Tim Westwood with troops at Camp Bastion

Being not only a Hip Hop artist but a life-long fan of the genre, I have, like many others, been very familiar with Tim Westwood. As a young boy, I remember listening to his show on Capital FM and have since spent the majority of my almost decade-long musical career trying to get a spot on his BBC Radio1/BBC 1xtra show. For a long time, an appearance on the show was – and, to some extent, remains – the benchmark for any aspiring Hip Hop or Grime MCs. For many rising artists, you were only considered relevant if you had been acknowledged by Westwood. Moreover, whenever Westwood chose to champion a particular artist, throwing his weight behind their career, big success was almost guaranteed.

Yes, his clout as the self-described “gatekeeper” has declined over the past three years, due to the rise of independent media like SBTV and Grime Daily and, more recently, the progression of Radio 1’s Hip Hop DJ Charlie Sloth. Nonetheless, turning down an invitation to appear on Tim Westwood TV, as I have done this month, was not a decision I could take lightly.

As far as I am aware, Tim Westwood’s first visit to the occupying military base ‘Camp Bastion’, in Afghanistan, was in early February 2011. In contrast to his later trip in May 2011, this one seemed to be in a more personal capacity, he had remarked of the British troops stationed there that they were “really making a difference to the world” and that he felt he had a “moral duty to come out”. He also vowed to “come back with Radio 1”. And come back he did.

A BBC Press release, published in late April 2011, announced that “Tim Westwood will be broadcasting his show live from Camp Bastion, the main base for British troops in Afghanistan, for five consecutive days from Monday 30 May 2011.”  BBC Radio 1Xtra, according to the announcement, was ‘the home of new black music’.

Further down, the press release proudly proclaimed that BBC Radio 1Xtra had “teamed up with BFBS (British Forces Broadcasting Service) to simulcast Westwood’s show from the base, linking live with the BFBS Radio studio on the ground in Afghanistan, across the UK and to British Forces in more than 20 countries.” Moreover, Westwood’s Afghanistan shows were to be aired not only on BBC 1Xtra and the BFBS but also on BBC Radio 1 for 5 consecutive days.

This naturally prompts a question: what does ‘black music’ have to do with the occupation of Afghanistan? And why should BBC Radio 1Xtra listeners be subjected to this propaganda? Indeed, even setting aside the broader fact that as a citizen of this country my taxes were being spent to station an army, supposedly representing my interests, in over twenty countries, I found this entire press release very alarming.

Of course, for some this will come as no surprise. After all, whenever the BBC reports from places occupied by British soldiers, the journalists doing so are often “embedded” with them, and that is the perspective many have come to expect from the BBC. However the Westwood move seemed to me to signal a concerted effort to increase support for the British occupation amongst a specific UK demographic.

Although I do not believe Westwood’s decision to do this to be a malicious one, I do not believe it was the apolitical gesture of goodwill he tried to depict it as when he said “I got quite a lot of hostility back in the UK from people who said I was supporting the war, but that’s not what this is about. There is a distinction between the people who sent them and the people who are out there doing it.”

Indeed, a blog post by Rhys Hughes, executive producer for BBC Radio 1 makes clear how calculated this decision was, writing “BBC Radio 1 and 1Xtra decided to bring Tim Westwood to Camp Bastion, Afghanistan, because the story of the troops out here is primarily a 19-year-old’s story, which is perfect for our audience.” Hughes went on to add “Radio 1 and 1Xtra worked very closely with BFBS (British Forces Broadcasting Service) as well as the MOD to make this trip possible.”

The Ministry of Defence are precisely the people who send our young men and women to kill and die in our name. As such, this was clearly a concerted effort to target the very demographic they look to recruit. After all, who do the Ministry of Defence rely on to leave their homes in Britain and sacrifice their humanity thousands of miles away? It is, as Rhys Hughes put it, the 19-year-olds that are “perfect for our audience.”

Who do the Ministry of Defence rely on to sell these wars? Who do they rely on to recruit for these wars? To provide justification for these wars? The media, of course. The BBC, of course. And now Tim Westwood, the most well-known Hip Hop DJ in this country.

Indeed, upon Westwood’s return from Afghanistan, the BBC 1xtra website published some pictures of his trip with one photo labelled “Westwood phrases in Helicopter ground crew greeting” showing a white board with the words “Westwood quote of the day: Drop a bomb!” written on it.

Whether this was written by Westwood himself is unclear but the sad joke is there for the world to see. Have the people underneath those bombs ceased to be human?

Now, as I’ve said earlier I do not believe this decision was educated enough to be a malicious one on the part of Tim Westwood, but it clearly was a calculated one on the part of the BBC and the MOD hierarchies. Essentially, this trip has enrolled Tim Westwood as part of the war machine; a war machine I want nothing to do with.

Just this month, footage surfaced of US Marines urinating on Afghan corpses. The BBC, no doubt briefed by the MOD, fell over itself to report that those were ‘Taliban corpses’. Not human corpses, just Taliban corpses. As if they even knew the names of the people they were urinating upon, let alone any political affiliations they had and as if that makes any difference anyway.

Can Tim Westwood imagine for one minute how it feels to have your country violently invaded, occupied against your will and then see those foreign troops literally treat the corpses of your countrymen as a toilet? No he can’t. Can he imagine his country being occupied four times by the same foreign power in less than two centuries? Why do the British keep going back to the Afghans’ land? A land almost everyone knows to be the ‘graveyard of empires’?

Let us ignore the feelings of the Afghan people, as we do everyday anyway, and think about what this occupation is doing to the British soldiers involved in it, and how it affects their lives. A recent study has found that, for the last 2 years running, the US military has lost more troops to suicide than it has to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. This is the US military and not the British military but it would be interesting to find out the figures for the latter. I would not be surprised if such findings end up being somewhat similar. Of course, even if such studies existed, I wonder if the MOD would grant us access to them.

Or let us ignore the feelings of the soldiers, as those feelings are clearly not valued by the war machine that has sent them anyway. Let us think of how the citizens of this country feel about our military presence in Afghanistan. Well, in April 2010 an Independent on Sunday poll found that 77% of British citizens want the troops to be withdrawn from Afghanistan. And here we reach the truth of Tim Westwood’s trip to Afghanistan.

The reality is that the MOD and the BBC need to sell an increasingly unpopular military adventure to the youth of this nation, so they use a character of dwindling relevance by getting him to broadcast his live show from the heart of the occupation itself. After all, despite his dwindling relevance, this character remains the most widely recognised Hip Hop personality this country has ever produced.

