Syria and Diplomacy 2917


The problem with the Geneva Communique from the first Geneva round on Syria is that the government of Syria never subscribed to it.  It was jointly chaired by the League of Arab States for Syria, whatever that may mean.  Another problem is that it is, as so many diplomatic documents are, highly ambiguous.  It plainly advocates a power sharing executive formed by some of the current government plus the opposition to oversee a transition to democracy.  But it does not state which elements of the current government, and it does not mention which elements of the opposition, nor does it make plain if President Assad himself is eligible to be part of, or to head, the power-sharing executive, and whether he is eligible to be a candidate in future democratic elections.

Doubtless the British, for example, would argue that the term transition implies that he will go.  The Russians will argue there is no such implication and the text does not exclude anybody from the process.  Doubtless also diplomats on all sides were fully aware of these differing interpretations and the ambiguity is quite deliberate to enable an agreed text. I would say that the text tends much more to the “western” side, and that this reflects the apparently weak military position of the Assad regime at that time and the then extant threat of western military intervention.  There has been a radical shift in those factors against the western side in the interim. Expect Russian interpretations now to get more hardline.

Given the extreme ambiguity of the text, Iran has, as it frequently does, shot itself in the foot diplomatically by refusing to accept the communique as the basis of talks and thus getting excluded from Geneva.  Iran should have accepted the communique, and then at Geneva issued its own interpretation of it.

But that is a minor point.  The farcical thing about the Geneva conference is that it is attempting to promote into power-sharing in Syria “opposition” members who have no democratic credentials and represent a scarcely significant portion of those actually fighting the Assad regime in Syria.  What the West are trying to achieve is what the CIA and Mossad have now achieved in Egypt; replacing the head of the Mubarak regime while keeping all its power structures in place. The West don’t really want democracy in Syria, they just want a less pro-Russian leader of the power structures.

The inability of the British left to understand the Middle East is pathetic.  I recall arguing with commenters on this blog who supported the overthrow of the elected President of Egypt Morsi on the grounds that his overthrow was supporting secularism, judicial independence (missing the entirely obvious fact the Egyptian judiciary are almost all puppets of the military) and would lead to a left wing revolutionary outcome.  Similarly the demonstrations against Erdogan in Istanbul, orchestrated by very similar pro-military forces to those now in charge in Egypt, were also hailed by commenters here.  The word “secularist” seems to obviate all sins when it comes to the Middle East.

Qatar will be present at Geneva, and Qatar has just launched a pre-emptive media offensive by launching a dossier on torture and murder of detainees by the Assad regime, which is being given first headline treatment by the BBC all morning

There would be a good dossier to be issued on torture in detention in Qatar, and the lives of slave workers there, but that is another question.

I do not doubt at all that atrocities have been committed and are being committed by the Assad regime.  It is a very unpleasant regime indeed.  The fact that atrocities are also being committed by various rebel groups does not make Syrian government atrocities any better.

But whether 11,000 people really were murdered in a single detainee camp I am unsure.  What I do know is that the BBC presentation of today’s report has been a disgrace.  The report was commissioned by the government of Qatar who commissioned Carter Ruck to do it.  Both those organisations are infamous suppressors of free speech.  What is reprehensible is that the BBC are presenting the report as though it were produced by neutral experts, whereas the opposite is the case.  It is produced not by anti torture campaigners or by human rights activists, but by lawyers who are doing it purely and simply because they are being paid to do it.

The BBC are showing enormous deference to Sir Desmond De Silva, who is introduced as a former UN war crimes prosecutor.  He is indeed that, but it is not the capacity in which he is now acting.  He is acting as a barrister in private practice.  Before he was a UN prosecutor, he was for decades a criminal defence lawyer and has defended many murderers.  He has since acted to suppress the truth being published about many celebrities, including John Terry.

