Dear Friend,
At least 13 protesters were killed and 150 were injured Sunday in Baghdad and the southern cities of Basra and Nasiriya during clashes between security forces and the protesters. Sunday was one of the “worst” days since protests began. Many of these deaths were due to the use of live ammunition and tear gas by security forces against demonstrators. At least 342 people have been killed in protests in Iraq since the protest began in early October.
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13 Protesters killed in a day in Iraq while
death toll reaches 342
by Countercurrents Collective
At least 13 protesters were killed and 150 were injured Sunday in Baghdad and the southern cities of Basra and Nasiriya during clashes between security forces and the protesters. Sunday was one of the “worst” days since protests began. Many of these deaths were due to the use of live ammunition and tear gas by security forces against demonstrators. At least 342 people have been killed in protests in Iraq since the protest began in early October.
At least 13 protesters were killed and 150 were injured Sunday in Baghdad and the southern cities of Basra and Nasiriya during clashes between security forces and the protesters. Sunday was one of the “worst” days since protests began. Many of these deaths were due to the use of live ammunition and tear gas by security forces against demonstrators.
At least 342 people have been killed in protests in Iraq since the protest began in early October.
Several of killed protesters are reported to have died after they were shot in the face with tear gas canisters. Safaa al Saray, a 26-year-old protester, killed in the same way as Safaa was protesting against the lack of jobs, an end to corruption and better public services.
The anti-government protests began in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square and spread to cities across the south of the country.
On Sunday, thousands came out across the country after activists called for a general strike.
Meanwhile, in Baghdad, street battles between security sources and protesters continued as demonstrators gathered in Tahrir Square on Sunday.
According to the Iraqi Human Rights Council, “three demonstrators were killed in violent clashes with security forces in Umm Qasr, south of Basra, and 78 others were injured. Three demonstrators died in Nasiriya and 71 people were injured. In Basra, seven people were killed in what one security official called “one of the worst” days of the protest movement.
In Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, street battles between security sources and protesters continued.
Interior Ministry spokesperson Khaled al-Mahanna said Saturday night that three demonstrators were killed in Baghdad alone and more than 100 people were injured, including 30 members of the security forces in clashes with demonstrators at Ahrar Bridge.
Human rights groups have previously described the situation in Iraq as a “bloodbath” and have called on the government to stop the security forces.
For their part, protesters are demanding the overthrow of the political elites that they consider corrupt and serving foreign powers, while many Iraqis suffer in poverty without work, medical care or education.
Iraqi protesters blocked Sunday the third bridge leading to Baghdad’s Green Zone and roads leading to oilfields and the main port in the country’s south, gaining more ground in the largest and deadliest anti-government demonstrations in decades.
Security forces used tear gas and stun bombs to stop protesters from crossing the Ahrar Bridge in central Baghdad, in part of a weeks-long attempt to disrupt traffic and get to the Green Zone where government ministries and embassies are located.
Additionally, hundreds of students gathered in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, the symbolic place of the protest movement.
“No politics, no parties, this is a student awakening!” read one banner carried by a young Iraqi.
For the second time since the start of anti-establishment demonstrations, protesters on last Monday blocked the entrance to the Umm Qasr, Iraq’s main Gulf port near Basra, preventing employees and tankers from entering and bringing operations down by 50 percent, two port sources said.
If the blockage continues, operations will come to a complete halt, the sources told Reuters.
“We students are here to help the other protesters, and we won’t retreat a single step,” said another teenager.
In the city of Hillah, south of Baghdad, students and other activists concentrated in front of the provincial headquarters.
“We’ll keep up our protest and general strike with all Iraqis until we force the government to resign,” said Hassaan al-Tufan, a lawyer and activist.
Sit-ins have become the main tactic for the protest rallies.
Iraqi security forces have been heavily criticized for their use of live rounds including machine-gun fire – and firing of heavy-duty tear gas canisters against mostly young and unarmed protesters, leading to “gruesome” deaths and injuries when canisters pierce protesters’ skulls or lungs.
The outgoing chief of NATO’s Iraq mission told AFP on Sunday the violence was “an absolute tragedy.”
“While the events of the last six weeks are an absolute tragedy, NATO continues to urge restraint to the government of Iraq,” said Major General Dany Fortin.
The government has proposed a list of reforms in recent weeks but demonstrators rejected them as insignificant and made too late in a country ranked the 12th most corrupt in the world by Transparency International.
“These steps, these reforms are just an opiate for the masses. Nothing more, nothing less,” one protester said on Sunday, pointing to the Green Zone, adding, “there are so many capable young people in Iraq who are deprived, and unfortunately those are the guys who rule us.”
The breach of the Paris climate accord
by Dr Andrew Glikson
Since its inception the Paris climate accord has been in questiondue to,among other(1) its broad definition, intended to keep a mean global temperature rise this century to below 1.5oC and efforts to limit temperature increase well below 2oC
above pre-industrial levels; (2) its non-binding nature; accounting tricks by vested interests. The goal assumes pre-determined limits can be placed on greenhouse gas levels and temperatures beyond which they would not continue to rise. Unfortunately these targets do not appear to take account of the amplifying positive feedback effects from land and oceans under the high cumulative greenhouse gas levels and their warming effects. Thus unfortunately the current high CO2 levels of about 408 ppm and near-500 ppm CO2-equivalent (CO2+methane+nitrous oxide) would likely continue to push temperatures upwards.
Since its inception the Paris climate accord has been in questiondue to,among other(1) its broad definition, intended to keep a mean global temperature rise this century to below 1.5oC and efforts to limit temperature increase well below 2oC above pre-industrial levels; (2) its non-binding nature; accounting tricks by vested interests. The goal assumes pre-determined limits can be placed on greenhouse gas levels and temperatures beyond which they would not continue to rise. Unfortunately these targets do not appear to take account of the amplifying positive feedback effects from land and oceans under the high cumulative greenhouse gas levels and their warming effects. Thus unfortunately the current high CO2 levels of about 408 ppm and near-500 ppm CO2-equivalent (CO2+methane+nitrous oxide) would likely continue to push temperatures upwards.
