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By Bill Quigley

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) reports 2.2 million people are in our nation’s jails and prisons and another 4.5 million people are on probation or parole in the US, totaling 6.8 million people, one of every 35 adults. We are far and away the world leader in putting our own people in jail. Most of the people inside are poor and Black. Here are 40 reasons why.

One. It is not just about crime. Our jails and prisons have grown from holding about500,000 people in 1980 to 2.2 million today. The fact is that crime rates have risen and fallen independently of our growing incarceration rates.

Two. Police discriminate. The first step in putting people in jail starts with interactions between police and people. From the very beginning Black and poor people are targeted by the police. Police departments have engaged in campaigns of stopping and frisking people who are walking, mostly poor people and people of color, without cause for decades. Recently New York City lost a federal civil rights challenge to their police stop and frisk practices by the Center for Constitutional Rights during which police stopped over 500,000 people annually without any indication that the people stopped had been involved in any crime at all. About 80 percent of those stops were of Black and Latinos who compromise 25 and 28 percent of NYC’s total population. Chicago police do the same thing stopping even more people also in a racially discriminatory way with 72 percent of the stops of Black people even though the city is 32 percent Black.

Three. Police traffic stops also racially target people in cars. Black drivers are 31 percent more likely to be pulled over than white drivers and Hispanic drivers are 23 percent more likely to be pulled over than white drivers. Connecticut, in an April 2015 report, reported on 620,000 traffic stops which revealed widespread racial profiling, particularly during daylight hours when the race of driver was more visible.

Four. Once stopped, Black and Hispanic motorists are more likely to be given tickets than white drivers stopped for the same offenses.

Five. Once stopped, Blacks and Latinos are also more likely to be searched. DOJ reportsBlack drivers at traffic stops were searched by police three times more often and Hispanic drivers two times more often than white drivers. A large research study in Kansas Cityfound when police decided to pull over cars for investigatory stops, where officers look into the car’s interior, ask probing questions and even search the car, the race of the driver was a clear indicator of who was going to be stopped: 28 percent of young Black males twenty five or younger were stopped in a year’s time, versus white men who had 12 percent chance and white women only a 7 percent chance. In fact, not until Black men reach 50 years olddo their rate of police stops for this kind of treatment dip below those of white men twenty five and under.

Six. Traffic tickets are big business. And even if most people do not go directly to jail for traffic tickets, poor people are hit the worst by these ticket systems. As we saw with Ferguson where some of the towns in St. Louis receive 40 percent or more of their city revenues from traffic tickets, tickets are money makers for towns.

Seven. The consequences of traffic tickets are much more severe among poor people. People with means will just pay the fines. But for poor and working people fines are a real hardship. For example, over 4 million people in California do not have valid driver’s licenses because they have unpaid fines and fees for traffic tickets. And we know unpaid tickets can lead to jail.

Eight. In schools, African American kids are much more likely to be referred to the police than other kids. African American students are 16 percent of those enrolled in schools but 27 percent of those referred to the police. Kids with disabilities are discriminated against at about the same rate because they are 14 percent of those enrolled in school and 26 of those referred to the police.

Nine. Though Black people make up about 12 percent of the US population, Black children are 28 percent of juvenile arrests. DOJ reports that there are over 57,000 people under the age of 21 in juvenile detention. The US even has 10,000 children in adult jails and prisons any given day.

Ten. The War on Drugs targets Black people. Drug arrests are a big source of bodies and business for the criminal legal system. Half the arrests these days are for drugs and half of those are for marijuana. Despite the fact that Black and white people use marijuana at the same rates, a Black person is 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for possession of marijuana than a white person. The ACLU found that in some states Black people were six times more likely to be arrested for marijuana than whites. For all drug arrests between 1980 and 2000 the U.S. Black drug arrest rate rose dramatically from 6.5 to 29.1 per 1,000 persons; during the same period, the white drug arrest rate barely increased from 3.5 to 4.6 per 1,000 persons.

Eleven. Many people in jail and prison because the US has much tougher drug laws and much longer sentences for drug offenses than most other countries. Drug offenders receive an average sentence of 7 months in France, twelve months in England and 23 months in the US.

Twelve. The bail system penalizes poor people. Every day there are about 500,000 people are in jails, who are still presumed innocent and awaiting trial, just because they are too poor to pay money to get out on bail. Not too long ago, judges used to allow most people, even poor people to be free while they were awaiting trial but no more. In a 2013 study of New York City courts, over 50% of the people held in jail awaiting trial for misdemeanor or felony charges were unable to pay bail amounts of $2500 or less.

Thirteen. This system creates a lot of jobs. Jails and prisons provide a lot of jobs to local, state and federal officials. To understand how this system works it is good to know the difference between jails and prisons. Jails are local, usually for people recently arrested or awaiting trial. Prisons are state and federal and are for people who have already been convicted. There are more than 3000 local jails across the US, according to the Vera Institute, and together usually hold about 500,000 people awaiting trial and an additional 200,000 or so convicted on minor charges. Over the course of a year, these local jails process over 11.7 million people. Prisons are state and federal lockups which usually hold about twice the number of people as local jails or just over 1.5 million prisoners.

Fourteen. The people in local jails are not there because they are a threat to the rest of us. Nearly 75 percent of the hundreds of thousands of people in local jails are there for nonviolent offenses such as traffic, property, drug or public order offenses.

Fifteen. Criminal bonds are big business. Nationwide, over 60 percent of people arrested are forced to post a financial bond to be released pending trial usually by posting cash or a house or paying a bond company. There are about 15,000 bail bond agents working in the bail bond industry which takes in about $14 billion every year.

Sixteen. A very high percentage of people in local jails are people with diagnosed mental illnesses. The rate of mental illness inside jails is four to six times higher than on the outside. Over 14 percent of the men and over 30 percent of the women entering jails and prisons were found to have serious mental illness in a study of over 1000 prisoners. Arecent study in New York City’s Rikers Island jail found 4,000 prisoners, 40 percent of their inmates, were suffering from mental illness. In many of our cities, the local jail is the primary place where people with severe mental problems end up. Yet treatment for mental illness in jails is nearly non-existent.

Seventeen. Lots of people in jail need treatment. Nearly 70 percent of people prison meet the medical criteria for drug abuse or dependence yet only 7 to 17 percent ever receive drug abuse treatment inside prison.

Eighteen. Those who are too poor, too mentally ill or too chemically dependent, though still presumed innocent, are kept in cages until their trial dates. No wonder it is fair to say, as the New York Times reported, our jails “have become vast warehouses made up primarily of people too poor to post bail or too ill with mental health or drug problems to adequately care for themselves.”

Nineteen. Poor people have to rely on public defenders. Though anyone threatened with even a day in jail is entitled to a lawyer, the reality is much different. Many poor people facing misdemeanor charges never see a lawyer at all. For example, in Delaware more than 75 percent of the people in its Court of Common Pleas never speak to a lawyer. A study of Jackson County Michigan found 95 percent of people facing misdemeanors waived their right to an attorney and have plead guilty rather than pay a $240 charge for a public defender. Thirteen states have no state structure at all to make sure people have access to public defenders in misdemeanor courts.

Twenty. When poor people face felony charges they often find the public defenders overworked and underfunded and thus not fully available to provide adequate help in their case. In recent years public defenders in Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri and Pennsylvania were so overwhelmed with cases they refused to represent any new clients. Most other states also have public defender offices that have been crushed by overwork, inadequate finances and do not measure up to the basic principles for public defenders outlined by the American Bar Association. It is not uncommon for public defenders to have more than 100 cases going at the same time, sometimes several hundred. Famous trial lawyer Gerry Spence, who never lost a criminal case because of his extensive preparation for each one, said that if he was a public defender and represented a hundred clients he would never have won a case.

