Antony Loewenstein

My weekly Guardian column:

Western-friendly dictators can die in peace, knowing they’ll be lauded as soon as they stop breathing. So it was for Singapore’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew, who recently passed away at the age of 91. Tributes poured in from across the globe. Barack Obama called him “visionary” while Australian prime minister Tony Abbott mourned a “friend”.

Neither man mentioned that Lee presided over an authoritarian state where dissent was barely tolerated, where even his commemoration was marked by the authorities shutting down events at Speaker’s Corner, the only place in the country where protest is permitted.

Singapore may have become a global business hub in a matter of decades, a remarkable economic feat, but growing numbers of its young citizens no longer believe or accept that silence in the face of repression is acceptable. Clean sidewalks may not be enough anymore to satisfy a public yearning for more.

After Lee’s death, Singapore arrested a local teenager for daring to post a video slamming the deceased leader’s record. Greater freedom of speech and rights is on the agenda for its globally connected youth.

This is the problem with dictators admired in elite western circles for being able to dismiss the will of the people even more successfully than elected politicians; the population eventually wants change.

In the eyes of the west, Singaporean autocracy was less important than the building of a stable Asian nation that enriched western and Asian businesses. Lee Kwan Yew didn’t need to push this message too hard to convince anybody. After all, the west is more than happy to deal with China, another success story with a deplorable human rights record and worsening attacks on civil society.

The tradeoff – stability and prosperity for authoritarianism – is global. When Saudi King Abdullah died in January this year, Australian government buildings lowered their flags to mark the death. Obama flew to the funeral to pay respects to the royal family.

Alongside a massive entourage, including the CIA director and a host of Democrat and Republican figures, Obama’s goal was to confirm the primacy of the special relationship between Saudi Arabia and America and reassure the unelected sheikhs that he wasn’t intending to leave them isolated against an ascendant Iran, which has increasing control over four regional capitals – Sana’a, Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut – as a result of Washington’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 that unleashed a chain-reaction of shifting alliances.

Saudi Arabia beheads its own people, its legal system is opaque, it refuses women basic rights, like permission to drive, and tolerates no criticism of its rule. Its abundant oil is used ruthlessly to keep heads of state in line; Obama, Abbott and other western heads of state are unwilling to challenge a country that is known to export terror.

The response to another autocrat’s death, Indonesia’s Suharto, in 2008, was also enthusiastic. Former Australian prime minister Paul Keating damned critics who dared condemn the dictator as “a cruel and intolerant repressor” when in fact he had “saved Indonesia from destruction”. Left unsaid were the million Indonesians killed after Suharto’s bloody ascension to the presidency in the 1960s and the occupation of East Timor.

The New York Times obituary noted his rule as “one of the most brutal and corrupt of the 20th century”. This didn’t bother Keating, who saluted Soeharto for bringing “stability” on Australia’s doorstep.

How dictators are revered in their death wholly depends on their usefulness to western interests. When US-backed Iraqi-forces executed Saddam Hussein in 2006, few mourned his bloody rule. Yet for decades, Hussein was a close American ally, during a time when he was at his most murderous against internal dissent.

Washington even provided the location of Iranian troops to Saddam’s Iraq in 1988, to assist in a chemical weapons attack. It was only when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990 that America designated him an official enemy.

But is the west’s insistence on stability helping reduce violence? Aligning with the darkest forces on the planet for the sake of oil, access or apparent geo-strategic positioning is guaranteed to achieve the opposite. Western leaders inevitably end up preparing grandiose and intrusive plans to control the monsters they’ve unleashed. Dirty alliances, escalation and invasions with unpredictable outcomes; this seems like all our leaders know. Afterwards come the glowing eulogies.

Many leaders are happy to play the Washington game and are feted accordingly. Criticism of abuses in Uzbekistan, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Vietnam and Israel are muted because military, strategic or economic benefits to both sides are integral to these relationships. Deaths of their rulers would bring salutatory statements from Britain and America. Conversely, Russia is deemed a national security threat because it refuses to be bought by economic threats from the US.

When you dance with the devil, you’ll be bitten on the behind. Democratic security and moral integrity is weakened when western friends commit abuses and they’re ignored or rationalised. You can tell an awful lot about so-called western values when leaders fawn at the feet of autocrats when they die.

I’m happy to have recently signed this statement on Washington’s unprovoked aggression against Venezuela (via Telesur):

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has added his name to a growing list of Australian journalists, academics, politicians, trade unionists and solidarity activists calling on U.S. president Barack Obama to revoke his executive order against Venezuelan .

On March 9, Obama issued the order which imposed sanctions on a number of Venezuelan state officials and deemed Venezuela to be an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

In response, the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign (Melbourne), with the support of the Australia Venezuela Solidarity Network, initiated an open letter to Obama.

The letter has over 70 signatories, including Assange, renowned journalists John Pilger and Antony Loewenstein, Greens senator Lee Rhiannon, two socialist local councillors, officials from four different trade unions, academics from ten universities, and representatives from a range of political parties and solidarity organisations.

The letter urges the U.S. president to revoke the executive order and “stop interfering in Venezuela’s domestic affairs and cease making reckless public statements regarding Venezuela’s democratic processes.”

