SACW - 5 Aug 2014 | Speak up Against Gaza Massacre / Sinhala extremism / Afghan Elections / Hatred in Myanmar / The struggle to define Indonesia/ 1950 India - Pakistan Agreement on Minorities / India: Intolerance, Hate speech, Curriculum Change / On Boko Haram and ISIS

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - Special Dispatch 5 August 2014 - No. 2830 
[since 1996]
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SACW  - 5 August 2014 | 

Contents:
1. Video from Jewish Voice for Peace: Freedom for Palestine - GazaNames Project
2. Gaza: The Jewish Right and the Muslim Right | Meredith Tax
3. Why Israel Lies | Chris Hedges
4. Raise the Voice in View of the Massacre in Gaza | Dominique de Villepin
5. July 2014 Declaration on Gaza by 46 Right Livelihood Award Laureates from 32 countries
6. Ensuring respect for international law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including E. Jerusalem - Resolution adopted by the Human Rights Council - 23 July 2014
7. How Sinhala extremism turned against Sri Lanka's Muslims after the civil war | Samanth Subramanian
8. Meera Srinivasan on Militarisation of the State in Sri Lanka
9. Bangladesh: Garment sector Unions, NGOs 'solidarity' circuit and foreign policy
10. Pakistan Lynch Mob Killing In Gujranwala For Alleged Blasphemy - Statement by HRCP
11. How archaeology in Pakistan is forced to deny the nation’s past
12. History Archive: Full Text of 1950 Official Agreement Between India and Pakistan on Minorities
13. Pakistan - India: Shriking Freedom of Expression - Press Release by Delhi Chapter of PIPFPD - 21 July 2014
14. India: Agitate to Prosecute Hate Speech | Teesta Setalvad
15. India: When the Fringe Become the Mainstream | Teesta Setalvad
16. India: Ambient intolerance goes up | Bharat Bhushan
17. India:: Ideology as a cover for political agenda: New ICHR Chief is a Communal Ideologue | Ram Puniyani
18. India: Reports from Committee for Resisting Saffronization of Textbooks, Karnataka 2012-13 and 2014
19. India: Moral Presciptions from Mr Batra (of Hndutva book police) now part of Gujarat Schools Curriculum
20. India: Statement of Concern on SLAPP Cases filed against authors, journalists and publishers
21. India: Building a cross-sectoral movement to defend and ensure social services & security for all
22. India: Mumbai’s factories are a death trap for workers and the general public | Sharad Vyas
23. Saral Sarkar: "God's Warriors" Against the Secular State — On Boko Haram and ISIS
24. Karima Bennoune: When people of Muslim heritage challenge fundamentalism
25. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
 -- India: Myth and epic are being introduced as fact into school curricula of states | Anuradha Raman
 -- India: Saffronisation of Education - Guru Dronacharya Station: Doors To Open On The Right
 -- India: The BJP’s plan to restructure India is now well in place | Sidharth Bhatia
 -- India: CPM statement on unwarranted comments of Supreme Court Judge Regarding Compulsory religious instruction
 -- Pushpa M. Bhargava: In defence of Secularism
 -- India: Hate Story, old Script | Amit Baruah
 -- Catch them Young It is the Textbooks Once Again | R Arun Kumar
 -- Raja Mohan Peddles Religion into India - Nepal Nepal Relations Agenda
 -- India: Kashmir: Kounsarnag yatra - using pilgrimages to extend influence of Hindutva ideology
 -- India to build “detention centres” for illegal immigrants from Bangladesh
 -- Pakistan’s shrinking minority space | Farahnaz Ispahani
 -- Textbook Politics: What the government of Gujarat is encouraging children to read is dismaying - Diksha Madhok
 -- BJP forces will press for saffronisation of history books: Partha Chatterjee
 -- India: Why are journalists reproaching Modi’s sarkar? | Mukul Kesavan
 -- India: UP Saharanpur clashes indicate meticulous planning
 -- India: New Headquaters for the RSS in Madhya Pradesh

::: FULL TEXT :::
26. Afghan presidential vote audit halted over which ballots to throw out | Emma Graham-Harrison
27. Power-sharing in Afghanistan - The election that never ended | S.R.
28. A moral conflict | Brian Cloughley
29. Hatred as politics in Myanmar | Kyaw Win
30. Malnutrition, disease rising in Burmese Muslim camps | Annie Gowen 
31. Life in a Jihadist Capital: Order With a Darker Side | an Employee of The New York Times and Ben Hubbard
32. Iraq: Isis warns women to wear full veil or face punishment | Reuters
33. The Places in Between: The struggle to define Indonesia | Pankaj Mishra
34. Failed monument to military logic: The Atlantic Wall’s colossal wreck | Ianthe Ruthven

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1. VIDEO FROM JEWISH VOICE FOR PEACE: FREEDOM FOR PALESTINE - GazaNames Project
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Prominent Jews and Palestinians and others stand for Palestine in this heartbreaking video with Jonathan Demme, Gloria Steinem, Tony Kushner, Diana Buttu, Chuck D, Eve Ensler, Brian Eno, Roger Waters, Mira Nair, Wallace Shawn, Naomi Klein, Mira Nair, Raj Patel, Noura Erakat and many others. To learn more or take action, visit freedom4palestine.org. Project of JewishVoiceforPeace.org with assistance from IMEU.org (Institute of Middle East Understanding)
http://sacw.net/article9261.html

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2. GAZA: THE JEWISH RIGHT AND THE MUSLIM RIGHT | Meredith Tax
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The war in Gaza has strengthened both the Muslim Right and the Jewish Right; while the results have been disastrous for the people of Gaza, they aren’t good for the people of Israel either. Meredith Tax asks, what does this mean for the two state solution?
http://sacw.net/article9279.html

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3. WHY ISRAEL LIES | Chris Hedges
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There is a perverted logic to Israel’s repeated use of the Big Lie—Große Lüge—the lie favored by tyrants from Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin to Saddam Hussein. The Big Lie feeds the two reactions Israel seeks to elicit—racism among its supporters and terror among its victims.
http://sacw.net/article9280.html

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4. RAISE THE VOICE IN VIEW OF THE MASSACRE IN GAZA | Dominique de Villepin
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Today, to raise one's voice, in view of the massacre perpetrated in Gaza is, and I write this with conscience, France's duty. France, whose commitment to the existence and the security of Israel is unwavering, but who, at the same time, cannot neglect the rights and duties of Israel in its quality as a nation state. I appeal to all those who are tempted to recoil in the face of the perennial return to war: now is time to speak and to act. It is time to measure the dead end in which France finds itself, aligned and so certain of the merits of force as recourse. It is time to pull off the veil of lies, of omissions and of half-truths, to support the hope for change.
http://sacw.net/article9278.html

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5. JULY 2014 DECLARATION ON GAZA BY 46 RIGHT LIVELIHOOD AWARD LAUREATES FROM 32 COUNTRIES
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Stockholm/New Delhi, July 25 2014: As recipients of the Right Livelihood Award, popularly known as the "Alternative Nobel Prize", we strongly condemn the killing of hundreds of children and innocent civilians in Gaza by the Israeli Defence Forces, the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Hamas against Israeli civilians, and we mourn the continued suffering of Gaza’s inhabitants.
http://sacw.net/article9242.html

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6. ENSURING RESPECT FOR INTERNATIONAL LAW IN THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORY, INCLUDING E. JERUSALEM - RESOLUTION ADOPTED BY THE HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL - 23 July 2014
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Deploring the massive Israeli military operations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, since 13 June 2014, which have involved disproportionate and indiscriminate attacks and resulted in grave violations of the human rights of the Palestinian civilian population, including through the most recent Israeli military assault on the occupied Gaza Strip, the latest in a series of military aggressions by Israel, and actions of mass closure, mass arrest and the killing of civilians in the occupied West Bank
http://sacw.net/article9236.html

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7. HOW SINHALA EXTREMISM TURNED AGAINST SRI LANKA'S MUSLIMS AFTER THE CIVIL WAR | Samanth Subramanian
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During the final years of the civil war, Sri Lankan Buddhism had developed a muscular right wing.
http://sacw.net/article9277.html

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8. MEERA SRINIVASAN ON MILITARISATION OF THE STATE IN SRI LANKA
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Sri Lankan army is reluctant to recover from its victory hangover, not realising that the resulting anxiety among its people threatens the relief that came at the end of the civil war
http://sacw.net/article9267.html

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9. BANGLADESH: GARMENT SECTOR UNIONS, NGOS 'SOLIDARITY' CIRCUIT AND FOREIGN POLICY
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American Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) have been at the forefront of lobbying for unionisation and aiding existing unions in becoming functioning workplace representatives and ‘responsible organisations of civil society'.
http://sacw.net/article9270.html
   
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10. PAKISTAN LYNCH MOB KILLING IN GUJRANWALA FOR ALLEGED BLASPHEMY - STATEMENT BY HRCP
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HRCP is shocked and disgusted at the killing of four citizens belonging to the Ahmadi faith in Gujranwala after a blasphemy allegation. Four other Ahmadis were reported to be hospitalised in a critical condition. As things stand in the country now, particularly in Punjab, a blasphemy charge, however unfounded, makes such cold-blooded killings somehow less repulsive. The people who were killed were not even indirectly accused of the blasphemy charge. Their only fault was that they were Ahmadi. Torching women and children in their house simply because of their faith represents brutalisation and barbarism stooping to new lows.
http://sacw.net/article9255.html

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11. HOW ARCHAEOLOGY IN PAKISTAN IS FORCED TO DENY THE NATION’S PAST
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archaeological investigations are motivated by a desire to grant Pakistan historical legitimacy
http://sacw.net/article9212.html

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12. History Archive: FULL TEXT OF 1950 OFFICIAL AGREEMENT BETWEEN INDIA AND PAKISTAN ON MINORITIES
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THE GOVERNMENTS of India and Pakistan solemnly agree that each shall ensure, to the minorities throughout its territory, complete equality of citizenship, irrespective of religion, a full sense of security in respect of life, culture, property and personal honour, freedom of movement within each country and freedom of occupation, speech and worship, subject to law and morality. Members of the minorities shall have equal opportunity with members of the majority community to participate in the public life of their country, to hold political or other office, and to serve in their country’s civil and armed forces. Both Governments declare these rights to be fundamental and undertake to enforce them effectively.
http://sacw.net/article9217.html

