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By Dr Binoy Kampmark

The fall and ignominious retreat of Sri Lanka’s Gotabaya Rajapaksa has enlivened one distinct possibility. Having formally resigned as Sri Lankan President, a point made via email from Singapore, those wishing to see him account for war crimes may get their wish.

There have been various efforts in train regarding a man who ruthlessly concluded his country’s civil war in an orgy of mass killing. The war itself, waged between the forces of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism and the minority Tamils seeking independence, was the rotten fruit of discrimination, exclusion and ethnocratic politics heralded by the passage of the Sinhala Only Act in 1956. That legislative instrument, implemented by Prime Minister S.W.R.D Bandaranaike, made Sinhalese the country’s official language while banishing Tamils from important positions of employment.

Gotabaya’s entry into Sri Lankan politics was a fraternal affair. His brother Mahinda, on becoming president in 2005, picked him as defence secretary. Prior to that, “Gota” worked as a computer systems administrator at Loyola School in Los Angeles, during which time he became a US citizen.

The appointment made him overseer of the war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). “My job,” Gota stated in an interview posted on the Sri Lankan Defence Minister website, “was to understand the priorities, rationally organise those priorities in terms of what was really required for victory and flush out needs and requirements that had zero relevance to our objectives.”

In seeing the 26 year conflict to its conclusion in 2009, an estimate by the United Nations put the death toll of Tamil civilians at 40,000. (The number may well be as high as 70,000). The formal line taken by government forces was that the Tamils only had themselves to blame, being used as human shields by the guerrilla forces.

Such killings took place even as US President Barack Obama urged a cessation in “the indiscriminate shelling that has taken hundreds of innocent lives, including several hospitals.” Hoping for some balance, Obama also urged “the Tamil Tigers to lay down their arms and let civilians go. Their forced recruitment of civilians and their use of civilians as human shields is deplorable.”

The unabashed statement of command responsibility by the former defence secretary is also supported by the view of US Ambassador Patricia Butenis, whose frank assessment is available via a WikiLeaks cable. According to Butenis, “responsibility for many of the alleged crimes rests with the country’s senior civilian and military leadership, including President [Mahinda] Rajapaksa and his brothers.”

There is also abundant prima facie evidence that Gotabaya is responsible for the execution of a number of political leaders and their families upon surrender, was responsible for bombing civilian infrastructure such as hospitals, and insisted that the would target and kill innocent civilians, if necessary, to defeat the LTTE.

His return to public life as president took place on a populist platform denigrating his opponents for not giving “priority to national security. They were talking about ethnic reconciliation, then they were talking about human rights issues, they were talking about individual freedoms.” These remarks to Reuters assumed force in the wake of the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings by Islamist militants that caused over 250 deaths.

Over the years, Gotabaya’s resume has been weighed down with blood. His actions did not begin and end as defence minister. A May report by the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP) and Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka (JDS) focused on the ex-President’s role in a number of atrocities committed in 1989. The account focuses on the role Gotabaya played as District Military Coordinating Officer of Matale District, an area that saw brutal engagements between government forces and those of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP).

Between May 1989 and January 1990, Gotabaya oversaw a rule of forced disappearances (the report accounts for 1,042 victims), torture, and killing. A number of Sri Lankan government commissions took note of over 700 forced disappearances.

His role in the disappearances was also noted by the lengthily titled Presidential Commission into Involuntary Removals or Disappearances of Persons (Central Zone) List of Persons Whose Names Transpired as Responsible for Disappearances – Central Province – Matale District. (In a list of 24 alleged perpetrators, Gotabaya pops up at 16.) The tenure was also characterised by an absence of interest in preventing the commission of such crimes or investigating them, “despite complaints being made to him directly by family members of the victims”.

Civil suits have become another avenue of redress in the absence of criminal proceedings, though these have been complicated by questions of state immunity. Ahimsa Wickrematunge, daughter of assassinated Sri Lankan journalist Lasantha Wickrematunge, is one figure seeking damages from the man she accuses of authorising the murder of her father, former editor of the Sunday Leader newspaper, in 2009.

The civil action, filed in the US District Court for the Central District of California, alleged extra judicial killing, crimes against humanity and torture. The action was dismissed because the plaintiff “cited no authority suggesting that Defendant’s citizenship alone should override the fact that all of the allegations against him concern actions taken in an official capacity as the Sri Lankan Secretary of Defense.” In conclusion, the Court found for Gotabaya, as he was “entitled to common law foreign official immunity.” There was an absence of “subject matter jurisdiction”.

Former detective with Sri Lanka’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID) Nishantha Silva also argues that, as secretary of defence, Gotabaya had the means, opportunity and, in the words of his written statement for the People’s Tribunal on the Murder of Journalists, “a clear motive for killing Lasantha Wickrematunge”.

Another possibility, one as yet unexercised, is available under the War Crimes Act of 1996, which amended the Federal criminal code to enable the prosecution and punishment of US nationals for grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. Law academic Ryan Goodman, in a pertinent 2014 piece for Just Security, argues that there would be “a legal windfall for any US effort to investigate and prosecute [Gota] across international borders. His citizenship also expands US policy space – by reducing US vulnerability to accusations of meddling if we go after one of our own.”

As politicians the world over dread the spectacle of an enraged citizenry storming the residences of president and prime minister, taking dips in their pools, sitting at their desks and eating on the lawns as public commons, a number of dedicated human rights lawyers will be readying their briefs and submissions. Their mission: Get Gota.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.

17 July 2022

Source: countercurrents.org

By Chris Hedges

The United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, responsible for military fiascos, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and innumerable war crimes in the Middle East, are now plotting to attack Iran.

The United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia are plotting a war with Iran. The 2015 Iranian nuclear arms accord, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which Donald Trump sabotaged, does not look like it will be revived. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) is reviewing options to attack if Teheran looks poised to obtain a nuclear weapon and Israel, which opposes U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations, carries out military strikes.

During his visit to Israel, Biden assured Prime Minister Yair Lapid that the U.S. is “prepared to use all elements of its national power,” including military force, to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon.

Saudi Arabia, Israel and the U.S. function as a troika in the Middle East. The Israeli government has built a close alliance with Saudi Arabia, which produced 15 of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks and has been a prolific sponsor of international terrorism, supporting Salafi jihadism, the basis of al-Qaeda, and such groups as the Afghanistan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Al-Nusra Front.

The three countries worked in tandem to back the 2013 military coup in Egypt, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who overthrew its first democratically elected government. He has imprisoned tens of thousands of government critics, including journalists and human rights defenders, on politically motivated charges. The Sisi regime collaborates with Israel by keeping its common border with Gaza closed to Palestinians, trapping them in the Gaza strip, one of the most densely populated and impoverished places on earth.

Israel, the only nuclear power in the Middle East, has conducted an ongoing campaign of covert attacks on Iranian nuclear sites and nuclear scientists. Four Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated, presumably by Israel, between 2010 and 2012. In July 2020, a fire, attributed to an Israeli bomb, damaged Iran’s Natanz nuclear site. In November 2020, Israel used remote control machine guns to assassinate Iran’s top nuclear scientist. In January 2020, the United States assassinated Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, along with nine other people including a key figure in the anti-ISIS coalition, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. It used an MQ-9 Reaper to fire missiles into his convoy, near Baghdad’s airport.

If similar attacks had been carried out by Iranian operatives inside Israel, it would have triggered a war. Only Iran’s decision not to retaliate, beyond lobbing about a dozen ballistic missiles at two military bases in Iraq, prevented a conflagration.

