Dear Friend,
In a dramatic comeback, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, progressive and one of Argentina’s most popular presidents during her two terms in 2007-2015, has been voted back into office as vice president.
California wildfires are again in the news as the Kincade Fire now raging risked 50,000 people, who have been evacuated. It might come as a surprise but there have been 41,074 wildfires compared to 47,853 in 2018 for the first nine months of the year.
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Progressive Cristina Fernandez wins
presidency in Argentina
by Countercurrents Collective
In a dramatic comeback, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, progressive and one of Argentina’s most popular presidents during her two terms in 2007-2015, has been voted back into office as vice president.
Climate Risks: Wildfires, Glacier Melt, Coastal Flooding
by Dr Arshad M Khan
California wildfires are again in the news as the Kincade Fire now raging risked 50,000 people, who have been evacuated. It might come as a surprise but there have been 41,074 wildfires compared to 47,853 in 2018 for the first nine months of the year.
California wildfires are again in the news as the Kincade Fire now raging risked 50,000 people, who have been evacuated. It might come as a surprise but there have been 41,074 wildfires compared to 47,853 in 2018 for the first nine months of the year. Blame the downslope Santa Ana winds for fanning them. Fires can occur naturally through lightning strikes but these days some 90 percent are due to human carelessness: discarded cigarettes, unquenched campfires and the like, all exacerbated by a warming climate. Killing 85 people, the deadliest wildfire in the state’s history seemed to have been caused by Pacific Gas and Electric power lines (although it is still under investigation), and they are suspected in the present Kincade Fire. Wildfires do clear brush — 4.4 million acres burned off this year — ensuring a worse fire will not occur in the future.
As can be expected, such fires also place property at risk. California, Texas and Colorado have the highest numbers of properties at risk, while Montana and Idaho are tops in percentage terms; in Montana 29 percent and in Idaho 26 percent of properties are in the danger zone.
If the west is prone to wildfires, the east has an opposite problem: flooding. Sea levels are rising. The Greenland ice sheet holding enough water to raise the water line by 7 meters is melting. Scientists estimate two-thirds of the ice loss is due to glacier calving as chunks of ice detach from the 300 odd outlet glaciers that end in the fjords. As reported in Science magazine recently, (October 11, 2019), Helheim, a major glacier responsible for 4 percent of Greenland’s annual ice loss is being observed by a team headed by Fiamma Straneo of the Scripps Institution.
In severe retreat since 2014, the glacier has reduced “by more than 100 meters, leaving a tell-tale ring on the rock around the fjord.” This summer its water temperature is 0.2C above the previous high in a relentless rise. Also the data collected will improve mathematical modeling to predict future consequences.
Coastal flooding on the East Coast has been noted by the New York Times (October 8, 2019) in a feature article titled As Sea Levels Rise, So Do Ghost Forests. Trees in coastal areas are dying off due to frequent total incursions of saltwater.
An excellent estimate of coastal flooding on the East and Gulf coasts, Encroaching Tides, was prepared by the Union of Concerned Scientists a few years ago. Sober reading, it forecasts coastal innundation over the next three decades. It talks about adaptation to the new norms, the responsibility of Municipalities, States and the Federal Government,
sea walls, economic consequences, and a retreat from heavily impacted areas. Is anybody listening, and when they called for reducing emissions was the US listening?
When more than 190 countries signed up to almost all of the rulebook buttressing the 2015 Paris Agreement, it made the 24th International Climate Conference in Katowice, Poland (Dec 2018) a major success. This December the 25th International Climate Conference will convene in Santiago, Chile. A primary issue before it is how to avoid double counting i.e. counting the same emission reduction more than once. Countries have so far failed to reach common ground on how to avoid it despite the threat to carbon markets underpinning the Paris Agreement. Is bashing heads together in Santiago one answer?
Meanwhile on the top of the world, inhabiting the Tibet plateau, the beautiful and majestic chiru or Tibetan antelope, once in trouble from excessive poaching and then recovering, is at risk again. This time it is due to climate change. It has caused excessive melt and a burst natural dam that used to surround Lake Zonag right beside their calving site.
Dr Arshad M Khan (http://ofthisandthat.org/index.html) is a former Professor based in the U.S. whose comments over several decades have appeared in a wide-ranging array of print and internet media. His work has been quoted in the U.S. Congress and published in the Congressional Record.
