Just International

Indian tycoon gets builds world’s first billion-dollar home

Mukesh Ambani is having a few friends round to celebrate moving into his new Mumbai pad. But as the home has 27 storeys, soars to 173 metres and is worth an estimated £630m, it will be a housewarming like no other.

The building – named Antilia, after a mythical island – will be home to Ambani, the richest man in Indiaand the fourth richest in the world, plus his wife and their three children. It contains a health club with a gym and dance studio, at least one swimming pool, a ballroom, guestrooms, a variety of lounges and a 50-seater cinema.

Those lucky enough to have received an invitation to the housewarming later this month will be able to choose a variety of means of transport to get there.

If they want to avoid Mumbai’s gridlock, there are three helicopter pads on the roof. If they do drive, they will not have any trouble parking: there is space for 160 vehicles on the lower floors.

Once in, nine lifts will take the guests from the lobby to upper levels, where the festivities will take place.

On the top floors, with a sweeping view of the city and out over the Arabian Sea, are quarters for the 53-year-old tycoon and his family. Overall, there is reported to be 37,000 sq metres of space, more than the Palace of Versailles. To keep things running smoothly, there is a staff of 600.

It cost an estimated £44m to build but, because of Mumbai’s astronomic land and property prices, will be worth about 15 times that amount – £630m. “Antilia is marvellous, I remember a Picasso painting [there], it was one of its kind – stunning,” one local businessman who visited the building gushed to the Times of India newspaper.

Experts say there is no other private property of comparable size and prominence in the world.

According to Forbes magazine, Ambani, who owns much of Reliance Industries, is worth £18bn. He ran the oil, retail and biotechnology conglomerate with his brother Anil until they fell out several years ago.

But Mukesh was always known as the quieter of the brothers and there is surprise that he has made such a public statement of his immense wealth. A deeply private man, he has distanced himself from the flamboyance of India’s ultra-rich, preferring home cooking to haute cuisine and local fashions to western suits.

The Ambanis had been living in a converted 14-storey apartment block.

“Perhaps he has been stung by his portrayal in the media as an introvert. Maybe he is making the point that he is a tycoon in his own right,” said Hamish McDonald, author of Ambani and Sons, a history of the business – India’s biggest privately owned company.

An asymmetric stack of glass, steel and tiles with a four-storey hanging garden, Ambani’s new home has been built, reports say, with local materials as far as possible. According to Forbes magazine, the plants save energy by absorbing sunlight, making it easier to keep the interior cool in summer and warm in winter.

Billionaire’s bling is not absent – hence the glass and gold chandeliers hanging from the ballroom ceiling. Interior design of Antilia was overseen by an American firm and is described as “Asian contemporary”. It has apparently been influenced by vaastu, an Indian tradition close to feng shui which supposedly allows positive energies to move through the building.

India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has previously called on business leaders to “eschew conspicuous consumption” and “be role models of moderation”.

Shiny Varghese, deputy editor of the Indian magazine Design Today, said the Ambanis’ house was the ultimate expression of a much broader trend. “It’s so obscenely lavish that I’m not sure too many people will go all that way, but we are heading into the sort of culture where money is not a question when setting up a home,” he said. “The lavishness is huge.

“People are now happy to spend 100,000 rupees (£1,400) on a chair.”

Friends defended Ambani from charges of ostentation in a city where millions live in slums. “He can’t just walk into a cinema and watch a film like you or me,” one associate told the Guardian. “So he has built a house to his requirements like anyone else would. It’s a question of convenience and requirements. It’s only a family home, just a big one. It’s just another home that someone is living in. It’s no big event.”

Jason Burke

guardian.co.uk,

Wednesday 13 October 2010

In Struggle With The American Mind

Since The Great Flood hit Pakistan in July …

  • many millions have been displaced, evacuated, stranded or lost their homes; numerous roads, schools and health clinics destroyed
  • hundreds of villages washed away
  • millions of livestock have perished; for the rural poor something akin to a Western stock market crash that wipes out years of savings
  • countless farms decimated, including critical crops like corn; officials say the damage is in the hundreds of millions of dollars and it does not appear that Pakistan will recover within the next few years
  • infectious diseases are rising sharply
  • airplanes of the United States of America have flown over Pakistan and dropped bombs on dozens of occasions 1

I direct these remarks to readers who have to deal with Americans who turn into a stone wall upon hearing the United States accused of acting immorally; America, they are convinced, means well; our motives are noble. And if we do do something that looks bad, and the badness can’t easily be covered up or explained away … well, great powers have always done things like that, we’re no worse than the other great powers of history, and a lot better than most. God bless America.

A certain percentage of such people do change eventually and stop rationalizing; this happens usually after being confronted X-number of times with evidence of the less-than-beautiful behavior of their government around the world. The value of X of course varies with the individual; so don’t give up trying to educate the hardened Americans you come in contact with. You never know when your enlightening them about a particular wickedness of their favorite country will be the straw that breaks their imperialist-loving back. (But remember the warning from Friedrich Schiller of Germany: Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens. — “With stupidity even the gods struggle in vain.”)

Here’s a recent revelation of wickedness that might serve to move certain of the unenlightened: New evidence has recently come to light that reinforces the view of a CIA role in the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of The Congo following its independence from Belgium in 1960. The United States didn’t pull the trigger, but it did just about everything else, including giving the green light to the Congolese officials who had kidnaped Lumumba. CIA Station Chief Larry Devlin, we now know, was consulted by these officials about the transfer of Lumumba to his sworn enemies. Devlin signaled them that he had no objection to it. Lumumba’s fate was sealed.2

It was a classic Cold War example of anti-communism carried to absurd and cruel lengths. Years later, Under Secretary of State C. Douglas Dillon told a Senate investigating committee that the National Security Council and President Eisenhower had believed in 1960 that Lumumba was a “very difficult if not impossible person to deal with, and was dangerous to the peace and safety of the world .” 3 This statement moved author Jonathan Kwitny to observe:

How far beyond the dreams of a barefoot jungle postal clerk in 1956, that in a few short years he would be dangerous to the peace and safety of the world! The perception seems insane, particularly coming from the National Security Council, which really does have the power to end all human life within hours. 4

President Eisenhower personally gave the order to kill the progressive African leader. 5

We can’t know for sure what life for the Congolese people would have been like had Lumumba been allowed to remain in office. But we do know what followed his assassination — one vicious dictator after another presiding over 50 years of mass murder, rape, and destruction as competing national forces and neighboring states fought endlessly over the vast mineral wealth in the country. The Congo would not hold another democratic election for 46 years.

Overthrowing a country’s last great hope, with disastrous consequences, is an historical pattern found throughout the long chronicle of American imperialist interventions, from Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s to Haiti and Afghanistan in the 1990s, with many examples in between. Washington has been working on Hugo Chávez in Venezuela for a decade.

Just like the commercials that warn you “Don’t try this at home”, I urge you not to waste your time trying to educate the likes of Thomas Friedman of the New York Times , who not long ago referred to “the men and women of the US Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps” as “the most important peacekeepers in the world for the last century.” 6 What can you say to such a man? And this is the leading foreign policy columnist for America’s “newspaper of record”. God help us. The man could use some adult supervision.

A man named Barack Obama

For many years I have not paid a great deal of attention to party politics in the United States. I usually have only a passing knowledge of who’s who in Congress. It’s policies that interest me much more than politicians. But during the 2008 presidential campaign I kept hearing the name Barack Obama when I turned on the radio, and repeatedly saw his name in headlines in various newspapers. I knew no more than that he was a senator from Illinois and … Was he black?

Then one day I turned on my kitchen radio and was informed that Obama was about to begin a talk. I decided to listen, and did so for about 15 or 20 minutes while I washed the dishes. I listened, and listened, and then it hit me … This man is not saying anything! It’s all platitude and cliché, very little of what I would call substance. His talk could have been written by a computer, touching all the appropriate bases and saying just what could be expected to give some hope to the pessimistic and to artfully challenge the skepticism of the cynical; feel-good language for every occasion; conventional wisdom for every issue. His supporters, I would later learn, insisted that he had to talk this way to be elected, but once elected — Aha! The real genuine-progressive, anti-war Barack Obama would appear. “Change you can believe in!” Hallelujah! … They’re still saying things like that.

Last week Obama gave the traditional annual speech at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. 7 To give you an idea of whether the man now sincerely expresses himself “outside the box” at all, here’s what he had to say about Pakistan: “Since the rains came and the floodwaters rose in Pakistan, we have pledged our assistance, and we should all support the Pakistani people as they recover and rebuild.” Does he think no one in the world knows about the American bombs? Did he think he was speaking before sophisticated international diplomats or making a campaign speech before Iowa farmers?

