Current Intelligence - The Complex Terrain Laboratory

Sunday

07Feb2010

India and Burma: Playing Nice With Rogues

—Author:

Eric Randolph

Human Rights Watch do not like the turn India has taken in its international affairs in recent years. The more ruthless pursuit of its interests, they argue, not only costs India moral authority but wins it few tangible advantages, particularly in its approach to Burma:

India has moved away from supporting the democracy movement and honouring detained Opposition leader Aung San Su Kyi to deciding that economic and security concerns take precedence.

… However, what remains baffling is what exactly India can claim to have gained from supporting one of the most abusive regimes in the world. India has not won significant access to Burma’s energy reserves … The Burmese military has not cooperated consistently with efforts to contain rebels in India’s Northeast. Nor has India been able to undercut China’s influence with the junta.

She goes on to discuss the blind eye India is turning the blood diamond trade in Zimbabwe and the support it gave to Sri Lanka in its war against the Tamils.

All terrible things, to be sure. But the question is: what good did India’s moral stance against Burma achieve in the past? Its support for Aung San Su Kyi certainly did her few favours. As we have seen from America’s attempts to support opposition movements in Iran, nasty regimes love a bit of outside interference because it allows them to label all protesters as ‘foreign spies’ that can justifiably be shot in the throat.

As this excellent article from Nader Mousavizadeh at IISS argues, the whole idea of trying to bully rogue regimes into compliance has failed miserably. Harsh words and harsh actions from the US and its allies have only hardened attitudes and closed off channels of communication.

Countries that have been locked out by the west – Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, Burma – are increasingly able to rely on each other for support. Moreover, they can turn to China, a country that considers sovereignty and influence much more important than western conceptions of human rights.

It might not be pretty, but it is happening:

[The West’s] two-decade-old policy of isolating Burma now looks like a carefully constructed attempt to weaken Western influence and open the door to China, while devastating Burma’s legitimate economy and doing nothing to improve its people’s human rights.

… Virtually no aspect of Western policy here has worked: the military junta is as firmly in control as ever; the democratic opposition is in disarray; and where Western policy toward Burma used to be primarily concerned with the regime’s domestic behavior, it now must contend with the generals’ suspected ties to North Korea, including in the area of nuclear cooperation.

He concludes that the best response would be to do what these regimes fear most: remove the sanctions, open up trade, allow unfettered travel for students and business people. Stop giving them excuses to be bastards.

Obama might have been the man to do this, but his government seems incapable of thinking beyond the idea of more sanctions. And sadly, for large swathes of the American right, even Obama’s mildly more diplomatic approach to international relations is seen as proof that he is indeed a Satan-worshiping Communist agent sent to feast on the guts of small-time America, burn all its money and hand over the keys of the White House to the reanimated corpses of Karl Marx, Hitler and King George III. Things are so bad that the opposition in America has started taking on the character of an insurgency, with a beaming monstrosity as its figurehead.

So perhaps India has it right. Perhaps the job of publicly decrying human rights violations needs to be left to private organisations like Human Rights Watch, and governments should rely on quiet diplomacy, building influence through mutual benefit and only levelling their criticisms behind closed doors.

Despite what HRW says, there are signs that the quiet approach is getting some results from Burma: a recent meeting between their home ministers led Burma to agree that it would help track down Paresh Barua, leader of one of the most violent insurgencies in northeastern India. In return, India agreed to continue training Burma’s fighter pilots for the planes it sold them. It’s all a bit unsavoury, but hopefully India are also using these meetings to pressure the junta about its human rights violations ahead of elections later this year. It probably won’t do much good, but they will certainly get a better hearing than the Americans.

P.S. I almost had a really good headline for this – something to do with joshing with rogues – Rogue and Josh, something like that, but it didn’t quite work. Damn shame.

[cross-posted from Kikobor]

—Filed On:

Feb 7, 2010 at 12:04

Saturday

06Feb2010

Whiteout

Headlines | —Author:

Marisa Urgo

So where have I been? Wedding planning, folks, wedding planning. I am currently in the middle of a personal jihad of party favors, flower arrangements, and balloon colors. That said, with eight inches of snow already on the ground here in Washington, DC, and another twelve to fifteen more expected by Sunday morning, I plan on squeezing a post into this long, white weekend. In the meantime, I began sharing my ideas for a fantasy version of the "Norton Anthology of Jihad Literature" over at the other blog.