Twenty One. Lots of poor people plead guilty. Lack of adequate public defense leads many people in prison to plead guilty. The American Bar Association reviewed the US public defender system and concluded it lacked fundamental fairness and put poor people at constant risk of wrongful conviction. “All too often, defendants plead guilty, even if they are innocent, without really understanding their legal rights or what is occurring…The fundamental right to a lawyer that America assumes applies to everyone accused of criminal conduct effectively does not exist in practice for countless people across the US.”

Twenty Two. Many are forced to plead guilty. Consider all the exonerations of people who were forced by police to confess even when they did not do the crime who were later proven innocent: some criminologists estimate 2 to 8 percent of the people in prison are innocent but pled guilty. One longtime federal judge estimates that there is so much pressure on people to plead guilty that there may easily be 20,000 people in prison for crimes they did not commit.

Twenty Three. Almost nobody in prison ever had a trial. Trials are rare in the criminal injustice system. Over 95 percent of criminal cases are finished by plea bargains. In 1980, nearly 20 percent of criminal cases were tried but that number is reduced to less than 3 percent because sentences are now so much higher for those who lose trials, there are more punishing drug laws, mandatory minimum sentences, and more power has been given to prosecutors.

Twenty Four. Poor people get jail and jail makes people worse off. The poorest people, those who had to remain in jail since their arrest, were 4 times more likely to receive a prison sentence than those who got out on bail. There are tens of thousands of rapes inside jails and prisons each year. DOJ reports over 4,000 inmates are murdered each year insideeach year. As US Supreme Court Justice Kennedy told Congress recently “This idea of total incarceration just isn’t working. And it’s not humane. We [society and Congress and the legal profession] have no interest in corrections, nobody looks at it.”

Twenty Five. Average prison sentences are much longer than they used to be, especially for people of color. Since 1990, the average time for property crimes has gone up 24 percent and time for drug crimes has gone up 36 percent. In the US federal system, nearly 75 percent of the people sent to prison for drug offenses are Black or Latino.

Twenty Six. There is about a 70 percent chance that an African American man without a high school diploma will be imprisoned by the time he reaches his mid-thirties; the rate for white males without a high school diploma is 53 percent lower. In the 1980, there was only an 8 percent difference. In New York City, for example, Blacks are jailed at nearly 12 times the rate of whites and Latinos more than five times the rate of whites.

Twenty Seven. Almost 1 of 12 Black men ages 25 to 54 are in jail or prison, compared to 1 in 60 nonblack men. That is 600,000 African American men, an imprisonment rate of five times that of white men.

Twenty Eight. Prison has become a very big private business. Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) owns and runs 67 for-profit jails in 20 states with over 90,000 beds. Along with GEO (formerly Wackenhut), these two private prison companies have donated more than $10 million to candidates and spent another $25 million lobbying according to the Washington Post. They lobby for more incarceration and have doubled the number of prisoners they hold over the past ten years.

Twenty Nine. The Sentencing Project reports that over 159,000 people are serving life sentences in the US. Nearly half are African American and 1 in 6 are Latino. The number of people serving life in prison has gone up by more than 400% since 1984. Nearly 250,000 prisoners in the US are over age 50.

Thirty. Inside prisons, the poorest people are taken advantage of again as most items such as telephone calls to families are priced exorbitantly high, some as high as $12.95 for a 15 minute call, further separating families.

Thirty One. The DOJ reports another 3.9 million people are on probation. Probation is when a court puts a person under supervision instead of sending them to prison. Probation is also becoming a big business for private companies which get governments to contract with them to collect outstanding debts and supervise people on probation. Human Rights Watch reported in 2014 that over a thousand courts assign hundreds of thousands of people to be under the supervision of private companies who then require those on probation to pay the company for the supervision and collect fines, fees and costs or else go to jail. For example, one man in Georgia who was fined $200 for stealing a can of beer from a convenience store was ultimately jailed after the private probation company ran up over a thousand dollars in in fees.

Thirty Two. The DOJ reports an additional 850,000 people are on parole. Parole is when a person who has been in prison is released to serve the rest of their sentence under supervision.

Thirty Three. The DOJ reported in 2012 that as many as 100 million people have a criminal record, and over 94 million of those records are online.

Thirty Four. Everyone can find out people have a record. Because it is so easy to access to arrest and court records, people who have been arrested and convicted face very serious problems getting a job, renting an apartment, public assistance, and education. Eighty-seven percent of employers conduct background checks. Employment losses for people with criminal records have been estimated at as much as $65 billion every year.

Thirty Five. Race is a multiplier of disadvantage in unemployment for people who get out of prison. A study by Professor Devah Pager demonstrated that employers who were unlikely to even check on the criminal history of white male applicants, seriously discriminated against all Black applicants and even more so against Black applicants with criminal records.

Thirty Six. Families are hurt by this. The Sentencing Project reports 180,000 women are subject to lifetime bans from Temporary Assistance to Needy Families because of felony drug convictions.

Thirty Seven. Convicted people cannot get jobs after they get out. More than 60 percent of formerly incarcerated people are unemployed one year after being released. Is it a surprise that within three years of release from prison, about two-thirds of the state prisoners were rearrested?

Thirty Eight. The US spends $80 billion on this big business of corrections every year. As a retired criminal court judge I know says, “the high costs of this system would be worth it if the system was actually working and making us safer, but we are not safer, the system is not working, so the actual dollars we are spending are another indication of our failure.” The cost of being number one in incarceration is four times higher than it was in 1982. Anyone feeling four times safer than they used to?

Thirty Nine. Putting more people in jail creates more poverty. The overall poverty rate in our country is undoubtedly higher because of the dramatic increase in incarceration over the past 35 years with one research project estimating poverty would have decreased by 20 percent if we had not put all these extra people in prison. This makes sense given the factthat most all the people brought into the system are poor to begin with, it is now much harder for them to find a job because of the barriers to employment and good jobs erected by a criminal record to those who get out of prison, the increased number of one parent families because of a parent being in jail, and the bans on receiving food stamps and housing assistance.

Forty. Putting all these problems together and you can see why the Center for American Progress rightly concludes “Today, a criminal record serves as both a direct cause and consequence of poverty.”

What does it say about our society that it uses its jails and prisons as the primary detention facilities for poor and black and brown people who have been racially targeted and jail them with the mentally ill and chemically dependent? The current criminal system has dozens of moving parts from the legislators who create the laws, to the police who enforce them, to the courts which apply them, to the jails and prison which house the people caught up in the system, to the public and business community who decides whom to hire, to all of us who either do something or turn our heads away. These are our brothers and sisters and cousins and friends of our coworkers. There are lots of proposed solutions. To learn more about the problems and the solutions are go to places like The Sentencing Project, the Vera Institute, or the Center for American Progress. Because it’s the right thing to do, and because about 95 percent of the people who we send to prison are coming back into our communities.

Bill Quigley is Associate Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. He is a Katrina survivor and has been active in human rights in Haiti for years. He volunteers with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) and the Bureau de Avocats Internationaux (BAI) in Port au Prince.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

03 June, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

 

By Eric Margolis

When is genocide not really genocide? When the victims are small, impoverished brown people no wants or cares about – Burma’s Rohingya.

Their plight has finally commanded some media attention because of the suffering of Rohingya boat people, 7,000 of whom continue to drift in the waters of the Andaman Sea without food, water or shelter from the intense sun. At least 2,500 lucky refugees are in camps in Indonesia.

Mass graves of Rohingya are being discovered in Thailand and Burma (Myanmar). Large numbers of Rohingya are fleeing for their lives from their homeland, Burma, while the world does nothing. Burma is believed to have some 800,000 Rohingya citizens.

This week, the Dalai Lama and other Nobel Peace Prize winners call on Burma and its much ballyhooed ‘democratic leader,’ Aung San Suu Kyi, to halt persecution of the Rohingya. They did nothing.

The Rohyinga’s persecution has been going on for over half a century, totally unobserved by the rest of the world. Burma’s government claims they are descendants of economic immigrants from neighboring Bengal who came as indentured laborers to the British colony of Burma in early the 19th century.