Plus endless verbiage about the endless Israeli-Palestine issue, which could have been lifted out of almost any speech by any American president of the past 30 years. But no mention at all of Gaza. Oh, excuse me — there was one line: “the young girl in Gaza who wants to have no ceiling on her dreams”. Gosh, choke. One would never know that the United States possesses huge leverage over the state of Israel — billions/trillions of dollars of military and economic aid and gifts. An American president with a minimum of courage could force Israel to make concessions, and in a struggle between a thousand-pound gorilla (Israel) and an infant (Hamas) it’s the gorilla that has to give some ground.

And this: “We also know from experience that those who defend these [universal] values for their people have been our closest friends and allies, while those who have denied those rights — whether terrorist groups or tyrannical governments — have chosen to be our adversaries.”

Such a lie. It would be difficult to name a single brutal dictatorship of the Western world in the second half of the 20th Century that was not supported by the United States; not only supported, but often put into power and kept in power against the wishes of the population. And in recent years as well, Washington has supported very repressive governments, such as Saudi Arabia, Honduras, Indonesia, Egypt, Kosovo, Colombia, and Israel. As to terrorist groups being adversaries of the United States — another item for the future Barack Obama Presidential Liebrary; as I’ve discussed in this report on several occasions, including last month, the United States has supported terrorist groups for decades. As they’ve supported US foreign policy.

“Yes, of course it’s nice to have a president who speaks in complete sentences. But that they’re coherent doesn’t make them honest.” — John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine. 8

The secret to understanding US foreign policy

In one of his regular “Reflections” essays, Fidel Castro recently discussed United States hostility towards Venezuela. “What they really want is Venezuela’s oil,” wrote the Cuban leader. 9 This is a commonly-held viewpoint within the international left. The point is put forth, for example, in Oliver Stone’s recent film “South of the Border”. I must, however, take exception.

In the post-World War Two period, in Latin America alone, the US has had a similar hostile policy toward progressive governments and movements in Guatemala, Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Grenada, Dominican Republic, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, and Bolivia. What these governments and movements all had in common was that they were/are leftist; nothing to do with oil. For more than half a century Washington has been trying to block the rise of any government in Latin America that threatens to offer a viable alternative to the capitalist model. Venezuela of course fits perfectly into that scenario; oil or no oil.

This ideology was the essence of the Cold War all over the world.

The secret to understanding US foreign policy is that there is no secret. Principally, one must come to the realization that the United States strives to dominate the world. Once one understands that, much of the apparent confusion, contradiction, and ambiguity surrounding Washington’s policies fades away. To express this striving for dominance numerically, one can consider that since the end of World War Two the United States has:

  • Endeavored to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically-elected.
  • Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
  • Waged war/military action, either directly or in conjunction with a proxy army, in some 30 countries.
  • Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.
  • Dropped bombs on the people of some 30 countries.
  • Suppressed dozens of populist/nationalist movements in every corner of the world.10

The United States institutional war machine has long been, and remains, on automatic pilot.

The 9/11 Truth Movement

The Truthers have long been pressing me to express my support for their cause. Here’s how I stand on the issue. I’m very aware of the serious contradictions and apparent lies in the Official Government Version (OGV) of what happened on that fateful day. (Before the Truthers can be dismissed as “conspiracy theorists”, it should be noted that the OGV is literally a “conspiracy theory” about the fantastic things that a certain 19 men conspired to do.) It does appear that the buildings in New York collapsed essentially because of a controlled demolition, which employed explosives as well as certain incendiary substances found in the rubble. So, for this and many other questions raised by the 9/11 Truth Movement, the OGV can clearly not be taken entirely at face value but has to be seriously examined point by point. But no matter what the discrepancies in the OGV, does it necessarily follow that the events of 9/11 were an “inside job”? Is it an either/or matter? Either a group of terrorists were fully responsible or the government planned it all down to the last detail?

What if the government, with its omnipresent eyes and ears, discovered the plotting of Mideast terrorists some time before and decided to let it happen — and even enhance the destruction — to make use of it as a justification for its “War on Terror”? The Truthers admit that they can’t fully explain what actually took place, but they argue that they are not obliged to do so; that they have exposed the government lies and that the fact of these lies proves that it was an inside job. The Truthers have done great work, but I say that for me, and I’m sure for many others, to accept the idea of an inside job I have to indeed know what actually took place, or at least a lot more than I know now. It is, after all, an incredible story, and I need to know how the government pulled it off. I need to have certain questions answered, amongst which are the following:

  1. Were the planes that hit the towers hijacked?
  2. Did they contain the passengers named amongst the dead?
  3. Were they piloted or were they flying via remote control?
  4. If piloted, who were the pilots?
  5. Did a plane crash in Pennsylvania? If so, why? What happened to the remains of the plane and the passengers?
  6. Did a plane crash into the Pentagon? What happened to the remains of the plane and the passengers?
  7. Why do Truthers say that some, or many, of the named Arabic hijackers have been found alive living abroad? Why couldn’t their identity have been stolen by the hijackers?

If the Truthers can’t answer any or most of the above questions, are they prepared to consider the possibility of 9/11 being a “let-it-happen” government operation?

Do words have to mean something?

“Holocaust denier barred from leading tour at Auschwitz”. That was the headline over a short news item in the Washington Post on September 22. The story, in full, read: “British historian and Holocaust-denier David Irving will not be permitted to give tours at Poland’s Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, museum officials said Tuesday after the controversial historian arrived in Poland to lead a tour of Nazi sites. Irving told the British Daily Mail on Friday that Treblinka was a genuine death camp but that Auschwitz was a ‘Disney-style tourist attraction’.”

So how can Irving be called a “Holocaust-denier” if he says that the Nazi concentration camp at Treblinka “was a genuine death camp”? I don’t know. Do you? Why don’t you ask the Post ? They never reply to my letters. And while you’re at it, ask them why they and their columnists routinely refer to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a “Holocaust-denier”. You might even point out to them that Ahmadinejad said in a speech at Columbia University (September 24, 2007), in reply to a question about the Holocaust, “I’m not saying that it didn’t happen at all. This is not the judgment that I’m passing here.”

Indeed, I don’t know if any of the so-called “Holocaust-deniers” actually, ever, umm, y’know, umm … deny the Holocaust . They question certain aspects of the Holocaust history that’s been handed down to us, but they don’t explicitly say that what we know as the Holocaust never took place. Yes, I’m sure you can find at least one nut-case somewhere.

Speaking of nut-cases, two days after Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia, Congressman Duncan Hunter (R.-CA) introduced legislation “To prohibit Federal grants to or contracts with Columbia University” (HR 3675, 110th Congress). I’m surprised he didn’t call for a Predator to fly over the campus and drop a few bombs. Don’t ya just love our Congressmembers? Soon to be joined it seems by a few Teaparty types who think that Barack Obama is a socialist. (If Obama is a socialist, what, I wonder, do they call Hugo Chávez? Or Karl Marx?) The new Madame Speaker of the House may be Alice in Wonderland.

Notes

  1. Wikipedia , Drone attacks in Pakistan ?
  2. AllAfrica.com , New Evidence Shows U.S. Role in Congo’s Decision to Send Patrice Lumumba to His Death , August 1st 2010
  3. The Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (US Senate: The Church Committee), Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders , November 20, 1975, p.58
  4. Jonathan Kwitny, Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World (1984), p.57
  5. New York Times , February 22, 1976, p.55
  6. New York Times , October 11, 2009
  7. White House Press Office, Remarks by the President to the United Nations General Assembly , September 23, 2010
  8. The Providence Journal , ” Obama a very smooth liar “, June 17, 2009
  9. Reflections by Comrade Fidel, ” What they want is Venezuela’s oil “, September 27, 2010
  10. A link to any of the first five lists can be obtained by writing to William Blum at bblum6@aol.com . The sixth list has not yet been uploaded to the Internet.

WRITTEN BY WILLIAM BLUM

POSTED: 02 OCTOBER 2010 16:56

William Blum is the author of:

  • Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
  • Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
  • West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
  • Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org

 

01 October, 2010

Killinghope.org

 

In A Nuclear War The ‘Collateral Damage’Would Be The Life Of All Humanity

Global Research Editor’s Note,

From October 12 to 15, 2010, I had extensive and detailed discussions with Fidel Castro in Havana, pertaining to the dangers of nuclear war, the global economic crisis and the nature of the New World Order. These meetings resulted in a wide-ranging and fruitful interview that will be published shortly by Global Research and Cuba Debate. The following message by Fidel against Nuclear War was recorded on October 15. Below is the text of this brief and forceful message as well the video recording. This important message is based on Fidel Castro’s analysis and understanding of the dangers of military escalation including the threats (confirmed by statements of President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton) to use tactical nuclear weapons on a pre-emptive basis against Iran.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, October 21, 2010

The use of nuclear weapons in a new war would mean the end of humanity. This was candidly foreseen by scientist Albert Einstein who was able to measure their destructive capability to generate millions of degrees of heat, which would vaporize everything within a wide radius of action. This brilliant researcher had promoted the development of this weapon so that it would not become available to the genocidal Nazi regime.

Each and every government in the world has the obligation to respect the right to life of each and every nation and of the totality of all the peoples on the planet.

