians. In the Yugoslav period, the area became an autonomous region within Serbia, but it was never raised to the status of a full constituent republic.

Kosovo's history and the rise and fall of Slobodan Milosevic are closely intertwined. Milosevic shot to prominence by embracing Serbian nationalism and the cause of the Serbian minority in Kosovo. On achieving power in Serbia, he succeeded in closing down the region's autonomous government, shutting the ethnic Albanians out of public life. In the early 1990s, though, armed Kosovar rebels struck against Serbian rule, and Milosevic's attempt to crush them triggered the NATO bombing campaign that effectively forced a Serbian withdrawal from the region, fatally undermining Milosevic's credibility.

Kosovo thereafter assumed a somewhat anomalous status. The international community basically ran Kosovo as protectorate while preserving the fiction that it was still part of Serbia. Eventually, though, Kosovo was allowed to declare independence in 2008. There was much grumpiness about this in Serbia (and among ethnic Serbs in Kosovo), but the Serbs were unable to prevent this development. Because of the general distaste in international law and politics for secessionist regimes, Kosovar independence was justified on the convoluted grounds that Milosevic's 1994 crackdown constituted an effective Serbian repudiation of sovereignty over the province.

Now, one might wonder why I am bothering to list Kosovo as a phantom country. It does, after all, have a lot of international recognition, including by three permanent members of the UN Security Council. Kosovo's status nevertheless remains somewhat anomalous, for a number of reasons. Firstly, its state apparatus is still a bit ramshackle, and the country remains dependent on civil and security support from the international community. One could argue, therefore, that despite the relatively wide recognition afforded to it, Kosovo's independence is actually notional, with the region remaining a protectorate. Another problem is that although Kosovo has received plenty of recognition, many other countries actively reject it as an independent state. The Serbian state continues to maintain that it has jurisdiction over Kosovo. Although the Serbs do not really count for much, they are pals with the Russians, whose Security Council veto stands in the way of Kosovar membership of the United Nations. Spain, meanwhile, bedevilled by its own would-be secessionists, has also declined to recognise Kosovo, and may well block any move towards Kosovar membership of the EU. Kosovo is therefore likely to remain outside the world of key international organisations for some time.

Kosovo also has internal problems. The Serbian minority are not that taken with separation from the rest of Serbia. Serbs in the border areas adjacent to Serbia-proper have effectively seceded from Kosovo, rejecting Pristina's authority in favour of Belgrade. Relations between Serbs and Albanians in the rest of the country remain tense, partly triggered by memories of intercommunal violence during the Milosevic years.

It is hard to know what the future holds for Kosovo. One possibility is that some kind of comprehensive Balkan settlement will see Pristina and Belgrade make friends as they jointly move to EU candidacy and Kosovo becomes fully accepted into the family of nations. For this to happen, though, it will be necessary for Kosovo to build an effective administration and to achieve some kind of rapprochement with its internal Serbian minority. It would not surprise me if the areas abutting Serbia succeed in seceding from Kosovo, or are at least allowed to permanently remain under Serbian administration even if showing up on maps as part of Kosovo.

An aside – there is apparently very little likelihood of Kosovo ever becoming part of Albania. Although Kosovo has a large majority of ethnic Albanians, ethnic Albanians do not seem to have the kind of pan-nationalist sentiment seen in some members of other ethnicities. There seems little or no interest in forming a Greater Albanian state out of Albania, Kosovo, and the bits of surrounding countries that have large Albanian populations.

Another aside – I think that ethnic Albanian Kosovars refer to their country as Kosova, but I am opting for the generally accepted international version of the country's name.

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"The Priest and the King"

The full title of this book by Desmond Harney is The Priest and the King: An Eyewitness Account of the Iranian Revolution. Mr Harney seems to be some businessman fellow who was a large international bank in Iran at the time of the Shah's fall. The book is a diary of political events he kept during the last months of the Shah's regime. One thing that strikes about it is that by the time he starts writing the Shah's position already seems terminal, even though it was still four months before the fall of the monarchy and the Ayatollah Khomeini's return. The sense of impending doom seems to have driven Harney to start writing. He had been out of Iran on holiday, but while he was away news came in of a massacre of demonstrators by the Shah's soldiers. Sensing that this was going to both trigger further unrest and expose the regime as morally bankrupt, Harney raced back to Iran, and rapidly becomes convinced that the regime, and the Iran he knew, was doomed.

Oddly, the Ayatollah Khomeini takes some time to appear in this book. Although the Shia Muslim clergy played an important part in the agitation against the Shah, Khomeini was not initially that prominent. At the commencement of the unrest, Khomeini was in exile in Iraq, confined to the city of Najaf. Messages smuggled from him there were reaching the disaffected in Iran, and his teachings did have some resonance. In an attempt to reduce his influence, the Shah prevailed upon Saddam Hussein to deport Khomeini, to remove him from the vicinity of Iran. From Iraq the Ayatollah made his way to France, where he was able to speak to the world media, with his message making its way into Iran through the BBC World Service's broadcasts. This seems to have turned Khomeini from being just one of many disaffected clerics to being the face of opposition to the Shah.