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13. PAKISTAN - INDIA: SHRIKING FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION - Press Release by Delhi Chapter of PIPFPD - 21 July 2014
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Intolerance in both countries has been on the rise and there is a need for the governments to not just talk of peace but engage with the critical issues that the people in both countries are facing. Journalists, lawyers, human rights activists, common people using social media, writers, poets are all voices of the people and attempts at restricting such voices is a reflection of the kind of society we are building. Moreover, attacks on common people, purely because of their belonging to a certain community or attacks on school children wanting an education are undoubtedly the reflections of a repressive society.
http://sacw.net/article9211.html

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14. INDIA: AGITATE TO PROSECUTE HATE SPEECH | Teesta Setalvad
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Teesta Setalvad, eminent activist, speaks on Freedom of Dissent at the Idea of India Conclave. Setalvad says that we must all agitate to prosecute hate speech and not allow it to be part of public amnesia, that is being forced upon us.
http://sacw.net/article9269.html

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15. INDIA: WHEN THE FRINGE BECOME THE MAINSTREAM | Teesta Setalvad
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The point is that the Shiv Sena and the sangh parivar, now in power and control in New Delhi actually believe that India is no more secular and democratic, but actually there dream inverse state of Pakistan – a Hindu Rashtra. Listen to what BJP member Ramesh Bhiduri said yesterday in Parliament when the matter was being debate “Go to Pakistan, this is Hindustan.”
http://sacw.net/article9266.html

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16. INDIA: AMBIENT INTOLERANCE GOES UP | Bharat Bhushan
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With the temperature of Hindutva rising in the Indian social discourse, Narendra Modi is yet to become the inclusive leader that the high office he occupies demands of him
http://sacw.net/article9260.html

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17. INDIA:: IDEOLOGY AS A COVER FOR POLITICAL AGENDA: NEW ICHR CHIEF IS A COMMUNAL IDEOLOGUE | Ram Puniyani
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Electoral and political arena is only one of the grounds through which political agenda of vested interests is achieved. Capturing of people’s mind, the ideological propagation, is the foundation on which political agenda stands and perpetuates itself. That’s how the change in History text books or teaching a communal version of History is a necessary part of sectarian nationalism in many South Asian countries.
http://sacw.net/article9258.html

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18. INDIA: REPORTS FROM COMMITTEE FOR RESISTING SAFFRONIZATION OF TEXTBOOKS, KARNATAKA | 2012-2013 AND 2014
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http://sacw.net/article9254.html

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19. INDIA: MORAL PRESCIPTIONS FROM MR BATRA (OF HNDUTVA BOOK POLICE) NOW PART OF GUJARAT SCHOOLS CURRICULUM
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Man who got Wendy Doniger pulped is made ‘must reading’ in Gujarat schools
http://sacw.net/article9237.html

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20. INDIA: STATEMENT OF CONCERN ON SLAPP CASES FILED AGAINST AUTHORS, JOURNALISTS AND PUBLISHERS
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We, the undersigned condemn the threats of defamation cases served on authors, journalists and now as publishers in writing.
http://sacw.net/article9251.html

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21. INDIA: BUILDING A CROSS-SECTORAL MOVEMENT TO DEFEND AND ENSURE SOCIAL SERVICES & SECURITY FOR ALL
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Public Hearing on Pensions, NREGA, NFS, including Rations and Maternity Entitlements, Discussion also on Changing Labour Laws, Land Acquisition And Displacement
http://sacw.net/article9257.html

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22. INDIA: MUMBAI’S FACTORIES ARE A DEATH TRAP FOR WORKERS AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC | Sharad Vyas
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Everything from detergent to popcorn is made in factories dotting the Mumbai Metropolitan Region that store tonnes of hazardous chemicals with scant regard for rules or the safety of workers and the public at large
http://sacw.net/article9210.html

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23. SARAL SARKAR: "GOD'S WARRIORS" AGAINST THE SECULAR STATE — ON BOKO HARAM AND ISIS
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In Nigeria, a big gang of Islamic fundamentalists, namely Boko Haram, is fighting for a “state of God”, killing civilians of other faiths, destroying educational institutions and abducting girls. And the secular state Nigeria – the most populous country and economic power number one in Africa –is powerless against it. Something similar is happening in Iraq. A relatively small militia of Islamist jihadists called ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) – according to estimates of Western experts, (along with allied militant Sunni groups) about ten thousand strong – invaded northwestern Iraq, and the soldiers of the Iraqi army – in all about two hundred thousand strong – who were stationed there took flight in a panic, totally without a fight. They even threw away their uniforms and helmets, and ran (probably) straight back home. The fact that the units in question were taken by surprise cannot be the only explanation for the flight. For even on the following days, the army could not stop the advance of the ISIS-fighters.
http://sacw.net/article9268.html

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24. KARIMA BENNOUNE: WHEN PEOPLE OF MUSLIM HERITAGE CHALLENGE FUNDAMENTALISM
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Video recording of talk by Karima Bennoune at TEDxExeter | March 2014
http://sacw.net/article9241.html

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25. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
=========================================
India: Myth and epic are being introduced as fact into school curricula of states | Anuradha Raman
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/08/india-saffronisation-of-education-myth.html

India: Saffronisation of Education - Guru Dronacharya Station: Doors To Open On The Right
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/08/india-saffronisation-of-education-guru.html

India: The BJP’s plan to restructure India is now well in place | Sidharth Bhatia
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/08/india-bjps-plan-to-restructure-india-is.html

India: CPM statement on unwarranted comments of Justice Dave of the Supreme Court Regarding Compulsory religious instruction
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/08/india-cpm-statement-on-unwarranted.html

Pushpa M. Bhargava: In defence of Secularism
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/08/pushpa-m-bhargava-in-defence-of.html

India: Hate Story, old Script | Amit Baruah
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/08/india-hate-story-old-script-amit-baruah.html

Catch them Young It is the Textbooks Once Again | R Arun Kumar
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/08/catch-them-young-it-is-textbooks-once.html

Raja Mohan Peddles Religion into India - Nepal Nepal Relations Agenda
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/08/raja-mohan-peddles-religion-into-india.html

India: Kashmir: Kounsarnag yatra - using pilgrimages to extend influence of Hindutva ideology
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/08/india-kashmir-kounsarnag-yatra-using.html

India to build “detention centres” for illegal immigrants from Bangladesh
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/08/india-to-build-detention-centres-for.html

Pakistan’s shrinking minority space | Farahnaz Ispahani
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/08/pakistans-shrinking-minority-space.html

Textbook Politics: What the government of Gujarat is encouraging children to read is dismaying - Diksha Madhok
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/07/textbook-politics-what-government-of.html

BJP forces will press for saffronisation of history books: Partha Chatterjee
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/07/bjp-forces-will-press-for.html

India: Why are journalists reproaching Modi’s sarkar? | Mukul Kesavan
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/07/india-why-are-journalists-reproaching.html

India: UP Saharanpur clashes indicate meticulous planning
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/07/india-up-saharanpur-clashes-indicate.html

India: New Headquaters for the RSS in Madhya Pradesh
http://communalism.blogspot.com/2014/07/india-new-headquaters-for-rss-in-madhya.html

::: FULL TEXT :::
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26. AFGHAN PRESIDENTIAL VOTE AUDIT HALTED OVER WHICH BALLOTS TO THROW OUT
 Emma Graham-Harrison in Kabul
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(The Guardian, 20 July 2014)

Deal to resolve political crisis in jeopardy after election workers walk out just days after large-scale audit of disputed poll begins

Afghanistan's tenuous deal to resolve its presidential election crisis fell into jeopardy over the weekend when an ambitious audit was halted just days after it began.

Election workers began looking for irregularities before agreeing rules about which ballots should be thrown out, but a dispute over invalidation led one audit team to walk out of the recount on Saturday afternoon, Afghan and foreign sources said.

The team agreed to go back to work nearly 24 hours later, but still do not have a deal on what constitutes fraud. Progress has been slow for a country that has been in a dangerous political limbo for months.

After three days of counting, the audit teams of election workers, international and Afghan observers and agents for the two presidential candidates, Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, had only made their way through 435 boxes of ballot papers.

With more than 22,000 boxes to be checked in the unprecedented recount of all votes cast, the teams must speed up dramatically or Afghanistan will not have a new president until 2015.

The economy has been left on hold by months of election wrangling, and foreign security support vital to holding off the Taliban will only be available if there is a new leader by the autumn.

Hamid Karzai, the outgoing president, has refused to sign a long-term security deal with the US, despite widespread backing from senior Afghans and Washington's clear warning that without it all forces will leave by the end of this year.

The two candidates are feuding over how many votes to throw out. Ghani, a former World Bank technocrat who is leading in preliminary results, wants a cautious approach to elimination, arguing that the young democracy cannot afford to disenfranchise voters.

Abdullah, a former mujahideen doctor, has called for more aggressive rules to root out what he says are 2m fraudulent ballots cast for his rival.

The debate is complicated by a lack of reliable demographic data and registration rules that allow any Afghan to vote in any polling station.

This makes it hard to assess if some dramatic leaps in turnout during the second round of voting were a realistic reflection of greater enthusiasm or a warning sign of fraud.

Also, the country's voting patterns are driven in many rural areas by tribal, ethnic or other group loyalties that can make it harder to spot or isolate fraud.

So while in most elections observers would be highly suspicious of a ballot box with perhaps 95% of votes cast for one candidate and just 5% for the other, in many areas of Afghanistan this could be a legitimate reflection of local sentiment.

Mokhtar Amiri contributed reporting

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27. POWER-SHARING IN AFGHANISTAN - THE ELECTION THAT NEVER ENDED
by S.R.
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(The Economist, July 29th 2014)
THREE airless aluminium warehouses, shaped like giant armadillos, sit hunched on the outskirts of Kabul. Inside hundreds of volunteers and international election observers have been bustling around in stifling heat, arguing over the shape of tick-marks on individual ballots. During Ramadan the lack of food and drink made the stale atmosphere inside the godowns all the more draining. The Ramadan fast has since broken, but the counting goes on. Until it has finished, the presidential election that was supposed to replace Hamid Karzai hangs in suspension.

