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John Kerry’s rhetoric is divorced from the reality on the ground, where life goes on – even at the barricades

 

By Mark Weisbrot

Images forge reality, granting a power to television and video and even still photographs that can burrow deep into people’s consciousness without them even knowing it. I thought that I, too, was immune to the repetitious portrayals of Venezuela as a failed state in the throes of a popular rebellion. But I wasn’t prepared for what I saw in Caracas this month: how little of daily life appeared to be affected by the protests, the normality that prevailed in the vast majority of the city. I, too, had been taken in by media imagery.

Major media outlets have already reported that Venezuela’s poor have not joined the right-wing opposition protests, but that is an understatement: it’s not just the poor who are abstaining – in Caracas, it’s almost everyone outside of a few rich areas like Altamira, where small groups of protesters engage in nightly battles with security forces, throwing rocks and firebombs and running from tear gas.

Walking from the working-class neighborhood of Sabana Grande to the city center, there was no sign that Venezuela is in the grip of a “crisis” that requires intervention from the Organization of American States (OAS), no matter what John Kerry tells you. The metro also ran very well, although I couldn’t get off at Alta Mira station, where the rebels had set up their base of operations until their eviction this week.

I got my first glimpse of the barricades in Los Palos Grandes, an upper-income area where the protesters do have popular support, and neighbors will yell at anyone trying to remove the barricades – which is a risky thing to attempt (at least four people have apparently been shot dead for doing so). But even here at the barricades, life was pretty much normal, save for some snarled traffic. On the weekend, the Parque del Este was full of families and runners sweating in the 90-degree heat – before Chávez, you had to pay to get in, and the residents here, I was told, were disappointed when the less well-to-do were allowed to enter for free. The restaurants are still crowded at night.

Travel provides little more than a reality check, of course, and I visited Caracas mainly to gather data on the economy. But I came away skeptical of the narrative, reported daily in the media, that increasing shortages of basic foods and consumer goods are a serious motivation for the protests. The people who are most inconvenienced by those shortages are, of course, the poor and working classes. But the residents of Los Palos Grandes and Altamira, where I saw real protests happening – they have servants to stand in line for what they need, and they have the income and storage space to accumulate some inventory.

These people are not hurting – they’re doing very well. Their income has grown at a healthy pace since the Chávez government got control of the oil industry a decade ago. They even get an expensive handout from the government: anyone with a credit card (which excludes the poor and millions of working people) is entitled to $3,000 per year at a subsidized exchange rate. They can then sell the dollars for 6 times what they paid in what amounts to a multi-billion dollar annual subsidy for the privileged – yet it is they who are supplying the base and the troops of the rebellion.

The class nature of this fight has always been stark and inescapable, now more than ever. Walking past the crowd that showed up for the March 5 ceremonies to mark the anniversary of Chávez’s death, it was a sea of working-class Venezuelans, tens of thousands of them. There were no expensive clothing or $300 shoes. What a contrast to the disgruntled masses of Los Palos Grandes, with $40,000 Grand Cherokee Jeeps bearing the slogan of the moment: SOS VENEZUELA.

When it comes to Venezuela, John Kerry knows which side of the class war he is on. Last week, just as I was leaving town, the US Secretary of State doubled down in his fusillade of rhetoric against the government, accusing President Nicolás Maduro of waging a “terror campaign against his own people”. Kerry also threatened to invoke the Inter-American Democratic Charter of the OAS against Venezuela, as well as implementing sanctions.

Brandishing the Democratic Charter against Venezuela is a bit like threatening Vladimir Putin with a UN-sponsored vote on secession in Crimea. Perhaps Kerry didn’t notice, but just a few days before his threats, the OAS took a resolution that Washington brought against Venezuela and turned it inside-out, declaring the regional body’s “solidarity” with the Maduro government. Twenty-nine countries approved it, with only the right-wing governments of Panama and Canada siding with the US against it.

Article 21 of the OAS’s Democratic Charter applies to the “unconstitutional interruption of the democratic order of a member state” (like the 2009 military coup in Honduras that Washington helped to legitimize, or the 2002 military coup in Venezuela, aided even more by the US government). Given its recent vote, the OAS would be more likely to invoke the Democratic Charter against the US government for its drone killings of US citizens without trial, than it would be to do so against Venezuela.

Kerry’s “terror campaign” rhetoric is equally divorced from reality, and predictably provoked an equivalent response from Venezuela’s foreign minister, who called Kerry a “murderer”. Here’s the truth about those charges from Kerry: since the protests in Venezuela began, it appears that more people have died at the hands of protesters than security forces. According to deaths reported by CEPR in the last month, in addition to those killed for trying to remove protesters’ barricades, about seven have apparently been killed by protesters’ obstructions – including a motorcyclist beheaded by a wire stretched across the road – and five National Guard officers have been killed.

As for violence from law enforcement, at least three people appear to have been killed by the National Guard or other security forces – including two protesters and a pro-government activist. Some people blame the government for an additional three killings by armed civilians; in a country with an average of more than 65 homicides per day, it is entirely possible these people acted on their own.

A full 21 members of the security forces are under arrest for alleged abuses, including some of the killings. This is no “terror campaign”.

At the same time, it is difficult to find any serious denunciation of opposition violence from major opposition leaders. Polling data finds the protests to be deeply unpopular in Venezuela, although they do much better abroad when they are promoted as “peaceful protests” by people like Kerry. The data also suggest that a majority of Venezuelans see these disturbances for what they are: an attempt to remove the elected government from power.

The domestic politics of Kerry’s posturing are pretty simple. On the one hand, you have the right-wing Florida Cuban-American lobby and their neo-conservative allies screaming for overthrow. To the left of the far right there is, well, nothing. This White House cares very little about Latin America, and there are no electoral consequences for making most of the governments in the hemisphere more disgusted with Washington.

Perhaps Kerry thinks the Venezuelan economy is going to collapse and that will bring some of the non-rich Venezuelans into the streets against the government. But the economic situation is actually stabilizing – monthly inflation fell in February, and the black-market dollar has fallen sharply on the news that the government is introducing a new, market-based exchange rate. Venezuela’s sovereign bonds returned 11.5% from 11 February (the day before the protests began) to 13 March, the highest returns in the Bloomberg dollar emerging market bond index. Shortages will most likely ease in the coming weeks and months.

Of course, that is exactly the opposition’s main problem: the next election is a year-and-a-half away, and by that time, it’s likely that the economic shortages and inflation that have so increased over the past 15 months will have abated. The opposition will then probably lose the parliamentary elections, as they have lost every election over the past 15 years. But their current insurrectionary strategy isn’t helping their own cause: it seems to have divided the opposition and united the Chavistas.

The only place where the opposition seems to be garnering broad support is Washington.

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research in Washington DC.

 

20 March 2014

theguardian.com

By Kourosh Ziabari

The representative of the Jewish minority in Iran’s parliament (Majlis) has recently given an extensive interview to one of Iranian news agencies and discussed his different viewpoints regarding the Israeli regime and the way the Jewish community of Iran see the entity which proclaims to be representing the global Jewry.

According to Siamak Mareh Sedq who has talked to the Fars News Agency, Tel Aviv needs to create crisis in the Middle East in order to survive. “If Israel faces no threat it will be destroyed within one month. Israel needs (regional) crises in a bid to continue its existence,” he said.

This wise and precise analysis is exactly what the audacious commentators, intellectuals and journalists in the West who dare to criticize the policies and practices of the Israeli regime without fear of losing their jobs or being vilified as “anti-Semites” agree on. This is something that even the Israelis know well and confess to. An anonymous Israeli official once had privately told the president of the National Iranian American Council Trita Parsi, “You have to recognize that we Israelis need an existential threat. It is part of the way we view the world. If we can find more than one, that would be preferable, but we will settle for one.”

The fact that Israel needs a serious existential threat to secure its survival and depends on regional crises to make sure that its existence will not be undermined and can go ahead with its colonial, expansionistic projects and ambitions is no closed book to anyone studying the history of this regime.

Israel has always been at odds with its neighbors and has intentionally failed to live with the countries surrounding it in peace and friendly coexistence, even though some of them, for the sake of cajoling the United States and earning some benefits, have pretended that they have recognized the existence of this regime and have no problems with it! Since its inception, Israel has been constantly waging attacks or creating troubles for others, and unfortunately, those who worked hands in glove with the United States, Britain, Canada and others to establish a land for the homeless in 1948 are now figuring out that their magnum opus has turned into a lawless, authoritarian, racist and apartheid regime that even finds it convenient to go beyond the continental borders to launch bomb attacks on a country 2,060 kilometers away: Tunisia, in the Operation Wooden Leg on October 1, 1981.

But what I want to touch upon today is not Israel’s illegitimate and unlawful military attacks on Jordan, Egypt and Syria in 1967 or the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981, even though all of these events need investigation and contemplation as the crises which Israel has nimbly created in order to consolidate its position in the Middle East and secure its fragile survival by the use of military force. What I want to allude to is the crisis which Israel manufactured around one decade ago to make sure that the international community will be busy dealing with the different aspects of the crisis until finding a solution, and in this period, it can work to build more settlements, kill or imprison more Palestinian leaders and fortify the castle of its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East.

