North Africa is no existential threat

February 9, 2013 Leave a comment

In a speech last week, the prime minister warned of a “large and existential terrorist threat” in North Africa’s “ungoverned spaces,” menacing not only the peace and stability of the region but as far away as the United Kingdom. This idea enjoys a high level of political support and is being taken seriously enough by David Cameron that he recently sought Tony Blair’s counsel,reportedly on the possibility of waging a war on terror in North Africa.

The concept has been uncritically received in most of the popular media and outright supported by journalists in Westminster. In a report on Cameron’s recent Tripoli speech, for example, Guardian journalist Patrick Wintourrefers to “a growing threat from al Qaeda-linked terrorists in the region.” In the Evening Standard, Matthew D’Ancona defended the government’s new interest in the region as a response to “the threat the region poses to our country.”

It’s not hard to determine why this belief has arisen. Following an abortive military coup in Mali, a secular secessionist group, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), unsuccessfully attempted to declare independence for the north of the country. It was then overrun by Islamist criminal organisations who seized the opportunity to take over northern Mali. In response, France has undertaken a military operation aimed at re-establishing the authority of the Bamako-based Malian government.

This brought the names of groups like al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Ansar Dine, and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (Mujao), who have long run smuggling and hostage-taking operations in North Africa’s desert, to the attention of policymakers and the public. On 16th January, one of AQIM’s many splinter groups, al Mulathameen, captured a gas plant at In Amenas in Algeria and killed a number of foreign contractors who were working there.

But whatever these events show, there is no existential threat to the United Kingdom from North Africa. The combined state power of all five Maghreb countries and all the region’s warlords could not come close to threatening to the UK at anything like an existential level—and no such union is remotely conceivable.

The emerging fear of North African terror grossly misunderstands the nature of the relevant groups. Contrary to the descriptions supplied by, for example, Wole Soyinka, of “al Qaeda clones,” Ansar Dine, Mujao and al Mulathameen bear no real relation to the organisation. Al Mulathameen’s leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar has been running a criminal operation based primarily on cigarette smuggling for years—his proclivity earned him the nickname “Mr Marlboro.” Rudolph Atallah, the former US head of counter-terrorism for Africa, describes Belmokhtar as more “how do I negotiate and put extra money in my pocket” than anything else. Alhough Al Multhameen says it pays homage to al Qaeda, there is little evidence of a tangible link between them.

AQIM is not an al Qaeda cell. It grew out of a predecessor, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), a splinter group of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA), which formed in the late 1990s. The use of the al Qaeda name was a 2007 rebranding of an existing, independent group. As professor Scott Atran puts it: “al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb is a logo, not part of an international organization.” Groups like AQIM are primarily criminal and their capability is limited. Talk of a threat to the UK from North Africa is at best mistaken, at worst an outright fabrication.

This does not mean that such groups are innocuous or wholly unthreatening. To the world’s weakest state apparatus, in particular moments of vulnerability (as was the case in Mali), they pose a threat. To regional business interests, as the events at In Amenas demonstrate, they also pose a threat. To Western aid workers, such as those recently evacuated from the refugee camps for Sahrawis in Tindouf, southern Algeria, they pose a clear threat.

Excluding talk of existential threats, then, what policy should Westminster adopt toward North Africa? A war on terror-style campaign is to be avoided at all costs. Rhetoric about “ungoverned spaces” and weak states must not be allowed to lapse into support for further violence in the region. Morocco and Algeria are still highly authoritarian states, posing a significant threat to their own populations. Fear of smuggling and kidnapping gangs must not be used as cover to extend or bolster support for them. Sending fewer British arms and limiting diplomatic support to such countries may in fact diminish the danger that groups like AQIM pose to the UK, as it would decrease the chances of radicalising the region’s criminal networks and pushing them towards political violence.

Most future threats in North Africa will not be international but national. If and when such groups do pose serious threats to the region, they should be dealt with using the framework of the UN charter and international law, and not unilateral military action. Otherwise, we will become a new source of violence in the region.

 

This article was originally published with Prospect magazine on February 8 2013.

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Inside Occupied Western Sahara

January 19, 2013 Leave a comment

“Duck down and put your head below the window,” says Hamid as we pass one of the smaller military outposts (housing an armoured vehicle) in southern Laayoune, the capital of Western Sahara. Bundled into a 15 year old Citroen with four Sahrawi human rights activists, I have to repeat the exercise multiple times before reaching the family home they use as headquarters and meeting place.

