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Diplomacy

War in the Northern Mozambique Channel?

To the list of major concerns for the 798,000 inhabitants of the small Indian Ocean archipelago of Comoros -- such as frequent coups and hyperactive volcanoes -- add secession and, um, war with France? An independent country since 1975, Comoros has co-existed awkwardly with a couple of islands in the chain, together known as Mayotte, which has been "politically separate" since independence. Now, as of yesterday, with the endorsement of 95% of Mayotte voters, the islands officially constitute a departement outre-mer of France. In response, Comoros' vice president has, naturally, suggested that this is tantamount to a declaration of war. While France is probably not about to send its destroyers down into the Indian Ocean, it is interesting to note that, in the past, UN attempts to grant sovereignty of Mayotte to Comoros were stymied by the French Security Council veto. This is not necessarily neo-colonialism, though, as indicated by the heavy support by Mayotte's population for incorporation into the metropole. Economic benefits abound, but there also seems to be a somewhat odd sense of national belonging, somewhat disturbingly expressed by this Mayotte legislator quoted by Reuters: "We may be black, poor and Muslim, but we have been French longer than Nice." Interesting what the island assumes that the French think of "Frenchness." (image of a Mayotte sunset, from flickr user gunner.romain under a Creative Commons license)

Joe Biden’s Latin America Op-Ed

Via Tim Fernholz at TAPPED, here's a good international cooperation snippet from the op-ed that U.S. Vice President Joe Biden published in 11 major newspapers in Latin America today:
The President and I understand that only by working together can our countries overcome the challenges we face. Today, we are more than just independent nations who happen to be on the same side of the globe. In today’s interconnected world, we are all neighbors who face many common concerns. The current global economic crisis has touched virtually all of us—every country, every community, every family. Citizens everywhere are searching for answers, looking for hope—and turning to their leaders to provide them. It is our duty as global partners to heed their calls, to together forge a shared solution to a common problem.
Say what you will about the new U.S. administration, they sure know how to place op-eds that cover entire continents. Full text after the jump.

Anti-Racism Conference is Not the Next Holocaust

Frenzied anti-Durban propaganda is not limited to blogospheric wingnuts, I'm afraid. Writing in The Hill's Congress Blog, Representatives Mike Pence and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen rail on next month's anti-racism conference with feverish gusto, eagerly seizing the bait of the ridiculous premise that the entire conference is worthy of scrapping because it seeks to build off its predecessor. The Representatives' heated rhetoric -- which more or less forecasts an Armageddon of hatred if the United States and its allies do not repudiate every tidbit of the conference -- unsurprisingly soars into the absurd, reaching a level that borders on the downright offensive.
Like the struggles of years ago, we must never eschew what is right in favor of what is easy. We can abdicate neither our responsibility to address and reject bigotry wherever it lurks, nor our obligation to safeguard public funds as Americans face extraordinary economic challenges. To give meaning to the words ‘Never again,’ the United States and other responsible nations must not fund or participate in any part of Durban II.
Pence and Ros-Lehtinen begin their piece with a reference to the Holocaust. To imply that participating in the Durban Review Conference would amount to another mass murder of Jews is just sickening. Yes, the 2001 Durban conference was marred by disgusting anti-Semitic rhetoric, and yes, some of the participants in its successor have tried and will try to peddle loathsome Holocaust-denying myths (which, it bears mentioning were soundly rejected in the Durban final outcome document, which explicitly recognizes and condemns the Holocaust). But please -- a sense of proportion. Bloating this hateful language into mass murder gives it far more impact than it deserves, and it demeans both the cause of anti-racism and the actual experience of the Holocaust. As ironic as Claudia Rosett's good question yesterday is the fact that Pence and Ros-Lehtinen are actually quite unintentionally on the right track. "We must never eschew what is right in favor of what is easy" -- except that what is easy here is, in fact, to sacrifice the Durban Review Conference to the wolves howling against it, and to leave the fight against racism painfully un-waged. Similarly, one might reasonably think that "our responsibility to address and reject bigotry wherever it lurks" would lead us to decry not only the excesses of the fringe elements of the Durban process, but also the powerful strains of racism that still haunt society, and which the Review Conference has the potential to deal with. That potential is vastly increased with the U.S. leadership that these two representatives would unfortunately have us abandon.

