Diplomacy & Crisis News

In the summer of 2009, John Anari, a young political activist from the Indonesian region of West Papua, created a Facebook page. He did it using an old desktop computer with a dial-up Internet connection, in a one-room apartment in Manokwari, the provincial capital situated on West Papua’s northeastern coast. The page wasn’t a personal profile. Anari, who prides himself on being tech savvy, had created one of those the year before. The page was the first of what would become several online outposts for the West Papua Liberation Organization (WPLO), a group that Anari had founded to agitate for his homeland’s independence.

 

“Most freedom groups in Papua cannot access the Internet or don’t know how to use it,” Anari, now 35, said recently. “I wanted to show the world Indonesia’s crimes.”

 

On the WPLO page, Anari posted unclassified diplomatic cables related to West Papua’s colonial past, updates from exiled independence activists, and videos of defiant rebel leaders training for armed struggle in remote highland camps. He also shared gruesome photos of West Papuans who reportedly had been beaten, shot, or tortured by the Indonesian security forces that have controlled the western half of New Guinea, the world’s largest tropical island, since 1962. Because foreign journalists and NGOs are rarely granted entry to West Papua and are closely monitored when they are, the page opened a rare, real-time window into one of the bloodiest and best-kept secrets of the South Pacific.

 

As social media does, this window also functioned as a global drive-thru. Anari, who had never traveled outside Indonesia, began cultivating friendships with a motley mix of international sympathizers. To educate them about West Papua, he posted comments about international treaties and resolutions that he described as evidence of the region’s right to independence. Most people who reached out to him pledged moral support or promised to write letters to world leaders on West Papua’s behalf. But a minority of Anari’s new contacts—quixotic adventure seekers, soldiers of fortune, and crackpots claiming to represent foreign armies and intelligence agencies—volunteered a deeper commitment to the WPLO’s mission. To them, Anari emphasized his ambition to build an army from West Papua’s fractious rebel cells. Although he had no formal military training (by day he worked as an IT contractor), Anari presented himself as a man capable of leading a full-blown insurrection.

 

One of Anari’s first online friends credulous of his revolutionary potential was Tom Bleming, a longtime mercenary living in Wyoming. Unlike Anari, Bleming had been everywhere: After serving in Vietnam, the American became a free agent, aiding independence movements and coup plots around the globe. In 1979, he landed in a Panamanian military jail for attempting to blow up Manuel Noriega’s entourage with dynamite and diesel. When Anari contacted him for the first time, via a Facebook message in 2009, Bleming had just returned from a pro bono stint advising and supplying nonmilitary aid to the Karen National Liberation Army, a rebel group in eastern Myanmar. Then 63 and living on veteran disability payments, Bleming was considering retiring. But the West Papuan cause fired the boiler of his moral and military imagination; he later described it to me as his “last hurrah.” Over several years’ worth of messages and phone calls, Bleming offered to help Anari however he could, from making introductions to arms dealers to providing room and board in the United States.

 

By 2014, a room was exactly what Anari needed: He was planning a trip to New York to meet with contacts at the United Nations and with NGOs lobbying the international body. He wanted a base of operations anywhere in the United States, and Bleming offered one with benefits. “The rebel groups in West Papua do not understand modern unconventional warfare,” Anari later told me. “Tom and his friends offered to educate me.”

 

Thanks to Bleming’s financial help, Anari landed in Casper, Wyoming, on an unseasonably warm afternoon in October 2014. Bleming was waiting near the airport, leaning against his beater Oldsmobile that’s plastered with bumper stickers; one bears the silhouette of an AK-47, while another sports Che Guevara’s face. He greeted his guest with military formality: “General Anari, welcome.”

 

Bleming lives in Lusk, an old ranching town about 100 miles southeast of Casper, best known these days for its stagecoach museum, a women’s prison, and an annual pioneer-days re-enactment called the “Legend of Rawhide.” On the drive to Bleming’s house, the pair stopped for lunch at the Ghost Town Fuel Stop & Restaurant. Over bowls of chili, they agreed that the old mercenary would serve as Anari’s unofficial military advisor, as well as his “chief protocol officer,” handling the West Papuan’s security, travel, and scheduling. Bleming invited Anari to stay in Lusk as long as he liked.

 

When I visited Wyoming this January, Anari was in the middle of what became a four-month stay. Our first meeting took place around a flaming oil drum on the rolling prairie; every Sunday, on 80 acres that the former gunrunner owns just beyond Lusk’s town limits, Anari and Bleming burned the trash they’d generated the previous week. Wearing his leather jacket, sunglasses, and military beret, Anari, who also carried a compact pistol, evoked a paunchy Black Panther leader circa 1965, mysteriously transported to the emptiest county in America’s emptiest state. Only the shiny emblem on his beret betrayed his even more unlikely origin. It featured the mascot of the West Papuan rebels, the cassowary: a flightless bird that can grow to 6 feet tall and that has been known to fatally attack humans with its knife-like middle claw.

 

The men’s fireside talk of war and independence was by then familiar to many of Lusk’s townsfolk. Since Anari’s arrival, the pair had discussed martial and diplomatic strategy in the town’s bars, in meet-and-greets with Bleming’s friends—mostly fellow ex-military and mercenary types—and with local journalists. “We’re lining up people to handle everything from refineries to civil aviation, grid, radar,” Bleming proclaimed as the trash blackened.

 

For Bleming, West Papua is more than an injustice. It is a screen for projecting long-held fantasies of winning a good fight on behalf of an oppressed underdog. Outraged by what he sees as the plundering violence of Indonesian rule, Bleming spoke in Patton-esque bursts of bravado. “We’re going to win in Papua. Win faster than anyone thinks,” he insisted.

 

Anari more than tolerated his friend’s theatrical self-assurance; he gently encouraged it. And why not? In Lusk, nothing could stop Anari from role-playing a general on the cusp of certain victory. It was a tempting indulgence, given murky and tragic truths in West Papua. Indonesia’s military is more powerful by magnitudes than the likes of Anari’s planned army could ever become. The country’s strongest allies include the United States, which sees Indonesia as a key economic and military partner in Asia. And far from the commander he aspires to be, Anari is just one self-styled player among many in the disarray of activists and organizations pushing for West Papua’s freedom.

 

“Anari represents a long tradition of the fragmentation and organizational weakness of the independence movement,” said Richard Chauvel, a historian of West Papuan nationalism at the University of Melbourne’s Asia Institute. “These activists that pop up hither and thither—and they’re ‘presidents,’ ‘ministers,’ or ‘generals’—know that West Papua hasn’t had the capacity to threaten Indonesian control at any time since 1963. The more modestly titled activists often have a stronger basis of support in West Papua.”

 

Whatever his true influence, it’s possible that Anari’s winter journey to the United States could place him in danger back home. According to Ed McWilliams, a former political counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesian intelligence regularly monitors critics of the state’s iron grip on West Papua. “[Anari’s] seeming support for armed struggle would make him especially vulnerable to legal or extra-legal retaliation,” McWilliams wrote in an email.

 

But in Wyoming, Anari and Bleming told a very different story, one of an impending, triumphant return. “We can’t tell you the details because they’re classified, but the general has a devastating strategy he’s going to unleash on the Indonesian forces,” Bleming said as the fire died down that January evening. “It’ll be a historic rout. Right, John?”

 

The question caught Anari entranced with a dome of starry sky. He straightened himself and assumed a stern look. “If the world abandons us again, then, yes, we will fight,” he said. “We will kick the Indos out.”

 

“That’s right,” Bleming said. “They won’t know what hit ’em.”

 

The modern history of West Papua is one of uninterrupted foreign domination. In 1824, the British and Dutch East India companies split the island of New Guinea down the middle. Its rich soils and cloud forests provided industrializing Europe with coffee, rubber, spices, and cocoa; its natives offered the enduring tropical “savage” tropes of grass skirts, phallic gourd-sheaths, headhunting, and cannibalism found in Western ethnographies and newspapers of the day.

 

After World War II, the island’s colonial masters began preparing to transfer control to New Guinea’s native Melanesian population, who share physical features and origins with Australia’s Aborigines. On the island’s eastern half, this culminated in the establishment of Papua New Guinea, a free country, in 1975. Meanwhile, on the western half, Indonesia brought the process to a halt when it invaded in 1962. (Jakarta knew that the fledgling state was weak and that it was rich with natural resources.) The Soviet Union made a play for Indonesian allegiance by backing the country’s claim on West Papua. In true Cold War fashion, U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s administration decided to compete for President Sukarno’s loyalty, and America brokered a deal that put West Papua under de facto Indonesian control. In 1965, a military coup placed General Suharto in power. In addition to deepening military ties with Washington, Suharto signed lucrative, long-term development deals with American mining and oil companies. Some of the largest of these projects were in West Papua.

 

In anticipation of statehood, West Papua had begun building a national army. Following the Indonesian invasion, many troops went underground. They established bases under the banner of the Free Papua Movement, or OPM (the acronym for the group’s Indonesian name), including training camps and parade grounds in the mountains. They drilled with spears and arrows, colonial Dutch bolt-actions, and M16s stripped from dead Indonesian soldiers (and some purchased from living ones). Organized into “cassowary battalions,” OPM fighters carried out wildcat strikes on Indonesian troops. Suharto responded by brutally suppressing all independence activity, using assassination campaigns and village-wide revenge sweeps. In 1969, the Indonesian government organized an independence referendum, and the army forced about 1,000 hand-selected West Papuans to cast ballots at gunpoint. The locals voted unanimously against freedom.

 

By the 1970s, many independence leaders were in exile, and thousands of West Papuans had fled to neighboring Papua New Guinea. During the more than three decades that Suharto ruled Indonesia, the OPM maintained a ragtag resistance amid a permanent crackdown. But the violence was largely invisible to the world due to tight travel and media restrictions in West Papua. “Because of the long effort to draw a curtain around Papua, not much is known about the blood bath that has been underway since the early 1960s,” said McWilliams, formerly of the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta.

 

Anari was born behind this curtain in 1979 and raised in Manokwari. Despite family ties to the OPM—he says his father and maternal uncle are both veterans—he was shielded as a child from the dangerous world of rebel activity. “They stopped talking politics when I walked into the room,” he recalled. “I heard only pieces. But I put the pieces together. My uncle could not hide the bullet scar on his stomach.”

 

Anari’s activism began as a teenager, when Internet cafes popped up in local cities. His research into his homeland’s past allowed him to understand the violence around which he’d grown up. “The OPM fighters in the mountains did not know the global politics of why New Guinea got decolonization, and we got recolonization,” he said. “The schools teach only official Indonesian history.”

 

When the Asian financial crisis walloped Indonesia, triggering a wave of violent unrest that forced Suharto from power in May 1998, Anari was a 19-year-old student activist studying computers at a university in Central Java province. He joined the tumult by linking up with other young West Papuans who saw opportunity in the chaos. Anari says he organized protests at the Dutch and U.S. embassies in Jakarta. “The army always attacked us,” he told me. In 1999, he helped found a Papuan student group, the Independent Network for Kejora Action. Its name was a reference to West Papua’s red, white, and blue national flag, known as Bintang Kejora (Morning Star).

 

Simultaneously, the wider independence movement stirred with new life in what became known as the Papuan Spring. On Dec. 1, 1999, two generations of West Papuan activists and fighters, many fresh back from exile, gathered in Jayapura, a provincial capital, to raise the Morning Star in an event that had all the trappings of a state ceremony. OPM soldiers in tribal headdresses and ragged fatigues stood in formation next to black-uniformed members of a new 5,000-member, student-based militia called Satgas Papua (Papuan Task Force). By 2001, pro-independence groups had unified under the leadership of the new Papuan Presidium Council.

 

But even without Suharto in power, the army kept tight control of West Papua, and raisings of the Morning Star often resulted in bloodshed. (In July 1998, in response to a protest involving the flag, Indonesian troops killed scores of West Papuans and dumped their bodies into the sea.) In 2001, Jakarta unleashed units from Kopassus, the country’s special forces command, in a campaign of targeted assassinations and arrests. The clampdown was in full swing by November of that year, when Papuan Presidium Council Chairman Theys Eluay attended a dinner at Kopassus headquarters. Days later, his decapitated corpse was found with its heart carved out. The chief of the Indonesian army publicly hailed the soldiers who committed the murder as “heroes.”

 

“Eluay’s assassination effectively ended the Papuan Spring,” said Chauvel, the historian at the University of Melbourne’s Asia Institute. “The detention of his colleagues further dispersed the reasonably cohesive independence movement.”

 

In the vacuum that emerged, rebels continued to carry out occasional, small-scale attacks on Indonesian forces, while activists fractured into dozens of pro-
independence organizations and coalitions. In July 2002, according to Anari, he founded a new group, more radical and militant than his first one, that sought to unite student activists: the Association of West Papua Indigenous Students and Youth. Six years later, he expanded it to include representatives from armed groups and renamed it the WPLO. Anari had big ambitions for his organization. Abroad, he would use it to build awareness of and international solidarity with West Papua. At home, he would unify rebel factions into a national liberation army. Today, according to its organizers, the WPLO has about 500 members in leadership roles and many thousands in its broader membership. (Its Facebook group had just over 1,600 members as of press time.)

 

But it is no easy task to understand the network of West Papua’s pro-independence groups. The region, which Indonesia split into two legal provinces in 2003 in an effort to dampen rebellious sentiment, contains numerous tribes and dialects. There are also constantly shifting alliances among liberation forces. “The key problem with movement mapping is that membership is fluid,” Nick Chesterfield of West Papua Media, an online news source, noted in an email. “We have been trying to map them accurately for years, but every time we are almost there, it changes.”

 

All this complicates attempts to differentiate influential leaders from poseurs. Anari is no exception to this rule.

