Foreign Policy In Focus

Holding the director of "Innocence of Muslims," however objectionable a film, responsible for murder doesn't pass the legal smell test.

In his speech before the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, September 25, President Obama denounced the now notorious film denigrating the Prophet Muhammad as "crude and disgusting." He also declined to call the film a catalyst for the tragic deaths of four Americans on September 11 at the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya. Instead, President Obama rightly reaffirmed America’s commitment to freedom of expression and shined a light on extremists.

At the heart of the discourse over the incident is the position that Islam forbids any depiction of its founder. This belief should be respected. In her initial speech condemning the deaths, Secretary Clinton noted that America has always stood for religious tolerance. And so we stand today.

Yet, rather than seizing an opportunity to explain the significance of depicting Muhammad and to explore various perspectives on the violence, some commentators and even world leaders, such as newly-elected Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, suggest that the film constitutes incitement. The implication is that by providing a representation of Muhammad – just like burning a Quran – the creator is inciting Muslims to commit violence. This argument conveniently shifts the blame to the filmmaker.

As last week’s speech makes clear, however, the incitement debate doesn't work. Along with our acceptance of people of all races and religions, America also honors a strong tradition of respect for freedom of expression, grounded in the U.S. Constitution. This tradition allows criticism of religion, including President Obama's own Christian beliefs, as he stated in his address. But violence holds no place in this equation.

Societies do place limits on rights of expression, and these conditions vary based on community beliefs. There is no absolute right to free speech – even in the United States. To push the debate forward, we must understand these relative norms. The internationally recognized crime of incitement, however, generally prescribes that there must be direct incitement to commit a crime. To be direct, the alleged inciter must have intended to induce his audience into the commission of the crime, or at least have been aware of the likelihood of its commission due to his conduct.

To call these actions incitement begs the question – what crime did the filmmaker induce or know he was likely to induce his audience to commit by lobbing it out into the Internet? Murder? The film may have been distasteful, insensitive, and created to inflame certain viewers. Accordingly, in a free society, protests against it should be permissible and legal. A disturbing assumption, however, anchors the incitement argument with respect to events in Libya: Islam permits individuals to commit violence in response to representations of Muhammad. It follows that the filmmaker knew acts of murder might be a consequence of his actions.

The “depiction equals violence” scenario puts the filmmaker on the legal hook. It seems incredulous, however, that the second largest religion worldwide would condone the murder of innocent civilians – diplomats from the very same nation that supported them, along with France and the United Kingdom, through the revolution. The alternative is too ridiculous, and horrifying, to entertain. As President Obama noted Tuesday, “There is no speech that justifies mindless violence.  There are no words that excuse the killing of innocents.” Reactions in Libya to the violence, including the statements of their newly elected Prime Minister Mustafa Abushagur, indicate that many Libyans agree.

The more likely scenario, promulgated by President Obama, is that these murders are the work of extremists. Recent acts of destruction throughout Libya and in its neighbor Mali – in which Salafists have used bulldozers and pickaxes to damage Sufi mosques considered idolatrous, including ones in UNSECO World Heritage Site Timbuktu – support this phenomenon. The splintering of Islam, just like the factionalized components of modern day Christianity, is on the rise. As with relative free speech norms, the current state of Islam must enter the dialogue.

Blaming the filmmaker is not the answer. This approach is futile not only for its dangerous precedent for free speech and condemning views on Islam, but also because it is impractical in a digital era. As President Obama told the UN General Assembly, “In 2012 … the notion that we can control the flow of information is obsolete.” We must therefore drop the illusory incitement debate. The consequences of failure to do so are grave. Without an acknowledgement of the true causes of this violence, Libyans will continue to face the risk of being high jacked by extremists seeking to hinder the journey to democracy. In his speech, President Obama reminded us that when Ambassador Stevens died, Libyans said he was their friend; and so the United States should make the Libyans ours.

Annie Castellani is a fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit law firm, the Public International Law & Policy Group, where she focuses on transitional justice, constitution drafting, and civil society development in Libya and other post-conflict nations. Her views are independent.

The atmosphere was tense during the DRC Briefing at IPS on June 29, 2012. The audience of 45 squeezed into the conference room to hear the updates on Rwanda’s most recent breach of Congolese sovereignty, and the Q & A session threatened to reach a fever pitch.  

The panel, comprised of three Congolese and one Rwandan, represented integral members of Congo's extended civil society family. Each panelist expressed concerns about the future of Eastern DRC, yet convictions about the recent M23 uprising diverged dramatically. Some were convinced the conflict was spurred on by remaining post genocide ethnic tensions between Hutus and Tutsis. Others blamed the Congolese government for its lack of political will to handle conflict. Yet others maintained that the external influence of international actors was muddling the picture and exacerbating the poor image of African nationhood. And, of course, the "corruption card," omnipresent in conversations of the "dark continent's" troubles, was placed on the table early on.