Significant climate science evidence appears to have been left out of the equation. The accord hinges on the need to reduce emissions, which is essential, but it does not indicate how further temperature rise can be avoided under the conditions of a high-CO2 atmosphere, which triggers carbon release, unless efforts at sequestration (down-draw) of greenhouse gases are undertaken. Inherent in global warming are amplifying positive feedbacks, including albedo (reflection) decline due to the melting of ice and the opening of dark water surfaces, increased water vapor contents of the atmosphere in tropical regions which enhances the greenhouse effect, reduced sequestration of CO2 by the warming oceans, desication of vegetation, fires, release of methane from permafrost and other processes. This means that even abrupt reductions in emissions may not be sufficient to stem global warming, unless accompanied by sequestration of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere to a lower level, recommended as below 350 ppm CO2by James Hansen, the leading climate scientist.
The world is on track to produce 50 percent more fossil fuels than can be burned before reaching the limit prescribed by the Paris agreement, with currently planned coal, oil and gas outputs making the Paris goal impossible. Projected fossil fuel production in 2030 being more than is consistent with 2°C, and 120% more than that for 1.5°C.
Unbelievably, according to the International Monetary Fund, “In 2017 the world subsidized fossil fuels by $5.2 trillion, equal to roughly 6.5 percent of global GDP”, which is more than the total the world spends on human health. Such subsidies cannot possibly be consistent with the Paris accord. The pledge to end fossil fuel subsidies by 2025 by the G7 nations , with exceptions by the UK and Japan, may come too late as global CO2 concentrations, already intersecting the stability limits of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, are rising at a rate of 2 to 3 ppm per year, the highest in many millions of years.
Despite the scientific consensus regarding the anthropogenic origin of global warming, the world’s biggest fossil fuel corporations are taking a defiant stance against warnings that reserves of coal, oil and gas are already several times larger than can be burned if the world’s governments are to meet their pledge to tackle climate change. ExxonMobil said new reserves in the Arctic and Canadian tar sands must be exploited. Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private coal company, said global warming was “an environmental crisis predicted by flawed computer models”. Glencore Xstrata said that governments would fail to implement measures to cut carbon emissions. The World Bank and Bank of England have already warned of the “serious risk” climate action poses to trillions of dollars of fossil fuel assets.
Not to mention the risks to the living Earth and its billions of inhabitants!
The apparent neglect of scientific advice is not an isolated instance. It is not uncommon that climate reports are dominated by the views of economists, lawyers, bureaucrats and politicians, often overlooking the evidence presented by some of the world’s highest climate science authorities. Whereas the IPCC reports include excellent and comprehensive summaries of the peer-reviewed literature, the summaries for policy makers only partly represent the evidence and views of scientific authorities in the field, including those who have identified global warming in the first place.
Fig. 1. Arctic (land stations north of 60° N) and global mean annual land surface air temperature (SAT) anomalies (in °C) for the period 1900-2018 relative to the 1981-2010 mean value. Source: CRUTEM4 dataset.
There exists a tendency in the media to report averages, such as average global temperature values, rather than the increasingly common anomalies. For example, the annual mean global temperature rise of +0.8 degrees Celsius for 2018 is about one third the Arctic mean temperature rise of up to +3 degrees Celsius (Fig. 1). Given that developments in the Arctic bear major consequences for global warming. Given that developments in the Arctic bear major consequences for climate change, the global mean of +0.8C does not represent the seriousness of the climate crisis.
Another example is the way extremes weather events are reported as isolated instances, neglecting the rising frequency and intensity of hurricanes, storms, fires and droughts, indicated in frequency plots (Fig 2).
Fig. 2.Number of relevant natural loss events worldwide 1980–2018. Munich-Re.
It is not until international and national institutions take full account of that climate science is indicating that a true picture of the climate crisis will be communicated to the public.
Andrew Glikson, Earth and climate scientist
Poor people must be accommodated in the climate change discussion
by Simi Garewal
It is true that poor people generally lack formal or academic education, as they cannot generally afford the financial cost of academic education, particularly higher education. But it is certainly
not true that this lacking would make their participation less effective. Simply presuming that their lack of education would not allow them to effectively participate in environmental discussions and actions would be wrong, as by doing this we are excluding entire communities who could have been doing many things to reverse the changing patterns of our planet’s climate.
Popes Against Nuclear Weapons
by Dr Binoy Kampmark
The current pontiff Pope Francis has layered his comments in line with a growing body of thought suggesting that the use of nuclear weapons in any circumstances, including their possession, would be illegal. Nuclear boffins see him as “unusually active compared to his predecessors in nuclear diplomacy.”
Bearing Witness to the Costs of War
by Andrea Mazzarino
I think of this image when I wake up at night, when I
hear patients describe the screams of children in war zones, when I hear my own children scream during tantrums. It’s like a nightmarish echo that spurs me to keep working because all of us, regardless of where we are, should be bearing witness to the costs of war until somebody in power decides to end the suffering.
China – The Belt and Road Initiative – The Bridge that Spans the World
by Peter Koenig
The New Silk Road, or BRI, is Chinese President Xi Jinping’s brainchild.It’s based on the same ancient principles, adjusted to the 21st Century, building bridges between peoples, exchanging goods, research, education, knowledge, cultural wisdom, peacefully, harmoniously and ‘win-win’ style. On 7 September 2013, Xi presented BRI at Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University. He spoke about “People-to-People Friendship and Creating a better Future”. He referred to the
Ancient Silk Road of more than 2,100 years ago, that flourished during China’s Western Han Dynasty (206 BC to 24 AD).
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also called the New Silk Road, is based on a 2,100-year-old trade route between the Middle East and Eastern Asia, called the Silk Road. It wound its ways across the huge landmass Eurasia to the most eastern parts of China. It favored trading, based on the Taoist philosophy of harmony and peaceful coexistence – trading in the original sense of the term, an exchange with “win-win” outcomes, both partners benefiting equally.
Today, in the western world we have lost this concept. The terms of trade are imposed always by the ‘stronger’ partner, the west versus the poorer south – the south where most of the natural resources are lodged. Mother Earth’s assets have been and are coveted by the west– or north – for building and maintaining a lifestyle in luxury, abundance and waste. This trend has lasted for centuries of western colonialism: Exploitation, loot, esclavisation and rape of entire peoples of the Global South by the Global North, to use the current soothing World Bank lingo.