 

Anari and Bleming had a regular routine at the old mercenary’s modest, single-story home, which smells of stale cigarettes and whose closets are stuffed with AK-47s, Uzis, and M16s. (A storage room abutting the kitchen is lined with metal ammo boxes stacked four high, the way a retired baker might keep sugar stock.) Anari woke daily around 4 p.m., as Wyoming’s winter light faded and dawn broke over West Papua. He ambled from his sparse guest room to a dining table crowded with maps, printouts, and back issues of magazines such as Working Ranch, Cowboys & Indians, and Guns & Ammo. A Morning Star blocked a nearby window.

 

Bleming served coffee, toast, peanut butter, and bananas. After breakfast, Anari booted up his old Toshiba laptop and spent hours writing and Skyping with activists in the diaspora, as well as comrades in West Papua. His most frequent contact was Ben Kaisiepo, the leader of Kobe Oser (“United”), a Netherlands-based exile group. Anari calls Kaisiepo “Father.”

 

“The general talks to Kaisiepo for hours,” Bleming said one day. “It’s a job just keeping him stocked with Skype gift cards. Man, does he go through those things like butter.” (I reached out to Kaisiepo for this article, but he declined to comment unless I transferred a minimum of 1,000 euros to Kobe Oser’s Dutch bank account. In an email, he wrote that the money would be used for “our important U.N.-lobby work.”)

 

When Anari ventured out to meet with reporters or Bleming’s friends, some of whom opened their checkbooks in support, he wore his fatigues and beret and presented himself as a military chief. “I feel that we will have to resort to armed struggle to win our freedom,” he told the Lusk Herald. Most locals seemed bemused, if not charmed. A woman at the desk of Lusk’s visitors office said, “He seems like a very sweet man, and it’s just awful what’s happening to his people over there.” Others took Anari’s presence less kindly. A red-faced retiree at the Silver Dollar Bar told me the West Papuan had no business in Lusk. “The whole thing is some kind of—frankly, it’s just communist horseshit,” he sputtered.

 

At Bleming’s house one evening, Anari elaborated on his military efforts. The army he is building will eventually have 10,000 rebels, managed through a complex hierarchy down to the village level. Its tactics will combine ancient West Papuan fighting techniques, such as bamboo-arrow archery assaults, with modern guerrilla warfare. “I am preparing them to attack,” he told me bluntly.

 

Ten thousand men, however, is a far cry from any credible estimate of current rebel strength. Leaked Indonesian intelligence reports from the 2000s put the number of active fighters at around 1,000, most still armed with stone-tipped spears, bamboo arrows, and antiquated rifles. “Papua’s rebel forces are tiny,” Chauvel said, “maybe a couple thousand.”

 

Benny Wenda, a prominent, Oxford-based West Papuan exile, similarly downplayed Anari’s talk of a military solution. Wenda’s Free West Papua Campaign advocates an independence referendum to end the crisis in his homeland. He is also the spokesman of the recently formed United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), a coordinating body for several of the larger pro-independence groups. Anari’s organization is not one of them. “The WPLO is just an affiliation group, a small group,” Wenda told me. He noted, “All leaders [of independence factions] have a full mandate to advance the freedom cause. We are very weak at the moment, and it is important that we speak in one voice to demand the right of self-determination, the same as any nation.” In a separate conversation, though, Wenda seemed to reserve the final voice of authority for himself. “If Anari tells you anything,” he said, “call me and I will clarify.”

 

“The situation of ‘who speaks for whom’ has been highly fraught for years,” wrote Chesterfield of West Papua Media. “[M]any people have claimed leadership of the movement, and many groups claim supremacy, such as Anari’s. We call it the ‘I’m the President of the World!’ complex.”

 

In Lusk, there was little talk of competition among West Papua’s pro-independence forces. Rather, Bleming and Anari welcomed company who shared the conviction that a WPLO-led revolution in West Papua is a foregone conclusion. One evening, a wiry man with a bushy gray beard and camo cap pulled low came to the house. His name was R.D. Saathoff. A former Special Forces training officer, he was visiting from his underground bunker in Wyoming’s Red Desert, where he lives six miles from the nearest neighbor. “My specialty is tactical assault,” he said, his words slurred by the absence of several front teeth lost during what he called a “rough weekend” long ago in the jungles of southern Colombia.

 

Bleming served coffee as his friend lectured Anari. “Guerrilla groups often forget key steps and concepts, ya’ see,” Saathoff said. “You have to spend time on target analysis; you don’t want to destroy the house you’re going to have to live in. You don’t blow up the oil tanker—you take out the driver, ya’ see. You don’t take out the bridge—you blow a hole in front of it, so the local people can still use it and you don’t have to rebuild it.”

 

Later, Bleming and Saathoff debated the timetable for Anari’s victory. “I’ll be there for the official surrender this summer,” Bleming said. Anari, in turn, reasserted his commitment to struggle. “Our tactics will surprise the Indonesians,” he said. “We are fierce people.”

 

Neither ferocity nor dining-table strategy sessions, however, can diminish the long odds faced by advocates for West Papua’s freedom. Unlike East Timor and Aceh, two provinces that struggled, to some success, against Indonesian control—the former gained independence, the latter partial autonomy—West Papua has enormous economic value. It is larger than Japan and holds a third of Indonesia’s forest area, including some of Asia’s deepest remaining tracts of virgin rain forest. In the south, a mine owned by the U.S. company Freeport-McMoRan controls some of the Earth’s largest deposits of gold and copper. The region’s waters contain gigantic offshore stores of natural gas. According to McWilliams, “Papua is an important source of income for the military, providing a large portion of its budget…. They’d be very reluctant to let it slip away.”

 

Geopolitics are no more favorable to West Papua’s independence prospects. In 2010, the United States and Indonesia signed a “comprehensive partnership” agreement that ended restrictions on weapons sales and included the transfer of F-16s and Maverick missiles. The deal reflected an alignment of strategic interests over Indonesian power projection in the Pacific. “Relations with Indonesia are increasingly regarded as an important component of the U.S. ‘pivot’ or ‘rebalance’ to Asia,” said Lynn Kyuk, a Southeast Asia specialist at the Brookings Institution. “Indonesia has a strong tradition of nonalignment, but it shares growing concerns about China’s assertiveness in the South China Sea.”

 

In 2013, a coalition of nearly 100 international NGOs urged Washington to block Indonesia’s pending purchase of eight Apache helicopters. The signees had history on their side when they warned, “Providing these helicopters would pose a direct threat to Papuan civilians.” Nonetheless, the deal went through without a hitch.

 

Against this bleak picture, some activists are focused on raising West Papua’s profile as a human rights emergency in hopes of at least mitigating bloodshed. The past several years have seen ongoing political arrests and state violence against indigenous people, intensifying a half-century pattern estimated to have caused 500,000 deaths. Papuans Behind Bars, a civil society monitoring collective in London, estimates that Indonesian police made 369 political arrests in West Papua in 2014, most at peaceful demonstrations. The group recorded 212 cases of reported torture and ill treatment; nearly a third involved members of the West Papua National Committee, a pro-independence group. (Martinus Yohame, a leader of one of the organization’s branches, was abducted and murdered in 2014.)

 

Wenda, of the ULMWP, is on the international front lines of the human rights approach. He has persuaded almost 100 politicians in a dozen countries to join an international parliamentary campaign for West Papuan independence. His personal story is an asset: As a child, Wenda survived numerous Indonesian air raids and witnessed state soldiers kill his aunts and infant cousins. He was arrested during the crackdown on the Papuan Spring, escaped prison, and in 2002 found asylum in Britain. Today, he shares a lawyer with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. In early February, Wenda organized the ULMWP’s application for West Papua to join the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG), an organization based in Vanuatu that promotes the shared interests of small, ethnically bound nations in the South Pacific. Wenda hopes MSG membership would give West Papua an institutional foothold that might allow it to join larger cooperative groups. “We must convince the world we’re united to end Indonesian colonization,” Wenda told me. “For decades, Indonesia has treated us as subhumans.”

 

It may not sound like much, but from solidarity saplings, trees do grow. Jakarta remembers well the explosion of global support for East Timor in the 1990s, which hastened independence. In February, around the same time the MSG application was filed, Indonesia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that it is establishing a task force to shape global opinion of the situation in West Papua. “We have to engage … all instruments involved in the spread of information, including politicians, media, and groups affiliated with separatist organizations,” an Indonesian official told the Chinese news agency Xinhua.

 

Despite his talk of military assaults, Anari is also enamored with diplomacy, and he shifts his tone based on his audience. In 2010, he began communicating with U.N. offices focused on indigenous issues and self-rule. He sent them human rights reports written in broken English, typed on WPLO letterhead featuring elaborate fonts, including one that dripped like the title on a 1950s horror movie poster. The reports began and ended with a request to include West Papua on the agenda of a U.N. General Assembly meeting.

 

A series of events encouraged his efforts. In 2011, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told a reporter that he supported the idea of West Papua being discussed by the U.N. Special Committee on Decolonization, which was created in 1961 to oversee and assist the post-World War II wave of independence movements. In 2012, a U.N. team studying Pacific decolonization also recommended that West Papua be included on the committee’s agenda. (No official decision on the recommendation has been made.)

 

Anari was eager to get to New York. Spurring him on was a new coalition of indigenous movements called the Decolonization Alliance, which in the spring of 2014 opened a small office on the eighth floor of a building at the U.N. Plaza, with support from the World Council of Churches. Ringing the walls are the desks of five members, situated under the flags of each: the Hawaiian Kingdom, the Republic of the South Moluccas, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), the Alaskan Eskimos, and West Papua.

 

Anari had to see with his own eyes this glorious site—a Morning Star hanging a long stone’s throw from the famous First Avenue display of the world’s sovereign flags. (Although the alliance has no formal standing at the United Nations, Anari calls it “the representative office of the Transitional Government of West Papua.”) So in late October 2014, he shed the pseudo-military pomp and circumstance he’d adopted in Lusk and flew to New York. During a three-week trip, he donned civilian clothes, including a white polo shirt with a U.N. logo that he wore with pride. He stayed at a no-frills midtown hotel with funds Bleming had raised.

 

When Anari arrived and sat at West Papua’s desk, he wept. “I felt something must happen now,” he said. “To be at the U.N. was a 52-year struggle for us.”

 

During his visit, Anari was able to speak to Alfred de Zayas, the U.N. independent expert on the right of self-determination. In an email, de Zayas’s spokesperson described the details of the conversation as “not information the Independent Expert would be in a position to share with you.” (In an interview with the online journal Current Concerns, published in December 2014, de Zayas described West Papua as an example of why putting “the right to self-determination into practice” is important; the “fundamental norm of international law constitutes a preventive strategy to avoid armed conflicts.”)

 

In arguably the perfect encapsulation of fact and fiction, of his earnest but limited activism and his superficially militant aesthetic, Anari produced a short documentary about his New York trip in order to share its triumphs with people back home. The film begins with a staged, slow-motion explosion behind a Morning Star, setting the tone of a revolutionary recruitment video. Then it segues lovingly into shots of the West Papuan coast and banal details of the Decolonization Alliance’s office, from a shared kitchen to a bathroom down the hall. Anari is seen on screen happily chatting with de Zayas, and at one point he pans the camera across the General Assembly building and the East River behind it, sparkling in the sun.

 

After layering in a soundtrack, including West Papuan tribal music, Anari posted the video on Facebook and YouTube. As of this writing, it had more than 1,000 YouTube views.

 

Following his New York excursion, Anari returned to his high-plains idyll in Wyoming. Bleming resumed cooking his meals, more guests cycled through to talk shop about insurgencies, and Anari spent time on his Toshiba designing special forces logos for his future liberation army.

 

On my last night in Lusk, I stopped by Bleming’s around midnight to say goodbye. He was sitting in the dark with a cigar, watching a videotape of Fidel, a B-grade Showtime biopic about young Castro. “I watch this movie a lot for inspiration,” Bleming said. “I started off years ago on the far right, but I’ve seen enough poverty around the world to believe people run over by greed should be given their just place in the sun. Fidel was a patriot, just like John over there.” (According to the U.N. Development Programme, the poverty rate in Anari’s homeland is more than double Indonesia’s national average of roughly 11 percent.)

 

Anari, who had been on yet another Skype call with Kaisiepo of Kobe Oser, eventually joined us in front of the television. “I was talking with Father,” he said. “Father will be interim president until we hold elections.”

 

Bleming interjected, “I’m signed on to handle palace security. But you guys better get to work; I’m not going to live to a thousand. I’m not Methuselah.”

 

As I prepared to leave, Bleming handed me copies of his self-published memoirs, Panama: Echoes From a Revolution and War in Karen Country. On the title page of the latter he had written, “I certainly enjoyed meeting with you in Wyoming. One day you and I shall meet again, in a free and independent West Papua.”

 

Anari too had prepared a parting gift: a stack of OPM combat-seal stickers, on which two crossed machetes frame a cassowary above the Latin slogan “Persevero.” He also offered me a job in the transitional government, a proposition he sweetened by throwing in a private beach. “You can help us explain West Papua’s positions to the world and live in a house on the water,” he said. “The Raja Ampat islands”—located off the region’s northern coast—“are very beautiful.”

 

To illustrate the point, Anari grabbed his laptop and opened a folder of photos. In stark contrast to the bloody pictures on the WPLO’s Facebook page, these looked like touched-up images from a travel brochure: palm-lined cays outlined by white sand and surrounded by emerald sea.

 

A month later, I received a Facebook message from Anari saying that he had not yet returned to West Papua. The promised revolution, it seemed, would have to wait. After leaving Wyoming in March, Anari had traveled to Los Angeles to visit distant relatives who emigrated from West Papua to escape persecution in the 1970s. He told me he was making plans to return to New York and address an April session of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. “I am going to push [the U.N.] about their responsibility for not overseeing independence for West Papua,” he told me over the phone. “I will tell them, ‘If you do not take seriously your responsibility, then the responsibility will be left on our shoulders, to foment action and to fight.’”

 

“One way or the other,” he concluded, “we will get the world’s attention.”