If the Assad regime and not the government of Qatar had instructed him and paid him, he would now be on our screens arguing the opposite case to that he is putting.  That is his job.  He probably regards that as not reprehensible.  What is reprehensible is that the BBC do not make it plain, but introduce him as a UN war crimes prosecutor as though he were acting in that capacity or out of concern for human rights.  I can find no evidence of his having an especial love for human rights in the abstract, when he is not being paid for it.  He produced an official UK government report into the murder of Pat Finucane, a murder organised by British authorities, which Pat Finucane’s widow described as a “sham”.  He was also put in charge of quietly sweeping the Israeli murders on the Gaza flotilla under the carpet at the UN.

The question any decent journalist should be asking him is “Sir Desmond De Silva, how much did the government of Qatar pay you for your part in preparing this report?  How much did it pay the other experts?  Does your fee from the Government of Qatar include this TV interview, or are you charging separately for your time in giving this interview?  In short how much are you being paid to say this?”

That is what any decent journalist would ask.  Which is why you will never hear those questions on the BBC.

 

 

 


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2,917 thoughts on “Syria and Diplomacy

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  • nevermind

    Sofia, bless, you’re coming on to me….. thanks, sorted. Guess were I live…78156… hint: its John Wayne at its best, the poor man.

  • Sofia Kibo Noh

    Nevermind. You Lucky man!

    How will you, or for that matter, the Land of the Free cope?

  • John Goss

    Mary I’ve signed. Similar problem with Zip code but got round it with a Birmingham Alabama code.

    Birmingham, Alabama ZIP Codes
    ZIP County State Area Code Time Zone
    35201 Jefferson AL 205 CST
    35202 Jefferson AL 205 CST
    35203 Jefferson AL 205 CST

    I used the first.

  • John Goss

    What we should be doing is suing the good old USA, our special partner, for causing adverse weather conditions, pumping Sulphuric Acid into the upper atmosphere causing earthquakes, tsunamis and floods with its HAARP programme. Get rid of HAARP and hope the world can recover. Imprison all those involved in the programme, and all the governments who supported this madness. It began in earnest with that star war twat Reagan whose statue stands outside the US embassy. If ever a statue needed to be pulled down it is not the one of Sadam Hussein.

  • Mary

    I think it is a record. There were 8 of H’s comments earlier shot out as if from a popcorn gun within 38 minutes. There are either other chimeras of H (Lord protect us!) tapping away, the comments are pre loaded to send, or he/she is a fast typist albeit with some typos.

    He quotes the poet (aka ‘post’ LOL) Percy Shelley whom I know as Percy Bysshe Shelley and whose stirring poem The Mask of Anarchy, written in tribute to the men of Peterloo, I value greatly. It includes these verses:

    ”Men of England, heirs of Glory,
    Heroes of unwritten story,
    Nurslings of one mighty Mother,
    Hopes of her, and one another;

    ‘Rise like Lions after slumber
    In unvanquishable number,
    Shake your chains to earth like dew
    Which in sleep had fallen on you –
    Ye are many – they are few.

    http://www.artofeurope.com/shelley/she5.htm

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!

    Mary

    “I think it is a record. There were 8 of H’s comments earlier shot out as if from a popcorn gun within 38 minutes. There are either other chimeras of H (Lord protect us!) tapping away, the comments are pre loaded to send, or he/she is a fast typist albeit with some typos.”
    _______________________

    Was that a record? If so, thanks for pointing it out and I hope you’ll propose me for the Guiness Book of Records.

    On second thoughts, perhaps better not – for you are the real record holder here, both in terms of frequency, variety (is there anything or anyone you don’t have a gripe against?) and irrelevance.

    Sorry about the typos.

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!

    Mary

    “..the comments are pre loaded to send,…”
    ___________________

    Absolutely! All pre-loaded. You’ve cracked my secret – I know in advance what you’re going to post about and in what vein 🙂

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!

    Mary “corrects” me thus :

    “Percy Shelley whom I know as Percy Bysshe Shelley”
    ___________________

    But you do not appear to know Nicolas Maduro as Nicolas Maduro Moros. Strange, that…

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!

