Archives: Articles

By Liz Theoharis and Cedar Monroe

In 2019, a group of homeless folks were living on a deserted piece of land along the Chehalis River, a drainage basin that empties into Grays Harbor, an estuary of the Pacific Ocean, on the coast of the state of Washington. When the city of Aberdeen ordered the homeless encampment cleared out, some of those unhoused residents took the city to court, because they had nowhere else to go. Aberdeen finally settled the case by agreeing to provide alternative shelter for the residents since, the year before, a U.S. court of appeals had ruled in the case of Martin v. Boise that a city without sufficient shelter beds to accommodate homeless people encamped in their area couldn’t close the encampment.

Indeed, for years, homeless people on the West Coast have had one defense set by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. In Martin v. Boise, it ruled that criminalizing people who had nowhere else to sleep was indeed “cruel and unusual punishment.” However, a group of homeless folks in Grants Pass, Oregon, who had been fined and moved from place to place because they lacked shelter, took their case all the way to the Supreme Court. And in June, it ruled against them, overturning Martin v. Boise and finding that punishing homeless people with fines and short stints in jail was neither cruel, nor unusual, because cities across the country had done it so often that it had become commonplace.

Dozens of amicus briefs were filed around Grants Pass v. Johnson, including more than 40 friends of the court briefs against the city’s case. The Kairos Center for Religions, Rights & Social Justice (to which the authors of this piece are connected) submitted one such brief together with more than a dozen other religious denominations, historic houses of worship, and interfaith networks. The core assertion of that brief and the belief of hundreds of faith institutions and untold thousands of their adherents was that the Grants Pass ordinance violated our interfaith tradition’s directives on the moral treatment of the poor and unhoused.

One notable amicus brief on the other side came from — be surprised, very surprised — supposedly liberal California Governor Gavin Newsom who argued that, rather than considering the poverty and homelessness, which reportedly kills 800 people every day in the United States, immoral and dangerous, “Encampments are dangerous.” Wasting no time after the Supreme Court ruling, Newsom directed local politicians to start demolishing the dwellings and communities of the unhoused.

Since then, dozens of cities across California have been evicting the homeless from encampments. In Palm Springs, for instance, the city council chose to demolish homeless encampments and arrest the unhoused in bus shelters and on sidewalks, giving them just 72 hours’ notice before throwing out all their possessions. In the state capital of Sacramento, an encampment of mostly disabled residents had their lease with the city terminated and are now being forced into shelters that don’t even have the power to connect life-saving devices (leaving all too many homeless residents fearing death). The Sacramento Homeless Union filed a restraining order on behalf of such residents, but since Governor Newsom signed an executive order to clear homeless encampments statewide, the court refused to hear the case and other cities are following suit.

In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, such acts of demolition have spread from California across the country. In August alone, we at the Kairos Center have heard of such evictions being underway in places ranging from Aberdeen, Washington, to Elmira, New York, Lexington, Kentucky, to Lancaster, Pennsylvania — to name just a few of the communities where homeless residents are desperately organizing against the erasure of their lives.

Cruel but Not Unusual

However unintentionally, the six conservative Supreme Court justices who voted for that ruling called up the ghosts of seventeenth-century English law by arguing that the Constitution’s mention of “cruel and unusual punishment” was solely a reference to particularly grisly methods of execution. As it happens, though, that ruling unearthed more ghosts from early English law than anyone might have realized. After all, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, peasants in England lost their rights to land they had lived on and farmed for generations. During a process called “enclosure,” major landholders began fencing off fields for large-scale farming and wool and textile production, forcing many of those peasants to leave their lands. That mass displacement led to mass homelessness, which, in turn, led the crown to pass vagrancy laws, penalizing people for begging or simply drifting. It also gave rise to the English workhouse, forcing displaced peasants to labor in shelters, often under the supervision of the church.

To anyone who has been or is homeless in the United States today, the choice between criminalization and mandated shelters (often with religious requirements) should sound very familiar. In fact, Justice Neil Gorsuch, who delivered the majority opinion in the Grants Pass case, seemed incredulous that the lower court ruling they were overturning had not considered the Gospel Rescue Mission in that city sufficient shelter because of its religious requirements. In the process, he ignored the way so many private shelters like it demand that people commit to a particular religious practice, have curfews that make work inconceivable, exclude trans or gay people, and sometimes even require payment. He wrote that cities indeed needed criminalization as “a tool” to force homeless people to accept the services already offered. In addition to such insensitivity and undemocratic values, Gorsuch never addressed how clearly insufficient what Grants Pass had to offer actually was, since 600 people were listed as homeless there, while that city’s mission only had 138 beds.

Instead, the Supreme Court Justice sided with dozens of amicus briefs submitted by police and sheriff’s associations, cities and mayors across the West Coast (in addition to Governor Newsom), asking for a review of Martin v. Boise. In that majority opinion, Gorsuch also left out what his colleague, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, revealed in her fiery dissent: the stated goal of Grants Pass, according to its city council (and many towns and cities across the West), is to do everything possible to force homeless people to leave city limits. The reason is simple enough: most cities and towns just don’t have the resources to address the crisis of housing on their own. Their response: rather than deal better with the homelessness crisis, they punch down, attempting to label the unhoused a threat to public safety and simply drive them out. In Grants Pass, the council president said, in words typical of city officials across the country: “The point is to make it uncomfortable enough for [homeless people] in our city, so they will want to move on down the road.”

The United States of Dispossession

This country, of course, has a long history of forcing people to go from one place to another, ranging from the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade to widespread vagrancy laws. From the very founding of the United States, as the government encountered Indigenous people who had held land in common since time immemorial, they forced them off those very lands. They also subjected generations of their children to Indian boarding schools patterned after English workhouses. In just a few hundred years, the government attempted to destroy a series of societies that provided for all their people and shared the land. Now, Indigenous people have the highest rates of homelessness in this country. And in the modern version of such homelessness, the West has become a region of stark inequality, where Bill Gates owns a quarter of a million acres of land, while millions of people struggle to find housing. Put another way, 1% of the American population now owns two thirds of the private land in the nation. Such inequality is virtually unfathomable!

In Trash: A Poor White Journey (a memoir by Monroe with a foreword by Theoharis), we argue that the homelessness crisis in this country reveals the chasm between those relative few of us who possess land and resources and those of us who have been dispossessed and are landless or homeless. There were indeed periods in our recent history — the New Deal of the 1930s and the War on Poverty of the 1960s — when government agencies built public housing and invested more in social welfare, greatly reducing the number of homeless people in America. However, this country largely stopped building public housing more than 40 years ago. Housing services have been reduced to the few Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) apartments still left and a tiny bit of money funding housing vouchers for landlords. Our cities are now full of people like Debra Black, who said in her statement in the Grants Pass case, “I am afraid at all times in Grants Pass that I could be arrested, ticketed, and prosecuted for sleeping outside or for covering myself with a blanket to stay warm.” She died while the case was being litigated, owing the city $5,000 in unpaid fines for the crime of sleeping outdoors.

The Supreme Court ruled that ordinances against sleeping or camping outdoors or in a car applied equally “whether the charged defendant is currently a person experiencing homelessness, a backpacker on vacation, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building.” As Anatole France, the French poet and novelist, said so eloquently long ago, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” In this country, of course, everyone is forbidden from occupying space they don’t own.

After all, while the Bill of Rights offers civil rights, it offers no economic ones. And while the United States might indeed be the richest country in history, it hasn’t proven particularly rich in generosity. Even though there are far more empty homes than homeless people (28 for each homeless person HUD has counted on a single January night annually), they’re in the hands of the private market and developers looking to make fast cash. In short, privatizing land seems to have been bad for all too many of us.