Plurinationalism, Pancasila – and the pettiness of Hindu Nationalism
by Ananda Maitreya
While the
Indian constitution includes succinct expressions of a nation’s aspirations to respecting all faith persuasions and manners of belief, the Bolivian constitution is more explicit and detailed in the recognition of the plurality of nationalities that exist under the nation-state of Bolivia – and their flourishing.
What the Dismantling of the Berlin Wall Means 30 Years Later
by James Carroll
This November anniversary of the dismantling of the Berlin Wall should offer an occasion to say no to that. The Wall’s demise stopped in its tracks the demonic dynamic set in motion on the very same date in 1938 by that Kristallnacht. If idealistic hope could so triumph once, it can so triumph again, no matter what the die-hard realists of our moment may believe. I’ve referred to that November in Berlin as a miracle, but that is wrong.
Some anniversaries are less about the past than the future. So it should be with November 9, 1989. In case you’ve long forgotten, that was the day when East and West Germans began nonviolently dismantling the Berlin Wall, an entirely unpredicted, almost unimaginable ending to the long-entrenched Cold War. Think of it as the triumph of idealistic hope over everything that then passed for hard-nosed “realism.” After all, Western intelligence services, academic Kremlinologists, and the American national security establishment had always blithely assumed that the Cold War would essentially go on forever — unless the absolute malevolence of Soviet Communism led to the ultimate mayhem of nuclear Armageddon. For almost half a century, only readily dismissed peaceniks insisted that, in the nuclear age, war and endless preparations for more of it were not the answer. When the Berlin Wall came down, such idealists were proven right, even if their triumph was still ignored.
Yet war-as-the-answer reasserted itself with remarkable rapidity. Within weeks of the Wall being breached by hope — in an era that saw savage conflicts in Central America, the Philippines, and South Africa transformed by a global wave of nonviolent resolution — the United States launched Operation Just Cause, the invasion of Panama by a combat force of more than 27,000 troops. The stated purpose of that act of war was the arrest of Panama’s tinhorn dictator Manuel Noriega, who had initially come to power as a CIA asset. That invasion’s only real importance was as a demonstration that, even with global peace being hailed, the world’s last remaining superpower remained as committed as ever to the hegemony of violent force.
Who Ended the Cold War?
While President George H.W. Bush rushed to claim credit for ending the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev was the lynchpin of that historic conclusion. It was he who, in the dramatic autumn of 1989, repeatedly ordered Communist forces to remain in their barracks while throngs of freedom-chanters poured into the streets of multiple cities behind the Iron Curtain. Instead of blindly striking out (as the leaders of crumbling empires often had), Gorbachev allowed democratic demands to echo through the Soviet empire — ultimately even in Russia itself.
Yet the American imagination was soon overtaken by the smug fantasy that the U.S. had “won” the Cold War and that it was now a power beyond all imagining. Never mind that, in 1987, when President Ronald Reagan issued his famed demand in then still-divided Berlin, “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” the Soviet leader was already starting to do precisely that.
As the wall came down, the red-scare horrors that had disturbed American dreams for three generations seemed to dissolve overnight, leaving official Washington basking in triumphalism. The U.S. then wrapped itself in a self-aggrandizing mantle of virtue and power that effectively blinded this country’s political leadership to the ways the Cold War’s end had left them mired in an outmoded, ever more dangerous version of militarism.
After Panama, the self-styled “indispensable nation” would show itself to be hell-bent on unbridled — and profoundly self-destructive — belligerence. Deprived of an existential enemy, Pentagon budgets would decline oh-so-modestly (though without a “peace dividend” in sight) but soon return to Cold War levels. A bristling nuclear arsenal would be maintained as a “hedge” against the comeback of Soviet-style communism. Such thinking would, in the end, only empower Moscow’s hawks, smoothing the way for the future rise of an ex-KGB agent named Vladimir Putin. Such hyper-defensive anticipation would prove to be, as one wag put it, the insurance policy that started the fire.
Even as the disintegration of the once-demonized USSR was firmly underway, culminating in the final lowering of the hammer-and-sickle flag from the Kremlin on Christmas Day 1991, the United States was launching what would prove to be a never-ending and disastrous sequence of unnecessary Middle Eastern wars. They began with Operation Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush’s assault on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1990. In American memory, that campaign, which crushed the Iraqi autocrat’s army and forced it out of Kuwait, would be a techno-war made in heaven with fewer than 200 U.S. combat deaths.
