Tag Archives: Britain

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Robert Fisk at The Independent:

Quite a lot of the dead this weekend appear to have been Hamas members, but what is it supposed to solve? Is Hamas going to say: “Wow, this blitz is awesome – we’d better recognise the state of Israel, fall in line with the Palestinian Authority, lay down our weapons and pray we are taken prisoner and locked up indefinitely and support a new American ‘peace process’ in the Middle East!” Is that what the Israelis and the Americans and Gordon Brown think Hamas is going to do?

Yes, let’s remember Hamas’s cynicism, the cynicism of all armed Islamist groups. Their need for Muslim martyrs is as crucial to them as Israel’s need to create them. The lesson Israel thinks it is teaching – come to heel or we will crush you – is not the lesson Hamas is learning. Hamas needs violence to emphasise the oppression of the Palestinians – and relies on Israel to provide it. A few rockets into Israel and Israel obliges.

Not a whimper from Tony Blair, the peace envoy to the Middle East who’s never been to Gaza in his current incarnation. Not a bloody word.

We hear the usual Israeli line. General Yaakov Amidror, the former head of the Israeli army’s “research and assessment division” announced that “no country in the world would allow its citizens to be made the target of rocket attacks without taking vigorous steps to defend them”. Quite so. But when the IRA were firing mortars over the border into Northern Ireland, when their guerrillas were crossing from the Republic to attack police stations and Protestants, did Britain unleash the RAF on the Irish Republic? Did the RAF bomb churches and tankers and police stations and zap 300 civilians to teach the Irish a lesson? No, it did not. Because the world would have seen it as criminal behaviour. We didn’t want to lower ourselves to the IRA’s level.

Yes, Israel deserves security. But these bloodbaths will not bring it. Not since 1948 have air raids protected Israel. Israel has bombed Lebanon thousands of times since 1975 and not one has eliminated “terrorism”. So what was the reaction last night? The Israelis threaten ground attacks. Hamas waits for another battle. Our Western politicians crouch in their funk holes. And somewhere to the east – in a cave? a basement? on a mountainside? – a well-known man in a turban smiles.

The whole thing is here

Vulnerable Children

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The world’s most vulnerable children go from one frying pan to another:

British police helped cover up a horrific sex abuse scandal at a Christian missionary orphanage in Albania, a Guardian investigation has found.

Senior officers agreed to keep details of abuse secret from their counterparts in Albania after the British director of the orphanage, David Brown, persuaded them that while children had been sexually abused in his care, he had played no part in it.

Brown, 57, an evangelical charity worker who founded the His Children orphanage seven years ago, was yesterday found guilty of “sexual relations” with minors.

Sentencing him to 20 years in a maximum-security jail in Albania, Judge Gerti Hoxha said the home had been used as “camouflage” for sexual abuse. He hoped the sentence would serve as a warning to other paedophiles.

Looking unstable on his feet, Brown was escorted from the courtroom.

Two other British helpers at the orphanage remain on trial for their alleged part in the abuse. Dino Christodoulou, 45, a social therapy nurse from Blackburn in Lancashire, and Robin Arnold, 56, a salesman from Cromer in Norfolk, were extradited to Albania from Britain in May. Brown’s shelter cared for 40 abandoned children and babies. It was raided by Albanian police in May 2006. Ten children, aged between four and 13, told Albanian police they had been sexually abused by Brown and the two Britons. In some cases the children claim to have been bound to a balcony, gagged and raped.

But an investigation has revealed that Britain’s National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) received details about abuse at the home 18 months earlier, in December 2004, and failed to tell their Albanian counterparts.

Brown gave members of NCIS, stationed in the region to fight organised crime, harrowing accounts of abuse suffered by boys at his home, but denied he was involved. Taking his word, officers decided not to inform Albanian police about the abuse.

Before speaking to the detectives, Brown sought advice from his friend Alan Moir, a retired police superintendent from Inverness. Moir, 64, who supported the running of the home, convened a meeting at a hotel in the capital with officers from NCIS. At that meeting Brown claimed that Christodoulou, whom he had allowed to return to Blackburn, had sexually abused the children behind his back. He did not say anything about Arnold’s alleged involvement and claimed to have had no prior knowledge that children were being harmed.

“We made a decision that we would not report [the abuse] to the authorities,” said Moir. “We knew what would happen – someone would be arrested and the children would be back on the street.”

Read the rest here

Nuclear Bomb Power Politics

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Hiroshima, August 6th, 1945 – August 6th, 2008:

The mayor of Hiroshima on Wednesday urged the next US president to work to abolish atomic weapons as the city marked the 63rd anniversary of the world’s first nuclear attack.

Some 45,000 people, including Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, gathered at a memorial to the dead within sight of the A-bomb dome, a former exhibition hall burned to a skeleton by the bomb’s incinerating heat.

They stood up and offered silent prayers at 8:15 am, the exact moment in 1945 when a single US bomb instantly killed more than 140,000 people and fatally injured tens of thousands of others with radiation or horrific burns.

Delivering a speech at the memorial, Hiroshima mayor Tadatoshi Akiba noted the United States was one of only three countries which oppose a UN resolution submitted by Japan calling for the abolition of nuclear arms.

“We can only hope that the president of the United States elected this November will listen conscientiously to the majority, for whom the top priority is human survival,” he said.

Akiba said the effects of the atomic bombing on the minds of survivors had been underestimated for decades, adding that “the voices, faces and forms that vanished in the hell” had never left the hearts of survivors.

With the average age of survivors now over 75, he said the city would launch a two-year scientific study of the psychological impact of the experience.

“This study should teach us the grave import of the truth, born of tragedy and suffering, that the only role for nuclear weapons is to be abolished,” the mayor told the service.