The crisis that Israel manufactured was the controversy surrounding Iran’s nuclear program. This is the topic which the prominent American investigative journalist and historian Gareth Porter skillfully discusses in his recently published book “Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.” Although Gareth Porter does not concur with me on all points I have mentioned, he generally shed a light on “how Israel and the George W. Bush administration successfully portrayed the various actions taken by Western nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as responses to a long history of Iranian covert work on militarization of its nuclear program.”

The breakthrough book which is the product of Gareth Porter’s six years of close investigation of Iran’s nuclear standoff and the developments of Iran’s foreign policy tries to show that Iran’s civilian nuclear program has been used as a pretext by the United States in unison with Israel to put pressure on Iran and extinguish its technological and political progress. Porter says that the IAEA used documents as the reference of its allegations and accusations against Iran that were provided to it either directly by Israel or through the terrorist cult Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MKO or MEK) which was just recently removed from the U.S. Department of State’s list of foreign terrorist organizations in an attempt to provide political shelter for this miserable and wretched group of traitors and serial killers which sees Tel Aviv as one of its main benefactors and sponsors.

The book provides reliable and confirmable evidence showing that Israel was one of the main culprits behind the complication of Iran’s nuclear dossier through forging false documents and evidence and presenting them to the IAEA.

Porter’s book published by the “Just World Books” is a must read and is praised by such figures as the renowned American director Oliver Stone, leading investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, prominent Middle East expert Juan Cole and former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles W. Freeman.

Gareth Porter’s book inspired me to think about the crisis that has been manufactured in the most wicked way by Israel and its patrons and led to years of animosity and acrimony between Iran and the West, and in particular the United States. The controversy surrounding Iran’s nuclear program soared when the IAEA Board of Governors, under the pressure by the United States, voted in 2006 to refer Iran’s nuclear file to the UN Security Council. It was after then that the economic sanctions began being shot at Iran one after the other. The sanctions, as inhumane, illegal and unjustifiable they were, created different hardships for the ordinary Iranian citizens, including the patients suffering from chronic disorders in need of foreign-imported medical equipments and pharmaceutical products.

The “manufactured crisis” not only embittered Iran’s trade with the United States and the European Union, but also imposed costs on the European firms that sustained significant damages as a result of cutting their business with Iran, and there are credible statistics showing that in such countries as Germany and France, thousands of people lost their jobs due to the direct or indirect consequences of the economic sanctions. The sanctions which were pioneered and cheered by Tel Aviv also caused serious irregularities in international banking systems and protocols and brought about disastrous outcomes for the global economy.

However, after almost one decade of dispute and quarrel, Iran and the six world powers have once again sat at the negotiation table, and the first outcome of their intense negotiations became evident in November 24, 2013 when they reached an interim agreement in Geneva known as the “Joint Plan of Action” by which Iran would limit certain portions of its nuclear activities and will receive relief from some of the important parts of the sanctions it has been enduring in the recent years. This is what dissipates and fritters away more than one decade of Israel’s day and night efforts to hamper Iran’s relations with the world and embroil it in a stalemate over its nuclear program.

As the negotiations for a comprehensive and final agreement between Iran and the P5+1 (five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) get started in Vienna, Israel finds itself in an awkward position that will be costing it a lot if the talks lead to substantive and successful results.

Israel has been pulling all the stops to foil the endeavors of Iran and the international community to settle their dispute, and that is why the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the Geneva accord a “historic mistake” and the “deal of century” for Iran.

The fact that Iran’s nuclear file was passed to the Security Council by the IAEA, that the Security Council decided to impose four rounds of sanctions on Iran in its eight resolutions regarding Iran’s nuclear program, and also the fact that the United States, in the past ten years, went through fire and water to make sure that Iran will remain under huge economic and political pressures indicate that Israel was pleased and somehow relieved as it could see that its efforts to manufacture a new crisis in the region were bearing fruits. No conscious mind would accept the claim that Israel didn’t play a central role in Iran’s nuclear standoff.

However, the new turn in Iran’s relations with the international community and the possibility of a final agreement between Iran and the P5+1 group (Britain, China, France, Russian, the United States and Germany) during the Vienna talks sound to Israel like an elegy and an extremely sorrowful funeral song.

Although Israel is reliant on the regional crisis to make sure that it will not cease to exist, the obliteration of one of the crises it has produced through diligent work will not be a promising sign for the people in Tel Aviv who should think of new ways for prolonging the lifespan of their apartheid entity.

Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian journalist and a writer.

By Mickey Z.

Holocaust (noun): destruction or slaughter on a mass scale

One of the least discussed obstacles we face in the struggle against speciesism is language.

While most of us will flippantly toss off callous phrases like “more than one way to skin a cat” or “kill two birds with one stone,” perhaps the biggest issue is the way some words — “rape” and “slavery,” for example — are often reserved solely for human references.

In an even tighter example of restriction, the term “holocaust” has become uniquely associated with and thus limited to humans of Jewish ethnicity or heritage.

While the scores of communists, Roma, homosexuals, and dissidents murdered in Nazi concentration camps would obviously not concur with such a qualification, what are we to say of the ubiquitous packed trains, warehousing, experimentation, gassing, and targeted slaughter of non-human earthlings?

It’s been estimated that in all the wars and genocides in recorded history, a total of 619 million humans have been killed by humans. That same number — 619 million non-humans — are murdered every five days for “food” by an industry that consumes and destroys one-third of the planet’s land surface and is the No. 1 source of human-created greenhouse gases (read: climate change).

Each and every day, somewhere between 150 and 200 animal and plant species go extinct thanks to human behavior and roughly 32 trillion insects are killed by automobiles in the United States alone!

Is this not a holocaust, as in “destruction or slaughter on a mass scale”?

How would it disrespect the nightmarish experiences of humans to use the same word to describe practices that are threatening all life on the planet?

“Auschwitz,” wrote sociologist Theodor Adorno, “begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.”

To declare otherwise is to betray one’s speciesist bias and expose a glaring lack of holistic compassion.

FYI: To declare otherwise is to also to betray the original meaning of the word: “A holocaust is a religious animal sacrifice that is completely consumed by fire. The word derives from the Ancient Greek holocaustos.”

So how about we eschew the fascism of speciesist semantics and focus more on the fact that non-humans are being killed by the trillions? This frighteningly and sad reality is not the result of some unstoppable force of nature or preordained theology. Non-humans are being wiped out thanks to specific and identifiable human decisions.

From the film, Earthlings: “Like us, (animals) are the psychological centers of a life that is uniquely their own. What these animals are due from us, how we morally ought to treat them, are questions whose answer begins with the recognition of our psychological kinship with them.”

These animals are also due some linguistic honesty.

#shifthappens

Note: To continue conversations like this, come see Mickey Z. in person at Hunter College on March 26.

Order Occupy this Book: Mickey Z. on Activism here.

Mickey Z. is the author of 11 books, most recently the novel Darker Shade of Green.

 

21 March, 2014

World News Trust

By Rajesh Makwana

At a time when the risk of civilizational collapse is widely forewarned, it is time to recognise that the call for sharing is a cause that can unite concerned citizens working on a diverse range of interconnected global issues.

More than ever before, analysts and organisations are advocating for the process of sharing to guide our response to pressing global issues. One recent example is a research project sponsored by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which modelled a range of scenarios “closely reflecting the reality of the world today” and found that civilizational collapse will be “difficult to avoid”. Although the research is yet to be published, Nafeez Ahmed (executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development) recently outlined the report’s dramatic findings in the Guardian, which led to a flurry of activity on the blogosphere as the content went viral. Putting aside the prospect of collapse that most commentators inevitably focussed on, the research adds further weight to the notion that only an international process of economic sharing can guarantee a just and sustainable future for humanity.

For many, any talk of civilizational collapse is viewed as an overreaction to world problems. But even without the historical references to failed empires mentioned in the NASA-funded report, it is now widely accepted that today’s perfect storm of socio-economic, environmental and geopolitical crises means humanity is already in the midst of a global emergency . The study emphasises two distinct factors that most often lead to collapse. The first of these is “the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity” of planet earth, which is already widely visible in the pervasive and increasingly harsh impacts of climate change. The second element is the economic stratification of society into a small group of powerful ”elites” and the rest of society – the “masses”. As the Occupy movement’s infamous 1% vs the 99% slogans encapsulate, such polarisation is now almost universal, even though the evidence suggests that inequality is detrimental to economic growth and causes widespread social disruption and disenfranchisement.

A common response to this toxic mix of social and environmental dynamics is to look towards technological innovation to provide the necessary solutions. But according to the NASA report’s authors, relying on technology is an evasive way of maintaining business as usual – a familiar tendency in civilisations on the verge of collapse, where decision making is exercised by elites who are temporarily shielded from the devastating impacts of their policy decisions.

Equitably distributing the earth’s resources

The potential triggers for civilizational collapse outlined in the report are already well-documented; people have long been calling for a more equal world , more sustainable global consumption patterns, and a shift away from techno-fixes and palliative economic reforms. But the solutions emphasised by the team of scientists who worked on the NASA paper demand further consideration. They suggest that collapse can be avoided “if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion”. Their conclusion essentially points to the need for a new paradigm for human progress that is broadly in line with the principle of sharing , and for this process of economic sharing to take place on an international scale. Unless nations can agree on a framework for sharing the world’s natural resources in a sustainable manner, it will remain impossible to achieve the reductions in per capita resource use or the equitable distribution proposed by the authors.