Anyone who has heard of the DRC knows it's a country with some issues but despite the devastating numbers (200,000 displaced), popular media has largely ignored the gravity of the latest mutinies in the Kivu provinces. Perhaps the "resource curse" seems too cliché to make headlines anymore...Or, perhaps the ugly effects of Western involvement are too unpleasant for America's tender ears.

The US government certainly seems to believe the latter is the case. Portions of a recent leaked UN Report provide implicating evidence that Rwandan leaders have been aiding and abetting mutinous rebel leaders. Furthermore, the US has turned a blind eye to its ally’s behavior, suspiciously delaying the release of the report.

However, the root motivation for Rwanda's and the State Department's covert support of violence was largely overlooked by the panel. What the conversation lacked was a focus on the vast amount of valuable minerals in the region and potential succession of the Kivu Provinces. It has been said that Rwanda wishes to see the Eastern DRC break off and form a South Sudan-esque situation. A vulnerable and independent Eastern DRC would make an easily manipulated nation state for the resource hungry Rwanda.

More troubling was the lack of solutions with real teeth. Increased diplomacy between the Rwandan’s and Congolese has a warm fuzzy feel to it but in a situation driven by layers of greed, it sounds hollow and unlikely. Security sector reform was also mentioned as a potential answer to the problematic mutiny. However, if the Congolese government lacks political will and all of its members are defecting to the M23 in the Kivus, it's likely that Kabila's government simply doesn't have the capacity to undertake such reforms.

The situation is likely to remain sticky if the international community continues to play the role of concerned onlooker.

The Wall Street Journal reported the State Department’s tepid response:

"'We are deeply concerned about the report's findings that Rwanda is implicated in the provision of support to Congolese rebel groups,' said U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland. The U.S. has 'asked Rwanda to halt and prevent the provision of such support from its territory.'"

Pentagon, it is time to put your money where your mouth is. Politely asking to cease and desist is a little too polite with the amount of lives at stake.

One of our panelists, Kambale Musavuli, summed up the situation tidily in a July 3rd Al Jazeera interview:

"We are funding half of the [Rwandan] military. They are being trained by AFRICOM and we are still not holding them accountable... Military aid [to the Rwandan Government] is causing conflict in the Congo, and we are partly responsible in the United States."

Ultimately, a push for greater corporate responsibility is needed in the mining regions and must take a increased policy priority. In the mean time, the US government must suspend all aid to Rwanda until the Rwandan army discontinues its supply of ammunition, recruits, and weapons to M23. It’s time to stand with the people of the Congo. Let's talk about an sanctions, not pathetically stand by because we can’t let our corporations suffer from lack of access to minerals. The US has a law that requires the revocation of aid from countries who contribute to violence in the Congo. It's called Public Law 109-456. Let's see that it gets enforced.

President Barack Obama may be steering clear of the Rio+20 Earth Summit, but thousands of government delegates, civil society activists, and business lobbyists are already streaming into Brazil.

I arrived last night and will blog throughout this UN Conference on Sustainable Development. I'll bring you the latest about the talks among those somber-suited delegates who'll buzz around a complex of aircraft hangars on the edge of the city. And I'll sum up the action at the tent city that has sprung up in Rio's vast and verdant Flamengo Park — where the People's Summit for Social and Environmental Justice is taking place.

To kick things off, here's some recommended reading for anyone who's about to board a plane to Rio to attend the summit from June 20-22, or to help you follow the action if you're not. To learn what's at stake, I recommend reading the Rio Conventions, which world leaders agreed to follow during the meeting they held here in 1992. These landmark treaties laid out the principles under which key issues of environmental protection are to be discussed. The three landmark conventions address climate change, biodiversity, and desertification.

Then there's Agenda 21 — a modest and rather toothless action plan for supposedly "sustainable development." (While over-excited tea partiers may consider that document to be a Soros-funded, left-wing conspiracy for the United Nations to achieve world domination, it never had much impact.)

And although the first Rio Earth Summit successfully established a framework for multilateral environmental negotiations, its impact has remained limited. Nature magazine's damning report card, which makes that clear, is also very disturbing. Global greenhouse gas emissions have risen at even faster rates than before. We continue to lose biodiversity at an unprecedented rate. Land degradation is causing the continued spread of deserts.

