Antony Loewenstein

Following the release this week of a major international statement calling on writers going to Sri Lanka’s Galle Literary Festival to understand the political ramifications of doing so, controversy has exploded.

Here’s the Hindu newspaper:

Organisers of the Galle Literary Festival have ridiculed attempts to portray the festival as one that legitimises repression and asserted that there was nothing political about the festival.

“We certainly believe in freedom of speech. In fact, one of the goals of the festival is to promote freedom of speech,” said Festival Founder Geoffery Dobbs, in response to a question. The festival will be held in the south Sri Lankan city of Galle from January 26 to 30.

The festival curator and writer Shyam Selvadurai described the efforts to discredit the festival as “unfair” and said that the festival did not shirk its responsibility when it came to recent events; it had sessions on the civil war too. “We are not running a carnival for the rich. The festival is a celebration of pluralism, tolerance and multi-culturalism,” he said and wondered if the people who had signed had read what the festival stood for.

On January 19, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka, a network of exiled Sri Lankan journalists, announced in the website of RSF the launch of an international appeal. The website said that the appeal had already been signed by Noam Chomsky, Arundathi Roy, Ken Loach, Antony Loewenstein and Tariq Ali, asking writers and intellectuals to endorse a campaign for more freedom of expression in Sri Lanka.

RSF and JDS said that they find it highly disturbing that literature is being celebrated in a land where cartoonists, journalists, writers and dissident voices are so often victimised by the current government. The signatories of this appeal ask them to consider this grave situation before deciding to go to the Galle Festival.

“We believe this is not the right time for prominent international writers like you to give legitimacy to the Sri Lankan government’s suppression of free speech by attending a conference that does not in any way push for greater freedom of expression inside that country… We ask you in the great tradition of solidarity that binds writers together everywhere, to stand with your brothers and sisters in Sri Lanka who are not allowed to speak out,” the appeal said.

In RSF’s Press Freedom Index, Sri Lanka ranks 158, while India ranks 122.

Personally speaking, it’s always important to challenge the cosy assumptions of any cultural event, many of which want to sideline uncomfortable questions related to politics. Sri Lanka is a brutal police state. What better time to ask what effect holding a writer’s festival will have on Colombo and its global image? As Naomi Klein writes, “boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic“.

Unsurprisingly, Sri Lankan nationalists are displeased with our statement, too.

If any more evidence was required that Washington, no matter who runs the place, only acts towards Israel with uncritical affection, the Wikileaks cables confirm it:

CounterPunch has accessed Wikileaks’ file of cables on Israel’s Gaza assault two years ago (Operation Cast Lead, December 27, 2008 through January 18, 2009). Though the cables often  simply rehash Israeli press reporting, providing  little new insight into Israel’s attack or the planning behind it, they show with pitiless clarity  the U.S. government to be little more than a handmaiden and amanuensis of the Israeli military machine.

The cables make clear, were any further disclosure needed, exactly where the United States stands with respect to Israel’s unprovoked attacks on Palestinians and its other Arab neighbors.  Although Operation Cast Lead took place in the last days of the Bush administration, ending two days before Barack Obama was inaugurated, every Obama policy in the succeeding  two years – including the administration’s repudiation of the Goldstone Report detailing Israeli atrocities and war crimes during Cast Lead – has demonstrated a striking continuity of support for Israeli actions.

The cables give a notably one-sided account of the assault.  Because they take their daily reporting primarily from the Israeli media, the cables keep a tally of rockets fired into Israel from Gaza and dramatically describe “burned dolls and destroyed children’s toys” at an unoccupied kindergarten in Beer Sheba hit by a rocket, but make virtually no mention of Israel’s intensive air and artillery bombardment of Gaza, including its civilian population.  There are no reports of burned Palestinian babies or very few of destroyed property in Gaza.  Even the western media provided more accurate coverage of Palestinian casualties than this.

The U.S. embassy cables did provide some information on Palestinian casualties, but the reporting was minimal.  In one cable buried in the collection, approximately ten days into the assault, western press reports are cited giving a single report of 530 Palestinians killed.  This was at a point when the cables counted five Israelis having been killed.  Israeli casualties were totted up repeatedly.  This roughly 100-1 ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed persisted throughout the operation, but this is not noted in the U.S. cables.  In a few instances, U.S. consular officials report the views of a few Gazans, frankly conveying Palestinian distress, but even here, when one Gazan reports that his town is increasingly being assaulted by Israeli fire, the cable qualifies his report by referring to “what he termed ‘indiscriminate’ Israeli fire.”

