By Eric Hobsbawm

Victor Kiernan, who has died aged 95, was a man of unselfconscious charm and staggeringly wide range of learning. He was also one of the last survivors of the generation of British Marxist historians of the 1930s and 1940s. If this generation has been seen by the leading German scholar HU Wehler as the main factor behind “the global impact of English historiography since the 1960s”, it was largely due to Victor’s influence. He brought to the debates of the Communist party historians’ group between 1946 and 1956 a persistent, if always courteous, determination to think out problems of class culture and tradition for himself, whatever the orthodox position. He continued to remain loyal to the flexible, open-minded Marxism of the group to which he had contributed so much.
Most influential through his works on the imperialist era, he was also, almost certainly, the only historian who also translated 20th-century Urdu poets and wrote a book on the Latin poet Horace. The latter’s works he, like the distinguished Polish Marxist historian Witold Kula, carried with him on his travels.
Like several of his contemporaries among the Marxist historians, including Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton and Edward Thompson, he came from a nonconformist background. In his case it was a lower-middle-class, actively congregationalist family in Ashton-on-Mersey, though in his time as a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, he used his Irish name as an excuse to justify a lack of zeal for the British monarchy.
He came to Trinity College from Manchester grammar school in 1931 and remained there for the next seven years as an exceptionally brilliant undergraduate, research scholar and, from 1937, fellow. In 1934, the year of his graduation (double starred first in history), he joined the Communist party, in which he remained for the next 25 years. His first book, British Diplomacy in China 1880-1885 (1939) announced his consistent interest in the world outside Europe.
Unlike his Trinity comrade John Cornford, about whom he wrote with remarkable perception, his public profile among Cambridge Communist party members of the 1930s was low. Only those with special interests were likely to meet him, a boyish face emerging in a dressing-gown from among mountain ranges of books on the attic floor of Trinity Great Court. This was because he soon took over the officially non-existent “colonial group” from the Canadian EH Norman, later a distinguished historian of Japan, diplomat and eventual victim of the McCarthyite witch-hunt in the US, and first of a succession of communist (and later ex-communist) historians who looked after the “colonials” – overwhelmingly from south Asia – until 1939.
Marxism and the irresistible friendship of Indians moved Victor, in 1938, to use one year of his four-year Trinity fellowship to visit the subcontinent. This was nominally “to see the political scene at closer hand and with some schemes for historical study” and he also had a Comintern document for the Indian CP.
He was to stay there until 1946, mainly as a teacher at a Sikh college and, somewhat unexpectedly, at that stronghold of the raj and its rajahs, Aitchison college, both in Lahore. He returned, “reading Thucydides on the Peloponnesian war” in his cabin, with a cargo of friendships, a permanent passion for the great (and progressive) Urdu poets Iqbal and Faiz whom he translated, but with no apparent trace in his subsequent life of a short-lived marriage to Shanta Gandhi, whom he had got to know in London in 1938. Few of his British friends were even aware of it, or expected to see this quintessential bachelor don with a wife, before his fortunate second marriage in 1984 to Heather Massey.
He returned to Trinity, an unreconstructed, but always critical, communist with vast plans for a Marxist work on Shakespeare. His referee denounced his politics when he applied for posts at Oxford and Cambridge universities, but – such was Britain in 1948 – did not mind the charming subversive contaminating the history department at Edinburgh University. There he remained until retirement from a chair in 1977, to all appearances at ease with himself, though not, except for some science fiction, with the post-1945 cultural world. He returned from long bicycle rides across the Pentlands to a flat at the top of an austere staircase in the New Town, to write – not least the diary which he had kept since 1935 – and amaze students and admiring friends by his surprise that they did not know as much as he.
He settled down in the 1950s to publish on everything: from Wordsworth to Faiz, evangelicalism to mercenaries and absolute monarchy, Indo-Central Asian problems, Paraguay and the “war of the Pacific” of Chile, Peru and Bolivia, not forgetting a full-scale study of the Spanish revolution of 1854. In the 1960s he discovered his unique gift of asking historical questions, and suggesting answers, by bringing and fitting together an unparalleled range of erudition, constantly extended by one of the great readers of our time. He became the master of the perfectly chosen quotation inserted into a demure but uncompromising survey of a global scene. Nobody else could have produced the remarkable works on the era of western empires he wrote after the middle 1960s, and by which he will be chiefly remembered, notably The Lords of Human Kind: Black Man, Yellow Man and White Man in an Age of Empire (1969).
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By V. G. Kiernan

