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A Question of Leadership: Lessons from the UN’s Actions in Myanmar

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by Gerrit Kurtz

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon meeting with Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, Commander-in-Chief of Myanmar Defense Services. (Image credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe)

 

The UN’s inquiry into its own actions in Myanmar since 2012 draws significant parallels with a similar exercise that focused on the UN’s role during the end of the war in Sri Lanka. Once again, the UN found itself in a situation where a government was committing atrocities, but the UN showed an incoherent, ineffective response. Without clear leadership adjudicating differences among key stakeholders in the UN system, the principled engagement to which Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had committed himself remained elusive.

Engaging with severe human rights violations requires courage and coherence, setting clear principles and the readiness to stand by them if they are under pressure. An independent inquiry on the UN’s action during the Rakhine crisis in Myanmar, which came out in June, observed that the international organisation showed a “systemic failure” in dealing with the state’s repression of the Rohingya people between 2010 and 2018. Choosing his words carefully, its author, the former Guatemalan foreign minister Gert Rosenthal, echoed a similar exercise on the UN’s behaviour during the end of the war in Sri Lanka in 2008/09. Importantly, the UN system’s shortcomings were not a simple matter of failing to speak out, but of incoherence across the system, exacerbated by the lack of executive decision-making in Myanmar and at headquarters level. The lack of leadership by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, despite his strong rhetorical commitment to human rights and atrocity prevention, deserves further attention.

From the UN’s perspective, the situation in Sri Lanka and Myanmar showed uncanny parallels, despite all objective differences. In Sri Lanka, the armed forces pursued a relentless final assault on the Tamil Tigers’ last hold-outs in Sri Lanka in 2008-2009. In Myanmar, the security forces attacked Rohingya civilians repeatedly, culminating in full-scale ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya population in 2017. In both countries, governments were the major perpetrators of violence, the presence of armed groups notwithstanding. Both governments were opposed to a strong human rights presence by the UN, and frustrated efforts by the UN Secretariat to increase its relevant capacity.

Myanmar and Sri Lanka, though both at the time host to significant armed violence, had successfully objected to any political or peacekeeping presence. The Resident Coordinators (RC), the head of the UN Country Team, in both countries had been chosen at a time of relative peace and with a strong development focus, not a profile in international humanitarian and human rights law. There were even some personal overlaps: Vijay Nambiar, the special advisor on Myanmar between 2012 and 2016, had been one of the most important UN officials during the Sri Lanka crisis, as Ban’s chef de cabinet. Lastly, there were strong geopolitical divisions that manifested themselves in a reluctance of the UN Security Council to discuss the situation as an official agenda item. In short, they were among the most difficult situations for the UN to work in.

The central challenge, as identified by Rosenthal, is a familiar and highly pertinent one: “how the United Nations can maintain some type of constructive engagement with individual member states where human rights abuses are systematically taking place, while at the same time pressing for those states to uphold their international commitments.” In other words, the UN needs to find an adequate mix of “quiet diplomacy” and “outspoken advocacy”, approaches that are associated with different parts of the UN system. For such a mix, the UN needs an inclusive organisational structure to produce a coherent policy, communicated across the system, owned by the leadership, and based on current, on-the-ground information and analysis.

The failure in Myanmar, according to Rosenthal, was that none of those prerequisites were present. Both at country and at HQ level, there were stark differences of opinion regarding the most adequate modus operandi. These manifested themselves in an increasingly polarised  working environment, as a function of the high stakes involved in the crisis in Rakhine state. Both sides of the argument thought that the other approach was not only wrong-headed, but potentially dangerous and counterproductive to de-escalate the violence and reduce discrimination. The emotionally charged atmosphere explains the reports about critical individuals being excluded from key meetings by Renata Lok Dessalien. The UN also had difficulty accessing the most volatile areas of Rakhine state and providing independent monitoring after alleged incidents.

Perhaps most importantly, there was a lack of strategic leadership, not just at the country level, but also at the highest level of the UN system. Differences between Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson, who pressed for advocacy, and Special Envoy Vijay Nambiar and UNDP Administrator Helen Clark, who stressed quiet diplomacy and development efforts, respectively, were never resolved by Secretary-General Ban. Rosenthal writes, “even at the highest level of the Organization there was no common strategy.”

