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By Sandeep Banerjee

Dr Kamel Eddine Fekhar was arrested on March 31 by the authority in the de facto military rule that is continuing in Algeria. He started hunger strike and became very weak. His health was already fragile and he undertook several hunger strikes in the past when he was arrested protesting government injustices. Rightly he was honoured there not only as a practising doctor but also, or more, as a human right activist. Sadly, he when his health was much deteriorated the military jail sent him to hospital and he died on May 28 at an age of 55 only; and what an irony, the hospital where he died is named after that great Dr (Psychiatrist) and Algerian Revolutionary Franz Fanon.

Louisa Hanoune, the Secretary General of Workers Party (PT, Parti des travailleurs, a party known to be Trotskyite communist) is also under military custody since May 9. And she is not alone. Nobody knows exactly how many or how many hundreds of activists and protestors are under arrest. But arresting Madame Hanoune is a signifier, it shows that the authority is not ready to spare anyone. Louisa Hanoune is the first woman in the Arab world to contest in a presidential election, that was in 2004, and in 2009 presidential election she got 4.22% vote to be the runners up, where Saïd Abdelaziz Bouteflika won for his third term with 90.24% votes, an election which many called fraudulent. PT is one of the major parties in Algeria. She is now under arrest, the military court accused her for plotting conspiracy against the military and the state. Many political parties together demanded immediate release of Louisa Hanoune.

Protests in Algeria started in second half of February this year when the president Saïd Bouteflika announced that he would run again for presidency for his fifth term in the ensuing vote. He is already 82, he suffered serious heart disease and spent several times in hospital, lost ability of speech at least for some time and etc. – people believe he cannot manage affairs. Moreover, people are disgruntled with clientele-nepotism, coteries and corruption. And the big wasteful spending he made – to build the largest mosque of Africa (or the world?) spending allegedly $4 billion (a French doctor satirically said that the president could have built 200 hospitals with this money)! With protests exacerbating Bouteflika purportedly retreated. Practically the Army generalissimo and bureaucrats are running the country as a country under military rule.

Every time such a protest happens the media talks about ‘youth protest’, ‘leaderless protest’, and so on, like “Youth lead the movement for change” reported BBC News in mid-April. The same way they did not highlight the Egyptian and Tunisian workers’ movement during 2011 like those in Gazl Al Mahalah and Alexandria in Egypt or Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia. We shall look into some news here. But before that a general picture: Each Friday hundreds of thousands protested. Last Friday, May 24, was the fourteenth Friday of protests, and police and military were over working to diffuse perhaps the largest protest yet happened. Police even was not allowing people to have their Iftar that evening in the GPO stairs, a very usual place for many people for their fast breaking in this month of Ramjan. Hundreds of thousands are protesting, Fridays being the biggest protest days. People are chanting angry slogans against army general Ahmed Gaid Salah. Army is keen for an early president election possibly on July first week. But main political forces and people too want an interim process and interim civilian government that will also review the constitution and look after the election.

UGTA (Union Générale des Travailleurs Algériens) is the biggest Trade Union in Algeria. It is informally controlled by the ruling party FLN, that is the party of Saïd Abdelaziz Bouteflika. This party is in the continuity of the force that once took a big role in the Algerian revolution. And also it was one of the forces (and the other main force was the military loyal to it) that fought against Islamist forces when the later tried to capture state after almost poised to winning ‘democratically’ a national election – the elections were not held after the first phase in fear that the very popular FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) would win the elections. (FIS won 54% votes in local body elections in 1990.) A hard-core Islamist armed group emerged in reaction to banning FIS. And civil war followed for years after years. Ultimately FLN and army became victorious and when Bouteflika assumed presidency in 1999 after president post was managed by pro-army persons, the civil war almost stopped.

UGTA is ‘under’ FLN control. But UGTA is composed of ‘people’, in this case ordinary workers, and they were also full of dissent like their fellow toiling countrymen. The New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) of France released a material, “Algérie: de la contestation dans l’UGTA et les grèves” on April 17, 2019 written by Hocine Guernane. There were general strikes in between march 10 and 14, there were marches. There were calls included ‘the departure of the system’, ‘reorganisation of UGTA’. This was started by the provincial union of Bejaia. Provincial UGTA bodies of Bejaïa, Tizi-Ouzou, Saïda, Tlemcen met in Algiers and signed a communiqué through which they reaffirmed their involvement in the popular movement “to the satisfaction of its demands” and “the building of a new republic” and they demanded the departure of UGTA chief Sidi Said and his national secretariat. In response Sidi Said and the leadership ordered expulsion of these local leaders. This only fuelled the movement. On April 10, members of the CEN (Central Executive Committee), supreme body between two congresses, the Provinces of Algiers, Blida, Tipaza, Médéa, Brouira, Tizi-Ouzou, total 32 out of 47 members, wrote a statement in which they declared to support the popular movement and denounce secretary general Sidi Said. Afterwards Federation of Metallurgy and Federation of Electronics formally joined the workers’ protests. On April 11 at Bejaia, under a heavy rain, thousands of workers assembled and shouted slogans – Sidi Said get Out – UGTA is not your property it is ours. Later UGTA local bodies decided to make a show in front of the UGTA headquarters.

It remains to be seen what happens in Algeria in near future, and how toiling people protest in the coming Fridays. Recently in the NPA website we saw a FB post of Mahmoud Rechidi which tells (in easy translation) ‘In Algeria 70% of the working population earns less than 100 € a month. Minimum wage at Algeria is lowest in the region. But there are mad people who say this is not the time to talk social issues’. Hundreds of migrants fleeing to Europe die of boat capsize. Algeria cannot continue like this. [First edition of this was written on 29th May and was published in Frontier Weekly online on 30-5-2019; this updated version, with photographs and their twitter sources, is dated 31-5-2019.]

The author is an activist who writes on political and socioeconomic issues and also on environmental issues. Some of his articles are published in Frontier Weekly. He lives in West Bengal, India. Presently he is a research worker. He can be reached at sandeepbanerjee00@gmail.com

31 May 2019

Soure: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Team

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder now imprisoned in the UK, has been moved to the hospital wing of the Belmarsh prison in the UK, prompting concerns about his health pending the hearing on his extradition to the US.

“The decision of prison authorities to move him to the health ward speaks for itself,” said WikiLeaks.

It said Assange has lost a lot of weight and was barely able to speak to his Swedish lawyer last week.

Media reports said:

Assange’s health had already “significantly deteriorated” during the nearly seven years he spent inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and has continued to get worse over the seven weeks he has spent in Belmarsh, WikiLeaks said in a statement on Wednesday.

“Assange’s health situation on Friday was such that it was not possible to conduct a normal conversation with him,” his lawyer Per Samuelson told reporters after visiting Belmarsh, but the quote was barely reported in Sweden, let alone elsewhere.

WikiLeaks statement said:

WikiLeaks has grave concerns about the state of health of our publisher, Julian Assange, who has been moved to the health ward of Belmarsh prison. Mr Assange´s health had already significantly deteriorated after seven years inside the Ecuadorian embassy, under conditions that were incompatible with basic human rights. The United Nations twice found him to have been arbitrarily detained and called on the United Kingdom to honor its commitments under international law and free him. The UK’s refusal to abide by UN rulings, and its subsequent treatment of Mr. Assange since his arrest, presents serious questions about the UK’s standing as a human rights-abiding nation.

In his last year in the embassy, as the US finalized its extraditions plans, Julian Assange was, at the bequest of US authourities, totally isolated and gagged – a situation designed to make his life as hard as possible.

During the seven weeks in Belmarsh his health has continued to deteriorate and he has dramatically lost weight. The decision of prison authorities to move him to the health ward speaks for itself.

We strongly condemn the refusal by the Swedish court to postpone a hearing on 3rd June on the basis of Mr Assange’s health condition. Defense lawyer for Assange, Per Samuelson said that Julian Assange’s health state last Friday was such “that it was not possible to conduct a normal conversation with him”.

Tomorrow, May 30, there is a formal hearing in Westminster Court on the Extradition request by the Trump administration. The initial U.S. warrant has been expanded to include a life sentence or potential death penalty under the Espionage Act, announced last week in the the superseding indictment which disclosed 17 additional charges, bringing the potential sentence to 175 years in prison. The indictments have been widely condemned by free press organizations as the most serious attack against publishing activities in modern times — the Trump administration in essence criminalizes the very act of journalism. The indictment utilises the archaic Espionage Act of 1917 to indict a publisher for the first time in history–in an unprecedented escalation of the Trump administration’s war on the free press.

Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief:

“Julian’s case is of major historic significance. It will be remembered as the worst attack on press freedom in our lifetime. The People need to voice their condemnation; it is their politicians, their courts, their police and their prisons that are being abused in order to leave this black stain on history. Please act now to avert this shame”.