When Marx died in 1883 and Engels, less than twenty years before the Great War, in 1895, they left the outlines of a “Marxist” philosophy to be carried forward by disciples of their own like Kautsky, and by new men in new lands like Plekhanov and then Lenin in Russia, or Labriola in Italy. The Marxism held its ground against “revisionist” criticism in the international socialist movement before 1914, but more securely in appearance than in reality because most of its upholders were too much concerned to defend it as an established creed, too little to develop it and keep abreast of changing times.
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By Arzu Celalifer Ekinci

Recent Israeli attacks on Gaza caused more than a thousand civilian casualties. At least 1,300 Palestinians have been killed and 5000 injured since the beginning of the attacks. Israel’s disproportionate use of force and its attacks on civilians had been condemned and led to many protests all around the world. It was probably the first time that the world public opinion reacted in such a large scale at the same time.
There are various opinions about why Israel chose such a roadmap. While a noteworthy majority explains this by the oncoming elections in Israel, others claim that the main reason behind those attacks was inciting Iran and endangering the possible dialogue process between the U.S and Iran by drawing Iran in that conflict. Another group defends the idea that the key player behind this conflict was Iran and Iran would be the only beneficiary of that conflict in any case. Thus the Iranian stance toward the conflict has become important.

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By Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Dec 9 (IPS) – In a ritual that includes sacrificing goats or fowl, a “babalawo” priest of the Yoruba religion in Venezuela can “mount a saint” (attract blessings from forces of nature) on an initiate willing to pay up to 10,000 dollars, and sometimes even more.

The ancestral faith of the West African Yoruba people – who inhabit present-day Nigeria, Benin, Ghana and Togo – “has been distorted, turned into a religion used to make a profit through scams,” Pablo Acosta, president of Venezuela’s Ile-Ife Foundation, told IPS.

Ile-Ife is the mythical original city of the Yoruba, who were brought to the Americas in great numbers during the slave trade. The slaves managed to keep their religious traditions alive, practicing their beliefs through secretly celebrated rituals and a form of religious syncretism that especially took root in Brazil and in Cuba and other Caribbean countries, forming faiths alternative to the dominant Catholic religion.

In Venezuela, a set of beliefs in the powers of the saints and their priests known as “Santería” developed from Yoruba rituals, and today it is experiencing a boom that has not been quantified but which is visible everywhere. Boxes with dead, sacrificed animals can be seen strewn on beaches, along the side of roads, or on river banks.

Santería followers are easily identified through the typical ribbons, bracelets, necklaces and white clothing they wear. According to the Catholic priest Otty Aristizábal, Venezuela currently has thousands of babalaos or babalawos, a Yoruba term that literally means ‘father or master of the mysteries’ and is the title that denotes a priest of Ifa, or system of divination. Apprentices are recruited among high school students.

The Santería faith has reached such a level of sophistication that babalawos are being brought over from Cuba, and even Nigeria, to “mount saints” for believers among the wealthier population, and important figures in Venezuela’s political circles have been swept away by this “new wave.”

It has also opened the door to “palería” rituals – known in Cuba as Palo Monte or Palo Mayombe -, which are considered to be black magic or witchery practices and use human bones stolen from desecrated graves.

“Practices that combine ancestral African beliefs with Venezuela’s dominant religion have spread widely, drawing large numbers of believers. Although there are no reliable studies or statistics available, perhaps up to 30 percent of the population has turned to these faiths,” Vice President of the Ile-Ife Foundation Marjorie Montiel told IPS.

The Archbishop of Caracas Jorge Urosa told IPS that “the Catholic Church is naturally concerned by such a surge in followers of these practices, which we reject because they deviate from our creed and our guiding principles.”

