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By Brian Terrell

Current events concerning Turkey and the Kurds in Syria remind me of a conversation I had with a US Air Force colonel almost 17 years ago in a courtroom in Des Moines. To refresh my memory, I dug deep into my closet and dusted off the transcript of the case, “STATE OF IOWA, plaintiff vs. CHRISTINE GAUNT et al.,” in which I was a defendant, heard in February, 2003, the month before the US invasion of Iraq. The following quotes from that dialogue are verbatim per the transcript.

The case concerned an alleged trespass at the headquarters of the 132nd Tactical Fighter Wing of the Iowa Air National Guard, based at Des Moines International civilian airport, on October 26, 2002. Activists from around Iowa blocked the gates of the base in protest of the 132nd’s participation in Operation Northern Watch, the no-fly zone over northern Iraq imposed by the US after the Gulf War that lasted until the Iraq War in 2003. Pilots and crews of the Guard’s F-16 fleet went to Turkey to participate in patrolling northern Iraq or to Kuwait to patrol in Operation Southern Watch for a month during most of the years those no-fly zones were in place.

One of the witnesses called by the state was Colonel Douglas Pierce, Vice Commander of the Iowa Air National Guard. Until a few weeks before our protest, Col. Pierce was commander of the 132nd and had personally led several deployments of the Iowa Air Guard to Operation Northern Watch.

Under direct questioning by the prosecutor, Col. Pierce described how the 132nd was under federal control as part of the US Air Force while posted overseas and how the no-fly zones were authorized and conducted under a United Nations resolution. The resolution that Col. Pierce cited did not exist. Secretary General of the UN, Boutros Boutros-Ghali insisted that the no-fly zones were “illegal”, but US government and the Air Force often used this fiction to justify their almost daily incursions into Iraqi airspace that often resulted in civilian casualties.

Another fiction that Col. Pierce swore to under oath is the purpose of the no-fly zone. Defending myself, I had the opportunity to cross examine the Colonel, “Do you have any knowledge of what the purpose of that no-fly zone—the northern watch is?” Predictably, Colonel Pierce testified according to the official narrative: “Primary Purpose is, obviously, to reinforce the no-fly zone in northern Iraq and primarily to keep Saddam Hussein from attacking the Kurds who live in northern Iraq in which he had done on numerous occasions prior to the establishment of those no-fly zones.”

The base of operations for the US Air Force patrols over Iraq was Incirlik Air Base, the colonel affirmed. “So this Incirlik Air Base is – whose air base is it?” I asked. “Is it the United States air base?” “No. It belongs to Turkey,” he answered. “There are Turkish forces there too?” “Yes sir.”

“Have US Air Force enforcement of no-fly zones ever been interrupted so that the Turkish Air Force can go into Iraq and bomb Kurdish cities there?” I asked. “I don’t have personal knowledge of that,” Col. Pierce replied, followed by an eloquent and perfect example of Orwellian doublespeak: “All I can tell you is that our activities in northern Iraq have been restricted when supposedly events like that took place. And the reason our activities were restricted is that they didn’t want to have any black eye, if you will, on the United States or UN forces that they could accuse us of doing that if that’s what they did.”

What the colonel told the court in is that he did not know about the Turkish Air Force bombing Kurds in the very zone he swore that the US Air Force was there to protect, but he testified that when, not if but when, “supposedly events like that took place,” US Air Force activities in the zone were restricted. And the reason for that restriction was “they (the US and UN) didn’t want to have any black eye” for anything that the Turkish forces did to the Kurds.

“So if I got this right,” I asked just to be sure, “the watch is primarily to protect the Kurds. However, the watch is lowered when Turkey wishes to attack the Kurds, is that correct?” Col. Pierce had no answer, but taking a cue from the Nuremberg trials he demurred: “You are asking me to make foreign policy decisions, and that’s well above my pay grade.” Rather than allow proceedings to edge any nearer to the truth, the prosecutor intervened, “Objection, Your Honor” and the judge complied, “Okay, I’ll sustain that objection.”

The “green light” that the US regularly gave Turkish armed forces to attack Kurdish communities in northern Iraq during the years of Operation Northern Watch has recently allowed Turkish forces into northern Syria to attack Kurds there previously under US protection. As President Trump understands the situation at present, using the language of ethnic cleansing, “they (Turkey) had to have it cleaned out.” Trump, in his cynical callousness toward the Kurds, stands in illustrious company. It was not Saddam Hussein who first used chemical weapons against the Kurds of northern Iraq (with assistance and approval of the US). That distinction belongs to Winston Churchill, who as Britain’s Secretary for War and Air in 1920 answered his critics: “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against primitive tribes.”

Incirlik Air Base is again in the news. On Wednesday, October 16, President Trump publicly affirmed the open secret that the US, in a NATO nuclear sharing agreement, has up to 50 B61 nuclear bombs stored in bunkers at Incirlik. In these tense times, Trump was asked, are those nuclear warheads safe? Whereas Douglas Pierce, Vice Commander of the Iowa Air National Guard testifying in court in 2003, had to stick to the official narrative that Incirlik “belongs to Turkey,” Trump is under no such restraints and was able to boast about Incirlik as our own: “We’re confident, and we have a great — a great air base there, a very powerful air base. That air base alone can take anyplace. It’s a large, powerful air base.”

The number of overseas US military bases, estimated at more than 800 in some 70 countries, is hard to gauge, given that they often are camouflaged as bases of the host country. The constitution of Honduras, for one example, does not permit a foreign military presence and officially, no US troops are based there. Under a “hand shake” agreement with the US, however, Palmerola Air Base today unofficially houses some 600 US troops, down from a peak of thousands in the 1980s. In violation of Irish neutrality, the civilian airport at Shannon is a virtual US air base, with more than 3 million US soldiers and their weapons having passed through since 2001. Menwith Hill, in Yorkshire, United Kingdom, officially a Royal Air Force Base, is the nerve center of the US National Security Agency’s full spectrum surveillance and targeted assassination programs with only a token RAF presence. The US has the same nuclear sharing arrangement under which US nuclear warheads are maintained in Turkey with five other NATO member nations. No nation hosts a US military base without surrendering its sovereignty and its integrity to some extent.

Trump’s confidence is well placed. Along with Incirlik, the US has many “great” and “very powerful” military bases around the world. In 2003, Col. Pierce’s courtroom testimony revealed the purpose behind this great game of smoke and mirrors: it is to keep the US from getting a “black eye,” so that no one “could accuse us of doing that if that’s what they did.”

Trump says that “We’re getting out of the endless wars” but that is a lie. While exposing the Kurds to Turkish aggression, roughly 1,000 U.S. troops remain in Syria and there are 5,000 troops across the border in Iraq. Now Trump is sending 1,800 more US troops to Saudi Arabia.

Trump is already claiming his place in history now for a cease fire that Turkey says isn’t one. “And you know what? Civilization is very happy. It’s a great thing for civilization,” he boasts. “There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people,” said the historian Howard Zinn, and there is no lie that can cover the black eye of US complicity in genocide.

Brian Terrell (brian@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence

19 October 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Daisaku Ikeda

“That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it,” observed Aristotle, highlighting an all-too-common human tendency. His warning is still relevant today, especially in our fight against climate change.

The Paris Agreement, adopted in December 2015, is an international framework to strengthen efforts to mitigate global warming. However, as UN Secretary-General António Guterres warns, “climate change is moving faster than our efforts to address it,” and is posing a threat to the very survival of humankind. This year alone has seen strong heat waves sweeping over Europe and India, and record high temperatures in the Arctic region including Alaska and Siberia.

