Show Restraint
February 21 “The secretary-general reiterates his call for the non-use of force and respect for basic freedoms,” a UN spokesman said in a statement, adding that Mr Ban had been in contact with regional leaders to discuss the situation. “Stressing that utmost restraint must be exercised by all concerned, he wishes to reaffirm his conviction that this is the time for broad-based dialogue and for genuine social and political reform,” it said.
February 20 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke by phone today to Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal. In discussing regional developments with her Saudi counterpart, the Secretary underscored the necessity of restraint by the security forces in Bahrain. She also noted that the United States has welcomed steps by Bahraini Crown Prince Selman bin Hamad al-Khalifa to initiate a meaningful dialogue with the full spectrum of Bahraini society.
February 20 “The European Union is extremely concerned about the events unfolding in Libya and the reported deaths of a very high number of demonstrators,” Ashton said in a statement. ”The EU urges the authorities to exercise restraint and calm and to immediately refrain from further use of violence against peaceful demonstrators,”
February 19th The President reiterated his condemnation of the violence used against peaceful protesters, and strongly urged the government of Bahrain to show restraint, and to hold those responsible for the violence accountable.
February 19th President Barack Obama spoke with the king on Friday evening, condemning the violence and urging the government to show restraint. Obama said the stability of Bahrain, home to the U.S. Middle East fleet, depended upon respect for the rights of its people, according to the White House.
February 18th “The United States urges the governments of Bahrain, Libya and Yemen to show restraint in responding to peaceful protests and to respect the rights of their people,” Obama said.
February 17th U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Washington supported “real, meaningful” change in Bahrain, which she called “a friend and ally,” and called on the government to show restraint.
February 17th “As a long-time ally and home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, Bahrain is an important partner and the department is closely watching developments there,” Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan said. “We also call on all parties to exercise restraint and refrain from violence.”
February 17th British Foreign Secretary William Hague voiced deep concern and urged the Bahraini police to use restraint. “I am deeply concerned by events in Bahrain last night and by level of violence at Pearl Roundabout and urge all sides to avoid violence and for the police to exercise restraint,” he said in a statement released by the British embassy in Manama.
February 15th The United States is very concerned by recent violence surrounding protests in Bahrain,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said in a statement. “We also call on all parties to exercise restraint and refrain from violence.”
February 10th Going forward, it will be essential that the universal rights of the Egyptian people be respected. There must be restraint by all parties. Violence must be forsaken.
February 8th Even as Washington voiced its criticism, Defense Secretary Robert Gates praised Egypt’s military for its restraint. The armed forces — long the backbone of Egypt’s government — have behaved in “an exemplary fashion” by standing largely on the sidelines during the uprising, he said.
February 4th All parties should show restraint and avoid further violence and begin an orderly transition to a broad-based government. The European Council underlined that this transition process must start now,” the EU’s 27 leaders said in a statement issued on Friday during a summit in Brussels.
February 3rd Biden called for “restraint by all sides,” according to a White House statement, and urged that inclusive negotiations begin in order for Egypt to move to a democratic government.
February 3rd I’m concerned about the growing violence. I have urged all sides to exercise restraint. Violent attacks against peaceful protesters are completely unacceptable,” Ban [Ki-moon] said. ”We should not underestimate the danger of instability across the Middle East,” he said
February 2nd I am deeply concerned by the continuing violence in Egypt. I once again urge restraint to all the sides,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said after meeting British Prime Minister David Cameron in London.
February 1st Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, held a telephone conversation with Enan on Sunday in which he urged restraint from Egypt’s military, but at the same time praised the “professionalism” of Egypt’s armed forces, a Pentagon spokesman, Capt. John Kirby, said at that time.
February 1st “I urge both the army and the police to act with the utmost care and restraint,” she said, stressing protesters should also avoid committing acts of violence. Authorities should listen to “the demands of the Egyptian people for fundamental reforms to improve human rights and democracy,” said Pillay, who made similar appeals in the days before the fall of Tunisian leader Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.
January 30th Egypt’s military appears to be showing restraint with peaceful anti-government protesters so far and there is no talk at this time about halting U.S. aid to Egypt, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Sunday.
