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By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

At lease 59 cadets were killed and more than 116 injured as terrorists attack the Police Training College in Quetta, Pakistan, in one of the deadliest extremist attacks this year.

Three gunmen burst into the sprawling academy, targeting sleeping quarters home to some 700 recruits, and sent terrified young men aged between 15 and 25 fleeing, Dawn News reported.

Communication intercepts showed the attack was carried out by Al-Alimi faction of the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi militant group, IG Frontier Corps (FC) Major General Sher Afgan said. The group itself has not claimed the attack.

Most of the deaths were caused when two of the attackers blew themselves up. The third was shot dead by Frontier Corps (FC) troops. At least 120 people were injured, according to Dawn News.

The IG FC said “terrorists were communicating with their handlers in Afghanistan”. “There were three terrorists and all of them were wearing suicide vests,” he added.

The training college is situated on Sariab Road, which is considered to be one of the most sensitive areas of Quetta. Militants have been targeting security forces in the area for almost a decade.

The attack comes a day after militants belonging to the Baloch Liberation Army on a motorcycle shot dead two coast guards and a civilian and wounded a shopkeeper in a remote southwest coastal town in Balochistan.

In August, a suicide bombing at a Quetta hospital claimed by the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar faction of the Pakistani Taliban killed 73 people, including many of the city’s lawyer community who had gone there to mourn the fatal shooting of a colleague.

Last month Indian government formally offered political asylum to secessionist Baloch leaders. The Zee News of India reported that the media is buzz with reports that Brahumdagh Bugti, grandson of Nawaz Akbar Khan Bugti, is set to get Indian citizenship. He is currently living in exile in Switzerland.

Balochistan is a key region for China’s ambitious $46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor infrastructure project linking its western province of Xinjiang to the Arabian Sea via Pakistan.

Security problems have mired CPEC in the past with numerous separatist attacks, but China has said it is confident the Pakistani military is in control.

18 Indian soldiers killed in an army base attack

The Quetta terrorist attack came five weeks after a militants attack on an army base in the garrison town of Uri in the Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir — killing 18 soldiers. The attack on Sept 18, which took place near the de facto border between India and Pakistan in the disputed region, was one of the deadliest on an army base in Kashmir since militant attacks began in 1989, according to CNN.

Tension remains high between the neighbors following the Uri attack. The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, has been under intense pressure from his own party and the Indian public to respond to the Uri army base attack. Mr Modi came to power pledging to toughen India’s response to what he calls cross-border incursions from Pakistan. He vowed that the Uri raid “will not go unpunished”.

On September 29, India announced that it had carried out early morning “surgical strikes” on terrorist camps in Pakistani ­controlled Kashmir. However, Pakistan denied that a cross­ border strike had taken place, saying that Indian troops had fired small arms across the Line of Control, killing two soldiers and injuring nine. The notion of surgical strike linked to alleged terrorists’ bases is an illusion being deliberately generated by India to create false effects,” the Pakistani military said in a statement.

A senior Pakistani security official was quoted by the New York Times as saying that Pakistan would consider a cross ­border strike by India an act of war. The official warned that Pakistan could use tactical nuclear weapons in self-defense if India initiates a war.

Tough stand by Modi raises risk of war with Pakistan: NYT

The New York Times has warned that tough stand by the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi raises risk of war with Pakistan.

In a report about the current situation between the two nuclear armed neighbors, the paper pointed out that “as an opposition leader, Narendra Modi was a vocal critic of India’s government for not responding more forcefully to cross-border attacks from militants based in Pakistan. As prime minister, Mr. Modi has not shied away from openly retaliating in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir against the militants and stirring up nationalist passions. Now, with his tough stance, there are growing concerns that Modi may have narrowed his options, raising the risks of war with India’s nuclear-armed rival, Pakistan.”

The New York Times said experts are worrying about what India will do when allegedly Pakistan-based militants carry out another attack in India, as is almost certain. And how will Pakistan respond?

“We’re not at the point of no return, but we are in very dangerous waters,” said Bruce Riedel, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who served in the Central Intelligence Agency, where he advised several American presidents on South Asia.

“When we get to the next terror attack, which is probably only a matter of time, the prime minister has boxed himself in, and he can’t take the route his predecessors did and choose to use solely diplomatic alternatives without some loss of face,” Mr. Riedel said adding: “The big danger here is once you get started up the escalation ladder, how do you cool it off?”

“I’m scared,” retired Lt Colonel Ajay Shukla was quoted as saying. “We’re not Israel bullying Gaza, or the U.S. with Haiti. We’re the fourth-biggest army confronting the 11th-biggest army.”

Mr. Modi’s predecessors were more risk averse by nature, Mr. Shukla said. “Modi is better at brinkmanship than they were in these actions where there’s an element of risk,” Mr. Shukla said. “Manmohan Singh would not take that risk and would place India’s economic development ahead of it,” he said, referring to the previous prime minister.

That willingness to take risk derives in part from Mr. Modi’s ambition.

Nationalist sentiment, stoked by the Indian news media, has spiraled so high that even Mr. Modi may be powerless to contain it, Mr. Shukla said adding: “He’s gotten onto the tiger, and now he can’t get off.” With elections coming up in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, Mr. Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party will be motivated to keep nationalist sentiment high because it has quickly subsumed economic development as the party’s main election platform there, Mr. Shukla said.

Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Chief Editor of the Journal of America (www.journalofamerica.net) email: asghazali2011 (@) gmail.com

25 October 2016

By George Monbiot

Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left failed to come up with an alternative?

Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.

Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.

Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What About Me? are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Britain, in which neoliberal ideology has been most rigorously applied, is the loneliness capital of Europe. We are all neoliberals now.

The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism.

In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Hayek argued that government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control. Like Mises’s book Bureaucracy, The Road to Serfdom was widely read. It came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism – the Mont Pelerin Society – it was supported financially by millionaires and their foundations.

With their help, he began to create what Daniel Stedman Jones describes in Masters of the Universe as “a kind of neoliberal international”: a transatlantic network of academics, businessmen, journalists and activists. The movement’s rich backers funded a series of thinktanks which would refine and promote the ideology. Among them were the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. They also financed academic positions and departments, particularly at the universities of Chicago and Virginia.

As it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident. Hayek’s view that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way – among American apostles such as Milton Friedman – to the belief that monopoly power could be seen as a reward for efficiency.

Something else happened during this transition: the movement lost its name. In 1951, Friedman was happy to describe himself as a neoliberal. But soon after that, the term began to disappear. Stranger still, even as the ideology became crisper and the movement more coherent, the lost name was not replaced by any common alternative.

At first, despite its lavish funding, neoliberalism remained at the margins. The postwar consensus was almost universal: John Maynard Keynes’s economic prescriptions were widely applied, full employment and the relief of poverty were common goals in the US and much of western Europe, top rates of tax were high and governments sought social outcomes without embarrassment, developing new public services and safety nets.

But in the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter the mainstream. As Friedman remarked, “when the time came that you had to change … there was an alternative ready there to be picked up”. With the help of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the US and Jim Callaghan’s government in Britain.

After Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power, the rest of the package soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services. Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organisation, neoliberal policies were imposed – often without democratic consent – on much of the world. Most remarkable was its adoption among parties that once belonged to the left: Labour and the Democrats, for example. As Stedman Jones notes, “it is hard to think of another utopia to have been as fully realised.”

It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice and freedom should have been promoted with the slogan “there is no alternative”. But, as Hayek remarked on a visit to Pinochet’s Chile – one of the first nations in which the programme was comprehensively applied – “my personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism”. The freedom that neoliberalism offers, which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for the pike, not for the minnows.

Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty.

As Naomi Klein documents in The Shock Doctrine, neoliberal theorists advocated the use of crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted: for example, in the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina, which Friedman described as “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system” in New Orleans.

Where neoliberal policies cannot be imposed domestically, they are imposed internationally, through trade treaties incorporating “investor-state dispute settlement”: offshore tribunals in which corporations can press for the removal of social and environmental protections. When parliaments have voted to restrict sales of cigarettes, protect water supplies from mining companies, freeze energy bills or prevent pharmaceutical firms from ripping off the state, corporations have sued, often successfully. Democracy is reduced to theatre.

Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one
Another paradox of neoliberalism is that universal competition relies upon universal quantification and comparison. The result is that workers, job-seekers and public services of every kind are subject to a pettifogging, stifling regime of assessment and monitoring, designed to identify the winners and punish the losers. The doctrine that Von Mises proposed would free us from the bureaucratic nightmare of central planning has instead created one.

Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one. Economic growth has been markedly slower in the neoliberal era (since 1980 in Britain and the US) than it was in the preceding decades; but not for the very rich. Inequality in the distribution of both income and wealth, after 60 years of decline, rose rapidly in this era, due to the smashing of trade unions, tax reductions, rising rents, privatisation and deregulation.

The privatisation or marketisation of public services such as energy, water, trains, health, education, roads and prisons has enabled corporations to set up tollbooths in front of essential assets and charge rent, either to citizens or to government, for their use. Rent is another term for unearned income. When you pay an inflated price for a train ticket, only part of the fare compensates the operators for the money they spend on fuel, wages, rolling stock and other outlays. The rest reflects the fact that they have you over a barrel.

Those who own and run the UK’s privatised or semi-privatised services make stupendous fortunes by investing little and charging much. In Russia and India, oligarchs acquired state assets through firesales. In Mexico, Carlos Slim was granted control of almost all landline and mobile phone services and soon became the world’s richest man.

Financialisation, as Andrew Sayer notes in Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, has had a similar impact. “Like rent,” he argues, “interest is … unearned income that accrues without any effort”. As the poor become poorer and the rich become richer, the rich acquire increasing control over another crucial asset: money. Interest payments, overwhelmingly, are a transfer of money from the poor to the rich. As property prices and the withdrawal of state funding load people with debt (think of the switch from student grants to student loans), the banks and their executives clean up.

Sayer argues that the past four decades have been characterised by a transfer of wealth not only from the poor to the rich, but within the ranks of the wealthy: from those who make their money by producing new goods or services to those who make their money by controlling existing assets and harvesting rent, interest or capital gains. Earned income has been supplanted by unearned income.

Neoliberal policies are everywhere beset by market failures. Not only are the banks too big to fail, but so are the corporations now charged with delivering public services. As Tony Judt pointed out in Ill Fares the Land, Hayek forgot that vital national services cannot be allowed to collapse, which means that competition cannot run its course. Business takes the profits, the state keeps the risk.

The greater the failure, the more extreme the ideology becomes. Governments use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatise remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations and re-regulate citizens. The self-hating state now sinks its teeth into every organ of the public sector.

Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts. Instead, neoliberal theory asserts, people can exercise choice through spending. But some have more to spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder democracy, votes are not equally distributed. The result is a disempowerment of the poor and middle. As parties of the right and former left adopt similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement. Large numbers of people have been shed from politics.

Chris Hedges remarks that “fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the ‘losers’ who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment”. When political debate no longer speaks to us, people become responsive instead to slogans, symbols and sensation. To the admirers of Trump, for example, facts and arguments appear irrelevant.

Judt explained that when the thick mesh of interactions between people and the state has been reduced to nothing but authority and obedience, the only remaining force that binds us is state power. The totalitarianism Hayek feared is more likely to emerge when governments, having lost the moral authority that arises from the delivery of public services, are reduced to “cajoling, threatening and ultimately coercing people to obey them”.

Like communism, neoliberalism is the God that failed. But the zombie doctrine staggers on, and one of the reasons is its anonymity. Or rather, a cluster of anonymities.

The invisible doctrine of the invisible hand is promoted by invisible backers. Slowly, very slowly, we have begun to discover the names of a few of them. We find that the Institute of Economic Affairs, which has argued forcefully in the media against the further regulation of the tobacco industry, has been secretly funded by British American Tobacco since 1963. We discover that Charles and David Koch, two of the richest men in the world, founded the institute that set up the Tea Party movement. We find that Charles Koch, in establishing one of his thinktanks, noted that “in order to avoid undesirable criticism, how the organisation is controlled and directed should not be widely advertised”.

The words used by neoliberalism often conceal more than they elucidate. “The market” sounds like a natural system that might bear upon us equally, like gravity or atmospheric pressure. But it is fraught with power relations. What “the market wants” tends to mean what corporations and their bosses want. “Investment”, as Sayer notes, means two quite different things. One is the funding of productive and socially useful activities, the other is the purchase of existing assets to milk them for rent, interest, dividends and capital gains. Using the same word for different activities “camouflages the sources of wealth”, leading us to confuse wealth extraction with wealth creation.

A century ago, the nouveau riche were disparaged by those who had inherited their money. Entrepreneurs sought social acceptance by passing themselves off as rentiers. Today, the relationship has been reversed: the rentiers and inheritors style themselves entre preneurs. They claim to have earned their unearned income.

These anonymities and confusions mesh with the namelessness and placelessness of modern capitalism: the franchise model which ensures that workers do not know for whom they toil; the companies registered through a network of offshore secrecy regimes so complex that even the police cannot discover the beneficial owners; the tax arrangements that bamboozle governments; the financial products no one understands.

The anonymity of neoliberalism is fiercely guarded. Those who are influenced by Hayek, Mises and Friedman tend to reject the term, maintaining – with some justice – that it is used today only pejoratively. But they offer us no substitute. Some describe themselves as classical liberals or libertarians, but these descriptions are both misleading and curiously self-effacing, as they suggest that there is nothing novel about The Road to Serfdom, Bureaucracy or Friedman’s classic work, Capitalism and Freedom.

For all that, there is something admirable about the neoliberal project, at least in its early stages. It was a distinctive, innovative philosophy promoted by a coherent network of thinkers and activists with a clear plan of action. It was patient and persistent. The Road to Serfdom became the path to power.

Neoliberalism’s triumph also reflects the failure of the left. When laissez-faire economics led to catastrophe in 1929, Keynes devised a comprehensive economic theory to replace it. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers in the 70s, there was an alternative ready. But when neoliberalism fell apart in 2008 there was … nothing. This is why the zombie walks. The left and centre have produced no new general framework of economic thought for 80 years.

Every invocation of Lord Keynes is an admission of failure. To propose Keynesian solutions to the crises of the 21st century is to ignore three obvious problems. It is hard to mobilise people around old ideas; the flaws exposed in the 70s have not gone away; and, most importantly, they have nothing to say about our gravest predicament: the environmental crisis. Keynesianism works by stimulating consumer demand to promote economic growth. Consumer demand and economic growth are the motors of environmental destruction.

What the history of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism show is that it’s not enough to oppose a broken system. A coherent alternative has to be proposed. For Labour, the Democrats and the wider left, the central task should be to develop an economic Apollo programme, a conscious attempt to design a new system, tailored to the demands of the 21st century.

George Monbiot’s How Did We Get into This Mess? is published this month by Verso. To order a copy for £12.99 (RRP £16.99) ) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

15 April 2016

By Cathy Breen

I’ve written often about our Iraqi refugee friend and his oldest son from Baghdad. I will call them Mohammed and Ahmed. They made the torturous flight last year from Baghdad to Kurdistan and then across Turkey. They were on three Greek islands before permission was granted them to continue their trip. They passed through several countries at the time the borders were being closed. They arrived finally at their destination in late September 2015. Finland.

Having lived with this family in Baghdad, I have the faces of the wife and each of the children before me. Below is a photo of two of Mohammed’s children.

Generally, I use Mohammed’s words, quoting him in a first person narrative. He told the story of their desperate life-threatening journey over a year ago. They went to Finland with the hope that fewer refugees would travel so far, that they would get asylum quicker and be reunited with their family, Mohammed’s wife and the other six children in Iraq. Together with a small group of friends, Kathy Kelly and I were able to visit them in Finland in the deep winter cold this past January. We were able to bring them for a few days from the camp to Helsinki where they were warmly received by many Finnish people involved in the peace movement, journalists among them.

In late June Mohammed wrote us about the depression and frustration among refugees in their camp as many of them were getting rejected for asylum. He wrote that even Iraqi refugees from Fallujah, Ramadi and Mosul were getting rejections. “I don’t know what I will do if I get a bad answer. For the last three weeks only bad answers are coming.” Then in late July came the crushing news that his own case had been denied.

“Today I got the immigration decision that my case was rejected. Me and Ahmed are not welcomed to Finland. Thanks for everything you did.” The next day he wrote again. “Today is one of the heaviest days of my life. Everybody, my son, my cousin and myself….we just kept silent. We are shocked from the decision. Losing my brother, jailed for 2 years, kidnapped, tortured, losing my house, parents, father-in-law, death threat letter and assassination attempt. Over 50 relatives killed. What more must I give them for them to believe me? Only one thing I forgot, to submit my death certificate. I feel I am being slaughtered. I don’t know what to tell my wife and children [in Baghdad].”