That memory, however, fits poorly with what was actually happening that year. An internationally mounted sanctions regime had already been on the verge of thwarting Hussein without the U.S.-led invasion — and, of course, what Bush the father began, Bush the son would, with his 2003 shock-and-awe recapitulation, turn into the permanent bedrock of American politics.
As the 30th anniversary of the end of the Cold War approaches, it should be obvious that there’s been a refusal in the United States to reckon with a decades-long set of conflagrations in the Greater Middle East as the inevitable consequence of that first American invasion in 1990. Above all, Desert Storm, with its monumental victory parade in Washington D.C., brought the Pentagon’s Cold War raison d’être back from the brink of obsolescence. That campaign and what followed in its wake guaranteed that violence would continue to occupy the heartlands of the U.S. economy, its politics, and its culture. In the process, the world-historic aspirations kindled by the miracle of the Berlin Wall’s dismantling would be thoroughly dashed. No wonder, so many years later, we hardly remember that November of hope — or the anniversary that goes with it.
Out of the Memory Hole
By revisiting its astonishing promise as the anniversary approaches, however, and by seeing it more fully in light of what made it so surprising, perhaps something of that vanished positive energy can still be retrieved. So let me call to mind the events of various earlier Novembers that make the point. What follows is a decade-by-decade retracing of the way the war machine trundled through recent history — and through the American psyche — until it was finally halted in a battle-scarred, divided city in the middle of Europe, stopped by an urge for peace that refused to be denied.
Let’s start with November 1939, only weeks after the German invasion of Poland that began what would become World War II. A global struggle between good and evil was just then kicking into gear. Unlike the previous Great War of 1914-1918, which was fought for mere empire, Hitler’s war was understood in distinctly Manichaean terms as both apocalyptic and transcendent. After all, the moral depravity of the Nazi project had already been laid bare when Jewish synagogues, businesses, and homes everywhere in Germany were subject to the savagery of Kristallnacht, or “the night of broken glass.” That ignition of what became an anti-Jewish genocide took place, as it happened, on November 9, 1938.
The good-versus-evil absolutism of World War II stamped the American imagination so profoundly that a self-righteous moral dualism survived not only into the Cold War but into Washington’s twenty-first-century war on terror. In such contests against enemies defined as devils, Americans could adopt the kinds of ends-justify-the-means strategies called for by “realism.” When you are fighting along what might be thought of as an axis of evil, anything goes — from deceit and torture to the routine sacrifice of civilians, whose deaths in America’s post-9/11 wars have approached a total of half a million. Through it all, we were assured of one certain thing: that God was on our side. (“God is not neutral,” as George W. Bush put it just days after the 9/11 attacks.)
From Genocide to Omnicide
But what if God could not protect us? That was the out-of-the-blue question posed near the start of all this — not in August 1945 when the U.S. dropped its “victory weapon” on two cities in Japan, but in August 1949 when the Soviet Union acquired an atomic bomb, too. By that November, the American people were already in the grip of an unprecedented nuclear paranoia, which prompted President Harry Truman to override leading atomic scientists and order the development of what one called a “genocidal weapon,” the even more powerful hydrogen bomb. Then came the manic build-up of the U.S. nuclear arsenal to proportions suitable less for genocide than for “omnicide.” Such weapons mushroomed (if you’ll excuse the word in a potentially mushroom-clouded world) from fewer than 200 in 1950 to nearly 20,000 a decade later. Of course, that escalation, in turn, drove Moscow forward in a desperate effort to keep up, leading to an unhinged arms race that turned the suicide of the human species into a present danger, one measured by the Doomsday Clock, of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which was set at two minutes to midnight in 1953 — and then again in 2019, all these Novembers later.
Now, let’s flash forward another decade to November 1959 when the mortal danger of human self-extinction finally became openly understood, as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev began issuing blatant threats of nuclear war over — you guessed it — Berlin. Because part of that city, far inside Communist East Germany, was still occupied by American, French, and British forces, it amounted to a tear in what was then called the Iron Curtain, separating the Soviet empire from Western Europe. With thousands fleeing through that tear to the so-called Free World, the Soviets became increasingly intent on shutting the escape hatch, threatening to use the Red Army to drive the Allies out of Berlin. That brought the possibility of a nuclear conflict to the fore.
