The suspension of Gita Sahgal for allegedly briefing the Sunday Times against her employer, Amnesty International, follows the suspension a few months ago by a Human Rights Watch employee, Marc Garlasco, who was revealed to be a collector of Second World War memorabilia.

Perhaps predictably, some of the people who were most vociferous in calling for Garlasco’s suspension have been equally forthright in calling Sahgal’s reinstatement.

I do not know either Sahgal or Garlasco and I do not know all the circumstances surrounding their suspensions, but I do have some experience of operating disciplinary procedures in a human rights organisation.

I worked as a middle level manager in Amnesty International UK Section’s Campaign Department 10 years ago and a large part of my job involved personnel issues. I have absolutely no doubt that if a member of my staff had behaved as Sahgal is alleged to have done I would have had to take disciplinary action against her and this applies not just to Amnesty International, but to every management job in every organisation I have done before or since.

As even her friend and supporter, Rahila Gupta, admits here Sahgal was not a whistle-blower because she was not revealing activities that anyone was trying to conceal. She went to the media because she disagreed with a decision that Amnesty had taken to give a platform Moazzam Begg and to work with his organization Cageprisoners on behalf of people detained in Guantánamo Bay.

She must have done it knowing this would be used by journalists like Nick Cohen who is on record as supporting the torture of detainees in certain circumstances, as part of his ongoing campaign to denigrate the organization.

At a professional level I have more sympathy with Garlasco whose hobby, while slightly weird, had no bearing on his professional activities. However, I think that, on balance, Human Rights Watch were right to suspend him and both cases should provide a wake-up call to human rights organizations.

As Frances Crook notes, Amnesty used to operate a very strict ‘joint-platform’ policy in which it was reluctant ever to mount joint campaigns with other organizations. I remember that part of my recruitment process was an in-tray exercise that included telling Campaign Against the Arms Trade why we would not be signing a hypothetical letter to the Guardian with them condemning the sale of arms to Turkey.

I also remember the first report I wrote (with Keir Starmer) coming back full of paragraphs with red lines scored through them because, in by boss’s opinion, they had broken the ‘work on own country’ rule.

These procedures were awful for those of us who had to operate them. Getting out public statements was slow and cumbersome and we often appeared stand-offish and aloof to other organizations. Staff were also expected to observe considerable discretion in their personal lives; a friend of mine who worked as an Indonesia Researcher resigned her job because she fell in love with a resistance leader in East Timor.

It is on that basis that I think Human Rights Watch was right to suspend Garlasco but why I also think that Sahgal’s – on the face of it appalling – behaviour should not detract from her political argument. Her basic criticism of Amnesty is that it has allowed itself to be seen as too close to someone who has strong views on the position of women in society, which many people (myself included) find repugnant.

Begg has every right to hold whatever political views he wants and – as he points out – nearly everyone familiar with the situation in Afghanistan has concluded that ‘engagement and dialogue’ with the Taliban may be the only route to peace in the country.

But, as Southall Black Sisters have noted, ‘We know from experience around the world, including post war Iraq that women’s rights are the first to be traded in such political settlements’. Indeed Amnesty itself has warned of the danger of such a development in Afghanistan.

Some argue that Begg’s actions, for example, in developing dialogue with his former prison guards, could be used as a model for peace-building and that Amnesty should encourage this process. However, I think that misunderstands the basis of how human rights organisations should work in conflict and post-conflict situations.

Despite its name, Amnesty has played a leading role in opposing those who argue that human rights violators should be forgiven in the name of ‘peace and reconciliation’.

I think that the position that it has taken on the ‘justice and peace’ trade-off has sometimes been too dogmatic in places such as Northern Uganda. However, part of the reason why Amnesty International is so important is that it has been so uncompromising in defence of human rights above all other political considerations.

In its statement justifying the suspension of Sahgal, Amnesty made clear that it welcomed a ‘vigorous internal debate’ and my memories of the organisation are that those debates were very vigorous indeed. But one thing that has always held Amnesty together is a realisation that the organisation’s core purpose is bigger and more important than any of our factional considerations or ideological disagreements.

Amnesty is listened to and taken seriously at the highest and lowest levels because of its reputation as a neutral, impartial and independent organisation. It is capable of generating a deluge of letters, faxes, phone calls and emails that may save a life or stop someone from being tortured.

Those who seek to undermine that reputation – for whatever reason – had better be clear that their own ‘higher purpose’ justifies the suffering that will go unchallenged as a result.

