John Tulloh

  • John Tulloh. Turkey’s new neighbour – DAESH (Islamic State)

    President Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey must feel like a chess grand master playing several games simultaneously. He has far more neighbours and different cultures to contend with than most leaders: eight in all. They are a mixed bag across more than 2600 kms of borders – Iran, Iraq, Syria, Armenia, an Azerbaijan enclave, Georgia, Bulgaria and Greece. And across the Black Sea he has Russia. Now he has an unofficial neighbour: Daesh, also known as Islamic State. It has been active along Turkey’s frontier inside Syria and regards territory it has seized as part of its self-styled caliphate.

    It poses a dilemma for President Erdogan. He has 1.5 million refugees on his hands, mainly from Syria as a result of barbaric actions by Daesh. The EU has offered him what some see as a generous bribe to deter the refugees from heading west to Europe. He has joined the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Daesh, but is his heart really in it even though he has blamed it for killing 100 people at a peace rally in Turkey in October? His air force by all accounts prefers to attack Kurdish targets. His critics say he tolerates Daesh as being good for business and helping deal with what he sees as his real enemy, the Kurds. But for the U.S.-led coalition fighting Daesh, it is the Kurds who have done more than any other force on the ground in repelling its advances.

    David Graeber, a professor at the London School of Economics, thinks he has the answer to eliminate Daesh. Writing in the Guardian, he says:

    ‘All it would really take would be to unleash the largely Kurdish forces of the YPG (Democratic Union party) in Syria and PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) guerrillas in Iraq and Turkey. But instead the YPG-controlled territory in Syria finds itself placed under a total embargo by Turkey and the PKK forces are under continual bombardment by the Turkish air force. Not only has Erdogan done almost everything he can to cripple the forces actually fighting (Daesh); there is considerable evidence that his government has been at least tacitly aiding (Daesh) itself’. 

         That aid concerns oil which Daesh has looted from Syria and Iraq and sells on the black market. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said it enters Turkey on ‘an industrial scale’. Russia a few days ago released satellite images they claim show columns of tanker trucks loading with oil at an installation controlled by Daesh in Syria, before crossing the border into Turkey.

    Last year, a member of the Turkish parliamentary opposition, Ali Edibogluan, claimed Daesh had smuggled $800 million worth of oil into Turkey from Syria and Iraq. Now a former Iraqi MP, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, has backed up that claim, saying ‘Money and dollars generated by selling Iraqi and Syrian oil on the Turkish black market is like the oxygen supply to (Daesh) and its operation’.

    But President Erdogan was indignant about such claims as well as a Russian one that he and his family were profiting from it. He said that, if there were proof Turkey was cooperating with Daesh, he would resign.

    He presides over a powerful country which possibly has the most strategic location of any nation in the world with its Eurasia presence. His ruling party now has a parliamentary majority which may give him the temptation to broaden his own powers. Since 2011, he has encouraged the Islamisation of Turkey which for nearly a century prided itself on its secular outlook. But he knows he cannot push his luck too far when EU membership remains a goal.

    It is a conundrum when Daesh is, according to Time, ‘a fibroid of territory enmeshed in a cat’s cradle of ethnic, tribal, religious and geopolitical strands so densely tangled as to defy solution’.

    Just as Turkey has a foot in both Europe and Asia, President Erdogan will need all his political wiles to maintain a balance between being seen to be supporting the action against Daesh while stopping its influence spilling over into Turkey and yet maintaining business as usual.

    Whatever happens, you can be certain that the restless Kurds, who make up 20% of Turkey’s population, will remain President Erdogan’s biggest concern, especially the PKK with its territorial ambitions.

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news.

  • John Tulloh. Europe: The political impact of a dead Syrian.

    Ahmed al Mohammad may have a greater impact on Europe than his evil terrorist deeds did in Paris last week. It appears he was a Syrian asylum-seeker who, according to Greek records, passed through Greece last month and made his way through the Balkans to join his cohorts in France. He satisfied whatever checks there were and was sent on his way with tens of thousands of others. We will never know what happened after then because he died in the mayhem.

    With the number of asylum-seekers pouring into Europe numbering 7000 a day, many will be wondering how many other fifth columnists like Al Mohammad are in their midst. It will ‘fuel an emerging pan-European backlash against the influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, many of them military-age Moslem males’, says David Kilcullen, the counter-insurgency and intelligence specialist.

    It also will be further fodder for European countries wanting to justify closing their borders or putting up razor wire or simply refusing to take in refugees. They will find willing allies in the form of the growing influence of right-wing parties which have prospered with their anti-immigration rhetoric.

    Across the Atlantic, the new Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, has called for a total suspension of the program to accept Syrian refugees.

    U.S. officials quoted by the Wall Street Journal said the Paris attacks ‘could reinforce perceptions of many Europeans that the refugee flows are bringing in terrorists. It is going to feed a backlash, it is going to feed into concerns people have over refugees’. Even the alleged leader of the attacks boasted in the Islamic State’s journal last February of having travelled through Europe unnoticed.

    A recent international Gallup poll quoted by the Washington Post said 52% of Europeans wanted immigration decreased. That was more than any other region in the world and twice as much as Australia. Understandably, this has become a matter of growing concern among the European electorate. Photos of hundreds of strangers from the Middle East and beyond snaking their way across European fields must cause alarm for their very anonymity.

    While the majority will be refugees and others will be economic opportunists, the law of averages says jihadists will have melted in among the throng. The refugees also will include young men who, failing to find the prosperity they think awaits them, will become disaffected and become easy prey for Islamic extremists just as the Brussels-based terrorists who brought carnage to Paris last week were.

    For genuine refugees, their plight has become even harder with the inevitable growing suspicion of anyone connected with Islam. The new Polish government has reneged on its predecessor’s EU promise to take in asylum-seekers. Others in East Europe are beginning to say ‘not in our back yard’. Scandinavia, a long-time welcome mat for people in distress, has seen a rise of anti-immigration electoral sentiment in all four of its countries. Even in Switzerland, which is barely affected, voters gave a bigger tick than usual to right-wing candidates.

    Europe faces a huge dilemma. Firstly, how to absorb the current wave of asylum-seekers and how to weed out potential jihadists. Secondly, whether to revoke the Schengen Agreement allowing free movement within EU members. Thirdly, how to handle the anticipated next wave of tens of thousands of asylum-seekers and refugees seeking refuge, safety and prosperity.

    A few days ago EU leaders gathered in Malta to discuss financial incentives to African countries in return for curbing the exodus of their citizens to attempt the Mediterranean crossing to Europe. The talks ended in disarray. The EU wants Turkey to do more to stop the flow through there. But Turkey in return wants more than the EU is prepared to concede. The U.S. and Russia are scrambling to set up negotiations early in the new year to reach a political settlement in Syria, the source of the majority of the refugees. Given the disparate nature of the different Syrian parties involved and the obduracy of the Assad regime, the chances of success must be remote.

    Even Islamic State is trying to help with a propaganda blitz to discourage refugees fleeing to Europe, warning of the debauched hell which awaits them. It is really concerned about the exodus of professionals who are desperately needed to help the self-styled caliphate survive.

    If anything, EU complacency has much to answer for. Its border controls have been almost non-existent. The EU partnership has amounted to little when it counts the most with many members willingly pushing refugees into other countries instead of processing them. Intelligence has been deficient. Some of its members are running for cover rather than sharing the burden of the mass movement of the greatest number of people in the EU’s history. It is as if EU members regarded it all as another member’s problem.

    For refugees, there is hope. Europe’s birth rate is shrinking dramatically. This and the flight of young people from countries with high unemployment mean immigrants are wanted like never before. According to the Guardian, Europe desperately needs more young people to run its health services, populate its rural areas and look after its elderly because, increasingly, its societies are no longer self-sustaining.

    Whatever happens, the social make-up of Europe is irrevocably changed.

    FOOTNOTE. France is no stranger to terrorism and bloodshed. Back in the early ‘60s, French settlers opposed to Algerian independence inflicted a wave of bombings, assassinations – including several attempts on President de Gaulle’s life – and even derailed a high-speed express train, killing 28. A pro-independence organisation was just as active with its bombings. When 30,000 supporters demonstrated on the streets of Paris, the police opened fire and, officially, 40 people were killed whereas estimates have put the figure as high as 200.

     

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news.    

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • John Tulloh. Turkey at a dangerous crossroad.

    Spare a thought for Turkey as it goes to the polls on November 1. It straddles Europe and Asia, but it is not sure if it is part of either. Nor is it part of the Middle East, yet it shelters more Arab refugees than any other country there. They number two million – mainly Syrian – who are not exactly welcome. It is the south-east European bulwark for NATO, but the EU has taken fright at the idea of a secular Islamic nation of 76,000,000 people becoming a member. It shares a large border with two of the most unstable states in the world, Iraq and Syria. It is overwhelmingly Sunni and has the ambitious Shia stronghold of Iran as another neighbour. Its two-year truce with the Kurdish PKK, a terrorist organisation, has been shattered. It stood by and did nothing while Islamic State (IS) roamed unchecked on its very doorstep in Syria, causing the refugee exodus. It now has IS jihadists in its midst inasmuch they were blamed for the recent Ankara suicide bombings which claimed 105 lives. And Turkey’s president has been accused of trying to manipulate the political process in order to become a dictator.

    The election is for a new parliament. It is aimed at President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reasserting his authority. He has ruled Turkey since 2003. But his Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost its parliamentary majority in the last election in June and now President Erdogan wants it back. He also wants more, according to his critics. One, Daniel Pipes, president of the conservative Middle East Forum, claims President Erdogan plans to establish a dictatorship, possibly hostile to Western interests, and even introduce sharia law. In the past five years under his watch, Islamic schools have proliferated and the number of students jumped from 60,000 to 1.6 million.

    Turkey has always been troubled by division: secular and religious, rich and poor and Turks (80%) and Kurds (20%). At one time, President Erdogan seemed capable of resolving those differences, according to the New York Times. ‘He sought peace with the Kurds, empowered the formerly oppressed religious masses and presided for a time over a robust economy’, it said. All that has now changed.

    ‘Turkey is so deeply polarised after 13 years of AKP. rule’, according to Soner Cagaptay, a Turkish analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He now fears it is ‘about to come apart at the seams’. The prominent Turkish novelist, Eli Shafak, was quoted in news reports as saying ‘Today, so deep is the rift between the pro-government and anti-government sides that it cannot be bridged anymore, not even in celebration or grief’.

    It will be the fourth parliamentary election in just over 18 months. The best outcome would be a coalition with the main opposition, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), says former MP Suat Kiniklioglu, writing in the Huffington Post. ‘It would lessen the tension and polarisation in the country’, he says. ‘But the AKP has been used to running the country unchallenged for more than a decade and is not ready to share power’. One reason is that the CHP would want to pursue the matter of corruption allegations against President Erdogan and his son.

    The AKP’s chances have been boosted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s startling promise to support Turkey’s entry into the EU and ease visa and travel restrictions for Turks. Her promise was a surprise as she has long opposed Turkey joining the EU. But Turkey’s pledge to try to stem the flow of refugees to Europe, particularly to Germany where she faces an electoral backlash, was enough to change her mind or at least for now.

    Turkey’s Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, said Turkey was ‘not a concentration camp’ and would not host refugees permanently to appease the EU which has donated $4.7 billion towards their upkeep. ‘We cannot accept an understanding like “give us the money and they stay in Turkey”’, he said. A recent poll quoted by the Wall Street Journal said 70% of Turks want the Syrians to return home, not least because they are potential threat to jobs.

    The election is no threat to President Erdogan’s own position. But a majority victory for his AKP would enable him to achieve what he has long desired: to change the constitution to make his job, the presidency, the absolute ruler of Turkey and for 10 years.

    Daniel Pipes warns that ‘Whereas Ataturk and several generations of leaders wanted Turkey to be in Europe, President Erdogan brought it thunderingly back to the Middle East and to the tyranny, corruption, female subjugation and other hallmarks of a region in crisis’.

    Turkey’s powerful military, which has often intervened at times of crisis, will be watching developments with close interest.

    FOOTNOTE. Back in the 60s, I took the weekly train from Beirut to Istanbul. Although I bought only a second class ticket, I was put in an ancient first class sleeping car on the grounds that, as a Christian, I might get in the way of Islamic passengers with their daily prayers. We left Beirut at 7 o’clock on a Saturday night. The next day in Aleppo, we linked up with the weekly train from Baghdad which had a dining car. When would we arrive in Istanbul? The Turkish guard shrugged. It depended on how long it would take to get over some mountains in Anatolia without the need for back-up. The steam train panted into Istanbul several hours behind its supposed schedule. But no one was upset and everyone – Turks, Arabs and Christians – enjoyed the fellowship and hospitality of that journey. Would it be so today?

     

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • John Tulloh. Return to the Syrian battlefield.

         ‘Foreign (military) adventures have long appealed to insecure leaders’, wrote the veteran British journalist, Sir Simon Jenkins, in the right-wing Spectator magazine. ‘Those who’ve had no experience of war seem to crave it’. He was referring to British Prime Minister David Cameron’s renewed enthusiasm to get involved in Syria. He could just as well have been referring to another conservative leader, our own Tony Abbott.

    His cabinet this week is expected to approve what he reportedly is keen for, namely to extend Australia’s involvement in Iraq to the Syrian battlefield. This would mean joining a small US-led coalition force of air power targeting Islamic State (IS) or Daesh, as Mr Abbott calls it. It fits in well with his frequent mantra about anything related to national security, no matter how far away it is.

    Australia is no military stranger to what is independent Syria today, having been involved there in both world wars.

    In 1918, troops of the Australian Light Horse were first into Damascus, driving out the Ottoman occupiers of what was then known as the Arab Levant. But popular history overlooks the Australian role, preferring the myth that it was no less than Lawrence of Arabia and his Arab army which captured Damascus and sent the Turks fleeing.

    The facts are that the Australians entered the city at 5am on October 1, 1918, paving the way for the Lawrence forces to enter later the same day. The Arabs were given the credit for propaganda purposes and historians have tended to go along with this as what actually happened.

    In 1941, Australian troops and this time the RAAF were back in Syria, now a French mandate, to help fight the pro-German Vichy forces. The intention was to prevent any German move into the eastern Mediterranean. The Australians suffered 416 killed and 1136 wounded. It was only later that Australia learned the Germans had no intention of getting involved there. Its new focus then was the attack on the Soviet Union.

    But in 21st century warfare it is hard to see what, if any, impact a handful of RAAF fighter-bombers would have on a ground force like IS which has melted into local communities and is scattered across a vast terrain representing one-third of Syria as well as part of Iraq.

    Defence Minister Kevin Andrews was very cautious about how far Australia would dip its toes into the sands of Syria. He told the government’s favourite mouthpiece, The Australian, that RAAF missions would be planned in advance rather than be ‘hot pursuit’ operations. He rejected claims that the bombing to date had achieved little.

    But the reality is that IS is still firmly in charge of Mosul, Iraq’s main northern city, and Raqqa, its capital in Northern Syria. Indeed, according to Al Jazeera, some in Raqqa say life is better despite IS’s brutal approach to law and order. IS reportedly has brought stability to daily life by restoring the power supply, painting road signs, introducing a new education system and imposing taxes.

    The best that could be said is that, unlike most of the world, we in Australia are taking action against a vicious and dangerous organisation. But at the same time the law of averages says innocent lives will be lost, even more refugees will be on the move, more grievances created and more jihadists will want to join IS.

    Abbott’s enthusiasm to get involved is hard to reconcile when you consider the coalition consists of just the US, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Canada and Turkey, though the latter seems more interested in attacking Kurdish targets. Britain is hinting it might get involved, but that would have to wait until next month when parliament resumes.

