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By  Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers

24 October, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

The story of Fukushima should be on the front pages of every newspaper. Instead, it is rarely mentioned. The problems at Fukushima are unprecedented in human experience and involve a high risk of radiation events larger than any that the global community has ever experienced. It is going to take the best engineering minds in the world to solve these problems and to diminish their global impact.

When we researched the realities of Fukushima in preparation for this article, words like apocalyptic, cataclysmic and Earth-threatening came to mind. But, when we say such things, people react as if we were the little red hen screaming “the sky is falling” and the reports are ignored. So, we’re going to present what is known in this article and you can decide whether we are facing a potentially cataclysmic event.

Either way, it is clear that the problems at Fukushima demand that the world’s best nuclear engineers and other experts advise and assist in the efforts to solve them. Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen of  Fairewinds.org  and an international team of scientists created a  15-point plan  to address the crises at Fukushima.

A subcommittee of the  Green Shadow Cabinet  (of which we are members), which includes long-time nuclear activist  Harvey Wasserman , is circulating a sign-on letter and a  petition  calling on the United Nations and Japanese government to put in place the Gundersen et al plan and to provide 24-hour media access to information about the crises at Fukushima. There is also a call for international days of action on the weekend of November 9 and 10. The letter and petitions will be delivered to the UN on November 11 which is both Armistice Day and the 32 nd  month anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

The Problems of Fukushima

There are three major problems at Fukushima: (1) Three reactor cores are missing; (2) Radiated water has been leaking from the plant in mass quantities for 2.5 years; and (3) Eleven thousand spent nuclear fuel rods, perhaps the most dangerous things ever created by humans, are stored at the plant and need to be removed, 1,533 of those are in a very precarious and dangerous position. Each of these three could result in dramatic radiation events, unlike any radiation exposure humans have ever experienced.  We’ll discuss them in order, saving the most dangerous for last.

Missing reactor cores:  Since the accident at Fukushima on March 11, 2011, three reactor cores have gone missing.  There was an unprecedented three reactor ‘melt-down.’ These  melted cores , called corium lavas, are thought to have passed through the basements of reactor buildings 1, 2 and 3, and to be somewhere in the ground underneath.

Harvey Wasserman, who has been working on nuclear energy issues for over 40 years,  tells us  that during those four decades no one ever talked about the possibility of a multiple meltdown, but that is what occurred at Fukushima.

It is an unprecedented situation to not know where these cores are. TEPCO is pouring water where they think the cores are, but they are not sure. There are occasional  steam eruptions  coming from the grounds of the reactors, so the cores are thought to still be hot.

The concern is that the corium lavas will enter or may have already entered the aquifer below the plant. That would contaminate a much larger area with radioactive elements. Some suggest that it would require the area surrounding Tokyo,  40 million people , to be evacuated. Another concern is that if the corium lavas enter the aquifer,  they could create  a “super-heated pressurized steam reaction beneath a layer of caprock causing a major ‘hydrovolcanic’ explosion.”

A further concern is that a  large reserve of groundwater  which is coming in contact with the corium lavas is migrating towards the ocean at the rate of four meters per month. This  could release greater amounts  of radiation than were released in the early days of the disaster.

Radioactive water leaking into the Pacific Ocean:  TEPCO did not admit that  leaks of radioactive water  were occurring until July of this year. Shunichi Tanaka the head of Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority finally  told reporters  this July that radioactive water has been leaking into the Pacific Ocean since the disaster hit over two years ago. This is the  largest single contribution of radionuclides to the marine environment ever observed  according to  a report by the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety .  The Japanese government finally admitted that the situation was urgent this September – an emergency they did not acknowledge until 2.5 years after the water problem began.

How much radioactive water is leaking into the ocean? An estimated 300 tons (71,895 gallons/272,152 liters) of contaminated water is flowing into the ocean every day.  The first radioactive ocean plume  released by the Fukushima nuclear power plant  disaster will take three years to reach the shores of the United States.  This means, according  to a new study from the University of New South Wales , the United States will experience the first radioactive water coming to its shores sometime in early 2014.

One month after Fukushima, the  FDA announced it was going to stop testing fish in the Pacific Ocean for radiation .  But, independent research is showing that  every bluefin tuna tested in the waters off California has been contaminated  with radiation that originated in Fukushima. Daniel Madigan, the marine ecologist who led the Stanford University study from May of 2012 was quoted in the  Wall Street Journal saying, “The tuna packaged it up (the radiation) and brought it across the world’s largest ocean. We were definitely surprised to see it at all and even more surprised to see it in every one we measured.” Marine biologist Nicholas Fisher of Stony Brook University in New York State, another member of the study group, said: “We found that absolutely every one of them had comparable concentrations of cesium 134 and cesium 137.”

In addition,  Science reports  that fish near Fukushima are being found to have high levels of the radioactive isotope, cesium-134. The levels found in these fish are not decreasing,  which indicates that radiation-polluted water continues to leak into the ocean. At least 42 fish species from the area around the plant are considered unsafe.  South Korea has banned Japanese fish  as a result of the ongoing leaks.

The half-life (time it takes for half of the element to decay) of cesium 134 is 2.0652 years. For cesium 137, the half-life is 30.17 years. Cesium does not sink to the ocean floor, so fish swim through it. What are  the human impacts of cesium ?

When contact with radioactive cesium occurs, which is highly unlikely, a person can experience cell damage due to radiation of the cesium particles. Due to this, effects such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and bleeding may occur. When the exposure lasts a long time, people may even lose consciousness. Coma or even death may then follow. How serious the effects are depends upon the resistance of individual persons and the duration of exposure and the concentration a person is exposed to, experts say.

There is no end in sight from the leakage of radioactive water into the Pacific from Fukushima.  Harvey Wasserman is questioning whether fishing in the Pacific Ocean will be safe after years of leakage from Fukushima.  The  World Health Organization (WHO) is claiming  that this will have limited effect on human health, with concentrations predicted to be below WHO safety levels. However,  experts seriously question  the WHO’s claims.

The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Radiation is in the process of writing a report  to assess the radiation doses and associated effects on health and environment. When finalized, it will be the most comprehensive scientific analysis of the information available to date examining how much radioactive material was released, how it was dispersed over land and water, how Fukushima compares to previous accidents, what the impact is on the environment and food, and what the impact is on human health and the environment.

Wasserman warns that “dilution is no solution.”  The fact that the Pacific Ocean is large does not change the fact that these radioactive elements have long half-lives.  Radiation in water is taken up by vegetation, then smaller fish eat the vegetation, larger fish eat the smaller fish and at the top of the food chain we will find fish like tuna, dolphin and whales with concentrated levels of radiation. Humans at the top of the food chain could be eating these contaminated fish.

As bad as the ongoing leakage of radioactive water is into the Pacific, that is not the largest part of the water problem.  The  Asia-Pacific Journal reported last month  that TEPCO has 330,000 tons of water stored in 1,000 above-ground tanks and an undetermined amount in underground storage tanks.  Every day, 400 tons of water comes to the site from the mountains, 300 tons of that is the source for the contaminated water leaking into the Pacific daily. It is not clear where the rest of this water goes.

Each day TEPCO injects 400 tons of water into the destroyed facilities to keep them cool; about half is recycled, and the rest goes into the above-ground tanks. They are constantly building new storage tanks for this radioactive water. The tanks being used for storage were put together rapidly and are already leaking. They expect to have 800,000 tons of radioactive water stored on the site by 2016.  Harvey Wasserman warns that these unstable tanks are at risk of rupture if there is another earthquake or storm that hits Fukushima. The Asia-Pacific Journal concludes: “So at present there is no real solution to the water problem.”

The most recent news on the water problem at Fukushima adds to the concerns. On October 11, 2013, TEPCO disclosed that the  radioactivity level spiked 6,500 times  at a Fukushima well.  “TEPCO said the findings show that radioactive substances like strontium have reached the groundwater. High levels of tritium, which transfers much easier in water than strontium, had already been detected.”

Spent Fuel Rods:  As bad as the problems of radioactive water and missing cores are, the biggest problem at Fukushima comes from the spent fuel rods.  The plant has been in operation for 40 years. As a result, they are storing 11 thousand spent fuel rods on the grounds of the Fukushima plant. These fuel rods are composed of highly radioactive materials such as plutonium and uranium. They are about the width of a thumb and about 15 feet long.

The biggest and most immediate challenge is the  1,533 spent fuel rods  packed tightly in a pool four floors above Reactor 4.  Before the storm hit, those rods had been removed for routine maintenance of the reactor.  But, now they are stored 100 feet in the air in damaged racks.   They weigh a total of 400 tons and contain radiation equivalent to 14,000 times  the amount released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

The building in which these rods are stored has been damaged. TEPCO reinforced it with a steel frame, but the building itself is buckling and sagging, vulnerable to collapse if another earthquake or storm hits the area. Additionally, the ground under and around the building is becoming saturated with water, which further undermines the integrity of the structure and could cause it to tilt.

How dangerous are these fuel rods?  Harvey Wasserman explains that the fuel rods are clad in zirconium which  can ignite if they lose coolant . They could also ignite or explode if rods break or hit each other. Wasserman reports that some say this could result in a fission explosion like an atomic bomb, others say that is not what would happen, but agree it would be “a reaction like we have never seen before, a nuclear fire releasing incredible amounts of radiation,” says Wasserman.

These are not the only spent fuel rods at the plant, they are just the most precarious.  There are 11,000 fuel rods scattered around the plant,  6,000 in a cooling pool less than 50 meters  from the sagging Reactor 4.  If a fire erupts in the spent fuel pool at Reactor 4, it could ignite the rods in the cooling pool and lead to an even greater release of radiation. It could set off a chain reaction that could not be stopped.

What would happen? Wasserman reports that the plant would have to be evacuated.  The workers who are essential to preventing damage at the plant would leave, and we will have lost a critical safeguard.  In addition, the computers will not work because of the intense radiation. As a result we would be blind – the world would have to sit and wait to see what happened. You might have to not only evacuate Fukushima but all of the population in and around Tokyo, reports Wasserman.

There is no question that the 1,533 spent fuel rods need to be removed.  But Arnie Gundersen, a veteran nuclear engineer and director of Fairewinds  Energy Education , who used to build fuel assemblies,  told Reuters  “They are going to have difficulty in removing a significant number of the rods.”  He described the problem  in a radio interview:

“If you think of a nuclear fuel rack as a pack of cigarettes, if you pull a cigarette straight up it will come out — but these racks have been distorted. Now when they go to pull the cigarette straight out, it’s going to likely break and release radioactive cesium and other gases, xenon and krypton, into the air. I suspect come November, December, January we’re going to hear that the building’s been evacuated, they’ve broke a fuel rod, the fuel rod is off-gassing.”

Wasserman builds on the analogy, telling us it is “worse than pulling cigarettes out of a crumbled cigarette pack.” It is likely they used salt water as a coolant out of desperation, which would cause corrosion because the rods were never meant to be in salt water.  The condition of the rods is unknown. There is debris in the coolant, so there has been some crumbling from somewhere. Gundersen   adds , “The roof has fallen in, which further distorted the racks,” noting that if a fuel rod snaps, it will release radioactive gas which will require at a minimum evacuation of the plant. They will release those gases into the atmosphere and try again.