Interestingly, the British Empire created a similar ethnic problem by bringing large numbers of Tamils from southern India to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) to work the British tea plantations.

But Bengalis have been on Burma’s Arakan Coast for centuries. What sets Rohyingas apart is their dark skin and Islamic faith. Burma seems determined to expel its Muslims for good, treating them like human garbage. It’s the kind of brutal ethnic cleansing, racism and genocide that we recently saw unleashed against Albanian and Bosnian Muslims and Catholics in Bosnia and Kosovo.

I’ve been watched the steady rise of a weird form of Asian racism among some militant Buddhists in Burma and Sri Lanka. The first sign was anti-Tamil riots in Sri Lanka a decade ago led by fiery Buddhist monks.

But wait a minute. I have always been very attracted to Buddhism as a gentle, sensible, human faith. My first book, “War at the Top of the World,” was inspired by my conversations with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. I like to meditate in Buddhist temples whenever I’m in Asia.

So from where did all those screaming, hate-promoting Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka and Burma come from? Clearly, from deep smoldering fires that we knew nothing about. The bloody Sri Lankan civil war between the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils was largely initiated by militant monks. One also remembers Vietnam’s self-immolating monks.

The same phenomena erupted in Burma, a nation rent by violent regional and ethnic tensions that have raged since 1945. But who initiated a campaign of hate and pogroms against the Arakan Muslims who were quietly, minding their own business and eking out a living? As soon as Burma’s military stepped back from total rule, the anti-Muslim violence went critical.

The triple-sainted (at least in the Western media)Aung San Suu Kyi refuses to hear foreign pleas that she do something. Burma will hold elections in November and she wants to avoid antagonizing Buddhist voters – even when her nation in practicing genocide.

I stood in front of her in Rangoon years ago when she was still a prisoner of the military junta, listening to her platitudes about human rights and democracy. I thought then and now that like all politicians, her words were not to be given too much credit. Maybe those fools on the Nobel Peace Prize committee could revoke her Peace Prize and, while they’re at it, Obama’s.

Thailand wants no Rohyingas; Indonesia says only a few thousand on a temporary basis. Australia, which is not overly fond of non-whites, say no. Bangladesh can’t even feed its own wretched people. So the poor Rohyingas are a persecuted people without a country, adrift on a sea of sorrows.

What of the Muslim world? What of that self-proclaimed “Defender of the Faith. Saudi Arabia?” The Saudis are just buying $109 billion worth of US arms which they can’t use, but they don’t have even a few pennies for their desperate co-religionists in the Andaman Sea. The Holy Koran enjoins Muslims to aid their brethren wherever they are persecuted – this is the true essence of jihadism.

But the Saudis are too busy plotting against Iran, bombing Yemen, and supporting rebels in Iraq and Syria, or getting ready for their summer vacations in Spain and France, to think about fellow Muslims dying of thirst. Pakistan, which could help, has not, other than offering moral support. Neither has India, one of the world’s leading Muslim nations.

In the end, it may be up to the United States to rescue the Rohyinga, just as it rescued Bosnia and Kosovo. That’s fine with me. I don’t want the US to be the world’s policeman; I want it to be the world’s rescuer, its SOS force, its liberator.

We should tell Burma to halt its genocide today, or face isolation and sanctions from the outside world.

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2015

Eric S. Margolis is an American-born journalist and writer. For 27 years, ending in 2010, he was a contributing editor to the Toronto Sun chain of newspapers, writing mainly about the Middle East, South Asia and Islam.

30 May 2015

By Jonathan Cook

Nazareth: Only a few weeks into Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government, the intense strain of trying to square its members’ zealotry with Israel’s need to improve its international standing is already starkly evident.

The conundrum was laid out clearly by Tzipi Hotovely, a young political ally of Netanyahu’s recently appointed to oversee the foreign ministry on his behalf.

She called together the country’s chief diplomats last week to cite rabbinical justifications for taking Palestinian land. Her broader message was that Israeli embassies abroad needed to stop worrying about being “smart” and concentrate instead on being “right”. Urging the country’s envoys into a headlong confrontation with the world community, she told them the “basic truth” was: “All the land is ours.”

Netanyahu is too experienced a politician to take Hotovely’s advice fully to heart himself. Having briefly spoken his mind to ensure he won the recent general election, he has now walked back a comment much criticised by the White House that he would never permit a Palestinian state.

Damage control was also the reason he quickly cancelled defence minister Moshe Yaalon’s plan to create separate buses for Jewish settlers and Palestinian labourers as they return to the occupied territories at the end of a day in Israel.

Unlike most in his cabinet, Netanyahu understood that, denied by his military of even the flimsiest security pretext, the historical antecedents of bus segregation were too uncomfortable, especially for Israel’s patron, the United States.

The graver danger for Netanyahu is that, stuck with a cabinet of the like-minded – of ultranationalists, settlers and religious extremists – he lacks a solitary fig leaf to soften his image with the international community.

In his two previous governments, he relied on such sops: Ehud Barak, his defence minister, followed by Tzipi Livni as justice minister became the sympathetic address in the Israeli cabinet craved by Washington and Europe. Both spoke grandly about Palestinian statehood, even while they did nothing to achieve it.

With no veteran of the peace-process to hand, the west now faces an Israeli foreign ministry led jointly by Hotovely and Dore Gold, appointed director-general this week. Gold, a long-time hawkish adviser to the prime minister, is deeply opposed to Palestinian statehood, and even floated two years ago the idea of annexing the West Bank.

The minister in charge of talks with the Palestinians – hypothetical though such a role is at the moment – is Silvan Shalom, another Netanyahu intimate who publicly rejects the idea of two states and supports aggressive settlement building.

Other key ministries affecting Palestinian life are similarly burdened with righteous – and outspoken – extremists.

Shortly before announcing his bus segregation plan, Yaalon suggested that Israel, in dealing with Iran, might ultimately follow the example set at the end of the Second World War by the US, as it dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yaalon’s deputy, Eli Ben Dahan, a leading settler rabbi, refers to Palestinians as “sub-human”.

Ayelet Shaked, who spoke in genocidal terms against Palestinians in Gaza last summer, calling them “snakes”, now oversees Israel’s justice system, the sole – and already feeble – form of redress for Palestinians struggling against the occupation’s worst excesses.

Other ministers are no less dogmatic in their fanatical opposition both to Israel signing an agreement with the Palestinians and to the US signing one with Iran. The self-evident absurdity of diplomacy in these circumstances may be one reason why Tony Blair, the already deeply ineffective Middle East peace envoy, threw in the towel this week.

Similarly, Barack Obama is certain to find the new Israeli government an even bigger headache than Netanyahu’s previous two.

While the US tries to reach a deal on Iran’s nuclear programme and revive peace talks between the Palestinians and Israel – however futile such a process may be – Israeli ministers will be in a contest to see who can make most mischief.

Netanyahu, already an unloved figure at the White House, will now find no one across the Israeli cabinet table helping him to apply the brakes.

The irony is that, just as the White House gears up for another 18 months of humiliation and sabotage from Netanyahu and his government, Obama is showering Israel with gifts, as part of its long-standing “security” doctrine.

Last week, it was reported, the US agreed to provide Israel with $2 billion worth of arms, including bunker-buster bombs and thousands of missiles, to replenish stockpiles depleted by Israel’s sustained attack on Gaza last summer that killed more than 2,000 Palestinians.

The news broke just as United Nations officials reported that unexploded ordnance was still claiming lives in Gaza nearly a year later.

According to the Israeli media, the US is also preparing to “compensate” Israel with other goodies, including possibly more fighter planes, if Netanyahu agrees to restrain his criticisms over an expected deal with Iran in June.

And Washington averted last week a threat to Israel’s large, undeclared nuclear arsenal by blocking the efforts of Arab states to convene a conference to make the Middle East free of nuclear weapons by next year.

