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	Europe Learns, America Provokes by Rami G. Khouri The Daily Star   Oce 2005   After a week in Geneva and London and many discussions with European, American and Arab political activists, business people, politicians, diplomats and academics, I sense that the United States and the United Kingdom may be finally, slowly, moving towards catching up with the rest of the world on the issue of terrorism and how to deal with it.   Ever since 9/11, the Western world as a whole has allowed the United States to define and lead the "global war on terrorism;" this process has proven to be only partially effective, and deeply flawed in both its analysis and results, as the quagmire of Iraq reminds us daily.   The most obvious sign of the failure of the American-led global anti-terror war is the pervasive, frequently expressed, and growing sense of vulnerability that defines much of the West, especially the United States and Britain. The certainty that something equivalent to or bigger than 9/11 is going to happen is matched by the almost total inability of the U.S. and U.K. political leaderships to comprehend the real nature, causes and aims of the terror groups that target them, like Al Qaeda. Consequently, the U.S. and U.K. counterterrorism strategies are failing across the board. Fear and ignorance together are a deadly combination.   The main mistake in the Anglo-American terrorism threat analysis is that it sees Al Qaeda and Co. as representing those in the world "who seek to destroy our way of life, for various reasons," as one foreign policy official in London said privately earlier this week. He went on to say that part of the anti-terrorism response is an effort "to persuade such people that they are wrong about our way of life."   Such an analysis of Al Qaeda and others who target the West and Arab societies alike is diversionary, fanciful and grossly incomplete. Opposition to some Western values (materialism, sexual liberties, fragmentation of family ties, etc.) is common in the world, but is not the cause of the terror threat today. The cause comprises a much more complex series of forces that include defensive resistance to foreign troops in Islamic lands, rebellion against indigenous autocrats in the Arab-Asian region, fighting back against cultural and social alienation, resisting predatory foreign policies by Israel and Western powers, yearning to create an authentic Islamic society, and a few others. All these issues are certainly debatable—but they are very, very far from wanting to destroy the Western way of life.   The bombings in London on July 7, 2005, caused the British and other Europeans to wake up to the real nature of this problem, and to explore more deeply the causes that might lead British-born and raised citizens of Asian ancestry to become suicidal terrorists. Wider issues of emigration, religion, culture and identity are now being discussed more seriously.   The British government are somewhat more realistic than the Americans in assessing the problem and the threat, with one official noting that "we need to get a lot more sophisticated about how we deal with terrorism in the United Kingdom" perpetrated by citizens of this country. London does not use the Bush terminology of a "global war on terror", preferring to speak about a "battle for the hearts and minds" of Islamists and others who might threaten the U.K.   But the British, like the Americans, still refuse to make that final step into a more complete analytical framework that explores the full cycle of forces that result in the transformation of middle class citizens in England, Saudi Arabia or Egypt into mass murderers of the innocent in foreign lands. They refuse to consider how their own foreign policies contribute to the cycle of discontent that ultimately becomes marginalization, humiliation and dehumanization in the mind of a middle-class young man who finally decides to resist this cycle with a single act of what he sees as self-affirmation, redemption and resistance. It is more than merely interesting—it would suggest it is strategically relevant—that young British Muslims here are making the same kinds of analyses and saying the same kinds of things that many of us in the Middle East have said for several decades.   "Disillusionment, disenfranchisement and disadvantage have been evident among the Muslim community in England for many years," one articulate Muslim woman editor said in a discussion here this week, echoing the same things we in the Middle East have been saying since the 1970s. People who are mistreated by their own societies, and attacked, colonized and manipulated by foreign armies, will not forever take their abuse passively. Terrorism is one form of reaction; it is perverse and criminal, but not surprising or unexpected, and it emerges today from European societies as much as from the Middle East and Asia.   Slowly, it seems, more and more thoughtful people in the West are asking deeper and more useful questions about the terror threat and how to solve it—including some among the ideological skinheads whose peculiar intellectual hooliganism still defines much foreign policymaking in the U.K. and U.S.   They are painstakingly moving toward a more comprehensive and accurate appreciation of the fact that religion, identity, socioeconomic conditions, foreign policy, terrorism and political governance systems are separate issues that impact on one another in subtle and changing ways, with the trigger for terrorism usually being a combination of humiliation and deep vulnerability in the face of foreign military and political power.   The last four years have been a costly learning experience, but if we learn from them, we shall not have wasted the time or the lives lost in Middle Eastern and Western societies alike   (Rami G. Khouri is editor at large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune).