In the end, the Supreme Court’s ruling proved short-sighted indeed. While it gave the cities of the West Coast what they thought they wanted, neither the court nor those cities are really planning for the repercussions of millions of people being forced from place to place. The magical thinking exhibited by Grants Pass officials — that people will just go down the road and essentially disappear — ignores the reality that the next city in line would prefer the same.

The Supreme Court opinion cited HUD’s Point in Time (PIT) counts (required for county funding for homeless services) that identified more than 650,000 homeless people in the United States in January 2023. That number is, however, a gross underestimate. Fourteen years ago, Washington State’s Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) issued a study suggesting that, while only 22,619 people had been found in the annual PIT count in that state, the total count using DSHS data proved to be 184,865, or eight times the number used for funding services.

A conservative estimate of actual post-pandemic homelessness in this country is closer to 8 to 11 million nationally. Worse yet, the effects of the pandemic on jobs, the subsequent loss of Covid era benefits, and crippling inflation and housing costs ensure that the number will continue to rise substantially. But even as homelessness surges, providing decent and affordable housing for everyone remains a perfectly reasonable possibility.

Consider, for instance, Brazil where, even today, 45% of the land is owned by 1% of the population. However, after authoritarian rule in that country ended in 1985, a new constitution was introduced that significantly changed the nature of land ownership. Afro-Brazilians were given the right to own land for the first time, although many barriers remain. Indigenous people’s rights as “the first and natural owners of the land” were affirmed, although they continue to find themselves in legal battles to retain or enforce those rights. And the country’s constitution now “requires rural property to fulfill a social function, be productive, and respect labor and environmental rights. The state has the right to expropriate landholdings that do not meet these criteria, though it must compensate the owner,” according to a report by the progressive think tank TriContinental: Institute for Social Research.

That change to the constitution gave a tremendous boost to movements of landless peasants that had formed an organization called Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), or the Landless Workers Movement. The MST created a popular land reform platform, organizing small groups of homeless people to occupy and settle unused vacant land. Because the constitution declared that land public, they could even sue for legal tenure. To date, 450,000 families have gained legal tenure of land using such tactics.

If Not Here, Where?

Today, untold thousands of people in the United States are asking: “Where do we go?” In Aberdeen, Washington, people camping along the Chehalis River were given just 30 days to leave or face fines and arrests.

Eventually, Americans will undoubtedly be forced to grapple with the unequal distribution of land in this country and its dire consequences for so many millions of us. Sooner or later, as Indigenous people and tribal nations fight for their sovereignty and as poor people struggle to survive a growing housing crisis, the tides are likely to shift. In the West, we would do well to consider places like Brazil in developing a strategy to start down the path to ending homelessness here and we would do well to consider the power of the 8 to 11 million unhoused people who know what they need and are finally beginning to organize for their future. They may have lost this time around, but if history teaches us anything, they will find justice sooner or later.

Cedar Monroe is a chaplain, organizer, and author. They are the author of Trash: A Poor White Journey and served as a chaplain alongside people experiencing homelessness for 13 years.

Liz Theoharis, a TomDispatch regular, is a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist.

9 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Craig Mokhiber

What do two South Pacific countries, two North American countries, one country in the Middle East, and (until recently) one country in southern Africa have in common with Europe? The answer is rooted in centuries of imperialism and conquest in the ideologies that have sustained them — and in the four-letter acronym “WEOG.”

Five countries — the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel (and for several years during apartheid, the South African regime) — are part of the UN diplomatic grouping known as “WEOG,” together with 20 European states.

WEOG stands for the “Western Europe and Other Group.” The “WE” for Western Europe is self-evident. But the “other” in the group is more coded, representing states founded by European settler colonialism.

WEOG is one of the five official “regional groupings” of the United Nations. But while the other four are all defined by regional boundaries (Africa, Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean), WEOG is cross regional and represents something else: the white world.

The White World’s Bloc

This will instantly shock the casual reader, but for practitioners and academics in the world of international relations, it’s a familiar concept. The West has long centered its approach to international relations on race. Indeed, the study of international relations began in the West as “race relations.” And Foreign Affairs, the leading U.S. publication on international relations, was originally the Journal of Race Development.

That approach was never horizontal, but rather one in which whiteness was centered and supreme. While sometimes obscured by a more genteel façade, below the surface the same dynamics continue today.

Of course, WEOG avoids any such direct racial billing, instead describing itself as a group of “western democracies.” The problem they have, however, is that their membership includes some states that are not (geographically) western, and some that are not democracies. Israel, former member South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand are all situated outside the West.

And as for democracies, original WEOG members Spain, Portugal, and Greece were governed during their membership by dictatorial regimes until the mid-1970s. South Africa and Israel were both admitted under apartheid regimes. And the United States had a formal system of racial segregation until the mid-1960s and was therefore hardly a “democracy” for a significant part of its population.

In other words, WEOG is not now and has never been a group of “western democracies.”

At other times, WEOG has been described as a principally anti-communist or anti-Soviet alliance. But there have been plenty of countries in the global South that opposed the Soviet Union and communism but were never admitted to WEOG. And while the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, WEOG has continued on the same course for over three decades since, proving that this is not principally a Cold War alliance either.

Institutional Inequity

Those tempted to view this as a matter of mere academic interest should first consider that WEOG wields disproportionate power in the UN. WEOG countries represent only about 11 percent of the global population. They are the second smallest UN group — with 29 members compared to the 54 members of the Africa Group, for example.

Nevertheless, three out of five permanent members of the Security Council are WEOG members, and the group enjoys an additional two elected seats on the Council beyond the five permanent members, for a total of seven out of 15 seats. Similar patterns of structural inequities privileging WEOG are reflected in the composition of other intergovernmental bodies as well.

They are also grossly over-represented in the UN’s senior management team. The post of head of political affairs is unofficially reserved for an American, as is the head of UNICEF and of the World Food Programme. The head of peacekeeping is reserved for the French, and humanitarian affairs for the British. And of the nine Secretaries-General in the organization’s history, four have been from WEOG countries.

The group also benefits from the formidable sticks and tempting carrots of the U.S. empire. Regardless of who occupies the rotating chair of the group, the dominant actor remains the United States, the group’s “first among equals.” Even though it sometimes claims to be an “observer,” the United States conveniently accepts full membership when electoral slates for UN bodies are decided.

This disproportionate influence is brought to bear across the UN agenda. The imperial, colonial, and white supremacist roots of WEOG run deep, and they directly impact the policy positions taken by the group (especially the “OGs”) in UN voting. Voting patterns bear this out especially in the defense of colonialism, apartheid, and political Zionism, and in opposition to Indigenous rights, the anti-racism agenda, Palestinian rights, and to the right to development.

This colonial logic is evident in WEOG’s opposition to guaranteeing people control over their own national development, to efforts to control mercenaries (often deployed to deny peoples’ self-determination), and to moves addressing the devastating impact of unilateral coercive measures (like sanctions) imposed by Western governments on countries of the global South.

Members of WEOG actively oppose anti-colonial and post-colonial perspectives on trade, debt, finance, and intellectual property. And when the UN moved to recognize the human right to food in 2021, only the United States and Israel, both WEOG members, voted no. Virtually every effort by formerly colonized countries to break from the exploitative economic relations and destructive racial legacies imposed by their former colonial masters is resisted by WEOG states.

Colonial Values

A clear demonstration of the true nature of the sub-group can be found in its position on the UN’s official global program to combat racism, known as the Durban Declaration.

