The Progressive Response
Volume 6, Number 25
August 17, 2002
The Progressive Response (PR) is a weekly service of Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF)—a "Think Tank Without Walls." A joint project of the Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Institute for Policy Studies, FPIF is an international network of analysts and activists dedicated to "making the U.S. a more responsible global leader and partner by advancing citizen movements and agendas." We encourage responses to the opinions expressed in the PR and may print them in the "Letters and Comments" section. For more information on FPIF and joining our network, please consider visiting the FPIF website at http://www.fpif.org/.
Tom Barry, editor of Progressive Response, is a senior analyst with the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC) www.irc-online.org and codirector of Foreign Policy In Focus. He can be contacted at <tom@irc-online.org>.
Editor: Tom Barry (IRC)
Table of Contents
I. Updates and Out-Takes
FRONTIER JUSTICE NO. 4: SURRENDERING REASON TO POWER
By John Gershman, Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC)
FAR RIGHT & REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS
By Jodi L. Jacobson and Rupsa Mallik, Center for Health and Gender Equity
SEVEN FALLACIES OF WAR AGAINST IRAQ
By Stephen Zunes
II. Letters and Comments
I. Updates and Out-takes
FRONTIER JUSTICE NO. 4: SURRENDERING REASON TO POWER
By John Gershman, Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC)
(Editor's Note: Frontier Justice is a weekly column written alternately by Tom Barry and John Gershman, foreign policy analysts at the Interhemispheric Resource Center, that chronicles instance of U.S. unilateralism and assault on the multilateralism framework for managing global affairs. It is part of FPIF's new Project Against the Present Danger. These columns are now indexed on the Present Danger.org site at: http://www.presentdanger.org/frontier/2002/index.html .)
International opposition and outrage continues to grow in response to the Bush administration's latest attempt (the third in the past four months) to undermine the International Criminal Court (ICC). After President George W. Bush "un-signed" the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the U.S. government then held the peacekeeping operations in the Balkans hostage until the UN Security Council passed a resolution that exempted peacekeepers from the court's jurisdiction for one year.
Its latest effort involves negotiating bilateral treaties with countries that would prevent them from turning U.S. citizens over to the court. The issue involves Article 98 of the court's treaty, which was designed to allow governments to devise orderly procedures to implement the treaty's preference for prosecutions by national authorities. This provision was premised on the ICC's ability to take jurisdiction of a case should it find that an investigation or prosecution at the national level was not conducted in good faith.
In recent weeks, the Bush administration has approached dozens of governments seeking Article 98 agreements against surrendering any U.S. suspect to the ICC. To pressure them to agree, the administration is citing newly passed legislation, the American Servicemembers' Protection Act. The law is less charitably known as the "Hague Invasion Act" because it authorizes the use of military force to free U.S. and allied suspects from detention by the court. (The ICC will be based in The Hague in the Netherlands.) The Act also places limits on various forms of U.S. military assistance to governments, other than NATO members and specified allies, that refuse to sign Article 98 agreements, unless the president issues a waiver stating that continued military aid is in the national interest.
Two countries, Romania and Israel, have pledged not to turn over U.S. citizens to the court. The Netherlands rejected such a deal and other European Union (EU) countries will meet in the next few weeks to decide a common policy. Switzerland and Yugoslavia have already refused a side agreement and Norway has said it is likely to refuse to sign such an agreement. (None of the three are members of the EU.)
Secretary of State Colin Powell claims the U.S. will not use the threat of withdrawing military aid as a bludgeon to get states to sign Article 98 agreements. Perhaps, but other forms of persuasion are clearly on the table. Romania is anxious to join both the EU and NATO. The U.S. linked the agreement with Romania to its support for Romanian membership in NATO. Now negative reaction from EU officials may have compromised its ambitions to join the EU.
The EU has since advised countries hoping to join the EU not to respond to the U.S. demands until the EU develops a unified policy on the Article 98 agreements in the coming month. Meanwhile a State Department spokesman said that such efforts were "inappropriate, in seeking to direct candidate country foreign policy choices in advance of EU accession." There is no mention of the appropriateness of Bush administration efforts to "direct" the foreign policy choices of other nations.