Military stations are one thing Laayoune has no shortage of. Western Sahara has been ruled by Morocco since 1975 when, after Franco’s death, the Spanish left and allowed Morocco and Mauritania to enter.An International Court of Justice advisory opinion issued at the time did not find “any tie of territorial sovereignty” between Western Sahara, Morocco, and Mauritania, though it also noted the “difficulty of disentangling the various relationships existing in the Western Sahara region at the time of colonisation”

By 1979 internal resistance had forced Mauritania out, but Morocco’s King Hassan II was committed to the Sahara as bilad al-siba, part of a “Greater Morocco” that would eventually cover all of Mauritania as well. Hundreds of thousands of Moroccan settlers were encouraged to enter Western Sahara with state subsidized property and employment, under the army’s protection.

Morocco then fought a war against an indigenous Sahrawi resistance group, the Frente Polisario, which ended in 1991 when the UN brokered a ceasefire and pledged to hold an independence referendum within six months.

The referendum has still not been held. Morocco retains control of Western Sahara, and its lucrative phosphate and fishing resources. The country is now the last United Nations designated “non-self-governing territory” in Africa, and is home to between 100,000 and 140,000 Moroccan military personnel (despite a total population of just 500,000).

Morocco’s reigning King Muhammad VI has said that “the issue of our Saharan provinces is central” in order “to complete our territorial integrity”.

 

Life under the occupation

The fighting drove much of the indigenous population of Western Sahara into refugee camps in Tindouf, Southern Algeria, but some remain as a minority within the occupied territory, west of the 1,600 mile separation wall that Morocco built during the war with the Polisario between 1981 and 1986.

The UN peacekeeping mission, MINURSO, has limited jurisdiction: unusually for such missions, the UN Security Council has not given it a mandate to monitor rights abuses. Nor is it sufficiently staffed: the mission has only six police officers and 237 military personnel covering an area larger than Britain. MINURSO staff said they need an additional 10 civilian police just to monitor Laayoune.

Media access in Western Sahara is extremely restricted: almost no foreign journalists are given permits to enter, and the occasional groups of journalists who are allowed in have their movement controlled by the state. Accordingly, little is known about the lives of the Sahrawi in the disputed territory.

“Our group is underground,” Fatima Tobarra, president of the Sahrawi Observatory for Women and Children, told me. “We tried to make an official organization, but the authorities refused even to receive our application, so we can have no premises.”

Neither the Moroccan police nor the Moroccan government’s human rights department responded to requests for comment for this article.

Life expectancy in Western Sahara is just 62, tellingly lower than Morocco’s 72. Fatima’s Observatory focuses on supporting vulnerable Sahrawi families, who feel the effects of the occupation keenly. “The police here guard the schools, and intimidate the Sahrawi children, then inside they are discriminated against by the teachers who are almost always Moroccans so attendance drops,” she told me.

“Our children are not even allowed to join the activity groups that the Moroccan children have, so we run groups for them.”

Many of the families have had relatives killed or “disappeared”. Fatima’s own father and uncle were split up as refugees, and neither have been heard from since. Her grandfather and grandmother were both interred in Agdz prison, and died there.

“We cannot live like this, and we will not,” Fatima said. “We want our self-determination so that we can live good lives. The people in other countries, in Tunis, in Yemen, they won their freedom – and we want that to happen here, it has to happen here.”

 

Repressing the internal resistance

Despite the extensive security apparatus, the Sahrawi have been holding demonstrations against Moroccan rule, and what they see as their second class citizenship, for years.

This peaked in October 2010, with the establishment of the Gdeim Izik protest camp: a tent city set up by activists south-east of Laayoune. The camp was forcibly dismantled by the Moroccan police, with between 11 and 36 Sahrawi killed.

I met members of a group called Coordination Gdeim Izik in a house that serves as their headquarters.

The group played a key part in the protest camp, and continue to organize regular non-violent demonstrations in Laayoune, Smara, and Dakhla. Most recently, they organized a protest on international human rights day, in front of the Moroccan human rights organization (CCDH) office in Laayoune.

The protest was forcibly broken up with beatings administered to the protesters, like Salimah, a Sahrawi woman in her late twenties.“I was very badly attacked, they smashed my teeth to pieces and I had to get them reconstructed,” she said, displaying the artificial replacements that now lie in place of her lower front six teeth. “The police came to the protest out of their uniforms and beat us with clubs.”

Another young member, Khalil, told me that the security forces have become adept at pre-empting and breaking up their protests, routinely using clubs and batons against anyone who attends.

“They do not care if you are young, old, man, woman, if you come to the protests they will attack you”, he said, adding that most of the 40 to 50 people in the room have stories like Salimah’s.