Nick Cohen has not written anything on international issues for a while, but he was back on form in the Observer this week. “Opponents of the Iraq war are deluded if they think Chiclott will find the allied intervention was illegal” he thundered, The “central allegation that the second Iraq war was ‘illegal’ is unsustainable,” he concludes.

Uh huh.

An inquiry into the Netherlands’ support for the invasion of Iraq says it was not justified by UN resolutions. The Dutch Committee of Inquiry on Iraq said UN Security Council resolutions did not “constitute a mandate for… intervention in 2003″.

The inquiry was launched after foreign ministry memos were leaked that cast doubt on the legal basis for the war.

But what would they know, eh Nick.

Meanwhile the Economist has some reasonable questions for the inquiry to put to Tony Blair:

When they question Mr Blair about WMD, Sir John and his colleagues should concentrate on nuclear weapons—and in particular on the government’s assertion that Saddam might develop one “in between one and two years”. These nuclear allegations, which helped Mr Blair call the threat from Iraq “serious and current”, need further probing.

A second focus should be on how raw intelligence was changed. Mr Blair described as “extensive, detailed and authoritative” intelligence that was, in fact, patchy and old; he described conclusions that were speculative as “beyond doubt”. At the inquiry, Mr Campbell drew a distinction between shifting lines and paragraphs in dossiers and actually fabricating intelligence. . . . .

There is also a string of outstanding questions about the conduct and aftermath of the war. For instance, why did some British troops seem not to have been fully equipped for the task? . . . . Another concern is the increasingly vexed issue of when, precisely, Mr Blair committed British forces to the invasion—and whether he simultaneously said different things to George Bush and the British public. And why did he enter the war without much assurance that the Americans had a plan for post-war reconstruction?

Two years ago today gunmen attacked the Serena hotel in Kabul. A number of my friends were there at the time and a couple got caught up in the cross-fire. Here is an account by one of them about what happened.

Thor Hesla, a former colleague of mine from the UN mission in Kosovo, was amongst the people killed that day

Was the invasion of Iraq illegal? Yes, I think we have now got almost enough evidence to conclude that George Bush and Tony Blair were more concerned to effect regime-change (which has no basis in international law) than with Saddam Hussein’s supposed possession of WMD in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions.

Does it matter? Yes, because if you selectively disregard international law than you weaken its framework and that makes the world a more dangerous place. Blair and Bush also unleashed a bloody maelstrom in Iraq itself which killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

Are Bush and Blair war criminals? Possibly. Customary international law recognises the existence of the crime of aggression and some international criminal tribunals (Nuremburg and ICTY) have prosecuted people for this offence. But the crime is not a part of British law and the International Criminal Court has also not yet defined it or granted itself jurisdiction to hear cases. Hopefully this anomaly will be dealt with next year (although the outcome could be a fudge) but the court will not be able to hear cases retrospectively.

If we instead have to content ourselves with the ‘court of public opinion’, I would like to be clear what I do and do not consider these two leaders guilty of.
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It is things like this which I wrote about here that make me less convinced about what people say at meetings like this and drives me to despair when this happens.

Although Oliver Kamm and Scott Ritter could not be further apart on their views about the invasion of Iraq, both use the phrase ‘smoking gun’ in their relation to the Chilcot Inquiry whose existence or non-existence they believe must be the test by which its results will be judged. Kamm makes the case against having an inquiry at all while Ritter warns that unless the UN weapons inspectors are called to give evidence it will end in another whitewash.

Kamm, quoting John Rentoul, says that opponents of the war have become convinced that ‘there is a big secret that is being concealed from us, a smoking gun that “explains it all”. This is a symptom of the anti-war psychology, which so strongly disagrees with the decision made by Tony Blair, the Cabinet and the House of Commons that it seeks constantly for a hidden reason for it.’

Ritter, by contrast, says: ‘As of December 1998, both the US and Britain knew there was no “smoking gun” in Iraq that could prove that Saddam’s government was retaining or reconstituting a WMD capability. Nothing transpired between that time and when the decision was made in 2002 to invade Iraq that fundamentally altered that basic picture.’
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The Humanitarian Policy Group of the Overseas Development Institute are launching a book on land and conflict this week, the details of which can be found here.

Land issues are often central to understanding the dynamics of conflict and post-conflict settings, particularly in contexts of large scale displacement, but there has been very little serious discussion of their actual dynamics. It has been a fairly central part of my work over the last 10 years, and I have a chapter in the book based on the situation in Angola. Other contributors include: Alex de Waal, Liz Alden Wiley, Jon Unruh and Scott Leckie. The book is edited Sara Pantuliano who previously led UNDP’s Peace-building unit in Sudan.