The lesson drawn by Netanyahu should be clear. Obama may signal verbally his disquiet with the current Israeli government, but he is not about to exact any real price from Israel, even as it shifts ever further to the fanatical right

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.
29 May, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By John Roberts

As delegates from 19 countries gather today in Bangkok for a meeting on “irregular migration in the Indian Ocean,” more evidence has emerged of the horrors facing thousands of Bangladeshis and Rohingya Muslims from Burma fleeing persecution and poverty. All of the countries attending the meeting, in one way or another, bear responsibility for their plight.

According to estimates by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), at least seven boats containing 2,600 dehydrated and starving refugees are still adrift in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea—testimony to the badly coordinated and half-hearted official rescue efforts.

Another 3,500 Rohingya and Bangladeshi refugees have managed to reach shore in Malaysia and Indonesia after those governments ended the policy of driving the boats out to sea and granted temporary shelter to some for one year. The UN estimates that at least 120,000 asylum seekers have left from Burma and Bangladesh so far this year.

For years, Rohingya and Bangladeshi refugees have been forced to rely on often unscrupulous traffickers who have used well-established routes via sea to southern Thailand and then through jungle pathways across the border into northern Malaysia. The extent of the trade makes clear that officials, including at high levels, were involved.

Refugee boats were left stranded at sea by the traffickers when Thai authorities closed down transit camps in the south of the country earlier this month after the discovery of 33 corpses provoked popular outrage.

BBC journalist Jonathan Head uncovered evidence of involvement of Thai government officials and businessmen in the transit camps. His report published May 22 included an interview with a local Thai official who had closed down one camp but was ordered by the central government to send the Bangladeshi migrants to a detention centre where it was common knowledge that detainees would be “sold back to the traffickers.”

A police officer spoke of a large camp in the military zone on the Thai-Malaysian border big enough to accommodate 1,000 trafficked migrants that could not be shut down as the military had not given its approval.

Over the past week, Malaysian police have uncovered a network of 28 camps near the Thai border where refugees were imprisoned and maltreated in order to extort more money from their relatives. Police believe that one camp held up to 300 people, while others were smaller.

Malaysia’s national police chief Khalid Abu Bakar told Time: “I am not surprised by the presence of smuggling syndicates. But the depth of the cruelty, the torture, all this death has shocked me.” He confirmed on Monday that at least 139 possible graves had been found near the camps, which included crude wooden cages for those who attempted to escape.

Forensic teams have begun working to find and recover bodies. Only one body has been discovered above ground in a wooden holding pen. It was so badly decomposed that forensic investigators had to remove it in five separate bags.

Brad Adams, Asia director of the US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), said: “Survivors describe how they flee persecution in Burma only to fall into the hands of traffickers and extortionists, in many cases witnessing deaths and suffering abuse and hunger.

One Rohingya woman told HRW that she had been held in camp on the Thai side of the border and severely abused to force her relatives to pay a ransom. “The brokers beat me with sticks and bamboo and put out cigarettes on my legs and ankles because I could not raise the money,” she said.

Adams pointed to official involvement in the trafficking operations. “Interviews with officials and others make clear that these brutal networks, with the complicity of government officials in Burma, Bangladesh, Thailand and Malaysia, profit from the desperation and misery of some of the world’s most persecuted and neglected people,” he said.

After denying the existence of camps or graves in northern Malaysia until as late as this month, Malaysian authorities have been forced to detain 12 police officers for alleged involvement in the human trade. Government ministers, however, are continuing to try to play down the extent of the trafficking.

Former chief of the UN Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking, Matthew Friedman, told the Guardian that there were reports on the camps going back 10 years which had been passed onto authorities, “but there was no follow-up.”

The Rohingya are a persecuted Muslim minority in Burma where they are branded by authorities as “illegal Bangladeshi immigrants” and have no citizenship rights, even though many have lived in Burma for generations. Even as the US was forging closer relations with Burma’s military backed government in 2012, the Rohingya were subjected to a new wave of state-sanctioned violence that resulted in scores of deaths and drove tens of thousands from their homes.

Having fled persecution in Burma, the Rohingya face similar treatment in Bangladesh where they have been herded into detention camps, official and unofficial, where they face appalling conditions. The government has just announced that it intends to force 32,000 registered Rohingya refugees from two official camps in the Cox’s Bazar district, a tourist area, out of sight onto Hatiya Island in the Bay of Bengal.

The Special Meeting on Irregular Migration in the Indian Ocean being convened today in Bangkok by the Thai military junta supposedly to “comprehensively work together to address the unprecedented increase of irregular migration across the Bay of Bengal in recent years.”

Attending are all the chief culprits in human trafficking trade, including Burma, Malaysia and Indonesia. Far from addressing the horrific situation facing the refugees, the assembled countries will no doubt seek to cover up their own responsibility while imposing even more obstacles to those seeking asylum and forcing them to ever more desperate lengths.

The Burmese delegation has already made clear that it has no intention of alleviating the plight of the Rohingya in any way. On Wednesday, Buddhist monks and nationalists from the reactionary Habyelsaw Tadaban organisation held a march of 300 through Rangoon, denouncing the Rohingya as “beasts” and demanding the government make no concessions in Bangkok.

29 May, 2015
WSWS.og

 

For the crimes against humanity, including a genocide, haul the following genocidaires to the Hague.

1) retired Senior General Than Shwe (Officer Training School In-take ?)

2) retired Vice-Senior General Maung Aye (Defense Services Academy or DSA, In-Take 1)

3) ex-General Khin Nyunt (Officer Training School, In-Take?), the founder of the now disbanded Nasaka (or Myanmar’s equivalent of SS – for the Rohingyas) and former Chief of Directorate of Defense Services Intelligence(DDSI)

4) ex-General Shwe Mann (DSA-11), Speaker of the Parliament and Chair of the ruling party USDP (Defense Services Academy or DSA- In-Take-1)

5) ex-General and Myanmar President Thein Sein (DSA In-Take 9)

6) Lt-General Ko Ko (Home Minister), already accused of war crimes by Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic

7) ex-Major Zaw Htay, President’s Office Director (DSA In-Take 36)

8) Union Minister ex-Admiral Soe Thein (DSA In-take ?) (whose navy units have been involving in pushing out the Rohingya out of Burma’s territorial waters; he inked the business deals with Norway’s Telenor)

9) Information Minister ex-Colonel Ye Htut (DSA In-Take ?)

10) Foreign Minister Wunna Maung Lwin (DSA In-Take?)

11) Deputy Foreign Minister That Kyaw (DSA In-Take?)

12) ex-Major General Maung Maung Ohn (DSA In-Take 22), Rakhine Chief Minister

13) Aye Maung, Member of the Parliament from Ramree and Chairman of the Rakhine party who calls for “Israel-style destruction of Rohingya on Rakhine soil)

14) Wirathu – 969 “Monk”

15) Dr Kyaw Yin Hlaing (PhD Cornell), of Norway-funded “Myanmar Institute for Diversity and Myanmar Peace Center), advocate and author of Rakhine Action Plan (Myanmar’s equivalent of “Final Solution”)

16) Nay Myo Wei, Chair of Diversity Party (who openly calls for the mass killings of Rohingya in this week’s mass rally in Rangoon)

 

 

Oslo, ‪#‎Norway‬, May 28, 2015 – A two-day conference focusing on ending the persecution of Burma’s Rohingyas concluded today, with a call from seven Nobel Peace Laureates to describe their plight as nothing less than a genocide.

In his pre-recorded address to the conference, Desmond Tutu, leader of South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s, called for an end to the slow genocide of the Rohingya.

