THE
December 2015
WEEKLY PLANET NOT IN MY NAME
London protests to UK’s government decision to bomb Syria
Hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside Britain’s parliament in London to protest the government’s determination to press ahead with air strikes on Syria. Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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The case for Britain bombing IS in Syria is empty – here’s why By Feargal Cochrane/ Hugh Miall / Kevin Clements December 2015
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B Sowing dragon’s teeth in Syria. Photography by Reuters/ Ammar Abdullah
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ritish prime minister, David Cameron, has released a motion for the House of Commons which will vote on whether to join the bombing campaign against Islamic State in Syria on the grounds that it “poses a direct threat to the United Kingdom”.
motion is based on shared values and alliance solidarity, rather than evidence that expanded bombing will remove the threat from IS. He has not managed to establish any causal connection between expanded bombing and how this would weaken ISIS or make Syria more stable.
The terror attacks on Paris have provided an emotional justification for deeper military intervention in Syria, but on just about every other basis for argument the situation cries out for caution, prudence and reflection rather than more extensive military engagement. The Middle East has already suffered 14 years of military intervention with few positives to show for it. The challenge facing us, now, is how to develop creative, plausible and non-violent alternatives to the current cycle of violence.
If the primary justification for expanded bombing is enhancing the security of British citizens, then this connection has not been made either. A US marine commander, Lieutenant General Robert Neller, offering his best assessment of how the war is going, described it as “a stalemate”.
The critical and under-explored questions about a new intervention in Syria are: is it justified? Will it work to weaken Islamic State? And what are the likely consequences for both Syria and the UK when the bombing stops? Past answers to these questions ended badly in Afghanistan, Iraq (twice) and Libya. We should reflect before making the same mistakes in Syria.
Despite what the motion says about there being a “clear legal basis to defend the UK and our allies in accordance with the UN Charter”, there is no compelling legal authority for bombing. Security Council resolution 2249 does not give any state a licence to declare war. The resolution asks members to “take all necessary measures to prevent and suppress terrorist acts committed specifically by ISIS and to eradicate the safe haven they have established over significant parts of Iraq and Syria”. It also speaks of being determined to combat Islamic State by “all means”.
The rationale for bombing is unclear on several grounds: David Cameron’s case for bombing as set out in the Commons
The resolution did not, however, invoke Chapter VII of the Charter, which specifically sanctions military action. It
Brothers in arms: David Cameron and Francois Hollande. EPA/Ian Langsdon
was also not a formal decision of the Security Council rather a request for action from states. To act as though it were a Chapter VII resolution further erodes the integrity of the council and the charter. There is no historical reason for thinking that deeper military engagement will end any more happily than any Western intervention since the first Gulf War in 1991. These interventions have arguably made bad situations worse. They have not degraded the capacity of regimes or militias in the Middle East to wage war on citizens and neighbours nor generated better regimes than those they toppled and replaced. There is no evidence to support the claim that 70,000 moderate Syrian militia remain ready and poised to overthrow both ISIS and Assad and develop a regime capable of restoring peace and stability to Syria and the region. Very little attention has been given to any post-war reconstruction strategy and the West has proven woefully inadequate on these issues. Islamic State is a violent group and its methods are deadly and horrific. To respond to its violence with violence, however, is to cede the ethical high ground and exclude nonviolent possibilities.
HITTING DANDELIONS
OPTIONS TO EXPLORE
It has been said that trying to stop terrorism with air strikes is like trying to stop a seeding dandelion by hitting it with a golf club. Bombing Syrian towns is likely to increase Islamic State recruitment both in the Middle East and in Europe. This is why IS encourages terror attacks in Western cities and why al-Qaeda welcomed Soviet and US attacks on Afghanistan. Responding to terrorism with air strikes justifies the ISIS narrative that they are engaged in a holy war with the West and arguably creates the very radicalisation it purports to be fighting.
There are alternative courses of action available. The conditions which allowed IS to breed are the civil wars in Syria and Iraq. The top priority, as Syrians themselves say, is to stop the war. In the short term, the need is for a UN-mandated ceasefire. Over the longer term, the need is to continue and intensify the search for a political settlement, to end the outside supply of weapons and finance which fuel the war, to wind down outside military interventions and move towards disarming and demobilising the forces inside Syria.
Based on the evidence of the Global Terrorism Index Report 2015, we judge that the “War on Terror” is likely to have increased terrorism to date. The growth of jihadism and the incidence of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq increased significantly following the military interventions in those countries. The great majority of these have taken place in just five countries where the “War on Terror” has been concentrated: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Nigeria. Terrorism and the war on terror are locked into one another, each fuelling an escalating cycle of violence and conflict.