This week Colombia, the most recent country to ratify the ICC treaty, came under U.S. pressure. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman asked President Alvaro Uribe to shield U.S. military trainers in Colombia from prosecution by the International Criminal Court for any human rights abuses that may arise in connection with their work. Colombia, the third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid, has received nearly $2 billion in U.S. assistance over the past two years.
The irony of the U.S. campaign against the ICC is more than a little thick. Washington pressured the current Yugoslavian government to extradite its citizens to The Hague for the war crimes tribunals, including the former President, Slobodan Milosevic. But the Bush administration and many in Congress--on both sides of the aisle--remain unwilling to allow American nationals to face the same kind of trial. Colombia is the subject of human rights conditions on its military aid from the U.S., but the Bush administration wants to insure that U.S. military advisers will not be held accountable to human rights standards. As Senator Patrick J. Leahy, chair of the Senate Appropriations foreign operations subcommittee who drafted the human rights requirements for U.S. aid to Colombia, said, "I am concerned with the message this sends to the Colombian government when we are urging them to do more to protect human rights."
Human Rights Watch has criticized the Bush campaign against the ICC has undermining the framework of international law. Because the Bush administration refuses to cooperate with the court and rejects the oversight function (even for crimes committed on the territory of governments that have ratified the ICC treaty), governments would violate their treaty obligations if they surrender U.S. suspects to the United States rather than to the ICC. In a letter sent to all governments that have signed the ICC treaty, Human Rights Watch urged them to stand up to the administration's threat to end military assistance unless they agree never to surrender U.S. nationals to the ICC.
This month marks the 57th anniversary of the London Agreement, which established the charter for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg to try Nazis accused of war crimes. It was signed by the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. The U.S. was represented by Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, who went on to serve as the lead prosecutor in Nuremberg. In his opening statement at the Nuremberg trials, he hailed the tribunal, noting that "four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury [that] stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason." The Bush administration has decided it is time for Power to extract tribute from Reason.
On September 3, the court's first Assembly of States Parties will convene at United Nations Headquarters in New York. Made up of states that have ratified the ICC treaty--77 at last count--the assembly is the ICC's governing body. It would be a good time for advocates of international law and justice in the United States to make themselves heard.
(John Gershman <john@irc-online.org> is a senior analyst at the Interhemispheric Resource Center (online at www.irc-online.org).)
For More Information:
Human Rights Watch Campaign on the ICC
http://hrw.org/campaigns/icc/
Coalition for the International Criminal Court
http://www.iccnow.org/
FAR RIGHT & REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS
By Jodi L. Jacobson and Rupsa Mallik, Center for Health and Gender Equity
(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a new FPIF Global Affairs Commentary, posted in its entirety at: http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2002/0208unfpa.html .)
In late July, President Bush cut off funds to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), deeming it guilty by association for abuses within China's one-child family program, despite findings by the administration's own investigative team that no such links exist. Yet while all the focus of public debate is on China and UNFPA, crucial issues about U.S. policies and the politics of reproduction in developing countries continue to be overlooked.
Coercive policies and practices--including the use of targets, incentives, and disincentives--are a legacy of the era of the "population bomb." These practices continue in a number of countries today, and in many cases, Washington's own policies are at least partly to blame. And while the premise of cutting funds to UNFPA is concern for women's rights, the administration and its conservative allies in Congress are working through the legislative and appropriations process and through more covert tactics in a number of countries to undermine the very health services on which millions of women depend for basic care. The irony is that these efforts, coupled with mounting political pressure in many populous countries to cut birth rates farther and faster, increase the likelihood that more women will be subject to heavy-handed approaches to reducing births in the long run.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, mounting fears about the effects of rapid population growth on poverty, the environment, and international security led to a focus on reducing birth rates throughout the world. National family planning programs were established in many populous countries, including Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, and Peru. Where social conditions were conducive and individual and social goals coincided, birth rates fell relatively quickly. But where demographic objectives were out of sync with individual preferences, fertility declined much more slowly, if at all.
To hasten fertility declines, donor nations invested heavily in family planning programs. The U.S. Congress, for example, concluded that "population control" was necessary to preserve order and stability in developing countries-and thus protect U.S. interests. Annual appropriations grew rapidly and the United States quickly became the leading donor in this area. U.S. influence in some programs grew markedly. Over a 25-year period ending in the mid-nineties, for example, the U.S. contributed one-fourth of all funds for Mexico's family planning program.