Sweden has rejected Samuelson’s motion to delay Assange’s extradition hearing, though he was never charged with anything.

Swedish investigators never interviewed Assange about claims of “sexual assault” that seem to have been trumped-up as a pretext to extradite him to the US in 2012, and prompted him to seek asylum in Ecuador.

The preliminary hearing on Washington’s extradition request is still scheduled for today, May 30.

The US has charged Assange with 18 counts under the Espionage Act, which carry a sentence of up to 175 years in prison.

“Julian’s case is of major historic significance. It will be remembered as the worst attack on press freedom in our time,” said Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief.

Kristinn Hrafnsson urged people everywhere to oppose their politicians, courts, police and prisons from being abused to “leave this black stain on history.”

The Wikileaks statement also called attention to pressure by the United States on the Ecuadorean government to deny Assange during his last year in the embassy any communication rights in a bid to have the asylum seeker “isolated and gagged.

Belmarsh prison is a high-security prison located in Thamesmead southeast London and holds hardened murders, rapists and other violent offenders.

Everyone else must take my place: Assange in letter from British prison

An earlier report datelined May 24, 2019 said:

In a handwritten letter from Belmarsh prison, Julian Assange says he is being denied a chance to defend himself and that elements in the US that “hate truth, liberty and justice” want him extradited and dead.

The letter was sent to independent British journalist Gordon Dimmack. It was dated May 13 – ten days before the US announced 17 additional charges under the Espionage Act against the jailed whistleblower.

In light of the new indictment, Dimmack read out the letter in a YouTube video. A photo of the handwritten note was soon posted online as well.

“I have been isolated from all ability to prepare to defend myself: no laptop, no internet, ever, no computer, no library, so far, but even if I get access it will just be for a half an hour, with everyone else, once a week,” Assange wrote.

He wrote: “The other side? A superpower that has been preparing for 9 years, with hundreds of people and untold millions spent on the case.”

I am defenseless, he wrote.

“I am unbroken, albeit literally surrounded by murderers, but, the days where I could read and speak and organize to defend myself, my ideals, and my people are over until I am free! Everyone else must take my place,” Assange wrote in the letter.

“The US government, or rather, those regrettable elements in it that hate truth, liberty and justice, want to cheat their way into my extradition and death, rather than letting the public hear the truth, for which I have won the highest awards in journalism and have been nominated 7 times for the Nobel Peace Prize,” Assange wrote.

Truth, ultimately, is all we have, Assange said in the letter.

The new charges against Assange have alarmed even the mainstream media outlets that have spent years pouring vitriol on WikiLeaks, as they began to realize his prosecution along those lines would essentially criminalize all journalism.

30 May 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jonathan Cook

It is astonishing how often one still hears well-informed, otherwise reasonable people say about Julian Assange: “But he ran away from Swedish rape charges by hiding in Ecuador’s embassy in London.”

That short sentence includes at least three factual errors. In fact, to repeat it, as so many people do, you would need to have been hiding under a rock for the past decade – or, amounting to much the same thing, been relying on the corporate media for your information about Assange, including from supposedly liberal outlets such as the Guardian and the BBC.

At the weekend, a Guardian editorial – the paper’s official voice and probably the segment most scrutinised by senior staff – made just such a false claim:

Then there is the rape charge that Mr Assange faced in Sweden and which led him to seek refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in the first place.

The fact that the Guardian, supposedly the British media’s chief defender of liberal values, can make this error-strewn statement after nearly a decade of Assange-related coverage is simply astounding. And that it can make such a statement days after the US finally admitted that it wants to lock up Assange for 175 years on bogus “espionage” charges – a hand anyone who wasn’t being wilfully blind always knew the US was preparing to play – is still more shocking.

Assange faces no charges in Sweden yet, let alone “rape charges”. As former UK ambassador Craig Murray recently explained, the Guardian has been misleading readers by falsely claiming that an attempt by a Swedish prosecutor to extradite Assange – even though the move has not received the Swedish judiciary’s approval – is the same as his arrest on rape charges. It isn’t.

Also, Assange did not seek sanctuary in the embassay to evade the Swedish investigation. No state in the world gives a non-citizen political asylum to avoid a rape trial. The asylum was granted on political grounds. Ecuador rightly accepted Assange’s concerns that the US would seek his extradition and lock him out of sight for the rest of his life.

Assange, of course, has been proven – yet again – decisively right by recent developments.

Trapped in herd-think

The fact that so many ordinary people keep making these basic errors has a very obvious explanation. It is because the corporate media keep making these errors.

These are is not the kind of mistakes that can be explained away as an example of what one journalist has termed the problem of “churnalism”: the fact that journalists, chasing breaking news in offices depleted of staff by budget cuts, are too overworked to cover stories properly.

British journalists have had many years to get the facts straight. In an era of social media, journalists at the Guardian and the BBC have been bombarded by readers and activists with messages telling them how they are getting basic facts wrong in the Assange case. But the journalists keep doing it anyway. They are trapped in a herd-think entirely divorced from reality.

Rather than listen to experts, or common sense, these “journalists” keep regurgitating the talking points of the British security state, which are as good as identical to the talking points of the US security state.

What is so striking in the Assange coverage is the sheer number of legal anomalies in his case – and these have been accumulating relentlessly from the very start. Almost nothing in his case has gone according to the normal rules of legal procedure. And yet that very revealing fact is never noticed or commented on by the corporate media. You need to have a blind spot the size of Langley, Virginia, not to notice it.

If Assange wasn’t the head of Wikileaks, if he hadn’t embarrassed the most important western states and their leaders by divulging their secrets and crimes, if he hadn’t created a platform that allows whistleblowers to reveal the outrages committed by the western power establishment, if he hadn’t undermined that establishment’s control over information dissemination, none of the last 10 years would have followed the course it did.

If Assange had not provided us with an information revolution that undermines the narrative matrix created to serve the US security state, two Swedish women – unhappy with Assange’s sexual etiquette – would have gotten exactly what they said in their witness statements they wanted: pressure from the Swedish authorites to make him take an HIV test to give them peace of mind.

He would have been allowed back to the UK (as he in fact was allowed to do by the Swedish prosecutor) and would have gotten on with developing and refining the Wikileaks project. That would have helped all of us to become more critically aware of how we are being manipulated – not only by our security services but also by the corporate media that so often act as their mouthpiece.

Which is precisely why that did not happen and why Assange has been under some form of detention since 2010. Since then, his ability to perform his role as exposer of serial high-level state crimes has been ever more impeded – to the point now that he may never be able to oversee and direct Wikileaks ever again.

His current situation – locked up in Belmarsh high-security prison, in solitary confinement and deprived of access to a computer and all meaningful contact with the outside world – is so far based solely on the fact that he committed a minor infraction, breaching his police bail. Such a violation, committed by anyone else, almost never incurs prosecution, let alone a lengthy jail sentence.

So here is a far from complete list – aided by the research of John Pilger, Craig Murray and Caitlin Johnstone – of some of the most glaring anomalies in Assange’s legal troubles. There are 17 of them below. Each might conceivably have been possible in isolation. But taken together they are overwhelming evidence that this was never about enforcing the law. From the start, Assange faced political persecution.

No judicial authority

• In late summer 2010, neither of the two Swedish women alleged Assange had raped them when they made police statements. They went together to the police station after finding out that Assange had slept with them both only a matter of days apart and wanted him to be forced to take an HIV test. One of the women, SW, refused to sign the police statement when she understood the police were seeking an indictment for rape. The investigation relating to the second woman, AA, was for a sexual assault specific to Sweden. A condom produced by AA that she says Assange tore during sex was found to have neither her nor Assange’s DNA on it, undermining her credibility.

 

• Sweden’s strict laws protecting suspects during preliminary investigations were violated by the Swedish media to smear Assange as a rapist. In response, the Stockholm chief prosecutor, Eva Finne, took charge and quickly cancelled the investigation: “I don’t believe there is any reason to suspect that he has committed rape.” She later concluded: “There is no suspicion of any crime whatsoever.”

 

• The case was revived by another prosecutor, Marianne Ny, during which time Assange was questioned and spent more than a month in Sweden waiting for developments in the case. He was then told by prosecutors that he was free to leave for the UK, suggesting that any offence they believed he had committed was not considered serious enough to detain him in Sweden. Nonetheless, shortly afterwards, Interpol issued a Red Notice for Assange, usually reserved for terrorists and dangerous criminals.

 

• The UK supreme court approved an extradition to Sweden based on a European Arrest Warrant (EAW) in 2010, despite the fact that it was not signed by a “judicial authority”, only by the Swedish prosecutor. The terms of the EAW agreement were amended by the UK government shortly after the Assange ruling to make sure such an abuse of legal procedure never occurred again.