January 29th CATHERINE ASHTON, EU FOREIGN AFFAIRS CHIEF ”I reiterate my call on all parties to exercise restraint and calm and I urge the authorities to immediately and unconditionally release all peaceful demonstrators from detention.”
January 29th Afterward, the White House said its focus remained on “calling for restraint, supporting universal rights and supporting concrete steps that advance political reform.”
January 28th HILLARY CLINTON, U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE ”As a partner of Egypt we are urging that there be a restraint on the part of the security forces, there not be a rush to impose very strict measures that would be violent and that there be a dialogue between the government and the people of Egypt.”
January 28th Before his departure, Alexander Vershbow, a U.S. assistant secretary of defense, urged restraint during talks with Enan on Wednesday and Thursday, Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan said, without elaborating.
January 28th Obama urged the government and protesters to show restraint, saying violence was not the answer. “It is very important that people have mechanisms in order to express legitimate grievances,” he said, citing freedom of expression and access to social networking websites.
January 25th The United States supports the fundamental right of expression and assembly for all people. All parties should exercise restraint and we call on the Egyptian authorities to handle these protests peacefully,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said in a statement.
January 25th U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Tuesday urged all sides in Egypt to exercise restraint following street protests and said she believed the Egyptian government was stable and looking for ways to respond to its people’s aspirations.
January 13th The French prime minister, François Fillon, who is in London on an official visit, criticised the Tunisian government’s handling of the crisis.”We insist that all parties show restraint and choose the path of dialogue … we cannot continue with this disproportionate use of violence,” he said.
January 10th New York, the United Nations said Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was concerned about the escalation of violence and called for restraint.
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February 18, 2011 at 10:40 pm
Lol
I note you’ve showed meta-restraint and refrained from critiquing calls to show restraint outright!
You poor thing, finding the quotes for this article must have been awful. As Don Watson puts it, governmental language is like “A toothless vampire, sucking at your neck”.
Timothy Scriven
February 18, 2011 at 11:06 pm
point made, can i translate thus: cross border interaction through non-mainstream media, having had an effect on the propagation of dissent, has stopped short of international organizing, logistics and sheer participation.
it is just one step of, people bordering planes to neighboring destinations, cross-border ingression by car and bus. sailing in support by ship. …on the grass root level. the world is full of intelligent, smart professional doctors for one, who can get organized on a whim, let it be facebook, twitter, independent blogs and do not depend on us state department, gb foreign office, un or any state national and international institution or mainstream media filters to observe, analyse, (as is done today) then act in a coordinated manner (as was neglected) to complete the phenomenon of cross border ´democracy´ (so abused and prostituted a word).
thus engendering direct interference and make the national and international superstructure of this one sided globalized (corporations, banks, public institutions) world to oblige and take into account the new realities of century 21. intelligent, smart, ethical individuals could get organized and act() cross traditional boundaries: nation, state, religion, race, physical boundaries and open up the world to long term, principled and planetary thinking.
let us go for the occasion present. a few thousand, yes a few hundred medics, off duty police, clear thinking energetic individuals from all walks of life, from all over the world, would make a difference in the ´area´ (lybia, bahrein, algeria, morocco, jemen) and could probe the feasibility of the theory of an unconfined world, anyhow sustainability has few alternatives other. a pressing occasion to rise to.
m.
February 18, 2011 at 11:22 pm
update: let there be interaction, not restraint (from constructive interference, as opposed to restraint from violence) based on the outdated protocol of nation-states.
m.
February 18, 2011 at 11:40 pm
I love the subtle linguistic implication that violence and human rights abuse is the sort of global default setting, and it’s a laudable positive to put effort in to move away from that.
If anything, this sort of unholy alliance of diplomatic language along with PR speak is really a net transfer from people craving strong leadership to feeding the insecurities of other nations.
Fortunately, democratic movements and wikileaks have shown that ordinary people are more than able to provide this for themselves.
James Smart
February 19, 2011 at 1:40 am
well said, again, according to me, a systemic thinking error slipped in: as applied in your note,´nations´ apparently in this particular situation.
in a world of nations, the term nation imprisons the innate boundary that prohibits and does not facilitate planetary, long-term, principled thinking. the hope is that trans-boundaries (national entities for one), to the occasion, timely organized, smart, capable and ethical individuals get physically (ahead from digitally which they have) involved and do not stop at analyzing and concluding from afar or if you will, from the two-dimensional world of a computer screen.
m.