These shortcomings are particularly salient because Ban and Eliasson had vowed to turn a page after the damning findings of the Sri Lanka inquiry. They launched the “Human Rights up Front” initiative in late 2013 with the aim to improve coordination, information management, engagement with member states, and the UN’s organisational  culture. One of the new mechanisms established as part of the initiative was the so-called Senior Action Group (SAG). The SAG brought together the system’s most important parts at the top leadership level, including the UNDP Administrator, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Emergency Relief Coordinator, and other high-level officials. It was chaired by Deputy Secretary General Eliasson.

In the SAG’s discussion of the crisis in Rakhine state, Helen Clark, then UNDP administrator, protected UNDP and her RC, insisting that investing in development would also benefit the Rohingya, which should not be jeopardised  by an overly focus on human rights advocacy. Allegations of specific incidents required more investigation, she often insisted. According to a UN official familiar with these discussions that I interviewed, “any time there was a contentious issue, a dilemma between quiet diplomacy, public diplomacy and so on, the differences were simply discussed, and no executive decision was taken.”

While the UNDP administrator is appointed by the Secretary General, he or she also reports to the UNDP Executive Board. At the time, Clark had the final say on appointing or replacing RCs. The UN official that I interviewed described her behaviour as “territorial.” In any case, Ban could have insisted on a common position on the Rakhine crisis, not the least since Helen Clark had officially signed up to Human Rights up Front. Eliasson, who knew the destitute situation of the Rohingya from his time as Emergency Relief Coordinator in the early 1990s, had pressed for the replacement of the RC as early as 2015. Still, Ban did not overrule Clark nor did he “arbitrate a common stance between these two competing perspectives,” as Rosenthal writes.

The lack of leadership was highly problematic: the whole purpose of such high-level meetings as the SAG was to deal with questions that UN officials at the country level had not been able to agree on, and to create a common analysis and joint ownership of decisions. The different perspectives are ingrained in the distinct mandates and ways of working of the parts of the UN system; it falls to the collective leadership of the UN system to resolve tensions arising from the operational work. “Systemic failure” sounds like the reasons for incoherence lie mainly in structural differences. While these are important, ultimately responsibility for ensuring that the whole UN system works falls to its leadership, including the Secretary General and member states.

Clearly, the UN system is subject to the same cleavages and divisions that characterise  the international system as a whole. As Renata Lok Dessalien herself points out in a paper written after her assignment in Myanmar, conceptual differences regarding the meaning and interpretation of basic principles are ingrained in the UN Charter, for example between the promotion of human rights and the respect for national sovereignty. No internal UN reform such as Human Rights up Front can do away with those tensions, or abolish geopolitical differences. What it can do, and it has done with some mixed success, is change the way the organisation works, improving communication, analysis and decision-making procedures.

If the UN can hope to influence events in situations like those in Rakhine state in Myanmar at all, a coherent and coordinated policy across the whole system is a prerequisite. Otherwise both governments and critical member states are always able to play different parts of the system against each other, muting their respective effectiveness.

Luckily and despite significant opposition from key member states, the UN has started to improve its coherence in dealing with the crisis in Myanmar. Shortly after he came into office, Secretary General António Guterres appointed a permanent monitoring group within the UN, and prioritised strategic dialogue with Myanmar’s government, including State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi. He also championed a reform of the RC system. When Myanmar’s armed forces began their military offensive that included ethnic cleansing in Rakhine state in August 2017, Guterres resorted to public diplomacy. In a rare step, he wrote to the UN Security Council, urging its members to take action. Also in 2017, Renata Lok Dessalien finished her position as RC in Myanmar. Her successor, the Norwegian Knut Ostby, emphasized communication and principled engagement, for example threatening to reduce all but essential aid to IDP camps in Rakhine state if the government did not improve the Rohingyas’ freedom of movement. At the same time, renewed fighting between the ethnic Rakhine Arakan armed group and the government as well as continued denial of citizenship have left around a million Rohingya refugees stranded in refugee camps in neighbouring Bangladesh.

