Steve Hutcheson
The world is not just about you and me

Hi there

I was reading the papers this morning as I do everyday and I saw this one article about a guy in Australia who was selling his life or his lifestyle at least on eBay. But as I read into it I was instantly disappointed. He is selling his rather mediocre lifestyle and I thought, why?

He owns a small suburban house and has a suburban job driving a truck delivering carpets. He owns a 15-year old suburban car. He has some big boy suburban toys, he has no girlfriend and a wife who left him. He also has half a dozen suburban friends who are probably are happy to see him go. I thought to myself, even as he hates his own lifestyle so much, why on earth would he think for a moment that any one else would want to buy it.

Then there is me. I absolutely love every minute of my lifestyle even though I don’t have the suburban trappings he has, I don’t even have a car but then again I live a life that can be total adventure everyday. Think of Indiana Jones without the whip.

So why am I writing here? Well I thought if this guy can sell his life, I can sell you my adventure and you will enjoy it a whole lot more.

For the past ten years or so I have been living and working outside of Australia. In that time I have visited 34 countries and lived in half a dozen for a year or so. I have built schools and clinics, I have been guest of honour at foundation laying ceremonies in little mountain villages where I would be presented with a new turban or a Kazai style hat. I have been part of processes where people have died or been shot at or blown up, I have had to sort out feuds between Albanian mafiosa. I have been called to see dead bodies of friends and have had more guns pointed towards me and more death threats than I care to recall. There have been bombs go off next door that blow out the windows and I have spent days in bunkers waiting until they finish. I have a Pride of Australia Peace Medal. I have a beautiful Japanese partner (she is not part of the deal). We have lived on a boat in the middle of France for almost a year and I now live on a tropical island.

I have great plans to go on with it and chase more adventures and I want you to come along with me. We are going to go to places like Afghanistan where we are will talk to government Ministers and provincial Governors, we will try to see the President if he can make time to listen to our ideas. We are going to dodge the Taliban and the warlords then sit down and eat dinner and pick fruit with an old Mujahadin friend in a quiet garden in his village. We will have armed guards and we will drive along dangerous roads and then we are going to build stuff, lots and lots of stuff, then we going to convince the World Bank to fund our projects for 50 million dollars or more.

Afghanistan needs lots of work. I worked with an NGO in Jalalabad and we built lots of schools and clinics, we had thousands or men working on miles of roads and irrigations canals and we taught hundreds of women sewing and embroidery. I worked with the UN and gave advice to Ministers on how to run their country, I managed fifty million dollar projects and employed 30,000 people crushing rocks and clearing old government munitions buildings that the US had blown up. We had hundreds of people working on projects setting down new sidewalks in Kandahar city where the Governor would come and inspect it every day and invite my engineers and me for dinner. With the way the war is going right now it concerns me they are going to wreck some of the things we did but I guess that is what this adventure is all about.

But I am almost finished with that side of it now, the side that does project that are unsustainable. What I want to do now is stuff that is going to provide an even longer and more sustainable benefit to the people we propose to assist, I want to find entrepreneurs and help get their businesses started where we create permanent jobs that really stimulate the economy. I want to build a tractor factory that will need its own power plant and then we will set up a distributorship across the country. I want to provide farmers and contractors with finance packages they can manage and buy new equipment. I want to build commercial cool-stores in half a dozen places so farmer can stop their crops from rotting so soon. I want to build fruit juice factories and canneries. I want to help set up a sterile surgical dressing factory and biscuit factories and a help get hundred other similar projects kick started so Afghanistan can really make the peace process start going.

We will find investors and financiers, we will scour the world for technical partners to help run the businesses, we need to sort out financing packages that suits the Afghans, we will eat bad food and sleep rough on the floor in a village mud house or the local Governors palace. We will see some of the most beautiful desert and alpine countryside and watch camel trains go by or join it if you like walking (I drive thanks). There are a thousand things that need to be done and you can help get them done if you buy into my adventure. We can haggle and buy our own Afghan carpets from the village where they make them or buy jewellery off the Kuchi tribesmen.

For the moment I live in Thailand on a small tropical island but will move to Malaysia in a month or so where we can enjoy the best of tropical and city life as our office.

Did I mention the two cats? They are not for sale either. They have to protect the Japanese partner when we travel.

Anyway, you can buy the adventure straight up for a million bucks or see if you can win the auction. It is not only one adventure I have for sale because when we are done with Afghanistan, we can go to Laos or Cambodia or Vietnam if you like. I have some great ideas for a nail factory in Aceh and a charcoal water filter outfit in Burma. I hear that they are still looking for some new assistance to start new brick businesses back in Kosovo.

What do we do with the million? We will employ experts and set up deals to put all of the above into place. What will you get in return if being part of the adventure is not enough? You get the satisfaction that comes from knowing that you caused it all to happen and seeing the results on the face of the people we will help. Oh and reports, you will get lots of reports. Best of all you can come and do it with me if you like or you can wait until it all comes out on CD.

We have a website at www.aidsolutions.org so you can see more of who we are and what we do.

If you really want it, I will also supply you with a whip but you can get your own fedora.

On the basis that there are some six billion people in the world, I am convinced that a fair number of them are what we would call “good people” who would make interesting reading if only someone bothered to take the time to ask them their story and write about it in an interesting way.