We have since learned that Finland is granting residency to only 10% of asylum seekers. An appeal is in progress, and several people have written letters on Mohammed’s behalf. It is by no means clear however that his request will be accepted.

In the meantime, the situation in Iraq and in Baghdad continues to worsen in terms of daily explosions, suicide bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, ISIS, police, army and militia activity. His wife lives in a particularly open and vulnerable rural area. His brother, who used to live a stone’s throw away, had to flee with his family several months ago due to death threats. This left Mohammed’s wife and children without protection. During Ramadan Mohammed wrote: “The situation is really terrible during these days. My wife was planning to take the kids to her mother’s village during EID but she cancelled this idea.” On another occasion he wrote “My wife is very worried about our second oldest son, afraid he will be kidnapped. She is thinking of moving from the village. Today we argued very hard as she blames me, telling me that I said we would be reunited within 6 months.”

On two recent occasions armed uniformed men came to Mohammed’s house seeking information about Mohammed and Ahmed. Mohammed wrote: “Yesterday at 5am the house was raided by armed official military guys in uniforms. Maybe the police? Maybe the militia or ISIS?” It is hard to imagine the fright of Mohammed’s defenceless wife and the children, the youngest of whom is only 3 years old. It is hard to imagine Mohammed and Ahmed’s fright being so far away. At times Mohammed’s wife has hidden the oldest boy in the reeds by their house, afraid he will be recruited by force by ISIS or the militia! She has also been afraid to send the children to school because the security situation is so dangerous. She is angry at Mohammed, scared and not understanding why they have not been reunited after a year’s time.

Recently Mohammed emailed: “Honestly, Cathy, every night I am thinking of returning home and ending these arguments. Living away from your beloved kids is really hard. If I get killed alongside of my family, then everyone will understand why we had to leave and the arguments will finish. Even the Finnish immigration will understand that what I told them was true. But the next morning I changed my mind and decided to await the court’s final decision.”

“Every night I am afraid from the next morning’s news from my family. My daughter asked me by phone last week ‘Dad, when can we live together again. I am now 14 years and you have been away so long.’ She broke my heart.”

Just a few days ago he wrote: “I’m so happy because the ice has melted between my wife and I.” His little boy, 6 years, and his youngest daughter 8 years went to school today. My wife is so brave….She decided to pay for a school bus for all of the kids. She said ‘I believe in God and I am sending the children and taking the risk.’”

I often ask myself how Mohammed gets up in the morning. How are he and his wife able to face the day? Their courage, their faith and their resilience inspires me, challenges me and pushes me to get out of my own bed in the morning.

Cathy Breen (newsfromcathy@gmail.com), lives and works at Maryhouse Catholic Worker in New York City. She is also co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence.
Photo credit: Cathy Breen

21 October 2016

By James Cogan

Iraqi Army units and troops of the autonomous Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), backed by US and allied air power, special forces and “advisors,” continue to push toward the Islamic State (ISIS)-held northern city of Mosul and the estimated 1.5 million civilians trapped within its confines. In the past 24 hours, Kurdish forces claimed to have captured villages and towns to the city’s north and east, while Iraqi Army units advanced from the south.

The assault is unfolding amid uncritical media coverage, with embedded journalists filing reports that in general laud the success of Kurdish and Iraqi forces in the face of supposed fanatical resistance and suicide attacks by ISIS defenders. Vast columns of black smoke rising over the battle zones are universally attributed to ISIS igniting oil wells and mounds of tyres to obscure their movements from aerial detection and attack.

No official estimates of Kurdish or Iraqi government casualties have been released, nor figures on ISIS losses. The US military confirmed yesterday that one of its special forces soldiers was killed by a roadside bomb to the north of Mosul.

Next to nothing is being reported about the devastation and casualties caused by US and allied air strikes on targets within the urban reaches of the city itself. Instead, the media is full of accusations that ISIS is using people as “human shields”—justifying civilian deaths in advance. American, British, Australian, French, Canadian and Jordanian bombers, jet fighters, helicopter gunships, drones and surveillance aircraft are involved in the air assault.

One indication of the destruction being inflicted was an October 19 report by the British Broadcasting Corporation that the University of Mosul, once one of the best equipped in the Middle East, is in ruin. A source stated: “The university is completely inoperative and air strikes have made it a difficult place to go. Most of the buildings have been brought down, it’s virtually gone.”

US and allied military commanders project that operations to recapture Mosul will last as long as three months. This suggests that much of the city will be reduced to rubble and the predominantly Sunni Arab civilian population will suffer horrific casualties from the bombing, starvation and disease.

Just five days into the Mosul offensive, however, it is stirring a cauldron of inter-state and ethno-sectarian conflicts that are the legacy of 25 years of US imperialist violence, intrigue and destabilisation in Iraq, Syria and the broader Middle East. Before the city even falls, savage fighting threatens to break out between nominal allies in the operations against ISIS.

The Syrian regime, with the assistance of Russian air power and Lebanese and Iraqi Shiite militias, claims it is on the verge of recapturing the eastern sectors of the city of Aleppo from Sunni Islamist militias that have received overt support from the US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states to try to overthrow the government of President Bashar al-Assad. The fall of Aleppo would largely end the US-backed rebellion in the coastal regions of Syria and enable Assad’s military to shift focus to the ISIS-held areas in the interior and east of the country, particularly the city of Raqqa.

Both the Syrian regime and Russia are accusing US-backed Iraqi and Kurdish forces of deliberately allowing ISIS fighters in Mosul to escape the city to the west and cross into ISIS-controlled areas of Syria. Hundreds have allegedly successfully made their way to Raqqa to join the fighting against the Syrian government.

Iraqi Shiite militias, known as the Popular Mobilisation Units, are rushing to the west of Mosul to cut off such escape routes for ISIS and declared yesterday they will launch an assault on the ISIS-held city of Tal Afar in northwestern Iraq. The Shiite militias had been blocked from taking part in the attack on Mosul due to the sectarian killings and abuse of Sunnis they committed during earlier battles to recapture the western Iraqi cities of Fallujah and Ramadi.

A militia attack on Tal Afar raises the prospect of Turkish military intervention, as it has a predominantly ethnic Turkmen population, factions among which are calling for their own autonomous province. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made shrill vows to protect the Turkish diaspora—which includes Iraq’s Turkmen—from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, to Central Asia and Afghanistan (see: “Amid Mosul offensive, Turkey denounces US policy, stakes claims in Balkans”).

Erdogan has also expressed alarm that US backing is strengthening the position of the Kurdish region in northern Iraq. The openly-stated intention of the KRG is to incorporate the areas it has taken from ISIS into its autonomous zone, not return them to the jurisdiction of the Shiite Arab-dominated government in Baghdad. A spokesman for one of the largest Shiite militias said in September they would fight against KRG annexations.

The Turkish establishment bitterly opposes any further expansion of the Kurdish region, fearing it will lead to the declaration of a Kurdish nation-state and fuel separatist agitation among the substantial Kurdish population in the east of Turkey, bordering Syria and Iraq.

Unable to act in Mosul itself at this point, Turkey responded yesterday with its most intense air attacks on the Kurdish YPG militia in northern Syria, which recently seized a number of villages from ISIS and expanded the areas of the country under their control. The Turkish military claimed to have killed up to 200 fighters of the YPG—which it alleges is a front for the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) that advocates the separation of the Kurdish region of Turkey. This operation may well sharply escalate ethnic conflict inside Turkey itself, or attacks by Kurdish forces on the small number of Turkish troops that are in Iraq to the northeast of Mosul.

In a statement, the Syrian government said it viewed the Turkish air strikes as an attack on its sovereignty and vowed to engage any future incursions.

Anthony Cordesman, a leading US analyst for the Center for International and Strategic Studies (CSIS), expressed the perplexity among US imperialist strategists. On October 17 he commented: “[T]he most critical aspect of the battle may not be whether ISIS is defeated. It may be whether Iraq’s deeply divided factions can find some way to cooperate if they win. The alternative could be worse than ISIS: Sunni versus Shiite, Arab versus Kurd, and Turkey, Iran, outside Arab states, and Russia all competing to serve their own ends. ‘Winning’ could all too easily divide Iraq on a lasting basis and/or turn into new forms of civil conflict.”

