Patrick Cockburn

Lebanon’s WhatApp intifada

Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

We know more or less what constitutes Lebanon, but we don’t know how it works. If we had to send into space a country capable of containing the world, Lebanon would fit the bill. If we had to send one that did not contain what is needed to make a real country, Lebanon would also be the answer.   Lebanese author Dominique Eddé

The sparks which that lit the fire of the current protests in Lebanon were an increase in the price of using the WhatApp messaging, which many Lebanese preferred to the high rates charged by private telcos, and destructive wildfires on the iconic Chouf mountains which could not be tamed because the authorities had grounded the firefighting helicopters for want of routine maintenance. But the root of Lebanon’s autumn of discontent go much deeper.

Almost thirty years of stagnation characterized by high unemployment, particularly among the youth, increasing inequality, limited opportunities, rampant corruption, meagre infrastructural reform, and decaying administrative, social, and educational institutions, are bringing young and old from across Lebanon’s many confessional fault lines and clan and party loyalties (often the same thing) onto the streets of major major towns all over this tiny but divided country. They accuse the government being preoccupied with enriching its members and their supporters and neglecting the needs of ordinary Lebanese. See longtime Beirut resident Robert Fisk’s article in The Independent: I don’t blame the Lebanese rioters setting Beirut alight – they are hungry, poor and furious; and Beiruti journalist Samah Hadid’s piece: The protests in Lebanon have bridged social divides – now everyone is fighting against the corrupt elite.

There are many left-wing social media tropes that are blinkered by an obsession with theories of US, Saudi and Israeli conspiracy, accusing them of manipulating the Lebanese street to bring down the Hariri government. They are letting Lebanon’s corrupt and dysfunctional sectarian political establishment off the hook.

Other media are talking excitedly about this being Lebanon’s version of the 2011 Arab Spring – as illustrated by our featured image and the lass sporting the word thawra or ’revolution’’ on her tee shirt – a sure way of drawing the invidious “evil eye’ to the the Lebanese’ peaceful (so far) and convivial (again, so far) intifada, for we all know how the Arab Spring ended. And none have yet allocated this putative revolution a colour like those that popped up from Kiev to Kazakhstan in the early years of this century (the ‘Cedar Revolution’, anyone?). Which is probably wise, because we all should have learned by now to avoid the trap of false analogies.

The party atmosphere and the images of unity among Lebanese of all classes, clans and confessions can be deceptive. Three decades since the end of a brutal civil war, which left over 120,000 propel dead, and tens of thousands “disappeared”, and almost eighty years since the National Pact of 1943 laid the foundations for Lebanon’s shaky and perennially challenged multi-faith political dispensation, divisions run deep. Not only traditional clan and sectarian lines, and the inequitable distribution of power and wealth, but also, the deliberately indeterminate status of upwards of 170,000 Palestinians (the refugees of the 1948 war and their descendants), and upwards of 1.5 million increasingly unwelcome Syrian refugees.

There are many amongst the party faithful and their never quite disarmed militias who at a signal from above, could let lose the dogs of violence with infiltrated provocateurs or strategically placed snipers – we’ve seen this before, in Sarajevo and Kyiv, in Tahrir Square, and in Syria in 2011 when demonstrations had yet to morph into violence and civil war. This it is already happening in Iraq, where security forces and lone wolves affiliated with Iranian interests are alleged to have fired on protesters.

The Lebanese National Army and police force have been ordered to disperse the protesters, but as yet, are merely holding the line. Many on the streets are no doubt anxious about the role the powerful Shia Hezbollah will chose to play in the coming days. Its reclusive but undisputed leader Hasan Nasrallah has declared that the status quo should stand, that the government should hold firm because it would taken too long to form a new one, thus delaying the reforms that the demonstrators are demanding. Hezbollah, with thirteen seats in the parliament and three cabinet posts, is the most powerful political and military and an army stronger than the national army, and whilst bankrolled by Iran, is itself part of the establishment that the protesters and one of the parties that many protesters are demonstrating against – as part of the problem and not of the solution.

Calling for a non-confessional government of technocrats appointed on the basis of experience and not patronage and clan connections, the protesters paint Hezbollah with the same brush as the the Christian Phalange, the Shia Amal, and other self serving confessional parties – quite apart from its constant provocation of what many see as needless confrontation with Israel (and its western backers), and its deep involvement in the Syrian civil war.  Whilst there is no doubt a traditional prejudice towards the country’s Shia minority, many Lebanese resent Hezbollah for exposing their country to potential destruction at the hands of Israel, and for dragging it into the conflict in Syria, a country and a regime for which for which they retain bad memories and harbour little affection.

Meanwhile, there have been indications that Hezbollah’s hitherto uncritical mass following in the south is fraying somewhat as economic hardship bites, tarnishing even Hezbollah’s credentials as a provider of social and educational services. But there are now reports from Beirut of Hezbollah supporters attacking protesters. Dressed in black and wielding batons, they are chanting that their boss is not like the others, whilst he has declared that the protests are being fomented by his enemies (it’s all about him!) and that it could reignite the fifteen year long civil war that ended in 1990. There is also talk of supporters of Hsiang part Amal and of Hezbollah coming to break up the demonstrations. Ominously, they are being called ‘shabiya’, Arabic for ‘ghosts’, and also the name of the murderous Alawi militias unleashed by the regime in Syria. 

