Tariq Ali's Blog, page 12

A Question for Egypt

A Question for Egypt

Millions gathered in squares and streets

They wanted the end of the system

They wanted to topple Mubarik and his regime.

When the military men understood the resolve of the crowd

They took Mubarik away.

That was the first phase.

Then came the Brotherhood

Elected by many not of its number

They wanted to end the old regime for ever.

But the Brotherhood broke its promises,

Clung to the old system

Sent sewage down the tunnels of Gaza

Praised the man in the White House.

Did nothing at home

except torment Copt and women and Shia. Read more

Pakistan’s Osama bin Laden report is more cover-up than self-criticism

“Pakistan’s Osama bin Laden report is more cover-up than self-criticism” by Tariq Ali for the Guardian, 10th July 2013

 

After the US helicopter assault on Osama bin Laden’s quarters in Abbottabad and his assassination by navy Seals in 2011, a shaken Pakistani government set up a commission of inquiry, presided over by a retired judge, Javed Iqbal. Its findings, a part of which was leaked to al-Jazeera this week, reveal the country’s intelligence agencies at loggerheads and in a general state of confusion.

The evidence of General Pasha, the former chief of the Pakistani intelligence agency ISI, is particularly interesting, with its account of Bin Laden’s travels in Pakistan following the war on Afghanistan, and explanation of how one of his aides used his Pakistani identity card to buy a plot of land not far from the Pakistan military academy. Many of these details are fascinating and the tone of the report may strike many as honest and self-critical. Yet it is worth clarifying that the overall thrust of the report is to exonerate the intelligence agencies by effectively accepting the official version that the ISI and the Federal Investigation Agency were unaware of Bin Laden’s presence in the country.

The notion that Bin Laden, family and bodyguards left Afghanistan and entered Pakistan in 2002 without the knowledge and help of the ISI is risible. The report is weak on background. For example, it fails to explain that the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan was made possible only by heavy Pakistani involvement on every level: the operation was viewed by Pakistan’s general headquarters as a total success, the first in its entire history. The control of Kabul and the southern part of the country supposedly provided Islamabad with “strategic depth”.

The links between the ISI and the Taliban regime were intimate. There were differences on some issues but treated by the senior partner as little more than lovers’ tiffs. After 9/11, the Pakistani military were instructed by Washington to facilitate the Nato occupation. General Musharraf, then president of Pakistan, asked for more time and was given two weeks. An American general warned that if Pakistan did not help it would be bombed to extinction. Musharraf caved in. This resulted in enormous tensions within the army, which was now being asked to reverse its only military triumph and help topple a government it had created. The high command held firm, but military dissidents organised three attempts on Musharraf’s life and the jihadi groups funded by the ISI went rogue. Read more

 

Tariq Ali: “I see Snowden as a Freedom Fighter”

Interviewed on Outlook India, Tariq Ali discusses the American NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Opinion on Edward Snowden is sharply divided. Some see him as a whistleblower, one who has done great service to the world; others see him as a traitor. How do you see him?

I see him as a freedom fighter. “I’m neither traitor nor hero. I’m an American,” he told the South China Post. If only there were more like him. A whole movement is what is needed. He has informed US and British citizens that they have no privacy whatsoever. The US campaign against China on the hacking issue has been turned upside down. The sheer hypocrisy of Washington is breathtaking. And its not surprising that Germans appear to be the most shocked: the main charge against the Stasi in East Germany was they spied on their own people. They’ve been left far behind by the US and its British satrapy.

How justified are governments to spy on their own citizens?

There is no justification. If a citizen has broken the law then he or she should be arrested and tried in a court of law and the evidence made available. One of the outcomes of 9/11 has been the death of habeas corpus and growing restrictions on democratic rights. This is nothing new. Intelligence agencies in the West and elsewhere have been snooping for years. In the 60s and 70s my post was opened before it was delivered, my phone was tapped and I was told of this by people who had carried it out, but we knew it was happening. The infiltration and destruction of dissident groups in the United States (the Black Panthers in particular) has been well documented. What is different is that the birth of the internet, mobile phones, etc., has made it so much easier. But its also become easier to detect. And so many people are involved that sooner or later someone, disgusted with what is being done, breaks and goes public.

Terrorism today affects most countries. But is that justification enough for governments to listen to private conversations, open e-mail and Face book accounts of people?