In the immediate future, we urge a pause rather than adopting an irreversible course, which is likely to kill and maim more innocent people in Syria, to fuel terrorism, and to have further damaging effects in the Middle East and the world. We need more creative and imaginative solutions to the problems we are confronting than those currently on the table.
The Conversation (CC BY-ND 4.0)
December 2015
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We must prepare for a 30-year war in the Middle East We have recently entered the 15th year of what used to be called the “War on Terror”. BY PAUL ROGERS
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Twelve years ago, George W Bush gave his “Mission Accomplished” speech from the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, confident that the Saddam Hussein regime had been consigned to the dustbin of history, the Taliban regime had been terminated, al-Qaeda was dispersed, if not destroyed, and the desperately needed New American Century was back on track. That’s what he thought. Instead, over the following decade, hundreds of thousands died in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. In the past two years, the latest manifestation of al-Qaeda’s terrorist ideology, Islamic State, has grown apace to affect millions of people across north-east Syria and north-west Iraq, even in the face of an intensive air campaign against them. The US air war, Operation Inherent resolve, has – according to the latest figures from the
US Department of Defense – involved more than 8,125 airstrikes and has hit more than 16,000 targets. An estimated 20,000 IS supporters have been killled, yet the number of fighters that IS can deploy – between 20,000 and 30,000 – is unchanged. Moreover, the assessment of US intelligence agencies last year that 15,000 people from 80 countries had joined IS and other extreme groups has been raised to 30,000 from 100 countries. War is good for IS. It relentlessly portrays itself as the defender of Islam under attack from crusader forces as it creates a rigid and determined caliphate, a pernicious world view hated by the overwhelming majority of Muslims – yet appealing to a tiny minority that is still worth proselytizing. Until last spring, IS concentrated primarily on developing and protecting
somehow be engaged. It is the most difficult of all the tasks and will require the best skills of highly competent conflict resolution specialists. Close behind that in importance will be a huge and immediate effort to aid the 3m or more refugees from Syria and Iraq, principally in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, many of them facing an appalling winter while the UNHCR and other agencies struggle to provide support. The core motive must be humanitarian – but if help is not provided, these camps also will provide a remarkable recruiting ground for IS. A third element is to work as hard as possible to encourage the Abadi government in Baghdad to reach out to the Sunni minority, especially in those many parts of Iraq where persistent neglect of that minority is helping maintain support for IS. Finally, there is the issue of the expansion of IS, not least in Libya. The need to support UN attempts to bring stability to that country is urgent yet seriously lacking at present.
Reuters/Jean-Paul Pelissier
its proto-caliphate. But it has now taken a leaf out of the old al-Qaeda book and extended its operations overseas. This has taken two forms – developing connections with like-minded groups: whether in Libya, Nigeria, the Caucasus, Afghanistan or within the Middle East – and fostering direct attacks on the “crusaders”, whether it’s the tourists killed at the Bardo Museum and the Sousse resort in Tunisia or, more recently, on the Russian Metrojet, and during the horrific attacks in Paris last weekend. As IS no doubt hoped, France has reacted with renewed air strikes in Syria, and across the West there is talk of an expanded air war and even the use of ground troops. This will be music to the ears of the IS leadership. Some of them will be killed but what does that matter when they are part of a divine plan? Moreover, if their acolytes can carry out more attacks then there is a real chance of rampant Islamophobia evolving
rapidly in France and elsewhere, with all the recruitment potential that it provides.
What should the West do? If we follow the logic of IS wanting war and suggest quietly that it might not be a good idea, then the inevitable response is: “What should we do?”. It is not enough to say, for example, that we should not have invaded Iraq in the first place, true though that is. There are, though, some clear steps that can be taken to start the multi-year process of curbing IS. An early priority is putting far greater emphasis on ending the Syrian civil war, the necessary precursor to constraining IS in Syria. There are some small signs of progress here with the two recent meetings in Vienna involving all the proxies to the war including Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia. But the process must be accelerated and, however difficult, Assad and key militia leaders must
In this context, perhaps the most urgent need for any state seriously interested in preventing the further growth of extreme Islamist movements is to foster a change in the repressive policies of the Sisi government in Egypt. With more than 1,000 Muslim Brotherhood supporters killed and well over 10,000 imprisoned, many under sentence of death, this is the one country that is ripe for Islamist expansionism. None of these measures provides anything like a full answer to the many challenges of IS but they collectively point us in a different direction. We have recently entered the 15th year of what used to be called the “War on Terror” – and that war is about to intensify with little thought about the long-term effects or the reasons for past failures. If we do not take a new direction then we should prepare for a 30-year war.