UN diplomacy consists of difficult balancing acts, in particular in dealing with unrepentant governments committing atrocities against their own population. Faced with an increasing emphasis of state sovereignty, including by the United States, Guterres has, at times, appeared to waver on human rights. If his prevention agenda is to succeed, he needs to mobilise all pillars of the UN to support each other, not just in Myanmar.

Gerrit Kurtz is a non-resident fellow with the Global Public Policy Institute, Berlin. You can find him on Twitter @GerritKurtz

The Funding of Terrorism (Part IV) – A Trust Deficit is Undermining the Investigation of Terrorist Financing across MENA

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by Jack Watling

Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei (Image credit: Ayatollah.ir/Wikimedia)

 

The Kingdom of Bahrain sentenced 139 people to prison in April 2019, alleging they were part of a terrorist cell, which the authorities refer to as ‘Bahraini Hezbollah’. The charges in the mass trial ranged from plotting to conduct attacks and the smuggling of arms, to terrorist financing. Specifics however were not revealed, and point to a damaging trend: the use of ‘terrorism’ as a politically acceptable charge with which to implement repression. The consequences of this policy are not just unjust, but in pushing communities to avoid cooperation with the authorities sustains avenues for actual terrorists to finance and carry out their operations.

There are armed groups active in Bahrain, just as there are non-state armed actors, many of which have carried out terrorist attacks, in Iraq, Syria, the Palestinian Territories and Lebanon. Many of these groups are directly supported by Iran in these activities. While sanctions on Iran can be effective in reducing the country’s available resources for financing clandestine activities, limited progress has been made in restricting the routes by which money reaches armed groups. To understand why, it is necessary to appreciate how the Shia community manages its tithes. Although a minority of Shia Muslims are followers of Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s religious leadership has ties across the Shia community, and the Iranian government is consequently able to leverage these networks.

Each Twelver Shia Muslim selects an Ayatollah – or religious jurist – as their spiritual guide. They are obligated to follow the scholar who they believe to be most theologically knowledgeable. A follower must pay a fifth of their profits each year to their Ayatollah. The khums is supposed to support the Ayatollah in his research, and to provide subsistence for the Howza: the seminary he oversees. Many Shia give more than the required khums and, in discussion with the cleric or their representatives, make additional donations for him to spend in support of an agreed cause.

The Shia financial system was developed in small communities. Between the collapse of distance brought about by international finance, and a rapidly expanding global population, it now sees donations made by a community of around 220 million people. The volume of money is therefore vast, and far exceeds the immediate needs of the Ayatollahs and the Howza. A far higher proportion of the money is therefore used to support charitable ventures, and to help Shia communities.

What constitutes ‘help’ is contextual. It may mean educational scholarships to students in Mali, or aid to flood victims in Pakistan. It could also mean supporting military activity. When Islamic State seized Mosul in 2014 Grand Ayatollah Sistani declared the fight to defend Iraq a ‘sacred defense’ and large amounts of money from the Marjaiy’ah – the Shia clerical authority – went to the Popular Mobilization Forces, and their families, to support the war effort. The use of religious funds to support the war effort was understandable. It also highlighted how the Shia financial system can support a wide range of political causes, and military efforts.

The capacity for Shia clerics to inject political and financial capital into causes was lamented by the British in the early twentieth century.[1] It has been viewed with hostility by Arab governments since, especially in the wake of the Iranian revolution of 1979. Following the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 for instance Grand Ayatollah Sistani decided that Bahraini Shia should use their khums locally.[2] Done for humanitarian reasons, this act gave the protest movement both a large amount of money, and the infrastructure for managing it.

Much of that infrastructure is entirely opaque, with local religious representatives receiving cash, and conveying or dispersing it as a matter of trust. The Shia community has a good reason for keeping their finances away from the banking system. In 1991 for instance Saddam Hussein looted the Shrines of Karbala, and actively attempted to seize khums revenues.  The fear that opening the process to scrutiny will see predatory seizures by hostile governments is both persistent within the Marjai’yah, and understandable.

