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19 03 2010 EuroNews - Thailand's 'Red-shirt' movement are giving blood to throw at government offices in protest at what they say is the illegitimate leadership of Prime…

'I am 88 – but I am also 24'

19 03 2010 The Guardian | Book reviews -

'I'm not turning into Kingsley. I'm already Kingsley' The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Tuesday 16 February 2010 "In truth this is easily the most unusual thing about me," wrote Martin Amis in the column below: "I am the only hereditary novelist in the anglophone literary corpus." A reader points to at least one other, Anthony Trollope, following from his mother Frances.

I was born in Clapham in 1922. My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, Lucky Jim. This was followed by That Uncertain Feeling and Take a Girl Like You, among others; but my really productive period began in 1973, when I published both The Riverside Villas Murder and The Rachel Papers. 1978 saw the appearance of Jake's Thing and Success; in 1984 it was Stanley and the Women and Money; in 1991 it was The Russian Girl and Time's Arrow. This last was shortlisted for the Booker prize; but I had already been a winner with The Old Devils in 1986. I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice – the first time for my first first novel, the second time for my second first novel. That period, alas, came to an end in 1995. Since then, though, I have been far from sluggardly. This year, for instance, at the age of 88, I publish my 37th work of fiction, The Pregnant Widow, and next year will see another novel, State of England – my 67th book, which nicely sets the scene for my 90th birthday. I have written five volumes' worth of journalism; I have taught at Princeton, Cambridge and Manchester. May I quote Anthony Burgess? "Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now." I have been married four times (two of my wives are novelists), and I have eight children and seven grandchildren – so far. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention my Collected Poems (1979). ❦ The creature described above is of course imaginary. But such a phantasm, such a monster of longevity and industriousness, seems to exist in the minds, or in the anxiety dreams, of a tiny stratum: British – no, English – feature-writers who occasionally address themselves to literary affairs. Incidentally, this is what they're groping to express when they say I'm "turning into Kingsley". They should relax: I'm already Kingsley. In truth, this is easily the most unusual thing about me: I am the only hereditary novelist in the anglophone literary corpus. Thus I am the workaholic and hypermanic, and by now very elderly, Prince Charles of English letters. I have overstayed my welcome. I have been about the place for much too long. About 90% of the coverage has passed me by, but some new tendencies are clear enough. What's different, this time round, is that the writer, or this writer, gets blamed for all the slanders he incites in the press. Some quite serious commentators (DJ Taylor, for one) have said that I'm controversial-on-purpose whenever I have a book coming out. Haven't they noticed that the papers pick up on my remarks whether I have a book coming out or not? And how can you be controversial- on-purpose without ceasing to care what you say? The Telegraph, on its front page, offers the following: "Martin Amis: 'Women have too much power for their own good'." This is the equivalent of "Rowan Williams: 'Christianity is a vulgar fraud'." I suppose the Telegraph was trying to make me sound "provocative". Well, they messed that up too. I don't sound provocative. I sound like a much-feared pub bore in Hove. And yet experienced journalists will look me in the eye and solemnly ask, "Why do you do it?" They are not asking me why I say things in public (which is an increasingly pertinent question). They are asking me why I deliberately stir up the newspapers. How can they have such a slender understanding of their own trade? Getting taken up (and recklessly distorted) in the newspapers is not something I do. It's something the news- papers do. The only person in England who can manipulate the fourth estate is, appropriately, Katie Price. But there I go again. No, the vow of silence looks more and more attractive. That would be a story too, but it would only be a story once. Wouldn't it? ❦ To return briefly to the longevity theme – and all the stuff about street-corner suicide parlours, and the "silver tsunami" (which is the demogaphers' shorthand for what has been described as "the most profound population shift in history"). The press reacted to my remarks with righteous dismay; but I saw no recent headlines saying "Terry Pratchet is mad", by way of commentary on his resonant statement about euthanasia. In addition, it turns out that 75% of Britons (but none of the political parties) agree with him and agree with me. Thus the euthanasia question, eerily, is the reverse image of capital punishment at the time of its abolition. The people wanted judicial killing, but the government, highmindedly and quite rightly in this case, said no. Of course, Sir Terry's dignified remarks were taken from a public lecture; mine were a mishmash of half-quotes from a satirical novel. For the interested, the passage reads (I am referring to Europe's distorted age structures): "Hoi polloi: the many. And, oh, we will be many (he meant the generation less and less affectionately known as the Baby Boomers). And we will be hated, too. Governance, for at least a generation, he read, will be a matter of transferring wealth from the young to the old. And they won't like that, the young. They won't like the silver tsunami, with the old hogging the social services and stinking up the clinics and the hospitals, like an inundation of monstrous immigrants. There will be age wars, and chronological cleansing . . ." Then, too, Sir Terry has Alzheimer's – a condition made yet more tragic by the liveliness of the mind it here afflicts (I am thinking also of Iris Murdoch and Saul Bellow). And Sir Terry is older than me. Or is he? Well, yes and no. I am 88 – but I am also 24. Look at the photographs. A 60-year-old grandfather, I am still the "bad boy" (not even the bad man) of English letters. Who could possibly "manipulate" perceptions as chaotic as these?