The victims will be the long-suffering masses of Iraq and the Middle East. In recent days, some 5,000 people have made their way from Mosul to a squalid tent city in northeastern Syria, while several thousand have reached the overcrowded refugee camp of Dibaga in Iraqi Kurdistan. Hundreds of thousands more are predicted to follow, overwhelming unprepared relief agencies.

Disturbing video footage has already emerged of Iraqi government troops beating, with a hammer, a young boy who fled Mosul. All males over 14 who escape the city are being detained and interrogated on suspicion of ISIS loyalties.

First published in WSWS.org

21 October 2016

By Nile Bowie

In recent weeks, officials of Western governments have engaged in a dramatic escalation of rhetoric condemning the Syrian and Russian governments for alleged war crimes that have occurred since the collapse of a UN-backed ceasefire in late September.

The escalating charges aimed at Russia and Syria, reinforced by well-orchestrated media campaigns propagating official talking points, are familiar in the sense that such attempts to mould public opinion have traditionally been a precursor to Western military interventions.

Western and Gulf states have been unequivocal about their intention to topple the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, presumably to replace it with a client regime that would maintain an adversarial relationship with Russia, Iran and various political forces associated with Shia Islam.

On the ground, the Syrian military, supported by Russian, Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah allies are on the path to military victory over the rebel-held east of Aleppo, which would mark the restoration of government control in all of Syria’s largest population centres.

Insurgents that have been armed and supported by the United States are now besieged in eastern Aleppo fighting Syrian government forces in coordination with jihadist militants, including the al-Nusra Front, the former Syrian wing of al Qaeda that Washington itself classifies as a terrorist organisation.

Some 270 thousand civilians are besieged alongside the militants controlling the area. Though the ongoing offensive has undoubtedly put the civilian population of the area at risk, larger questions about the fighting in Aleppo have hardly been raised by Western media.

The dominant narrative about Aleppo asserts claims that Syria and Russia are ‘deliberately bombing schools and hospitals to kill civilians’ or maintaining a siege to ‘break the will of the population’.

Almost no serious questions are asked of the rebel leadership in control of eastern Aleppo. The insurgents’ routine shelling of government-held western Aleppo – where the vast majority of the population, reportedly 1.5 million, reside – is hardly reported.

It must be recognised that the primary armed opposition fighting in eastern Aleppo and elsewhere are jihadist insurgents who have either superficially distanced themselves from the al-Qaeda brand or openly associate with it. More so, it is common knowledge that these groups have committed beheadings and heinous rights abuses.

Given the ferocity of Russian and Syrian airstrikes, why haven’t more civilians attempted to leave eastern Aleppo? UN Syria Envoy Staffan de Mistura claimed that Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, the rebranded version of al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate, is holding ‘hostage’ the civilian population of east Aleppo.

From a humanitarian perspective, it is pertinent to question the effectiveness of the forceful approach taken by the Syrian and Russian militaries. There is a precedent for a non-violent solution to the situation, advocated by De Mistura himself.

In August 2016, a deal between government forces and militants ended the four-year siege of the Damascus suburb of Daraya. Civilians were evacuated and militants were bused to rebel-held areas in northern Syria without surrendering their weapons. This took place with the full cooperation of government forces.

De Mistura has offered to personally accompany the jihadist fighters out of eastern Aleppo, while other (allegedly ‘moderate’) insurgents and civilians remain under conditions of a ceasefire. The botched September 2016 ceasefire also sought this outcome, a key condition being that US-backed rebels divorce themselves from jihadist al-Nusra fighters.

It is clear that expelling these jihadist forces is the prerequisite for quelling the fighting in Aleppo, but there is political resistance to this outcome from Western and Gulf states because it would imply the surrender of anti-Assad groups and the impotence of their regime change objectives.

Moreover, as Syria’s largest city, Aleppo represents a major strategic prize. If captured, the foreign-backed opposition could establish an alternative Syrian government, which Western and Gulf states would then treat as the sole legitimate government.

The battle for Aleppo has been characterised as an ‘existential crisis’ for the mainstream anti-Assad forces. Should the Syrian government retake eastern Aleppo, it would deal a devastating blow to regime change efforts, but it would not mean a decisive end to the war. Kurdish forces have maintained their hold over parts of Syria, while the Islamic State continues to hold much territory.

That being said, the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and others have invested enormous political capital to regime change efforts in Syria. Washington is determined to avoid a costly and humiliating defeat in Aleppo and is currently reviewing measures to shore up its proxies.

Among the options under consideration is the establishment of a no-fly-zone and safe zones, staging attacks against the Syrian air force and arming the Syrian rebels with additional weaponry. Should the US attempt of these options, it would directly violate international law.

The United States is not technically at war with the Syria, nor is there a UN resolution authorising American forces to operate inside Syria’s borders. Establishing a no-fly zone over Syrian airspace, safe zones within Syrian territory, or US military attacks on the Syrian air force and its bases would directly constitute an act of war against Damascus – and by extension, Moscow.
The Washington Post reports:

“‘There’s an increased mood in support of kinetic actions against the regime,’ one senior administration official said. ‘The CIA and the Joint Staff have said that the fall of Aleppo would undermine America’s counterterrorism goals in Syria.’’

“One proposed way to get around the White House’s long-standing objection to striking the Assad regime without a U.N. Security Council resolution would be to carry out the strikes covertly and without public acknowledgment, the official said.”

It is deeply alarming and baffling that the US leadership has here equated the fall of the jihadist-occupied Aleppo as harmful to counterterrorism objectives. Should moral outrage be directed at any side, it should not be toward the Syrian and Russian governments, who are attempting to restore legal order over Syrian territory, albeit by controversial means.

Rather, it is the United States and its European and Gulf allies that have forged an alliance with terrorist organisations in an attempt to destroy an independent-minded secular nationalist government promoting a pluralistic and inclusive form of Islam that should most beget public condemnation.

This would certainly be the case if the Western public at large ever truly absorbed the gravity of what their governments have done in Syria. It is unlikely that President Obama would concede to a major military escalation during his final months in office, though the possibility remains.

Hillary Clinton, who will presumably become the next US president, publically supports the establishment of a no-fly zone in Syria and has openly stated her number one objective in Syria is the removal of Bashar al-Assad’s government.

Russia has begun to deploy advanced anti-missile and anti-aircraft systems in Syria. Trust between Russia and the United States has entirely eroded. Russia is holding the cards in Syria and it is difficult to imagine how open conflict can be avoided should the US pursue an escalation. The seriousness of this moment should not be understated.

Nile Bowie is an independent writer and current affairs commentator based in Singapore. He is a JUST member. He may be reached by email at nilebowie@gmail.com

21 October 2016

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

First Chinese ship, named Tianfu, finally docked on Sunday (Oct 16) at Pakistan’s Gwadar port that is center of $46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor project between Beijing and Islamabad.

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is about 3,000 kilometers long consisting of highways, railways and pipelines that will connect China’s Xinjiang province to rest of the world through Pakistan’s Gwadar port.

The money China is planning to pour into Pakistan is more than twice the amount of all foreign direct investment Pakistan has received since 2008, and considerably more than the entire assistance from the United States, Pakistan’s largest donor until now, since 2002, according to a BBC report.

According to The Guardian, US largesse to Pakistan, including payments of $1.5bn a year since 2010 under the so-called “Kerry-Lugar” act, has failed to elicit anything like such a warm relationship. Even though much of the cash was funneled to the Pakistani army, the country’s most powerful institution, relations were often tense and the US polled among the least loved nations in opinion polls.

In September 2015, the government of China announced that the $230 million Gwadar International Airport project would no longer be financed by loans, but would instead be constructed by grants which the government of Pakistan will not be required to repay.

For the Chinese, the CPEC has a geo-strategic significance.

The corridor through Gwadar gives them their shortest access to the Middle East and Africa, where thousands of Chinese firms, employing tens of thousands of Chinese workers, are involved in development work.

The corridor also promises to open up remote, landlocked Xinjiang, and create incentives for both state and private enterprises to expand economic activity and create jobs in this under-developed region.

China could also be trying to find alternative trade routes to by-pass the Malacca straits, presently the only maritime route China can use to access the Middle East, Africa and Europe. Apart from being long, it can be blockaded in times of war.