	The UN keeps the ideal of human cooperation alive by Ronald Sanders / Alberto G. Romulo Caribbean Net News / Manila Times   September 27, 2005 (Caribbean Net )   For three days in September World leaders met in New York to mark the 60th anniversary of the United Nations and to produce what was called an ‘Outcome Document’.   The occasion was not a celebration. Indeed, reading the statements that were made formally in the General Assembly and the comments made to the media outside of the UN, the anniversary was marked by complaints, criticism, doubts and frustration.   Two countries – Venezuela and Cuba – objected to the final document. They accused the United States and its allies of seeking to “subjugate the organisation completely and turn it into an instrument of their world dictatorship”.   It was always going to be an impossibility to produce a document with which 189 nations with different and conflicting interests could agree entirely. The most that could have been expected was serious attention to a handful of the urgent problems that now confront mankind globally   On these issues, there was a mixed bag of success and failure. A major failure was tackling poverty in the developing world.   Jamaica’s Prime Minister, P J Patterson made the shocking point that developing nations make annual payments of $230 billion a year to developed countries. This is a great weight upon the shoulders of countries that are contending with worsening terms of trade, lower incomes in real terms, and higher costs to cope with natural disasters and security arrangements, as well as increased costs for vital imports.   In 2000, rich countries committed to earmark 0.7% of their GDP as official development assistance to poor countries. But, as the Prime Minister of India, Manmohan Singh, pointed out: “Five years later, we find that the international community is generous in setting goals, but parsimonious in pursuing them”.   Even that sacred cow, the much vaunted Millennium Development Goals (MDG), came in for some practical and realistic criticism. The Foreign Minister of Guyana, Rudy Insanally, told the UN that while the “realisation” of MDG provides the necessary foundation for development, “true economic and social progress cannot be achieved in the absence of a more comprehensive policy framework”. And, of course, there is no such framework - not even on the drawing board.   While debt write-off has been agreed by the G7 countries for seventeen of the most highly indebted countries in the world including Guyana, the reality is that real machinery with a time table to tackle global poverty through new and more assistance has still not been identified let alone implemented for the 2 billion people worldwide who remain destitute.   And, there are those countries whose people could slip into poverty if their problems remain neglected. Among them are the small states of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM).   The Prime Minister of St Kitts-Nevis, Dr Denzil Douglas, expressed concern about “the apparent neglect of the unsustainable debt” of countries like those in CARICOM that are classified by the IMF and World Bank as “middle income countries”. He was right to emphasize that even as CARICOM and other small states seek to develop new growth sectors, they are confronted by new rules and conditionalities that hobble their development.   On terrorism, the text of the document was vague and did not produce a definition. In a sense, the absence of an internationally accepted definition of terrorism leaves this pressing issue to individual governments with all the conflict and confusion that unilateral action brings into play in the global community.   Kofi Anan, the UN Secretary-General, expressed his deep regret that member states failed to address the threat of nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament in the document. Apparently, an entire chapter on disarmament, which was originally to be included in the document, was left out in the end.   None of this is good news for a world deeply troubled by violent conflicts in many regions. Sixty years after the creation of the United nations with its pledge “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”, the failure to agree on disarmament and nuclear non-proliferation is a woeful foreboding that conflicts will get worse not better.   But, the Summit produced real movement on the matter of intervention in states to stop massive human rights violations and genocide as, for example, in Rwanda in 1994 and more recently in Srebrenica, and Darfur.   Kofi Anan had adopted a Canadian initiative called ‘responsibility to protest’ which cut across the doctrine on non-intervention in the internal matters of a sovereign state unless the state posed a threat to its neighbours. World leaders have now agreed that the UN will have powers to intervene in countries whose governments fail to protect their people from massacres and which themselves violate the human rights of their people.   Much of the ‘Outcome Document’ displeased certain influential organisations in the United States, among them The Heritage Foundation which has severely criticised the mandates given to the UN and the money they will cost.   In a paper issued after the Summit, The Heritage Foundation said: “This focus on assuring more resources rather than ensuring that existing resources are better used is typical and should be a clear signal to Congress that the U.N. will not reform on its own”. The Foundation then called on the US government to “push reform” by withholding payments to the UN.   Of course, there are many who wish to close the UN, if it cannot be tamed into carrying out the will of the most powerful. This is why they frequently assert that the UN is an empty ‘talk shop’ that should be closed.   But abandoning the UN would not be in the interest of the people of the world, and certainly not in the interest of the people of Small States. This is why an agreed ‘Outcome Document’, however unambitious and lacking in machinery, was important for peace and security in the world, and for the UN as an institution.   