Martin Amis

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In praise of | Tony Judt | Editorial

19 03 2010 The Guardian | Book reviews -

Lecturing from a wheelchair, breathing through a tube, he has not done 'the natural thing' of taking to whisky and old movies; he remains a historian who intervenes in politics, author of a doorstopper history of Europe that is a hymn to social democracy Tony Judt is not what you are expecting. Speaking to this paper a few weeks ago, he remarked: "Today I'm regarded outside New York University as a Looney Tunes leftie self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university I'm … a typical old-fashioned white male liberal elitist … I'm on the edge of both, it makes me feel comfortable." Sure enough, an unpredictable spikiness is Judt's motif. He is a historian who intervenes in politics; a leftie who has skewered such greats of leftwing historiography as Eric Hobsbawm (in one of the most gobsmacking New York Review of Books articles of recent years), and a self-proclaimed fan of specialism who turns out essays on anything from Israel to Arthur Koestler to the bus service in postwar London. Judt's own specialism is socialism in modern France – but the book he will be remembered for is Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. At nearly 900 pages, it is a doorstopper – but it is both a brilliant examination of why eastern Europe collapsed, and one academic's hymn to social democracy. Spikiness has also defined Judt's latest phase. Paralysed with motor neurone disease, he has not done what he calls "the natural thing" of taking to whisky and old movies, but has kept working: dictating essays, memorising lectures and delivering them to packed houses from a wheelchair while breathing through a tube. And, true to form, his latest book, Ill Fares the Land – on the role of the state in a capitalist economy – is probably his most pugnacious yet.

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Turkish military chiefs in alleged coup

19 03 2010 The Guardian | World news -

About 20 held in investigation into alleged rightwing network Turkish police today detained about 20 people, including serving military officers, as part of an investigation into an alleged plot to topple the government. The operation was part of an investigation into the "Ergenekon" network, an alleged rightwing militant group that prosecutors say had planned to overthrow prime minister Tayyip Erdogan's AK party government, according to broadcaster NTV. The suspects were detained in eight cities, the television report said. No details of names were given. More than 200 civilians and retired and working officers in the military are on trial accused of membership of Ergenekon. Close to 40 other officers, including generals and admirals, have recently been charged as part of a separate alleged coup plot. Critics accuse the AK party government of using the investigations to hound secularist opponents. The army – self-appointed guardian of Turkey's secular order – has ousted four governments since 1960 but its powers have been eroded in recent years by democratic reforms designed to boost the government's bid for EU membership. The other main pillar of the secularist establishment, the judiciary, is also at odds with the government, which is suspected by its opponents of harbouring an Islamist agenda. Erdogan's party narrowly survived an attempt in the country's constitutional court to ban it in 2008 and wants to push through judicial reforms to make it harder to ban political parties. Such plans have caused speculation for weeks that the secularists would hit back by launching a court case to close the party.

Turkey

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North Korea minister shot for economic failure