There is also talk of supporters of Hsiang part Amal and of Hezbollah coming to break up the demonstrations. Ominously, they are being called ‘shabiya’, Arabic for ‘ghosts’, and also the name of the murderous Alawi militias unleashed by the regime in Syria. 

As I watch from afar, I am reminded of the words of celebrated Lebanon’s national poet Khalil Gibran: “Pity the nation that raises not its voice save when it walks in a funeral, boasts not except among its ruins, and will rebel not save when its neck is laid between the sword and the block”.

 © Paul Hemphill 2019.  All rights reserved

For more on the Lebanese civil war, and the full text of Gibran’s poem, see In That Howling Infinites Pity the Nation

For other posts about the Middle East, see: A Middle East Miscellany

Afterword:  Lebanon’s  huge smallness

In a fascinating article in the New York Review of Books, The Compatibility of Opposites, Lebanese author and novelist Dominique Eddé  writes one of the most profound and insightful descriptions of her homeland, that you could ever read  – a portrait of what I would describe as Lebanon’s  huge smallness (after Walt Whitman’s  “I am small, I contain multitudes”):

“Every Lebanese invents a personal Lebanon for a country that does not exist”.
A Lebanese author writes … Lebanon is both the center of the world and a dead end. The broken little village of a planet that is sick. Chaotic, polluted, and corrupt beyond belief, this is a country where beauty and human warmth constantly find ways to break through” …All extremes and all clumped together. It is like a magician’s trick handkerchief: you simply unfold one end and it will stretch ad infinitum. Individual memories are rich and compelling while the collective memory is nowhere to be found, impossible to recount”.

She continues: “It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that in Lebanon, everything can be explained and nothing can be understood. All the decisions made for this country are made behind its back, and all that happens here epitomizes the rest of the world: the mix of populations, the vulnerability of borders, political lying at its worst, building the present by destroying the past, an utter lack of perspective … “With a total population of 4 to 5 million, Lebanon is home to 1.5 million refugees. Between a quarter and a third of the population is foreign: Palestinians displaced by the wars of 1948 and 1967, Syrians and Palestinians fleeing repression and the war in Syria that began in 2011, Iraqis displaced by the two Gulf wars. Lebanon’s degree of absorption and hospitality is almost proportional to its degree of intolerance. Ambivalence is everywhere, in everything”.

Postscript – the autumn of our discontent 

Last Sunday, a million people marched in London, demanding a second people’s vote on Brexit. In Britain and in Australia environmental protesters are disrupting city centres and enraging commuters. The “law and order brigade” in parliaments, press and social media have called down fire and brimstone upon climate activists’ heads, one television host going so far as suggesting that they should be used as speed bumps.

But in far-away places around the globe, popular protests are far from peaceful.

In Lebanon, Iraq, Ecuador and Chile, people of all ages, genders and political affiliations are on the streets. There are many common themes, including demands for education and employment, and an end to the incompetence, self-interest and corruption of ruling elites. Bolivians are on th streets protesting the ruction of its president. In Spain, Catalans protest jail sentences handed down to their separatist parliamentary leaders. And in Hong Kong, there is no let up to months of demonstrations against China’s relentless chipping away at the city’s tenuous autonomy. Young Indonesians have been on the streets of Jakarta protesting new laws that undermine civil rights and endemic corruption amongst elites, and in Indonesian-occupied Papua, calls for independence have been met with predictable brutality.
In most of these each these outbreaks of popular outrage and protest, the authorities are responding with heavy handed police tactics, tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannon, and mass arrests, and in some instances, deadly live fire.
See The Washington Post’s  The Common Factor Uniting Protesters … ; an Patrick Cockburn’s insightful analysis of the changing nature of the Middle East’s many ethnic and sectarian conflicts: Mass protests against corruption and deprivation are replacing an era of sectarian civil wars. 

The Deal of the Century is designed to fail

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

“Trump’s peace plan has ­morphed from being a plan to promote peace between Israel and the Palestinians to a plan to help get Netanyahu re-elected in return for Netanyahu helping to get Trump re-elected,”  Martin Indyk

With the second Israeli election this year taking place this week, the Kushner Peace Plan, the US’ long awaited solution to the seventy year old – no, century old – conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and put together by President Trump’s ingenue and arguably disingenuous businessman son-in-law Jared and his highly partisan, blinkered and thus discredited amigos. is about to finally be plonked down on the rickety and sloping negotiating table.One of them, Donald’s “special representative to the peace process’  Jason Greenblat has just this week left the room, which says heaps about his confidence in the project.