On July 7, Iran informed The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it is using IR-6 centrifuges with “modified subheaders.” The declared purpose of the enrichment process at its underground facility at Fordow is to create uranium isotope enriched up to 20 percent—far below the 90 percent enrichment levels necessary to create weapons-grade uranium. Under the JCPOA agreement, enrichment levels were capped at 3.67 percent.

Israel has allocated $1.5 billion for a potential strike against Iran and, during the first week of June, held large-scale military exercises, including one over the Mediterranean and in the Red Sea, in preparation to attack Iranian nuclear sites using dozens of fighter aircraft, including Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets.

The 2016 Memorandum of Understanding signed by President Barack Obama provides a 10-year, $38 billion military package for Israel.

Israel and its lobby in the U.S. are working to scuttle negotiations with Iran to monitor its nuclear program. The preparation for war mirrors the Israeli pressure on the U.S. to invade Iraq, one of the worst strategic decisions in U.S. history.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in testimony before the British Iraq war commission, offered this account of his discussions with George W. Bush in Crawford, Texas in April 2002:

As I recall that discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this.

Saudi Arabia, which seeks to dominate the Arab world, severed ties with Iran in 2016 after its embassy in Tehran was stormed by protesters following Riyadh’s execution of Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr. Saudi Arabia, with Chinese help, has built a plant to process uranium ore and acquired ballistic missiles. Saudi Arabia signed a series of letters in 2017 with the U.S. to purchase weapons totaling $110 billion immediately, and $ 350 billion over the next decade.

A war with Iran would be a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. It would spread swiftly throughout the region. The Shiites across the Middle East would see an attack on Iran as a religious war against Shiism. The two million Shiites in Saudi Arabia, concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern province; the Shiite majority in Iraq; and the Shiite communities in Bahrain, Pakistan and Turkey would join the fight against the U.S. and Israel.

Iran would use its Chinese-supplied anti-ship missiles, rocket and bomb-equipped speedboats and submarines, mines, drones and coastal artillery to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquified gas supply. Oil production facilities in the Persian Gulf would be sabotaged. Iranian oil, which makes up 13 percent of the world’s energy supply, would be taken off the market. Oil would jump to over $500 a barrel and perhaps, as the conflict drags on, to over $750 a barrel. Our petroleum-based economy, already reeling under rising prices because of the sanctions on Russia, would grind to a halt.

Israel would be hit by Iranian Shahab-3 ballistic missiles. Hezbollah’s store of Iranian-supplied rockets that allegedly can reach any part of Israel, including Israel’s nuclear plant at Dimona, would also be deployed. Strikes by Iran and its allies on Israel, as well as on American military installations in the region, would leave hundreds, maybe thousands, dead.

In 2002, the U.S. military conducted its “most elaborate war game” ever, costing over $ 250 million. Known as the Millennium Challenge, the exercise was between a Blue Force (the U.S.) and the Red Force (widely considered as a stand-in for Iran). It was meant to validate America’s “modern, joint-service war-fighting concepts.” It did the opposite. The Red Force, led by retired Marine lieutenant general Paul Van Riper, conducted a swarm of kamikaze suicide boat attacks and destroyed 16 U.S. warships in under 20 minutes.

When the war game was reset, it was rigged in favor of the Blue Force. The Blue Force was given access to experimental technology – including that which doesn’t exist such as airborne laser weapons. Meanwhile, the Red Force was told they weren’t allowed to shoot down the Blue Team’s aircraft, had to keep their offensive weapons in the open and could not use chemical weapons. Even then, the Blue Force could not achieve all of its objectives as Riper unleashed a guerrilla insurgency on the occupying forces.

Why shouldn’t Joe Biden be feted by the murderous regime of Saudi Arabia and the apartheid state of Israel? He and the U.S. have as much blood on their hands as they do. Yes, in 2018 the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, ordered the assassination and dismemberment of my friend and colleague Jamal Khashoggi. Yes, Israel assassinated Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. But Washington has more than matched the crimes carried out by Israel and the Saudis, including against journalists.

The imprisonment of Julian Assange – who released the collateral murder videoshowing U.S. helicopter pilots laughing as they shot to death two Reuters journalists and a group of civilians in Iraq in 2007 – is designed to destroy Assange psychologically and physically. The corpses of civilians, including children, piled up by Israel and Saudi Arabia, who do much of their killing in Gaza and Yemen with U.S. weapons, don’t come close to the hundreds of thousands of dead we have left behind in the two decades of warfare we have perpetrated in the Middle East.

In 1991, a U.S.-led coalition destroyed much of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure, including water treatment facilities resulting in sewage contaminating the country’s drinking water. Then followed years of U.S., U.K. and French airstrikes enforcing a “No Fly Zone” along with crushing sanctions they imposed via the U.N. From 1991 to 1998, these sanctions alone were estimated to have killed 100,000 to 227,000 Iraqi children under the age of five, although the exact figures have been the subject of much dispute. The U.S. “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign of Iraqi urban centers during its subsequent invasion of Iraq in 2003 dropped 3,000 bombs on civilian areas, killing over 7,000 noncombatants in the first two months of the war.

By one estimate, the U.S. has been responsible for directly or indirectly killing nearly 20 million people since the end of the Second World War.

Israel and Saudi Arabia are gangster states. But so is the United States.

“There are few of them,” Biden, reacting to Democratic lawmakers who have criticized Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, told Israel’s Channel 12 news. “I think they’re wrong. I think they’re making a mistake. Israel is a democracy. Israel is our ally. Israel is a friend and I make no apologies.”

The angst about Biden’s not holding the Saudis and the Israelis to account on this visit is risible, as if we have any credibility left that allows us to arbitrate between right and wrong. The idea that Biden and the U.S. are brokers for peace was eviscerated long ago. The U.S. offers shameless support for Israel’s right-wing government, including vetoing U.N. resolutions that censor Israel. It refuses to condition aid on a respect for human rights even as Israel launches repeated murderous assaults against the civilian population in Gaza, labels Palestinian NGOs as terror groups, expands illegal Jewish-only settlements, carries out aggressive housing evictions of Palestinian families and mistreats Palestinian and Arab-American citizens at points of entry and within the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

The idea that we represent and promote virtue illustrates the self-delusion that accompanies our moral and physical degeneration. The rest of the world, which recoils in repugnance at whom we have become, does not take us seriously. They fear our bombs. But fear is not respect. They no longer envy our hedonistic mass culture, tarnished by mass shootings, social inequality, the decay of our infrastructure, dysfunction and a Grand Guignol-style of politics that has turned civil and political discourse into a tawdry burlesque. America is a grim joke, one about to be made worse when the Christian fascists, bigots and conspiracy theorists take control of the Congress in the fall, and I expect, the presidency two years later.

The U.S., along with Israel, makes war on Muslims who, with an estimated 1.9 billion adherents, comprise nearly 25 percent of the world population. We have turned many in the Muslim world into our enemies. The Muslim world does not hate us for our values. It hates our hypocrisy. It hates our racism, our refusal to honor their political aspirations, our lethal attacks and military occupations and our crippling sanctions. Muslims express the rage felt by Guatemalans, Cubans, Congolese, Brazilians, Argentines, Indonesians, Panamanians, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Filipinos, North and South Koreans, Chileans, Nicaraguans and Salvadorans – those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.” They too were slaughtered by our high-tech military machine and subjugated, humiliated, forced to accept U.S. hegemony and killed in our clandestine torture centers or by CIA-backed assassins.

No one is held accountable. The CIA blocked all investigations into its torture program, including destroying videotape evidence of interrogations involving torture and classifying nearly all of the 6,900-page report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that examined the CIA’s post-9/11 program of detention, torture and other abuse of detainees.

