Why should Scottish MPs vote in the House of Commons on legislation that affects only England when English MPs can't vote on Scottish matters that are devolved to the Scottish Parliament (Tam Dalyell's 'West Lothian Question')? Should the MPs for English constituencies form a kind of English Grand Committee to deliberate on matters affecting only England? How can Gordon Brown, a Scot representing a Scottish constituency, preside (if Mr Tony ever allows him to) over a government responsible for legislation affecting only England, when his government and the Westminster Parliament can't legislate for Scotland on identical matters? Now that Scotland, Wales and (soon, with luck) Northern Ireland have their own assemblies, quasi-legislatures or the real thing, with varying powers, why doesn't England have the same thing? Why hasn't the devolution to Scotland of fairly extensive powers blunted the appetite for Scotland to secede from the UK as an independent state, an increasingly strongly supported idea according to the opinion polls?
There's actually a remarkably simple diagnosis available for all these current teasers, and an equally simple cure for them. Today's Independent newspaper publishes my letter setting out both diagnosis and cure:
Letters: Genuine democracy
The Independent, 31 January 2007
A federal system in the UK would deliver genuine democracySir: Rising support for Scottish independence and a parliament for England threatens the Union, but none of the solutions currently being discussed tackles the underlying problem. Even the radical but piecemeal reforms proposed by Helena Kennedy and her Power Inquiry ("Hand over some power to the people", 23 January) don't amount to a real overhaul of our outdated constitutional arrangements sufficient to revive genuine popular democracy. Devolution has moved us half-way, but only half-way, into a federal system, with the Westminster parliament trying vainly to function both as an all-UK federal legislature and simultaneously as a parliament for England, with no definition or restriction of its powers in either capacity, and a membership incompatible with the latter.
The only durable answer to the many questions this raises is a separate second-tier parliament for England, with the Westminster parliament becoming a first-tier, all-UK federal body exercising defined and limited responsibilities, mainly for foreign affairs, defence, human rights and regional policy, plus any other powers voluntarily ceded to the centre by the four national bodies. All residual powers (i.e. effectively all domestic matters) would be devolved to the four "national" (second-tier) parliaments and governments. This transfer of full internal autonomy, much more than at present, to Scotland and the other three UK nations should satisfy most Scottish and other nationalists, meet the demand for an English parliament, bring government much closer to the people, definitively answer the West Lothian Question – and, best of all, preserve the Union. It would supply a vital role for the federal second chamber as a Senate of the Four Nations. It would cure us forever of the British disease of over-centralisation.
Federation works for the US, Australia, Canada, Germany and many others: why not for us? All it needs is some courageous political leadership, currently apparently in short supply. How about it, Mr Brown?
BRIAN BARDER (HM DIPLOMATIC SERVICE, 1965-94),
LONDON SW18
It's puzzling that such an obvious solution to so many of our current problems and anomalies doesn't form part of our national constitutional debate, although reality will (I'm sure) eventually force it on us. I think the reasons for this refusal even to consider the federal solution include the fact that the Europhobes have (absurdly) demonised the concept of federalism, which they misrepresent as centralism when in fact it's the reverse; and the fear on the part of timid Labour Party leaders that full devolution to England would risk permanent Tory control of England even though Labour would probably retain control at the Federal (Westminster) level thanks to all the safe seats in Scotland and Wales. In fact, English devolution could be a real tonic for Labour in England, forcing it to listen to the people and go out to recruit members and win seats, instead of sitting back and relying on Scotland to keep it in power at the centre.
But the most serious inhibition smothering any discussion of a federal solution must be the recognition that the Westminster federal parliament and government would lose a vast array of powers to the four national bodies, including justice, crime, prisons, education, health, most aspects of transport, the environment (except matters affecting the whole of the UK), and many kinds of tax policy. It's likely that Messrs Blair, Cameron and Brown, perhaps even Sir M Campbell (all Scots, incidentally), and their lieutenants would fight to the last drop of English blood to avoid having their responsibilities reduced to foreign affairs and defence, and such other matters as transcend the borders of the four nations of the kingdom. They would see themselves as demoted: stripped of power, patronage and prestige. Yet no-one regards the Federal President of the United States as being less powerful or prestigious than the Governors of California and West Virginia: or the prime minister of Australia as in any sense playing second fiddle to the premiers of New South Wales and Tasmania. These fears are fanciful. Let's do it!