I am not talking about the sport stars or the actors and singers who succeed publicly and make lots of money doing it and then turn out to be prats in real life, I am not talking about the politicians or business leaders that are in fact doing it for themselves, I am talking about real people who do good things in life, who change peoples lives in some small way without asking for a reward or give up part of their lives to help their fellow man and not expect to reap any benefit beyond their due.

They do it because it needs to be done. The sort of people I am talking about would be be the characters behind Lawrence of Arabia or even Indiana Jones or even Dawn Dulhunty.

Behind it all however what they do is inspiration of another kind. Far too often we as a society are driven by the excesses of greed and corruption, we have it instilled in us daily that you can be bad, you can be corrupt and still you can be regarded as successful, whatever that means.

Recently a well known TV character in Melbourne Australia who had a massive following based on his hosting character on television and his later involvement in the art world, pleaded guilty to corrupt business practices that saw him being fined a huge amount of money in normal terms but possibly only a small percentage of whatever he made through that scam and being excluded from business for several years. How many people were affected by his greed is unknown or what effect it had on their lives is inconsequential but affected they were. It has been a couple of years perhaps but now his publicity machinery is driving him back into the public sphere again and I have to ask why? Why are we allowing it? What has he done to make amends for the pain and suffering he has caused? Surely there are enough people around with good vibrations that we can idolize?

It goes on of course. There are any number of people in the news this week who are there because they are bad or they entertain us with their excesses as opposed to being good people doing good things and making life an adventure as it should be.

So much for my high horse. Initially this column started out as a political commentary on stuff that six million other writers are commenting on so I have decided to forgo that and perhaps concentrate on finding good stories about good people in the world and bringing them to the fore where they should be and to work on new projects where good things can be done. I must say I was driven to change focus when I read about this kid who gained notoriety on trashing his parents house with a party then appeared on a national TV program and was paid some $80,000 by the program to do so. Maybe I am getting old but I just find it difficult to reconcile that this is what it being promoted as the present value system of Australia. It is a big world out there and it is my conviction that there are many more interesting people out there than that.

What this exercise will be is stories about people as I said who make life an adventure and contribute to the well being of other people either as individuals or collectively in the same way that Indiana Jones could save the good people from pending disaster. If I can achieve it, it will not be a simple chronology of events but a discovery of the hardships and sense of adventure that is part of their achievements. That kids can read and become intoxicated by their exciting if not difficult lives. As I write, there is plenty of that happening in the world right now what with the cyclone in Burma and the earthquake in China. As I see it, no one knows who are the men and women who will go to these disasters, no one knows the men and women of the fire service or the regional hospital systems, no one knows the men and women who protect Australia’s shores and numerous other endeavors that change peoples lives on a daily basis. It these people that should be the inspiration for the future generations of Australians.

You can be the judge. Please nominate someone for inclusion.

p.s. My bet is you do not know who Dawn Dulhunty is. Well you should. She is An Australian humanitarian who has worked with her husband Paul for their church group in places like Nepal and India and Kosova and a dozen other places around the world, riding elephants to work, putting peoples lives back together for thirty years. She is an Australian version of Mother Teresa, without all the hype. She inspires me and I will write about her if she lets me.

For some years I have been frustrated with the vast disconnection in crisis recovery that exists between compelling relief aid on the one hand and long term sustainable development on the other.

Looking for instance at the major economic disaster that occurred in the Pacific and in particular Aceh that wore the brunt of it, the western coastline and large tracts of the eastern coastline of northern Sumatra were devastated as was almost half of the provincial city of Banda Aceh. Relief aid poured into the country from all over the world. So much so that international aid agencies were overwhelmed with the public response attracting hundreds of millions of dollars intended to facilitate a recovery process.

For the aid agencies however, they were operating in the dark, many still are with no viable connection between the need to provide immediate emergency relief and the long term structural recovery of the sustainable economic climate that prevailed prior to the tsunami.

There is no doubt that emergency relief was needed and it was well founded in the clean up programs and planned reconstruction yet for the most part, industrial development within the community at the onset was ignored in favour of the various agencies compelling need to engage projects in order to spend their surfeit of funds.

There were two options open to the international agencies. Firstly they could establish a logistics supply base in Medan or Jakarta neither having sustained any damage and neither actually requiring the overload of economic benefit forthcoming or secondly, challenged the local supply and service companies to procure on behalf of the programs. That would have had several unseen benefits though employment and immediate local economic stimulation for expansion or industrial recovery that otherwise were now stripped of their labour resources and no longer able to fairly compete with the inflow of donor funding.

With the purpose of putting results on the board, most if not all, international agencies took the first option. Aceh had lost half of its supply and service companies either through being totally destroyed with the tsunami or the people involved in them had perished. The number of international agencies engaged in establishing cash for work and other recovery projects became the primary employers of the region soaking up all available labour and professional skills in largely non-sustainable immediate relief programs depleting even those surviving government and private sector industries of skilled and unskilled workers with the attraction of salaries higher than the local economy would normally command.

The largess of the international community through the lack of any planning process had the capacity to skew the normal economic utility of the city without any form of compensation to the industries that had functioned previously, who it might be added also now needed assistance to recover and continue yet were faced with inordinate competition from temporary supply chains set up outside the region.

The capitalist functioning economy although faltering due to the ongoing militant action had overnight turned into a more socialist one where through the influx of capital the idea that individual profit should be made was anathema and the community collective should prevail.