“But they also deviate from the traditional values that Venezuelan society has been built on, and they’re often used as a means to swindle people, obtaining favours and benefits for individuals who are nothing but con artists,” Urosa said.

Shops that sell herbs, icons and articles used in the celebration of Santería and similar rituals are mushrooming throughout Caracas and other cities of Venezuela. The local newspaper El Universal reports that there are 150 of these stores in the capital alone.

Aura Meza, the manager at one of these shops in the downtown district of Quinta Crespo, told IPS that they haven’t seen changes in what people are buying, as “they’re still taking the same herbs and products to use in their baths and mix with their rubbish, following recipes to bring health, love or fortune, or for initiation with babalawos; but we have seen a growth in sales.”

For her part, Montiel said that “if people feel the need to resort to these African-based beliefs, they have the right to do it.” She added that there “must be a reason why they don’t find what they need in faiths such as that of the Catholic Church.”

Superstitions are very much present in cultures across Latin America, and they have always made it into the high circles of social and political power. The late Luis Herrera Campins, who governed Venezuela from 1979 through 1984, was a devout Catholic but always carried with him a “zamuro pip” – the polished seed of a local tree – as a good luck charm.

Today, President Hugo Chávez wears a scapular that belonged to his great-grandfather Pedro Pérez, nicknamed “Maisanta,” who fought in the wars between conservatives and liberals in the early 20th century. Chávez’s critics have spread alleged reports and testimonies depicting the leader as a Santería follower.

“We have reports of people very high up in Venezuelan political, and also economic, circles, who have gone to babalawos and paid important sums to obtain the so-called protection of Ifá,” Acosta said.

Ifá is the orisa, or deity, of wisdom and knowledge, and it also refers to the system of geomantic divination of the Yoruba culture, which uses numbers and verses and is basically a corpus of values and instruments that relate human beings with elements of nature such as the sun, the moon, winds, tides or mountains, he explained.

The Ifa Divination system was added in 2005 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to its list of “Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity”.

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Social isolation affects how people behave as well as how their brains operate, a study at the University of Chicago shows.

The research, presented Sunday at a briefing, “Social Emotion and the Brain,” at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is the first to use fMRI scans to study the connections between perceived social isolation (or loneliness) and activity in the brain. Combining fMRI scans with data relevant to social behavior is part of an emerging field examining brain mechanisms—an approach to psychology being pioneered at the University of Chicago.

Researchers found that the ventral striatum—a region of the brain associated with rewards—is much more activated in non-lonely people than in the lonely when they view pictures of people in pleasant settings. In contrast, the temporoparietal junction—a region associated with taking the perspective of another person—is much less activated among lonely than in the non-lonely when viewing pictures of people in unpleasant settings.

“Given their feelings of social isolation, lonely individuals may be left to find relative comfort in nonsocial rewards,” said John Cacioppo, the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Professor in Psychology at the University. He spoke at the briefing along with Jean Decety, the Irwin B. Harris Professor in Psychology and Psychiatry at the University.

The ventral striatum, which is critical to learning, is a key portion of the brain and is activated through primary rewards such as food and secondary rewards such as money. Social rewards and feelings of love also may activate the region.

Cacioppo, one of the nation’s leading scholars on loneliness, has shown that loneliness undermines health and can be as detrimental as smoking. About one in five Americans experience loneliness, he said. Decety is one of the nation’s leading researchers to use fMRI scans to explore empathy.

They were among five co-authors of a paper, “In the Eye of the Beholder: Individual Differences in Perceived Social Isolation Predict Regional Brain Activation to Social Stimuli,” published in the current issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
In the study, 23 female undergraduates were tested to determine their level of loneliness. While in an fMRI scanner, the subjects were shown unpleasant pictures and human conflict as well as pleasant things such as money and happy people.

The subjects who rated as lonely were least likely to have strong activity in their ventral striata when shown pictures of people enjoying themselves.

Although loneliness may be influence brain activity, the research also suggests that activity in the ventral striatum may prompt feelings of loneliness, Decety said. “The study raises the intriguing possibility that loneliness may result from reduced reward-related activity in the ventral striatum in response to social rewards.”