    “What we should be doing is suing the good old USA, our special partner, for causing adverse weather conditions, pumping Sulphuric Acid into the upper atmosphere causing earthquakes, tsunamis and floods with its HAARP programme. Get rid of HAARP and hope the world can recover. Imprison all those involved in the programme, and all the governments who supported this madness.”
    _________________________

    I second every word of that, Mr Goss.

    I would go further and say that “we” (who’s the “we”, by the way?) should sue every Western European govt for a variety of offences.

    I would furthermore propose Vladimir Putin as the President of the Court and a panel of assessors consisting exclusively of Chinese.

  • John Goss

    Great poem Mary. There are suspicions that Shelley was drowned by the secret services. There was an earlier attempt on his life in Wales as mentioned in Paul Foot’s “Red Shelley”. Oxford sent him down but then raised a naked statue to his memory.

    They had the young romantic
    Drink of a bitter cup
    And when the salt-draught drowned the man
    They bouyed his statue up.

    “Shelley was here.” the statue cries
    Yet they should cry with shame,
    Hypocrisy rides through those halls,
    Those hallowed halls of fame.

  • Mary

    Washington’s Cloned Female Warmongers
    By Finian Cunningham
    February 09, 2014

    What is it about America’s women diplomats? They seem so hard and cloned – bereft of any humanity or intelligence. Presumably, these women are supposed to represent social advance for the female gender. But, far from displaying female independence, they are just a pathetic copy of the worst traits in American male politicians – aggressive, arrogant and completely arrant in their views.

    /..
    http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37599.htm

    The writer refers to Nuland and Sherman. The latter is also Jewish and was a counsellor to Madeleine (‘the price is worth it’) Albright in 1999. She met Peres last year to give him assurances on Iran.
    http://www.timesofisrael.com/peres-meets-top-us-negotiator-with-iran/

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!

    Ah, “The Mask of Anarchy”! I too value it greatly for its flattering reference to Robert Stewart*, 2nd Marquess of Londonderry, Lord Castlereagh :

    “I met Murder on the way-
    He had a mask like Castlereagh -”

    and am very surprised that you didn’t quote the above lines.

    * apologies in advance if I’ve missed out his middle name.

    PS – how many posts am I up to now, Mary?

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!

    Mary gleefully informs us :

    “The writer refers to Nuland and Sherman. The latter is also Jewish….”

    ____________________

    ALSO Jewish, huh? Do you mean “Jewish in addition to her other bad qualities” or “Jewish as is Victoria Nuland”?

    Either way, unless you’d care to explain the relevance of these two persons’ religion to the rest of your post I’ll have to put this comment down to your habitual anti-Jewish prejudice.

  • Mary

    On Medialens from Jonathan Cook whose computer received the attentions of Shin Bet.

    Jonathan Cook: Notes from a journalist in the margins

    Posted by The Editors on February 10, 2014, 4:12 pm

    Many thanks to all of you who sent me suggestions for how better to protect my privacy after what looked suspiciously like a hack of my computer by the Shin Bet. There are some suggestions that I will certainly be incorporating into my working practices, as best I can.

    I have received far too many emails to be able to answer each of them, at least not in the short term (although I will do my best over the coming days if my workload eases). I thought in the meantime I would write a quick post as a way to address more generally some of the issues readers have raised, including a few misconceptions I may have encouraged with my original post on the hacking incident.

    These thoughts are also worth setting down, in my view, because, increasingly in the wake of the NSA revelations, some misunderstandings about the work of journalists have emerged.

    – See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2014-02-10/notes-from-a-journalist-in-the-margins/#sthash.hZozJBe1.dpuf

  • John Goss

    The lines you quote are at the start of the poem H, but Mary quotes from the end of a fairly long poem which sometimes loses metrical form but never the sense of meaning. It also mentions Eldon (Fraud). Castlereagh must have eventually got a conscience because he slit his throat. Unless someone did it for him.

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!

