Two British soldiers were killed in Iraq today and a third was injured after their patrol was attacked. The attack was in Amara, a city in the Maysan province of southern Iraq just north of Basra, where the main British base is located. There were unconfirmed reports that the soldiers died after being hit by a roadside bomb - an attack tactic used regularly by insurgents against coalition troops. A local witness said a car bomb had targeted the patrol. 
…. It is supported by SecGen Kofi Annan (father of Kojo), the U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour and two leading human rights organizations (Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International), as well as former President Jimmy Carter (the all purpose rent-a-quote supporter of all tranzis, dictators and terrorists) and other Nobel Prize winners.
Unsurprisingly, John Bolton, US Ambassador to the UN, is not impressed by the new and watered down proposal to reform the Human Rights Commission. That’s the body, as the Washington Post helpfully reminds us, which was responsible for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but “has recently been tainted by the frequent election of members with dismal human rights records, such as Sudan and Zimbabwe”. And Cuba, and Libya, which chaired it, and many others.
I should imagine John Bolton has grasped the basic impossibility of working within an organization that sets up a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, then expands to take in scores of member states who do not understand the basic concept.
One of the main points of the proposed reform of the UN was a thorough overhaul of the Human Rights Commission to exclude countries with a poor internal record. Naturally, the idea has stalled.
“Senior U.S. and U.N. officials had sought to prevent countries with poor rights records from joining the new organization by raising the membership standards and requiring a two-thirds vote of the 191-member General Assembly for any nation's admittance. But the proposal met stiff resistance, and the current draft resolution would require members to be elected by an absolute majority -- at least 96 countries.”
So now Annan and the others are pleading with the United States to accept this somewhat inadequate proposal, pointing out that it will do some of the work needed:
“They noted that provisions to subject all council members to scrutiny of their human rights record would discourage countries with poor records from joining. They also said that council members suspected of abusive behavior can be suspended by a vote of two-thirds of the U.N. membership present.”
The notion that the sort of scrutiny the UN gives to its own organizations, let alone member states could discourage “countries with poor records from joining” is purest moonshine. These countries do not think they have poor records as they do not know what the heck everybody is talking about. The average UN inspection would not find a single bottle of hooch in a bootlegger’s hide-out.
And, of course, it would be so easy to get a country suspended by two-thirds of the vote. They may all vote to suspend Israel, if needs be, and America, at a pinch. But Sudan? DR Congo? Cuba? Forget it.
Besides the 47 members of the new commission would be selected by secret ballot on the basis of “geographical distribution”. Mighty few candidates with good human rights record from some parts of that geographical distribution.
COMMENT THREAD
Unreported by the MSM – apart from a brief mention on BBC's Yesterday in Parliament – the Joint Strike fighter made an appearance in the House of Commons yesterday, during defence questions.We have stood shoulder to shoulder with the Americans not only on the battlefield but in the corridors of diplomacy and on the factory floor. Joint efforts to build a replacement for the Sea Harrier are being challenged by a corner of Capitol Hill. Will the Minister and the Secretary of State do what they can to ensure that the necessary technology is shared? Otherwise, we will have two new aircraft carriers, but no aircraft to put on them.Ingram did "not accept the hon. Gentleman's conclusion" but did inform us that Reid had raised the matter directly with the US secretary of state for defence in the past two weeks.