The Straits of Malacca provide China with its shortest maritime access to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Approximately 80% pass of its Middle Eastern energy imports also pass through the Straits of Malacca. As the world’s biggest oil importer, energy security is a key concern for China while current sea routes used to import Middle Eastern oil are frequently patrolled by the United States’ Navy. The sea-route via the Straits of Malacca is roughly 12,000 kilometres long, while the distance from Gwadar Port to Xinjiang province is approximately 3,000 kilometres, and another 3,500 kilometres from Xinjiang to China’s eastern coast. [Wikipedia]

In addition to its significance to reduce Chinese dependence on the Sea of Malacca and South China Sea routes, the port of Gwadar will provide China an alternative and shorter route for energy imports from the Middle East, thereby reducing shipping costs and transit times. The currently available sea-route to China is roughly 12,000 kilometres long, while the distance from Gwadar Port to Xinjiang province is approximately 3,000 kilometres, with another 3,500 kilometres from Xinjiang to China’s eastern coast. As a result of CPEC, Chinese imports and exports to the Middle East, Africa, and Europe would require much shorter shipment times and distances. [Wikipedia]

The Chinese provinces of Xinjiang and Tibet were closer to Pakistani ports than to any port in China and development of a trade corridor linking Xinjiang to the Middle East via Gwadar held great prospects. 60 per cent of Chinese import of crude came from countries in the Gulf and the amount would increase in next decade. Because of the proximity of the Gulf countries to Gwadar, oil flow from the region to China will be facilitated.

“The Gwadar port will also guarantee China’s naval ships’ maintenance and supply in the Indian Ocean. The move is widely seen as crucial for China, especially as it is unlikely that Sri Lanka will open its ports to Chinese naval ships,” Zhao Gancheng, director of South Asia Studies at Shanghai Institute for International Studies told state-run Global Times.

The new Sri Lankan government headed by President Maithripala Srisena reversed his predecessor Mahinda Rajapaksa’s policy of allowing Chinese submarines to dock in Colombo, following India’s concerns.

Pakistan’s decision to hand over strategic Gwadar port to China is a matter of “serious concern” for India, Defence Minister A K Antony said in 2013. “Chinese are now constructing that port on Pakistan’s request. In one sentence, I can say that it is a matter of concern to us. My answer is simple and straightforward,” he told a press conference.

Gwadar Port is approximately 120 km from the Iranian border. It is located 380 km away from Oman, and near key oil shipping lanes from the Persian Gulf. The greater surrounding region is home to around two-thirds of the world’s proven oil reserves. It is also the nearest warm-water seaport to the landlocked, but hydrocarbon rich, Central Asian Republics, as well as Afghanistan.

Upon completion of CPEC-related infrastructure projects, transit times between Kashgar and Pakistan’s Gwadar Port will be greatly reduced, which in turn will also reduce transit times to the Kyrgyzstan and hydrocarbon-rich Kazakhstan through already existing overland routes. The Chinese government has already upgraded the road linking Kashgar to Osh in Kyrgyzstan via the Kyrgyz town of Erkeshtam while a railway between Urumqi, China and Almaty, Kazakhstan has also been completed as part of China’s One Belt One Road initiative. Numerous land crossings already exist between Kazakhstan and China as well. Additionally, the Chinese government has announced plans to lay railway track from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, towards Kyrgyzstan with onwards connections to China and Pakistan’s coast. [Wikipedia]

Interestingly, In September 1958, the Gwadar enclave was purchased by Pakistan from Oman for US$3 million and Gwadar officially became part of Pakistan in December 1958, after 200 years of Omani rule.

It is expected that by 2017, the port will handle over one million tons of cargo, most of which will consist of construction materials for other CPEC projects. China Overseas Port Holding Company (COPHC) plans to eventually expand the port’s capacity to 400 million tons of cargo per year. Long terms plans for Gwadar Port call for a total of 100 berths to be built by 2045.

Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Chief Editor of the Journal of America (www.journalofamerica.net) email: asghazali2011 (@) gmail.com

17 October 2016

By Andre Vltchek

Rodrigo Duterte, the outspoken President of the Philippines has by now, most likely, joined the concealed, prestigious and permanent hit list of the Empire.

The hit list isvery long; it hasalready been long for several decades. One could easily lose count and get confused: how many personalities have been marked and secretly condemned to death? How many of them actually died?

It reads like a catalogue ofillustrious world leaders:from Patrice Lumumba (Zaire), Mohammad Mosaddegh (Iran), Hugo Chavez (Venezuela), Sukarno (Indonesia),Juvénal Habyarimana(Rwanda), Salvador Allende (Chile)toMuammar Gaddafi (Libya), Al-Basheer(Sudan) and Fidel Castro (Cuba), to name just a very few.

Some were directly assassinated; others were ‘only’ toppled, while only a handful of ‘marked’ leaders actually managed to surviveandto stay in power.

There were several grave crimes committed by almost all of them, very similar crimes.They include:defending the vitalinterests of their nations and people, refusing to allow the unbridled plunder of natural resources by multinational corporations, and standing against the principles of imperialism. Simple criticismof the Empire has also been often punishable by death.

Mr. Duterte is committing all those horrid crimes,which have been mentioned above. He seems to be ‘guilty as charged’. He is denying nothing; he even appears to be proud of the charges that are being brought against him.

‘Is he bored with his life?’ some are asking. ‘Is he out of his mind? Is he ready to die?’

Is he a hero, a new Asian Hugo Chavez, or just an out of control populist?

He is definitely risking a lot, or maybe he is even risking absolutely everything. He is now committing the most unforgiveable sins in the eyes of the Western regime: he is openly insulting the Empire and its institutions (including the UN, NATO and the EU). He is even spitting in their faces!

‘To make it worse’, he is not only chatting; he is taking decisive actions! He is trying to help the poor in his country, he is flirting with the Communist Party and with the socialists, and on top of it he is basically asking both China and Russia for assistance.

The sparks are flying. Periodically such people and institutions like Obama, Pope, the US, the EU, and the UN get advised to go to hell, or are re-Christened as son-of-a-bitches or son-of-a-whores!

And the people of the Philippines absolutely love it. Duterte won elections with tiny margins, but his latest approval rating towers at an astounding 76%. Some would therefore argue that if ‘democracy’ is truly the ‘rule of the people’ (or at least it should be reflecting the will of the people), then all is exactly as it should be in the Philippines.

While Eduardo Climaco Tadem, Professorial Lecturer of Asian Studies

(University of the Philippines Diliman), is critical of Duterte’s ‘un-presidential’ speech writing and for him “scoring negatively on the issue of civil and political human rights”, he is clearly impressed by his achievements in several other spheres. As he recently wrote to me in a letter:

“Positive initiatives on other fronts have been taken. The appointment of Communist Party cadres to cabinet positions for agrarian reform, social work and development, and anti-poverty programs is good. Other left wing and progressive personalities occupy other cabinet positions in labor, education, health, science, and environment. More important, positive initiatives have been taken on moving land distribution forward, ending labor contractualization, reaching out to and learning from Cuba’s health programs, and curtailing the environmentally destructive operations by big mining corporations. Moreover, peace negotiations with both the CPP and the MILF/MNLF have been revived with initial steps that are looking good.

An independent foreign policy has been announced and Duterte no longer kowtows to the US and Western powers, unlike previous presidents before him. He is also mending fences with China and taking a different and less belligerent track in resolving the territorial disputes in the South China Sea…”

That is all ‘bad’, extremely bad as far as Washington, London and Tokyo are concerned. Such behavior never goesunnoticed and unpunished!

The response of the Empire came almost immediately this time.

On September 20, 2016, the International Business Times reported:

“The Philippines government has claimed that a coup d’état is being masterminded against President Rodrigo Duterte and said the administration is cracking down on the suspected plotters. A government spokesperson said some Filipino-Americans in New York are planning to oust the abrasive leader.

Without revealing the names of the suspected plotters or their plans, the Philippines government Communications Secretary Martin Andanar said those conspiring against Duterte should “think twice… ‘I have received information from credible sources in the United States. Yes, we have names but I don’t want to mention it. We are looking [at] it seriously. We are investigating it,’” said the senior government official.

The coups, the assassination plots. Soft coups, hard coups: Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, Syria, Ukraine, Libya, Paraguay, Honduras, and Sudan, half of Africa… All in just the few last years…and now the Philippines? Bravo, the Empire is accelerating! The work ethic of its cutthroats is clearly improving.

President Duterte has it all figured out. As mentioned above, he has already defined President Obama as a ‘son-of-a-bitch’, ‘son-of-a-whore’, and recently suggested that ‘he goes to hell’.

That is even tougher than what President Hugo Chavez used to say about George W Bush, also known as “Señor W”. And President Chavez, according to many Latin American analysts, ended up paying for his openness, antagonism towards the Empire and imperialism in general,with his own life.