 

• The UK supreme court also approved Assange’s extradition even though Swedish authorities refused to offer an assurance that he would not be extradited onwards to the US, where a grand jury was already formulating draconian charges in secret against him under the Espionage Act. The US similarly refused to give an assurance they would not seek his extradition.

 

• In these circumstances, Assange fled to Ecuador’s embassy in London in summer 2012, seeking political asylum. That was after the Swedish prosecutor, Marianne Ny, blocked Assange’s chance to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

 

• Australia not only refused Assange, a citizen, any help during his long ordeal, but prime minister Julia Gillard even threatened to strip Assange of his citizenship, until it was pointed out that it would be illegal for Australia to do so.

 

• Britain, meanwhile, not only surrounded the embassy with a large police force at great public expense, but William Hague, the foreign secretary, threatened to tear up the Vienna Convention, violating Ecuador’s diplomatic territory by sending UK police into the embassy to arrest Assange.

Six years of heel-dragging

• Although Assange was still formally under investigation, Ny refused to come to London to interview him, despite similar interviews having been conducted by Swedish prosecutors 44 times in the UK in the period Assange was denied that right.

 

• In 2016, international legal experts in the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which adjudicates on whether governments have complied with human rights obligations, ruled that Assange was being detained unlawfully by Britain and Sweden. Although both countries participated in the UN investigation, and had given the tribunal vocal support when other countries were found guilty of human rights violations, they steadfastly ignored its ruling in favour of Assange. UK Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond, flat-out lied in claiming the UN panel was “made up of lay people and not lawyers”. The tribunal comprises leading experts in international law, as is clear from their CVs. Nonetheless, the lie became Britain’s official response to the UN ruling. The British media performed no better. A Guardian editorial dismissed the verdict as nothing more than a “publicity stunt”.

 

• Ny finally relented on interviewing Assange in November 2016, coming to London after six years of heel-dragging. However, she barred Assange’s lawyer from being present. That was a gross irregularity that Ny was due to be questioned about in May 2017 by a Stockholm judge. Apparently rather than face those questions, Ny decided to close the investigation against Assange the very same day.

 

• In fact, correspondence that was later revealed under a Freedom of Information request shows that the British prosecution service, the CPS, pressured the Swedish prosecutor not to come to the London to interview Assange through 2010 and 2011, thereby creating the embassy standoff.

 

• Also, the CPS destroyed most of the incriminating correspondence to circumvent the FoI requests. The emails that surfaced did so only because some copies were accidentally overlooked in the destruction spree. Those emails were bad enough. They show that in 2013 Sweden had wanted to drop the case against Assange but had come under strong British pressure to continue the pretence of seeking his extradition. There are emails from the CPS stating, “Don’t you dare” drop the case, and most revealing of all: “Please do not think this case is being dealt with as just another extradition.”

 

• It also emerged that Marianne Ny had deleted an email she received from the FBI.

 

• Despite his interview with Ny taking place in late 2016, Assange was not subseqently charged in absentia – an option Sweden could have pursued if it had thought the evidence was strong enough.

 

• After Sweden dropped the investigation against Assange, his lawyers sought last year to get the British arrest warrant for his bail breach dropped. They had good grounds, both because the allegations over which he’d been bailed had been dropped by Sweden and because he had justifiable cause to seek asylum given the apparent US interest in extraditing him and locking him up for life for political crimes. His lawyers could also argue convincingly that the time he had spent in confinement, first under house arrest and then in the embassy, was more than equivalent to time, if any, that needed to be served for the bail infringement. However, the judge, Emma Arbuthnot, rejected the Assange team’s strong legal arguments. She was hardly a dispassionate observer. In fact, in a properly ordered world she should have recused herself, given that she is the wife of a government whip, who was also a business partner of a former head of MI6, Britain’s version of the CIA.

 

• Assange’s legal rights were again flagrantly violated last week, with the collusion of Ecuador and the UK, when US prosecutors were allowed to seize Assange’s personal items from the embassy while his lawyers and UN officials were denied the right to be present.

Information dark ages

Even now, as the US prepares its case to lock Assange away for the rest of his life, most are still refusing to join the dots. Chelsea Manning has been repeatedly jailed, and is now facing ruinous fines for every day she refuses to testify against Assange as the US desperately seeks to prop up its bogus espionage claims. In Medieval times, the authorities were more honest: they simply put people on the rack.

Back in 2017, when the rest of the media were still pretending this was all about Assange fleeing Swedish “justice”, John Pilger noted:

[QUOTE]

In 2008, a secret Pentagon document prepared by the “Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch” foretold a detailed plan to discredit WikiLeaks and smear Assange personally. The “mission” was to destroy the “trust” that was WikiLeaks’ “centre of gravity”. This would be achieved with threats of “exposure [and] criminal prosecution”. Silencing and criminalising such an unpredictable source of truth-telling was the aim.” …

According to Australian diplomatic cables, Washington’s bid to get Assange is “unprecedented in scale and nature”. …

The US Justice Department has contrived charges of “espionage”, “conspiracy to commit espionage”, “conversion” (theft of government property), “computer fraud and abuse” (computer hacking) and general “conspiracy”. The favoured Espionage Act, which was meant to deter pacifists and conscientious objectors during World War One, has provisions for life imprisonment and the death penalty. …

In 2015, a federal court in Washington blocked the release of all information about the “national security” investigation against WikiLeaks, because it was “active and ongoing” and would harm the “pending prosecution” of Assange. The judge, Barbara J. Rothstein, said it was necessary to show “appropriate deference to the executive in matters of national security”. This is a kangaroo court.

[END QUOTE]

All of this information was available to any journalist or newspaper that cared to search it out and wished to publicise it. And yet not one corporate media outlet has done so over the past nine years. Instead they have shored up a series of preposterous US and UK state narratives designed to keep Assange behind bars and propel the rest of us back into the information dark ages.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.

29 May 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Vidya Bhushan Rawat

While in truly technical terms Dr Payal Tadvi committed suicide on May 22nd 2019 in her hostel room in Mumbai, but for all practical reasons, I would call it a murder, a crime which was not merely racial hatred but also look like Islamophobia as she seem to belong to tribal community practicing Islamic faith. The twenty six year old Gynecologist was pursuing her post graduate course and would have become the first doctor from her community. It is so difficult for the Adivasis to come up and stand when there is so much of concealed hatred. It is reported that Payal has complained to higher authorities about the continuous harassment by her savarna colleagues and room mates namely Dr Hema Ahuja, Dr Bhakti Mehra and Dr Anikta Khandelwal who were her seniors too. They would not only not allow her to perform surgeries but were regularly harassing and humiliating her.

Payal had informed this to her mother Abeda Tadvi and father Salim who live in Jalgaon and work in Zila Parishad office. She was a very hard working girl, a brave one who passed out her MBBS degree in Gynecology from Miraj. A report in the Hindu, quoting her husband Dr Salman Tadvi says, “When she came to Nair Hospital for her postgraduation, she was asked to temporarily share a room with Dr. Hema Ahuja and Dr. Bhakti Mehar. The two began harassing her soon,” “The two doctors would go to the toilet and wipe their feet on her mattress and litter it. When she would be away, they would taunt her that she was spending time with her husband,” he said.

Her mother Abeda Tadvi is a cancer patient and has been listening to her daughter and standing with her all the time. She said : “My daughter was extremely strong. But this constant abuse eventually broke her. The three accused should be punished so that it sets an example for others who traumatise and torture students like Payal.”

How do you define this treatment given to Payal by her savarna seniors? This is pure hate crime ? All those who are insulting Dalits and Adivasis, humiliating them, compelling them to commit suicide, attacking them, their habitat, their land are criminals and should be dwelt under hate crime laws. The savarna hate crime must be now on the top of the government agenda if it want to win ‘sabka vishwas’, trust of all. The three savarna doctors must be prosecuted with stringent laws so that this become an example but we know very well that the government and its officers have never been sincere in following the constitution and implementing the rule of law otherwise Dr Payal would not have died. Where are the institutional mechanism to protect SC-ST students. Her death is an institutional killing like that of Rohit Vemula and the BYL Nair Hospital, Mumbai can not get away from its accountability in this regard. Why are institutional mechanism not strong to deal with the discrimination which is rampant in our educational institutions. Why was there no ‘committee’ which could have taken action against these three girls. If there is a committee then what did it do ? Who are the members of the committee ? Are there SC-ST members in these committees ? Can we trust those committees where no member belong to these communities.