Today there is an imminent risk of war with the use of that kind of weapon and I don’t harbour the least doubt that an attack by the United States and Israel against the Islamic Republic of Iran would inevitably evolve towards a global nuclear conflict.

The World’s peoples have an obligation to demand of their political leaders their Right to Live. When the life of humankind, of your people and your most beloved human beings run such a risk, nobody can afford to be indifferent; not one minute can be lost in demanding respect for that right; tomorrow will be too late.

Albert Einstein himself stated unmistakably: “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”. We fully comprehend what he wanted to convey, and he was absolutely right, yet in the wake of a global nuclear war, there wouldn’t be anybody around to make use of those sticks and stones.

There would be “collateral damage”, as the American political and military leaders always affirm, to justify the deaths of innocent people.

In a nuclear war the “collateral damage” would be the life of all humanity.

Let us have the courage to proclaim that all nuclear or conventional weapons, everything that is used to make war, must disappear!

Fidel Castro Ruz

October 15, 2010

Hijacking Britain: A Close Look At The Pro-Israeli Lobbies Inside Britain

United States of America is considered as the backbone of Israel and the mother of many evils in Middle East. With the presence of various pro-Israeli lobbies and pressure groups rallying around the corridors of power in Washington to press their case, they have been highly successful not only in setting the agenda in favour of Israel, but also makes sure that the Palestine voice is not heard. Many believe that this is a typical phenomenon in Washington and hence an internal issue of the United States. But the pro-Israeli lobbies are a decisive factor in most European countries and its influence is felt manifold in Britain.

These pro-Israeli lobbies are a coalition of wealthy individuals and organizations who actively work to shape British foreign policy in a pro-Israeli direction. Though the percentage of British Jews who wholeheartedly support the pro-Israeli lobby in very minimal, they have been highly successful in portraying their cause to be of great concern to the majority of the Jewish community. The lobbies has got great influence and access to all major parties including the Labour and Conservative to the extent that they shape the foreign policy the United Kingdom, much as their counterparts in the United States.

Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) is one of the most active lobbying groups in UK with major stakes in the Conservative Party. In 2009, few months after Israel’s brutal Operation Cast Lead that saw more than 1200 Palestinians killed and many thousands injured, Conservative Friends of Israel held its Annual Lunch for its Conservative politicians and businessmen. David Cameroon who was star speaker for the day made no reference to the widespread killing of innocent civilians and massive destruction in Gaza that happened six months earlier. Instead he praised Israel and commented that Israel strives to protect innocent life. Thanks to the estimated £10 billion bankrolled in the last eight years to the Conservative Party, Mr. Cameroon continued to say that ‘if I became Prime Minister, Israel has a friend who will never turn his back on Israel.’

This is not something particular to the Conservatives, but is in line with the Labour Friends of Israel stance that UK shall continue to foster strong relationship with Israel as it is being a close ally of the UK with regular warm and productive exchanges at all levels. Back in the nineties pop music millionaire Michael Levy was made the special envoy to the Middle East under Tony Blair in return for the estimated £15 billion he had raised for the Labour Party in the prior elections campaign. As he was not part of any ministry he had a free hand at doing whatever he intended to do on behalf of the pro-Israeli lobby. An unelected friend of the Prime Minister having so much influence over British policies in the Middle East did damage the reputation of Britain in the Middle East and hence the negotiations he had with Israel and its Arab neighbors on behalf of Britain are still kept secret.

Money plays a big part in the lobbying game and millions of pounds in donations from businessmen and others are flown into the bank accounts of these politicians and political parties. Besides from raising cash, some of the pro-Israeli lobbies in parliament also pay for and arrange trips to Israel. They have send almost as many MPs and candidates on trips to Israel as have been made by all MPS to the United States and Europe combined over the last eight years. These MPs get enormous donations to their party funds and it would be stupid to believe that these contributions come with no strings attached. These MPs then become passionately concerned about Israel and that is reflected in the foreign policies of the United Kingdom. Moreover, financial pressures are also exerted by these lobbies to coerce any dissent within these parties to fall in line to the Israeli policy.

The influence of these lobbies is not restricted to bankrolling political parties and favours extracted in return. They also try to define the debate in order to limit the options that British politicians can choose when it comes to issues pertaining to Middle East. The hand of CFI in shaping up the British opposition against the UN resolution following judge Goldstone’s Report criticizing Israeli human right abuses in Gaza is a classic example of their clout.

There are various other pro-Israeli lobbies including Britain Israel Communication & Research Centre (BICOM), Jewish Leadership Council, Zionist Federation of Great Britain, and Board of Deputies of British Jews. Their activities include, but not restricted to, getting the Israeli message across the British Universities, silencing any criticism of the Israeli policies inside Israel and elsewhere and engaging in successful Public Relations campaign to shape the media coverage of Middle East conflict. High profile members of these pro-Israeli lobbies even own business units in the Occupied Palestinian territory that is considered as illegal under international law. This would tend to indicate in which direction the message of these lobbies are going.

Israel is really fighting the war on two fronts, the first is the military campaign being waged in the occupied territories against the Palestinian people and the second is the Public Relations (PR) Campaign being waged throughout the world media to ensure continuous support for Israel’s military occupation. In addition to the military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, Israel is also involved in an attempt to ideologically occupy the world media and these lobbies are the key functionaries in that respect. Sophisticated media outlets in UK including The Guardian and the BBC have been at the receiving end of these censorships. These have gone to the extent that the journalist get to the feeling that it’s not worth the trouble and better stay away from reporting the truth about Middle East. BBC who had previously run emergency appeals for disasters around the world including Palestine past, declined to air a humanitarian plea for Gaza victims in the 2009 January Israeli invasion under the pressure of pro-Israeli lobby.

These institutional frame works of Israeli lobbies and their political interest in combination with Israeli Public Relations department shape media coverage of the Middle East. At the same time progressive Jewish organizations opposing Israeli government policies, let alone scores of Muslim organizations, that strive to bring out the ground reality rarely make it through these institutional filters.

Finally, if any news stories critical of Israeli policy do surface there are hosts of media watch dog groups that monitor and pressure journalists and media outlets, and most important of which is HonestReporting. There are active pro-Israeli organizations that very effectively monitor (read harass) journalist and their editors and try to make sure that the coverage is objective, by which they mean is pro-Israel. There are even pressure groups to write campaigns and letters to editors and news outlets asking to boycott certain news agencies, demanding the stories to be changed or the reporter to be fired. This becomes so twisted, that the dearth of reporting, the absence of images, lack of analysis, the void of voices of describing the experience of Palestinians under occupation is so vast that the people has no idea that a military occupation is going on.

Britain cannot wash her hands off from the plight of Palestinians today for its involvement in creation of the state of Israel. Now Zionism is becoming more pervasive in British politics as is already rampant in the United States. It would need huge amount of mettle both from the British politicians and the media to stand against this high profile pressure group. And the act needs to be done soon, before it would become an obsession and a moral liability for the British parliament to support anything and everything that Israel does according to the whims and fancies of its insane leaders.

By Ershad Abubacker

13 October, 2010

Countercurrents.org

Ershad Abubacker is a Research Analyst based in Chennai. He can be contacted at ershadna@gmail.com

Growing Conflict Over Arctic Resources And The Threat Of A Climate Catastrophe

At first the event sounds like a simple textbook story illustrating the conflicts which the world’s rich nations have for centuries been fighting over access to fossil fuels and other natural wealth. On September 21 last, an Arctic Forum was held in the Russian capital of Moscow. Organized by the Russian Geographic Society together with Russia’s press agency RIA Novosti, the Forum brought together hundreds of scientists and politicians hailing from countries bordering the Arctic region and from countries located farther away. Russia’s government, evidently pleased with the Forum, used the occasion to boost its own claims over large parts of the North Pole which is (still) covered by an icecap. In 2007 Russia already had pushed its claims, when its scientists had boarded a mini-submarine and had planted a rust-free flag of their nation on the bottom of the North Pole. Earlier yet, in 2001, Russia had submitted its bid to ownership over the underwater ridge known as ‘Lomonosov’ to the United Nations, arguing that the given geographic formation is an extension of Russia’s continental shelf. As Russian news reports on the Arctic Forum indicate, – Russia believes its claim to 1.2 million kilometer of the Arctic circle are in line with the rules set by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Yet Russia is by no means the only country that lays claims to a part of the North Pole. In fact, each of the five nations bordering the Arctic has been making its own separate bids. Denmark for instance, which rules over the vast ice-covered land mass of Greenland, largely located within the Arctic circle, has carried out its own scientific expedition aimed at backing up its own claims. And Denmark’s Scandinavian neighbor Norway has officially demanded that its rights over the eastern part of the Arctic be extended. The rationale underlying the fever of the Arctic border states appears to be just one: to reach out to the rich reserves of oil and gas deposited at the bottom of the Arctic circle, – either before or after the icecap of the North Pole melts. Both Russia and the USA, which too borders the region, i.e. from its Western side via Alaska state, are convinced that vast quantities of fossil fuels and other raw materials lie buried under the Arctic sea. According to figures of American experts that were cited at the Moscow Forum, – the Arctic’s extractable reserves include an estimated 90 Billion barrels of crude oil, and 50 Billion cubic meters of natural gas. Such figures suffice to entice energy-hungry nations. Especially at a time when the world is reaching ‘peak oil’, the point at which any further growth in the world’s size of oil production becomes elusive in view of the physical exhaustion of extractable reserves.