The Japan Times  writes : “The consequences could be far more severe than any nuclear accident the world has ever seen. If a fuel rod is dropped, breaks or becomes entangled while being removed, possible worst case scenarios include a big explosion, a meltdown in the pool, or a large fire. Any of these situations could lead to massive releases of deadly radionuclides into the atmosphere, putting much of Japan — including Tokyo and Yokohama — and even neighboring countries at serious risk.”

This is not the usual moving of fuel rods.  TEPCO has been saying this is routine, but in fact it is unique – a feat of engineering never done before.  As Gundersen says:

“Tokyo Electric is portraying this as easy. In a normal nuclear reactor, all of this is done with computers. Everything gets pulled perfectly vertically. Well nothing is vertical anymore, the fuel racks are distorted, it’s all going to have to be done manually. The net effect is it’s a really difficult job. It wouldn’t surprise me if they snapped some of the fuel and they can’t remove it.”

Gregory Jaczko, Former Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission concurs  with Gundersen describing the removal of the spent fuel rods as “a very significant activity, and . . . very, very unprecedented.”

Wasserman sums the challenge up: “We are doing something never done before – bent, crumbling, brittle fuel rods being removed from a pool that is compromised, in a building that is sinking, sagging and buckling, and it all must done under manual control, not with computers.”  And the potential damage from failure would affect hundreds of millions of people.

The Solutions

The three major problems at Fukushima are all unprecedented, each unique in their own way and each has the potential for major damage to humans and the environment. There are no clear solutions but there are steps that need to be taken urgently to get the Fukushima clean-up and de-commissioning on track and minimize the risks.

The first thing that is needed is to end the media blackout.  The global public needs to be informed about the issues the world faces from Fukushima.  The impacts of Fukushima could affect almost everyone on the planet, so we all have a stake in the outcome.  If the public is informed about this problem, the political will to resolve it will rapidly develop.

The nuclear industry, which wants to continue to expand, fears Fukushima being widely discussed because it undermines their already weak economic potential.  But, the profits of the nuclear industry are of minor concern compared to the risks of the triple Fukushima challenges.

The second thing that must be faced is the incompetence of TEPCO.  They are not capable of handling this triple complex crisis.  TEPCO “is already  Japan’s most distrusted firm” and has been exposed as “dangerously incompetent.”   A poll found that 91 percent of the Japanese public wants the government to intervene at Fukushima.

Tepco’s management of the stricken power plant has been described as  a comedy of errors . The constant stream of mistakes has been made worse by constant false denials and efforts to minimize major problems. Indeed the entire Fukushima catastrophe could have been avoided:

“Tepco at first blamed the accident on ‘an unforeseen massive tsunami’ triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011. Then it admitted it had in fact foreseen just such a scenario but hadn’t done anything about it.”

The reality is Fukushima was plagued by human error from the outset.  An official Japanese government investigation concluded that the Fukushima accident was a  “man-made” disaster, caused by “collusion” between government and Tepco and bad reactor design . On this point, TEPCO is not alone, this is an industry-wide problem. Many US nuclear plants have serious problems, are being operated beyond their life span, have the same design problems and are near earthquake faults. Regulatory officials in both the US and Japan are too corruptly tied to the industry.

Then, the meltdown itself was denied for months, with TEPCO claiming it had not been confirmed.   Japan Times reports  that “in December 2011, the government announced that the plant had reached ‘a state of cold shutdown.’ Normally, that means radiation releases are under control and the temperature of its nuclear fuel is consistently below boiling point.”  Unfortunately, the statement was false – the reactors continue to need water to keep them cool, the fuel rods need to be kept cool – there has been no cold shutdown.

TEPCO has done a terrible job of cleaning up the plant.  Japan Times describes some of the problems:

“The plant is being run on makeshift equipment and breakdowns are endemic. Among nearly a dozen serious problems since April this year there have been successive power outages, leaks of highly radioactive water from underground water pools — and a rat that chewed enough wires to short-circuit a switchboard, causing a power outage that interrupted cooling for nearly 30 hours. Later, the cooling system for a fuel-storage pool had to be switched off for safety checks when two dead rats were found in a transformer box.”

TEPCO has been  constantly cutting financial corners  and not spending enough to solve the challenges of the Fukushima disaster resulting  in shoddy practices  that cause environmental damage. Washington’s Blog reports that the Japanese government is spreading radioactivity throughout Japan – and other countries – by  burning radioactive waste  in incinerators not built to handle such toxic substances.  Workers have expressed concerns  and even apologized for following order regarding the ‘clean-up.’

Indeed, the workers are another serious concern.  The Guardian reported  in October 2013 the plummeting morale of workers, problems of alcohol abuse, anxiety, loneliness, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and depression. TEPCO cut the pay of its workers by 20 percent in 2011 to save money even though these workers are doing very difficult work and face constant problems. Outside of work, many were traumatized by being forced to evacuate their homes after the Tsunami; and they have no idea how exposed to radiation they have been and what health consequences they will suffer. Contractors are hired based on the lowest bid, resulting in low wages for workers. According to the Guardian, Japan’s top nuclear regulator, Shunichi Tanaka, told reporters: “Mistakes are often linked to morale. People usually don’t make silly, careless mistakes when they’re motivated and working in a positive environment. The lack of it, I think, may be related to the recent problems.”

The history of TEPCO shows we cannot trust this company and its mistreated workforce to handle the complex challenges faced at Fukushima. The crisis at Fukushima is a global one, requiring a global solution.

In an  open letter to the United Nations , 16 top nuclear experts urged the government of Japan to transfer responsibility for the Fukushima reactor site to a worldwide engineering group overseen by a civil society panel and an international group of nuclear experts independent from TEPCO and the International Atomic Energy Administration , IAEA. They urge that the stabilization, clean-up and de-commissioning of the plant be well-funded. They make this request with “urgency” because the situation at the Fukushima plant is “progressively deteriorating, not stabilizing.”

Beyond the clean-up, they are also critical of the estimates by the World Health Organization and IAEA of the health and environmental damage caused by the Fukushima disaster and they recommend more accurate methods of accounting, as well as the gathering of data to ensure more accurate estimates. They also want to see the people displaced by Fukushima treated in better ways; and they urge that the views of indigenous people who never wanted the uranium removed from their lands be respected in the future as their views would have prevented this disaster.

Facing Reality

The problems at Fukushima are in large part about facing reality – seeing the challenges, risks and potential harms from the incident. It is about TEPCO and Japan facing the reality that they are not equipped to handle the challenges of Fukushima and need the world to join the effort.

Facing reality is a common problem throughout the nuclear industry and those who continue to push for nuclear energy. Indeed, it is a problem with many energy issues. We must face the reality of the long-term damage being done to the planet and the people by the carbon-nuclear based energy economy.

Another reality the nuclear industry must face is that the United States is turning away from nuclear energy and the world will do the same. As  Gregory Jaczko , who chaired the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission at the time of the Fukushima incident says “I’ve never seen a movie that’s set 200 years in the future and the planet is being powered by fission reactors—that’s nobody’s vision of the future. This is not a future technology.” He sees US nuclear reactors as aging, many in operation beyond their original lifespan.  The  economics of nuclear energy are increasingly difficult  as it is a very expensive source of energy.  Further, there is no money or desire to finance new nuclear plants. “The industry is going away,” he said bluntly.

Ralph Nader describes  nuclear energy as “unnecessary, uneconomic, uninsurable, unevacuable and, most importantly, unsafe.”  He argues it only continues to exist because the nuclear lobby pushes politicians to protect it. The point made by Nader about the inability to evacuate if there is a nuclear accident is worth underlining.  Wasserman points out that there are nuclear plants in the US that are near earthquake faults, among them are plants near Los Angeles, New York City and Washington, DC.  And, Fukushima was based on a design by General Electric, which was also used to build 23 reactors in the US.

If we faced reality, public officials would be organizing evacuation drills in those cities.  If we did so, Americans would quickly learn that if there is a serious nuclear accident, US cities could not be evacuated. Activists making the reasonable demand for evacuation drills may be a very good strategy to end nuclear power.

Wasserman emphasizes that as bad as Fukushima is, it is not the worst case scenario for a nuclear disaster. Fukushima was 120 kilometers (75 miles) from the center of the earthquake. If that had been 20 kilometers (12 miles), the plant would have been reduced to rubble and caused an immediate nuclear catastrophe.

Another reality we need to face is a very positive one, Wasserman points out “All of our world’s energy needs could be met by solar, wind, thermal, ocean technology.” His point is repeated by many top energy experts, in fact  a carbon-free, nuclear-free energy economy is not only possible, it is inevitable .  The only question is how long it will take for us to get there, and how much damage will be done before we end the “all-of-the-above” energy strategy that emphasizes carbon and nuclear energy sources.

Naoto Kan, prime minister of Japan when the disaster began,  recently told an audience  that he had been a supporter of nuclear power, but after the Fukushima accident, “I changed my thinking 180-degrees, completely.” He realized that “no other accident or disaster” other than a nuclear plant disaster can “affect 50 million people . . . no other accident could cause such a tragedy.” He pointed out that all 54 nuclear plants in Japan have now been closed and expressed confidently that “without nuclear power plants we can absolutely provide the energy to meet our demands.”  In fact, since the disaster Japan has tripled its use of solar energy, to the equivalent of three nuclear plants. He believes: “If humanity really would work together . . . we could generate all our energy through renewable energy.”

To take action,  click here .

Related articles by Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese:

Carbon-Free, Nuclear-Free Energy Economy Is Inevitable

Vibrant Movement for Green Energy Economy

Gang Green or Fresh Greens?

US Climate Bomb is Ticking: What the Gas Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know

America’s Secret Fukushima Poisoning the Bread Basket of the World

The Rule of Law in Times of Ecological Collapse – Truthout

Dirty Energy’s Dirty Tactics: Boulder on the Front Lines of the Renewable Energy Future

To hear Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers interview with Harvey Wasserman of NukeFree.org  Fukushima – A Global Threat That Requires a Global Response  click here .

This article was first published on Truthout and any reprint or reproduction on any other website must acknowledge Truthout as the original site of publication.

Kevin Zeese JD and Margaret Flowers MD co-host  ClearingtheFOGRadio.org  on We Act Radio 1480 AM Washington, DC and on  Economic Democracy Media  and on  UStream.TV/ItsOurEconomy , co-direct  It’s Our Economy  and are organizers of  PopularResistance.org . Their twitters are @KBZeese and @MFlowers8.

By Kourosh Ziabari

24 October, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

With the recommencement of nuclear talks between Iran and the six world powers, hopes have been revived that more than a decade of conflict and dispute between the two sides can finally come to an end and the concerns over the possible diversion of Iran’s nuclear activities toward an atomic weapon will be completely allayed.

