The US Against the People of Egypt

“We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population… In this situation, we cannot help but be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity”.

George Kennan, 1948[1]

I’ve just finished reading The Road to Tahrir Square by historian Lloyd Gardner, a decent account of US-Egyptian relations from around 1945 to the overthrow of Mubarak. It has helped me understand more clearly the current situation in Egypt, and has the odd fascinating piece of information about Middle Eastern relations in general. For Gardner, ‘there is a strong historical thread stretching from the agreements reached between the CIA and Nasser on Iraq in 1963 to the final days of Mubarak’s regime in early 2011’ (p.95).

To many, it is hard to contextualise the events of 2011 and see them relative to the historical ties between the US and Egypt. The US has invested around $50 billion in military and economic aid in Egypt over the past few decades, and this has given it no small say in Egyptian politics. During the 2011 crisis, ‘Secretary of Defence Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen had made phone calls to their counterparts almost every day’ (p.195). The Pentagon spokesman claimed that this was ‘just an example of how engaged we are with the Egyptians’. Gardner notes how the Guardian reported days before Mubarak’s downfall that the Obama administration ‘had refused to cut military aid to Egypt “and is instead working behind the scenes with the commanders of the armed forces on how to oust President Mubarak”’ (p.189). Indeed, as Kees Van der Pijl pointed out, the takeover of the Supreme Military Council was an outcome ‘announced to Congress by Leon Panetta, then head of the CIA, on February 10, the day before it happened’ (‘Arab Revolts and Nation-State Crisis’, New Left Review (70), p.27), something also commented on by Gardner. Earlier both Obama and Biden had refused to call Mubarak a dictator, or even authoritarian; despite, as an interviewer pointed out, the fact that 1000’s of people were tortured and imprisoned under Mubarak and his feared intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman. Obama even managed to duck the question with the astonishing claim that he tends ‘not to use labels for folks’. Indeed, for Obama, Mubarak was a ‘stalwart ally ... a force for stability and good’, a sentiment echoed by the laughably pathetic Tony Blair.

As Tariq Ali pointed out, Washington tried desperately to maintain their influence in Egypt, clinging on to Mubarak until it was clear the pressure was too great and that the whole edifice upon which US influence had been devised in Egypt was being threatened. When they finally abandoned Mubarak, Obama was largely  lauded by liberal commentators as having been on the side of the people all along; another example of the standard ‘liberal’ contempt for facts. The brutal Omar Suleiman was even ‘at one stage touted as Mubarak’s successor’ (‘Between Past and Future’ New Left Review (80), p.63), before the decision was made that all the hated figureheads needed to be changed, and the army was considered reliable enough by Washington and popular enough with the people to be the ones to take over. 

David Wearing, a SOAS researcher and up-and-coming writer, wrote an excellent summary and review of Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the US-Egyptian Alliance by Jason Brownlee in February; Brownlee generally argues the same thing. Wearing quotes a passage to sum it up perfectly: ‘Official US-Egyptian relations have been at odds with domestic public opinion in Egypt. Rather than fostering democracy in an incremental fashion, US and Egyptian officials have promoted an autocratic security state that supports a US-led regional order built around Israeli security and US influence over the Persian Gulf. By contrast, public opinion in Egypt favours a regional security order less dominated by the United States and Israel, and a government that respects political competition and civil liberties’. Gardner compares the way the US provided for Sadat’s own personal security with the way they helped train and create the brutal secret police in Iran under the Shah. This is of course unremarkable to anyone with even a passing knowledge of US foreign policy, but it may seem odd to those accustomed to the standard line in the media and academia- that the US, whilst it may make the odd mistake, is fundamentally committed to democracy promotion around the world. This is no more true than the idea that the Soviet Union was fighting for the poor and oppressed around the world, or that the Roman Empire had any interest in the wellbeing of its conquered subjects (or the British Empire for that matter). Every power in history has been concerned with its own interests, whilst claiming to follow a higher moral cause, and the US is unremarkable in this respect. Its rhetoric about promoting democracy in Egypt should be disregarded; the quote from George Kennan at the start of the article is a far more honest and accurate portrayal of US policy, from the pen of a man who did so much to shape its direction after World War 2.

As Brownlee points out, US policy is heavily at odds with Egyptian public opinion. Gardner cites a Gallup poll which revealed an ‘“overwhelming tsunami of negative opinions” about the United States’; more than half opposed any US aid to Egypt, and three-quarters ‘opposed any aid to specific political groups’ (p.201). He quotes Gallup’s chief analyst of the poll, who believed that the reason was simply because US aid was perceived as only serving to ‘perpetuate the condition of the Mubarak years’ (p.202). The recent uprisings had far more of an anti-US government flavour to them than the 2011 uprisings- it seems the Egyptian people offered the US a chance to redeem themselves and have now tired of extending the olive branch. Perhaps there is a recognition that the US isn’t, and never will be, on their side.

Anti-US government feeling across the region is quite easily explained for those who are genuinely interested, and don’t just want to have an idiotic rant about why the Muslims ‘hate us because they hate us’. A review article in Foreign Affairs a couple of months ago detailed a study by Amaney Jamal who found that so-called ‘anti-Americanism’ was the result of a ‘deeper rejection of undemocratic political systems in Arab countries, which for decades have been underwritten and supported by the United States’; not to mention more immediate grievances like the CIA and Pentagon’s global assassination, torture and kidnapping campaigns, and the mass crime which was the Iraq War (‘The Persistence of Arab Anti-Americanism’, Mark Lynch, Foreign Affairs, 92(3), p.147).