    Syria is a tangled political web like none other. In addition to IS and the coalition air forces, there are the al-Qaeda offshoot, the Nusra Front; another militant Islamic organisation, the anti-government Ahrar al-Sham; the Free Syrian Army now in disarray; the Kurds and, of course, the demoralised Syrian armed forces.

    In addition, Russia is stirring the pot. Recent news reports suggest Moscow, a long-time ally of Syria, intends to expand its aid to prop up the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. According to the London Daily Telegraph, ‘speculation is growing that Russia has significantly expanded its involvement in recent months, including deliveries of advanced weaponry, a raft of spare parts for existing machines, and the deployment of increasing numbers of military advisers and instructors’. President Putin has not ruled out military intervention, leading Washington to worry it might even lead to a ‘confrontation’ with the US-led coalition. This should particularly concern coalition pilots as Russia has supplied Syria with advanced air defences, including missiles.

    Crushing IS might lead to a much bigger problem: what to do with a hopelessly fragmented Syria when it has other violent groups jostling for power. We should beware of getting entangled.

    FOOTNOTE: It is possible we could see Australia fighting on – or at least from – Turkish soil for the first time since the Gallipoli debacle 100 years ago. According to The Australian, Canberra has been in touch with Ankara about the possibility of operating from the Incirlik air base in SE Turkey, though it says it has no plans at this stage.

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news.

  • John Tulloh. Syria; a step too far for Tony Abbott.

    It was said that in World War One the British Army laced the tea of its soldiers with bromide in order to curb their sexual impulses and concentrate on the matter at hand. It would be useful if something could be found to put in Tony Abbott’s morning cuppa to inhibit his desires for military adventures. He is like a corporal trying to please a general.

    Media reports suggest he wants to oblige an American request for the RAAF to extend its Iraqi operation to Syria to combat ISIS or Daesh, as the Prime Minister calls it. At the same time, he acts like the national town crier, drawing constant attention to the threat to domestic security posed by Islamic extremists in Australia, jihadists and impressionable young Moslems who have been radicalised.

    Does it not occur to Mr Abbott that, the more we get involved in a far away conflict, the more resentment and bitterness we cause among disaffected Australian citizens of Middle East origin and thus the greater the threat to the stability of our way of life?

    It also raises other questions which the Prime Minister, given his repeated assertions of his concern for the well-being of Australians, should be addressing, such as:

    + What impact has the air war in Iraq had so far? Has it made any real difference to the strength and influence of ISIS? The Defence Dept’s website has a lot of bland figures which mean little. Occasionally, more meaningful information is released. But overall the fog of war information prevails.

    + Is it not about time that federal Parliament had a proper debate about the pros and cons of our participation in this conflict? Britain’s House of Commons did two years ago, voting down a proposal for military involvement against Syria for its use of chemical weapons? Why all the secrecy of huddled briefings behind closed doors and sealed lips?

    + Why should a country removed as far as we are from the Middle East be lured into its troubles when nations under greater threat, especially in Europe and elsewhere in the Arab world, leave it to others to deal with? Can it be that we are in the permanent thrall of the mighty U.S. war machine?

    + Australia went to great lengths to ‘legitimise’ our return to Iraq almost 12 months ago both on the ground as advisers and in the air. Mr Abbott is quoted as saying there is ‘no moral difference’ whether RAAF attacks ISIS targets in Syria or Iraq. Why the change of policy?

    + It is one thing to go after ISIS, but where does the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda splinter group which also operates in Northern Syria, stand in Australia’s thinking? Australia regards it as a terrorist organisation and yet it operates in coalition with the Free Syrian Army which the West supports.

    + Something like $500 million was earmarked earlier this year to cover the cost of Australia’s return to warfare in Iraq. How much has been spent so far and what domestic needs will have to be sacrificed to cover the inevitable additional funding?

    + If Australia should help in eliminating ISIS, what are the likely political, social, demographic and peace-keeping consequences for the region? In other words, are we inviting a new form of geopolitical crisis? Dr John Blaxland, a senior fellow at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the ANU, told ABC radio that he thought Australia was being baited by ISIS:

    ‘To me, it’s pretty compelling that this is a goading. (It) is a ‘comeon’, if you like: to spill more blood in the sandpit, if you like. And I think we need to be very, very cautious about going down that path.

    ‘While it is attractive to try and topple them, realistically we have to look at it and think: If we do defeat the Daeshists in Iraq and Syria, what then?’

    Mr Abbott may have been a Rhodes scholar, but it is unlikely because he was outstanding at modern history. He should be asking himself: When was the last successful bombing strategy in recent times? The answer is debatable.

    Vietnam was plastered with bombs and napalm, including under the concerted Operation Rolling Thunder. Overall, it made little military difference. Cambodians were subject to secret bombing from unseen B-52s at 30,000ft. The plains of Laos became a bombing free-for-all arena. The aim was to crush the Communists. It failed in Vietnam and Laos.

    In 1999, all of NATO got together to bomb Serbia on the basis that it was committing atrocities in Kosovo, forcing President Slobodan Milosevic to sue for peace. Result: Thousands of Serbs being driven out of Kosovo into exile, seething resentment still to this day and social distress. The Iraqi war in 2003 was fought mainly from the air by the US-led coalition forces. The bombs certainly helped get rid of Saddam Hussein, but the effect on overall life in Iraq was catastrophic and remains so.

    Syria thought it could deal with its civil war in 2011 by concentrating on air attacks, including its terrifying barrel bombs dropped from helicopters at random into civilian areas. The strategy failed catastrophically again and the country is now in such a hopeless state.

    In 2011, many NATO countries got together to deal with Libya and behead the Gaddafi regime. They succeeded except look at the fractured, shambolic state that Libya is now. It back-fired in a way because Libya has become an easy conduit for thousands of asylum-seekers and economic immigrants wanting to settle in Europe.

    Look also at the situation in Yemen. Saudi Arabia has plunged into mainly an air war against the Houthi rebels in the south of the country. An International Red Cross official said only this week that ‘Yemen after five months looks like Syria after five years’. What’s more, the UN says the conflict has left Yemen on the brink of famine.

    If there is a moral in all this, it is that meddling by anyone in the Middle East or the Arab world is asking for trouble. The best of intentions never succeed.

    If there is a certainty in all this, it is that meddling causes death, displacement, destruction, untold misery and even more woe on a scale that in our comfortable Australian lives we cannot even begin to imagine.

    Mr Abbott might care to listen to his chief of joint operations, ViceAdmiral David Johnston, who also told ABC radio:

    ‘The contribution of Australia, while always welcome, isn’t a game-changer one way or the other’.

    That begs the obvious question. So does whether we would still feel strongly enough to get involved closer to the ground if we did not have the advantage of overwhelming superiority in the skies.

    John Tulloh had a 40 year career in foreign news, much of it dealing with warfare and its consequences.

  • John Tulloh. Goodbye Syria.

     THE DEAD-END ROADS TO AND FROM DAMASCUS

    Fifteen years ago this month, Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father to become president of Syria. Having spent some years studying and living in France and England, he had hopes of a Western-style liberalisation and development and turning his country into the Switzerland of the Middle East. Those ambitions proved naively fanciful and now he finds himself inextricably wedged, the country under his control shrinking and the outlook hopeless.

    Assad’s report card is a shocking one. A four-year-old civil war. More than 200,000 people killed. A total of 7.6 million Syrians displaced inside their own country, according to the UNHCR. Another 3.9 million driven into exile or living as refugees outside their country. In other words, half the country’s population either dead or driven from their homes.

    Two international terrorist groups – ISIS and al-Nusra (an arm of al-Qaeda) – now control much of northern Syria. More than half the country is no longer in government hands. Syria’s armed forces are demoralised. The army is only half the strength it was four years ago due to death and desertion. Syria, which once prided itself on its secularism, is now racked by sectarianism. Christians have fled for their lives. The economy is in a shambles and unemployment is at record levels. Much of the once vibrant Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city, is in ruins. Its main allies are only Russia and the leper of most of the Arab world, Iran.

    If all this were not bad enough for a country’s ruler, there is more. Assad is said to have locked up 200,000 opponents. He has been implicated by the UN in war crimes and crimes against humanity. The U.S., E.U., Canada and Australia among others have imposed sanctions. Syrian assets in those countries have been frozen.

    Despite all this, Assad carries on almost as if it’s business as usual. The U.S., some Arab states and now finally neighbouring Turkey have got involved. But that has been only from the air and their targets have been just ISIS and al-Qaeda and for Ankara the Kurdish PKK militants exploiting the turmoil. President Obama once threatened to intervene when Assad was accused of using chemical weapons, but later thought better of it and still does. The CIA has been training and arming the Free Syrian Army and other anti-Assad rebels, but they are in disarray.

         Last year, a European Council on Foreign Relations report found that: 

       ‘The Syrian economy lies in ruins. Assets and infrastructure have been destroyed, half of the population lives below the poverty line, and the human development index has fallen back to where it stood 37 years ago. It is estimated that even with average annual growth rate of 5 percent it would take nearly 30 years to recover Syria’s 2010 GDP value’. 

         How did it come to this? Bashar Assad was never meant to be president. His father, Hafez al-Assad, from the minority Alawite sect, ruled Syria for 30 years with the help of patronage, a strong army, the Mukhabarat secret police, smart politics and protecting all religions. His successor was supposed to be his eldest son, Bassel. He was killed in a car crash in 1994.

    ‘His name (Bassel) summoned images of a vocal, shrewd, dynamic man who was a parachutist, a ladies’ man, an accomplished athlete and an outgoing statesman’, wrote Syrian journalist Majid Rafizadeh in The Atlantic. But ‘Bashar did not seek out recognition or popularity. He had no interest in being in the middle of politics. The people of Syria viewed Bashar as a nerd, not someone with the instincts or drive to lead a country’.

    When Bassel died, his father summoned home the next son in line to prepare to replace him. That was Bashar, who had been studying in Paris and London. He wanted to be an ophthalmologist and it was said all he aspired to was to have a family and a comfortable life, probably in Europe. His early introduction to the levers of power was being despatched to Lebanon as an unlikely gauleiter to keep an eye on the Syrian security presence there.

    His father died in 2000. Bashar Assad, with his lugubrious looks, diffident manner and beanpole figure, was now in charge. He introduced some of his ideas in what was known as the Damascus Spring. But he tried to run politically before he could walk and within a year those good intentions were scuttled. The Damascus regime settled back into its old ways.

    The turning point came in 2011 when Syrians became infected by the Arab Spring demonstrations which began in Tunisia and spread to Libya and Egypt. Enough of that, decided Assad. Egged on by his widowed mother, he cracked down on it in the same way as his father had crushed a Moslem Brotherhood uprising in the Syrian city of Hama in 1982 with the loss of thousands of lives. Little did he realise he had sowed the seeds of a real revolution and now the disintegration of his country as hostile forces surged in to fill the vacuums created in the north.

    Assad emerged from the twilight shadows only this week to make his first public speech in a year. He admitted to what most Syrians already knew about the state of their country and the armed forces. ‘The word defeat does not exist in the Syrian army’s dictionary’, he said disingenuously. ‘We will resist and we will win’.

    Too late, said Amos Gilad, a senior official at neighbouring Israel’s Defence Ministry. ‘Syria is gone. Syria is dying’, he said as quoted by the Jerusalem Post. ‘The funeral will be declared in due time. This Bashar Assad, he will be remembered in history textbooks as the one who lost Syria’.

    Assad’s best hope may be a rump state carved out of his shrinking territory and dominated by his minority Alawites. After all, Syria was an artificial state in the first place, part of the spoils Britain and France cynically divided up as the Ottoman empire crumbled a century ago. Who will run the rest of the country is anyone’s guess as so many fractious parties fight for possession, power and influence.

    ISIS with its grandiose caliphate already controls the north-east area along the Iraqi border. It will not want to surrender any influence or territory. The Nusra Front has the backing of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the usual source of support for undesirables in the region. Its intentions are not clear yet. Although it has been involved in suicide bombings, news reports suggest it is trying to ‘rebrand’ itself as a respectable anti-ISIS/Assad Syrian organisation with no links to al-Qaeda.

    Then there is Iran. It sees Syria as a conduit to arm its fellow-Shiites, Hezbollah, in Lebanon. Charles Lister, a Syria expert at the Brookings Doha Centre in Qatar, said Iran with the help of Hezbollah and other militias is building ‘a state within a state in Syria, an insurance policy to protect itself against any future Assad demise’.

    Then there is Turkey, which shares the longest border of all with Syria. It has exploited the ISIS presence to break its truce with the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) which it – along with the West, including Australia – regards as a terrorist organisation. However, the Kurds, with their own sovereign state ambitions, have been doing as much as anyone in resisting ISIS.

    As for the U.S., the New York Times editorialised: ‘Having failed to reach a consensus over the scope and nature of an authorisation of war that would have set parameters for Washington’s involvement in Iraq and Syria, lawmakers appear resigned to allow the Obama administration to slide even more deeply into a complex war’. 

         In short, it is a fine old mess. None of this will soothe the nerves of Bashar Assad and his family as they view the increasing uncertainty of their future. Even their Alawite stronghold, Syria’s main port of Latakia, is under threat from dissident forces. His father, the Assad patriarch, would have been aghast.

    A century later, Syria’s borders can expect to be redrawn no matter what happens, though not as cynically as before.

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news.

     

     

        

  • John Tulloh. Why Eritreans are crossing the Mediterranean.

    Current Affairs.

    ERITREA: THE NORTH KOREA OF AFRICA 

    It is the seventh youngest nation in the world. It was born in 1993 after a 30-year war. Its flag was raised for the first time as an independent nation with high hopes for democracy in a continent dominated by too many despots. In its first years it set an example of frugality when its people were encouraged to ride bikes and, what vehicles there were, had to be modest small ones. Its original leader is still in charge 22 years later. Time for an election? ‘Never’, he said. Instead he has created a harsh dictatorship with thousands of desperate citizens deciding life must be better elsewhere. Hundreds have died in the process. Their country has been likened to North Korea.

    Such is life in Eritrea, the sun-baked former Italian colony on the African shore in the south of the Red Sea. Its people today cause nervousness in the capitals of Europe. They make up a considerable proportion of asylum-seekers risking their existence among the huddled masses crossing the Mediterranean to make a future in Europe.

    Recently, the UN took a look at how the fledgling nation was doing. Its report was damning. The initial sense of democracy, it said, ‘has been extinguished by the government under the pretext of national defence’. The UN investigators said the regime of President Isaias Afewerki was guilty of extra-judicial killings, widespread torture, sexual slavery, Orwellian mass surveillance and enforced labour. In short, it may have committed crimes against humanity.

    Eritrea has a system known as ‘national service’. The report says this really involves ‘arbitary detention, torture, sexual torture, forced labour and absence of leave’. Compulsory military service can be open-ended, continuing for years. Avoidance can lead to execution. Women recruits are rounded up to satisfy the lust of their commanders. Eritrea is a country ruled not by law, but by fear, said one of the UN investigators.

    No wonder five percent of Eritreans have fled, according to the UN. Even that can be dangerous. Abandoning the country is regarded as treachery and until last year soldiers at border crossings routinely shot anyone trying to escape. It is a similar story for North Koreans who’ve had enough of their country.

    It is a sad tale when the birth of Eritrea was greeted with such lofty expectations. A reporter for the Washington Post was moved to write:

         On a continent of millionaire dictators, where broken promises of democracy dovetail with collapsing living standards and unpayable debts, Eritrea’s revolutionaries hold out the possibility of an efficient, self-reliant African nation, run by Africans who have had 26 years to learn from the failures of independent Africa. 

         The trouble is that they didn’t learn or didn’t want to know. As a result, Eritrea has ended up like the Ethiopian regime – the Derg – which it fought for the three decades to get rid of. Its ratified constitution was suspended with no explanation and has now been abandoned altogether. Promised elections at the outset never took place and again without explanation. All private newspapers were closed and their journalists detained. Land was nationalised. Aid agencies were driven from the country. ‘Short of North Korea or an ISIS slave cave, there’s no more hopeless place on earth’, wrote Spectator columnist Mary Wakefield last month.