However, within the current political and economic paradigm – characterised by national self-interest and fierce international competition – attaining agreement on how to share planetary resources is an almost insurmountable challenge. Given the enormity of this task, it is important to recognise that the demand for sharing is actually a common cause that connects a diverse range of local, national and global issues. Moreover, the call for a fairer sharing of wealth, power or resources is becoming more explicit by the day, and is now evident in numerous countries across the world.

Sharing in its multiple dimensions

For example, within local communities and cities, millions of people and organisations are embracing the sharing economy , which – if properly understood in relation to concerns for global equity and sustainability – has the potential to revolutionise our economic systems from the ground up. Similarly, many local initiatives that prioritise self-sufficiency work towards sharing available resources more fairly and sustainably, and the increasingly popular commons movement also draws on a conceptual framework that is based on the principle of sharing.

At the national level, the call for wealth and power to be shared more equally and democratically was popularised during the Arab Spring and Occupy protests, and is still making headlines . There is a growing movement of people calling for a proportion of revenues from the use of land and natural resources to be shared among citizens . And countless campaigns for tax justice , an end to austerity and the strengthening of social welfare are all predicated on the notion of sharing national resources more equitably.

Demands for sharing are also well established in relation to global issues. Given that half the world still has limited access to sufficient food, water and healthcare, many campaigns focus on the need for a just redistribution of the world’s financial resources. Long established campaigns call for political power to be shared more inclusively in global governance bodies, and sharing is advocated as a key solution in international climate change negotiations. In recent years, a debate on fair shares in a constrained world has also emerged, in which major NGOs are investigating the complex issues around equity that arise in the context of resource limits and environmental boundaries.

Acknowledging the common ground

Innumerable other instances of individuals, organisations, businesses and people’s movements calling for sharing in different ways could be mentioned. As yet, many of these campaigns exist in isolation, which is often a strategic necessity. But in light of the challenge articulated in the NASA-funded study, it may be time for those involved in sharing-related initiatives to explicitly acknowledge their common cause.

In an economic paradigm geared towards maintaining business as usual, it stands to reason that averting a civilisational collapse can only be possible if the demand for change connects disparate peoples’ movements and informs public opinion beyond national borders. This does not mean abandoning the goals of existing initiatives, but rather supporting the emergence of a common platform for change that can be explicated in the simplest terms and embraced by the greatest number of people. With support for the principle of sharing rapidly growing across the globe, a united call for sharing the earth’s resources could ultimately hold the key to safeguarding human progress in the 21st Century.

Rajesh Makwana is STWR’s director and he can be contacted at rajesh [at] sharing.org

21 March, 2014

Sharing.org

By Johannes Stern & Alex Lantier

Continuing its well-prepared campaign to exploit the Ukrainian crisis as a pretext for a vast expansion of imperialist operations in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, Washington and its European Union (EU) allies responded yesterday to Russia’s official annexation of Crimea by calling for a military buildup that would put NATO on a perpetual war footing against Moscow.

Speaking yesterday at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said: “Ladies and gentlemen, we live in a different world than we did less than a month ago… The annexation of Crimea through a so-called referendum held at gun point is illegal and illegitimate.”

Were it not for the potentially catastrophic consequences of NATO’s actions, Rasmussen’s statements would have a grotesquely farcical character. Nothing he said bore any relation to reality.

The portrayal of NATO as a peaceful opponent of Russian aggression is a political fraud. The majority-Russian Crimean population voted overwhelmingly to join Russia principally due to fear of the anti-Semitic, anti-Russian forces the West unleashed in Ukraine when it backed the February 22 fascist-led putsch in Kiev. This regime now rules Kiev with appeals to anti-Russian chauvinism and by relying on violence to intimidate its opponents.

Rasmussen is outlining a policy of continually stoking war hysteria against Russia, in order to isolate Moscow and shift US and European politics dramatically to the right. This includes increasing military spending and the US military presence in Europe—a continent already bankrupted by five years of budget cuts and austerity measures.

Rasmussen told the Washington Post there is now “no doubt that Europe has to invest more in defense and security.” He added that “many Europeans would like a reaffirmation of the US commitment to European security… Developments in Ukraine are a stark reminder that security in Europe cannot be taken for granted,” Rasmussen said. “We need to focus on the long-term strategic impact of Russia’s aggression on our own security.”

This policy is being closely coordinated with Washington. Before his speech, Rasmussen attended a “working dinner” hosted by US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, together with Secretary of State John Kerry and National Security Advisor Susan Rice. Hagel is preparing for a meeting with the Business Roundtable, an influential US business lobby, to discuss Ukraine and US military spending.

These policies aim to transform NATO into an anti-Russian military alliance, with outposts in ex-Soviet states all along Russia’s borders in a campaign of permanent military pressure on Moscow that threatens to escalate into war. US Vice President Joe Biden outlined a policy of militarily isolating and threatening Russia in his remarks delivered to officials of the Baltic states in Vilnius, Lithuania. He also had a phone call with the prime minister of the Kiev regime, former banker Arseniy Yatseniuk.

Biden stressed the broad military guarantees Washington is offering Eastern European regimes amid the ongoing US military buildup in the region—which involves surveillance flights over Poland and Romania, warplane deployments to Poland and the Baltics, and stepped-up training exercises in the region.

 

He said, “We stand resolutely with our Baltic allies in support of the Ukrainian people and against Russian aggression. As long as Russia continues on this dark path, they will face increasing political and economic isolation.”

He added, “The reason I traveled to the Baltics was to reaffirm our mutual commitment to collective defense. President Obama wanted me to come personally to make it clear what you already know, that under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, we will respond. We will respond to any aggression against a NATO ally.”

According to Article 5 of the NATO treaty, member states “agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.”

These moves to inflame military tensions reflect a broad, aggressive shift in imperialist policy that finds fullest expression in escalation of the military operations of Germany—the power that, together with the United States, is pushing most aggressively for a confrontation with Russia over Ukraine.

The German media is unleashing a campaign for harsh economic sanctions and a more aggressive military build-up against Russia. Today’s lead comment in the Süddeutsche Zeitung calls upon Obama to take “a lesson in Cold War history,” lamenting: “The world will not improve by itself, simply because Obama extends his hand to everyone. And crises like in Syria or Ukraine do not disappear simply because they bore Obama.”

The Süddeutsche then praises NATO as the “foundation of a basic international order. Whoever, like Ukraine, belongs neither to NATO nor exactly either to the West or to the East rapidly becomes a victim of the appetites of neighboring autocrats. The Baltic states and Poland, on the other hand, can be fairly sure that they are protected from Putin’s Special Forces.”

For the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, NATO’s response is not nearly enough. It complains, “Putin knows that NATO is not a threat to Russia; in the Crimean crisis, only the Fiji Islands could have reacted in a more restrained way than the NATO leadership.”

The level of aggressiveness, distortions and outright lying in the German media has not been heard since Goebbels ran the propaganda ministry under Hitler. The media is supporting an increase in German military activity called for by President Joachim Gauck at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year.

The Ukrainian crisis, which Chancellor Angela Merkel and other key figures in the German state played a major role in instigating, provides the pretext for the implementation of a carefully planned militaristic reorientation of the country’s foreign policy.

Almost exactly one month ago, on February 21, 2014, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a major Washington think tank, published a statement, “Is Germany Ready to Lead?” It explained: “For over a year, senior German officials have been carefully preparing the way for a shift towards a more assertive foreign and security policy.”

The analysis noted that the removal of former Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle had been necessary to implement the new policy. The CSIS also welcomed the signs in the “public debate” conducted in the media—that is, the unending stream of militaristic propaganda—“that a new consensus may be emerging among the German elite,” and expressed the hope that “over time, the public may follow.”

Now, after Berlin played a leading role in orchestrating the fascist-led putsch in Kiev on February 22, the German ruling elite feels that the time is right to repudiate the military restraints placed on Germany after the end of the Second World War and the horrible crimes of the Nazis. It is fueling the conflict with Russia to resume its traditional role as the dominant power in Eastern Europe.

Ahead of the EU summit taking place today and tomorrow in Brussels, the German cabinet has approved the EU Association Agreement with Ukraine that, according to its preamble, seeks “Ukraine’s gradual integration in the EU internal market…and to support Ukrainian efforts to complete the transition into a functioning market economy.”

That is, Berlin and the EU are deepening their ties with outright fascists in the Ukrainian government to turn the country into a cheap labor platform for European finance capital and an outpost of the EU and NATO for military provocations against Russia.

 

20 March, 2014

WSWS.org

 

Oxfam report reveals scale of inequality in UK as charity appeals to chancellor over tax

By Larry Elliott

 

Who are the five richest families?

The scale of Britain’s growing inequality is revealed by a report from a leading charity showing that the country’s five richest families now own more wealth than the poorest 20% of the population.

Oxfam urged the chancellor George Osborne to use Wednesday’s budget to make a fresh assault on tax avoidance and introduce a living wage in a report highlighting how a handful of the super-rich, headed by the Duke of Westminster, have more money and financial assets than 12.6 million Britons put together.

The development charity, which has opened UK programmes to tackle poverty, said the government should explore the possibility of a wealth tax after revealing how income gains and the benefits of rising asset prices had disproportionately helped those at the top.