In some cases the reprisals against demonstrators are more serious than assault. The next day I met with the family of a demonstrator who was killed by the police during a protest in Laayoune in December 2010.

Maryem Dambar explains how she watched as her brother, Said Dambar, was shot in the head by the police at a protest not far from his own house.

The Moroccan security forces then attacked the house, clubbing Maryem and her mother after she fled inside. The police subsequently denied all responsibility for Said’s death, and to this day refuse to admit that the killing happened, or to investigate it.

“All our family wants is justice for Said,” Maryem said. “I saw him killed, and cannot understand how the Moroccans can deny that they murdered him. If there were any human rights in Western Sahara, Said’s death would not be denied, and his killers would be brought to justice.”

The case may not be unique. Human Rights Watch has complained that Moroccoan authorities failed to follow-up on the beating of the group’s research assistant in 2010, calling the attack a “case study of impunity for police violence”.

“If there is impunity for police who beat up a citizen who works for an international organization in broad daylight, in front of witnesses and despite formal complaints, it’s clear how vulnerable ordinary citizens are,” Sarah Lee Whitson, a Human Rights Watch spokesperson, said in a March 2012 statement.

“Restricted Freedoms”

In April, Amnesty International reported that: “Sahrawis advocating self-determination for the people of Western Sahara remained subject to restrictions on their freedoms of expression, association and assembly, and leading activists continued to face prosecution.”

Despite the danger of documenting unrest – anyone caught filming or taking pictures of protests in Western Sahara faces punishment, and usually the destruction of the camera equipment – Coordination Gdeim Izik say they have video evidence of the attacks on their protests.

In one video seen by this reporter, a 55-year-old woman is savagely beaten and kicked to the floor by two riot policemen; in another, uniformed military personnel beat a young girl so severely she had to be hospitalised, according to her friends. A senior member of the group, Sidi Muhammad Ramadiy, pointed to the screen and said: “This is human rights for Morocco.”

The group’s de facto leader, Lahib Salhi, said: “We live here always under the eyes, and under the clubs of the Moroccans. The world must do what it promised to do when the UN first came: hold the referendum, and give us the chance to live as we wish to live.”

Many Sahrawis in fact blame the international community. “The Moroccans make the claim on our land because they can, because they are strong and because they are supported by France, the United States, and Britain,” said Salhi. “But they know the claim is false. The Mauritanians once claimed Western Sahara for themselves. Where are they now? How much longer will the world permit this injustice?”

A version of this report was published with Al Jazeera, on January 3rd 2013.

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Walking on glass: Why we’re facing another half decade of recession

November 5, 2012 Leave a comment

The UK economy is stagnant, and is facing nominal stagnation and real terms recession for the next five years, at least according to aggregate growth estimates. One per cent growth in a quarter that prices in the Olympic games is concrete evidence of this, not countervailing data.

The “growth” rate for 2012 is predicted to be 0.3 per cent. For 2013 the median prediction is 1.1 per cent, but more sensible projections are at 0.5 per cent. The ONS five year prediction is about 3 per cent, but leading economists such as James Carrick at Legal & General provide substantial analysis that shows it’s likely to be more like 1.5 per cent – again, real terms recession.

Why is the economy still receding, over fours years after the beginning of the financial crisis?

Well, one thing we know is that the problem isn’t one of labour. UK labour is in fact highly versatile – far more so than US labour. This is not for pretty reasons. The UK labour market is one of the least regulated on earth, and it shows. Since 2008 around 700,000 full-time jobs have been lost. At the same time almost 1 million part-time and self-employed jobs have emerged and been filled. Essentially there’s been a huge blow to general job security.

Fig.1 – Source: Reuters Ecowin, via L&G

From the point of view of national employment, however, this “flexible” workforce is meant to be positive. The graph above [fig.1] is a Beveridge curve. It shows the stark difference between the UK and US on this point.

In America, vacancies are up in the last few years, but labour hasn’t responded. Why? The prevailing theory is that Americans are less likely to relocate (entirely understandable), or change professions. The UK workforce is much more willing to do so, and of course the geographical implications are, well, smaller.

The basic point is this: unlike the US, the UK seems to have a cyclical, not structural, employment problem.

It’s also important to add that other fundamental economic indicators are strong. The best example comes from imports. Since 2008, UK companies have stopped or radically reduced outsourcing production. The reason is clear. Imports negatively track non-energy consumer prices. Through the mid-nineties, when prices were high, import penetration was low [fig.2]. In the early noughties prices dropped and imports rose substantially. That trend is now reversing. Oil and shipping costs have skyrocketed, wages in countries like China are rising, and UK inflation is higher again.