The international observers hailed the latest round of nuclear negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 (Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States) on October 15 and 16 in Geneva as constructive, calling it a step forward on the path of finding a conclusive and definite resolution for Iran’s nuclear standoff.

The Iranian negotiators demanded that the contents of the talks remain undisclosed until an agreement is reached. Their demand sounds reasonable as it will prevent the mass media from spreading falsehood regarding the details of the agreement yet to be reached and also impede the efforts made by the extremist and neo-conservative elements in the Western governments to bring the negotiations to a dead-end.

During the talks, Iran presented a three-phased PowerPoint proposal in English language entitled “Closing Unnecessary Crisis, Opening New Horizons” which drew a roadmap for the future of the talks. According to the proposal, Iran would remove the concerns of the P5+1 group of world countries through confidence-building measures and increased transparency in its nuclear activities, and in return, the Western powers will offer incentives to Iran by lifting the unilateral and multilateral sanctions on a step-by-step basis.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told the reporters following the conclusion of talks in Geneva that “the negotiations will be done in the negotiating room, and not in the press.” He said that Iran is not after creating some kind of media hype over its proposal and rather takes a down-to-earth and practical approach toward the talks.

Iran’s presentation was welcomed by the P5+1. According to Reuters, Michael Mann, the spokesman for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said Iran made a “very useful” presentation during the talks. Even the United States that usually expressed disappointment over the nuclear talks with Iran in the past couldn’t hide its tacit satisfaction with the Iranian proposal. “The Iranian proposal was a new proposal with a level of seriousness and substance that we had not seen before,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters.

A senior U.S. State Department official also praised the negotiations, saying that “for the first time, we had very detailed technical discussions”

The British Catherine Ashton who became the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy for the European Union in 2009 and took lead as the coordinator of P5+1 in talks with Iran also underlined her “cautious optimism” but “a real sense of determination” toward the new round of negotiations with Iran.

Since the details of the Iranian proposal didn’t leak out and especially after Iran rejected the allegations made by the Israeli military intelligence website, Debka File, that had claimed to be possessing information on the contents of the proposal put forward by Iran, it’s not sensible to make suggestions and gossips on what Iran has offered to the West, but what is clear is that Iran will be making reasonable compromises, in a balanced manner, which will not sacrifice its nuclear rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, but ease the tensions with the West, and this is something which seems to be completely logical and fair. On the other side, what the Iranian nation expects to be high on the agenda of the P5+1 is the complete removal of the economic sanctions that have caused serious damages to their lives.

The sanctions which were imposed upon Iran after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, especially following the escalation of controversy over Iran’s nuclear program in the past decade, are so diverse and extensive that it’s virtually impossible to elaborate on all of them in a single article, but it is worth alluding to some of them in passing. These sanctions have had such devastative impacts on the Iranian people that even a large number of American officials, think tanks and advocacy groups have called on the U.S. government and its European allies to freeze them.

As an instance, the banking sanctions, which disrupt and block Iran’s access to international financing systems have prevented the Iranian companies from importing vital medicine for chronic disorders, and the Iranian patients suffering from different types of cancer, hemophilia, thalassemia, hepatitis, multiple sclerosis, diabetes and psychiatric disorders are struggling with dire conditions resulting from their inability to find medicine for their diseases.

According to a report released by the U.S. Department of Commerce on February 8, 2013, the exports of pharmaceutical products to Iran had decreased by half. This is while the United States claims that it doesn’t block the exports of medicine to Iran and that it has issued some licenses for the sale of medical goods and foodstuff to Iran; however, there have been several reports of deaths as a result of the scarcity or shortage of foreign-produced medicine in Iran. Even those patients who can find the medicine they need should buy them at extremely higher prices than before, simply because they are being imported through intermediaries and third parties, and this is the direct, undeniable impact of the anti-Iran sanctions.

The U.S.-based news, analysis website Al-Monitor published a report on July 29, 2013, detailing the pain and suffering of the Iranian patients who are grappling with the problem of finding medicine for their diseases.

Hessam, a 27-year-old veterinary student with MS told Al-Monitor, “I have managed to buy Rebif every month, but the price has tripled over the past year.” He added, “Those who need to use other Western-made medicines, like Avonex and Betaferon, have been facing extremely serious problems buying them. Betaferon’s price has risen from 980,000 rials [$40] to 16,000,000 rials [$649] a box. You cannot find them even at this price at any drugstores.”

The insufficiency of medicine and pharmaceutical products in Iran as a result of the sanctions is a fact endorsed and confirmed by different outlets. Joy Gordon wrote in an article for the Foreign Policy on October 18, 2013 that the sanctions have complicated the health conditions of the Iranian patients and are leading to a kind of humanitarian crisis which the International Crisis Group has also verified in a detailed, 70-page report published in February 2013 about the consequences and impacts of the anti-Iran sanctions.

“The most effective medicines to treat cancer and AIDS, which are manufactured only by Western pharmaceutical companies, can no longer be gotten within Iran. Ordinary commerce, as a matter of necessity, is now deeply dependent on the international criminal network in order to function at all,” wrote Joy Gordon in the Foreign Policy’s “The Middle East Channel” blog.

Citing reports published by Iran’s major pharmacies, BBC Persian published a report on November 11, 2012 that a 350% increase in the price of imported medicine had taken place at that time, and the majority of experts and analysts attribute this surge in the medicine prices to the sanctions.

However, the human costs of the sanctions are not limited to the difficulties they create in terms of medical shortages for the ordinary people. The devaluation of Iran’s national currency, rial, as a result of the sanctions, has made it extremely difficult for thousands of Iranian students studying in the foreign universities to afford their tuition and accommodation fees. Their families in Iran cannot deposit into their accounts considerable amounts of financial assistance and many of such students have chosen to return to Iran to continue their education. The depreciation of rial has also made it quite unreachable for the Iranian citizens to travel abroad for personal purposes since the air fares have increased almost threefold in the past 3 years and many European carriers have stopped their flights to or from Iran.

At any rate, they are the ordinary Iranian citizens who bear the brunt of the sanctions against their country, and one of their major demands is the complete lifting of all the unilateral, multilateral and private sanctions. This demand was echoed in their election of Dr. Hassan Rouhani as the Iranian President who had promised to work toward persuading the West to lift all the sanctions.

Iran and the P5+1 are slated to meet once again on November 7 and 8. Before the main meeting, nuclear and sanctions experts from the two sides will hold technical meetings to reach a consensus over a systematic framework for putting into practice the agreements reached in the first meeting in Geneva.

It’s not in the interests of the six world powers to continue pushing for new sanctions, as some Republicans of the U.S. Congress did, or leaving the previous sanctions in place. It will not contribute to the course of negotiations positively and will simply add to the suffering and economic woes of the Iranian people and will further complicate the disputes.

The most rational decision which the United States and its European allies can take is to lift the sanctions for two reasons: first, to respect the demands of the Iranian people who feel it’s not righteous and justifiable to be under the pressure of unfair and cruel sanctions that are violating their basic rights according to the Fourth Geneva Convention, and secondly because the lifting of the sanctions will be a great step on the path of striking a deal with Iran to close the nuclear dossier forever.

Kourosh Ziabari

Journalist, writer and media correspondent

www.KouroshZiabari.com

Israel continues to threaten Iran, despite the new dawn in Iranian diplomacy spearheaded by President Rouhani.

By Akbar Ganji

22 Oct 2013

@ Al Jazeera

During his eight-year presidency Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeatedly used inhumane and absurd language to speak about the existence of Israel and cast doubt on the catastrophic events of the Holocaust, and by doing so he served extremists such as Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu well, to the extent that he was favoured by many Israeli officials in the presidential elections of 2009.

Netanyahu, who is the biggest loser in the outcome of Iran’s last presidential elections, called President Hassan Rouhani a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”, alleging that he smiles while building a nuclear bomb.

In my recent article, Iran’s olive branch, I demonstrate the fallacy of Netanyahu’s arguments. The fact is that Netanyahu and his government have tried to bring the Iran “nuclear threat” to the foreground in order to sideline other major issues, including the continued occupation of Palestinian lands and denying citizenship rights to its inhabitants. The fact that has been neglected is that Israel has been building hundreds of nuclear warheads and it threatens Iran with military attacks.

Iran’s nuclear bomb is a product of Israel’s propaganda. Since 1992, Netanyahu and current Israeli President Shimon Peres have repeatedly claimed that Iran will build a nuclear weapon over the next few years. Here are  two out of many examples:

1992: Israeli parliamentarian Netanyahu tells his colleagues that Iran is three to five years from being able to produce a nuclear weapon – and that the threat had to be “uprooted by an international front headed by the US”.

1992: Israeli Foreign Minister Peres tells French TV that Iran was set to have nuclear warheads by 1999. “Iran is the greatest threat and greatest problem in the Middle East,” Peres warned, “because it seeks the nuclear option while holding a highly dangerous stance of extreme religious militancy.”

After 21 years, Netanyahu is now declaring that if Iran possesses 250kg of uranium enriched at 20 percent, Israel will bomb its nuclear sites. This is while Israel possesses up to 200 nuclear warheads and is not a signatory of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). According to newly-released documents, 50 years ago,  Israel secretly received thousands of kilograms of “yellow cake”, an essential product for fueling nuclear weapons, from Argentina. Israel continues to build nuclear weapons without any monitoring or inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

On the other hand, Iran is a signatory to the NPT, and is under close monitoring and inspection by the IAEA.  Further, according to the NPT, member states are entitled to the peaceful use of nuclear technology, including uranium enrichment.

A history of military threats against Iran

Israel has repeatedly tried to provoke the US into attacking Iran. In an interview with the Times of London on November 5, 2002, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon tried to persuade the US to attack Iran. Calling Iran a “centre of world terror” that is pursuing nuclear weapons, Sharon insisted that the US put pressure on Tehran, the “day after action against Baghdad ends”.

In April 2003, Daniel Ayalon, then Israeli ambassador to the US, called for regime change in Iran and Syria, claiming in a conference that “it [the US] has to follow through.” In the same year, other Israeli officials spoke repeatedly about the possibility of Israeli unilateral attacks on Iran’s nuclear sites. Then Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz warned that “under no circumstances would Israel be able to tolerate nuclear weapons in Iranian possession.”

In January 2005, Seymour Hersh reported, “The Defence Department civilians, under the leadership of [Under-secretary of Defence for Policy] Douglas Feith, have been working with Israeli planners and consultants to develop and refine potential nuclear, chemical-weapons, and missile targets inside Iran.”

In April 2005, Sharon said, “Israel – and not only Israel – cannot accept a nuclear Iran. We have the ability to deal with this and we’re making all the necessary preparations to be ready for such a situation.”Sharon had reportedly ordered the IDF to develop plans for attacking Iran by March 2006. In the same month, when the IDF chief Dan Halutz was asked, how far Israel was willing to go to stop Iran’s nuclear program, he responded, “two thousand kilometres,” meaning Tehran. In response to Ahmadinejad’s infamous and incorrectly translated statement that “Israel must be wiped off the map,” Peres said, “Iran can also be wiped off the map.”