—Filed On:

Feb 6, 2010 at 3:52

—Index:

information

Saturday

06Feb2010

The Arctic: The Final Frontier

War & Peace | —Author:

John Matthew Barlow

This weekend, the G7's finance ministers are gathering in Iqaluit, in the Canadian Eastern Arctic, to discuss the fallout from last year's global economic meltdown, as well as how best to prevent the same from happening again. The meeting comes amidst questions about the on-going relevancy fo the G7 in the face of the creation of the G20 to handle the global economy.

That the meeting is being held in the Arctic is both interesting and significant, as Canada is currently attempting to bolster its claim to various lands and waters in the Arctic, as are the US, Russia, Norway, and Denmark. That the G7 is meeting in the Canadian Arctic is surely no coincidence.

Canada is also caught up in a sort of new Cold War with Russia, its neighbour across the North Pole, in the Arctic. Russia has just announced it is going to spend another $50 million USD on hydrographic and geophysics research along the Arctic Ocean bed. This comes as Canada, Russia, and the other Arctic nations face a UN-mandated deadline to register their claims to the Arctic according to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Norway did so over a year ago, whilst the other 3 Arctic nations. The 5 Arctic nations face staggered deadlines, Norway's was last year, Russia's this year, Canada's in 2013. Denmark has a claim to the Arctic through its possession of Greenland.

Under UNCLOS, panels of scientists will assess the validity of uncontested claims in the Arctic, but the 5 nations themselves will sort out their own disagreements when it comes to disputed claims.

For example, Canada's mapping effort is focussed on proving that 2 massive under-water mountain chains, the Alpha and Lomonosov, are geologically connected to North America. If this is indeed the case, not only will Canada benefit, but so, too, would Denmark and the US. Hence, whilst Canada is carrying out the majority of the mapping work, it periodically co-operates with the Danes and Americans. Meanwhile, both Canada and the US will come to loggerheads over the Beaufort Sea and its oil & gas reserves, whilst Canada, Denmark, and Russia are expected to have competing claims to the territory around the North Pole. And then there is the battle over the Northwest Passage. Canada hopes to prove the waters within the Arctic Archipelago belong to it, meaning the Passage would be Canadian. This would limit access to the Passage as a shipping chanel as global warming causes the ice in the passage to melt.

Cross-posted at Spatialities.

—Filed On:

Feb 6, 2010 at 1:12

—Index:

Friday

05Feb2010

Procedural Justice at the ICC

War & Peace | —Author:

Charli Carpenter

Mark Leon Goldberg of UN Dispatch explains yesterday's decision of the International Criminal Court's Appeals Chamber to require the Pre-Trial Chamber to reconsider including the crime of genocide in the arrest warrant against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. The Pre-Trial Chamber previously included "only" war crimes and crimes against humanity in the warrant. The ruling is here.

Via Veronica Glick, Don Krause argues that the ruling demonstrates the ICC is governed by rule of law. That's a good point. But I also think the fact that a relatively minor procedural decision is being treated as so significant tends to demonstrate why the PTC may have sought to avoid the charges in the original indictment. On procedural terms, the ruling makes absolute sense. But in political terms the earlier decision may have made sense as well.

An important distinction between "crimes against humanity" and "genocide" is that in the case of genocide, the burden of proof is on the prosecutor not only to demonstrate that atrocities occurred, but that the defendant ordered them with the intent that they have a particular effect on groups, rather than people. Intent crimes are extremely difficult to prosecute. At the same time, genocide is considered by the public to be more heinous than crimes against humanity, and many people take it for granted already that what went on in Darfur was genocide, which is why UN lawyers' equivocating on this point was so unpopular in 2005. So the charges over genocide will likely be both more politicized and harder to prove than "crimes against humanity." By prosecuting genocide, the court may set itself up to disappoint a lot of people if it is unable to convict.

The salience of the "genocide" concept in public understandings of Darfur also explains why this new ruling has been greeted with so much enthusiasm by Darfur watchers. Yet I tend to agree with Alex de Waal (see his comment on David Barsoum's blog) that the significance of the legal distinction here may be overblown.

How different does genocide seem from crimes against humanity from the perspective of the victims of killing, rape, or forced displacement? There is also no difference in terms of the maximum sentence. So at best the charges are somewhat redundant; at worst I fear the insistence on genocide charges erroneously suggests that crimes against cultural groups are somehow worse than crimes against people, or that if something is not "genocide" then somehow it's not quite as bad. (On these points Kevin Jon Heller has a dissenting view.