Labour MP for Chorley, Lindsay Hoyle, then took up the bowling, noting an article in The Times stating that Lord Drayson – defence procurement minister -had declared technology transfer a priority for the building of the joint strike fighter. Again he got a dead bat for his reward, opening the way for Gerald Howarth, the Conservative procurement shadow (pictured). Said Howarth:It is true that we agree across the Dispatch Box that a failure by the United States to permit the transfer of technology to enable us to service our own aircraft would amount to an unacceptable loss of British sovereignty. However, do not US suspicions about its technology leaching out to France and elsewhere inevitably increase when Javier Solana states that he wants the European Defence Agency to be responsible for at least 20 percent. of all European military research spending? Ministers cannot have it both ways -protesting in Washington and then sneaking off to Brussels to sign up to technology sharing with our European partners is hardly likely to win friends in Congress.Ingram's answer was a studied example of "he doth protest too much":
The hon. Gentleman sets a hare running that has no substance whatsoever. His allegation has no foundation. The fact that some senior representative in Europe expresses his point of view does not necessarily mean that it is our point of view.Just to remind Ingram of the issues about which Congress is concerned, in addition to the UK's enthusiastic participation in the European Defence Agency, there are also the little matters of:
Just standing back from the fray, if you were American, would you be entirely happy to hand over to the British top-secret high-tech defence technology, worth billions of dollars, and be absolutely certain that there is no chance of any of the details finding their way to France, other European countries, or China? And if you had some doubts, what would you do in the American position, Mr Ingram?Proven leakage of defence technology to China of secret, high-technology US military systems; A joint declaration of a "strategic partnership" between the EU – of which the UK is a member - and China; EU support for lifting the China arms embargo. Partnership between the EU and China on the Galileo satellite navigation system; Close ties between French and Chinese aviation companies; Co-operation deals between French and Russian aviation companies on high-tech military equipment, including the development of UCAVs – with China as the biggest arms customer of Russia; A treaty agreement between the UK and European countries on defence industrial co-operation, including France, with mutual recognition of security clearances; Close French-owned industrial involvement with the MoD, and multiple cooperative defence agreements between France and the UK.
Sir, it is extraordinary, writes Roger Helmer, MEP, to The Telegraph today, that the Power report seeks to understand public disaffection with politics, yet apparently does not once mention the EU. It calls for politicians to pass more powers to the electorate, he says, but seems unaware that they are in fact passing powers to Brussels. He continues:Well over half our new laws in this country come directly from the EU's unaccountable institutions. Voters may feel they have little influence over events in Westminster, but they have almost none over decisions in Brussels. The Conservative Party's investigation into political engagement will be chaired by Ken Clarke. Let's hope he will not make the same elementary omission as the Power report.Actually, Roger, if you had read the report before you had written the letter, you would have found there are numerous references to the EU, some of which are quoted in our own report.
Have you noticed that the more detached the "colleagues" get from the real thing, the more bellicose becomes their language? Thus we have an excitable little Italian complaining shrilly about the latest underhand dealing from the French – now there's a surprise – declaring that, "This is 1914 all over again."
Before he bursts a blood vessel, someone should perhaps take Tremonti to one side and explain was happened in 1914 and how dreadful the years following really were. That might at least help restore some sense of proportion into his febrile brain.
On the other hand, according to Ambrose, de Villepin is in effect pushing through a step-by-step withdrawal from the EU's economic system, with his finance minister Breton resorting to the "atomic weapon" of a poison pill law enabling French national champions to fight off foreign bids by issuing stock purchase warrants at a discount.
However, that stance was not to survive as no sooner had the commission crafted one position then it was ready with another. Reuters again was on the spot, this time with the news that the commission had come to the conclusion that the French merger did not appear to violate EU rules on the free movement of capital. That was from Oliver Drewes, spokesman for EU internal market commissioner Charlie McCreevy (pictured right).
Thanks again to the excellent Little Green Footballs for calling attention to yet another ridiculous posturing by the SecGen Kofi Annan (father of Kojo). Instead of getting on with the task of reforming the UN (stop sniggering at the back), the egregious Kofi has been addressing – deep breath – the Open Session of the Second Meeting of the High Level Group For the Alliance of Civilizations. As Humpty-Dumpty said, there’s glory for you.
To make the whole affair even more ludicrous, it was taking place in Doha, Qatar. One assumes he went there just after accepting his $500,000 from Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum of Dubai.
Well, what did the SecGen say? The Alliance, he explained, had been set up to deal with “the sense of a widening gap and lack of mutual understanding between Islamic and Western societies”. Don’t know where the SecGen learnt his history, but I seem to recall periods (the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries spring to mind) when the gap and lack of mutual understanding was considerably wider. But, I suppose, “widening” is a relative term.
“At the heart of this crisis is a trend towards extremism in many societies. We should beware of overemphasizing it, because extremism in one group is almost always fed by the perception of extremism in another group. Few people think of themselves as extremists, but many can be pushed towards an extreme point of view, almost without noticing it, when they feel that the behaviour or language of others is extreme.”
Still, not all is lost. Most people are really pretty sensible and can always come to some arrangement though what the middle road between freedom and slavery might be, the SecGen did not explain.