Tutu’s appeal was amplified by six other fellow Nobel Peace laureates: Mairead Maguire from Ireland, Jody Williams from the USA, Tawakkol Karman from Yeman, Shirin Ibadi from Iran, Leymah Gbowee from Liberia, and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel from Argentina. They stated that, “what Rohingyas are facing is a textbook case of genocide in which an entire indigenous community is being systematically wiped out by the Burmese government.”

Philanthropist George Soros drew a parallel between his childhood memories of life in a Jewish ghetto under the Nazi occupation in Hungary and the plight of the Rohingya after visiting Rohingya neighborhood in Sittwe which he called a “ghetto”. “In 1944, as a Jew in Budapest, I, too was a Rohingya… The parallels to the Nazi genocide are alarming,” he said, in a pre-recorded address to the Oslo conference.

The meeting was held at the prestigious Norwegian Nobel Institute and Voksenaasen Conference Center in Oslo, Norway. It was attended by Buddhist monks, Christian clergy, and Muslim leaders from Myanmar. Also present were genocide experts, international diplomats, interfaith and human rights leaders. Attendees explored ways to end Myanmar’s systematic persecution of the Rohingya, as well as foster and communal harmony in Burma.

Addressing the conference, Morten Høglund, the State Secretary of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, announced his government’s decision to give 10 million Norwegian Kroner ($1.2 million US) in humanitarian assistance to Burma. The participants were dismayed however, as the State Secretary choose not to even mention the word “Rohingya” in his entire speech in an apparent compliance to Myanmar’s government stand.
The conference communiqué urged the Norwegian government to immediately prioritize ending Myanmar’s genocide over its economic interests in Burma, including sizeable investment by Telenor and StatOil.

During the conference, former Prime Minister of Norway Kjell Magne Bondevik conferred on three leading Myanmar monks who have saved Muslim lives in Burma and opposed Islamophobia the first-ever “World Harmony awards” on behalf of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, a 120-year-old interfaith organization. Rev. Seindita, Rev. Withudda, and Rev. Zawtikka, were the three awardees who also chanted Buddhist prayers at the inauguration.

Presenting the awards, the Parliament’s chair, Imam Malik Mujahid said, “These extraordinary monks challenge the widespread perception that all Buddhist monks clamor for violence against the Rohingyas.”

The participants from 16 different countries, including leading Rohingya activists and leaders, as well as genocide scholars, adopted the following statement:

————-Full text of the communiqué adopted by the Oslo Conference———-

Today the Oslo Conference to End Myanmar’s Persecution of the Rohingya ended. The conference was held at the Norwegian Nobel Institute and Voksenaasen, Oslo, Norway on May 26 & 27, 2015.

After two days of deliberations the conference issue the following urgent appeal to the international community, based on the following conclusions:

1. The pattern of systematic human rights abuses against the ethnic Rohingya people entails crimes against humanity including the crime of genocide;

2. The Myanmar government’s denial of the existence of the Rohingya as a people violates the right of the Rohingya to self-identify;

3. The international community is privileging economic interests in Myanmar and failing to prioritize the need to end its systematic persecution and destruction of the Rohingya as an ethnic group.

The call by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to end Myanmar’s genocide of the Rohingya made during the Oslo conference is supported by six additional Nobel Peace Laureates: Mairead Maguire, Jody Williams, Tawakkol Karman, Shirin Ibadi, Leymah Gbowee, and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel.

The United Nations and the international community have an urgent responsibility to stop Myanmar’s systematic persecution of the Rohingya.

As the home country of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, the conference urges the Government of Norway to immediately prioritize ending Myanmar’s genocide over its economic interests in that country, including sizeable investment by Telenor and StatOil.

The conference calls upon the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the European Union (EU), the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the United Nations (UN) and other relevant international actors to take all possible measures to pressure the Government of Myanmar to do the following:

to immediately end its policies and practices of genocide;

to restore full and equal citizenship rights of the Rohingya;

to institute the right of return for all displaced Rohingya;

to effectively provide the Rohingya with all necessary protection; and

to actively promote and support reconciliation between communities in Rakhine State, Myanmar.
Contact Persons:

USA: Imam Malik Mujahid
Chair Burma Task Force USA
malik@SoundVision.com
1-312-804-1962
UK: Dr. Maung Zarni:
447710473322
fanon2005@gmail.com

Co-author (with Cowley). “The Slow Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya”
[Background information on the conference: The conference was co-organized and co-sponsored by the following organizations. However, the communiqué was adopted by the attendees of the conference without any approach to the respective organizations.
Justice for All, Burma Task Force USA; Parliament of the World’s Religions; Refugees International (USA); International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) Queen Mary University of London; Harvard Global Equality Initiative (HGEI); Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI).
Dr. Maung Zarni and Imam Malik Mujahid serve as the co-chair of the conference]
Photos:

For conference photos contact Ahmed@BurmaMuslims.org
Links to transcripts and images

Link to the official transcripts of the recorded messages including that of Archbishop Tutu http://www.maungzarni.net/…/the-speech-of-archbishop-desmon… and George Soros http://www.maungzarni.net/…/the-speech-of-george-soros-at-o…

Link to their video recordings at

https://drive.google.com/…/0B1Os6IDEJi3ZLXE2ZVh0c3MxRmM/view
Links to some of the news coverage:

Suu Kyi not invited to meeting on persecuted Rohingya

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/myanmars-suu-kyi-missing-global-m…

Link Myanmar aid to Rohingya rights: Tutu

http://www.thelocal.no/201…/use-myanmar-aid-to-save-rohingya

Aung San Suu Kyi must act on refugee crisis: Dalai Lama

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/dalai-lama-urges-suu-kyi-act-rohi…

 

Oslo conference opens with calls for citizenship, rights for Rohingya
https://www.dvb.no/news/oslo-conference-opens-with-calls-for-citizenship-rights-for-rohingya-burma-myanmar/51413

 

 

 

By Edward Dark

Throughout most of its history, Aleppo had been a city-state, or a capital for surrounding territory in what is now North Syria and parts of south Turkey. There are strong indications now that this ancient city may once again assume this role, but this time around in a far more sinister way.

The “mother of all battles” is what a looming showdown in Aleppo is being called, as revitalised Islamist rebel forces fresh from victories in nearby Idlib are preparing to mount an all-out offensive in the next few weeks to seize the remaining part of the city under government control. The stakes couldn’t be any higher – no less than the fate of the Syrian nation hangs in the balance – and the final lines of division might be drawn here.

The plan, drawn up by the insurgency’s three most powerful regional backers – Turkey, Saudi and Qatar – is to overrun the entire northwest of Syria and create a rebel controlled “safe zone,” and through direct military intervention prevent the Syrian regime’s aircraft and missiles from targeting it, thereby essentially setting up a de facto mini state.

To that end, there has been unprecedented cooperation and coordination between those powers who have put aside their rivalries and differences after King Salman of Saudi assumed the throne. This effort has seen them pour enormous financial, logistical and military resources into setting up what is called the “Fatih Army” or the Army of Conquest, and controlling the flow of its battles directly through an operations room in Turkey as well as intelligence officers on the ground. This was given the go ahead by the US, which under pressure from those allies again seems to have flipped its priority in Syria from battling the Islamic State (IS) to regime change.

It is worth mentioning that after almost a year of US-led coalition bombing, IS has continued to expand and grow, and now controls half of Syria and a third of Iraq. US policy here, as many had foreseen, is a confused and muddled disaster.

If the name of the Fatih Army sounds ominous, then its composition is even more disturbing, being made up primarily of al-Qaeda’s affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, as well as other hardline Salafi jihadist groups like Ahrar el-Sham. This army has already “conquered” most of Idlib province, and is looking to go for Aleppo next.

Apathy meets al-Qaeda advance

That there is global apathy towards an al-Qaeda army – backed and sponsored by the Western world’s predominant Middle Eastern allies – preparing to take over Aleppo and possibly establish another caliphate similar – albeit hostile – to its neighbouring Islamic State, is very indicative of what the Syrian crisis has come to after four years.