The same can be said of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Each one has a compelling humanitarian engine driving them to climb off the bottom rungs of development. The means of addressing each one however is largely non-sustainable requiring continued unsustainable sponsorship by the developed world through local government interventions that is prone to all manner of misuse in order to maintain them.

Objectively, the best means of recovery is the ability for the community to engage itself by means of long term sustainable employment whereby individuals can ultimately assist themselves to overcome the various MDG targets. Too often it is a bottom up approach by an expanded government service offering individuals small subsistence level cottage industry self employment solutions while too little emphasis is given to developing small to medium industries that can employ 10 to 100 individuals in long term employment.

The challenge of course is how to generate the development of these industries so that they can reach this point. Basically, what is required is the opportunity for them to attract the business in the first place.

In Japan following the World War, Toyota Truck Company was languishing with an annual build rate of some 300 vehicles per year. With the onset of the Korean war in 1951, the US placed an initial order for 3000 vehicles that was followed by subsequent orders. The influx of business enabled the company to eventually become one of the biggest automotive companies in the world. Much can be said for numerous other industries in Japan at that time benefiting though business and not handouts, sufficient that it turned the previously destroyed economy around to where it is today.

In many similar situations around the world where poverty is prevalent bought about by natural and man-made political crisis, assistance that aims itself to the bottom through relief or at the government through inter-country donations are not sustainable development strategies. Increased emphasis has to be given to build local small to medium industry either through preferential procurement strategies that favour local manufacture, through sponsored technological transfers between international industrial partnerships and even access to financial assistance to expand current operations irrespective of the security difficulties. Bankers tend to become security conscious when lending money to individuals yet increase loans to government economies that are in the same throes of recovering from upheaval.

related articles listed under development

In September 2007, the pre-eminent US General in Iraq in conjunction with the US Ambassador to Iraq delivered to the US congress an up to the minute report on the state of events and the implementation of America’s interventionist policy to that country.

Gone are the days of focusing on the search Weapons of Mass Destruction that was the primary reason to intervene, the present search is for peace and the imposition of democratic processes and benchmarks that confirm them albeit in an American way.

Petraeus and Crocker managed to entice the US Congress for additional six months time to gauge the success of the “surge” and the level of progress in the Iraqi government. That report is due this week at which point, based on the preliminary information currently being fed to the media, that report should in fact once more stall for additional time while reporting that some progress is being achieved.

The recent violent incursion into Basra where more than 600 civilians are reportedly killed, the government is posturing success of the campaign ignoring that important statistic yet it was only that Sadr called a ceasefire that the campaign ended. With again a reported 1000 government soldiers deserting their posts from the government side it hardly augers a success.

The difficulty for Petraeus and Crocker is that they have to take a side in what is largely a battle between two local power brokers from the major ethnic group while the other ethnic groups sit out the skirmish looking to pick up any of the available remaining pieces. A further difficulty for Petraeus also is that the purpose of the surge was not intended to negate the power of al Sadr’s Sh’ia militias in Basra. They had for some time been subdued through their own holding of fire before it commenced. The surge was primarily to account for the activities of the Sunni militias, the remnants of loyalist to Saddam and also where al Qaeda has been operating from their midst in the area of Anbar province and Baghdad.

With the passage of time, a peace has been bought to order with the Awakening Councils, a process that has involved a significant transfer of funding from the US government to purchase these groups loyalty. Will it last, that is a moot point. Critics argue that is will survive as long as the US continue the payments and perhaps not much longer.

But now Petraeus and to a lesser extent, Crocker have to deliver a report on progress on all fronts of peace and security and the corresponding development in this country that has been at war for twenty years. It begs the question; will his report be a factual and objective account that is high on the success of the military strategy and less able to determine the political stability of the various factions or will it be to consolidate in the eyes of the American public the nebulous vision for Iraq that is proposed by the US Administration.

Petraeus has political ambitions. In a report in the British newspaper, the Independent in September last year, it was reported that Sabah Khadim, a senior Advisor with the Iraqi government had discussed this very issue with the General as far back as 2004.

In Khadim’s words “I asked him if he was planning to run in 2008 and he said, ‘No, that would be too soon’,” The political path for the General however is not to be overlooked.

Coming to the current Presidential campaign, Democratic frontrunner, Barack Obama has declared a policy of withdrawal of US forces from Iraq should he win government. That is possible however the implications for Iraq are not so straightforward.

A recent report compiled by a US think tank that is funded by the US congress, the US Institute of Peace argues that the surge is not working in the way it was intended. The political framework of Iraq is fragile, dominated by self-interested factions and is incapable of bringing together a cohesive government as none of the political benchmarks set by the US as a purpose for the surge have been reached and primary focus has been on those legislative benchmarks that primarily satisfy the US demands.

An immediate withdrawal of US forces should Obama win however, with the inability of the government force to maintain order is likely to draw the country into a much more unstable civil war than presently exists. Obama will be held responsible for the carnage and genocide that ensues leaving open the possibility of Petraeus to run a Republican Presidential campaign on  the basis of “I told you so” in 2012 is ever more plausible. Americans have long since seen military Generals gather political credibility on the basis of successful campaigns. In his case he needs to hold on to marginal successes until a new administration shifts the goalposts, at which point he can argue that he tried his best.