Fig.2 – Source: Reuters Ecowin, via L&G

This is good news for UK manufacturing. It’s not for no reason that the government just announced a 200,000 job textile manufacturing scheme – that market is clearly well placed for UK manufacture.

Contrary to the dominant post-industrial commentary of the last 10-15 years, manufacturing is still extremely important for the health of the economy. The UK is no longer the workshop of the world, as it was in the 1860s and 70s, accounting for 34 per cent of global trade in manufactured goods (note that China’s peak was about 17 per cent), but manufacturing still accounts for at least 10 per cent of UK employment. That figure is also rising, not falling.

So given these two key indicators are good, and the trends predicted by the data positive, is it true to say that the UK economy’s fundamentals are strong? Almost. There is one indicator, exports, that has weakened this year despite a general upturn since 2008. The UK’s non-EU exports have fallen by £1.5bn (around 11.5 per cent) over the last three months – a substantial drop which means for now the UK is a net importer. This is a real problem, and certainly needs to be carefully monitored.

An honest assessment of the indicators, then, would say this: fundamentally the UK economy is not broken, but its output appears to be. Why is this, and what solutions can we propose?

In a speech last month governor Mervyn King emphasised that “rebalancing” remained the central challenge of economic planning. “Despite the probable rise in output in the third quarter, the big picture is that GDP is barely higher than two years ago, and remains some 15% below where steady growth since 2007 would have taken us.”

The concept of rebalancing is useful; it contains a carefully implied preference for a movement back toward manufacture, first at home and then through export. L&G’s Carrick employs the same concept in likening the economy to a child “learning to walk” and finding its balance.

But these descriptions of “rebalancing” don’t address the underlying problem – that is, that there don’t appear to be any underlying problems. (Or at least not enough of them for the poor output figures.)

So why is the economy still receding? An answer becomes clear if one looks at the sectoral accounts. The bland fact is that despite zero interest rates UK corporations are still either retrenching (this quite possibly includes using more of that disposable short-term labour) or running a surplus.

Historically this situation is not that uncommon; much the same thing happened in 90s Japan for over 10 years. Capital deployment is usually more difficult a commitment to get out of than taking on low-cost temporary labour, and it isn’t happening.

Fig.3 – Source: Reuters Ecowin, via L&G

There are two necessary consequences of this. The first is that monetary policy will be mostly ineffective, because companies aren’t borrowing and banks aren’t lending [fig.3] regardless of the rate. It will depress gilt yields,making some asset managers buy a few more equities, but that’s about it.

The second consequence is that fiscal austerity policies will be self-defeating, even in purely fiscal terms. This is the crux of the matter, and the only sensible answer to the question ‘why are we still in recession’. So long as the corporate sector is retrenching, as it still is, any and all reductions in government spending can serve only to contract the economy.

If neither the private nor public sector is spending, the fact that the fundamental economic indicators are good is beside the point, because there’s too little for all the economic agents to act on. The only result is a spiralling demand problem and stagnation.

Fiscal policy since 2008/9 has been to make mild cuts to government spending in order to cut the state spending deficit. The result we would expect, given private sector retrenchment, is the result we see: despite no deep structural problems the economy continues to contract, leading to larger not smaller deficits.

The picture Carrick paints of a child struggling to balance as it learns to walk is accurate, but omits a key factor. The child has strong legs, but repeatedly falls because it’s in an impossible environment. It’s as if the child were being forced to walk on a highly polished glass surface that makes gaining any traction impossible.

But fiscal tightening is not a law of nature. It could and should be reversed. The standard argument against this is from solvency. But that argument is demonstrably weak. Developed countries which have full control of their own currency, as the UK does, have always been able to borrow in that currency at very low rates.

To hope that the commitment to cutting public spending in the name of deficit reduction will be reversed in the face of continuing recession and little effect on the deficit currently seems highly optimistic – the major political parties united as they are in almost unwavering support for it. So long as it continues so will recession.

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We need an end to UN leadership that is more Secretary than General

October 20, 2012 Leave a comment

Every October five of the ten non-permanent members of the United Nations Security Council are elected by the General Assembly. This year they were: Argentina, Australia, Luxembourg, South Korea, and Rwanda.

I don’t think I’ve met many people, even in international affairs circles, who could have named the five that this year’s cohort replaced (South Africa, India, Colombia, Germany, and Portugal in case you were wondering).

The reason is clear: the institutional structure of the Security Council reduces all but the permanent members, the veto powers, to a ceremonial role. Which countries hold the non-permanent positions is essentially irrelevant.

