The Humanitarian Impact of Russia’s Intervention

The same day as the House of Commons debated airstrikes, elsewhere in Westminster the APPG for Syria was hosting a briefing by GOAL, an Irish NGO working inside northern Syria. The briefing was led by CEO Barry Andrews.

GOAL’s programme began in 2012, and is now reaching over a million people in rebel–held or contested areas. They distribute food to nearly 500,000 people. They supply flour to over 50 bakeries providing bread at stabilised prices to nearly one million people.

GOAL also supports water and hygiene services for over half a million people. In 2016 they plan expanding water systems and rural sanitation.

On livelihoods, GOAL supports farming families with pesticides, and plans on supporting related businesses and market systems, and developing small business groups accessible to women.
When GOAL first set up projects inside Syria, it was in the expectation that the war would end more quickly, and that the effort would support post–war transition and reconstruction. As things are, their work has helped temper the flow of refugees, making it possible for many to stay inside Syria. Their North Syria Response Fund is reaching over 200,000 internally displaced people, many from Aleppo and Homs.

Now the violence of Russia’s intervention has thrown the future of all this in doubt.

Russia is seen as carrying on Assad’s work, choosing to hit non-ISIS forces and infrastructure. There are fewer of Assad’s barrel bombs now, but the Russian weapons have far greater intensity. Buildings are gone in a single strike. They are targeting areas that were previously relatively safe, targeting border areas, hitting humanitarian convoys as well as commercial traffic.

People who before were prepared to stay now lack confidence that it is tenable, and there is a danger that pressure on Aleppo and Homs could displace as many as a million more.

While they see some grounds for hope in negotiations, GOAL are concerned not just by the bombing of civilians, but also at the bombing of FSA forces “holding the line against ISIS.”

While some have questioned the existence of moderate Syrian forces to fight ISIS, GOAL’s experience is that where there is extremism it’s amongst foreign fighters, whereas Syrian fighters are nationalists and “can be reasoned with.”

Where once there was talk of humanitarian intervention, now the focus has shifted to security threats and funding for aid has reduced even as the humanitarian crisis has worsened.

There is both a humanitarian and a political reason to continue aid work inside Syria, Barry Andrews argued; if you want forces of moderation to resist extremism, they need to be able to live and survive.

With thanks to the APPG for Syria Chair Roger Godsiff MP and his staff.

First published in Syria Notes.

Related at EA WorldView: Russia’s Aerial Victory—80% Aid Cut, 260,000 Displaced, Infrastructure Damaged.

Horror and hand-wringing

(Updated at the end of the post.)

Arguments over intervention, whether in Afghanistan, Libya, or Syria, often seem over-familiar over time, with the same points being made irrespective of which conflict is being discussed.

One example is the type of argument that paints the foreign country as culturally inhospitable to democracy. Invoking Sweden as a contrast to the country in question is one way to highlight the abyss that separates us and them, as in “Why can’t Afghanistan be more like Sweden?” Like Sweden? Ridiculous, obviously. Using Jeffersonian as an adjective is another way of depicting democracy as intrinsically Western. It’s not their culture! They’ve not been raised on Rousseau, Burke, and John Stuart Mill like us Western citizens.

As if Western voters all brush up on Jefferson or Mill before heading to the ballot box.

In recent years one fortifying tonic against such xenophobic justifications for despotism has been Normblog, the pioneering political blog of Norman Geras. For example this post from 2006 which offers a snippet of Amartya Sen citing the aforementioned Mill:

Democracy, to use the old Millian phrase, is "government by discussion," and voting is only one part of a broader picture (an understanding that has, alas, received little recognition in post-intervention Iraq in the attempt to get straight to polling without the development of broad public reasoning and an independent civil society). There can be no doubt at all that the modern concepts of democracy and of public reasoning have been very deeply influenced by European and American analyses and experiences over the last few centuries (including the contributions of such theorists of democracy as Marquis de Condorcet, Jefferson, Madison and Tocqueville). But to extrapolate backward from these comparatively recent experiences to construct a quintessential and long-run dichotomy between the West and non-West would be deeply misleading.
.....
Since traditions of public reasoning can be found in nearly all countries, modern democracy can build on the dialogic part of the common human inheritance.

