No-one writes to the ex-General

Like the eponymous character in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, No-one Writes To The Colonel, Augusto Pinochet Ugarte has found that old age has brought him not the security that he feels his status demands, but instead increasing irrelevance, antipathy and – in the latter’s case – incarceration. As he spends his ninetieth birthday under house arrest, what kind of thoughts are likely to be running through the mind of the former Chilean dictator?

Disgust, possibly, at the manner in which his authority and seemingly unimpeachable status in the country he viciously ruled for seventeen years has slipped away into the ether. Pinochet’s brutal rule lasted until a lost plebiscite on the extension of his presidency resulted in a peaceful handover in 1990. Until 1997, he remained as army chief; upon retirement he elected himself a lifelong senator with absolute legal immunity. His dramatic arrest in London the following year, at the behest of Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon, made headlines across the world and was heralded as a watershed moment for the rule of international law. A figure that once loomed over South America, a symbol for authoritarianism and reckless free-market economics, synonymous with the murder, torture and brutal repression of his own people, was being held in a foreign country for crimes committed thousands of miles away in his homeland. Despite the slow and often frustrating progress of his prosecution since then, his arrest remains a poignant memory for all those who believe in the magnitude of human rights. Furthermore, it helped usher in a new sense of shared responsibility amongst Chileans. As congresswoman Isabel Allende – daughter of the man Pinochet overthrew in 1973, and cousin of the well-known author of the same name – described the significance in a recent interview:

“The 500 days that Pinochet was detained in London were a watershed. It forced Chileans to accept that the serious human rights abuses committed by the military government were part of a systematic state policy, not isolated cases or accidental ‘excesses’ as Pinochet supporters claimed. There was a remarkable cultural change; people stopped being afraid and accepted the need for justice.”

While Pinochet was not extradited to face charges in Spain, as many had hoped, he was returned to Chile and since then has suffered a string of legal setbacks. He was stripped of his immunity and prosecuted, although the process was halted when his team successfully proved that the octogenarian was suffering from senile dementia. However, a 2004 interview with a Miami-based TV network – in which Pinochet appeared lucid and sagacious – was used as evidence to disprove the earlier claims. Since then, a series of tit-for-tat exchanges between rival legal teams have promulgated, with decisions over Pinochet’s culpability in murders and torture dating back to the 1970s over-ruled, and then re-instated once more. In September of this year he was placed under arrest for what could be described the ‘Al Capone doctrine’ – a US investigation revealed Pinochet’s deep involvement in a tax evasion and money-laundering scandal. Yet no sooner had he been released on bail in this week, he was re-arrested on charges relating to the disappearance of dissidents in 1974 in a case known as Operation Colombo.

Pinochet could well claim that he is being persecuted, and it would be true to form. In the early years of his reign, he was quick to accuse Marxist and Communist malcontents as plotting his assassination and the destabilisation of his regime. Such accusations were used to justify the brutal repression of anybody opposed to his government, and approximately 3,000 Chilean citizens were “disappeared”; the fate of most remains unknown to this day. To the present day, Pinochet makes similar allegations; his lawyer recently spoke ominously of a plot hatched by “international Marxism”, an absurd charge, but one completely in keeping with Pinochet’s refusal to countenance that his actions whilst in power were anything but fair and necessary.

What is significant about Pinochet’s ongoing legal strife is that his authority has been eroded to the point of obsolescence. His arrest in 1998 prompted mass demonstrations on the streets of Santiago, with protestors storming the British embassy and the Chilean government demanding the return of their former president. Nearly a decade later, his popularity has dissipated. His legal peccadilloes merit little in the way of sympathy, and even his granddaughter has acknowledged the crimes committed in her family name. For the remainder of his life Pinochet will be shunted from prosecution to prosecution, and whether or not he ever receives a jail sentence or not, the fact that he has lived to see his ultimate irrelevance is worth noting in itself.

The country holds elections in December that will further cement the fact that today’s Chile is a modern democracy that is increasingly influential in the region’s political realm. Current President Ricardo Lagos, a socialist who governs the Concertacion party and was a member of Salvador Allende’s cabinet of the early 1970s, will step down in the new year after a fairly successful six years in power, marked by an increase in the country’s economic productivity and a slow, albeit steady, reduction in poverty, and the establishment of social programs for unemployment, healthcare and the homeless. Furthermore, Lagos has been instrumental in helping the country come to terms with Pinochet’s legacy, supporting the trial of the former dictator and his allies for human rights abuses and approving compensation payments to victims of the regime.