The global Durban Conference that drafted the declaration in 2001 was boycotted by Israel and the United States — and both the subsequent Durban II review conference and the Durban III meeting were boycotted by Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Israel, and the United States, along with a few European states. The group’s opposition is regularly registered in voting, in diplomatic demarches, and importantly, in positions taken in annual budget negotiations.

Worse still, the United States, Israel, and a hodge-podge of pro-Israel lobby groups, often with the complicity of some European nations, have carried on a decades-long campaign of disinformation to discredit the Declaration, going so far as to call it antisemitic, which is especially ironic given that the Declaration specifically commits the UN to combatting antisemitism.

The Declaration’s real offense? It directly challenges institutionalized racism, including in these countries, and sets out a program of remedial measures. Needless to say, the settler-colonial pedigree of these countries, and their long histories of institutionalized racism, put them squarely in the bullseye of the Declaration, a position that they cannot and will not tolerate. In their view, human rights critique is for the countries of the global South — not for the wealthy, white world of WEOG.

The world saw the same positioning again when the UN General Assembly convened on September 13, 2007 to adopt the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, after 20 years of debate. The Declaration was adopted with the overwhelming majority of states voting in favor, a handful abstaining, four countries (the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) voting against. Israel skipped the vote altogether.

Obviously, the shared history (and continued policies) of these five countries in persecuting, dispossessing, and exterminating the Indigenous peoples of the lands they colonized stands in direct contradiction of the provisions of the UN Declaration, and this realization was front and center when they joined forces to oppose it in 2007.

The settler-colonial agenda of the alliance is also evident in voting on Palestine. While most countries of the world recognize the State of Palestine, WEOG is once again the outlier.

The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and several European states (and, of course, Israel) have still not recognized Palestine. Israel and the United States (which also uses its veto in the Security Council to block Palestine’s full UN membership) consistently vote against UN resolutions supporting the human rights of the Palestinian people, while Canada often votes no or abstains, and Australia and New Zealand frequently abstain. Apartheid South Africa, during its tenure, was one of Israel’s closest allies and routinely supported it in the UN, while post-apartheid South Africa would become one of Palestine’s closest allies.

Indeed, perhaps most revelatory of the strident commitment of these countries to the defense of settler-colonialism is their lock-step support of Israel, even as Israel perpetrates history’s first live-streamed genocide against the indigenous Palestinians. WEOG countries that had previously made human rights and international law key centerpieces of their international public positioning (however cynically) have turned on a dime to openly distort, devalue, and dismiss these rules in order to buttress Israeli impunity.

Some have even crossed the line into direct complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, exposing themselves both legally and politically. The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Germany, and several other European states have provided arms, financial investments, intelligence support, and diplomatic cover for Israel’s crimes, even while they are being committed.

Calls for Reform

The message is clear: the defense of settler colonialism (and its inherent atrocities) trumps all other values, all other interests, and all other rules. The wagons must be circled. The colonial project must be protected. Human rights and international law be damned.

But the UN has been on a constant trajectory of change, peaking in the mid-1970s after the entry of a large number of newly independent states — and again now, as the unipolar moment of the United States begins to fade.

Calls for reform are growing. And if the UN is to survive, the vestiges of the colonial era will need to give way to more equitable diplomatic, political, and economic arrangements. The principles of the organization, including self-determination, human rights, and equality will need to play a more central role in intergovernmental processes.

And WEOG will need to find its place in a diplomatic museum, alongside the top hats, all-male meetings, and smoke-filled rooms of yesteryear.

Craig Mokhiber is an international human rights lawyer and former senior United Nations Official.

9 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

Palestinian Territory – Israel has escalated its systematic policy of targeting—without warning—schools functioning as shelters for forcibly displaced civilians in the Gaza Strip, killing and wounding hundreds of them. This policy is part of the ongoing genocide that Israel has been waging against Palestinians in the Strip since 7 October 2023.

The Israeli military targeted the Halima al-Sadia School, which provides shelter to hundreds of internally displaced people in Jabalia al-Nazla, in the north of the Gaza Strip, at midnight on Saturday 7 September 2024. The school was bombed by Israeli aircraft, according to the Euro-Med Monitor field team. Four people were killed and several others were injured in the attack.

On Saturday afternoon, Israeli planes then bombed the Amr Ibn al-Aas School, north of Gaza City, which was also housing displaced people. Four Palestinians, including a child, were killed, and several others were injured.

Since the beginning of August, the Israeli occupation army has bombed 16 schools being used as shelters in the Gaza Strip, 15 of them located north of Gaza Valley. Two hundred and seventeen Palestinians have been killed in the reported attacks, while hundreds more have been injured, a large number of casualties being women and children.

In the past week, the Israeli army has increased its targeting of civilians in the Gaza City and North Gaza governorates by bombing residential buildings, civilian gatherings, and commercial stalls there, in addition to shelter centres and their surrounding areas.

There is no legitimate reason to target schools above the heads of displaced individuals, and this act is a blatant violation of the principles of distinction, military necessity, proportionality, and the obligation to exercise appropriate caution. Every time it launches an attack, the Israeli army attempts to justify its actions by claiming that it is attacking military targets, but it never offers any proof to support these assertions.

By killing and forcibly displacing as many Palestinians as possible from their land, these attacks are a part of the genocide being carried out by Israel in the Gaza Strip.

According to preliminary investigations conducted by the Euro-Med Monitor field team, the Israeli army has deliberately destroyed all of the remaining shelters in the north of the Gaza Strip, including schools and public facilities. This destruction has been committed with the goal of establishing a coercive environment, in order to compel the civilian population to leave their neighbourhoods and evacuate to the central and southern sections of the Strip.

Additional evidence of Israel’s clear intention to push Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip is the plan leaked by Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, which published an article claiming that the Israeli army is currently researching options to drive out and displace the remaining Palestinians in the northern Gaza Valley under what is known as the “Generals’ Plan”.

Yedioth Ahronoth pointed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conversation with the army about launching a fourth phase of his bloody war, centred on driving out residents of the northern Gaza Strip. This suggests that the plan for forced displacement, which has been in place since the beginning of this genocide—now in its 11th consecutive month—is still in effect, in the absence of any strong international opposition to Israel’s attempt to annihilate the Palestinian people.

The United States and numerous European nations’ complicity in Israel’s horrific crimes against the Palestinian people, particularly in the Gaza Strip, coupled with the international community’s near silence and lack of action to halt the genocide there, is enabling Israel to finalise its plan to exterminate the Palestinian people in large numbers, through forced displacement and direct and indirect killing.

Israel’s bombing strategy reveals a deliberate policy to target Palestinians civilians everywhere in the Gaza Strip; spread fear among them; deny them stability or shelter, even for brief periods of time; force them to evacuate repeatedly; subject them to life-threatening conditions; and ultimately destroy them. The bombing continues throughout the entire Strip, with Israel targeting places designated as humanitarian areas, mainly shelter centres, including those set up in UNRWA-run schools.

As of the time of publication, the Israeli military has been attacking the Gaza Strip for 11 months. During this time, Israel has been carrying out military operations against civilian targets, killing large numbers of civilians in the process. These attacks have also targeting refugee centres, the majority of which were housed in UN buildings, and have killed large numbers of people there, all of which constitutes crimes against humanity, full-fledged war crimes, and genocide.

As part of their international obligations, all nations must put an end to Israel’s crimes of genocide and other serious offenses in the Gaza Strip; safeguard civilians there; ensure Israel abides by international law and the rulings of the International Court of Justice; and impose effective sanctions on Israel by halting all forms of military, financial, and political cooperation and support. This includes an immediate stop to all arms sales, exports, and transfers to Israel, including export licenses and military aid.

