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Turkey provides a unique example of the interaction between religion and politics. Recip Tayyeb Erdoğan, with his strong-man appeal to Islamic piety, won the Turkish Presidential election run-off at the weekend by 4% of the vote taking 52.1%. Kemal Kiliçdarğoglu with his promise of modern social democracy, had won only 44.9% of the vote in the first round, so stood little chance of overtaking Erdoğan with 49.5%. Fateful figures.
Two highly charged contending mindsets define Turkey’s national identity. Kemal Atatürk, a revolutionary nationalist who, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following the First World War, founded the modern Turkish secular State in 1923. He was influenced by French laicité, an ideological commitment to keep religion out of the public domain, and achieve its complete separation from the State. For many, this is expressed as a passionate rejection of Islam in favour of Turkey’s 1928 secular constitution traditionally supported by the military. For others there is a no less passionate religious commitment but to a moderate, pious Islamic conservatism. The US Brookings Institution wrote glowingly in 2002 that the AKP, Erdoğan’s Justice & Development Party which had just swept to power, “heralds democracy”. It seemed like a “new model” for the Islamic world. A year later, Erdoğan became Prime Minister. His development of a modern transport system, political flair and skillful negotiation of the deep nationalist tensions, while maintaining his espousal of Islamic values in the AKP, have enabled him to increase his power ever since. Erdoğan’s religious appeal owed much to the phenomenal success of the Gulen Islamic revival movement that provided him with the cultural and religious credentials of Turkish Islamic piety and helped to attract pious voters. Inspired by Fetullah Gulen, a scholar and preacher, the movement prioritized modern education, understanding of science and a commitment to interfaith dialogue as well as traditional Islamic practice. During the 1980s, starting with popular dershane, crammer schools, the Gulenists – calling themselves Hizmet meaning service – gained ground in the medium-sized towns of Anatolia. Those with money, the ‘Anatolian tigers’, invested in media and business forming the Confederation of Businessmen and Industrialists. Nationwide, Gulenist-led universities and schools became a ladder into the civil service, judiciary, police and army. With a flat structure and a reputation for being secretive, Hizmet was accused both of ‘infiltration’ of the state structures and of becoming too close to Erdoğan, collaborating in his dismissals of secular opponents of the AKP. At trials, beginning in 2008, Gülenist prosecutors brought charges, some falsified, against some 275 key secularists, high ranking military, government critics and opposition politicians. By 1999, Fethullah Gulen had withdrawn from the fray to a ranch in Pennsylvania after a new Turkish government which aimed to restore the constitution’s secular principles put him in danger of arrest for ‘anti-secular activity’. By 2012 Erdoğan was powerful enough to dispense with Hizmet’s blessing. Influential in the judiciary, the media, universities and schools and with supporters in some 160 countries, Hizmet was now a potential rival needing to be curbed. That October Erdoğan obliged Hizmet to hand over its cash-cow, the dershane schools, to the State. In February 2014 Hizmet members hit back by releasing tapes which provided concrete evidence of major corruption involving the President and his son. Erdoğan brazened it out and was elected President that August. The key to survival as an autocrat is ruthlessness, luck and courage. A military coup got underway on the night of 15 July 2016 while Erdoğan was on holiday in Marmaris, south-west Turkey. He narrowly escaped capture, broadcast to the nation via a mobile phone held to camera in a TV studio, flew back to Istanbul, called his supporters out onto the streets and regained control. Over 250 people were killed and 2,200 injured. Here was his opportunity finally to take control of the army and destroy his old allies, the Gulenists, some of whom had joined the coup. A disturbing feature of the coup’s aftermath, demonstrating the efficiency and depth of surveillance by the National Intelligence Agency was the immediate arrest of thousands of Gulenists alongside the coup’s secular military participants. A massive purge of civil service, police, armed forces, judiciary, media, universities and schools followed. Many were guilty of nothing more than a vague connection with Hizmet. ‘estoring democracy’, Erdoğan had seized the last pieces completing the puzzle of autocratic power. A sorry story of not much import? No. Now that we perceive geo-politics as a struggle been democracy and autocracy the Turkish experience is a neon sign flashing confirmation that democracy is losing the global struggle. Look at the post-Cold War record: Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya three tragic failures of intervention; Iran still in the hands of the mullahs; Russia triumphant in a devastated Syria and destroying Ukraine; Putin contemptuous of European democracies, the USA and international law; China with its terrifying surveillance society watching Ukraine as a dry-run for taking Taiwan; Narendra Modi’s discriminating against religious minorities; the army in Pakistan unwilling to accept Imran Khan’s attempt to reduce its power over the State. Sudan wrecked by two military factions. South Africa by government corruption. Just one hopeful sign in Brazil with its peaceful democratic transfer of power from Jair Bolsonaro. There are two main possible reactions to Erdoğan’s adding five more years to his twenty in power. Firstly, realpolitik requires continuing efforts to keep Turkey, a NATO member, out of the expanding band of brother autocratic regimes around the world, notably Russia. Another imperative is continuing huge payments to Erdoğan, following a 2016 migration deal which is keeping nearly four million refugees (3.6 million of them Syrians) out of the EU. Secondly, there is the utopian hope that one last push in the next elections in 2028 will remove Erdoğan, ending the imprisonment of opposition politicians, journalists and dissident voices, as well as removing government control of 98% of press, radio and television. But how realistic is this? Over half the electorate, not only in Erdoğan’s Anatolian heartland, feel he represents their values and hopes, and sustains their version of national identity. He represents strength amidst the fragility of their lives and their fear of repeating the chaos across Turkey’s southern and eastern borders. Must foreign policy choose between these two visions of Turkey’s future? Between realpolitik and utopian? In a recent slim volume, The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power by Robert D. Kaplan, a US journalist who has served on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, implies we need to embrace both. The tragic mind, he argues, experiences failure not as fatalism or despair but as a goad to greater understanding and as a prompt for the heroism of ‘acting bravely in the face of no great result’. The tragedy of Kemal Kiliçdarğoglu and his defeated Republican People’s Party (CHP) is that however much he may understand the nationalism, culture and thinking of Turkey’s rural poor and of the working class in its medium sized towns – his talk of expelling the refugees - he does not speak to them and their condition convincingly. Erdoğan, more street-wise, plays on their heart-strings. No-one can doubt Kiliçdarğoglu’s heroism and bravery in facing a ruthless autocrat. There are lessons to be learned about navigating today’s multiple threats to democracy from the failure of Turkey’s Opposition. See TheArticle 30/05/2023
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Today about 27% of adults in the UK own a dog. We have over 10 million ‘best friends’ second per capita in Europe only to Germany. That’s an awful lot of hungry animals. UK spending on dry dog-food alone is estimated at over £0.5 billion a year.