Although Labour is seeking to make living standards central to the political debate in the run-up to next year’s general election, Osborne is determined not to abandon the deficit-reduction strategy that has been in place since 2010. But he is likely to announce a fresh crackdown on tax avoidance and measures aimed at overseas owners of high-value London property in order to pay for modest tax cuts for working families.

The early stages of the UK’s most severe post-war recession saw a fall in inequality as the least well-off were shielded by tax credits and benefits. But the trend has been reversed in recent years as a result of falling real wages, the rising cost of food and fuel, and by the exclusion of most poor families from home and share ownership.

In a report, a Tale of Two Britains, Oxfam said the poorest 20% in the UK had wealth totalling £28.1bn – an average of £2,230 each. The latest rich list from Forbes magazine showed that the five top UK entries – the family of the Duke of Westminster, David and Simon Reuben, the Hinduja brothers, the Cadogan family, and Sports Direct retail boss Mike Ashley – between them had property, savings and other assets worth £28.2bn.

The most affluent family in Britain, headed by Major General Gerald Grosvenor, owns 77 hectares (190 acres) of prime real estate in Belgravia, London, and has been a beneficiary of the foreign money flooding in to the capital’s soaring property market in recent years. Oxfam said Grosvenor and his family had more wealth (£7.9bn) than the poorest 10% of the UK population (£7.8bn).

Oxfam’s director of campaigns and policy, Ben Phillips, said: “Britain is becoming a deeply divided nation, with a wealthy elite who are seeing their incomes spiral up, while millions of families are struggling to make ends meet.

“It’s deeply worrying that these extreme levels of wealth inequality exist in Britain today, where just a handful of people have more money than millions struggling to survive on the breadline.”

The UK study follows an Oxfam report earlier this year which found that the wealth of 85 global billionaires is equivalent to that of half the world’s population – or 3.5 billion people. The pope and Barack Obama have made tackling inequality a top priority for 2014, while the International Monetary Fund has warned that the growing divide between the haves and have-nots is leading to slower global growth.

Oxfam said the wealth gap in the UK was becoming more entrenched as a result of the ability of the better off to capture the lion’s share of the proceeds of growth. Since the mid-1990s, the incomes of the top 0.1% have grown by £461 a week or £24,000 a year. By contrast, the bottom 90% have seen a real terms increase of only £2.82 a week or £147 a year.

The charity said the trends in income had been made even more adverse by increases in the cost of living over the past decade. “Since 2003 the majority of the British public (95%) have seen a 12% real terms drop in their disposable income after housing costs, while the richest 5% of the population have seen their disposable income increase.”

Osborne will this week announce details of the government’s new cap on the welfare budget and has indicated that he wants up to £12bn a year cut from the benefits bill in order to limit the impact of future rounds of austerity on Whitehall departments.

Oxfam said that for the first time more working households were in poverty than non-working ones, and predicted that the number of children living below the poverty line could increase by 800,000 by 2020. It said cuts to social security and public services were meshing with falling real incomes and a rising cost of living to create a “deeply damaging situation” in which millions were struggling to get by.

The charity said that starting with this week’s budget, the government should balance its books by raising revenues from those that could afford it – “by clamping down on companies and individuals who avoid paying their fair share of tax and starting to explore greater taxation of extreme wealth”.

The IMF recently released research showing that the ever-greater concentration of wealth and income hindered growth and said redistribution would not just reduce inequality but would be economically beneficial.

“On average, across countries and over time, the things that governments have typically done to redistribute do not seem to have led to bad growth outcomes, unless they were extreme”, the IMF said in a research paper. “And the resulting narrowing of inequality helped support faster and more durable growth, apart from ethical, political or broader social considerations.”

Phillips said: “Increasing inequality is a sign of economic failure rather than success. It’s far from inevitable – a result of political choices that can be reversed. It’s time for our leaders to stand up and be counted on this issue.”

 

Duke of Westminster (Wealth: £7.9bn)

Gerald Grosvenor and his family owe the bulk of their wealth to owning 77 hectares (190 acres) of Mayfair and Belgravia, adjacent to Buckingham Palace and prime London real estate.

As the value of land rockets in the capital so too does the personal wealth of Grosvenor, formally the sixth Duke of Westminster and one of seven god parents to the new royal baby, Prince George.

The family also own 39,000 hectares in Scotland and 13,000 hectares in Spain, while their privately owned Grosvenor Estate property group has $20bn (£12bn) worth of assets under management including the Liverpool One shopping mall, according to leading US business magazine Forbes.

 

Reuben brothers (£6.9bn)

Simon and David Reuben made their early money out of metals. Born in India but brought up in London, they started in local scrap metal but branched out into trading tin and aluminium.

Their biggest break was to move into Russia just after the break-up of the Soviet Union, buying up half the country’s aluminium production facilities and befriending Oleg Deripaska, the oligarch associate of Nat Rothschild and Peter Mandelson.

The Reuben brothers are still involved in mining and metals but control a widely diversified business empire that includes property, 850 British pubs, and luxury yacht-maker Kristal Waters. They are also donors to the Conservative party.

 

Hinduja brothers (£6bn)

Srichand and Gopichand Hinduja co-chair the Hinduja Group, a multinational conglomerate with a presence in 37 countries and businesses ranging from trucks and lubricants to banking and healthcare.

They began their careers working in their father’s textile and trading businesses in Mumbai and Tehran, Iran but soon branched out by buying truck maker, Ashok Leyland from British Leyland and Gulf Oil from Chevron in the 1980s, while establishing banks in Switzerland and India in the 1990s.

The family’s London home is a mansion on Carlton House Terrace, overlooking St James Park and just along from Buckingham Palace, which is potentially worth £300m. They have links with the Labour party.

 

Cadogan family (£4bn)

The wealth of the Cadogans family is built on 90 acres36 hectares of property and land in Chelsea and Knightsbridge, west London.

Eton-educated Charles is the eighth Earl of Cadogan and ran the family business, Cadogan Estates, until 2012 when he handed it over to his son Edward, Viscount Chelsea.

Charles, who is a first cousin to the Aga Khan, started in the Coldstream Guards before going into the City.

He was briefly chairman of Chelsea Football Club in the early 1980s and his family motto is: “He who envies is the lesser man.”

 

Mike Ashley (£3.3bn)

Ashley owns Newcastle United football club and became a billionaire through his Sports Direct discount clothing chain which he started after leaving school.

He was the sole owner of the fast growing business, which snapped up brands such as Dunlop, Slazenger, Karrimor and Lonsdale, until it floated on the stock market in 2007. He now owns 62%.

Ashley is a regular visitor to London’s swankiest casinos but is famously publicity-averse.

 

17 March 2014

The Guardian

By Hozan Alan Senauke

Buddhadharma  recently asked Hozan Alan Senauke, Soto Zen priest and longtime peace activist, to offer some insight on the current conflict between Buddhist and Muslim ethnic groups in Burma. Below is his response — an excellent explanation not only of the conflict itself but of how we, as Western Buddhists, might try to make a difference.

Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world; by non-hatred only is hatred appeased.  This is an unending truth.  — Dhammapada, 5

On February 27, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) was ordered to close all its long-established clinics in Myanmar/Burma. They were accused of giving preferential treatment to Muslim Rohingya people. This was in response to statements by MSF about what they saw as ongoing and systematic attacks on Rohingyas in vulnerable communities of Burma’s western Rakhine state. According to UN documents, the latest of these attacks — in Du Chee Yar Tan village this January — left forty-eight Rohingya dead, mostly women and children, at the hands of Buddhist-based rioters and state security forces. MSF, with numerous clinics in the area, publicly reported that they had treated at least twenty-two victims.  The government of Myanmar has denied claims of these abuses, asserting that the UN’s and MSF’s facts and figures were “totally wrong.”

After negotiations, the government stepped back a little, allowing MSF to continue its HIV/AIDS work and other activities in Kachin and Shan states, as well as in the Yangon region. Rakhine state remains off-limits to MSF, despite the pressing needs of thousands from all religions and ethnicities who depend on their clinics.

Before going much further, I should say that nothing I write can convey the complexity of issues or the passion and fear that fire both sides. From my distant vantage point in the United States, I know that I can’t see the whole picture, which includes colonial history and geopolitics, along with regional and ethnic tensions within modern Myanmar.

Seven years ago, the junta’s harsh economic measures brought a daring movement into the streets of Burma’s towns and cities. That movement came to be called the “Saffron Revolution.” Many thousands of Burmese joined the tide of protest, led by monks and nuns who stood up to the armed troops of an entrenched military dictatorship. The vision of a river of robed monastics and stark images of courageous confrontations of activists and soldiers are still clear in my mind. It was inspiring to see Buddhist monks and nuns take the lead and bear great risk for the sake of their nation.

Inspiring as it was, the Saffron Revolution was crushed by the junta’s armed forces in the late days of September 2007.  Monasteries were emptied, with police cordons set up at their gates.  Thousands of monks, nuns, and supporters were thrown into prisons or disappeared.  An unknown number were killed. According to some reports, crematoriums on the outskirts of Yangon were operating night and day. When I visited Yangon with a small witness delegation in December of that year, we saw for ourselves the silent streets, empty monasteries, and the look of fear on people’s faces.