All nations that cooperate with Israel in committing crimes must be held accountable, especially those that provide Israel with any kind of direct support or assistance. This includes giving aid and engaging in contractual agreements with Israel relating to the military, intelligence, politics, law, finance, and the media, among other domains that might help its crimes continue.

At the international, regional, and local levels, all possible avenues for accountability must be explored with urgency. This includes serious joint work to activate the path of universal jurisdiction, in order to hold accountable perpetrators of crimes against Palestinian civilians before the national courts of countries where such jurisdiction exists.

The International Criminal Court must act quickly to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Galant; broaden the scope of its investigation into individual criminal responsibility for crimes committed in the Gaza Strip, to include everyone involved; issue warrants for their arrest; hold them accountable; and categorically declare Israel’s ongoing crimes to be genocide

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor is a Geneva-based independent organization with regional offices across the MENA region and Europe

9 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Maureen Clare Murphy

Israeli occupation forces killed both an American woman during a protest in Beita, a village near Nablus in the northern occupied West Bank, and a 13-year-old Palestinian girl in a separate but nearby incident on Friday.

In the latter incident, Bana Amjad Baker (some outlets gave her family name as Laboom) was struck by a bullet in her chest while in her home during confrontations that erupted in Qaryut village, also near Nablus, after settlers raided and attacked the community.

The girl’s father said that she was shot by Israeli occupation forces while in her room with her sisters, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.

Also on Friday, Israeli troops withdrew from Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank after a 10-day raid in which essential infrastructure was destroyed and at least 21 Palestinians were killed and more than 130 injured.

Israeli forces have laid siege to several other refugee camps in the northern West Bank since 28 August. At least 39 Palestinians were killed in the territory during that time, including in Jenin.

Israeli troops desecrate boy’s body

On Friday, Defense for Children International-Palestine stated that on the previous day, “Israeli forces shot and killed a 16-year-old Palestinian boy in the northern occupied West Bank then desecrated his body.”

The teen, Majed Abu Zeina, “was shot in the leg by an Israeli soldier from a distance of 30 meters” in al-Faraa refugee camp south of Tubas.

“Israeli soldiers approached Majed as he lay injured on the ground and prevented a Palestinian ambulance from reaching him,” according to Defense for Children International-Palestine.

[https://twitter.com/DCIPalestine/status/1832123532827926670]

“Majed pleaded with Israeli soldiers to let the ambulance help him, but they ignored him” and one of them ordered him to lift up his shirt, “which revealed a homemade explosive device that Majed was allegedly carrying.”

The soldier “then shot Majed at point-blank range in the neck, killing him,” according to the children’s rights group.

Video shows an Israeli military bulldozer moving the boy’s body with the front blade. The soldiers operating the bulldozer drove around al-Faraa with the teen’s body in the blade for an hour before dumping him in another area of the camp.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights said that the boy’s abdomen was torn open while being carried by the bulldozer and his internal organs were exposed. His body was “disfigured and unrecognizable” when it was finally retrieved following the withdrawal of Israeli troops hours later.

Defense for Children International-Palestine said that 76 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank so far this year, including two US citizens.

At least 157 children are among the nearly 700 Palestinians killed in the West Bank since October.

“Intentional killing” of American woman

The US citizen killed in Beita on Friday was identified as 26-year-old Ayşenur Eygi, a resident of Seattle, Washington, who was born in Turkey.

“It was an intentional killing that cannot be justified,” according to Jonathan Pollak, an Israeli anti-occupation activist who was present when Eygi was shot in the head:

[https://twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1832109384253763592]

Pollak said that he and others had joined Beita’s weekly demonstration against the colonization of village land.

Israeli troops fired tear gas and live ammunition during confrontations that ensued following afternoon prayers held during the protest, forcing demonstrators to retreat towards the village.

Demonstrators were congregated on the outskirts of the village some 150-200 meters away from Israeli troops, according to Pollak. The situation was quiet when a sniper positioned on a rooftop fired two live bullets, he said.

The first bullet hit a metal object and shrapnel hit a village resident in his thigh. The second one was the bullet that hit Eygi.

“I found her lying on the ground … bleeding from her head,” Pollak said, adding that she “had a very weak pulse.” Eygi was evacuated to a hospital but efforts to save her life failed.

Saad Dhiab, a resident of Beita, told WAFA that after the shots rang out, “I saw the soldiers dancing happily at what they had done.”

The International Solidarity Movement stated that Eygi was an activist with the group and is the 18th person to be killed in the context of Beita’s protests since 2020, following the establishment of Evyatar, a settlement outpost, on village land.

[https://twitter.com/ISMPalestine/status/1832116250559811955]

Evyatar, which was most recently evacuated by the Israeli government in 2021, has become a symbolic site for the settlement movement emboldened by top political figures in Benjamin Netanyahu’s extreme-right coalition.

In June last year, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, urged settlers to “run for the hilltops” during a visit to Evyatar. He called for killing “thousands” of terrorists to “fulfill our great purpose: the land of Israel for the people of Israel” and assured settlers that “we’ve got your back.”

The weekly protests in Beita were revived and therefore the repression increased after the Israeli cabinet approved the retroactive “legalization” of Evyatar in June this year, according to the International Solidarity Movement.

Last month, Amado Sison, another American volunteer, was shot in the back of his leg during a demonstration in Beita.

All Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory.

[https://twitter.com/AidaTuma/status/1832040796347830447]

Following the killing of Eygi, the Israeli military claimed that its forces “responded with fire toward a main instigator of violent activity who hurled rocks at the forces and posed a threat to them.”

It said that it was “looking into reports that a foreign national was killed as a result of shots fired in the area.”

Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, said the government “deplored” the death of Eygi. He added that the facts still needed to be established and declined to say whether her killing would lead to any change in policy on allocation of American weapons to Israel:

[https://twitter.com/prem_thakker/status/1832153300893933826]

US citizens killed by Israel with impunity

Several international activists with the International Solidarity Movement have been severely injured or killed by Israeli forces since the group’s founding in 2001, including American college student Rachel Corrie and British photography student Thomas Hurndall, who were both fatally injured by soldiers in Gaza in 2003.

Two other US citizens were killed by Israeli forces during humanitarian missions to Gaza.

Jacob Flickenger, a dual US-Canadian citizen, was killed by the Israeli military while working for the Washington-based charity World Central Kitchen in Gaza earlier this year.

[https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1832052581176160673]

[https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1832078842363596928]

In 2010, Furkan Doğan, an 18-year-old US citizen and Turkish legal permanent resident, was shot five times, including once in the head at point-blank-range, and killed alongside eight others in international waters when Israeli commandos stormed the flagship Mavi Marmara that was part of a humanitarian flotilla attempting to break the siege on Gaza.*

A tenth passenger died of his injuries four years later. All of those killed during the raid, except for Doğan, were Turkish citizens.

Instead of seeking accountability for the American teen’s death, the Obama administration in Washington worked behind the scenes to “turn off” a UN fact-finding mission into the Mavi Marmara massacre, as documents from the US mission in Geneva showed.

The International Criminal Court probed the incident but ultimately declined to open a formal investigation. Fatou Bensouda, the tribunal’s chief prosecutor at the time, stated in 2020 that war crimes may have been committed but the Israeli attack on the flotilla was not “sufficiently grave” to warrant prosecution.

That court has been petitioned to investigate the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, the iconic Al Jazeera reporter and US citizen who was shot in the head by an Israeli army sniper while covering a military raid in Jenin in 2022.

Later that year, Al Jazeera released a documentary laying out the complicity of the Biden administration in Israel’s cover-up of Abu Akleh’s death.