Ultimately, the Communists would adopt a quite different strategy when, in 1961, they built that infamous wall, a concrete curtain across the city. At the time, Berliners sometimes referred to it, with a certain irony, as the “Peace Wall” because, by blocking escape from the East, it made the dreaded war between the two Cold War superpowers unnecessary. Yet within a year the unleashed prospect of such a potentially civilization-ending conflict had hopscotched the globe to Communist Cuba. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 caused the world to shudder as incipient nuclear war between Washington and Moscow suddenly loomed. That moment, just before Khrushchev and American President John F. Kennedy stepped back from doomsday, might have changed something; a relieved world’s shock of recognition, that is, might have thrown the classic wooden shoe of sabotage into the purring engine of “realism.” No such luck, however, as the malevolent power of the war state simply motored on — in the case of the United States directly into Vietnam.
By November 1969, President Richard Nixon’s cynical continuation of the Vietnam War for his own political purposes had already driven the liberal-conservative divide over that misbegotten conflict into the permanent structure of American politics. The ubiquitous “POW/MIA: You Are Not Forgotten” flag survives today as an icon of Nixon’s manipulations. Still waving over ball parks, post offices, town halls, and VFW posts across the nation, that sad black banner now flies as a symbol of red state/blue state antagonism — and as a lasting reminder of how we Americans can make prisoners of ourselves.
By 1979, with the Vietnam War in the past, President Jimmy Carter showed how irresistible November’s tide — the inexorable surge toward war — truly was. It was in November of that year that militant Iranian students overran the American embassy in Tehran, taking sixty-six Americans hostage — the event that was credited with stymying the formerly peace-minded president. In reality, though, Carter had already initiated the historic anti-Soviet arms build-up for which President Ronald Reagan would later be credited.
Then, of course, Carter would ominously foreshadow America’s future reversals in the deserts of the Levant with a failed rescue of those hostages. Most momentously, however, he would essentially license future Middle East defeats with what came to be known as the Carter Doctrine — the formally declared principle that the Persian Gulf (and its oil) were “vital interests” of this country, worthy of defense “by any means necessary, including military force.” (And of course, his CIA would lead us into America’s first Afghan War, still in a sense going on some 40 years later.)
Retrieving Hope?
Decade by decade, the evidence of an unstoppable martial dynamic only seemed to accumulate. In that milestone month of November 1989, Washington’s national security “realists” were still stuck in the groove of such worst-case thinking. That they were wrong, that they would be stunned by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent implosion of the Soviet Union, should mandate thoughtful observance of this coming 30th anniversary.
During the late 1980s, a complex set of antiwar and antinuclear countercurrents seemed to come out of nowhere. Each of them should have been impossible. The ruthlessly totalitarian Soviet system should not have produced in Mikhail Gorbachev a humane statesman who sacrificed empire and his own career for the sake of peace. The most hawkish American president in history, Ronald Reagan, should not have responded to Gorbachev by working to end the arms race with him — but he did.
Pressuring those two leaders to pursue that course — indeed, forcing them to — was an international grassroots movement demanding an end to apocalyptic terror. People wanted peace so much, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower had predicted in 1959, that, miracle of all miracles, governments got out of their way and let them have it. With the breaching of the Berlin Wall that November 9th — a transformation accomplished by ordinary citizens, not soldiers — the political realm of the possible was substantially broadened, not only to include prospective future detente among warring nations, but an eventual elimination of nuclear weapons themselves.
Yet, in November 2019, all of that seems lost. A new Cold War is underway, with East-West hostilities quickening; a new arms race has begun, especially as the United States renounces Reagan-Gorbachev arms-control agreements for the sake of a trillion-plus dollar “modernization” of its nuclear arsenal. Across the globe, democracy is in retreat, driven by pressures from both populist nationalism and predatory capitalism. Even in America, democracy seems imperiled. And all of this naturally prompts the shudder-inducing question: Were the worst-case realists right all along?