Whenever the cables mention a specific location in Gaza having been attacked or destroyed, including hospitals and mosques, the cables repeat Israeli claims without questioning them; on January 2, for instance, it is reported that the Israeli Air Force destroyed a mosque “reportedly serving as a weapons depot and communications hub.”  The embassy reports, without a hint of skepticism, the Israeli claim midway through the operation that Hamas operatives were reconstituting “certain command and control capabilities” at Shifa Hospital in Gaza by disguising themselves as doctors and nurses.

Instead, we have Washington and its allies pumping countless millions into a nice, little, compliant authoritarian state, aka Palestine:

“If we are building a police state — what are we actually doing here?” So asked a European diplomat responding to allegations of torture by the Palestinian security forces. The diplomat might well ask. A police state is not a state. It is a form of larceny: of people’s rights, aspirations and sacrifices, for the personal benefit of an élite. This is not what the world meant when it called for statehood. But a police state is what is being assiduously constructed in Palestine, disguised as state-building and good governance. Under this guise, its intent is to facilitate the authoritarianism which creates sufficient popular dependency — and fear — to strangle any opposition.

The transition from the lofty aspiration of statehood to a scheme intended to usher West Bank Palestinians into a new alleviated containment — a new form of remotely-managed occupation — is not some unfortunate error. The roots of this manipulation of the Palestinian aspiration into its opposite — cynically dressed up and sold as statehood — were present from the outset. Professor Yezid Sayyigh has shown how U.S. and EU rhetoric “promoting democratic development and the rule of law is pious at best, at worst disingenuous”. Both America and Europe bear responsibilities for this betrayal.

The seed of this deception which was to grow into a new police state in the region was the US and European acquiescence to Israel’s self-definition of its own security needs — and by extension, Israel’s definition of the requirements for Palestinian security collaboration. This Faustian pact, which prioritized Israel’s security-led criteria as the boundaries for negotiations — above any principles of justice — set the scene for the inevitable inflation of Israeli demands of security collusion by the Palestinian leadership — demands on which America’s ‘war on terrorism’ poured fuel.

The hidden, and false, western assumption was that if a two-state solution was in the interest of the dominant party, all that the Palestinians needed to do was to establish that a stable two-state solution was available to Israel. And in the end, it would emerge simply because it was in Israel’s demographic interest to give it. On this false premise, the Abbas-led Ramallah leadership embraced security collusion comprehensively. The western state-building project was conceived simply with the aim of providing Palestinian efficiency in the delivery of security collusion, nicely wrapped in a discourse of security reform and good governance.  But the problem is that the underlying assumption — that Israel was going to give the Palestinians a sovereign state in its own interest — was false.

During research for my book The Blogging Revolution, a great deal of time was spent examining just what companies such as Google actually do in Iran.

The company has posted the latest information:

During the protests that erupted in Iran following the disputed Presidential election in June 2009, the central government in Tehran deported all foreign journalists, shut down traditional media outlets, closed off print journalism and disrupted cell phone lines. The government also infiltrated networks, posing as activists and using false identities to round up dissidents. In spite of this, the sharing of information using the Internet prevailed. YouTube and Twitter were cited by journalists, activists and bloggers as the best source for firsthand accounts and on-the-scene footage of the protests and violence across the country. At the time, though, U.S. export controls and sanctions programs prohibited software downloads to Iran.

Some of those export restrictions have now been lifted and today, for the first time, we’re making Google Earth, Picasa and Chrome available for download in Iran. We’re committed to full compliance with U.S. export controls and sanctions programs and, as a condition of our export licenses from the Treasury Department, we will continue to block IP addresses associated with the Iranian government.

Our products are specifically designed to help people create, communicate, share opinions and find information. And we believe that more available products means more choice, more freedom, and ultimately more power for individuals in Iran and across the globe.

Posted by Neil Martin, Export Compliance Programs Manager

It’s almost impossible to imagine a conservative leader talking this way in Australia or America:

Islamophobia has “passed the dinner-table test” and become widely socially acceptable in Britain, according to Lady Warsi, the Conservative chairman.