The current polls indicate that Lagos will be succeeded by Michele Bachelet, current Defense Minister, who if elected will become the continent’s first democratically elected female premier. Bachelet’s ascension to the presidency would be poignant; in 1973 both her and her parents were tortured by the dictatorship. Bachelet’s father, an officer in Allende’s government, died of cardiac arrest as a result. What better way for Pinochet’s legacy to be buried than for one of his former victims to preside over the country where he once walked tall?

Melanie Phillips and the "France Insurrection"

Notorious Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips has been having a field day with the past month's rioting in parts of France. Never slow to twist facts in service of her often racist (and certainly Islamophobic) viewpoints, Melanie has written one Daily Mail article, another for the Jewish Chronicle, and entry after entry after entry after entry in her online Diary, all mining the same thread: that France is burning, an Islamist jihad movement is attempting to overthrow the Republic, and that the whole of Europe (or "Eurabia" as the ridiculous Spectator headline had it last week) was about to be subsumed by an Islamic caliphate.

Baiting Melanie Phillips is not a particularly onerous task, as she writes with such fire-and-brimstone apocalyptic verve that a sane individual would be unable to take anything she says even remotely serious. Yet she receives an audience in the millions through her work in the Mail, and it is disturbing to think that percentage - however small - of that readership will be won over by her noxious opinions.

I have made a habit of writing to her for around a year now, and occasionally she responds, which I'll admit is good of her as she most likely receives a large bulk of mail responding to her work. Below is a letter I have sent her based on her recent columns and my own experience of the "French intifada" during a trip to Paris last weekend. I'll post her reply if and when it comes.

Hello Melanie,

I hope you are well.

I see that you continue to vent on the "French Intifada", or the "French Insurrection", on your diary (although, admirably, you have limited your published articles on the subject to just two). I'm wondering, have you been to France yet to report first-hand as Europe falls to the hordes of Islam? Or are you still going by second-hand reports, such as the hilarious (and I understand already a collector's item amongst fans of black comedy) 'Eurabian Nightmare' edition of the Spectator?

I have just returned from a long weekend in Paris, visiting an ex-girlfriend. A great time I had, too. Oddly, I didn't see any rioting myself - strange for a city that is supposedly "burning". I'm sure you will be heartened to hear that I managed to avoid being apprehended by any Muslim and have my head sawn off as an infidel, and thankfully I was able to escape any suicide bombings in buses or restaurants. In fact I was unable to find evidence of any beheadings, no any suicide bombings, in the whole city. Strange for a country that - according to you - is facing an intifada by crazed jihadists.

I regretfully admit that my French is almost non-existent, and thus I was grateful that almost everybody I met over the course of the weekend knew at least rudimentary English. A great many things were discussed, and one of the subjects that occurred frequently was the rioting of recent weeks. One thing I noticed was how none of the people voluntarily brought up the supposed 'Muslim angle' of the riots. When I ventured that a great many in the UK had viewed the clashes as the equivalent of the 2000 Palestinian intifada, I was greeted by laughter and horrified cries. My new friends - young, intelligent French, from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds - were united in their appraisal: while many of the rioters were indeed Muslim, the idea of the entire thing being an Islamist movement was more than ridiculous - it was in fact a dangerous untruth, an example of the villification that has led to the state of unrest in the impoverished banlieus in the first place. They worried that this type of barefaced lie - that Muslims were trying to overthrow the Republic - would only lead to a further shift to the right, one that Sarkozy or, ominously, Le Pen could exploit.

I do hope, Melanie, for the sake of your journalistic reputation, that you try to visit France and see the situation on the ground and speak with some French people before continuing to draw erroneous and self-serving conclusions.

More on Amir Peretz's victory

Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian offers an interesting analysis of how the election of Peretz to leader of Israel's Labour party could re-energise the country's peace camp...

Already people are speaking of a revolution in the country's politics, a new "Peretzstroika" according to the veteran peace activist Uri Avnery (who also noted that the Hebrew word "peretz" could be read as "breakthrough"). The beleaguered Israeli left is hailing the new leader's arrival as the best news since the collapse of the Camp David peace process five years ago.

Why the excitement? Start with Peretz's position on the central question, the conflict with the Palestinians. For two decades - long before it was fashionable - he has advocated a Palestinian state. He calls now for an end to Ariel Sharon's unilateralism and a renewed pursuit of a negotiated peace, engaging with the Palestinians directly. He dares to speak of a return to the "path of Oslo", brave in a country where the architects of the 1993 accords are routinely referred to as the "Oslo criminals".