On the eve of the anniversary, children gathered in front of the Atomic Bomb Dome for a lantern march. Survivors burned incense before dawn broke.

An altar at the Peace Memorial Park quickly filled up with a mountain of flowers. A group of South Koreans performed a traditional dance to honour the dead, who included a number of Koreans.

“Children who evacuated buildings or went to work at factories on that day have not returned 63 years on… the atomic bomb deprived them of normal life,” 11-year-old school girl Honoka Imai told the service.

A Chinese representative, a diplomat, attended the annual ceremony for the first time in a move welcomed by the city, which each year invites representatives of the world’s eight declared nuclear powers to the event.

Previously India, Pakistan and Russia were the only nuclear powers that had sent representatives to the ceremony. The other declared nuclear states — Britain, France, North Korea and the United States — have never come.

Three days after the Hiroshima bombing, the United States dropped a second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, which killed another 70,000 people in the southern port city.

Japan surrendered in World War II on August 15. The nation has since been officially pacifist and turned into one of the closest US allies, hosting more than 40,000 US troops.

Dozens of atomic survivors and activists protested in Nagasaki this week as a US nuclear-powered submarine arrived in Japan, just days after it emerged another sub may have suffered a small radiation leak earlier this year.

[emphases mine]

Antigona in Britain

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From New Statesman, a review of What Is She Doing Here?  The Story of a Kosovan Refugee in Britain by Kate Clanchy:

What Is She Doing Here? is a memoir tracing Kate Clanchy’s involvement as ally, employer and confidante of Antigona, a Kosovar refugee in Britain. Told with the colloquial intensity of a friend sharing her secrets over coffee, it has all the urgency of a story that needs to be told, one that gives a voice to the lives behind anti-immigration, anti-Muslim headlines.

Its pages are filled with women, Kosovar and British, city and country, girls and old ladies. In it, we have a scrapbook of female perspectives. The main threadline is Antigona’s escape across Europe with her daughters and son, and her resulting life in the United Kingdom. This is supplemented by scenes from her sisters’ lives in the Kosovo highlands and the tale of one daughter who ends up working in Miss Selfridge clad in a burqa. At the margins are the British women, struggling in their own ways, united by neurosis and concern over their performance as mothers, wives and career women.

The preface tells us to “consciously peer past” Clanchy’s presence in the text, and her “large, British, liberal behind”. The book, however, is crucially shaped by this “liberal behind”. Hers is a set of eyes we can trust. Her struggle to understand Antigona’s abusive husband mirrors our own, and her richly suggestive language, revealing her background as a poet, brings sinister undertones to the Kosovar women who gather to inspect the bridal bedsheets after a wedding night, to “read the sentence of the stain”. Such a western female perspective makes this more than “a refugee’s story”. It becomes instead a narrative of convergence; an exploration of being female, of cultural conditioning and, most importantly, of sisterhood.

[…] 

A cry to sisterhood rings out from the heart of the memoir: “If we want to be feminists, if we want women to be free, all women, then we need to live differently here.” Clanchy’s great skill lies in her ability to illustrate this with subtle and richly suggestive vignettes. The memoir is deeply imbued with a sense of the accident of birth which meant that Clanchy was the one asking the crucial, triggering question, “Do you want a job?” of the woman she met in the park one warm spring day.

Floating Prisons

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From The Guardian/UK:

The United States is operating “floating prisons” to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.

Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.

Information about the operation of prison ships has emerged through a number of sources, including statements from the US military, the Council of Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners.

The analysis, due to be published this year by the human rights organisation Reprieve, also claims there have been more than 200 new cases of rendition since 2006, when President George Bush declared that the practice had stopped.

It is the use of ships to detain prisoners, however, that is raising fresh concern and demands for inquiries in Britain and the US.

According to research carried out by Reprieve, the US may have used as many as 17 ships as “floating prisons” since 2001. Detainees are interrogated aboard the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations, it is claimed.

Ships that are understood to have held prisoners include the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu. A further 15 ships are suspected of having operated around the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which has been used as a military base by the UK and the Americans. 

Go Jimmy Carter

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Seems Canada isn’t the only nation “supine” before the US:

Britain and other European governments should break from the US over the international embargo on Gaza, former US president Jimmy Carter told the Guardian yesterday. Carter, visiting the Welsh border town of Hay for the Guardian literary festival, described the EU’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as “supine” and its failure to criticise the Israeli blockade of Gaza as “embarrassing”. 

Referring to the possibility of Europe breaking with the US in an interview with the Guardian, he said: “Why not? They’re not our vassals. They occupy an equal position with the US.” 

The blockade on Hamas-ruled Gaza, imposed by the US, EU, UN and Russia – the so-called Quartet – after the organisation’s election victory in 2006, was “one of the greatest human rights crimes on Earth,” since it meant the “imprisonment of 1.6 million people, 1 million of whom are refugees”. “Most families in Gaza are eating only one meal per day. To see Europeans going along with this is embarrassing,” Carter said. 

He called on the EU to reassess its stance if Hamas agreed to a ceasefire in Gaza. “Let the Europeans lift the embargo and say we will protect the rights of Palestinians in Gaza, and even send observers to Rafah gate [Gaza’s crossing into Egypt] to ensure the Palestinians don’t violate it.”

 Guardian/UK

For the Birds

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Many of the birds that migrate to Britain and Europe from Africa every spring, from the willow warbler to the cuckoo, are undergoing alarming declines, new research shows.

The falls in numbers are so sharp and widespread that ornithologists are waking up to a major new environmental problem – the possibility that the whole system of bird migration between Africa and Europe is running into trouble.

The Independent/UK