The Security Council is the most prestigious of the UN’s organs, charged with upholding the core value of the charter (“to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”), yet clearly its current form is beyond broken, its composition a farce.

This should worry us all. It certainly worries me.

Earlier this year I interviewed Lord Malloch-Brown, ex-Deputy Secretary General of the UN under Kofi Annan about reforming global institutions. Now seems as good a time as any to publish that interview.

Here’s me describing the central point Malloch-Brown made then:

The United Nations, for which he worked for many years, Malloch-Brown unsurprisingly sees differently. But his experience inside it has strengthened his conviction that “the UN desperately needs strengthening.”

The main task? Effective leadership at the top.

I remember at the time thinking this was foolish, that the UN is basically a network of different bodies which overlap, compete too much, and fall well short of the influence they should have given their scope and funding. That if they aren’t reformed from the bottom up a strong, principled leader will be ossified by them as much as a weak ineffectual one.

I’ve since reviewed this and come to the conclusion that Malloch-Brown was basically correct.

The Security Council is a good example. Here are my (completely unoriginal) proposals for a council fit to uphold the central tenet of the Charter:

  1. Remove the veto and institute a two-thirds majority decision mechanism for all resolutions;
  2. Expand the membership level to 21;
  3. Expand and redress the permanent membership to better represent global population;
  4. Rebalance the regional group requirements to end the distortion towards the Western European and Other Group, which is clearly unnecessary and at least partially anachronistic;
  5. Remove the same regional bias in favour of WEOG in the permanent membership;
  6. Introduce a limited term ban (including suspension of permanent members) of three years on any nation condemned by the council or another named body, such as the ICJ, for acts of aggression.

These are all institutional changes, that ostensibly have nothing to do with the current leadership. The trouble is the structure of the UN and its leadership aren’t really separable.

The current formulation of the council isn’t a law of nature. It endures because no strong, principled leader has been willing or able to force through deep changes to it. I certainly can’t imagine anything like the above proposals happening without a concerted campaign from a Secretary General.

Malloch-Brown put it like this:

“The bottom line is so long as the UN is led by someone who is more Secretary than General, and make no mistake the hegemonic states prefer that, there’s little hope for any kind of effective global policy, let alone the peaceful resolution of violent international conflicts.”

That seems basically correct. The hegemonic states want ineffectual UN leadership for a reason – it precludes their neutering.

Image courtesy of the United Nations

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An Interview with Lord Malloch-Brown

October 20, 2012 Leave a comment

Lord Malloch-Brown at the World Economic Forum in May 2010.

Lord Malloch-Brown is a British politician in the traditional style. He started at a good school, got a first in History at Cambridge, and then worked for a year with the United Nations. In his words: “it was the kind of education that had a legacy of colonialism, an international legacy, but that taught one about the world”

His career since has been anything but traditional. He is currently chairman of FTI Consulting and has previously held some of the most powerful diplomatic positions in the world. After a spell as political correspondent for The Economist, he entered the UN, first at the High Commissioner for Refugees under Kofi Annan, before taking a key position in an international political consultancy that successfully advised the opposition to General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, the opposition to Marcos in the Philippines, and a swathe more in Eastern Europe.

When he was finished helping to topple dictators, Malloch-Brown became Vice-President for External Affairs at the World Bank, then head of the United Nations Development Programme. In 2006 he became Deputy Secretary General of the UN itself, again under Annan, where he earned the disdain of Washington’s political elite, and even that of President Bush.

The genesis of Malloch-Brown’s interest in global politics comes very strongly from his family life. “My father was exiled from South Africa, and had a real passion for politics; it was very much the atmosphere of our household.

“But it was also a globalist’s household, one internalized the idea that national level policy just didn’t do it any more, and that the big questions of my adult life were going to be global questions bigger than a Britain which was in post colonial decline.”

Malloch-Brown wanted to find a stage that mattered, a world stage, where Britain could be an important player. “If that were true then, the questions young people entering the political world now will face are even more global,” he opines.

I ask him what he thinks of the famous argument of Cambridge economist Ha Joon Chang – that the importance of global information exchange technology is overstated, and that the laying of the transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858 was more important than the internet. Malloch-Brown laughs. “There have been great bursts of globalisation over the centuries, and many of them have been tied to communications revolutions, however in the past those movements have always been followed by setbacks in global integration,” he replies.

