SPOKESMAN BOOKS
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Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation
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Catalogue
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THE BERTRAND RUSSELL PEACE FOUNDATION
DOSSIER
2007
Number 25
NATO – A SOBER
EVALUATION
Johan
Galtung, founder of TRANSCEND, the peace and development network, protested
about the meeting of Nato foreign ministers in Oslo on 25 April 2007. This is
what he said.
Foreign
Ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization!
You
are not welcome. The best thing about your meeting is the short duration.
We
wish you good riddance.
As
a matter of fact, we wish you did not exist. We wish you had had the decency
to dissolve like the Warsaw Treaty Organization after the Cold War.
The
old Nato had a rationale, to contain Soviet aggression. About that we can
discuss, but it is history.
The
new Nato is offensive, not defensive. The theatre is no longer the North
Atlantic arena, but the whole world. It is engaged in preventive war, rather
than containing aggression, in expanding the space under Nato control, rather
than in solving conflicts. In doing so, Nato creates the situations it is
supposed to eliminate.
Today
it looks like a major purpose is to keep Nato alive for its own sake, as a
dinosaur heading for extinction. It is a tragedy to hear people claim that
Nato must succeed instead of asking what is good for the Afghan people. And it
is even more tragic to watch countries compensating for unwillingness to
support Nato’s Master, the United States of America, in Iraq by turning to
Afghanistan, sacrificing Afghan lives on the altar of submission to
Washington.
‘North
Atlantic’. That smells Anglo-America –- with a dash of Norway, where you
are right now located. And with a trail of blood from Palestine to Iraq to
Iran to Afghanistan. Yes, it also stands for democracy and human rights. Like
apartheid for the Palestinians, torture and rendition to several of you, walls
of concrete and steel, repression and killing.
Democracy?
Some democracy: the USA executive is not accountable
–
to the people, but to money fuelling fake elections as in Florida and
Ohio, and to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the
National Rifle
Association
(NRA);
–
to the judiciary, appointed by the executive itself;
–
to the Congress, because the President can veto any bill and the two-party
system makes it very difficult to override a veto.
Is
this really a model for which you are killing people, or are you simply afraid
of Washington? Of being rejected by the Master, of one day being exposed to
its carpets of bombs? And what does that say about the nature of Nato?
As
specialists on Afghanistan, you of course know the histories of the English
invasions of 1838–42 and 1878–81, which ended with a massacre of the
English Embassy in Kabul, and the Soviet invasion of 1979–86, with final
withdrawal in 1989. You might draw a conclusion for good or for bad: these are
proud people, who want to be masters in their own land.
You
have no military chance whatsoever. You cling to the idea of something finite
– ‘Taliban’ – that you can crush or contain. But the more you kill,
the more resistance you create. And that resistance has:
–
no limit in time. There may be lulls, but never any capitulations;
–
no limit in space. They have the whole Muslim UMMA, 1.3 billion,
mainly separated by borders drawn by the West, to draw upon.
And
yet there are solutions in Afghanistan, for them, not you, to bring about:
–
Acoalition government with, not without, Talibans, negotiating, not crushing
them;
–
Priority to the basic needs for food, shelter, clothing, health and education
for all;
–
Afghanistan as a federation, not the unitary state run for foreign benefit
from Kabul;
–
A Central Asian Community with neighbouring nations deeply intertwined with
Afghanistan;
–
Security provided by the Christian-dominated UN Security Council with the
Muslim Organization of the Islamic Conference.
And
there are solutions to the conflict with Iran. Why are the US/UK so much more
worried about a nuclear Iran and missiles flying than about a nuclear Pakistan
and India? Because they think Iran hates them. And why should Iran hate them?
In one word: 1953. The CIA – MI6 coup against a legally elected Prime
Minister, Mossadegh, installing the Shah and 25 years of dictatorship. And how
does one handle that? By a one-minute Bush/Blair speech accepting
responsibility and apologizing. Do you Foreign Ministers have the courage to
tell the self-righteous Anglo-Americans to do so?
And
there are solutions to Iraq, not any stupid ‘reconciliation’ without
political solutions, better known as pacification. US/UK and the remaining
coalition partners stop killing, shed their uniforms, apologize, compensate,
clean up, and ask the UN to convene a Conference on Security and Cooperation
in West Asia, like the Helsinki Conference 1973-75 model. The fate of Iraq
–- possibly as a community more than as a state – is for the Iraqis to
decide.
And
there are solutions to what your Master calls terrorism – in your midst you
have a country called Spain, whose leader, Zapatero, did after 11 March 2004
what Bush and Blair should have done after 9/11 and 07/07. He stopped killing
Arab Muslims in Iraq. He legalized migrants from Morocco. He started
negotiating with Morocco instead of bombing. And he organized a Dialogue of
Civilizations. Use Spain rather than US/UK as the model.
But
you have a huge problem: your Master. With more than 70 interventions on its
conscience after the Second World War, with somewhere between 13 and 17
million killed in overt actions. You are allies. With few exceptions, you are
silent.
Silence
means consent – to one of the worst crimes in history: US/UK in Iraq.
There
is one way out. You stand up against your Master rather than mimicking the
Master’s Voice with some corridor whispering.
You
can walk out.
You
can say stop.
You
can say: enough killing!
Let
us solve all these conflicts, and let us turn the adversaries of our
Master’s creation into our friends.