This was, in essence, a failed attempt to make war cool. Now, none of us are perfect, I have made a million mistakes and bad decisions in my life and I am likely to make a million more, but turning down Tim Westwood TV is not one of them. I hope Tim Westwood develops the conscience to regret this decision in years to come.

If you want to stay updated on articles like this one, type your email address in the top right corner box. For previous articles, reviews and interviews featuring Lowkey, click here.

Also see: The Second Death of Mark Duggan.

Baha Mousa, 26, with his wife and two children. He was detained by the British army for 36 hours and died on 15 September 2003 (Photograph: Reuters)

Two million people marched in London against an invasion of Iraq on 15 February 2003. I doubt if any of the protesters could have imagined in their wildest dreams the serious human rights violations about to be committed by UK Armed Forces and intelligence personnel in our name. Our worst nightmares might have included the use of cluster munitions causing indiscriminate deaths of Iraqi civilians, or disproportionate bombardments of civilian areas, or even the use of depleted uranium, but not what actually happened.

The UK’s detention and interrogation policies in Iraq were not only completely unlawful but outrageously contaminated by the fact that our co-author in this illegal war, soon to become our Joint Co-Occupier subsequently, was the United States. Everything the world community associates with US practices and techniques, whether at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram Air Base, Abu Ghraib, secret sites or rendition is of a piece with UK policies and practices in Iraq. This is not my subjective opinion or idle speculation. It is a matter of publicly available evidence.

What are the building blocks of this assertion? First, the reader should access the publicly available report of Sir William Gage into the death of Baha Mousa. He records that the MoD had no grip on its own interrogation policies; that unlawful coercive interrogation techniques were being taught to UK Tactical Questioners and interrogators before the invasion and during the UK occupation of SE Iraq; that the five banned techniques from internment in Northern Ireland (hooding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, food and water deprivation, and the use of noise) returned as Standard Operating Procedure.

He notes that as early as 20 May 2003 UK battle groups had killed a number of Iraqi civilians in custody (the number turns out to be eight). He makes 73 wide-ranging recommendations: no more hooding, “harshing”, and training of coercive techniques and many, many more.

Second, the reader needs to consider the relative narrowness of the Gage Inquiry Terms of reference. Sir William could only look at the context of Baha Mousa’s killing. He could not explore the UK’s relationship with the US, or the practices in theatre of the interrogators in the Joint Forward Interrogation Team.

Next, it is crucially important to explore the context of the recent Court of Appeal judgment in the case of R (Ali Zaki Mousa and others) v Secretary of State for Defence, 22 November 2011. This case concerns 129 Iraqi civilians complaining that their loved ones had been killed whilst in detention by UK Forces, or that they are victims of torture and ill-treatment at their hands.

The MoD’s case was that it was legally sufficient for it to investigate all these cases through its establishment of the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT). The Court of Appeal has ruled that IHAT is not independent, as it must be, and the Secretary of State for Defence now has to consider whether he can further delay the establishment of a fully independent and public inquiry into the UK’s detention policy in SE Iraq. 

The detail of the allegations made by the victims in these cases makes for deeply unpleasant and shocking reading and includes:

• The use of sexual techniques specifically designed to humiliate and debase male Muslims including forced simulated oral and anal sex, the playing of hardcore pornography all night during Ramadan, soldiers having sex in front of Iraqis, female interrogators shoving their genitals and breasts into the faces of detainees, masturbation over Iraqis and so on.
• Threats, deaths threats, threats to rape wives, mock executions and similar.
• Prolonged solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, other techniques designed to disorientate, temperature manipulation, the playing of music all night and other techniques designed to ensure that Iraqis held in incommunicado detention had no idea whether it was night or day, or what to expect next.

When these allegations first began to surface in 2004, the MoD fell back on the familiar “few bad apples” thesis. That has long fallen by the wayside. Then it assured us that it had investigated through The Aitken Report and that all was well. That argument also fell into disuse years ago.

Next they said that IHAT will do the job. The Court of Appeal now says that is not good enough. It remains to be seen what its next move will be. To date, the MoD as a corporate entity has consistently plumbed the depths of what can be dreamt up as dirty tricks and tactics to keep its detention and interrogation policies from public view. The recent convictions of two of the murderers of Stephen Lawrence gives my team hope that in some circumstances, if teams of lawyers keep at it, justice might in the end prevail.

Born in Jerusalem, Larissa Sansour studied Fine Art in Copenhagen, London and New York. Her work is interdisciplinary, immersed in the current political dialogue and utilises video art, photography, experimental documentary, the book form and the internet. Sansour’s 2009 collaboration with Oreet Ashery, ‘The Novel of Nonel and Vovel’, was a graphic novel described as raising questions “on artistic agency, collaborative processes, the nature of authority and art and politics.”

Last month, Sansour made headlines when the French clothing firm Lacoste expelled her from the Lacoste Elysee Prize, awarded by the Swiss Musee de l’Elysee. Sansour had been one of the eight finalists shortlisted for the prize when she issued a press release stating that her work had been censored for being “too pro-Palestinian.”  Her work, a multimedia project titled ‘Nation Estate’, depicted a world in which the entire Palestinian was housed within a single skyscraper, with lost cities recreated on the different floors.

Larissa Sansour answered questions posed by Musab Younis, Ceasefire’s Deputy Editor, on the Lacoste Prize and the complexities of being a Palestinian artist.

Musab Younis: Could you describe the images you submitted to the Lacoste Prize which were labelled too “pro-Palestinian”?

Larissa Sansour: The NATION ESTATE project is a sci-fi photo series conceived in the wake of the Palestinian bid for nationhood at the UN. I developed three preliminary sketches especially for the Lacoste Elysée Prize. Encouraged to approach the theme of the competition, ‘la joie de vivre’, indirectly or even with irony, I decided on a slightly dystopic approach.

Set within a grim piece of hi-tech architecture, this narrative photo series entitled Nation Estate envisions ‘la joie de vivre’ of a Palestinian state rising from the ashes of the peace process.

In this vision, Palestinians have their state in the form of a single skyscraper – the Nation Estate. Surrounded by a concrete wall, this colossal high-rise houses the entire Palestinian population – finally living the high life. Each city has its own floor: Jerusalem, third floor; Ramallah, fourth floor. Intercity trips previously marred by checkpoints are now made by elevator.

Aiming for a sense of belonging, the lobby of each floor reenacts iconic squares and landmarks – elevator doors on the Jerusalem floor opening onto a full-scale Dome of the Rock. Built just outside the actual city of Jerusalem, the building has views of the original golden dome from the top floors.

MY: What kind of reaction have you received since the prize was cancelled?