“So let us always remember that those who shout loudest, or act in the most provocative ways, are not necessarily typical of the group on whose behalf they claim to speak. I think one can safely say that most non-Muslims in western societies have no desire to offend the Muslim community, and that most Muslims, even when offended, do not believe that violence or destruction is the right way to react.”
Well, that’s probably true though why, in that case, does the SecGen together with many other western political figures, such as our own Foreign Secretary, the execrable Jack Straw, should spend so much time appeasing the extremists in Islam, remains a mystery.
Annan has his own explanation of how the whole problem arose. It seems that the Danes have not yet adjusted to having a significant Muslim minority in their country and have been behaving as if the freedom that Europeans have fought for over centuries was still their birthright. Well, no, that is not quite the way the SecGen put it but that is the gist:
“In truth, the present conflicts and misunderstandings probably have more to do with proximity than with distance. The offensive caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad were first published in a European country which has recently acquired a significant Muslim population, and is not yet sure how to adjust to it. And some of the strongest reactions – perhaps especially the more violent ones – have been seen in Muslim countries where many people feel themselves the victims of excessive Western influence or interference.
Whether or not those who published the caricatures were deliberately seeking to provoke, there is no doubt that some of the violent reactions have encouraged extremist groups within European societies, whose agenda is to demonize Muslim immigrants, or even expel them.”
No doubt some of the violent reactions did encourage extremist groups. Most people have an objection to people parading through their cities, demanding beheadings, annihilation, a new Holocaust and other suchlike delightful concepts. They might start thinking that there is something wrong with those who come to live in Europe and abuse the hospitality to that extent.
They might also think that there is something wrong when members of the Muslim community are not allowed to express free views themselves and the female members are stoned, beaten, raped and murdered if they behave the way we all think it right in the West.
Sir Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, for instance, said on TV this week-end that people in Britain should live under British law. If they wish to live under Shariah law, well, there are plenty of countries where they can do so.
The same, presumably, would apply to Denmark, Norway, France, Germany and many other countries.
But I digress. The SecGen disdained such details. His was a lofty view, appropriate to the Alliance of Civilizations that he was discussing:
“So misperception feeds extremism, and extremism appears to validate misperception. That is the vicious circle we have to break. That, as I see it, is the purpose of the Alliance.
It is important that we all realize that the problem is not with the faith but with a small group of the faithful – the extremists who tend to abuse and misinterpret the faith to support their cause, whether they derive it from the Koran, the Torah or the Gospel. We must not allow these extreme views to overshadow those of the majority and the mainstream. We must appeal to the majority to speak up and denounce those who disrespect values and principles of solidarity that are present in all great religions.”
Those of us who have been following events would say that of the three great texts cited above, only one has been used to any extent to abuse and misinterpret the faith and bring about violence recently. Perhaps, the SecGen has information the rest of us do not possess.
But I am glad he has mentioned the need for all religions and civilizations to understand each other, live peacefully with each other and open their borders to each other. I look forward to the day – surely not far off – when SecGen Kofi Annan opens the first Christian church and Sunday school in Saudi Arabia (or, for that matter, Qatar).
COMMENT THREAD
Via Islamophobic blog we learn from the BBC that "extremists" have been blamed after a cartoon featuring the prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban was put up in a housing office in Oldham. 
Not content with this unceasing effort in pursuit of law and order, Leicestershire plods have sent round emails to some of whom they presumed to be solid citizens, alerting the good people to the fact that BNP intends to distribute their Mohammed leaflet in the district. They are asking for information and proof that the leaflet is being delivered. No prizes for guessing what's in what passes for their minds.
If all you had to rely on was The Telegraph account of the report of the Power Commission, released today, you might have come away with the impression that the main and substantive recommendation was that "16-year-olds should be allowed to stand for Parliament".