Most interesting is Gardner’s claim that the crisis in Egypt has ‘portended far greater long-term dangers’ for the US government than the debacles in Iraq or Afghanistan, something he quotes Henry Kissinger (the most powerful National Security Advisor in US history and former Secretary of State for Gerald Ford) as agreeing with (p.204). Egypt has been described by US officials as a ‘cornerstone’ of US policy in the Middle East, and that certainly has a lot of truth to it; today it is second possibly only to Saudi Arabia as a US Arab ally in the region.  The latest upheavals could turn out to favour or harm the US; it’s too early to tell.

 I will continue to write about Egypt in the weeks to come.

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[1] Quoted in The Road to Tahrir Square by Lloyd Gardner. George Kennan was one of the major US government planners in the Post-War period. 

Asia's Hidden Genocide

The blog is an early copy of an article I had published in the Warwick Globalist, before it was cut down to size and slightly changed by the editor. This was more or less how I intended the article to be. Given the style of the magazine, there are no references and it reads more like an emotive opinion piece than my usual blog posts do/will. Enjoy:

In 1969, 1,022 native tribesmen of West Papua were summoned by the UN to vote on the so-called ‘Act of Free Choice’; a referendum to decide if their land should be incorporated into Indonesia. The tribesman, supposedly representative of all 1m native inhabitants, voted under the gaze of the Indonesian army’s guns. Unsurprisingly, they voted to surrender independence. The beginning of a brutal subjugation of one of the world’s oldest civilisations had begun.

In 1962 West Papua- the western half of Earth’s second largest island and recently freed from Dutch imperialism- was pressured to incorporated with Indonesia. After Dutch protests, the UN agreed to ‘participate in and supervise’ a vote on potential Indonesian rule by the tribal elders of Papua, to be held by 1969. Given that, according to the then-US ambassador to Indonesia, ‘85-90% of the native population [were] in sympathy with the Free Papuan cause’, Indonesia had to rely on a campaign of terror to get the desired result from handpicked ‘representatives’. An officer assigned to intimidate the Papuans into voting for annexation told a group of tribal leaders that he would “shoot anyone who is against [Indonesia] and all his followers”. According to some estimates, the Indonesian army killed around 30,000 Papuans over the 7 year period whilst the UN ‘observed’. In some parts of the country Catholic missionary schools were forced to close following disappearances of entire families.

Thankfully for Indonesia, the world’s major western powers did their utmost to ensure the unimpeded perpetration of this injustice.  The result of the vote required approval from the UN General Assembly; the US pressured Latin American leaders to vote for its acceptance, and the French pressured former colonies to follow suit.

44 years later, the nascent ‘Free Papua cause’, alluded to by the ambassador in 1969, has developed into a fully grown independence movement. The OMP (Free Papua Movement) is a ‘broad based social movement, which almost everyone in West Papua, if you get them alone, will admit to belonging’, according to Paul Kingsnorth, an investigative writer who travelled across West Papua in the early 2000’s. It does have an armed wing- maybe a thousand men armed mainly with bows and arrows- who for decades have sought to regain their homeland from the occupying Indonesians. Unfortunately for them, Indonesia is armed by the most advanced military machines in the world- the US and UK- and is willing to use this equipment in the most brutal manner imaginable. According to Human Rights Watch, the International Centre for Transitional Justice, and local Papuan human rights groups, torture, assassination, detention without trial, rape and massacres of peaceful protesters are common place. In 2003 a group of Yale Law School academics released a report making a strong case that the Indonesian government was liable for prosecution under the 1948 Genocide Convention. According to official estimates, around 100,000 West Papuans have been killed since 1969. Unofficially, the number approaches 800,000. The truth is unknown, and the destruction of ‘the forgotten bird of paradise’, as it is known, is invisible to the rest of the world.

The tale of West Papua is mirrored in another island in the region: East Timor. In 1975 Kissinger and Nixon travelled to Jakarta to authorise an Indonesian invasion of the peaceful land. What followed was possibly the closest anyone has come to the eradication of an entire ethnic group in the post-war period. 90% of the weapons used for the genocide came from the US and UK, and the then-US ambassador to the UN later wrote that ‘The United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about’. This story, however, had something of a happy ending; at the end of the 20^th century a worldwide protest movement grew, and Clinton was forced to withdraw support from the brutal Indonesian dictator, General Suharto. Consequently Suharto fell swiftly from power, and the Indonesian army withdrew from East Timor- a lesson in the life and death power the West wields. The harrowing occupation of West Papua continues to this day.

In 2010 Obama reauthorised US training and arming of Kopassus- the Indonesian Special Forces group responsible for much of the East Timorese genocide- despite leaked Kopassus documents detailing an assassination campaign against West Papuan independence leaders and civilians, described in the documents as ‘the enemy’. Filep Karma, a celebrated member of the liberation movement, warned that this US support would lead to Kopassus being “even better equipped to commit their murders”.

Compounding the misery in 2012, part time arms salesman David Cameron – ignoring mass demonstrations from the West Papuans imploring him to help end colonisation and genocide - ‘toured Asia’ with UK arms companies promoting sales to Indonesia. British ‘Hawk’ jets have been used to bomb villages and British surveillance equipment helps monitor peaceful protesters. So whilst Cameron talks of ‘freeing’ the Libyan people, he supplies the Indonesians with the equipment and logistical support needed to carry out ethnic cleansing of Papuans, who lived in harmony with their land for around 40,000 years. As privileged students and members of this state, we must demand the British government cease this horror story – in which we are all complicit by association. Visit www.freewestpapua.org to learn more and help promote groups working to end our government’s diplomatic and military support for ‘Asia’s hidden genocide’.