This November anniversary of the dismantling of the Berlin Wall should offer an occasion to say no to that. The Wall’s demise stopped in its tracks the demonic dynamic set in motion on the very same date in 1938 by that Kristallnacht. If idealistic hope could so triumph once, it can so triumph again, no matter what the die-hard realists of our moment may believe. I’ve referred to that November in Berlin as a miracle, but that is wrong. The most dangerous face-off in history ended not because of the gods or good fortune, but because of the actions and efforts of human beings. Across two generations, countless men and women — from anonymous community activists and union organizers to unsung military officials, scientists, and even world leaders — overcame the seemingly endless escalations of nuclear-armed animus to make brave choices for peace and against a war of annihilation, for life and against death, for the future and against the doom-laden past.
It can happen again. It must.
James Carroll, TomDispatch regular and former Boston Globe columnist, is the author of 20 books, most recently the novel The Cloister. His history of the Pentagon, House of War, won the PEN-Galbraith Award. His Vietnam War memoir, An American Requiem, won the National Book Award. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Originally published in TomDispatch
Moscow once again appears on the African continent
with the first Russia-Africa summit
by Abdus Sattar Ghazali
The first ever two-day Russia-Africa economic summit ended Thursday in the resort city Sochi, Russia resulting over 500 commercial agreements worth $12 billion.
The first ever two-day Russia-Africa economic summit ended Thursday in the resort city Sochi, Russia resulting over 500 commercial agreements worth $12 billion.
About four dozen African leaders and high-level government officials attended the summit and economic forum, from Nigerian President Muhammad Buhari to African Union Commission Chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat. Over 40 African nations were represented by heads of state or government at the summit, while 11 others sent their vice presidents, foreign ministers or ambassadors.
The two-day event was the first of its kind hosted by Russia, which is seeking a new engagement on the African continent in competition with China, the United States, and even countries like India and Turkey, which have increased their diplomatic efforts in recent years.
According to Financial Times Russia offered nuclear power plants, fighter jets and missile defense systems to African countries in a charm offensive designed to win back influence on the continent, at the summit.
Russia has defense orders worth $14bn from African countries, its state-run arms export agency said at the summit. Sales to the continent account for about a third of Moscow’s military exports. Mr Putin said Russia had agreed “military technical co-operation agreements” with more than 30 African states, to supply weapons. “Some of these deliveries are free of charge,” he added. Elina Ribakova, deputy chief economist at the Institute of International Finance, described Russia’s offerings as “no strings attached”.
While the Soviet Union was a close partner with many African states during the cold war, Russia’s current bilateral trade of $20bn is just a tenth of China’s, and relies heavily on exports of arms and grain to a handful of richer states.
Mr Putin promised to double trade within the next “four to five years”, and used a marathon schedule of back-to-back bilateral meetings with visiting delegations on both days of the summit to offer deals on everything from diamond mining to pork exports — though few have yet materialized.
The Kremlin’s aim is to use military and trade ties to reinsert itself as a geopolitical powerbroker on the continent, the Financial Times said.
Agreements signed
Some of the agreements signed at the Russia-Africa Forum as reported by Sputnik:
Trade financing: The Russian Export Center, VEB.RF state development corporation, Sberbank and GemCorpCapital LLP investment company have signed a $5 billion worth framework agreement for creating a mechanism of Russian-African trade financing.
Nuclear energy: Russia and Ethiopia have signed an intergovernmental agreement in Sochi for cooperation on the peaceful use of nuclear energy. Russian oil company Lukoil signed a memorandum for drilling rights in Equatorial Guinea and Nigeria, while state-run atomic energy group Rosatom inked a preliminary agreement to build a nuclear power plant in Ethiopia. It also agreed to begin construction on an Egyptian reactor next year.
Defence ties: Russia plans to deliver $4 billion worth of weapons to Africa in 2019, Rosoboronexport Director General Alexander Mikheev told Sputnik.
Russia and Nigeria have signed a contract for deliveries of 12 Russian Mi-35 attack helicopters, Russian Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation Deputy Director Anatoly Punchuk told Sputnik on Wednesday at the Russia-Africa forum.
Although Russia has signed military agreements with some two dozen countries, its actual presence on the ground is still relatively marginal in comparison to the French or the US. The US military has outposts in 34 African countries and had at least 33 active missions in 2017, according to journalist Nick Turse. This includes special forces fighting covert wars in Libya, Somalia, Tunisia, and Niger, with little to no accountability to the US Congress or the broader American public.
