MIDTERM ELECTIONS IN THE US PAGE 10

NOVEMBER 2006

Pacifi c

overtures

‘VISIBLE STATEMENT OF SEPARATION AND DIFFERENCE’

Britain’s

multiculturalism

BY IGNACIO RAMONET

CNAC/MNAM DIST RMN

SUGAI KAMI: ‘Sun Eclipse’ (1996)

falters

The British government has questioned its relationship with the nation’s Muslim community just as serious, justifi ed concerns over domestic security make cooperation vital. Instead, the government began a debate about the face veil worn by a very small minority of Muslim women.

NORTH Korea’s first nuclear test on

9 October was not the only recent shock in northeast Asia. The region

had been just as disturbed two weeks earlier by the election of Shinzo Abe as

Japan’s new prime minister on September 26. Abe, like his predecessor Junichiro Koizumi,

is a member of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that has dominated Japanese politics

since 1955. At 52, he is Japan’s youngest prime minister since 1945, and the fi rst to be born

after the end of the second world war. The Japanese left views him as an ultraliberal,

archconservative nationalist. His enemies in the region regard him as a hawk.

He is a member of a leading rightwing dynasty that has never apologised for its brim

stone past (1). His father was once minister for foreign aff airs. His grandfather, Nobusuke

Kishi, was a minister in the government of Manchukuo, imperial Japan’s artifi cial state

in occupied Chinese Manchuria in 1932. Back in Tokyo in 1941, he joined Hideki To

jo’s war cabinet, which ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor.

In 1945 the United States arrested and imprisoned Kishi on suspicion of being a war

criminal, but he was not brought before the Tokyo war crimes tribunal (the equivalent of

Nuremberg) because the US wanted to rebuild the Japanese political right at the beginning

of the cold war. Kishi served the US faithfully. After his release in 1948, he served two terms

as prime minister, from 1957 to 1960, and signed a new mutual security treaty with the

US that sparked violent popular protests in Japan.

Abe’s great-uncle, Yosuke Matsuoka, was a foreign minister who promoted Japanese

expansion in Asia. In 1941 he brought Japan into the Axis with Hitler’s Germany and

Mussolini’s Italy. He too was accused of war crimes but died in prison before he could be

brought before the tribunal. Japan has never offi cially sought forgive

ness for war crimes committed against Korea and China. Abe, far from disowning his fam

ily history, has minimised Japan’s past responsibility and denounced those who take

a “masochistic” view of Japanese history. He and Koizumi have been regular visitors to the

Yasukuni shrine, which honours those “who gave their lives for Japan”, among them Abe’s

great-uncle and 14 convicted war criminals. These visits have made Koizumi persona non

grata in Beijing and Seoul; they accused him of being a revisionist who sought to glorify

Japan’s military past.

Abe is on the right wing of the LDP and has

successfully played on the Japanese media’s racism to exploit a major issue. During the

1970s and 1980s, when Kim Il-sung controlled North Korea, his special forces abducted

civilians from Japanese beaches. There was something demagogic about the insistence

with which Abe demanded the return of the surviving abductees and called for sanctions

against North Korea, even when only one case remained unresolved.

On 19 September this year he demanded and secured new sanctions against North

Korea in response to July’s Nodong missile tests (2). He used the “North Korean threat”

as a pretext to call for a referendum allowing article 9 of Japan’s pacifi st constitution (3)

to be changed to permit the strictly defensive forces to be changed into fully fl edged armed

forces released from the limitations imposed by the victors in 1945 (4). This ambition now

enjoys the support of the group surrounding President George Bush, which feels the need

for a powerful military ally in northeast Asia to help contain China.

Japan already has the world’s second-largest military budget (the US is world leader) giv

ing rise to real fears that its rearmament could accelerate an arms race already under way in

one of the world’s most dangerous regions. Most Japanese oppose the idea and on 10

October Abe found it necessary to emphasise that Japan, protected by the US military um

brella, had no intention of acquiring nuclear weapons (5). Japan has at least 43.8 tonnes

of plutonium, produced by its civil reactors, and it would take only a few months to build a

nuclear warhead. The North Korean nuclear test was inexcus

able. But by deciding to carry it out on the day that Abe visited Seoul in South Korea, North

Korea clearly signalled how dangerous it believes him to be. This was an irresponsible

way to make the point, and alarmed the globe. It is clear confi rmation that without some —

improbable — relaxation of Abe’s nationalist posture, tensions will not decrease in Asia.