LS: The response has been absolutely overwhelming. Since I released a statement telling the story of my nomination being revoked by Lacoste, I have received hundreds of emails stating support, and my story has featured in mainstream newspapers, magazines, blogs and on television channels worldwide. I am deeply grateful for all the support.

I also applaud the museum’s decision to break off their relationship with Lacoste, cancel the prize and side with the artist instead of the corporate sponsor – even if it took them a while to gain the courage. Many of the people who supported me have written directly to the museum and praised them for this move.

MY: You said in an earlier interview that “As a Palestinian artist, this is not the first time works of mine or shows I have been in have been exposed to politically-motivated pressure.” Could you talk about some of the other instances in which this has happened?

LS: This kind of pressure is not uncommon, and it has expressed itself in various forms over the years. I have experienced several calls to close down exhibitions I have featured in. These calls normally come from special interest groups opposing any kind of rights, let alone statehood to Palestinians. But there have also been attempts at muffling my work from people initially favourable to it. I have been asked by gallerists showing my work to change the title of my exhibition or a specific piece in order to avoid aggravating Jewish communities, for example.

MY: What do you think the recent addition of Palestine to UNESCO means for Palestinian artists?

LS: I think we have yet to understand the full value of this membership. Symbolically, though, it is a very important step in the right direction.

MY: What is your perspective on the wider issue of corporate sponsorship of the arts, particularly art prizes?

LS: I am not opposed to the idea of corporate sponsorship per se. Administered well, financial support from institutions that can afford it is a valuable asset to artistic production. But the rules of the game have to be respected. Art prizes are not advertising campaigns for the sponsoring corporation. As soon as a sponsor blocks, censors or attempts to limit the artistic freedom, the system has failed. In the case of the Lacoste Elysée Prize, I am happy that the museum eventually decided to acknowledge this and cancel the prize.

MY: Are there specific contradictions, difficulties or paradoxes you feel you have to navigate as a Palestinian artist?

LS: Funding a Palestinian art project can be quite difficult. On several occasions, sponsors have demanded that a certain project of mine also presents an Israeli perspective. I have never understood the logic behind this. Asking the occupied to introduce the position of the occupier seems at best misguided.

MY: Do you feel that there is an expectation of the kind of work you will produce because you are Palestinian? How do you navigate such expectations?

LS: Palestinian work tends to be very political, and most institutions showing Palestinian artists are interested in this approach. This does not mean, however, that artists produce political work in order to meet expectations. For all Palestinians, politics is not just an option, but a fundamental circumstance.

MY: Thank you for talking to Ceasefire.

Larissa Sansour’s The Nation Estate project consists of 8-10 large-format photos. It is scheduled for production in early 2012. In addition to the photo series, a sci-fi video version of Nation Estate is currently in production.

This week, Newt Gingrich, current favourite in the Republican presidential race, suggested the reintroduction of child labour, prompting a Guardian commentator to ask: are we going back to the 18th century? Times of crisis tend to encourage comparisons with the past, for comfort or otherwise. The most obvious precedent – the Great Depression – has been endlessly discussed since the 2008 crisis. More recently, a study finds current wage disparity in Britain ‘worse than Victorian levels’. With the prospect of EU meltdown, yet more ‘shared pain’, the replacement of most of Europe’s leaders with unelected technocrats – in short, with everything bound to get even worse – one wonders how far we’ll soon have to look back to find a suitably unfortunate parallel for our times.

Let’s stick for now with the 18th century. A recent Mother Jones article humorously captured the new Enlightenment vogue, taking inspiration from Jonathan Swift’s famous pamphlet ‘A Modest Proposal’ to suggest a gathering on Wall Street of the 99% – who are to offer up in ritual sacrifice to late capitalism their college degrees, housing deeds, children. But is there anything else we can take from a comparison with Swift – and not just from his anarchic spirit and graveyard humour, but from the specific circumstances that produced his Irish pamphlets?

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Swift had been occasionally writing on Irish politics since 1707, but the real tipping point, when he fully assumed the mantle of ‘Hibernian Patriot’ and entered nationalist mythology, came in 1724. That year an obscure English ironmaster named William Wood obtained a patent from George I to privately mint £100,000 worth of copper halfpence for Ireland. The scheme, dubbed ‘Wood’s halfpence’, would have glutted the Irish economy with inferior coin, devaluing Irish manufacture and assets. In Ireland, already resentful about England’s severe economic restrictions (which included, ironically, a ban on minting currency) , the proposal met with widespread anger. Under the nom de plume of ‘The Drapier’, and heavily influenced by John Locke, Swift addressed a series of letters to the Irish people, advancing a systemic condemnation of colonial policy in Ireland and inciting resistance.

Swift’s arguments were understandably less popular in England than in Ireland. His first published political tract, the 1720’s ‘Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture’ , which advocated the refusal of English imports (‘I should rejoice to see a Stay-Lace from England be thought Scandalous’, etc.) so enraged the English authorities that its printer, John Harding, was prosecuted. On the publication of the Drapier’s fourth letter – by a long chalk his most revolutionary, challenging the fundamental tenets of Irish dependancy – the English-installed Lord Lieutenant Carteret offered a reward of £300 for the identity of the Drapier. No-one came forward. Meanwhile, Wood waged a campaign of misinformation in England, producing pamphlets that claimed universal support for the half-pence among the Irish, with dissent confined to a manipulative cadre of ‘Papists and enemies to King George’.

Remarkably, The Drapier and Ireland won out. Manifestly and unavoidably rejected by the majority of Irish people – and in the final instance by the Irish Grand-Jury – the English Government were forced to withdraw the proposal, compensating Wood with a big pension which, ever luckless in business, he would squander on a half-cocked experiment with iron patents. Swift – Dean, Drapier, Hibernian Patriot – entered the annals of Irish nationalist mythology, as eulogised by Yeats: ‘World-besotted traveller he/Served human liberty’.

The Drapier’s Letters and related tracts wittily chronicle a lurid and scandalous episode of British colonialism , and represent a vital landmark in Irish nationalism and the development of anti-colonial thought. They also speak, with unusual precision, to a very current moment in resistance.

Consider, for example, Swift’s statement in ‘A Short View of the State of Ireland’: ‘I have sometimes thought, that this Paradox of the Kingdom growing rich, is chiefly owing to those gentlemen the BANKERS, who are the only thriving people among us.’ The enemy in Swift’s pamphlets – whether it is refracted through bankers, landlords, financial speculators, the colonial English – is always the ‘one percent’. Wood and his half-pence, after all, comes down to a private financial interest in bed with government, a neoliberal game of speculation and a ruined population with no recourse to democracy.