    Eritreans in exile are unanimous in saying the villain for all this is President Alwerki. He apparently regards himself as indispensable and clearly sees himself as president for life – just like the Kim dynasty trio of tyrants in  North Korea. In a strange twist of irony, Eritrea in its written response denouncing the UN report lifted lines word for word from a North Korean fulmination to the UN on another matter:

    “We are fully ready for any confrontation with the U.S. and will shatter the reckless “human rights” racket by the hostile forces through our toughest reaction. 

    “The moves of the hostile forces to dare provoke the socialist system of the DPRK which was chosen and has been consolidated by the Korean people will not be able to escape disgraceful doom.”

    The West pays little attention to Eritrea other than warning people travelling there. The EU in April approved an aid package of 122 million euros. ‘The more it gives, the faster the population decamps’, observed Wakefield.

    The country is of little strategic value despite the Soviet Union once having a naval base there before independence. While Eritrea has a majority Christian population, more than 40 per cent of its people are followers of Islam. But no doubt the West is content in the knowledge that Eritrea’s brutal president will keep any Islamic radicals in their place.

    Just as North Korean defectors have a tough time adjusting to life among even their own kith and kin in the south, for Eritreans it is an entirely new challenge in a new continent where they are far from wanted. ‘They were in Africa until yesterday and are fleeing like lost goats in Rome’, a social worker was quoted in The Times about newly-arrived Eritreans now trying to evade a different type of authority.

    The number of Eritreans who made it to Italy by the boat last year was 40,000 or 23 percent of all asylum-seekers. That compares with just 32,000 of all asylum-seekers who made it to Australia by the dreaded boat in the 18 months to June 2013. The Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton, can only pale when this year’s likely record-breaking exodus across the Mediterranean is totted up.

    If there is a glimmer of hope for Eritreans, it may be it’s because gold has been discovered in their benighted country and other minerals could be there as well. That’s if President Alwerki doesn’t follow the example of other African dictators by pocketing the money for himself and keeping his country to remain among the 10 poorest in the world.

    FOOTNOTE: Australia has had a connection with Eritrea ever since 1987 when the late Fred Hollows began his work there to restore sight to thousands of people. Despite the crackdown on NGOs, the foundation in his name continues his work there today.

     

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news.

  • John Tulloh. Gallipoli: Lest we forget the British promise to the Indians.

     

    One hundred years on, many Australians probably still regard the
    Gallipoli campaign as an event involving only Australia and, to a lesser
    extent, New Zealand. We hear mainly legends, tales of derring-do, myths
    and maudlin sentimentality about the Australians who fought there. We
    hear next to nothing about the others who also participated in this futile
    exercise.

    It was, of course, an international campaign led by Britain and
    France. They suffered more deaths than the Anzacs. As a German general
    commanding a Turkish division observed: ‘Seldom have so many
    countries of the world, races and nations sent their representatives to so
    small a place with the praiseworthy intention of killing one another’. That
    amounted to about 130,000 on both sides.

    Little reported among the mix were the soldiers from the Indian
    Army. India has every reason to commemorate the Gallipoli centenary
    with both pride and anger. Like the others, the Indian troops made a
    magnificent contribution in trying to dislodge the Turks. But Britain broke
    a promise in the process and literally made India pay for it.

    According to the veteran Indian newsman and scholar of modern Indian
    history, Prem Prakash, London made a pledge to Mahatma Gandhi
    to grant India dominion status in return for rallying support for the war
    effort and contributing troops. Gandhi responded enthusiastically because
    he saw this as the simplest means to become a dominion within
    the British Empire without further ado. It was something he had been
    agitating for and which the colonial authorities were loath even to consider.

    India contributed 15,000 troops to the Dardanelles. But once World
    War One was over, Britain had second thoughts about its promise. Gandhi
    had to continue agitating for almost another three decades, including
    time in jail, before he got his wish only to be assassinated by a Hindu fanatic.

    India’s price for its effort was two-fold. One was a loss of 1358 dead
    and 3421 wounded, according to the Australian War Memorial. The other
    was getting a large bill from London for its troubles at Gallipoli and on
    the western front as well. It paid up.

    The Indians were ‘the forgotten soldiers of history’, says Indian military
    historian Wing Commander Rana Chhina in his appraisal of Gallipoli.
    ‘The average Indian is (virtually) ignorant about Gallipoli as a campaign
    in World War One’. The same about the Indian involvement can probably
    be said about the average Australian. The only known permanent tribute
    is a plaque at Ferozepur in the Punjab, from where many of the WW1
    soldiers came.

    India deployed ‘some of the finest classes of its fighting men at Gallipoli’,
    according to Wing Commander Chhina. They included the formidable
    Sikh warriors and the ferocious Gurkhas led by British officers.
    One officer actually drew his ceremonial sword as he led Gurkhas in a
    charge against Turkish positions. Unlike so many of the Anzac troops,
    the Indians were all professional soldiers and steeped in the British military
    system.

    But there was far from unity in the ranks. Some Moslem troops deserted
    as they did not see why they should be fighting other Moslems.
    Others were exploited by Indian activists pushing the ideal of a pan-Islamic
    movement with the aim of international solidarity and unity of all
    Moslems. One Indian battalion, the 89th Punjabis, had predominantly
    Moslem soldiers and it was felt prudent to divert them from Gallipoli to
    France to fight other British enemies.

    The Indians fought elsewhere in the Gallipoli peninsula before teaming
    up with the Anzacs in August, 1915. There was friendship in their
    fraternisation and they often shared food rations. It was said the Indian
    roti and daal appealed more to Australian tastes than their standard bully
    beef and biscuits.

    An important Indian contribution was the Mule Corps. Given the lack
    of roads and the hilly and precarious terrain of the Gallipoli peninsula,
    motorised transport was out of the question. More than 1000 mules and
    10,000 tons of fodder were brought in from India. The mules were used
    to ferry supplies. They and their handlers were the unsung heroes, said
    Rana Chhina. Just as with the Australian Light Horse animals, the surviving
    mules were shot when the Indian troops evacuated Gallipoli in December,
    1915. They did not want them to fall into the hands of the
    Turks.

    Spare a thought also for the 89th Punjabis. They sailed from India in
    late 1914 and did not reach home until nearly six years later. They
    fought for the British Empire in more theatres of war than any other Allied
    battalion. But the reward for them and all other Indians was not
    what Gandhi had expected from what he thought would be a grateful
    Britain. It proved to be an empty promise.

    Prem Prakash says he combed the archives of the India Office in
    London to try to find ‘a serious enough reason’ for Britain to have reneged
    other than ‘India was not ready yet’. Perhaps it was simply a matter
    of the unthinkable: losing control of the strategic jewel in the crown
    of the British Empire.

    John Tulloh has a 40 year career in foreign news.

  • John Tulloh. An inconvenient centenary Turkey prefers to ignore.

         The Gallipoli battle aside, you can be sure that Turkey will not be commemorating the centenary of another major event in its history this month. A few hours before Australian, New Zealand and other allied forces landed at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915, what has become widely known as the Armenian genocide got under way in Constantinople (Istanbul). But Australians visiting Gallipoli for the other centenary should be careful about what they say. For a Turk to say it was genocide is enough to get punished for insulting the country.

    It is a bitter and contentious argument which has been going on for more than 70 years since the word ‘genocide’ was coined. That was by a Polish jurist to describe not only what the Nazis were doing to the Jewish peoples, but also what Turkey had inflicted on the Armenians starting in 1915.

    Turkey strenuously denies that it was genocide even though it concedes 600,000 Armenians perished. As far as Ankara is concerned, they were victims of wartime action, deportation marches, isolated massacres, disease and malnourishment. They were exiled because the Ottomans regarded the Armenians as war-time allies of the Tsarist Russians who were active along Turkey’s eastern border where so many Armenians lived.

    But independent estimates have put the death toll at between 1 and 1.5 million based on eye-witness accounts. Turkey’s WW1 ally, Germany, told Berlin that something terrible was happening to the Armenians. Australian POWs thought so as well. Even Hitler later referred to their ‘annihilation’.

    Geoffrey Robertson, QC, the Australian human rights lawyer, is the author of a new book called An Inconvenient Genocide: Who Now Remembers the Armenians? He writes: ‘The Young Turks who ran the Ottoman government did not use gas ovens, but they did massacre the men and sent the women, children and elders on death marches through the desert to places we hear of now only because they are overrun by Islamic State. They died en route in their hundreds and thousands from starvation or attack and many survivors died of typhus in the concentration camps at the end of the line’.

    Tony Abbott, as opposition leader, said it was genocide and condemned it. So did the SA and NSW parliaments. But when Turkey in retaliation threatened to ban MPs from visiting Gallipoli, Canberra buckled. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop last year conceded that the events of 1915 were a ‘tragedy’. But, she added, ‘we do not recognise the events as genocide’.

    Pope Francis thinks otherwise. Only this week he infuriated the Turkish government by referring to genocide. The official line from countries like Russia, France, Spain and Canada is that it was genocide, while in Greece, Slovakia and Switzerland among others it is a criminal offence to deny it was genocide.

    Barack Obama in 2008, when campaigning for the US presidency, also condemned the genocide and promised to reiterate that if elected. But he thought better of it following geopolitical pressure from Turkey about the future of US bases and support for American interests in the region. It is much the same story with the British government when so many refugees are camped in Turkey and eager to live elsewhere.

    The Armenians had long been persecuted in Turkey and were the victims of massacres from time to time. They were ancient Christians and generally better educated and wealthier than the Islamic Turks. It was the usual brew for violent resentment of a minority. The 1915 events began with the round-up and deportation or execution of Armenian community leaders and intellectuals. Documents and statements at the time made it clear that Turkey planned and carried out a massive pogrom against the Armenians.

    The Australian author, Louis Nowra, wrote a play for the BBC based on the memoirs of a US diplomat, who witnessed deportations, death marches and atrocities. He says: ‘Led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a cynical populist, Turkey is doing all within its power not to confront its own past and also to stop the truth being heard. This is, of course, not unusual (witness Japan’s refusal to acknowledge its horrific crimes in WW2 and Australia’s deliberate amnesia about its treatment of Aborigines), but the evidence of the genocide is so overwhelming that the Turkish denial of what happened is breathtaking in its immaturity and lack of pity’.

    Robertson says: ‘The mental scars and trauma for the children and grandchildren of survivors throughout the diaspora will continue until Turkey makes some sort of acknowledgement and offers an apology’.

    In 2014, Erdogan, then Prime Minister, offered an unprecedented expression of condolence for the massacres of Armenians, saying the events of 1915 had ‘inhumane consequences’. But Armenians want them recognised as genocide. This is unlikely to happen when a recent poll showed that only 9% of Turks questioned believe the events set in train 100 years ago amounted to genocide.

    While thousands of Australians and New Zealanders descend on Gallipoli this month, hundreds and thousands of Armenians will fill the streets of their capital, Yerevan, to observe the centenary of the most terrible event in their history. It is unlikely Australia will be represented. ‘The approach of the Australian government has been not to become involved in this sensitive debate’, Julie Bishop said last year.

    But it has not stopped us from becoming involved in just as sensitive matters just to the south of Armenia on Turkey’s borders, namely Iraq.

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • John Tulloh. Israel the promised land of democracy.

    Surrounded by a hostile region where even basic freedoms cannot be taken for granted, Israel is to be admired for its electoral democracy at least. It has a boisterous political system full of wheeling and dealing with everybody having a say. One party even has a 101-year-old leader. Electioneering is in full swing right now for next week’s general election (March 17) with no less than 11 parties fielding candidates.

    The next Prime Minister will be either the incumbent, Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, aiming for an unprecedented fourth term, or Labor’s Isaac Herzog, a man with Irish roots and the name of political royalty in Israel. Polls have them neck and neck.

    But there is an unprecedented twist. The third most popular leader is a young Moslem lawyer, Ayman Odeh, who heads a coalition of three Arab parties known as the Joint Arab List. This unites a historically splintered demographic covering the interests of 20% of Israel’s population. It is conceivable that, if Netanyahu and Herzog should end up forming a grand coalition, Odeh could find himself the official official opposition leader.

    Latest polls suggest Likud and Labor each will win 24 seats in the 120-seat Knesset. The Joint Arab List may win as many as 15. The outcome of Israeli elections is always a coalition government and whoever is Prime Minister has to be an astute juggler of different party interests.

    Israel’s parliamentary make-up is complex. Each party submits a list of candidates. The number of seats it gets is proportional to the number of votes it receives. Thus if a party wins 20% of the votes, it gets 20% of the seats. The leading parties, traditionally Labor and Likud, look for partners to reach a majority of seats and then approach the President of Israel to choose who should form the new government. This process can last up to 40 days.

    Here in Australia we read about Israel in the context of many problems – Iran, the Palestinians, terrorism, settlements, anti-Semitism, Gaza, Hamas, Hezbollah and external threats. But they are minor issues in this election. Unsurprisingly, it is mainly about problems all voters have to deal with: a struggling economy and the high cost of living.

    Netanyahu, leader of the Likud Party, is now Israel’s second longest-serving Prime Minister. He represents the Right wing which wants to consolidate the Jewish presence wherever he can at the expense of Palestinians, encourage settlements in the West Bank and constantly alert Israelis to security issues. Talks with the Palestinians are hardly a talking point. Nor is the Iranian nuclear threat despite Netanyahu’s long-held fixation with it, ramming that home in a speech to the US Congress earlier this month.

    Herzog, leader of the Labour Party since 2013, represents the Centre-Left known as the Zionist Union. His coalition partner is Tzipi Livni, the former Justice Minister and leader of the Leftist Hatnua Party. Her party symbol for this election is Che Guevara of all people. He was certainly no friend of Israel, but for Livni he represented change.

    The Prime Minister and his challenger are two contrasting people. Netanyahu is not popular – less than 40% popularity. He has brought about little change. Poverty has increased and the economy is in bad shape. According to supporters quoted by the Washington Post, he is ‘arrogant. But they admire his swagger. He’s a tough guy in a tough neighbourhood. Polls suggest Israeli voters may be tired of Netanyahu, but many cannot imagine the Prime Minister’s office without him’. In a recent poll of preferred leader, 44% opted for Netanyahu and 36% wanted Herzog.

    A former head of the Mossad spy agency, Major-General Meir Dagan, despairs of today’s Israel. ‘There is a lack of vision, a lack of direction and determination and a dearth of exemplary leadership’, he told a rally of 80,000 people in Tel Aviv as reported by Ynetnews.com. ‘I fear hesitation and stagnation. I fear – above all – a crisis at the helm. The crisis we are experiencing today is the worst that I can remember since the creation of the state’.

    Herzog is a dark horse. A lawyer, he is the grandson of the chief rabbi of Ireland and later Israel and the son of a famous Israeli general and diplomat. The questions of poverty and living costs head his agenda. He also wants to settle Israel’s borders once and for all. ‘I will lead Israel in a different direction’, he says. Unlike the forceful Netanyahu, he is soft-spoken and has been described as being like a professor.

    ‘Much hope rests on his small shoulders’, the Haaretz newspaper columnist Asher Schechter wrote. A Herzog supporter, he went on to compare the challenger to ‘a small animal that uses cunning and wit to survive in the jungle’.

    The controversial question of Israel becoming officially the ‘Jewish State’ is not an immediate issue. A Bill has been drawn up, but has not yet had a preliminary reading. As it is, only one third of the Knesset’s current MPs have indicated their support.

    Visionary individual leadership in Israel is nigh on impossible because whoever is the Prime Minister has to appease so many different and sometimes opposing interests in order to govern. Just like our Senate. In short, Israelis probably will end up voting for business as usual whether they want it or not.

