***SPAM*** SACW - 19 June 2014 | Sri Lanka: Buddhist Right & violence in Aluthgama, Beruwela / Bangladesh: Violence Against Biharis / Pakistan: parallel justice / Myanmar: People vs. The Monks / 'Decisionism' and the Cult of Narendra Modi ; Stand up for Teesta, Javed / ErdoÄŸan and the Syrian rebels / Dark side of Aix-en-Provence / Cost of Hidden Money

[Harsh / sacw.net]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 19 June 2014 - No. 2825
[since 1996]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Contents:
1. Sri Lanka: Anti Muslim Violence by the Buddhist Right in Aluthgama
and Beruwela | select reports
2. Repression of Dissent in Sri Lanka: INFORM report April 2014
3. Bangladesh: Violence Against Biharis of Mirpur Camp in Dhaka |
Commentary and Reports
4. Myanmar: The People vs. The Monks | Min Zin
5. Pakistan's parallel justice system proves Taliban are
'out-governing' the state | Jon Boone
6. Die my daughter, die quickly! | Marvi Sirmed
7. India: 'Decisionism' and the Cult of Narendra Modi - A Note' | M S
S Pandian and Satyaki Roy
8. India: Is there really a Narendra Modi 2.0 ? | Praful Bidwai
9. India: Contours of Secularism | Irfan Engineer
10. India: PUCL seeks NHRC's Urgent intervention in Teesta Setalvad Case
11. India: Respect the fair trial rights of Teesta, Javed and others
says Amnesty International
12. Report on accident of May 14, 2004 at the Kudankulam Nuclear Power
Plant in India | VT Padmanabhan, R. Ramesh, V Pugazhendi, Raminder
Kaur, Joseph Makolil
13. India: Revisionist history rears its ugly head | Saurav Datta
14; Audio: Indian Labour and the Geographies of the Great War, lecture
by Prof. Radhika Singha
15. India: 2,50,000 People to Face Illegal Submergence in Narmada Valley
16. Recent content on Communalism Watch:
- It's history, but not as we know it: Gujarat schools left red-faced
as textbooks claim Japan 'launched a nuclear attack on US'
- India: Gujarat court to hear Teesta Setalvad's anticipatory bail
plea on 19 June 2014
- Maharastra Should Curb Hate Crimes | Omar Rashid
- India: Due Process Trick and RSS at work to Weed out People from
Educational Institutions
- Revise your book, Orient Blackswan tells Megha Kumar
- India: The Onset of Fear - The State must be seen to give protection
from hooliganism | Prabhat Patnaik
- India - 2002 Gujarat riots: High Court orders panel to give Sanjeev
Bhatt access to records
- Hate Crimes and Communal Polarization - Murder of Techie in Pune |
Ram Puniyani
- Sri Lanka imposes curfew after Buddhist - Muslim clashes
- India: ‘Destroy’ defamatory books on saints: Court
- India: Video of a conversation with Dina Nath Batra of Shiksha Bachao Samiti
- India: Dhananjay Desai, Hindu Rashtra Sena chief arrested for Mohsin’s murder
- India: Notes on a Death - The real tragedy of Mohsin Shaikh | Mukul Kesavan
:::Full TEXT:::
17. Sri Lanka: UN rights chief alarmed at inter-communal violence,
urges end to hate speech
18. With Values Like These ... | Nilanjana S. Roy
19. The Red Line and the Rat Line: Seymour M. Hersh on Obama, Erdoğan
and the Syrian rebels
20. Aix-en-Provence: the dark side of France's most beautiful town |
Anthony Peregrine
21. The True Cost of Hidden Money | Jacques Leslie

=========================================
1. SRI LANKA: ANTI MUSLIM VIOLENCE BY THE BUDDHIST RIGHT IN ALUTHGAMA
AND BERUWELA - SELECT REPORTS
=========================================
A curfew was clamped down in the Aluthgama and Beruwela Police
divisions of Kalutara district in the Western Province of Sri Lanka
following an outbreak of communal violence on Sunday June 15th 2014
that was triggered off by the “Ethno Religious Fascist” Organization
the Bodhu Bala Sena (BBS).
http://www.sacw.net/article8937.html

=========================================
2. REPRESSION OF DISSENT IN SRI LANKA: INFORM REPORT APRIL 2014
=========================================
’’Government Ministers, MPs, politicians, supporters and groups backed
by the government appeared to behind almost all the reported
incidents. On several occasions, Police watched by and refused to take
action as these government politicians and allies attacked and
threatened opposition politicians, journalists and a prominent
Buddhist Monk advocating for religious freedom and harmony. As in
previous months and years, there appears to be no interest and urgency
in conducting investigations and prosecuting those responsible,
despite the availability in some cases of ample evidence including
eyewitness accounts, video and photographic evidence, most of which
are in the public domain’’
http://www.sacw.net/article8901.html

=========================================
3. BANGLADESH: VIOLENCE AGAINST BIHARIS OF MIRPUR CAMP IN DHAKA |
Commentary and Reports
=========================================
IN VIEW of the questionable role that the police have played since the
arson attack in the Mirpur Bihari camp on Saturday, which killed at
least 10 persons, including seven of a family, the Urdu-speaking
people, virtually holed in different relief camps in the capital
Dhaka, are only expected to feel a profound and pervasive sense of
insecurity.
http://www.sacw.net/article8954.html

=========================================
4. MYANMAR: THE PEOPLE VS. THE MONKS
by Min Zin
=========================================
One of the darkest aspects of Myanmar's political transition is a
surge in religious intolerance, especially toward Muslims. Last week
the government proposed a law that would require anyone who wants to
change religion to first seek permission from local authorities; it
would also penalize proselytizing through “improper influence and
persuasion.” This is one of four bills the government has drafted at
the instigation of a powerful group of radical Buddhist monks called
Mabatha. A coalition of almost 100 civil society groups, led by
well-known women activists and ethnic minority leaders, immediately
protested the president's endorsement of the discriminatory laws. The
Mabatha denounced them as “traitors,” but that only prompted more
civil society groups to oppose the bills.
http://www.sacw.net/article8944.html

=========================================
5. PAKISTAN'S PARALLEL JUSTICE SYSTEM PROVES TALIBAN ARE
'OUT-GOVERNING' THE STATE
by Jon Boone
=========================================
While Islamabad's authority does not extend to the tribal areas,
Taliban's unofficial court in Waziristan rules on cases in Karachi
http://www.sacw.net/article8936.html

=========================================
6. DIE MY DAUGHTER, DIE QUICKLY!
by Marvi Sirmed
=========================================
Farzana Perveen's murder was not the first time men played the game of
honour on a woman's body. In societies like Pakistan, India,
Afghanistan and much of the Middle East and Africa, this is an
everyday reality women have to live with. According to a 2000 UN
report, around 5000 women are killed every year around the world.
There exists no UN research after that. In 2012-13, the global figure
estimated by independent organizations was 20,000 killings per year.
In Pakistan, HRCP reported the number of killings in 2012 at 949 and
in 2013, at 869.
http://www.sacw.net/article8854.html

=========================================
7. INDIA: 'DECISIONISM' AND THE CULT OF NARENDRA MODI - A NOTE'
by M S S Pandian and Satyaki Roy
=========================================
The Indian electorate's endorsement of Narendra Modi is influenced by
the ideology of "Decisionism" similar to that mobilised by the German
intelligentsia in the 1930s to defend the Third Reich. Where could the
expectations and the possible failure of the promises of Decisionism
lead us to?
http://www.sacw.net/article8955.html