Says the Power Commission website, though, introducing the final report of an inquiry funded by the Joseph Rowntree Trust and chaired by Baroness Helena Kennedy QC:After eighteen months of investigation, the final report of Power is a devastating critique of the state of formal democracy in Britain. Many of us actively support campaigns such as Greenpeace or the Countryside Alliance. And millions more take part in charity or community work. But political parties and elections have been a growing turn-off for years. The cause is not apathy. The problem is that we don't feel we have real influence over the decisions made in our name. The need for a solution is urgent. And that solution is radical. Nothing less than a major programme of reform to give power back to the people of Britain...The report itself runs to 175 pages and contains much that is common sense. It also offers by way of substantive recommendations, "three shifts in political practice":
taking the view that the current disengagement (with party politics) is not a "little local difficulty" but rather the result of a profound contempt for formal politics. There is a popular view that our political institutions and politicians are failing, untrustworthy and disconnected from the people they are supposed to represent.a rebalancing of power away from the executive and unaccountable bodies towards Parliament and local government; the introduction of greater responsiveness and choice into the electoral and party systems; allowing citizens a much more direct and focused say over political decisions and policies…
Supranational bodies and processes of international negotiation such as the European Union have gained extra powers and influence at the expense of nationally and locally elected representatives. The direction and sometimes the detail of wide areas of policy are now heavily influenced by, or determined by, decisions taken by appointed officials working in supranational organisations or by politicians and civil servants in negotiations with their overseas counterparts.Inevitably, the conclusion is more than a little woolly though, the report authors stating:
The result of these shifts has been to make political decision-making more opaque, hidden and complex. It means that the people who take key decisions are more likely to be geographically, socially and politically distant from the people who are affected by their de-cisions. It also means that decision-makers are less directly account-able to those who are affected by their decisions and rarely engaged in dialogue with them. The Power Commissioners saw at first-hand how a lack of real influence over decision-makers has become a primary cause of alienation from formal democracy, and recognise that those processes which have produced greater distance between governed and governors are a source of deep concern.
One key step in reducing this distance is to expand the capacity of elected power to scrutinise unelected and indirectly elected authority and to initiate change where those authorities refuse to act. In doing this, a basis may be provided for citizens to enter into a new dialogue with the holders of power and hold them to account. The introduction of greater scrutiny of the political firmament will also help citizens to see that power in Britain operates in accordance with the citizens' wishes.The authors cannot, it seems, bring themselves to observe make the obvious statement that there is no provision within the EU to "initiate change where those authorities refuse to act" and therefor draw the obvious conclusion that the only way there can be greater accountability is if we leave the EU. This omission is all the more egregious when it cites this evidence taken:
People will not vote if they feel their vote won't count. For many years turnout in local elections has been poor, because voters realise councillors have little power to affect local decisions. Now the same thing applies to national Parliament. MPs have given so much power to the corrupt Brussels octopus that they no longer can set the laws of the land. 60-70 per cent of laws now come from the Brussels oligarchy. Subconsciously, voters realise MPs have lost control, although Ministers NEVER admit this.There is much more where that came from, but therein lies the nub of the issue. And as for the political parties, these – as we all know – are too wrapped up in their own affairs to bother with, or understand people's concerns. Obsesssed with their own concerns, they have become part of the problem rather than the solution.
After its stunning victory over the tumultuous question of VAT on hairdressers and restaurant meals, France has acquired a taste for blood.
When the long and tortuous negotiations that resulted in the less than spectacular Centre for the Monitoring of Racism, Xenophobia and Anti-Semitism (all of which unaccountably have grown in leaps and bounds according to the Commission under its wise guidance) and the passing of various directives that would prevent any kind of discrimination, there was a strong suggestion that denial of Holocaust should be made a crime across the EU.
It really is a great shame about David Irving’s obsessions. He could, as Michael Burleigh made clear in last Wednesday’s Daily Telegraph, have been a good if somewhat eccentric military historian, where his almost unhinged obsession with archival evidence would have been quite useful.“He's not a historian, he's a falsifier of history. This is about abuse of freedom of speech.”Defining abuse of freedom of speech is difficult and likely to land you in messy situations. That this is one can be seen from the gleeful articles and cartoons published in Iranian and Middle Eastern newspapers. So, freedom of speech means insulting the Prophet but not casting doubts on the Holocaust? Very nice. Just the proof needed of the West’s evil intentions.
Others, on the other hand, rejoice. Lord Janner, always the first to make pronouncements on such matters, expressed himself pleased with the conviction:“It sends a clear message to the world that we must not tolerate the denial of the mass murders of the Holocaust.”Well, I hate to have to disagree with any noble peer, especially such a charming one, who entertains his colleagues with magical tricks, but Lord Janner is talking through his hat. The only message it sends to the world is that we are obsessed with the Holocaust and have lost all understanding of it and of totalitarianism.