After a meeting in July 2009 with then US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, Ehud Barak, Israel’s Defence Minister, said that attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities is an option, adding, “We clearly believe that no option should be removed from the table. This is our policy; we mean it. We recommend to others to take the same position ….”

Barak and Netanyahu were determined to attack Iran in 2010, but were thwarted by the military and intelligence establishments within Israel. In November 2012, Netanyahu again threatened Iran with military attacks, even if the US does not go along.

On June 19 Moshe Ya’alon, Netanyahu’s new Defense Minister called for “significant increase in pressure by Western countries to lead Iran to the dilemma of either having a bomb or surviving.”

In the latest of such provocations, in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on August 9, Barak emphasised again that attacking Iran is a serious option for Israel. He added that Iran must be made to understand, either behind closed doors or publicly, that the military option is serious, and if they cross the red line [set by Netanyahu], military attacks will prevent them from building nuclear weapons.

Israel is the real threat

Even if Iran wanted to, it lacks the capability to attack Israel. The Jerusalem Post reported on April 28 that in a meeting in New York, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert talked about Netanyahu’s claims about Iran’s nuclear capability and said, “I think that we have exaggerated, for a long time, the potential threat of Iran possessing nuclear power.”

In a research paper released by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, military analyst Anthony Cordesman stated that “Israel now poses a more serious existential threat to Iran than Iran can pose to Israel in the near term.” Adding, “Israel long ago extended the range of its nuclear-armed, land-based missiles, probably now targets Iran with thermonuclear weapons, and is examining options for sea launched cruise missiles.”  And according to the CSIS report, “A mix of several air and ground bursts in an Israeli thermonuclear or high fission yield attack on five key cities – Tehran (capital) 7.19 million; Mashhad 2.592 million; Esfahan 1.704 million; Karaj 1.531 million; Tabriz 1.459 million – would probably destroy Iran as a nation in anything like its current form.”

Through its powerful lobby, Israel has succeeded in convincing the US Senate to unanimously pass a resolution that stated that if Israel attacked Iran, the US must help it. Senate Resolution 65 declared that:

“If the Government of Israel is compelled to take military action in legitimate self defense against Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the United States Government should stand with Israel and provide, in accordance with United States law and the constitutional responsibility of Congress to authorize the use of military force, diplomatic, military, and economic support to the Government of Israel in its defense of its territory, people, and existence.”

Before the recent diplomatic opening at the United Nations General Assembly meetings, there was even speculation about a secret agreement between the US and Israel whereby, in return for renewed negotiations with the Palestinians, the US will not oppose Israel’s attacks on Iran as strongly as in the past. John Bolton, former US ambassador to the United Nations, told Fox Business Network on July 29, that Netanyahu agreed to release 104 Palestinian prisoners because he wants to be able to tell Obama, “I have done everything you asked me on the Israel-Palestinian question, despite the political cost, now I want you to stand with me against Iran.”

The facts on the ground

Israel has hundreds of nuclear warheads, but Netanyahu does not recognise Iran’s right to enrich uranium within the NPT framework. The IDF chief, Lt Gen Benny Gantz, has said that he does not believe Iran will build a nuclear weapon. He was quoted as saying, “I don’t think [Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] will want to go the extra mile. I think the Iranian leadership is composed of very rational people.”

In fact Khamenei’s suggestion for resolving the problem between Israel and the Palestinians is to hold a referendum on the future of all of the Palestinian territories in which Israelis and Palestinians, including those that are refugees, can vote. Regardless of how one thinks about the plausibility of such a proposal, he believes that because Palestinians will be in the majority, they will liberate their nation – akin to what happened in South Africa – in which the Jewish people can also live in peace.

Netanyahu staged the last episode of this two-decade-old campaign of constructing an image of Iran as the most imminent global threat on October 1, during his UNGA speech. He devoted 214 words – less than seven percent of his speech – to the main issue, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and in those words he set two conditions for the Palestinians: Recognise Israel as a “Jewish state”, and thus formally accept second-class citizenship for those 25 percent of the population of Israel who are not Jews; and accept a “demilitarised” Palestinian state. He did not mention anything about the illegal settlements in the occupied territories, status of the borders or the refugees. That is the kind of “painful compromise” he intends to make on the Palestinian issue.

The speech was meant to portray the conflict as a four-thousand-year-old story of wars among prophets, kings, ancient empires and catastrophic events. Elevating a conflict over land and water and other resources to the realm of God and prophets is the best way of mystifying the political reality of a 46-year-old occupation of land and collective punishment of its people, and, in the same act, making the resolution of the conflict impossible. That is the rationale behind the magnification of the “Iranian menace”.

In the same speech Netanyahu again threatened Iran with military attacks. In his numerous speeches and interviews while in New York, Netanyahu claimed that Iran is after the destruction of Israel by creating another Holocaust.

To justify military aggression against Iran – who unlike Israel, has not attacked another country for almost 300 years – Netanyahu constantly likens Iran to Nazi Germany – see here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Iranians are deeply worried about a possible Israeli military attack. Even if such an attack is restricted to Iran’s nuclear facilities, the resulting radiation and contamination will kill a large number of people. An extensive study by Abdullah Toukan and Anthony Cordesman of CSIS, shows that attacking Iran’s nuclear sites will kill and injure hundreds of thousands of people. It will also release radioactive nuclear materials in the air, farms, and groundwater resources. Another study by Dan Plesch and Martin Butcher of Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the University of London concluded that attacking Iran’s nuclear and chemical sites could kill over 2 million people.

The Middle East needs peace, not instability, war, enmity, inequality, and double standards. Without security and peace, democracy and respect for human rights will be marginalised.

Akbar Ganji is one of Iran’s leading political dissidents and has received over a dozen human rights awards for his efforts. Imprisoned in Iran until 2006, he is author of one book in English, The Road to Democracy in Iran, which lays out a strategy for a nonviolent transition to democracy in Iran.

By William J. Astore

21 September, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

Disaster Capitalism on the Battlefield and in the Boardroom

There is a new normal in America: our government may shut down, but our wars continue. Congress may not be able to pass a budget, but the U.S. military can still launch commando raids in Libya and Somalia, the Afghan War can still be prosecuted, Italy can be garrisoned by American troops (putting the “empire” back in Rome), Africa can be used as an imperial playground (as in the late nineteenth century “scramble for Africa,” but with the U.S. and China doing the scrambling this time around), and the military-industrial complex can still dominate the world’s arms trade.

In the halls of Congress and the Pentagon, it’s business as usual, if your definition of “business” is the power and profits you get from constantly preparing for and prosecuting wars around the world. “War is a racket,” General Smedley Butler famously declared in 1935, and even now it’s hard to disagree with a man who had two Congressional Medals of Honor to his credit and was intimately familiar with American imperialism.

War Is Politics, Right?

Once upon a time, as a serving officer in the U.S. Air Force, I was taught that Carl von Clausewitz had defined war as a continuation of politics by other means. This definition is, in fact, a simplification of his classic and complex book, On War, written after his experiences fighting Napoleon in the early nineteenth century.

The idea of war as a continuation of politics is both moderately interesting and dangerously misleading: interesting because it connects war to political processes and suggests that they should be fought for political goals; misleading because it suggests that war is essentially rational and so controllable. The fault here is not Clausewitz’s, but the American military’s for misreading and oversimplifying him.

Perhaps another “Carl” might lend a hand when it comes to helping Americans understand what war is really all about. I’m referring to Karl Marx, who admired Clausewitz, notably for his idea that combat is to war what a cash payment is to commerce. However seldom combat (or such payments) may happen, they are the culmination and so the ultimate arbiters of the process.

War, in other words, is settled by killing, a bloody transaction that echoes the exploitative exchanges of capitalism. Marx found this idea to be both suggestive and pregnant with meaning. So should we all.

Following Marx, Americans ought to think about war not just as an extreme exercise of politics, but also as a continuation of exploitative commerce by other means. Combat as commerce: there’s more in that than simple alliteration.

In the history of war, such commercial transactions took many forms, whether as territory conquered, spoils carted away, raw materials appropriated, or market share gained. Consider American wars. The War of 1812 is sometimes portrayed as a minor dust-up with Britain, involving the temporary occupation and burning of our capital, but it really was about crushing Indians on the frontier and grabbing their land. The Mexican-American War was another land grab, this time for the benefit of slaveholders. The Spanish-American War was a land grab for those seeking an American empire overseas, while World War I was for making the world “safe for democracy” — and for American business interests globally.

Even World War II, a war necessary to stop Hitler and Imperial Japan, witnessed the emergence of the U.S. as the arsenal of democracy, the world’s dominant power, and the new imperial stand-in for a bankrupt British Empire.

Korea? Vietnam? Lots of profit for the military-industrial complex and plenty of power for the Pentagon establishment. Iraq, the Middle East, current adventures in Africa? Oil, markets, natural resources, global dominance.

In societal calamities like war, there will always be winners and losers. But the clearest winners are often companies like Boeing and Dow Chemical, which provided B-52 bombers and Agent Orange, respectively, to the U.S. military in Vietnam. Such “arms merchants” — an older, more honest term than today’s “defense contractor” — don’t have to pursue the hard sell, not when war and preparations for it have become so permanently, inseparably intertwined with the American economy, foreign policy, and our nation’s identity as a rugged land of “warriors” and “heroes” (more on that in a moment).

War as Disaster Capitalism

Consider one more definition of war: not as politics or even as commerce, but as societal catastrophe. Thinking this way, we can apply Naomi Klein’s concepts of the “shock doctrine” and “disaster capitalism” to it. When such disasters occur, there are always those who seek to turn a profit.

Most Americans are, however, discouraged from thinking about war this way thanks to the power of what we call “patriotism” or, at an extreme, “superpatriotism” when it applies to us, and the significantly more negative “nationalism” or “ultra-nationalism” when it appears in other countries. During wars, we’re told to “support our troops,” to wave the flag, to put country first, to respect the patriotic ideal of selfless service and redemptive sacrifice (even if all but 1% of us are never expected to serve or sacrifice).

We’re discouraged from reflecting on the uncomfortable fact that, as “our” troops sacrifice and suffer, others in society are profiting big time. Such thoughts are considered unseemly and unpatriotic. Pay no attention to the war profiteers, who pass as perfectly respectable companies. After all, any price is worth paying (or profits worth offering up) to contain the enemy — not so long ago, the red menace, but in the twenty-first century, the murderous terrorist.

Forever war is forever profitable. Think of the Lockheed Martins of the world. In their commerce with the Pentagon, as well as the militaries of other nations, they ultimately seek cash payment for their weapons and a world in which such weaponry will be eternally needed. In the pursuit of security or victory, political leaders willingly pay their price.

Call it a Clausewitzian/Marxian feedback loop or the dialectic of Carl and Karl. It also represents the eternal marriage of combat and commerce. If it doesn’t catch all of what war is about, it should at least remind us of the degree to which war as disaster capitalism is driven by profit and power.