Warsi, the first Muslim woman to attend Cabinet, is expected to use a speech at Leicester University today to raise the alarm over the way in which she believes prejudice against Muslims is now seen by many Britons as normal.

She will also warn against the tendency to divide Muslims between “moderates” and “extremists”, which she contends can fuel misunderstanding and intolerance.

Warsi is expected to say that terrorist offences committed by a small number of Muslims should not be used to condemn all who follow Islam. But she will also urge Muslim communities to be clearer about their rejection of those who resort to violent extremism.

“Those who commit criminal acts of terrorism in our country need to be dealt with not just by the full force of the law,” she will say. “They also should face social rejection and alienation across society and their acts must not be used as an opportunity to tar all Muslims.”

On the matter of portraying Muslims as either “moderate” or “extreme”, she will say: “It’s not a big leap of imagination to predict where the talk of ‘moderate’ Muslims leads; in the factory, where they’ve just hired a Muslim worker, the boss says to his employees: ‘Not to worry, he’s only fairly Muslim’.

“In the school, the kids say: ‘The family next door are Muslim but they’re not too bad’. And in the road, as a woman walks past wearing a burqa, the passers-by think: ‘That woman’s either oppressed or is making a political statement’.”

The peer will also blame “the patronising, superficial way faith is discussed in certain quarters, including the media” for making Britain a less tolerant place for believers.

How many public holidays in Australia should be re-framed?

A fine statement:

Pip Hinman, the Socialist Alliance candidate for the NSW state electorate of Marrickville, has expressed strong support for Marrickville Council’s recent resolution to join the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israeli apartheid in Palestine.

She disputed claims by the ALP candidate for Marrickville, Carmel Tebutt, and the local federal Labor MP, Anthony Albanese, that the Council’s decision was on a matter beyond the range of concerns appropriate for local government. She congratulated the Mayor of Marrickville, Fiona Byrne, and the NSW Greens candidate for the state electorate, for her stand.

The whole point of the BDS campaign”, Hinman said, “is that despite national policy being skewed by the anti-Palestinian bias of both major parties, we can campaign for our trade unions, community organisations, campuses and local governments to not be economically or institutionally involved with Israeli oppression in Palestine.

For example, many Sydney councils outsource garbage collection to a multinational corporation that is also building a light rail system in the illegally occupied West Bank. Palestinians will be banned from using, or even crossing, this light rail system, which will connect illegal Israeli settlements while further carving up Palestinian communities.

People in this community care about what happens in the wider world”, Newtown resident Hinman said. “We don’t want our garbage collected by a corporation that builds infrastructure for apartheid. Our council’s resolution, the first of its kind in Australia, ensures that this won’t happen.”

Liberal candidate for Marrickville Rosana Tyler condemned the council’s resolution for pandering to “xenophobic” community sentiment.

To call our community xenophobic is quite absurd — 38% were born overseas”, Hinman said. “What Rosana Tyler calls xenophobia is a sentiment for our community’s engagement with the wider world to be ethical. Fiona Byrne and the Marrickville Council have recognised this sentiment. The failure of Carmel Tebutt and Anthony Albanese to do likewise is one of many reasons why they no longer hold safe seats.”

I was recently asked to sign the following statement about the upcoming Galle Literary Festival in Sri Lanka. I am honoured to appear in such company to highlight the ongoing abuses taking place in a supposedly terror-free country:

Reporters Without Borders and Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka (JDS), a network of exiled Sri Lankan journalists, announce the launch of an international appeal already signed by Noam Chomsky, Arundathi Roy, Ken Loach, Antony Loewenstein and Tariq Ali, asking writers and intellectuals to endorse a campaign for more freedom of expression in Sri Lanka.

In a few days, the family and colleagues of political cartoonist Prageeth Ekneligoda will be commemorating the first anniversary of his disappearance. He was kidnapped in the heavily-guarded capital, Colombo, on 24 January 2010, a few hours before the most recent presidential elections. The authorities have never given his wife any information about where he might be and the investigation is in limbo.