On the eve of the first world war, he says, the global economy was quite integrated, until it was thrown asunder by war. “The difference is this time the internet does mean the volume of information crossing borders is on a scale never before seen and this has been accompanied by a growing share of global GDP coming from international trade. We’ve passed a critical tipping point where, unlike these early dry runs of globalisation, it can’t be undone. This is the real thing.”

“A really global world is here, it’s not going to be reversed, the issue is: what is our political reaction to it – is it to embrace and manage it, or to resist it?”

He maintains that globalisation will be the paradigm of the coming decades. “I think it’s only just starting. If the 20th century was about class, the 21st will be about globalisation.”

One example of this ‘paradigm’ he gives is the need for a change in the internal culture of Transnational Corporations (TNCs). “Gone is the idea that every market is to all intents and purposes like the next. The role of national market traits, and personality, is going to rank much much higher.

“Successful TNCs are not only going to have to understand economics, which is now their only concern, they’re going to have to have political DNA, because there’s no doubt that the volume of regulation in states is going to grow.”

What assessment does he make of how states are currently managing the realities of global trade? “Firstly, the very concept is under attack. It’s identified as a banking elite at one end and low-cost exploited labour force at the other. Unfortunately there’s some truth to that.”

When Malloch-Brown speaks about the so-called ‘anti-globalisation’ movement, it’s not with the opprobrious tone you might except. The critics of NAFTA, he concedes, made strong, prophetic points. “I think NAFTA was an extension of that early World Bank liberal view of comparative advantage and no tariffs and it led to a very uneven development in places like Mexico and to problems that are still being dealt with. So mine is not an uncritical pitch for globalisation, that’s why it’s a pitch for managed, governed, politically led globalisation rather than just a hidden hand of markets globalisation.”

His answer to these issues, as a “sentimental globalist”, is the establishment of effective, democratically accountable global institutions, and that means radically changing the institutions that currently exist.

“The European Union is crap,” Malloch-Brown says, “Europe isn’t going to go away, but the Brussels institutions may. I think there’s a significant enough convergence in Europe, culturally, that the concept will stick around, but I do think there needs to be another go at finding the right governance institutions and arrangements for it. And it may have to come in a kind of big bang next time, rather than the gradual attempts to merge into union that we’ve seen. Certainly the EU way has not worked.”

The United Nations, for which he worked for many years, Malloch-Brown unsurprisingly sees differently. But his experience inside it has strengthened his conviction that “the UN desperately needs strengthening.”

The main task? Effective leadership at the top. There are just two Secretary Generals Malloch-Brown cites as good examples of UN leadership. The first is the second Secretary General, the Swedish diplomat Dag Hammarskjöld. “In the 1960s, Hammarskjöld presented the UN as the ally of decolonization, and of the new independence in Africa and elsewhere.

“This was challenged by countries that did not want to accept the end of empire, and Hammarskjöld died under still suspicious circumstances.”

I ask him who he believes killed the late Secretary General. “It may have been the CIA, but to be honest, if I were to put money on it, I think British Northern Rhodesian farming colonial interests were more likely to have been the culprits, with a wink and a nod from the British government.”

The second Secretary General he admires is Kofi Annan, who Malloch-Brown “was lucky enough to work for”. Annan wasn’t assassinated, but he did face what Malloch-Brown calls “a massive political onslaught”, not least from Washington, which he himself attempted to defend Annan from. Kofi, he says, “was a fabulous man, who was gentle but firm, and just a very, very, visionary figure.”

Malloch-Brown believes that a UN fashioned more as Kofi Annan would have liked it, and with key structural changes such as the end of the veto, would have been able to respond to a situation such as that in Syria far more effectively. But then he would say that, he admits to me that Kofi is a personal friend, and that the two retain regular contact. [Annan's reputation has not weathered his appointment monitor the Syria crisis well.]

What would Kofi have done differently, if he still held the powers of the Secretary General? “I think he’d have done a better job of negotiating and making the different sides understand each other’s points of view, and would’ve tried to find a way around this. Annan was a hugely skilled diplomat in that sense.”

“The bottom line is so long as the UN is led by someone who is more Secretary than General, and make no mistake the hegemonic states prefer that, there’s little hope for any kind of effective global policy, let alone the peaceful resolution of violent international conflicts. That must change.”

This interview was conducted on February 7th 2012.

Image courtesy of the World Economic Forum

 

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Why Morocco must not be allowed to join the African Union

September 7, 2012 Leave a comment

Sahrawi refugees in Laayoune.

“What does Morocco mean to an Englishman?” George Orwell asked in one of his finer essays. “Camels, castles, palm-trees, Foreign Legionnaires, brass trays and bandits.” That was 1939. But whatever Morocco means to an Englishman today it probably isn’t “occupation, refugees, and landmines”.