‘A Modest Proposal’, the perfect summation of Swift’s dissident consciousness, suggests that an impoverished native population sell its children as food for rich landlords, removing the problem of an unproductive element in society and providing a lucrative home-grown industry in one fell swoop. Swift, adopting the voice of a ‘Projector’ (in modern parlance, a technocrat) carries the irony to its logical extreme: ‘Whereas the maintenance of an Hundred Thousand Children cannot be computed at less than ten Shillings a piece per annum, the Nation’s stock will be thereby encreased Fifty Thousand Pounds per annum; and the Money will circulate among our selves, the Goods being entirely of our own Growth and Manufacture.’

Swift’s Irish pamphlets render monstrous these abstractions of economic logic. Maxims and economic rules are controlled and defied by Ireland, which – due to the imbalances of colonial rule – represents a sort of a ‘nonsense state’, where accepted truths about prosperity and growth go to die. Economic wisdom dictates, ‘The people are the riches of a nation’; only, Swift corrects, ‘if we had the African privilege of selling our bodies as slaves’ since the native Irish, rendered beggars by colonial restrictions, are worth no more than their weight in flesh. In 2011, the maxims that underwrite prosperity in the neoliberal age – minimal regulation, ‘free’ markets, cheap credit, an undemocratic economy tightly controlled by an isolated financial sector – increasingly assume the quality of the absurd. The role of protest in such conditions often becomes, as Swift famously discovered, the use of satire, parody, and reductio ad absurdum. And for both Swift and the 2011 resistance, it is the clinical absurdity of classical economic thinking that has formed the target of such satire.

*

Colm Toibin, in a recent LRB panel discussion, likened Swift Irish pamphlets to a ‘blog’. It’s an interesting and, in many ways, valid comparison. Pamphlets provided Swift with a free channel of communication – an uncensored format that was cheap, anonymous (or, in his case, pseudonymous) that enabled him to respond quickly to developments in the unfolding drama of the ‘Wood affair’. Pamphets offered, like the Internet does now, a democratic alternative to the metropolitan media engine. ‘My people wanted’, writes the Drapier, ‘a plain, strong, coarse stuff, to defend them against cold Easterly winds’, and indeed, his pamphlets reflect this self-effacement, privileging maximum exposure – ‘one copy of this paper may serve a Dozen of you, which will be less than a Farthing apiece’ – over artistic posterity, or profit. This year’s revolution – which has definitively not been televised – has mobilised an efficient, potent counter-narrative through digital media channels, outflanking a mainstream media establishment debased by corporate and state interests. ‘The Kingdom requires New and Fresh warning,’ observes Swift, ‘since Wood is his own News-Writer’: a sentiment that resonates loudly in the age of News International.

In a recent New York Review of Books article, Michael Greenberg tried to sum up the Occupy Wall Street mentality: ‘a galvanising succinctness, speaking directly’, he offered. It is a description that precisely fits Swift’s criticism of financial capitalism in the Drapier’s Letters, which was reactive and populist, attuned to the universal, basic and concrete realities of injustice. It is tempting (almost irresistible, with ‘Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture’) but ill-advised to read a proto-Marxist vein into some of his pamphlets. Swift wasn’t a socialist or a revolutionary, nor indeed, on close examination, much of an egalitarian – he revolted on a moral and instinctive, rather than a political, level against a cluster of injustices at a particular place and time. But it is precisely this ambivalence and occasionality that could be said to characterise the mood of protests in 2011: notably, of course, the Occupy movement, which has seen a return to a discourse of protest that relies on notions of instinctive injustice. And it may well be the case that in 2011, as Swift wrote in his fourth letter: ‘Money, the great divider of our world, hath, by a Strange Revolution, been the great Uniter of a most Divided people.’

Swift remains, despite all this, a problematic touchstone for radical activism. Recent critical examinations of the ‘Hibernian Patriot’, notably by Carole Fabricant and Robert Mahony, have corrected for and nuanced the stock image of Swift as anti-imperialist hero. His political tracts, while directed ‘To the Whole People of Ireland’, must be understood as coming from a writer who was, however precariously, part of the Protestant elite in colonial Ireland. For all his sustained engagement with subordinated classes – and it is not to be disregarded as just ‘token’, or ‘rhetorical’ – his efforts on behalf of the most marginalised segments of colonial Irish society are often paternalist, a negative defence.

For example, he challenges discrimination and repression of Irish Catholics – a seditious, murderous third column in the Protestant imagination – by emphasising their political toothlessness: ‘A Lyon at Feet, bound fast with three of four Chains, his Teeth drawn out and his Claws pared to the Quick’. Nowhere in his writing is the possibility of equality between Protestants and Catholics seriously entertained.

Even Swift’s pivotal anti-colonial tract, A Modest Proposal, is qualified by some apparently earnest genocidal tendencies elsewhere in his writing. In the aforementioned ‘Maxims Controlled in Ireland’, he confesses himself ‘touched with a very sensible pleasure, when I hear of a mortality in any country parish…[populated by] wretches, brought up to steal and beg, for whom death would be the best thing to be wished for.’ For all Swift’s mockery of inhuman Projectors, the Irish poor appear in his writing as a sub-human, inherently criminal undercaste, a burden on society, ‘bred up from the Dunghill in idleness, Ignorance and Thievery’ and undeserving of sympathy or charity and owing their poverty to their own natural defects. There is an unavoidable reactionary strain in Swift’s writing and he must, despite his unusual applicability to contemporary patterns of resistance, always be read with the particular circumstances of his time and situation – his ‘hyphenated Anglo-Irish identity’ – in mind.

If the state of popular resistance in 2011 tells us anything it is – to go back yet further in time, to Trinculo in The Tempest – that ‘misery acquaints a man with Strange Bedfellows’. The financial crisis has broadened the definition of the protester. Some sectors of the traditional left who would, one suspects, prefer a picturesque revolution in the Marxist tradition, baulk at the populism of the movements like Occupy, which counts among its martyrs Scott Olsen (an ex-marine and Iraq war veteran), or the role of Islam in post-revolution Egypt. Swift’s Irish writing is ambivalent, problematic and paradoxical – in other words, perfect reading for a year of uncomfortable dissent.

Last week, on the afternoon of 14th December, Sara Eckymans, international coordinator of Western Sahara Resource Watch, sat intently in the public gallery at the back of the voluminous semi-circular auditorium of the European Parliament. Beside her a group of bored school children fidgeted. In front of her, a full house of MEPs attending a plenary session were asked to vote on a proposal to extend the EU fisheries agreement with Morocco, allowing European vessels to continue fishing the waters off occupied Western Sahara.