According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the long-term trend of rising global temperatures is undeniably related to many of the extreme weather events seen all over the world, and this is likely to continue for some time.

As the phrases climate crisis and climate emergency ring in our ears more and more, the UN Climate Action Summit 2019 will take place in New York on September 23. Our world stands at a crucial crossroads: Will governments be able to step up their concerted efforts to reduce the causes of global warming such as greenhouse gas emissions, and effectively respond to the impact of rising temperatures including loss and damage caused by extreme weather?

The rising sea levels due to the melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, as well as heat waves, torrential rain and other extreme weather events have had devastating effects on economies and businesses. Moreover, the effects of climate change are driving more and more people into forced displacement.

The Toda Peace Institute, which I founded in 1996, has been working in recent years on a research program on Climate Change and Conflict that focuses on forced migration. The research has highlighted the extremely grave situation that the people of the Pacific Islands are facing. Affected by rising sea levels, people and communities in the region are being forced to consider relocation, while little attention has been given to what this means to them emotionally and spiritually.

To many Pacific Island societies, one’s ancestral land is like a mother. Being forced to move from the land to which one is deeply connected is almost equivalent to losing one’s fundamental identity. Ontological security that our native land provides cannot be replaced by material security guaranteed by resettlement to a new site. The research program urges that such inseparable connections between people and their lands be included as a vital perspective in planning action to combat climate change.

I am reminded of the Buddhist teaching of the Four Views of the Sal Grove, which illustrates how differences in people’s mental or spiritual state or perspective will cause them to see the same thing in completely different ways.

For example, the sight of the same forest might inspire one person to be moved by its natural beauty and another to calculate its economic value. The problem is that what is missing in one’s perspective will also be completely lacking in one’s overall worldview.

Consequently, the loss of something irreplaceably precious to a certain community can cause great suffering and deprivation without even being noticed by the overwhelming majority of people.

As we develop responses to climate change challenges, we must consider and incorporate the needs and perspectives of those who are affected by the impact of global warming around the world and who are also vulnerable to gender inequalities and other forms of structural discrimination, rather than simply focusing on economic costs that are more easily quantified.

In this regard, I hope that the leaders of governments who will be attending the Climate Action Summit in New York will reexamine the way they engage with the world, and strengthen collaborative action through their deliberations on global warming challenges.

In order to powerfully advance the Paris Agreement, they must take the initiative to find ways to cut greenhouse gases in every sector from power generation and transportation to food production and distribution, as well as finding ways to increase carbon dioxide absorption, including the planting of trees.

As part of the lead-up to the Summit, the UN Climate Youth Summit will take place on September 21, bringing together young people from around the world.

It is certainly not an easy task to halt global warming. But if we take youth initiatives seriously as a starting point from which to develop a hope-inspiring scenario that engages more people to take action, I believe it will certainly be possible to open a way to build a sustainable global society. Indeed the fate of humanity in this century rests on our relentless efforts to follow the lead of our youth in this respect.

Daisaku Ikeda is a Budhist philosopher, peace builder and educator

19 October 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Mudasir Firdosi

Kashmir has been cut off from the rest of the world for more than two months now, with little certainty about what is coming next. Kashmiris living in and outside the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir remain disconnected with hardly any means to communicate with each other. Just a few days ago some mobile connectivity was restored. Terrible stories of loss, grief, and mourning are making rounds on social media, few news outlets, and mostly within the minds of Kashmiris. The days of siege have become another statistic with most losing count. People are hearing about the deaths and ill-health of their loved ones with little detail or ability to make it to the funeral or the bedside. No one is talking out about the children stuck in homes, shut schools, and not to mention those beaten, tortured, and incarcerated. People with chronic and acute diseases are dying undocumented with only God to blame. The collective punishment of Kashmiris is working.

The perpetual worry about that ‘phone call’ has traumatized so many. One fears that people are developing traumatic stress even when not physically present in the valley. Even when people do manage a phone call after begging or borrowing, the harrowing silence on the other side says it all. Although most people talk about everything being well, the deafening silence you hear even when words are being spoken is unmissable. How does a nation reconcile and sleep at night with this travesty in their name? Here a billion or more souls if not always celebrating, are content with what is being done to millions of other human beings in an alleged part of the same country in their name. Who shares the blame if something wrong is happening? The home minister of India declared that ‘It is all in your mind’ and everything is ‘normal’ in Kashmir. You may refuse to agree with him but most of the Indians, educated, illiterate, liberal, religious, atheists, left-wing, right-wing, rich, poor, men, and women are convinced that Kashmiris need disciplining and that this is for their best. How does one argue with that?

Most Indians are ordinary, hardworking, friendly people, who claim to love animals and would not harm a fly. How do they reconcile with what their state is doing to fellow human beings? Indian friends, the close ones, like others, decided to remain silent. They would not even ask if the family was alright and did we manage to get in touch. They will bleed for you in case of an accidental injury to you and will remain by your bedside till recovery. But what is happening here then? What kind of morality has been created? Would sympathizing with Kashmiris mean a betrayal of their own country? What about the claim of belonging to the same country? Please feel free to ponder. Something has happened. Somewhere the fear of the other has been used so convincingly that it has managed to break all the bonds, be it of friendship or simply of being human. After all,India claims to be the propagator of vegetarianism, desperately trying to save cows even if that means ignoring the lynching of fellow citizens while practicing ahimsa and non-violence.

Lately, the concept of the ‘nation first’ is doing rounds. Nothing can be said or written against ‘the nation’. But what makes the nation; the current ruling party and the Prime Minister, the land, or the idea of a map in one’s head? Or it is the religion of the majority, the conquest of minorities or something else. What about the people who live in that besieged piece of land? Do they also make the nation? Maim, punish, and kill people to save the nation from some unknown force. Does the nation need saving or a self-fulfilling prophecy of destroying the nation is in action? Treating Kashmiris as an extension of the neighbouring country and punishing them collectively to revenge generational hate for the neighbour only proves Kashmir is not part of the ‘alleged nation’ on whose name all this is being done.

History is a witness that nationhood was used by most tyrants, convincing the majority using fear, prosperity, and superiority as tools to rise to power. Once in power, unimaginable things were done in the name of the nation, building on the fear of minorities and weaker sections. Although none of the fascists remained to live their dreams and were victims of their own cruelty, but in the process the death and destruction they managed to offer humankind is unimaginable. Once they are done with one group, they do have to go after others. You cannot fathom that a fire set in a neighbour’s backyard will not spread to burn the whole village. It has already started, people are even being booked for writing open letters, and students are being thrown out of colleges just for some minor criticism of the dear Prime Minister.

The generational trauma, displacement, and human suffering change the course of history both for good and bad. What is then the solution, dignity in living or living with dignity? It does not take long to realize that putting others through pain and suffering does not make any nation happy. You may think that whatever is happening has nothing to do with you, but everything done in your name is your burden. More so, instead of thinking and questioning, blindly condoning the state action seals the deal. Some argue that if Kashmiris did not create trouble, in other words, aspire for freedom and demand a referendum as per the promises made to them by all the parties involved, Jammu & Kashmir will still have been a statehood the least. Blaming victims is not a new strategy. Like Kashmiris have a choice to decide. They are still to make to the table allegedly meant to decide on their fate. Who does not desire freedom?