After a surprising reversal of fortunes suddenly favoured Ashraf Ghani in the second round of the presidential elections, his opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, cried foul. Alleging fraud, several of his powerful supporters threatened to establish a breakaway government. It took an emergency agreement brokered by John Kerry, America’s secretary of state, to keep the process alive, but the deal is starting to show some of its inherent flaws. Mr Kerry has moved on and the two presidential hopefuls are now left to wrestle over its shortcomings.

To prevent Afghanistan from splitting down the middle, the candidates committed themselves to a two-pronged agreement: a full, internationally supervised audit of all 8m votes cast; and the formation of a government of national unity. Mr Ghani and Mr Abdullah were induced to hug each other before Mr Kerry and the cameras on July 12th. Since then the mood has soured.

One dispute is over the national-unity bit of the deal. Mr Ghani and Mr Abdullah agreed to divide power between the president and a “chief of the executive council”, to be nominated by the losing side. In two years’ time, a loya jirga (a gathering of tribal elders, local power-brokers and elected officials) is to vote on the option to turn the new executive role into the post of prime minister.

To this extent, both sides agree. The balance of power, however, is a matter of debate. Mr Abdullah is pushing for something close to a 50-50 division of power.

Mr Ghani however, perhaps feeling confident that his contested lead will stand up in the face of the audit, seems reluctant to put too much “share” in power-sharing. Referring to the Afghan constitution, his side insists that the real power must remain in the hands of the president. “Nobody can push the president,” as Abbas Noyan, a member of Mr Ghani’s team, puts it. He says Mr Ghani is committed to the agreement, but that “further details about the national-unity government will be discussed after the announcement of the audit result.”

Mr Noyan claims that positions in the unity government must be based on merit, not simply on whomever the losing side chooses to introduce. And that the leader of the opposition is supposed to be someone who is loyal to the government of the president. A prime-ministerial post may be established, Mr Noyan allows, “but we will not change the system to a parliamentary one.” It becomes unclear exactly what power will be left to the executive council—Mr Ghani’s side says that its chief will be “responsible for implementing government policies”.

A decade ago it was widely thought that democracy in fissiparous Afghanistan could only work with a strong central authority. But Mr Karzai's unsatisfactory and increasingly whimsical rule, under which cronies flourished, has underlined the disadvantages of an overstrong presidency. When the Kerry deal was announced, Mr Karzai called it “a bitter pill”. As it turns out, some Afghan voters are finding it hard to swallow. “They don’t respect our votes,” said Lutfuddin Osmani, a 28-year-old NGO worker. “Why did they have to spend so much money on the elections, if [the candidates] are going to share the power anyway?”

As a result of this dispute, talks behind the scenes have stalled. Mr Ghani and Mr Abdullah have met only twice since Mr Kerry’s visit, most recently on July 18th.

The technical part of the agreement also provides grounds for disagreement. As the audit limps along, the agents of both candidates are arguing strenuously over minor details. Should they void only individual votes that appear spoiled? Or should they dump the whole of any contaminated ballot box? In what cases does a sharp increase in voter turnout warrant suspicion? Can a fingerprint stand in for a tick mark? Initially scheduled for four weeks, the audit was suspended for the third time on July 26th, and will not resume until after Eid. At its current pace, Afghanistan will not have a new president to inaugurate until December.

Mr Kerry’s mission to Kabul left many Afghans feeling relieved. He appeared to have salvaged an election in which Western donors had invested over $130m. But neither of the rivals seems to have accepted the basic fact of the contest between them: one of the two must lose more than the other. Stalling and prevarication are the only outcomes on which they seem to stand in agreement.

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28. A MORAL CONFLICT
by Brian Cloughley
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(The News International, 14 July 2014)
Last week a pair of British clowns visited India. Their purpose was entirely commercial and they managed to amuse many people while achieving their moral aim of selling more weapons to a country that is already the world’s largest importer of military equipment.

The UK’s foreign secretary, William Hague, and finance minister (‘chancellor of the exchequer’) George Osborne popped into New Delhi and performed a double act that must have had their hosts chortling about how servile and toadying some of their visitors can be.

Since May India has been governed by the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party led by Narendra Modi who undoubtedly possesses enormous charisma, impressive political talent and great energy. He is also the man who in 2000, as chief minister of Gujarat, failed to bring the forces of law to bear on those who were massacring over a thousand Muslims in some of the most horrible savagery India had seen since the Hindu slaughter of 8,000 Sikhs in 1984.

Most official post-pogrom inquiries stated that Modi was not to blame, but there must have been some substance to the allegations because the US denied him entry. He was refused a US visa in 2005 under US Code 6442 that bans admittance of foreign persons responsible for “severe violations of religious freedom,” and Britain forbade any official meetings with him on similar grounds. The BBC reported that in 2002 “the UK helped to organise an effective ban on Mr Modi travelling to Europe.”

Countries don’t deny entry to people over trivialities. They must have a practical or even a moral reason for so doing. And the object of their disfavour must have done something pretty bad for such action to be taken – obviously with approval at the highest level, as Modi was chief minister of a large state that was business-oriented and becoming quite prosperous.

And it was the prosperity of Gujarat that led in part to reassessment of the high moral principles governing the bans on Modi. The other reason for the slackening and eventual evaporation of condemnation was Modi’s advance to national stature as a prominent representative of the BJP which was becoming the front-runner in Indian national politics. The coalition governments of Dr Manmohan Singh were well-meaning but accident-prone, and the Congress Party was sliding down the opinion polls.

Gradually it came to be considered by western nations that their moral disapproval of Modi’s inactivity during the slaughter of a thousand Muslims could be moderated with profit and even forgotten entirely.

So, as the BBC reported in 2012, “Britain has ended a 10-year diplomatic boycott imposed on a controversial Indian politician accused of failing to stop anti-Muslim rioting that left at least a thousand people dead. Sir James Bevan, the British high commissioner, spent 50 minutes with Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat . . . The conversation is understood to have been focused on business and investment.”

And since then, business and investment have continued to be the UK’s focus on India. There was discard of all this moral nonsense about rapping a chap over the knuckles for sitting back while a thousand people were slaughtered. That was blood under the bridge. It was time to flow on to pursuit of economic opportunities after Modi ascended in the national scene and became the prime minister who was lauded by Britain’s finance minister as a paragon of financial get-up-and-go.

Chancellor Osborne declared that “it is a measure of the ambition and drive and pace of the new government of Prime Minister Modi that this complete turnaround in sentiment about the Indian economy has been achieved in just seven short weeks,” which was a pathetic gobbet of sycophantic slush.

The fawning oiliness of Britain’s approach was characterised by the visit of the dynamic duo to the site of the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi, the pacifist who was noted by Hague as having had a “commitment to non-violence.” Hague then announced that there would be a statue of Gandhi erected in London’s Parliament Square – obviously not in commemoration of the previous day’s agreement for a “contract worth £250 million with MBDA UK for the supply of advanced short-range air-to-air missiles for the IAF’s Jaguar fleet.”

Finance minister Osborne was asked on the BBC’s Today programme why Britain was “selling arms to a country with such widespread poverty” and in justification replied that “India has real security issues. It has got some very difficult neighbours.” Which confirms to China and Pakistan exactly how they are regarded by the United Kingdom. India, of course, is not a difficult neighbour to anyone.

Osborne explained modern British morality in clear-cut terms. The Gujarat slaughter was consigned to history and “we took a decision in 2012 to re-establish contact” with the former pariah Modi. He explained that the alteration in national policy was “very sensible given all that has happened since, in the way Mr Modi has managed to win an outright majority for the first time in Indian politics for 30 years.” Majorities trump moralities.

The Times of India gave Hague and Osborne space for a sparkling joint article composed by their spin doctors and special advisers in which they stated that Britain wants “our defence and aerospace companies to help bring India more cutting-edge technology, skills and jobs”; and then Hague said there was no contradiction between selling weapons to India and extolling the virtues of the pacifist Gandhi, he of the future Parliament Square statue. Britain’s foreign minister declared that “we're dealing with the Indian government, we're not imposing anything on anybody . . . There is no moral conflict.”

But perhaps Gandhi would have had problems with that pronouncement. He was, after all, no advocate of arms and armour and told the world that “non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind.” He went further in publishing a list of Seven Social Sins, deploring, for example, “politics without principle” and “wealth without work” which are as evident in the world today as they were in 1925.

But another of the sins identified by Gandhi was “commerce without morality.” Perhaps that would make a good inscription on the base of his statue in Parliament Square.

The writer is a South Asian affairs analyst.

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29. HATRED AS POLITICS IN MYANMAR
By Kyaw Win
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(Asia Times, July 18, 2014)

This month's tragic anti-Muslim violence in Mandalay has again revealed that dark forces are alive and well in Myanmar. The violence left two dead and many injured, causing damage to property and generating a climate of fear in the country's cultural and historic capital.

In the aftermath of the violence, the government has moved to crack down on hate speech but has also warned the media against making statements that could destabilize national security, saying that "action will be taken against those who threaten state stability."

Tellingly, however, no action has been taken against those responsible for triggering the Mandalay violence by spreading false rumors on social media, while journalists reporting on the riots have already been threatened with violence. In addition, some observers have noted that the violence has also had a secondary effect- it has successfully distracted public interest from a signature campaign calling for amendment to the 2008 Constitution.

Such patterns are finally leading more and more analysts to ask critical questions about the nature of recent anti-Muslim violence in Myanmar and the real motivations behind it. Outside of Myanmar, reporting has been less critical, with some major media wires referring to the violence as 'sectarian'.

Such inaccurate diagnosis is not new, as international diplomatic and public opinion circles have tended to portray Myanmar's anti-Muslim violence as an unfortunate social consequence of transition from authoritarianism to democracy. In this view, it is the uncertainty of transition and the new freedom of expression that have given rise to fear of the Muslim minority and ultra-nationalist Buddhist extremism.