Here’s another Normblog post, this one from 2004. It excerpts portions of an interview with former Polish dissident Adam Michnik concerning Michnik’s support for the invasion of Iraq:

We [Michnick and other east European former dissidents] take this position because we know what dictatorship is. And in the conflict between totalitarian regimes and democracy you must not hesitate to declare which side you are on. Even if a dictatorship is not an ideal typical one, and even if the democratic countries are ruled by people whom you do not like. I think you can be an enemy of Saddam Hussein even if Donald Rumsfield is also an enemy of Saddam Hussein.
.....
It's simply that life has taught me that if someone is being whipped and someone is whipping this person, I am always on the side of those who are being whipped. I've always criticized U.S. foreign policy for forgetting that the United States should defend those who need to be defended. I would object to U.S. policy if it supported Saddam Hussein, and I have always criticized the United States for supporting military regimes in Latin America.
.....
I don't think it is utopian to want to install democratic rule in Iraq. If it won't be an ideal democracy, let it be a crippled democracy, but let it not be a totalitarian dictatorship.

That interview was published in Dissent magazine.

And this week we have Normblog recommending a post by former Dissent editor Michael Walzer. But instead of the old reliable tonic, we’re slipped a Mickey Finn. Geras quotes Walzer thus:

Many people have been criticizing President Obama for dithering over what to do in Syria. Not me; dithering seems an entirely rational response to what's going on there. The difficulty is that we don't really know what we want to happen - I mean we don't know which among the likely possibilities would be the least awful. Of course, readers of Dissent would be happy to see the victory of Syrians who have been studying John Stuart Mill or who take their cue from Swedish social democracy. But nothing like that lies anywhere on (or near) the horizon.

I despair.

Norman Geras couples this with a quote from Monday’s Human Rights Watch statement on Syria., focusing on the widely reported video of a Syrian Rebel commander apparently mutilating a corpse:

Human Rights Watch has reviewed graphic evidence that appears to show a commander of the Syrian opposition “Independent Omar al-Farouq” brigade mutilating the corpse of a pro-government fighter. The figure in the video cuts the heart and liver out of the body and uses sectarian language to insult Alawites. The same brigade was implicated in April 2013 in the cross-border indiscriminate shelling of the Lebanese Shi’a villages of al-Qasr and Hawsh al-Sayyed.

There’s no question that such corpse mutilation is a war crime. There’s no question that indiscriminate shelling of villages is a war crime. But if the question is, in Walzer’s words, “which among the likely possibilities would be the least awful,” then in trying to answer it we should look at the relative scale of atrocities by the various parties, and their relative susceptibility to pressure to stop.

This is not a nice task. It means for example comparing the mutilation of the dead soldier with a gruesome New York Times report of massacres by regime forces in Tartus province:

After dragging 46 bodies from the streets near his hometown on the Syrian coast, Omar lost count. For four days, he said, he could not eat, remembering the burned body of a baby just a few months old; a fetus ripped from a woman’s belly; a friend lying dead, his dog still standing guard.

It means for example comparing last month’s shelling of the Lebanese villages of al-Qasr and Hawsh al-Sayyed by the rebel Omar al-Farouq Brigade, killing two civilians and wounding three, with last month’s HRW report on Syrian government air and missile attacks on civilian areas of Aleppo:

During a recent seven-day mission to Aleppo, Human Rights Watch researchers documented five attacks that took place between March 18 and April 7, 2013:

• On April 7, an airstrike in the Ansari neighborhood of Aleppo killed at least 22 civilians, including 6 children.

• On April 3, a cluster bomb attack in the Sheik Sa’eed neighborhood of Aleppo killed 11 civilians, including 7 children.

• On March 29, a cluster bomb and ballistic missile attack in the town of Hreitan in northern Aleppo killed at least 8 civilians, including 2 children, and injured dozens more.

• On March 24, an airstrike in the town of Akhtarin in northern Aleppo killed 10 civilians, including at least 4 children.

• On March 18, an airstrike on Marjeh neighborhood in the city of Aleppo killed at least 33 civilians, including at least 17 children.

It means for example comparing rebel executions of prisoners, such as the three publicly executed in Raqqa this week apparently by Al Qaeda-affiliated Islamists, with Aleppo’s river of corpses, described in detail in this Guardian report by Martin Chulov.

It means asking which scenario holds the better chance of some measure of accountability, of a future Syria ruled by law: a victory by rebels, or by the regime?

