Monbiot is responding to Herman and Peterson’s reply on ZNet to his original criticism in The Guardian,  following his unsuccessful attempts in lengthy email correspondence (reproduced on Monbiot’s own site) to get Chomsky to address his collaborators’ genocide denial.

Last year I published a review which came to similar conclusions to Monbiot’s. In preparing his latest reply Monbiot asked me and three other academic writers on genocide (Adam Jones, Linda Melvern and Marko Atilla Hoare) to write our own responses to Herman and Peterson’s new justification of their position. Monbiot refers to my review and response in his article, and has published all four comments on his site. Below I reproduce my own new response to Herman and Peterson.

Edward Herman and David Peterson, in their reply to George Monbiot, do little to respond to the wave of incredulity and revulsion which their denial of genocide and its endorsement by Noam Chomsky are causing.

They misrepresent Monbiot, a widely respected critical journalist, as a cog in a Guardian-Observer propaganda machine which – in turn – is simply churning out a version of something called the ‘Western party-line’. Such crude, amalgamated constructs not only make serious debate difficult, but are also designed to damage one of the most important arenas for critical information and debate in the mainstream media – in precisely one of the areas in which it has been strongest, reporting on and debating crimes against humanity.

Herman and Peterson do this because, as I have argued in my full review in the Journal of Genocide Research, their Politics of Genocide ‘does not stop at raising … counter-examples to the Western mainstream. Instead, it engages in what can only be described as extensive genocide denial.’ Deniers need to block out key information and misrepresent opponents to support their perverse world-views. As the sociologist Stanley Cohen puts it in a classic study, ‘One common thread runs through the many different stories of denial: people, organizations, governments or whole societies are presented with information that is too disturbing, threatening or anomalous to be fully absorbed or openly acknowledged. The information is therefore somehow repressed, disavowed, pushed aside or reinterpreted. Or else the information “registers” well enough, but its implications – cognitive, emotional or moral – are evaded, neutralized or rationalized away.’

What is the information which disturbs Herman and Peterson? They cannot accept what has now been established by extensive and rigorous enquiry, that in 1995 unarmed Bosniak men and boys from the Srebrenica ‘safe area’, who were captured by Bosnian-Serbian forces, were murdered in cold blood. They suggested in their book that the case was ‘extremely thin, resting in good part on the difficulty of separating executions from battle killings’. This is a classic genocide denial mechanism (which can be traced back to the Armenian genocide), representing genocidal killing as really only war, suggesting that the victims were not really civilians (they might have been killed in battle), or if they were, as killed accidentally in the course of fighting.

Herman and Peterson believe that their trump card against Monbiot is that he ‘fails to mention that … we point out that the Bosnian Serbs “had taken the trouble to bus all the women, children, and the elderly men to safety”.’ What this shows, however, is that do not understand genocide, which involves not just indiscriminate attacks on entire populations, but also narrower, targeted violence – as often against men of military age (as potential resisters) as against women (whose sexual violation completes the humiliation of a community).

They also cannot accept that an exceptionally large, fast campaign of mass murder was carried out by Rwandan Hutu Power forces in 1994, claiming that the ‘great majority of deaths were Hutu, with some estimates as high as two million’. Claiming that Monbiot’s objections are ‘laughable’, they ridicule him for running ‘to his readers with the scoop that we are so sloppy in our use of sources’.

Yet the principal academic reference for Herman and Peterson’s claim is an unpublished paper, ‘Rwandan Political Violence in Space and Time’, which they attribute to Christian Davenport and Allan Stam and source to Davenport’s website, dated to 2004. Yet on page 37 of the same paper (which while citing a database compiled jointly with Stam, is attributed only to Davenport and dated 2008), are printed in black and white the following unequivocal conclusions: ‘we find that the majority of killings take place in the zone under government control (accounting for approximately 990,000 deaths). They are the ones directly responsible for almost all of the political violence.’ (Accessed on 17 October 2011)

A charitable explanation could be that Davenport’s paper has been updated since 2004, and this conclusion added since then, although 2008 was still well before The Politics of Genocide went to press. But Herman and Peterson can hardly have missed a clear line of argument which, while qualifying previous accounts of the Rwandan genocide, does not undermine the conclusion that the majority of killing in Rwanda in 1994 was committed by Hutu Power forces. The difference is that Davenport and Stam want to raise questions about the narrative of genocide; Herman and Peterson want to fully overturn it.

So they are sloppy with their sources: it is they, in the nice phrase they use against Monbiot, who are ‘hit-and-run intellectuals’, scooping up quotes and references without due care. As Cohen says, in denial ‘information is … somehow repressed, disavowed, pushed aside or reinterpreted.’ We find bucket-loads of all these tendencies in Herman and Peterson – and their patron, Chomsky. Indeed one suspects that, as Cohen continued, ‘the information “registers” well enough, but its implications – cognitive, emotional or moral – are evaded, neutralized or rationalized away.’

The remaining question is why do the Chomskyites do it? The obvious answer is political: they have such a huge investment in the idea that the USA and the West are the source of all the world’s evils, that they can only process information to fit this case. More complex answers might include, that like their fellow deniers in the former LM coterie, they are building an intellectual and political niche out of contrarian positions. The danger is that such nonsense, with its pseudo-scholarly apparatus of extensive footnotes and media science, finds a ready audience among the political idealistic.