Lastly, it is not late to question yourself, if not the state. Are you sure you know what is being done in your name? Are you the nation or the next victim of the nation? If you are the nation, then own it and live with the consequences. Democracy cannot be imposed, neither can freedom.Everyone knows it is not about development, freedom of women or education of youth. Neither is it about terrorism as mostly purported to slander Kashmiris. There is still time to question the alleged truth unless you have decided to be the hangman in a mask.

Dr Mudasir Firdosi is a Kashmiri psychiatrist and writer currently based in London. Email – mudasirfirdosi@gmail.com Twitter: @drmfirdosi

19 October 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Ibete Fernández Hernández

Cuba has been the victim for almost six decades of an unfair financial, economic and commercial blockade that was formalized on February 3, 1962 with the sole objective of overthrowing the nascent Cuban Revolution.

In a secret memorandum in 1960, Lester D. Mallory, a state department official said: “We must quickly use all possible means to weaken Cuba’s economic life (…) deprive it of money and supplies, to reduce its resources financial and real wages, provoke hunger, despair and the overthrow of the Government ”. The official came to this conclusion by recognizing that there was no effective opposition to the revolutionary process in Cuba.

The basis of this addiction towards Cuba, were established by Thomas Jefferson in 1810 with a geopolitical statement, known as the “ripe fruit” theory referring to the need for the island to belong to the United States and not another power, to ensure the safety of the giant of the north and the protection of its commerce, this vision was put in danger after the Cuban people demonstrated in 1959 that it was possible defeat the power of the north in its own hemisphere.

In 57 years, the blockade has caused damages to Cuba worth 138,843.4 million dollars representing a total of 922 thousand 630 million usd, taking into account the depreciation of the dollar against gold between 1961 and 2018. Suffice it to say that each and every one of the sectors of the social economic life of the country, have been affected. I propose to review some effects between April 2018 and March 2019:

• Health 104 million 148 thousand 178 usd
• Food- 421 million 230 thousand 614 usd
• Tourism- 49 million usd
• Transportation- 170 million usd
• Energy- 78 million 336 thousand 424 usd
• Foreign trade 2,896 million 581 thousand usd

The figures may be cold, but we will illustrate with examples, included in Cuba’s report to the UN:

• Between June 2018 and April 2019, the US government imposed nine sanctions on companies or banks from third countries, including from the US itself.

• The blockage hinders the acquisition of technologies, raw materials, reagents, diagnostic means, equipment and spare parts, as well as medicines for the treatment of serious diseases, such as cancer. These inputs must be obtained in distant markets, on many occasions, through intermediaries.

• The companies responsible for the elaboration of food products in the country import approximately 70% of their raw materials from different markets. To date, the blockade has made it impossible to make purchases in the US market, which is very attractive due to its prices and proximity.

• The University of Sancti Spíritus could not acquire 20 SMART Braille typewriters and hearing aids from the Perkins company, which are necessary for the training of undergraduate and graduate students in Special Education. Both technologies are American made.

• The Cuban team, winner of the second place in the Caribbean Baseball Series, held in Panama from February 4 to 10, 2019, could not receive its cash prize of $ 72,000. The same happened with several Cuban athletes who could not receive their prize of $ 5,000 per player.

• If the blockade does not exist, it is estimated that 35% of total visitors to Cuba in a year could be Americans.

• The blockade prevents access to brands and / or equipment of high performance and leaders in the market of infocommunications or that are distributed or have patents of US entities, including landlines, mobiles, antennas, computer systems, etc.

• Refusal to transfer funds to or from Cuba and to provide other banking services: 15 entities, including nine Asian, three European, two Latin American and one from Oceania.

In this context in which the resurgence of the bloc has become the cornerstone of the current US administration policy towards Cuba, we will present the resolution once, because we are assisted by the right to demand justice for the millions of Cubans who have lived under this stigma.

It is not a bilateral issue as the phenomenon has intended to be observed, but an intrusion into the sovereignty of other states that due to restrictions, threats and intimidation are unable to trade regularly with Cuba.

For 27 years a resolution the international community has condemned the blockade against Cuba. This claim has been ignore the claims, not only in UN but in other forums. Blockade must stop without conditions. Cannot be used to provoke political changes that are not of the will of Cuban people.

Cuba, while appreciating the accompaniment of the international community, will not give up its efforts to end the blockade. It is the longest and most unfair in the history of mankind and constitutes the greatest obstacle to the development of the economic potential of the island.

In the midst of the complex situation in the world today, we aspire to have the support of all countries that defend their sovereignty and self-determination.

Ibete Fernández Hernández

Ambassador of Cuba in Malaysia

19 October 2019

By Jonathan Cook

Nazareth: The decades-long struggle by tens of thousands of Israelis against being uprooted from their homes – some for the second or third time – should be proof enough that Israel is not the western-style liberal democracy it claims to be.

Last week 36,000 Bedouin – all of them Israeli citizens – discovered that their state is about to make them refugees in their own country, driving them into holding camps. These Israelis, it seems, are the wrong kind.

Their treatment has painful echoes of the past. In 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled by the Israeli army outside the borders of the newly declared Jewish state established on their homeland – what the Palestinians call their Nakba, or catastrophe.

Israel is regularly criticised for its belligerent occupation, its relentless expansion of illegal settlements on Palestinian land and its repeated and savage military attacks, especially on Gaza.

On rare occasions, analysts also notice Israel’s systematic discrimination against the 1.8 million Palestinians whose ancestors survived the Nakba and live inside Israel, ostensibly as citizens.

But each of these abuses is dealt with in isolation, as though unrelated, rather than as different facets of an overarching project. A pattern is discernible, one driven by an ideology that dehumanises Palestinians everywhere Israel encounters them.

That ideology has a name. Zionism provides the thread that connects the past – the Nakba – with Israel’s current ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homes in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, the destruction of Gaza, and the state’s concerted efforts to drive Palestinian citizens of Israel out of what is left of their historic lands and into ghettoes.

The logic of Zionism, even if its more naive supporters fail to grasp it, is to replace Palestinians with Jews – what Israel officially terms Judaisation.

The Palestinians’ suffering is not some unfortunate side effect of conflict. It is the very aim of Zionism: to incentivise Palestinians still in place to leave “voluntarily”, to escape further suffocation and misery.

The starkest example of this people replacement strategy is Israel’s long-standing treatment of 250,000 Bedouin who formally have citizenship.

The Bedouin are the poorest group in Israel, living in isolated communities mainly in the vast, semi-arid area of the Negev, the country’s south. Largely out of view, Israel has had a relatively free hand in its efforts to “replace” them.

That was why, for a decade after it had supposedly finished its 1948 ethnic cleansing operations and won recognition in western capitals, Israel continued secretly expelling thousands of Bedouin outside its borders, despite their claim on citizenship.

Meanwhile, other Bedouin in Israel were forced off their ancestral lands to be driven either into confined holding areas or state-planned townships that became the most deprived communities in Israel.

It is hard to cast the Bedouin, simple farmers and pastoralists, as a security threat, as was done with the Palestinians under occupation.

But Israel has a much broader definition of security than simple physical safety. Its security is premised on the maintenance of an absolute demographic dominance by Jews.

The Bedouin may be peaceable but their numbers pose a major demographic threat and their pastoral way of life obstructs the fate intended for them – penning them up tightly inside ghettoes.