Biden goes to Saudi Arabia and Israel as a supplicant. As a presidential candidate, he called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” and vowed to make it “pay the price” for Khashoggi’s murder. But with the rising price of oil, Biden is whitewashing the murder, along with the humanitarian disaster the Saudis have caused in Yemen, imploring the Saudis to increase output, a plea Prince Salman has rejected. Similarly, Biden is weak in Israel, powerless against the expansion of Jewish settlements and assaults on Palestinians, and unwilling to move the U.S. Embassy back to Tel Aviv from Jerusalem, a move by the Trump administration that violates international law. Biden’s staff was reduced to pleading with the Israelis not to embarrass him as they did during his 2010 visit as vice president. During his 2010 visit, Israel announced it was building 1,600 new Jewish-only houses in illegal settlements in occupied East Jerusalem. The Obama White House angrily condemned “the substance and timing of the announcement.”

How can the U.S. bar Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela from a summit of the Americas in Los Angeles and embrace the Saudi regime and the Israeli aparatheid state? How can it decry the war crimes of Russia and unleash industrial violence on the Mulism world? How can it plead for the 12 million Uyghurs, mostly Muslim, living in Xinjiang, and ignore the Palestinians? How can it justify another “preemptive war,” this time against Iran? The duplicity is not lost on most of the world. They know who we are. They know that in our eyes they are unworthy. Our inevitable demise on the world stage is cheered by the majority of the planet. The tragedy is that, as we go down, we are determined to take so many others down with us.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper.

18 July 2022

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Collective

The West does not have the stockpiles of weapons needed to sustain a prolonged military campaign in Ukraine or elsewhere, the CEO of one of the Pentagon’s main defense contractors has warned.

The military-industrial complex therefore needs a “clear demand signal” from Western governments on what exactly it should produce and whether it will be purchased, Kathy Warden told the Financial Times in an interview published on Sunday.

“The most important thing now is to get a clear demand signal on what the sustained commitment is and the level of drawdown from those stockpiles is going to be,” she explained.

Existing weapon stockpiles were not designed for a prolonged conflict, Warden said. However, the West is not yet running out of arms for Ukraine.

She said, “I would not necessarily say that I have heard we are running out, but if you do project forward that we are going to want to sustain these levels of commitments for another couple of years – that is certainly not what anyone had built stockpiles to accommodate.”

The Pentagon’s main contractors have been meeting several times a week to discuss efforts to supply Ukraine. The dialogue with the Pentagon was “good.” Warden said, and further discussions are ongoing about “getting clarity on their plans.”

“They have been doing their best to pull industry together and share those plans, both at a more general level and specific, so that we can get ahead of contract and make investment and advance,” she added.

While Northrop Grumman is ready to invest and even expand its factories “ahead of a contract” the industry still needs more clarity about Washington’s plans to support Ukraine, Warden warned. The military-industrial complex needs to “get an indication that if we build it, the demand will come.”

The U.S. is become Kiev’s top supplier in the ongoing conflict, allocating billions to prop up Ukraine in its fight against Russia.

Global supply chain issues have doubled or tripled the company’s turnaround time in some cases, Warden said.

Another defense company has already begun to procure the necessary components in anticipation of contracts for more weapons, but there is a risk that the produced weapons will not be ultimately used, the newspaper noted.

Germany Would Not Survive Winter Without Russian Gas

Germany’s natural gas reserves are not enough to see the country through next winter without purchasing additional Russian gas, the top official in charge of electricity and gas networks has told the media.

In an interview with Germany’s Bild am Sonntag, published on Sunday, Klaus Muller warned that while “gas reservoirs are nearly 65% full,” and “it is better than in the previous weeks” it is still not sufficient to “go through the winter without Russian gas.”

Muller, who is president of Germany’s Federal Network Agency, added that much now depends on whether maintenance work on the Nord Stream 1 pipeline concludes as expected on Thursday.

When asked how long it would take before energy prices for consumers in Germany are further raised, in case of a complete stoppage of Russian gas deliveries, Muller said no decision has yet been made.

The energy regulator president insisted that Germans “should not succumb to panic,” assuring that “private households have the least reason of all to worry,” and will be provided with gas far longer than industry.

Moreover, according to the official, “there is no scenario in which we remain completely without gas.”

Muller noted that even if Russia were to cut supplies entirely, other countries like Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium would still be selling the fossil fuels to Germany. In future, the country’s own liquefied natural gas terminal will also make a difference, the network agency’s president added.

Muller said if gas rationing occurs, the agency will weigh up the potential damage to the economy and supply chains from shutting off supplies to any particular business or industrial plant.

The official went on to claim that even if there is a shortage, it will likely affect only the parts of Germany which are at the end of the gas network.

Muller also dismissed suggestions that Berlin should ban any gas exports to neighboring European countries, stressing the importance of solidarity.

“Just like we are now benefiting from the liquefied natural gas ports in Belgium and the Netherlands,” Germany would lend its neighbors a helping hand should they face a severe gas shortage, the official pledged.

Muller predicted that Germany has two difficult winters ahead, with a risk of gas shortages, but by summer 2024 the country will be independent from Russian gas.

“What is also true, however, is that the prices will never be as low as they once were,” Muller acknowledged.

Since the start of Russia’s offensive against Ukraine, gas prices in Europe have soared, reaching an all-time-high of over $3,600 per 1,000 cubic meters in early March.

While Ukraine and some other Eastern-European nations, including Poland, have been calling on the EU to ban imports of Russian gas, Brussels has so far stopped short of implementing the measure due to a lack of consensus among member states.

German government officials and industry representatives have repeatedly warned that a stoppage of Russian gas supplies would deal a huge blow to the economy.

In late June, Economy Minister Robert Habeck activated the second phase of Germany’s three-stage emergency gas plan. It came as Russia slashed supplies via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, blaming the lack of a turbine, stuck in Canada due to sanctions.

On Monday, Russia began regular maintenance work on the pipeline, meaning no gas was flowing to Germany at all.

Also this week, Berlin asked Ottawa to exempt the piece of equipment cited by Moscow as the reason for falling supplies.

Canada has accepted Berlin’s request, and will ship the turbine to Germany, from where it will make its way to Russia, allowing Ottawa to avoid violating its own sanctions by using an indirect delivery route.

Meanwhile on Friday, Russia’s state energy giant Gazprom officially asked German industrial giant Siemens to provide the paperwork needed for the return of the equipment to Russia.

EU Lawmakers Seek More Energy Savings To Tackle Gas Crunch

Lawmakers on the European Parliament’s energy committee supported more ambitious EU targets to save energy and expand renewable power on Wednesday, viewed as key to ending Europe’s reliance on Russian gas.

Brussels is scrambling to prepare for further cuts to Russian gas supplies, and will unveil a plan next week for how countries could cope this winter if Moscow halted deliveries.

Meanwhile, the EU is negotiating more ambitious laws to push countries to replace Russian gas with clean energy this decade and reduce planet-warming CO2 emissions.

The Parliament’s energy committee backed a proposal on Wednesday to raise the EU’s target for primary and final energy savings to 14.5% by 2030 compared with expected levels, and set binding contributions for every country.

The lawmakers want a far higher goal than the 9% energy savings the Commission originally proposed last summer, although Brussels hiked that to 13% in May in a bid to quit Russian fuels faster after Moscow invaded Ukraine.

“Good for the climate and bad for Putin,” Niels Fuglsang, lead lawmaker on the proposal, said in a tweet after the vote. The proposal passed with a large majority of 50 in favor, 7 against and 13 abstentions.