The New Silk Road, or BRI, is Chinese President Xi Jinping’s brainchild.It’s based on the same ancient principles, adjusted to the 21st Century, building bridges between peoples, exchanging goods, research, education, knowledge, cultural wisdom, peacefully, harmoniously and ‘win-win’ style. On 7 September 2013, Xi presented BRI at Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University. He spoke about “People-to-People Friendship and Creating a better Future”. He referred to the Ancient Silk Road of more than 2,100 years ago, that flourished during China’s Western Han Dynasty (206 BC to 24 AD).
Referring to this epoch of more than two millenniums back, Xi Jinping pointed to the history of exchanges under the Ancient Silk Road, saying,“they had proven that countries with differences in race, belief and cultural background can absolutely share peace and development as long as they persist in unity and mutual trust, equality and mutual benefit, mutual tolerance and learning from each other, as well as cooperation and win-win outcomes.”
President Xi’s vision may be shaping the world of the 21st Century. The Belt and Road Initiative is designed and modeled loosely according to the Ancient Silk Road. President Xi launched this ground-breaking project soon after assuming the Presidency in 2013. The endeavor’s idea is to connect the world with transport routes, infrastructure, industrial joint ventures, teaching and research institutions, cultural exchange and much more. Since 2017, enshrined in China’s Constitution, BRI has become the flagship for China’s foreign policy.
BRI is literally building bridges and connecting people of different continents and nations. The purpose of the New Silk Road is “to construct a unified large market and make full use of both international and domestic markets, through cultural exchange and integration, to enhance mutual understanding and trust of member nations, ending up in an innovative pattern with capital inflows, talent pool, and technology database”. BRI is a perfect vehicle for building peacefully a World Community with a Shared Future for Mankind – which was the theme of an international Forum held in Shanghai, from 5-7 November, a tribute to China’s 70th Anniversary of her Revolution and achievements – with a vision into the future.
BRI is a global development strategy adopted by the Chinese Government. Already todayBRI has investments involving more than 150 countries and international organizations – and growing – in Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas. BRI is a multi-trillion investment scheme, for transport routes on land and sea, as well as construction of industrial and energy infrastructure and energy exploration – as well as trade among connected countries.Unlike WTO (World Trade Organization), BRI is encouraging nations to benefit from their comparative advantages, creating win-win situations. In essence, BRI is to develop mutual understanding and trust among member nations, allowing for free capital flows, a pool of experts and access to a BRI-based technology data base.
At present, BRI’s closing date is foreseen for 2049 which coincides with new China’s 100th Anniversary. The size and likely success of the program indicates, however, already today that it will most probably be extended way beyond that date. It is worth noting, though, that only in 2019, six years after its inception, BRI has become a news item in the West. Remarkably, for six years BRI was as much as denied, or ignored by the western media, in the hope it may go away. But away it didn’t go. To the contrary, many European Union members have already subscribed to BRI, including Greece, Italy, France, Portugal – and more will follow, as the temptation to participate in this projected socioeconomic boom is overwhelming.
Germany, the supposed economic leader of Europe, is mulling over the benefits and contras of participating in BRI. The German business community, like business throughout Europe, is strongly in favor of lifting US-imposed sanctions and reconnecting with the East, in particular with China and Russia. But official Berlin is still with one foot in the White House – and with the other trying to appease the German – and European – world of business. This balancing act is in the long run not sustainable and certainly not desirable. At present BRI is already actively involved in over 80 countries, including at least half of the EU members.
To counteract the pressure to join BRI, the European Union, basically run by NATO and intimately linked to Washington, has initiated their own ‘Silk Road’, attempting to connect Asia with Europe through Japan. In that sense, the EU and Japan have signed a “free trade agreement” which includes a compact to build infrastructure, in sectors such as energy, transport and digital devices. The purpose is to strengthen economic and cultural ties between the two regions, boosting business relations between Asia and Europa. It is an obvious effort to compete with or even sideline China’s BRI. But it is equally obvious that this response will fail. Usually initiatives taken in ill-fate are not successful. And China, non-belligerent China, is unlikely to challenge this EU-Japan competitive approach.
In another approach to counter BRI, The U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), and Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), launched on 4 November the Blue Dot Network (BDN), an initiative supposedly run entirely by private actors, funded by private banking, intended to bring together governments, the private sector, and civil society “to promote high-quality, trusted standards for global infrastructure development in an open and inclusive framework.”
It is not clear how the BDN will interact with or counteract BRI. Anything run entirely by the private sector, especially western private banking, is no good omen for the country their “development effort” touches. Such investments’ objectives are primarily shareholder profits, not socioeconomic development benefitting the countries where they plan to invest. No competition for China’s BRI. Again, non-aggressive China is unlikely to react.
China’s New Silk Road is creating a multipolar world, where all participants will benefit. The idea is to encourage economic growth, distributed in a balanced way, so as to prioritize development opportunities for those most in need. That means the under-developed areas of western China, eastern Russia, Central Asia, Central Europe – reaching out to Africa and the Middle East, Latin America, as well as to South East Asia and the Pacific. BRI is already actively building and planning some six to ten land and maritime routes, connecting Africa, the Middle East, Europe and South America.
The expected multi-trillion-dollar equivalent dynamic budget is expected to be funded by China, largely, but not exclusively, by the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB), by Russia – and by all the countries that are part of BRI and involved in singular or multi-country projects. The long-term return on these massive investments in people’s wellbeing is an exponential multiple of the original investments and cannot be limited to numerical economics, as social benefits of wellbeing cannot be defined by linear accounting.
Implementing BRI, or the New Silk Road, is itself the realization of a vision of nations: Peaceful interconnectivity, joint infrastructure and industrial development, as well as joint management of natural resources. For example, BRI may help with infrastructure and management advice resolving or preventing conflicts on transboundary water resources. There are some 263 transboundary lake and river basins, covering almost half the earth’s surface and involving some 150 countries. In addition, there are about 300 transboundary aquifers serving about 2 billion people who depend on groundwater.