Regarding the rebels, Time reports Brigadier General Salim Idris, head of the Syrian Military Council (SMC), which oversees, according to its leadership, about 90% of the rebel forces as saying “it is very clear that these kinds of behaviors, this cutting of bodies, is not allowed. If there is evidence that fighters from the FSA are doing something against human rights or international law, they will be brought before the court.”

As for the Assad regime, its chief backer in the UN Security Council, Russia, is blocking the possibility of referring both regime and rebel crimes to the International Criminal Court.

On one side is a fragile hope, more endangered with every day of war, on the other is no hope at all. Every day of dithering over Syria weakens that fragile hope further.

UPDATE: Norm has written a response, In defence of uncertainty (over Syria), and I thank him for it, especially given what a difficult time this is for him.

He clarifies that “there is not a balance of atrocity in this matter so far as I'm aware.” For Norm, the key point is “the crucial justifying condition that external intervention must have a reasonable chance of making a difference for the better.”

I explained my own views on what kind of intervention I believed was needed on just such a basis of likely consequences in March of last year. My view has not substantially changed since then, and I believe events since that time confirm the accuracy of much of my analysis.

Biscuits from the North Pole

These chocolate wafer biscuits were amongst the treats handed round at a recent presentation of Kjetil Berge’s Breaking the Ice project, which I’ve written about earlier.

He has now completed his appointed rounds from London to Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, and then in Russia through St Petersburg, Petrozavodsk, Murmansk, and Nikel, and finally to Kirkenes in northern Norway. Now we are very happy to see him back in his more southerly home again!

Below are some videos of the journey - more here.


Narva, 24 December 2012



St Petersburg, 27 December 2012.



Petrozavodsk, 29 December 2012.



Murmansk, 3 Janury 2013.

Breaking the ice

My friend Kjetil Berge is departing on an expedition to the Arctic on Saturday. Travelling overland by ice cream van, he will go via Berlin and St Petersburg to Murmansk, Russia, and then to Kirkenes, Norway. Ice creams will be offered in exchange for talk about the weather, songs and stories.

Londoners can wave him farewell (and get an ice cream for a song) at Gillett Square this Saturday, between 4 and 6 pm. Read more about the journey here, and see Kjetil’s other doings here.

The top image is from the 2006 hardback edition of Rasmus Klump På Nordpolen by Carla and Vilhelm Hansen. Rasmus Klump is copyright Egmont Serieforlaget.

US Navy Privateer down - Baltic Sea, April 1950

The Danish daily Politiken, Wednesday the 12th of April 1950.

This selection of Danish newspaper clippings come from a scrapbook I bought some years ago in a Copenhagen antiquarian bookshop. They concern the search operation for a US Navy Privateer plane shot down over the Baltic Sea near Latvia on the 8th of April 1950 by Soviet aircraft. There’s a brief account of the event at spyflight.co.uk.

In 1956 the United States accused the Soviet Union of holding a number of airmen prisoner from the crew of the US Navy Privateer shot down in 1950 and from the crew of an Air Force B-29 list in the Sea of Japan on June 13th 1952 (see TFR 27-86 here). The Soviet Union denied this (see TFR 27-8).

In 1975 the Pentagon acknowledged the plane was on an intelligence mission, not a training flight as originally claimed. AP reported US Navy officials as saying that there was ‘no credible evidence’ that any of the crew escaped the plane and ended up in Soviet prison camps.

Speculation revived in June 1992 after comments by Russian President Boris Yeltsin to NBC News that American prisoners of war from Vietnam were sent to Soviet labor camps and some might still be alive. Later that month US envoy Malcom Toon in Russia following up reports of missing Americans expressed doubt about Yeltsin’s comments, but in November 1992 Russian emissary Dimitri Volkogonov presented a letter from President Yeltsin to the US Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs stating that the USSR under Stalin had executed some American prisoners after World War II, and forced others to renounce their citizenship. Dimitri Volkogonov also talked of more than 730 US airmen being imprisoned in the Soviet Union, some of whom were executed.

The lost crew were Jack Fette, Howard W Seeschaf, Robert D Reynolds, Tommy L Burgess, Frank L Beckman, Joe H Danens, Jack W Thomas, Joseph J Bourassa, Edward J Purcell, and Joseph N Rinnier Jr.

Here’s a 1956 news story on the reaction of the remarried wife of Howard W Seeschaf to claims that he might be alive.

And here’s a 1994 story on Jane Reynolds Howard, remarried wife of Lt Robert Reynolds, who was told in 1958 that her first husband was still alive by a man who said he was a former cellmate of Reynolds’ in a Soviet psychiatric hospital. And another from 1997, still searching.