There is immediate politics in this, marking a clean break with the outgoing Labour leader, Shimon Peres - the grand old man who has moved in Israel's ruling circles since before Peretz was born in 1952. While Peres was prepared to let Labour serve as Likud's hind legs in a national coalition, barely questioning Sharon's unilateralist approach, Peretz wants out. He is pushing for Labour to bolt now, triggering early elections by next spring.

But there is more to Peretz's stance than electoral calculus. In his speech to the rally that gathered on Saturday to mark the 10th anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Peretz called for a "moral road map, whose guiding star is respect for human dignity", arguing that Israel's continued rule over the Palestinians was exacting a moral cost on Israelis themselves. "A moral road map is ending the occupation and signing a permanent agreement," he said, before invoking Martin Luther King to declare that he too had a dream - that Palestinian and Israeli children would one day "play together and build a common future."

He also sounds a note of caution...

Of course, Israeli politicians have talked like this before. In 2002, in an another upset victory, the dovish Amram Mitzna became Labour leader and got peaceniks excited - only to be wiped out by Sharon in a landslide. But this time there is a crucial difference.

Peretz is from what used to be known as "the Second Israel", Jews with roots in the Muslim or Arab world: in today's argot, Mizrachim.

...

He is himself a working-class man from Sderot, one who can speak to the millions lost to Labour for so long. He is no token, but an authentic grassroots leader, one who has fought hard for workers' rights and equality, eventually running the Histradut, Israel's TUC

"Death of the ethnic demon"

Israel’s political structure was spun on its head this week with the unexpected ousting of the Labour leader, Shimon Peres, in a closely fought battle. His successor, Amir Peretz, signalled immediately that he intends to withdraw his party from the coalition government that has ruled Israel for the past four years, and turn Labour back to its socialist and welfare-state roots. In the week of the tenth anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, Peretz promised to return to the slain premier’s desire for a negotiated peace with the Palestinians. But will Peretz’s election re-energise the Israeli left, or spell its death knell?

The rise of Peretz comes at a time when the state of Israel is undergoing a period of political upheaval. The withdrawal from the Gaza Strip did not, as many had predicted, plunge the country into civil unrest; most Israelis supported the pullout beforehand, and the relative ease with which it was accomplished has seen the scheme’s architect, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, shore up his popularity across the country. However, Sharon’s popularity amongst his own Likud party has plummeted, with the majority of Likud Knesset members (or MKs) mortified at the return of the Palestinians’ rightful land. Sharon has walked a very fine line between the wishes of his party, and the desires of the electorate; indeed, this has only been possible with Labour’s backing in the Knesset. Now that backing is going, Sharon will be forced to call an early election, most likely in March 2006.

Sharon’s grip on the Likud leadership now looks increasingly perilous. His former finance minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, quit the government in protest at the Gaza withdrawal. He has long been planning to wrest the leadership from Sharon’s grasp, and – with the majority of Likud MKs supporting him – he may well see now as the ideal time. Where this leaves the country’s political structure is a matter of debate amongst Israelis. Even if he loses the Likud leadership, Sharon could well still prevail by forming a new political party; polls suggest that he would still draw enough support in the Knesset to win another term as prime minister as the head of any new organisation, although he may well depend on Labour support to achieve it.

It will be interesting to see how responds to a resurgence of Labour’s socialist roots. Once a divisive figure, and with a war-crime charge awaiting him in the Hague, Ariel Sharon has earned widespread respect across the country for his success in withdrawing from Gaza. Despite the unfinished nature of this withdrawal – the Israelis still control the borders and are currently restricting the import and export of goods within the Strip – the consensus is that Sharon took a bold step, one that ran against the grain of opinion within his own party, and should be congratulated for having the bravery to do so. A Labour party in touch with its socialist roots may well challenge this consensus. On Monday, Peretz submitted his first bill as Labour leader – he wishes the Knesset to consider offering West Bank settlers the same amount of compensation as the former Gaza settlers, if 60% of any settlement’s residents voted to do so. A clearer decision of his intent to withdraw totally from the West Bank would be difficult to imagine.