The lawmakers also backed with a large majority a target to get 45% of EU energy from renewable sources by 2030, up from 22% in 2020. Brussels had initially proposed 40%, raising it to 45% after the invasion.

Hitting the energy savings goal will require renovating millions of energy-hungry buildings, which produce a third of EU greenhouse gas emissions.

Countries will also need to overcome the years-long permitting delays that currently hamper new wind and solar projects. The EU has proposed a separate law to fast-track renewables permits.

The full EU Parliament will vote on the proposals in September. If approved, they will form Parliament’s position for negotiations with EU countries on the final laws.

Countries have said they support the Commission’s original proposals, which would already mark a jump in ambition compared with current EU policies, and plan to consider the more ambitious goals in the upcoming negotiations.

NATO Experts Directing Ukrainian Servicemen, Europe Needs to Realize Consequences, Says Lavrov

NATO’s multiple rocket launcher (MRL) experts appear to be directing the actions of Ukrainian troops “on the ground,” which is fraught with certain consequences, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.

“NATO instructors and MRL gunners are already, apparently, directing the actions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the national battalions ‘on the ground’,” Lavrov said in his article for the Izvestia newspaper, adding that he hoped that “there are responsible politicians among the Europeans who are aware of the consequences this is fraught with.”

He added that the armed forces of Russia, as well as the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR), are confidently solving tasks within the framework of Moscow’s special military operation in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, “losing on the battlefield, the Ukrainian regime and its Western patrons do not disdain to stage bloody dramatizations in order to demonize our country in international public view,” the Russian foreign minister said.

Lavrov emphasized that the demand of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to Moscow to conclude an agreement on territorial integrity and sovereignty guarantees with Kiev is in vain, since such a document already existed, it was the Minsk-2 peace deal, which was “killed” by Germany and France.

According to the Russian foreign minister, Europe is suffering from sanctions imposed against Russia the most, and is using up its arsenals, supplying weapons to Kiev without requiring an account of who controls the arms and where these weapons end up.

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18 July 2022

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Collective

Sri Lankan protesters have vowed to continue their struggle for a complete change of the system by abolishing the presidency, as the popular uprising that ousted Gotabaya Rajapaksa as president marked the 100th day on Sunday.

The anti-government protest began on April 9 near the presidential office and has been continuing without a break. “We will continue our fight till we achieve our goal for a complete change of the system,” said Father Jeewantha Peiris, a leading activist of the movement.

This is a freedom struggle. We managed to send home an authoritarian President through people’s power,” Peiris said.

Rajapaksa, 73, who fled to the Maldives on Wednesday and then landed in Singapore on Thursday, formally resigned on Friday, capping off a chaotic 72 hours in the crisis-hit nation that saw protesters storm many iconic buildings, including the President and the Prime Minister’s residences here.

Acting president Wickremesinghe appears to be their next target for the protesters and the campaign to oust him has already begun.

On July 5, we issued an action plan. Foremost of that was removing Gotabaya and defeating Ranil Wickremesinghe and the Rajapaksa regime,” Peiris said. “We press for the abolition of the presidency to make it a true realization of our action plan,” he said.

“We do not fear the government,” the protesters chanted in chorus. After occupying the most important administrative buildings in the capital, the protesters vacated three of them other than the presidential office. The protest had seen violence since it began mid-April. Some elements with extremist political agendas have been blamed for arson attacks on the personal properties of Sri Lankan leaders.

Wickremesinghe’s private house suffered an arson attack the same day when Rajapaksa fled the country. He is one of the four candidates who seek to succeed Rajapaksa in the vote in Parliament scheduled for July 20.

Wickremesinghe, who is also the prime minister, on Friday pledged to maintain law and order after he was sworn in as Sri Lanka’s interim president.

He said that the armed forces have been given the powers and the freedom to deal with any acts of violence and sabotage.

“I am one hundred per cent supportive of peaceful demonstrations. There is a difference between rioters and protesters,” he had said.

Wickremesinghe said the true protesters would not resort to unleashing violence.

Current regime in Sri Lanka doesn’t represent majority opinion, says LoP Sajith Premadasa

Following the Sri Lankan Parliament’s announcement that the nominations for the Presidential elections will be held on July 19, opposition leader, Sajith Premadasa on July 12, said that Right now they have a Parliament that does not represent the majority opinion of the people.

The leader also said that they are taking to the members of Parliament to achieve the majority in the Presidential Polls. “Right now we have 225 Parliamentarians choosing the President. Parliament composed of Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s Legislative majority and President will be chosen from this composition. I have given my name, will see what happens. We are talking to all members,” said the leader in an exclusive interview with ANI. “We are talking to all the members of Parliament… Victorious people should be in congruence with grassroots-level thinking. Right now we have a Parliament that doesn’t represent majority opinion of the people,” he added.

India Govt. To brief Parliament Floor Leaders On Lanka Situation

The Indian ministries of external affairs and finance will brief the floor leaders of various political parties in Parliament on the Sri Lanka situation.

Citing an office memorandum, the officials said the briefing by the two ministries has been scheduled for the evening of July 19, the second day of the monsoon session of Parliament.

The briefing on the present situation in Sri Lanka will be attended by the floor leaders of various political parties, the officials added.

Earlier in the day, India assured Sri Lanka that it will continue to support democracy, stability and economic recovery in the country, which is at a crucial juncture, amid the unprecedented political crisis and economic turmoil.

The assurance was given to Parliament Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena by India’s High Commissioner Gopal Baglay when he called on the Sri Lankan leader.

Sri Lankan lawmakers met on Saturday to begin the process of choosing a new leader to replace Rajapaksa, who is now in Singapore.

Sri Lanka’s Ruling Party To Nominate Interim President For Presidency

Sri Lanka’s ruling party has said they would nominate interim President Ranil Wickremesinghe to the presidency when the Parliament elects a new President on July 20.

Opposition Leader Confirms His Candidacy For The Presidency

Sri Lanka’s opposition leader, Sajit Premadasa, has announced his candidacy for the island’s presidency following the resignation of Gotabaya Rajapaksa and the appointment of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe as interim president.

“I am running to become president. Although it is an uphill struggle, I am convinced that the truth will prevail,” Premadasa has informed in his profile on the social network Twitter, where he has pointed out that the coalition of the already former president Rajapaksa “dominates the numbers”.

Premadasa’s decision comes after the positive talks that his party, Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), held earlier this week with other formations in the Parliament of Sri Lanka.

TUCC Declare Proposals

The Trade Union Coordination Centre (TUCC) today declared a set of proposals aiming to resolve the burning issues faced by the country during an event held at the Public Library, Colombo.

However, the proposals are yet to be made public.

Protest Erupted Outside Sri Lankan Ousted President’s Son’s House In Los Angeles

A group of Sri Lankan protestors in the U.S. had gathered outside the residence of Manoj Rajapaksa, son of ex-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, in Los Angeles, shouting slogans to ask his father to return home, who fled to Singapore.

The protest took place ahead of the resignation of Rajapaksa on July 13, reported The Sunday Morning.

The protester said that the money which he Rajapaksa is owning is the money of the Sri Lankans which has to be returned.

“We are in the Los Angeles Sunland neighborhood. We are in front of the house of Gotabaya Rakapaksa’s son, Manoj Rajapaksa. He has stolen money from the people of Sri Lanka and bought this luxury property. This is our money. This is our property. There are only a few of us here today but if your father will not leave his office, we will come here in the thousands,” the protestors had said.

However, Sri Lankan Twitter users criticized the protest saying Manoj Rajapaksa has not been political and his life in the US is not linked to his father’s politics.