The Buddhist-led Saffron Revolution opened the world’s eyes to the plight of Burma. Images of brutality, violence, and murder — smuggled out at great risk — raised the stakes between the junta and citizenry.  The whole nation — citizens and junta alike — was shamed by these images.  That shame deepened the following year when Cyclone Nargis tore across southern Burma, leaving more than 150,000 dead and large areas of population and agricultural devastated.  The junta’s sluggish response and resistance to outside humanitarian relief drove the death toll higher. Once again, Burma was shamed before itself and the world.

In the spring of 2011, after fifty years of direct oppression, a flawed but nonetheless significant election seemed to set the course for a period of liberalization. Many of us were heartened by this change and by the return of Nobel-laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to active political life.  In time, almost all of the thousands of known political prisoners, many of them monks and nuns, were released, rededicating themselves to the building of a free society.

These changes, tentative as they seemed, were hopeful signs, acknowledged by the wide community of nations and by international nongovernmental organizations ready to help with resources and training. On my visits to Burma I could feel a burden of fear lifting and the sense that a future was possible.  Although there was still active fighting between government troops and rebel forces in Shan and Kachin states, it was possible to imagine an end to internal violence after so many years.

But in May 2012, the rape and murder of a woman in Rakhine state, which borders Bangladesh, touched off violence between groups of ethnically Buddhist Rakhine people and local communities of Muslim Rohingyas. Hundreds were killed, dozens of villages were looted and burned, and many Rohingyas fled to hastily constructed camps. The population of these camps is now approaching 200,000, out of an estimated population of 750,000 Muslims in Rakhine state.

Over the last two years, voices and acts of intolerance in Burma have been regularly in the news,  as have the government’s denials of discrimination or responsibility.  Burma’s minister of religious affairs, Sann Sint, a lieutenant general in the former junta, justified a boycott of Muslim businesses led by monks: “We are now practicing market economics,” he said. “Nobody can stop that. It is up to the consumers.”

In May 2013, authorities in Rakhine state announced a policy imposing a two-child limit on Muslim Rohingya families in two western townships, reinforcing the perception of ethnic cleansing in Burma. This alarming policy is the only known legal restriction of its kind today against a specific religious group.

According to the June 14, 2013 edition of The Irrawaddy, “About 200 senior Buddhist monks convening in Rangoon on Thursday have begun drafting a religious law that would put restrictions on marriages between Buddhist women and Muslim men.”

In July the international edition of Time magazine added fuel to the fire with a cover photo of the fundamentalist Burmese monk Wirathu, calling him “The Face of Buddhist Terror.”  President Thein Sein’s office released a statement about Wirathu and his fundamentalist 969 movement, saying 969 “is just a symbol of peace” and Wirathu is “a son of Lord Buddha.”

Anti-Islamic violence has spread to other areas of the country. March 2013 riots in Meikitla, in central Burma south of Mandalay, left forty-four people dead and thousands of homes consumed by flames.  Later, two days of violence between Buddhists and Muslims in Lashio — the largest town in Burma’s Shan state, near the Chinese border — left a mosque, an orphanage, and many shops destroyed by Buddhist-identified mobs roaming the streets on motorcycles.

Undoubtedly, there has been violence on both sides. But in each of these instances, the preponderance of organized reaction seems to be Buddhist-identified, often with leadership from monks, and with minimal response from the government and the Burmese army only after damage has been done. Local people describe the military as standing by and watching as the destruction unfolds.

This conflict has tangled roots, going back decades to the British colonial occupation and years before. But the current tensions also speak to contention over scarce agricultural land and economic resources that manifests as communal hostility. Rakhine state, an independent kingdom for several thousand years, was only absorbed into greater Burma at the end of the 18^th century, then ceded to the British only forty years later. Under the military dictatorship, Rakhine state was exploited by the generals for its rich natural resources and labor. In the north, it was pressed by an ever-expanding “Bengali” population of Muslim-majority Bangladesh. It is no surprise that Rakhine fear “Bengalis” and are suspicious of outsiders.

One wonders, too, whether we are seeing garden-variety religio- or ethno-centrism, a disease of group identity and privilege that is sadly endemic among humans?  Is there also a perverse political motivation in which the former military junta is “allowing” the violence so they can intervene and reassert their position as the preservers of social order in Burma?

Rohingyas have lived in Burma in Rakhine state for generations, and very likely for several hundred years, although the facts are hotly contested. The former military regime’s 1982 law excluded them from among the nation’s 135 recognized ethnicities, denying the Rohingyas citizenship and basic rights on the basis that they were in fact “Bengali,” having infiltrated Burma from the eastern region of the Indian Empire. Yet present-day neighbor Bangladesh denies citizenship to Rohingyas living within its own borders.  In the background, of course, is a fear rooted in the historical sweep of Islam across Buddhist and Hindu India and on, across large portions of Southeast Asia.

The Rakhine state region, with natural gas reserves and a long shoreline on the Indian Ocean, is also at play in geopolitical tensions between China and India, each with its eye on Burma’s wealth and strategic location.  It is not surprising that the United Nations views the Rohingyas as “one of the world’s most persecuted minorities.”

Myanmar/Burma is still in a delicate transition to democracy after fifty years of military dictatorship. The 2008 constitution reserves one quarter of the seats in both legislative bodies to delegates from the tatmadaw/military.  It is hard to imagine Burma going back to its dark ages, yet within recent memory we can recall the dissolution of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia into oppositional ethnic and religious enclaves when Soviet-style dictatorship ended.  One hopes against hope for better in Burma.  We look to the government of Burma, including President Thien Sein and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, to play an active and nonviolent role in resolving conflicts between Buddhists, Muslims, and all ethnic groups. Central to this resolution is a guarantee of citizenship as well as human and religious rights to all Burma’s diverse inhabitants. So far their response has been evasive.

At a press conference with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in early March of this year, Jim Brooke, editor of the Cambodia Daily, asked her to address the plight of Burma’s Rohingya People.  Suu Kyi’s response was indirect, to say the least.  She said:

In any society, when there are tensions between different communities, you have to first of all ensure security. People who are insecure will not be ready to sit down to talk to one another to sort out their problems. So if you ask me what the solution is to the problem in the Rakhine, I would say simply ‘I don’t know what the solution is completely, but one essential part of it is the establishment of the rule of law.’

It seems to me that when the house is burning down, it’s not the time to discuss the fire department’s management policy. At the same time, one can understand Daw Suu’s vulnerable political position as parliamentary elections approach in 2015.  Fundamentalist Buddhists have already begun to form alliances with the former junta generals to block Aung San Suu Kyi’s eligibility to stand for the Myanmar’s presidency.

The views of many “progressive” Buddhists are defensive and locked down with regard to Muslims. This can also be seen as an artifact of a military dictatorship that dismantled an excellent education system in a successful effort to replace knowledge with fear, mistrust, and superstition.  A friend recently returned from Myanmar, where she was evaluating a residential program in peacebuilding for Buddhist activists, reports that even voices of moderation, reflection, and dialogue are now being effectively silenced.

A monk in Sittwe, capital of Myanmar’s Rakhine State, told my friend:

Rakhine [people] do not like the talk of foreigners on human rights, and their suggestions to accept Muslims. The Rakhine have too much fear and lack trust…. They fear Muslims will take over their land, and feel betrayed by foreigners who come to help Muslims and not them.

I don’t assume that the concerns of Rakhine Buddhists have no factual basis. Violence by individual Muslims is also part of the picture. But it might be that the fears and acts of Buddhists — effectively, the demonization of Rohingyas and of Muslims throughout Burma — are creating the very conditions they fear most, with an increasing internationalization of an organized and potentially violent Islamic pushback.

Burma seems headed into a maelstrom of intercommunal conflict.  And this may very well fit the purposes of still-powerful generals and politicians whose vision is to create a strong nationalist entity with a Burmese Buddhist identity. Ethnic confrontation in Burma challenges many of our cherished ideas of a “peaceful” Buddhism and religious fellowship. We know that the Buddha’s teaching and example are profoundly nonviolent, but for those of us inside and outside Burma who may have idealized a Buddhist-based nonviolent movement for democracy and human rights there, violence in Rakhine State and elsewhere is a discouraging reality.

And this is not confined to Burma. A decade of conflict between Buddhists and Muslims in southern Thailand has left more than 6,000 dead and 10,000 injured.  In Sri Lanka, after the murderous suppression of a Hindu Tamil minority in the north by Singhalese Buddhist nationalist military, tensions between Buddhists and Muslims have taken center stage.  In the modern era, we see again and again that where a national state and religious identity merge, nothing wholesome will emerge.

I know there are countless open-minded citizens, monks, and nuns in Burma who desire peace and harmony among all religions and ethnicities. May they have the courage to speak out. And may they remember that what happens in the name of Buddhism affects how people around the world view this precious path that we strive to follow. Shakyamuni Buddha lived in a place and age of great diversity and change. He never taught fear. He never advocated violence. He did not hesitate to speak out for what was right and just.  I would hope that Buddhists of today, whether they are in Burma or the West, would hold themselves to the same high standard. May all beings live in safety and happiness.

Hozan Alan Senauke
Clear View Project
March 2014

 

Postscript: What Can I Do?

