In the Company of Kings

Today, celebrating her 60 years on the throne, the British monarch, Elizabeth Windsor, hosted an event at Windsor Castle attended by several unsavoury characters, including the Kings of Swaziland, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Although the Bahrain tyrant, Hamid al-Khalifa, missed a later banquet at Buckingham Palace, the Queen's appetite for his frequent company seems undiminished in spite of his brutal suppression (much aided by his Saudi neighbours) of democracy protesters last year. Scores of people were killed, hundreds have disappeared (including a number of children) and even a number of doctors and nurses who treated injured demonstators have been jailed for lengthy terms.

Died for democracy:  and now his killer lunches with the Queen

But, Bahrain, like Dubai, exists pretty much to service the financial and recreational desires of the international elite, of which Elizabeth Windsor is one. And of course, she and Hamid love horse-racing. So the troublesome people asking for the right to vote in a country which has had the same Prime Minister (a relative of the King) since the 1960s matter not a whit to her.

It is remarkable how she gets away with it. Even critics of the visit like Dennis McShame and George Galloway have said the Government has let her down by not advising her to not invite this man. Yet, time and again, we hear the stories of how well-informed of the world she is, how she keeps up keenly with the news and supposedly interrogates her Ministers on their policies with a razor-sharp intellect.

Well, the tales are probably overblown, but there can be no doubt she is as aware as any about the blood spilled on the streets of Bahrain. The bottom line is neither our Royal Family nor our Government care. Unlike Libya, Syria and Iran, Bahrain, Saudi and the other Gulf monarchies dutifully fall into line when it comes to supporting the economic interests of the west. A number of these corrupt regimes, including the Bahrain one, were sustained by direct intervention by the British and American military in the 1950s and 1960s and have retained power in the teeth of popular opposition ever since only by means of repression and violence. The West, so willing to kill Iraqis and Libyans in the name of democracy, doesn't merely sit back in Bahrain and Saudi - we sell them weapons, patronise their desert luxury resorts and do business with their near-slave economies. Yet again, oil and money have trumped the aspirations and human rights of the local people.

And it seems as if Elizabeth Windsor does not care.

"A monarch, when good, is entitled to the consideration which we accord to a pirate who keeps Sunday School between crimes; when bad, he is entitled to none at all." (Mark Twain)

Lessons from Libya - and Caroline Lucas on ethical foreign policy

 
As the battle for Tripoli continues, the Gadaffi regime appears to be tottering towards collapse, but huge question marks remain over the future of Libya. The western backed rebels are a loose and contradictory confederation of tribal, political and religious interests; and the intervention of Britain and France in particular in the bombing of the country, which has been largely ascribed as the crucial factor in the rebels' success, is likely to be one requiring payback from any new government. Britain alone has fired over £250,000,000 worth of missles and bombs into a country that last year the Con Dem Government was happy to sell almost as much "crowd control" equipment to, while the British SAS trained the Leader's elite guards (though maybe not so well as it has turned out).

Like Iraq, Libya is one of the few Arab states with a large public sector, boasting clean water, free education (for males and females) and health services unrivalled in the rest of the region. Along with state controlled industries, these are now ripe for the capitalist "liberation" of the economy which has so often gone hand in hand with supposed political liberation in the history of US and UK military intervention. With the rebels already hundreds of millions of euros in debt to the EU for loans to cover their war effort, the level of western influence and pressure on any new administration to comply with European demands for access to the Libyan economy is already massive. Oil is perhaps less of an issue, as it was already substantially in western hands. But public sector privatisation and the sanctioning of the Desertec solar array plan, which Gadaffi's regime opposed, are clearly tempting prospects for western business interests.

While an overwhelming number of British parliamentarians have meekly gone along with Britain's military role, which far exceeded any "mission to protect civilians", Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas, was one of just 15 MPs who voted against the intervention (compared to 557 in favour). Today, she has issued a statement which, while welcoming the fall of Gadaffi, warns the West not to intervene, but rather that the Libyans be allowed to run their country free from external interference.

But the lessons from Libya Caroline Lucas calls for include acting on the need for a greater ethical dimension in British Foreign and trade policies - both the last and current British governments happily engaged with Gadaffi in return for cash. And while Deputy PM Nick Clegg talked about Britain aiding freedom in Arab states earlier this week, the same Government he leads with David Cameron just weeks ago happily hosted the Crown Prince of Bahrain, whose regime brutally crushed protests and calls for democracy earlier this year. And who can forget Cameron's opportunistic appearance in Egypt's Tahrir Square at the head of a delegation of arms merchants?