Brian
Anyone under the widely shared illusion that NATO's attack on Serbia in 1999 over Kosovo permanently resolved the problem of Kosovo's relationship with the rest of Serbia needs to have another think. The veteran peace-making miracle man, Martti Ahtisaari, former President of Finland and accomplished godfather of UN solutions to intractable problems, is shortly to announce his proposals for the future status of 
Kosovo, having consulted at length with the governments of Russia, the US, the UK, France, Germany and Italy, the leaders of Serbia and Kosovo, and many others. The forecast is that (after yet another round of protracted 'consultations') he will propose for Kosovo a form of internationally policed quasi-independence from Serbia — but without any specific mention of the i-word; probably also without any entitlement to membership of the UN, other countries then free to decide whether to 'recognise' Kosovo as a state or not. This, like any other kind of severance of Kosovo from Serbia, will be bitterly and perhaps violently opposed by the great majority of the people of Serbia, and (not unnaturally) by the small, beleaguered Serbian minority still clinging on in Kosovo. For there are still some Serbs in Kosovo despite the virtual ethnic cleansing that followed the departure of the Serbian army and police in 1999 and the installation of the NATO-led international régime in Kosovo under the revised settlement programme skilfully negotiated by — you guessed! — Ahtisaari, with discreet help from the Russians and the Americans, after the NATO bombing had failed to bring the Serbs to heel.
There's a predictably excellent account of the current situation in the Guardian of 26 January 2007 by Jonathan Steele, who argues with his usual persuasiveness for the award of full independence to Kosovo without further delay, despite the acknowledged risks. One such risk is that when the package is submitted to the Security Council for endorsement, the Russians, traditional protectors and patrons of the Serbs, will veto it. There's also the risk of armed resistance by Serbia to the secession of Kosovo, prospect reinforced by the sweeping victory of the Serb nationalists (united in their determination that Kosovo should remain part of Serbia) at the recent Serbian elections. Another risk is that even qualified independence for Kosovo will precipitate a demand by the Bosnian Serbs for secession from Bosnia and union with Serbia, a situation that could also degenerate into violence. Any move by the newly independent Kosovars, often referred to as the Kosovo Albanians, to seek a union with their kith and kin in neighbouring Albania would give a strong fillip to the campaign for a Greater Albania which in turn would arouse intense alarm throughout the region, providing another destabilising element. Yet another daunting factor is the impact of any UN-approved Kosovo secession from Serbia, justified on grounds of nationalism and self-determination, on the serious dispute between Russia and Georgia over the future status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia (usefully described in an article last August in the Christian Science Monitor). There could even be consequences for Chechnya, in that case wholly negative for Moscow. Here too there's a real danger of disputes erupting, or erupting again, into violence.
There's a sad irony in all this. The Kosovo nationalists fighting for their independence from Serbia in the period leading up to the NATO attack on Serbia in 1999 were given a promise by the Americans of an "act of self-determination" — unmistakeable code for independence, the inevitable result of any such exercise of self-determination — in exchange for the Kosovars' reluctant acceptance of the NATO ultimatum drawn up at the Rambouillet conference in March, 1999. The ultimatum had been carefully crafted to ensure that the Serbian government — any Serbian government — would reject it, as indeed it duly did. The US and some other western delegations at Rambouillet, presumably including the British who co-chaired the conference with the French, were determined to ensure that their ultimatum would be accepted by the Kosovars and rejected by the Serbs. This was designed to provide a plausible justification for the NATO aerial assault on Serbia on which Madeleine Albright, the then US Secretary of State and leader of the US team at Rambouillet, was determined, drawing on a false and misleading analogy with the west's failure, earlier, to use force against the Serbs in Bosnia until too late.
NATO's escalating attack on Serbia for 11 weeks in 1999 had many eerie parallels with the US-led attack on Iraq four years later, for which in many ways Kosovo was intended to be the model. Contrary to the current received wisdom, both wars were illegal, neither having been authorised by the UN Security Council and neither fought in self-defence. Both failed in their proclaimed objectives: it wasn't the NATO bombing that eventually dislodged the Serbian forces and administration from Kosovo but the flexible and constructive behind-the-scenes diplomacy of an American and a Russian negotiator (Strobe Talbott and Viktor Chernomyrdin) — and Martti Ahtisaari. Both wars were unnecessary: the terms eventually accepted by the Serbs could and should have been negotiated with them at Rambouillet, producing the same as the eventual settlement without a single bomb being dropped. Similarly, if the UN inspectors under Blix had been allowed to complete their work in Iraq, they might well have been able to show that Iraq had no WMD, which would have demolished the sole British rationale (at the time) for participation in the attack and occupation. Both wars were publicly asserted to have a variety of objectives and justifications, some of each of them sold on a deliberately false prospectus. Both military actions were disproportionate to both their real and their proclaimed objectives. Both turned out to be counter-productive: the NATO bombing of Serbia actually accelerated and aggravated Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and precipitated for the first time the wholesale flight of refugees into neighbouring countries. So far from producing a solution to the problem of how Kosovars and Serbs could live together in peace in Kosovo, the NATO attack actually aggravated it, and the international administration which was eventually installed under the US-Russian-Ahtisaari settlement has merely frozen the problem — and made it worse by presiding over the expulsion of thousands of Serbs from their Kosovo homes.