=========================================
8. INDIA: IS THERE REALLY A NARENDRA MODI 2.0 ?
by Praful Bidwai
=========================================
We have two scenarios unfolding simultaneously today. In one, Narendra
Modi declares, “I will be [the] prime minister of all Indians,
including those who did not vote for me”, and invites the neighbouring
countries' leaders to his swearing-in; President Mukherjee in his
Parliamentary address pledges a commitment to the welfare of religious
minorities; and home minister Rajnath Singh condemns the barbaric rape
and hanging of two Dalit girls in Badaun. In the second scenario, over
a dozen communal incidents break out across India; a young Muslim IT
professional is hacked to death by the Hindu Rashtra Sena in Pune in
an outburst of Sangh triumphalism; Hindutva hawk Ajit Doval of the
Vivekananda International Foundation becomes national security
adviser; and singer Shubha Mudgal is bullied by Modi supporters in the
US.
http://www.sacw.net/article8939.html

=========================================
9. INDIA: CONTOURS OF SECULARISM
by Irfan Engineer
=========================================
Triumphant and victorious in the 16th general elections for the Lok
Sabha, the Hindu nationalists are attributing their victory as
rejection of secularism by the Indian electorate. The election results
have unwittingly started sort of questioning on the desirability of
using the term secularism. It is true that secularism has become a
much abused term in India.
http://www.sacw.net/article8938.html

=========================================
10. INDIA: PUCL SEEKS NHRC'S URGENT INTERVENTION IN TEESTA SETALVAD CASE
=========================================
People's Union for Civil Liberties today filed a petition with the
National Human Rights Commission seeking an independent review and
intervention in respect of continuing persecution and prosecution of
human rights defenders, Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand of Citizens
for Peace and Justice and others.

=========================================
11. INDIA: RESPECT THE FAIR TRIAL RIGHTS OF TEESTA, JAVED AND OTHERS
SAYS AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
=========================================
There is concern among Human Rights Activists about what will happen
after the 19th of June, 2014. Padamshri Teesta Setalwad, Javed Anand,
Tanvir Jafri, Salimbhai Sandhi and Firoz Gulzar Pathan face
allegations including cheating, forgery, and criminal breach of trust
in a case filed in January 2014 relating to the raising of funds for a
riot memorial museum in Gulberg Society, Ahmedabad. The Gujarat High
Court has stayed their arrest in the case until 19 June 2014 following
their application for pre-arrest bail.
http://www.sacw.net/article8933.html

=========================================
12. REPORT ON ACCIDENT OF MAY 14, 2004 AT THE KUDANKULAM NUCLEAR POWER
PLANT IN INDIA
by VT Padmanabhan, R. Ramesh, V Pugazhendi, Raminder Kaur, Joseph Makolil
=========================================
An accident in which six workers received burn injuries, three of them
severely, occurred on 14 May 2014 at the Kudankulam Nuclear Power
Plant (KKNPP) which is under the last phase of commissioning in
Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu, South India. The Press Information
Bureau of the Government of India states that the reactor was on a
maintenance shut down and that the workers were repairing a valve at
the time of the accident at 12.10 on 14 May, 2014. According to the
Southern Regional (...) - Environment, Health and Social Justice /
India, Nuclear Energy, Tamil Nadu, Industrial accidents
http://www.sacw.net/article8932.html

=========================================
13. INDIA: REVISIONIST HISTORY REARS ITS UGLY HEAD
by Saurav Datta
=========================================
Monikers make for alarmist headlines and also elide the reality. And
anodyne handwringing or widespread navel-gazing, though making for
indulgent introspection and stormy debates, seldom do enough to make
us think. Therefore, this time round, when “book police” and “textbook
vigilante' Dina Nath Batra got Orient Blackswan to put historian
Sekhar Bandyopadhyay's From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern
India under review, the lack of an outpouring of hysterical shock,
grief and protests came as a welcome relief, for this would enable us
to view things in the proper perspective.
http://www.sacw.net/article8931.html

=========================================
14. AUDIO: INDIAN LABOUR AND THE GEOGRAPHIES OF THE GREAT WAR, lecture
by Prof. Radhika Singha
=========================================
Lecture delivered at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library
http://www.sacw.net/article8928.html

=========================================
15. INDIA: 2,50,000 PEOPLE TO FACE ILLEGAL SUBMERGENCE IN NARMADA VALLEY
=========================================
Sardar Sarovar Dam Height Raised in Violation of Law - Non-compliance
of NWDT Award and SC 2000 Order
Supporters of Narmada Bachao Andolan Protest the Decision
http://www.sacw.net/article8907.html

=========================================
16. RECENT CONTENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH
=========================================
It's history, but not as we know it: Gujarat schools left red-faced as
textbooks claim Japan 'launched a nuclear attack on US'
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/06/its-history-but-not-as-we-know-it.html

India: Gujarat court to hear Teesta Setalvad's anticipatory bail plea
on 19 June 2014
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/06/india-gujarat-court-to-hear-teesta.html

Maharastra Should Curb Hate Crimes | Omar Rashid
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/06/maharastra-should-curb-hate-crimes-omar.html

India: Due Process Trick and RSS at work to Weed out People from
Educational Institutions
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/06/india-due-process-trick-and-rss-at-work.html

Revise your book, Orient Blackswan tells Megha Kumar
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/06/revise-your-book-orient-blackswan-tells.html

India: The Onset of Fear - The State must be seen to give protection
from hooliganism | Prabhat Patnaik
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/06/india-onset-of-fear-state-must-be-seen.html

India - 2002 Gujarat riots: High Court orders panel to give Sanjeev
Bhatt access to records
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/06/india-2002-gujarat-riots-high-court.html

Report of the Seminar: What sets the 2014 elections apart 14th June,
2014, Mumbai
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/06/report-of-seminar-what-sets-2014.html

India: Pune Divided: Recent events spotlight the communal discord in the city
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/06/india-pune-divided-recent-events.html

Hate Crimes and Communal Polarization - Murder of Techie in Pune
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/06/murder-of-techie-in-pune.html

Pune Peace March- A Brief Report
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/06/pune-peace-march-brief-report.html

Sri Lanka imposes curfew after Buddhist - Muslim clashes
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/06/sri-lanka-imposes-curfew-after-buddhist.html

India: ‘Destroy’ defamatory books on saints: Court
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/06/india-destroy-defamatory-books-on.html

India: Video of a conversation with Dina Nath Batra of Shiksha Bachao Samiti
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/06/india-video-of-conversation-with-dina.html

India: Dhananjay Desai, Hindu Rashtra Sena chief arrested for Mohsin’s murder
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/06/india-dhananjay-desai-hindu-rashtra.html

India: Notes on a Death - The real tragedy of Mohsin Shaikh | Mukul Kesavan
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/06/india-notes-on-death-real-tragedy-of.html

India: Police custody extended till June 12 for Hindutva thugs
involved in Pune Murder
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/06/india-police-custody-extended-till-june.html

India: statement on the murder of three young persons in Badaun and
Pune - People’s Alliance for Democracy and Secularism (P.A.D.S.)
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/06/india-statement-on-murder-of-three.html

::: FULL TEXT :::

=========================================
17. SRI LANKA: UN RIGHTS CHIEF ALARMED AT INTER-COMMUNAL VIOLENCE,
URGES END TO HATE SPEECH
=========================================
(UN News Centre)
16 June 2014 – The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
voiced her deep alarm today at inter-communal violence taking place in
south-western Sri Lanka in which several people have reportedly been
killed and scores injured.