   

My father, Roy Shaw, died on 15 May 2012, aged 93.

Informed appreciations of his life and work can be found as follows:

• by Richard Hoggart in The Guardian, and further comments in The Guardian by Simon Hoggart, Ian Searle and Paul Oestreicher, together with letters by Jane Robinson and Robert Hutchison
• by Francis Beckett in The Independent
• in The Times (paywall)
• in The Tablet
• on the Arts Council website

There was also an obituary in the Daily Telegraph.

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In a speech at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), President Barack Obama has launched a ‘comprehensive strategy’ to ‘prevent and respond to atrocities’. He has charged his new Atrocities Prevention Board (APB), chaired by Samantha Power (author of an indictment of earlier US inaction on genocide) with ‘helping the US government identify and address atrocity threats, and oversee institutional changes that will make us more nimble and effective.’

The APB will be beefed up with representatives of all the main departments of the US government, the National Intelligence Council will prepare a National Intelligence Estimate on the global risk of mass atrocities and genocide, and there will be new peacekeeper training and diplomatic initiatives. There will be a new capacity for ‘civilian surge’ to respond rapidly to crises, and new sanctions for companies that aid the Syrian and Iranian governments track and target civilians for abuse. Most important perhaps, the US military will incorporate counter-atrocity planning into its operating procedures, and senior officers will meet – at the USHMM – to plan this.

Aiming to bridge the gap between national interest and altruistic intervention, last year’s Presidential Study Directive 10 had already claimed that ‘preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest’ as well as ‘a core moral responsibility of the United States. Our security is affected when masses of civilians are slaughtered, refugees flow across borders, and murderers wreak havoc on regional stability and livelihoods. America’s reputation suffers, and our ability to bring about change is constrained, when we are perceived as idle in the face of mass atrocities and genocide.’

A White House release accompanying Obama’s speech claims ‘an unprecedented record of actions taken to protect civilians and hold perpetrators of atrocities accountable’, including ‘leadership of the successful international military effort to protect civilians in Libya’ as well as of of various international efforts over Cote d’Ivoire, Kyrgyzstan, Libya, and Syria; efforts to ensure ‘peaceful and orderly’ independence for South Sudan; action against the Lord’s Resistance Army and to apprehend Joseph Kony (anti-hero of a recent YouTube hit), and supporting the capture of Ratko Mladic.

Obama’s moves have been welcomed by the USA’s increasingly active genocide lobby. The principal campaigning group, United to End Genocide, webcast Obama’s speech to supporters, and its president, Tom Andrews, hailed it in an email to them as ‘a major victory for genocide prevention’ and campaigning, indeed as ‘a result of three years of hard work and over 200,000 of your emails, phone calls, letters and meetings’.

Certainly, counter-atrocity policy is taking ever-stronger shape under Obama. It will now be institutionalised in a way that entrenches its role as a ‘national interest’. However genocide campaigners should beware functioning as the administration’s cheerleaders. Even if atrocity-prevention is a national interest, that hardly means it will trump other national interests – strategic and commercial for example. In the UK, we recall the fate of the ‘ethical dimension’ of New Labour’s foreign policy: it remained just a dimension, and an increasingly subordinate one at that.

Administration claims immediately suggest specific reasons for scepticism.  Some civilians were certainly protected by Western military support for Libya’s rebels, but many others died in the civil war: it is egregious to claim that the policy was merely one of civilian protection, when the main driver was regime change.  The USA’s support for peace and order in the Sudan has not prevented the Sudanese government’s new aggression in border provinces, which genocide activists have been quick to protest. Kony, despite his new celebrity, is still at large.

Although the administration sees atrocity-prevention as multilateral rather than unilateral, it makes no commitment to consistent multilateral action against atrocity. It is one thing to sanction your enemies in the name of fine ideals, but if you don’t mobilise the UN to do the same against your allies, these ideals are tarnished. Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s hesitation over acting against Mubarak and his military successors in Egypt, and against the repression carried out by the Saudi and Bahraini monarchies, suggests a strong danger in tying ‘atrocity’ campaigning closely to official US policy.

It could be objected that repression in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain has not reached genocidal levels, but it has surely included atrocities. The policy and board are framed, after all, in ‘atrocity’ rather than ‘genocide’ terms. It is surely the point of ‘preventative’ policy to act at lower levels of violence, to stop escalation. Why are there no sanctions against companies that aid these regimes to track and abuse activists? Why, indeed, is there no withdrawal of US military collaboration with these (and similar) regimes that have also been responsible for atrocities?

The linkage to sanctions against Iran and Syria is also problematic, not because these regimes are not guilty of atrocities, but because of the link this could easily provide to Israeli campaigning for a military strike on Iran to halt the Iranian nuclear programme. Israel’s leaders, the pro-Israel lobby in the USA, and some ‘genocide scholars’ are already framing their proposed attack as ‘genocide prevention’. Yet the last thing genocide prevention needs is to be linked to aggressive war, which will severely discredit the whole idea.