Most of the Bedouin have title deeds to their lands that long predate Israel’s creation. But Israel has refused to honour these claims and many tens of thousands have been criminalised by the state, their villages denied legal recognition.

For decades they have been forced to live in tin shacks or tents because the authorities refuse to approve proper homes and they are denied public services like schools, water and electricity.

The Bedouin have one option if they wish to live within the law: they must abandon their ancestral lands and their way of life to relocate to one of the poor townships.

Many of the Bedouin have resisted, clinging on to their historic lands despite the dire conditions imposed on them.

One such unrecognised village, Al Araqib, has been used to set an example. Israeli forces have demolished the makeshift homes there more than 160 times in less than a decade. In August, an Israeli court approved the state billing six of the villagers $370,000 (Dh1.6 million) for the repeated evictions.

Al Araqib’s 70-year-old leader, Sheikh Sayah Abu Madhim, recently spent months in jail after his conviction for trespassing, even though his tent is a stone’s throw from the cemetery where his ancestors are buried.

Now the Israel authorities are losing patience with the Bedouin.

Last January, plans were unveiled for the urgent and forcible eviction of nearly 40,000 Bedouin from their homes in unrecognised villages under the guise of “economic development” projects. It will be the largest expulsion in decades.

“Development”, like “security”, has a different connotation in Israel. It really means Jewish development, or Judaisation – not development for Palestinians.

The projects include a new highway, a high-voltage power line, a weapons testing facility, a military live-fire zone and a phosphate mine.

It was revealed last week that the families would be forced into displacement centres in the townships, living in temporary accommodation for years as their ultimate fate is decided. Already these sites are being compared to the refugee camps established for Palestinians in the wake of the Nakba.

The barely concealed aim is to impose on the Bedouin such awful conditions that they will eventually agree to be confined for good in the townships on Israel’s terms.

Six leading United Nations human rights experts sent a letter to Israel in the summer protesting the grave violations of the Bedouin families’ rights in international law and arguing that alternative approaches were possible.

Adalah, a legal group for Palestinians in Israel, notes that Israel has been forcibly evicting the Bedouin over seven decades, treating them not as human beings but as pawns in its never-ending battle to replace them with Jewish settlers.

The Bedouin’s living space has endlessly shrunk and their way of life has been crushed.

This contrasts starkly with the rapid expansion of Jewish towns and single-family farming ranches on the land from which the Bedouin are being evicted.

It is hard not to conclude that what is taking place is an administrative version of the ethnic cleansing Israeli officials conduct more flagrantly in the occupied territories on so-called security grounds.

These interminable expulsions look less like a necessary, considered policy and more like an ugly, ideological nervous tic.

A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.

17 October 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

Bharat Bhushan, BS

The Kashmiris have Delhi confounded. They have refused to engage the security forces in street confrontations. Their children are not queuing up to take up arms and by and large there has been no significant targeting of security posts and establishments. Having taken a ‘bold’ step in Jammu and Kashmir, decision makers in New Delhi seem undecided about how to deal with the evolving civil disobedience in the Valley.

More than two months after the lockdown, upset Kashmiris are refusing to open their business establishments, notwithstanding the government’s exhortations through newspaper advertisements. Wherever restrictions are lifted in the Valley, people impose their own brand of civil disobedience they call “civil curfew”. This involves closure of business establishments for most of the working day. Shops open either a couple of hours in the morning or evening. The market closure is spontaneous. This form of passive resistance to the state, denying it the symbols of normality – was never witnessed in Kashmir earlier.

The full page newspaper advertisements issued in J&K enjoining people to open their shops and establishments disingenuously suggest that the shopkeepers are under pressure from armed militants. While there have been stray incidents of militants urging people to shut shops – a shopkeeper was even killed in the early days of the lockdown – but subsequently there is no evidence that their influence is widespread. If the militants are really to blame then the government must ask itself how a hundred-odd militants are able to control more than 80 lakh people in the Valley? And it must further ask what then does the state administration control with the assistance of an estimated 9 lakh security personnel deployed there?

In a bid to ‘convince’ the Kashmiris, the speeches of a senior minister who is at the forefront of the Modi government’s Kashmir policy are apparently being translated into Urdu. Either the government is groping in the dark or it has become a victim of its own propaganda. People the world over understand when they are being slighted irrespective of the language used by those in power.

If the civil disobedience of the Kashmiris continues the government would have few options. Without restoration of a semblance of “normalcy” it cannot be repackaged for national and international propaganda. Nor can the government use force to restore business as usual. Any use of force can precipitate a violent confrontation with the people, an outcome that policy makers in Delhi want to avoid at any cost. It would give the lie to those who have been shouting from the rooftops that not a single bullet has been fired and the ground situation is therefore normal. The Kashmiri civil disobedience, has therefore become a major headache for the government.

Today it is hard to find any Kashmiris who stand with India. It would seem that they have finally cut the psychological umbilical cord with India. Perhaps their disillusionment with India as an inclusive, diverse and thriving democracy is complete.

Their disappointment is not only with the Modi government. The people of the Valley feel abandoned by the entire Indian political class. The Bharatiya Janata Party government after all only did what it had promised in its election manifesto. What has shocked them more is that not a single other political party or national leader has asked for the restoration of status quo ante by reinstating Article 370 and the pre-August 5 status of the state. Even the Opposition parties have not objected to the dramatic decision taken through subterfuge to remove the special status of the state and its bifurcation through a presidential ordinance. In giving parliamentary approval to the decisions, they have only objected to the absence of consultation – i.e. to the process by which it was done.

The judiciary has also appeared partisan on events in Kashmir. It has avoided taking quick and judicially sound decisions for protection of civil liberties of the citizens in the state. By allowing suspension of these rights, by default it has discarded well-established judicial principles. Petitions challenging the government’s constitutional and administrative decisions, restrictions on freedom of expression by cutting communication links that make it difficult for the media to function freely and even writs for habeas corpus have been repeatedly adjourned. Strangely the apex court has been adjudicating visitation rights of detained Kashmiri politicians which are normally governed by the Jail Manual. It has also offered its unsolicited opinion that considerations of national security supersede citizens’ rights in Kashmir in the present situation.

The disappointment with Indian civil society is equally acute. Abandoned and isolated, the more political among them warn their friends of the long-term consequences of their silence for the rest of the country.

It is no surprise then that Kashmiris have mentally shut themselves off from India and Indians. This is why neither government propaganda nor stray sympathetic attempts by Indian civil society to open a dialogue with them is likely to fetch results.

The government will go ahead with Block Development Council (BDC) elections later this month as planned. Whether that will allow it to project the Kashmir situation as business as usual is uncertain. Like the village body elections, sullen Kashmiris are unlikely to go to the polling booths on October 24. As in the elections for Panchs and Sarpanchs, the government may produce acceptable poll data by using the turnout in Jammu region to “average” out the figures. But that is unlikely to make those elected any more acceptable to people in the Valley. The new elected council members may well have to live as guests of the government in hotels in Srinagar, unable to travel back to their villages and face public anger. This is what those ‘elected’ to village panchayats last December have had to do in the Valley.

It is increasingly clear is that after August 5, Kashmiris feel that this is the end of the road for politics within India. In their assessment, all avenues of normal politics have ended and a phase of controlling them from Delhi has begun.

16 October 2019

By Andre Vltchek

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is opening up to the world. It used to be absolutely impossible to get a visa to enter, unless you were a religious pilgrim (therefore officially a Muslim), NATO military personnel, or a businessman or woman, invited by a local company or by the Saudi government.Even if you secured approval, visas were outrageously expensive, costing several hundreds of dollars. The only loophole was a “transit visa” for those who were going to drive from Oman or Bahrain, to Jordan.