For clarification of many, unlike the scheduled castes, the tribes have got reservation irrespective of faiths. Payal belonged to Bhil community which has about 2.7% people practicing Islam though around Maharashtra. Total number of Bhils and Gonds in India is nearly 2.8 crore, which is 27% of the total adivasi population in India.Among the Muslim Tribal communities 1.32 lakhs live in Jammu and Kashmir and 1.12 lakh hails from Maharashtra where Bhils are the biggest tribal community where Islam is one of the practicing faiths.

Dr Payal was killed by the three seniors who happened to be women. She became the victim of hate crime where her tribal identity practicing Islamic faith might have further aggravated her troubles. How can the racists hate-mongers allow a tribal Muslim doctor, full of confidence and equally meritorious, to stand shoulder to shoulder with them. This is the crisis that the caste Hindus suffer. First they blame that the SC-ST dont have merits and when people come and join them, they become so notorious that they create all the obstacles so that these students leave their courses mid way and return their home. Those who remain in the institutions are continuously harassed in the hope they will give up. Payal did not leave the hostel and decided to stay put. There is a limit of patience. She was after all just 26 years old with no one to help her or even console her. This is how girls from Dalit Adivasi communities face when they are in these manuwadi institutions. The whole atmosphere in these so called institutions of merit is so suffocating with brahmanical arrogance that it kills the students from the Dalit Bahujan Communities.

With more and more brahmanisation process in these institutions, further obstacles are being created so that students dont come up and leave. That is a strategy by the savarna elite where the institutions and their caste owners to are party to hate crime. Will Maharashtra government act and get this case heard in a fast track court so that the hate criminals get the maximum punishment. Let the government develop mechanism in all our colleges, universities, institutions as well as offices like Women Cell, develop special cell for SC-ST communities so that such murders are not repeated and India show its commitment against caste and race based prejudices which are order of the day.

Our salute to Dr Payal Tadvi . her fighting spirit will remain alive and her death will always remind us the grave nature of discrimination that exists in our minds and body against Dalits and Adivasis. We will remain the most barbaric, uncivilised and highly prejudiced society If India does not address this issue with honesty. With so many people being kept outside humanity and denial of justice to them will never make us a great nation. Time to show real intent to fight against hate crimes on Dalits and Adivasis.

Vidya Bhushan Rawat is a social and human rights activist.

28 May 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Team

In Shahjahanpur of Uttar Pradesh a mother walked with her dead son’s body home as the hospital denied ambulance. The deceased child had been admitted to the hospital after he encountered high fever. It was alleged that three ambulances were parked at the hospital but the authorities failed to spare one.

The doctors of the concerned hospital dismissed the claims of the parents. The father of the deceased told the news agency, ANI that the doctors asked them to take their child to another hospital. The hospital also refused to give them a vehicle for going to another hospital.

With no money in their pockets, the deceased decided to walk to another hospital. The mother of the deceased alleged that her son had passed away on their way to the hospital.

The emergency medical officer, Anurag Parashar stated that they had admitted a child named Afroz in their hospital at 8:10 pm. Parashar added that since the condition of the child was not good, they asked the parents to take him to Lucknow for proper treatment. Parashar alleged that on hearing this, the parents of the child ‘scoffed’ and said that they will take their child wherever they want. After saying this, the parents of the deceased allegedly left.

Madhya Pradesh Farmer, Family Of Five Consumes Poison In Suicide Pact, Unable To Repay Rs 1.6 Lakh Debt

In Madhya Pradesh a small scale farmer killed himself in a suicide pact along with his family. Ashok Prajapati, a resident of Rewa district attempted suicide with his wife and three children by consuming poison. While Ashok, his wife Sunita and their 14-year-old son died their two other children are still undergoing treatment in a hospital.

According to Ashok’s father his son was a small scale farmer and after years of facing losses, he borrowed Rs 1.6 lakhs from a local moneylender to start a brick kiln.

The troubles started after Ashok failed to repay the loan. He was allegedly getting threats from the money lender. And on Friday night, he gave poison-laced soft drink to his children and wife before consuming himself.

Bihar man asks vendor his name, shoots at him on knowing he is Muslim

In a suspected case of hate crime, an inebriated man here asked a street vendor his name and then shot him in the back on learning that he is a Muslim, police said on Monday.

The suspect, Rajiv Yadav, also asked the man, Mohammed Qasim, to go to Pakistan, they said. On the compliant of Qasim, a case has been registered against Yadav, who is absconding, Station House Officer Neeraj Kumar Singh said.

“The incident took place at Kumbhi village in Cheria Bariyarpur police station area of the district on Sunday. An FIR has been registered and search is on for Rajiv Yadav. We are making efforts to bring the accused to book at the earliest,” he said.

A video of Qasim, who sells detergents to make a living, expressing his ordeal while undergoing treatment at a hospital, has gone viral on social media.

The clip shows Qasim alleging that the man fired at him in an inebriated state after asking him his name.

“I was on my daily round when the attacker stopped me and asked me my name. When I replied, he exclaimed – you are a Muslim. What are you doing here? You should go to Pakistan. He, thereafter, whipped out a pistol and opened fire. The bullet hit me in my back. His firearm had just one bullet. As he proceeded to load more ammunition, I shoved him away and ran for my life,” Qasim, who is in his 30s, alleged, adding that bystanders did not come to his rescue.

CPI leader Kanhaiya Kumar, who had contested from Begusarai in the Lok Sabha elections but lost by a huge margin to BJP’s Giriraj Singh, said leaders who spread hate for political gains were to be blamed for the incident.

“For such incidents, leaders and their cronies who spread hate for their political gains are responsible. We will not rest until the guilty are punished,” he tweeted.

Hijab-clad student in Bengal college ‘harassed’ by Jai Shri Ram chanting men

A 23-year-old hijab-clad student of North Bengal Medical College in Siliguri was allegedly threatened and intimidated by a group of 10-12 men chanting ‘Jai Shri Ram’ inside the institution campus on Saturday.

“I along with a friend around 10 PM were returning from the canteen after dinner when we saw a group of 10-12 men standing on the road. We were walking on our own but after noticing my attire they started shouting ‘Jai Shreei Ram’ while pointing fingers at us. Later they started thumping their feet to intimidate us. We immediately ran away to save ourselves,” said the final-year medical student.

The student maintained that she had never seen the accused in the college campus earlier. The local police initially refused to take her complaint but later asked her to remove the word ‘threatened’ from the FIR, she said. The FIR, though, was finally filed the next day with the word added.

“I am a hijab-wearing Muslim, I always wear this attire. I have never faced such harassment in my life. There was no one in the street that day to save us. Is this how we have to live now?” she added.

4 year old kid stripped, burnt with Hot Khichdi for asking extra egg in West Bengal Childcare Centre

In a disgusting and disturbing incident in West Bengal, a 4-year-old boy was stripped and burnt with steaming khichdi at a government-run child development centre since the boy asked for an extra egg for breakfast. The shocking incident of the kid crying in pain happened in Raghunathganj area of Murshidabad district on Friday. This happened in a state-funded organisation where children up to six years are given supplementary nutrition, immunization, and non-formal education.

The incident came to light after the child’s mother lodged a police complaint against the woman after her son came home crying. As per Hindustan Times, a case has been filed against the woman who has gone into hiding since the shocking incident.

28 May 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja

Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was assassinated 50 years ago today, on 17 January, 1961. This heinous crime was a culmination of two inter-related assassination plots by American and Belgian governments, which used Congolese accomplices and a Belgian execution squad to carry out the deed.

Ludo De Witte, the Belgian author of the best book on this crime, qualifies it as “the most important assassination of the 20th century”. The assassination’s historical importance lies in a multitude of factors, the most pertinent being the global context in which it took place, its impact on Congolese politics since then and Lumumba’s overall legacy as a nationalist leader.

For 126 years, the US and Belgium have played key roles in shaping Congo’s destiny. In April 1884, seven months before the Berlin Congress, the US became the first country in the world to recognise the claims of King Leopold II of the Belgians to the territories of the Congo Basin.

When the atrocities related to brutal economic exploitation in Leopold’s Congo Free State resulted in millions of fatalities, the US joined other world powers to force Belgium to take over the country as a regular colony. And it was during the colonial period that the US acquired a strategic stake in the enormous natural wealth of the Congo, following its use of the uranium from Congolese mines to manufacture the first atomic weapons, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

With the outbreak of the cold war, it was inevitable that the US and its western allies would not be prepared to let Africans have effective control over strategic raw materials, lest these fall in the hands of their enemies in the Soviet camp. It is in this regard that Patrice Lumumba’s determination to achieve genuine independence and to have full control over Congo’s resources in order to utilise them to improve the living conditions of our people was perceived as a threat to western interests. To fight him, the US and Belgium used all the tools and resources at their disposal, including the United Nations secretariat, under Dag Hammarskjöld and Ralph Bunche, to buy the support of Lumumba’s Congolese rivals , and hired killers.