On May 11, nine ships from the Russian Navy and China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) kicked off 10 days of combined exercises in the Mediterranean Sea, for their first joint naval war games in European waters. What does this nautical confab, dubbed “Joint Sea 2015,” entail? “Maritime defense, maritime replenishment, escort actions, joint operations to safeguard navigation security as well as real weapon firing drill,” according to Sr. Col. Geng Yansheng, a spokesman for China’s Defense Ministry. The aim of the exercises is to “further deepen friendly and practical interaction between the two countries,” maintained the Russian Defense Ministry. Moscow added that the drills “are not aimed against any third country.”

Despite the soothing words, some Western commentators opined that Europe’s middle sea constitutes an “unlikely and provocative venue” for this venture. Yes, Moscow and Beijing chose the venue precisely to be provocative — the exercise is a throwback to Soviet maneuvers in the Mediterranean 40 years ago. It was predictable that an allied fleet would eventually put in an appearance off NATO’s southern, nautical flank.

Does a Sino-Russian naval presence off NATO seaboards sound frightening to you? It shouldn’t — there’s nothing new nor especially worrisome here. It represents normalcy in a world of geostrategic competition — the kind of world that’s making a comeback following a quarter-century of seaborne U.S. hegemony. The United States wants to preserve its primacy, along with the liberal maritime order over which it has presided since the end of World War II. Challengers such as China and Russia want to amend that system while carving out their own places in the sun of great naval power. Irreconcilable differences over purposes and power beget open-ended strategic competition.

Hence deployments like Joint Sea 2015. Yes, exercises have functional uses like those outlined by Geng. But navies can also shape global and national opinion by constructing impressive warships, aircraft, and armaments. Showmanship plays a part when commanders display gee-whiz hardware to important audiences. Mariners impress by showing up in far-flung regions in sizable numbers, and by handling their ships and planes with skill and panache. And a seafaring state creates an even bigger sensation if its fleet deploys in concert with allies, backing their common cause with steel. Competitors, like China and the United States, can one-up one another through peacetime maneuvers — bucking up morale among allies and friends, helping court would-be partners, and disheartening rival alliances.

That’s the essence of great-power naval diplomacy, and it can pay off handsomely. The three-ship PLAN contingent — guided-missile frigates Linyi and Weifang, accompanied by fleet oiler Weishanhu — are taking a break from counterpiracy duty in the Gulf of Aden for Joint Sea 2015. The PLAN flotilla wended its way from the western Indian Ocean into the Red Sea, through the Eastern Mediterranean, and into the Black Sea. It tarried at the Russian seaport of Novorossiysk for Victory Day commemorations before exiting back into the Mediterranean in company with Russian Black Sea Fleet ships.

The interoperability challenge

Why go to the time, expense, and bother of assembling a fleet in European waters — so far from East Asia, the natural theater for Sino-Russian escapades? Let’s start with the obvious motive, and the official one. Russia and China are doubtless sincere about harvesting the dividends that come from steaming around together and practicing routine operations. Both navies need to learn, and they can learn from each other. China is constructing its first world-class navy since the 15th century. Russia is recovering from the dreary post-Cold War years when ships rusted at their moorings and sailors went unpaid. Both countries’ sea services are now trying to put things right following protracted intervals of decay — a lapse of centuries in China’s case, decades in Russia’s. So where does this newfound strength come from? Materiel — reliable, technologically sophisticated hardware and weaponry — and the proficiency of its users. Maneuvers like Joint Sea 2015 help the navies improve along both the material and human axes.

In material terms, the Russian and Chinese navies need to bolster their equipment “interoperability” — their capacity to back up the Sino-Russian partnership’s policies efficiently and effectively. Call it a form of multinational gunboat diplomacy. Armed services order their kit from defense manufacturers. Such firms may — or, more likely, may not — build their products to a common standard. Their wares are far from interchangeable. Dissimilar hardware makes it hard to work together, even for armed forces flying the same national flag. To take a workaday example: think about trying to use tools designed for English and metric measurements together.

Such widgets just don’t fit — or at least not without workarounds. It’s just not easy to fight together when two air forces use different airframes, communicate or exchange data on different frequencies, or sport different weaponry with unlike characteristics. Procuring hardware from multiple suppliers in multiple countries exacerbates the interoperability challenge.

Take India, for example. Asia’s other rising military power imports ships, aircraft, and weapons from firms in Russia, France, and the United States while also manufacturing its own naval armaments. At present, the Indian Navy operates British- and Soviet-built aircraft carriers, while in the future it will operate a Soviet-built aircraft carrier alongside indigenously built flattops. Diesel submarines of French, German, Russian, and Indian design; a nuclear-powered attack sub leased from Russia; an Indian-built nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarine; and a Russian-built nuclear-powered cruise-missile sub will constitute the undersea fleet. U.S.-built maritime patrol aircraft will fly for the same naval air force as MiG fighters imported from Russia. You get the point: this is a virtual Tower of Babel of armed forces. Getting such disparate platforms to work together has proved troublesome for India, to say the least.

Interoperability, then, is the process of devising procedures or material fixes to make incompatible machinery compatible. Yes, the PLAN and Russian Navy have a fair amount of equipment in common: China imported Soviet-built weaponry to help kick start its naval renaissance in the 1990s. But at the same time, Chinese industry started building ships, planes, and armaments with zest — even as Russia fields newfangled hardware of its own. Consequently, the navies are drifting apart in compatibility terms. Interoperability is on the decline. Exercises help restore it. (Moscow is reportedly mulling a purchase of Chinese frigates like the Linyi and Weifang; reciprocal arms sales help narrow the gap as well.)

Eating soup together

Then there’s the human factor. Ameliorating equipment interoperability challenges is well and good, but the finest implement is no better than its user. Napoleon once quipped that soldiers have to eat soup together for a long time before they can fight as a unit. Same goes for seamen. Armed forces are teams: Their members have to learn common tactics, techniques, and procedures. And they have to practice tactics and routine operations, over and over again. Repetition is the soul of combat effectiveness.

Crewmen also need get to know one another, acquainting themselves with their shipmates’ strengths, weaknesses, and foibles. Strangers seldom collaborate smoothly in the hothouse environment of combat. That’s doubly true in alliances, where linguistic barriers, disparate histories and cultures, and countless other impediments work against military efficiency. Seafarers learn by doing: if you want to work well together, then work together early and often. Eat soup together — and refine seamanship, tactical acumen, and élan in the bargain.

That’s the tactical and strategic logic behind Joint Sea 2015 — if we take Moscow’s and Beijing’s words at face value. But are there ulterior motives impelling this Mediterranean adventure?

Of course. For one, it’s a reply to the U.S. pivot to Asia. As Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu explained in November when announcing a slate of Sino-Russian undertakings, including Joint Sea 2015, the two partners are worried about “attempts to strengthen [U.S.] military and political clout” in the Asia-Pacific.

That’s a worrisome trend from their standpoint. The U.S. Navy has mounted a standing presence in China’s and Russia’s near seas since World War II, manifest in the Japan-based Seventh Fleet. It’s augmenting that presence as it rebalances to the Far East. By staging a show of force in the Mediterranean, to NATO’s immediate south, Moscow and Beijing proclaim, sotto voce, that what’s good for the U.S. Navy is good for the Russian Navy and PLAN.

Learning from the best

But there’s more to the Mediterranean expedition than jabbing NATO in the eye. Contesting control of Eurasian waters is sound strategy backed up by history. During World War II, Yale professor Nicholas Spykman ascribed the age of British maritime supremacy to the Royal Navy’s control of the “girdle of marginal seas” ringing Eurasia’s coastlines. He called the South China Sea — the site of territorial disputes among China and several other nations — the “Asiatic Mediterranean.” Seagoing forces could flit around the periphery quickly and economically relative to land transport — radiating power and influence into the Eurasian rimlands from the sea. Mobility and seaborne firepower let Britannia rule. By cruising the Mediterranean Sea, the Russian and Chinese fleets project power into European waters – much as the Royal Navy projected power into Asian waters via the South China Sea and other littoral expanses. The logic works both ways.

To Chinese and Russian eyes, surrendering control of offshore waters to the U.S. Navy looks like surrendering control to the Royal Navy and fellow imperial powers a century ago. Historical memory is especially acute for China, which lost control of its seaboard and internal waterways to waterborne conquerors. But Russia endured traumas of its own: It watched the Imperial Japanese Navy demolish the Russian Navy during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. China and Russia hope to banish such memories while turning Spykman’s logic of nautical supremacy to their advantage. If successful, they’ll stiff-arm the United States in Asia while projecting power into NATO waters.

Vying for control of these seas puts important Eurasian audiences — prospective allies, prospective foes, fence-sitters — on notice that China and Russia are sea powers to be reckoned with. And on a global level, Joint Sea 2015 could be a forerunner to bigger things. In 1970, for example, the Soviet Navy executed a deployment titled Okean (ocean), which stunned Western navies through its geographical scale and the sheer number of assets deployed. Indeed, some 200 Soviet warships and hundreds of aircraft took to the Baltic Sea, Norwegian Sea, North Atlantic, Mediterranean Sea, Indian Ocean, and Western Pacific.

It was an armada, mounting a presence across an enormous swathe of the world’s oceans and seas. Soviet ships weren’t just plentiful in numbers but youthful, generally under 20-years-old. Okean made it plain that the Soviet Navy was outbuilding its Western rivals at a time when the United States was in a funk over the Vietnam War and the U.S. Navy was under strain. The exercise made the statement that the Soviet Navy was a serious contender for mastery of the seas. It could defend Warsaw Pact shores while competing against the U.S. Navy on the vasty main.

However gratifying for Moscow, though, such capers set the law of unintended consequences in motion. By the 1980s, the Soviet naval rise jolted the United States into a naval buildup of its own — a buildup that empowered the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps to reassert their supremacy in Eurasian waters while setting the stage for the United States’ post-Cold War preeminence. In short, Moscow’s propaganda coup backfired badly: it goaded Washington into action, prompting the Carter and Reagan administrations to fashion a new, offensive-minded maritime strategy prosecuted by a nearly 600-ship navy. That’s what strategists call self-defeating behavior. So be careful what you wish for, Russia and China.

Stringer/AFP/Getty Images

Thursday we brought you the story of actor Johnny Depp’s two Yorkshire terriers, which Australian authorities believed he had brought into the country illegally and threatened to euthanize if they were not sent back to the United States. The affair has now reached a happy ending, and the dogs, Pistol and Boo, are on their way back to the United States.

Australian Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce has been vocal in his efforts to enforce his country’s biosecurity laws against the superstar and celebrated the victory on Twitter:

Dogs gone.

— Barnaby Joyce (@Barnaby_Joyce) May 15, 2015

“Two dogs that were brought into Australia without meeting our import requirements have now been exported back to their country of origin. A Department of Agriculture officer has escorted the two dogs from the property in Queensland, where they had been held under quarantine order, to the airport for their flight home,” Joyce said in a statement. “All costs associated with returning the dogs were met by the owners.”

Australia has strict requirement on the importation of animals in order to prevent the spread of disease and invasive species. While the threats to euthanize Pistol and Boo might seem extreme, Australia has in recent years seen several invasive species arrive on its shores. The Department of Agriculture’s hardline response, in light of such incidents, doesn’t seem so extreme.

The international reaction to the incident however has included anything but a serious contemplation of the bio-risks inherent to an interconnected world and has boiled down to the hashtag #WarOnTerriers:

As you were, Australia. The #WarOnTerriers is over. Depp's dogs have finally left Australia http://t.co/dYjA3JVkko pic.twitter.com/fqiV97USTE

— Greg Barila (@GregBarila) May 15, 2015

Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Marco Rubio, the Republican presidential hopeful from Florida, opened his remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) earlier this week by quoting from the last speech President John F. Kennedy gave before his assassination. Kennedy had insisted that by making America stronger he had advanced the cause of world peace. By contrast, Rubio observed, President Barack Obama had entered office believing that “America was too hard on our adversaries,” and that the world would benefit if “America took a step back.”

It was a deft bit of oratory. Kennedy, after all, was, like the 43-year-old Rubio, young, brash, optimistic — and a member of the U.S. Senate. Citing a Democrat allowed Rubio to imply to CFR, a nonpartisan body whose centrist internationalism constitutes a heresy for Republican ideologues, that he represents an older, bipartisan tradition. Republican presidential candidates don’t go to CFR to win votes, after all, but to acquire a sheen of elite legitimacy. The boyish Rubio knows he needs that.

If that was the goal, Rubio succeeded. Though the crowd listened to his prepared remarks in dead silence, the consensus afterwards was that he had addressed a wide range of subjects with a high degree of fluency, and had said nothing he would later need to retract. Rubio has made himself CFR’s favorite Republican candidate — though I doubt he’ll note that on the stump in South Carolina.

I am not convinced, however, that John F. Kennedy — the Kennedy who famously promised in his inaugural address to “pay any price, bear any burden … to assure the survival and the success of liberty” — is the right metaphor for our time.

Kennedy was wrong even for his own time. In his blithe self-confidence, Kennedy utterly miscalculated the effect that his military build-up and zest for geopolitical competition would produce on the Soviet Union, and thus brought us to the verge of World War III. Only thanks to the wisdom and restraint of a generation “tempered by war,” as he also put it, did Kennedy see his way past his own triumphal pieties to a less cocky and combative stance. Those historians who argue that Kennedy would not, in fact, have enmeshed the United States in a land war in Vietnam, assume that by the time of his death JFK had assimilated hard lessons about the limits of U.S. power.

I am tempted to quote Lloyd Bentsen: “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Our presidential candidates are no longer tempered by war; if only for this reason, we should wish them to err on the side of peace. Both in his speech and in the subsequent Q&A with Charlie Rose, Rubio argued for a more interventionist stance everywhere. He favors embedding Special Forces in Yemen to help with the Saudi-directed air war there, providing weaponry to the government in Ukraine, stepping up aid to the rebels in Syria, and expanding airstrikes over Iraq. He would re-impose sanctions on Cuba, and end discussions of a two-state solution in Israel. Rubio hasn’t yet discovered a “missile gap” with Russia, but he does argue that the United States is unilaterally disarming in the face of growing threat.