This story regarding competing ‘territorial’ claims may appear ordinary. Still, the circumstances surrounding future extraction of Arctic resources are by no means average. First, the North Pole, as indicated, is no land mass, but a deep sea area. Like the Antarctic, i.e. the pole located towards the Southern extreme of the globe, the North pole has been covered by ice ever since humans started roaming the earth. But the geographical circumstances of the two polar regions are widely divergent. Whereas the Antarctic is an ice-covered landmass surrounded by sea, – the centre of the Arctic features a deep sea area capped by ice. For two reasons, the idea of oil and natural gas extraction in this polar region is an extremely hazardous proposition. For one – the experience which the world’s oil corporations have gathered with drilling in areas covered by ice is limited. More ominously: BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April brings out that all deep sea drilling is risky, and that such drilling can easily result in a human and environmental catastrophe. In the wake of the oil spill, opponents of Arctic drilling in Alaska have intensified their efforts to prevent exploratory drilling by Shell along Alaska’s Northern shore. Yet one wonders whether the prohibition on deep sea drilling need not be greatly extended, so as to cover all sections of the Arctic.

To bring out that this proposition is not farfetched, we need to place Moscow’s Arctic Forum and the ‘territorial’ conflicts over the North Pole against the background of the debate over climate change. The risks deriving from the warming-up of the earth can very well be illustrated with data on the situation in the Arctic. If the whole ice sheet covering Greenland today were to melt, – this change alone according to climate experts would result in a 7 meter rise in sea levels worldwide. But the melting of ice in Greenland is not a distant prospect, for the effects of climate change are already visible here. Some of Greenland’s glaciers for instance have accelerated the speed at which they flow towards the sea along the country’s coast. One of these glaciers, the Kangerdlunggssuag, is reported to have doubled the velocity of its flow. As to the Arctic circle as a whole: the Arctic ice sheet has lost a reported 15 percent of its surface over the last thirty years, and 40 percent of its thickness. Both indigenous hunters and animals which depend on the ice sheet for their habitat suffer in consequence. The ice bear is one instance. Considered to be the symbol of the Arctic, the ice bear is threatened with extinction in the short term.

Against this background, the Moscow Forum on the Arctic seemed a rather surrealistic event. For the Arctic circle is the very region where the drama of the world’s climate catastrophe threatens being enacted. Two of the natural phenomena which scientists describe when speaking of ‘tipping points‘, of natural changes that in the future will speed up the pace of climate change, occur in the Arctic circle and its surroundings. The Arctic´s ice sheet causes what´s called the albedo effect, i.e. the reflection of the sun´s light back into space. And the permafrost, i.e. frozen soil, which covers a vast expanse of Russian territory along the Arctic, contains huge amounts of the potent greenhouse gas methane. Hence, the melting processes taking place in this part of the globe may ultimately cause a worldwide deluge, – a rise in sea water levels so rapid that hundreds of millions of people will be swept away almost overnight. Meanwhile, some states are getting prepared to enforce their claims over portions of the Arctic by military means. Russia reportedly is building special Arctic armed forces, and Canada has started construction of a military base in the region. Yet the very idea of oil and gas exploration in the Arctic circle seems an absurd proposition. Instead, there are strong reasons to demand that Russia and other Northern nations refrain from any exploration or extraction of fuel resources in the North Pole and the Arctic.

By Dr. Peter Custers

16 October, 2010

Countercurrents.org

Global Research Editor’s Note

Global Research Editor’s Note,

From October 12 to 15, 2010, I had extensive and detailed discussions with Fidel Castro in Havana, pertaining to the dangers of nuclear war, the global economic crisis and the nature of the New World Order. These meetings resulted in a wide-ranging and fruitful interview that will be published shortly by Global Research and Cuba Debate. The following message by Fidel against Nuclear War was recorded on October 15. Below is the text of this brief and forceful message as well the video recording. This important message is based on Fidel Castro’s analysis and understanding of the dangers of military escalation including the threats (confirmed by statements of President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton) to use tactical nuclear weapons on a pre-emptive basis against Iran.

TRANSCRIPT

The use of nuclear weapons in a new war would mean the end of humanity. This was candidly foreseen by scientist Albert Einstein who was able to measure their destructive capability to generate millions of degrees of heat, which would vaporize everything within a wide radius of action. This brilliant researcher had promoted the development of this weapon so that it would not become available to the genocidal Nazi regime.

Each and every government in the world has the obligation to respect the right to life of each and every nation and of the totality of all the peoples on the planet.

Today there is an imminent risk of war with the use of that kind of weapon and I don’t harbour the least doubt that an attack by the United States and Israel against the Islamic Republic of Iran would inevitably evolve towards a global nuclear conflict.

The World’s peoples have an obligation to demand of their political leaders their Right to Live. When the life of humankind, of your people and your most beloved human beings run such a risk, nobody can afford to be indifferent; not one minute can be lost in demanding respect for that right; tomorrow will be too late.

Albert Einstein himself stated unmistakably: “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”. We fully comprehend what he wanted to convey, and he was absolutely right, yet in the wake of a global nuclear war, there wouldn’t be anybody around to make use of those sticks and stones.

There would be “collateral damage”, as the American political and military leaders always affirm, to justify the deaths of innocent people.

In a nuclear war the “collateral damage” would be the life of all humanity.

Let us have the courage to proclaim that all nuclear or conventional weapons, everything that is used to make war, must disappear!

Fidel Castro Ruz

October 15, 2010

Fidel Castro and Michel Chossudovsky, Havana, October 2010

 

Fun With Arithmetic – Winning The War In Afghanistan

Michael Nasuti of Kabul Press recently published an article in which he calculated that killing each Taliban soldier in Afghanistan costs on average of $50 million to the US. The article, seemingly carefully. researched with all assumptions laid out so that anyone can examine them, is well worth reading. Nasuti, “Killing Each Taliban Soldier Costs $50 million,”

http://www.kabulpress.org/my/spip.php?article32304. He points out that at this rate, killing the entire Taliban forces (only 35,000) would cost $1.7 trillion, not a small amount for a country suffering from a severe economic downturn to spend on a war with no apparent purpose. And Nasuti’s number, of course, assumes that they coud not be replaced faster than they are killed, but it appears that they can, easily.

Nasuti, who actually uses a “conservative” number (assuming that he has undercounted the number of Taliban casualties by one half), states that he had previously served “at a senior level” in the United States Air Force. He says,

The reason for these exorbitant costs is that United States has the world’s most mechanized, computerized, weaponized and synchronized military, not to mention the most pampered (at least at Forward Operating Bases). An estimated 150,000 civilian contractors support, protect, feed and cater to the American personnel in Afghanistan . . . The ponderous American war machine is a logistics nightmare and a maintenance train wreck.

He concludes:

The Taliban’s best ally within the United States may be the Pentagon, whose contempt for fiscal responsibility and accountability may force a premature U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan as the Americans cannot continue to fund these Pentagon excesses.

But Nasuti’s cost estimates are only the beginning. Afghanistan had until recently the highest fertility rate in the world (7.5. now down to 7.1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_

states_and_dependent_territories_by_fertility_rate and its population doubles roughly every 20 years even under the stress of war.. At a current population of 34 million, gaining by 800,000/yr, http://www.allcountries.org/uscensus/

1352_population_by_country.html it can lose in order of magnnitude 400,000 men per year more than it is presently losing to war without net population loss. That, using Nasuti’s figures, would be at a cost to the US of $20 trillion/yr. to stay even , when we have a GDP of about $12 trillion. And there is no apparent reason why the Taliban could not go on in perpetuity suffering losses of 2000/yr (Nasuti’s estimate of the true numbers), or many times that, because 2000 is only approximately half of one percent of the numbers of available men each year without population loss.

Of course, all that is assuming that the Taliban can recruit within Afghanistan as its men are lost. Clearly at least the numbers are there, however, because of Afghanistan’s extraordinary rate of population growth..

In the understatement of the year, Mr. Nasuti suggests, “A public discussion should be taking place in the United States regarding whether the Taliban have become too expensive an enemy to defeat.”

Any bets on whether we’ll win this one (assuming anyone can explain what “winning this one” means) without changing our strategy?

8 October, 2010

Countercurrents.org

WRITTEN BY NICHOLAS C. ARGUIMBAU

POSTED: 29 OCTOBER 2010 11:52

The author is an attorney presently residing in Massachusetts, licensed in California, USA.