It also encourages Obama to “demonstrate to Latin America that the U.S. is capable of establishing relations based on the principles of peace and with respect for their sovereignty.”

Obama’s recent actions have seen relations continue to sour between the U.S. and the rest of the Americas. At the recent Summit of the Americas, held in Panama April 10-11, numerous regional heads of states expressed their support for Venezuela and called on Obama to revoke the executive order.

Britain’s Institute of Race Relations, “at the cutting edge of the research and analysis that inform the struggle for racial justice in Britain, Europe and internationally”, has reviewed my recent book, Profits of Doom, in its Race and Class publication:

instituteofracerelationspodreview

My following essay appears in Al Jazeera America:

On a blazing hot March day in the town of Ganyiel in South Sudan’s Unity state, 19-year-old Elizabeth cautiously smiled. Born in Yei, a southwestern town near the border with Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the young woman was unafraid to criticize her country’s leaders.

“Stop killing,” she said referring to South Sudanese President Salva Kiir and his main rival, rebel leader Riek Machar. “We need peace.”

Elizabeth completed school — one of the few South Sudanese citizens who have done so — and speaks basic English. “Only WFP gives us food. We can’t find it anywhere else,” she said pointing at the World Food Program workers handing out aid in an open field of cracked brown dirt. “There’s not enough in the market. And there’s too much water in the land to cultivate crops.” For Elizabeth, living in Ganyiel with her young son and mother and with her husband in Ethiopia looking for work, the future was bleak.

Civil war has raged across Africa’s newest nation since December 2013. Tens of thousands have died amid horrific allegations of mass rape, recruitment of child soldiers and war crimes. Peace talks between Kiir and Machar have broken down numerous times. A recently leaked report from the African Union (AU) suggested that it temporarily take over the country and exclude Machar and Kiir from the transitional government. In South Sudan, nobody believes the AU is up to the task. In fact, many argue that it’s a ploy to steal the country’s oil and other natural resources. The AU denies making these recommendations.

Ganyiel, a relatively peaceful area, has attracted more than 100,000 civilians displaced by the civil war. But it suffers constant flooding, raising concerns about worsening living conditions. The United Nations says 2.5 million people in South Sudan are facing severe food insecurity. This number could reach 4 million by the end of the year, in a country with a population of 11 million. Meanwhile, South Sudanese leaders — almost all of them men — stay in luxury hotels and endlessly negotiate an elite power-sharing deal in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa.

“If the men got out of the way,” said the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in South Sudan, Toby Lanzer, “women would probably just run the country much better.”

I visited Ganyiel last month with the WFP, which was delivering tons of sorghum and cooking oil, using 10 planes to air-drop the supplies. “We constantly have to make decisions where to drop and deliver food,” one of the aid workers said, noting the huge demand and lack of resources. In other words, some needy families will miss out on the meager food handouts and have to fend for themselves under inhospitable circumstances. Temperatures can soar to 115 degrees in the summer months.

It’s easy to write off the humanitarian disaster in South Sudan as just another local conflict, a bloody African civil war with no resonance beyond its borders — a confusing mix of tribal groups fighting over land and power, disconnected from the modern world or even regional players. This would be incorrect, not least because the fingerprints of the United States, the European Union and major African powers are everywhere.

The U.N. and international nongovernmental organizations admit that they’re unable to provide more than Band-Aid solutions. South Sudan joins a growing list of quasi-nation-states, including Palestine, Nauru and Papua New Guinea, which exist more on paper than in reality.

This is not to deny the South Sudanese people’s hard-won freedom from oppressive Sudan, where they were often treated as little more than chattel. In his book “The Shadow of the Sun,” the late Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski recalls visiting what was then southern Sudan in 1960 and witnessing the viciousness of a war between north and south that the West essentially ignored. Millions died in the following decades.

“We are in a world in which man, crawling on the earth, tries to dig a few grains of wheat out of the mud, just to survive another day,” he wrote. Little has changed in the decades since his trip.

Except, of course, South Sudan is now an independent country, with huge Chinese and American contributions. The U.S. invested heavily in South Sudan’s independence, hoping to find a reliable strategic ally that would help counter the predominantly Muslim Sudan, buy U.S. weapons and challenge Beijing’s growing influence on the continent. China was far cleverer in its strategic aims, funding infrastructure and oil resources with an eye on the long game. Washington now appears distracted in other theaters of war. But Beijing continues to court Sudanese leaders. The United States still provides huge amounts of foreign aid, underscoring the kind of dependent relationship it hopes to engender.

But Kiir isn’t necessarily playing along with Washington’s cajoling. In a speech at a rally in the capital, Juba, recently, he appeared uncompromising toward his local opponents and foreign pressure. This did not stop a South Sudanese student from calling for Kiir to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for being a “revolutionary icon and peacemaker.”

Millions of South Sudanese desperately need food, water and hygiene assistance. But that is not enough. The elite’s powermongering and apathy for peace have dispossessed millions of people, from Bor to Wai and Ganyiel to Juba. It continues to polarize citizens and erode the country’s social relations. The U.N. Security Council is considering targeted sanctions, and critics are calling for travel bans, asset freezes and denying the children of elites access to Western education. These levers of pressure may already be too late.