Tariq Ali's Blog, page 8

What’s going on in Pakistan?

A trip through the dark corridors and political galleries suggests that what we are witnessing in Pakistan today – street demos in Lahore and Islamabad, attempts to seize the prime minister’s house, a token occupation of the state television building – is little more than a crude struggle for power between the incumbents (the two stooges otherwise known as the Sharif brothers) and a segment of the opposition led by Imran Khan and the forces unleashed by the Canadian-based ‘moderate’ Islamist cleric Tahirul Qadri, who controls a large network of madrassahs that were supported by the Sharifs and many others. Mohammad Sarwar, for instance, the governor of Punjab (a millionaire chum of Blair and Brown and former New Labour MP from Glasgow), joined Qadri’s procession, presumably to demonstrate his faith.

Qadri says that democracy has failed the country and cannot deliver the reforms necessary to alleviate the suffering of the majority. He is opposed to violence and insists that his group was not in favour of his temporary partner’s tactics. While Khan’s followers stormed the Red Zone, Qadri stayed away and drizzled. His own politics are mysterious. The only serious alternative to actually existing democracy is the army, which in the decades that it ruled Pakistan was also incapable of any real reforms that benefited the poor or middle layers of society. And being a moderate, Qadri is certainly not in favour of a caliphate. At least, not yet.

Khan alleges that the polls were so heavily rigged in last year’s general election as to deny him victory. That polls in Pakistan are often rigged is beyond dispute – but to what extent? The defeated Pakistan People’s (in reality Zardari-Bhutto’s) Party made no such charge, despite being virtually wiped out in Punjab. Khan, too, accepted the results at the time and was photographed smiling with the new prime minister, Nawaz Sharif. More to the point, his party agreed to form the government in the frontier province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. If the election had been rigged so extensively, why not bide your time, become Leader of the Opposition and fight in parliament instead of forming a provincial government composed of the usual coterie of bandwagon careerists? Those (including me) who had thought that Khan’s new movement might create a political space for something better have been proved wrong. He is demanding the Sharif brothers resign with immediate effect and new elections be organised.

After their electoral triumph, the Sharif brothers behaved in the same old way as before, announcing fancy projects (with fancy contracts attached) that had little to do with the real state of the country: power cuts worse than before; the price of basic commodities spiralling upwards; religious violence; terror attacks, including one on Karachi Airport in which some poor, privatised security guards who had taken shelter in the airport’s huge freezer were burned to death. The Sharifs’ unpopularity grew rapidly.

Sulking in his tent, the frustrated, untutored, impulsive Imran Khan felt that he could and would have done better had he not been cheated at the polls. He convinced himself that he had actually won and that the Sharifs had to go. If the record of his government in KP is anything to go by, it’s doubtful that he would have done any better on a national scale. But no serious observer of Pakistan politics (including severe critics of the existing order) believes that the elections were that heavily rigged. The Sharif brothers (especially Shahbaz, who runs the Punjab) are masters of guile backed up, when necessary, with plump envelopes stuffed with money. But like it or not, they won the elections, which is why the Baluch parties, the PPP and the Jamaat-i-Islami have not joined the campaign to dethrone them.

Pakistan’s politicians never seem to have understood that the army is the crucial player in the country. This has been true since the state’s creation. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto overestimated his power base, made one mistake too many and was hanged by the generals. Nawaz Sharif imagined that with his overwhelming electoral triumph and the enthusiastic backing of Riyadh (on whose oil both the country and the military are heavily dependent) he was untouchable. He wanted to make an example of General Pervez Musharraf, who had toppled the last Sharif government in a coup in 1999, by trying him for high treason in the Supreme Court and having him hanged or locked up indefinitely. The army high command was livid. Six months ago [OK?] the current chief of staff, General Raheel Sharif, called Nawaz in and asked him to desist. Evidently he agreed to drop the charges against Musharraf and told the army chief that his predecessor was free to leave the country.

Outside GHQ, back in the sunlight, the prime minister’s colleagues told him he had made a mistake. The deal was off. The corps commanders were enraged. Heads had to roll. At the same time, the head of the country’s most popular and efficient news channel, Geo TV, said that a recent attempt on the life of one of their leading investigative journalists had been carried out by the ISI, and named the general in charge of that body as the assassin-in-chief. There was mayhem at GHQ. Nobody in the media had ever treated the army in such a cavalier fashion. The regulatory body was pushed to take Geo off the air. This incident, too, became part of the indictment against the Sharif brothers.

So the movement launched by Khan and Qadri is seen by many as being orchestrated by the secret state, its aim to destabilise the Sharifs and force them to resign. Khan’s outburst against the Saudis for ‘interfering in Pakistani politics’ was a result of Riyadh’s open hostility to any attempt to remove Sharif. The corps commanders held a meeting yesterday to discuss the political crisis and made it clear that the army has no plans to take control beyond what they control already – defence and foreign policy. The brothers have been weakened but are the wounds fatal? The protesting crowds are small for Pakistan. Tens of thousands, nowhere near the million-strong march that had been predicted. The people let Khan down badly and that can’t be ascribed to rigging – or can it?