 

 

Force Of Faith Trumps Law And Reason In Ayodhya Case


If left unamended by the Supreme Court, the legal, social and political repercussions of the judgment are likely to be extremely damaging

New Delhi: The Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court has made judicial history by deciding a long pending legal dispute over a piece of property in Ayodhya on the basis of an unverified and unsubstantiated reference to the “faith and belief of Hindus.”

The irony is that in doing so, the court has inadvertently provided a shot in the arm for a political movement that cited the very same “faith” and “belief” to justify its open defiance of the law and the Indian Constitution. That defiance reached its apogee in 1992, when a 500-year-old mosque which stood at the disputed site was destroyed. The legal and political system in India stood silent witness to that crime of trespass, vandalism and expropriation. Eighteen years later, the country has compounded that sin by legitimising the “faith” and “belief” of those who took the law into their own hands.

The three learned judges of the Allahabad High Court may have rendered separate judgments on the title suit in the Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhoomi case but Justices Sudhir Agarwal, S.U. Khan and Dharam Veer Sharma all seem to agree on one central point: that the Hindu plaintiffs in the case have a claim to the disputed site because “as per [the] faith and belief of the Hindus” the place under the central dome of the Babri Masjid where the idols of Ram Lalla were placed surreptitiously in 1949 is indeed the “birthplace” of Lord Ram.

For every Hindu who believes the spot under the central dome of the Babri Masjid is the precise spot where Lord Ram was born there is another who believes something else. But leaving aside the question of who “the Hindus” referred to by the court really are and how their actual faith and belief was ascertained and measured, it is odd that a court of law should give such weight to theological considerations and constructs rather than legal reasoning and facts. Tulsidas wrote his Ramcharitmanas in 16th century Ayodhya but made no reference to the birthplace of Lord Rama that the court has now identified with such exacting precision five centuries later.

The “faith and belief” that the court speaks about today acquired salience only after the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bharatiya Janata Party launched a political campaign in the 1980s to “liberate” the “janmasthan.”

Collectives in India have faith in all sorts of things but “faith” cannot become the arbiter of what is right and wrong in law. Nor can the righting of supposed historical wrongs become the basis for dispensing justice today. In 1993, the Supreme Court wisely refused to answer a Presidential Reference made to it by the Narasimha Rao government seeking its opinion on whether a Hindu temple once existed at the Babri Masjid site. Yet, the High Court saw fit to frame a number of questions that ought to have had absolutely no bearing on the title suit which was before it.

One of the questions the court framed was “whether the building has been constructed on the site of an alleged Hindu temple after demolishing the same.” Pursuant to this question, it asked the Archaeological Survey of India to conduct a dig at the site. This was done in 2003, during the time when the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government was in power at the Centre. Not surprisingly, the ASI concluded that there was a “massive Hindu religious structure” below, a finding that was disputed by many archaeologists and historians.

The territory of India — as of many countries with a settled civilisation as old as ours — is full of buildings that were constructed after pre-existing structures were demolished to make way for them. Buddhist shrines made way for Hindu temples. Temples have made way for mosques. Mosques have made way for temples. So even if a temple was demolished in the 16th century to make way for the Babri Masjid, what legal relevance can that have in the 21st century? And if such demolition is to serve as the basis for settling property disputes today, where do we draw the line? On the walls of the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi can be seen the remnants of a Hindu temple, perhaps even of the original Vishwanath mandir. Certainly many “Hindus” believe the mosque is built on land that is especially sacred to them. The denouement of the Babri case from agitation and demolition to possession might easily serve as a precedent for politicians looking to come to power on the basis of heightening religious tensions.

Even assuming the tainted ASI report is correct in its assessment that a Hindu temple lay below the ruins of the Babri Masjid, neither the ASI nor any other expert has any scientific basis for claiming the architects of the mosque were the ones who did the demolishing. And yet two of the three High Court judges have concluded that the mosque was built after a temple was demolished.

From at least the 19th century, if not earlier, we know that both Hindus and Muslims worshipped within the 2.77 acre site, the latter within the Babri Masjid building and the former at the Ram Chhabutra built within the mosque compound. This practice came to an end in 1949 when politically motivated individuals broke into the mosque and placed idols of Ram Lalla within. After 1949, both communities were denied access though Hindus have been allowed to offer darshan since 1986. In suggesting a three way partition of the site, the High Court has taken a small step towards the restoration of the religious status quo ante which prevailed before politicians got into the act. But its reasoning is flawed and even dangerous. If left unamended by the Supreme Court, the legal, social and political repercussions of the judgment are likely to be extremely damaging.

WRITTEN BY SIDDHARTH VARADARAJAN

POSTED: 02 OCTOBER 2010 17:11

Copyright © 2010, The Hindu.

01 October, 2010

 

Focus On Hunger

Today marks the beginning of my second exploration of world hunger, as part of Conducive Chronicle’s 21 days for Hunger. For these two days I will be focusing on women in hunger, a topic I covered last May in my first souljourn for world hunger. As Kenda mentioned in the Intro to the series yesterday, I work as a women’s rights activist and educator, and the fact that 70% of the world’s hungriest people are women and girls sits uneasily in my heart. It is this fact, and the constellation of injustices that lead to it, that I will be exploring today in my article and in my interview with world renowned food justice activist, global south advocate, and eco-feminist Vandana Shiva.

Everything about world hunger is unfair. The fact that there are nearly 1 billion people starving in the world right now speaks to the vast amounts of injustice that our global system is built on. That 1 out of 6 human beings goes to bed hungry every night while there is more than enough food to feed everyone generously, seems to me the very definition of unfair. When I began my first exploration of world hunger last May, the endless stream of inequality and injustice was enough to make me want to scream. But out of all of the rage inducing facts and statistics, the one that haunts me the most, that makes me lose sleep at night, that I still find hard to believe, is that the people who grow the world’s food, our farmers, are some of the most likely to experience hunger.

In our world, farmer means woman. 80% of the developing world’s food supply, and 60% of the world’s food in total, is grown by women’s hands. Women plant, nurture, and harvest the food we all need to survive, yet they own less than 1% of all farmland, and are generally the last to eat. 70% of those suffering from chronic poverty and hunger are women and girls. They feed us, and while we eat they starve. The industrialization of our food system has led us to a place where we are now so removed from the food we eat that most of us barely know what’s in it, let alone where it came from or who grew it. What kind of life did she live? Was she well fed, able to enjoy the literal fruits of her labor? Or was she drowning in debt, a slave to the chemical and agricultural companies that have quickly devoured our world? Was she able to protect her land and grow her food in the way her mother and grandmothers did for centuries before her? Or has she been forced to pollute her land and her body with the genetically engineered seeds that promise so much, while yielding so very, very little? How much do we know about our food and the people who grow it? Why are they always the last to eat?

In India, 75% of people make their living by farming, and 60% of those farmers are women. These women plow the fields and raise our food, and yet their harvest is being stolen. In 1994, the completion of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) legitimized corporate growth based on harvests stolen from nature and people. The WTO’s agricultural agreements and ‘free’ trade policies allow transnational corporations that do not grow the food or work the land to make super profits off of the small farmers and their back breaking labor. The WTO’s Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement made seed-saving and seed-sharing a criminal act, disrupting millennia old traditions practiced in agricultural communities throughout the world. Corporations are now allowed to monopolize the right to a seed, the basic building block of our food security, by claiming it as their exclusive private property. The Agreement on Agriculture legalized the dumping of genetically engineered foods on countries, and criminalized actions taken to protect the biological and cultural diversity on which indigenous food systems are based.

Under World Bank and International Monetary Fund structural adjustment mandated reforms, India was forced to radically alter the way food had been grown in the country for centuries. Flashy advertising campaigns assaulted the country and images of gods, goddesses, and saints were used to sell new, hybrid seeds directly to small farmers, even as their land was being devalued, redrawn, and sold out from under them. Once the farmers began to purchase these new corporately ‘owned’ seeds they discovered they were highly vulnerable to pests, fungi, and weeds. Encouraged by their government and the corporations, the farmers bought the necessary corporate owned pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides on credit, comforted with the knowledge that these new seeds would produce yields so large they could repay their debts and have money to spare. Unfortunately, the new seeds were a dismal, drastic failure and crops failed throughout the country. Farmers were left with barren fields, polluted waterways, sky high debts, and empty bellies. Since 1997 200,000 Indian farmers have killed themselves, many by drinking the toxic pesticides that were supposed to save their crops. This cycle of debt and loss and more debt and more loss has been termed the ‘suicide economy’ and has created millions of chronically hungry and debt enslaved people throughout India.

Not only does this suicide economy lead to debt and impoverishment created hunger, it also destroys a region’s ancient biodiversity by creating huge swathes of lifeless monocrops in its place. The promises of ‘life science’ corporations like Monsanto are that they will feed the world through their genetically engineered seeds and the resulting higher crop yields. However, the opposite has been true. They have, in fact, created hunger on an unimaginable scale. Whatever higher yields they have been able to display are offset by the fact that they require massively higher inputs. Traditional farming practices have always been highly productive as they utilize a close looped cycle of animal integrated perennial and annual polycultures. When resource use is taken into account, the ‘advancements’ of the Green Revolution is obviously counterproductive and grossly inefficient. More and more land is needed to create adequate harvests under the new methods, along with more water, more money, more time, more effort, all of it for slightly more food, and far more hunger.