Such a war will surely bring its own atrocities against innocent Iranian civilians, just as the Iraq war did against Iraqis and the Afghan war against Afghans. There are direct victims of US policy, currently including Pakistani citizens who are dying from US drone attacks, and Afghan villagers (notably the wedding parties studied in a new book chapter by Stephen Rockel) regularly strafed by US aircraft. And there are indirect victims, notably the thousands of Iraqis who are still dying in the low-level civil war provoked by the US-UK invasion in 2003, a war that at one point reached genocidal dimensions as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were forced to flee their neighbourhoods, mostly into exile.

Are not these all cases of atrocity? The Atrocities Prevention Board, to live up to its name, cannot ignore the way that US military policies daily produce atrocities. Genocide campaigners need to be alive to these dangers, and campaign against US policy when it too causes violence against civilians. While we should note the potential of the Obama administration’s latest moves to prevent some atrocities, we should remain vigilant lest they end up being mobilized to produce others.

Gerard Toal and Carl C. Dahlmann, Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and Its Reversal, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 978-0-19-973036-0.
Paul Mojzes, Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the Twentieth Century, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011, 978-1-4422-0663-2.

The anti-population violence during the Bosnian War of 1992-95 was, together with the mass murder in Rwanda in 1994, one of the seminal events for the public awareness of genocide in the period after the Cold War. Yet while the Rwandan Genocide has been clearly named and is the focus of ever-growing academic study, the significance of the Bosnian events remains highly contested and their study lacks the momentum of the Rwandan field. Most of the general literature dates from the 1990s, and there have been few recent attempts to synthesise the events themselves and their legacy. Gerard Toal and Carl C. Dahlmann’s Bosnia Remade, with its incisive empirical study of the problematic post-war ‘return’ of the expelled and its ambitious critical-geopolitical theoretical framework for understanding the war and its aftermath, is therefore a very welcome addition.

The authors’ primary aim is to evaluate the process of return of displaced people. Annexe 7 of the 1995 Dayton General Framework Agreement committed the international authorities supervising Bosnia to upholding this right in the aftermath of the war, and there followed what was probably the most determined attempt to enforce the return of expelled populations anywhere in the world. (Omar Bartov was therefore wrong to claim, in this journal, that the right of return is demanded only for Palestinians displaced by Israel.#) Although around a million, out of over two million, Bosnians expelled from their homes and home districts during the war had returned by 2004, Toal and Dahlmann’s analysis – using detailed studies of three key municipalities as well as general data – shows that most of these were ‘majority returns’, of people belonging to the same ethnic group as the postwar controllers of particular areas. ‘Minority returns’, of people belonging to different groups from local powerholders, were often met with violence and obstruction. Despite sometimes determined efforts by international bodies, they were largely unsuccessful.

This outcome is explained as a consequence of the character of the wartime processes that produced displacement and how the political structures that they produced were largely embedded in the postwar settlement, and explains why Bosnia Remade’s account of the returns process is preceded by a very full synthesis of the war itself and the original expulsion process. Ethnic cleansing, they say, was a ‘military tactic to realise a larger strategic vision … as much about seizing and consolidating territory as … about identity. More than simply the removal of an out-group from a location, ethnic cleansing involves the ethnicization of space.’ It is thus a form of geopolitics, involving two related practices, the attempts to produce a new ethnoterritorial order of space, and to build an ethnocratic political order. The latter involved a ‘fundamental reorganisation of a local political economy’, through ‘accumulation by dispossession’, with housing, land and valuables stolen (116-17). The phenomenon originated in the Serbian strategy ‘to reconstitute Yugoslavia as a smaller, more compact federation controlled from Belgrade’ (21) and Serbian nationalists were responsible for most expulsions, although the Croatians developed similar strategies in some areas and their ethnic cleansing in 1995 constituted its ‘largest single instance’ (6). Although Toal and Dahlmann ‘reject as lazy and irresponsible the nostrum that there is a “moral equivalence” between the fighting factions in Bosnia’ (17), they recognise that Bosnian forces were also responsible for some expulsions and show that Muslim-based parties sometimes blocked minority returns to areas they controlled after the war.

The key to the relative failure of the returns process is that Dayton mostly allowed parties controlling localities at the end of the war – in many cases having removed much of the original population – to consolidate their power. Post-war politics was ‘the continuation of the war by other means’; local elites ‘established patronage systems in their captured opstine [municipalities] that endured into the peace.’ (235) US President Bill Clinton insisted on early elections, in the belief that democratisation was a way out of Bosnia’s impasse, but just as the earlier 1990 elections had originally ethnonationalised Bosnian politics – laying the basis for territorial division – so post-Dayton elections were manipulated by local powerholders who boosted their own population group’s electoral registration and absentee voting, while blocking the participation of the expelled – so confirming territorial division. ‘Rapid elections … mostly served to entrench nationalist parties and collective rights’ (234), at the expense of the individual rights of expelled people. Moreover this local control was reinforced by the establishment of the wartime Republika Srpska as an ‘entity’ (within a new federal structure for the Bosnia-Herzegovina state), which Serbian politicians treated as far as possible as a separate state. Although the literature has often emphasised the lack of ‘will’ of international authorities, Toal and Dahlmann point to the inherent weakness of multinational bureaucracy and its lack of capacity faced with local intransigence: ‘the international community soon realised that it was insuffiently equipped to monitor and enforce Dayton’s provisions across two entities, ten cantons and 148 local governments, each with its own tactics for discouraging returns and repossession.’ (237)