Why does ‘terrorism’ happen? Without a cause there is no effect. India has a rich tradition of terrorism: the struggle against the British provoked it in Bengal and the Punjab. The US occupation of the Arab world and Afghanistan, its threats against Iran, the use of drones in Pakistan, etc., anger many people. A tiny minority organises its revenge. It’s politically ineffective, but in a world where there is hardly an opposition from above the spectacle created by terrorist attacks appeals to some. The spillage from the Afghan war has completely destabilised Pakistan and the Pakistani Taliban are creating mayhem in the country. I don’t think most of these bearded gentlemen are on Facebook or tweeting each other in between saying their prayers and targeting foreigners.

Should the power given to a government and various other agencies in a democracy to spy be based on blind trust or informed consent?

I think governments should be transparent. All this surveillance has been going on for years. How come that the Boston brothers were not detected? There will always be people who will manage to slip below the radar. How do you stop that? Even if you encourage neighbourhood groups to spy on each other non-stop and report anything suspicious, you become a police state and it won’t work. The real solution lies in changing what is going on in the world. Throughout the Cold War the charge against the Communist countries was that they spied on their citizens, which was true. If it was wrong then, why is it justifiable today? Just because its being carried out by elected governments? The double-standards are grotesque. Read more 

Tariq Ali: In Ankara

How it changes. When I was in Istanbul last April the mood was sombre. Even the most ebullient of friends were downcast. The latent hostility to the regime was always present, but the AKP’s hegemony, I was told many times, went deep. Erdo?an was a reptile, cynical but clever and not averse to quoting the odd verse from Nâz?m Hikmet, the much-loved communist poet imprisoned by Atatürk. The poet had escaped in a boat and been rescued by a Soviet tanker. ‘Can you prove you’re Hikmet,’ the captain asked him. He laughed and pointed to a poster in the captain’s cabin which had his photograph on it. He died in Moscow in 1963. His remains are still in exile.

Talk now was of food (the exquisite wafer-thin pizzas from the Syrian border) or the delights of children produced in middle age. Complaints were varied. An old cinema on ?stiklal was about to be dynamited. It would be replaced by yet more characterless shops that have already disfigured this historic street with its arcades and Belle Epoque apartments (where, once upon a time, many wealthy Armenian merchant families lived). There had been a few mild demonstrations against the execution of the movie house, but symbolic in character. The newspapers were talking of the regime’s latest PR triumph: sixty ‘wise men’ who would be consulted from time to time. There were photographs of their first assembly in the Dolmabahçe Palace, a suitably kitsch setting for a kitsch gathering. An old acquaintance, Murat Belge, was among their number.

Encouraged by the indifference, Erdo?an proceeded with other plans: A shopping mall in Gezi Park, a new bridge over the Bosphorus and a new grand mosque to steal the landscape from Sinân’s delicate creations. The citizens of Istanbul were never asked for their views. It was this lack of any consultation that angered the citizens and triggered the occupation of the tiny green space in the heart of the city. As we all now know, the spirit of conciliation is not the Turkish prime minister’s strong point. Nor is generosity of heart or mind. He loathes secular intellectuals, refers to the founders of the republic as drunkards or alcoholics (as if those were their defining characteristics rather than outwitting Lord Curzon and the British Empire to create a republic) and talks constantly of the danger from left-wing ‘terrorists’. When angry, which is often, Erdo?an takes on the character of a village bully, sometimes embarrassing his colleagues.

Socially conservative, politically unscrupulous, economically beholden to the building industry and militarily/politically Nato’s favourite Islamists, the party in power ignored the voices on the street. They were meant to be the model for other Muslim countries. Erdo?an’s arrogance in using violence – baton charges, water cannon and tear gas, against mainly young people – has wrecked the model. Hence the note of exasperation from the White House, and the familiar request that ‘both sides should show restraint.’ Read more

Solidarity with Taksim Gezi Park Demonstrators

In a message from Ankara, Tariq Ali offers solidarity with Turkish demonstrators occupying Taksim Gezi Park.

The Filthy Rich Election

Tariq Ali for the London Review of Books, 20th June 2013

Not long before last month’s elections, dozens of workers (the youngest was 12) were burned to death in factory fires in Karachi and Lahore. Pakistan’s rulers were unmoved: there were token expressions of regret but no talk of tough new laws being passed after the election. There is barely any safety regulation in Pakistan, and if any legislation does impede business a modest bribe usually solves the problem. Factory inspections were discontinued during the Musharraf regime in order, it was claimed, to protect industry from harassment by state inspectors. Ali Enterprises, the factory that burned down in Karachi, somehow passed an inspection by a New York-based body called Social Accountability International.