The Conversation (CC BY-ND 4.0)
December 2015
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Weekly News
Europe’s many-headed security crisis – a challenge to rival the Cold War BY UMUT KORKUT The Conversation (CC BY-ND 4.0)
The downing of a Russian jet on November 24 over Turkey’s border with Syria is indicative of the security challenges that Europe faces. To deal with Islamic fundamentalist terrorism and the refugee crisis, Europe needs to neutralise Islamic State and stabilise Syria to stop the flow of refugees. That means that the EU, Turkey and Russia need to respond coherently to Syria. The stakes are unimaginably high with the EU already divided internally over its policy on refugees, failure in Syria risks making things worse. That could undermine the EU at a time when the terrorist threat needs the union to be as tight-knit as possible. First, the EU’s internal situation. Since the surge of refugees over the summer, the new position of Europe’s increasingly strident right – particularly in eastern Europe and Russia – is that people’s skin colour determines their inclination to terrorism. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, recently said that “all terrorists are immigrants”. Led also by Poland – which is taking an increasingly hard line on migrants – the conservative right in the region wants to draw a boundary that is white, native and Christian on one side and non-white, non-Christian and immigrant on the other. The sad fact is that the most homogenous countries have been the least able and willing to cope with the influx of refugees – and this has had substantial knockon effects. When Croatia shipped newcomers to the Hungarian and Slovenian borders within hours of arrival in October, Hungary responded by extending its notorious fence to close the border between these two EU members. Meanwhile, Slovenia transported all its new arrivals to the Austrian border, which increased the disproportionate burden that Austria and Germany had assumed on behalf of the
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Photography by EPA
newer EU members. Conservative politicians in central and eastern Europe talk up the need to protect a white homogenous culture that has no real basis in history. And by doing so, risk giving extra credibility to hardliners in Western countries. It doesn’t help that a small Muslim minority have views about issues such as gender rights, homosexuality and Jews that are – on the whole – deemed as unacceptable in western Europe and make it easier for conservatives to characterise migrants as a threat to social cohesion. Then we have Russia, where recently the prominent political scientist and member of the duma, Vyacheslav Nikonov, told a conference in Moscow that in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, Europe would have to rediscover religion just like the “whites” in Russia. Be in no doubt that “white” in this context is also a proxy for “traditional”, “heterosexual”, “Christian” and “nonmigrant”. It has also been pointed out that the Russian government has links with the far right. So the West’s newfound and urgent desire to pursue a united military response involving Russia adds yet another set of intolerant voices to the equation.
Aside from the threat to the European project from these diverging views, Europe also needs to tackle the root causes of the Syrian crisis. This means defeating Islamic State and ending the war by coming up with a policy on the fate of Bashar al-Assad that is agreeable to two authoritarian leaders in Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who have diametrically opposed objectives. Sunni Turkey doesn’t want to see the shia forces of Bashar al-Assad gaining any ground in Syria and is deeply involved with a number of Sunni rebel factions. Ankara wants these Sunnis to control a chunk of its border with Syria to prevent the two Kurdish cantons on either side of the border from joining up and building a stronger case for eventual statehood. This is being undermined by the Russians, who have been facilitating Assad’s revival for several months by bombing these Sunni rebels. Now in the wake of the Paris attacks the West is coming round to Moscow’s view that it is more important to get a grip on Assad’s enemies in Islamic State than to remove Assad. So how does Turkey play its part when its own interests in Syria will be undermined by such a change of heart? The downing of the Russian jet has drawn attention to Turkey’s ambivalence
on the eve of the Turkey-EU migration summit scheduled for November 29 in Brussels. What could have been an important step in Turkey’s efforts to eventually secure EU membership is now in danger of being undermined. Ankara’s narrative has been that of concern for Turkmen, ethnic Turks who have been fleeing Russian bombardment in Syria into Turkey – but this is just an attempt to deflect attention from Turkey’s main game, which is to stop Kurdish selfdetermination. This all represents a very difficult situation for Europe. It is very hard to see how it brings these conflicting interests together to answer its own concerns over EU cohesion, terrorism and refugees. One useful step would be to reinvigorate the OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe), which was created by the 1975 Helsinki Accords to help reduce Cold War tensions between East and West. The OSCE is the only political institution that brings together the EU, Turkey, Russia and the US, so it is a forum in which the main powers can at least sit down and talk to each other properly. Make no mistake though – this is a big challenge, maybe bigger than during the Cold War era. These are tense times in Europe to say the least. December 2015
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Weekly News
Islamic State billboards in Raqqa. Reuters/Nour Fourat
We need to talk about how Islamic State interprets Islam BY BALSAM MUSTAFA Scholars of Islam attend a meeting on extremism in Egypt. Photography by Reuters/ Mohamed Abd El Ghany
Since capturing swathes of Iraq and Syria, Islamic State has embarked on a cyber-offensive to spread its message through social media. A great effort has been made to block and remove the content, to understand how this information spreads – and to understand why some find it so convincing. But it is also important to look at the message itself. Islamic State’s claims are not plucked out of the sky. As unpalatable as they may be, they are framed by religious narratives and debates about Islam that have spanned
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for many centuries. A look at Islamic State’s online magazine, Dabiq, reveals arguments built on Wahabbism, a fundamentalist branch of Islam. There are invocations of the founder Ibn Taimaya, “Sheik al Islam”, and references to Ibn Abbas, Ibn Masood, Ibn al-Qayyim, Ibn Hajar, Muhammad Ibn Abdil-Wahhab, Bukhari, and Sahih Muslim – Muslim scholars either collecting, interpreting, or narrating Hadith (the words of the prophet). The broader message is blunt: “Kill whoever changes his religion [Sahīh al-Bukhārī]“.