Palestinians with US citizenship may be among the nearly 40,900 killed in Gaza since 7 October. Thousands more Palestinians not reflected in the official fatality count are missing under the rubble of destroyed buildings or their unidentified bodies haven’t been recovered from the streets.

On Friday, Abed Ayoub, the executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, stated that “for decades, Israel has been killing Palestinians and US citizens without consequence, exposing the hypocrisy and double standards of US rule of law, our politicians and the media.”

[https://twitter.com/DaliaHatuqa/status/1832060228210192703]

“The same voices that outcried the death of an Israeli soldier with US citizenship held captive in Gaza remain silent when other US citizens, all civilians, are executed by Israeli forces,” Ayoub added, referring to Hersh Goldberg-Polin.

Goldberg-Polin, who was captured at a music festival during the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023, was found dead alongside five other captives in southern Gaza last Saturday.

Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic senator from Maryland, said on Friday that he had “repeatedly” raised concerns over the lack of accountability for the killing of US citizens by Israeli forces.

“The Biden administration has not been doing enough,” he said.

“If the Netanyahu government will not pursue justice for Americans, the US Department of Justice must,” he added.

Maureen Clare Murphy is senior editor of The Electronic Intifada.

8 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Julia Conley

Thousands of people gathered at London’s Picadilly Circus Saturday for the city’s latest march against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the United Kingdom’s continued support for the Israel Defense Forces, following what organizers called “a major victory in defense of the democratic right to protest.”

The Metropolitan Police on Friday dropped its restrictions on the march, which was the first pro-Palestinian protest since last October to proceed to the Israeli embassy in London.

The police had attempted to stop campaigners from gathering before 2:30 pm, conflicting with plans to begin the rally preceding the march at noon.

“They never provided any convincing explanation or evidence for this delay, and it has caused enormous, unnecessary difficulty to the organization of a large-scale demonstration,” Ben Jamal, who leads the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, one of the groups organizing the march, toldMiddle East Eye on Friday.

“It has unfortunately been part of a pattern of obstruction, delay, and lack of communication on the part of the Met which we will press them to review and reflect on for future demonstrations,” he added. “For tomorrow, we call on our supporters to turn out in their hundreds of thousands to show we will not be deterred from seeking an end to Israel’s genocide and justice for Palestine!”

Jamal said the police “saw sense and abandoned their unjustified and impractical attempt to delay the start of the march by two hours on Saturday,” allowing the march to begin at 1:30 pm.

[https://twitter.com/hzomlot/status/1832402479104868822]

During previous marches in which hundreds of thousands of people have demonstrated in solidarity with Palestinians since last October, police have blocked off the area surrounding the Israeli embassy in Kensington, threatening anyone who protested in the vicinity with arrest.

Marching to the embassy, demonstrators made a “renewed call to end the ongoing genocide in Gaza” and demanded an “immediate and full cessation of arms supplies to Israel.”

Earlier this week, the U.K. government announced it was suspending approximately 30 of its 350 arms export licenses for Israel, saying that “there does exist a clear risk that they might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law.”

Human rights advocates, medical professionals working in Gaza, and legal experts have for months demanded that Israel’s top international funders, including the U.S. and U.K., stop providing military aid as Israel has blocked humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza and waged attacks on civilian infrastructure, killing more than 40,000 people.

The country has also been accused of carrying out genocide in a case led by South Africa at the International Court of Justice; the court has ordered Israel to end its blockade on humanitarian aid and to prevent genocide in Gaza.

“We demand our government completely stop arming Israel and push for a cease-fire now,” said the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

[https://twitter.com/PSCupdates/status/1832398983106588817]

As Londoners marched on Saturday, the Gaza Health Ministry announced that at least 61 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli forces in the last two days. Four people were killed in a strike on Halimah al-Saadiyah school in Jabaliya, where displaced Palestinians have been sheltering, and three were killed in a bombing at Amr Ibn al-As school in Gaza City.

Media outlets in Palestine reported that a baby named Yaqeen al-Astal had become the 37th child in Gaza to die of malnutrition since Israel began its near-total aid blockade.

International outrage also grew on Saturday regarding the killing of a Turkish American activist, Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, in the West Bank on Friday. Local media and eyewitnesses said Eygi had been deliberately shot in the head by Israeli forces at a protest over the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements.

The U.S. called on Israel to investigate the killing on Friday, but Eygi’s family said in a statement that such a probe would not be “adequate.”

“We call on President [Joe] Biden, Vice President [Kamala] Harris, and Secretary of State [Antony] Blinken to order an independent investigation into the unlawful killing of a U.S. citizen and to ensure full accountability for the guilty parties,” said the family.

Stéphane Dujarric, spokesperson for the United Nations, called for “a full investigation of the circumstances” and said that “people should be held accountable. And again, civilians must be protected at all times.”

Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

8 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Kit Klarenberg

The banning of The Cradle from Facebook and Instagram shows a troubling alliance with Israeli-linked groups to silence voices critical of the occupation state, especially those media outlets covering its adversaries’ narratives.

3 Sep 2024 – On 16 August, social media giant Meta permanently banned The Cradle from Facebook and Instagram. The outlet’s accounts on those platforms, which had amassed over a hundred thousand followers and millions of views, were unilaterally purged without warning or a chance to appeal.

By Jake Johnson

“Apartheid Israel is targeting Gaza and the West Bank simultaneously, as part of an overall process of elimination, replacement, and territorial expansion,” said United Nations special rapporteur Francesca Albanese.

3 Sep 2024 – An independent United Nations expert warned Monday that “Israel’s genocidal violence risks leaking out of Gaza and into the occupied Palestinian territory as a whole” as Western governments, corporations, and other institutions keep up their support for the Israeli military, which stands accused of grave war crimes in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

By Akshaya Kumar

5 Sep 2024 – The United Nations Security Council should mobilize to prevent further atrocities in Myanmar. The Council’s inaction over the last few months starkly contrasts with the clear warnings from senior UN officials who are urgently ringing alarm bells. As the Council is grappling with calls for reform, the current silence on Myanmar only deepens the sense that the Council can’t rise to the moment when it matters.

The UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar warned in July that “the situation carries echoes of the lead-up to genocidal violence in 2016 and 2017.” In a rare joint statement, the UN special advisers on genocide prevention and the responsibility to protect urged the international community to undertake “joint efforts to reassess the crisis in Myanmar in the light of the significant developments that are unfolding and launch a robust coordinated effort.”

In the last few weeks, both the UN children’s agency, Unicef, and the UN’s acting resident coordinator in Myanmar have condemned attacks on civilians in Rakhine State.

The Council’s last open meeting on Myanmar was held in April. Britain is the “penholder” on Myanmar, which means it takes the lead on all statements or resolutions in the Council and bears unique responsibility to galvanize the members. The Council has allowed paralysis at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) level around Myanmar to influence its approach, leading to paralysis at the international level too. The Council has also failed to follow up on its December 2022 resolution on Myanmar, the body’s first since the country’s independence in 1948.

In contrast, both the UN Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly have adopted a series of stronger but nonbinding resolutions on Myanmar, including calls for an embargo on arms and jet fuel to the military junta. The crisis presents a key test for the UK’s new Labour government, which has claimed the mantle of “progressive realism” and defense of international law.

Progressive realism may promote engaging with regional blocs, but allowing regional paralysis to mute the Security Council amid atrocities certainly is neither progressive nor pragmatic.