Tourism was not recognized as a reason to visit the KSA. There were simply no tourist visas issued. Full stop.

Then, suddenly, everything changed, at the very end of September 2019. The Saudi government introduced e-visas, for 49 nation nationalities, including the USA, Canada, all nationals of the European Union, as well asthe Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China (including Hong Kong and Macau).

Everything has been streamlined. The formerly brutal international airports of Riyadh (the capital), Jeddah and Dammam, received incredible face lifts. Now, friendly ladies (still in hijab), speaking perfect English, are processing first-time visitors, taking their fingerprints, photographing them, then welcoming them to Saudi Arabia. There are rating buttons on the walls of the immigration booths: “How are we serving you?” From excellent, to terrible. Riyadh Airport is now clean, well illuminated, and pleasant.

All over the capital city, foreign women are now walking with fully exposed hair: at the airport, in all major hotels of Riyadh, office buildings, even inside the luxury malls.

The Royal Family is sending a clear message to the world: things are rapidly changing: Saudi Arabia is not what it used to be a few years ago. Women can now drive, foreigners (some, at least from the rich countries) can enter the country, and the dress-code for women is getting more and more relaxed.

Words like “the arts” and “culture” have been reintroduced into the local lexicon, after being nearly extinct for decades.

Saudi Arabia has a wide range of problems. They include corruption,the increasing dissatisfaction of the middle classes, the great desperation of the poor, vulnerability of oil prices, cross-border retaliatory attacks by the Houthis in Yemen, the imminent defeat of the Saudi extremist allies in Syria, the prolonged conflict with Qatar, as well as a still undiversified economy based on the export of oil.

After cutting the journalist, Jamal Khashoggi into pieces,precisely one year ago, the KSA suddenly drew strong criticism from all corners of the world.

The continuous killing of tens of thousands of innocent Yemeni civilians has evoked wrath in progressive circles worldwide.

The rulers in Riyadh had to re-think many issues. They calculated, and came to the conclusion that the best way to act would be to open up the country, and basically demonstrate to the would that the Kingdom is “not as bad” as many would like to believe.

The risk is great. Could this strategy really work? Or would it backfire?

*

Politics aside, Saudi Arabia is a “specific place”, and definitely not to everyone’s liking.

To give it credit where it is due, it counts on some stunning vistas, on endless deserts, dunes and oases producing dates and delicious fruits. It is dotted with castles and forts, and of course, as the cradle of Islam, it has some of the most incredible historic sites.

A few years ago, the National Museum in Beijing, China, exhibited thousands of historic objects and images from the KSA. To those of us who visited, it was a tremendous discovery.

Unfortunately, what can be shown in China, could not always be allowed in Riyadh, Jeddah, Macca and Medina.

For decades, the Saudi extremist Wahhabism has been fighting against everything that is not perceived as holy: music, films, non-religious books, even the images of animals.

This religious extremism has been exported to all corners of the world. Paradoxically and bizarrely, it has been intertwined with Western, particularly North American, “culture”. Extreme capitalism has been thriving all over the Kingdom. More oil, more kitsch.

Tremendous Muslim monuments had been dwarfed by lavish malls, badly designed and overpriced hotels, car culture and cheap US eateries such as Big M, Dunkin Donuts and Pizza Hut.

There is hardly any city planning, or connectivity in the major cities like Dammam, Jeddah and Riyadh, even when compared with the neighboring Dubai, Doha or Muscat.

According to The Independent:

“The destruction of sites associated with early Islam is an ongoing phenomenon that has occurred mainly in the Hejaz region of western Saudi Arabia, particularly around the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The demolition has focused on mosques, burial sites, homes and historical locations associated with the Islamic prophet Muhammad and many of the founding personalities of early Islamic history.”

Vulgar luxury malls and 5-star hotels for the super-rich pilgrims are now literally encircling the holiest site in Macca.

But it is not only religious sites that are being ruined.

During this recent visit, I drove to the At-Turaif District in ad-Dir’iyah, some 20 kilometers from Riyadh, once a stunning World Heritage site designated by UNESCO. This location of the first Saudi Dynasty was “undergoing renovation”. Read: entire areas of traditional houses and ancient streets, squares and courtyards have been “rearranged”; destroyed. A modern mall has been erected. I was told that soon, more areas will give way to the fake buildings.Al-Turaif District has already been nicknamed the “Beverly Hills of Saudi Arabia.”

What’s next, nobody knows. But one thing is certain: if the rulers of Saudi Arabia want to attract visitors from the West, Russia, China or Japan, in order to diversify its economy, they’d have to offer a bit more than clogged roads, shopping malls, broken sidewalks and kitschy hotels and restaurants.

*

Saudi Arabia is extremely rich (although not as rich as Qatar), at least on paper. But it is full of absolute misery, from slums to beggars whose arms were amputated at a young age, so they could evoke the pity of motorists, and generate higher incomes for the mafias that are pimping them.

In many luxury malls, there are sexy, almost pornographic lingerie stores for the upper class wives, while outside, millions of manual workers, mainly from the sub-Continent, Africa and the Philippines, are living in destitution, not unlike that which they left behind in their native lands.

Politically, Saudi Arabia is, together with Israel, the closest ally of the United States.

And it shows. In those proverbial 5-star hotels that cost in Riyadh,double what they do even in Qatar, stereotypical Western ‘development-types’ are lecturing locals, openly, arrogantly and without any shame.

Visa restrictions have been eased, but mass tourism in the KSA is still hard to imagine. The country is not ready for culture-oriented types, for history connoisseurs, or for people on average budgets.

There is no way of walking here. There is no public transportation to speak of, yet. Even getting a taxi can be an ordeal, as everything is designed for private cars.

The prices are outrageous and the quality of services very, very low. Crime rates high.

It will take some time to convince foreigners to come.

*

But an attempt to bring the world into KSA is there. Changes are in the air.

The National Museum in Riyadh opened its doors. The building is magnificent, although exhibitions are, to put it mildly, very poor. The new National Library is stunning, although the selection of books is very limited. Research centers mainly highlight the activities of the Royal Family. A new mass rapid system is being constructed, but no one knows exactly when it will become operational.

I am interested in this complex country. I want to come back, and understand more; for years I am writing about Wahhabism and the deadly alliance with the UK, and then the US.And, honestly, I have always been fascinated with the deserts and with the people who inhabit them.

Considering my strong criticism of the KSA foreign policy, including my frequent appearances on the Iranian Press TV, I was a bit worried about this visit, but I was holding an “official”, not “e” visa, and in the end, nothing bad happened. The people that I met were kind and open with me. Now, I am writing this short essay on board Sri Lankan Airlines, bound for Colombo, alive and well.

*

Diversification could prove to be extremely positive for the people of Saudi Arabia. Both Russia and China are now making important inroads, and soon, there will be substantial investment from both countries, in the Saudi oil industry, as well as tourism and other sectors. Chinese and Russian people are curious and daring. They will come. Many will. Saudis know it.

At the National Museum in Riyadh, a receptionist asked where I was from, in English. I answered, “I am Russian”. He hesitated for just a few seconds, then smiled and uttered: “Privet! Kakdela?” (“Greetings, how are you doing?”) Perhaps he had to learn those few words of greeting in all world languages. Or perhaps not. Maybe he was studying Russian.