“The Government must urgently do everything it can to arrest this
violence, curb the incitement and hate speech which is driving it, and
protect all religious minorities,” said Navi Pillay.

The violence erupted yesterday in the town of Aluthgama following a
large rally of the Buddhist group Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) to protest an
alleged assault a few days earlier by a Muslim youth against a monk
visiting the local temple.

After the rally, violence erupted on both sides as the BBS and
supporters moved in procession through Muslim neighbourhoods,
allegedly chanting anti-Muslim slogans, the High Commissioner’s office
(OHCHR) said in a news release.

Homes, shops and mosques were reportedly attacked and some set ablaze.
Despite a curfew and deployment of approximately 1,200 police,
violence apparently continued into the night, the Office reported.

“I am very concerned this violence could spread to Muslim communities
in other parts of the country,” said Ms. Pillay. “The authorities must
immediately bring the perpetrators of such attacks to book and make it
clear to the religious leadership on both sides, and to political
parties and the general public, that there is no place for
inflammatory rhetoric and incitement to violence.

“At the same time, the security forces must use appropriate measures
to contain the situation and ensure this tragic situation is not
compounded by any excessive use of force,” she added.

During her August 2013 visit to Sri Lanka, and in her subsequent
reports to the UN Human Rights Council, Ms. Pillay warned about the
rising level of attacks against religious minorities and the
incitement of violence by Sinhala Buddhist nationalist groups.

OHCHR noted that while the Government had promised amendments to
enhance existing laws with regard to hate speech, these have yet to be
adopted.

The Human Rights Council in March 2014 expressed its alarm at the
significant surge in attacks against members of religious minority
groups in Sri Lanka, including Hindus, Muslims and Christians.

=========================================
18. WITH VALUES LIKE THESE ...
by Nilanjana S. Roy
=========================================
(The New York Times, June 16, 2014)
NEW DELHI — Of all the pictorial charts used in Indian schools as
teaching aids, it was the Ideal Boy that haunted my generation. The
Ideal Boy woke up and brushed his teeth with care, saluted his
parents, prayed, had his meals on time, helped others, performed
sundry duties and, more puzzling, took “lost children to police post.”

The Ideal Boy embodied certain Indian values, and though these seemed
innocuous enough, there was something about his smudgy features,
identifiably mainstream Hindu and North Indian, and his expression of
saintly smugness that scarred my child brain. Now that I am an adult,
and that the right-wing has come back to power in India, I understand
why I was so queasy back then. The feeling was a foreboding that
otherwise unobjectionable traditional Indian values — respect for
one’s family, obedience to elders, modesty for women — might be
invoked to reject or repress certain groups.

The new Bharatiya Janata Party government seems determined to look to
Asia for political and cultural inspiration. Prime Minister Narendra
Modi projects an image of himself as an authority — even an
authoritarian — figure, in keeping with the regional ideal of a strong
leader. All the while he has been careful to reach out to his
counterparts. His first scheduled trips abroad will be to Bhutan and
then Japan: and the Chinese foreign minister has just ended a visit to
India.

His approach isn’t just a personal predilection; it also reflects a
wider shift within India: the search, especially among right-wing
politicians and intellectuals, for a common set of Asian cultural
norms that would help them create and strengthen a new sense of Indian
identity.

In the 1990s, Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore,
triggered a fierce debate by drawing a line between Western freedoms
and human rights, on the one hand, and on the other, an Asian vision
of living in harmony, which might place individual rights in abeyance
for the good of the community. In India, this “Asian values” debate
found its way into discussions on development, among other things,
notably in arguments trying to discredit environmentalists for being
too heavily influenced by the West.

The problems with that position are the same now as they were then. As
the economist Amartya Sen put it in 1997, “What can we take to be the
values of so vast a region, with such diversity?” As a result,
invoking an Indian, or Asian, identity in such a plural country, or
region, often becomes an excuse for the majority to speak over many
minorities.

And why assume, Mr. Sen also argued, that “Western notions” were
“somehow alien to Asia”? Yet just a couple of weeks ago, a report by
the Indian government’s Intelligence Bureau on the influence of NGOs
was leaked to the media. One of its conclusions was that many local
NGOs — some funded by “donors based in the U.S., the U.K., Germany,
the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries” — had been “using
people-centric issues” to stall development projects. Another was that
some of their work served “as tools for the strategic foreign policy
interests” of Western governments.

Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue
reading the main story
This stiff-collared bureaucrat-speak isn’t just a peculiarity of the
Intelligence Bureau: It reveals a suspicion of the West — and of a
human rights culture seen to have been forged in the West — that is
widespread in India, among politicians and businessmen and, indeed,
many ordinary Indians.

Every major case of rape recently, for example, has prompted a
belligerent reaction against the victim, often couched in terms that
pit India against the West. On June 7, a leading ideologue of the
extreme right-wing organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, S.
Gurumurthy, raised a minor storm of protest when he tweeted: “If
Indian women westernize rapes will rise by 50/60 times to reach the
levels of West, But there will be no media report No UN intervention.”
Among his next few tweets was this definition of Westernization:
“Unbridled individualism which destroys relations and families.”

These days, the purportedly shady influence of the West is invoked not
only to explain why women are victims of sexual violence, but also why
Indian culture is in danger, artists should be censored or anyone who
questions the costs of development is “anti-national.” In other words,
the return of the Asian values debate in India has already become an
excuse to assault civil and political rights.

The first time around, Mr. Sen had argued that “The so-called Asian
values that are invoked to justify authoritarianism are not especially
Asian in any significant sense.” This was a wise attempt to get beyond
hopeless dichotomies. But it appealed to rationality, and lately
rationality is a value that has seemed not Indian enough.

Nilanjana S. Roy is an essayist and critic, and author of the novel
“The Wildings.”

=========================================
19. THE RED LINE AND THE RAT LINE
Seymour M. Hersh on Obama, Erdoğan and the Syrian rebels
=========================================
(London Review of Books, 17 April 2014)

In 2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya
without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin
attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an
allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for
allegedly crossing the ‘red line’ he had set in 2012 on the use of
chemical weapons.＊ Then with less than two days to go before the
planned strike, he announced that he would seek congressional approval
for the intervention. The strike was postponed as Congress prepared
for hearings, and subsequently cancelled when Obama accepted Assad’s
offer to relinquish his chemical arsenal in a deal brokered by Russia.
Why did Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about
rushing into Libya? The answer lies in a clash between those in the
administration who were committed to enforcing the red line, and
military leaders who thought that going to war was both unjustified
and potentially disastrous.

Obama’s change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence
laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of
the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that
the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian
army’s chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case against
Syria wouldn’t hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of
staff. The British report heightened doubts inside the Pentagon; the
joint chiefs were already preparing to warn Obama that his plans for a
far-reaching bomb and missile attack on Syria’s infrastructure could
lead to a wider war in the Middle East. As a consequence the American
officers delivered a last-minute caution to the president, which, in
their view, eventually led to his cancelling the attack.

For months there had been acute concern among senior military leaders
and the intelligence community about the role in the war of Syria’s
neighbours, especially Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan was known
to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the
rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups. ‘We knew
there were some in the Turkish government,’ a former senior US
intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, told
me, ‘who believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling
with a sarin attack inside Syria – and forcing Obama to make good on
his red line threat.’