At the same time, writers from Asia and all over the world are planning to gather in the southern city of Galle for a literary festival co-sponsored by the country’s leading tourism promotion agencies (http://www.galleliteraryfestival.co…). Reporters Without Borders and JDS find it highly disturbing that literature is being celebrated in this manner in a land where cartoonists, journalists, writers and dissident voices are so often victimized by the current government. The signatories of this appeal ask them to consider this grave situation before deciding to go to the Galle Festival.

Full version of the Galle Appeal

We urge you who have been invited to attend the fifth Galle Literary Festival (26-30 January 2011) to consider Sri Lanka’s appalling human rights record and targeting of journalists. Reporters without Borders said this about Sri Lanka in a recent report: “Murders, physical attacks, kidnappings, threats and censorship continue in Sri Lanka despite the end of the civil war. The most senior government officials, including the defence secretary (the President’s brother), are directly implicated in serious press freedom violations affecting both Tamil and Sinhalese journalists.”

We believe this is not the right time for prominent international writers like you to give legitimacy to the Sri Lankan government’s suppression of free speech by attending a conference that does not in any way push for greater freedom of expression inside that country.

The second anniversary of journalist and cartoonist Prageeth Ekneligoda’s disappearance will be on 24 January 2011, just two days before the Galle Literary Festival begins. He went missing in the capital city after writing a column praising the opposition candidate in the presidential election. The police have failed to conduct a credible investigation into his disappearance. Today, because Prageeth chose to do what you do – express an opinion – his two young sons are without a father.

Another renowned journalist, Lasantha Wickremetunga, was gunned down in the capital on 8 January 2009. Although his murder took place in a high-security area where security forces personnel were manning roadblocks, his killers were allowed to escape. In a chilling editorial published posthumously, Mr. Wickremetunga said: “When I am finally killed, it will be the government who killed me.”

Fourteen journalists have been killed since 2006, three have disappeared, and more than 30 have fled the country. Journalists, writers and performers remaining in the country are constantly threatened, physically attacked or cowed by legislation under which they can be jailed them for up to 20 years simply for what they write.

The stifling of free expression has also had a negative impact on other freedoms in Sri Lanka. For instance, it was because journalists were not permitted to cover the war between the government and rebel LTTE that so many atrocities took place, including alleged war crimes. While mounting evidence of Sri Lanka’s war crimes is being shown around the world, journalists inside the country cannot talk about them or even visit the northern areas because they are afraid that they will disappear or be killed.

It is this environment that you will be legitimizing by your presence.

We ask you in the great tradition of solidarity that binds writers together everywhere, to stand with your brothers and sisters in Sri Lanka who are not allowed to speak out. We ask that by your actions you send a clear message that, unless and until the disappearance of Prageeth is investigated and there is a real improvement in the climate for free expression in Sri Lanka, you cannot celebrate writing and the arts in Galle.

Signatories

Noam Chomsky
Arundathi Roy
Ken Loach
Antony Loewenstein
Tariq Ali
R. Cheran
Dave Rampton

So:

The damage caused by the WikiLeaks controversy has caused little real and lasting damage to American diplomacy, senior state department officials have concluded.

It emerged in private briefings to Congress by top diplomats that the fallout from the release of thousands of private diplomatic cables from all over the globe has not been especially bad.

This is in direct opposition to the official stance of the White House and the US government which has been vocal in condemning the whistle-blowing organisation and seeking to bring its founder, Julian Assange, to trial in the US.

A congressional official briefed on the reviews told Reuters news agency that the administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers. “I think they want to present the toughest front they can muster,” the official said.

The official implied that the WikiLeaks fiasco was bad public relations but had little concrete impact on policy.

“We were told [it] was embarrassing, not damaging,” the official added.

It appears that damage was localised in terms of a few specific cables, for example about Yemen, and thus expected to be containable in the long-run.

Scott Burchill, in an ongoing series dedicated to the issues surrounding Wikileaks that the media is ignoring, reminds us of the various ways Australian governments over the last decades have attempted to keep information secret that we have the right to know. Note how few journalists today are leading this kind of charge:

Asserting the Public’s Right To Know

Below are three publications which were largely based on leaks from the Australian Government. Without them, the Australian public would have been much less well informed about what their governments do in their name, especially their country’s foreign policy. All three caused much discomfort to those who rule, and in two cases attempts were made block their publication: one was successful. They provide a useful historical context for Canberra’s response to the recent disclosure of US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks.