For a synthesis, we need only turn from Carl or Karl to Cal — President Calvin Coolidge, that is. “The business of America is business,” he declared in the Roaring Twenties. Almost a century later, the business of America is war, even if today’s presidents are too polite to mention that the business is booming.

America’s War Heroes as Commodities

Many young people today are, in fact, looking for a release from consumerism. In seeking new identities, quite a few turn to the military. And it provides. Recruits are hailed as warriors and warfighters, as heroes, and not just within the military either, but by society at large.

Yet in joining the military and being celebrated for that act, our troops paradoxically become yet another commodity, another consumable of the state. Indeed, they become consumed by war and its violence. Their compensation? To be packaged and marketed as the heroes of our militarized moment. Steven Gardiner, a cultural anthropologist and U.S. Army veteran, has written eloquently about what he calls the “heroic masochism” of militarized settings and their allure for America’s youth. Put succinctly, in seeking to escape a consumerism that has lost its meaning and find a release from dead-end jobs, many volunteers are transformed into celebrants of violence, seekers and givers of pain, a harsh reality Americans ignore as long as that violence is acted out overseas against our enemies and local populations.

Such “heroic” identities, tied so closely to violence in war, often prove poorly suited to peacetime settings. Frustration and demoralization devolve into domestic violence and suicide. In an American society with ever fewer meaningful peacetime jobs, exhibiting greater and greater polarization of wealth and opportunity, the decisions of some veterans to turn to or return to mind-numbing drugs of various sorts and soul-stirring violence is tragically predictable. That it stems from their exploitative commodification as so many heroic inflictors of violence in our name is a reality most Americans are content to forget.

You May Not Be Interested in War, but War Is Interested in You

As Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky pithily observed, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” If war is combat and commerce, calamity and commodity, it cannot be left to our political leaders alone — and certainly not to our generals. When it comes to war, however far from it we may seem to be, we’re all in our own ways customers and consumers. Some pay a high price. Many pay a little. A few gain a lot. Keep an eye on those few and you’ll end up with a keener appreciation of what war is actually all about.

No wonder our leaders tell us not to worry our little heads about our wars — just support those troops, go shopping, and keep waving that flag. If patriotism is famously the last refuge of the scoundrel, it’s also the first recourse of those seeking to mobilize customers for the latest bloodletting exercise in combat as commerce.

Just remember: in the grand bargain that is war, it’s their product and their profit. And that’s no bargain for America, or for that matter for the world.

William Astore, a TomDispatch regular, is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He edits the blog contraryperspective.com and may be reached at wjastore@gmail.com

Copyright 2013 William J. Astore

By Jean Shaoul

21 October, 2013

@ WSWS.org

The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals, has published a report supporting the thesis that Yasser Arafat was poisoned with polonium-210.

The president of the Palestinian Authority died in a French military hospital in November 2004 after falling ill at his headquarters in Ramallah.

The study did not address the question of whether Arafat had been assassinated or how he had come into contact with polonium, but the presence of the radioactive isotope points irrefutably to Arafat’s murder. Given the difficulty of obtaining the isotope by anyone other than the nuclear powers and asking cui bono (who benefits?), the murder could only have been planned—if not carried out—by Israel or the United States.

The office of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the report, saying he had “nothing new to say” on the death of Arafat.

The study, Improving Forensic Investigation for Polonium Poisoning was published on October 12. It described an examination by Swiss scientists of 38 items belonging to Arafat, including his underwear and a toothbrush, and their comparison with a control group of 37 items of his that had been in storage for some time before his death. The toxicologists found traces of the substance that “support the possibility of Arafat’s poisoning with polonium-210.”

The scientists added, “Although the absence of myelosuppression [bone marrow deficiency] and hair loss does not favour acute radiation syndrome, symptoms of nausea, vomiting, fatigue, diarrhoea, and anorexia, followed by hepatic and renal failures, might suggest radioactive poisoning.”

The length of time that had elapsed since Arafat’s death made the detection of polonium, which decays relatively rapidly, more difficult. Nevertheless, “… on the basis of [the] forensic investigation, there was sufficient doubt to recommend the exhumation of his body in 2012.”

The report was written by scientists from the Institute for Radiation Physics in Lausanne and the University Centre of Legal Medicine, Lausanne-Geneva, some of whom had carried out the tests published in an Al-Jazeera broadcast last year.

The news channel’s nine-month investigation into Arafat’s death revealed that the Swiss examination of his medical records and some of his belongings provided by his widow Suha Arafat, including his toothbrush, clothes and his kaffiyeh, contained traces of polonium.

Suha Arafat first voiced her suspicions about the cause of Arafat’s illness when he was in hospital in France in 2004. Arafat had been flown to a French military hospital suffering from severe nausea and stomach pain after vomiting during a meeting. His symptoms worsened despite medical treatment, with his liver and kidneys failing. He died a few weeks later after lapsing into a coma.

Arafat’s remains lie in a mausoleum in the Mukatta in Ramallah, which is guarded by troops.

Rumours mounted that Arafat had been poisoned, particularly as the doctors were unable to identify what had led to a cerebral haemorrhage that caused his death.

Following the Al-Jazeera broadcast last year, Suha Arafat pressed the Palestinian Authority to exhume his body to enable an autopsy to establish the cause of death.

Her request embarrassed Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, Washington’s choice to succeed Arafat in the elections held shortly after his death. The PA never undertook any serious investigation into Arafat’s death. Abbas was forced to accede to her request when Mufti Mohammed Hussein, the West Bank’s top Muslim cleric, said he had no objection to the autopsy.

Samples from Arafat’s corpse were sent to forensic teams in Switzerland, France and Russia in November 2012 to determine whether he was indeed murdered with polonium-210, the same substance that caused the death in London in 2006 of the former Russian KGB agent-turned-Kremlin-critic Alexander Litvinenko. The investigations by three teams of toxicologists into Arafat’s remains, the shrine and earth samples continue. It is not known when the results will be published because of legal procedures.

Responsibility for Arafat’s death has long been attributed to Israel’s Mossad secret service, which has a record of carrying out kidnappings and assassinations of Palestinian leaders and more recently Iranian nuclear scientists. In 1997 it carried out a botched attempt to poison Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Amman, Jordan by spraying a poison into his ear. Two of the agents were arrested almost immediately. The Jordanian authorities were furious and insisted that Israel provide an antidote to save Meshaal’s life.

In 2002 and 2004, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and in 2003 Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, were on record as having threatened to assassinate Arafat, and there are believed to have been numerous attempts on his life.

Just weeks before Arafat’s final illness, Sharon reiterated the threat, telling the Ma’ariv newspaper that Israel would “operate the same way” against Arafat as it had against Hamas leaders Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi—both were assassinated by Israel. Sharon had repeatedly stated that he regretted not killing the Palestinian leader during the siege of Beirut in 1982.

Uri Avnery, a former Israeli legislator and peace activist, reported that just before Uri Dan, a close confidante of Sharon, died, he published a book in France. The book reports that Sharon told Dan about a conversation Sharon had with President George W. Bush. Sharon asked for permission to kill Arafat and Bush gave it to him, with the proviso that it must be done undetectably. When Dan asked Sharon whether it had been carried out, Sharon answered, “It’s better not to talk about that.”

Israel’s hatred of Arafat stemmed from his relentless support for Palestinian statehood and his refusal to suppress the militant opposition to Israel from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Islamic Jihad and Hamas, which would have entailed launching a civil war against his own people. His successor, Mahmoud Abbas, had no such scruples. He used the PA and its security officials, such as Mohammed Dahlan, who dealt regularly with the CIA and Israeli intelligence officials, to carry out the dictates of Israel and the US.

According to the magazine Vanity Fair, the US supplied Dahlan with arms and cash, trained his men and ordered him to carry out a military coup against Hamas, which had won the PA elections in January 2006 in the Gaza Strip. However, the elected Hamas government was forewarned and carried out a pre-emptive counter-coup, routing his forces.

The PA was later to fall out with Dahlan, expel him from Fatah and accuse him of building a private armed militia in the West Bank aimed at supplanting Abbas. A report by the PA in 2011 even accused him of involvement in Arafat’s death. Dahlan is Israel’s preferred candidate to succeed the ailing Abbas.

October 11th, 2013

@ Larouchepac.com

The Russian weekly Zavtra of October 10 published a Q&A with Japanese economist Daisuke Kotegawa in its front-page “Off the Cuff” column. The question was, “What is your evaluation of the current global financial situation?” Kotegawa’s reply, as published in Zavtra: “My experience and research indicate that a financial catastrophe, accompanied by a global collapse, could happen in the immediate weeks ahead, unless the leaders of the major economic powers adopt certain specific, tough measures. The crisis is linked with the situation in the United States, where political disputes have led to a freeze-up of the budget process and a rejection of attempts to raise the debt ceiling. Because of this, my view of the overall situation is extremely skeptical.”

Zavtra identified Kotegawa as former Executive Director for Japan at the IMF (2007-2009) and current Research Director at the Canon Institute for Global Studies. The newspaper has a print circulation of 100,000 copies and is read throughout the Russian political establishment.

In recent public presentations during a visit to Europe and the United States, Kotegawa elaborated on his assessment that the economic collapse could come at any moment. In addition to the government shutdown/debt ceiling fiasco in the United States, he warned that Greece is facing a third bailout and the Spanish banks are in big trouble, holding vastly over-valued real estate portfolios and lacking sufficient reserves to deal with a further crash of the housing and commercial property bubble. He warned that the ECB is facing a major crisis, and that he believes that the reckoning could come as soon as a new German cabinet is formed. Because of the new crises on both sides of the Atlantic, the financial markets are panicked. He also pointed to serious short-term debt problems in South Korea that add to the overall global instability. He warned that the investment banks must be dumped if there is any hope of avoiding a new systemic crash.

By Chris Hedges

14 October, 2013

@ http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_folly_of_empire_20131014/

The final days of empire give ample employment and power to the feckless, the insane and the idiotic. These politicians and court propagandists, hired to be the public faces on the sinking ship, mask the real work of the crew, which is systematically robbing the passengers as the vessel goes down. The mandarins of power stand in the wheelhouse barking ridiculous orders and seeing how fast they can gun the engines. They fight like children over the ship’s wheel as the vessel heads full speed into a giant ice field. They wander the decks giving pompous speeches. They shout that the SS America is the greatest ship ever built. They insist that it has the most advanced technology and embodies the highest virtues. And then, with abrupt and unexpected fury, down we will go into the frigid waters.

The last days of empire are carnivals of folly. We are in the midst of our own, plunging forward as our leaders court willful economic and environmental self-destruction. Sumer and Rome went down like this. So did the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. Men and women of stunning mediocrity and depravity led the monarchies of Europe and Russia on the eve of World War I. And America has, in its own decline, offered up its share of weaklings, dolts and morons to steer it to destruction. A nation that was still rooted in reality would never glorify charlatans such as Sen. Ted Cruz, House Speaker John Boehner and former Speaker Newt Gingrich as they pollute the airwaves. If we had any idea what was really happening to us we would have turned in fury against Barack Obama, whose signature legacy will be utter capitulation to the demands of Wall Street, the fossil fuel industry, the military-industrial complex and the security and surveillance state. We would have rallied behind those few, such as Ralph Nader, who denounced a monetary system based on gambling and the endless printing of money and condemned the willful wrecking of the ecosystem. We would have mutinied. We would have turned the ship back.