Twit Archive - 10-30 April 2011

Lots more on Libya, plus a couple of links to the Weimar Art blog to posts Ride a Bike and With Love From Russia. The above image comes from that Russia post, a photo by Dmitry Debabov, The “Krasin” ice-breaker in the Arctic, 1936.

Tweets below the fold.

Twit Archive - 1-9 April 2011

Lots of Libya tweets, and one moon tweet. Above is a detail of a jolly Soviet moon illustration from 1965, one of hundreds of images in this Man in Space! Flickr set, tweeted by Tom Gauld.

Tweets below the fold.

Twit Archive - 1-20 March 2011

Tweets below the fold, on intervention in Libya, UNSC Resolution 1973, and more.

Above, Chemical Warfare board game, art by AV Kuklin, USSR 1925, from Dieselpunk via @brendankoerner.

Scraps

Postcards from the USSR

found discarded

in an alleyway in North London.

On the reverse - one, two, three and four - are marked prices, but it seems they did not sell.

Or perhaps someone did buy them, and then regretted the purchase.

Found by S.

Libya: the regime under siege

Today BBC News has a story headlined Libya rebels ‘in secret talks’ with Tripoli underground, quoting Alamin Belhaj of the National Transitional Council (NTC) in Benghazi on what he describes as extensive nightly communications with an extensive network in Tripoli planning for an uprising in the capital.

Earlier in the week, feb17.info reported Maj. Gen. Abd-al-Fattah Yunis al-Ubaydi, chief-of-staff of Libya’s liberation army, as saying “ Freedom Fighters in Tripoli have formed secret cells and are undertaking spectacular operations,” and going on to call on them not to repeat the destruction of property that happened after the uprising in Benghazi.

One consequence of attacks on regime buildings in Benghazi was the loss of potential evidence of human rights abuses. In Misrata, the Guardian reported, uprising forces have been working to collect and preserve such evidence of war crimes.

Two other stories relevant to the siege of Tripoli, both via libyafeb17.com: one from Reuters, an analysis of NATO strategy seeing it as designed to create conditions for an uprising in Tripoli, and one from The Economist, on how rebels are putting pressure on the regime’s fuel supplies.

Despite some opponents of intervention clinging to their precious pessimism, more serious observers in the governments of Russia and China have seen for some time which way the wind blows, and continue to realign accordingly.

Given all this, the effect of negative noises from kitsch Left characters like Germaine Greer (comment via Bob) and Cynthia McKinney will be inconsequential for Libya’s future; instead the damage they do is to the cause of an enlightened Left at home.

Finally, as a counter to the offensive comments by Ms Greer, Gita Sahgal earlier this month on rape allegations in Libya.

_

ADDED: In the interview above, Gita Sahgal sensibly caveats her comments with “it hasn’t been proved yet” and speaks more widely on the topic of organised rape as a weapon in war. Now her former employers at Amnesty International, as well as Human Rights Watch, are reported as expressing doubt on allegations of organised rape in Libya.

ADDED: In the New York Times, Rebels Arm Tripoli Guerillas and Cut Resources to Capital.

Gogol blogging

December 5th

I spent the whole morning reading the papers. Strange things are happening in Spain. I read the throne has been left vacant and that the nobility are having a great deal of trouble choosing an heir, with the result that there’s a lot of civil commotion. This strikes me as very strange. They’re saying some ‘donna’ must succeed to the throne: that’s impossible. A king must inherit the throne. And they say there’s no king anyway. But there must be a king. There can’t be a government without one. There’s a king all right, but he’s hiding in some obscure place. He must be somewhere, but is forced to stay in hiding for family reasons, or perhaps because he’s in danger from some foreign country, such as France. Or there may be another explanation.

December 8th

I was about to go to the office but various reasons and considerations held me back. I couldn’t get that Spanish business out of my head. How could a woman inherit the throne? They wouldn’t allow it. Firstly, England wouldn’t stand for it. And what’s more, it would affect the whole of European policy: the Austrian Emporor, our Tsar, . . . I must confess, these events shook me up so much I couldn’t put my mind to anything all day. Mavra pointed out that I was very absent-minded during supper. And, in fact, in a fit of distraction I threw two plates on the floor, and they broke immediately. After dinner I walked along a street that led downhill. Discovered nothing very edifying. Afterwards I lay on my bed for a long time and pondered the Spanish question.