Late to the Party: Russia’s Return to Africa
“Late to the Party: Russia’s Return to Africa,” is the title of the article of Paul Stroski about the Russia-Africa summit published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Paul Stroski, a senior fellow in Carnegie’s Russia and Eurasia Program, said:
“After a decades-long absence, Russia is once again appearing on the African continent. The Kremlin’s return to Africa, which has generated considerable media, governmental, and civil society attention, draws on a variety of tools and capabilities. Worrying patterns of stepped-up Russian activity are stirring concerns that a new wave of great-power competition in Africa is now upon us.
“U.S. policymakers frequently stress the need to counter Russian malign influence on the continent. On a visit to Angola in early 2019, Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan said that “Russia often utilizes coercive, corrupt, and covert means to attempt to influence sovereign states, including their security and economic partnerships.”
“Advocates for a more forceful Western policy response point to high-visibility Russian military and security cooperation in the Central African Republic and the wide-ranging travels of Russian political consultants and disinformation specialists as confirmation that Russia, like China, represents a major challenge in Africa.”
Resurgence of a global power on the continent
Joe Penney of Quartz Africa says Russia’s Africa summit is the latest step in its resurgence as a global power on the continent. Since 2015, Russia has signed military agreements with 21 African countries, and in the past decade, it has grown its trade with the continent to $20.4 billion in 2018 from $5.7 billion in 2009.
“Forced to find new diplomatic partners as well as markets for arms and goods after United States and European Union’s sanctions for Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the rapid growth of this partnership has set off alarm bells in Washington, D.C. and Paris,” Joe Penney said adding:
“Russia’s interest, like those of other major world powers in Africa, “involves arms exports, imports of natural resources, and the projection of power,” writes Jakob Hedenskog, researcher at the Swedish Defense Research Agency. It has accelerated its diplomatic, military and economic push by building upon its former Soviet ties, when it armed anti-Apartheid and anti-colonial movements like those in Angola, Mozambique, and Algeria. While Russia is Africa’s top arms supplier, nearly 80% of the weapons it sells the continent are directed to its longtime ally Algeria, who have relied on Russian equipment since their independence war against France in the late 1950s. Its economic plans for Africa include lucrative oil and gas, mining and nuclear energy deals across the continent.”
Penney quoted journalist Nick Turse as saying: Although Russia has signed military agreements with some two dozen countries, its actual presence on the ground is still relatively marginal in comparison to the French or the US. The US military has outposts in 34 African countries and had at least 33 active missions in 2017, according to journalist Nick Turse. This includes special forces fighting covert wars in Libya, Somalia, Tunisia, and Niger, with little to no accountability to the US Congress or the broader American public.
China-Africa summit
Russia-Africa summit and economic forum follows a similar approach by the Chinese. The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation has become so influential as a source of economic support for African countries, twice as many African leaders attended the Beijing event in September 2018.
The 2018 Beijing Summit of the Forum on China Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) was defined by Beijing as its most important home diplomatic event of the year, with 53 out of 54 African countries represented, leaving out only Swaziland, which still maintains diplomatic relations with Taiwan.
Established 18 years ago, FOCAC has achieved fruitful results and has become a significant mark of China-Africa cooperation. China-Africa trade volume amounted to $170 billion in 2017, up from just over $10 billion in 2000, according to data from China’s Ministry of Commerce.
the Forum on China-Africa Co-operation-Ministerial Conference (FOCAC) was held in Beijing from 10 to 12 October 2000. This was the first gathering of its kind in the history of China-Africa relations.
The second FOCAC adopted the Beijing Action Plan (2019-2021).
The vigorous development of China-Africa cooperation has not only promoted the progress of Africa, but also inspired international partners to pay closer attention to Africa and increase their input into and cooperation with the continent, Chinese President Xi Jinping said.
African leaders expressed support and appreciation for the Belt and Road Initiative, believing that the joint building of the Belt and Road by Africa and China will speed up African regional integration.
The year 2018 marked the fifth anniversary of the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative, with more African countries expressing their interest in joining the grand project.
So far, nearly 10 African countries have signed Belt and Road cooperation agreements with China, and a few more are in negotiations..
Proposed in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative refers to the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, which aims to build a trade and infrastructure network connecting Asia with Europe and Africa along the ancient trade routes of the Silk Road.