As investments increased, governments simultaneously put increasing pressure on these programs to show results. The U.S. Congress developed stringent reporting requirements for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), requiring USAID to demonstrate how funding translated into increasing contraceptive use, numbers of births averted, and lower birth rates overall.
As a result of the pressure to perform, "choice" became a relative concept in many programs. In the 1980s, for example, providers in Indonesia were initially trained to insert Norplant, but not to remove it, leaving women who suffered side effects or changed their minds without recourse, and eventually tainting the method itself. During the 80s and 90s in Mexico, large numbers of women delivering babies in government maternity hospitals were sterilized without consent, a practice that continues in at least some states today. In Bangladesh, India, Mexico, Peru, and elsewhere, women were encouraged to "choose" sterilization and IUDs over other "less effective" methods. Food, money, and other incentives were used along with disincentives in a carrot and stick approach, especially in marginalized communities. Pressure was put on health care providers, whose salaries and even jobs sometimes depended on the numbers of new users recruited.
The historical tension between individual needs and demographic goals created a striking paradox that persists today. Family planning services were and are desperately needed by women seeking to control their fertility safely and effectively. Indeed, increased access to a wide range of reproductive health services is quite literally a life and death issue in places where complications from pregnancy and delivery, unsafe abortion, and HIV are the leading causes of illness and death among women in the prime of their lives. Yet from their inception, these services became the conduit for a political agenda that had less to do with women's needs than it did with the achievement of demographic goals.
Strenuous efforts to improve services are being made by international agencies such as UNFPA, USAID, and innumerable national and international NGOs, but these have been persistently undermined by the recurrent funding cuts sought by conservatives. Multilateral institutions, frequently viewed by recipient governments as more independent than bilateral donors, can act as a more effective counterweight to coercive measures. Last year, in the state of Gujarat, India, for example, the government considered stringent measures aimed at promoting two-child families. In field visits conducted last fall, sources both within and outside the government repeatedly told us that UNFPA played a singular role in lobbying for critical changes to the policy that focused on individual rights.
Problems in these programs are a reality, but given the urgent need for reproductive health services worldwide, they are far from the whole story. Yet the conservative right here and abroad have nonetheless joined forces to undermine reproductive health programs in every way possible, using human rights as a foil for their efforts, while making no commitment to improving women's health or taking meaningful steps to eliminate coercion. In effect, the right has merely replaced one anti-woman political agenda with another.
Each year, for example, conservatives in the U.S. Congress seek new ways to limit funding for family planning by insisting on onerous procedures such as "metering," in which funds appropriated by Congress were literally meted out to USAID in increments so small that programs could not function properly. Congressman Chris Smith, who has made a career of bashing health programs, recently visited Peru where he and his staff have been working doggedly behind the scenes to undermine access to emergency contraception and to the equipment needed to treat life-threatening infections in women with complications from unsafe abortions.
In addition, laws passed in recent years by the U.S. Congress under the guise of preventing coercion instead are routinely used as a tool to further undermine programs in ways that are likely to increase it. In 1998, for example, Congressman Tiahrt, who earlier had tried and failed to completely eliminate U.S. bilateral funding for family planning, attached an amendment to the 1998 appropriations bill that calls for withdrawing funds from any country in which violations can be found. Since then, the Tiahrt Amendment has been used by conservatives to mandate cumbersome monitoring and reporting by USAID, and to justify sending missions abroad to investigate abuses for the purposes of cutting funds altogether.
Eliminating coercion while promoting women's health and rights will simultaneously require a dramatic increase in funds to expand and improve reproductive health programs worldwide and an unfailing commitment to providing a wider range of needed services. Finally, this agenda requires an acknowledgment that having helped create the situation in the first place, the U.S. has a moral and ethical obligation to help change it. In the annual battles to cripple UNFPA and persistently attack USAID, the conservative right in the United States has shown no inclination for such an agenda.