     

    FOOTNOTE: A few days ago, Netanyahu visited a crowded Jerusalem market to meet voters. He stopped at a coffee shop and bought an espresso, paying with a 100 shekel note. As reported by the Jerusalem Post, the woman serving him paid him back with 87 coins as a protest against his economic policies, which she said harmed small businesses. It is to Israel’s credit that such a gesture to a country’s leader can be shrugged off whereas it would be unthinkable in its hostile neighbours.

     

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • John Tulloh. The flight of Christians from the Middle East.

    If there is one region which Christians increasingly want to abandon, it is the biblical heartland of their faith: the Middle East. They are fleeing in greater numbers than ever before. They are fearful of the growing turmoil in places like Syria and Iraq, the spread of radical Islam and, of course, now the presence of Islamic State (IS) and its dire warning to non-believers that ‘there is nothing to give (you) but the sword’. The exodus has alarmed Pope Francis who said: ‘We will not resign ourselves to imagining a Middle East without Christianity’.

    That is unlikely to happen, but there won’t be much of it left. According to Time, if the Middle East’s current demographic trends continue, the region’s 12 million Christians will be halved as soon as 2020. It has been a steady decline which has been gathering pace in recent years. A century ago the last Ottoman census revealed that Christians comprised 25% of the region’s population. Today it is said to be less than 5%.

    It was St Thomas the Evangelist who introduced Christianity to Egypt in the first century and it was the dominant faith until the arrival of Islam. What is Syria today was associated with the apostles St Peter and St Paul. St Thomas extended it to ancient Mesopotamia which is today’s Iraq. Islam came into being in the 7th century and spread rapidly.

    Ironically, in recent decades it was Arab despots who gave Christians the greatest feeling of security. Saddam Hussein made sure Iraq’s came to no harm just as the Assad dynasty had done in Syria until recently and Hosni Mubarak did during his 29 years of governing Egypt. In fact, Saddam’s long-time foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, was a Christian who used to startle guests by singing Onward Christian Soldiers in Aramaic, the language of Jesus.

    But when Saddam was toppled by the US-led invasion in 2003, Iraqi Christians panicked and it was reported that nearly a million of them fled the country, fearful of the alternative. The upheaval in Syria has caused a mass flight from there as well – 1 in 4 of the country’s Christians. In the last census 20 years ago they comprised 8% of the population.

    Egypt has the biggest Christian community – about 8 million of mostly Copts. Many were alarmed when Mubarak was ousted in 2011 and the following year replaced by a democratically-elected Moslem Brotherhood government which proposed an Islamist-based constitution. Nearly 100,000 of them cleared out of the country. But those who remained were relieved and indeed cheered when the Brotherhood was overthrown last year and replaced by a government led by another military strongman, Field Marshal Abdel al-Sisi, who has no time for Islamic extremism.

    If it hadn’t happened, there would have been a mass exodus, according to Egypt’s richest man, Naguib Sawiris, himself a Christian. He was quoted as saying that majority rule in the Arab world leaves minorities at risk. So it was better to support a secular-leaning coup-maker than risk annihilation by Islamists.

    But Michael Wahid Hanna, a Middle East analyst at the Century Foundation, a US think tank, is not so sure. He is quoted in Time as saying: ‘Christians in the region are forced into these Faustian bargains in which they end up supporting authoritarian regimes for fear of what the alternative would look like. But the price is that it can aggravate underlying sectarian tensions and create further animosities and bigotry’.

    The Christians have resettled in the Americas, Europe and Australia. As has been the case in recent weeks, others have been driven into exile by the depredations of IS. Prince Hassan of Jordan, who takes a close interest in regional humanitarian matters, says there are now more Jerusalem Christians living in Sydney than in Jerusalem itself.

    Their flight leaves the Arab world depleted culturally. The Lebanese historian, Professor Kamal Salibi, is quoted as saying: ‘Each time a Christian goes, no other Christian comes to fill his place and that is a very bad thing for the Arab world. It is the Christian Arabs who keep the Arab world “Arab” rather than “Moslem”.’

    Even if the exodus ceases, the ratio of the Christian population will continue to decline simply because the birthrate among Moslem families is so much higher. ‘The Christian era in the Middle East is over,’ says the Italian author and journalist, Giulio Meotti, who specialises in the Holy Land. He notes that Bethlehem was 80% Christian in 1948 and today they are ‘near extinction’. Nearby Ramallah was 90% Christian and now it is an Islamic city.

    Despite Christianity being their dominant faith, Western countries have showed little interest in the plight of their co-religionists in the Middle East. An exception was the recent case of the obscure Yazidis in Iraq, an ancient part Christian sect who were being threatened with starvation by marauding IS followers. Their desperate situation not only prompted a humanitarian airlift, including by the RAAF, but also helped galvanise the current US-led aerial campaign to crush IS.

    There is no doubt the Middle East politically as well as demographically is more Islamist than ever. This makes Christians and other minorities feel more isolated and nervous than ever about their future. If anything, we are now entering the Islamic era in the Middle East.

    John Tulloh had 40-year career in foreign news.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    The former Archbishop of Canterbury

  • John Tulloh.  The season of ill will for Bethlehem’s Christians.

    Christians in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, must be wondering about the traditional Christmas message of ‘good will to men’ (men meaning people).

    They face a bleak future. Christians are fleeing in their thousands for a better life in other lands free of an occupation force, endless security checks and territorial disputes. Those who remain have what is one of the  highest unemployment rates (18%) in the West Bank. Business has rarely been so bad.

    The main reason is two-fold: the loss of land caused by the eight-metre high concrete security barrier which Israel is building for its own security and the steady encroachment of Jewish settlements on what Palestinians have regarded as as their own land.

    A Palestinian film-maker, Leila Sansour, claims that the security wall now confines Bethlehem residents to only 13% of the town’s original territory, the rest having been confiscated. A Palestinian official is quoted as saying it could end up even more crowded than Gaza.

    Bethlehem’s mayor, Vera Baboun, says: ‘We are a strangulated city with no room for expansion due to the settlements and the wall’. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said Bethlehem was enduring a ‘choking reality’. He added: ‘For the first time in 2000 years of Christianity in our homeland, the holy cities of Bethlehem and Jerusalem have been completely separated by Israeli settlements, racist walls and checkpoints’.

    According to a Guardian correspondent, Bethlehem is now surrounded by 22 settlements. More will follow. The UN has declared them to be illegal. Israel regards these and other settlements in the area to be legitimate suburbs of Jerusalem which is 10 kms north of Bethlehem. Having annexed East Jerusalem after the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel declared Jerusalem as the unified capital of the Jewish state.

    Last August, Israel took over 400 hectares near Bethlehem of what a Palestinian mayor said was land belonging to Palestinian families and declared it ‘state land’. This came just after three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and killed two months earlier. The New York Times reported that the timing of the takeover ‘suggested it was meant as a kind of compensation for the settlers and punishment for the Palestinians’.

    The very idea of Palestinians recovering lost land is wishful thinking. It is lost forever. Bethlehem is slowly being surrounded by settlements, a kind of ring of nationalism to reinforce Israel’s security. As far as many of the settlers are concerned, the land has belonged to the Jews since Biblical times. Indeed websites for settlements refer them to being not in the West Bank, but Judea and Samaria.

    It is generally accepted that the shepherds who watched their flock by that momentous night 2000 years ago were Jewish. Just outside Bethlehem, the fields where the sheep once grazed are now separated from the town by the security wall and inaccessible to the Palestinians.

    Local Christians have gone to the courts to fight the planned route of a section of the security wall. This would cut off a monastery and convent from their land along with 58 families. The monks and nuns have joined forces to challenge it. It will be decided in the Israeli courts next year.

    One can only wonder what Jesus, a Jew worshipped in the name of Christianity, would have made of all this ill will.

    FOOTNOTE: An Israeli couple I knew who lived in Jerusalem each week drove to Bethlehem for their weekly food shopping. They got on well with all the Palestinian shopkeepers and were good friends. But after the first intifada (Palestinian uprising) in 1987 any vehicle with an Israeli numberplate became a target for the ubiquitous Palestinian rock-throwers. Such a once simple drive is not possible today thanks to the wall, checkpoints and Israelis needing a special permit to travel to places like the little(r) town of Bethlehem.

    Now for a lament by an old friend and former foreign newsman, Andrew Ailes, who lives in London:

    The Unholy Land 

    I fear this year that I will see,
    Another million refugees,
    Filling the news from overseas,
    As I sit by my Christmas tree. 

    Where Jesus spoke in Aramaic,
    Was once a land of rich mosaic,
    Where Christian sects of many colours,
    Lived in harmony with others. 

    Now every day the Christians flee,
    Seeking some kind of sanctuary.
    The Holy Land of history,
    Is riven with uncertainty. 

    Can I recall the Holy birth,
    And wish my neighbours ‘Peace on Earth’,
    While displaced people sit and wait,
    Powerless to control their fate? 

    Man’s inhumanity to man
    M    akes Christmas hard to understand –
    Those children with their haunted eyes.
    The babies with their wounded cries. 

    They are the flotsam of a war –
    We don’t know what they did before,
    The victims of so many ills,
    Clinging to life in barren hills. 

    How much I wish them peace on earth,
    And question what my wish is worth,
    Can any faith be consolation,
    For these scenes of desolation? 

    In some wrecked building, cold and damp,
    A cave, a tent, a U.N. camp,
    No doubt some babies will be born
    On Christmas Day……. God keep them warm.

     Christmas 2014.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • John Tulloh. The ABC on the slippery slope in Asia.

        ‘The overall objective for the International News initiative is to focus resources on original storytelling of the highest quality, ensure our international newsgathering operations are sustainable and ensure all audiences – digital, television and radio – are considered in our coverage’. ABC announcement, November 2014.

    This is a worthy aim for that fickle and costly product called international news coverage. But how do you achieve this?

    Amid all the bloodletting at the ABC, one trend is clear for international news: the days of the old specialist foreign correspondent are over. The new hunter and gatherer of overseas news is expected to be a jack (or jill) of all trades – someone who can report for radio and television, shoot stories and now be able to adapt to the germinating digital platforms which seem to have become the priority of the ABC MD, Mark Scott.

    The most dramatic change is in Asia where Australia’s future lies, though you could be forgiven for wondering  whether the ABC really grasps this. The bureaux in Bangkok, New Delhi and Tokyo will be closed and transferred to the abode of the correspondent who in future will be not so much a correspondent as a video journalist (VJ).

    For the ABC, the saving is the office rent , by making the local staff redundant, their salaries. But there is a four-fold price to pay apart from the pain for the victims.

    The first is the heave-ho of a huge store of experience, local know-how, goodwill and contacts which the local staff have and perhaps in the case of Tokyo the relationship with the major broadcaster.

    The second is the working environment. There is a big difference between working in an office – a bureau – and your spare bedroom at home. This applies not only to technical facilities, but also the attitude and outlook of the correspondent. Reporters work best in a media environment where they can compare notes with others and exchange information and even vision to improve a TV story. Working from home makes a journalist with daily commitments very much an outsider.

    The third is the calibre of reporters who will be attracted to a job requiring both such demanding versatility and having to live not so much above the shop as in it. You would need only one guess what any partner or spouse thinks of it. Instead it will attract the younger journalists who are full of raw ambition and inexperience, but more at home with the changing technology and ease of using it. They have become a prime asset in broadcast newsrooms forever seeking to reduce costs and staff. The standard of reporting is now a secondary matter.

    The fourth is that it deters seasoned reporters and thus professional maturity is wasted. That is, the capacity to see the wider picture of events, the ability to be able to interpret and analyse developments thoughtfully and to have the presence and credibility to be taken seriously by the radio and television audience back in Australia as well as government officials, diplomats and important contacts in the countries where the VJ is based. So much for the ‘highest quality’. 

    Perhaps this does not matter so much these days to the ABC when it is focussing on appealing to younger demographics. This is the generation which is turning away from television for news and instead relying on websites and social media for news and information. But the ABC mustn’t lose sight of the fact that it still has a huge audience across Australia which treasures it for its news and information.

    As someone who spent 19 years at the forefront of overseeing ABC foreign news coverage and resources, I was shocked that the new arrangements also applied in Japan, a country so vital to Australia’s future. The ABC bureau in Tokyo has had a longstanding and productive presence at the HQ of NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster, with in-house access to its vast news resources. Walking away from such an asset is short-sighted to say the least.

    Now the resident VJ no longer will commute each day to NHK. The person will simply wander into the spare bedroom which has become the news bureau. He/she will have to put up with a guest, namely the arrival five days a week of the local producer/interpreter/translator. The kitchen and bathroom will no longer be the VJ’s own. It does not have the makings of a stimulating working partnership.

    It is much the same in Bangkok where the ABC for years has had a successful and productive bureau at an international broadcast media centre.

    The ABC in its annual report will note that, despite the financial cuts, it has been able to maintain its presence in the three affected countries. But the new arrangement is really just papering over a new threadbare set-up with the inevitable loss in the scope of reporting and its quality. And possibly domestic harmony as well.

    One positive change, however, is the intention to create an Australian-based production team to handle foreign news output to back up overseas colleagues so they can concentrate on original reporting. This makes sense. But a danger is that the ABC one day might conclude this is so effective that what is left of its overseas presence can be reduced even further. Having closed three Asian bureaux, the ABC is already on the slippery slope and even runs the risk of dumbing down when it comes to Asian news content.

    How to divide government funding is an endless conundrum for the ABC. It is the same for the share the News department gets. In the case of international news, one wonders why four reporters are based in one country – the US – when they rarely venture outside its borders. It would be no bad thing to put this arrangement on the slippery slope and make an effort for a greater focus on Asia which more than anywhere else has our future in its hands.

    FOOTNOTE: The ABC has never had a ‘foreign editor’. It has always been an ‘international editor’. The reason for the original decision was because the word ‘foreign’ might offend immigrants. So it is interesting to note that the ABC is now creating the post of Chief Foreign Correspondent.

     

    Before joining the ABC, John Tulloh was in charge of news bureaux in Saigon, Singapore, Hong Kong and New York. None was at his abode.

     

     

  • John Tulloh. Innocents abroad at the ABC.

    INNOCENTS ABROAD AT THE ABC LOOK INWARDS AS AUSTRALIA LOOKS OUTWARDS

    ‘Now we cross to an ABC correspondent in Beijing for the latest on the Japanese crisis…’

    The Guardian the other day carried a report that the ABC planned to emasculate its foreign news presence as part of its budget cuts. While the ABC has not confirmed or denied the claim, the reporter concerned has had very good contacts at the ABC for many years.

    If true, it means that at least 40% of the ABC’s foreign bureaux will be scrapped. Nearly half. Snuffed out. Just like that. It will mark the destruction of one of the most impressive and admired foreign news-gathering operations anywhere in the world. It has employed so many outstanding foreign correspondents and cameramen over the last half century that you wouldn’t know where to start. They have brought home to Australians the biggest international stories in that time as well as unrivalled and specialist radio and television reporting.

    The report claims Beijing, Jakarta, London and Washington will become the news hubs. If so, that means the end of the long-standing ABC bureaux in Auckland, Bangkok, New Delhi and Tokyo. No mention was made of the Africa bureau. Incredibly, the bureau in the most volatile region of the world – the Middle East – is said to be ‘under review’.  All this follows the recent axing of the Moscow bureau despite the resurgence of Russia as an unpredictable power to be reckoned with.

    In short, the ABC will end up with perhaps just six overseas news bureaux. Even Fairfax Media, which face even more straitened times than the ABC, have a presence in seven countries.

    Again if true, the report means the ABC is once again taking what for its executives is an easy way out by going after ‘soft’ targets. These are out of sight and thus out of mind. The local staff mean little to ABC HQ. They have no union to fight for them and thus will go quietly and cause no discomfort to the bosses back in Sydney.