The joint chiefs also knew that the Obama administration’s public
claims that only the Syrian army had access to sarin were wrong. The
American and British intelligence communities had been aware since the
spring of 2013 that some rebel units in Syria were developing chemical
weapons. On 20 June analysts for the US Defense Intelligence Agency
issued a highly classified five-page ‘talking points’ briefing for the
DIA’s deputy director, David Shedd, which stated that al-Nusra
maintained a sarin production cell: its programme, the paper said, was
‘the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort’.
(According to a Defense Department consultant, US intelligence has
long known that al-Qaida experimented with chemical weapons, and has a
video of one of its gas experiments with dogs.) The DIA paper went on:
‘Previous IC [intelligence community] focus had been almost entirely
on Syrian CW [chemical weapons] stockpiles; now we see ANF attempting
to make its own CW … Al-Nusrah Front’s relative freedom of operation
within Syria leads us to assess the group’s CW aspirations will be
difficult to disrupt in the future.’ The paper drew on classified
intelligence from numerous agencies: ‘Turkey and Saudi-based chemical
facilitators,’ it said, ‘were attempting to obtain sarin precursors in
bulk, tens of kilograms, likely for the anticipated large scale
production effort in Syria.’ (Asked about the DIA paper, a
spokesperson for the director of national intelligence said: ‘No such
paper was ever requested or produced by intelligence community
analysts.’)

Last May, more than ten members of the al-Nusra Front were arrested in
southern Turkey with what local police told the press were two
kilograms of sarin. In a 130-page indictment the group was accused of
attempting to purchase fuses, piping for the construction of mortars,
and chemical precursors for sarin. Five of those arrested were freed
after a brief detention. The others, including the ringleader, Haytham
Qassab, for whom the prosecutor requested a prison sentence of 25
years, were released pending trial. In the meantime the Turkish press
has been rife with speculation that the Erdoğan administration has
been covering up the extent of its involvement with the rebels. In a
news conference last summer, Aydin Sezgin, Turkey’s ambassador to
Moscow, dismissed the arrests and claimed to reporters that the
recovered ‘sarin’ was merely ‘anti-freeze’.

The DIA paper took the arrests as evidence that al-Nusra was expanding
its access to chemical weapons. It said Qassab had ‘self-identified’
as a member of al-Nusra, and that he was directly connected to
Abd-al-Ghani, the ‘ANF emir for military manufacturing’. Qassab and
his associate Khalid Ousta worked with Halit Unalkaya, an employee of
a Turkish firm called Zirve Export, who provided ‘price quotes for
bulk quantities of sarin precursors’. Abd-al-Ghani’s plan was for two
associates to ‘perfect a process for making sarin, then go to Syria to
train others to begin large scale production at an unidentified lab in
Syria’. The DIA paper said that one of his operatives had purchased a
precursor on the ‘Baghdad chemical market’, which ‘has supported at
least seven CW efforts since 2004’.

A series of chemical weapon attacks in March and April 2013 was
investigated over the next few months by a special UN mission to
Syria. A person with close knowledge of the UN’s activity in Syria
told me that there was evidence linking the Syrian opposition to the
first gas attack, on 19 March in Khan Al-Assal, a village near Aleppo.
In its final report in December, the mission said that at least 19
civilians and one Syrian soldier were among the fatalities, along with
scores of injured. It had no mandate to assign responsibility for the
attack, but the person with knowledge of the UN’s activities said:
‘Investigators interviewed the people who were there, including the
doctors who treated the victims. It was clear that the rebels used the
gas. It did not come out in public because no one wanted to know.’

In the months before the attacks began, a former senior Defense
Department official told me, the DIA was circulating a daily
classified report known as SYRUP on all intelligence related to the
Syrian conflict, including material on chemical weapons. But in the
spring, distribution of the part of the report concerning chemical
weapons was severely curtailed on the orders of Denis McDonough, the
White House chief of staff. ‘Something was in there that triggered a
shit fit by McDonough,’ the former Defense Department official said.
‘One day it was a huge deal, and then, after the March and April sarin
attacks’ – he snapped his fingers – ‘it’s no longer there.’ The
decision to restrict distribution was made as the joint chiefs ordered
intensive contingency planning for a possible ground invasion of Syria
whose primary objective would be the elimination of chemical weapons.

The former intelligence official said that many in the US national
security establishment had long been troubled by the president’s red
line: ‘The joint chiefs asked the White House, “What does red line
mean? How does that translate into military orders? Troops on the
ground? Massive strike? Limited strike?” They tasked military
intelligence to study how we could carry out the threat. They learned
nothing more about the president’s reasoning.’

In the aftermath of the 21 August attack Obama ordered the Pentagon to
draw up targets for bombing. Early in the process, the former
intelligence official said, ‘the White House rejected 35 target sets
provided by the joint chiefs of staff as being insufficiently
“painful” to the Assad regime.’ The original targets included only
military sites and nothing by way of civilian infrastructure. Under
White House pressure, the US attack plan evolved into ‘a monster
strike’: two wings of B-52 bombers were shifted to airbases close to
Syria, and navy submarines and ships equipped with Tomahawk missiles
were deployed. ‘Every day the target list was getting longer,’ the
former intelligence official told me. ‘The Pentagon planners said we
can’t use only Tomahawks to strike at Syria’s missile sites because
their warheads are buried too far below ground, so the two B-52 air
wings with two-thousand pound bombs were assigned to the mission. Then
we’ll need standby search-and-rescue teams to recover downed pilots
and drones for target selection. It became huge.’ The new target list
was meant to ‘completely eradicate any military capabilities Assad
had’, the former intelligence official said. The core targets included
electric power grids, oil and gas depots, all known logistic and
weapons depots, all known command and control facilities, and all
known military and intelligence buildings.
London Review Cake Shop

Britain and France were both to play a part. On 29 August, the day
Parliament voted against Cameron’s bid to join the intervention, the
Guardian reported that he had already ordered six RAF Typhoon fighter
jets to be deployed to Cyprus, and had volunteered a submarine capable
of launching Tomahawk missiles. The French air force – a crucial
player in the 2011 strikes on Libya – was deeply committed, according
to an account in Le Nouvel Observateur; François Hollande had ordered
several Rafale fighter-bombers to join the American assault. Their
targets were reported to be in western Syria.

By the last days of August the president had given the Joint Chiefs a
fixed deadline for the launch. ‘H hour was to begin no later than
Monday morning [2 September], a massive assault to neutralise Assad,’
the former intelligence official said. So it was a surprise to many
when during a speech in the White House Rose Garden on 31 August Obama
said that the attack would be put on hold, and he would turn to
Congress and put it to a vote.

At this stage, Obama’s premise – that only the Syrian army was capable
of deploying sarin – was unravelling. Within a few days of the 21
August attack, the former intelligence official told me, Russian
military intelligence operatives had recovered samples of the chemical
agent from Ghouta. They analysed it and passed it on to British
military intelligence; this was the material sent to Porton Down. (A
spokesperson for Porton Down said: ‘Many of the samples analysed in
the UK tested positive for the nerve agent sarin.’ MI6 said that it
doesn’t comment on intelligence matters.)

The former intelligence official said the Russian who delivered the
sample to the UK was ‘a good source – someone with access, knowledge
and a record of being trustworthy’. After the first reported uses of
chemical weapons in Syria last year, American and allied intelligence
agencies ‘made an effort to find the answer as to what if anything,
was used – and its source’, the former intelligence official said. ‘We
use data exchanged as part of the Chemical Weapons Convention. The
DIA’s baseline consisted of knowing the composition of each batch of
Soviet-manufactured chemical weapons. But we didn’t know which batches
the Assad government currently had in its arsenal. Within days of the
Damascus incident we asked a source in the Syrian government to give
us a list of the batches the government currently had. This is why we
could confirm the difference so quickly.’