Thus Bosnia Remade shows that Michael Mann’s argument that ethnic cleansing is the ‘dark side of democracy’ is particularly relevant when the latter is proposed as an answer to ethnic conflict: as a growing literature attests, elections can be catalysts for conflict. The book also matches two of the themes of Stathis Kalyvas’ influential arguments about civil war violence: the importance of the local level, and the fact that populations help produce the violence that is directed at civilians.#  Thus Toal and Dahlmann argue that ethnic cleansing ‘is never straightforwardly “ethnic” or motivated only by a desire to “cleanse” localities thought the murder and expulsion of ethnic others. Criminal opportunism, local grievances, revenge and nihilism fuelled by alcohol and drugs are also elements of the practice. Some violence … was motivated by long-held grudges.’ (13) However their demonstration of the centrality of Serbian and Croatian geopolitical projects to the cleansing process contradicts Kalyvas’ claim, in an article with Nicholas Sambanis, that it can be mainly explained by the level of resistance to Serbian power.#

Toal and Dahlmann argue that both ethnic cleansing and return are unavoidably geographical projects, and their approach is based on critical geopolitics, ‘an approach that produces “categories of analysis” to grasp and explain the too-often unproblematized “categories of practice” of banal and not-so-banal nor benign geopolitics.’ (9) Thus they reject the subsumption of the events in the categories of ‘civil war’ and ‘ethnic conflict’, and similarly to David Campbell’s earlier post-structuralist account#, show how ethnopolitics was constructed out of Bosnia’s historic hybrid, plurinational society. However, despite pointing out that ‘ethnic cleansing’ is ‘a vivid metaphor conveying the commitments of its perpetrators’ (3), they are remarkably content to use this as their main analytical category. ‘Genocide’, in contrast, is treated overwhelmingly as a rhetorical device of actors, whether of Serbian perpetrators recalling their peoples’ historic victimisations, or of Bosnian Muslim leaders complaining about Serbian ‘cleansing’. In a surprising lapse of critical focus on the ‘categories of practice’, they reproduce the view (now conventional in international legal circles) that genocide was only committed at Srebrenica in 1995, while the general destruction of plural Bosnian society, which occurred as they show mainly in 1992, was not genocide.

Yet what Toal and Dahlmann describe is what others from Raphael Lemkin onwards have carefully defined as genocide: carving out imagined ethnic homelands by destroying Bosnia’s ‘common life, multiethnic settlements and the homes of ordinary Bosnians’ (134), and destroying its common public infrastructure and cultural and religious property, indeed its ‘lifeworld of coexistence (140). When they talk of a ‘geopolitical logic of erasure and refoundation’ (6) they reproduce Lemkin’s ‘two phases [of genocide]: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group: the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.’# Their argument that the ethnonationalism has largely succeeded even though it was not militarily victorious is another way of expressing his dictum that genocide is a way of winning even when the war itself is lost. Yet nowhere do Toal and Dahlmann argue for these conceptual choices.

Paul Mojzes makes similar conceptual decisions, but he does at least try to justify them. His book is a historical synthesis, which has the considerable virtue of bringing together the large number of genocidal events in the modern Balkans over the last century. He begins with the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, seen as an ‘unrecognized genocide’, and proceeds to the ‘multiple genocides of World War II’ and ‘retaliatory genocides against wartime enemies’, before arriving at ‘ethnic cleansing during Yugoslavia’s wars of distintegration in the 1990s’ (Kosovo is considered in a separate chapter, as is the ICTY). In each of this periods, Mojzes carefully accumulates the evidence on anti-population violence from all sides, and this will serve as a useful reference work. He also tries to say which events constituted genocide, and which not, and while his criteria and judgements may both be disputed, it is all done in a careful way that gives the readers useful pointers. The sheer range of events that are covered, the variety of their perpetrators, and the demonstrations of their interconnectedness, also provide useful antidotes to any simple ideas that only one or other type of actor perpetrated genocide. Mojzes falls into a trap against of identifying the political factions with the ethnic groups themselves, so begging the question of the ethnopoliticisation that is the focus of Toal and Dahlmann’s analysis. But by placing the Bosnian war in the larger series of recent conflicts that began in Slovenia and Croatia and ended in Kosovo, he provides useful contextualisation, even if Balkan Genocides has neither the interpetative historical depth of Donald Bloxham’s work#, which covers the earlier part of its ground, nor the theoretical and empirical richness of Bosnia Remade.

Any optimism about the future of the Balkans in these books is highly tempered, but Toal and Dahlmann are right to say that Bosnia-Herzegovina is still in the process of being made. There is no inexorable law that condemns us to reproduce the crimes of the past, even if there are powerful social forces that work in that direction.

See the full review including references.

Israel’s prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu made a characteristic intervention during his address in Washington to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac ^↑ ) on 5 March 2012. In voicing determination to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and thus to reject a situation where Israelis would “live under the shadow of annihilation”, Netanyahu said ^↑ that in his desk was a copy of a letter from the World Jewish Congress requesting the United States to bomb the Auschwitz death camp ^↑ in 1944, together with the American reply making excuses for declining to do so.

