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Editorial sarkozy is right lieberman must go

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Editorial / Sarkozy is right – Lieberman must go
 

 By Editorial: Haaretz
  
French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s request of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he replace Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman exposes a sad truth: At present Israel does not have a functioning foreign minister. The international community refuses to speak to a politician who is considered racist in the wake of the campaign conducted by his party, Yisrael Beiteinu, against Arab citizens during the recent Knesset election campaign. There is not and cannot be any other way to interpret Sarkozy’s comparison between Lieberman and far-right French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen.

The angry reactions emerging from the Foreign Ministry after Sarkozy’s comment was publicized on Israel’s Channel 2 on Monday, to the effect that he had "interfered in Israel’s internal affairs," are not relevant.

France did not impose an official boycott on Lieberman, nor did Sarkozy condemn him publicly – he only conveyed a message to Netanyahu in private. It is therefore difficult to maintain that Sarkozy behaved in an undiplomatic manner.

It is more important to focus on the main thing, which is the ongoing damage to Israel’s diplomatic interests resulting from Lieberman’s tenure in the Foreign Ministry. Sarkozy was not the first to express dissatisfaction with the fact that the leader of Yisrael Beiteinu was elevated to the top of Israel’s diplomatic pyramid.

The Arab countries refuse to speak to Lieberman because of his threats and the rude things he said in the past about Egypt and its president.

When Lieberman was recently invited to Washington, the U.S. administration expressed its dissatisfaction with him by demonstrating a preferential attitude toward Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who was invited to meet with President Barack Obama. Lieberman’s predecessors in the Foreign Ministry, Tzipi Livni (Kadima) and Silvan Shalom (Likud), were also invited to such meetings with the president during their visits to Washington. He was not.

Lieberman’s bizarre attempt to offer an alternative diplomatic policy, whose main feature is a strengthening of strategic cooperation with Russia as a counterweight to the Obama administration, collapsed embarrassingly right from the start. Before inviting Lieberman to Moscow, the Russians sent their foreign minister to a meeting with Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshal.

In light of Israel’s complex international situation on the eve of the renewal of negotiations with the Palestinians and perhaps with Syria too, it needs all the support it can enlist from the international community. It is imperative to replace Lieberman with another foreign minister, who will benefit from an open door in the world’s capitals. 
  

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Kashmir and the Indian empire

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* By Iqbal Jassat

Kashmir is undergoing a fresh impetus in resistance to Indian occupation. Following a controversial transfer of land to a Hindu shrine trust, a renewed revolt by Kashmiris has once again catapulted their freedom struggle into the living rooms of a worldwide television audience.

This new spotlight on Kashmir has resulted in many questions. Foremost seems to be the puzzling paradox of India: a country freed from the yoke of British colonialism yet itself remaining in occupation of another. It is remarkable that six decades into the post-colonial era, the formerly colonized would employ medieval repressive tactics to enforce their own version of colonial practices. Successive Indian governments have retained many characteristics of the old and current British imperial policy to subjugate Kashmir without any regard for International Conventions. Besides merely disregarding its obligations as a member-state of the United Nations, India has deliberately frustrated numerous “crisis solving” efforts, thus contributing to what analysts term as “diplomatic failure”.  

Such failure would naturally leave Occupied Kashmir at the mercy of India. And records of brutality documented by human rights organizations reveal that India’s military control of the territory has been anything but “merciful”.

This does not suggest that Kashmiri territory under Pakistani control – known as Azad Kashmir – has been free. These inhabitants’ freedom hinges on the political expediency of the current leaders in Islamabad, as indeed their fortunes have been tied to all the former military dictators – whether in civilian dress or not – in the past six decades. Azad Kashmir remains subject to the political designs fabricated in Pakistan and heavily influenced as studies indicate, by foreign Western advisors.

The dispute over Kashmir derives from the defective geopolitical process of Partition in 1947, which saw the old British Empire split up into India and Pakistan. It is symbolic of the type of legacy of Britain’s imperial achievements in India as indeed in other conflicts such as Israel/Palestine, to bequeath perpetual strife. In his book ‘Incomplete Partition – The Genesis of the Kashmir Dispute 1947-1948’, Alastair Lamb admits as much: “The British Indian Empire was just that, an empire like other empires, an assemblage of diverse territories and peoples joined together through British military might, diplomacy and duplicity over many years and then maintained in being by means of the continued forcible application of British control over non-British peoples.”   

India’s repressive policies against insurgents in Kashmir received a boost following 9/11. According to award-winning journalist Phil Rees, any hesitation over the use of ‘terrorism’ by the Indian establishment disappeared after 2001. Whereas throughout the 1990s, the Hindu nationalist government was seeking Western sympathy and support for its conflict in Kashmir, after 9/11 it was expedient to jump headlong onto the ‘war on terror’ bandwagon. Thus it served Indian interests to define the Kashmiri freedom struggle as “terrorist” and to lump its fighters with Osama bin Laden.

In this misty haze new myths have been created to hide the fact that Kashmir is a victim as Rees asserts, of the disputed division of British India during the transfer of colonial power in 1947. He explains that a border was created on religious lines and states with a Muslim majority formed the newly created Pakistan alongside a predominantly Hindu India. “When India and Pakistan became independent, it was generally assumed that Jammu and Kashmir, with its 80 per cent Muslim population, would accede to Pakistan, but Kashmir was one of 565 princely states whose rulers had given their loyalty to Britain but preserved their royal titles. The partition plan, negotiated by the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, excluded these princely states, which were granted independence [albeit without the power to express it]. Of the 565 princely states, 552 agreed to become part of India but the remainder posed problems: Hyderabad and Junagadh had Muslim rulers but Hindu majorities and were surrounded by Indian territory. Indian troops occupied the states and overthrew the Muslim rulers. In Kashmir a Hindu nobleman, Sir Hari Singh, was the maharaja, or governor. Two months after the independence of India and Pakistan, he was still unable to make up his mind.”

The strategic geographical location of Kashmir bordering Afghanistan and China remains an important consideration for the Indian authorities. The irony though is that amongst the two regions in China bordering Kashmir, Tibet’s political crisis is articulated regularly in the Western media while Xinjiang’s story is largely unknown. China, like India, views the Muslim majority region of Xinjiang’s struggle for greater autonomy as “terrorist”. A glance at the map of Kashmir will explain that its pivotal position will remain a factor influencing India and allies such as Britain and America not to grant Kashmir its overdue independence.

UN Resolutions or not; previous agreements on plebiscite or not; India’s empire is determined to ignore with contempt any or all its international obligations.

* Iqbal Jassat
Chairman: Media Review Network

(Media Review Network is an advocacy group based in Pretoria (Tshwane), South Africa)

 

 

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