For this reason, many delegates in Rio this time around are simply calling for measures to implement existing commitments. They say that would be better than creating any new corporate-driven initiatives or issuing yet more empty promises. The Third World Network has a comprehensive overview of the key issues, and is publishing regular updates with details of who said what at the Rio+20 talks.

"Green economy" proposals have proven to be some of the most contentious so far. On June 14, the 133 countries that comprise the G77+China (the largest negotiating bloc, representing the majority of the world's population) walked out of talks on this element of the text. They cited a lack of progress on funding to help developing countries achieve more sustainable development and "technology transfer" mechanisms that could ease patent restrictions to promote the spread of cleaner technologies. Today, they kicked out of the agreement text that would have advocated a "transition to a green economy."

That's a win for progressives. Really. Wait — don't we want a greener economy? Of course we do, but as this briefing, this video , this animation, and this report clearly show, there's widespread concern that the term "green economy" is being used as a cover by rich countries lobbying for new markets to be created in biodiversity and ecosystems, and new avenues for financial speculation. A truly green economy, by contrast, would recognize the limits of what can be "financialized." It would protect both the common good and public resources.

The battle between these very different worldviews will continue here over the coming days. The Rio+20 negotiating text remains littered with language that could be used to promote markets for environmental services. And the fight against the anti-democratic variety of green economics must be waged outside this conference too, because the World Bank and other powerhouses are busily building institutions to support these new markets.

Oscar Reyes is an associate fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies' Sustainable Energy & Economy Network. www.ips-dc.org

World War II ushered in the age of globalization. While the proliferation of information-technology has increased the speed of globalization to breakneck pace in the last two decades, the foundations of the tightly interconnected world we live in now were laid in the early days of World War II by leaders hoping to prevent the next Great War.

Having lived through two cataclysmic world wars, the overriding concern for leaders of the day was engineering an international system that would increase state interdependence, both in an effort to limit conflict and encourage cooperation in the face of crises.

In many ways, the discussions about how to order the international system at the end of World War II reflect the discussions currently under way in the debt-ridden Euro-zone. Then, as now, the largest and most powerful states faced a choice: recognize that a new era of global interdependence required strong and resolute action to stave off future disaster, and that truly we are all in this together, or retreat back towards a policy of isolationism and disengagement and blithely hope that when the storm comes it does not reach your shores.

As in 1944, we cannot allow ourselves to be seduced through fear or greed by the short, narrow and selfish view.

The following was taken from remarks made by the British Minister of State Richard Law at London’s Caxton Hall on October 28, 1943. This passage was published in War and Peace Aims: Extracts from Statements of United Nations Leaders, Special Supplement No. 3 to the United Nations Review, April 30, 1944.

We and our Allies are completely interdependent. This is a world war, and the peace, which will follow will have to be a world peace. Neither we nor any of our Allies can fight this war single-handed. Neither we nor any of our Allies can make peace single-handed. This is the lesson, which by this time, I hope, we shall have thoroughly learned. We shall have learned it through the mistakes of the past and through the triumphs of the present and future.

We shall have to create international institutions or codes of rules, which will sustain the enormously complicated and delicate structure of international security. It is true that we must never again find ourselves in the positions, in which we found ourselves at the time, for example, of the Munich agreement, when there was no collective organization for peace on which we could rely and when we had not the physical strength to defend ourselves. That was a shameful period in our history, a period of blindness and folly, and we must never repeat it. But we must realize that, no matter how strong we may be ourselves, we shall still need the strength of international organizations to buttress political and military security.

I think that is generally recognized not only in this country, but elsewhere. Recent debates in both Houses of Congress show how generally recognized it is in the United States. But there is another aspect of international security, which is not, I think, recognized so widely. It is this. If we make political and military arrangements to secure the peace, and at the same time pursue economic policies which can only lead to war, you will get no peace, but war. Your political and military arrangements will break down.

Man does not live by bread alone, but bread is very important to him. When the war is over, not only this country, but everyone of our Allies will be faced with the same appallingly difficult problem of the demobilization of industry. Every country will be faced with the possibility of shortages or the hardships of unemployment during this period of transition, If we or any other country seek to solve the problem by means of economic warfare, if we seek to protect ourselves against the impact of unemployment by putting it on somebody else’s shoulders, we shall find we have taken the first sure, certain and irretrievable step towards the next war.

I have been made very conscious of the danger in various international discussions covering the economic field in which I have taken part during the past twelve months. I learned from these talks that if we act carefully, if we can show some measure of restraint, if we can look a little bit beyond our noses, there are enough riches in the world greatly to improve the conditions of all of us.