It hardly honours Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide to make them a pretext for killing more innocents in a new ^↑ war. Netanyahu’s cheap comparison between the situation of Israelis today and the terrible plight of Auschwitz inmates sixty-eight years ago only insults their memory. Likewise, his attack on the secrecy of Iran’s nuclear programme – “its underground nuclear facilities” – is brazen hypocrisy from the leader of an undeclared nuclear-armed state; one which is moreover in a deep alliance with the greatest nuclear power on earth.

Such Holocaust militarism is surely an example of the “loose talk of war” of which President Barack Obama rightly warned in his own speech ^↑ to Aipac the previous day. But sadly, the abuse of genocide-victims’ experience is all too routine. It is not only Israeli spokespersons – who regularly invoke the Holocaust as a justification for their state’s oppression of Palestinians – who abuse historical memory. Across the board, victims’ tragedies are cheapened by many politics of genocide mobilisation (as also, of course, of genocide denial).

The anti-denial problem

A twist in this situation is that some abuses of this kind take place in the name of combating denial. In Rwanda, journalists Agnès Uwimana and Saïdati Mukakibibi were sentenced ^↑ to seventeen and seven years respectively for articles (published in a small circulation journal) that alleged corruption among officials and criticised Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame ^↑ , in the run-up to the elections of 2010. They were convicted on counts of endangering national security, insulting the president, fomenting division, and denying the genocide of 1994.

Rwanda has a constitutional ban ^↑ on “revisionism, negationism and trivialisation of genocide”. It defends this by referring to similar laws that were adopted by some European countries in response to Holocaust denial. Such laws have long existed in Germany, Austria and elsewhere; more recently they are being complemented by laws ^↑ against denial of the Armenian genocide of 1915. A law adopted by the French parliament is a prime example, which was later struck ^↑ down by France’s constitutional court though may yet ^↑ be passed in revised form.

Such laws have some value in indicating the gravity of these issues, but they are also insidious (by enshrining in statute particular versions of historical memory in a way that facilitates tendentious manipulation) and invidious (in protecting the memory of some genocides and some victims while suppressing that of others).

It is legitimate, for example, to draw attention to Hutu victims of massacres committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which controls the post-genocide government in Rwanda ^↑ – even if it must also be acknowledged that these massacres were different from the “Hutu power” genocide against the Tutsi (being of far lesser scale, and not linked to the unified aim of destroying a whole population group, than was the case in the 1994 events ^↑ ). But this nuanced argument, which I can make from the safety of European academia (and which I hasten to add, the condemned Uwimana and Mukakibibi did not make) would earn me imprisonment in Rwanda.

Laws in third-party countries, like France’s in relation to events in the Ottoman empire a century ago, inevitably raise questions of international politics. Many Turks (and others) will interpret the French law in terms of contemporary French chauvinism towards Muslims and hostility to Turkish membership of the European Union. It will probably reinforce denial more than it will make Turks confront the dark side of their state’s early history.

Moreover, such international moves provoke retaliatory accusations, as when Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan argued ^↑ that France should instead “investigate how many people French soldiers massacred in Algeria, and their involvement in the killing of 800,000 people in Rwanda”. Erdogan was not wrong: Jean-Paul Sartre famously accused ^↑ his country of genocide in Algeria, and many questions have been raised about France’s role in Rwanda (see Andrew Wallis, “Rwanda: a step towards truth“, 21 January 2012). But such accusations are hardly an appropriate response to the overwhelming historical consensus on the Armenian genocide.

The law is often too crude an instrument to address the questions raised by genocide, whether it focuses on particular cases (and thus is interpreted as partisan and selective) or on general sanctions against denial (which then provoke legitimate and sometimes difficult historical questions about where and when genocide has actually been committed, which can make the law look controlling or irrelevant).

Education, not politicisation

The only answer to denial is non-partisan historical research and education. But even scholarship is bedevilled by partisanship based on nationalist and ideological agendas. In a previous article, I criticised the denial of genocide in Rwanda by Noam Chomsky and his associates (see “The politics of genocide: Rwanda and DR Congo“, 16 September 2010). But I was uneasy about a proposal for an official condemnation of their denial by the International Association of Genocide Scholars ^↑  (IAGS), which seemed to be applying a sledgehammer to crack a few nuts.

The IAGS, after all, is the very organisation that compromised its authority when it responded to the anti-Israeli rhetoric of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, by warning ^↑ of “a risk of genocide” from Iran’s nuclear programme, thus helping to lay “academic” foundations for Israel’s current efforts to make war look reasonable and perhaps inevitable.

Knowledge and understanding of genocide deserve to be made widely available – but the pitfalls in “authoritative” collective pronouncements on these questions should be at the forefront of educators’ minds. Academic fatwas are as problematic as legal prohibitions, neither of which protects the victims or their memory.

At the European Union summit in Brussels on 8-9 December 2011, Britain’s Conservative prime minister David Cameron refused to agree to a full EU treaty to support new governance for the eurozone. He was alone among representatives of the twenty-seven member-states in doing so, with the partial exception of three leaders who will consult their parliaments before making a final decision. Thus, Britain will be isolated (or near-isolated) as almost the entire union proceeds to implement the treaty, probably by March 2012.