The populations of dying empires are passive because they are lotus-eaters. There is a narcotic-like reverie among those barreling toward oblivion. They retreat into the sexual, the tawdry and the inane, retreats that are momentarily pleasurable but ensure self-destruction. They naively trust it will all work out. As a species, Margaret Atwood observes in her dystopian novel “Oryx and Crake,” “we’re doomed by hope.” And absurd promises of hope and glory are endlessly served up by the entertainment industry, the political and economic elite, the class of courtiers who pose as journalists, self-help gurus like Oprah and religious belief systems that assure followers that God will always protect them. It is collective self-delusion, a retreat into magical thinking.

“The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than the original,” Daniel J. Boorstin wrote in his book “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.” “We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories in the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.”

Culture and literacy, in the final stage of decline, are replaced with noisy diversions and empty clichés. The Roman statesman Cicero inveighed against their ancient equivalent—the arena. Cicero, for his honesty, was hunted down and murdered and his hands and head were cut off. His severed head and his right hand, which had written the Philippics, were nailed onto the speaker’s platform in the Forum. The roaring crowds, while the Roman elite spat on the head, were gleefully told he would never speak or write again. In the modern age this toxic, mindless cacophony, our own version of spectacle and gladiator fights, of bread and circus, is pumped into the airwaves in 24-hour cycles. Political life has fused into celebrity worship. Education is primarily vocational. Intellectuals are cast out and despised. Artists cannot make a living. Few people read books. Thought has been banished, especially at universities and colleges, where timid pedants and careerists churn out academic drivel. “Although tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” “it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.” And ours have been destroyed.

Sensual pleasure and eternal youth are our overriding obsessions. The Roman emperor Tiberius, at the end, fled to the island of Capri and turned his seaside palace into a house of unbridled lust and violence. “Bevies of girls and young men, whom he had collected from all over the Empire as adepts in unnatural practices, and known as spintriae, would copulate before him in groups of three, to excite his waning passions,” Suetonius wrote in “The Twelve Caesars.” Tiberius trained small boys, whom he called his minnows, to frolic with him in the water and perform oral sex. And after watching prolonged torture, he would have captives thrown into the sea from a cliff near his palace. Tiberius would be followed by Caligula and Nero.

“At times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!”

The anthropologist Joseph Tainter in his book “The Collapse of Complex Societies” looked at the collapse of civilizations from the Roman to the Mayan. He concluded that they disintegrated because they finally could not sustain the bureaucratic complexities they had created. Layers of bureaucracy demand more and more exploitation, not only of the environment but the laboring classes. They become calcified by systems that are unable to respond to the changing reality around them. They, like our elite universities and business schools, churn out systems managers, people who are taught not to think but to blindly service the system. These systems managers know only how to perpetuate themselves and the system they serve, although serving that system means disemboweling the nation and the planet. Our elites and bureaucrats exhaust the earth to hold up a system that worked in the past, failing to see that it no longer works. Elites, rather than contemplate reform, which would jeopardize their privilege and power, retreat in the twilight of empire into walled compounds like the Forbidden City or Versailles. They invent their own reality. Those on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms have replicated this behavior. They insist that continued reliance on fossil fuel and speculations will sustain the empire. State resources, as Tainter notes, are at the end increasingly squandered on extravagant and senseless projects and imperial adventures. And then it all collapses.

Our collapse will take the whole planet with it.

It is more pleasant, I admit, to stand mesmerized in front of our electronic hallucinations. It is easier to check out intellectually. It is more gratifying to imbibe the hedonism and the sickness of the worship of the self and money. It is more comforting to chatter about celebrity gossip and ignore or dismiss what is reality.

Thomas Mann in “The Magic Mountain” and Joseph Roth in “Hotel Savoy” brilliantly chronicled this peculiar state of mind. In Roth’s hotel the first three floors house in luxury the bloated rich, the amoral politicians, the bankers and the business owners. The upper floors are crammed with people who struggle to pay their bills and who are steadily divested of their possessions until they are destitute and cast out. There is no political ideology among decayed ruling elites, despite choreographed debates and elaborate political theater. It is, as it always is at the end, one vast kleptocracy.

Just before World War II, a friend asked Roth, a Jewish intellectual who had fled Nazi Germany for Paris, “Why are you drinking so much?” Roth answered: “Do you think you are going to escape? You too are going to be wiped out.”

U.S. Air Force/Yasuo Osakabe

A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion   Publisher, Zuade Kaufman   Editor, Robert Scheer

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By Jose Luis Vivero Pol

16 October, 2013

@ Shareable.net

Food is treated as a private good in today’s industrial food system, but it must be re-conceived as a common good in the transition toward a more sustainable food system that is fairer to food producers and consumers. If we were to treat food as a commons, it could be better produced and distributed by hybrid tri-centric governance systems implemented at the local level and compounded by market rules, public regulations, and collective actions. This change would have enormous ethical, legal, economic, and nutritional implications for the global food system.

A common resource versus a commodity

Food, a limited yet renewable resource that comes in both wild and cultivated forms, is essential for human existence. Over time, it has evolved from a local resource held in common into a private, transnational commodity. This process of commodification has involved the development of certain traits within food to fit the mechanized processes and regulations put in practice by the industrial food system, and it is also the latest stage in the objectification of food—a social phenomenon that has deprived food of all its non-economic attributes. As a result, the value of food is no longer based on the many dimensions that bring us security and health, including the fact that food is a:

>> Basic human need and should be available to all

>> Fundamental human right that should be guaranteed to every citizen

>> Pillar of our culture for producers and consumers alike

>> Natural, renewable resource that can be controlled by humans

>> Marketable product subject to fair trade and sustainable production

>> Global common good that should be enjoyed by all

This multidimensional view of food diverges from the mainstream industrial food system’s approach to food as a one-dimensional commodity. Even so, the industrial food system has yet to enclose, or to convert into private property, all aspects of our food commons, including:

>> Traditional knowledge of agriculture that has been accumulated over thousands of years

>> Modern, science-based agricultural knowledge accumulated within national institutions

>> Cuisine, recipes, and national gastronomy

>> Edible plants and animals created in the natural world (e.g., fish stocks and wild fruits)

>> Genetic resources for food and agriculture

>> Food safety considerations (e.g., Codex Alimentarius)

>> Public nutrition, including hunger and obesity imbalances

>> Extreme food price fluctuations in global and national markets

Our most basic human need, privatized

The industrial food system’s enclosure of food through the privatization of seeds and land, legislation, excessive pricing, and patents, has played a large role in limiting our access to food as a public good. The system now feeds the majority of people living on the planet and has created a market of mass consumption where eaters become mere consumers. As such, the industrial food system’s goal is to accumulate under-priced food resources while maximizing the profit of food enterprises, instead of ensuring food’s most important non-economic qualities, such as nutrition. Many believe this has resulted in the failure of the global food system.

We can’t rely on the market

Within the mainstream “no money no food” worldview, hunger still prevails in a world of abundance. Globally speaking, the industrial food system is increasingly failing to fulfill its basic goals of producing food in a sustainable manner, feeding people adequately, and avoiding hunger. The irony is that half of those who grow 70% of the world’s food go hungry today. Most believed that a market-led food system would finally lead to a healthier global population, yet none of the recent analyses of the connection between our global food system and hunger have questioned the privatization of food. As a result, most people believe food access to be the main problem of global hunger.

But reality proves otherwise. Unregulated markets simply cannot provide the necessary quantity of food for everyone—even if low-income groups were given the means to procure it. An industrial food system that views food as a commodity to be distributed according to market rules will never achieve food security for all. There won’t be a market-driven panacea for our unsustainable and unjust food system; rather the solution will require experimentation at all levels—personal, local, national, and international—and diverse approaches to governance—market-led, state-led, and collective action-led. We need to bring unconventional and radical perspectives into the food transition debate to develop a different narrative for our food system.

Practical implications of a common food system

A “re-commonification” of food—or, in other words, a transition where we work toward considering food as a commons—is an essential paradigm shift in light of our broken global food system. However, there would of course be practical consequences of this paradigm shift. Food would need to be dealt with outside of trade agreements made for pure private goods, and, as a result, we would need to establish a particular system of governance for the production, distribution, and access to food at a global level. That system might involve binding legal frameworks to fight hunger and guarantee everyone the right to food, cosmopolitan global policies, ethical and legal frameworks, universal Basic Food Entitlements or Food Security Floors guaranteed by the state, minimum salaries matched to food prices, bans on the financial speculation of food, or limits on alternative uses of food, such as biofuels.

Agricultural research and locally adapted, evidence-based technologies would highly benefit from crowdsourcing and creative-commons licensing systems to improve the sustainability and fairness of the global food system as well. When millions of people innovate, we have a far greater capacity to find adaptive and appropriate solutions than when a few thousand scientists innovate in private labs. There is more and more evidence today that the copyrighted agricultural sector is actually deterring food security innovations from scaling up, and that the freedom to copy actually promotes creativity and innovation, such as with open-source software.

What it might take to “re-commonify” of our food system

Collective civic actions, or alternative food networks, are key in the transition toward a more sustainable and fairer food system because they are built on the socio-ecological practices of civic engagement, community, and the celebration of local food. Based on Elinor Ostrom’s polycentric governance, food can be produced, consumed, and distributed by tri-centric governance schemes comprised of collective actions initially implemented at the local level; governments whose main goal is to maximize the well-being of their citizens and to provide a framework enabling people to enjoy their right to food; and a private sector that can prosper under state regulations and incentives. Today, in different parts of the world, there are many initiatives that demonstrate how such a combination yields good results for food producers, consumers, the environment, and society in general. The challenge now is to scale up those local initiatives. Self-governing collective actions cannot create the transition by themselves, thus there will be space for local governments, entrepreneurs, and self-organized communities to coexist, giving the state a leading role in the initial stage of the transition period to guarantee food for all.

We are just starting to reconsider the food narrative to guide the transition from the industrial food system toward an attainable and desirable utopia. It may take us several generations to achieve, but, as Mario Benedetti rightly pointed out, utopias keep us moving forward.

Jose Luis Vivero Pol is an anti-hunger and social rights activist with fourteen years of experience on food security policies and programs, Right to Food advocacy, nutrition interventions, and food sovereignty in Latin America, Africa, and the Caucasus. Additionally, he has experience in biodiversity conservation and plant genetic resources. An agricultural engineer by profession, he is a PhD research fellow at the Catholic University of Louvain, and his current interests include the ethical, legal, and political dimensions of the transition toward fairer and more sustainable food systems, the governance of global commons, and the motivations for biodiversity conservation and anti-hunger actions.