I would be interested in seeing the definition of genocide in the Rome Statute reconsidered by states parties given the decades of reconsideration and critique of the 1948 definition by academics and the ad hoc tribunals. The crime as currently defined is not only hard to prosecute but also extremely limited (excluding purges of political groups, for example).

All that said, the procedural issue here was an important one. Al-Bashir may now have, if he is ever apprehended, a more costly and politically complicated trial but in any case one that meets ICC internal procedural standards - which is itself good for rule of law and may help dampen criticisms of the court. Will justice itself ultimately be served by this decision? I think this ruling shows that the a landmark case like this is never only about justice, but also about institutional credibility. And it shows that how to balance those two goals is not always entirely clear. [cross-posted at Lawyers, Guns and Money]

—Filed On:

Feb 5, 2010 at 5:37

—Index:

crime,

genocide,

institutions,

law,

war

Thursday

04Feb2010

Crowdsourcing Counterterrorism

Culture & Technology | —Author:

Tim Stevens

Let’s be clear about this: the UK government’s new initiative for reporting hate, extremism and terrorism online has a very limited shelf-life. On the other hand, what else could government have done?

To be fair to the Home Office, they have made it perfectly clear that “most hateful or violent website content is not illegal. While you may come across a lot of things on the internet that offend you, very little of it is actually illegal.” Good call, and a message it’s good to see reinforced. They also clearly indicate what steps you can take if you really think it falls foul of the indicators of potential illegality: first enquire of website administrators, then hosts, and contact police only as a last resort. The reporting page is here.

The new scheme provides a reporting mechanism direct to a five-person team in Whitehall, within the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) Prevent Delivery Unit. This is the Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit, and they will decide if content submitted for review falls foul of legislation, and may be subject to Section 3 of the Terrorism Act (2006). This allows for notice-and-takedown (NTD) of content, although has yet to be used, mainly because it’s so difficult to decide what might, for example, constitute the ‘glorification’ of terrorism, and allied offences.

If we assume for now that there is even an argument for trying to remove certain types of material from the web then there are still problems with this scheme:

it will probably be hijacked by single-issue groups (at least to start with)
how does government maintain the visibility of this scheme?
how are police competent to judge legality?
it will have no transnational effect
it won’t actually make any difference to the practical CT objectives of Whitehall
how is this related to the ‘blacklist’ of sites that the Office of Security and Counterterrorism may or may not maintain?

Notwithstanding its minimal contribution to countering the production and consumption of extremist media, government opens itself up to potential ridicule, although I don’t think anyone’s going to be paying this much attention after a while.

It does have one important function, however. Government has painted itself into a corner over ‘internet terrorism’ and the role of content in radicalisation, etc. It has therefore spent two years trying to meet the challenge of ex-Home Secretary Jacqui Smith when she announced she wanted a zero-tolerance approach to online terrorist content. Pretty much everything else has failed and this scheme does have a communicative effect, even if it has little practical utility. What it can say, if handled properly, is a simple message: you cannot use the UK as a platform for terrorist media without censure. It’s a “sorry, you can’t do that here” statement that could fit snugly into a renewed attempt to demonstrate what exactly it is that the UK stands for.

This approach has worked with online child sexual abuse imagery, mediated by the Internet Watch Foundation, and the UK is no longer regarded as a place where paedophiles can exchange material with impunity. The total volume hasn’t changed but the ability to operate in UK cyberspace has. A similar concept seems to underpin this new initiative, which “aims to make the internet a more hostile environment for terrorists and violent extremists who seek to exploit modern technology.”

The whole thing can be derailed by one poor decision, of course, so the scheme has to be consistent from the start. Hopefully, it won’t actively seek to issue NTDs, let alone pursue prosecutions, and ‘do nothing’ should be the default position, as I always maintain.

In conclusion, this reporting and adjudication mechanism looks to be the ‘least worst’ thing government could have done. It hasn’t announced that this will ’solve’ the problems as they see it, and it hasn’t sought to grab the headlines by launching it. If managed well, this could have some real effect on online behaviours government sees as undesirable. It takes the heat off ISPs and hosting companies, restores a degree of responsibility to consumers, and is unequivocal that there is actually very little content likely to be affected.

At the end of the day, if you don’t like something, don’t read it or watch it. It won’t go away, whatever government does, but you can just go somewhere else, leaving the miniscule minority of internet users to do what they’re going to do anyway. They will shift their hosts abroad, as most of them did long ago, and carry on regardless. And they will do so knowing that the UK will not allow them to base their activities there.

—Filed On:

Feb 4, 2010 at 19:52

—Index:

cyber,

politics,

surveillance,

terrorism