Cameron’s ostensible reason for using the United Kingdom’s “veto” is that his EU partners rejected his demands to accord special protection to “Britain’s interests” by protecting its financial centre, the City of London. In reality the City was not threatened and is more likely to be undermined by Britain’s self-inflicted pariah status.

Cameron’s position reverses a forty-year stance of engagement (albeit often reluctant) with the rest of Europe by British governments. The overriding reason is that he will do anything to avoid an open split in his Conservative (or Tory) party. The dominant trend in the party is hostile to anything but the most minimal role for the UK in Europe; many Tory MPs and even ministers are Europhobic to the extent that they wish to leave the union altogether (the more common label “Eurosceptic” is inappropriate because it implies that they are open to reason on the subject, which for many is not the case).

For the Europhobes, holding a referendum on Britain’s role in Europe trumps all other political goals. Cameron could not afford the referendum that they would have obliged him to stage over Britain’s signature of any new treaty, since the “wrong” result would have obliged him – thanks both to his international commitments and to his Liberal Democratic coalition partners (who are mostly europhile) – to support a treaty that many in his party would continue fiercely to reject. The ensuing splits in his party and government would be fatal.

The political logic

David Cameron’s European decision belongs to a broader political context. He came to power in 2010 after an election dominated by the reality that the winner would have to manage a major financial crisis (thus the Bank of England’s governor remarked that it was a good election to lose). The outgoing Labour government had already promised cuts in public spending, but Cameron and his chancellor George Osborne announced even deeper austerity measures over a five-year term.

Thus the Conservative-LibDem government faced from the start a huge political task, which Cameron had to handle well if he were to have a chance of being re-elected in 2015. His strategy has been to consolidate his existing electorial base by focusing on cuts to the (traditionally pro-Labour) public sector rather than tax increases for the well-off and rich (his own constituency). At the same time he is trying to rig the electoral system, both by equalising the size of constituency electorates (in principle a democratic demand) and by making electoral registration voluntary (which will reduce the size of the national electorate). The certain outcome of the latter change will be that many people will be excluded – perhaps millions, and most of those young and/or poor.

The strategy, taken as a whole, faces great problems. The combination of the austerity programme and the eurozone crisis has halted the already weak economic recovery, caused tax revenues to fall, and raised indebtness further; already this has led Osborne to extend the deficit-elimination plan by two years beyond the next election, to 2017 (and then only on implausibly optimistic assumptions). Moreover, the prolonged assault on public-sector workers’ pay and pensions is likely to ensure further unrest, following the strikes of 30 November.

Against this background, Cameron’s European “veto” has proved popular with most of his party and the Europhobic press that many voters read. But there is another crucial element in the equation: the “national” one within the UK. Here, the European dimension intersects most acutely with the Scottish one, especially when the Scottish National Party (SNP) government is in power in Edinburgh and plans to hold a Scotland-wide referendum in which the options include full independence and a more limited (if still meaningful) transfer of additional powers to the Scottish parliament.

David Cameron is, like all his fellow Conservatives, a “unionist” (which in Scottish-British terms means a supporter of maintaining the UK as a unified state), and he officially opposes both these options. Yet more covertly, he has reason to favour either. The first, independence, would boost the possibility of the Tories extending their rule in England alone (since in British elections the Conservatives do better there and badly in Scotland, whereas Labour usually needs Scottish and Welsh votes to reach office); the second, additional powers, could be even better, since it would give Cameron a pretext to challenge the right of Scottish members of parliament to vote on English matters (the so-called “West Lothian question”) as a route to consolidate Tory control in England without breaking up the union.

Either way, there is a striking complementarity between the interests of Scottish nationalism (at present generally Europhile) and English Tory nationalism (uniformly Europhobic). The ex-Liberal leader Paddy Ashdown strongly criticises Cameron’s decision in Brussels and says that it offers the SNP leader Alex Salmond “an uncovenanted gift. If England is to be out of Europe, why should Scotland not be in?”

The political logic is an embrace of “Little Tory England” within the shell of the still nominally EU-affiliated and still more or less united, United Kingdom. It will be a country that keeps its nuclear weapons, its seat on the United Nations Security Council, and a high military profile. It will aim to stay a centre of European and world finance, keeping the freedoms to export to and travel in the EU, but with as little as possible to do with any other EU institutions, especially not with the European Convention on Human Rights or any sort of workers’ or social protection.

It will be a country whose financial sector is protected from the kind of regulation that might impinge on the ability of its elite to pay themselves exorbitant salaries and bonuses; whose prime minister proclaims “zero tolerance” for the criminality of rioters but indulges the criminality of powerful media figures in his own social circle; and where the official atmosphere is increasingly aggressive towards the poor, migrants and asylum-seekers. It will, in short, be like the worst of the present UK, but with the danger of further entrenchment as the Tories gain a further electoral advantage from the “loss” of Scotland.

The opposition matrix

This fusion of economic crisis, austerity, public hypocrisy, intra-UK tension, and now a semi-divorce from the Euopean Union suggests that December 2011 is a major turning-point in British politics. But there are other actors in this situation besides David Cameron – and their responses will determine whether Little Tory England is actually realised over the next decade.