February 19, 2011 at 3:30 am
well said, wikileaks and independent blogs offer concise data and analysis.
could the next step be providing the organizational whiteboard to activism, participation on short notice of individuals world wide unfiltered by official spokesmen and their ´jargon´. just that might be the 21 century essential clue to human sustainability and maybe mere survival. smarter people, ethically engaged, direct interference. as bad as bahrein goes, the west has neither a globally feasible world strategy either. the religion of growth(consumption more then production, finance and shifting the burden to the unprivileged) that is preached by the west depletes and dwindles any planetary human progress, it also falsely motivates people abroad to shed national realities in exchange for the next hoax.
m.
m.
February 19, 2011 at 3:56 am
Love this post.
There should be more like it pointing out the incredible, incredible monotony of public pronouncement language. It’s so damn insidious, predictable, manipulative, weasely, and yet fascinating. I, for one, “condemn it in the strongest possible terms”.
[Of course the significance of this post goes beyond just language and its use, since the policies and hypocrisy represented thereby are the more important issue here, but still...]
-c
CC
February 19, 2011 at 1:41 am
I’m at a loss for—
SEK
February 19, 2011 at 2:08 am
My praise is more apparent when WordPress doesn’t eat my fake HTML golf-claps…
SEK
February 19, 2011 at 2:09 am
Brilliant. And bitter.
ish
February 19, 2011 at 4:14 am
Ah yes, restraint.
it’s OK to bludgeon demonstrators as long as you show restraint.
It’s OK to shoot protesters in the head as long as you show restraint.
It’s OK to torture prisoners as long as you show restraint.
Carry-on with what you are doing; just show restraint.
Nice word, restraint.
Eric Yendall
February 19, 2011 at 7:20 am
I’m sorry you had to do this (but glad you did).
The calls for “restraint” are part and parcel of the language which is representative of the point of view we see so much in mainstream journalism, i.e., steering through the “middle ground”, as if somehow the playing field between protesters on the one hand, and the purveyors of state violence on the other were on some sort of level playing field. The calls for non-violence on the part of citizens manifesting their reasonable discontent is in this sense meaningless, as the security forces of the state, and the state itself, already frame the reality in terms of violence for most citizens, it is just a more structural violence.
So, the calls for “restraint” can be translated as :
“Get back to business as usual, we want peace and quiet.” As are the calls for “dialog”, and “stability”, which tend to join it in the shallow boilerplate lexicon of “statecraft” and “diplomacy”.
That being said, it’s difficult to proceed more stupidly than the Bahrain authorities have done so far. We’ll see what the Saudis think of this, it’s not a joke.
Rob
February 19, 2011 at 7:30 am
This does show how much the rhetoric of our foreign policy centers around markers of pace and degree rather than, say, markers of kind or causation: action X is only acceptable if under conditions Y and Z. The problem with “restraint” is that it gestures toward this kind of formula without ever getting there. It’s an aesthetic category that very nearly resembles an ethical boundary, one that seems to demand that the agents of foreign states do nothing that disrupts the ruse of spectatorial distance, nothing that makes a scenario into an actual event, something that demands too much attention per second, against the dictates of gradualism. Any sense of whether this word crops up in domestic issues when full humanity is assumed?
Dan C.
February 19, 2011 at 2:58 pm
along these lines, what about the term “regret”? as in,
“We express our regret over those who died or were injured in the latest incidents and extend our sincere condolences to their families and to the people of Bahrain,” according to a statement on the ministry’s website.
http://m.cnn.com/snarticle?articleId=urn:newsml:CNN.com:20110217:bahrain.protests:1&category=cnnd_latest
“regret” is what the state’s repressive apparatus feels (i.e. says it feels) after it has exceeded the arbitrary limits imposed by “restraint.”
reclaimuc
February 19, 2011 at 6:38 pm
Intelligent Bible thinking is not oxymoronic. Do a search: The First Scandal.
Robert Hagedorn
February 20, 2011 at 3:52 pm
[...] restraint” is an interesting development in the rhetoric, by the way, if you’re as morbidly fascinated as I am by the way words go into Clinton or Obama’s mouth to die. When live fire was used against [...]
Yemen « zunguzungu
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