“However, this phenomenon of the stolen harvest is not unique to India. It is being experienced in every society, as small farms and small farmers are pushed to extinction, as monocultures replace biodiverse crops, as farming is transformed from the production of nourishing and diverse foods into the creation of markets for genetically engineered seeds, herbicides, and pesticides. As farmers are transformed from producers into consumers of corporate-patented agricultural products, as markets are destroyed locally and nationally but expanded globally, the myth of ‘free-trade’ and the global economy becomes a means for the rich to rob the poor of their right to food and even their right to life.” Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest

It was in this environment, to fight these wrongs, that world renowned global south activist, physicist, and eco-feminist Vandana Shiva created Navdanya. Founded in 1984, Navdanya is providing an alternative to the modern global food system by promoting biodiversity conservation, farmer’s rights, and organic farming methods, with an emphasis on seed saving. Navdanya means nine crops, in reference to the nine crops that represent India’s collective source of food security, and it is this self-sufficient food security that it hopes to preserve. Over the past 26 years, Navdanya has created an ever expanding alternative to the culture of death and debt pushed by the transnational corporations. Dedicated to the preservation of nature and the people’s right to knowledge, water, and food, Navdanya promotes global peace and justice through the conservation, renewal, and rejuvenation of the gifts of biodiversity. Navdanya has helped to create 54 community seed banks throughout India with the intent to rescue and conserve crops that are being pushed to extinction by monoculture farming practices. 3,000 varieties of native rice, 12 genera of cereals and millets, 16 genera of legumes, and 50 genera of vegetables have so far been saved due to their efforts. More than 500,000 farmers have been trained in organic and sustainable farming methods and more than 50 international courses have been offered on biodiversity, food, biopiracy, water, globalization, business ethics and more. Navdanya focuses on empowering local farmers to resist patents on seeds, and struggles to keep India free from GMO crops by recognizing humanity’s inherent right to food, water, and seed sovereignty.

One of Navdanya’s specific goals is to empower women and to keep food security in their hands through a network of women’s producer groups (Mahila Anna Swaraj). Navdanya views women as the caretakers of biodiversity, the providers of food security, and the conservationists of the cultural diversity of food traditions. By keeping women’s food knowledge and expertise alive they hope to guarantee food security for generations to come. Navdanya’s gender program, Diverse Women for Diversity, works on a local, national, and international level as a global campaign for women to resist monoculture monopolies and celebrate food security and biodiversity. Leaders in the food justice movement around the world recognize that it is women who hold the key to fighting the global hunger crisis, and it is this topic that I wanted to focus on in my interview with Dr. Vandana Shiva.

Burge: In 1998, India was forced to open up its seed and farming sector to global corporations like Cargill, Monsanto, and Syngenta by the World Bank’s structural adjustment policies. Can you explain how it is not natural disasters like drought and famine that cause the majority of hunger, but man-made economic policies like these? Why must a resistance to globalization form such a necessary part of food security and bio-diversity?

Shiva: The main causes for hunger are industrial agriculture and globalised trade in food. Industrial agriculture creates hunger both by destroying the natural capital for producing food and locking farmers into debt because of its high cost of production. Globalised trade creates hunger by diverting fertile land for exports, promoting dumping and unleashing speculative forces. In industrial agriculture and globalisation also contribute 40% to green house gas emissions that are leading to climate change which in turn is destroying agriculture and food security. The rules of globalisation both in the structural adjustment programmes of the world bank and the free trade rules of WTO promote industrialisation and trade liberalisation. Resisting such corporate globalisation is necessary for food security and biodiversity.

Burge: Since 1997, 200,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide after being forced into inescapable debt by pesticide and seed companies, in what has been termed a ‘suicide economy’. Do you think this kind of unending debt is a political tool consciously designed to keep the people powerless and desperate, or is it simply an unintended tragic consequence of misguided economic policies?

Shiva: The corporations and governments that are designing high costs agriculture systems to maximise corporate profits are simultaneously designing the debt trap for small farmers. This debt trap is what is leading to farmers suicides. Pushing small farmers to extinction is very much part of the corporate design of industrial farmer. It is not merely an unintended consequence. As a US agriculture policy person said: “farmers must be squeezed of the land like the last bit of toothpaste is squeezed out of the toothpaste tube”.

Burge: What do you say to critics who claim that with the global population nearing 7 billion people we need industrial agriculture and genetically modified foods to feed everyone?

Shiva: Industrial agriculture actually reduces nutrition per acre since it destroys the biodiversity which maximises nutrition per acre. Industrial agriculture is artificially projected as being productive through the monoculture of the mind and a focus on the monoculture yield of handful of globally traded commodities. That is why hunger and malnutrition has grown in direct proportion to the spread of industrial agriculture. As far as genetic engineering is concerned, it is a not a yield increasing technology. It has only put Bt. toxin genes into plant or genes for resisting toxic herbicide. This has increased the yield of toxins not of food. The Union of Concerned Scientist report “Failure to Yield” and Navdanya’s reports “Seeds of Suicide” and “Biodiversity Based Productivity : A New Paradigm for Food Security” have the data that shows that genetic engineering has not contributed to increase in production.

Burge: Women grow the majority of the world’s food and 60% of India’s farmers are women. Women also make up 70% of the world’s chronically hungry people. Why is it that women, the people who grow the majority of the world’s food, are the last to eat?

Shiva: Just as farmers who grow the food are the largest number of hungry people in the world, women who produce and process food constitute the majority of malnourished people. The denial of food to the producers of food is a result of the injustice built into industrial food systems and social discrimination.

Burge: Navdanya calls itself a ‘women centered movement’, holds female heritage learning and preservation classes known as Grandmothers’ University, and has a gender program, Diverse Women for Diversity, that is a global campaign of women advocating for bio-diversity and food security. Could you tell us why it was so important for Navdanya to focus on the empowerment of women? Why do you consider the partnership of ecology and feminism to be a partnership of liberation?

Shiva: The dominant model of agriculture has come out of capitalist patriarchy and is based on war. These wars begin as wars in the mind, become wars against the earth, and result in wars against our body. Women need to lead the movement for a non-violent food system because they have not been part of the war economy. Grandmothers hold the heritage of non-violent knowledge which protects the earth and our health.

Burge: In your book Stolen Harvest you describe a ‘hijacking of the global food supply’, as corporations that do not grow the food or work the land reap the obscene profits of the farmers’ labor. When people are kept so poor they can barely feed themselves, and the multinational corporations are unimaginably powerful and wealthy, how can the common people find the resources to stand up to this injustice?

Shiva: Since each of us eats everyday food can become the site of a revolution for justice. If we say no to GM foods, if we commit ourselves to eating organic, we build another food system which is controlled by people and not by giant corporations.

Burge: In describing the implementation of ‘free-trade’ policies upon an unwilling population, you have said that the moment the will of the people is ignored it becomes a dictatorship. In light of the unfathomable levels of violence being perpetrated against an almost powerless population (and at a time when an agricultural company like Monsanto hires the services of the private army Blackwater), why do you and Navdanya remain committed to a non-violent resistance strategy?

Shiva: We in Navdanya stay committed to non-violent resistance strategy because it has more power and more resilience.

Burge: The women you work with through Navdanya’s various programs and Diverse Women for Diversity often have their lives profoundly changed when they are given the tools and resources for self-empowerment. Can you tell us of an instance when you saw a woman, a family, or a community transformed?

Shiva: Twenty years ago, a women called Bija came to me to find work as domestic help. Bija means the seed and I asked her if she would help me in Seed Saving and she immediately agreed. For two decades Bija has worked as Navdanya seed keeper. She holds classes for scientists on the conservation of biodiversity, she received the Slow Food Biodiversity Award on behalf of Navdanya in Porto Portugal in 2001. The potential Bija achieved is the potential in every peasant woman and it is this potential Navdanya seeks to unleash.

Burge: What kind of future is envisioned by the women of Diverse Women for Diversity? How will a world premised on food security, bio-diversity, and sustainability look?

Shiva: The future envisioned by Diverse Women for Diversity is a future in which every species and every person has space to evolve to their highest potential, live in mutuality with each other and create a world of peace, justice, and sustainability.

Burge: How can we in developed Western nations stand in solidarity with the women in India and throughout the world who are facing chronic hunger and poverty, and assist them in their struggle?

Shiva: There are three ways in which you can support our work. You can support our programs by making donations to Navdanya. You can attend our courses at Bija Vidyapeeth – The School of the Seed and visit our programs on seed saving and organic farming as solutions to hunger. You can spread the principles on which our work is based.