There may well be other options for peace at a regional level. Significant political influence can be held over the Iraqi Sunnis by Saudi Arabia as can great influence by Iran over the Sh’ia factions. The Kurds are not at war on an internal level other than expressing their desire for autonomy from both. It needs however a reckoning of the independence of both these nations from the US, an understanding of their own level of influence and a desire to move towards a regional peace process.

In the event that Petraeus does have a political ambition, the likelihood of him reporting a failure at this point in time in Iraq is less likely than ever, what has to be asked of him is, can the people of Iraq and the gulf region contend with instability of the order that is possible for another several years? It also has to do with his possible political aspirations in four years time.

If you read the “about me” on this blog you will see that between 2003 and 2005 I spent two and half years in Afghanistan working on large job creation programs with the UNDP. These were aimed at employed large numbers of local workers at rebuilding public infrastructure such as roads, schools, clinics and irrigations systems particularly in the rural areas of Jalalabad and Kandahar while aiming to find alternatives to the cultivation and production of opium. In the early days I was with Relief International managing their “Creating and Restoring Alternative Livelihood’s Sources” (CRAWLS) program that was funded by USAid and that flowed over to my engagement with UNDP. It was one of those vexing problems that the wages we paid to build these roads, schools and irrigation systems although common for the region were less than the poppy farmers paid to the labourers causing our programs to suffer during the planting and harvesting periods.

Afghanistan as you may appreciate has some 80% of the population working in agrarian based industries where correspondingly free water is one of their major deficiencies, a cause towards which we were often engaged to overcome the seasonal irregularities building or restoring irrigation systems and wells.

To that end, working with my partner Akiyo, we are now looking at a small investigative project that involves utilizing the worst of one situation in Malaysia in solving the worst of another in Afghanistan and hopefully arrive at a genuinely positive outcome.

We are soon moving from Thailand and Malaysia and in doing so we looked at what we could usefully do there. One of the things we came upon was the millions of tonnes of waste materials resulting from palm oil production and that prompted me to consider how they may be used beneficially in resource poor Afghanistan.

My niece first put me to the idea of using a compost in plant propagation and initially I was thinking along these lines and will come back to that as we get more established. What we are looking at initially is to investigate the use of the fibrous material waste material as mulch/weed mats around certain crops, in particular cotton or various vine crops and other arboriculture projects that have a high demand for moisture retention. The idea of a mulch mat around the plants slows down the process of evaporation that 40 degree heat will induce giving the plant a greater chance to survive.

One outcome of poor water supply we found in Afghanistan was that the farmers were prone to plant opium and hashish in lieu as they were more drought tolerant than normal crops.

Successful trials of the material have apparently been conducted in similar climatic conditions in Australia and we want to establish similar trials in Afghanistan. What we are initially pursuing is to:

• produce a mat material that meets with the agricultural demands in Afghanistan.
• design a suitable configuration that can be easily shipped and distributed
• field test in comparative plots the effectiveness of using a mulch/weed mat during the formative growing periods.

In that respect we are seeking to link up with interested parties who may have the programs, resources and the capacity to support the design process and research in Malaysia and to then conduct the field trials in Afghanistan.

If you would like to assist our quest please contact me. We are currently in the process of setting up a legal entity in Malaysia that will enable us solicit funding specifically for this purpose.

Water is going to be one of the world’s major problems of the future. Doing something now will soften the damage it causes.

American politics and the outcome of the campaign for the US Presidency is still any ones guess for the moment however the three front runners who are the primary contenders, are McCain as the Republican candidate and either Clinton or Obama for the Democratic candidate. The next few days will establish which of these last two carry the bulk of voting delegates and receive the final nomination but it would seem that Obama has gained sufficient impetus to carry the day.

In the meantime there is an interesting survey being conducted by a major Israeli English language daily where a media panel has been monitoring the various candidates with the express purpose of establishing which would be better for Israel. The acknowledgment being that Israel relies heavily on the US for financial and military support in addition to its current unfettered political support in the Middle East conflict.

All of the candidates with the exception of Texan Ron Paul who has not been included in the survey err on the positive side of the scale. Of the front runners however, Obama is the least attractive for the Israelis only registering a figure that is near neutral with a score of 5.2 while both Clinton and McCain are registering around 7.5 on a scale of 1 to 10.

Maintaining the status quo is obviously important to the Israelis in their present escalation of hostilities with the Palestinian militants in Gaza and simultaneously in either reaching consensus or inserting a protracted delay of the peace process that is presently being undertaken as a consequence of the Annapolis conference.

The peace process should be simple however the terms of peace for both sides remain some distance apart as elements of the demands by the Palestinians continue to be intractable to the Israelis.

A shift in the political climate support for the present Israeli regime and their stonewalling may have significant import in the final outcome however. To date Obama has been cautious with his words however he publicly maintains support for the Israeli government’s position and has so far divorced himself from any separation from the status quo for obvious reasons.

The Jewish vote in America is less than 2% however the political influence they have over the electoral process and the US government is far more significant than that small sector of the community represents. Through the efforts of AIPAC and other Jewish lobby groups there is no US politician currently prepared to speak out against Israel or the special relationship that exists between the two countries. As a number of American politicians have found out, to do so is tantamount to political suicide.

So is Obama the voice of reason that the world and particularly the Arab world needs and is that why the Israeli panelists have rated him less favorably in measuring their own interests?