19 03 2010 The Guardian | World news -

Pak Nam-gi killed by firing squad after currency reform worsened markets, but many see him as a scapegoat North Korea has executed a senior official blamed for currency reforms that damaged the already ailing economy and potentially affected the succession, a news agency in South Korea reported today. Pak Nam-gi was killed by firing squad last week, said Yonhap, citing multiple sources. The Workers party chief for planning and the economy had not been seen in public since January. The 77-year-old was put to death as "a son of a bourgeois conspiring to infiltrate the ranks of revolutionaries to destroy the national economy", the agency said. But it reported that many North Koreans did not believe the explanation, citing one source who said: "The mood is the leadership has made Pak Nam-gi a scapegoat." November's abrupt redenomination of the won led to public discontent and was having a negative impact on plans for the succession, another source said. Kim Jong-il, the country's Dear Leader, appears to be preparing the way for the transfer of power to his third son, Kim Jong-un. There has been widespread speculation about the state of his health following a reported stroke. The International Crisis Group (ICG) described the currency revaluation as "disastrous" in a report released this week. The reform appeared to be aimed at reasserting state control over the economy, curbing inflation and tackling corruption. Although people were allowed to exchange currency – at a rate of 100 to one – only a small amount could be changed. That wiped out the savings of slightly better off North Koreans who had managed to put aside money through trading. Food prices soared as uncertainty over contradictory policies led to hoarding, the ICG said. By mid-January there were reports of rising deaths from starvation, thought to have prompted the release of emergency food supplies. The problems may have been exacerbated by the decision to pay those on state salaries the wage level in the new currency – in theory increasing their real incomes 100 times over. The government closed markets and banned both North Koreans and foreigners from using foreign currency – widely employed by the better-off to pay for goods smuggled in from China – but later reversed the currency ruling and eased restrictions on trading. But the ICG argued: "The relationship between the Workers party and the North Korean people has probably been damaged irreversibly [by the redenomination], which has serious implications for the long-term survival of the regime." There were several reports that the currency reform led to unrest – highly unusual in the tightly controlled country. That led to an equally rare public apology from the government, according to a South Korean newspaper. Daniel Pinkston, north-east Asia deputy project director for ICG, said Pak's execution was unlikely to be reported domestically but could possibly cause dissension with the party. "Will people start thinking 'I could be next' or will they say 'He really screwed up and got what he deserved'?" North Korea has struggled to feed its people since the famine of the mid-90s and is still reliant on food aid. But aid reductions and United Nations sanctions over its nuclear programme have further damaged the faltering economy, the ICG says, at a time when Pyongyang must also deal with the succession. The 90s famine forced the government into easing its grip on the economy, leading to the emergence of markets. But in recent years it has sought to clamp down on them again.The Daily NK, a Seoul-based website run by democracy and human rights activists, said Pak had allegedly submitted a report saying redenomination would improve people's lives and secure the country's finances. Pak was last mentioned by the north's official Korean Central News Agency in January when he accompanied Kim on an inspection trip. He was allegedly denounced as a traitor at a party meeting in the same month and arrested on the spot.

Tania Branigan

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In praise of | Tony Judt | Editorial

19 03 2010 The Guardian | World news -

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How to Greet the Dalai Lama

19 03 2010 The New York Review of Books -

Robert Barnett

President Barack Obama meeting with the Dalai Lama in the Map Room of the White House, February 18, 2010 (Pete Souza/whitehouse.gov)

Since President Obama’s meeting with the Dalai Lama on February 18, the details of the closely-watched encounter have been carefully parsed, from the history of the room in which the two men met (the White House Map Room, an apparent indicator that a meeting is private, yet not personal) to the absence of the First Lady (making the meeting more official), and the serving of tea (making it less formal). Even the garbage bags that the Dalai Lama passed on his exit (seen as either incompetence by White House staff or a veiled message to Beijing) and the Dalai Lama’s flip-flops (seen as a metaphor for his policies or a rebuttal to Rupert Murdoch’s claim that the Tibetan leader wears Gucci shoes) were debated. Yet some of the most interesting details—those that may bear most directly on Obama’s handling of the China-Tibet issue—were missed. Chief among them, perhaps, was that the official White House description of the meeting omitted any mention of religion. It did not even pretend that the two leaders had discussed religion, spirituality, world peace, or any of the other fig-leaves used by European leaders like Gordon Brown to mollify Beijing when committing the offense of meeting with the Dalai Lama. There was also little mention of the fact that the President and his spokesmen did not use the rhetoric about democracy or freedom that in the past has made American leaders (and sometimes the Dalai Lama) look like ideologues. Instead, administration officials described the meeting as a discussion in plain terms about the political situation in Tibet, thus sending a muscular message to Beijing, which, after all, remains firmly in charge of that territory. The press also downplayed the Dalai Lama’s separate, extended meeting with the Secretary of State, although that could be taken by Beijing as a serious indication that the US views him as a national leader. This perhaps explains why the State Department referred to the Dalai Lama as “a religious and cultural leader,” while the White House described him much more assertively as also “a spokesman for Tibetan rights.” But what may turn out to have been the most explosive element of ritual emerged only during a minor speech on a quite different topic by the Dalai Lama the following day, and was noticed by a sharp-eared AFP reporter and a Tibetan specialist from VOA: President Obama gave his visitor a gift, mentioned in no official statements—a specially bound volume containing copies of the five letters sent by Roosevelt and Truman directly to the young Dalai Lama when he ruled what was, in practice, an independent country. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to guess how that went down in Beijing. Still, Chinese leaders must have relished the visual record of the event. The subtext of the single photograph of the meeting, released by the White House, was clear to anyone familiar with Buddhist, Asian or Chinese iconography, literate or not: it showed the President speaking to the Dalai Lama with his right hand raised, much as in the teaching mudra used to show the Buddha preaching to his disciples; while the Dalai Lama, like an attentive pupil, has turned to listen, so that his eyes cannot be seen.