Example 1

In November 1980, George Munster and Richard Walsh tried to publish Documents on Australian Defence and Foreign Policy 1968-1975. Almost immediately the federal governments served injunctions on the book’s publishers and distributors (and, for the first time since the Second World War, on two major newspapers which had acquired serialisation rights) preventing further distribution of the work. After a well-publicised High Court battle, all unsold copies held by the publishers had to be handed over to the government, and were later destroyed.

The reason for the furore? The documents mentioned in the title were secret documents –memoranda, assessments, briefings, cables – many of them quite embarrassing to the public servants who had prepared them and the politicians for whom they were intended. As far as the publishers were concerned, the documents were important for the light they threw on the role of the public service (in this case the Departments of Defence and Foreign Affairs) in formulating government policy, or on their methodology and competence. Never before had the inner workings of a vital area of the Australian government been exposed so thoroughly and so contemporaneously.

These two paragraphs are from the back cover of G.J Munster (ed), Secrets of State: A Detailed Assessment of the Book They Banned (Walsh & Munster, Sydney 1982). Secrets of State is largely a reprinting of Documents on Australian Defence and Foreign Policy 1968-1975 with editorial changes and some supplementary additions and commentary. It contains documents dealing with East Timor, US military bases in Australia, the Soviet Navy in the Indian Ocean, the Shah’s regime in Iran and the Vietnam War.

Example 2

Brian Toohey & Marian Wilkinson (eds), The Book of Leaks: Exposes In Defence Of the Right To Know (Angus & Robertson, North Ryde 1987) also publishes material governments have routinely withheld from public scrutiny on the grounds of ‘national security’.

In this case topics ranging from cables presaging Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, the Nugan Hand Bank, the “loans affair” and the dismissal of the Whitlam Government in 1975 to the Hope Royal Commission into the intelligence services are covered. Again, this book cause embarrassment and discomfort for officials and former government ministers, though the public moved several steps closer to a detailed understanding of these crucial events in modern Australian history.

Example 3

In November 1988 the Australian Government successfully intervened in the courts to prevent the publication of what became Brian Toohey & William Pinwill, Oyster: The Story Of The Australian Secret Intelligence Service (William Heinemann, Port Melbourne 1989). Publication only proceeded once both ASIS and DFAT had the opportunity to vet and censor the entire manuscript.

Although the authors argue that forced redactions did not imperil the integrity of the history of Australia’s overseas spy service, the episode was another example of how sensitive governments of all ideological persuasions are to the public exposure of their secrets, and the secrets of their predecessors. The book remains an indispensable guide to how covert Australian diplomacy is practised.

Wikileaks is providing profoundly significant news day after day (and thanks to Greg Mitchell at The Nation for keeping the fires burning):

A US diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks over the weekend says North Korea has likely received 2-and-a-half million US dollars for weapons sold to Iran through the Seoul branch of Iran’s Bank Mellat.
According to the cable, Iran’s Hong Kong Electronics transferred the money to the bank in November 2007.
Hong Kong Electronics is a front for North Korea’s Tanchon Commercial Bank which manages funds from its weapon exports.
A thorough investigation into the bank’s financial activities that year did not find any weapons-related financial transactions, but the South Korean government has been watching its activities ever since.
The Seoul branch was suspended from October 11th to December 10th last year as part of international moves to sanction Iran for its nuclear weapons development.

Many Wikileaks cables are fascinating but not necessarily reflecting the truth. This one, on Iran’s supposed rush for a nuclear bomb, is written by US officials with many reasons for telling their masters that Tehran is an evil nation pursuing evil means. It may be true, of course:

Iran has been developing contacts in more than 30 countries to acquire technology, equipment and raw materials needed to build a nuclear bomb, a Norwegian newspaper said on Sunday, citing U.S. diplomatic cables.

Aftenposten said that according to the cables, obtained by WikiLeaks, more than 350 Iranian companies and organizations were involved in the pursuit of nuclear and missile technology between 2006 and 2010.

Iran says its nuclear program has purely peaceful aims but the West suspects is designed to develop a weapons capability.

“For years, Iran has been working systematically to acquire the parts, equipment and technology needed for developing such weapons, in violation of UN sanctions against the country’s nuclear and missile program,” Aftenposten said.