In his words, Obama argues that US politics has become so partisan and gummed up by money and influence that they are unable to solve the world’s problems that demand solutions.

Quoting from his campaign website he states “I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over. I have done more than any other candidate in this race to take on lobbyists — and won. They have not funded my campaign, they will not get a job in my White House, and they will not drown out the voices of the American people when I am president.” It is fair warning to the lobbyists and that would include AIPAC that their days of undue influence on the American political system will draw to a close.

In relation to Israel his platform is still more of the same although there are subtle caveats. Obama has stated that he supports a secure Israel that is capable of defending itself, and that the foreign assistance provided by America will be maintained and that a strong relationship between the two countries will continue to exist.

But Obama also supports the continuation and acceleration of the peace talks and is prepared to add emphasis to the US relationship with Israel to make that happen. In a recent Q&A with the Washington Post he stated. “The Annapolis conference was a worthy, but late, effort, and already the follow-up has been lacking. As president, I will commit myself personally, and I will assign high-caliber diplomats, to be engaged with both sides on an ongoing basis — encouraging communication, helping them develop and implement solutions, holding them accountable to their commitments by carefully monitoring and reporting on their implementation. I will also demand greater support for this process from the Arab world.”

So what does this mean for Israel and why have the panelists been so cautious in their assessment and finally why does the Arab world have much to gain by his presidency? Firstly it is apparent that he will neuter the capacity of the Israel lobby through his office to address the inordinate influence that as one lobby group that it exerts over the system of government controlling the very things that they use to apply leverage, the financial backing of candidates. Secondly, it is his intention to be more proactive and to press home the peace process until an equitable resolution for a settlement between the two parties is reached.

How his policy alters once he is in office remains to be seen however for the moment there is a positive sign for the Arab world that he is committed to a bringing forward a peaceful resolution to the Middle East crisis, that he will remove the friction that the US war on terror has created in Iraq, he will add emphasis to pursuing the leaders of the terrorist organizations and that he will enter into dialogs with those presently considered rogue states with all the changes within the US government processes necessary to do that.

For a large number of people in the west, there is a rather strange myopic view of the Israeli – Palestinian question and the Gaza issue in particular. One that sees the people of Israel as being those that suffer most in the conflict, that if Hamas (and Hezbollah in Lebanon) were to suddenly cease their armed resistance to its perceived oppression by Israel then peace would automatically prevail in the region.

Peace might prevail under those circumstances but at the same time, if history is to be any judge, the oppression being waged on the Palestinian people wouldn’t.

For the Palestinians, their plight is a situation that has gone on continuously since the ethnic cleansing of the Arab people that occurred in 1948 following the Arab-Israel war, the same sort of ethnic cleansing that occurred with the Kosovo Albanians in 1999. However, in that case the Serbians did not have any influence with the US or British government as does Israel that would fail to arrest it. The refugees in the camps surrounding Israel and the Palestinian territories have become grandparents in the process of waiting for a solution that will be agreed to by the Israelis.

In response to an article I wrote recently that highlighted certain parallels with the present treatment of Palestinians in Gaza with the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto I received a number of emails that all pointed to the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Hamas into Israel as being the sole cause of the dislocation of the peace process yet this is so far from the truth that it beggars belief.

Too much emphasis is given to the Israeli situation and far too little is given to the Palestinian arguments; a function of the undue influence Israel has over the major media in the US such that the enemies of Israel are simultaneously the enemies of the US. Ignorance has become a weapon. The rhetoric that surrounds the whole peace process fails to adequately acknowledge the position of the Palestinians. They are perceived as the protagonists. From the Israeli perspective, the rockets are the sole cause of destabilisation of the peace process. The obligations for peace rest fully on the Palestinians as an oppressed people with no agreed rights and largely not on their oppressors whom are simultaneously seen to be fighting for their rights.

Hamas itself formed in 1987 at the beginning of the First Intifada as the Palestinian uprising was known. That itself was a consequence of the stalled peace negotiations the PLO had been engaged in over a 20-year period as well as protest to the brutal treatment then being meted out by the Israelis, treatment that included then and still includes today, mass detentions, extra-judicial killings and the wanton and unjustified destruction of Palestinian property. It is said Mossad supported Hamas in its early days as a means to counterbalance the political strength the PLO had at the time. It was a deliberate interference by Israel to destabilise the domestic politics of the territories. The converse of course is now the case, Israel currently provides support to Fatah to contest Hamas in a continued process of divide and conquer.

But why did Hamas form? What were the core tenets that gave rise to its base? The answer being that diplomatic discussions had failed successively to achieve anything towards settling the myriad issues that came with the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, or the rights of the four million people confined to external refugee settlements. Hamas with the support of the Palestinian people argued that peace was only likely to be achieved with a more militant process since diplomacy had consistently failed them. The Israelis were not being forcefully obligated to comply with successive UN resolutions and statements condemning their actions and the demands by the international community for peaceful solutions. The Hamas platform as did Hezbollah took on an extremist position as more moderate positions had consistently failed to achieve anything of substance.

Even while Hamas took part in the heavily monitored political process of legislative elections in January 2006, it was not meant to win nor was it meant to win as decisively as it did. The Israelis had miscalculated the feelings of the Palestinians of Gaza. Since then Israel has persistently attempted to derail the Hamas parliament, by targeting its leaders for assassination and by arresting the elected parliamentarians en masse, in favour of negotiations with a more conciliatory representative in the West Bank based President Mahmoud Abbas.