Taking the long view, there is no reason to doubt that we shall be able in this country and others enormously to raise the standards of living and improve the whole condition of the people.

It is the short view I am afraid of. I am fearful lest the short, narrow, selfish view should prevail during the immediate postwar period. That is the time when we shall have to keep an eye on ourselves. That is the time when we must avoid the temptation, which will be very strong, to lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps. We have got to realize, and other nations have got to realize it too, that international co-operation is just as important, perhaps even more important, in the economic field than in the political and military field.

Greg Chaffin is a research assistant for the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London.

History tends to remember the defeat of Japan as a purely American victory. It is unlike the allied victory over Hitler in Europe that was the result of the combined efforts of the United States, Britain, the USSR, the Canadians, Free French and countless others. History remembers victory in Europe as a triumph of the Allies.

The Pacific War is different. In the minds of most Americans, the Pacific War was a one-on-one fight with Imperial Japan, and it was America alone that prevailed. It was American forces that turned the tide against the Japanese at Midway, Americans who carried out the costly strategy of Island-hopping, it was Americans who took the fight to mainland Japan and it was America that broke the back of the Empire by bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Indeed, the American victory in the Pacific, and in particular, certain battles such as Pearl Harbor, Midway and Iwo Jima have become important to the American identity and continue to attract great interest nearly seven decades later.

The United States did achieve a great victory over Imperial Japan, and that accomplishment should be recognized; however, it did not achieve that victory alone. The United States did not have large and powerful allies in the Pacific War as it did in Europe, however, despite this, its Pacific allies played an integral part in achieving victory over Japan.

Australia offered U.S. forces strategic depth within the Pacific theater. Throughout the Pacific war, Australia acted as a sanctuary outside of Japanese reach where battle-weary troops could be rotated away from the front and given the chance to recuperate. Australia also provided invaluable logistical support as U.S. forces began its counter-offensive to retake territory occupied by the Japanese.

The Philippines. a U.S. possession at the time of the war, housed a large contingent of combined U.S. and Filipino forces, including the U.S. Asiatic fleet and was the headquarters of the US Army Far Eastern Command. Thousands of Filipino and American soldiers fought and died alongside one another in a heroic yet doomed attempt to stem the initial Japanese onslaught; many later suffered untold horrors on the infamous ‘Bataan Death March,’ or in Japanese prison camps. Those that escaped formed a guerrilla network to resist the Japanese occupation. Aided by many local villages, Filipino and American soldiers were able to continue to fight the Japanese, and importantly, provide intelligence that proved invaluable to the liberation of the Philippines in 1944, itself a hugely important step towards bringing about the Japanese defeat.

China, one of the original ‘big four’ signatories of the 1942 Declaration by United Nations, was another vital ally in the struggle to liberate Asia and the Pacific. Japan seized on the internal turmoil caused by years of civil war between the Communists and the Kuomintang by invading and conquering Manchuria in 1931. Japanese forces pressed onward into China following the orchestrated attack at the Marco Polo Bridge. The Japanese quickly captured Peking, Shanghai and Nanjing, at which time hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians were killed in some of the worst atrocities of the war. By the time Europe became engulfed in war, the Chinese had been fighting against the Japanese occupation for nearly a decade, in what many would later term, “the forgotten war.” Estimates of Chinese casualties during the war range from 10 to 20 million as the result of enemy action or from widespread famine and illness resulting from the war.

The tenacity exhibited by Chinese forces to continue fighting despite suffering such horrendous losses stretched the Japanese war machine to its breaking point, as the Japanese were required to direct increasingly scarce resources to the Chinese front, thereby hastening their own defeat.

Finally, in what was to prove the war’s final act, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an important detail is often left out in many historical accounts. On August 8^th 1945, two days after the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the USSR entered the war against Japan and advanced troops into Manchuria early in the morning of August 9^th. Shortly after, the second bomb fell on Nagasaki. Emperor Hirohito announced Japan would surrender 6 days later on August 15^th.

In his August 15^th radio address, Emperor Hirohito cited the use of a “new and most cruel bomb,” as the reason for Japan’s capitulation. However it is nearly impossible to conclude that a stark appraisal of the power now arrayed against it upon the Soviet entry into the war was not a significant factor in Tokyo’s decision to surrender.

The United States did do a great deal of the heavy lifting in beating back the Japanese. However, these advances could not have been made without the vital help of its Pacific allies. In many cases, the sacrifices that enabled an Allied victory in the Pacific War have gone unnoticed or unmentioned. As in Europe, victory was only achieved through the collective efforts of nations and peoples united, fighting towards victory.

Greg Chaffin is a research assistant for the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London.