A Peace Maker, Downer he ain’t
ΣΧΕΤΙΚΑ ΑΡΘΡΑ
By MARIOS EVRIVIADES
The Australian Alexander Downer is busy these days making the rounds as a UN envoy to bring peace to Cyprus. He can’t. He is uniquely unqualified for the job and for such a high mission.
Here is why. To begin with the man is blatantly disrespectful of the ideals and principles of the United Nations, the organization he represents at the bequest of its Secretary General. The latter has been mandated by the Security Council to use his “good offices” to bring an end to the Cyprus conflict, in line with pertinent UN Resolutions.
Worse, as representative of an organization that pledges in the name of humanity to “turn swords into plowshares”, Alexander Downer is an unabashed warmonger. Just read what this man had to say on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war, pursued by the US as “a war of choice”, that is an aggressive war, and which the then UN Secretary General characterized as “illegal”. “Even with hindsight the Iraq war was the best option for all concerned”, he opined in The Sydney Morning Herald on March 25, 2013. Only on Monday May 20th over 133 were killed and close to 300 injured in uncontrolled sectarian violence in “liberated” Iraq.
Australia and he as Foreign Minister supported and participated in the war to get rid of a dictator, Downer, has proudly proclaimed. The world and the Iraqis, he went on to say, got rid of a dictator who killed and gassed “his own people”, with humanity, democracy and freedom benefiting. All of which it took Downer and his ilk 10-12 year to recognize and digest. And all the while hypocritically making money by bribing the Saddam regime with hundreds of millions of dollars, as did the Australian wheat producers. Downer was “shocked, shocked” when he finally found out that all these illegalities were taking place under his watch.
Unlucky for Downer, his fellow Aussies have known him better than the unsuspecting Cypriots. Andrew Worssam wrote this in response to Downer’s “humanitarian” effusions: “I rarely read a more sickening and self-serving post-facto rationalization than Alexander Downer’s defence of the indefensible – the illegal and grossly incompetent invasion of Iraq”. And here is another Aussie, John Barman: “Many thousands more civilians –men, women and children were slaughter during the “shock and awe” invasion and the sectarian violence that followed … than were killed by Saddam. In Downer’s claim of “simple humanity” we’d have done better to have left Saddam and his secular crew in place”.
Downer’s ethical perspective on matters of life and death was no different than the company he kept. Like that of his now new business associate, Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright. She was asked on the “ The 60 Minutes” program of CBS in 1996 whether the “price” –the 500.000 Iraqi children that died of malnutrition because of the West’s Iraq embargo – “is worth it”. And her response was yes, “we think the price was worth it”.
And so was with the 2003 war for Downer and his government. In order to convince Australians to participate in America’s “war of choice”, Downer argued, according to press reports at the time, that Australian wheat producers were going to make a kill because the war would have jacked up demand for surplus Australian wheat. Alternatively, he argued, the Iraqi market would have been lost to the American producers. Is this cesspool morality, or what?
“Sovereignty”, he writes in his warmongering article, “is important but not more important than humanity”. Let’s see how Downer measures up to his own standard. In 2001 while Foreign Minister he refused permission for a ship, the NV Tampa to put in an Australian harbor because it had the “misfortune” to pick up shipwrecked non-white asylum seekers on the high seas. And he repeated the same in 2003 with the Australian Pacific Solution. No humanity here for Mr. Downer. Only Australian sovereignty. And this raises another moral issue. In his bio, Mr. Downer lists himself a recipient of an honorary doctorate from Israeli’s Bar Ilan University. This honor was awarded in 2007 after the MV Tampa and the Pacific Solution outrages. I doubt that busybody Downer ever heard of the WWII “Struma” tragedy. But what about the folks at Bar Illan who honored him? Did they not see similarities and analogies? Seven hundred Jewish refugees on board the “Struma” perished at sea in 1942 because the pro-Nazi regime in Turkey refused them safe harbor. Details, I suppose.
Which brings us back to Cyprus and my point that this man Downer has no moral standing and is not qualified to be a peace envoy anywhere. On almost all issues of relevance to Cyprus, human rights, refugees, right of return, property, respect for UN principles, resolutions and international law, his record of which he is proud, is abysmal.
With regards to Cyprus he does not acknowledge that the country, a UN member, was forcefully partitioned by Turkey in the 1974 war, that 1% of Cypriot population was killed by a NATO army run amok, and that decades later a Turkish occupation army remains ensconced in the country. Cyprus, he writes elsewhere, is just a “bifurcated” country and there is a “Greek Cyprus” and there is a “Turkish Cyprus”, which is precisely Ankara’s terminology. That he sees and writes about. But the Turkish army whose NATO bayonets are the cause for this state of affairs, Downer sees not. His thesis, which he repeats ad nauseum, is that the Turkish army is not the problem. The problem for him is the victimized Cypriot majority that refuses to lie prostrate before Turkish power, mediated by Downer. (He does acknowledge the Turkish army on Cyprus but only in the context of… Gallipoli. But that’s another story burried deep into the psyche of Downer as an Aussie).
Nor is the Turkish occupation and its delibilating effects seen by his Cyprus UN Office, that uses millions of unaccounted UN and US monies to fund dubious, “academic” projects by GONGOS (Governmental Non Governmental Organizations), most prominent of which is Cyprus 2015 and Norway’s controversial Cold War remnant, PRIO. Here we have politically correct pseudo-scholarship at its best. Proof of this is that the authors quote their likes incestuously and follow instructions so that their labors and conclusions always come down the line 50-50. (Really if numbers in Cyprus do not count and only communities do – as Downer and his subordinates claim- then the divider should be by five and not two. For five are the Cypriot communities, not two. Imagine what that would do to Downer’s humanitarian agenda and his pseudo scholar enablers. Five politically correct conclusions for every project, and more money, I suppose).
Alexander Downer a.k.a. Alexander John Gosse Downer, is just another politically opinionated charlatan, but no official in Cyprus dares tell him that and send him packing. Still the nature of the man is such that he may bolt on his own and soon, if the premiership of Southern Australia comes calling and provided Australians forget his loser role as opposition leader in the 1990s.
What most people do not know is that Cyprus, besides being small fish, is a part time job for Downer. And he has said on another occasion involving alleged nepotism towards his elder daughter, (too many Downer stories, too little space) that he has a family and expenses to meet. On that he ain’t doing badly. He is a visiting professor and a regular columnist in Australia. And above all he is a businessman associated with the consulting and lobbying firm Bespoke which he cofounded, and also associated with Albright’s Stonebridge Group, the British spy firm Hakluyt, Lake’s Oil, AO Energy, Huawei (China) Group, Cappello Capital Corp., Resource House LTD, and probably more.
Is this man a peacemaker, a warmonger, a mammonite or what? What do you think?