To claim that Islamic State is not related to Islam is therefore naive, even wilfully dismissive. It ignores the interpretations of Islam that IS presents in its videos, statements and other communication. Arguing that IS is comprehensively Islamic, on the other hand, is simplistic, too. That is to see the group as representing all Muslims and the different and competing readings and interpretations of Islam around the world. Clearly, they do not. Grabbing either of these easy, polar explanations for what IS represents will not provide a solution to the problem. We need to consider some controversial issues upon which most of the varying sects of Islam agree in order to understand IS, and subvert its narratives.
Selective reading For example, IS invoked Sabi – the Arabic term for the enslavement of women – when it kidnapped Yazidi women in northwest Iraq in August 2014. It argued that this was justifiable because the Yazidi are “infidels”. When reporting on what had happened to the Yazidi women, Arabic media shied away from having an honest discussion about Sabi. Questions were asked about whether it was justifiable to call the Yazidi infidels, but less about whether the practice of Sabi itself was justifiable. Later, the question of Sabi was raised among Muslim scholars who generally agree that the practice existed before Islam and continued during the religion’s early stages. The debate was about whether Sabi can justifiably be revived as a practice if a caliphate is created – as IS would argue. Some Muslim scholars tried to contend this by undermining the legitimacy of IS and its self-proclaimed caliphate. Some went further to stress that Sabi is not legitimate in our age – but they were few and far between. They failed to provide a strong counter-narrative to IS. The Islamic State’s demand that Christians should either convert to Islam
or pay Jizya, a tax imposed on nonMuslims in return for protection and services, has also caused problems. In an open letter to leader Abu Bakr alBaghdadi, 120 Sunni scholars criticised how IS was interpreting Islam but failed effectively to respond to its claims. Instead, their comments about whether jizya is still applicable in the modern world were vague and contradictory. They first described Christians as “Arabs” and “friends” who should not be subject to jizya, but then the tax was put into two categories: one against groups who waged war against Muslims, and the other — described as similar to Zakat (a tax paid by Muslims) — imposed on Christians who did not wage war. Having tried to establish that jizya was illegitimate, the scholars had failed to offer a coherent religious argument against it.
difficult to achieve in the foreseeable future. Still, there are steps that need to be taken to pave the way for this ultimate goal. People are already creatively trying to shift the extremist language and narratives through comedy and factual programmes. These efforts often emphasise the human over religion or ethnicity. And messages of this kind can be found in religious texts too – even if they are largely overlooked by extremists. Take the Quranic verse: “there is no obligation in religion”; the Hadith by prophet Muhammed: “religion is how you treat others”; and the saying by Ali Ibn Abi Talib, cousin of prophet Muhammed, “people are two types: your brothers in religion, or your human counterparts, otherwise”.
There are plenty of other problematic cases that arise from IS activities. Can atheists or apostates be killed, for example, as some extreme interpretations of Islam suggest?
We need to listen to these messages and use them to confront violence. It will be a long journey, but it is worth all our efforts. If we defeat IS but do not have an honest, critical re-reading of Islam, another group will only come along to replace it.
An honest debate
As the debate among Islamic scholars has shown, it has been difficult to establish the consensus that, even if sabi and jizya were once considered valid, they are no longer legitimate. But that very difficulty reinforces the need to undertake the task.