The Protest Began In A Tent

An ABC News report — Sri Lanka’s protests started with plan hatched in a tent. Within months, thousands would storm the president’s luxury residence — (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-17/sri-lanka-protests-started-in-a-tent-but-people-power-prevails/101238082) said:

Across the road from Colombo’s famous seaside park, Galle Face Green, a tent city filled with young people has been buzzing with activity for the past four months.

It is the hub of Sri Lanka’s anti-government protest movement — a motley collection of colorful tents that has become home to a few hundred people.

“It is good to live here with like-minded people,” Buddhi Prabodha Karunaratne, one of the protest leaders, told the ABC.

“We gather around in the evening and we discuss and we plan our strategies — what should we do and what shouldn’t we do — and I think living here has helped us to plan many things and fight against this government.”

It was inside one of the tents that plans were hatched to occupy the luxury residence of strongman president Gotabaya Rajapaksa and the colonial-era office of his hand-picked prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe.

Sri Lankans blame the pair, as well as former prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, the president’s older brother, for the unprecedented economic crisis that is crippling this island nation.

“We were planning [and thought] well maybe at some time if millions of people decide to come into Colombo, we might be able to acquire [the President’s residence],” Karunaratne said.

“We were talking about it for the past three months and when we actually did it, it was hard to believe.”

He was one of the first people to get inside the compound, then thousands followed over the next five days.

Sri Lankans who had been battling to make ends meet for months lapped up the palatial surroundings — even swimming in the pool, using the expensive gym equipment, taking selfies on the sofas, and making curries in the kitchen.

“People are struggling in their lives and their jobs, they are running out of food, and people are dying because they don’t have medicine, but still the luxuries were there [inside the president’s residence] and they were living their same old life,” Karunaratne said.

The young advertising executive emerged as a protest leader after he was one of the first people to set up at the tent city in early April.

Fed up with seeing his community hit by power cuts, inflation, and shortages of essentials such as food, fuel, and cooking oil, Karunaratne put out a call on social media.

“I am going to get on the streets to protest even all by myself. These ruling blokes don’t understand. If nothing else, at least get on the road near your home and protest,” he wrote.

Support came flooding in and the very next day Karunaratne found himself leading a rally of around 400 people.

After that he joined up with other emerging protest groups and took a break from work to concentrate on the ‘Gota Go Home’ campaign.

“I’m just an individual, I am not representing a political party. I am not coming from any trade union whatsoever, I am just an individual who made a statement on social media and I wanted people to join,” he said.

“But now the whole world knows this is a protest, this is a struggle by commoners, by real citizens in Sri Lanka.”

Environmental psychology consultant Kasumi Ranasinghe Arachchige has also been living in the tent city since the protests began.

She told the ABC she was “very proud of the people of Sri Lanka for standing up for themselves” by protesting against the government.

“To be truthful, I had been skeptical about how united Sri Lanka was,” she said.

“But I [have seen] more and more people getting involved and helping in different ways — it doesn’t have to be people just protesting, it’s distribution, it’s contribution, it’s providing a service in different ways, in your own capacity.”

Sri Lankans Don’t Believe Politicians Will Keep Promises

Ms Arachchige, a protester, said protesters have wanted new leadership for Sri Lanka since the beginning, but they are still in disbelief that it is happening.

“We achieved something and I’m actually hopeful. I’m hopeful [for the future] because of the fact we were able to achieve this in such a short time span,” she said.

The protest movement is dominated by students and young professionals, but people from all walks of life have been supporting their occupation of government buildings.

When they heard the protesters had stormed the President’s residence, they came from towns near and far to look inside the opulent building for themselves — even with the high cost of transport right now.

Once at the front gate, they were greeted by some of the protest leaders who had taken on caretaker-like roles, only allowing a certain number of people in at once, and tidying up as groups went through.

Asanka Ranasinghe and Samangita Ranasinghe came with their three children because they thought they would never get the opportunity to see the colonial-era mansion again.

“This presidential bungalow is very important for the locals, this place is very important,” Ms Ranasinghe told the ABC as she took photographs of her family inside the luxurious rooms.

But she added that it was hard to see such grandeur during tough times.

“This is a bad time… there is no fuel, no food, very expensive,” she said.

Student Rashid Firdause brought his parents and younger siblings to see the residence.

“I had to come to this place, it was my dream to come here,” he said.

He had been contemplating trying to leave Sri Lanka because of the economic crisis.

“The situation is very difficult to stay in this country,” he said.

Sri Lankans know there is a long road ahead to recovery, even with assistance from the IMF and other countries.

All eyes will be on the parliament this week for the presidential vote and the subsequent choices that person makes for other key leadership positions.

Protesters have left the buildings they occupied but are planning their next moves.

Their tent city has been up for exactly 100 days now, but they don’t plan to dismantle it just yet.

Protests Reach 100 Days As Crisis Continues

An AFP report said:

Sri Lanka’s protest movement reached its 100th day having forced one president from office and now turning its sights on his successor as the country’s economic crisis continues.

The campaign to oust ex-president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, organized mainly through posts on Facebook, Twitter and TikTok, drew people from across Sri Lanka’s often unbridgeable ethnic divides.

United by economic hardships, minority Tamils and Muslims joined the majority Sinhalese to demand the ouster of the once-powerful Rajapaksa clan.

It began as a two-day protest on April 9, when tens of thousands of people set up camp in front of Rajapaksa’s office – a crowd so much larger than the organizers’ expectations that they decided to stay on.

Under Sri Lanka’s constitution, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe was automatically installed as acting president following Rajapaksa’s resignation, and is now the leading candidate to succeed him permanently in a parliamentary vote next week.

But the veteran politician is despised by the protesters as an ally of the Rajapaksa clan, four brothers who have dominated the island’s politics for years.

Social media activist and protest campaign supporter Prasad Welikumbura said Wickremesinghe too should go.

“It has been 100 days since it started,” Welikumbura said on Twitter.

“But, its still far from any concrete change in the system. #GoHomeRanil, #NotMyPresident.”

Now the Rajapaksas’ SLPP party – which has more than 100 MPs in the 225-member parliament – is backing Wickremesinghe in the vote due Wednesday.

Turning against Wickremesinghe

A spokesman for the protesters told AFP news agency: “We are now discussing with groups involved in the ‘Aragalaya’ (struggle) on turning the campaign against Ranil Wickremesinghe.”

Numbers at the protest site have diminished since Rajapaksa’s exit.

Economy To Shrink By More Than 6%

Nandalal Weerasinghe, the Governor of Sri Lanka’s Central Bank said that the country’s economy is likely to contract by over 6% this year. He stressed that a stable political administration is needed to resume talks for IMF bailout.

In an interview to the Wall Street Journal, Weerasinghe told the publication that top-level talks with the IMF on a multibillion-dollar bailout had stalled.

He said the country urgently needed a stable political administration to progress discussions with the IMF on key structural reforms — such as taxation and public expenditure.

He added that stable government was essential to secure short-term bridge financing from other countries and multilateral agencies for payments for imports like fuel, pharmaceuticals and fertilizers.

17 July 2022

Source: countercurrents.org

By Kathy Kelly

As President Joe Biden embarks on his trip to the Middle East, those of us back home must acknowledge that a “sensitive” trip would visit the victims rather than the butchers.

President Joe Biden’s foreign policy advisors are applauding themselves for devising a “sensitive” itinerary as he plans to embark on a trip to the Middle East on July 13.

In a Washington Post op-ed, Biden defended his controversial planned meeting with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (known as MBS), saying it is meant not only to bolster U.S. interests but also to bring peace to the region.