In Congo, Lumumba’s assassination is rightly viewed as the country’s original sin. Coming less than seven months after independence (on 30 June, 1960), it was a stumbling block to the ideals of national unity, economic independence and pan-African solidarity that Lumumba had championed, as well as a shattering blow to the hopes of millions of Congolese for freedom and material prosperity.

The assassination took place at a time when the country had fallen under four separate governments: the central government in Kinshasa (then Léopoldville); a rival central government by Lumumba’s followers in Kisangani (then Stanleyville); and the secessionist regimes in the mineral-rich provinces of Katanga and South Kasai. Since Lumumba’s physical elimination had removed what the west saw as the major threat to their interests in the Congo, internationally-led efforts were undertaken to restore the authority of the moderate and pro-western regime in Kinshasa over the entire country. These resulted in ending the Lumumbist regime in Kisangani in August 1961, the secession of South Kasai in September 1962, and the Katanga secession in January 1963.

No sooner did this unification process end than a radical social movement for a “second independence” arose to challenge the neocolonial state and its pro-western leadership. This mass movement of peasants, workers, the urban unemployed, students and lower civil servants found an eager leadership among Lumumba’s lieutenants, most of whom had regrouped to establish a National Liberation Council (CNL) in October 1963 in Brazzaville, across the Congo river from Kinshasa. The strengths and weaknesses of this movement may serve as a way of gauging the overall legacy of Patrice Lumumba for Congo and Africa as a whole.

The most positive aspect of this legacy was manifest in the selfless devotion of Pierre Mulele to radical change for purposes of meeting the deepest aspirations of the Congolese people for democracy and social progress. On the other hand, the CNL leadership, which included Christophe Gbenye and Laurent-Désiré Kabila, was more interested in power and its attendant privileges than in the people’s welfare. This is Lumumbism in words rather than in deeds. As president three decades later, Laurent Kabila did little to move from words to deeds.

More importantly, the greatest legacy that Lumumba left for Congo is the ideal of national unity. Recently, a Congolese radio station asked me whether the independence of South Sudan should be a matter of concern with respect to national unity in the Congo. I responded that since Patrice Lumumba has died for Congo’s unity, our people will remain utterly steadfast in their defence of our national unity.

Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja is professor of African and Afro-American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History

17 January 2011

Source: www.theguardian.com

By Dr Gilbert Sebastian

Sachin Mathew (name changed), one of my students who completed M.A. in at the Central University of Kerala subsequently did his B.Ed. and worked in a school in the rural part of Gorakhpur, the district the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath hails from. He had given me an interesting account of the actual conditions prevailing there. I asked him to write about it but was not inclined to write it. So I thought of making this brief note which is not, by any means, to denigrate our fellow citizens in north India but for the understanding of the compatriots of south India, especially, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh which refused to give a second tenure to the Modi government. This is for the understanding of these south Indians who wonder why Modi government won a second term in spite of the note-ban which was an “organised loot and legalised plunder”, according to Manmohan Singh; the Rafale Deal which was the “Largest Defence Scam” in Indian history according to Adv. Prashant Bhushan; writing off the debts of 3 lakh 16 thousand crore rupees of big industrialists; acute farm crisis driving an average of 12,000 farmers to suicide every year; price rise; grueling unemployment; mob lynchings; etc. The pinch of the stomach made little impact on the electoral outcome in 2019. The majoritarian nationalist rabble-rousing on terrorist attacks especially at Pulwama and the surgical strike at Balakot in Pakistan were sufficient to win the votes of the north Indians. This signaled a return of nationalist ideology – communal and anti-Pakistan in character quite unlike the secular and anti-imperialist nationalism of the Nehru era.

Returning to the discussion on Gorakhpur, the Principal cum Owner of the school is a matriculation-failed person. Sachin Mathew was the most educated person among the teachers of the school. The fees in the school is around 3000 rupees per month. Yet the demand for education was so high that the students were sitting so cramped on the school benches that they could not free their hands for writing.

On the average, the supply of electricity in the district is only for four hours a day even as the summer heat goes up to 40-45 degree Celsius.

An average house in the area was a hall in which they live on the one side and their animals live on the other side. The youth dress impeccably with tucked in shirts and shoes. But if you visit their places of stay, it is clear that they live in very unhygienic conditions. Flies cover the food they offer so it is hard to follow their friendly prodding, ‘Khao, khao’ (Eat, eat). So Sachin Mathew decided not to visit their houses anymore.

When they hear that he was from Kerala, they express their high regard for the state which they say is very educated and equipped with knowledge of English and this appreciation is also reflected in the high demand for getting educated in schools where teachers from Kerala teach. But they invariably ask a Malayalee whether he/she eats beef and they add, ‘How could you do this? The cow is like your mother.’ Sachin Mathew hails from a Christian background in north Kerala. They give a complacent smile when they hear that he is from a Christian background. But they start hurling communal abuses as soon as they hear about Muslims.

The narrative above may cast light on the culture and living conditions of an average rural locality in north India and could make us understand why Modi was voted back to power. Rural underdevelopment and miserable living conditions in the Hindi belt go hand in hand with communal anti-Muslim sentiments, obviously powered by dominant class politics. The fertile land of the Gangetic plain makes agriculture an earning proposition. So people are able to afford costly education but the quality of education remains so low.

Article 45 under Directive Principles of the Constitution of India says, “The State shall endeavour to provide, within a period of ten years from the commencement of this Constitution, for free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of fourteen years.” (emphasis added). This promise remains belied even after 69 years of the inauguration of the Constitution and the prime responsibility lies with the dominant class politicians who should be asked to give an explanation. India would have been a very different country if at least, basic literacy was provided to all Indian citizens so that they would be aware of their basic rights and would not be swayed by communal passions. This is of extreme importance for the future of India because once the delimitation of constituencies is carried out by 2025, the seat share of south Indian states will further go down and the Hindi belt with a growing population would overwhelmingly determine the shared destiny of India. It may be underlined that the biggest challenge, in the days to come is to win people over from the grip of communal ideology.

Dr. Gilbert Sebastian is an Assistant Professor at the Central University of Kerala, Kasaragod.

26 May 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

Rim Banna, a famous Palestinian singer who translated Palestine’s most moving poetry to song passed away on March 24, 2018, at the age of 51. Rim captured the struggle for Palestinian freedom in the most dignified and melodious ways. If we could imagine angels singing, they would sound like Rim.

When Rim died, all Palestinians mourned her death. Although a few international outlets carried the news of her passing at a relatively young age, her succumbing to cancer did not receive much coverage or discussion. Sadly, a Palestinian icon of cultural resistance who had inspired a whole generation, starting with the First Palestinian Intifada in 1987, hardly registered as an event worthy of remembrance and reflection, even among those who purport to champion the Palestinian cause.

Compare Rim to Madonna, an ‘artiste’ who has stood for self-aggrandizing personal fame and money-making. She has championed the most debased moral values, utilizing cheap entertainment while catering to the lowest common denominator to remain relevant in the music world for as long as possible.

While Rim had a cause, Madonna has none. And while Rim symbolized cultural resistance, Madonna symbolizes globalized cultural hegemony – in this case, the imposition of consumerist western cultures on the rest of the world.

Cultural hegemony defines the US and other Western cultures’ relationship to the rest of the world. It is not culture as in the collective intellectual and artistic achievements of these societies, but as a set of ideological and cultural tools used by ruling classes to maintain domination over the disadvantaged, colonized and oppressed.

Madonna, along with Michael Jordan, the Beatles and Coca Cola represent far more than mere performers and fizzy drinks, but also serve as tools used to secure cultural, thus economic and political dominance, as well. The fact that in some cities around the world, especially in the Southern hemisphere, Coca Cola “flows more freely than water” speaks volumes about the economic toll and political dimension of cultural hegemony.

This issue becomes critical when a pro-Israel Madonna decides to perform in Israel, as she has done repeatedly in the past, as part of the Eurovision contest. Knowing who she is and what she stands for, her decision should not come as a surprise; after all, in her September 2009 Tel Aviv concert, she sang while wrapped in an Israeli flag.

Of course, it is essential that artistes of her caliber and the contestants representing 41 different countries, are reminded of their moral responsibilities towards occupied and oppressed Palestinians. It is also important that Israel is confronted regarding its unrelenting efforts to mask its apartheid and war crimes in Palestine.

Indeed, the whitewashing of Israeli human rights violations using art – also known as “art washing” – should not be allowed to continue when Gaza is under siege, where Palestinian children are shot and killed daily without remorse and without the least legal accountability.