    From Detective Constable Goss:

    “There are suspicions that Shelley was drowned by the secret services.
    _____________________

    If one reads enough posts like the above from DC Goss and others of his sort one starts wondering if there are any examples of anyone in the public eye who met a wholly natural death…..

    What’s the word on Shakespeare, John?

    As for myself, I think Proust was murdered by Albertine, who put arsenic into his absinthe.

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!

    “Castlereagh must have eventually got a conscience because he slit his throat. Unless someone did it for him.”
    ________________

    It woz young Princess Vicky wot done it, John.

  • Kempe

    “Get rid of HAARP and hope the world can recover. ”

    HAARP was shut down in May of last year but if you’re daft enough to believe HAARP can cause earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, cancer, false pregnancy and scurvy in ewes then that’s irrelevant.

  • John Goss

    Kempe, there’s more than just the Alaskan one if my understanding is correct. There are I believe sixteen facilities. Yes I do believe it like I believe that climate change and global warming are facts of life, and I believed them back in the 1990s – not like some.

  • Herbie

    After the sad loss of Helen Thomas, Matthew Lee of AP seems to be one of the few in the Washington Press Corps to hold these sophistic parsers to account.

    Look who it is:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU7osIl8IDI

    Here she is again:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFGjQqmADYI

    And here’s the hapless Jen Psaki faffing her lines:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDFIVVmXE-g

    And here’s the Fuck EU woman again:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH-sdy50uik

    Seems to be a bit of a regular.

  • Herbie

    More importantly, the Fuck EU woman has revealed that the US is managing the fascist groups behind the terrorism in Ukraine:

    “The call is concrete confirmation of what we have been writing here at RPI for some time. This is a cruder and more violent version of the US-sponsored Orange Revolution.

    Particularly interesting from the recording is the treatment of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon as some sort of junior errand boy for Washington. That explains his cowardly move to rescind Iran’s invitation to participate in the Geneva II talks as soon as Secretary Kerry demanded it.”

    http://www.globalresearch.ca/fk-the-eu-tape-reveals-us-runs-ukraine-opposition/5368117

    Are there any terrorists operating anywhere in the world that aren’t being backed by the US.

  • John Goss

    So I say again:

    “What we should be doing is suing the good old USA, our special partner, for causing adverse weather conditions, pumping Sulphuric Acid into the upper atmosphere causing earthquakes, tsunamis and floods with its HAARP programme. Get rid of HAARP and hope the world can recover. Imprison all those involved in the programme, and all the governments who supported this madness. It began in earnest with that star war twat Reagan whose statue stands outside the US embassy. If ever a statue needed to be pulled down it is not the one of Sadam Hussein.”

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo-T_KvLNdQ

  • A Node

    “The writer refers to Nuland and Sherman. The latter is also Jewish and was a counsellor to Madeleine (‘the price is worth it’) Albright in 1999. She met Peres last year to give him assurances on Iran.”

    To be fair to Ms Albright, she thought that she was Catholic until she was in her 50’s and had become US Secretary of State. When The Washington Post reported that she was Jewish in 1997, she said “This was obviously a major surprise to me. I have never been told this.” She’d forgotten about the letters written to her by the mayor of Letohrad, the town where her Czech father grew up, which included clippings from Czech newspapers referring to her Jewish heritage. She didn’t even wonder why her cousin was Jewish.

    Her Dad, Josef Korbel, would have been disappointed that it spelled the end of his daughter’s political career just when she was being touted as the first female president of the United States, but he was probably consoled by the success of his other protégé, Condoleezza Rice.

    Interesting man, Josef Korbel.

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!

    A Node

    “…..his daughter’s political career just when she was being touted as the first female president of the United States, but he was probably consoled by the success of his other protégé, Condoleeza Rice….”
    _________________

    ‘Touted’ by whom, A Node? I think you’ll find that over time all sorts of people are ‘touted’ for all kinds of posts and almost all fall by the wayside. You shouldn’t be unduly influenced by that kind of idle speculation as journalists and pundits of all kinds have to keep churning out the prose. Much as the Eminences do, in fact.

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