A range of potential oppositional forces exist, and possible synergies between different levels of resistance. The Liberal Democrats’ collaboration with Cameron’s retoxified Conservatives has just received a mighty shock, as reflected in the responses to the “veto” of their leader Nick Clegg and business minister Vince Cable (as well as Paddy Ashdown); more fissures are likely, as well as mollifying moves by Cameron to keep the coalition on track.

This moment also presents an opportunity for the extra-parliamentary opposition, in the trade unions, the environmental and women’s groups, and the emerging “occupy” movement. In a parliamentary democracy, a mass movement can succeed only if it engages the political system. In France in 2010, a similar mobilisation against changes to the pensions system, stronger than the British movement is at the present time, escalated its protests through a powerful series of strikes, only to be defeated by a conservative majority in parliament. In Britain, a conservative parliamentary majority exists only through LibDem support. The junior coalition partner will not be easily detached, in part because it fears an early election; but the broad opposition can make any real headway only by increasing the strains inside the coalition.

The opposition needs therefore to combine internet and street-level activism with targeted pressure, especially on the vulnerable element of the coalition. At the same time, the challenge of Little Tory England demands a bolder response from Ed Miliband and Labour: a vision of Europeanism and internationalism that also addresses English concerns, and of social justice in a situation where the living standards of people across the UK are being squeezed while the rich sail on. The task is urgent, before the lockdown of power becomes irreversible.

The great interruption

The terrorist attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 had a huge impact on world politics in the following decade, but they did not mark a fundamental change like the 1989-91 upheavals or 2011’s extraordinary beginning of transformation in the Arab world. Indeed looking at 2001 in the light of these more important turning-points shows the limited character of the actions and the modest historical significance of both major protagonists in the subsequent conflict, al-Qaida and the George W Bush administration.

9/11 was an appalling mass murder and marked a quantum-leap in spectacular atrocity politics. Al-Qaida so effectively turned the Hollywood disaster-movie genre against the United States that it became, for a few years, an indispensable actor in world politics; yet the tactic reflected the organisation’s underlying political and military weakness. This has been cruelly exposed in its failure to execute a further major atrocity attack after the Madrid (2004) and London (2005) bombings, and underlined by the assassination of Osama bin Laden in May 2011.

9/11’s main effects were to prompt President Bush to declare the “global war on terror” and enable him to invade Iraq. But Bush’s overreach also exposed the exaggeration of US power which its apparent victory in the cold war had encouraged. He in turn dissipated the worldwide support for the US after 9/11, provoked a low-grade genocidal civil war in Iraq itself, and left office one of the most discredited presidents in history, his principal legacy the unwinnable war in Afghanistan. Any western success against al-Qaida was down to intelligence and policing, not war or the detention and torture with which Bush besmirched western democracy.

Bin Laden and Bush had in common that they attempted to short-circuit democratic change in world politics, the former with terror attacks and the latter with militarised regime-change. The main effect of their different but mutually reinforcing forms of substitutionism was to interrupt the twin processes of democratisation and legitimate global institution-building which had gained momentum after 1989. But with the fading of al-Qaida and neo-conservatism alike, the Arab revolts have shown a new birth of mass democratic movements and the possibilities of synergy with more responsive action by western governments and United Nations institutions.

In the light of 2011, it is hard to understand how bin Laden ever gained a significant following among Muslims – or Bush among western democrats. Yet during the “great interruption” of the 2000s, superficial journalism and scholarship followed superficial politics in embracing the notion that terrorism was the greatest threat to world society and the struggle against it the great challenge of our times.

We can now see that, however necessary is continuing vigilance against terrorist attacks, counter-terrorism was and is no more than a sideshow of world politics in the 21st century. It may, however, still be an uphill struggle to take the measure of the daunting challenges of democratic change, global equality and legitimate international order: not least because these are posed not just by the heroism of protesters on the Arab street but by the deepening crisis of a dysfunctional world economy.

The overthrow of the Muammar Gaddafi regime in Libya – messy and incomplete though it remains – represents a striking success for the Arab revolt which began only in December 2010. While the movements in Tunisia and Egypt achieved regime change through peaceful protest, that in Libya has succeeded through armed rebellion, but this moment – awaited by most older Libyans for the forty-two years of Gaddafi’s rule – still belongs to the same wave (see “The global democratic revolution: a new stage“, 7 March 2011).

This victory also represents an important shift in world politics. The synergies between anti-authoritarian movements in the non-western world and international (western and United Nations) governmental action – which were evident in the 1990s but disrupted by George W Bush’s disastrous regime change in Iraq, which substituted military intervention for local democratic action – have been partially restored by the successful Nato intervention in Libya.

These developments are accompanied by two misleading and confused criticisms. First, several observers point out that Nato’s campaign aimed not only at civilian protection (the manifest UN mandate) but also at regime change – though this must be set against the reality that the civilian population had arisen precisely to achieve the latter, and that the threat of violence against them arose from that fact.

Second, it is further argued that there has been an “imperial hijacking” of the Libyan movement, which would never have succeeded without western bombing. The latter point is evidently correct; but more relevant is that the movement was inspired by the courageous actions of everyday Libyans, many of whom (unlike Nato’s leaders and airmen) have given their lives.

Until they began to protest in February 2011 – peacefully at first, and in Tripoli even before Benghazi – western governments (Britain and France prominently among them) were all too happy to sell arms, riot-control gear and anything else to the Libyan dictator (see Fred Halliday, “Libya’s regime at 40: a state of kleptocracy“, 8 September 2009).