This is why such artistic events are important for the Israeli government and society. Israel has used Eurovision as a distraction from the blood and gore that has been taking place not far from that venue. Those who labored to ensure the success of the event, knowing fully how Israel is using the brand as an opportunity to normalize its war against Palestinians, should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

But, on the other hand, should we be the least surprised? Aren’t such global music events, as Eurovision, at the heart of the western-centric globalization scheme of cultural hegemony, which sole purpose is to enforce a capitalist view of the world, where western culture is consumed as a commodity, no different from a McDonald’s sandwich or a pair of Levi jeans?

Calling on 60-year-old Madonna to refrain from entertaining apartheid Israel can be considered beneficial as a media strategy, for it helped highlight, although momentarily, an issue that would have been otherwise absent from news headlines. However, by placing so much focus on Madonna, and whatever human rights’ values she supposedly stands for, we also take the risk of inadvertently validating her and the consumerist values she represents. More, in this Madonna-driven trajectory, we are also neglecting Palestine’s cultural resistance, the core drive behind Palestinian ‘somoud’ – steadfastness – over the course of a century.

In response to her critics, Madonna answered, “I’ll never stop playing music to suit someone’s political agenda nor will I stop speaking out against violations of human rights wherever in the world they may be.” In the eyes of many who are ignorant of the facts, such an answer may appear as if an ‘empowered’ response to those who are trying to sway a genuine, pure artiste from following her calling.

In fact, Madonna is an expert in appearing as if morally-guided, yet never translating such morality to anything meaningful in reality. In a speech described as “powerful” by the Rolling Stone Magazine, Madonna declared during a Women’s March in Washington D.C. in 2017 “to the rebellion, to our refusal as women to accept this new age of tyranny. Where not just women are in danger, but all marginalized people.”

Of course, Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian women – who have paid a heavy price for Israeli Occupation, war and marginalization – are not to be included in Madonna’s false revolution. And the chances are, shortly after she sings and dances in a jubilant, apartheid Israel, she will once more take on many platforms as if the Rosa Parks of revolutionary art.

While it is important that we keep the pressure on those who engage and validate Israel politically, economically and culturally, these efforts should come secondary to embracing Palestine’s culture of resistance. Behaving as if Madonna’s stage shenanigans represent true culture, while ignoring Palestinian culture altogether, is similar to academics addressing decolonization from the point of view of the colonizer, not the colonized. The truth is, nations cannot truly rid themselves from the colonial mindset without having their narratives take the center-stage of politics, culture and every other aspect of knowledge.

“The intellectual’s error consists in believing that one can know without understanding and, even more, without feeling and being impassioned,” wrote Italian anti-fascist intellectual, Antonio Gramsci. This entails the intellectual and the artist to feel “the elementary passions of the people, understanding them and, therefore, explaining and justifying them.”

The truth is that appealing to Madonna’s moral sense without immersing ourselves passionately in the art of Rim Banna will, in the long run, do Palestinians no good. Only embracing Palestine’s culture of resistance will, ultimately, keep the self-serving, hegemonic and cheap cultural messages of the Madonnas of this world at bay.

– Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle.

22 May 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Lirar Pulikkalakath

“The people of Iran should stand united in the face of this, and they will deliver a strong punch to the mouth of the American secretary of state and anyone who backs them” (Dehghanpisheh and Andrew 2018)). Almost one year back, Ismail Kowsari, the deputy commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Iran’s elite military force, responded strongly at Mike Pompeo, United States (US) secretary of state for threatening ‘the strongest sanctions in history’ on Iran. Mr. Kowsri’s harsh response was against the statement of the latter that the US would impose new penalties on Iran if the country did not make any changes in its position towards various regional and international issues, including dropping its nuclear program and pulling out of the Syrian civil war. Now the region is in an alarming situation after the sabotage attack on four oil tanks in the Strait of Hormuz on 14th May of this year. There were reports of four commercial vessels sabotaged near Fujairah emirate of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This location is one of the world’s largest bunkering hubs lying just outside the Strait of Hormuz. Media reported that the attacks were conducted by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, supported by Iran. As West Asia is known for its political instability, regional Wars and international interventions, this attack is a warning of deepening tensions between the US, its GCC allies, and Iran could be coming to a head.

Strategic Importance of the Strait of Hormuz

Strait of Hormuz is a narrow seaway that connects the Indian Ocean with the Persian/ Arabian Gulf. Historically, the waterway has connected Persian and Arab civilisations with Pacific Asia, Indian subcontinent, and the Americas (Weitz 2018). This strategic seaway also links major crude oil producers of the West Asian countries to markets in the Asia Pacific region, West and beyond. The area also has much significance since one-third of the world’s sea-borne oil passes through it every day.

The strait is only 33 to 95 km wide throughout its length. Oman and Iran are the countries nearest to the Strait, and they share territorial rights over the strategic water body (Briney 2019). “The international shipping lane at the entrance to the Gulf is in Oman’s territorial waters, but farther up the tankers enter an area that Iran claims as within its sovereignty. Accordingly, it would be relatively easy to interrupt marine transportation to and from the Gulf” (Guzansky 2010). The widths of the chokepoint, however, is much narrower (about three km wide in each direction). “Because the waters are not deep enough for oil tankers throughout the strait’s width” (Briney 2019). Thus, the sea route makes one of the most challenging busy commercial shipping lane in the world.

In the year 2016, the waterway accounted for 30% of all sea-borne trade of crude oil and natural gas. The bulk of these natural resources comes from countries like UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Kuwait and Qatar. The U.S. Navy’s Bahrain-based Fifth Fleet, tasked to protect commercial ships is in this area (Moussa 2018). All the facts have given the Strait of Hormuz a strategically significant water body.

Context of the Sabotage Attack

According to media reports and statements made by officials of the UAE and Saudi governments, there were four oil tankers targeted in and around the Strait of Hormuz. When two of the sabotaged oil tankers belong to Saudi, another one belonged to the UAE. The fourth one belongs to the Thome Group, a Norwegian company. Importantly the first three ships belonging to the arch-rival of Iran and the most reliable allies of the US in West Asia. It is also important to note that tensions between the US and Iran had risen since last year when Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) signed in 2015.

The Iranian government had warned about the closing of the Strait many times since then, especially in the context of potential sanctions that could be levied upon Iranian oil exports. President Donald Trump has given countries until November 4, 2018, to stop importing petroleum from Iran. These attempts were part of a new campaign of pressure and confrontation against Iran, a staunch enemy of the US and its close allies (Chang 2019). Of course, verbal confrontation tension between the two was already heightened after the designation of the IRGC as a terrorist organisation, by the US government, withdrawal from the JCPOA, and the imposition of new sanctions on the Islamic Republic. Adding fuel to this, at the beginning of May 2019, the US sent the USS Abraham Lincoln, the aircraft carrier, and B-52 bombers to the Gulf (Freer 2019).

As an impact of these series of confrontation and pressure from each part, Iran’s oil exports have fallen significantly. Additionally, the US also warned at five of Iran’s biggest remaining customers, especially India and China, to stop purchasing Iranian oil. The move to deploy aircraft carriers strike group is an attempt to cut Iranian oil exports to zero in response to an ‘unspecified’ threat.

Responses of Major Actors

Neither the UAE nor the Saudi government assigned blamed any country publicly. But there were reports that the US officials suspect that Iran and its proxies are behind the attack. “worrisome and dreadful” is the statement made by Iran’s foreign ministry after the incidents and asking for an investigation. Al Jazeera reported that the Qatar government is attempting to defuse the tensions between the regional powers by holding talks in Tehran (Freer 2019).

Conclusion

The Strait of Hormuz is one of the busiest commercial sea routes especially for oil trade in the world. This route is vital in linking oil producing countries in the Arabian/ Persian Gulf region to markets in Europe, Asia, North America and other regions. Iran has been threatening to close the Strait at different occasions whenever the country was in trouble and international pressure. Since the Iran- Iraq War in the 1980s, it has attempted to interrupt the strategically vital waterway. But the sabotage attack in the second week of May 2019 on four oil vessels and two oil pipelines at the strategic shipping lane has further escalated the existing tension in the region. The attack can have dire consequences on the international political economy. It can lead to the decline in the shipping of oil from the Arab/ Persian Gulf region that will be resulted in the price hike. Energy security and the economy of major Asian economies like India, Japan, China, and South Korea will be most affected. Any interruption in this waterway can affect the oil producers in the Gulf region, including Iran. Because, they rely on this passage for commerce; to export oil and natural gas and import food products. Anyhow, the regional cold war and the threat from Iranian authority to close the waterway has created an alarming situation in the region. There is possibility for a close encounters between Iran and its regional enemies like Saudi Arabia and UAE. In this potential War, the former may get the support of Houthis from Yemen and Hezbollah from Lebanon, and the latter will get help from the U.S. Anyhow another war will be a catastrophe to the entire region of West Asia and international economy.