In case some of these assertions sound improbable, I have set out the ample and damning evidence in support of them in a much earlier piece here. Nothing can excuse the brutal behaviour of the Serbs towards their Kosovo compatriots in their repeated over-reaction to the 'liberation struggle' — or 'terrorist campaign' (select whichever description you prefer) — waged until 1999 by the Kosovo Liberation Army; but it's almost equally hard to excuse the misjudgements, the duplicity, and the failure to exhaust the resources of diplomacy before resorting to the use of force, which characterised the western performance at Rambouillet leading, as it was always designed to do, to the NATO bombing campaign, just as the same failures characterised the performance of the US and UK governments over Iraq in 2003. Kosovo, not Iraq, was Blair's first illegal war; sadly, it was Clinton's and Robin Cook's, too.
I don't of course pretend to have a solution to the problem of what to do now about Kosovo. No possible solution is without its risks and defects, and — as Jonathan Steele rightly says today — the stakes are high, as always in the Balkans. What's certain, though, is that the intractability of the problem now is in part the fruit of the misjudgements of the western powers in 1999 in their hasty, premature, unnecessary, unsuccessful, and above all illegal resort to the use of force. History was all too soon to repeat itself.
Backdate: For a typically idiosyncratic take on the 1999 NATO (i.e. US) bombing written by the late Edward Said while the bombing was still going on, click here. Edward Said was right about the effect of the bombing on Serbian support for Milosevic, whose fall occurred only months later, toppled not by bombs but by the ballot box.
Update (30 Jan 2007): I am flattered that this this post has been reproduced, with full acknowledgement but no trackback, by the web journal Atlantic Free Press, which I had previously and gladly authorised to reproduce any Ephems posts that it fancied. It has prompted some vigorous and readable comments (there, not so far here!).
Brian
In my earlier post about the rise and fall of Jade Goody (of Celebrity Big Brother notoriety — it no longer much resembles fame), I reluctantly saluted her plucky resilience, the residual defiance that somehow still peeped out from behind the tearful contrition, even after she began to realise the magnitude of the calamity that had befallen her. In the old days she was horribly coarse, aggressive and bad-tempered, but at least she was bouncy and flamboyant; now she's utterly crushed. Who is the bully now? The media circus turned her from trailer-trash nonentity into rich and successful celebrity almost overnight, and now it has destroyed her. I defy anyone who watches the short video-clips of Jade's interviews with the News of the World published today not to feel some compassion for this wretched girl. Jade Goody, like many others, has been betrayed by the society which she grew up in and which has now turned on her. She has never been helped to express herself, to understand her own feelings, to imagine the effect on others of what she says and the way she behaves, to control her temper, to channel her anger and frustrations into creative or constructive channels, or to gain any insight into the human condition from literature, music or art. And now she feels the intolerable burden of what appears to her as the hatred of the whole world being dumped on her: rejection and condemnation by the bulk of the media that once profited from flaunting her celebrity, by self-appointed moralists on all five continents, by the pontificating professional anti-racism drum-beaters, even, incredibly, by a brace of political grandees of her own government. Poor, poor kid.
She's probably ruined financially, too. She has been forced to give to charity both the £50,000 she gets for having been in the Big Brother House and the same amount that she's been paid by the News of the World for the gut-wrenching interview she gave them yesterday, sobbing and bewildered. She has lost the main money-spinner that she had got from her earlier fame, a wildly popular perfume with her name on it — it's been withdrawn from the shops. The tabloids and talk-shows and phone-ins will roast her if she tries to sell interviews or articles for money that she's allowed to keep ("profiting from her racist bullying"). In her News of the Screws interviews (as the video clips testify) she appears completely broken, every trace of the old panache beaten out of her. She says in one interview that she doesn't think any of her money will be left after this and that she won't be able to marry her boy-friend now. Perhaps she'll bounce back eventually somehow, but as of this evening it doesn't look promising. More likely the careless media and vox pop that created her have now definitively destroyed her. Anything for a circulation boost or a spike in the viewing figures that brings in the advertisers, and the hell with the human casualties!
Not an edifying episode.
Update, late 23 January: Five recent comments on this post, below, turned out to be from the same source, so I have put representative extracts from them into a single comment and deleted the rest. The extracts are pretty horrifying, confirming some of the suspicions raised by Jade's behaviour and language on Celebrity Big Brother about the kind of quality of life (or lack of it) with which the English education system is equipping many of its products. Of course we don't know the age of the author in question, nor even whether she, if she is really a she, is 'british' as claimed: this kind of impoverished language, illiterate with traces of debased rap, is commonplace on American as well as British websites, blogs and forums, as we know. Perhaps she'll grow out of it.
Meanwhile Jade Goody has reportedly accepted the imaginative invitation of the Indian Tourism Board to visit India as their guest and to see for herself what Indian people are like. She will apparently be accompanied on the visit by a television documentary camera team. It's hard to guess what impression Jade will make on her Indian hosts, and harder still to guess what impression the Indians will make on her. But I will risk a wild guess that the visit will demonstrate that whatever else she might be, and notwithstanding some of the things she undoubtedly said to and about Shilpa Shetty, Jade is not a racist — as some of the orchestrated comments below, all from the same source, seem to be trying to say, with varying degrees of success. Wishful thinking, probably.
Brian
Well, everyone else seems to be writing about Celebrity Big Brother and Jade Goody and what it all means, so I suppose I had better join in too.