Land dispossession has often been the cause of rural resistance and insurrection. Land issues are rarely the sole cause of conflict. But in places like Afghanistan, Colombia and Darfur they have been a major factor. The most common form of land conflict is often played out at the local level between communities (along borders, between pastoralists and farmers), frequently in the context of a state that has little interest in seeing a resolution, or where the state has collapsed or is powerless.

Conflicts over land occur in extremely different settings, though – from Rwanda to the Balkans, and the international community’s response to these problems is still weak, uncertain and under-analyzed. A failure to tackle land-grabbing in Afghanistan when I was there was one of the first signs that western governments were prepared to tolerate the corruption and lawlessness which have now fatally compromised its government’s legitimacy. An early reluctance to engage with institutions of customary law is also now widely recognised to have been a catastrophic mistake.

The book notes that humanitarian actors have been reluctant to address with land rights issues, because of their complexity and sensitivity can clash with our more limited mandates. What is more surprising is that politicians, policy-makers and pundits also rarely face up to the challenges that they pose.

There is a good piece at the Bleeding Heart Show on the recent attack on Laurie Penny at Harry’s Place. I completely agree with the following section:

As it happens, I think it’s quite possible (providing you don’t venture into the comment threads) to read Harry’s Place and not find much which is quarrelsome or controversial. It’s not often that a day passes without HP posting something I generally agree with . . . .

But it’s posts like this which give HP the reputation for bullying and sectarianism which Laurie was decrying. The habit of singling individuals out and ‘exposing’ them as morally or intellectually deficient doesn’t speak well of the site, particularly when the writers claim to be interested in some of the big international debates of our time. This leads on to my main frustration with the site: for all the intention to stand up for democracy and human rights around the world, and all the time spent standing against ideologues, racists & militants wherever they may be found, the actual foreign policy content on Harry’s Place is incredibly superficial.

I will now wait to be assailed by the wit and wisdom of Habibi and Morgoth.

My mis-reading of the headline of Dave’s piece yesterday brought back some wonderful memories of the maddest moments of the ultra-left. These days, of course, they just write silly manifestos about reforming international law, call for random invasions of foreign countries, attack human rights organisations or give support to reactionary, homophobic, misogynist, antisemites.

But back in the old days Trots had a far grander perspective.

J. Posadas (1912–1981) (occasionally referred to as Juan Posadas), was the pseudonym of Homero Rómulo Cristalli Frasnelli, an Argentine Trotskyist whose personal vision is usually described as Posadism. Posadas became the leader of the Latin America Bureau of the Fourth International and, under his guidance, the movement gained some influence in the region, particularly among Cuban railway workers, Bolivian tin miners and agricultural workers in Brazil.

When the Fourth International split in 1953, Posadas and his followers sided with Michel Pablo and the International Secretariat of the Fourth International. By 1959, however, he and his followers were quarrelling with the leadership of the ISFI accusing them of lacking confidence in the possibility of revolution. They also differed over the issue of nuclear war with Posadas taking the view that “War–Revolution” would “settle the hash of Stalinism and Capitalism” and that nuclear war was inevitable and desirable as a socialist society would rise from the ashes. Posadas and his international followers, who were concentrated in Latin America, split from the ISFI in 1962 prior to its rectification of the 1953 split with the International Committee of the Fourth International.

Posadas wrote that “Nuclear war [equals] revolutionary war. It will damage humanity but it will not – it cannot – destroy the level of consciousness reached by it… Humanity will pass quickly through a nuclear war into a new human society – Socialism.” J. Posadas’ enthusiasm for nuclear war and “worker’s bombs” escalated in the 1970s with the Posadist movement issuing demands that the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China begin a “preventative war” against the United States in order to finish off capitalism.
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On 17 March 2003, the British Attorney General published a short statement, in response to a parliamentary question, claiming that the forthcoming invasion of Iraq was legal under international law. This legal opinion was sufficient to head off a major rebellion within the British government against the war.

It was also enough for Sir Admiral Michael Boyce, the Chief of Defence, who had demanded a clear assurance of the war’s legality to ensure military chiefs and their soldiers would not be “put through the mill” at the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Ten days before his opinion was published the Attorney General had sent a longer, private and secret, memorandum to the Prime Minister setting out the legal arguments in more detail.

This was shared with the Foreign Office and Defence Chiefs and appears to have been what alarmed Boyce into demanding the clarification. In it he noted that the three legal grounds for the use of force were “a) self-defence (which may include collective self-defence); b) exceptionally to avert overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe; and c) authorisation by the Security Council acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter.” He stated that he did not believe that the invasion could be justified on either of the first two grounds, but that an arguable case could be made for it on the third.
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Norm is usually quite sharp and succinct in comments, but his post here is on the wordy side.