In addition to differing responses in the ventral striatum, the subjects also recorded differing responses in parts of the brain that indicated loneliness played a role in how their brain operates.

Joining Decety and Cacioppo in writing the Journal of Cognitive Science paper were Catherine Norris, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Dartmouth College; George Monteleone, a graduate student at the University of Chicago; and Howard Nusbaum, Chair of Psychology at the University of Chicago.

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By Bob Weber

An academic maverick is challenging conventional wisdom on Canada’s prehistory by claiming an archeological site in southern Alberta is really a vast, open-air sun temple with a precise 5,000-year-old calendar predating England’s Stonehenge and Egypt’s pyramids.
Mainstream archeologists consider the rock-encircled cairn to be just another medicine wheel left behind by early aboriginals. But a new book by retired University of Alberta professor Gordon Freeman says it is in fact the centre of a 26-square-kilometre stone “lacework” that marks the changing seasons and the phases of the moon with greater accuracy than our current calendar.
“Genius existed on the prairies 5,000 years ago,” says Mr. Freeman, the widely published former head of the university’s physical and theoretical chemistry department.
Mr. Freeman’s fascination with prairie prehistory dates back to his Saskatchewan boyhood. He and his father would comb the short grasses of the plains in search of artifacts exposed by the scouring wind. That curiosity never left him and he returned to it as he prepared to retire from active teaching.
Looking for a hobby, he asked a friend with an interest in history to suggest a few intriguing sites to visit. On a warm late-August day in 1980, that list drew him to what he has come to call Canada’s Stonehenge, which is also the title of his book.
A central cairn atop one of a series of low hills overlooking the Bow River, about 70 kilometres east of Calgary, had been partially excavated in 1971 and dated at about 5,000 years old. But as he approached it, Freeman strongly felt there was much more there than previously thought.
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(Submitted by a reader)

The caning of 16 primary school teachers by the police officers has sparked outrage in the education sector, with the teachers’ union threatening to take legal action against the ministry.

The teachers were reported to have been caned by the police after an inquiry into poor exam results at three schools, which the officials claimed teachers were not teaching the official syllabus and were failing to show up at work.

The Bukoba District Commissioner Albert Mnali allegedly ordered a police officer who was accompanying him during his official tour in the District last Wednesday to dispense four strokes of the cane each to 16 teachers for failure to execute their duties.

But Deputy Education Minister Mwantumu Mahiza termed the incident as “unfortunate and utterly absurd,” suggesting that Mr Mnali needed to be psychologically assessed for his unusual behavior.

“I really can’t believe that a sane senior government official can order the police to cane civil servants. There are procedures to be followed before a civil servant is punished,” Ms Mahiza said.
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from Hari Sharma

Dear friends:

SOME GOOD NEWS FROM GUJARAT, AFTER ALL.

Slaps on Narendra Modi’s face.

But do slaps on Narendra Modi’s face mean anything to him? These have been delivered before, time and again. And he has continued to act as if nothing really landed on his face.

This time, the High Court in his own State has declared unequivocally that the fraud he had committed on the night of February 28, 2002 by publicly broadcasting that the fire on the Sabamati train coach was a conspiracy hatched by the Muslims of Godhra, was nothing but a wholesale lie. It is on the basis of this fraud that Narendra Modi had whipped up the anti-Muslim and pro-Hindutava frenzy which led to a three-day long orgy of organized pogrom. Thousands were slaughtered in broad day light. Women were gang raped in public plazas; wombs ripped and unborn fetuses tossed in open fires. Fleeing people in the country side cornered and lynched. Homes turned into ashes. Fascism had its ugly, ferocious dance. India’s fragile democracy was nailed on barren poles.

And for the last seven years Narendra Modi has continued to shine in his own glory – as if nothing really could touch him; as long as he had the Gujarati upper-caste Hindu masses hoodwinked to the notion of Hindu Rashtra. The Corporate India came to touch his feet; declared him as the most desirable future prime minister of India. International Capital eulogized him, as a model of third world development, and as the prime destination of capital flows.