Like some other observers of this extraordinary phenomenon, I have begun to feel a certain reluctant sympathy for Jade since her eviction from the Big House yesterday, eviction decided by 82% of the votes cast by the British public, or at any rate those who had been watching the programme (and those who deny watching it, if only in the last few days, are probably lying). Of course her behaviour and that of her mother and other supporters towards the beautiful Indian Bollywood actor Shilpa Shetty was deplorable: bullying, foul-mouthed, ignorant, malignant, and with unmistakeably racist undertones. 
But as the realisation of what she had done began to dawn on her, she displayed first defiance, then alarm, and then a kind of horrified contrition, supported by an attempt, apparently at least half-genuine, to make it up with Ms Shetty and to apologise to her. Yet her persistent denial that she is a racist person was curiously and perversely persuasive (her father, incidentally, was mixed-race, so Jade is too), and it was impossible not to acknowledge her recovery from her initial tearful terror at the prospect of being evicted — she called it 'rejected' — and having to face an outraged public opinion: in the end a kind of cockney chippiness won out, and she came across as defiantly plucky in her self-inflicted misfortune, as well as being shrewd enough to know that she had behaved abominably and now needed to apologise for it. [Up-date, Sunday 21 Jan.: A Sun columnist reviewing the newspapers on today's Andrew Marr programme mused that there was now a danger that it was the media who were doing the bullying, Jade becoming their victim -- a palpable hit.]
I can't see much point in the argument now raging over whether Jade and her prejudices, ignorance, foul temper, bullying proclivities, and above all her racism — or at any rate her racist language and behaviour — are characteristic of a significant number of Britons, or of working-class Britons, or of our society as a whole (as the always predictable Martin Jacques would have us believe); whether the mirror that Big Brother allegedly holds up to us all is a faithful reflection of us, warts and all ("Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the foulest of us all?"), or whether it is a cracked and distorting fairground mirror that makes an ordinary innocuous observer look like a demon — it's hard to see such a debate reaching a useful or informative conclusion, although so many media and blog commentators are obsessively preoccupied with racism, real and imaginary, that the Jade phenomenon was always bound to focus on that. We all know that an element of racism lurks in many otherwise blameless people's attitudes, and that this can range from vicious physical attacks and malignant discrimination to relatively harmless (though often hurtful) jokes about other people's ethnicity and cultural differences. Which point along this spectrum the majority of working-class, middle-class, or all-class Britons occupy is a matter of pure conjecture, although the evidence provided by articulate people from ethnic minorities is not at all reassuring. End of story.
What's clear, surely, is that Jade is and has always been more victim than villain. She's shrewd, although no intellectual; inarticulate and insecure (she obviously felt threatened by the elegant, well-spoken, calm Indian beauty, rather than genuinely despising her); culturally and socially poverty-stricken, although by now extremely rich, thanks entirely to her earlier participation in non-Celebrity Big Brother. That a 25-year-old young woman from Bermondsey with a powerful personality and probably considerable latent intelligence should have gained so little from the English education system to enable her to take full advantage of her human potential — that terrible cultural impoverishment — does look very much like an indictment, although I'm not sure of whom.
Perhaps more interesting than the hapless Jade is Peter Bazalgette, chairman of Endemol UK (producers of Big Brother) and member of the international group Endemol's Executive Board as Chief Creative Officer, overseeing the 'creation of content across the whole group'. Bazalgette (rhymes with 'regret', not 'Betty' or even 'Shilpa Shetty') is the great-great-grandson of the 19th century civil engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette, creator of the then revolutionary London sewage system. (Jokes on this theme at Bazalgette Jnr.'s expense are well past their sell-by date.) 'Baz' not only presides over Big Brother, celebrity and otherwise: he is also the godfather of 'reality TV' in the UK, going back to 'Millionaire' and beyond. You can watch and hear his own account of this in a clip (here) in which he talks about his book, Billion Dollar Game, published in 2005. Here's an extract from the Guardian review of the book:
Big Brother was always more controversial [than its predecessor programme, 'Millionaire']. [Peter] Bazalgette launched the British version, and he gleefully retails some of the condemnation of the critics while noting that they were predominantly male and over 50. "Men," he writes, "have little sympathy for soap operas with emotional storylines." And that points to his vision of Big Brother: not reality television, but candidly "an entertainment, a pantomime". He ties this in with the way the media need a constant fresh supply of celebrities – so they create them from shows such as Big Brother, and we draw closer than ever to Andy Warhol's promise of 15 minutes of fame for everyone.
[Roger Mosey, reviewing 'Billion Dollar Game' by Peter Bazalgette, Guardian, 21 May 2005]
There's something undeniably — well, perhaps not undeniably — refreshing about this frankness in describing a product which attracts such bilious contempt on the part of many middle-class Brits (especially men, apparently). Bazalgette, with his Cambridge law degree, and his record as a former President of the Cambridge Union and star international debater, deserves to be taken seriously when he discusses the role of Big Brother and similar programmes in our national life, and in the context of widespread national political apathy and disillusion. His Observer article of 14 May 2006 (available on the Guardian's Comment is Free blog) is full of interesting ideas and proposals (not all of them wholly convincing), prompted by the farcical appearance of the 'Respect' MP, George Galloway, in Celebrity Big Brother last year.