From the point of view of Arab governments like Bahrain or Saudi Arabia however this architecture provides a highly suspicious and invisible flow of funds that goes to both legitimate charity, and to subversive political activities. It is exploited by Iran. The problem is that because it is opaque, finding the evidence trail of the small amount of terrorist financing in the large flow of legitimate funding is hard, especially when those conducting legitimate charity have no incentive to cooperate with the authorities.

Bahraini officials have repeatedly sought to have US counterterrorism investigators endorse their actions against what they see as Iranian subversion in their country. The problem, as a former senior US Treasury official noted in interview, is that ‘they present us with suspicious unknowns – and the opacity of Shia finance certainly represents a threat vector – but they claim it is evidence of terrorist financing. It is not.’[3]

If Bahrain – and other Gulf monarchies – intend to clamp down on the financing of terrorism they need to avoid mass trials and vague charges. They must conduct diligent investigative work, and present detailed cases. Charging five people with specific, evidenced crimes, would be infinitely more credible. It would require a shift from attempting to rule by law, to supporting the rule of law. But until governments across the region are able to build trust with the Shia community, they can expect Shia finance to remain opaque, and so long as it is opaque, it will remain a vector for the financing of subversion from Iran.

Jack Watling is Research Fellow for Land Warfare in the Department of Military Sciences at RUSI. He holds a PhD in history examining the evolution of UK policy responses to civil war. Jack has worked in Iraq, Mali, Rwanda and further afield and has contributed to the RUSI Journal, RUSI Defence Systems, Reuters, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Jane’s Intelligence Review, Haaretz and others. He was shortlisted for the European Press Prize in 2016, and won the Breakaway Award at the International Media Awards in 2017. This report was supported with funding from the Pulitzer Centre.

[1] TNA, FO 800/70: Cecil Spring Rice to Edward Grey, 18 July 1907.

[2] Author interviews with officials from Iraq’s clerical establishment, held in October 2017 in Najaf.

[3] Author interview, a former senior treasury official, Washington DC, April 2019.

The Funding of Terrorism (Part III) – America Needs a New Economic Patriot Act

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by Michael Greenwald

8 August 2019

Section 311 of the Patriot Act, an effective tool against money laundering (Image credit: Financial Tribune)

 

Since 9/11, Washington has deployed a powerful weapon to halt the financing of terrorism: Section 311 of the Patriot Act. By shutting down the ability of banks to facilitate cross-border payments, Section 311 has revolutionised the field of anti-money laundering while helping the U.S. implement aggressive and effective sanctions against Iran and North Korea.

Take the case of Banco Delta Asia (BDA), a bank that facilitated financial transactions with North Korea. When the 311 was used in 2005, BDA lost its access to correspondent banking in the United States. This loss provoked a run on the bank and caused Macanese authorities to freeze $22M in North Korean deposits. However, the effects of the 311 were not localised—they swept across the entire Asian banking system. Chinese banks, in particular, dumped their North Korean exposure for fear of being targeted with a 311 designation themselves. The 311 was so powerful that, when North Korean negotiators demanded the release of the $22M in frozen funds, no Asian banks were willing to facilitate the payments transfer.

In the sanctions campaign against Iran, Washington used the 311 designation to punish a nation-state for the first time. Treasury officials had one-on-one discussions with CEOs and officers to convince them that the compliance costs of doing business in Iran were too steep to justify investment. Later, the United States sanctioned several private banks before levying a 311 on the Central Bank of Iran. Doing so classified the entire Iranian jurisdiction as a primary money laundering concern. This translated into the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) disconnecting the Iranian financial system from access to international commerce.

While Section 311 has been extremely useful in weakening terrorist and other enemy nations, the current strategic environment is changing. Rogue states, terrorists, and money launderers have developed innovative tactics to evade sanctions. Additionally, secular shifts in the global economy have altered Washington’s sanctions calculus. In today’s era of great power competition, priority threats are no longer rogue states with little economic clout but instead nations with systemically important financial institutions and economic linkages. Russia and China top the list.

