Craig Murray's Blog, page 201

Berlin Conference

This speech in Berlin was to an interesting conference on freedom of expression at the Institute of Cultural Diplomacy. It proved useful in forcing me to pull together an overview of my current thoughts on events of the last year or so.

You can find video of other speakers here.

Nigeria

I was going to entitle this blog post "The Trouble With Nigeria", but that would require a book not a blog. Probably several volumes.

I spent four years of my life in Nigeria, and one reason I seldom blog about it is that I do not wish to upset my many Nigerian friends, who tend to find my views unpalatable (and it is their country, not mine).

It is only in recent years that I have come to the view that so many of the problems of the world come from colonial boundaries. If the 20th century was The Age of the Nation State – and I think that characterisation has merit – then so many of those nation states, arguably the majority, are defined by frontiers imposed by colonial outsiders. Often the ethnic and social ties of the inhabitants were among the least important factors in the minds of the colonialists carving up maps.

But the extraordinary thing is the way that entirely artificial national boudaries work, in the sense of creating national loyalties. Ethnic Ewes view themselves as first or foremost Ghanaian or Togolese, and indeed speak different official languages from their cousins in the next village. The creation of independent nations in Central Asia from deliberately unworkable borders (a power ploy by Stalin) is sufficiently recent for the genuine taking hold of strong national loyalties, cutting across ethnicity and geography, to be able to have been closely studied – the work of Olivier Roy is fascinating.

The title of The Catholic Orangemen of Togo takes an amusing example of the distortion on peoples of colonial legacy in Africa, but the book considers much more serious ones.

Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa, and the hostage killings today result directly from tensions arising from Nigeria's entirely artificial colonial borders. This is going to upset my Nigerian friends, but unfortunately the forcing together by the British of the Sultanate of Sokoto, Emirate of Kano, half of the territories of the Lamido of Adamawa etc with the Kingdom of Benin, and the Yoruba confederation, with the Ibo and other chieftaincies and at least sixty other ethnicities, was always an extraordinary and perilous construct.

I described the government of Nigeria in The Catholic Orangemen as a simple pump, by which military controlled governments dominated by Northern generals moved cash relentlessly and only northwards, from the populous and productive South to the comparatively empty and barren North. The demands of "Democracy" required a whole history of ludicrously false censuses and electoral registers to negate the obvious truth, that the South is vastly, vastly more populous than the North.

Two southern Presidents in a row – Obasanjo and Jonathan – have reduced the permanent flow of money northwards. Not stopped, but reduced. Most of that wealth anyway ended up in London or Geneva, but it did have some social spread in the Northern populations. That has also reduced, and that is why the violence by Northern based terrorist groups has increased. It has nothing to do with Al Qaida, despite the nonsense on our television screens.

I have not here discussed the terrible effect of oil in promoting the World's worst corruption, or the currency overvaluation that destroyed a once great agricultural economy. I have not discussed the resulting urban flight, despair and poverty, or the corrosive effect of a totally corrupt elite in encouraging a whole urban society to view fraud as the normal means of transaction. I have not covered the dignity of the remaining rural population, the despoilation of the oil areas, or the greater social cohesion of Northern society. You can learn a little on each in The Catholic Orangemen (the purchase button on the right is working again). Chinua Achebe remains indispensable to understanding.

I am dreadfully sorry for the dead construction workers, British and Italian. But the heart of the matter is a false colonial national construct.

My Nigerian friends are proud of their country, but I am afraid to say Nigeria's existence a a single entity is a great British error.

NHS Privatisation

An excellent posting here on the "lawmakers" who stand to make money out of turning over the NHS to private profit.

Is it fair to call this privatisation? The NHS will continue to be funded by taxpayers, but the primary motivation of those supplying the medical services will no longer be care or public service but private shareholder or partner profit, and the percentage of the taxpayers' money paid for the NHS which ends up as shareholder or partner profit will exponentially increase. NHS hospitals will be allowed to give 49% of their beds over to private patients. I think it is fair to call this privatisation.

But it is also worth remembering that this process of the "marketisation" of the NHS was given a massive boost by New Labour in the 2006 Health Act under Blair and Milburn. As the research I linked to above makes plain, as usual all three neo-con parties are absolutely in it together. Maybe that's what "We're all in this together" really means.