The dog market boomed during COVID. You see more couples with three dogs when you would have thought two’s company. The top price paid to date, in 2021, for a Border Collie with exceptional shepherding skills is £28,000 – and prices have risen with inflation. But what price the unalloyed love and affection of a pet dog? Crufts showcases dogs at their healthy glossy best. This year’s Best of Show was a perfectly groomed Lagotto Romagnolo, not a football coach from North Italy but a former ‘duck hunter’ now employed to find truffles, a fine example of canine labour flexibility. On a more mundane note, I was pleased to discover that the dog-show judges score dachshunds for ‘good ground clearance’. It is surely time to create a class of Professional Pets judged on their ‘petting performance’, an opportunity for great family dogs. My own contenders would be two Hackney residents, Solly a curly haired, gentle and cuddly Wheaten Terrier- Poodle Cross and Charlie, a Cavalier King Charles-American Cocker Spaniel cross whose love is measured by the number of excited circles performed to greet visitors and reproachful looks when he’s washed. But Solly and Charlie’s social skills pale when set against the abilities of working dogs, from guide dogs, an integral part of their blind owners’ lives, to trained sniffer dogs. Police German shepherds and Belgian Malinois find mobile phone by detecting the TPPO, triphenylphosphine oxide, which stops the microchip in the sim card overheating. When after much running around tail-wagging and sniffing, a police dog sits down next to your suitcase, it is time to get worried. More difficult to pinpoint are explosive residues, there can be false positives. And then there’s trained dogs’ ability to smell out diseases. These dogs are public servants working in the canine public sector. It seems extraordinary that animals so acutely attuned to human feelings, or so defined by human relationships, are descended from wolves. But you don’t have to be an evolutionary biologist to appreciate that this is where, with considerable help from selective breeding, our plethora of dog breeds began, from chihuahuas to greyhounds and Great Danes. Our current canine economy, how dogs fit into ways of making a living today, not least dogged devotion for sale, is a good starting point for understanding evolutionary dynamics. How did wolves and our ancestral hunter-gatherers get together? Who made the first moves? Shared hunting is thought to have developed between 32,000 and 18,000 years ago. The first undisputed domesticated dog found with human remains was buried some 14,000 years ago. By the beginning of the Neolithic – the agricultural revolution – 12, 000 years ago, dogs were moving from a purely economic relationship with people to becoming companions. One theory is that smarter, more enterprising, - more Thatcherite - wolves took the initiative, moved into hunter-gatherer settlements and became domesticated. Right now, there are foxes in London progressing from nervously raiding bins to entering kitchens in search of something to eat, and even one in Hackney who apparently without fear follows people walking home. An alternative plausible domestication theory is that the hunter-gatherers initiated the relationship. Like wolves, hunting was central to their lives. Both wolves and men travelled in search of prey. Though sharing the hunt, taking advantage of wolves’ sense of smell to find prey and rewarding kills with cast off portions of the meat, could only have worked if the prey was no larger than reindeer. Wolves were a highly successful species but could not cope with the main prize for human hunters, the mammoth. The canine economy is much more complex today. Fox hunting hounds baying under government restrictions retain the old skills whilst still generating a few jobs - not to mention class hatred. Greyhound racing for the working class has almost disappeared. But dog-walkers by the thousands have entered the service sector alongside child-care for busy professional households. There are grooming salons with dog accessories, dog educators and dog psychiatrists. A beloved pet should be both beautiful, fit, well behaved and well balanced. With so much reported loneliness the demand for a dog’s devotion is unlikely to diminish. But the price of this unalloyed love can be high. Veterinary care is expensive. Anecdotal evidence suggests, contrary to good practice in human medicine, that too often pet diagnosis begins with costly testing such as MRI and CT scans only then moving on to simpler therapeutic trials with inexpensive medication. The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons does have a code of ethical conduct, professional misconduct includes taking “advantage of your age and inexperience”. But, unschooled in diagnosis, who is capable of resisting the authority of the veterinarian and denying their beloved dog the suggested treatment? And how many people realise after hundreds, sometimes thousands of pounds spent on preventing the unpreventable, and far too late, that the kindest way forward would have been to ‘let their pet go’. Wolves by contrast are still unloved. Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t help their bad press. But there is something chillingly grand about them. They have not been subjected to ever more bizarre selective breeding. We don’t run after them with poo-bags. They don’t roll over to have their tummy tickled. They don’t sneak up to sleep on your bed or cover the sofa with hairs - at least not yet. “The Eurasian Wolf”, Rewilding Britain tells us, is “a vital top predator that can have a major influence on the landscape through influencing the behaviour of herbivores”. Quite so. The canine economy has proved productive, innovative and adaptive. Dogs both as workers and pets have established themselves amidst economic and home life. Their emotional ties to families look likely to defeat the future capacity of AI. And on the whole, canine evolution hasn’t turned out all that badly - apart, that is, from those dogs facing the hazards of poor ground clearance. The national emergency alert on 23 April was well timed. Many poor families with sick members have “a life-threatening emergency nearby”. We have reached a point where our public services are on the verge of collapse. We have become accustomed to the employed needing foodbanks. More widely, more insidiously, our political culture has become debased.
In the last five years, the Conservative Party has made two frightful choices of leader: Johnson and Truss. One after the other, they took forward the impoverishment of several million people placing the UK below other European countries by most economic indicators. Stark inequalities prevail, from health to housing to educational achievement. We now have a Prime Minister who lacks a personal electoral mandate. Polls suggest that most people in the UK have no confidence in their Government. Or more worryingly, their lack of confidence extends to politics itself and to all politicians as agents of social harmony, justice and wellbeing. If Sunak has any concern for democracy and Britain’s future, he must call a general election no later than this Autumn. Here is a short list of the reasons why. We are getting sicker and poorer. Our National Health Service is in intended decline. Speaking on a recent Andrew Marr show Sir Michael Marmot declared forthrightly: “If you had the hypothesis that the government was seeking to destroy the National Health Service....all the data that we’re seeing are consistent with that hypothesis” (a hypothesis he also described as “a sort of malicious undermining” of the NHS). Marmot is a distinguished Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London. He has been an adviser to the Director-General of the World Health Organisation and this year was made Companion of Honour by King Charles. What might be the motivation for undermining Britain’s flagship institution? Well space is being created for a developing market in healthcare. As the publicly funded service deteriorates, as waiting lists lengthen, as staff vacancies grow, those with money can, and do, ‘go private’. Current evidence suggests that we are heading for a second-rate NHS for the majority and private practice for those with the money to buy it. Private good, public poor, as the ideology goes. Look at dental treatment and social care to see where this takes us. As Sir John Major said in June 2016: “the NHS is as safe with them as a pet hamster is with a hungry python”. Conservative governments have failed to take adequate action to curb rising levels of obesity, ignoring both the link between poverty and ill health and the crushing demand diabetes alone will make on the NHS. Implementation of legislation that would ban the advertising of food with high sugar, salt and fat content before the 9pm watershed, and two for the price of one offers, has repeatedly been delayed. The food processing industry and supermarkets are free to encourage increased consumption and thus profit. Such delays placate the Conservative Party’s libertarian faction favouring the private sector whilst rejecting government responsibility for the public good. The government is refusing to address the crisis in our schools. Primary school class sizes are the largest in forty years. Schools are in budgetary crisis and in several fields of study unable to recruit teachers, not least in mathematics. It is typical of the Conservative practice of governing by unfulfilled announcement that in the continuing lack of maths teachers and of the salaries which might attract maths graduates into teaching, Rishi Sunak should now be sharing his daydream of maths for everyone up to the age of 18. But for parents if you have the money, there are always the public schools, or private schools or tutoring, to make up for any inadequacies in the underfunded State sector. Democracy itself is being weakened. Major institutions that balance and inform legislative power, the judiciary and the law, the civil service, and the Churches, with the support of the right-wing Press are either ignored or directly attacked. The first steps towards US-style voter suppression are being taken. On the spurious grounds of voter identity fraud, for which there is no evidence, at the local elections this May voters will be required to produce a visual identity document. A travel pass will permit an old person to vote but not a young one. The old are more likely to vote Tory than the young. Respect for human rights, a pillar of democracy, is diminishing. The civil right of citizens to vote is an expression of inalienable human rights defined in the European Convention of Human Rights - which the parliamentary Conservative Party