Norm said in his first post that he used the terms ‘liberal intervention’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’ interchangeably. I pointed out they are quite obviously not the same thing, but those who had set out to confuse them (unintentionally or not) had damaged the cause of humanitarianism.

In his latest post Norm argues that the two terms ‘overlap’ which I agree with; but that was not his original statement. Oranges and apples are not interchangeable things and nor are cats and dogs – although both can be categorised together under different and more general terms. There is a certain ‘overlap’ between the actions involved in stroking a child and the actions involved in slapping one, but there are also good reasons why we distinguish between them as well.
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When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’

Alice in Wonderland

In a post here a couple of days ago I noted that the term ‘liberal intervention’ had been discredited due to its association with Tony Blair’s disastrous foreign policy adventures and that humanitarian aid workers were amongst its sharpest critics. This was because we objected to the perversion of the long-established principle that military interventions on humanitarian grounds could be justified, as a last resort during humanitarian crises – in Rwanda for example – for regime-changes invasions like Iraq. In a reply entitled ‘liberals confused about intervention’, Norm states that I myself tend to use the terms ‘liberal intervention’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’ interchangeably’ .

I suppose I could just thank Norm for illustrating my point so succinctly, but since the two terms are so obviously not the same, it does beg obvious questions like ‘so why do you that then?’ or ‘so what do you think that they actually mean?’

The doctrine of humanitarian intervention is a long-established concept in international law.
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Normblog picked up a good point by Jonathan Freedland talking to delegates at Labour party conference. He said that whatever their other differences on New Labour’s legacy there was

close to a consensus on the debacle of foreign policy. Voices of left and right agree that Blair’s doctrine of “liberal interventionism” is one part of the inheritance that should be dumped in the nearest skip. Even those who liked the idea in theory concede that its practice proved disastrous.

I think that is probably right. Those of us working in the humanitarian field were the first to realize how badly wrong the policy was going and it is one of the reasons why our critique of liberal interventionism came earlier and was much sharper than that of many others on the centre-left.

I would not change a word that I have written about Afghanistan in the last six years. I wonder how many of the liberal interventionists can say the same?
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Amnesty have a good action on Gaza which you can support byclicking on the following link

They are calling on as many people as possible to email David Miliband right now. It is a very short, simple action. An independent UN fact-finding mission into the Gaza conflict has just published its findings. This major report outlines powerful evidence of war crimes and other violations of international law on both sides, consistent with the results of Amnesty’s own investigations. And the UK Government is reviewing it right now.

The UN Human Rights Council will debate the report on Tuesday (29 September), when a vote will be taken on how its recommendations should be acted upon.

The UK Government (a member of the council) is not planning to support key recommendations, which Amnesty believe offer the best chance of ensuring justice and accountability, as a well as a deterrent to future conflicts. Instead, they appear to be taking a lead from the US Government in dismissing the findings.

War criminals are literally getting away with murder. Act now

There can be no long-term peace and security in the Middle East without an end to impunity – please email David Miliband today and urge him to support the Goldstone Report.

During the 22-day conflict from 27 December 2008 to 18 January 2009, some 1,400 Palestinians and nine Israelis were killed. Most of the Palestinians killed by Israeli forces were unarmed civilians, including some 300 children. Indiscriminate Palestinian rocket attacks killed three Israeli civilians and six soldiers.

I don’t always agree with Martin Kettle, but he has a good article here about the need for the political party conferences to move a but more into line with modern day opinion.

I spent about a dozen years going to Labour party conferences from the mid-1980s until the end of the 1990s when I left Britain to work overseas. This period marked their transformation from the weird and whacky to the smug and strange, with a few years in the middle where we had some genuine political debates that shaped the reform agenda of Labour’s first term in office.

I think that this year will be tenth anniversary of not going to Labour’s conferences and – apart from the free champagne and caviar at the various receptions we used to crash – I can’t say I have missed them much. I was a card carrying member of the Labour party from the age of 15 until last year when I cancelled my standing order, but I had gradually drifted away from party political activism long before I left Britain.
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There are two good pieces at Comment is Free written by Afghan women.

Malalai Joya, who was formerly the youngest Afghan MP, notes that ‘Almost eight years after the Taliban regime was toppled, our hopes for a truly democratic and independent Afghanistan have been betrayed by the continued domination of fundamentalists and by a brutal occupation that ultimately serves only American strategic interests in the region.