From Blog of a Diary of a Madman by Nikoláy Vasilévich Gógol, Penguin Classics edition, translation copyright © Ronald Wilks 1972.

We went to the theatre this week. Matthew Jure made a great madman at the Pleasance.

I love going to the theatre. As long as I’ve a kopeck in my pocket you can’t stop me. But these civil servants of ours are such ignorant pigs, you’d never catch those peasants going, even if you gave them a ticket for nothing.

Remembrance in St. Petersburg

In the IHT, Alison Smale writes of the Piskarovskoye Memorial Cemetery, and its monument to the one million victims of the siege of Leningrad, and then goes on to tell of an exhibition at the Anna Akhmatova Museum on the Soviet-Finnish wars of 1939-40 and 1941-44, and of arguments that Stalin’s attack on Finland on June 25, 1941, with 85,000 Finns and 330,000 Russians killed, led directly to the siege of Leningrad.

Akhmatova, who knew nearby Finland from pre-1917 days when many St. Petersburg residents vacationed there, was one of the few European intellectuals to see Stalin’s attack on Finland in 1939 on a par with Hitler’s occupation of Paris or bombing of London.

In the permanent exhibit that chronicles her life, the Finns have installed pictures of these wars. On another floor, they built what looked like a Finnish apartment, peppering it with war images in unlikely places (the surface of dinner plates) to illustrate that memories of war never fade.

Read more.

In his book, The Soviet Invasion of Finland 1939-40, Carl Van Dyke writes that this war “convinced the Finnish government of the need to seek protection against the threat of another Soviet invasion by courting allies either in Scandinavia or Germany.”

He also describes how “the war revealed many deficiencies in the Red Army’s ability to conduct contemporary warfare, confirming the Red Army’s low status in relation to other European armed forces...”

Though Stalin had increased the size of the military prior to the war years, from 1934 on he’d introduced a series of organisational reforms in the Red Army to consolidate his own political power, culminating in a wave of repression in 1937-38 during which “36,761 army commanders and some 3,000 naval commanders had been dismissed, shot or imprisoned.”

From the book:

The absurdities and horrors of the first month of the war had given rise to jokes and humorous stories which ridiculed superior officers and commissars while indulging in self-deprecation. Eventually, a more benign expression of this humour found its way into the military press in the character of Pasha Brezhuntsov (‘The Liar’), who was a creation of the editorial board of the newspaper Boevaia krasnoarmeiskaia. In early February the editors began printing the fictional letters of Pasha the Liar, depicting a gossiping, undisciplined soldier incapable of shooting or skiing and unfamiliar with regulations, whose exploits poked fun at Soviet weaponry, military food, the excessive formality of military bureaucracy, and traffic-jams on the roads. These stories came to the attention of the Political Administration of the Leningrad Military District which condemned such humour as politically subversive and a mockery of the Red Army soldier.

A more politically sympathetic alternative was the cartoon character ‘Vasia Tërkin’ created by the military journalist A. Tvardovskii with the help of the artsts V. Briskin and V. Fomichev at the newspaper Na Strazhe Rodiny. Tvardovskii based his cartoon character on a truck driver he had met during the invasion of western Belorussia a few months before, embellishing him with traits of a folk hero. Tvardovskii’s intent was to portray the role model of a combat-ready soldier who combined cheerful, quick-witted but unpretentious humour with resourcefulness under fire ‘without undermining the sacred principles of military discipline’. ‘Vasia Tërkin’ was introduced to the reading public on 31 December 1939. (...) ‘Vasia Tërkin’ sought to co-opt the potential subversiveness of military humour (...)

Images and excerpts from The Soviet Invasion of Finland 1939-40, Copyright © 1997 Carl Van Dyke.

I blame Bonnie and Clyde

Another week of anti-establishment and anti-imperialist apologists for political repression, political violence, and alleged sexual violence, and whatever else it takes to stick it to the man . . .

On Friday The Guardian published sexual assault allegations against Julan Assange, central to which were assertions that he deliberately and repeatedly had unprotected sex with women contrary to their wishes. Bizarrely self-described feminist Naomi Wolf read this and saw only consent, as she says in this TV debate with Jaclyn Friedman. Wolf had earlier ridiculed the two women alleging assault.