The Chinese government calls the Silk Road Initiative “a bid to enhance regional connectivity and embrace a brighter future”. Today, John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” is more relevant than ever. And China is a vanguard in promoting peaceful development across the globe. BRI, China’s foreign policy flagship, is clearly an initiative towards world Peace.
Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organizationaround the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21st Century; Greanville Post; Defend Democracy Press, TeleSUR; The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.
Peter Koenig is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
Peter Koenig is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
First published by the New Eastern Outlook – NEO
Armenian genocide resolution reaffirms the ‘g-word’ is a tool for U.S. interests
by Max Parry
Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives voted in an overwhelming bipartisan majority to officially recognize the Armenian genocide more than a century after the atrocities were committed. The motion was a departure from decades of U.S. government refusal because of its ‘realpolitik’ considerations of regional ally and fellow NATO member, the Republic of Turkey. The Ottoman Empire’s successor state and the Turkic state of Azerbaijan remain the sole nations in the world that explicitly deny the mass extermination and expulsion of 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians constitutes “genocide.”
Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives voted in an overwhelming bipartisan majority to officially recognize the Armenian genocide more than a century after the atrocities were committed. The motion was a departure from decades of U.S. government refusal because of its ‘realpolitik’ considerations of regional ally and fellow NATO member, the Republic of Turkey. The Ottoman Empire’s successor state and the Turkic state of Azerbaijan remain the sole nations in the world that explicitly deny the mass extermination and expulsion of 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians constitutes “genocide.” While the U.S. had previously acknowledged that war crimes were committed beginning in 1915, Washington refrained from using the ‘g-word’ to avoid fallout with Ankara despite the international community consensus. President Donald Trump would be the first commander-in-chief to utter the term if he follows suit, but that scenario is unlikely as the proposal came in reaction to his green-lighting a Turkish invasion of Kurdish-held Northeastern Syria with a U.S. troop withdrawal that was unpopular with lawmakers.
In 2015, WikiLeaks revealed Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton’s email exchanges on the issue with her foreign policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, during the 100th anniversary. The disclosure gave a rare look inside the suspected cynical reasoning behind Washington’s longstanding lack of formal acknowledgement. Sullivan wrote:
“Friday is the 100th Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. I presume the Armenian groups will be looking for a statement or a signal from the campaign on whether she will call it a “genocide” if she is elected president. As a Senator and candidate, she was unequivocal in recognizing the genocide. As Secretary of State, she did not use the term genocide but rather focused on future reconciliation between Turkey and Armenia. The White House has studiously avoided using “genocide” so far. There is an internal debate now about whether to change that posture given that it is the 100th anniversary. But in all likelihood they won’t change. Two questions: Do you all agree that she should embrace the position she took as Senator and candidate, even though she did not take it as SecState? Do you all agree that we should just wait until we are asked as opposed to doing something proactive? Sorry to bother with this, but as you all know this matters enormously to Armenian-Americans.”
Campaign manager John Podesta replied, “quote the Pope.” Just two years into his papacy, Francis had described the mass killing of Armenians as the “first genocide of the twentieth century” which drew Turkey’s ire, but Clinton would never recite the Argentine holy father’s words despite her team’s encouragement. Her decision speaks to the power of the Turkish and Azeri lobbies which have spent millions bribing and extorting U.S. politicians for decades to prevent recognition of the Ottoman crimes against humanity by the legislature and any such proclamation by an American head of state. What an insult to the Armenian-American community which waited generations only to see the step finally taken under such dishonest circumstances. The measure has since been blocked in the Senate by neocon warmonger Lindsey Graham of South Carolina shortly after his meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, but the changes that brought about the ill-fated resolution should not go unexamined.
Turkey is often said to be the ‘bridge between East and West’, as its transcontinental territory extends across both southeastern Europe and western Asia. An ally during the Cold War with NATO’s second largest army, it was the U.S. placement of Jupiter ballistic missiles in Izmir which sparked the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 after Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev retaliated by deploying intermediate-range nuclear missiles to Havana in an effort to thwart Washington from gaining the upper hand. Turkey has remained vital to geo-strategic interests as the point connecting Europe and the Middle East, but the rise of Moscow under Putin on the world stage has threatened to throw the Atlanticist alliance into disarray along with Washington’s reckless disregard for Ankara with its incorporation of the Kurds into the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) coalition in the Syrian war. The U.S.’s arrogance that it could maintain an alliance while supporting Kurdish militants regarded as terrorists by Ankara marked a turning point in their relations with the prospect of Turkey exiting NATO suddenly no longer an impossibility.
When the neo-Ottoman sultan Erdoğan signed on with the U.S.-Saudi-Israeli attempt to oust the secular Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, he did not anticipate it facilitating a potential Kurdish state on Turkey’s doorstep. The likelihood of U.S. involvement in the failed 2016 coup d’etat attempt against him and Washington’s harboring of rival Islamic cleric Fethullah Gülen did not help matters, nor did Turkey’s retaliation by purchasing Moscow’s S-400 missile defense system in noncompliance with its NATO commitments. It is ironic that it took Trump’s throwing the Kurds under the bus queueing the Turkish offensive to result in the house finally acknowledging the ‘other holocaust’, as many Kurds themselves were participants in the slaughter of the Armenians a century ago. Nevertheless, the resolution is further sign of the geopolitical alignment shifting and the inevitable decline of U.S. hegemony with its plans to redraw the Middle East derailed by Moscow. No one should be fooled into believing that Congress is motivated by anything other than a desire to punish Turkey for making the U.S. look bad while rebuking Trump for deviating from the bipartisan consensus of endless war.
Coincidentally, just as the row between the traditional allies of Washington and Ankara resulted in U.S. legislators affirming the Armenian genocide, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been mired in controversy for having awarded an accused “denier” of such atrocities in the Balkans. The Austrian-born playwright and novelist Peter Handke, perhaps best known for penning the screenplay to Wim Wenders’s art house classic film Wings of Desire, was the recipient of the 2019 prize for his body of work. Despite such career achievements, Handke has been plagued by scandal for his political activism, namely opposition to the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia during the 1990s. An Orthodox Christian convert, Handke was a member of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević when the former Serbian president was held for war crimes in the Hague Tribunal and even spoke at his funeral after he mysteriously died while in custody in 2006.