It's easy to dismiss the Big Brother phenomenon as a cynical and meretricious money-spinner for Channel 4, Endemol, their advertisers, and Bazalgette; of course that's one of the things it is. There's certainly something distasteful about making a mass entertainment out of the bizarre and often pitiable or embarrassing behaviour of the 'housemates', locked into the Big House and subjected by the programme-makers to a series of artificial stresses and humiliations. It's often been compared to the once fashionable entertainment of going to watch the inmates of the old Victorian lunatic asylums. But nobody is ever forced to become a housemate on Big Brother: they are all volunteers, who know what they are letting themselves in for, and are well paid for doing it. Some, like Jade Goody, go from total obscurity to international celebrity status (and serious wealth) through appearing on the programme. If they behave disgracefully on camera, as Jade — and at least four other participants in the current programme — did, or embarrassingly, as George Galloway did, perhaps that tells us something about our society, even about ourselves? The current tsunami of argument and discussion about Jade certainly suggests that the whole thing might have a significance beyond mere entertainment or voyeurism. If so, which is the offence: the portrayal on television of real-life racism, bullying, prejudice, ignorance and foul language, or the existence of those failings in our society? If the latter, then condemnation of Big Brother for displaying a repulsive feature of society is a bit like condemning the witness who filmed the Iraqi hangmen insulting and reviling Saddam Hussein in the last minutes of his life, instead of condemning the hangmen. Don't shoot the messenger because he brings an unwelcome message!
Having said all that, I shan't go back to watching Celebrity Big Brother now that Jade is out and the controversy over her behaviour towards Shilpa is, or will be, slowly dying down. There's something distasteful about manipulating people into behaving badly towards each other, and then using them for the entertainment of the more fortunate — even if they did volunteer for it. And good taste is all, isn't it?
Disclosure: I know Peter Bazalgette slightly, through serving on the same (somewhat obscure) committee as him. But I don't think the views expressed above are influenced by that.
Brian
I'm saddened by the ugly noises emitted by the bloggers, writers of letters to the newspapers and contributors to phone-in programmes who are denouncing the English National Ballet (ENB) for employing as one of their 'principal dancers' Simone Clarke who, it has emerged, is a member of the far-right anti-immigration British National Party, and 
demanding that the ENB dismiss her. Fanatical witch-hunters actually bought seats for one (or more?) of her performances in order to hiss and boo her — for her political views, not for the quality of her dancing, generally regarded as delectable. This in turn has prompted the nasty bovver-boys from the BNP to stage demonstrations in her support outside the theatre where she has been performing, with counter-demonstrations by the witch-hunters.
Persecuting an artist, or indeed anyone else, by seeking to get her or him sacked from a legitimate job because of her or his political views or membership of a legal political party, however obnoxious its policies and attitudes, is despicable. Attacking an organisation (whether the English National Ballet or any other) because it employs someone whose politics are objectionable, and trying to pressure it into sacking the person concerned because of the person's poilitical views, is even worse: it's a 5-carat copy of McCarthyism – the wicked old Senator from Wisconsin indeed used very similar tactics. Ms Clarke's politics are her own business. Campaign against the BNP, by all means, but leave Simone and the ENB to get on with the dancing. Start to force employers to investigate the political views and affiliations of their workers, with a view to sacking those not judged correct, and who shall 'scape whipping?
Tim Worstall does a characteristically vigorous hatchet job on the witch-hunters in an uncompromising blog post here. In contrast, here's a particularly emetic example of persecution mania from a public official who should know better:
Lee Jasper, equalities director for the mayor of London and chairman of the National Assembly Against Racism, said: "The ENB must seriously consider whether having such a vociferous member of an avowedly racist party in such a prominent role is compatible with the ethics of its organisation. I seriously doubt that it is and that should lead to her position being immediately reviewed. I think she should be sacked." He called on funders and David Lammy, the arts minister, to intervene. (Guardian report, 1 January 2007)
This whole noxious campaign is a grim reminder of the self-righteous, bully-boy streak that runs through so much of the anti-racism industry and too many of its fellow-travellers. The fact that the ENB gets a subsidy from public funds (like most other ballet and opera companies) is completely irrelevant: the subsidy supports ballet, not the BNP, and to pretend otherwise is political illiteracy — or worse. There's more than a whiff of real live fascism in the air, and it's not coming from a politically misguided but artistically talented ballet dancer. You don't have to sympathise with the diluted, down-market fascism of the BNP, or share its racist proclivities, to be disgusted by this display of contempt for the vital principle of freedom of speech and opinion. If that principle is thrown out with the BNP bath-water, and vanishes down the drain along with all the other fundamental liberties under attack from our illiberal government, we are all going to be in serious trouble — and the first to suffer will be those who can't endure the idea of a beautiful dancer with stupid political ideas.