It seems that his trip will not include Yemen, though if this were truly a “sensitive” visit, he would be stopping at one of Yemen’s many beleaguered refugee camps. There he could listen to people displaced by war, some of whom are shell-shocked from years of bombardment. He could hear the stories of bereaved parents and orphaned children, and then express true remorse for the complicity of the United States in the brutal aerial attacks and starvation blockade imposed on Yemen for the past eight years.

From the vantage point of a Yemeni refugee camp, Biden could insist that no country, including his own, has a right to invade another land and attempt to bomb its people into submission. He could uphold the value of the newly extended truce between the region’s warring parties, allowing Yemenis a breather from the tortuous years of war, and then urge ceasefires and settlements to resolve all militarized disputes, including Russia’s war in Ukraine. He could beg for a new way forward, seeking political will, universally, for disarmament and a peaceful, multipolar world.

More than 150,000 people have been killed in the war in Yemen, 14,500 of whom were civilians. But the death toll from militarily imposed poverty has been immeasurably higher. The war has caused one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, creating an unprecedented level of hunger in Yemen, where millions of people face severe hardship.

Some 17.4 million Yemenis are food insecure; by December 2022, the projected number of hungry people will likely rise to nineteen million. The rate of child malnutrition is one of the highest in the world, and nutrition continues to deteriorate.

I grew to understand the slogan “No Blood for Oil” while living in Iraq during the 1991 Operation Desert Storm war, the 1998 Desert Fox war, and the 2003 Shock and Awe war. To control the pricing and the flow of oil, the United States and its allies slaughtered and maimed thousands of Iraqi people. Visits to Iraqi pediatric wards from 1996 to 2003 taught me a tragic expansion of that slogan. We must certainly insist: “No Starvation for Oil.”

During twenty-seven trips to Iraq, all in defiance of the U.S. economic sanctions against Iraq, I was part of delegations delivering medicines directly to Iraqi hospitals in cities throughout the country. We witnessed the ghastly crime of punishing children to death for the sake of an utterly misguided U.S. foreign policy. The agony endured by Iraqi families who watched their children starve has now become the nightmare experience of Yemeni families.

It’s unlikely that a U.S. President or any leader of a U.S-allied country will ever visit a Yemeni refugee camp, but we who live in these countries can take refuge in the hard work of becoming independent of fossil fuels, shedding the pretenses that we have a right to consume other people’s precious and irreplaceable resources at cut rate prices and that war against children is an acceptable price to pay so that we can maintain this right.

We must urgently simplify our over-consumptive lifestyles, share resources radically, prefer service to dominance, and insist on zero tolerance for starvation.

This article first appeared in The Progressive Magazine.

Kathy Kelly (kathy.vcnv@gmail.com) is a peace activist whose efforts at times have led her to war zones and prisons.

12 July 2022

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Collective

The current world population of 7.6 billion is expected to reach 8.6 billion in 2030, 9.8 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100, according to a new United Nations report released today. The global population is expected to reach 8 billion by November 15, the UN predicts

With roughly 83 million people being added to the world’s population every year, the upward trend in population size is expected to continue, even assuming that fertility levels will continue to decline.

The World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision, published by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, provides a comprehensive review of global demographic trends and prospects for the future. The information is essential to guide policies aimed at achieving the new Sustainable Development Goals.

According to the UN, the world’s population is on the rise in part due to declining mortality, with global life expectancy reaching 72.8 years in 2019, which is almost nine years longer than it was in 1990. At the same time, the organization said that the pace of the growth is gradually slowing down.

India To Surpass China

The new projections include some notable findings at the country level. China (with 1.4 billion inhabitants) and India (1.3 billion inhabitants) remain the two most populous countries, comprising 19 and 18% of the total global population. In roughly seven years, or around 2024, the population of India is expected to surpass that of China. By 2050, India is projected to have 1.6 billion people, while China is projected to have 1.3 billion people.

Nigeria To Surpass U.S.
Among the ten largest countries worldwide, Nigeria is growing the most rapidly. Consequently, the population of Nigeria, currently the world’s 7th largest, is projected to surpass that of the U.S. and become the third largest country in the world shortly before 2050.

Half Of The World’s Population Growth Will Be In 9 Countries
From 2017 to 2050, it is expected that half of the world’s population growth will be concentrated in just nine countries: India, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, Ethiopia, the United Republic of Tanzania, the U.S., Uganda and Indonesia (ordered by their expected contribution to total growth).
LDCs To Have Relatively High Level Of Fertility

The group of 47 least developed countries (LDCs) continues to have a relatively high level of fertility, which stood at 4.3 births per woman in 2010-2015. As a result, the population of these countries has been growing rapidly, at around 2.4 % per year. Although this rate of increase is expected to slow significantly over the coming decades, the combined population of the LDCs, roughly one billion in 2017, is projected to increase by 33 % between 2017 and 2030, and to reach 1.9 billion persons in 2050.
Africa

Similarly, Africa continues to experience high rates of population growth. Between 2017 and 2050, the populations of 26 African countries are projected to expand to at least double their current size.
The concentration of global population growth in the poorest countries presents a considerable challenge to governments in implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which seeks to end poverty and hunger, expand and update health and education systems, achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment, reduce inequality and ensure that no one is left behind.

Fertility Has Declined In Nearly All Regions
In recent years, fertility has declined in nearly all regions of the world. Even in Africa, where fertility levels are the highest of any region, total fertility has fallen from 5.1 births per woman in 2000-2005 to 4.7 in 2010-2015.
Europe, An Exception
Europe has been an exception to this trend in recent years, with total fertility increasing from 1.4 births per woman in 2000-2005 to 1.6 in 2010-2015.
More and more countries now have fertility rates below the level required for the replacement of successive generations (roughly 2.1 births per woman), and some have been in this situation for several decades. During 2010-2015, fertility was below the replacement level in 83 countries comprising 46 % of the world’s population. The ten most populous countries in this group are China, the U.S., Brazil, the Russian Federation, Japan, Viet Nam, Germany, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Thailand, and the UK (in order of population size).
Lower Fertility Leads To Ageing Populations
The report highlights that a reduction in the fertility level results not only in a slower pace of population growth but also in an older population.
Compared to 2017, the number of persons aged 60 or above is expected to more than double by 2050 and to more than triple by 2100, rising from 962 million globally in 2017 to 2.1 billion in 2050 and 3.1 billion in 2100.
In Europe, 25% of the population is already aged 60 years or over. That proportion is projected to reach 35% in 2050 and to remain around that level in the second half of the century. Populations in other regions are also projected to age significantly over the next several decades and continuing through 2100. Africa, for example, which has the youngest age distribution of any region, is projected to experience a rapid ageing of its population. Although the African population will remain relatively young for several more decades, the percentage of its population aged 60 or over is expected to rise from 5% in 2017 to around 9% in 2050, and then to nearly 20% by the end of the century.
80 And 80+
Globally, the number of persons aged 80 or over is projected to triple by 2050, from 137 million in 2017 to 425 million in 2050. By 2100 it is expected to increase to 909 million, nearly seven times its value in 2017.