The indiscriminate guerrilla tactics currently employed by Hamas are a definite sticking point in the negotiations but they are not the cause of the conflict. The intransigence by Israel to reach a clear conclusion, the twists and turns that they employ to set any peace negotiation back for another year or decade are legendary. It is when the only major power to whom they will contend with, from whom that they receive the most lucrative financial and military support, decide that enough is enough and that an equitable peace must prevail and apply to all the pressure within their capability to both side with equality, that peace will prevail and not a moment before.

The Israeli occupiers and their US supporters have labelled Hamas a terrorist organisation even though Hamas would call themselves a resistance movement; there is a parallel in the Warsaw Ghetto that the occupying Germans would have called the ZZW and the ZOB that resisted them terrorists by the same broad but fuzzy definition, opposition to occupation.

I am not necessarily in favour of Hamas or Hezbollah or the methods they employ yet I see them as a consequence of a failed peace process and international ambivalence towards the humanitarian and political needs of the Palestinian people. Their strength will only continue to garner support while the world stands by and allows the people it represent to be constantly downtrodden in pursuit of a neighbouring populations unrealistic desires to dominate them.

The way to counter Hamas is not through suppression of the Palestinian people but by the world pressing forward the agreements that have been set aside in doing so. The two sides after sixty hears of discussion have not shown the capacity to reach a mutual consensus and it is in the interest of the world to arbitrate conclusively and fairly on their behalf.

I saw a photo today of a father holding his 6 month old baby son. The father’s face was devoid of expression; the child in his arms was dead. The boy’s name was Mohammed al-Borai; he along with several others had been killed in a blast fired indiscriminately by an Israeli cannon into the densely populated areas of Gaza.

What followed that in the article were more photos, one of a group of young boys holding flowers standing around the battered and bloodstained body of the baby boy that struck me as the most poignant. I had been having a discussion about the cause of suicide bombers in the Palestinian conflict and it will be this image more than any other that will concern me more than most. In their minds the young dead boy and the nature of his death will have more impact on their future than anything any one might tell them.

It was then that I started to contemplate perhaps more fully the plight of the Palestinians today and the parallels in the history of the Jews that led to their mass exodus from their own countries to immigrate to the land that was at the time known as Palestine.

The Warsaw Ghetto during the Jewish Holocaust hold special significance to the European Jews. It was a place of oppression and the pathway to the ultimate death of thousands of their population that has become symbolic with their struggle for recognition. Yet what they are failing to acknowledge as their descendants press forward with their own brand of Jewish and Zionist idealism is the parallel set of conditions that they are now imposing on the Arab people of Palestine.

The Nazis rounded up the Jews of Poland and quartered them in a small area of Warsaw, building a barricade around the perimeter to prevent them leaving. So too have the Israelis through conflict and force pushed many of the Arab inhabitants out of Israel into an enclave that now has a population density of 4200 people per sq km which 14 times that of the surrounding area of Israel which is currently at 360 people per sq km.

The Nazis deprived the ghetto inhabitants of food and essential supplies. So too have the Israeli government deprived the flow of goods into serve the population of 1.4 million inhabitants of men women and children by limiting the convoys of supplies into Gaza to a mere trickle.

The Nazis reduced the average calorie intake of the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto to 241 calories per day. So too have the Israelis reduced the calorie intake of the Palestinians in Gaza that the UN report it is presently at 61% of the average daily requirements.

The Nazis restricted public utilities such as water and electricity. So too have the Israeli government restricted the flow of these essential utilities to the population at large.

The Nazis restricted the inhabitants from adequate health care. So too do the Israelis restrict the health care by limiting the medical supplies in or the treatment of cases that need to be done outside.

The Jewish inhabitants through the ZZB and the ZOB resisted the oppression by the Nazis albeit too late and their rebellion was brutally crushed without concern for who was in the way. So too have the Palestinians of Gaza through their own resistance organizations in particular Hamas, rebelled against their oppressors and so too do the Israelis use all means available to crush the rebellion without concern for who is in the way or who they maim or kill in doing so.

The Nazis destroyed the structure of the ghetto leveling it to the ground in a broad quest to rout the resistance to their oppression. So too do the Israelis indiscriminately level buildings and the infrastructure in Gaza in a quest to rout out the resistance to their oppression.

The Nazis assigned the Jewish people to a lesser status of all their inhabitants depriving them of their rights as citizens and even as humans. So too do the Israeli assign the refugees held in Gaza less status than they do to Jews worldwide and deprive them of their rights to return to their former lands.

The Nazis set themselves on a campaign to produce a nation that was all Aryans. So too have the Israelis set themselves on a path to have a nation that is all Jewish.

The Nazis applied whatever was at their means to break the will of the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto avoiding their control. So too do the Israelis use whatever is at their means to break the will of the Palestinians avoiding the Israelis control.

The Nazis killed the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto indiscriminately in forcing their control over the ghetto. So too do the Israelis indiscriminately kill the inhabitants in forcing their control over Gaza.

The Jews of Israel quite right protest at the inhumanity of the Nazis in their treatment of them and oblige the world to not allow the same situation to happen again. So to do the Palestinians protest at the inhumanity of the treatment by the Israelis yet in a bizarre twist of events, the world still allows the oppression to happen.