Since the breakdown of an unofficial ceasefire between the Myanmar military and the ethnic Rakhine Arakan Army last November, Human Rights Watch has been warning that the ethnic Rohingya population, which was already marginalized, faced even greater risks. The Rohingya have been subjected for years to movement restrictions, mass detention, denial of medical care persecution and apartheid.

The recent violence has included the killing of nearly 200 Rohingya civilians on the banks of the Naf River. They were attempting to escape hostilities after monthlong Arakan Army attacks on Rohingya villages and neighborhoods. Satellite imagery and thermal anomaly data analyzed by Human Rights Watch reveal that more than 40 villages and hamlets in Buthidaung township were partly or completely destroyed by fire from April 24 to May 21.

The Myanmar military has been stoking tensions between the Rakhine Buddhist and Rohingya Muslim communities for years, most recently through the unlawful recruitment of Rohingya men and boys, triggering heightened hate speech and misinformation.

These divisive tactics were previously used during the ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya in 2012. The  community’s vulnerability was then deepened by the military junta’s 2017 scorched-earth campaign, rampant sexual violence and genocidal acts, which left villages burned to ash as several hundred thousand people fled to Bangladesh.

More than 327,000 Rohingya have been newly displaced across Rakhine State since fighting resumed in late 2023, bringing the overall number of displaced people to well over a half a million. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that 400,000 people are experiencing “food gaps” in Rakhine State with cross-border supplies limited because of the conflict.

Members of the military junta, the Arakan Army and other armed groups could also face scrutiny by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged crimes amid the current conflict committed in Bangladesh, such as forced recruitment and deportation of Rohingya.

The court is investigating the situation, but its jurisdiction is limited to crimes committed, at least in part, in Bangladesh, an ICC member country, or on the territory of any other member of the court. The Security Council should expand the court’s jurisdiction by referring the situation in Myanmar, which is not an ICC member country, to the court.

Recent events also underscore the blatant disregard of the provisional measures ordered by International Court of Justice in the ongoing case brought by Gambia against Myanmar. The provisional measures are binding, and the Council should play a role in enforcing them. In a June report, the UN high commissioner for human rights found that “actions taken by all parties that endanger the Rohingya appear inconsistent with the provisional measures ordered by the International Court of Justice.”

Article 94(2) of the UN Charter makes clear that parties to disputes may take recourse to the Security Council if their opponent fails to “perform obligations incumbent upon it under a judgment rendered by the Court.”

The Council’s great-power deadlock means that it has been far too quiet on Myanmar for years. But if it chooses to let recent events pass without even a meeting or public show of concern, that neglect will stain the legacy of every ambassador sitting on the Council, particularly the UK, which is supposed to “lead” on Myanmar.

Akshaya Kumar is the director of Crisis Advocacy.

9 September 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Gideon Levy

8 Sep 2024 – On Friday [6 Sep], 11 funerals were held in the Jenin refugee camp. Eight of the deceased were camp residents who were killed by the Israeli army; three died of natural causes. None of them could be buried during the 10 preceding days, on account of the brutal Israel Defense Forces operation in the camp. The bodies of another five people were seized by the army, for its purposes.

On Friday morning the IDF left the camp, after completing the mission that was given the sadistic name Operation Summer Camp, and residents began returning to what was left of their homes after the army’s camp. They were in shock.

One man said Saturday that the sights were even worse than the scenes of destruction after 2002’s Operation Defensive Shield and that the behavior of the soldiers during those 10 terrible days was more violent and vicious than ever before. The spirit of the war in Gaza has become the zeitgeist of the army.

My interlocutor, Jamal Zubeidi – who had already lost nine family members to the Palestinian struggle, including two of his sons, and who last week lost Hamudi, the son of his nephew Zakaria Zabeidi – returned once again to a ruined home, as in 2002. During the 10 days of the operation, he hid in his daughter’s home on the mountain. About two-thirds of the camp’s approximately 12,000 residents were removed from it, led in refugee columns under the supervision of the soldiers, as in Gaza.

As the people of Jenin buried their dead, soldiers shot and killed a 13-year-old girl. Bana Laboum died in her home in the village of Qaryout, whose residents tried to defend themselves after settlers set fire to their fields. The settlers riot, the army comes – and kills Palestinians, oddly enough. “Confrontations,” the media calls the incidents. The rape victim confronts their rapist, the robbery victim their robber. In the insanity of the occupation, the aggressor is the victim and the victim is the aggressor.

At around the same time, not far from Qaryout, in the village of Beita, soldiers killed a protester – an American human-rights activist who was also a Turkish citizen. Aysenur Ezgi Eygi was shot in the head during a demonstration against the wildcat settlement Evyatar, which was built on the village’s land and has already cost the lives of at least seven Palestinians.

The White House said that it was “deeply disturbed by the tragic death.” But this was not a “tragic death.” Jonathan Pollak, a Haaretz journalist said that he saw the soldiers on a rooftop: “I saw the soldiers shooting. … I saw them aiming,” adding that at the time there were no active clashes. As to the “deep disturbance” in the White House, it will pass quickly.

President Joe Biden has not called the woman’s family, as he called the Goldberg-Polin family; Ezgi Eygi was also not declared an American hero, as was Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was abducted and executed.

On Saturday, Josh Breiner published a video filmed in Megiddo Prison the morning of the criminal killings, in which dozens of Palestinians lie on the floor – prostrate, half-naked, their wrists bound behind their backs – as Israeli guards walk past them; one holds a police dog that passes inches from the detainees’ faces, barking viciously.

The Israeli flag flies over this disgraceful spectacle – a gift to Itamar Ben-Gvir. The Israel Prison Service reassured the handful of outraged observers: “It’s a routine exercise.” This is routine. A common prison service entertainment, a Shabbat ceremony for the sadistic guards.

All this happened on Friday, an ordinary day. Israel yawned. It was much more upset by the (infuriating) arrest of a young Jewish woman who threw a handful of sand at Ben-Gvir than by the fatal shooting of a non-Jewish woman who was motivated by principle no less than the young woman from Tel Aviv.

And in the ruins of the Jenin refugee camp, Jamal Zubeidi tried to gauge the extent of the damage to his home, the contents of which soldiers threw into the street. There was no power in the camp, and darkness descended on it. In all our long years of friendship, I had never heard Zubeidi sound more despairing. “They will return and we will return. A new generation will come. It won’t end here,” he said wearily.

Look at what happened Friday in the Jenin refugee camp, in Qaryout, in Beita and in Megiddo Prison – and perhaps you will see us, finally.

Gideon Levy is a Haaretz columnist and a member of the newspaper’s editorial board. Levy joined Haaretz in 1982, and spent four years as the newspaper’s deputy editor.

9 September 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

4 Sep 2024 – In 1989 I served as an advisor to the first post-communist government of Poland, and helped to devise a strategy of financial stabilization and economic transformation.  My recommendations in 1989 called for large-scale Western financial support for Poland’s economy in order to prevent a runaway inflation, enable a convertible Polish currency at a stable exchange rate, and an opening of trade and investment with the countries of the European Community (now the European Union).  These recommendations were heeded by the US Government, the G7, and the International Monetary Fund.

Based on my advice, a $1 billion Zloty stabilization fund was established that served as the backing of Poland’s newly convertible currency.  Poland was granted a standstill on debt servicing on the Soviet-era debt, and then a partial cancellation of that debt.  Poland was granted significant development assistance in the form of grants and loans by the official international community.
Poland’s subsequent economic and social performance speaks for itself.  Despite Poland’s economy having experienced a decade of collapse in the 1980s, Poland began a period of rapid economic growth in the early 1990s.  The currency remained stable and inflation low.  In 1990, Poland’s GDP per capita (measured in purchasing-power terms) was 33% of neighboring Germany.  By 2024, it had reached 68% of Germany’s GDP per capita, following decades of rapid economic growth.