Long before the U.S. opportunistically declared what was done by the Young Turks to the Ottoman Armenians to be genocide, they were using the label to mischaracterize the Yugoslav wars as the basis for NATO’s Orwellian-styled ‘humanitarian intervention’ against Serbia. Even though ethnic cleansing was committed on all sides in what was fundamentally a civil war, the heroes and villains were preselected based on the Serbian alliance with Moscow and the time-honored anti-Russian strategy of aligning with Islamists designed by Zbigniew Brzezinski that began with the arming of the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets. After instigating the ‘USSR’s Vietnam’ in Afghanistan, the Atlanticists applied this same strategy to the Balkans and the North Caucasus to undermine post-Soviet Russia.
Winston Churchill famously referred to the Balkans as the “soft underbelly” of Europe during WWII when it was under Axis occupation. During the Yugoslav Wars, it once again become Europe’s ‘weak spot’ as the West supported the al-Qaeda elements in Bosnia and Kosovo against the Serbs. Mass media would never report the war crimes by the Bosnian mujahideen and Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) nor the ethnic cleansing of thousands of Serbs from Krajina in Croatia. When the Srebrenica massacre of military-age Bosniaks made international headlines in 1995, it became a PR-managed event designed to fixate world attention exclusively on one of many such killings that took place in the enclave by both sides in order to give grounds for NATO intervention without approval from the UN Security Council.
The late, great media critic Edward S. Herman, who proved to be more principled on the matter than his Manufacturing Consent co-author Noam Chomsky, summed it up in his final column before his death in 2017:
“Milošević had nothing to do with the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which Bosnian Serbs took revenge on Bosnian Muslim soldiers who had been ravaging nearby Bosnian Serb villages from their base in Srebrenica under NATO protection. The several thousand Serb civilian deaths were essentially unreported in the mainstream media, while the numbers of Srebrenica’s executed victims were correspondingly inflated.”
In the years since, the inter-ethnic war has been widely referred to in the West as the “Bosnian genocide”, with Srebrenica a microcosm to misleadingly summarize the entire conflict. Thankfully, Moscow has vetoed efforts by the UN Security Council to condemn it as such. The truth is that the dice were loaded from the very beginning, as NATO’s kangaroo court, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), was initiated as a U.S. policy option to disproportionately prosecute Serbs for war crimes with a clear bias against them, as revealed in a declassified CIA document from 1993 which states:
“11. Establish a War Crimes Tribunal. Serb paramilitary leaders charged with war crimes might attempt terrorist operations in the West. The Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian Governments might harbor some high-ranking war criminals while turning over those considered expendable. They may even rid themselves of war criminals to cover up war crimes. Most West Europeans — with the exception of Greece — probably woigld support this option. Muslim states would approve a War Crimes Tribunal and publicizing Serbian atrocities. Even treatment of Bosnian transgressions, however, would be regarded as tilting in Belgrade’s favor.”
This would explain why a Bosnian war criminal like Naser Orić, who commanded the assaults on Serb villages that resulted in the retaliatory killings of Bosniaks in Srebrenica, was acquitted while Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladić received a life sentence. Meanwhile, the Bush administration made it clear that the U.S. would respond with military force if the Hague ever attempted to charge U.S. personnel with war crimes in the American Servicemembers Protection Act of 2002, also known as the ‘Hague Invasion Act’, an astonishing display of bullying of the international community even for U.S. imperialism. The ICTY would be one of two rigged judicial organs created by the UN Security Council before the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the other being the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 1994.
Although NATO did not directly intervene in the small African country’s civil war, it spun a similar one-sided account where the Tutsi heroes and Hutu villains were predetermined even as mass slaughter was committed by both factions. Rwanda had been a Belgian colonial territory following WWII where the favored Tutsi minority ruled the landlocked country under a monarchy that subjugated the ethnic Hutu majority until they revolted in 1959 and expelled more than 300,000 Tutsis to neighboring countries. Decades later, Tutsi refugees based in Uganda seeking to repatriate formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front army led by Paul Kagame and in 1990, the RPF invaded the small nation in a guerrilla campaign. The assault came following the assassination of Rwanda’s Hutu President, Juvénal Habyarimana, after his plane was shot down in a probable ‘false flag’ operation that was pinned on Hutu extremists. Despite the fact that the RPF started the armed conflict, the West transposed reality and painted the Hutus as pure villains in the violence that would follow.
No one disputes that anywhere from 800,000 to 1 million Rwandans were killed in the ensuing bloodshed. However, the figures of a “genocide” of Tutsis debunks itself, given that there were significantly less than a million of them in the country at the time with the highest estimate at 600,000. The simple fact is that the majority of the victims could only have Hutu, considering there were at least 400,000 surviving Tutsis in the country after the war was over, thus the remaining number of victims in all probability were Hutu. Since the war began with an offensive by the RPF, that the lion’s share of victims would be their opponents is only to be expected except perhaps to Western propagandists and their newspeak that Kagame was conquering the country to “stop a genocide” while committing one himself. Even though the Kagame regime would go on to commit further atrocities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), this would not prevent the media from maintaining its portrayal of him as a hero. However, the BBC of all news organizations would produce a must-see documentary, Rwanda: The Untold Story, that challenged the official story in 2014 but not without stirring controversy.
Historically, the politicization of “genocide” began from its earliest implementations. Coined by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, he devised the term from the Greek word “génos” (group or race)and the Latin append “-cide” (killing), supposedly with the Armenians in mind. It was said that if the Genocide Convention of 1948 been ratified during the inter-war period following the annihilation of the Armenians, it could have prevented future atrocities against European Jews in WWII, citing a reputed quote by Adolf Hitler, “who after all, remembers the Armenians?” from a speech just prior to the invasion of Poland in 1939. Of course, for the Zionists this was at the exclusion of other, inferior groups victimized by the Germans whose sins the Palestinians are still paying for many decades later.