Brian
Comments on the hanging of Saddam Hussein from around the world, especially from the principal invaders and occupiers of Iraq, have set new records in queasy weasel-wordism. The test to be applied is how far each pronouncement avoids comment on the one main substantial issue (A: Was the hanging itself a valid act of justice, leaving aside the view one takes of capital punishment generally, but taking into account the circumstances of the trial, the moral legitimacy of those responsible for the death sentence and its execution, and the likely political effects of the hanging?), instead taking refuge behind a comment on a far less important and less controversial issue (B: Were the circumstances of the hanging appropriate, including the dreadful slowness of the proceedings, the exchanges of abuse between the hangmen and the prisoner right up to the moment of the latter's death, and the decision to perform the hanging at the beginning of a major Islamic sacred festival?). Some comments even sheltered behind the aspect which barely raises an issue at all (C: Should one or more of those present at the hanging have filmed it on mobile telephones and revealed the truth about it by putting the film on the Web?).
The British Foreign Secretary, Mrs Margaret Beckett, seemed initially to be tackling Issue A, the only difficult one, but then to be perversely offering the answer Yes:
"I welcome the fact that Saddam Hussein has been tried by an Iraqi court for at least some of the appalling crimes he committed against the Iraqi people. He has now been held to account.
"The British government does not support the use of the death penalty, in Iraq or anywhere else. We advocate an end to the death penalty worldwide, regardless of the individual or the crime.
"We have made our position very clear to the Iraqi authorities, but we respect their decision as that of a sovereign nation." (BBC News, 30 Dec 2006; my emphasis)
Calling the hanging of a man "holding him to account" surely deserves its shoddy place in the annals of euphemism. But having later seen and heard the less bold (and certainly less perverse) comments of other dignitaries, including those by several of her ministerial colleagues, her department, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, belatedly homed in on the obvious doddle — Issue C — but then proceeded to get even that one wrong, condemning those responsible for letting the world know the full horror of what actually happened, with the implication that it would all have been all right if only we hadn't known about it:
The Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, who was criticised by some MPs for not initially condemning the manner of the execution [! -- BLB], has also hardened her line. 'The Iraq government are looking into it, but we agree with John Prescott that the use of video images [of Saddam] was unacceptable,' said a senior Foreign Office source. (The Observer, 7 Jan 07, my emphasis)
However, Gordon Brown, prime minister-in-waiting, and shrewder than the hapless Mrs Beckett or her senior Foreign Office source, cannily — good word for a Scot, especially this Scot — carved out a distinctive position for himself, establishing a perceptible distance between himself and his colleagues, by making an unexceptionable comment on Issue B (no, the manner of the killing was not appropriate, as everyone without exception has been forced to agree) while also clearly implying the bolder and more honourable verdict on Issue A: no, the hanging was not an act of justice and its political effects will be disastrous:
[Gordon] Brown said: 'Now that we know the full picture of what happened we can sum this up as a deplorable set of events. It has done nothing to lessen tensions between the Shia and Sunni communities. Even those people, unlike me, who are in favour of capital punishment found this completely unacceptable.' He hoped lessons would be learnt 'as we learn other lessons about Iraq.' (The Observer, 7 Jan 07)
(Don't you love that parting shot about learning the 'other lessons about Iraq'?)
The Iraqi government has understandably insisted that the answer to A is 'Yes' and admitted that the answer to B must be 'No', while also answering 'No' to C — and arresting the witnesses suspected of filming the event, not the executioners who converted it into a ghoulish circus.
Those who have chosen the easy way out by condemning only the manner in which the execution was carried out might usefully be challenged to describe what would have satisfied them as an acceptable 'manner' of killing this man, after a farcical show trial, at least in part at the behest of his country's illegal invaders: reverent silence on the part of the hangmen, a blubbering Saddam, and no cameras, presumably.
Those who filmed the proceedings and then made the record public for all the world to see should surely be given medals, not punished. And a specially uncomfortable place should be reserved in purgatory for those political leaders who have shirked the only defensible answer to A: No, this was not a valid act of justice, on at least ten cogent grounds, none of them dependent on a general objection to capital punishment: for those ten grounds, please see my previous Ephems entry on this subject, 'Saddam's end: yes, it was an atrocity' (and don't miss the sometimes steamy comments on it). Any bets on whether Tony Blair's eventual comments, promised within the next few days, will face up to Issue A and give it an honest answer? I fear that the odds against are long.
By their comments ye shall know them.
Brian
On the morning that Saddam Hussein was killed (I think 'executed' should be reserved for the culmination of something resembling due process), I said in a private e-mail to a few friends:
The gruesome videos of Saddam before and after are at http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/12/30/hussein/index.html
(needs Windows Media Player 9.0 or later, and it works in Internet Explorer but not apparently in Mozilla Firefox).
He was an authentic villain and criminal, but he showed great courage (it seems to me) both at his trial and immediately before his execution, notwithstanding some of the allegations by witnesses of the latter.