The 5th Dalai Lama meeting the Qing Emperor Shunzhi in 1653

The most famous visual record of any encounter between the Tibetan pontiff and a worldly ruler is the mural in the Potala Palace that depicts the 5th Dalai Lama meeting the Qing Emperor Shunzhi in 1653. The Chinese authorities misread that powerful image in the past: they reproduced it in the 1980s in innumerable postcards and propaganda books because it shows the Emperor sitting on a slightly higher throne than his Tibetan visitor—until they discovered that all Tibetans and any Buddhist could see that the mural shows that the Dalai Lama has his right hand raised and is clearly teaching his imperial disciple. This time, it is the Emperor who is preaching. But even for the most secular Tibetans, the White House photograph is puzzling: it shows the President with his legs crossed, unthinkable casualness for a Chinese or Tibetan leader. And then there’s the tea: the photograph shows a tea-cup and a cookie in front of the Dalai Lama, while the President has neither, an unmistakable sign that the President did not deign to drink with his visitor. In case anyone thinks that drinking tea together is not important, they need to reread their copy of the Dukula, the 5th Dalai Lama’s autobiography, in which he describes his 1653 meeting. Immediately after noting that the Emperor’s throne was slightly higher than his, he writes:

gsol ja byung ba’i dus sngon la ‘thung gsungs kyang de ‘dra mi ‘gab zhus pas dus mnyam du ‘thang gnang ba sogs mthong gzos shin tu che ba mdzad When tea was served, the king asked me to drink first. I replied that this would not be proper. So he suggested we drink at the same time. He showed much respect.

That’s something you won’t read in Beijing’s accounts of the meeting, just as you won’t find the contemporary descriptions—unthinkable to those brought up on the Chinese myth that Tibetan leaders had to kowtow to the Emperor—of Shunzhi descending from his throne to meet the Dalai Lama, walking “approximately four bow-lengths” (about 30 feet) towards him and taking him by the hand. Consider The Secret History of the Potala Palace, the famous feature film produced in Lhasa in 1989, in which the historic 1653 meeting was recreated by contemporary Tibetan actors without a kowtow: it has been banned by Beijing since its first showing. The White House photograph’s symbolism was presumably unintentional, but it carries another echo from the past: American officials tried to tone down Dalai Lama meetings once before, and it did not work out well. In 1908, the great Tibetologist William Woodville Rockhill, then the US envoy in Beijing, insisted that the 13th Dalai Lama reverse the precedent of 1653 and show submission to the Imperial throne probably because the US sought a Chinese alliance in order to deny the British market access to the Qing domains. The 13th compromised and went down only on his knees, not unlike Lord Macartney, sent to China in 1793 as the first British envoy, who had gone down on one knee before the Emperor Qianlong. But Rockhill’s efforts at staging conciliation failed: within 2 years the Qing had sent an invasion force to Lhasa, and three years later the 13th Dalai Lama, disappointed with misjudged American conciliation and increasingly close to the British, declared Tibet to be independent. His successor, the 14th Dalai Lama, travels the world constantly scoring symbolic victories and will be unconcerned about the President’s teaching mudra or the single cup of tea. Inside Tibet, however, people might fear that the shade of Rockhill is whispering equivocating advice in the corridors of the White House. This would seem a little unjust if the other details are considered (though the garbage bags don’t help). But it raises the central and as yet unanswered question, which is whether Obama’s long-awaited initial foray into the Tibet issue will bring Beijing, masters of the land, any closer to settling with their Tibetan neighbors, masters of symbolic ritual.