Public Diplomacy in Action

President Obama issues a special message to the Iranian people on the occasion of Nowruz, the Iranian New Year. Be sure to watch to the end in which President Obama issues a send off in farsi. From the White House. This line, "The measure of that greatness is not the capacity to destroy, it is your demonstrated ability to build and create," sticks out. Obama seems to be signaling to the Iranian people that he understands that the Iranian nuclear program is a point of national pride. In turn, Obama seems to be showing the rest of us that curbing Iran's nuclear ambitions is going to require more than just pressure on the elites.

It’s Called the Durban REVIEW Conference For a Reason

The Durban Review Conference is scheduled to be held in Geneva next month. Its purpose, as one might gather from its title, is to review implementation of the measures decided upon in 2001, at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. It's clear, then, that opponents of the whole process have run out of substantive complaints when they start objecting to even the rather tame notion that the upcoming conference will use its predecessor as a starting point. With the European Union threatening to join the United States, Israel, and Canada in already committing to a boycott of the Review Conference, the rather odd bedfellows of Russia, Norway, Egypt, and Belgium put together a new compromise document for the April conference to work off of. Even by the admissions of some hardcore Durban opponents, this version steers clear of most of the "red lines" that Western countries had set, including language forbidding the "defamation of religions" and any mention of Israel whatsoever. The remaining sticking point, then, for such chronic hyperventilaters as Anne Bayefsky, is that the document -- gasp -- dares to reference and "reaffirm" the final outcome document of the 2001 conference, the Durban Declaration and Program of Action. The objection to this boilerplate statement is utterly ridiculous. Of course the Durban Review Conference will start by building off of the outcome document of the original Durban Conference. Indeed, this premise would be objectionable if, as Bayefsky contends, the earlier text "says Palestinians are victims of Israeli racism--with Israel the only U.N. state found guilty of racism." But such bunk, plain and simple, is nowhere to be found in the original Durban Declaration.

Move Over, Belgium?

Since the United States opted to send back the observer to the Human Rights Council that the Bush Administration had recalled nine months earlier, the next logical question has been whether the U.S. would opt to run for an official seat on the Council in its May elections. No decision has yet been made, but one is expected very soon, and signs seem to be pointing in a positive direction. The rumors suggesting a U.S. decision to run, however, include a somewhat disconcerting detail. Rather than entering a competitive election in the "Western European and Others Group" to which it belongs, the United States may seek to convince one of the current candidates in the group to drop out, leaving Washington to run unopposed. Norway, Belgium, and New Zealand are currently the only countries campaigning for three slots, and I'm told that Belgium, the EU's representative, would be the one to bow out in this scenario. Deciding to campaign for a spot on the Council would be, as Mark has argued before, a very smart move for an Obama Administration seeking to bolster its image in the world, engage more with other countries, and, not insignificantly, improve the Human Rights Council itself. And the question is really one of when rather than if the United States will run, given the Obama team's hints on the issue. This decision is weighted considerably by the fact that, if it runs next year, it will not be able to contribute to the mandatory review of the Council – a prime opportunity to push for reforms. But the option of running in an unopposed field of candidates is wrongheaded and counterproductive. First, it is most likely unnecessary, as the United States stands a very good chance to win a seat anyway if it chooses to campaign. Second, and more fundamentally, this undermines the entire principle of competitive elections that has made the Human Rights Council an improvement over its ineffectual predecessor, and which were a sticking point for the United States in the negotiations to create the Council. Sure, unsavory countries still make it on to the body, but this is largely through a system of bloc voting in which each region agrees on a certain number of candidates to propose. A system that, come to think of it, seems suspiciously similar to what the United States would be engineering if it nudged Belgium off the stage… On the plus side, at least Iceland's not in the running to get snubbed once again for an international body.