The rulers of the KSA are very secretive people. No one really knows which direction the country is going to evolve in the next few years. Could the KSA one day become “neutral”? I don’t know.

But one thing is certain: something is moving, brewing and evolving. KSA is not the same country as it was five years ago. In the future, perhaps five years from now, it may become unrecognizable.

*

[First published by NEO – New Eastern Outlook – a journal of the Russian Academy of Sciences]

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist.

15 October 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Alex Lantier

The war unleashed by Turkey’s invasion of Syria, targeting formerly US-backed Kurdish forces, escalated out of control this weekend as the Syrian army and Iran moved to counterattack. With Turkish troops and allied Al Qaeda militias advancing deep into Kurdish-held territory in Syria, the Middle East is only days away from an all-out war between the major regional powers that could trigger a global conflict between nuclear-armed world powers.

UN reports show that 130,000 Syrians have fled their homes in the region amid the Turkish offensive, and Turkish officials claim they had “neutralized” at least 415 Kurdish fighters. Turkish troops seized the cities of Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ayn, amid heavy fighting including ongoing Turkish air raids, and seized a road crossing that cut off US and Kurdish troops in Kobani. Turkish troops also fired artillery at US troops near Kobani in what former US envoy Brett McGurk said was “not a mistake,” although Turkish officials later denied this.

Smoke billows from fires on targets in Ras al-Ayn, Syria, caused by bombardment by Turkish forces [Credit:”AP Photo/Emrah Gurel]

Turkey’s Syrian “rebel” allies, the Islamist Syrian National Army (SNA, formerly the Free Syrian Army), are executing Kurdish civilians in areas they hold, according to multiple reports. Kurdish politician Hevrin Khalaf was executed; her bullet-riddled car appeared in a video surrounded by SNA fighters. Beyond Al Qaeda-linked calls to destroy infidels, the British Daily Telegraph noted, the SNA’s main outlook “is sectarian: they are anti-Kurdish and they are Arab chauvinists.”

Yesterday evening, the Syrian army announced it would march on the area. The official Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported: “Syrian Arab Army units began moving north to confront Turkish aggression on Syrian territory… The movement comes to confront the ongoing Turkish aggression on towns and areas in the north of Hasaka and Raqqa provinces, where the Turkish forces committed massacres against locals, occupied some areas and destroyed infrastructure.”

The Syrian army has reportedly reached an agreement with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) militia, whose alliance with the United States was broken by Washington a week ago. Under this agreement, Syrian army troops would reach the city of Kobani near the Syrian-Turkish border in 48 hours. On Saturday, President Donald Trump had authorized the remaining 1,000 US troops in Kobani to withdraw, and US forces were in full retreat across northern Syria this weekend to avoid being cut off by advancing Turkish troops.

Iran, which has deployed tens of thousands of troops as well as drones to Syria in recent years to back the Syrian regime against a NATO-led proxy war, indicated it would support the Syrian army.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s Advisor for International Affairs Ali Akbar Velayati met with Syrian Ambassador to Iran Adnan Mahmoud yesterday in Tehran. He gave Iran’s “full support to Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, calling for the withdrawal of the Turkish forces,” SANA reported. Velayati added, “The principled policy of Iran is based on supporting the people and government of Syria and defending their righteous stances in a way that entails continuing joint cooperation until terrorism and terrorist organizations are completely eliminated.”

At the same time, military tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia are surging amid mutual attacks on tankers carrying Persian Gulf oil supplies that are critical to the world economy. Last month, the US and Saudi governments blamed a September 14 missile attack on Saudi oil facilities that caused a sharp rise in world oil prices on Iran, without providing any evidence. Then on October 11, two missiles hit the Iranian tanker Sabiti off Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast.

Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of the Iranian Supreme National Security Council, said yesterday that Iran would retaliate against unnamed targets for the attack on the Sabiti. “A special committee has been set up to investigate the attack on Sabiti… Its report will soon be submitted to the authorities for decision,” Shamkhani told Fars News. “Piracy and mischief on international waterways aimed at making commercial shipping insecure will not go unanswered.”

Saudi officials declined to comment on the Sabiti attack, and officials with the US Fifth Fleet in the Gulf sheikdom of Bahrain claimed to have no information on it. But there is widespread speculation in the international media that the attack was carried out by Saudi Arabia or with its support.

The conflicts erupting between the different capitalist regimes in the Middle East pose an imminent threat not only to the population of the region, but to the entire world. Workers can give no support to any of the competing military plans and strategic appetites of these reactionary regimes. With America, Europe, Russia and China all deeply involved in the proxy war in Syria, a large-scale Middle East war could strangle the world oil supply and escalate into war between nuclear-armed powers. The working class is coming face to face with the real possibility of a Third World War.

The Kurdish-led SDF militias in Syria, vastly outgunned by Turkish forces and vulnerable to air strikes, warned US officials in talks leaked by CNN that they would appeal for Russia to attack Turkey and protect SDF and Syrian army forces. As Turkey is legally a NATO ally of Washington and the European powers, such an attack could compel the United States and its European allies to either break the 70-year-old NATO alliance or go to war with Russia to protect Turkey.

“You are leaving us to be slaughtered,” SDF General Mazloum Kobani Abdi told US officials in a meeting last Thursday. “You are not willing to protect the people, but you do not want another force to come and protect us. You have sold us.”

Mazloum dismissed US officials when they replied by demanding that the SDF not cut a deal with Russia, but instead keep taking huge casualties from Turkish air raids. He said, “I need to know if you are capable of protecting my people, of stopping these bombs falling on us or not. I need to know, because if you’re not, I need to make a deal with Russia and the regime now and invite their planes to protect this region.”

US forces across Syria were in full retreat, however, and US Defense Secretary Mark Esper told US television news yesterday that the Turkish-Kurdish conflict “gets worse by the hour.” Given the attempts by the Kurds to work out an alliance with Syria and Russia, he added, Trump “directed that we begin a deliberate withdrawal of forces from northern Syria.”

Esper said he would “not place American service members in the middle of a longstanding conflict between the Turks and the Kurds. This is not why we are in Syria.”

Esper said the Turkish army was rejecting the Pentagon’s appeals for a ceasefire with the Kurds and instead expanding its war aims inside Syria. “In the last 24 hours, we learned that they likely intend to expand their attack further south than originally planned, and to the west,” he said. Esper added that “all the exact things” US officials warned their Turkish counterparts would likely happen if they invaded Syria were now taking place, including the release of tens of thousands of Islamic State (ISIS) fighters held in prison camps by Washington’s former Kurdish allies.

What is unfolding in the Middle East is a bloody debacle produced by three decades of imperialist wars waged by Washington and its European allies since the 1991 Gulf War in Iraq. Their inflaming of national, ethnic and sectarian divisions in an attempt to divide and rule this oil-rich region has placed it on the brink of an all-out conflagration. Former US allies across the region are turning against Washington amid the deep discrediting of these wars and of the entire capitalist political order among hundreds of millions of people in the Middle East, America and Europe.

Radio France Internationale journalists along the Syrian border inside Turkey reported intense anger over US foreign policy among Turkish civilians and soldiers. One told RFI, “The United States do not fear God, they trust their strength. But they take 15 hours to arrive here by plane, and to do what? They interfere in our affairs and act like a fighter who only fights those he knows he can defeat. When they face a strong opponent, they run away.”