How these signals will be received in Israeli society will be seen over the coming months. But Peretz can certainly expect a bumpy ride, as many – including a significant number in his own party – are wary of his doveish views. But Peretz is nothing if not tenacious. He claimed last week that he his election represented the ‘death of the ethnic demon’; as a Sephardic Jew, of Mahgreb descent (he moved from Morocco as a child), Peretz is a rarity in high level Israeli politics which is dominated by Ashkenazim, or Jews of European descent. Following the right-wing bent that Labour embarked on following Rabin's assassination, whereby Peres, then his successor Ehud Barak maintained the fiction that the Israelis had "no partner for peace" (as is pointed out here), the party of peace finally has a leader who can give the country what it needs: a viable political alternative. Whether his attempt to wrest Labour back to its socialist routes ends in improbable success or spectacular favour, Peretz has shaken up an Israeli political landscape appeared to be wedded unswervingly to Likud’s right-wing agenda.

The rush of hacks fighting to kill of Blair

The government of Tony Blair, having suffered last week the resignation of one of its most loyal ministers, yesterday suffered it’s first parliamentary defeat. The proposal to allow police to extend the detention of suspects without trial from 14 days to 90 days was defeated by 31 votes, with some 49 Labour MPs – eleven of them former ministers – eschewing the frantic government whips and inflicting the most significant setback of the Prime Minister’s eight-year reign.

With some predictability, the Government sought to play down the vote’s significance. Earlier in the day, Gordon Brown and Jack Straw had been hastily withdrawn from overseas trips to vote. Blair himself admitted that it is “sometimes better to lose and do the right thing than to win and do the wrong thing”, a candid admission that he foresaw defeat and a canny attempt to win the moral high ground nonetheless. After the unexpectedly large margin of the vote, senior Labour apparatchiks immediately denied that the Prime Minister had in any way been compromised by the result, and claimed that it was never a referendum on Blair’s occupancy of 10 Downing Street. Well, quite. By the morning, scapegoats had been bullied into position: the ever-reliable Charles Clark blamed himself and suggested that the whole project was his idea from the outset, convincing precisely no-one. Yet the sense of a badly wounded government will take more than trite actions like this to dispell.

Equally predictably, the media has largely overreacted, with some of Blair’s more trenchant critics moving in for the kill and claiming that the end of Blairism is nigh. More than one newspaper starkly described it as the “Beginning of the end”, while the Mirror questioned whether or not they shouldn’t “start packing”. The Sun, meanwhile, found itself in the familiar position of governmental cheerleader, denouncing MPs for jeapordising the country while failing – much like the cabinet itself, not to mention the police – to justify why and how exactly the magical ‘ninety days’ figure would make as any safer.

Yet for those crouched in Westminster expecting the white flag to be raised outside the Prime Minister’s residence any time soon, the chances are that they will be hanging around for a while yet. As Polly Toynbee argues in the Guardian, for Labour to sweep Tony under the carpet right now, or in the coming weeks, would set in stone the image of a panicked government that is jumping at the first sign of trouble. It would effectively offer the new Tory leader a perfect start.

Moreover, there is the chance that this defeat will force the Prime Minister to face up to the new reality facing his government. This May’s election was a brutal slap in the face: a huge majority slashed to just 66 seats means that contentious issues – such as the motion defeated yesterday – are nowhere near as likely to be railroaded into being. The months between May and November saw two near-simultaneous events – London’s winning the 2012 Olympics, and the July 7th terror attacks – that offered a convenient smokescreen for Blair's predicament. July's occurrences boosted his popularity, and there was a temporary sense that – far from being a lame-duck prime minister who was merely keeping the seat warm for his successor – Blair would in fact seize be able to seize the moment to mould the ‘radical’ agenda that he promised in the election’s immediate aftermath.

We can see now that this feted resurgence was a false dawn. The beating he took yesterday has returned the sense of ultimate futility in his final term to the forefront. The only way he can overcome this is to recognise that the rules have changed irrevocably. Policies that are unpopular with ministers, law officers, and the Home Office – despite unreliable polls suggesting that they are popular with voters – can no longer be whipped into shape. It is a victory for the parliamentary system over a prime minister who was becoming demagogic in his zealot-like disregard for Parliament itself.

Will he have learnt these lessons? The immediate indication is that he has not; on Thursday he ominously warned MPs that they are out of touch with the populace, once again scrabbling for the higher moral ground. But it is only by recognising the ultimate authority that rests within Parliament that Blair will be able to resurrect the tattered remains of his final term.