The process hadn’t worked as smoothly in the spring, the former
intelligence official said, because the studies done by Western
intelligence ‘were inconclusive as to the type of gas it was. The word
“sarin” didn’t come up. There was a great deal of discussion about
this, but since no one could conclude what gas it was, you could not
say that Assad had crossed the president’s red line.’ By 21 August,
the former intelligence official went on, ‘the Syrian opposition
clearly had learned from this and announced that “sarin” from the
Syrian army had been used, before any analysis could be made, and the
press and White House jumped at it. Since it now was sarin, “It had to
be Assad.”’

The UK defence staff who relayed the Porton Down findings to the joint
chiefs were sending the Americans a message, the former intelligence
official said: ‘We’re being set up here.’ (This account made sense of
a terse message a senior official in the CIA sent in late August: ‘It
was not the result of the current regime. UK & US know this.’) By then
the attack was a few days away and American, British and French
planes, ships and submarines were at the ready.

The officer ultimately responsible for the planning and execution of
the attack was General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs.
>From the beginning of the crisis, the former intelligence official
said, the joint chiefs had been sceptical of the administration’s
argument that it had the facts to back up its belief in Assad’s guilt.
They pressed the DIA and other agencies for more substantial evidence.
‘There was no way they thought Syria would use nerve gas at that
stage, because Assad was winning the war,’ the former intelligence
official said. Dempsey had irritated many in the Obama administration
by repeatedly warning Congress over the summer of the danger of
American military involvement in Syria. Last April, after an
optimistic assessment of rebel progress by the secretary of state,
John Kerry, in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Dempsey
told the Senate Armed Services Committee that ‘there’s a risk that
this conflict has become stalemated.’

Dempsey’s initial view after 21 August was that a US strike on Syria –
under the assumption that the Assad government was responsible for the
sarin attack – would be a military blunder, the former intelligence
official said. The Porton Down report caused the joint chiefs to go to
the president with a more serious worry: that the attack sought by the
White House would be an unjustified act of aggression. It was the
joint chiefs who led Obama to change course. The official White House
explanation for the turnabout – the story the press corps told – was
that the president, during a walk in the Rose Garden with Denis
McDonough, his chief of staff, suddenly decided to seek approval for
the strike from a bitterly divided Congress with which he’d been in
conflict for years. The former Defense Department official told me
that the White House provided a different explanation to members of
the civilian leadership of the Pentagon: the bombing had been called
off because there was intelligence ‘that the Middle East would go up
in smoke’ if it was carried out.

The president’s decision to go to Congress was initially seen by
senior aides in the White House, the former intelligence official
said, as a replay of George W. Bush’s gambit in the autumn of 2002
before the invasion of Iraq: ‘When it became clear that there were no
WMD in Iraq, Congress, which had endorsed the Iraqi war, and the White
House both shared the blame and repeatedly cited faulty intelligence.
If the current Congress were to vote to endorse the strike, the White
House could again have it both ways – wallop Syria with a massive
attack and validate the president’s red line commitment, while also
being able to share the blame with Congress if it came out that the
Syrian military wasn’t behind the attack.’ The turnabout came as a
surprise even to the Democratic leadership in Congress. In September
the Wall Street Journal reported that three days before his Rose
Garden speech Obama had telephoned Nancy Pelosi, leader of the House
Democrats, ‘to talk through the options’. She later told colleagues,
according to the Journal, that she hadn’t asked the president to put
the bombing to a congressional vote.

Obama’s move for congressional approval quickly became a dead end.
‘Congress was not going to let this go by,’ the former intelligence
official said. ‘Congress made it known that, unlike the authorisation
for the Iraq war, there would be substantive hearings.’ At this point,
there was a sense of desperation in the White House, the former
intelligence official said. ‘And so out comes Plan B. Call off the
bombing strike and Assad would agree to unilaterally sign the chemical
warfare treaty and agree to the destruction of all of chemical weapons
under UN supervision.’ At a press conference in London on 9 September,
Kerry was still talking about intervention: ‘The risk of not acting is
greater than the risk of acting.’ But when a reporter asked if there
was anything Assad could do to stop the bombing, Kerry said: ‘Sure. He
could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the
international community in the next week … But he isn’t about to do
it, and it can’t be done, obviously.’ As the New York Times reported
the next day, the Russian-brokered deal that emerged shortly
afterwards had first been discussed by Obama and Putin in the summer
of 2012. Although the strike plans were shelved, the administration
didn’t change its public assessment of the justification for going to
war. ‘There is zero tolerance at that level for the existence of
error,’ the former intelligence official said of the senior officials
in the White House. ‘They could not afford to say: “We were wrong.”’
(The DNI spokesperson said: ‘The Assad regime, and only the Assad
regime, could have been responsible for the chemical weapons attack
that took place on 21 August.’)

*

The full extent of US co-operation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar
in assisting the rebel opposition in Syria has yet to come to light.
The Obama administration has never publicly admitted to its role in
creating what the CIA calls a ‘rat line’, a back channel highway into
Syria. The rat line, authorised in early 2012, was used to funnel
weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the
Syrian border to the opposition. Many of those in Syria who ultimately
received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with
al-Qaida. (The DNI spokesperson said: ‘The idea that the United States
was providing weapons from Libya to anyone is false.’)

In January, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on the
assault by a local militia in September 2012 on the American consulate
and a nearby undercover CIA facility in Benghazi, which resulted in
the death of the US ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and three others.
The report’s criticism of the State Department for not providing
adequate security at the consulate, and of the intelligence community
for not alerting the US military to the presence of a CIA outpost in
the area, received front-page coverage and revived animosities in
Washington, with Republicans accusing Obama and Hillary Clinton of a
cover-up. A highly classified annex to the report, not made public,
described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama
and Erdoğan administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By the
terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi
Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible
for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria. A number of front
companies were set up in Libya, some under the cover of Australian
entities. Retired American soldiers, who didn’t always know who was
really employing them, were hired to manage procurement and shipping.
The operation was run by David Petraeus, the CIA director who would
soon resign when it became known he was having an affair with his
biographer. (A spokesperson for Petraeus denied the operation ever
took place.)
Subscribe to the London Review of Books

The operation had not been disclosed at the time it was set up to the
congressional intelligence committees and the congressional
leadership, as required by law since the 1970s. The involvement of MI6
enabled the CIA to evade the law by classifying the mission as a
liaison operation. The former intelligence official explained that for
years there has been a recognised exception in the law that permits
the CIA not to report liaison activity to Congress, which would
otherwise be owed a finding. (All proposed CIA covert operations must
be described in a written document, known as a ‘finding’, submitted to
the senior leadership of Congress for approval.) Distribution of the
annex was limited to the staff aides who wrote the report and to the
eight ranking members of Congress – the Democratic and Republican
leaders of the House and Senate, and the Democratic and Republicans
leaders on the House and Senate intelligence committees. This hardly
constituted a genuine attempt at oversight: the eight leaders are not
known to gather together to raise questions or discuss the secret
information they receive.

The annex didn’t tell the whole story of what happened in Benghazi
before the attack, nor did it explain why the American consulate was
attacked. ‘The consulate’s only mission was to provide cover for the
moving of arms,’ the former intelligence official, who has read the
annex, said. ‘It had no real political role.’