The truth is that the Empire never forgives those who show it a mirror. It kills mercilessly for the tiniest signs of disobedience, rebelliousness.Its propaganda apparatus and its right hand – the mass media – then always manage to craft a suitable explanation and justification. And the public in both North America and Europe is fully complacent, indoctrinated and passive; it only defends its own narrow interests, never the victim, especially if the victim is from some far-away country inhabited by ‘un-people’.

The great Indonesian President Sukarno was overthrown and destroyed(among other things) for shouting publicly at the US ambassador: “To hell with your aid!” …And of course, for defending the interests of his people against the Empire. Patrice Lumumba was assassinated for daring to say that Africans have no reason to be grateful to the colonizers.

Duterte says much more. He is bitter and he has countless reasons to be. The United States murdered more than one million Philippine people, most of them at the end of the 19th andthe beginning of the 20th Century. In recent history, it has turned this once proud and promising nation into a doormat, into a humiliated semi-colony, fully dependent on Washington’s whims. Capitalist and totally pro-American, the Philippines hasevolved, like Indonesia, into a ‘failed state’, a social disaster and an intellectual wasteland.

President Duterte has managed to put in place a determined cabinet of like-minded thinking intellectuals and bureaucrats.

As RT reported recently:

“Duterte’s foreign secretary, Perfecto Yasay, who has at times tried to downplay his boss’s comments, released a statement on Facebook titled “America has failed us” in which he says that, while there are many “countless things that we will be forever grateful to America for,” the US has never fully respected Philippine independence.”

“After proclaiming in July 4, 1946 that the Filipinos had been adequately trained for self-determination and governance, the United States held on to invisible chains that reined us in towards dependency and submission as little brown brothers not capable of true independence and freedom,” the FM said in the statement.”

Such statements very rarely appear in the pages of Western mainstream media publications, where Duterte and his cabinet are uninterruptedly demonized and ridiculed.

This is how the latest headlines on the Philippines read:

‘Drug-dealing daughter of playboy baron Antony Moynihan is shot dead in the Philippines’ (Daily Mail).

‘The president of Philippines has been accused of feeding a man alive to a crocodile’ (The Journal.ie via Yahoo UK & Ireland News)

‘Special Report – in Duterte’s war on drugs, local residents help draw up hit list’ (Reuters)

‘Duterte killed justice official, hitman tells Philippine senate’ (AFP)

Nothing about the fight for social justice! Nothing about the battle against Western imperialism.

The war on drugs…

Yes, many people in the Philippines are genuinely concerned that the ‘bodies are piling’ and the approach of this government could be defined as too heavy-handed, even intolerable.

But the situation is not that simple. This is not Europe. This is Asia with its own culture dynamics and problems. In Philippines, the crime rate has reached grotesque heights, unseen almost anywhere else in Asia Pacific. Much of the criminality is related to drugs. And people are genuinely fed-up. They demand decisive action.

For many years, Mr. Duterte used to serve astheMayor of Davao, a city on the island of Mindanao. Davao used to be synonymous with delinquency; a tough place to live and many say, almost impossible placeto govern.

Mr Duterte is honest. He openly admits that he could not have lasted long as a mayor of Davao, if he ‘was following the 10 Commandments’. Perhaps no one could.

He is extremely sensitive to criticism of his human rights record. Whether it comes from the UN or EU or the US, his reply is mostly defiant and consistent: “Fuck you!”

And that is what usually gets reported in the West.

But what is omitted is that Rodrigo Duterte usually continues, explaining:

You tell me about human rights? What about those millions you are killing allover the world, including recently in Iraq, Libya and Syria? What about the Filipino people that you had slayed? And what about your own people, African-Americans who are being slaughtered by police, every day?

He does not hide his deep allergy towards Western hypocrisy. For centuries, the United States and Europe have beenkilling millions, plundering entire continents, and then they reserve the right to judge, criticize and boss around others. Directly, or through institutions they control, like the United Nations. Again, his reply is clearly Sukarno-esque: “To hell with you! To hell with your aid!”

But you will not read this on the pages of the The New York Times or The Economist. There it is all about the ‘war on drugs’, about the ‘innocent victims’ and of course about the ‘strongman’Duterte.

The situation is evolving rapidly.

Recently, President Duterte ordered a halt to a military drill, dubbed as the ‘Philippines Amphibious Landing Exercise’ (Phiblex).It began on 4th October and was scheduled to run for more than one week. Around 1,400 Americans and 500 Filipino troops are involved in the war games, some dangerously close to the waters near the disputed islands in South China Sea.

According to several leading Filipino intellectuals, the US has been using the Philippines for its aggressive imperialist ambitions in the region, consistently antagonizing and provoking China.

Duterte’s government is determined to movemuch closer to China and away from the West. It is very likely that the Philippines and China will be able to resolve all disagreements in the foreseeable future. That is, if the US will be out, kept permanently at bay.

To demonstrate its goodwill towards China, and to show its new independent course, Manila is also planning to cancel all 28 annual military exercises with the United States.

President Duterte knows perfectly well what is at stake. To mark his 100 days in office, he has given several fiery speeches, acknowledging that the West may try to remove him from the office, even kill him:

“You want to oust me? You want to use the CIA? Go ahead… Be my guest. I don’t give a shit! I’ll be ousted? Fine. (If so) it’s part of my destiny. Destiny carries so many things. If I die, that’s part of my destiny. Presidents get assassinated.”

They do. They often do get assassinated.

But recently, one after another, countries all over the world are joining the anti-imperialist coalition. Some are prevailing; others get destabilized (like Brazil), economically devastated (like Venezuela) or fully destroyed (like Syria). All defiant nations, from Russia to China, the DPRK and Iran are demonized by Western propaganda and its mass media.

But it seems that the world has had enough. The Empire is crumbling; it is panicking. It is killing more and more, but it is not winning.

Are Filipinos joining this alliance? After only 100 days in the office, it seems that President Dutertehas made up his mind: No more servitude! No coming back!

Is he going to survive? Is he going to stay on his course?

How tough is he, really? One has to have nerves of steel to confront the Empire! One has to have at least nine lives to survive the countless intricate assassination plots, elaborate propaganda schemes, and trickeries. Is he ready for all this? It appears that he is.

The elites of his country have fully sold out to the West; the same as those of Indonesia and to a great extent, Thailand and Malaysia.

It will be an uphill struggle. It already is.

But the majority of his nation is behind him. For the first time in modern history, Filipino people may have a chance to take control over their own destiny, in their own hands.

And if the West does not like what is pouring out from Manila? President Duterte doesn’t care. Hehas declared that he has already prepared plenty of counter-questions. And if the West cannot answer them:

“If they are unable to answer, son of a whore, go home, you animal. I will kick you now. Do not piss me off. It cannot be that they are brighter than me, believe me!”

Most likely, they are not; they are not brighter than him. But they are definitely more ruthless, more brutal.

What are they accusing him of? Of a ‘war on drugs’, that has taken around 3,000 lives?

How many lives has the West (or those ‘son-of-whores’, as many would call it these days in the Philippines) taken after the end of WWII, all over the world? Is it 40 or 50 million? Depends how it is calculated: ‘directly’ or ‘indirectly’.

The Empire will almost certainly try to murder President Duterte, most likely soon, very soon.

In order to survive, to keep on going, to keep fighting, to defend his battered and exploited country, he will most definitely have to permanently forget all about the 10 Commandments.

*

(First published by NEO)

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries.

18 October 2016

By CounterCurrents

People’s Forum on BRICS held in Goa develops a declaration for heads of state attending the 8th BRICS Summit

GOA, 14 October 2016: The People’s Forum on BRICS that took place in Goa on the 13th and 14th of Goa witnessed several social movements and civil society formations, representing the people of at least 10 countries, make a declaration towards the official 8th BRICS summit in Goa.

The declaration has urged upon the BRICS nations to look at issues of Social, Economic and Environmental justice and has reminded the BRICS leadership of a time of an unprecedented crisis facing humanity and nature.

The forum has emphasised the threat that several democracies across the world are facing from reactionary and imperialist forces and has in particular drawn attention to the coup in Brazil that has overthrown a people’s government. The representatives also noticed with great concern the state repression of people’s movements and student’s protests in countries including India and South Africa.

The declaration also points out the massive levels of ecological destruction that is taking place around the world, led by corporations and in collusion with the state. Goa, the site of the summit is ironically at the receiving end of this destruction.