DC Confidential

This week The Guardian has been serialising the memoirs of Christopher Meyer, the former British ambassador to the US. It makes for interesting reading, as well as being downright embarrassing to certain Cabinet members. The list of MPs who command respect in Washington are few: only Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the late pair of Robin Cook and Mo Mowlam, in Meyer’s eyes, emerge with any credit. There are some cringeworthy anecdotes: John Reid cringing at the bluff of his opposite number Donald Rumsfeld, John Prescott blathering on to an American general about war in the “Balklands” and bombers operating at “fifteen foot”, a nervous Jack Straw seemingly at a loss when it comes to foreign policy. For a government that is swiftly losing whatever credibility with the public it has left, Meyer’s revelations are an ill-timed kick to the teeth.

Yet the central crux of the Guardian’s selection is an elevation of Blair’s role in the decision whether or not to join Washington’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. Much has been written on this, and it has long been assumed that Britain’s inflated opinion of itself was illusory. The “coalition” – the misnomer has unfortunately stuck – would not have been greatly weakened by Britain’s absence, and the idea of a British truculence leading to further compliance by the US with the United Nations seems a fantasy of the highest order. However, Meyer makes the other case: that – had he wished to – Blair could have reined in the White House and, quite possibly, have slowed the rush to war, allowing for UN countries (France in particular, whose much-quoted ‘total veto’ on invasion could have been eschewed) to come on board and a ratified agreement for post-war planning been arranged.

Whether or not this is the case is debatable, and Simon Jenkins in the same newspaper disagrees with Meyer’s analysis, sticking to the line that the British involvement was an irrelevance at best. Meyers does occasionally let his guard slip, and reveal the axe that he is (quite validly) grinding, judging by the way his department was so repeatedly circumvented by Downing Street and his eventual departure – due to illness – spun as some kind of dereliction of duty. Meyers also comes across as just a little too cosy with the Bush administration; in trying to correct the commonly-held view of the President’s oft-cited mental sluggishness, he sounds a little too much like a mediocre figure star-struck by his brief touches with tangible power. Yet the portrait of an unsure and often immature Cabinet, undermined by twenty years of opposition and treading gingerly across a world stage that is a far cry from the simpler world of the Westminster village, remains a fascinating read.


Extracts from Sir Christopher Meyer's memoirs

More on Iran

Despite the worldwide condemnation that greeted his comments last week, it seems that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is only just beginning his campaign to yank his country back into it's 1980s conservatism. Fresh from banning foreign films, and ordering women to tug their veils down lest a wisp of hair be revealed, he has now sacked scores of foreign diplomats, most of whom were fairly recent appointees put into place by the Ahmadinejad's liberal predecessor, Mohammad Khatami.

As the Times reports:

Four of the envoys, the ambassadors to London, Paris, Berlin and the representative to the United Nations in Geneva, were involved in months of delicate mediation between Iran and Europe over Tehran’s nuclear programme.

Iranian and Western officials told The Times that they feared the purge was a sign of a further hardening of the provocative foreign policy that has isolated Mr Ahmadinejad’s regime.

One of the most prominent victims of the diplomatic cull is Mohammad Hossein Adeli, the urbane, American-educated Ambassador to London, who has served only for 12 months and is the first Iranian envoy since the Islamic Revolution who speaks fluent English.

Mr Adeli, 52, will be leaving the foreign service in the coming weeks, along with the Iranian envoys to Paris, Berlin, Geneva and Kuala Lumpur. Iran’s ambassadors to Indonesia, Kazakhstan and several Arab states are also believed to be on the hitlist.

“We are expecting Iran to recall more than 20 ambassadors and heads of mission,” a Western diplomat in Tehran told The Times. “Obviously the new Government wants to have its own people and many of these ambassadors were supporters of (the former President) Rafsanjani and were pro-reform.”

Getting rid of the diplomats who had worked to broker a deal between Iran and the EU over nuclear inspections is a bold move that verges on the reckless. Coming in tandem with the President's desire to see Israel "wiped off the map" - whether or not it is interpreted as a threat, or merely a rabble-rousing attempt at distracting from his domestic woes - the level of suspicion now felt by most of the world towards Iran is at breaking point. However, the Times article also does note that MR Ahmadinejad's critics are not limited to foreign powers:

Mohammad Khatami and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, two former reformist presidents, are openly critical of his policies. On Sunday, Mr Khatami accused the new leader of “using fascist values and principles in the name of Islam to criticise liberalism”. Mohammad Atrianfar, a close Rafsanjani ally, yesterday called the sackings a big diplomatic mistake. “The President does not understand that he should proceed with caution,” he said.