wants the ability to contravene. There is also an assault on human rights and human dignity in the treatment of asylum seekers and economic migrants. Having made a shambles of our immigration procedures – we do not provide adequate channels for asylum seekers to enter the country legally - contrary to refugee conventions we criminalise those who arrive by non-regulated means of entry. The backlog in assessing asylum applications is as much the result of intention as incompetence. This hostile environment intended as a vote-winning policy in marginal seats is another step towards populist authoritarianism. Government has a cavalier attitude towards food security. British farmers currently provide about half our food needs. Here is Liz Webster, chair of Save British Farming: “The Conservatives with their BREXIT messed up our trade. This also impacted our labour supply because it ended freedom of movement. It also removed the cap and food subsidies”. Informed comment from a sector that on the whole foolishly supported BREXIT. The Minister for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Thérèse Coffey, was booed at this February’s NFU (National Farmers Union) conference. Minette Batters, NFU President, attributed food supply-chain problems to BREXIT. It was refreshing to hear the truth. British farming has been blighted. Finally, we come to the genuinely existential crisis which threatens everyone and to which farming contributes: climate change. The Government has given itself permission to defy COP agreements including the spirit of COP26 held under British chairmanship. It has repeatedly caved in to lobbying by the fossil fuel companies including granting new licenses for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea. As a result internationally agreed targets for reducing carbon emissions in the UK, Net-Zero by 2050, will be impossible to achieve. The Government is generating flurries of announcements to hide that it is treading water. After 13 years, Tory rule has run its course. It is tired. It lacks talent. The Prime Minister’s judgement of who should be appointed to his Cabinet looks increasingly questionable. Scandal follows scandal. Senior Government Ministers follow each other onto the back benches. The vocabulary of politics, increasingly influenced by social media, swings from schoolboy jibes to dog-whistles to misinformation that fact-checkers can reveal as such in minutes. As a university lecturer in Nigeria, I learned a lot about corruption and heard many pithy expressions. Commenting on their own politicians Nigerians often said: “they no savvy shame”. Words that perfectly fit 13 years of Tory rule. The May local elections will give some indication of whether the public agrees. But most likely, despite predictable losses it will remain Party first, country second. We may well have to wait until the last moment, in the autumn or winter of next year, before the Tories finally savvy shame. See TheArticle 27/04/2023 We think of sanctions as an alternative to war. They are also a projection of power. States, corporations, and recently, individual citizens, are punished economically. The aim is to stop or curtail actions which are inimical to the interests or values of the sanctioning State or contrary to international law, or to both. In the long term the economic impact of sanctions may erode a belligerent State’s will or ability to wage war. So far so theoretical.
But after reading Agathe Demarais’ recent Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against US Interests, Columbia University Press, 2022, you might be surprised how little practice fits theory. Demarais recounts how sanctions have evolved since the 1950s including the variety of things that can go wrong and backfire on those who have imposed them. President Eisenhower, with the creation in 1950 of the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), instituted the use of trade sanctions as a way of achieving foreign policy goals. The first target was North Korea, a legacy of the Korean war. North Korea’s economic links with the USA were tenuous. The approach had to be multilateral: a UN embargo on oil imports and coal exports. After the revolution in 1959, Cuba was always a particularly American concern. 73% of Cuba’s exports went to the USA and 70% of its imports came from the USA. Yet Eisenhower’s embargo imposed in 1960 failed to achieve its goals. Despite an estimated loss over $130 billion in income, Castro died with his regime intact and was succeeded by his brother Raul. The Kim dynasty in North Korea survives. There are always ways of getting round trade embargoes. Fast forward thirty years to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the lessons of Cuba and North Korea hadn’t been learned or were just ignored. Only a few days after Operation Desert Shield destroyed Saddam Hussein’s retreating army, comprehensive international sanctions were imposed on Iraq. They lasted from 1990 to1995 cutting off medical supplies and food imports. Estimates of Iraqi children dying of preventable diseases and malnutrition vary from tens to hundreds of thousands. An ‘oil for goods’ provision in 1995 permitted some humanitarian aid to enter the country. But Saddam Hussein was hanged in December 2006 as consequence of military defeat. Inflation is the most immediate result of even partial enforced economic isolation. It powerfully affects the poorest. According to Demarais writing in Backfire, American OFAC sanctions on Venezuela in 2018 caused the price of a roll of toilet paper to jump “to nearly 3 million bolivars, requiring a three-kilogram stack of 1,000 bank notes to pay for it”. Mass emigration followed. The regime survived. American companies shared a lot of the resultant pain from US sanctions while non-American companies were able to profit by filling the gaps created. Congress dealt with growing complaints from US business by legislation subjecting foreign companies to the same penalties for trading with Cuba. In a second 1996 Act, sanctions on Iran’s - and Libya’s - energy sectors were extended to include and enforce compliance by all international companies. This was the beginning of highly contentious ‘extraterritorial’ ‘secondary’ sanctions. The European Union, coerced by the Americans, had enough clout to stand up to them. It warned that they would initiate a dispute procedure in the WTO (World Trade Organisation) which most believed the EU would win. Clinton backed down. By the turn of the century, OFAC, without abandoning the blunt weapon of embargoes, was moving on to sectoral sanctions, focusing on technology and finance, applied now to Iran. The US was playing to its strengths, in particular the dominant role of the dollar in global financial services. Companies and individuals in pariah countries were put on a Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list barring them from doing business - in dollars - with the USA. Information on banks’ customers and networks became critical. In 2012, under strong US pressure, SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications), the over 11,000 strong cooperative network for international payments with its – today's - $5 trillion worth of transactions daily, 40% conducted in dollars, cut off Iranian banks. But come the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014 and China’s increasingly autocratic behaviour both nationally and internationally, the USA - and European Union – squared up to two significantly more formidable targets. A second phase in the sanctions saga opened up. The Peoples’ Bank of China immediately began developing its own financial service, CIPS (Cross-Border Interbank Payment System), for international payments in renminbi. After its launch in 2015, CIPS attracted not only HSBC and Standard Chartered but also Deutsche Bank, Citi and BNP Paribas, the French investment banking group. In January 2023 Russia and Iran joined up to create their own payments network after SWIFT excluded some important Russian banks. The sanctioned targets were hitting back. Agathe Demarais indicates in Backfire that the growth of cryptocurrencies is providing sanctions-proof banking. China issued its own state-backed cryptocurrency in 2019, the digital renminbi. Today some 300 million Chinese citizens use mobile phones for such accounts, thus creating another doorway to comprehensive government surveillance. The Communist Party leadership now appear to be aiming at total control of the country’s financial system by displacing its two big tech firms, Alibaba and WePay, in the field of digital payments. So the not-so hidden logic of sanctions is the ‘decoupling’ of the world’s major economies, the fracturing of the global economy into competing economic blocs. China’s Belt and Road Initiative, its extensive investment in trade and infrastructure in Africa, its role in the global South’s association of big economies, BRICS, leaves little doubt which bloc will eventually incorporate the most States. One brake on such ‘decoupling’ is the crucial role of semiconductors and microchips in all economies and in military-industrial complexes. Put crudely ‘it’s the supply-chain stupid’. A key feature of decoupling is a policy of beggar - your- economic- neighbour (and rival) in microchip production. China controls 80% of the production/refining of the world’s vital rare earths used in semi-conductors present in a vast array of modern appliances. A F-35 fighter requires 417 kilos of these metals. But the USA predominates in the equipment, software and design of semi-conductors. A handful of such high-tech firms are collectively worth over $1 trillion. The bulk of mass microchip manufacture takes place in Taiwan and South Korea. In 2020 Chinese legislation restricted the export of 17 rare earths and Trump banned all microchip sales to Huawei and other Chinese companies. Skirmishes in a future economic war? Geopolitics are changing. A multipolar world is emerging. Sanctions have helped shape the present contours of international economic relations. Yet on the whole sanctions don’t achieve their goals, often harming those they are not aimed at and bringing about unintended consequences. States with a powerful coercive apparatus and a cohesive military show considerable durability. Even weak States like Cuba and Venezuela resist successfully. The most that can be said is that war, the alternative to sanctions, is far worse. Backfire is a fascinating must-read for those who contribute to making foreign policy, for those who suffer from it, and for us baffled onlookers who fear for our grandchildren’s future. See TheArticle 18/04/2023 Finland has just joined NATO. Norway was a founding member in 1949. Sweden wishes to join but to date is blocked by Turkey.
