Britain lecturing the world on morality? That’s rich

Kevin McKenna in The Guardian

To the world’s despots and gangsters: if you think you’re bad, just look at what’s going on in Cool Britannia

 

Panama City has been the centre of the news because of revelations about the law firm Mossack Fonseca. But maybe we should be looking a little closer to home. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty




As ever, the King James version adds a literary edge to one of the most dramatic tales of the Old Testament. In Genesis 18:24, Abraham is appealing to God’s good nature as he attempts to save the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah from the Almighty’s ultimate sanction. “Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city: wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein,” the desperate patriarch solicits his maker. In the end, Abraham’s pleas come to naught as he couldn’t even name one good man, let alone 50, and so the cities are duly consumed by fire and brimstone.

Now, I’m not suggesting for a minute that Panama, the Las Vegas of the rich and infamous, is about to meet a fiery denouement just yet. After all, God’s ire seems to have softened since those biblical early days when He favoured a no-nonsense approach. And, as the leaked Mossack and Fonseca documents show, if Panama was to be turned to dust where would that leave the UK? As the Times declared last week: “No other country in the world maintains and indulges a network of offshore tax havens as brazen in their defence of unwarranted secrecy as Britain’s overseas territories.”

Indeed, I’m sure some enterprising management consultancy could establish a lucrative wee venture engaging with the world’s top gangsters and despots in the following blameless and entirely legal way. I’d suggest they produce a glossy brochure showing how, no matter what crimes against humanity they are ever accused of, not to get too strung up about it all. The brochure would be entitled If you think you’re bad, just look at what’s going on in Cool Britannia. A series of seven seminars and modules would also be offered to tyrants and vagabonds everywhere providing them with something money just can’t buy: solace, geopolitical schadenfreude and a good night’s sleep.

1. Hypocrisy

The UK has recently instigated a programme of benefit cuts, advocating that its poorest citizens all tighten their belts to see them through the choppy waters of economic recession. They are being told that everyone is all in it together and that the government is going to make work pay. There will be a clampdown on workshy benefit cheats. For an extra premium we will provide you with a list of all the companies using places such as Panama to avoid tax and show you how the world’s poorest countries are deprived of £240bn of income by similar practices.

2. Cynicism

Are you sick of western democracies lecturing you about ethnic cleansing and enriching yourselves while your people starve? We’ll show you how every spare scrap of land in London is being sold off to unnamed persons to build blocks of £5m luxury flats that will never be occupied. Attached, please see the DVD of the view from the Docklands train. This is called economic cleansing and is the process of removing undesirable taxpayers to make room for the proceeds of global money-laundering. And destroying the concept of social and affordable housing.

3. Graft

Political and civic leaders all preach the values of financial rectitude and putting away money for a decent pension. But every Saturday and Sunday (and all other nights when there is football on the telly) they permit dozens of unregulated online gambling outlets to prey on working men as they watch their favourite teams in action. “Please gamble responsibly,” they say, and then encourage people, when they are at their most vulnerable, to bet on every possible outcome, every hour of the day on every electrical device. Remember this when they take a dim view of Igor and Sergei, your new business partners.

4. Cheating

If you ever find yourself resentful at another chinless wonder from the British Embassy lecturing you on human rights abuses this one’s for you. In Scotland, almost half the land is owned by 500 individuals. This came about after illegal and often violent land-grabs 300-400 years ago that have been protected by dubious legislation ever since. After 17 years of so-called “left-wing” governments their land reform bill is a toothless joke. Scotland is a rich country with great export goods, good universities and stacks of churches. Tonight, though, 250,000 of its children will go without food and 5,000 don’t know where they’ll be sleeping.

5. Warmongering

Do you ever get hurt when Britain and its allies routinely describe you as being part of the axis of evil? Doesn’t it make you sick when they insist only they can be trusted with nuclear warheads? Perhaps you ought to know that this moral arbiter of what is good for the rest of the world routinely has sold £5.6bn worth of military hardware to Saudi Arabia, aka The Headless State, since the Tories came to power. During that time, according to the Campaign Against Arms Trade, the UK has sold weapons to 24 of the 27 states included on its own list of “countries of humanitarian concern”.

6. Greed

Don’t get too upset when the UK tries to excoriate you for your apparent lack of democracy. Instead, just tell them that you won’t take any lessons in this from a state that pimps its own parliament as a place to purchase influence in the laws of the land and where MPs can be bought. All it takes is a tidy six-figure cheque to Tory central office and you’re in. In fact, for the price of a few lunches at Claridge’s and a two grand a month retainer you can get any number of Tories to ensure no one looks too closely at your new bespoke torture chambers. Everything has a price, and that includes parliament.