References

Briney, Amanda (2019), “Strait of Hormuz”, ThoughtCo, April 10, [Online: web] Accessed 17 May 2019, URL: https://www.thoughtco.com/strait-of-hormuz-1435398

Chang, Edward (2019), “The Real Iran Military Threat: Close the Strait of Hormuz (Watch Oil Prices Jump): Could this happen?”, The National Interest, May 16.

Dehghanpisheh, Babak, Andrew Heavens (2018), “Commander says Iran’s people will punch U.S. Secretary of State in the mouth”, Huffpost, May 22.

Freer, Courtney (2019), “Gulf Uncertainty Reigns amid Iran-US showdown”, Aljazeera, 16 May.

Guzansky, Yoel (2010), “The Straits of Hormuz: Strategic Importance in Volatile Times”, The Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) Insight No. 204, September 3, [Online: web] Accessed 18 May 2019, URL: https://www.inss.org.il/publication/the-straits-of-hormuz-strategic-importance-in-volatile-times/

Moussa, Ziad (2018), “Strait of Hormuz: Its strategic importance for sea-borne oil (Lebanon) -, By The East, July 6, [Online: web] Accessed 18 May 2019, URL: https://www.bytheeast.com/2018/07/06/strait-of-hormuz-its-strategic-importance-for-sea-borne-oil/

Weitz, Rockford (2018), “Why is the Strait of Hormuz important?”, The Conversation, July 9, [Online: web] Accessed 18 May 2019, URL: https://theconversation.com/why-is-the-strait-of-hormuz-important-99496

Dr. Lirar Pulikkalakath is Assistant Professor at the School of International Relations and Politics, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala, India.

20 May 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dan Lieberman

President Donald Trump’s use of the most vicious aspects of economic warfare prompt another examination of the politics of starvation.

After George W. Bush’s administration, Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump lessened Bush’s aggressive war policies and leaned to economic warfare. Sounds harmless when compared to exploding bombs, but it is not — economic warfare can crush an adversary without firing a shot. Gone to its extreme, economic warfare has the force of a neutron bomb; it disables the nation’s infrastructure and debilitates its population. Isolation from the international financial system, material embargos, and other sanctions reduce living standards and bring populations close to starvation The most serious aspects of economic warfare are major crimes and a form of terrorism.

Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and Iraq endured the most punishing sanctions from the United States. Results of sanctions against these countries, models for the effects of sanctions, show that sanctions have rarely accomplished their stated purposes and their intentions may be for other reasons — stalling economic progress, weakening challenges to antagonistic actions, advancing dominance, and promoting regime change.

Iran
Disturbed with the rule of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and infuriated by the hostage taking of 52 of U.S. embassy personnel by extreme Islamic students and militants, President Jimmy Carter froze several billions of dollars in Iranian bank deposits, gold and other properties, and followed with a 1980 embargo on trade with and travel to Iran. These punitive actions accomplished nothing for the United States, strengthened the Ayatollah’s Authority and hardened the student demands for releasing the captured embassy officials.

President Reagan, who partially owed his climb into the executive office to the hostage crisis, showed contempt for Iran’s resolution of the problem. Driven by the unproven assertion that Iran was involved in the 1983 bombing of a marine barracks in Beirut, and favoring Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the Iraq-Iran war, the U.S. president imposed additional sanctions on the Islamic Republic. and, in 1987, banned all imports from Iran.

Duriing the Clinton administration, the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA) penalized all foreign companies that provided investments over $20 million for the development of petroleum resources.

Iran’s entrance into the atomic age provoked a series of new sanctions. Economic warfare soon reached full scale by subduing Iran’s earnings from its most precious resource and export – oil. The U.S. Congress passed unilateral sanctions that targeted Iran’s energy and banking sectors. Sanctions did not halt Iran’s nuclear activities, or prevent it from signing contracts with foreign firms to develop its energy resources. Exports slowly grew to an estimated $82 billion in 2012, with liberated Iraq and independent China filling the gap as trading partners.

Nevertheless, economic warfare affected Iran’s industries and welfare. In October 2012, Iran’s currency, the rial, fell to a record low against the US dollar, losing about 80 per cent of its value in one year. Lack of spare parts and inability to replace planes affected aviation safety. Real growth rate in GDP, at a steady six per cent a year during the first decade of the twenty first century, fell to two per cent in 2011-2012. One report, citing officials from the U.S. Departments of State and Energy, concluded that gasoline imports in the Shah’s former kingdom declined from 130,000 barrels a day in 2009 to 50,000 barrels a day in 2011. Machinery wears, and the costs and time for repairs rapidly increased. A nation of educated professionals, who depended upon access to foreign technology and scientific cooperation, had their access to knowledge severely curtailed.

In a October 5, 2012 report to the UN General Assembly, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon summarized effects of sanctions on Iran’s population.

The sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic of Iran have had significant effects on the general population, including an escalation in inflation, a rise in commodities and energy costs, an increase in the rate of unemployment and a shortage of necessary items, including medicine,.

The embargoes have also hampered humanitarian operations, as the imposed restrictions on Iran’s banking system have halted the imports of medicines needed for treating diseases like cancer and heart and respiratory conditions.

The Obama administration eventually eased restrictions on the sale of medicines to Iran, and, after the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in which Iran halted and downsized its uranium enrichment, the UN lifted sanctions. In a following year, Iran GDP increased 15 percent.

On May 8, 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. and U.S. sanctions came into effect again in November 2018. President Trump articulated his plan for renewed sanctions as, “to bring Iran’s oil exports to ‘zero’ and remove a main source of revenue for the regime.” Trump imposed the ultimate harm afforded by economic warfare — starve the people and have them revolt against the regime.

That has not happened nor is predicted to occur. World Bank statistics from:
https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/iran/publication/economic-update-april-2019 indicate a severe slowing of the economy and steady rise of inflation.

As shown in the charts, oil production, and GDP growth dropped monotonicallyandseverely. Currency value suffered an initial shock and had some recovery. Inflation was up 40%, especially in food (up 60%) — — a suffering economy, a suffering people, and no political gain for the U.S.

Cuba
Immediately after the 1960 Cuban revolution, the United States imposed an embargo against Cuba. Fifty plus years of sanctions have not succeeded in accomplishing the purposes for which the United States proposed the sanctions — compensation to U.S. firms nationalized by Cuba and the overthrow of the Castro regime. The only result of the embargo has been deprivation of the Cuban people.

Although the United Nations General Assembly on November 2, 1995, voted 117 to 3 to recommend an end to the U.S. embargo against Cuba, President Clinton, on March 12, 1996, signed into law the misnamed Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act. This Act imposed penalties on foreign companies doing business in Cuba, permitted U.S. citizens to sue foreign investors who make use of American-owned property seized by the Cuban government, and denied foreign investors in Cuba’s industry to enter the U.S.

The World Health Organization (WHO) complimented pre-90’s Cuba for its public health system, which had been credited with eliminating hunger and malnutrition and wiping out infectious diseases. A tightened embargo reinforced Cuba’s suffering after Russia withdrew subsidies. and, soon, Cuba of the mid-90’s portrayed another image. The American Association for World Health and the American Public Health Association ascertained that the embargo caused significant deterioration in Cuba’s food production and health care:

• Cuba was banned from purchasing nearly 1/2 of new drugs on the market.
• Physicians had access to only 890 medications, down from 1,300 in 1989.
• Deterioration of water supply increased water borne diseases.
• Daily caloric intake dropped by 33% between 1989 and 1993.

In 2000, the Clinton administration finally allowed Cuba to have some relief from an aggressive economic warfare. The administration allowed the sale of agriculture and medicine to Cuba for humanitarian purposes. According to the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service, U.S. agricultural exports to Cuba reached $380 million in 2004. However, after hitting a peak of $710 million in 2008, U.S. food sales to Cuba declined over 50 percent by the year 2011. Reasons for the decline were largely economic – lack of foreign currency and better financial terms being offered by other countries.

Dollars and Sense, 2009, The Costs of the Embargo, by Margot Pepper

Representatives of a dozen leading U.S. business organizations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, signed a letter in December urging Barack Obama to scrap the embargo. The letter pegs the cost to the U.S. economy at $1.2 billion per year. The CPF’s estimates are much higher: up to $4.84 billion annually in lost sales and exports. The Cuban government estimates the loss to Cuba at about $685 million annually. Thus the blockade costs the United States up to $4.155 billion more a year than it costs Cuba.

After a period of harsh policy toward Cuba under President George W. Bush, President Obama announced in late 2014 that Washington and Havana would begin normalizing relations. To that end, the Obama administration achieved three pillars of normalization: 1) the removal of Cuba’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism, which allowed Cuba to access international finance; 2) the reestablishment of diplomatic relations; and 3) relaxed restrictions on travel and trade through executive action. The embargo remained in place.