(Jodi L. Jacobson <jjacobson@genderhealth.org> is Founder and Executive Director and Rupsa Mallik is a Program Associate at the Center for Health and Gender Equity in Takoma Park, Maryland (online at www.genderhealth.org).)
SEVEN FALLACIES OF WAR AGAINST IRAQ
By Stephen Zunes
(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a new FPIF Policy Report, posted in its entirety at: http://www.fpif.org/papers/iraq2.html .)
The United States appears to be barging ahead with plans to engage in a large-scale military operation against Iraq to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein. In the international community, however, serious questions are being raised regarding its legality, its justification, its political implications, and the costs of the war itself.
Such an invasion would constitute an important precedent, being the first test of the new doctrine articulated by President George W. Bush of "preemption," which declares that the United States has the right to invade sovereign countries and overthrow their governments if they are seen as hostile to U.S. interests. All previous large-scale interventions by American forces abroad have been rationalized--albeit not always convincingly to many observers--on the principle of collective self-defense, such as through regional organizations like the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) or the Organization of American States (OAS). To invade Iraq would constitute an unprecedented repudiation of the international legal conventions that such American presidents as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower helped create in order to build a safer world.
This policy report attempts to encourage popular debate by raising a number of concerns that challenge some of the key rationales and assumptions behind such a military action. One of the seven fallacies is that there is no proof that Iraq is developing weapons of mass destruction.
Despite speculation--particularly by those who seek an excuse to invade Iraq--of possible ongoing Iraqi efforts to procure weapons of mass destruction, no one has been able to put forward evidence that the Iraqis are actually doing so, though they have certainly done so in the past. The dilemma facing the international community is that no one knows what, if anything, the Iraqis are currently doing.
In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War and the subsequent inspections regimen, virtually all Iraq's stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, delivery systems, and capability of producing such weapons were destroyed. Inspectors with the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) were withdrawn from Iraq in late 1998 before their job was complete, however, under orders by President Clinton prior to a heavy four-day U.S. bombing campaign. The Iraqi government has not yet allowed them to return. Prior to that time, UNSCOM reportedly oversaw the destruction of 38,000 chemical weapons, 480,000 liters of live chemical weapons agents, 48 missiles, six missile launchers, 30 missile warheads modified to carry chemical or biological agents, and hundreds of pieces of related equipment with the capability to produce chemical weapons.
In its most recent report, the International Atomic Energy Agency categorically declared that Iraq no longer has a nuclear program.
In late 1997, UNSCOM Director Richard Butler reported that UNSCOM had made "significant progress" in tracking Iraq's chemical weapons program and that 817 of the 819 Soviet-supplied long-range missiles had been accounted for. A couple dozen Iraqi-made ballistic missiles remained unaccounted for, but these were of questionable caliber. Though Iraqi officials would periodically interfere with inspections, in its last three years of operation, UNSCOM was unable to detect any evidence that Iraq had been further concealing prohibited weapons.
The development of biological weapons, by contrast, is much easier to conceal, due to the small amount of space needed for their manufacture. Early UNSCOM inspections revealed evidence of the production of large amounts of biological agents, including anthrax, and charged that Iraq had vastly understated the amount of biological warfare agents it had manufactured. In response, UNSCOM set up sophisticated monitoring devices to detect chemical or biological weapons, though these devices were dismantled in reaction to the U.S. bombing campaign of December 1998.
Frightening scenarios regarding mass fatalities from a small amount of anthrax assume that the Iraqis have developed the highly sophisticated means of distributing these bioweapons by missile or aircraft. However, there are serious questions as to whether the alleged biological agents could be dispersed successfully in a manner that could harm troops or a civilian population, given the rather complicated technology required. For example, a vial of biological weapons on the tip of a missile would almost certainly either be destroyed on impact or dispersed harmlessly. To become lethal, highly concentrated amounts of anthrax spores must be inhaled and then left untreated by antibiotics until the infection is too far advanced. Similarly, the prevailing winds would have to be calculated, no rain could fall, the spray nozzles could not clog, the population would need to be unvaccinated, and everyone would need to stay around the area targeted for attack.