This once tolerant, secular, multicultural and multi-confessional nation with a diverse society and rich heritage will soon become home to two of the world’s most noxious, extremist and violently fanatical statelets. In their wake, all of Syria’s non-Sunni Muslim inhabitants are being ethnically cleansed and displaced. Predictably, this is what happened in Idlib after it fell to the Fatih Army, which saw all of its Christians abandon their homes and flee to government-controlled areas, to little media attention. This will undoubtedly happen in Aleppo too, which has a very large Christian population comprised of various denominations, including ethnic Armenians.

Leaders of the Christian community here have sounded the alarm, and warned that after surviving for countless centuries in one of the first lands inhabited by ancient Christians, their presence here might be coming to a final end. Again, the absence of any media concern about this impending calamity is very telling.

The backers of the insurgency have now dropped any pretence of “moderate” rebel groups fighting the Syrian regime, and have almost completely ditched and sidelined the umbrella opposition in exile which they for so long touted as the “legitimate representatives” of the Syrian people. In their stead, we now have an al-Qaeda army preparing to “liberate” north Syria.

Gone are all those grand slogans along with the “moderate” rebel groups we have heard so much about in the news, who after all these years proved to be little more than incompetent and corrupt profiteers. Those groups disintegrated, many of their former fighters joining the extremist jihadist groups who also seized their sophisticated US supplied weapons.

This rebel farce of course was well known to us Syrians, but was never a newsworthy item. We’ve always known that the only effective insurgents on the ground were the Islamists and the jihadists, and that the others were there for show, for the camera crews and media consumption. Maintaining this image no longer seems to be a concern however. After failing to convince Nusra to “rebrand” and ditch its ties with al-Qaeda, The Fatih Army was formed as a more palatable and purely cosmetic media-friendly cover name.

Partitioning Syria

This is what the nations who claim to back the Syrian people’s aspirations for freedom and a democratic inclusive state have deemed fit to unleash upon us. After failing to topple the Syrian regime for four years and realising there would never be any political compromise that would fit their goals, they have now decided to partition Syria and facilitate its partial takeover by jihadists.

It doesn’t seem that previous lessons have been learned, with Afghanistan being the prime precedent. You simply cannot deal with and hope to control the jihadi proxies that you are using to fulfil your military ambitions. Quite simply those groups don’t play by the rules, and will turn on you the first chance they get and follow their own ideologically motivated agendas. The repercussions of doing so have always been, and will continue to be, extremely dangerous and profound.

Al-Qaeda was first spawned by backing the same sort of Islamists against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The destabilising fallout is still being felt today, with subsequent manifestations becoming even more violent and extreme, culminating in the Islamic State. Let’s not forget that for many months at the beginning of the Syrian conflict, the precursor to what was to form the Islamic State’s Syrian division was an integral part of the Syrian insurgency named, yes you guessed it, Jabhat al-Nusra. When the “bad al-Qaeda” went rogue, the very powers that today back the “good al-Qaeda” started to bomb it, and to little effect. It is now just a question of when, not if, Nusra becomes the “bad guys” and have to be bombed.

Needless to say, the majority of Syrians refuse the partitioning of their nation and its takeover by extremists under any pretexts. But that this pretext should be “freeing them from tyranny and oppression” is yet another sad little irony in the black comedy that is Syria’s conflict.

This is felt especially acutely in Aleppo, whose helpless people have endured years of a deadly stalemated war that has killed many of them and destroyed all they held precious. It now seems they must again dread the day they will be “conquered” and “liberated” as it would likely mean the loss of what little they still have left of their city, and what little hope they still hold for the future.

Exodus of minorities

In all likelihood, Aleppo becoming the capital of yet another caliphate would see the majority of its inhabitants abandoning it in droves, and the complete loss of its religious minorities, hence its unique character and identity.

The people here are bracing themselves for the worst, for a momentous battle ahead. The outcome of this battle is by no means a foregone conclusion though, as Syria’s ambassador to the UN has warned in no uncertain terms that Aleppo is a red line, which once crossed would see the escalation of the conflict to other nations. Whether these words are empty and mere rhetoric remains to be seen and depends largely on what the regime’s prime backer, Iran, decides to do.

This month is a very sensitive time for Iran, as it prepares to sign a historic nuclear agreement while regional tensions are soaring. While the ball is now squarely in its park with regards to Syria, it may choose to delay its move until the picture becomes clearer.

Speculation is rife that along with the nuclear deal, regional issues are being hammered out too. Could it be that Iran would accept the partitioning of Syria as long as it gets to keep a majority Shia and Alawi “protectorate” along the coast? Or is it sticking to its guns and thwarting the planned “mother of all battles” in Aleppo by demanding it be stopped, or threatening a serious escalation if it isn’t? How will the flow of war and proxy showdown in Yemen affect Syria?

The coming weeks will tell, and they will be some of the most difficult the people of Syria and Aleppo have seen yet.

26 May 2015

– Edward Dark is MEE’s Aleppo-based columnist and writes under a pseudonym.

By Sukumaran C. V.

To safeguard democracy the people must have a keen sense of independence, self respect and oneness, and should insist upon choosing as their representatives only such persons as are good and true.—M. K. Gandhi. (The Story of My Experiments with Truth)

In his 32-minute long speech delivered extempore at the Central Hall of Parliament on 20th May 2014, Narendra Modi said that his “government is one which thinks about the poor, listens to the poor and which exists for the poor. … The new government is dedicated to the poor. This government is for the villagers, farmers, Dalits and the oppressed, for their aspirations and this is our responsibility.”

That is in words, in rhetoric. But Mr. Modi’s one year of governance proved that in deeds, his government is one which thinks about the corporates, listens to the corporates, exists for the corporates and dedicated to the corporates.

Nobody expected that Mr. Modi will or can translate his rhetoric into practice. Every politician comes to power in the name of the poor and governs to safeguard the interests of the rich. And the one year of Modi government is a categorical statement that the government rules only for the welfare of the corporate world, not for the welfare of the villagers, farmers, Dalits and the oppressed. Their condition is worsening by each passing day and they are referred to and remembered only in rhetoric!

How enthusiastic Mr. Modi and his team is to make the Land Acquisition Bill and the Environmental Laws more corporate friendly and anti-farmer and anti-poor; and in slashing social expenditure that will benefit the ‘villagers, farmers, Dalits and the oppressed’ he mentioned in his rhetoric!

The ‘achievements’ of Mr. Modi’s one year governance reminded me of what Arundhati Roy says about the Kingdom in the Sky in her article Listening to Grasshoppers: Genocide, Denial and Celebration:

“Ironically, the era of the free market has led to the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in India—the secession of the middle and upper classes to a country of their own, somewhere up on the stratosphere where they merge with the rest of the world’s elite. This Kingdom in the Sky is a complete universe in itself, hermetically sealed from the rest of India. It has its own newspapers, films, television programs, morality plays, transport systems, malls and intellectuals. …But there is a problem, and the problem is lebensraum—living space. A kingdom needs its lebensraum. The Sky Citizens look toward the Old Nation. They see thousands of acres of farmland, and think: These really ought to be Special Economic Zones for our industries. They see Adivasis sitting on the bauxite mountains…They think: That is our bauxite, our iron ore, our uranium. What are these people doing on our land? What is our water doing in their rivers? What is our timber doing in their trees?”

It is natural that the Sky Citizens will certainly try to deprive the people of their land, rivers and even their right to live. Who will protect the people in a democracy if those who are elected by the people become the servants of the Sky Citizens?

In his keynote address at the opening of the Edinburgh Commonwealth Summit on October 24, 1997 the then Prime Minister of India, I. K. Gujral, said: “Equal opportunity and democracy are often absent in the restricted chambers of the international economic system. And yet, I have little doubt that, in the long run, globalization will succeed only if it is equitable and just. The institutional systems that oversee the globalised economy must reflect an enlightened balance of interests.”