    It seems the ABC is reverting to its old white bread reporting outlook with emphasis on Mother Britain and its new-found obsession with every political development in the US. The last US presidential campaign lasted for nine months and was covered to excess and at the expense of almost anything from Main St USA. The Washington bureau has become an American version of the ABC’s Canberra Parliament House bureau. It has four reporters, the same number as those on death row in Auckland, Bangkok, New Delhi and Tokyo.

    Imagine a reporter based in Beijing trying to analyse with credibility the intricate political and economic moves in Japan. Or the same person being asked to report on events in Thailand because the Jakarta correspondent is tied up on a local story. Or the Jakarta person trying to make sense of Indo-Pakistan politics. Or London colleagues possibly having to keep tabs on news as far east as Vladivostok and as far south as Cape Town. It is only natural that reporters will become absorbed in developments where they are based rather than the region around them. What sort of quality reporting can ABC viewers and listeners expect then?

    It is hard to reconcile the reported moves when you consider the following:

    + As every Australian schoolchild knows, our future is in Asia, including countries like India and Japan. That’s where we are focussing our trade agreements. That’s where our commercial interests lie. And that’s where topics critical to our future interests and well-being can be expected.

    + The biggest migration intake into Australia is now from India. The new Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, is a reformist who has bold ideas to crank up the Indian economy into what will be the biggest transformation in the sub-continent in this century. It is reported that the leaders of Australia’s top 500 companies will attend a lecture he is due to give in Melbourne this week (November 18) which speaks volumes about India’s future and the economic opportunities for Australia. How is the ABC going to report the developments with any authority?

    + Tony Abbott has praised Japan as Australia’s great friend in Asia, while his Japanese counterpart, Shinzo Abe, has hailed the ‘special relationship’ which has led to closer economic and defence ties. Japan, as Australia’s second biggest trading partner, is critical to our economic security. Our close ties with Japan have been a matter of concern to China. Is the ABC going to walk away from this?

    + Apart from the Korean peninsula, the military flashpoint of any significance in East Asia is the Senkaku Islands administered by Japan and claimed by China. Again, how can the ABC interpret with any authority developments in this dispute from Beijing?

    + China cracks down on social media, still maintains strict internet censorship and     restricts access to foreign satellite broadcasts. Look what happened during the recent Hong Kong protests. Is this an appropriate working environment for a major news hub? You will find no such interference in Japan.

    + The proportion of Australians from English-speaking backgrounds is in decline yet the ABC is reverting to the old Anglo-Saxon mindset. Even Tony Abbott with his once limited outlook on the world has become stimulated by his encounters in Asia and the prospects for Australia.

    + The ABC’s foreign news coverage more than ever will become bland and be much the same as that of the commercial networks. The value-added reports by ABC correspondents away from the main news of the day will become a threatened species. So will specialist reporting and analysis of trends and developments in the countries where the bureaux face closure. The ABC seems bent on foreign news suicide.

    + Australians are among the most widely-travelled people in the world. More went overseas last year than ever before. Partly because of our isolation, we have an abiding curiosity in other countries and what is happening there. The leading destination for Australian travellers is New Zealand. Thailand is the fourth most popular. So we may well ask: why close the bureaux there?

    The Guardian report suggests that the threatened bureaux may be replaced by Video Journalists working from home. If so, I cannot imagine reliable ABC reporters queuing up for that sort of working existence or a partner or spouse happily sharing an abode with a daily news operation and possibly, if the budget will permit, a translator.

    It is not unreasonable for the ABC foreign news operation to contribute to funding cuts, of course, but to take a sledgehammer to it is wanton vandalism. As I recall, the Auckland, Bangkok and New Delhi operations are the least costly of all, while the Tokyo bureau has had a long-standing and successful tie-up with NHK, the Japanese equivalent of the ABC.

    As a former ABC colleague observed elsewhere in Pearls and Irritations, once you dismantle a bureau you cannot put it together again. Nor can you under-estimate the value of the local staff’s contribution to a successful reporting operation with their local know-how, contacts, ideas, language skills, versatility, dealing with program requests from Australia and ability to assist at all hours for the good of the ABC.

    ABC foreign news-gathering has done far more than its fair share towards saving money in recent years with the closing of bureaux in New York, Moscow, Brussels, Singapore, Hong Kong, Hanoi, Nairobi, Amman, Kuala Lumpur and Nicosia. Some were because of changing times and news demands, but the majority were to save money. Have there been comparable savings or sacrifices elsewhere in the ABC? I doubt it.

    The ABC London bureau once had three reporters to cover mainly Britain and Ireland. They were supplemented by two in Brussels to focus on Europe and two in Moscow to cover the old Soviet empire and later Russia and its former states. Now the ABC has just three reporters to cover those regions, based in London. It is not because it makes news sense. It is to save money. The price is a wholesale dilution in the extent and scope of ABC reporting.

    Furthermore, the ABC correspondents overseas set the example years ago of bimedia reporting instead of serving just radio or television outlets. This made the operation less wasteful, more efficient and saved a lot of money, especially on off-base assignments. Domestic reporters later followed the example.

    While I am not privy to the ABC’s budget, I imagine the financial elephant in the room is the 24-hour news channel which costs the ABC far more than anticipated. Certainly news staff elsewhere under threat of cuts resented having, as they saw it, to bail out the service.

    In an ideal world, the ABC could have a foreign news unit in Sydney or Melbourne to package the general news of the day for radio and television just like SBS’s excellent example. That would leave the overseas correspondents to focus on interesting, meaningful and interpretative stories that the international news agencies never touch. Among the Australian broadcast media, the ABC would stand out like a beacon in the desert rather than being just another player.

    It could be revealing to learn how much the ABC estimates it will cost to staff the proposed news hubs and fly in reporters and camera staff to cover countries where bureaux face the axe and compare that with the cost of maintaining the bureaux. At least twice since the closure of the Moscow bureau the last correspondent, now the ABC’s social affairs reporter, has been sent back from his Melbourne base to report from Russia.

    Once upon a time, the ABC despatched a camera team from Singapore several times a year to Tokyo and New Delhi to link up with the local correspondents who otherwise worked mainly for radio. It seemed so quaint. Who knows, now the same could start happening, with cameramen travelling hither and thither to help some harried Video Journalist working out of a flat.

    The ABC’s reported decision to look inward while Australia takes on a greater role in international matters – think Julie Bishop at the UN – is puzzling. It is all the more so when the same Guardian report says the ABC’s superb Foreign Correspondent program is going to be cut back from 30 weeks a year to 26. All this comes at a time when the only other television foreign affairs program, SBS’s long-running Dateline, is said to be under threat and, if it does survive, will focus on light rather than hard-hitting stories.

    I once attended a meeting of ABC news executives from all over Australia. I was asked if the ABC had to close a foreign bureau, which one should go. Launceston, I suggested. As my former colleague has concluded, the ABC should take a closer look at some of its domestic practices if it wants to save money.

    John Tulloh was the ABC television news and current affairs international editor from 1985 to 1999 and then head of international operations until 2004.

  • John Tulloh. Israel High Court upsets Government on asylum seekers

    Israelis have been observing the month of repentance (Elul). As far as their government is concerned, it is members of the High Court who should be repenting. They have infuriated the Netanyahu government with an order to shut down a detention centre for asylum-seekers within 90 days and to reduce maximum detention without trial from one year to 60 days.

    It is all about what is called the Infiltrators Prevention Bill. This contained stiff measures to curb the influx of African asylum-seekers or, as the government calls them, illegal infiltrators.

    Israel has an estimated 48,200 asylum-seekers, mainly from Eritrea and Sudan. Many are fleeing genuine persecution. But some are almost certainly more interested in economic benefits than a sanctuary.

    About 2200 of them have been locked up in the Holot detention centre deep in the Negev desert near the Egyptian border and the subject of the court decision. Although called an ‘open’ facility, detainees were subject to three roll calls a day and the nearest town was 65 kms away. The inmates were locked up overnight and not allowed to work.

    In a 7 to 2 judgment, the court described the conditions there as ‘wretched’ and said the law ‘violates human rights in an essential, deep and fundamental way’. The judgment continued: ‘Infiltrators do not lose their right to their full dignity in coming to this country by any means necessary. They do not shed their (right to) dignity when they enter custody…and their right to dignity stands even if their arrival to the country was through illegal infiltration’.

    The Israel Interior Minister, Gideon Sa’ar, said he would not accept the High Court verdict. In a TV interview, he said ‘Israelis have rights, too. The state cannot accept a situation where it has no tools to deal with illegal infiltrators’. The result, he added, would mean ‘we won’t have a Jewish democratic state because our borders will be overrun with illegal infiltrators’.

    He ignored the fact that unwanted immigration had dropped to a trickle since the fence along the Egyptian Sinai border was completed in late 2012. But he did note that since the one-year detention law was introduced last December, the number of asylum-seekers leaving had tripled.

    The Israeli government has so far countered the court ruling in three ways.

    Firstly, it is investigating whether the Knesset can introduce new legislation, which, subject to certain provisos, could bypass the High Court. So much for the separation of powers.

    Secondly, it has announced the construction of an ‘open’ detention facility elsewhere consisting of tents where there would be only two roll calls a day.

    Thirdly, it has increased the payment offered to asylum-seekers willing to leave from up to US$1500 to up to $5000. But many Africans say no amount of enticement would encourage them to leave because of the fate they fear awaits them if they return home. Some say they would go if they could be resettled in a third country.

    Most of the African arrivals have descended on South Tel Aviv, a poor area, where they rely on NGOs and volunteers to survive. Many of the local residents want to see the visitors move on, saying they fear for their safety.

    However, the High Court justices did not offer any solution to the problem. Their sole interest was interpreting the law.

    According to an article on Israel’s The Real News website, Israel has an awkward dilemma. It says it has no real means for asylum-seekers to be assessed as refugees. If an African can achieve refugee status, then what about the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled or were expelled after the 1948 war? It is a question Israel prefers to avoid.

    One asylum-seeker advocate wrote in the Jerusalem Post, ‘As Jews, we are taught we must love the stranger because we were once strangers in the Land of Egypt. We must not mistreat runaway slaves because we were once runaway slaves’. But many Israelis worry that the character of their country which they regard as essentially the homeland for Jews is under threat from the arrival of non-Jews from Africa.

    As it is, Israelis have had 30 years of experience of Africans living in their midst. These are the Ethiopians who fled the unrest back in the 80s, declaring they were Jewish. In a momentous airlift by Israeli planes, thousands were collected from refugee camps along the Sudan border and taken to Israel. Well before then, these Beta Israelis, as they are known, were officially declared by senior rabbis to be Jewish. Today there are 84,000 of them in Israel, many of whom have struggled to adapt to life there and the Hebrew language. But they are regarded as Jewish and therefore entitled to live in Israel without question whereas the Eritreans and Sudanese are not.

    It is certain that the Netanyahu government will continue to take a hardline approach to asylum-seekers and what, perversely, is called the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Freedom. In order to govern, it needs the support of ultra-nationalist and religious parties which have no empathy for the visitors no matter what the Torah teaches them about helping strangers.

    For now, though, the asylum-seekers remain in a legal limbo held as a collective rather than as individuals. Since Israel does not investigate their refugee claims, they are not granted any rights, cannot work and thus face a future with no way forward other than backward.

     

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news.

     

     

     

  • John Tulloh. Australia could fight another far away war in a better way.

    It is sobering to consider that the 21st century is only 15 years old and a geographically isolated and peaceful country like Australia has already participated in two major conflicts – Afghanistan and Iraq – and fought skirmishes in a lesser one, the birth of Timor Leste. Now we are preparing to join another one far away in Iraq and perhaps even extend that to Syria.

    It is just as sobering to consider a number of other facts:

    •      The disturbing images of police guarding Parliament House in Canberra being armed with assault rifles no less. This seems so un-Australian.
    •       The recommendation that servicemen wear civilian clothes where possible and avoid hanging their uniforms on the backyard clothes line so as not to draw attention to their presence. What is life coming to?
    •      The likelihood that the fastest-growing industry in our cities will come under the heading of threats. That is, extra security for public buildings, more cameras monitoring every movement, more thorough searches of airline passengers, bullet-proof vests becoming a common sight and chicanes guarding the more sensitive targets. We shall become a suspicious society. The friendly Australian assurance of ‘No worries’ will no longer be the same.
    •      That young people from Islamic families given haven in Australia from persecution should want to persecute others, including fellow Moslems, under an Islamic banner and in a means so vicious and gruesome as to disturb the emotions of people everywhere.

    What is happening to our once pleasant, safe, generous, tolerant and easy-going land?

    It may be to the good name of Australia that we are doing something about crushing a tyranny in a region far from our shores. But shouldn’t others closer with more to fear than Australia be doing something?

    It is heartening that Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have now contributed their planes to the fight against Islamic State (IS). But what about other Arab countries and European nations with large Islamic populations vulnerable to IS hatreds? Between them they have much more to offer than what Tony Abbott calls our ‘minimal contribution’.

    Australia has got involved ostensibly on the grounds that up to 60 Australian jihadists have lent their services to IS. But so have volunteers from many other countries which have not stirred themselves into action. The truth is that we want to remain eager to help the U.S. at any time, few questions asked.

    We like to think we are important to the U.S. when it comes to military adventures. We are not. We are useful. Our presence in the Gulf and Iraq wars was very small. We did not suffer a single death in action. President George W. Bush proclaimed John Howard a ‘man of steel’. Yet he and Australia barely rated a paragraph in his memoirs.

    A major casualty of IS’s rampage through Iraq and Northern Syria are the terrorist group’s potential victims fleeing for their lives. In the past week alone, an estimated 120,000 desperate Syrians fled to the sanctuary of Turkey. They joined tens of thousands before them who have sought safety in Turkey and Kurdistan in Northern Iraq.

    It is trauma on a mass scale. These people have lost their homes, their livelihoods, their possessions, their dignity, their way of life, their hopes and in many cases their relatives, neighbours and friends.

    This is and will always be very much a local issue with so many different religious, political and tribal interests involved. It should be for the immediate neighbourhood to deal with rather than 21st century Crusaders.

    It begs the questions:

    Should Australia, while giving moral support, not leave at least the initial heavy lifting against IS to Iraq’s fellow Arab countries and Turkey who are far more threatened than we are?

    And would Australia not make a greater contribution to the IS question by being at the forefront of the campaign to help the displaced victims than to provoke a threat to its own people and way of life by our ‘minimal’ military involvement?

    After all, IS had never threatened Australia until we joined the coalition. Its sole initial purpose was to create a Sunni caliphate and victimise anyone in the region who disagreed. But it seems old loyalties and habits will win out and Australia has probably gone beyond the point of no return in arming the RAAF fighters now poised for action at their UAE base.

    FOOTNOTE: When I returned to Australia in 1985 after living in security-conscious London and New York even then, I was enchanted by a Sunday afternoon scene on Sydney harbour. There were people in boats and yachts alongside a submarine in the old Neutral Bay base and sailing next to warships at Garden Island with no attempts to stop them. They were carefree days when truly there were ‘no worries’.

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign tv news.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • John Tulloh. Islamic State – The Saudi Connection.

    How ironic it was that last week Saudi Arabia should host a meeting between the foreign
    ministers of the Arab League and U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, to discuss what to
    do about the growing crisis about Islamic State (IS). The fact is that IS is inspired by
    Salafism, a small branch of Islam sponsored by Saudi Arabia. What’s more, it is said to
    have got plenty of its money from Saudi supporters.
    Salafism represents only about three percent of the world’s Moslems. It eschews modern
    morality and the accepted ways of 21st century life. It wants what it regards as a pure form
    of Islam which is really what applied in medieval times. It supports sharia laws long
    abandoned by most Moslems. Within the space of a fortnight last month in Saudi Arabia 19 people were beheaded, nearly half of them for non-violent crimes. That may be why IS
    adherents apparently regard this as the norm and acceptable practice.