It was after the Jews in the ghetto had been largely killed or transported that the world stood up and found guilt in not acting sooner.

With the picture of Mohammad al-Borai in my mind I question when the world will stand up and say enough is enough, there is not going to be a repeat of the Warsaw Ghetto and particularly when its main protagonists are those who suffered the most by its conduct.

There is a basic conflict of inhumanity occurring to the Palestinian people of Gaza that the world is deliberately ignoring. An inhumanity that was inflicted by the Nazis over the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto is now more than ever closely paralleling that which they are inflicting on the people of Gaza. They learned a hard lesson but it was not a lesson learned well. They have been given the power to practice humanity but have decided instead that they will treat the concerns of the Palestinians in the same inhumane way the Nazis treated them.

A future monument will no doubt contain photos of Mohammad al-Borai in the arms of his father and the world will decry the injustice.

This article appeared in Arab News 2 March 2008

The declaration of independence by the Kosovo Parliament on the 17th February 2008 comes with mixed feelings. On one hand having worked for almost two years in Kosovo during the post NATO period, I am very happy for the people of this small mountain valley state in finally achieving their sovereignty for self-determination, on the other, I have concerns for the impact that it will have with the rest of the world

That initial feeling goes back to the deplorable condition I first found Kosovo had been left in on the departure of the disgruntled Serbian army and militias, the mayhem and wanton destruction of anything that belonged to the Albanian population, the complete lost of responsibility of the Serbian masters towards its indigenous inhabitants absolved them absolutely from having any further interest or stewardship in the province. Their treatment of this particular ethnic group of citizens of what was once part of Serbia was appalling and warrants no recompense in their favour.  I can recall coming from Australia arriving in Prishtina some five or six weeks after the NATO hostilities had concluded and being in a state of bewilderment that one group of people with a similar history and makeup of its neighbours could be so brutal, so vicious in response to their call to serve their own nationalism that there is no doubt in my mind that they no longer deserve to have any say in the matters of Kosovo.

Historically Kosovo has of course has had its power base transferred dozens if not a hundred times in its long and chequered history. The indigenous people can trace their history to the Illyrians from the 4th century BC while the Slavic tribes did not start to appear until the 7th century AD, a thousand years later when it was absorbed under the might of Serbian military domination often switching between the rule of Serbian, Bulgarian and Byzantines from Turkey. Serbia won a more dominant role in 1346 and lost it to the Turks in 1455 under whose control it remained for almost the next 500 years. The prize of course was the extensive mineral wealth the area contains and still has.

Throughout the period of the late 19th century, it was the constant quest between the Serbian Kingdom and the Turks until finally coming under Serbian rule once again after World War 1. At each stage enormous atrocities were committed by the Serbian rule against the local inhabitants, often forced from their land only to repair to it as each wave was dispelled. The oppression the local populations have suffered over centuries now necessitates a more politic way of deciding their future that countless wars have failed to achieve.

At the international level however, the position today maintains the same sad state of affairs as it has over the centuries, the dominant invaders each fighting for the spoils that the local people rightfully own.

It is light of this history and the brutality of the reprisals that led to the invasion by NATO in 1999 and the vanquishing of the claimants, the claim by the local people should be acknowledged yet is still not the fully case. The Serbians still want control, if not for the mineral wealth it contains, then for the historical significance they place on it and was exploited by Milosevic in his rise to power. The major loss at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 in the fields outside Prishtina, a battle the Serbians see as a defining moment in the formation of the Nation of Serbia.

The difficulty comes however to the international arena due to the precedence that recognition for independence places on numerous other political hotspots around the world. Kashmir, Palestine, Kurdistan, Chechnya, TRNC in Cyprus, northern Nigeria, even Wales and Scotland all have their secessionist movements to name but a few.

Serbia does not concern itself with the welfare of the residents of Kosovo. In 1999 it did in fact endeavour to expel totally those people over whom they now want control once more. Serbia’s interest is self-serving and hardly a privilege that the rest of the world is likely to hand to them now that they have been relieved of it. There is also no doubt based on recent history to the brutality with which they would extend to the Albanian communities should that situation arise.

Underlying it all is the plight democracy is experiencing in today’s world. For all the right reasons that it professes, it has its inordinate number of failings that successive governments and events that people often fail to recognise. The idea of replacing autocratic rulers and dictators that rule on their emotions and ideals using their force and power with elected officials who for the most part, rule autocratically on their emotions and ideals using force and power seems incongruous with the basic principles of democracy.

Democracy is about exercising the will of the people over whom the decisions will affect and in the case of Kosovo, the predominant population have expressed their will about how they want to be governed. But is that it? The answer of course is no. Even within the new Republic of Kosovo there are a multitude of opinions that the new leaders will manage their own ideals on how the county should be run with force and power. In a broader context democracy for all its virtues needs to be reconfigured to eliminate the ability of a dominant force within it assuming the power of Kings and Dictators and put the power with the people where it rightfully belongs.

It is far too early to determine the international fallout from Kosovo assuming its independence. It is however a catalyst that needs to be observed. The rights of the individuals in communities have been set-aside in the desire for control by those with the most physical power and ability to dominate. For the moment however, the Declaration of Independence by the Kosovars is the right path to follow and should be given them willingly.