Nearly 20 years after, the globalised economy in India not only reflects a balance of interests but also widened the imbalance between the rich and the poor and as a result it has wiped out the lives of nearly three lakh farmers between 1995 and 2011. According to the NCRB (National Crime Record Bureau) data; 2, 90, 740 farmers committed suicide during 1995-2011—an average 18,171 farm suicides each year! And this wave of farm suicides still continues.

When Mr. Manmohan Singh ushered in the liberalized economic policies in 1991, it paved the way for the corporate business to be a Shylock with the unconditional help of the State. And in the 2001-02 Union Budget, the then Finance Minister Yaswant Sinha introduced a major policy decision (in favour of the big business) to reduce the role of the FCI to maintaining only minimum buffer stocks. This policy shift was a lethal blow to our PDS and led to the dismantling of the Minimum Support Price scheme which was a solace to the farmers.

The Union governments since 1991 have confined themselves to creating conditions for private enterprise to flourish. While the successive Union Budgets in the liberalization era have inflicted severe cuts in agriculture subsidies, the revenue forgone under corporate income tax, excise and customs duties during the period 2005 – 2011 is Rs. 21, 25, 023 crores. (P. Sainath, “Corporate socialism’s 2G orgy”, The Hindu, March 7, 2011)

And on Sept. 21, 2012 in his address to the Nation, Prime Minister manmohan Singh, by calling us brothers and sisters again and again, told us: “No government likes to impose burdens on the common man. Our Government has been voted to office twice to protect the interests of the aam admi.” What a great joke it was! And I was reminded of this joke when I haerd Mr. Modi saying that his ‘government is for the villagers, farmers, Dalits and the oppressed, for their aspirations and this is our responsibility.’ And the one year of his governance proved that he was really joking.

A country’s well-being depends on the safety and security its farmers and women enjoy. India miserably fails in this count. In our country an average of 15,000 farmers commit suicide every year since 1995. It means that India’s agricultural sector has been in great distress since 1995 and the woes of our farmers still go unaddressed and unmitigated. In his article ‘Of luxury cars and lowly tractors’, published in The Hindu (Dec. 28, 2010), P. Sainath says that “over a quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1995. It means the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history has occurred in this country….It means one and a half million human beings, family members of those killing themselves, have been tormented by the tragedy. It means farmers in thousands of villages have seen their neighbours take this incredibly sad way out. A way out that more and more will consider as despair grows and policies don’t change.”

Manmohan Singh and his team have gone and Mr. Modi has come, but the policies have still not been changed and our farmers still kill themselves. In his article “Corporate socialism’s 2G orgy” (The Hindu, March 7, 2011) Sainath writes: “In six years from 2005-6, the Government of India wrote off corporate income tax worth Rs.3,74,937 crore. While writing off this gigantic sum for corporates, Pranab Mukherjee’s latest budget slashes thousands of crores from agriculture.”

Modi government too writes off corporate income tax and slashes thousand s of crores from agriculture and social expenditure. And he says that his government is dedicated to the poor!

PS: When millions of farmers were killing themselves during the decade long Congress rule, the Congress Vice President was in deep slumber and now suddenly he wakes up and sees the distress of the farmers and sheds (crocodile) tears for them. Every politician remembers the farmers and the poor when they are out of power and the moment they are in power they can only see the elites and their ‘problems’.

Author is a former JNU student now working as clerk in the Kerala State Government service.
27 May, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Dan Glazebrook

The ISIS suicide bombings in Yemen and Saudi Arabia – killing a total of at least 43 people – is yet more bitter fruit of the policy pursued by Britain, the US and France and their Gulf allies for the past eight years. This strategy – of fostering violently sectarian anti-Shia militias in order to destroy Syria and isolate Iran – is itself but part of the West’s wider war against the entire global South by weakening any independent regional powers allied to the BRICs countries, and especially to Russia.

The strategy was first revealed as far back as 2007 in Seymour Hersh’s article ‘The Redirection’, which revealed how Bush administration officials were working with the Saudis to channel billions of dollars to sectarian death squads whose role would be to “throw bombs… at Hezbollah, Motada al-Sadr, Iran and at the Syrians” in the memorable words of one US official.

But more evidence of precisely how this strategy unfolded has been coming out ever since. Most recently, last Monday saw the release of 100s of pages of formerly classified US Defence Intelligence Agency documents following a two year court battle in the US. These documents showed that, far from being an unpredictable ‘bolt from the blue’, as the mainstream media tends to imply, the rise of ISIS was in fact both predicted and desired by the US and its allies from as far back as 2012. The DIA report, which was widely circulated amongst the USA’s various military and security agencies at the time, noted that “There is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in Eastern Syria, and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran)” Elsewhere, the “supporting powers to the opposition” are defined as “Western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey”.

In other words, a Salafist – that is militantly anti-Shia – “principality” was “exactly” what the West wanted as part of their war against, not only Syria, but “Shia expansion” in Iraq as well. Indeed, it was specifically acknowledged that “ISI [the forerunner of ISIS] could also declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organisations in Iraq and Syria”.
The precision of the declassified predictions is astounding. Not only was it predicted that the terrorist groups being supported by Washington and London in Syria would team up with those in Iraq to create an ‘Islamic State’, but the precise dimensions of this state were also spelt out: recognising that “the Salafist[s], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria”, the report noted that the consequences of this for Iraq would be to “create the ideal atmosphere for AQI [al Qaeda Iraq] to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi.” Mosul, don’t forget, was taken by ISIS in June 2014, and Ramadi fell earlier this week.

In the three years since the document was drawn up, the policy has continued relentlessly. Recent months have seen the West and its regional allies massively stepping up their support for their anti-Shia death squads. In late March, Saudi Arabia began its bombardment of Yemen following military gains made by the Houthi (Shia) rebels in that country. The Houthis had been the only effective force fighting Al Qaeda in the country, had taken key territories from them last November, and were subsequently threatening them in their remaining strongholds. This was when the Saudis began their bombardment, with US and British support, natch, and, unsurprisingly, Al Qaeda have been the key beneficiary of this intervention, gaining ‘breathing space’ and regaining valuable lost territory, retaking the key port of Mukulla within a week of the commencement of the Saudi bombardment.

Al Qaeda have also been making gains in Syria, taking two major cities in Idlib province last month following a ramping up of military support from Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. And of course, Britain has been leading the way for a renewed military intervention in Libya in the guise of a “war against people smuggling” that, as I have argued elsewhere, will inevitably end up boosting the most vicious gangs involved in the trade, namely ISIS and Al Qaeda.

So what explains this sudden stepping up of Western and ‘allied’ support for al Qaeda and co right now?
The answer lies in the increasing disgust at the activities of the death squads across the region. No longer perceived as the valiant freedom fighters they were depicted as in 2011, their role as shock troops for the West’s ‘divide and ruin’ strategy, promising nothing but a future of ultra-violent trauma and ethnic cleansing, has become increasingly obvious. The period between mid-2013 and mid-2014 saw a significant turning of the tide against these groups. It began in July 2013 with the ouster of Egypt’s President Morsi following fears he was planning to send in the Egyptian army to aid the Syrian insurgency. New President Al-Sisi put an end not only to that possibility, but to the flow of fighters from Egypt to Syria altogether. The West hoped to step in the following month with airstrikes against the Syrian government, but their attempts to ensure Iranian and Russian acquiescence in such a move came to nought and they were forced into a humiliating climbdown.

Then came the fall of Homs in May 2014, as Syrian government forces retook a key insurgent stronghold. The momentum was clearly with the government side; that is until ‘ISIS’ sprang onto the scene – and with them, a convenient pretext for the US intervention that had been ruled out just a year before.