    The Saudis find themselves in a terrible dilemma. King Abdullah wants his country to move forward from some of its questionable practices, such as its strict dress code, zealous religious police and suppression of women’s rights, and put an end to cruel movements like IS. But he is a prisoner of the Salafi clerics.

    ‘The king is a moderniser’, says Ed Husain, a Moslem and adjunct senior fellow at the
    Council on Foreign Relations in the U.S. ‘But he and his advisers do not wish to disturb the
    270-year-old tribal pact pact between the House of Saud and the founder of Wahhabism,
    an austere form of Islam close to Salafism. It is time to nullify that 1744 desert pact’.
    Easier said than done, of course. While compromise is always possible in political matters,
    it is out of the question when it comes to deep-rooted religious extremism.
    Saudi Arabia faces another dilemma: What to do? It has already outlawed IS, has donated
    $100 million to the United Nations to help with counter-terrorism, has banned public and
    private donations to support IS (though they still happen) and has signed up to the U.S.-
    led campaign to destroy IS. But the extent of that support is unclear. All U.S. officials would say was that the Saudis have agreed to provide bases for the training of moderate Syrian rebels fighting both the Assad regime in Damascus and IS militants in their country.
    The U.S. is reluctant to push Saudi Arabia when for so long it has been an ally of
    Washington, never mind its vast oil wealth and the influence that goes with it plus it being
    greatest customer of American defence companies. Three years ago it signed the biggest
    defence contract in history – $60 billion worth of weapons. Indeed Washington tends to tip-toe around sensitive matters in its relationship with Saudi Arabia. It continues to suppress 28 pages of the report of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into the September 11 attacks because, it is speculated, they contain evidence of Saudi complicity in the terrorist strikes.
    Even though John Kerry has Saudi Arabia and nine other Arab states on board to crush IS,
    it is hardly a case of ‘Here comes the cavalry’. They are mainly all Sunni countries which
    do not want to risk disaffecting their people over a Sunni movement no matter how evil
    they regard it. They will do their best to blacken the name of IS, choke off funding to it,
    curb local support and punish countrymen who have joined the movement. The rest will be left to the U.S. and its traditional allies, including Australia. Arab states usually are reluctant to go to war. The last incident among them of any kind was in 2011 when a popular uprising in Bahrain threatened the dynastic regime there. Saudi Arabia despatched its national guard, the Emiratis sent their police forces and Kuwait assigned its gunboats to patrol the Bahrain coastline. The uprising was put down and the U.S. with its large naval presence there no doubt felt relieved.

    For the Saudis, their most immediate concern is combatting the terrorist threat within,
    including the Yemen-based al-Qaeda. They are also on the lookout for plots to assassinate
    religious and Government officials as urged by Saudi IS members fighting in Syria.
    They might also start quietly removing textbooks from schools and universities which teach Salafism. Next they could tackle the university in the holy city of Medina which, according to Ed Husain, recruits students from around the world to indoctrinate them in ‘the bigotry of Salafism’ with the aim to spread the word back in their own countries.
    IS today has an estimated 30,000 active followers on the Iraqi and Syrian battlefields.
    Australia, now that we are plunging back into this dangerous and unpredictable region,
    should be ready for the long haul and the greater risk to our way of life. This crisis has all
    the elements of a long-running one.
    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news.

  • John Tulloh. Canberra’s fork in the road – the humanitarian way or the warpath?

    What interesting, fraught and changing times we live in. This month marks the 75th anniversary of the start of World War Two. Britain and France with little ado told Germany to get out of Poland or else. Three days later King George VI made a radio speech to the British nation that good must prevail. Robert Menzies, the Australian Prime Minister, did his ‘melancholy duty’ via ABC radio and without further ado off went the men of both countries to war again. It all seemed so straight forward.

    But today we face another fearful dilemma about another occupying force:  how to handle the Islamic State (IS) insurgents whose barbaric behaviour in Iraq has been as evil as that of the Nazis. The need for humanitarian assistance by the West for IS’s victims required no debate. But then what? Another invasion was out of the question, of course. But clearly, IS cannot be left unchecked when its followers roam elsewhere in Iraq like primitive bandits imposing their brutal rule in the name of Islam.

    Other Arab countries have shown little or no interest in intervening, while Iraq’s own army appears not up to the task despite the billions of dollars the U.S. spent in training them. That leaves the West. In fact, it’s the West’s biggest and most acute predicament: how do what are essentially Christian democracies deal with Islamic extremism?

    Tony Abbott has been characteristically cautious in discussing any plans beyond the humanitarian air drops in conjunction with other Western countries and now the delivery of military supplies to friendly forces. But he has confirmed what is obvious: that he has already discussed with Washington a wider military role.

    Mr Abbott might care to refresh himself about what happened in the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq invasion. Neither conflict incurred Australian casualties as a result of warfare. The Gulf War was a UN-sanctioned operation to drive Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait which they had invaded the previous year. Bob Hawke, the Australian Prime Minister then, restricted our involvement to helping patrol the Persian Gulf and demining operations.

    In 2003, Mr Abbott’s mentor, John Howard, was in charge and more accommodating of Washington’s interests., He kept the public and the media guessing right up to the last minute. Once he had decided or rather confirmed that we would join President George W. Bush’s plan to invade, Australian SAS troops were operating in western Iraq with considerable success two days before the bombing of Baghdad began.

    Our intention to be part of the coalition of the willing was never in doubt despite all the ducking and weaving by Mr Howard. A few weeks before the invasion, the Sydney Morning Herald, ran a memorable cartoon showing an enthusiastic George Bush waving his Stetson and a grinning Tony Blair aboard a rocket bound for Baghdad with an alarmed-looking John Howard sitting on the tail and saying something to the effect of ‘Seriously, though, we haven’t decided yet’.

    Greg Sheridan, the well-connected foreign editor of The Australian, is in little doubt in the current case. He says Canberra is ‘considering deploying SAS soldiers, F18 Super Hornet jet fighters and sophisticated airborne early warning and control aircraft as part of a military contribution to US-led efforts in Iraq’. Here we go again.

    Our military involvement to date has been the delivery of weapons to the Kurdish militia, the peshmerga (‘One who faces death’). The U.S. are looking to these fierce fighters as a kind of first line of defence in Northern Iraq where IS followers have been rampant.

    Then what? How will the West deal with IS units terrorising communities elsewhere in Iraq? The era of ground troops is over. The new battles are being fought from the sky by warplanes and drones. As the Americans discovered 40 years ago over North Vietnam during that war, relying on just bombing is a futile exercise.

    The most the West could hope for is to drive IS followers back into their original sanctuary, Syria. Then what? You can almost imagine President Obama saying ‘I wish I knew’ when to date he’s had no idea how to deal with Syria and its nasty Assad regime. It would widen the conflict with who knows what consequences for Australia as well as the other participants.

    James Brown, a former Australian military officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and is now a fellow of the Lowy Institute, claims that Mr Abbott is using the military as ‘a tool of international policy’. He cited not only the Iraq developments, but now Australia’s startling involvement with faraway Ukraine. He told ABC radio that staff in the Prime Minister’s office are talking about an Abbott doctrine. ‘It’s a doctrine that’s reactive, it’s a doctrine that leads with the military and it’s a doctrine that’s very values driven’.

    For now Abbott’s biggest worry is the possibility of jihadists slipping through the cracks with the potential to cause mayhem to our safe and comfortable way of life. There is also the unthinkable: a fellow Australian – a media person, an NGO or even a soldier – being taken prisoner and beheaded. However, Mr Abbott can take some comfort from the fact that the overwhelming Moslem community in Australia feel the same way about IS as he does.

    The conflict has thrown up some developments which future historians will pore over.

    One is that the Kurds, having been ignored by the West for years, cannot believe their good fortune in finally being the centre of favourable attention and in such demand. But they know there will be a limit to the West’s attention lest their long-held ambitions for an independent homeland lead to the break-up of Iraq.

    Another is the steady exodus of Christians from the Middle East where they have existed since the first century. Many are fleeing brutal oppression, such as from IS. Others see little future when sectarian differences and hostility dominate daily life. It is estimated that the region’s 12 million Christians will drop to 6 million by 2020.

    For Mr Abbott, he now has more rapidly changing developments than ever before to take into account in determining Australia’s future direction in foreign matters. While still playing a humanitarian role anywhere, it might be safer and more practical to focus on where our future really lies – East Asia.

    FOOTNOTE: In late 2002, the notoriously secretive Defence Dept in Canberra called a meeting of all media representatives to discuss accreditation in the event of a potential conflict, i.e. the looming Iraq invasion. The rules had been drawn up by a leading Australian legal company for some bizarre reason. They included censorship of all news reports. So much for ‘live’ reporting. The location of the UAE base where RAAF jets might be stationed was never to be mentioned despite them presumably being visible to passers-by. Violators of the rules would have their accreditation revoked. All this was part of what was code-named ‘Operation Chad’. As the RAN was also involved, the brigadier in charge of the briefing was asked why such a name was chosen. ‘Why not?’ he replied as if this were a stupid question. Chad is land-locked, he was informed. He still look puzzled. Needless to say, the media were unanimous in rejecting the terms of accreditation.

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news.

  • John Tulloh. The Grief and Pain of Life in Gaza.

    ‘Gaza is a tragic place’, observed John Lyons, The Australian’s Middle East correspondent, the other day. It certainly is. Gaza must be one of the worst places in the world in which to live or at least try to survive. For starters, its population of more than 1.7 million long-suffering Palestinians has to live in an area of just 365 sq km. Compare that with Sydney’s 12,145 sq km. They have no control over their Mediterranean waters or their air space. That belongs to Israel. Israel, along with Egypt, controls who and what come in and out, making it as some see it the occupying power even though it officially disengaged from there in 2005.

    The people of Gaza live under the rule of Hamas which has done little to advance their economic prospects. While Hamas was democratically elected, its leaders have shown scant concern for the well-being of the electorate. They have mounted relentless rocket attacks on neighbouring Israeli towns and other Jewish targets, knowing full well the deadly consequences. The Israel Defence Force website tracks the number of rockets launched. Since Hamas came to power in 2006 the total is a figure many Australians would find hard to comprehend as part of our daily life: 11,687.

    Three times in the past six years, Israel has been sufficiently provoked to go to war against Hamas with punishing and lopsided results for Gazans as we are witnessing at present. For them, that means Israeli shells whistling in from tanks on the sand dunes along the border or warships off the coast or missiles from the air. Homes are destroyed or blown up in an instant. So are what normally would be thought to be safe places for Gazans to seek shelter, such as schools, mosques, hospitals and even refugee camps. Currently, the U.N. says 167,000 Gazans are displaced.

    Israel says it targets only sites which it claims Hamas uses to store rockets or from which to fire them. It tries to warn residents in the vicinity that an attack is just minutes away. While this may be noble in the absence of rules in today’s warfare, the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem says more than half the Gazan dead are innocent civilians. The total Gaza death toll in the current offensive is more than 1350 as well as 56 Israeli soldiers and three civilians. The Gaza Health Ministry says the number of injured is 6000. Who knows what the long-term trauma might be for Gazans, not to forget those Israelis having to live with the constant threat of rockets hitting them.

    Gazans may well hope that the U.S. will arrange a settlement to bring them peace. John Kerry, the Secretary of State, mishandled the talks to try to achieve that, according to many observers. He has virtually walked away from them now, much to the satisfaction of hardline Israelis. President Obama urged Benjamin Netanyahu to cease the Israeli bombardment. The Israeli leader simply ignored him and increased the attacks just as he did with the same plea from the U.N. Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon. It is yet another example of  Washington’s influence in foreign affairs counting for so little these days, even with one of its closest allies.

    It also must be yet another cause for disillusionment by Gazans. Some may even hark back to the days when Israel occupied their tormented land. The economy was much better then, thanks in part to the 9000 Israelis who settled there. They brought industry and agriculture, creating hundreds of jobs. But the settlers were evicted when Israel relinquished control of Gaza in 2005.

    When Hamas came to power in 2006, the U.S. and the European Union refused to recognise it and suspended direct aid. They regarded it as a terrorist organisation. Hamas had to rely on aid from friendly countries like Turkey, Qatar and Iran.Then Hamas and Fatah, which controlled the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority umbrella, fell out. This led to more distress for Gazans: power struggles and Palestinians (Gazans) killing each other – 600 no less.

    Next, Israel imposed economic blockades in response to Hamas rocket attacks. Egypt, which controlled the south-west border, joined in because of suspected connections between Hamas and terrorist groups operating in the Sinai. All this led to shortages of fuel, urgently-needed medical supplies and cement and building materials. At times the border was closed altogether, preventing Gazans carrying out employment in Israel. At one stage, they had no power for seven weeks. In fact, this week’s Israeli bombardment has knocked out the power station again.

    But Gazans were not without ingenuity. They dug tunnels from Egypt in particular to smuggle in all manner of supplies, including rockets. Emboldened, they also dug a network of tunnels to infiltrate Israel. Given Israel’s record of security vigilance, it is astonishing that the tunnels managed to escape detection. Their discovery further inflamed Israel, resulting in the ferocity of its current action to destroy them along with Hamas’ weapons arsenal.

    The chances of a permanent settlement are remote. Israel says it is determined to crush Hamas and would not consider any deal until its foe was fully disarmed. Hamas says it has no interest in any deal with conditions. Indeed it would be contrary to its whole raison d’être of wanting to drive Israel from occupied land. So for now we can expect a continuation of those distressing images of anguish and tears as Gazans learn of the deaths of their loved ones and return to what is left of their homes and of Israelis as they bury their soldiers and run for cover when sirens alert them of another Hamas rocket on its way.

    The overwhelming military might of Israel and its destructive deeds against its comparative Dad’s Army neighbour have been a disaster for the Jewish state’s international image. It has provoked ugly attacks of anti- Semitism, especially in Europe. But a poll shows that the overwhelming majority of Israelis are in favour of the offensive against Hamas.

    Wars have never brought genuine peace to the Middle East. They never will, given the deep historic, cultural and religious differences. The antagonists have created so much hostility among themselves that the likelihood of any enduring peace settlement is remote and the cycle of violence will continue its terrible toll.

    FOOTNOTE: In 1972, five years after Israel drove out the Egyptian forces and began its occupation of Gaza, I visited the territory. I was amazed to encounter a small factory where Gazans were making Israeli military uniforms. ‘Why not?’ someone said. ‘We need jobs’. Nothing has changed except the relaxed atmosphere in Gaza then is anything but today.

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news.

  • John Tulloh. Iraq’s road to disintegration.

         As far-fetched as this scenario was until recently, it is just possible that international governments may one day face an unprecedented dilemma: whether to recognise a caliphate as an independent country. The newly-declared Islamic State (IS) – formerly the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) – is indicating it is separate to the Baghdad and Damascus regimes. It is its own state, though the U.S. has scoffed at the very idea. Then again, there is growing indecision in Washington in how to deal with these unwelcome developments.   

    The IS jihadists have overrun and carved out a sizable chunk of land straddling the Iraqi and Syrian border for themselves and scrapped the border itself. Welcome to IS. Both countries may decide they have enough problems as it is without trying to crush this act of geographical hijacking. More than three years on, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria is still fighting rebels elsewhere in his country, while Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki is beset by jihadists running rampant in his disintegrating nation.

    IS, of course, has no history in governance let alone a currency. The only law which concerns it is Sharia. Initially, its interpretation of the Islamic legal code has been harsh and brutal with beheadings, crucifixions and the mass execution of Iraqi soldiers. It has even banned smoking.