A few days ago, the Russian Ambassador in Stockholm, Ukrainian-born Viktor Tatarinsev, commented “the Swedes will undoubtedly be sent to their deaths in the interests of others” adding that joining NATO would make Swedes “a legitimate target of Russia’s retaliatory measures”. Putin had similarly warned that Finland stood to suffer “serious military and political consequences". You have to admire these three Nordics close neighbors of Russia, Finland with 800 miles of shared border. Their total population today is a mere 21.5 million. They are threatened by a Russian Federation of 146 million. St. Petersburg is about the same distance from the Finnish border as Aberystwyth from London. Defiance like this takes courage. Not the first instance of courageous Nordic foreign policy. In the 1980s while working on human rights and international development, I grew to respect Sweden and her fellow Nordics as international actors. My first encounter was with Birgitta Berggren, the southern Africa desk officer of SIDA (the Swedish International Development Agency) - at the time equivalent to Britain’s now defunct DfID. She was seeking assistance in funding the ‘home front’ of the African National Congress (ANC). A British passport meant I did not require a visa involving special checks to enter South Africa and my Church contacts would help. The 1980s saw an intensification of the Cold War and the final crisis of apartheid. In 1982 Nelson Mandela was moved off Robben Island to Pollsmoor prison where the South African National Intelligence Agency could sound him out more privately – most likely in the hope of driving a wedge between him and the ANC leadership. They failed. In November 1985 while Mandela was in hospital for a prostate operation, ‘Kobie’ Coetzee, the Minister of Justice opened the first government talks. Under pressure from Pretoria, the Frontline States with their many South African exiles had reached bilateral agreements with the apartheid regime that restricted or closed the bases of the ANC’s military wing. But in 1983 within South Africa, the UDF (United Democratic Front) had been launched. Made up of some 400 civic, trades union, student, women’s and church-linked organisations, despite repression, it gained ground becoming the key pillar of the ANC’s ‘home front’. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Olof Palme until his assassination in February 1986, support for national liberation movements in Southern Africa was a key element of the Swedish Social Democrats’ foreign policy. By the mid- 1980s, in contrast to the US and UK who were doing their best to make sure the ANC failed, Sweden was treating the ANC as a government in waiting. What mattered for most western governments was that the ANC was ‘Soviet-backed’. ‘Swedish-backed’ or ‘Nordic backed’ would have been just as accurate a description, especially when referring to non-military support. * Sweden had begun supporting the ANC’s “home-front” in the mid-1970s and in the 1980s sought to increase their funding via the trade unions and the Churches within South Africa. In the words of SIDA’s Lars-Olof Edström in Lusaka, Zambia in 1980: “ANC is no longer an exile organisation [but] very active inside South Africa. Support to the internal work must accordingly constitute an essential part of the Swedish assistance”. The Nordics’ intervention was both timely and strategically important. Between 1969-1995 SIDA’s regular assistance to the southern African liberation movements, using figures from Tor Sellström’s Sweden & National Liberation in Southern Africa Vol II, adjusted for inflation and converted to sterling, amounted to £100s of millions in current values. And this does not include money for cultural activities, information, research work and emergencies. Half of it went to the ANC. Many in the Churches inside South Africa were ready to help deliver financial assistance to the ANC. An influential group of radical Christian leaders supporting and consulting the ANC determined the spending priorities. They were led by Rev. Dr. Beyers Naudé, a prominent Dutch Reformed Church minister who had resigned from his ministry in order to oppose apartheid. He endured banning (severe restrictions on movement and political activity) from 1977 to 1985. Naudé, with influence in the Netherlands and internationally, then became secretary-general of the South African Council of Churches (SACC) and a key point of reference for the Swedish legation in Pretoria. Alongside him were the theologian Father Albert Nolan OP, who when elected master-general of the Dominicans had asked to be allowed to continue his work in South Africa, and Rev. Frank Chikane, who succeeded Naudé as secretary-general of the SACC. He survived an attempted poisoning ordered by the Minister of Law and Order, Adriaan Vlok. With the blessing of this Christian group Swedish money financed - non-military - needs of ANC activists as well as supporting organisations like COSAS (Congress of South African Students), the ANC’s youth movement. A Catholic network led by the Fr. Albert Nolan worked with the internal organisations of the ANC. The Grail, a lay Catholic women’s association, sheltered activists on the run, handing out Swedish money for travel and other needs. One need was a de-bugging device sourced in Croydon and delivered to the UDF. Thabo Mbeki, a future President of South Africa, speaking in a 1995 interview, said that the special role of Sweden “was to say that the people have got the right and the duty to rebel against oppression” and “as part of the recognition of that right...you support the people who are engaged in the struggle”. “You do not define what they should be”. Or become, he might have added. Sweden through the Churches and trade unions made a significant contribution to internal grassroots mobilisation. By the mid-1980s Church relations with the ANC extended from grassroots to the highest level. Thabo Mbeki travelled often to London so I was able to consult him in a variety of venues, mainly pubs. Meetings between the Southern Africa Catholic Bishops Conference (SACBC) and the ANC began with a discussion between Archbishop Denis Hurley, President of the SACBC and Oliver Tambo, the exiled ANC President, at the Great Western Hotel, Paddington, London - hugs, beer and sandwiches. This meeting was followed by a more formal one in Harare between the South African bishops in the SACBC and Mbeki. The Churches also established wider more complex links. Until the mid-1980s the European Economic Community (EEC), the USA and UK resisted pressure to impose sanctions on the apartheid regime. The EEC initiated, and was ready to fund, a face-saving ‘special programme for the victims of apartheid’ within South Africa. To this end they asked two representatives, one Protestant and one Catholic to a consultative meeting in Brussels. Rev. Beyers Naudé represented the Protestants. At the time, Father Smangaliso Mkhatshwa, secretary- general of the Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference (SACBC), was in prison and suffering torture. I was surprised to be asked to go instead of him. The array of EU officials that greeted us was even more surprised to hear from Dr. Naudé of the restrictive conditions which the Churches demanded before they would accept and distribute EEC funding. No money should go to Inkatha, an ethnic Zulu political movement shaping up for a civil war with the non-racial nationalist ANC. Germany, USA, and UK greeted Inkatha as an opponent to the ANC despite the risk of serious violence. Civil war came close during government negotiations between 1990 and 1994, with massacres involving Zulu militia trained and armed by the South African Defense Force. During the 1994 elections, the Nordics through the Churches continued their efforts to contain violence. Highly effective election monitoring, notably by international World Council of Churches’ teams, played a significant part in keeping campaigning and voting peaceful. I accompanied former President of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda, monitoring in KwaZulu Natal, the main area of Inkatha support. Tensions were palpable but a ceasefire ordered by the Inkatha leader, Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, held. The ANC won 62% of the national vote, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) 10%. In the bipolar world of the 1970s and 1980s, Swedish governments of different persuasions and the Nordics, had the courage to break the Cold War mould by making difficult ethical and political choices. In their support for the liberation movements, they had in the main the enthusiastic agreement of civil society. Human rights and development agencies, diplomats, anti-apartheid and women’s groups, trades unions and Churches interacted and worked together. The result and success of the 1994 elections was a vindication of their judgement. The closing lines of Tor Sellström’s magisterial study, Sweden & National Liberation in Southern Africa point to an anomaly worth pondering: “the great Swedish support to the South African struggle against apartheid has not become a fact worth mentioning in the textbooks... It would have been possible to point out the importance that also a small country like Sweden can have. But the textbooks are silent”. *See William M. Minter (Africa Today 1996), On Tuesday 21 March this year Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) issued, in their words, an “unprecedented warning” in the form of a “strategic alert”. The gist of the alert was that the ‘judicial reforms’ proposed by Prime Minister Netanyahu and his ultra-nationalist and religious extremist coalition would “seriously harm the functioning of the IDF” (Israel’s Defense Forces), the economy, and “endanger relations with the USA”. The reforms would give the Government of Israel control over the appointment of judges and weaken the Supreme Court’s ability to undertake judicial review of legislation.