Many Buddhists and concerned people in the West want to know what we can do to be of help in this painful situation.  Over the last two years I have organized and taken part in letter-writing campaigns to Myanmar’s government, the United Nations, and the U. State Department by citizens and Buddhist teachers from Asia and the West. So far, to no avail. By long habit, the government of Myanmar is relatively heedless of outside criticism, and they know that money from developed nations will continue to flow in their direction so long as Burma has resources to sell.

Nonetheless, we have to try.  Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield just returned from Burma, and he suggests the following:

Write or contact your congresspeople and the State Department, pressing the US not to support major aid, business deals, and especially military collaboration with Burma unless the Burmese government stands up for human rights for all groups. Western Buddhist can write to Myanmar’s Ministry of Religious Affairs www.mora.gov.mm/ expressing your concerns.

I would also urge you to stay informed and be watchful. Online publications like www.irrawaddy.org/, as well as conventional sources like the New York Times and the BBC, do a good job following this issue.

I am encouraged by discussions that took place at last November’s conference of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (www.inebnetwork.org/) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Throughout the conference, Burmese Buddhists and Muslims held a daily dialogue behind closed doors, where they could begin to map out both differences and possible solutions. Growing from these discussions, a commission of inquiry has been organized by a recently formed International Forum on Buddhist-Muslim Relations. This fact-finding commission plans to meet and collaborate with local civil-society bodies inside Myanmar. It will have three primary objectives:

1. to bring forth the facts of Buddhist-Muslim conflict in Myanmar;
2. to ascertain the causes of this conflict;
3. to develop resources and proposals for the establishment of inter-religious peace and harmony in Myanmar.

People of Burma and of the whole Southeast Asian region will need to solve these problems by their own agency.  I believe they can do this, and they will need us to bear witness and lend support.  In time we will be able to offer help.

As the situation evolves, I will do my best to keep you informed in these pages and on the Clear View Project website and blog (www.clearviewproject.org).

—  A.S.

Hozan Alan Senauke is vice-abbot of Berkeley Zen Center in California, where he lives with his family. As a socially engaged Buddhist activist, Alan has worked closely with Buddhist Peace Fellowship and the International Network of Engaged Buddhists since 1991. In 2007 he founded Clear View Project, developing Buddhist-based resources for relief and social change in Asia and the United States.

March 18, 2014 – 12:43 pm

By PIEF

 

Joining his voice to those of the churches in Palestine and Israel, the World Council of Churches (WCC) general secretary Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit has expressed “grave concern” about a law recently passed by the Israeli Knesset or parliament.

The law passed by the Knesset on 24 February would define the status of Palestinian Arab Christians in the state of Israel.

Top officials of the Catholic Church in the Holy Land have said that this new law “introduces a distinction between Christian and Muslim Palestinians and states that Christian Palestinians are Christians and not Palestinians”.

In a statement issued on 18 March, Tveit called on “Israeli authorities to reverse this law to stop an injustice against the Christian citizens of Israel”.

He encouraged the WCC member churches to “raise this issue with representatives of Israel and with their own governments”, urging reversal of this law.

Tveit said that this law establishes a “legislative distinction between the indigenous Palestinian Arab Christians and Palestinian Arab Muslims, both of whom are citizens of the State of Israel”. This distinction, he stressed, is an “unacceptable severing of entire communities from their cultural identity”.

Tveit added that the “Knesset has transgressed all proper distinctions between state and religious authority by attempting to define the nature and character of Christian communities within Israel against their own will and self-understanding”.

Warning of the adverse implications of this law, Tveit said that “rather than creating divisions among communities, the Knesset should pave the way for breaking down barriers that divide people according to ethnicity and religion.”

Tveit echoed heads of the Catholic Church in Israel, who stressed that “it is not the right or the duty of the Israeli civil authorities to tell us who we are”.

The Catholic Church leaders have called this law part of a campaign which was aimed at drafting Christian Palestinians into the Israeli military. “This campaign clearly has as its aim to divide Christians from their Muslim compatriots. However, it is equally dangerous because it will divide Christians among themselves even further,” they said.

The WCC has long affirmed the right of religious communities to define themselves, condemning the manipulation of religious identity for political gains.

 

19 March 2014

http://dv25.oikoumene.org/

 By Ramzy Baroud

Long before the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment campaign inched slowly from the fringes of global solidarity with Palestinians to take center stage, Tony Benn had been advocating a boycott of Israel with unrestricted conviction, for years.

“Britain should offer its support for this strategy by stopping all arms sales to Israel, introducing trade sanctions and a ban on all investment there together with a boycott of Israeli goods here and make it a condition for the lifting of these measures that Israel complies with these demands at once,” Benn wrote in his blog on April 19, 2002, under the title “A STATE OF PALESTINE NOW”. The ‘strategy’ of which Ben spoke was for Arafat to declare a state, and for ‘friendly nations’ to recognize it.

Yes, the title was all in caps. It was as if Benn, a principled British left wing politician, had wanted to loudly accentuate his insistence that the Palestinian people deserved their rights, freedom and sovereignty. He was as bold and courageous as any man or woman of true values and principles should always be. He remained uncompromising in matters of human rights and justice. This international warrior left a challenging space to fill when he passed away at the age of 88, on Thursday, March 13.

Following the news of his death, British media was awash of reports about Benn and his long legacy of being a stubborn politician and uncompromising advocate for human rights. Frankly, there was less emphasis on the latter and much more on the former, despite the fact that Benn understood politics was a platform to quarrel with moral dilemmas. The parliament was a platform to serve the people, not to conspire with other politicians for the sake of one’s party. For some politicians, it is all about winning elections, not using office to carry out a morally-grounded mandate to serve the people. Benn was different, thus there was the love-hate relationship Britain had with him.

True to form, British media immediately conjured up a few buzzwords by which it attempted to define Benn’s legacy. He had ‘immatured with age,” was one of them. It was a remark made by Benn’s fiercest rival in the Labor Party, Harold Wilson (still alive at 96) in reference to Benn’s becoming more of a radical left-winger as he grew older. Some in the media simply love axioms and catch phrases, for it spares journalists the pain of exhaustive research. Wilson and his camp invested heavily in assigning Benn the responsibility of the successive defeats experienced by the Labor Party at the hands of the Conservatives. Indeed, Margaret Thatcher and then John Major had won four elections in a row, and between them changed the face of British economy and quashed major labor unions. But blaming Benn for splitting the party is unfair to say the least.

Compare Tony Benn’s legacy with that of Tony Blair. The first was principled to the core, boldly challenged US hegemony in the world, and fought hard for Britain’s poor, working class and against unhindered globalization that made states vulnerable to the inherent disparity of the global economic system.

Blair stood for the exact opposite: a self-serving politician, devoid of any morality, and was rightly dubbed Bush’s poodle for heeding to the US military adventurism, mainly in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Benn, even from the point of view of those who disagreed with him, was always seen, and shall always be remembered as a man of high values. Blair had been districted by his own peers even before he was forced to concede office. One can imagine that Israeli media is the one likely to remember Blair with much fondness.

 

Although Benn seemed guided by the same high moral values that accompanied him throughout the over 50 years in which he served as an MP in the British parliament, when he retired in 2001, he seemed ready to take on even bigger challenges. His task morphed from that of a fierce politician at home, fighting for the very definition of the Labor Party, to an internationalist, taking on the most difficult of subjects, and never bowing down.

Following the US-British so-called ‘war on terror’ – designed around economic and strategic interests – Benn rose to greater prominence, not as another TV celebrity ‘expert’, but as a fierce opponent to the US and his own government’s wholesale slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Since then, the man never stayed away from the streets. He spoke with passion and mesmerized audiences in his beautiful, immaculate English. Most important about the timing of Benn’s courageous stances was the fact that back then, all public discourses related to the wars were saturated with fear. But, whenever Benn spoke, he pushed the narrative up to higher degrees of audacity.

I listened to him once speak at Trafalgar Square in London. He wore a Kuffiya, the traditional Palestinian headscarf. He spoke of Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, as if their peoples were his own. Thousands of us applauded with so much enthusiasm. It was as if his words alone were the salvation that would free Arab nations from the bondage of military occupation and war. But at times, words live in a sphere of their own where they multiply, and when repeated often enough, can change the world.

“The main responsibility for the appalling crimes being perpetrated against the Palestinians must be equally shared between Jerusalem and Washington for successive American governments have funded Israel, armed Israel and used their veto at the Security Council to protect Israel from being forced to comply with what world opinion wanted,” he said in 2003, in an interview with Egypt-based Al Ahram.

True, Benn was not the only British politician who spoke with such candor about the shared responsibility of crimes committed against Palestinians, but few went as far as he did.

The next time there is a rally for Palestine, there ought to be an empty chair with a Palestinian Kuffiya, and the name of Tony Benn. It is a Palestinian tradition to honor its heroes, even those with a splendidly beautiful British accent.

Ramzy Baroud is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com.

 

19 March, 2014

Countercurrents.org

By Rohini Hensman

The cornerstone of Modi’s and the BJP’s campaign for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections is that the UPA has ruined the Indian economy and the BJP led by Modi will make it boom. These claims have been reinforced by corporate adulation for Modi in his ‘Vibrant Gujarat’ summits [1] and surveys showing that almost 75% of top corporate CEOs want him to be the PM [2]. How valid are these claims?