Then there’s Michael Moore who described the allegations as “lie and smear” when interviewed by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC’s Countdown. And Mr Olbermann has turned out to be quite a spectacle himself, retweeting a link from Assange supporter Bianca Jagger to a piece written by Holocaust denier Israel Shamir naming both women in the case and alleging a link between one of the women and the CIA. Finding himself criticised as a result, Olbermann reacted in a rather extreme manner and has since kept on digging.

What else? Michael Moore found he didn’t like it much when his own name turned up in a WikiLeaked cable on Cuba, and protested that The Guardian had the story wrong. Terry Glavin tells just how wrong the story was, and putting it right gives no credit to Moore.

Oh, and conspiracy theorist Israel Shamir turned out to be not just an Assange supporter but WikiLeaks’ man in Russia. Bizarrely for a representative of an organisation supposedly devoted to fighting corrupt government, he popped up in Belarus making excuses for the regime’s brutal crackdown on opposition activists.

Modernityblog, a WikiLeaks supporter, finds himself stunned that somebody as internet savvy as Assange hadn’t thought to Google Mr Shamir before getting involved with him. Perhaps that’s because Assange has been too busy Googling himself.

Added: apologies, how could I have left out John Pilger?

Police Radio

Police corruption in New York, in Right to Remain Silent, an episode of This American Life from September. The show also includes another tale similar to the Twitter joke trial story.

Anti-police insurgency in Russia’s far east, The Primorsky Partisans, from BBC Radio 4’s Crossing Continents and broadcast in November. Also as an MP3.

Not radio: Axe Cop comics, via Mr Bowbrick.

Added: Buster Keaton in Cops, at Archive.org.

Frunzenskaya Quay

The sun was out earlier. Fresh air, exercise, a little break from the work I thought, that’s the ticket to lighten the heart; but I must have taken a wrong turning.

Photo from oldmos.ru.

Walking forwards, looking backwards

Amongst all the hundreds of opinion pieces on Afghanistan that attempt to draw lessons from some snippet of history, this post by Steve Coll of The New Yorker is unusual and interesting: Gorbachev Was Right.

Fritz Behrendt

Caption: You never know who's next to you in a German tram, but then you never know in The Netherlands either.

The Dutch Resistance Museum, Amsterdam, is currently showing work by the cartoonist Fritz Behrendt. The show runs until November 15th. There’s a short review at Globespotters. You can see photos of some of the Fritz Behrendt displays along with some of the museum’s permanent exhibition in this Flickr set.

Born in Berlin in 1925, Fritz Behrendt’s family moved to The Netherlands in 1937. From 1943 to the end of the war he attended the Amsterdam Arts and Crafts College.

During a lesson he watched as three British planes were shot down by the Germans. The RAF pilots were shot dead while hanging from their falling parachutes. “That was the moment when I told my art teacher that we could no longer keep on drawing flowers. That was the moment when I decided I would not become a painter or a photographer, but rather use my drawing skills in the fight against injustice.” He was imprisoned by the SS in 1945 for participating in the Dutch Resistance.

In 1947 he went to Yugoslavia as a commandant in the Gerrit Jan van der Veen youth brigade to work on the Samac to Sarajevo Youth Railway. In 1948 he studied at the Art Academy in Zagreb, and in the holidays worked as project leader and interpreter in the International Youth Brigade constructing the Zagreb to Belgrade motorway.

At the urging of Erich Honecker, leader of the Freie Deutsche Jugend, Behrendt went to East Berlin in 1949 and worked there in the FDJ Central Council as an expert on visual promotion, designing orders of merit and citations. Following the Tito-Stalin split, Honecker had Behrendt arrested as a supporter of Yugoslavia. He was imprisoned in solitary confinement for six months, one of the first prisoners of the newly formed Stasi secret police. He was released in 1950 following pressure from the Dutch government.

He went on to work for several major Dutch papers, as well as The New York Times, Time, Punch, Der Spiegel, and the New York Herald Tribune. He died on December 5th last year.

This Vrij Nederland article (in Dutch) includes a choice sample of his postwar cartoons, anti-Stalinist, pro-Israel, UN-critical, including the above drawing on the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the one below of hip Western leftists making an embarrassing discovery.

Details taken from this Dutch biography and this Germanish-English one.

Drawings copyright © the estate of Fritz Behrendt.

You might also be interested in my earlier post on Danish cartoonists during the occupation.

Iran, Israel, Palestine

(image from Raye Man Kojast)

The Guardian News Blog is covering today’s Green Movement protests during Quds Day in Iran.