The army would like to punish the Sharif’s for their impertinence and would like to see the back of them, but the Saudis might stop the oil subsidies. Even were the Sharifs to resign voluntarily, it is unlikely that Khan would be appointed head of a caretaker government. Some technocrat would be found to prepare the next election and inflate his own bank account. Every scenario has been tried and failed.

Click here to view the original article on the LRB site

Tariq Ali on the launch of TeleSUR English, the largest Latin American news channel

By Sophia Hussain

Last week, Venezuela-based news channel TeleSUR launched its English language website, bringing the left-leaning perspectives of Latin America to new audiences and offering a corrective to the English news media.

The site, which largely represents the views of state backers Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Uruguay and Venezuela, has already published incisive reporting on Israeli offensive in Gaza. Tariq Ali, Verso author and New Left Review editor, has long been involved with TeleSUR and will host The World Today, an interview show to be broadcast four times a week.

 

Addressing criticism that TeleSUR is a “mouthpiece of the Latin American left,” Ali told The Miami Herald that this is a hypocritical stance:

 

The global corporate media is the mouthpiece for the system of the market — its political aims, its wars . . . [but] no one ever refers to American networks as mouthpieces of official propaganda, which they are. At English-language Telesur, we come with a different philosophy and have a different worldview . . . but we will not make up things, we will not make up lies, we will not show documentaries with certain things cut out, all of which have happened on Western television at one time or another.

Tariq’s interview with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, as well a recent in-depth commentary on the situation in Gaza, is available to view on the TeleSUR website.

The site also prominently features many Verso authors: The Poorer Nations author Vijay Prashad on the geopolitics of the Islamic state, Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work author Belén Fernández on Israel as the U.S.’s adopted “progeny,” and They Can’t Represent Us! author Marina Sitrin on the Detroit water crisis—and it’s parallels to the situation in Gaza—and the Greek collectivist workers of Vio.Me. Sitrin will write for Telesur three times a month, and even more Verso authors are on the docket.

New Left Review Assistant Editor Tony Wood recently contributed a media review on Financial Times and Latin America specialist Richard Gott will write on Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Simon Bolivar. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life authors Karen and Barbara Fields will write on new films on slavery.

 

With its access to Latin American “administrations, officials and personalities that often shun the mainstream media,” and strong roster of contributors, we are eager to see how TeleSUR will impact the landscape of English language media.

 

For further viewing and reading:



Tariq Ali’s news show, The World Today.

Tony Wood reviews the Financial Times on The World Today. 

Belén Fernández, “A New Round of Birth Pangs”

Vijay Prashad, “The Geopolitics of the Islamic State”

Marina Sitrin, “Direct Action to Survive in Detroit”

The Miami Herald article on the launch of TeleSUR English.

Clikc here to access the VersoBooks site

 

 

Public meeting: On the eve of the Nato summit, how to stop the spread of war

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From Gaza to Iraq to Ukraine: the world is in flames and the western powers are bent on pouring fuel on the fire. NATO gives full backing to Israel, the watchdog of imperialism in the Middle East. Meanwhile in Ukraine the alliance has been stoking the flames of civil war, holding military exercises on Ukrainian soil at time fraught with international tensions. And in Iraq, horrific sectarian violence has shown how western intervention has failed by every measure.

The leaders of the key Western powers will gather in Wales for the NATO summit at the end of the month. We need the biggest possible protests to force them to break from their aggressive foreign policy.

Public meeting: How to stop the spread of war

Wednesday 27th August, 6.30pm

The Bloomsbury Baptist Church
235 Shaftesbury Ave, London, WC2H 8EP

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Speakers include Tariq Ali, Lindsey German, Boris Kagarlitsky

Share the Facebook event with your contacts

The latest from the Stop the War web site


Exposed: Stop the War Coalition is target of US program to track and kill activists Nafeez Mosaddeq
Killed, maimed, traumatized and terrified: what Israel did to the children of Gaza Khaled Alashqar


Obama and Cameron piggybacking on a humanitarian crisis for a new Iraq war Danny Schechter

Gallows Humour

Stupidity knows no bounds, especially when fuelled by narcissism and a tongue laced with demagogy. There is no other way to describe George Galloway’s absurd and offensive suggestion that Bradford should impose a total ban on Israeli tourists. Statistically it would be interesting to see how many tourists from any country visit Bradford (even after Galloway’s election as the Respect MP, an election that some of us welcomed at the time).

Politically it’s crazy. There are, after all, many Arab Israelis. Presumably they will not be excluded from savouring the delights of Bradford. And there are many anti-Zionist Israelis, including factions of the hassidim who were and remain opposed to the existence of Israel. Will they be punished too? Will there be Israeli-style checkpoints at every entrance to the city where Israelis will be asked whether or not they’re Zionists? How do you tell?

Demagogy of this sort helps those who defend Israel right or wrong, but one can’t help feeling that this is a desperate last throw to save Galloway’s seat in the general election. I doubt that the ploy will work. He might be luckier (though I hope not) in Scotland where his unionist politics align him with the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems and where he argues that an independent Scotland would not be inclusive. Unlike Bradford?