Yet, all this could not hide for ever the edifice of lies and fraud. Even the Commission of Enquiry headed by Justice Nanavati, hand-picked by N. Modi himself, to look into the ghory details of what happened during those fateful days of 2002, had shamefully exonerated Narendra Modi.

And now the judicial verdict has come. No, it was not a conspiracy. No, it was not an Act of Terror. No, the suspects could not be kept behind bars under the notorious POTA act, without even a chance of bail. And, Yes, the government of Narendra Modi deliberately misused the legal system.

We happily append below a series of newspaper articles on the High Court judgement of February 12. And beyond that, if you continue to scroll down, we append some write-ups on the Nanavati Commission findings which we had already shared with you on November 9, last year: an article by the veteran journalist Kuldip Nayar, and a link to a detailed Critique of the Nanavati Commission prepared by an Ahmedabad-based organization, Jan Sangarsh Manch (Front for People’s Struggles), headed by the Advocate Dr. Mukul Sinha, who had been making representations before the Commission.

The observations contained in that detailed Critique stand vindicated by the latest High Court judgement.

Most importantly, the High Court ruling has given a sunshine hope to the 81 people who had been incarcerated all these years under the draconion POTA Act, as conspirators for the torrorist act. Maybe, they now have a chance to get out, atleast on some kind of a bail.

No memory of my 2005 visit to Modi’s Gujarat is more poignant than the ones associated with my visit to the Muslim neighborhood of Godhra, where hundreds of people had assembled in some kind of a false hope (because a new outsider had come to visit them), and where I heard loud wails and complaints from old fathers, mothers, young wives, small children, brothers and sisters, neighbors – because someone among them was kept in the custody under POTA. Never in my life had I felt more helpless, and my words sounding more hollow, than what I experienced that evening and what I managed to utter there. Painfully I remember all that.

Maybe, there is an end now to that embarrassment, to that sadness. An end to the seemingly endless suffering.

But one doesn’t know. What if Narendra Modi, shamelessly, made an appeal against the High Court ruling!

Let’s see.

hari sharma
for SANSAD

Syed Khalique Ahmed Posted: Feb 13, 2009 at 1541 hrs (Indian Express)
Ahmedabad: THE Gujarat High Court’s decision of upholding the recommendation of the Central POTA Review Committee that there was no evidence to prove ‘conspiracy’ behind the Sabarmati Express carnage has come as a setback for the Special Investigation Team (SIT), appointed by the state government. It was this team which had established the conspiracy theory behind the incident.
Comprising Rakesh Asthana, J K Bhatt and Noel Parmar — officers of the Gujarat Police — the team had concluded that a conspiracy was hatched at the Aman guesthouse in Godhra on the night of February 26, 2002. A huge quantity of petrol was procured to torch the S-6 coach carrying pilgrims from Ayodhya, the report had said.
It was on the basis of the SIT’s findings that provisions of POTA were applied to the accused imprisoned in the Sabarmati jail.
While Asthana and Bhatt were not available for comment, Parmar, who was present in the court when the order was pronounced, refused to say anything on the issue. Reacting to the judgement, however, Sayeed Umarji, the son of 75-year-old Maulana Hussain Umarji imprisoned for his alleged involvement in the carnage, said the “ruling has proved that investigating agencies have misused law”. He demanded action against the SIT officials.
Senior advocate and representative of the Jan Sangharsh Manch, Mukul Sinha, who had earlier defended the Godhra accused, said the HC order blasted the findings of the Nanavati commission report which had relied on the SIT findings.
He said the HC ruling also upheld the recommendations of the UC Banerjee commission, which had rejected the conspiracy theory. Now, the trial of the accused, which had been stayed since November 2003, could begin, he added. While Sayeed Umarji said he would move the Supreme Court, praying that no interim relief should be given to the petitioner without hearing the accused, Vijay Patel, the advocate of Sardarji Maganji Vaghela who had challenged the recommendations of the review committee, said he would challenge the order in the apex court after consulting the petitioner.