The unprecedented nature of the strategic alert is explained by the unprecedented level and nature of the protests against the proposed ‘reforms’ now entering their twelfth week. The numbers taking to the streets in Israel’s cities have been prodigious with the Jewish crowds predominately – but not exclusively - drawn from Israel’s professional elites. The INSS was in particular reacting to the increasing number of IDF reservists joining street protests and threatening not to turn up for military service. In two letters published on 16 March, some 750 Air Force, special forces, Mossad and military intelligence officers warned of imminent threats to stop volunteering for duty. The Likud Party Minister of Defence, Yoav Galant, publicly called for a halt to the reforms and was promptly fired by Netanyahu. President Biden, throughout his political career, has strongly espoused the view of Israel as a deserving democratic outpost in the Middle East and has acted accordingly. His relationship with Netanyahu has been warm. But Washington is continuing to express ‘concern’ about the proposed drastic judicial curbs. In a telephone call with Netanyahu, Biden expressed his belief that “democratic societies are strengthened by genuine checks and balances, and that fundamental changes should be pursued with the broadest possible base of popular support”. It is some measure of the Biden administration’s former inaction that this modest and diplomatic statement, barely a fraternal admonition, has had an impact on the INSS. This current outcry in Israel is new. It is not an extension of existing Jewish protests against violations of the human rights of Arab citizens of Israel, nor of those of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, though some protestors may be supporters of B’Tselem, Yesh Din, and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) Israel’s major human rights organisations. Neither do current protests seem a harbinger of calls for a new peace initiative. But there are very good reasons why peace and human rights ought to be on today’s Jewish protestors’ placards. Whether citizens of Israel, in Gaza or the West Bank, relations between Arab Muslims and Jewish Israelis - with Christians and Druze to a lesser extent - are at boiling point. The May 2021 evictions of Arabs from East Jerusalem and skirmishes around the Al-Aqsa Mosque on Temple Mount sparked street fighting between Jews and Arabs within Israel itself. This led to a wave of attacks and counterattacks on and from Gaza and the West Bank. 250 Arabs were killed, ten synagogues left in flames, 112 Jewish homes burned, and 13 Jews lost their lives. In October 2022 alone, 32 Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers were killed. This continuing high level of violence encourages narratives of the enemy within which carry with them the ugly prospect of civil war plus a third intifada. To date averting such dangers do not feature prominently amongst the protestors’ demands on Netanyahu. The dangers, though, were clearly spelt out in a prescient response to the May 2021 communal violence by the Catholic Bishop Declan Lang and the Anglican Bishop Christopher Chessun in the Holy Land Coordination: “unless the international community is willing to adopt a rights-based approach to its peace-making, Israel’s control of the occupied territories will become ever more entrenched, Palestinian rights further encroached upon and outbreaks of fighting increasingly likely. Israel’s security cannot be based on the permanent inequality and disenfranchisement of Palestinians.” (The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales set up the international Coordination group in the late 1990s to act in solidarity with the Christian communities of the Holy Land). Since the 1967 war some 450,000 Jewish settlers have moved into the West Bank and 235,000 into East Jerusalem creating 279 new settlements. I once heard the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks speaking passionately about peace emphasising repeatedly that “peace is in everyone’s interests”. But the truth of that is called in question if it means, without redress, you lose your land, your home, your olive groves and your schools (currently 44 Palestinian schools are due for demolition), all to make room for Israeli Jewish families. The pre-conditions for a two-State solution have disappeared. Israel’s Minister of Defense, Yoav Galant, recently signed an agreement with Bezalel Smotrich, the ‘adjunct Minister of Defense’, giving Smotrich administrative authority over Area C, that is 60% of the West Bank - extracted for Religious Zionist Parties’ support for Netanyahu. A little over a year ago the Board of Deputies of British Jews described Smotrich, during a visit to the UK, as having “abominable views and hate-provoking ideology”. “Get back on the plane”, they wrote in a Hebrew tweet “and be remembered as a disgrace forever”. Five years ago Smotrich was advocating flooding the West Bank with settlers. Irrespective of how much control he will be able to exert over the territory, his annexationist intentions are obvious. The international context is also changing. The bilateral deals that the Trump administration brokered between Israel and the frontline Arab States are fraying. Jordan’s Parliament has voted to expel the Israel ambassador after a typically provocative speech by Smotrich in front of a map showing Jordan as part of ‘Greater Israel’. “There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. There is no Palestinian history. There is no Palestinian language,” he said in Paris on 19 March. And China’s unexpected intervention to reduce the enmity between Saudi Arabia and Iran is a new move in the Middle East with unknown consequences. Meanwhile Netanyahu has been doing the rounds in Europe to garner support. Here, Rishi Sunak is echoing Biden’s mild diplomacy, speaking of the importance of ‘shared democratic values”. In December 2022, he told the Conservative Friends of Israel that Britain’s relations with Israel had ‘never been stronger’. Reading the 2030 Roadmap for UK-Israel bilateral relations, signed on 21 March by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the State of Israel, you can see what he means. It commits to seeking a very wide-ranging partnership including trade, development, defense and security. To say the least, it is unfortunate timing. Foreign Minister Cleverly’s roadmap gives no hint of the cliff edge ahead nor that Israel is in - the INSS’ words - “a looming crisis”. After massive national demonstrations last Sunday provoked by the Minister of Defense’s sacking, a general strike with disruption of Tel Aviv airport and major ports shut down by striking workers, Netanyahu announced yesterday he was postponing the new legislation. It is not enough. Ultra-nationalists were already counter-demonstrating Monday night with violence threatened. Netanyahu is caught in a trap of his own making: requiring concessions to both anti-reformers, delaying until May with less drastic legislation, and pro-reform, granting his extremist National Defense Director, Ben Gvir’s demand for a new civil ‘national guard’. Netanyahu may continue to push for a decisive attack on Iranian nuclear facilities hoping to close ranks behind his inherently unstable coalition government. Iran is fast moving towards sufficient enriched uranium to make a nuclear warhead, and fear of the threat of nuclear proliferation is shared with Western allies. But whatever his next move to prop up his political house of cards, it is unlikely to reduce conflict or be without consequences for the Middle East. See also TheArticle 28/03/2023 The rule of law is the cornerstone of democracy. In Israel, the authoritarianism of Prime Minister Netanyahu and his extremist coalition partners seeking to appoint and curb the Israeli judiciary has brought more than 250,000 protestors onto the streets. In Britain, we seem less concerned about attacks on custodians of the law.