America’s sanctions strategy, however, has not evolved to meet the challenges of this new global landscape. Like Thor’s Hammer, Section 311 remains a powerful tool, but its collateral costs are too high to confront banks that are too big to fail. After levying this tool throughout the past two decades, it has become clear that the mere threat of its deployment can trigger severe reputational damage; its actual use can generate devastating shockwaves across a regional banking sector.

It is time for a new Economic Patriot Act that can provide the scalpel-like instruments Washington needs to thwart our adversaries, such as Russia and China, with speed and precision.

As the United States sanctioned Russia, a nation with significantly more financial links to the Western World (and Europe in particular), this weakness became apparent. The costs to of implementing financial and energy sanctions from Iran’s playbook against Moscow are too great for Brussels to seriously contemplate an escalation to this stage.

China presents an even trickier challenge. China’s four biggest banks rank among the largest in the world. If even one of them were targeted in the same manner, as the far less systemically important Iranian banks, the result could be a deep financial crisis not limited to China’s borders. Think of it as a Lehman Brothers-style collapse – only a deliberate one.

Section 311 may be a crude cudgel, but Washington still has options to develop a savvy sanctions strategy in the era of great power competition. In the fight against illicit finance, Russia benefits from lax financial transparency in jurisdictions ranging from Cyprus to Delaware. Money laundering from Russia represents not only a law enforcement issue but also a geopolitical dilemma: Russia’s ability to move money outside its boundaries and place it in the security of European banks upholds the patronage networks that form the beating heart of the Kremlin’s kleptocracy.

Other sections of the Patriot Act have also proved out-dated and ineffective in the current geopolitical landscape. The Patriot Act’s Section 313 fully banned correspondent banking with foreign shell banks, which have no physical presence in a jurisdiction and are thus virtually unregulated entities. The move was instrumental in fighting terrorist financiers, but these vulnerabilities are no longer loopholes that facilitate threats. These loopholes are threats themselves and form the core of the Kremlin’s business model.

Over the past two decades, the US Treasury has done quiet heroic work to financially weaken terrorists and rogue states. But complacency regarding the Patriot Act is handicapping our ability to respond to Russian and Chinese provocations. An executive order spelling out a new Economic Patriot Act would enable a smarter sanctions strategy backed by a suite of new, powerful instruments for the era of great power competition at hand.

Michael B. Greenwald is a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He is also a Senior Adviser to the Atlantic Council President and Chief Executive Officer Frederick Kempe and an Adjunct Professor at Boston University. From 2015-2017, Greenwald served as the US Treasury attaché to Qatar and Kuwait.

Tactical Instability on the South China Sea and Sino-American Decoupling

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By Axel Dessein
30 October 2018

The USS Decatur finds itself seconds from disaster during an unsafe encounter with a Chinese destroyer in September 2018. (Image Credit: US Navy)

In late September 2018, a Chinese Luyang-class destroyer nearly collided with the American destroyer U.S.S. Decatur during a Freedom of Navigation Operation (FONOP) in the South China Sea. These operations are essentially aimed at signalling a commitment to keeping the sea lanes open, the near-collision demonstrates that such commitments are to be upheld. Following the unsafe encounter at sea, several commentators pointed out that this atypical event may be a reflection of the broader deterioration in relations between the two countries. Indeed, we may now be witnessing the effects of the trade war spilling over into the military and security domain. This shift in behaviour is a crucial development, as the Trump Administration seems to have declared a new Cold War on China.

Winning Control

At the strategic level, China’s acquisitions in the South China Sea are its answer to the First and Second Island Chains, which caused the country’s claustrophobic vision of its surrounding seascape. Indeed, while the American interpretation of these island chains was aimed at keeping the country in, China itself views this enduring element of the region’s geostrategic outlook as benchmarks for its naval ambitions, as Andrew S. Erickson and Joel Wuthnow demonstrate.

In the 1970s, China took control of the Paracel Islands and their surrounding waters after a military standoff with the Vietnamese Navy. It is on those islands that China eventually established Sansha City, the administrative basis for control over the “Three Sands:” the Paracels (or Xisha, West Sand), the Spratlys (or Nansha, South Sand), and the Macclesfield Bank and Scarborough Shoal (commonly grouped under the name Zhongsha, Central Sand).