Strictly as a matter of political calculus, I don’t see how “rollback,” to use the old Cold War phrase, holds wide appeal. It’s Republican audiences, not Democratic ones, who are taxing Jeb Bush with his brother’s ill-fated decision to intervene in Iraq. Rubio has a perfectly sound answer to this critique — I wouldn’t have gone into Iraq knowing what we know now, and President Bush has said that wouldn’t have either — but the persistence of the issue reflects ongoing skepticism about military adventures abroad. Where is the groundswell, outside the Weekly Standard, for deeper American military engagement in the Middle East?

I very much doubt that the growing anxiety over America’s loss of influence in the world, and the rise of competitors like China and Iran, constitutes the sort of crisis that makes foreign affairs a first-order electoral issue. But even if it does, I suspect that the sweet spot will lie elsewhere. An effective anti-Obama agenda, even if it’s substantively wrong, would stress traditional statecraft, managerial competence, sober oratory — Bush I rather than Bush II. be a good moment for Colin Powell, but he’s not running. It’s not such a bad moment for Hillary Clinton, who is.

Whatever its political merits, Rubio’s chesty worldview would make the world less safe rather than more. He would have the United States throw in its lot with Saudi Arabia in its growing proxy war with Iran by putting boots on the ground in Yemen. President Obama is trying to use the current Camp David summit to assure Gulf States that the U.S. fully recognizes the threat of Iranian adventurism while at the same time restraining the headlong rush to confrontation. That requires a degree of balance and prudence to which our budding Kennedy seems immune. Rubio would encourage Ukraine to join NATO, though he argued that the American failure to bolster Ukrainian military capability over the last few years has left it currently unsuitable for membership. That kind of brinksmanship would only provoke reciprocal aggression from President Vladimir Putin of Russia. The actual, as opposed to cartoon-version, John F. Kennedy, made just that mistake.

Rubio is quite prepared to say perfectly inane things for perceived political advantage — most notably, his proposal to require Iranian recognition of Israel as a condition for Senate approval of a nuclear deal. (He did not repeat that formulation before the CFR.) Nevertheless, it’s obvious that he thinks seriously about policy issues, foreign as well as domestic. He asserted that early intervention on behalf of the Syrian rebels might have stemmed the rise of the Islamic State there, which is at the very least an arguable proposition. Intriguingly, he mocked Obama’s preference for “nation-building at home,” implying that he sees at least some merit to nation-building abroad — a neoconservative shibboleth that few of Rubio’s rivals would endorse. He advocated “transparent and effective” foreign assistance, whatever that means.

Rubio has positioned himself to be the champion of the “pay any price, bear any burden” wing of the GOP. It will be highly entertaining to watch him spar with Rand Paul, the isolationist standard-bearer, or with halfwits like Rick Perry. And nothing will beat watching him torture Jeb Bush, his former mentor, over the failures of brother George. Should Jeb falter, Rubio would have a good shot at the Republican nomination. Given his youth and his “story” — child of impoverished Cuban immigrants — he might match up quite well against Clinton.

Rubio is adroit enough that he could tone down his bellicosity in order to mount an effective attack against Obama’s foreign policy, as embodied in Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State. That, too, would be fun to watch. Nevertheless, the world of 2016, with its emerging powers and disintegrating international order, its sub-state actors and transnational problems, does not need John Kennedy circa 1960. That would not be fun to watch.

 Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Wesley Clark, once a four star officer, next a failed presidential candidate, and then involved in some kind of reality TV show, has become “a penny stock general,” says Bloomberg News. In an impressive story, Zachary Mider and Zeke Faux write that:

“Since he ran for president in 2004, Clark has joined the boards of at least 18 public companies, 10 of them penny-stock outfits, whose shares trade in the ‘over the counter’ markets, a corner of Wall Street where fraud and manipulation are common.”

All but one of the 10 lost value during Clark’s tenure. Three went bankrupt shortly after he left their boards, and the chief executive officer of one pleaded guilty to fraud.”

In the department of picking Army generals: I have never met the new Army chief of staff, Mark Milley, that I can recall. But I am hearing some very bad vibes about him, real unhappiness with this selection. People wonder how it happened that of all the available candidates, it was Milley, kind of a non-entity, was tapped.

In other officer news, the commander of the Air Force “boneyard” in Arizona got fired.

John Foster/DefenseLink Multimedia/Flickr

Depuis quelques années, la vie politique française a beaucoup tourné autour de la question du front républicain. Il renaît à chaque succès électoral du FN. Fort confus, il renvoie à une mythologie plutôt qu'à un débat rationnel et factuel. / France, Démocratie, Élections, État, Extrême droite, Histoire, (...) / France, Démocratie, Élections, État, Extrême droite, Histoire, Idées, Idéologie, Parti politique, Politique, Stratégie - 2015/03

Cette recension d’ouvrages est issue de Politique étrangère (1/2015). Marc Hecker propose une analyse croisée de deux ouvrages : celui de François Vignolle et Azzeddine Ahmed-Chaouch, La France du Djihad (Paris, Éditions du Moment, 2014, 208 pages) et celui de Dounia Bouzar, Ils cherchent le paradis, ils ont trouvé l’enfer  (Ivry-sur-Seine, Les Éditions de l’Atelier, 2014, 176 pages).

Depuis 2012 et la prise de contrôle par les rebelles de plusieurs postes-frontières, l’afflux de combattants étrangers n’a cessé d’augmenter en Syrie. À la fin 2014, près de 15 000 personnes ont ainsi rejoint les rangs de l’opposition à Bachar Al-Assad, dont environ 3 000 Occidentaux. Parmi ces derniers, les Français sont les plus nombreux. D’après les chiffres communiqués par le ministère de l’Intérieur en novembre 2014, plus de 1 000 ressortissants français étaient alors impliqués dans les filières syriennes.

Les deux ouvrages présentés ici apportent des éclairages complémentaires sur ce phénomène inquiétant. Le premier est l’œuvre de deux journalistes d’investigation, François Vignolle et Azzedine Ahmed-Chaouch. Il met l’accent sur la dimension sécuritaire du djihad syrien : on nous y présente les « nouveaux Merah » et autres « petits soldats d’Allah » qui, radicalisés très rapidement par le biais des réseaux sociaux, ont quitté précipitamment la France pour combattre aux côtés de l’État islamique. Certains d’entre eux rêvent de revenir en Europe pour y commettre des attentats.

La diversité des profils de ces « djihadistes made in France » est frappante. La proportion de convertis est élevée, probablement supérieure à 20 %. Celle des femmes avoisine également les 20 %. La part des individus connus des services de police avant leur départ est significative, mais ils ne sont pas majoritaires : parmi les Français qui sont morts en Syrie, les deux tiers avaient un casier judiciaire vierge. Et parmi ces derniers, certains avaient fait de bonnes études. La dernière phrase de l’ouvrage – citation d’un avocat – résume la teneur générale du livre : « Lorsqu’on commence à avoir peur de ses enfants, on peut craindre pour l’avenir de son pays. »

L’ouvrage de Dounia Bouzar est très différent : il se focalise sur des parents qui n’avaient pas peur de leurs enfants, ont été confrontés à un processus d’endoctrinement brutal, et déploient des efforts incommensurables pour les ramener à la raison (et à la maison). Beaucoup de ces enfants sont des adolescentes qui, dans une période de faiblesse consécutive à un deuil, ont été séduites par la rhétorique des djihadistes. À force de conversations sur Facebook, elles ont décidé de partir en Syrie où certaines d’entre elles ont épousé des combattants.

Le désarroi et l’abnégation des parents sont émouvants. Des termes très forts sont employés : « mères orphelines », « kidnapping moral », « anesthésie affective », etc. Pour l’auteur, le processus qui a conduit les enfants à se séparer de leurs parents s’apparente à une emprise sectaire. En l’occurrence, le principal gourou serait le chef de la branche francophone de Jabhat Al-Nosra. Pour désendoctriner ces adolescentes, il faudrait se situer non dans le registre de la rationalité ou dans celui de la théologie, mais dans celui des émotions.

On comprend à la lecture de ces deux ouvrages la complexité de la situation pour les autorités françaises. Les adolescentes décrites par Bouzar ressemblent plus à des victimes qu’à de dangereux terroristes. D’autres individus ayant rejoint le djihad syrien sont, en revanche, une menace réelle pour l’Europe, comme l’illustre le cas de Mehdi Nemmouche. En l’absence de méthode scientifique séparant le bon grain de l’ivraie, il appartient aux juges de trancher, au cas par cas.

S’abonner à Politique étrangère.

President Barack Obama promised Thursday to stand by Gulf allies against any “external attack,” capping the end of a one-day summit at Camp David that ended without a formal defense pact.

“The United States is prepared to work jointly with [Gulf Cooperation Council] member states to deter and confront an external threat to any GCC state’s territorial integrity,” he said at a press conference.

The word “external,” repeated six times in the joint statement released by the White House, is widely understood to allude to Iran, which has expanded its influence in Yemen, Lebanon, and Iraq to the alarm of the six GCC countries: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman.

But the word is also significant in that it unburdens the White House from committing itself to lending military assistance to Gulf allies in the event of an internal uprising in the authoritarian countries — an issue the White Houses agonized over during the Arab Spring protests of 2010 that upended governments in Egypt, Tunisia, and beyond.

The issue, a sensitive one given that the Gulf states are monarchies with widely varying degrees of freedom and inclusiveness, resurfaced controversially last month, when the president gave an interview to the New York Times  highlighting the risk of internal uprisings by disenfranchised citizens.

“I think the biggest threats that they face may not be coming from Iran invading,” Obama told columnist Thomas Friedman. “It’s going to be from dissatisfaction inside their own countries. … That’s a tough conversation to have, but it’s one that we have to have.”

That remark reverberated across the Arab world and angered a number of Gulf allies who consider such public criticisms meddling in the internal affairs of their countries.

When asked about the comment during an Atlantic Council event last week, the ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to the U.S. suggested the remark was not suitable for public consumption.  “It’s a conversation we welcome in private,” said Yousef Al Otaiba.

He emphasized that the UAE had assisted the U.S. in six military conflicts, including in the current war against Islamic State extremists in Iraq and Syria.

“A country that doesn’t share your values fought with you six times,” he said. “We still don’t share your democratic values, but we are great partners.”

In the joint statement released at the end of the summit, the nations also committed to working more closely on missile defense, military exercises and training, counterterrorism and maritime security.

The White House would not commit to the formal defense pact that some Gulf nations, particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, had wanted.

The U.S. hopes to win the GCC’s diplomatic backing for an Iran nuclear deal currently being negotiated with Tehran and five other world powers. Just prior to the summit, the monarch of Saudi Arabia, King Salman, announced his plans to skip the high-level meeting, a move widely perceived as a snub to Obama.

Getty Images

 

BUJUMBURA, Burundi — Thousands of people stormed the streets, blowing whistles and screaming into megaphones, as the news spread across Burundi’s capital city of Bujumbura. Just hours after President Pierre Nkurunziza left the country to attend a meeting of East African leaders in Tanzania on May 13, Maj. Gen. Godefroid Niyombare announced that the president’s time in office had come to an abrupt end.

“President Nkurunziza is dismissed,” General Niyombare said around lunchtime on Wednesday, surrounded by several senior police and army officials, including a former defense minister. “His government is dismissed too.”

For many, the announcement was a welcomed response to sustained anti-government demonstrations. Protests have paralyzed the capital for nearly three weeks, after Nkurunziza announced his intention to run for a third term in the presidential elections on June 26 — a move which opponents say is illegal. Yet, on Thursday, it was clear that the celebrations were premature as a security force with divided loyalties fought violently for control of the capital.

Burundi has a long history of political unrest. Between 1993 and 2005, the country fissured during a 13-year civil war that pitted Tutsis against Hutus, and left some 300,000 dead. The ethnic loyalties that sparked the war have largely dissolved today (in accordance with the peace agreement, the army cannot comprise more than 50 percent of any one ethnic group). In fact, those opposed to Nkurunziza’s third term come from all ethnicities. Yet the president, who is Hutu, still has his supporters — primarily the police, and some within the military — who are unwilling to stand on the sidelines as their elected leader is toppled. It is as yet unclear whether the attempted sacking of Nkurunziza by General Niyombare marks the end of a protest movement, or the beginning of a more enduring conflict.

The protests began on April 26, a day after Nkurunziza announced he’d run for a third term. Since then, anti-government protesters have amassed each morning in the streets — many awaking after snatching just a few hours of sleep. During the demonstrations, protesters had feared being beaten, arrested, or even killed by police and militant young loyalists. At night, they took turns standing guard — armed with whistles and mobile phones to warn neighbors of impending attacks. Each day, crowds of energetic young men, wearing makeshift masks and carrying fake guns, then gathered in small pockets throughout the city and began to march.

The army was deployed to the streets on the second day of protests. Much-respected by civilians, it sought to play a valuable mediation role. Yet the protests turned violent and unpredictable, particularly after Burundi’s constitutional court backed the president’s bid for re-election last week. On Monday, three people were killed and dozens more wounded in clashes between police and demonstrators. In all, at least 20 people have died since the demonstrations began.

“Because the police had been attacking the demonstrators for a while, people in those neighborhoods were very anxious, very tired,” said Ketty Nivyabandi, a 36-year-old mother of two, after the announcement of the coup. She attended her first march on Sunday, a peaceful, female-only march that managed to reach the center of town.

“We needed to put peace back into the protest,” she said. “What we did was revolutionary.”

For Burundians like Ketty, General Niyombare’s actions on Wednesday were simply a response to Nkurunziza’s defiance of the constitution — and the culmination of a justified popular movement. Though many jubilant protestors return to their homes, it remains unclear who is in charge of the country.