The “speculative” details are now well known, and it would appear that the “deal of the Century” will be DOA. The plan has been described as a a rewriting of the old story of the king’s new clothes. It will likely be rejected by both Israeli right-wing hardliners and a majority of Palestinians, but Israel’s leadership is likely to accept the plan only because they know that the Palestinians will reject it, allowing them to blame the failure of the Trump administration-brokered “peace process” on the Palestinians. It seems like the Us is going to an awful lot of trouble to get to exactly where things are now : stalemate and the potential for annexation.

There has been much excellent reporting on the so-called ‘deal of the century” (as in “mo one does deals like Donald’. ‘I’m finding Bel Trew’s reports from the Middle East very worthwhile and insightful, alongside her colleagues Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn.

The indefatigable Fisk takes the prize, but.

‘How many times can you fit a South Sea Bubble into a Bermuda Triangle?’

Whatever you might think of Robert Fisk or whatever side you take on the Israel-Palestine conundrum, he certainly pinpoints the strangeness of Jared Kushner’s “March of folly”. He was in fine form and in full flight whilst reporting on the recent Bahraini bash that launched the plan’s economic vision, he  was in fine form:

“Trump’s fey and vain son-in-law, a supporter of Israel’s colonial expansion on Arab land, set off with” Jason Greenblatt (who says “West Bank settlements are not an obstacle to peace”) to work out the economic underpinning of Trump’s “deal of the century” … Kushner recently went to visit some Muslim killer-states, some of them with very nasty and tyrannical leaders – Saudi Arabia and Turkey among them – to chat about the “economic dimension” of this mythical deal. Middle East leaders may be murderers with lots of torturers to help them stay in power, but they are not entirely stupid. It’s clear that Kushner and Greenblatt need lots and lots of cash to prop up their plans for the final destruction of Palestinian statehood – we are talking in billions – and the Arab leaders they met did not hear anything about the political “dimension” of Trump’s “deal”. Because presumably there isn’t one …”

Fisk continues: “This very vagueness is amazing, because the Kushner-Greenblatt fandango was in fact a very historic event. It was unprecedented as well as bizarre, unequalled in recent Arab history for its temerity as well as its outrageous assumption … this was the first time in modern Arab history – indeed modern Muslim history – that America has constructed and prepared a bribe BEFORE the acquiescence of those who are supposed to take the money; before actually telling the Palestinians and other Arabs what they are supposed to do in order to get their hands on the loot”.

On the eve of the the peace plan’s great unveiling, we republish from behind News Limited’s paywall, the following a worthwhile interview with veteran US diplomat Martin Indyk.

Related: Throwing Abbas under the bus; and on a lighter note, Bob Dylan’s 116th Dream – a Jerusalem Reverie.

Also, in In That Howling Infinite, see A Middle East Miscellany

Trump’s deal of the century engineered for failure: Indyk

Cameron Stewart, The Weekend Australian, 14th September 2019

People walk past an Israeli election billboard for the Likud party showing Donald Trump shaking hands with Benjamin Netanyahu with a caption in Hebrew reading ‘Netanyahu, in another league’. Picture: AFP

Bibi and his bestie. Israeli election billboard captioned ‘Netanyahu, in another league’

Martin Indyk’s phone won’t stop ringing in his office at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. US President Donald Trump has just sacked his third national security adviser, John Bolton, while in Israel a few hours earlier Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to annex a large chunk of the West Bank if he wins next week’s general election.

These events mean that Indyk, the Australian-educated two-time US ambassador to Israel and former National Security Council member in Bill Clinton’s White House, is in high demand for comment from the US media.

“The departure of Bolton suggests that President Trump is going to be his own foreign policy adviser,” he tells The New York Times in a quote that will appear on the front page the next day.

At 68, Indyk, a distinguished fellow at prestigious US think tank the Council on Foreign Relations and a former executive vice-president at the Brookings Institute, is one of America’s most sought-after experts on US foreign policy, especially on the Middle East.

Right now Indyk is watching a confluence of events that will help determine the future of US policy in the Middle East with ramifications for allies such as Australia. On Tuesday Israel goes to the polls in an election that could end the era of Netanyahu, its longest serving prime minister, or extend his reign and reshape Israel’s footprint in the occupied territories. Soon after that election, perhaps even within days, Trump says he will release his long-awaited Middle East peace plan, which he has dubbed “the deal of the century”.

At the same time, the Trump White House is struggling to deal with a more assertive and aggressive Iran as it stares down the US in protest against crippling sanctions imposed on it by Washington.

Trump’s decision to sack Bolton reflected growing differences on a range of issues including Iran, where Bolton unsuccessfully tried to push Trump to launch a military strike over its recent downing of a US drone. Indyk says Bolton’s overly hawkish views on Iran have helped lead Trump down the wrong road on dealing with Tehran. More broadly, he says Trump’s overall policy approach to the Middle East has been poorly advised and badly executed.

“When it comes to the Middle East, Trump is effectively subcontracting to Israel and Saudi Arabia, and that can’t work, it isn’t working,” he tells Inquirer. “It doesn’t work for the peace process, as we can see, and it hasn’t worked for Arab-Israeli relations. These things, I think, are a real setback for American interests.”