The Guardian's former Iran correspondent Robert Tait is monitoring events from Istanbul. He writes: Ahmadinejad was giving a live interview on IRIB's Channel Two from the scene of Quds Day. As he spoke, viewers could clealy the chants of "Ahmadi, Ahmadi, resign, resign" - this all over live TV. Apparently Ahmadinejad was aware of the chants and their effect on the interview. He is said to have become flustered and quickly wrapped up the interview.

Much more, including snippets of Ahmadinejad’s speech today blaming the formation of Israel on the British (huh?) and again denying the Holocaust.

New York Times News Blog coverage.

BBC News on today’s events.

From Raye Man Kojast, Moussavi’s recommended slogan for Quds Day demonstrations:

Put down your gun For I am weary from seeing this bloodshed Whether in Lebanon or Gaza Whether in Quds or Iran

Lots more today from Raye Man Kojast.

From Pedestrian, chants heard today in Iran:

argh bar Roosiyeh - Death to Russia Roosiyeh Haya Kon, Keshvaremoon ro raha kon - Russia, leave our country alone! Na Ghazeh, na Lobnan, janam fadayeh Iran - My life belongs to neither Gaza nor Lebanon - but Iran Che Ghazeh, che Iran, margh bar zaleman - Whether in Gaza or in Iran, death to tyrants

More. Also from Pedestrian, Today, and What We Are After, while her friend Naj has a laugh at the official version, and shows the early editions of tomorrow’s front pages.

From Tehran Bureau, Co-opting Quds Day, and Quds Day Updates.

Via Azarmehr, a message of solidarity to the people of Iran by Mubarak Awad:

My Dear People of Iran, For the past thirty years, the Iranian regime has used the cause of the Palestinian people as a way to distract from its own oppressive rule. I thank the people of Iran for showing their support over the years with the people of Palestine, especially because on this day of Qods, the people of Iran suffer under the kind of unelected oppression that is comparable in some ways to that suffered by Palestinians. As a Palestinian, life-long fighter for the freedom and independence of Palestine and a leader of the first Palestinian intifada, I strongly condemn the Iranian regime’s violations of human rights and repeated use of violence against the nonviolent Iranian protesters, activists and prisoners. I stand in complete solidarity with and support for the Iranian people and am confident that with their resilience, they will achieve a free and democratic Iran to raise their children in and have a good life. In unity, Mubarak Awad

More on Mubarak Awad at Nonviolence International, International Peace & Conflict Resolution at American University, and Wikipedia.

Azarmehr also links to videos of today’s events, here, here, here, and here.

The Times has a report today on the degree of violence unleashed by the regime in response to the post-election protests:

The Times has been given access to 500 pages of documents - a small fraction of the total - that include handwritten testimony by victims, medical reports and interviews. They suggest that security forces have engaged in systematic killing and torture to try to break the opposition.

[...] The documents suggest that at least 200 demonstrators were killed in Tehran, with 56 others still unaccounted for, and that 173 were killed in other cities. These are several times higher than the official figures. Just over half of the 200 were killed on the streets. They were beaten around the head or shot in the head or chest as part of an apparent shoot-to-kill policy - there are no reports of demonstrators being shot in the legs.

The rest here.

More posts on today’s protests at From Tehran With Love, ModernityBlog, Harry’s Place, Francis Sedgemore, Fat Man on a Keyboard, Enduring America.

Update: for morning after coverage in english language mainstream press, see the SWJ Roundup for 19 September, with 68 matches for the word ‘Iran’.

Update 21 September: Harry’s Place points to a video of demonstrators in Iran tearing down a Hezbollah banner with the headline Hezbollah: More Popular With Elderly British Trots Than With Young Iranians.

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Some interesting background on the ongoing issue of Iran’s nuclear programme, and the question of whether Israel might attempt military action to impede it:

Joshua Pollack at Arms Control Wonk puts together a brief history of military missions to prevent nuclear weapons development, beginning with World War II actions in Telemark, Norway, and including Iranian and Israeli air attacks on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in 1980 and 1981, and Iraqi attacks on partially complete Iranian nuclear power plants at Bushehr in 1984, ’85, ’86 and ’87.

A commenter on that post gives a link to a detailed story from Air Enthusiast (issue 110, March/April 2004) which maintains there was a high degree of co-operation between Iran and Israel in their attacks on Osirak.