Morocco is a standard tourist destination and is held up as a model for Arab and African development alike. It may, therefore, come as something of a shock to hear that Morocco is the only African country excluded from membership of the African Union (Madagascar, Mali, and Guinea-Bissau have all been “suspended” since 2009 and 2012 respectively).

This is not something that sits well with King Mohammed VI or his new Government, and on Wednesday a diplomatic team in Rabat started Morocco’s latest push for membership. Kindly voices from the AU have also started to exercise their larynxes on the matter, such as prominent Tanzanian MP, Edward Lowassa Ngayai, who backed bringing Morocco into the AU fold last month.

Morocco was elbowed out of the AU’s predecessor, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1984 after the organization finally recognised the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, the exiled government of Western Sahara, which Morocco invaded and occupied in 1976 and has held by force ever since.

Western Sahara represents one of international diplomacy’s greatest failures. When the Spanish left in 1975, Sahara was to be the last country on the continent to go through decolonisation; it would forever mark the end of the sanguinary history of empire in Africa. Instead it is Africa’s last colony.

The occupation has left hundreds of thousands of Sahrawi disenfranchised, and somewhere between 90,000 and 200,000 have fled as refugees, most of whom currently live in the Tindouf refugee camp in Southern Algeria, and in similar camps in Mauritania. The Moroccan army has established a segregation wall over 2000km long and surrounded by landmines, going through Western Sahara. Sahara’s resources are plundered, and its people continue to suffer.

The United Nations response to the occupation has been nothing short of a disgrace. Though the UN recognises the occupation is illegal, it has utterly failed to do anything about it. The UN has maintained a peacekeeping mission meant to hold a referendum on autonomy in Sahara (MINURSO) since 1991, but it has no mandate to monitor human rights abuses, a skeleton staff, and thanks to France’s Security Council veto has failed to produce a referendum for 21 years.

In spite of all this, it was in Western Sahara’s Gdeim Izik camp that the political protest movements in North Africa began, two months before the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi. The Western Sahara protests received little recognition, let alone backing, in national newspapers, nor did anyone call for the end of the authoritarian regime that was its target. Moroccan security forces dismantled the 6000 tent camp, and the movement, by force.

The African Union is undoubtedly a corrupt and weak institution, and includes countries with even worse human rights records than Morocco. But the one break in over 35 years of international inertia on the occupation of Western Sahara has been the AU’s stand for independence, and refusal to admit the membership of Morocco.

If regional institutions are capable of having any impact at all on global justice (a question to which the answer may well be no), then it can only be by making membership for countries on the peripheries of regional blocks conditional on ending their abuses of human rights, something which has arguably been achieved to some extent with the European Union.

A Chatham House report once compared an AU human rights court to “whistling in the wind”, but its policy on Western Sahara and Moroccan membership is one success in a list so short that it could be inscribed on one of Orwell’s brass trays. If it abandons that stance now, the AU will have to say it is happy living with a colonial Africa.

This article was originally published with the New Statesman on June 6th 2012.

Image courtesy of the United Nations.

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I’m No Trappist

March 22, 2012 Leave a comment

The Speaker of the House of Commons is committed to party political impartiality, but John Bercow hasn’t let that stop his passion for politics. He calls the Daily Mail the ‘Daily Fail’, wants to ensure Parliament doesn’t turn into an ‘institutional toffocracy’, and tells backbenchers to ‘get off their knees’. He has a penchant (and a talent) for putting on old, posh accents, and makes sure he gets in four swimming sessions a week.

In an exclusive interview, Tom Stevenson finds out more about the man who sits on the grandest chair of all.

John, thank you very much for joining us. You were once, in your youth, Britain’s top ranked junior tennis player. What on earth made you leave that for politics?

Well, the truth is that I was never quite good enough at tennis. I was county champion and so on, but I wouldn’t have made it as a professional, and I never particularly wanted to. As far as my interest in politics, I have always been a passionate believer in parliament. I believe in the value, and history, of parliament as a representative democratic institution.

You were known as a firebrand at party conferences, and an MP with some very strong views on policy, what led you to run for the position of Speaker of the House of Commons, a position that demands impartiality?

I was in a position, for various reasons, where my becoming a minister was very unlikely, and to tell you the truth I didn’t particularly want to become a minister, nor do I think I would have been particularly good at it. The Speaker of the commons is an extremely important, and influential role in parliament. So when the opportunity arose, I did some digging around (as I suspect one always does in such situations) to find out whether there was support for my running in the election. I soon found out that there was considerable support and so I ran.