By Adfer Rashid Shah

15 October, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

Now a country where even a Prime Minister in office is kidnapped that too in the capital of the country. Imagine the security apparatus of the post-Gaddafi Libya.

Prelude

The head of the transitional government, Ali Zeidan was kidnapped by ex-rebels on October 10, from a hotel amid the tight security and then freed. Imagine the security scenario of post-Gaddafi Libya today. Has Libya gained anything from the bloody uprising?

The fallouts of Arab Spring have hardly been constructive and mass friendly in almost all the regime toppled States. The Arab Spring like a massive flash flood collapsed everything that came its way, even the basic institutions of law and order, centralized State regulation, security apparatus, people’s feel secure psyche, basic human rights, etc, were not spared. As for Libya, the unceasing chaos and violence grabbed the whole oil rich state and lead to serious ramifications/fallouts be that the unaccounted and unregulated mass proliferation of weapons, continuing unrests, unceasing bloodshed, emergence of a plethora of self styled and tribal militias and their fiefdoms shaping up the prolonged chaos and uncertainty throughout. Libya today undoubtedly has proved the worst victim of Arab Spring that has lost almost everything to the 2011 uprising that proved nothing but a shapeless/mindless revolution

Introduction

This goes without saying that the post-Moammar Gaddafi Libya is purely a failed state (state governed by militia) despite the fairy tales of optimism and growth by a few Middle East and Libyan political analysts. Actually the security vacuum is such that even the former US Ambassador, Christopher Stevens was murdered in office (on September 11, 2012 in Benghazi) solely due to security crisis and issues. More than his murder, even more disturbing was that the Ambassador himself was aware about his being unsafe and of the acute security situations and uncontrolled chaos in the country. If the Ambassador of the world’s powerful country cannot feel safe and ultimately loses his life in the post-Gaddafi Libya, one can well imagine the terror/fear among the common Libyans and it also reflects the nasty fallouts of the so called Libyan revolution. The so called civilized big powers, who took pride in attacking Libya (NATO assaults) and helped/encouraged the rebels/thugs to sabotage the entire country to topple the Gaddafi regime, could not even save the credible Ambassador. If the allies could not control the post-regime situation then what was the fun of attacking Libya and execute Gaddafi- the man who changed the picture of Libya from poorest in Africa to the richest zone. Is it now merely the craze for manufacturing hegemony or maintaining/creating supremacy or the love for adventurism of the west to demolish the less powerful states one after another and then instead of rebuilding leaving these in ruins, purely to witness and enjoy the chaos, public suffering, civil wars, economic decline, emergence of uncontrolled militias, proliferation of weapons and spread of terrorism, radicalism, sectarianism and widespread bloodshed and above all the terror and the consistent feeling of insecurity among the common innocent masses.

Gaddafi’s Murder: The Beginning of an Endless Chaos

While the Gaddafi era of history ended by his inhuman murder in Sirte in October 2011, leaving the entire oil rich state in tatters for many decades to come, the pressing question remains, whether Libya in true sense has headed towards the democracy or better governance and if at all it has, at what cost? If not, then why do the world powers encourage/fund/stir up rebellions/uprisings or topple the régimes? Was destabilizing Libya or other states merely for fun or simply the west’s hunger for neo-colonialism? Why was the Gaddafi regime toppled with so much of the violence that still continues without an apparent end? Was it merely to create another Iraq or Afghanistan or impoverish the country of its rich oil resources simply to transform it to the horn of Africa? Also it is now clear to see whether Gaddafi’s execution really proved heavenly to Libyans or merely fulfilled the western interests and hijacked the entire State into the everlasting chaos, instability and uncertainty. The question remains who will reconstruct Libya now when everything has been deconstructed with the foreign might/aid by rebels? Who is safe when a plethora of uncontrolled militias are wreaking havoc day in and day out with their religion of assassinating even government officials off and on, amidst the collapsed institutions, poor security apparatus and lack of a powerful national army? Who will care of the common man who was happily leading his life in the pre-uprising era? Is the present regime virtually capable of constructing a new Libya or is simply paving the way for yet another devastated state like Iraq or Afghanistan or Mali or Somalia.

The Misuse of Power and the Costly Fallout

Noteworthy to mention that after murdering Gaddafi without caring for any trial or justice system, Libya’s self proclaimed NTC (the so called “sole representative of all Libya”) had claimed high of rebuilding and working for a united and democratic Libya but all that proved a farce because the very first blunder that they committed was killing Col. Gaddafi even after capturing him alive and when the dictator had already surrendered. Though they received a good patting by the western powers/their sponsors by then but killing a captive/a world renowned leader reflected the NTC’s political maturity, their concept of governance ahead, justice and futuristic vision. Even after Gaddafi’s murder, the tyranny or oppression has hardly gone because the new self claimed leaders/war lords and the democratic tyrants have simply replaced the slain dictator to crush the common masses a step further and put Libya to the acute political chaos. It will be apt to argue that today’s Libya can be anything but safe and growing.

The biggest challenge today is the deteriorated law and order situation along with the appalling activities by the emergence of uncontrolled militia/erstwhile fighters of the (incomplete & mishandled) revolution. The continuing bloodshed accompanied by the loss of country’s huge wealth and more importantly the collective feel secure psyche has resulted in the public dismay and panic instead of jubilation after the collapse of the Gaddafi’s tyrant regime. This entire chaotic state of affairs raises certain questions to ponder over for Libya’s future that seems too dark in the absence of the credible leaders and powerful institutions.

On one hand , Seeing the current political uncertainty and unbridled militia might now spreading in other countries to create more fuss like their role in Syria and alarming proliferation of arms, resulting in the terrified and bemused state of the common Libyans, While on the other hand, the criminal exclusion of the slain dictator’s loyalists (like Tuaregs, Sirte public & loyal belts, Gadafi’s army, etc,.) in all respects and the emergence of a new power class or rise of a new power structure is leading to nothing but mass alienation, social exclusion of particular sections of the society, unequal treatment and political rights, considerable social rupture, pathology and broken social fiber. Now even the former Gaddafi regime officials are likely to be barred from contesting elections despite of the fact that they contributed in Gaddafi’s overthrow. This is happening as even General National Congress (GNC) led by Mohmed Magarief has almost bowed down before arrogant armed militiamen that analysts describe virtually as a legal coup. Further tribal/group feuds, ethnic clashes, bloody and continuous power struggle, increasing discrimination, institutional breakdown, etc, has actually impoverished the growth and peace of the country and thus alienated the common man rather than emancipation, empowerment or democracy as being anticipated earlier and the continuing bloodshed as witnessed in post-Saddam Iraq or post Mubarak Egypt.

Libya’s Shapeless Revolution

It was rightly apprehended earlier that Libyan pro-democracy revolution may too end up in a shapeless revolution and that has proved right. Also it is a matter of concern for analysts that will NATO’s bombing, breaking role end in any of the rehabilitative measures in the post-Gaddafi era or will the devastated state sustain like Afghanistan and Iraq and turmoil will be kept deliberately alive for military adventurism and west’s neo-colonialist colony extension craze. Seeing the current growing western military adventurism under the NATO garb and their replay of Iraq drama of 2003 in Libya, Egypt, Syria, etc, Libya cannot avoid a similar fate and cannot rebuild the broken institutional mechanism back in the present crisis ridden atmosphere. In order to bring the country on a new democratic basis and to create and maintain the integrity among the institutions of power and social justice, the key issue and the major challenge before the new establishment (a bigger curiosity in fact for political analysts and social scientists round the globe right now) is to devise a workable strategy to maintain a stringent control simultaneously deliver for public welfare by the government in the centre. Seeing the situation, the fact remains that on the ground the current Libyan situation appears hardly in a settling mode.

At such a critical juncture, it is also worth pondering to assess the state of affairs in the economy of the post- Gaddafi era of the oil rich nation (worth $32 billion, 2010 estimates) though frozen assets have been released but practical appearance of normalcy is still not visible. Has it shaped Libya like the post-Taliban era way, or post war Iraq way or post sanctions Iran way and how long the clashes and massacres shall keep cuddling it. Also can the new Libyan administration fairly recover oil payments lying pending with many states and if not what will be its impact on the country’s economy and the subsequent repercussions on the 6.5 million Libyan people and safeguard their multiple ethnicity and tribal identity. Also the new challenges by Islamists at the political front remains to be seen though they (Brotherhood tributaries) are not too strong in Libya as compared to Egypt, though now their influence has started from Misrata now. Despite Islamists were defeated and National forces Alliance (NFA) secured majority party sets in last July elections. However Gaddafi’s inference about the proliferating of Jihadist agencies and their strengthening and mushrooming in north Africa is proving right after his death be it Libya itself or Mali, Algeria, Somalia, Yemen, etc,.

The public opinion which had turned decisively against the regime though had been demanding freedom from the past and expected a giant leap forward be it public security, human rights upholding, quality education, gender justice and egalitarian treatment and tribal welfare besides economic well being and proper social security. But currently the establishment is even not coming out of its own crisis, not to talk of delivery for the public welfare. Moreover, the prime focus on more efficient and enhancement in the oil production along with the gainful marketing and above all efficient accountability system which can only be realized and expected once Libyan government stabilizes politically and comes out of the contemporary fuss.

Is Post ‘Revolution Libya A Failed State?

The present Libyan social structure is in utter disorder and its populace stands a soul crushed chunk; the apprehension is whether the post uprising or post-Gaddafi times may be beleaguered with radicalism or pan-Islamism and NATO, US-Britain intervention may continue in the region. The fact is that this devastated North African oil-producing state has been shabbily exploited by all. The gimmicks like, West’s claims of working closely with the new Libya (where is that new Libya?) or Libyans have defied violence to cast ballots for a 200-member assembly (violence never ceased actually), ex-interim Prime Minister, Jibril’s political “road map”, NATO’s mission, NTC’s plan of a transitional process for constitutional declaration, Libya’s constitutional reforms, presidential elections, general elections (July 2012) and turnout of 62%,series of prime ministers coming and going seem all cruel jokes at the moment. Libya currently is worse than anything where militias, Salafi-Sufi tussle and continuing political uncertainty like terror on the streets, unceasing PM Ali Zindan Vs Magarief tussle, persistent security paralysis, collapsed institutional apparatus, the tussle between the centre and periphery, and the wide gulf between tribes and the rest, ethnic fissures, dichotomy between Gaddafians and anti-Gaddafians, etc, have endangered the lives of common the common Libyans. The west though defeating Gaddafi, has ideologically also lost its game in the country for its weapons (arms shipments given to rebels to topple Gaddafi) are now smuggled and proliferated to other vulnerable States like Syria and other terrorist safe heavens.