Washington abruptly ended the CIA’s role in the transfer of arms from
Libya after the attack on the consulate, but the rat line kept going.
‘The United States was no longer in control of what the Turks were
relaying to the jihadists,’ the former intelligence official said.
Within weeks, as many as forty portable surface-to-air missile
launchers, commonly known as manpads, were in the hands of Syrian
rebels. On 28 November 2012, Joby Warrick of the Washington Post
reported that the previous day rebels near Aleppo had used what was
almost certainly a manpad to shoot down a Syrian transport helicopter.
‘The Obama administration,’ Warrick wrote, ‘has steadfastly opposed
arming Syrian opposition forces with such missiles, warning that the
weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists and be used to shoot
down commercial aircraft.’ Two Middle Eastern intelligence officials
fingered Qatar as the source, and a former US intelligence analyst
speculated that the manpads could have been obtained from Syrian
military outposts overrun by the rebels. There was no indication that
the rebels’ possession of manpads was likely the unintended
consequence of a covert US programme that was no longer under US
control.

By the end of 2012, it was believed throughout the American
intelligence community that the rebels were losing the war. ‘Erdoğan
was pissed,’ the former intelligence official said, ‘and felt he was
left hanging on the vine. It was his money and the cut-off was seen as
a betrayal.’ In spring 2013 US intelligence learned that the Turkish
government – through elements of the MIT, its national intelligence
agency, and the Gendarmerie, a militarised law-enforcement
organisation – was working directly with al-Nusra and its allies to
develop a chemical warfare capability. ‘The MIT was running the
political liaison with the rebels, and the Gendarmerie handled
military logistics, on-the-scene advice and training – including
training in chemical warfare,’ the former intelligence official said.
‘Stepping up Turkey’s role in spring 2013 was seen as the key to its
problems there. Erdoğan knew that if he stopped his support of the
jihadists it would be all over. The Saudis could not support the war
because of logistics – the distances involved and the difficulty of
moving weapons and supplies. Erdoğan’s hope was to instigate an event
that would force the US to cross the red line. But Obama didn’t
respond in March and April.’

There was no public sign of discord when Erdoğan and Obama met on 16
May 2013 at the White House. At a later press conference Obama said
that they had agreed that Assad ‘needs to go’. Asked whether he
thought Syria had crossed the red line, Obama acknowledged that there
was evidence such weapons had been used, but added, ‘it is important
for us to make sure that we’re able to get more specific information
about what exactly is happening there.’ The red line was still intact.

An American foreign policy expert who speaks regularly with officials
in Washington and Ankara told me about a working dinner Obama held for
Erdoğan during his May visit. The meal was dominated by the Turks’
insistence that Syria had crossed the red line and their complaints
that Obama was reluctant to do anything about it. Obama was
accompanied by John Kerry and Tom Donilon, the national security
adviser who would soon leave the job. Erdoğan was joined by Ahmet
Davutoğlu, Turkey’s foreign minister, and Hakan Fidan, the head of the
MIT. Fidan is known to be fiercely loyal to Erdoğan, and has been seen
as a consistent backer of the radical rebel opposition in Syria.

The foreign policy expert told me that the account he heard originated
with Donilon. (It was later corroborated by a former US official, who
learned of it from a senior Turkish diplomat.) According to the
expert, Erdoğan had sought the meeting to demonstrate to Obama that
the red line had been crossed, and had brought Fidan along to state
the case. When Erdoğan tried to draw Fidan into the conversation, and
Fidan began speaking, Obama cut him off and said: ‘We know.’ Erdoğan
tried to bring Fidan in a second time, and Obama again cut him off and
said: ‘We know.’ At that point, an exasperated Erdoğan said, ‘But your
red line has been crossed!’ and, the expert told me, ‘Donilon said
Erdoğan “fucking waved his finger at the president inside the White
House”.’ Obama then pointed at Fidan and said: ‘We know what you’re
doing with the radicals in Syria.’ (Donilon, who joined the Council on
Foreign Relations last July, didn’t respond to questions about this
story. The Turkish Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to questions about
the dinner. A spokesperson for the National Security Council confirmed
that the dinner took place and provided a photograph showing Obama,
Kerry, Donilon, Erdoğan, Fidan and Davutoğlu sitting at a table.
‘Beyond that,’ she said, ‘I’m not going to read out the details of
their discussions.’)

But Erdoğan did not leave empty handed. Obama was still permitting
Turkey to continue to exploit a loophole in a presidential executive
order prohibiting the export of gold to Iran, part of the US sanctions
regime against the country. In March 2012, responding to sanctions of
Iranian banks by the EU, the SWIFT electronic payment system, which
facilitates cross-border payments, expelled dozens of Iranian
financial institutions, severely restricting the country’s ability to
conduct international trade. The US followed with the executive order
in July, but left what came to be known as a ‘golden loophole’: gold
shipments to private Iranian entities could continue. Turkey is a
major purchaser of Iranian oil and gas, and it took advantage of the
loophole by depositing its energy payments in Turkish lira in an
Iranian account in Turkey; these funds were then used to purchase
Turkish gold for export to confederates in Iran. Gold to the value of
$13 billion reportedly entered Iran in this way between March 2012 and
July 2013.

The programme quickly became a cash cow for corrupt politicians and
traders in Turkey, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. ‘The middlemen
did what they always do,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘Take
15 per cent. The CIA had estimated that there was as much as two
billion dollars in skim. Gold and Turkish lira were sticking to
fingers.’ The illicit skimming flared into a public ‘gas for gold’
scandal in Turkey in December, and resulted in charges against two
dozen people, including prominent businessmen and relatives of
government officials, as well as the resignations of three ministers,
one of whom called for Erdoğan to resign. The chief executive of a
Turkish state-controlled bank that was in the middle of the scandal
insisted that more than $4.5 million in cash found by police in
shoeboxes during a search of his home was for charitable donations.

Late last year Jonathan Schanzer and Mark Dubowitz reported in Foreign
Policy that the Obama administration closed the golden loophole in
January 2013, but ‘lobbied to make sure the legislation … did not take
effect for six months’. They speculated that the administration wanted
to use the delay as an incentive to bring Iran to the bargaining table
over its nuclear programme, or to placate its Turkish ally in the
Syrian civil war. The delay permitted Iran to ‘accrue billions of
dollars more in gold, further undermining the sanctions regime’.

*

The American decision to end CIA support of the weapons shipments into
Syria left Erdoğan exposed politically and militarily. ‘One of the
issues at that May summit was the fact that Turkey is the only avenue
to supply the rebels in Syria,’ the former intelligence official said.
‘It can’t come through Jordan because the terrain in the south is wide
open and the Syrians are all over it. And it can’t come through the
valleys and hills of Lebanon – you can’t be sure who you’d meet on the
other side.’ Without US military support for the rebels, the former
intelligence official said, ‘Erdoğan’s dream of having a client state
in Syria is evaporating and he thinks we’re the reason why. When Syria
wins the war, he knows the rebels are just as likely to turn on him –
where else can they go? So now he will have thousands of radicals in
his backyard.’