The MEPs pressed their buttons and, within seconds, the vote appeared on screens around the hall. Eckymans, who has campaigned on the issue for over six years, jotted down the figures. Votes for: 296. Votes against: 326. Abstentions: 58. The auditorium erupted into applause. Ecykman’s pen and papers fell to the floor. Tears coursed down her cheeks. “I’m sorry” she explained to the bemused teacher sat beside her, “something historic has just happened”.

The decision was indeed historic. The Fisheries Partnership Agreement between the European Union and Morocco was signed in 2005 and controversially granted licences to 119 EU vessels – predominantly Spanish – to fish in Morocco’s Atlantic waters. However, the agreement failed to distinguish between the waters of Morocco and those of Western Sahara, meaning that EU vessels were fishing the waters off Western Sahara’s 1,100-kilometre coastline. The agreement officially expired at the end of February and a one-year extension to the agreement was approved by a small majority in the Council of Ministers in March. However, pressure for the Parliament to reject the extension had been building.

In November, both the parliament’s Budget Committee and the Development Committee recommended that the fisheries agreement be stopped and the 2010 publication of a confidential legal opinion showed that the European Parliament’s Legal Service viewed the fishing by European vessels in Western Sahara’s waters to be in violation of international law.

This view supported that of the UN Legal Adviser, Hans Corell, whose 2002 legal opinion for the UN Security Council on Western Sahara’s natural resources made clear that exploitation of the territory’s resources could only be considered legal if the Saharawi population were consulted and benefited. This consultation had not taken place and according to human rights activist Aminatou Haidar speaking earlier this year, “[t]he Saharawi do not benefit at all from this agreement. Instead it only intensifies their oppression”.

In response to last week’s MEP’s decision, Morocco ordered foreign fishing boats operating in its waters to leave immediately. Despite the fact that the annual loss of the 36 million Euros ($47 million) paid by the EU for fishing rights will have little impact on Morocco, and that the EU decision was perhaps motivated more by the agreement’s poor profitability rather than considerations of international legality, the decision is nevertheless politically important.

After nearly 36 years of Moroccan occupation and over 20 years of waiting for a promised referendum on self-determination, the people of Western Sahara have had precious few victories on the international political stage. According to Elarbi Messaoud, Secretary of the collective of Saharawi Human Rights Defenders (CODESA), “the main significance of this decision by the European Parliament lies in the acknowledgement of the unresolved legal status of the territory”.

Western Sahara is classified by the UN as a non-self-governing territory, a term used to describe a nation whose people are yet to attain a full level of self-government. Under General Assembly resolution 1514 (XV), the natural resources of Western Sahara should belong to the Saharawi people. In 2002, the UN Legal Counsel Hans Correll declared that exploration and exploitation activities are being carried out “in violation of the principles of international law applicable to mineral resource activities in Non-Self-Governing-Territories”.

General Assembly Resolution 63/102 of 2008, called on Member States to take: “Legislative, administrative or other measures in respect of their nationals and the bodies corporate under their jurisdiction that own and operate enterprises in the Non-Self-Governing Territories that are detrimental to the interests of the inhabitants of those Territories, in order to put an end to those enterprises”. This has not been done and despite many attempts to break the long-running diplomatic stalemate, progress towards a resolution of the conflict has been tortuously slow.

For Sara Eyckmans the result came as a shock. “Not a single hair on my head was expecting this result” she admits. “I cannot find the words to describe the emotions of Saharawi I spoke with on the phone following the vote: they were crying out of sheer joy and amazement”.

From the coastal towns in Western Sahara, to the dusty desert refugee camps in Algeria, Saharawis were holding impromptu celebrations. But for Elarbi Messaoud, celebrations were short lived: “The Japanese, Russians are still fishing our waters,” he says. “Celebrations will never be complete while our right to self-determination remains confiscated, human rights violations increase every day and dozens of Saharawi human rights defenders languish in prison.”

(An edited version of this piece appears on Think Africa Press.)

The memorial at El Mozote lists the names of all who were killed in the massacre

To mark the 30th anniversary of the atrocious El Mozote massacre of 10 Dec 1981 – at the onset of a bloody civil war (1980-1992) which resulted in the deaths of more than 70,000 people in total –, a ceremonywas held in El Mazote on Saturday, attended by El Salvador’s Foreign Minister, Hugo Martínez.

Martínez said the event sought to ‘honour the memory of hundreds of innocent people who were murdered 30 years ago here in El Mozote and in nearby towns’, with the statesman also asking forgiveness for what he called the ‘blindness of state violence’ .

Between 10-11 December 1981, members of the US-trained Atlacatl, an anti-guerilla elite battalion headed an incursion into El Mozote following suspicions of collaboration between the villagers and anti-government rebel forces.

According to a report by Archdiocesan human rights group Tutela Legal, an estimated 393 people were brutally tortured, raped and killed, including men, women and mostly children (their bodies and houses burned after the killings), although the total death toll is placed at 794 when including military operations in nearby towns which took place between 10-13 December. A 1992 report by Human Rights Watch describes El Mozote as “probably the largest mass killing reported during the war” (p. 3).

The United States’ involvement in the civil conflict and specifically in the El Mozote massacre grants a certain amount of legitimacy to Simón Bolívar’s assertion that the “United States [seems] destined to plague and torment the continent in the name of freedom” (1829).

For, much like in Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala, both the Carter and Reagan administrations offered training as well as extensive funding and armament to security forces in fear of losing the government to what was described – along Kessingerian lines – as the spread of the virus of ‘communist terrorism’.

In truth, the real fear – and for good reason – amounted to the possibility of the spread of a virus, indeed, but that of establishing a democracy in El Salvador – much like in Chile under Salvador Allende – that would further the welfare of the majority of its own people, instead of privileging corporate and foreign interests. This ‘rotten apple’ might give other countries in the region and elsewhere the wrong kind of ideas.

Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Monterrosa was the founding commander of the Atlacatl Batallion (1980), after serving in the army for several years and completing a course at the US Army’s infamous (and still operational) School of Americas (SOA) in 1966, at a time when the school was located in Panamá.

The US-trained SOA graduate later confessed to having organised and participated in the El Mozote massacre during an interview with reporter James LeMoyne in which he is heard saying: “Yeah, we did it. We killed everyone. In those days I thought that was what we had to do to win the war. I was wrong”.

In his Turning The Tide (p. 122), Noam Chomsky highlights that in March 1984 “it was revealed publicly that US planes were rapidly increasing reconnaissance to provide intelligence for what the government and the press call “military operations””, which included “ground sweeps and massacres [of civilians] by US-trained elite units”.

According to a forensic investigation into El Mozote conducted after the 1992 peace accords, “the cases were all fired in a 5.56 mm NATO-caliber firearm” and “appear to have been fired in United States M-16 military rifles”.