Undoubtedly, heaps of sand abound. Satellite imagery reveals that since 2014, China has engaged in massive land reclamation and construction activities on many of the islands and submerged features. This island-building enterprise is a clear expression of the intent to establish a military foothold in the region, thereby securing relative control of the sea. If for instance, one draws a line between the different island groups, a triangle becomes visible within the Nine-Dash Line, a series of dashes that trace China’s maritime demarcation line.

The Science of Military Strategy (Zhanlüe xue), an informative study released by the Chinese Academy of Military Science is especially enlightening as to what these advancements mean for China. According to the study, China’s strategic thinking is increasingly looking towards the South China Sea to attain a form of effective control (youxiao kongzhi) over the area to establish a forward-deployed position (qianyan fangwei) away from the mainland. However, it remains unclear what exactly China is claiming: the sea itself or the many features within the Nine-Dash Line.

This ambiguity fits perfectly within the nature of the country’s approach towards asserting its claims. In fact, China seems to be moving within the so-called grey zone, a form of strategy “at the low end of the conflict spectrum in which […] military coercion is occurring to alter the status quo,” according to James J. Wirtz. Whether conflict in the grey zone is an entirely new domain is of course an interesting debate, as Toshi Yoshihara demonstrated an earlier variation of such behaviour in his appraisal of the Paracel Sea Battle between China and Vietnam. Whatever the answer may be, such short-of-war behaviour has clearly demonstrated its effectiveness time and again.

Manning the Great Wall at Sea

Ambiguity and non-military coercion appear to be essential elements in China’s toolbox for the South China Sea. Conor M. Kennedy and Andrew S. Erickson have written extensively on this topic. Most importantly, one has to recognise that there are essentially three Chinese sea forces: the grey-hulled navy, the white-hulled coast guard and its fishermen. Aptly called a maritime militia, these fishing boats are the vanguard involved in promoting and defending China’s sovereignty at sea. That is not to say, however, that China has come up with a recipe for success.

The 2012 Scarborough Shoal standoff demonstrates the fallibility of Chinese strategy. Special attention can be drawn to the Philippines which in 2013 filed a case against China’s territorial claims at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. After a ruling in favour of the Philippines that thereby denied the Chinese claims, China rejected the validity of the PCA and insisted on resolving the disputes bilaterally. In this instance, China failed to win control, and the shoal remains a major source of tension between the two countries.

The South China Sea is sometimes referred to as “Asia’s powder keg” because of its precarious position between China and several ASEAN states. (Image Credit: Global Security, CSIS, DW)

Other attempts have been made to quell China’s expansionist activities in the South China Sea. After sixteen years of negotiations China and the Association of the Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) recently made some progress on drafting the framework of a proposed Code of Conduct in the South China Sea, which is a slow albeit necessary process. However, the conflict is not limited to Asia. Because of the growing economic and political relationship between China and countries like Greece, the European Union has come short of wording a clear statement on the issue. Here, we see attempts at preserving international law in a key trading region like the South China Sea increasingly being trumped by other economic interests.

One commentator suggests that the Scarborough Shoal standoff reveals much about China’s intent. The country demonstrated non-military assertiveness with the aim of becoming a great power at sea (haiyang qiangguo). Another commentator sees an analogy between China’s sea power endeavours and those of the German navy under Admiral Tirpitz. Broader historical parallels are also drawn with the Anglo-German conflict of the nineteenth century. However, while the clash between the world’s most powerful states is primarily about their desire for great-power status, diverging ideologies are shaping how this conflict plays out. Here, Alfred W. McCoy writes: “Treat the South China Sea as central, not peripheral, and the Cold War not as bounded by a specific ideological conflict but as the midpoint in a century-long clash of empires.” Today, the empires in question are of course, China and the U.S.