The military is divided, and many still back the president. The army’s chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Prime Niyongabo, for example, said on state radio late on Wednesday that he is “against Maj. Gen. Niyombare.”

“This coup attempt has been foiled,” said a statement yesterday from Nkurunziza posted on the president’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. “These people, who read the coup announcement on the radio, are being hunted by defence and security forces so that they can be brought to justice.”

On Thursday, rival troops clashed in the capital. According to the most recent reports, Nkurunziza returned to Burundi today (though his location remains uncertain) and soldiers loyal to him control much of the capital.

In the vacuum of security, some analysts fear reprisal attacks by loyalist members of the police force and the Imbonerakure, the ruling party’s much-feared youth wing, against those perceived to be anti-government. Late Wednesday, men in police uniforms attacked and set fire to the influential, independent African Public Radio station, which in the past had reported on government efforts to silence critics. On Thursday, another independent radio station, Bonesha, was attacked and set alight by uniformed men with Kalashnikovs and grenades. At the time of writing, all national independent radio stations were off air.

Tutsis outside the capital may be particularly vulnerable to attacks. “The Imbonerakure would go for easy targets,” said one political analyst in the capital, who asked not to be named. “Tutsi opposition are isolated and need to be protected,” he said of those living in the countryside.

Though fighting calmed on Thursday evening, control of the capital remains very much uncertain. As civilians prepare for potentially another day of clashes between rival security forces, some have begun constructing barricades on the streets to protect themselves.

For Moustang Habimana, one of the demonstrators camped out on the streets, the prospect for a stable political transition in the short term is all but dead.

“Only the people,” he said, “control the country right now.”

Jennifer Huxta/AFP/Getty Images

Last June, in order to fulfill a promise to make his daughter a real life princess, Jeremiah Heaton planted a flag in a trapezoidal stretch of unoccupied territory between Egypt and Sudan and claimed it as his own.

The move was a birthday gift to his seven-year-old daughter, Emily. Heaton called the territory, which is claimed by neither Egypt nor Sudan and is known as Bir Tawil, the Kingdom of North Sudan. The move prompted outrage in the Twitterverse, where users derided it as “foolishness” and “colonization.”

Heaton told Foreign Policy that much of the criticism has come from what he scornfully calls “academics” quick to label his project modern-day colonialism. The purported country is named on no official maps and recognized by no nations on earth, including Heaton’s native United States.

Less than a year later, Heaton looks he’ll have the last laugh: Disney now plans to make The Princess of North Sudan, a movie based on his family’s story, and Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me is producing it.

It’s a strange new phase of an exceedingly strange story. Heaton’s plan to lay claim to this unchartered territory first went viral after he posted a photo of himself next to the flag last June. The story was soon picked up by the Bristol Herald Courier, and then by the Associated Press.

The story was brought back into the limelight this fall with news of the Disney deal. On Wednesday, the Hollywood Reporter said the movie would be written by Stephany Folsom, whose previous works include 1969: A Space Odyssey or How Kubrick Learned to Stop Worrying and Land on the Moon, sparking new anger over the fact that the first African Disney princess would be a white girl from Virginia named Emily.

But in a conversation with FP Thursday, Heaton, a Virginia farmer who runs a mining-safety company, said anyone calling this project colonialist is “living through the lens of racism.”

“Academics at universities saying this is modern day colonialism, really that’s a euphemism for racism,” he told FP. “I can’t help any more that I was born in America as a white man than an Asian person born in Asia can [help that].”

His establishment of the Kingdom of North Sudan was legal, he said, because the territory belonged to no one.

“The definition of colonialism is the invasion of one country by another country for exploitation of resources and goods,” he said. “I don’t represent the U.S.A. and that area was abandoned.”

Today, the family is mainly just concerned about getting all the plans they have for their kingdom up and running.

A self-described group of science lovers, the Heatons want to use the land to create a sustainable opportunity for food production, an idea that originated with Princess Emily.

“Once she understood it was in Africa and correlated that information with the fact that her elementary school teacher does missions work in Africa…and we were in the same neighborhood as children who didn’t have a lot to eat, in her very simple terms said she wanted to grow a garden big enough to feed everyone,” he said.

Heaton, whose wife is a middle school science teacher, admitted the area, which is one of the driest in the world, is not the most ideal location to start a garden.

“There’s a reason people don’t live there,” he said with a laugh.

For now, they’re proceeding slowly. The first step, Heaton said, was declaring his borders and proving the area doesn’t have a history of being controlled by any other government. The second, which he says he did when he planted his flag last June, was to announce to the world his intention to govern the region. The third and fourth steps are where it gets trickier: It will need to be occupied and have trade relations set up with its neighbors. Considering even Heaton describes it as “inhabitable,” and neither Sudan nor Egypt have legally recognized the country as a state, that might be difficult.

Although Heaton acknowledges it’s “nothing but a barren desert” that is currently “no good to anyone,” he dreams of building a large energy production facility there to supply surplus energy to both Egypt and Sudan, who he says are both in the midst energy crises. In his conversation with FP, he didn’t specify what kind of energy would be produced there, but did say it would be renewable.

According to Heaton, Egypt is making a push for foreign investment right now, and he thinks his faux-country is “really on the same path.” He also wants to use funds to set up what he’s called the “Agricultural Research Center” to house scientists, including water purification specialists and climatologists, who will use their time to find solutions to food insecurity in the region.

This week, the family launched an IndieGoGo fundraiser to help fund the project. For a donation of $15 you get a bumper sticker, for $25 an honorary title of nobility. But if you want to name the capital city, that’s going to run you $1.75 million.

Heaton said that while they’ve only raised $4,100 so far, he thinks he will raise more than $15 million by the time the fundraiser ends in 42 days.

“I might be the sovereign king, but I see myself more as the fundraiser-in-chief,” he said.

In fact, Heaton isn’t all that thrilled he had to make the country a monarchy in the first place, but the family is already working out those political kinks.

“The only reason there’s a monarchy is that’s what I had to establish to make Emily a princess,” he said. “We’re gonna go to a constitutional form of monarchy where we are just figureheads for the state and the people who actually live there will run things so our titles will be strictly ceremonial. As king I just rule over my kids.”

As for the Disney movie? A spokesperson for Disney confirmed plans were in the works, although there isn’t a script yet.

Heaton’s family feels “blessed” to have a “neat” relationship with Disney, but the movie project is only a tiny smidgen of what they have planned for the Kingdom of North Sudan.

“For us the movie deal is five percent of what we have going on,” he told FP. “If our life was a circus, it’s the tent at the farthest end of the midway, and that’s the truth.”

“In this process we have been able to make Emily a real princess,” he said. “She’s also a Disney princess.”

Photo Courtesy of Jeremiah Heaton’s Facebook

In recent weeks several reports have claimed that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was severely wounded in a Western air strike and that he may be on death’s doorstep. But on Thursday, the militant leader broke a prolonged period of silence with the release of a 35-minute audio message to his followers in which he urged Muslims around the world to travel to Iraq and Syria and join up with the Islamic State.

Baghdadi’s message comes as the Islamic State lost momentum in Syria to a coalition of rebel groups, including other Islamist militants, who have in recent weeks won a series of victories against the forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. In Iraq, the Islamic State has also suffered some setbacks but continues to hold large chunks of the country and are currently fighting government forces for control of its largest oil refinery, at Baiji.

Baghdadi’s speech describes this fight in cataclysmic terms and makes an aggressive appeal for additional recruits. “It is the war of every Muslim, in every place, and the Islamic State is merely the spearhead in this war,” Baghdadi said, according to a translated version of his remarks provided by Site Intelligence, which monitors online jihadi message boards. “There is no excuse, for any Muslim is capable of performing hijrah to the Islamic State.” Hijrah is an Arabic term referring to the Prophet Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina and which radical groups have appropriated to describe the journey to join up with guerrilla fighters.

In an indication of the Islamic State’s international ambitions, the message was disseminated along with translations of the address in English, French, German, Russian, and Turkish. While Baghdadi’s emphasis in the address was on international recruitment to the Islamic State’s core force, he also urged Muslims to “fight in his land wherever that may be.”

For Western officials puzzling over why thousands of their youths are signing up with the militant group, Baghdadi’s address provides a litany of reasons why it has become so appealing: “We call upon you so that you leave the life of humiliation, disgrace, degradation, subordination, loss, emptiness, and poverty, to a life of honor, respect, leadership, richness, and another matter that you love — victory from Allah and an imminent conquest.”

Baghdadi casts that fight as a civilizational struggle that is sure to inflame debates about the degree to which the Islamic State is an expression of the Muslim faith: “Islam was never for a day the religion of peace. Islam is the religion of war.”

With Iraqi forces preparing to broaden their offensive against the Islamic State, Baghdadi directly addressed the residents of western Anbar province, control of which will represent a key test for the central government’s efforts to expel the extremists from the country. Baghdadi lamented the plight of Anbar residents, most of whom are Sunni, like the extremist group itself, who have been forced from their homes and said that Anbar residents fighting against the Islamic State will be forgiven for their “crimes” if they repent.

It’s not clear when the address was made, but referenced recent events in the late March-early April timeframe. Baghdadi harshly criticized Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen, and referred to fighting for control of the Iraqi city of Tikrit, which was liberated from Islamic State control during the first days of April. Operation Decisive Storm, as the Saudi campaign in Yemen was known, began on March 25.

EPA/Islamic State Video

In a recent Democracy Lab piece, editor Christian Caryl laments that genocide and mass atrocities continue to occur, and wonders why. After nodding to arguments that “we’ve made a lot of progress in preventing mass slaughter,” he turns pessimistic:

I have to confess that I don’t find the signs of progress he cites quite so encouraging. There are far too many places in the world where people are still being singled out for death on a grand scale simply because they belong to the wrong group.

In moral terms, it is impossible to disagree. Any situation “where people are still being singled out for death on a grand scale simply because they belong to the wrong group” is one situation too many.

Empirically, however, the historical trend is more encouraging than Caryl’s enumeration of recent examples and potential genocides implies. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker aggregates data on genocides (loosely defined) over the course of the twentieth century from three public sources: research by R.J. Rummel, the Political Instability Task Force (PITF), and the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). Each of these data sets is imperfect in its own way, and the quality of all estimates of the tolls of specific episodes of mass killing — in these sources or elsewhere — ranges from careful approximation to crude guessing. Still, the data they have produced collectively represent some of our best well-educated guesses about the frequency and severity of deliberate, lethal violence against noncombatant civilians by states and other armed groups over the past 100 years.

So what do those data show? Below, via Max Roser, is a reproduction of Figure 6-7 from Pinker’s book, showing annual death rates according Rummel and PITF data from 1900 to 2008. As Pinker wrote, “in the four decades that followed [the 1940s], the rate (and number) of deaths from democide went precipitously, if lurchingly, downward.” Contrary to popular belief, that long-term decline did not stop when the Cold War ended. Despite terrible genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, and elsewhere, the global trend remained “unmistakably downward… The first decade of the new millennium [was] the most genocide-free of the past fifty years.”

Coincidentally, the statistics discussed in Pinker’s book stop just before the start of the global spell of economic malaise and political instability that began with the financial crisis of 2008 and includes the Arab Spring. That spell has produced new episodes of mass atrocities, including ongoing ones in Syria, Iraq, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic. To assess the trend since then, we can turn to the most recent data from UCDP, which now covers the period from 1989 through 2013. The chart below plots deaths per 100,000 people per year — the same statistic as in the previous chart, and shown on the same scale — for that 14-year period. UCDP’s data set includes low, best, and high estimates; to err on the side of overcounting, I used the high ones. The estimates of global population used to calculate the annual rates come from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators.

As the chart shows, the spell of global political instability that began in the late 2000s has not yet produced a significant increase in the severity of one-sided violence around the world, at least as of the end of 2013 and as far as UCDP can tell from its sources. This chart uses the same scale as the previous one to facilitate easy comparison. At this scale, the recent annual rates of less than 1 death per 100,000 people are hard to tell apart from zeros. The annual rate more than doubled from 2012 to 2013 — from 0.05 to 0.12 — but both of those figures remain radically smaller than the rates in the tens or hundreds the world saw just a few decades earlier. Even if UCDP’s best estimates are lower than the true counts — and, as UCDP acknowledges, they almost certainly are — the long-term decline has not been reversed. The latest data from PITF show essentially the same thing.

In short, humans certainly do continue to perpetrate mass killings, but the frequency and intensity of these terrible episodes has diminished significantly over the past half-century, and even the recent increase in violent instability has not reversed that longer-term decline. As horrible as the past few years may seem when reading the news, the intensity of deliberate, lethal violence against civilians remains an order of magnitude lower than what we typically saw just a few decades ago, which was itself an order of magnitude lower than the peak rates in the middle of the twentieth century.

Why? This, as Dartmouth professor and genocide scholar Ben Valentino wrote in a recent email, is the “million dollar question.” In his book, Pinker construes the decline in mass atrocities as part of a broader and longer decline in violence among humans, and attributes that trend to changes in cultural and material conditions that increasingly favor and reward our cooperative instincts over our more violent ones.

Valentino’s own answer resembles Pinker’s in general, if not in all the specifics. Valentino spotlighted two forces: a decline in the frequency and intensity of civil wars, and the collapse of communism. “Since most genocide and mass killing occur during civil war,” he wrote in an e-mail, “fewer civil wars means fewer mass killings.” As for why civil wars are rarer, “I’m inclined to believe that stronger central governments and the rise of full democracies are at least a big part of the story.” Meanwhile, the collapse of communism removed both the perpetrators and, to some extent, the motive behind many of the worst mass killings of modern history, and “nothing has really replaced communism as an ideology for mass killing on that scale.”