A US intelligence consultant told me that a few weeks before 21 August
he saw a highly classified briefing prepared for Dempsey and the
defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, which described ‘the acute anxiety’ of
the Erdoğan administration about the rebels’ dwindling prospects. The
analysis warned that the Turkish leadership had expressed ‘the need to
do something that would precipitate a US military response’. By late
summer, the Syrian army still had the advantage over the rebels, the
former intelligence official said, and only American air power could
turn the tide. In the autumn, the former intelligence official went
on, the US intelligence analysts who kept working on the events of 21
August ‘sensed that Syria had not done the gas attack. But the 500
pound gorilla was, how did it happen? The immediate suspect was the
Turks, because they had all the pieces to make it happen.’
London Review Bookshop

As intercepts and other data related to the 21 August attacks were
gathered, the intelligence community saw evidence to support its
suspicions. ‘We now know it was a covert action planned by Erdoğan’s
people to push Obama over the red line,’ the former intelligence
official said. ‘They had to escalate to a gas attack in or near
Damascus when the UN inspectors’ – who arrived in Damascus on 18
August to investigate the earlier use of gas – ‘were there. The deal
was to do something spectacular. Our senior military officers have
been told by the DIA and other intelligence assets that the sarin was
supplied through Turkey – that it could only have gotten there with
Turkish support. The Turks also provided the training in producing the
sarin and handling it.’ Much of the support for that assessment came
from the Turks themselves, via intercepted conversations in the
immediate aftermath of the attack. ‘Principal evidence came from the
Turkish post-attack joy and back-slapping in numerous intercepts.
Operations are always so super-secret in the planning but that all
flies out the window when it comes to crowing afterwards. There is no
greater vulnerability than in the perpetrators claiming credit for
success.’ Erdoğan’s problems in Syria would soon be over: ‘Off goes
the gas and Obama will say red line and America is going to attack
Syria, or at least that was the idea. But it did not work out that
way.’

The post-attack intelligence on Turkey did not make its way to the
White House. ‘Nobody wants to talk about all this,’ the former
intelligence official told me. ‘There is great reluctance to
contradict the president, although no all-source intelligence
community analysis supported his leap to convict. There has not been
one single piece of additional evidence of Syrian involvement in the
sarin attack produced by the White House since the bombing raid was
called off. My government can’t say anything because we have acted so
irresponsibly. And since we blamed Assad, we can’t go back and blame
Erdoğan.’

Turkey’s willingness to manipulate events in Syria to its own purposes
seemed to be demonstrated late last month, a few days before a round
of local elections, when a recording, allegedly of a government
national security meeting, was posted to YouTube. It included
discussion of a false-flag operation that would justify an incursion
by the Turkish military in Syria. The operation centred on the tomb of
Suleyman Shah, the grandfather of the revered Osman I, founder of the
Ottoman Empire, which is near Aleppo and was ceded to Turkey in 1921,
when Syria was under French rule. One of the Islamist rebel factions
was threatening to destroy the tomb as a site of idolatry, and the
Erdoğan administration was publicly threatening retaliation if harm
came to it. According to a Reuters report of the leaked conversation,
a voice alleged to be Fidan’s spoke of creating a provocation: ‘Now
look, my commander, if there is to be justification, the justification
is I send four men to the other side. I get them to fire eight
missiles into empty land [in the vicinity of the tomb]. That’s not a
problem. Justification can be created.’ The Turkish government
acknowledged that there had been a national security meeting about
threats emanating from Syria, but said the recording had been
manipulated. The government subsequently blocked public access to
YouTube.

Barring a major change in policy by Obama, Turkey’s meddling in the
Syrian civil war is likely to go on. ‘I asked my colleagues if there
was any way to stop Erdoğan’s continued support for the rebels,
especially now that it’s going so wrong,’ the former intelligence
official told me. ‘The answer was: “We’re screwed.” We could go public
if it was somebody other than Erdoğan, but Turkey is a special case.
They’re a Nato ally. The Turks don’t trust the West. They can’t live
with us if we take any active role against Turkish interests. If we
went public with what we know about Erdoğan’s role with the gas, it’d
be disastrous. The Turks would say: “We hate you for telling us what
we can and can’t do.”’

4 April


=========================================
20. AIX-EN-PROVENCE: THE DARK SIDE OF FRANCE'S MOST BEAUTIFUL TOWN
by Anthony Peregrine
=========================================
The Telegraph (UK), 10 June 2014

Les Milles, near Aix-en-Provence. The former brickworks became an
internment camp during World War II, and is now open to visitors
Photo: Alamy

So you’ve been to Aix-en-Provence, the most cultivated city in the
French south. You have strolled the fountain-studded Cours Mirabeau.
You have walked with Cézanne, ambled past Good King René and been
scowled at by the waiters at Les Deux Garçons café. (It’s not you.
They scowl at everyone. They are busy men.) As you toy with côtelettes
d’agneau aux herbes on a terrace under the plane trees somewhere, you
may reflect that France in general, and Provence in particular, are
elegant, voluptuous and rather superior sorts of places.

Then you drive five minutes out of the centre to the suburban village
of Les Milles. After faffing about through narrow streets, you are
suddenly confronted with a god-almighty brickworks. Well, brick- and
tile-works. The buildings - in brick, obviously - are industrial
colossi, from a 19th-century when nobody doubted that making bricks
was a damned fine thing. These days, they tower, glower, and
intimidate. They are clearly determined to show you another side of
France.

And so they do. Shut down in the mid-1930s, Les Milles brickworks
were, in 1939, pressed into service as an internment camp. This was
not unusual. There were more than 200 such wartime camps across
France. Les Milles was, though, among the biggest and most important
in southern France. Some 10,000 people from 38 nations were brought
here - almost invariably innocent folk wrenched from normal lives of
family, school reports and côtelettes d’agneau with friends, to be
parked on factory floors with far too little space each, straw for
bedding and the most woeful latrines.

The other thing distinguishing Les Milles is that it has now been
restored to past non-glory, and may be visited. This has taken time.
Official France is not always sharp in granting approval, never mind
funding, for projects dealing with the shoddier elements of its past.
But the site finally opened quietly in 2012. It now provides an
utterly engrossing, even moving experience. In a year when attention
is on headline war anniversaries, Les Milles’ is a smaller story. And,
certainly, it is infinitely less hellish than those recounted by Nazi
concentration camps.

But, in placing the camp in its context - including an overview of
Nazification - the site designers have pulled off a coup of clarity.
And the camp’s own tale still resonates through desolate factory space
intended for bricks, not humans. It leaves one frustrated and
infuriated in equal measure, and looking for someone to hit. A French
bureaucrat would do nicely - for, if nothing else, Les Milles is an
exposé of the oafish venality of an administration too timid and
indolent to do anything but follow routine and orders - even as
absurdity went stratospheric.

The first internees into the brickworks in 1939 and 1940 were Germans,
Austrians and German-speaking Czechs on French soil as war broke out.
The official line was that these men (initially, Les Milles was men
only) constituted a fifth-column menace. And one can understand that
witnessing German speakers strolling about the south, as German troops
crashed through the north, might distress locals. However, a great
many of the Germans concerned were artists, writers and intellectuals
who had taken refuge in France precisely because of their opposition
to fascism.

These fellows, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann among them, gathered on
the Provençal coast around Sanary-sur-Mer. In interning them, the
French were therefore banging up good guys who were on their side. Les
Milles hosted men like surrealist artists Max Ernst and Hans Bellmer,
and Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger, then a giant of German literature
and unconditional fan of French republican values.

Max Ernst: the German was artist interned in Les Milles (Alamy)

Feuchtwanger had fled to France the moment Hitler was elected, in
1933. So he wasn’t around to see his German home ransacked by the
Nazis, or hear himself declared their public enemy No 1. The French
treated him initially as an honoured guest. Shortly before his
internment, he’d been received by the French president, Albert Lebrun.
Now, as he records in The Devil In France, he was sleeping on straw,
breathing brick dust to the point of continually coughing up blood and
paying people to keep him a place in the queue for the unspeakable
bog.