The war in Iraq is mired in controversy, a discombobulating pool of mixed messages, falsehoods and fanciful posturing. Earlier pronouncements as to the reasons for being there in Iraq uttered prior to the invasion now after some years, an enormous cost and an unacceptable casualty rate, have been proven erroneous and in many cases in fact, downright false. The discussion no longer looks at these facts, for the most part been swept under the carpet as historically insignificant, but now concentrates on how best to extricate the military from the scene and leave a lasting peace between the existing factions. A new agenda has surfaced that is constantly being massaged and repositioned.

Compounding this dilemma is the continuation of positive spin being applied by the government and the military on how well the various current actions are going, how much improved the war is going, how successful the various strategies are working, how beneficial it all is for the long term security of the region yet when it is all pealed away, much of what if said is still false, fulfilling an MBA mantra of constant positive affirmation as a panacea to ward off failure as failure in itself is considered unacceptable.

But are the government and the military living in a fantasy world, do they seriously believe that the solution will evolve out of a constant barrage of military might and positive determination on behalf of those that are directing it.

By comparison, one needs to look at the neighbour and again put things into a perspective, stripping away the rhetoric and looking at the logicality of the complex situations and in the end, asking if the powers to be really do have answers to these enormous problems.

Israel and the Palestinians have been warring for more than sixty years and still, even though Israel maintains the upper hand militarily, financially and with its strong US allegiances, it is no closer to a reaching an equitable solution with the Palestinians and their Arab backers now than it was in 1948.

In Iran, the US has imposed sanctions and sought its allies in the region as well as internationally to support them yet still Iran continues on its own quest, greatly inconvenienced but largely unimpeded in cementing its agenda and its position as a regional leader. The US President went to all his major allies of the region and continued to spread the message of moral superiority over the Iranians yet nothing could be further from the truth, a point noted almost universally by the Arab press while that news hardly causing a ripple in the western media where it promoted a sense of achievement.

The UAE, possible the most strongly aligned Gulf State to the US and heavily engaged in democratisation of its economy and political face has in 2007 Iran as its major trading partner, providing and consuming more than 50% of its national GDP as are all the other Gulf States so inextricably involved.

Each of the regional governments of the Gulf States listened to Bush yet retained one foot on the ground in acceptance of his words. They were not being elevated into another space and time frame as the reality of the proximity of their location and their deeper comprehension of the political and strategic issues at hand tempered the Bush almost naive attempt at persuasion.

The feeling of the Middle East and in particular the neighbours of Iran is that it has a place in their midst, it is a significant economy and strategic partner, it is of a similar faith and maintains a religious piety similar to their own, it is one that they will continue to deal with irrespective of the negative imputations delivered by the major international force and consumer.

Where the honesty appears to be failing is the rhetoric that proclaims Iran to be a threat to the Gulf and by extension, US security. The US administration would have the world believe that these States are as one with the US in its determination against Iran however gauging the response of the Gulf and Arabic papers following his excursion, Iran is not a threat to the Gulf nor to the world at large and conversely, on several fronts the Gulf and Arab nations are in advanced states of normalizing of their relationships, even that which is under the strongest US influence in the region, Iraq.

Major dilemmas also for the Bush administration are the constant unravelling of foreign policy for the region. In 2007, Alan Greenspan made a casual remark in his memoirs when he wrote “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

To avoid being drawn, Greenspan spent the following weeks extricating him self, making the point that this was not the professed reason however never really recanting his assertion that is was the true one. The perceived belief promoted by the administration and its supporting media is that this was not the reason, the doctrine of dishonesty continues in the administrations quest to justify the military incursion.

Over the past two years as the war has entered into a phase that is largely intractable, a more permanent legacy that America will leave on the region for time immemorial extending the divide between the sectarian groups and between Islam and the west for which there appears to be no viable solutions, and the truth being that there may not be one. Committed army Generals after General have come forward upon retiring to lament the politicisation of the process of war with Iraq and the falsehoods upon which the battles have and are being waged. Within the administration itself a number of senior advisors have also been engaged in litigation and prosecution that highlights their dishonesty to the American public. Some such as Richard Perle, one of the architects of the Project for a New American Century have withdrawn their earlier opinions upon which the war was waged arguing that the government once engaged in the process became dysfunctional.

Colin Powell, the most senior insider of the Bush administration left after being obligated to make a case at the UN that in hindsight he regards that episode as a “blot” on his career saying on Barbara Walters program “It will always be a part of my record. It was painful. It’s painful now”.

Where does that leave us? Now a new batch of Presidential hopefuls are pursuing the highest office of the land yet they too are obliged to continue in the wake of their predecessor, to support the dishonesty or at the very least, failing to address it as it should be as it too will weigh heavily on their administrations.

The questions that needs to be asked without the partisan rhetoric, without the flawed logic of the likes of the international hegemony proposed by the Project for the New America Century, without the need to appease influential foreign governments, is what is in fact best for America and why is in the mess it presently is in?

Unless honesty becomes a weapon in the arsenal being utilised by the US administration, unless the awful truths of why battles are being waged in distant countries that pose no serious threat to the security of the region or the west are revealed and addressed in consultation with the public, the house of cards build on lies will reverberate throughout the psych of America and throughout its various roles in the world for decades.

The Battle for Honesty must begin before we can go any further.