From the get-go, the g-word was a political football during the Cold War in order to legislate history with a pro-Western bias. In spite of having survived Nazi persecution himself, Lemkin argued in his writings that the Soviet Ukrainian famine of the 1930s qualified despite the myth of deliberate starvation having been concocted by their Ukrainian nationalist collaborators who fled to Western Europe and North America in order to escape penalty for their war crimes. Stories of the “man-made” hunger were then publicized in the pages of American sensationalist newspapers owned by media tycoon William Randolph Hearst, a Nazi sympathizer who ran columns by Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler himself, as well as the yellow press of his UK equivalent, Lord Viscount Rothermere, an open supporter of Nazi Germany and British fascist Oswald Mosley. Nevermind that Moscow had liberated both the European Jews and Armenians in both world wars, respectively. The post-war attempt to classify the Holodomor hoax as “genocide” instead of the mass destruction of indigenous peoples across the world by European settler colonialism was the beginning of the West’s conflation of Nazi Germany with the USSR in order to separate the former from its own legacy.
Ultimately, the Genocide Convention is as politicized with a pro-Western partiality as institutions like the Nobel Foundation. While its literature award is accustomed to controversy, so too is its peace laureate which has repeatedly bestowed its honor to questionable choices, if not outright war criminals. In 1973, it infamously awarded then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for negotiating a cease-fire between the U.S. and North Vietnam, even though he was by all accounts responsible for prolonging the Vietnam War, along with a laundry list of other destructive policies in his tenure that many feel warrant prosecution for crimes against humanity. This includes the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War which facilitated the CIA-backed Khmer Rouge’s rise to power. The tens of thousands of deaths from Operation Freedom Deal would not be included with those attributed to the “genocide” by Pol Pot whose regime would be used to demonize communism, despite his Western support and that Phnom Penh was liberated by Vietnam. Later in 2009, just a year into his first presidential term Barack Obama became the Peace Prize recipient not for anything he had actually done but in a vacuous gesture as “a call to action.” The first African-American to hold the office would go on to drop hundreds of thousands of bombs on seven different nations. Then again, the accolade itself is inherently paradoxical considering that among Alfred Nobel’s list of accomplishments was success in arms manufacturing.
When Slobodan Milošević was being slowly murdered in custody in the Netherlands, Peter Handke was one of the few public figures brave enough to come to the former Serbian president’s defense, but he was not alone even amongst his fellow Nobel Laureates. The late British playwright Harold Pinter, one of the most influential dramatists of the 20th century, also lent his name as a signatory to the Slobodan Milošević International Committee. During a five decade career, Pinter was a dedicated anti-war activist in his private life and used the occasion of his accepting the literary honor in 2005 while still in poor health to deliver a powerful, scathing indictment of U.S. foreign policy in his Nobel Lecture. Since his name was announced, Mr. Handke has been the subject of relentless, unjustified attacks as a “genocide denier” and should be granted the same relative level of respect Pinter was paid when he was its honoree. It is likely geopolitical factors at play making Handke the subject of a smear campaign, with the restart of the Cold War and the need to demonize all things Russia-related with whom with the Serbs share a brotherhood. Be it the case of Mr. Handke or the congressional exploitation of the Armenians, it is clear “genocide” is nothing more than a political construct earmarked for the usage of empire.
Max Parryis an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His work has appeared in Counterpunch, Global Research, Dissident Voice, Greanville Post, OffGuardian, American Herald Tribune and more. Max may be reached at maxrparry@live.com
New Cold War and the Attack on Saudi Oil
Installations
by Nauman Sadiq
The September 14 attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility in eastern Saudi Arabia was an Armageddon for the global oil industry because it processes five million barrels crude oil per day, more than half of Saudi Arabia’s total oil production.
The September 14 attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility in eastern Saudi Arabia was an Armageddon for the global oil industry because it processes five million barrels crude oil per day, more than half of Saudi Arabia’s total oil production.
The subversive attack sent jitters across the global markets and the oil price surged 15%, the biggest spike witnessed in three decades since the First Gulf War when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, though the oil price was eased within days after industrialized nations released their strategic oil reserves.
In order to bring home the significance of the Persian Gulf’s oil in the energy-starved industrialized world, here are a few stats from the OPEC data: Saudi Arabia has the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves of 265 billion barrels and its daily oil production is 10 million barrels; Iran and Iraq each has 150 billion barrels reserves and has the capacity to produce 5 million barrels per day each; while UAE and Kuwait each has 100 billion barrels reserves and produces 3 million barrels per day each; thus, all the littoral states of the Persian Gulf, together, hold 788 billion barrels, more than half of world’s 1477 billion barrels proven oil reserves.
Not surprisingly, 35,000 American troops have currently been deployed in their numerous military bases and aircraft carriers in the oil-rich Persian Gulf in accordance with the Carter Doctrine of 1980, which states: “Let our position be absolutely clear: an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
It bears mentioning that alongside deploying several thousand American troops and additional Patriot missile batteries in Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the Abqaiq attack, several interventionist hawks in Washington invoked the Carter Doctrine as a ground for mounting retaliatory strikes against Iran.
Although the Houthi rebels based in Yemen claimed the responsibility for the September 14 complex attack involving drones and cruise missiles on the Abqaiq petroleum facility and the Khurais oil field in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, and they have UAV-X drones having a range of 1,500 kilometers, Washington dismissed the possibility.
Instead, it accused Tehran of mounting the attack from Iran’s territory, which is unlikely because Iran would never leave behind smoking gun evidence implicating Tehran, as the strategically vital Persian Gulf is monitored round the clock by American satellites and surveillance aircraft. The most likely suspects were Iran-backed militias in Iraq because the complex attack involving 18 drones and 7 cruise missiles was staged from the north.
Quoting Iraqi intelligence officials, David Hearst reported [1] for the Middle East Eye a day after the September 14 attack that the attack was mounted by the Hashed al-Shabi militia from its bases in southern Iraq. What lends credence to the report is the fact that in the weeks preceding the attack, Washington had accused the Hashed al-Shabi militia of mounting another attack in eastern Saudi Arabia claimed by the Houthi rebels because the oil-rich Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia is nearer the Iraq border than it is to the Houthi stronghold in Saada, Yemen.