As for outright crimes, it’s best to use the cloak of religion to justify them. This effectively paralyses the lower and middle echelons of the judiciary, the police and the politicians. In March, Joseph Colony, a Christian settlement in Lahore, was attacked by a Muslim group calling itself Lovers of the Prophet. The Lovers had heard that one of the Christians had defiled the name of Muhammad. The accusation was false, but the person accused was arrested even so, and, even so, the Lovers and other zealots attacked the settlement, burning down 171 dwellings as the police and other worthy citizens watched. As news of the disaster spread and the chief minister of the Punjab, Shahbaz Sharif, pretended nothing was going on, the chief justice of the Supreme Court criticised the police and the Punjab government for failing to protect the public and noted that it hadn’t learned the lesson of the even worse atrocity in the predominantly Christian town of Gojra in 2009, when eight Christians were burned alive, dozens were injured, houses were torched and a church destroyed. The chief justice asked why the report submitted by the judicial inquiry into that incident had not been published. There was no reply from the provincial government. One reason for politicians’ complacency is that they know they have the support of the silent majority. A Pew Institute survey carried out in April reveals that 84 per cent of Pakistanis favour the sharia as the only law of the land, slightly fewer than in Iraq (91 per cent), more than Egypt (74 per cent) and seven times as high as in Turkey (12 per cent).

The elected representatives of the people didn’t pay much attention to the factory fires or to the anti-Christian riots. They were busy elsewhere. Take just one example: the shenanigans of the provincial assembly in Sindh where the Pakistan People’s Party, led by Benazir Bhutto’s widower, Asif Zardari, is the single largest bloc. The day before the assembly was due to be dissolved in advance of the general election, the provincial government ordered all the banks to stay open (it was a Saturday) so that money could be withdrawn. Long-forgotten schemes were revived and a number of dodgy deals hurriedly voted through the chamber. And as if to reward themselves for all this hard work, the assembly voted its members a 60 per cent salary rise backdated to July 2011, adding measures to make sure that anyone who wasn’t re-elected kept his or her perks: free government accommodation with servants laid on, VIP treatment at airports, official passports and so on. It’s a mystery why they don’t just make the privileges hereditary. Needless to say, very few members of parliament pay taxes and several outgoing cabinet ministers, including the prime minister, are refusing to pay the electricity and telephone bills in their government residences. It’s easy to see why so many Pakistanis want to become members of one of the five parliamentary assemblies. Read more

Tariq Ali in Croatia

Tariq Ali recently appeared at the Subversive Cinema Festival in Croatia. Click here to see Tariq Ali being interviewed on Croatian TV.

In this footage Tariq Ali appears on a leading current affairs TV show with filmmaker Oliver Stone.

In the final video Tariq Ali can be seen in a roundtable discussion with Oliver Stone at the Subversive Cinema Festival.

 

1963: from the Stones to Dr Strangelove, a year of social and cultural upheaval

“1963: from the Stones to Dr Strangelove, a year of social and cultural upheaval” by Tariq Ali for the Guardian, May 7, 2012

 

Was it a prefigurative year? I think so. Not that one thought of it as such at the time or even a few years later, when it was totally forgotten in the turbulence that engulfed the world. I am trying to recall that year, to find deep down some memories, even a few impressions on the basis of which I could reconstruct a misted-up past without too many distortions.

When I arrived to study at Oxford in October 1963, the bohemian style was black plastic or leather jackets for women and black leather or navy donkey jackets for men. I stuck to cavalry twills and a duffle coat, at least for a few months. The Cuban missile crisis had temporarily boosted CND: the Labour party conference had actually voted for unilateral nuclear disarmament in 1960, before changing its mind again the following year, influenced strongly by leftwing icon Aneurin Bevan’s deathbed refusal to “go naked into the conference chamber”. Bertrand Russell thought CND was too moderate and resigned to create its direct action offspring, the Committee of 100.

Talk was of the Beatles. Those who had been at the Carfax assembly rooms that February to hear them were bewitched. Even so, there were huge arguments at parties between the Beatles partisans and those of us who thought the Rolling Stones were simply superior, certainly more exciting, more sensual and better to dance to. At one such party we voted on who we would dance to and the women, with a few exceptions, preferred the Fab Four. The “real men” demanded the Stones.