THE DERAILED REPORT OF SABARMATI EXPRESS

Here is the link for the Report by Jan Sangarsh Morcha, led by Dr. Mukul Sinha.
http://nsm.org.in/2008/09/29/jan-sangharsh-manch-comments-on-nanavati-commission-report/

Following is an article by Mr. Kuldip Nayar, a prominent journalist, and also a former Member of Paliament. (Hari Sharma)

Modi let off the hook?
By Kuldip Nayar
http://www.kashmirtimes.com/opinion.htm

I suspected some design when the Justice Nanavati Commission submitted only a part of the inquiry report on what was known as the Godhara incident. I could see the contents written on the face of a gleeful Gujarat Chief Minister Narender Modi in a photograph at the time of the report’s presentation. It was clear that Modi had been exonerated.

Was it necessary for Justice Nanavati to suggest this or even release a part of the report in he did not want to favour Modi and the BJP? Nanavati has clarified after heavy criticism that his first report was confined only to the burning of Sabarmati Express coach. He has said that he did not give a clean chit to Modi or his government and that he was still working on the rioting after the Godhara incident. Why should the Nanavati Commission which has had as many as 16 extensions submit an incomplete report?

There was no pressure on the commission. Then why hurry with it?

It looks as if Nanavati is a party to the travesty of justice: separating the report into two parts while it should have been one. True, the BJP and Modi wanted it that way. But I cannot comprehend why Nanavati has done so. He knows that nobody can condone the killing of some 2,000 Muslims, not even his Commission. The ethnic cleansing in Gujarat has been recorded visually and there are many witnesses and documents to corroborate it. Is his compulsion on the second part the reason for splitting the report?

Maybe, Nanavati has a point. But he has already held local Muslims guilty of “conspiracy” for burning the coach. The manner in which he has exonerated Modi and his officials suggests that Nanavati was discussing the Gujarat carnage, not the burning of the coach. Since the full report will be ready only by the end of the year, this gives an opportunity to Modi and the BJP to go to town on what Nanavati has already said and exploit the findings in November assembly elections in five states.

It was clear that Nanavati was more or less repeating the version which Modi and the BJP had projected to provide an alibi for the massacre of the Muslims soon after 59 kar sevaks were burnt alive in the compartment that was set to fire. The report released by Nanavati is no different. He too says the fire was “a pre-planned conspiracy” by local Muslims. Justice Nanavati has also ruled out the involvement of any religious or political organization, exonerating the BJP the Bajrang Dal and the likes.

The version which Nanavati has relied upon is in stark contrast to what another Supreme Court judge, Justice U.C. Bannerjee, had reported. According to him-he was appointed by the Railways-the fire was not ignited from outside the coach but from within it, either by accident or design. Bannerjee has repeated his findings even after Nanavati’s report.

The Special Investigation Team (SIT), appointed by the Supreme Court to reinvestigate the riots, is still at work. Nanavati should have waited till it had given its report. By not doing so. Justice Nanavati, himself from the Supreme Court, has only shown scant respect to the Supreme Court. Even the petition challenging the Bannerjee Committee’s findings is still pending before the state High Court. Should Nanavati have still gone ahead?

The conflicting reports, one by Justice Bannerjee and the other by Justice Nanavati, bring no credit to the judiciary. Had such a thing happened at the level of the two judges in a subordinate court, the High Court would have taken them to task. I cannot say anything more but do feel intrigued by the spectacle when the judges involved are from the Supreme Court.

It is obvious that Nanavati wanted to favour Gujarat, the state which appointed him to head the inquiry commission. He knows he cannot but criticise the state in the post-Godhara report. Did he intentionally separate the two incidents, which are really one? Since the first report is favourable to the state, he let it go as if it was independent of the other. Legally, there is nothing wrong in releasing the report in parts. But ethically, it is not correct because people are now expected to make up their mind on the basis of partial report.

I have a nagging feeling that the post-Godhara report, which is bound to hold Modi and the Gujarat administration guilty, and corroborate the thesis that there was a prior plan to cleanse the state ethnically will be released after the general elections which are due early next year. Wittingly or unwittingly, Nanavati has helped Modi and his party.

The Jan Sangarsh Manch (JSM), a Gujarat NGO, is the first to react to the submission of incomplete report. It has criticised the Nanavati Commission for being hasty in giving are incomplete report to the state government. The JSM’s convenor, S.H. Iyer, has questioned the urgency of the partial report. He asks: “Don’t the thousands of victims of the post-Godhara riots have any right to know why their lives and property were destroyed? And which minister, politician, police officer or organisation was responsible for the massacres.”