Without the UN, Small States, such as those in the Caribbean, would have no forum at which they could voice their concerns to the global community about the economic conditions that trouble them, and present cogent arguments for change. Nor could they enjoy protection from adventurism of larger and more powerful states which might, otherwise, subjugate them in pursuit of their own objectives.   The world is already a dangerous place filled with States that resent the principles of international law and the constraining power of the United Nations. If the UN did not exist, many States in the world would ride rough shod over others, there would be a grab for resources such as oil on the basis of ‘the right of might’, and even within States the level of human and civil rights abuses, genocide and other acts of violence would be even more prevalent.   No one should doubt that such a situation always remains possible in the fragile international context in which the nations of the world exist today.   So, if the 60th anniversary session of the UN General Assembly and its ’Outcome Document’ have proven anything, it is that all the countries of the world, particularly small, weak ones like those in the Caribbean, need a stronger UN.   The UN is the forum in which mankind’s worst problems can be aired, and its best ambitions promoted. Regimes, like man, pass on, but the UN keeps the ideal of human cooperation alive. And, once that ideal remains alive, so does the opportunity for doing better for the world as a whole.   “The United Nations and the building of a better world”, by Dr. Alberto G. Romulo, Secretary of Foreign Affairs of the Philippines. (Manila Times)   For sixty years, the United Nations has provided us the forum to draw up norms of conduct that takes on board all our concerns. From its inception with 50 member-countries in 1945, the membership has almost quadrupled to its present 191 states.   While the United Nations has, time and again, adopted some reforms, at no other time has the pressure for far-reaching change been starker than it is now. The changing needs of its increasing membership must be met.   The evolving global and regional security environment, ongoing conflicts in many countries that have multidimensional root causes and other flashpoints have to be addressed.   It is clear that in pursuing our shared interest to preserve our common humanity, the United Nations continues to serve as our indispensable tool. It is therefore also our shared interest to strengthen it. The Philippines proposes that we follow the principle that the form follows the substance in strengthening the key structures of the UN system.   Even before San Francisco, some key decisions had already been reached among the major powers, primarily on the power of the veto, or what was referred to then as the “unanimity rule.”   Our delegation, in concert with others, pressed for an increased role for the General Assembly and for limits on the use of the veto. We felt that this was the balance necessary to safeguard the effectiveness of the United Nations in maintaining international peace and security.   We also urged wider and more equitable representation in the Security Council—an aspiration which has yet to achieve realization, and thus an advocacy which my country carries to this day.   The outcome of the High-Level Plenary Meeting provides the substance upon which to strengthen the UN system. They should guide us well in our discussions on institutional reform.   Six decades after San Francisco, our common humanity remains at stake. We have today another opportunity to make our United Nations succeed.   Whether the issue is United Nations reform or freedom from want or fear, we must act now to ensure that the principles committed to by our leaders at this year’s Summit, be implemented effectively and efficiently.   Allow me therefore to present at this point some practical strategies that may assist us in ensuring that we achieve our goals. Our proposed strategies assume that multilateral frameworks and mechanisms will be the approach adopted to implement the High-level Plenary meeting commitments.   First, the agreed commitments should be broken down into tangible steps. Concrete benchmarks and pragmatic indicators of progress must be set. The interrelated nature of the commitments will admittedly not make this an easy task, but we need to take this forward step.   Second, with concrete international benchmarks, national strategies can be geared to achieving these. All concerned national actors in domestic procedures and actions should be involved. This is necessary to put into effect and implement multilateral commitments.   Ideally, national actors should be privy to developments in the negotiating process and have the opportunity to provide their own inputs to the national position to be taken. This is expected to ensure implementation and follow-up to the commitments made by our leaders.   In this way, necessary legislative and executive action to ratify or put the treaty into effect will be facilitated.   Domestic programs to implement the commitments made by the leaders can be supported in the national and local budgets, as appropriate and as resource capacity allows. Where capacity is lacking, international cooperation can be further resorted to.   Third, we must not lose sight of the need to increase congruence among national, regional and international plans of action. Keeping these in sight contributes to a faster rate of achieving the goals. National plans of action can be elevated to the regional level, whenever feasible. Regional cooperation and pooling of regional resources can scale up progress on the goals.   Fourth, we must rethink our existing modes of international cooperation. There will be value in assessing how we have been collaborating bilaterally, regionally and multilaterally. Let us assess the effectiveness of our current modes of cooperation.   As we assess, we open ourselves to explore new collaborative arrangements that can make better use of comparative advantages, expertise, experience and resources available from countries, international agencies as well as civil society. Let us challenge ourselves to discover new opportunities to address new threats.   In adopting practical measures and in discovering new opportunities and addressing new threats, we must be mindful of the old hopes and enduring dreams that led to the birth of our United Nations.
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