“Women were, really, in my view, the ones who domesticated plants, created agriculture. And as long as women were controlling agriculture, agriculture produced real food. Agriculture was based on [women’s learned and passed on] knowledge. A Women’s centered agriculture never created scarcity. As long as women controlled the food system you did not have a billion people going without food and you didn’t have 2 billion going obese and w/diabetes. This is the magic of patriarchy having taken over the food system. Earlier, patriarchy left food to women, modern patriarchy wants to control food . . . women’s knowledge has been removed from agriculture . . .we can only have a secure food culture if women come back into agriculture.” Vandana Shiva

By Natasha Burge

19 October, 2010

FoodFreedom

Faith Shared Wisdom and International Law

A Consultation of some sixty religious scholars, legal experts and leading thinkers and policy makers was held on the theme Faith, Shared Wisdom and International Law in Kuala Lumpur during October 3rd–7th 2010.  It was jointly convened by the International Movement for a Just World (Kuala Lumpur), the Weeramantry International Centre for Peace Education and Research (Colombo), the Centre for Dialogue, La Trobe University (Melbourne), and the Sri Ramanuja Mission Trust (Chennai).

The Consultation agreed on a Global Action Plan which draws its inspiration from the moral wisdom shared by the world’s religious and ethical traditions, including indigenous spiritualities. The endeavour to find common ethical ground holds the key to constructing a more peaceful and ecologically sustainable world order – a task that must be approached with new thinking and great urgency.

Central to this task, is the conceptual and practical integration of this shared wisdom into international law.

The Consultation, convened with the generous support of the Malaysian Government, believes that finding common ethical ground can help overcome mistrust and suspicion, weaken religious and political extremism, and pave the way for collaboration in a dangerously divided world.

This Consultation particularly welcomes the statement by the Prime Minister of Malaysia who in a recent speech at the UN General Assembly on 27 September gave unwavering and continuing support for the United Nations and the multilateral principles based on International Law which it embodies.  The Prime Minister also made timely and effective comment about those “who intensified the divide between broad Muslim world and those in the West.  The real issue is not between Muslims and non-Muslims but between the moderates and extremists of all religions be it Islam, Christianity and Judaism.  Across all religions we have inadvertently allowed the ugly voices of the periphery to drown out the many voices of reason and common sense”. We applaud those remarks.  They encapsulate much of the reason behind the holding of this Consultation.

Unprecedented challenges facing humanity

This Consultation meets at a time of particular urgency unparalleled in the history of the human race.  While the world has negotiated difficult and dangerous times in past years, there are today new causes for concern.  The proliferation of nuclear weapons has spread apace.  8 or 9 countries have nuclear arsenals including one of the poorest countries in the world.  40 countries have the technology to build nuclear weapons and the knowledge for the construction of nuclear weapons is becoming more readily available as each year passes.  There are a limited number of advanced countries who could have fully armed missiles available for launch within a matter of months.  The non-proliferation treaty has not been applied equally.  Friends of nuclear states have been allowed to develop weapons while others have been sanctioned by the international community even though they have acted within the permissible bounds of the non-proliferation treaty.  Others have ignored that treaty and the restraints that it imposes.

Unless steps are taken to abolish nuclear weapons nuclear war is inevitable.  A limited conflict in South Asia between India and Pakistan would no only kill countless millions of people, but would devastate the environment and have severe consequences for the impoverished masses in the entire region.  There is also a dangerous situation on the Korean Peninsula and because of Israel’s nuclear weapons and the fears that Iran seeks to develop them.

The danger of a nuclear conflict grows in part because the war in Afghanistan has serious consequences for Pakistan where there is instability and the possibility that extremists could gain control of her nuclear arsenals.

Such a nuclear war would end the planet as we know it.

Secondly, again for the first time in the human race we have the capacity to destroy the planet slowly.  Scientific evidence for global warming is beyond legitimate dispute.  Unless developed and developing countries take significant steps to change the paradigm by which they live, global warming over time will do the work that a nuclear war could do in a matter of days.

With these challenges in mind, the Consultation broke into working groups to address the relevant issues.

Building a more peaceful world

Against the background of the 140 wars since the end of World War 2 and the danger of nuclear war as set out at this Consultation, it becomes essential to consider the core principles which are overwhelmingly important to humanity if peace and security are to be achieved.

The Consultation concerned itself with building a more peaceful world based on justice.  The core principles and recommendations enunciated below seek to strengthen those elements of the United Nations whose purpose is to outlaw war and to put practical and humanitarian limits on the conduct of war.  These re-emphasize and strengthen articles limiting the legality of war, the conduct of war and, strengthen provisions designed to prevent war.

Core Principles

  1. Every human being must be treated humanely.  We should treat others as we would wish them to treat us.
  2. This principle rests on the view that every person is possessed of an inherent and inalienable dignity.  Therefore, every person should be treated equally, without discrimination on the basis of age, sex, race, skin colour, physical or mental ability, language, religion, political opinion, ethnicity or national origin.
  3. Every person has the right to live in safety and to the free development of their personality, insofar as they do not injure the rights of others.
  4. It follows that no person has the right to harm, kill, torture, or injure another.

The Illegality of War

  1. The use of force is outlawed unless explicitly sanctioned by the United Nations or unless a country is under attack and must defend itself.
  2. No nation or people has the right to wage war with another.  No government should wage war in order to gain economic wealth, to acquire natural resources or to win power and empire.
  3. The commission by any nation or people of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, crimes of aggression or terrorist attack is absolutely prohibited.
  4. Preventive war is unacceptable and contrary to International Law and the United Nations Charter.
  5. When acting in self-defence, a sovereign government must respond to an actual or imminent attack only in a manner that is necessary and proportionate.  Reprisal is impermissible.  War must always be the last resort.
  6. In exceptional circumstances, it may be permissible for the community of nations to act together in defence of peoples subject to or at risk of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity or ethnic cleansing.  No such action may be taken, unless explicitly sanctioned by the United Nations.
  7. The aim of national governments and the United Nations should be the achievement of a just and lasting peace among peoples.  Occupation by one nation of another is contrary to International Law.
  8. Weapons of mass destruction including nuclear, chemical or biological weapons should be prohibited.  Nuclear powers should all affirm their support for the abolition of nuclear weapons.  They are no longer relevant to the defence of any country.  Until abolition occurs all nuclear powers should declare that they will never use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear armed state and that they will never be the first to use nuclear weapons and should desist in any further development of nuclear arms.
  9. Peace and security for all nations will not be achieved unless all nations great and small are prepared to comply with International Law.

Prevention of War

  1. In all conflicts, contending parties must make every endeavour to resolve their dispute by negotiation, mediation, arbitration, judicial settlement or resort to representative international organizations.

The United Nations should:

  1. Take every possible step to prevent the conditions from which threats to international peace and security may arise.  State failure, whether through political corruption, economic collapse or civil war, should be anticipated and avoided.
  2. Ensure that states at risk of failure are provided with the economic, social, political and technical assistance they require to attain minimum standards of stability and prosperity.
  3. Ensure that global economic inequality and hence poverty is reduced to such an extent that all peoples may have the opportunity to create and inhabit viable, autonomous and decent states and societies.
  1. Ensure that environmental degradation causing resource scarcity, population movements, pollution and widespread economic distress is prevented.

The Role of Religion

  1. Different religious faiths, their institutions and leaders have an important role to play in the prevention of conflict at the local, national and international level. They should be active at each of these levels in combining forces to avoid and resolve political, social and military conflict.

The Future of Humanity And The Global Environment

The Consultation emphasized humanity’s relationship with and dependence upon the preservation of the planet. It reasserted the importance of effective national and international action to overcome pressing environmental problems including global warming.

The primary reason for our environmental crisis arises from our own behavioral patterns.  Sections of society have become obsessed with conspicuous consumption, which demands an increasing and never ending supply of goods and services that can only be produced at the cost of environmental degradation. What is needed is the individual and collective transformation of human consciousness. The religious and ethical traditions have a major part to play in stimulating this transformation.

Our legal and political processes need to enshrine responsibilities centred on a different ethical standpoint. Key moral insights include the following:

a.       Economic and social arrangements should rest not on the notion of the self-centred, self-interested individual but on the needs of the entire human family, closely interconnected with the whole of nature;

b.       Humanity is in a position of trusteeship of the environment and not in a position of ownership or dominance

c.       The entire environment is part of a structure and no part of it can be damaged without damage to the entirety

d.       Given the interconnectedness of all life, nature and all its elements have rights of their own

e.       Earth’s resources belong to all and must be equitably shared

f.        Human greed should be restrained and unjust enrichment must be avoided

g.       The present generation should show a deep concern for the welfare of future generations

h.       Pollution of earth, air, space and water constitutes damage to future generations and must be avoided

i.        Animal life is entitled to special protection and the extinction of species should be prevented

j.        A balance must be struck between the imperatives of development and the concept of sustainability.