Indyk, who was the US special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations from 2013 to 2014, says there is “zero chance” the Trump White House will produce a plan that will revive the stalled peace process.

“One leading indicator of the expectations for this plan is that Jason Greenblatt, who is Trump’s envoy for the negotiations, has resigned before the plan has come out,” he says. “If he expected that this plan would lead to negotiations he would not be resigning.”

Indyk expects the administration’s plan, which is said to be 60 pages long, will take the form of a vague “vision” for the region rather than a document that can work towards solutions.

“In terms of process, I don’t see how a 60-page document can be the basis for negotiation,” he says.

“A two-page document which laid out the basis for the negotiations could, but not 60 pages. In terms of acceptance there is zero chance that the Palestinians will accept it because it will not see their minimum requirements of a Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital.”

Indyk says Trump’s peace plan was effectively dead from the moment the administration moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to the disputed city of Jerusalem.

“The peace process had a design fault from that time on,” says Indyk. “It was engineered for failure because there was no way they were going to get the Palestinians to engage.”

Trump’s strong support for Netanyahu is largely driven by the belief of both leaders that they can help each other to get re-elected, Indyk says. Trump has been a far more pro-Israel president than his predecessor, Barack Obama. He has moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, recognised Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights, sup­ported Netanyahu’s expansionist policies in the occupied territories and adopted a far tougher stance against Iran, including withdrawing from the nuclear deal. Indyk says Netanyahu’s statement this week that he would seize on the historic opportunity given to him by a sympathetic White House to annex nearly a third of the occupied West Bank if he were re-elected would be a generational blow to peace.

“There is no way that Israel can go ahead and annex the Jordan Valley and expect to have peace with the Palestinians. That is critical territory for the Palestinian state, which is the minimum the Palestinians would require to make peace with Israel,” he says. If the Trump administration backs such a move, as Netanyahu claims, it will be “a recipe for continued conflict”.

“If Trump has in mind green-lighting a (partial) annexation of the Jordan Valley then that’s not a peace plan; that’s a plan for peace between the US and Israel, it’s a plan for the right-wing annexationists and it’s a plan for a one-state solution, which is not a solution at all.”

Indyk says Trump’s support for Netanyahu, which has proved divisive with American Jews, is driven more by domestic US politics than by geo-strategic calculations.

“Trump’s peace plan has ­morphed from being a plan to promote peace between Israel and the Palestinians to a plan to help get Netanyahu re-elected in return for Netanyahu helping to get Trump re-elected,” he says. “The key here for Trump is the (vote of the) US evangelicals. It’s not the American Jews because the vast majority of American Jews vote Democrat. But the evangelicals care deeply about Israel and appreciate what Trump has done for Israel and appreciate it when Netanyahu says he is the best president Israel has ever had, so that’s a critical part of Trump’s base.”

The Democrats gave Trump “a gift” with controversial anti-Israeli comments made by Democratic congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, members of the so-called Squad, Indyk adds.

“That gave Trump the ability to try to paint the Democratic Party as anti-Semitic, and I don’t think anyone really takes it seriously, but he is trying to drive a wedge between the Democratic Party and American Jews. I don’t believe he will succeed but that is his purpose. The way he did it most recently by questioning the loyalty of American Jews … saying they should be loyal to Israel is something that is very dangerous and yet Netanyahu did not say a word. So I think it is an informal pact they have reached that he will do what he can do to get Bibi elected and in exchange Bibi will help him.”

Indyk says if the results of the Israel election reflect current polling then Netanyahu’s prospects of forming a working coalition of 61 seats in the 120-seat Knesset are unlikely. He says in some ways the election will be a referendum on Netanyahu, who faces indictment on corruption charges and has had a larger-than-life presence in Israeli politics for a generation.

“He has dominated the Israeli political scene for more than a decade and he has made this election very much about himself,” he says. “The fact that he is likely to be indicted within a month of the elections also ensures that it’s going to be focused on him.”

On Iran, Indyk says the US has lost the advantage it had in negotiations with Tehran because the White House has overplayed its hand and provoked Iran to step up its aggression. He says the US decision last year to leave the Iran nuclear deal and impose tough economic sanctions on Tehran initially led to a relatively muted response from Iran. “The Iranians were kind of hunkering down in the face of this intense economic pressure from the sanctions hoping to wait Trump out while staying within the nuclear deal hoping to split the Europeans off from Trump,” he says. “So in a sense Trump was winning the game.”

But he says when Trump went a step further by designating Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as terrorists and further increasing economic pressure, sending Iran’s economy deep into negative territory, he provoked Tehran to become more assertive.

“They decided to show Trump that they could hurt him in every area that mattered to him,” he says. This included attacks on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, attacking Saudi oil infrastructure, threatening US troops in Iraq and a step-by-step flouting of the terms of the nuclear deal.

“It put Trump in a tighter and tighter corner. He had to decide whether he was going to respond by confronting them.”