Furthermore, there is compelling evidence pointing to the undisclosed presence of US officials in El Mozote during the massacre (it is widely known that there were at least US military advisers operating in El Salvador at the time), as journalist Mark Danner suggests in a 1993 article for the New Yorker:

“a number of highly placed Salvadorans, including one prominent politician of the time who had many friends among senior officers, claim that two American advisers were actually observing the operation from the base camp at Osicala. On its face, the charge is not entirely implausible — American advisers had been known to violate the prohibition against accompanying their charges into the field — but it is impossible to confirm.”

The US officially praised the efficiency of the Atlacatl Batallion on several occasions. During a Senate hearing on El Salvador which took place on 8 February 1992, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Elliott Abrams stated that ‘the battalion to which you refer [Atlacatl] has been complimented at various times in the past over its professionalism and over the command structure and the close control in which the troops are held when they go into battle’.

The perpetrators of the El Mozote and other equally vicious massacres – along with their supporters in the Carter and Reagan administrations (including the Presidents themselves) –  were never charged, as authorities granted all forces a general pardon following the peace accords of 1992 which put an end to the war.

This week’s commemorations, nonetheless, serve as a stark and necessary reminder of the devastating impact US foreign policy has had on the region over the past few decades. It remains to be seen whether US involvement in El Salvador’s civil war would ever be brought to justice, but if the region’s move away from American influence over the past few years is any guide, the verdict of history has already been delivered.

(Caption: “Revolution Until Victory”)

While upheaval has been sweeping the Arab World since the start of the year, Palestinians seem to have taken a different approach to their struggle, focusing on their internal affairs and their hopes of achieving national unity.

Indeed, despite being divided on the issue, the Palestinian Authority’s bid for statehood at the U.N has also been the focus of the year for Palestinians, bringing different parties and intellectuals together arguing either against the move or in support of it. Abbas’s historical speech at the General Assembly on 23 September 2011 refocused people’s mind on the real issue of occupation. This was followed by the successful prisoner exchange between Hamas and Israel on 18 October 2011; Palestinians had much to celebrate and little to disagree on.

However, one would wonder why the domino effect of the Arab Spring hasn’t reached Palestine, and why Palestinians are not taking part in the events which are changing the history of their region. Despite early glimmers of hope, Palestinians are unlikely to become a full state member of the U.N because of the expected U.S Veto; while no major development on the national unity issue has been achieved so far. Even the prisoner exchange deal did not live up to people’s expectations: although a large number of prisoners has been released, it included no big name leaders, like Marwan Barghouti, against people’s expectations.

The surprise came a few days ago, when Hamas and the Islamic Jihad Party announced that they would be willing to work with Mahmoud Abbas to adopt a post-98 Sinn Fein-style political model, by focusing on peaceful and popular resistance rather than the armed one. This is a huge announcement that seemed to have escaped the news reports completely, too busy reporting the continuing upheavals elsewhere.

There are a number of reasons why Palestinians are taking this neutral stance on the political changes around them, a position emphasised and agreed upon during the meeting between Abbas and the head of Hamas, Mr. Khalid Meshal. They both told the press publicly that Palestinians will not interfere with the Arab Spring. A point of view which has been criticised by many fellow Arab governments, especially Qatar which seems to continue playing a vital role in fuelling the Arab uprisings, particularly through its Al Jazeera networks.

The first reason for this abstention is that Palestinians have more to lose than any of the parties involved, whether in those countries which have overcome their dictators or those in the process of doing so. With over 5 million Palestinian refugees spread out across the Arab World, particularly Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Libya, any political position the Palestinian leadership takes on the Arab Spring will automatically affect many Palestinian refugees living in those countries and who have been, for decades, unable to return to Palestine since being kicked out of their homes in 1948 when Israel was established, and who have since become stateless.

The painful memory of Palestinians being kicked out of Kuwait immediately after the first Gulf War is still alive. In 1991, the Kuwaiti government expelled over 450,000 Palestinians out of their homes in response to Yasser Arafat’s support for Sadam Hussein’s invasion of the country; the second time these refugees found themselves with nowhere to go, and were hosted eventually in a number of other Arab countries including Syria, Jordan and Iraq. The Palestinian leadership can’t afford to risk a similar dilemma hence Hamas’s refusal to participate in pro-Assad demonstrations in Syria. A decision which has angered the Syrian regime and put the Palestinian party in financial and political isolation for sometime.

The second reason is perhaps that the Arab Spring, one could argue, had reached Palestine much earlier: when Hamas won the parliamentary elections in 2006 and took over Gaza militarily in 2007. During this period, most Arab countries did not take a neutral position and, instead, supported Fatah and the leadership in Ramallah massively. In fact, the former Egyptian regime imposed heavy sanctions on Gaza and helped tighten Israel’s siege by closing the Rafah border completely for nearly 5 years. Palestinian pursuit of democracy was then mocked by other fellow Arabs and referred to, ironically, as the work of foreign intervention in Palestinian home affairs.

What has been referred to as a military coup by the resistance movement, Hamas, is now more widely understood as no different from the current revolutions in the Arab World. From this perspective, the Palestinian Spring has had its chance to mature and develop into a more coherent political agenda where both Fatah and Hamas, as well as other Palestinian factions, are focusing more on building their civil society and getting international recognition rather than engaging in party-political infighting.

This is because both Islamists and Secularists have realised that they can’t exist without each other. Fatah is trying to re-engage itself with the Palestinian public as a resistance movement while Hamas is focusing on presenting itself as a leader not only in the battlefield but also in the political arena, hence agreeing with Abbas on civil resistance as an alternative method. This position ought to be saluted and encouraged by international players, such as the Quartet, rather than ignored.

Those wishing to see a speedy transition to democracy in the countries that have already got rid of their dictators need only look at the Palestinian model and realise that it will take some time for the political situation to mature and become more inclusive. Because of Israel’s blockade of Gaza, Palestinians focused on finding other sources to rely on other than Western financial support.

This has proven to be successful given that Gaza remains a stronghold of the resistance despite continuous Israeli attacks and invasions. Coupled with isolating Abbas and Fatah in the West Bank, by continuing settlement building, Israel has exposed the bias of Western politics. This is why the U.S and Europe are very keen on starting a dialogue with the Islamist movements across the Arab World to ensure that the same mistake they made with Hamas is not repeated. The advantage here is that the U.S and Europe won’t have to adhere to the Israeli pressure as they did with Hamas.