In line with this shared ethical wisdom:

a.       The profit strategies of business and pragmatic politics must be constrained by the findings of scientists, the inspiration of poets and artists, and the wisdom of sages, thinkers and scholars

b.       The objectives of economic growth must be tempered by the need to arrest and reverse the presently dangerous levels of environmental degradation – GDP centred economic growth must give way to ecologically sustainable development

c.       The urgent need to arrest and reverse the presently dangerous levels of environmental degradation should proceed by giving due attention to equity, and in particular to the needs and entitlements of the poorer third of humanity

d.       Decision making at both national and international level should give a voice to all the peoples of the world and to future generations

e.       The budgetary strategies of local and national governments as well as of international institutions must now have as an urgent priority substantial and on-going support for:

(i) conservation measures with the aim of redesigning our transport systems and the structure of our cities as well as our patterns of consumption;

(ii) much greater efficiency in the use of all energy fuels, water and other scarce resources;

(iii) the rapid development of renewable sources of energy (including solar, wind, geothermal and ocean energy).

The international community should set the target of renewable energy sources supplying 40 per cent of total energy needs by 2030

f.        Local, national and international institutions must incorporate environmental knowledge and awareness at all levels of education from early childhood through to primary, secondary, and higher education as well as all forms of community education

g.       Legal and political discourse as well as our educational and media programs must make effective use of our diverse religious, spiritual and ethical systems, and importantly our indigenous traditions, to develop rituals, practices and celebrations that acknowledge the interdependence of all life

h.       All major development projects must be regulated, nationally and internationally, so that full account is taken of their impact on both neighbouring and distant communities as well as on future generations.

The Consultation recognizes that while important steps must be taken by all countries, different steps, different standards will need to be applied between developed and developing countries.  The Consultation’s recommendations depend upon two basic principles.  The first quite simply is the necessary principle to protect, to preserve and enhance the environment and planet itself.  The second principle concerns the question of equity, a question ignored in Copenhagen.  This Consultation recognizes that while important steps must be taken by all countries, different steps, different standards will need to be applied in developing countries.  It is not only the total pollution produced by a country that must be taken into account in achieving a just outcome, but also the pollution per capita which is highly relevant to the way the human race tackles this particular problem.

Integrating a Common World Ethic into the Work of International Institutions

The Consultation believes that the values and principles that form part of a common world ethic should be more effectively integrated into the work of the UN system and major international legal institutions. Integrating values and principles will require significant reforms to leading organs and agencies of the United Nations.

To this end religious and other ethically based institutions should work with legal and political authorities with the following aims in mind:

a.       To develop a higher level of public understanding and awareness of commonalities in values between the major religious and ethical traditions, while fully respecting religious, ethnic and cultural diversity

b.       Where differences exist, to serve as mediating agents and so maximize the prospects of agreement on constructive ways of handling the most pressing challenges currently confronting humanity

c.       To scrutinize the present institutions and instruments of international law with a view to identifying shortcomings in the incorporation of shared values into both customary and treaty law

d.       To work with national governments with a view to monitoring actual violations (as well as anticipating potential violations) of international agreements, or failure to ratify and fully implement such agreements. More effective mechanisms of engagement are needed between legal and political authorities on the one hand and religious and civil society organizations on the other.

This can be done in diverse and complementary ways:

  1. by making more extensive use of the educative role UN agencies and programs (including UNESCO, the United Nations University and the Alliance for Civilizations), inviting them to highlight the relevance of a shared ethic and wisdom to the international legal order, and to bring this to the attention of national education ministries and other educational institutions;
  2. by requesting UNDP to consider funding such an educational project
  3. by helping to establish a World Forum of eminent persons, comprising religious scholars, legal experts and former political leaders which would consider ways in which international law bodies could more systematically incorporate the agreed values and principles that form part of a common world ethic. Such a Forum could then submit its recommendations to the UN secretary-General as well as to national governments and civil society organisations;
  4. by asking the International Law Commission to undertake a scoping study which would consider the extent to which existing international law bodies and international instruments have incorporated key values and principles that form part of a shared ethic, and to recommend to the UN General Assembly ways in which this could be more effectively achieved;
  5. by requesting national governments to identify ministries which would liaise through the UN with a view to exploring ways in which common ethical principles and shared wisdom could be more carefully integrated into international and domestic legal provisions.

These are just a few possible initiatives which should be read in conjunction with the many other imaginative proposals put forward by the Consultation. The Implementation Committee will need to give serious consideration to these proposals as it begins to flesh out a program of effective consultation, coordination and action.

Global Action Plan

The Consultation seeks to define a common ethic and to suggest how this can be more effectively integrated into the work of the United Nations, including its various agencies, other international global and regional institutions, and relevant legal institutions, such as courts and tribunals.  In this regard the Consultation notes the work of many groups who have addressed the idea of a commonly accepted global ethic.  In particular, the Consultation supports the draft Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities proposed by the InterAction Council including its preamble. The draft comprises 19 Principles which speak of integrity, honesty and fairness, and the dignity of every person.  It enshrines the golden rule “what you do not wish to be done to yourself, do not do to others”.

While it is a draft it remains the most concise exposition of core values common to all religions.  It has been endorsed by many different political and religious leaders including those from Germany, Netherlands, Thailand, Costa Rica, United Kingdom, United States, Mexico, France, Spain, Singapore, Japan, Canada, Australia, Nigeria, Brazil, apart from many members of the InterAction Council.

The Consultation recommends that the Secretary General acts to advance acceptance of a statement of shared ethical values and that the document be introduced into the General Assembly for debate and adoption.  That would lead to a Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities that would stand beside the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

While this document would be a statement of high principle, we would strongly recommend the United Nations and its organs should follow the path adopted after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was accepted in 1948 and draft Conventions relevant to its various aspects would be open for ratification and which would then have the force of law.

There is an opportunity for religious leaders to take a leading role.  Too often nations or political leaders have used alleged or perceived differences between religions to create fear and even to justify conflict.  This underscores the importance of ethical political leadership which would set the moral tone and tenor of society.

Major divisions have arisen between religious groups. The commonly accepted ethical standard, once adopted by the United Nations, would make it extraordinarily difficult for politicians and for governments to use religion for base political purposes.

The Consultation has noted with great appreciation the remarks of the Grand Mufti of Syria who has recaptured with clarity and in the strongest way, the basic values common to all religions.  The Consultation strongly endorses his call for understanding and acceptance of diversity without discrimination.

The Consultation therefore, requests the Secretary General to:

  1. Use and advance the recommendations of this Consultation to strengthen the United Nations and the Security Council’s search for the preservation of peace and for the outlawing of war.
  2. Use the full force of his office to achieve acceptance of the shared core values and responsibilities supported by the world’s religions as enunciated with clarity in the draft Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities prepared over 20 years by the InterAction Council.  The Consultation urges the draft Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities be introduced into the General Assembly for acceptance and adoption.
  3. Having in mind the urgency created by the possibility of nuclear war and of global warming, initiate substantial steps consistent with recommendations of this Consultation to protect the environment and the planet for the benefit of all people.
  4. Use the authority of his office to encourage all countries to heed this call; to recognize the urgency of the situation caused by uncontrolled nuclear proliferation and its linkages with the environment; and advance urgent and effective action.

Next Steps

The participants in this Consultation take ownership of the document with the sense of responsibility to implement in letter and spirit the Global Action Plan.

The Global Action Plan will be executed by a Secretariat under the oversight of the Implementation Committee.  It will include programs of research, publication, education, consultation and advocacy relating to gaining acceptance of the incorporation of universal spiritual and moral principles into the corpus of international law;  strengthening the role of values and norms derived from our philosophical traditions in the policies of the United Nations and other organizations; and campaigning for the  endorsement of the Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities  as a High Principle at the international level.

The Implementation Committee will determine a time-frame for the GAP which will be implemented in phases.  It will spell out institutional mechanisms and will include provisions for personnel and for a budget.

Among the institutions and groups that the GAP will focus upon are the following:-

  1. The United Nations General Assembly, the Security Council, UNESCO, UNDP.
  2. Regional organizations, including ASEAN, the African Union and the European Union.
  3. Governments sympathetic to the aims and objectives of the GAP.
  4. Religious and cultural institutions and personalities at national, regional and international levels.
  5. Educational institutions in various countries.
  6. Youth movements operating at all three levels: national, regional and international.
  7. Indigenous movements and other marginalized communities
  8. Women’s organizations
  9. Civil society groups committed to peace, justice and environmental protection.

10) Professional associations of lawyers, doctors, and academics.

11) Businesses and corporations at national and international levels.

To implement the GAP, the Implementation Committee will, as a matter of priority, identify a university that has intellectual affinity with the GAP and which is prepared to cooperate with the Implementation Committee.  The Implementation Committee will seek the support of the country in which the university is located, and other governments, to reinforce this effort. The funds required will be mobilized from both public and private sector institutions.

One of the first tasks of the Implementation Committee will be to establish a comprehensive directory of institutions, organizations and individuals that we can work with in furtherance of our goals.