The UPA’s performance

The economic reforms initiated by the Congress government in the 1990s raised the GDP growth rate from an average of around 3.5% per annum since Independence to more than 9% between 2005-06 and 2007-08 [3], before dropping to 6.7% in 2008-2009 as a result of the global crisis [4]. Global competition forced manufacturers of products like electrical and electronic goods to improve the quality and reduce the prices of their products. Computers, internet access and mobile phones became much more widely available.

However, neoliberal policies that were part of the changes had serious negative consequences. Privatisation was in many cases accompanied by massive corruption (e.g. the CWG and 2G scams), as politicians and bureaucrats received kickbacks from the corporates they favoured. In other cases, even if there were no kickbacks, lack of adequate regulation allowed corporates to make windfall profits, while public sector banks offered them generous loans without exercising due diligence. The campaign by industrialists for the abolition of protective labour laws reached a crescendo during the NDA regime. It stopped when the UPA came to power, but the anti-labour atmosphere had already influenced state labour departments and even the judiciary to such a degree that workers struggling for their rights were seldom successful.

The result of these trends was a huge increase in inequality. At the top, a few capitalists became dollar billionaires, joining the global rich. Just below them, 10-15% of the population became a prosperous middle class. But for the vast majority there was no improvement. Between the top and the bottom there was an unbridgeable gulf.

These developments were not peculiar to India . A wave of neoliberalism was sweeping through the world. What does this mean? The only interest of most capitalists is to maximise their profits regardless of the damage they do to the economy. If reducing wages below subsistence and destroying the environment boosts profits, so be it; if gambling with worthless derivatives promises trillions, then go for it. If privatisation of public utilities like electricity and water offers huge profits to a few, then that is the way to go, even if it reduces the profits of many others and imposes an intolerable burden on non-coporate users. But normally the state, even if it supports capitalism, takes a broader view. It may regulate the banking sector so that it is not threatened with collapse if risky investments go wrong. It may nationalise railways and public utilities so as to reduce costs for all capitalists. It may even invest in health and education in the interests of a better labour force.

The peculiarity of a neoliberal regime is that the state takes the standpoint of individual capitalists and allows them to do what they want rather than protecting the system as a whole. The corruption unleashed by this regime in countries like the US has been phenomenal. Mortgage providers ramped up the housing market to astronomical levels by offering large mortgages to buyers who would never be able to pay them back. Investment banks then ‘bundled toxic mortgages into complex financial instruments, got credit rating agencies to rate them as AAA securities, and sold them to investors, magnifying and spreading risk throughout the financial system, and all too often betting against the instruments they sold…’ [5]. The outcome was the global crisis of 2008, resulting in millions of homes, jobs and pensions lost on one side, while on the other side gigantic fortunes were made. Years later, some of these banks were penalised, but their CEOs were not [6]. Credit rating agencies too came under fire for giving triple-A ratings to junk; Standard & Poors even faced a civil suit [7]. Yet they too remained in operation.

This background is important in understanding what has been happening in the Indian economy. The global crisis hit all countries across the world. India , because its economy was not fully neoliberalised, did better than most. Its relatively well-regulated banking sector survived, though not unscathed: generous loans given to corporates like Kingfisher Airlines without proper scrutiny of their ability to repay piled up on the balance-sheets of the banks as non-performing assets [8]. This has justifiably been seen as collusion between bank managements and corporates to rob the public of over 3 lakh crores over the past two years [9]. The Finance Ministry and Reserve Bank acknowledged the scale of the problem in November 2013, and pledged to take steps to deal with it [10]. Recession and austerity in developed countries hit exports from India , which in turn hit employment, reducing wage expenditure and demand. Paradoxically NREGA, which had been intiated before the crisis, acted as a stimulus package, creating employment, helping to raise agricultural wages and preventing the collapse of rural spending power. But the middle classes, who had been doing so well before the crisis, saw their future and the future of their children threatened.

The net result in India has been a slow-down in economic growth and high rates of inflation, which are causes for concern but not nearly as catastrophic as the slow-down in developed countries. According to Shankar Sharma, a director at one of India ‘s leading investment brokers, First Global, ‘ India ‘s current economic management is inarguably the best that we have… In the last nine years, India has grown at about seven and a half percent compounded. But more importantly, in this ten years, debt to GDP has come down from 91 percent to 67 percent’ [11]. APCO Worldwide agrees with this assessment of the UPA’s economic performance: ‘ India today is a trillion-dollar market with an enviable rate of GDP growth. India ‘s economy is fueled by the combination of a large services sector, a strong and diversified manufacturing base and a significant agricultural sector that continues to provide a framework for the growth of the domestic economy. The country’s resilience in weathering the recent global downturn and financial crisis has made governments, policy-makers, economists, corporate houses and fund managers believe that India can play a significant role in the recovery of the global economy in the months and years ahead’ [12].

This is a very different picture from the constant BJP blitzkrieg blaring the allegation that the UPA has made a mess of India ‘s economy. Given that APCO is the PR firm hired by the state government of Gujarat from 2009 to 2013 at a reported cost of $ 25,000 a month to promote Modi’s Vibrant Gujarat [13], it can hardly be accused of pro-Congress bias. Moreover, while rampant corruption during the UPA regime is undeniable, it also enacted the Right to Information (RTI) Act, which played a considerable role in exposing corruption. If the BJP’s anti-UPA propaganda is economical with the truth, what about its pro-Gujarat propaganda?

Corruption, poverty and pollution in Vibrant Gujarat

The average GDP growth rate in Gujarat over the past ten years has been above the national average, but in line with the growth rates of comparable large states like Maharashtra , Tamil Nadu and Delhi [14]. Gujarat’s growth has been achieved at the cost of handing over complete control over the economy to corporates, and wholesale privatisation: ‘Key sectors – traditionally held to be the preserve of the state – such as ports, roads, rail and power have been handed over to corporate capital. This has meant, inevitably, that the government has abdicated all decision making powers, as well as functional and financial control over such projects. Nowhere else in the country has this abdication of responsibility been so total, nowhere else has the state given over the economy so entirely to the corporates and private investors ‘. Infrastructure and access to water and electricity favour industry over agriculture and individual consumers. Employment growth in manufacturing and services turned negative in the last five years, and even prior to that was concentrated in the informal sector [15].

The Modi administration’s largesse to corporates can be judged by two examples. One is the staggering subsidies offered to Tata for its Nano plant and other projects. Against an investment of 2900 crores, Tata received a loan of 9570 crores at 0.1% interest, to be paid back on a monthly basis after 20 years, in addition to land at much below market rates, with stamp duty, registration charges and electricity paid for by the state. Tax breaks mean that the people of Gujarat will not be getting any of this money back in the near future [16]. All the rules were bent to provide Adani with a power supply contract costing the state of Gujarat an excess Rs 23,625 crores over 25 years [17], and other companies, including Reliance Industries and Essar Steel, were extended similar favours [18]. So when these companies praise Modi to the skies [1], support his candidature for PM [2], use the media they own to promote Modi and silence criticism of him [19], and put their aircraft at his disposal [20], this is merely quid pro quo.

Any objective definition of ‘corruption’ would include such activities. The scale of corruption in Gujarat is stupendous, and those who campaign against it have not fared well. With only 5% of India ‘s population, 22% of the murders and 20% of the assaults of RTI activists in recent years have occurred in Gujarat , which has only two RTI Commissioners compared to eight in Maharashtra and nine in Tamil Nadu [21]. The post of Lokayukta (corruption watchdog) was not filled for ten years since 2003. When the Governor and Chief Justice of the High Court selected Justice R. A. Mehta for the post in 2011, as they were empowered to do according to the Gujarat Lokayukta Act, Modi fought tooth and nail against the appointment, reportedly spending Rs 45 crores to challenge it all the way up to the Supreme Court. Even after the Supreme Court had upheld the appointment, the state government refused to cooperate with Mehta, leading him to decline the position [22]. Subsequently the state government amended the Lokayukta Act to make it a toothless body under the control of the very government whose corruption it was supposed to monitor [23]! Apparently Modi learned a lesson from the fate of his friend Yedyurappa, former BJP Chief Minister of Karnataka, who was forced to resign due to corruption charges against him initiated by the Karnataka Lokayukta [24], and resolved never to give any Lokayukta the opportunity to do the same to him.

The ordinary people of Gujarat have paid a heavy price for its economic growth. Gujarat has one of the highest poverty levels of all the Indian states. Huge swathes of land allocated to corporates have displaced lakhs of farmers, fishermen, pastoralists, agricultural workers, Dalits and Adivasis. During Modi’s tenure, 16,000 workers, farmers and farm labourers had committed suicide due to economic distress by 2011 [25]. Gujarat has the highest prevalence of hunger and lowest human development indices among states with comparable per capita income, its implementation of NREGA is the worst among large states, and Muslims, ‘in particular, fare poorly on parameters of poverty, hunger, education and vulnerability on security issues’ [26]. Refuting Modi’s claim that the high level of malnutrition in Gujarat is a consequence of vegetarianism and figure-consciousness, an eminent scholar has pointed out that the real reasons are extremely low wage rates, malfunctioning of nutrition schemes, lack of potable water supplies, and lack of sanitation: the state ranks 10 th in the use of toilets, with more than 65% of households defecating in the open, with resulting high levels of jaundice, diarrhoea, malaria and other diseases [27]. Uncontrolled pollution has destroyed the livelihoods of farmers and fishermen, and subjected the local populations to skin diseases, asthma, TB, cancer and death [28].