But Indyk says Trump then made the mistake of blinking in June when he initially ordered a military strike against Iran for the shooting down of a US drone, only to reverse the order several hours later. As a result, Indyk says, Iran is much more confident that Trump will not pursue armed conflict.

“Trump’s advisers, Bolton and (Secretary of State Mike) Pompeo, should never have put him up to it, one drone being shot down is not a basis for a strike on Iran,” he says. “Trump doesn’t want a war and they don’t want a war, but they have won this round.”

Australia is correct to stand alongside the US in helping enforce safe passage of oil supplies through the Strait of Hormuz against Iranian attacks, Indyk says. “Australia has always been there in every circumstance when the United States has needed military assistance and I think that one would have to say, looking back over the years, with the exception of Vietnam, I think paying that premium has been basically a worthwhile policy from a strategic point of view.

“And given that Australia, like all America’s allies, are now dealing with a mercurial and unreliable President who has a kneejerk disdain for allies who aren’t pulling their weight in his terms, I think it is probably a prudent thing for Australia to do.”

Indyk, who was born in London to Jewish immigrants from Poland, was reared in Sydney, attending the University of Sydney and then the Australian National University. His brother and their family still live in Australia and he visits them each year. He moved to the US in 1992 and became a US citizen the following year. “But you can’t take the Australian out of the American,” he says. “Australia is still very much in my heart.”

In a glittering CV, Indyk says the best job he has had were his two terms as US ambassador from 1995 to 1997 and again from 2000 to 2001, during a turbulent era in Israel. “It was really difficult and in the end disastrous with (prime minister) Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, the Intifada, but there were also some very high points like the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, the Oslo Accords; we did some great things,” he says.

“Being an ambassador on the front lines of American diplomacy at a time when the US was heavily involved in trying to make peace was just an amazing experience and a real privilege.”

Cameron Stewart is an Associate Editor of The Australian and its Washington correspondent.

Martin Indyk

The agony of Julian Assange

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

I walked, with other souls in pain,
Within another ring,
And was wondering if the man had done
A great or little thing,
When a voice behind me whispered low,
‘That fellow’s got to swing’.

Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol
 

Julian Assange has served his time. He has effectively been deprived of his liberty for a decade and faces many more years in the US, a sentence that far exceeds a proportionate penalty. His continuing persecution brings only shame upon self-proclaimed paragons of “freedom” like the US, Britain and Australia.

In Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall sequel, Bring Up The Bodies, Thomas Cromwell’s son questions his father after the trials of Queen Anne and her alleged lovers: When Gregory says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did they do it?’ But when Thomas says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did the court find them so?’ The lawyer’s world is entire unto itself, the human pared away.” The law, sadly, is about justice and retribution”.

Imprisoning journalists as spies and traitors has always been the norm in authoritarian countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt, while denouncing the free press as unpatriotic is a more recent hallmark of nationalist populist governments that have taken power all over the world. The US, perennially claiming the high moral ground with regard to freedom of the press, and of human rights generally, rarely raises its voice in condemnation and rarer still in anger its “friendly” autocrats. But plotting to take down Julian Assange mere years after condemning (though yet again, not punishing) the kidnap and murder of Saudi journalist and dissident Adnan Khashoggi takes its perfidy to astral heights.


The Road to Belmarsh Gaol

Julian Assange, the Australian co-founder of online media organization WikiLeaks is in deep shit. He’s pissed off the Yanks, frustrated the Poms, and angered his Ecuadorian hosts, and now the Swedes want to have another bash …

He was arrested on April 11th 2019 by British police at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he had been claiming political asylum for almost seven years having lost a final appeal against his extradition to Sweden to face charges of sexual assault. He was then charged with failing to surrender to the court.

While in the embassy, Assange could not be arrested because of the international legal protection of diplomatic premises, which meant police could not enter without Ecuador’s consent. On April 11, British police were invited into the embassy and made the arrest. On the same day, Assange was found guilty on that charge of failing to surrender, sentenced to fifty weeks for jumping bail. and is serving his time at HM Prison Belmarsh.

The United States government unsealed an indictment made in March 2018 charging Julian Assange with a conspiracy to help whistle-blower Chelsea Manning, former soldier and pardoned felon to crack a password which enabled her to pass on classified documents that were then published by WikiLeaks – in effect, conspiracy to hack US computer systems, a charge which carries a maximum five year sentence. The US has requested that the UK extradite Assange to face these charges before a US court. Assange has now been indicted on seventeen charges under the espionage act, which if proven, could mean life imprisonment. There is no guarantee that once he enters the the legal system he will ever re-emerge.

In 2010, a Swedish prosecutor requested Assange’s transfer to Sweden to face sexual assault allegations, which he denies. Whilst appealing a British High Court decision to extradite him, he spent eighteen months under house arrest at the home of a supporter (in effect, he has been incarcerated for almost a decade). In 2016, Assange was questioned by Swedish authorities by video link while he remained in the Ecuadorian embassy. In 2017, they closed the case against him, but after his arrest, the lawyer for one of the Swedish complainants indicated she’d ask the prosecutor to reopen the case. Sweden’s Prosecution Authority reviewed the case and renewed its request for extradition; but in November 2019, it dropped the matter citing a lack of substantive evidence.