Population ageing is projected to have a profound effect on societies, underscoring the fiscal and political pressures that the health care, old-age pension and social protection systems of many countries are likely to face in the coming decades.
Higher life expectancy worldwide
Substantial improvements in life expectancy have occurred in recent years. Globally, life expectancy at birth has risen from 65 years for men and 69 years for women in 2000-2005 to 69 years for men and 73 years for women in 2010-2015. Nevertheless, large disparities across countries remain.
Although all regions shared in the recent rise of life expectancy, the greatest gains were for Africa, where life expectancy rose by 6.6 years between 2000-2005 and 2010-2015 after rising by less than 2 years over the previous decade.
The gap in life expectancy at birth between the least developed countries and other developing countries narrowed from 11 years in 2000-2005 to 8 years in 2010-2015. Although differences in life expectancy across regions and income groups are projected to persist in future years, such differences are expected to diminish significantly by 2045-2050.
The increased level and reduced variability in life expectancy have been due to many factors, including a lower under-five mortality rate, which fell by more than 30 % in 89 countries between 2000-2005 and 2010-2015. Other factors include continuing reductions in fatalities due to HIV/AIDS and progress in combating other infectious as well as non-communicable diseases.
Refugees and Other Migrants
There continue to be large movements of migrants between regions, often from low- and middle-income countries toward high-income countries. The volume of the net inflow of migrants to high-income countries in 2010-2015 (3.2 million per year) represented a decline from a peak attained in 2005-2010 (4.5 million per year). Although international migration at or around current levels will be insufficient to compensate fully for the expected loss of population tied to low levels of fertility, especially in the European region, the movement of people between countries can help attenuate some of the adverse consequences of population ageing.
Syrian Refugee Crisis
The report observes that the Syrian refugee crisis has had a major impact on levels and patterns of international migration in recent years, affecting several countries. The estimated net outflow from the Syrian Arab Republic was 4.2 million persons in 2010-2015. Most of these refugees went to Syria’s neighboring countries, contributing to a substantial increase in the net inflow of migrants especially to Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.
The 2017 Revision of World Population Prospects is the 25th round of official UN population estimates and projections that have been prepared by the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
The 2017 Revision builds on previous revisions by incorporating additional results from the 2010 and 2020 rounds of national population censuses as well as findings from recent specialized sample surveys from around the world. The 2017 Revision provides a comprehensive set of demographic data and indicators that can be used to assess population trends at the global, regional and national levels and to calculate other key indicators for monitoring progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals.

In 2020, the global population growth rate fell below 1% for the first time since 1950. Factors such as the rise of life expectancy are reasons why the global population continues to rise.

Men And Women

Men currently make up 50.3% of the population, but by 2050, there are expected to be just as many women as men.

Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Serbia, Ukraine

61 countries are expected to have a population decrease of at least 1%. Of that list, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Serbia and Ukraine are projected to lose at least 20% of their population.

North America

North America is projected by the UN to reach its peak population in the late-2030s and then start declining “due to sustained low levels of fertility.” But that won’t affect the population of the U.S.

The U.S. population is currently 337 million people and it is projected to be at 375 million people in 2050, still making it the third most populous country in the world, behind India and China.

The date of the publication coincided with World Population Day. In his message on the occasion, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres lauded humanity’s achievements. At the same time, he noted that the eight-billion milestone “is a reminder of our shared responsibility to care for our planet,” adding that the Covid-19 pandemic, the climate crisis, wars and humanitarian disasters had shown that the world is “in peril.”

Guterres said that the world is still plagued by vast gender inequality and assaults on women’s rights.

“Reaching a global population of eight billion is a numerical landmark, but our focus must always be on people,” he reiterated.

Special Edition: Palestine Update 571

The Presbyterian Church Friday decisively declared that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people constitutes apartheid.

Commissioners of the 225th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church decisively voted in favor of the resolution, called overture in denominational language, INT-02 “On Recognition That Israel’s Laws, Policies, and Practices Constitute Apartheid Against the Palestinian People”, with 266 affirmative votes (70 percent) and 116 negative votes (30 percent).

Under the resolution, the Presbytery “recognize]s[ that the government of Israel’s laws, policies, and practices regarding the Palestinian people fulfill the international legal definition of apartheid.”

“Apartheid is legally defined as inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them. This occurs in Israel/Palestine through: establishing two sets of laws, one for Israelis and one for Palestinians, which give preferential treatment to Israeli Jews and oppressive treatment to Palestinians; expropriating Palestinian land and water for Jewish-only settlements; denying the right to freedom of residence to Palestinians; dividing the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the Palestinians and denying Palestinians the right to a nationality,” the text of the resolution read.

The resolution “urge]s[ members, congregations, presbyteries, and national staff units, including the Office of Interfaith Relations, to seek appropriate ways to bring an end to Israeli apartheid.”

As for the purpose of the resolution, it is “pursued with the hope it will lead to a peaceful reconciliation for the people of Israel and Palestine similar to that which occurred in South Africa when apartheid was internationally acknowledged.”

Christians spoke out in the 1950s against segregation in the United States and later against apartheid in South Africa. They must again raise their voices and condemn Israel’s discrimination against Palestinians and give a name to the crime against humanity that this discrimination represents, the crime of apartheid.

The US Presbyterian Church said that it was not the first to name Israel’s practices as constituting apartheid, recalling that among those who named them as such were Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, The National Christian Coalition of Christian Organizations in Palestine (NCCOP) in addition to Jewish and Israeli leaders.

10 July 2022

Source: palestineupdates.com

By Vijay Prashad & Manolo De Los Santos

To move from 59 infant deaths out of every 1,000 live births to no infant deaths in the matter of a few decades is an extraordinary feat.

Palpite, Cuba, is just a few miles away from Playa Girón, along the Bay of Pigs, where the United States attempted to overthrow the Cuban Revolution in 1961. Down a modest street in a small building with a Cuban flag and a large picture of Fidel Castro near the front door, Dr. Dayamis Gómez La Rosa sees patients from 8 AM to 5 PM. In fact, that is an inaccurate sentence. Dr. Dayamis, like most primary care doctors in Cuba, lives above the clinic that she runs. “I became a doctor,” she told us as we sat in the clinic’s waiting room, “because I wanted to make the world a better place.” Her father was a bartender, and her mother was a housecleaner, but “thanks to the Revolution,” she says, she is a primary care doctor, and her brother is a dentist. Patients come when they need care, even in the middle of the night.

Apart from the waiting room, the clinic only has three other rooms, all of them small and clean. The 1,970 people in Palpite come to see Dr. Dayamis, who emphasizes that she has in her care several pregnant women and infants. She wants to talk about pregnancy and children because she wants to let me know that over the past three years, not one infant has died in her town or in the municipality. “The last time an infant died,” she said, “was in 2008 when a child was born prematurely and had great difficulty breathing.” When we asked her how she remembered that death with such clarity, she said that for her as a doctor any death is terrible, but the death of a child must be avoided at all costs. “I wish I did not have to experience that,” she said.

Eradicate the Diseases of the Poor

The region of the Zapata Swamp, where the Bay of Pigs is located, before the Revolution, had an infant mortality rate of 59 per 1,000 live births. The population of the area, mostly engaged in subsistence fishing and in the charcoal trade, lived in great poverty. Fidel spent the first Christmas Eve after the Revolution of 1959 with the newly formed cooperative of charcoal producers, listening to them talk about their problems and working with them to find a way to exit the condition of hunger, illiteracy, and ill-health. A large-scale project of transformation had been set into motion a few months before, which drew in hundreds of very poor people into a process to lift themselves up from the wretched conditions that afflicted them. This is the reason why these people rose in large numbers to defend the Revolution against the attack by the United States and its mercenaries in 1961.

To move from 59 infant deaths out of every 1,000 live births to no infant deaths in the matter of a few decades is an extraordinary feat. It was done, Dr. Dayamis says, because the Cuban Revolution pays an enormous attention to the health of the population. Pregnant mothers are given regular care from primary care doctors and gynecologists and their infants are tended by pediatricians—all of it paid from the social wealth of the country. Small towns such as Palpite do not have specialists such as gynecologists and pediatricians, but within a short ride a few miles away, they can access these doctors in Playa Larga.