Kashmir: "The World's Most Dangerous Place"

19 03 2010 The New York Review of Books -

Pankaj Mishra

Kashmiri women looking over a wall at the funeral ceremony of Sajjad Ahmed, a suspected militant allegedly killed by Indian security forces, Rajpora, India, February 19, 2010 (Dar Yasin, AP Images)

In New Delhi last week the Foreign Secretaries of India and Pakistan met for the first time since the terrorist attack on Mumbai in November 2008; the official talks concluded with both sides arguing over what they should talk about. India demanded that Islamabad prosecute the Pakistani militants responsible for the Mumbai attacks more vigorously. Pakistan insisted that the core issue between the two countries remains the India-held Muslim majority valley of Kashmir, where, out of a population of some 7.6 million people, more than 80,000 people have died since an insurgency supported by Pakistan began in 1989. In one sense at least, the faltering dialogue between India and Pakistan resembles the ‘peace process’ in the Middle East: by the time any ways to proceed are agreed upon, usually with much acrimony, peace seems even further away. Last week’s talks in Delhi most likely came about because of pressure from the United States. The Obama administration seems to have decided that it cannot do without Pakistani assistance in fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and that Pakistan has its own strategic interests in Afghanistan. Pakistan has rewarded this overdue acknowledgment of its concerns by arresting senior Taliban leaders who have long been living in its territory. In return, the Obama administration has pressed India to be more conciliatory over Kashmir. Of course, protecting American security interests isn’t the only reason why India and Pakistan should work toward a solution in Kashmir. As Basharat Peer’s new book, Curfewed Night, recounts, India’s occupation of the valley, enforced by more than half a million soldiers, has given a powerful raison d’etre to militant organizations in Pakistan, which have grown exponentially since 1989. Peer, a Kashmiri journalist and currently a Fellow at the Open Society Institute, was in his teens when the insurgency began in Srinagar, the capital of India-held Kashmir. His own friends, enraged by police firing upon unarmed demonstrators, left the valley to train in militant camps set up across the border by Pakistani intelligence and army officers. Sent away to India by his parents, Peer witnessed the progressive alienation and isolation of Muslims as Hindu nationalists unleashed one violent campaign after another through the 1990s. He later returned to Kashmir as a journalist, and Curfewed Night reflects his diverse experience of the valley by combining memoir with reportage, history, and analysis. In clear, swift prose, Peer evokes the relentless ordeal of checkpoints, arbitrary arrests and disappearances that Kashmiri Muslims live with. He explores the valley’s syncretic Islam, and the attempts to undermine it by fundamentalists from Pakistan. He describes the plight of the poorest among more than a hundred thousand Kashmiri Hindus, who fled the valley after radical Islamists killed many of them. He also investigates the widespread use of torture against Kashmiri young men by Indian security forces, particularly the practice of inserting live copper wires into penises, which led to hundreds of cases of impotence in the valley. Peer is not writing about a remote past; torture and extrajudicial execution remain commonplace in Kashmir today, even though Pakistan-trained or indigenous militants are fewer and less lethal. Nor have India and Pakistan gotten any closer to resolving their dispute over the region. Pakistani army and intelligence officers loudly invoke the alleged existential threat from India, helping them to preserve the ISI’s extra-constitutional authority (and business monopolies) in Pakistan and severely limiting the prospects for democracy and equitable economic growth. Kashmir also exacts a great price from India, which is still overwhelmingly poor despite its fast-growing GDP, while radicalizing many among the country’s 150 million Muslims. The Chennai daily, The Hindu, revealed last month that Pakistani militants demanding the Indian army’s withdrawal from Kashmir during the four-day terror attack on Mumbai in November 2008 were being prompted via their mobile phones by an Indian Muslim, who advised them to call the media to condemn India’s “two-faced” policy toward Muslims. The new round of talks could be derailed by another terrorist attack in India—such as the one last month that killed 15 Indians and foreigners in the Western Indian city of Pune—or against an Indian target in Afghanistan. In any case, the Obama administration doesn’t seem much interested in slowing or reversing the arms buildup in South Asia—the necessary prelude to peace in the region—as it promotes major arms deals with both India and Pakistan. As is well known, the Pakistani army under General Pervez Musharraf eagerly appropriated for their own purposes the $10 billion in aid showered on Pakistan by the Bush administration after September 11. Beholden for his survival to the army and the ISI, Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari seems far from renouncing the venal ways that earned him long spells in prison. Nevertheless, American military sales to Pakistan, paid for with aid money, will increase almost two-fold next year. Meanwhile, American defense firms like Lockheed Martin and Boeing are currently vying for the world’s biggest weapons contracts from India, which is racing to modernize its military. Almost entirely exempt from parliamentary debate or public scrutiny, the unprecedented expansion of India’s defense budget, which rose 34 percent last year, is a bonanza for the country’s alarmingly numerous corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and army officers. The consensus on defense spending is facilitated by an increasingly right-wing press that is constantly raising the alarm about various external and internal enemies. There are, as the political scientist Sunil Khilnani recently warned, grounds to fear the emergence in India of a “military-industrial complex”—especially while the Indian state, as Khilnani points out, is at war with its own people in Central India: the Mao-inspired guerillas who have organized India’s traditionally disadvantaged tribal communities and low-caste peasants into a militant movement spanning 20 of India’s 28 states. The apparent failure of an ambitious counterinsurgency campaign called “Operation Green Hunt” has recently forced the Indian government to propose ceasefire talks with the “Maoists.” As politicians and columnists frequently point out, “they are our own people.” But no such magnanimity may be extended to the 4 million Kashmiri Muslims who many Indians regard as blatantly treasonous after twenty years of anti-India, Pakistan-supported militancy. Of course most Kashmiris, weary of both radical Islamists from Pakistan and Indian security forces, long to be free of their overbearing neighbors. But even before its recent jingoistic phase, Indian press and television tended to obscure the clear Kashmiri demand for self-determination, preferring to highlight the depredations of Islamic fundamentalists. The complexity of the conflict as well as strictures on travel continue to inhibit foreign reporters from covering what Bill Clinton in 2002 described as the “world’s most dangerous place.” More disturbingly, a generation that has grown up in the shadow of the insurgency may soon be provoked into a new cycle of extreme violence. Scantily reported in the Indian and international press, Kashmir has been paralyzed for the last two weeks by strikes and clashes between police and young Kashmiri Muslims angered by the alleged killing of two unarmed teenagers by Indian soldiers. The possibility of participating in India’s growing economy will only partly defuse the fresh rage and frustration of these youths: they may prove to be no less compromising than their predecessors—Basharat Peer’s generation—who took up arms against the Indian state. No doubt Pakistani army and intelligence officials are watching them with interest, especially as talks between India and Pakistan go nowhere and the two countries embark upon their costliest arms race yet. Basharat Peer, Curfewed Night: One Kashmiri Journalist’s Frontline Account of Life, Love, and War in His Homeland (Scribner, 2010)