Not Iran

It’s hard to keep your eyes pointing in all directions at once . . .

Iraq, and Thoughts on Intervention, by Roland Dodds. Added: Ibn Muqawama on Joe Biden, Iraq envoy.

At the SWJ, Pentagon planners should study Somalia, not just Hezbollah.

Sietske in Beirut writes on conversations she has. Not many dead, according to the papers.

Via Mick Hartley, Riots in China. Mick has also paid particular attention to the Uighurs being released from Guantanamo, fleshing out their tale with information on ongoing repression of Uighurs by the Chinese authorities in Xinjiang. Since his last round up on the story, The New York Times has published a report on the Uighurs settled in Bermuda.  

Georgia’s Hard Slog to Democracy by Michael Cecire, at Michael Totten’s blog. Related at the NY times, Russia’s Neighbors Resist Wooing and Bullying.

Also from Michael Totten, A Conversation with Robert D Kaplan. This does include discussion of Iran, along with China’s involvement in Sri Lanka, Russia and its neighbours, Afghanistan and Pakistan. However I’d like to highlight an exchange at the end regarding Israel’s failure in counterinsurgency, material relevant to the essay topic set in an earlier post here.

Kaplan: You know what’s interesting? The Israelis. They’ve been great at defeating structured Arab armies, but they haven’t figured out how to deal with a few thousand insurgents in South Lebanon or in Gaza. What did their wars in 2006 and 2009 in Lebanon and Gaza get them? MJT: It got them fewer rockets for a while, but it’s temporary. Kaplan: Yeah. MJT: I don’t know what they should do. They can’t put a David Petraeus in Gaza or Lebanon. It won’t work. Kaplan: No. MJT: And they can’t fight a counterinsurgency from the air because that’s just absurd. Kaplan: Yeah. They haven’t been able to solve this problem at all. MJT: I’m glad it isn’t up to me what Israel should do. There aren’t any good options. Maybe they should hold Syria accountable. Syria is at least a state with a return address and national interests. I don’t think the Syrian government is particularly ideological. It isn’t like the Iranian government. Syria isn’t an ideology, it’s a state. Kaplan: It wants to survive. MJT: Maybe the Israelis should lean on Assad. They can’t lean on Hamas or Hezbollah. They can’t lean on Beirut because Beirut is too weak to do much. Kaplan: Yeah. I mean, the idea of bombing highway overpasses near Beirut to punish Lebanon for Hezbollah is ridiculous.

Kaplan and Totten point to Israel’s failure to develop of a true counterinsurgency campaign, but positive suggestions are still lacking. Tackling the Syrian regime may be relevant, but does not address the absence of a population-centric strategy. Any takers? 

Update: Vigilant as I try to be, one direction I didn’t think to look was down.

In fear of the people - 5

Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Marjane Satrapi speaking on Wednesday at the European Parliament in Brussels on behalf of the Moussavi campaign. More details at The New York Times.

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In the previous post I noted that The Guardian was the only UK national paper to lead on Iran yesterday. The paper’s news blog has also been excellent at providing rolling coverage. See here for today’s updates.

However, as Norm points out, the paper’s leading Stalin apologist Seumas Milne has proved as reliably wrong as ever. Like Galloway, it seems Milne never met an ‘anti-imperialist’ he didn’t like, no matter how murderous. Milne was The Guardian’s comment editor from 2001 to ’07 and is currently an associate editor. A paper that pays Milne’s salary is a paper I would be embarrassed to spend money on.

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More from today:

From Martin, We just want to be normal, ctd. 

From ModernityBlog, Not just rich kids in Iran.

Today’s updates from The New York Times.

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On the broader implications of events in Iran:

The Poor Mouth points to an article from AP on reaction in the Arab world.

Andrew Sullivan on making the Russian connection, follow up here, and here.

Talking of Russia and Caspian Sea oil and gas, if relations between Iran and the West change considerably, it would make the Russian threat to the Caucasus fuel route via Georgia much less critical.

Michael Totten on the view from Beirut.

A lot of focus has been put on what these events might mean for Israel regarding the Iranian regime’s support for Hamas and Hizbollah, its threats regarding Israel’s existence, its promotion of Holocaust denial, and its nuclear weapons programme. However another aspect to consider is the lesson that it is not Iran’s population that is the problem, in fact they are showing themselves to be the solution. There might be something to learn here regarding how security is to be achieved for Israel closer to home.