But the British Home Secretary Sajid Javid has signed off on the US’ extradition request. It must now go through the British courts. The process could take years, well beyond Assange’s initial   fifty weeks incarceration, the court’s refusal to free him when it had expired – on the grounds that he was a flight risk (he has form, after all) – and the formal expedition hearing which open in February 2020.

Stay angry, get even

The current US administration cleaves to the maxim “stay angry and get even” – Uncle Sam neither forgets nor forgives. Just wait and see what happens if it can get its hands on exiled hacker and   Now Russian resident Edward Snowden. The British Government, relieved to have restored a corner of Knightsbridge to its sovereignty, and currently knee deep in the Brexit “Big Muddy”, probably won’t lift a finger to help him even though by any standard of much-vaunted British ‘fair play’, his self-imposed punishment hardly fits his alleged crimes, an by any liberal and democratic benchmark, he’s certainly served his time. Former Aussie prime minister Kevin Rudd has declared that  Julian Assange would pay an “unacceptable” and “disproportionate” price if he is extradited to the United States, that no actual harm to individuals has been demonstrated, whilst the WikiLeaks founder should not take the fall for Washington’s failures to secure its own classified documents.

Our leaders here in Australia, lost in our own short-term political preoccupations bleat from the distant sidelines that it’s not our problem – which politically and diplomatically speaking, it isn’t, other than the fact that he is an Australian citizen (albeit a longtime absentee) and therefore warrants consular assistance. Simplistically put, there are no votes in it.

Will our government now help him out? Demand his return to Australia? Oppose the calls from the US to extradite him from the UK?

Our tepid and tardy response to the detention in Thailand of footballer Hakeem al-Araibi on a dodgey Bahraini extradition order and the asylum plea of Saudi teen Rahaf Mohammad – ironically, again from Thailand – does not auger well for a resolute and reasonable response. The way we left erstwhile al Qaida fellow-travelers David Hicks and Mamduh Habib to rot in Gitmo, and the  lack of enthusiasm with which we took up journalist Peter Greste’s case in Egypt – his family and journalists worldwide maintained the struggle for his release – suggest that after what we call “diplomatic representations” (what ordinary folk call “going through the motions”), we will face political realities and bend to the US’ will.

Caught up between our subservient relationship with the US, our slavish pandering to economic and strategic interests, placing these above considerations of human rights, and our government’s susceptibility to the malign influence of shock-jocks and populist politicians, Australia’s official behaviour in such cases is often predictably and reflexively disingenuous.

Nowadays, most governments are desperate to stop leaks, data dumps, whistle-blowers and uncomfortable revelations. Democratic governments have attempted to use ostensibly benign legal and security powers to restrict media oversight and criticism. Witness here in Australian how the Victorian Director of Prosecutions is seeking to put thirty-six media outlets, editors and journalists on trial over allegations that they breached a suppression order in reports published after the prominent and well-connected Cardinal George Pell was convicted of child sex abuse charges. The powerful look after their own.

Less squeamish, more thuggish autocratic regimes have few qualms about consigning journalists and editors to jail and worse whilst their western allies and armourers ‘see no, hear no, speak no evil’. Narrow, national interests as ever trump (an apposite word, indeed) human rights. Witness the hundreds of Egyptian and Turkish journalists jailed without trial, the harassment and even killing of reporters in Eastern Europe and Russia, and, of course, the gruesome murder of Saudi scribbler and stirrer Jamal Khashoggi.

The US, the land of the free and the First Amendment has truly shown its hand, and its true colours, proving that Assange’s fears of extradition were quite justified. The UK, meanwhile, has long ached to nail him for contempt of its bail laws, and just plain contempt, really – and a seriously extravagant waste of already straitened police resources. When Assange had worn out his Ecuadorian welcome, lubricated, it is alleged (by WikiLeaks), a $4.2 billion IMF bailout plus another $6 billion from other financial institutions, the Met was ready to roll. Meanwhile, Australia’s political class, having long regarded his Australian nationality as an embarrassing inconvenience, just hoped that we could be left out of it all.

Rally ‘round the fall guy

The media, mainstream, extreme, any stream really, including social media and sundry supporters and detractors, are rushing to both praise Assange and to bury him. They defend and demonstrate, denounce and demean. So Julian Assange, simultaneously icon and bête noir, is the ideal fall-guy “pour decourager les autres”: for everyone on the left and the right who dig him, there’s another who can’t stand him for reasons political, personal, or perverse.

There’s the role he played in the demise of Hilary Clinton and election of Donald Trump, as if, some believe, he was hoping for some kind of “get out of jail free” card from a Trump administration. There’s his hanging out, in a confined space, with the likes of UKIP’s irritating and arguably obnoxious Nigel Farage. All this has forever tarnished his reputation as a warrior of the left. There’s those problematical charges in Sweden that we now learn have never gone away.