Well, of course not. But what of the historians who have been peddling lies about the Soviet Union, denying the horrors of Communism and generally abusing freedom of speech? What of Professor Eric Hobsbawm CH, given that honour by Tony Blair?“… the Tory MP said that the Holocaust was a uniquely depraved event in human history. She highlighted the fact that six million people had been exterminated in an industrial killing process because of their Judaism, their disability, their ethnicity or their homosexuality.”Dear me. So an industrial killing process geared to the extermination of millions because of their class (peasantry, intelligentsia), nationality (Chechen, Tatar, Ingushi), religion (just about everybody) is not particularly depraved?
As it happens, I agree that Austria had to acknowledge her participation in many of the horrors of the Second World War. On my last visit to Vienna I was extremely pleased to see that on Judenplatz there was a large memorial to the Jews who had been deported from that city.
The Business has managed a singular achievement today in recruiting an American writer, James Forsyth who, in writing about Jack Straw and his wholly malevolent role in the Iran crisis, seems to display some understanding of British politics.
In complete vindication of our piece posted on 25 January, when we reported that the UK was getting set to dump the US Joint Strike Fighter, the Financial Mail today leads its front page with "Anglo-US defence deals in jeopardy".
And now it has come to pass that there was a side-deal, or the makings of one – exactly as we suspected – with Reid agreeing to consider the offer made by Alliot-Marie. Says the Mail, "even agreeing to give the proposal serious consideration could be seen as a major snub to the Americans, whose relations with the French on defence are strained".
One thing - amongst several – the Mail gets wrong is its claim that the UK will now consider cancelling the JSF contract. As it stands, of course, no production contracts have been signed. Completion on these is scheduled for November of thereabouts. Thus, the UK government is playing its options in a "window of opportunity" between now and then, when it must make a firm commitment to the JSF or withdraw from the project.
Blinded by current – what might be called "legacy" - commitments, where our armed forces are working in close harmony with the US in the Iraqi and Afghan theatres, they fail to realise that the gradual realignment in defence procurement, detailed in my CPS pamphlet Wrong side of the hill, sets the tone for the future. Blinded by the short-term, commentators are failing to see the longer-term trends.
Not that we think that the intervention of the EU would actually do any good in any number of the burning issues of the day but, even if you take its ambitions of being a world power seriously, you can only stand back in amazement at the amount of fiddling this construct is doing.
It still stirs up controversy and excites strong feelings. People may no longer faint but they grind their teeth and pummell the floor in frustration. Or they grind their teeth silently and hope that they can just wish it all away. But it will never disappear and the world will never go back to February 24, 1956.
Fifty years ago, on February 25, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, mounted the podium to give his report on the final, closed session of the party’s Twentieth Congress. It was, to put it mildly, an unusual report.
Instead of the expected boasts and admissions of failure (to be blamed on someone else) Khrushchev delivered a four-hour long speech in which he denounced what he first referred to as the cult of personality that had grown up around Stalin. In effect, he denounced Stalin and some of his crimes.
The speech concentrated on the purge of the party and the destruction of the Communist cadres through “glaring violations of revolutionary legality”. Little was said about the many millions of other victims but there were references to the destruction of the agriculture (and by inference, of the peasantry), to Stalin’s grave mistakes in the Second World War (the full horror of that is still largely unknown in Russia), the deportation of whole nationalities at the end of the war and the paranoia of the doctors’ plot.
Like a good Soviet apparatchik, Khrushchev made no references to the largely anti-Semitic nature of the second purge, which was gathering momentum as Stalin fortuitously (or, perhaps, not) died. But he did quote Stalin’s instructions on how to extract confessions from the various highly placed medical specialists and their assistants, all of whom had been arrested: “Beat, beat, beat and beat again”. Few survived.
It is said that the speech produced an unprecedented effect. People fainted in the hall. Supposedly secret, the speech was passed on to some Soviet and East European organizations. It was also smuggled out by one or two of the foreign Communist leaders who had been present. (One, the leader of the Polish party had a heart attack and died.)
The Poles passed the speech on to the Israelis, who passed it on to other western countries. Very swiftly, the so-called secret speech was known all over the world, though in the Soviet Union its existence was denied till the late eighties when it was finally published.