Although Iraq's potential for developing weapons of mass destruction should not be totally discounted, Saddam Hussein's refusal to allow UN inspectors to return and his lack of full cooperation prior to their departure do not necessarily mean he is hiding something, as President Bush alleges. More likely, the Iraqi opposition to the inspections program is based on Washington's abuse of UNSCOM for intelligence gathering operations and represents a desperate effort by Saddam Hussein to increase his standing with Arab nationalists by defying Western efforts to intrude on Iraqi sovereignty. Indeed, the Iraqi defiance of the inspections regime may be designed to provoke a reaction by the United States in order to capitalize on widespread Arab resentment over Washington's double standard of objecting to an Arab country procuring weapons of mass destruction while tolerating Israel's nuclear arsenal.
A far more likely scenario for an Iraqi distribution of biological agents would be through Iraqi agents smuggling them clandestinely into targeted countries. This is what led to some initial speculation, now considered very doubtful, that the Iraqis were behind the anthrax mail attacks during the fall of 2001. To prevent such a scenario requires aggressive counterintelligence efforts by the United States and other potentially targeted nations, but this type of terrorism is not likely to be prevented by an invasion. Indeed, a U.S. invasion could conceivably encourage rogue elements of Iraqi intelligence or an allied terrorist group to engage in an anthrax attack as an act of revenge for the heavy Arab casualties resulting from U.S. bombing. One of the frightening things about biological weapons production is the mobility of operations. A "regime change" engineered by the U.S. would not necessarily ensure the closure of labs producing such weapons, since they could easily be relocated elsewhere or even continue to operate clandestinely in Iraq.
U.S. officials have admitted that there is no evidence that Iraq has resumed its nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons programs.
Finally, Saddam Hussein has demonstrated that he cares first and foremost about his own survival. He presumably recognizes that any effort to use weapons of mass destruction would inevitably lead to his own destruction. This is why he did not use them during the Gulf War. In the event of a U.S. invasion, seeing his overthrow as imminent, and with nothing to lose, this logic of self-preservation would no longer be operative. Instead, such an invasion would dramatically increase the likelihood of his ordering the use of any weapons of mass destruction he may have retained.
Saddam Hussein's leadership style has always been that of direct control; his distrust of subordinates (bordering on paranoia) is one of the things that has helped him survive. It is extremely unlikely that he would go to the risk and expense of developing weapons of mass destruction only to pass them on to some group of terrorists. If he does have such weapons at his disposal, they would be for him and nobody else. In the chaos of a U.S. invasion and its aftermath, however, the chances of such weapons being smuggled out of the country into the hands of terrorists would increase. Currently these weapons, if they do exist, are under the control of a highly centralized government unlikely to provoke an attack by passing on the weapons to terrorist groups.
The serious moral, legal, political, and strategic problems with a possible U.S. invasion of Iraq require that the American public become engaged in the debate over the wisdom of such a dramatic course of action. What is at stake is not just the lives of thousands of Iraqi and American soldiers and thousands more Iraqi civilians but also the international legal framework established in the aftermath of World War II. Despite its failings, this multilateral framework of collective security has resulted in far greater international stability and far less intergovernmental conflict than would otherwise have been the case.
During the 2000 election campaign, George W. Bush scored well among voters by calling for greater "humility" in U.S. foreign policy, decrying the overextension of U.S. military force, and criticizing the idea that the U.S. armed forces should be engaged in such practices as "nation-building" in unstable areas. As president, Bush has made a remarkable reversal of this popular position and appears eager to embark on perhaps the most reckless foreign military campaign in U.S. history.
(Stephen Zunes <zunes@usfca.edu> is a professor at the University of San Francisco and Middle East analyst at Foreign Policy In Focus.)
II. Letters and Comments
The reference to John Bolton's comment on the ICC in your Frontier Justice column (available online at http://www.presentdanger.org/frontier/2002/0808power.html ) reminded me that apparently there is an effort in England to have Saddam Hussein indicted before the ICC. Those of us who believe in nonviolence may not be able to have peace. But if we can not have peace, let us have law not war. Yes, the ICC only has jurisdiction over actions that took place after it was duly ratified, but Saddam Hussein continues to violate the norms the ICC has jurisdiction over. Think how much pressure there would be on the Bush administration to rethink its approach to Iraq if it were obliged to frame it as a law enforcement action against the criminal Saddam rather than as a war against a rouge state that would warrant the kind of killing that occurred in Afganistan. Frankly, I believe the logic of law enforcement would be politically irresistible to most American people. Might even move the U.S. toward seeing the benefits of signing the treaty.