Alongside were ex-German MPs who had legged it post-Reichstag fire and
even German members of the Foreign Legion, some of whom had been
fighting for France for 20 years. No matter. They were behind the
barbed wire, too. Once there, in fact, the legionnaires ran much of
the camp’s black market ... in blankets, alcohol, tobacco - and
newspapers. A Berlin-style cabaret club was set up in a brick oven.
Courses and conferences were held, plays and concerts put on.

Indeed, it was a German opera singer who had one of the most
teeth-gnashing of all experiences. He’d been living in France for
years before being denounced by his French cleaning lady. While
dusting, she’d seen a photo of him wearing a military uniform. A spy,
obviously. He was interned. It transpired that the picture was of him
in a costume uniform in a production of Carmen. This became known but
- here’s the really hair-tearing element - the singer never got out.
The entirely erroneous suspicion lay on the file. None of the
succession of camp officials was energetic or brave enough to question
or countermand it.

Epic frustration compounded the filth, the more so that almost
everyone in the camp (by 1941, numbers nudged 3500) had already been
verified many times by police in their French homes. “The authorities
knew that saboteurs and spies and friends of Nazis could be anywhere
except among us,” wrote Feuchtwanger. Ultimately, it was reluctantly
admitted that hundreds of internees were more in danger from the
advancing Wehrmacht troops than in league with them. They were crammed
into a cattle train bound for Bayonne on the south-west coast, and
possible escape by sea. The train, though, was not allowed to approach
Bayonne - because the station-master had heard it was full of Germans
... whom he took to be part of the invading forces. They were
re-directed back to a camp near Nîmes, from where Feuchtwanger finally
escaped dressed as a woman. Like many artists, he got away to the USA.

Later, in 1941, after France’s defeat, “enemy aliens” trying to get
out of France were joined at Les Milles by “undesirables” - foreign
Jews, Spanish civil war veterans and other people suspected of
anti-fascism. In other words the camp, now under Vichy control, was
interning people on exactly the opposite grounds used to justify the
imprisonment of the German intellectuals a year earlier. So goes war.

Yet the camp’s final months - in summer 1942 - were its darkest. In
enthusiastic response to a German demand, Vichy authorities rounded up
2000 Jews in the southern, supposedly free zone of France, assembled
them in Les Milles - and then shipped them out to the death camps. On
French (not German) insistence, Jewish children were sent too. That’s
easy to write, easy to read. But, at Les Milles it is given full
impact by the collection gathered by Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld. This
comprises details and photos of thousands of Jewish children, adults
and families deported from France and who didn’t return. The men are
serious and be-suited, the ladies in improbable hats, the little girls
as smart as flowers, little boys in sailor suits. These could be my
family or yours. It’s a hell of a thing to bump into on holiday. Also
valuable beyond words, of course.

Camp des Milles, 40 Chemin-de-la-Badesse, Aix-en-Provence

=========================================
21. THE TRUE COST OF HIDDEN MONEY
by Jacques Leslie
=========================================
(The New York Times June 16 2014)

GABRIEL ZUCMAN is a 27-year-old French economist who decided to solve
a puzzle: Why do international balance sheets each year show more
liabilities than assets, as if the world is in debt to itself?

Over the last couple of decades, the few international economists who
have addressed this question have offered a simple explanation: tax
evasion. Money that, say, leaves the United States for an offshore tax
shelter is recorded as a liability here, but it is listed nowhere as
an asset — its mission, after all, is disappearance. But until now the
economists lacked hard numbers to confirm their suspicions. By
analyzing data released in recent years by central banks in
Switzerland and Luxembourg on foreigners’ bank holdings, then
extrapolating to other tax havens, Mr. Zucman has put creditable
numbers on tax evasion, showing that it’s rampant — and a major driver
of wealth inequality.

Mr. Zucman estimates — conservatively, in his view — that $7.6
trillion — 8 percent of the world’s personal financial wealth — is
stashed in tax havens. If all of this illegally hidden money were
properly recorded and taxed, global tax revenues would grow by more
than $200 billion a year, he believes. And these numbers do not
include much larger corporate tax avoidance, which usually follows the
letter but hardly the spirit of the law. According to Mr. Zucman’s
calculations, 20 percent of all corporate profits in the United States
are shifted offshore, and tax avoidance deprives the government of a
third of corporate tax revenues. Corporate tax avoidance has become so
widespread that from the late 1980s until now, the effective corporate
tax rate in the United States has dropped from 30 percent to 15
percent, Mr. Zucman found, even though the tax rate hasn’t changed.

Mr. Zucman, an assistant economics professor at the London School of
Economics, is part of a wave of data-focused economists led by his
mentor, Thomas Piketty, of the Paris School of Economics. Mr. Zucman’s
short book on tax evasion, “The Missing Wealth of Nations,” was a best
seller in France last year.

Mr. Zucman’s tax evasion numbers are big enough to upend common
assumptions, like the notion that China has become the world’s “owner”
while Europe and America have become large debtors. The idea of the
rich world’s indebtedness is “an illusion caused by tax havens,” Mr.
Zucman wrote in a paper published last year. In fact, if offshore
assets were properly measured, Europe would be a net creditor, and
American indebtedness would fall from 18 percent of gross domestic
product to 9 percent.

Only multinational corporations and people with at least $50 million
in financial assets usually have the resources to engage in offshore
tax evasion. Since the less wealthy continue paying taxes, the
practice deepens wealth inequality. Indeed, newly invigorated efforts
in the United States to curb personal tax evasion, codified in the
2010 Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, have armed the Internal
Revenue Service with strong sanctions to levy on foreign banks that
fail to disclose accounts held by American residents. This has made it
“more difficult for moderately wealthy individuals to dodge taxes,”
Mr. Zucman says, while the richest account holders still have more
elaborate evasive techniques at their disposal.

“There’s a profound shift in attitudes that happened in the 1980s,”
Mr. Zucman says. “In the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, taxes were much higher,
yet it was not considered normal to try to aggressively minimize your
tax bill and even to evade taxes.” He finds it “no coincidence” that
the era of widespread tax evasion began in the Reagan era, with the
rise of the idea that government is a beast that must be starved.

Because large-scale tax evasion skews key economics statistics, it
hampers officials’ ability to manage the economy or make policy, Mr.
Zucman says. It erodes respect for the law, preventing the government
from carrying out one of its essential tasks. And it discourages job
creation, since it rewards people and corporations for keeping money
overseas, instead of investing it domestically.

Despite the obstacles that the tax compliance act faces, Mr. Zucman
believes its passage marked a global turning point, starting an era of
“remarkable progress” in reducing bank secrecy. Even so, only an
international approach has a chance of stopping tax evasion, he says.
Its most important feature would be a global financial registry, which
would track wealth ownership in the same way that Americans routinely
record real estate holdings now. “If you can’t measure wealth,” Mr.
Zucman says, “it’s almost impossible to tax it.”

A registry would make it impossible for multinationals to falsely
attribute profits to tax havens instead of the countries where the
profits should be taxed. The United States and Europe could build
momentum for a global registry by establishing national registries for
their own residents, perhaps incorporating the idea into the free
trade agreement that Europe and the United States are now negotiating.

What’s beyond question is that there is no economic, political or
moral justification for tax evasion — it exists only because of the
political influence that wealth buys. A society that fails to fight
widespread tax evasion proclaims its own corruption.

Jacques Leslie is the author of “Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over
Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment.”

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web:
www.sacw.net/

DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do
not necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.
=====================================