Click here to view the article on the LRB website.

 

Disgrace

The United Nations secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, denounced the bombing of the UN school in Gaza as ‘outrageous’ and ‘unjustifiable’. His officials have described the massacres as a ‘disgrace to the world’. Who stands disgraced? The UN General Assembly has regularly voted in favour of an independent Palestine. It is the Security Council that has vetoed the very thought and the Security Council, as everyone knows, is dominated by the United States; on this issue, Russia and China have remained on message.

What of the broader ‘international community’, in other words the United States/EU/Nato? They have backed Israel. As for the ideologues of the human rights industry, Samantha Power, the queen of ‘humanitarian interventions’, is the US rep on the Security Council and staunchly pro-Israel. Both the House and the Senate have unanimously written Israel a blank cheque; the French Socialist government banned demonstrations against the Gaza horrors in Paris on the grounds that they would encourage anti-semitism (not well received by French Jewish organisations who co-sponsored the march); the British Foreign Office is compliant as usual; the Germans too busy imposing sanctions against Russia while turning a blind eye to Gaza and refusing to accept that the Palestinians are the indirect victims of the judeocide the Third Reich unleashed during the Second World War and for which successive democratic governments in Germany have been paying ever since. The US satellite states in Eastern Europe have followed suit. Scandinavia, too, with this exception: Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister and veteran Nato hack, supports US policies, but the Swedish king and queen donned Palestinian scarves and joined a public demonstration against Israeli atrocities.

In the Arab world there is great anger below, but the Wahhabi monarch in Riyadh, the Israeli-protected king in Jordan and General Sisi in Egypt have effectively backed Israel’s assault on Gaza. They loathe Hamas and make no secret of the fact that they would rejoice if the Israelis exterminated the organisation. And what about those who vote for it? Dissolve the people and elect another? In Turkey, Recip Erdo?an makes a lot of noise, mostly ineffective and over-the-top, but refuses to break diplomatic relations with Israel. Turkey is after all a longstanding member of Nato and if Iraqi Kurdistan becomes ‘independent’ as a US-Israeli protectorate, Erdo?an will need their help to prevent a spillover in eastern Turkey.

While Asia is effectively silent – China thinks trade, India is close to Israel, Japan is still not allowed its own foreign policy – in South Africa there is growing support for the BDS campaign (boycotts, divestment and sanctions) led by Desmond Tutu and others. The apartheid analogies are not taken lightly and the ANC in the South African parliament voted unanimously to expel the Israeli ambassador, a demand ignored by President Zuma.

The strongest political reaction has come from a continent where Muslim populations are either non-existent or tiny. Venezuela and Bolivia broke relations with Israel after the attack on Gaza in 2009. The Israeli ambassadors in Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Salvador and Brazil have now been asked to pack their bags.

In the Occupied Territories themselves there is strong unity from below and Mahmoud Abbas, who initially remained silent and refused to visit Gaza, is now talking of ‘Israeli war crimes’, but his security apparatus and the PLO leadership has been collaborating with the IDF ever since the Oslo Accords. Hamas might have been drawn to this position with the help of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, whose elected leaders were willing to capitulate to Washington like the PLO. Sisi’s coup put paid to all of that and Hamas was, as a result, able to reassert its independence.

There is no military solution in the region. Israel is a nuclear state and has the sixth largest army in the world (so talk of parity with Hamas – moral, political or military – is grotesque). It is threatened by itself, not by an outside force. The only solution left is the creation of a single state with equal rights for all and till this is achieved the only way to help the Palestinians in the medium-term is via the BDS campaign. It is not enough, I know, but it is the very least we can do.

Click here to view the article on the LRB website.

Motorway Accident in Wales

On Wednesday I received four calls from the BBC’s Good Morning Wales.

First morning call: was I available to be interviewed about Gaza tomorrow morning? I said yes.

First afternoon call: could I tell them what I would say? I said (a) Israel was a rogue state, pampered and cosseted by the US and its vassals. (b) Targeting and killing Palestinian children (especially boys) and blaming the victims was an old Israeli custom. (c) The BBC coverage of Palestine was appalling and if they didn’t cut me off I would explain how and why.

Second afternoon call: was I prepared to debate a pro-Israeli? I said yes.

Afternoon message left on my phone: terribly sorry. There’s been a motorway crash in Wales, so we’ve decided to drop your item.

Click here to view the LRB website. 

Tariq Ali tells the BBC why there is so much anger about its biased Gaza reporting

Tariq Ali tells the BBC on 09/08/14, when 150,000 marched in the biggest ever UK demonstration for Gaza, why there is such widespread criticism of the Israeli bias in its reporting.

 

Tariq Ali’s speech at the National Demonstration for Gaza on 8th August, London.

Here is a video of Tariq Ali’s speech at the largest UK demonstration for Gaza on 8th August, London.

Tariq Ali on The World Today

Watch Tariq Ali on Telesur’s The Day Today, talking about the current Israel-Palestine conflict. Click here for more information and to watch the programme.

Can Democracy Co-exist with Contemporary Capitalism?