This definition, however, is misleading and has resulted in significant confusion both about the form of violence in question as well as its root cause. Indeed, from the point of view of many Myanmar Muslims, it appears to be a case of applying a perfectly sensible theory to the wrong context.

Such misconceptions not only ignore the reality of decades-long persecution of Muslims in the country, but they also absolve authorities of their historical responsibility for manufacturing, endorsing and permitting such violence, both directly and indirectly.

They also ignore the role played by Myanmar's generals and their cronies in manufacturing Burman-Buddhist nationalist ideology and institutionalizing a culture of fear and distrust of minorities, including the Muslim community. Anti-Muslim violence is, in fact, not a new phenomenon, and has been stirred by the military and its proxies since 1981.

The misdiagnosis also ignores the fact that the military deliberately designed the 2008 constitution to maintain sufficient power to protect their interests and have historically exploited identity as a tool to divide and control the country's diverse population.

It also ignores the reality that many institutions, including some of Myanmar's Buddhist monasteries, have long been infiltrated by certain military actors and have served as sites for organizing support for the military and their vision of nationalism.

That much of the violence has been carried out by mobs that also involve ordinary people does not mean that it is purely a social phenomenon free from any political involvement. Indeed, this form of violence is neither new nor apolitical, as campaigns to spread public fear against Muslims and the mobilization of pogroms have been consistently carried out by Myanmar's military and their proxies throughout the decades of military dictatorship.

The reality is that the current anti-Muslim violence is sign of continuity with the past, rather than a break with it.

Mask of reform
President Thein Sein's government is not the first to employ divide and rule tactics through a variety of proxies, manipulating religion and ethnicity as a means of maintaining power.

In the 1960 general election, Prime Minister U Nu published in his manifesto a promise to declare Buddhism as the state religion if elected. As a result, he won a landslide election victory.

Thein Sein's government now appears to be using this old tactic to kill three birds with one stone- to divert public attention from Chinese interests, to avoid enacting constitutional amendments that would allow opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to become the country's next president and to attract voters ahead of the 2015 elections.

Since Thein Sein took office in 2010, he has faced three major challenges: public protests against Chinese projects, public protests to amend the 2008 constitution and public support for Suu Kyi. These challenges have coincided with the re-emergence with anti-Muslim violence across Myanmar. That can hardly be a coincidence.

Public opposition to mega-projects, particularly those backed by China, has grown since Thein Sein took office. While he won praise for suspending the Chinese mega-dam project in Kachin State in 2011, this was short-lived.

In August 2012, police used white phosphorus against peaceful demonstrators, including monks and villagers at the Letpadaung copper mine. Another major Chinese project is the Shwe gas pipeline, which starts near Kyauk Pyu Township, Rakhine State and provides an important alternative route for China to much-needed energy resources should access through either the Malacca Strait or the South China Sea be blocked in a future conflict.

The second challenge is the growing public demand to amend the 2008 constitution, which many in Myanmar view as deeply flawed, undemocratic and designed by the junta to maintain the power of the army. Since early 2012, activists have been raising public awareness against the constitution and several public mass gatherings were organized to protest against the constitution and demand its amendment.

The third challenge is the outcome of 2012 by-election, which placed the military-backed ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) on the horns of a dilemma. Although Thein Sein successfully convinced the international community to recognize him as a reformist, even receiving a peace award from the International Crisis Group, his party has not yet convinced his country's own voters.

On the contrary, members of the USDP are well known for their record of corruption and it is not surprising that Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) party won a landslide victory at the 2012 by-election. The poll result was alarming for the ruling party and has created anxiety about the upcoming general election in 2015. The ruling party and its military backers may have thus considered applying political tactics that had already been tried and tested.

Political scapegoats
As the government came under increasing pressure from these multiple challenges, a new wave of anti-Muslim violence emerged. Violence broke out in Rakhine State in June and October 2012 where Rohingya and Kaman Muslims were targeted.

Tensions between Muslims and Buddhists have historically been at their highest in Rakhine, with ethnic cleansing campaigns against the Rohingya occurring in 1942, 1978 and 1991, making it an easy target for igniting anti-Muslim violence. But anti-Muslim mobilization was not limited to Rakhine and was soon followed by hate-speech campaigns in Karen State at the end of 2012 that spread to other parts of the country. In March 2013, anti-Muslim pogroms erupted in Meiktila in central Myanmar.

Government and crony-controlled media have also played a dangerous role by portraying Rohingya as intruders from Bangladesh and Islam as a threat to Buddhism. They have succeeded in obscuring real problems such as land grabbing by the army, civil war and the use of rape as a weapon against minorities. The majority of Buddhists are unaware that they are being brainwashed by the powerful cronies' media.

It is highly likely that many extremist Buddhist monks are agents of Myanmar's army and part of a vast propaganda machine. In a context where monks are the most revered figures in society, this strategy has proven highly effective and faces almost no opposition. Those who have spoken out against radical monks have been intimidated.

During the crisis, the inflammatory rhetoric of Thein Sein and his spokesperson Major Zaw Htay received strong support from Buddhist extremists. In a meeting with the head of UNHCR in July 2012, Thein Sein denied the existence of the Rohingyas, stating that they are the illegal immigrants and should be sent to third countries or kept in concentration camps as refugees. His comments have directly put the lives of Rohingya into great danger, encouraged hatred against them and allowed the extremists to target them without condemnation by the wider public.

During a recent attack on Rohingyas, Zaw Htay posted provocative anti-Rohingya propaganda on his Facebook account in Burmese. Exercising scare tactics, he used the Rohingya Solidarity Organization, an organization known to be almost defunct for several decades, as a scarecrow, claiming that RSO members had crossed into Myanmar to invade Rakhine State and threaten the lives of Buddhists. He also warned opposition parties and critics not to oppose government policy towards the Rohingya on the basis of human rights.

Anti-Muslim hate campaigns led by the radical 969 movement, including those led by Buddhist monk U Wirathu, have played a significant role in expanding the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya into generalized anti-Muslim violence across the country. U Wirathu has traveled across Myanmar giving anti-Muslim speeches without restriction and expanded an extremist network known as the Race and Faith Defense League, (Ma Ba Tha).

Bigoted boycotts
The biased judiciary, meanwhile, systematically grants impunity to the hate instigators, encouraging further attacks on Muslims. In return, these extremists promote the ruling party as a defender of Buddhism and Buddhist interests. Ma Ba Tha also largely opposes the amendment of the 2008 constitution, particularly the section 59(F) that bars Suu Kyi from becoming president because she was married to a now deceased foreigner.

A public declaration of anti-Muslim persecution was made on September 10, 2012 after a meeting between monks from all Buddhist sects in Karen State organized by the Alliance of Buddhism Custodians at Mae Baung Monastery in the state capital Hpa-an.

The declaration was mainly intended to segregate Muslims from social and economic activities, including a drive to boycott Muslim-owned shops. In December 2012, the alliance declared it would fine anyone who breached the order and members of Ma Ba Tha began monitoring Muslim shops to implement the order.

The declaration openly challenges the rule of law and yet in spite of this there has not been a single response from Thein Sein's government. The President did not fail, however, to swiftly issue a statement defending U Wirathu when Time magazine published an edition with the monk on the front cover calling him 'the face of Buddhist terror'.

Tolerance of anti-Muslim violence was also apparent during the Meiktila pogroms in March 2013. Victims said that when police were requested to protect Muslims from deadly attacks they responded that orders were not given to stop the violent mobs. The mystery in that instance is who held the authority to give the orders and why these officials would allow the mobs to target Muslims.

At the same time, the organized manner in which the mobs targeted Muslims reveals that at least some among them were well-trained to carry out heinous crimes against humanity, such as the chopping and burning alive of 28 small children at an Islamic orphanage.

So far anti-Rohingya and anti-Muslim campaigns have successfully diverted public attention from many issues: Chinese projects, land grabbing, the civil war in Kachin State, corruption, dubious multi-billion dollar property holdings by high-ranking generals, and calls to amend the controversial 2008 constitution.

Undoubtedly, the military will plan their every strategy carefully and execute every move deliberately. The result of the 2012 by-election could be used as a parameter to measure the USDP's chance of victory in 2015. The stakes are high, raising the potential for more distractive anti-Muslim mobilization, persecution and violence in the run-up to the polls.

While the international community invests millions in government institutions such as the Myanmar Peace Center, more must be done to hold the government accountable for the role it has played in supporting organizations and movements responsible for inciting hatred and violence. Allowing these deadly and divisive trends to continue is morally wrong and threatens to unleash new cycles of fear, violence and vengeance that will undermine the prospects of all of Myanmar's people and jeopardize stability across the wider region.

Kyaw Win is a Burmese Muslim scholar and human rights activist living in London.

(Copyright: 2014 Kyaw Win) 


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30. MALNUTRITION, DISEASE RISING IN BURMESE MUSLIM CAMPS
by Annie Gowen 
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(Washington Post, July 29, 2014)
 
SITTWE, Burma — A little girl balances a bag of donated rice on her head as she begs for her family of eight. Other children play in fetid, trash-clogged pools of water. And at a religious class at a makeshift mosque, more than a third of the children had not eaten that day. Or the day before.

The United Nations says that 135,000 ethnic Rohingya Muslims are still stuck in refugee camps on the western coast of Burma, two years after the government rounded them up in the wake of religious violence that left villages scorched, thousands homeless and more than 200 dead.

The Rohingya, a long-persecuted ethnic minority, have been forced to live as virtual prisoners in temporary huts, scraping by on donated bags of rice and chickpeas and whatever fish they can pull from the ocean. The situation is so dire that some 86,000 people have tried to flee by boat, and Human Rights Watch has accused the government of a campaign of “ethnic cleansing.” Yanghee Lee, the United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in Burma, said recently that the situation is “deplorable” and that restrictions on movement have had a severe impact on the Rohingya’s access to jobs, water and sanitation, health care and education.

“The Muslim community . . . continues to face systematic discrimination, which includes restrictions in the freedom of movement, restrictions in access to land, food, water, education and health care, and restrictions on marriages and birth registration,” Lee said.