As an analysis of the Soviet system or, even, of Stalinism, the speech was inadequate. It concentrated on the crimes committed against the Party, leaving out the other victims. It created the illusion that the whole monstrous system had been created by Stalin and a few of his henchmen, some of them still around and, by a strange coincidence, Khrushchev’s rivals for power.
There was no reference, for obvious reasons, to Khrushchev’s own involvement in the ferocious Ukrainian purges or the use of slave labour to construct many new parts of Moscow and, above all, the Moscow metro.
Still, with all its inadequacies, the speech was stunning and its effect felt all over the world. It caused the Sino-Soviet split that followed in 1960. Closer home, it created disturbances in Eastern Europe that culminated in the Hungarian revolution that autumn. Though put down quite ferociously, the after-effects remained. Never bright confident morning again.
In the Soviet Union there was an attempt to losen the rules. The small measure of artistic freedom that we know about came, in fact, after the second, even mosre shattering, as it gave more details, anti-Stalin speech at the Twenty-Second Congress of 1961.
People had been gradually released from the gaols and the gulag since Stalin’s death. Now the process was speeded up though it was never a complete one. Other people were arrested. Some of those “illegally repressed” were rehabilitated and they or their families were given certificates to that end. Most, on the other hand, had to wait for several decades.
There was a half-hearted attempt to investigate the murder of Kirov (known to all to have been done on Stalin’s orders), which had triggered off the Great Terror of the thirties but it came to nothing. It was finally completed and Stalin’s role admitted under Gorbachev.
The greatest effect of the speech was in the West. There was uproar in all the Communist Parties with hundreds leaving, feeling that they had been cheated and humiliated.
Others, who had known some or all of the truth, felt cheated that it had now come out and their word would no longer be accepted, their honesty doubted. For years they had denied the horrors of the Soviet system and fought to destroy the good name of anyone who had tried to tell the truth. (These are the people nowadays described as innocent vicitms of McCarthyism.)
The good times were over – they would have to try that much harder and weasel their way through words that much faster to be believed. Fortunately for them, the Left, after the first shock continued to prefer the Communist explanation for everything.
An even bigger problem faced the fellow travellers, the people who had mindlessly accepted all assurances, who had used their authority to support what was now acknowledged to be the truth. Some never quite recovered. Others, again after a decent interval, found themselves another foul murdering regime to be a fellow traveller of.
It took another three decades for the Soviet system to collapse. Communism has not gone yet and the full truth about it has not been told in Russia and several other countries. Even in the West the reluctance to acknowledge the horror of the other totalitarian system is prominent as we cling ever more despairingly to the idea that nothing could have been as bad as Nazism and no crime as vile as the Holocaust.
Yet the work that was started in a somewhat incomprehensible fashion by Nikita Khrushchev fifty years ago has to be completed or we shall never rid ourselves of the incubus of the twentieth century.
We have understood and tried to overcome the horrors of Nazism, though there is a sad reluctance to see its human causes; but not until the horrors of Communism are fully understood; not until its widespread influence is acknowledged; not until our leaders and our media stops finding excuses for the heirs of Stalin (as Yevtushenko called them) or, more precisely, the heirs of Lenin; not until then shall we be able to move on.
COMMENT THREAD
This week, there has been much ado about the threat to close upwards of ten thousand rural post offices, causing much distress to their customers.
Hold the front page! "BNP to print Muslim cartoon leaflets", reports Reuters, oddly enough datelined Wednesday but only appearing on the Google news site today.
Not content with having seriously affected the mental stability of a significant proportion of the population – as is evident, at times, from our own and other EU-related forums – it appears the European Union, having in part been responsible for the problem, is now making a pitch to take an active role in countering "mental ill health" in the "European" population.
We shall reform the UN one day. Honest we shall. Well, not tomorrow, of course, or the day after or even the year after. In fact, according to Prince Zeid Ra'ad Zeid al-Hussein, the Jordanian Ambassador to the UN, it will take several years. I am not holding my breath even about that.“Jean-Marie Guehenno [head of peacekeeping operations] said the UN had investigated 295 cases under a new reporting system introduced last year.”It is not clear from that statement whether all the cases were investigated or not; nor can we tell what the outcome of the investigations was. My assumption is that nobody was punished even if the report proved to be accurate.