- Jerry Kendall <7kendall@jmls.edu>
(Editor's Note: An analysis of religious-political conflict in India by Arun Swamy has elicited an influx of responses, some of which have been included in previous editions of the Progressive Response--including four letters in the past two editions: http://www.fpif.org/progresp/volume6/v6n24.html and http://www.fpif.org/progresp/volume6/v6n23.html . His controversial commentary can be found at: http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2002/0203indhind.html . Swamy, an analyst at the East-West Center, is an FPIF contributor whose latest commentary is "Powell Punts in South Asia," posted at: http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2002/0208powellpunt.html .)
I have received many responses to my article "Is India Going the Way of 1930s Germany," initially written in March 2002 in the wake of the Gujarat riots, some sent directly to me, and some to FPIF. Until a week ago, these ran about half in support of my piece and half critical of it, with many of the supportive comments coming from activists and journalists in India with a closer knowledge of the events perhaps than either I or my critics can claim. As there has been a renewed flurry of interest in the piece it seems necessary to respond to some criticisms. Since these repeat themselves considerably, I will make two general points before responding to the four letters published by FPIF.
First, I should emphasize what the piece was about and what it was not about. The article was not concerned with Hindu-Muslim relations in India generally. Neither did it argue that history was repeating itself in all respects. While I will defend my characterization of Hindu Nationalism as "fascist" below, the analogy drawn was explicitly to the "rise of Hitler." (I first titled the piece "The Weimarization of the Indian Republic.") The piece was concerned with the implications of what appeared, and still appears to have been a coordinated, state-sponsored attack on a minority group, that used public records to identify Muslim homes and businesses and went on for days, the continued provocations of right-wing groups thereafter (including an attack on the state assembly of Orissa that had nothing to do with Hindu-Muslim relations), and the paralysis of centrist political parties--both in the opposition and the ruling coalition--who protested but could do little.
Second, I should respond to the many critics who have complained that I have downplayed or excused the attack on the train at Godhra that started the cycle of violence in Gujarat. Had I wished to excuse the attack I would have mentioned the widely circulated reports--first made by Hindu reporters for a Gujarati language newspaper--that the Hindu activists proceeding to and from Ayodhya had repeatedly harassed Muslim vendors on train platforms along the route and had even, at Godhra, molested and briefly abducted a teenage Muslim girl. I did not do so because Godhra was not the issue. Whether Hindus or Muslims started any particular cycle of violence was not the issue. The issue was and is the active complicity of the state government in the attacks on Muslims throughout Gujarat, the passive acquiescence of the central government in the actions of the state government, and the feeble response of mainstream political parties to these events.
Bhadraiah Ramapalli complains that I have not made "an independent inquiry" into how many of the Hindus killed at Godhra were activists. To my knowledge, nobody has made such an inquiry. However, at the time the killings started in Ahmedabad, nobody had made an independent inquiry into who set the train on fire either: it was simply assumed that local Muslims had done so. Since my article was written there has been an independent forensic report that concludes the fire was set from inside the train compartment, raising serious doubts about who actually set the fire. Mr. Ramapalli does not mention this report. Neither does he acknowledge the numerous independent inquiries that concluded that the widespread killings of Muslims in Ahmedabad had to have been coordinated and were probably state-sponsored, making this event quite different from earlier riots. This conclusion was reached by India's National Human Rights Commission, as well as major Indian newspapers. Finally, every independent scholarly inquiry into whether there was ever a temple on the site of the former Babri Masjid has concluded that there is no evidence of this having been the case, but this has never slowed down the movement.