A Fascist Hero in Democratic Kiev

19 03 2010 The New York Review of Books -

Timothy Snyder

Independence Day, Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1993 (Josef Koudelka, Magnum Photos)

The incoming Ukrainian president will have to turn some attention to history, because the outgoing one has just made a hero of a long-dead Ukrainian fascist. By conferring the highest state honor of “Hero of Ukraine” upon Stepan Bandera (1909-1959) on January 22, Viktor Yushchenko provoked protests from the chief rabbi of Ukraine, the president of Poland, and many of his own citizens. It is no wonder. Bandera aimed to make of Ukraine a one-party fascist dictatorship without national minorities. During World War II, his followers killed many Poles and Jews. Why would President Yushchenko, the leader of the democratic Orange Revolution, wish to rehabilitate such a figure? Bandera, who spent years in Polish and Nazi confinement, and died at the hands of the Soviet KGB, is for some Ukrainians a symbol of the struggle for independence during the twentieth century. Born in 1909, Bandera matured at a time when the cause of national self-determination had triumphed in much of eastern Europe, but not in Ukraine. The lands of today’s Ukraine had been divided between the Russian Empire and the Habsburg monarchy when World War I began, and were divided again between the new Soviet Union and newly independent Poland when the bloodshed ceased. The Soviets defeated one Ukrainian army, the Poles another. Ukrainians thus became the largest national minority in both the Soviet Union and Poland. With time, most Ukrainian political parties in Poland reconciled themselves to Polish statehood. The Ukrainian Military Organization, however, formed of Ukrainian veterans in Poland, followed the movement that sought to change the boundaries of Europe: fascism. With Benito Mussolini, who came to power in 1922 in Italy, as their model, they mounted a number of failed assassination attempts on Polish politicians. By the time the Ukrainian Military Organization became the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), in 1929, a younger generation was dominant. Young terrorists such as Stepan Bandera were formed not by the prewar empires, but by fascist ideology and the experience of national discrimination in Poland. In the 1920s the Polish authorities had closed Ukrainian schools and ignored Poland’s promise to provide for Ukrainian national autonomy. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, as a new Polish government sought reconciliation with its five million Ukrainian citizens, Ukrainian nationalists acted decisively to prevent any compromise settlement. Bandera was one of the main organizers of terror campaigns intended to prevent Ukrainians from accepting the Polish government by provoking Polish retaliation. The main targets of their assassination attempts were Ukrainians and Poles who wished to work together. The OUN assassinated the leading advocate of Ukrainian-Polish rapprochement, Tadeusz Holówko, in his sanatorium bed. They also sought (but failed) to kill Henryk Józewski, who was implementing a policy of national concessions to Ukrainians in Poland.