You must understand that the government headed by Hamid Karzai is full of warlords and extremists who are brothers in creed of the Taliban. Many of these men committed terrible crimes against the Afghan people during the civil war of the 1990s.’
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‘The latter stages of the war in Sri Lanka have been carefully choreographed and hidden from the outside world, with the voices of victims silenced through fear and insecurity.

Al Jazeera has conducted its own investigation into the conflict and spoken to Tamils who have suffered and aid workers who have remained silent until now, revealing testimonies that call into question the version of events Sri Lanka’s government wants the world to believe.’

There is a link to the full article here and a vidoe report here The government’s response is here.

When I was working in Sri Lanka a few months ago it was very difficult to get news out about the situation, but everything in these reports matches what I saw and heard. For several months government forces repeatedly bombarded around 200,000 people crammed into an area the size of New York’s central park, creating the worst humanitarian crisis that I have ever witnessed in my life.

There are now up to a quarter of a million people being held in what can best be described as concentration camps. China and Russia have blocked attempts by the UN Security Council to put pressure on the Sri Lankan government to close the camps – which are taking on an increasing air of permanence. Unfortunately, the non-aligned group of countries, led by Brazil, have also accepted the principle of ‘non-interference’ in Sri Lanka’s internal affairs.

The news that Unison has banned Trade Union Friends of Israel from having a stall at its annual conference is disturbing.

I keep meaning to write a piece here about why the left should support a two state solution to the Middle East, but I never get around to it because the arguments just seem so obvious. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the creation of the state of Israel sixty years ago, it now expresses the legitimate right of its people to self-determination. This right should be exercised alongside the right of Palestinians to live within their own state, the precise borders of which need to be negotiated by the two parties. Pressing both the Israeli Government and the Palestinian’s elected leadership towards mutual recognition and supporting the forces of moderation on both sides is the only way to get that agreement. This seems to me a no-brainer.

Given that it is the Palestinians who are currently being denied their right to self-determination, it is correct for the left to concentrate their criticisms on the Israeli Government. The appalling conditions in which the people of Gaza are living, the war crimes committed during Israel’s recent assault there, the illegality of the wall being constructed across the West Bank, and the attempts to change the demographics of East Jerusalem are all issues on which progressives should speak out loudly and clearly.

Yet in voicing these criticisms we need to also show that we understand that – as in all conflicts – there two sides, both of which have committed human rights violations and both of which have often behaved with stubborn unreasonableness. I can fully understand how the conditions in which people are living in Gaza has led them to support Hamas, but I also understand why the people of Israel have just voted for Benjamin Netanyahu. Too often the left seems to only be able to contextualise the former and not the latter.

This could partly be down to the sheer unpleasantness with which some supporters of Israel argue their case. Harry’s Place website, for example, is notorious for its ad hominem attacks and the gross distortions that it puts on other people’s views. Reading the comments beneath some its articles is like contemplating the contents of an un-flushed toilet. Yet just as we can distinguish between the need to defend ordinary Muslims who are been victimized in the current political climate and supporting the vile views of Islamic fundamentalists so we should surely be able to see why so many ordinary Jewish people regard attacks on the existence of the state of Israel as attacks on their own identity.

I am not Jewish and it is always difficult to write about issues of race, gender, ethnicity or other forms of identity from second-hand experience. I am also not a Zionist, in that I have no fixed opinion about whether or not the creation of the state of Israel was the best response to the situation in which Jews found themselves in the late 1940s. However, I do not find it all difficult to understand why so many Jews after centuries of dispossession, discrimination and persecution – which culminated in the Nazi Holocaust, should have concluded that their rights, interests and safety could best be safeguarded through the creation of a Jewish state. I can also understand why the Jewish diaspora remain concerned about the safety of that state – and their friends and relatives living in it – surrounded, as it is, by hostile neighbours one of which may soon have nuclear weapons.

My strong view is that it is in Israel’s own best interests to trade land for peace and I hope that President Barack Obama can succeed in making that case where so many others have failed. There are genuine liberal, moderate voices in Israel, although the size and influence of this group is clearly diminishing. We need more critical engagment, open debate and dialogue. Bans and boycotts achieve precisely the opposite effect.

Tim Montgomerie and James Bethell of ConservativeHome have started an excellent new site: Nothing British About The BNP. Here is a link to their website.

I posted a piece at the Guardian CiF about the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Blair Peach and this has prompted some discussion about the parallels with the recent death of Ian Tomlinson. One of the points discussed in the comments is how should both the police and fellow protestors behave towards a ‘hardcore of people who’d turn up just for the ruck?’

I do not have a short answer to that, but it got me thinking about the type of demonstrations that I have gone on down the years and also about what the point of going on a march really is.
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