British Governments have to practice what they preach; for now, their policy reeks of the rank stench of rotten hypocrisy and self-serving sanctimony.

Caroline Lucas' full statement can be read here.

Kill all you like - Cameron & the Crown Prince, batting for British business in Bahrain

Libya war IS about regime change / Britain / Home - Morning Star

Libya war IS about regime change / Britain / Home - Morning Star (click for full M.S. article)

The West has gone far beyond the concept of a protective no-fly zone and is now advocating regime change - even although the rebels are a very uncertain band containing some rather unpleasant passengers. In addition, they have refused to even contemplate any negotiations with Tripoli and gave the recent African peace envoys an incredibly hostile and violent reception when they visited Benghazi to sound out the possibility of peace talks.

Why is such intransigence now being underwritten by an open-ended guarantee to the rebels from Britain, France and the USA for continuing and increasing military support and aid with arms supplies?

What has gone largely unreported is that the revolt against the Gaddafi regime developed from rallies called by religious groups to commemorate the 2006 publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed, which upset Muslims around the world given their faith's injunction not to make representations of any human form, let alone such an important one. Most fundamentalist Muslims see Gaddafi as an enemy of their faith given his closure of Islamist schools, his taunting of the veiling of women and his call for Arabs to "put the Koran away on the bookshelf" as a relic of a former age.

Whilst the Transitional Rebel Council is composed of a rather motley bunch of academics, lawyers and army commanders, many of whom were senior members of the Gaddafi regime until just a few weeks ago, there is much evidence of more radical religious elements running through the revolt. What is for sure is that this is no democratic uprising like the ones in Tunisia and Egypt - where, especially in the latter case, the West were so incredibly hesitant about calling for Mubarak to resign. But, of course, as history has shown time and again, the West's interests and frequently violent intervention in the Arab world has never been about democracy, and indeed as often as not has been to squash the demands of the Arab people for reform.

Gadaffi, of course, is no democrat either. But the West is not concerned about that. His sin, unlike Mubarak and the Saudis, has been to not always toe the line with the West. That makes him no saint, but equally, it begs the question as to why Libya is such a special case as to now require our active intervention, not merely to provide some sort of protective no-fly zone around Benghazi, but to continue every day to bomb large tracts of Libya and say that this will continue until Gaddafi is gone.

Our Masters have decided Gaddafi must go, but sit on their butts in Bahrain as the political opposition is destroyed and people shot on the streets - in the same city as the largest overseas US naval base in the world.

Yet there again, they're Our Bastards, and he isn't.  At least, not one of Ours.

Payback Time for Our Bastards

"He may be a bastard, but he's our bastard."
So US President FD Roosevelt famously said of the blood soaked dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo. Trujillo had risen through the ranks of the army established by the USA after its invasion of the island republic in 1916 to preserve the interests of American banks in debt repayments. When in 1930 a rebellion by oppressed workers and farmers led to the overthrow of the President, Trujillo, by then army chief, deftly absorbed the demands of the rebel crowds, subverted the subsequent election (in which he polled more votes than registered voters) and instituted a personal rule that was to last for over 30 years until his assassination.

Trujillo: a bastard, but Ours.

Trujillo governed by corruption, nepotism, fear and violence - he banned all but his own political party, imprisoned opponents, bought and sold favours with American companies, and killed over 50,000 of his own people - as well as many as 30,000 Haitians massacred during an incursion into his neighbour's territory.But all through his rule, he was a favourite of America - providing Caribbean hospitality for his sponsors' richest citizens as well as a place for them to place their "offshore" investments beyond the reach and audit of any regular authorities. As revolution swept Central and South America in the 1950s, Trujillo and his family were seen as bulwarks of western interests.

