Archive 1986 – 2017

By Jonathan PowerJanuary 19, 2010 The Obama Administration is going to leave behind 50,000 troops as they withdraw from Iraq called “Advise and Assist Brigades”. They will have warplanes, helicopters and Iraqi troops to command. Besides all this, the US State Department will deploy tens of thousands of mercenaries, provided by so-called contractors who seem to enjoy their Rambo style, careering around without much discipline. One wishes the more or less disciplined US military were not going if this is the substitute. What kind of withdrawal is this? Other questions remained unanswered too. Why did the President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair seek to topple Saddam Hussein when he was extraordinarily weak militarily, having lost most of his planes, tanks and warships in the first Gulf War twelve years before? Moreover, a good part of what was left of his armoury was destroyed by the UN and...

Last week the Indian minister for home affairs, P.Chidambaram, surprised many when he said that the year 2009 was remarkable for its lack of terror attacks. His statement came just over a year after Pakistani terrorists attacked Mumbai’s great hotel, the Taj Mahal, and killed more than 160 people. What he didn’t add was that this was the moment that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said he was waiting for before he signed up for a peace deal with Pakistan over the disputed northern province of Kashmir. Kashmir has been torn in two ever since India and Pakistan won their independence from Britain in 1947. Independence provoked a mass exodus of Muslims to Pakistan and Hindus to India resulting in a massive carnage of both. At independence the ruler of Kashmir announced that the state would be part of India even though the large majority of its people were Muslims....

By Jonathan PowerJanuary 4th, 2010 It’s all coming along very nicely – the threat to arrest war criminals and those charged with crimes against humanity. Who would have thought in the days of the Vietnam and Cambodia wars, the civil war in ex-Yugoslavia, the pogrom in Rwanda and perhaps soon the architects of torture in the recent U.S. Administration of George W. Bush, that the hand of international justice would be reaching out to arrest the protagonists, try them and imprison them? After the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials in 1945 and 1946 of the wartime leaders of Germany and Japan there was a hiatus, finally broken when in 1975 most of the world signed the Convention against Torture. Then there was an even broader treaty when the Convention Against War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity was signed in Rome in June, 1998. In October, 1998, Scotland Yard arrested the ex...

December 31, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – If in 2010 the big nuclear weapons powers and UN Security Council permanent members – the U.S., Russia, China, Britain and France – don’t make significant reductions with their nuclear weapons then an important opportunity will be lost. Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitri Medvedev appear to be of a mind on this. One has to go back to the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to get the full picture on the dismal progress on nuclear disarmament. Their Defence Secretary, Robert McNamara, told both presidents nuclear weapons were unusable. Henry Kissinger, when National Security Advisor to President Richard Nixon, publically said the same, chiding the Europeans for thinking that they were under an American umbrella. He told them bluntly that America would never sacrifice its own cities to revenge European ones. Later President Ronald Reagan was quite clear that he could...

December 24, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – The American president, Barack Obama, has made the greatest speech ever uttered by a government leader in the twenty first century. Even comparing him with the great orators of the twentieth century, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler he comes out in the top five- and that is just for delivery. As for content he is alone in the top place. Very few papers have published the full text and even less television programmes have run the full speech, which suggests that editors do not know their history and cannot perceive its significance. For the head of state of the one remaining superpower, whose military spending dwarfs the sum of all the world’s militaries combined, to talk of “the law of love” between peoples, to conjure up the examples of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, quoting the former...

December 19, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – What India wants India will get. As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told me a couple of years ago, India wants to overtake China whilst putting its own runaway capitalism under tighter social control. At the time he seemed downbeat about realizing these goals. But as India has emerged faster than China, from the great recession, and as its huge anti poverty programmes begin to bite his pessimism seems unwarranted. Maybe it was just caution about the revolution he has wrought. I first came to Kolkata 35 years ago. It was then literally a “black hole”. I walked out of my hotel in the evening. Everywhere was dark. The city could only afford minimal street lighting. The bodies of families eating, defecating and sleeping were scattered along every pavement. The next morning I walked along the back lanes near the hotel. How could I...