Last week it was Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s turn to call Keir Starmer, the leader of the Opposition, ‘a lefty lawyer’. It has become standard Conservative Party fare. Between 2008-2013, prior to entering politics, Keir Starmer was Head of the Crown Prosecution Service and Director of Public Prosecutions. From 2010 to 2013 he was the main legal adviser to the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government. He was knighted in 2014. When in early 2020 he was competing to be leader of the Labour Party, Corbynistas worried that his politics were far from ‘leftist’. ‘Lefty lawyer’ may be a handy alliteration but Sunak’s language is further indication of the Conservative Party’s continuing populist mindset. Starmer is known in the legal world for his record on human rights. The ‘McLibel’ case, a challenge to freedom of speech over a leaflet denouncing different aspects of McDonald’s corporate practice, is famous. After the case progressed through the British courts, Starmer in 2005 represented pro bono two environmental activists against the might of McDonald’s in the European Court of Human Rights. He was human rights adviser to the Policing Board of Northern Ireland and noted for his work – also pro bono - opposing capital punishment in several Caribbean and African countries. Is the promotion and executive enforcement of human rights law still being branded as ‘lefty’ repeating Boris Johnson’s ‘lefty human rights lawyers’ attacks? By that token John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis qualify for abuse as ‘lefty Popes’. Presumably the Conservative Party is in the business of conserving. But it has become hard to believe that conservatism aims to conserve the key institutions of UK governance and our – unwritten - constitution. In an unusual moment of anger, the historian of government and broadcaster Peter Hennessy, less well known as the cross-bench peer Baron Hennessy of Nympsfield, described Boris Johnson in a BBC interview as “the great debaser in modern times of decency and public and political life, and of our constitutional conventions – our very system of government”. Yet Johnson remains popular with the grassroots of the Conservative Party. No Government likes the constraints imposed upon it by law but dismissing with taunts of ‘fat-cat lawyers’ (yes – once used by Tony Blair), or more dangerously ‘lefty lawyers’, subverts one of the institutions by which we are all protected. It is not so much that Sunak’s playground jibes should be beneath his dignity as Prime Minister diminishing the respect he has gained for his diplomacy in Northern Ireland and Paris, but that such demeaning name-calling subtly undermines the law itself. From where did we get the binary division of ‘left’ and ‘right’ now so entrenched in the language of politics? It dates from 1789 when the French King’s supporters began sitting to the right of the President of the National Assembly with the revolutionaries to the left, though the occupants of the House of Commons benches can hardly be described in terms of royalists versus revolutionaries. Political Parties love binaries. The national argument about EU membership gave us Remainer/Remoaner v Brexiteer as well as ‘the people’ versus ‘the elite’. More appropriately on a global scale we now speak of democracy versus authoritarianism. Political Parties have problems putting ‘clear blue water’ between them. Johnson-style bluster, obliterating any nuance in different political visions within the Opposition plays to the back-benches and is amplified in social media and Sun, Express, Mail and Telegraph. The Opposition are then turned into a monolithic enemy. But today’s political divisions are not adequately expressed by terms such as left versus right. Right and left labels are even less appropriate when they are applied to religious believers. Catholics, for example, are held to be ‘right-wing’ if they hold pro-life, anti-abortion, views. Worldwide there are c. 1.3 billion Catholics, many of them may hold such views; this is a large number of people to designate as politically ‘right wing’. They may, as well as being protective of life in the womb, also have a strong commitment to peace, elimination of capital punishment, trade unionism, the environment, and ‘the preferential option for the poor’ - including refugees and economic migrants. These views are hardly right wing. Just one individual example. Amnesty International was founded in 1961 and in its early years campaigned exclusively in support of prisoners of conscience. It later broadened its mandate to promote all the human rights enshrined in the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights. Between 2007 and 2008, under pressure mainly from their US section, a woman’s right to choose was proposed as an addition to their UN ‘s list. The movement was split pretty evenly on the issue. In response, the late Bruce Kent, an internationally known peace-campaigner, went to see Amnesty UK to ask them not to go down the road of adopting access to abortion as a human right (which Amnesty did unequivocally in 2018). He pointed out that two of the key founders of the organisation, Sean Mcbride and Peter Berenson, were Catholics, and the result would probably be the loss of Catholic members. Bruce as General-Secretary of CND in the 1980s had been a great supporter of the Women’s Peace Camp resisting the placement of cruise missiles at Greenham Common. But, while very sympathetic to the concern for pregnant women’s health and safety, he did not view abortion as a fundamental human right. The 1980s were the last decade of the Cold War and CND was both under surveillance by British Security Services and infiltrated by them at Board level. So not right-wing but a dangerously popular ‘lefty’ then? Up to a point Lord Copper. There are few as courageous and honest as Bruce Kent but there are many others who do not fit into the crude political stereotypes that they are alleged to inhabit. You wouldn’t guess that from the parliamentary Punch and Judy of Prime Minister’s Questions. Instead of answering questions with bluster and aggression, in a poor imitation of Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak would do well to douse what Lord Hennessy called the ‘Bonfire of the Decencies’. He described respecting those decencies as the ‘good chaps’ theory of governing. It needs to be revived if we are to conserve the best of Britain. Rishi Sunak is promising that the Home Office’s - in his words - ‘Stop the Boats Bill’ (the Illegal Migration Bill) will be unveiled within weeks and placed on the government legislative timetable. It is destined for the courts. This year, aspects of Suella Braverman plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda go before the Court of Appeal. We already have a sample of the Home Secretary’s preferred language, a foretaste of how she hopes to deal with legal challenges. An email sent to Conservative Party members in her name blames “an activist blob of leftwing lawyers, civil servants and the Labour Party” for the failure to stop the growing number of little boats heading for Britain. We are yet to hear that her denial of any knowledge of the email being sent has resulted in anyone being disciplined or sacked for failing to get clearance. We may be on the brink of a slippery slope. The Prime Minister should resolve now to respect our own Judges - along with solicitors and barristers - and to acknowledge their important role in a democracy, not least one whose constitution is unwritten. See TheArticle 14/03/2023 How has it come about that, when it comes to choosing a leader of a political party, a politician’s views on same-sex marriage seem to be a deal-breaker? The controversy caused by Kate Forbes, once front runner for leadership of the Scottish National Party (SNP), saying she believed that “marriage is between a man and a woman” did not come out of a clear blue sky. It has deep roots and prompts an important discussion about religious belief and politics.