7. Indifference

The next time you’re in London to collect your latest batch of Eurofighters take a note of every time you hear British people congratulating themselves on being the most enlightened and civilised country in the known universe. Then ask yourself why they all look the other way when this is all happening. Their passivity can be bought cheaply with a few royal babies; some gold medals at the next Olympic Games and arranging another one of their wars against another third world country.

A tale of two ethnic cleansings in Kashmir

by S A Aiyar in the Times of India

January 19 marks the 25th anniversary of the Azaadi (independence) uprising in the Kashmir Valley, leading to the ethnic cleansing of around 400,000 Kashmir Pandits. For some, this day heralded the rejection of Indian rule by protesting Kashmiris, followed by the bloody suppression of Kashmiri human rights by Indian forces (portrayed in the film ‘Haider’). For the Pandits, it heralded a reign of Muslim terror.

Rahul Pandita has written a heartbreaking first- person account of the Pandit tragedy in ‘Our Moon has Blood Clots’. He shows that ethnic cleansing was not the work of a few Islamic militants, as claimed by optimists. On January 19, Pandita’s Muslim neighbours chanted the Islamic battle cry “Naara-e-taqbeer, Allah-o-Akbar”, made famous as heralding Muslim attacks by the TV film ‘Tamas’. Pandita’s mother swore to kill her daughter and then herself if the house was invaded. The long night passed without an invasion, but many fearful Pandits quickly left.

Soon after, local Muslim boys gathered outside Pandita’s home, and discussed how they would share the houses of departing Pandits and rape their girls. One Muslim boy laughingly said to another, “Go inside and piss: like a dog you need to mark your territory.” Pandita’s terrified father decided to flee.

Official figures say only 219 Pandits were killed in the valley. But the threat of violence was so great, and the chances of curbing it so remote, that lakhs of Pandits fled. Most are now rotting in refugee camps in Jammu.

Recently, an ex-general — also a Pandit — told me the Indian media had underplayed the tragedy of his tribe. I agreed, but added that the media has also ignored the earlier mass expulsion of Muslims from Jammu. This surprised the ex-general: I’ve never heard of that, he declared.

He is not alone. Although our media pride themselves on free and bold speech, they maintain a conspiracy of silence on some issues relating to the supposed “national interest.” This includes the mass killing and expulsion of lakhs of Muslims from Jammu in 1947. That story should be recalled on this sombre anniversary.

Today, Jammu is a Hindu-majority area. But in 1947, it had a Muslim majority. The communal riots of 1947 fell most heavily on Jammu’s Muslims; lakhs fled into what became Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. That turned Jammu’s Muslim majority into a Hindu majority. In sheer scale, this far exceeded the ethnic cleansing of Pandits five decades later.

The jagir of Poonch was a semi-autonomous part of J&K till World War II. Subsequently, the maharaja took direct control and imposed high taxes, with special levies on Muslims. This sparked an anti-tax protest in early 1947, which the maharaja put down with armed force.

Poonch had 50,000 ex-soldiers of the British Indian Army, many of whom still had guns. The maharaja felt threatened by this, and in July ordered all holders of arms to deposit these in police stations. But many arms deposited by Muslim ex-soldiers were then handed out by the maharaja’s police to Hindu and Sikh families, raising communal fears. Muslims responded by purchasing fresh weapons from arms bazaars in neighbouring NWFP province. Sardar Ibrahim Khan, a prominent Poonch politician, organized an armed Muslim force that soon staged a revolt.

The official Indian version holds that the Indo-Pak imbroglio over Kashmir began with the invasion of the valley by Muslim tribesmen in October 1947, obliging the maharaja to accede to India. But many academics, including Christopher Snedden in his book ‘Kashmir: The Unwritten History’, argue that the Poonch revolt was the first step in upending the maharaja’s rule, for purely local reasons unrelated to Indo-Pak claims.

Meanwhile, the bloody partition riots in neighbouring Punjab spilled over into Jammu. Snedden cites estimates of between 70,000 and 237,000 Muslims killed. Historians Arjun Appaduri and Arien Mack in their book ‘India’s World’ give a hair-raising estimate of 200,000 killed and 500,000 displaced in Jammu. Tens of thousands of Hindus were killed and expelled from what became Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, but Muslims were by far the biggest victims.

The ethnic cleansing of Pandits from the valley was more one-sided than that of Jammu Muslims in 1947. Yet in sheer numbers and horrors, the Jammu episode was much worse. We have forgotten what happened then because it is politically and morally inconvenient.

The tragedies of J&K constitute a long, horrific tale of death and inhumanity. It has many villains and no heroes. Both sides have been guilty of ethnic cleansing. Both claim to be victims, forgetting they have also been perpetrators. On the 25th anniversary of the Azaadi uprising, the Hindu-Muslim divide is deeper, and ethnic amnesia more selective, than ever before. Some stories do not have happy endings.