The only force giving a progressive expression to this elemental anger against imperialist war is the international working class and the resurgence of the class struggle. Mass protests against the US-backed regime in Iraq and the military dictatorships in Algeria and Sudan, and an escalating strike movement among US autoworkers, teachers and miners, testify to the growing radicalization of the working class. However, this international movement faces enormous dangers and enormous tasks.

To the extent that this growing anger is diverted behind the national ambitions and military staffs of the competing capitalist nation states, truly catastrophic global wars can break out—as they did twice in the 20th century.

It is critical to mobilize the workers independently of all the warring capitalist states in an international antiwar movement of the working class fighting for socialism.

Originally published by WSWS.org

15 October 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Peter Koenig

For close to 40 years the IMF has weaponized its handle on the western economy through the dollar-based western monetary system, and brutally destroyed nation after nation, thereby killed hundreds of thousands of people. Indirectly, of course, as the IMF would not use traditional guns and bombs, but financial instruments that kill – they kill by famine, by economic strangulation, preventing indispensable medical equipment and medication entering a country, even preventing food from being imported, or being imported at horrendous prices only the rich can pay.

The latest victim of this horrifying IMF scheme is Ecuador. For starters, you should know that since January 2000, Ecuador’s economy is 100% dollarized, compliments of the IMF (entirely controlled by the US Treasury, by force of an absolute veto). The other two fully dollarized Latin American countries are El Salvador and Panama.

The Wall Street Journal recently stated that Ecuador “has the misfortune to be an oil producer with a ‘dollarized’ economy that uses the U.S. currency as legal tender.” The Journal added, “the appreciation of the U.S. dollar against other currencies has decreased the net exports of non-oil commodities from Ecuador, which, coupled with the volatility of oil prices, is constraining the country’s potential for economic growth.”

Starting in the mid 1990’s, culminating around 1998, Ecuador suffered a severe economic crisis, resulting from climatic calamities, and US corporate and banking oil price manipulations (petrol is Ecuador’s main export product), resulting in massive bank failures and hyper-inflation. Ecuador’s economy at that time had been semi-dollarized, like that of most Latin American countries, i.e. Peru, Colombia, Chile, Brazil – and so on.

The ‘crisis’ was a great opportunity for the US via the IMF to take full control of the Ecuadorian (petrol) economy, by a 100% dollarizing it. The IMF propagated the same recipe for Ecuador as it did ten years earlier for Argentina, namely full dollarization of the economy in order to combat inflation and to bring about economic stability and growth. In January 2000, then President Jorge Jamil Mahuad Witt, from the “Popular Democracy Party”, or the Ecuadorian Christian Democratic Union (equivalent to the German CDU), declared the US dollar as the official currency of Ecuador, replacing their own currency, the Sucre.

Adopting another country’s currency is an absurdity and can only bring failure. And that it did, almost to the day, 10 years after Argentina was forced by the same US-led villains to revalue her peso to parity with the US-dollar, no fluctuations allowed. Same reason (“economic crisis”, hyper-inflation), same purpose: controlling the riches of the country – absolute failure was preprogrammed. Did Ecuador not learn from the Argentinian experience and converted her currency at the very moment the Argentinian economy collapsed due to dollarization, into the US dollar? – That is not only a fraud, but a planned fraud.

Ecuadorian goods and services quoted in dollars, became unaffordable for locals and uncompetitive for exports. This led to social unrests, resulting in a popular ‘golpe’. President Mahuad was disposed, had to flee the country, and was replaced by Gustavo Noboa, from the same CDU party (2000 – 2003). Ever since the dollar remained controversial among the Ecuadorian population. President Rafael Correa’s quiet attempt to return to the Sucre, was answered by a CIA-inspired police coup attempt on 30 September 2010.

In 2017, the CIA / NED (National Endowment for Democracy) and the US State Department have brought about a so-called “soft” regime change. They urged (very likely coerced) Rafael Correa to abstain from running again for President, as the vast majority of Ecuadorians requested him to do. This would have required a Constitutional amendment which probably would have been easily accepted by Parliament. Instead they had Correa endorse his former Vice-President (2007-2013) Lenin Moreno, who run on Correa’s platform, the socialist PAIS Alliance. Therefore, expected to continue in Correa’s line with same socioeconomic policies.
Less than a year later, Moreno turned tables, became an outright traitor to his country and the people who voted for him. He converted Ecuador’s economy to the neoliberal doctrine – privatization of everything, stealing the money from the social sectors, depriving people of work, drastically reducing social services and converting a surplus economy of tremendous social gains into one of poverty and misery.

President Correa left the country a modest debt of about 40% to GDP at the end of his Presidency in 2017. A debt-GDP ratio that would be no problem anywhere in the world. Compare this to the US debt vs. GDP – 105% in current terms and about 700% in terms of unmet obligations (net present value of total outstanding obligations). There was absolutely no reason to call the IMF for help. The IMF, the long arm of the US Treasury – ‘bought’ its way into Moreno’s neoliberal Ecuador, coinciding with Moreno evicting Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

The IMF loan of US$ 4,2 billion increases the debt / GDP ratio by 4% and brings social misery and upheaval in return, and that as usual, at an unimaginable cost, by neoliberal economists called “externalities”. It was practically a US “present” for Moreno’s treason, bringing Assange closer into US custody. What most people are unaware of, is that at the same time, Moreno forgave US$ 4.5 billion in fines, interest and other dues to large corporations and oligarchs, hence decapitalizing the country’s treasury. The amount of canceled corporate fiscal obligations is about equivalent to the IMF loan, plunging large sectors of the Ecuadorian population into more misery.

Besides, under wrong pretexts it allowed Moreno to apply neoliberal policies, all those that usually come as draconian conditions with IMF loans and that eventually benefit only a small elite in the country – but allowswestern bankingand corporations to further milk the countries social system.

According to a 2017 report of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), an economic thinktank in Washington, Ecuador’s economy has done rather well under Rafael Correa’s 10-year leadership (2007 – 2017). The country has improved her key indicators significantly: Average annual GDP growth was 1.5% (0.6% past 26 years average); the poverty rate declined by 38%, extreme poverty by 47%, a multiple of poverty reduction of that in the previous ten years, thanks to a horizontally distributive growth; inequality (Gini coefficient) fell substantially, from 0.55 to 0.47; the government doubled social spending from 4.3% in 2006 to 8.6% in 2016; tripled education spending from 0.7% to 2.1% with a corresponding increase in school enrollments; increased public investments from 4% of GDP in 2006 to 10% in 2016.

Now, Moreno is in the process of reversing these gains. Only six months after contracting the IMF loans, he has already largely succeeded. The public outcry can be heard internationally. Quito is besieged by tens of thousands of demonstrators, steadily increasing as large numbers, in the tens of thousands, of indigenous people are coming from Ecuador’s Amazon region and the Andes to Quito to voice their discontent with their traitor president. Government tyranny is rampant. Moreno declared a 60-day state of emergency – with curfew and a militarized country. As a consequence, Moreno moved the Government Administration to Guayaquil and ordered one of the most severe police and military repressions, Ecuador has ever known, resulting within ten days to at least 7 people killed, about 600 injured and about 1,000 people arrested.
The protests are directed against the infamous Government Decree 883, that dictates major social reforms, including an increase in fuel prices by more than 100%, reflecting directly on public transportation, as well as on food prices; privatization of public services, bringing about untold layoffs, including some 23,000 government employees; an increase in Aggregated Value Taxes– all part of the so-called “paquetazo”, imposed by the IMF. Protesters called on Moreno, “Fuera asesino, fuera” – Get out, murderer, get out! – Will they succeed?