The Way forward: Understanding the Policy Issues being to be tacked

Undeniably, the Arab Spring has more sabotaged peace and common man’s life than proved constructive. Just regime changes for never ending instability and chaos cannot be a revolution. The most crucial and important was to stabilize the uprising states in the post uprising era, which proved a brutal failure. Arab spring’s hallow success is quite manifested in Egypt’s continuing bloodshed , saga of strifes and civil wars, the formation of new incapable and west’s puppet establishments, exclusion of women and minority voices, emergence of vulgar militias with territory politics and proliferation of terror through widespread weapons with arms smuggling, etc,. Thus everything is being witnessed as worst than the pre-spring scenario. Libya today is far weaker and insecure even than the Gaddafi era, where actualizing a centralized control mechanism and curbing arrogant tribal militias seems a project of decades and formation of a powerful national army a very difficult challenge.

The Libyan citizens are fed up with the proliferation of vulgar militias and have been demanding the departure of militias that they call the “illegitimate brigades”. Fox News (Published July 07, 2013 AFP), quotes Libyan PM, who maintains,

“We want a regular army and police force!” and “No to arms!” and “Yes to legitimacy!” cried the demonstrators amid a heavy presence of militiamen who currently enforce the law. Prime Minister Ali Zeidan, meanwhile, spoke to reporters of the necessity “to dissolve the brigades and other formations (of ex-rebels who battled the late Moamer Kadhafi) and integrate them individually into the army and police”[i].

Therefore, it can be assumed that the Libyan Government as a policy stunt seems powerless before the militias and is ready to integrate them into a national force. Can the national force comprise of such militias really safeguard the vulnerable nation is a curious question.

Strategy to be Followed

Though the efforts are on but the effective, practical and action oriented policy and planning needs to focus upon Libya’s oil and natural gas industry that makes up more than 70 percent of Libya’s economy and generates almost all the state’s revenue[ii]. Moreover it was the Libya’s oil industry that became the target of violent attacks and civil protests. The latest challenge is a lack of electricity[iii] that is an example of a worsening energy crisis in the energy rich State. Also Libya has to improve and redevelop its friendly international relations that too are not praiseworthy at the moment. Though measures are being taken to revive the oil exports, maintaining of healthy trade and international relations however roadblocks to development and reconstruction can only be tackled by improving the security situation round the country. Another issue that needs to be tackled efficiently is the issue of refugees and the provisions of their safe and secure return that government must ensure at the earliest. This goes without saying that the Post-Gaddafi Libya is in desperate need of foreign investment to reconstruct its ruined infrastructure[iv], so the policy to be tacked immediately is to seek foreign assistance and funding the rebuild the nation in tatters. Therefore efforts must be to make Libya economically stable and more importantly secure from the violence and ethnic clashes. Also the the foreign military interventions/adventures need not to be encouraged in order to build peace. Lastly, a comprehensive political, economic and technical assistance for achieving the internal stability is important and must be taken as a preferred policy initiative.

Last Word

Military in Africa has no good record as far as human rights are concerned. Libya’s transition to true democracy can prove developmental and positive however it needs patience and time. Rebuilding a new democratic Libya, improving its international relations and diplomatic skills cannot be done over night. The horrors of the so called revolution will keep haunting the state for decades even. Assessing the current situation seems too disappointing. Today’s Libya despite having Dr Ali Zendan at the PM’s Position lies nowhere in peace building and security, that he must address on priority. The functional administration has virtually gone to dogs, because of the power with everybody (that needs to be curbed immediately) and with no immediate progress or control on the holistic state as a whole.

This goes without saying that in the post-Spring and regime changed states almost everything needs reconstruction especially in Libya where even the force/army for the protection is non-existent because the army in command during the unrest has been abandoned under the pretext of being pro-Gaddafi, hence unreliable. Though we must acknowledge that devastation created by the massive uprising cannot be done away with over night, however the quest remains that will Libya really recover from such a massive and total demolition ever. The unrest initially supported by NATO’s assaults has resulted in the lifelong rupture of Libya’s social and political structure. Moammar Gaddafi’s execution has proved a historic blunder and the craze of regime toppling in the drama of Arab Spring has hardly proved functional to Libya that is still grappling with violence and unceasing bloodshed. Peace has vanished for decades and feel secure psyche among common masses has gone forever. The ripple effect of the turmoil hit Libya is visible in Mali violence or other neighboring states as well. The country has lost all its credible institutions and is currently in acute political instability.

Seeing the stolen Libyan revolution and arbitrary power with militias in the State, One can safely conclude that Libya though has moved from Colonialism to monarchy to dictatorship but not to democracy even after Gaddafi but to the democratic tyranny, uncertainty and perhaps chaos forever.

The fact remains that whosoever will try to curb unbridled militias will not be safe in Libya and the country that is currently the hub of arms smuggling is in no ways different from the tyrant Gaddafi regime. The Arab spring helped in one way-Sabotaged it completely.

Someone has rightly said,

Sooraj Hamein Har Shaam Ye Dars Deta Hai,

Maghrib Ki Taraf Jao Gay, to Doob Jao Gay…!

Notes

[i] http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/07/07/libya-militias-out-demand-tripoli-residents-afp/

[ii] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-08/libya-oil-output-slumps-as-power-cuts-mix-with-protests-energy.html

[iii] Ibid

[iv] http://rt.com/op-edge/libya-conflict-foreign-funds-826/

Adfer Rashid Shah (Adfar Shah) is a New Delhi based Kashmiri Sociologist and belongs to SNCWS AT Jamia Millia Islamia, Central University, New Delhi. Author is a guest columnist & Contributor at Eurasia Review, Analyst World, Kashmir Monitor,South Asian idea and also contributes in other reputed international Publications. Mail at adfer.syed@gmail.com

By Robert Stevens

15 October, 2013

@ WSWS.org

Rescuers have ended their search for the bodies of the migrants who died in the October 3 Lampedusa boat sinking. Only 155 of the 545 people, including Eritrean, Somalis, and Syrians aboard the vessel which sank in the Mediterranean survived the tragedy. Just 359 bodies have been recovered.

These deaths were followed by another boat sinking in Maltese waters, south of the island of Lampedusa, on October 11. Of the more than 200 Syrians and Palestinian men, women and children on board, at least 34 died. The boat was apparently fired upon by a military vessel carrying a Libyan flag.

Speaking to “Channel 4 News”, a survivor said, “They followed us for an hour. Then they asked the captain to stop and then started to shoot in the air. They were trying to turn the boat upside down. Then they started to shoot at the boat. They shot at the engine. They managed to hit four people as well.”

The United Nations refugee agency’s Maurizio Molina said, “Because of the hole caused by the shooting… the water started entering into the boat, causing a lot of tension among the Syrians that were on board. At a certain point the ones that were (below), around 100 people, were obliged to go upstairs, creating this unbalancing and then at the end finally causing the capsize.”

At least 500 more migrants had to be rescued Saturday in separate incidents near the Italian island of Sicily. In another incident, on Friday, 12 migrants drowned in a shipwreck off Alexandria’s coast. Egyptian state media reported that 116 survived the sinking.

The toll of deaths in the Mediterranean since October 3 will be added to the staggering figure of 25,000 who have died trying to enter “Fortress Europe” in the last two decades.

By the beginning of October, some 30,000 people had attempted to cross over the Mediterranean into Italy this year alone. Many are attempting to flee war and persecution in countries like Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Syria.

The vast majority of refugees, upwards of 95 percent, never get anywhere in Europe. Officially 1.6 million Syrians are now refugees, far beyond the one million predicted by the United Nations by the middle of 2013.

The UN’s Syria Regional Response Plan of December 2012 calculated that 515,061 Syrian refugees had arrived in surrounding Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, and Egypt. The refugee crisis has escalated this year, with the UN confirming in June that an additional one million refugees had arrived in these countries.

In January 5,000 per day were fleeing Syria, and by March this had reached an average of 10,000. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees stated, “Based on arrival trends since the beginning of the year, it is estimated that the number of Syrian refugees in need of assistance across the region may reach 3.45 million by the end of 2013, hosted in camps and, for the most part, in local communities.”

According to the latest figures, a further five million people have been displaced inside Syria. All told, more than seven million Syrians have been displaced from their homes—around a third of the country’s 22 million people. That figure is expected to reach 50 percent in short order.

António Guterres, the UN’s high commissioner responsible for refugees, stated, “Syria has become the great tragedy of this century—a disgraceful humanitarian calamity with suffering and displacement unparalleled in recent history.”

What Guterres will not and cannot acknowledge is that the tragedy befalling millions of Syrians is the result of a civil war engineered by the United States, Britain, and France with the assistance and funding of Turkey and the Gulf monarchies.

Even prior to the outbreak of the imperialist proxy war in Syria, sanctions against the country had wrought a devastating impact. In 1979 the US designated Syria a “state sponsor of terror” and began imposing numerous economic sanctions. In August 2011, the Obama administration imposed additional sanctions on Syria’s energy sector and froze all Syrian government assets in the US.

Last month Britain’s Independent noted that sanctions had hit Syria’s “once excellent under-fives vaccination program and brought to a standstill the MDG [UN Millennium Development Goals] targets on maternal and infant mortality, which Syria was well on the road to meeting by 2015. They have collapsed the production of essential medicines for which the country was near to self-sufficiency. Medicines for the treatment of cancer, diabetes and heart disease not produced locally are not available except at huge cost in neighbouring countries. The cost of essential food, cooking, and heating oil has increased several-fold, putting it out of reach for the majority whilst gangster-led smuggling and profiteering thrives. All this alongside the raging horrors of a war.”

Masses of Syrians are now being held in refugee camps, denied basic freedoms and citizenship. Some 520,000 Syrians are now in Jordan, increasing its population by eight 8 percent in two years. One camp, Zaatari, houses 130,000 people in appalling, overcrowded conditions. When it was established in July 2012, it contained just 100 families. It is now growing at a rate of 2,000 residents each day. Another camp, Azraq, is under construction and will also have the capacity to host up to 130,000 people.

Turkey only allows Syrian refugees to enter when there are spaces in refugee camps.

The Lebanese government allows Syrians entry, but only on the basis of recognising them as “visitors” not refugees. Around 1.3 million Syrians are now in Lebanon, with 780,000 registered as refugees by the UN.

Further tens of thousands remain in perilous conditions camped on the Syrian-Jordan border, waiting to cross over.

Many of the ships containing refugees seeking to enter Europe via Lampedusa are forced to begin a hazardous journey via Libyan ports. After the 2011 overthrow of the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, in another imperialist-inspired “humanitarian” civil war, Libya was hailed as a model for regime change and the “democracy” that Syrians could expect. What has emerged is a criminal regime, fractured by rival armed militias, under which thousands remain imprisoned without charges and subjected to systematic torture.

In order to clampdown on this means of entry, the European Union is working with the Libyan regime via a €30 million-a-year deal operation named Eubam Libya. Central will be the creation of a “border management strategy” to “improve the legal and institutional framework of border management.”

Last year Amnesty International reported that Italy signed an April 2012 secret agreement with the then Libyan National Transitional Council to “curtail the flow of migrants”. Commenting on the agreement, Amnesty’s Nicolas Beger said, “For the EU, reinforcing Europe’s borders clearly trumps saving lives.”

The 34 refugees killed on October 11 as a result of being fired on by a Libyan ship will not be the last to die as a result of EU collusion.