During the Australian Federal election before last, the party running his senate bid in absentia gave its preferences to right-wing libertarian nut-jobs ahead of Labor and the Greens, his erstwhile natural allies – and then put it all down to clerical error.

Sadly, stories about his tantrums, visits by Yoko Ono, Lady Gaga and onetime Baywatch hottie Pamela Anderson (nudge, nudge, wink, wink!) and neglecting to clean up after his cat – lurid tales of his hygiene habits appear have been concocted to dehumanize him in tabloid tittle-tat – have rendered him an object of ridicule. And the images of him being dragged out of the embassy, pale and blinking in the unforgiving daylight, grey-haired, bearded, wide-eyed and disheveled, like some mad old street person, have engendered pathos and pity.

There can be little doubt that his mental and physical health deteriorated during his confinement. For sure he is not the confident man who entered the embassy so many years ago; but the law doesn’t recognise this – it demands a reckoning. And many love to kick a man when he’s down.

In the end, Assange was in so many ways his own worst enemy. It is hypothesized that he could’ve surrendered to the Brits long time passing and took his chances at law instead of hiding, a much diminished figure, in the embassy of a small Latin American republic. The sad irony is that if he’d faced the music all those years ago, he might’ve been a free man by now, either having done his time or been exonerated, or else, a credible and respected political prisoner supported worldwide as a champion of press freedom and free speech.

Lights in dark corners

Amidst all the commentary and partisanship swirling about the Assange’s unfortunate circumstances, there has been remarkably little explanation of what he, Manning, WikiLeaks and Snowden have actually done in a substantive security sense. Robert Fisk and his colleague at The Independent, Patrick Cockburn, address just that.
Fisk wrote on 31st May:  “ … the last few days have convinced me that there is something far more obvious about the incarceration of Assange and the re-jailing of Manning. And it has nothing to do with betrayal or treachery or any supposed catastrophic damage to our security”.
Cockburn succinctly belled the cat with on the same day: “ … the real purpose of state secrecy is to enable governments to establish their own self-interested and often mendacious version of the truth by the careful selection of “facts” to be passed on to the public. They feel enraged by any revelation of what they really know, or by any alternative source of information. Such threats to their control of the news agenda must be suppressed where possible and, where not, those responsible must be pursued and punished.”
Fisk continues: “The worst of this material was secret not because it accidentally slipped into a military administration file marked “confidential” or “for your eyes only”, but because it represented the cover-up of state crime on a massive scale. Those responsible for these atrocities should now be on trial, extradited from wherever they are hiding and imprisoned for their crimes against humanity. But no, we are going to punish the leakers – however pathetic we may regard their motives … Far better we hunt down other truths, equally frightening for authority. Why not find out, for example, what Mike Pompeo said in private to Mohammed bin Salman? What toxic promises Donald Trump may have made to Netanyahu? What relations the US still secretly maintains with Iran, why it has even kept up important contact – desultory, silently and covertly – with elements of the Syrian regime?
Assange was not, in Fisk’s opinion an investigative journalist; he is nevertheless, a scapegoat, and also a salutary warning for all who shine a light into the dark corners of power: “… what we find out through the old conventional journalism of foot-slogging, of history via deep throats or trusted contacts, is going to reveal – if we do our job – just the same vile mendacity of our masters that has led to the clamour of hatred towards Assange and Manning and, indeed, Edward Snowden. We’re not going to be arraigned because the prosecution of these three set a dangerous legal precedent. But we’ll be persecuted for the same reasons: because what we shall disclose will inevitably prove that our governments and those of our allies commit war crimes; and those responsible for these iniquities will try to make us pay for such indiscretion with a life behind bars. Shame and the fear of accountability for what has been done by our “security” authorities, not the law-breaking of leakers, is what this is all about”.

Back to Cockburn who writes that one reason Assange was being persecuted was for WikiLeaks’ revelations about US policy in Yemen: “Revealing important information about the Yemen war – in which at least 70,000 people have been killed – is the reason why the US government is persecuting both Assange and Yemeni journalist Maas al Zikry … (who) says that “one of the key reasons why this land is so impoverished in that tragic condition it has reached today is the US administration’s mass punishment of Yemen”. This is demonstrably true, but doubtless somebody in Washington considers it a secret.”

A nice dilemma

WikiLeaks and Julian Assange has done the world many favours. They’ve exposed war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere; they’ve shine an unwelcome light on wrongdoing, shabby deals, and hypocritical, incriminating and ofttimes embarrassing goings-on in the corridors of power and diplomacy worldwide. And they’ve passed all this on to reputable media sources throughout the so-called free world to sift, analyse, question, join disparate dots, and disseminate.

Yet, in what may seem in retrospect to be a bad dose of overconfidence and hubris, they aspired to be players in the power games of others rather than remaining a neutral and discerning watchdog. And this was perhaps Assange’s undoing – if undone he indeed becomes. This story has some distance to run …

His faithfully longtime lawyer Jen Robinson declared that his arrest, after seven years of self-imposed internal exile, has “set a dangerous precedent for all media and journalists in Europe and around the world”. His extradition to the US, she said, meant that any journalist could face charges for “publishing truthful information about the United States”. She might have added “published outside the US”, Indeed, US revanchism is a chilling demonstration of imperial overreach and a grim warning to others.