Moreover, in the weeks before the attack, the Iran-backed militias blamed [2] the US and Israel in August for mounting airstrikes on their bases in Iraq targeting the missile storage facilities. The missiles were recently provided to the militias by Iran. It’s worth noting that 5,000 American troops and numerous aircraft are still deployed in Iraq, therefore the likely culprit targeting the Iran-backed militias in Iraq was Washington, not Tel Aviv.
Taking cover of the Israeli airstrikes, Washington has conducted several airstrikes of its own on targets in Syria and Iraq and blamed them on Israel, which frequently mounts air and missile strikes against Iranian operatives and Hezbollah militia in Syria and Lebanon, though it has never conducted an airstrike in Iraq because for that Israeli aircraft would have to violate Jordanian or Saudi airspace.
Besides the airstrikes on the missile storage facilities of Iran-backed militias in Iraq, it is suspected that the US air force was also behind a recent airstrike at the newly built Imam Ali military base in eastern Syria at al-Bukamal-Qaim border crossing alleged to be hosting the Iranian Quds Force operatives.
In addition to planting limpet mines on the UAE’s oil tankers and shooting down an American Global Hawk surveillance drone, the September 14 attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility was the third major attack in the Persian Gulf against the interests of Washington and its regional clients.
That the UAE had forewarning about imminent attacks is proved by the fact that weeks before the attacks, it recalled forces from Yemen battling the Houthi rebels and redeployed them to man the UAE’s territorial borders.
Nevertheless, a puerile prank like planting limpet mines on oil tankers can be overlooked but major provocations like downing a $200-million surveillance aircraft and mounting a drone and missile attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility that crippled its oil-processing functions for weeks can have serious repercussions. Unless Iran got the green light to go ahead with the attacks from a major power that equals Washington’s military might, such confrontation would amount to a suicidal approach.
Therefore, the recent acts of subversion in the Persian Gulf should be viewed in the broader backdrop of the New Cold War that has begun after the Ukrainian crisis in 2014 when Russia occupied the Crimean peninsula and Washington imposed sanctions on Russian entities.
In addition, Russia’s membership in the G8 forum was suspended by the Western powers in March 2014 and Russian President Vladimir Putin was snubbed at international summits by the Western leaders, by then-President Obama in particular, an insult that the Russian strongman took rather personally.
The Kremlin’s immediate response to the escalation by Washington was that it jumped into the fray in Syria in September 2015, after a clandestine visit to Moscow by Major General Qassem Soleimani, the wily commander of the Iranian Quds Force.
When Russia deployed its forces and military hardware to Syria in September 2015, the militant proxies of Washington and its regional clients were on the verge of drawing a wedge between Damascus and the Alawite heartland of coastal Latakia, which could have led to the imminent downfall of the Assad government.
With the help of the Russian air power, the Syrian government has since reclaimed most of Syria’s territory from the insurgents, excluding Idlib in the northwest occupied by the Turkish-backed militants and Deir al-Zor and the Kurdish-held areas in the east, thus inflicting a humiliating defeat on Washington and its regional clients.
Moreover, several momentous events have taken place in the Syrian theater of proxy wars and on the global stage that have further exacerbated the New Cold War between Moscow and Washington:
On February 7, 2018, the US B-52 bombers and Apache helicopters struck a contingent of Syrian government troops and allied forces in Deir al-Zor province of eastern Syria that reportedly [3] killed and wounded scores of Russian military contractors working for the Russian private security firm, the Wagner Group.
The survivors described the bombing as an absolute carnage, and Moscow lost more Russian nationals in one day than it had lost throughout its more than two-year-long military campaign in support of the Syrian government since September 2015.
A month after the massacre of Russian military contractors in Syria, on March 4, 2018, Sergei Skripal, a Russian double agent working for the British foreign intelligence service, and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a public bench outside a shopping center in Salisbury. A few months later, in July last year, a British woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after touching the container of the nerve agent that allegedly poisoned the Skripals.
In the case of the Skripals, Theresa May, then the prime minister of the United Kingdom, promptly accused Russia of attempted assassinations and the British government concluded that Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a Moscow-made, military-grade nerve agent, Novichok.
Sergei Skripal was recruited by the British MI6 in 1995, and before his arrest in Russia in December 2004, he was alleged to have blown the cover of scores of Russian secret agents. He was released in a spy swap deal in 2010 and was allowed to settle in Salisbury. Both Sergei Skripal and his daughter have since recovered and were discharged from hospital in May last year.
Nevertheless, the motive that prompted the Vladimir Putin-led government to escalate the conflict with the Western powers was that the Russian presidential elections were slated for March 18, 2018, which Putin was poised to win anyway but he won a resounding electoral victory with 77% vote by whipping up chauvinism of the Russian electorate after the war of words with the Western powers.
In the aftermath of the Salisbury poisonings in March last year, the US, UK and several European nations expelled scores of Russian diplomats and the Trump administration ordered the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle.
In a retaliatory move, Russia also expelled a similar number of American, British and European diplomats, and ordered the closure of American consulate in Saint Petersburg. The relations between Moscow and Western powers reached their lowest ebb since the break-up of the former Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in December 1991.
A month later, an alleged chemical weapons attack took place in Douma, Syria, on April 7, 2018, and Donald Trump ordered a cruise missile strike in Syria on April 14 last year in collaboration with the Theresa May government in the UK and the Emmanuel Macron administration in France.
The strike took place little over a year after a similar cruise missile strike on al-Shayrat airfield on April 6, 2017, after an alleged chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhoun, though both cruise missile strikes were nothing more than a show of force.
But the fact that out of 105 total cruise missiles deployed in the April 14, 2018, strikes against a military research facility in the Barzeh district of Damascus and two alleged chemical weapons storage facilities in Homs, 85 were launched by the US, 12 by the French and 8 by the UK aircrafts demonstrated the unified resolve of the Western powers against Russia in the aftermath of the Salisbury poisonings in the UK a month earlier.
Footnotes:
[1] Iranian drones launched from Iraq carried out attacks on Saudi oil plants:
[2] Iranian-backed militia blames US and Israel for attacks on bases in Iraq:
[3] Russian toll in Syria battle was 300 killed and wounded:
Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism.