The Forum also pointed out the teetering world economy that is on the verge of another financial meltdown resulting in stocks and currency market crisis in many of the BRICS countries. The longer-term crisis of capitalism is evident in the marked slowdown in international trade, in declining global profit rates, and in business disinvestment, especially evident in the three BRICS which have negative or negligible GDP growth.

The world’s workers are losing rights, farmers are suffering to the point of suicide, and labour casualisation is rampant in all our countries, with the result that BRICS workers are engaged in regular protest and wildcat strikes, of which the strike by 180 million Indian workers inspired the world on 2 September;

On the social front, the threat to our already-inadequate welfare policies is serious, especially in Brazil’s coup regime but more generally across the BRICS where inadequate social policies are not providing adequate safety nets;

The commodification of public services is causing misery, such as in South Africa where university students are fighting hard for a fee-free, decolonised tertiary education;

Everywhere that people’s movements have made countervailing demands – such as democracy, peace, poverty eradication, sustainable development, equality, fair trade – the elites have co-opted our language and distorted our visions beyond recognition. Many of our leaders are hopelessly corrupt, and so when BRICS spin-doctors claim that their work in Goa will “build responsive, inclusive and collective solutions,” we have spent two days looking beyond the pleasing rhetoric and have found a very different, harsh reality.

In short, whereas we criticise the way world power is created and exercised, the BRICS leaders appear to simply want power sharing. To illustrate, the BRICS New Development Bank is working hand-in-glove with the World Bank; the Contingent Reserve Arrangement empowers the International Monetary Fund; and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank serves mainly corporate interests – and all these financial institutions lack opportunities for adequate civil society monitoring and participation.

As a result, the Forum has raised constructive critiques of BRICS in our plenaries and workshops. But beyond the analysis, we understand that only people’s power, across borders, can make change. Some of our most successful struggles – such as access to life-savings medicines or ending apartheid – required international solidarity. This Forum found many routes forward for cross-cutting BRICS internationalism in various sectors.

For example, the Forum recognises the need for a just solution to the Syrian crisis in accordance with the principles of international law, and condemns the US-backed aggression and the Pentagon/NATO doctrine of regime change. The Forum reaffirmed its solidarity with the Palestinian struggle against colonialism and occupation, and we endorse Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions against apartheid Israel, including opposition to Israel’s attempted export of its unsustainable water and agricultural technologies to BRICS countries.

The social movements and progressive unions and formations who gathered at the Xavier’s Centre for Historical Research, Goa declared their intention to win their demands for social, economic and environmental justice. The victories that many of the movements have won already on multiple fronts – such as halting numerous multinational corporations’ exploitation, gaining access to essential state services, occupying land and creating agricultural cooperatives, and generating more humane values in our societies – give the Forum the momentum and optimism. In 2017 and beyond, the BRICS People’s Forum will reconvene, and redouble our efforts with new-found allies from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

Peoplesforumonbrics@gmail.com

By AP

Kansas City library officials ‘outraged’ that prosecutors are charging audience member simply ‘for asking questions’

KANSAS CITY, Missouri — The executive director the Kansas City library system says he is “outraged” that prosecutors continue to pursue charges against a man who was arrested after asking pointed questions during a library discussion about the Middle East peace process and an employee who tried to intervene.
Although the arrests occurred in May following a speech by author and diplomat Dennis Ross, the library system only recently went public about its opposition to charges, the Kansas City Star reported.

R. Crosby Kemper III, executive director of the city’s library system, said “we’re going to be living in a different kind of country” if people can be arrested for asking questions at a library. “If this kind of behavior is unacceptable to the police, then I guess we’re going to have to shut the library down.”

Issues arose after Ross finished speaking and took a question from Jeremy Rothe-Kushel concerning whether Jewish Americans like Rothe-Kushel should be concerned about actions by the US and Israel that amount to “state-sponsored terrorism.”

“When are we going to stand up and be ethical Jews and Americans?” Rothe-Kushel asked.

When Rothe-Kushel tried to ask another question, a private security guard grasped his arm, followed by an off-duty police officer, both employed by the Jewish Community Foundation. Rothe-Kushel then shouted, “Get your hands off of me right now!”

Steve Woolfolk, director of public programming for the library, tried to intervene. Both men were arrested by off-duty officers.

“Every police officer who was on duty that evening was very communicative and respectful,” Rothe-Kushel said. But he said he would have left if he had been asked to and given the chance to do so.

Kansas City police spokeswoman Capt. Stacey Graves said off-duty officers hired by the event sponsor acted properly in helping private security stop an audience member from asking follow-up questions.

Rothe-Kushel is charged in city court with trespassing and resisting arrest. Woolfolk is charged with interfering with an arrest. Woolfolk said he suffered a torn medial collateral ligament in his knee when a police officer kneed him in the leg.

Kemper said the private security guards had no right to remove a patron for asking a question.

Ross’ speech was the inaugural Truman and Israel Lecture, established by the Truman Library Institute and the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Kansas City.

3 October 2016

By AMEC

Two years after independence, political division and contestation for power within South Sudan’s ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) turned violent, and the country descended into chaos. It failed to develop politically neutral and transparent institutions capable of serving public interests; governance institutions remain weak and politicised, lacking oversight; the government has maintained power via coercion; and a militarised society and state have left no room for civil society.

No country is entirely self-contained or lacking in interdependencies. These interlocking interests form the critical part of any country’s existence. Therefore, compartmentalising South Sudan in matters of interconnectedness is, at best, disingenuous, and at worst, sheer political autarky.

In December 2013, South Sudan descended into a brutal civil war. More than two years after independence, political division and contestation for power within the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) quickly turned violent. One cause of this atrocious conflict was the fact that the de jure state had failed to become a de facto state with efficient, fair, politically neutral and transparent institutions capable of serving public interests. Governance institutions remain weak and politicised, lacking oversight. In the absence of a credible and coherent opposition, the government has maintained power via coercion. A highly militarised society and state have left no room for civil society, the media and non-partisan spaces to expand. Rather, this context has created fertile ground for impunity and a breakdown of rule of law.

In the absence of a history of governance and legitimate institutions, South Sudan, as a failing and fragile state, has easily become a source of incalculable security risks, a threat to peace and security domestically, regionally and internationally. Domestic security challenges arising from the rubble of a collapsed state are contagious and transcend its borders. As a result, South Sudan poses an acute risk to international security in the form of transnational organised crime, arms proliferation, civil conflict, terrorism and health hazards. Moreover, given the historical affinities between South Sudan and its immediate neighbours, the region’s countries are not only culturally intertwined but also geographically contiguous. Consequently, South Sudan is not only part of the African continent; it is also an important geopolitical player in the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes region. In other words, South Sudan occupies a geostrategic position.

It is these interlocking risks that partly motivated regional actors to play an active role in South Sudan’s conflict. Since 2013, beyond the limits of judicial sovereignty, South Sudan’s regional neighbours and international partners have been impelled to respond to risks affecting the country. Strictly, one government’s blunders, resulting from its own untamed wagering, affect the neighbourhood and humanity at large. They should be viewed as occurrences within a wider ecosystem of risks, which may have blood-curdling implications across national borders. Specifically, trans-boundary criminality, such as foreign insurgencies from Sudan and Uganda operating in South Sudan, has increased – and international borders have become less relevant. Hence, its neighbours have the right to intervene, as they did in the past, especially during the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005). Fundamentally, a state that considers its sovereignty a license to destroy itself and its people is an illegitimate enterprise.

Applying fire protection measures to one’s property – fire retardants or fire extinguishers – ensures a neighbourhood’s safety; in the same way, regional peace and security requires a united effort. For good or ill, decision-making powers in Juba as well as the armed opposition have already crossed borders to regional capitals, with serious ramifications. As the conflict intensifies, the geographic boundaries of national politics and economics are likely to ebb and flow accordingly.

Hawks in Juba have exaggerated the debate on South Sudan’s borders and sovereignty – even if its rulers are acting irresponsibly – in order to distract from the dire humanitarian situation caused by this manufactured disaster. To the extent that state-society relations are central to the functioning of a political entity, the underpinnings of popular and empirical sovereignty have been deliberately buried. State functions, such as the effective administration of territories, holding a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, taxation, provision of public security, etc. are not viewed by the gun-toting leadership in Juba as critical to the government’s mandate.