In your election speech you also mentioned a pair of 18th century Speakers elected at rather young ages who both went on to become Prime Minster. You said that wasn’t a likely career move for you. Why not?

Well firstly getting into government depends on the internal dynamicsof the house, and it certainly would have been unlikely that I would have done so. But more broadly, there is a culture in modern Parliament which doesn’t see the role of Speaker as a role which leads to ministerial positions. Perhaps partly because of the people who have gone before in recent years, and for whatever other reasons, it’s seen as the culmination of a political career, not a stepping stone to other things.

Tony Benn once suggested the Speaker could replace the Queen as head of state if Britain ever became a republic, what do you make of that idea?

Well, I would make absolutely clear that I have great admiration for Her Majesty the Queen, who I think is an outstanding monarch and head of state, and that I think she deserves all our respect as she celebrates her Diamond Jubilee. I also have great respect for a man, Tony Benn, with whom I have often disagreed but nonetheless listened to with great interest and passion on all sorts of political issues.

But do you think the Speaker would be a suitable head of state should Britain ever become a Republic?

I can’t ever imagine a situation where Britain would be without the monarchy.

Ok, well as Presiding Officer you are of course responsible for selecting which MP s may speak in Parliamentary debates. Do you ever feel like an old fashioned school master choosing children with outstretched arms to answer questions?

The analogy that I favour, and the one that I strive to live up to, is closer to that of being a referee or an umpire in the house, but the one area in the comparison is quite fitting is when members attempt to violate the conventions and rules of the house, and especially for use of unacceptable language. Then I do feel a bit like a headteacher, or teacher. Some members have in the past gotten themselves reputations for this, George Galloway would be an example, or Dennis Skinner who had a reputation and was suspended from the house many times. One instance where I had to ask for a colleague to withdraw a remark was when Tom Watson called Michael Gove a “miserable little pipsqueak”… “out of deference to you Mr. Speaker”, he said he would withdraw it. You can make up your own mind about that.

So who are the trouble makers?

The one thing I can and will tell you is that overall the women of the house are markedly better behaved than the men.

Does Prime Ministers Questions still serve a democratic function, or is it just theatre, and is that acceptable?

We famously have a much livelier chamber than probably any other country, but I can’t tell you the amount of representatives from other countries who say they wish they could haul in the Prime Minister or President and question them directly as we do in Britain. So I think it does serve a democratic function. That kind of accountability, even if the decibel level sometimes gets rather high, is very important. In recent years there has been an increase in orchestrated shouting, and that’s something I’ve tried to change.

The people have to be interested in Parliament though… isn’t the drama rather interesting?

Absolutely, and we wouldn’t want to lose all the drama and turn MPs into Trappist monks, but we also need to have serious substantial debate. Planned artificial heckling, especially when it gets to the volume that it sometimes does, which Deep Purple would have been proud of, doesn’t add to that.

As Speaker of the House, one of your responsibilities is for Parliamentary process. The current debate around Scottish independence brings the West Lothian question forward. Do you think it proper that Scottish (and of course Northern Irish) MPs to vote in Westminster, as well as their own assemblies?

I am responsible for process, but an issue like this is a highly controversial one where there are strong opinions all over the house.

But it is a matter of the process of Parliament isn’t it, you must be one of the major players at the table on this?

Yes, but this is also a matter of high politics, and as I said it’s very contentious so it isn’t for the speaker to make judgements on this kind of issue. Traditionally the Conservative party were against devolution, but have steadily shifted position, and whether we should have devolution, or independence, or devolution-max, I really can’t say. It’s not that I’m ducking your question – I’m not scared of any question – It’s just not an issue that I as Speaker can make judgements on.

Yes, as Speaker you have to refrain from expressing political opinions in the house, and are committed to impartiality, yet as we said your early career was marked by very strong party-political opinions… do you not feel constrained, and aren’t you ever tempted to influence things, by choosing certain people to speak for instance?

Your political opinions don’t disappear over night, but out of respect for the office of Speaker I feel no strain at all for not, say, participating in debates. But Ministers don’t participate in debates except where their office is responsible. I would never try to ‘influence’ a debate like that, because it would undermine the office. But I have very good access to ministers, who certainly answer my requests far quicker now than they ever did when I was a backbencher. So I’m no Trappist monk either, to return to the earlier metaphor, and I have absolutely no regrets about being Speaker. I don’t expect this to be the case, but if I were to die tomorrow, I would die a happy man.

This article was published in New Turn Magazine on March 6th.

Image courtesy of The National Assembly for Wales.

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