On the basis of Poland’s economic success, I was contacted in 1990 by Mr. Grigory Yavlinsky, economic advisor to President Mikhail Gorbachev, to offer similar advice to the Soviet Union, and in particular to help mobilize financial support for the economic stabilization and transformation of the Soviet Union. One outcome of that work was a 1991 project undertaken at the Harvard Kennedy School with Professors Graham Allison, Stanley Fisher, and Robert Blackwill. We jointly proposed a “Grand Bargain” to the US, G7, and Soviet Union, in which we advocated large-scale financial support by the US and G7 countries for Gorbachev’s ongoing economic and political reforms. The report was published as Window of Opportunity: The Grand Bargain for Democracy in the Soviet Union (1 October 1991).

The proposal for large-scale Western support for the Soviet Union was flatly rejected by the Cold Warriors in the White House.  Gorbachev came to the G7 Summit in London in July 1991 asking for financial assistance, but left empty-handed.  Upon his return to Moscow, he was abducted in the coup attempt of August 1991.  At that point, Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Federation, assumed effective leadership of the crisis-ridden Soviet Union.  By December, under the weight of decisions by Russia and other Soviet republics, the Soviet Union was dissolved with the emergence of 15 newly independent nations.

In September 1991, I was contacted by Yegor Gaidar, economic advisor to Yeltsin, and soon to be acting Prime Minister of newly independent Russian Federation as of December 1991. He requested that I come to Moscow to discuss the economic crisis and ways to stabilize the Russian economy. At that stage, Russia was on the verge of hyperinflation, financial default to the West, the collapse of international trade with the other republics and with the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe, and intense shortages of food in Russian cities resulting from the collapse of food deliveries from the farmlands and the pervasive black marketing of foodstuffs and other essential commodities.

I recommended that Russia reiterate the call for large-scale Western financial assistance, including an immediate standstill on debt servicing, longer-term debt relief, a currency stabilization fund for the ruble (as for the Zloty in Poland), large-scale grants of dollars and European currencies to support urgently needed food and medical imports and other essential commodity flows, and immediate financing by the IMF, World Bank, and other institutions to protect Russia’s social services (healthcare, education, and others).

In November 1991, Gaidar met with the G7 Deputies (the deputy finance ministers of the G7 countries) and requested a standstill on debt servicing.  This request was flatly denied.  To the contrary, Gaidar was told that unless Russia continued to service every last dollar as it came due, emergency food aid on the high seas heading to Russia would be immediately turned around and sent back to the home ports.  I met with an ashen-faced Gaidar immediately after the G7 Deputies meeting.

In December 1991, I met with Yeltsin in the Kremlin to brief him on Russia’s financial crisis and on my continued hope and advocacy for emergency Western assistance, especially as Russia was now emerging as an independent, democratic nation after the end of the Soviet Union.  He requested that I serve as an advisor to his economic team, with a focus on attempting to mobilize the needed large-scale financial support.  I accepted that challenge and the advisory position on a strictly unpaid basis.

Upon returning from Moscow, I went to Washington to reiterate my call for a debt standstill, a currency stabilization fund, and emergency financial support.  In my meeting with Mr. Richard Erb, Deputy Managing Director of the IMF in charge of overall relations with Russia, I learned that the US did not support this kind of financial package.  I once again pleaded the economic and financial case, and was determined to change US policy.  It had been my experience in other advisory contexts that it might require several months to sway Washington on its policy approach.

Indeed, during 1991-94 I would advocate non-stop but without success for large-scale Western support for Russia’s crisis-ridden economy, and support for the other 14 newly independent states of the former Soviet Union. I made these appeals in countless speeches, meetings, conferences, op-eds, and academic articles. Mine was a lonely voice in the US in calling for such support.  I had learned from economic history — most importantly the crucial writings of John Maynard Keynes (especially Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1919) — and from my own advisory experiences in Latin America and Eastern Europe, that external financial support for Russia could well be the make or break of Russia’s urgently needed stabilization effort.

It is worth quoting at length here from my article in the Washington Post in November 1991 to present the gist of my argument at the time:

This is the third time in this century in which the West must address the vanquished. When the German and Hapsburg Empires collapsed after World War I, the result was financial chaos and social dislocation. Keynes predicted in 1919 that this utter collapse in Germany and Austria, combined with a lack of vision from the victors, would conspire to produce a furious backlash towards military dictatorship in Central Europe. Even as brilliant a finance minister as Joseph Schumpeter in Austria could not stanch the torrent towards hyperinflation and hyper-nationalism, and the United States descended into the isolationism of the 1920s under the “leadership” of Warren G. Harding and Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge.

After World War II, the victors were smarter. Harry Truman called for U.S. financial support to Germany and Japan, as well as the rest of Western Europe. The sums involved in the Marshall Plan, equal to a few percent of the recipient countries’ GNPs, was not enough to actually rebuild Europe. It was, though, a political lifeline to the visionary builders of democratic capitalism in postwar Europe.

Now the Cold War and the collapse of communism have left Russia as prostrate, frightened and unstable as was Germany after World War I and World War II. Inside Russia, Western aid would have the galvanizing psychological and political effect that the Marshall Plan had for Western Europe. Russia’s psyche has been tormented by 1,000 years of brutal invasions, stretching from Genghis Khan to Napoleon and Hitler.

Churchill judged that the Marshall Plan was history’s “most unsordid act,” and his view was shared by millions of Europeans for whom the aid was the first glimpse of hope in a collapsed world. In a collapsed Soviet Union, we have a remarkable opportunity to raise the hopes of the Russian people through an act of international understanding. The West can now inspire the Russian people with another unsordid act.

This advice went unheeded, but that did not deter me from continuing my advocacy.  In early 1992, I was invited to make the case on the PBS news show The McNeil-Lehrer Report.  I was on air with acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger.  After the show, he asked me to ride with him from the PBS studio in Arlington, Virginia back to Washington, D.C.  Our conversation was the following.  “Jeffrey, please let me explain to you that your request for large-scale aid is not going to happen.  Even assuming that I agree with your arguments — and Poland’s finance minister [Leszek Balcerowicz] made the same points to me just last week — it’s not going to happen.  Do you want to know why?  Do you know what this year is?”  “1992,” I answered.  “Do you know that this means?”  “An election year?” I replied.  “Yes, this is an election year.  It’s not going to happen.”

Russia’s economic crisis worsened rapidly in 1992.  Gaidar lifted price controls at the start of 1992, not as some purported miracle cure but because the Soviet-era official fixed prices were irrelevant under the pressures of the black markets, the repressed inflation (that is, rapid inflation in the black-market prices and therefore the rising the gap with the official prices), the complete breakdown of the Soviet-era planning mechanism, and the massive corruption engendered by the few goods still being exchanged at the official prices far below the black-market prices.

Russia urgently needed a stabilization plan of the kind that Poland had undertaken, but such a plan was out of reach financially (because of the lack of external support) and politically (because the lack of external support also meant the lack of any internal consensus on what to do).  The crisis was compounded by the collapse of trade among the newly independent post-Soviet nations and the collapse of trade between the former Soviet Union and its former satellite nations in Central and Eastern Europe, which were now receiving Western aid and were reorienting trade towards Western Europe and away from the former Soviet Union.