What they are all in is the trough.

Pointless Death

There is something extraordinarily pointless about the death of six British soldiers today at the fag end of a war which we have lost, the purpose of which is long since vanished. Of course Afghans die daily in this war, which is not meaningless for most of them as it involves ridding their country of an extremely unwelcome and alien occupying force. Each death is a tragedy, but we can be forgiven for being most immediately struck by the deaths of our own.

I will set off for India in a week on the next stage of my research for my biography of Alexander Burnes, including his own terribly wasteful death in the First Afghan War. In 1840 and 41 the British Army fought two pretty reasonable battles in just the area of Helmand where the six new deaths have occurred. Both were similar affairs, with British forces numbering over 2,000, including artillery, cavalry and infantry, defeating much larger forces of Pashtun tribesmen. The artillery was criticial. Both tactical successes had no effect at all on the eventual disastrous result of the British occupation, which achieved nothing but death.

We are in alliance with an Afghan government and army dominated by Northen Alliance warlords, plus the renegade Karzai clan of Pashtuns, fighting on the losing side of a civil war to support a massively corrupt government, which is incompetent only in that we have a total misunderstanding of what it is trying to achieve. The purpose of the Afghan government is to use NATO forces to enforce a temporary monopoly of power by the warlords who control the government. This will enable them as long as it lasts to loot billions in aid money and control the booming heroin trade. Then when NATO leave, so will they with their billions.

Seen in this light, its own light, the Afghan government is extraordinarily efficient. It is only incompetent if you imagine its purpose is to establish western governmental institutions, the rule of law, schools, roads etc. It has no intention of doing any of that, except where a little bit of actual development is required to keep lootable aid funds flowing.

There will be no long – or even medium – term effects of our occupation, except for even greater ingrained hatred of the West in the Afghan population.

I wonder who will be the next soldier to die for that?

Heartsick

Sometimes the horror of the abuse of power in the world just seems to close in, and I want to run away from the toil of blogging against it. To rage against the dying of the light is indeed noble; but also energy-sapping, and the light dies anyway.

Where do I begin? Not content with giving over the entire NHS budget to be plundered for private profit, the police service is now being privatised. The use of coercive force against its citizenry is the ultimate sanction of the state and must in a civilised society only be exercised with utmost restraint and control. Of course, in the last twenty years the British and US states have moved fast towards the use of fatal force against foreigners for profit, in their wild embrace of companies of mercenary killers. So while shocking, it is hardly surprising that politicians seek to find profit for their paymasters in use of state force against their own citizens. It makes you wonder whether anything the government can do would be so shocking as to wake the public from the lull of Simon Cowell or the Sun on Sunday. I fear in truth they could shoot asylum seeker children on the streets without the bulk of the population lifting a finger.

Then we have Obama on his knees before AIPAC, accepting his marching orders and promising that the US will participate if Israel decides to attempt to launch Armageddon. Are there no US taxpayers out there, unbesotted by religous fanatacism, who find it humiliating to have their national leader so obviously powerless and crawling before the Israeli lobby? Given that it is the US which funds Israel, and not vice versa, it is all very peculiar. Or is it simply that the US taxpayer funds Israel, but Israel funds US politicians, thus Israel is simply a de facto pimp in the diversion of taxpayers money into politicians' pockets?

We then have the very largely state owned Natwest Bank increasing mortgage rates on households whose real incomes were already falling, with all the media politely reporting that this is due to higher rates Natwest is having to pay for inter-bank borrowing. Which is to ignore the tens of billions free cash Natwest has received through first bailout then quantitative easing, and their recent access to effectively as much as they wanted from the European Central Bank at just 1%.

I am not a fan of Putin; the real democratic deficit in Russia comes not from the bussing and vote-rigging, without which Putin would have probably scraped over 50% anyway, but in the lack of media access for the opposition and the use of state resources effectively to campaign for Putin. But how different is that from what happens in the UK anyway? How much airtime do voices against the war in Afghanistan get? Or against the bank bailouts?

One cheerful moment, on last night's Newsnight. Jeremy Paxman actually challenged the Israeli Ambassador, who seemed keen to attack Iran, over Israel's nuclear weapons. First time in years I heard such a thing on the BBC.