TRANSLATED BY DONALD HOUNAM

(1) See Philippe Pons, “Shinzo Abe, prince de la droite”,

Le Monde , 21 September 2006.

(2) See Ignacio Ramonet, “North and South”, Le Monde

diplomatique , English language edition, October 2006.

(3) This article stipulates that “the Japanese people for ever

renounce war”, and that “land, sea, and air forces, as well as

other war potential, will never be maintained”.

(4) See Muto Ichiyo, “Revise the Peace Constitution, Restore

Glory to Empire”, Japonesia Review , no 1, Tokyo, 2006.

(5) El País , Madrid, 11 October 2006.

BY WENDY KRISTIANASEN

JACK STRAW started it. Britain’s

former foreign minister, who is MP for Blackburn in Lancashire, where

nearly 20% of his constituents are Muslim, wrote in his local paper that he “felt

uncomfortable about talking to someone faceto-face who I could not see” because they were

wearing a face veil (niqab). It was a “visible statement of separation and of difference” (1).

The niqab was an easy target: a cultural attack made for political reasons. Straw’s

decision to raise the issue created a storm amplifi ed by the media and used by politi

cians as Labour fi gures positioned themselves for the announced post-Blair era, as govern

ment discipline broke down and as Britain’s disastrous foreign policies in Iraq unravelled.

Labour sensed it was losing the voters over Iraq and perhaps looked to the white working

class vote, while gambling on the retention of the core of its massive Muslim vote of the past. Was it also a distraction from the unending bad news from Iraq and the uncertain war on

terror? The prime minister, Tony Blair, had been forced to agree with the head of Britain’s

army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, who had said the army should “get ourselves out [of

Iraq] sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems” (2).

The suspension of Aishah Azmi, a 23-yearold classroom assistant at a junior school in

the Yorkshire town of Dewsbury, for refusing to remove her niqab in class, intensifi ed the

debate. On 15 October the government min

ister for race and faith, Phil Woolas, told the

Sunday Mirror that she “should be sacked. She has put herself in a position where she

can’t do her job.” Harriet Harman, a minister in the department of constitutional aff airs

and, like Straw, probably a candidate for the deputy leadership of the Labour party, told

the New Statesman that she would like to see an end to the niqab “because I want women to

be fully included. If you want equality, you have to be in society, not hidden away from it” (3).

Then it was Blair’s turn. He said he backed Azmi’s suspension, as part of a diffi cult but

necessary debate about how Islam integrates into British society and the modern world.

The niqab was “a mark of separation and that is why it makes other people from outside of

the community feel uncomfortable” (4). On 19 October a Leeds employment tribu

nal dismissed Azmi’s claims for discrimination and harassment, but awarded her £1,100

for victimisation by Kirklees council over its handling of the dispute. The tribunal rebuked

government fi gures, including Blair, for commenting on the issue while it was sub judice.

Azmi announced an appeal against the ruling. The government then brought schools into

the debate: state schools should introduce ethnic quotas into admissions criteria to end

segregation along cultural and religious lines (school heads saw this as unworkable); new

state-funded faith schools should take up

Continued on page 2

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

Algeria: the rise of al-Qaida’s

newest offi cial affi liate page 4

North Korea: a Chinese view

of its nuclear testing page 6

Burma: wild frontier zone near

the Chinese border page 7

Peru: will it be the ally of the Latin

American right or left? page 8

US: what does democracy mean

in a caste society? page 10

US: unending security war of

the supermax prisons page 11

France: how to legislate for an

unemployed underclass page 12

European Union: the confusion

over patent laws page 13

The art of crossing borders:

a word and picture essay page 14

An angel’s rage: a contemplation

on cinema by John Berger page 16