The humanitarian crisis worsened over the winter, after the Burmese government suspended operations of the aid group Doctors Without Borders in the area, leaving more than 700,000 people without proper medical care. The government said only late last week that the doctors could return. Violence forced other organizations to evacuate, then struggle to ramp up aid. 
 
Now, children are starving. Aid workers say they have seen an alarming uptick in child malnutrition in recent months because for so long, local hostilities hindered their access to mothers and pregnant women and interrupted water, food and sanitation supplies.

“What we have observed from March to June is a dramatic increase in admissions for severe acute malnutrition. We saw the figures doubling,” said Bertrand Bainvel, UNICEF’s representative in Burma. “We’re all still very concerned about the situation.”

‘Economic isolation’

The Rohingya camps are spread out over miles of the western state of Rakhine, some so remote they are reachable only by boat. With so much time having passed, life has established a rhythm of its own for the residents. In some camps, small markets have sprung up, with goods supplied by Rakhine traders on the outside, the same ethnic group the Rohingya have long clashed with.

Fish from the nearby ocean dries on long poles, and some residents have planted gardens next to their huts with donated seeds to augment the meager food supply. They are not allowed to leave for the most part, although the residents near the town of Sittwe can take trips in guarded trucks to the one remaining Muslim neighborhood across town.

The Rohingya are an ethnic minority in Burma, the predominantly Buddhist Southeast Asian nation of more than 55 million people. Tensions between the Rohingya and their ethnic Rakhine Buddhist neighbors existed long before the recent flare-up of violence.

During five decades of harsh military rule in Burma, the Rohingya were persecuted by the government, human rights experts say, forced to endure hard labor, relocations, rape and torture. Although Rohingya have lived in Burma for generations, a strict 1982 citizenship law rendered many of them stateless, and the government continues to consider them refugees from Bangladesh. This year, census workers refused to count those who identified themselves as Rohingya.

Ye Htut, the spokesman for the Burmese president, Thein Sein, bristled when the word “Rohingya” was used in an interview.

“I would like to point out that the government of Myanmar and Myanmar people didn’t accept the word Rohingya,” Ye Htut said. “We recognize there are Islamic Bengalis in our country.” But, he said, “We recognize there are tensions and challenges in our country, especially communal violence.”

Phil Robertson, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch in Asia, said that the government has engaged in a policy of “social and economic isolation of the Rohingya” for years, particularly since June 2012, when three Muslim men allegedly raped a Buddhist woman.

Since then, Robertson said, “It’s been a downward spiral in terms of humanitarian access and accountability. The situation is going badly downhill. You have about 140,000 people in displaced-persons camps and another 40,000 locked in their villages without adequate access to food and medical services.”

Ye Htut said that the Rohingya are being kept in the camps for their own protection.

The crisis has given rise to widespread international outrage, and questions about whether the United States — which eased economic sanctions on Burma after the government began a process of democratic reform in 2011 — has painted a rosier picture of the emerging democracy than is warranted.

“No one is turning a blind eye to anything. In fact we’re working continually to help address problems on the ground,” said Derek J. Mitchell, the U.S. ambassador to Burma. “What we are doing out here is in anticipation of continued reform, although we need to remain patient as the country deals with increasingly difficult issues going forward.”

Doctors Without Borders said in a statement Friday that they were “cautiously optimistic” after the government’s surprise announcement that doctors could return to the area after they were expelled in February for treating victims of a January clash that left more than 40 Rohingya dead — a confrontation the government denies took place. Some, however, viewed the news with skepticism, arguing it could be a public relations ploy ahead of an expected visit by U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry in August.

The group was the main provider of medical care for more than 700,000 people in Rakhine state, and the ouster of the 600 staffers and the shuttering of clinics and traveling medical teams left huge gaps. The government compensated with a small mobile team that now numbers around 100.

The impact of the suspension has been profound. One recent humid day in the back of a makeshift pharmacy at a camp just outside Sittwe, dozens of Rohingya waited in line to receive a few tablets of donated medicine. A woman, Ommar Khulsom, 30, clutched her feverish newborn niece. The little girl’s mother had suffered from edema throughout her pregnancy and had been under the care of Doctors Without Borders, a local staffer who had worked with the aid group said. When they were forced out, however, her treatment stopped. The night she gave birth, the woman bled to death.
Looking for hope

Maung Hla Tin, 33, a carpenter and camp leader, said that about 50 people had died in his section, including more than a dozen babies, in the past two years. His area was without food for 15 days in April, and a nongovernmental organization stopped delivering soap, fresh water and other sanitary supplies, which gave rise to widespread diarrhea and other diseases, he said.

“We have no hope,” he said.

The government’s unexpected decision to allow Doctors Without Borders back into the camps followed a June meeting at which local leaders, U.N. officials, civil activists and others drew up an action plan to address the crisis. While that was viewed as a positive step, some feel little is being done to address the larger question of the Rohingya’s fate.

“In the long term, solutions must be found” for the displaced people and thousands of others living in isolated villages, said Pierre Peron, spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Rangoon.

Many Rohingya said they fear they may never resume normal lives.

“We’re suffering here. We want to go back to our homes,” said Thin Mg, 44, who had a small goods-trading business before the violence displaced his family. “One day is like one year.”

Annie Gowen is The Post’s India bureau chief and has reported for the Post throughout South Asia and the Middle East.

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31. LIFE IN A JIHADIST CAPITAL: ORDER WITH A DARKER SIDE: In a Syrian City, ISIS Puts Its Vision Into Practice
by an EMPLOYEE of THE NEW YORK TIMES and BEN HUBBARD
=========================================

(The New York Times, JULY 23, 2014)
RAQQA, Syria — When his factory was bombed in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, the businessman considered two bleak options: remain at home and risk dying in the next airstrike, or flee like hundreds of thousands of others to a refugee camp in Turkey.

Instead, he took his remaining cash east and moved to a neighboring city, Raqqa, the de facto capital of the world’s fastest growing jihadist force. There he found a degree of order and security absent in other parts of Syria.

“The fighting in Syria will continue, so we have to live our lives,” said the businessman, who gave only a first name, Qadri, as he oversaw a dozen workers in his new children’s clothing factory in Raqqa.

Long before extremists rolled through Iraq and seized a large piece of territory, the group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, took over most of Raqqa Province, home to about a million people, and established a headquarters in its capital. Through strategic management and brute force, the group, which now calls itself simply the Islamic State, has begun imposing its vision of a state that blends its fundamentalist interpretation of Islam with the practicalities of governance.

Graphic:
A Rogue State Along Two Rivers
The victories gained by the militant group calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria were built on months of maneuvering along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which define a region known as the cradle of civilization.

In time, it has won the surprising respect of some war-weary citizens, like Qadri, who will accept any authority that can restore a semblance of normal life. Rebel-held areas of Aleppo, by comparison, remain racked with food shortages and crime. But there is a darker side to Islamic rule, with public executions and strict social codes that have left many in this once-tolerant community deeply worried about the future.

In the city of Raqqa, traffic police officers keep intersections clear, crime is rare, and tax collectors issue receipts. But statues like the landmark lions in Al Rasheed Park have been destroyed because they were considered blasphemous. Public spaces like Al Amasy Square, where young men and women once hung out and flirted in the evenings, have been walled off with heavy metal fences topped with the black flags of ISIS. People accused of stealing have lost their hands in public amputations.

“What I see in Raqqa proves that the Islamic State has a clear vision to establish a state in the real meaning of the word,” said a retired teacher in the city of Raqqa. “It is not a joke.”

How ISIS rules in Raqqa offers insight into what it is trying to do as it moves to consolidate its grip in territories spanning the Syrian-Iraqi border. An employee of The New York Times recently spent six days in Raqqa and interviewed a dozen residents. The employee and those interviewed are not being identified to protect them from retaliation by the extremists who have hunted down and killed those perceived as opposing their project.

To those entering Raqqa, ISIS makes clear, immediately, who is in charge.

At the southern entrance to the city, visitors were once greeted by a towering mosaic of President Bashar al-Assad and Haroun al-Rasheed, the caliph who ruled the Islamic world from Raqqa in the ninth century. Now there is a towering black billboard that pays homage to ISIS and to the so-called martyrs who died fighting for its cause.

Raqqa’s City Hall houses the Islamic Services Commission. The former office of the Finance Ministry contains the Shariah court and the criminal police. The traffic police are based in the First Shariah High School. Raqqa’s Credit Bank is now the tax authority, where employees collect $20 every two months from shop owners for electricity, water and security. Many said that they had received official receipts stamped with the ISIS logo and that the fees were less than they used to pay in bribes to Mr. Assad’s government.

“I feel like I am dealing with a respected state, not thugs,” said a Raqqa goldsmith in his small shop as a woman shopped for gold pieces with cash sent from abroad by her husband.

Raqqa is a test case for ISIS, which imposed itself as the ultimate authority in this city on the Euphrates River early this year. The group has already proved its military prowess, routing other militias in Syria as well as the Iraqi military. But it is here in this agricultural hub that it has had the most time to turn its ideology into reality, a project that appears unlikely to end soon given the lack of a military force able to displace it.

An aid worker who travels to Raqqa said the ranks of ISIS were filled with volatile young men, many of them foreigners more interested in violence than governance. To keep things running, it has paid or threatened skilled workers to remain in their posts while putting loyalist supervisors over them to ensure compliance with Islamic rules.

“They can’t fire all the staff and bring new people to run a hospital, so they change the manager to someone who will enforce their rules and regulations,” the aid worker said, speaking on the condition of anonymity so as not to endanger his work.

Raqqa’s three churches, once home to an active Christian minority, have all been shuttered. After capturing the largest, the Armenian Catholic Martyrs Church, ISIS removed its crosses, hung black flags from its facade and converted it into an Islamic center that screens videos of battles and suicide operations to recruit new fighters.

The few Christians who remain pay a minority tax of a few dollars per month. When ISIS’s religious police officers patrol to make sure shops close during Muslim prayers, the Christians must obey, too.

The religious police have banned public smoking of cigarettes and water pipes — a move that has dampened the city’s social life, forcing cafes to close. They also make sure that women cover their hair and faces in public.

A university professor from Raqqa said ISIS gunmen recently stopped a bus heading to Damascus when they found one woman on board insufficiently covered. They held the bus up for an hour and a half until she went home and changed, the professor said.