Politics amid contradiction

These interpretations ignore the fact that international politics is often contradictory, a reality that revolutions tend to heighten. Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron may be unprincipled politicians, interested mainly in votes and trade, but they nevertheless played a progressive role in Libya: first in preventing the crushing of the revolt, and then in ensuring its success. The significance of their stand is not undermined even by, for example, their use of anti-immigrant politics (in Sarkozy’s case, scaremongering together with Silvio Berlusconi about the new migrants the Libya revolt was unleashing into the European Union); though the more discreet United States involvement was actually the most decisive international contribution.

The fact that some of the mix of elements in the Libyan movement itself are less than attractive is part of this same messy reality. In a society where (unlike Egypt and Tunisia) no independent organisation was allowed, some ex-regime figures have partially dominated the movement (rather like in Romania after the fall of the Nicolae Ceausescu regime in 1989). In the initially unequal military struggle, the rebels had to accept the aid of defecting Gaddafi commanders, which produced (inter alia) a conflict between the movement in Misrata and the National Transitional Council [NTC]). Amidst exaggerated suspicions of the role of mercenaries in Gaddafi’s repression, anti-black racism has surfaced.

In addition, the civil war has clearly produced enormous human costs (as have several of the wars of the last decade). The NTC estimates of 50,000 deaths may prove exaggerated – as many initial estimates tend to do – but large numbers of people have died in the fighting, as TV reports on the overflowing morgues of Tripoli have illustrated. The numbers of wounded and psychologically harmed will be even greater. In this sense the price paid by Libyan society is many times in excess of their co-revolutionaries elsewhere: the death-toll in Syria, which after months of violent repression has been estimated (in late August) at a little over 2,200, is an example.

The armed character of the Libyan movement is undoubtedly very significant for the future. There is proper attention on atrocities committed by rebel fighters, although the regime appears to be responsible for the worst such actions (including a reported massacre of over 100 men in Tripoli). As the rebels move to the exercise of state power, their conduct towards Sirte and other Gaddafi outposts will be a crucial indicator of their respect for the laws of war, and more generally of their ability to produce a viable settlement in Libyan society.

It must be of concern that the struggle has given to young men with weapons such an important role, and this will pose significant challenges to the new Libyan government and to society. In the worst case, continuing challenges from Gaddafi-linked tribes or divisions among the rebels could produce ongoing civil war. However I remain unconvinced (as I argued in April) by easy comparisons with Afghanistan and Iraq (see “Libya: popular revolt, military intervention“, 7 April 2011). The high level of urbanisation of Libyan society and the degree of popular unity in supporting the overthrow of Gaddafi make this a significantly different situation.

The war’s accounting

There remain two crucial questions about the international significance of the Libyan outcome. The first concerns the kind of boost it will give to the emancipatory movement across the Arab world. Now that a band of three countries in north Africa has been liberated from dictatorship, the military-backed Algerian regime will be feeling nervous and even the “reformed” Moroccan monarchy may wonder if it has gone far enough to stave off revolt. The fall of Gaddafi has already been welcomed by those struggling peacefully against the Syrian dictatorship, and has emboldened those in the United States and Europe looking for (non-military) means of helping the protesters.

The second concerns the implications for international politics. Much has been written about the revival of “humanitarian intervention” in a new guise. In reality, Nato’s Libyan campaign is not so different from the Kosovo campaign of March-June 1999; the main difference is that in Libya the alliance between Nato and the rebels has been more open.

Whether Libya creates a new template depends partially on whether this Nato campaign, formally prosecuted in the cause of civilian protection, has actually produced a lower rate of civilian casualties from aerial bombing than others. There have been no reports of Libyan wedding-parties being strafed with the regularity of those in Afghanistan, which may turn out to be significant. The credibly reported incidents of civilian deaths (including one in Zlitan where (according to the Gaddafi regime) eighty-five civilians died) have been relatively few; but as Paul Rogers points out, Nato refuses to account for the casualties it has caused (see “The casualties of war: Libya and beyond“, 7 July 2011). In any event, there will be an accounting – if not from Nato itself, then from independent NGOs or scholars.

I have argued that western bombing campaigns systematically transfer risks from aircrew to the civilians they are supposed to protect (see Afghanistan and Iraq: western wars, genocidal risks“, 24 July 2009). How far did this happen in Libya? It will be interesting to see if surveillance from UN Security Council members, concerned that Nato was overstepping its mandate, actually made a difference. In some other cases (bombing in Afghanistan, drone-warfare in Pakistan and elsewhere), it does seem that relative western indifference to civilian casualties is one of the causes of death. A serious lower civilian death-rate from the Libyan bombing may again raise the spectre of ultra-precise, “humane” intervention. But it will also raise awkward questions about the conduct of operations elsewhere.

For the moment, Nato’s success gives a boost to western governments, which have little else to celebrate as their economies stall. And it puts governments like the Russian and Chinese, which permitted the Libyan venture with some reluctance, on the defensive. But Libya’s transformation may give new life to the Arab upheavals, such as in Syria. There will then be more shocks on the way, and none of the world’s governments can be confident of its future in a world in which the people are once again on the march