"Our respect for human rights requires us to execute him…" Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq prime minister, quoted in FT 30.xii.06.Yet another atrocity.
Two judicious and moderate recipients of my message have politely reproached me for describing the hanging of Saddam Hussein as an atrocity. Further reflection has however confirmed me in the view that the description was and is amply justified.
Like all civilised people in the western world, I regard all forms of capital punishment as disgusting and unacceptable: I wouldn't think it an exaggeration to call every such killing an atrocity, although I certainly meant much more than that in this case. There were at least ten separate elements that in combination add up to something properly described as atrocious:
1. The American government was plainly responsible, along with the Shia-dominated government which they sustain (the question of legitimacy through election is for another day) for the trial, verdict, sentence and its execution (in the purely literal sense). The tribunal, specially tailor-made for Saddam and his co-defendants, was originally established by decree of Paul Bremer when US Pro-Consul administering Iraq. Under international law, the occupying power has no right to change the pre-existing laws of a country in this way. The court had no legitimacy from the beginning.
2. The charge against Saddam, i.e. that he was guilty of crimes against humanity, should plainly have been heard in an international tribunal of some kind under clearly specified legal statutes defining the powers, rights and roles of the court, the defendant and the prosecution. It seems to me obvious that the main reason for US resistance to this was that it would have been impossible to assemble an international panel of reputable judges for a court empowered to impose the death sentence: and the Americans were determined to have the man killed. (But see also (8) below.)
3. The trial was a travesty. As all the reputable human rights groups have pointed out, the political pressure on the first judge was so intense that he resigned; two defence lawyers were murdered; the defence was given wholly inadequate time to study the mass of detailed prosecution evidence or to call witnesses to rebut it; the proceedings often degenerated into vulgar slanging matches. The presence of television and film cameras and microphones confirmed the status of the process as a show trial. There were similar defects in the 'appeal' process. To kill a defendant on the basis of such a charade was grotesque.
4. Even if the conduct of the trial had been impeccable, everyone concerned — judge, defence and prosecution lawyers, Saddam, world opinion — knew in advance that the results were pre-ordained. To pretend that a fair trial can be conducted on such a basis is simple hypocrisy. (To pre-empt the likely retort that this reasoning would apply equally to the Nuremburg trials, I would reply that I condemn the executions of the Nazi war criminals as unacceptable and dishonourable 'victors' justice', while accepting the value to posterity of the trials themselves as an essential procedure for establishing in detail what had actually been done during the Nazi era. For the contrast with the Saddam trial, see (5).)
5. The only acceptable purpose of putting Saddam on trial would have been to establish a detailed and incontrovertible record for all the world to see (including his hundreds of thousands of victims and their families) of the appalling crimes committed by this mass murderer and torturer. No attempt was made to establish such a full record: Saddam's sole conviction was for one of the less grotesque of his crimes, and the haste with which he was almost immediately put to death for it has prevented any possibility of a judicial process to get the rest of his iniquities on the record. It's no exaggeration to say that the Kurds and the Iranians, for example, have thereby been robbed of the justice due to them.
6. At the time when Saddam was committing some of the worst of his crimes, he was being actively supported by the United States and its allies who were even supplying him with some of the wherewithal for committing them. The nature of his régime and his lavish employment of gas, torture and repression were well known to western capitals at the time. He was supported then in part as a bulwark against violent and extreme anti-western Islamism — which he continued to be until he was overthrown by his former patrons in 2003. He was also an effective enemy of al-Qaida terrorism: Osama will have rejoiced at his extinction. Moreover, even the US, and yet more explicitly its co-conspirator, the British government, pretended throughout the run-up to their illegal attack on Iraq that their purpose was not to overthrow this evil dictator but to force him to give up his weapons of mass destruction. President Bush's final ultimatum to Saddam offered him and his sons the opportunity to leave Iraq by a given deadline in order to avert military action against their country; Mr Blair went further, publicly asserting that Saddam could remain in office if only he would obey UN resolutions and disarm. For either of them to turn round only a few months later, after their avowed casus belli had proved to be groundless, and say that Saddam was such a monster that only his death could satisfy the demands of Iraqi justice (Blair's foreign minister adding primly that of course Britain didn't hold with capital punishment, but that was a matter for the Iraqis) is enough to turn the stomach. Bush's announcement that the hanging represented "a step on the road to democracy" is, if anything, even more sickening.
7. Not only did the trial and appeal fail to satisfy the most elementary requirements of due process: the American-led occupiers lacked the moral (and possibly also the legal) legitimacy to preside over and arrange the repulsive outcome. It was bad enough to launch an illegal attack on a sovereign state, however repressive its recognised government, and to substitute a new régime of local people more or less subservient to the occupiers and largely bent on sectarian revenge for their past wrongs at Saddam's hands: to capture the former head of state, put him through a farcical show trial and then kill him, lacked any kind of moral legitimacy, a legitimacy that could have been achieved only by handing him over for trial and punishment to a properly constituted authority established by a UN organ.