In 2017, the Trump administration reversed some of the changes made under President Obama, but the vast majority remained U.S. policy. Despite some tighter trade sanctions and limitations on authorized travel, there are still legal pathways for Americans to export and travel to Cuba. On the list of new sanctions is allowing Americans to sue foreign companies in Cuba that are profiting from or using properties that were seized during the Cuban revolution.

From CBS News, May 11, 2019.

Havana — The Cuban government announced Friday it is launching widespread rationing of chicken, eggs, rice, beans, soap and other basic products in the face of a grave economic crisis. Commerce Minister Betsy Díaz Velazquez told the state-run Cuban News Agency that various forms of rationing would be employed in order to deal with shortages of staple foods.

Díaz blamed the hardening of the U.S. trade embargo by the Trump administration. Economists give equal or greater blame to a plunge in aid from Venezuela, where the collapse of the state-run oil company has led to a nearly two-thirds cut in shipments of subsidized fuel that Cuba used for power and to earn hard currency on the open market.

Another suffering economy, suffering people, and no political gain for the U.S.

North Korea
The proud and impoverished nation of North Korea has been continually subjected to sanctions, threats of economic sanctions, and hastily withdrawn sanctions. The media is peppered with the words: “U.S. Lifts sanctions,” “U.S. recommends sanctions,” “South Korea wary of sanctions.” It’s difficult to know if North Korea is being sanctioned or being forced into being sanctioned. After its 2006 claim of conducting a nuclear test, the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic Korea) leaders responded to intended sanctions by labeling them as “a declaration of war.”

The DPRK has,suffered from economic warfare, which includes restrictions on trade and financial transactions. Export of sensitive dual-use items (items that have both military and non-military uses) have, at times, been prohibited. During March 2012, the politics of starvation entered the situation; angered by an intended North Korea missile test, the U.S. suspended food aid to the “hermit kingdom.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States has suspended planned food aid to North Korea as Pyongyang vows to push ahead with a plan to launch a long-range missile in defiance of international warnings, U.S. military officials said on Wednesday.

Under President Obama, sanctions increased as a policy of “strategic patience;” the US waited for North Korea to change its bad behavior before engaging with the state. As a result, trade between North Korea and China increased and sanctions did not encourage Kim Jong-An to discuss de-nuclearization.

On September 21, 2017, President Donald Trump, as part of his administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign, allowed severing from its financial system and/or freezing assets of companies, businesses, organizations, and individuals who traded in goods, services, or technology with North Korea.

U.S. negotiations with North Korea have a built-in error; they request de-nuclearization in exchange for improved relations and reduction in sanctions. Not considered is that North Korea’s development of a nuclear arsenal was a response to its regard of U.S. actions in the Korean peninsula as a direct threat to its regime and the developments had no relation to sanctions. Therefore, the DPRK will not trade de-nuclearization for relief of sanctions, and that approach is a non-starter.

Sanctions, intended to collapse the North Korea regime, have not halted its development of nuclear weapons and guided missile delivery systems. They have collapsed the economy and harmed the North Korean people; starvation during droughts have occurred. Although some international assistance has been provided to North Korea, the intensive economic warfare waged against the “hermit kingdom” has exacerbated its problems, without any apparent benefit to its principal antagonist, the United States.

Iraq
If Iraq were Pompeii, then the US would be Mt. Vesuvius.
The sanctions against Iraq began August 6, 1990, four days after Hussein invaded Kuwait, and featured a near-total financial and trade embargo. Resultant suffering has been outlined in a UN Report on the Current Humanitarian Situation in Iraq, submitted to the Security Council, March 1999. Due to the length of the report, only significant features are mentioned.

Before the Gulf War

• before 1991 Iraq’s social and economic indicators were generally above the regional and developing country averages.
• Up to 1990, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) cited Iraq as having one of the highest per capita food availability indicators in the region.
• According to the World Health Organization (WHO), prior to 1991, health care reached approximately 97% of the urban population and 78% of rural residents. A major reduction of young child mortality took place from 1960 to 1990; with the infant mortality rate at 65 per 1,000 live births in 1989 (1991 Human Development Report average for developing countries was 76 per 1,000 live births). UNICEF indicates that a national welfare system assisted orphans and children with disabilities and supported the poorest families.
• Before 1991, southern and central Iraq had well developed water and sanitation systems, composed with two hundred water treatment plants (“wtp’s”) for urban areas and 1200 compact wtp’s to serve rural areas, as well as an extensive distribution network. WHO estimates that 90% of the population had access to an abundant quantity of safe drinking water.

From Sanctions After the Gulf War

• Economist Intelligence Unit estimates that Iraqi GDP may have fallen by nearly 67% in 1991, and the nation had “experienced a shift from relative affluence to massive poverty” and had infant mortality rates that were “among the highest in the world.”
• The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) estimated the maternal mortality rate increased from 50/100,000 live births in 1989 to 117/100,000 in 1997. The under-five child mortality rate increased from 30.2/1000 live births to 97.2/1000 during the same period. The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) calculates that the infant mortality rate rose from 64/1000 births in 1990 to 129/1000 in 1995 (the Human Development Report set the average infant mortality rate for Least Developed Countries at 109/1000). Low birth weight babies (less than 2.5 kg) rose from 4% in 1990 to around a quarter of registered births in 1997, due mainly to maternal malnutrition.
• Calorie intake fell from a pre-war 3120 to 1093 calories per capita/per day in 1994-95. The prevalence of malnutrition in Iraqi children under five almost doubled from 1991 to 1996 (from 12% to 23%). Acute malnutrition in Center/South rose from 3% to 11% for the same age bracket.
• The World Food Program (WFP) estimated that access to potable water decreased to 50% of the 1990 level in urban areas and 33% in rural areas.
• School enrollment for all ages (6-23) declined to 53%. According to a field survey conducted in 1993, as quoted by UNESCO, in Central and Southern governorates, 83% of school buildings needed rehabilitation, with 8613 out of 10,334 schools having suffered serious damages. The same source indicated that some schools with a planned capacity of 700 pupils actually have 4500 enrolled in them. Substantive progress in reducing adult and female illiteracy ceased and regressed to mid-1980 levels. More families are forced to rely on children to secure household incomes. Figures provided by UNESCO indicate that drop-outs in elementary schools increased from 95,692 in 1990 to 131,658 in 1999.

Sanctions, and its toll on the Iraqi people, continued until the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Excerpts from Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions, Joy Gordon. Harvard University Press, 2010, describe the extent of irrational economic warfare conducted by the United states against a defenseless Iraq.

While the United States consistently justified its policies in terms of preventing Iraq from developing weapons or threatening its neighbors, the U.S. policy went well beyond any rational concern with security. There was an elaborate architecture of policies that found a dozen other ways to simply do gratuitous harm that had not the least relation to the threat Iraq might have posed to its neighbors or to anyone else.

For thirteen years the United States unilaterally prevented Iraq from importing nearly everything related to electricity, telecommunications, and transportation, blocked much of what was needed for agriculture and housing construction, and even prohibited some equipment and materials necessary for health care and food preparation.

As the criticism grew, there is no sign that anyone in the U.S. administration, and only a tiny handful within Congress, actually took it to heart– actually questioned the sanity and legality of reducing an entire civilization to a preindustrial state, of bankrupting an entire nation for the purpose of containing one tyrannical man.

On May 12, 1996, Madeleine Albright, then U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, appeared on the CBS program 60 Minutes. Commentator Lesley Stahl asked, “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?” Madeleine Albright replied, “we think the price is worth it.” Is that an expected response from a normal human being?

The U.S. 2003 invasion of Iraq accomplished what sanctions failed to accomplish — push Iraq to total ruin. A question, “Why war, if had sanctions, or why sanctions if need to go to war?”

CONCLUSION
As shown, sanctions never accomplished their stated purposes and gravely harmed populations. The economic warfare had equivalents to military war. The country that took the offensive became the aggressor, as in any war, and the destruction to the defending state was equally brutal. In the one-sided engagement, the civilian population of the defending nation suffered greatly and the aggressor country suffered few losses. The economic wars never achieved the results that the offended party desired, and no peace treaties were signed. The struggles remained an open issue.

A limited form of economic warfare may, at times, have a legitimate purpose. A complete economic war, that invades all aspects of a country’s life and continues until it debilitates the population, cannot be accepted. In a military campaign, atrocities and human rights violations are often committed. Although no shots are fired and battlefields are not identifiable, economic warfare cannot camouflage its atrocities and disguise its human rights violations.

Dan Lieberman is the editor of Alternative Insight, a web based newsletter.

20 May 2019

Source: countercurrents.org