There is no immediate magical solution to this problem. A comprehensive, constructive, and critical reading of Islamic fiqh (the human understanding of Sharia law) and history in all its stages requires a huge collective effort. That effort needs to include governments, religious authorities and other institutions, such as academia and the media. Such effort needs to start with challenging religious messages that incite hatred or violence. That should include TV channels that support sectarian and ethnic division. These are not only broadcast from Arabic countries but also from Western countries, including the US and Britain.
The Conversation (CC BY-ND 4.0)
Given the political conflict that feeds religious and sectarian conflict – often supporting and funding extremist voices delivering the message of hatred among and beyond Muslims – this might be December 2015
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Spotlight
- Weekly News -
WHO WAS ROSA PARKS? and what did she do in the fight for racial equality?
By Robert Cook
Lauren/Picasa, CC BY-SA
Rosa Parks has gone down in history as an ordinary, elderly black woman who spontaneously kick-started the modern African American civil rights movement. It all began in December 1955, when Parks was arrested for civil disobedience: she had refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a crowded bus in the racially segregated town of Montgomery, Alabama. Her defiance sparked the push for racial equality, which brought civil rights superstars such as Martin Luther King Jr into the public eye, and changed the world forever. Or so the story goes. The truth – as is so often the case – is actually far more complicated. In fact, Rosa Parks was just 42 years old when she took that famous ride on a City Lines bus in Montgomery – a town known for being the first capital of the pro-slavery Confederacy during the American Civil War. Parks – a seamstress at a downtown department store – had a history as a civil rights campaigner, having served as a youth organiser for the local branch of America’s oldest and most effective civil rights organisation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She had also attended the controversial Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, where a number of African Americans were trained in protest methods by labour radicals.
Seizing the moment Parks' protest did not come out of the blue. In 1954, the US Supreme Court verdict in the case of Brown v Board of Education signalled federal opposition to racial segregation. The court ruled that segregated public schools deprived African Americans of their entitlement to “equal protection of the laws”. And black leaders in Montgomery – including
Parks’ refusal to give up her seat, and her subsequent arrest, seemed to offer these campaigners with the chance they had been looking for: to test the state’s bus segregation laws in the federal courts. labour activists, NAACP members, and middle-class members of the Women’s Political Committee – had been campaigning for better treatment for black people on the local buses for several years. Parks’ refusal to give up her seat, and her subsequent arrest, seemed to offer these campaigners with the chance they had
been looking for: to test the state’s bus segregation laws in the federal courts. As soon as they heard of Parks' arrest, Women’s Political Committee leader Jo Ann Robinson and veteran trade unionist E. D. Nixon set about mobilising a community-wide boycott of the buses. Under the leadership of a charismatic, but previously unknown preacher named Martin Luther King Jr, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) spearheaded the year-long boycott that captured the attention of the world and heaped pressure on the city’s white authorities to respond to black demands. Initially, the MIA used the African American response to Rosa Parks’ arrest to campaign for better treatment of blacks on the segregated buses. But the NAACP wanted more – it offered legal assistance to the MIA, on condition that the organisation fight for full integration. To avoid legal complications relating to Parks' arraignment, she was not made a plaintiff in the case of Browder v Gayle, which challenged Alabama’s segregation laws. In November 1956, the US Supreme Court issued a brief and narrow ruling that, in the wake of the Brown decision, racial segregation on private buses in Montgomery was unlawful under the Fourteenth Amendment.
December 2015
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A false dawn This judicial success proved to be a false dawn for the civil rights movement in the United States. Martin Luther King and other prominent activists soon found that the Eisenhower administration had no intention of attacking racial segregation in the South with genuine vigour. Not until February 1960, when a group of black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, initiated the first of what proved to be a rash of “sit-ins” in segregated stores, did the movement really gain momentum. The nonviolent direct action protests that followed in cities such as Birmingham and Selma would eventually bring African Americans in the South an unprecedented degree of political and social power. The US civil rights movement also had a significant impact on racial protest in other parts of the world. In Australia, students from the University of Sydney undertook their own “freedom ride” in 1965 to expose racism against the country’s indigenous inhabitants. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, it was an inspiration for the Bristol bus boycott of 1963 and the Northern Ireland civil rights demonstrations later in the decade. Rosa Parks died in 2005. She earned her place in history, alongside hundreds of other brave men and women who helped end racial segregation by statute. Even today, the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States – sparked by the unlawful police killing of African Americans – demonstrates that the activist spirit unleashed in Montgomery in 1955 lives on. The Conversation (CC BY-ND 4.0)
Rosa Parks statue in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall Photography by Robert Firmin and Eugene Daub, Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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