Valentino’s colleague and sometimes-coauthor Chad Hazlett, now a political scientist at UCLA, also sees the collapse of communism as an important part of the explanation, but more due to its effects on competition in the international system than the waning of the ideology. During the Cold War, the superpowers often prolonged and intensified armed conflicts within states by supporting rival sides, and many those conflicts involved mass killings of civilians. After the USSR collapsed and the Cold War ended, however, that external support evaporated, and with it went most mass killings. “Without superpower support to both sides,” Hazlett wrote in an email, “long-running conflicts and atrocities began to come to an end at unprecedented rates, producing a long decline in the number of atrocities.”

Scott Straus, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has written several books on the topic, sees the wider decline in armed conflict as a relevant factor, too. He also gives partial credit to changes in global norms and improvements in international and domestic policy options. He emailed:

Peacekeeping is better mandated, bigger, and more equipped for civilian protection than before. A range of non-military mechanisms is in place, from commissions of inquiry to “smart sanctions” to threats of international prosecution. I am as skeptical as the next scholar and practitioner on the specific effectiveness of each of these but the policy tools are at a minimum thicker and more applied than in the past. Whether these measures are causally related to the decline of mass atrocities is difficult to know at this stage, but there is a plausible connection between these developments and the decline in the mass atrocity events.

All of these scholars, including Pinker, acknowledge that this decline is not necessarily permanent, and none is certain of its causes. The trend itself is clear, however. While we recognize and grieve for those who suffer and die in the atrocities that persist, we might choose to take some encouragement from that fact.

This piece was written as part of the author’s work as a consultant to the Early Warning Project, a new effort to provide routine, public assessments of mass-atrocities risks for countries worldwide.

In the photo, Chorale Abagenzi singers take part in a genocide commemoration ceremony in Kigali, Rwanda.
Photo Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Jeb Bush has flip-flopped-flip-flopped.

On Monday, the Republican, who is running for president but hasn’t made it official, was for the Iraq war.

Under pressure, Bush said a day later he misunderstood the question.

Then he clarified his position.

One more time.

This type of waffling is impressive, even if the former Florida governor hasn’t officially launched a bid for the GOP nomination in next year’s presidential election. But it illustrates one of his biggest challenges to being an attractive candidate: the legacy of his big brother, former President George W. Bush, and his disastrous Iraq policy.

W. is still admired by many in the Republican Party, but keeping him at arm’s length may be something Jeb is forced to do to win over Democrats in a general election. His back-and-forth on the issue shows just how difficult it will be to completely sever family ties.

And just so you’re clear: Knowing what we know now — that the intel on WMDs was trumped up — Jeb Bush would not invade Iraq. Until he would.

Photo Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The summit between President Barack Obama and representatives from the Persian Gulf countries that kicked off today at Camp David is meant to reassure Washington’s Arab allies. “Don’t worry about the nuclear deal with Iran,” Obama will say. “We’ve got your back.”

And what’s the best way to show your friends that you’ve got their back? Sell them billions of dollars worth of advanced weapons. In fact, it seems like arms sales are the Obama administration’s tool of choice these days for dealing with everything from counterterrorism to a lagging economy. And the consequences, unsurprisingly, are bloody.

In its first five years in office, the Obama administration entered into formal agreements to transfer over $64 billion in arms and defense services to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states, with about three-quarters of that total going to Saudi Arabia. And new offers worth nearly $15 billion have been made to Riyadh in 2014 and 2015. Items on offer to GCC states have included fighter aircraft, attack helicopters, radar planes, refueling aircraft, air-to-air missiles, armored vehicles, artillery, small arms and ammunition, cluster bombs, and missile defense systems.

Sales to GCC members have been the most important component of the record-level U.S. arms deals concluded during Obama’s term. The Obama figures for sales worldwide even edge out levels reached during the Nixon administration, when the end of the Vietnam War and the rising purchasing power of members of the OPEC oil cartel spurred the United States’ first major arms export boom.

The surge in arms sales under Obama is rooted in two factors, one political and one economic. The political aspect of the Obama approach mirrors the path pursued by President Richard Nixon in response to the unpopularity of the Vietnam War. In 1969, Nixon announced that henceforth the United States would supply generous quantities of military assistance to allied regimes, in an effort to “avoid another war like Vietnam anywhere in the world.” And in a 1967 article in Foreign Affairs, Nixon referenced the political roots of his emerging policy, noting that Vietnam had sown “bitter dissension” domestically, producing a “deep reluctance to become involved once again in a similar intervention on a similar basis.”

Substitute Obama for Nixon and Iraq for Vietnam, and you have a latter-day version of the Nixon Doctrine of arms sales promotion. Obama wants to be seen as a president who ended large-scale wars, not a president who started new ones. And, as he has made clear time and again, he is particularly reluctant to put large numbers of U.S. “boots on the ground,” as the Bush administration did in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Given these restrictions, the Obama administration has developed an approach to warfare designed to limit U.S. casualties. This has relied largely on drone strikes and the extensive use of Special Forces; but boosting arms sales advances is also a part of this hands-off approach, giving allies the equipment and training to fight terrorism on their own. (Let’s forget for the moment the fact that Obama’s approach may spawn more terrorists than it kills by generating anti-U.S. sentiment.)

But it might be the legacy of the 2008 economic crisis, as much as the 2003 Iraq disaster that drives this White House’s arms sales. The Obama administration clearly wants to create jobs in the defense industry and boost the bottom lines of major defense contractors. The Pentagon’s 2010 announcements of offers involving tens of billions of dollars’ worth of F-15 fighter planes, Apache attack helicopters, armored vehicles, and other equipment to Saudi Arabia listed the prime beneficiaries as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Electric, the Sikorsky Helicopter unit of United Technologies, and ITT Aerospace. But these are just the major contractors; thousands of subcontractors across the United States will get a piece of the action as well. For example, in announcing the deal for selling 84 Boeing F-15s to the Saudis, Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Andrew Shapiro proudly asserted that the deal would create 50,000 jobs in 44 states, most notably in St. Louis, the site of the main assembly plant for the plane.

Foreign sales are particularly critical for keeping alive weapons production lines that are about to be closed down as the Pentagon moves towards buying next-generation systems. Absent new domestic orders, Boeing’s F-18 production line will have to close in early 2017. But last week’s report that Kuwait intends to buy 40 F-18s for $3 billion holds out hope that the line will stay open for another year or more, during which time the company can seek more foreign sales to prolong the life of the program even further. Similarly, the General Dynamics M-1 tank, a program which the Army started winding down in 2012, has been surviving based on yearly add-ons to Pentagon budget requests spearheaded by the Ohio and Michigan delegations, whose states host the main production sites for the vehicles. These efforts have been supplemented by a deal to upgrade 84 M-1s for Saudi Arabia.

The Obama arms sales boom has bolstered the bottom lines of companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon. Each firm has been the lead contractor one or more mega-deals like the $29 billion offer of 84 Boeing F-15 fighter jets and related equipment to Saudi Arabia, a $6.5 billion sale of Lockheed Martin’s THAAD missile defense system to Qatar, and the proposed transfer of the Lockheed Martin/Raytheon produced Patriot Air and Missile Defense System to Saudi Arabia for $1.8 billion. The payoff won’t come all at once, but as these deals work their way through the pipeline, they will generate substantial profits for each of these firms for years to come.

As Pentagon procurement spending has dipped slightly due to the caps on the agency’s budget established in the Budget Control Act of 2011, arms industry executives are looking to promote overseas sales even more aggressively — and the Middle East market will be central to these efforts. Lockheed Martin has set a goal of increasing exports to 25 percent of total sales over the next few years. In a conference call with investors in late January, Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson suggested that continued “volatility” in the Middle East and Asia make them “growth areas” for the firm. And a few years ago, Boeing launched an effort to get export sales in its defense division up to 25 to 30 percent, from just 7 percent in 2005. Dennis Muilenburg, a company vice president who formerly ran Boeing’s defense segment, has suggested that if the F-15 deal with Saudi Arabia stays on track, the company will be “well on our way” to its goal.

The Obama administration is clearly on board with the industry’s agenda. The lengths to which U.S. officials will go to help secure an arms sale for a U.S. company were revealed at a House Foreign Affairs Committee in April 2013. Asked whether the administration was doing enough to advocate for U.S. arms exports, Tom Kelly, principal deputy assistant secretary of the State Department’s bureau of political-military affairs, said that, “it is an issue that has the attention of every top-level official who’s working on foreign policy throughout the government, including the top officials at the State Department … in advocating on behalf of our companies and doing everything we can to make sure that these sales go through.” Just to make himself perfectly clear, Kelly went on to say that [arms sales promotion] “is something that we’re doing every day, basically [on] every continent in the world, and we take it very, very seriously and we’re constantly thinking of how we can do better.”

The Obama administration can definitely do better — but not by hawking top-of-the-line weaponry to Middle Eastern regimes. That approach has already proved disastrous.

In 2011, the U.S-backed security forces of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates intervened to help put down the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain. Last summer, the United Arab Emirates conducted bombing raids against Islamist forces in Libya, further inflaming the situation in that country. Most recently, Saudi Arabia, armed with U.S. planes and bombs, has launched a devastating assault on Yemen that has killed at least 700 civilians, displaced hundreds of thousands, and sparked a humanitarian emergency by blocking access to food and medicine.

One shudders trying to imagine what comes next after the president inks billions more dollars worth of arms sales at Camp David this week.

Photo by Kevin Dietsch – Pool/Getty Images

Just over a year ago, Edward Snowden appeared in a pre-recorded clip during a nationally televised public forum to ask President Vladimir Putin whether Russia spies on its citizens by monitoring their communications. The president declared in response, “We don’t have a mass system for such interception, and according to our law it cannot exist.” Conveniently, Putin didn’t provide robust details on the System for Operative Investigative Activities, under which the state can amass data from Russian communication systems; phone calls, emails, and Internet searches are all fair game. Collecting information requires a court order, but legal decisions are made largely in secret. In 2012 alone, according to Russia’s Supreme Court, security services were authorized to intercept phone and web traffic more than 500,000 times. This is to say nothing of the illegal surveillance many Russia hands suspect the Kremlin of conducting.

 

Yet the new epoch of snooping in Russia involves more than metadata. Much like British authorities, who use closed-circuit TV devices throughout London, Moscow deploys cameras to keep a watchful eye on its populace. And it is the next generation of such video surveillance that has inspired the work of British-based photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin: What would the consequences be if cameras didn’t simply document, but could actively recognize faces, allowing security forces to monitor specific individuals’ whereabouts?

 

To explore this question, the artists recruited more than 1,000 Muscovites as models, including Pussy Riot band member Yekaterina Samutsevich (pictured above), and shot a series of portraits using a prototype of facial-recognition technology developed by Russian engineering company Vocord. Unlike with a typical biometric system—for instance, touching a thumbprint pad to enter a secure room—Vocord’s innovation does not require a person to be an active participant in, or even to be aware of, the identification process. (Hence the portrait subjects’ expressions being rendered passive.) Rather, it uses four lenses, operating in tandem, to capture and recognize a face, stripping it bare of shadows or even makeup. Conceivably, the technology could be linked to police databases across Russia, notifying law enforcement as individuals of interest—terrorism suspects, Kremlin critics, human rights activists—
are recognized. It could be placed in subways, stadiums, or other crowded places.

 

To the artists, the project is something of a warning: Technology, Chanarin says, “is always ideological.”

 

AIN EL HILWEH, Lebanon — The gunmen who control this tiny, cramped Palestinian refugee camp in south Lebanon are uncharacteristically eager to please. Hardened militants scurry to meetings with political rivals, and speak with newfound candor to journalists about past unsuccessful efforts to overcome a history of deadly feuds in the camp.

For decades, the coveted slot of camp boss has gone to the man able to deploy the most shooters and force Ain el Hilweh’s unruly clans and factions to fall in line. Today, however, an unlikely new order prevails: Bitter rivals have forged an unprecedented level of cooperation to police their sometimes-anarchic camp, forcing the most violent jihadists to lay low, and even turning over Palestinian suspects to the Lebanese Army, an act that just a few years ago would have been considered an unpardonable treason. Strongman Munir Makdah, a member of the Fatah movement, presides over a special council of 17 militia leaders — including some borderline jihadists — who must approve the most sensitive moves.

“It’s very important: This is the first time we’ve done anything like this,” Makdah said during a recent visit to his headquarters, nestled in Ain el Hilweh’s claustrophobic horizon of apartment blocs. “I call it the democracy of the gun. We tell our brothers when they visit that they can do the same thing in Palestine.”

Since its establishment in 1948, Ain el Hilweh has been a byword for militancy — a haven for fugitives and a bête noir (at different times) to the Lebanese government, the Israeli military, even the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). An estimated 100,000 people live in the camp, which is rimmed by walls, barbed wire, and army checkpoints. Under a convoluted agreement, Lebanese soldiers search the cars going in and out, but don’t enter the camp itself, leaving policing inside to the Palestinian factions.

The experiment underway in this camp represents a rare instance of cooperation and pragmatism in a region where fragmentation and infighting is the norm. Much more is at stake than simply the stability of an overpopulated square kilometer: There is a widespread fear that if the Islamic State, or jihadists sympathetic to the group, ever gained a foothold in Lebanon, it will be in a place like Ain el Hilweh — where residents are poor, politically disenfranchised, and ineffectively policed.

The agreement in Ain el Hilweh presents significant potential upside, too, in a region currently short of examples of political progress. The camp is home to actors who can impact flashpoints all over the region: It could contain the seeds of reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah in Gaza and the West Bank, while authorities everywhere might look it as a model for a successful initiative to curb jihadists.

“Syria’s war was like a storm coming to us,” Makdah said. “Everyone was worried about the camps. We reflect society.”

When it comes to security, senior Hamas officials in Ain el Hilweh amiably take orders from Makdah. At the camp’s Hamas office, a visiting Fatah official refilled the Hamas chief’s coffee cup as the Hamas official gave his unvarnished assessment of the regional security situation. “Honestly, we Palestinians are in a weak position,” said the official, Abu Ahmed Fadel.