Such dismal failure and utter denial does not allow a polity to generate a moral voice to claim legitimacy over the population and territories that are under its juridical control. A state operating at the peak of legitimacy is dangerously hollowed out. Clearly, it subjects itself to a low fire-sale price in the eyes of its citizens and allies – and as prey for its enemies. Substantive debate around sovereignty must include rights and responsibilities to act in tandem with national and international laws.

Big-hearted allies
South Sudan’s independence followed decades of bloody conflict and enormous sacrifices by its people. Since 1955, southern Sudanese had taken up arms to end colonialism at the hands of their northern, Arab neighbours. South Sudan’s independence also rested upon significant, sustained regional and international efforts. The Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) region and the USA played a key role in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), leading up to the 2011 independence referendum.

Since a change of established borders – especially the breakup of a fragile state like Sudan – is fraught with risks, the regional and international community closely followed developments in South Sudan. After the CPA’s signing on 9 January 2005, the UN Security Council (UNSC) adopted Resolution 1590, establishing the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS). Following South Sudan’s independence, and in light of the newborn state’s perceived fragility and potential threats to international security, the UNSC adopted resolutions 1996 (2011) and 2057 (2012), respectively, which established and extended the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) – a peacekeeping mission, in accordance with Chapter Seven of the United Nations Charter. Both UNMIS and UNMISS have involved large military components. In addition, UNMISS established a high-level mechanism to ensure the alignment of its goals to government priorities. Further spheres of cooperation include peace consolidation; decentralisation; infrastructure development; constitutional review; security sector reform, including disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration; conflict prevention; and administration of justice.

Despite the unanimity leading to the establishment of UNMIS and UNMISS – both played an important role in keeping the UNSC actively involved in the peace-building process – external actors have played a negligible role in South Sudan’s state-building process. In fact, the UN system together with other external actors only succeeded in applying astute diplomatic strategies to maintain the peace during an interim period. On many other levels, however, such interventions have borne limited results in achieving the desired goals. More importantly, many external actors saw the region as a complex, continuous emergency, focusing their efforts on humanitarian aid rather than post-conflict recovery and reconstruction. Regardless of a limited shift to development assistance in 2011, the complex emergency response argument quickly appeared whenever levels of insecurity increased in the country.

Whether the 2013 crisis was the natural outcome of a false start or an inevitable tumble, the transformation of UNMIS into UNMISS under a new mandate in 2011 did have benefits. In 2012, when interethnic raids intensified in Jonglei, especially in Pibor County, UNMISS intervention prevented possible ethnic cleansing through mass violence, looting, widespread displacement and starvation. In 2013, UNMISS humanitarian action was remarkably swift. In an atmosphere of targeted killings and revenge attacks, thousands of victims found protection within UNMISS bases in Juba, Malakal, Bentiu and Bor. As violence gained traction, the mission also provided periodic reports and updates on the dire human rights situation in the country.

Throughout the conflict, an array of parties – the IGAD, AU, and the Troika (Norway, the UK and the USA) – took part in intensive mediation efforts, which culminated in the August 2015 peace deal meant to arrest the crisis at an embryonic stage. However, the 2015 peace deal was a compromise. It called for power-sharing and reform leading to a national constitution-making process. It also called for mechanisms to deal with crimes committed during the war and to prepare for democratic elections. The parties to the agreement have never been satisfied with its power-sharing and security components, and implementation got off to a slow start because of disagreements over timing and conflicting interpretations of the way forward.

Nearly a year after the deal was signed many of its security and political milestones have been only partially implemented. For instance, Juba was supposed to be demilitarised, but there remains heavy deployment everywhere; planned joint military and police units have yet to be established, and contrary to the agreement, rival forces have not been cantoned. These disagreements reached their peak in July 2016 when the main parties to the agreement resorted to fighting in the streets of Juba. When the civil war resumed, the IGAD, AU, Troika and the UN embarked on a last-ditch effort to save the deal, which resulted in UNSC Resolution 2304 of 2016.

The post-July 2016 conflict in Juba
There is little accord about what triggered the return to war. Whatever the preferred interpretation, one thing is certain: the Juba conflict resulted from the selective and poor implementation of the security components of the 2015 peace deal and a deep sense of mutual distrust between Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, South Sudan’s president and vice president, respectively. The fighting dims prospects for the 2015 peace deal’s successful implementation, a fact further aggravated by the splintering of the SPLM-in-Opposition and the swearing in of Taban Deng Gai as the new first vice president. Any trust that might have existed between the main parties has now vanished. The dire economic situation and mushrooming of new rebel movements across the country make the need for a functioning government all the more urgent. The unfolding humanitarian catastrophe and looming famine further complicate an already hopelessly complex situation. According to the UN, a third of South Sudan’s population, nearly five million people, faces ‘dangerous levels’ of hunger and the ‘worst famine in the world’.

After the carnage in Juba, there are two potential outcomes: a return to the status quo ante and a full, immediate and unconditional implementation of the agreement, or a return to full-scale war. The former is the easiest, most principled, least costly and best scenario. The international community knows and supports the roadmap. However, clearly the main parties to the conflict lack the political will to proceed with the agreement. This could very well return the country to full-blown war. Obviously this scenario would be costly, complex and unpredictable. If war breaks out, many different armed groups could become involved with no end in sight. Regional or international players may enter the fray, further complicating the situation.

In order to encourage the former and discourage the latter, the UNSC passed Resolution 2304 of 2016. The resolution strengthens the UNMISS mandate, increases its capacity and capabilities, and provides for the deployment of a regional force to operate within the command structure of UNMISS, but with a specific mandate to provide, by all means, protection to civilians, to protect vital state installations and to ensure humanitarian access. In the event of non-cooperation from the Government of South Sudan, the UNSC may impose an arms embargo and further sanctions.

The way forward
In the wake of UNSC 2304 and the Security Council visit in September, the Government of South Sudan, in its usual waggish behaviour embarked upon semantic negotiations focusing on the differences between intervention and protection or consent and acceptance, as a means to barter and delay the regional protection force’s deployment through a game of synonyms. Yet, beyond the logjam of Juba’s doublespeak on the deployment, external actors have continued to engage with South Sudan, in order not to leave the nascent state to its own devices. Simply put, the region and the international community have taken on a unique ‘brother’s keeper role’ in order to preserve a fragile peace in South Sudan. However, Juba must be disabused of its tendency to intensify semantic arguments or commoditise and mis-sell sovereignty. Its actions and veiled threats to bludgeon internal dissent and gag civil society voices that support the regional protection force’s deployment must stop.

Worse still, the government will try to deceive the regional and international community as a way of watering down Resolution 2304 and the peace agreement itself. If it succeeds to call the international community’s bluff and impose what has been described as Pax Salvatica, South Sudan will find itself on a staircase to hell.

Therefore, the force’s deployment should not be an end in itself as it is not a sufficient condition for South Sudan to exit the conflict. Rather, the emergence of a resilient state requires profound and long-term engagement in peace consolidation and peace-building, reconciliation, healing and accountability, in addition to the creation of durable governance institutions. Such efforts will open up a political space to promote a smooth transition to democracy and crowd out violence in the exercise of political power in the country. This premise justifies the call for a roundtable of all stakeholders including political groups, civil society, and faith-based groups, in addition to partners of South Sudan, to repair aspects of the peace deal that have been fractured by violations and delayed implementation, and to produce an abbreviated, actionable roadmap for the transition. This is more practical than the current life-support option, which calls for either a form of neo-trusteeship/trusteeship or a UN transitional administration.

In particular, the images of President Kiir and former vice president Machar have been terribly tarnished by their self-serving agendas, as highlighted in a 2016 report on corruption, which implicates the two politicians, their families and cronies. Morally, the two leaders are unfit to be part of the transition. A roundtable conference should explore the possibility of a transitional arrangement that excludes Kiir and Machar. A return to the status quo ante must be on the basis of a modified peace deal that embraces a four-year-tenured caretaker administration led by carefully vetted national personalities and technocrats who will have no stake in the future politics of South Sudan. Such an arrangement must be buttressed by powerful international security and political oversight in form of a reinforced Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission (JMEC). This entails a split of executive authority between the caretaker administration and JMEC. This arrangement must be based on an all-party consensus derived from the deliberations of the roundtable conference.

As the country sits precariously on a cliff, it may fall and hit the surface with a minimum blow. Thereafter, to paraphrase former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Chester Crocker, if the world does not seize the moment opportunely, no amount of effort and innovation will be able to put humpty dumpty back together again.

10 October 2016