Contrary to the myth that Gujarat is a powerhouse attracting large FDI inflows, in 2012-13 its share in FDI was a meagre 2.38%, ranked 6 th , compared to Maharashtra ‘s 39.4% [29]. Most damning of all, for a state that purports to provide a template for the whole country’s economy, is the Modi government’s ‘lack of financial discipline. The Gujarat growth pattern relies on indebtedness. The state’s debt increased from Rs 45,301 crore in 2002 to Rs. 1,38,978 crore in 2013… In terms of per capita indebtedness, the situation is even more worrying, given the size of the state: each Gujarati carries a debt of Rs 23,163 if the population is taken to be 60 million’ [30].

The Gujarat economic model is a more extreme version of neoliberalism than the version practised by the UPA, which retains elements of regulation and social welfare. This is clearly the reason why the majority of CEOs want him to be the PM. It bothers them that the policy of endless credit from public sector banks has come under scrutiny by the UPA, and billionaires like Sahara boss Subrata Roy can be arrested for robbing small investors of Rs 20,000 crores [31]. They look forward to a Modi regime where they can continue to loot the public unhindered by regulations, where small concessions to working people like NREGA and the Food Security Act can be shelved, and the NDA’s old programme of scrapping protective labour legislation can finally be realised. Importers of gold and other luxury consumption goods can’t wait to have a PM who is clueless about technicalities like current account deficits and fiscal deficits and would allow the whole country to become as indebted as Gujarat is today [32]. It is also instructive that the very same ratings agencies and investment banks indicted for making trillions by bringing down the US economy and causing a global crisis (see [5] and [7]) have been busy downgrading the UPA economy [33] and batting for Modi [34]. All these firms, Indian and international, would be least bothered if the Indian economy were to crash; they would have parked their profits elsewhere by then.

Modi’s policies are exactly the same as those which destroyed the economy of the US , the richest country in the world, resulting in the global crisis: wholesale privatisation and deregulation, extreme disparities in wealth, and unsustainable indebtedness. And they would have the same results in India , such as massive job losses, and worse. The US dollar has maintained much of its value because it is a global reserve currency, and other countries buy it in order to maintain their currency reserves. The Indian rupee is not a global reserve currency, and there is nothing to stop it from plummeting due to the rising deficits, leading to runaway inflation many times worse than India has ever experienced. Ironically, it is the same sections of the middle class who look to Modi as their saviour who would be hardest hit, because they have so much more to lose than the poor, who would also be hit.

Perhaps Modi would leave the economy to be handled by others in the BJP, but who is competent to do it? Yashwant Sinha, the finance minister during the NDA regime, does not exactly inspire confidence. ‘In 1990, Sinha was finance minister in the government of Chandrashekhar, when the bottom fell out of the Indian economy. The government’s policy response then was to ship all the gold in the Reserve Bank of India ‘s vaults off to the Bank of England as collateral for a loan… In 1998, by a peculiar coincidence, Sinha was again finance minister, this time in the BJP-led NDA coalition government… In March 2001, soon after Sinha presented his Budget, India experienced one of its worst market crashes: about $32 billion worth of market capitalisation was wiped out that month… In the NDA era, a little less than $4 billion entered India each year on average. Under the UPA, this number stands at a little less than $25 billion, more than six times the NDA average’ [35]. According to investment broker Shankar Sharma, ‘The BJP is the only mainstream political party that has no economist. And the BJP rule between 1999 and 2004 had the worst nominal GDP growth in the last 30 years in India , the worst by far. They ran the country into a huge debt trap. India ‘s debt to GDP ratio went from about 78 percent in 1999 to 91 percent by 2004. So again, whatever GDP growth the BJP delivered in those five years, the growth was with very high debt’ [11].

At a time of downturn and global crisis, putting India ‘s economy in the hands of a party that has no competent economist is tantamount to economic suicide. In accordance with their-frog-in-the-well perspective, Modi and the BJP never mention the global crisis or inquire into its causes. Anyone who takes the trouble to do so would realise that the ‘medicine’ they prescribe for the economy, which is suffering from slow poisoning by neoliberalism, is a lethal dose of the same poison.

Do the Left parties and the Aam Aadmi Party offer viable alternatives?

The Left parties failed to deliver a better model of development during more than thirty years in power in West Bengal , culminating in the Nandigram and Singur violence [36]. The Paschim Banga Khet Mazoor Samity had been demanding a rural employment guarantee scheme for decades, but the Left Front government refused even to consider it until NREGA was enacted by the UPA. The lack of an alternative was demonstrated most starkly over the issue of FDI in multibrand retail, where they formed a united front with the NDA to oppose it [37] rather than thinking of anything more principled and imaginative like forming consumer cooperatives which draw in street vendors. The failure of the Left parties to offer any economic alternative is particularly disappointing because they do have a critique of neoliberalism, and can at least be counted on to oppose the wholesale privatisation and deregulation of the economy or attempts to scrap protective labour legislation and welfare schemes.

AAP has a one-point economic programme: eliminating corruption. Their Jan Lokpal Bill, through which they hope to achieve this, sees all corruption as emanating from the state, and affecting only corporates that have a relationship with the state: a view entirely compatible with neoliberal World Bank anti-corruption programmes [38]. Its economic model is neoliberalism purged of corruption and ‘crony capitalism’. This comes through in their recent speeches. Privatisation is good, because ‘Government has no business doing business, it only has to govern. Business should all be held by the private sector,’ according to Arvind Kejriwal, who made a point of saying that the party disagreed with the economic views of Prashant Bhushan, the left-wing face of AAP [39]. AAP objects to industrialists like the Ambanis getting favoured treatment, but former banker Meera Sanyal clarified that they want to create the conditions in which all ‘hard working entrepreneurial, highly innovative people can feed themselves and their families’, suggesting that the state would help all capitalists equally [40]. Yogendra Yadav said that ‘Food subsidies should not be provided,’ and that the party stands for ‘clean politics, pro-business deregulation, non-interference of the state and not to serve the interests of crony capitalists’ [41].

This economic model is as neoliberal as Modi’s and more neoliberal than the UPA model, which still has elements of regulation and social justice. It offers nothing to workers and the poor, and would do nothing to reduce inequality. With their exclusive focus on an extremely narrow definition of corruption, AAP ignores the underlying disease of which it is a symptom – extreme inequality resulting from neoliberalism – and their policies would in fact exacerbate the basic problem. In theory, their model would be free of ‘crony capitalism’, but whether AAP can actually eliminate corruption is questionable, given that much of the corruption during the UPA regime has been the consequence of pro-business deregulation. Finally, their government’s grant of electricity subsidies to supporters who had not paid their bills but not to non-supporters who had paid their bills (subsequently stayed by the High Court) [42] sounds suspiciously like quid pro quo: you vote for us, we give you subsidies.

Conclusion

For years the BJP, Modi, the corporates which support him and the media they control have bombarded us relentlessly with propaganda and lies about the mess that the UPA has made of the economy and the shining success of ‘vibrant Gujarat’. In reality, we find that the UPA regime suffers from the same problems as other neoliberal regimes and has done better than most, while Modi’s policies would have catastrophic consequences for the Indian economy. AAP’s policies would not be much better: they would benefit a wider layer of entrepreneurs – say 3-5% of the population compared with Modi’s 0.1% – but scrapping food subsidies would make the poor poorer, so inequality would be greater than under the UPA. The UPA and Left parties seem to be the best of a bad lot so far as economic policy is concerned.

Does this mean that there is no better alternative to current policies? Far from it. Perhaps before the next Lok Sabha elections we will have a party opposing sops and subsidies to the rich, loss of lives and livelihoods due to expensive, dangerous and polluting nuclear power plants and weapons, the privatisation of public utilities, education and health care, and much more. A party which would stand for reducing inequality through (1) raising wages by protecting the right of all employees, regardless of their place of work or employment status, to unionise and bargain collectively without fear of victimisation; (2) putting in place a comprehensive system of progressive taxation to help fund the provision of education, health care and social security for all; and (3) creating employment through various measures such as (a) shortening statutory working hours to 40 per week and enforcing this measure; (b) expanding NREGA and including new projects such as water harvesting and rural electrification through small renewable energy projects; and (c) supporting the formation of workers’ cooperatives in agriculture, industry and services. Until then, mass movements have to continue fighting for such goals.

Those who think these goals belong to an obsolete left-wing economic model would do well to listen to Christine Lagarde: ‘Let me be frank: in the past, economists have underestimated the importance of inequality. They have focused on economic growth, on the size of the pie rather than its distribution. Today, we are more keenly aware of the damage done by inequality. Put simply, a severely skewed income distribution harms the pace and sustainability of growth over the longer term. It leads to an economy of exclusion, and a wasteland of discarded potential’ [43]. These are not the words of a left-winger but of the head of the International Monetary Fund, the financial institution which, along with the World Bank, has done the most to impose neoliberal policies on the world. If she can see the writing on the wall for neoliberalism, it is high time that policy-makers and the public in India followed suit.

 

Rohini Hensman is a writer and researcher active in workers’ rights, women’s rights, anti-communal and anti-war movements.

 

19 March, 2014

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