It is worth recalling the initial slow change in social attitudes after July 1967 when the bill decriminalizing homosexual acts between consenting adults over 21 was given royal assent. The bill at the time excluded Scotland, Northern Ireland and the armed forces. And there were setbacks such as Margaret Thatcher’s Section 28 banning in 1987 ‘the promotion of homosexuality’ in schools. Government provision of civil partnerships in 2004 and the 2010 Equalities Act summarising and simplifying previous anti-discrimination law were major landmarks in achieving equal right for people in same sex relationships. The compatibility of religious belief and practice with the Equalities Act is normally established in the calm and clarity of a courtroom. But since Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation and the instant withdrawal of prominent Forbes supporters, sexuality issues have been manipulated politically in the media by partisan contestants for her position as leader of the SNP. As a result, the ensuing debate has been reduced to clashes on the frontline of the culture war between ‘woke’ and ‘reactionary’ belligerents. Calm and clarity are not the first words that come to mind. Sexual ethics have played a significant role in religious education in the past and still do. People with religious beliefs can hardly complain that issues of sexuality are newsworthy, it is a perennial interest and people of goodwill passionately disagree about it. But does that mean holding socially conservative views based on religious belief should automatically exclude people from high political office? The Equalities Act was intended to protect the rights of minorities whose sexual identities differ from the majority but also to protect the rights of religious minorities. Here are some observations which try to put the problem in historical context. We now inhabit an ethical terrain in which the terms human rights and civil rights have proliferated unhelpfully in popular usage. They have come to trump other ways of talking about and legislating what is the right thing to do. Not everything we might reasonably hope for in a democratic society is a human right or even a civil right. Campaigning for gay rights was about the removal of discrimination. A success was Tony Blair’s 2004 legislation creating civil partnerships in the UK affording same-sex partnerships the civil rights equal to those of heterosexual marriage. In later legal tidying up, the provisions of the 2004 Act became available to those in heterosexual relationships who, for one reason or another, (because of the patriarchal connotations of traditional marriage) did not wish to be married. Peter Tatchell’s successful campaign for same-sex marriage used the brilliant slogan “Equal Love” and was rewarded by the 2013 Same-Sex Couples Act that did away with State prohibition of same-sex civil marriage. The 2013 Act gave recognition to the equal value of same-sex love and thus to the human dignity of the couples in same-sex relationships felt to have been inadequately expressed by the initially special minority provision called civil partnership. But religious organisations were not obliged to religiously marry same sex partners. It was not a human right. The 2004 and then 2013 Acts, subject to the permission of Local Authorities, enabled religious organisations to register marital relationships and perform same-sex marriages as well as civil partnerships. The latter was a major change in the concept of marriage. No longer an exclusively heterosexual institution it became a challenge to traditional Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinking and scripture on marriage, a change in both definition and meaning. It inevitably was, and is, profoundly divisive. The concept of ‘equal love’ is a mainstay of Christian theology and in February 2023 the Church of England General Synod voted to allow priests to bless same sex marriage and civil partnerships. The Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA), though, described it as “schismatic and unbiblical behaviour”. Alongside the no less conservative leaders of GAFCON (Global Anglican Future Conference) the GSFA represents over 70% of the Anglican Communion round the world, mainly provinces in the southern hemisphere. Heaven above knows what they would call approval of the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill. So we come to the Scottish National Party (SNP) and the undeniably courageous Kate Forbes speaking openly about what her Christian - ‘Wee Free’ Presbyterian – beliefs demand. In interviews she has described how she would vote according to her conscience but honour the present and future democratic will even if she personally disagreed with it. A window into her soul best kept closed? Refreshing openness and truthfulness in a politician or foolish candour? Forbes does not have the good fortune to be a German politician. In 2017 the then Chancellor Angela Merkel allowed a free vote on the same-sex marriage Act, voted against it herself, and when resigning four years later enjoyed 80% approval. Throw in a little misogyny and Forbes may have forfeited the role of first Minister to Humza Yousaf who has contrived to miss voting on such issues. Can Scotland trust Kate Forbes to honour the democratic will? The most compelling argument made against her is that whatever she now says no-one can be sure that as First Minister her strong Christian principles wouldn’t later unacceptably influence her policy judgements. Acceptance depends on trusting her word. Strange then that her truth-telling should be distrusted but a serial offender against truth, the untrustworthy Boris Johnson, was elected leader of the Conservative Party and remained popular even when the threat of a Corbyn government receded. We live in a democracy. Those who are unwilling to set aside a candidate’s religious views are free not to vote for them. But the question remains do views on sexuality influence political judgement more strongly than other views? After all, socially conservative views on sexuality do not imply or mean conservative views on all other social and political issues. For example, views on climate change, inequality, defence, health and social care need probing before a candidate is judged either way. Again, why is this minority position on sexuality a deal-breaker? Is this about making faith a private matter, excluding religion from public debate? Forget woke and not woke. It is time to step back, reject the social media lynch mob, and start listening to each other. Writing in The Observer 26 February Kenan Malik’s proposes that in a secular democracy strong religious views can be safely compatible with the top job in, say, the Treasury and Foreign Office but problematic for a Party leader responsible for the totality of policy. Pure conjecture of course but interesting. Yet when we reach a point where someone convicted of raping two women, described as a ‘transgender woman’, is sent to an all-female prison for assessment, it is arguable that Scotland needs someone running the SNP with some old-fashioned ideas, or at least some common sense. The first leadership debate on STV on 7 March will have been an opportunity for participants to listen to religious views and treat them with respect. In the words of the Scottish Catholic Bishops “religion is not a problem for legislators to solve but instead makes its own vital contribution to the national conversation”. Two weeks ago, a Russian frigate docked in South Africa’s Simon’s Town naval base near Cape Town. Admiral Nikolai Evmenov, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian navy and his crew were not there for a swim with the penguins nearby but to lead a joint naval exercise off Durban and Richard’s Bay. The exercise involves the South African Defense Force (SADF) and the naval forces of the People’s Liberation Army of China. Evmenov’s ship carries the Zircon hypersonic cruise missile, Putin’s pride and joy.
The Mayor of Cape Town, Major Geordin Hill-Lewis, a member of the Democratic Alliance, expressed sentiments common to Western Governments and many observers: “All freedom-loving people around the world should rightly be outraged at the South African government's indefensible position and the moral position in this conflict. So, while the Russian ship is here and has been allowed here by the national state, it is certainly not welcome in the Mother City." Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s Minister of International Relations and Co-operation, at first condemned the Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine but then back-tracked under pressure from her President, Cyril Ramaphosa. South Africa’s policy towards Russia is not exceptional. Over 40% of African States have been abstaining from UN votes against Russian aggression in Ukraine. But South Africa, as a member of BRICS a loose association of Brazil, Russia, India and China, is the most significant. Is there any more to say? Yes, even though there is always the risk that explanation will be interpreted as condoning. Why does President Cyril Ramaphosa - head of the Student Christian Movement at school, celebrated leader of the South African National Union of Mineworkers, legally trained, the adroit negotiator who facilitated the deal with President F.W. De Klerk that brought Mandela to power, and a successful businessman - keep this sort of company? We need to go back to the 1960s and early 1970s to the days of the ANC’s then lackluster struggle against the apartheid regime when the Soviet Bloc were almost the ANC’s only supporters. The South African Communist Party and its leaders were an integral and influential part of the ANC and seem to have had relatively high immunity to infiltration by BOSS (Bureau of State Security). The Soviet Union provided funds. From 1987-1988, Cuba and East Germany fought the apartheid army to a standstill and forced their retreat within Angola. The contrast with the policies of the Western powers could not have been more different. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher meeting with the Press during the 1987 Vancouver Commonwealth Conference, refusing to support sanctions advocated by the anti-apartheid movement, described the ANC threat to ‘target’ British companies in South Africa as showing ‘what a typical terrorist organisation it is’. When, in May 1990, her Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, sought £1 million to fund UNHCR repatriation of South African refugees, she categorically refused saying she would never give money to any organisation that practised violence. Forthright and undiplomatic but not out of step with the hostility of British FCO policy towards the ANC. US governments were no less hostile. Reagan adamantly opposed sanctions for years until Congress forced his hand in 1986. That July the New York Times reported credible suspicions that US satellite intelligence was being shared with the apartheid regime. This may have been behind the large-scale slaughter of Namibian nationalist guerrillas, SWAPO entering South African-occupied Namibia from Angola. British policy aimed to split off a supposedly ‘nationalist’ section of the ANC from the communists. When that failed, virtuously pushing for Mandela’s release in the late 1980s, Britain stood by whilst members of the European Economic Community (EEC) dabbled with the idea of supporting the - violent - Zulu Nationalist movement Inkatha to divide the black vote in the 1994 elections. All of the southern African liberation movements were viewed by Western governments through the prism of the Cold War. Only the Nordics responded with a supportive position seeing the future danger of the ANC beholden solely to the communist world. The most notable was Sweden which began funding the external movement of the ANC from 1977, and from 1982 under the leader of the Social Democrats, Olof Palme, increasingly funded what they called the ‘home-front component’, the ANC’s internal movement. It may have cost the Swedish Prime Minister his life. In 1986 at the height of the repression in South Africa, Palme was assassinated by an unknown assailant in the street outside a Stockholm cinema. Funding was managed clandestinely from the Swedish Legation in Pretoria under the resourceful direction on Birgitta Karlstrom Dorph, the Legation’s head, using the Churches and civil society organisations such as the trades unions as intermediaries. Is it too much to imagine that Sweden’s non-alignment in the Cold War and support for the ANC, versus Western governments’ opposition, impressed Ramaphosa? Shortly after the inauguration of the new government in 1994, South Africa joined the non-aligned movement and, from Mandela through the Presidency of Thabo Mbeki, made peaceful resolution of conflicts a foreign policy goal. South Africa’s government has a sovereign right to adopt neutrality especially when the dominant narrative is that the world faces a re-run of the Cold War - at a much higher temperature. But joint exercises with Russia during Putin’s imperialist war does not look much like neutrality. The ruling ANC would argue that they conduct naval exercises with other countries such as France. But they should not be oblivious to the timing of such exercises nor heedless of the abhorrence in which most UN member States hold Putin’s Russia. True, neutral States have never consistently managed punctilious even-handed treatment of the two sides in a conflict. Nor is neutrality necessarily for all seasons as Finland and Sweden, now seeking membership of NATO, have shown. But hundreds didn’t die and thousands suffer in the anti-apartheid struggle to give succour and propaganda opportunities to brutal autocracies. Their sacrifice was to bring about a non-racial democratic South Africa. From Friday 27 January a Yemeni family tuning in to the BBC World Service Arabic broadcasts would be disappointed. To save £28 million towards a shortfall caused by inflation and freezing of the license fee, BBC radio’s ten language services are being shut down and several hundred staff made redundant. It’s digital or TV now for those who can afford it.