Once the unrest got seriously going, it took a while to bring down the Shah's regime, but the outcome (to Harney anyway) was never in doubt – he consistently dismisses as too little too late any attempts to form new governments acceptable to the opposition. He also has no time for the talk, common in the elite circles in which he moves, of a hard-line crackdown by the regime, or even a rightwing coup that would remove the Shah and crush the opposition. To Harney, a crackdown was impossible, as after the initial massacres of demonstrators morale in the army had collapsed, and there was the real likelihood that the army would mutiny or disintegrate if ordered to shoot demonstrators again.

As well as the demonstrations, Harney also mentions the labour unrest that paralysed Iran in 1978. Half the country seems to be either on strike or else showing up to work but not doing any. From his perspective, it is not too clear how much of this is political and how much purely economic – Iran had been going through an inflationary boom, and many workers would have found prices rising faster than their wages.

One thing you hear in retrospect about the Iranian revolution is leftist played a major part in it, only to be crushed after the fact by Khomeini and his allies. You do not really get much of a sense of this from Harney. Leftists are fairly invisible, with the demonstrations appearing to be lead by the clergy. As Khomeini assumes greater prominence, pictures of him are increasingly everywhere. He does mention one demonstration by the Tudeh ("masses"), Iran's communist party. It comes pretty late in the day, and comes across distinctly as a "we're here too!" affair. It sounds almost quaint and, in the light of what came after, rather sad – the demonstration features mass ranks of men and (unveiled) women marching hand in hand, openly repudiating the Khomeini-ist social codes they would soon have to live under.

One factor significant in the Shah's fall that Harney does not mention, because it only came into the public domain afterwards, was how unwell the Shah was at the time. Harney does comment on the unfortunate paralysis of the regime, its inability to act or take any kind of serious decision. We know now, of course, that the Shah was severely unwell in the last years of his rule, and was basically terminally ill at a time when his regime most needed direction. Whether his dynasty could have survived if he had been in a position to provide clearer direction is something we cannot say, but it is often noticeable in history how often monarchical regimes fall when a major crisis coincides with some kind of weakness at the top.

A couple of things in the book seem relevant to current events in Iran. One thing he is struck by is how the Shah has no riot police – so once a demonstration becomes too big for the ordinary cops to deal with, the authorities have to either surrender the streets or call in the army to start shooting people and creating martyrs. In contrast, during the recent unrest in Iran it was noticeable that the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad clique was able to deploy riot police and various paramilitary thugs to crack heads and clear the streets, keeping demonstrator fatalities to a minimum. On the other hand, the role of external broadcasts (indeed, of the BBC) is strikingly similar in both cases. In 1978, the BBC world service was broadcasting to Iran in Farsi*, carrying reports of the unrest that the censored local media was ignoring. In 2009, meanwhile, the BBC was publicising the unrest on the web and in Farsi-language satellite news broadcasts. Memories of the role played by the BBC in the fall of the regime they replaced may well have driven the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad faction's recent vilification of the BBC.

There is one big difference, though, with the fall of the Shah and the current situation in Iran. In 1978, the Shah's regime increasingly had no support whatsoever outside the various placeholders who surrounded him – in society at large it was increasingly isolated. This is not really the case with the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad faction. They may have stolen the recent election, but they do have a significant bloc of public support. Their supporters may well be a minority, but they might well be a minority sufficiently large to keep the regime in place so long as it is willing to crack the heads of anyone who tries to stand against it.


*Farsi is the main language of Iran. I am guessing the word comes from the same root as Persian.

Phantom Countries: Nagorno-Karabakh

hey look, it's another in my series of posts about a semi-imaginary countries!

Nagorno-Karabakh just about makes it onto the list of phantom countries, despite being basically a territory other countries fight over rather than a would-be country in its own right. It lies in the southern Caucasus, and in the late Soviet period it was part of Azerbaijan but had a mainly Armenian population. If my memory is correct, the Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan started fighting each other over Nagorno-Karabakh even before the Soviet Union broke up. The Armenians triumphed in this struggle, overrunning Nagorno-Karabakh and also the Azerbaijani territory lying between it and Armenia proper.

Looking at Wikipedia, it seems like Nagorno-Karabakh's notional independence is a ploy to allow Armenia to escape the censure that comes from invading a neighbouring country and taking some of their territory. Although Nagorno-Karabakh has its own formal government apparatus, in practice it is completely interlinked with Armenia, and it was Armenian troops fought the war that separated it from Azerbaijan. I suspect that its continued existence is dependent on Armenian arms.

A few years ago, there was the suggestion that the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute was about to reignite. Azerbaijan was reputedly engaged in a military build-up. This was funded by oil revenues that allowed Azerbaijan to spend more on arms than Armenia was spending on everything. For now the threat of this war has been averted, perhaps because the more recent collapse in oil prices leaves Azerbaijan less able to support a bloated military.

Nagorno-Karabakh has a semi-presidential political system. It is a member of the Community for Democracy and Rights of Nations, an organisation of various former Soviet would-be states.

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Yeah I Know

I've been neglecting you. I fear I will need home internet once more before Hunting Monsters rides again.