Stepan Bandera on a 2009 postage stamp commemorating the 100th anniversary of his birth

Bandera and his fellow Ukrainian nationalists were aware of the far greater repressions on the Soviet side of the border, where far more Ukrainians lived; given the effectiveness of the Soviet secret police, however, they could only act within Poland. They did nevertheless react to Josif Stalin’s deliberate starvation of millions of peasants in Soviet Ukraine in 1933. Bandera was probably involved in planning the revenge assassination of a Soviet diplomat in Poland late that year. Ukrainian nationalists hoped to use the trial of the young Ukrainian who carried out the assassination as a forum to spread the news of the famine, but Polish authorities did not allow this. Ukrainian nationalists (and many other Ukrainians in Poland and elsewhere) were embittered by the failure of the west to respond to the mass death in the USSR. 1933 was also the year when Hitler took power in Germany. Bandera and other Ukrainian nationalists saw the Nazis as the only power that could destroy both of their oppressors, Poland and the Soviet Union. OUN activists were in contact with German military intelligence. In June 1934, the OUN assassinated Bronislaw Pieracki, the Polish minister of internal affairs, when he began to negotiate with moderate Ukrainian groups in Poland. For his part in organizing the murder, Bandera was sentenced to death—commuted to life imprisonment–-in January 1936. He was released from prison when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, and now sought to bring the OUN under his own command. Instead, it split into two factions, with Bandera commanding the more radical, known as the OUN-Bandera or OUN-B. Bandera was active in a time and place where violence was very practicable, but where the chances that it would lead to Ukrainian national independence were minimal. His followers fell ever further into the maelstrom of violence on the eastern front, without thereby creating a Ukrainian state. The Germans did destroy Poland in 1939, as the Ukrainian nationalists had hoped; and they tried to destroy the Soviet Union in 1941. When the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union that June, they were joined by the armies of Hungary, Romania, Italy, and Slovakia, as well as small contingents of Ukrainian volunteers associated with the OUN-B. Some of these Ukrainian nationalists helped the Germans to organize murderous pogroms of Jews. In so doing, they were advancing a German policy, but one that was consistent with their own program of ethnic purity, and their own identification of Jews with Soviet tyranny. Ukrainian nationalist political goals, however, were not identical with Hitler’s. In June 1941, supporters of Bandera declared independence for a Ukrainian state, while promising cooperation with Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler was not interested in Ukrainian independence on these or any terms, and eventually had most of the leadership of the OUN-B arrested. Bandera himself was incarcerated in Berlin and then in the camp at Sachsenhausen. Like other east European nationalists of stature, he was being held in reserve for some future contingency when he might be useful to the Nazis.