Yemen is a destitute, hungry, war-torn country. Few will have the money to buy a mobile phone to catch the only independent news on-line. This unseen discrimination against the poorest in the world may seem a minor, distant matter. But it is small part of a bigger picture. And we should be concerned. For the last few years, the UK has been behaving as if it didn’t have enough money to pursue a coherent Foreign, Commonwealth and Development policy (FCDO). Yet we were one of the 19 founder signatories of the OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development) in 1960. It numbers 38 democracies today. Its mandate is to promote ‘a collaboration in policy standards to promote sustainable growth”. It describes development assistance as directed at “economic development and welfare of developing countries”. Do we really share these goals? There is growing evidence we don’t. In 2021 the aid budget was ‘temporarily’ (weasel words – it is likely to stay that way until the end of the decade) reduced from the UN target of 0.7% of GNP (Gross National Product) to 0.5%. This amounted to a cut of 21% from £14.5 billion to c.£11.4 billion of which c.£7.14 billion (62.6%) was in the form of direct bilateral aid to individual countries, some of it via the World Food Programme, for example feeding the starving in Yemen. The overall budget for Yemen was halved in 2021 from £221 million to £114 million. Yet need continued to grow. Cuts in spending for Lebanon are another egregious example. In July 2021, a year after a huge explosion in a port warehouse caused extensive devastation in Beirut, and on top of Lebanon’s economic collapse, the incoming British ambassador, Ian Collard, inherited an aid budget of £140 million cut from £260 million for the period 2019-2020. According to the newspaper L’Orient Today a further 2021-2022 cut was scheduled to reduce the budget to c. £32 million. Lebanon hosts 2.2 million Syrian refugees and over 200, 000 Palestinians. Its total population is 5.6 million, 40% of whom now require humanitarian assistance. It doesn’t take much imagination to predict the impact of across-the-board cuts of this magnitude on British embassies’ capacity to promote ‘economic development and welfare’. You might have thought that Lebanon, a failed State, tucked perilously between Israel and Syria, would fall within the Foreign and Development Office priority category, alongside Syria and Afghanistan. Not so. In June 2020 Boris Johnson described the aid budget as a “giant cashpoint in the sky” and amalgamated our development ministry with the Foreign Office. But who is making the withdrawals and for what purpose? The Home Office for one. A more accurate description is the budget for plugging holes - of which there are many such as the rising cost of housing and feeding refugees in this country. We have an aid ceiling in the UK. So payment of hotels, for food and other burgeoning refugee expenses cannot be covered by adding to the overall budget which is fixed. An interesting set of submissions to a December 2022 Parliamentary Select Committee on International Aid on the funding of asylum seekers and economic migrants arriving in UK, (on-line thanks to the Washington and London based Global Center for Development), provides detailed evidence. 12% of the UK aid budget is being used to meet some of the current Treasury shortfall. And the sum could double. Just as the effects of climate change are being felt, this means drastic cuts in life-saving humanitarian aid let alone development aid. £700 million went to East Africa to mitigate the consequences of the 2016-2018 droughts. £156 million was budgeted for last year’s continuing and no less severe drought. Over 150,000 thousand applicants for asylum in Britain are waiting for a decision on their status, tens of thousands have been waiting for over three years. In Germany, using a UNHCR triage system, the wait is on average 6-7 months. We are dealing with far fewer Ukrainian refugees than Germany which has issued six times the number of UK visas, or neighbouring Poland which has accepted 1.26 million. Yet, here in the UK the arrival of 45,750 people in small boats in 2022 is treated as a national crisis while the inefficiency and waste of the Home Office is covered by money taken from the world’s hungry. The Home Office under Priti Patel and Suella Braverman appears incapable of managing, timely processing and integrating any arrivals. Part of the problem is the plethora of un-coordinated special programmes for select categories of refugees from Ukraine, Hong Kong, Afghanistan and Syria. Home Office staff don’t even have an adequate data-base and rely on spreadsheets. But at the root is a dysfunctional Home Office led since July 2018, the date of Priti Patel’s appointment, by Ministers simply not up to the job. They have played to the Conservative back benches while expenditure and backlog soared, rhetoric rather than action. Pre-Covid, 2018, the government was spending £370 million on refugee costs in the UK. Today it is projected to be c. £2.7 billion. And this will come out of the aid budget. The OECD does acknowledge that members may want to fund refugees from their aid budgets for the first year after their arrival [my italics]. But none of the G7 countries are funding most of what are called ‘in-donor costs’ from aid in the way Britain does. This expedient is not illegal, simply unethical. It is condemned by a wide range of British NGOs concerned with human rights, the plight of refugees and international development aid. Dipping into the aid budget began in a small way in 2009 under Gordon Brown and expanded under David Cameron. It reached unacceptable proportions under Johnson, Truss and Sunak. Priti Patel’s more than £120 million Migration and Economic Development Partnership, a deportation scheme in collaboration with an authoritarian African State, Rwanda, further championed by Suella Braverman, is the embodiment of the way our former vision of development assistance, and that of the OECD, has been deliberately degraded. So no surprise. ‘Global Britain’ is an empty slogan put about in 2016 to provide Brexit with the illusion of grand purpose. “The whole idea of having a coherent, consistent portfolio of development action has disappeared”, in the words of Geography Professor Michael Collyer of Sussex University. By 2030 it is reckoned conflict and fragile States will be home to 85% of the world’s poor. We neglect them at our peril. Britain does not need empty slogans. We need to nurture clear foreign and development policy objectives, to pursue them and to hold out for an ethical dimension within a coherent FCDO strategy. We should not be making the poor of the world pay for the failures of incompetent Ministers. See TheArticle 14/02/2023 |
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