Unlike many who would argue that the hope for a true democracy in the Arab World is set in Tunisia and Egypt, the position that Hamas will take from National Unity and resistance will determine the way other Arab Islamist movements will adopt in the coming few months. This is particularly true if Palestinian elections go ahead as recently agreed upon in May 2012. During the lead up to the recent Tunisian elections, which the organisers wanted to be purely Tunisian without any foreign observers, the only place they sought advice and observers from was the small and humble Palestinian authority.

A third reason why Palestinians are refraining from getting involved could be because they have always been the weaker side, whose opinion is discounted even when it comes to Palestinian issues. Many Arab governments boycotted Yasser Arafat for signing the Oslo Agreement. In fact, Gaddafi expelled nearly 30,000 Palestinian refugees after the agreement was signed in 1993. Those refugees were mostly from Gaza, they tried to go back but they Egyptians wouldn’t let them claiming that the Israelis wouldn’t allow them to return home. A large majority then was admitted to Syria after months of negotiations.

Palestinians have always paid a heavy price for what goes on around them starting from the Great Arab Revolution in 1916 led by Sheriff Hussain of Mecca who had, for personal interests, ignored the Belfour Deceleration while concentrating mainly on his expansion agenda, and was helped by Britain and France.

One would also ask why a Palestinian authority was not established between 1950 and 1967 when Egypt and Jordan ruled Gaza and the West Bank respectively. It would be impossible to answer this question without digging deep into the Arab rivalry and quest for leadership, particularly between the old and current regimes of Egypt and Jordan. Palestine has always been used as a propaganda tool for Arab regimes to keep their own peoples under control.

Therefore, staying away from current changes in the region is the right thing to do, as no one can predict where things will go and what price will need to be paid. Focusing on internal affairs and developing a unified front where political, civil and popular resistance go hand in hand to raise awareness of the Palestinian struggle for freedom should be the priority for now. With an Israeli hardline government that continues to build settlements, increase checkpoints, besiege Gaza and isolate Fatah and Abbas, it is no surprise that Palestinians are developing a new political outlook that focuses on people’s right to build a state.

The Islamists across the Arab World have learned a lot from the Palestinian model, trying to present themselves differently. During the Tunisian elections, the new Justice and Development Islamist party has already announced that they will not be adopting Sharia Law and will continue to capitalise on the country’s economic strengths, such as tourism. It is also reported that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt will not revoke Egypt’s Camp David Agreement with Israel if they win the elections.

Most of these new parties have no experience of politics to speak of, just as Hamas was when it won the Palestinian elections in 2006. All eyes will be focussed on the way Palestinian politics develop, which will produce more lessons to be learned.

Ultimately, if the U.S and Europe would like better relationships with the Arab World, they should engage with Palestinian politics and open a dialogue with Hamas and Fatah encouraging a unity government, instead of continually yielding cravenly to Israeli pressures.

Finally, if the new form of civil disobedience and demonstrations that have swept the Arab Spring are to reach Palestinians, they are more likely to affect those living within the state of Israel in places like Haifa, Galilee, Jerusalem…etc. This is because of Israel’s official policy towards its own non-Jewish citizens, those Palestinians who stayed in their homes after 1948 and now represent 20 % of the population. This segment of the Israeli society is continuing to experience increasingly unsustainable forms of apartheid, where they are limited in their choice of jobs, places they can live and government positions they have a right to aspire to.

In fact, the Israeli Kenesset has repeatedly tried to ban Israeli-Arab political parties that do not explicitly recognise Israeli as a Jewish State, a move that would obviously jeopardise any Palestinian,  Muslim or Christian right to live in Israel were it to be succeed.  The last such bill, put forward in 2010, was rejected by The Israeli central elections committee due to lobbying by the country’s Palestinian citizens. Unless reversed, Israel’s Gaddafi model of restricting citizens from its own population from practicing their civil, religious and political rights will eventually open the floodgates of an Arab Spring in the country.

(Photo: fawq-jedar.blogspot.com)

While it is widely understood that revolutions endeavor to overthrow political structures and aim to change the social order and power paradigm within any given society, there is still no single, inclusive understanding of what actually constitutes a revolution. Nor is there any consensus as to exactly what a revolution is supposed to achieve.

An ordinary Egyptian is likely to determine his/her take on revolution from various angles: measurable economic advancement – or lack thereof; the ability to voice an opinion without fear of censorship or retaliation; the right to participate in collective action, and influence the overall direction of his/her country.

A revolution can also delve into the realm of self-definition. Some Arab collectives have redefined themselves along religious, nationalistic or ideological lines – by re-coloring a flag or rewording a national anthem – in the hope that this would allow them to cement political change through a collective psychological departure from one era into another.

While conceptual depictions of major phenomena may be achievable, their practical application can be elusive. On January 14, just days after the ousting of Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, I warned of the failure to appreciate the unique circumstances of the Tunisian revolution, and the distinctiveness of Tunisian society as a whole:

“There is no harm in expanding a popular experience to understand the world at large and its conflicts. But in the case of Tunisia, it seems that the country is largely understood within a multilayer of contexts, thus becoming devoid of any political, cultural or socio-economic uniqueness. Understanding Tunisia as just another ‘Arab regime’, another possible podium for al-Qaeda’s violence, is convenient but also unhelpful to any cohesive understanding of the situation there and the events that are likely to follow.”

The article was a response to the media frenzy which placed all Arab societies into one category. But this failure of distinction cannot be attributed merely to the overriding ignorance of the Western media and intellectuals in their understanding of Arabs, nor of Western governments’ opportunistic relationship to the ‘Arab world’. Analogous generalizations were also being employed by the Arab media and intellectuals, and even the rebelling masses themselves.

There seemed little harm in Yemeni activists relating to the Egyptian revolutionary experience, or Syrians and Libyans borrowing each other’s slogans. After all, there is an unmistakable cultural and historical bond between various Arab societies, and they are rife with overlapping experiences of colonization, foreign occupation, dictatorship and popular uprisings. But what was meant to inspire a sense of shared values and experiences quickly became a fault line, exploited by those who wanted to ensure the failure of Arab uprisings, or to direct their outcomes.

It was no surprise that the Arab uprisings did not remain the business of the Arabs alone. Even before the governments of France and the United Kingdom signed their infamous Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916 – dividing Arab provinces (then part of the Ottoman Empire) into spheres of influence – the fate of the region had already been determined by outside powers. And unlike common myths associated with the ‘Arab Spring’, Arab nations have repeatedly rebelled against foreign colonizers and their own despots.

The belated Western response to the Tunisian revolution – and the incoherent reaction to the Egyptian revolution in January 25 – served as a wakeup call to those who inherited the legacy of François Georges-Picot and Sir Mark Sykes Indeed, past encounters continue to define the Western countries’ ties to the ‘Middle East region’, which is appreciated for its many economic spoils and unmatched strategic importance.