Meanwhile, in Libya, the pro-death squad parties decisively lost elections for the first elected ‘House of Representatives in June 2014. Their refusal to accept defeat led to a new chapter in the post-NATO Libyan disaster, as they set up a new rival government in Tripoli and waged war on the elected parliament. Yet following a massacre of Egyptians by ISIS in Libya last December, Egypt sent its airforce in on the side of the Tobruk (elected) parliament; it is now, apparently, considering sending in ground troops.

Losing ground in Yemen, in Libya, in Egypt and in Syria, the West’s whole strategy for using armed Salafists as tools of destabilisation had been starting to unravel. The direct interventions in Syria, Yemen and soon Libya, then, are nothing but a means of propping them up – and last Friday’s bombings show they are already paying dividends.

Dan Glazebrook is a political writer and journalist. He writes regularly on international relations and the use of state violence in British domestic and foreign policy.. He can be reached at danglazebrook2000@yahoo.co.uk

27 May, 2015
RT.com

 

By Thierry Meyssan

Macedonia has just neutralised an armed group whose sponsors had been under surveillance for at least eight months. By doing so, it has prevented a new attempt at a coup d’État, planned by Washington for the 17th of May. The aim was to spread the chaos already infecting Ukraine into Macedonia in order to stall the passage of a Russian gas pipeline to the European Union.

On the 9th of May, 2015, the Macedonian police launched a dawn operation to arrest an armed group which had infiltrated the country and which was suspected of preparing a number of attacks.

The police evacuated the civilian population before launching the assault. The suspects opened fire, which led to a bitter firefight, leaving 14 terrorists and 8 members of the police forces dead. 30 people were taken prisoner. There were a large number of wounded

Not a terrorist act, but an attempted coup d’État

The Macedonian police were clearly well-informed before they launched their operation. According to the Minister for the Interior, Ivo Kotevski, the group was preparing a very important operation for the 17th May (the date of the demonstration organised by the Albanophone opposition in Skopje).

The identification of the suspects has made it possible to determine that they were almost all ex-members of the UÇK (Kosovo Liberation Army) [1].

Among them were :

• Sami Ukshini, known as « Commandant Sokoli », whose family played a historic rôle in the UÇK.

• Rijai Bey, ex-bodyguard of Ramush Haradinaj (himself a drug trafficker, military head of the UÇK, then Prime Minister of Kosovo. He was twice condemned for war crimes by the International Penal Tribunal for ex-Yugoslavia, but was acquitted because 9 crucial witnesses were murdered during the trial).

• Dem Shehu, currently bodyguard for the Albanophone leader and founder of the BDI party, Ali Ahmeti. 
• Mirsad Ndrecaj, known as the « NATO Commandant », grandson of Malic Ndrecaj, who is commander of the 132nd Brigade of the UÇK.

The principal leaders of this operation, including Fadil Fejzullahu (killed during the assault), are close to the United States ambassador in Skopje, Paul Wohlers.

Paul Wohlers is the son of US diplomat Lester Wohlers, who played an important part in Atlantist propaganda, and directed the cinematographic service of the U.S. Information Agency. Paul’s brother, Laurence Wohlers, is presently an ambassador in the Central African Republic. Paul Wohlers himself, an ex-Navy pilot, is a specialist in counter-espionage. He was the assistant director of the United States Department of State Operations Center (in other words, the service for the surveillance and protection of diplomats).

To eliminate any doubt about the identity of the operation’s sponsors, the General Secretary of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, intervened even before the assault was over – not to declare his condemnation of terrorism and his support for the constitutional government of Macedonia, but to paint a picture of the terrorist group as a legitimate ethnic opposition : « I am following the events in Kumanovo with deep concern. I would like to express my sympathy to the families of those who were killed or wounded. It is important that all polititcal and community leaders work together to restore order and begin a transparent investigation in order to find out what happened. I am calling for everyone to show reserve and avoid any new escalation of violence, in the intersts of the nation and also the whole region. » You would have to be blind not to understand.

In January 2015, Macedonia foiled an attempted coup d’état organised for the head of the opposition, the social-democrat Zoran Zaev. Four people were arrested, and Mr. Zaev had his passport confiscated, while the Atlantist press began its denunciation of an « authoritarian drift by the régime ».

Zoran Zaev is publicly supported by the embassies of the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Holland. But the only trace left of this attempted coup d’état indicates the responsibility of the US.
On the 17th May, Zoran Zaev’s social-democrat party (SDSM) [2] was supposed to organise a demonstration. It intended to distribute 2,000 masks in order to prevent the police from identifying the terrorists taking part in the march. During the demonstration, the armed group, concealed behind their masks, were supposed to attack several institutions and launch a pseudo-« revolution » comparable to the events in Maidan Square, Kiev.

This coup d’État was coordinated by Mile Zechevich, an ex-employee of one of George Soros’ foundations.
In order to understand Washington’s urgency to overthrow the Macedonian government, we have to go back and look at the gas pipeline war. Because international politics is a huge chess-board on which every move by any piece causes consequences for all the others.

The gas war

The United States have been attempting to sever communications between Russia and the European Union since 2007. They managed to sabotage the projet South Stream by obliging Bulgaria to cancel its participation, but on the 1st December 2014, to everyone’s surprise, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a new project when he succeeded in convincing his Turkish opposite number, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to sign an agreement with him, despite the fact that Turkey is a member of NATO [3]. It was agreed that Moscow would deliver gas to Ankara, and that in return, Ankara would deliver gas to the European Union, thus bypassing the anti-Russian embargo by Brussels. On the 18th of April 2015, the new Greek Prime Minister, Alexis Tsípras, gave his agreement that the pipeline could cross his country [4] . As for Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, he had already conluded discrete negotiations last March [5]. Finally, Serbia, which had been a partner in the South Stream project, indicated to the Russian Minister for Energy Aleksandar Novak, during his reception in Belgrade in April, that Serbia was ready to switch to the Turkish Stream project [6].

To halt the Russian project, Washington has multiplied its initiatives : in Turkey, it is supporting the CHP against President Erdoğan, hoping this will cause him to lose the elections; in Greece, on the 8th May, it sent Amos Hochstein, Directeur of the Bureau of Energy Ressources, to demand that the Tsípras government give up its agreement with Gazprom; it plans – just in case – to block the route of the pipeline by placing one of its puppets in power in Macedonia; and in Serbia, it has restarted the project for the secession of the small piece of territory – Voïvodine – which allows the junction with Hungary [7].

Last comment, but not the least: Turkish Stream will also supply Hungary and Austria, thus ending the alternative project negotiated by the United States with President Hassan Rohani (against the advice of the Revolutionary Guards) for supplying them with Iranian gas [8].

Thierry Meyssan French intellectual, founder and chairman of Voltaire Network and the Axis for Peace Conference. His columns specializing in international relations feature in daily newspapers and weekly magazines in Arabic, Spanish and Russian. His last two books published in English : 9/11 the Big Lie and Pentagate.

Notes

[1] « L’UÇK, une armée kosovare sous encadrement allemand », par Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, 15 avril 1999.
[2] Le SDSM est membre de l’Internationale socialiste.
[3] “How Vladimir Putin Upset NATO’s Strategy”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 13 December 2014.
[4] “Möglicher Deal zwischen Athen und Moskau: Griechenland hofft auf russische Pipeline-Milliarden”, Von Giorgos Christides, Der Spiegel, 18. April 2015.
[5] “Геннадий Тимченко задержится на Балканах. Вместо South Stream “Стройтрансгаз” построит трубу в Македонии”, Юрий Барсуков, Коммерсант, 12 марта 2015 r.
[6] «Énergie : la Serbie souhaite participer au gazoduc Turkish Stream», B92, 14 avril 2015.
[7] “Brussels’s Next Balkans Ersatz State: Vojvodina”, by Wayne Madsen, Strategic Culture Foundation (Russia), Voltaire Network, 7 March 2015.

[8] “Behind the anti-terror alibi, the gas war in the Levant”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 3 October 2014.
Translation – Pete Kimberley

27 May, 2015
Voltairenet.org