More pragmatically, ISIS has managed to keep food in markets, and bakeries and gas stations functioning. But it has had more trouble with drinking water and electricity, which is out for as much as 20 hours a day.

Perhaps realizing that the young extremists most attracted to its sectarian violence lack professional skills, the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, asked in a recent audio address for doctors and engineers to travel to places like Raqqa to help build his newly declared Islamic State. “Their migration is an obligation so that they can answer the dire need of the Muslims,” Mr. Baghdadi said.

Hints of this international mobilization are already apparent in Raqqa, where gunmen at checkpoints are often Saudi, Egyptian, Tunisian or Libyan. Raqqa’s emir of electricity is Sudanese, and one hospital is run by a Jordanian who reports to an Egyptian boss, according to Syrians who work under them.

After ISIS’s advance into Iraq last month, the Jordanian went to Mosul to help organize a hospital there before returning to Raqqa.

“He talked with an eager shine in his eyes, saying that the caliphate of the Islamic State that began in Raqqa would spread over the whole region,” one of his employees said.

An employee of The New York Times reported from Raqqa, and Ben Hubbard from Beirut, Lebanon. Hwaida Saad and Mohammad Ghannam contributed reporting from Beirut.

A version of this article appears in print on July 24, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Life in a Jihadist Capital: Order With a Darker Side. 


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32. IRAQ: ISIS WARNS WOMEN TO WEAR FULL VEIL OR FACE PUNISHMENT
Reuters in Baghdad 
=========================================
(The Guardian, Friday 25 July 2014)

Sunni insurgents issue guidelines in mosques on how clothes should be worn to prevent women 'from falling into vulgarity'

An Iraqi woman in Baghdad
'Anyone who is not committed to this duty and is motivated by glamour will be subject to accountability.' Photograph: Ali Al-Saadi/AFP/Getty Images

Islamic State (Isis), the al-Qaida offshoot that seized large swathes of northern Iraq last month, has warned women in the city of Mosul to wear full-face veils or risk severe punishment.

The Sunni insurgents, who have declared a caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria and have threatened to march on Baghdad, also listed guidelines on how veils and clothes should be worn, part of a campaign to violently impose their radical brand of Islam.

"The conditions imposed on her clothes and grooming was only to end the pretext of debauchery resulting from grooming and overdressing," the group said in a statement.

"This is not a restriction on her freedom but to prevent her from falling into humiliation and vulgarity or to be a theatre for the eyes of those who are looking."

A cleric in Mosul told Reuters that Isis gunmen had shown up at his mosque and ordered him to read their warning on loudspeakers when worshippers gather.

"Anyone who is not committed to this duty and is motivated by glamour will be subject to accountability and severe punishment to protect society from harm and to maintain the necessities of religion and protect it from debauchery," Isis said.

The insurgents, formerly called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, have been systematically stamping out any religious or cultural influences they deem non-Islamic since their lightning sweep through the north.

US military and Iraqi security officials estimate Isis has at least 3,000 fighters in Iraq, rising towards 20,000 when new recruits since last month's advance are included.

Isis has provided guidelines on how women should dress in Mosul, one of Iraq's biggest cities. Their hands and feet must be covered, shapeless clothes that don't hug the body must be worn and perfume is prohibited. Women have also been told to never walk unaccompanied by a male guardian. Isis has even ordered shopkeepers to cover their store mannequins with full-face veils.

The insurgents run vice patrols in Mosul that answer to a morality committee, which has shut the city's college of fine arts and physical education, knocked down statues of famous poets and banned smoking and waterpipes.

A man was recently whipped in public for sexually harassing a woman.

Isis militants view Iraq's majority Shias as infidels who deserve to be killed and have told Christians to either convert to Islam, pay a religious levy or face death. Their radical views have alarmed Iraqis, but there are no signs their leaders will be able to regain control of captured areas."Since the army's virtual collapse in the face of the Sunni militant onslaught, Kurdish peshmerga fighters and Shi'ite militias have emerged as the only forces that seem capable of challenging Isis.

Political paralysis has eroded faith in Iraqi leaders. Politicians have been in deadlock over forming a new government since an election in April, and the next step – choosing a prime minister – may prove more difficult.

Iraq's parliament elected a senior Kurdish lawmaker president on Thursday, a significant step in a delayed process to create a government capable of uniting the country and countering insurgents.

The Shi'ite prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, has ruled since the election in a caretaker capacity, defying demands from minority Sunnis and Kurds that he step aside for a less divisive figure. Even some fellow Shi'ites oppose his bid for a third term.

Critics say Maliki has alienated Sunnis, deepening sectarian divisions that have benefited Isis.

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33. THE PLACES IN BETWEEN: THE STRUGGLE TO DEFINE INDONESIA
by Pankaj Mishra
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(The New Yorker, August 04, 2014 Issue)

After India and China, Indonesia was the biggest new nation-state to emerge in the mid-twentieth century. Consisting of thousands of islands large and small, it sprawls roughly the same distance as that from Washington, D.C., to Alaska, and contains the largest Muslim population on earth. Yet, on our mental map of the world, the country is little more than a faraway setting for earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. The political traumas of post-colonial Egypt, from Suez to el-Sisi, are far better known than the killing, starting in 1965, of more than half a million Indonesians suspected of being Communists or the thirty-year insurgency in Aceh Province. Foreign-affairs columnists, who prematurely hailed many revolutions at the end of the Cold War (Rose, Orange, Green, Saffron), failed to color-code the dramatic overthrow, in 1998, of Suharto, Indonesia’s long-standing dictator. They have scarcely noticed the country’s subsequent transfers of power through elections (there was one earlier this month) and a radical experiment in decentralization. The revelation that, from 1967 to 1971, Barack Obama lived in Jakarta with his mother, a distinguished anthropologist, does not seem to have provoked broadened interest in Indonesian history and culture—as distinct from the speculation that the President of the United States might have been brought up a Muslim.

Indonesia’s diversity is formidable: some thirteen and a half thousand islands, two hundred and fifty million people, around three hundred and sixty ethnic groups, and more than seven hundred languages. In this bewildering mosaic, it is hard to find any shared moral outlooks, political dispositions, customs, or artistic traditions that do not reveal further internal complexity and division. Java alone—the most populous of the islands, with nearly sixty per cent of the country’s population—offers a vast spectacle of overlapping cultural identities, and contains the sediments of many world civilizations (Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, European). The Chinese who settled in the port towns of the archipelago in the fifteenth century are a reminder of the great maritime network that, long before the advent of European colonialists, bound Southeast Asia to places as far away as the Mediterranean. Islam is practiced variously, tinged by the pre-Islamic faiths of Hinduism, Buddhism, and even animism. The ethnic or quasi-ethnic groups that populate the islands (Javanese, Batak, Bugis, Acehnese, Balinese, Papuan, Bimanese, Dayak, and Ambonese) can make Indonesia seem like the world’s largest open-air museum of natural history.

As Elizabeth Pisani writes in her exuberant and wise travel book “Indonesia Etc.” (Norton), this diversity “is not just geographic and cultural; different groups are essentially living at different points in human history, all at the same time.” In recent years, foreign businessmen, disgruntled with rising costs and falling profits in India and China, have gravitated to Indonesia instead. About half the population is under the age of thirty, and this has stoked excited conjecture in the international business media about Indonesia’s “demographic dividend.” And it is true that in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, once known for its ferocious headhunters, you can now find gated communities and Louis Vuitton bags. But the emblems of consumer modernity can be deceptive. While Jakarta tweets more than any other city in the world, and sixty-nine million Indonesians—more than the entire population of the United Kingdom—use Facebook, a tribe of hunter-gatherers still dines on bears in the dwindling rain forests of Sumatra, and pre-burial rites in nominally Christian Sumba include tea with the corpse.

This coexistence of the archaic and the contemporary is only one of many peculiarities that mark Indonesia as the unlikeliest of the nation-states improvised from the ruins of Europe’s empires after the Second World War. The merchants and traders of the Netherlands, who ruthlessly consolidated their power in the region beginning in the seventeenth century, had given the archipelago a semblance of unity, making Java its administrative center. The Indonesian nationalists, mainly Javanese, who threw the Dutch out—in 1949, after a four-year struggle—were keen to preserve their inheritance, and emulated the coercion, deceit, and bribery of the colonial rulers. But the country’s makeshift quality has always been apparent; it was revealed by the alarmingly vague second sentence in the declaration of independence from the Netherlands, which reads, “Matters relating to the transfer of power etc. will be executed carefully and as soon as possible.”

Indonesia, Pisani writes, “has been working on that ‘etc’ ever since.” To be fair, Indonesians have had a lot to work on. Building political and economic institutions was never going to be easy in a geographically scattered country with a crippling colonial legacy—low literacy, high unemployment, and inflation. The Japanese invasion and occupation during the Second World War had undermined the two incidental benefits of long European rule: a professional army and a bureaucracy. In the mid-nineteen-fifties, the American novelist Richard Wright concluded that “Indonesia has taken power away from the Dutch, but she does not know how to use it.” Wright invested his hopes for rapid national consolidation in “the engineer who can build a project out of eighty million human lives, a project that can nourish them, sustain them, and yet have their voluntary loyalty.” Indonesia did have such a person: Sukarno, a qualified engineer and architect who had become a prominent insurgent against Dutch rule. For a brief while, he formed—with India’s Jawaharlal Nehru and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser—a kind of Holy Trinity of the post-colonial world. But Sukarno struggled to secure the loyalty of the country’s dissimilar peoples. In the service of his nation-building project, he deployed anti-imperialist rhetoric, nationalized privately held industries, and unleashed the military against secession-minded islanders. He developed an ideology known as Nasakom (an attempted blend of nationalism, Islam, and Communism), before settling on a more autocratic amalgam that he called Guided Democracy.