8. On the face of it, the Americans' rigid determination to preserve their own sole custody of Saddam throughout his captivity, and even throughout a trial which purported to be by and for Iraqis, until only a couple of hours before he was killed, looks decidedly fishy, especially as it exposed the falsity of the pretence that the whole thing was Iraqi-inspired and Iraqi-organised. What seems the likeliest explanation for this determined US control right to the end? We shall never know, I suppose; but it's not easy to overlook that film clip of Donald Rumsfeld, at that time head of the multinational pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle & Co., smilingly and respectfully shaking the bloodstained hand of the dictator when visiting Baghdad in December 1983 on a mission[1] –
'to establish "direct contact between an envoy of President Reagan and President Saddam Hussein," while emphasizing "his close relationship" with the president… Rumsfeld met with Saddam, and the two discussed regional issues of mutual interest, shared enmity toward Iran and Syria, and the U.S.'s efforts to find alternative routes to transport Iraq's oil; its facilities in the Persian Gulf had been shut down by Iran, and Iran's ally, Syria, had cut off a pipeline that transported Iraqi oil through its territory. Rumsfeld made no reference to chemical weapons, according to detailed notes on the meeting…'
Considering this and other evidence of active US support for Saddam in his self-inflicted struggle with Iran and the Kurds, it's clear that Saddam "knew where the bodies were buried" in more senses than one; that if he had been given half a chance in further, more extensive trials, or if transferred from American to international custody, he would have spilled some very embarrassing and incriminating beans about the roles played by some of those now bent on having him killed. Is it not at the very lowest plausible that this was the reason for trying him on charges which didn't involve evidence about supplies of gas and other weapons by the west, for cutting short his trials on any other, wider charges, for keeping him in US custody until the very last minute, and for the absolute insistence that at the end of the process Saddam must be killed, not sentenced by some international tribunal to life-long exile and incarceration? If this wasn't at least part of the explanation, what better explanation is there?
9. As more details of Saddam's last minutes begin to seep out, supported by both the official and some unofficial videos and superseding the official line put out by one of the official witnesses (according to whom Saddam was an obviously "broken man", "fear in his face" at every step as he was led to the gallows, all definitively contradicted even by the officially released film), it becomes clear that one or more of the hangmen in their ski-masks were taunting and shouting insults at Saddam even as they took him to his death, and that Saddam was replying in kind, with the defiance that he had exhibited throughout the trial. This hideous behaviour by the executioners makes the cold-blooded killing of a living, healthy, vigorous human being even more obscene.
10. Even on the lowest calculus of political expediency, and even allowing for Iraqi and other Arab attitudes towards capital punishment and the treatment of one's defeated enemies, this was a patently counter-productive deed connived at by a government purportedly committed to national reconciliation and the end of inter-sectarian violence, egged on by an occupying power that still pretends that the purpose of its occupation is to restore human rights to Iraq and to guide the country to democracy. To carry out the killing at the beginning of an Islamic sacred festival compunded the divisiveness of the act.
In short, the killing of Saddam raises profound doubts about its morality, legality, and political expediency, and unavoidable suspicions about the true motives of its perpetrators. It combined elements of farce, charade, hypocritical pretence and tragedy.
I know of no better description of this disgusting event and its incriminating background than that by Robert Fisk in The Independent of 30 December 2006, obligatory reading in full — but here's a sample (hat-tip: once again, to David Tothill):
No, Tony Blair is not Saddam. We don't gas our enemies. George W Bush is not Saddam. He didn't invade Iran or Kuwait. He only invaded Iraq. But hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead — and thousands of Western troops are dead — because Messrs Bush and Blair and the Spanish Prime Minister and the Italian Prime Minister and the Australian Prime Minister went to war in 2003 on a potage [sic] of lies and mendacity and, given the weapons we used, with great brutality.
In the aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 2001 we have tortured, we have murdered, we have brutalised and killed the innocent — we have even added our shame at Abu Ghraib to Saddam's shame at Abu Ghraib — and yet we are supposed to forget these terrible crimes as we applaud the swinging corpse of the dictator we created.Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the greatest war crime he has committed[,] for it led to the deaths of a million and a half souls? And who sold him the components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder the Americans, who controlled Saddam's weird trial, forbad[e] any mention of this, his most obscene atrocity, in the charges against him. Could he not have been handed over to the Iranians for sentencing for this massive war crime? Of course not. Because that would also expose our culpability.
If all this doesn't add up to "another atrocity", it's hard to imagine what does. No, I don't apologise for the word.
[1] The official account of all this in the National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 82 of February 25, 2003 is well worth reading. There is also a link here to the video clip of Rumsfeld's call, as President Reagan's official envoy, on Saddam in 1983 (Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player required).
Update (11 January): A friend has helpfully pointed me at Robert Fisk's characteristically eloquent article in the Independent of 6 January which makes many of the same points. I part company with Fisk on only one thing: I believe that the objectionable features of the hanging of Saddam are objectionable regardless of one's views on capital punishment generally. Fisk's final sentences seem to suggest that the objections to this specific hanging are bound up with wider objections to capital punishment in general.
Brian