Fadel said it took the factions much too long to learn the lesson of the crisis in the Nahr el Bared refugee camp in north Lebanon in 2007, when jihadists battled the Lebanese Army. That fight destroyed the entire camp and left 27,000 residents homeless. Ever since then, Fadel said, Lebanese leaders suggested that the Palestinians set aside their internal differences and form a united front. It took what Fadel called “the fires in Syria” to finally push the sides to agree.

“Compared to what’s happening around us, we’re a stable river,” said Khalid al-Shayeb, the Fatah deputy who’s in charge of the patrols in Ain el Hilweh and the neighboring Mieh Mieh camp. “We managed to neutralize the threats from Palestinians much more effectively than the Lebanese Army has managed to neutralize the threats from the rest of Lebanon.”

There’s no sign here of the discord that forced a bitter break between Hamas and its long-time patrons in Damascus, or the blood feud between Hamas and Fatah, or between Hamas and the more extreme religious factions like Islamic Jihad and Ansar Allah. One fear has managed to outweigh all that acrimony: the dread of an encroachment by the Islamic State, whose entry into the camp could provoke outsiders to destroy it and cost the grand old factions everything.

“People should be united because there is a threat to everybody,” said Ali Baraka, a senior Hamas official based in Beirut.

That’s not to say that the camp’s residents have entirely stayed out of the Syrian war. Some reports say that one of Makdah’s own sons snuck into Syria to join the jihadists. Makdah has figures of his own: precisely 52 Palestinians from all the camps in Lebanon, he says, have been tracked joining the Syrian jihadists.

The impact of the war is felt everywhere in Ain el Hilweh. A human flood of refugees has entered over the past several years, filling the impossibly crowded camp to its breaking point. According to Makdah, at least 20,000 newcomers moved to the camp since 2011, when war broke out in Syria. Officials have struggled to maintain the camp’s fragile water supply and say they can’t provide adequate education, housing, and health care to the camp’s residents. Until last week, Makdah said, he had turned over his offices to refugees. Now that they’ve found better dwellings, he’s moved back in.

A murder in April tested Makdah’s efforts to construct a new order in the camp. A Lebanese supporter of Hezbollah named Marwan Issa was dragged into Ain el Hilweh and murdered. According to Palestinian security officials, Issa was a member of a Hezbollah auxiliary militia called the Resistance Brigades, and his suspected killers were known arms dealers. They believe the murder was related to a weapons deal gone awry. Two suspects were quickly apprehended. Leaders of the 17 factions called an emergency meeting to vote on whether to hand them over to the Lebanese authorities.

“Usually the Islamic factions object,” said Bilal Selwan Aboul Nour, the camp security officer in charge of liaising with the Lebanese security establishment. “In this case, it was different. The victim was Lebanese. And if we didn’t cooperate, it could bring trouble on the entire camp.”

Aboul Nour immediately delivered the captives himself to the Lebanese Army barracks up the road.

A third suspect in the murder remains at large in the camp, however, illustrating the limits of this new cooperative order. That suspect is under the protection of Jund el-Sham, a jihadist faction, in the Taamir area of the camp. “We can’t use force,” Aboul Nour said. “He’s in an area outside our control.”

Hezbollah and the Lebanese government have been patient and understanding, according to the Palestinians, although Hezbollah called the killing a “stab in the back of the Lebanese resistance.”

It was the Islamic State’s infiltration of the Palestinian camp of Yarmouk in Damascus that motivated the dithering Palestinian factions to unite last summer. At the time, the already unraveling region was experiencing extra strain: The Islamic State had seized much of northern Iraq and declared a caliphate, and had seized control of some entrances to Yarmouk and assassinated Palestinian operatives, according to Baraka. Senior officials from Fatah, Hamas, and the Lebanese government quickly agreed that if the Islamic State could win followers in Yarmouk, it could easily do the same in Lebanese camps.

Since September, the Palestinian Joint Security Committee has doubled the number of camp police in Ain el Hilweh from 200 to 400. Fatah supplies the top commanders and foots 70 percent of the cost of the committee, and Hamas provides the rest. The officers are mostly familiar faces in the camp, some of them veteran fighters in their fifties. Now they wear red armbands that identify themselves as Joint Security Committee fighters. Makdah has not only brought together Fatah and Hamas, he has also convinced jihadists and secular Marxists to police the camp in joint patrols — a success that eluded generations of Arab leaders before him.

Most of the fighters still stay close to their factions: In the headquarters, Fatah old-timers cluster around the small fountain full of goldfish. Outside, Ansar Allah’s fighters — identifiable by their long Salafi-style beards — politely decline to talk to reporters. Near the hospital, the clean-shaven leftists of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine shun the uniform altogether; their unit commander, Ali Rashid, wears blue jeans and a brown leather jacket. The groups sometimes organize joint patrols, and the major checkpoints include fighters from all the factions.

It was especially difficult for secular leftists to join forces with Islamist jihadists, Rashid said.

“We agreed that we would cut off any hand that tries to mess with security in the camp,” Rashid said. “We cannot tolerate even the smallest action from any takfiri [extremist] who enters here.”

So far, he said, the extremists in the camp have obeyed the new order. They might shelter fugitives — but so long as the fugitives are in the camp they refrain from any active role in militant operations.

Makdah says the camp really needs 1,000 police officers. In March, he extended his writ to the nearby camp of Mieh Mieh. If the experiment continues to succeed, Palestinian and Lebanese security officials said they hope to spread the experiment to all the Palestinian refugee camps in the country.

Ain el Hilweh’s unique circumstances make it an unlikely template for other places: It’s a hyper-politicized area whose claustrophobic living conditions make the Gaza Strip appear positively suburban by comparison. But sudden and intense collaboration between militants of secular, Marxist, Islamist and jihadist pedigrees show just how dramatically the Syrian war has shaken the old order. And it provides a fleeting glimpse of the kind of politicking — and transcending of old divisions — that has so far escaped mainstream Palestinian politics and the revolutionary movements that fueled the Arab Spring uprisings.

MAHMOUD ZAYYAT/AFP/Getty Images

Eight months after a devastating war, Israel’s continued and deliberate policy of besieging Gaza and enforcing its separation from the West Bank means conflict could break out again.

The formation of a new right-wing coalition government doesn’t look like it will help. The cabinet appears to be a devastating blow to hopes of any accord with the Palestinians. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a lot to do to convince domestic and foreign audience that he has a credible desire and vision for peace.

Netanyahu is now trying to find common cause with neighboring Arab countries over the Islamic State and violent Salafi-jihadism, instead of working toward a regional peace agreement. But Israel should recognize that Gaza is not immune to these radicalizing trends as its population sinks further into poverty and despair.

The plight of Gaza and its people, and the security threat it poses to the whole region, was at the heart of our mission earlier this month to Israel and Palestine. We went as members of The Elders, the group of independent former leaders who campaign for peace and human rights across the globe.

One place we visited was Kibbutz Nir Am, just one kilometer from the border with Gaza. We heard directly from people on the front line of the conflict who wish to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbors. One mother’s words stood out: “If people have nothing to live for, then they will find something to die for.”

She and her fellow kibbutz residents are understandably frightened and angry about the threats of rocket attacks and tunnel raids, but we were impressed by their insistence that only a just peace can bring security to their community.

We regret that we were unable to visit Gaza on this trip, to see the situation there for ourselves. What we heard from independent experts and United Nations officials confirmed our worst expectations regarding poverty, housing, health, and political deadlock. It only strengthened our determination to work for peace, a two-state solution, and the lifting of the blockade.

The situation in Gaza is intolerable. Eight months after the end of last summer’s war, not one destroyed house has been rebuilt. People cannot live with the respect and dignity they deserve.

A complete paradigm shift is essential. This demands the lifting of the siege and an end to Israel’s policy of separating the West Bank and Gaza: the two main components of what should, in our view, become an independent Palestinian state. Unfortunately, as we heard during our visit, without Gaza the two-state solution simply cannot be realized.

We have both spent decades working for peace in the Middle East and, notwithstanding the growing number of skeptics, believe the two-state solution remains the only viable outcome.

Gaza’s 1.8 million people are besieged, isolated, and desperate. They cannot enjoy any of the aspects of normal life, from trade and travel to health and education, that people in our countries — and, indeed, in Israel — take for granted.

The risk of another war is very real. This would be disastrous not just for the people of Gaza but for all Palestinians and all Israelis as well. Everyone who lives in the Holy Land has suffered under the shadow of conflict for long enough.

To avoid further bloodshed and boost the currently slim chances of a peace agreement, Palestinian reconciliation and unity is a prerequisite. When we met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, we were encouraged by his commitment to convene the Interim Leadership Framework, a new caucus that would bring together the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization and representatives of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the main factions in Gaza.

Abbas asked us, as Elders, to secure from Hamas a written request for the convening of elections, and he committed to hold fresh presidential and Palestinian Legislative Council elections upon receipt of this communications. This is now the focus of our ongoing work in the region.

We also believe it is essential that the Palestinian Government of National Consensus is fully established in Gaza, initially to control the border crossings and thus to allow many more goods to enter the territory for reconstruction and other essential purposes.

These steps might seem merely procedural but they are vital to reconnecting Gaza and the West Bank politically, economically, and socially.

Even if Palestinian factions can be reconciled, however, they will still need credible and sincere partners for peace on the Israeli side. Such forces do exist despite the dominant trends in the Knesset. We were encouraged by the sincere commitment of several proudly patriotic Israelis we met for the realization of the two-state solution.

The best guarantee of Israel’s future security and acceptance by its neighbors will be the two-state solution and an end to the occupation and settlement expansion. To help achieve this goal, we feel it is high time that the countries of Europe take a more proactive role, underpinned by a serious financial commitment to assist in Gaza’s reconstruction.

Although the United States will remain a key player, it cannot shoulder the burden of peacemaking alone. We will do all we can to support EU High Representative Federica Mogherini so an effective multilateral process can be set in motion.

This was the fourth Elders mission to Israel and Palestine since 2009. Our organization was founded by Nelson Mandela to work for peace and human rights around the world. Each time we visit this region, it is brought home to us how the former cannot be secured without the latter. The people of Israel and Palestine deserve nothing less.

ABBAS MOMANI/AFP/Getty Images

Europe is poised to try to help Libya stem the lethal human trafficking trade that has imperiled the lives of tens of thousands of desperate migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea in search of a better life in Europe.

But Libya’s U.N. ambassador, Ibrahim Dabbashi, is essentially saying “not so fast.”

The Security Council’s four European members — Britain, France, Spain and Lithuania — have crafted a resolution that would grant Europeans broad authority to use military force to seize suspected smuggling ships on the high seas or in Libya’s territorial waters, according to a diplomat familiar with the draft. The resolution, which European foreign ministers are scheduled to take up on Monday in Brussels, would also allow European forces to pursue human traffickers in Libya.

It’s unclear how many European navies are prepared to participate in a concerted interdiction effort on the high seas, and it seems highly unlikely that any European countries would relish the chance to send combat forces into a country riven by a bloody civil war.

Dabbashi doesn’t want to wait to find out. In an interview with Foreign Policy, Dabbashi expressed deep reservations about the European plan, which he said could violate Libya’s sovereignty. He also fretted that Libyan fishermen might get caught up in the international operation and have their boats, their only source of income, destroyed. “It will be very difficult to distinguish between fishermen and trafficking boats,” he said. “It could be disastrous for fishermen.”

The ambassador’s concerns echo public and private misgivings being expressed about the European plan from the United Nations, the United States, and Russia. The resolution would be adopted under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, a provision that is traditionally invoked to impose sanctions or authorize military action. The European text, which may be shared with the 15-nation Security Council later this week or next week, also would permit the detention of smugglers and the scuttling of their ships. In addition, foreign powers would be allowed to mount attacks on Libyan soil to seize any “assets” the smugglers might use to further their illicit trade.

The initiative is being driven most fervently by Italy and EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, an Italian. Rome has shouldered the greatest burden of accommodating the massive flow of tens of thousands of desperate migrants into Europe. In previous efforts to stem the tide, Italy sought unsuccessfully to rally international support for a U.N.-backed stabilization force in Libya.

European powers cast the diplomatic push on humanitarian grounds, but Dabbashi voiced suspicion that Italy and other European powers were actually seeking a blank check to carry out offensive military operations on Libyan soil and Libyan territorial waters. The European approach, he said pointedly, could “raise more problems than it solves.”

The European diplomacy follows one of the deadliest months for the nearly 60,000 migrants that have fled unrest in Africa and the Middle East for Europe since the beginning of the year. In one particularly horrific incident, a boat carrying more than 750 migrants capsized off the coast of Sicily, killing most of the passengers.

“In the first 130 days of 2015, 1,800 people have drowned in the Mediterranean,” Peter Sutherland, the U.N.’s special representative for international migration, told the Security Council Monday. “That total represents a 20-fold increase over the same period last year – and at this pace, between 10,000 and 20,000 migrants would perish by autumn.”

The migrants come from as far away as Afghanistan, Eritrea, Somalia, and Syria, where political repression or long-standing conflicts have fueled a mass exodus. The largest numbers are transiting through Libya, which is in the midst of its own civil war, and are paying a fee of $5,000 to $15,000 for their passage to the southern shores of Italy, according to the United Nations. “They face a substantial risk of death,” Sutherland said. “But, clearly, the situations from which they flee are even more dangerous.”

European governments have faced intense criticism for mounting what has largely been a lackluster response to the rising migrant death toll.

Last November, European leaders shuttered an Italian naval operation, dubbed Mare Nostrum, that patrolled international waters in search of smuggling boats and sought to prosecute the traffickers. The program, which is credited with saving thousands of lives, was considered too costly by its European funders. A newer, less ambitious European program, called Operation Triton, only operates within about 21 miles of Italy’s shores, and has only six vessels at its disposal, according to Sutherland. Mare Nostrum had 32.