V.C. Vijayaraghavan makes many accurate observations but draws inaccurate inferences from them. It is true that Hindu nationalism has not been characterized by a cult of the leader--although the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, which once fanned hatred against South Indians like Mr. Vijayaraghavan and myself is an exception. However the RSS' emphasis on loyalty to the organization is the source of its longevity and therefore not necessarily a source of comfort to the rest of us. Indians do continue to enjoy most political and civil liberties, but that is because the country's institutions are still intact. The BJP has been limited by the fact that it is dependent for power on allies who resist some of its initiatives, its coalition has not controlled the upper house, it has not had the sympathy of the president or the courts, and most state governments are controlled by the opposition. The Vajpayee government resigned in 1998 (and 1996 after its brief 13 days in power) because it had no choice. The president had required the government on both occasions to prove its majority or leave office. The passage of the Prevention of Terrorism Bill, discussed in the article, raises serious questions about the commitment of the government to civil liberties. And what the article warned against was the "gradual" erosion of these protections as the moderate political establishment begins to make its peace with Hindu extremism--or stops challenging it out of fear.
Vinod Dawda is correct that "extremist elements … form a minority" in India. But that was true in Weimar, Germany as well, and it did not prevent them from taking power, as the "moderate majority" did not protest. He is also correct that "there is fear built up [among Hindus, presumably?] that a Muslim can be convinced to kill a kafir in the name of religion." The question is, why is this fear so widespread in India? How many Indians outside Jammu and Kashmir have had any contact with Islamic extremism? The fear has been created by Hindu extremists in order to "unify" Hindus and justify killing Muslims.
I am grateful to K.M. Guru for including excerpts from the paragraph in my article that discussed factors that would prevent a fascist state from emerging in India. I wish he had included those sentences that discussed the institutions like the courts or the National Human Rights Commission. One could add to that the free Indian press, which has been unrelenting in calling attention to the fact that this "riot" is quite unlike any other in Indian history, given the clear complicity of the state government in Gujarat. As Mr. Guru has charged me with "paranoia" I hope he will work on the paranoia of those to whom Mr. Dawda refers, as it is they, not I, who caused what happened in Gujarat. My concern is not that they will attempt world domination but that they will kill Indian democracy.
In that context it is worth noting that, since my piece was written, the BJP state government in Gujarat has chosen to go for fresh elections in an apparent effort to benefit from the heightened tension between religious communities in the state, and the national BJP has launched personal attacks on the country's Chief Election Commissioner for expressing doubts over whether Muslims would be able to exercise their franchise. According to The Hindu, one of India's most respected newspapers, this blatant attempt to intimidate the country's most vital democratic institution into holding the election has led even one member of a party allied with the BJP to ask "If the government does not respect the country's institutions, who will?" Who indeed? Messrs. Ramapalli, Vijayaraghavan, and Guru? Somehow one doubts it.
- Arun R. Swamy <SwamyA@EastWestCenter.org>
Please consider supporting Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF). FPIF is a new kind of think tank—one serving citizen movements and advancing a fresh, internationalist understanding of global affairs. Although we make our FPIF products freely available on the Internet, we need financial support to cover our staff time and expenses. Increasingly, FPIF depends on you and other individual donors to sustain our bare-bones budget. Click on https://secure.iexposure.com/fpif.org/donate.cfm to support FPIF online, or for information about making contributions over the phone or through the mail.
We Count on Your Support. Thank you.
Subscribe to The Progressive Response!
To subscribe to The Progressive Response, send a blank email to:
To unsubscribe from The Progressive Response, send a blank email to:
lists-unsubscribe@irc-online.orgSimply click the appropriate hyperlink above, or send a blank email to the appropriate email address above.
The Progressive Response aims to provide timely analysis and opinion about U.S. foreign policy issues. The content does not necessarily reflect the institutional positions of either the Interhemispheric Resource Center or the Institute for Policy Studies.
We're working to make the Progressive Response informative and useful, so let us know how we're doing, via email to irc@irc-online.org. Please put "Progressive Response" in the subject line. Please feel free to cross-post the Progressive Response elsewhere. We apologize for any duplicate copies you may receive.
IRC
Tom Barry
Editor, Progressive Response
Codirector, Foreign Policy In Focus
Email: tom@irc-online.org
IPS
Martha Honey
Codirector, Foreign Policy In Focus
Email: ipsps@igc.org
This page
was last modified on
Saturday, August 17, 2002 1:54 PM
Contact the IRC's webmaster with inquiries regarding the functionality of this website.
Copyright © 2001
IRC and IPS. All rights reserved.