Then when the Israeli Ambassador replied "Israel is not the one threatening to attack other countries" Paxman replied "You just discussed attacking Iran".

All of which is entirely obvious, but almost totally absent from broadcast media.

The Quest for Somali Oil

Just back from Accra and just about to set off for Berlin. I am very rude about the partiality of the Guardian's focus on occasions, but they deserve congratulations for getting it spot-on with this article explaining Cameron and Hague's sudden activism on Somalia.

Question of the Day

Why is self-determination an inalienable right for the people of the Falklands, but a gross example of Iranian meddling for the people of Bahrain?

Answers on a postcard please with a twenty pound note and framed photo of William Hague to Wars'R'Us, Oil and Armaments Ltd, House of Lords.

Death in Syria

The killings of Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik are deeply sad, as are the killings of all those millions of innocents who have died in the conflicts of the last decade whose names do not get such global sympathy. That is not to decry the sympathy; the world needs more of it, not less.

The Assad rule of Syria is brutal and it would be good if it were to end. There is no doubt the indiscriminate nature of the bombardment of Homs is vicious and wrong. But the same was true of the NATO destruction of Sirte. The idea that the answer to such deaths is to intensify the killing to a more industrial scale is crazed. The deliberate escalation of civil war in order to back a new winning side to gain leverage over economic resources appears to be the new standard method of advancing the interests of ruling western elites.

The truth is that Gadaffi was awful, but the life of ordinary Libyans is no better for the war, death and destruction and there is no practical improvement in human rights – indeed an awful lot more arbitrary rule, rape, brutalisation and killing by armed militias.

Life in Iraq is materially still massively worse than under the awful Saddam Hussain. The doctrine of "liberal intervention" is a screen for resource grab. The fact its practical effects on the countries upon whose inhabitants the necessary death – or "creative destruction" in the words of imperialist propagandist Niall Fergusson – is rained, are the opposite of those claimed, is hidden by the media simply declaring "Mission accomplished" and moving on. The awfulness of everyday life today in Iraq and Libya is not shown.

I hope Syrians can save themselves from their own government, their own militias, and above all from the awesome death-dealing of NATO.

Goebbels Broadcasting Corporation and Koran Burning

BBC World has just lead its 9am headline with "More protests in Kabul over the inadvertent buning of the Koran by NATO troops".

The word "inadvertent" has been interpolated since the 8am headlines. Who was responsible for its introduction?

It seems to me simply untrue that the Korans were burnt "inadvertently". The BBC have just reported that they were being burnt in an "incineration pit". That is not inadvertent. The US story is that the Korans were used to smuggle messages. If the books contained hidden messages, the Americans would have been analysing them, not burning them. They would certainly have been subjected to scrutiny, and it is therefore impossible that the Americans did not know they were Korans they were burning.

Inadvertent no. Inexplicably stupid yes.

Fit and Well and Still Learning

I am now at my Accra home after some travels in Africa. There is still a sanity and courtesy in the African countryside – even in drought affected Mali and Burkina Faso – that is refreshing to the soul after London. It is a linguistic irony that great cities are so uncivil.

There is no doubt that climate change is affecting West Africa, but not in any way which is easily predictable to the inhabitants, or anyone else. Weather patterns are undoubtedly more unsettled and more capricious, and the reliable seasonal rains and winds I knew apparently a thing of the past. Ghana saw a steady, apparently inexorable and accelerating thirty year decline in water inflow levels behind the Akosombo Dam, suddenly reversed by three years of massive rains reaching the north, which also brought bumper harvests in Mali and Burkina Faso. Then in the last year an extreme rain failure in those same regions.

The lack of food security to millions of marginal Sahelian inhabitants is a problem which has been little tackled despite decades of largely useless – or, I would argue, often counter-productive – international aid efforts. Emergency response is always marginal and does not kick in until a great many have already died. We are not yet there in northern West Africa, but we are in great hardship and economic ruination from which farmers will find it hard to recover, particularly with regards to loss of livestock.

I apologise for these undigested impressions, and will give some more considered problems once I have had a shower and sleep and thought a bit.