    Curiously, no one has any idea where its leader is or really what he looks like apart from a fuzzy photo. Shades of Mullah Omar, the elusive Taliban leader in Afghanistan! The caliphate leader is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, now renamed Caliph Ibrahim. He has been rumoured to be in either Syria or Iraq. He is said to lead his followers from the front on the battlefield and to be a smart tactician. With a $10 million bounty on his head, he will certainly be making sure he’s well out of sight of snooping U.S. drones.

    We have had nothing in modern times to compare our relations with a caliphate. The last one – belatedly enshrined in the Ottoman Empire’s constitution – was abolished by Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk in 1924.

    Caliph Ibrahim may have trouble explaining on what basis he was entitled to such a title. A caliph means ‘successor’ and for the Sunnis like him that is supposed to mean being chosen by the Moslem community. As far as we know, his only authority is as leader of a fearsome terrorist group – ISIS – which usurped the standing of al-Qaeda.

    That aside, the fact is that IS is under the rule of an extreme Sunni fanatic who, like most religious zealots, probably has a closed mind and is beyond persuasion to look at life differently, especially towards Shiites. But at least he has tempered the actions of his followers in some areas under his control for fear of alienating all Sunnis.

    Even so, daily life in the area which represents IS must be nerve-wracking for those residents who haven’t fled because of the draconian new Sharia rules. Tourek Masoud, an Islamic scholar at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, says the concept of a caliphate is not something most Moslems think about. ‘The majority of Moslems and the majority of Arabs generally accept the legitimacy of the nation-states they inhabit’, he says.

    Caliph Ibrahim is surprisingly well set up. He has plundered military bases of equipment and looted banks of gold and cash. He already pumps oil to customers and is even reported to sell electricity to the Assad regime which his group is trying to overthrow. He gets income from taxes and is said to be running mafia-like activities in the areas under his control.

         He may find himself presiding over a rump state as Iraq and Syria are too preoccupied with other pressures and may care little about losing some desert territory even if it is festering with terrorists. As it is, IS jihadists have a foothold elsewhere in Iraq.

    So what to do? Popular opinion is to start by getting rid of Prime Minister al-Maliki and replace him with a respected figure who will reach out to the Iraqi Sunnis. Al-Malaki, a Shiite, is loathed by them for neglecting their interests and ridding the government and military of their numbers. An IS spokesman once dismissed him as ‘an underwear merchant’. He is running for a third term as PM and showing no signs of wanting to step down for the good of his stricken country. Finding a suitable replacement is unlikely.

    That may well lead to a wholesale conflict between the Sunnis and Shiites, even more refugees and the disintegration of Iraq as we know it. The Shiite majority would remain concentrated in the oil-rich southern half and the Sunni minority would share the northern half with the Kurds. Indeed the Kurds might want to exploit the chaos to form their long-sought independent homeland to supersede their current autonomous region. They and Turkey – unlikely partners not too long ago – might then form a buffer to protect the northern approaches to Iraq.

    Viewing all this with alarmed interest will be not only the U.S., but also Iran, the most powerful of the Shiite states. Both countries might astonish themselves by realising they now share common interests just as Washington once did with Saddam Hussein in Iraq’s war against Iran.

    All this is not the fault of George W.Bush and his allies who invaded Iraq in 2003. We should blame Mark Sykes, a young British politician, and François Georges-Picot, a former French official in Beirut. Back in 1916, with the Ottoman Empire tottering, they agreed to break up the Levant to suit Western goals. They drew a diagonal line across the region and divided the empire between their countries, creating artificial states irrespective of religious, tribal and cultural differences.

    As far as Australia is concerned, we might be relieved that our nearest Moslem nations, Indonesia and Malaysia, have never been under the influence of a caliphate. The closest has been the introduction of Sharia law in Indonesia’s Aceh province in Sumatra.

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news.  

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • John Tulloh. Misery accomplished in Iraq as disintegration threatens.

    Perhaps dictators have their place after all. Saddam Hussein presided over Iraq for 24 years. While he was cruel and vainglorious, he generally succeeded in ensuring Iraqis stayed in line and kept the peace. He was toppled in 2003 when the U.S., with the support of Australia and other allies, invaded the country with the aim of introducing democracy and an altogether more acceptable way of life. Today his country is unravelling with astonishing speed as a small Islamic extremist group takes control of large areas with impunity. Iraq could be even on the verge of disintegration.

    Since the 2003 invasion, by the most conservative estimate, half a million people have lost their lives. They have been killed as the result of fighting throughout the country, religious violence, executions, lawlessness, random bombings and widespread other terrorism. Hundreds of thousands of people have been uprooted and forced to flee for their lives to seek refuge elsewhere in Iraq or other countries.

    President George W.Bush called the initial bombing of Baghdad a ‘shock and awe’ campaign and within six weeks proudly declared ‘mission accomplished’. Given the results 11 years on, it has proved to be as shocking and awesome on any scale of political and humanitarian disasters.

    It is all the more so when you consider the calamity now facing the Iraqi government with the fall of its second largest city, Mosul, to Islamic insurgents, who are said to be heading in the direction of Baghdad. Now Kirkuk in the north has been taken over by the Kurds who might see this as an opportunity to establish their long-desired independent homeland.

    It is a catastrophic setback for a weakened regime still trying to establish itself. That a movement – the Islamic State in Iraq in Syria (ISIS) – of said to be less than 10,000 fighters could take over a city of more than 1,500,000 people and intimidate the security forces there to shed their uniforms and flee is the humiliating reality of the state of Iraq today.

    ISIS declared it had come to ‘liberate’ Mosul. It hoisted its flag over the city. It was no colourful, reassuring victorious pennant. It was a sinister flag in the grim black and white style of the piratical skull and crossbones. Little wonder when reports said that half a million Mosul residents had fled the city. They had good reason.

    As relatively small as it is, ISIS already controls other parts of Iraq and reports says it has enforced its rule with a reign of terror, including assassinations, beheadings and amputations. It is so extreme that even its former partner. al-Qaeda, severed ties. It is reported to have attracted the interest of hundreds of foreign fighters eager to support its ambitions.

    It is a force which started in Iraq as part of al-Qaeda before splintering. It then moved into Syria during the uprising against the Damascus regime. It had no interest in working with other rebel groups in overthrowing Bashar al-Assad, but simply wanted to establish an Islamic state there. Now, with ISIS back in Iraq in a big way, it wants to eliminate the border with Syria altogether to form one state, hence its name.

    It is an unwelcome crisis for President Barack Obama whose cautious, tip-toeing foreign policy has been heavily criticised. After initial threats to take action in Syria, he decided that the tragedy there could somehow take care of itself without US involvement. But after what has transpired in the past 11 years in Iraq since the initial shock and awe and now a terrorist body of potential mass destruction and misery roaming the desert landscape, does the U.S. have any moral obligation to rescue what it created?

    Washington certainly wouldn’t want to revisit its military occupation which cost its own forces 4500 lives. Iraq has a weak and almost helpless government. Its parliament cannot even raise a quorum at a time of grave emergency. It faces rising tensions between the dominant Shiites in Baghdad and the Sunnis whom ISIS supports. Its troops seemingly have no will to do their duty. Mosul and Kirkuk, both important commercial hubs, are lost for now. And the billions of dollars the U.S. has spent on training and equipping the Iraqi military have proved a dubious investment.

    But what can the U.S. and its Western partners do? President Obama says the U.S. is considering all options short of sending in ground troops. That probably will be limited to what the U.S. can do from the air. Tony Abbott, ever eager to please, is not ruling out Australian involvement.

    So while the policy-makers wonder what to do next, spare a thought for the innocent victims of this upheaval who so often are forgotten. The estimated 500,000 Iraqis who’ve fled Mosul join four million other Iraqi refugees around the world, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. UNHCR says nine million Syrians have had to flee their homes since the uprising three years ago. About 2.5 million of them – more than the population of Brisbane – are sheltering in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and even Iraq. Their future is even more uncertain now.

    The Iraqi and Syrian borders were drawn up by Britain and France after World War One and the collapse of the Ottoman empire. Who knows, nearly 100 years on, current events may force cartographers to have to change their atlases with new borders.

    A poetic postscript: Mosul, famed for its muslin fabric, is on the Tigris River on the opposite bank from the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh. Once upon a time, every Australian schoolchild learned John Masefield’s poem ‘Cargoes’. Its first verse was:

    Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,

    Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,

    With a cargo of ivory,

    And apes and peacocks,

    Sandalwood, cedarwood and sweet white wine.

    If only a tiny semblance of that charming scenario were so today.

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • John Tulloh. Egypt’s new would-be Pharaoh.

    The headline in The Australian was stark and brutal: SISI VOWS TO ERADICATE BROTHERHOOD. Eradicate? This is a word you associate with efforts to get rid of a disease or an agricultural pest. But in this case it was meant as a kind of cleansing of religious adherents and caused barely a ripple of protest outsider Egypt.

    The story, of course, referred to Egypt’s new strongman, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who has won this week’s presidential election. He says one of his first tasks will be to suppress the Moslem Brotherhood out of existence. His interim government has already declared it a terrorist group.

    The Moslem Brotherhood has been an organisation long feared by Egypt’s leaders because of its shadowy presence like an underground movement and yet having enough support for effective political influence. It demonstrated that in 2011 when it won almost a majority of seats in parliament and in 2012 when its candidate, Mohamed Morsi, won the presidential election with 51% of the vote. This was a stunning result given that the Moslem Brotherhood had virtual illegal status for six decades.

    All that came to an end last July when al-Sisi staged a military coup and ousted Morsi, who has been under arrest ever since. Huge protests in support of Morsi followed which the military ruthlessly put down. More than 600 people died, said to be the worst mass killing in modern Egyptian history.

    The Moslem Brotherhood was founded in 1928. It favoured Sharia law and wanted Egypt to be governed according to the teachings of the Koran. Within 20 years it had an estimated two million members.

    But it was long regarded as a pest to Egyptian authority. It has been accused over the decades of murders, assassinations, bombings, arson attacks and plots, which is why it has been for so long been treated as a threat from within. Yet it also has been associated with charity work in a country with endemic poverty.

    Al-Sisi in an interview earlier this month said the Moslem Brotherhood was ‘finished’. Asked if it would cease to exist if he were elected president, he was quoted as saying ‘Yes, just like that’. Eradicated! Most of the Brotherhood’s political leadership has been imprisoned or fled the country. Any sign of support, real or imagined, is harshly dealt with as Australian journalist Peter Greste and two Al-Jazeera colleagues have discovered. They have been locked up for five months without a shred of evidence against them.

    Many Egyptians are hoping al-Sisi can provide some welcome stability. Egypt has become a dystopia. The once booming tourist industry has collapsed because of unrest. The enormous bureaucracy still toils in a pre-computer era.  Essential and social services are in disarray. Unemployment is rampant and the outlook is not only grim, but ripe for unrest.

    According to the Egyptian author, Thanassis Cambanis, al-Sisi wants to restore Egypt’s standing as the most powerful country in the Arab world. He (al-Sisi) thinks only one institution can do this: the military. This recalls the 50s and 60s when another former army officer, Gamal Abdel Nasser, ruled the country and was the most powerful of all Arab leaders.

    Cambanis, writing in Time magazine, says: ‘According to advisers who’ve heard his private comments, al-Sisi wants Egypt to project power in the region, rather than be seen as a basket case that can be manipulated by the oil sheikhs in the Gulf’.

    If al-Sisi really does want Egypt to assert its former military muscle, he might have an opportunity beyond the country’s borders. Ethiopia is building a dam on the Blue Nile – part of Egypt’s lifeblood – and, if al-Sisi sees this as a threat to his citizens’ fresh water supply, he may see that as a just cause for military action.

    What of the Moslem Brotherhood? Ashraf Khalil, a Cairo journalist and author, says if it has any hope of playing a future political role, ‘it needs to acknowledge – to itself and the rest of Egypt – that its downfall was partially its own fault. Through a combination of arrogance, incompetence and ham-fisted politics, Morsi and the Brotherhood managed to systematically alienate every potential ally they had’.

    Whatever displeasure the West has felt at a democratically-elected government being overthrown has been muted. Under the Foreign Assistance Act, the U.S. is supposed to reduce or suspend aid to guilty regimes. But little has happened apart from delaying the delivery of some Apache helicopters. No doubt this is because Egypt can be counted on to curb terrorism and has been a steadfast supporter of Western interests, thanks in part to its military and economy relying so much on Washington’s aid.

    In the months and years ahead, you can be sure that Egypt’s formidable security apparatus will be closely monitoring sermons in the mosques for any sign of dissent. As it is even today, the clerics are supposed to follow official government advice of what sermon topics are acceptable.

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • John Tulloh. The way to the future through annexation.

    Annexation, as in the latest example of Russia with Crimea, usually refers to a smaller entity being swallowed up by a bigger one. It has a long history with both violent and peaceful outcomes. A recent example is East Jerusalem which Israel took over after the Six-Day War in 1967, resulting in enmity ever since. Before that was the Anschluss in 1938 when Hitler declared Austria to be part of Nazi Germany. Not long afterwards he annexed Sudetenland, a German-speaking area of Czechoslovakia, precipitating the road to World War Two. In 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor and announced it had annexed it, much to the disquiet of its residents.

    It may surprise some that Hawaii and Texas became part of the U.S. as a result of annexation in the 19th century. Texas had been a northern state of Mexico until a majority of its people favoured joining the U.S and got the blessing of Congress to do so. Hawaiians had little say in the matter. The Americans overthrew their Queen and made Hawaii part of the U.S. for strategic and trade reasons.  In 1910, Japan annexed Korea. In 1914, Britain added Cyprus and Egypt to its Empire, taking both from the Ottomans with whom it was at war.

    In 1961, Goa, the Portuguese colony on the west coast of India, was forcibly absorbed into the newly-independent country. In formal terms, it was annexed, but India has always insisted it was ‘liberated’. It has similarities with with Crimea. Both are small specks in the overall geography of their regions. Crimea has a Russian-speaking majority who voted overwhelmingly to become part of Russia. In 1961, nearly two-thirds of Goa’s population was Hindu just as they were the overwhelming majority in India. Goa had been in Portuguese hands since 1510. Crimea became part of Russia in 1783 when Catherine the Great actually annexed it until the Soviet Union ceded it to one of its states, Ukraine, in 1954.

    The reasons for both takeovers were mainly strategic. In its latest move, Russia clearly wants to protect its naval access to the Black Sea and to the Mediterranean. In the case of Goa, India was worried by the likely consequences of the 1955 CENTO pact (Central Eastern Treaty Organisation) consisting of Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey and Britain with the U.S. taking a keen interest on the sidelines.

    The distinguished Indian newsman, Prem Prakash, who covered the Goa takeover, recalls:

    ‘With the prospect of Goa, the only natural harbour along the vast western coast of India, possibly becoming a military base of the U.S.-led CENTO which could bring Pakistan forces there, India became alarmed. India’s hawks and anti-U.S. lobbyists led by Krishna Menon, the then Defence Minister, started pressurising (Prime Minister Jawaharlal) Nehru to take pre-emptive action’.

     Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, wanted to see if the matter could be resolved peacefully. But the Portuguese Prime Minister and dictator, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, said Goa was non-negotiable because it was part of metropolitan Portugal.

    India began building up its forces around Goa. Portugal tried to rush warships there, but President Nasser of Egypt refused them access to the Suez Canal. That was because India and Egypt had just become founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement. Portugal then tried to provide reinforcements through its air force only for its planes to be denied overflying or refuelling rights. A civilian charter did get through. Portuguese soldiers, expecting to find hand grenades, instead found sausages for their consumption.

    Salazar demanded his hopelessly-outnumbered  troops in Goa fight until the last man. They ignored him. The result was that India took control of Goa within a day with minimal casualties. Later the Portuguese governor was tried for treason.