And so Roosevelt's dreadful nostrum was deployed, both long before and ever since it was articulated by the great liberal hero, with nauseating regularity. America has installed and maintained dozens of rightwing regimes with violence and corruption at their rotten hearts - Pinochet's Chile being the most blatant but far from isolated case. There, a democratically elected government was overthrown by a CIA coup simply because of its left wing policies. As with so many cases, such as threatening economic ruin if voters choose the wrong way in Nicaragua in the 2007 election, to the sham elections of Mubarak's Egypt, or the weapons and financial support channelled to Saddam Hussein's Iraq during his war with Iran, democracy has never been a genuine feature of American or British foreign policy.

We have happily subsidised these most violent men to suppress the liberal and social democratic movements whose aims have been to establish precisely the same norms of elected legislatures, civic governance and rule of law we espouse in the West. We have colluded with the dictators in painting their most moderate opponents as dangerous, wild-eyed radicals and patronisingly questioned whether people in so many countries round the world are "ready" to govern themselves. Indeed, when Pakistan was passing through a crisis in 2008, former US UN Ambassador John Bolton told the BBC that "Democracy in Pakistan is not in the USA's interests." Just like in the Palestinian Authority when Hamas won the elections, people might vote the wrong way, you see.

Britain has even subsidised sales of weapons to these brutal regimes with taxpayers' money through the Defence Export Services Organisation - this lent billions of pounds of credit to some pretty odious governments in exchange for them purchasing weapons and security equipment from British companies. Consequently, we saw the tragic irony that large quantities of the weapons used against British troops by the Iraqi army in the wars of 1991 and 2003 were actually paid for by the UK taxpayer after Saddam defaulted on his payments. It is to Gordon Brown's largely unsung credit that he closed it down within weeks of becoming Prime Minister in 2007. However, Britain's arms industry continues to be one of the top five in the world, essentially selling to anyone who will pay - frequently involving itself with some palm greasing, as was allegedly the case in the dropped investigation into BAe and Saudi Arabia.

And nowhere has this been more exposed and self-evident than in the current round of rebellions sweeping the Arab world. As Obama equivocated over the crowds in Cairo calling for the resignation of the corrupt and brutal Mubarak regime, there was UK Foreign Secretary William Hague, heavily qualifying his "welcome" of the people's demands with a hope that they would give time for an "orderly transfer" of power. And again this week, Hague has been busy dissembling - reluctantly withholding export licences for supplies of tear gas to the Bahrain government on the same day that its police shot dead several peaceful protesters - but still silent on the demands for an elected parliament.

Of course, the Bahrain monarchy was put in power by the British several decades ago, and has been sustained ever since by the Americans. Indeed, the last significant riots in Bahrain - way back in 1956 - were crushed by the direct intervention of the British Army. The West has billions invested in the small state - "stability", which translates as a pro-western Sunni Muslim puppet regime suppressing the poor Shia Muslim majority, is at a premium.

For decades, we have sponsored these men to crush the legitimate will of their peoples. We have traded with them on the most favourable terms for the West, and supplied them with military muscle, training and equipment to put down any opposition. Our companies have profited from exporting leg irons made in Britain and even equipping the Saudi government with a fully functional gallows. The UK also sold large quantities of crowd control equipment, including tear gas, to Libya just last year. And most cynically of all, as people die for democracy across the Middle East this weekend, over one thousand British and other western arms manufacturers are happily congregating in Abu Dhabi for the 10th and largest ever Idex Arms Fair. Just a short distance from the butchered bodies in Manama, and fully supported by President Obama and Premier Cameron, a huge marketplace of violence is being fronted by large western companies keener than ever to profit from the paranoia of the Princes and Sheiks of suppression.

Oil and blood: the West profits from the Arab world either way.

Withdrawing a few export licences in the dying days of these kleptocracies is far too little, far too late. We may indeed be astonished by the relatively moderate demands of many of the protesters, but if we think that means we can continue to back two horses - pious calls for democracy in public while privately conniving with the dictators to keep them in power - then we are badly mistaken. It is already too late to wish, like di Lampedusa's Leopard, that by letting something change, everything else may stay the same: it is payback time for the bastards, and sooner or later for us.

The demands sweeping the Arab world today are setting an example to people all over the globe. Where it will take us on a planet of rapidly diminishing resources, no one can know. It is a tragic yet hopeful time, whatever the outcome of the dramatic events now playing out. The established regimes will fall in some places, while clinging on in others and trying to absorb and deflect the power of change.

But nothing will be the same again.

(CAUTION - VIDEO CONTAINS DISTURBING FOOTAGE)