China is willing to work with Africa to dovetail its Belt and Road Initiative with the Agenda 2063 of the African Union, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development of the United Nations, as well as the development strategies of individual African countries to explore new opportunities and inject new impetus for Africa’s development, said Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Chief Editor of the Journal of America (www.journalofamerica.net) email: asghazali2011 (@) gmail.com
Disagreeing Reasonably in a Complex World: A review of The Case Against Free Speech
by Robert Jensen
Reasonable people can disagree, and I take both Moskowitz and myself to be reasonable. The Case against Free Speech is a flawed book, and I’m glad I read it. Both things are true, and therefore both are relevant.
Genetically Engineered Golden Rice: A Silver Bullet that Misses the Target
by Colin Todhunter
Promoters of genetic modification (GM) in agriculture have long argued that genetically engineered Golden Rice is a practical way to provide poor farmers in remote areas with a subsistence crop capable of adding much-needed vitamin A to local diets. Vitamin A deficiency is a problem in many poor countries in the Global South and leaves millions at high risk for infection, diseases and other maladies, such as blindness.
Unlevelled Fields: Brexit, Workers’ Rights and the Environment
by Dr Binoy Kampmark
The smorgasbord of Brexit terms has been further plated up with the latest acronym: the WAB or Withdrawal Agreement Bill. It comes in at 115 pages, with an added bonus of 126 pages of explanatory notes. For something seemingly so significant, not much time was on offer for
those in the Commons to peruse, let alone digest it. Rushed before the members last Monday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson was hoping that the most significant constitutional change to Britain in decades would be a push over.
Report From Iran: The Country Moves Onward
by Ugo Bardi
Iran is a country that maintains something of the fascination it had in ancient times, when it was both fabulous and remote. In our times, it remained somewhat remote, but also something that couldn’t be ignored as it went through a series of dramatic events, from the revolution of 1979, the hostage crisis, the Iraq-Iran war from 1980 to 1988, and much more. The latest political convulsion was the “Green Revolution” in 2009 that quickly abated, but the country clearly keeps evolving, especially in its relations with the West.
By-Elections 2019: Arrogance slapped
by Vidya Bhushan Rawat
The poll results of the Haryana and Maharashtra Assembly as well as by-polls in about 52 constituencies across the country are out and wronged the pollsters as well as the arrogant ‘spokespersons’ on the Manustream media who were out and out ‘determined’ to ‘decimate’ the opposition. In any democracy, if we wish to strengthen it, people must ensure that a healthy opposition remains in the Parliament and Assemblies to make the government accountable
Dushyant Chautala Factor in Haryana Politics
by Dr Rahul Kumar
A young, tall, smart, US-educated Dushyant Chautala, Deputy Chief Minister of Haryana understands better how he can protect his beloved and respected father Ajay Chautala under the thumb of the BJP. He also understands that the BJP is a ‘Nirma Washing Powder ’now- a -days for all the corrupt political
leaders in India.
Whipping Nationalism: Media ends up a ‘lapdog than a watchdog’
by Jaspal Singh Sidhu
Inducing Flag Waving Patriotism, Indian Media Stands Unmasked and Exposed
Pain
by Dr Mudasir Firdosi
Man in his arrogance committing the inconceivable,
pretending to be divinely indestructible.
Suffering, enduring, caring,
liberates the resilient
Freedom is yet attained,
no matter what the era pronounces.
The Age of Savarkar in Gandhi’s India
by Aijaz Zaka Syed
During the month and year of Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary, the BJP has the audacity to celebrate Savarkar, the plotter of Mahatma’s assassination
Justice for Harsha!
by Anonymous
On October 21st , 2019, Harsha a student in
Amrita School of Engineering in Bangalore, committed suicide within the college premise, by jumping off the main college building. Ever since then the students have been protesting in the college demanding justice for Harsha who was pushed to take this step by the college administration. This write up is by alumni of Amrita School of Engineering, Bangalore on how the students are treated in the college and latest set of events that led to the loss of a student’s life.
Are we forgetting that TB prevention is better than cure?
by Shobha Shukla
Prevention of new infections of TB bacteria (Mycobacterium tuberculosis) and their progression to active TB disease is critical to reduce the burden of TB disease and to achieve the goal of ending TB by 2030.
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