A Relationship Adrift

Amid growing trade tensions, the countries put a halt to their Diplomatic and Security Dialogue (D&SD). The U.S. Secretary of Defence James Mattis also skipped China during his October 2018 trip to Asia, but did meet with his Chinese counterpart in Singapore. In light of such events, it is but a small surprise that Chinese academics and political groups are discussing a “decoupling” (tuogou), a process which describes a potential rupture in the economic and security relationships between China and the U.S. The risks associated with such an unravelling of the ties between China and the U.S. are manifold, with increased tactical instability demonstrated by the recent near-collision as an example.

Strategic competition with China is back on the American agenda. As a result, the two giants are increasingly stepping on each other’s toes. In this scenario, the destroyer’s sortie could indeed be a display of greater confidence and boldness on the Chinese part, showcasing a broader shift in the relationship. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that an article by a think tank affiliated with China’s State Council still urges restraint in face of “long-term strategic competition” with the United States. While it is unclear how long such moderation will last, our understanding of the Chinese decision-making process clearly suffers from large information gaps. Simply talking about a new Cold War will not be the answer, learning from Chinese words and actions will be.

Axel Dessein is a doctoral candidate at King’s College London and a Senior Editor at Strife. His research focuses on the implications of China’s rise on the current world order. Axel completed his BA and MA in Oriental Languages and Cultures at Ghent University. You can follow him on Twitter @AxelDessein.

Banner image source: https://www.stripes.com/news/photos-show-how-close-chinese-warship-came-to-colliding-with-us-navy-destroyer-1.550153

Strife Review – Khaled Hosseini, Sea Prayer: Refugees, Storytelling and the importance of Human Dignity

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By Anna Plunkett

Khaled Hosseini (Credit Image: UNHCR/Paul Wu)

 

“I have heard it said that we are the uninvited.

We are the unwelcome.

We should take our misfortune elsewhere.

But I hear your mother’s voice,

Over the tide,

And she whispers in my ear,

‘Oh, but if they saw, my darling.

Even half of what you have.

If only they saw.

They would say kinder things, surely.”

-Hosseini, Sea Prayer 

 

Like many others, it was Khaled Hosseini’s novels that brought the vibrancy of conflict alive for me. His books have enraptured thousands, detailing lives under oppressive regimes, insecurity, and conflict. He has detailed the normalisation of violence, the varying levels and stages of fear, and the wide-ranging uncertainty. Though, perhaps more importantly, he’s illustrated the moments of normalcy, joy, sadness, and tenderness that are part of life, even in extenuating circumstances.  His stories focus around the family unit and how the developments, challenges, and changes to these fundamental ties transcend the cacophony of chaos that conflict brings.

As such, I was thrilled when, as part of the Literature and Spoken Word programme at the Southbank Centre, Khaled Hosseini presented his latest work – Sea Prayer.  A move away from the mountains of Afghanistan that first inspired the Afghan-American doctor to turn his talents to writing. Sea Prayer was inspired by the death of Alan Kurdi who was found washed up on the beaches of Turkey. The image of the three-year-old boy became one of the most iconic images of the Syrian War in 2015 after the boat he and his family were fleeing on capsized just minutes after leaving the shore. The illustrated novel pays homage to those who lost their lives whilst crossing the Mediterranean and narrates the stories of those who survived.

For ninety minutes, Hosseini held the stage in the cavernous Royal Festival Hall speaking to an audience and an interviewer, Razia Iqbal, who were equally rapt and charmed. Born in Afghanistan in 1965, he left in 1976 when his family relocated to Paris for his father’s diplomatic career but was unable to return after the 1979 Soviet invasion. Hosseini spoke about his first-hand experience of becoming a refugee – watching the invasion on TV in Paris as a teenager and realising that his life was about to change, dramatically. From there, he relocated to the US, and attended school whilst speaking no English, and watched his parents struggle to understand and overcome the challenges they now faced in a completely alien situation. It is easy to see the links he draws between his own life and those of his characters.

Hosseini delivered his message clearly. He stressed the importance of storytelling in understanding and overcoming the challenges of the refugee experience. As many qualitative researchers will attest, figures and statistics can miss vital details and experiences that need to be considered when understanding social and political phenomena. Hosseini adds to this, noting how the use of statistics has distanced and dehumanised the refugee plight whereas personal stories can help to overcome the misconceptions and misunderstandings around such complex issues.  Storytelling, in Hosseini’s eyes can make seemingly inconceivable situations and choices, such as putting your loved ones on a boat that you know may not make it to the other side, understandable and relatable.