During 1992 I continued without any success to try to mobilize the large-scale Western financing that I believed to be ever-more urgent.  I pinned my hopes on the newly elected Presidency of Bill Clinton. These hopes too were quickly dashed. Clinton’s key advisor on Russia, Johns Hopkins Professor Michael Mandelbaum, told me privately in November 1992 that the incoming Clinton team had rejected the concept of large-scale assistance for Russia. Mandelbaum soon announced publicly that he would not serve in the new administration. I met with Clinton’s new Russia advisor, Strobe Talbott, but discovered that he was largely unaware of the pressing economic realities. He asked me to send him some materials about hyperinflations, which I duly did.

At the end of 1992, after one year of trying to help Russia, I told Gaidar that I would step aside as my recommendations were not heeded in Washington or the European capitals.  Yet around Christmas Day I received a phone call from Russia’s incoming financing minister, Mr. Boris Fyodorov. He asked me to meet him in Washington in the very first days of 1993.  We met at the World Bank. Fyodorov, a gentleman and highly intelligent expert who tragically died young a few years later, implored me to remain as an advisor to him during 1993.  I agreed to do so, and spent one more year attempting to help Russia implement a stabilization plan. I resigned in December 1993, and publicly announced my departure as advisor in the first days of 1994.

My continued advocacy in Washington once again fell on deaf ears in the first year of the Clinton Administration, and my own forebodings became greater.  I repeatedly invoked the warnings of history in my public speaking and writing, as in this piece in the New Republic in January 1994, soon after I had stepped aside from the advisory role.

Above all, Clinton should not console himself with the thought that nothing too serious can happen in Russia. Many Western policymakers have confidently predicted that if the reformers leave now, they will be back in a year, after the Communists once again prove themselves unable to govern. This might happen, but chances are it will not. History has probably given the Clinton administration one chance for bringing Russia back from the brink; and it reveals an alarmingly simple pattern. The moderate Girondists did not follow Robespierre back into power. With rampant inflation, social disarray and falling living standards, revolutionary France opted for Napoleon instead. In revolutionary Russia, Aleksandr Kerensky did not return to power after Lenin’s policies and civil war had led to hyperinflation. The disarray of the early 1920s opened the way for Stalin’s rise to power. Nor was Bruning’sgovernment given another chance in Germany once Hitler came to power in 1933.

It is worth clarifying that my advisory role in Russia was limited to macroeconomic stabilization and international financing.  I was not involved in Russia’s privatization program which took shape during 1993-4, nor in the various measures and programs (such as the notorious “shares-for-loans” scheme in 1996) that gave rise to the new Russian oligarchs.  On the contrary, I opposed the various kinds of measures that Russia was undertaking, believing them to be rife with unfairness and corruption.  I said as much in both the public and in private to Clinton officials, but they were not listening to me on that account either.  Colleagues of mine at Harvard were involved in the privatization work, but they assiduously kept me far away from their work. Two were later charged by the US government with insider dealing in activities in Russia which I had absolutely no foreknowledge or involvement of any kind.  My only role in that matter was to dismiss them from the Harvard Institute for International Development for violating the internal HIID rules against conflicts of interest in countries that HIID advised.

The failure of the West to provide large-scale and timely financial support to Russia and the other newly independent nations of the former Soviet Union definitely exacerbated the serious economic and financial crisis that faced those countries in the early 1990s.  Inflation remained very high for several years.  Trade and hence economic recovery were seriously impeded.  Corruption flourished under the policies of parceling out valuable state assets to private hands.

All of these dislocations gravely weakened the public trust in the new governments of the region and the West. This collapse in social trust brought to my mind at the time the adage of Keynes in 1919, following the disaster Versailles settlement and the hyperinflations that followed: “There is no subtler, no surer means of over- turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and it does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

During the tumultuous decade of the 1990s, Russia’s social services fell into decline.  When this decline was coupled with the greatly increased stresses on society, the result was a sharp rise in Russia’s alcohol-related deaths.  Whereas in Poland, the economic reforms were accompanied by a rise in life expectancy and public health, the very opposite occurred in crisis-riven Russia.

Even with all of these economic debacles, and with Russia’s default in 1998, the grave economic crisis and lack of Western support were not the definitive breaking points of US-Russian relations.  In 1999, when Vladimir Putin became Prime Minister and in 2000 when he became President, Putin sought friendly and mutually supportive international relations between Russia and the West.  Many European leaders, for example, Italy’s Romano Prodi, have spoken extensively about Putin’s goodwill and positive intentions towards strong Russia-EU relations in the first years of his presidency.

It was in military affairs rather than in economics that the Russian – Western relations ended up falling apart in the 2000s.  As with finance, the West was militarily dominant in the 1990s, and certainly had the means to promote strong and positive relations with Russia.  Yet the US was far more interested in Russia’s subservience to NATO than it was in stable relations with Russia.

At the time of German reunification, both the US and Germany repeatedly promised Gorbachev and then Yeltsin that the West would not take advantage of German reunification and the end of the Warsaw Pact by expanding the NATO military alliance eastward.  Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin reiterated the importance of this US-NATO pledge.  Yet within just a few years, Clinton completely reneged on the Western commitment, and began the process of NATO enlargement.  Leading US diplomats, led by the great statesman-scholar George Kennan, warned at the time that the NATO enlargement would lead to disaster: “The view, bluntly stated, is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.” So, it has proved.

Here is not the place to revisit all of the foreign policy disasters that have resulted from US arrogance towards Russia, but it suffices here to mention a brief and partial chronology of key events.  In 1999, NATO bombed Belgrade for 78 days with the goal of breaking Serbia apart and giving rise to an independent Kosovo, now home to a major NATO base in the Balkans.  In 2002, the US unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty over Russia’s strenuous objections.  In 2003, the US and NATO allies repudiated the UN Security Council by going to war in Iraq on false pretenses.  In 2004, the US continued with NATO enlargement, this time to the Baltic States and countries in the Black Sea region (Bulgaria and Romania) and the Balkans.  In 2008, over Russia’s urgent and strenuous objections, the US pledged to expand NATO to Georgia and Ukraine.

In 2011, the US tasked the CIA to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Russia.  In 2011, NATO bombed Libya in order to overthrow Moammar Qaddafi.  In 2014, the US conspired with Ukrainian nationalist forces to overthrow Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych.  In 2015, the US began to place Aegis anti-ballistic missiles in Eastern Europe(Romania), a short distance from Russia. In 2016-2020, the US supported Ukraine in undermining the Minsk II agreement, despite its unanimous backing by the UN Security Council.  In 2021, the new Biden Administration refused to negotiate with Russia over the question of NATO enlargement to Ukraine.  In April 2022, the US called on Ukraine to withdraw from peace negotiations with Russia.

Looking back on the events around 1991-93, and to the events that followed, it is clear that the US was determined to say no to Russia’s aspirations for peaceful and mutually respectful integration of Russia and the West.  The end of the Soviet period and the beginning of the Yeltsin Presidency occasioned the rise of the neoconservatives (neocons) to power in the United States. The neocons did not and do not want a mutually respectful relationship with Russia.  They sought and until today seek a unipolar world led by a hegemonic US, in which Russia and other nations will be subservient.

In this US-led world order, the neocons envisioned that the US and the US alone will determine the utilization of the dollar-based banking system, the placement of overseas US military bases, the extent of NATO membership, and the deployment of US missile systems, without any veto or say by other countries, certainly including Russia.  That arrogant foreign policy has led to several wars and to a widening rupture of relations between the US-led bloc of nations and the rest of the world.  As an advisor to Russia during two years, late-1991 to late-93, I experienced first-hand the early days of neoconservatism applied to Russia, though it would take many years of events afterwards to recognize the full extent of the new and dangerous turn in US foreign policy that began in the early 1990s.

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

9 September 2024

Source: transcend.org