Hunger Games: Food Abundance and Twisted Truths
by Colin Todhunter
The world already produces enough food to feed 10 million people but over two billion are experiencing micronutrient deficiencies (of which 821 million were classed as chronically undernourished in 2018). However, supporters of genetic engineering (GE) crops continually push the narrative that GE technology is required if we are to feed the world and properly support farmers.
The world already produces enough food to feed 10 billion people but over two billion are experiencing micronutrient deficiencies (of which 821 million were classed as chronically undernourished in 2018). However, supporters of genetic engineering (GE) crops continually push the narrative that GE technology is required if we are to feed the world and properly support farmers.
First of all, it must be stressed that there is already sufficient evidence to question the efficacy of GE crops; however, despite this, conventional options and innovations that outperform GE crops are in danger of being sidelined in a rush by powerful, publicly unaccountable private interests like the Gates Foundation to facilitate the introduction of GE into global agriculture; crops whose main ‘added value’ is the financial rewards accrued by the corporations behind them.
Secondly, even if we are to accept that at some stage GE can supplement conventional practices, we must acknowledge that from the outset of the GMO project, the sidelining of serious concerns about the technology has occurred and despite industry claims to the contrary, there is no scientific consensus on the health impacts of GE crops.
Both the Cartagena Protocol and Codex share a precautionary approach to GE crops and foods, in that they agree that GE differs from conventional breeding. There is sufficient reason to hold back on commercialising GE crops and to subject each GMO to independent, transparent environmental, social, economic and health impact evaluations.
To evaluate the pro-GMO lobby’s rhetoric that GE is needed to ‘feed the world’, we first need to understand the dynamics of a globalised food system that fuels hunger and malnutrition against a backdrop of food overproduction. As Andrew Smolski describes it: capitalism’s production of ‘hunger in abundance’.
Over the last 50 years, we have seen the consolidation of an emerging global food regime based on agro-export mono-cropping, often with non-food commodities taking up prime agricultural land), and linked to sovereign debt repayment and World Bank/IMF ‘structural adjustment’ directives. The outcomes have included a displacement of a food-producing peasantry, the consolidation of Western agri-food oligopolies and the transformation of many countries from food self-sufficiency into food deficit areas.
As long as these dynamics persist and food injustice remains an inherent feature of the global food regime, the rhetoric of GM being necessary for feeding the world is merely ideology and bluster. Furthermore, if we continue to regard food as a commodity in a globalized capitalist food system, we shall continue to see the comprehensive contamination of food with sugar, bad fats, synthetic additives, GMOs and pesticides and rising rates of diseases and serious health conditions, including surges in obesity, diabetes and cancer incidence, but no let-up in the under-nutrition of those too poor to join in the over-consumption.
Looking at India as an example, although it continues to do poorly in world hunger rankings, the country has achieved self-sufficiency in food grains and has ensured there is enough food available to feed its entire population. It is the world’s largest producer of milk, pulses and millets and the second-largest producer of rice, wheat, sugarcane, groundnuts, vegetables, fruit and cotton.
Farmers therefore produce enough food. It stands to reason that hunger and malnutrition result from other factors (such as inadequate food distribution, inequality and poverty). It is again a case of ‘scarcity’ amid abundance. The country even continues to export food while millions remain hungry.
While the pro-GMO lobby says GE will boost productivity and help secure cultivators a better income, this too is misleading as it again ignores crucial political and economic contexts; with bumper harvests, Indian farmers still find themselves in financial distress.
India’s farmers are not experiencing hardship due to low productivity. They are reeling from the effects of neoliberal policies, years of neglect and a deliberate strategy to displace smallholder agriculture at the behest of the World Bank and predatory global agri-food corporations. It’s for good reason that the calorie and essential nutrient intake of the rural poor has drastically fallen.
And yet, the pro-GMO lobby wastes no time in wrenching these issues from their political contexts to use the notions of ‘helping farmers’ and ‘feeding the world’ as lynchpins of its promotional strategy.
Agroecological principles
Many of the traditional practices of small farmers are now recognised as sophisticated and appropriate for high-productive, sustainable agriculture. These practices involve an integrated low-input systems approach to agriculture that emphasises, among other things, local food security and sovereignty, diverse nutrition production per acre, water table stability, climate resilience and good soil structure. Agroecology represents a shift away from the reductionist yield-output industrial paradigm, which results in enormous pressures on health and the environment.
A recent FAO high-level report called for agroecology and smallholder farmers to be prioritised and invested in to achieve global sustainable food security. Smallholder (non-GMO) farming using low-input methods tends to be more productive in total output than large-scale industrial farms and can be more profitable and resilient to climate change.
Despite the fact that globally industrial agriculture grabs 80 per cent of subsidies and 90 per cent of research funds, smallholder agriculture plays a major role in feeding the world. At the same time, these massive subsidies and funds support a system that is only made profitable because agri-food oligopolies externalize the massive health, social and environmental costs of their operations.
These corporations leverage their financial clout, lobby networks, funded science and political influence to cement a ‘thick legitimacy’ among policy makers for their vision of agriculture. In turn, World Bank ‘enabling the business of agriculture’ directives, the World Trade Organization ‘agreement on agriculture’ and trade related intellectual property rights help secure their interests.
In the meantime, supporters of GMO agriculture continue to display a willful ignorance of the structure of the food system which produces the very problem it claims it can resolve. The pro-GMO scientific lobby arrogantly pushes its ideological agenda while ignoring the root causes of poverty, hunger and malnutrition and denigrating genuine solutions centred on food sovereignty.
Colin Todhunter is an independent writer
Ayodhya: Adding insult to injury
by Aijaz Zaka Syed
If the bizarre Ayodhya verdict of India’s Supreme Court is a classic case of adding insult to injury, on the one hand, it marks the final and total surrender of the country’s democratic institutions to Hindutva, on the other. But this had long been coming and should have been apparent to all those watching the meltdown of the republic under the current order.
Maharashtra governor’s action unconstitutional
by Vidya Bhushan Rawat
It is deeply distressing and disgusting to see how blatantly conventions, rules are kept aside and things are being done in an absolutely arbitrary manner without ever thinking of being accountable to the people and to the constitution of India.
Empress With A Pen!
by Kabir Deb
A poem on Arundhati Roy on her birthday
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