Ukrainian partisans, 1943

Bandera was still in the German camp at Sachsenhausen, and without influence, when his group took command of a partisan army in early 1943. As the tide turned against the Germans at the Battle of Stalingrad, Ukrainians who had served the Germans as auxiliary policemen left the German service and went into the forest. Among their duties as policemen had been the mass killing of west Ukrainian Jews. These Ukrainians, some of them members of the OUN-B, formed the core of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (or UPA), which declared itself against both the existing German occupation and the coming Soviet one. Two leaders of Bandera’s organization, Mykola Lebed’ and Roman Shukhevych, brought the UPA under the control of the OUN-B. Under their command, the UPA undertook to ethnically cleanse western Ukraine of Poles in 1943 and 1944. UPA partisans murdered tens of thousands of Poles, most of them women and children. Some Jews who had taken shelter with Polish families were also killed. Poles (and a few surviving Jews) fled the countryside, controlled by the UPA, to the towns, controlled by the Germans. Those who survived formed self-defense organizations, or joined the German police (replacing the Ukrainians) or the Soviet partisans who were fighting against the UPA. In all of these conflicts Poles took revenge on Ukrainian civilians. The UPA, for that matter, probably killed as many Ukrainians as it did Poles, since it regarded people who did not adhere to its own brand of nationalism as traitors. After the Red Army drove the Germans from Ukraine in summer 1944, the UPA engaged Soviet forces in large-scale partisan war. In late 1944 the Germans released Bandera from Sachsenhausen, and he considered returning to Ukraine. His fellow Ukrainian nationalists dissuaded him from doing so, on the ground that he was too valuable as a symbol of the struggle and should not risk his life. Meanwhile thousands of Ukrainians died fighting for independence under his name. No other underground force resisted the Soviets for as long as the UPA, or caused such losses. By the end of the 1940s, however, the Soviets prevailed, having killed more than a hundred thousand Ukrainians, and deported many more to Siberia. If Soviet counts are reliable, Ukrainian nationalists suffered more mortal casualties fighting communist rule than did the US Army in the Korean and Vietnam wars combined. It is this legacy of sacrifice that many in western Ukraine today associate with Bandera, and do not wish to be forgotten. The UPA also fought on the Polish side of the border, resisting a Polish communist regime there that was deporting Ukrainians from their homeland. Many people who joined the UPA in both the Soviet Union and communist Poland did so after the war, in self-defense, and took no part in the earlier murder campaigns. As the Cold War began, some OUN-B members and UPA fighters were recruited by British and American intelligence, and then dropped by parachute in doomed missions across the Soviet border. Soviet and Polish communists, having consolidated their rule by the late 1940s, demonized the OUN and the Ukrainian partisans as “German-Ukrainian fascists,” a characterization accurate enough to serve as enduring and effective propaganda both within and without the Soviet Union. Bandera himself remained in Germany after the war, a leading figure in the fractious milieu of Ukrainian nationalists in Munich. He remained faithful to the idea of a fascist Ukraine until assassinated by the KGB in 1959. Fascism never had a significant influence in eastern and central Ukraine, and was only important in west Ukrainian political life in the very special circumstances of World War II and the partisan war against Soviet power, when terrorists with underground experience enjoyed a natural advantage. Nevertheless, Bandera is associated with a certain alternative history of the country, one which is beyond the reach of Russia and the Soviet Union. Bandera was born in the Habsburg monarchy rather than the Russian Empire, and his movement arose in Poland rather than the Soviet Union. These lands only became part of the Soviet Union as a result of World War II. Ukrainian nationalists from this region believed that they were taking part in a larger European movement, and they were right. The recovery from fascist ideology in southern, central, and western Europe took place only after World War II, in circumstances of American occupation and prosperity. For many people in western Ukraine, the triumphant westward march of the Red Army through their homeland was not so much a liberation as the beginning of another occupation, Soviet after Polish and German. The UPA was the only hope for national self-defense. This is one telling of Ukrainian history, but it is not the dominant one. Yushchenko was soundly defeated in the first round of the presidential elections, perhaps in some measure because far more Ukrainians identify with the Red Army than with nationalist partisans from western Ukraine. Bandera was burned in effigy in Odessa after he was named a hero; even his statue in west Ukrainian Lviv, erected by city authorities in 2007, was under guard during the election campaign. For Yushchenko, who is not a west Ukrainian, the embrace of Bandera was part of a more general attempt to distance Ukraine from the legacy of Stalinism. As everyone who is interested in the history of Soviet Ukraine knows, from Vladimir Putin in Moscow to Ukrainian nationalist emigrants in Toronto, partisans fighting under Bandera’s name resisted the imposition of Stalinist rule with enormous determination. Thus there seems to be a certain binary political logic to Yushchenko’s decision: to glorify Bandera is to reject Stalin and to reject any pretension from Moscow to power over Ukraine. Consistent as the rehabilitation of Bandera might be with the ideological competition of the mid-twentieth century, it makes little ethical sense today. Yushchenko, who praised the recent Kiev court verdict condemning Stalin for genocide, regards as a hero a man whose political program called for ethnic purity and whose followers took part in the ethnic cleansing of Poles and, in some cases, in the Holocaust. Bandera opposed Stalin, but that does not mean that the two men were entirely different. In their struggle for Ukraine, we see the triumph of the principle, common to fascists and communists, that political transformation sanctifies violence. It was precisely this legacy that east European revolutionaries seemed to have overcome in the past thirty years, from the Solidarity movement in Poland of 1980 through the Ukrainian presidential elections of 2005. It was then, during the Orange Revolution, that peaceful demonstrations for free and fair elections brought Yushchenko the presidency. In embracing Bandera as he leaves office, Yushchenko has cast a shadow over his own political legacy.

Parties agree to end squabbles, Zuma

19 03 2010 Zimbabwe Times - All smiles from left: Prime Minister Tsvangirai, President Zuma, President Mugabe and Deputy Prime Minister MutambaraBy Raymond MaingireHARARE – South African President Jacob Zuma says Zimbabwe’s feuding political parties have agreed to implement “a package of measures” to end recurrent squabbles that have rocked the country’s unity government since its formation February 2009.“The parties have [...]