The IMF’s guns are needlessly imposed debt, forced privatization of social services and public assets as railways, roads, and worst of all, health, education, water supply and sewerage services. Unemployment rises, extreme poverty skyrockets, public service tariffs – water, electricity, transportation – increase, often exponentially, depriving people from moving to work or look for new employment elsewhere. Diseases that otherwise may have been curable, like cancers, under the new regime lack medication. Patients die prematurely. Depression brings about rapidly rising suicide rates, as the British medical journal Lancet has observed in many IMF oppressed countries, but especially in Greece.

Targeted are primarily those nations that do not want to bend to the dictate of Washington, and even more so those with natural resources the west covets, or countries that are in strategic geographic locations, where NATO wants to establish itself or get a stronger foothold, i.e. Greece. The IMF is often helped by the World Bank. The former providing, or rather coercing, a ‘debt-strapped’ country into accepting so-called rescue packages, billions of dollars of loans, at exorbitant “high-risk” interest rates, with deadly strings attached.

The latter, the WB, would usually come in with loans – also euphemistically called “blank checks” – to be disbursed against a matrix of fulfilled conditions, of economic reforms, privatizations. Again, all usually resulting in massive government layoffs, unemployment, poverty. In fact, both the IMF and the WB approaches are similar and often overlapping – imposing “structural adjustment” (now in disguise given different names), to steal a countries resources, and sovereignty, by making them dependent on the very financial institutions that pretend to ‘help’ them.

The three most recent and flagrant cases of IMF interference were Greece, Ukraine and Argentina. Greece was doubly destroyed, once by her brothers and sisters of the European non-Union that blackmailed them into staying with the euro, instead of exiting it and converting to their local currency and regaining financial sovereignty.

Ukraine, possibly the richest country in terms of national resources and with an enormous agricultural potential due to her fertile soil, was “regime changed” by a bloody coup, The Maidan massacre in February 2014, instigated and planned by the CIA, the EU and NATO and carried out through the very US Embassy in Kiev. This was all long-term planning. Remember Victoria Nuland boasting that the US has spent more than 5 billion dollars over the past five year to bring about regime change and to convert Ukraine into a fully democratic country and making it ready to enter the European Union?

The western allies put a Nazi Government into Kiev, created a “civil war” with the eastern Russia-aligned part of Ukraine, the Donbass. Thousands of people were killed, millions fled the country, mostly to Russia – the country’s debt went through the roof, and – in comes the IMF, approving in December 2018 a 14-month Stand-By Arrangementfor Ukraine, with an immediate disbursement of US$ 1.4 billion. This is totally against the IMF’s own Constitution, because it does not allow lending to a country at war or conflict. Ukraine was an “exception”, dictated by the US. Blamed for the ever-changing and escalating Ukraine fiasco was Russia.

Another IMF victim is Argentina. In December 2015 through fraudulent election, Washington put a neoliberal henchman into the Presidency, Mauricio Macri. He carried out economic and labor reforms by decree and within the first 12 months in office, increased unemployment and poverty from about 12% he inherited from his predecessor, Christine Kirchner, to over 30%.

Within 15 years of Kirchner Governments, Argentina largely recovered from the collapse of 2000 / 2001 / 2002, accumulating a healthy reserve. There was no need to call the IMF to the rescue, except if it was a pre-condition for Macri to become president. In September 2018, Argentina contracted from the IMF the largest ever IMF loan of 57.1 billion dollars, to be disbursed over a three-year period, plunging Argentina in an almost irrecoverable debt situation.

The Bretton Woods Organizations –World Bank and IMF, were created in 1944 precisely for that reason, to enslave the world, particularly the resources-rich countries. The purpose of these so-called international financial institutions, foresaw an absolute veto power of the United States, meaning they are doing the bidding of the US Treasury. They were created under the UN Charter for good disguise, and are to work hand-in-glove with the fiat monetary system created in 1913 by the Federal Reserve Act. The pretext was to monitor western “convertible” currencies that subscribed to the also newly modified gold standard (1 Troy ounce [31.1 grams] of gold = US$ 35) , also established during the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944.

Both organizations started lending money – the Marshall Fund, managed by the world Bank in the 1950s – to war devastated Europe, moving gradually into economic development of “Third World” countries – and, eventually, in the 1980s showing their evil heads by introducing the neoliberal doctrines of the Washington Consensus worldwide. It is a miracle how they get away with spewing so much misery – literally unopposed for the last 30 – 40 years – throughout the world. Why are they not be stopped and dismantled? – The UN has 193 members; only a small proportion of them benefit from the IMF-WB financial crimes. Why does the vast majority – also potential victims, remain silent?

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist.

14 October 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Collective

United Nations-backed dialogue between the right wing Lenin Moreno’s government and leaders of protesting people including indigenous people’s organizations reached a deal Sunday to revoke pro-International Monetary Fund (IMF) Decree 883, end strikes across the country, and to set up a commission that will write the new document, which will replace the decree issued earlier. Indigenous groups that led the protest rallies consented to stopping the people’s mobilization that was going for 11 days.

Arnaud Peral, the U.N. Representative in Ecuador, informed that the new decree would be drawn up by organizations of the Indigenous movement.

In a televised speech on October 3, Moreno announced executive order 883, which, it claimed, “liberates the price of diesel and extra gasoline.”

Moreno justified his decision by saying that the Ecuadorean state allocates more than US$1.3 billion a year in fuel subsidies.

The next day prices increased by 25 to 120 percent, as the gallon of gasoline went from US$1.85 to US$2.30, and of diesel, used by most freight transport, rose from US$1.03 to US$2.27. It was part of a measure in compliance with the IMF’s US$4.2 billion loan to the country.

An influx of protesters from all over the country came to Quito following the government announced sweeping austerity policies, a part of the IMF loan package. Most of all people were angry at the decree cancelling fuel subsidies that saw the prices skyrocket.

The protesters occupied the parliament building and other administrative buildings for a short period.

Massive protests by people, mainly led by the Indigenous sector, began, and it reached 12th day on Sunday. President Moreno even fled away the capital city. He moved the government to a city, which is a bastion of right wing forces.

The protests rocked the capital, set up barricades, burned tire. The capital city took the look of a war battered city. Police used tear gas, military equipment and even mounted officers pushed back the protesters. Curfew was imposed several times. But the people defied the curfews.

“We’ve got more than 2,000 injured, 1.000 prisoners, 10 killed, 100 missing. We have had human rights violations. We ask for the resignation of Minister Romo and Minister Jarrín, only then will we have peace and freedom,” said Jaime Vargas president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, CONAIE in short, (Ecuadorean Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities).

Jaime Vargas thanked all the people joining the protests or helping the protesters that came to Quito.

The negotiations brokered by UN started in Quito, the country’s capital.

The parties agreed to create a commission to develop a new decree repealing the one that caused the discontent.

Jaime Vargas, said that anti-government mobilizations would be lifted throughout the territory.

He criticized the police and the military for their actions against the demonstrators calling them “violation of human rights” and called for the removal of the Ministers of Interior and Defense.

Private secretary of Moreno defended the work of the law enforcers.

Fireworks went off in Quito and cars honked their horns in celebration after the UN negotiator Arnaud announced an agreement had been reached following three hours of televised negotiations.

14 October 2019

Source: countercurrents.org