And yet, much of the legal argy-bargy around the charges Assange is likely to face in the US hinge on the question of whether he is actually a journalist and whether WikiLeaks is actually a news organization. He and his supporters have long portrayed him as a champion of a free press, but some experts believe that the US Department of Justice’s decision to charge him with conspiring to hack government computers limits his ability to mount a vigorous free speech defense. Assange has long said WikiLeaks is a journalistic endeavour protected by freedom of the press laws, and in 2017, a UK tribunal recognized WikiLeaks as a “media organisation”.

Political prisoner, maybe, whistle-blower, certainly, but “not a prisoner of conscience”, at least by Amnesty International’s definition. Compared to many prisoners on Amnesty’s books, innocents and activists banged up by oppressive regimes, Assange has been pretty well treated. The consistent reference in many media reports to a potential death sentence in the US is egregious insofar as the UK will not allow extradition if a death sentence is on the cards. Many would also dispute the tag “investigative journalist” that some have bestowed upon him, seeing as he and Chelsea Manning released classified US and other information. They did not ferret it out, sift it and analyse it for publication as investigative journalists generally do. As for making Assange a “working class hero”, as some on the far-left have done, that is drawing a long bow. Friends and foes alike are now dancing around these distinctions.

In a concise recent article in The Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Greste, who got to know very well the inside of a squalid Egyptian prison cell and the Egypt’s kafkaesqe judicial system for allegedly publishing what a government didn’t like, makes a few points that Jennifer, her colleague, the eloquent and famous Geoffrey Robertson, and others have skated lightly over:

“Julian Assange is not a journalist, and WikiLeaks is not a news organisation. There is an argument to be had about the libertarian ideal of radical transparency that underpins its ethos, but that is a separate issue altogether from press freedom … Journalism demands more than simply acquiring confidential information and releasing it unfiltered onto the internet for punters to sort through. It comes with responsibility. To effectively fulfill the role of journalism in a democracy, there is an obligation to seek out what is genuinely in the public interest and a responsibility to remove anything that may compromise the privacy of individuals not directly involved in a story or that might put them at risk. Journalism also requires detailed context and analysis to explain why the information is important, and what it all means”.

Greste nevertheless sounds a warning. On the eve of the first extradition hearing on January 25th 2020, in an opinion piece in the SMH, he wrote of how the Obama administration   “realized that if they prosecuted him, they would then have to prosecute the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and others for also publishing much of Wikileaks’ material, and in the process do irreparable harm to the constitutional guarantees for press freedom. It is clear that under Trump, Assange is highly unlikely to have his rights respected or get a fair trial, and those, too, are grounds to oppose his extradition. The manner in which US prosecutors are handling his case, and its implications for anybody who believes in democratic accountability, are too serious to let Assange be extradited without a fight”.

Other Australian are not as hostile to Assange as Peter Greste, as a recent article  by Amanda Horton in the Sydney Morning Herald observes, concluding with the not quite rhetorical question of what would Australia do if he was serendipitously returned to our distant shore:

“The Australian government certainly appears singularly unmoved by Julian Assange … Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said the legal processes must “run their course” and Assange should “face the music”. The government position appears to be that f the US wants to extradite him, and extradition proceedings are underway, Australia can’t intervene even if it wanted to … This is total nonsense, says everyone with experience: diplomacy is all about pulling levers behind the scenes … The problem, say sources in government, is that Australia may be reluctant to expend political capital on behalf of Assange … Australia may also be too afraid – “too craven”, according to one – to test its standing with the US; and there may be a sense that the US has gone too far to back down, so a request to do so would be both embarrassing and useless. The US-Australia relationship may be further tested if, eventually, the UK refuses extradition and deports Assange back to Australia. It appears that the US might then be able to request his extradition directly from us. What will we do then?”

Meanwhile people continue to argue over whether Assange is a hero or a ratbag – our ratbag as an equally ratbag conservative Australian member of parliament called him – demanding,  surprisingly that he be brought home).  They debate whether he is a legitimate journalist, publisher, troublemaker or whistleblower, a Trumpista or Putinesca. But sycophantic and pusillanimous politicians aside, most informed people of goodwill believe that there isn’t a case to answer and that he should be repatriated to Australia. It will be interesting to see where Jen Robinson’s last minute (February 2020) witness statement about Trump’s offer of pardon will go, and indeed, what the British Court will decide. One thing’s for sure: The Powers That Be will continue to play dirty.

 

© Paul Hemphill 2019.  All rights reserved

Yes, Julian is in deep shit. But, you animal lovers and sharers of kitty pics out there in the twitterverse and Facebook world, his cat and companion Michi has gone to a good home …

Read more about politics in In That Howling Infinite here: A Political World – Thoughts and Themes