By the early nineteen-sixties, Sukarno was worried about the military, which had been developing close links with the Pentagon, and he sought to establish a counterweight by strengthening the Partai Komunis Indonesia, at that time the largest Communist party outside the Soviet Union and China. But a series of still unclear events on the night of September 30, 1965, led to his downfall: several members of the military high command were murdered, provoking a counter-coup by a general named Suharto. The new rulers, Pisani writes, unleashed “a tsunami of anti-P.K.I. propaganda, followed by revenge killings.” The military zealously participated in the extermination of left-wing pests, and, as Pisani points out, “many ordinary Indonesians joined in with gusto.” Various groups—big landowners in Bali threatened by landless peasants, Dayak tribes resentful of ethnic Chinese—“used the great orgy of violence to settle different scores.” In Sumatra, “gangster organizations affiliated with business interests developed a special line in garroting communists who had tried to organize plantation workers.” The killings of 1965 and 1966 remain one of the great unpunished crimes of the twentieth century. The recent documentary “The Act of Killing” shows aging Indonesians eagerly boasting of their role in the exterminations.

This bloodletting inaugurated Suharto’s New Order—an even more transparent euphemism for despotism than Sukarno’s Guided Democracy had been. Suharto offered people rapid economic growth through private investment and foreign trade, without any guarantee of democratic rights. Styling himself bapak, or father, of all Indonesians, he proved more successful than other stern paternalists, such as the Shah of Iran and the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos. One of his advisers was a close reader of Samuel Huntington’s “Political Order in Changing Societies” (1968). The book’s thesis—that simultaneous political and economic modernization could lead to chaos—was often interpreted in developing countries as a warning against unguided democracy. Suharto, accordingly, combined hard-nosed political domination with an expanding network of economic patronage. In effect, he was one of the earliest exponents of a model that China’s rulers now embody: crony capitalism mixed with authoritarianism. He benefitted from the fact that the massacres had not only disposed of a strong political opposition but also intimidated potential dissenters among peasants and workers. According to Huntington, the historical role of the military in developing societies “is to open the door to the middle class and to close it on the lower class.” Suharto, together with his relatives and allies in the military and in big business, pulled off this tricky double maneuver for more than three decades, helped by the country’s wealth of exportable natural resources (tin, timber, oil, coal, rubber, and bauxite).

During the nineteen-seventies and eighties, Jakarta expanded from the low-rise city of Obama’s childhood into a perennially gridlocked glass-and-steel megalopolis. But with economic growth came a revolution of aspirations and an increasingly politicized public. In 1998, after the Asian financial crisis exposed the fragile foundations of Indonesia’s economic gains, Suharto’s autocracy finally collapsed. His successors have cautiously permitted elections and press freedoms, but they have struggled to find a formula that can attract investors, who seek high quarterly returns on their infusions of capital, without alienating the poorly paid or unemployed masses. Stalwarts of the Suharto regime—both ex-generals and monopoly industrialists—have reinvented themselves as manipulators of electoral politics, and disillusionment with democracy runs high.

The country’s innate centrifugal forces have been strengthened by the abrupt decision, in 1999, to devolve political power from Java to the provinces. As Pisani puts it, “In the space of just eighteen months, the world’s fourth most populous nation and one of its most centralized burst apart to become one of its most decentralized. The center still takes care of defence, fiscal policy, foreign relations, religious affairs, justice and planning. But everything else—health, education, investment policy, fisheries and a whole lot more—was handed over to close to 300 district ‘governments.’ ”
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Many of the new administrators in the provinces—popularly known as “mini Suhartos”—are adept at siphoning off the funds and resources at their disposal. The country’s old problems of poverty, inequality, and environmental despoliation have become more daunting amid the euphoria generated by faster economic growth and the enrichment of a tiny minority. The elections earlier this month revealed a deepening confusion over what kind of country Indonesia should be. One of the two main Presidential candidates was Suharto’s former son-in-law, Prabowo Subianto, a former general accused of committing many human-rights abuses in the nineties, who was backed by most of the political and business élite. Though he is an oil magnate these days, Prabowo tried to direct mass rage and frustration against foreigners who are “pillaging” Indonesia. His ultimately victorious opponent was Joko Widodo (widely known as Jokowi), who has enjoyed a spectacularly rapid rise since 2012, when he went from being the mayor of his home town to governor of Jakarta. Jokowi was the first Presidential candidate since Suharto to have had no ties to the dictator. The son of a carpenter, he has a record of supporting small businesses and the urban poor. The election results show the huge appeal of his call to a “mental revolution” and “bottom-up” governance among young Indonesians discontented with top-down modernizers.

Pisani is an exceptionally resourceful observer of the ongoing battle to define Indonesia. She first visited the country more than thirty years ago, as a backpacker; she returned as a journalist in 1988, just as public disaffection with Suharto was starting to bubble. In 2001, three years after Suharto was forced out, she was on hand to witness the country’s fumbling attempts at political reform, or reformasi, and stayed to see its first direct Presidential election, in 2004. Her book, a product of more recent and extensive travels, benefits from this long view, and also from her fluency in Bahasa Indonesia, the one language that most Indonesians can communicate in.

Seeking the unconventional and the little explored, Pisani seems to have deliberately ignored Bali, whose terraced rice fields, gamelan ensembles, and matrimonial opportunities were commemorated most recently in “Eat Pray Love.” Exposing herself to motorbikes and dingy buses on bad roads, leaky fishing boats and unreliable ferries, she traces a long, meandering route through the islands on the periphery—Sumba, Maluku, Sulawesi, Sumatra, and Kalimantan—before arriving in the old core of Java. She creatively uses the travel book’s discursive form, its built-in tendency toward the random. Her journey is structured by curiosity, and quickened by a sense of wonder and discovery. The information that a shaman was called in to catch a woman-eating crocodile on an island off the coast of Sumatra prompts a typical response from Pisani: “I resolved to go to Haloban to talk to the Crocodile Whisperer.” Such wanderlust can border on the masochistic in a country that is, as one of Pisani’s friends points out, “hard on the bum.” Pisani, however, is always game for fresh experience, whether watching votes being bought at a local election in Aceh or looking for the optimum distance between a twenty-four-hour karaoke bar and a smelly toilet on the five-day ferry to Maluku.

More remarkable, she never fails to situate her often meticulously ethnographic depictions of distinct peoples and cultures within a larger picture of a fast-changing country—one in which a system of patronage connects district officials and their local supporters to one another and to Java, and the modern capitalist economy is everywhere, raising incomes on the remotest islands while also despoiling them. Indonesians, Pisani finds, all partake of a collective life at various levels—family, village, neighborhood, region, and country—no matter how diversely they worship their gods or make and dissolve marriages. Indeed, much of rural Java still resembles the island that Clifford Geertz, Indonesia’s most astute American observer, saw in the nineteen-fifties. But the old bonds are fraying. Pisani writes, “This spirit of solidarity may not survive the pressures of the modern economy, much less the wholesale move to that other Java, the McDonald’s, Indomaret, toll-road, gated-community Java that is gobbling up the island, bite by bite.”

A much cited report by the McKinsey Global Institute claims that “around 50 per cent of all Indonesians could be members of the consuming class by 2030, compared with 20 per cent today.” It’s tempting to see Indonesia as a typical “traditional” society in which an increasingly individualistic middle class will bring about a secular and democratic nation-state. But Pisani’s knowledge of the country’s innermost recesses leads her to challenge the boosterish speculations of “pinstriped researchers at banks in Hong Kong, committees of think-tank worthies, or foreign journalists.” She counters McKinsey’s projections with some simple facts: “A third of young Indonesians are producing nothing at all, four out of five adults don’t have a bank account, and banks are lending to help people buy things, not to set up new businesses.” Meanwhile, the self-dealing activities of the country’s political and business élites—“raking in money from commodities, living easy and spending large”—do little to spur real economic growth.

She is equally dismissive of the ideologues who claim that Indonesia is in the ever-expanding evil empire of Islamic extremism. In much of Indonesia, religious practices are still syncretic. In Christian Sumba, she finds the islanders adhering to the ancient Marapu religion, “guided more by what they read in the entrails of a chicken than by what they read in the Bible.” Muslims show no sign of repudiating the wayang, the shadow-puppet theatre based on the Hindu epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Though it’s true that orthodox religion seems increasingly attractive to urban Indonesians, this is largely because religion “is a visible badge of identity which suits the need to clump together, so very pronounced in clannish Indonesia.” A few fanatics attacking Christians and Muslim minorities, she argues, do not represent the majority, who seem indifferent to what other people believe. Religious political parties, faced with declining vote share, have moved pragmatically toward the center. However, a more hardheaded analysis would show that intolerance of religious difference has grown since the fall of Suharto and the advent of democracy. As Pisani admits, “Bigotry does produce votes.” In order to achieve electoral majorities, politicians have pulled all kinds of stunts—from rash promises of regional autonomy to legislation making women ride motorbikes sidesaddle and protests against Lady Gaga.

Indonesia’s political development has had other unexpected outcomes. In a country where once only an élite few could benefit from corruption, many more people are now on the take. Pisani argues that it’s possible to see widespread corruption as a kind of “social equalizer.” In Indonesia’s long-standing system of clan patronage, people look out for members of their extended family or village, awarding them money, contracts, or jobs. Decentralization has empowered many more people to do favors than was previously the case, which in turn gives them a greater investment in maintaining the political status quo. Thus, corruption plays a crucial role “in tying the archipelago’s mosaic of islands and disparate peoples into a nation,” Pisani writes. “Patronage is the price of unity.”

Coming from one of the mini Suhartos, this would seem a cynical rationalization. But Pisani recognizes, as Richard Wright did, that a collective project sustained by voluntary loyalty is crucial to an artificial nation-state like Indonesia, especially when there is a widening abyss between wealth and misery and only a weak national ideology. In Indonesia these days, as in many post-colonial countries, welfare is rarely conceived as a national project, as it was during the idealistic era of Sukarno, Nehru, and Nasser; it is every man for himself. Pisani fears that this new culture of global capitalism has rapidly hollowed out beliefs and institutions that once gave meaning and direction to millions of lives, and replaced them with little more than an invitation to private gratification. High economic growth sustained over several years might eventually help Indonesians aspiring to become free, self-motivated individuals in the modern world. As for the rest, she writes, “the deeply rooted village populations of Indonesia have always lived fairly close to subsistence and millions remain contented with that life.”