Walking through the Playa Giron museum earlier that day, the museum’s director Dulce María Limonta del Pozo tells us that the many of the captured mercenaries were returned to the United States in exchange for food and medicines for children; it is telling that this is what the Cuban Revolution demanded. From early into the Revolution, literacy campaigns and vaccination campaigns developed to address the facts of poverty. Now, Dr. Dayamis reports, each child gets between twelve and sixteen vaccinations for such ailments as smallpox and hepatitis.

In Havana’s Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB), Dr. Merardo Pujol Ferrer tells us that the country has almost eradicated hepatitis B using a vaccine developed by their Center. That vaccine—Heberbiovac HB—has been administered to 70 million people around the world. “We believe that this vaccine is safe and effective,” he said. “It could help to eradicate hepatitis around the world, particularly in poorer countries.” All the children in her town are vaccinated against hepatitis, Dr. Dayamis says. “The health care system ensures that not one person dies from diarrhea or malnutrition, and not one person dies from diseases of poverty.”

Public Health

What ails the people of Palpite, Dr. Dayamis says, are now the diseases that one sees in richer countries. It is one of the paradoxes of Cuba, which remains a country of limited means—largely because of the U.S. government’s blockade of this island of 11 million people—and yet has transcended the diseases of poverty. The new illnesses that she says are hypertension and cardiovascular diseases as well as prostate and breast cancer. These problems, she points out, must be dealt with by public education, which is why she has a radio show on Radio Victoria de Girón, the local community station, each Thursday, called Education for Health.

If we invest in sports, says Raúl Fornés Valenciano, the vice president of the Institute of Physical Education and Recreation (INDER), then we will have less problems of health. Across the country, INDER focuses on getting the entire population active with a variety of sports and physical exercises. Over 70,000 sports health workers collaborate with the schools and the centers for the elderly to provide opportunities for leisure time to be spent in physical activity. This, along with the public education campaign that Dr. Dayamis told us about, are key mechanisms to prevent chronic diseases from harming the population.

If you take a boat out of the Bay of Pigs and land in other Caribbean countries, you will find yourself in a situation where healthcare is almost nonexistent. In the Dominican Republic, for example, infant mortality is at 34 per 1,000 live births. These countries—unlike Cuba—have not been able to harness the commitment and ingenuity of people such as Dr. Dayamis and Dr. Merardo. In these other countries, children die in conditions where no doctor is present to mourn their loss decades later.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter.

Manolo De Los Santos is the co-executive director of the People’s Forum and is a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

7 July 2022

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

15 years have passed since Israel imposed a total siege on the Gaza Strip, subjecting nearly two million Palestinians to one of the longest and most cruel politically-motivated blockades in history.

The Israeli government had then justified its siege as the only way to protect Israel from Palestinian “terrorism and rocket attacks”. This remains the official Israeli line until this day. Not many Israelis – certainly not in government, media or even ordinary people – would argue that Israel today is safer than it was prior to June 2007.

It is widely understood that Israel has imposed the siege as a response to the Hamas takeover of the Strip, following a brief and violent confrontation between the two main Palestinian political rivals, Hamas, which currently rules Gaza, and Fatah, which dominates the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank.

However, the isolation of Gaza was planned years before the Hamas-Fatah clash, or even the Hamas’ legislative election victory of January 2006. Late Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was determined to redeploy Israeli forces out of Gaza, years prior to these dates.

What finally culminated in the Israeli Disengagement from Gaza in August-September 2005 was proposed by Sharon in 2003, approved by his government in 2004 and finally adopted by the Knesset in February 2005.

The ‘disengagement’ was an Israeli tactic that aimed at removing a few thousand illegal Jewish settlers out of Gaza – to other illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank – while redeploying the Israeli army from crowded Gaza population centers to the border areas. This was the actual start of the Gaza siege.

The above assertion was even clear to James Wolfensohn, who was appointed by the Quartet on the Middle East as the Special Envoy for Gaza Disengagement. In 2010, he reached a similar conclusion: “Gaza had been effectively sealed off from the outside world since the Israeli disengagement … and the humanitarian and economic consequences for the Palestinian population were profound.”

The ultimate motive behind the ‘disengagement’ was not Israel’s security, or even to starve Gazans as a form of collective punishment. The latter was one natural outcome of a much more sinister political plot, as communicated by Sharon’s own senior advisor at the time, Dov Weisglass. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in October 2004, Weisglass put it plainly: “The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process.” How?

“When you freeze (the peace) process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem,” according to Weisglass. Not only was this Israel’s ultimate motive behind the disengagement and subsequent siege on Gaza but, according to the seasoned Israeli politician, it was all done “with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.” The President in question here is no other than US president at the time, George W. Bush.

All of this had taken place before Palestine’s legislative elections, Hamas’ victory and the Hamas-Fatah clash. The latter merely served as a convenient justification to what had already been discussed, ‘ratified’ and implemented.

For Israel, the siege has been a political ploy, which acquired additional meaning and value as time passed. In response to the accusation that Israel was starving Palestinians in Gaza, Weisglass was very quick to muster an answer: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

What was then understood as a facetious, albeit thoughtless statement, turned out to be actual Israeli policy, as indicated in a 2008 report, which was made available in 2012. Thanks to the Israeli human rights organization Gisha, the “redlines (for) food consumption in the Gaza Strip” – composed by the Israeli Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories – was made public. It emerged that Israel was calculating the minimum number of calories necessary to keep Gaza’s population alive, a number that is “adjusted to culture and experience” in the Strip.

The rest is history. Gaza’s suffering is absolute. 98 percent of the Strip’s water is undrinkable. Hospitals lack essential supplies and life-saving medications. Movement in and out of the Strip is practically prohibited, with minor exceptions.

Still, Israel has failed miserably in achieving any of its objectives. Tel Aviv hoped that the ‘disengagement’ would compel the international community to redefine the legal status of the Israeli occupation of Gaza. Despite Washington’s pressure, that never happened. Gaza remains part of the Occupied Palestinian Territories as defined in international law.

Even the September 2007 Israeli designation of Gaza as an “enemy entity” and a “hostile territory” changed little, except that it allowed the Israeli government to declare several devastating wars on the Strip, starting in 2008.

None of these wars have successfully served a long-term Israeli strategy. Instead, Gaza continues to fight back on a much larger scale than ever before, frustrating the calculation of Israeli leaders, as it became clear in their befuddled, disturbing language. During one of the deadliest Israeli wars on Gaza in July 2014, Israeli right-wing Knesset member, Ayelet Shaked, wrote on Facebook that the war was “not a war against terror, and not a war against extremists, and not even a war against the Palestinian Authority.” Instead, according to Shaked, who a year later became Israel’s Minister of Justice, “… is a war between two people. Who is the enemy? The Palestinian people.”

In the final analysis, the governments of Sharon, Tzipi Livni, Ehud Olmert, Benjamin Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett failed to isolate Gaza from the greater Palestinian body, break the will of the Strip or ensure Israeli security at the expense of Palestinians.

Moreover, Israel has fallen victim to its own hubris. While prolonging the siege will achieve no short or long-term strategic value, lifting the siege, from Israel’s viewpoint, would be tantamount to an admission of defeat – and could empower Palestinians in the West Bank to emulate the Gaza model. This lack of certainty further accentuates the political crisis and lack of strategic vision that continued to define all Israeli governments for nearly two decades.

Inevitably, Israel’s political experiment in Gaza has backfired, and the only way out is for the Gaza siege to be completely lifted and, this time, for good.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

7 July 2022

Source: countercurrents.org