“Allegations being lodged against UN peacekeeping personnel remain high and unacceptably so.” [Presumably, only a small proportion of those who have been abused or exploited do actually lodge allegations.]He also noted
“… how hard it is to change a culture of dismissiveness, long developed within ourselves, in our countries and in the mission areas”.That is a damning indictment. Even more damning is the comfortable assurance that it will take years to change this culture. As the blog Captain’s Quarters comments:
“So what's supposed to happen while the UN continues its weak efforts at reform? Do refugees need to literally hide the women and children when blue-helmeted soldiers appear on the scene?”Let me add two more comments of my own, both drearily repetitive.
With the Turkish Army on the process of re-equipping and developing into a formidable modern force, an intriguing report appeared recently in DefenseNews, which harped back to another story on which we reported back in September last.
Amazingly, even Sweden, with a population size of less than greater London, is able to produce its own fighter aircraft – currently the Gripen (illustrated) – perversely in partnership with the British-owned BAE Systems, a company which has not been trusted to produce aircraft for our own forces.
How is it that the UK, again with a small-arms industry of long antiquity, cannot support even the one factory needed to supply its own armed forces with rifles? For sure, Germany maintains its own manufacturing capability, but how come such industrial giants like Austria and Belgium can maintain world-class industries of their own, despite not having armies worthy of the name?
And, as for ships, why is it that France, Italy and Germany have the capability to build their warships and support vessels in-house, and Spain is able not only to supply her own navy but maintain an active export industry – selling to Australia amongst others – yet our shipyards are so run-down that our government needs to consider awarding contracts for our replenishment vessels offshore.
Remarkably, in a Mori poll carried out for The Sun today, "defence/foreign affairs/terrorism” were regarded as the most important issues facing Britain today.
The UK Metric Association was having a ball yesterday, urging the government convert all road signs to metric in time for the 2012 Olympics. Typically for the genre, it argues that failure to do so risks Britain being seen as a backward nation clinging to an awkward and outmoded measurement system.
To support their case, they called in aid Ann Cody, the "road safety" official who oversaw the change in the Irish Republic. She said that there had not been a single serious incident in the past 12 months, adding: "There were many scare stories before the switch, but the danger never materialised."
Only IrelandOn-Line and EUObserver reported the interesting news that the EU justice ministers have decided not to go ahead with the plans to harmonize rules to do with defamation in the media.“The proposed law aims to define which national law applies in disputes where individuals or companies from different countries are involved, including non-EU member states. However, ministers meeting in Brussels on Tuesday (21 February) decided to postpone the law after it became clear that unanimous agreement would not be possible.”There were many problems with the whole issue, as various journalist organizations pointed out:
Commissar Frattini promised that they would harmonize whatever they can and, as for defamation: it would not be swept under the carpet, just more time was needed.“Media organisations, NGOs and politicians warned of damage to the principle of freedom of speech, arguing that a Swedish newspaper, for instance, could be sentenced according to Syrian or Pakistani law following a law suit on defamation from a citizen in either of these countries.
Critics also pointed out that an inconvenient practical consequence of the commission proposal would be that media in one country would be obliged to have knowledge of all other countries' media laws - which would be impossible to oversee.”
Over the years of its existence Prospect magazine has published very few pieces that have strayed away from the "consensus" in the media and the political world. One of them is in the March issue.As Harris says,"Cameron, though, is right about one thing. Brown is in many respects "very much a 1980s politician," in some ways temperamentally similar to Thatcher, who dominated that decade. It is significant that Brown has publicly praised her record while the Tories have sought to disavow it.
Like Thatcher, Brown is immensely able, a workaholic, driven by values inherited from a Protestant upbringing. He believes in duty, work, effort, merit. He is serious about politics and contemptuous of those more interested, like his next-door neighbour, in the trappings of power. He is passionate about improving the lives of those at the bottom of the pile. One should also add that Brown is 100 per cent wrong about how to achieve these noble goals."
"Having abandoned the issues of immigration, crime, Europe and tax as distastefully populist, the Tory manifesto may look a little thin."All they will be relying on is Gordon Brown's unpopularity. If they get that wrong, they are in trouble.