    Just as happened with the Crimea takeover, the U.S. rushed to the UN Security Council to protest, while the Soviet Union applauded the action. China, though a vociferous opponent of colonialism and its running dogs, neither condemned nor supported the invasion.

    Prakash says the Indian action was justified in much the same way as the Russian one was. Why, he asks, would India allow the threat of a foreign takeover of a prime naval base just as Russia reasoned much the same about its Black Sea presence after the elected leader of the Ukraine had been overthrown by mob rule tacitly supported by the West?

    Goa became part of India with little trouble and has developed into a prosperous and peaceful international tourist destination. Lisbon still offers Goans Portuguese nationality if they can prove they or their ancestors were born during colonial rule. For Crimea, separation may not be so easy when it depends on the Ukraine for its water and power supplies and has no contiguous border with Mother Russia.

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career covering foreign news.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • John Tulloh. The French at Gallipoli – Lest we not Forget

    A popular myth is that the Gallipoli landings were all about the Australian and New Zealand troops – the Anzacs – with the British somewhere involved, having concocted the unfortunate military adventure.

    But what is so often overlooked is the participation of France in the Gallipoli campaign. It may surprise a lot of people to learn that France suffered more deaths than Australia and New Zealand combined.

    France contributed over 40,000 troops. About 15,000 were killed as against 8141 Australians and 2721 New Zealanders. France has its own war cemetery aptly named Morto Bay, meaning Death Bay.  It has 3236 individual graves and several large ossuaries containing the unidentifiable remains of thousands of militaires. It is maintained with the same devotion and attention as the Commonwealth war graves.

    But France’s participation features only briefly in the comprehensive website of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs dedicated to Gallipoli. It is understandable when the department is there to serve Australian interests. But as an educational instrument it is lopsided in the broad view of Gallipoli.

    That is a pity when the Australian government has budgeted millions to create public interest like never before in recent peacetime to commemorate the centenary next year of Gallipoli and the birth of our most solemn anniversary, Anzac Day.

    The French participation was the result of its politicians rather than its military – hard pressed by the Western Front stalemate – being enthused by opening a new front. This was the British idea of attacking Germany through ‘the back door’, Turkey and its tottering Ottoman empire. They thought it would be a simple exercise to tackle Berlin from there and they could divide the spoils. What’s more, France thought such participation would help maintain its Middle East interests after the war and counter any undue additional British influence in the Mediterranean.

    Needless to say, given the historic enmity between Britain and France, there was much bickering of who would be in charge and who would do what.  From the very start, it was an unequal partnership, wrote Eleanor Van Heyningen, a historian for the Imperial War Museum in London. The British made the decisions under the overall commander, Sir Ian Hamilton.

    In the end, the task of the French troops was to neutralise the Turkish presence on the Asian or eastern side of the narrow Dardanelles Strait to ease the threat to the British-led forces on the European side where Gallipoli is. In fact, of all the Allied objectives on April 25, only one was secured when the French took the the town of Kum Kale, close to the ancient city of Troy.

    But thereafter the French forces encountered fierce resistance in rugged terrain and suffered  casualties on a scale which disturbed their commander. They were not helped by the fact some of their soldiers wore brightly coloured uniforms with red trousers and white hats, making them an easy target, according to Van Heyningen.

    The French troops consisted of Foreign Legionnaires, settlers from North Africa, Senegalese and those from metropolitan France. They met some of the greatest Turkish opposition at Kereves Dere, a place they later called Le Ravin de la Mort, the Valley of Death. This was a ravine which the French had to cross to advance except the Turks had control of the high ground.

    A French medical officer wrote: ‘‘We laid the poor fellows in rows…groans were piteous to hear…bandages soaked in blood, clothes torn to ribbons…ever more wounded arriving’.

    As with the other Allied forces, the French had some later success, including at Kereves Dere, but it proved to be a doomed campaign. It led to embarrassment and unhappiness back in France. Within five months, the French realised the folly of it all and pulled out. It came as no surprise that their new commander did not bother to secure the approval of Hamilton.

    After the war, France did not forget the Gallipoli campaign easily. Van Heyningen writes:

         ‘Gallipoli was the subject of frank public debate and resentment in France. The French had clearly been under the command of the British in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign and so were quick to criticise its organisation, execution and cost. For a time, it was seen as typical British incompetence and willingness to shed Allies’ blood’.

    It should be noted that the British themselves suffered 21,000 deaths at Gallipoli. It should also be remembered that the Indian Army also came ashore there and suffered heavy casualties.

    It is unclear how France will commemorate the Gallipoli centenary, if at all. Given its long history of military victories and losses, especially on its home front in WW1, what happened on the distant shores of the Dardanelles may be regarded as little more than just another bloody chapter in centuries of French military campaigns.

    De peur que nous les oublions. Lest we forget.

     

         John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news, including 15 as the ABC’s first international editor for television news and current affairs.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

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  • Mid-east Journey to Nowhere. Guest blogger: John Tulloh

    I read Marcus Einfeld’s response to my blog regarding Israeli settlements posted on October 16 with both interest and incredulity. It seems that he has grasped my piece as an opportunity to voice his own musings on the question of Israel/Palestinian relations.

    Mine was based on my own personal bewilderment why Israel on one hand says it wants peace, but on the other insists on aggravating the Palestinians by building settlements in disputed land when it has five times as much undisputed territory of its own. To a distant outsider, it doesn’t make sense.

    Mr Einfeld suggests I have come up with ‘instant judgments and simplistic solutions’. Excuse me? I have made no judgments let alone been so naive as to offer solutions. He goes on to claim that for me ‘the only or principal cause’ of the current problems is the question of settlements. I wrote it was ‘one reason’ (my italics).

    He then accuses me of ‘one-sidedness’. I do not understand this when I was merely laying out what were mostly indisputable facts about just one of the many factors in this endless conundrum. The question of settlements has been a recurring theme in news reports for years. An international journalist friend, having read my blog, wrote to me to say: ‘I would like to see you give (your) opinion’.

    Mr Einfeld seems to believe I was – or should have been – writing an overview of the entire Israel/Palestinian question because that was the thrust of his tortuous response. My interest was simply the question of settlements.

    He views it all through rose-tinted glasses, possibly based on his own involvement there in the 80s and 90s when there was a real chance of a deal. Indeed I recall assigning ABC coverage of his much-lauded aid visits to help the Palestinians. He says the overwhelming majority of Israelis want a peace treaty which would involve the ‘evacuation of…the settlements’. In such a case, ‘most of the settlements would be no more than a passing phase of history…’ That may have been an idealism in his late 20th century world when there were far fewer settlements, but the reality in the 21st century is different. After all, why would so many settlers today – 350,000 at the latest count – invest their long-term future in the West Bank if they seriously thought they would be forced to move elsewhere and lose most of their money in return for a two-state settlement? Again, it doesn’t make sense.

    John Lyons in the Weekend Australian of November 2-3 has an article, quoting a Palestinian official, which says 15,000 Palestinians in Jerusalem will be left homeless because their apartment blocks are to be demolished by order of the Jerusalem Council. Meanwhile, the newspaper Haaretz reported that ‘Israel was about to advance construction plans for 5000 new housing units in Jewish settlements’. These are hardly the actions to enhance the prospects of a peace deal which Mr Einfeld says the overwhelming majority of Israelis want.

    In fact, the same article also says: ‘Reports in the Israeli and Palestinian media suggest the talks are collapsing. Both sides are facing strong internal opposition. On the Israeli side, right-wing elements in the Knesset, led by the Minister of the Economy, Naftali Bennett, have made clear their opposition to any Palestinian state’.

    Two other statements in Mr Einfeld’s response require an explanation:

    What was Netanyahu’s ‘shameless role in Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination’? This is a rather extreme accusation.

    Also, what does he mean by ‘They (Palestinian leaders) know that the so-called “right of return” of Palestinians to Israeli coastal areas is a hoax and a cruel play on words used to save Holocaust survivors, with no chance of fulfilment’? I do not understand what he is trying to say.

    I am surprised that a man who has a distinguished reputation as a jurist could be so loose with his claims and statements. I hope you can find room on your blog to note the above

     

     

  • The Mideast Road to Nowhere. Guest blogger: John Tulloh

     

    If ever there were a news story which goes nowhere, it must surely come under the heading of ‘Middle East peace talks’ with specific reference to the Israelis and Palestinians. Google the topic and you will find no less than 84,800,000 references at last count.

    Mediators come and go, the protagonists gather at the White House and Camp David, optimistic speeches are made, governments change, the Oslo accords were agreed, detailed ‘road maps’ reached, fresh initiatives made, the UN has been involved and international leaders have descended on Israeli and the Palestinian capitals with high-minded intentions and yet nothing really changes.

    One reason is the rapid spread of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, both Palestinian territory until the Six-Day War in 1967. The UN, the International Court of Justice and the international community at large, never mind the Palestinians, all regard the settlements as illegal. Israel’s attorney-general back in 2005 actually thought so, too, but two years ago a Jerusalem judicial commission disagreed. They were perfectly legal under international law, according to the three jurists appointed by the government. It was the ideal excuse to accelerate development.

    Pleas, including by US presidents, have been made to put a stop to the expansion in the interests of peace. There have been freezes on construction, but they’ve always been temporary.

    It is widely accepted that the current dispute is a result of the 1967 war when Israel took over East Jerusalem, which it then annexed, and the West Bank. But the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, disagrees. He said only last week that the problem actually goes back to 1921 when Palestinians, hostile to Jewish immigration, attacked a home for immigrants in Jaffa. At least, his reason was a 20th century one rather than the once customary biblical ones given in recent years, namely Israel’s rightful claims to the ancient lands of Judea and Samaria which basically comprise Jerusalem and the West Bank.

    The latest peace talks, brokered by President Barack Obama, have been stalled since 2010 when Netanyahu refused to freeze settlement construction in East Jerusalem. An overall settlement is supposed to involve Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank.

    That is highly unlikely when you consider it already has 121 officially- recognised settlements and a population of 350,000 Jewish settlers. A recent survey said there were more than 55,000 private homes and apartments worth US$13.5 billion. The settlers rely on the Israel Defence Force for their security, surrounded as they are by Palestinian towns and villages and many resentful residents.

    This is clearly an investment by people confident about their long- term future there. Indeed the rate of population growth in the settlements is higher than in Israel itself. Communities elsewhere in Israel complain that they don’t get the same government financial aid as the West Bank outposts do.

    A Palestinian would have to be a supreme optimist to think that he or she has any hope of repossessing now occupied land. Israel has said that claims to East Jerusalem are non-negotiable. Until its annexation, it was the home for thousands of Palestinians. Now it is home for 300,000 Jewish residents.

    One can ask why, if Israel genuinely aspires to peace, it aggravates its neighbour by building so much on disputed land when it has five times as much undisputed land. The fact is that the settlements represent frontline security for Israel. In addition, many settlers are religious fanatics who believe the land was selected by God for them, the chosen people. Try negotiating on that basis!

    Leftist sympathies for the Palestinian cause in previous governments have all but vanished as Israelis, mindful of suicide bombings in recent years and increasingly distrustful of Palestinians, move to the Right in their electoral preferences. The current and recent coalition governments have depended on small Jewish nationalist parties to survive.

    A long-time Jewish foreign correspondent based in Israel told me that most Israelis could not care less about the Palestinians. What’s more, he said, ‘settling the land God gave the Jews, expanding the borders, is an unspoken priority for all Israeli governments’.

    A few years ago, a Palestinian friend, who was born in Israel and speaks Hebrew better than most Jews, told me how she and her family now had a new address at a place near Jerusalem. Innocently, I asked if both Jews and Palestinians lived there. She looked at me in disbelief. ‘Of course not’, she said. ‘Why would you ask such a question?’

    Some things in the Middle East will never change.

    As a postscript, I would add that I was at the birth of this never-ending story, covering the Six-Day War as a young journalist. I recall driving from Tel Aviv and reaching the brow of the hill. There before me, across the valley on the ridge, were scores of whitewashed homes bathed in the afternoon light. It was like a Biblical scene. It was in fact Jerusalem. The only concession to the 20th century was the outline of the Hilton Hotel. Five years later I returned and was shocked to discover the ridge dominated by tall tv aerials and modern architectural eyesores having muscled in among those whitewashed homes. The expansion of the Jewish presence was under way.

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news, including 15 as the ABC’s first international editor for television news and current affairs.

     

  • Israel’s asylum-seeker dilemma. Guest blogger: John Tulloh.

    Like Australia, Israel has a major problem of what to do with asylum-seekers. And, like Australia with our proposed Malaysia solution in 2011, Israeli legislation aimed at curbing the influx has been thrown out by the country’s highest court.

    Those seeking refuge in Israel did not come by boat. They came across the Sinai from Egypt, many having to pay up to $2000 to Bedouin people smugglers. The majority were Sudanese and Eritreans fleeing abusive regimes. They used to fly to Cairo for refuge until police broke up a peaceful demonstration by Sudanese in 2005 and killed 20 of them.

    Last year, with more than 55,000 having reached Israel, there was growing disquiet. The Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called the new arrivals ‘illegal infiltrators’ who threatened the security and identity of the Jewish state.

    Jerusalem decided to act with what was known as the Anti-Infiltration Law. It allowed Israel to detain the asylum-seekers for up to three years without trial. Two detention camps were hastily built – and, like Woomera, the main one is in a desert location. They house more than 1700 people – mainly men, but also women and children – in what social activists call harsh conditions.

    Two weeks ago, the nine members of Israel’s High Court of Justice unanimously ruled the new law illegal because it violated Israel’s law on human dignity and disproportionately impinged on a person’s right to freedom.

    One of the judges, Edna Arbel, noted: ‘We cannot deprive people of basic rights, using a heavy hand to impact their freedom and dignity, as part of a solution to a problem that demands a suitable, systemic and national solution’.

    As welcome as this news was to the incarcerated, they remain locked up at time of writing. The Interior Ministry has 90 days – until mid-December – to review the inmates’ status. The Israeli government is said to be examining other ways of keeping them under detention.

    The governing coalition’s Whip, Yariv Levin, denounced the court decision as ‘insane, breaking all records for anarchy and will turn Israel from a Jewish state into a state belonging to its migrants’. This is hardly likely when Israel has now managed to stem the flow of ‘the illegal infiltrators’.

    Earlier this year, construction of a 230-kilometre fence from Eilat on the Gulf of Aqaba to southern Gaza was completed. This has reduced the unwelcome visitors to a trickle.

    Virtually all the now estimated 60,000 asylum-seekers in Israel remain in a legal limbo. Most have temporary protection visas which have to be renewed every three months.

    Although they entered Israel from Egypt, Israel cannot send them back there because Cairo refuses to rule out returning them to their country of origin, where human rights are questionable. News reports in August suggested that Israel was planning to repatriate them to ‘safe’ African countries in return for military and other specialist aid. Jerusalem has denied this.

    Uganda was mentioned as one such country. Ironically, it was a place which Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, once considered as a site for his Jewish homeland.

    The majority of the asylum-seekers have made their home for now in Tel Aviv’s poorer southern suburbs. They have been subject to the predictable demonizing, including being blamed for criminal activity whereas statistics show that the rate of crime by others is much higher.

    The government provides a range of social services, such as free education for children and free medical care for infants. An emergency medical clinic has been established along with psychiatric services for children.

    But, said Sammy, a 32-year-old Eritrean quoted by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, ‘There is one big problem here – we have no ID, no papers, and no life’.

    Mindful of the persecution of the Jews over the centuries and their need to escape, Israel has long championed the rights of refugees. It helped draft the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol protecting the rights of people fleeing persecution.

    Indeed the Jewish Bible – the Old Testament to Christians – exhorts the faithful to ‘love the stranger as thyself, for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt’.

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news, including 15 as the ABC’s first international editor for television news and current affairs.