EU Possibly to Join Durban Boycott

Reuters and the Associated Press report. The conditions for EU participation appear to be the same as those that prompted the United States' withdrawal from the anti-racism conference, scheduled to occur next month in Geneva: either the draft document is changed to eliminate anti-Semitism and free speech restrictions designed as "anti-defamation of religion" statutes, or we won't be there. Obviously, the best option is for all parties, including the United States and the EU, to participate and work toward a document acceptable to all sides. The only way to have an effective anti-racism conference is for everyone to be involved. In Durban in 2001, the EU banded together -- during the conference itself, after the United States and Israel had already departed -- to keep all offensive passages out of the final document. If EU countries are not confident that they could do so this time, then I suppose solidarity is best, but solidarity at the conference would be better. (image from flickr user Vovchychko under a Creative Commons license)

NATO is NOT a Future “League of Democracies”

Russia's Kommersant newspaper is peddling a bizarre and baseless rumor that, at NATO's upcoming anniversary summit in April, the Obama administration will unveil a plan to transform the body into a "league of democracies" to replace the United Nations. Huh?!? For those who don't remember, the "League of Democracies" was an idea that, while actually proposed by scattered voices from both the left and the right, not as a creation of the McCain campaign, as Kommersant erroneously reports, was given a lot of play as one of the primary planks of the former U.S. presidential candidate's foreign policy platform. Kommersant seems to have built its flimsy case for the League's revival by stretching a single fact: that Ivo Daalder, one of those voices from the left who at one time expressed support for some form of an organization of democracies, will now be Obama's ambassador to NATO (Kommersant might well have also noted that Anne-Marie Slaughter, another liberal who was once warm to the idea, also occupies a high position in the Obama Administration). So from a paper he wrote over two years ago, in which Daalder discussed a "Concert of Democracies" -- never mentioning it as a possible transformation of NATO -- Kommersant has evidently concluded that he will use his new position to go around President Obama's policies and single-handedly engineer the evolution of NATO into an organization that nobody is even mildly interested in. Why would Kommersant report such an out-there rumor as the top item on the United States' NATO agenda? Journalistic shoddiness aside, this seems to be an exercise in paranoia-mongering. Russia was (obviously) none too keen on the whole League of Democracies idea from the get-go, and its feelings on NATO are rapidly souring with the push for membership of countries like Ukraine and Georgia. Claiming that the United States is building NATO into a confrontational organization to threaten Russia is simply trying to pick a fight that no one wants to have. About the only thing that this Russian political analyst has right is that this fictional idea is a "non-starter from the beginning." The question, then, is why Kommersant decided to start it in the first place. (image of Ivo Daalder)

Response to Durban Hysterics

David Harris, the Executive Director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in New York pens this refreshingly sane rebuke to the most rabid of the anti-Durban extremists (whose excesses I have denounced here and here, among other places). When the United States opted to test the waters and send a delegation to the conference's preparatory meetings in Geneva last month, one of the members was the AJC's Felice Gaer. Predictably, Gaer was demonized, and, as Harris relates, the AJC's participation became "red meat for a chorus of critics, led by writers Caroline Glick in Israel, Anne Bayefsky in the U.S., and Melanie Phillips in the U.K." These frantic voices levelled unconscionable and unhinged attacks on AJC's patriotism, integrity, and support for Israel, also assuring that, by simply appearing for talks, the United States was dooming itself, and the entire West, to complicity in a morals-eroding, world order-destroying "hate-fest." Harris' response to such over the top pronouncements:
In the end, these three well-known observers, in their consequences-be-damned approach to Durban II, got it wrong. They viciously lashed out at anyone who dared to disagree on tactics, irresponsibly questioned motives, incorrectly prophesied the U.S. position and failed to see that European nations were now more, not less, likely to walk out. Indeed, Italy adopted the U.S. stance within days. To become so blatantly and blindly partisan and to irresponsibly accuse groups like AJC of cavorting with Holocaust deniers and doing willful damage to Israel, is, I’d say, well over the top.
An even greater tragedy than the fact that the United States will not be attempting to further its agenda by participating at Durban is that the debate leading up to the conference was so skewed by such baseless, and often ad hominem, attacks. Reasoned debate and discussion would have been the best way to attempt to move the conference to a credible anti-racism platform, and reasoned debate and discussion would have been the proper way to argue in the lead-up to the conference. Unfortunately, we were left with neither.