December 9, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – To describe the Bhopal disaster of 25 years ago when a chemical plant owned by the Indian subsidiary of Union Carbide sprang a leak and killed 4,000 people instantly and another 15,000 later in an agonizing Hiroshima-like death as “the unacceptable face of capitalism” does not do it justice. It was malevolence beyond belief. Union Carbide made only the most modest of efforts to compensate their victims and when later the company was bought out by the American company, Dow Chemicals, the same insouciance was continued. Imagine what would have happened if an Indian company had had an accident like that in the U.S. The bosses would be behind bars for a very long time. The company would have been milked dry by the courts to compensate the victims and to provide top-notch medical care for the survivors. Here was one of the...

December 1st, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – Enlargement of the European Union to bring in Turkey was never meant to be so tense an affair. When the Berlin Wall came down opinion makers in Western Europe were breathless before the quite unexpected overthrow of tyranny and were falling over themselves in their attempt to wave broadly stretched arms of welcome to those who could join the historic mission of making Europe one. In the event the incorporation of these nations into NATO (where Turkey has long been an unquestioned member) was easier to pull off than economic integration into the EU. It needn’t have been. It wasn’t the economics of the argument. It was the politics: in the military arena politicians simply have more independent room for manoeuvre. And anyway Bill Clinton, when president, was pushing for it for his own internal political reasons- he needed the east European ethnic...

LONDON – A census released in Beijing reported that there is now an extraordinary imbalance in the birth-rate – 117 boys are being born for every 100 girls. In southern Hainan province the gap widens to an astonishing 135/100 ratio. In China today about 97% of all unmarried persons aged between 28 and 49 are male. China is probably the world leader in using cheap scans to enable parents to know the sex of their child in the womb and, despite breaking the law, to find a doctor who will abort a foetus for no more reason than it happens to be female. However, this practice is also widely practised in many other Asian countries. India is not far behind. Adding the two countries together there are perhaps between 60 and 70 million missing females in Asia. The historical record suggests that societies that breed surplus males end up with more crime and...

LONDON – A reader of a column of mine on the social consequences of abandoned street children wrote to point out that my prognosis that these little Lords of the Flies would grow up as the new bin Ladens, primed to wreck vengeance on established societies, was mistaken. “Osama bin Laden’s anger did not develop out of poverty,” she argued, “but out of a middle class malaise”. Of course. And so did Che Guevara’s and Stokely Carmichael’s and that of Marx and Lenin. But this does not exclude the undisputable, well-researched, fact that poverty, particularly when it exists in a society of gross inequalities, breeds violence, crime and the urge to deal out deadly punishment on conventional society. The leaders may be educated; the shock troops often come from the underclass. Besides, humanity has never confronted before 100 million youngsters growing up on the street, without parents. Their anger, one...

November 3, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – It is little comfort to the families of those murdered but the evidence is that the life cycle of a terrorist group is 40 years and of many much less, and very rarely goes into a second generation. Policy makers and the media skim over the built-in weaknesses of terrorist groups. The highlighting of their dastardly deeds gets full play, but the potent evidence that points to infighting and fractionalizing is downplayed. The opening of recent archives shows that even heads of government including the president of the U.S. have not been given the raw material on this by their intelligence services to make up their own mind. Members of the West German Second of July Movement (an ally of the Baader-Meinhof group that caused mayhem in the 1970s) shot a colleague because they believed he had botched a bombing and become a...

LONDON – Sweden, which holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, has launched a drive to speed up liberalization of the EU’s trade with the Third World. And there are increasing indications that the Obama Administration in Washington is likely soon to join with Europe and Japan and indicate its willingness to attempt to complete the Doha trade round, meant to lower tariffs across the board. The trade ship, which seemed to have hit the rocks just over a year and a half ago, has been prized free and is once again sailing on the high seas with the wind behind it. And so it should. Eighteen months on it appears even more nonsensical than it did at the time that the seasoned diplomats and politicians gathered together for earnest negotiations on freer trade should have allowed their plans to be scuttled. Moreover, the journalistic reporting was shoddy in...