Additionally, drawing heavily on his time as a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador since 2006 and his trips to Uganda, Lebanon, and Sicily, Hosseini also spoke about the importance of human dignity and why this should challenge our current thinking about the refugee experience. Engaging with numerous refugees and communities who are at different stages in their journey to finding a new home, Hosseini noted three essential rights that he believes are critical when considering the refugee experience: the sanctity of families; the right to asylum; and the right to human dignity.

The first is clearly an issue close to Hosseini as can be seen throughout his work. On the importance of family, he joked that “privacy was another word for being lonely” and family, as he was sure every Afghan in the audience could attest, was everything. Thus, as he rightly identifies, refugees need to be respected – families should not and cannot be separated. The precedent that they can is not only a dangerous one but one that can have disastrous consequences.

The right to asylum is protected under the UN Declaration of Human Rights under article 14. However, as the mobilisation of populations has increased recently and especially since the refugee crisis has hit along the Mediterranean’s shores, this human right has increasingly come under threat. With borders closing to such asylum seekers across regions previously welcoming to refugees, new solutions need to be found.  Hosseini remains resolute – he believes that this is not a problem for refugees and asylum seekers alone. He avers that we, as a society, must own and be responsible for guaranteeing this right.

The last of these rights, the right to human dignity, is probably the most under threat among them. With growing dehumanisation of migrants, the rights of these people are often forgotten. People fleeing conflict, in fear of their lives, risking the ‘vessels of desperation’[1] have become caught in a system that rarely provides the materials or opportunities for dignity and purpose. It does not have to be this way – Hosseini acknowledged alternative, progressive strategies being piloted in Uganda where South Sudanese refugees receive plots of land in local communities three days after entering the country.

Overall, the book is a slim volume that is exactly what it says on the tin – a prayer from a father to the seas for safe passage of his precious cargo. The short verses bring work in harmony with Dan Williams’ beautiful artwork to bring the hauntingly sad story to life. Hosseini attempts to capture the essence of the refugee’s plight and the loss that comes with it – it is a story Hosseini admits hearing told to him time and again by refugees during his visits with UNHCR. Hosseini noted that storytelling invites listeners to perceive the world from a plurality of perspectives and this, in all its forms, helps overcome the misconceptions and instead build communal understanding. Storytelling may be the bridge over misunderstandings between the two communities – refugee and the local recipient community. However, there is a social obligation by us all that must be realised – the refugee crisis does not belong to refugees. It belongs to us all as a society. We must improve our collective action to ensure that human dignity is guaranteed to all people, including those refugees who so clearly deserve it.

 

Khaled Hosseini presented Sea Prayer in conversation with Razia Iqbal at the Southbank Centre on the 4th September 2018. Sea Prayer was released for sale in the UK on the 30th August 2018, and in the US on the 18th September 2018. It was written in collaboration with the UNHCR and illustrated by Dan Williams.  

 

Anna is a doctoral researcher in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. She received her BA in Politics and Economics from the University of York, before receiving a scholarship to continue her studies at York with an MA in Post-War Recovery. She was the recipient of the Guido Galli Award for her MA dissertation. Her primary interests include conflict and democracy at the sub-national level, understanding how minor conflicts impact democratic realisation within quasi-post conflict states. Her main area of focus is Burma’s ethnic borderlands and ongoing conflicts within the region. She has previously worked as a human rights researcher focusing on military impunity in Burma and has conducted work on evaluating Bosnia’s post-war recovery twenty years after the Dayton Peace Accords. You can follow her in Twitter @AnnaBPlunkett

Notes:

[1] Hosseini in conversation about the boats used to cross the Mediterranean at the Southbank Centre, 4th September 2018.

 

Image Source:

Banner: http://www.unhcr.org/khaled-hosseini.html

Image 2: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/sea-prayer-9781526602718/