Pisani is adamant that not all Indonesians can be or ought to be committed to the modern adventure of realizing individual freedom through material success and possessions in the metropolis. Her experience among the premodern communities of Indonesia has made her alert to the painful and often futile sacrifices that their members make for the sake of an imagined better life: how “the all-encompassing security of a shared culture gets sold off in exchange for individual fulfillment.” A pragmatic conservatism also explains the lack of a sizable Indonesian diaspora in the West. Emigration to foreign lands looks too arduous when, “by drifting to another island, you can unlace the stays of place and clan, you can learn new dances and try new foods.” Pisani’s views are similar to those of Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother, whose anthropological field work among Javanese villagers made her argue for the economic viability of rural craft traditions among subsistence farmers, and against the bias in all modernizing ideologies toward urbanization.

Pisani hopes, somewhat wistfully, that Indonesia’s “next Etc.” may be a “collectivist culture without the feudalism.” This seems even vaguer than the country’s original declaration of independence, in 1945. Indonesia cannot avoid a reckoning with its present and future challenges by trying to retreat into its past. Of all the historical forces that have worked upon its diverse peoples in the past century—maritime trade, imperialism, development, and despotism—the economy and the culture of globalization may turn out to have the most profoundly ambiguous effects. Halfway through her journey, Pisani begins to worry that she is trying “to write a book about a country that has ceased to exist.”

Such uncertainty seems widely shared in many other post-colonial countries. Nationalist ideologies, forged to bring consensus to new heterogeneous societies, have long been in decay. Electoral democracy has lost its moral prestige. Old-style military despots are back in power in Thailand and Egypt. However brutal, they seem to lack the conviction and the resources to build a new national project. Authoritarianism itself has ceased to be a bulwark against disorder in many places, most dramatically in Syria and Iraq.

Indonesia is hardly immune to catastrophic breakdowns, as the anti-Communist pogrom showed. But, like India, it has been relatively fortunate in evolving a mode of politics that can include many discontinuities—of class, region, ethnicity, and religion. Indonesia can’t avoid or prevent severe conflict, but it can weather it without falling apart. The Indonesian archipelago is unlikely to descend into the violent secessionist anarchy currently on display in the Middle East and North Africa. However, what it still needs, as Geertz once argued, is a “structure of difference within which cultural tensions that are not about to go away, or even to moderate, can be placed and negotiated—contained in a country.” Such a reconfigured national consensus, or a way of doing without one, seems equally imperative in the case of Hispanic immigrants in America, Muslims in France, Palestinians in Israel, Tamils in Sri Lanka, Kurds in Turkey, and Tibetans in China. The old question—what is a country, and what is its basis?—has become menacingly relevant long after it appeared to have been settled. In that sense, it is not facile to wonder if we are all Indonesians now, facing the perplexities of a shattering old order. 


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34. FAILED MONUMENT TO MILITARY LOGIC: THE ATLANTIC WALL’S COLOSSAL WRECK
by Ianthe Ruthven
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(Le Monde Diplomatique, July 2014)

Hitler meant his defence line from the Arctic to the Spanish border to last for a thousand years. Given the strength of reinforced concrete, bits of it may do that; but most of it was breached within two weeks.

Walking in Normandy some years ago, I came across two monumental bunkers half buried in a wood; their silent, menacing presence in the gentle Cotentin landscape was deeply incongruous. Later I found several tipped-up pillboxes on a beach, with looming shapes that suggested stranded sea monsters. Fascinated by the scale, and length, of these fortifications, I bought a campervan and explored the whole of the Atlantic Wall.

The Wall — the chain of second world war fortifications stretching from Norway’s Arctic frontier with Russia to France’s Basque Country frontier with Spain — is the least acknowledged of Europe’s military monuments. Mostly built between 1942 and 1945, it is the largest construction project in history to have been executed in so short a time. It remains a testament to the “Thousand-year Reich” — yet it lasted just over a decade, even if the virtually indestructible qualities of reinforced concrete mean that a good portion of it will endure for the millennium Adolf Hitler dreamed about.

Strategically, the idea of protecting Nazi-occupied Europe from Allied invasion with a vast network of batteries and bunkers is evidence of the folly of Hitler’s enterprise: without air supremacy, fixed defences were at best redundant, at worst useless. Hitler had understood the limitations of fixed defences when, in May 1940, he successfully bypassed France’s supposedly impregnable Maginot Line. Yet he took an obsessive interest in the Wall, sketching the designs of casemates and bunkers, and planning the installations down to the smallest details.

After the death of his minister for armaments, Fritz Todt, in an air crash in February 1942, Hitler entrusted the project to his chief architect, Albert Speer. In barely two years, the Wall consumed millions of tonnes of reinforced concrete, depriving armaments factories of vital iron and steel. As Speer recollected during his years in Spandau prison, it had been an exercise in futility: “All this expenditure of effort was sheer waste.” The Wall had concentrated its fortifications on harbours, predicated on Hitler’s belief that the Allies would be unable to mount a successful invasion without taking a sizeable port. But, as Speer noted, with a “single brilliant technical idea [the floating Mulberry harbours], the enemy bypassed these defences within two weeks of the first landing” (1).
Human cost

The Wall’s military futility is only part of the story. At the height of work in 1944, nearly 300,000 men were coerced into building 60,000 structures, from one-man machine gun foxholes known as “tobruks” to massive casemates to protect the largest guns from air and sea attack. Around 10% of the workers were Germans in supervisory roles, but most were prisoners of war or conscripts of the Compulsory Work Service (Service du Travail Obligatoire), offered the choice of work on the Wall and the massive submarine pens that protected the U-boat “wolf packs” preying on Atlantic shipping, or forced labour in Germany. Many thousands died in terrible conditions, including 500 Soviet prisoners in the Norwegian Arctic not given adequate clothing. Local building contractors operated as subsidiaries of German companies, and profited from the occupation. The Wall is a monument to the profiteers of occupied Europe, as well as to the thousands who died building it or who fought to breach parts of it.

It was designed according to military logic and should not be considered a monument to fascist architecture. Far from reflecting Hitler’s preference for neoclassical grandeur, the structures are infused with the modernist aesthetic that the Nazis were obliged to despise. By integrating form, function and materials, they fulfilled the criteria of rationalist architecture, using standardised sections that could be reproduced in quantity. As the architectural critic Jonathan Meades wrote, “The Todt Organisation built many more Expressionistic structures than the Expressionists did; it gave the idiom new legs” (2).

Many of the structures are strikingly modernist. The command post at Batz-sur-Mer in Brittany — a structure of receding horizontal planes with a cantilevered roof — resembles Le Corbusier’s “machines for living”, while the ground-hugging contours of Henry van de Velde’s masterpiece, the 1914 Werkbund Theatre, are echoed in the massive Oldenburg battery at Calais. The innovative use of moulded concrete had a strong influence on the new brutalist style that became fashionable after the war, when many buildings employed the same materials, techniques and aesthetic. As well as military functionality, the Wall is permeated by modernist industrial logic and the aesthetic of strong geometrical forms, with concrete allowed to “speak” — showing the imprint of its wooden shuttering without any cladding or finish. Architectural quality is not a corollary of a building’s functions. Future generations may well be shocked that most of the Lindemann battery at Sangatte lies buried under a lake of slurry created by the Channel Tunnel excavations. No one considers destroying a Norman castle or Vauban fortress because of its oppressive military connotations.
Mutated symbols of menace

The Wall’s 70 standard designs specified the proportions for each type of structure, based on criteria determined by their military purpose. The hard geometrical lines are often softened by curved angles to reduce the impact of shrapnel and the effects of blast. Many of these bunkers, crouching in the landscape to avoid aerial attack, are moulded to maximise camouflage, in a variety of zoomorphic or even human shapes: casemate embrasures flanked by walls with gorilla-like shoulders to protect the guns have yawning mouths like sharks. Observation towers resemble giants with helmets and visors, while command posts have officers’ peaked caps and epaulettes.

A few of these relics have been converted into museums that attract tourists, and coachloads of students of 20th-century history. But most lie neglected in fields and woods, perched on cliffs or sinking beneath the sands, taboo monoliths. Over seven decades, nature has been at work, covering them with lichens, ivy and climbing plants, or creating mysterious patterns on the concrete surfaces through the action of water, weather and minerals.

In wooded hills and pastures near the coastline, what were once symbols of menace and power have mutated into the relics of a lost civilisation. A few are used by farmers for storing fodder and machinery, or as shelters for cattle and sheep, while a handful have been converted into exotic dwellings or weekend retreats. In urban areas, graffiti artists have covered them with colourful, cheeky displays. On the coast of Jutland, some have been playfully converted into sculptures and there is a “bunker love” festival in summer. Danes, more than other Europeans, seem to regard them as stage sets, discarded props from the tragedy of Europe in the 20th century.

For the architect and philosopher Paul Virilio, the Wall is a last relic of the era of the defensible frontier, beginning with the Roman limes and the Great Wall of China: “Abandoned on the sand of the littoral, like the skin of a species that has disappeared, the bunker is the last theatrical gesture in the endgame of Occidental military history” (3). Today, lines drawn on land or boundaries formed by seas are militarily redundant, though they may still have political and legal significance. When military power is ubiquitous, exemplified by unmanned aerial vehicles or drones guided by invisible operators thousands of miles from their targets, defending territory with reinforced concrete makes little sense.

The Wall may have created, for a time, a false sense of security for the Germans and their collaborators. But, as Virilio points out, the war in the air cancelled out this sentiment: the destruction of so many European cities by Allied bombing “completely broke down the shielding effect of littoral and frontier fortifications.” On 6 June 1944, D-Day, the bunkers commanding the Normandy beaches only resisted the Allied invasion a little while. Given the Allies’ command of the air and their willingness and capacity to destroy whole cities, such as Caen and Le Havre, civilians became the victims, not just of Nazism, but of modern warfare itself.

Ianthe Ruthven is a photographer and the author of The Atlantic Wall: Hitler’s Coastal Fortress from the Arctic to the Pyrenees, London, 2014; www.iantheruthven.com

(1) Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1994.

(2) Jonathan Meades, Atlantic Wall exhibition review in Country Life, London, 4 June 2014.

(3) Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970.

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