“Western security, construction and infrastructure companies that see profit-making opportunities receding in Iraq and Afghanistan have turned their sights on Libya, now free of four decades of dictatorship,” wrote Scott Shane in the New York Times (October 28, 2011).

This short sentence truly sums up the motives of Western intervention, and the West’s overall attitude towards its former colonies. However, there is a strange resolve among many players in the ‘Arab Spring’ – including in Arab media – that discount or ignore the foreign element whenever Arab uprisings are discussed. This tendency is not only intellectually dishonest and perceptibly ahistorical, it is also highly suspicious. Amid the purposeful silence regarding the self-serving and destructive role played by foreign powers, plots are being hatched against various countries under the very pretexts that led to the destruction of Iraq, Libya, and even Lebanon. Yes, in 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon, it used the concept of democracy as part of its justification.

However, being fully appreciative of the disparaging and exploitative role of foreign powers shouldn’t allow one to turn into an apologist for dictatorship either. A more somber reading of history shows the unshakable bond between dictators and their foreign benefactors – at the expense of the oppressed masses, who are now revolting to reset the course of history on a more equitable route.

True, a revolution can be polarizing for those who are projected to either win or lose once its final outcome is determined. But intellectuals have a historic responsibility to remain vigilant of the uniqueness of each and every collective experience, and to place it within accurate historical contexts. They should not omit inconvenient truths when such omissions are deemed convenient.

This is not moral neutrality, a notion that has been articulated by South African anti-Apartheid leader Desmond Tutu in his iconic statement: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” It is rather the responsibility of the intellectual to question what is taken for granted. Edward Said claimed that the ideal intellectual should be seen as an “exile and marginal, as amateur, and as the author of a language that tries to speak the truth to power.”

Speaking truth to power is still possible, and is more urgent than ever. The fate of a nation, any nation, cannot be polarized to the terrible extent that the Arab uprisings have. On both sides of the divide, some are cheering for foreign intervention, while others are justifying the senseless murder of innocent people by dictators.

There is possibly a fine line between the divides, and it is the responsibility of the intellectual to trace this line, and remain steadfast there. He may consequently find himself marginalized and exiled, but at least he will maintain his integrity.

This is the statement the Sun received but did not print:

“This government cancelled the tax on bankers’ bonuses. Instead it has brought in a nurses’, teachers’ and lollipop ladies’ tax.

This is what the increase in pension contributions – around £1,000 a year for a nurse – really means. It is not paying for pensions but going straight to the Treasury to fill the hole left by the bonus tax.

It takes a lot to get Brits to strike. Yet the government has driven millions of its own staff to stop work, including unions that have never gone on strike before such as head-teachers. They are not stupid or manipulated by union leaders, but ordinary decent people doing important jobs taking a stand as a last resort.

We know the strike will cause difficulties today, and we regret that. But it’s proved to be the only language the government understands.

I’ve been leading talks with ministers for months. But they were going nowhere. It’s only when we called a day of action that government started to move. Ministers should listen carefully today to their staff, and get stuck into trying to reach the fair negotiated settlement that unions want.”

Spread the word.

Gaddafi was one of those dictators that authoritarian left wingers liked. It’s not that surprising that they’d ignore his numerous crimes against his own people given their continued lionisation of Lenin and Trotsky. The crimes of the Bolsheviks against the Russian people are dismissed as necessary to save the revolution despite the fact that, as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman described so well, they destroyed the revolution and laid the path that led to Stalin.

Forget Lockerbie and the IRA, Gaddafi’s worst crimes were against his own people. Political opponents were imprisoned and “disappeared”, many murdered – such as the estimated 1,200 prisoners reported massacred in 1996 in a Abu Salim, a prison that led some in Guantanamo to consider their conditions an improvement.

Gaddafi colluded with the UK and US during the worst days of the “war on terror”, accepting rendition flights of people to torture. That’s right, the great anti-imperialist linked up with the CIA and MI6 – ask Abdul Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi.

People seem to have conveniently forgotten that the whole thing started with protests against the arrest of a human rights activist, Fethi Tarbel, back in February. Just like in Tunisia and Egypt, these protests were attacked by the security forces. Unlike Tunisia and Egypt, Gaddafi wouldn’t go and instead turned the country’s considerable military might against his own people as the rebellion spread out from Benghazi.

As for NATO’s intervention, what was the alternative? Gaddafi’s tanks had Benghazi encircled, having already all but destroyed Zawiya and violently retaken Ra’s Lanuf and Brega. The world was faced with letting Gaddafi massacre more of his people and potentially crushing the rebellion, or someone stepping in. Do the NATO countries have ulterior motives? Very likely. Was there anyone else who could have done it? Maybe, but no-one stepped forward.

My personal preference would have been the Egyptian army doing what the Vietnamese army did with Cambodia in 1978. This would have had the added advantage of getting the military out of Egypt where they are now trying to roll back post-Mubarak progress. But that wasn’t on the agenda. It was NATO or nothing and I’m glad it wasn’t the latter.

It seems horrible things may have happened during the revolution and are happening now in Syria – much like every other revolution in history. I challenge anyone to cite a revolution against a vicious dictator like Gaddafi or al-Assad where the revolutionaries have been as pure as the driven snow and haven’t engaged in executions. Do those criticising what happened to Gaddafi and, apparently, some of his forces feel the same about what the Italians did to Mussolini? Or the Bolsheviks did to the Romanovs in 1918?

The full story of the Libyan revolution has yet to be written, it’s now in the hands of the Libyan people. Those who are criticising them show a disgraceful lack of faith in their ability to create a new situation. It seems, in the mind of the authoritarian left-winger, praise is only due to people who had the good fortune to have ultimately weak rulers Praise for the Egyptians and Tunisians, condemnation for the Libyans for daring to ask for help.

As for Syria, I hope intervention isn’t necessary. Bashar isn’t his father, the archetypal Arab strongman dictator who ordered the massacre in Hama in 1982 in which tens of thousands were killed. Bashar has sent in the army and thousands have been killed, but he hasn’t shown the ruthlessness that defined his father.

He’s talking compromise – the kind of compromises both Ben Ali and Mubarak offered before they went and now the rest of the Arab world is turning against him (hypocrites that many of them are). He even appears to have shaved off his moustache in protest (not that it was every particularly noteworthy)!

Life isn’t black and white. It’s possible to criticise NATO, condemn the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and still be thankful that Benghazi didn’t end up like Hama in 1982 and that Gaddafi’s gone. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend. The people of Libya and Syria are not some pawns in a game of global politics and deserve a taste of freedom. Democracy is far from perfect, but it’s a damn sight better than totalitarianism.