Bob Dylan was in the air too. His album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan had just been released and Mr Tambourine Man provided the backdrop for myriad eye contacts, a prelude to seduction or not, as was often the case. The pill had changed attitudes and given women much more freedom, but the discrimination was appalling. It was Judith Okely (Jude the Baptist), fresh from the Sorbonne, who argued the case for feminism and introduced some of us to the work of Simone de Beauvoir.

That same year Dylan moved in with Suze Rotolo in the Village. Her parents were communists who had survived McCarthy. Together they radicalised Dylan. The Times they are a-Changin’ (1964) was the result, helping to fuel the civil rights movement and radicalise students who had expected a great deal from President Kennedy, but had got the Bay of Pigs invasion and Vietnam instead, and later Lyndon B Johnson. In August, Martin Luther King’s “I had a dream” speech electrified a whole generation. Almost a century after the civil war, African Americans were being lynched, denied basic human rights, not allowed to register for the vote in most southern states, and discriminated against in the north. The Ku Klux Klan had supporters in both Republican and Democrat parties. They had decided to fight back: peacefully if we may, said Dr King; violently if we must, replied Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X. Read more

Socialism, Capitalism and Democracy

Tariq Ali speaks on “Socialism, Capitalism and Democracy.

On Buddhist Fundamentalism

Tariq Ali for London Review of Books, April 25th 2013

Four years after the killing of between eight and ten thousand Tamils by the Sri Lankan army, which brought to an end a civil war that had lasted for 26 years, there is trouble on the island again. This time the army isn’t directly responsible: instead it’s the Buddhist monks from Bodu Bala Sena, the most active of the fundamentalist groups that have sprouted in Sinhalese strongholds. Three-quarters of Sri Lankans are Sinhalese; most of them are Buddhists. The monks’ target this time is the small Muslim minority. Muslim abattoirs have been raided, halal butchers attacked, homes targeted. The police merely stand and watch, and Sri Lankan TV crews calmly film the violence. A few weeks ago, Buddhist monks got some hoodlums to attack a Muslim-owned car showroom. One of its employees was going out with a young Sinhalese woman and her father complained to a local monk. The Sunday Leader reported that ‘an eyewitness saw a monk leaving one of the temples … followed by a group of youths, mostly under 25 years of age. The group carried stones and, people were later to discover, kerosene.’

A BBS blogger recently explained the ‘reasoning’ behind the targeting of Muslims:

Muslims have been living in this country since seventh century and now only they want to have Halal food in Sri Lanka. Population wise they are only 5 per cent. If we allow Halal, next time they will try to introduce circumcision on us. We have to nip these in the bud before it becomes a custom. We should never allow the Muslims and Christians to control anything in Sri Lanka … Hijab, burqa, niqab and purdah should be banned in Sri Lanka. The law and the legislature should always be under the control of the Sinhala-Buddhists and our Nationalist Patriotic president. After all, Sri Lanka is a gift from Buddha to the Sinhalese.

Difficult to imagine how circumcision could be ‘nipped in the bud’ even by a Buddhist, or how the percentage of the Muslim population could have fallen from 9.7 per cent in the 2011 census to 5 per cent today. It has undoubtedly dropped, however, as a direct result of decades of unchecked harassment and persecution, by Tamils as well as Sinhalese Buddhists.

It isn’t just members of the BBS who spout this nonsense. Many in the Sinhalese political-military mainstream share these views. In the town of Pottuvil, where the Muslims are the majority, soldiers have been helping local monks erect Buddhist statues and allowing loudspeakers to blare out Buddhist hymns morning and night. Local women who own land are being driven off it: the monasteries then steal the land, with the army providing protection.

Buddhist hardliners hate the suggestion that the island was not a gift from Buddha to them alone, but the earliest architectural finds reveal Tamil as well as Buddhist objects, which is hardly surprising given the proximity of South India to northern Sri Lanka. Who came first was a burning issue throughout the colonial period. Ever since independence in 1948, Buddhist fundamentalism has been the driving force behind Sinhalese intransigence on the Tamil question. A Buddhist monk assassinated S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, the leader of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party and the country’s fourth prime minister, in 1959. He was said to have made too many (in fact too few) concessions to the Tamils. After this, politicians began to pander to the monks’ prejudices and anti-Tamil discrimination was institutionalised. Young Tamils began to believe armed struggle was the only way to free themselves. If Bengali Muslims could split from their brethren in West Pakistan and create Bangladesh, why not the Tamils?

Read more