The push for a Security Council resolution is aimed to show renewed European resolve. It comes as the European Commission on Wednesday announced a new European migration plan, which would triple funding for a European maritime operation aimed at rescuing migrants at sea, establish a quota system for distributing refugees throughout Europe, and forge a common security policy aimed at dismantling traffickers networks and fighting the smuggling of humans.

On April 23, the European Council endorsed a plan favored by Mogherini “to undertake systematic efforts to identify, capture, and destroy vessels before they are used by traffickers in accordance with international law.”

The European call for the use of force has faced some skepticism at the United Nations, where U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Russia, and the United States have expressed public or private reservations about the plan. “Destroying the boats in not the appropriate way, it’s not the good way,” Ban told reporters during a visit to the Vatican. He voiced concern that destroying boats could damage an already ailing local economy.

Russian officials, for their part, have voiced regret for supporting a resolution in 2011 that paved the way for a NATO-backed overthrow of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, saying they were fooled into believing that the mission was designed only to prevent the mass slaughter of civilians. Moscow remains skeptical about the latest European plan. “We think it’s just going too far,” Russian Ambassador to the U.N. Vitaly Churkin said late last week.

The United States has not publically criticized the European proposal. But during a May 11 closed-door Security Council debate, Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, asked a series of pointed questions about the European plan, according to three diplomats briefed on the meeting. One of her biggest: Whether creating a European force designed to deliver rescued migrants to Europe for processing might actually encourage people to try to make the risky passage.

Power and other American diplomats have also privately raised concerns with foreign officials about the wisdom of trying to adopt the resolution under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, a provision used to authorize sanctions or the use of military force. Washington worries that governments in other parts of the world, including Asia, might seek authorization for military force against their own migrants using the provision.

Some diplomats, however, say they suspect the U.S. is reluctant to see the Security Council getting into the business of addressing migration issues because it doesn’t want to set a precedent that might invite other governments to call for council consideration of American migration policies.

Speaking to the Security Council on May 11, Mogherini sought to downplay the military nature of the operation, saying the Europeans had no intention of sending an intervention force onto Libyan soil. She also assured council members that the effort was not aimed at forcing refugees to remain in Libya, where many faced detention in extremely harsh conditions.

“Let me explicitly assure you that no refugees or migrants intercepted at sea will be sent back against their will,” Mogherini told the council. “Their rights under Geneva conventions will be fully honored.”

Asked to expand on Power’s remarks in the closed-door meeting, a U.S. official said that the Obama administration wanted to ensure that “any response that imposes consequences on smugglers and their assets should avoid putting migrants in further danger.”

But the official, who declined to be identified by name, said: “We support Europe’s effort to take a comprehensive approach to resolving these migration challenges and would emphasize that – as laid out in the EU council’s conclusions – a sustainable solution must include elements to expand search and rescue operations, increase legal avenues to migration, provide protection to refugees, and help source and transit and transit countries to manage migrants and refugees more humanely, in addition to cracking down on smugglers.”

European officials, meanwhile, are calling on Libya’s leaders to write a formal letter to the U.N. granting their consent for a new mission.

But any effort to secure Libyan backing is complicated by the fact that two rival factions — the internationally recognized government, headquartered in the eastern city of Tobruk, and a coalition of Islamists and fighters from the Misrata-based militia — are in the midst of a bloody civil war. Any decision to use force would require the formal consent of the government in Tobruk, which fled the Libyan capital of Tripoli last summer. But it would also require the approval of the rebels, who now control Tripoli and many of the country’s main ports. The failure to secure both parties consent, U.N. officials warn, could undermine U.N.-brokered talks aimed at forming a government of national unity in Libya.

While Dabbashi didn’t rule out the possibility that the Libyan government might ultimately agree to an outside maritime force, he set potentially insurmountable terms. “If we have to ask for assistance we will ask for assistance of the Security Council to extend the authority of the Libyan government over all of Libya,” he said.

That is a non-starter as it would run contrary to U.N. efforts to negotiate a power-sharing arrangement, according to diplomats. But they said they remain confident that they can secure the support of the key Libyan parties.

“We know what Dabbashi thinks, but at the end of day, if we are going to get a request from the government, it’s not going to be a letter written by Dabbashi,” said one U.N.-based diplomat.

The Libyans are not the only ones to harbor serious doubts about the European plan. “Nobody really thinks the European Union has a very convincing plan,” said Richard Gowan, a U.N. expert at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation. “There is a lack of clarity over how these operations would work [and] there is a lot of fear that this will end up in situation where the Europeans blow up harmless civilians. The U.N. secretariat is unconvinced it’s a good idea, Ban Ki-moon is unconvinced it’s a good idea.”

Gowan said the Italian government has failed to build European and U.N. support for a peacekeeping force in Libya, and the current strategy offers an opening to enlist greater support for military involvement in Libya. “This is partially a genuine response to migration crisis but it’s also an alibi for a serious European intervention in Libya,” he said. There is a lot of “genuine skepticism” about whether this constitutes a viable strategy capable of addressing Europe’s migration crisis, Gowan added, or a “lowest common denominator” pact that simply papers over differences within Europe.

“To be honest it looks like a half-baked baked plan that could go seriously awry,” said Gowan. “My suspicion is a lot of people are hoping maybe Russia and China will kill this off and save everyone a lot of embarrassment.”

Francesco Malavolta/AFP/Getty Images

Mazrak camp in the tough mountainous scrublands of Yemen’s north-west border with Saudi Arabia is now home to more than 10,000 people displaced by the escalating war between the government and rebels from the Huthi clan.
Photo: Annasofie Flamand / IRIN / 201003230854400244

By Ali G. Scotten

As Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) officials meet with President Obama at Camp David, their lobbying efforts are revolving around one question: In the event of a nuclear deal with Iran, what will the U.S. do to counter the Islamic Republic’s influence in the Middle East? The more important question, however — and one that Obama should ask them — is how they plan to stop the spread of sectarian warfare in the region.

The intensification of fighting along the Sunni-Shia divide should be of far greater concern than the challenge posed by Iran’s emergence from isolation. Sectarian hatred is drawing religious extremists from around the world to fight in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. The longer that violence continues along religious communal lines, the harder it will be to arrive at political solutions to each conflict, and the more battle training foreign insurgents will receive — experience that can be used to wreak havoc when they return home.

The transnational nature of the current sectarian conflict is largely a result of the way a number of GCC countries, led by Saudi Arabia, have attempted to counter Iran’s increasing influence in the region. For over a decade, Arab leaders have been warning Western governments of the Islamic Republic’s nefarious plan to establish a Shia empire across the Middle East — an argument based on the assumption that all Shias are sleeper agents, mindlessly awaiting orders from Iran’s Supreme Leader. The irony is that, in employing sectarian rhetoric to thwart Shia community efforts to address local grievances, these leaders have galvanized Sunni extremists, whose violence often serves to push Shias into Iran’s arms as a last resort.

Iraq and Yemen provide just two examples.

Following the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, Saudi Arabia and its allies feared that a new representative government in Baghdad would emerge as a Shia theocracy operating under Tehran’s thumb. This was despite the fact that the majority of Iraqi Shias align with the Najaf school of Shiism, which looks down on ayatollahs engaging in worldly politics, and that most Shias polled at the time didn’t see Iranian involvement in their political affairs as a positive development. However, anti-Shia rhetoric and funding from wealthy individuals in GCC countries — coupled with the U.S. de-Ba’athification program, which exacerbated Sunni fears of marginalization — drew Sunni militants to Iraq harboring the intent to spark a sectarian civil war. When the civil war erupted in 2006, Shia Iraqis had little recourse but to turn to Iranian-allied extremist groups for protection.

In Yemen, the Saudis have been bombarding Houthi rebels, whom they view to be Iranian proxies because of their Zaydi Shia faith. But Zaydis share more in common religiously with their northern Yemeni Sunni neighbors than they do with distant Iranian Shias; in fact, many Zaydis even consider themselves to be a distinct sect. As a result, until the past couple of decades, Yemen experienced relatively little in the way of sectarianism. The more assertive form of Zaydism that the Houthis follow, however, emerged in the early 1990s in response to the encroachment of Saudi Wahabbism—the brand of Sunni Islam that has inspired the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and the Islamic State—into northern Yemen, accompanied by attacks on Zaydi shrines and mosques.

This new tension, combined with the economic deprivations experienced by northern Yemenis, created the Houthi movement. During the past decade, the Houthis became more radicalized following Yemeni dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh’s six military incursions into northern Yemen, which left thousands dead. The Saudis, who supported the attacks as a means of countering Iran’s supposed influence in the Arabian Peninsula, joined the fight against the Houthis in 2009, prompting emboldened rhetoric from Tehran in support of the rebels.

Ultimately, in attacking the Houthis as Iranian proxies rather than seeking to alleviate the social and economic problems afflicting northern Yemen, Sana’a and Riyadh pushed the rebels to seek Iran’s help. Moreover, Saudi intervention in the name of countering Tehran created an incentive for the Iranians to operate in a region that held minor strategic importance to them, largely in order to prevent the Saudis from claiming that they had dealt the Islamic Republic a blow. Today, multiple flights travel each week between Tehran and the Houthi-held Yemeni capital, with many likely carrying arms (although most analysts see Saleh’s about-face in support of the Houthis, rather than Iranian weaponry, as the key to the rebels’ recent success).

None of this is to say that Iran is blameless in the sectarianism game. The Saudis and Bahrainis, for instance, likely wouldn’t see their sizeable Shia populations as security threats if it weren’t for Islamic Republic founder Ayatollah Khomeini’s call in the 1980s to spread the Islamic Revolution — a call that led to the establishment of pro-Iranian revolutionary groups throughout the Persian Gulf. One such group, Hijazi Hezbollah, is widely believed to have been behind the 1996 bombing of the U.S. military barracks in Al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia. And Iran’s failure to rein in previous Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki’s persecution of Iraqi Sunnis contributed to the widespread alienation that allowed the Islamic State to take over much of the country’s Sunni areas with such ease. The massacres being perpetrated against Sunni civilians by Iranian-backed Shia militias in areas liberated from the Islamic State do nothing to address this problem.

At today’s meeting with Obama, GCC leaders will ask for more military assistance. While Washington is likely to grant them their wish — perhaps providing them with a missile shield — it’s unclear what more weaponry will ultimately accomplish given that most of the fighting is being waged by non-state actors who can’t be defeated through conventional military means. Already possessing the world’s fourth-largest defense budget, the Saudis have been unable to achieve definitive success against the Houthis. Instead, the fighting is spreading into Saudi Arabia, and the Islamic State appears to have used the unrest to gain a foothold in Yemen.

It’s time for the GCC to accept that the years of containing Iran are over; the Bush administration’s decision to overthrow Tehran’s mortal enemy in Baghdad made that all but inevitable. Even in the face of the most crippling sanctions it has ever seen, the Islamic Republic has been able to preserve the Assad regime in Syria and increase its influence in Iraq. Is it possible that, following the lifting of sanctions, Iran could use the billions of dollars in unfrozen assets and increased oil revenue to intensify the fighting? Yes. But it should be painfully clear by now that none of the region’s most serious conflicts can be resolved without having Iran at the table. Ultimately, lasting security will have to involve the establishment of a new regional framework that binds the Islamic Republic and the other Persian Gulf countries into a relationship that elevates economic collaboration over geopolitical confrontation.

This is unlikely to occur, however, without domestic reform in the region. All of the conflicts raging in the Middle East today — with the exception of the U.S.-inspired chaos in Iraq — were sparked by protests against repression. In this regard, it’s important to note that Persian-led Iran has only made substantive inroads into the Arab world in times of instability. This was the case following the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which provided the context for Hezbollah’s emergence, and it’s the case in Iraq and Yemen today. Meanwhile, GCC leaders’ policies that marginalize their Shia subjects, rather than integrate them into a pluralistic national project, have created the very susceptibility to Iranian influence that the Sunni monarchs fear.

For these reasons, when President Obama’s visitors ask him how they can best counter Iran, the most honest answer he can give is, “Get your own houses in order.”

Ali G. Scotten is a Fellow with the Truman National Security Project and founder of Scotten Consulting, LLC, a company specializing in sociocultural and geopolitical analysis of the Middle East. Views expressed are his own.

Famed fictional archaeologist Indiana Jones often said antiquities belong in museums. A new bill introduced this week in Congress agrees.

Rep. Bill Keating (D-Mass.) is offering new legislation, called the Prevent Trafficking in Cultural Property Act, to help the Homeland Security Department block Islamic State sales of antiquities on the black market, a major source of the group’s revenue. It’s not clear how much the sale of these artifacts, looted from museums and archaeological sites, is bringing in, but intelligence officials estimate it’s the second largest source of funding for the group, behind oil revenue. In one region of Syria, the group reportedly cashed in on $36 million by selling plundered artifacts.

The United Nations already has a ban against the sale of items looted from Iraq and Syria. But according to Keating, efforts within U.S. law enforcement to stop their sale are poorly coordinated, and officials charged with preventing the illicit trade are not well trained.

“It takes more expertise to be able to spot what’s an antiquity,” Keating told FP. “These investigations aren’t occurring the way they should.”

The Islamic State profits from the sale of stolen relics in two ways. In some cases, the group offers them on the black market. In others, it serves as a courier between parties, exercising a tax as high as 50 percent on their sale.

The market for these goods is global, but Keating said the main buyers are in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan. His bill would require DHS to appoint a lead law enforcement coordinator to stop such sales in America, better train U.S. officials to identify stolen pieces, and improve efforts to prosecute buyers.

Keating said Reps. Mike McCaul (R-Texas) and Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) also have signed on to the plan, which he described as a way to cut off Islamic State funding that is just as important as military operations against the extremists on the battlefield.

“It’s something we have control over,” he said, referring to cracking down on the black market. “There are so many things we don’t have control over.”

Photo Credit: Louai Beshara/Getty Images