I recall talking to Justice Nanavati before he submitted his report on the 1984 riots in which 3,000 Sikhs were killed at Delhi alone. He told me what happened in Delhi could happen anywhere in India and at any time because the police knew no limits and politicians no norms of behaviour. He even commented on the probe that he was conducting on the Gujarat killings. He said “I have seen the same pattern in Gujarat.” He also said he saw many similarities between the happenings in Delhi and Gujarat and he had no good word either for the politicians or the authorities. Therefore, I find it difficult to understand when he gives a clean chit to Modi, his council of ministers and police officials.

Former Chief Justice J.C. Verma, then chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, has released a letter which shows that he had cautioned Nanavati. In his statement Justice Varma has said that Nanavati’s clean chit is far from the truth.

In the report on the 1984 riots, Nanavati had expressed his helplessness. After 20 years, he said, there was no concrete evidence to pursue, nothing to bring the killers to book. I hope he does not take the same line on the post-Godhara killings and expresses his helplessness once again. The 1984 killings were two decades old when Justice Nanavati was asked to probe. The killings in Gujarat are only six years old. The nation expects him to do a better job.

By PATRICK COCKBURN

In what could turn out to be the greatest fraud in US history, American authorities have started to investigate the alleged role of senior military officers in the misuse of $125bn (£88bn) in a US -directed effort to reconstruct Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The exact sum missing may never be clear, but a report by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests it may exceed $50bn, making it an even bigger theft than Bernard Madoff’s notorious Ponzi scheme.
“I believe the real looting of Iraq after the invasion was by US officials and contractors, and not by people from the slums of Baghdad,” said one US businessman active in Iraq since 2003.
In one case, auditors working for SIGIR discovered that $57.8m was sent in “pallet upon pallet of hundred-dollar bills” to the US comptroller for south-central Iraq, Robert J Stein Jr, who had himself photographed standing with the mound of money. He is among the few US officials who were in Iraq to be convicted of fraud and money-laundering.
Despite the vast sums expended on rebuilding by the US since 2003, there have been no cranes visible on the Baghdad skyline except those at work building a new US embassy and others rusting beside a half-built giant mosque that Saddam was constructing when he was overthrown. One of the few visible signs of government work on Baghdad’s infrastructure is a tireless attention to planting palm trees and flowers in the centre strip between main roads. Those are then dug up and replanted a few months later.
Iraqi leaders are convinced that the theft or waste of huge sums of US and Iraqi government money could have happened only if senior US officials were themselves involved in the corruption. In 2004-05, the entire Iraq military procurement budget of $1.3bn was siphoned off from the Iraqi Defense Ministry in return for 28-year-old Soviet helicopters too obsolete to fly and armored cars easily penetrated by rifle bullets. Iraqi officials were blamed for the theft, but US military officials were largely in control of the Defense Ministry at the time and must have been either highly negligent or participants in the fraud.
American federal investigators are now starting an inquiry into the actions of senior US officers involved in the program to rebuild Iraq, according to The New York Times, which cites interviews with senior government officials and court documents. Court records reveal that, in January, investigators subpoenaed the bank records of Colonel Anthony B Bell, now retired from the US Army, but who was previously responsible for contracting for the reconstruction effort in 2003 and 2004. Two federal officials are cited by the paper as saying that investigators are also looking at the activities of Lieutenant-Colonel Ronald W Hirtle of the US Air Force, who was senior contracting officer in Baghdad in 2004. It is not clear what specific evidence exists against the two men, who have both said they have nothing to hide.
The end of the Bush administration which launched the war may give fresh impetus to investigations into frauds in which tens of billions of dollars were spent on reconstruction with little being built that could be used. In the early days of the occupation, well-connected Republicans were awarded jobs in Iraq, regardless of experience. A 24-year-old from a Republican family was put in charge of the Baghdad stock exchange which had to close down because he allegedly forgot to renew the lease on its building.
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